Through Beet-Colored Glasses, more on Just Kids

Robert and Patti

Last night Ben and I played the High Fidelity game — you know, the one where you list your Top 5 of something and then debate over certain choices that you think prove the other player to be uninformed or possibly Communist. We were both padding around the kitchen in our “comfy pants,” which is what I call track pants when I use them for non-athletic endeavors, which is always. Ben vaguely resembles John Cusack, making it even more satisfying to yell, “The Blue Album!” and interrupt him mid-sentence to add another title to my list of Most Influential Albums of Our Generation. Ben has a certain way of pausing what he’s doing to consider something, head angled skyward, and then nod a nod that says, okay I concede, but here’s one better.  To every R.E.M. album I pronounced, he had an Incubus or a Nine Inch Nails. It quickly became obvious that we grew up on different planets.

We were cooking dinner together. We do this often and move easily around the kitchen together. Mostly Ben cooks and I clean; good teamwork. Yesterday Ben stood over our white ceramic sink peeling beets, juice like blood cycloning around the drain. The most endearing parts of Patti Smith’s Just Kids are moments like this — moments that existed between her and Robert Mapplethorpe alone. Sharing a thermos of coffee over an afternoon of people-watching in Washington Square. Sharing their art with each other first. Sharing secrets.

Just Ohio Kids

My friend Jason reads from his novel at our monthly Poetry & Prose Extravaganza, a literary open mic night.

“I was there for these moments, but so young and preoccupied with my own thoughts that I hardly recognized them as moments.” So writes Patti Smith after recalling an evening when she sat in a hotel room listening to Kris Kristofferson and Janis Joplin singing “Me and Bobby McGee.”  I’m reading her memoir Just Kids about her relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe and her development into a musician and artist. She is in her early 20s and moving in the circles of the Chelsea Hotel and Max’s Kansas City. She knows she will be an artist of some kind and surrounds herself with the most talented young people in the city.

To read about these icons, from Sam Shepard to Bob Dylan, and to see them as young and fallible, to see them still learning and coming into their own, and to see them supporting each other and fostering a community of creativity – I can’t help but think about my own group here in Mansfield.

Even as I write this I cringe a little, knowing how it sounds comparing Mansfield, Ohio in 2012 to New York City in the late 60s. (And who would I be, exactly – Andy Warhol?)