Jubilee City: A Memoir at Full Speed [Hardcover]

Joe Andoe (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 24, 2007

A life story told in discrete, arresting snapshots of despair, resilience, creativity, and hope, Joe Andoe's literary portrait of his time to date on earth is as powerful as a heavyweight's hook and as spellbinding as a major crack-up on the opposite side of the highway. It is a testament to a young man's fortitude and genius and luck that enabled him to survive a life lived wildly out of control; a rocket ride from the sordid depths of self-destruction to the glorious pinnacles of . . . Jubilee City.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In this charming memoir, Andoe narrates his journey from his Tulsa childhood through redneck, hard-partying teen years to a highly successful career as a (hard-partying redneck) painter in New York City. While Andoe may not be a professional writer, his humor and offbeat artistic sensibility make up for any lack of prose-writing chops. Through discrete anecdotes that seldom run longer than two pages, Andoe assembles vivid portraits of his family and friends and of the various environments he inhabited—the working-class Tulsa neighborhoods of the 1960s, the high school and college drug culture at the end of the hippie era, and the New York art scene of the 1980s. Andoe rarely said No to drugs, and the marginal characters and dangerous encounters of the lowlife provide the book with a great deal of energy and pathos; at times his memoir reads like a more amateur version of Denis Johnson's Jesus' Son. Yet whenever the gonzo stories verge on tedium, Andoe modulates his tone and shows himself as the stay-at-home dad, the outdoorsman, the artist. While Andoe has an occasional tendency to settle scores (his ex-wife receives particularly brutal treatment) or trumpet his status as an outsider, for the most part his wide-eyed sense of wonder and keen observations make the everyday strange and fresh. (Aug.)
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From Booklist

After running wild for too long in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Andoe moved to New York, where he eventually won acclaim as an artist. Charged with a before-the-tornado sizzle, his paintings depict cows, horses, flat stretches of highway, stormy skies, and sulky, long-haired girls in cutoffs. Andoe's similarly brooding episodic and illustrated memoir recounts tales of poor judgment and worse luck, followed by car wrecks, epic inebriation, vicious fights, jail time, and explosive relationships with women. Although repetitive, Andoe's reminiscences smolder with down-and-out wit, peculiar detail, tense eroticism, and plain-old orneriness as he ponders his family history, early memories of drawing on the cardboard from his handsome trucker grandfather's starched shirts, his redneck culture's implicit message that "men don't draw," and his recognition that for him, no matter what, art is the only possible salvation. Andoe's edgy self-portrait connects to the mythology of the outlaw painter as exemplified by Jackson Pollock, yet it is also a blunt confession of the all-too-common artist's battle with self-destructiveness on the way to embracing art as a life-sustaining discipline. Seaman, Donna

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 224 pages
• Publisher: William Morrow (July 24, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0061240311
• ISBN-13: 978-0061240317
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 5.5 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #181,245 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Oklahoma, Okay, September 30, 2007

By 

Kevin Killian (San Francisco, CA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Jubilee City: A Memoir at Full Speed (Hardcover)

Joe Andoe must be fifteen years younger than the artists and poets I'm most familiar with who hailed from Tulsa--the WHITE DOVE REVIEW crew of Joe Brainard, Dick Gallup, Ron Padgett. His book JUBILEE CITY rivals the memoirs of Brainard (I REMEMBER) and Padgett (OKLAHOMA TOUGH, MY FATHER KING OF THE TULSA BOOTLEGGERS) as far as getting the lowdown on one of America's most exciting, durable, and dreamlike city-states. When I picked up this book, out of curiosity towards all things Tulsa, I had never heard of the painter Joe Andoe, and now that I've read it I realize he's one of the most famous artists of the world and he's shown all over the known universe. Somehow he flew under my radar but perhaps I have my head in the clouds or buried in the sand like a West Coast ostrich, what do I know? In any case Joe's childhood was like a real-life version of JT Leroy books, except for one stabliizing factor, his father was a real man's man who didn't say very much but Joe always knew that, no matter how many juvenile shenanigans young Joe got his sorry butt into, there was always going to be one man who had his back, his dad.

The saddest part of the book was when Andoe Sr., a relatively young man, had a heart attack and Joe had to bundle him into the car and drive him to the hospital, simultaneously talking him alive, keeping him going. But I think Mr. Andoe didn't want to stay alive not smoking, having to watch his diet, living as "half a man," and so, it wasn't long before they were carrying him back to his Maker.

Joe's interest in art went into high gear when he found out that his chichi society drawing teacher could sell a drawing or a watercolor for 900 dollars--900, as much as the car Joe was driving cost. "He looked like veal to me, all soft and white." And Joe was skeptical of the teacher's talents, thinking to himself, if his s**t flies, then mine will too. At college he learned about men like Robert Smithson, Dennis Oppenheim, other hipsters like himself, but as he says, it wasn't until he saw one of Warhol's pink Marilyns that art got its hook into him once and for all. The teacher told him he should have more humility but Joe just looks at him sideways and says, "I don't know what that word means--is it like humid?"

He had to deal with rapacious and uncaring dealers who tried dicking him every which way from Sunday, and he wound up with a Smith College alumna girlfriend in NYC who, addicted to heroin, had him breaking into his own kids' piggy banks for nickels and dimes. His brushes with the law were frequent and outrageous, and if you read THE BASKETBALL DIARIES or seen the movie with Leo Di Caprio you will agree with me by admitting that Joe Andoe was the baddest boy in many moon,s but he never lost his soul and he never lost heart. His story further proves the continuing vitality of Tulsa and Tulsans, who include also Garth Brooks, Leon Russell, Gene Autry, and David BREAD Gates in music and, in other fields, Jennifer Jones, John Hope Franklin, Sammy Sosa, Larry Clark, Alfre Woodard, S. E. Hinton who wrote THE OUTSIDERS, and Wes Studi. What do these folks all have in common? They're tough and they're cool, ubercool.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Soul of an artist, September 28, 2007

By 

D. Shapiro (malibu,CA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Jubilee City: A Memoir at Full Speed (Hardcover)

Reading Joe Andoe's memoir is like walking through a collection of his paintings. Sublime, sensual and haunting. His words reach right into your soul as do his paintings.Unlocking ghosts of distant memories.For anyone who has lived outside the box ,or for that matter looked inside and not quite know how to fit in there is comfort in knowing you are not alone. Loved it.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Inmate Inspiration, October 8, 2007

By 

Pamela G. Simcox-wilson (Portland, OR) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Jubilee City: A Memoir at Full Speed (Hardcover)

My son is incarcerated and I sent this book to his cell mate who is an aspiring artist. He loved it. He has talent and someday, maybe, we will all be buying JP Kennedy's!
Thank for sharing the story-you never know who'll you will be inspiring to stay straight and focused.