Year of the Dream Inn
"Who would bring up a space break
and thus end a
conversation?"
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| San Francisco |
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| Tokyo |
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| Patti's suitcase |
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| Jackson and Jesse Smith, Detroit |
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| Dublin |
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| Adirondack chairs (Sam's) |
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| Kitchen window (Sam's) |
Selected passages & pages from 'Year of the Monkey' ©
2019 Patti Smith.
The year was 2017.
Inside cover drawings and B&W photos by Patti Smith (except jacket photo by Barre Duryea).
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Paperback © 2020 with added material:
35 pages,
extra photos, new cover with a photo by Patti's sister, Linda |
From Epilogue to an
Epilogue
"The Year of the Monkey has long past, and we
have entered a new decade, one that has so far played out with mounting
challenges and a systemic nausea, though not necessarily induced by illness or
motion. More of a psychic nausea that we are obliged to work off in every way
available. Though harboring hopeful dispatches, the new year has unfolded with
our personal and global concerns eclipsed by a profound lack of judgment.
We greet 2020 as our constitutional moral center is
being redesigned in an increasingly immoral way, governed by those professing
to have a hold on Christian values yet sidestepping the core of Christianity —
to love one another. Their necks turn from the suffering as they willingly
follow one lacking an authentic responsiveness to a waning human condition. I
had hoped for a more enlightened scenario for our new decade, imagining
ceremonial panels opening, as the wings of great altarpieces on feast days,
revealing 2020 as the year of perfect vision. Perhaps these expectations were
naïve and yet were truly felt, just as the anguish of inequity is felt, a dark
blot that will not go away.
Where is brightness? Where is prudent justice? we
ask, standing our ground with mental plow, burdened with the task to stay
balanced in these unbalanced times.
There is a saying in the canons of lunar astrology
that the Monkey needs the Rat. I’m not sure in what capacity, though some say
that Rats are able to cheer Monkeys up when they’re feeling down, for when
together the air is filled with laughter. Of course, we are speaking not only
of the species themselves but also of certain inherent qualities of those born
in the year of either augury. In any event, we are, at this very moment,
entering the lunar Year of the Metal Rat, to be vastly celebrated in our great
cities, especially those containing magnificent Chinatowns, with massive
displays of fireworks, sacred lion dances, and confetti and multicolored tinsel
floating from the sky. Festivities to be capped with a parade on February 10,
as the full snow moon rises, with floats and dragons and effigies of the year’s
namesake. In an abstract gesture of solidarity, I dig into a box of old records
and unearth Frank Zappa’s Hot Rats. The girl on the cover, rising from a
deserted swimming pool, is Miss Christine, the fragile Victorian beauty of
Girls Together Outrageously, known as the GTOs.
Hot Rats came out at the end of 1969. At the time,
I was living with Robert Mapplethorpe at the Chelsea Hotel, and we often talked
with her in the lobby. She was an ethereal being, with a mane even wilder than
mine and skin like peach fuzz. Somewhere in early 1970, Miss Christine
petitioned me to join her revolutionary band, and though it wasn’t the right
vocation for me, I was flattered. Shaking her slender hand, I had the impression
I was facing a delicate bird of prey. That was over half a century ago, which
is hard to fathom, for I can still picture her wide-eyed and soft-spoken, head
cocked, a pirate’s fair daughter who never saw twenty-three. With a nod to
Zappa’s young protégée, I slip the record from the sleeve and examine it
carefully, discovering it covered with tiny scratches, like the claw prints of
a circling band of rats.
A turntable spins straight back through time. I place the album jacket on my desk, temporarily obscuring a small Tenniel print of Alice conversing with the Dodo. Propped next to that is a birthday gift from a dear friend, an upright crystal rat washed in gold that I have christened Ratty. He will preside over my room as my lunar talisman. For that's how it works; we look to the rising Metal Rat with unguarded optimism, for each new year begins with its designated lunar creature, with its particular armor and distinctive personality, and the integral belief that things will soon be better."
