(1:44pm Dec 21, 2009)

Robert Mapplethorpe and Patti Smith at the Chelsea Hotel. Photo by Gerard Malanga

The New York Times on Patti Smith, “Godmother of Punk,” and Dream of Life, a documentary on her life filmed over 11 years by fashion photographer Steven Sebring:

“It begins with her goodbye to the house in Detroit where, in a retreat from fame into a new role as a mother, she lived for 16 years beginning in the early 1980s. From there the film documents Ms. Smith’s return to New York and to performing a decade ago, after a trio of unexpected deaths that affected her deeply — of her husband, the guitarist Fred Smith; of her brother, Todd; and of her longtime pianist, Richard Sohl.

“I had to leave Detroit,” Ms. Smith said in the interview, which took place in August, when PBS was promoting the film to television journalists. “I don’t drive, and I didn’t want to live in Detroit alone, and so I brought my children back to the East Coast.”

“But I had to get a job, to take care of them, and to send them to school,” she added. “You know it’s a lot more expensive to live in New York City than in Detroit. And so I went back to performing.”

On Jan 21, join Sam Shepard and Patti Smith, close friends since the early 1970s, when they read from their newly published books at the 92Y Unterberg Poetry Center for the first time together.