Oh you'll ride
Surely dance, In a ring
Backwards and forwards
Those who seek, feel the glow
A glow we will all know

-Patti Smith

-- -- -- -- --


So excited to read this book. How did I not purchase it
when I was released earlier this year? Thank Beth
for sending me the info on this memoir about art, struggle,
and following your instincts.....



-- -- -- -- --

In 1967, 21-year-old singer–song writer Smith, determined to make art her life and dissatisfied with the lack of opportunities in Philadelphia to live this life, left her family behind for a new life in Brooklyn. When she discovered that the friends with whom she was to have lived had moved, she soon found herself homeless, jobless, and hungry. Through a series of events, she met a young man named Robert Mapplethorpe who changed her life—and in her typically lyrical and poignant manner Smith describes the start of a romance and lifelong friendship with this man: It was the summer Coltrane died. Flower children raised their arms... and Jimi Hendrix set his guitar in flames in Monterey. It was the summer of Elvira Madigan, and the summer of love....



This beautifully crafted love letter to her friend (who died in 1989) functions as a memento mori of a relationship fueled by a passion for art and writing.

Smith transports readers to what seemed like halcyon days for art and artists in New York as she shares tales of the denizens of Max's Kansas City, the Hotel Chelsea, Scribner's, Brentano's, and Strand bookstores.

"Rise up hold the reins
We'll meet again I don't know when
Hold tight bye bye, Paths that cross will cross again"

---------------

.......In the lobby of the Chelsea, where she and Mapplethorpe lived for many years, she got to know William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and Johnny Winter. Most affecting in this tender and tough memoir, however, is her deep love for Mapplethorpe and her abiding belief in his genius. Smith's elegant eulogy helps to explain the chaos and the creativity so embedded in that earlier time and in Mapplethorpe's life and work.




(Publisher's Weekly review)

“I learned to see through you,” she wrote him in a late letter,
“and never compose a line or draw a curve that does not
come from the knowledge I derived in our precious time together.”


Patti Smith's letter
to Robert Mapplethorpe










"the statuary" by Robert
Mapplethorpe.


"Robert Mapplethorpe’s sadomasochistic photographs stirred controversy in the late 1980s. But by then he had mostly abandoned such themes, and also began to deeply explore a fascination with ancient Greek statuary. In addition to photographs of actual statues, this exhibition presents the polished—and surprisingly demure—nudes inspired by them."

"Oh how time flies With crystal clear eyes
And cold as coal When you're ending with diamond eyes"
- crossbones style.

"During the 1980s Mapplethorpe's sense of rapture in the classical ideal found full expression through photographing live, lithe bodies of unusually powerful dancers and bodybuilders — notably those who, like him, broke stereotypes.

It was Mapplethorpe's transgression of high culture as much as the breathtaking courage of his oeuvre that brought him to the epicenter of art and censorship issues before he died of AIDS in 1988."



















"the statuary" by Robert
Mapplethorpe.





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