Illo: Anna Parini

We weren’t three minutes into our pedicure—or two toes—and already The Observer was getting wasted.

The place was Dashing Diva in Greenwich Village, a chain nail salon with 12 locations in the city and two in California. The place’s decor resembles a little like what might happen if Elle Woods met Malibu Barbie. The only part that isn’t either bright pink or white are the racks of multicolored nail polish on the walls. The pedicure station is a banquette of pink pillows, cut off from the rest of the salon by a wall of mini pearly-pink tiles. It’s a nice place to get plastered.

We were there for “Girls Night Out,” a weekly promotion that offers a free Cosmopolitan with any manicure or pedicure on from 6 to 9pm on Thursdays and Fridays. This particular salon touted a one-drink limit (at least that’s what it said on FourSquare), but we knew better. Besides, we were paying $40 for this pedi.

“You want water or Cosmo?” the pedicurist asked, only after enticing us into paying $5 extra for a mandarin orange salt soak. $45. “Cosmo,” we replied.

The Observer sipped. Svedka was our best guess. There was only one other customer, and she was not partaking. We felt like the old man at the dive bar—a lost, lonely soul, slinging back cheap whiskeys and searching for a friend. Except this time there was someone scrubbing dead skin off our feet.

The pedicurist noticed the empty glass. “You want more?” she asked.

As she returned with another, we began asking questions. Who makes these? What ingredients do you use? She didn’t know, she said. She just poured them from a jug in the back.

“You very funny,” she said and kept scrubbing.

It was then that the other customer noticed our beverage. “What is that?” she asked.

“It’s a Cosmo.”

“Oh, like on Sex and the City!”

She ordered one, and we felt better. Looser. Thirstier. We asked for one more.

“Usually customer only get one,” she said. “You drunk?”

“No. Are you kidding? Not at all!”

“You drunk! Your face red!”

Was it? Oh, god.

“Listen, I’m a bartender,” we said. “There’s no way I’m drunk off two Cosmos.”

“Ooooo-kay.” She laughed, then she got us another drink.

It’s not uncommon to walk into a salon—whether hair or nail—and have an alcoholic beverage offered to you while your perm sets or your dye soaks or whatever shellac you might have dries. In fact, it’s quite de riguer.

“I’d say most New York City salons serve wine, at least after 3 o’clock,” said Joe, who’s been a hairdresser at upscale salons in the city for seven years. “I don’t really know about like, New Jersey though.”

For most women, this is not news at all. The Observer was served our first glass of wine at age 20, by Joe himself (one of the few reasons he wanted to withhold his last name).

It a wonderful practice, isn’t it. But is it legal?

According to the New York State Liquor Authority, it isn’t—at least, not without a liquor license. And, though a spokeswoman for NYLA said she was “sure there are a couple” licensed salons in the state, the authority was unable to name any. “We don’t organize them that way,” she said.

The Observer attempted a painstaking, manual search through the list of 30,445 licensed venues in New York county, but we could not find a single licensed hair salon.

Salons in general don’t profit from alcohol. They serve it up gratis—either as a polite gesture, an attempt to allay the anxiety that can accompany a radical haircut, or a marketing tactic. Which is why going through the hassle of procuring a license hardly seems worth the trouble. Especially since, as Joe told us, salons have been serving alcohol without complaint for “as far as I know, forever and ever and ever.”

They just don’t know they’re violating the law.

At the high-profile John Barrett salon above Bergdorf Goodman, Heather, a manager who declined to give her last name, wondered why we were asking if they served wine. After all, what did it matter? “I’m pretty sure it’s legal to serve it, as long as we’re not selling it,” she said.

We told her the truth. We also told her that we had been told that the salon did in fact serve wine—by the receptionist! Like two minutes ago!

She explained that yes, the salon would offer wine, but added that technically customers would be buying it from the restaurant downstairs. “We’re a corporate salon,” she said, “so we have to cover our asses.”

April Barton, owner of the chic, celebrity-attended Suite 303 above the Chelsea Hotel (and former Season 3 contestant on Bravo’s Shear Genius) confirmed that her salon does “occasionally” serve wine. “But it’s not really a big thing,” she said. “We used to do it a lot, but lately its slowed down.”

When we told her it was illegal, she froze up for a moment. “I didn’t know,” she said.

The Observer also spoke with Kerri Lee Ross, an account supervisor for Siren PR, the agency that handles Hollywood stylist Sally Hershberger’s salons in New York. She said it was “a fair assumption” that the salons served wine to their customers, but “to be perfectly honest,” she had never heard that it was illegal.

Severon Dickson, owner of the trendy, hole-in-the-wall Dickson Hairshop on the Lower East Side, says his barbershop stopped serving bourbon a few months ago because of the “Nutcracker Bill” passed in June. That bill threatened to take store licenses—specifically salon licenses—away from any establishment found selling “Nutcrackers”—a potent Kool-Aid-like cocktail found in bodegas and barbershops, sometimes served to minors in a Styrofoam cup or soup container.

Back when they offered booze, did they have a license?

“No, but no salons do,” said Mr. Dickson claimed. “Because you don’t have to have a liquor license to give away alcohol.”

Wrong! We dropped the bomb. “Oh, O.K.,” he said, unfazed. “It’s not worth the liability for me, and I’m definitely not gonna be carding every client. Which is fine, because people don’t come here to drink. They come here for haircuts.”

Even Joe, with all his years in the business, had no idea he was violating the law. “I’m glad you told me,” he said. “I’m planning to open up my own salon, and I was going to serve wine!”

Naive as they all may have been, salon managers tended to go into lock-down mode when asked about serving booze. Diva Salon said a manager might be available to speak in an hour. The Observer returned 15 minutes early to find a dark, abandoned salon, the gate pulled down. The receptionist at the Dashing Diva said no manager would be in for five days. When Ms. Ross called The Observer back, she insisted that she had never said Ms. Hershberger’s salon served wine. At the end of our phone call with Ms. Barton, she said her salon shouldn’t really count. “I’d prefer to say we didn’t do it,” she said. “It’s not our priority here…our salon’s about craft, beauty, music.”

The last thing we want to do is rain on everybody’s parade, but according to the Liquor Authority, there are legitimate health concerns involved. Because any New York establishment with a liquor license is required to serve food of some kind and also pass an inspection by the state or city Health Departments. Think about it: would you chow down in your hair salon?

Leonard Fogelman, a lawyer who has specialized in New York liquor law for 35 years, said he’s never even heard of hair salons applying for licenses.

“What it appears is that these salons are [making] a nice gesture to their guests, but the reality is that it’s violative of New York State liquor law,” he said. “It’s a misdemeanor.”

So for god’s sake, why doesn’t the Liquor Authority act? How can this outrage be allowed to continue?

“We do receive complains once an a while, but believe it or not, we forward them to the NYPD,” said NYLA spokesman William Crowley, who explained that busting an establishment without a license did not fall under it’s jurisdiction.

“We can’t take a license away that doesn’t exist,” he said.

So should the law be enforced—if for no other reason than to bring a little more revenue into state coffers?

“The issue is not the revenue, the issue is the appropriateness of the law,” said Gerald Benjamin, a political science professor at SUNY New Paltz and an expert on state policy. “Whether the rationale is sensible in contemporary times, and if it’s not, what should replace it.”

Mr. Benjamin added that it was the first time he’d heard of the issue.

“I am shocked,” he said. “Shocked, shocked, shocked.”

When The Observer woke up in our bed three hours later, toes perfectly soft and glistening lilac, we were pretty shocked too.

With any luck, that’s about to change. States have begun to implement or at least discuss the legalization of on-line poker with an eye on taxing winnings, just as they are taxed in brick-and-mortar casinos. Other states are seeking to eliminate bans on all kinds of gambling, knowing full well that it is taking place anyway, so why not divert some of the cash into the treasuries of states and municipalities?

Governor Andrew Cuomo reportedly is looking into an expansion of gaming in New York, while some states are studying Washington, D.C.’s recent legalization of on-line poker, a move that has produced an extra $9 million in yearly revenues for the city. That’s all good, because right now countless millions are being spent at the federal level in a vain attempt to crack down on on-line gambling.

It’s a lost cause, and it’s time that governments at all levels recognize—and profit from—reality. People are going to gamble. Either governments can waste resources trying to suppress this activity, or they can legalize it and get a piece of the action.

“If there is going to be gaming, how should it be done?” Mr. Cuomo asked recently. “And that issue, that question, is an important question for the state.”

It is important because the state needs creative solutions to its revenue issues. The state constitutional ban on casinos is out of date. Let’s get rid of it.

Now, however, as it prepares to mourn its fallen heroes yet again, the department faces another challenge. Soon, thousands of would-be firefighters will take a civil service test in hopes of qualifying for a job with the FDNY. It will be the first such test given in four years, and it will be one of the most important such tests given since FDNY reformers insisted on qualifying tests more than a century ago.

Simply put, the FDNY is too white and too male. At a time when the Police Department has become a model of diversity, at a time when other fire departments around the country have found a way to incorporate and even welcome women as colleagues, the FDNY’s overwhelmingly white male work force is an anachronism. Worse, it is a court case waiting to be made.

Fire Commissioner Salvatore Cassano knows what is at stake when new hiring begins. If the department’s hiring practices continue as usual, lawsuits on behalf of women and minorities inevitably will be brought, and a judge could order a new round of testing. That would delay the hiring of young new recruits and inevitably add to tensions in the city’s firehouses.

So Commissioner Cassano is spending the summer in minority neighborhoods, encouraging underrepresented groups to prepare for and take the test. But encouragement isn’t enough—the commissioner has to reassure women and minorities that they are welcome in the firehouse. That has not always been the case, as more than a few women and black firefighters have said publicly.

New York has made great strides ameliorating racial tension in the city over the past decade. But the lack of diversity in one of the city’s most storied departments remains a sore point. This needs to be fixed, now, so that the new class of the Bravest looks more like New York City.

But that does not mean that the campaign has gotten serious. Not when a character like Michele Bachmann is running around with a claim to be the front-runner for the Republican Party’s nomination.

Such a campaign might be described as pathetic. But serious? Not unless the nation’s Republicans truly are prepared to turn back the clock to a time and a place when gay people were denied dignity and civil rights, when people with foreign-sounding names and backgrounds were considered suspect, and when American policymakers and ordinary citizens conducted their business as though the rest of the world simply didn’t exist—or wasn’t worthy of consideration.

In the aftermath of the congresswoman’s showing in Iowa, some pundits noted that Ms. Bachmann appeals to some Republican voters because she speaks from the heart and believes what she says. And that is precisely why it seems so difficult to describe her success as anything but a sad and tragic farce.

In recent interviews in The New Yorker and on the television talk shows, Ms. Bachmann made many things clear, not the least of which is that she considers gay people to be something less than human. She and her husband are invested in the notion that they can “convert” gay people from their despicable lifestyle (in their view) to good, red-blooded, all-American heterosexuality.

Needless to say, the congresswoman from Minnesota is not a big fan of gay marriage or, indeed, of any efforts to accord gay people the same rights, liberties and freedoms she celebrates in her tiresome rhetoric. This, perhaps, should not come as a surprise, given that she has associated with people who seem to think that African Americans were better off under slavery—because, you see, the gentle, well-meaning, white slaveholders helped keep slave families intact, except, of course, when there was profit to be made in selling off a mother, a father or a few children.

If Michele Bachmann really does believe what she says, if she really does speak from the heart as some observers contend, she is perhaps the most mean-spirited, bigoted presidential aspirant since George Wallace in 1968. Like Wallace did, Ms. Bachmann opposes civil rights (for blacks, in Wallace’s case; for gays, in Ms. Bachmann’s). Like Wallace did, she seeks to capitalize on anger and frustration by pointing the finger of blame at others—the possibly foreign-born black man in the White House; the gays who prey on the innocent and the pure; the secularists who believe in the separation of church and state.

Michele Bachmann is to 2012 what Wallace was to 1968—a vicious figure whose rhetoric is designed to inflame hatred and resentment. Her rise to prominence shows that the forces of reaction and intolerance remain powerful in certain parts of the country and in certain factions of the Republican Party.

They may yet prevail, but only if the Republican Party as a whole refuses to get serious.

Jesse Eisenberg and Aziz Ansari in '30 Minutes Or Less.'

 “30 Minutes or Less” is the wish-fulfillment fantasy that generations of slacker pizza delivery guys have been waiting for. The rest of the world may look down on the stoners who deliver their pies, but Jesse Eisenberg is here to prove that the lowly pizza guy has the catlike reflexes, driving skills and ease under pressure to handle the most stressful of situations (like, say, getting kidnapped by two chubby dudes with an explosion fetish who force him to rob a bank).

All in a day’s work for your noble pizza dude, who makes up for his lack of career/life ambition with a wealth of MacGyver-like survival skills. If parents catch on to the film’s moral—which appears to be that you can turn a lazy college grad’s life around by strapping a bomb to his chest—America might have more to worry about than the debt ceiling.

But for now, 30 Minutes or Less is a harmless, funny little coming of age story that fits neatly into its 83-minute run time. And while it may be hard to believe the guy who played Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network as a slacker delivery guy, once you suspend your disbelief about that (and his willingness to turn to a life of crime), things start moving pretty smoothly.

When the movie opens, Nick gets into a fight with his only friend, Chet (Aziz Ansari), over the fact that he slept with Chet’s twin sister, Kate (Dilshad Vadsaria). After they brawl and end their friendship, it becomes clear that Nick is in love with Kate and unable to tell her. Nothing a little bank robbery can’t solve! Luckily for Nick, he is about to cross paths with the equally undermotivated Dwayne (Danny McBride), who is disgruntled that his military veteran father, the Major (Fred Ward), has won millions of dollars in the lottery and resents him for being a video game-obsessed layabout. The Major refuses to give any of his winnings to Dwayne and, until he kicks the bucket, Dwayne is forced to go through life as a penniless miscreant. In the meantime, Dwayne bides his time waiting for his dad to croak by blowing up watermelons with his pal Travis (Nick Swardson). But when he tells a stripper during a lap dance that he will be a millionaire after his dad dies, she quickly comes up with a plot to kill the Major and make them both rich. (Kids—this is why your mom wants you to stay out of strip clubs!)

Trouble is, it’s going to cost $100,000 to get the Major killed, so Dwayne and Travis devise a plan to get a certain unsuspecting delivery guy to do their dirty work for them. They call for a pizza, fit Nick with an explosive vest and give him 10 hours to return with cash from their local bank.

Some men might show trepidation in executing this plan of grand larceny, but not our hero! He enlists the help of his friend Chet and gets to bank robbing. Along the way Nick repairs their friendship, gets the girl and generally learns to love life again.

30 Minutes or Less manages to do all this with plenty of humor and a few good car chase scenes (the whole thing was filmed in Michigan and is a bit of a love song to the American-made automobile). The emotional investment between the male leads is sometimes lacking (and the relationship drama between Mr. Eisenberg and Ms. Vadsaria is more of an afterthought than a crux to the plot), but all the men on screen seem more than comfortable in their roles. They should be, as they’ve all played them before. 

Director Ruben Fleischer also did Zombieland, that other hero nerd adventure story Mr. Eisenberg starred in that wasn’t Adventureland. And 30 Minutes or Less borrows heavily from other comedies like Superbad, Pineapple Express, I Love You, Man, The Foot Fist Way and Tropic Thunder. The characters, relationships and even the actors have already appeared in other recent movies together.

In the end, 30 Minutes or Less is a tidy, entertaining nerd action movie that should provide a good distraction for viewers this summer. It just probably has the approximate cultural staying power of its title.

Running time 83 minutes

Written by Michael Diliberti, Matthew Sullivan

Directed by Ruben Fleischer

Starring Jesse Eisenberg, Danny McBride,
Aziz Ansari

2/4

editorial@observer.com  

Telling a love story that spans many decades is no small feat, especially on film, where it takes more than a few shakes of baby powder and artificial neck folds to convincingly age an actor. Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan pulled it off in When Harry Met Sally, aided by a variety of wigs and a bevy of Nora Ephron-provided bon mots. Forrest Gump tried, as did The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, but doctored archival film reels and C.G.I. wizening take you only so far. Groundhog Day did a bang-up job, but Harold Ramis had a sizable crutch—namely, that years and years played out onscreen without the characters having to turn a single calendar page.

One Day, a romantic dramedy based on the bestselling novel by David Nicholls (who also wrote the screenplay), employs a similar but savvier conceit—the relationship of the protagonists, Emma Morley (Anne Hathaway) and Dexter Mayhew (Jim Sturgess), plays out over the course of each July 15 between 1988 and 2007, the story swiftly skimming the surface of time like a stone skipping over vast expanses of water. There’s not much mystery as to where Emma and Dexter are ultimately headed—the movie poster, after all, shows them wrapped up in a kiss—but Mr. Nicholls’s clever temporal structure distracts attention from the foregone conclusion that is the movie’s plot. Well, for a while, anyway.

When we first meet Emma and Dexter, they fall into bed after drunkenly celebrating their college graduation, but fail to consummate the relationship (possibly because she selects Tracy Chapman as sex music). Emma is a staunch feminist with large glasses, frizzy hair and Doc Martens, and Dexter is a rich, handsome playboy who treats life like a complimentary all-you-can-eat buffet, but for reasons that aren’t immediately revealed thanks to the 24-hour storytelling limit, they become platonic friends. Over the next few years she works as a waitress at a pathetic Mexican restaurant while he stumbles into a lucrative TV hosting job (think a British, early-’90s Ryan Seacrest). They take a holiday in their 20s that rekindles their almost-forgotten sexual chemistry but stop short of doing the deed. A few years later, as Dexter begins an inevitable downward spiral fueled by alcohol, cocaine and narcissism, Emma finds a stable (if painfully awkward) boyfriend, launches a writing career and—by the looks of it—discovers the joys of flat-ironing. Emma is unabashedly in love with Dexter, and he’s only slightly more abashedly (or unwittingly) in love with her, but the timing never quite works out. Before they know it they are in their mid-30s, one of them has a failed marriage and a child, and there’s nothing to do but finally get together, against swells of manipulative string music.

This swan dive into melodrama is what makes the second half of One Day drag. In Mr. Nicholls’s book (which, to be fair, had 448 pages to tell its story as opposed to the movie’s relatively measly 106 minutes), Emma and Dexter are allowed to have subtle feelings and move slowly toward their star-crossed union; onscreen they hem and haw and throw themselves at—or away from—each other with such urgency and sudden force that I often feared the actors would get whiplash (maybe that’s what caused Anne Hathaway’s shaky British accent?). As the decades tick by, Jim Sturgess is saddled with a salt-and-pepper ’do and crow’s feet that don’t look right on his smooth, baby face and that seem only to exacerbate Dexter’s emotional pain. And, as is the case with so many will-they-or-won’t-they pairings, as soon as the couple succumbs to their fated union, the chemistry flatlines.

That said, there are some surprises. The always-excellent Patricia Clarkson shows up as Dexter’s cancer-ridden mother. The obligatory sex scene is missing—it does not happen, inconveniently but refreshingly, on a July 15. And the ending will come as a shock to anyone who hasn’t read the novel (be forewarned that this is not your standard rom-com, and that the significance of One Day’s one day, when finally revealed, seeks to redefine the term “tearjerker”). It’s a sweet, harmless, meandering tale with an engaging gimmick, but a great love story—or a great movie—it’s not.

Running time: 106 minutes

Written by David Nicholls

Directed by Lone Scherfig

Starring Anne Hathaway, Jim Sturgess,
Patricia Clarkson

2/4

ulamarche@gmail.com

It’s not terribly hard to get an audience to clap along to a song, especially when its singers are lined up across the front of a stage, bringing their own hands together. The challenge is having the audience stop—all at once, at the right moment, no petering out or stragglers. As the second act began at the press preview of the Off-Broadway revival of Rent I attended last week, the 490-odd giddily enthusiastic theatergoers around me—they couldn’t all be friends of the production—dove right into the clap-along portion of Jonathan Larson’s anthemic “Seasons of Love,” and, much more impressive, they all stopped precisely on cue.

That’s a good sign for this pleasant but unthrilling production, which opened Thursday night at New World Stages. Its producers are honing a scheme to keep popular Broadway musicals running indefinitely at Off-Broadway scale, as they’ve already done with Avenue Q. The idea is to leverage an iconic show’s name recognition, built on Broadway, mix it with Off-Broadway’s much lower running costs, add just a pinch of creative freshening, and end up with a respectable little income stream. It’s a plan that greatly benefits from a built-in fan base devoted enough to know when to stop clapping.

It all makes good sense from a business perspective, and it worked nicely with cynical and ironic Avenue Q, which moved intact to New World immediately after its six-year Broadway run and retained its fun and bite in the new space. But Rent, an earnest product of a different era, has fared less well.

This landmark musical of the 1990s, a celebration of life and love and making art in the just-starting-to-gentrify East Village, arrived at New York Theater Workshop in 1996 and quickly transferred to Broadway’s Nederlander Theatre, where it camped out for the next 12 years. Three years after it closed there, director Michael Greif has hauled his original production out of storage and remounted it in the new venue, with a new cast, a different set and costumes, and just about everything else intact.

The legendary power and freshness of that original production is gone. What’s on stage now feels a bit worn and even a bit silly. What exactly is the “cyber studio” the greedy landlord still wants to build on the show’s hallowed block of East 11th Street? (And, when considered as a real thing, not just as bogeyman, isn’t it just the sort of establishment today’s creative East Villagers would want to live near?) This is a fine production of a rightly beloved show, sure to thrill great numbers of angsty high schoolers visiting New York, which is of course what the producers have set out to do. In its eager-to-please passability, it brings nostalgic smiles to more jaded theatergoers, too.

But, at base, what was once a show that spoke truths about life in New York is now a show that speaks truths about the theater business. “Theater is a business and we do it to make money,” producer Jeffrey Seller told The Times a few weeks ago, an atypically explicit declaration of the commercialism of commercial theater. “I’m a producer and I have to make a living, and we have a director who needs to make a living, and we have actors who act to make a living.” It’s a fair point, but an odd fit for a musical that celebrates the virtues of refusing to make a living.

Never mind the bohemians; it’s la vie capitaliste.

The writer and drag performer Charles Busch is known for two types of shows: shticky, drag send-ups of golden-age movie tropes, like his recent and hilarious Divine Sister, and marginally less shticky, non-drag send-ups of New Yorker cartoon-style New York Jews, like his Broadway hit, Tale of the Allergist’s Wife.

His latest, Olive and the Bitter Herbs, which he wrote but does not star in—all the women are played by actual women—opened last night in a Primary Stages production at 59E59 Theaters. With a crotchety, rent-stabilized protagonist named Olive and a climatic Passover seder (those titular bitter herbs), it would seem to fall squarely into the latter camp.

But not entirely: the plot is moved forward by a spectral presence perhaps living in Olive’s living-room wall mirror, a hot-tubbing gay real-estate agent from Key West named Howard. It’s a bit of high-shtick looniness that seems more a part of drag cabaret than Borscht Belt realism, and it gives the play—which is sort of silly, mostly forgettable, and entirely laugh-out-loud funny—a goofily delightful third reel, as each character in turn realizes they interacted with Howard on the last day of his life.

Mark Brokaw directs a cast of pros who ably handle Mr. Busch’s one liners: Marcia Jean Kurtz as Olive, resentful of everything; David Garrison and Dan Butler as the gay neighbors she can’t stand, trying to win her over; Richard Masur as, well, The Sisters Rosenzweig’s Merv Kant, who ultimately shows Olive the love of a good alter kocker.

But the best moment in the show belongs to longtime Busch collaborator Julie Halston, as the friend Olive leans on and belittles, who has a wonderful meltdown moment as she finally breaks free of the woman who’s tormented her. “The waters have parted,” she says, building to delicious high dudgeon. “Free at last. Free at last. Oh, dear Lord, I’m free at last!” It’s derivative, sure; but it’s very, very funny.

editorial@observer.com

It took Alex Shakar 10 years to complete his second novel, Luminarium (Soho Press, 448 pages, $25.00), and he had to take up Zen meditation to do it. “I knew I wanted to write about spirituality,” Mr. Shakar said during a recent phone interview. “But it took me a while to figure out that I really didn’t understand it.”

His spiritual exploration began, unwittingly, on the evening of Sept. 10, 2001, when he was moved to offer a prayer before going to sleep in his parents’ Brooklyn home. Mr. Shakar wasn’t religious, but he had just returned from a memorial service for his editor, Robert Jones, whose death from cancer at age 47 had come as a shock. Mr. Shakar’s debut novel, The Savage Girl, would be published in a week’s time, and he felt nervous about bringing it into the world without Mr. Jones.

At the same time, Mr. Shakar felt lucky. At 33 years old, he was being treated by his publisher like the next big thing, getting sent on photo shoots and being prepped for television interviews. His agent, young superstar Bill Clegg, had secured him a six-figure advance—a far cry from the $100 Mr. Shakar had received for his previous book, City in Love, a collection of short stories. For the first time in his life, Mr. Shakar didn’t have to worry about having enough money or being published.

“The prayer wasn’t to ask for anything,” Mr. Shakar wrote via email. “I just said to the empty room that I’d been given so much that if harder times were to come, I could take it.”

Harder times came. The next morning, Mr. Shakar was scheduled to fly back to Chicago, where he was a doctoral candidate in creative writing at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Instead he stood on the roof of his parents’ building and watched the twin towers burn. As Mr. Shakar described in a recent essay for The Millions.com, a year that began with the promise of literary stardom ended with his having to defend The Savage Girl against critics who deemed its humor “irrelevant” in an earnest, post-9/11 age.

The truth is that the book may have hit too close to home. Mr. Shakar’s novel, about a group of young trend spotters living in a disaster-prone metropolis called Middle City, was predictive of many things, including a dark age of “post-irony.” Even more damning, the novel was critical of the way decadent, marketing-centered culture conflates abstract values like beauty and love with products and fashions.

It was a satire with a heart of gold, but it wasn’t the kind of book anyone wanted to read while the president was urging Americans to exercise their freedom by heading to the shopping mall. Although Janet Maslin of The New York Times praised The Savage Girl’s sharp intelligence, she also called it “a relic of the recent past” and compared it unfavorably to Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections, which was published Sept. 1, 2001, and was also a time capsule of times gone by. Mr. Franzen’s more traditional family saga, Ms. Maslin suggested, “will have no trouble finding its place in a newly irony-free atmosphere.”

The comparison to Mr. Franzen did not come out of the blue. The novelist was a friend of Mr. Shakar’s and provided a blurb for The Savage Girl that is now featured prominently on paperback editions of the book. The two writers first met in 1996, at a reading at the KGB bar when Mr. Shakar was promoting City in Love.

“I was struck, first of all, by his radiant niceness as a person,” Mr. Franzen wrote to The Observer via email, “and then, in his reading, by his commitment to letting formal experimentation and human emotion inform one another, rather than oppose or cancel one another.”

Mr. Franzen and Mr. Shakar kept in touch over the years, especially during the aftermath of 9/11, when both were faced with the task of selling a book during a time of national mourning. Ms. Maslin’s prediction turned out to be correct: Mr. Franzen’s book sold well, while The Savage Girl floundered. Mr. Shakar’s publisher, HarperCollins, scaled back publicity for the novel. Meanwhile, Mr. Shakar’s agent, Mr. Clegg, fell off the map, succumbing to a crack addiction he would eventually write about in his 2010 memoir, Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man. But at the time, Mr. Shakar didn’t know anything of Mr. Clegg’s habit.

Mr. Shakar returned to Chicago, where he defended The Savage Girl as his dissertation. He began working on a second novel, which he envisioned as “a simple, spare book set in Chicago” that would explore the intersection of neurology, spirituality and technology. His jumping-off point was an article he’d read about a Canadian researcher who gave subjects “the feeling of God” by directing electromagnetic impulses into the brain.

The neurological research came easily to Mr. Shakar, but as he delved into the spiritual aspects of the narrative, he hit a wall. Although his mother was a master of Reiki, the Japanese stress reduction and healing technique, Mr. Shakar was skeptical of spiritual thought and had trouble getting inside the material. At the same time, his book was becoming more personal. Instead of setting it in Chicago, where he lived, Mr. Shakar found he wanted to write about New York City, where he’d grown up. But it was impossible to write about contemporary New York without writing about 9/11, and he was wary of approaching such politicized material.

“It took me a while to figure out I was more interested in showing the ways people were trying to adapt, rather than their initial reactions,” he said. “I decided to set it in 2006, because that seemed to be a time when 9/11 was passing from present reality into history. I was interested in the transition.”

Mr. Shakar also began to incorporate autobiographical elements. He created a protagonist whose materialist viewpoint roughly mirrored his own, and whose parents, a Reiki-master mother and actor father, were similar to his own. When a friend’s software company, a virtual world for children, was subcontracted by the military and transformed into a virtual training ground for soldiers, he used that, too. Finally, Mr. Shakar began practicing Zen meditation. At first he was reluctant to meditate because he associated it with a kind of contentment that would be antithetical to creativity, but after immersing himself in the work of mystic writers, his curiosity got the better of him. Once he started meditating, the book came into focus, and his themes began to overlap in new ways.

“As I wrote the book and was meditating and doing research and seeing how the story played out,” he said, “it struck me that, for all the loud argumentation on either side of this secular religious divide that really exploded in the post-9/11 period, the people who are really exploring the issue from the inside, the neuroscientists on the one hand, the monks and mediators of the major religions on the other, are oddly in agreement when it comes to the issue of the self—that it’s yet another belief system that may not be as real as we think it is.”

By 2007, he had a completed manuscript called Avatara, a word borrowed from Hindu cosmology. His new agent, whom he had acquired while Mr. Clegg was recovering from his addiction, sent the book out with high hopes, but when weeks without bidding dragged into months, Mr. Shakar was demoralized. The Savage Girl had been sold over a long weekend; it was his first time dealing with such prolonged rejection.

Desperate, Mr. Shakar called Mr. Clegg, who had recovered from his addiction and was once again taking clients. He asked his old friend to read the manuscript and give an honest assessment. Mr. Clegg agreed. “It was one of the better things a human being has done for me,” Mr. Shakar said.

Mr. Clegg didn’t think the book was working. “There was something missing, something that grounded the plot emotionally,” Mr. Clegg told The Observer. Mr. Shakar had to decide whether to scrap the book or to rewrite it. To make the decision even more difficult, Mr. Shakar was an untenured professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and he needed to secure publication of a second novel before his tenure came up for review.

Mr. Shakar found himself returning to the prayer he’d made on the eve of 9/11. Although he was embarrassed to admit it, for fear of sounding solipsistic, the moment had stuck with him over the years. He felt as if he’d entered into a contract, and that to fulfill it, he would have to rewrite his book. Returning to an idea he’d had early on in the writing process, Mr. Shakar gave his skeptical protagonist an idealistic twin whose cancer-induced coma compels him to embark on a spiritual journey. With that one change, all the esoteric pieces of his story clicked into place.

Two years later, he had a new book whose title, Luminarium, refers to a neurologically induced state in which subjects have “the feeling of God”—his initial inspiration. Luminarium is the opposite of the simple, spare book he had originally intended to write. Instead, it is a novel of interwoven metaphors for the mind that toggles between a Manhattan research hospital, the streets of New York, a virtual world called Urth and Orlando, Fla., where the “military-entertainment complex” has taken hold. At the heart of the book is a love story.

Mr. Shakar was convinced that Luminarium was the best work he’d done, but when Mr. Clegg sent the manuscript out, all the major publishers turned it down. At the same time, U.I.U.C. denied Mr. Shakar’s tenure because his book wasn’t yet under contract. His only recourse was to write a letter of appeal, citing positive responses from outside reviewers. In the meantime, Mr. Clegg kept sending out Luminarium.

“In terms of uncertainty, it was the most awful period of my life,” Mr. Shakar said.

Finally, after several months, Mr. Shakar heard first, from U.I.U.C., that the appeal had been decided in his favor and he would be awarded tenure, and then, a couple days later, that Mark Doten, a young editor at Soho Press, had fallen in love with the manuscript.

“It is quite rare as an editor to have a book land on your desk that is anything close to the scale or ambition of Luminarium,” Mr. Doten said. “I got it at the tail end of a period in which I’d been reading a great deal of Dostoevsky, and it came as something of a relief to get something so packed with ideas.” Advance reviews for the novel, which comes out next week, have been effusive. When asked if he is nervous about the book’s reception once it hits the shelves, Mr. Shakar demurred, then mentioned that he had just returned from a summer Zen retreat. “Let’s just say it came at the right time,” he said.

editorial@observer.com

The State History Museum on Red Square in Moscow. (Photo By Ian Walton/Getty Images)

Not since the Cold War, it seems, have strained diplomatic relations between the U.S. and Russia spilled over into the public arena with such ferocity—only this time the war is over art and two collections of religious books.

The art wars were triggered by the private agenda of Chabad, a Jewish sect seeking religious books and manuscripts possessed by Russia. In 2004, Chabad brought suit as the successors to earlier owners of these pieces and claimed to be their rightful owner. Russia instituted an embargo on art loans to U.S. museums after Brooklyn-based Chabad obtained a default judgment in July 2010 from the District Court in Washington, D.C. Russia had walked out on the proceedings, claiming no U.S. court has jurisdiction over it.

Last week, the Metropolitan Museum of Art turned up the heat in this standoff another notch when it confirmed its decision not to send 35 works by fashion designer Paul Poiret to the Moscow Kremlin Museum for an upcoming exhibition there. The Met’s chief spokesperson, Harold Holzer, said the museum was acting in response to Moscow’s recent cancellation of loans to the Met as part of Russia’s now year-long embargo.

Bruce W. Bean, who headed top law firm Clifford Chance’s Moscow office and now teaches at Michigan State University, told The Observer that because it was obtained on default, that judgment, which orders Russia to turn over the collections to Chabad, is “unenforceable” in Russia. 

Chabad has said it wants to enforce the judgment by attaching Russian property as “leverage” to get Russia to surrender the collections.

How would attachment work as “leverage” when a plaintiff is seeking specific property? The Observer asked legal experts. Howard Spiegler of art law powerhouse Herrick Feinstein said he didn’t know. “Enforcement” is when “you haven’t gotten back property but want this instead,” he said.

Louis M. Solomon, head of international litigation at Cadwalader Wickersham & Taft, questions whether Chabad has the right to attach Russia’s property at all. “If you have a judgment for monetary damages, then you can seize property. If the property is money, you can take it. If the property is not money, you can convert it” to money. Chabad is “not entitled to” attach assets as leverage, he said.

Mikhail Shvydkoy, Russia’s presidential envoy for international cultural cooperation, went on record in March as saying the embargo would last until Chabad’s claim is resolved.

Russia’s embargo has been widely derided—it’s “a phony stunt,” according to Charles A. Goldstein, counsel to the Commission for Art Recovery, an organization that specializes in art restitution—though the court hearing the case stated last month that Russia’s fear that Chabad would seize its art to enforce the judgment was not “unfounded.”

Russia has a history of fierce nationalism, especially when it comes to what it considers threats to its patrimony, something discussions of the case and the embargo have ignored. When Mr. Shvydkoy was culture minister, he was threatened with criminal prosecution in Russia for agreeing to return some art to Germany that had been taken during the Second World War. The art stayed in Russia.

This attitude is a reality Chabad sometimes “failed to take into account,” Patricia Kennedy Grimsted, of Harvard’s Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, said.

Neither side comes out looking especially good. During a Chabad-organized protest in Russia demanding the books be surrendered, some of its members were reportedly attacked, and the international legal community has long expressed outrage over Russia’s retention of cultural objects taken from others. But neither is Chabad a stranger to extremism—it has pursued its cause, provocatively, through litigation rather than what insiders say could be partial settlement through payment of money, albeit as a de facto bribe. The group’s efforts, Dr. Grimsted has suggested, have played a part in the passage of Russian legislation making it more difficult for others to make claims.

After 20 years, despite steady U.S. diplomatic support, Chabad’s efforts have yielded little: almost all the books and manuscripts are still in Russia, and its default judgment is of dubious value. 

Reports have generally obscured, as has Chabad, that it is seeking two separate scholarly collections. One is of Jewish books; it’s referred to as the “library” and was nationalized shortly after the Russian Revolution because it was created in and remained in what was then the post-Revolution U.S.S.R. 

The other collection, referred to as the “archive,” is a private one belonging to a rabbi who had to leave it behind in Warsaw when he fled the Nazis in 1939. The archive was first seized by the Nazis and then, after Soviet soldiers conquered the Nazi-controlled territory, seized again as spoils of war by the U.S.S.R in 1945.

These two collections are often referred to as one unit, but the difference between property, like the library, that was nationalized after the Russian Revolution and what Russia now refers to as “cultural property displaced to the U.S.S.R. as a result of the Second World War,” like the archive, is significant. 

What was in Russia at the time of the Revolution is generally considered inviolate and has left Russia only on limited loan or, during a terrible period of mass starvation there in the early ’30s, via surreptitious sales to get money for food.

Russia also views its vast plunder of cultural treasures during World War II, taken in territory where millions of Soviets died fighting the Nazis, as rightfully its own. Providing even symbolic restitution, member of Duma (the Russian Parliament) and former culture minister Nikolai Gubenko said in 1997, is “to spit on the grave” of the many millions who died during the war, The New York Times reported. A culture minister who advocated restitution was burned in effigy. 

Russia is entitled to these objects, Mr. Gubenko, then-deputy chair of the Duma’s Committee on Culture, told the Washington Conference on Holocaust Era Assets in 1998. He emphasized Soviet losses and suffering in fighting the Nazis: “Twenty-seven million killed, of them two million Jewish compatriots, 1,710 fully or partially destroyed cities … nearly 200 million destroyed and stolen books, more than 600,000 lost cultural works … ” 

And he added, “This is the amount of the U.S.S.R.’s losses in World War II. At the Nuremberg process, the Soviet Union offered 30 volumes of documentary evidence of the destruction and looting of its cultural property. What other country could provide such evidence?”

Russia formally nationalized the “displaced” property, including the archive, when it passed a new law in 1998—but the law contains an exception for Holocaust victims like émigré Jewish communities. It permits “restitution” provided the claim goes through diplomatic channels and Russia is compensated in exchange.

Before Russia walked away from the case in 2009, its argument that its own law could provide Chabad some relief outraged the U.S. Court of Appeals: “Obviously, Russia’s mere willingness to sell the plaintiff’s property back to it could not remedy the alleged wrongs,” the court wrote.

According to a report in Die Presse, 10,770 documents were returned to Austria in 2009 for “compensation” of 400,000 euros. That’s about $40 per document.

Mr. Goldstein, the restitution expert, thinks money could be raised, but on “principle,” he said, you “don’t pay to get stolen property back.” Further, Mr. Goldstein said claims are granted only on “[Vladimir] Putin’s whim.” Dr. Grimsted, however, who supports Chabad’s claim to the archive, said those few archives that have been surrendered have gone through the 1998 law, which may be Chabad’s best hope.  

In any event, Chabad deliberately rejected advice to take this route, said someone who was privy to strategy discussions, because it did not want to separate the archives from the library, which it views as more valuable, but to which it has no World War II restitution claim.

It’s “against Russian law” to surrender the library, nationalized after the Russian Revolution, Dr. Grimsted pointed out, because the books “were always in Russia” or what was the U.S.S.R. 

The claim for the library would ordinarily not be recognized by U.S. courts, either. When the U.S. formally recognized the Soviet Union in 1933 it also gave Soviet laws retroactive effect. The Court of Appeals said that the U.S. court had jurisdiction over the library claim on other grounds, however questionable that might be.

Chabad, said Dr. Grimsted, has “not taken into account” Russia’s special concerns about the library. Chabad’s first attempts in the early 1990s immediately aroused its fears, she said, that surrendering the books to Chabad would set a precedent that “would open it up to demands from every religious body” whose property was nationalized after the Revolution, including, within its own borders, the Russian Orthodox church. 

After Chabad obtained its default judgment in July 2010, “there was an outburst of indignation,” said Dr. Grimsted. The Duma had been considering a law nationalizing religious texts, and in November it passed.

“After the decision,” said Dr. Grimsted, Russia “wouldn’t have passed something that would give the books away.”

The current art embargo isn’t the first time the Chabad case has ratcheted up tensions between the two nations. In May 1992, the U.S. was scheduled to return to Russia the portion of the Soviet “Smolensk Archive” it had gained possession of during World War II. But the return of those materials didn’t happen in 1992, because Chabad had won U.S. government support, and in March of that year the Senate, led by then-Senator Al Gore, passed a resolution blocking the return of the Smolensk Archive unless Russia surrendered the Chabad library. 

Dr. Grimsted has suggested that Chabad’s efforts and the withholding of the Smolensk Archive “may well have inspired” the Duma debates that led to the passage of the 1998 law nationalizing spoils of war. At any rate, the Smolensk Archives were part of the Duma’s vigorous discussion.

The Senate resolution and Mr. Gore’s continuing efforts “held the Smolensk Archive hostage to the recovery of the Chabad Library from Moscow for 10 years,” Dr. Grimsted wrote recently. It wasn’t returned to Russia until 2002.

As for the current art embargo, Cadwalader’s Mr. Solomon points out the U.S. can enter the litigation at any time to protect its interests. He predicted that the U.S. will play a role there as “neutral arbiter.” Mr. Holzer, the Met spokesperson, said he understands that the State Department is trying to resolve things diplomatically. 

editorial@observer.com

Professional car racing, like any dangerous sport, tends to attract people who are daring, confident and skilled. Ayrton Senna, the Brazilian Formula One driver who died at the age of 34 during the 1994 San Marino Grand Prix, was no different. Strikingly handsome, charming and ambitious, Senna makes for a captivating screen presence—an ill-fated matinee idol striding purposefully toward his untimely death in endless, fuzzy clips of archival footage. But while he lived quite literally in the fast lane, the new documentary about his life, which won the World Cinema Audience Award at Sundance in January, drags. Senna’s accomplishments are impressive, but his story seems more suited to an ESPN special than a feature-length film. As long stretches of reverent but irrelevant footage unspool onscreen, it’s hard not to wonder, Why now? Why him?

Senna was born in São Paulo into a wealthy family. Naturally athletic and gear-headed, he began go-kart racing at age 13. But director Asif Kapadia doesn’t dwell on these early years, leaping instead to the 1984 Monaco Grand Prix that established Senna as a rising star of the Formula One franchise. In driving rain, Senna recovered from a slow start in “a car that was not going to win races” to pass every competitor on the track, including frontrunner Alain Prost—although a red flag caused final positions to default to an earlier lap, in which Prost was still leading. Senna took second place in Monaco, but went on to win six Grands Prix over the next three seasons, after which he joined Mr. Prost on the McLaren team (in Formula One, drivers partner with car manufacturers, sort of like baseball franchises, except that in racing members of the same “team” are still in competition with each other).

In the case of Senna and Prost, the competition was particularly bitter, and a good half of the film is devoted to the rivalry between the two racing stars. At the 1988 Portuguese Grand Prix, Senna almost forced Prost off the track, resulting in a warning from the FIA. The following year, at the Japanese Grand Prix, the two men collided on an escape road after Prost cut off his teammate on a sharp turn. Senna rejoined the race and won, only to be disqualified by the FIA for skipping a small portion of the track in his attempt to get his car into the pit for repairs. His license was suspended for six months and he was forced to pay a $100,000 fine. The footage used in the film strongly suggests that this disqualification was a direct result of a complaint by Prost.

The diminutive Frenchman certainly looked the part of the antagonist, even if his motives fell short of true malice. Standing a good six inches shorter than the strapping Senna, with a crooked nose and sad, watery eyes, Mr. Prost had no chance of upstaging the handsome Brazilian no matter how many races he won. But despite Mr. Kapadia’s best efforts, the rivalry never reaches the dramatic heights necessary to justify the amount of time he spends recapping it.

It doesn’t help that Senna appears to have had no other struggles on or off the race track. He loved his family, dated a string of models and generally enjoyed the adoration of the masses. He gave money to help poor children and continually expressed his deep faith in God. There were no injuries, no arrests, no drugs, no torrid affairs—none of the kinds of things that celebrity documentaries feed off of. And while Senna’s early death certainly qualifies him as a tragic, almost mythical hero, there is simply not enough material to make a compelling movie, even though Mr. Kapadia appears to have used every last frame of footage from the Formula One archives (there is, literally, not a single second of Senna that takes place in modern day, as interviews are presented as voice-overs, often, and to somewhat confusing effect, with subtitles).

A few sequences almost make up for the rest of the film’s lack of momentum. First, Senna’s emotional hometown win at the Brazilian Grand Prix in 1991 is made all the more heartbreaking by the fact that, thanks to painful muscle spasms, he can barely lift his trophy over his head. And the extended build-up to his fatal last race on May 1, 1994, finally jump-starts the dramatic tension that Senna so desperately needs—over an hour too late.

The days leading up to the crash seem overwhelmingly ominous in retrospect. On April 29, Rubens Barrichello, a fellow Brazilian driver, crashed during a qualifying session, breaking his nose and arm. On April 30, in another qualifying round, Austrian driver Roland Ratzenberger was killed when his car careered into a concrete wall. Senna was visibly devastated by these accidents, and his then-boss Frank Williams (of Williams-Renault, the team to which Senna switched after McLaren) recalls in a voice-over that he told Senna to quit and go fishing.

In footage from the day of the crash, Senna looks troubled as he gets into his car—he clearly had reservations about going through with the race—and knowing what comes next makes it hard to watch. Point-of-view footage taken from inside Senna’s car is used throughout the film, but when Mr. Kapadia uses it here it is particularly disturbing. As the car whines down the San Marino course at breakneck speed, there is nothing to do but wince, preparing for the moment of impact.

If only the rest of the movie were half as gripping.

Running time: 106 minutes

Written by Manish Pandey

Directed by Asif Kapadia

Starring Ayrton Senna, Alain Prost, Frank Williams

2/4

ulamarche@observer.com