Amanda Palmer wank!
Amanda Palmer is a solo artist, formerly one half of The Dresden Dolls. (She's also dating Neil Gaiman, but that's not important right now.) She's known for experimenting with music a lot and throwing spontaneous free gigs at airports and beaches. And inviting her fans to a night out at a strip club via Twitter, featuring Katy Perry and Peaches as surprise guests at her concerts, making silent films with Bill Nighy, things like that.

For the past month or so she's been tweeting about practicing a Tchaichovsky piece for an upcoming concert. She eventually decided it was too hard for her and came up with a pretty funny and creative solution (starts at 2:45), which she later blogged about, explaining why she feels it was the best thing to do.



That was a lot more narcissim than artistic expression. Art usually requires self-discipline at some point. I'm not dissappointed, however. Truth to tell, I only expect narcissim from you these days.
- Please do record a clip of yourself playing this piece so we can all see how it should be done.
- Art does not require self-discipline at all. Art requires expression and emotion; self-discipline is often counter to these.

Nobody who actually LIKES this piece could possibly have enjoyed it.
- Get laid, Stephen Cole. It might help you.
- If you think that was lame, then you really don't understand music and the community of artists and their fans in this modern day and age at all. I feel sorry for you.
- I am also a Stephen Coles and I formally submit that this fellow is unworthy of the name.

Amanda, you don't do anything original! Don't forget that, regardless of what your teenage "minions" say between their posts of "U RULE" and "xD". (Posted again four hours later to really drive it home.)
- I really don't understand why you're even visiting this site except to antagonise people.

Amanda herself responds somewhat passive-aggressively to the whole thing.


ETA - Since the video isn't loading for everybody: what she did was, she plays the first half normally, then staged an interruption by someone's cell phone going off in the audience. She walks over to the cell phone guy, drags him onto the stage and makes him play the piece from where she left off (in a "well, see if YOU can do it then" kind of way). The guy turns out to be a pianist friend of hers (Lance Horne), and they finish the piece with four hands and drink some wine. So, no music was changed, no damage done to Tchaikovsky, just some help from a professional.