After the Fall, She was Broken and Small (part two)

Late in 1976 the Patti Smith Group toured England. Amusingly enough, the indigenous folk of the British Isles had somehow managed to invent something they called Punk. The British press, infatuated with Sex Pistols, Siousxie Sioux (now THAT one must have stung) and nascent XTC, no longer saw the bloom on our blushing American rose. Insufficiently adored at a press conference, she "climbed up on to a table, kicking aside whatever was on it. Before stalking out of the room, Patti declared, 'I'm the field marshal of rock 'n' roll! I'm fucking declaring war! My guitar is my machine gun!'"

Radio Ethiopia couldn't carry the momentum from Horses. By January of 1977 PSG was opening for Bob Seger and his Silver Bullet Band in the sovereign nation of Florida. This was worse than the Brits: at least they had sparred with her. Trying to rouse the Margaritavillians out of stonefaced silence, Patti dervished off the stage and fell into the darkness.

She landed fifteen feet below, took the impact in her head and neck. So much for that battle. If only we had some video footage of genial old Bob Seger claiming the stage in the wake of what appeared to most of his audience as the death of the opening act.

Patti spent that winter and spring under house arrest in NYC, on an oxycodone vision quest, writing poetry and preparing the miracle of her own resurrection. Her visitors were men, with Names You Will Know. Richard Hell: " . . . She 's so lovable and charming with her 'little girl' stuff and her sweetness . . . But I couldn't deal with it." (Unauthorized Bio, p. 178) So he went off with the Voidoids to get Blank Generation out.

Tom Verlaine ended their relationship, and Allen Lanier stepped into the role. Deerfrance considered this a good trade for Patti: "[Lanier] was almost more like a father than a boyfriend. We talked about Patti as someone who had to be protected." (UnBio, 180) And it was Deefrance who saw "this little face looking in through the window" of CBGB's after she emerged from her apartment and began to think performistry again. (UnBio, 181) The field marshal knew how to act the waif ("really shy")when she needed a hoist to get back up on her horses.

And when the men weren't around the little girl had started hitting the weights--rehab for her injuries had turned into training for the Ultimate Fighting event she had planned for Easter Sunday: Napoleonette in a neck brace, wrapping the rapturous CBGB's crowd around her resurrected finger. Like Christ, now, she had made some changes: in 1977, the Patti Smith Group stopped playing with a certain kind of fire. "Gloria" was gone from the set list.

jesus died for somebody's sins but not mine

Inside Every Field Marshal There's an Adorable Little Girl (part one)

. . . now don't squirm. let me put my rubber
on. I'm a worl in a lamb skin trojan. ohh yeah that's
hard that's good. now don't tighten up. open up be-
bop. lift that little butt up. ummm open wider be-bop.
come on. nothing. can. stop me. now. ohhh ahhh.
isn't that good. my. melancholy be-bop.

(From Patti Smith, "rape," in the 1973-1974 section of Early Work: 1970-1979.)

What's a feminist to do? There we all were, if not burning our bras (boobs too big) wanting to, stepping forward in closed sessions (no men allowed) to confess our secret and ultimately redundant histories so we could take the bruised hand of the next girlvictim and lead her into the light, away from all that. In the universities (why is that all these meetings took place on one campus or another?) we combed and combed the archives like Rapunzel's hair, searching for tenure--oops, I mean the nit of that Hot New Forgotten Author from at least a century ago, that female Bartleby scrivening away unaware that we were waiting in the future to rescue her from the Canon fire of our benighted colleagues. Like Poe, we preferred them lovely and dead.

Because the living ones cause so much trouble.

a pith of a kith

what's it mean to say "i'm a feminist"? In 1965? In 1977? In 1985? In 1992? In 2006? looking back, according to hilary poole, it meant looking at patti, envying her androgyny, wanting to be her girl-part, wanting to ravage her boy-part, but thinking in binaries: housewife/mother/daughter-in-training-for-marriage v. feminist, monogamous/heterosexual/reproductive v. that way. patti couldn't claim to be a feminist in the 60s and 70s; she didn't identify that way. patti's fans back then couldn't categorize her in that way, either, since to do so would require that they step out of cbgb's and predict a future they couldn't begin to imagine: patti as wife/mother/moustached/postmenopausal? today, poole suggests, to say "i'm a feminist" means to admit that "she's ugly" (220). no sowing-wild-oats-rebellious-gal in the 60s would have dared speak such male-identified woman-selfhating heresy. she's ugly, she's ugly, she's ugly: today's feminists can repeat it aloud (like a consciousness-raising group back then chanted vagina, cervix, labia, oh my) and don't care whether she would "feel bad" if she knew because they are confident that "she's beyond worrying about what people...find worth looking at: love me, love my moustache, baby" (221). but there's more to it in 2006, if poole is right. a feminist today makes a statement about her own identity by denigrating the appearance of another woman, an older woman, a former avant guard celeb; a feminist today points to another's bad looks as a way to foreground her good looks. the mark of the millenial feminist in mirror-splotched lipstick traces: how many times does she pucker up and smooch?

[quotes taken from: Poole, Hilary. "Ugly Duckling." Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 9:2 (1997): 210-222.]

ventriloquizing patti

in '77, it was all contradiction, contra-dick-shun? or contra-dick-less?

from the OED: contradictless means "that cannot be contradicted"; although obs., the word was used in 1607 by Day Trav. Eng. Bro., "words thunderlike, a contradictlesse tongue."

the pictures with lizzie hammer dick-shun. yet her ode to moreau, barbedwire-fenceonfire-liarliarfemaledesire, dick-less.

moreau's "words thunderlike," oui oui, near the close of Mademoiselle (1966)and the townspeople pitchfork manou to death. in 1979, manou's mime, ettore manni, who patti describes as "this burly italian burt lancaster...reeking of the wine fields ("On Jeanne Moreau") shot himself in the groin, se suicider, tout-ou-rein.

but patti swishes both ways. in her interview in An Unauthorized Biography, she says that she's taken over by men, but 5 years later, she thinks that moreau is "so great" because of "the way she conquers a guy." too, patti nudges punkgazers in '77 with this morsel, further fraying her public gender id: "i'd like jeanne moreau to cut me down to size, 'cuz in the process of being cut down to size by her i'd really start to grow" ("On Jeanne Moreau"). either patti doesn't want to be taken over by men, although she is, or she wants to be the guy, cut down by the girl (plunked center stage with sigmund?) to become a girl (by oedipal force of her hysterical, cathected, imaginary penis?), a girl who's "got brains" ("On Jeanne Moreau"), whose brains "start to grow" after it's gone.

Femme or Feminista?

VB: You’re bisexual.

PS: Completely heterosexual.

VB: You talk as if you were bisexual.

PS: Most of my poems are written to women because women are most inspiring. Who are most artists? Men. Who do they get inspired by? Women. The masculinity in me gets inspired by female. I get, you know, I fall in love with men and they take me over. I ain’t no women’s-lib chick. So I can’t write about a man because I’m under his thumb, but a woman I can be male with. I can use her as my muse.

(From Patti Smith: An Unauthorized Biography, by Victor Bockris and Roberta Bayley, “Patti Smith’s First Interview,” conducted August 15, 1972, by Mr. Bockris.)

I am woman, hear me roar
In numbers too big to ignore
And I know too much to go back and pretend

In 1972 Helen Reddy tried to find a song to express how the women’s movement had changed her. She soon realized she would have to write it herself. “I am woman” spent a week at #1 on the Billboard charts but it seemed to occupy a recursive loop. Hearing it made me cringe—shoulders slumped forward, eyes on the floor. I wanted that big brassy voice, just slightly flat, to shut up before she blew my cover. When this weirdo from Australia sang “I am woman, hear me roar,” it made 16-year-old me implode. I felt like nothing but breasts and belly and butt. I would do anything to shed that cocoon of flesh and emerge as a boy. But Helen Reddy insisted: “too big to ignore.” DNA had fixed my fate as female: adult female: woman.

Woman. Say it to yourself. Feel the way that first syllable, the womb that defines you, gags as it falls down your throat. Your lips expel the “-man” part soundlessly, as if it had placed its hand over your mouth. Blank canvas beholds the incoming brush and blanches. The mind that guided the artist’s hand never paused to see what, if anything, was already there.

4pics tell the same morphopithic transgender story

patti and lizzie (mercier desclos), both in drag, nyc apt, '77