Patti Smith and Daylight Savings Time

I live with someone who doesn't believe in Daylight Savings Time--she's the Arizona of our Republic.

It's not that I believe in DST, though I'm usually for things that Benjamin Franklin proposed, but I dutifully follow its dictates. I suppose I like the changing of the time, messing up with all our clocks and watches. My Ger, though, she still abides by Standard Time. Purist.

And tomorrow night, our mutual heroine (and I even don't know her views on DST) Patti Smith is being inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. She represented to me all that was cool about the idea of living in NYC, being a Manhattan punk-bohemian--with Sam Shepard, Robert Mapplethorpe, and others. I suppose I was too young to get into the Washington Square folk scene of the early sixties, and the glam rockers were cool but inaccessible to me (sorry Lou Reed, New York Dolls).

Maybe I pine for the pre-Guiliani, pre-Disney Manhattan, or at least my idea of it: dirty, hard-edged, difficult, and rude. Oh yes, I love my 1950s Best of Everything and my 1920s Cotton Club fantasies of NYC, my admittedly romantic ideas of the city. But the little tough guy writer me wants those early 1970s Manhattan, the start of CBGB and all those kids looking to outdo the tired old Beats and New York School of poetry. Anyway, for me growing up in Idaho, Patti Smith's great album Horses was all about the most elemental and elementary in her hard, untrained voice and in her harder lyrics.