Bohemian Rhapsody
To see Patti Smith at her most indispensable, go to YouTube and watch her perform "Horses/Hey Joe," a medley that peaks with the immortal directive "Go, Rimbaud! Do the Watusi!" Rimbaud? Watusi? Yes! Anybody who sees the link between the most delirious of French poets and the dumbest of '60s dance crazes is onto something.
Smith is 63 now and ready for her memoir. But the story she's chosen to tell isn't about the rock-star years. It's a coming-of-age tale about a shy Jersey girl who falls in love with a lapsed altar boy from Long Island with "tousled shepherd's curls." He's Robert Mapplethorpe, future famed photographer and shrewd reprobate who would die of AIDS in 1989. As Smith tells us, "I would someday hold his ashes in my hand." After his death, his matter-of-fact pictures of leather S&M, with their strange composure, would set off one of the most heated episodes of the culture wars. But the Mapplethorpe whom Smith remembers is still just a provocateur-in-training, a Botticelli imp who loves chocolate milk and makes her a tambourine. She calls her book Just Kids (Ecco; 304 pages). She could have called it Mad About the Boy. Read More: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1960262,00.html#ixzz0ezBaTuUK
![[video_chat_web.jpg]](http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_0nU628tq7iQ/S2e-42GdBFI/AAAAAAAAAsQ/HKzuFe_u-Qc/s1600-h/video_chat_web.jpg)
