JUST KIDS- PATTI SMITH

The things I have gleaned from JUST KIDS, PATTI SMITH

I’m already free.
We ventured out like Maeterlinck’s children seeking the bluebird and were caught in the twisted briars of our new experiences.
Both of us had given ourselves to others. We vacillated and lost everyone, but we had found one another again. we wanted, it seemed what we already has, a lover and a friend to create with, side by side. To be loyal and yet free.
“Patti, no one sees like we do.”
Nureyev and Artaud.
Isadora Duncan.
forlorn souls who had fouled their lives.
Romanticization of excess …. and yet. 
My East of Eden outfit.
Who can know the heart of youth but youth itself.
Magical life-breathe.
Gregory Corso, Allen Ginsberg, and William Burroughs were all…
The Moon had turned blood red.
Natural Gravitation // Gerard Malanga.
He was holding a carton on milk, as if he were about to pour it in the saucers of his eyes.
Memento Mori // Remember we are mortal.
It wasn’t easy for him to sever our physical ties, I knew that.
Extremely Caustic.
Robert felt a part of our equation.
Patti Smith to Janis Joplin
I was working real hard
To show the world what I could do
Oh I guess I never dreamed
I’d have to
World spins some photographs
How I love to laugh when the crowd laughs
While love slips through
A theatre that is full
But oh baby
When the crowd goes home
And I turn in and I realize I’m alone
I can’t believe
I had to sacrifice you
Investing the homosexual with grandeur, masculinity, and enviable nobility. Without affection, he created a presences that was wholly male without sacrificing feminine grace.
To imbue homosexuality with mysticism. As Cocteau said of a Genet poem, “His obscenity is never obscene.”
Marianne Faithfull, Anita Pallenberg, Amelia Earhart, Mary Magdalene.
Les Enfants Terrible.
Indefinable devotion.
Often contradiction is the clearest way to truth.
Others sacrificed themselves to drugs and misadventure.
Daguerreotype.
A Season in Hell. At one point I realized I was crying.
All around me the messages written in chalk were dissolving like tears in the rain.
“It’s intoxicating,” he would say. “The power that you can have. There’s a truck line of guys that all want you, and no matter how repulsive they are, feeling that collective desire for oneself is powerful.”
Unruly and impious performances. > The sounds of a scene emerging.
I dressed in a manner that I thought a boy from Delaware would understand: black ballet flats, pink shantung capris, my kelly green silk raincoat, and a violet parasol.
Catholic Medals torn from shaved throats.
I choose Earth.

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JUST KIDS, a love story about youth, rock and roll, what it mean to be an artist, and the trials and tribulations that come along for the ride. It was one of the best and most fulfilling reading experiences I have had in a good long time. The novel is a motivator to push me forward, to get off my television saturated brain and think, think about the present and most importantly my future as an artist and human being.

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  1. Pingback: Like Rimbaud, in Manhattan. « The Hieroglyphic Streets

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