This article was first published at Blogcritics
After some cursory attention to her childhood, Patti Smith moves very quickly to the heart of her new memoir, Just Kids, with her arrival in New York City in the summer of 1967 in pursuit of the artist's life. She has no money. Friends she hoped would put her up are nowhere to be found. Some kind of job in the arts out of reach: she is reduced to living on the streets. And then she meets a young man, an artist almost as destitute as she is herself; there is an affinity right from the start. Their relationship seems to have been almost mystically fated. They pool their meager resources, and Smith begins her "vie boheme," with famed photographer, Robert Maplethorpe.
If you are looking for the story of Patti Smith's career as a rock star, Just Kids isn't where you're going to find it. While she does write something about her music, it only comes at the very end of the book, it is very sketchy at best. She tells more about Maplethorpe's photograph session for the "Horses" album cover than she does about the music itself. This memoir is focused on the period before she became famous. It talks about her poetry; it talks about her drawings, but most of all it talks about her love and friendship for the photographer.
They may have only had enough money to share a hot dog at Nathan's or grilled cheese sandwiches at a local diner, but what they did have was an intense faith in themselves as artists destined to produce work of greatness coupled with a firm belief that to produce art was perhaps man's noblest ambition. "It's the artist's responsibility," she tells us, " to balance mystical communication and the labor of creation." More often than not she talks about art and artists in religious terms. Jim Morrison is "like a West Coast Saint Sebastian." Birdland is "hallowed ground" that was "blessed by John Coltrane." Maplethorpe's "service was to art, not to church or country." She sets off for New York from her South Jersey home like a Joan of Arc in pursuit of her destined glory.
And she finds it. The late sixties in New York were filled with budding painters, musicians, poets, actors with the same kind of devotion, not to mention the bevy artistic wannabees and hangers on in pursuit of their own dreams. There were even those, poets like the Beats, artists like Andy Warhol, who had already found success. There was a ready-made community with similar values always looking for kindred souls, always willing to see greatness in the work of their friends.
Indeed, the most interesting parts of the book are the anecdotes about the great and the near great. Allen Ginsberg, thinking she's a pretty boy, buys Smith a cheese sandwich at the Automat when she is short of money. Gregory Corso, falls asleep in her arm chair while reading her poems, and burns a hole in the arm. She goes out to dinner with Sam Sheppard, not realizing he is a famous playwright. Maplethorpe takes her to meet his Catholic family and tells them they are married. She visits Jim Morrison's grave in Paris and is scolded by an old crone caretaker because Americans have no respect for their poets.
Her own prose is at times very poetic, at times somewhat pretentious. At her best she has a knack for just the right inventive image. The first man walking on the moon is putting "rubber treads on a pearl of the gods." Jim Carroll "shot stuff in his freckled hand, like the darker side of Huckleberry Finn." On the other hand she calls a Bob Dylan obsessed fan's analysis of one of his songs an "endless labyrinth of incomprehensible logic." She says Maplethorpe "sought to elevate aspects of male experience, to imbue homosexuality with mysticism." Often the high flown mystical language makes an ironic contrast to the sleaziness of the one small room they shared at the Chelsea Hotel and the second hand outfits she is constantly describing.
As memoirs go, the most impressive thing about Just Kids is its honesty. Smith's description of her life with Maplethorpe has the ring of truth. She doesn't seem to have tidied things up. Drugs, sex, poverty—they're all there. Nothing is made to look rosy: except that there were two young people and they had their art and they had each other, and for a time that was enough.
Thursday, June 17, 2010
Sunday, June 6, 2010
Book Review: Body Parts: A Collection of Poems About Aging. by Janet Cameron Hoult
This article was first published at Blogcritics
Robert Browning, in his dramatic monologue "Rabbi Ben Ezra," begins with the Rabbi asserting "Grow old along with me!/The best is yet to be." Not every reader looking at Janet Cameron Hoult's images of old age in the poems in her new anthology, Body Parts: A Collection of Poems About Aging would agree. Poem after poem details the physical breakdowns associated with the 'best' that is yet to come. "Just can't bend over anymore," she tells us in "Anymore." In "Lost in Noise," she tells us "My hearing loss is getting worse," and in "Ringing in My Ears," her tinnitus "rings like a church steeple." In "The Nose Knows," she talks about the loss of the sense of smell, and other poems talk about loss of memory, loss of teeth, not to mention sagging body parts. Of course aging isn't only about loss, there is gain as well: hair in the nose and ears, pain in the joints, wrinkles in the flesh.
And Hoult knows what she's talking about. Certainly, we don't want to confuse the poet with the speaker in her poems, no more than we would want to confuse Browning with the good Rabbi or any of the less reputable speakers in his poems. Poetry is not autobiography; as the author profile on the back cover of Body Parts proudly proclaims, the poet is in her seventies, and though she may well suffer some, even all of the maladies and disorders described in the poems, she and her husband are still actively "chasing solar eclipses, mentoring student rocketeers and visiting their grandchildren and great grandchild." Nevertheless, you can't be in the seventies without at least some experience with the physical decay endemic to aging.
So, let's postulate that Hoult indeed knows what she is talking about. It is significant, then, that despite all the demeaning insults of aging, she can still find like Tennyson's "Ulysses" that "old age has yet his honor and his toil." Poets have long sought the "newer world," the "work of noble note" left to those grown old. They have sought the "abundant recompense" that makes up for the loss of "splendor in the grass, of glory in the flower." The fire and passion of youth may be gone, but there is something new to replace it: a new calmer way of looking at the world, "the philosophic mind." It may well be something less intense, but it may well be something well suited to the later stages of life. Intensity may be overrated when the AARP beckons.
"Choice Parts" is a poem that looks what seniors still have to offer:
It is the choice of the senior to go on living as best she can, or simply die a little more each day. So "let's just keep on, keeping on," she concludes.
In "Memories and Sensations," she talks about the loss of youthful passion in terms very much reminiscent of Wordsworth. She, like him, asks, what can fill us with joy and delight again now that age has drained us of "vital juices." What she concludes is that we have memories: "the sight of a lovely sunset,/the sound of a haunting violin. . ./the touch of a lover's caress." In a somewhat less serious vein, "Compensations" points out that while old age may ravage us physically; those very ravages prevent us from seeing the flaws in those we love. If our significant other snores, our hearing loss lets us sleep peacefully. Since we can't see each other's faces as well anymore, we can't see the gray, the wrinkles, the age spots. Growing old together then is not all bad.
Hoult's poetry is not always so serious. She likes a pun: "Mr. Arthur It is." She plays with Poe's "The Bells" in "Pills" and Joyce Kilmer's "Trees" in "Knees:" "I think that I shall never see/A replacement lovely as a knee." She does a couple of comic turns on the confusion of similar words caused by hearing loss. She pokes some gentle fun at the forgetfulness that haunts us as we get older, the glasses we can never find, the people we can't remember, the car that we parked and lost.
The poems in Body Parts are not written in the cryptic mode of much of modern poetry. Hoult writes with a simple clarity and ease. Her imagery is drawn from experience. The verse patterns are fluid but never the stuff of insipid doggerel. In short, this is an anthology that deals with its subject seriously and with honesty.
Robert Browning, in his dramatic monologue "Rabbi Ben Ezra," begins with the Rabbi asserting "Grow old along with me!/The best is yet to be." Not every reader looking at Janet Cameron Hoult's images of old age in the poems in her new anthology, Body Parts: A Collection of Poems About Aging would agree. Poem after poem details the physical breakdowns associated with the 'best' that is yet to come. "Just can't bend over anymore," she tells us in "Anymore." In "Lost in Noise," she tells us "My hearing loss is getting worse," and in "Ringing in My Ears," her tinnitus "rings like a church steeple." In "The Nose Knows," she talks about the loss of the sense of smell, and other poems talk about loss of memory, loss of teeth, not to mention sagging body parts. Of course aging isn't only about loss, there is gain as well: hair in the nose and ears, pain in the joints, wrinkles in the flesh.
And Hoult knows what she's talking about. Certainly, we don't want to confuse the poet with the speaker in her poems, no more than we would want to confuse Browning with the good Rabbi or any of the less reputable speakers in his poems. Poetry is not autobiography; as the author profile on the back cover of Body Parts proudly proclaims, the poet is in her seventies, and though she may well suffer some, even all of the maladies and disorders described in the poems, she and her husband are still actively "chasing solar eclipses, mentoring student rocketeers and visiting their grandchildren and great grandchild." Nevertheless, you can't be in the seventies without at least some experience with the physical decay endemic to aging.
So, let's postulate that Hoult indeed knows what she is talking about. It is significant, then, that despite all the demeaning insults of aging, she can still find like Tennyson's "Ulysses" that "old age has yet his honor and his toil." Poets have long sought the "newer world," the "work of noble note" left to those grown old. They have sought the "abundant recompense" that makes up for the loss of "splendor in the grass, of glory in the flower." The fire and passion of youth may be gone, but there is something new to replace it: a new calmer way of looking at the world, "the philosophic mind." It may well be something less intense, but it may well be something well suited to the later stages of life. Intensity may be overrated when the AARP beckons.
"Choice Parts" is a poem that looks what seniors still have to offer:
Yes, we can make a difference
in this world of ours;
And sharing skills with others
can help to pass the hours.
We have so much experience,
there's so much that we know.
Why don't we share this wisdom
and help young people grow?
It is the choice of the senior to go on living as best she can, or simply die a little more each day. So "let's just keep on, keeping on," she concludes.
In "Memories and Sensations," she talks about the loss of youthful passion in terms very much reminiscent of Wordsworth. She, like him, asks, what can fill us with joy and delight again now that age has drained us of "vital juices." What she concludes is that we have memories: "the sight of a lovely sunset,/the sound of a haunting violin. . ./the touch of a lover's caress." In a somewhat less serious vein, "Compensations" points out that while old age may ravage us physically; those very ravages prevent us from seeing the flaws in those we love. If our significant other snores, our hearing loss lets us sleep peacefully. Since we can't see each other's faces as well anymore, we can't see the gray, the wrinkles, the age spots. Growing old together then is not all bad.
Hoult's poetry is not always so serious. She likes a pun: "Mr. Arthur It is." She plays with Poe's "The Bells" in "Pills" and Joyce Kilmer's "Trees" in "Knees:" "I think that I shall never see/A replacement lovely as a knee." She does a couple of comic turns on the confusion of similar words caused by hearing loss. She pokes some gentle fun at the forgetfulness that haunts us as we get older, the glasses we can never find, the people we can't remember, the car that we parked and lost.
The poems in Body Parts are not written in the cryptic mode of much of modern poetry. Hoult writes with a simple clarity and ease. Her imagery is drawn from experience. The verse patterns are fluid but never the stuff of insipid doggerel. In short, this is an anthology that deals with its subject seriously and with honesty.
Friday, June 4, 2010
Madness Under the Royal Palms: Love and Death Behind the Gates of Palm Beach by Laurence LeamerMy rating: 2 of 5 stars
Pretentious look at the rich and perhaps not so famous demonstrating that they are just as vain, vapid and self promoting as the rest of humanity. One has to wonder why anyone would care about these people, except that they have money.
View all my reviews >>
Saturday, May 29, 2010
Thoughts on Malcolm Galdwell's Essays
What the Dog Saw and Other Adventures by Malcolm GladwellMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
No wonder Gladwell's books don't drop from the best seller lists, his essays are wonderful reading. No matter what the subject, he is smart and challenging. One of his favorite tactics is to knock two or three different exsamples together to make a point: pit bulls, mafioso, and terrorists to make a point about stereotyping and profiling; reading aerial photographs and reading mamograms to show the difficulty of interpreting different kinds of information even though we often regard the results of those interpretations as definitive.
View all my reviews >>
DVD Review: The Pacific
Article first published as DVD Review: The Pacific on Blogcritics.
HBO's Emmy Award winning miniseries, The Pacific, will be released in a smartly boxed six DVD set on November 2. Beginning in December of 1941 and going through the end of the war in 1945, the series looks at the struggles in the Pacific theater through the dramatization of the real life experiences of three representative Marines and their comrades. It is not simply the story of the battles, although there is some of the most realistic depiction of the horrors of those famous battles—Guadalcanal, Cape Gloucester, Peleliu, Iwo Jima, Okinawa; it is also the story of the effects of these brutal struggles on the men who fought them.
The three central figures are Medal of Honor winner John Bosilone played by Jon Seda, Eugene Sledge (Joe Mazzello), and Robert Leckie (James Badge Dale). The journeys of these three men provide a convenient point of departure and an excellent source of first person information, since both Sledge and Leckie wrote about their wartime experiences after the war: Leckie in the 1957, Helmet for My Pillow and Sledge in With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa. Bosilone, on the other hand, after his heroic actions on Guadalcanal, was ordered back to the United States to take part in the war bond drive and became a well known celebrity whose life was well documented. The series shows the high almost naïve expectations of the men as they leave for the war zone, their reactions to the horrifying deaths and mutilations of their comrades and the fanaticism of the enemy, and the difficult adjustment to ordinary life after they return home.
The Pacific is not a glamorous romanticized picture of war. There is heroism certainly, but it is the heroism of conquering fear and charging up a beach into the face of machine gun barrages, it is the heroism of trudging through mud in the heat of tropics with little or no water or time to rest, it is the heroism of doing what needs to be done to kill the enemy and to stay alive. It is impossible to watch this series without tearing up at what these men went through. War is hell may have become something of a cliché; every once in awhile we need to be reminded that what may be a cliché for those of us who never had to experience that horror, may well be a truth for those who do. With our armed forces fighting even now, it is a reminder that is clearly of the moment.
Nor does the series shy away from some of the philosophical questions raised by war. There is for example a discussion in the fifth episode between the newly arrived Sledge and the more veteran Leckie on the question of evil in a world created by a just God. The question of ends justifying means is raised when one of their own soldiers loses it and begins screaming in the middle of the night and needs to be silenced before he gives away their position. There is the problem of how to deal with an enemy who will try and kill you even as you try to deal with his wounds. There is even some implied explanation and justification of the use of the Atom Bomb to end the war.
War brutalizes everyone involved in it, and the series doesn't sugar coat the brutal behaviors of either side. We are shown how the Japanese used civilians as shields on Okinawa, how, for example they turned one woman and her baby into a human bomb. But we are also shown marines digging gold teeth out of the mouths of dead Japanese soldiers. We see them taking pot shots at one of the enemy soldiers who seems to be surrendering. While these things are not quite morally equivalent, they do suggest that there is inhumane behavior on both sides.
Still when all is said and done The Pacific is most importantly a testament to the self-effacing courage of the marines that fought and died for their country. One of the extras included on the DVD is a set of profiles of some of the men featured in the film. Friends and relatives talk about them. Those that were still living talk about themselves and the others. They explain what it was like to be there and how it felt to come home. To a man they declined to call themselves heroes; to a man they question how it was that of all the men who went, why is it they that were the ones that made it out alive. To a man they talk about the nightmares that still haunt them after fifty years. It is to the series' credit that their service and the sacrifice of those who didn't make it home are never trivialized; they are presented with honesty and integrity.
Other bonus materials included with the set are a feature on the making of the series, a special section on what they call the "Anatomy of the Pacific War," and short historical narratives that can be played before each of the ten episodes. The first shows the care the production team took to create an accurate picture of what it was like on those islands, whether it was in creating a beach that looked like the real thing or trying to emulate the torrential rains. Actors were put through a boot camp to give them an insight into what the men they were playing actually went through. The "Anatomy" talks about the Japanese soldier and the Japanese attitude toward surrender. It focuses on the cultural attitudes fostered both in the East and the West that may well have been responsible for the brutality of the war. It tries to provide a larger perspective through which to view the events. The historical introductions are narrated by Tom Hanks and include clips from interviews with some of the veterans.
HBO's Emmy Award winning miniseries, The Pacific, will be released in a smartly boxed six DVD set on November 2. Beginning in December of 1941 and going through the end of the war in 1945, the series looks at the struggles in the Pacific theater through the dramatization of the real life experiences of three representative Marines and their comrades. It is not simply the story of the battles, although there is some of the most realistic depiction of the horrors of those famous battles—Guadalcanal, Cape Gloucester, Peleliu, Iwo Jima, Okinawa; it is also the story of the effects of these brutal struggles on the men who fought them.
The three central figures are Medal of Honor winner John Bosilone played by Jon Seda, Eugene Sledge (Joe Mazzello), and Robert Leckie (James Badge Dale). The journeys of these three men provide a convenient point of departure and an excellent source of first person information, since both Sledge and Leckie wrote about their wartime experiences after the war: Leckie in the 1957, Helmet for My Pillow and Sledge in With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa. Bosilone, on the other hand, after his heroic actions on Guadalcanal, was ordered back to the United States to take part in the war bond drive and became a well known celebrity whose life was well documented. The series shows the high almost naïve expectations of the men as they leave for the war zone, their reactions to the horrifying deaths and mutilations of their comrades and the fanaticism of the enemy, and the difficult adjustment to ordinary life after they return home.
The Pacific is not a glamorous romanticized picture of war. There is heroism certainly, but it is the heroism of conquering fear and charging up a beach into the face of machine gun barrages, it is the heroism of trudging through mud in the heat of tropics with little or no water or time to rest, it is the heroism of doing what needs to be done to kill the enemy and to stay alive. It is impossible to watch this series without tearing up at what these men went through. War is hell may have become something of a cliché; every once in awhile we need to be reminded that what may be a cliché for those of us who never had to experience that horror, may well be a truth for those who do. With our armed forces fighting even now, it is a reminder that is clearly of the moment.
Nor does the series shy away from some of the philosophical questions raised by war. There is for example a discussion in the fifth episode between the newly arrived Sledge and the more veteran Leckie on the question of evil in a world created by a just God. The question of ends justifying means is raised when one of their own soldiers loses it and begins screaming in the middle of the night and needs to be silenced before he gives away their position. There is the problem of how to deal with an enemy who will try and kill you even as you try to deal with his wounds. There is even some implied explanation and justification of the use of the Atom Bomb to end the war.
War brutalizes everyone involved in it, and the series doesn't sugar coat the brutal behaviors of either side. We are shown how the Japanese used civilians as shields on Okinawa, how, for example they turned one woman and her baby into a human bomb. But we are also shown marines digging gold teeth out of the mouths of dead Japanese soldiers. We see them taking pot shots at one of the enemy soldiers who seems to be surrendering. While these things are not quite morally equivalent, they do suggest that there is inhumane behavior on both sides.
Still when all is said and done The Pacific is most importantly a testament to the self-effacing courage of the marines that fought and died for their country. One of the extras included on the DVD is a set of profiles of some of the men featured in the film. Friends and relatives talk about them. Those that were still living talk about themselves and the others. They explain what it was like to be there and how it felt to come home. To a man they declined to call themselves heroes; to a man they question how it was that of all the men who went, why is it they that were the ones that made it out alive. To a man they talk about the nightmares that still haunt them after fifty years. It is to the series' credit that their service and the sacrifice of those who didn't make it home are never trivialized; they are presented with honesty and integrity.
Other bonus materials included with the set are a feature on the making of the series, a special section on what they call the "Anatomy of the Pacific War," and short historical narratives that can be played before each of the ten episodes. The first shows the care the production team took to create an accurate picture of what it was like on those islands, whether it was in creating a beach that looked like the real thing or trying to emulate the torrential rains. Actors were put through a boot camp to give them an insight into what the men they were playing actually went through. The "Anatomy" talks about the Japanese soldier and the Japanese attitude toward surrender. It focuses on the cultural attitudes fostered both in the East and the West that may well have been responsible for the brutality of the war. It tries to provide a larger perspective through which to view the events. The historical introductions are narrated by Tom Hanks and include clips from interviews with some of the veterans.
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