Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe shared a room
at the Chelsea Hotel as they began to make names for themselves in their
respective fields. They made an unlikely pair, if only because Smith's music
reveled in finding poetry in chaos, where Mapplethorpe's photography often
imposed order on potentially chaotic subjects, including Smith herself. Their
connection, whatever its foundation, was undeniable, and eight years after
Mapplethorpe's death from AIDS at the age of 42, Smith published The Coral
Sea, a
long poem recasting her friend's life and death in Smith's unmistakable
Beat-inspired cadences. This two-disc set of the same name collects live
performances of the work—one from 2005 and another from 2006—that
find Smith backed by the sympathetic drones of My Bloody Valentine's Kevin
Shields.
The two performances are different, but not that
much. In each, Smith recasts Mapplethorpe's life as a deathbound sea journey to
the Southern Cross, a conceit that allows her to fill the work with allusions
to his photos ("a pale orchid crushed by a hand paler still"), make his vanity
and unrepentant hedonism seem almost heroic, and stirringly mourn his death.
It's a moving work, intensified by Shields' improvisational guitar and the way
Smith's voice makes Mapplethorpe's particular story universal. "He was destined to be
ill. Quite ill," she says early on. But aren't we all?