what happens in the 70s should stay in the 70s

isn't it just the way it always is, like girls who claim to go for girls when they're 20 something, turning wife and mom in their 30s, professing never to put men before their girlfriends, yet they do.

should we hold it agin' 'em?

and if ps looks embarrassingly male-centered now (and then in retrospect) must she be accountable now for my perception of what-i-needed-her-to-be-for-me-to-be then?

although it probably seems so, i'm not actually too critical of her 70s male-centeredness, after all there weren't many women to turn to in the 70s; no women that she knew of, perhaps, that could do for her what rimbaud could, intellectually: kaleidoscoping le mythe, l'arte, la beaute, la morte. even ethridge homages to springsteen, after all.

but ps disappoints today, not because of her past but because 70s limitations bled through to a time when those limitations (should) no longer matter (to her).

epigraph to "Rimbaud and Patti Smith: Style as Social Deviance," Carrie Jaures Noland (Critical Inquiry, 21, Spring 1995, 581) quotes ps' Early Work (1971):

"I keep trying to figure out what it means
to be american. When in myself
I see arabia, venus, nineteenth-century
french but I can't recognize what
makes me american."

I wonder if she can recognize what makes her american today?

one thing: ps' retreat to suburbia, focus on kids, deference to hubby -- it's what the girls do.

second thing: appropriation of euro-(high)culture for effect in neo(american)-(pop)culture.

we've given one thing the once over, so about the second thing:

According to noland, "Smith actually foregrounded her debt, referring directly to her major poetic influence, Rimbaud, and participating in a hermeneutic activity as she transformed Rimbaud's texts into her own" (585). in other words, ps cites her sources, yet reads and interprets rimbaud well enough to theive (detournement, translation from french, embezzlement or hijacking), in public, on stage, for 3 decades, right into r&r hall of fame as punk icon in 2007. no problem with that; dylan did it too, and morrison, and the sex pistols....

ps, nolan adds, "[mediated]...the punk reception of Rimbaud" (584). Consequently, ps sought inspiration from "the linguistic strategies we associate with the lyric genre" (584), not only from voyou inspiration. in other words, ps embezzled rimbaud to create "a blueprint for countercultural activity" (584), expressed through punk, to fit punk "within the paradoxical 'tradition' of antiestablishment art" (581), nolan notes.

what's so countercultural about a brief, diverting, "slumming" walk on the wild side (Lou Reed) only to end up back to from which she came (Bob Dylan)?

the walk to detournement matters, that's what.

because ps hijacks both high and low culture, in nolan's assessment; she, as well as the punk tradition ps mediates, doesn't simply thieve from high to gild low; ps creates a hybrid culture, detournant high and low: a vendre les corps sans prix (Rimbaud, "Solde"). and in doing so, ps "Rimbaldizes us," an effect Alain Jouffroy defines as low culture academic inheritance in "Petite Introduction a un Manifeste d'Aden" (Europe, 746-747, June-July 1991, 6).

ps may have turned around, but taking the walk that she did changed us: "Ce qui rimbaldise en nous est notre seule chance d'echapper a la banalisation et a la sterilisation universelles des activites productives de la pensee" (Jouffroy 6).

punk, then, "is a solution, a ritualized resistance...to the problems of being an intellectual" (609), nolan concludes, problems that Simon Frith in "The Cultural Study of Popular Music" (Cultural Studies, Eds. Lawrence Grossberg et al., NY: Routledge, 1992) collectively deems "the deep desire of intellectuals not to be intellectual" (182).

can we crit who she brings home, and how 70s (unfeminist) she remains after the millennium, when ps' unmasked intellectuals' internalized self-hatred, created a place for les corps du voyou in cleveland, and resolved americans' identity crisis: the counterculture is for sale at macy's; ps signing antiestablishment cookware this sunday.

ditto penny!

man o woman man, roiling homicidal ideations
but who doesn't share them,
reading those quotes re transformation
makes a 70's-embedded mind whirl;
----------"it's should be easter...but
---------- it's not. It's deposition day 2..."
testifying to her cushy life
outer limits of motocity.

well, her new self's not her old self.
that's the point of the con, no?

is she the c'artist or is it the media's gotta hang on to the old?

flee the burbs, bad bad burbs,
(but still love your family)
return to the burbs
(don't tell anyone)
haven from the people: to
write people have the power

(away in the decay of urban display where
artistic strays plot linguistic forays,
deep psychic sprays,
power girl, homegirl, power gone girl, home)

ps strolls shaded lanes
back to macmansionville
polo club in hand
writing lyrics/inhaling piney lacquer
idyllic exile from
people (who) have the power,
she says, but
what gives? 'cuz they not here!

On The Morning After the Seventies

"One afternoon while performing KP duties, I was interrupted by Fred with these words, 'People have the power. Write it.' After scraping out the pots and pans, I set about my studies in preparation for writing the lyrics . . . This song became our anthem for Dream of Life." (Patti Smith Complete, p. 154)

"Fred and I began to chart the territory for another album in 1994 . . . I came to him one evening and expressed my desire to learn to play the acoustic guitar so I could write songs of my own. He said he would teach me if I would practice hard. He kept his word and gave me lessons. I was a slow pupil, but he was a patient, encouraging teacher.

"I brought him a little song I wrote when jackie Kennedy died. Fred was taken with it and often sang and played it himself while I sang harmonies on the chorus. I was proud that he, a prolific and gifted musician, would like my song so much." (PSC, p. 184)

"According to John Sinclair, the MC5's [Fred 'Sonic' Smith's seminal band] manager, "they [Fred and Patti] never went out, they never had people over they didn't perform, they didn't record, they never even went to local shows. Nobody could figure out how they were surviving." (The Unauthorized Biography, p. 237)

"Some of Patti's old friends were amazed by her apparent transformation. Reading apiece on Patti in Vogue, Penny Arcade, for one, was shocked. 'I just wanted to kill her,' she said." (Ibid., p. 242)

"Though the Smiths owned a brand-new sedan, Patti, whose eyesdight had been damaged in the 1977 fall, remained one of the few people in Detroit without a driver's license." (Ibid., p. 234)

The exodus of the Smiths is generally related as a tale of migration: from the New York City that would become the playground of Madonna and Basquiat, to the Dresden-desolated quietude of Detroit in the 80's. "It's Morning in America!" beamed the Reagan campaign ads, but everyone understood (except the gulled UAW voters) that the alarm had rung: get out of the rust belt, or get caught in the periphery of Michael Moore's lacerating portrait of urban decomposition, Roger and Me. So Patti's flight under the wing of husband Fred had a certain nobility: shun the cocaine for raw need, leave the partying to join in honorable union with "the people."

Just one tiny issue: the Smiths didn't settle in Detroit. They bought a house in St. Clair Shores, a suburb just north of Grosse Pointe. Get out of town? They lived within an hour of the evolving Timothy McVey. You can have the car keys in a north shore suburb along a Great Lake; the country club's in walking distance. Hey Joe, where are you gonna go?

"a serious upgrade" from jewel

Nate Chinen in "Wrestling with Songs Tougher Than the Rest," The New York Times 7 Apr. 2007: B11.

and good pic.