"If you love someone, set them free"

It's quite atypical for my face to face book club to suggest a book that overlaps with my blog themes but it happened quite serendipitously for June. One member suggested we read Just Kids by Patti Smith to commemorate Gay and Lesbian month. Being a somewhat acquiescing member, I reserved it at the library ...especially since the group's selection for May was so awful.

Anyway, I loved Just Kids. We have new flash cards for our project meetings at work, and one says "my bias is showing" and I readily admit it. Left to my own devices, I would read nothing but murder mysteries and minor biographies, looking to find famous people popping into the lives of the second or third ring of celebrity. Patti meets everyone who's anyone in the late 60's and 70s in NYC ... a time when I haunted the City as well, but never in the same circles.

Another bias or two of mine are not liking punk rock or Mapplethorpe's sexually infused photographs. I wasn't expecting much except voyeurism in Just Kids and was blown away. Patti can write!! Phenomenally well, poetically, lyrically, with a good story thread and so, so many interesting people, and minute attention to detail. But making that detail so much more personal and relevant than The Museum of Love, or is my American versus mid-Eastern bias now showing.

Not only does Patti and Robert live through the seminal tragic events of culture from 1967 onward, but she marks all the days of her life referencing who was born, died or had some other historic significance on any day she recollects as a marker in her experience. She haunts museums and book stores looking for art materials and bargains. She seems so female and like me, despite both Robert and Allen Ginsberg finding her attractive for her most masculine of features.

My time then in NYC was split between political protest and a need for physical refinements. What art I craved was theatrical not musical, museum not gallery. But she captures the freedom and fluidity of the era. Her and Robert's moving definition of sexual traits does not ring false to me. We all dressed funny, experimentally, and talked on end of what it meant to adhere to stereotypes. We all wrote. We acted in college adaptations of Hair to hide behind theatrics in order to disclose our personal truth or dare.

So, after this praise, how does Just Kids rate on the passion meter for 2011? Patti is Victorianly discrete when it comes to sex and passion. She no more lets the reader into her bed with Robert than with Sam Shepard or Blue Oyster Cult. Her husband lands in the story like an extraterrestrial, lending credence to the excuse that she married him not to have to change her last name. But her love of Robert and his in return is tremendously, achingly passionate. There is a love that is artistic, between muse and artist ... and even when Robert's migrates to Sam and his money, Patti remains top in his Pantheon as the first.

The book is romantic and passionate if not an expose. That intrigue and guise ennobles it.