Over a thousand guests assembled with a laundry list of required white equipment (tables, tablecloths, chairs, electric votives, and more), for Manhattan's first Dîner en Blanc, a decades-old secret society picnic imported from Paris.

"I somehow miraculously was able to register, and I am so glad" said Kate Allgood Cowley, an assistant at Glenview Capital who was decked out in white feathers, flowers and "as many pearls as I could get my hands on."

"Look at this scenery -- it's just a wow," said James Wolfensberger, who came dressed as German playboy Gunter Sachs, as he sampled the contents of a catered picnic basket.  "It's really delicious," said Adriana Kaegi, his date and a singer from Kid Creole and the Coconuts.

"I heard of this event when I was still in France, but I never got a chance to participate because in France it's for friends of friends, so if you don't know anyone involved you cannot get in," said Alexandra Simoes, the director of the Lyceum Kennedy, who helped to organize the New York Dîner.

Two bicyclists interrupted to ask Ms. Simoes about it. "We are lucky today," one said. "We can see something new."

The tradition began in the suburbs near Versailles, where Francois Pasquier hosted annual picnics in his garden to catch up with old friends after a two-year stint in Polynesia. The garden soon became too small, and the picnics moved to public parks, where guests dressed in white to recognize each other. As the numbers of guests climbed into the thousands, all through word of mouth, the Dîner moved into Paris.

"At first the police tried to forbid it, so it had to be secret," said Mr. Pasquier's son, Aymeric, who organized the New York picnic. "It was like a game with the authorities, and there was never any advertising because it was a social network that grew slowly and surely."

But the New York franchise couldn't be farther from its mischievous heritage.  With an online waiting list, liquor and event licenses, and security guards on walkie talkies, New Yorkers were more concerned with not being overcharged than skirting the law.

A widely publicized computer glitch accidentally charged over a thousand people on the waiting list for 200 available spots, and complaints continue to be posted on the event’s Facebook wall.  The city mandated a 1,150-person attendance cap, and Mr. Pasquier told The Observer that the computer error resulted from a significantly higher demand than anticipated, which overloaded the website.

"The French mentality is more laid back, less conformist, so we don't follow the rules as Americans do," he said. "In America, it's a different mentality -- all the lines are straight -- so I'm surprised that the Dîner can cross the ocean."

Something stinks.

But not according to the owners of permanent year-round slips at the 79th Street Boat Basin.

“I think all the talk about the leak was an overreaction,” Ed Bacon, who has lived in the basin for 41 years, told The Observer. “We used to have ‘Coney Island whitefish,’ which are condoms, hanging off our dock lines, and at low tide the sulfur dioxide would bubble up through the mud.”

“Sure, I knew about it, but nothing was wrong,” said Michael Fischer. He’s a tall, Austrian man with blond curls, and as he lounged on deck in bright orange swim trunks, he mentioned owning several businesses in Europe and a pied-a-terre on 74th and Columbus. “You couldn’t tell there was any sewage,” he said.

Others said the stench was palpable, but they take the Hudson’s lack of sanitation for granted.

Ryan and Teresa Diehl, who have a summertime slip, thought the floating sewage was disgusting—but par for the course. “It’s gnarly, man, there’s floating bleh,” said Mr. Diehl, a drummer trying to break into the New York jazz scene.

“But we wouldn’t swim here anyway,” Ms. Diehl quickly chimed in.

The untroubled attitude harkens back to an earlier New York—one in which sewage drained uninhibited into the Hudson and 79th Street was oh-so-unfashionably uptown.

In the ’70s, the boat basin was a hideaway for divorced dads, according to Mr. Bacon, who quit his job at IBM to “sail off into the sunset.” Run by haphazard concessionaires, the basin was a playground for children on the weekends, but during the week, their fathers were busy with more adult fun and games.

“They’d have wild parties all through the ’70s and ’80s,” Jane Clegg told The Observer. Ms. Clegg, who learned to sail in the Suez Canal while serving in the British Women’s Royal Navy Service in the ’50s, has lived at the boat basin (often with multiple pets) for decades. Reclining on deck with her one-eyed cat, Saucy, slinking around her neck, she gave off an air of hardy nobility sculpted by what she calls her “theatrical background.”

“It’s been cleaned up and cleared out!” she pronounced, swirling the contents of her wine glass. “Oh, in the bad old days when I first came here, it was operated by concessionaires who had very few rules.”

And the few existing rules were ignored. Rent was rarely paid, bribes were commonplace, and the management hid profits from the Parks Department. Residents would move into the city proper and sublet their slips on the sly. “We’d have sinkings every week,” Ms. Clegg said. “We had to be very, very self-reliant in those days.”

“It was like the Wild West,” said a neighbor who had dropped by Ms. Clegg’s boat for a sunset chat. When asked about his cowboy past, he demurred. “Even if I had bribed anybody, I wouldn’t tell you about it,” he said. He chuckled and nudged The Observer’s leg with a barefoot big toe.

But as the Upper West Side itself became more sanitized (and more expensive), the boat basin’s seedy lifestyle and comparatively cheap “rent” began to irk the neighborhood’s fussy new guard. Critics called the basin a “squatters’ paradise,” Ms. Clegg said, and city officials crusaded against the corruption, at one point threatening to oust the boaters altogether.

In 1989, the Parks Department asserted its control over the basin, claiming that the concessionaire under contract with the city had acted as an “absentee slumlord.”

Today, at $108 per linear foot for the summer season (with a minimum of $2,700), the slips are in high demand. The Diehls were stuck for eight years on the waitlist for their current summer slip.

While the yachting world may be the explicit domain of the wealthy, the 79th Street basin is far from a glamorous haven for the elite. “I don’t think it’s very ritzy,” said Leah Oppenheimer, whom Mr. Bacon introduced as a “boat basin baby.” Raised on her parents’ boat, Ziskeit (Yiddish for “sweetheart”), Ms. Oppenheimer attended the Upper West Side’s Heschel School and only realized that the boating lifestyle was “abnormal” when she transferred to a school in New Jersey. “Living in a boat, your kitchen’s the size of this box!” she exclaimed, indicating what looked like a garbage bin.

“You’re your own superintendent here,” Mr. Bacon said. “If you live in an apartment building, you have a super to take care of your problems, but here you have plumbing, electrical, snow, hazardous weather. A lot of things that the apartment-dweller takes for granted that we have to deal with ourselves.”

In the winters, the water splashes onto the docks and forms a precarious layer of ice, and the paths through Riverside Park (the only way to exit the basin) are often the last stops for snow trucks. Ms. Clegg said the boaters were stuck in the basin for two days before the roads were cleared last winter.

But in the inevitable emergencies, boaters are quick to lend a line (boat-speak for “rope”), and shared hardships have fostered a tight-knit community.

“Every time we’re docking, there are at least one or two people ready to catch our lines, and any time we’re going out, people ask if we need a hand,” said Ms. Diehl.

Mr. Bacon publishes a short community newsletter and even helps to arrange reunions for basin alumni. “It’s a little bit like a suburban cul de sac because you tend to know the people on your dock a little more,” he said.

Shielding his eyes from the sun, he surveyed the dock. “The basin’s a jewel,” he said.

Only three hours earlier, when the fish had been delivered at over three times their intended size, threatening to ruin her main course, Becerra hadn’t lost her cool. “The norm is chaos, so we embrace it,” she said.

And Becerra, a former restaurant owner and Top Chef contestant, is making her career on that chaos.

She and friend Lelaine Lau decided to inaugurate their traveling restaurant series, "the Cookery," this summer. Each event is scheduled in a different venue-- ranging from established hotels to artists’ lofts-- with an original five-course menu. There's no permanent wait staff, no kitchen supplies, no backup ingredients. Over the course of a single day Becerra must acclimate to a new kitchen, train her helpers, and cook a gourmet meal. Guests purchase their $128 tickets before they know the venue, the menu, or anything else.

Becerra didn’t question the practicality of creating a restaurant in a single day; nor did her guests, who gladly forked over five star prices for a meal that was far from a guaranteed success. They inhabit a world where, Lau told us, there’s “fatigue around the word ‘pop-ups,’” and novelty equals quality.

Originality pays-- word has gotten out surprisingly fast.  Already, upcoming Cookery events are sold out, and there's even a whisper of an "in-development" TV show.

“The show is meant to be very New York-centric,” Becerra told The Observer, although she was contractually obligated not to say much more. “The show is basically based on these dinner parties from acquiring the product to the end of the night."

Becerra's no newcomer to the restaurant scene. She began working on events after her Brooklyn restaurant, Paloma, burned down.  “At the time I was heartbroken,” she said. “I had put everything I had into it, and I had nothing.”  She seems to think that collaborating with most corporate partners, a near necessity in opening a new restaurant, would be akin to communing with the devil. “Manhattan has become so corporate that I can’t just say, ‘I love cooking, and I want to open a restaurant by myself,’ as I did in Brooklyn,” she said. “That couldn’t happen anymore.”

The “peek-a-boo” dinner series, as she calls The Cookery, is more about the atmosphere than the food itself. "I love the romance of going to different places all the time-- floating around, drifting from one end of the city to another, throwing these little intimate dinner parties,” she said.

And Becerra embodies the feeling she wants to convey in her food.  She's someone who carts her groceries from the farmers' market in bags tumbling around the back of her Vespa.  "I feel like I'm flying," she told The Observer in a far-off tone.

The day of a pop-up event at the boutique Gild Hall hotel in the Financial District, Becerra met The Observer at the farmers' market.

"I saw these little spiky flowers, and I don't know what they are, but I want to make centerpieces out of them," she told us. Five minutes later, The Observer was carrying a plastic bag punctured with tiny snags from the thistle-like petals of some Echinops sphaerocephalus.

Becerra didn't need a shopping list. There was no readily apparent method to her wandering from shop to shop. But she knew what she wanted.

“To always have a new menu and to always tackle something new is so awesome to me,” she said. “I think I’d whither if I had to make mashed potatoes and chicken sandwiches every day.”

Mashed potatoes and chicken sandwiches, incidentally, were being prepared back in the hotel kitchen, though not for the Cookery.  The room service staff skirted around the Cookery chefs, amused by their relative finesse.

"It's my birthday tomorrow," Becerra confided, grinning almost guiltily at The Observer, as she arranged celery in a vase.

Out in the hotel dining room, the lights were low, and Eurythmics’s "Sweet Dreams," repeated on the stereo, playing softly.  There were Becerra’s “spiky” flower centerpieces, at once quirky and elegant.

As Lau delivered instructions rapid-fire (she's someone who knows what she's doing and wants you to know it, too), Becerra rattled off her courses, taking time to note unnecessary details and address the servers-- strangers, for the most part-- by name. First course, paddlefish roe with petals. Second course, “cuchifritos,” ("a take on my Latin heritage,” Becerra said.).  Third course, a watermelon and tomato salad and a zucchini blossom flatbread. Fourth course, the dramatic striped bass and a gypsy salad.

As the guests trickled in, Becerra peeked into the dining room. “Did you go outside?” she asked The Observer. “They’re so cute, right?! Everyone’s so pretty!”

Pretty or, well, colorful. African tribal garb, a pink (Gatsby-esque?) suit, and a few skullcaps graced the dining room alongside the more typical cocktail dresses and business suits.  A friend of Becerra’s, who said he was a producer, rubbed the bare chest of another guest while musing on the relative merits of waiters and pool boys in bed.  A flustered hotel waitress rushed back and forth every few minutes, refilling her tray of red gin cocktails.

It soon became clear that the Cookery doesn't hurry things. Half an hour was allocated for mingling, and the event, slated to begin at 8:00, was still going well into the morning. Guests, who were assigned to large tables of friends and strangers, chatted loudly, collapsing on one another in fits of laughter. Part booze (almost every course came with a specialty cocktail), part ambience-- Becerra had stirred up her "romance."

The kitchen's euphoria, though, dwarfed the dining room’s excitement.  In the final minutes of dinner service, Becerra was all smiles. "And now I can go partay for mah birthday!" she shouted.  She made a dirty joke, and, doubling over in laughter, told The Observer not to print it. "Kitchen pressure release," Brian Sullivan, pastry chef for the night, explained.

Becerra sprinted home to her apartment, and by the time she returned-- cleaned up in a white cocktail dress-- guests broke from eating their flaugnarde and gaznates on couches in the upstairs event space to sing a heartfelt rendition of Happy Birthday. She circled the room, thanking her guests for coming and asking them about their lives. A singer named “Polystylez (The Real Adonis)” played guitar.

"Sometimes I feel like everybody leaped off the galaxy to go live somewhere on MySpace. I no longer have a sense of what’s reality, looking on my iPhone at a Facebook page, yeah. Just wanna ask, anybody left living: What ever happened to the human race?” he crooned.

That sentiment seemed to fit into the tiny world Becerra’s trying to create.  After all, it’s what Becerra is setting the scene for—genuine, if fleeting, interaction.

One guest, lounging on the couch in front of The Observer, extracted his arm from behind a swaying girl to upload a blackberry picture to Facebook.

"It's so important, and also increasingly difficult, to expose people to roller skating these days," said Mr. Casalino, who has skated two or three times a week since 1988.  "There are so few good places to skate."

But, until September 26th, there is one new rink, designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro and James Corner Field Operations. Situated on "The Lot," the Highline's temporary 40,000-square-foot plaza on 30th street beneath the Highline, the roller rink joins food trucks Rickshaw Dumplings, Eddie's Pizza, Coolhaus, La Bella Torte, Korilla BBQ, and Red Hook Lobster.

The Highline split the cost of constructing the rink with UNIQLO, a Japanese clothing company with a SoHo flagship.  Two UNIQLO cubic booths stand in front of the rink, filled with t-shirts and cashmere sweaters.  But in yesterday’s heat, UNIQLO couldn't attract the long lines away from Coolhaus, which served gourmet ice cream sandwiches, or La Bella Torte, which was advertising its iced cappuccinos.  The store had only sold two sweaters, a saleswoman told The Observer-- both to Susan Sarandon, who dropped by for the ribbon cutting early in the morning. "I think it's too hot for anyone to buy cashmere," said UNIQLO's store manager.

Tripping over their rental skates, couples skated around the rink with ice cream sandwiches from the Coolhaus truck.

But they were amateurs, implied Kathy (who didn't want to reveal her last name because she had taken a personal day to go skating). The serious skaters were boogieing in the center of the rink.

A class of summer campers marveled at the Central Park Dance Skaters' Association, which had decided to assemble for an inaugural spin around the plaza.  "You have to practice for many years to get that edge, that flavor," said Steve Love, a member of the Association and founder of Love Productions, which has produced, among other things, a roller skating show that toured the world.

"Roller skating is my heart," he said. "I was rockin' it out there!"

"I used to play a lot of basketball, but there's just no competition within my age bracket," said Robert Clarke, 60, who wore a red shirt with "Swag" written on the front in giant letters. "This uses all the muscles in your body, so all the impurities leave, and you maintain a youthful appearance."

Although the Highline offers rental skates, the Association skaters brought their own. "I cheat," said James Singley. "I put roller blade wheels on my roller-skates, which makes for much sharper edges."  He hoisted his foot onto the railing to show off his skate/blades.

But most skaters were concerned with remaining upright, let alone creating sharp edges to their turns.  They stumbled into the railings, reveling in the nostalgic goofiness of the activity. “It’s been so many years since I’ve roller skated,” said Tami Laifer. “I’m so excited!”

And Jeremy Bent, a comedian who has worked as a roller derby referee, said that the rink fills a void. New York once had many rinks, but most closed due to lawsuits, gang violence, and a lack of demand. He’s thrilled with the new rink. “In the summer, there’s nothing better than skating,” he said.

Grand Openings and friends pose for a photo on the fifth floor of MoMA.

Yesterday was “formal dress day” at the Museum of Modern Art, but you wouldn’t have guessed it if you had spent the day wandering the museum.

An open invitation on the museum's website asked visitors to "come to the MoMA in your most formal and glamorous attire,” a call that was put out by the five-artist collective Grand Openings.  The collective is in the middle of a 13-day residence in MoMA's Marron Atrium, for which it is programming events and reporting on them in “blog posts” taped to the atrium’s back wall.

An hour after the beginning of the event, The Observer spotted the first person who appeared to be involved. In casual clothes, he typed the blog on a couch in a closed off area of the atrium, and he didn't want to talk to a reporter (or even tell us his name).  "I don't really have the authority to speak for the piece," he said.

At 3:00 p.m., a tall blonde in a black evening gown and sunglasses looked a little bit lonely in the atrium--she was the only one in formal dress, and had been persuaded to attend by a friend who worked at the museum. "I expected more people would be here," she told The Observer.

A few minutes later, the collective began to rearrange long wooden planks, a central component in many of Grand Openings' MoMA events, forming a square on the floor of the atrium. Watching this, a man in a tuxedo asked The Observer when the performance was going to start.  (The rearranging was the performance, it turned out.)

A few museum-goers started to watch and then, not knowing what to do, walked into the next gallery. A man mistakenly walked into one of the blocks. He looked around for security guards and was visibly relieved when none scolded him.

The group decided to look at the art around the museum. Posing in intricate shapes on the floor for photographs, they attracted attention. "I think it's a wedding party," The Observer overheard one onlooker say to another.

When a security guard began to shoo visitors away from the finished piece, Jutta Koether, a member of the collective, interrupted. "No, no--they can go in. They can touch them, whatever they like," she explained. "That's the whole idea. That's the teaser."

"We want people to confront this 'can I or can't I?' situation," Ms. Koether told The Observer. "It's very awkward, but this is all about making people question their ordinary behavior in a museum, in a way that's not dogmatic or didactic."

"The project deals with the museum apparatus as a performance machine. It's interfacing with a culture of events that have become performance in themselves,” she said. “It's meta-performance.”

Catherine Malfitano addresses protesters outside the Guggenheim.

The New York City Opera chorus and orchestra broke out in song outside the Guggenheim Museum today to protest artistic director George Steel's simultaneous announcement that the company will leave Lincoln Center, a decision that likely will cost them their jobs.

"We shall not, we shall not be moved," sang the musicians, led by John O'Connor on guitar. "Our home is Lincoln Center, we shall not be moved."

Despite the operatic rendition of the classic protest song, it seems City Opera shall, in fact, be moved.  Facing bankruptcy and struggling to pay the exorbitant costs of its Lincoln Center address, the opera's leadership believes it can no longer afford a permanent home and plans for the company to rotate from opera house to opera house, assembling a new ensemble for each performance.

"In light of a challenging economic climate, New York City Opera created and is executing a very difficult, but strategic new model that reverses a decade-long trend of debilitating deficits,” a spokeswoman told The Observer over email.

But the Opera’s staff, with the help of the American Guild of Musical Artists and the Local 802 union, refuses to make this season’s curtain call its last.

The protest's Facebook event page instructed attendees to dress in "formal concert attire," and many--obedient to the union organizers, if not to the opera's leadership--remained clad in tuxedoes, their hair matted with sweat, through the hour-long demonstration in today's heat wave.

Renowned soprano Catherine Malfitano, who began her career at City Opera, took the podium. With the enunciation of a pro and the same drama she has used to portray Salome and Tosca, she cried out: "To perform without the chorus is unthinkable, but to perform with a pick-up chorus is insane!" The crowd, waving posters behind her, cheered uproariously. "Brava! Bravissimma!" they shouted.

Reading a statement by former director Julius Rudel, whose Op-Ed in the New York Times helped to bring momentum to the opera workers' cause, her voice rose in a steady crescendo. "'If the current management believes they have the vision of what an opera company should be, then let them play elsewhere, but they have no right to hijack the legacy, the traditions, and the name of the New York City Opera Company, which has meant so much to so many,'" she intoned. "'I call on the knowledgeable members of the board of directors to stand firm and reject what amounts to the death sentence of our New York City Opera.'"

James Odom, the President of the American Guild of Musical Artists, was met with a chorus of "here, here” when he pointed a finger at City Opera's leadership. "It is shameful that they want a premier arts institution to turn itself into a traveling college volunteer production company," he said. "I do not know how they can stand and face people."

Councilwoman Gale A. Brewer, Assemblywoman Linda Rosenthal, and State Senator Tom Duane also spoke against the decision. (Mr. Duane spent the majority of his speech villifying the Koch Brothers for donating to Lincoln Center and not keeping City Opera afloat. He urged those who care about the opera to join him in boycotting Koch Industry's Brawny paper towels, despite the temptation of "that hot '70s guy on the packaging.")

But City Opera employees took a graver tone.  "Our jobs are at stake," Frank Bruiser, a chorus member a City Opera since 1977, told The Observer.

"Most people think this is an economic problem, but the real problem is a whole series of incredible blunders," added Bruiser’s colleague, baritone Neil Eddinger. "George Steel, who has no prior experience with opera, is trying to shrink the company to his comfort level, which is experimental theater and non-professional pieces."

As the crowd dissipated and the podium was carted away, Ms. Malfitano said, "If we don't have solidarity, this is never going to work--we need to all come together and solve this."

Fans camped outside Lincoln Center for tonight's Harry Potter red carpet premiere.

Preparing to watch the wizarding world's final battle unfold, hundreds of muggle fans are engaging in a battle of their own. It may not be a fight of good versus evil, but that doesn’t make their struggle any less determined.

"We sleep in shifts," said a fan who has camped for five days outside Lincoln Center to spot the stars at tonight’s red carpet premiere. "We have to be at the front of the line when they get here."

Dressed in head-to-toe Harry Potter regalia, hundreds have slept on the street across from Lincoln Center for up to six days in the hopes of spotting a favorite cast member. Sleeping bags and blankets lined Dante Park, and fans perched atop a statue of Alighieri himself to escape the hoard, Gryffindor and Ravenclaw face paint dripping down their necks in the 91° heat.

"I get sleazy for Ron Weasley," read Maryelle Smith's poster.  Maryelle told The Observer she isn’t exaggerating. "It's 100% true. I wouldn't say that about many guys, but Rupert Grint, mmmm," she said. "I've been in love with him since the first movie."

And Megan Kidwell said she spent over $2,000 traveling from Illinois to meet Matthew Lewis, the actor who plays Neville Longbottom. With "I [heart] Matthew Lewis" painted on her face, she says the opportunity to meet him is "priceless."

When The Observer mentioned that this was the final movie in the Potter franchise, we were met with a chorus of shrieks -- a few even plugged their ears. "I don't want to think about it! Don't even bring it up," said Jennifer Crumb, who arrived at the front of the line six days ago from Florida. "It's the one last time they'll all be together, so it's just too much for me."

Her friend, Bridget Claire, said she quit her waitressing job for a chance to meet the stars. "They weren't going to give me time off to come here, but this is something I love, so it's totally worth it."

The fans have pursued their front-of-the-line spots with an almost religious fervor.  "We need everyone to know that we were here first," said Ms. Crumb.

“It’s more than just movies; it’s our childhood ending,” said Natasha, who has stayed second in line for five days. “"For the first few nights we weren't allowed to sleep here, so we had to wander the streets. At least the past few nights we got to sleep a little on the ground."

Harry, Ron, and Hermione may have camped out in the Forrest of Dean, but even they never braved sleeping on New York City streets.

The film, screened last night at Anthology Film Archives before the tenth anniversary of 9/11, chronicles the struggle of activists, friends, and lawyers to free Abdel-Muhti. It is part of an ongoing project by Third World Newsreel, which aims to bring attention to the mistreatment of minorities and immigrants in the wake of 9/11, and was shown following a series of related shorts.

The director, Konrad Aderer, compares Abdel-Muhti’s detention to his grandparents' experience in a Japanese-American internment camp in Utah, where his mother was born. "I'd grown up with the idea that internment happened a long time ago and America had apologized," he told The Observer. "But when I saw the sort of discourse and rhetoric happening again, and similar actions being taken--and not a lot of mainstream media coverage--I wanted to put a spotlight on it."

The film spotlights governmental paranoia. Abdel-Muhti is charged with using aliases because his name is transliterated in multiple ways. In what Aderer called the "scariest part of the movie," the INS stops him from filming outside a prison and confiscates his tapes. After reviewing them, the police are alarmed by footage of Abdel-Muhti’s son waving a sword in an attempt to satirize jihadism. An INS officer tells Aderer that he cannot ask Abdel-Muhti about prison conditions when he finally interviews him. And a fellow inmate recalls a prison guard beating Abdel-Muhti and yelling, “You have no fucking rights, fucking Palestinian!”

In one particularly stunning scene, congressional hopeful and immigration lawyer Michael Wildes -- Ted Kennedy once said that he had "high expectations" of seeing him in Congress – appears to defend Japanese-American internment.

"What about the argument that when we look back at what happened with Pearl Harbor and the Japanese Americans, everyone agrees that it was wrong?" asks a voice from offscreen.

"Who agrees? Who agrees?" asks Wildes.  Pressed further, he says, "I think, you know... exigent times call for very strenuous reactions."

In the course of making the film, Aderer said he was particularly struck by that exchange. "That was a galvanizing moment for me when I found myself talking to an immigration lawyer called on by the government as a terrorism expert (and a Democrat politician) who questioned that the camps were wrong,” Aderer said in an email.

In a phone conversation with The Observer, Wildes said his opinion was misrepresented in the film. He called Japanese internment "one of the biggest scars in American history and a tremendous embarrassment."  What's more, he said, he believes that detention without due process is "completely inappropriate."

(Aderer sent The Observer a more complete transcript of the interview, in which Wildes said, "The rules change when people take planes into buildings.")

Despite the unflattering portrayal, Wildes said, "I think movies like this are good because they shine the light in corners that generally don't get attention, and then we learn from them."

Aderer hopes his film can do just that. As he said, "It’s unfortunate that a decade later people still don’t know a lot about what happened: 1200 people were rounded up right after the attacks, and none of them turned out to be connected with terrorism.”

In the film, Aderer cites statistics from the 9/11 Commission Report: 140,000 people were targeted for Special Registration, 11 of whom the Department of Homeland Security claimed--on what the Commission said were questionable grounds--were connected with terrorist organizations; the Absconder Initiative targeted 6,000 Arabs and South Asians for arrest and interrogation but did not catch a single terrorist.

"I think it’s tragic that these types of things happen in the United States when we represent ideals that are so much higher,” Aderer said. “I'm trying to encourage people to be more aware of what's happening in front of us. We need to see that after attacks there's a natural xenophobic reaction, and we have to understand it for what it is."

Ai Weiwei's self-portrait, 1987. c/o Asia Society Museum.

Three decades before his arrest and subsequent release last week by the Chinese government incited a media firestorm, Ai Weiwei worked as a Times Square street portraitist.

Enrolled at Parsons and living on the Lower East Side, he encountered drug dealers in abandoned buildings, a gritty underground arts scene, and police brutality at Tomkins Square Park riots — all of them captured in the Asia Society Museum’s new exhibit of his photographs, which opened yesterday.

Distilled from an original 10,000 photographs that Ai shot in his decade here before returning to China, the selection of 227 black-and-white images portrays a New York plagued by AIDS and urban blight — a city in stark contrast to Ai’s native China. “I was actually kind of surprised that so many people call America a civilized society,” Ai said in an interview conducted for the exhibit. “It’s not all that civilized because each person still has a lot of burdens. Americans don’t enjoy life as much.”

Ai’s sense of American burdens is unmistakable in his photographs. There’s one of a homeless man in a subway entrance wearing a sign that reads, “I Have AIDS Ples Help.” There’s another picture that features a protestor with blood flowing down his face, another of a protester waving a sign that says, “No police state!” One of the tenser shots features police lined up on the edge of a riot, ready to pounce.

Seeing the protests in New York City gave Ai “a strong sense of the power of the individual voice,” museum director and exhibit curator Melissa Chiu told The Observer. Known for his anti-government-laden Tweets, blog posts and artistic works (he famously gave Tiananmen Square the finger), Ai said in the same interview, “I was interested in individual rights, group rights, and their relation to power — power in the form of police control — and the resulting confrontations and abuse of those rights.”

That’s not to say that the exhibit is confined to political subjects. The photographs also reveal Ai’s impulse to record his personal life – living circumstances in a cramped East 3^rd Street apartment, a nude self-portrait reminiscent of Duchamp’s Rrose Selavy, and a lady-friend smiling and pointing at an old-fashioned cinema display that features “Hot Orgy,” “Carnal Desires,” and “Wet Fantasy.”

The exhibit also highlights Ai’s meticulous documentation of the downtown arts circle to which he belonged. Photos of Allen Ginsberg in his apartment accompany those of other Chinese artists in the nascent stages of their careers; notables like Tan Dun, Chen Kaige and Xu Bing feature prominently in his pictures.  One gets the sense that the Chinese artistic community was gathered around Ai — even before his debut as an international rabble-rouser.

The exhibit is on view at the Asia Society Museum until August 14.

As crowds of tourists milled around on the way to Broadway matinees, staff members in USA t-shirts ushered them into five "stress relief zones," as they called the distinct areas designated for sumo wrestling, boxing with 6-foot high punching bags, dancing “to silent music” (with headphones on), hurling footballs at a target, and receiving complimentary massages. The synthetic grass-carpeted field looked out of place amid Times Square’s usual foot-traffic congestion. Signs advertised, "USA Network's THERAPLAY: Therapy has never been this fun."

New York Jets star running back LaDainian Tomlinson, who was hired to promote the show, signed autographs and posed for photos against a USA wallpapered background.  Tightly gripping his miniature "Necessary Roughness" football (wouldn’t want to fumble a promotional event), he told The Observer, "I really think it's a great thing they're doing here because a lot of people probably don't know about [sports therapy] and they walk through here and realize they can get massages and sumo wrestle and all this stuff."

"Actually I have tried this kind of therapy with boxing," he admitted, as a young boy with a disposable camera shouted "LT!"  He added-- raising his voice above Gnarls Barkley's "Crazy" on the stereo-- "Obviously I get massages all the time."

While the event's marketing appeared to target stressed New Yorkers (advertisements asked consumers to "tackle their issues and loosen up"), the primary clientele were children; adults, for the most part, watched on the sidelines as their kids and teens strapped on sumo suits and rolled around on the "field," dancing to their favorite music on headphones.

“It looked like fun for the kids, so we’re going to throw the ball around—we just got a massage!” said Brian Mahoney, on vacation from Miami with his son Matthew.

Adult New Yorkers, however, seemed too busy to waste an hour boxing or sumo wrestling.  Pedestrians looked on in bemusement at the little Theraplay oasis in the center of the city that never sleeps (let alone de-stresses!)