I went to the library to pick up some books I had ordered from other branches, and as fate would have it both Slash and Kiki’s Memoirs had arrived. The library clerk’s demeanor changed from willing helpfulness to disgusted suspicion as she scanned first the book with the cigarette-smoking rock n’ roller, and then the book with the topless, big-breasted woman seductively holding a sheet. Hey lady, I may have the tastes of a reprobate, but at least I’m reading.
Slash is, of course, the legendary guitarist for Guns N’ Roses. Kiki is Kiki de Montparnasse, a famous French artist’s model and bohemian who I became interested in after seeing repeatedly mention of her in my beautiful book about 1920s Paris. Since both books are autobiographies, I feel obliged to come up with threads of commonality to link these two tomes: both Kiki and Slash were artists; they lived unconventional lifestyles of varying degrees of hedonism; and they loved their grandmothers.
The Slash autobiography was comprehensive… too comprehensive for the casual GNR fan. Slash chronicles every couch he ever slept on, every girlfriend he ever had, and most of the wild and crazy parties he ever attended. Despite this, owing to Slash’s ineffectual use of details, one does not come away with a sense of what it was really like. Here is a typical passage:
We were in no condition to perform, let along even drive ourselves to the gig. In desperation, [Izzy’s girlfriend] Dezi called her friend Melissa, who lived up in Hollywood, in Izzy’s old apartment. She had heard from Sammy and was going to meet him shortly. That was enough to motivate us: we drove over there somehow and hung out waiting for Melissa to return with out drugs. It looked like we might have taken care of one problem, but at the same time, it was around five pm, and we were about an hour from the gig. Finally she returned, Izzy and I got our shit, we did all that, and what a relief that was. Fuck! We were once again functional. We had barely enough time to join our band, who were waiting for us so that we could play our first arena, to a sold-out crowd of three thousand.
Sprinkled in between all this meandering prose is an actual story with fascinating tidbits about the band, like how “Paradise City” was composed and written as the band jammed during a drive from San Francisco back to LA. There’s also some interesting insight into the mind of a rock star, like when Slash had an AIDS scare after waking up with a lesion: “Everyone was alarmed [about AIDS] but most of us still felt immune to the whole thing. We figured that no one needed to worry about it until David Lee Roth got it.”
Kiki’s Memoirs has an introduction written by Ernest Hemingway — a rare honor. Writes Hemingway, “This is the only book I have ever written an introduction for, and God help me, the only one I ever will… It is written by a woman who, as far as I know, never had a Room of Her Own… you have a book here written by a woman who was never a lady at any time. For about ten years she was about as close as people get nowadays to being a Queen but that, of course, is very different from being a lady.” Kiki was a Queen of the bohemian scene in the Parisian neighborhood of Montparnasse, where she eventually landed after moving from Burgundy to Paris when she was twelve. “Little by little, I made my way into artistic circles, so full of wayward charm… I was so very gay that my poverty didn’t make so much as a dent ; and such words as “kill-joy”, “gloom”, “the blues” were just so much Hebrew so far as I was concerned.” Kiki finds odd jobs and eventually begins posing for artists like Foujita –“the thing that astonished him about me was the lack of hair on my sexual parts — and Man Ray, the Philadelphia-born Jewish photographer with whom Kiki was romantically involved with for much of the 1920s, and whose loving photographs of Kiki –both posing and casual — are one of the book’s highlights.
Kiki’s Memoirs is a surprising sparse about Man Ray and the 1920s. She does not dwell on the details, leaving one with an incomplete picture of her life. Surely something is lost in the translation from the French, but I did get a vivid sense of Kiki’s flippant, spirited sweetness. Here is a typical passage in which Kiki discusses doing cocaine with a rich gentleman she just met: Now and then, I could see him take a little box with a pretty little spoon in it and stick the spoon up his nose! I didn’t know what it was all about, until he went and left me alone. I then did the same thing he had done, and I suddenly felt very happy.
In sum: Slash told too much, and Kiki told too little. Both look great shirtless.
