terça-feira, 19 de janeiro de 2010

Just Kids by Patti Smith

In Just Kids, Patti Smith’s first book of prose, the legendary American artist offers a never-before-seen glimpse of her remarkable relationship with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe in the epochal days of New York City and the Chelsea Hotel in the late sixties and seventies. An honest and moving story of youth and friendship, Smith brings the same unique, lyrical quality to Just Kids as she has to the rest of her formidable body of work—from her influential 1975 album Horses to her visual art and poetry.

Book Description

It was the summer Coltrane died, the summer of love and riots, and the summer when a chance encounter in Brooklyn led two young people on a path of art, devotion, and initiation.

Patti Smith would evolve as a poet and performer, and Robert Mapplethorpe would direct his highly provocative style toward photography. Bound in innocence and enthusiasm, they traversed the city from Coney Island to Forty-second Street, and eventually to the celebrated round table of Max's Kansas City, where the Andy Warhol contingent held court. In 1969, the pair set up camp at the Hotel Chelsea and soon entered a community of the famous and infamous—the influential artists of the day and the colorful fringe. It was a time of heightened awareness, when the worlds of poetry, rock and roll, art, and sexual politics were colliding and exploding. In this milieu, two kids made a pact to take care of each other. Scrappy, romantic, committed to create, and fueled by their mutual dreams and drives, they would prod and provide for one another during the hungry years.

Just Kids begins as a love story and ends as an elegy. It serves as a salute to New York City during the late sixties and seventies and to its rich and poor, its hustlers and hellions. A true fable, it is a portrait of two young artists' ascent, a prelude to fame.

Critical Praise for Just Kids

“The reckless, splendid circus of New York’s royal bohemia in the 1960s and ‘70s — rock idols, cowboy poets, Warhol Superstars — surrounds Smith in her heady recounting of a halcyon era. But the heart of Just Kids, a captivating memoir, is the lifelong love affair (first romantic, later creative and platonic) between Smith and photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, before she became music’s punk poet laureate and he one of the art world’s most provocative and controversial figures. In her inimitable, lyrical style, Patti Smith recalls the pair’s coming together as young, monumentally broke dreamers: ‘’just kids.’’ What follows is both a poignant requiem (Mapplethorpe died of AIDS at age 43) and a radiant celebration of life. Grade: A.”

— Entertainment Weekly

” A story of art, identity, devotion, discovery, and love, the book is [Smith’s] first prose work...[it] conjures up the passionate collaboration--as lovers, friends, soul mates, and creators--that she and Mapplethorpe embarked on from the summer they met in Brooklyn in 1967.”

— Elle

“[Smith] has great insight into the development of their creative processes, especially her evolution from writer to rock star, and [Mapplethorpe’s] from painter to shutterbug (not to mention from straight to gay).In the end, it’s not just an ode to Mapplethorpe, but a love letter to New York City’s ’70s art scene itself.”

— Time Out New York

“Funny, fascinating, oddly tender.”

— O, The Oprah Magazine

“Patti Smith’s memoir of her youth with Robert Mapplethorpe testifies to a rare and ferocious innocence...’Just Kids’ is a book utterly lacking in irony or sophisticated cynicism.”

— Salon.com

“A shockingly beautiful book...a classic, a romance about becoming an artist in the city, written in a spare, simple style of boyhood memoirs like Frank Conroy’s ‘Stop Time.’”

— New York Magazine

“[Patti Smith] managed to make garage rock both literary and iconic. More than 30 years after its release, Horses still has the power to shock and inspire young musicians to express themselves with unbridled passion. Now she brings the same raw, lyrical quality to her first book of prose, Just Kids, out this month.

— Clive Davis, Vanity Fair

“[A] beautifully crafted love letter to [Robert Mapplethorpe]...Smith transports readers to what seemed like halcyon days for art and artists in New York...[a] tender and tough memoir...[an] elegant eulogy.”

— Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Riveting and exquisitely crafted.”

— Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“She was once our savage Rimbaud, but suffering has turned her into our St. John of the Cross, a mystic full of compassion.”

— Edmund White

“Captivating....a poignant requiem...and a radiant celebration of life. Grade: A.”

— Entertainment Weekly

“More than 30 years after its release, Horses still has the power to shock and inspire young musicians to express themselves with unbridled passion. Now she brings the same raw, lyrical quality to her first book of prose.”

— Clive Davis, Vanity Fair

“In the end, [JUST KIDS is] not just an ode to Mapplethorpe, but a love letter to New York City’s ‘70s art scene itself.”

— Time Out New York