couldreads

Just kids stuff

In a bit of fortuitous timing, I finished Patti Smith’s Just Kids the same day that Girls, a new comedy from Lena Dunham/Judd Apatow, premiered on HBO.

Now, these two things aren’t directly related. In fact, they’re not really related at all. Rather, one just made me think of the other, and since the critical reception of Just Kids ran the gamut from appreciative to absolutely glowing—while Girls received less favorable treatment from the likes of Gawker and, you know, viewers—I thought it perhaps an apt time to share the comparison.

For the unfamiliar, Just Kids is a memoir written by artist/poet/musician Patti Smith, about her long relationship-turned-friendship with fellow artist Robert Mapplethorpe, he of controversial photography fame. Smith, now married with children, wrote the book in 2010, nearly 20 years after Robert’s death, and more than forty years after the pair first met in Brooklyn as 20-year-old aspiring artists. Smith’s is a memoir about love, but also about a time and a place—New York in the 1970s—and about coming into one’s own as an artist and an adult. Although we as readers know how the story ends—with success for both subjects and Mapplethorpe’s ultimate death from AIDS—Just Kids isn’t so much focused on the tangible progression of the pair’s respective careers. It’s a glimpse behind the scenes, into the development and maturation of two people who at first glance really are just young and clueless, aspirational and broke, hopeful and driven.

Tower of terror

I’ve been putting off writing this post because I’m not exactly sure how to go about it—reviewing the fifth book in an eight-volume Stephen King series is like trying to explain the intricacies of the third Harry Potter novel to an alien from a planet with no concept of wizards.

If you haven’t heard of, let alone read, the Dark Tower books, then…I’ll admit, I’m not sure what to tell you. What’s your general feeling on 6,000 pages of mutant lobsters, decaying robots, time travel and gunfights? In fact, let me ask you a few questions. Do you like Westerns? Do you like fantasy Westerns? Did you enjoy the movie Cowboys & Aliens? No but really, did you kind of? Like a little bit? Okay well do you like Stephen King? What’s your favorite Stephen King novel? Did you really read that or just see the movie? No it’s okay, it’s a great movie. How would you feel about seeing a Stephen King movie about a Stephen King movie? I know, it’s a little meta. Do you need to sit down?

They should paste that list of questions up in bookstores.

Throwing shade

I’m going to start today’s review with a confession. Well, part confession, part memory. A confessory, if you will.

When I was a kid—I’m going to guess around age 10—we had a VHS recording of Mr. Mom, the (still completely awesome) Michael Keaton movie about a dude who loses his job and has to stay at home and take care of the kids. So controversial, that film! Men staying home? Women working!?

Anyway, for whatever reason, I watched Mr. Mom with some regularity, and in it there’s a scene where a cadre of local housewives take Michael Keaton with them to a Chippendale club, to see some male strippers. In the beginning of that scene, ominous music plays while distinctly 1980s-looking guys in astronaut costumes come on stage and slowly reveal their naked selves. And by naked I mean in underwear and space boots.

New York state of mine

I have a handful of “first New York” memories. In one (the true first, I suppose), I’m in maybe ninth grade, sporting braces and what I must say was a pretty fly windbreaker, looking down from the World Trade Center. In another, I’m arriving at Fordham for freshman orientation, toting a carefully curated collection of posters and knickknacks into my dorm room.

But it’s really the last memory, the last first if you will, that I consider my real introduction to the city.

It was ~~a dark a stormy night~~ a nice May afternoon, shortly before college graduation, and my soon-to-be-roommate Lou and I had just driven to our new apartment in Brooklyn (Bed-Stuy, to be exact) from my mom’s house in Pennsylvania, bringing back both the contents of my bedroom and a selection of other items my mother was willing to part with (lamps, a toaster, her entire silverware set.) We parked the U-Haul in front of 904 Greene Ave.—a pleasant brownstone that for two years afforded me the ability to say I lived off of Malcolm X Boulevard—and set about unloading the truck so we could return it.

After piling all of my worldly possessions on the sidewalk, Lou and I realized that we were in a bit of a pickle. The U-Haul needed to be returned within the next half hour, and we both needed to be there (I can’t remember the logistics of this, but it was something about the truck being in his name, but me being the only one with a driver’s license.) So we did what any logical person would do: asked the kindly older gentleman sitting on the stoop next door to watch our stuff while we disappeared for the better part of a half hour.

Goldman Suchs

In the world of financial news, last week’s completely badass op-ed from (now former) Goldman Sachs executive Greg Smith, titled “Why I Am Leaving Goldman Sachs” was, well, pretty huge. Like a real-life Jerry Maguire-ing, minus the pilfering of goldfish or a pleasantly pre-surgery Renee Zellweger. Smith’s diatribe—which you should definitely read—basically lamented the moral unhinging of a firm that, if always greedy, at least used to be that way on behalf of its clients.

“It makes me ill how callously people talk about ripping their clients off,” Smith wrote. “Over the last 12 months I have seen five different managing directors refer to their own clients as ‘muppets,’ sometimes over internal e-mail. Even after the S.E.C., Fabulous Fab, Abacus, God’s work, Carl Levin, Vampire Squids? No humility? I mean, come on. Integrity? It is eroding. I don’t know of any illegal behavior, but will people push the envelope and pitch lucrative and complicated products to clients even if they are not the simplest investments or the ones most directly aligned with the client’s goals? Absolutely. Every day, in fact.”

The op-ed sparked a great deal of backlash, some of it from people who mocked Smith for an alleged naivete about how the banking sector works. NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg popped over to Goldman’s offices to reassure them—because doesn’t this firm just scream insecurity?—that he’s still their friend, and Bloomberg News (yes relation) published its own opinion piece scoffing at what they considered Smith’s perception of banks as “existing only to bring light and peace and happiness to the world.”

Me, I was riveted by the whole thing. Not only because Smith broke the first rule of Wall Street—you do not talk [honestly] about Wall Street—but because when the op-ed appeared I was smack in the middle of Matt Taibbi’s Griftopia, a book spawned in part by the Rolling Stone reporter’s now-famous article about Goldman (the source of the also-now-famous “vampire squid” moniker.) It was the nonfiction equivalent of reading Twilight and then having a sparkly vampire show up at your front door, bitching about immortality and the wet-dog smell of all those fucking werewolves. Continue reading “Goldman Suchs”