VU
Lou Reed, Mo Tucker and Doug Yule in conversation with David Fricke, Live at the New York Public Library
nyc Archive
Patti Smith: A Salute to Robert Frank
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
17 October 2009
I keep trying to figure out what it means to be American.
When I look at myself I see Abyssinia, nineteenth-Century France, but I can’t recognize what makes me American. I think about Robert Frank’s photographs - broke down jukeboxes in Gallup, New Mexico, swaying hips and spurs, ponytails and syphilitic cowpokes, hash slinges, the glowing black tarp of US 285 and the Hoboken stars and stripes.
Patti wrote the words above in 1971. I thought about those words as I walked through the new Frank exhibit at the Met. I thought about Bruce Springsteen describing Bob Dylan a few weeks ago - “it was the country I recognized” - and how both of those sentiments describe what it was like being in the same room with “the Hoboken stars and stripes”.
jim carroll
I spent a lot of time seeing Jim Carroll when I was in college. This was when I went to poetry readings and gatherings and everything I possibly could, and Jim Carroll was, well, Jim Carroll. I also got to see his band play, a lot. Lenny Kaye was in his band, and while I would probably cringe today if I found a live recording of one of their shows somewhere, at the time I thought they were great. And Jim still read almost every year at the New Year’s Day reading at St. Mark’s.
Jim was accessible. Jim was kind. Jim never treated me like a stupid kid from the suburbs, which is what I was at the time.
Selfishly, this shit is getting entirely too close to home.
expressway to your heart.
I got the best fucking seats in the WORLD in the drop this morning.
Shea Goodbye
I was writing a post about concerts I have seen at Shea Stadium, and my paragraph on the Who prompted me to dig around on the hard drive for this masterpiece.
elsewhere