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3.79 AVERAGE
3.79 AVERAGE
adventurous
dark
emotional
reflective
slow-paced
3.5 , some amazing writing but not as good as M Train or Just Kids, a bit more diffuse although also still dealing with mourning and loss.
emotional
inspiring
reflective
slow-paced
emotional
hopeful
informative
reflective
fast-paced
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
I love reading all of Patti Smith’s memoirs. They make me nostalgic for NYC and SF of the past. This book is especially poignant to read right now as we dive into another Trump presidency (this was written at the time of his first inauguration). I am eternally inspired by Patti’s curiosity, her devotion to her creative practice, to her loved ones and the way she treasures meaningful objects - whether they are a piece of art or a passed down piece of furniture. She has truly mastered listening and seeing rather than just floating through life obliviously.
Basically, I seem to love everything Patti Smith writes, and this was no exception. Smith looks poignantly yet unsentimentally at the year 2016 through her personal lens--traipsing the California coast and back to New York in Beatnik style, meeting people and re-meeting them (or is she only imagining it? or is life a dream?), mourning her friends and her past as her peers age and die, facing down the year she turns 70 and the year Trump comes into power simultaneously. Beautifully, dreamily written, and illustrated with her photographs as is her usual style.
I mean:
And earlier:
I mean:
Her [Belinda Carlisle's] exuberance was infectious. I imagined a nonviolent hubris spreading across the land, like the boys in West Side Story buoyed by a mounting swagger, singing When you're a Jet . . . Hundreds of thousands of girls and boys flooding the open perimeters, taking on Belinda Carlisle's moves, singing We got the beat. And soldiers laying down their arms and sailors leaving their posts and thieves the scenes of their crimes and all at once we're in the epicenter of one grand musical. No power, no race, no religion, no apologies. And with this vast spectacle racing through my head, some part of me leapt up and sashayed down the road, entering the scene, joining the chorus increasing ad infinitum, like William Blake's angels streaming from the turning pages of the book of life.
And earlier:
That night, performing Land of a Thousand Dances, I closed my eyes during the breakdown, improvising all the way to the Baltic, to the land of Medea. I walked that barren stretch, following Medea's sandaled feet, as she had followed Jason. The golden fleece shimmered, blinding all who dared to glance upon it. I saw the flame in Medea's transparent heart and felt the blood boiling her veins. A high priestess yet also a country girl, she was unable to match wits with Jason's people. Forced to draw from her primal self she dresses as a fox to obscure the hunt. Her small sons sleep. Jason's sons. She loved him and he betrayed her. I watched as she raised her white arm encircled with heavy bracelets. I saw the fleece lose its luster. I saw the dagger find their small hearts.
The band played loudly, the people were rowdy, spontaneously erupting. Perhaps some followed the thread wound from the fleece of Jason to the fleecing of Medea and the terrible witchcraft of the beyond, but it didn't matter. I sang for Sandy, and the poetry that spewed was for him ... .
She could write about going to the supermarket and I would read it willingly. In saying that, this wasn’t as perfect as her other works to me. It is more stream of consciousness over 2016. She is a beautiful writer and an artist I admire greatly but this would be my least favourite of her work.
A dreamy reflection of a year in the life at a level of fortune I cannot comprehend. I go back and forth on my thoughts here quite a bit. On the one hand, the prose is pretty and powerful. On the other, there isn’t a ton of depth here—although there are a few notable moments in this manner.
mysterious
reflective
medium-paced
emotional
reflective
slow-paced
I could feel the gravitational pull of home
Which when I’m home too long becomes the gravitational pull of somewhere else.