September 11, 2008 by info.

(Originally published on MOLI 7/16/8)

Some 20 years ago, Southern rock band Molly Hatchet opened for punk pioneer Joan Jett. Charming singer Danny Joe Brown “warmed up” the crowd with a little stage banter: “I can’t believe we’re playing before some bitch.” Jett’s road manager slammed the dirtbag against a wall and his own band soon canned him. Jett played on; it was the kind of sexist crap she had to put up with a lot as the rare woman on the hard rock circuit and it wasn’t going to stop her. “You’re living in the past/ It’s a new generation,” buddy.

Fast forward: On Saturday, July 12, Molly Hatchet opened for Jett again at the Riverfest in Beloit, Wisconsin. This time the night was all smiles. Jett stood on the stage overlooking the downtown Riverside Park while the Hatchet churned through their hits (“Flirting with Disaster,” anyone?) in a comradely show of solidarity. Between the sets, guitarist Bobby Igram thanked Joan repeatedly for letting his band open for her. He even had an invite: Would Jett come on the Lynyrd Skynyrd tribute cruise with them in January? The tattooed love goddess was uncommittal. (Me, I’m getting my pitch together to cover what I’m sure will be an endless all-star “Freebird” jam.)

“She’s O negative,” Jett’s longtime manager, producer, and sometime keyboardist Kenny Laguna said as we stood backstage and watched her watching Hatchet. “She can play before any crowd.” It’s true: Yes, it’s somewhat disconcerting to watch a woman who’s still crafting smart, timely, poignant anthems like “Five” and “Naked” having to trot out “I Love Rock’n’Roll” on what’s essentially an oldies (“classic rock”) circuit. A week before the Beloit gig, I caught Jett at the Miccosukee Casino in Miami; there, the opening act was Foghat.

But Jett’s a professional and no elitist. I’ve seen her play at CBGB’s and at the Warped Festival, and she treated the mix of bikers and families at the Riverfest and casino with the same dedication and respect that she showed at those gatherings of the hipoisie and pierced. Maybe I’m projecting, but it seems to me the erstwhile Runaway is aware that out there in the crowd in Beloit was some awkward teenager, or 20 of them, who needed to see and hear a self-made woman sing about identity and desire and changing the world maybe even more than the gathering of the faithful at the birthplace of punk did.

For me, it was an ultimate rock ’n’ roll moment. I stood on the side of the stage next to my five-year-old son playing air guitar and my 72-year-old dad drinking beer; it was both of their first real shows. In the background, across the river, stood my alma mater: Beloit Memorial High School. Jett was playing on my home turf. I was in town for a smidgen of glory myself; earlier that day, I signed copies of Mamarama at the town bookstore. The fact several of my old teachers, but only one former classmate showed speaks volumes about my own awkward adolescence on the shores of the Rock River (yes, that’s really its name).

Jett closes her set with a cover of Sly and the Family Stone’s “Everyday People,” a song about the acceptance of difference – about treating everyone like they’re O negative. The thousands gathered on a perfect summer night on the banks of a swollen, brown Midwestern waterway cheered. Not bad for a bitch.

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September 11, 2008 by info.

(Originally published on MOLI 7/10/8)

Many moons ago, I was in a band. My friend Michelle played bass, my boyfriend Jeff played guitars and sang, my roommate Paige drummed, and I played guitar and sang. We only had one gig, a going-away party for Michelle and me, who were embarking on a two-month road trip around the States; shortly after our return, we moved from Providence to Minneapolis and New York respectively. The, er, smoke has clouded my memory of the few songs we played – I think there was a cover of “Why Don’t You Smile Now,” a song by a pre-Velvets Lee Reed band – but I do remember our name: the Fiendish Thingees.

Pop trivia question: Where’d that name come from?

Bingo Ringo: A “fiendish thingy” is what George Harrison called an explosive device that was curled at the Beatles in the classic Richard Lester movie Help!

Paige and I were obsessed with this deadpan, madcap adventure – probably had something to do with that aforementioned smoke. Recently, I got to revisit my love for the flick that, along with the earlier Lester-Beatles movie A Hard Day’s Night, is widely considered the antecedent of music video (“Show me the blood test!” says Lester in the documentary disc that accompanies the DVD). As I’ve mentioned before, I rented it for my five-year-old son, and now, he’s a Beatlemaniac.

It is one of the deepest pleasures of my adult life to hear my son singing in his wee little earnest voice, “Help! I need somebody/ Help, not just anybody.”

The Beatles were one of the first groups I got obsessed with as a kid myself (there was also the Jackson Five). They were already broken up even back then, but it didn’t matter: There was something timeless about those million-dollar melodies and their cheeky, appealing personalities. In the liner notes for the Help! DVD, Martin Scorcese quotes the critic Geoffrey O’Brien saying that “the Beatles’ music possessed a beauty so singular it might almost be called underrated.” As the filmmaker notes, it’s absurd to call the most-acclaimed group in history underrated, and yet, so it is. I’ve heard these songs a million times – and admittedly, for years, even decades, I hadn’t bothered to play a Beatles disc. But rehearing them now with Cole, the sheer number of perfect compositions is overwhelming. Even a five-year-old can tell.

I know it’s not very blogoteric new-discovery coolhuntery to write, in 2008, about the Beatles. But I believe that, as in literature, it’s always important to go back to the classics, and pop music simply does not get any better than “Ticket to Ride” (that syncopation!), “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away” (most beautiful sad song ever?), “You’re Gonna Lose That Girl” (those harmonies), [your favorite Beatles song here].

It was Ringo’s birthday earlier this week, and he had a wish: for everyone to make the peace sign and say, “Peace and love.” Very ‘60s, but also, very today.

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September 11, 2008 by info.

(Originally published on MOLI 7/9/8)

One day, a few years ago, my husband and I attended an Argentinean rock concert in Miami’s Bayfront Park with a friend of ours from Buenos Aires. We had a bird’s eye view of the pit in front of the stage that separates the band from the audience, an area populated mostly by burly security guards, photographers, and the occasional VIP. When one man walked in front of the stage, he immediately began shaking the many hands stretched out to him from the packed crowd. Everyone seemed to know, or want to know, this guy. Bud and I didn’t recognize him, but then we were new to this world of rock en espanol. “Who is he? Some celebrity?” we asked our friend, let’s call him Alfredo.

Alfredo shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe, immigration?”

The movement of the people around the world may have replaced abortion as the hot-button issue of our time. Immigration combines two of the U.S.’s deepest worries: the economy and “homeland security.” It’s a hornet’s nest of difficult questions that politicians wade into only with great reluctance, knowing no matter what they say they’re going to wind up stung. Meanwhile, xenophobia is symbolic to many people from other nations of everything that’s wrong with Americans: hubris, ignorance, fear. (Not that Americans have a corner on xenophobia: Just ask the Africans in Paris, or the Asian proletarian diaspora doing the globe’s dirty work.)

hattie gossett plugs directly into the slipstreams of this debate in the immigrant suite: hey xenophobe! who you calling a foreigner?, her recent collection of poems from Seven Stories Press. gossett, a New York-based poet of page and stage, writes mostly in the voice of the confused, disappointed, and angry immigrant. There aren’t a lot of refugees from other countries’ war, oppression, or poverty delighting in the American dream in these stanzas. Recent newspaper stories back up gossett’s bodega-level reports: More and more people have not found the embrace of Lady Liberty to be all it’s cooked up to be, and have been returning home to their countries. The Miami Herald even profiled some Cubans who have gone back to their communist homeland – dios mio!

gossett, who often performs her poems with a band and calls herself sister no blues, writes deceptively simple, repetitive lines. But she’s a mistress of rhythm, building patterns and crescendos that load each word with centrifugal force. She has a fine ear for the many accents around her: Puerto Rican, Dominican, black American, African, Indian, etc. She’s all about stirring the melting pot. In the poem “what do you like? how do you cook it?” she lists different ethnic foods over a calypso beat, ending with the observation and question, “we all eat rice & beans/ why can’t we get along?”

Don’t mistake that Rodney King-ish quote for naivete. Sarcasm has long been gossett’s weapon of mass destruction, and she often dons people’s points of view in order to expose their shortsightedness. “have we got a job for you!” proclaims the recruiter in the title of one poem: “doctor at home scrubs the hospital floor here.” She also doesn’t buy some immigrants’ own packed-in isms: In “in my country is no like this,” the narrator brags, “nobody cares what color you are/ each group stays with his own/ we don’t have to live next door to them.”

Here in Miami, I know a lot of first-generation Americans who, after decades, still can’t figure out our health care system (or lack of one); who have found their new land to be as cruel as it can be rich; who have gone back home. I also know those, like Alfredo, who have gone to great lengths to be here and have the kind of life they couldn’t have in their native destroyed economies. Or at least that was the story a couple months ago. Because Alfredo works construction, which means round these parts, he hasn’t worked in weeks.

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September 11, 2008 by info.

(Originally published on MOLI 7/3/8)

The world champion DJ and now sought-after producer known as Infamous remembers the first time he visited the Hit Factory Criteria recording studio in Miami. “They gave us a walking tour,” says the man who subsequently helmed the boards for the hot Lil Wayne and Jay-Z collaboration “Mr. Carter” at Hit Factory Criteria. “The GA said, ‘Oh Eric Clapton recorded “Layla” there.’ As soon as I heard that I froze still and tried to inhale as much of the room as I could.”

Iggy Pop also remembers his first glimpse of the stucco building in a quiet warehouse district. The rock legend, who eventually recorded most of his album Skull Ring there, says that one of the first things he did when he moved to Miami in the early ’90s was drive by Criteria, just to see where songs like “Funky Nassau” were made. The punk pioneer, who recently returned to Hit Factory to record with the band Jet, and calls metal engineer Chris Carroll the studio’s “secret weapon,” was smitten with the two-story building’s funky Miami charm. “You don’t feel like you’re walking into some goombah’s armpit,” says Pop. “It’s still very Florida; you can still chill.”

For 50 years, the studio founded as Criteria then acquired by Hit Factory in 1999 has been host to a slew of recording legends: James Brown, Aretha Franklin, Eric Clapton, Bob Marley, the Rolling Stones, the Bee Gees, Michael Jackson, Ricky Martin, Madonna – the list goes on. I recently spent a month talking to a number of the people who built this iconic space and have helped it stay alive (to coin a phrase) for an Associated Press story: You can read the whole thing here.

Criteria, and then Hit Factory, have drawn a dizzying array of artists together into one space. Founder Mack Emerman was a gear-head, and the rooms have been a haven for audiophiles ever since, from Tom Dowd and the Albert Brothers to Scott Storch and Timbaland. “It was the people behind the scenes who made the studios here,” says Robert Lanier, Hit Factory Criteria’s executive vice president and COO. “It was the engineers, the innovative individuals who were part of the growth of the recording industry. They came up with different sounds, new techniques.”

Eric Schilling is one of the many serious music heads who revere Hit Factory Criteria’s big rooms and state of the art consoles. The freelance engineer has relied heavily on Criteria since the ‘70s, twiddling the knobs on tracks for such artists as the Eagles, Gloria Estefan, Juan Luis Guerra, and Janet Jackson. “It’s the sound of the rooms that keeps me here,” he says. “They’re good spaces for recording live. They don’t make rooms like that anymore.”

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September 11, 2008 by info.

(Originally published on MOLI 7/1/8)

Here’s my antidote for junk kid culture: good kid culture. Your daughter zoning out on preteen Disney musicals? Rent Help! and A Hard Day’s Night. Hyper-driven, commercial-laden Nick programming driving you nuts? Throw Modern Times in the DVD player. Cries for Happy Meals driving you crazy? Go out for sushi. My son hasn’t kicked his Hannah Montana crush or Power Rangers habit, but he knows the words to a dozen Beatles songs and loves Charlie Chaplin. And his favorite breakfast is a tin of surimi from the local Latin takeout restaurant: inch-long eels smothered in olive oil and peppers and garlic.

I’m not bragging about my five-year-old’s sophisticated taste. Okay, I am bragging — but I’m making a point too. A huge part of a parent’s job is to curate and expose him to culture. For me, it’s so much fun singing “Ticket to Ride” with Cole, I can’t even call it a job.

Of course, as long as Pixar’s around, you can trust your offspring with at least some of today’s pop culture. With Wall-E, the kings of animation have hit the ball way out of the park.

Anthropomorphic robots are a staple of cartoons and sci-fi; Robots and The Iron Giant are also excellent kiddie flicks. But rarely has a nuts-and-bolts character had the vaudevillian soul of Wall-E. He looks more than a little like E.T., and he serves a similar function: as an emissary from another planet (which in this case used to be our planet) who reminds us humans of the humanity we’ve lost in ourselves (ditto Iron Giant).

With his sad eyes, forlorn shabby appearance, and slapstick pratfalls, Wall-E also draws a lot on Chaplin. Like the Little Tramp, he will do just about anything for love. In Eve, he finds a va-va-voom modern girlfriend.

But Wall-E is no mere sentimental cartoon: It’s a pointed apocalpytic parable. Wall-E and his pet cockroach seem to be the sole inhabitants of an environmentally blighted Earth. Fat, lazy humans with their greed and consumerism have buried the planet in trash and then fled. It’s An Inconvenient Truth come to cartoon life.

Despite my opening graf, I’m not really a total snob. I like a lot of kid’s movies — better than most adult ones. We have a running joke in our house that we haven’t seen a new film that doesn’t feature a talking animal in years. And I don’t really mind.

Wall-E is quite simply one of the best. It’s definitely up there with Monsters, Inc., Toy Story, Shrek, Finding Nemo, and Bambi. The landscapes and artistic direction in the film are stunning, their towering bleakness lightened with comic touches, like the robot’s collection of found objects (a Rubik’s cube, lighters, a tape of Hello, Dolly! that provides the film’s unlikely soundtrack and romantic analogy). New York Times critic A.O. Scott called the first 40 minutes a “cinematic poem,” and that’s not wrong. Wall-E is the antidote. And the fact that millions are taking it in makes me feel more hopeful than ever about November 4.

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September 11, 2008 by info.

(Originally published on MOLI 6/27/8)

Suze Rotolo is perhaps the most famous arm charm in rock’n’roll, quite literally. On the cover of Bob Dylan’s second album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, she clutches the singer’s side as they make their way down a wintry West Village street in 1963. Rotolo was 19 at the time, and the girlfriend of the 22-year-old artist who was just beginning to be recognized as a colossal folk and rock talent. Talk about pressure.

Before and after that photo, of course, Rotolo had a life story of her own, as she tells in A Freewheelin’ Time: A Memoir of Greenwich Village in the Sixties (Broadway). She was a red diaper baby, the daughter of communist Italian-Americans, who became an artist. She was a beautiful, intelligent New York City girl, whose political, intellectual, urban upbringing probably seemed exotic to the exile from small-town Minnesota. One gets the sense from this memoir that Rotolo was and is very much her own woman – albeit a fragile young person with a difficult home life, who probably tended to break “just like a little girl.”

Freewheelin’ is by no means a tell-all. In fact, the author tells very little of the personal details of her relationship with Robert Zimmerman (she does reveal that not even she knew his real name and identity until a news story revealed it). Neither rancor nor a great deal of sentimentality drive the narrative. Four decades later, she is eminently respectful of the four-year love affair and her ex’s privacy – that tactfulness, so refreshing in the age of endless celebrity dish, itself speaks volumes about both Rotolo and Dylan.

Freewheelin’ is most interesting as a document of Downtown New York during the folk boom and the birth of ‘60s counterculture. Mostly, Rotolo pays tribute to the incredible talent pool that was her community, people like Sylvia and Ian Tyson, Dave Von Ronk, and Janet Kerr. I absolutely eat up books like these, documents of bohemian places and times – god, it must have been fabulous to live there and then, I sigh as I turn their pages (even as an equally happening scene may be unfolding outside my window).

Rotolo also captures the souring of the hippie experience – the good trip gone bad. Unsurprisingly, her relationship with Dylan collapses under the weight of their greatly changed lives, as his fame mounts. She is stalked, her apartment burns, and she has the kind of nervous collapse that so many people, living on the edge in pursuit of a dream, had at that time.

The book falls apart a bit too; it’s unclear what Rotolo’s point is, as she grasps for a special light to shed on a much-illuminated era. Still, she has a vivid, clear way of describing her memories that’s enchanting; you can see how a guy would fall for her. “We were full of truths and enthusiasms, non sequiturs, stories, insights, pronouncements, resentments, and of course poetry, prose, and song,’’ she writes.

The Freewheelin’ photo is a portrait of youth in love, two people sheltering in each other’s arms on a cold city street. Rotolo is no mere ornament – and unlike the usual rocker arm candy, her body is completely covered in a bulky winter coat (she told the New York Times she felt like an Italian sausage). Still, she’s the full-maned bohemienne giving flesh to the skinny bard’s songs. An emancipated woman living with her lover – Rotolo was the embodiment of freewheelin’. Her memoir reveals that she was more than just a symbol, though, that she had her own life and stories to tell.

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September 11, 2008 by info.

(Originally published on MOLI 6/24/8)

Social networking sites work counter to that old Groucho Marx/Woody Allen joke, about not wanting to belong to any club that would have you as a member. The Internet is all about context. You are who you friend. MOLI and Facebook are both supposed to be havens from MySpace, for “grownups” who think MySpace is for teenagers. But SNSes only succeed if they have that critical mass of users who attract other users. They’re like giant high school cliques; people only want to hang out in the ones where the people they want to hang out with are.

In his “Wk 52 — self-ish” blog post for MOLI, the poet Mike Tyler discusses his own reasons for blogging much better than I do: “I like Moli because it is new and growing and I like things at the beginnings like Silent Movies, and Early Rock ‘n Roll (when the electric guitar was just invented), and any kind of stuff that is going on before grown-ups find it and begin their jihad. (Look out for the word-ish, ‘monetize.’)”

Tyler has been posting one blog a week under the profile name nyc boi for one year, every Sunday morning – hence the blog name, sunday am. I first met Mike when he was a poet hanging out at spaces like the Nuyorican Poets Café and ABC No Rio back in the early ’90s, and made him the lead subject of a story I wrote for The Village Voice in ‘91: “Café Society.” We’ve been friends since, and when he found out I was hired by MOLI some 52 weeks ago, he decided to make it a place to hang his own words.

sunday am can be a tough, trippy, tripping, hilarious, profound read. Mike has always been a philosopher as well as a writer, and sometimes you have to follow his punning neologisms – words like “somethinc,” “humane bean” — back to their etymological source (Mike’s brain) to make sense of him. I always find the investigation worth the wade.

In “self-ish,” Tyler – who made a name/spectacle of himself as a globetrotting performance poet back when spoken word was the MTV rage – in typical Tyler fashion, finds he has no lessons to share from his first year in a new medium: “I’ve had words of wisdom about blogging, before I did it, and now that I’ve done it, I have not one jot (whutz a jot?) more than I started.”

But of course, Mike does have something profound to say about blogging, and it has to do with landing where your feet find themselves – monetizers beware and be damned. Like Juliana Luecking, Donnell Alexander, Wendy Case, Natasha Bright, Jana Martin, Jeanne Fury, Cathay Che, Audra Hodges, Neal Pollack, Martin Johnson, Richard Pachter, Rob Levine, Celeste Fraser Delgado, Rebecca Wakefield, Erika Schickel, and [your name here], nyc boi is the kind of person I want to hang out with, virtually or otherwise. As long as they’re here, I’ll be here.

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September 11, 2008 by info.

(Originally published on MOLI 6/20/8)

New York, London, LA, Athens, San Francisco, Detroit, DC, Hialeah. Among the cities that can be name-checked in a punk-rock roll call, South Florida’s heavily Cuban American municipality is generally pretty low on the list. Hia-fucking-leah – as it’s lovingly known on a popular Miami T-shirt – is known more for being the birthplace of the 1970s proto-disco Miami sound (K.C. and the Sunshine Band, etc.) and chongas than for wearers of Mohawks and chanters of “hey-ho, let’s go.”

The band Guajiro is out to change that. Thursday night, opening for a sold-out Rancid concert at Fort Lauderdale’s Revolution, the four-piece played a vigorous bilingual set in which they name-checked Hialeah on the song “Mulatona.” They also debuted the new band Final Reformation – Guajiro minus singer Willy Lopez plus singer Joe Koontz from Against All Authority.

But most notably, they led the moshpit through a chant of their new single “Olé (Latinos for Hope)” (being released by I Scream Records on June 24). The anthem turns a futbol chant into an endorsement for Barack Obama, and translates Obama’s catchphrase “Yes We Can” into the riff “Si Se Puede.”

Guajiro has made a powerful, will.i.am-style video for Oléthat mixes shots of the presidential candidate with video of Guajiro’s sweaty members — Lopez, Jorges Gonzalez Graupera, David Santos, and Dougla’ MacKinnon.

Lots of musicians, of course, are getting on the Obama train; some Latin stars already recorded a video for him. But the presumptive Democratic nominee doesn’t usually get a lot of love from South Florida’s conservative exile community; in fact, today, some of Elian Gonzalez’s relatives (oh God, here they go again!) are holding a press conference against the senator because he has advisors who didn’t believe the boy was brought here by dolphins to be safe from Fidel.

“Tonight it’s about hope,” Lopez told the crowd Thursday night. It’s hard to say whether the stylized youths got it – I did see one kid in an Obama T-shirt, but unfortunately, so many of these third-generation punk fans follow the fashion of the Exploited, but not the politics of the Clash. Rocking for voting is a gutsy move for some Hialeah punks. Ole!

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September 11, 2008 by info.

(Originally published on MOLI 6/17/8)

On Sunday, my local newspaper, The Miami Herald, was one of several around the country to run the first installment of “Guantanamo: Beyond the Law,” an intensive, global investigation of the U.S.’s treatment of detainees in military bases since 9/11. The story, written by Tom Lasseter for the chain that owns the Herald, McClatchy, was everything the world desperately needs from the fourth estate: A thoroughly documented, unrelenting prying open of doors the government has done its best to keep shut (frequently by invoking “patriotism”). The series, which continues all week, reveals how many of the detainees had nothing to do with Al Qaeda or the Taliban, how they were often beaten, how some died in custody, and how the accumulation of American atrocities on these people has turned the prison camp at Guantanamo not into a terrorism containing instrument, but a place that breeds terrorists.

Monday, day two of the series, the Herald announced that due to the continuing collapse of the newspaper industry, 17 percent of its staff will be eliminated through buyouts, attrition, or layoffs. McClatchy, in general, is cutting back its payroll by 1,400 employees, or 10 percent.

It’s the best of times, and the worst of times.

The Herald, like many papers, has made a lot of mistakes when it comes to keeping up with changing technology. Case in point: You can’t read articles more than two weeks old on its website, without registering for a special archive service and paying for them. There must be hundreds of articles on, say, Britney Spears in the Herald database, but you will only find the latest news in a Google search of her name. Talk about missed opportunities for easy hits.

The Gitmo investigation, however, shows McClatchy (the nation’s third-largest newspaper chain) making smart use of the web’s multimedia and extended database capabilities. Lasseter interviewed 66 former detainees. You can see many of their pictures in the online version of the story, along with video interviews; handy hyperlinks in the text will take you right to them. There are PDFs of documents used during the investigation, a la the Smoking Gun. There are maps of where detainees are from. And there’s a place to leave comments (though I think this part of the story should have been played up better online).

The investigation, so far at least, is a riveting must-read – and has been the talk of other news outlets. Coming on the heels of last week’s Supreme Court decision overthrowing the illegal detention of many of these prisoners, the timing couldn’t have been better – except for that little layoff announcement.

MOLI View contributing editor Rob Levine has done a great job of repeatedly drawing attention to the tremendous existential crisis facing journalism in this country; so has our colleague Richard Pachter. Normally, I would leave this discussion in their capable digits. But this time, the timing of the Guantanamo series and the layoffs is too egregious – and personal. After spending six great years as the paper’s pop music critic, I left the Herald a year ago, in part because I saw the writing on the wall in terms of the future of print journalism, and had a chance to get some Internet experience under my belt (thank you MOLI!). I have tremendous respect for the journalists I left behind. The Herald is far from perfect, but the newspaper has broken some major stories for the community just in the seven years since I have lived here – perhaps most significantly, the Pulitzer Prize-winning House of Lies series on how developers and politicians were taking off with millions intended for public housing. Another realtor just last week went to jail, thanks to that exposé.

I’m sure Lasseter is not in danger of being laid off right now. In fact, they should just hand the guy a Pulitzer this minute and forget the wait. But I’m also sure some people I know and respect will no longer be keeping an eye on the bad guys – whether in city government or local bands – as the Herald cuts are made manifest in the next month. And that hurts. All of us.

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September 11, 2008 by info.

(Originally published on MOLI 6/12/8)

There’s perhaps no more famous and fruitful collaboration between a rock musician and photographer than the long friendship between Patti Smith and the late Robert Mapplethorpe. Roommates in New York in the ’70s, a period fascinatingly chronicled in Mapplethorpe: A Biography, by Patricia Morrisroe, they both were transgressive pioneers: she as one of the poetess founders of punk, he as a portraitist of gay America. He shot the iconic black and white image of her for the cover of her debut Horses, an album that launched a million musical careers. If you ever get a chance to see Sandy Daley’s obscure 1971 film, Robert Having His Nipple Pierced, don’t miss it. Smith’s rambling narration — while, yes, Robert has his nipple pierced — in her thick New Jersey accent is off the wall and hilarious.

With her walleye, long tangled locks — no gray-hiding hair dye for this artiste — and Giacometti face, Smith has been a visual muse for many photographers since, including REM’s Michael Stipe. For the last decade or so, the singer has been working with fashion shutterbug Stephen Sebring. His documentary about her, Patti Smith: Dream of Life, was nominated for the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance and is scheduled for September release by Palm Pictures, it was announced yesterday. New Yorkers get a first peek at it at the Film Forum, August 6 to 19.

According to the press release, Dream of Life “is a plunge into the philosophy and artistry of this complicated, charismatic personality. Sebring captures Smith, who narrates the film, through her spoken words, performances, lyrics, paintings and photographs.” The movie also features Phillip Glass and Sam Shepard (another legendary ’70s collaborator of Smith’s).

Rizzoli will publish a companion book in August, which will include Polaroids taken by Smith. In addition, she and Sebring are releasing on their new PASK label The Coral Sea, a live CD she recorded with My Bloody Valentine’s Kevin Shields — along with photographers and playwrights, Smith has excellent taste in guitarists (Lenny Kaye, Tom Verlaine, her late husband Fred “Sonic” Smith, etc.).

There’s no artist who has been singularly more inspiring to me as a woman than Patti. That said, I find the sometimes reverential attitude of and towards her work since the early ’90s can get a tad annoying. Smith has always prided herself on her sense of humor, citing Johnny Carson as a major inspiration. I hope Dream of Life has some of the wackiness that makes Daley’s movie a classic. Whatever: The world could always use more Patti Smith, now maybe more than ever.

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