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.  

I Don't Care About Your Band

"Girrrrrrl." - My brain, to Julie Klausner, while reading her horrifying tales of dating hipster douchebags and hateful depressives of every variety and flavor. It's like watching a slasher movie, except instead of yelling "Don't open that door!" you're yelling...okay well you're yelling "Don't open that door!" but the guy behind it just treats you like shit instead of murdering you. Which is SCARIER? You decide!

Actually my favorite part of this book is when she talks about how your twenties are the worst years of your life that at the time you think are great. God, hindsight's a bitch. I don't care about your band! Or your stupid accounting internship! That felt good, let the healing process begin.

3.5 late-night booty calls out of 5.

Bedbugs

Oh man. If you know me (and you do because, let's face it, this blog ain't no Dooce), you know that when I see a mattress on the side of the road I give it a wiiiiiiide berth. In New York, in Boston, in any city where students are crammed into tiny apartments where they spend their days swapping fluids with anything that moves (or so the media has led me to believe), bed bugs have taken hold. Every year, the students flee, they deposit their urine (I *hope* that's urine?) stained mattresses on the streets, and the bed bugs flex their haunches and prepare to launch onto whomever is so foolish as to walk within 2-3 feet. ALSO they never die. ALSO they can live in books. BOOKS. Bedbugs, you wound me to my CORE!

To sum: This book is scary & gross. The characters are well-developed, and there are some great twists and turns. Also if you get bed bugs, we can no longer be friends. Sorry.

4 tiny spots of blood on your pillow out of 5. Huh. Weird...