Astragal - Albertine Sarrazin

 ASTRAGAL - ALBERTINE SARRAZIN

Like a lot of other people, I first came upon Astragal by Albertine Sarrazin through Patti Smith's endorsement of it. Patti had written an essay about the book and it was a glowing one, singling it out from all the many other books she was fond of. Like David Bowie was, Patti Smith is a big reader and the list she composed some years ago of her favourite books is an exemplary one. So, for her to heap praise upon one book in particular was something to be noted.

Astragal is a semi-autobiographical novel written by Sarrazin whilst she was in prison. It starts with her escaping from a prison by jumping from a 30-feet high wall and ends with her arrest, presumably to be returned to the same prison? In jumping from the wall, however, she breaks a bone in her ankle and is rendered immobile, leaving her able only to drag herself to the nearby road where she is picked up by a passing traveller by the name of Julien. Sarrazin's flight for freedom lasts all of the few seconds from her jumping and her landing on the ground below. Unable to move, stuck out in the cold and the wet, she has simply exchanged one form of incapacitation for another. Hope, however, arrives in the form of Julien, an ex-con himself who rescues Sarrazin and deposits her in a series of safe-houses whilst her ankle heals and she's able to walk again.

The premise of Astragal is a promising one, with suggested shades of Jean-Luc Godard's 'Breathless', Jean Genet's 'The Thief's Journal', and even Bonnie And Clyde, the film version starring Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway. What we get, unfortunately, is something completely different with two thirds of the book comprised of Sarrazin laid-up in bed ruminating over her broken bone.

It's all very well written but the actual subject matter and the non-stop internalising doesn't really make for an exhilarating read. Once her ankle is healed and she's able to walk again we're into the last third of the book and it's here that things start to liven up a bit.

Sarrazin is in Paris but still an absconder and there's no way to gain lawful employment so she turns to prostitution. She's very much in love with Julien - her guardian angel - but he's not exactly ideal boyfriend material due to him vanishing for weeks on end pursuing his own criminal career involving it seems a lot of petty burglary.

Finally, Julien is away for a lot longer than usual and in a bid to track him down Sarrazin discovers he's been arrested. On his release they meet each other and decide to spend the rest of their lives together in fugitive bliss but then Sarrazin herself is re-arrested and their dream thwarted.

Astragal obviously spoke to Patti Smith and touched her in a way some books are able to but very few do. Something about Astragal chimed with Patti but clearly on a very personal level. Was it something to do with chasing a fugitive vision of freedom? Chasing a fugitive vision of fugitive love?

The circumstances of Patti discovering Astragal are very similar to her first discovering of Seasons In Hell by Arthur Rimbaud. Desperately poor whilst living in New York, she found both books on two different occasions at a second-hand bookshop in the East Village. On both occasions she was attracted initially by the pictures of the authors on the covers; Rimbaud and that classic portrait of him as a boy, Sarrazin and her 'striking, remote face - rendered violet on black - on a dust jacket proclaiming its author a 'female Genet''.

Apart from both being of French origin, the two books couldn't, however, be more different. Whilst Rimbaud is poetry of a boy-genius able to tear away the veil and blow holes in the fabric of imagination, Sarrazin is feistiness disabled and reduced to helpless navel-gazing. Sarrazin is teenage rebellion curtailed and reduced to being a package moved from one 'safe-house' to another. Julien - her rescuer - her seducer, her co-dependent in captivity.

Astragal is ultimately an empty promise. A book and a story to inspire but paradoxically only through its failure to inspire. Its strength but also its weakness is in its lack of sensationalism though in this it's arguably very true to life. There's no-one wielding guns here, for example. What we have instead is a wrought, somewhat complicated affair. Astragal is a lesson in potential unfulfilled, both as a book and as the story of Albertine Sarrazin's  life.

John Serpico

A Book Of Days - Patti Smith

 A BOOK OF DAYS - PATTI SMITH

I must admit, I was quite a latecomer to social media. I'd had a micro-presence on the Internet for years but that was mainly on specific news websites that would come up if my name was googled. I had opened up a Facebook account years ago but I never went on it, never used it. I never really understood the point of it and could never quite understand what it was for. What I did see, rather, was that it was a time-consuming activity where people seemed to be carving out an online identity that was often the complete opposite of their real life self. Online they presented and depicted themselves as all laughs and jokes and isn't life wonderful when in reality they were miserable buggers who never spoke to anyone, least of all me. Or they would post constant selfies of themselves, or pictures of their pets or of what they've had for dinner, and well, I just couldn't see the point.

In hindsight, I started using social media on moving to a relatively isolated location where my immediate social circle was a lot less than what it had been. I still don't really understand what it's meant to be for though. I haven't got anything to promote (not least myself), I haven't got anything to sell and I'm not interested in creating a social media profile or 'identity'. Admittedly, I can be quite active on there at times but I still don't see any benefits to be gained from it, in fact quite the opposite: I can see the disadvantages of it as in time spent when that time could be put to better use. What I think keeps me on social media nowadays is that I do it mainly for myself, as a way of noting things such as films watched, books read, and of jotting down thoughts or sounding off. I don't really care about numbers of followers and friends and how many 'likes' anything gets. It's not important and in fact is actually quite meaningless.

Which brings us to Patti Smith and her latest book, entitled A Book Of Days. Of all people already in the public eye, Patti is one of the last who might have any need of social media. Her profile is already well-established and her reach already global. It was Patti's daughter who first suggested she should open an Instagram account so as to counter the fraudulent ones posting in Patti's name but more importantly because she thought the medium would suit her. Patti's daughter was right. Her first post was a photo of her hand, with her daughter being her first follower which has now grown to over a million followers.

A Book Of Days is a collection of 366 of Patti's Instagram posts, representing a leap year. Each post is a photograph accompanied by a short caption and is a prime and fine example of social media being put to good use and of it being of some benefit. The benefit it derives is that of inspiration. There are photos of pictures of Patti's heroes such as William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Baudelaire, Gogol, Joan Didion, Jean Luc Godard, Elvis Presley, Jerry Garcia, Jackson Pollock and so on. There are photos of her home, her desk, her books, even her old boots. There are snapshots from her travels, of gravestones, of her family, and of herself. Selfies. There are even pictures of her cat.

'Social media,' Patti writes in her introduction 'in its twisting of democracy, sometimes courts cruelty, reactionary commentary, misinformation and nationalism, but it can also serve us. It's in our hands.'

In Patti's hands she has shown social media can be life affirming and an albeit limited force for good. Who would have thought? Who would have ever guessed? Who would ever have imagined?

John Serpico

Banga - Patti Smith

 BANGA - PATTI SMITH

Is it a bird? Is it a plane? Is it a cd? Is it a book? Whatever you might call it, Banga by Patti Smith is surely confusing for the anally retentive and the fastidious librarian. How to categorise it is the question? And where to keep it? Well, first and foremost as it's in book form the only place to keep it is obviously on your bookshelf even though it is as well Patti Smith's eleventh album released/published in 2012 as both a cd with a book and a book with a cd. More importantly than all this, however: Is it any good?

The first thing to acknowledge is that just about anything created by Patti Smith is going to be of interest due to it simply being by Patti Smith, which means it's almost guaranteed to be a work of art. Banga is no exception. Written over a period of three years, the twelve compositions (including a version of Neil Young's 'After The Goldrush') work equally well as both poems and lyrics. Not that this should come as a surprise, of course.

The subject matter of the compositions are in many ways typical Patti Smith fare, reflecting her current travels, concerns and meditations. The featured characters and scenarios ranging from Mikel Bulgakov, Nikolai Gogol, Andrei Tarkovsky, Amerigo Vespucci, Maria Schneider, Johnny Depp, and Amy Winehouse, to the discovery of America, the Tohoku earthquake, the stations of Saint Francis of Assisi's life, and the threat of environmental devastation.

One of the problems Patti Smith has always had to contend with is that her debut album, Horses, has always been her masterpiece and so has been near impossible to surpass. Not that she hasn't tried and often come close, it should be said. How do you follow what is, in fact, one of the greatest albums of all time? The poem/song 'Amerigo' in/on Banga is quite possibly one of the best things she's ever written and that's obviously no mean feat, and for this alone makes Banga an important addition to her canon. It concerns the exploits of the navigator Amerigo Vespucci, from whom America got its name, and him coming to the New World with the intention of baptizing and bringing salvation to the natives. "Ah the salvation of souls," writes/sings Patti "But wisdom we had not. For these people had neither king nor lord and bowed to no one, for they have lived in their own liberty." Come the end, rather than converting the natives, Amerigo himself is transformed. "And the sky opened, and we laid down our armour. And we danced naked as they, baptized in the rain of the New World." In its depth of subject matter and its ambitious scope - it works. As does the whole collection.  With its beautiful design and its array of accompanying black and white photographs taken by Patti on her old polaroid camera, Banga is without doubt a work of art from one of the world's true artists. 

And whilst on the subject of Patti Smith, it's interesting that she's one of the very few artists who has been with me throughout almost the whole of my life. From my very first introduction to her via a cassette tape of Horses at the age of seventeen whilst living on the southeast coast of Crete through to the present day and being given a copy of Banga as a present. I've seen her playing live a number of times and though we've never spoken our paths have crossed, from backstage at the Glastonbury festival, to the Van Gogh museum, to the streets of Amsterdam with us passing each other by, looking straight at each other almost as if to see who would blink first.

A thing to appreciate about her, I've always thought, is her lack of pretension which of all things might appear to be a strange thing to say given her penchant for namedropping and her range of oft-cited influences? What should be remembered, however, is that essentially Patti Smith is of working class origin and that what elevated her to renowned artist level was and still is her love of reading. She's an autodidact. She's the living proof of how by simply reading, the world becomes a much more wondrous place and life becomes a much more fascinating and beautiful experience.

As Patti puts it in a final sign-off at the end of Banga: Believe or Explode                                                                                                                                                             John Serpico    

Year Of The Monkey - Patti Smith

YEAR OF THE MONKEY – PATTI SMITH

How strange it must be living Patti Smith's life. Just a thought that occurred whilst reading Year Of The Monkey. At the start of the book Patti mentions she's just finished the last of three nights in a row performing at the Filmore, in San Francisco. Can you imagine? Three nights of ecstatic, classic rock'n'roll that for some would probably be as near to a religious experience they will ever get, and that quite possibly includes Patti herself.

Patti, however, just casually mentions it almost as a 'by the way', as though it was no big deal. What is more significant to her is some guy with a greasy ponytail leaning over and puking on her boots on the last night and whether this is a good or a bad sign to end the year on? 'Well, considering the state of the world,' she surmises 'who could tell the difference?'

Patti wanders into a thrift store and buys an old Grateful Dead tie-dye T-shirt with Jerry Garcia's face on it. It's an impulsive buy, she says. She later hitches a ride to San Diego with a couple who ask for eighty-five dollars advance payment for gasoline. At a truck stop she gets out to go to the bathroom and on her return she sees the car speeding off into the distance, leaving her there stranded. Meanwhile, Patti's friend for over forty years, record producer extraordinaire Sandy Pearlman, is lying in a coma in a hospital.

All these things and more are fused together like fragments of a dream to create an encompassing dream-like experience but rather than the fragments it's the dream in totality that Patti is more interested in, and it's this that she writes about.

It's unlikely that Patti's a rich person at all but at the same time she's not going to be poverty-stricken, so if need be she's going to be able to afford new clothes if required. It's interesting then that she would instead buy an old, second-hand tie-dye T-shirt peeled from the body of some old Deadhead. It's interesting that rather than catching a coach or even a taxi, she would instead hitch a ride with a couple of potential psycho killers. Rather than staying at a Hilton hotel she chooses instead to stay at some rickety, old motel called the Dream Inn.

All things, however, are connected and nothing is coincidental so perhaps all things are meant to be? 'I was dreaming in my dreaming', as Patti sings on People Have The Power though that could easily be changed by dropping just one letter to 'I was dreaming in my dreamin' but in the book she fails to make that connection for some reason. Dreamin'? Dream Inn? Dreaming in my Dream Inn? It's like an exercise in Carl Gustav Jung's theory of synchronicity.

Throughout Year Of The Monkey there is a continuous sense of mortality as Patti marks the passing of time and the passing of life as she approaches her seventieth birthday. Her friends and those she admires fall and pass away continuously: Muhammad Ali, Sandy Pearlman, Fidel Castro, Carrie Fisher, Sam Shepherd. 'This is what I know.' she writes 'Sam is dead. My brother is dead. My father is dead. My mother is dead. My husband is dead.'. It's like an echo of Jack Kerouac's lament at the end of The Dharma Bums where he asks: 'Are we fallen angels who didn't want to believe that nothing is nothing and so were born to lose our loved ones and dear friends one by one and finally our own life, to see it proved?'

All is dream. The dream of life. Dream for free because if nothing else we're free to dream. Is there, however, such a thing as the end of dream and if so where might that be? And if there is an end of dream would it not follow that there is also a birth of dream? Subsequently, might there be an afterbirth of dream? Come the end of Year Of The Monkey, Donald Trump is elected as the next President of the United States so yes, perhaps there is an afterbirth of dream and he's the full, dayglo embodiment of it?

'Yet still I keep thinking that something wonderful is about to happen.' Patti writes 'Maybe tomorrow. A tomorrow following a whole succession of tomorrows.' She concludes, however, that 'The trouble with dreaming is that we eventually wake up'...

John Serpico

Devotion - Patti Smith

DEVOTION – PATTI SMITH

The premise of Devotion, by Patti Smith, is to answer the question 'Why is one compelled to write?' It's a very straightforward question that demands a straightforward answer but then when you ask a writer such a thing it's never going to be simple because writers tend to ponder, dwell and contemplate. Or at least the good ones do.

Patti Smith twirls the question around: 'Why do I write? My finger, as a stylus, traces the question in the blank air. A familiar riddle posed since youth, withdrawing from play, comrades and the valley of love, girded with words, a beat outside. Why do we write? A chorus erupts.'

Patti's answer is concise and to the point: 'Because we cannot simply live.'

If you think about it, Patti's answer makes sense. The act of writing is living plus something more, as is any act of creativity. Or it should be. Why does an artist paint? Is not a landscape or a bowl of fruit, for example, enough in itself? Why does a man desire to render a vision upon canvas? Is not the vision enough? Why does a photographer need to capture an image? Is the image in itself not enough? For posterity, you might say? But photography is an art so capturing an image with a photograph is the act of turning an image into art.

Art isn't just limited, however, to the obvious forms of it such as writing, painting, sculpturing, etc, etc. Baking bread, for example, is also an art. As is building a house, tending a garden, raising a family, etc, etc. Anything that involves creation, really. And it doesn't even stop there. Dancing is also an art, as is playing football, climbing a mountain, swimming in a sea, and so on. Nothing is being created from these things but that's not the point. It's the act of 'doing' that matters. Creating something ephemeral. Something of, in and for the moment. Existing one moment but gone the next. Art is the act of living. Your life is your art.

In Devotion, Patti Smith very cleverly reveals the process of her writing. The main plank of the book consists of a story about an ice skater who lives for her art (of skating) and a possessive collector and dealer of rare artefacts. It's the story of the relationship between the two and of how obsession and possession become entwined.

What Patti does, however, is to book-end the story with her travel diary, detailing a trip to France and England. In France she visits the family home of Albert Camus where she is invited to see the unfinished manuscript of the book he was working on prior to his death in a car crash, provisionally entitled The First Man. In England she visits the grave of political activist and Christian philosopher Simone Weil so as to pay homage.

Along the way she notes various incidents, memories and observations all of which end up in the main story of the ice skater and the art collector. If Devotion is a crime, as Patti explains, then all these notes she has taken during her travels is the evidence.

So, from the art of her life – and Patti Smith's life is indeed an artistic one – is forged the art of her book, Devotion. It was Henry Miller who once wrote: 'Certainly I want to write but I don't think it's the be-all and end-all. First comes life.' This isn't to neglect, however, the importance of dream as Henry Miller again once wrote: 'We are all dreamers, only some of us wake up in time to put down a few words.'

In her song Free Money, from her Horses album, Patti famously sings 'When we dream it, we dream it for free. Free money free money free money.' What Patti means by this (or what it can be translated as Patti meaning) is that dreaming is a currency allowing the dreamer to purchase other, possibly even better dreams. It is these dreams that are rendered upon a page, a canvas, film, in a song or whatever.

From the art of life and of dreams, then, is born another kind of art.

Devotion by Patti Smith is a work of genius. It is a book that captures the essence of art and the process that goes into the creation of it. It's a very generous book that offers a rare insight into the secrets and innermost thoughts of one of our greatest – in my opinion – living day artists. For someone who obviously has a love for the written word, Patti Smith has created something whose value is actually beyond words.

John Serpico

The Coral Sea / Woolgathering - Patti Smith

THE CORAL SEA / WOOLGATHERING 
PATTI SMITH

I always felt Patti Smith's great curse - the cross she's had to bear - is in being born American. She was like a strange and exotic flower growing in a cabbage patch. The cuckoo in the nest.

She grew up in New Jersey before moving to New York where she met Robert Mappelthorpe, and it was her relationship with him that crystallised her destiny to be what she's now become: a near-holy person, as near to a saint that anyone can be in this day and age.

I'll admit it now - I've always been a bit of a fan of Patti Smith.

She was influenced by the best - the Stones, Dylan, Hendrix, The Doors, etc - and she's never been shy of citing those influences but it was Mappelthorpe who cemented her will to be an artist. He was her friend, her mentor and her comrade-in-arms. Being American, however, was like an obstacle to overcome because the themes she was always aiming for were so un-American. She had so much more to prove and had a much harder battle to show she was serious. America has Walt Whitman but France has Baudellaire and Rimbaud, and England has William Blake. Of the four, it would probably have been easier for her to have Whitman as a spiritual guide but instead she chose the European poets and in doing so aimed far beyond her own culture.

In Europe she's now recognised as an absolute artist but I suspect that in America she's not viewed in quite the same way. What is it they say? A prophet is never recognised in their own land?

What Patti has built up over the decades is a huge canon of work and it's this that is going to be her legacy for humankind when she passes. I remember her once saying that in the end, you won't be remembered for your looks or for taking a lot of drugs; only the work will remain - so make it good.

Patti has stayed faithful to this idea and when it comes to her recorded output the only dud album she's ever made (in my opinion) is Twelve, her covers album. I remember her also saying about when she met William Burroughs when she was very young and him telling her to build up her name by the merit of her deeds and her work. Again, this is what she's stayed faithful to (which is why Twelve is a dud album - the songs are all straight covers and there's nothing really of herself put into them, so consequently they have little artistic merit).

Her recorded output is, however, just one aspect of her work. There is also her photography and her written work. Of her books, there's one in particular with the title Complete that I can always go to if ever I need inspiration as it contains both her lyrics and her photographs. It never fails. And then there's her memoir, Just Kids, of course. And then her lesser known books such as The Coral Sea and Woolgathering.

The Coral Sea is basically an ode to Robert Mappelthorpe, composed after his death in 1989. It's a deeply personal collection of poems - a season in grief, Patti describes them as - telling the story of a man on an ocean journey to see the constellation of the Southern Cross. The man is called simply 'M' and he's fighting an illness that's consuming him. Mappelthorpe, of course, died of AIDS.

"When he passed away I could not weep so I wrote," says Patti as an introduction, so as you might imagine it's not a light or an easy read. An interesting thing is that Patti makes no attempt to be communicative and instead it seems that the poems are the point in themselves. She's not trying to talk to an audience, a readership, or to anyone, really; and to understand The Coral Sea, it helps if you can recognise this.

Some years later, Patti performed it live at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London accompanied by Kevin Shields of My Bloody Valentine on guitar, later releasing it as a double CD. Like the book, it's not an easy experience but it's brilliantly mesmerising in its intensity and in many ways works far better than the printed version.

Woolgathering stems from 1992 and is another collection of Patti's prose poems, this time being a meditation on her childhood. Quite simply, it's accessible, it's beautiful and it's sublime. It's a joy to read.

One of the pieces by the name of Nineteen Fifty-Seven concerns itself with the year that Patti's younger sister, Kimberley, was born, beginning with the subject of her neighbour - an elderly man who would sit out in all weathers outside his house selling fish bait. As a child, Patti believes there are people out in the field near her home at night, working away at some strange task. She can see movement in the grass and she can catch glimpses and hear the sound of talking but can never fully see them. One day she asks her neighbour who these people are and he replies "They be the woolgatherers...", and from this Patti's imagination is fired. She goes on to describe the death of her pet dog and the fire that consumes a large black barn near to her home one night. She stands watching the fire as she holds her baby sister in her arms, knowing that the woolgatherers will protect the field from the fire just as she was protecting her sister.

If you know Patti Smith then you'll know this is connecting to the song Kimberley, from her Horses début album: "The wall is high, the black barn, the babe in my arms in her swaddling clothes. And I know soon that the sky will split, and the planets will shift. Balls of jade will drop and existence will stop. Little sister, the sky is falling, I don't mind, I don't mind. Little sister the fates are calling on you... The palm trees fall into the sea, it doesn't matter much to me, as long as you're safe, Kimberley. And I can gaze deep, into you starry eyes, into your starry eyes."

There's a line in one of the poems, Barndance, that catches childhood so well: "The child, mystified by the commonplace, moves effortlessly into the strange," and when you juxtapose this to, as an example, her indictment of George W Bush in the film Dream Of Life then you can see the sheer breadth of her consciousness. There it all is. A beautiful and clear insight into innocence and a scathing, coruscating anger against the abuse of power.

I rest my case: Patti Smith is as near to a saint that anyone can be in this day and age.

John Serpico