Amanda Palmer has been a busy lady. It’s been four years since her last record, Who Killed Amanda Palmer, and in the interim she’s been dabbling in all sorts of projects: business (you can read about her huge Kickstarter success), music (channeling her musical roots for her new album, Theatre Is Evil) and fun (adapting Neutral Milk Hotel for a high-school production). Palmer will also be guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week. Read our brand new feature on her.
Palmer: This was started eons ago as a fringe set of events surrounding the hoity-toity Edinburgh International Festival, in which “legit” hoity-toity artists would ride in and show their hoity-toity art to the hoity-toity residents of Scotland and beyond. The fringe has now eaten the original festival alive, boasting something ridiculous like 2,500 performances a day: bizarre theater, performance art, comedy. music, buskers, people dancing in the windy freezing Scottish streets, soaked in pear cider until 4 am … for the entire month of August. People play flaming bicycle pianos in the streets. I often describe the fringe to my American friends as “Burning Man, except almost everybody is actually doing and making shit, and there’s way more drinking than dosing” or the less crass “Disney World for weird theater dorks.” Almost every show that travels here to show its stuff stays in residency for the entire month, and the population of the fairy-tale cobble-stoned city itself triples, possibly quadruples. It truly turns into a mini art city, covered with activity and randomness. I came eight years ago and have hardly let a summer go by without at least checking in for a few days to soak up the energy. I’ve met some of my best cabaret and comedy friends here, from Australian meow meow to the U.K. comedian Andrew O’Neill to American weirdo comedy-musician Reggie Watts. (I dragged Regina Spektor to go see him the night after I first met him back in 2007; she was in town for a one-off show, and I was like “You must see this man.”) If you want to immerse yourself in an art vacation, this is highly recommended. Arrive sometime between august 10-15 for prime awesomeness. And stay in a cheap hostel! The city’s teeny and everything is walking distance to everything else. You’ll barely be sleeping anyway.
Video after the jump.
