all the retro-dits say

the experts who make claims about who was and was not influential seem to agree that ps was. in march of this year, her sixtieth (yes, Obama, she is a boomer), ps's getting into the rock and roll hall of fame, a sort of recognition that's incidental to what she insists she "want[s] to do with the rest of [her life]."

According to a Newsweek poll of celeb boomers ("Send Me To Space," 22 Jan. 2007, 50-54), ps wants to learn horsebackriding from some polo club in Buenos Aires, to ride across the South American pampas (bareback?), and to read The Bible, The Torah, and The Qur'an (by campfire, when she roughs it out on the plains, perhaps?).

But where's the punk in that dream?

seems a more anthropological group of desires than an artistic constellation of hopes, motivations, or yet-to-do accomplishments. Her spiritual quest appears a solitary one, these days, in contrast to her 70s' public enlightenments: move ov'r/angels callin' everyone/levitation to freedom/now pow/livin' loud/livin' pushy/livin' on the verge of change (well, the lyrics aren't these, exactly). what's important, though, wasn't whether "you" got the words right, but that "you" found "your" own and were able to do something with them.

i'm not able to fit the Buenos Aires polo club into any of the ps stories that i tell myself, that other readers/listeners tell themselves, or that i interpret ps to tell herself.

is the polo club a boomerang? clearly, her statement to Newsweek that "if we take care of ourselves and stay focused, we can accomplish all of our dreams" is the kind of statement that can only be made retrospectively and that only a "poet laureate" of one thing or another, in this case punk, can make, coming back from a past when she could not predict her future accomplishments.

i'm not able to fit this quote into the 70s ps i thought i knew anymore than i can fit the polo club into that bygone version of herself. it sounds too much like a commencement speech, hoisting twenty-somethings right smack dab into the myth of the American dream; all ga-ga with hope that they can do anything they want to do, when really only some of them can and the rest just have to do whatever, making enough to live and pay off their student loans or not, falling into default.

1977: patti smith embedded

i don't remember much of it; although, like any good growing-up-in-the-70s near-chick, i should, but i don't. my mind failed to absorb the happenings: the zeitgeist just floated on by.

looking back, though, it was an eventful year. Wikipedia, under 1977: elvis passed into graceland in the sky that year, the sex pistols stole the show in europe, and talking heads was all the rage in the new world, while david berkowitz drove ny girls indoors (to men who conflated sex and rape, mothers who passed their daughters off to men who conflated sex and rape, playing martyrs to sexual violence horror, instructing their daughters to close their eyes and pray to god above that it ends asap -- "jesus died for someone's sins but not mine," damn right). controlf "patti smith": blyp.

Wikipedia, under 1977 in music: one entry, informing global readers that back in that day she kerplunked off the stage when she opened for seger in tampa, got 22 stitches in her head, and wrote Babel while recovering. i read it cover to cover, that year i think (let's say that i did; gives me a way to mark time). i recall commenting to some guy who asked what i thought (a line, perhaps?), "she's brilliant," with exuberance, because it was exubering just to call a woman "brilliant," then. and it was exubering, too, to retire The Communist Manifesto (required accessory at the time for left-thinking youngbloods) from the right back pocket of my fraying, embroidered Levis 501s and to replace it with a female punk's poetry (recognizable only to those who rode the bus with rimbaud), neck brace, stitches, ankle monitor and all.

marx said, but don't quote me, can't change the world until men stop raping women as if fucking. ps says, kind of, if jesus can't die for our sins -- of course he can't! -- then it's not a sin to call it rape. the boys don't know any better; they will be boys after all, and so jesus makes a habit of expunging their ignorance qua violence.

what's a girl to do, jeanne, if she wants to change the world? we can't all careen off the stage head first and write in tongues to recovery; christ, we don't all have the opportunity to climb up on a stage in the first place. we can burn bras in mass revelry, but then we have to protect ourselves; bouncing tits turn them on. we can go for other girls, but lesbianism turns them on. we can bulk up, but big girls turn some of them on. we can starve ourselves to puke stinking model thinness, but that's suicide -- and for them?

oh wait! we could mass market eugenics amazonas and dexter all the undesirable specimens, caging the genetic five stars for procreation, but then our nurturing, inclusive, pc feminist pangs would nix that scheme: what about the family value, status quo seeking straights that want 2.5 indigo kids, picket fences, and hetero marriages until death do them part; we can't erase their dream, can we?

perhaps we need to build more stages.