My name is Maya Lopez. I’m not sure If I’m still that person. The newspapers call me Echo. That’s what I feel like an Echo. This is my story.

drawing-bored:

doloresdepalabra:

Strange Beauties

Jen Mann is an emerging Canadian artist from Toronto Ontario.

“Inspired by the circus, illusions, dreams and the innocence and playfulness
of childhood, these strange beauties are saturated, eye candy explorations
in the odd and the beautiful.”

luxury bacon.

williams-blood:

Amanda Palmer: The Art of Asking (for TEDTalks)

I’m not going to comment on it in great detail here, aside from linking you to Gawker’s incredibly ignorant article (and by extension, all of the other commentaries linked within it). You can make up your own mind, but here’s my perspective in a few paragraphs:

The people snarling at her Kickstarter success do not understand her fanbase, her interactivity with them, or how long this interaction has actually been transpiring. Demanding that a dollar value be placed on the experience of performing with AFP live is something that I find deeply insulting and intrinsically hypocritical of her commentators to suggest. A long-standing fan and artist, whose heart’s desire is to be on stage with a legend on their eyes, would gladly accept Amanda’s offer (“beer, hug/high-five you up and down (pick your poison), give you merch, and thank you mightily for adding to the big noise we are planning to make”) without a second thought.

As much as I don’t want to use the phrase they’re not in it for the money, that’s exactly the concept at work here.

Now feel free to judge the everliving fuck out of me for creating discussion on this topic without having ever been a struggling artist/musician/living statue. I don’t pretend to know what that’s like on any level, but I’m sure a multitude of you don’t either; much less the people paid to slander without understanding. If that’s an unfair assessment of the situation, I apologise to those people, but that’s what I see happening here. Please enlighten me further with firsthand experience and legitimate criticism if you see fit.

But all I can see is this:

• AFP’s fanbase respond in an outstandingly positive way on Kickstarter
• media sources deeply unfamiliar with her past/nature as an artist tear her to shreds for doing what she’s done for years upon years
• a million dollars does not go that far in modern-day society, especially for a musician who is now entirely self-funded and self-produced
• any person who comes into that manner of small fortune with an eighth of a brain will budget it intelligently
• a fringe individual, who has learned through personal experience that the value of money is an incredibly fickle concept in modern society, will not immediately change her worldview to align with the brownbeatings of the majority
• the idea of insisting a dollar value be placed on an artist’s autonomous willingness to contribute for the experience they get is horrific to me
• labelling AFP a ‘small business’ is grotesque, as is likening her gift of beauty for an immersion in love to a transaction of Goods & Services
• people need to shut the fuck up and leave well enough that they will never have any concept of understanding alone

Fuck it, I lied, it’s Drum&Bass that went for a lot longer than intended… but I absolutely needed to get my thoughts out there this instant. But now I desperately need to talk to the man I love so y’all can fuck off :D

Seriously, thank you if you read through that wall of text; I really appreciate it when people spare their time for my thoughts, because you are truly the embodiment of generosity in this world.

The ironic thing is, Amanda’s not even breaching the conduct of established capitalism. She is still exchanging goods for money… It just so happens that the monetary issue is, part of the time, voluntary. In the land of the free and bold, there’s this stigma about the notion of simply asking for money. In the land of the free, you earn your money. You go out there, you get that job and you work your way up the corporate ladder because that is how you get money in the West. We are so enthralled as a society in the act of doing something for monetary compensation. What else is incredulously ironic, though, is that everyone expects money. We live in the world of reality TV, bona fide corruption in journalism, cheating our consumers out of money.. so surely what Amanda Palmer is doing is the same, right? She’s tricking people to relinquish their hard earned ‘green’ so that she doesn’t have to lift a finger, right? Nope. She’s simply asking. It’s such an innocent idea. Such a childlike notion of walking up to someone and just asking them for help. And that’s what she’s doing. And people are helping her. In my eyes, there’s nothing out there that’s less corrupt or less rebarbative.

Well see the thing is, I was researching thingies for an assignment, as you do, but then I sort of began highlighting my face and now half of it is orange.