Coney Island of the Minds

A few years ago, on a trip to NYC, I took the F train out to Coney Island.  I’d never been and had wanted to go see it for many years.  It was winter, late February, and I thoroughly enjoyed the deserted and desolate tawdry seediness of the place.  I took a bunch of photos and when I got back to California eagerly showed them, but no one seemed to get my affection for it.  So I was amused, gratified, and a trifle vindicated to learn in Just Kids, Patti Smith’s memoir of her friendship with Robert Mapplethorpe, that Coney Island was one of their favorite places and they took many photos of it.  One has a sense there of being on a borderline between tacky vulgarity and the sublimely eternal.  I think this feeling intoxicated them and that Mapplethorpe subsequently sought to replicate it in many of his photographs. 

Patti Smith didn’t start out with the ambition to be a rock star.  She came to New York City from poverty in south Jersey in the summer of ’67 with nothing but a copy of Rimbaud’s Illuminations and the hope to be an artist, but without a clear notion of what that meant or how to get there.  Like thousands of other kids in those days, she wrote poetry and drew.  She did not sing or play an instrument.  

I was in the East Village myself in the summer of ’68, as Patti was, so I may have rubbed shoulders with her in Tomkins Square Park without knowing it, since she was as anonymous as I was back then.  There was some nostalgia for me in hearing about her adventures in the city in those days.  I knew plenty of wanna-be artists then, but none of them made it big like her. 

The propulsion of Just Kids derives from the mystery of how she got from being a wanna-be artist/poet and hanger-on to a rock star, and the disappointment of the book is that, after spending a lot of time describing the first phase (I must admit to some envy about all the interesting people she met while lodging at the Chelsea Hotel), she skims over the second in just a few pages.  Mapplethorpe’s transition from a hippie bead-stringer, part-time art student at Pratt, and collagist to enfant terrible photographer and darling of the haut monde also takes place mostly off stage, although his charisma and social-climbing aspirations come across.  She gives him a lot of credit for building her sense of worth and encouraging her to sing and take her poetry in a musical direction, just as she encourages him to start making photographs.  In fact, she testifies that, without him, she would never have become who she became.  And she met him entirely by chance.  But in addition to him, there were at least a dozen other people she had to meet at just the right moments in order for her career to take the path it did.  The same may be said for Robert.  Had he not met Patti, he might never have come to photography.  Subsequent steps along that path required more ‘helpers.’  But there are many who do not encounter the right helpers at the right times; in fact, to do so is the rare exception. 

Chance, or luck, plays a role in the success or failure of everyone, in every walk of life, but because the odds are so long, it plays an inordinate role in the arts.  You can see people all around Patti falling by the wayside.  And there are many more in the shadows.  It’s like walking through a hail of bullets and watching your cohorts be picked off, one after another.  Jimi Hendrix is picked off, Janice Joplin, Jim Morrison, but these are well-known people who had already, to a substantial extent, realized their potential.  There are many more people we have never heard of who were talented but unlucky.  They may not have literally died, but just been shunted off their proper path by some onerous obstacle or unlucky break, or merely missed some critical connection, so that they never reached their full potential, never found the endeavor that was right for them.  These are the vast majority, actually.  Everyone has some talent.  The question is: are you able to figure out what your greatest talents are and get what you need to maximize them. Patti knows how lucky she was.  It’s hard enough for people who know exactly where they want to go, but for people like her, who are groping, unclear where their paths lie, stumbling around, bumping into things, there is so much that has to go right for them to grasp the prize.  And so much that can go wrong and prevent them from grasping it.  The people who make it through become heroes precisely because they are so incredibly lucky.  There’s an aura of mystery and wonder, even awe, about how it could possibly have happened.