Just Kids by Patti Smith
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Until I read her memoir, Patti Smith was only a vague TV image. I was turned off by the scary darkness of her looks, and her music made me change the station as fast as I could. Robert Mapplethorpe made a stronger impression, also negative, when he achieved notoriety for his homoerotic photographs of male nudes. But when I read Just Kids I found two very different people: rebels, yes, but also passionate creators yearning to produce great art and fulfill great love, willing, even eager, to sacrifice comfort and security. Before she was a musical performer, Patti was an artist and a poet, living with Mapplethorpe in New York--first on the streets, then in a warehouse loft without a bathroom, and finally in the Chelsea Hotel, a famous hangout for artists ranging from Dylan Thomas to Bob Dylan. In their early years as a couple, they gave themselves only to each other and to their art. "'Nobody sees as we do, Patti,'" Robert would say. "Whenever he said things like that, for a magical space of time, it was if we were the only two people in the world."

Robert's drug use (Patti claims to have never used drugs) and his anguish about his emerging bisexuality eventually led to their split, but they remained close. She set her poetry to music and became a successful performer, married a musician, had children. He achieved the notoriety of the cultural rebel as well as respect as a photographic artist. He died of AIDS in 1989.

I'm glad I read this. It humanized two people I'd known only as caricatures, gave me insight into the process of creating art, and provided an interesting tour of the New York art world of the 70s and 80s.  



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