Just Kids

I just got my hands on Patti Smith's book, Just Kids , and it's good. To be honest, I was prepared to be disappointed. Many songwriters aren't the best prose stylists, but Patti's memoir of her relationship with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe is an incredibly lucid, loving tribute to Mapplethorpe, who died from AIDS more than twenty years ago.

I had other reservations, too. See, I have kind of a love/hate relationship with Patti Smith. Very few artists have meant as much to me as Patti, and after seeing her for the first time in 2004 was the closest this atheist has ever been to a religious experience. But her idols, her influences, have all been men. Her career has been modeled on the romantic swagger of Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, and poet, Baudelaire. I guess it always struck me as odd that someone as hugely influential on girls who came of age after the punk era would deny (ignore?) the women who came before here.