Everybody clap along.

New goal: listen to all of Patti Smith's albums. She's a force, and I haven't seen much but I know even if I'd seen more I'd never have seen anything like her. Hot damn, forty years and counting, and how many people can say that?

One of the perks of the Y is the lecture series it hosts, and tonight I saw Patti Smith. She read some bits from Just Kids and a couple of poems, performed some songs alone, then with Lenny Kaye and finally with Sam Shepard. "My Blaken Year" was one, and "Redondo Beach" and "Power to the People." She talked about things she thought she'd lost and wouldn't see again, about sleeping in graveyards and horrible sunburns, Alan Ginsberg buying her a sandwich and the dog show she'd seen on TV last night. Above all she was present. Even when she was flipping through pages to find something or stumbling over words in a song there was nothing compromised at all, just her as she is and wants to be.

And now would be a fantastic time for me to make something - shouting to the audience, "Don't forget, use your voice!" right before it was time to go - if I wasn't so tired. Even so, I feel ready to pull out my paper-and-pen notebook and start writing things in there again, and that feeling's hard to find these days. Something that moves you, now that's art.