Patti Smith (punk rocker) is a fink. I tell you this because i thought she was just a punk, but last night i found out she is also a fink. Patti Smith decides to hold a tribute to William S. Burroughs at the Royal Festival Hall on the Thames. She starts it off with an anecdote about her and Burroughs, how she would hail cabs for him outside the Chelsea Hotel in New York. Then she goes nuts on a bassoon, and then up comes the supporting cast. Iain Sinclair (London personality) and Alan Moore (comic book writer) read their little homages to Burroughs, which are part biographies and part pastiche, with background noise supplied by a few instrumentalists, Marc Ribot (Tom Waits collaborator), Matthew Shipp (nu-jazz pianist), and Jason Spaceman (from Spiritualized).
There is, of course, no real 'form' to the thing, they just read or play at the whims of The Great Magnet. Sinclair, who represents the proper English side of things, gives anecdotes about Burroughs living on Duke St. (about 20 min walk from my place), waxes about the battle of poetry and politics. Meanwhile Alan Moore (wrote From Hell, League of Extrordinary Gentleman), who looks like Rob Zombie's older brother, flexes his skull rings around a book by Burroughs and reads in a grovelly Northhampton voice about mugwumps and junk.
Patti reappears later, playing the bassoon, but this time in the middle of the audience, slinking around. I'm filled with the desire to hug her, mostly because she's fuckin Patti Smith, punk god, but it doesn't really matter because she's in a trance and slinks off anyway, up to the stage and back into the spotlight. She then goes into another anecdote, about an ageing Burroughs leading her down some steep staircase to hail her a cab, and that was the last time she saw him. Seeing her shed tears at the memory is no small performance, i suppose, but Patti Smith and everything she's been doing for decades has been performance anyway. And then i realize that Patti Smith has had a boner for Burroughs and that's why i'm sitting in this theatre. Patti Smith is a fink.
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3 comments:
fink is such a wonderful word, and so well deployed here.
two of your blogposts have now been distributed to nineteen freshmen in pittsburgh. they will be marking passages where your "voice" is especially strong. your words - yours, your very own words - will be the topic under discussion on friday at 11:00am EST.
(thanks for your kind permission)
I haven't blushed since grade school.
You were ever so popular with the freshmen....they all laughed a lot. one kid wants to hear you perform the blog as a monologue on a stage. several others said you were "like a comedian." one asked, in hushedrespectful tones, if i knew the writer (!).
the chelsea flower show was indeed decadent and depraved. and the freshmen in pittsburgh lapped it right up.
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