"Nightclubbing": '70s NYC punk rock videos sneak into library

Who could ever imagine that Patti Smith (of all people) would emerge as a certain kind of pop-culture icon, if such a distinction were ever granted? Her bohemian, romantic literary swoons and the nearly-Biblical declarations of her lyrics, which seemed so cantered to the prevailing popular culture of the 1970s and day-glo '80s, are now being celebrated as the unique visions her fans always knew they were.

The mirror of art is a subjective one, and clarity comes only with the passage of time, but Patti was right all along: I got nothin' to hide here save desire, she sang on that first single in 1975, Oh, watch me now. It was her big kiss-off to her Jersey childhood, and with its lyrical echoes of the Velvet Underground a hint of the fireworks to come.

She rocked out in a way that challenged the boys-club, but she was a quick study in opposites: Easter, the 1978 album that contained her biggest chart hit "Because the Night," was graced with a cover of Patti that was guaranteed to mess with the heads of many who bought it. Even as the song climbed in the charts (the single eventually reached 13 in Billboard -- a feat in itself during the Fleetwood Mac juggernaut year of Rumours) the cover image was there to remind us that rock'n'roll, like much art, is more about surprise than expectation.

Surprise, not expectation. Patti has continued to make a career out of contradiction, long after the term "downtown art" seems often to have lost any edge at all except as a weapon in the continuing "culture wars" of the moment. Just ask David Wojnarowicz about the recent furor at the Smithsonian. Patti's punk past -- along with the participation of the Ramones, Television, and others -- has come to seem a revelation with the right three chords.

Nightclubbing is a recent documentary that manages to capture some of the 1970s New York spark that Patti helped ignite, a five-part series of performances from 1975-1980 caught on Bowery stages and compiled by filmmakers Pat Ivers and Emily Armstrong. The two brought video equipment to CBGBs and other New York clubs; some rock bands (including Patti Smith) refused to be recorded, others agreed and then changed their minds. But the two kept coming back. When Ivers and Armstrong began paying 75 cents for beers -- the artists' rate at CBGB's -- Armstrong says "they had it made."

Kim Davis of The Local / East Village profiled efforts to preserve the hours of video at the Fales Library Special Collections. The filmmakers' entire treasure trove of early NY punk (more than one hundred bands) is now being digitally transferred and added to the Fales Library, and a series of five one-hour presentations of Nightclubbing are available for screenings with an arrangement by the film-makers themselves.

The shows feature the early Heartbreakers with Richard Hell, Talking Heads, Blondie, The Cramps, DNA, the Contortions, Dead Boys, John Cale, and more. The filmmakers are asking for comments and suggestions during the ongoing restoration process. For complete details and contact information the Nightclubbing website is here, and the documentary's Facebook page is here.

While it's to be expected that artists look back on their rough-and-tumble years with a certain tough fondness, Patti's personal history since those incendiary days has been just as challenging. Patti's book is without regret, if tinged with a sadness for the loss to AIDS of so many that created her Lower East Side universe. Here is Maureen Dowd, in a New York Times column, adding to the accolades for Patti and her memoir Just Kids.

Shocking! Patti, 1978, high on rebellion: some girls don't shave

... For anyone who has had a relationship where the puzzle pieces seem perfect but don’t fit — so, all of us — “Just Kids” is achingly beautiful. It’s “La Bohème” at the Chelsea Hotel; a mix, she writes, of “Funny Face” and “Faust,” two hungry artists figuring out whom to love, how to make art and when to part.

It unfolds in that romantic time before we were swallowed by Facebook, flat screens, texts, tweets and Starbucks; when people still talked all night and listened to jukeboxes and LPs and read actual books and drank black coffee.

Smith describes the wondrous odyssey of taking the bus from South Jersey and meeting a curly-haired soul mate who wanted to help her soar, even as the pair painfully grappled over the years with Mapplethorpe’s sexuality and his work’s brutality.

“Robert took areas of dark human consent and made them into art,” Smith writes about the former altar boy from Floral Park, Queens, who was bedeviled by Catholic concepts of good and evil. “Robert sought to elevate aspects of male experience, to imbue homosexuality with mysticism.”

When he began exploring his own desires in San Francisco, she said it was an education for her too.

“I had thought a man turned homosexual when there was not the right woman to save him, a misconception I had developed from the tragic union of Rimbaud and the poet Paul Verlaine,” she writes, adding that she mistakenly considered homosexuality “a poetic curse” that “irrevocably meshed with affectation and flamboyance.”

As they redefined their love, she writes, “I learned from him that often contradiction is the clearest way to truth.” ...

(Top: Photo of videotapes by Emily Armstrong, from The Local / East Village)

A writer's education: "For the Love of Books," 115 authors' favorite works

Here's the ultimate hot-summer-weekend beach read: Ask 115 writers to write about their favorite books. What author wouldn't spend five or six pages babbling on (okay, carefully crafting) a reply about some obscure title they obsessively read as a child, or the effect of a book casually chosen that hit them like a thunderclap? Which writers, exactly, did they desperately first try to mimic? With some choice replies achingly absent -- no one expected cranky J.D. Salinger to break his long career of silence -- For the Love of Books is still a fascinating and sometimes confounding pleasure.

For the Love of Books collects the stories of these 115 writers' literary educations: some are funny, many serious, and a great number surprising. John Barth's love of fable underpins his mention of The Thousand and One Nights; I wasn't expecting Kurt Vonnegut's debt to The Book of Genesis: "It's very interesting to have an origin myth, and I certainly wouldn't want to live without one." More than a few replies are echoes of near despair: books in which the writer finds a talent so monumental that they almost gave up their own writing altogether. And many of the replies open the reader to authors whose works may still be a puzzle, or yet to be read. From Pete Hammill comes mention of an unfamiliar novel also noted by Barth and Thomas McGuane:

"Epitaph of a Small Winner, by Machado de Assis, is another great novel, set in Brazil and written in Portuguese. I have maybe seven different versions of it. What's extraordinary is that it was written more than a hundred years ago yet it's so incredibly modern. First, the writing is so clean, and so about life -- it's written from the point of view of being dead. And it also has this very modernist sense that there is a collusion between the writer and the reader that's directly in the text. It's the kind of book I am incapable of writing. ... (Machado) was trying to capture, it seems to me, some essential truth about human beings ... he's saying that individuals are capable of stupidity and folly but then, in the end, you cherish them anyway. There's a warmth to the book, a kind of awed sunniness in Machado that I personally connect to."

Elmore Leonard admires Hemingway, but admits cheerfully that "Papa was the wrong guy to imitate"; then he discovers his narrative voice in the books of Richard Bissell: "The novel that hooked me was High Water. The story is set on a tow-boat pushing eight barge-loads of coal from St. Louis to St. Paul, up the Mississippi on a flood tide." What Leonard learns from the rough-and-tumble characters of Grease Cup and the Ironhat is to develop affection for his characters, and not to take writing books too seriously: "I've learned it has to be fun or it isn't worth doing."

John Irving admires the Dickensian novelists Garcia Marquez, Salman Rushdie, Gunter Grass ("I even gave Owen Meany the same initials as Oskar Matzarath, in homage to the master"). No surprise that Frank McCourt recites the opening questions from the catechism of the Roman Catholic Church. A surprising number list The Great Gatsby and Look Homeward Angel. Of Thomas Wolfe: "not much talked about these days," Sven Birkirts notes, "and the consensus seems to be that the novels are word-zeppelins, acres of hot air over which an outer skin has been stretched ... " Still, it was Wolfe's "cloud of romanticism (that) persuaded me I wanted to be a writer -- a novelist." Wolfe's "word-zeppelin" of a book also makes the lists of Mark Strand, William Styron, Kurt Vonnegut.

From John Updike to Dave Barry, even a random glance at For the Love of Books will reveal some gem: Gertrude Stein gets her expected, modernist due, and then there's the fond mention by one author of Archie comics. (Guess who.) The book is a joy-ride through contemporary literature: you may not understand Pete Hammill's esteem of Bomba, the Jungle Boy at the Giant Cataract, but here he is describing the excitement of meeting a a mutual fan:

"There couldn't be two American writers more different than me and Louis Auchincloss, but we know each other and we both have this Bomba, the Jungle Boy thing. Not long ago I ran into him in the middle of some big event at the Museum of the City of New York and he says to me, 'Pete, old boy. Do you have Bomba, the Jungle Boy at the Swamp Death? I just found a copy.' The people in our immediate vicinity thought we were insane or putting them on. But it was dead serious."

In his introduction Ronald Shwartz admits that compiling this book, while a work of deep interest and literary pursuit, was not easy. "Some correspondents were just this side of surly ... some were demure, like John Gregory Dunne ... then there were those who declined, redeclined, then acceeded, then redeclined again, and finally succumbed over the course of nine months." One of the more fascinating aspects of the book is the bibliography, which lists all the titles mentioned in the text, as well as who recommended them.

It's the reader's own to discover who likes what, who disparages whom, and who at the age of fifteen found a copy of Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio translated into Hebrew. And some contributors just can't leave without a slash of the poison pen; On the Road gets a faint-hearted pass by the curmudgeonly P.J. O'Rourke: "not very good, either ... but so completely American that, by comparison, Walt Whitman sounds like a windy, ancient Greek. Made me think even I could write." Take that, Jack!

In Bahrain, a poet is arrested, beaten, and receives a one-year jail term

Ayat Al Qurmazi

The Arabist blog reports that on Sunday a court in Bahrain sentenced Ayat Al Qurmazi, a 20-year-old education student, to a year in prison for insulting the king and inciting hatred. Al Qurmazi became famous after reciting poetry in Pearl Square that includes the lines such as:

We are the people who will kill humiliation and assassinate misery

We are the people who will destroy the foundation of injustice

Don’t you hear their cries, don’t you hear their screams

You can see her reciting her poetry at a recent event — dedicated directly to the king — here.

According to the Associated Press, while in detention Al Qurmazi was lashed in the face with electrical cables and forced to clean toilets with her hands. A Facebook page, in Arabic, is dedicated to her case.

The Guardian UK has more details on the arrest:

Qurmezi was in her second year of study toward a teaching degree at the University of Bahrain when she joined the protesters in Pearl Square.

"My daughter did nothing wrong," her mother told The Associated Press from the family home in Sadad, a village in central Bahrain. "She didn't raise her hands in anger. She used words to express how they felt. She was only using her rights of free speech."

Across the Arab world, poetry is a powerful and popular form of expression. Thousands of works have extolled the so-called Arab spring, ranging from free-form verse in Cairo's Tahrir Square to literary figures such as Syria's Ali Esber, better known by his pen name Adonis, who has railed against Arab despots and last month was awarded Germany's Goethe prize. ...

Her mother said Qurmezi also was expelled from university apparently caught up in government-ordered purges of thousands of students, workers and others accused of backing the protests.

At least 31 people have been killed in the unrest in Bahrain. Amnesty said at least 500 people have been detained.

"How can they do this to my daughter?" her mother asked. "Is this fair?"

Two former parliament members, Jawad Fairooz and Mattar Mattar, also went on trial on Sunday as part of wide-ranging arrests and trials of perceived enemies of the ruling system. Both are members of the main Shia political group, Wefaq, whose 18 lawmakers resigned to protest the harsh measures against protesters.

In a statement, Wefaq said the poet's arrest is a "clear message that the government is against freedom of expression." ...

This is a sad and sobering reminder that freedom is a never-ending destination, and a goal never universally achieved. Every day, much hard work must be done just to speak and write freely, not only in Bahrain but around the world — America included.

An excerpt from "See a Little Light," Bob Mould

New Day Rising was a very different album from Zen Arcade. They were composed only a matter of months apart but when I look back, it seems like years. Before New Day Rising, it was words floating around in notebooks, and me sweeping them up and gathering them all together in my hands like they were snowballs or fastballs, spitting on them, and throwing these words at the listener. The songs were outbursts of confusion, dealing almost exclusively with problems, and rarely offered answers. But the new songs, and their imagery, were different -- they addressed time, the transitory nature of emotions, and the passing of seasons.

"Celebrated Summer" was my first truly effective use of melancholy, a sentiment that was to become an element of my future songwriting. "I Apologize" chronicles a suspicion-filled and explosive relationship, describing how something as seemingly minor as forgetting to take out the trash can highlight how easily a relationaship can go silent. I still play those two songs in most every show.

And if Zen Arcade was the "gram of crystal meth in the first pot of coffee album," then New Day Rising was my drinking album. That's surely why the sessions don't stand out big for me. I'd been drinking heavily for a while, and you don't have to listen too hard to hear my inebriated state. "Perfect Example" was the sound of me sitting alone in front of an open microphone, a wee bit too drunk, muttering through a series of doubts, fears, and regrets. The words tumbled in free verse, and I don't think I listened to it after it was done. Then there's the mindless hardcore blast of "Whatcha Drinkin'": "I don't care what they say / I'll be drinkin' today." ...

We all make our own beds, and when the alarm goes off that's when it's time to wake up.

(from See a Little Light: The Trail of Rage and Melody, the new autobiography by Bob Mould, published by Little, Brown. Mould is an American musician, singer / songwriter, producer, and DJ. An original member of the influential 1980s punk band Hüsker Dü, he released several albums after the band separated, including Workbook, Copper Blue, Body of Song, and Life and Times.

A poem read after the Republican debate, by W.B. Yeats

Yeats, photographed in 1923

"Why Should Not Old Men Be Mad?"

William Butler Yeats

Why should not old men be mad?

Some have known a likely lad

That had a sound fly-fisher's wrist

Turn to a drunken journalist;

A girl that knew all Dante once

Live to bear children to a dunce;

A Helen of social welfare dream,

Climb on a wagonette to scream.

Some think it a matter of course that chance

Should starve good men and bad advance,

That if their neighbours figured plain,

As though upon a lighted screen,

No single story would they find

Of an unbroken happy mind,

A finish worthy of the start.

Young men know nothing of this sort,

Observant old men know it well;

And when they know what old books tell

And that no better can be had,

Know why an old man should be mad.

"Why Should Not Old Men be Mad?" appears in The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats. Yeats (1865-1939) was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1923, and was aware of the symbolic value of an Irish winner so soon after Ireland had gained independence. His reply to many of the letters of congratulations sent to him contained the words: "I consider that this honor has come to me less as an individual than as a representative of Irish literature, it is part of Europe's welcome to the Free State." Yeats used his acceptance lecture at the Royal Academy of Sweden to present himself as a standard-bearer of Irish nationalism and Irish cultural independence. As he remarked, "The theatres of Dublin were empty buildings hired by the English travelling companies, and we wanted Irish plays and Irish players."

NPR's Brooke Gladstone tonight in Decatur

Tonight at the Decatur Library, Brooke Gladstone talks about her new book The Influencing Machine, illustrated by artist Josh Neufeld in a comic-strip-style narrative, about the state of contemporary media. It's a funny, savvy and ultimately sobering examination of how the functions of journalism and Americans' constitutionally-guaranteed right to know have subtly been turned into a behemoth of corporate control.

Gladstone, the host of National Public Radio's On the Media, is opinionated about the way we ourselves have let the media construct our view of the world -- even more now, when all of us have access to an endless stream of information, when we use the internet to shape news in a way that reinforces our own ideas.

Ultimately optimistic, if a bit scattered, The Influencing Machine is an entertaining primer on the history of American mass media and its promising road into the 21st century -- once we learn that journalism has been a tool, and just often used as a weapon, throughout American history. At this point, with new technologies opening ever broader possibilities, it's still up to the user to decide how "mass media" will serve the individual best.

The event begins at 7:15 p.m. For more information on tonight's appearance contact the Georgia Center for the Book.

"When That Rough God Goes Riding", Greil Marcus listens to Van Morrison

When I was a sophomore in college sometime in the B.C.D. era (before compact discs), a friend of mine said she was taking six months off to follow Van Morrison, who was on tour. I can't remember what my initial thought was but I remember letting out a short laugh. It was a way of saying "What? Van Morrison?" without actually confronting my friend's decision to sidetrack the winter months in Syracuse (which now I consider a wise move) as much as ditching school to follow Morrison around the country -- which, now, of course, seems like the very wisdom of the ages, or of the early Seventies, at any rate.

Even after his brilliant string of albums (you can look them up) by 1972, I was not a Van man, simply for his music being off my radar more than anything. I just wasn't paying attention, busy on other things I suppose, and not much into Van's high-Irish pastoral vision of whatever he was getting at. Gimme rock'n'roll, baby: The Stooges, honkin' and squawkin'.

Now, in these decades A.D. (after disc), I have found that Morrison's music, like awaiting the return of a prodigal son, was worth waiting for, no matter how long it took. His was the first art that made me glad "to leave something for my old age" -- at 40, or 45, whenever it was that I first really listened to Astral Weeks and Veedon Fleece, and explore the vast pastures beyond.

Now I realize the world would be a somber, unbearable place without them, much less my own sense of place. Van may be singing about Eire's green hills but the aching and longing and sheer mystery of life-where-one-is-at-right-now or what-life-would-like-to-be-tomorrow is palpable. Not always (genius is unreliable, that's its spark) -- but there is enough continuity in the thread of his work and the meaning of Morrison's music that most of his albums have moments of clear and heartbreaking beauty.

Even when he's bitching about the music biz, which is like a splinter he can't quite dig out. By the point he recorded Magic Time (2005) he was at least aware of this last-nerve ranting: he doesn't end the album with the artist-as-persected-Jesus of "They Sold Me Out" ("...and divided up my robe") but ends the album with the resigned benediction of "Carry On Regardless."

Greil Marcus is no stranger to the arcane and the inexplicable in pop and rock culture, but also, in Lipstick Traces (1989), the canvas of the entire history of the twentieth century. (The effect of that book is like looking at history as if it were a Dali painting from five feet away, instead of fifty. History as art's extreme close-up.)

His book, When That Rough God Goes Riding: Listening to Van Morrison is his foray into the Morrison mysteries and, if you're up for it, a cross-cultural romp of influences, judgments, and fractured emotional responses to Van's work. Is it too much? Yes, and not enough, too. Its thick, wild and wooly theorizing is more a product of Marcus's love of Van's music than any rational trip through Morrison's catalogue. Fans will understand.

Abandoning a linear narrative opens the book to complaints of Marcus's personal obsession, messy and strained connections, and sheer confusion. But his approach-of-tangents gets to the core of why Morrison's music has an appeal more to individuals than a mass audience: at its best it's a vision. (One can Imagine the mystical, yearning Yeats attempting to fill stadium seats, decades of touring behind his work.) Whether Morrison himself intends it so, it's a wonder his music still makes it to the marketplace at all.

Here's Marcus making the case for Morrison's restlessness:

No performer, or no person who does creative work whether it’s a novelist or a singer or film director, actor, wants to be the prisoner of his or her past work. Otherwise you can’t go to anything new with a sense that is new, that you’re going to do something you haven’t done before, [that] you’re going to break through into an area you’ve never been able to reach before. I would think that would be both incredibly tiresome for Van Morrison to always have people tell him, “I love Astral Weeks so much,” or whatever it might be. And then he might say or he might imagine, “Well, did you hear The Healing Game or did you listen to Keep It Simple?” “Oh no, man, I stopped buying records back in 1981.” That’s awful. ...

I did find something he said in an interview very revelatory where he said something like, "The only time I'm really concentrating on the words is when I am writing them. But after that, when it comes time to sing the song, I release the words. And the words go out and they do what they want. Sometimes it's me chasing them or it's not up to me how they are going to arrange themselves."

Is this the book to start with an understanding of Van Morrison? No way. But it hits at something central in Morrison's music, the reaching for something else that may not even be there -- the phantom in the music that conjures more than the words and music and endless humming ever can. The best of Morrison's music, like Irish tales, wait on some force or form to appear and create some other meaning, to conjure some other reality.

One of these days, now, I gotta see Van the Man live in concert. But I'm not holding my breath it'll happen anytime soon.