On Saturday, Sept 17, New York Writers Workshop launched a new series of readings at the utterly charming Underland Gallery, the vital nerve center of cultural activity in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn (conclusively supplanting Rocky & Nicky's Pizza on Colonial and Bay Ridge Ave.). Featured readers at the inaugural event were Ravi Shankar, Deedle Rodriguez-Tomlinson, and me. It was a night to remember, and to be repeated.
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Honored to have this new work, "Blame It On My Youth," appear on the vaunted screens of Jerry Jazz Musician. Many thanks to editor Joe Maita and to the Jerry Jazz team. Thanks to Karrin Allyson for the haunted, deeply inhabited version of the song. And thanks to Oscar Levant/Edward Heyman for writing it.
7/18/2022 0 Comments Listening to FishI'm excited to be returning next month to Bonaire, an island I haven't visited in over twenty years. I'll be carrying along my new bible, Ned & Anna DeLoach's Reef Fish Behavior, a companion volume to the great set of fish, coral, and creature identification guides Ned DeLoach put together with the brilliant Paul Humann. There isn't much these people haven't seen, and photographed, underwater. The cover shot of this volume captures Butter Hamlets in a spawning clasp.
Much of the work that went into Reef Fish Behavior was conducted in Bonaire's waters, which have been protected as a marine reserve for over four decades. In that reserve, I'll be doing field work (diving, writing, photographing) for a project long in the works, a hybrid collection of poetry and prose called Listening to Fish. The idea is to listen closely to what fish and corals and reef creatures have to tell us about their imperiled environments. In particular, I'll be thinking about the health of the reefs today compared to what I recall from when I first began diving in the 1970s, when dropping down on a reef was like entering a psychedelic circus. Now, of course, many of the world’s reefs are desolate graveyards. I’m hoping conditions in Bonaire aren’t quite so bleak. And I hope whatever work I do can contribute to the preservation and restoration of what remains. In the new collection, I’ll be including “Night Dive,” which originally appeared in the Tule Review back in 2015 (or thereabouts), and then in my book. I think its octopus will fit right in with the other creature encounters, and I hope I meet some of her grandchildren. Night Dive Once on a moonless night I lost my companions. Their beams were bright but I’d edged over an outcropping into darkness and touched down softly on a rubble ledge where the wall pulsed with half-hidden forms, eyes on the ends of stalks, spiny feelers testing the current, feather dusters vanishing in a blink, spaghetti worms retracting. So sadly familiar-- things I desire withdrawing, their forms disappearing the instant I extend a hand. The reef folding into itself like a fist. Then, from the stacks of plate coral, the arm of an octopus slid, and another, two more, reaching for my fingertips, my palm. The soft sack of the octopus followed, inching nearer, her tentacles assessing the flesh of my wrist, my arm. My heart pounding. Turquoise pink explosions rushing across the octopus’s form. At my armpit, she tucked in, sliding her arms around my neck and shoulder, her skin becoming the blue and yellow of my dive skin. She stayed with me such a short time, her eyes, those narrow slits, heavy with trust, and my breath so calm, so easy. Above, my companions banged on their tanks, summoning me to ascend. How we worry when one slides over a ledge. How urgently we admonish the lost ones to turn back. Honored to have work up at The Antonym: Bridge to Global Literature, and thrilled for another of the Parentheticals series to appear, this one "Parentheticals V: Nothing About Nothing." Many thanks to the editorial team, and especially to Bishnupriya Chowdhuri.
Honored to be included in this Father's Day suite of poems that includes giants like Kwame Dawes and Jacqueline Bishop. Many thanks to editor Ann-Margaret Lim for this opportunity to appear in the Jamaica Gleaner. The photo is of me and Dad, ca 1962, taken in either Queens or Brooklyn.
"Parentheticals VI" now up on Flash Boulevard, a journal I hold in very high esteem, edited by grand flashmaster Francine Witte. I'm honored to join its screens.
4/26/2022 0 Comments Live Encounters, May 2022I was asked by publisher (and photographer) extraordinaire Mark Ulyseas to edit an issue of this very fine literary journal. This is the result (link takes you to my editorial for the issue, from which you can access the rest). I was honored to have been asked, and I'm thrilled by the outcome. Brilliant work by so many--too many to mention, so I'll confine my citations to one contribution, the debut publication of the extraordinarily gifted Rafael Fajer, whose creative nonfiction, Notes from the Borderline, will become one of the critical new additions to the literature of addiction.
Delighted to learn today from an inquisitive student that the title story of my collection is online. It first appeared on the screens of the late, lamented Medulla. Here it is, hosted by Literary Shanghai. I'm honored.
3/17/2022 0 Comments Appearing soon on screens near youLuck of the English-Sicilian (Ethiopian-Coptic), I guess ... I was hoping this would have appeared by today. In its lieu, I'll provide this little teaser.
"I had this hat, see. A cap, actually. A gray Donegal tweed, kind of a newsboy’s cap I guess you’d call it, made in Ireland, land of the Celtic mystics. Jack Kerouac wore one on the cover of Scattered Poems. Maybe that’s what triggered the dream I had in which I wore one exactly like his. I woke up that morning with a purpose: acquire that hat. But in those years you couldn’t find a decent hat in New York City, you couldn’t find an indecent hat. So I saved up, and borrowed, and borrowed more, and used what I borrowed as collateral to borrow again, until I had enough money to fly to Ireland. I took Aer Lingus to Shannon. The guy seated next to me was Irish. He asked what I planned to do on my visit to his country." Delighted to have work in the Winter 2022 Ekphrasis Magazine. Many thanks to editors Michelle Rose Chow, Jay Castro, and H.R. Link. My poems respond to the music of Arnold Schoenberg and Erik Satie. "Six Effects of Schoenberg's Five Piano Pieces, Op. 23" appears on p. 13; "Falsehoods and Banalities in Satie's Trois Gnossiennes" appears on p. 40. The line-up and the work is great and far-ranging. I'm honored to be among so many fine ekphrasticians.
Honored to see "Restless Spirits Depart" appear in The Archer, the excellent international journal out of Bangladesh. Many thanks to editor Masud Uzzaman, and to The Archer team. I wrote the story in honor of my friend, Waray poet Nemesio Baldesco of Samar, who once asked me if I remembered him. Very well indeed, sir. Your work, your spirit, made an indelible impression. (photo Deedle Tomlinson, on a hot morning in Hotel Alejandro, Tacloban)
Contributors to SCAN (Science/Art Network) were asked to respond to images in some way connected to the brain, in a Rorschach kind of way. I've always thought that if they opened my brain, they'd find a word cloud of lyrics and lines from movies and plays and fiction. The result: "Opus 23." Many thanks to Paris Lyon, Julia Prendergast, and the SCAN team. It's an honor to have this brain matter looked into.
2/23/2022 0 Comments The Nü Gui at Live EncountersDelighted to have the "The Nü Gui" appear in Live Encounters, March 2022. Many thanks to Mark Ulyseas, the Live Encounters team, and congratulations to all the contributors.
2/16/2022 0 Comments Parentheticals II on Big City LitThrilled to see this one appear: "Parentheticals II" in Big City Lit, Winter 2022. Many thanks to the editors, and congratulations to all the contributors.
Honored to have "Mahler," a new story, placed with Home Planet News, Issue #9. Many thanks to the editors, and congratulations to all the contributors.
JOHN PERSON, PAUL PERSON, JANE PERSON -- TIM TOMLINSON
(this piece first appeared in the March 2015 issue of Esquire-Philippines) In 2011, 1 took an assignment to teach writing to international students at New York University’s Shanghai campus. I was new to China, didn’t have the language, so what did I plan for our first Shanghai weekend? I checked the film schedule at Alliance Francaise and, to my surprise and delight, discovered that Saturday afternoon’s feature was a screening of Deep End (1971) by Polish-born, London-based director Jerzy Skolimowski. Deep End was one of the rare great 1970s films that had never made it to video or DVD. I’d seen it only once, back in film school in 1979 or 1980, and it left an indelible impression. Set in London (but shot mostly in Munich), it starred Jane Asher, the radiant redhead who was best known as Beatle Paul McCartney’s girlfriend and, for a short time, his fiancée, ca 1964-1968. Jane Asher. For me, no one more fully embodied the beauty, the insouciance, the esprit of the ‘60s girl than she. The ginger fringe, the mini-skirts, the inscrutable green-eyed stare. I developed a hopeless crush the instant she appeared— I was not quite nine-years old— and my heart broke for her when she and Paul split four years later, because how do you get over a Beatle? But another quality that drew me (and, I’m sure. Sir Paul) to Jane was her appearance of complete self-possession. By the time of A Hard Day’s Night (summer, 1964), when the Beatles’ collective persona resolved into distinct musical and public personalities, the question for young identity-seeking hipsters became: Are you a John person (clever, sharp, aggressive) or a Paul person (cute, charming, sensitive)? Jane was with Paul, yes, but she always seemed more a Jane person (smart, sexy, sophisticated) than anything else. Unlike the rest of us, she was not a satellite orbiting Planet Beatle, even if she sometimes appeared in their pictures. The Shanghai screening confirmed this impression. There she was, Jane Asher, big as life, swinging London icon in go-go boots, mini-skirts, micro-minis, bikinis ...then (breath getting short here) topless, and, finally, climactically, heart-stoppingly nude. Fully nude. Swirling-around-in-a-blue-lit-pool nude and oh-my-god was the crush reignited, along with its accompanying heartache. I left the screening with Jane Asher on my mind. I became a Jane person, too. It is widely supposed that Yoko Ono’s influence on John Lennon was significant, perhaps pernicious. Certainly she enabled John to make discoveries—some complicated and unpleasant (the thorny and meandering “Revolution #9”), others stark and revelatory (his first post-Beatles LP, John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band). What influence, I wondered, did Jane Asher have on Paul? The research I undertook to answer that question— biographies, articles, websites, and song after song after song— was thoroughly delightful, if at times poignant, and its answer conclusive: vast, to say the least, and its beneficiaries include not only Paul, but all of us who love music, and who get from music, to paraphrase Greil Marcus, a sense of promise our own lives fail to provide. Remember, Paul and Jane met in 1963, when “she was just seventeen,” and already something of a celebrity herself She interviewed the Beatles for the BBC’s Juke Box Jury programme. John was aggressive and crude (read: insecure and intimidated), and Paul was affable and gallant (read: Paul). Jane was charmed, a relationship was born. It lasted until mid-1968, at which point Paul had become somewhat less than gallant, indeed, (passively) aggressive and, arguably, crude. Jane returned to the London home she shared with Paul, to discover him in their bed with another woman— an American, no less, with the decidedly unmelodious name of Francie Schwartz. In between charmed meeting and traumatic break-up, in the enchantment, the spell, the torment, and the misery of the Jane years, Paul composed some of the most enduring love songs of the 20th century. Consider Paul’s pre-Jane contributions to the genre: “P.S. I Love You,” “Hold Me Tight,” “Love Me Do.” Simple to simplistic, inoffensive to pleasant, lyrically jejune— the musical equivalent of postcards (which, for the record, I love), or e-mails with emojis (which, for the record, I loathe). Then, in less than a year of Jane, we see “All My Loving” with its in medias res opening and its relentlessly urgent pace; “Things We Said Today,” an upbeat love ballad torqued by a minor key; and “And I Love Her,” whose bittersweet tonal ambiguities hint at dark complicated currents just beneath the lyrics’ idealized romance. Would Paul have grown so far so fast without Jane? Quite possible—he’s Sir Paul, one of the rare, the touched, the anointed. But by 1964, John, George, and Ringo had moved into tony London suburbs where, when not on tour (which wasn’t often) they languished in television and marijuana and alcohol. By contrast, Paul remained in London and moved into the attic of Jane’s family home at 57 Wimpole Street. This is where the McCartney learning curve accelerated at warp speed. Without Jane, or someone very like her (and her family), Paul’s growth would certainly not have been as dramatic. How can I make so certain a claim? Because in one year, with Jane, through Jane, or under the influence of Jane, McCartney’s writing evolved from pop generic to personal, complex, and psycho-sociological (all those qualities typically applied to Lennon)—evolved, in short, from pop to art. One of the great dramas of mid-1960s rock songs, that period when rock ‘n’ roll became rock, was the collision between inexperienced working class scruffs, those unwashed lads from the other side of the tracks who didn’t know which side of the plate the fork went on, and their sophisticated and hitherto obscure objects of desire, the daughters of the aristocracy (or what passed for it), with their fashionable clothes and bon vivant behaviors. Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone” and The Rolling Stones’ “19th Nervous Breakdown” are two famous examples in which musically gifted angry young men take their posh intimidating girlfriends down a peg or two. The Beatles contributed their share. Most are attributed to John: “Ticket to Ride,” “Day Tripper,” “Norwegian Wood,” “Girl.” Paul, the story goes, wrote the silly love songs. And no doubt he did— but not when he was with Jane. Jane took him on a roller coaster ride that peaked with rhapsodies (“She’s a Woman”), plunged to tantrums (“I’m Down”), with pleas and put-downs (“You Won’t See Me,” “Drive My Car”) along the way. One reason was Jane’s independence. She gave as good as she got (or nearly). If Paul could pursue his career, as he must, then she would pursue her own (acting). If Paul could take lovers in that pursuit, then Jane could take hers. This is not the posture of a typically submissive Merseyside girlfriend, and young Sir Paul was flummoxed. On Help! (1965), he travels from smitten (“I’ve Just Seen a Face”), to bewildered (“The Night Before”), to vengeful (“Another Girl”). On Rubber Soul, later that same year, he’s beside himself with pain in “You Won’t See Me” (“I just can’t go on/if you won’t see me”), then gleefully derisive in “I’m Looking Through You” (“you were above me/but not today”). “We Can Work It Out,” a Jane-influenced lover’s quarrel, presents one side of the argument: Paul’s. And if this argument is the best he could produce, it’s no wonder she spun him around like a top. What the song shows is that while Paul had his position, Jane resolutely had her own, and she’s wasn’t budging, and she didn’t even have to state it to win. Westminster girls are that slick. If class discrepancy bothered Paul, that didn’t stop him from soaking up whatever culture Jane and the Ashers provided. They played classical music at home and introduced Paul to art with a capital A. Soon he was attending concerts, recitals, gallery openings, collecting art by Magritte, attending plays by Jarry, talking film with Antonioni, and listening to new sounds by Bach, Berio, Ornette Coleman, Sun Ra, and John Cage. Quite a distance from the barber shops and roundabouts of Penny Lane; quite a distance, too, from his band-mates partying in the culturally conventional suburbs. The first masterpiece of this collaboration between Paul and his muse was born in a dream Paul had in the attic bedroom of the Asher home. He woke with a melody in his head, a melody so haunting and complete he was certain that he’d heard it before and unwittingly absorbed it from an earlier source. He tested it on various friends and experts by humming it or playing it on the piano. Where, he wanted to know, had he heard this melody before? And everyone told him the same thing: nowhere. It originated with or through Paul. Doubts of its provenance aside, he began to apply lyrics, which at first failed adequately to serve the melody’s melancholy. Meanwhile, the struggles with Jane persisted. Career obligations pulled them apart, reconciliations (at the Asher family home) brought them together. You get the sense of a young couple in love, but bewildered and exhausted by love’s requirements. You get the sense of a young couple who could not work it out. And in that fatigue, the young couple went off for a short holiday in Spain. On the drive from the airport to the resort, with Jane asleep on his shoulder, Paul’s mood carried him to a simpler past, and the lyrics he’d been searching for finally arrived. 'Yesterday/all my troubles seemed so far away...” The resulting record is chamber music, a string quartet with guitar accompaniment, and Paul’s voice milking the deeply sad, perfectly simple lyrics. It was as if the spirit of Franz Schubert had visited him. By 1966, things were getting wiggier—the hair longer, the skirts shorter, the bellbottoms bellier. The Beatles responded with Revolver, which essayed new forms (Lennon’s droning tape-looped “Tomorrow Never Knows,” Harrison’s Indian-inflected “Love You To”), but it’s the Paul/Jane drama that takes central stage where it drives Paul to higher highs and deeper lows. “Good Day Sunshine,” “Here, There, and Everywhere,” “Got to Get You into My Life”: these celebrate love’s excitement and delicious intimacy. But their flipsides, one deriving directly from the Jane agonies, the other from their cauldron, might each qualify for saddest song of all time. “For No One,” a waltz, depicts the forlorn lover as something less than a footnote to the woman who’s left him so far behind (“You stay home/she goes out/she says that long ago she knew someone/but now he’s gone/she doesn’t need him”). It’s that “long ago” that does it: how is it possible that the securities of love can vanish so quickly, so conclusively? That’s a question I remember asking on the corner of 7th Avenue and West 10th Street watching my former girlfriend walk away with friends laughing, probably, I thought, about me. And when I turned away that night and entered the Christopher Street subway, I joined all the lonely people that Paul wonders about in “Eleanor Rigby,” his other 1966 masterpiece. In “Eleanor Rigby” Paul’s pain elevates to vision; he transcends himself and addresses the human condition. The string quartet of “Yesterday” is doubled, John and George add their voices to the chorus, and a set of lyrics indebted to the emotional tutelage of Jane Asher begins to find its way into anthologies of poetry taught in universities. The relationship’s closing number might be its least memorable but it’s appropriately bi-polar, 1967’s neo-psychedelic bauble “Hello, Goodbye.” In another two years, marked by infidelities, increasing drug use, trips to India, and Jane is out of the picture. Paul’s musical imagination turned away from romantic strife toward others’ stories (“She’s Leaving Home,” “The Fool on the Hill,” “Rocky Raccoon”). The silly love songs spring up (“I Will,” “Oh Darling”) and become, in the post-Beatles ‘70s, something of a manifesto. And Jane? One of the great things about the Paul-Jane relationship is its principals’ categorical moratorium on providing fodder for the gossip mill. The silence suggests deep, mutual respect, which leads me to suspect similar depths in the lyrics of the songs. Jane’s career carried on, with high, sustained achievements in television, film, stage, and later as an author, television personality, and activist. Thinking about her while walking around the streets of Shanghai returned me to one of the moods that animated my adolescence, and I found that melancholy oddly comforting, like reconnecting with an old friend. I want to thank Jane for sticking up for herself, and for causing Paul so much educational pain. I suspect Sir Paul has already thanked her. These images are separated by twelve or thirteen years. The one on the left is from our kitchen floor during a glorious year in Florence, the one on the right is from the living room floor of our current digs in Brooklyn. I hope what I've lost in flexibility and hair I've gained in kindness and stillness. Writing, travel, yoga, and Deedle have been the constants. I think of the final paragraph of Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer: “The sun is setting. I feel this river flowing through me—its past, its ancient soil, the changing climate. The hills gently girdle it about: its course is fixed.”
1/9/2022 0 Comments Three EkphrasticsI've been writing ekphrastics to art, music, and movies. These Three Ekphrastics, in Live Encounters, respond to the Jasper Johns Mind/Mirror exhibitions running simultaneously at the Whitney and the Philadelphia Museum of art, to the Préludes flasques of Erik Satie, and to the John Cage Thirteen Harmonies.
12/22/2021 0 Comments Books of 2021 (and yesteryear)These are always difficult lists for me to compile since most of my reading dives into the past. That said, I still get around to some new releases and this year’s list references a few. Here’s my picks: The 1619 Project, Nikole Hannah Jones Easy to understand why this one rattles the IWSCPs (imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchs—thank you, bell hooks). It doesn’t just shake the buildings, it shakes the tectonic plates. Hold on—the bumpy ride is just beginning. Afterparties, Anthony Veasna So Stories from a brilliant young writer whose passing just weeks before publication is one of the year’s greatest losses Who They Was, Gabriel Krauze Hybrid tales from the London estates in Kilburn, rife with intoxicating slang, frightening with implications. Last Evenings on Earth, Roberto Bolaño You enter this world, you stay in this world. You even come to like it, but why you’ll never know. Craft in the Real World, Matthew Salesses An unpacking of the creative writing workshop that, like the Nikole Hannah Jones above, shakes the tectonic plates. A provocative, important book for workshop leaders, participants, and institutions. Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror, Carlos Basualdo and Scott Rothkopf This catalogue, for the concurrent retrospective exhibitions of Johns’s vast output at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, gathers essays that range from historical, art historical, and speculative, from curators, art historians, and literary writers the likes of Terrance Hayes and Colm Tobin. Johns said, do something to an object, then do something else. Not a bad place to start for writers. The Copenhagen Trilogy, Tove Ditlevsen A riveting account of literary ambition forged out of cultural and economic deprivation. Ditvelsen’s work set me off on a memoir kick. These three grabbed me. How I Became Hettie Jones, Hettie Jones Memoirs of a Beatnik, Diane di Prima Feelings are Facts, Yvonne Rainer The Jones and the di Prima depict a long lost New York City (the New York City I love, but missed, like the proverbial wave). So does the Rainer. The first two, like the Ditlevsen, concern aspiring writers, the third a dancer-filmmaker. Sex is also very much on the minds of these memoirists. Gore Vidal said that in the 1950s only three Americans were fucking: himself, Tennessee Williams, and JFK, and that left all the women to Jack. The accounts of these three women suggest something else. In each case, the fucking of the 50s leads the way to the more and merrier 60s. Correctional, Ravi Shankar And while I’m on memoirs, this. Shankar provides a detailed account of his family’s migration from India to the US, and his trajectory from celebrated poet/editor and professor to inmate of the Hartford Correctional Center, the Connecticut prison that forms some of the book’s most riveting scenes. Another important book that explores the 1619 turf of America’s “justice” system. Oblivion, Robin Hemley In this wildly and hilariously inventive posthumous autobiography by an author very much alive, Hemley explores both family history and the career misery of the mid-list writer. With a Kafka quest that echoes Flaubert’s Parrot. Riverrun, Danton Remoto Remoto's brilliant hybrid memoir-fiction-recipe book reissued here in the US, where, in the next few decades, we might be seeing our own bildungsromans of life under a dictatorship. And three current releases in poetry: Post-Mortem, Heather Altfeld In “The Apoacalypse Club,” Altfeld writes, “Let’s face it, the end of days titillates …” The collection supports the claim. Love and Other Poems, Alex Dimitrov A collection firmly ensconced in New York City, and in the New York School circa now. Earthly Delights, Troy Jollimore With a sense of humor part Coen Brothers, part Slavoj Zizek, the poet-philosopher takes on the movies, and existence. 12/18/2021 2 Comments Patti Celebrates KeithSTORYSUNDAY / Litro Magazine
PATTI SMITH TAKES A PISSby Tim Tomlinson / •April 11, 2021 It’s a hellish hot night in New York City’s Central Park. You’re crowded into a concert space, the sun setting, the crowd sweating, the album of the summer, the Rolling Stones’ Some Girls (do-do-doo-do, do-de-do, do-do-doo-do, do-de-do) blasting over the PA system. Track after track you’re wondering when the hell Patti Smith is gonna come on and start the show, at the same time you’re thinking, this is the show. The Stones never sounded this good. This loud. This significant. Love and hope and sex and dreams, Mick Jagger sings, does it matter? And here she comes bouncing onto the stage. Black boots, black trousers, black jacket, sleeves rolled up, arms above her head, bouncing and twirling. She gyrates center stage, grabs the mike—“this town,” she shouts, “is all that matters.” And the crowd roars. Then she’s into the show: “I don’t fuck much with the past,” she snarls, “but I fuck plenty with the future.” There’s a clarinet leaning near her bank of amps and a couple of numbers in, she picks it up and starts blowing. Just noise—squeaks, skwonks, squoinks, no relation to what the band’s doing, no relation to song, to harmony, melody, rhythm, and she’s transfixed like a kid on the spectrum. Blowing, screeking, honking. At the edge of stage right, a roadie lifts a sheet of opaque plastic and holds it neck high. She hands off the clarinet, drops behind the plastic and, for the length of time it might take to let loose a good piss she’s just a dark blur in a deep crouch, like a form underwater. Back standing, she buckles her belt, retrieves the clarinet, and the roadie drops the plastic. You’re thinking, did she just piss on-fucking-stage? Did she piss in public? Piss on the hallowed space? You’re thinking “Piss Factory,” that odor rising roses and ammonia. What was she saying, you wonder. There had to be a metaphor, a message. Piss. Performance. Perversion. Subversion. Your girlfriend says, “You don’t even know if she actually pissed.” “What else could she have done behind that plastic?” “Uh, just about every single thing in the world that’s not pissing?” But you’re not buying it, you insist that she pissed, that you all saw Patti Smith pissing. “Whatever,” your girlfriend says, “but you’re never gonna know for sure unless you ask her, and even then…” ••• You feel indebted to Patti Smith. Only a year back you were a sophomore in college, directionless, the veteran of a lot of dead ends and bad mistakes. Detours and detoxes. You’d pissed on stages, as it were, every single one, without the benefit of a plastic curtain. You were beginning to see a way out into the straight world, a way to become a civilian, to participate, to contribute, to wear the pinstripes and carry the briefcase. You visited your folks, told your mother you think it’s going to be law school for you, then maybe politics. She was so relieved, so happy, she started crying, gave you a twenty to go have a beer in town. Handed you the keys to her Volvo. You hit the back roads, put on the FM. From the top pocket of your vest, you fished what you’d sworn would be your final joint, Hawaiian sins, no seeds, all female. You fire up and pedal down and you’re racing along Sound Avenue. You’d know its curves and dips blindfolded and you race it on autopilot, holding deep inhalations, frenching the exhales. On the radio, a program featuring the new noise out of New York: Ramones, the Dolls, Dead Boys, the Contortions. Out of a bludgeoning feedback maelstrom emerges Patti Smith doing The Who’s “My Generation.” Well I don’t need that fuckin’ shit, she shrieks, the hairs on your neck and arms spring up. You envision your law degree on fire and standing over it, Patti Smith pissing gasoline. ••• The afternoon following the concert with clarinet, you’re in the Caffé Dante where Patti Smith sits in the window scribbling figures into an unlined notebook. She’s in a Keith Richards t-shirt with an oversized derby pushed back on her head. There’s opera on the PA system, Tchaikovski’s Eugene Onegin. At a tenor aria, her head drops back as if she’d just received an injection. The derby falls to the floor. And on her face, an exqusite pain. She’s wincing at the sublimity, its objective aesthetic beauty, and you’re thinking, this is the woman who sixteen hours earlier was bouncing around with a clarinet like a lunatic in an asylum, and you and five thousand others like you bounced around with her, the canals in your ears experiencing collective paroxysms. When the aria concludes and the orchestra subsides, you get up and retrieve Patti Smith’s hat. Her eyes remain closed, lost in the music. The eyes, lined with kohl, the nose just a bit too large for the narrow face, the perfect bow lips. Slowly the eyes open and they spot you standing alongside her. “Yeah, kid,” she says, “what?” You tell her she’s dropped her hat and you extend it. She says, “I didn’t drop it, man. I didn’t drop it. It fell. Weren’t you watching? Weren’t you listening? Didn’t you hear that fucking beauty?” You tell her you did. “Not if you’re policing peoples’ hats, man. Not if you’re policing peoples’ hats. Maybe I wanted that on the floor, at that moment, in that aria, and now you fucked it all up.” You sputter some attempt at an apology. “I can’t even understand you, man. Just give me the fucking hat.” A few minutes later, Patti Smith approaches your table. “Hey man.” “Ms Smith.” “Ah, so you know who I am. Getting to be a thing. Listen, something I gotta ask you.” “Please do.” “Please do? What are you like from the BBC, please do?” I blushed. “Nah, listen, like, back there, I was just fucking with you, man.” “Not a problem.” “Man, just listen, OK, let me finish.” “Please do.” “There’s that please do again. Listen, I feel bad if you got the wrong impression. See, I’m just…” You say it’s OK. “OK with you,” she says. “But what I keep trying to tell you is that it’s not OK”—and here she winds up like a pitcher, reaching way behind herself with her right hand, then coming forward like she’s throwing a fastball, but just at the point of release she spins the hand around and points a finger at herself—“with me, you dig?” You laugh. You tell her you dig. She says, “What, I say something funny? Now I’m making you laugh I’m funny?” You say, “I loved your show last night.” This stops the schtick. “You were there? Cool. What was your favorite song, and don’t tell me because the fucking night, I know you’re hipper than that.” “I liked the clarinet solo.” She beamed. “Dude.” She reached forward for a handshake with about sixteen parts. “How would you describe my playing?” You think for a moment, then say, “Kind of crypto-avant dada skronk.” She looks behind her. “Are we on like fucking candid camera, because that’s the most perfect—listen, what’s your name?” You tell her. “Clifford Foote,” she repeats. “With an ‘e’” you tell her. “Of course with an ‘e’, man,” she says. “Of course with an e. Otherwise it’s just a fucking foot. And what do you do Clifford Foote with an e. You must be like a poet or something.” “Film student.” “What I fucking say? So who’s your thing? Méliès? Cocteau?” “Cassavetes.” She says, “Cassa-- Hold on a second.” She goes to her table, scribbles something on her notepad and rips out the page. “Here,” she says. It reads
You spin it around on the table and she scribbles something that is the handwriting equivalent of her clarinet playing. “For life,” she says, “anywhere I’m playing, you get me?” Before you can ask her about taking the piss onstage, she’s at the turntable, selects Delibes’ Lakme, returns to her place at the window. At the exquisitely excruciating “Flower Duet,” her eyes squeeze shut, the neck goes slack, the derby floats to the floor. This time, you leave it there. ••• Her next show is uptown at Hurrah. You show security your pass for life. Security, big and bald with tattooed arms as thick as your legs, laughs in your face. Then Patti Smith moves to Detroit, the rest of your fucking life happens, and your girlfriend turns out to be right about at least one thing. TIM TOMLINSON was born in, and has returned to, Brooklyn, NY. In between, he's lived in Boston, New Orleans, Miami, the Bahamas, Shanghai, Florence, London, but mostly Manhattan. He's a high school dropout, a Columbia University graduate, and a co-founder of New York Writers Workshop. He teaches in NYU's Global Liberal Studies. Among his publications are Requiem for the Tree Fort I Set on Fire (poetry), and This is Not Happening to You (short fiction). His poems and stories have appeared in numerous US and international venues, including, most recently, Another Chicago Magazine, Teesta Journal, Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, and Telephone, a multi-media collaborative endeavor including arts from across the globe. |
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