THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 19, 2019 C1
NNEWS CRITICISM
4 ART
Francis Bacon’s bookshelf as
muse. BY CODY DELISTRATY
6 DANCE REVIEW
Choreography with stretch
and snap. BY BRIAN SEIBERT
5 POP MUSICWhat alternative
rock radio sounds
like in the Spotify
age. BY JOE COSCARELLI
AGAINST A PHALANXof mostly dreary new
apartment towers, the soon-to-open Hunt-
ers Point Community Library by Steven
Holl Architects is a diva parading along the
East River in Queens, south of the famous
Pepsi sign. With its sculptured geometry —
a playful advertisement for itself — it’s even
a little like the Pepsi sign.
Compact, at 22,000 square feet and 82
feet high, the library is among the finest and
most uplifting public buildings New York
has produced so far this century.
It also cost something north of $40 million
and took forever to complete. So it raises the
question: Why can’t New York build more
things like this, faster and cheaper?
Opening on Tuesday, Hunters Point issurely what Queens Library officials and
the borough’s former president, Helen M.
Marshall, had in mind when the project was
proposed more than 15 years ago: a crown
jewel among Queens branches, at a singu-
lar, symbolic spot facing the United Nations
and Louis Kahn’s exalted Four Freedoms
Park across the water.
On dark days and evenings, its enor-
mous, eccentric windows will act like invit-
ing beacons of light, attracting eyes and
feet. They carve whimsical jigsaw puzzle
pieces out of a cool, silvered-concrete fa-
cade.
That facade is a load-bearing structure,
allowing the library’s liberated interior to
spiral some 60 feet upward and outwardPHOTOGRAPHS BY WINNIE AU FOR THE NEW YORK TIMESLate-Blooming
Crown Jewel
Hunters Point Community Library is a
fine new public building. It almost died.
Top, the Hunters Point Community Library by Steven Holl Architects.
Above, the library’s canyonlike lobby entrance. The building is on the
East River in Queens, south of the well-known Pepsi sign.MICHAEL KIMMELMAN CRITIC’S NOTEBOOKCONTINUED ON PAGE C2ALL HER LIFE, SUSAN SONTAG,a voracious
moviegoer, insisted on sitting in the same
seat in theaters: third row, center.
I can’t recommend it, not if you value
your neck. But it’s where she sat, and the
very place she occupied in the culture for
close to a half-century — up front, in the
midst of the action — establishing the tone
and terms for debates on taste, language,
global literature, ethics and photography,
involving herself in matters of military in-
tervention and genocide. Not for her the
stately remove of the American intellectual,
the retiring panel-dweller — never mind the
risk to herneck; Sontag was in Sarajevo
during the Bosnian war and in Berlin as the
wall fell. She was the striking subject of pho-
tographs by Richard Avedon, Diane Arbus
and Robert Mapplethorpe — a Zelig-like fig-
ure who even made a cameo in “Zelig.”
Sontag died in 2004, of complications of
leukemia. Since then, another essay col-
lection has been published, along with the
first two volumes of her diaries, chronicles
of her “sore heart + unused body” — the one
place where she wrote frankly about her ho-
PARUL SEHGAL
BOOKS OF THE TIMESA Metaphor
That Takes
Center Stage
Susan Sontag as intellectual
and ‘great original creation.’
Sontag:
Her Life and
Work
By Benjamin
MoserCONTINUED ON PAGE C6
“I’M NOT HEREto be popular. I’m here to be
free,” Madonna declared to a packed, ador-
ing audience on Tuesday night at the Brook-
lyn Academy of Music’s Howard Gilman
Opera House. It was the premiere of her
Madame X tour, named after the album she
released in June that she has said was influ-
enced by the music in Lisbon, her adopted
home. The show follows her decades of
arena spectacles by scaling the same kind
of razzle-dazzle — Dancers! Costumes!
Video! Choir! — for a theater stage.
Unlike jukebox musicals or “Springsteen
on Broadway,” Madame X is a concert fo-
cusing on new songs and the present mo-
ment. In other words, Madonna is still tak-
ing chances. She will reach arena-size at-
tendance in only a handful of stops on the
eight-city tour, but with much longer en-
gagements; the Gilman Opera House holds
2,098, and she booked 17 shows there,
through Oct. 12. Onstage, “selling” a selfie
Polaroid to an audience member who hap-
pened to be Rosie O’Donnell, she claimed,
“I’m not making a dime on this show.”
Concertgoers arrived to what was billed
as a phone-free experience. Cellphones and
smart watches were locked into bags at the
door, though quickly unlocked after the
show. It helped prevent online spoilers; it
certainly removed the distractions of wav-
ing screens. (No photography was permit-
ted, including the media.)
As both album and show, “Madame X” is
Madonna’s latest declaration of a defiant,
self-assured, flexible identity that’s entirely
comfortable with dualities: attentive parent
and sexual adventurer, lapsed Catholic and
spiritual seeker, party girl and political
voice, self-described “icon” and self-de-
JON PARELES
MUSIC REVIEWTaking
Chances,
And Phones
Madonna: Madame X Tour
Brooklyn Academy of Music
Madonna’s new show arrives.
Check your cell at the door.
CONTINUED ON PAGE C5