Read, Worship, Listen To: Patti Smith
There’s a pretty good chance that if we’ve spoken in the last year I have insisted you get to Patti Smith’s Just Kids by any means necessary. I am eternally grateful that I don’t ever really have to review anything, because I don’t think I’m capable of terming just how breathtakingly wonderful it really is. Though the plot outlines Smith’s complicated relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe in the artistic haven of New York in the late 1960s and early 70s, it really tells the story of how they both became artists.
And Smith is, more than anything else, an artist. I’ll admit that while I happily soaked in Just Kids, I never really listened to any of Smith’s music. A miscalculation fixed this week when my boss deposited Land on my desk. Punk rock isn’t my thing, but in Smith’s hands, it becomes poetry (a word I usually have to stifle my gag reflex to say out loud and virtually never mean as a compliment). I don’t know how I got this far in life without it.
