Poetry and Patti

Enrico Ghezzi's Fuori Orario - Cose Mai Viste opens with a clip from Jean Vigo's 1934 trancelike feature film L'Atalante, narrating the story of two young newly-weds' trip through the waterways of France. The track Ghezzi uses for his series' opening is none other than Patti Smith's fetching 1970s masterpiece Because the Night.





Despite the hundreds of times I've watched this opening, I still find the totally arbitrary combination of the poetic shots from Atalante and Patti's masterpiece overpowering. The shots and the music somehow coalesce. Parhaps it is poetry that creates this very strange connection: Vigo's visual metaphor and Patti's pregnant lines.




I must admit I've been a Patti Smith fan since ages. Like Roger Waters, she is a rock-poet par excellence. Her distinguished arty ways to rock, her literature accompanied by music, make her one of the very few people in the rock scene who I can't stop admiring.

I spent yesterday evening reading The Coral Sea, Patti's poetic farewell to long time friend Robert Mapplethorpe. It is a metaphorical journey through grief and anguish, recasting in a very Romantic manner Mapplethorpe's last voyage from earth to the Beyond.

And he spread his naked arms to the sun like a savage. Stretched them into
dawn, into warmth. And he believed he could adapt to anything. His elevated
temperature would gift him with unlimited mobility. Then nourished, refreshed he
would harden, expand.

And all the muscles were contracting.

And he could feel it coming and all he could do was draw what he could and
shed what was wretched.

And all the muscles were contracting.

And images rushed with Amazon force. Some pleasurable, some liquid. A
glowing hive, a helmet of skin. And he could feel everything. The purity wherein
all formulas of light and death are exposed.

And all the muscles were contracting.

And he was emergin, drenched and pink and vibrant, the sking pulled back by
the hand of God.

Incidentally, anyone lucky enough to have the time and cash to fly to London in June should make sure to attend this year's Meltdown Festival, which is being directed by Patti Smith.