Nevertheless, the event was a rousing success: it turned out that the appetite for atavism was robust among the drinky class in New York.

“Just because we’re older doesn’t mean we don’t like the same things as when we were kids,” explained Tim Donnelly, who helped organize the event. “We can just be drunk while doing it now.”

He restated the problem, “If there were a Chuck E. Cheese for grownups, I would totally go.”

As it turns out, there is; in fact, there are many of them. In the past half-dozen years or so—at an increasing rate—bars with children’s games have been opening in New York, particularly in the garland of yuppie Brooklyn extending from Gowanus to Greenpoint.

At Red Hook’s Brooklyn Crab, there is mini-golf and cornhole, a beanbag-tossing game. In Clinton Hill, there is the Brooklyn Tap room, with foosball and Ping-Pong tables. In Williamsburg, one finds Barcade, with its vintage video-game machines; Full Circle, a skee-ball-themed bar, and Bushwick Country Club, which features a down-at-the-heels putt-putt course out back. In Manhattan there is Susan Sarandon’s SPiN, a boozy table-tennis club, and the West Village’s Fat Cat, the apotheosis of the phenomenon, which features a myriad of games, including Ping-Pong tables for “$5.50/per person/per hour (prorated .09/min) Sun-Thu.”

And they have done very well catering to the new alco-lescent crowds.

But whatever happened to just having a drink and a lively conversation? The idea that intelligent, interesting adults could gather over some glasses of one fortified thing or another and carry on an exchange of sentiment and ideas while getting somewhere between reasonably and blindingly drunk? While such things do still happen in some corners of the city, there is an annoying emergence of these establishments that not only cater to but encourage patrons who prefer to behave like their much younger selves.

“Everyone knows this—it’s not something I think—there’s a very prolonged youthfulness now. It really seems to last forever!” author and conversationalist Fran Lebowitz told The Observer recently. “Their idea of being sociable is not to sit around and talk. Their idea of being sociable is to sit around and play games. To me, this seems childish. Whenever people ask me to play a game, I say, ‘I don’t play games.’ And they say, ‘Why?’ And I say, ‘Because it’s a game ... There’s been a general disappearance of adulthood.”

To Ms. Lebowitz, who will be in conversation onstage with Frank Rich at Town Hall later this month, there is little in life more important than the verbal arts.

“Conversation to me is something that requires lot of time. I don’t want to sound conceited, but I think you’d have to look long and hard to find someone who has wasted more time than me. I mean, I’ve wasted decades of my life—mostly talking! Talking to me is something that fills my life.

“When our current and perhaps endless mayor, when he was only in his like 10th term, whenever he made that smoking law in bars—which actually really shocked me—I actually said to him—although if you were questioning him, he would not recall this—I said, ‘Do you want to know what sitting around in bars and restaurants talking and smoking is called? The history of art, that’s what it’s called.’”

Indeed. It’s hard to imagine many great ideas have been hatched over a microbrew and a foosball table.

Nevertheless, The Observer and a companion decided to take a tour of these atavistic drink shops on a recent Sunday evening, starting with Williamsburg’s Barcade, to witness this Never Never Land of liquor and perpetual children.

A cavernous, characterless room with 1980s arcade games lining the walls, Barcade is a dystopian version of a teen hangout, Blade Runner meets Fast Times at Ridgemont High.

After securing a drink, our companion left to survey the room. The Observer approached a 20-something couple visiting from London, Amy Chapman and Chris Curd. They were huddled around a Frogger machine, by their account faring “piss poor” at the game.

Ms. Chapman was particularly impressed by the concept of Barcade. “It makes me want to go home and start one myself. It’s such an amazing idea,” she enthused.

“It’s awesome,” Mr. Curd concurred.

Agree to disagree. But did they not have similar diversions in London?

“Not in bars. It’s mostly gambling machines,” responded Mr. Curd

“It’s mostly a thing for kids,” added Ms. Chapman.

Fancy that. We rejoined our companion at the bar. He informed us of his attempt at regaining the gaming prowess of his youth. “I just made it 30 seconds into Contra and just died. I just blew a dollar on Contra,” he said. “Fucking Contra.”

But what of the vibe, the boozy teenageness of the joint?

“There’s something very nonthreatening about this place,” the companion mused. “There’s no one attractive. It’s like, ‘Let’s just go and play some video games.’ I mean, I guess they’re just nerds ... Alright, I’m getting some change.”

In addition to being childish and silly, there was something decidedly unsexy about the superimposition of adolescent accoutrements into the context of a bar. It took away the potential, the edge and the libidinous quality that the best boozing joints give off.

When we reached him by phone, Jason Kosmas, co-owner of the swank bar Employees Only, went even further, pointing out that games of this sort, while ostensibly sociable activities, are actually kind of antisocial.

“You go out with your friends and you spend time with your friends,” he explained. “You know, it’s a wagon train. You go out with your friends and you sort of form a little fortress, and nobody else really comes in.”

As opposed to his establishment, which he said is structured around possibility. “Ultimately, in those places [like his own], people are going to get laid,” he explained. “The word ‘laid’ has different connotations for different people. It might be that they want a great drink, or they might want to see someone famous, or they might want to make a business connection. Something’s gonna happen to them that is out of their ordinary life. Or, most importantly, get laid.”

Imagine as part of this metaphor getting the day’s high score on Galaga. Doesn’t work, right?
Cocktail guru Jim Meehan found that his bar PDT had so much sexual charisma—and such drinkable concoctions—that he had to institute a “No PDA at PDT, hands on the table, tongues inside your mouth” point of etiquette.
“It’s bizarre to me,” he said of the gaming bars. “I work all the time, so going to a bar with my friends to catch up is actually a luxury. I would never go to a place to play lawn darts.”
From Barcade, The Observer and our companion ventured next to the Bushwick Country Club, whose mini-golf course the bartender humbly described as “six holes which you can put a ball into with a club.” It did, however, have a windmill made of entirely of PBR cans. (Go Bushwick!)

There were no golfers present, so we asked the bartender about the proliferation of games in bars.

He responded with consternation that his friends had signed him up for a cornhole league.
Had anyone ever gotten laid by playing in a cornhole league?

“Probably,” he said. “Every team has to have at least one girl on it. I’m sure that someone can get laid from cornhole. You end up with a lot of guys with their shirts off. But those same guys would probably have their shirts off anyway.”

We headed over to Full Circle, a bar so wedded to its skee-ball-centric identity that its name is the term for rolling an expert-level round of the “sport.”

The crowd, if that’s the word, was exclusively male, save the bartender.

(After sinking $10 into the skee-ball alley in about five minutes, we realized another incentive for bar owners to feature games.)

We encountered George McNeese, co-owner of the buzzy Bed-Stuy eatery Do or Dine. He comes to Full Circle about once a week and is even in a skee-ball league with his girlfriend.
He apprised us of the tyranny of small differences within the alco-lescent demimonde.

“If you go to Barcade, it’s going to be filled with people who are more or less looking for a bar scene. You know, it’s going to be filled with hipsters and all sorts of shit that I don’t want to deal with,” said Mr. McNeese, who was wearing oversize clear-framed glasses, a tote bag that looked like a Nintendo controller and a phone cord as a necklace. “It’s gonna be packed, and the drinks are gonna be overpriced. You know, I just want to have a couple beers and play some skee-ball.”

This last reminded us of something Jim Meehan had pointed out. “In a city like New York,” he said, “where there are so many bars and so many people, each bar can fill a specific niche, because they don’t have the collective responsibility. For instance, I just got back from Michigan—there were like two bars in town. If you’re one of two bars, there’s probably more pressure to appeal to a broad audience, whereas if there are like a million bars for 6 million people you can, and especially if you’re small, you can fill a specific niche and be successful.”
Unfortunately, he was right: there is clearly a market for bars catering to nostalgic activity-philes.

Of course, the infantilizing of the bar-going experience is lent a kind of dismaying symmetry by the recent contretemps at the Park Slope beer garden Greenwood Park, where among Yelp reviewers there has been considerable outcry not about grown-ups behaving like kids, but about them actually bringing kids.

“It’s not daycare it’s a BAR,” groused one.

“Too many kids, and I don’t mean 20-somethings, I mean actual children,” bitched another.
And a third noted, “Bars also don’t have proper entertainment for kids.” Erroneously, it turns out. You guessed it, Greenwood Park has games!

As Fran Lebowitz pointed out, “Any environment devolves to the youngest person in the room.” So, why not gather around the bocce courts, young and old alike, and collapse the distinction? In no time, one could look from child to adult, and from adult to child, and from child to adult again, and already it would be impossible to say which was which.
bgallagher@observer.com

Mr. Amis.

A mediocre book by Martin Amis is better than most books by anyone else, but unfortunately, a bad book by Martin Amis is just as bad as any other bad book. And Lionel Asbo (Knopf, 255 pp. $25.95) is a bad book.

The mention on the cover of Mr. Amis’s previous masterworks—Money and London Fields—does Lionel Asbo no favors by calling to mind its better-realized predecessors. As in those books, the protagonist is a morally bankrupt, misogynistic menace to society—which for Mr. Amis is a promising start. Unfortunately, Asbo reads like a first draft of an Amis novel, before the linguistic pyrotechnics, trenchant wit and cosmopolitan insight have made it in.

Lionel’s surname is a play on the acronym for England’s Anti-social behavior order, a legal mechanism devised to deal with chronic disruptive behavior—things like repeated public drunkenness or playing music too loudly. The term morphed first into a verb—one could get “asbo-ed,” or more gratifyingly, “asbo” others—then became a noun once more; one could be “an asbo”—the British equivalent of “white trash.” Thus, Lionel Asbo is an asbo. You can see how clever that is.

The plot, as far as it goes, is fairly simple. A violent, ignorant man wins the lottery, becomes rich, is oddly adept at keeping and even making more money, and continues to behave badly. Meanwhile, his nephew Des is a well-meaning young man with journalistic aspirations and the desire to make for himself a livable existence with a normal girl. (There is some incest and mayhem thrown in, but it feels oddly incidental.)

Des and Lionel hail from Diston, a fictional neighborhood of council flats and housing estates where “nothing—and no one—was over sixty years old. On an international chart for life expectancy, Diston would appear between Benin and Djibouti (fifty-four for men and fifty-seven for women) ... In Diston, everything hated everything else, and everything else, in return, hated everything back.”

When Mr. Amis tells us that Diston is “a world of italics and exclamation marks,” it is an artful enough way to characterize working-class life and to elucidate the novel’s theme of class and language—and the particularly British nature of the relationship between the two, which Mr. Amis returns to repeatedly.

“Lionel pronounced ‘myth’ miff,” reads one passage. “Full possessive pronouns—your, their, my—still made guest appearances in his English, and he didn’t invariably defy grammatical number (they was, and so on). But his verbal prose and accent were in steep decline. Until a couple years ago Lionel pronounced ‘Lionel’ Lionel. But these days he pronounced ‘Lionel’ Loyonel, or even Loyonoo.” And later, “The first time he said brothel he pronounced it broffle, and the second time he said brothel he pronounced it brovvle.”

“I’m a wealthy man and it’s a worthy cause.’ Welfy, wervy.” We get it. You can take the chav out of the council estate, but etc. However, these linguistic signposts never seem to do anything other than remind the reader, over and over, that Lionel is lower-class. After about the 10th instance, it starts to be come unclear whether Mr. Amis is observing how language acts as a class indicator or if he’s actually using it as one. The whole thing gets a little “U and non-U,” and not in a self-aware way.

The most marked characteristic of Lionel Asbo is its joylessness. It doesn’t seem that Mr. Amis has any affection for his characters, even the despicable ones. In the past, real social monsters have been his forte. There is a palpable glee in his descriptions of Keith Talent’s infidelity and John Self’s alcoholic implosion. Lionel Asbo, in contrast, is a nasty enough creature—beating women, assaulting random passersby and drinking olympian amounts of liquor are among his pastimes—but there is none of the vivid squalor of those other louts.

As Philip Roth put it in his essay “Writing American Fiction,” “The actuality is continually outdoing our talents, and the culture tosses up figures almost daily that are the envy of any novelist.” And while this is, of course, a persistent concern, Mr. Amis has in the past done reality one better on a consistent basis. It is apparent that the world has, by now, matched and surpassed his most squalid projections. While he is certainly a disturbing specimen, Lionel Asbo is less appalling than what one would see on, for example, The Only Way Is Essex, or even High Street on a given Saturday night, not to mention any one of thousands of places on the internet. To wit, at one point Lionel advises Des to check out some internet porn. “Des did, in fact have a quick look at Fucked-up Facials. And the site, he found, was accurately so-called: he had never seen anything half so fucked-up in all his life.” The thing is, Fucked-up Facials actually exists in reality, and that’s the problem. Mr. Amis has lost his ability to be predictive about the degradation of society and its actors, as he was with, say, the murderous house party of Dead Babies, the television addictions of London Fields, or any of the other depravities that made him the bard of the “new unpleasantness.” There can be no sense of foreboding when the worst has already come to pass. Here, one can almost imagine Mr. Amis bleating, “You kids get the hell on my lawn!”

The moral turpitude is rote, and the violence lacks the grinning menace of Mr. Amis at the height of his talents. Lionel Asbo is a daunted and tentative work that suffers from exactly the syndrome Mr. Roth diagnosed. The dulling of this edge may also be a function of Mr. Amis’s age, which he himself has acknowledged as a concern for a writer’s ability to corral the prevailing culture on the page. In a recent interview with New York magazine, he lamented, “Getting old is the subtraction of your powers. Which very much goes for writing ... I don’t see many exceptions to that rule.” That he would so publicly point out such a thing in advance of his own highly anticipated book either indicates a man who is so confident as to believe himself immune, or one who is too anxious about his own diminution of powers that he can’t help but mention it. The latter seems more likely.

But the true problem seems to be his lack of interest in his subject. The book is subtitled “State of England,” but it’s exactly this that seems to have lost its hold on Mr. Amis.

In that same interview, he declared, “No one cares about what happens in London anymore.” This is a tough case to make, however, considering the recent deluge of Olympics coverage, and last year’s riots, as well as the 2005 bombings. And the catastrophic JP Morgan trade of last spring. The recent revelations about misreported financial statements by Barclays. And of course there is the constant battering of the public with news of the royals, their in-laws, the hats at Prince William’s wedding, Kate Middleton’s recent Vanity Fair cover, and the various comings and goings of Pippa Middleton and her world-famous backside. That no one cares about what happens in London anymore is simply a bizarre notion, and sounds like nothing so much as projection. No, it seems only Martin Amis doesn’t care what happens in London anymore. And you can tell from this bloodless book.

At one point, Lionel himself inveighs, “I love this f***ing country. It’s England, my England, for Lionel Asbo.” But perhaps no longer for Martin Amis.

bgallagher@observer.com

Etan Patz's mother, Julie (holding her youngest son), and his father, Stan (far right), organizing a search effort in the days after the child's disappearance. (Photo by Allen Arpadi)

On May 25, 1979—the first day his mother allowed him to walk to the bus stop alone—6-year-old Etan Patz went missing just blocks from his parents’ Soho loft. The case roused the fears of the nation and changed the way parents raised their children. In the days and months after, the full force of the New York press was trained on the family. The case became as much of a media phenomenon as a police investigation.

Despite thousands of man hours on the part of law enforcement, and the identification of at least one suspect in 1990—a convicted child molester named José Ramos, currently in prison in Pennsylvania on other charges—no arrests have been made in the Patz case. Last week, the FBI and NYPD excavated a basement on Prince Street, just one block from the Patzes’ apartment, and once again the media descended on the family. Law enforcement officials are analyzing a stain they found, but so far they have “nothing conclusive.”

On the slim chance that Etan would find his way home, the Patzes have never moved or changed their telephone number, and each time a possible development arises, a new onslaught of reporters arrives at their door. In the 33 years since the disappearance, the Patzes have lived with the media as a fact of their life. We talked to reporters and editors who covered the case in its first year.

George Goodman, then a reporter for The New York Times, now at work on a biography of Sonny Rollins: It was a beautiful spring afternoon on Spring Street. And nobody really knew the distress that the Patz family was going through.

John Miller, then a reporter at Channel 5 News, now a senior correspondent at CBS News: What I remember that day was walking up the couple of flights to get to the Patzes’ apartment and walking in and seeing the pandemonium inside. The police had set it up like a command post. They were stringing telephone wires to bring in extra lines so that the Patzes’ line would be free in case there was a call from the kidnappers. They had 300 cops there, and they were doing a grid search of the neighborhood, every apartment every backyard, every basement.

Alan Tannenbaum, then the chief photographer and photo of the Soho Weekly News, now a photojournalist at Polaris Images: It was a big shock that something would happen in that neighborhood, which was kind of a quiet neighborhood not known for having a lot of kids. And then he just disappeared so quickly and without any trace at all, so that was pretty mind blowing.

Jerry Schmetterer, then the police bureau chief of the Daily News, now a spokesman for the Brooklyn district attorney’s office: Soho back then wasn’t like it is now. It was an artsy neighborhood. Etan’s father was a photographer. It had galleries, but it wasn’t the trendy, chic place that it has been over the last 10 years or so. It was a little meaner and there were still areas of warehouses and printing companies. The Apple store wouldn’t have opened down there.

Tannenbaum: There was a law called Artists in Residence, and a lot of these loft buildings had signs on the outside that said “AIR. floor five,” things like that. So the firemen would know there were people living there, if there was a fire.

Miller: I met Julie Patz that day and I said, "Tell me what happened." And she said, “He walked to school, and I stood out on the fire escape and I watched him walk all the way to the corner where the bus stop was, and that was the last I saw of him.” I asked her would you step outside on the balcony and point in that direction and show me how you watched, ’cause I was thinking, it’s a television story, we’re going to have to make it visual. So we had the cameraman shoot her on the balcony kind of looking in the direction she was looking.

Goodman: She was just gulping coffee. And I think she might’ve been smoking cigarettes. It’s like every reporter feels when they’re going out to do a story like that. You ask people how they feel. It’s an intrusion in a way and you feel very self-conscious asking them questions that they’ve answered already for a dozen times.

Allen Arpadi, then a photographer for the Soho Weekly News, now a retired photography professor: When I went to the apartment, there were some—let’s call them friends of the family—as well. And I asked somebody a kind of religious question: "Can you have a funeral?" And I remember a guy saying "No, you need a body to bury."

Julie Patz, on the Today show, two years after her son Etan's disappearance.

Selwyn Raab, then a reporter for The New York Times, now, an author and investigative reporter: They invited me up to their apartment. There was no difficulty on their part. You have to be sensitive. When I did interviews, regardless if they were organized crime figures, or they were police officers, or they were parents with problems or victims, you’re always sensitive to their feelings. Listen, you’re not dealing with some politician.

Schmetterer: I can only speak for myself that I never liked doing those kind of interviews, and as a police reporter you’re often calling up people and saying how did you feel when you found out your kid was killed? It was tough. You’re dealing with two people who are naturally upset. They’re a nervous wreck, and they’d rather not be talking to you. These two people recognized the importance of talking to the press. They recognized the value of the publicity that may help find him.

Raab: My thinking at the time was to make sure the story didn’t disappear, even though you know it’s a million-to-one chance that somebody would see. The perverts probably didn’t read The New York Times, but somebody might’ve seen something in that neighborhood, and I still think so.

Miller: Are they available for an interview on the first day, the second day, during the first week? Yeah. After that, they kind of withdrew, on the idea that doing more interviews wasn’t really moving the ball forward. They were then, and they remain today, extraordinarily self-possessed and dignified people, who never got bitten by the media bug. To them, this was always a family tragedy and a missing child.

Anna Quindlen, then a reporter at The New York Times; now an author: A couple of days in, it became clear that it was going to be a big deal, but I don’t think any of us saw it as as big a story as it became. I think early days you think it’s going to resolve itself.

Murray Weiss, then a reporter at the Daily News; now a columnist and the criminal justice editor at DNAinfo.com: The cops went looking, and after a very short period of time it was like, “Oh my God, nobody knows where he is,” and, “Oh my God, is this the worst nightmare kind of concept?” Then it became, “Yes, it is.” The police very quickly ramped up their investigation. It went from a bunch of detectives and cops on searches, to dozens and hundreds. It became a Son of Sam kind of a scale and very rapidly.

Schmetterer: I think that the editors recognized all the different elements in this story. This was a big story almost from the first minute it broke. So you didn’t have to create anything or blow things out of proportion. This story had every element of tabloid journalism, but The New York Times and everyone else covered it just as heavily, because you had this wonderful little kid. You had the very cooperative and intelligent parents. They had the neighborhood that knew the kid, and he was kind of a beloved character.

Quindlen: All the pieces of the Etan case you could see in your mind’s eye. You could see him leaving, and his mother looking out the window. And the bus stop so close and all that. And it was as though he just was gone.

Raab: I mean, it’s a hell of a story. Anyone who doesn’t see that as a great story, especially after it’s early stages, shouldn’t be in journalism. I mean it’s simple, if you don’t know a story then sit down.

Jimmy Breslin, then a columnist at the Daily News; now an author: I didn’t write about it. Do you know how many fucking kids die in Brooklyn and Queens?

David Hershkovits, then a reporter at the Soho Weekly News; now co-editor and publisher of Paper magazine: I read that Philip Glass had said that The New York Times had a policy of not covering anything below 14th Street.

Weiss: Right from the get-go there was an enormous competition between all the papers. There’s always civility and cordiality, but underneath it is a brutal competition that goes on. All the newspapers were fighting to find out what each newspaper had or find out what the cops were doing or their leads.

Schmetterer: That was a time where the police and the press had pretty good relations, but they didn’t really know anything. They were canvassing the neighborhood and they were looking everywhere. One of the things I remember most about this were how many cops were in the street looking under garbage cans, opening up the dumpsters, going into alleys and basements. I mean you could walk up to them and get their observations.

Miller: The thing to do was to stay on it, to stay connected to it, because if you didn’t, you were likely to miss an important development as a reporter.

Schmetterer: It was a time when the News and the Post were engaged in real tabloid battle.

Sam Roberts, then the city editor at the Daily News; now the urban affairs correspondent at The New York Times: I think the News had a much better sense of the city. Murdoch came in very aggressively, but with a large number of people who didn’t know the city particularly well. They made some sort of glaring mistakes early on. I remember one story, during the David Berkowitz case. One of the mothers of the one of the victims was interviewed and it said she was sitting on her veranda in Brooklyn. Someone at the News, I think it was Jimmy Breslin, said, “A Jew hasn’t sat on a veranda in 2000 years.” But they were very aggressive.

Steve Dunleavy, then a reporter at the New York Post; now retired: I don’t know that you’d say it was the dream story for a new New York Post. It was a horror story for the New York Post.

Raab: The Times did respectable stories. Even if the tabloids might have feasted on it, for us it was still a great story. Nobody had any problems, I had no problems with the Times editor.

Goodman: The paper then was the paper of record, so a story like that was a very important story. The paper wanted to be on top of it, wanted to have everything, and then anything the tabloids would have, you had to have at least that much in your story.

Schmetterer: One of the things that helped drive the story was that he—the father Stan—had these excellent photographs of Etan.

Miller: You had this clear-eyed, blonde-haired boy, with this impish grin who would mug for the camera in different ways, and a father who had hundreds of high-quality photographs. It was something that was very organized for television and the newspapers because of the imagery.

Quindlen: The photograph. There’s probably no little boy who’s ever been photographed in history who is as alive in the frame as that child is in those photographs.

Miller: With most missing kids what you got was a blurry picture from a Kodak Instamatic of the the boy or the girl of them in the middle of a family photo.

Goodman: I’m a black guy, but still a picture of a child at that age and so vulnerable would make anybody feel, you know, anybody would react that way, but they wouldn’t be the same pictures of a kid in tough shape. But it was a lost white kid, and that’s a big deal. In the ideal world it would be different, but this was a kid that looked like he could be in the movies, so he had a certain photogenic appeal no one could deny.

Schmetterer: At the Daily News, the brilliance of the editor, Dick Oliver, came up with the idea of doing a column called Have You Seen This Person? And I started writing that column. It was a weekly column, and I wrote it for about five years, until I left the News. And I found, helped find, 123 people.

Arpadi: Then it slowly ebbed. I remember when the milk carton came out with Etan’s image on it, it was already old news.

Miller: You knew there was something bad happening, but you also had a sense that it would have a logical ending. That there would be word from the kidnappers, that there would be a ransom. That there would be a body found. That there would be an ending within sight... that weekend, the next week, the week after that.

Hershkovits: There was nothing really to report, you know. There were no leads.

Goodman: That was the really scary aspect, that it just went on and on. I don’t think anybody had a sense that it could go on for so long without any leads that panned out.

Dunleavy: There were many, many rumors, but no real breaks, you know. It was so, it was so tragic, but more than tragic it was just an absolute mystery. There’s not much to say except that we were as baffled as the cops. And if the cops are baffled, who’s that make us?

Miller: It’s been a tough and frustrating case from a reporting standpoint. Also, the personal attachment to it. Every reporter who works hard on a story, especially if you’ve been on it for a long time, you expect it to have a beginning, a middle and an end. The Etan Patz case seems to just have a middle.

Quindlen: More than any story I’ve ever covered, this was one where I didn’t feel so much like a reporter. We’re used to walking away from things. You know, you write your 800 words and you go on with your life. This story has stayed with me my entire life. In part because we’re used to writing stories that have endings to them.

Tannenbaum: I wasn’t there and I haven’t staked out their doorstep, but apparently [last week] Mrs. Patz berated the journalists and yelled at them twice, calling them low-life scum.

Miller: They’ve been extraordinarily patient, for a longer time than many of those reporters have been alive. When that patience frays, it’s usually fairly reasonable. Nobody who’s covered this case has as much experience with this case as they have. This is all remarkable to all of us, because we think of it as development in the Etan Patz case, potentially, but they’ve been through this before, there have been other basements dug up, other garages, other fields, other close calls. The reporters who are coming in in the last 10 years or the last 15 years or the last week, have seen a part of it. But the Patzes, because they lived it, they never miss one of these. It’s not like they were off covering something else when the third one or the fifth one happened. They’ve been through all of them.

bgallagher@observer.com

The fame wall isn’t new, if course, nor is what it represents. But now it’s more ubiquitous because it’s finally gone digital.

It’s not enough to adorn the walls of your home or office; there are entire walls on Facebook to bedeck.

And among venture capital and social media types, particularly, the practice of taking photos of oneself with famous faces and tweeting or posting the snaps has become epidemic—even when the types in question are already wealthy and powerful. Money does not necessarily trump the allure of celebrity, which is worth projecting in itself. I may be an alpha monkey in my own right, the photos say, but you should know that I have been in close proximity to more publicly visible alpha monkeys. 

Elizabeth Currid-Halkett, author of the book Starstruck: The Business of Celebrity, has made a study of this sort of behavior. Using the entire Getty photo database, she and her colleagues at U.S.C. have devised not just a taxonomy, but a phenomenology of star photos. “Without sounding too wonky,” she explained, “they’re always expending different forms of capital. People who possess extreme versions of a particular thing—wealth or fame—end up hanging out with one another, hoping some of the star dust rubs off.”

According to her research, as The Observer suspected, there is the A-list, which she said is “meaningfully connected” (though perhaps the exact opposite of that phrase would be more appropriate)—and the rest of humanity. “If you’re a C-lister, you might as well be a Z-lister … you might as well not be on the list,” she declared, sounding very much like an A-lister herself.

(When it was pointed out that this was reminiscent of the famed restaurateur Graydon Carter’s theory about the various “rooms” of power, wherein the beta monkeys become alpha monkeys by passing through increasingly exclusive rooms to the elite “inner room,” Ms. Currid-Halkett giddily replied that Mr. Carter had in fact emailed her to that very effect. “I was like, ‘Oh my God, Graydon Carter emailed me,’” she enthused, a tad susceptible to the A-list glow herself.)

Patrick McMullan, who has been photographing the celebrity species in its natural habitat for decades, has witnessed firsthand the pull of being photographed with celebrities. “People always want to be with Madonna,” he said. “Business people really want to be with Buffett.”

But if there is no chance for real mobility into the realm of celebrity oneself, no chance to be Ms. Ciccone or Mr. Buffett, why the constant drive to stand next them?

The fresh-faced entrepreneurs “grew up geeky guys and now they are gazillionaires, and they can settle past scores,” Ms. Currid-Halkett explained. “It imbues a particular product with coolness or glamour. You have an entrepreneur spending time with stars and that adds cachet to the brand. ‘My gosh, there must be something cool about that venture capitalist that all these Hollywood people would be photographed with him.’”

So, Mark Pincus, Farmville creator and Facebook billionaire: that tweet pic of you getting Jason Alexander to jokingly pay for dinner with your Black Card? Canny business decision! Jim Breyer, venture capital genius and Silicon Valley heartthrob: those pictures of you on your Facebook wall with Beyoncé, Shakira, Jessica Simpson and Will Smith? Not gauche! Brand building. And Tim Draper, founder of go-go venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson: that picture that Steve Jurvetson took of you picking up Natalie Portman was not irrational or vaguely creepy. Just exuberant! Not weird at all.

However, the adoration flow may be starting to flow in the opposite direction, as well, though mostly to the one-man Z-list named Mark. “Facebook is the essence of cool,” said Ms. Currid-Halkett. “Maybe not if you’re a hipster on the Lower East Side, but there’s no question that as far as tech companies go, it’s about as forward thinking and sexy as you can get. Celebrities want to show up at Facebook’s headquarters more than Mark Zuckerberg needs to go to the Vanity Fair Oscar party.”

Though the übergeek did post a picture of himself with country singer Keith Urban when the country singer dropped by Facebook’s Palo Alto headquarters. (It’s possible he just has very specific taste in celebrity photo-mates.)

Jason Binn, both a participant in and observer of the celebrity-proximity industry, also noticed this shift. “Hollywood is a big force to building brand, getting traction,” he said. “But lately it’s also about people who are very tech-savvy and have created strong revenue streams. These people are as much celebrities today. I go to the Oscars and the Golden Globes, and I see these guys there. And I see celebrities flocking to them, the Eric Schmidts, the Sean Parkers.”

As The Observer put pen to paper—or fingers to keyboard, as it were—a tweet came across the wires, concerning Mr. Binn himself. According to the Twitter feed of Michael’s, midtown mess hall to the media elites, Mr. Binn was “in the house,” lunching with Today show host Hoda Kotb. His plate barely bussed, he retweeted the Michael’s tweet and appended a twit pic of himself and Ms. Kotb theatrically thumbing through a copy of Mr. Binn’s magazine, Gotham—thereby unwittingly demonstrating the bizarre compulsion we were just discussing. Mrs. Kotb then retweeted Mr. Binn’s tweet, amplifying the effect.

But in the course of our research we stumbled upon another, even more rarified frontier whereupon new money could align itself with Hollywood power: the photoless photo.

One post by handsome-elf Tumblr founder David Karp read, “Just had dinner with Jessica Alba … I didn’t take a photo because I’m a CLASSY GUY.” The unverifiable celebrity moment, wherein the beneficiary of tinseltown sheen demurs from obtaining photographic evidence and declares as much in perfectly inflected above-it-all-ese. Very clever, Mr. Karp. We see what you did there.

Even though we don’t.