prepostpunkpatti

Happy Birthday, Dear Patti

2007-12-30T20:44:00.000-08:00

My husband gave me the CD of Horses for an early Christmas present. My vinyl LP had reached its 30th year in something less than minty-fresh condition and in any case it's inaccessible without a turntable. I waited until a sunny morning when I was alone and all the cats were asleep. Maybe the chiropractor's office downstairs was open. Would the patients in the waiting room look up at the ceiling in consternation if I cranked it? I took a breath, pushed > and nothing else mattered.

"Jesus died for somebody's sins but not mine." Those bittersweet piano chords lay down a path to your voice, soft and sorrowing but utterly sure. These notes have haunted me through the decades, while the balls-to-the-wall wail of Gloria chased me out of silence, a hellhound on my trail.

So memory served: you kicked ass. You're kicking my ass right this moment: I'm actually writing this. To you, my sister! Because i too am an american artist, and when i can live it i lose my own guilt. You breathe that life into me. Thank you, Patti. Rock on.

ending is the hardest part

2007-11-02T11:23:00.000-07:00

passing the torch time, my partner says maybe, and maybe so, time's come. a year since clocks' stepped back, 2006.

A's don't yet match all Q's, but that's as conversing in blog goes; other Q's, other A's got blog time.

perhaps why 70's, why now eludes us: maybe they never ended, maybe we share the illusion of time passing; after all, they seeped through the 80's, 90's, right into the millennium with patti smith et al. perhaps it's not the right question -- with Wonder Woman on the charts covering standards, the stuff of tatoos, and still a promoqueen with fashion cred. the original poo-poos starring in the film, though, explaining "i hope it makes a jillion dollars and every little boy and girl sees it because i think she's great....[but] i really do think that the baton need to be passed" (Melanie Ryzik, "A '70s Survivor with a Secret Identity," New York Times, 30 Oct. 2007: E2). 07 digicast 70: jessica biel plays carter playing Nam/postNam era superwoman; iraq2 version, carter gushes, "i think it's the goddess within us, the secret self" (Ryzik), that's ww's appeal. the 70's appeal too, now?

that secret 70's goddess self inside? that three-decade-long afterglow? that something (not in the way she smiles) that keeps ps looking in the mirror back at...who? the gray goddess in hiding, fronting a platinum coif? smith red carpeting a bleached harry?

did the 70's just get lost in the packaging, in the end?

what was the question?

2007-10-29T06:03:00.001-07:00

yeah, you're right, our conversation about patti smith/the 70's/our growing-up years (back in the day)/south Jersey (that thread's personal) began almost a year ago, Fright Night 2006. the buzz around us, you're right again (but you usually are), has escalated since then: can't pivot in public these days without crashing into some 70's ref, if not a specifically ps musing.

but does that mean "bye bye to all that" just now?

i can let go -- no problem there -- my gene for separation anxiety underdeveloped as it is -- though we/i/you haven't answered my initial question:

why the 70's, why now?

because they who made them have passed on or turned 60? because, simply, it's a babyboomers' fetish, the last hurrah of a senescing generation? because the up-and-comers can't know it like we remember it, even if they wear it better than we did? because bottle blonde can't cover gray quite as well as it trashed browns back then?

perhaps, history's in the making? Ed Hamilton just published Legends of the Chelsea Hotel: Living with the Artists and Outlaws of New York's Rebel Mecca; among the "rare individuals" who took five in the Chelsea's rooms, on its stoop, across the doorway after a speeding4art binge were, of course, our subject and the 70's cru who have come to matter, other artists with the mostest of that day.

legends?

Pattie Boyd penned Wonderful Tonight: George Harrison, Eric Clapton, and Me with Penny Junor, reviewed in this Sunday's New York Times Sunday Book Review by Stephanie Zacharek, the tale of the woman behind two spotlight 60's crooners. possibly boyd is the real "Layla," possible there was "something in the way she smiled." although zacharek believes boyd's worth reading, she begins her review noting that some readers won't be inspired to turn the first page: pishwa, those nonreaders might snarl, she's just a wife; who cares what she has to say. the times might have changed boyd's life; the music might have changed her life; in any case, the review suggests that boyd witnessed two guys take off on a three chord jitney, upending hers, theirs, everyone else's soundtrack: they changed the world and her life, incidentally but significantly since she sat in the first row, with one opening 4/4 time blast of GCGG.

ps, percolating, figuring out what words to use to take center stage from jesus, when boyd let harrison and then clapton squeeze her little model hand for the camera (imagine what happened behind the bedroom door?): ps cast '77 as the new '68. boyd inspired the big boys (how flattering!); ps fronted the band (no public chatter about what she's like in the sack).

i can let go, but i'd really like to know.

Save the Last Post for Meme

2007-10-26T20:17:00.000-07:00

“Are you done with Patti?”

Have you forgotten you asked me this question? Granted: it was weeks ago, you've actually GOT a life and as per usual I couldn't come up with an answer since I hadn't foreseen the question, because I truly foresee nothing and at the moment my intellectual capacity was occupied by a game of tug o' war with an Airedale. Breath and the idea sank in. Some people, when they ask you questions, it doesn't matter what you say if anything. "I'm not trying to pressure you or anything," you continued, exerting all your will to modulate the genetic rat-a-tat effect of your speech once the starting gun fires. "I just don't know if this has run its course, especially for you, I mean, not living in South Jersey like I do, and you've probably got projects of your own you want to focus on by now--"

"Yeah, right." I plopped down in my chair and wrapped the knotted pants leg over the Airedale's eyes. She flipped it off, seized it between her maloccluded jaws and broke its neck. That was that. "No, I know what you mean. It’ll be a year in October. And, like ever since we decided to write about her, Patti’s just gotten so damn trendy . . . I mean, she's everywhere now--"

"Yeah, I'm always ahead of the culture curve that way." You laughed your choppy little laugh. "But it's kind of good for us too, right?"

My hair was slipping into my eyes, the gray piece I wish looked like Susan Sontag's streamer but instead just makes me look more and more like my negative destiny every year ("You get hair cut, put on some make-up, you could be an attractive lady," my physiatrist informed me during my second visit to be treated for neck pain; this was minutes after he had read my body and given away the last chapter to me, in which should I pursue my lifelong refusal to open up and admit whatever it is that I'm secretly afraid of, I will lose even THIS pathetic grip and wind up . . . "a Cat Lady").

I sat in my chair looking at the Airedale and thinking of mean things to say. There was Patti Smith, interviewed in the special "Fashion Rocks" magazine put out by the folks who Define, refine and fact check our taste and our opinions every weeks (with cartoons, minus some double issues for Fiction, Food and Travel--these editions I've always found make excellent sources of collage material), telling how it feels to be on the tour bus “rumpled" (just like back in the Field Marshall days) but "in beautiful clothes” supplied by a fashion designer fan who started sending her shirts gratis. Then our Patti let Annie Liebovitz take a (gorgeous) photo of her and the (striking in a goinng-through-her-kate-moss-phase way) aforesaid designer to run with the puff piece in “Fashion Rocks”, possibly the most navel-fixated product the New Yorker has ever spawned. And that’s going some.

Oh, okay, Patti. Y' still rock. Y're severely beautiful. You never stopped writing. "You know more than I know, you know more than I know, You know more than I know" (John Cale).

"If you wanna get down/ down on the ground / Cocaine" (J.J. Cale--no, not Eric Clapton.)

"Baby got big and baby got bigger . . . " (PS, "Rock 'n' Roll Nigger")

Maybe I just can't keep up? Or maybe aliens picked me up on some North Carolina country road and planted lymph nodes in my abdomen programmed to inflate like bubble wrap when the time came to box myself up and call Fed-Exit.

Yeah, I know what you mean about wrapping this one up. For a long time this was my only proof that I still existed. I’m having separation anxiety, dear partner. You learned from the mourning doves how to wean when the pinfeathers sprout. But for all my quips and my petty jealousy (you got so many more hits on your profile when it was still BLANK, even!!!), I am one of those birds, squawking on a pine branch, blinking into the sun--trying to figure out how the hell you get from here to there.

eulogy to Hilly

2007-10-21T10:40:00.000-07:00

yeah, cbgb's opened its doors this past august to homeless folks otherwise clothed in corrugated cardboard cramped under the awning when shows ended for the night, 4 AM or so; droop-lids, mind-fucked, cotton mouth to the max, punkphiles who stuck it out yet again, going-going-going on the urgency of making history every show every night (nothing since or before or ever again) daintly step aside them, testing the concrete for no-see-em ieds. did they camp there to soak punk soul or was it just an accidental warm entryway?

where was patti when all her softshoeing fans exited on bowery?

ultimate fighting out back? ultimate scribbling on the pot?

wanted it so bad back then, out of suburban nuclear verge-of-disaster ordinariness, into contact with safe urban ruination-like-creative fire bombing contact, rubbing off others' filth.

caught off-guard, unwitting walk-on, passerby in smokey black and white improvisation for one of warhol's 472 screen tests: there she is, then, among the wannabee public intellectuals sparing for film-time memory, who all lucked-out famous by association, but too scrubbed and styled and cosmeticized to call home a recycled box abutting granite. or to play it.

words matter, when bodies pulverize, beneath windows peering out from an 1800 sq. ft rm w/vw.

I Have not Loved You as I Should

2007-10-15T14:34:00.000-07:00

One late September night I abandoned a Law & Order:CI repeat I’d seen three times to look for something shinier. You know what? Inside Edition has much more gravitas than people think--like US Magazine. College professors discovered People a decade ago (many years after my own subscription ran out), but out here on the crystal fringe, we metabolize what our hands sieze from Check-Out line. Skip The National Enquirer, Gray Lady of the tabloids. Go to The Star for the dirt.

I watched, wrapped in my kitty throw. Elizabeth Taylor sat on some stage immobilized by a cascade of sequins. With all those glittering sequins and what they had to cover, you couldn't see a chair. She looked disturbingly like my mother. She always has: all their phases cosmically parallel. Liz has more money, but even she could take some lessons from Mom in how to spend it.

My laptop gaped receptively on top of my lap. I just about had a sentence in my head--not MY sentence, but a good one by the Beach Boys that would surely get me going. Something slipped, like maybe the walls, and suddenly there was Mary Hart, way too close.

“Are you done with Patti?” my blog-partner had asked that morning on the phone. Are you done with Patti? the tiny clh in my head had harangued me all day. You haven't posted in weeks! she shrilled, in italics, because unlike me she bothered to figure out how to put italics in her [imagine italics for emphasis] posts.

Done? With Patti? Okay, so I only post when I’m drunk. My fingers lay pink and swollen on the edge of the keyboard. (It's an Irish thing--booze doesn't flush just our faces.) Post, MM! You must post!

Suddenly it was dark out, darker westward than it should be, and a burl of thunder jolted me just before I could fuse with my genius. But I love Patti! I cried out to my blog-partner (who wasn't there, really). And I love you, dear blog-partner! I just don't know what to write.

An idea did come: Maybe I should sleep with my iBook before I do something nuts. It worked in the past, sort of. And closing it for now would give all of us a rest. Plug the battery back in and calibrate one more drink. These things take some talent, after all.

"The pen is mightier than the sword, but no match for a gun."

(The Beach Boys, "Student Demonstration Time," from Surf's Up)

outskirts of the ground war

2007-10-14T08:55:00.000-07:00

the other day, walking out of work with a colleague, i chatted about this blog. i had just posted my previous entry "there's always war -- somewhere" and, hoping for that speed-home-to-revise insight I oftentimes receive in conversation with this colleague, felt the need to rehearse its dangling metaphors.

uninterested in such a grammatical quirk, my colleague blurted:

"patti smith is everywhere these days,"

adding, with equal enthusiasm:

"I think it's because of your blog!"

an ample dose of modesty and a self-induced, sharp pinch successfully subordinated my wish about the latter to the accuracy of the former.

everywhere, ps is, it does seem so; even though her name isn't always mentioned, public chatter on punk or lower e-side poetry or artsy avant-garde reference her.

everywhere, ps is, fading in and out between lines, before first draw, after final movement, an avatar (straggling cur) marking terrain of a 30-years' war we might forget we were fighting (us exiles from Family Circle perched in camouflage dugouts west of hudson, waiting to dispatch en masse, following cur),

still fighting:

culture of men, by men, for men.

70's refs on New York Times arts' section front pages last week --
poez reincarnates a pioneer who gets the girl,
Rudolf Stingel markets others art his art,
Joy Division's mythic post-punk, post-industrial dystopicult.

ps in situ: no divertissement fad man; she plays for keeps.

in other words, the blog's because everywhere, ps is.

there's always war -- somewhere

2007-10-10T10:26:00.000-07:00

according to eric sevareid, CBS radio correspondent in the final days of WW2: "only the soldier really lives the war" and "war happens inside...." the clipped title of the 1 Oct. 2007 New York Times article that contained these two quotes, "...War...Story...from the Heart, Not the Maps," headed a review of Ken Burns' documentary The War.

real war in the 70's, too.

although that one has since been referred to as a "conflict," but torture's torture even if it's called enhanced interrogation. up the escalator and then down; after Kent State and Watergate, US pulled out, leaving chaos in SE Asia, rice fields contaminated with Agent Orange, survivors of exploded temples floating on rickety barges, landing in New Orleans, and that one's not over, not for them, not for us.

the other one, unsuspected for 30 years, seething in the desert where abraham, jesus, and muhammad shut their doors. i waited it out; Leila Khalid got married, had kids, did the wife-thing, twice.

nam in the jungle rot terrain of my first cello teacher's face;
palestine in place of the entryway mirror after Black September.

victual struggle: blast wars, twisting tales in my dna, to uncoded rubble. thirty more years, maybe, for that, if only i can prevent passing them on, or mutating back to farm country arkansas, the IP paper mill in Camden, now in ruin as if it never was, after the end of my Dad's memoirs.

we war from where we are.

Discharge

2007-10-09T20:39:00.000-07:00

A new meaning for the word “soldier”? I don’t think so.

No, there’s a real war now, and soldier means what it always did. Patti closes that Finding a Voice section thus: “Perhaps I have been none but a scrappy pawn, but I am nonetheless grateful for the moves I came to make.”

She remembers to “salute all who helped me make them.” But really she credits herself. Her "PS Complete" voice acts upon the past like embalming fluid. The affected diction yields “none but a scrappy pawn” and a disembodied expression of gratitude to herself for her own accomplishments. These sentences could’ve marinated in formaldehyde. Locked out, the supervibrant visionary of the early to mid-70's. But neither is this the lyric sage, the widow and mother of sons at age 60. Something happens when Patti/now submits Patti/then to the process of re-vision.

Decomposing prose is always a tip-off. The woman who conjured Johnny pinioned into his locker and aware of only horses? Well, she went to Detroit. And now she wants her tombstone to say “She loved her husband." If she found her voice in NYC, something got lost in translation to hausfrau. She never lost her boyish figure, but she did her chores like a scullery maid. No, she kept her body pure: not-girl. But something seems to have changed in her heart and mind.

Patti/now keeps issuing benchmarks: "Complete." Where are the front lines now, or does it matter anymore if the shirts are nice enough?

wrong's the new right

2007-09-29T09:04:00.000-07:00

new jersey: right turn off I95, or trope for the shared kink in our stories, or -- as my mother says of arkansas, where she was born -- "the jumping off point," the place to flee from -- flee to in my mother's case, even if it meant marrying the wrong man; flee back to in my sister's, the right man.

in the chapter "To Find a Voice" in Patti Smith Complete, 1975-2006: Lyrics, Reflections and Notes for the Future, ps maps her moves. she isn't from nj in the way that my mother claims to be from arkansas; she got there: born in chicago ("My Kind of Town"), first stop Philly ("South Street, the hippest street in town"), detour to snj, where she played Manrico and trilled the lullaby from Il Trovatore (19).

then, duded up for the "spiritual and cultural revolution" (19) she marched up north and over east to the island across the hudson, her "battlefield" (19). as she describes this move: "I broke from the confines of a rural existence. Farewell the factory, square dance hall, the withering orchards" (20). failed painting, to words on plaster walls recited out loud inside (reving in place), ready? set, go...accelerating to cbgb's, shooting up the place with word-ammo.

is ps from nyc, then, because she found her voice en route from her bunker with Mapplethorpe at the Chelsea Hotel to the Bowery Street front line? Or because it was there, and then, that "we gave new meaning to the word 'soldier'?" (19).

we are all mutations

2007-09-17T11:42:00.000-07:00

tortoise (terry griffen; my sister dated him when they were both in high school) used to call jerseyites "mutations." he exempted himself because he was from minnesota, forced to live in jersey because his father relocated after a second marriage to mrs. hansen, president of bergen bluestone, after her husband's death.

i had a friend in nyc who referred to me -- along with jack nicholson, bruce springsteen, and patti smith -- as a "jersey mongrel." like tortoise, this friend exempted himself since he migrated to the city not from the other side of the hudson but from south of carolina.

i wasn't from jersey either; "from" is so much more complicated than where i went to high school or where my parents currently live or even where i now lay my hat. in fact, lots of us "mutations" and "mongrels" aren't from the place to which self-describe "exemptions" hook us. instead, from elsewheres, product of remixed genetics, ribbons of this and that dna-knots, generating nonlinear stories, multiple, conflating, shifting, replicating, warring, inconsistent answers to the question "where are you from?"

a man operating the elevator in an apartment building in rio assumed i was from argentina -- something to do with my portuguese accent, i assumed -- and so i was (at that time, the late 80's, brazilians responded more favorably to argentinians than americans; one or the other, still inherited the gene pool of um civilizacao que assassinar los indios) and so i am, because i was for a time, at least to this trabalhador; although before this, i had been taken for french (because i carry a pen case in my bag?).

DUI

2007-09-15T16:20:00.001-07:00

"exit light
enter night"

maybe my best thing after all is driving a little drunk, blasting metallica into the ghetto twilight as if i weren't a white girl with a ribbon of african blood the legacy of some unrecorded rape, another strand cherokee, this one vaunted in our Children of the Mayflower pedigree, the First Families of Virginia, DAR legacy I bear on my whicker shoulders, unlike the jews from Alsace-Loraine my grandmother could not stand to hear about when her daughters traced the geneology

as if i were a punk from the trailer park south accused and convicted of child murder simply because metallica was my lifeline and i read books . . . i know real live southern gentlemen who claim to know (second or third hand) that the Gore family has connections to Satan worship, that's how it works

"never me, never free"

as if i were a boy a boy a boy, shifting gears like my hands were born with the knob in my palm, over the legal limit making a right turn out of the diner deserted (Jewish new year) this early evening, past two police cars lights flashing having pulled over a late model blond sedan, and i am willing to bet all the money in my disabled pocket the driver was black, or goth, or just wrong wrong wrong, like me

only this time i don't get caught.

future-redact: shirts on, girls!

2007-09-12T07:10:00.000-07:00

"there was never a year like 1977..." (John Tyrangiel, "The 30th Anniversary of Punk," Time 10 Sept. 2007).

Tyrangiel: "Patti Smith could sing with fury, but she was a genuine poet."

separate the poet from the boys -- also fury singing, shirts off, 6-pack abs (from horse not crunches?), writhing punk anguish through frothy mics. her wedding dress tilting off-shoulder (Tyrangiel, pic 26), impish stare, memories of twelve that "have not done well" (ps, "Notes to the Future").

the poet fell from the stage that year...kerplunk into 80's postpunk, draping demeulemeester cuffed linen "sackcloth and ashes" (ps, Notes to the Future"), and "a great reverence for the past" (Mark Holgate, "Kindred Spirits," Fashion Rocks, Sept. 2007), standing where Piaf stood, whisper of sucer francais, exhaled as raspy, nyc blare.

on paris olympia, the shirted poet disrobes les hard-knock mots suces, anthem-to-the-boys: "ain't it strange oh oh oh...girl in white dress boy shoot white stuff" (ps, "Ain't It Strange" from Radio Ethiopia).

an asphalt ribbon or free-floating lint de l’histoire: when we were twelve…

2007-09-10T09:34:00.000-07:00

add a jersey tag: the network’s on the grow….

all those girls doing androgyny until they’re stopped in their tracks have the same story. desperate to tell, to share the plot, to join the club that whips jersey off, a defiant fin after the prohibition.

it was my father, too, who conveyed the taboo.

a look, though, not a word, and i knew, even when “hot as hades,” my shirt must stay sweat glued.

happilyeverafter.

ps reading "Notes to the Future"

Bambi Got Fixed

2007-08-31T09:26:00.000-07:00

What ties us together, blond or charred or ginger snappish, but a ribbon of asphalt? It winds on from that tunnel in Paris ten years ago today (so image-savvy the People's Princess, to bleed out internally while retaining her beautiful surface post mortem, une infante defunte truly worthy of Debusy's Splenda'd Pavanne) to the Jersey Turnpike: Up for Sale--Yours for the Low! Low! Price of your Mortal Soul! and 35 cents every fifteen miles or so. What ties us, M.I.A./Patti/PJ Harvey/Madonna/Fantasia, and You, my partner . . . You, La Migliora Fabbra with the Open Sesame secret to invoke sleep that I can't trick, seduce or bribe into sharing my bed.

What made Patti write? She wanted to be like Jo in Little Women: a tomboy who wasn't a "bull" and had lots of boyfriends (see the Unauthorized Biography). What sucker punched her?

“I was twelve years old when my mother took me inside and said, ‘You can’t be wrestling outside without a T-shirt on.’ It was a trauma in fact. I got so fucked up over it when my mother gave me the big word—that I was absolutely a girl and there was no changing it—that I walked out dazed on a highway with my dog, Bambi, and let her get hit by a fire engine.” (UB, 26)

My sheltie's name was Peter. I loved him but one afternoon I hit him over and over with a Madame Alexander Scarlet O'Hara doll I'd given my sister, because he had chewed on it while we were out and because the teethmarks in her pink plastic "skin" would not would not would not would not--

My dad slapped me as hard as he could. First one side, then the other. It stopped with me holding the doll in one hand and Peter's chain link collar in the other. My father's hand was raised and I could tell from his squeezed red face he wanted to hit me again and for once he had the perfect justification. My sisters and my mother were watching. The word hysterical was swarming the air like a hive of yellow jackets. No one had to say it. Peter's panicked ribs rose and fell. We were in the closet in my sisters' room, where the pile of clothes on the floor made a place to memorize everything you could see with your eyes closed. I think I went there then.

the quietners: ps and m.i.a.

2007-08-22T10:24:00.000-07:00

without ever having listened to one ps tune, even one melody, or read through a single poem, m.i.a.'s getting herself compared to ps, by no less than the chairman of Interscope, Jimmy Iovine. iovine says he's not concerned that m.i.a. won't make "much impact...on the mainstream" (Ben Sisario, "An Itinerant Refugee in a Hip-Hop World," New York Times 19 Aug. 2007).

he goes on: "the left of center artists...you really wonder about them. can the world catch up? can the culture meet them in the middle?" (sisario).

born in london, raised in sri lanka, traveled everywhere, and like a squeezed sponge, it all comes out in her lyrics, instruments, beat, her duds, dance, and lingo:

unbud for a minute:

synliterate/globalkitch, to the too-much point -- and she's not blonde.

so we're back to the beginning, the first set of questions:

does ps influence female artists after her?

well, yes, clearly, in this case; although neither m.i.a. nor ps may know that the influence is taking place.

john szwed, one of the professors that i studied with when i was in graduate school, might respond to this effect, as he did to so many others: "who can explain it?"

culture'n axshin, there's no 'splayn'n.
but quietn down, now, she needs to make a sound...

rap saved Beah's life

2007-08-09T09:32:00.000-07:00

i just finished teaching a summer writing course. the primary text for this course was Ishmael Beah's A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, which is also the first year reader at the school where i work.

students in this summer course wrote their final essay on Beah's use of music. in their work, many students noted that music, in particular rap and reggae, saved Beah's life. he skirted certain death on a number of occasions, students observed, either by performing rap, by repeating meaningful Marley lyrics in his head, or by writing out complete soundtracks in a notebook. music triggered memories, the means for healing when Beah was in rehab, as the first grip of the AK-47 squeezed them out of his mind on the front.

Beah also experienced environmental sounds as music: the beat of rapid fire gunshots in the distance, the melody of dying gutteral wrenching, the percussive crack of dry branches under the weight of soldiers' boots, the soft timbour of rain on the underbrush. this music saved Beah's life, too, when he was hiding from the rebels and, later on, after he joined the boy soldier ranks; during these two periods, he didn't have a player with him, so to keep on, he listened as if the world out there composed tunes for him -- violent and anguished tunes, cautionary tunes, soothing tunes.

students connected to Beah because the music he listened to was also the music they listened to. although they did not live through a war of the same sort as Beah did and although they were not compelled to serve as boy soldiers, many students fought wars on urban streets, wars at home, and wars with themselves. many claimed to know a need similar to Beah's desperate moan for lyrics and bass and refrain. music saved their lives, too, even as it folded into wind around the lives of their friends and family.

to those of us who need music for transport to other worlds, who find music in our environments that sets the pace, who beseech music to time travel, who make music to tell a true (war) story, the power of music is power -- to know, to move on, to remember, to change, to stay alive.

the students this summer didn't even know who patti smith is, but they definitely gitR.

paris baby same as paris doll, OED

2007-06-28T07:46:00.000-07:00

ps (perhaps) announces that "the long blonde hair is up for auction" in a recent thread of the nj.com forum "nostalgia." no clarification from ps re. value at auction of nature-made v. bottle-dreamt. (most head props on "girls" over 12 created in a salon, though. have to assume that auction-goers abrade their noses for the unreal head, that most unreal demands the highest bid, that most unreal passing for most real-like sells to the man , no doubt, in the seersucker suit. this, predictable, post-hitchcock/post-warhol: grace kelly slurps campbell's tomato soup oil-off-canvas).

pony up for the realest paris head from a bottle! (her father asked for a mil, just to talk on camera with his paris baby out of jail).

paris head, 1561. S. Adams Househ. Accts. R. Dudley (1995) 132 (OED citation): "Paid for a parryes head with other furnyture for the chieff mourner at my ladies buryall," and (c1596 in Gentleman's Mag. (1819) 89 I. 23): "Next after them came the Lady Strange..in her paris head, tippit, wimple, vaile [etc.]."

paris heads, not necessarily blonde, but covered with something white.

single file to view the paris doll! (also from the OED: a dummy or mannequin dressed in the latest fashion, used by dressmakers as a model).

paris doll, since 1745: (1745 Gentleman's Mag. Oct. 553/1) "But Paris-dolls, by fashion and mamma, Tricked off, ‘all glare without distinction gay’," (1761 H. MANN Let. 2 May in H. Walpole Corr. (1960) XXI. 501) "His wife..is the Paris doll here, but too outrée to be followed," and (1950 P. BOTTOME Under Skin xii. 106) "The Paris doll, splendid in turquoise-blue taffeta under a golden lamé coatee, was poised within reach of Henriette's hand."

paris dolls, not necessary posed for autopsy, always for auction, but what's the difference, REALLY, definitely on display and for sale.

my sister says "everyone's got their price." but don't ya think sell out blonde heads should stake grey heads, aka ps. OED: (1702 STEELE Funeral V. i. 79) "Else Boys will in your Presence lose their Fear, And laugh at the Grey-head they should revere."

Kill the Blonde

2007-06-23T14:36:00.000-07:00

Paris is burning in an L.A. jail.
After a claws-out flurry, the networks now maintain they aren't actually competing for the Exclusive! Paris-in-the-Sprung Interview.
Paris called Barbara Walters from jail to say that she had "found god." Since we heard this from Barbara Walters, this constitutes Hearsay in a court of law. But since it is incrementally being revealed, to beasts who tread the earth, that Barbara Walters very likely IS god, it follows that Paris's assertion must be true. Clearly she possesses Barbara Walter's personal cell number. Moses didn't get any closer than that.
Paris has been spending her time in jail reading and answering her fan mail. Word on the cable news shows and the progressive talk radio stations has it that she "dots her i's with a heart."
They say she might have bipolar disorder. They say she takes medication every day.
A friend who visited her in jail said it was unbelievable how beautiful she looked without make-up.
One report on cable news showed an aerial view of what they said was Paris's house, and related that since her incarceration her dogs have been wandering from the premises and her ginger tabby cat got run over by a car.
Paris is an Aquarius. She shares a birthday with Michael Jordan. Today both of them, like me, are having a three star day.

If you go to www.ParisHiltonAutopsy.com, you will find the teenage winners of a writing contest. Their task was to write Paris Hilton's obituary after viewing a sculpture called "Paris Hilton Autopsy" by Daniel Edwards. The stated purpose of this sculpture (more views at http://www.caplakesting.com/parishiltonautopsy/index.htm) was to confront young people with the apocalyptic consequences of drunk driving. (Full disclosure: "apocalylptic" is my word, not that of Mr. Edwards, his gallery or Mothers Against Drunk Driving, who supported this project.) The sculpture depicts Paris Hilton lying in death on an autopsy table, arms opening outward and head turned in a pose that from the torso up evokes classic depictions of the Madonna, except that on Paris's chest her Chihuahua Tinkerbell (not apparently in rigor mortis herself; in fact seemingly alive and bewildered) stands straining toward the face of her mistress. Both appear nude, with the exception that each wears a tiara of the distinct Princess Diana style. From the waist down Paris Hilton looks like the victim of a sex murderer given to posing his trophies. It is a "hands on" exhibit, and for an added punch the kids who are its target audience can remove Paris's internal organs, including her uterus, which in this exhibit features a "double abortion": fetal twins, to underscore the "tragedy."

Mel Gibson. George W. Bush. Vin Baker. These people have also been arrested for drunk driving. They are not "dumb blondes." Paris Hilton's blood alcohol level at the time of her arrest was .08%. Check out your state's laws. Don't forget the pregnancy test! And maybe leave the tiara in the closet.

Suzanne Somers was also known as "dumb blonde." Her IQ is 154 (the same as Raquel Welch's; both self-reported). Madonna's (not "the Madonna" referenced above) is 144. Marilyn Monroe was a Gemini: "Two for one--more than two!" she joked. Like Princess Diana, she died at the age of 36, but not of drunk driving, unless you want to call it that. You could probably get a book deal if you do.

"Watcha gonna do when you get outta jail?
I'm gonna have some fun
What do you consider fun?
Fun, natural fun!"

"Genius of Love" by the Tom Tom Club

"Hello, Dad? I'm in jail! And I like it! It's nice! Say hi to Mom from jail!"

From What Up, Dog? by Was (Not Was)

street sighting

2007-06-21T08:06:00.000-07:00

and wondering what happened to cbgb's? well, it's become a homeless shelter:

out of the blonde, 4mm

2007-06-21T07:38:00.000-07:00

rayosunshine posted this to the "nostalgia" forum on http://www.nj.com. takes us back to the beginning:

4116.
If you were to write your own epitaph or eulogy:
what would you say? I would say "She had a wicked sense of humor, could make you laugh in an instant. She loved her husband, but always took time to love all the poor animals too. A true gentle heart.

PS. The long blonde hair is up for auction!"

(by rayosunshine, 6/18/07, 19:34 ET)

road trip stall off

2007-06-20T08:00:00.000-07:00

had a flash idea a few weeks ago: take a road trip to ps' home town. thought it might put some juice in my blog muscles, a bit flaccid lately, and spark an insight or two -- geography's not destiny, of course, but geography can tell some story.

first, needed to know the name of her town. a snap, you might think, but she's from sjersey, where i also live these days, and where names of towns change regularly, where towns split off from or become incorporated into larger townships sometimes with the same name as one of the towns (extremely confusing!). have to be "in the know" about all the splitting off and incorp-ing, or else you're lost all the time (my condition most of last year if i veered off route 30 or route 9).

sjersey road trip lesson 1:
the map changes,
gotta "go with the flow" (Madonna, "Vogue"),
juggle then and now maps in mind before setting out and during the trip.

i recently read that ps grew up in deptford township (exit 12 off 42, an exit i mistakenly took on my first trip to sjersey, thinking i was getting off the ACE in galloway, so i knew how to get there from route 30; everyone in sjersey knows how to get to deptford twnsp apparently since deptford has the only indoor mall in the area); however, i have also read that she grew up in woodbury, a city close to deptford twnsp, in fact a recent split off (deptford has actually shrunk since its incorp. in 1695 from 106 to 18 sq. miles., according to the twnsp website). deptford still retains "woodbury" in the names of two sections: woodbury terrace and woodbury gardens. good intent, is the name of another section, fyi. quakers and other religious groups settled in both deptford twnsp and woodbury, and the two places maintain roots to these religious traditions (note: sjersey was an important station on the underground railroad, transporting escaped slaves farther north after they made it across the delaware).

sjersey road trip lesson 2:
history matters,
otherwise every place looks the same, condos mcdonalds' outbacks mall-sprawl -- and, in sjersey, undevelopable wildlife refuge or pinelands reserve areas.

since i wasn't sure whether to head out for deptford twnsp or woodbury, i decided to people search ps' mom (beverly) and two sisters (kimberly and linda); maybe they still lived in the town where ps grew up. maybe i'd give a call before i left. didn't find any particularly useful information, though, not an address or phone number that i knew without a doubt corresponded to ps' mom's or 2sis'. however, woodbury and deptford were among the places listed as previous residences for all three names. but only confirmed what i thought i already knew: ps grew up somewhere in gloucester county.

sjersey road trip lesson 3:
cool out when you're going in circles,
take a cigarette break, buy a cold diet coke (down it till you burp), chat up a local, watch the entire last season of something on-demand, as scarlett o'hara said, "tomorrow's another day."

the day after that day, turned on the computer again and searched (long shot, i knew) the deptford twnsp and woodbury websites. thought, maybe, beverly held a local position, or ps' 2sis, or ps went back to read poetry with school kids at one of the local libraries, or ps performed at a summer music event. but, no. however, the woodbury website contained links to the local paper. so i searched "patti smith" in The Gloucester County Times.

sjersey road trip lesson 4:
try everything,
keep going: even if you end up on an unpaved road, pinelands on both sides, ghosts wafting, recitations of piney legends on the wind -- and you end up having to turn around -- if you want to find ps, you have to look:
"Outside of society they're waiting' for me/Outside of society if you're looking/That's where you'll find me/Outside of society they're waitin' for me" ("Rock n Roll Nigger")

okay, so the local paper isn't "outside of society." but it's outside of any place i initially thought to look, smack dab in the midst of sjersey cult, ps hiding out in plain sight, how ironic, how in character, how nostalgic for the clash of woods and mall. she's not from deptford twnsp or woodbury, pitman (17 miles outside of, se of, philly, and the location of a vinyl pressing factory back in album days).

you'll see:
read through the "nostalgia" forum on http://www.nj.com, follow "rayosunshine" threads....

In heart what I am is wasted

2007-05-31T16:31:00.000-07:00

"At heart, I am fairly quiet girl, who tries to do the right thing and tries to treat people kindly along the way."

These were the words of Monica Goodling, former administrator for the Department of Justice, testifying before the House Judiciary Committee. "I crossed the line," she admitted, when asked whether she sorted job applicants based on party affiliation. Much she did "not recall."

"in heart i am a moslem in heart i am an american artist and i have no guilt"

Patti Smith, the incantation that spirals into "Rock 'n' Roll Nigger." Could it be 30 years ago? Would that propel her onto the Billboard Top 100 Terror Watch List (with a bullet) today?

The thunderstorm just broke over the skateboarders who've been using Orange Street all afternoon as if this were Venice Beach, not 2007. The calicoes observe the sodden joggers with an academic interest. If they weren't litter sisters I think they might collaborate on a blog, but moments of unity devolve into padded spats pretty quick.

What about electric storms and wireless connections? I don't know about this. There's a lot I don't know. I would ask the cats, but they like to string me along.

I cleaned off my Patti books. I have no idea how the covers got layers of 1. dust, 2. something reddish and sticky, suggestive of vodka mixed with cranberry and orange juice, and 3. cat fur. But there's nothing a bottle of Windex and a "gently used" paper towel can't improve. Not in this world, at least.

Codename: Tara

2007-05-26T02:21:00.000-07:00

Howdy, pardner. So, you've been smashing vases lately--great! But when I heard your human voice you gave me pause.

You asked me, "Am I doing it correctly?"

Correctly? I guess, to rip off the Mythbusters' line, I'm what you call an 'expert.' (For anyone who's interested, I have four Ivy League degrees I won't be using, value "priceless," but I will take Mastercard.) That said, whenever anyone tried to hand me the Professors' Answer Book to Solving Poetry, my hands were full. Cigarette, beer, rare fossils . . . binoculars for spying field marks on birds who never comply with the descriptions in the guides.

A field guide to the poems? Look for enjambment. In grad school my peers talked like that, and they thought I was a stoner from California. I flunked my first presentation on Emily Dickenson by reading "hard" the dashes that ended her lines, only to be told by our white-haired professor that those were an editor's rendition. But I had started my career as a poem reader by feeling like a fool, and I live by that creed.

Feel like a fool. Fools take deer and daughters to heart. Experts take nothing to heart. And for what it's worth, my darling, today is a sacred anniversary in Ireland for the Hill of Tara, where the politicians are planning to plough through burial mounds older than Yeats's rough beast in order to build a highway for tourists. Another vector. Another tangent. Another arrow into the foul rag and bone shop of the heart. Our Patti IS an expert archer, despite having been born a few days too late for us to read her her horoscope under Sagitarius.

I think I spelled that wrong. Well, they can't take my diplomas away from me; I haven't been able to find them for 20 years anyway. Love, love and love, another poet.

PS: sharp shards and plenty of superglue to go around, any time you ask . . . a scout is always prepared.

thoughts in progress, 3: making sentences

2007-05-21T11:12:00.000-07:00

line breaks are suggestions, fragments aligned that read out loud, preferably, reconfigure, breaking elsewhere, accelerating to take a deep breath.

tara's edges fuzz subjects superimpose blinking images, so it's a "good poem."

and i was wrong 2 posts back; the ps that i thought i knew could have written "Tara," not only because it's "good," but also because it duels The New Yorker readers.

"what's going on in this poem? what does it mean?"

"no matter how far removed..."

her daughter may be unharmed today, but what about tomorrow, the next day, two years from now? remoteness can't save her; technology can't save her; it's useless against...who? she who stood by the door of her Virginia farm?

certainly not the deer; deer don't do that.

ravage their own.
tsk-tsk bombs' rubble as if february's nor'easter remains.
carbon-dioxidate ice caps.

deer don't; they are in the way.

thoughts in progress, 2: breaking Tara down

2007-05-14T09:48:00.000-07:00

can't read a poem without tearing it apart.

i know no other way; never studied ways to read poems
-- clearly -- just do what i can to make some sort of meaning.

need to do this because it's my way of thinking; have to make a mess of things, always, still, before i can fully appreciate the intricacy, beauty, brilliance of the thing's workings, the parts' fit.

i assume there's that in every thing.

need to do this (might as well admit it now since it will be evident at some point soon if it is not so already) because it's damn fun to throw a vase across the room, smashing it to bits, find all the pieces, and put it back together again. i like the vase with glue scars, sharp edges, tiny airholes, bumpy (hiero)glyphs better than i did the unbubbled one that used to sit on the shelf; this one shows the signs of me and you.

poems use words for the same reason: to break the flow, cut a new tangent. so doing it back, to instate yet another oozeway, makes poetry, making the poem better than it was before.

like ripping a tshirt, or careening off the stage. learned that from 70s/80s ps.

now i'm learning about her nuance: subtlety summons through association, reconfiguration.

this is a subtle poem, so here goes:

the title, "Tara" -- plantation in Gone with the Wind -- Civil War -- racial, economic divide, brother fighting brother, amputations (Iraq?)-- tara, an edible fern (Scarlett should have known; she wouldn't have gone hungry the first time) -- tara = ta ta (so long to all that) -- tara, a mnemotechnic (or mnemoglyph) exclamation (saying the name, Tara: the word lingers, hangs into the future, linguistic artifact turns sculpture, the plantation in ruination, a way of life gone forever).

reading "Tara": thoughts in progress

2007-05-13T11:04:00.000-07:00

i began the introduction to my father's book asking "Who would write this book?" the question followed from the difficulty that i had recognizing the man i thought i knew as the person who could write the text i witnessed him write. but i saw him put pen to paper (he handwrote the book before transferring it to .doc files), he talked nonstop about the book for the number of years he spent working on it, and after he completed a draft, he printed the 2520 pages, stacking them on the bed in the guest room where they remained until he passed away last year. so i knew that he was the author of that mss.

after his death, i read the book, all 2520 pages. Not only was i unable to recognize him in the text but i was also unable to understand why anyone, my father or someone else, would write a book of that sort. although the book is interesting, a reviewer might consider it "a page turner," i found it (almost) too enigmatic; i still puzzle over passages and plot segments, failing to have additional insights or to resolve any of its many koans. naively perhaps, i hoped that reading his book would accomplish what a lifetime could not: i had hoped to know him, finally. but no, his surviving words refused to disclose what the man alive kept to himself.

i have a similar response to ps' poem "Tara," recently published in The New Yorker. after reading and rereading (and rereading many more times than that), I still come away from the poem puzzled: the ps that i thought i knew (of course, at a distance), and whose work i have heartily consumed, studied, and allowed to influence me, couldn't have written that poem.

it's not rimbaldian; it's not rippedtshirt-girlinyourface-voyou-ing with warhol's bowery boys on the make for their 15minutes-godfearing/godsneering/godwilling; it's not thanking frank (at least, i don't think it is).

it's different; taking a 360 at 60 -- it seems, but perhaps not -- "her daughter unharmed": war's like that, random, undiscriminating, relentless.

i thought of this, written about another war, when deer and daughter succumbed.

a few citations 4 the 1 before

2007-05-11T06:12:00.000-07:00

2 sift out the subtleties of the 1 before...

guns 'n roses lyrics:

clicks to find

The Spaghetti Incident? -- "Down on the Farm"
Use Your Illusion 1 -- "November Rain" (view)
Del James' "Without You" ("November Rain" from and "Introduction" written by axl rose)
Use Your Illusion 2 -- "Pretty Tied Up"

ref to Edgar Allen Poe's "Annabel Lee" and "The Philosophy of Composition"

there...but

je voudrais connaitre savoir:
the daughter is safe? from? the constraint to die beautifully? the fear of an ugly death? that doesn't count, no poetry?....more

Pretty Died Up

2007-05-11T01:55:00.000-07:00

" . . . That pleasure which is at once the most intense, the most elevating, and the most pure, is, I believe, found in the contemplation of the beautiful."

" . . . Beauty of whatever kind . . . invariably excites the sensitive soul to tears. Melancholy is thus the most legitimate of all the poetical tones."

" . . . I asked myself - 'Of all melancholy topics, what, according to the universal understanding of mankind, is the most menacholy'? Death - was the obvious reply. "And when,' I said, 'is this most melancholy of topics most poetical?' From what I have already explained at some length, the answer, here also, is obvious - 'When it most closely allies itself to Beauty: the death, then of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world - and equally is it beyond doubt that the lips best suited for such a topic are those of a bereaved lover.'"

Edgar Allen Poe, "The Philosophy of Composition"

In July of 1993 my sisters and I had late afternoon hours to kill in a motel in Hayward, Wisconsin. Never mind the family history, the thin-lipped silences among the sunlight filtered in slanting slices through the second growth pines, the soft sand soil under bare feet hot from driving. The motel had MTV, which was featuring its Top 100 Videos of "all time," meaning, I guess, the ten years it had been on the air. By the time all three of us were back in the motel room, spread out on kingsize spreads in absract green and gold "contemporary" prints," they were down (or up) to the top five. We tried to predict: "Material Girl"? "Billie Jean"? I had the edge in popular culture, since Brigit and Sheila both had real jobs.

But both of those showed up before number one. Even Dire Straits and those two great Peter Gabriel videos had come and gone. I sensed Brigit losing interest. But I had to know. And then it bloomed on the screen, a dark flower of inevitability: Guns 'N' Roses' "November Rain."

Because Poe was right. Nothing more excites the soul than the death of a supermodel. Except for some of us. For some of us, me that summer and six years old in religious school in North Carolina and last Saturday at the counter of Krauszers for cigarettes suddenly stunned by the angel face of boy assembling a pile of goods in front of me--for me nothing excites the soul like the death of a beautiful boy. And I think Patti Smith touched that nerve with Johnny and the locker, when I first listened to Horses alone in my dorm room at Princeton. She knew.

I think she is still touching that nerve. "The deer don't do that." The daughter is safe.

And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side
Of my darling - my darling - my life and my bride,
In the sepulchre there by the sea -
In her tomb by the sounding sea.

Poe, "Annabel Lee"

in with the new

2007-05-04T12:28:00.000-07:00

"Tara"
a new poem by ps, published in this weeks' issue of The New Yorker. Read it at: http://www.newyorker.com/fiction or at: The New Yorker 4 May 2007: 76.

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

2007-04-28T07:41:00.000-07:00

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!

2007-04-21T09:17:00.000-07:00

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

2007-04-20T16:49:00.000-07:00

"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

2007-04-07T11:53:00.000-07:00

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

and good pic.

suburbanite playacting add-on

2007-03-28T08:45:00.000-07:00

i have disliked my subject before: what self-respecting, even self-depricating, woman, not even necessarily a feminist, walking on the edge, living against "the way it's done," wouldn't find kimberly bergalis unlikable?

never brilliant, as i thought ps.

willing to blame the victim publicly, proclaiming her virginity, while privately struggling, so repentantly, to seek foregiveness for sex, lies, and lawsuits.

it's not like that with ps right now.

but too many more facial-tic causing conundrums qua sexuality -- and the question, exclamation: is she really just one of those girls? all along, a punk trickster, she wanted what they wanted: to get the guy and to praise the guy and to thank the guy and to give her desserts to the guy? why not give her sweet cream to lizzie? -- and i don't know.

the submissive thing doesn't work for me, the good-girl-doesn't-curse thing doesn't work for me, the frank-said-to-act-like-a-lady-so-i-did thing doesn't work for me, either.

call darlene, she needs a dye job. blueblack. and eyebrow pencil. and mac-glow lips. and a few plucks. and a pucker, definitely.

induction afterthoughts: playacting suburbanite?

2007-03-27T07:33:00.000-07:00

in the induction press coverage, ps was described as

"influential" (Christopher Blagg, "Patti Smith Rocks on Hall of Fame Moment," Boston Herald, 12 March 2007),

a "punk priestess" who "scorched the place" (Scott Mervis, "Smith, Stipe Run the Show at Rock Hall Induction," Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 15 March 2007),

a "one album wonder" who is "commercially marginal" (Edna Gundersen, "Dispute Rocks the Hall: Purists Question whether Rap, Metal Artists Belong," USA Today, 12 March 2007),

"another suburbanite playacting in the city" (The Lefsetz Letter, 13 January 2007), and

an icon who "opened doors that female artists have been walking through ever since" (Lliane Hansen, "Spector and Smith, Making Rock History," NPR, 11 March 2007).

Nekesa Mumbi Moody's piece "Rap, Rock and Acrimony: It's Only the Hall of Fame," which appeared in The Seattle Times on 14 March 2007, recounts a conversation between ps and her late husband: "He told her she would get into the hall and that she would feel guilty because he would not make it even though he was more deserving." as the story goes, sonic also urged her to "accept it [the award] like a lady and not to say any curse words."

ok? now, which patti smith does this refer to? the playacting suburbanite? omg! is lefsetz right? has he coined the 70s subtitle?

the induct2day finale contra-verse-shall-e

2007-03-18T06:41:00.000-07:00

forgotten words, off key, mess on stage, but people have the power: see it now

induct2day: kickdpoetree n ass

2007-03-14T06:47:00.000-07:00

check out http://www.rockhall.com/, click "inductees,"
click "patti smith," read on.

she thought poetry was dying back then:
post-st.markshowl? pre-90snavelgazingengage?

'75: enter the nubbie, nebuly (wavy outline of a cloudpic), from south jersey, onstage at ceebee's, bringnit, neo-protest/ant/ism to her act.

who would have guessed? minister-ess "kick poetry in the ass," today, on stage at the waldorf, recipient of fame, yet not one of her "poetry books" makes it into the top 200 must-haves?

poetry in 2007: blown out the ass? hiding under which fold of flesh? politesse distress?

Induction Day: Santo, Hodges Passed Over Again

2007-03-12T05:55:00.000-07:00

Every year this ritual brings tears of joy for those embraced by the gods, and sighs of resignation for the lame, the forgotten and the suspiciously anabolic. It is hard to argue with the Veterans' choice of 1984 World Series winner Van Halen, despite the team's history of internal rivalry and quasi-legal roster changes. Grandmaster Flash? First ballot. No question--if only for the signature pre-game back flips that always brought a smile to youngsters whose dads brought them early to catch BP.

And the case can be made for REM; while never quite as popular as Jesus, their output has spawned at least two generations of myopic textual interpreters, keeping the holy and arcane (read: unreadable) "writ" in creative writing classes for a quarter of a century. Not everyone's coup d'etat, but--whatever.

In this day of slipping standards and sayers of the unsooth, however, someone must draw a line in the sand, between workmanship and art, between service and transcendence. After two promising AA seasons in the Downstairs Grubby Bar League, Patti Smith exploded in the majors like a flashbulb, with "Horses"--exactly like a flashbulb. This self-styled Field Marshall brought passion and pizazz to the position of short-stop, briefly reminding fans of Ozzie ( the "other" Smith) in his prime: the wheeling guitar solos, the burnout vocal intros, and especially the mane of unkempt hair.

But the keyword is "briefly," for unlike Oz, this wizard could not control her magic and wound up raising two sons in Michigan. An uncredited AP story speculates that voters, confused by the name, thought they were lauding the waif-like "Warrior" (that's Patty Smyth, two Why?s), who will in fact be inducted next year.

How soon we forget the golden age, and the golden ageless: Ron Santo (known backstage as The Saint, for reasons best unrehearsed in a family blog) not merely carrying his lunch pail to work every day, but flipping the switch to Genius when the spotlight shone upon him. How many of us spent our childhood summers playing "Innagaddavida" over and over and over again, just to savor his magisterial nine-minute drum solo? And carried the secret knowledge into adulthood . . . that like the humble Hodges, he knew that greatness always stands on the shoulders of others. Contrary to playground rumor, the song had nothing to do with Eden's garden at all. Rather, it was Santo's and his mates' tribute to the legendary pitcher Vida Blue.

Blue got elected to the Hall, rightly and properly. But let's not make it the Hall of Blues. Think before you vote!

missed Toad's Place show

2007-03-03T10:09:00.000-08:00

Toad's Place, a venue in New Haven, Connecticut, books new music as well as select retro acts. ps and her band gigged there on the 23rd of February.

i made the trip from south Jersey to New Haven to visit friends and to take in her show. we didn't make it, though. a nostalgic "alas," sigh, "oh well." but what are memories for if not to take the place of missed come-back performances?

did we really want to know what she's "like" now? clearly, not enough.

can ps now even begin to follow up ps then? even though she'll be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on the 12th, a sort of punk icon, one of the guys now as well as then, she's 70s not millennial.

that's one reason: the second reason relates -- the audience? who wants to clap (politely) and sing (misremembered words) and perform clicking arthritic movements passing for dancing with others struggling to call up teenage gusto just for the night?

the third reason, perhaps the most important, that bitch who always thought she was too cool to be cool, who'd down five straight-ups one after the other on top of an extra dose of anti-psychotics, whose five trips to the derm left her with an unrepentent chin flap and no niptuck remedy, she'll be there for sure, swinging fists, kicking chairs, throwing girls across the room. who wants to defile perfectly raunchy -- but with an artsy swish -- flashbacks with the bullyish antics of a senescent police magnet, who never got it that punk wasn't violent.

in heart i'm an american idol and i have no guilt

2007-02-03T00:37:00.001-08:00

A short-lived but intriguing rumor last week: the (reputedly) impaired Paula Abdul is going to be relieved of her judging commission on Idol and replaced by Courtney Love. (Insert your own joke here. Why aren't arrogance and condescension considered impairments? Paula at least succeeded at the very career the poor Idolators seek--a distinction from her cohosts that Courtney shares.)

The snide suggestion (Keith Olbermann's) was that Ms. Love had generated this rumor herself (own joke again). Go out and buy her book. Like a punkrock Cassandra, she saw all of it coming before the industry imagined anything but its own--now Simon Cowell's--navel. As a girl in notorious Olympia,WA (see "Live Through This") she already grasped Patti Smith.

Here's the latter-day Courtney, the one we don't hear about since rehab: "Rock n Roll nigger is the most superior song in the canon of recorded rock n roll music." (See Dirty Blonde: the Diaries of Courtney Love, p.262. And for a fabulously related Meg Ryan item, flip to p. 227.)

She even saw this blog coming. Here's where we at P4 get ontological: our title came from a Sunday morning idea jam session in October, before the release of her diaries. That's why, like Patti, Love is a genius. Not only does her callused thumb rest exactly on the zeitgeist, but she has the ability to ventriloquize it. She's what you'd call "an artist." More on the song: "There is zero refuge in this song . . . you are transported to a crotch dampening wilderness of pre punk pre post punk pre rock fanzine [sorry, CL, can't make this word out] nonsense "ethos" spouting nonsense . . . " (It makes impeccable suprasense on her page.) She ends this entry "Shine on. Shine on."

"Don't you wish your girlfriend was HOT like me?" The woman with long dark hair who slammed her hands down stageward on the word "hot" in ultimate repudiation of the Idol tryout ritual, and reclamation of her own exhausted dignity, screamed in invisible neon "Patti Lives! Fuck the age requirement!"

"i have not sold myself to god."

Shine on.

all the retro-dits say

2007-01-28T06:28:00.000-08:00

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

2007-01-14T12:55:00.000-08:00

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.

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

2006-12-27T23:18:00.000-08:00

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)

2006-12-27T01:36:00.000-08:00

. . . 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

2006-12-16T10:28:00.000-08:00

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

2006-12-10T10:17:00.000-08:00

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?

2006-12-07T23:37:00.000-08:00

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

2006-12-04T09:53:00.000-08:00

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

pithiatic pithanology

2006-11-27T07:27:00.000-08:00

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

2006-11-16T03:10:00.000-08:00

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

2006-11-10T09:57:00.000-08:00

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

2006-11-10T09:34:00.000-08:00

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

prosopopeian comedy

2006-11-06T07:42:00.000-08:00

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

2006-11-03T04:33:00.000-08:00

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?

the context

2006-10-30T09:02:00.000-08:00

couldn't find them at the time; the urgency, yes, the desire but not the thing desired. the times were straight inside the box, in the paper bag overhead, not thinking out of it, not "that way" anyway. didn't need the 70s then; now do, but only find them on the internet. patti's grey, debbie's had work done, and lizzie's fused to the dna of sea urchins, offline. i met her, i'm sure, in the 80s, when she was working with tillett, writing a screenplay on his toshiba in my apartment on the lower east side, but not in the 70s on the verge of, in the 80s belated blow up your nose nostalgia without desire for the thing desired a decade ago then, two and some now.