• horsesvisions > paintings — Birdland > Genesis

This confirmation of the important role of the birds in Birdland made immediately obvious in my mind an association between Patti Smith’s composition and Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds (which I knew by heart already by then, as I have always idolized unconditionally that film), in a kind of definitive and indissoluble strike. From that moment, I could never see The Birds without thinking of Birdland.
And I could never listen to Birdland without thinking of Hitchcock’s black crows perched on their monkey bars, ready to cast a pall over the sky with their deadly vortex. The New York Punk Rock poetess’ black birds and those of the British Master of Suspense had mingled in a synergistic stormy wedding, as symbiotic as furious. At that time, no rational element came in to support this association. Simply, I felt that these two worlds had occult links, even if the majority of them still lurked away from my understanding. And I also knew that beyond the black crows, the two works had anyway two blatant common denominators: the singularity specific to masterpieces only, and a devastating power.

Birdland came on my record player and later on my CD player back and back again, countless times, since 1975. When I was able to accede to the original text through the Modern Times' electronic Sibyl that the Web is, the opacities of mystery surrounding Birdland finally clarified : Patti Smith’s story of the little boy in Birdland had been inspired by the story of Peter Reich and his father, the controversial psychoanalyst and still more controversial researcher and scientist Wilhelm Reich.

However, under this new light, the birds of Birdland did not replace those of the Hitchcock film in my mind as an alternative soundtrack, because the world of these two creations did not express violence and mystery similarly, and certainly not on the same purposes. Hitchcock’s The Birds refered in a parable to the comfortable complacency of the careless and selfish human kind, beings proving helpless when the storm comes to rage. In Smith’s work, the theme is different. As she explained in the press about this title (The Observer / 2005): "The song was inspired by "A Book of Dreams", the childhood memoir of Peter Reich, son of radical psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich. There's a section in it where Peter describes a birthday party not long after his father died. He wandered outside and became convinced his father was coming down to get him and take him off in a spaceship".