baby please don't go

2016 has been a horrible year if you love music. So many people have died. So many. (Note to universe: can we stop now? Please?)

Today, it's Prince. You don't have to be a lifelong fan to know what an influence he had - his androgyny, his amazing lyrics, his look, his idiosyncracies, his innovation. 

My favorite Prince song has always been "When Doves Cry." Here's a link to the lyrics, and here's the verse that will always haunt me.

How can you just leave me standing?
Alone in a world that's so cold? (So cold)
Maybe I'm just too demanding
Maybe I'm just like my father too bold
Maybe you're just like my mother
She's never satisfied (She's never satisfied)
Why do we scream at each other
This is what it sounds like
When doves cry

The version of this song that I'm listening to you now is by Patti Smith. She nails it.  Listen...

two American Idols

Did you enjoy New Year's Eve? My husband and I went out for an early dinner, watched some of a "Twilight Zone" marathon, and ate a truly ridiculous amount of chocolate, including truffles from "See's" that would beat anything Godiva could throw at them, no question.


The last week of December was unusual because it offered two amazing television programs about two amazing women who were - at least on the surface, quite different. I wonder, though, whether they would have liked each other for their boldness, their resourcefulness, and their practicality. Both women worked to support families. The Alcotts needed support because Amos Bronson Alcott was brilliant, but unable to hold a job. Patti Smith had children to support when her husband died. Sometimes, necessity can be a powerful muse.

The American Masters program, Lousia May Alcott: The Woman Behind Little Women, was too short. I wanted more - more Louisa, of course, but also more Amos Bronson and more Abigail. He has always fascinated me because he was known for his brilliant and iconoclastic speeches and innovations, but he was unable to write a coherent paragraph. (He was, however, able to design and the building that housed meetings of the Transcendentalists. Look at that photo and tell me you don't feel drawn to its whimsy!) Abigail has always fascinated me because she did not hold him back from his experiments or object to his passion for philosophy and innovation, despite the practical hardships and chaos the family endured.

I have not read the biography that the program was based on (nor the collection of her journals, alas), so it shall be the first book I'll add to this year's TBR list. (Last year's list was huge. I managed to whittle it up tenfold.)


And then, there was Patti Smith: Dream of Life. I have written about Patti Smith before, but I don't think I ever could capture my passion for the woman. This film, a type of cinema verite, follows Patti Smith through ten years, countless flashbacks, interviews, and snippets of performances.

Throughout the film, she takes photographs using an old Polaroid camera. Isn't that a perfect metaphor for artistry? She looks at an object, a scene, a peron, photographs what anyone else would see, and then peels that objective reality away, leaving a blank space for her own vision.

The film got, shall we say, mixed reviews, but Andrew O'hehir from Salon got it right:

• One of the greatest things that can be said about Patti Smith, I think, is that although she was either an inventor or a precursor of punk (depending on how you look at it), it rapidly bored her and she moved on. She couldn't be contained by any movement or ethos or ism, and anyway was always closer to being Rimbaud or Ginsberg than to being Billy Idol (or, for that matter, Joan Jett), and by the early '80s she was married and living in suburban Detroit. Her great triumph was not that she was a female rock revolutionary, or that she left music for a domestic life, or that she came back to it when that domestic life ended. It was that she never questioned her right to live her life exactly as she saw fit, to make it up as she went along in the great tradition of all those dead white male artists she worshiped. As Sebring's film makes clear, she's still doing that today.

Patti Smith -- "somebody's sins but not mine"

I love Patti Smith. I love her persona, her music, her lyrics, her poetry, her politics, her sturdiness, and her honesty. When I went to her book signing a few years ago, she talked and sang and ate pizza.It was the homiest, most gemultlich book signing I've ever attended.

Robert Mapplethorpe captured her stark, strange beauty early on, but it's taken years for the rock world to catch up to his vision. Some of her lyrics - ecstatic, direct, uncompromising - may be less prettified than many would like. Others - well, others are just beautiful:

"Ours is just another skin
That simply slips away
You can rise above it
It will shed easily

It all will come out fine
I've learned it line by line

One common wire
One silver thread
All that you desire
Rolls on ahead"

("Grateful," from the album Gung Ho.)


Visit her website, read some of her occasional writings , read Rimbaud and Baudelaire and her own recent book of poetry (Auguries of Innocence), listen to her recordings. She's a treasure, and now she's in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame!

(The title of this entry is from the first line of her first album: "Jesus died for somebody's sins - but not mine.")