Urban Cowboy Mouth

Book reviewed:

Just Kids
by Patti Smith
Harper Collins Publishers, 2010
278 pages

Patti Smith's Just Kids is a passionate tribute to her dear friend (and one-time lover) the late Robert Mapplethorpe, and to the New York in which they came of age in the late 1960's and 1970's. Smith was just making a name for herself as a poet and rock journalist when she emerged from the CBGB's punk scene that spawned the Ramones and Talking Heads, among others, while Mapplethorpe developed an intense photographic style, much of it infused with gay and s/m themes, before dying of AIDS in 1989. The young, still-aspiring artists matured among the moveable feast of Beats and Punks, young turks and elders who were recreating the city and the world in their image.

Smith has made an idiosyncratic but iconic career as musician, writer and visual artist out of a romantic commitment to a pure distillation of art, idolizing and idealizing those she considers to have shared that utter commitment (Baudelaire, Genet, Bob Dylan, Keith Richards) or even been consumed by it as martyrs to artistic purity (Rimbaud, Jackson Pollock, Jim Morrison) Similar larger-than-life figures move in and out of the narrative, changing and evolving the culture around them as surely as Hemingway, Joyce, Picasson, Pound and Stein in 1920's Paris. Throughout, Smith maintains a certain Candide meets Forrest Gump innocence, resisting the drug use around her, professing surprise when Mapplethorpe's embrace of homosexuality becomes personal, rather than simply artistic and voyeuristic.

So many vivid portraits emerge, highly personal and unique, yet simultaneously timeless: Mapplethorpe embraces the transgressive New York world of Warhol, drag queens and bohemian socialites, but lies to his Catholic parents about him and Smith being married; Kris Kristofferson sings "Me and Bobby McGee" to Janis Joplin while Smith sits on the floor; Salvador Dali sees her with a stuffed crow and tells Smith she looks like a "gothic crow": she begins an intense affair with a drummer who introduces himself as Slim Shady, only to find out several days later that he is Off-Broadway playwriting sensation (and husband and father) Sam Shepard, who she collaborates with on the play Cowboy Mouth.

Harry Smith, Gregory Corso and Jim Carroll, (who appears in a similar, decadent saintly role in Kathleen Norris' 1970's in New York memoir The Virgin of Bennington), all dead now (if any of those names are unfamiliar to you, go to Google immediately, then come back. It's okay, we'll wait for you.... Take your time.... Okay, come on back now, you can return to that later.... come on, I'll loan you some books) are among the others who inspire Smith along the way, and are portrayed with much affection and respect. Each of the three were sporadically brilliant artists with emotionally trying personalities, as symbolic of their city at the time as anyone. As in Carroll's classic song, "People Who Died," Smith endows her time, her circle of friends and lovers, and her city, with a luminescent dignity which will make you search your bookshelves, cd racks and Netflix queue for the artifacts they left behind.