Started reading Just Kids

I took a break from blog several years ago. I was in another country, overworked, sometimes working 18 hours a day 7 days a week, often insomniac, imbibed too much coffee, and generally troubled and unhappy. I couldn't focus my thoughts enough, or get them to a coherent string to write. Maybe there's something to this malaise of being unable to write for a long time.

There's also been my experimentation with social media. The more I get into the various platform, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram etc, the less I write. I pretend I was generating content on the other media, but as I truly examine my posts - often, I was merely reposting other people's stuff, and not creating my own. I wasn't articulating my true inner voice. But I have a sense that to write again, I need to read, again.

So many distractions these days, from reading. Just playing on my iPhone sucks the time away. But reading is so much a part of calming the mind. Why have I neglected my friends, my books?

I picked up Patti Smith's Just Kids last night. I bought it a while ago, full of inspirations, determined to read Patti Smith's lyrical prose, and about her profound friendship with Robert Mapplethorpe, about art, about being an artist. The pages were yellow, and spotted with yellow, the result of acid reactions on the paper.I bought it, and have left it unread for too long.

I'm a few pages in. Her writing lulls me into a state of quiet. The words are simple, but taut with memories, elegant even.

Much has been said about Robert, and more will be added. Young men will adopt his gait. Young girls will wear white dresses and mourn his curls. He will be condemned and adored. His excesses damned or romanticized. In the end, truth will be found in his work, the corporeal body of the artist. It will not fall away. Man cannot judge it. For art sings of God, and ultimately belongs to him.

Patti Smith Interview with Harper's Bazaar

JJB: I have too many books.

PS: I gave away 20 boxes, but it didn't make a dent. It's terrible. I'll have a whole library to write one song. Sometimes there's a jewel, a bit in one book and a bit in another .… It's like an unfolding screen of the four seasons. You say, "If I get rid of that, then there's no more autumn." I remember when my mother was my age. She'd collected a lot of stuff she bought in thrift stores, at flea markets. Then one day I came to visit her, and the house looked very empty. I said, "Mommy, where are your dolls? Where are the plates?" She'd packed them away. I said, "Are you all right? You're not sick …" She said, "No, I'm keeping the things I like the best. You get to a certain time in your life where you don't want to be fettered by all of your things. You want to have some lightness." Now I understand. This year I put everything into my little house in Rockaway, and now I want to keep my life as unfettered as possible. So maybe I'll just pretend to get rare books from my catalogue, and not really get them.

Harper's Bazaar interview with Patti Smith. [ full interview ]

PATTI SMITH | Reading M Train

I'm reading Patti Smith's M Train slowly, allowing her voice to flow through me. This is what happens when the writer has a distinct "voice" in their writing. I stop, and I want to "listen" to that voice in my head. I want the process to be comfortable, and allow it as much time as it needs. That's how I feel right now as I'm reading M Train.

My bias for travel makes me think of this book as travel writing. Yes, in this book, she writes about the various places she had been. She doesn't quite do the usual tourist destinations. There is a method to her journeys, and it is usually to follow the footsteps of a writer, or an artist. She took a photo of Frida Kahlo's bed, she took a photo of the chair Robert Bolano sat in. She traveled to laid stones on Jean Genet's grave.

I am reminded of how someone asked me last year, after my trip to Paris - Did you visit the Eiffel Tower? No, I did not. And there was a questioning look. Who goes to Paris and not go see the Eiffel Tower?

But why do I need to? Our journey is ours, and all we truly need to do, is to listen to the whispers in our hearts. To follow that voice that tells us where to go, and what to see. Who cares what is written in the guide books or tripadvisor? Your own yearning should be the true compass.

This is why I enjoy this series of Patti Smith's journeys. She is guided by her own yearnings, her own idiosyncrasies. There is not greater testimony to a life lived true to oneself.

New York Times, on Patti Smith's M Train

Michiko Kakutani, on Patti Smith's M Train:

“M Train” feels more like a look at the past through a rearview mirror. Ms. Smith writes of feeling “a longing for the way things were.” She writes about ghosts drawing us away from the present. She writes about singing “What a Wonderful World” for Fred at his memorial service and she writes about realizing that she is now older than Fred when he died — and older than many of her departed friends.

“I’m going to remember everything,” she thinks, “and then I’m going to write it all down. An aria to a coat. A requiem for a cafe.” An eloquent — and a deeply moving — elegy for what she has “lost and cannot find” but can remember in words.

[ Full essay ]

Looking forward to Patti Smith's 'The M Train'

The New York Times featured some books about places. Among them, Patti Smith's The M Train was featured.

In “M Train,” to be published next month, Ms. Smith writes about her life in New York, her love of cafes, her favorite books and television shows, her cats, her memories, joyful and melancholy, of her husband, the guitarist Fred Smith. But it is her travels — idiosyncratic, ritualistic, vividly recalled — that provide a unifying theme. “I believe in movement,” she writes. “I believe in that lighthearted balloon, the world.”

Nico and Patti Smith

I did not know that Patti Smith and Nico knew each other. Patti Smith did not speak much of her acquaintance with the tall blonde, hipster femme fatale.

Came across this excerpt from a book on Nico recently though, where she spoke about her impression of Patti Smith, and Smith's generosity to her. It's a small human piece, but so touching.

“I had met Patti in New York, when she was a young poet on the scene. She was a female Leonard Cohen, when she moved from writing to singing, and I liked her because she was thin but strong. John Cale produced her first album, which was about heroin (Horses, 1975). Then I met her in Paris, and got to know her better. I felt like she could be a sister, because anyway she was the double of Philippe Garrel, and I liked to be together with her...

“Patti was very kind to me. Early in 1978 my harmonium was stolen from me. I was without any money and now I couldn’t even earn a living playing without my organ. A friend of mine saw one with green bellows in an obscure shop, the only one in Paris. Patti bought it for me. I was so happy and ashamed. I said, “I’ll give you back the money when I get it”, but she insisted the organ was a present and I should forget about the money. I cried. I was ashamed she saw me without money.”

- Nico: The Life and Lies of an Icon, Richard Witts

20 Odd Questions with Patti Smith

From Wall Street Journal

Patti Smith:

When I go on tour, I only pack a very small suitcase. The thing that takes me the longest to choose is the book I'm going to read. It is Dylan Thomas's 100th anniversary this year; I have Elizabeth Bishop's copy of "In Country Sleep," so I might bring that.

PATTI SMITH | "... please don’t abandon the book"

“I dreamed of having a book of my own, of writing one that I could put on a shelf. Please, no matter how we advance technologically, please don’t abandon the book. There is nothing in our material world more beautiful than the book.”

~ Patti Smith, in her acceptance speech for the 2010 National Book Awards

Random Patti Smith Post

[ Photo by Annie Leibovitz]

From pattismith.net: coffeebreak dated 27 July 2008.

Patti Smith, on what she packed while in Europe:

Certain important things I placed in my shoulder sack: A small eighteenth century icon given to me by Edward Boyakov, wrapped in a length of brown linen. My passport and wad of Euros. A reporter style moleskin notebook, 3 packs of 667 Polaroid film, a worn copy of The Master and Margarita and a tin of aspirin.

Another Reason To Love Ellen Page

PATTI SMITH | Tara

Tara

She stood by the door
of her Virginia farm
pulling a sweater on
the branches
of the dogwood
she had tended
were bowed
blossoms loosened
tossed in sudden snow
the deer stood
in mute wonder
by her garden’s edge
she slipped the phone
in her pocket
her daughter
unharmed
among
petals gone
she snapped
a branch
a tempest stalled
she felt the boy
she felt the dead
she felt the families
she felt the wind
the deer don’t do that
she said
the deer don’t do that

~ Patti Smith

Source: The New Yorker

Because everyday should be Patti Smith Day.

PATTI SMITH | Twelve and Sixty

If it was possible, every day should be Patti Smith Day — but it's not, although occasionally we do have a new album by her.

Twelve — her new album — was released recently. It's not based on original materials unfortunately. Rather, it's a collection of 12 covers Smith did on the songs of various artists. Still, it's her delivery of the songs that matters, and fans of Patti Smith will want this. I can never get tird of hearing her deep, raspy voice drawing out the lyrics.

The Twelve tracklist:

1. Are You Experienced? (Jimi Hendrix)
   
2. Everybody Wants to Rule the World (Tears for Fears)
   
3. Helpless (Neil Young)
   
4. Gimme Shelter (Rolling Stones)
   
5. Within You Without You (The Beatles)
   
6. White Rabbit (Jefferson Airplane)
   
7. Changing of the Guard (Bob Dylan)
   
8. The Boy in the Bubble (Paul Simon)
   
9. Soul Kitchen (The Doors)
   
10. Smells Like Teen Spirit (Nirvana)
    
11. Midnight Rider (The Allman Brothers)
    
12. Pastime Paradise (Stevie Wonder)

Pitchfork Media interviewed Patti Smith recently. Here's a book related excerpt from the interview:

Pitchfork: And then you can re-read, too. Do you still love Rimbaud as much as you used to?

Patti Smith: Are you kidding? I still read Pinocchio. I read Pinocchio, or Uncle Wiggly, or Lewis Carroll. I re-read Herman Hesse. I love my books. I re-read books the way I play albums over and over. I've listened to the same Maria Callas record a thousand times, just like Blonde on Blonde. I'm always moved by people's work, and it's part of the beautiful things in life, you know? Looking at the work, and seeing inside the mind of other people. Then, you know, contributing your own thing.

I still listen to Horses over and over. It never ceases to move me. The quote above is a reminder from Smith that it's okay, even at 60, to go back to the things that inspire you — even if it's a children's book like Pinocchio, or Lewis Carroll, or even "retro" music that was hip 20 years ago, but which the twenty-something friends of yours don't even recognise. Look at the works that other minds and hearts have created. Allow them to engage you, and then bring something of yourself into the experience. That, is Art.

What I like most from this interview is how at 60, Patti Smith is still going at life with the uncompromising spirit of a bohemian artist. In her heydays, she was the Prophetess of Punk Rock. At 60, she's still the iconic Patti Smith.

Patti Smith: When I was in my twenties, I had huge amounts of energy. In fact, I had too much energy sometimes, and a lot of times I needed to focus, because my mind was all over the place. Art was a good way to focus that energy. Rock n roll was a great energy, a great way to focus my energy on all the things I had to say, whether they were poetry or political ideas or just-get-it-all-out energy. I just turned 60, and I still feel connected to a certain amount of rage, or excitement, or a sense of fun. I was just downstairs, and my son [Jackson, 24] was playing on guitar. He was playing "Jump" by Van Halen, and we were just dancing around. So in certain ways, I don't feel any different at all.

You are only as old as you allow yourself to be. Engage yourself in the things that invigorate you, be it art, music or sports of any kind.

MUSIC | Patti Smith and Hall of Fame

While we're on the topic of music, Patti Smith (one of my personal heroes) was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Yes, as long as I'm still breathing, we will see posts on Patti Smith.

Her opening lines for "Gloria" (from the 1975 album, Horses) heralded her arrival as punk rock goddess:

"Jesus died for somebody's sins but not mine"

These are the very lines that made me take notice and fall in love with Patti Smith, her music and mission. She is more than a performer/artiste; she is Punk Rock Prophetess. She was more than the nihilistic self-destruction of Sid Vicious and his likes. For me, Patti Smith's mission was about defiance against institutionalised authorities, rebellion as activism. Her purpose was admirable and even now she has not lose her idealism in pursuing what she believes in.

In an interview with Patti Smith on her induction, Smith explains the famous opening lines:

Did you have any idea in 1975 that the opening line of 'Gloria' would become as famous as it has?
[Laughs] No. First of all, I wrote the poem for 'Gloria' in 1970. I was brought up a Jehovah's Witness and I had a strong religious education and a very good Bible education. I left organized religion as a teenager because I felt it was too confining. When I wrote 'Gloria,' it wasn't really anti-Christ -- who I really admire -- it was anti the idea that everything was set up for us and we had to fall into a certain behavior based on how things were organized for us. If I was going to do things wrong, I didn't want anyone having to die for my sins -- I was going to take responsibility. It was really about personal and mental liberation. A writer called it a declaration of existence. To this day, I think that's the best description of that song, although I probably would not write the same lyric now because I've gone through a long process of evolution.

Also read what Patti Smith has to say about the induction into the Hall of Fame in an Op-Ed article for The New York Times.