Patti
Smith live dates and events
Dates for Paris in January 2011 already...
Steven Sebring's documentary Patti Smith: Dream of Life up for primetime Emmy
Tonic: "Smith is an important fixture in American culture. She is a singer, poet, activist and mother. Yet Sebring felt documenting her life, as the woman who encompasses all of these aspects, was important enough to spend years creating. "Life is an adventure of our own design intersected by fate in a series of lucky and unlucky accidents," Smith says in the film. "I had in mind to become an artist, poet, and through that pursuit I found the root of my voice."
Patti Smith confesses love of Lorca's poetry
ThinkSpain: “I have always enjoyed reading him and I've learnt a lot about improvisation and on-scene presence, thanks to him.” Patti Smith, who currently works as 'advisor' to Johnny Depp in his production of a film about Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards, has been performing tracks from her most recent studio album, Twelve, released in 2007."
Letter From Paris: Patti Smith and Just Kids
Huffington Post: "It's important for them to read this record of your and Robert's life as artists growing up together and of this transforming crack of time in New York when young women and men came to our greatest American city and soared like eagles in the sky before flying too close to the sun, burning their wings, and falling to the earth dying or dead. A generation of genius lost...not forgotten."
Documentary: "Patti Smith: Long for the City"
"Patti Smith and her poetry wind their way through the streets of New York City, as she voices her thoughts on her neighbourhood and her life." Duration nine minutes. Included in the programme of Melbourne International Film Festival in July 22nd - August 8th 2010.
Patti Smith by Joseph O'Connor: "My hero"
The Guardian: "She has been a poet, an acclaimed photographer, a memoirist, a mother, perhaps the last truly uncompromised artist in rock music"
"How Peter Pan inspired Patti Smith to write a children's classic"
Evening Standard: "Her thoughts have turned to writing her own story for posterity after the success of her memoir, Just Kids. "It has inspired me to keep writing," she said. She has a sequel planned and a book of travels but her ambition is to write a children’s classic. "I want to write a book like Peter Pan or Alice in Wonderland or Pinocchio, a classic like the books I loved. That’s my life goal.""
Anniversary of accident marked at rock festival
New York Times: "The annual Roskilde music festival began in Denmark on Thursday with a memorial to mark the 10th anniversary of an accident in which nine people were killed during a concert performance, The Associated Press reported. Patti Smith threw nine roses to the crowd as Lenny Kaye, her longtime bandmate, read the names of the concertgoers who were killed."
"Patti Smith’s Punk Screams Shatter Peace in Hyde Park"
Bloomberg: "It was meant to be a lazy evening of thoughtful folk music in a London park. That was until Patti Smith and her band delivered 90 electric minutes of taut punk rock, incisive anger and guitar- driven beat poetry."
"Patti Smith knows how to walk into a room"
Mike Hoolboom / Ryeberg Curated Video about Patti Smith on “Kids are People Too” (circa 1979): "Patti makes her way to the piano massacre without missing a beat. The keyboard player is in one time signature, while Patti is in another. I want to say that she’s singing from her heart, but she’s not. She’s singing from her whole body. The whole body at once is the teacher. Still that little girl from New Jersey playing in the patch. She forgets the words, she skips a verse. She holds the lines too long, she can’t hit the notes, and in her mistakes, in her necessary fragility and failures, she makes the song human again. She makes me human again."
Oscilloscope to lunch with “Burroughs” this fall
IndieWire: "Oscilloscope has picked up North American rights to Yony Leyser’s doc “William S. Burroughs: A Man Within.” The 2010 Slamdance Film Festival debut is a portrait of the Beat figure featuring never-before-seen archival footage of the author of Naked Lunch. Oscilloscope will release the film theatrically in the Autumn of 2010 followed by a DVD and digital release."
"Featuring interviews with colleagues and confidants including John Waters, Patti Smith, Iggy Pop, Gus Van Sant, Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, Sonic Youth, Laurie Anderson, Amiri Baraka, Jello Biafra, and David Cronenberg, the feature is described as a “probing, yet loving look at the man whose works at once savaged conservative ideals, spawned countercultural movements, and reconfigured 20th century culture.” Peter Weller narrates the film, with a soundtrack by Patti Smith & Sonic Youth."
Patti Smith asks fans to keep their cell phones off
Spinner: "A lot of people spend a lot of time taping, taking pictures, talking on the phone and sometimes, for me as a performer, I'd like us all to be more engaged in the moment," she told Spinner at the ASCAP Pop Music Awards on Wednesday night. "Usually that happens along the line."
"My number one job is to communicate and whether there's 20 people or 20,000 people, I try to get a sense of each person as an individual and of the collective energy," she said. "It's not necessarily to be perfect or to please every minute, but to feel that we're all living in the moment. We're just an old-fashioned rock 'n' roll band and it's a collective exchange. It's like alchemy."
Patti Smith Receives Lifetime Achievement Award from ASCAP
Crawdaddy: "Just yesterday, Patti Smith received a lifetime achievement award from the songwriting royalties groups ASCAP (American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers), a group that collects royalties on behalf of its member songwriters and copyright holders from public performances like radio, TV, in bars, restaurants, and concert halls. Songwriters especially benefit if others cover their songs. During her acceptance speech in Hollywood, Smith talked about how ASCAP checks helped her out of some really hard times, especially after the death of her husband, punk rocker Fred “Sonic” Smith, who left her a widowed mother of two. Which goes to show that not every musician, even iconic ones, are rolling in the dough. “I was actually down on my luck,” Smith said. “And what helped bail me out and helped me get back on my feet were the ASCAP checks that I got for ‘Because the Night.’”
Patti Smith: A Donation to NOMA
Press release by NOMA: "On Thursday, April 22nd, the night before JazzFest opens in New Orleans , artist and musician Patti Smith will present a talk at NOMA entitled "On Photography" at 6:00 pm in the Museum's Stern Auditorium. Her talk will accompany the opening of an exhibition of forty-five photographs by Smith, donated by the artist to the museum in 2009 and 2010. After receiving these two major gifts to NOMA's permanent collection, I invited Smith to come to NOMA to publicly address her relationship to photography, both in terms of her own photographic work and the history of the medium itself. "Patti Smith: A Donation to NOMA," consists of forty-five silver prints made from negatives produced by the artist's antique Polaroid Land 250 camera. These prints will be augmented by a few original, but unique, Polaroid photographs, which are also part of Smith's generous donation to our museum.".
Just Kids is getting great reviews
One of them by The Sunday Times: "They first met in 1967: she, an awkward Catholic girl from New Jersey, he an awkward Catholic boy from Queens. Both were 20. Smith, tall, thin and dreamy, had just recovered from an unwanted pregnancy, in which the nurses had been “very cruel and uncaring…[they] left me on a table for several hours, ridiculed me for my beatnik appearance and immoral behaviour, calling me ‘Dracula’s daughter’ ”. Giving the child up for adoption and jacking in her job at a text-book factory, she arrived in New York on a stolen fare with a raincoat, a suitcase and a copy of Baudelaire. Sleeping rough in parks and graveyards among junkies and hustlers, she finally secured a job; a series of chance encounters brought her together with Mapplethorpe, then a student at the Pratt Institute. Within days, they became inseparable, two downtown urchins “irrevocably intertwined, like Paul and Elisabeth, the sister and brother in Cocteau’s Les Enfants Terribles”."
"By day she scraped a living at Scribner’s, the bookstore, by night she painted, drew and wrote poetry with Mapplethorpe. To supplement their income, she stole half-eaten lobster claws from the restaurant next door for him to spray and sell as jewellery; he, in turn, took to, er, hustling “to make money for us”, she says, admitting a few pages later that he sometimes failed to take payment."
The 36th annual New Year's Day Poetry Reading features Patti Smith, Philip Glass
The Independent: "For the 36th year of the event, the 2010 New Year's Day Marathon Poetry Reading will occur at St. Mark's in New York City's East Village. More than 140 writers, poets and performers will read and perform, including Patti Smith, composer Philip Glass, and singer-songwriter Steve Earle. The event draws over 1,000 through the day, beginning at 2 pm on January 1, 2010."
Objects of Life
An exhibition by Patti Smith and Steven Sebring in Robert Miller Gallery, New York City: January 6th - February 6th 2010.
"Objects of Life is a fascinating exhibition of photographs, objects and video inspired by Steven Sebring's time with Patti Smith during the filming of their extraordinary documentary Dream of Life. During the 11 years of filming, Sebring became increasingly interested in the history and mythology behind the possessions and personal treasures that Smith shared in the film's most intimate moments. It resulted in the desire to return to his roots as photographer and to recontextualise the sacred and the commonplace through his camera lens. Objects of Life consists of 14 large-scale photographs taken by Sebring. This collection ranges from Smith's childhood dress to an ancient urn containing the remains of Smith's close friend and collaborator Robert Mapplethorpe, to black leather boots that have stomped around the world and a video installation of Smith in the course of creating an art piece. The exhibition also includes a rare oil painting by Smith, her largest and most recent work to date. Also featured is a private collection of personal belongings from both artists whose collaboration is grounded by their relationship to the film and to their individual personal experiences."
Who Shot Rock and Roll
A photographic exhibition at Brooklyn Museum until January 31st 2010.
"The New York City rock and roll scene figures prominently, featuring photos of bands from the Talking Heads and the Ramones, to Patti Smith and the Velvet Underground. "Very important what we were doing. For me, photographing in the streets, the Ramones being photographed on the streets, Talking Heads writing about Psycho Killer, everything was very of the moment and of New York and we were working to transform New York into an art form," said photographer Godlis. The exhibit shows the importance of photography to a musical movement as a silent window into the world of sound."
The New York City 400
"In celebration of New York's 400th birthday, the Museum of the City of New York recently compiled a list of the 400 most influential New Yorkers from the last four centuries. Of these great figures, one of them was Patti Smith, and along with this honorable title, she was also awarded a lifetime membership to the museum."
Pratt Institute honors Patti Smith
Interiordesign.net: "For her part, Smith accepted her award with recollections of her time spent living near the school. "Even though I never attended Pratt, I was touched by the world of Pratt, by the campus, by the students, by the professors, and I'm very happy to be part of a night that builds resources for scholarships."
"Smith wrapped the ceremony up with a four-song performance that included her classic "Because the Night," which she dedicated to Robert Mapplethorpe. "
Patti Smith – Simply a concert
An Italian photographic book of Patti Smith performing has been published.
"Patti Smith fans storm Mapplethorpe opening"
Artinfo (October 14th 2009): "The Alison Jacques Gallery could have found no better way to drum up interest for its exhibition of photographs by the late Robert Mapplethorpe than to host a performance by Patti Smith: songstress, poet, onetime Mapplethorpe muse, and all-around cultural icon. The problem was, the event last night generated a little too much interest. By 5:45, 15 minutes before Smith was to go on, a line of her fans stretched a full block from the gallery’s Berners Street address, and no sooner had the gallery thrown open its doors than more of them arrived, and streamed in, until the two rooms were packed and stifling, becoming an inadvertent play on the exhibition’s Rimbaud-derived title, “A Season in Hell.” One gallery-goer was seen fleeing, tossing over her shoulder the remark, “If you want to get hot, definitely go in there.”
Patti Smith performs 'Because The Night' at the opening (Youtube)
In Perfect Harmony: Music Legends and their Animals
A calendar, whose proceeds benefit Rational Animal, a nonprofit organization specializing in awareness for at-risk animals, includes Patti Smith: "Photographer Frank Stefanko’s portrait of Patti Smith and her kitty, titled “The Lookout,” successfully smashes the stereotype of the unhip “cat lady.”
Remembering Jim Carroll
Los Angeles Times: "A guardian angel for Jim then was Patti Smith, who worked at Scribner's bookshop on Fifth Avenue. One day I was there when Jim OD'd. Patti kept him awake, walking him around until he came to. "
Sam Shepard and Patti Smith in January 2010
Event information: "Sam Shepard and Patti Smith have been close friends since the early 1970s, when they co-wrote and co-starred in the play Cowboy Mouth. Upon the publication of their new books—Shepard's Day Out of Days, a collection of stories; and Smith's memoir Just Kids—they read together at the Poetry Center for the first time."
News
archives
1UPDATED JULY 29TH 2010 |
