Happy Birthday, Dear Patti

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

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?

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

“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

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

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

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.