Fotonovela -- Masked and Anonymous -- Other People's Pictures -- Souvenir -- The Spirit Hand -- The Show Window -- The Famous -- The Stalking Ghost -- V -- Cut with the Kitchen Knife -- Torn Down -- The Seventh -- The Long Summer Evening -- Commerce -- The Liquid Dollar -- Like an Artist -- Poet and Movie Star -- Neighbors -- The Unknown Soldier -- Copyright Information -- Acknowledgments -- Also by Luc Sante
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Intro -- I -- My Generation -- E. S. P. -- Maybe the People Would Be the Times -- The Now -- Hooliganism -- Mother Courage -- Bass Culture -- 12 Sides -- II -- Case Study -- The Grasshopper and the Ant -- Grownups -- Ancestry -- I Remember the Fabled Rat Man -- I Was Somebody Else -- Shill -- Thirteen Most -- Dear Messiah -- Summer with a Thousand Julys -- III -- The Source -- The Freelancer -- The Conspiracy -- The Heroic Nerd -- The Golem -- The Orphan -- The Carpenter -- The Collector -- The Portraitist -- The Avenger -- IV -- Suspect -- Instantaneous -- Ghosts -- The Empty Room -- Arcade
. - "A collection of articles on photographers, musicians, artists, and writers, many of them with a strong autobiographical element and sense of place, the Lower East Side of New York City where the author came of age in the fertile 1970s and '80s. He traces his engagement with music and photography, his experience of the city, and his development as an artist and observer, in a series of pieces that range from memoir to essay, fiction to critical analysis, humor to poetry"-- c Provided by publisher. In his second collection (after Kill All Your Darlings, 2007), Luc Sante pays homage to Patti Smith, Rene Ricard, and Georges Simenon; traces the history of tabloids; surveys the landscape that gave birth to the Beastie Boys; explores the back alleys of vernacular photography; sounds a threnody for the forgotten dead of New York City. The glue holding the collection together is autobiography. Every item carries deep personal significance, and most are rooted in lived experience, in particular Sante's youth on the Lower East Side of New York in the fertile 1970s and '80s. He traces his deep engagement with music, his experience of the city, his progression as an artist and observer, his love life and ambitions. Maybe the People Would Be the Times is organized as a series of sequences, in which one piece leads into the next. Memoir flows into essay, fiction into critical writing, humor into poetry, the pieces answering and echoing one another, examining subjects from multiple vantages. The collection shows Sante at his most lyrical, impassioned, and imaginative, a writer for whom every assignment brings the challenge of inventing a new form.
