The New York Times - 19.09.2019

A look from JW

Anderson at fashion

week, as Brexit

drives designers to

new trends. Page 4.

Showing

In London

TOM JAMIESON FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

PARIS — The more Patti Smith rips her French audience,

the more they love her.

She tells the crowd at the Olympia music hall that they

should show more appreciation for their beleaguered presi-

dent because at least he cares about the environment.

There were scattered boos at the mention of President Em-

manuel Macron, and Ms. Smith isn’t having it. With her South

Jersey accent gloriously intact, she lets loose.

“You should have Trump as your president,” she tells the

pack of Parisians. “Then you’d know what it’s like to wake up

every day with a president who doesn’t give a” — and here

Ms. Smith uses one of several vulgarities — “about living

things, about trees, about animals, about the air we breathe

or the water we drink.”

She rocks them with “People Have the Power” (“The peo-

ple have the power/ To redeem the world of fools”), peri-

odically spitting on the stage, and Neil Young’s “After the

Gold Rush,” her wavy silver hair hanging in her face as she

fiercely plays guitar and howls, “Look at Mother Nature on

the run/ In the 21st century.”

Ms. Smith drolly informs the audience that they should be

applauding more when she name checks Sly Stone. “If I was

in the audience and somebody mentioned Sly, I would go out

of my mind,” she says. (She has said she learned to spar with

audiences by watching Johnny Carson.)

The next night, as she gets ready to sing “My Blakean

A Banquet

Of Music

And Words

Has Fed

An Epic Life,

But to Her

‘It’s All Poetry’

By MAUREEN DOWD

WITH...

PATTI SMITH

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 19, 2019D1

N

FASHION BEAUTY NIGHTLIFE

2 THINK IT OVER

A Supreme on the group’s

style. BY CHRISTOPHER PETKANAS

3 SKIN DEEP

Your gateway to the beauty

industry. BY COURTNEY RUBIN

7 NO REGRETS

The Who at a Pace Gallery

party. BY BEN WIDDICOMBE

8 AT AUCTION

Anthony Bourdain’s items, for

sale. BY JONAH ENGEL BROMWICH

In a video that began making the rounds
last month, Meg Stalter describes herself as
a writer in New York City (“Can you get any
more cliché than that, no you can’t,” she
said), and gives some writerly advice.
“Write every day, every second of the day.
When you wake up, you should be looking,
‘Where’s my writing stuff that I use to
write?’ ” Ms. Stalter is a comedian, and her
video has gone a little viral. Even Lin-
Manuel Miranda now follows her on Twitter.
Her impersonation of a writer giving ad-
vice to aspiring writers is funny because it’s
true. Thanks to tweets, comment threads,
Instagram captions, Facebook confession-
als, newsletters, self-publishing and the in-
ternet’s thirst for first-person essays, every-
oneis a writer (or “content creator”). With
an oversupply of words and increasingly
distracted demand, making money in a side
hustle or day job is harder than ever.
So there has been a surge in writer semi-

nars, workshops and salons, to which

mostly nonprofessional (or not-yet profes-

sional) writers sign up for advice on ideas,

structure, tone and pitching from published

authors, writers and editors looking to aug-

ment the income that goes along with the

full-time career everyone on the internet

wants — until they find out what it pays.

The author Meghan Daum created her

writing “master class” about a year and a

half ago after noticing Twitter vitriol di-

rected at smart but unpolished essays that

she assumed had not been well edited.

Ms. Daum, a former columnist for The

Los Angeles Times and The New York

Times Book Review and author of the forth-

coming nonfiction book “The Problem With

Everything,” said that she was able to de-

velop a contrarian voice in the 1990s with-

out fear of being assailed immediately by a

social media mob.

“I realized this was a luxury I had that

On a Mountain of Words,

They Are Your Sherpas

CONTINUED ON PAGE D8

By KATHERINE ROSMAN

From delighting Paris to

publishing a new book, an

ageless star still speaks the truth.

ANDRE D. WAGNER FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
The singer and writer Patti Smith at Electric Lady Studios in Greenwich Village.

CONTINUED ON PAGE D6