Just Kids: From Brooklyn to the Chelsea Hotel, a Life of Art and Friendship

Patti Smith

Language: English

ISBN

20th Century Artists Artists; Architects; Photographers Biography Biography & Autobiography Composers & Musicians Entertainment & Performing Arts General History Holding hands with God Hotel Chelsea Individual Photographers Just kids Literary Middle Atlantic (DC; DE; MD; NJ; NY; PA) Monday's children Musicians New York (N.Y.) Photographers Photography Poets; American Rock musicians Separate ways together State & Local United States Women poets Women rock musicians

Publisher: Ecco

Published: Jan 26, 2010

Description:

PRODUCT DESCRIPTION:

Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe weren't always famous, but they always thought they would be. They found each other, adrift but determined, on the streets of New York City in the late '60s and made a pact to keep each other afloat until they found their voices--or the world was ready to hear them. Lovers first and then friends as Mapplethorpe discovered 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 friend's delight, from a poet into a rock star. (Mapplethorpe soon became famous too--and notorious--before his death from AIDS in 1989.) Smith's memoir of their friendship, Just Kids, is tender and artful, 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 price of automat sandwiches and the shabby, welcoming fellow bohemians of the Chelsea Hotel, among whose ranks these baby Rimbauds found their way.