Last time we saw Patti Smith do “People Have the Power,” she was on stage with Miley Cyrus, Laurie Anderson, Debbie Harry and pretty much every other New York City music legend — and before that she was belting it out with Michael Stipe and James Franco. But she and Lenny Kaye kept it lean and mean at last night’s benefit at Theatre 80 for the victims of the East Village explosion. Check out the above footage posted to YouTube by Sandy Bachon.
Today it was announced that Smith will release a sequel to her memoir, Just Kids, on October 6. Here’s the publisher Knopf’s description, via the Amazon page.
From the National Book Award-winning author of Just Kids: an unforgettable odyssey into the mind of this legendary artist, told through the prism of cafés and haunts she has visited and worked in around the world.
M Train is a journey through eighteen “stations.” It begins in the tiny Greenwich Village café where Smith goes every morning for black coffee, ruminates on the world as it is and the world as it was, and writes in her notebook. We then travel, through prose that shifts fluidly between dreams and reality, past and present, across a landscape of creative aspirations and inspirations: from Frida Kahlo’s Casa Azul in Mexico, to a meeting of an Arctic explorer’s society in Berlin; from the ramshackle seaside bungalow in New York’s Far Rockaway that Smith buys just before Hurricane Sandy hits, to the graves of Genet, Plath, Rimbaud, and Mishima. Woven throughout are reflections on the writer’s craft and on artistic creation, alongside signature memories including her life in Michigan with her husband, guitarist Fred Sonic Smith, whose untimely death was an irremediable loss. For it is loss, as well as the consolation we might salvage from it, that lies at the heart of this exquisitely told memoir, one augmented by stunning black-and-white Polaroids taken by Smith herself. M Train is a meditation on endings and on beginnings: a poetic tour de force by one of the most brilliant multiplatform artists at work today.