Patti

Patti had dry leather muscles, tight rawhide ropes twisted into mean cables and spread with the waxy mud of skin. Her eyes balanced on her cheekbones, her face a narrow African mask, lips snarling and cavernous hollows remembering the starving drought times, never lured into the mischievous reassurance of a good harvest. She came to be in the most dangerous part of the 70's and her body showed the abuse in her junky teeth and brittle nails, and the shapeless unisex clothes that hung off of her. That she had survived these decades was a testament to ruin, like the scouring, sandy wind that hasn't quite won its' battle against the withering rocks. And a blogger wrote about her, wondering if she was finally softening her image and selling out, wearing a silly pirate hat with her friend the actor, in an ad for Disney shot by her long time colleague.

Her first priority was to challenge. Her songs were abrasive and chaotic, mixing genres and spilling the boundaries of music by interjecting flailing wild woman poetry and dissonant, tribal interludes. Yelping, stamping, gnashing rabid ecstasies of spirit, sensualism, spells and invocations. She offered herself as a sacrifice to destruction like her romantic heroes and one by one she lost her friends to overdose, AIDS and cancer. His story questioned her survivorship and authenticity.

Would the Patti of 1975 pose for a good natured photograph, next to a movie star, on the bow of a fake wooden ship? The repulsively seductive, yellow toothed smile replaced with a likable and innocent grin, and the relentless pestilent limbs covered in blue and buff. Probably not, but that was before the ones closest to her dwindled in number. She had written her unapproachable anthems that guaranteed she was unmarketable. Even if there was any cache to be gained for Disney through her fame it would be quickly extinguished when google related what she was most known for. If anything she was a liability to the casual observer, ugly and controversial. He was judging Patti in her 60's by Patti in her 20's, ignoring 40 years of iconoclasm and declaring that she needs to be revolutionary only within the parameters he can imagine. He refuses to accept the depth of a person, the self confidence and motive developed over a lifetime because he demands ownership of the personas he is not able to create. So he publishes his article that passively accuses Patti of failing to fill obligations she never agreed to, sidesteps the burden put on him as author and insinuates judgment to gestate in the minds of his readers, then starts on his peice remembering Poly Styrine, whom he had never thought to write about before.