Last weekend in New York, as part of the PEN World Voices Festival, Patti Smith spoke to author Jonathan Lethem (Chronic City, The Fortress of Solitude).  You can stream the entire interview here, but Vanishing New York singled out a particularly telling moment.

After Dame Smith touches on everything from sneaker semiotics to her new book on Robert Mapplethorpe, Just Kids, she offers a rather grim assessment of the city she’s best associated with:

New York has closed itself off to the young and the struggling.  But there are other cities.  Detroit.  Poughkeepsie… New York City has been taken away from you… So my advice is: Find a new city.”

Kids of the world take note: Patti knows what’s good for you!  She’s always been on your side!  Witness below the classic clip from TV’s Kids Are People Too.  Oddly enough (nearly as odd, I suppose, as seeing a group of kids engaging in some mutual adoration with Patti Smith) the song she chooses to sing is You Light Up My Life.

 
(via L Magazine)

 
Reviews for Just Kids, Patti Smith‘s musings on her early days with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe are trickling in, and, happily for this fan, they’re ranging from good to glowing.  Bookforum calls it “occasionally corny and often deeply affecting.”  Janet Maslin of The New York Times compares it, favorably, to Bob Dylan’s impressionistic take on his own budding youth, Chronicles, Volume I. 

And much like Dylan’s own look back, Patti Smith ends her story on a golden note: fame is looming fast, but the deaths of Mapplethorpe and, later, her husband and musical collaborator, Fred “Sonic” Smith, are still very far away.  A clip of Smith and Mapplethorpe follows below:

 
See also: Remembrances of the Punk Prose Poetess