Southern Crossing

Patti Smith & Kevin Shields's The Coral Sea

WEDNESDAY, JULY 9, 2008 AT 4 A.M.

By Don  Allred

Patti Smith & Kevin Shields

The Coral Sea (PASK)

From the ambered memory and legacy of artist-collector Robert Mapplethorpe (1946–1989), his early lover and long-time friend Patti Smith draws "the passenger M" (listed thus) through her 1996 prose poem The Coral Sea, now a performance piece, recorded in collaboration with My Bloody Valentine guitarist Kevin Shields. M's abbreviation mark washes away as he (dreams that he) sets sail to find the Southern Cross—or at least glimpses "wet crepe, a beloved port, or a loved one fading, a tiny dot dissolving, in the vast grainy sea." But he's on his own way now (this isn't a Mapplethorpe biography), and even if he's glimpsed death, his sudden "weightless" relief isn't about casting off earthly snares and cares; instead, it's filled with "the earth-rageous scent of his own volition: The air is sweet. . ."

Smith says "earth-rageous" during the second of two shows, from 2005 and 2006, which make up this double-disc set. Like all of her wordplay here---as written, sometimes spontaneously spoken, and occasionally sung---it fits. Mapplethorpe claimed that he never wanted his work to be outrageous. Even the photographer's Portfolio X, an eerie slow train of S&M-mad hopefuls, is fueled by the very extended draining of pain (and shock, revulsion---all bad blood) from its sculpted wake. With the same kind of conviction, Smith rides and guides the diverging momentum of both renditions, one 64 minutes long, the other 55. As M's visions and decisions ("He would dine on desire…") keep zigzagging and spiraling through the last of his refiner's fire, the tides of his veins, so Smith and M attune and recalibrate each other via the non-twangy, raised and extended twang bar of Kevin Shields's otherwise-unaccompanied (frequently E-bowed, sounding more like a violin than slide) guitar---and the singing, maybe-thinking-about-singeing, hinges of its pedals.

A wicked tableau of a tropical paradise, in which other travelers, all of many pleasing aural colors, come bearing gifts to the discerning infant phenomenon, eventually jolts into, "He couldn't---he couldn't remember what they were for." One performance wobbles into a seemingly impromptu, tremulous, somewhat superfluous fable for hoarders (okay, c'est moi). But soon enough, Shields reveals another shiny reminder: all words and other sounds are rungs, bringing the passenger through. Ultimately, Shields's celestial navigation of The Coral Sea is closer than it often seems to his recurring role as My Bloody Valentine's blow-torch gator: a beast is waiting for and in M, though so is something gorgeous.

(A different way of putting it, in a different context:

https://papercomet.blogspot.com/2020/10/negativland-pitch-see-prev.html )