i was talking today to an older, successful writer. She was saying there isn’t a good how-to writing book about how to live a life and still write. Make a living, manage the paid work with the passion work, retain relationships, attend events, juggle pitches and poems, save time for spacing out. Wish i could write that one but i can’t/ Don’t know the how-s or the to-s of it.
side 2 (of Horses) feels older, a little bit. Side 2 is about longer-ness and loudening and farewells, but also about really becoming yourself.
So, why the post-adolescent confessionals in response, all typed out like a Beat, what’s up with the question marks and where’s the rock and roll analysis, what gives with the girlish need for perfection, the romance of artistic superlatives?
Because, patti smith, your work — music, words, all — connects me with something tiny and true and wonder in here, something that tells me, remember?, and remember. the something never satisfied, the something keeps you making, the something that always asks for more. greedy in its own gifting, this something.
A million and a half smart people have written briliant critiques of your album, patti, saying things like gamechanger, like godmother, birther of a vivid nascent howl of culture (and your flow, your sweet rapper’s flow, they sing of you!) sing how you traveled time for generations of us, young, who heard you first in others, who only later really noticed hearing you. for me you followed your own influence, the way the jump-cuts of Jean-Luc Godard came for me after MTV: by the time we got it it was quotidian, even typical.
i ask to let me never think of voice as everyday, be it raw people poems or Fenders or my own. i ask to let them also be this way: unleashed like potential, like the tremor in a land-owner at hearing the pump-slash-gutwrench of electric guitar meets angelic imagery, accessed like an every-day how-to.
Like young you, standing in an ideal triangle of light before the shutter of the artist of your life, we ask for more so we can become it.
cuz we can only try, sweet girl, to be the artists of our lives.
The first time I moved to San Francisco, it was 1994.
The second time, 2000. I came back again in 2003.
Time passes.
My city feels unhinged when it’s windy like today, a frayed edge, an impending catastrophe.
Modern times.
Men crawl on sidewalks, holes appear in thoroughfares, fires.
Recently I walked squares around the park repeatedly, me and a friend with a negative life-view. It wasn’t windy; it was hot. Stifled. She bemoaned the old days of high crime and low rent and punk rock. “You see that girl,” she said low to me as a jogger sped by, sports bra cradling two perfectly tanned D cups over a fleshless waist and a buttery ass.
“She would have been raped doing that when I first moved into this neighborhood.” When the block-wide city park wasn’t yet filled with picnickers toting plastic wine glasses and wicker-held deli samplers, I assume. Which would have kept her out, it’s implied.
“Except now there are still piles of human shit on the street.” And strollers.
In songs you write in your twenties, a lover is rejected; in the major label feeding frenzy that follows, a simple guttery dream is destroyed by the slick substance of what it ultimately sought.
In the park as we walked, a man without a residence was run over by a train. Much previously, a bridge fell down and commuting cars embodied their own disintegration, passing through volcanoes of steam from below. Masses teemed.
A great rising pulse is what I feel when I hear it now, and joy– none of this rough and survival bitter shit of yesteryear. Nobody cared that Blake held a wine glass on the back cover roof shot, not a beer. Or maybe they did.
“She can jog wherever now, because violence is displacement.”
I said, I don’t want to talk about this right now, it’s not like there is a right or a wrong way of living inside America’s urban catastrophe.
I said, I just want to get my electric guitar back up and running. Start a band. Feel this raw, this overwrought again. There’s a feeling of desperation in the ambition behind the songs. Do you know that feeling?
“Warehouses are expensive, nowadays,” my friend reminded me.
Today mine is a privileged complaint. But it’s still a complaint.
After work at two jobs with no lunch break, I rode my bike to the YMCA to sweat it out. When I came out 45 minutes later, something was missing: my well-worn Brooks bike seat. Yes, this is an expensive saddle. Yes, there is a lot of bike theft in San Francisco and in some ways having nice bike stuff is “asking for it.” Yes, the seat was locked to the frame. And you know what? That doesn’t matter. I had so much fucking fun on that bike seat. I rode it across the Pyrenees, twice. I blistered and bruised my ass to wear it in. I worked in a dark cubicle with no windows and no soul for months in order to buy it. And I’m pissed off.
I’m angry that I live in a culture (and a city) in which some people have so much, and other people have so little, so that oftentimes people who are in between and sort of just have a few things can’t walk out their door without locking all their shit down and it STILL gets stolen. I’m angry at the person who stole it for not respecting my shit. I’m angry at the randomness of being late and not staying outside for a minute to make sure that guy who was lingering by the bike rack left before I went inside (a guy, by the way, who did not look in any way in need of the money a Brooks sale might bring him but instead looked like he might just want a really nice seat for his own nice bike). I’m angry at the dozens of rich people marching their cars into the fancy restaurants’ valet parking next door to the Y who didn’t see something or say something. I’m angry at feeling immobilized. I’m angry because this had to happen on a day when I was already feeling taxed by having four jobs for the past three weeks and still not having a paycheck in my hand. And I’m angry at myself for being so upset about having a material, although admittedly very practical, object taken away from me when there are so many greater injustices going on around me every day.
But also something about independence. About the feeling I had, just seconds before choosing that particular bike rack to lock to, that bicycling is empowering for me. It allows me the freedom to drive my own movement, to be in my body in visceral and unexceptional ways, to move faster than people who might want to do me harm, and it always, always, makes me feel better than I felt before. Emotionally, too.
This record is an amazing compilation by Ebullition Records made in the 90s with the bands Amenity, Desiderata, Seein’ Red, Spitboy, End of The Line, Man Lifting Banner, Born Against, Econochrist, Profax, Suckerpunch, Sawhorse, Struggle, Bikini Kill, and Downcast.
The songs are political in nature, loud and awesome and angry in a meaningful way that would probably not approve of me whining about my fancy leather missing object. The Spitboy song “Seriously” in particular was a staple of my late teen years. The record was also a benefit for Planned Parenthood, the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, and Shelter Services For Women. It comes with an amazingly cool insert booklet packed with essays and lyrics and awesomeness.
It’s great. And it helps me focus my anger. It reminds me of being younger and having less things, and still getting jacked by the ways of men and economies. It reminds me to remember to keep fighting for my rights, as a woman. And that there are bigger things than the ones I’m pissed off about, but also that everybody has a right to pissed off about the things that trouble them.
Because nobody ever asks for it.
And dude. If you can’t give me back a just world or my equal rights, and you can’t give me back my youthful punk mental state, can someone at least give me back my bike seat?
(By the way, this is only free linkable thing from any of the songs on this album (except Bikini Kill) that I could find on the interwebs. There’s a nice open slot here for an online video/music archive project about 90s punk/hardcore/etc….)
dear Patti,
