Janet's Reviews > Just Kids

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.
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