pithiatic pithanology

i don't know how to respond to "Armpith," except to suspect that judy linn wouldn't have foregrounded that raised arm-disclosing-unfemininity on the cover of Easter because her pics show, or seem to need to show, the girl in the girl. if linn did, though, would she have been able to catch ps huffing that moist matted tuft, effigy to an alien indentation in an otherwise justified text?

if she's a girl, does she shave?
if she shaves, is she all girl all the time or sometime performer?
if she shaves, does she repress struts and stinks of maleness?
or if she shaves, does she unleash female in male in female?

and if she doesn't shave, on l'a meme appele quelquefois pithecanthopus?

a hypothetical creature, avant-et-apres sex, gender, la lettre?

without accents is it french?
without the scraped rashy scabbed rhetoric, concealed in a fold of flesh, could she mask rimbaud, dylan, morrison?
and without that fem trace, could she seduce lizzie or judy or us?

Armpith

We were shaving our armpits in the shower in a half-assed way. Verboten hair: the speed with which it sprouts its graceless and aptly named stubble, and the difficulty of scraping it off its follicles. The hair in question has not had the decency to go gray. It remains obdurately black, and even under the skin the roots show blue. The armpits in question are of the concave variety. Armpits come in innies and outies too, and we await the debut of a double edged razor blade in the shape of a tiny disco ball. The implement at hand is one of those pink plastic things that come in a pack of six, the ones you grab in the checkout line at the supermarket. We scrape, rescrape, tug at the skin to pull the hairy part over the ridge of muscle so as to expose it to the blade. At some point in this process (thirty years ago, say) one might ask, WHY?

Patti on the cover of Easter, left arm raised sensuously over her head so what met our gaze wasn't her I-dare-you stare but that fluffy brown fan of armpit hair. The pout of her lips, her lowered gaze, the shadow of her breast inside her flimsy white chemise: all these telegraphed sex. At their center defiant as the O'Keeffe flowers she celebrated lay that tuft of hair. Maybe somewhere else women were burning bras and inventing a militancy we knew only through mustached rumors and suspicious new books in our moms' reading stacks. But even Gloria Steinem shaved her legs (we thought). And yet here was Patti. We had seen her posed on Horses like Jagger, beyond male, impervious to the nicks and odors of manhood: pure boy, fucking the camera just as sure as she had fucked the perma-boy who held it.

Now we sat cross-legged on our bed beholding a girl, seductive and strange. Here was not Linda Ronstadt. Here was an animal. A mammal, heat and hair. And here too was sex.

roiling gravel in guts 2

words and things ps in cyberspace:

patti pics

patti web

patti fan web

the web encyc on ps

more ps stuff

aristarecbio

some more ps stuff

some more than more ps stuff

a fan

webzine says 1

webzine says 2

roiling gravel in guts 1

youtube.com "people have the power":
see her now

prosopopeian comedy

in her review of An American Prayer (Creem, January 1979), smith takes morrison, out of the mirror, graphically. she does this, of course, because he fails to respond when she insists: "tell them james how we pray screaming" and "tell them jim of the burden of mutation." his failure means he and she makes not a we to the man, means not his impotence for once, which she wanted to witness (didn't everyone?). so we must discard her androgyny, so we must unveil her scar, castrato vaginalis: read Freud; jim obviously did. but so did she. ha ha. to one of the men she loves, as to all of the men she loves (in awe of her scar), she shrugs at the face in the mirror, "nothing posthumous is perfect."

Patti's Las Vegas Spectacular

The Doors are doing it--the three whose hearts didn't explode in a bathtub in Paris in 1971. If their justification is Jim’s vanishing point (in the kitchen in the glare of an early July afternoon, I stood gliding the point of the ancient steam iron into the tiny gathers that feed shirt sleeves into cuffs, savoring the precision of it and the smell and the sweat trance of LA Woman on the AM station I put on when Mom was working, when the DJ broke the wire report: the trance lolled useless like a neck snapped), why shouldn't Patti exploit him too?

He's hot, sexy and dead either way. And wouldn't we love to see her gray mane tossing the stage lights at the Mirage: a one-woman Cirque de Soleil?