Patti Smith’s memoir Just Kids, her first work of prose, won the National Book Award for nonfiction. It tells the story of what it was like growing up mostly broke in New York City during the late ’60s and early ’70s with boyfriend and soulmate Robert Mapplethorpe. She started out as a graphic artist and poet, he as a painter. Together they discovered drugs, their own sexuality and new artistic visions. The writing is as lyrical and moving as the scenes Smith describes: Ginsberg buying her lunch, mistaking her for a young man. Hanging with Jimi Hendrix for a moment in a hallway outside a party. Her first “concert” reading her poetry, backed by Lenny Kaye on electric guitar. It’s a thrilling ride.
No one at the Advocate offices has yet read Keith Richards’ new autobiography Life, but most of us agree that “Please Allow Me to Correct a Few Things,” an imagined response to the autobiography by bandmate Mick Jagger, is a work of journalistic genius (www.slate.com/id/2273611/). Written for Slate by long-time music critic Bill Wyman (no relation to the Stones’ one-time bassist), the “review” masterfully evokes a world-weary, emotionally abused, long-time friend who is nonplused by his lead guitarist’s accusations.
The strangest and perhaps most lavish offering is from Queen guitarist Brian May. In recent years, he’s completed work on a doctoral degree on astrophysics, and in his spare time, he and photo archivist Elena Vidal collected, compiled and published a book of Victorian stereoviews, A Village Lost and Found. The collection, originally known as Scenes From Our Village, was photographed by T. R. Williams, and features bucolic scenes of an unnamed English village from the early 1850s. It was a very popular series of images at the time and widely collected, but until the publication of May’s book, the complete series hadn’t been seen in decades. In addition to research on Williams and his technique, May found the village that had originally been photographed and was able to provide stereo images of it today. The hardbound book comes with a sturdy plastic stereoscope for viewing the images (and it also works well with antique stereo pairs).
