| The Bed Song Book is ... DONE |
[Sep. 15th, 2014|05:35 am]
kyle cassidy
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Years ago the Dresden Dolls had a reunion show on my birthday in New York and I found myself standing somewhere in the back with Neil who said "Have you heard The Bed Song?" I said I had not. "Get Amander to play it for you," he said, "it's really beautiful."
That was long before it came out and over the next couple of years, I would come to know it as an incredibly beautiful song. One of the things that really amazes and inspires me about Amanda Palmer is that she can write a funny song, like Oasis and she can write a terribly sad song like the Bed Song. (And she rhymes "Slayer" with "dare", which is both daring and wonderful.)
If you haven't heard it, it's the story of a couple's relationship told through the beds that they own.
When it came time to make the Theatre is Evil album, Neil and I did a very ambitious book version of the song. It was a $1,000 backer reward and was, basically, a comic book script by Neil that I turned into photographs. The book took a long time to produce for a number of reasons, one being that we wanted to make a book that was incontrovertibly worth a thousand dollars a copy. Another, I discovered, was that because there was nudity in it, no printer that we approached in the United States would print it. (Weird, I know.)
(Video not showing up on your mobile device? click here.)
This weekend, we all met up at the Gaiman Compound (though technically it's a compound, it's actually more like a fairy glade) to sign all the books. It took a long time. SuperKate and Eric (aka Southships) spent a day unpacking boxes and prepping things. (The book itself comes in a box, and the boxes were made on a different continent than the books, so there were boxes of boxes and boxes of books). While this was going on Neil introduced  trillian_stars and I to the new Doctor Who (Trillian and I hadn't seen Peter Capaldi yet, and we enjoyed the two episodes we watched) and plotted the Librarian documentary and went running out in the wilderness and saw monarch butterfly caterpillars and examined tree that piliated woodpeckers had been systematically dismantling to get some gigantic ants out of and Neil cooked dinner (not ants) and then breakfast (and then lunch) and made us "Bubble and Squeak", which I'd never had before and now I feel properly touched by the English. & then we had to race Trillian home so she could be Lady Macbeth in her closing night performance, but it was grand and we saw friends and had a swell time and this thing exists that wouldn't exist if a lot of people hadn't worked very hard on it.
When I first saw the boxes opened and the books come out (I had to wear white gloves) I was so happy ... they're astonishingly beautiful. The printing of my photos is exquisite, the book is so well put together (AAAAAND, since we were worrying that people might cut their books up to frame the prints, you can actually disassemble the book, frame the prints, and then put the book back together later if you want.) So many things so thoughtfully done.
Thank everybody who made it happen. It's a beautiful thing. |
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accomplished