thursday, december 30, 2010


MUSICREVIEW Fantasia


at DAR The singer’s concert had musical highlights and a wacky vibe. C8


Style ABCDE C EZ SU


Bon Jovi was the year’s highest-grossing concert act, making a whopping


$201 million. Names and Faces, C2


3LIVETODAY@washingtonpost.com/discussions Got plans? The Going Out Gurus can help. 1 p.m. BOOKWORLD


Biography of an opium addict


Michael Dirda reviews “The English Opium-Eater,” about the adventuresome life of the romantic essayist Thomas De Quincey. C3


Lincoln Center resets the stage for smart urban design


STEPPINGUP


BY PHILIP KENNICOTT IN NEW YORK


T MUSIC A pair of rebels and the roads they took BY MARK JENKINS Special to the Washington Post Keith Richards’s autobiography,


“Life,” doesn’t allot much space to pay- back. But it does fling a few daggers, mostly at people who have personally affronted the quick-tempered guitarist. Of the various people Richards derides in the book, there’s only one he seems never to havemet: JohnnyRotten. Rotten and the Sex Pistols were a


threat—short-lived, as it turned out— to the Rolling Stones’ rep as Britain’s baddest boys. Raised by socialists and agnostics in a working-class London suburb, Richards by 18 was a rhythm- and-blues purist who considered him- self “anti-showbiz” and his new band


“the anti-Beatles.” Naturally he would have resented the uprising of 1977, the year the Clash proclaimed, “No Elvis, Beatles or theRolling Stones!” Across the ocean and a little earlier, a


youngwomanwashaving similarlymu- tinous doubts about the Stones and their peers. “We feared that the music which had given us sustenance was in danger of spiritual starvation,” writes Patti Smith in her memoir, “Just Kids.” The punk-rock bard who began her hipster makeover by giving herself a Keith Richards haircut decided that ’70s rock was “floundering in the mire of spectacle, finance and vapid techni- cal complexity.” That might sound like a lean new


AUTHORS: Keith Richards’s and Patti Smith’s books tell similar tales.


musicians continued on C8


he vastmajority of the redesignandrebuilding of New York’s Lincoln Center is now finished. And even on a blusterywinter day, the 16-acre arts center, which celebrated its 50th anniver- sary in2009, is looking livelier, smarter,hipper


and more inviting — a change that should be studied closely not just by theKennedyCenter andWashington’s publicart institutions,butbyanyonewhocaresabout the peculiar freedoms ofurbanlife. Alaneof traffic thatonce raninfrontof thearts center,


a product of 1960s car-centric, slum-clearing redevelop- ment, has been shifted underground. A bridge across West 65th Street that connected themain venues of the marble plaza to their northern neighbors has been removed, creating a viable new streetscape where there was once a dark and dispiriting tunnel. A new fountain has been installed, plus new lighting, new signage and video monitors that don’t just advertise the evening’s offerings, but give a glimpse backstage. A bizarre but


BEFOREANDAFTER: For the renovated Lincoln Center, top, the architects have lightened and enlivened the space, opened it up to the city and added touches of humor and eccentricity that suggest both a subtle aesthetic and a playful one.


ADAYATTHECORCORAN A cherub in the rough BY BLAKE GOPNIK Every day this week, art critic Blake


Gopnik is discussing a work from the Mantel Room at the Corcoran Gallery of Art.


DAYFOUR:EUGENECARRIERE’S “ARSENECARRIERE”


So far, inmy week at the Corcoran, I’ve


taken it easy onmyself, looking at works by famous artists hung near eye height where they’re easy to see. It’s time I take in something more esoteric, “skied”upnear the ceiling of the salon-hungMantel Room. Eugene Carriere’s canvas called “Arsene Carriere” (formerly known only


as “Baby”) ought to fit the bill. It was painted close to the turn of the 20th century by an almost forgotten artist of the juste milieu, a Parisian semi-avant- garde that abandoned the tight brush- work of the French Academy for the freedom of impressionism, but used that freedom to render more traditional sub- jects. But is Carriere’s subject as traditional


as all that? It is “just” his new daughter, Arsene, who ought to be a standard vehicle for treacly Victorian sentiment. But little Arsenemanages to beckonfrom the very farthest corner of the Corcoran’s grand gallery, against competition that includes rushing horses, a femme fatale and a roaring lion.Her portrait seems to


corcoran continued on C3


thrilling new restaurant building with a tilted plane of grassforaroofhasbeenadded,creatingnot justaplaceto eat andbe seen, but animpromptuhangout zone. The Lincoln Center redesign, by Diller Scofidio +


Renfro, the same firm that is slated to create a new, bubblelike temporary event space next fall atWashing- ton’s Hirshhorn Museum, is an exercise in surgical and scattered intervention. In many ways it is remarkably modest giventhe scope of the problem—amonumental, out-of-date campus, clad inmarble, that has always felt detachedanda little barren. Adecadeago, thecenter floatedaredesignschemethat


would have enclosed the plaza with a giant dome, de- signed by Frank Gehry. That went nowhere, a false start attributed to the scale and impracticality ofGehry’s idea (Beverly Sills, then chairman of Lincoln Center, worried about who would “clean the pigeon poop” off of it). The truculent opposition of important players among the center’s sometimes competitive tenant organizations alsodoomedtheGehry idea. But if, inthe end, the center got a less flashymakeover,


lincoln center continued on C2


TOP: MARK BUSSELL/LINCOLN CENTER FOR THE PERFORMING ARTS; ABOVE: LINCOLN CENTER DEVELOPMENT PROJECT/LINCOLN CENTER FOR THE PERFORMING ARTS


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