"Just Kids" (2010): Patti & Robert, East Village valentines

"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."

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.

"You Can't Win," Jack Black (1926): Winner take nothing

"Jack Black calls his book You Can't Win. Well, who can? Winner take nothing."
-- William Burroughs, 1988


This autobiography of the outlaw and convict Jack Black, which Burroughs recalls from memory as "the Good Red Book," is a documentary of life lived against the grain. It came as a shock and a revelation when it was originally published in 1926 during the Roaring 20s -- his tales of poverty and deprivation as a youth, and then as a young man, ran counter to the prevailing image of America as a land of wealth and excess. Originally published in serial form in The San Francisco Call, the book became a best-seller, going through five printings and gaining the attention of social reformers like Lincoln Steffens. Its success propelled Black into a brief literary career that included a play based on his experiences and then a film contract at MGM writing screenplays for $150 a week.

The picture of Black as a literary figure and upright citizen is too simple, though. Those who found the Folsom Prison ex-con extremely well-read probably didn't know he had used his prison years to read the entire Encyclopedia Britannica three separate times learning "to play Society's game." Or that he got his 25-year sentence by shooting a man in a botched hold-up in Golden Gate Park in what one biographer calls "a one-man San Francisco reign of terror." His prison years were spent developing a network for survival, a patchwork of favors done for favors received, that extended years after his release. This underworld had its cast of prison"yeggs" and, just as important, people whom Black calls "the Johnsons" --those who are as good as their word, and keep their promises.

"Some of my debts had to be paid in kind, and no one could help me. I owe my life to a thief who risked his life to get me out of jail. He smuggled me saws to open my cell, then came in the night to cut the bars out of the window and lifted me through the hole when I was so weak from tuberculosis I could barely walk. ... Years afterward, when I had cured myself of the dope habit and served my sentence, won immunity from the law, and was just beginning to feel a little secure in my respectability, my telephone rang in the small hours of the night. A woman's voice asked if I was 'Mr. Black,' and said 'I have a message from Eddie ... of course, you know I can't give it over the phone. Hurry.' I didn't know what had happened but I knew another debt was due."

Once he got out of prison Black seems determined never to go back, and this is where You Can't Win develops its themes of reform and resurrection. Though he found a respectable life full of "too much hypocrisy" and said he never cared for it, for a short time Black became a police reporter and then circulation manager of The San Francisco Bulletin. He was befriended by members of the Progressive movement who urged him to write about his hardscrabble life and prison experiences in order to promote prison reform, and You Can't Win -- first serialized asBreaking the Shackles -- was the result, a modern pilgrim's progress full of crime and punishment -- and redemption.

"I am sure but of one thing -- I failed as a thief and I am luckier than most of them. I quit with my health and liberty. What price larceny, burglary and robbery? Half my thirty years in the underworld was spent in prison. Say I handled $50,000 in the fifteen years I spent outside; that's about nine dollars a day... 'what chance have you now?' I would ask any young man, 'with shotgun squads, strong-arm squads, and crime-crushers cruising the highways and byways; with the deadly fingerprinting, central identification bureau, and telephotoing of pictures; and soon every police station broadcasting ahead of you your description and record?' Then consider the accidents and snitches -- what chance have you? Figure it out yourself. I can't."

"I was fascinated," Burroughs writes in his foreword to the 2000 reissue of You Can't Win, "by this glimpse of an underworld of seedy rooming-houses, pool-parlors, cat-houses and opium dens, of bull pens and cat burglars and hobo jungles." The book made such an impression on Burroughs that he used some of Black's characters like Salt Chunk Mary, and even his language word for word. "When you can remember a passage of prose after fifty years it has to be good," he writes. Here's a passage from Burroughs's late novel Place of Dead Roads:

"A two-story red-brick house down by the tracks in Junction City, Idaho. Salt Chunk Mary, mother of the Johnson Family ... train whistles cross a distant sky. Mary keeps a pot of pork and beans and a blue porcelain coffee pot always on the stove. You eat first, then you talk business, rings and watches slopped out on the kitchen table. She names a price. She doesn't name another. Mary could say "No" quicker than any woman Kim ever knew, and none of her no's ever meant yes. She kept the money in a cookie jar, but nobody thought about that. Her cold gray eyes would have seen the thought and maybe something goes wrong on the next lay. John Law just happens by, or John Citizen comes up with a load of double-zero into your soft and tenders."

The fame, and the money, was fleeting. Jack gave his talks on crime and prisons under the auspices of the League to Abolish Capital Punishment, which Clarence Darrow had started. Only his lecture fees were "keeping him out of the soup kitchens and breadlines," he wrote. His pride, or something like it, would not let him seek the charity that was becoming part of the Depression of the 1930s. Speaking engagements became fewer, and the royalties from You Can't Win dried up.

He had once told friends that if life got too grim he would tie weights to his feet, row into New York Harbor and drop overboard. This seems to be precisely what he did in 1932: Black vanished. His watch was found in a pawnshop pledged for eight dollars; it had been his prize possession, a gift from an ex-con he had helped. For his friends this became definite proof that he had been as good as his word to the end.

Underground art in NYC: a game of hide and seek ... and handcuffs

Jeff Stark's table for two, at an undisclosed subway stop

As artists from the cave-painters of Lescaux to graffiti-man Banksy can tell you, public art calls for big, big spaces. And in New York those big public spaces are likely to be underground. Location, location, location.

Today's New York Times Arts Beat carries an article about what might be considered the most exclusive of public galleries, a subway station so mysteriously secret and filled with art that police arrest anyone who tries to find it.

In an official game of good cop/bad cop, a spokeswoman from the Transit Authority confirms the department is not disturbing the art works, but the police are "taking a hard line" and arresting anyone who is caught trespassing in the station trying to see the art. It's a creative double-bind: seek but don't find, and if you do find it, you're under arrest for trespassing. There's a Kafka-like lesson in there somewhere.

The underground effort took eighteen months and includes work from more than a hundred artists. One blogger who has seen the "installation" now reports the art has been vandalized. Who said art was easy? Here's an excerpt from today's article, written by Michael Grynbaum:

The New York City police have arrested 20 people for trying to enter the abandoned subway station that is home to the formerly secret guerrilla exhibition of underground street art that was revealed to the public this month.

The clandestine gallery has attracted urban explorers eager to catch a glimpse of dozens of provocative, large-scale installations created by more than 100 street artists who sneaked into the station over the course of a year.

Several of these spelunkers, however, have encountered something else: a team of police officers, some in plain clothes, assigned by the city to monitor the site. Most of those arrested were charged with criminal trespass, and a few were caught carrying spray cans and other graffiti paraphernalia, the authorities said. Two others received transit summonses.

While the police are taking a hard line on keeping people away — “This is not an art gallery; this is completely illegal,” said one officer – the paintings of what the artists called the Underbelly Project are likely to live on. Subway officials said they have no plans to paint over the artwork, even if they sincerely hope nobody ever gets to see it again.

“We have no intention of disturbing the works,” said Deirdre Parker, a spokeswoman for New York City Transit, the subway’s operator. Ms. Parker noted that the fiscally challenged transit agency would not want to devote resources to restoring a space almost entirely unseen by the riding public. “It’s in complete darkness and not really at all visible to anyone,” she added.

The organizers of the project, who did not return a request for comment, have so far refused to disclose the location. So have transit officials. But first-person accounts, photographs, and speculation around the Internet focus squarely on an abandoned station constructed in the 1930s atop the existing Broadway stop on the G line, near South Fourth Street in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. ...

So far, efforts by the authorities to secure the space have appeared only partly successful. Evidence of recent visits to the site has been published on the Internet, including photographs that suggest some of the artwork has been defaced by graffiti.

One blogger from Brooklyn, who said he explored the site in the early hours of Nov. 4, posted photographs on his Web site that appeared to show vandalized works. “It does seem to only have been tagged by one person and it’s actually kind of sad since some of the works are so amazing,” the blogger wrote in an e-mail. (He asked to remain anonymous, hoping to avoid interest from the authorities.)

Photos from the New York Times by Garrett (at bottom) and Katherine Lorimer (at top).