Twentieth-Century Boy

December 18, 2017
Midway through this exuberant chronicle of his life in New York City in the 1970s, the author, who is now a distinguished painter, notes, “I’m living faster than I can write.” Composed from journals that Hannah kept between 1970 and 1981, the book reads like a modern Rake’s Progress, beginning with Hannah’s years at Bard College and following his move to Manhattan in 1973. Hannah writes candidly about his drug- and drink-fueled adventures, and he captures the kaleidoscopic swirl of the avant-garde art scene into which he immediately immersed himself. He hung out with Patti Smith, glam rockers, punk musicians, and members of Warhol’s Factory, and he writes about
it all with a youthful wistfulness, observing, “I get the feeling from this society that New York takes care of its own, that all these eccentric characters have found a niche no other city would have provided for them.” He punctuates each journal with lists of books to read, movies to see, and music to hear that are as much a time capsule of the era as the celebrities, clubs, and concerts whose names he drops throughout. This is a more of a chronicle of N.Y.C.’s art scene in an exciting period than an introspective coming-of-age story. Still, it’s entertaining; readers will likely agree with Hannah’s assessment that “I was in the right place, at the right time, at the right age.”

December 15, 2017
An intensely personal and engrossing portrait of a bygone era.As Hannah states in the preface, his first book is "not a memoir," but rather "journals, begun in 1970, at the age of seventeen, written as it happened, filled with youthful indiscretions." As such, it benefits from an immediacy and exuberance that the hindsight, self-censorship, editing, and foggy recollections of a proper memoir would most certainly lack. The book begins rather unceremoniously with the author in high school in suburban Minneapolis; he was a budding artist and musician, precocious reader, and typical rebellious American teenager in search of drugs, sex, and kicks. He longed for big city nights far from his staid surroundings, and after a short tenure at Bard College, he landed in Greenwich Village in 1973 to attend Parsons School of Design. An avid partier and drinker in the right place at the right time, the author met and/or befriended a variety of the celebrities of the day, many of whom would go on to become legends (Patti Smith, Andy Warhol, David Bowie). Hannah's frequently poetic descriptions of his underground cohorts recalls Genet's parade of subversive heroes, and the author's enthusiasm for la vie boheme and general disdain for the square world at times reads like a cross between a glam-rock Kerouac and a stoned Holden Caulfield (in the best possible way). Along the way, readers receive all the lurid details of the author's sex life--by turns romantic, erotic, dramatic, and hilarious--as well as a portrait of a young artist truly coming of age. Eventually, Hannah spent less time hanging out with rock stars and more time in his studio, culminating in his showing several works in the Times Square Show in 1980 alongside luminaries like Keith Haring and Jenny Holzer.Devotees of the underground art and punk scenes of 1970s New York will devour Hannah's journals, each page of which contains something fascinating or worthy of note--best enjoyed while listening to Bowie's "Diamond Dogs," Television's "Marquee Moon," and Patti Smith's "Horses."

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February 15, 2018
Hannah hurls himself into life with abandon, reveling in music, drugs, alcohol, sex, and insane escapades as he finishes high school in 1970 in Minneapolis and then attends Bard College, not far up the Hudson from New York City. As extreme as his partying is, he is focused on art, his true calling (he switches to Parsons, an art school in Greenwich Village), and he is an ardent reader. And no matter how inebriated he gets and how wild his adventures are at a time when recklessness was deemed holy, Hannah, subsequently renowned for his figurative paintings, kept journals throughout his rampaging twenties, recording his experiences with bemused candor, rock-'n'-roll lyricism, and a painter's visual acuity. He vividly captures the extravagant, often ferocious expressiveness of the music, art, styles, and attitudes of 1970s New York as his androgynous allure (which masked unwavering heterosexuality, to the disappointment of many) and endless curiosity and daring granted him access to now-legendary musicians and artists. Hannah's jubilantly explicit and omnivorous notebooks will be avidly appreciated by admirers of Patti Smith's Just Kids (2010).(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)