An Illuminated Past

Just Kids creates a frame around all the work of Patti Smith, the writer of this elegant memoir about her life with Robert Mapplethorpe, the photographer who died of AIDS in 1989, as well as the work of Mapplethorpe himself. Both artists were each other's muses, visionaries whose work, however different it was from one another, challenged established mores and shone with a unique brightness, and darkness. Their work was more than edgy. It was new. Mapplethorpe took leaps no one had taken before him, elevating gay pornography to the rank of art as he chronicled his own relationship to a world that repelled at the same time it forced one to look. Smith is a poet, writer, artist, photographer, rock and roller whose unique web of art was influenced by Mapplethorpe.

Smith's remembrances are tenderly wrought, with attention to detail that sometimes takes the breath away. It's not just Smith and Mapplethorpe who come alive as youths, but the extraordinary times in which they lived and which the two seem to transform with the urgency of their desire to transcend limitations and become artists of the first rank. It's not just the New York of their era we see shifting as they move, breathe and influence others and themselves, but everything in this brilliant retrospective.

The exquisite detail of Smith's remembrances, her trip to Paris in 1973, for example, when she slept in an attic room at L'Hotel des Etrangers, as she waited to visit Rimbaud's grave and Jim Morrison's, seep one in the richest and most delicate pictorial soup into which the reader sinks with Smith, as layer after layer of sacred time and knowledge are peeled away, until there is only art.  

Smith reawakened my interest in Mapplethorpe. His work tended to repel me, even as I saw its beauty. There was one occasion in the mid 90s when I worked at a bookstore in Ithaca when I opened a large book of his photographs and chanced upon the series of a penis bound by a cord to the point of bleeding. I'd been listening to jazz, something I love, feeling totally open and in my element. The combination of books and jazz and the quietude of the section of the bookstore in which I worked had placed me in a kind of ecstasy. I was so happy there, and free to explore, and it was in this state that I came upon those photographs of Mapplethorpe which disturbed me to the core. I had no name for what I saw or witnessed. I felt like something sacred had not so much been upturned as been violated. I felt I'd seen a rape, close up, and all I could do was ask, why, for what? There was no answer for me, and so there and then, I closed the book on Mapplethorpe -- not because I couldn't understand the work, but because of how the images made me feel -- I wanted no part of it.

But it was lovely to see in Just Friends how Mapplethorpe was, as a young man in particular, how hungry they both were to be artists and how open they were together, and how brave in their art and explorations. I've often felt that artists and writers should create a frame around their work whenever it's published or shown, that poems should never appear alone in collections without context, a word or two, or even an image of the poet, something that shows how the creation arose, from whence it came. In Just Friends, Smith has created a wildly elegant frame around her friend and muse, around their life together. This is a work of art, not just a gift to Mapplethorpe, but to everyone who reads it.

Punk Activism Brings Down the House

I love Patti Smith's poetry. I wasn't a part of the punk rock scene of the 70s when Smith's music first began blowing away people's minds. I was too busy hiding in the Berkshires. I'd heard of Smith, but didn't start getting into her work until I chanced upon her poetry, which happened to be published alongside mine in The Cafe Review in the late 90s. From that moment on, I couldn't stop digging her music and poems. I believe she's also an artist, multi-dimensional, and that's no surprise.

I had the chance to film her tonight, performing, as part of a special benefit event for the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives (ALBA), hosted by the Puffin Foundation at the Museum of the City of New York. She followed the great Pete Seeger and Guy Davis (who is the son of Ruby Dee and Ozzie Davis), a powerful Blues artist and musician.

One can't say enough about Seeger, whose commitment as a musician to peace and social justice causes defies description and belief. He's been around as a professional more than 70 years, and has been singing about the Abraham Lincoln Brigade and its struggle to save Spain from Franco for 60 years. As someone said at tonight's event, Seeger is "America's own troubadour." He sings because he loves it and loves America. And he makes everyone sing along with him. It's really beautiful to see all that history skimming across his face when he performs.

But here's the thing, although I was there as a professional to film the event, as a fan, I was really there to see Patti. Afterward, I got to meet her and chat with her a bit about her book, Just Kids, which was just nominated for The National Book Award. The book chronicles her coming of age as an artist with friend Robert Mapplethorpe, the photographer who died of AIDS in 1989. The 2009 film, Dream of Life, an intimate portrait of Smith's journey as an artist, was also nominated for an Emmy.

Smith is more than a poet, artist, singer, performer and songwriter. She's humble, calm and graceful and wouldn't allow herself to be classified an activist, but dedicated her performances to activists, starting with Seeger. She read from Auguries of Innocence, her most recent volume of poetry, and sang for protesters, prefacing, "The thing is, with activists, they're not getting out there to win, win, win. They're getting out there, knowing they're going to lose, lose, lose."

Poetic and punk, dramatic and low key, Smith is larger than life, an ageless rebel. I especially like that she hasn't let time or trends, opinion or praise compromise her power and grace.

The Joy of E-Lit

The Joy of E-Lit

I spend so much of the day in front of a computer,  I have to ask myself why I'm so preoccupied with telling you about books, the kind one cradles in one's palms, like an infant, and not the lit to which I'm privy daily on the Internet.

I'm a child of hands-on lit, as opposed to the kind you access on Kindle and other wireless reading devices. But, I realize, I'm always reviewing lit, in a way, posting links on Facebook and Twitter, texting everybody about my latest and best Internet finds. Not a day goes by that I don't post at least a handful of links to something that in the moment feels like the most amazing new discovery. The best E-lit is fresh and timely.

On my fave e-lit list this week is a stunning review by Charles McNulty, the L.A. Times theater critic, of Dream of Life, Steven Sebring's 2008 film about avant garde poet/rocker Patti Smith. McNulty's understanding of Smith, her journey and 1960s New York was so in-depth, astute and sensitive, I simply had to "comment." I'm ashamed to admit that before reading the byline I assumed the writer was a woman.

But hey. On the Internet, it's always more about What I read than Who wrote it.

I read a handful of books a week, and literally dozens of articles a day, and scan dozens a day, and you can bet this wouldn't be without the props of a computer or laptop. Haven't experts already proven the Internet improves reading ability?

It's not just cool articles I pore over, but helpful, inspiring blogs, many on social media. I'm fascinated by the increasingly abbreviated language spawned by social media networking, and equally with the role that youth plays in evolving our language and attraction to things techie. Reading my niece's facebook posts, I note that letters can be used like art, and rarely used keys such as * can carry a host of meanings. You can always count on kids to create fresh values.

Thanks to our Blackberries and computers we can speak economically about just about anything. Or we can go on about it. Who's to stop us? The electronic rant is the new silent song of the masses, the deliverance of the individual from the shackles of nine-to-five, and just about any kind of oppression -- momentary, illusionary or real.

Our language is increasingly abbreviated, symbolic. Beyond math and the alphabet. What do all these conflagrations of meek, rarely used keys combined with ordinary expressions mean to our styles of evolving communication? What do they mean to kids, and to our future? How will they impact how we speak and communicate tomorrow?

I'm a fan of The New Yorker. I love a long read in a chaise lounge under the sun or the dim light of a reading lamp in the wee hours. I cherish stories that have arcs and characters and take a while to read and digest. But I also know that anything as charged as the coils of tweets going out all over the Internet universe have something vital to say about who we are and how we live. Studying them is a revelation about how fast our culture changes, and also about our illusions of change.

New styles of communication seem as easy to learn and enjoy as breakfast cereal for the kids who conjure them as they go along. Yesterday's language is, well, just that. Minimalism plus a jazz twist, a dadaist urge to upturn what came before is what I see happening now -- text novels, tweeting can be performance art in sound bites. They can also be plagiaristic, meta-fiction, forgettable. But they have acquired the power to arouse us, our interests, curiosity, thought and ire -- often for justifiable causes. And for this, if nothing else, we must thank them.