The 'Kids' Is Alright

I'm partial to books about artistic awakenings. Bob Dylan's 'Chronicles' was a wondrous account of the Greenwich Village folk scene of the early Sixties. 'The Bell Jar' was a less cheery version of Sylvia Plath's introduction to the magazine world of Manhattan. Meanwhile, a few pages worth of 'A Moveable Feast' and you want to haul a typewriter up to the top of a Parisian garret and to hammer out manly copy like Ernest Hemingway,

while getting soused with F Scott Fitzgerald and out to lunch with Gertrude Stein.

That said, you really should read 'Just Kids' by Patti Smith, which recently arrived in paperback. It's the story of New York in the early '70s, just after the heyday of Warhol and ahead of all that punk rock adventure in the Bowery. Patti is telling the story of her intense relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe and their slumming years at the Chelsea Hotel. The pair is looking to find a steer on their art, which will result in Patti's rock and roll babble plus Robert's audacious photographs.

Along the way, there are incidents with playwright Sam Sheppard and author Jim Carroll. At The Chelsea, we meet Janis Joplin and the great alchemist Harry Smith. Over at Max's, the transvestites are preparing to take their place in Lou Reed's 'Walk On The Wild Side' and William Burroughs is uniquely weird. It's a royal piece of namedropping, but never just for the sake of it. Patti took a long time to realise her power of self-expression. She wanted to live out the creative fever of Rimbaud, but instead she found a whole sea of possibilities.