It’s taken
me years to pick up Patti Smith’s memoir “Just Kids.” Now that I’ve finished
it, I’m wondering why I waited so long. Like Smith’s poetry and music, her memoir
is beautifully composed but incisive, leaving a lasting impression on the
reader.
The book
has a straightforward structure. Smith starts with her childhood and moves from
adolescence into adulthood. Growing up for Smith seems like a continuous run of
artistic explorations. From an early age, Smith becomes fascinated with the
individual’s ability to create art and captivate the attention and imagination
of an audience. A childhood trip to the Museum of Art in Philadelphia has a
profound impact on her:
But it was
the work in a hall devoted to Picasso, from his harlequins to Cubism, that pierced
me the most. His brutal confidence took my breath away… secretly I knew I had
been transformed, moved by the revelation that human beings create art, that to
be an artist was to see what others could not.
As a young
woman from South Jersey, Smith makes the common trek to New York City. When she
arrives, in 1967, she can hardly contain her stoke. She visits lots of bookstores and
hangs out in parks and coffee shops in Greenwich Village, just like I did when
I first moved to NYC.
It’s
during this wandering period when Smith meets Robert Mapplethorpe. The two
become inseparable, each inspired by the other to explore different artistic
themes and media. Their relationship is the crux of this memoir, which works
because their enduring connection is a beautiful thing.
When Smith
meets Mapplethorpe, he’s struggling to accept his own sexuality, struggling to
find a place in the world for his artistic expression.
He wasn’t
certain whether he was a good or bad person. Whether he was altruistic. Whether
he was demonic. But he was certain of one thing. He was an artist. And for that
he would never apologize.
Together,
Smith and Mapplethorpe weave their way through the thriving art rock scene of late 60s/early 70s New York. They move into the Chelsea hotel together, which Smith
describes as being, “like a doll’s house in the Twilight Zone, with a hundred
rooms, each a small universe. I wandered the halls seeking its spirits, dead or
alive.”
Robert Mapplethorpe & Patti Smith. |
The title
of the memoir stems from an experience Smith and Mapplethorpe share while hanging out
in Washington Square Park.
We were walking toward the fountain,
the epicenter of activity, when an older couple stopped and openly observes us.
Robert enjoyed being noticed, and he affectionately squeezed my hand.
“Oh, take their picture,” said the
woman to her bemused husband, “I think they’re artists.”
“Oh, go on,” he shrugged. “They’re
just kids.”
But the
two do become artists, successful ones by pretty much any standard.
Mapplethorpe and Smith make the rounds together, and the art rock reader will
find plenty of names to relate to: Janis Joplin, Andy Warhol, Todd Rungren, Jimi
Hendrix and many other folks I’ve never heard of. While Smith drops lots of names
without much context, she does spend time with a lot of these people and she has
plenty of interesting things to say about how they interact.
I’ve
always been fascinated by Smith’s revulsion for traditional female gender
roles, which she explores in this book. Apparently, she feels this way
from quite a young age. Early in the memoir, Smith recalls a conversation she
had with her mother as a pre-teen:
“Patricia,” my mother scolded, “put
a shirt on!”
“It’s too hot,” I moaned. “No one
else has one on.”
“Hot or not, it’s time you started
wearing a shirt. You’re about to become a young lady.” I protested vehemently
and announced that I was never going to be anything but myself, that I was of
the clan of Peter Pan and we did not grow up.
It seems Smith
is never fully comfortable with her body and her sexuality, like she feels
burdened by the baggage of the classification: straight white female. Smith’s physical
features are striking and sharply delineated, and her cut hair and hippy-mod dress
led some people to mistake her for a man, a lesbian or a gender nonconformist.
This doesn’t seem to bother Smith, perhaps because she herself isn’t sure what
to make of her appearance.
Traditional
gender roles are further shaken up by her relationship with Mapplethorpe, who
is gay but maintains a loving partnership with Smith. The love that
Mapplethorpe and Smith share is alluring in its inability to be categorized.
We needed
time to figure out what all of this meant, how we were going to come to terms
and redefine what our love was called. I learned from him that often
contradiction is the clearest way to truth.
Patti Smith, 1976. Credit: The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation. |
Mapplethorpe
develops a keen interest in photography while shooting Smith in their Chelsea
Hotel room. Smith calls herself Mapplethorpe’s muse, but she doesn’t fully
understand his interest in her as a subject.
I no
longer felt that I was the right model for him, but he would wave my objections
away. He saw in me more than I could see in myself. Whenever he peeled the
image from the Polaroid negative, he would say, “With you I can’t miss.”
When I was
in Hamburg, Germany a few years ago I attended an exhibit of Mapplethorpe’s
photography, which featured many nude images of Smith. I found Mapplethorpe’s
photos striking with their black and white contrast and voyeuristic intimacy. I
found Smith’s nakedness beautiful in a profound and arresting way, her rigid
facial features and dark hair contrasted with her wiry frame and generous
breasts. Looking at her nude, it’s hard to imagine how anyone could find her
ugly or strange looking.
Smith’s
first meeting with the poet Allen Ginsberg tells a lot about how others
perceive Smith, and how she, in turn, perceives herself. To set up the story,
Smith is broke (as usual) and hungry. She wants to buy a cheese and lettuce
sandwich (apparently that is a food) from a local shop. She’s saddened to find
out that the price has gone up by a few cents, and Smith doesn’t have enough
change for the sandwich.
I was disappointed, to say the
least, when I heard a voice say, “Can I help you?”
I turned around and it was Allen
Ginsberg. We had never met but there was no mistaking the face of one of our
great poets and activists. I looked into those intense dark eyes punctuated by
his dark curly beard and just nodded. Allen added the extra dime and also stood
me to a cup of coffee. I wordlessly followed him to his table, and then plowed
into the sandwich.
Allen introduced himself. He was
talking about Walt Whitman and I mentioned I was raised near Camden, where
Whitman was buried, when he leaned forward and looked at me intently. “Are you
a girl?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said. “Is that a problem?”
He just laughed. “I’m sorry. I took
you for a very pretty boy.”
I got the picture immediately.
“Well, does this mean I return the
sandwich?”
“No, enjoy it. It was my mistake.”
“No, enjoy it. It was my mistake.”
… Sometime later Allen became my
good friend and teacher. We often reminisced about our first encounter and he
once asked how I would describe how we met. “I would say you fed me when I was
hungry,” I told him. And he did.
Despite
Smith’s persistent and prolific work, she struggles with a sense of artistic self-doubt
in a time of war, racial violence and anomie — a time much like our own. She wonders: What is the value of
dedicating oneself to art when people all around are suffering?
I craved
honesty, yet found dishonesty in myself. Why commit to art? For self-realization,
or for itself? It seemed indulgent to add to the glut unless one offered
illumination.
Speaking
of illumination, Smith has an interesting take on god. She is taught prayer and
reverence for god as a child, and she develops a mystical sense of the divine
as she grows into her art.
It pleased
me to imagine a presence above us.
But, of
course, Smith’s ideas about god are complicated. One of the first things I
remember hearing about Patti Smith was her line: “Jesus died for somebody’s
sins but not mine.” It resonated strongly with me because it was such a liberating assertion
of the self, and a simultaneous rejection of the false promises of salvation. Smith
explains her thoughts behind that statement:
… I spoke
the line “Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not mine.” I had written the line some
years before as a declaration of existence, as a vow to take responsibility for
my own actions. Christ was a man worthy to rebel against, for he was rebellion
itself.
She writes
about the “moral power I gleaned in taking responsibility for one’s own
actions.” Smith — the mystic, seeker
and romantic — yet she refuses to
apologize or make excuses. While her music isn’t exactly punk rock, Patti Smith
lays out quite a punk rock ethos with her focus on these themes.
When I
lived in Brooklyn in the early 2000s, I saw a lot of my favorite punk and
hardcore bands play at CBGB’s, the old Bowery club and Mecca of American punk. I watched Sham
69, Agnostic Front, Sick Of It All, Youth Brigade, T.S.O.L. I soaked up every
minute in that steamy dive because I knew it wouldn’t be around for long. Knowing
the pivotal part that CBGB’s played in the birth of punk rock, I found it especially interesting to read about Smith’s experiences at CBGB’s.
We feared
that the music which had given us sustenance was in danger of spiritual
starvation. We feared it losing its sense of purpose, we feared it falling into
fattened hands, we feared it floundering in a mire of spectacle, finance, and
vapid technological complexity. We would call forth in our minds the image of
Paul Revere, riding through the American night, petitioning the people to wake
up, to take up arms. We too would take up arms, the arms of our generation, the
electric guitar and the microphone. CBGB was the ideal place to sound a clarion
call.
That
clarion call was heard loud and clear. And I’m glad I was able to experience
the reverberations decades later.
No comments:
Post a Comment