OCTOBER 2019 |TheAustralian Women’s Weekly 63
won the National Book Award in the
USA, and the less literal memoirs M
Train and now The Year of the Monkey.
She still gets up early every day to write.
Often, Patti’s artistic ventures have
been family affairs. As Jackson (a
guitarist) and Jesse (a pianist) grew, they
felt free to come and go from the band.
They’ve both toured with Patti, and
Jesse remembers joining her onstage at
the annual Tibet House benefit in New
York when she was still in her teens.
Jesse and Jackson have become
respected musicians in their own right,
and this month the label Smithsonian
Folkways will release an
album, Songs from the Bardo,
on which Jesse has collaborated
with conceptual artist Laurie
Anderson and Tenzin Choegyal,
a Tibetan flautist. Jesse has also
trained in healing with sound
and in grief education.
“It’s an area of life that is
very meaningful and important
to me,” she says, “I have spent
a lot of time thinking about
death, reflecting on my own
losses, and helping others with
the losses in their own lives.”
Patti and Jesse, meanwhile,
have co-curated exhibitions,
and Patti has been a dedicated
supporter of Jesse and her
musician friend Rebecca Foon’s
Pathway to Paris initiative,
which brings together artists, academics,
politicians and others to work towards
making the Paris climate targets a
reality. That her daughter is working
with the United Nations Development
Fund and city councils around the
world to limit carbon emissions
hasn’t come as a huge surprise to
Patti, who has been watching Jesse’s
passion for the issue grow since she
read her first article about global
warming in high school.
“What I admire most about Jesse
is her empathetic nature, not just for
people but for the earth,” says Patti.“She always had this. She was always
concerned about the world, and from a
very young age, she was always joining
groups that planted trees, recycling
groups, trying to promote awareness
about our environment. She is a very
empathetic person, and this is something
that comes from deep within herself.
This is something that is very particular
to Jesse.”
Jesse and Patti share that deep
commitment to nature. As the afternoon
draws to a close, Patti mentions a trip
to Uluru that was an afterward to her
last Australian tour. It was 2017, the
year she was 70 and reprised Horses
to packed houses and critical acclaim
around the word.
Patti had made a pact with her friend
and former lover, the actor-playwright
Sam Shepard, that they would visit
Uluru together. But Sam was in the final
stages of ALS, a motor neurone disease,
so she decided she must visit the rock
for them both. She gave one of the great
performances of her life at Bluesfest in
Byron Bay (where she’ll be back again
in 2020). Then, when the tour wound
up, she sent her band home and
travelled alone into the desert.
Patti stood in the shadow of Uluru
and reached out to touch it: a pale New
York poet’s hand on ancient rust-red
rock. It was the fulfilment of a dream.
“I went in the morning to watch the
sun rise and in the evening I watched
it set, and I did that every day for four
days,” she says softly. For a woman who
can shout and keen to raise the dead on
stage, in conversation she’s been warm
and generous. “I walked and I sat in
the rock’s presence, and I put my hand
upon it and it was like putting my hand
on a giant’s chest to feel a giant’s heart.
“In the evenings, I would look at the
stars – I could see the Southern Cross- and I was completely happy. I felt
that I had accomplished my goal and
I wanted for no more.” AWW
Clockwise from left: Patti and
Robert Mapplethorpe in 1969; at
the Tribeca Film Festival last year;
son Jackson and daughter Jesse;
with husband Fred Smith in 1990.The Year of the
Monkey ($29.99)
and a new illustrated
edition of Just
Kids ($59.99) are
published this month
by Bloomsbury.