The Art of Asking: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Let People Help
to their generosity. It was an overwhelming gratitude, more than I knew what to do with. I thought about how I used to feel as The Bride, when people would throw in a ten- or twenty-dollar bill. Or when a homeless person would give me a dollar, and all I had to give them in return was my gesture of thanks, my gratitude, my stupid token flower. And
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That dad and his little girl didn’t want theater. They didn’t want to be provoked. They wanted to be entertained. But they also wanted something more. They wanted connection.
Amanda Palmer • The Art of Asking: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Let People Help
Lewis Hyde published a beautiful dot-connecting book in 1983 called The Gift, which tackles the elusive subject of what Hyde calls “the commerce of the creative spirit.”
Amanda Palmer • The Art of Asking: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Let People Help
Brian and I took great pleasure in the fact that we seemed to have created the most eclectic community of fans in Boston: art college students, vegan punks, drag queens, metalheads, academics, people who listened to National Public Radio. That meant the world to us. We didn’t want to tap a particular crowd—we didn’t want to be a hip indie band or a
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The recorded songs, the tangible CDs, were only the tip of the iceberg: the perfect, frozen, beautiful soundtrack for something far bigger, and far deeper.
Amanda Palmer • The Art of Asking: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Let People Help
The opposite of “Indian giver” would be something like “white man keeper”…that is, a person whose instinct is to remove property from circulation…The Indian giver (or the original one, at any rate) understood a cardinal property of the gift: whatever we have been given is supposed to be given away again, not kept…The only essential is this: The gif
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We have a fucked-up relationship with artists. While artists are, on one hand, applauded for their awe-inspiring, life-changing works of art, they’re simultaneously eyed with suspicion, disdain, and other sentiments of the GET A JOB variety. Look at the media: we deify artists one second, demonize them the next. Artists internalize this and perpetu
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And when you’re afraid of someone’s judgment, you can’t connect with them. You’re too preoccupied with the task of impressing them.
Amanda Palmer • The Art of Asking: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Let People Help
And so you will take the coffee, because the truth of the matter is that your acceptance of the gift IS the gift. And if you’re not in a hurry, you will also draw the barista a picture, or draw a picture for his friend who’s a huge fan, or tell her about the Ben Folds song. And when he’s not looking, you leave a ten-dollar bill in the tip jar. Beca
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