Spitz.

“I’ve not left Manhattan in two and a half years,” Marc Spitz told The Observer over breakfast in a chic West Village café last week. “When I turned forty, I was just like, buckle down, do good work, do whatever it takes.”

He paused and rubbed his forehead, “Don’t drink with actors.”

The 41 year-old music journalist-cum-biographer-cum-novelist-cum-playwright laughed from behind his tortoise-shell sunglasses which were concealing a hangover. Though he visibly hasn’t been adhering to his own advice, his writing, as of late, has certainly been prolific. In the last ten years he has written three novels and three biographies, the latest of which, Jagger: Rebel, Rockstar, Rambler, Rogue, is on shelves today, published by Gotham Books.

His books were his way of making money when print journalism wasn’t able to pay the bills. “It’s just like a super-sized cover story. And I got really good at writing them,” he reasoned, referring to the 15 or so he has written for Spin. “So I thought, ‘O.K.,’ what’s the next step up from doing this? And so [biographies] was the answer to that question.”

But he has kept up with his roots in rock journalism all the while, which began way back when you had to go to Tower Records to find a song or an album. “Now, if you hear a song, it doesn’t haunt you because you can literally snipe it out of the air and it’ll tell you what it is” - you just hold your phone up to the music and use Shazam to find out what it is.

The music and journalism industries have altered so much that Spitz believes the job he once did no longer exists. He likens himself to a primitive hunter on a modernized terrain: “I’m just holding the gun and like, ‘Where’s the buffalo?’” Although he resents going straight to the internet for a song, Spitz is not technologically illiterate by any means, and blogs daily for Vanity Fair.

He always wanted to write plays, though, and you can tell they are what matters to him at the moment because he remains near the theater, even though none of the 12 or 13 (he can’t remember exactly how many) he has done since 1998 have made any money. The plays haven’t fared well away from what Spitz called their off-off-Broadway turf in L.A. or at The Aspen Comedy Festival, where they have shown to poor reception.

“It didn’t translate,” he said simply.

When he started out, the Ludlow Street scene where his plays were put on was one of theaters instead of bars. “It was still a little dirty and druggy and the plays were dirty and druggy,” he remembered. Spitz and his director and actor friends still inhabit that scene, but it is rapidly evaporating, leaving them alone in the once crowded neighborhood. “There’s a sort of a sense of – like, you know, where’s everyone else? This is supposed to be New York.”

Still, Spitz later pointed out that when Dylan moved here in the 60s, there were people saying, “The scene is dead.”

“The scene is always dead and always reinventing itself,” he rejoined.

But coverage of the scene is certainly waning. At the beginning of their theatrical foray, they were featured in Village Voice and The New York Press and some of their plays even moved into bigger theaters. But now they’re back in the smaller theaters where they began.

'P.S. It's Poison', September 8-17, 2011, is directed by Arthur Aulisi.

It is easy to understand why there are not hoards of people in the audience: his latest offering, P.S. It’s Poison, which opens today at The Red Room on East 4th Street, is gritty and uncompromising like the music industry and theater scene Spitz mourns, and sees a return to the gun, bag of heroin, and sexual confusion of his first few plays. It explores the tensions of relationships and of ageing at a dinner party of five artsy friends of varying talent, success and self-centeredness. And a ditsy, younger plus one from out of town who is out of place and out of her depth. Similar to how Spitz feels in the new New York he now lives in.

It is spatially dense, set in a one-bedroom apartment in Lower Manhattan, perhaps not far from the theater it is performed in. New York references – to The Observer, no less – abound, and the kind of inward-looking conversations of close friends – the ones that are hard for any outsider to follow – dominate. For all their linguistic adroitness, they don’t use it kindly; there is a lack of sympathy among the characters which terrifies.

Spitz admitted it is angry, but, he said, “There’s a certain musicality to it; I wanted a sort of escalation where literally there’s bodies on the floor at the end.”

It’s funny, too, in a Beckettian apathy sort of way. The opening scene revolves around a long-winded, anti-climactic story about how one of the characters, Roth, saw a fisherman on the Hudson who catches a fish but doesn’t kill it, leaving it gulping for air beside him as it dies. Roth looks on, doing nothing.

“You pussed on the fish”, his friend Ozone later tells him.

The scene resonated with Spitz as he admitted, “I’m that guy. I pussed on the fish.”

Whatever the fish may symbolize, it is not Spitz’s indifference to his writing. In the play, Ozone insists that writing doesn’t have to be a life choice.

“Part of me hopes that it’s not true,” Spitz said. “It’s definitely a harder life, a lonelier life.”

Sometimes, when he is walking his dogs, he imagines they are kids and longs for “just this” and not to have to be “such a raw nerve when you’re walking down the street.”

But, still, he keeps writing .

At the moment, he is working on a documentary about the rise and fall of music journalism from jazz through R&B to the current realm of the blogosphere. “Take away Almost Famous, and what else has explored that life? It’s an interesting life and they’re crazy people. They’re sort of intense in their own way.”

It is an intensity that Spitz himself possesses, and for all its isolating effects, it has something of the idealist-in-the-face-of-extinction about it.

He returned to the events of the night before when he had been with the cast of his play at rehearsals: “I was outside on the stoop of the theatre, and I was like, god, I’m still here. I’m smoking a cigarette–why am I smoking a cigarette? When is this going to change? And I realized that – that it’s just not going to change.”

The stalwart of old Ludlow Street looked through his dark glasses at the café with its mint-green walls and cupcakes on the counter.

“And there’s like a beauty in that.”

Installing the stars. Photo: The Windmill Factory.

Wednesday night, as The Observer crossed the West Side Highway at Bank Street and walked over to Pier 49, the pink-orange sun was reflecting onto the Hudson River, and people had filled the surrounding patches of grass, waiting for the official unveiling of a new public artwork by artist Jon Morris called Reflecting the Stars, which was sitting out in the water.

Mr. Morris and his team had spent the past few days attaching wirelessly controlled, solar-powered LED lamps onto the gnarled wooden posts that once constituted the pier in an arrangement that replicates the constellations that one would see in the night sky, looking west from the pier, were it not for New York’s substantial light pollution.

The opening had been delayed by 24 hours because the threat posed by Hurricane Irene had forced his installation team to remove an accompanying plaque and solar panels days before it was due to open. “They can get rained on, but they can’t be submerged,” Mr. Morris told The Observer.

“We left the stars in the water,” Mr. Morris said, “and some of them got skewed out of place, but we didn’t lose any.” He sounded elated. “Then we had to reprogram everything and there just wasn’t enough time.”

The project had cost $25,000 to install and was paid for by a variety of companies and foundations. It will be in place until there is no longer enough power from the sun to light them up at night—“probably the end of October or the beginning of November,” Mr. Morris said.

New York assemblyman Linda Rosenthal and Charles Renfro of Diller Scofidio + Renfro, the architecture firm behind the nearby High Line, were on hand to discuss their support for the project.

For Ms. Rosenthal, the work also has political significance. She is currently working to pass a bill that would create dark-sky reserves, light-free areas set aside to allow people to see the night sky, and promote new shades for streetlamps that would lessen their blinding glare. “At the moment I have a lot of opposition,” she said, “but something like this could really turn things around.”

Mr. Renfro took a more philosophical approach to the work. “Reflecting the Stars links itself to realms near and distant,” he said. “It is a new way of observing our surroundings, helping us imagine the invisible if mankind were not so visible.”

New York has become a bastion for public art lovers of late. We asked Renfro how this was different from public art elsewhere in the city.

“I like the city’s public art,” he said. “But this has the whimsy of The High Line; it connects with something else.”

Later, Mr. Morris told the crowd that Buddhism advises its devotees to go out and look up at the night sky in order to relieve stress. We tried to imagine looking up at his LED stars from the bottom of the Hudson, but we couldn’t quite manage it.

“We look down at the stars today,” we thought, as the blue-white lights flickered on and off in their constellations in the now dark, starless sky.

They want to be Roxy Hart.

"You see, everyone thinks they've got it," said Arne Gundersen.

The president of the Actor’s Equity Foundation and a judge of Broadway.tv’s new competition Next Broadway Star and I were standing by the side of the still empty red carpet for the competition’s first of four rounds on Monday, at the unlikely venue of McDonalds on 42^nd Street. His remark was prompted by a woman dressed in a sky blue shirt and a long, patterned skirt, after she wandered over and asked what was going on.

“Is it auditions? Can anyone go in?” Her voice was quiet and wistful as she looked up at the golden arches.

Mr. Gundersen and the show’s other two judges, Gunnar Larson, President and CEO of NetworkGlobal Companies which owns Broadway.tv, and Duncan Stewart, Broadway Casting Director behind Chicago the Musical and La Cage aux Folles, explained that unfortunately the sixteen contestants had already been selected for the competition.

Mr. Gundersen went on insisting that “the weeding out is a big deal. There is a lot of talent in New York” – and uncovering that talent was Mr. Larson’s intention in setting up the competition.

“What I’m looking for,” Mr. Stewart said, his palms clasped together in a stage-like gesture, “is something that pops. That might be a look, a voice, a charm factor. Ideally a combination.”

Whoever has that combination will receive $5,000, as well as the opportunity to audition in front of the most influential casting directors and producers in the industry. 

The red carpet (which was more like a rug) was getting busy. We watched as Russell Fischer, the 22 year-old recently cast in Jersey Boys, the long-haired Marshall Kennedy Carolan of Hair, and other Broadway successes jumped instantly into their Broadway personas in front of the cameras.

Then the sixteen would-be Broadway stars whose pop – or lack thereof – was about to be revealed, emerged from their rehearsals and posed for the press uncertainly. There were some awkward reshuffles of smiles and skirts – as if they were not yet comfortable with the beaming Broadway smile. They then went inside to perform their acts on a Broadway stage of sorts. There they would be whittled down to ten.

As we watched from the back and tried not to wince each time the faulty microphone shrieked, we wondered whether the quiet, wistful woman would have been any good.

Times Square (Photo Edit: Terabass)

Broadway box offices took a major blow due to Hurricane Irene last week, with total grosses dropping 39 percent from the $20-million figure that shows earned the previous week, according to statistics provided by the Broadway League.

The sizeable drop is the result of Broadway shows being shuttered on their two most profitable days, Saturday and Sunday, when most productions stage three shows.

The shows that took the biggest hits were Wicked, Spider-Man Turn Off the Dark and The Lion King. Despite only having five performances, those shows still managed to be the highest earners in comparison to other Broadway shows. Spider-Man Turn of the Dark earned $933,424, while The Lion King and Wicked each earned more than $1 million.

Billy Elliot, another popular show, grossed only $358,485 last week, less than half the $731,895 figure it earned the previous week.

Off Broadway shows suffered as well. Cirque Du Soleil’s Zarkana, which closed for the weekend, lost out on the opportunity to sell 22,000 tickets. The group declined to release financial figures to The Observer.

Broadway has typically prided itself on staying open during even the worst weather conditions. This was its first emergency shutdown since the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.

The canceled screenings, of Donizetti’s Don Pasquale (1843) and Verdi’s Simon Boccanegra (1857), which were scheduled for Saturday and Sunday, respectively, will not be rescheduled, according to the Met’s press office. The Met Opera Guild, which organizes lectures that precede each screening, said that its accompanying programs for those days will not be rescheduled.

The ten-day festival, which has now been slimmed to eight days, provides seating for 3,000 people and is free to the public. Met officials advise arriving two hours before the screen lights up (start times vary, so check the schedule), in order to secure a spot.

Suddenly upgraded to the lead-off position in the festival is Gluck’s Iphigénie en Tauride (1779), which hits the screen at 8:30 p.m. tonight. Other highlights this week include Puccini’s La Rondine (1917), on Tuesday at 8 p.m., and Bizet’s Carmen (1845), which will appear on Thursday at 7:45 p.m.

Alas, Thomas Ades’s 2004 version of Shakespeare’s The Tempest will not be shown, though the Met is planning to present the work for the first time during its 2012-2013 season.

Peter Halley, Up & Down.

Geometry is destiny, at least in the work of Peter Halley, whose Day-Glo prisons, cells and conduits have been familiar icons since the mid-’80s. Mr. Halley has proved to be reliably consistent, from his choice of acid-hued paints to his use of Roll-A-Tex, a gritty product that lends his work an architectural edge. At first glance, the artist’s airy studio at 526 West 26th Street, filled with rows of colorful paint containers surrounded by canvases in various stages (and dominated by a huge classical cast of Poseidon that Mr. Halley acquired from the Athens Museum), could be a day-care center for child prodigies. But Mr. Halley, 57, who recently stepped down as director of Graduate Studies in Painting at Yale, has an enviably stable midlife career. A Halley installation is included in this year’s Venice Biennale, and he has his first show at Galerie Thomas Modern in Munich this September: eleven canvases and one huge digital wall installation—a multipaneled grid of exploding cells.

Mr. Halley has been playing with permutations of the same modular building blocks—three basic geometric components—ever since he, Jeff Koons, Ashley Bickerton and Meyer Vaisman became overnight sensations with what was more or less their very own art movement, Neo Geo, which was as instantly reviled as it was celebrated. The so-called Hot Four, as they were dubbed by New York Magazine, officially made it onto the map in 1986. Three of them had already been showing at International With Monument, on East Seventh Street, which was co-owned by Elizabeth Koury, Ealan Wingate and Mr. Vaisman. But behind the scenes, the ambitious Mr. Vaisman had engineered a deal with Ileana Sonnabend, the legendary gallerist and ex-wife of Leo Castelli. The much-hyped move to Sonnabend’s Soho gallery, which entailed many machinations—even by art world standards of expert manipulation—was widely perceived as Machiavellian. Still, critics, who saw Neo Geo as a welcome antidote to that other neo, Neo-Expressionism, raved about the actual show when it opened that October, praising its “cool calculation.”

If Jeff Koons was the cute one of the fab four, the one even then with a showman’s flair for self-promotion, Mr. Halley (still bespectacled but now gray-haired) was the smart one, whose cerebral paintings weren’t just geometrical abstracts but philosophically linked to such deconstructionists as Jean Baudrillard and Michel Foucault. Mr. Halley had already made somewhat of a name for himself for his critical writing, even before his first show at International With Monument in 1985. As Mr. Vaisman said at the time, “A lot of people hated Peter’s work in the beginning. Now they love it and claim they’ve always loved it. Some people feel that they have to love it or else they’re going to be seen as fools.”

As Mr. Halley himself puts it, “I always wanted to be a public intellectual. I was interested in Foucalt and Baudrillard and everything they had to say about the social experience of space in our society. And that in turn seemed to reflect Warhol’s ideas, who was, I guess, my most important intellectual mentor.” (A black-and-white Warhol portrait of Mr. Halley, done in 1986, hangs in the studio bathroom.)

Mr. Halley, the son of a prominent attorney and politician, Rudolph Halley, who died when he was 3, was born and bred in New York. His father investigated organized crime for the U.S. Senate and ran unsuccessfully for mayor. There were also art connections: Mr. Halley’s great uncle, Aaron Wyn, published William Burroughs. And Allen Ginsberg’s epic poem “Howl” is dedicated to Carl Solomon, Mr. Halley’s father’s first cousin. Mr. Halley attended Phillips Academy before going to Yale. But after being rejected by the art program, he studied art history. He got his master’s at the University of New Orleans, returning to New York in 1980, just when artists like Julian Schnabel and David Salle were exploding onto the scene.

“When I got here I found that there were people like Cindy Sherman, Richard Prince and Barbara Kruger, mostly connected with the Pictures Generation, doing really interesting things,” the artist recalls. “And on the other hand there was Neo-Expressionism, which, with all respect to the individual artists, seemed like the idea of the art world gone mad. It reminded me of Sleeper, when Woody Allen wakes up in the future and Rod McKuen is a great poet, and all these things that seemed like the aspects of art that I consider negative had become dominant.”

In stark contrast, Mr. Halley’s work—brazenly conceptual—was like a cartoon schematic of an urban environment or cross-section of a basic building. Thanks to its linear elements, which reference everything from Abu Ghraib to computer circuitry, it has remained visually timeless. Says Scott Nussbaum of Sotheby’s, “The prison is always going to be a relevant image, as is the cell, particularly in our digital age. And the concept that we are connected electronically is now even more true than it was in ’80s, when the imagery first emerged. These types of images reverberate continuously and powerfully to anybody who is paying attention to world events, whether it’s the stock market or riots in London.”

Says the photographer Timothy Greenfield-Sanders, a longtime friend who was also a contributor to Mr. Halley’s art magazine Index (published from 1996 to 2005, and loosely modeled on Warhol’s Interview) “Peter was way ahead of his time. I think he was way ahead of the digital age. Today we take it so for granted that we have a cell phone. Everything is digital—everything is bits—and Peter was aware of that in the ’80s, when we were still getting used to fax machines.”

While they can look futuristic and almost antihumanistic, the artist says that his paintings are, in fact, autobiographical. Mr. Halley stops in front of a large, bifurcated canvas, depicting an orange prison against a deep blue background above another prison, light blue, bordered in yellow against a red background, with two blue conduits feeding into its top. “These paintings began in terms of the prison being a kind of self-portraiture or self-representation, and they were gender-based,” he says, pointing to the trade-mark bars. “I thought of guys as sort of in prison, if you think of guys being uptight. So it was sort of the imprisonment of even myself as an individual, as I related to myself as a middle-class male. You know the beatnik term for an uptight person is a square? So here’s a square and a prison and also a feeling of isolation.”

Even the painting’s rough surface has a personal meaning. “I started using the Roll-A-Tex to give the square or the prison an architectural feature. Now Roll-A-Tex is a strange thing. I’ve been using it since 1981, and I always shy a little bit from autobiography, but even when I was much younger, I didn’t shave every day, and I usually have a little stubble, so this stubbly surface like a man’s beard sort of fed into that gender identification.”

Although he quickly found his artistic voice, Mr. Halley’s first days in New York were solitary. “I didn’t know many people. It was a very lonely time and it was a very big city, and I began making prison paintings, because I felt very isolated. But the thing that happened afterwards is that I felt maybe I wasn’t so isolated. I began to think about the prisons or cells being connected, or myself being connected to others in terms of technology, telephones and cable TV and the grid in the city, and that’s how I got interested in this spatial system of cells and prisons connected to other cells and prisons, in a sort of human-made technological environment. And I feel I sort of lucked into something—like Dan Flavin with the fluorescent lights—because over the next 30 years that ended up being about the extension of the communications environment and the web.”

Although many people would label Mr. Halley’s work as abstract, he sees his work as not only represetnational but also comical. “I think my paintings are funny,” he says. “They are mostly based on a kind of overly naïve or simplistic schematic theme, almost like in Krazy Kat. And I find that whole thing quite slapstick. And I think sometimes my color is funny. A large part of the root of my creativity is humor. I’ll be working on a painting and I’ll think, this would be funny. If I put this green here, what a joke.”

Soon after the Neo Geo show, Mr. Halley joined the Sonnabend gallery. “I eventually left because the art market was in really bad shape and I had two small children and I felt the gallery’s philosophy was they were content to let people come to them.” But in 1992, when Mr. Halley jumped to the Gagosian Gallery, where Ealan Wingate was then ensconced, Sonnabend lost no time suing Larry Gagosian, the Gagosian Gallery and Mr. Halley for breach of contract. (The lawsuit was eventually dropped.) “For me it was a nightmare,” Mr. Halley says, shaking his head. After that, not only were Ms. Sonnabend and Mr. Halley not on speaking terms, “even worse, I think I was the only person in the art world that Leo Castelli wouldn’t talk to.”

Mr. Halley did one show at Gagosian, where he remained until 1994. “But basically I broke it off because he [Larry] wasn’t able to live up to the terms of the agreement.” Still, he left the gallery on good terms. Says Mr. Halley of Mr. Gagosian, “He has great taste and a great eye and beautiful spaces and subsequently moved in the direction of becoming an unbelievably effective impresario. And in that sense he has created a unique model for a gallery. And I guess just as Larry found out he was an impresario, I found out I was happiest working with a pretty big constellation of smaller galleries each of which had their own signal collectors.” (Mr. Halley has shown with Mary Boone in New York since 2002; he also has half-a-dozen galleries in Europe and one in Moscow, in addition to Galerie Thomas.)

Says Mr. Wingate, who until recently had a Halley hanging in his country home, “I think he is somebody who has a terrific embrace of a palette which is difficult to take, and he’s not afraid of being visually abrasive, which I think is quite thrilling. His work livens up anything in a room. It’s terrific to live with, and it’s jokey. It’s like a Rothko of our time, done after the film Brazil.”

Does he ever long for the stratospheric fame of his youthful Neo Geo comrade Mr. Koons? “I don’t want to be a supercelebrity—I’m not the type,” the artist says emphatically. Still, he takes some credit for Mr. Koons’s initial success. “Early on I had a really key role in Jeff Koons’s career, because I wrote about him and then I introduced him to Meyer Vaisman. I like to remind people that I sort of half-discovered Jeff. As everybody got better known, I was really disappointed in him, because he was really claiming this sort of mantle of genius. And his ideas about self-promotion and money and the artistic persona he got for himself I thought were much closer to Neo-Expressionists than something I had hoped that this new generation would have used.” But, he insists, his primary response is not envy. “I don’t want people to think that’s who artists are.”

The soft-spoken Mr. Halley has a daughter (Isabel, 25, who with Laurie Simmons and Carroll Dunham’s daughter Lena created the website Original Downtown Divas) and a son (Thomas, 21, who is studying neurobiology) with his first wife, Caroline Stewart. After a self-confessed dry spell of nearly a decade, Mr. Halley married the painter Ann Craven, whom he met at Yale, last January. As for his show at Galerie Thomas, known for its blue-chip artists, “I kind of like being the youngest artist in the gallery. I’m happy as a clam,” he said.

Because he was a genius, Caravaggio kept catching breaks. Because he could not truckle, he kept screwing them up. The inability to tone it down was not a pose; the artist lacked an off switch. In the winter of 1605, Caravaggio was engaged to produce an altarpiece for Saint Peter’s Cathedral in Rome, the Park Avenue of painterly real estate. It was the loftiest commission he had ever received. The result, The Madonna of the Serpent, was exquisite. It was also a nonstarter. “He had stressed [the Madonna’s] tenderness,” writes Andrew Graham-Dixon in Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane, “leaning down over the child with gentle solicitude, but in the process he had revealed quite a lot of her cleavage.” The commissioners balked. The zaftig Virgin would not cut it. Caravaggio was turned away, his Madonna spurned.

In retrospect, the most surprising thing about the episode is that anyone was surprised. All the artist had done was live up to the reputation that got him the gig. Caravaggio is the father of Tenebrism, a method of painting that combines photorealistic granularity with Gothic dinginess. “He composed by staging scenes, or fragments of scenes, that he knitted together, collage-like, on his canvas, using shadow to mask the joints,” writes Mr. Graham Dixon. The technique behind it is known as chiaroscuro. Its effect on painting was comparable to that of grunge on music, or Hemingway on prose—at once a roughing-up and a paring-down, enacted in the name of cutting out the crap. It was a reaction to the conceits of an earlier age.

The Renaissance had been a time of aesthetic idealism; it erected a cult to ideal images. An ugly subject (a rape, a murder, a martyrdom) was merely a more complex opportunity for beauty. Human bodies, especially, had to look good. They had to be tuned, proportioned, poised. Caravaggio’s innovation was to revert to what he saw right in front of him. Michelangelo Buanarotti had mined Attic Greece for his models; Michelangelo da Caravaggio discovered his muse somewhere between the barroom and the back alley. “To animate the old stories of Christianity, to make them seem as though taking place in the present day, he had developed his own unique method,” Mr. Graham-Dixon writes, “he would systematically restage the sacred dramas, using real, flesh-and-blood people, and paint the results.” He painted whores, crones, wayfarers, the proles and perps of contemporary Rome. He adapted the Good Book to the idiom of the guttersnipe.

It was an exacting aesthetic. It left out landscape, sunlight, heavenly choirs, healthy cuticles. It put in grime; Caravaggio is the great painter of toejam. “Caravaggio was also becoming famous as the great painter of feet.” The result altered the DNA of Biblical imagery. Gone was the grandeur of a Raphael, the pure blues and unblemished pastures: “There is very little landscape in Caravaggio, very little feel of the open air.” In its place, stooped figures grappled in the gloom. Many of Caravaggio’s women have more in common with mollusks than they do with Botticelli’s maidens.

“In life as in art he hid what he wanted to hide in the shadows,” Mr. Graham-Dixon notes. The fragmentary paper trail of Caravaggio’s life oddly simulates the aesthetic that made it famous. The rap sheet shadows the oeuvre; the rumors inflect the facts. And indeed, a Dutch contemporary “described [Caravaggio] as a piece of living chiaroscuro.” The test for biographers of Caravaggio has therefore been to mimic the artist’s signature move—to make the murk eloquent. It requires style as well as research. Mr. Graham-Dixon pulls it off.

Michelangelo da Caravaggio grew up in Lombardy, splitting time between Milan and the exurb of his surname. He was lowborn, provincial, unlikely. Although previous biographers have made much of Caravaggio’s apprenticeship to Simone Peterzano, a mediocre local artist, Mr. Graham-Dixon argues, persuasively, that it meant little. “There was no reason to believe he was anything but an unruly teenager.” Caravaggio left Lombardy in his early 20s. He had the touchiness of the upstart; the orneriness of the autodidact. He may, according to some accounts, already have committed a murder. His destination was Rome.

The city flowed with testosterone. “Rome was not just an overwhelmingly male city; it was a city full of young and unattached men competing desperately with one another for favours.” There were 10,000 artists in a population of 100,000. The odds were bad, and they were compounded by Caravaggio’s temperament. But Caravaggio made it anyway, ascending from the streets into the retinue of an enlightened churchman, Cardinal Guidobaldo Del Monte. (The Cardinal looked “a little bit like a chess piece come to life,” as Mr. Graham-Dixon wonderfully describes him.) Under his aegis, Caravaggio grew famous. The fame had a tinge of infamy.

“There is no sign that success mellowed him,” Mr. Graham Dixon observes. Caravaggio’s rise augured his fall. His paintings were tense with violence. “The picture’s subject is a yearning for death so strong that it resembles sexual desire,” as the author writes of St. Catherine of Alexandria. Everywhere he went, Caravaggio wore a sword. He slurred rivals and irked the law. He brawled over women, artichokes, art criticism. Such was his entwinement with prostitutes that Mr. Graham-Dixon concludes, convincingly, that he was a pimp. A feud with a competitor reached the boiling point, and Caravaggio killed him in a tennis court. A bando capitale was imposed: “This meant that anyone in the papal stats had the right to kill him with impunity,” He skipped town, never to return.

From there he went to Naples—and then onto the isle of Malta, where he labored to become a knight, a rank that would annul the bando capitale. It took a year. A month after knighthood was granted to him, Caravaggio was stripped of it for assaulting a peer. Before Caravaggio died, in 1610, awaiting a pardon on the outskirts of Rome, that same peer would hunt him down and slash his face—“perhaps partially blind[ing]” him. His comeuppance had caught up with him. Caravaggio’s art did not recover.

Mr. Graham Dixon is an able tracker of his elusive subject. He tells a good story; he updates the factual record; he upends old hypotheses, and proposes others. Caravaggio was bisexual. He committed homicide in a duel, not a spontaneous ruckus. He painted his David in Rome. Where Mr. Graham-Dixon excels, however, is in the indication of irony. Caravaggio was a populist, yet his audience, while he lived, was elite; his paintings were too candid about the lives of the masses for mass consumption. Status obsessed the man, but scum mesmerized his art. The pious Catholic killer pimp “opened a Pandora’s Box of vulgarity.” Mr. Graham-Dixon is paraphrasing the observation of an enemy of Caravaggio’s here, but there may be something to it. The biographer gives Martin Scorsese, an avowed Caravaggiste, the last word in his book. Still, Caravaggio’s true cinematic heir may lie elsewhere. Blood and guts, rags and gloom, the literal-minded depiction of illiteracy—this sounds like a movie by Mel Gibson.

Broker Sami Hassoumi told The Observer earlier today that rennovations (we're talking another $10 million), a divorce, and a shaky market were to blame for the mansion being toppled from its pride of place as the most expensive property in the city.

The price may have fallen but Kirk Henkels, Executive Vice President and Director of Stribling Private Brokerage, insists that it is positive and shows that the market is experiencing a rebound. "The money is there and if it's exactly what buyers want, you're seeing bidding wars," he said. No one's going to fight over a house with a temporary staircase though.

At the end of the day, only one thing matters in Manhattan real estate, and that is the price tag. Here are the properties that now rank ahead of the Harkness on the real estate leaderboard.

Hughes. Courtesy Amy Wilton.

­­Home to Walt Whitman, the father of American poetry, Brooklyn has raised Henry Miller and inspired Hart Crane and Truman Capote, among many others. And in today’s Brooklyn, of course, the literati teem through the streets – it’s difficult to buy a coffee these days without tripping over Jonathan Safran Foer or Jhumpa Lahiri en route to a reading.

And so, last Tuesday in Brooklyn, the anxiety of influence weighed heavy upon the shoulders of those gathered to celebrate the launch of Evan Hughes' new book, Literary Brooklyn, alongside their own generation of literary Brooklyn. How to act? Lecherous like Norman Mailer? Or ponderous as Whitman? Better to emulate someone already deceased to avoid the embarrassment of being spotted in a Paul Auster-esque pose by Paul Auster.

In the event, neither he nor any other Brooklyn literary giants were present, aside from those reading, rendering such self-conscious precautions unnecessary. Instead, a throng of people in the far corner lined up for drinks in plastic cups – wine, or Brooklyn’s own Sixpoint Craft Ale – as they chatted away with vibrant faces full of curiosity. Others were beginning to seat themselves on the chunky cold concrete steps of the bookstore’s take on an amphitheatre beneath the exposed metal pipes on the high ceiling.

The emcee made her way through the book tables, which were piled high with titles such as 1000 new eco designs (such is Brooklyn’s literary advancement and postmodernist outlook that it has disposed of the custom of  capitalizing titles) and books published by powerHouse Books (see?), to the microphone. She interrupted Lou Reed and announced that proceedings were beginning.

The crowd hushed immediately so that they could be told about Brooklyn’s winding and varied literary history. Proceedings didn’t quite begin immediately, but no one dared speak again, so we sat in silence.

After Mr. Hughes had been introduced (by way of his author bio being read from the back of his book), he quoted Norman Podhoretz: “One of the longest journeys in the world is the journey from Brooklyn to Manhattan.” The Brooklyn crowd murmured and laughed – a comment on class mobility and assimilation is equally applicable to being stuck on a slow F Train.

His reading, taken from what he called one of the more troubled eras of Brooklyn’s multifarious tale, featuring Alfred Kazin, Bernard Malamud and Daniel Fuchs, then was followed by Fort Greene based journalist, Touré, reading from his book Soul City.

“Evan asked me to read something about Brooklyn. This isn’t exactly about Brooklyn, but those of you who really know Brooklyn will feel the Brooklyn in this,” he said.

Zealous Brooklynites and Manhattan dwellers alike again laughed the laugh of a truth confirmed as Touré read about Soul City’s mayor, Emperor Jones, whose main responsibility is to DJ for the town.

More Brooklyn jokes followed. The author Michael Thomas isn’t a Brooklyn writer – he’s from Boston and, as he made clear, hates New York, despite having lived here for twenty years, so… he read “In memory of W.B. Yeats” by W.H. Auden, who lived in Brooklyn for a year in the early forties.

Then Ukranian-born, Brooklyn-dwelling, indie-singer-songwriter Alina Simone sang some songs she had written, and one she had not.

“As an indie-singer-songwriter, I like to introduce people to other emerging artists,” she said by way of introduction to her second piece. The audience was vaguely intrigued as she played the opening cords. The irony was that it was in fact a cover of Britney Spears’s “Oops! I Did it Again”, but her joke had slipped by, unnoticed, and floated upwards with the music.

Mingling ensued, and there was a buzz of excited, friendly chatter – the kind to which Mr. Hughes referred when we inquired what exactly it is that attracts so many writers to Brooklyn.

“It’s welcoming, friendly. It’s like a home in a way that Manhattan is not,” Mr. Hughes, also a Brooklyn resident, enthused.

And will this book form a part of the borough’s burgeoning literary heritage?

“One can only hope so,” Mr. Hughes said, with a modest laugh.

Anne Hathaway and co-star Jim Sturgess. Courtesy: Patrick McMullan.

The people gathered at the downstairs floor of McNally Jackson books last week were excited. Or, more specifically, the mostly young, mostly female audience eagerly awaiting the arrival of David Nicholls, the British author of One Day, was excited.

“I just want to thank you for writing One Day,” one voice piped up, as Mr. Nicholls arrived and took his seat.

“Is he gay?” wondered another to her friend, looking saddened when Mr. Nicholls mentioned his “partner.” (For clarification: “David lives in North London with his partner Hannah and two children”, according to his website).

One Day, the bestselling novel that has now been adapted to film, is set in England (and Scotland, briefly) from the late eighties and runs through until 2008, following the friendship of Emma Morley and Dexter Mayhew over twenty years.

For all its international appeal, the jokes from Nicholls’ chosen extract – a letter from Dexter in Bombay to Emma in England – were somewhat lost on his young audience.

“There’s no reason in this day and age why you should be using a launderette, there’s nothing cool or political about launderettes it’s just depressing,” a drunken Dexter writes.

A few British expats laughed. The rest looked baffled – despite constituting part of the New York Laundromat massif, they clearly hadn’t looked up the “launderette/Laundromat” entry in the English/American dictionary.

Nicholls soothed their embarrassment: “It’s a very English novel. If Dex and Em were American they would say what they thought about each other straight away.”

We wondered what Danish director Lone Scherfig felt about the film’s Englishness.

“It is an English film; they are English characters. But it helps being a foreigner – I can ensure that the story doesn’t get trapped in its English world.”

Lisa Birnbach, co-author of The Official Preppy Handbook, who was interviewing the author, had no trouble relating to the characters.

“I’m a total Dexter, in a terrible way,” she announced as she rushed in a half hour late. “But I’m well-dressed, too,” she added.

Mr. Nicholls, who has created an extra-textual mix tape for Emma, gave a half laugh. He admitted to being attached to his characters and explained that he doesn’t send them to their fates on a whim.

“I have cried writing prose before. Terribly pretentious.”

There was a quiet intake of breath and a sincere nodding of heads from the skirt and heel wearing audience.

In the question and answer session, there were mumblings about the novel’s adaptation for the screen, also written by Mr. Nicholls. “How do you feel about the casting of Anne Hathaway [who plays Emma]?” they asked. “Was anything from the novel lost?”

“Anne is a terrific dramatic actress. She really gets Emma’s awkwardness,” Mr. Nicholls responded.

The Observer didn’t have much opportunity to ask Ms. Hathaway for her views on awkwardness when we saw her a few days later, dressed in Alexander McQueen for the movie’s premiere at AMC Loews at Lincoln Square. It was getting late, she was holding up the movie screening and her manager rushed her through the interviews. She did manage to volunteer that the scene which for her epitomizes Emma’s character – “so brave” – involves a dress and a haircut in Paris. Then she was swept into the cinema.

“Time doesn’t wait for princesses, even those with a diary”, we thought, as we overheard the model Coco Rocha mention Ms. Hathaway's performance in The Princess Diaries as she passed us on the red carpet.

Nevertheless, Random House editor Peter Gethers was on hand to impart a promotional quote about the reasons for the novel’s success (which may or may not transfer to the movie): “It’s a real romance based on friendship. David had the nerve to break the mold and write something that isn’t just another cookie cutter.”

Right, because in Britain they're called biscuits.