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(More customer reviews)I confess that when I first browsed through this book over a year ago, I really didn't like it. It seemed like quite a hostile work, and I put down a lot of the apparent bias to Bockris also being Deborah Harry's biographer and the Smith-Harry relationship, such as it ever was, being one of oil and water. However. On rereading, this book doesn't look as bad as all that. Smith won't enjoy reading it, but it certainly does not trash her--the clips and quotes from her most demented phases are kept to a minimum and the balance of what people have to say about her to this biographer is respectful, if somewhat baffled. There is a great deal of overlap between this treatment of Smith and Patricia Morrissey's far more detailed and professional biography of Robert Mapplethorpe, the Diego Rivera to Smith's Frida Kahlo. If one reads it as a supplement to that book, rounding out the picture of Smith as professional acquaintances and non-intimate friends saw her, the result is reasonably consistent. This in itself is an achievement. Bockris does not exactly get inside Smith's head, but that may be an impossibility for anyone other than Smith; she comes across as a powerful but fragmented personality. And this may be the mark of the born performer, the man or the woman with a sixth sense for their effect on others but little cohesive sense of self in private, giving them the talent for battening onto any symbols that project (and supply) their personal subjectivity, and fueling the combination of selflessness and narcissism that allows a person to take the blows on the path to fame. Smith's peculiar genius--the word is not too strong--is that of a long line of American artists who have been able to take this aspect of their personalities and use it to mirror the intense ambition, puritanism, fragmentation, and self-consciousness that typify the American character. She may have been obsessed with foreign influences--what American isn't?--but her unique talent was to be in some measure conscious of the source of this obsession, and use it, at her best, actually to find and channel links between the dementia of all nations and an indigenous spiritual lineage going back to John Brown at least. And as a working-class hero from the Rust Belt, her obsession with transcendence parallels that of a country whose greatest appeal and danger lies in the promise it holds out of being able to transcend one's origins--not to rise above them, but to bring them to a higher level, through a combination of courage, vision, and Napoleonic megalomania. Patti Smith remains dangerous long after punk has ceased to be; she remains dangerous because America does.
The trouble is that Smith's fans already know all this, and consequently there is only limited interest in hearing one more anecdote about the artist's eccentricities or one more piece of speculation about how she got that way. This book is not really a biography in the usual sense. It amounts to a superior compilation of stories and press clippings, most of which are not salacious (Smith always wanted you to believe she was bigger and badder than she was). But in the absence of the context provided by testimony from family members and others who know Smith best, and who naturally are not talking, the one or two pieces of interesting information sound like a tease and take on a pejorative quality. This effect can be observed in the little that we get to know about Fred Smith, Patti's late husband and, after Mapplethorpe, the biggest influence on her life and work. There is no doubt that his American populist aesthetic harmonized with hers, and may have rescued her from the manic "Radio Ethiopia" kitsch into which she was disappearing at the time of a near-fatal accident (she danced off a stage) that temporarily stymied her career. But depending on who you talk to, Fred Smith was either a kind and considerate husband, or a creep who stopped his wife's career, crushed her spirit, may have belted Patti around. The anecdotes to either effect are just that, anecdotes, and do not transcend the feeling of being breaches of privacy. And what does anyone mean by charging that the two albums Patti cut in the wake of his death are "careerist" or "professional mourning," just because he may not always have been good for her and she still misses him deeply? Sheesh.
The true biography of Patti Smith remains to be written. As for most important artists, it may need to wait till she is gone: Smith guards her privacy closely and there's no reason why she shouldn't. But by all means, read this one: it will take you back. And the pictures are good.
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