The pioneers of photography discovered one thing almost immediately: Statues make ideal models. Because they never twitched, much less moved, during long shutter exposures, a bust of Patroclus or a Roman portrait hung in the British Museum allowed early masters of the medium, like William Henry Fox Talbot in 1846 and Roger Fenton a decade later, to render light, space and viewpoints without exasperating sitters. In 1844, Talbot wrote, "Statues, busts, and other specimens of sculpture, are generally well represented by the Photographic Art."

Curator Roxanna Marcoci, in "The Original Copy: Photography of Sculpture, 1839 to Today," an exhibition that opened Sunday at the Museum of Modern Art, sets out to prove exactly that. Ms. Marcoci has brought together more than 300 prints, publications and other items by 100 artists that illuminate, in 10 distinct categories, what Talbot was talking about.

The exhibition offers a refreshingly unconventional presentation and breaks some conventions, if not rules, along the way. For starters, this history of art dispenses with a chronological approach. Though the exhibition spans 170 years, it doesn't proceed from A to Z. It wanders far afield, digressing often. Some sections treat general themes, such as photography's early days; others hone in on specific topics, including the way both Auguste Rodin and Constantine Brancusi used cameras to clarify how their bronze and marble statues should best be perceived.

Approaching prints by a trio of wayfarers active in different eras as cultural and political icons-Walker Evans, Lee Friedlander and David Goldblatt-sheds new light on their impressive bodies of work. There's even a look at sculpture in the expanded field-that is, Earth art by the likes of Robert Smithson, Michael Heizer and Richard Long. Through unconventional and mixed-media prints, the viewer gets a better grasp on how, as Ms. Marcoci puts it, "sculpture no longer had to be a permanent three-dimensional object" because of the advent of photography. Much as they would with three-dimensional art, the visitor regards the exhibition's engaging subject from a variety of angles. As a result, this show fundamentally alters the way we respond to photographs of sculpture. 

"Original Copy" (which is accompanied by a terrific reference book of a catalog) argues that photography changed not only the course of art history but how the art that predated it was perceived. Previously, visual information regarding antiquity and the Old Masters was transmitted through hand-drawn graphics that would occasionally omit salient details. Art history became a more viable area of interest, more popular, essentially, when the acuity of the camera lens provided details that were all but invisible to the naked eye. The equipment involved was heavy and cumbersome, yet someone like Charles Negre could make, as early as about 1853, views of the gargoyles of Notre Dame that allowed Victor Hugo's readers to see, close up, the haunts of the novelist's hunchback.

Taken over the course of several years, Eugene Atget's haunting scenes of a park in Saint-Cloud that is peppered with decorative objects remind the viewer time doesn't stand still. Seasons change. In his photographs of sculptures at Versailles, the sun is always moving. We see that shadows engender sensations as evocative as Proust's madeleine.

In an exhibition that melds the distant past with the present, small prints with large, black-and-white images with ones in color, well-known photographers with many that are less familiar or downright unknown, the visitor is constantly intrigued, itching to learn more, wanting to return to MoMA for another look, and above all, astonished to discover that sculpture and photography have had such a symbiotic relationship for more than a century and a half.

editorial@observer.com

"Who is Tony Judt?" a woman wanted to know. We were at a cocktail party at the offices of a left-wing publisher in Dumbo in March, and the name of the controversial British-born European historian and public intellectual was in the air.

A friend of hers who was hovering nearby, a man of British extraction, to judge by his accent, pitched in with the following epithet: "He's an anti-Marxist scumbag."

Not everyone was buying into the aura of sanctity that had attached to Tony Judt ever since amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, better known as Lou Gehrig's disease, had left him paralyzed from the neck down. And why should they? Judt himself was always bemused and irritated by it.

The disease that had ruined his body with terrifying rapidity, and which finally killed him on Friday, left his mind fully intact. And he used the life and the mind that was left to him to pursue the many polemics that had punctuated his career. He spent his life assailing other people's cherished myths, in essays all the more annihilating for being so urbane. He remained the same proud and indomitable man-such was his tremendous force of will-while strapped into a wheelchair.

"I'm as generous or mean as I ever was, and as intellectually aggressive or pedagogically gentle as I have always been," he told me this spring when I was profiling him for New York.

At other cocktail parties in other precincts of the city, one could easily imagine the question being answered differently: "He's a self-hating Jew." "He's a radical Leftist." "He's a white male elitist." "He's an arrogant blowhard."

But also: "He's the most brilliant political writer of our time." "He's the most rigorous and caring teacher I've ever met." "He's the last great public intellectual of our time."

In my own view, most of the attacks are plainly false; much of the adulation is substantially true. But to me he was, as a personality, a brilliant scholarship boy driven to exceed everyone in the acuity of his thinking, writing and speech.

Mr. Judt was the first member of his family to go to college-neither of his parents continued their schooling beyond the eighth grade. In a single generation, he had ventured from lower-middle-class London (his mother was "a qualified lady's hairdresser in the age of big hair," as he put it; his father a itinerant laborer) for the highest reaches of the Oxbridge mandarinate. The life he narrated to me was a series of renunciations: goodbye to the Marxism of his childhood, the Zionism of his youth and the political (and pseudo-political) passions of the late 1960s, followed by a career that was a long rear-guard action against the academic trends of his day.

He had always been, as he put it to me, "a difficult, disobedient and radical child." At Cambridge, he exchanged the Cockney accent of his youth (which he readily lapses into for comic effect) for the richly cultured idiom he spoke as an adult. He acquired the supreme self-confidence that is inculcated there. It was the renunciation that made him into the remarkable self-made creation he became.

"All scholarship boys, all upwardly educationally mobile people, break, even if they don't want to or don't realize it, with their family, their class, their way of speaking, the world they grew up in," he told me. "That's what upward social mobility is all about. Education is a particularly wrenching version of it. Because you can get rich in business from a working-class background and remain yourself, but with more money. But when you progress through education, you speak differently, you have different references and you live in a different world. I certainly experienced that."

Mr. Judt was a pure meritocrat, without inherited status or fortune to secure his place in the great world. He simply had to be smarter, more erudite and more verbally agile than everyone he confronted, in every setting he entered. And until the very end, he always was-and he knew it. Like many people who have had to earn their power, he was forthright about possessing it.

"I've never thought of myself as a benign despot; but I do crave autonomy and hate being obliged to people I don't respect," he told me when I asked him about the leadership style that had garnered controversy at New York University.

"I'm sure that's true of most of us, but I am lucky: I get to act on my preferences."

His preference was to defend his independence in thought against the blandishments of friends and the aggression of foes alike, and he acted on this preference with exemplary energy and wit until the very end.

editorial@observer.com

Ellis Wood, the daughter of two Martha Graham company members, has been dancing "since the dawn of man," she said. But for Ellis Wood Dance Company, which has supported from five to nine full-time dancers year-round for the past 10 or so years, these are exceptionally difficult times.

Ms. Wood's seven-year funding grant ran out after five. Then the funders of her mid-career grant called and informed her that it no longer existed. Incorporating as a nonprofit, she shifted to individual donations from grants as her company's main source of financial support because "there is less money for the same pool of people" these days, she said. Next, she pared down to four dancers. Recently, she decided to make her work more "accessible" and focus on a (cheaper-to-produce) solo project. Two weeks ago, she got news that her rehearsal space, Dance Forum in Union Square, is shutting down.

Times are perennially hard for modern dancers, but company managers, dancers and grants groups said the current climate may be among the most difficult they've ever faced. Long-independent dance companies are undergoing a wave of mergers like the one that gripped the investment banking business in 2008; some experimental spaces have closed or threaten to soon. Dancers report living in substandard housing; others have had to abandon Manhattan for Brooklyn. The recession also has consequences for simple lovers of dance. Across the board, audiences are being offered smaller and, sometimes, less experimental work. "I used to make pieces called Hereticus," said Ms. Wood. "Now I make pieces called Mom."

Since the 1950s, New York City has been the center of modern dance in the United States and, often, the world. From Broadway to Balanchine to Trisha Brown, dancers, and dance of the highest caliber, are a New York hallmark. Even with the recession and attendant deep funding cuts in the dance world, dancers must remain here-there is virtually nowhere else to go to consistently practice their craft in the U.S. And contemporary or "modern" dance often entails long rehearsals for little or no pay, even in cases when history books already record the significance of the performer or choreographer.

Indeed, fame is no defense against financial woes. The legendary Joyce Theater learned late last month that their $1-a-year lease deal will not be renewed. Dance Theater Workshop, a hub of downtown dance, has struggled in the recession and announced on April 9 that they would merge with the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane company, sharing space and staff. On July 14, major Manhattan dance studio Dance New Amsterdam was scheduled to shut down after 26 years because it could not pay the rent. After an impassioned "dance-in" at City Hall, the studio received a temporary reprieve. But its future remains uncertain. The situation is getting worse: While 2008 or '09 might have been the U.S. economy's darkest hour, the deepest cuts in the dance world are only coming down the pipeline now, dancers and company managers said, since budget committees take time to come to grips with a poor economy. 

Most dance entities rely on grants or other forms of assistance from the city, the state or the National Endowment for the Arts, all of which have, to one degree or another, cut back. Earlier this summer, Mayor Bloomberg's budget for fiscal year 2011 passed with a 31 percent reduction in financing for arts groups. These cuts were actually was less draconian than originally proposed, but the reductions came on top of those suffered for fiscal year 2010, and Governor Paterson has also proposed cuts to the state's arts budget.

Meanwhile, there is perhaps no performing arts vocation less financially rewarding in Gotham than dance. Actors can work in many forums simultaneously, picking up work on a sitcom or a Broadway show to shore up their finances. The better ballet dancers can eventually expect a regular salary. Modern dancers, who generally fine-tune their bodies rigorously and for hours for a particular technique, do not have those remunerative options. So the field is consolidating, even shrinking, and dancers are getting creative.

"I'm seeing more shared shows, more studio showings, more self-producing," said Anneke Hansen, head of Anneke Hansen Dance, a small New York City-based company. Companies are moving their rehearsal space out of Soho and into places like Ridgewood, Brooklyn. "People are leaving because it's too hard to sustain themselves as dancers," Ms. Hansen said. She won't leave New York because she applied for, and won, city-subsidized housing in 2004-her "fairy godmother," she called the Two Bridges area studio apartment with a rent so low she asked that it not be published. But she just had to move her studio to the Bushwick/Ridgewood border for financial reasons.

One of the biggest changes in the modern dance world has been geographic-with its many Manhattan expats and start-up dance spaces, the new headquarters for modern dance in New York just may be Bushwick. Chez Bushwick, a nonprofit organization off the Morgan stop on the L, opened in 2002 offering rehearsal space for $5 an hour. It's on an industrial block surrounded by abandoned-looking buildings, complete with Mack trucks parked next door and tennis shoes thrown over the power lines. It is rented out 24 hours a day. And it's still hard to schedule rehearsal time,said managing director Christina deRoos.

Dancers are doing the hustle. Tatyana Tenenbaum, a young choreographer, uses re-purposed space she finds through nonprofits such as auntisdance.com for her performances, often bartering instead of paying for the space. For a recent performance in an abandoned church in Bushwick, she exchanged the use of the space for her grant-writing skills, which she honed working in arts administration for the dance nonprofit The Tank. For rehearsal space and classes (another huge expense), she relies heavily on entities that also get funding from grants, like the Center for Performance Research, in Williamsburg, where she "splurges on the $13-an-hour space." She also received a Brooklyn Arts Council grant to support her own work, She hopes this will enable her to pay her dancers "something more than dinner."

"I feel like dancers put up with things no one in any other profession would," Ms. Tenenbaum said. She has worked for [just] dinner before, she said, and for free. "It is a sequestered high art. There is not much of a market for it." Nonetheless, she'll continue to dance.

gvoien@observer.com

I knew Andy Warhol for a short but lively stint in 1984 and '85, while my then-fiancée was one of his best friends. We were out every night, all night. One night, my parents had their big summer party in Greenwich; I thought Andy would like it since I had invited a few top polo players, all the Argentine pros. He arrived late, in a long white stretch limo. As the driver opened the door, out popped a six-foot-tall she-man dressed in white named "Marilyn"; next came Boy George in pink eye shadow. Then Andy, in a droopy black jacket, a snapshot camera around his neck.

Looking back now, I can only remember Warhol the celebrity, whether at Studio 54 or a social soiree. The idea of him as an artist was somehow lost on me; indeed, everyone knew he had painted Marilyn and Elvis, but people didn't seem to care much about what he was painting in the '80s. Andy the celebrity was just much bigger than Andy the artist. Somehow, the countless society portraits he had done in the '70s, and the entourage of sycophants and pretentious hangers-on, had become a circus, with Andy as ringleader. But as an artist he felt like a very famous hack.

A show now at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, "Andy Warhol: The Last Decade," is all about this time in his life and about the work he did before his death, in 1987, and it is meant to be a platform for us to focus and evaluate the broad range of works he did in the late '70s and '80s. (These are, by and large, familiar: the Rorschach blots, the collaborations with Jean-Michel Basquiat, the "Shadow" paintings, the peeing-on-copper "Oxidation" series.) So the show is worth seeing for many reasons, but not in order to discover the great late works of Warhol, since almost anyone paying attention could have seen them all in the galleries or at auction in the past several years. There has been a bull run on 1980s "Guns"; there has been a bull run on "Last Supper" paintings; and there is a market for any possible Warhol you can imagine. The hands-down winner was, of course, the 9-foot-square 1986 purple fright wig Self Portrait, which made $32.6 million at auction last May. So we won't be rediscovering the late work in this show-that happened over five years ago-but it's a good time to study the work and perhaps reconsider whether the bull run on late Warhol was justified.

Certainly, at the time, late Warhol, the man or the paintings, was not taken seriously by art critics. The catalog essay from the show explains that his 1973 show "Portraits of the '70s" at the Whitney Museum of American Art was a bomb; he was chastised by critics for "swimming in a sea of superficiality" and "carrying an absolute interest in the size of his bank balance." We learn from Robert Rosenblum's informative essay that the late period was preceded by a period of intense self-doubt. Indeed, in 1978, he said, "I wasn't creative since I was shot," and in his new book on Warhol, Arthur Danto takes that controversial and fascinating position, that he created virtually no good work after he was shot, in 1968. The Brooklyn show features clips from Andy Warhol's TV and copies of Interview magazine (which he founded), showing us that, good or bad, Andy's vision was big and complex. If Marcel Duchamp was the art world's Einstein, Warhol used his formula to make the bomb, and changed the art world forever.

This doesn't mean, though, that all the work is good. For example the "black and white ads" series on view at Brooklyn is a return to some of his earlier work. (They are images of newspaper ads for soup, or for "99-cent steaks" or "$24.99 Pumas.") The works are hand-painted, we are often told. Why that would matter is the real question, since Warhol's great works were screened, not painted. Who cares if he painted them? I don't. This series is dry and lacks any energy; I've never liked them, and even in the show they still fall flat. Swiss art dealer Bruno Bischofberger once said that some of the paintings look as if they are waiting for Jean-Michel Basquiat to apply some colorful faces and words, and he's right. I do not subscribe to the view that every late picture is a great picture; in fact, much of the late work is tired, lifeless and mechanical-but the exceptional pieces here are some of Warhol's best.

It's hard for us to sweep away the mythical stature of today and remember that in the '80s, you could pay Warhol to do almost anything-paintings of cars (Mercedes), or a commission for a cookie company the Statue of Liberty paintings). He was not unlike LeRoy Neiman, an artist whose commercial success Andy admired, and with whom he traded a few pictures. Warhol's work was always in dialogue with the art market and its paying clients, so socialite portraits, dollar-sign paintings and paid commissions were all welcome.

The "Last Supper" series (some of which is on view in Brooklyn) was actually a paid commission from dealer Alexander Iolas, who had just opened a gallery in Milan across from the real Leonardo da Vinci fresco. Warhol used his formula, chose a kitschy source image and silk-screened the copy of a copy in bright colors. This time, he produced beautiful, billboard-style paintings that treated Jesus like a pop star. The Baltimore Museum's monumental diptych on loan for the show is an absolute masterpiece, worth the trip to Brooklyn alone. To think that the artist was commissioned by a dealer to produce these works still feels strange, though the catalog notes that he continued to make them even after the order was filled. But whenever art embraces commerce, questions and doubts linger. The show gives us a new opportunity to understand the circumstances of what art he produced before his untimely death. In the '80s, Warhol answered those questions: "I'm still a commercial artist. I was always a commercial artist."

editorial@observer.com

Sometimes, fashion can be revolutionary.

Eunice W. Johnson, a publisher and business pioneer, brought high fashion to African-American women right around the time they were fighting for their civil rights. Johnson, who died in January at 93, helped her husband build the Johnson Publishing Company, parent company to Ebony and Jet magazines and to Fashion Fair Cosmetics. In fashion history, Johnson is credited as the first black woman to cross the Atlantic and buy couture in volume-selling young designers like Yves Saint Laurent on the idea that there was an African-American market they had yet to tap. In 1956, to raise money for a charity, she created the Ebony Fashion Fair, which grew so big it eventually traveled to 180 cities. Simply put by Bill Clinton at a recent Metropolitan Museum of Art luncheon in Johnson's honor, "She found a way to use women's fashion to do good."

And the woman could shop. On Sept. 16, about 800 gowns, dresses, pants, jackets, coats and blouses from her personal collection will go on auction at Leslie Hindman Auctioneers in Chicago (New Yorkers can bid online or by phone). Just like Johnson, the clothes are bold and flamboyant; they're from designers such as Thierry Mugler, Yves Saint Laurent, Emanuel Ungaro and Claude Montana. Said auctioneer Ms. Hindman, "She was known for her vivid style marked by textures, metallics and avant-garde silhouettes. She was not afraid to wear chic, out-there clothes." The collection is chronologically comprehensive, spanning about 1970 to the present, said Abigail Rutherford, Hindman's director of vintage couture and accessories. "It seems to tell Johnson's story and show who she was as a business woman and a trend-setter," she said. 

For a sales meeting, perhaps, she had a double-breasted Valentino faux leopard pony hair coat (estimate $700 to $900). One wonders what meeting called for a Thierry Mugler aquamarine blue leather skinny-legged pantsuit (a steal: estimate $200 to $400). Lot No. 725, a Jean-Louis Scherrer black wool crepe dress belted in gold at the waist and neck ($300-$500), is "a great example of couture," said Ms. Rutherford. Some of Johnson's other clothes were not quite right for auction but perfect for a tag-sale format. They'll be hanging on racks at the auction house and priced to take home, at $50 or less, starting in mid-September. The tag sale format stays true to Johnson herself, who wanted fashion to reach all women.

Liberal commentary resembles that band of escaped convicts in Woody Allen's Take the Money and Run, who break out of prison shackled to each other at the ankle and have to do everything as a group, like walking along the street and eating in a restaurant. Barack Obama is elected president, and the liberal News Brain runs in one direction, declaring that America is now post-racial, that racism has suffered a fatal setback, that we are at the dawn of a new age of racial harmony. The White House forces the black Shirley Sherrod to resign her top-level position in the Department of Agriculture after right-wingers falsely accuse her of racism, and the liberal News Brain takes off in the opposite direction, proclaiming that race is the albatross around Mr. Obama's neck, his Achilles' heel, the Fury at his back.

May I suggest that these pundits and commentators get themselves over to Film Forum to see The Radiant Child, a sensitive and intelligent-if carefully selective and frankly worshipful-documentary about the rise and fall of Jean-Michel Basquiat? Basquiat was a black artistic prodigy who acquired international fame by the time he was 24 and died of an overdose of heroin 22 years ago this week, at the age of 27. The fate of this gifted, mixed-race son of a Haitian father and a Puerto Rican mother is resonant with the complexity of black-to use our current shorthand term for anyone at least half-black-existence in America.

Basquiat was far from the wonder his admirers claimed he was, but he was nowhere near the shallow mediocrity that detractors accused him of being. Sound familiar? If it does, it's not because weak and emotional Basquiat and our iron-willed, unsentimental president have anything in common in terms of character or life trajectory. Rather, Basquiat was and Mr. Obama is doomed to be trapped inside a symbolic projection more than most other public figures. As Mr. Obama wrote at the end of The Audacity of Hope, "I am new enough on the national political scene that I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views." How peculiar it is to equate being a fresh arrival to politics with the capacity to project back to radically different people whatever they want to believe. Truly consequential political leaders, like Mr. Obama's beloved Lincoln, are in fact characterized by strong views that are divisive from the start. Yet Mr. Obama seems to have spent much precious time trying to retain that unifying blankness.

So, too, with the conflicted Basquiat. Leaving his upper-middle-class Brooklyn home for good when he was 17, he lived on the street and made his name as a graffiti artist. The white art world took him up and cast him in the role of an outsider who was going to liberate art from what had become arid conventions.

Having made him an iconoclastic street primitive, however, the white dealers and journalists who were crafting Basquiat's public image became conscious of the old stereotype of the primal black man. So they emphasized his intellectual capacities. This young, college-aged man-the product of a cultivated, affluent milieu-read literature! He was conversant with the art masterpieces of the past! Basquiat's boosters might just as well have been patting him on the head for being "eloquent," "rational" and "deliberative."

Basquiat played along, making scrupulously constructed paintings that alluded heavy-handedly to Western intellectual pillars like Charles Darwin and to the span of Western art history. Yet the more he presented himself as unexpectedly refined, the more he strained to shock viewers with discordant colors, stick figures and unsettling juxtapositions. Intellectual and aloof on the one hand, impassioned and emotional on the other. But never too impassioned or emotional to seem "too black."

Basquiat seemed to be striving to satisfy two calculatedly contradictory expectations on the part of the powerful white people who were making his career. No wonder that Peter Schjeldahl wrote in The Village Voice at the time: "I would have anticipated a well-schooled white hipster behind the tantalizing pictures." For his part, Basquiat responded to the pressure on him to play the two different roles of stereotypical black wild child and stereotypical self-taught black intellectual-Jack Johnson and Frederick Douglass-with paintings like Obnoxious Liberals with Eyes and Eggs. The picture's black figure is a short-order cook, and you are perhaps meant to wonder whether he is the artist himself, forced to respond ignominiously to his white dealers' requests for ever more explicit displays of visceral emotion on the one hand and rational detachment on the other.

According to the documentary, Basquiat took criticism badly, becoming furious and falling into a funk before needily coming around and catering to the critic, as he seemed to do time and again with Andy Warhol, who became his unlikely mentor and friend even as he hitched his falling star to Basquiat's rising one and in the process pulled Basquiat down. The Radiant Child is emphatic in its insistence that Basquiat was his own man who always went his own way, even as it inadvertently presents evidence to the contrary.

Yet the most striking refutation of Basquiat's autonomy is his face, utterly open and sweet, or nervous and uncertain yet beaming with joy around Warhol, or hard and exhausted toward the end of his young life. He had a hunger to please, and he turned with honest rage on himself because he had done so much to please so many people of vastly different stripes that nearly all of them, in the end, treated him as an exploitable object. His most powerful works are those late canvases that are not so much painted as covered with words and phrases written in a meticulous hand-almost a kind of anti-graffiti. Some of these phrases have a stinging epigrammatic power. One that occurs frequently is this: "Cowards will give to get rid of you." They will heap money and praise on you and remake you along the lines of their own desire, and work against you behind your back when you disappoint their impossible expectations-until you are defeated, gone and forgotten.

America elected its first black president in a convulsion of outraged disgust with his predecessor, and in the sudden throes of fear, panic and confusion. Mr. Obama will not be excused for his blackness the second time around. We should think now and again of Jean-Michel Basquiat, so that when we are next reminded that Mr. Obama's blackness is, despite our finest hopes, the most significant political fact about him, we will not be surprised. 

editorial@observer.com

Hello, Jet Blue passengers! I will never be serving you a fucking soft drink or a bag of stale, chemical-coated peanuts again. You know what, you want to leave that seat otherwise than in the upright position, go right ahead, bozo. When the guy behind you is lying in a hospital bed with a concussion and brain damage, see if I shed one lousy tear. Please put your tray tables in the upright position or else watch me laugh when your ribs crack as the plastic impales your thorax and your intestines spill out into the aisle, obstructing the path of your fellow cheapskate Jet Blue-flying kamikaze numbskull passengers. Should have flown Delta, dumb-dumbs! The seatbelt sign is on- please refrain from using the lavatories, but feel free to wet yourselves. We will soon be experiencing turbulence, so fasten your safety belts, crack open a cold one and pop a handful of Valium. This sucker's going down. Watch your head, Park Slope! Look out above, Long Beach! Next stop, Lockerbie! Muhammad Atta's got nothing on me! Attention-this is your captain speaking. Wrong! I'm a fucking flight attendant, which is the gender-neutral term for stewardess for all you geezers out there. You're in-flight entertainment this evening will consist of me swinging from the overhead compartments reprising my junior-high gymnastics routine and with a double back flip into your lap. At that point, the oxygen mask will drop from the overhead compartment, and you are instructed to apply it to my face. When I spring up for my finale, please hand me your seat cushion, which is also a helpful flotation device. On behalf or the whole crew, I hate you all! Finally, passengers seated by the emergency exits, get the hell out of the way because here I come! It's Miller time!

Moments after Wyclef Jean took a seat at table one for an early lunch at Michael's in midtown, a bodyguard of sturdy carriage advised moving to a different Breur Cesca chair facing away from the lunch crowd. "It's for security," Mr. Jean good-naturedly told the Transom from his new perch. Potential threats seemed unlikely among the growing congregations of media honchos with blazers and Hamptons tans, but this was a week where the musician-cum-Haitian presidential candidate saw enemies pounce from many corners.

Since Mr. Jean declared his political ambitions on Aug. 4, detractors have ranged from actor Sean Penn to a former band member to the anonymous callers who ominously suggest he "stick to singing" before hanging up. Then the $2.1 million tax lien the I.R.S. slapped on his New Jersey property became public. "In hip-hop, we have what's called 'the haters,'" Mr. Jean said between bites from a warm roll. "You constantly have to just brush the haters off and stay focused. That's really what I've been doing."

With weary eyes and a staid charcoal suit over an Alice blue dress shirt and striped tie contributing gravitas, Mr. Jean more resembled a businessman on a layover than a rap star moonlighting in politics. The ensemble drew admiring glances from the star-struck kitchen staff. He looks 40 years old, but pleasantly so. His hairline has retreated, but his face remains unblemished and uncreased. A Grammy-winning musician and the tear-streaked personification of the earthquake that ravaged his homeland earlier this year, Mr. Jean has become the most famous Haitian in the world-despite spending the past 30 years living in the tristate area. His popularity makes it difficult to ascertain whether he is running for president because he should or simply because he can. He is still tinkering with his talking points, too: In explaining his motivations, Mr. Jean meanders from "I was drafted" to "We can't take another five years." Something catchier may be in order.

No one has accused Mr. Jean of being a policy wonk-his platform emphasizing job creation and education is skeletal-but he believes the people dismissing him as a political neophyte aren't listening closely enough.

"I think people underestimate the power of a musician," he said. "They think we're not intellectual, we don't study policy, we don't know law and order. But we sing about it all the time." He listed his performances at Free Tibet concerts and the song "Million Voices" from the Hotel Rwanda soundtrack as examples of artistic and political intersection. Then Mr. Jean casually recited a few a cappella bars at the table. "Vision of Gandhi, courage of Malcolm X/ I envision Aristide the Haitian Pope," he said with a sly smile.

Not everyone is eager to sign couplets from the Fugees' 1994 album Blunted on Reality into law. "Besides the things about 'Let the Third World unite,' there's nothing specific that he's said with a clear or tangible political direction," said J. Michael Dash, a professor of French at New York University and the author of several books about Haiti. "He's a novice."

So it seems likely that Mr. Jean's policies will be influenced by those around him: He's friendly with Bill Clinton; his uncle Raymond Joseph was the Haitian ambassador to the U.S. and is also running for president; and he recently hired New Partners, a political consulting firm run by Paul Tewes, the grass-roots organizer who served as Barack Obama's state director for the Iowa caucuses. Mr. Jean may be the only member of the Viv Ansanm ("Live Together") party he created, but he will not be untethered.

Similarly, Mr. Jean proved willing to trust the council of experts when it came time to order lunch. After the server recommended both the slow-poached Alaskan halibut and the seared Maine scallops, Mr. Jean queried further. "But which one is the best?" he asked. Halibut it was, an ivory fist resting atop bronze chanterelles and electric-green pesto.

The Transom broached the subject of Yele Haiti Foundation, an organization Mr. Jean founded in 2005 and resigned from last week. Since January, he has been dogged by allegations that the charity misused funds. Most damning were documents unearthed by snoopy Web site The Smoking Gun indicating that Mr. Jean and cousin Jerry Duplessis paid themselves more than $400,000 in foundation funds for appearance fees, rent and production costs. Mr. Jean denies intentional wrongdoing and insists a hawk-eyed battalion of new accountants and lawyers are tending to the $9 million that have been donated to Yele since the earthquake. "We were a grass-roots organization," he said. "We made mistakes. It's just about cleaning up and making sure everything is squeaky. Is my organization and my movement of what I've been doing since I been 19 an act of corruption and all of that? No. It's basically what some artists go through." Cubism, Surrealism, Misappropriation-you dig?

A rapper running for a nation's presidency-even if the prize is a small, crippled island-is surely a victory for hip-hop, but Mr. Jean was never regarded as one of those leering goons that frighten the conservative punditry. The Fugees, his former group, sold six million copies of their 1996 sophomore LP thanks to Lauryn Hill's sparkly talent, Bob Marley and Roberta Flack remakes and a pan-Caribbean sensibility for which Mr. Jean, as producer, deserves much credit. The trio has been estranged since the late '90s (not including quickie reunions), and reconciliation appears unlikely.

In the wake of Mr. Jean's candidacy, the group's third member, Prakazrel Michel, has curiously resurfaced as a vociferous supporter of Michel Martelly, another singer vying for the Haitian presidency. "People are eating mud because they can't afford to eat food and you show up in a private jet?" Pras asked the Transom, in reference to the plane that ferried Mr. Jean down to Haiti for his campaign announcement. He subsequently compared Mr. Martelly to Ronald Reagan as a "transformative" politician and suggested the Transom spend lunch with him as well. We passed, just brushing the Haitians off, one might say.

-Ben Detrick

Mr. Detrick is a freelance writer living in Brooklyn.

Mr. Koch has become a one-person crusader for authentic and absolutely practical reform in Albany. In this election year, he is traveling the state on behalf of common-sense solutions like an end to partisan gerrymandering, which both parties now practice and which basically serves as protection for incumbents of both parties. There's a reason why state legislators are reelected with percentages that recall elections in the old Soviet Union. The system is rigged in favor of sitting officeholders, because they basically draw their own district lines.

That's just one of several changes Mr. Koch is advocating. And in typical Koch style, the man is nothing if not blunt: He is keeping score and is more than happy to identify the heroes of reform, and the enemies of reform. Among those enemies are some of Mr. Koch's fellow Democrats in the Legislature. They see change as a threat to their power. They are not wrong, and that is precisely the point.

Mr. Koch explained to The Observer that he was waiting for somebody to take the lead on behalf of change, but when nobody stepped forward despite a clear consensus that change was necessary, he nominated himself to take charge.

The man is a marvel. Long life to him.

Parents of the autistic children are understandably concerned about the coming academic year. Their children will be sent to programs in other schools, but nobody seems to know precisely where. That's unfortunate-parents of children with special needs deserve all the support they can get, and that includes timely information about their children's education.

But the good news is that students in the Girls Preparatory Charter School will be able to continue in the program through middle school, using space previously used by the autistic students. In a perfect world, the city would have the resources and ability to house everybody in the same location. But in the real world of difficult decisions, Chancellor Klein had to decide which was the greater good: Expanding opportunities for girls on the Lower East Side, or preserving the status quo at P.S. 188.

Albany, after months of delay, ruled that Chancellor Klein was barred from moving the autistic program without public hearings. But the State Education Department also noted that Mr. Klein had emergency powers that allow him to change the usage of a public-school building without consulting the public. Mr. Klein chose to invoke those powers to allow the charter school expansion.

The autistic children and their parents should have been treated with greater sympathy, but it should also be noted that the biggest critics of Mr. Klein's actions in this case also happen to be among the biggest critics of the charter school revolution. Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, for example, said the chancellor displayed "arrogance that too many parents have come to expect" from Mr. Klein. Actually, parents have come to expect accountability from Mr. Klein-accountability that was sorely lacking back in the days of the late, unlamented Board of Education.

Mr. Klein had a tough call to make in this unfortunate dispute over limited resources. We think he made the right one.