Just Kids

If this book had a smell, it would be beer, piss, sweat, charcoal dust, and that musty thrift-store clothing odor. I’m sure certain people would also add “pretension” to that list, but I never got that vibe from Patti Smith’s memoir of her time spent in late 60s/70s NYC with Robert Mapplethorpe.  Sure, if Paris Hilton wrote “The artist seeks contact with his intuitive sense of the gods, but in order to create his work, he cannot stay in this seductive and incorporeal realm,” I’d be rolling my eyes with the best of them and looking forward to the inevitable reading by James Lipton on Conan. But pretension can’t exist if you have the chops to back it up, and I’d make the argument that Patti Smith, the Godmother of Punk, has got some fierce chops.

Besides, the memoir is really a love letter to Mapplethorpe and to the gritty New York City I can barely imagine. Hustling on 42^nd street, rooming with junkies at the Hotel Allerton, shoplifting raw steaks...it all has a seedy glamour* when seen through the lens of Smith & Mapplethorpe’s complicated relationship. Sometimes lovers, always friends, and often muses for each other, they navigated the city and its art scene together. The intimacy, warmth, and affection that comes through in Smith’s writing is powerful enough – take away Warhol, Hendrix, Max’s Kansas City, Joni Mitchell, CBGB’s; even the protagonists' eventual fame & fortune, and it’s still a worthwhile read. Actually, it would have been more interesting if both of them had grown up, moved to suburbia, become tax attorneys, and gotten together occasionally to reminisce about their wild youth over a glass of Pinot. Oh well - sometimes people grow up to be rock stars.

4 androgynous haircuts out of 5.

*A seedy glamour I am happy to appreciate from afar: I hate having dirty feet & I’m terrified of bedbugs, so I’m fairly content with the sanitized version of NYC that exists today.