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Abeer Hoque's Reviews > Just Kids
Just Kids
by
by
I love learning about cultural history (or really any history) through literature. "Just Kids" by Patti Smith is the second rock and roll memoir I've read (the first was "Life" by Keith Richards) and just as edifying.
"It was my entrance into the radiance of imagination."
JK is about poet, artist, and rocker Patti Smith and artist and photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, "a young man with nothing but glory in his grasp," as they go from being just kids to artists of great renown.
"I noticed I was praying to the beat of my feet."
JK is not only a tribute to their love, romantic, platonic, artistic, everlasting, but also to the pursuit of art as a calling.
"Fill the wound we had opened to let other experiences in."
And it's a magnificent portrait of the "shifty and sexual" city of New York in the 60's and 70's, as seen through the lenses of music, art, drugs, sexuality, and ambition.
"He noticed his own breath like the breath of a collapsing god."
Until reading JK, I never understood the mystique of Clinton Street (which figures in so many songs) and the Chelsea Hotel (another massive cultural icon) or even Patti Smith herself who invents an entirely new art form that blends poetry, rock and roll, and art, and leads inexorably into the punk rock generation.
"My room reflected the bright mess of my interior world, part boxcar, part fairyland."
I did often get jogged out of the book because of repetition and uneven text, despite its brisk pace, fascinating story, and many many moments of gorgeous poetry (which only goes to show that everyone, even an accomplished poet, needs editing). And I felt the name dropping and references bordered on tediousness. Here's an example of said awkwardness:
"I had never listened closely to Lou Reed's lyrics, and recognized, especially through the ears of Donald, what strong poetry they contained."
Still, JK is a fast read, and would delight anyone interested in the birth of punk rock, in the elevation of homoeroticism in art as per Mr. Mapplethorpe's gorgeous black and white vistas, in blended genres by (literally) starving artists, in a really beautiful love story that withstands even changing sexualities, in NYC's cultural history, and in Ms. Smith's relentless drive to make a difference in the world and to do it with art.
"Pioneers without a frontier, as Andy Warhol would say."
"It was my entrance into the radiance of imagination."
JK is about poet, artist, and rocker Patti Smith and artist and photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, "a young man with nothing but glory in his grasp," as they go from being just kids to artists of great renown.
"I noticed I was praying to the beat of my feet."
JK is not only a tribute to their love, romantic, platonic, artistic, everlasting, but also to the pursuit of art as a calling.
"Fill the wound we had opened to let other experiences in."
And it's a magnificent portrait of the "shifty and sexual" city of New York in the 60's and 70's, as seen through the lenses of music, art, drugs, sexuality, and ambition.
"He noticed his own breath like the breath of a collapsing god."
Until reading JK, I never understood the mystique of Clinton Street (which figures in so many songs) and the Chelsea Hotel (another massive cultural icon) or even Patti Smith herself who invents an entirely new art form that blends poetry, rock and roll, and art, and leads inexorably into the punk rock generation.
"My room reflected the bright mess of my interior world, part boxcar, part fairyland."
I did often get jogged out of the book because of repetition and uneven text, despite its brisk pace, fascinating story, and many many moments of gorgeous poetry (which only goes to show that everyone, even an accomplished poet, needs editing). And I felt the name dropping and references bordered on tediousness. Here's an example of said awkwardness:
"I had never listened closely to Lou Reed's lyrics, and recognized, especially through the ears of Donald, what strong poetry they contained."
Still, JK is a fast read, and would delight anyone interested in the birth of punk rock, in the elevation of homoeroticism in art as per Mr. Mapplethorpe's gorgeous black and white vistas, in blended genres by (literally) starving artists, in a really beautiful love story that withstands even changing sexualities, in NYC's cultural history, and in Ms. Smith's relentless drive to make a difference in the world and to do it with art.
"Pioneers without a frontier, as Andy Warhol would say."
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Just Kids.
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Reading Progress
Started Reading
July 19, 2012
–
Finished Reading
July 20, 2012
– Shelved
