El año del Mono

Looking at my image on the mercury gray surface of the toaster, I noticed that it looked young and old at the same time. It is two in the morning on New Year's Eve 2015 when Patti Smith arrives at the Dream Motel, next to the beach of Santa Cruz, after giving a concert in the legendary Fillmore room in San Francisco. She has just turned seventy. On the first morning of the year, she goes out for a walk and takes her first Polaroid from the hotel sign, with which she has a lucid conversation, like a modern Alice in her own particular Wonderland. The talk inspires her some verses and she decides to go back to her room, from whose terrace she listens to the waves and thinks of her friend Sandy Pearlman, the famous music producer, who has been in a coma for two days. She was the one who suggested in her youth to start a rock band. Thus begins a journey through the West Coast, the desert of Arizona, Manhattan or Kentucky, but also through remembered or imagined places, of the outside and inside world, in which Patti Smith allows us to wander by her side as her closest companions. This edition closes with an exciting epilogue written in the wake of the events of 2020.