Patti Smith And Kevin Shields: The Coral Sea

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