patti smith is still a babe

Patti Smith, singer, writer and visual artist, former girlfriend of Robert Mapplethorpe and now the author of "Just Kids," a memoir about hipster life in New York City, circa 1969, is best remembered, looks-wise, for the skinny, wild haired, beak-nosed "man," really she looked like in contrast to Mapplethorpe's more femmy look. Of the two, Patti clearly was the guy even though she thought, they thought, they were a heterosexual couple. She was upset when for money Robert started turning tricks (the two were impossibly poor, living on air and probably potato chips) and then devastated when he told her he was gay. Although she went on to marry Fred Sonic Smith (also now dead) and had two children by him, Robert was the first and maybe biggest love of her life.

Now photographs of Patti as she looks today are circulating everywhere since her luscious new book came out. Close to 60 years old now, she is still skinny, still beak-nosed, and her hair -- which she wears in an unkempt, seemingly uncombed witchy 'do -- is as dry and scorched looking as ever. She's still wearing the same clothes, stricken her face of make up, and has done nothing whatsoever in the way of surgical procedures or applications of Botox or Restylene to cover up the lines on her neck and face. And yet she looks glorious. It's not that Patti hasn't been touched by time. She has. Possibly it has made her more beautiful than ever. Her visage and her bearing resemble every great female warrior who came before her: fearsome, powerful and haunted --and I mean that in the best possible way -- by ghosts from the past.

For every woman who never gave up their jeans, your cowboy boots, their untamed mane, Patti remains an aesthetic icon. She is still a babe.