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.
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.
posted by clh at 7:41 AM
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