U Tell Me

I spent yesterday reading patti smiths latest book Bread of Angels. when she is good she is sensational. delivering a concept, an idea, in and of itself worth rumination - and how she lands it is so wondrously wonderful it sometimes reaches sky heights. but as one review noted - one hundred pages in and we're still with ten year old sickly Patti channeling Blakeian phantasmagoria roaming round garbage strewn. abandoned lots somewhere in Nowhere, New Jersey. She can take any worthless found object or random imagining and ascribe facetted talismanic properties to them. It moves towards tired and precious and corny and maybe even invented.    

But ... 

her life is like no other I can think of. A scrawny little walleyed girl with not a single maybe prospect moves to the city, works in a bookstore, meets her idols who just happen to be current day Pop culture makers and shakers, talks, works and screws with them. She holds fast to her worth and know how, writes award winning books, sings, makes records, travels the world, abandons her rock star career at its peak, makes paintings and photographs, has gorgeous boyfriends, like Sam Shepard (see above)  marries her troubled same last name as her man, has children, she meett the woman she gave birth to at nineteen and discovers at 70 her biological father was a Jewish soldier, not a bird loving backwater factory worker. She's officially honored by entire countries, loves her solitude, works every day. 

You tell me.