Sometimes when Mr. Moon is out of town, I stay up and read too long. I did that last night. I am reading Patti Smith's book Just Kids about her young life in NYC living and loving with Robert Mapplethorpe. Such an alien world to the one I live in, the one they occupied back in the sixties, trying to figure out what it meant to be an artist, trying to figure out how to get food to eat, a place to stay, how to keep body and soul together enough to stay up all night and make art.Patti had a baby and gave it up for adoption when she was very young and then went to New York with no money and no place to live. She slept sometimes in doorways, she met a beautiful man who took her in, she fell in love, they became lovers, he discovered and explored his love for men, she tried to understand, she had a straight job, they moved into the Chelsea and met artists of all kinds. She had an affair with Sam Shephard. She cut her hair like Keith Richards. She acted, she painted, she wrote poems, she learned to play the guitar.
It's like there were no boundaries for them, those kids in New York City. Want to live at the Chelsea but have no money? Leave your gray-wrapped-with-red-ribbons-portfolio with the owner and maybe he'll give you the smallest room in the hotel.Don't have the sixty-five cents for a sandwich at the automat? Perhaps Alan Ginsberg will show up with the dime you need, think you're a pretty boy instead of a boyish girl and give you the dime.
Did the people you went to high school with think you were ugly? Take that ugly and enhance it with scissors and never-enough-to-eat and define beauty for yourself.
Find the prettiest boy in New York and throw your lot in with him. Try to understand him and let him try to understand you.
It's hard to put the book down. She is, of course, a very good writer and she has lived a life.I never really understood Mapplethorpe's art with its violence and christiness.
But it haunts.I never really understood Smith's music but I understood its power and honesty.
I understood that she was a woman who was redefining what a woman was and in sharing her music, she was helping me to redefine who I was, little hippie wife living in a small trailer with my two babies and my guitar-playing husband. Not unlike Yoko Ono who was also called ugly and who wailed, "I'm such a mean chickie baby."
These other lives so alien from mine and yet, they touched me and part of who I am and how I see the world was changed by them.
Isn't that what art is about?
Here is my reality. I have made it as clear as I possibly can. Can you understand what I'm trying to show/tell/sing to you?
I may not especially like or identify with it but if it is real, if the artist has put her or his soul into its creation, and I take the time to look and listen and set aside my judgment, I may understand, at least a little. I may be changed, at least a bit.
And my world gets a little bigger and my understanding grows to include that which I never even considered before.
Yes. Sometimes it's good to stay up too late, reading, because the next morning, you may be a slightly different person living in a different world where the boundaries are not so tightly defined.
