first round
(4) P!nk, “Get the Party Started”
buried
(13) The Avalanches, “Since I Left You”
141-58
and will play in the second round
Read the essays, listen to the songs, and vote. Winner is the song/essay with the most votes at the end of the game. If there is a tie, we will play a one-hour overtime (and repeat until we have a winner). Polls close @ 9am Arizona time on 3/5/24.
stephanie austin on P!nk’s “Get the Party Started”
We were in the back of a cab—it’s late 2001 or early 2002, cabs were all we had—me, this girl I’ll call Carla who was a fleeting friend of my roommate, and a guy I’ll call John because I think his actual name was John but John is a generic enough name no one will recognize him, and maybe my roommate, who might have been sitting in the front seat with the driver or she might have left me at the bar after her boyfriend showed up. Both scenarios had happened, and I do not recall which scenario we were in that night. Carla and John used to work together but didn’t work together anymore. Carla had a thing for John during the entirety of their working relationship, and they kept in touch, and Carla knew John would be at Maloney’s so Carla wanted my roommate and I to go with her to find John for the express purpose of hooking up with him. Carla and I put on our *power party shirts. (Both power shirts were mine.) We were at Carla’s place before the bar. I brought two power party shirts over with me. An orange and white striped halter, and the red, off the shoulder business with the sparkle flames going up the side. I let Carla pick first. She wanted the red one. No bra. Can’t wear a bra with a shirt like that. You’re not supposed to want to wear a bra with a shirt like that. I sat behind the passenger seat, Carla sat behind the driver seat, and John was between us. John was kissing Carla, and John had his hand on my leg. We pulled up to the apartment I was living in at the time, and I put my hand on the door to get out. John took his hand off my leg, reached across me for the door I was about to open and said, “You don’t have to go.”
What’s a power party shirt? They’re sleeveless. Skintight. Shirts full of sparkles and color or black or white. Back then, they were all one-shoulder or halter-top style. Maybe they are again. People don’t come back, but fashion always does. You wore your power party shirt to the bars without a jacket in the winter. You screamed about how cold you were. Maybe you had a guy or two or three scream back at you to “put on a coat!” But you know, and I know, those guys didn’t actually want you to put on a coat. When you are 22 you cannot—ahem—start parties when you have a coat on. You need skin. You need a power party shirt for the skin. Watch P!nk in her video for “Get the Party Started”. She tries on a lot of tops. What’s the top she wears to the Club? A white tank over a bright orange mesh that shows abs and skin. What’s the top she wears in the Club? A black tank with clear straps so that it looks like a tub top. Her friend? In a white tank with black spider-web like mesh around the shoulders. Shoulders and skin.
Someone on Twitter (X) tweeted (posted/exed) that he was “today years old” when he realized that P!nk’s song “Get the Party Started” from her album Missundaztood was about drugs. Drugs? No. I get the inclination. She opens with that giggle. That tease. That shot on its way into the mixer. That pill on the way down. That line on the counter. The long I’m. Comin’ up. A command: So you better. A battle cry: Get this party started. The beat wiggles into your brain. I offer you the following: “Get the Party Started” is an herbal salve. Makes you forget yourself—what’s been done to you, what you’ve done to others. Which is all anyone wants.
Look. I’ll say it. My headspace during this time in the backseat of the cab wasn’t awful but it wasn’t great. A few years of turbulence—toxic men, bad choices, worse consequences—and I was working in a job I liked but that didn’t pay well (actual story of my life) and all my old friends—the ones I hadn’t alienated—had moved away after college, so I had to find new friends, new roommates. I was on the cusp of a few life-altering decisions, but I hadn’t made them yet. The series of toxic men, bad choices, worse consequences was a response to the series of toxic men, bad choices, worse consequences that my parents had led me through. We fight against and live within our family of origin. The sickly-good comfort we find in repeating emotional patterns is the worst kind of addiction. Less than a year before I sat inside that cab, I was teetering on the edge of complete self-destruction. Not an exaggeration. I was on a cliff, a foot in the air, eyes closed. All I had to do was tilt forward. I wanted to tilt forward and fall all the way. But for whatever reason, I stopped. I sat down, army crawled away from the ledge where I found Linda Perry (4NonBlondes, super producer and songwriter) and P!nk holding their arms open to me.
Perry said the song was unlike anything she’d produced, and P!nk, who performed it, said it was unlike anything she’d put out at the time. P!nk was coming off the massive success of Can’t Take Me Home, which was rooted more in R&B, and Missundaztood, was rooted more in dance-pop--oops-you’re-in-therapy.
Earlier that night, the three of us—Carla, me, roommate—scoured Maloney’s for John. No such things as regular cell phones, texting. In my day, you had to lap the bar 45 times until you found the person you needed/wanted. In my memory, John was plowed, but the bar was dark and crowded and full of smoke. I had a few drinks but don’t remember being drunk. I was annoyed. I didn’t want to be out anymore, and yet, out I was. I didn’t want to be involved in drama, and yet I was. Carla was tall and very thin with shoulder-length blonde hair. John was all right. I can’t picture his face anymore, but I think it was a generic, attractive male face. In my mind, his haircut was basic, and he wore a flannel and khakis but so did every other guy in Flagstaff at the time. We found him, and I remember—clearly—he didn’t have hot friends—and I remember Carla took off with John and I remember after the way Carla hyped John all night when I saw him I was like, no. Who I was looking for that night? Probably no one. Probably I was nervous about running into people who had injured me and/or who I had injured. Maloney’s then did the thing where it turned off the music and played scenes from Animal House and everyone liked that. Animal House clips were a hit.
P!nk released “Get the Party Started” in October 2001, a date I had to double check. Were we releasing dance-pop so soon in a post 9/11 world? The answer is yes. In my mind, the only music on the radio at the end of 2001 was that Lee Greenwood song but anyway, yes, so, we were indeed interested in getting the party started again in late 2001, and P!nk delivered. I bought the CD at Hastings—we were in the Napster era of streaming/Hastings was all we had—and listened to the entire thing expecting more upbeat and fun music. Imagine how I felt then bumping into “Just Like A Pill” and “Numb” and “Family Portrait.” P!nk said in a Behind the Music that she called her family together to listen to the album. Ballsy. In “Family Portrait,” a song I had on repeat for years and still consider a sacred text she sings, “I don’t want love to destroy me like it did my family.” And then you play that for your family? P!nk and I are the same in that sense. I mean, I wrote my version of “Family Portrait” but I waited until my dad died. So he never read my book about him. That doesn’t mean I wasn’t still ballsy! P!nk offered you a bop, then made you, me, and all of us look at our fucking lives and choices. “Get the Party Started” lets everyone around you know you’re about to fuck some shit up, and that shit is your family, your toxic relationships, and your own goddamn self.
I didn’t stay. I got out of the cab, and the next morning, sitting outside smoking with my roommate, I told her about it. I smoked and I coughed and I smoked. Again, was this what I wanted? After everything, am I still sitting outside choking on the same gross cigarettes I hated when my parents smoked them? My roommate said she bet John thought he was going to have a threesome. No way, I said. I gave him no indication of any such thing—but hey, men. We called Carla for the down low, but she didn’t answer. We called later that afternoon. No answer. Was she dead? No, but she avoided us. My roommate bumped into her somewhere and got the gist of the story. They didn’t hook up. Carla was pissed, and she didn’t want to be friends anymore. Somehow it was our fault? My fault. She refused to give me my shirt back. I left a few messages, the last one, if you played it back now, textbook cringe. Me, angry, “you have my property” and my roommate, in the background, shouting about calling the police. The entire scene was a regression.
“Get the Party Started” is dance-pop, yes. It was, at that point, P!nk’s biggest selling song because it’s boppy and fun, however, the song digs in, goes deeper. “…Party” is a cleaning song. Motivation to get your house in order. It’s wild, highlighted with bright colors, power party shirts, and exists as a way in so you can find your way out. Me? I packed up my room at the apartment, made tenuous arrangements to crash at my dad’s place in Phoenix for awhile. My dad’s place he shared with my stepmother, who did not want me to crash at all, who told my dad who told me she was afraid I was coming to Phoenix to party and leech off them. My dad said, “So, uh, don’t do that, ok?” And if you know my dad, you’d know my dad telling me not to party or fuck up my life anymore than I already had and bring other people around me down was rich. My roommate decided to leave, too. We didn’t get our security deposit back.
I carried/still carry P!nk with me. She understands the only way to put yourself back together is to first rip yourself apart. You’re going to put on your best party shirt. You’re going to invite your friends, drink your shots, laugh and scream your mantra. And then, when you’ve had too much and you throw up and your throat is raw and you’re desperately thirsty, you’re going to start the real work.
Stephanie Austin is the author of the chapbook SOMETHING I MIGHT from WTAW Press. Follow her wherever you get your socials: Twitter/X, Threads, Bluesky, Instagram and her Substack, Something I Might Say. You can read more of her work at her website: stephanieaustin.net
A Drift Through Memories Of Bliss: Ashley Naftule On the avalanches’ "Since I Left You"
1. Watch the steps"
The plan was simple: steal enough dynamite from a work site to fill up a backpack and use it to blow up the Eiffel Tower. It was 1959 and Ivan Chtcheglov hadn’t slept in days. The poet and political theorist lived in an attic loft with his friend Henry de Bearn. Their nights were fitful and restless, the velvet black of REM. sleep pierced by lights shining off the Eiffel Tower. Each night Chtcheglov thinks about the woman in Bunuel’s Un Chien Andalou who gets her eye sliced open. He closes his eyes and feels the Eiffel lights sawing through them; he feels his dreams running down his face like a silvery yolk. He tries to imagine what kind of magnificent, impossible birds they would have hatched but nothing comes to mind. The desire to sleep smothers his imagination, forestalls the possibility of a future to fantasize about.
The Eiffel Tower must be destroyed.
"Architecture is the simplest means of articulating time and space, of modulating reality, of engendering dreams," Chtcheglov wrote back in 1953. The grim irony of a piece of architecture—THE piece of Parisian architecture—denying him his dreams is not lost on him. The tower juts out in front of his attic like a long metal finger, prying his and de Bearn's eyes open. The dynamite they stole in the dead of night from that construction site was merely step one in an act of self-defense. Do men not have the right to dream uninterrupted?
The younger Chtcheglov was a utopian at heart, who saw the possibility of The City being a landscape that inspired & cultivated play & liberation over repression & commerce. One simply had to grab hold of that secret city, the city under the city, and drag it up to the forefront. Cut up & scramble the maps of the old world and see what radiant Hacienda emerges when you paste it back together.
"You'll never see the hacienda," 1953 Chtcheglov wrote. "It doesn't exist. The hacienda must be built."
1959 Chtcheglov still believes in the Hacienda, but he has trouble imagining it, the shape of the city under the city is becoming less and less clear to him. You need to be able to dream to keep the blueprints for the architecture of tomorrow legible. And so Chtcheglov and de Bearn walk down the streets of Paris, dynamite bundled in a pack, to commit the world’s first act of insomniac terrorism. Or they would have, had they not stopped for a drink at a billiards bar en route to the Eiffel Tower and gotten picked up by the police.
“Everyone will live in his own personal “cathedral,” 1953 Chtcheglov said. “There will be rooms more conducive to dreams than any drug and houses where one cannot help but love.”
Confined to a mental institution, 1959 Chtcheglov is free to dream without that hateful light in his eyes. He dreams in-between injections of insulin and bouts of shock therapy. He will stay in this place for five years and then live free in his own cathedral until 1998 when his eyelids close for the last time and no amount of light can slice them open again. His greatest contribution to literature and political thought remains a polemic he wrote when he was 19 years old. Luckily for Chtcheglov, Formulary for a New Urbanism is the rare work that transcends his youth, a shamanic broadside powerful enough to be worthy of being the sum total of a life’s work. It’s like Daffy Duck said after quaffing a bottle of nitroglycerin: “It’s a great trick, but I can only do it once.”
The Eiffel Tower remains standing; the hacienda is still under the paving stones, waiting to be built.
2. Get a drink, have a good time now
In the vocabulary of music writing, “dreamy” is one of its most abused adjectives. We whip it out to describe ballads, psychedelic reveries, doo wop, mall pop, Philadelphia soul, Badalamenti instrumentals, an entire subgenre of English guitar pedal perverts, and much more. Like so many horses who’ve been ridden past the point of exhaustion, the kind thing to do would be to take this rode-hard adjective and put it away wet. But not today.
“Since I Left You,” like the rest of the album by The Avalanches that bears its name, has the hazy texture of a dream. A blissful tapestry of samples, summer vibes, and hypnagogic instrumentation, “Since I Left You” spends its 4 minutes and 22 seconds of recorded life overwhelming you with flutes, whistles, drums, snippets of conversation, bells, guitars, drums, triangles, and singing voices that sound like a stoned person trying to remember what the Jackson 5 sound like. Assigning a genre to it is a fool’s game—it’s too fluid in structure and sound, slipping back and forth from disco to soul to pina colada-sipping exotica to 70’s adult contemporary to yacht rock to electronic beat music to 60’s pop. At some moments in the song it seems to be occupying all these different sonic terrains at the same time.
The seamless interweaving of thousands of samples that The Avalanches pull off on this album lends it an unstable, thrilling quality. We’re never quite sure where the songs are going; each new sound we hear could repeat or never return, disappearing into the mix like a strange person you saw on the bus that walks out of your life at the next stop.
The music rushes by like a dream slipping out of your memories—you want to stay in it longer, but the gravity of consciousness pulls you away. "Since I Left You" offers the dream of escape. The sound promises a tropical paradise: it's dance music made for the floor of a cruise ship. “Get a drink, have a good time now,” a cheery voice says near the top of the song with the smooth cadence of a professional greeter. “Welcome to paradise.” And the song proceeds to take us there. The cruise ship grooves are accompanied by a joyful voice repeating the song title over and over again. “Since I left you/I found the world so new/E-Everyday,” they croon, their voice manipulated into a childish, androgynous swoon. “Since I Left You” luxuriates in the feeling of freedom that comes from dropping off baggage: a bad relationship, a terrible boss, a toxic family, or your literal bags in your room on the boat before you make your way over to the on-deck limbo luau.
“Since I Left You” isn’t all sun-kissed bliss—there’s an undercurrent of melancholy. There’s a distance in the mix: the music is in constant flux, swelling and retreating. The party is raging; the party won’t last. For someone leaving a relationship on their own steam, the lyrics are a balm; for the person who gets left behind, they can be deeply bittersweet. Listening to “Since I Left You” after being dumped is like standing outside a party you’re not invited to, that you will never enter, that is jumping off precisely because you aren’t there.
In order to enter a world so new, you have to leave the old one behind.
The 2000 music video for the song (directed by Blue Source) beautifully encompasses the dual nature of the song. Starting off in flickering black & white, a pair of dirty miners toil away in a cramped tableaux that wouldn’t be out of place in a Guy Maddin film. Chiseling away at the rocks, they hear faint music playing above their heads. They work their way up, pushing up floorboards as “Welcome to paradise” echoes on the track, to emerge in full-color in a modern dance studio. Greeted by the sight of two gorgeous women dancing at an audition, the coal miners are dumbfounded at first. One of them (sporting a majestic mustache) shakes off his confusion and joins them, busting out moves that shock & delight the audition judges & the dancers.
Most of the video features the big miner dancing—flinging himself all over the studio like Gene Kelly with a beer belly—solo & in tandem with a blonde woman. Their chemistry, in dance and romance, is immediately apparent. The other miner sits on the sidelines, shy & inhibited, resisting the gentle advances of the other dancer, and only joins in with some tambourine shakes toward the end. It’s too late: the color leeches away on his body, turning him monochrome while his friend stays behind in paradise. With the two miners we get the joy of escape and the sorrow of being left behind.
The only real sin in Paradise, the video suggests, is to not take part in it. The Hacienda must be built. If you want to live in a world so new, you have to help make it.
3. Welcome to paradise, paradise, paradise…
I’ve watched countless hours of The Love Boat, Fantasy Island, Dallas, Charlie’s Angels… I couldn’t recap a single episode from any of them if you dangled me over the lip of an active volcano. My memories of them are a supercut, splicing fragments of them together into a collage of 70’s-80’s decadence. A hallucinatory terrain where night never comes, where the suits are white and teeth even whiter, where nobody walks when they could take a boat or a helicopter and when they do walk it’s always in slow motion, where the smiles are easy and you can practically smell the suntan lotion wafting out of your TV.
It’s all one show to me: The Love Boat stopping at Treasure Island; Isaac Washington serving up drinks & bon mots to Jaclyn Smith & Farrah Fawcette in-between stakeouts; J.R. Ewing plotting in his office while Ricardo Montalban & Herve Villechaize stroll outside his cabana. A vision of a luxurious America as untenable & unattainable as the simple small town world of The Andy Griffith Show.
You’ll never see Mayberry. It doesn’t exist. Mayberry must be built.
I grew up on Nick At Nite reruns, watching reruns of I Love Lucy, Bewitched,I Dream Of Jeannie, The Twilight Zone, and the aforementioned Summertime MegaMix. The old comedy shows are easier to recall & tell apart from each other; Lucille Ball cannot be melted down in the crucible of memory so easily. So much of my youth was spent playing in the detritus of a past I could never have experienced; my dreams colonized in part by the dreams of the past, the Haciendas of older generations that were never built whose blueprints made it into syndication. I consumed hours of that junk, and watched shows like The Simpsons and SNL and The Critic and old Looney Tunes & Animaniac cartoons that riffed on all that junk, that made jokes I couldn’t begin to understand, planting seeds of contextual understanding that would bloom 10, 20, 30 years down the line. All of 20th century pop cultural history getting chopped & screwed & streamed directly into my brain during its most formative years.
The same kind of low-effort immersion in the past is harder to do today. All the detritus is still there, but neatly siloed in a thousand different channels and moated with paywalls. To be young and to have working knowledge of I Dream Of Jeannie in the 21st century requires WORK. You have to dig for that kind of esoterica whereas it used to be as easy as flicking on a channel on cable TV and letting your unsupervised child marinate their brain in it for 2-3 hours a night.
Since I Left You, as a song and an album, simulates that feeling of soaking in hundreds of hours of hand-me-down pop culture perfectly. It’s as much a mega-mix assemblage of 40 years worth of dance music & sunny pop as my stitched together golem of good-time-TV. Their music evokes a powerful feeling of deja vu. Those heavenly doo-doo-dooos that drift through “Since I Left You”: where have I heard them before? Why do those strings sound so familiar? Has this song always been here, hiding under the floorboards of the world’s used record stores, subtly infecting the ears of anyone who can hear its faint siren’s song, urging them to dig through crates, and build them a body out of old records so it can finally exist in the real world?
4. Since I left you
Aside from being the thwarted bomber of the Eiffel Tower, Chtcheglov was an influential figure in the Situationist movement. His Formulary for a New Urbanism is a grimoire, a foundational text for the practice of psychogeography. Observing that geography can affect the emotions & behavior of its inhabitants, Chtcheglov and other psychogeographers proposed reframing one’s surroundings in a kind of ontological hacking. Turn the familiar into the unfamiliar: rename the streets, create new neighborhoods out of old ones, assign new purposes to hoary old landmarks, create a new urban mythology without a care for what existed before it. The Situationists employed a technique they called the derive (or “drift”) where they would take this reframing as a walking exercise, carving out the map of their new city by criss-crossing the old one by foot. They saw each bend of the road, each dark alley, as a portal into a new world to explore. Some latter-day practitioners, like Anthony Alvarado in his book D.I.Y. Magic, suggest taking actual maps of cities and overlaying them over the place you live. Walk around Phoenix using a map of Paris and see what happens. What discoveries can be made from that disjointment?
One can see the sampledelic style of The Avalanches as a kind of derive. Since I Left You represents the swan song for a certain style of ambitious crate-digging, a lineage of crazy-quilting songs out of hundreds of samples that includes such heavy-hitter records as the Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique, Beck’s Odelay, Public Enemy’s Fear of a Black Planet and It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, De La Soul's 3 Feet High and Rising, and DJ Shadow's Entroducing... (whose moody, perpetual night atmosphere makes it the dark twin of Since I Left You). Composer John Oswalds' Plunderphonics, in which he made sound collages & montages out of pre-existing music (including a none-too-pleased Michael Jackson), served as a spiritual godfather for this magpie approach to beat-making. What unites all these disparate records is that they sound both wholly themselves while also throwing easily recognizable signifiers like Johnny Cash and Slayer at you in jarring new contexts. The old maps get torn up and re-assembled into something new.
Nothing sounds quite like these records, and nothing can again: the cost of sample clearances has become prohibitively expensive. Only an artist of Kanye West’s wealth and stature could afford to drift through music history and pull off a 3 Feet High and Rising today, and you do NOT want to see the kind of Hacienda that man would want to build.
Since I Left You got in just before closing time to play one lasting blistering set before the party stopped.
One thing that sets Since I Left You apart from these other sampledelic albums (with the exception of Endtroducing) is that the samples are much harder to identify. The Bomb Squad WANTS you to recognize the Isaac Hayes keys on “Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos.” On a lot of those records, part of the meaning derives from how they subvert and reappropriate music history; they’re in conversation with it. Recognizing that Steely Dan riff or that Isley Brothers bassline enhances the experience.
With The Avalanches, the dividing line between original instrumentation and sample can be hard to parse. “Since I Left You” and its sister songs aren’t in conversation with music history; they exist in a parallel universe, an eternal Now where the Beach Boys, ABBA and The Chemical Brothers can headline the same festival & guest on each other’s songs.
5. I found the world so new
There was an actual Hacienda in the world for a time. Tony Wilson, the impresario behind Factory Records, took the profits he made off Joy Division and New Order to build a nightclub in Manchester that he named after Chtcheglov’s dream. For a time, The Hacienda was an epicenter for the UK club scene, a place where dance music and rock fans could congregate, cross-pollinate sounds and do an extraordinary amount of drugs. It lasted until 1997, and then The Hacienda seeped back under the floorboards, waiting to be dug up again.
You can draw a line through Factory Records, The Hacienda, and the Madchester music scene it helped foment, that will take you up to that time in the 2000’s when DFA Records and “House of Jealous Lovers” was the next big thing and it became officially okay for music nerds to start dancing again. Quite a few electronic artists benefited from this loosening of asses, including The Avalanches. Since I Left You was met with rave reviews upon its release and has yet to experience any serious critical reappraisal in the negative since then.
It was a very atypical record for its time. As a dance album, it doesn’t indulge in any of the conventions that would become inescapable in indie-friendly dance music. There’s no chicken-scratch Chic guitar, no jagged Gang of Four rhythms, no Talking Heads homages or the kind of pill-popping post-punk you could’ve heard at Tony Wilson’s Hacienda during its glory days. The music is lush, bright, almost kitschy in its cartoony effervescence. It doesn’t aspire to dirtbag decadence. You could easily get trashed on mojitos listening to “Since I Left You” but it would seem way too try-hard to snort a few lines while it’s on the turntable.
You could dance to “Since I Left You” at an after hours party but the song is built for sunny afternoons, warm weather, and wide open spaces.
6. E-Everyday
The ghost of young Chtcheglov speaks again: “We are bored in the city, we really have to strain to still discover mysteries on the sidewalk billboards, the latest state of humor and poetry.”
I recently drove through downtown Phoenix, an area where I used to spend so many beautiful nights, listening to Since I Left You on the car stereo. Everything around me has been transformed into condos and craft bars through some terrible alchemy. Almost all the coffee shops and underground venues that I lived a second life in, trying to build a Phoenix within Phoenix, a shining Hacienda of our own, are gone. Some of the people who were building alongside me, who had built so much more than I ever could hope to, my brilliant friends, are gone. Some have moved, some have died, some have been outed as monsters. So it goes.
As I headed home I passed the corner of 7th St. and Pierce where my old theatre, Space55, used to be. Our old location was torn down years ago and we moved elsewhere. For our very last show on Pierce St., I had the privilege of getting to stage my first full-length play, a dark comedy I wrote called Ear. We rehearsed it for a month and a half at the end of summer of 2017 in a state of constant suspense, unsure if we were going to get evicted before the show opened. But we kept on building because we could see the shape of something invisible that we wanted to pull into the world.
In the very last scene of Ear, there’s a moment where the two lead characters—both of them driven mad and exhausted after maiming themselves—sit on a couch and listen to a piece of music that only they can hear. When I was writing the script, I agonized about this final scene. What were they going to listen to? It had to be something sweet but also melancholy, a piece of music that two desperate, bloody people would want to retreat into, a song for people dreaming about entering a private world so new just for two.
The song came to me before the final rehearsal. The actors said their last lines and sat on the couch, their bodies bandaged and coated in blood, holding hands, staring off dreamily into space as the lights dimmed. Over the speakers a cheery voice rang out:
“Watch the steps! Get a drink, have a good time now. Welcome to paradise, paradise, paradise—"
Ashley Naftule is a writer, performer, and the Associate Artistic Director at Space55 theatre in downtown Phoenix. They’ve written and produced 6 full-length plays: Ear, The First Annual Bookburners Convention, The Canterbury Tarot, Radio Free Europa, The Hidden Sea, and Orange Skies. A seventh play, Selena and Judy Go Dancing, is set to premiere later this year. As a freelance journalist their work has been published in The AV Club, Pitchfork, Phoenix New Times, The Outline, Daily Bandcamp, Vice, Bright Wall/Dark Room, Fanbyte, and AZCentral. They post about wrestling and movies on Twitter & share their chalk art on Instagram. They’ve often been mistaken for country singer Vince Gill but bear no relation to the man so please stop asking what Amy Grant is really like.