Monday, January 23, 2012
Citizen M's Bon Voyage
Darn it. Luc Sante had to go and write this splendid thing about Patti Smith (read it now, I'll be here when you get back)
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/feb/09/mother-courage-rock/?pagination=false
So I finally got around to tweaking my ancient Voice review of Smith/Shields' The Coral Sea (go listen first). Just added a little bit in the middle (any visual oddities are Blogger's of course)
PATTI SMITH/KEVIN SHIELDS: THE CORAL SEA (2008)
From the ambered memory and legacy of the artist-collector Robert Mapplethorpe (1946–1989), his friend and colleague Patti Smith has drawn "the passenger M," whose name appears thus in her 1996 prose poem The Coral Sea, now a performance piece, recorded in collaboration with My Bloody Valentine guitarist Kevin Shields. M's abbreviation mark washes away as he (dreams that he) sets sail to find the Southern Cross—or at least glimpses "wet crepe, a beloved port, or a loved one fading, a tiny dot dissolving, in the vast grainy sea." But he's on his own way now (this isn't a Mapplethorpe biography), and even if he's glimpsed death, his sudden "weightless" relief isn't about casting off earthly snares and cares; instead, it's filled with "the earth-rageous scent of his own volition: The air is sweet..."
Darn it. Luc Sante had to go and write this splendid thing about Patti Smith (read it now, I'll be here when you get back)
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/feb/09/mother-courage-rock/?pagination=false
So I finally got around to tweaking my ancient Voice review of Smith/Shields' The Coral Sea (go listen first). Just added a little bit in the middle (any visual oddities are Blogger's of course)
PATTI SMITH/KEVIN SHIELDS: THE CORAL SEA (2008)
From the ambered memory and legacy of the artist-collector Robert Mapplethorpe (1946–1989), his friend and colleague Patti Smith has drawn "the passenger M," whose name appears thus in her 1996 prose poem The Coral Sea, now a performance piece, recorded in collaboration with My Bloody Valentine guitarist Kevin Shields. M's abbreviation mark washes away as he (dreams that he) sets sail to find the Southern Cross—or at least glimpses "wet crepe, a beloved port, or a loved one fading, a tiny dot dissolving, in the vast grainy sea." But he's on his own way now (this isn't a Mapplethorpe biography), and even if he's glimpsed death, his sudden "weightless" relief isn't about casting off earthly snares and cares; instead, it's filled with "the earth-rageous scent of his own volition: The air is sweet..."
Smith says "earth-rageous" in the second of two shows, from 2005 and 2006, which comprise this double-disc set. Like all of her wordplay here—as written, sometimes spontaneously spoken, and occasionally sung—it fits. M's real-life original claimed that he never wanted his work to be outrageous. Even the photographer's Portfolio X, an eerie slow train of S&M-mad hopefuls, is fueled by the extended draining of pain (and shock, revulsion—all bad blood) from its sculpted wake. With the same kind of conviction, Smith rides and guides the diverging momentum of these two shows, one 64 minutes long, the other 55. As M's visions and decisions ("He would dine on desire . . . ") keep zigzagging and spiraling through the last of his refiner's fire, the tides of his veins, so Smith and M attune and re-calibrate each other via the raised and extended twang bar of Kevin Shields' otherwise-unaccompanied guitar, and its singing, maybe-thinking-about-singeing pedals.
A wicked tableau of a tropical paradise, in which other travelers, all of many pleasing aural colors, come bearing gifts to the discerning infant phenomenon, eventually jolts into, "He couldn't---he couldn't remember what they were for." One performance also wobbles into a tremulous, superfluous fable for hoarders (okay, c'est moi). But soon enough, Shields waves another shiney reminder: all words and other sounds are rungs, bringing the passenger through. Ultimately, Shields' celestial navigation is closer than it often seems to his recurring role as My Bloody Valentine's blowtorch-breathed gator; though a beast is waiting in and for M, so is something gorgeous. Don Allred
(Another riff on this in w other pitches, before Voice placement: https://papercomet.blogspot.com/2020/10/negativland-pitch-see-prev.html
¶ 1/23/2012
