Bob Dylan and Patti Smith or how myths end up assaulting literature. Because today these two greats of music who wrote the notes of generations and generations in the changing twentieth century, are now legends that make their books transcendental visions of our world from the staves to the pages.
But while it is Dylan who ended up surprising everyone by winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016, it is Patty Smith who to a greater extent has turned to literature as a new melting pot in which to melt his concerns already more mature; where to share your memories of the days of punk and roses; or simply where to exploit its valuable narrative imprint.
With its punk origins and its subsequent tune with all that Beat movement of the Keoruac and company, it is undoubted that Patti Smith's books are steeped in that point of rebellious, critical ideology, perhaps all disguised as a certain hedonism. In any case, everything has already been sifted by that residue of the passing of the years that complements the ideological with the melancholic.
Top 3 Recommended Books by Patti Smith
Devotion
If there were awards to the iconic characters of the musical world, two of the most prestigious accolades of the XNUMXth century would go to David Bowie on the male side and for Patti Smith on the female side. Being an icon or symbol in the musical goes far beyond the musical notes, the compositions and the lyrics.
In the turbulent years of the mid-twentieth century onwards, after great conflicts and in the midst of cold wars and decentralized conflicts that have lasted until today, musical idols had the power to generate currents of opinion, followers in the aesthetic and in the ideological. Bowie was a brutal, powerful, transformative and irreverent character. Patti Smith did the same but with the greatest need for demands from women.
And also, Patti Smith liked to write, transferring art and background from the musical to the literary.In this book Patti Smith collects writings from here and there, from distant times vindictive and from peculiar experiences, with the evocation of her literary tastes such as common thread, references to French poetry as well as the existentialism of authors such as Camus.
On many occasions the writer discovers that it is anecdotal. A Parisian hotel room, a sleeper and a television where Patti discovers the dance on ice of a seasoned skater. Beauty can push to write and, paradoxically, beauty also reveals melancholy, sadness and obsessions, but Patti continues to compose a kind of improvised literature that she has continued to this day.
In this book Devotion we find an ideology of the writer's motives that we all carry inside. Only the perspective of the legendary character permeates the entire composition. The perspective of Patti Smith, the rebellious woman who went from the androgynous appearance (even in her broken voice) of her punk beginnings, to the powerful transformative commitment of music offers another scope to what is written, especially as we know more concerns. deep, perhaps those that never fit into song lyrics, those that freed from the necessary lyrical fit, awaken in a prose that, however, ends up caressing other types of musical chords that are perfectly in tune with the soul.
We were children
There was a lot of talk about Patti Smith's relationship with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. Of course, the typical was not going to be established in their relationship and even less in the most intimate aspects of it.
But from the rarity it ends up establishing a relationship between masters that bears fruit in a creative universe around the most emblematic New York of the sixties and seventies.It was the summer Coltrane died… The hippies raised their empty arms and China detonated the hydrogen bomb. Jimi Hendrix set his guitar on fire in Monterey… It was the summer of love. And in that changeable and inhospitable climate, a chance encounter changed the course of my life: it was the summer I met Robert Mapplethorpe.It was July 1967 and they were children, but from then on Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe sealed a friendship that would only end with the death of the great photographer, in 1989.
That's what this splendid memoir talks about, about the life together of these artists, both enthusiastic and passionate, who crossed the outskirts of New York in great strides to reach the nerve center of the new art. That is how they ended up settling in the Chelsea Hotel and became the protagonists of a world now lost where Allen Ginsberg, Andy Warhol and their boys reigned, and the great music bands that marked the final years of the XNUMXth century were created, while AIDS was raging.
Year of the monkey
The biographical as a point from which to explore personally while the myth is crumbled for the general public. If in "We were children" we undertake the journey to that land of the privileged memories of a living legend, this time the journey is to the moment, to the now. And in the matter there is a lot of brutal sincerity, of recognition of all human fall in old age, in the discovery of the tinsel that always looked like gold. As I gazed at my image on the mercury gray surface of the toaster, I noticed that it looked young and old at the same time.
It's two in the morning on New Years Eve 2015 when Patti Smith arrives at the Dream Motel, next to Santa Cruz Beach, after giving a concert at the legendary Fillmore room in San Francisco. He has just turned seventy years old. On the first morning of the year, she goes out for a walk and takes her first Polaroid from the hotel's sign, with which she has a lucid conversation, like a modern Alice in her own particular Wonderland. The talk inspires him with some verses and he decides to return to his room, from whose terrace he listens to the waves and thinks of his friend Sandy Pearlman, the famous music producer, who has been in a coma for two days.
He was the person who suggested to her in her youth that she start a rock band. Thus begins a journey through places such as the West Coast, the Arizona desert, Manhattan or Kentucky, but also through remembered or imagined places, the outside world and the inside, in which Patti Smith allows us to wander by her side as her most companions. intimate.
