Something I’ve remarked on before is that these posts don’t properly reflect the ubiquitous presence of music in my daily life. Occasionally I do mention a new album that has made an impact, and I do record here all the live music events that I attend. But there’s always so much more. So here is a roundup of some of the music which I have particularly enjoyed in 2016. The post ends with a playlist of the music mentioned. Continue reading “The music in my head in 2016”→
Patti Smith’s performance of Bob Dylan’s ‘A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall’ at the Nobel Prize ceremony in Stockholm was truly magnificent, perhaps the song’s greatest interpretation. I was moved to tears by the deep feeling that flowed through her rendition of a song even more germane now than when it was written. The moment when Patti was overwhelmed by the imagery of the second verse and her own nervousness only made it even more moving, increasing the humanity of her performance. It was one of the great musical moments of 2016. Continue reading “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall: Patti channels Bob in her moving performance of a song even more relevant in 2016”→
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 fist to power, corruption and greed who stirred up a powerful, spiritual, shamanic experience: Patti Smith.
Sauntering on stage in a sweltering O2 Academy, Patti launched straight into every fan’s favourite ‘Dancing Barefoot’, taken at a stately pace. It was soon clear that this was going to be a great night: Patti in top form, as was the band (longtime collaborator Lenny Kaye on guitar, Jay Dee Daugherty Trilby-hatted on drums, Tony Shanahan on bass and keyboards and Jackson Smith on guitar), and the sound balance perfect.
Patti dedicated ‘Redondo Beach’ to Morrissey, ‘who made it his own’. The song has an incongruously jaunty reggae rhythm for something so sad. ‘I went looking for you, are you gone, gone ?’ she sang, the words actually a sort of morbid fantasy, written in remorse when she and her sister Linda were living at the Chelsea Hotel. They had quarrelled, and Linda had disappeared: the song was written as an anguished response.
‘April Fool’ was the first song taken from her new album. It’s one of the prettiest songs on Banga, full of a sense of freedom and a joy in being alive:
We’ll tramp through the mire When our souls feel dead With laughter we’ll inspire Then back to life again
She sang it beautifully, at the close repeating and emphasising the refrain: ‘We’ll break all the rules’.
Three more new songs followed – ‘Fuji San’, ‘Mosaic’ and ‘This Is The Girl’, the sixties-style pop ballad based on a poem she wrote about Amy Winehouse after her death at the age of 27 in July 2011. Smith told Uncut magazine:
The little song for Amy just blossomed in the studio. We were at [New York studio] Electric Lady doing a whole other song and I wrote Amy a little poem when she died and my bass player, Tony Shanahan, wrote a piece of music and the two matched perfectly.”
In Manchester, there was nothing mawkish about Patti’s introduction to the song. She pointed out that September 14 would be Amy’s birthday – and also that of her husband, Fred ‘Sonic’ Smith, who died in 1994, aged 45. ‘It will be a happy day, a day of celebration’, said Patti.
In an interview for Spinner, Patti explained that the purpose of the song was not to glamourise self-destructive behaviour. She didn’t actually know Winehouse:
I wrote it out of respect for her artistry and her youth. A lot of people think that because I admire a lot of musicians or artists who did have a self-destructive bent that I romanticize self-destruction. Well, I don’t at all. In Amy Winehouse’s instance, I really admired her as a singer. That girl was amazing. She sang songs from my generation – R&B songs and jazz and doo-wop – with no sixth degree of separation. She really comprehended this music and delivered something extra.
But for myself … I always wanted to be an artist. I was always just enthralled with the possibilities in life: Books and art and music and architecture and travel and love. There’s so much out there. Also, I was a very sickly child. I was sick quite a bit and my mother had to nurse me through everything from tuberculosis to scarlet fever to measles and mumps and influenza. By the time I was a teenager, I was just happy to be alive. I certainly wasn’t going to destroy what my mother spent almost two decades preserving. [So] I never really developed any vices – except coffee! I guess the simplest answer would be, I love life. I’m very grateful to have the imagination that I have, and the children that I have. I ain’t goin’ nowhere.
After this, Patti moved straight into one of her most shamanic songs – ‘Ghost Dance’, with its incantatory refrain, ‘We shall live again’. This was a powerful performance, with Lenny Kaye contributing vocals on one verse. Patti had also sung ‘Ghost Dance’ in Glasgow two nights earlier: this is a video of her performance there:
Announcing that ‘reality is over – after this show you will return only to semi-reality’, Patti withdrew to leave Lenny Kaye to lead the band through a fiery medley of garage classics that included the Strangeloves’ ‘Night Time’, the Seeds’ ‘Pushin’ Too Hard’, and the Blue Magoos’ We Ain’t Got Nothin’ Yet – all of them featured on the classic 1972 double LP Nuggets: Original Artyfacts From the First Psychedelic Era, 1965-1968 that Lenny Kaye helped to compile.
Returning to the stage, Patti spoke a little about her family history – she had recently been delving into it a little, and had discovered that her antecedents included Irish and Liverpudlian, some of them lacemakers. Then she gave a stunning performance of ‘Beneath the Southern Cross’, urged on by ay Dee Daugherty’s muscular drumming. It’s one of the songs that represent the ecstatic strand in Patti Smith’s work – songs that express a yearning for freedom, spiritual epiphany, and true communion.
Oh to be not anyone – gone Oh to owe not anyone – nothing
Words that echo that most beautiful of her poem-songs, ‘Wing’, where she writes:
I was a wing in heaven blue
Soared over the ocean
Soared over Spain
And I was free
I needed nobody
It was beautiful.
By the time we reached ‘Pissing in a River’, the musicians on stage and everyone in the audience was drenched in sweat. The song featured a blistering guitar solo by Lenny Kaye, and there was no let up as ‘Because the Night’ followed. Is there something about New Jersey? Born in Chicago on the last day of 1946, Smith spent the bulk of her childhood in southern New Jersey; in the same years, not so far away, a young Bruce Springsteen was growing up. They would write this song together. This is Patti’s performance in Glasgow two nights earlier:
As the notes died away, Patti leaned into the microphone: ‘In this world there is so much strife, stupidity, sorrow, corruption’, she said. ‘We sing of these things – but that doesn’t mean we can’t have a good time, too.’ And then she began to sing one of my personal favourites, ‘Peaceable Kingdom’, inspired by and dedicated to Rachel Corrie and first performed ten days after her death in 2003:
Yesterday I saw you standing there
With your hand against the pane
Looking out the window
At the rain
And I wanted to tell you That your tears were not in vain But I guess we both knew We’d never be the same
Why must we hide all these feelings inside? Lions and lambs shall abide
Maybe one day we’ll be strong enough To build it back again Build the peaceable kingdom Back again
This was a powerful and moving performance, enhanced by the segue into a spoken verse from ‘People Have the Power’ that Patti has taken to including (the song would return in blistering electric form during the encore). Then Patti and the band tore into her iconic take on Van Morrison’s ‘Gloria’ that opens with its ringing assertion that ‘Jesus died for somebody’s sins, but not mine’. On this night Patti changed the last verse, spelling out not GLORIA, but PUSSY RIOT, and yelling ‘Ask Jesus Christ – he would fucking forgive them! Youth and truth should not be imprisoned!’ This is how she did it a few days earlier in Stockholm:
At the close, Patti speaks with anger about the coroner’s ruling the previous day in the so-called ‘friendly fire’ incident in 2009 when two US Apache helicopters attacked a British base in Afghanistan, killing a British soldier. ‘What the fuck is friendly fire?’ she rages. ‘ This is friendly fire, this is our weapon’, she yells, raising high her guitar. What a way to end the show!
Patti returned for a three-number encore. ‘Banga’ was up first, preceded by Patti’s explanation of the story behind the song – a story of ‘the true loyalty of the canine’. Banga was Pontius Pilate’s dog in Mikhail Bulgakov’s satirical novel The Master And Margarita (a novel I bought when I was at university when it appeared in paperback; I still haven’t read it, but that same paperback is still on my bookshelf). ‘That dog was loyal for 2000 years, sitting at the edge of heaven while Pilate was waiting for Jesus Christ to speak to him,’ Smith explained. ‘It’ll take me 2000 years to finish telling this story’. It’s a song that is especially suited to live performance with its repeated shout, ‘Banga – Say Banga’. Towards the end Patti has us all barking like dogs.
Then we got the full electric version of ‘People Have the Power’, with Patti raging, ‘look what they are doing to our earth – the corporations and the banks’. ‘Use your voice!’ Patti shouts; ‘You are the future, and the future is now!’ She screams the opening lines of ‘Babelogue’ – ‘I haven’t fucked much with the past but I’ve fucked plenty with the future’ over the opening chords of ‘Rock and Roll Nigger’. The three imprisoned girls in Russia come to mind again as Patti sings the refrain:
Outside of society, they’re waitin’ for me. Outside of society, that’s where I want to be.
She ends by kneeling, Hendrix-like, guitar aimed at the audience to fire an arrow of love: straining on the string of the guitar, it wails, then snaps with an explosive sound.
‘I’m done, man, she gasps. ‘Manchester, you fuckin’ wore me out!’ And with that she’s gone.
This was a night of rock’n’roll that raised a banner and asserted that its music and words could really mean something – and matter. It was emotion, ecstasy: Jim Morrison’s ‘scream of the butterfly’. It was a rallying cry, that proclaimed change will come not from the barrel of a gun, but from the pen and from an electric guitar.
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 with everything. […]
Smith is still the eternal college freshman at heart, constantly stumbling upon new artistic heroes and then drawing from them fathomless and unabashedly ebullient inspiration. […] Ultimately, it’s Banga‘s earnestness about the thrill of discovery that makes it feel so out-of-time and refreshing. It runs counter to that sense of maxed-out ennui that governs the way so many people talk about art and artists in the age of Wikipedia– when posturing that you know it all is more attractive than confessing blind spots, if only so you can bemoan the fact that it’s all been done before. Though more in spirit than in sound, Banga pulses with the notion that there are still good books we haven’t read, old ideas waiting to be fucked with, and new lands we haven’t yet explored.
This, for me, states exactly, precisely, why a new album from Patti Smith is always so exhilarating – she isn’t afraid to wear her heart on her sleeve, and to joyfully stir into the mix imagery and thoughts provoked by art, poetry, film or literature which has recently inspired her. On Banga, set to some of the best musical arrangements to have graced her albums, played impeccably by familiar collaborators – guitarist Lenny Kaye, drummer Jay Dee Daugherty, bassist Tony Shanahan, guitarist Tom Verlaine, guitarist Jack Petruzzelli, and her children Jackson and Jessi on guitar and piano – her lyrics encompass a dog in Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita, Nikolai Gogol, film director Andrei Tarkovsky, actress Maria Schneider and ill-starred Amy Winehouse. About the dog, Patti explained in an interview:
The album title came from the dog in TheMaster and Margarita. It was Pontius Pilate’s dog and his dog’s name was Banga. The reason I wrote a song for Banga, for those who have not read the book, Pontius Pilate waited on the edge of Heaven for 2000 years to talk to Jesus Christ and his dog, Banga, stayed faithfully by his side and I thought that any dog that would wait 2000 years for his master deserves a song. Its really a song for my band and for the people. It’s a high-spirited song, dedicated to love and loyalty.
Patti Smith seeks out – and yearns to espress – the ecstatic: as she cries in the chorus of ‘Banga’: ‘believe or explode!’ Her imaginative cosmos is inhabited by Blake, Dylan, Jim Morrison, Rimbaud, Gahndi, Baudelaire and Burroughs – all part of a flowing conceptual continuity.
Banga evolved over four years, the songs emerging as Patti wrote her first memoir, Just Kids, the chronicle of her deep friendship with Robert Mapplethorpe, which won critical acclaim. This perhaps explains the variety of subjects and musical moods on the album. There are catchy, sixties-style pop songs like ‘April Fool’, ‘This Is the Girl’ (for Amy Winehouse), ‘Amerigo’, and the elegaic waltz ‘Maria’ (written for her friend, the actress Maria Schneider, and evoking, Smith writes in the sleevenotes, ‘the wanderings of the nameless girl in the desert that Maria portrayed in Antonioni’s The Passenger‘). ‘Tarkovsky (The Second Stop Is Jupiter)’ is a jam inspired by the free jazz of Sun-Ra and Andrei Tarkovsky’s first film, Ivan’s Childhood, in Patti’s estimation ‘the most beautiful movie about war’. Its repeated phrase, ‘The boy, the beast and the butterfly’ recalling a key scene in the film.
Ivan’s Childhood
The band really rocks out on the title track and ‘Fuji-san’, a remembrance for the victims of Japan’s Tohoku earthquake. Patti writes in the notes to Banga:
On March 11, 2011, Japan experienced the Tohoku earthquake. The concern for our friends and all of the Japanese people led Lenny [Kaye] and I to write ‘Fuji-san.’ It is for them — a call of prayer to the great mountain — for a protective cloak of love.
Hokusai : from Thirty Six Views of Mount Fuji
But it is the songs that bookend the album on which I’ll focus in this post. ‘Amerigo’ and the epic ‘Constantine’s Dream’ are romantic critiques of conquest and environmental degradation that spiral out into meditations on art and spirituality. ‘Amerigo’, with a lilting and infectious chorus, extrapolates from letters written by Amerigo Vespucci after discovering the New World. Smith imagines his Catholicism and colonial ideology being turned inside-out following his encounters with its indigenous people.
In this land we placed baptismal fonts And an infinite number were baptized […]
Ah the salvation of souls But wisdom we had not for these people had neither king nor lord And bowed to no one For they lived in their own liberty
Vespucci arrives in the New World
Amerigo Vespucci was a Florentine merchant and explorer who led four expeditions in search of a western route to the East Indies in the late 15th century, and whose name was given to the American continents by the mapmaker Waldseemüller. Patti Smith has drawn on letters Vespucci wrote to those who had sponsored his voyages back in Florence. This is an extract from a letter to Pier Soderini, Gonfalonier of the Republic of Florence that gives an account of Vespucci’s first voyage in 1497 (known as the Soderini letter). If his claims are in this missive accurate he reached the mainland of the Americas at least 14 months before Columbus:
They are not accustomed to have any Captain, nor do they go in any ordered array, for every one is lord of himself: and the cause of their wars is not for lust of dominion, nor of extending their frontiers, no for inordinate covetousness, but for some ancient enmity which in by-gone times arose amongst them: and when asked why they made war, they knew not any other reason to give than that they did so to avenge the death of their ancestors, or of their parents: these people have neither King, nor Lord, nor do they yield obedience to any one, for they live in their own liberty: and how they be stirred up to go to war is (this) that when the enemies have slain or captured any of them, his oldest kinsman rises up and goes about the highways haranguing them to go with him and avenge the death of such his kinsman: and so are they stirred up by fellow-feeling: they have no judicial system, nor do they punish the ill-doer: nor does the father, nor the mother chastise the children and marvelously (seldom) or never did we see any dispute among them. […]
They sleep in certain very large nettings made of cotton, suspended in the air: and although this their (fashion of) sleeping may seem uncomfortable, I say that it is sweet to sleep in those (nettings): and we slept better in them than in the counterpanes. […]
They use no trade, they neither buy nor sell. In fine, they live and are contended with that which nature gives them. The wealth that we enjoy in this our Europe and elsewhere, such as gold, jewels, pearls, and other riches, they hold as nothing; and although they have them in their own lands, they do not labour to obtain them, nor do they value them. They are liberal in giving, for it is rarely they deny you anything
In the Mundus Novus or Medici letter sent from Lisbon to Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de’ Medici, Vespucci describes a later voyage to South America in 1501-1502. In it, Vespucci gives a description of the Carib people of the southern Caribbean and the northern coast of South America:
Albericus Vespucius offers his best compliments to Lorenzo Pietro di Medici. On a former occasion I wrote to you at some length concerning my return from those new regions which we found and explored with the fleet, at the cost, and by the command of this Most Serene King of Portugal. And these we may rightly call a new world. Because our ancestors had no knowledge of them, and it will be a matter wholly new to all those who hear about them. […]
We found in those parts such a multitude of people as nobody could enumerate (as we read in the Apocalypse), a race I say gentle and amenable. Ali of both sexes go about naked, covering no part of their bodies; and just as they spring from their mothers’ wombs so they go until death. They have indeed large square-built bodies, well formed and proportioned, and in color verging upon reddish. This I think has come to them, because, going about naked, they are colored by the sun. They have, too, hair plentiful and black. In their gait and when playing their games they are agile and dignified. […]
They have no cloth either of wool, linen or cotton, since they need it not; neither do they have goods of their own, but ali things are held in common. They live together without king, without government, and each is his own master.[…]
Beyond the fact that they have no church, no religion and are not idolaters, what more can I say ? They live according to nature, and may be called Epicureans rather than Stoics. There are no merchants among their number, nor is there barter.
And the sky opened And we laid down our armour And we danced naked as they Baptized in the rain Of the New World
Martin Waldseemüller’s 1507 world map grew out of an ambitious project during the first decade of the 16th century to document the new geographic knowledge gained from the discoveries of the late 15th and the first years of the 16th centuries. Waldseemüller’s large world map included data gathered during Amerigo Vespucci’s voyages of 1501–1502 to the New World. Waldseemüller christened the new lands ‘America’ in recognition of Vespucci ’s understanding that a continent new to Europeans had been discovered as a result of the voyages of Vespucci and Columbus. There is only one known surviving copy of the first printed edition of the map which probably consisted of 1000 copies.
Waldseemüller’s map supported Vespucci’s revolutionary concept by portraying the New World as a separate continent, until then unknown to the Europeans. It was the first map to depict clearly a separate Western Hemisphere, with the Pacific as a separate ocean. The map represented a huge leap forward in knowledge, recognizing the newly found American landmass and forever changing the prior European understanding of a world divided into only three parts: Europe, Asia, and Africa.
Martin Waldseemüller’s world map, 1507
Patti explains in the sleeve notes for Banga:
I misplaced the postcard, and confused by the soldiers’ armour, I was unable to locate it in the realm of Spanish art, yet the image haunted me. Years later, on a plane to Rome, about to embark on an Italian tour, I mentioned the coveted image to Lenny, pledging I would one day find it. Our tour ended in Arezzo. That night, I had a troubled sleep and dreamed of an environmental apocalypse and a weeping Saint Francis. I awoke and went down to a courtyard and entered a church to say a prayer. I noticed a painting on the back wall. Piero della Francesca had created the frescoes of The Legend of the True Cross. There, in all its glory, was the full image that the postcard had detailed – The Dream of Constantine!
The Dream of Constantine by Piero della Francesca in the Basilica of San Francesco, Arezzo
As fate would have it, it was in the Basilica of St. Francis. I decided to learn more of his life and contribution and also of the painter of The Dream of Constantine. This opened a period of intense study and pilgrimage.
Our friend, Stefano Righi, guided Lenny and I through the stations of Saint Francis’ life: the mountain where birds covered him, singing, the forest in Gubbia where he tamed a wolf, the frescoes of Giotto and finallyhis magnetic tomb, beneath the lower Basilica ofthe Papal Basilica of Saint Francis of Assisi. We left the memorial card for our beloved friend, the poet Jim Carroll, who revered Saint Francis.
There are many stories I could tell in the creation of ‘Constantine’s Dream’, but let it suffice that Lenny and I prayed before the painting for the strength to achieve our mission. Lenny conceived of the musical themes and guitar figures, and our band recorded a strong basic track. We then took the track back to Arezzo and recruited the band Casa del Vento, whom I met during a benefit concert for EMERGENCY. The band from Arezzo improvised on the track of ‘Constantine’s Dream’, only steps away from the Basilica of Saint Francis, where the piece was born.
‘Constantine’s Dream’ is an improvised, half-sung, half-spoken meditation, recorded live in the studio, that weaves together Columbus’s voyage to the New World, the life and work of Renaissance painter Piero della Francesca, the pastoral ideals of St. Francis of Assisi, and environmental cataclysm. It is a major piece of work, exploring the relationship between art, knowledge, spirituality and humanity: rich and compelling, as deep and fully realised as anything she’s ever recorded.
The narrative consists, not of one dream, but a telescopic series of dreams, each one merging into the next like Russian dolls or Chinese boxes. Smith makes connections between seemingly unconnected events; in her hands, time flows like liquid.
In Arezzo, Patti has a dream in which Saint Francis
who kneeled and prayed For the birds and beasts and all humankind
In the early light, she leaves her room, ‘stepping down the ancient stones, washed with dawn’ and enters the Basilica of San Francesco where she finds peace in a vision of the world of Saint Francis:
I saw before me the world of his world The bright fields, the birds in abundance All of nature of which he sang Singing of him All the beauty that surrounded him as he walked
His nature that was nature itself
But Patti is senses another call, ‘the call of art, the call of man’ and is drawn to the beauty of Piero della Francesca‘s ‘Legend of the True Cross’, a series of tableaux that includes ‘The Dream of Constantine’, Francesca’s representation of the moment when the crusading Emperor Constantine converts to Christianity after seeing the vision of the True Cross. Patti here draws on the account of Eusebius, who wrote, ‘he saw with his own eyes in the heavens a trophy of the cross arising from the light of the sun, carrying the message, In Hoc Signo Vinces or ‘In this sign, you will conquer’. In her extemporisation this becomes:
And the angel came and showed to him The sign of the true cross in heaven And upon it was written
‘in this sign shall thou conquer’.
From Constantine’s dream, the poem shifts into the dream of the artist:
From the geometry of his heart he mapped it out He saw the King rise, fitted with armour Set upon a white horse An immaculate cross in his right hand. He advanced toward the enemy And the symmetry, the perfection of his mathematics Caused the scattering of the enemy Agitated, broken, they fled.
Patti sees Francesca wake and cry out:
All is art – all is future! Oh lord let me die on the back of adventure With a brush and an eye full of light.
The blind and aged Francesca dies in October 1492, just as ‘a world away, on three great ships, adventure itself’ Columbus arrives on the shore of the ‘New World’. Now, Patti imagines the ecstatic vision of Columbus as he sees the New World for the first time:
And as far as his eyes could see No longer blind All of nature unspoiled, beautiful
Columbus set foot on the New World And witnessed beauty unspoiled All the delights given by God As if Eden had opened up her heart to him And opened her dress And all of her fruit gave to him
Columbus falls into a sleep and in a dream of his own, sees all of this beauty ‘entwined with the future’ in an apocalyptic vision of nature destroyed – the ‘terrible end of man’, the ‘cross to bear’:
The 21st century advancing like the angelthat had come
To Constantine
Constantine in his dream Oh this is your cross to bear …
All shall crumble into dust
Oh thou navigator
The terrible end of man
This is your gift to mankind
This is your cross to bear
Then Columbus saw all of nature aflame The apocalyptic night And the dream of the troubled king Dissolved into light.
Here, Patti echoes Rousseau’s reversal of the Christian theme of the human fall from grace. The direction of the fall is reversed: no longer into nature, but into culture.
‘Constantine’s Dream’ is not the final track, though. The album concludes with Patti’s own haunting take on Neil Young’s visionary account of planetary collapse from the 1970s, ‘After the Gold Rush’, which has ‘Mother nature’s silver seed’ setting off in spaceships to a new home. Patti, accompanied by young children, sings:
Look at Mother Nature on the run In the 21st century…
In the album notes, Patti describes how the last two tracks came into being:
Back in New York at Electric Lady Studios, I summoned all I had experienced in the last year. I considered the night of my apocalyptic dream and finding the postcard image. I thought of the painter who went blind and died October 12, 1492, the same day Columbus set foot in the New World. I thought of Saint Francis and his bond with nature and the threat of environmental devastation in our own century. Surrounded by my supportive camp, I stepped before the microphone. All the research I had done fell away, as I improvised the words, driven by the deep personal struggle of the artist, who by the nature of his calling is obliged to manifest the spiritual as physical matter in the material world.
My daughter Jesse and son Jackson open the Neil Young song. I chose it to follow the dark apocalyptic vision of ‘Constantine’s Dream’, as it offers a new beginning. Tony Shanahan recorded his young nephew Tadhg and friends singing the last refrain. Thus Banga closes with my son and daughter, and the sons and daughter of others – all our children, the hope of the world, embarking on adventures of their own.
At a performance in San Francisco in October 2010, Patti prefaced a performance of her beautiful song ‘Wing’ with a reading of Saint Francis’ prayer. For the first time I was able to sense the true meaning of his words, free from the defilement that Margaret Thatcher imposed when she intoned them on her election victory in 1979:
Lord, make me an instrument of your peace. Where there is hatred, let me sow love. Where there is injury, pardon. Where there is doubt, faith. Where there is despair, hope. Where there is darkness, light. Where there is sadness, joy.
O Divine Master, Grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled, as to console; To be understood, as to understand; To be loved, as to love. For it is in giving that we receive. It is in pardoning that we are pardoned, And it is in dying that we are born to Eternal Life.
Patti Smith’s Banga is, both lyrically and musically, a superb album, bursting with inspiring and challenging ideas. It comes in a beautiful special edition a 65-page book of original images, complete lyrics, and liner notes by Patti Smith that is a gorgeous artefact in its own right.
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 global economic system collapses from over-consumption and laying waste the planet’s resources, that’s it. There is nowhere else to go.
The message of the film seemed to reinforce a growing feeling I’ve had in recent weeks that the global capitalist system we live under (‘civilization’ seems to noble a term), far from being, as presented by the practitioners of that dubious discipline economics, one of rationally operating markets that deliver sensible and sustainable outcomes, is no more than an infantile disorder: stupid, irrational, and self-destructive.
Surviving Progress argues that the world has financed an unsustainable growth rate by essentially encouraging whole nations to take out unpayable mortgages on their own futures. In the film, Brazil is taken as an example: huge loans are advanced to the nation, which is unable to keep up the repayments, and is then encouraged to liquefy its own natural assets – the rainforests. When the assets are gone and the wealth extracted, the corporations leave behind a drained nation and the bankers move on to another loan customer.
Dumb? Absolutely. The same sense of stupidity emerged from a piece in The Guardian recently, written by Ha-Joon Chang of Cambridge University and author of 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism. Commenting on the eurozone crisis and the unwillingness of the eurozone leaders to alter their austerity policies, even as Greece and Spain fall apart, he noted that it is increasingly accepted that these policies are not working in the current environment. But what’s worse is that there is abundant historical evidence showing that austerity has never worked. What kind of person fails to learn the lessons of previous experience? Ha-Joon Chang has the answer:
Perhaps they are insane – if we follow Albert Einstein’s definition of insanity as “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results”. But the more likely explanation is that, by pushing these policies against all evidence, our leaders are really telling us that they want to preserve – or even intensify, in areas like welfare policy – the economic system that has served them so well in the past three decades.
He concludes that the time has come for us to decide:
Do we want a society where 50% of young people are kept out of work in order to bring the deficit down from 9% of GDP to 3% in three years? A society in which the rich have to be made richer to work harder (at their supposed jobs of investing and creating wealth) while the poor have to be made poorer in order to work harder? Where a tiny minority (often called the 1% but more like the 0.1% or even 0.01%) control a disproportionate, and increasing, share of everything – not just income and wealth but also political power and influence (through control of the media, thinktanks, and even academia)?
If you want a tiny example of how a rich elite are increasing their share of wealth and running the country in their selfish interests, meanwhile threatening the environment, read George Monbiot’s brilliant piece of investigative journalism, published this week in the Guardian. He writes that ‘the pheasant, rather than the Gini coefficient should now be the unit for measuring inequality.
As Britain heads towards Edwardian levels of inequality, the countryside reverts to a playground for the rich, in which anything that cannot be shot and eaten is shot and hung from a gibbet. The aristocracy is back in charge. … In the countryside, as in the towns, policy is becoming the preserve of the 1%. The rest of us pay the landowners to expand their estates and destroy the wildlife. That’s what they mean when they say we’re all in this together.
Worth reading, too, is Larry Elliott’s chilling despatch from Greece last week. Elliott, along with Paul Mason of Newsnight, is always a reliable guide to the world of financial capitalism. Just days after IMF Chief Christine Lagarde provoked fury with her outrageous comments about ‘tax-dodging’ Greeks, Elliott wrote:
Greece is broke and close to being broken. It is a country where children are fainting in school because they are hungry, where 20,000 Athenians are scavenging through waste tips for food, and where the lifeblood of a modern economy – credit – is fast drying up. It is a country where the fascists and the anarchists battle for control of the streets, where immigrants fear to go out at night and where a woman whispers “it’s like the Weimar republic” as a motorcycle cavalcade from the Golden Dawn party, devotees of Adolf Hitler, cruises past the parliament building. Graffiti says: “Foreigners get out of Greece. Greece is for the Greeks. I will vote for Golden Dawn to remove the filth from the country.”
It has been interesting, too, to read the reviews of Harvard philosopher Michael Sandel’s new book, What Money Can’t Buy. It’s a study of ‘the moral limits of markets’ in the context of the increasing ubiquity of market ideas.
Michael Sandel
‘Over the past three decades,’ Sandel writes, ‘markets – and market values – have come to govern out lives as never before.’ Sandel is not arguing from a socialist position, and argues that markets can work in the right situation. He asserts: ‘No other mechanism for organising the production and distribution of goods had proved as successful for generating affluence and prosperity’. But Sandel is interested in what he sees as a critical loss of our collective moral compass in recent times as market thinking has swept the board in economics, and then spread to almost every area of public policy:
The most fateful change that unfolded in the last three decades was not an increase in greed. It was the expansion of markets, and of market values, into spheres of life where they don’t belong.
His central thesis is that markets have a moral impact on the goods that are traded in them. When something which is supposed to be a common good is marketised it invariably leads not only to unfairness, but, just as importantly, it corrupts and degrades the thing being marketised.
He quotes a vivid example that sums up the entire argument of What Money Can’t Buy; an Israeli daycare centre, which had a problem of parents turning up late to collect their children, introduced fines. The result? Late pick-ups increased. Parents turned up late, paid the fine, and thought no more of it; the fine had turned into a fee. Morality had been marketised. The fear of disapproval and of doing the wrong thing (turning up late) was based on non-monetary values, on morality. Even though the daycare centre went back to the old system, parents kept turning up late, because the introduction of market values had killed the old ideas of collective responsibility. Sandel concludes:
The question of markets is really a question about how we want to live together. Do we want a society where everything is up for sale? Or are there certain moral and civic goods that markets do not honour and money cannot buy?
The economic and social progress that has resulted in climate change raises questions of morality in an intractable form. In a recent article in the London Review of Books, Malcolm Bull wrote:
Adam Smith once noted that we are less troubled by the prospect of a hundred million people dying as a result of an earthquake in some distant location than of losing our little finger, but would nevertheless be horrified by the idea we might allow them to die in order to save it. Climate change effectively transforms the former scenario into the latter, and so places unprecedented demands on our moral imagination. Almost every little thing we do contributes to our carbon footprint, which increases greenhouse gases, which could in turn ultimately threaten hundreds of millions of lives in some remote time and place – the uncertainty only adding to the sublime awfulness of our responsibilities.
Bull’s conclusion was hopeful, though:
Climate change does not tempt us to be less moral than we might otherwise be; it invites us to be more moral than we could ever have imagined. … Climate ethics is … a new chapter in the moral education of mankind. It may tell us things we do not wish to know … but the future development of humanity may depend on what, if anything, it can teach us.
Returning to Surviving Progress. The film illustrates the argument of the book, A Short History of Progress by Ronald Wright. He was previously known to me as an authority on the pre-Colombian civilizations of the Americas. Some time ago I read a couple of his books on this subject, Stolen Continents: The ‘New World’ through Indian Eyes and Cut Stones and Crossroads: Journey in the Two Worlds of Peru. This film continues and develops Wright’s interest in how civilizations rise – and are destroyed. He coins the term ‘progress trap’ to define human behaviours that seem to amount to progress and to provide benefits in the short-term, but which ultimately lead to disaster because they’re unsustainable.
The film argues his case that the exponential growth in human numbers, the development of technologies, and the rapacious exploitation of the world’s natural resources threaten the planet, and the very existence of humanity. ‘Progress’ – defined in terms of never-ending economic growth – could destroy us. On population growth, he states controversially:
Between the fall of the Roman Empire and Columbus sailing, it took 13 centuries to add 200 million people to the world’s population. Now it takes only three years. A simple thing like pasteurization, the warming of milk so that the bacteria are killed and the control of smallpox. Things like that have led to a great boom in human numbers. So, overpopulation, which nobody really wants to talk about because it cuts at things like religious beliefs and the freedom of the individual and the autonomy of the family and so forth, is something that we’re going to have to deal with. We probably have to work towards a much smaller worldwide population than 6 or 7 billion. We probably need to go down to a half that or possibly even a third of that, if everybody is going to live comfortably and decently.
But the film also tackles the more significant aspect of this problem: the footprint of the individuals at the top of the social pyramid who are consuming the most. Somebody in the United States or Europe is consuming about 50 times more resources than a poor person in a place like Bangladesh. And to sustain the lifestyles of the planet’s rich, the banks and big corporations plunder the natural capital of our home, planet earth. In the film Wright sums up the problem as he sees it:
Some people have written about natural capital, the capital that nature provides, which is the clean air, the clean water, the, the uncut forests, the, the rich farmland, and the minerals, the oil, the metals. All of these things are the capital that nature has provided. And until about 1980, human civilization was able to live on, what we might term, the interest of that capital, the surplus that nature is able to produce, the food that farmland can grow without actually degrading the farmland or the number of fish you can pull out of the sea without causing the fish stocks to crash. But since 1980, we’ve been using more than the interest, and so we are in effect like somebody who thinks he’s rich because he’s spending the money that has been left in his inheritance, not spending the interest but eating into the capital.
Margaret Atwood appears in the film, and underlines its message with these words:
Instead of thinking that nature is this huge bank that we can just, this endless credit card that we can just keep drawing on, we have to think about the finite nature of that planet and how to keep it alive so that we too may remain alive. Unless we conserve the planet, there isn’t going to be any ‘the economy’.
Surviving Progress argues that faith in progress has become a kind of religious faith, a sort of fundamentalism, rather like the market fundamentalism that has just recently crashed and burned. Wright says:
The idea that you can let markets rip is a delusion, just as the idea that you can let technology rip, and it will solve the problems created by itself in a slightly earlier phase. That, that has become a belief very similar to the religious delusions that caused some societies to crash and burn in the past.
The anthropologist Jane Goodall puts it this way:
Unlimited economic progress in a world of finite natural resources doesn’t make sense. It’s a pattern that is bound to collapse. And we keep seeing it collapsing, but then we build it up because there are these strong vested interests, we must have business as usual. And you know, you get the arms manufacturers, you get the petroleum industry, the pharmaceutical industry and all of this feeding into helping to create corrupt governments who are putting the future of their own people at risk.
Towards the end of the film, Ronald Wright sums up his case in these words:
All the civilizations of the past, and I think our own, only seem to be doing well when they’re expanding, when the population is growing, when the industrial output is growing, and when the cities are spreading outwards. Eventually you reach the point at which the population has overrun everything, the cities have expanded over the farmland, the people at the bottom begin to starve, and the people at the top lose their legitimacy. And so, you get, you get hunger, you get revolution.Now, one kind of scary thing about the moment we’re in is that for the first time there’s kind of only one system. So, if the whole thing goes down, you won’t have what you’ve had in previous eras of epic collapse, which is that even a one civilization goes down, and it may take a while to recover, there are other robust civilizations that are kind of the guardians of progress.
As I listened to Margaret Atwood say, ‘all we’ve got is planet Earth, and we are destroying, we are polluting, we are damaging the future of our own species’, I thought of Banga, the new album from Patti Smith that I’ve been listening to this week. In part, her theme is environmental crisis and the destruction of the beauty and mystery of the natural world. The album concludes with her own haunting take on Neil Young’s visionary account of planetary collapse from the 1970s, ‘After the Gold Rush’, which has ‘Mother nature’s silver seed’ setting off in spaceships to a new home. Only – there is nowhere else to go.
On the previous track Patti Smith explores ideas that touch on the discussion here. ‘Constantine’s Dream’ is a ten minute improvised, half-sung, half-spoken meditation that weaves together Columbus’s voyage to the New World, the life and work of Renaissance painter Piero della Francesca, the pastoral ideals of St. Francis of Assisi, and environmental cataclysm.
In Arezzo, Patti has a dream in which Saint Francis weeps at the current state of the environment,then, in the dawn, she leaves her room, ‘stepping down the ancient stones, washed with dawn’ and enters the Basilica of San Francesco:
I saw before me the world of his world The bright fields, the birds in abundance All of nature of which he sang Singing to him All the beauty of nature surrounded him as he walked
But Patti is senses ‘the call of art, the call of man’ and is drawn to the beauty of Piero della Francesca‘s ‘Legend of the True Cross’, a series of tableaux that includes ‘The Dream of Constantine’, Francesca’s representation of the moment when the crusading Emperor Constantine converts to Christianity after seeing the vision of the True Cross: ‘with this sign shall thou conquer’. In her poem, Patti has Francesca cry out on finishing his painting:
Oh lord let me die on the back of adventure With a brush and an eye full of light.
The Dream of Constantine by Piero della Francesca in the Basilica of San Francesco, Arezzo
Francesca dies in October 1492, just as ‘a world away, on three great ships, adventure itself’ Columbus arrives on the shore of the ‘New World’. Patti imagines the ecstatic vision of Columbus as he sees the New World for the first time:
And as far as his eyes could see No longer blind All of nature unspoiled, beautiful
Columbus set foot on the New World And witnessed beauty unspoiled All the delights given by God As if Eden had opened up her heart to him And opened her dress And all of her fruit gave to him
Columbus falls into a swoon and a vision of his own:
The 21st century advancing like the angel That had come to Constantine
Constantine in his dream Oh this is your cross to bear …
All shall crumble into dust
Oh thou navigator
The terrible end of man
This is your gift to mankind
This is your cross to bear
Then Columbus saw all of nature aflame The apocalyptic night And the dream of the troubled king Dissolved into light.
The album closes with Patti, accompanied by small children, singing:
Look at Mother Nature on the run In the 21st century…
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, so I decided to read it.
After Nature was written in 1988 – that is, before his first book of fiction, Vertigo. Sebald himself described it as a ‘prose poem’, and the work is presented on the page as blank verse. For me – and many commentators have felt the same way – I think this is a mistake. The work consists of three parts, and though the final section might possibly stand as poetry, it is hard to accept the first two parts as anything other than randomly chopped-up prose. Prose of a high order, though, that should have been left as just that.
After Nature is certainly a fine piece of writing that anticipates themes which Sebald explored in later works: memory (and forgetting), art, the interpretation of history, migration. Each of the three parts concerns a figure from a different century – the 16th century artist Mathias Grünewald, the eighteenth-century botanist Georg Wilhelm Steller, and, in the final part, Sebald himself. What unites these stories? All concern men troubled by the violence and injustice of their century and who, in their different ways (artist, scientist, literary scholar), interpret and meditate on their time. All are migrants, geographically or socially, while Grunewald and Sebald seem to share the melancholic view of the human condition that is the hallmark of Sebald’s writing.
The first of the narratives, ‘As the Snow on the Alps’, concerns the artist Mathias Grünewald – ‘unknown’ as Sebald states, since Grünewald was probably not his name at all. We may know his face, though, since he incorporated his own self-portrait into many of his works, such as his John the Evangelist (below), ‘sketched out in heightened white crayon, later destroyed by an alien hand’s pen and wash, as that of a painter aged forty to fifty’.
Sebald suggests that he is the bearded man laying a gentle hand on another’s shoulder in commiseration in The Mocking of Christ (below): ‘always the same gentleness, the same burden of grief, the same irregularity of the eyes, veiled and sliding sideways down into loneliness’.
Sebald portrays Grunewald as an artist disturbed by the suffering and conflict of his time, especially the Peasants’ War – the Anabaptist insurrection against political and spiritual oppression led by Thomas Muntzer which was utterly defeated at the battle of Frankenhausen in1525, In the Battle of Frankenhausen, Müntzer and his farmers were defeated. Muntzer was captured, tortured and decapitated, while
the bodies of peasants piled up into a hetacomb, because, as though they were mad, they neither put up any resistance nor took to their heels. When Grunewald got news of this on the 18th of May he ceased to leave his house. Yet he could hear the gouging out of eyes that long continued between Lake Constance and the Thuringian Forest. For weeks at that time he wore a dark bandage over his face.
Thereafter, Grunewald ‘led a reclusive, melancholy life’, painting the altar panels for which he is now famous – most notably the extraordinary Isenheim Altarpiece, regarded as his masterpiece.
In one section an innermost panel, Grunewald depicts the Temptation of St. Anthony in mystical, visionary and grotesque form:
Sebald writes:
Now life as such, as it unfolds, dreadfully, everywhere and at all times, is not to be seen on the altar panels whose figures have passed beyond the miseries of existence, unless it be in that unreal and demented thronging which Grünewald has developed around St. Anthony of the temptation: dragged by his hair over the ground by a gruesome monster.
To him, the painter, this is creation, image of our insane presence on the surface of the earth […]
In this fashion Grünewald, silently wielding his paintbrush, rendered the scream, the wailing, the gurgling and the shrieking of a pathological spectacle to which he and his art, as he must have known, themselves belong.
Sebald later elaborated his thoughts on Grunewald’s vision in The Emigrants:
The extreme vision of that strange man, which was lodged in every detail, distorted every limb, and infected the colours like an illness, was one I had always felt in tune with, and now I found my feeling confirmed by the direct encounter. The monstrosity of that suffering, which, emanating from the figures depicted, spread to cover the whole of Nature, only to flood back from the lifeless landscape to the humans marked by death, rose and ebbed within me like a tide. Looking at those gashed bodies, and at the witnesses of the execution, doubled up by grief like snapped reeds, I gradually understood that, beyond a certain point, pain blots out the one thing that is essential to its being experienced – consciousness – and so perhaps extinguishes itself; we know very little about this. What is certain, though, is that mental suffering is effectively without end. One may think one has reached the very limit, but there are always more torments to come. One plunges from one abyss into the next.
The central narrative of After Nature, ‘And if I Remained by the Outermost Sea’, is based on the 18th century naturalist and botanist Georg Wilhelm Steller and his part in Vitus Bering‘s Alaskan expedition. Sebald is interested in what drove Steller to leave the safety of an academic career in Germany for the severity and the unknown dangers of the arctic wilderness. One answer:
Visions of this voyage of discovery, Steller later recorded, had so seized his imagination that he […] could think of nothing other than the shapes of the fauna and flora of that distant region where East and West and North converge, and of the art and skill required for their description.
Steller sought the unexplored arctic to catalogue and classify. But by the end of his life, Steller becomes aware of the ill-treatment of the indigenous people and writes papers defending their rights against the incursions and exploitation of Russian imperial interests: arrests and interrogations follow and Steller ‘now wholly grasps the difference between nature and society’. He flees, pursued by Imperial forces, and eventually dies of fever and stroke:
This is infirmitas, the breaking of time from day to day and from hour to hour, it is rust and fire and the salt of the planets, darkness even at noon and luminaries absent from heaven.
Sebald describes Steller’s death and burial:
…the dead man was dreaming still of the grazing Mammoth across the river until in the night someone came And took his cloak and left him to lie in the snow like a fox beaten to death.
The powerful last section, ‘Dark Night Sallies Forth’, brings together the themes of migration, departure, and ‘revisitings’ of histories, as Sebald explores his own family’s history and memory and tells of his journey out of Germany to study in Manchester:
…after leaving my remote home, I arrived there and took lodgings among the previous century’s ruins.
Sebald confronts the ease with which things are forgotten, or are displaced from memory because they are associated with a shadow that knows no limits. He stares at a photo of his mother and father, taken on 26 August 1943. The following day his father left for Dresden ‘of whose beauty his memory, as he remarks when I question him, retains no trace’. The very next day, Nurnberg is bombed; his mother
saw Nürnberg in flames, but cannot recall now what the burning town looked like or what her feelings were at this sight.
In all three narratives, the forces and phenomena of the natural world are powerfully present. Steller joins Vitus Bering on the ill-fated Alaska expedition in 1741, and watches captain and crew sicken and rot in wind and weather. Grünewald paints his altarpieces in revulsion at the physical world and at man’s plague-ridden, war-torn, sinful existence in it. Sebald recounts the journey of his mother, fleeing the bombing of Nürnberg and becoming aware that she is pregnant, and his own migration to Manchester. Then the narrative moves from memory to a melancholic vision of the future, in poignant lines addressed in the East Anglian present to his daughter:
Come, my daughter, come on, give me your hand, we’re leaving the town, I’ll show you …
…the end of the world, the five cold houses of Shingle Street. Inconsolable a woman stands at the window, a children’s swing Rusts in the wind, a lonely/spy sits in his Dormobile in the dunes, his headphones pulled over his ears. No, here we can write no postcards, can’t even get out of the car Tell me, child, is your heart as heavy as mine is, year after year a pebble bank raised by the waves of the sea aAll the way to the North, every stone a dead soul and this sky so grey? So unremittingly grey and so low as no sky I have seen before. Along the horizon freighters cross over into another age measured by the ticking of Geigers in the power station at Sizewell, where slowly the core of the metal is destroyed. Whispering madness on the heathland of Suffolk. Is this the promis’d end? Oh, you are men of stones. What’s dead is gone forever.What did’st thou say? What, how, where, when? Is this love nothing now or all? Water? Fire? Good? Evil? Life? Death?
The spellbinding conclusion of the poem – which might have been visualised by Werner Herzog, and is, in fact, inspired by Albrecht Altdorfer’s visionary 16th century painting, The Battle of Alexander at Issus – describes a dream in which Sebald sees far below him his own house and ‘the shadows falling on the East Anglian landscape’. He flies over the North Sea and the Rhine’s alluvial plain, ‘cities phosphorescent on the river bank, industry’s glowing piles waiting beneath the smoke trails…’ .
Now I know, as with a crane’s eye one surveys his far-flung realm, a truly Asiatic spectacle …
tents lying in the evening glow and a city on the shore …
The Nile Delta can be made out, the Sinai Peninsula, the Red Sea and, still farther in the distance, towering up in dwindling light, the mountain ranges, snow-covered and ice-bound, of the strange, unexplored, African continent.
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 exquisite book.
Although her narrative closes with Robert Mapplethorpe’s death in 1989, Patti Smith focusses on the years between 1967, when she first arrived, penniless in New York and first met Mapplethorpe, and the late 1970s when their lives diverged, as she broke through to rock stardom.
Though Patti came from a poor family, both her parents encouraged and stimulated her interest in art and literature, and the determination to make art is central to her account. And so it was that, twenty years old with a head full of Rimbaud and Baudelaire, she arrived in New York in July 1967 to start a new life. Robert Mapplethorpe was one of the first people she met, briefly, that day:
At 20 years old, I boarded the bus from Philadelphia to New York. I wore my dungarees, black turtleneck, and the old grey raincoat I had bought in Camden. My small suitcase, yellow-and-red plaid, held some drawing pencils, a notebook, Illuminations, a few pieces of clothing, and pictures of my siblings. I was superstitious. Today was a Monday; I was born on Monday. It was a good day to arrive in New York City. No one expected me. Everything awaited me.
I immediately took the subway from Port Authority to DeKalb Avenue in Brooklyn. It was a sunny afternoon. I was hoping my friends might put me up until I could find a place of my own. I went to the brownstone at the address I had, but they had moved. The new tenant motioned toward a room at the rear of the flat and suggested that his roommate might know the new address.
I walked into the room. On a simple iron bed, a boy was sleeping. He was pale and slim with masses of dark curls, lying bare-chested with strands of beads around his neck. I stood there. He opened his eyes and smiled.
When I told him of my plight, he rose in one motion, put on his huaraches and a white T-shirt, and beckoned me to follow him. I watched him as he walked ahead, leading the way with a light-footed gait, slightly bowlegged. I noticed his hands as he tapped his fingers against his thigh. I had never seen anyone like him. He delivered me to another brownstone on Clinton Avenue, gave a little farewell salute, smiled, and was on his way.
Patti gets a job in a bookstore, and one day the boy with dark curls comes in. Later that week, another chance encounter with the boy saves her from a desperate situation.
As if it was the most natural thing in the world we stayed together, not leaving each other’s side save to go to work. Nothing was spoken; it was just mutually understood.
Soon the couple were living together, part of a generation of struggling young bohemians who would make New York in the late 60s and early 70s a vibrant hub of creativity. They struggle to pay for food and shelter, take care of each other and dedicate themselves to making art. ‘To me, Robert and I were irrevocably entwined’, Smith writes.
Patti Smith’s intensely personal account is revealing in that it contradicts the taken-for-granted image of the couple as wild and druggy. Rather, as the title suggests, their lasting friendship was defined more than anything by its innocence and purity – two qualities that suffuse Patti Smith’s lyrical prose.
We played similar games, declared the most obscure objects treasure, and often puzzled friends and acquaintances by our indefinable devotion.
Smith gave Mapplethorpe love without reservation. Her devotion to him was undimmed by Robert’s discovery of his homosexuality and his entry into a world of gay hustlers and S&M. What, to her, was more dismaying was his social ascent. She could understand his love for men, but in order for her to spend time with his new, rich friends she would have had to change her ways:
I was a bad girl trying to be good and he was a good boy trying to be bad.
She speaks frankly about being shocked and frightened by the direction that Mapplethorpe began to take in his photography: the pictures were frightening, she says, the work shocking.It was meant that way:
Robert took areas of dark human consent and made them into art… I admired him for it, but I could not comprehend the brutality.
Smith left New York for Detroit in 1979 to live with the man she would eventually marry, the guitarist Fred ‘Sonic’ Smith, just as Mapplethorpe’s career was taking off. By then Smith had already produced Horses and had risen to international fame with her hit single, ‘Because The Night’. It’s at this point that the main section of the book draws to a close.
‘Separate ways but together’ is how Smith describes her continuing connection to Mapplethorpe from the time she left New York to his death in 1989 from complications due to AIDS: ‘Robert was ever in my conciousness, the blue star in the constellation of my personal cosmology’.
When she discovers that Mapplethorpe is dying of Aids in 1989, Smith writes with brutal poignancy that ‘every fear I had once harboured seemed to materialise with the suddenness of a bright sail bursting into flames’. Her description of a moment towards the end of Robert’s life – at the recording of ‘Jackson Song’, when she herelf is pregnant with her second child – is beautifully composed and simply heartbreaking. Smith is always acutely sensitive to pattern and coincidence; she writes:
Later that evening, Robert attended the recording of the lullaby that Fred and I had written for our son, Jackson. It was the song I had sung to Sam Wagstaff. There was a nod to Robert in the second verse: Little blue star that offers light. He sat on the couch in the control room. I would always remember the date. It was the nineteenth of March, the birthday of my mother.
Richard Sohl was at the piano. I was facing him. We were recording it live. The baby moved within me. Richard asked Fred if he had any special orders. ‘Make them cry, Richard, ‘ was all he said. We had one false start, then put everything we had into the second take. As I finished, Richard repeated the final chords. I looked through the glass window into the control room. Robert had fallen asleep on the couch and Fred was standing alone, weeping.
What is unstated, is that everyone named in this passage is now dead. Robert died on 9 March 1989. Sam Wagstaff, Mapplethorpe’s partner, for whom Patti wrote ‘Paths That Cross’, died in 1987. Richard Sohl, her pianist died in 1990. Her husband, Fred, died in 1994, and her mother in 2002.
Robert and I were always ourselves—’til the day he died, we were just exactly as we were when we met. And we loved each other. Everybody wants to define everything. Is it necessary to define love?
It is this genuine devotion – to her private artistic saints and to her friends – that permeates this wonderful book. It has been universally acclaimed as a poetic masterpiece, and was winner of the National Book Award in 2010. At the award ceremony, Patti Smith said:
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 discusses Just Kids at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC, December 2010
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 was nonsense – there were no festive feelings in him, and 20th century revolutions were made with guns, led by vanguard parties with their own precise agendas and had deadly consequences. Tonight the scenes from Cairo really do look like a festival of the people.
The movement symbolised by the occupants of Tahrir Square this past 18 days has no leaders and only home-made banners. They organised using the new communication technologies of Twitter and Facebook. But, as Timothy Garton-Ash wrote in yesterday’s Guardian, new forms of protest are combined with something as old as the hills:
New in Cairo 2011 is that it is now Arabs and Muslims standing up in large numbers, with courage and (for the most part) peaceful discipline, for basic human dignity, against corrupt, oppressive rulers. New in 2011 is the degree of decentered, networked animation of the demonstrations, so that even the best-informed observers there struggle to answer the question “who is organising this?”. New in 2011 is the extraordinary underlying pressure of demography, with half the population in most of these countries being under 25. Old in Cairo 2011 – as old as the pyramids, as old as human civilisation – is the cry of oppressed men and women, overcoming the barrier of fear and feeling, however fleetingly, the sense of freedom and dignity.
Tariq Ali has just written on Comment Is Free at guardian.co.uk:
A joyous night in Cairo. What bliss to be alive, to be an Egyptian and an Arab. In Tahrir Square they’re chanting, “Egypt is free” and “We won!”….The age of political reason is returning to the Arab world. The people are fed up of being colonised and bullied.
And he has quoted this extract from a poem written in 1967 by ‘one of the great Arab poets’, Nizar Qabbani:
Arab children, Corn ears of the future, You will break our chains. Kill the opium in our heads, Kill the illusions. Arab children, Don’t read about our suffocated generation, We are a hopeless case, As worthless as a water-melon rind. Don’t read about us, Don’t ape us, Don’t accept us, Don’t accept our ideas, We are a nation of crooks and jugglers. Arab children, Spring rain, Corn ears of the future, You are the generation that will overcome defeat.
Here’s another poem, For Tahrir, For Egypt, posted by Egyptian blogger Diptychal (‘I live in Cairo, where by day, I work at a publishing house. I’m 1/2 poet, 1/2 geek with a heavy dose of techno-joy….I post photos taken mostly in the streets of Cairo’).
that public square named for fate and history as though it knew what was to come we stood our ground saying, we will not be moved painted poems on the hard asphalt that had softened, soaking in our blood
and the world watched.
The world watched as we were called traitors and on television screens in homes, doors locked refusing to let in the truth, men spit scorn into cameras and women screamed into their phones eyes and hearts full of rage unable to understand that Tahrir was theirs, for them, while government eyes showed only what they wanted us to see the sun setting over the Nile
but all it would take, was the smallest turn of the head to the left a glance from the corner of the eye to show the haze of Cairo’s sun through tear gas, to show men charging the street with only their bodies met with police trucks running them down.
Newspapers wrote of unrest across the Mediterranean pretending that this day that had begun in Cairo was like any other.
But something had begun.
Men and women shook the earth with their voices.
From north to south bodies fell to the ground, hearts stopped beating but in Tahrir, we held our heads high for them moving away from the walls that, our whole lives we had walked close to, hiding in the shadow of conformity and fear
opened our chests to murder opened our faces to rocks, our eyes to bullets our minds to molotov fires thrown down onto our heads
and said
we are not afraid
because the fear of living with your face buried in the soil of a land that can no longer feel was nothing, nothing compared to the fear of dying without once having said
I am free.
Let us pray that the promise of Tahrir Square is fulfilled. As I watched the joyous scenes there this evening, I thought of Patti Smith’s poem, ‘Notes to the Future’. Here are extracts that seem to speak of this moment and its hope for the future (apologies to Patti for butchering it):
Listen my children and you shall hear The sound of your own steps The sound of your hereafter Memory awaits and turns to greet you Draping its banner across your wrists Wake up arms Delicate feet For as one to march the streets
Each alone, each part of another Your steps shall ring Shall raise the cloud And they that will hear will hear Will hear voice of the one And the one and the one As it has never been uttered before For something greater yet to come […]
And all their hearts were as one heart. And all their voices were as one voice.
[…]
This is our birthright. This is our charge. And we have given over to others. And they have not done well
Now my children You must overturn the tables Deliver the future from material rule For only one rule should be considered
The eleventh commandment To love one another And this is our covenant across your wrist […] It is merely a cloth, Merely our colors, Invested with the blood of the people All their hopes and dreams.
Our flag It has its excellence Yet it is nothing It shall not be a tyranny above us
[…]
And the children shall march And bring the colors forward Investing within them The redeeming blood Of their revolutionary hearts.
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 century, the inspiration for the event has been the work of the writer WG Sebald, who lived and worked in East Anglia for four decades. The Rings of Saturn, his most famous book, mixed history, travelogue, memoir, meditation, fiction and images to explore the personal, public and often overlooked histories of Suffolk. Across three days, and in varied media, his writing and its impact was celebrated by a bunch of artists who are among my favourites – including writers Richard Mabey and Robert Macfarlane, poet Alice Oswald, and musician Patti Smith.
The central event of the weekend was the world premiere of the Artevents-backed documentary, Patience (After Sebald), an award-winning film by Grant Gee about the landscapes and legacy of The Rings of Saturn. Patience (After Sebald) is described as a multi-layered film essay on landscape, art, history, life and loss told via a long walk through coastal East Anglia tracking Sebald’s walk The Rings of Saturn.
The Artevents weekend also included a writer’s day, when writers including Richard Mabey and Robert Macfarlane explored the meanings of place from different perspectives, and an evening with Patti Smith featuring a new work inspired by Sebald, Max: a Tribute.
Sebald has profoundly influenced many contemporary writers, thinkers and artists, some of whom speak in the film. He was born in Bavaria in 1944. His father served in the Wehrmacht under the Nazis, and the Holocaust and its meaning for post-war Germany came to constitute a central strand in Sebald’s work. He studied German literature at the University of Freiburg, before being appointed assistant lecturer at the University of Manchester in 1966 and settling in England permanently, later teaching at the University of East Anglia. Sebald died in a car crash near Norwich in December 2001.
Sebald’s works are largely concerned with the theme of memory, both personal and collective. They are, in particular, attempts to reconcile himself with, and deal in literary terms with, the trauma of the Second World War and its effect on the German people. But they are also noted for their overwhelming, hypnotic character, marked by repeated digressions. Roger Deakin wrote of Sebald:
I relish Max Sebald, as I love Thomas de Quincey, for his fearless digressions, for the sheer scope of his curious, cosmopolitan imagination and for his powers of free association. As a Suffolk man I have a special appreciation for The Rings of Saturn, although the Suffolk coast Sebald evokes is nothing like the Suffolk I know. It is a landscape transformed by a particular state of mind, gloomy but compelling. The place he describes is outlandish, like the writer, who is an exile from his language as well as from his land. Max’s ornate, stately sentences appear to wander as widely as his narrators on their travels, following winding paths of digression, disappearing into side-streets, and pausing to examine objects or images of particular interest. When asked by an interviewer from the New Yorker how he came to write The Rings of Saturn, he replied: ‘I had this idea of writing a few short pieces for the German papers in order to pay for the extravagance of a fortnight’s rambling tour. So that was the plan. But then, as you walk along, you find things. I think that’s the advantage of walking. It’s just one of the reasons I do that a lot. You find things by the wayside or you buy a brochure written by a local historian which is in a tiny little museum somewhere . . . and in that you find odd details that lead you somewhere else.’ Digression is at the heart of Max’s work. As Dave Eggers puts it: ‘The digressiveness follows the path of memory, which is rarely orderly. The uncovering of the story through the thicket of the mind – that’s the plot in a way.’
Sebald opens The Rings of Saturn by telling how, in August 1992, he ‘set off to walk the county of Suffolk, in the hope of dispelling the emptiness that takes hold of me whenever I have completed a stint of work’. He collapses ‘a year to the day after I began my tour’. He tells of being rushed to hospital in Norwich, and from this point the narrative drifts from one topic to the next, weaving an elaborate skein of associations drawn from his walk, his reading, thoughts and memories to produce a work that is a pilgrimage, a memoir, a prose poem, rambling and constantly digressing.
For example: as Sebald passes through Walsingham, he recalls that here, in 1658, in a field in the village, nearly fifty urn burials were unearthed. This inspired Sir Thomas Browne of Norwich to write his Hydriotaphia – Urne-Burial or, A Brief Discourse of the Sepulchrall Urnes Lately Found in Norfolk. Sebald meditates, in turn, upon Thomas Browne and Hydriotaphia:
The inquiry of oblivion blindly scatters her poppyseed and when wretchedness falls upon us one summer’s day like snow, all we wish for is to be forgotten. These are the circles Browne’s thoughts describe, most unremittingly perhaps in Hydriotaphia or Urn Burial of 1658, a discourse on sepulchral urns found in a field near Walsingham in Norfolk. Drawing upon the most varied of historical and natural historical sources, he expatiates upon the rites we enact when one from our midst sets out on his last journey.
Sebald’s landscapes are usually empty of human inhabitants:
The train ground into motion again and disappeared round a gradual bend, leaving a trail of black smoke behind it. There was no station at the stop, only an open shelter. I walked down the deserted platform, to my left the seemingly endless expanses of the marshes and to my right, beyond a low brick wall, the shrubs and trees of the park. There was not a soul about….
But, at the same time, they are haunted by the residue of human endeavour:
Too many buildings have fallen down, too much rubble has been heaped up, the moraines and deposits are insuperable.
There is a great deal of characteristic laconic humour. Just read his account of entering Lowestoft on a grey evening and then eating armour-plated fish and chips in his deserted hotel : ‘the fish . . . had doubtless lain entombed in the
deep freeze for years’.
Robert McCrum in the Observer noted that Rings of Saturn is
Ostensibly a record of a journey on foot through coastal East Anglia… [but it] is also a brilliantly allusive study of England’s imperial past and the nature of decline and fall, of loss and decay.
The Rings of Saturn is a strange, compelling work, with its curious archive of photographs and its chronicling of Sebald’s tour across epochs as well as the East Anglian countryside. On his way his thoughts meander via Rembrandt’s ‘Anatomy Lesson’, the natural history of the herring, a matchstick model of the Temple of Jerusalem, the travels of Sir Thomas Browne’s skull, and the massive bombings of World War 2. He connects sugar fortunes, Joseph Conrad, the horrors of colonial Belgian Congo, an abandoned bridge over the River Blyth, the Empress Tzu Hsi and the silk industry in Norwich.
He recalls visiting the Waterloo Panorama, a 360-degree representation of the battle wrapped around an ‘immense domed rotunda’, and muses:
This then . . . is the representation of history. It requires a falsification of perspective. We, the survivors, see everything from above, see everything at once, and still we do not know how it was.
For the Re-enchantment project, Artevents has commissioned four artists to explore the significance of our various relationships to place – personal, collective, cultural, ecological or spiritual. One of these, England Revisited, is a monumental land artwork by Simon English that builds upon his earlier work All England Sculpture (1971). Then, he journeyed to, and marked with a St. George’s flag, 75 points from Cumbria to the South of England over three months. For England Revisited, he has revisited all 75 points creating an entirely new work about change. From July to September 2010, Simon traveled across the country, photographing the locations, collecting samples of the local flora, talking to the locals, as he had done in 1971. This material from both journeys, along with Simon’s observations on England then and now, will eventually result in a downloadable touring exhibition to be produced by Artevents in 2011.
In December, Artevents published a book, Towards Re-Enchantment: Place and Its Meanings, with contributions by various writers and poets reflecting on the meaning of ‘re-enchantment’, with reference to an actual, particular place or region. The book has essays by, amongst others, Jay Griffiths, Richard Mabey, Robert Macfarlane, Iain Sinclair and Ken Worpole, with poems from Elisabeth Bletsoe, Lavinia Greenlaw and Alice Oswald.
Links
After Nature: a detailed review of the weekend by blogger Andrew Ray
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 was food – how farming, the cultivation of new grains and developments in cooking after the end of the Ice Age – transformed peoples’ lives and the tools they used.
This week the focus is cities, and today McGregor was discussing the Standard of Ur, a Sumerian artifact discovered by archaeologist Leonard Woolley in the 1920s. What the Standard of Ur was used for remains a mystery but it seems to have royal connections. It was buried in a royal grave and depicts two contrasting scenes of a king of Ur – identifiable as larger than the other figures. On one side captured enemy prisoners are presented to the king by his soldiers. On the other side the king enjoys a ceremonial banquet accompanied by lyre music.
McGregor is excellent at linking the past and the present, as he did in this programme when he said:
Woolley’s discoveries at Ur coincided with the early years of the modern state of Iraq, created after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire at the end of the First World War. One of the focal points of that new state was the Iraq Museum in Baghdad, which received the lion’s share of the Ur excavations. From the moment of discovery, there was a strong connection between Iraqi national identity and the antiquities of Ur, so the looting of antiquities from the Baghdad Museum during the recent war in Iraq was felt very profoundly by the Iraqis… Mesopotamia’s past is a key part of Iraq’s future. Archaeology and politics are set to remain closely connected as, tragically, are cities and warfare.
From around 4000BC, the Sumerian culture witnessed the development of the first complex system of mathematics, resulting in the creation of arithmetic, geometry, and algebra. This reminded me of Patti Smith’s great lyric, ‘Radio Baghdad’, from her 2004 Trampin‘ album:
Suffer not Your neighbour’s affliction
Suffer not Your neighbour’s paralysis
But extend your hand, extend your hand
Lest you vanish in the city and be but a trace
Just a vanished ghost and your legacy
All the things you knew science, mathematics, thought
Severely weakened like irrigation systems
In the tired veins forming from the Tigris and Euphrates
In the realm of peace all the world revolved
All the world revolved around a perfect circle
City of Baghdad City of scholars
Empirical humble centre of the world
City in ashes city of Baghdad
City of Baghdad abrasive, aloof
Oh, in Mesopotamia aloofness ran deep
Deep in the veins of the great rivers
That form the base Of Eden
And the tree the tree of knowledge
Held up its arms to the sky
All the branches of knowledge
Cradling
Civilization in the realm of peace
All the world revolved around a perfect circle
Oh Baghdad centre of the world
City of ashes with its great mosques
Erupting from the mouth of god, rising from the ashes like
a speckled bird splayed against the mosaic sky
Oh, clouds around we created the zero
But we mean nothing to you
You would believe
That we are just some mystical tale, we are just a swollen belly
That gave birth to Sinbad, Scheherazade
We gave birth
to the zero, the perfect number
We invented the zero and we mean nothing to you
Our children run through the streets
And you sent your flames your shooting stars
Shock and awe Shock and awe
Like some imagined warrior production
Twenty-first century, no chivalry involved
You came, you came through the west
Annihilated a people And you come to us
But we are older than you
You wanna come and rob the cradle
Of civilization and you read yet you read
You read Genesis you read of the tree
You read of the tree beget by god
That raised its branches into the sky, every branch of knowledge
Of the cradle of civilization
Of the banks of the Tigris and the Euphrates
Oh, in Mesopotamia aloofness ran deep
The face of Eve turning – what sky did she see
What garden beneath her feet, the one you drill
You drill pulling the blood of the earth
Little droplets of oil for bracelets, little jewels
Sapphires you make bracelets
Round your own world we are weeping tears
Rubies we offer them to you
We are just your Arabian nightmare
We invented the zero But we mean nothing to you
Your Arabian nightmare
City of stars
City of scholarship, science
City of ideas
City of light
City of ashes that the great Caliph
Walked through, his naked feet formed a circle
And they built a city a perfect city of Baghdad
In the realm of peace and all the world revolved
And they invented and they mean nothing to you
Nothing to you Nothing
Go to sleep Go to sleep my child
Go to sleep And I’ll sing you a lullaby
A lullaby for our city a lullaby of Baghdad
Go to sleep Sleep my child
Sleep Sleep…
Run Run…
You sent your lights your bombs
You sent them down on our city Shock and awe
Like some crazy t.v. show
They’re robbing the cradle of civilization
They’re robbing the cradle of civilization
They’re robbing the cradle of civilization
Suffer not the paralysis of your neighbour
Suffer not but extend your hand
I’m gonna get out of here, I’m gonna get on that train,
I’m gonna go on that train and go to New York City
I’m gonna be somebody, I’m gonna get on that train, go to New York City,
I’m gonna be so big, I’m gonna be a big star and I will never return,
Never return, no, never return, to burn at this Piss Factory
– Patti Smith, ‘Piss Factory’
I have been reading extracts from Patti Smith’s memoir of her years with Robert Mapplethorpe, Just Kids, which has just been published. The extracts are so beautifully written and so evocative that this has to go on my list of must-read books. The following extracts are published in today’s Observer and in Rolling Stone on January 7.
On 3 July 1967, Patti Smith – a 20-year-old dropout from teacher-training college who had just given up a child for adoption – boarded a bus in Philadelphia and, a couple of hours later, got off in New York to start life anew. Robert Mapplethorpe was one of the first people she met that day. Soon the pair were inseparable, working side by side in their apartment – she building a career as a poet and singer, he as a photographer – and mixing with the likes of Allen Ginsberg, Janis Joplin, Andy Warhol and Sam Shepard.
At 20 years old, I boarded the bus from Philadelphia to New York. I wore my dungarees, black turtleneck, and the old grey raincoat I had bought in Camden. My small suitcase, yellow-and-red plaid, held some drawing pencils, a notebook, Illuminations, a few pieces of clothing, and pictures of my siblings. I was superstitious. Today was a Monday; I was born on Monday. It was a good day to arrive in New York City. No one expected me. Everything awaited me.
I immediately took the subway from Port Authority to DeKalb Avenue in Brooklyn. It was a sunny afternoon. I was hoping my friends might put me up until I could find a place of my own. I went to the brownstone at the address I had, but they had moved. The new tenant motioned toward a room at the rear of the flat and suggested that his roommate might know the new address.
I walked into the room. On a simple iron bed, a boy was sleeping. He was pale and slim with masses of dark curls, lying bare-chested with strands of beads around his neck. I stood there. He opened his eyes and smiled.
When I told him of my plight, he rose in one motion, put on his huaraches and a white T-shirt, and beckoned me to follow him. I watched him as he walked ahead, leading the way with a light-footed gait, slightly bowlegged. I noticed his hands as he tapped his fingers against his thigh. I had never seen anyone like him. He delivered me to another brownstone on Clinton Avenue, gave a little farewell salute, smiled, and was on his way.
[Smith’s friends were not to be found at this house either, and she spent the next few weeks sleeping rough.]
It was hot in the city, but I still wore my raincoat. It gave me confidence as I hit the streets looking for work. I was relieved when I was hired as a cashier in the uptown branch of Brentano’s bookstore. I would have preferred manning the poetry section over ringing up sales of ethnic jewellery and crafts, but I liked looking at trinkets from faraway countries. My favorite object was a modest necklace from Persia. It was made of two enamelled metal plaques bound together with heavy black and silver threads, like a very old and exotic scapular. It cost $18, which seemed like a lot of money. When things were quiet I would take it out of the case and trace the calligraphy etched upon its violet surface, and dream up tales of its origins.
Shortly after I started working there, the boy I had briefly met in Brooklyn came into the store. He looked quite different in his white shirt and tie, like a Catholic schoolboy. He explained that he worked at Brentano’s downtown branch and had a credit slip he wanted to use. He spent a long time looking at everything, the beads, the small figurines, the turquoise rings.
Finally he said, “I want this.” It was the Persian necklace.
“Oh, it’s my favorite too,” I answered. “It reminds me of a scapular.”
“Are you a Catholic?” he asked me.
“No, I just like Catholic things.”
“I was an altar boy.” He grinned at me. “I loved to swing the frankincense censer.”
I was happy because he had selected the piece I singled out, yet sad to see it go. When I wrapped it and handed it to him, I said impulsively, “Don’t give it to any girl but me.”
I was immediately embarrassed, but he just smiled and said, “I won’t.”
By the end of my first week I was very hungry and still had nowhere to go. I took to sleeping in the store. I would hide in the bathroom while the others left, and after the nightwatchman locked up I would sleep on my coat. In the morning it would appear I had gotten to work early. I hadn’t a dime and rummaged through employees’ pockets for change to buy peanut butter crackers in the vending machine. Demoralised by hunger, I was shocked when there was no envelope for me on payday. I had not understood that the first week’s pay was withheld, and I went back to the cloakroom in tears.
When I returned to my counter, I noticed a guy lurking around, watching me. He had a beard and was wearing a pinstripe shirt . The supervisor introduced us. He was a science-fiction writer and he wanted to take me out to dinner. Even though I was 20, my mother’s warning not to go anywhere with a stranger reverberated in my consciousness. But the prospect of dinner weakened me, and I accepted.We walked down to a restaurant at the base of the Empire State Building. I had never eaten at a nice place in New York City.But even though I was starving, I could hardly enjoy it. I felt uncomfortable and had no idea how to handle the situation. It seemed like he was spending a lot of money on me and I got to worrying what he would expect in return.
After the meal we walked all the way downtown. He suggested we go up to his apartment for a drink. This was it, I thought, the pivotal moment my mother had warned me about. I was looking around desperately when I saw a young man approaching. It was as if a small portal of future opened, and out stepped the boy from Brooklyn who had chosen the Persian necklace, like an answer to a teenage prayer. I immediately recognised his slightly bowlegged gait and his tousled curls. He was dressed in dungarees and a sheepskin vest. Around his neck hung strands of beaded necklaces, a hippie shepherd boy. I ran up to him and grabbed his arm.
“Hello, do you remember me?”
“Of course,” he smiled.
“I need help.” I blurted, “Will you pretend you’re my boyfriend?”
“Sure,” he said, as if he wasn’t surprised by my sudden appearance.
I dragged him over to the science-fiction guy. “This is my boyfriend,” I said breathlessly. “He’s been looking for me. He’s really mad. He wants me to come home now.” The guy looked at us both quizzically.
“Run,” I cried, and the boy grabbed my hand and we took off, through the park across to the other side.
Out of breath, we collapsed on someone’s stoop. “Thank you, you saved my life,” I said. He accepted this news with a bemused expression.
“I never told you my name, it’s Patti.”
“My name is Bob.”
“Bob,” I said, really looking at him for the first time. “Somehow you don’t seem like a Bob to me. Is it okay if I call you Robert?”
The sun had set over Avenue B. He took my hand and we wandered the East Village. I did most of the talking. He just smiled and listened. I told him childhood stories, the first of many. I was surprised at how comfortable and open I felt with him. He told me later that he was tripping on acid.
I had only read about LSD and I wasn’t aware of the drug culture that was blooming in the summer of ’67. But Robert didn’t seem altered or strange in any way I might have imagined. He radiated a charm that was sweet and mischievous, shy and protective. We walked around until two in the morning and finally, almost simultaneously, revealed that neither one of us had a place to go. We laughed about that. But it was late and we were both tired.
“I think I know somewhere we can stay,” he said. His last room-mate was out of town. “I know where he hides his key; I don’t think he would mind.”
We got the subway out to Brooklyn found the key and let ourselves into the apartment.
We both fell shy when we entered, not so much because we were alone together as that it was someone else’s place. Robert busied himself making me comfortable and then, in spite of the late hour, asked if I would like to see his work that was stored in a back room. Robert spread it out over the floor for me to see. There were drawings, etchings, and paintings. Paintings and drawings that seemed to emerge from the subconscious.
I had never seen anything like it. We looked at books on Dada and Surrealism and ended the night immersed in Michelangelo. As dawn broke we fell asleep in each other’s arms. When we awoke he greeted me with his crooked smile, and I knew he was my knight.
As if it was the most natural thing in the world we stayed together, not leaving each other’s side save to go to work. Nothing was spoken; it was just mutually understood.
Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe on the balcony of their NY loft on W23rd St, 1971. Photo by Gerard Malanga.
In the summer of 1969 Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe moved to the Chelsea Hotel:
I had no concept of what life at the Chelsea Hotel would be like when we checked in, but I soon realised it was a tremendous stroke of luck to wind up there. We could have had a fair-sized railroad flat in the East Village for what we were paying, but to dwell in this eccentric and damned hotel provided a sense of security as well as a stellar education. A week or two after we moved in I waltzed into the El Quixote. It was a bar-restaurant adjacent to the hotel, connected to the lobby by its own door, which made it feel like our bar, as it had been for decades. Dylan Thomas, Terry Southern, Eugene O’Neill and Thomas Wolfe were among those who had raised one too many a glass there.
I was wearing a long rayon navy dress with white polka dots and a straw hat, my East of Eden outfit. At the table to my left, Janis Joplin was holding court with her band. To my far right were Grace Slick and the Jefferson Airplane, along with members of Country Joe and the Fish. At the last table facing the door was Jimi Hendrix, his head lowered, eating with his hat on, across from a blonde. There were musicians everywhere, sitting before tables laid with mounds of shrimp with green sauce, paella, pitchers of sangria, and bottles of tequila. I stood there amazed, yet I didn’t feel like an intruder. The Chelsea was my home and the El Quixote my bar. There were no security guards, no pervasive sense of privilege.
They were here for the Woodstock festival. Grace Slick got up and brushed past me. She was wearing a floor-length tie-dyed dress and had dark violet eyes like Liz Taylor.
“Hello,” I said, noticing I was taller.
“Hello yourself,” she said.
When I went back upstairs I felt an inexplicable sense of kinship with these people, though I could never have predicted that I would one day walk in their path. At that moment I was still a gangly 22-year-old book clerk, struggling simultaneously with several unfinished poems. The Chelsea was like a doll’s house in the Twilight Zone, with a hundred rooms, each a small universe. I wandered the halls seeking its spirits, dead or alive. My adventures were mildly mischievous, tapping open a door slightly ajar and getting a glimpse of Virgil Thomson’s grand piano, or loitering before the nameplate of Arthur C Clarke, hoping he might suddenly emerge. Occasionally I would bump into Gert Schiff, the German scholar, armed with volumes on Picasso, or Viva in Eau Sauvage. Everyone had something to offer and nobody appeared to have much money. Even the successful seemed to have just enough to live like extravagant bums.
I loved this place, its shabby elegance, and the history it held so possessively. There were rumors of Oscar Wilde’s trunks languishing in the hull of the oft-flooded basement. Here Dylan Thomas, submerged in poetry and alcohol, spent his last hours. Thomas Wolfe plowed through hundreds of pages of manuscript that formed You Can’t Go Home Again. Bob Dylan composed “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” on our floor, and a speeding Edie Sedgwick was said to have set her room on fire while gluing on her thick false eyelashes by candlelight.
So many had written, conversed, and convulsed in these Victorian dollhouse rooms. So many skirts had swished these worn marble stairs. So many transient souls had espoused, made a mark, and succumbed here. I sniffed out their spirits as I silently scurried from floor to floor.
Robert’s great wish was to break into the world that surrounded Andy Warhol, though he had no desire to be part of his stable or to star in his movies. Robert often said he knew Andy’s game, and felt that if he could talk to him, Andy would recognise him as an equal. Although I believed he merited an audience with Andy, I felt any significant dialogue with him was unlikely, for Andy was like an eel, perfectly able to slither from any meaningful confrontation. This mission led us to the city’s Bermuda Triangle: Brownie’s, Max’s Kansas City, and the Factory, all located within walking distance of one another. The Factory had moved from its original location on 47th Street to 33 Union Square. Brownie’s was a health-food restaurant around the corner where the Warhol people ate lunch, and Max’s where they spent their nights.
The politics at Max’s were very similar to high school, except the popular people were not the cheerleaders or football heroes and the prom queen would most certainly be a he, dressed as a she, knowing more about being a she than most she’s.
Max’s Kansas City was on 18th Street and Park Avenue South. It was supposedly a restaurant, though few of us actually had the money to eat there. The owner, Mickey Ruskin, was notoriously artist-friendly, even offering a free cocktail-hour buffet for those with the price of a drink. It was said that this buffet, which included Buffalo wings, kept a lot of struggling artists and drag queens alive. I never frequented it as I was working and Robert, who didn’t drink, was too proud to go. There was a big black-and-white awning flanked by a bigger sign announcing that you were about to enter Max’s Kansas City. It was casual and sparse, adorned with large abstract pieces of art given to Mickey by artists who ran up supernatural bar tabs. The big draw was surf and turf: steak and lobster. The back room, bathed in red light, was Robert’s objective, and the definitive target was the legendary round table that still harbored the rose-coloured aura of the absent silver king.
On our first visit we only made it as far as the front section. We sat in a booth and split a salad and ate the inedible chickpeas. Robert ordered Coke. I had a coffee. The place was fairly dead.
In recent memory the round table had seated such royalty as Bob Dylan, Bob Neuwirth, Nico, Tim Buckley, Janis Joplin, Viva and the Velvet Underground. It was as darkly glamorous as one could wish for. But running through the primary artery, the thing that ultimately accelerated their world and then took them down, was speed. Amphetamine magnified their paranoia, robbed some of their innate powers, drained their confidence, and ravaged their beauty.
Andy Warhol was no longer there, nor was his high court. Andy didn’t go out as much since Valerie Solanas shot him, but it was also likely he had become characteristically bored. Despite his absence, in the fall of 1969 it was still the place to go. The back room was the haven for those desiring the keys to Andy’s second silver kingdom, often described more as a place of commerce than of art. Our Max’s debut was uneventful and we splurged on a taxi home. Nonetheless, Robert and I continued to go to Max’s and we eventually graduated to the back room and sat in a corner under the Dan Flavin fluorescent sculpture, washed in red light. The gatekeeper, Dorothy Dean, had taken a liking to Robert and let us pass.
I knew that Max’s was important to Robert. He was so supportive of my work that I could not refuse him this nightly ritual. Mickey Ruskin allowed us to sit for hours nursing coffee and Coca-Colas and hardly ordering a thing. Some nights were totally dead. We would walk home exhausted and Robert would say we were never going back. Other nights were desperately animated, a dark cabaret infused with the manic energy of 30s Berlin. Screaming catfights erupted between frustrated actresses and indignant drag queens. They all seemed as if they were auditioning for a phantom, and that phantom was Andy Warhol. I wondered if he cared about them at all.
One such night, Danny Fields, the Ramones’ manager, came over and invited us to sit at the round table. This single gesture afforded us a trial residency, which was an important step for Robert. He was elegant in his response. He just nodded and led me to the table. He didn’t reveal at all how much it meant to him.
Robert was at ease because, at last, he was where he wanted to be. I can’t say I felt comfortable at all. The girls were pretty but brutal, perhaps because there seemed a low percentage of interested males. I could tell they tolerated me and were attracted to Robert. He was as much their target as their inner circle was his. It seemed as if they were all after him, male and female, but at the time Robert was motivated by ambition, not sex.
He was elated with clearing this small yet monumental hurdle. But privately I thought that the round table, even at the best of times, was innately doomed. Disbanded by Andy, banded by us, no doubt to be disbanded again to accommodate the next scene.
I looked around at everyone bathed in the blood light of the back room. Dan Flavin had conceived his installation in response to the mounting death toll of the war in Vietnam. No one in the back room was slated to die in Vietnam, though few would survive the cruel plagues of a generation.
In February Robert took me to the Factory to see rushes of Trash. It was the first time we had been invited, and Robert was filled with anticipation. I was not moved by the movie; perhaps it wasn’t French enough for me. Robert circulated easily in the Warhol circle, though taken aback by the clinical atmosphere of the new Factory, and disappointed that Andy himself did not make an appearance.
As we were leaving in the elevator, Fred Hughes, who managed the Factory, addressed me in a condescending voice. “Ohhh, your hair is very Joan Baez. Are you a folksinger?” I don’t know why, as I admired her, but it bugged me.
Robert took my hand. “Just ignore him,” he said.
I found myself in a dark humor. One of those nights when the mind starts looping bothersome things, I got to thinking about what Fred Hughes had said. Screw him, I thought, annoyed at being dismissed. I looked at myself in the mirror over the sink. I realised that I hadn’t cut my hair any different since I was a teenager. I sat on the floor and spread out the few rock magazines I had. I usually bought them to get any new pictures of Bob Dylan, but it wasn’t Bob I was looking for. I cut out all the pictures I could find of Keith Richards. I studied them for a while and took up the scissors, machete-ing my way out of the folk era. I washed my hair in the hallway bathroom and shook it dry. It was a liberating experience.
Patti Smith, Robert Mapplethorpe,1975
When Robert came home, he was surprised but pleased. “What possessed you?” he asked. I just shrugged. But when we went to Max’s, my haircut caused quite a stir. I couldn’t believe all the fuss over it. Though I was still the same person, my social status suddenly elevated. My Keith Richards haircut was a real discourse magnet. I thought of the girls I knew back in high school. They dreamed of being singers but wound up hairdressers. I desired neither vocation, but in weeks to come I would be cutting a lot of people’s hair, and singing at La MaMa. Someone at Max’s asked me if I was androgynous. I asked what that meant. “You know, like Mick Jagger.” I figured that must be cool. I thought the word meant both beautiful and ugly at the same time. Whatever it meant, with just a haircut, I miraculously turned androgynous overnight.
Opportunities suddenly arose. I was sitting in the lobby one day in my usual spot, bent over my orange composition book containing my cycle of poems for Brian Jones. I was dressed in my Song of the South get-up – straw hat, Brer Rabbit jacket, work boots, and pegged pants – and was hammering away at the same set of phrases when I was interrupted by an oddly familiar voice.
“Whatcha doin’, darlin’?”
I looked up into the face of a stranger sporting the perfect pair of dark glasses.
“Writing.”
“Are you a poet?”
“Maybe.”
I shifted in my seat, acting disinterested, pretending like I didn’t recognise him, but there was no mistaking the drawl in his voice, nor his shady smile. I knew exactly who I was facing; he was the guy in Don’t Look Back. The other one. Bobby Neuwirth, the peacemaker-provocateur. Bob Dylan’s alter ego.
He was a painter, singer-songwriter, producer and risk-taker. He was a trusted confidant to many of the great minds and musicians of his generation, which was just a beat before mine.
To hide how impressed I was, I got up, nodded, and headed toward the door without saying goodbye. He called out to me.
“Hey, where did you learn to walk like that?”
I turned. “From Don’t Look Back.”
He just laughed and asked me to join him in the El Quixote for a shot of tequila. I wasn’t a drinker but I downed a shot, without the lemon and salt, just to seem cool. He was easy to talk to and we covered everything from Hank Williams to abstract expressionism. He seemed to take a liking to me. He took the notebook out of my hands and checked it out. I guess he saw potential, for he said, “Did you ever think of writing songs?” I wasn’t sure how to answer.
“Next time I see you I want a song out of you,” he said as we exited the bar.
That was all he had to say. When he left, I pledged to write him a song. I had fooled with lyrics for Matthew, made up a few Appalachian-style songs for Harry, but didn’t think much of it. Now I had a real mission and someone worthy of having a mission for. Robert came home late, sullen and a little angry that I’d had drinks with a strange guy. But the next morning he agreed it was inspiring that someone like Bob Neuwirth was interested in my work. “Maybe he’ll be the one to get you to sing,” he said, “but always remember who wanted you to sing first.”
Robert had always liked my voice. When we lived in Brooklyn he would ask me to sing him to sleep, and I would sing him the songs of Piaf and Child ballads.
“I don’t want to sing. I just want to write songs for him. I want to be a poet, not a singer.”
“You can be both,” he said.
Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe, NYC 1977
Here’s another extract, published in Rolling Stone:
For my 21st birthday, Robert made me a tambourine, tattooing the goatskin with astrological signs and tying multicolored ribbons to its base. He put on Tim Buckley singing “Phantasmagoria in Two,” then he knelt down and handed me a small book on the tarot that he had rebound in black silk. Inside it he inscribed a few lines of poetry, portraying us as the gypsy and the fool, one creating silence, one listening closely to the silence. In the clanging swirl of our lives, these roles would reverse many times.
The following night was New Year’s Eve, our first together. We made new vows. Robert decided he would apply for a student loan and return to Pratt, not to study commercial art as his father wished, but to devote his energies to art alone. He wrote me a note to say we would create art together and we would make it, with or without the rest of the world.
It was going to be a hard winter. Robert was depressed working full-time at FAO Schwarz. Working as a window trimmer sparked his imagination and he made installation sketches. But he did less and less drawing. We lived on day-old bread and Dinty Moore beef stew. We hadn’t the money to go anywhere, had no television, telephone or radio. We had our record player, though, and drew back the arm so a chosen record would play over and over as we slept.
I needed to get another job. My friend Janet Hamill had been hired at Scribner’s Bookstore, and she found a way of giving me a helping hand by sharing her good fortune. She spoke to her superiors, and they offered me a position. It seemed like a dream job, working in the retail store of the prestigious publisher, home to writers like Hemingway and Fitzgerald, and their editor, the great Maxwell Perkins. Where the Rothschilds bought their books, where paintings by Maxfield Parrish hung in the stairwell.
Scribner’s was housed in a beautiful landmark building at 597 Fifth Avenue. The glass-fronted Beaux Arts-style exterior had been designed by Ernest Flagg in 1913. There was a two-and-a-half-story space behind a lavish expanse of glass and iron, under a vaulted ceiling lined with clerestory windows. Each day I rose, dutifully dressed and made the three subway changes to Rockefeller Center. My uniform for Scribner’s was taken from Anna Karina in Bande à part: dark sweater, plaid skirt, black tights and flats. I was positioned at the phone desk, which was manned by the kindhearted and supportive Faith Cross. I felt lucky to be associated with such a historic bookstore. My salary was higher, and I had Janet as a confidante. I was rarely bored, and when I got restless, I wrote on the back of Scribner’s stationery, like Tom in The Glass Menagerie, scribbling poems on the inside of cardboard boxes.
Robert was increasingly despondent. The hours were long. When he came home he was exhausted and dispirited and for a time stopped creating.
I implored him to quit. His job and scant paycheck were not worth the sacrifice. After nights of discussion, he reluctantly agreed. In return, he worked diligently, always anxious to show me what he had accomplished while I was at Scribner’s. I had no regrets taking on the job as breadwinner. My temperament was sturdier. I could still create at night, and I was proud to provide a situation allowing him to do his work without compromise.
At night, after trudging through the snow, I found him waiting for me in our apartment, ready to rub my hands to make them warm. He seemed always in motion, heating water on the stove, unlacing my boots, hanging up my coat, always with one eye on the drawing he was working on. He would stop for a moment if he noticed something. Most of the time, it seemed as if the piece was fully formed in his mind. He was not one for improvising. It was more a question of executing something he saw in a flash.
Existing in silence all day, he was eager to hear my stories of the bookstore’s eccentric customers, of Edward Gorey with his big tennis shoes or Katharine Hepburn wearing Spencer Tracy’s cap covered with a green silk head scarf or the Rothschilds with their long black coats. Afterward, we would sit on the floor and eat spaghetti while examining his work. I was attracted to Robert’s work because his visual vocabulary was akin to my poetic one, even if we seemed to be moving toward different destinations. Robert always would tell me, “Nothing is finished until you see it.”
Our first winter together was a harsh one. Even with my better salary from Scribner’s, we had very little money. Often we’d stand in the cold on the corner of St. James Place in eyeshot of the Greek diner and Jake’s art supply store, debating how to spend our few dollars — a toss-up between grilled cheese sandwiches and art supplies. Sometimes, unable to distinguish the greater hunger, Robert would keep nervous watch in the diner while I, filled with the spirit of Genet, pocketed the much-needed brass sharpener or colored pencils. I had a more romantic view of the artist’s life and sacrifices. I had once read that Lee Krasner had lifted art supplies for Jackson Pollock. I don’t know if it was true, but it served as inspiration. Robert fretted over not being able to provide for us. I told him not to worry, that committing to great art is its own reward.
At night we played the records we liked to draw to on our battered player. Sometimes we played a game called Record of the Night. The album cover of the chosen record would be prominently displayed on the mantel, the music informing the trajectory of the evening.
It did not bother me to work in obscurity. I was hardly more than a student. Yet Robert, though shy, nonverbal and seemingly out of step with those around him, was very ambitious. He held Duchamp and Warhol as models. High art and high society; he aspired to them both. We were a curious mix of Funny Face and Faust.
One cannot imagine the mutual happiness we felt when we sat and drew together. We would get lost for hours. His ability to concentrate for long periods infected me, and I learned by his example, working side by side. When we would take a break, I would boil water and make some Nescafé.
After a particularly good stretch of work, we would stroll along Myrtle Avenue, searching for Mallomars, splurging on Robert’s favorite treat, a marshmallow cookie covered in dark chocolate. Although we spent most of our time together, we weren’t isolated.
Our friends would come to visit. Harvey Parks and Louis Delsarte were painters; sometimes they worked on the floor next to us. Louis did portraits of us both, Robert with an Indian necklace and one of me with closed eyes. Ed Hansen shared his wisdom and collages, and Janet Hamill read us her poems. I would show my drawings and tell stories about them, like Wendy entertaining the lost children of Neverland. We were a crew of misfits, even within the liberal terrain of an art school. We often joked that we were a “losers’ salon.”
On special nights, Harvey, Louis and Robert would share a joint and play hand drums. Robert had his own set of tablas. And they accompanied themselves by reciting from Timothy Leary’s Psychedelic Prayers, one of the few books Robert actually read. Occasionally I would read their cards, deriving meanings from a mix of Papus and my own intuition. These were nights like none I had experienced in South Jersey, whimsical and filled with love.
A new friend entered my life. Robert introduced me to Judy Linn, a fellow graphics student, and we liked each other right away. She was pretty and intelligent with an offbeat sense of humor, like a young Ida Lupino. She eventually pursued photography, spending years perfecting her darkroom techniques. In time I became her subject and she produced some of the earliest images of Robert and me.
On Valentine’s Day, Robert gave me an amethyst geode. It was pale violet and nearly the size of a half grapefruit. He submerged it in water and we looked at the glowing crystals. When I was a kid I had dreamed of being a geologist. I recounted how I spent hours looking for rock specimens, wearing an old hammer tied around my waist. “No, Patti, no,” he laughed.
My gift to him was an ivory heart with a cross carved in the center. Something in this object provoked a rare childhood tale from him, and he told me how he and the other altar boys would secretly rummage through the priests’ private closet and drink the vestment wine. The wine didn’t interest him; it was the funny feeling in his stomach that excited him, the thrill of doing something forbidden.
In the beginning of March, Robert got a temp job as an usher for the newly opened Fillmore East. He reported for duty in an orange jumpsuit. He was looking forward to seeing Tim Buckley. But when he came home he was more excited by someone else. “I saw someone who’s going to be really big,” he said. It was Janis Joplin.
We didn’t have the money to go to concerts, but before Robert left the Fillmore he got me a pass to see the Doors. I had a strange reaction watching Jim Morrison. Everyone around me seemed transfixed, but I observed his every move in a state of cold hyperawareness. I remember this feeling much more clearly than the concert. I felt, watching Jim Morrison, that I could do that. I can’t say why I thought this. I had nothing in my experience to make me think that would ever be possible, yet I harbored that conceit. I felt both kinship and contempt for him. I could feel his self-consciousness as well as his supreme confidence. He exuded a mixture of beauty and self-loathing, and mystic pain, like a West Coast Saint Sebastian. When anyone asked how the Doors were, I just said they were great. I was somewhat ashamed of how I had responded to their concert.
It was the Sunday before Thanksgiving. We had moved into the Chelsea Hotel. Though autumn was ending, it was a bright Indian-summer kind of day. I had gathered our laundry, slipped on an old cotton dress, stockings and a sweater, and headed toward Eighth Avenue. I put the stuff in the washer with a fair amount of baking soda and walked the couple of blocks to Asia de Cuba to get a café con leche.
I folded our things. The song we called ours came on, Tim Hardin’s “How Can We Hang on to a Dream.” We were both dreamers, but Robert was the one who got things done. I made the money, but he had drive and focus. He had plans for himself but for me as well. He wanted us to develop our work, but there was no room. All the wall space was taken. There was no possibility for him to realize his installations. His spray painting was bad for my persistent cough. He sometimes went up on the Chelsea roof but it was getting too cold. Finally he decided he was going to find a raw space for us, and began looking through The Village Voice and asking around.
Then he had a piece of luck. We had a neighbor, an overweight sad sack in a rumpled overcoat, who walked his French bulldog back and forth on 23rd Street. He and his dog had identical faces of slack folding skin. We coded him Pigman. Robert noticed he lived a few doors down, over the Oasis Bar. One evening he stopped to pet the dog and struck up a conversation. Robert asked him if he knew of any vacancies in his building, and Pigman told him he had the whole second floor but the front room was just for storage. Robert asked if he could sublet it. At first he was reluctant, but the dog liked Robert and he agreed, offering the front room starting January 1st for $100 a month. Robert wasn’t sure where the money would come from but sealed it with a handshake.
Robert took me over to see the space. There were floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking 23rd Street, and we could see the YMCA and the top of the Oasis sign. It was everything he needed: at least three times the size of our room with plenty of light and a wall with about a hundred nails protruding. “We can hang the necklaces there,” he said.
“We?”
“Of course,” he said. “You can work here too. It will be our space. You can start drawing again.”
“The first drawing will be of Pigman,” I said. “We owe him a lot. And don’t worry about the money. We’ll get it.”
Not long after, I found a 26-volume set of the complete Henry James for next to nothing. It was in perfect condition. I knew a customer at Scribner’s who would want it. I cleared over $100. Slipping five $20 bills in a sock, I tied a ribbon around it and gave it to Robert. He opened it, saying, “I don’t know how you do it.”
Robert gave the money to Pigman, and set to cleaning out the front half of the loft. It was a big job. I would stop in after work and he would be standing knee-deep in the center of Pigman’s incomprehensible debris: dusty fluorescent tubing, rolls of insulation, racks of expired canned goods, half-empty bottles of unidentified cleaning fluids, vacuum cleaner bags, stacks of bent Venetian blinds, moldy boxes spilling over with decades of tax forms, and bundles of stained National Geographics tied with red-and-white string, which I snapped up to braid for bracelets.
He cleared, scrubbed and painted the space. We borrowed buckets from the hotel, filled them with water and carted them over. When we were finished, we stood together in silence, imagining the possibilities. We’d never had so much light. We scavenged for a mattress, worktables and chairs. I mopped the floor with water boiled with eucalyptus on our hot plate.
The first things Robert brought over from the Chelsea were our portfolios.
Things were picking up at Max’s Kansas City. I stopped being so judgmental and got in the swing of things. Somehow I was accepted, though I never really fit in. Christmas was coming and there was a pervasive melancholy, as if everyone simultaneously remembered they had nowhere to go.
Even here, in the land of the so-called drag queens, Wayne County, Holly Woodlawn, Candy Darling and Jackie Curtis were not to be categorized so lightly. They were performance artists, actresses and comediennes. Wayne was witty, Candy was pretty and Holly had drama, but I put my money on Jackie Curtis. In my mind, she had the most potential. She would successfully manipulate a whole conversation just to deliver one of Bette Davis’ killer lines. And she knew how to wear a housedress. With all her makeup she was a Seventies version of a Thirties starlet. Glitter on her eyelids. Glitter in the hair. Glitter face powder.
I hated glitter, and sitting with Jackie meant going home speckled all over.
Right before the holidays Jackie seemed distraught. I ordered her a snowball, a coveted unaffordable treat. It was a mound of devil’s food cake filled with vanilla ice cream and covered with shredded coconut. She sat there eating, plopping large glitter tears in the melting ice cream. Candy Darling slinked in next to her, dipping her lacquered fingernail into the dish, offering a bit of comfort with her soothing voice.
There was something especially poignant about Jackie and Candy as they embraced the imagined life of the actress. They both had aspects of Mildred Rogers, the coarse, illiterate waitress in Of Human Bondage. Candy had Kim Novak’s looks and Jackie had the delivery. Both of them were ahead of their time, but they didn’t live long enough to see the time they were ahead of.
“Pioneers without a frontier,” as Andy Warhol would say.
It snowed on Christmas night. We walked to Times Square to see the white billboard proclaiming “War is Over! If you Want It. Happy Christmas from John and Yoko.” It hung above the bookstall where Robert bought most of his men’s magazines, between Child’s and Benedict’s, two all-night diners.
Looking up, we were struck by the ingenuous humanity of this New York City tableau. Robert took my hand, and as the snow swirled around us I glanced at his face. He narrowed his eyes and nodded in affirmation, impressed to see artists take on 42nd Street. For me it was the message. For Robert, the medium.
Newly inspired, we walked back to 23rd Street to look at our space. We stood at the window and looked out at the snow falling beyond the fluorescent Oasis sign with its squiggly palm tree. “Look,” he said, “it’s snowing in the desert.” I thought about a scene in Howard Hawks’ movie Scarface where Paul Muni and his girl are looking out the window at a neon sign that said “The World is Yours.” Robert squeezed my hand.
The Sixties were coming to an end. Robert and I celebrated our birthdays. Robert turned 23. Then I turned 23.
The perfect prime number. Robert made me a tie rack with the image of the Virgin Mary. I gave him seven silver skulls on a length of leather.
He wore the skulls. I wore a tie. We felt ready for the Seventies.
“It’s our decade,” he said.
Bobby Neuwirth rode into town like some easy rider. He would dismount, and the artists, musicians and poets all came together, a gathering of the tribes. He was a catalyst for action. He would breeze in and take me places, exposing me to other artists and musicians. I was a colt, but he appreciated and encouraged my awkward attempts at writing songs. I wanted to do things that affirmed his belief in me. I developed long balladic oral poems inspired by storytellers like Blind Willie McTell and Hank Williams.
On June 5th, 1970, he took me to the Fillmore East to see Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. It was really not my kind of band, but I was moved to see Neil Young, since his song “Ohio” had made a great impression on me. It seemed to crystallize the role of the artist as a responsible commentator, as it paid homage to the four young Kent State students who lost their lives in the name of peace.
Afterward we drove up to Woodstock, where the Band was recording Stage Fright. Todd Rundgren was the engineer. Robbie Robertson was hard at work, concentrating on the song “Medicine Man.” Mostly everyone else drifted off toward some hard-core partying. I sat up and talked with Todd until dawn, and we found that we both had Upper Darby, Pennsylvania, roots. My grandparents had lived close to where he was born and raised. We were also oddly similar — sober, work-driven, judgmental, idiosyncratic wallflowers.
Bobby continued to open up his world to me. Through him I had met Todd, the artists Brice Marden and Larry Poons, and the musicians Billy Swan, Tom Paxton, Eric Andersen, Roger McGuinn and Kris Kristofferson. Like a flock of geese, they veered toward the Chelsea Hotel, awaiting the arrival of Janis Joplin. The only credential that gave me entrance to the private world of these people was Bobby’s word, and his word was undisputable. He introduced me to Janis as “the Poet,” and from then on that’s what Janis always called me.
We all went to see Janis play in Central Park at the Wollman Rink. The concert was sold out, but great crowds were spread out over the surrounding rocks. I stood with Bobby on the side of the stage mesmerized by her electric energy. It suddenly began to pour, followed by thunder and lightning, and the stage was cleared. Unable to continue, the roadies began to break down the equipment. The people, refusing to leave, began to boo. Janis was distraught. “They’re booing me, man,” she cried to Bobby. Bobby brushed the hair out of her eyes. “They’re not booing you, darling,” he said. “They’re booing the rain.”
The intense community of musicians staying at the Chelsea then would often find their way into Janis’ suite with their acoustic guitars. I was privy to the process as they worked on songs for her new album. Janis was the queen of the radiating wheel, sitting in her easy chair with a bottle of Southern Comfort, even in the afternoon. Michael Pollard was usually by her side. They were like adoring twins, both with the same speech patterns, punctuating each sentence with “man.” I sat on the floor as Kris Kristofferson sang her “Me and Bobby McGee,” Janis joining in the chorus. I was there for these moments, but so young and preoccupied with my own thoughts that I hardly recognized them as moments.
Toward the middle of July, I made my last payment on my first guitar. Held in layaway in a pawnshop on Eighth Avenue, it was a little Martin acoustic. It had a bluebird decal on its top, and a strap made of multicolored braid. I bought a Bob Dylan songbook and learned a few simple chords. At first they didn’t sound too bad, but the more I played, the worse it sounded. I didn’t realize you had to tune a guitar. Then it occurred to me that whenever it got out of tune, I could find a musician and ask them if they wanted to play it. There were plenty of musicians at the Chelsea.
I had written “Fire of Unknown Origin” as a poem, but after I met Bobby, I turned it into my first song. I struggled to find some chords to accompany it on guitar, and sang it for Robert. Death comes sweeping down the hallway in a lady’s dress/Death comes riding up the highway in its Sunday best/Death comes I can’t do nothing/Death goes there must be something that remains/A fire of unknown origin took my baby away.
When Janis Joplin returned in August for her rain date in Central Park, she seemed extremely happy. She was looking forward to recording, and came into town resplendent in magenta, pink and purple feather boas. She wore them everywhere. The concert was a great success, and afterward we all went to the Remington, an artists’ bar near lower Broadway. The tables were crowded with her entourage: Michael Pollard, Sally Grossman (who was the girl in the red dress on the cover of Bringing It All Back Home), Brice Marden and the actress Tuesday Weld. The jukebox was playing Charley Pride. Janis spent most of the party with a good-looking guy she was attracted to, but just before closing time he ducked out with one of the prettier hangers-on. Janis was devastated. “This always happens to me, man. Just another night alone,” she sobbed on Bobby’s shoulder.
Bobby asked me to get her to the Chelsea and to keep an eye on her. I took Janis back to her room, and sat with her while she bemoaned her fate. Before I left, I told her that I’d made a little song for her, and sang it to her. I was working real hard/To show the world what I could do/Oh, I guess I never dreamed/I’d have to/World spins some photographs/How I love to laugh when the crowd laughs/While love slips through/A theatre that is full/But oh, baby/When the crowd goes home/And I turn in and I realize I’m alone/I can’t believe/I had to sacrifice you.
She said, “That’s me, man. That’s my song.” As I was leaving, she looked in the mirror, adjusting her boas. “How do I look, man?”
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 have not forgotten them
– Jackson Browne, These Days
For the first hour of this walk, the canal follows the valley of the river Douglas. The landscape changes after Parbold: we leave behind the Lancashire flatlands and move steadily towards higher ground. Up to Appley Bridge this is a lovely stretch, with the Douglas twisting alongside the densely-wooded canal through the valley surrounded by rolling hillls. It’s also the busiest stretch so far – bustling with cyclists, walkers, narrowboats, canoes and a school party of hikers.
The river Douglas, a tributary of the Ribble, rises on Winter Hill on the West Pennine Moors, and flows for 35 miles through the town centre of Wigan and into the Ribble estuary. Walking through the valley is to go back to the early period of canal-making when rivers like the Douglas were canalised, these navigations being the forerunners of the canal-building boom that began barely four decades later.
In 1712, Thomas Steers, the engineer who built Liverpool’s first dock, surveyed the Douglas and recommended that it be made accessible to ships, enabling the transport of coal from the coalfields around Wigan down to the Ribble, and onwards to Preston. The canalisation of the river was authorised by Parliament in 1720 and involved the construction of 13 locks. The navigation opened in 1742 but was bought out by the Leeds and Liverpool Canal Company in 1780 and abandoned by 1801, by which time the canal provided a better route to the River Ribble. Although abandoned for 200 years, traces of the navigation, including the remains of several locks, can apparently still be seen between Parbold and Gathurst.
And history moves on: the canals were soon superseded by the railways. Walking this stretch, you are reminded occasionally of this as, behind the trees, a train clatters past on the line, opened in the 1850s, that follows the course of the canal through the valley.
In the hedgerow there are scentless wild roses or dog roses, another maligned wildflower, regarded as a weed (‘canker blooms’, they were known as in Elizabethan times) and inferior to the fragrant garden rose. Shakespeare’s Sonnet 54 hinges on that comparison: the scent of the garden rose is the true mark of its beauty, and stands for the inner qualities of the “lovely youth”. Nobody prizes the dog rose, which is all outward show, but the true rose outlives itself, in that its petals can be used to make fragrant rosewater or as a perfume: ‘Of their sweet deaths, are sweetest odours made’.
O! how much more doth beauty beauteous seem
By that sweet ornament which truth doth give.
The rose looks fair, but fairer we it deem
For that sweet odour, which doth in it live.
The canker blooms have full as deep a dye
As the perfumed tincture of the roses,
Hang on such thorns, and play as wantonly
When summer’s breath their maskèd buds discloses:
But, for their virtue only is their show,
They live unwoo’d, and unrespected fade;
Die to themselves. Sweet roses do not so;
Of their sweet deaths, are sweetest odours made:
And so of you, beauteous and lovely youth,
When that shall fade, my verse distills your truth.
Appley Bridge is a small hamlet which was once quite industrial, with several quarries and clay pits for the Wigan brick company.
Just beyond Appley Bridge the canal passes under the M6 motorway, so this stretch has offered several layers of transport technology – from 18th century river navigation and then canal to 19th century railway and 20th century motorway.
Beyond Gathurst lies Crooke where I expected to be able to get a pint and a bite to eat at the Crooke Hall Inn. But oddly both this and the next canalside pub were closed, with signs indicating they only opened at 2.00. Very strange!
So I had to contine along the rather dreary stretch into Wigan, through wasteland and industrial units, passing the JJB stadium where Wigan Athletic play. Now, I thought, I’ll be able to get a lunchtime pint at the Orwell on Wigan Pier, a CAMRA pub of the year. But it was not to be. I arrived to find the place shuttered and empty – it closed in January 2009. A converted three-storey grain warehouse, The Orwell was seen as a key feature of the Wigan Pier redevelopment when it opened as a national tourist attraction in 1985. But the venue had struggled with the credit crunch, the decline in the pub trade and, particularly, the closure of the other major Wigan Pier attraction last summer: the museum of Victorian life, The Way We Were.
It seems that Wigan Council have pulled the plug on funding for these venues and has plans (if the credit crunch allows) for other developments here. The council argues that the heritage industry is not the draw it once was. Visitor numbers had been declining whilst the council subsidised the attractions at the Pier to the tune of £1.3m a year. The council now believes that the Pier’s future lies in a gradual move towards a cultural quarter for the 21st century rather than a series of heritage attractions looking back at the last century.
The original ‘Wigan pier’ was a tippler where wagons from a nearby colliery were unloaded into waiting barges on the canal. It was demolished in 1929. The pier joke is thought to have originated in a music hall act performed by George Formby Senior in which he talked of Wigan Pier in the same terms as the seaside pleasure piers in Blackpool and Southport. The replica tippler seen above was erected on the site of the old one when the area was redeveloped.
In 1937, Wigan Pier was immortalised in the title of George Orwell’s Left Book Club account of unemployment and desperate living and working conditions in the northern industrial areas. In the book, Orwell responded to criticism from the Manchester Guardian of ‘his wholesale vilification of humanity’. On the contrary, he says:
Mr. Orwell was set down in Wigan for quite a while and it did not inspire him with any wish to vilify humanity. He liked Wigan very much — the people, not the scenery. Indeed, he has only one fault to find with it, and that is in respect of the celebrated Wigan Pier, which he had set his heart on seeing. Alas! Wigan Pier had been demolished, and even the spot where it used to stand is no longer certain.
In another passage Orwell writes:
I remember a winter afternoon in the dreadful environs of Wigan. All round was the lunar landscape of slag-heaps, and to the north, through the passes, as it were, between the mountains of slag, you could see the factory chimneys sending out their plumes of smoke. The canal path was a mixture of cinders and frozen mud, criss-crossed by the imprints of innumerable clogs, and all round, as far as the slag-heaps in the distance, stretched the ‘flashes’ — pools of stagnant water that had seeped into the hollows caused by the subsidence of ancient pits. It was horribly cold. The ‘flashes’ were covered with ice the colour of raw umber, the bargemen were muffled to the eyes in sacks, the lock gates wore beards of ice. It seemed a world from which vegetation had been banished; nothing existed except smoke, shale, ice, mud, ashes, and foul water.
The Wigan Terminus Warehouses (above) were built in 1777 and refurbished in the 1980s. For a while this was the end of the canal: barges could moor inside the building and off-load directly into the warehouse.
I’d imagined that Wigan only emerged as a township with the industrial revolution, but as early as the 13th century it was one of four boroughs in Lancashire with Royal charters, the others being Lancaster, Liverpool, and Preston. During the Industrial Revolution Wigan experienced dramatic economic expansion and a rapid rise in the population. Although porcelain manufacture and clock making had been major industries in the town, Wigan now grew as a major mill town and coal mining district.
Here’s a painting that evokes that period: The Dinner Hour – Wigan is one of the few paintings by Eyre Crowe that is well known today, and one of the few paintings of his on public display (at Manchester Art Gallery). It is likely that the painting was inspired by a visit to the cotton mill shown in the picture – Thomas Taylor’s Victoria Mills in Wigan – during one of Crowe’s trips around the provinces in his capacity as an Inspector of Schools of Art. The verdict of some modern critics is that it is the ancestor of the Northern townscapes of L.S. Lowry, who also painted Wigan scenes, including one of the Wigan Coal & Iron Works which was auctioned in 2008.
The first coal mine had been established at Wigan in 1450, but by the 19th century there were 1,000 pit shafts within 5 miles of the town centre. The town’s cotton and coal industries declined in the 20th centuryand the last working cotton mill closed in 1980.
I did eventually get lunch after a friendly local gave me an excellent recommendation – the Stables Brasserie, located in an 18th Century stable building on Millgate, just yards from the busy centre of the town and the new Grand Arcade Shopping Centre. I had a superb salad Nicoise and a pint of Boddy’s.
After the junction with the Leigh branch, the canal reaches the Wigan flight of 21 locks. This was once a heavily industrialised area, with collieries and ironworks. Today the canal has bequeathed a very pleasant linear park to the town, the adjoining industrial waste ground having been landscaped and the towpath paved to provide an excellent cycle lane that is evidently well-used.
Just before the top lock I was hailed by Alan who asked whether I’d seen any boats coming up the rise (I hadn’t). It turned out that he had worked on the canal before he retired and we chatted for while about how much the area around the locks had changed. Amongst the industrial sites along here were Bridge Colliery and Ince Hall Coal and Cannel Company (cannel being a dull coal that burns with a smoky flame). And beside the top nine locks stretched the Wigan Coal & Iron Works, then one of the largest ironworks in the country. It was a massive operation, employing 10,000 people at the turn of the 20th century. It mined 2 million tons of coal to produce 125,000 tons of iron annually. The skyline here was dominated by 10 blast furnaces, 675 coking ovens and a 339 foot chimney. It must have been an impressive sight on the Wigan skyline at night. All gone now, leaving not a trace.
From the top lock the canal makes a sharp turn left; looking down from here over the town you become aware of the great height climbed through the 21 locks.
Reaching Bridge 59A at New Springs, I decided to call it a day and caught a bus back into town. I travelled out on 9:55 train from Central to Ormskirk, then caught Cumfy Bus 203 to Parbold. Returned by bus to Ormskirk, then Merseyrail home. The bus to Ormskirk stopped at the Arriva depot in Skelmersdale to change drivers. It was there I caught sight of this strange admonition: what bureaucratic mind thought up this?
Back to Liverpool where this ad for British canals is currently on display at the bottom of Leece Street: the end of an everyday getaway.
That's How The Light Gets In 