Just Kids

Patti Smith

Celebrity autobiographies are an iffy proposition. This one grabs your with the first sentence and never lets go. No wonder it won a National Book Award.

Patti Smith arrived in New York on a Trailways bus with only a few dollars in her pocket and an old address of some friends she hoped to stay with. Instead she found Robert Mapplethorpe, then an unknown young aspiring artist. Together they worked their way up from homelessness to fame, or at least noteriety, and relative affluence.

You may recognize Robert Mapplethorpe's name. He was the artist who's work was used as an justification for an attack on the National Endowment for the Arts in 1989, led by then House Speaker and now Presidential candidate, Newt Gingrich. Mapplethorpe never received any NEA money. The controversy over an exhibition of his work that resulted in cuts to the NEA budget erupted about four months after Mapplethorpe's death.

Mapplethorpe's photographs were a deliberate attempt to make pornography an art form. His awakening to his own homosexuality, as well as the development of his artistic vision are central to this book.The opening chapter, as well as the end of the book deal with Mapplethorpe's death from AIDS. Smith does not attempt to gloss over or sugar coat his, or her own, participation in the sexual revolution that took place in the 1970's, or it's consequences. I'm sort of glad that I was so clueless that I missed the whole thing. You may want to have a serious conversation with your middle school age child before giving her this book to read.

Patti Smith came to New York believing that she was an artist, or maybe a poet. It was only through a series of accidents that she came to realize that she could be a rock star. Her musical debut occurred when she brought her friend, Lenny Kaye, along to play guitar at one of her poetry readings. She continues to produce drawings and publish poetry along side her musical career.

Smith and Mapplethorpe lived together in a room at the Chelsey Hotel in New York for a couple of years. At the Chelsey they met such people as Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix and saw Salvadore Dali stroll through the lobby. Many opportunities came to them through their association with the Chelsey.

Just Kids is not a "how I became a rock star" pot boiler. Smith's attention is very much on Mapplethorpe and the intense, if odd, relationship she had with him. Her premise is that the growth of his art, and hers, came directly out of this relationship. I get the impression that she feels it was worth the price of admission.

An Object of Beauty

Steve Martin

This is the third novel by the banjo playing stand up comic, remembered for his arrow through the head bit. It's not funny. It is an engrossing character study with enough of a plot to keep you reading.

An Object of Beauty follows the career of Lacey Yeager, a bright, beautiful young art dealer in New York through the late nineties and early oughts from the point of view of an also young art writer, who finds himself involved in a bit of shady dealing at a Sotheby's art auction in which Lacey makes a bit of unearned money. The novel is mostly about the art market during the tech bubble boom times with a lot of sex and a smattering of designer drugs thrown in.

The moral consequences of taking short cuts in business are touched on, lightly. The narrator is relieved  at not being outed for his small part, though Lacey does not entirely face the consequences of her action, either. Just like in real life, there is some ambiguity about things, not a cut and dried lesson to be learned.

September 11th 2001 sits in the middle of this novel like a stain. It would be pretty strange to have a novel about the beginning of the 21st century, especially one set in New York, that didn't mention that day. In this book nine eleven signals the end of the book times in the art world and the beginning of the failure of Lacey's gallery. If she hadn't bought into a deal to trade in a contemporary Chinese artist, just before the Dow tanked, though, everything would have been fine. The real moral of the story is: timing is everything and nobody knows what time it is.

This post is in the 68th

Published at Izgad.

Princess

A man's affair with a boat
Joe Richards
Susan Richards, Pub.
JoeRichardsPrincess.com



Years ago, my friend Johnson, the man with two last names, lent me an old yellowed hardback book called "Princess, New York." He told me that I had to read it and that it was a great story of an artist, who had bought a 60 year old Friendship sloop at the tail end of the great depression and sailed away in it, looking for an island. Johnson is a lover of old crankity wooden boats. He has one of his own that is just turning 44 this year, which keeps him gainfully employed in order to pay the repair bills.

Eventually Johnson got the idea to find the boat "Princess" and have it restored and put in a museum somewhere. He made a lot of telephone calls and even traveled to Florida, the last known location of the boat, to no avail. He did meet Joe Richards' daughter Susan, though, and his obsessive behavior regarding "Princess" gave her the idea that a new edition of the book was in order.

Johnson was right about one thing. "Princess" is one heck of a good read. Joe Richards was an artist, living in New York who discovered, on Long Island, the ruins of an old sloop, built in the 1870s in Friendship Maine. He bought the thing and then found himself learning the craft of wooden boat repair. Eventually Richards set off down the inter-coastal waterway, headed for Florida and an as yet to be discovered island, where he would live happily ever after- or something.

The book is a well written memoir of an impractical quest for an undefined goal, interrupted by the Second World War. There are many asides, stories of adventures in the merchant marine during the war, as Richards tell the tale of his journey down the inter-coastal to Florida.

In book II, when Richards has acquired a wife and two children, he decides to escape New York for Key Biscayne, bringing his family and sailboat along with him. In this book the mysterious island, or at least an island, is finally discovered.

There are several small color prints of Joe Richards' paintings in the book as well. The book cover illustration above is a fair example. Take a peek at the website JoeRichardsPrincess.com for more examples.