Tag Archive | Patti Smith
Patti Smith in Manchester: spirit in the night
The rock’n’roll spirit soared and raged last Friday night in Manchester, as if thirty years had not passed and reduced the flame to a flickering ember. The reason? One of the few artists left with any credibility from the time when rock and poetry fused was in town, a battered survivor still raising a […]
Patti Smith’s Banga: new lands to be explored
Reviewing Patti Smith’s new album, Banga, for Pitchfork, Lindsay Zoladz writes: Remember those words that shot out of her lips like hot lightning on her brilliant 1978 record Easter: “I don’t fuck much with the past, but I fuck plenty with the future.” Well, more than three decades later, Banga is the work of someone interested in fucking […]
Capitalism: an infantile disorder
The other night I watched Surviving Progress, a documentary shown on BBC4 that questions the standard view of progress, suggesting that civilizations are repeatedly destroyed by ‘progress traps’ – technologies that serve immediate needs, but ransom the future. In the past, civilizations could use up a region’s resources and move on. But if today the […]
Sebald: After Nature
What is this being called human?’ Recently I blogged about the event at Aldeburgh that celebrated the work of WG Sebald, Patience and Re-Enchantment, which culminated in a performance by Patti Smith at which she read from Sebald’s first literary work, published only posthumously, the prose-poem After Nature. I hadn’t been aware of this before, […]
Just Kids: a true rapture
I have just finished reading Patti Smith’s memoir, Just Kids, her beautifully written song of love and elegy for Robert Mapplethorpe . ‘This book is so honest and pure as to count as a true rapture’, Joan Didion says on the back cover, and that comment captures absolutely the tenderness and the beauty of this […]
Cairo: Notes to the Future
The brave, dignified, resolute, peaceful and determined people of Egypt have made history today. The Egyptian revolution – the most hopeful event of this century so far, likely to be as defining a moment as the Russian Revolution was for the last. Lenin once coined the phrase, ‘Revolution is the festival of the oppressed’. It […]
After Sebald: Patience and Re-Enchantment
If there is one place I would have liked to be this weekend it is Aldeburgh, where a rather unique event has been taking place, which we found out about too late. Organised by Artevents as part of The Re-Enchantment, their national arts project exploring and questioning the various meanings of ‘place’ in the twenty-first […]
The Standard of Ur
The History of the World in 100 Objects (BBC Radio 4) continues to enthrall and inform. What is most impressive about the series, presented by Neil McGregor, is its focus on the lives – and the objects – of ordinary people, as much as the relics of power and leadership. So last week the theme […]
Walking the canal: Parbold to Wigan
Well I’ve been out walking I don’t do that much talking these days These days… I’ll keep on moving Things are bound to be improving these days These days – These days I sit on corner stones And count the time in quarter tones to ten, my friend Don’t confront me with my failures I […]
