Just Kids audiobook

Hi Ho, the artistic life.I had very divergent feelings about Just Kids, Patti Smith's National-Book-Award-winning memoir about her friendship with Robert Mapplethorpe. There were times that I felt moved by the beauty of her writing, and others in which I found her to be nothing more than another spoiled, entitled kid who got where she got to, talented or not, because of connections. It is not that Smith arrived in NYC with a list of names and numbers. But she did have the good fortune to encounter a knight in shining armor who had a prodigious artistic drive and the good looks to attract a series of male gateways to the New York arts scene. Patti Smith - image from El Pais - photo credit - Cordon PressThere is no doubt about the deep connection Smith formed with Robert Mapplethorpe, famed photographer to-be. They were not only lovers, but bffs. And that continued long after they stopped sharing a bed. Smith takes us on a journey through the gritty and some not-so-gritty portions of the New York arts scene, offering glimpses of the many, many people she and Mapplethorpe met. It is a veritable who's who, including bits and pieces on Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Sam Shepherd, Andy Warhol, William Burroughs, and a cast of hundreds. I never got the impression that Smith was name-dropping. She was as amazed as any aspiring artist might be at finding herself among so many notables. One downside to this is that so many shining lights speed by like houses at night as seen from a train. I would have liked it had she gone into a little (or a lot) more detail on more of these luminaries. She certainly does reinforce the image of the Chelsea Hotel as a cauldron of creativity in its day. The story of her arrival in New York, meeting Mapplethorpe and struggling to get by is worth the price of admission, a real look at what it means to be a starving artist. And that is not just a glib turn-of-phrase, as Patti, at times, made use of the five-finger discount in order to eat. It is also fun to read about how she and Robert trolled discount stores for materials they would use to make jewelry or incorporate into other artistic projects. Smith and Mapplethorpe back in the day – image from Vanity FairDespite the minimal physical mileage traversed here, Just Kids is a bit of a road story. Instead of crossing continents, she and Mapplethorpe cross from obscurity to fame, from outsiders to insiders, from fellow travelers (in a very non-political sense) to lovers to soulmatesI was surprised at a few things. Ok, look at almost any photo of Patti Smith and tell me with a straight face that she doesn't make you think of the Calvin Klein ideal of physical appearance. Yet, when she appeared in a play as a person with drug issues she was completely uncomfortable pretending to shoot up. Even her director was shocked at her lack of hard drug experience. A little weed here and there does not give one that lovely Ginger Baker look. A diet sprinkled with stolen food contributed for sure, but nature sculpted that body, not dark substances. I was also surprised--having come to the book with no familiarity with Smith beyond her recording of “Because the Night”--about the diversity of her artistry, running from drawing to poetry, to playwrighting, to acting, and so on. I have read better memoirs, and I do not think this should have won the National Book Award. But there is no missing the real feeling she communicates, the love she and Mapplethorpe had for each other. Her writing is good, sometimes better than good, and you will not be disappointed. But for many, the lifestyles presented here might be discomfiting, the willingness to engage in hustling, thievery, and very open relationships make the artistic world Smith and Mapplethorpe inhabited a decidedly acquired taste.Review first posted - 2010Published - January 19, 2010 =============================EXTRA STUFFLinks to the author’s personal, Instagram and FB pages

“It was the summer Coltrane died. The summer of 'Crystal Ships.' Flower children raised their empty arms and China exploded the H-bomb. Jimi Hendrix set his guitar in flames in Monterey. AM radio played 'Ode to Billie Joe.' There were riots in Newark, Milwaukee, and Detroit. It was the summer of Elvira Madigan, the summer of love. And in this shifting, inhospitable atmosphere, a chance encounter changed the course of my life. It was the summer I met Robert Mapplethorpe.”*Warning: Slightly gooey, syrupy review ahead. Written on the eve of my daughter’s seventeenth birthday, with all the standard warm and fuzzy feelings you might expect and loathe.*This beautiful, magical memoir is an ode to art, to music, to writing, to New York City, to life, to love, but most of all to enduring friendship. True friendship that lifts the other up, affirming one’s worth and sustaining the soul. While this is Patti Smith’s memoir, I had the feeling throughout that it was really a tribute to Robert Mapplethorpe and his art. As it turns out, Patti made a promise to Robert that she would one day write their story. What a story this is! I knew little about Patti, other than a couple of her songs, before reading this. I knew almost nothing about Robert. To think that I could have missed out on such an inspirational life adventure! This is a quintessential tale of struggling artists, living in New York City, trying to make their big break. “I felt constantly confined by the notion that we are born into a world where everything was mapped out by those before us. I struggled to suppress destructive impulses and worked instead on creative ones.”“A child imparts a doll or tin soldier with magical life-breath. The artist animates his work as the child his toys. Robert infused objects, whether for art or life, with his creative impulse, his sacred sexual power.”Smith’s writing is poetic, conversational, and candid. She talks about her romantic relationships with Robert and later with other men, as well as Robert’s relationships with his other lovers, including his most lasting with his patron and lifelong friend, Sam Wagstaff. She never apologizes or shows regret for any of their choices. Life was what it was, bringing the good with the bad. They lived the lives they chose, and there is nothing to be sorry for in doing just that. It makes one feel wholly nostalgic for a different sort of past. “I was attracted to Robert’s work because his visual vocabulary was akin to my poetic one, even if we seemed to be moving toward different destinations.”Naturally, in a book like this, one is likely to stumble upon some name-dropping. It didn’t bother me one bit. When an artist is making his or her way in the world, there are going to be others that come into their orbit and influence their lives. It seems to me that it would be impossible to write a story of one’s life without mentioning those persons that played a large part. Living for a time in the iconic Chelsea Hotel, Patti and Robert ran into a number of other musicians, artists, and writers. I’m not going to mention names here, but these were sometimes funny little stories, often involving misunderstandings. Many of these went on to become household names, while others never made it to the big leagues. Patti seemed very humble about all of it. There’s no affected swagger to her eventual fame. “Many would not make it… Taken down, the stardom they so desired just out of reach, tarnished stars falling from the sky. I feel no sense of vindication as one of the handfuls of survivors. I would rather have seen them all succeed, catch the brass ring. As it turned out, it was I who got one of the best horses.”I don’t read a lot of memoirs, but I’m going to have to say this has got to rank up there with the best of them. I love to read about the creative process, what gives one the urge to share something sacred, something that reveals the stuff of one’s self. What does it take to succeed? Everyone has dreams, but only a select few actually realize them. I spent some time this past weekend listening to Patti Smith on Spotify and searching for Robert Mapplethorpe’s photography on the internet. I’m smitten by the two of them now, and I’m not ashamed to say I couldn’t close Just Kids without grabbing a tissue. A genuine celebration of art and life!“Only a fool would regret being had by art; or a saint.”

I'm not sure how to do this book proper justice in a review. Just Kids is a book that enthralled me, surprised me, and ultimately, a book that I have fallen in love with. Not only is it one of the best books I've read this year, it is one of the best books I have ever read.Knowing very little about Patti Smith or Robert Mapplethorpe going into reading this, I figured I would enjoy it but not quite appreciate it as much as someone who is a big fan of either. And while that might be true, I still came out of this book with the utmost appreciation for both and for those people living, breathing, and being artists today. Because, this book is about art.It's about art that you love so much that you make sacrifices like sleeping on doorsteps or eating anchovy sandwiches. It's about art that consumes you, that frustrates you, that makes you feel alive.Patti Smith is an artist through and through. And I am completely inspired by her story and her companionship with Robert. Hearing about their lives in 1960's and 70's New York City was incredible, meeting the likes of Jimi Hendrix, Janice Joplin, William Burroughs, and so many more incredibly talented artists, poets, musicians, writers, etc. For a short time I was transported into the mind of an artist, into the time of her creative birth, and came out of it with an experience that I won't soon forget. I am sure that I will read this book again in the future and each time take away something more. 5/5 stars

This book is remarkably easy to parody. Here, I'll try:"I was crossing Tompkins Square Park when I ran into a young man wearing a gabardine vest. He smiled at me and called me "Sister." It was a young George Carlin. Robert hated him because he frequently had flakes of rye bread in his beard, but I loved how he could make me laugh with his impressions of Mick Jagger. On this morning, though, we wept together at the news that Paul McCartney would have to sell his house in Cannes. It was a sort of paradise for us, even though we'd never been. George gave me a feather to put in my hair, and I took it home and pressed it between two pieces of crepe de chine, where it left a ghostly impression. Robert insisted on using it in a construction, and finally I relented, though I knew I'd never get it back. It was a sacrifice to art, the sort of thing Rimbaud would've done."I think this parodic potential arises from the book's total and complete lack of irony. This is the most earnest, sincere book I've read in a long time, and that's what makes it so heartbreaking. Smith begins the book with an abundance of naivete, and in many ways, she never loses the idealism with which she begins her career. Written in a lyrical, elegiac tone, this is, at its heart, a book about the bond two artists develop. There's a remarkable amount of honest in the pages, and Smith's and Mapplethorpe's friendship is unique. They were lovers, collaborators, confidants, rivals...Their lives were the stuff of legend, and this book is a valiant effort to put that legend on the page.If you've ever held the romantic "starving artist" cliche in esteem, this is the book for you. Smith spends paragraphs talking about how hungry she was when she first moved to New York, and she isn't using the word as a euphemism for ambition -- she really needed to eat. Upon her return from a season in Paris, Mapplethorpe greets her in a feverish state, suffering from abscessed wisdom teeth and gonorrhea. And yet! They lived the lives of artists, staying up into the wee hours creating, writing, singing. They knew everyone. Harry Smith, Allen Ginsburg, Sam Shepard, Jim Carroll, Todd Rundgren, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin -- they all passed through Smith's life, and they all make memorable appearances in the book. It's a name-dropper's paradise, and yet, I didn't come away from the book feeling as though Smith was boasting or exaggerating her own life. I'm sure she's omitted some unfortunate moments on her rise to the top, but she seems honest about her own shortcomings (She freely admits that she acted like a jerk after her first big poetry reading, for instance). I knew nothing of Robert Mapplethorpe beyond his work and the controversy it had caused in the late 80s (I was too young to understand much of what he was trying to say, though I could understand the controversy just fine). The portrait Smith paints of Mapplethorpe is one of a passionate, wildly creative artist, and also of a man driven by his ambition to become famous. Her friendship with him was clearly the defining moment of her life, and reading about it was a pleasure. I often felt lost in this book, and I suspect that that's the only way to read it -- to just plow through it. I don't think I share all of Smith's ideas about art, but I respect her passion and her talent as a writer. Her prose is clear and direct and eminently readable. And maybe best of all, wherever I took this book, people would comment on it. "I just finished it. It's heartbreaking." Or "I wish I had her passion." I love when I read a book that inspires that kind of connection between people. It makes me feel, even if only for a moment, that I live in the kind of world that Patti Smith lives in.

Looking For You (I Was)I can see why some reviews detect white-washing or sugar-coating in "Just Kids", but I wanted desperately to believe the story Patti Smith was telling about her relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe.Glitter in Their EyesPatti admits to her naivete, but I don't think she was trying to hide stuff from her kids or anything.Nor do I think she closed off her emotions about her past.Ultimately, the book is a love story, only the love extended over a long period, and sometimes it was requited, sometimes not.Just KiddingLots of things got in the way, sexuality for starters, drugs for main course, other partners for dessert.But the book is about a love that they shared, and a youth that they both retained the whole of their lives, no matter what happened on the inside or the outside and no matter how poor or successful they were.The name of the book asserts her belief that all that time they really were "just kids", those two kids that the tourists photographed soon after they first met.About Another BoyAlthough Patti reveals a lot about Robert, I think ultimately the book is her final expression of love for him.I think it's important that she express her sugary side anyway, rather than "hide your love away".The book might be relatively sugar-coated for our image of Patti Smith, but her sugar isn't as sickly sweet as most sleb love stories. Memento Mori (Postscript)One of the reasons I empathise with this book so much is my passion for Robert Mapplethorpe's photography (not to mention Patti's music, lyrics and poetry).In March - April, 1986, I was on the Board of the Institute of Modern Art in Brisbane, at the time we helped to bring an exhibition of Robert's photos to Australia.It was a time of great political and moral conservatism in Queensland.The Board included artists and academics who feared the loss of their jobs, if they were involved in the exhibition of photography that might later be found to be obscene under our criminal laws.Many Board Meetings in the lead up to the exhibition debated whether we should not proceed with the exhibition or remove particular images (including "Man in Polyester Suit").I made some tentative preparations to deal with a potential criminal action against the Board Members, including getting expert evidence on Robert's artistic status.In the end, we decided to proceed with the exhibition in an uncensored form. All images were displayed in the form submitted by the artist and the curator.The exhibition was highly popular and no complaints were made to the Police.No criminal prosecution occurred.The important lesson is that we could have self-censored and lost our own freedom.Instead, we asserted and preserved our freedom in the face of fear.For me, Robert and Patti represent, not just the existence of freedom in the abstract, but the assertion of freedom in reality.They more than earned the right to their love."Your ancestors salute you."

I admire this woman. She writes a deft, deeply felt prose. She has a peerless memory. She remembers gestures, apparel worn thirty years ago, favorite objects, facial expressions, stretches of dialog. She can reanimate for us moments of deep emotional complexity. This was clearly a labor of love. The character study of Robert Mapplethorpe is disturbing, shattering. We watch Smith living with him as a veil is lifted from her awareness, as her empathy broadens and she carries the reader along with her. This is memoir as maelstrom, cataclysmic in its effect. There's more than sufficient foreshadowing. We know that Robert will die. Yet one still finds oneself grabbing futilely for the gunwales, whirling ever faster, ever downward and inward.The book reminds me of Jean Stein and George Plimpton's Edie: American Girl in it's New York setting. But Stein and Plimpton's book consists of transcripts of recorded conversations worked up into semi-confessional monologues. It's compelling, but it doesn't touch the nimble pairing of image and incident we find in Just Kids, nor does it have the latter's exquisite verbal compression. Like Edie, this book details an era of New York's art and cultural scene, but with a vividness I've never come across before. This intensity radiates from The Hotel Chelsea where Mapplethorpe and Smith occupied a room. The middle third of the book gets a little lost in name dropping. I suppose that's inevitable. There's less insight into Mapplethorpe, whom the author is growing away from. The sixties greats parade by: Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, et al. Then the artists and then the poets and so on. The narrative dissipates under this welter of names. Smith dates poet and rocker, Jim Carroll ("People Who Died"). She dates playwright Sam Shepherd (True West, etc.) One begins to lose track. Who's Matthew with the 45s again? We watch Smith's astonishing evolution from visual artist to poet to rock and roller. If someone were to write this story as fiction, it would probably be criticized as unrealistic.The theme, one of them, is the artist being true to his or herself and doing the work. Fascinating is the level at which which both Mapplethorpe and Smith learn their art. They are huge talents but they have entered a talented artistic circle that beggars description. When Shepherd has to leave Smith to return to his wife, they pen a valedictory play which is later staged at the American Place Theater in midtown. Mapplethorpe falls in love with photography when curator John McKendry brings him into the Met vaults and shows him rarely exhibited works by Stieglitz, Strand and Eakins. Until then he was hesitant to do his own photography, though Smith had repeatedly encouraged him to; he worked in photo collages with images from male magazines. Smith in her turn is cajoled into poetry by Gregory Corso and into song writing by Bobby Neuwirth. Who can claim such mentors and so many of them? Most artists' develop in far less encouraging settings. Smith and Mapplethorpe have been incredibly blessed. Toward the end the author reaches for a kind of ecstatic prose flight that seldom works. Fortunately the attempts at woolgathering are few. We are soon returned to earth by way of Mapplethorpe's suffering. I was especially pleased to learn that in his last 15 years or so, he had found a partner, Sam Wagstaff, who supported him in all he did. Wagstaff was both patron and lover, and rich as Croesus. Mapplethorpe no longer had to hustle sex on 42nd Street to make the rent. Wagstaff bought him a studio on Bond Street, walking distance from his own flat. Smith herself no longer needed to work at Scribners bookstore either. She recorded Horses which made her an international star. So when the end comes at least it is unmarked by the poverty and obscurity of Smith and Mapplethorpe's earlier years. Smith, living in Detroit by then with her husband, Fred Sonic Smith, drives to New York to see both men—Sam is sick, too—during their final illnesses. Her last encounter with Robert, before he's wheeled off, was for this reader Sophoclean in its tragic impact. The love these two shared, the exquisite trust! Suddenly, it's gone. A void prevails.By no means perfect, this is still an astonishing, emotionally affecting book. As with all great writing, its effect is greater than the sum of its parts. Please read it.

This book will be added to "The Art Spirit" as an essential volume on my writer's "behind the desk" bookshelf, the story of two baby artists and how they grew. There's an oddly innocent tone to this all--for instance, the sexual relationship between the two of them is never really discussed, only accepted--when Patti gets the clap, we understand it's from him, but this is not a kiss and tell memoir. It's an opportunity to walk a mile in Patti Smith's head, in a less coded and more factual way than in her music or poetry, but no less poetic for having been a lived life. Patti Smith has always been my idea of an artist--that an artist is different from an intellectual. The artist's way of being in the world is not about mincing and dicing experience, but about allowing oneself to resonate with events, to be played by the texture of life, and seeing what one is naturally drawn to, and how that stimulates an artistic reaction. Her way and his way. I like the unselfconsciousness of this writing--in an odd way, unself-examining, a paradox in a memoir. I have read the Patricia Morrisroe bio of Mapplethorpe--admittedly for the Patti Smith/Mapplethorpe material--and it's a revelation to read Patti's take on that time versus the reportage of people who had known them at the time. I love the layering of experience that way, as anyone who's read my work will know--the difference between the lived life and the way it looks from the outside. If it were someone else, I would even question the simplicity of the tale-tellling, the innocence portrayed, say, if it were Dylan or other more manipulative figures--but having listened to Patti Smith for 25 years, I believe this awkward innocent visionary quality. This is what we need, what I need, in our pathetic, overfacebooked, overstudied 2010s. More living, more art, more innocence, more faith, more poetry, more friendship, more acceptance.***********************************

I always liked Patti Smith, but I was never that much into her music. I have tried in different moments of mi life to listen to her, and there are a couple of songs of hers which I consider an important part of my personal soundtrack. But this book has made me completely love her. Her dedication to art, her fierce loyalty to her friendship with R.M. is something beautiful and worthy of reading about. I loved it.

oh i get the hype now

Last year, I read Gloria Steinem's My Life on the Road. I didn't know much about Steinem, but her book made me see her in a whole new light -- not an icon, but a lovely dedicated generous person. I had a similar experience listening to the audio of Patti Smith's Just Kids. I didn't know much about her, but certainly wasn't expecting to be so charmed by her. The memoir focuses on her early adult years. She moved to New York, developed a complicated relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe and tried to figure out her place in the world. Rather than making herself sound heroic or tragic or dishing out tawdry gossip, she talks with great openness and generosity about her life, her family and her friends. Much of what she describes is mundane, but she recounts it with so much appreciation for small moments in her life that it's hard not to fall in step with her lovely sensibility. In many ways, I didn't find it easy to connect with the way she lived -- pretty gritty at times -- or her relationship with Mapplethorpe -- but I loved seeing it all though Smith's eyes. It helps that Smith writes really well -- occasionally veering into prose closer to poetry -- stark, simple and expressive. It all made me feel like slowing down -- appreciating what's there -- my family, friends and surroundings.A note on the audio: Smith narrates her own story. She has a slow droning voice. It really grew on me. You're going to love it or hate it. I gather the physical book has many photos.