Monday 14 February 2011

Polly, Patti and me.

I've just spent a week of summer and quality time with my dear Mamma, at the Canaries. She's called Pollyapparently named so by her Grandma for talking like a parrot when she was a baby. We had both longed for this break from what seems to be an endless, rough and freezing winter. The resort life might not the most interesting place in terms of cultural impulses, yet it what was we needed - sunshine and a slow pace. With my repeated excursions to Patti Smith's bohemian life in New York City and The Chelsea Hotel in the 60's and 70's I got the artistic satisfaction as well. Turns out that Polly and Patti were born the same year, and my mother could tell me stories of her own bohemian life in London and Bergen in the same period as Patti does in her truly evocative and fascinating memoir - Just Kids. It tells an honest and moving story of her youth and friendship with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. I was captured: I laughed, I cried and in some nostalgic way - I longed to have been there with them... 




Robert Mapplethorpe shot the cover of Patti Smith's fantastic album Horses.


Just Kids won The National Book Award 2010 for nonfiction in November 2010. If you haven't read it already - do so. 

Learn more Robert Mapplethorpe and his art at Artsy.net


The pictures were found here.