On the Many Deaths of Amanda Palmer Read Online Free PDF Page A

magazine called
Visioning!
In a brief obituary for Ingmar Bergman in their August 2007 edition John Biggs describes the filmmaker (in typically semi-colloquial prose) as “a diamond geezer well worthy of many a Palmeresque”. Since then its usage has spread beyond youth culture magazines into the trendier Arts journals, and an entry has now been prepared for the 2010 edition of Butler’s Modern English Dictionary, although I and many others would question the accuracy of the proposed definition:
    palmeresque
[noun]. A piece or fragment of memorial writing, usually fictionalised, which refrains from praise or direct contemplation of the life passed.

ON THE FOUNDING, ASPIRATIONS AND THE FURTHER INTENTIONS OF THE AMANDA PALMER TRUST (APT)
    By Franklin Davey, Executive Chairman of the APT
    In September 2006, following the untangling of Miss Palmer’s highly complex financial affairs, the Amanda Palmer Trust (APT) was founded with the intention of
working towards the perpetuation and development of the vernacular arts, with specific emphasis upon the weird, freakish and generally other,
as stated in her will. (The actual words in the will were
Fucking Rock Love Art Incarnate
but these were deemed inappropriate for the manifesto of an arts-based charity fund by a vote of 7 to 6 – a decision still considered contentious by some.) To date it has funded, or part-funded, sixteen projects including
Die Hard – An Itch In Time
by
The World’s Tiniest Theatre
(a theatrical retelling of the
Die Hard
story portrayed through the medium of the flea circus, unusually in this case using real fleas);
Dead White Music
by record producer Dog-Faced Gimp (a series of recordings from the graves of famous European composers using hydrophones (under-water microphones) pushed six feet into the ground where they lie); and
Suck On This
by Amy Kinsley (explained as a neo-feminist answer to England’s Cerne Abbas Giant: this involved the cutting of a 700ft vulva into the chalk downland outside Austin, Texas, with the words
Suck On This
encircling it. The image is only visible from the air, but is directly below one of the busiest flight routes in the US. So far all attempts to remove the image by the Texas authorities have failed. It was supposed to only last one week but is still clearly visible nearly two years on).
    Among the first projects taken up by APT was the compiling of a database of
palmeresques
. This task was given initial priority as it was believed that the transitory nature of the internet combined with what at the time was thought to be a short-lived phenomenonimplied that they would not be available to catalogue for very long. On both counts this has since proven not to be the case, as neither the viral nature of internet sharing nor the theatrically obsessive nature of Amanda’s fans were given great enough credit. Indeed some examples have been found on many thousands of different web pages and it has been estimated that with no further maintenance and given the average natural wastage of web pages and sites it could take 167.34 years for one particularly popular example to no longer be found, although admittedly that figure has been disputed.
    In compiling this small and inevitably unrepresentative collection of
palmeresques
many difficult and complex decisions have had to be taken. It was initially agreed that we were not looking for the best examples, if such a quality can even be defined in a web-based viral form, nor the most poignant or sentimental. Along the way various other options were considered: the most varied selection (too many); the most representative (impossible to collate); the most mystifying (this one almost got through); and the most popular (determined by the number of web pages they have been copied to – but this generated too many very similar examples). During the process a considerable amount of debate was expended on what is precisely meant by the term
Fucking Rock