How does life “on the edge” spur creativity and artistic production? National Book Award-winner Patti Smith narrates eighteen “stations” that have defined her life, from a ritual Greenwich Village café to Detroit’s punk rock venues, Frida Kahlo’s Casa Azul in Mexico City, a meeting of an Arctic explorer’s society in Berlin, and finally, a New York neighborhood defined by disaster and demographic, economic, and social shifts: Far Rockaway, which Smith now calls home. Conversation led by Kathy Iandoli and Legs McNeil.
Kathy Iandoli is a journalist, author, and cultural critic. Her work has appeared in publications including Pitchfork, Rolling Stone, Maxim, Cosmopolitan, The Village Voice, Billboard, The Guardian, and many others. Kathy holds her Masters in Music Business from New York University, having returned to her alma mater as a lecturer and Professor-In-Residence, and is a 2015 recipient of the National Association of Professional Women’s Woman Of The Year Award. She is based in the New York metropolitan area.
Roderick Edward “Legs” McNeil is a writer and rock music historian. He is the author of Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk and co-founder and a writer for Punk magazine; he is also a former senior editor at Spin, and the founder and editor of Nerve magazine.
