No such girl existed.
All of the people in Melbourne who’d turned the lobby into a group art-therapy project had felt something real. They’d been deceived. I’d been deceived. I didn’t tell them that the tragedy was fictional. (They’ll know now, though, and I wonder if that girl will read this book. I hope she is okay.)
The saddest thing about Earthquake Girl was that either way—truth or fiction—the story was tragic. Anyone who was unhappy and unhinged enough to pull a stunt like that clearly needed love.
Oddly enough, her lie had pulled us all together. She was like a broken thread in the net, hanging down.
A lot like art, I thought, like any work of fiction.
The story was fake, but the impact was real.
TROUT HEART REPLICA
They’ve been circling
They’ve been circling
Since the day they were born
It’s disturbing
How they’re circling
Fifty feet from the pond
Pretty often
Pretty often
I don’t want to be told
It’s a problem
It’s a problem
It’s a problem I know
And I won’t keep what I can’t catch
In my bare hands without a net
It’s hard enough to walk on grass
So conscious of the consequences
They’ve been jerking
They’ve been jerking
In a pail by the dock
I know that oxygen might
Make them blossom and die
But I’m not going to talk
Feed them details
Feed them emails
They’ll eventually grow
But it’s not working
It’s not working
Not as far as I know
And killing things is not so hard
It’s hurting that’s the hardest part
And when the wizard gets to me
I’m asking for a smaller heart
And I got you
I thought that I got you
Now I’ll ruin it all
Feeling helpless
Acting selfish
Being human and all
And they’re jumping
And they’re jumping
But they’ll never get out
Just keep touring
Just keep on ignoring
Be a good little trout
And the butcher stops and winds his watch
And lays their lives down on the block
He raises up his hatchet
And the big hand strikes a compromise
Wait, we’ll trade you
Wait
Please just one more day
And then we’ll go with
No complaining…
No complaining…
No complaining…
Stop
Come…
And they’re cutting
And they’re cutting
And I think that I know
And they’re gutting
And they’re gutting
And I think that I know
And it’s beating
Look, it’s beating
And I don’t want to know
And it’s beating
Look, it’s still beating
God, I don’t want to know
And killing things is not so hard
It’s hurting that’s the hardest part
And when the wizard gets to me
I’m asking for a smaller heart
And if he tells me no
I’ll hold my breath until I hit the floor
Eventually I know I’m doomed
To get what I am asking for
Now my heart is exactly the size
Of a six-sided die cut in half
Made of ruby red stained glass
Can I knock you unconscious as long as I promise
I’ll love you and I’ll make you laugh?
Now my heart is exactly the size
Of a six-sided die cut in half
Made of ruby red stained glass
Can I knock you unconscious as long as I promise
I’ll love you and I’ll make you laugh?
—from Theatre Is Evil, 2012
For most of human history, musicians and artists have been part of the village, accessing one another freely. They’ve been healers, listeners, mind-openers—in touch with the community, not untouchable stars on screens and behind barricades. I grew up believing that the distance of “real” stardom was glamorous. But in truth, feeling love from a distance is just lonely. Maybe even worse than no love at all, because it feels so unnatural.
The Internet has shaken things up in this regard and brought us, in some ways, full circle: we’re back around the fireside, albeit sometimes using our smartphones. The sorts of connections I make with people on Twitter and on my blog are real, honest, and loving. I’m able to reach safely into people’s heads and hearts, allow them to reach back into mine, and—most importantly—give them a place to reach into each other.
This morning, as I was getting ready to sit down and write this book, I popped onto Twitter and:
- I shared a news link about nine people who had been killed by a nineteen-year-old college student in Santa Barbara.
- I posted a live clip of one of my friend Mali’s songs and gave a shout-out to the West Coast fanbase to see if anybody could couch-host her or help her fill in some tour dates.
- I sent an old blog link to a fan who’d asked about some controversial lyrics I’d written years before.
- I told Neil, who was in Europe for his mother’s birthday, that I loved him.
- I encouraged anybody in the New York area to go see my friend Andrew O’Neill doing standup in Brooklyn.
- I looked at and shared a beautiful calligraphy-based painting by a kid in Brazil that was based on some Dresden Dolls lyrics.
- I reposted a link to the piece that Neil wrote about the trip he took last week to a refugee camp in Jordan.
- I shared the link to a school-project video some girls from Thailand had made about my Kickstarter.
- I asked for some book help as I tried to conjure up a good two-way megaphone metaphor (lots of people suggested cans and string, which was perfect). I eventually edited that section out of the book, but whatever. I used it here. Hooray!
- I pointed out that my last record producer, John Congleton, just joined Twitter. He twittered back and posted a photo of boobs.
- I asked for everybody to wish me luck as I started my ten-hour writing day. Ksenia, a Russian author I know on Twitter, offered me an encouraging bowl of virtual borscht. It’s a daily joke.
and
- I told two people I loved them and gave them each a Twitter hug ((((((()))))))). Just because they asked.
This all happened in fifteen minutes, the time it took me to order and drink my morning espresso and eat a croissant in the corner café. It’s not my job. It’s my life. It’s me.
I have over one million Twitter followers. As I ate my croissant, I chatted in real-time 140-character chunks, and a few hundred people posted responses to the things I’d just shared. I scanned all their messages and publicly discussed a few issues—personal, emotional, and political—with a few friends and strangers. I probably twittered about twenty times. I walked back to my apartment. By the time I got there, a few hundred more tweets had flowed in. I looked them over before I settled down to write, and was pleased to see a wave of thankful messages from the people whose artwork and photos I’d shared, a few 140-character pom-pom waves wishing me luck with the upcoming writing day, and a variety of other conversations and connections bobbing along in the wake of my fifteen-minute Twitter flurry.
This is a normal morning.
I asked my blog readers a question.
WHAT DO YOU WISH YOU’D ASKED FOR?
There were thousands of responses, and the overwhelming
majority were variations on this:
I wish I’d asked for help.
One girl wrote:
I was born legally blind to a rural family that didn’t know how to deal with disability, but wasn’t going to give up on me either. I was raised with the best of intentions, but ultimately I grew up as a mixture between a cherished porcelain doll for display and a feral dog let to run wild. I’m twenty-four and I’ve spent all of my late adolescence and early adulthood reteaching myself simple day-to-day life skills (using an oven, cleaning a toilet)… I wish I’d asked for independence.
She wishes she’d asked people to help her by not helping.
It’s the same thing, isn’t it?
I was comparing notes with my older sister Alyson one night, over wine, right around the time I was also struggling with a marriage-and-money freak-attack. She’s a scientist, and I’ve never totally been able to grasp what she does. Stuff with genetics, gene sequencing, finding cures for rare forms of cancer, and other simple things like that. She experiments on fish in her work, and I usually lose the plot a few seconds after she starts explaining what she does. I can’t stop worrying about the fish.
She and her new husband, like me and Neil, had been keeping their finances more or less separate since getting together. But also, like me and Neil, some things had merged; she’d ditched her apartment and moved into his flat. She had her upstanding position at the university, he had his freelancing tech job, and life was good—but she was about to come up for tenure. She wasn’t confident she was going to get it, and her husband had offered to support her so she could take time off to look for a new job, go back to school, or even spend a few months communing with nature and finding herself. She couldn’t stand the thought of it, the shame of it. She hadn’t taken more than a few days’ vacation in twenty years.
All my friends think I’m crazy, she said.
All MY friends think I’M crazy! I said.
What the fuck happened to us? I asked. Why are we so weird?
I don’t know, she said. Our self-sufficient, breadwinning mother? Our New England upbringing? Hangover from the witch-burning Puritans? Society as a whole?
I blame society, I said.
Well, we’re not alone, Alyson said. I have a couple of friends with this same problem. They make a ton of money, but not as much as their husbands, and they can’t stand feeling inadequate. I don’t think we’re crazy.
I thought about the men in my life, the ones who’d let me into their heads and hearts. Most of them didn’t have a hard time in certain departments of asking, but when it came to their emotional needs, it was a mess. They could ask for a raise, but they couldn’t ask for a hug.
I thought about Anthony. He was a professional therapist, listening to people, asking them about their deepest fears and problems all week long, and even he would clam up when things got rough. He likes being in control, he loves having answers, he loves fixing and helping people. But he has a really hard time letting people help him. Sometimes, when he gets depressed, he shuts down and doesn’t like to talk. When that happens, I figure it’s time for me to step up, ask him questions, help him through, talk about the problems. But he clams up and doesn’t like talking to anyone about his own problems. He calls it Going Into The Box.
When we ask for anything, we’re almost always asking for help in some form: help with money, permission, acceptance, advancement, help with our hearts.
Brené Brown has found through her research that women tend to feel shame around the idea of being “never enough”: at home, at work, in bed. Never pretty enough, never smart enough, never thin enough, never good enough. Men tend to feel shame around the fear of being “perceived as weak,” or more academically: fear of being called a pussy.
Both sexes get trapped in the same box, for different reasons.
If I ask for help, I am not enough.
If I ask for help, I am weak.
It’s no wonder so many of us just don’t bother to ask.
It’s too painful.
Sometimes it was like Neil was from an alien planet, where people never asked for or shared anything emotional without deeply apologizing first. He assured me that he was simply British. And that we Americans, with all of our loud oversharing and need for random hugs and free admissions to people we’ve just met of deep, traumatic childhood wounds looks just as alien to them.
When he started to trust me, he told me that he’d believed for a long time, deep down, that people didn’t actually fall in love. That they were all faking it.
But that’s impossible. You’re a professional writer, I said, and you’ve seen a thousand films and read a thousand books and memoirs and know real people authentically in love. What about John and Judith? Peter and Clare? Did you think they’re just lying? And you’ve written whole books, stories, scenes where people are deeply in love. I mean…I just don’t believe you. How could you write about love if you didn’t believe it existed?
That’s the whole point, darling, he said. Writers make things up.
While I was working on the first draft of this book (which I did over a few thousand coffees in various cafés in Melbourne), I shared a coffee with Samantha Buckingham, an Australian indie guitarist/singer-songwriter, during which I picked her brain about her process and her relationship with her own fanbase.
Sam is typical of a lot of indie musicians eking out a living. She’s not on a label, she crowdfunds and releases music directly to the Internet, she plays house parties in her fans’ living rooms. We were comparing notes about the pros and cons of Patreon.com, a new subscription service Sam was using, which allows fans to automatically deposit money into a musician’s account every time the musician releases a song, kind of like a book-of-the-month club for artists putting out content, so they can rely on a somewhat predictable income instead of praying that their Kickstarter will get funded every time they have something to release. (At the time of this writing, she’s got forty-four patrons—including nineteen $1 backers and one backer at $50—and is paid about $200 every time she releases a song. Patrons can choose how much they pay per song, and they can cap their monthly bill so she doesn’t all of a sudden dump one thousand songs on people and run off to Mexico. Although running off to Mexico when you’re Australian seems weird, so I’m thinking she would more, like, run off to Papua New Guinea.)
Sam was, in fact, about to travel to Asia with her boyfriend, and she was fretting about what her backers would think if she released some of her new songs to Patreon while she was “on vacation.” She was worried that posting pictures of herself sipping a mai tai was going to make her look like an asshole.
What does it matter where you are or whether you’re drinking a coffee, a mai tai, or a bottle of water? I asked. Aren’t they paying for your songs so you can…live? Doesn’t living include wandering and collecting emotions and drinking a mai tai—not just sitting in a room and writing songs without ever leaving the house?
I told Sam about another songwriter friend of mine, Kim Boekbinder, who runs her own direct-support website through which her fans pay her monthly, at levels from $5 to $1,000. She also has a running online wish list of musical gear and costumes, like a wedding registry, to which her fans can contribute money anytime. Kim had told me a few days before that she doesn’t mind charging her backers during what she calls her “staring-at-the-wall time,” which she thinks is essential before she can write a new batch of songs. Her fans don’t complain; they trust her process.
These are new forms of patronage, and it’s messy; the artists, and the patrons, are making up the rules as they go along. But whether these artists are using crowdfunding (“front me some money so that I can Make A Thing!”), subscription services (“pay me some money every month so I can Make Things!”), or pay-per-piece-of-content pledge services (“pay me some money every time I Make A Thing!”), the fundamental building block of all these relationships boils down to the same, simple thing: trust.
If you’re asking your fan
s to support you, the artist, it shouldn’t matter what your choices are as long as you’re delivering your side of the bargain. You may be spending the money on guitar picks, mai tais, baby formula, college loans, gas for cars, or coffee to fuel your all-night writing sessions. As long as art is coming out the other side and making your patrons happy, the money you need to live—and “need to live” is hard to define—is almost indistinguishable from the money you need to make art.
Like me, Sam, and thousands of new-school online artists, Kim is in daily communication with her fans. Her ongoing arrangement with her two hundred supporters functions because she shares her songwriting process, along with her bad days and heartaches. They trust her decisions. When she posts a photo of herself in a vintage dress she just bought, nobody scolds her for spending money on something other than effects pedals. It’s not like her fans’ money is an “allowance,” with nosy and critical strings attached. It’s a gift, in the form of money, in exchange for her gift, in the form of music.
The relative values are messy, but if we accept the messiness, we’re all okay. If Beck needs to moisturize his cuticles with truffle oil in order to play guitar tracks on his crowdfunded record, I don’t care that the money I’ve fronted him isn’t going towards two turntables or a microphone. Just as long as the art gets made, I get the album, and Beck doesn’t die in the process.
But that doesn’t mean observers are going to stop criticizing artists and their process anytime soon. No less than Henry David Thoreau has been called a poseur.
Thoreau wrote in painstaking detail about how he chose to remove himself from society to live by his own means in a little ten-by-fifteen-foot hand-hewn cabin on the side of a pond. What he left out of Walden, though, was the fact that the land he built on was borrowed from his wealthy neighbor, that his pal Ralph Waldo Emerson had him over for dinner all the time, and that every Sunday, Thoreau’s mother and sister brought him a basket of freshly baked goods for him, including donuts.6
The Art of Asking Page 17