Happy Birthday Patti Smith!

Happy 70th!

Patti.

In case you missed it on PBS NewsHour earlier this week, here's the great interview with Patti Smith about her wonderful new book, M Train, conducted by Jeffrey Brown.

The entire transcript is available here, but then you'll miss Patti's smile.

Patti Smith on William S. Burroughs

There are so many reasons to love Patti Smith, as anyone who watches this whole video will be reminded, but on what would have been William Burroughs' 101st birthday, watch it at least for what she has to say about his advice to a young Patti at the 59 second mark:

"Build a good name," Burroughs told her. "Keep your name clean. Don’t make compromises, don’t worry about making a bunch of money or being successful. Be concerned with doing good work and make the right choices and protect your work. And if you build a good name, eventually, you know, that name will be its own currency."

Celebrating Patti Smith's Birth on 12/30/1946

Here's Patti singing Horses and (a truncated) Hey Joe in 1976:

 

The sprechstimme line at 3'55"(which doesn't exist on the Horses album), "If you are male / and choose other than female / you must take responsibility / to holding the key / to ... freedom", seems so key to her later masterpiece about Robert Mapplethorpe, the beautiful Just Kids that brought her new literary fame and a National Book Award in 2010.
Please watch this wonderful and very touching conversation between Patti and Jeffrey Brown about the book and its award that aired on the PBS NewsHour three years ago:


And, finally, Patti reads a Christmas and birthday story from Just Kids (and smiles):


Happy Birthday.

The Quote of the Day from Patti Smith

“Please, no matter how we advance technologically, please don’t abandon the book. There is nothing in our material world more beautiful than the book.”
-- Patti Smith (quoted in the New York Times, 17 Nov 2010)

Patti Smith won the National Book Award for non-fiction last night for Just Kids. I'll have to move it farther up on my reading list. Right now I'm finishing Lives Like Loaded Guns by Lyndall Gordon and I have Life by Keith Richards and Freedom by Jonathan Franzen in the on-deck positions. All, of course, are being read in their paper editions (remembering that "e-books" are not books) and all are either from libraries or independent bookstores.

Congratulations Patti!