Tag Archives: Patti Smith

Summer Sigh of Relief

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Hanging with some friends in NYC

Me & some friends in our groovy NYC days.

Last week I was too stuffed up and busy to really register the summer solstice.  I don’t dress up in fairy garb and dance around my front yard, but I do like to notice these things-  especially the longest day of the year because it’s pleasing.  I’m getting caught up and laid back.  The girls have been out of school for almost a week.  I drank a lovely glass of rosé wine with my friends Elizabeth and David as we dined outside on their patio last night.  A guy on a bike, dog on a leash just rode past my window and the smell of fresh cut grass is wafting in.  Idyllic, no?  I find myself taking nice slow breaths.

It’s encouraging to realize that I do actually know how to relax.  There’s some sort of muscle memory at work.  I actually looked at the clock last night and found that I really didn’t care what time it was.  Yeah, I’ve got a lot of good work to do and the girls schedule is erratic.  Instead of my longish days while they’re at school, I’ve got choppy days with scattered bits of time.  But there’s no early wake up and no homework.  It’s lovely.  The good weather definitely helps too.

Last summer, my reading frenzy consisted of the trio of Stieg Larsson novels, To Kill a Mockingbird (Slipcased Edition) and more that I can’t remember.  My author of choice this summer is Ann Patchett and I’m continuing my obsession with Patti Smith.  There’s a new book out with photographs of Smith–Patti Smith 1969-1976.

The photographs are by Smith’s friend, Judy Linn.  They met and hung out in New York.  Here’s a quote from Smith in her afterword to the book:

I go back to the beginning when Judy and I met on a summer’s day in 1968.  Neither of our boyfriends, Peter nor Robert, survived the twentieth century.  We never could have known we would outlive them, just as these photographs will outlive us all.  But they both are here, embedded in our movie, the film not shot.  And these are the stills.  Like cards that fell from a mystical deck.  Any way you shuffle them, they testify that once upon a time we were innocent and beautiful and anyone we imagined we could be.

The book is a lovely reflection of the freedom and beauty Smith writes about.  I think I’m so taken with Patti Smith and that formative era of her life in the 60′s and 70′s because the energy of possibility is palpable in her words and in the photos I’ve seen.  Her life as an artist was just beginning and she didn’t know what form it was going to take.  She painted, drew, wrote, modeled and found her voice over and over.  It’s a deep, personal journey.  With Just Kids and other books and films, Smith has invited us in to share the memory of that discovery.  Unlike a dusty old inventory of snaps and journals, her words are very much alive.  This obsession of mine connects with the raw, vulnerable, edgy, open place where we all create our art.  In my days of schedules and responsibilities as a mother, it’s exciting to know that I can still tap into that current.  And summer is the perfect time for playing with all of this. 

Twitt

Patti Smith

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I’ve alluded to Patti Smith’s book, Just Kids in other posts.

Just Kids
by Patti Smith
Powells.com

 

I’m rereading it because I need that voice of hers.  I need to meet up with the artist.  Is their any artist who’s not striving to be free?  That freedom takes different forms, but I think it’s fundamental for anyone who’s creative.  It has to do with the eye, freeing the eye (ear, body, tongue, mind) from seeing the world in only one, proscribed, common way.  Without this kind of freedom, it is impossible to invent, design, create.

Jackson Pollock

Jackson Pollock had to see the world in a new way in order to paint the way he did.  In the documentary, Patti Smith: Dream of Life, Smith talks about Pollock as she works on one of her own paintings.  Pollock apparently complained because Picasso had done everything in painting.  Smith agrees, but then goes to talk about Picasso’s influence on Pollock–that it came down to a drip of sweat from a horse’s nose.  I don’t know if this is true, but it could be.  We are influenced by things around us in myriad ways, by connections that may not surface for years.

So I’m indulging my Patti Smith crush right now.  As I said, I need her voice to help me find my own.  After I watched the documentary this morning, I stood in my bathroom looking at myself in the mirror, imagining a conversation with Smith.  I want to ask her how she did it when her kids were young, when they were teens.  It’s not just finding an hour here or there to paint or write.  It’s how to sustain the big, huge energy that making art requires when one needs to switch gears so often to tend to children and family.

Which leads me around indirectly to the recent comment by V.S. Naipul about the inferiority of women’s writing.  He claims he can tell when a woman has written something within a half page or something ridiculous like that because of the sentiment of the work.  Bluster and bullshit.  But what picks at me is this–what is the impact on one’s work when interruptions are par for the course?  What does that kind of life pace do to the quality, the texture of the work?

I go back to something I think I’ve discussed here before–poet Maxine Kumin writes about doing her work (which won her a Pulitzer by the way) in the interstices.  She’d have one of her poems with her at all times.  While waiting for her daughter to finish swim lessons, she’d work.  Early for school pick up?  Out comes her latest poem.

Very few of us have the luxury of uninterrupted hours for our creative work.  Or at least, we don’t get it consistently.  I suppose it is a demonstration of persistence in keeping at it.  It is part of the commitment, the discipline.

When Patti Smith met Robert Mapplethorpe in NYC in 1967, she didn’t have a job or a place to live.  She’d come to NY to be an artist.  She didn’t even know what she meant by that exactly–her medium wasn’t clear.  But she was dedicated.  She worked hard.  I think luck played a little part in things.  But she was unafraid.  The path wasn’t clear and still, she wasn’t afraid.

Here’s an amazing picture of Smith that I first saw on Luke Storms’ blog, Intense City:

I rented Patti Smith: Dreams of Life from Netflix.  It’s meandering roam of a documentary.  Dream-like in one sense.  One of my strongest impressions is of Smith’s vulnerability and aloneness.  I don’t know if she’s lonely.  But she lost four key people in her life within a five or six year span.  I don’t get melancholy from Smith, but a sense of apartness.  I hesitate to attempt characterizing Smith based on a documentary I watched while lying on my couch with a sore throat.  But there’s something about her I admire, things about her inspire me.  I’m trying unsuccessfully to pin this down.  One thing I do want to get down is that without the vulnerability, that sense of life happening to us, we can’t make art.

And to my lovely friend Kehaunani–It was good to talk to you today.  Thanks.  You always know how to set my head back on just straight enough.

Twitt

Tide pools

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I’ve been slow to post lately.  I’m working on updating the visual part of the blog so it looks better.  But I don’t really know what I’m doing so we all have to live with the stock photos for a while longer.  If anyone’s good at this sort of thing, please let me know.  I’d love some help.  Hopefully, the actual blog content will outshine the photo of  the little black and white dog’s bottom that keeps coming up.

I have so many ideas floating around today that it’s hard to focus.  Each area of interest seems linked to at least three others, making it difficult to follow a clear thread and record any actual content.  That last sentence is a mess.  In other words, I have too many things I want to work on.  Each story, poem or project connects with the others.  I find myself diving into unlikely tangent pools. Kind of like tide pools but filled with internet sites and books. Or maybe a Venn diagram that keeps multiplying.  Actually, I like the idea of a Venn diagram of a tide pool.  There, I’ve just done it in this post.  See what I mean about tangents? (Little Venn diagram example.)

For example, I want to write about the kind of long, vaguely philosophical, probably pretentious talks my friends and I used to have in college.  We were in our 20′s hanging out in New Brunswick, Brooklyn and Manhattan.  Right after college, most of us worked in restaurants or did low paying work in non-profits dealing with the arts.  We all had plans.  Some more ambiguous than others.  We were all pushing against things from our childhood and trying in earnest to figure out who we were, what we thought.  Late nights, drinking and hanging out.  And always talking.  Turning things over and over.  We pulled on bits of thoughts like a knotted ball of yarn, hoping to tug just right so the whole thing would come untangled.  Those times were both a luxury and a necessity.  (Oh do I feel old.  Read the book Just Kids by Patty Smith.  Do you think she felt old while writing it?)

David Samuels wrote a wonderful piece for this month’s Harper’s magazine entitled, “Underachievers Please Try Harder: Indie Rock Unites on the English Coast.”  The article reminds me of the spirit of those discussions.  In brief, Samuels takes us through his weekend at the ATP weekend concert in Minehead.  He talks about the 80′s and 90′s indie bands that perform with the kind of understanding and nostalgic appreciation only a true fan can muster up.  Samuels is a really good writer and is clearly into his subject.

The concert included bands such as Belle and Sebastian, The Vaselines, The New Pornographers and Camera Obscura.  Some of the saddest music around, according to Samuels.  Fans and band members drift in and out of pubs.  The weather is predictably grey and cold.  You get the sense from Samuels’ piece that the whole weekend rolls out and  along, time sort of suspended except for the memories shared over a bottle of Bushmills or a beer.  Not wanting to grow up is a big theme.

This is where I jump in for a visit and revisit- remembering all those late night rambling conversations.  The kind you’d almost have to schedule a month in advance now while working, being a parent, a spouse and/or at any point past college age.  I pay to go to poetry workshops just for this kind of searching discussion on art.  I have step children so I sometimes get my fix when we hang out.

One of my goals with this blog was to write about creativity, writing and art.  How is this process of creating your work different once you become a parent?  The short answer is that since I’ve had kids, I have much less time to write and I use that time a lot better.  I have material cropping up from unexpected places.  I love the tension that exists between working on a poem ( ie. mentally playing with images, trying to get down to the bones of the words and ideas, researching, drifting off into a shape or color) and rushing to make it to school on time to pick up the girls, wondering if anyone will notice that I’m wearing the same clothes as yesterday.  I also really hate this sort of thing and wish everyone would just leave me alone.

When I go back to my college days, it feels as though there was nothing but time.  I didn’t write a great novel or publish my poems.  I didn’t really accomplish much in some ways.  But writing, painting, any art form requires some amount of drift and time.  Remembering to take this time is like the muscle memory of holding a stretch or hearing a long note played on a violin.  We can conjure it up.

I went to YouTube and conjured up a song by Belle and Sebastian–one of Samuel’s favorite bands.  Just to infuse a multimedia wrap up for this bounce around and keep the site current.  Hope you like it.  As always, comments/discussion are most appreciated!

YouTube Preview Image

Twitt