The Dresden Dolls

So over at the ol' 'Gum, they posted a link to a song called Sing by The Dresden Dolls.

And, color me quite obsessed. I think the song's brilliant. TOTALLY brilliant. Have you listened yet? Then, listen, dammit.

I've been meaning to check out The Dresden Dolls since I read an article about them in Spin or something -- not only do they bill themselves as "Brechtian Punk Cabaret," (and I love Brecht! I love Punk! I love Cabaret!) but I went to college with Amanda Palmer. My most vivid memory of Amanda is a performance piece she did wherein she was dumped unceremoniously from a wheelchair right in front of the campus center, and lay there covered in blood and dollar bills while we all pretended not to gape. It was awesome.

I was also in a performance piece with Amanda that my friend Sarah organized - I don't remember the exact intention, but it was a womyn's studies kind of thing about Mulveyan gaze theory and there were five or six of us who posed naked in the campus art gallery, recreating the poses of famous statues. I think the point was supposed to be something along the lines of, "Could people look at real naked women with the same objectivity with which they look at statues of naked women?" and we had to be perfectly still and not intereact with the crowd while the crowd gazed at our naked bodies and tried to make astute observations as if we were works of art, and not people who would probably be sitting next to them in an English class the next day. I'm not sure if it worked. I remember there was lots of discussion about if we should hide tampon strings or keep them visible. And I remember i had chains wrapped around my arms, and that Amanda was posed in a prone position on a pedestal of some sort. In fact, I think I was re-creating a statue called The Greek Slave and I looked like this, only Jewish and probably with more bellyfat that I was sucking in (possibly along with a tampon string):