PATTI SMITH’S VERLAINE TRIBUTE

2024-04-30T22:18:07+00:00January 23rd, 2024|Music|

In a eulogy she wrote for The New Yorker, in the days following Verlaine’s passing on January 28, 2023, Smith recalls meeting him in 1973 and going to an early Television gig: “As I watched Tom play, I thought, Had I been a boy, I would’ve been him.” Their relationship became a legend in rock history, constant companions through fame, loss, and everything in between.

RICHARD HELL’S ‘WHAT JUST HAPPENED’

2024-02-18T19:00:56+00:00September 6th, 2023|Music|

“I like to be worshiped,” Richard Hell declares in “Love Letters,” one of the first poems featured in his latest offering, What Just Happened (Winter Editions, 2023). The collection comprises new poems—his first in decades—followed by “Falling Asleep,” a morbidly driven essay written with a hint of optimism, and “Chronicle,” a list of musings from Hell’s notebooks kept in recent years. The concept of worship coupled with a punk ethos poses an intriguing juxtaposition, going against the popularized “no gods, no masters” ideology that defined the early stages of punk in the 1970s. But this contrast is precisely what makes Hell’s work, and his place in the pantheon of punk culture, so appealing.

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