At one point, Kermode takes up Auden on Antony and Cleopatra and then becomes swept up into both the play and Auden’s worldly, original response to the play. His critical imagination launches itself off Auden the way Auden’s own imagination has suddenly thrived on Shakespeare’s ancient lovers. Kermode: “Antony and Cleopatra are having their last affair and its purpose is to enable them to escape the future, old age and death.” He quotes Auden: “[The two lovers] need the fullest possible publicity and the maximum assistance from good cooking, good clothes, good drink.” And then Kermode himself: “The poetry of their love talk is like fine cooking, a technique to maintain excitement even as the senses cool.” Beyond the gulfs of time and death, Shakespeare, Auden and Kermode—the playwright, the poet and the critic—make sense of experience under the aspect of eternity. Such a moment is why you go into the business of making sense of art in the first place.

It’s why I enrolled in Kermode’s lecture class on Shakespeare, sometime in the 1980s. Kermode had just arrived at Columbia, I believe. He was a tall, solidly built man with healthy wisps of gray hair, a benign, square-shaped face and black-framed glasses. He stood awkwardly at the lectern, somewhat befuddled by American informality as about 300 students filled up the lecture hall on a late summer afternoon. Out from the chattering, capering crowd, a slight girl with spiked purple hair emerged and walked up to Kermode. She put a small tape recorder on the desk where the lectern stood. Kermode leaned down to hear her better and because his microphone was on, their brief exchange rippled out in a muddled way throughout the room. Would you mind speaking into this? she said. Since speaking into the tape recorder would have required Kermode to bend at a ninety-degree angle from the waist throughout the hourlong class, he looked at her in exasperation and brushed some wisps off his forehead with donnish elegance. I’ll see what I can do, he said.

Instead, he spoke with such softness throughout the course that all 300 of us had to lean forward to hear him. The gentle tones were not, however, some aristocratic affectation on the part of this humbly born man. They were the reflection of a calm, temperate, gentle character. Gentle, but rigorous. He failed half the class on the midterm and awarded only two A’s among the remaining 150.

But if you were lucky enough to stick it out to the end of the course, you learned to regard Shakespeare not as sacrosanct art but as pieces of life compounded with poetry and wisdom. No wonder that in his essay on Auden, Kermode seems sympathetic to Auden’s boredom with the idea of high art. “Shakespeare never takes himself too seriously,” Auden lectured, and Kermode himself never took Shakespeare so seriously that he could not make the daring worldly observation that put a play in a whole new light, such as the idea that Troilus and Cressida was written for an audience of lawyers and thus its language was shrewd and lawyerly, slippery and contentious.

I never got to know Kermode, alas, but had one meaningful encounter with him. I handed in the final paper three weeks late and was told by the phalanx of graduate students jockeying to please Kermode that they couldn’t accept it, which meant that I would get a C for the course—even though I had aced the midterm. So I went to Kermode himself. He sat awkwardly behind his desk—his natural elegance and sympathy seemed ill at ease with any kind of authority that had been conferred on him—while I expounded on the unjustness of his teaching assistants. Graduate students can be very rough, he said impishly. But tell me, he said, why is the paper so late? I fumbled around for a few seconds and then blurted out: "An excess of conscientiousness."  He laughed softly and stretched out his hand. Here, I’ll take it, he said. I like to think that it was one awkward self-made man responding to an awkward young man in the midst of self-making. I don’t think a week has gone by in the many years since then that I have not uplifted myself with the memory of Kermode’s kindness to me. It didn’t hurt, either, that I got an A for the course.

One such funster— he could not possibly be serious—is someone named Reuel Marc Gerecht, writing in “Entanglements,” the usually excellent new blog at The New Republic that is edited by the excellent Lawrence Kaplan (among other pleasures, I can on it read the work of David Rieff, one of the most original and brilliant thinkers around). According to Mr. Gerecht, Feisal Abdul Rauf—the imam who runs the center—is a shady character driven by dark ulterior motives. This is because, as Mr. Gerecht explains, “some of [Rauf’s] more tentative, if not deceptive commentary about terrorism against Israelis, America’s culpability for 9/11, and the nobility and value of the Holy Law for Muslims living in the West…” Remarkably, however, Mr. Gerecht never quotes a single line from Mr. Rauf’ s “tentative, if not deceptive commentary.” Instead he goes on to charge that Mr. Rauf’s defenders “may… not have done much due diligence on Mr. Rauf.” Then he goes on to portray Mr. Rauf with wild inaccuracy himself, speculating that the FBI and the CIA have damning information about him, and that Mr. Rauf is most likely not a “moderate Muslim.”

When The New York Times implements its paywall, I am going to treat Mr. Gerecht to a one-year subscription. He can use it to, first of all, bone up on the facts. Then he can use his new password to go to the paper’s archives, where he will find an article published December 8, 2009 and written by Ralph Blumenthal and Sharaf Mowjood. Here are the facts they presented: Beginning last October, Mr. Rauf was using a building in the very space where he wants to construct the Islamic center as a place where Muslims could gather and pray and, in his words, “send the opposite statement to what happened on 9/11.” Mr. Rauf added: “We want to push back against the extremists.” No doubt people like Mr. Gerecht would laugh this away as a cunning ruse to hide… well, what would these Muslims gathered in prayer be hatching and hiding?

If Mr. Gerecht doesn’t think that every law-enforcement agency in the country has by now triple-checked a group of Muslims gathering near ground zero, he’s been living on Pluto. But, then, the FBI has investigated Mr. Rauf. At least, we can assume it did because a spokesman for the FBI told Messrs. Blumenthal and Mowjood that Mr. Feisal had “helped agents reach out to the Muslim population after 9/11.” “We’ve had positive interactions with him in the past,” the FBI spokesman said, “positive interactions” quite possibly meaning giving the FBI information about various Muslim-American figures. Double agent? That would be a pretty dangerous game to play. If so, Mr. Rauf would have to be playing it with his wife, Daisy Khan, who is an official advisor to the National September 11 Memorial and Museum, set to be constructed at the heart of ground zero, not far from her husband’s planned Islamic Center. Are these two of the most committed spies the world has ever known? Or are they two people truly ashamed of what fanatics did in the name of Islam and ardently committed to a kind of reparation and penance for crimes committed by others?

As for the question of Mr. Rauf’s status as a moderate Muslim, he’s a Sufi. In other words, he is committed to Islam as an inner, spiritual experience with a strong mystical dimension, not as a social experience with political ambitions. Experts can correct me if I’m wrong, but I doubt that there is a single Sufi among the terrorists waging jihad against America. Those are the facts. That is the fact-based, verifiable truth. But facts vaporizing into fantastical venting and defaming and insulting, well, that’s not an argument, or rational skepticism, or “the other side of the story.” That’s entertainment.

On Wednesday, April 21, at a reading by Wall Street Journal reporter Katherine Rosman, the Daily Transom witnessed an unorthodox exchange:

“What are you wearing?” one audience member asked the writer.

The question, a strange one to hear at a book reading, was inevitable because of Ms. Rosman’s beautiful bright red dress.

“Prada,” Ms. Rosman said. “It was my mom’s," she said.  A pause. “It’s from the dead mother collection.”

Laughter in the room.

Ms. Rosman’s first book, a memoir called If You Knew Suzy, is about  her mother's life and death from lung cancer five years ago at age 60. Writing it, Ms. Rosman mined address books, business cards, old e-mails, and phone books to tackle the subject of “Mom," using the same method she has used to illuminate topics like elite book clubs, orgasm instructors and the death of “the slush pile” as a journalist. If You Knew Suzy is touching and sad, demonstrating a life well-lived and cut way too short.

“The Mom I conjured was not the vibrant ass-kicker, the energetic woman who on any given day might climb to a mountaintop before 7:00 am,” Ms. Rosman writes of the time just before she began working on If You Knew Suzy. “When I closed my eyes, I was seeing the cancer victim.”

Notepad in hand, she began calling the numbers in her mother’s address book.

“I wanted to know the things that weren’t the family clichés,” Ms. Rosman said at the reading. “We often think we know a story before we start reporting it. What I thought were my mom’s stories, none of those are in this book.”

She balances two narratives at once: one of the sick patient, whom Ms. Rosman is trying to forget, the other of an energetic beauty from the suburbs of Detroit whose story Ms. Rosman discovers as she writes: a woman who watched Law & Order reruns while perusing eBay; a Pilates instructor and lover of hip-hop; someone who called pushy lawyers “fucking ambulance chasers.” The discovery of all this life in the midst of mourning creates an investigative how-to manual in overcoming loss.

“I would go to the bookstore and see all these books about self-help,” Ms. Rosman said. “I didn’t want self-help. I tried to write the book that I wanted to read.”

Her first lead comes from a call to Jennifer, one of her mother’s Pilates students, and at the time a stranger to Ms. Rosman. Jennifer shared her favorite Suzy story: During one of their lessons, Jennifer admitted she was worried that her husband’s moodiness would embarrass her at an upcoming work party. Suzy’s advice?

“Twenty minutes before you have to walk out the door, have sex with him. It’ll buy you two or three hours of him being relaxed and in a good mood.”

 “My mom said this? My mom?” Ms. Rosman writes.

When she read this passage aloud, she made a yuck face, laughed, and then apologized to her stepsister, sitting in the audience. 

Even the seeminly insignificant people in Suzy's life—especially them—had a story to tell. Later in the book, while investigating printouts of her mother’s e-mail and eBay accounts, Ms. Rosman discovers Suzy had spent $25,000 on vintage glass while she was sick. She would get suggestions from Carl Bellavia, a “glass-world guru” from Jersey City, and seemingly random, miniscule component of her life. But.

Throughout her illness, Suzy refused to talk about dying with her daughters. After a series of interviews Ms. Rosman realized Suzy could, however, talk about dying with Carl.

“When you’re willing to spend the time to peel back the layers, even seemingly conventional players are revealed to be complex,” Ms. Rosman writes.

More than a writer dealing with grief through her craft, If You Knew Suzy says quite a bit about everything good journalism can accomplish. Through reporting her mother’s life—a life that she thought she knew backwards and forwards—Ms. Rosman discovered an altogether different story, filled with unexpected and fascinating characters. It was her most difficult assignment as a journalist, but she got the scoop.

"Coming from my own dysfunctional family it’s kind of great to see another one," designer Vera Wang, wearing a black feather skirt and a plunging-necklined top of her own design, told the Transom duromg the film's premiere last night at the Director's Guild of America on 57th Street.

Mr. García said that when it comes to his own family, he’s “always had a philosophy with being straightforward.” His daughter Dominik García-Lorido, who also plays his daughter in the movie, did not contradict this: She said that she didn’t own keys to the house as a teenager because her parents had to see what she looked like when she came home. Wearing an Erin Fetherston navy jumpsuit, she laughed about the time her father punched a hole through her door because she fell asleep with it locked and couldn’t hear him banging on it. (Sounds like some good times in the Garcia household....)

Meanwhile, actor Hugh Jackman, there as a guest, admitted that City Island had hitherto been a mystery to him. “Finally, today I saw it on a map!” he told the Transom.

And after the screening, during a party at Rouge Tomate, Christine Baranksi let the Transom in on a little trade secret: "We’re always telling our secrets through our acting," she said.

It was kind of confusing. What was this unassuming electronic specialist doing running around to parties with models and fashion designers attached to his arm? Surely it wasn’t just because they dug his 1999 breakthrough, Play (which sold 10 million copies, making it the best-selling electronic album of all time)? No, Moby represented something to them: Someone famous, accessible but untacky. He was a novelty.

“I had all of these strange opportunities,” Moby told The Observer in his home recording studio on the border of Little Italy recently, “to date glamorous people that I would have never been able to date before; to go to fantastic celebrity parties that I’d never been invited to before.” He removed his thick plastic glasses and sat at his kitchen table, binge-drinking tea, his signature beverage (the Lower East Side vegan restaurant he founded, Teany, was destroyed by fire last June). “I felt like a kid in a candy store, grabbing everything I could.”

With his new album, Wait for Me, Moby asserts definitively that those days are over. The huge bombast of Play has faded out, leaving dark, slow, quiet music in its wake. If there’s a pop song to be found on the album, it’s buried underneath layers of melancholy. Moby recorded all of it in his private studio, and it is his way of bowing out of the celebrity world.

“I was making a record at home for other people to listen to at home,” he said.

Inside the apartment, reminders of his supernova flash of stardom are everywhere: Gold and platinum records hung on the wall; a mantel was lined with MTV Video Music awards; stacks of old Casio synthesizers and analog drum machines lay across the floor. Moby himself was wearing wrinkled cargo pants and a white T-shirt. He’s not tall, and not too short; his shiny head contains friendly eyes that smile at you, even though his mouth never once curls up into a grin. He doesn’t look like a rock star.

“People assume that somehow fame and wealth will keep mortality at bay,” he said, scooting over to the sink to pour another cup of tea. “I often think of Nirvana. If Nirvana had remained a small, underground punk rock band, Kurt Cobain would still be alive. And he’d probably be living in Seattle, getting kind of fat and balding, be relatively happy and producing records for other people.”

But Kurt Cobain was shooting heroin long before he was famous, The Observer reminded Moby.

Still! “The more fame I had, the less happiness I had,” he said. “For me, there had to be that conscious moving away from the institutions of fame.”

It took a while. The artist’s last two albums, 2005’s Hotel and 2008’s Last Night, were filled with club-ready dreck. Moby was going through the motions and didn’t seem to have any reservations about his new role as Page Six fodder.

“I wanted to make records that would sustain the life I was living,” he said.

It was David Lynch, of all people, that inspired Moby to rethink his new life as celebrity candy. That’s right: The eccentric, pompadour-sporting director of Eraserhead is responsible for stirring this musician to record one of the most depressing albums of the decad,e in a bold attempt to drop out of the fame game. In October 2007, Moby heard Mr. Lynch speak about the creative process at the British Academy for Film and Television Arts. Mr. Lynch’s earnest presentation prompted an epiphany, Moby said: Ditch the models for the keyboards and get back to making music. So don’t expect to see him at any red-carpet events any time soon, bucko.

“I’m 44 years old. If I’m trying to be a pop star, that’s just tragic,” Moby said, and he almost smiled. Almost.

mmiller@observer.com

Mr. Woo is best known stateside for Face/Off and Mission: Impossible II: movies that combine balletic, slow-motion fight sequences with prodigious body counts. With Mr. Woo, the question is never if hordes of people will die, but how.

Red Cliff, screened on  Monday, Oct. 13, at Asia Society ahead of its release on Nov. 18, tackles the Battle of Red Cliffs in 208 A.D., during which a virtuous but outnumbered Chinese army repelled an attack from a power-hungry invader. Everyone in China knows this story; it's the subject of romance novels, comic books, and even video games. Mr. Woo said he spent the past 20 years thinking about the project, especially about its culminating naval battle. 

"I grew up with the story, and there were so many heroes I admired," he said during an interview onstage following the screening. "The burning ship scene—to put that onscreen is every director's dream. That kind of scene has never been done in Chinese movie history."

The film marks several firsts in Asian cinema. Its $80 million budget made it the most expensive Asian movie ever produced. Mr. Woo noted that one scene, in which the camera follows a dove on a two-minute flight across two army encampments, was the costliest CGI shot ever filmed. The movie became a national project: The Chinese government lent up to 1,500 soldiers to the production to play extras and, at times, to build temporary roads on location. Mr. Woo chuckled when he said he felt more like a general than a director.

After a long career in Hong Kong and Hollywood, what drew Mr. Woo to China?

"Five years ago I met several young people from China, and they have a great passion about movies," he said. "They worked very hard and were very talented and wanted to work on a Hollywood-type of movie. I thought it was about time to bring what I learned in Hollywood to the young people of China."

The serious subject doesn't keep Mr. Woo from having some fun. The audience alternatively winced or squealed with delight at the movie's outlandish stunts: a man fighting off 20 attackers with an infant strapped on his back, or another wielding a flaming whip above his head. Seemingly thousands of extras are impaled with spears, gouged with arrows or engulfed in flames. Yet there are lighter moments as well. Two military geniuses take a break from war games to duel in a rousing jam session on the guqin, a zither-like stringed instrument. Later, a stoic general teases his wife as she bandages his wounds: "You wrapped me up like a rice ball."

During a reception after the movie, a crowd gathered round the diminutive director, clamoring for autographs. The Transom beat through and asked: How did filming Red Cliff compare to his previous experiences?

"I was much happier working in China," Mr. Woo said. "Everything was so simple. I walked into the office and let them know I wanted to make a movie called Red Cliff, and they said, 'O.K., let's do it.' In Hollywood, it just takes a much longer time to set up a project and you have to listen to so many people. There are so many meetings."

And what about beating Titanic?

"Just by a little," he said, squeezing two fingers together to demonstrate the margin.

Minimalist clothing designer Jil Sander’s +J collection for Uniqlo debuted this morning and the line stretched down Broadway from Spring to Prince Street, and stayed that way, with people waiting as much as an hour and a half to get first dibs.

“I obviously can’t afford the real stuff,” said one customer, Stephanie Judge—who added she was at Uniqlo doing “research” for work but refused to explain what that meant. She had waited in line for an hour and 40 minutes. “Wait, wait, no, I’m with her!” Ms. Judge shouted, indicating a companion, as a security guard tried to block her entrance.

Ms. Sander’s collection, which includes both men’s and women’s clothing, dragged people away from other daily responsibilities.

“I actually have a class at 12:30,” Marcus Oda, a first year law student at N.Y.U., said. “So I’m getting a little nervous.”

People were let in ten at a time, and could only buy five items because of limited supplies.

“It’s exciting. I feel like these are collector’s pieces,” Fawnia Chang, a fashion blogger, said. She admitted to being more of a Uniqlo fan, but still she showed her support for Ms. Sander, buying a long gray winter coat, a cardigan and skinny jeans after waiting for an hour and a half. “Don’t tell my husband,” she whispered.

Ms. Sander’s ready-to-wear clothing usually sells for several thousand dollars per piece. The +J line ranges from $19.50 for shirts to $149.50 for outerwear. Get shoppin'!

Psychologist Eva Fogelman agreed, disapproving of "the level of dress." Dr. Fogelman, a specialist in Holocaust survivors who wore a black sequined frock, pointed out that formerly this premiere social event for New York's cinephiles was a black-tie affair. The dress code on this year's invitation was specified as "dazzling," a category that apparently embraced cocktail dresses, jeans, and one neon-green suit.

"Many people didn't enjoy" the more formal dress code, said festival program director Richard Peña. "But also, we never stopped anyone who wasn't wearing black tie."

He added that "Tavern had become almost too big. We wanted to rein in the party a little. Look, there were some economic considerations too--we had to lay off some staff this year, and we thought a smaller, low-key party would fit the spirit of the year."

The hall's vertiginous geometry also seemed to fit the spirit of the opening-night film selection, Alain Resnais's Les Herbes Folles (Wild Grass), a surreal late-career fantasia about a man who becomes obsessed with the woman whose wallet he finds in a parking garage. The director punctuates their halting, mutually suspicious affair with lingering shots of wind-ruffled grass.

The 87-year-old Mr. Resnais (Hiroshima Mon Amour, Last Year at Marienbad) came onstage before the screening with the help of a cane, which he said was only temporary. "My leg isn't broken," he told the audience. "But considering the way you use the expression 'I hope you break your leg,' I think it's a good sign for the film."

Mr. Resnais received a standing ovation, but his new movie rendered some viewers speechless. Young director Alex Olch (The Windmill Movie), when asked what he thought of the film, responded with a slow, uncertain nod and a long draft of pomegranate martini. The Film Comment staffer standing next to him followed suit.

"There was a lot of the nouvelle vague in the film," said WNYC radio host Leonard Lopate. The movie's false ending, intrusive narrator, ironic score--they were tricks that "only a young filmmaker who's trying to show off or an older filmmaker who knows everything would use," he added.

One of the film's stars, Mathieu Amalric (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly), stood nearby with the flame-haired burlesque dancer Dirty Martini, drinking a beer. What did Mr. Amalric think of the movie's chilling dentist's office scene? "I just spent the past month at the dentist," he said, shaking his head. "You get older and it all falls out."

Ms. Mortimer was attending the unveiling of the new Spider Silk Exhibit at the AMNH. The exhibit’s centerpiece is an 11-foot-long hand-woven textile made from the silk of one million golden orb spiders. The event’s press release touted the fabric as “imbued with metaphor and poetry, with nightmare and phobia, with tales and myths that resonate with us all.” It took artist Simon Peers and fashion designer Nicolas Godley five years and about $500,000 to produce the cloth. Some spiders did indeed die.

“It’s so delicate,” Ms. Mortimer, now securely draped in Spider Silk, said, “it makes me nervous.” Still, the shawl was “very comfortable, very light,” and, best of all, “it matches perfectly!” she said, gesturing toward her shimmering gold dress.

Model Maggie Rizer, Real Housewives of New York’s Countess Luann de Lesseps, Valentino’s Carlos Souza, Countess Natalie von Bismarck, and designer Nicole Miller each wore some version of gold, silk, glitter (or all three) as they walked a yellow carpet. Stylist Phillip Bloch wore a grey and blue tuxedo expertly matched with golden Nike sneakers. The fortuitous pairing was simply “a comfort choice,” he said. Perhaps having heard that some people in Madagascar eat the golden orb spider fried, a chatty Mr. Bloch added: “I was thinking I could go on that Survivor show, or I’m A Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here, but when it comes to, like, eating them [spiders]…” he trailed off sadly. 

The event was hosted by golden-haired actress Heather Graham, who wore a feathered and bejeweled black Valentino frock. When asked why she wasn’t wrapped in the Spider Silk scarf that Ms. Mortimer was wearing, she replied, “I don’t think it would go with this dress!”

Inside the AMNH’s Grand Gallery, DJ Donna D’Cruz, donning headphones affixed with a massive crown of jewels, spun for Champagne-swilling guests. As the party wound down, a few attendees who seemed to have snatched the shawl away from Ms. Mortimer passed it around and posed for pictures.

Earlier in the evening all eyes were on Mr. Owen as he paused for photographs on the red carpet. "Oh my God, he's handsome," gasped one passerby.

"I think he's dreamy," said Reshma Shetty, the elegant co-star of USA's Hamptons dramedy Royal Pains, which was recently picked up for a second season.

Writer/director Tony Gilroy, who directed Mr. Owen and Julia Roberts in Duplicity, also praised the actor. "He is a man without any issues," Mr. Gilroy remarked.

The Observer tried to get some inside information on the as yet untitled Jason Bourne movie, reportedly due in 2011. Mr. Gilroy had written the three previous installments; was he penning the new one as well? "Nah, not working on it," he said, before hustling up the stairs to find his seats.

In The Boys Are Back, Mr. Owen plays a sportswriter father in Australia who struggles to raise two sons—played by Ron Weasley look-alike George MacKay and an irresistible six-year-old Nicholas McAnulty—following the death of his wife. The Observer asked if he was a sports fan in real life.

"I'm a huge football fan," Mr. Owen said. "Soccer, to you people."

Besides Mr. Owen, the film's other star might be southern Australia's Adelaide coast, captured in dozens of loving shots by the Aussie director, Scott Hicks. "I hadn't made a film there for about twelve years," Mr. Hicks said. "I was able to set a story that I really cared about and really loved in a landscape that I also loved."

The RZA, clad in full camo, caught the movie and later joined Mr. Owen at the VIP table. The two had bonded on the set on the 2005 movie Derailed, co-starring Jennifer Aniston. 

"He's a special kind of dude," the hip-hop artist said. "Derailed was one of my early movies and I didn't really have it yet. He made me feel comfortable with what I was doing. We wound up hanging out a few times, and now we sight each other out."

The Observer was about to ask The RZA about his new book, The Tao of Wu, due from Riverhead in October, when Mr. Owen butted in. "You're not interviewing him now, are you?" he asked, flashing his trademark wry grin before teasing his co-star: "It's 24/7 for you, isn't it?"