"Life After ... ": Starting tomorrow, an NYC conversation series, Three Fridays in November @ The Rubin Museum of Art
Three Friday evenings, three guests, three intimate exchanges around what happens when significant, and sometimes unexpected, life events lead to opportunities for personal transformation.
Hello dear Substack folks!
A little life-musing, a question, and an announcement—especially for those of you in New York City.
Short story, if you wanna skip the below: I’m doing a conversation series at the Rubin Museum of Art—a wonderful hidden gem of NYC on 17th St., with a tiny theater—for the next three Fridays (starting tomorrow, Nov. 3rd) in November. Every talk will be followed by a Q&A with the audience.
You can get tickets for tomorrow’s event HERE (there are a handful left), and the links for Nov. 10th and Nov. 17th are below.
(If you have FOMO: The recorded talks will also be available later to my patrons, so join here to get them straight to your inbox.)
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Well, hello.
Greetings from a chilly November in Woodstock, N.Y. The leaves are falling. The hair needs brushing.
How are you doing?
Are you feeling okay?
(This is a real question; you can comment. I am reading, as are others.)
I’m not feeling particularly okay. I’m feeling almost totally overwhelmed and disoriented nowadays. Don’t worry. It’s not acute. I’m pretty okay with this feeling of not-okayness. I’ve … acclimated. Kinda.
And most people I know are not feeling particularly okay, either.
You? You … tell me.
This month, now that I’m done with a run of amazing shows with The Dresden Dolls…I want just sit down and collapse, and talk about how we are all doing.
Most folks I know are reeling from the wonkiness of Covid upending their lives and sense of reality, reeling from lockdowns, family rippings-apart, divorces, losses, new babies, friend ghostings, betrayals, economic strain, finding housing, grieving all sorts of unexpected massive changes across the board.
It’s fragile times.
If you’re not one of these people—bless you. I’m jealous.
Maybe life is always like this?
But also: there’s a pandemic to take stock of. There’s a climate crisis to combat. There’s wars, frightening headlines and yellings louder than bombs across the internet.
I have never known so many people to tell me—in a single week—that they are quitting Social Media altogether. They cannot handle the pain.
So: I feel it in the air, I see it on the faces … and I also took a poll.
Last week, at one of the shows at the Bowery Ballroom in NYC with The Dresden Dolls, I looked out at the squished sea of people. I was in the middle of telling a story about how disoriented I felt upon returning to the United States, and I just asked the ballroom:
How are you doing? Is everybody feeling okay?
Silence.
Is everybody feeling like things are out of control and you’re full of anxiety and … nothing feels like it’s gone back to normal?
A sea of hands shot into the air.
So, I feel you.
This is my plan for the month:
Starting TOMORROW—Friday, Nov. 3rd—I’m coming to the Rubin Museum of Art in NYC for three consecutive Fridays for what I hope will be some really important—and hopeful—conversations with some really, really wonderful conversation partners.
There are still a few tickets for each evening—the theater is small!!—and I’d love for you to come join us.
If you’ve never been to the Rubin Museum, it’s a beautiful little spot, and the theater is a little jewel of a room. The museum is dedicated to the collection, display, and preservation of the art and cultures of the Himalayas, the Indian subcontinent, Central Asia, and other regions within Eurasia, with a permanent collection focused particularly on Tibetan art.
You know me. I always want to talk, but I have a particular yearning at this moment in time to talk about the Before, and the After.
TICKET LINKS:
Friday, Nov. 3rd: "Life After … Covid," with Tibetan artist Gonkar Gyatso. TICKETS.
Friday, Nov. 10th: "Life After … Wellness," with writer Sophie Strand. TICKETS.
Friday, Nov. 17th: "Life After … Telling the Truth on Ourselves," with journalist Noor Tagouri. TICKETS.
The Rubin Museum of Art is located at 150 West 17th Street in NYC.
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A little more about my conversation partners…
GONKAR GYATSO: Friday, Nov. 3rd
Tickets: https://rubinmuseum.org/events/event/life-after-with-amanda-palmer-11-03-2023
"Life After … Covid"
This, below, is a piece of Gonkar’s sculpture called “The Great Equalizer.” We will talk about Lockdown, Covid, what the pandemic “did” to us as artists, and what it means now with a little bit of hindsight. I have been yearning to have the bigger, deeper talk about what happened to my heart, my head, my art, my voice during all that lockdown. What it meant to our souls.
Gonkar’s such a gentle soul. His work is incredible and hangs all over the world, including at the Met in NYC. It is in turns serious, playful, and sometimes downright hilarious. He has also dealt with a good deal of censorship in his work—being from Tibet and growing up in the 1970s ... you can imagine. He also has an eight-year-old kiddo and is dealing, like I am, with co-parenting after the dissolution of a partnership.
His stated modus operandi is to make the process a direct inspiration of life into work, with joy ... and to never be bored. I love him. C’mon, Buddha...
Bio:
Gonkar Gyatso is known for his colourful collages of found stickers, logos and images that irreverently merge popular culture’s iconography with symbols of Buddhist spiritualism. Working across collage, photography, painting, and installation, his work charts the ways identities shift in relation to globalisation and migration. Playfully subverting stereotypes of Tibetan culture while reflecting on the popularity of commercial Buddhism in the West, Gyatso considers the hybrid condition of living between cultures.
Born in 1961 in Lhasa, Tibet, Gyatso was the son of a Peoples Liberation Army soldier during the Chinese Cultural Revolution, which saw widespread censorship of art forms that did not adhere to a strict ideological programme. In his early 20s, Gyatso studied traditional Chinese brush painting in Beijing. Following his studies, he decided to travel to Dharamshala, India, to learn thangka—a traditional style of Tibetan painting. This became a turning point for his practice as he began to engage with themes of identity and cultural shapeshifting. In 1984, he moved back to Tibet, where he founded the first iteration of Sweet Tea House—the first Tibetan avant-garde artists’ association—in Lhasa.
(Gonkar doesn’t live much on social media, but you can read more about him here and here.)
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SOPHIE STRAND: Friday, Nov. 10th
"Life After … Wellness"
Tickets: https://rubinmuseum.org/events/event/life-after-with-amanda-palmer-11-10-2023
Sophie has become a recent good friend of mine, and speaking with her is beyond a pleasure. We spoke at the Omega Institute this past summer about wellness, the “wellness” industry, what it means to be “well” or “sick,” disability, and diagnosis, and it truly changed my perspective on life. If you want a taste of her writing, I suggest you start here with her essay entitled “I Will Not Be Purified.” she also runs her own Substack, which you can follow here.
Sophie is truly one of the most well-spoken and powerful living writing voices I know. This is going to be a unmissable talk.
Bio:
Sophie Strand is a writer based in the Hudson Valley who focuses on the intersection of spirituality, storytelling, and ecology. But it would probably be more authentic to call her a neo-troubadour animist with a propensity to spin yarns that inevitably turn into love stories.
Give her a salamander and a stone and she’ll write you a love story. Sophie was raised by house cats, puff balls, possums, raccoons, and an opinionated, crippled goose. In every neighborhood she’s ever lived in she has been known as “the walker.” She believes strongly that all thinking happens interstitially—between beings, ideas, differences, mythical gradients.
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NOOR TAGOURI: FRIDAY, NOV. 17th
"Life After … Telling the Truth on Ourselves"
TICKETS: https://rubinmuseum.org/events/event/life-after-with-amanda-palmer-11-17-2023
I met Noor recently through our mutual friend (and mentor) Esther Perel. Noor’s family is from Libya, and she has an unbelievable life/career story ... and let’s just say that people have some very, very strong feelings about her life choices. Including the choice to be the first woman in a hijab profiled in Playboy (which got her canceled in various quarters).
She’s done the dance of pain and suffering for many years as a result of telling the truth, for uncovering painful stories, and for uncovering ... well, lots of things. That always, as we know, comes with a tax.
She and I have become better friends recently, and we have had an ongoing conversation about the heavy price of telling the truth, whatever that means: about yourself, about your family, about your past, about ... everything. The emotional and physical tax. Also: what do we do with these truths we uncover? Art? Journalism? Music? Podcasting? What’s the medium?
This is definitely gonna be the perfect closer.
Bio:
Noor is an award-winning journalist and producer, a touring speaker for over 15 years, and has told stories in every medium from radio and print to documentaries and brand campaigns.
Born November 27, 1993, she is the producer of a documentary series on the mistreatment of people with mental disabilities titled The Trouble They’ve Seen: The Forest Haven Story and of a podcast series on sex trafficking in the U.S. titled Sold in America: Inside Our Nation’s Sex Trade.
In 2016, she became the first Hijab-wearing Muslim woman to appear (fully clothed) in an issue of Playboy magazine.
In 2018, Noor, along with her mother, Salwa Tagouri, launched the ISeeYou foundation to amplify the voices of the unheard and unseen.
Her podcast is here, and her Instagram is here.
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I hope to see many of you there for these events… I’ll likely be around for hugs afterwards.
If you are in NYC and cannot come, please spread the word for me, and if you’re disappointed you can’t make it, please consider becoming a patron.
Once again, we’re going to be recording all of these talks and sending them to patrons’ inboxes. You can join the Patreon here for as little as $1/month, and it supports all of my work and staff.
Thank you… I love you.
See you in the theater, or the comments.
And hang in there.
There is always an after.
xxx
Amanda
I'm feeling low-key twilight zone, knowing the pandemic really happened but still feeling like I'm in a weird dream and expecting to wake up from it. I haven't been home to my hometown since the pandemic because the borders were closed. my mom died the year before the pandemic, so my confusion over the reality of the pandemic sometimes bleeds over into the reality of her death too--like did all that really happen? memory is a strange thing. also, the train I'm taking tomorrow to come to the event at the Rubin is the same train I took back to school after my father died in 1987. so, like I said--twilight zone. all that being said, my direct personal world is generally okay other than the fact the world going to hell in a handbasket.
may all those suffering the hell of war quickly be freed from their suffering. if you are reading this and have family trapped in a war or are suffering yourself, I'm sending you some love. I hope things turn around soon.
on a happier note, the Rubin website is nice! there's a guided tour before the event tomorrow "Join us before the event at 6:15 PM for a docent-led exhibition tour of Death Is Not the End". The website has a video, the exhibit appears to have some interactive/contemplative elements. Looking forward to it! so happy you are doing this series, you're the perfect host AFP :)
Well damn. I took you off my Patreon when I subscribed to your substack. Could you zoom the conversations?
I spent yesterday in San Francisco at the Asian Art Museum, wandering through the Takashi Murakami "monsterous" exhibit and saying "Oh, wow!" a lot. I came home with a full brain and sore feet, and slept for 11 1/2 hours. As long as I'm petting the cat and reading a good book I'm fine; as soon as I pay attention to the outside world I get kind of batshit crazy: war and deranged politics, forests burning and strangely unseasonal weather, and no apparent relief in sight for any of it. My home is a tiny fragile island of what I am pleased to call sanity, but the world is way too much with us.