April 21, 2023
I am in Paris working on a project to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the publication of A Season in Hell. Also to celebrate we will have a forthcoming month dedicated to Arthur Rimbaud. Poems, videos, pictures, discussions. Everything that encompasses my own 60 years of reading, studying and loving his work.
It is a bit chilly in Paris, anticipating rain, but I have a nice spacious room and a big desk in the Gallimard complex. I am very proud to have them as my French publisher, and am amazed at the breadth of their authors, from Proust to Camus and beyond. Everyday I work in the Salon Bleu, which faced the Gallimard garden. The work is demanding, requiring study and articulating my thoughts on his work and life both with words and visual elements. A few examples of my mess is below.
Interesting! Got the idea that “Gallimard” was something more than a mere building complex, so I looked it up and, yes, Gallimard is actually a publishing house. One step to the founder and a cute little Venus in opposition to our friend Uranus.
Perhaps I can be excused if I add two other famous individuals close to Camus in the sphere of existentialist philosophers and writers.
April 15, 2023
I am still in Berlin and it is still raining. Today is the passing day of the poet, playwright and author Jean Genet. When I was young his work was banned in the United States but in the late sixties Grove Press was able to publish his novels. My favorite is The Thief’s Journal which traces his early youth as a vagrant poet in Spain.
14 Apr 2023
Hello from rainy Berlin. I am in a studio working with Soundwalk Collective. We will be improvising a piece later dedicated to Joseph Beuys. I was checking my headphones and thought to read you a poem that I wrote in 1978 for Robert Mapplethorpe’s limited edition book called Flowers. This is just a little test and I will send something again very soon. I also want to comment on the extremely beautiful and informative responses to Vermeer. Monday I am taking a 4 hour train to Paris, and I will write a longer response to your responses. I was truly moved, and a little envious as some of your responses eclipsed my own words. That is great!
13 Apr 2023
On Monday I wanted to send this little clip shot by Janine Bub, from my Easter performance with Soundwalk Collective, but had a technical issue. The footage on the screen is from my favorite Pasolini film The Gospel according to St. Matthew.
I am in Berlin, working, performing and recording. It has been intermittently raining so I have had a lot of cafe time. Studying the work of Joseph Beuys, rereading A Season in Hell and endlessly writing. Okay. And daydreaming.
12 April 2023
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8 Apr 2023
There was just a little chill in the air as my dear friend and collaborator Stephan Crasnenscki and I, walked past the canals, coffee shops and perused the bookstalls of Amsterdam. Then at 4 in the afternoon we headed to the Vermeer exhibition at the Rijks Museum. It was quite crowded but the people were civilized, all waiting for a turn to get a closer look at each masterwork, seeming as pearls strung from one room to another. It was the first such exhibition- 28 of his 37 known works together in one space!
April 6, 2023
Steven Sebring – no birth data
April 5 2023
This video was shot in memory of Kurt Cobain. My son Jackson is playing banjo. The song was cut live in Electric Lady Studio. I had been driving in Los Angelas some time before with my friend Steven Sebring. The song came on the radio and he turned it up loud. It seemed to me that Kurt had the sound of old style country in his voice, even the twang of banjoes and I decided to perform it live. The late John Cohen and Walker Sheperd played banjo. My band members played acoustic instruments. Sam Sheperd played tambourine and the bass drum with his foot.
April 1 2023
Maria Polydouri —-
April 2 2023
Nobody
March 26 2023
I quote the entire post as a good example of Patti’s writing.
This is the passing night of the composer Claude Debussy and the poet Novalis. They died a century apart but both leave us an atmosphere of the melancholy of calm. A French Impressionist and a German Romantic. I imagine them entering the same grand establishment, in heavenly hologram. The exquisite Cafe Pushkin laid out in a Baroque mansion. After a few glasses of wine, Debussy cannot resist the glowing keys of the piano and improvises an unpublished Suite of the Night. The young Novalis, who will never live to see thirty, is enthralled. He adds not yet known quatrains to his Hymns to the Night, not of sorrow or his own encroaching death, but words that sing of the majesty of moonlight illuminating the dark sea. He forms beauteous lines as the composer plays, each unaware of the other, or the century that separates them. The sea is silver. The poet sleeps; the composer rises. There is the swirl of dance, a sense of farewell, and seductive surrender, as both are drawn into Gods unholy arms.
March 25 2023
A Poem from Patti. Repeated Chart.
March 20, 2023
Happy first day of Spring. Here is a little poem by Emily Dickinson. She seems to be heralding then mourning the rare and precious light of spring itself. May we all look toward renewal, and find joy in the small things, a blade of grass, a chirping bird.
March 19, 2023
My mother, Beverly Ann Smith, born in Bridgeport, Connecticut on March 19, 1920.I wrote the song Mother Rose with Tony Shanahan, when she passed away in 2002. It’s addressed to my daughter Jesse. I will send the end of my message next, I had a technical error. Hope everyone is well and in good spirits….
March 18, 2023
This morning I read (on Substack Poetic Outlaws) the poem Advice to a Young Writer by Henry Miller. He suggest one reads The Palm Wine Drunkard by the Nigerian author Amos Tutuola. In the early seventies this obscure and transporting book was hard to find, and at the time the only people I knew who read it were William Burroughs and Tom Verlaine. It’s an awesome book and still needs some searching out. The volume below contains his follow up book. I won’t say anything about it; it is best to get lost in its atmosphere.
March 17, 2023
Yesterday I posted a video of Peaceable Kingdom. The music was written by my bass player Tony Shanahan. Tony’s parents were Irish immigrants, 100% Irish. His late father was a baker and they made hundreds of loaves of sourdough bread for Saint Patricks Day. I always think of Tony on this day and thought to choose a poem by the great Irish poet W.B.Yeats. I chose this lyrical poem as I loved it when I was young. The poem is both hopeful and sad, of unrequited love but also of a dream never abandoned. I hope you like it and read others by this great master.
March 16, 2023
On March 16, 2003 the twenty-three year old activist Rachel Corrie was crushed to death by an armored bulldozer in a Gaza Strip combat zone while attempting to protect the Israeli demolition of Palestinian property. As a mother I found myself grieving for her parents and wrote the lyrics to this song as a comfort to them.
My pianist and bass player Tony Shanahan wrote the music. This is a live recording from Electric Lady Studios. Thinking of the dying young all over the world. Young soldiers, young women fighting for their freedom, for their education, their voice. And also thinking of the mothers and fathers who bring them into the world, only to see them unjustly taken away.
March 16, 2023
Hello everybody
Here is the podcast I did Hamish McKenzie, with the co-founder of Substack, at Electric Lady Studios. Kind of freewheeling. I really Hamish and hope this is of some interest or entertainment.
