Just Kids
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- ISBN13: 9780066211312
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
Product Description
It was the summer Coltrane died, the summer of like and riots, and the summer when a chance encounter in Brooklyn led two young people on a path of art, devotion, and initiation.
Patti Smith would evolve as a poet and performer, and Robert Mapplethorpe would direct his highly provocative style toward photography. Bound in innocence and enthusiasm, they traversed the city from Coney Island to Forty-second Street, and eventually to the celebrated round table of Max’s Kansas City, where the Andy Warhol contingent held court. In 1969, the pair set up camp at the Hotel Chelsea and soon entered a community of the legendary and infamous—the influential artists of the day and the colorful fringe. It was a time of heightened awareness, when the worlds of poetry, rock and roll, art, and sexual politics were colliding and exploding. In this milieu, two kids made a pact to take care of each additional. Scrappy, romantic, committed to make, and fueled by their mutual dreams and drives, they would prod and provide for one another during the hungry years.
Just Kids starts as a like tale and ends as an elegy. It serves as a salute to New York City during the late sixties and seventies and to its rich and poor, its hustlers and hellions. A right fable, it is a portrait of two young artists’ incline, a prelude to fame.
Amazon.com Review
Amazon Best Books of the Month, January 2010: Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe weren’t permanently legendary, but they permanently thought they would be. They establish each additional, adrift but determined, on the streets of New York City in the late ’60s and made a pact to keep each additional afloat until they establish their voices–or the world was ready to hear them. Lovers first and then friends as Mapplethorpe learned he was gay, they divided their dimes between art supplies and Coney Island hot dogs. Mapplethorpe was quicker to find his metier, with a Polaroid and then a Hasselblad, but Smith was the first to fame, transformed, to her acquaintances delight, from a poet into a rock star. (Mapplethorpe soon became legendary too–and notorious–before his death from AIDS in 1989.) Smith’s memoir of their friendship, Just Kids, is tender and cunning, open-eyed but surprisingly decorous, with the oracular style familiar from her anthems like “Because the Night,” “Gloria,” and “Dancing Barefoot” balanced by her powers of observation and memory for everyday details like the fee of automat sandwiches and the shabby, welcoming fellow bohemians of the Chelsea Hotel, among whose ranks these baby Rimbauds establish their way. –Tom Nissley
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…. After all, I don’t like Patti Smith and I loathe the leprous Robert Mapplethorpe (who bears a arresting resemblance to the English murderer, Patrick Mackay). Smith, Mapplethorpe, and others of that ilk are considered (and view themselves as) artists in a world gone mad, where art has become so degraded, decadent, and degenerate that it can no longer be deemed art at all. But pick up “Just Kids” I did. And I was pleasantly surprised. Though really devoid of insight, the book is well written, evocative, and frequently poignant.
And I was delighted that my ancient friend, Ruth Kligman, was briefly mentioned. Well I remember the days when I used to take her out for mussels and Belgian fries. It made up for Smith’s egregious mistake in writing that a Jesuit’s priestly garb is brown, when it is in fact black.
Reluctantly recommended.
Reader’s Rating: 3 / 5
As much as I like Patti Smith, I dread she suffers from Lillian Hellman Syndrome: the ability to place yourself right in the middle of every past event. While Patti does not seat herself next to Winston Churchill, she certainly does manage to be present for several “pop” moments with stars of that period, though she was just a bookstore clerk abstractedly dreaming of being creative. Particularly absurd are the moments she supposedly shares with Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin. It becomes a bit annoying, and just rings of fantasy.
But its the actual prose that was most disturbing. I had such high expectations for her “voice”–but she reads like a really pretentious and slightly cliched 19th century romance.
Add to this the fact that she allowed herself to be treated like a doormat by Robert Mapplethorpe (including giving her a dose of VD) and it becomes a disappointing and not very appealing read all the way around.
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
Judge me when I say that I wanted to like, not like this book. And parts of it I do. You can’t help but weep at the way she ends the book, talking about Robert Mapplethorpe’s final battle with AIDS, and how they barely had enough to eat living in Brooklyn in the late 1960’s and their subsequent go to Chelsea in the early 1970’s. There are some pages so filled with this person and that person, and how she was with this guy and Robert was with that guy who introduced them to this additional guy who helped them out with another guy. I am not exaggerating. And they never get to meet Andy Warhol or Jim Morrison, but Patti meets everyone else, including brief encounters with Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix. It’s all believable but much of the book seems preposterous anyway. This book is a valiant tribute to a revolutionary artist, but additional biographers and journalists will have to more effectively chronicle the life of Mapplethorpe (as well as Patti herself).
Reader’s Rating: 3 / 5
nice to see her caringly rembering Max’s Kansas City, Wayne County,etc..
at a certain point, Patti divorced herself from all that,acted like it never existed,her early roots in the ’scene’,in order to keep the “Punk Magazine’ crowd pleased,who were sort of the fox news of that period…
welcome back to reality, Patti Smith….
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5
How a name can write an entire book and remain completely oblivious of her own part in her life’s failures, while rumor has it that trying to be introspective, is incredible. First Patti chooses Mapplethorpe, who vacillates between her and affairs with guys, then a married man (Sam Guide) and then a rock star who is gone all the time and cheats on her. Talk about choosing unavailable men!
Then she writes this book in tribute to Mapplethorpe, a guy who didn’t reflect enough of her to even bequeath any of his artwork or personal effects to her (she wistfully remembers his desk and slippers, which were sold at auction), and comments that she has his letters to remember him by–this, a guy who owned a half-million dollar place in Manhattan, and knew she was constantly scraping by and trying to avoid starvation! A guy who let her support him as he tried, unsuccessfully, to interest anyone in buying his art! Grumble.
Reading a book by a name with so small self-esteem, no boundaries whatsoever (she drifts into drug use with no explanation after spending her life refusing them), no sense of self (she appears to identify only with people she meets, and her clothes) is appealing but depressing.
Obviously smart, I wanted to just grab her half-way through the book and say: get a grip! Become your own person, not just a mirror for guys!
As a book illustrating how women’s passivity can toss them here and there through life at the whim of men, it’s perfect.
Reader’s Rating: 3 / 5