The View from the Cheap Seats

by Neil Gaiman

  The joy and power of portraiture is that it freezes us in time. Before the portrait, we were younger. After it has been created we will age or we will rot. Even Marc Quinn’s chilled nightmare self-portraits in liquid silicone and blood can only preserve a specific moment in time: they cannot age and die as Quinn does and will.

  Ask the question, Who are we? and the portraits give us answers of a sort.

  We came from here, the old ones say. These were our kings and queens, our wise ones and our fools. We walk into the BP exhibition hall and they tell us who we are today: a confluence of artistic styles and approaches, of people we could pass in the streets. We look like this, naked and clothed, they tell us. We are here, in this image, because a painter had something to say. Because we are all interesting. Because we cannot gaze into a mirror without being changed. Because we do not know who we are, but sometimes there is a light caught in someone’s eyes, that comes close to giving us the tiniest hint of an answer.

  Perhaps it is not a portrait gallery. It is, as T. S. Eliot (hanging on the wall as a modernist scrawl of overpainted profiles) put it, a wilderness of mirrors.

  If you want to know who we are, then take my hand and we will walk it together, and stare into each picture and object until, finally, we begin to see ourselves.

  * * *

  Originally published as an essay in the exhibition catalogue of The BP Portrait Award, 2015.

  * * *

  The Dresden Dolls: Hallowe’en 2010

  I want to describe Amanda Palmer, half of art-punk cabaret-rock band The Dresden Dolls, in a way that makes her seem like something exotic, but truly, it’s hard for me to think of Amanda Palmer as exotic: I know her too well. We’ve been friends for three years, a couple for nearly two, and engaged to be married for the best part of a year now. In that time I’ve seen her play gigs of all sizes and all kinds, alone or with bands, playing piano or keyboards and, sometimes, a joke that got so far out of hand it became a Radiohead covers album, the ukulele. I’ve seen her play grand churches and basement dive bars (once on the same night going from chapel to dive bar), watched her play a seriously genderbent Emcee in Cabaret and half of the pair of conjoined twin sisters known as Evelyn Evelyn.

  But I’d never seen The Dresden Dolls. They went on the sort of hiatus that most bands don’t come back from about a month before I met Amanda for the first time.

  I’d been a lazy sort of Dresden Dolls fan before that. I had their first two major-label CDs (but didn’t even notice when they released No, Virginia, their third). They had a few songs on my “Stuff I Really Like” iPod playlist. I’d felt vaguely warm towards them after hearing Amanda was nice to my goddaughters Sky and Winter after a gig, and when I noticed that the Dolls put up the hatemail they had received (complete with occasional hatedrawings) on their website. I tried to see them once, in 2005, when they played Sundance, but I had a panel on animation to attend when they were on, and I watched Nellie McKay instead.

  When I started going out with Amanda I asked about The Dresden Dolls. She told me it was a pity that I’d missed them. They were so good, she said. Brian Viglione and her, well, it was special.

  I was sure it was. But then she’d talk about Brian, the other half of The Dresden Dolls (Amanda played keyboards, Brian played mostly drums and sometimes guitar), and talk about their time on the road in the way someone talks about a bad marriage she’s glad she’s out of: they had been together all day and every day, and for 120 minutes of that time they had made the music that made her happy, and the rest of the time they drove each other crazy. They’d sometimes been lovers, or at least, they’d had a fair amount of sex over that seven years, and they’d sometimes been friends, but mostly they’d been The Dresden Dolls, a band on the road, united in a vision of art as liberation. And then in early 2008, they weren’t.

  Curious, I’d watched a YouTube video from the end of their final tour. Brian talks about why it was time for them to stop: “Why constantly fight?” he asks. “It’s not a marriage. It’s a band.” Cut to Amanda: “It’s like being brother and sister and married and business partners and then put in a box where you have to see each other twenty-four hours a day,” she says. They both look tired and they look done.

  But time heals. Or at least it forms scabs.

  Which explains why I am standing on the balcony at Irving Plaza at Hallowe’en, at the first gig of The Dresden Dolls reunion tour, watching two young ladies, wearing mostly glitter, Hula-Hooping in the dark with glowing Hula-Hoops, watched by an audience of clowns and zombies and mad hatters and such, and I don’t actually know where the Hallowe’en costumes end and the dressing up to see The Dresden Dolls begins.

  Amanda appears on the balcony to watch the support band, the Legendary Pink Dots. They were her favorite band as a teenager, gave the Dolls their first break. She’s happy that they are playing to twelve hundred people who would never have seen them otherwise. She holds my hand, introduces me to the man who introduced her and Brian at a Hallowe’en party exactly a decade before, and slips back into the shadows.

  The next time I see her, she’s on the stage wearing a red kimono over a Hallowe’en sweater she bought in June in the Wisconsin Dells. The sweater has a scarecrow on the back. She’s wearing a red military cap, and when, two songs in, she takes off the sweater and the kimono to play in skin and a black bra, she has the word LOVE written in eyeliner across her chest. Brian is dressed in a black vest, black trousers.

  The first strange thing about watching the Dolls is the feeling of immediate recognition. The “Oh, I get it. This is what the songs are meant to sound like.” As if the drumming makes sense of something, or translates it back into the language it was originally written in.

  The second strange thing about the Dolls is this: it’s very obviously a band that consists of two percussion players. They are two people who hit things. She hits the keys, he hits the drums.

  And the third, and strangest, thing about the Dolls is that they are, when they play, quite obviously, telepathic, like a couple who can finish each other’s sentences. They know each other and the songs so well that it’s all there, in muscle memory and in their heads and in the subliminal cues that the rest of the world is never going to see. I’d never really got that until now. I’d puzzled over why, if the songs needed a drummer, Amanda didn’t simply go and get a drummer. But drumming is only part of what Brian’s doing. He’s commenting, performing, pantomiming, playing, yin to Amanda’s yang. It’s a remarkable, virtuoso, glorious thing to see them play together.

  They play “Sex Changes.” They play “Missed Me,” and the audience are pumping their fists, zombies and superheroines and Pennywise the clown, and I think, I’ve heard her play this song so many times. I’ve seen her cross a hall with a marching band behind her playing this song. She’s done it with a full orchestra. And this is better than any of them.

  Two nights later, on the phone, after the Boston gig, she tells me how irritated she is with people who tell her that they like The Dresden Dolls better than her solo performances, and I feel guilty.

  I’m starting to understand why she went on her first tour with a dance troupe, even though it guaranteed the tour would make no money, why she would go on tour as conjoined twins with Jason Webley and a single dress that fitted both of them. I can see how much of what she’s been doing onstage was looking for things that replaced, not Brian, but the energy of Brian, putting something else on the stage that’s more than just a girl and a keyboard.

  She introduces Brian, tells off security for trying to take a fan’s camera: “We have an open photo policy.”

  A change of energy: they perform Brecht/Weill’s “Pirate Jenny,” and Brian acts it out as he conjures the ocean with the drumming. As the Black Freighter ships off to sea, and Jenny whispers that “On it is me,” the hall is perfectly quiet.

  A girl shouts, “I love you, Amanda.”

  A man shouts, “I love you, Brian.”

  The Long sisters, friends of
Amanda’s, both made up dead, Casey with a bullet hole in her forehead, Danni’s face a mess of stage blood, come and stand beside me.

  “We love every single fucking one of you in this whole fucking room,” says Amanda, using her favorite intensifier.

  The Dresden Dolls play Carole King’s song of Maurice Sendak’s “Pierre.” The moral is “Care,” and I don’t think either Brian or Amanda can stop caring for a moment: about the gig, about the other’s playing, about a decade of good times and bad times and petty offenses and anger and disappointment and seven years of really, really good gigs.

  Amanda goes into the chords of “Coin-Operated Boy,” a song that too often, solo, feels like a novelty song, and, played by Amanda and Brian together, it brings the house down: less of a song and more of an act of symbiosis, as they try to wrong-foot each other. It’s funny and it’s moving and it’s like nothing else I’ve ever seen,

  By now Amanda is a mop of hair and skin in a bra, Brian is a topless sheen of sweat and a grin. They launch into Auto-Tune the News’s musical version of the “Double Rainbow” speech, as hundreds of balloons fall, and it’s as foolish as it’s smart and either way it’s perfectly delightful.

  “The Jeep Song.” I don’t think I’ve ever heard Amanda play this live. They grab half a dozen fans and pull them up onstage for backing vocals.

  Then it’s “Sing.” If there ever was a Dresden Dolls anthem, it’s this: a plea to make art, whatever the hell else you do. “Sing for the teacher who told you that you couldn’t sing,” sings Amanda. The audience sings along, and it feels important, less of a sing-along and more like communion or a credo, and we’re all singing and it’s Hallowe’en and I’m up on the balcony slightly drunk, thinking that this is some sort of wonderful, and Amanda’s shouting, “You motherfuckers, you’ll sing someday,” and it’s all so good, and I’m standing with two dead girls, and we’re cheering and happy and it’s one of those perfect moments that don’t come along in a lifetime that often, the kind of moment you could end a movie on.

  The first encore: Brian’s on guitar, Amanda’s now wearing a golden bra, crawling out onto the speaker-stacks to sing “Mein Herr” from Cabaret. Then a crazed, wonderful improvisation that slowly crashes into Amanda’s song about parents, “Half Jack.” “They fuck you up, your mum and dad,” said Philip Larkin long before either of The Dresden Dolls was born, in a line that sounded like it could have swaggered out of an Amanda Palmer song, and “Half Jack” is just all about that. Jack Palmer, Amanda’s father, is up on the balcony near me, beaming proudly.

  A drunk touches my shoulder and congratulates me during the flailing madness of “Girl Anachronism.” Or I think he’s congratulating me. “How do you sleep at night?” he asks. “It must be like catching lightning in a jar.”

  And I say yes, I suppose it must be, and that I sleep just fine.

  The band crashes into “War Pigs” as a final number, and it’s huge and bombastic and heartfelt, and Amanda and Brian are playing like one person with two heads and four hands, and it’s all about the beat and the roar, and I watch the crowd in their lunatic, wonderful Hallowe’en costumes drink it in until the final explosive rumble of drums has faded away.

  I love the gig. I love everything about it. I feel like I’ve been made a gift of seven years of Amanda’s life, The Dresden Dolls years before I knew her. And I’m in awe of what The Dresden Dolls are, and what they do.

  And when it’s all over, and it’s two a.m. and we are back in the hotel and the adrenaline is fading, Amanda, who has been subdued and awkward since the gig finished, starts crying, silently, uncontrollably, and I hold her, not sure what to say.

  “You saw how good it was tonight?” she asks as she cries, and I tell her that, yes. I did, and for the first time it occurs to me how bad it must have got to make her leave something that meant that much to her, that made so many people happy.

  Her cheeks are black with wet eye makeup and it’s smearing on the sheets and the pillow as she sobs and I hold her tight, and try with all my might to understand.

  * * *

  This article was written for Spin magazine, and originally published on their website on November 5, 2010.

  * * *

  Eight Views of Mount Fuji: Beloved Demons and Anthony Martignetti

  I

  IT’S ALL ABOUT life.

  And in the midst of whatever else we’re in, it’s always about life.

  II

  I HAD KNOWN Amanda Palmer for six months, and we were going on our first date. Our first date was four days long, because it was all the free time we had at the beginning of 2009 and we were giving it to each other. I had not yet met her family. I barely knew her friends.

  “I want you to meet Anthony,” she said.

  It was January. If I’d really known who Anthony was in her life then, if I’d known how much he’d played his part in raising her, I think I would have been nervous. I wasn’t nervous. I was just pleased that she wanted to introduce me to someone that she knew.

  Anthony, she told me, was her next-door neighbor. He had known her since she was a child.

  He turned up in the restaurant: a tall, good-looking man who looked a decade younger than his age. He had a walking cane, an easy comfortable manner, and we talked all that evening. Anthony told me about the nine-year-old Amanda who had thrown snowballs at his window, about the teenage Amanda who had come next door when she needed to vent, about the college-age Amanda who had called him from Germany when she was lonely and knew nobody, and about rock star Amanda (it was Anthony who had named The Dresden Dolls). He asked me about me, and I answered him as honestly as I could.

  Later, Amanda told me that Anthony liked me, and had told her he thought I would make a good boyfriend for her.

  I had no idea how important this was, or what Anthony’s approval meant at the time.

  III

  LIFE IS A stream: an ongoing conversation of nature with itself, contradictory and opinionated and dangerous. And the stream is made up of births and deaths, of things that come into existence and pass away. But there is always life, and things feeding on life.

  We had been married for five months. Amanda phoned me in tears from a yoga retreat in the Canary Islands, to tell me Anthony had just been diagnosed with leukemia. She flew home. Anthony began treatment. It didn’t look as if there was anything real to worry about. Not then. They can treat these things.

  As the next year began, Amanda recorded an album, Theatre Is Evil. She started touring for it, a planned tour that would take the best part of a year.

  At the end of the summer, Anthony’s leukemia took a turn for the worse, and suddenly there were very real reasons to worry. He would need to go for chemo. He might not make it. We read the Wikipedia entry on the kind of leukemia Anthony had, and we learned that this was not the kind you get better from, and we were sobered and scared.

  Amanda had been a touring rock musician for a decade, and took pride in never canceling gigs. She called me, and she canceled the second half of her tour to be with Anthony. We took a house in Cambridge’s Harvard Square so she could be close to him.

  We had a small dinner for friends, shortly after we moved in, to celebrate the birthday of Anthony’s wife, Laura. Laura is very beautiful, and very gentle, and a lawyer who helps people who cannot help themselves. I cooked fish for them. Pat, Laura’s mother, came, and helped me cook.

  That was a year ago.

  IV

  ANTHONY HAD BEEN Amanda’s friend. Somewhere in there, while she and I were dating, before we were married or even engaged, he became someone I talked to when I was lost and confused and way out of my depth in the thickets of a relationship that was always like nothing I’d ever known before. I called him from Australia and texted him from a train in New Mexico. His advice was wise and practical, and often—mostly—it was right.

  He stopped me overthinking things; would offer hope, always with a matter-of-fact thread of darkness and practicality: yes, you can fix thi
s, but you’ll have to learn to live with that.

  I discovered over the years to come that many of the things I treasured most about Amanda were gifts that Anthony had given her or taught her over the years of their friendship.

  One night Amanda read me a story that Anthony had written, about his childhood, about food, about love. It was gripping. I asked for more.

  With a mixture of nervousness and diffidence, Anthony gave me more of his stories to read: autobiographical sketches and confessionals, some funny, some dark. Each of the stories shone a light inside Anthony’s skull and showed the reader the view from his past. He was nervous because I write books for a living, and he was relieved (I think) that I liked them.

  I liked them very much.

  I had worried that we would have nothing in common, apart from our love of Amanda. I was wrong. We both had a fascination with, and a delight in, stories. Do not give either of us gifts: give us the tale that accompanies the gift. That is what makes the gift worth having.

  Ask Anthony about the walking canes I gave him. The joys of the gifts are in the stories.

  V

  I’M THINKING ABOUT all those signs we put on our walls when we were teenagers and knew that we would live forever, in order to show how tough and cynical and worldly-wise we were: NOBODY GETS OUT OF HERE ALIVE was one of them. THE PERSON WHO DIES WITH THE MOST TOYS WINS was another. There was one of two vultures sitting on a branch that said PATIENCE MY ASS, I’M GONNA KILL SOMETHING.