"Any Day Now:" Bowie's big book of ch-ch-changes

 

For those who enjoy tripping down rock's memory lane, David Bowie has the ultra-glam treatment in a coffee-table slab of his own.

Any Day Now: David Bowie The London Years 1947-1974 (Adelita Publishers) is an eye-popping collection of memorabilia that should remind readers of a certain age that the '70s -- in the UK, at least -- certainly seemed ... well, a bit more colorful than here in the drab, Nixon-browed USA at the time.

 

Bowie was always a smart businessman -- he was the first to offer a stock offering in his musical back catalog -- and this book is a memento of a London  exhibition, edited by Kevin Cann, Bowie's gallery assistant and also contributor to the re-release of Bowie's music in the 1990s.

 

The parade of pictures shows The Thin White Duke in his many transformations from Maidstone folkie to Ziggy space case. The resulting tumble of images is a great laugh or a serious head-scratching case of pop remorse ... sometimes on the same page. Lady Gaga's got nothin' on this Aladdin Sane.

 

Bowie, au-courant, by Kenneth Pitt (1969)

340 pages, 850 images, pull-outs, signed glossies, concert tickets, lipstick traces: if you're interested in Bowie's history, you can read between the promo shots, coy backstage glances, and space-age album-cover art. Cann has put together all the details, as well as "the most concise listing of Bowie performances ever published," according to the Guardian UK.

 

At a length of 140,000 words, there's not much more to be read about Bowie's UK years. One must admit it was a nice gesture on Bowie's part to ask Dudley Moore to add piano to Hunky Dory, though. (Moore declined.)

 

Pin-up boy: Bowie by Terry O'Neill (1973)

 

But if a picture is worth a thousand words, then the price of the book (originally published in the UK at £24.99 for the no-frills paperback, £175.00 for the all-you-can-collect limited edition of 450 signed and numbered copies) is a bargain. A history stopping at 1974, when Bowie left the UK for his Stateside dukedom, should give the collector and his wallet pause. If you have any quid left over from buying this book of ch-ch-ch-changes, better start saving it for Bowie, vol. 2.

Art, photography, and a trip through bad taste: A selection of books for autumn weekend reading

These previously-reviewed titles at Bellemeade Books are a good reason to enjoy autumn's cooler weather indoors on the couch: from a rediscovered story by William Burroughs getting the graphic-novel treatment, to the photography of North Carolina photographer Joe Webb. There's still plenty of reading left for a lazy weekend afternoon.

Above: Everyone's favorite cranky Uncle Bill, William S. Burroughs, continues to battle the forces of Control years after his death. The author gave name to heavy metal, provided inspiration to underground writers everywhere, and pissed off an entire generation of academic critics, and now his forty-year old "bedtime story" Ah Pook Is Here is re-published in a deluxe edition by Fantagraphics Books: "Ah Pook Is Here is a consideration of time with respect to the differing perceptions of the ancient Maya and that of the current Western mindset. It was Burroughs’ contention that both of these views result in systems of control in which the elite perpetuate its agendas at the expense of the people. They make time for themselves and through increasing measures of Control attempt to prolong the process indefinitely."

The Work of Joe Webb: Appalachian Master of Rustic Architecture (Jargon Books, distributed by the University of Georgia Press) is work that celebrates the craftsmanship of the Highlands, North Carolina woodworker and builder who created nearly thirty log cabins in the 1920s and 1930s. Cox's contemporary photographs -- taken with a large-format field camera -- reveal the houses in current states of repair, disuse, or unrecognizable renovation: a review in Blueprint calls the images "hallucinatory ... balustrades of thick, twisted twigs minimizing thickets; staircases constructed with random patterns of interlocking laurel or rhododendron branches."The North Carolina artist whose website offers a welcome and a request ("welcome to my mosque ... please wipe your muddy mind before entering") is a photographer, luthier, portraitist; his photo subjects range from the ephemera of the soul to whorls of river water to the graffiti-plastered walls of the now-closed CBGB's, documenting the passage of the temporal in sharply-rendered images of both beauty and clarity.

The University of Texas at Austin recently offered a rare opportunity to see an image considered to be "the world's first photograph." Taken in 1826, the shadowy, indistinct image is almost invisible to the eye, but it is the centerpiece of a grand collection of 35,000 photographs, nearly 200 of which were displayed at the Harry Ransom Center on the Austin campus. The University of Texas Press is publishing a companion volume with 125 plates selected from the Gernsheim collection. From the book's preface: "The collection’s clearest strength remains its holdings in nineteenth-century British photography, including hundreds of images by such masters as David Hill and Robert Adamson, Lewis Carroll, Julia Margaret Cameron, Roger Fenton, and Henry Peach Robinson. The Gernsheims carried their passion for the medium into the twentieth century by also collecting significant works by modern photographers, such as Alfred Stieglitz, Alvin Langdon Coburn, Man Ray, Paul Strand, Albert Renger-Patsch, Edward Weston, and Henri Cartier-Bresson."

For whatever reason, some books just stay with you. Kitsch: The World of Bad Taste by Gillo Dorfles is one of those books. While the line separating art from kitsch is exceedingly fine, one man's trash is still saved from being another man's treasure by context, or (more rightly) kitsch's complete lack of one. Da Vinci's Mona Lisa appears much less inscrutable on a plastic shower curtain. Mass production has made the irony of "authentic reproduction" available on a grand scale.Some of the academic essays have not aged well -- the book was originally published in 1968 -- even if the gently tortured Italian-into-English translation has its own charm: "And obviously before long (and even now in fact) we will witness the anti-family kitsch, the kitsch of hippies and long-haired youths, the kitsch of addicts and beatniks,"writes Dorfles -- foretelling Nirvana's cover version of Bowie's "The Man Who Sold the World" by a good 20 years.

"The Day In Its Color:" A Technicolor look back at mid-century America

The Day in Its Color introduces readers to Charles Cushman’s extraordinary thirty-year work, an archive of 14,000 Kodachrome photos housed at Indiana University. The photographs, most shot on vivid, color-saturated Kodachrome stock from 1938 to 1969, are the visual record Cushman captured as he travelled constantly, photographing everything he encountered from New York to New Orleans, Chicago to San Francisco.

Cushman, the sometime salesman and non-professional photographer, traveled by auto across US highways before the Interstate system, built in the 1950s, eventually made cross-continental road travel a blur of exit signs and chain restaurants. The result is a chronicle of an era almost never seen in color beyond souvenir postcards and chamber-of-commerce brochures. 

 

What was America like at mid-century, at city-street level and country-crossroad? As one reviewer of The Day In Its Color expressed it, "Imagine Berenice Abbott or Walker Evans in technicolor." Our collective images of the 1940s, so dominated by black-and-white war photography and dustbowl portraiture, now have a dimension on view in vivid color:  Cushman's photos include portraits and everyday streetscapes, ethnographic studies, agricultural and industrial landscapes, movie sets and media events, children playing, laborers working, all precisely documented in time and place. The result is a chronicle of an era almost never seen or seldom envisioned in color. 

 Charles Cushman, 1939

The book's editor, Eric Sandweiss of Indiana University, selected one hundred fifty images from Cushman's collection. Viewing the original slides and prints was revelatory: in a recent post Sandweiss compares the experience to how people must have felt stepping into the land of Oz in a movie theater in 1939:

Pulling the little Kodachromes out of their slide boxes, I realized how thoroughly the gray shades that, for me, defined America before the late 1950s had, like a theatre scrim, distanced me from the experience of everyday lives lived before my own. Each black and white picture, I realized, reminds you that it is a document — not the thing itself. It pronounces its own pastness before you’ve even made it present. Laid out on the light table, glowing as bright as the room around them, the color slides quickly sucked me into an opposite fallacy: thinking that I was closer to the places pictured within them than I could ever be. “The day in its color,” to quote the poet Wallace Stevens, had come to seem the world itself.

In his archive of images Charles Cushman (1896-1972) preserves mid-century America as a place as vivid as the view out our own window. The collection is all the more remarkable for having gone undiscovered for decades. What makes the photos valuable is the wide range of subjects, landscapes, and moods it captures -- snapshots of America as yet untouched by an overlay of interstate highways, urban renewal, chain stores, and suburban development.

Atlanta, Christmas 1951

America is revealed as a world of hand-painted signs, state fairs, and ramshackle shops, small town living and bustling urban scenes before corporations began to stake claim on every street corner. (Although there were exceptions: Coca-Cola wasn't about to let Atlanta forget its hometown roots, above.) The book also reveals the fascinating and startling life story of the man who stood, unseen, on the other side of the lens, as one of America's most busy amateur photographers. 

To create a now-and-then contrast to Cushman's work, Sandweiss embarked on his own cross-country journey to the same vistas captured in the photographs. In Atlanta, the round Coca-Cola "Neon Spectacular" lit up the foot of Peachtree Street from 1948 to 1981. Today, hotels and office buildings dominate a more demure downtown streetscape, if just as busy. In his recent blog series Sandweiss comments on what has been lost in the intervening 70-plus years of road-travel in the American imagination:

 Tucson Rodeo Day, 1940

Route 66 exists so completely in our literary memories, our imaginations, our online search options, that even the faintest of efforts can serve to satisfy the curiosity that took a man of his generation many years to settle. As with every other aspect of our networked world, such access cuts both ways. While access to information democratizes our ability to fashion a coherent picture of the landscape, it furthers the atomization of our social and spatial selves. 

Locked in our homes, we open Google Maps for a 360-degree view of any square foot of the highway. On our GPS devices and our Mapquest searches, we break down the full experience of travel into a million randomly ranked impressions; “continue west 734.5 miles” takes up less space in our brains than “south 37 feet to unmarked intersection, take a soft right onto eastbound access road.” We know everything and we know nothing about the spaces through which we move.

Clinton Street, Manhattan, 1941

As Sandweiss comments in his post about the photographer as documentarian, "Like most Americans of his day, Charles Cushman was neither preservationist nor modernist. He enjoyed pieces of both past and present, using his camera to assemble a picture of his 'day in its color,' and seldom peering incisively into the shadows of class or race inequality or environmental degradation that lay beneath its surface. Cushman does not ask that we rush to his side in defense of these sites of imminent change, but neither do his pictures suggest confidence that something better awaits. His job (and his real job, at that) was to predict where the market was headed, not to take it there." What we take for granted in our everyday lives always disappears, replaced by some other building, some other idea, some other usefulness: we'd all better have that camera ready.

"Poets on the Peaks:"a photo journey retraces Snyder, Whalen, and Kerouac in the Cascades



Although he has been linked with the Beats since the mid-50s, Gary Snyder is less the shaman or the showman than Ginsberg and Kerouac, and his writing shuns the wild word-is-a-virus pyrotechnics of William Burroughs. He shared the Beats' post-war restlessness: he studied in Japan, and learned Japanese and Chinese and traveled to India; his interest in Buddhism was coincidentally shared with Ginsberg and Kerouac when they came to San Francisco in the mid-50s, meeting up with poets Kenneth Rexroth and Philip Whalen. That became Beat poetry's East-meets-West moment, New York-to-San Francisco's transcontinental linkage. He was present at the Six Gallery when Ginsberg read "Howl" in October 1955, the first Beat cannon shot across the bow of 50s conformity.

Yet Snyder's individual impact on twentieth-century poetry and ecology -- the actual sinew, flesh and bone of man's place on the planet -- has been considerable, and has continued so for more than 50 years. Reviewing The Gary Snyder Reader in 2000, William Pitt Root puts Snyder's contribution pretty nicely: "Except for Gary Snyder, post mid-twentieth century American poetry might never have gotten further out-of-doors than the nearest garbage dump, golf course, or catfish farm." And Snyder's essays on nature (Earth House Hold, The Practice of the Wild) prove that these ideas are not the stuff of airy, lost-Edenic poetry. To the careful reader, his essays reveal exactly what America is losing more rapidly with every passing season.

Writer and photographer John Suiter trekked to the mountain lookouts where Snyder and others spent several summers in the mid-50s and captured images of the western mountains that inspired them. Poets On the Peaks: Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, and Jack Kerouac in the North Cascades (2002) is a literary and photographic recreation of the Beats' original sojourn in the wilderness. Snyder began his long poem, Myths and Texts; Kerouac found inspiration for The Dharma Bums (Snyder was the model for the book's main character, Japhy Ryder) and Desolation Angels; Whalen's Sourdough Mountain Lookout was published in 1957. Suiter pulls together the books, notebooks, letters and diaries of poets and writers creating a wilderness ethic in mid-century America, away from the cities and highways that were beginning to mark the country, and into one of the last great wilds on the continent.



When The Dharma Bums was published the year after On the Road, Suiter writes, Jack was tremendously excited and wrote to Snyder that 1958 would be "the Year of the Dharma." Snyder, in his fashion, was planning another trip to the wild, but wanting to include Jack in his plans. Returning from sea aboard the oil tanker Sappa Creek, Snyder wrote:

"Maybe this is the Year of the Dharma. Now Arabian Sea and heading in for last load and trip home. Tiger, if you like, join me in the mountains this summer. I mean to wander the Sierras and Cascades both. Also, bhikku cabin around SF area -- we'll look into it."

To Whalen, Kerouac wrote that Gary's arrival would spark big changes:

"With Dharma Bums I will crash open the whole scene to sudden buddhism boom and look what will happen closely soon ... everybody going the way of the dharma ... then with the arrival of Gary, smash! Watch, you'll see. It will be a funny year of enlightenment in America."

It was telling of them both that Kerouac's comments envisioned a grand change in American values, while Snyder was planning a return to isolation and the high mountains. For Snyder, there was the real work to be done of living, creating and conserving. Kerouac's wild enthusiasm was not bound to last; within ten years he was disillusioned and drunk, full of despair -- even if his roman candle of a book inspired a generation, he was not part of the social revolution it created, and he despised the unintended counterculture that came up around On the Road.

What a contrast to the ecological awareness Snyder's work has encouraged. His poetry and essays have been enjoying a rediscovery, with a lengthy appreciation in the October 20 issue of the New Yorker ("Zen Master") being the most recent. Snyder's long career as a poet, his translations of the Cold Mountain poems by Han Shan and others from the Japanese, and his ecological essays have made him, in a way, the remaining Beat presence. It's ironic that his quiet and unassuming poetry (and his life away from the literary spotlight) would continue to give meaning to Kerouac's "rucksack revolution" and its subsequent 60s fireworks.

Now 78, after a lifetime of writing and contemplating what he once called "the real work", Snyder is still at it -- though his tools have changed from those he used at his Sourdough Mountain lookout in 1953. Here's an excerpt from "Why I Take Good Care of My Macintosh Computer":

... Because its keys click like hail on a rock & it winks when it goes out,
& puts word-heaps in hoards for me,
dozens of pockets of gold under boulders in streambeds,
identical seedpods strong on a vine,
or it stores bins of bolts;
And I lose them and find them,
Because whole worlds of writing can be boldly layed out
and then highlighted, & vanished in a flash at "delete"
so it teaches of impermanence and pain ...

Suiter's book is a valuable (and very beautiful) addition to Beat literature, putting into pictures as well as words what made this brief period of 1952-1956 so important to the scene that followed. He is currently at work on the first full biography of Snyder.

"Gravely Concerned': the last stops on a tour of Southern writers

No real estate is permanently valuable but the grave.
(Mark Twain, 1898)

Much like the recent unpleasantness between the states from 1861-1865, the topic of death has an unshakable hold on the Southern imagination. Maybe that fascination springs from the rural tradition of long-told family stories: of ghosts and haints, lost relatives and ne'er-do-wells, and other human mysteries that make this conscious life only a pause on eternity's long road. In the South death takes on a mythical stature unparalleled elsewhere in America. People do talk about their long-gone ancestors as if those ancient folk were sitting, here today, on the porch having a glass of tea.

This embrace of the past, indeed the near-physical presence of the departed, is a romantic idea expressed in the over-use of the word Gothic when applied to the Southern sensibility. There is no mistaking the haunting tales of Edgar Allan Poe as anything but Southern, and the Gothic continues to be a part of the regional feel. As Howard Bahr, writing from Jackson, Mississippi, remarks in the book's foreword as if a plume of one of W.J. Cash's Cavaliers were still in his hat:

I believe that a walk through a cemetery is no intrusion but first, a sojourn into the past and, second, a glimpse into the future of our ephemeral selves. I see no possible harm in walking over a grave, and I think it proper that a man should sit on a tombstone, smoke his pipe, and contemplate his own mortality while the mockingbirds sing in the oaks. I believe the dead, so far as they may be aware, find such occasions enjoyable: footsteps of a visitor from the world they left behind come to acknowledge them as fellow travelers, no different from us but only gone ahead. ... This, I have found, is the artist's view as well.

Graves of Robert Penn Warren and his wife Eleanor, Stratton VT.

Which makes John Soward Bayne's new book Gravely Concerned(Clemson University Digital Press) a regional celebrity-search of the famous and infamous writers who had much to do with creating the unique Southern imagination. The book is less haunted by morbid curiosity than it is an evocative visual record of where many writers associated with the South have chosen to spend eternity.

In some cases a choice was not offered: in 1973 Alice Walker determined the resting site of Zora Neale Hurston by calling out "Zora, where are you?" in an Eatonton, Florida cemetery to locate the writer's unmarked grave -- in itself an absolutely fitting Southern tale.

In other cases these sites, some elaborate and others more simple, reflect the reputations of the writers themselves in their lifetime and (one presumes) in the life beyond. They become points of pilgrimage for fans and the curious: Margaret Mitchell in Atlanta's Oakland Cemetery, William Faulkner (and his brothers) in Oxford Mississippi, Edgar Allan Poe in Baltimore, whose Poe Toaster tradition as of 2009 may be nevermore.

Yet there are many more -- regional writers whose legacies are less well known but whose fictions are part of the Southern fabric. Bayne began his photography project in 2003 with a mathematician's exactness and a reading fan's zeal, sometimes traveling by Greyhound overnight through Alabama and Mississippi and the Carolinas to locate a particular site.

Over the course of pages the book becomes a treasury of Southern names: John Trotwood Moore. Abbie Mandana Holmes Christiansen. Beatrice Whitte Ravenel. William Tappan Thompson. Thomas Holley Chivers. Douglas Southall Freeman. John Peale Bishop. Hubert Creekmore. Katherine Drayton Mayrant Simons.

It's understood if the casually curious may only be interested in tracking down Thomas Wolfe in Asheville, but where does one go to seek the disputed last rest of Truman Capote? That eternal gadabout may be buried in L.A.'s Westwood Memorial Park (a final cocktail party of sorts, surrounded by celebrities) -- or his ashes may be scattered at Crooked Pond near Bridgehampton, NY.

Many Southern writers are buried here, but not all. Although Mark Twain's grave is featured on the book's cover, in a recent discussion Bayne said he doesn't really consider Twain a Southern writer: born in Missouri, lived in Connecticut, he married a Yankee girl from Elmira NY and wrote several of his novels during 22 summers there. The serial bankrupt Clemens is buried in his wife's family plot in Woodlawn Cemetery in Elmira. At Woodlawn, driving directions are posted Mark Twain next left, as if it were a kind of final and continuing receiving line for the humorist -- or an eternal advertisement posted by his admirers.

On the other hand, there is the resting place of James Agee(Let Us Now Praise Famous Men) marked by an large and unchiseled boulder on his farm, also in upstate NY.

Eudora Welty gravesite, Jackson, MS

Monuments with their names and dates chiseled in stone offer many writers the opportunity for a final parting shot, or piece of wisdom on view for eternity. In his preface Bayne offers these: Among the best are T.S. Stribling's 'Through this dust these hills once spoke" and Ben Robertson's "I rest in thy bosom, Carolina, thy skies over me, thine air above and around me. Among my own and in my own country I sleep.'

Not all are quite so serious; some epitaphs are examples of the special Southern wit. On April 20, 2008, a monument was unveiled on the overlooked and presumed grave of George Washington Harris, with a new epigraph from the humorist's own fictional creation, "Parson Bullen's Oration Over the Corpse of Sut Lovingood": Let us try and ricollect his virtues -- ef he had any -- and forget his vices -- ef we can. For of such air the kingdom of heaven!"

John Soward Bayne

Bayne himself was born in Lenoir City, Tennessee, grew up in Anderson, South Carolina, and holds bachelor's and master's degrees from Clemson University, impeccable Southern bona fides on the Gravely Concerned website. So it's no surprise that his book, in its elegiac tone, suggests a certain urgent prompting to the procrastination of aspiring Southern writers and other present-day scribblers:

So, pilgrim, pass by. Be not reluctant at your author's grave. Look at the name indited in stone: what lies beneath the name is only dust, of course, but what lies behind it is the record of the artist's suffering and the true monument that is his or her work. Remember that this person once walked the earth, felt the compulsion to create, suffered rejection and frustration, just as you will do, have done, if you have chosen the writer's craft. Ask your questions; you may be astonished at the reply.

Up-Tight: "she couldn't believe what she heard at all"



Ultra Violet is gone, Lou Reed is gone, Nico is gone, Andy Warhol himself is gone, and photographer Billy Name died this year on July 18. Many of the mainstays and scene-makers that entertained a club-centric, drug-fueled New York downtown scene in the late 1960s are disappearing in the rear-view mirror.

 

Isabelle Collin Dufresene [aka "Ultra Violet"] was a Warhol creation as much as her own -- artist, playwright, and Warhol superstar who in 1980 wrote the autobiographical play "You Are Who You Eat." As early as 1988 she published her memoirs Famous For Fifteen Minutes, My Years With Andy Warhol. It received the Frankfurt Library Award and has been  published in 12 languages.

 

Every generation makes its own icons to suit itself, but in the hazy days of the mid- to late sixties, Warhol's Factory and the Velvet Underground upped the ante considerably in the battle of the generations. Lou Reed, John Cale, Sterling Morrison, and Maureen Tucker, first under the aegis of Andy Warhol, re-wrote the book of love to include obsessions of dirt and noise and sheer panic.

 



The Velvet Underground's third album

(photo by Billy Name)

 

That panic and noise came out of New York City, a far distance from the peace-and-love message emanating from San Francisco and the general good-vibes rock generated by Woodstock. The Velvets were more art than rock, more an experiment in tension than release. By the time they came to Warhol's attention the band had already been through some permutations of what is usually called "creative differences." There were more to come.

 

With that kind of tension it was obvious the band couldn't last, and each of the Velvets' four official studio albums reflected a different side of the creative battles within the group. That the band succeeded in recording at all beyond the marquee patronage of Warhol is a story of record-company insecurities as much as the band's own personal dramas. Up-Tight: The Velvet Underground Story (re-issued by Omnibus in 2003) is a relatively concise oral biography that details the trajectory of the Velvet Underground month-by-month, year-by-year, until the group finally splinters for good.

 

Out-of-focus Lou, with Sterling Morrison, Nico,
Maureen Tucker, and John Cale:
 The Velvets, 1966 (photo from The Daily Beast)

 

  

By now it's an often-told, backbiting and bitchy story. The group evolves from Lou Reed's pop-rock roots to Andy Warhol patronage and art-rock noise, through a subdued, confessional third album and finally, "despite all the amputations," to rock'n'roll. Victor Bockris and Gerard Malanga have assembled a witty, detailed, mostly-oral version with first-person accounts, full of the band's personal turmoil, drug use, and ego-fueled confrontations.

The interviews illuminate the art of the music and the band's struggle for commercial success in equal measure, two opposing goals that lead to the inevitable end of the band with centrifugal force. In the main, Up-Tight is rock's original cautionary tale of too much, too soon somehow not being enough: a template that survives, on a much different scale, with every 21st century pop sensation.

 

Bockris' and Malanga's collection of great black-and-white photographs capture a band as interested in its own look as in its music. This is much more than a fan's book, and the Velvets' highwire act performed without a net ought to dispel any notion of the monolithic "peace and love" image of Sixties' music.

Patti Smith & Robert Mapplethorpe, just '60s kids in the Village

"I was a dreamy somnambulent child. I vexed my teachers with my precocious reading ability paired with my inability to apply it to anything they deemed practical. One by one they noted in my reports that I daydreamed far too much, was always somewhere else. Where that somewhere was I cannot say, but it often landed me in the corner sitting on a high stool in full view of all in a conical paper hat." (Patti Smith)

The young, daydreaming wizard of southern New Jersey soon intuits that New York City is a more appropriate stage for her talents, and by the summer of 1967 Patti Smith is sleeping in Village doorways and living for art. Her bohemian dreams coincide with those already there and just as hungry. Robert Mapplethorpe is dropping LSD and already drawing his visions of the universe when they become friends, Dante and Beatrice on the Lower East Side.

Just Kids (Ecco/Harper) is a valentine to the blossoming relationship they shared and which deepened until Mapplethorpe's death in 1989. The memoir is Patti being tough and tender, romantic in the way artists often remember their own struggle, and filled with the people who made music and art their passion in New York of the 1970s. Robert's drawing and photography develops its challenging reputation as Patti begins to sing her own music, and this became a common creative bond that propels them in their personal life as much as their careers. For Patti the book allows her to wrap her troubles in dreams, even as the threadbare bohemian life becomes a distant memory through rock and roll.

As she re-traces the past, the book's real charm comes in the personal glances at Robert's life and career. His death in 1989 from AIDS and a portfolio of controversial images has made him, still, a confounding figure to many art historians. Just Kids allows a look at the artist as a friend and a companion, with his own troubles and dreams: he meets John McKendry, married and the curator of photography at the Metropolitan Museum of Art:"John's devotion to Robert's work spilled over to Robert himself. Robert accepted John's gifts and took advantage of opportunities that John opened up for him, but he was never interested in Robert as a romantic partner. John was sensitive, volatile, and physically fragile, qualities that would not attract Robert. He admired (John's wife) Maxime, who was strong and ambitious with an impeccable pedigree. Perhaps he may have been cavalier with John's feelings, for as time went on, he found himself entangled within a destructive romantic obsession."

The savvy curator and the romantic bohemian are a good match: "John McKendry could not have given Robert a better gift than the tools he needed to devote himself to photography," Smith goes on. "Robert was thoroughly smitten, obsessed not only with the process, but also its place in the arts."

This is a carefully-written and nicely detailed memoir, more gracefully artful than gratuitously salacious, although there is ample opportunity to read between the well-phrased line. Patti writes of the first musician she knew: "I never knew if his speedy speech patterns reflected amphetamine use or an amphetamine mind. He would often lead me up blind alleys or through an endless labyrinth of incomprehensible logic. I felt like Alice with the Mad Hatter, negotiating jokes without punch lines, and having to retrace my steps on the chessboard floor back to the logic of my own peculiar universe."

For the girl who loved Motown and r & b, New York in the 1970s became the land of a thousand dances as she wanders in and out of the music and poetry scenes that are quickly developing. The names and locations are already familiar, from nights at the Chelsea Hotel to CBGBs. Robert is on his own trajectory, but together Patti and Robert became so entwined that Patti's marriage to Fred Smith, in 1979, sent an unexpected tremor of apprehension between the two of them. "What about us?" Robert asks. "My mother still thinks we're married." Patti hasn't considered that. "I guess you'll have to tell her we got a divorce." "I can't say that," Robert shoots back. "Catholics don't divorce."

And like the good Catholic boy who's being bad, Robert understood his work wasn't meant for everyone, and he went out of his way to show it. His first hard-core photos were in a portfolio, marked with an X, and placed in a glass case for viewing only to those over eighteen years of age. Once these images became public, he didn't hide from the eventual storm of protest and notoriety, although they formed a fraction of his work. 

Soon enough there were more important personal issues -- he was diagnosed with AIDS in 1986. The story is an old and eternal one: in Just Kids, passion, art, and love are redeemed by youth. If the outlines are familiar, the book is told with enough toughness to avoid being overly sentimental.

As Robert wanes, the operatic overtones of their artful romance are often leavened by Patti and Robert with wit and humor, even to the end. After his death, as his belongings are sold at auction, Patti can't make herself attend the sale, afraid she couldn't bear to watch. She recalls a phrase Robert used if he obsessed about something he couldn't have: "I'm a selfish bastard. If I can't have it I don't want anyone else to." Patti has given readers no small gift by sharing her continuing love and affection for Robert with the rest of us.

December 30 is Patti's birthday; in William Burroughs' rare admiring phrase, the poet/performer is still a "rock'n'roll shaman" at 67.

"One Time, One Place," Eudora Welty, photographer: "because I was part of it."

"Sunday Morning"

It is often overlooked that Eudora Welty was a photographer before she was a writer. She took many street-level pictures of life around her in the deepening Depression years of the mid-1930s. Then In 1936, after she learned that a magazine was going to publish two of her short stories, she was overjoyed. "I wanted acceptance and publication," she said later. "If they had paid me a million dollars it wouldn't have made any difference."

Many of her photographs of 1930s Mississippi feature African-Americans, who up to then were "socially invisible" in American society. Welty shows them on the street, window shopping, working, in family groups. T.A. Frail in The Smithsonian magazine of April 2009 notes that although Welty grew up in Jackson, Mississippi, she graduated from the University of Wisconsin and studied business at Columbia University in New York, which helped "move her beyond the confines of her family environment."

She returned to Jackson after her father was diagnosed with leukemia, and began taking photography more seriously in a succession of writing jobs. In a 1989 interview excerpted here, Welty claims no larger agenda for her photographs other than her own, personal one. "I was taking photographs of human beings because they were real life and they were there in front of me and that was the reality," she said.

"Fairgrounds"

"While I was very well positioned for taking these pictures, I was rather oddly equipped for doing it," she would later write. "I came from a stable, sheltered, relatively happy home that by the time of the Depression and the early death of my father (which happened to us in the same year) had become comfortably enough off by small-town Southern standards." ...

It hardly mattered. Through the early '30s, Welty gathered a body of work remarkable for the photographer's choice of subjects and her ability to put them — or keep them — at ease. That is especially noteworthy given that many of her subjects were African-Americans. "While white people in a Deep South state like Mississippi were surrounded by blacks at the time ... they were socially invisible," the television journalist and author Robert MacNeil, a longtime friend of Welty's, said in an interview during a recent symposium on her work at the Museum of the City of New York. "In a way, these two decades before the civil rights movement began, these photographs of black people give us insight into a personality who saw the humanity of these people before we began officially to recognize them."

"Window Shopping"

Welty, for her part, would acknowledge that she moved "through the scene openly and yet invisibly because I was part of it, born into it, taken for granted," but laid claim only to a personal agenda. "I was taking photographs of human beings because they were real life and they were there in front of me and that was the reality," she said in a 1989 interview. "I was the recorder of it. I wasn't trying to exhort the public"—in contrast, she noted, to Walker Evans and other American documentary photographers of the '30s. (When a collection of her pictures was published as One Time, One Place in 1971, she wrote: "This book is offered, I should explain, not as a social document but as a family album—which is something both less and more, but unadorned.") ...