Patti Smith at St. Mark's Church

Last night I had the most incredible Patti experience thus far, the amazing opportunity to see her read poetry with Lenny Kaye on the 40th anniversary of their very first performance in the same church where it all started. I wrote a review of it for Sound System NYC, and took some shoddy video on my iPhone. This woman is truly inspiring in every way: universally talented, rousing, kind, warm, gentle, humble. She is everything I aim to be in my life. She is a true artist.

I've seen Patti three times over the past year, but this time was different because I had never seen her read poetry before. I recorded her reading "Ballad of a Bad Boy," a poem she wrote about Sam Shepard and his car, over the grisly hum of Lenny Kaye's electric guitar. It was the definition of badass. Turn your volume way up.

monday at midnight

tuesday at two

drunk on tequila

thinkin' of you ma

I drove my car on ma

wreckin' cars was my art

southern hem, northern haw

what i feel when i'm playing guitar is completely cold and crazy, like i don't owe nobody nothing and it's just a test just to see how far i can relax into the cold wave of a note. when everything hits just right (just and right) the note of nobility can go on forever. i never tire of the solitary E and i trust my guitar and i don't care about anything. sometimes i feel like i've broken through and i'm free and i could dig into eternity into eternity riding the wave and realm of the E. sometimes it's useless. here i am struggling and filled with dread—afraid that i'll never squeeze enough graphite from my damaged cranium to inspire or asphyxiate any eyes grazing like hungry cows across the stage or page. inside of me i'm crazy i'm just crazy. inside i must continue. i see her, my stiff muse, jutting around round round round like a broken speeding statue. the colonial year is dead and the greeks too are finished. the face of alexander remains not only solely due to sculpture but through the power and foresight and magnetism of alexander himself. the artist must maintain his swagger. he must he must he must be intoxicated by ritual as well as result. look at me i am laughing. i am laughing. i am lapping cocaine from the hard brown palm of the bouncer. and i trust my guitar. therefore we black out together. therefore i would run through scum. and scum is just ahead, ah we see it, but we just laugh. we're ascending through the hollow mountain. we are peeking. we are laughing. we are kneeling. we are laughing. we are radiating at last. this rebellion is just a gas our gas a gas that we pass. 

 

ya bangin on my heart's wammy bar

the vibrations reverb verb verb through my fingers

i get down on my knees

for you

I am peaches in September, and corn from a roadside stall
I'm the language of the natives, I'm a cadence and a drawl

I am a town.

 

Sitting in a bookstore in Dumbo, I see a child walk in.
It smells like ice cream! he exclaims.
I don't smell it, but I'm sure he's right.

I awoke from a dream.
I had been dreaming of Patti and Basquiat.
I awoke with menstrual cramps and hobbled bleary-eyed to the bathroom.
I went in and turned the light on but it blinded me so I shut it back off.
I was still asleep, really, as I felt like I was Patti and Basquiat, or at least belonged to them.
Or perhaps they belonged to me.
And I thought I was giving birth to them.
I thought about Just Kids,
How it was my second mother,
How my natural-born mother birthed me
And how that book birthed me again,
Anew.
For without it I would not exist.
I moaned in pain,
Thinking I was somehow returning the favor.
I thought of Patti hunched over shredding her guitar.
 I thought of how Basquiat died at only 27.
I thought of people with PBR tattoos.
I debated whether or not to take a pain pill.
I turned the light back on so I could see my blood,
Make sure it was the right kind and not the wrong kind.
My eyes cleared at last and I wondered how long I had been in that bathroom.
The sun was up now,
6 AM in Harlem, 
Birds tweeting.
What kind of vision was this?

jesus died for somebody's sins but not mine

I saw Patti Smith in concert in New Brunswick Friday night. It was the second concert experience I've had that was a religious one - the first being Lady Gaga - where you forget you have a body and just exist only in that moment and you realize the unbearable lightness of your idol standing a few feet away from you, looking at you and touching your hand and changing your life. We rushed to the stage when she came on, so I left my phone/camera behind and didn't take any pictures. That's OK, because Jenny took some really amazing ones. I'm going to post them here, in lieu of trying to reproduce the experience with words, and she's going to post them on her blog (plus a few more) later.

it was a portal
past bumping up
against future
tears on an amp
fists on a stage
guitar strings ripped out
with 60-year-old hands
and ageless
completely
ageless

Inspiration from New York, Circa 1971

I recently read this feature in New York Magazine on punk goddess Patti Smith's new memoir Just Kids, which she wrote about the time she spent running around New York in her 20s (the 1970s) with her once-lover-turned-gay-best-friend (yep) and fellow artist Robert Mapplethorpe. If you have any free time, it's worth investing it in this story. This woman doesn't let a word escape her lips that is not thoughtful and poetic. She's 62 and claims to still be working to create her great life's work. Living and working as a "creative" 20something in New York in 2010, I of course found the piece interesting as a comparative study.

In addition to loving the story, I have become obsessed with this photograph. I have looked at it for at least an hour. As I flipped through other pages in the magazine, I found myself compelled to turn back to this one page, just to stare at this one photograph.

 

The caption below the photo reads: Smith and Mapplethorpe on their West 23rd Street fire escape, 1971.

I'm obsessed with it for several reasons. 1. Everything about it screams New York. And not the new New York, but the old New York; the New York we'll never get back, the New York of the pre-fame artist, the New York of Andy Warhol and Janis Joplin, Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe, renting out rooms in Chelsea Hotel and living off whatever money they could make at their counter jobs, doing drugs and smoking cigs and drinking and creating amazing art just because they wanted to create. 2. Every time I look at it, I see something new. It took me several views to realize that Robert's right foot is actually not touching the fire escape. It looks like he's levitating, which seems appropriate. Writing this just now, I notice that Patti's fly is unzipped. XYZ Patti! 3. It was totally candid. 4. They're clearly fucking badasses and I want to be them.

I feel that I am entering into a new stage of my life where I want to explore everything and try everything. I want to listen to every kind of music that exists (just because). I want to read a gazillion books (just because). I want to stand around outside bars on the Lower East Side and smoke menthols, (just because I do it sometimes when I drink, and I always want to be those beautiful punk girls who let the smoke glide between their thick red lips while they talk). I want to get tattoos and then sort of regret them later (but not really because I'll just remember wanting to memorialize something that was important to me at the time). I want to make new friends, some of whom I'll never forget (and others I'll never remember). I want to write until I pass out. I want to use art to celebrate where I'm from. In short, I want to recreate (my version of) Patti's New York.

I want to remember that one day, I will look back on these young minutes and realize how special they were, and how important. I can't know now why they're important, but one day, if I'm real lucky, I will.

"...[Patti] was in the room in the Chelsea when Kris Kristofferson played “Me and Bobbie McGee” for Janis Joplin in her easy chair. 

'I was there for those moments,' writes Smith, 'but so young and preoccupied with my own thoughts that I hardly recognized them as moments.'"