When Roberta Flack arrived in a shimmery black ensemble and big orange curls, she was immediately swarmed by an adoring entourage. Ms. Flack said she wasn’t expecting the award, but was keenly aware of the Venn diagram overlap of her work and Broadway. “Dance and singing are the two art forms that keep Broadway runnin’, you know? Some things just go together. Like pound cake and ice cream. Rice and gravy. Chicken and potato salad.”

Introducing Roberta Flack on stage was Adriane Lenox, Broadway actress and Flack’s personal friend, who made a crack at her own age. “Back in the last millennium, I had a scholarship. And that was very helpful to me. We should all be proud that tonight, we are collectively paying forward to the education of the next generation of artists.”

After the performances, the VIP guests made their way to the penthouse, where a view of the Empire State Building and 5^th Avenue, alongside delicious finger foods, greeted them.

While we circled the man responsible for the evening’s talent, the famed dance teacher and executive director of NYCDA Joe Lanteri, we noticed Miss New York standing in her full regalia and speaking to doting fans about the responsibilities of wearing the crown. “I slept with it right by my bed and just woke up in the morning and put it on.”

Socialite photographer Rose Hartman rushed over to snap a picture of the beauty queen, but not before asking her to hide her liquor. “Would you not have a drink in your hand,” she cooed. “Was your mother thrilled? Did she take you out for a little pasta?”

The Observer chatted with celebrity blogger Tia Walker and wondered if she knew any of the Broadway stars. “There’s one guy. He’s really good-looking, he’s got dark hair. He came up and introduced himself. I forgot his name.”

Jeremiah James?

“That’s him! I don’t know where he went, but he’s really cute!”

We mingled with the cast of In the Heights and asked Lin-Manuel Miranda about his myriad of new projects, including a musical based on the Bring It On franchise, an Adult Swim pilot about his rap troupe Freestyle Love Supreme, and a movie version of In the Heights, to begin production next summer.

And as if his workload wasn’t enough, Miranda is currently working with Tommy Kail on a new musical adaption of a book, but would not provide details.

“I’m not gonna tell you. It’s not ready for that,” Miranda grinned. But he did admit he’s been spending a lot of time with Mr. Kail. “I talk to Tommy more than I talk to my parents! But we’re working!”

Also working was Mr. Lanteri, who remained invisible behind a wall of admirers. As the room emptied out, he was still blowing kisses goodbye and promising, “We’ll talk! I’ll call you!”

Miranda July at New York Screening of "The Future"

Independent filmmaker Miranda July knows about abandoning a work in progress.

While scripting The Future, her follow-up to breakout hit Me and You and Everyone We Know (the new film opens July 29), Ms. July met writer’s block and couldn’t find a realistic way to get the character of Jason, who sells trees, to enter the homes of strangers and experience a revelation. “Jason was supposed to really discover himself through giving up all goals and ambitions. I knew there had to be some kind of event that changed him. And I had written a million versions of what that event could be.”

One of these versions involved a mass of pink dough. “I don’t remember how the Play-Doh came to be, but at one point there was this huge mass of pink dough that he was bringing with him. I don’t even remember what people did with it.” She chuckled softly and stretched an invisible piece of dough in her hands. “I just remember this pink dough epiphany. Oh, it’s all going to be okay as long as I have this large mass of pink dough in it.”

That’s when she realized she needed to distance herself from the work. She scrapped the idea and called a bunch of arbitrarily selected people who were selling things in the PennySaver, the L.A. classifieds that came in her junk mail every week.

“I started interviewing people in the PennySaver to get out of my tiny, shrinking world,” she said. “And then I met Joe.”

Joe, an 81-year-old retired housepainter, invited Miranda July into his home and touched her life, just as he welcomes Jason into his house and changes his perspective in the movie. “He was a very moving, energetic, soulful person,” July said. “What’s in the movie is pretty minor compared to what knowing him was.”

What fascinated her was the fact that for sixty years, Joe made for his wife nine dirty limericks a year involving exposed genitalia and the like. Then there was the uncanny coincidence that Joe met his wife at a lake in Michigan called Paw Paw, which shares its name with the character of the cat in the film.

In front of the camera, July let Joe ad-lib and “speak in his own language,” while the other, trained, actors received tightly scripted lines. She referred to him fondly as “friend” and became noticeably morose when she talked about Joe’s death on the day after she finished her movie.

“He never got to see the film,” she said, gazing at nothing in particular. But, her writer’s block now a thing of the past, July has written a book about Joe and the other characters she met through making The Future.

July said that her book, coming out in the fall and called It Chooses You, is about “that process of going out without a goal, being open to it choosing you, kind of like Jason does in the movie.”

“The fact that it led back around is sort of magical.”

On Wednesday night, Christie’s brought in $361,938 for 46 previously unreleased photographs documenting The Beatles’ first US visit, well-surpassing a collective estimate of $100,000 and shocking photographer Mike Mitchell, who was just 18 when he took the pictures.

“I wasn’t expecting this, when I took those photos all those years ago. It’s a pretty good feeling,” Mr. Mitchell told The Observer after the auction had ended. During the bidding he watched wide-eyed from the audience as the prices kept rising, in some cases surpassing their estimates by a factor of ten. Frantically, he texted with his sister, who is in Florida.  “We were going ‘Wow, Wow, Wow!’”

The sums were impressive across all price-points for the shots, which largely document the band's arrival at Union Station in DC and performance at the Washington Coliseum. A Beatle-less shot of Ringo Starr’s drums went for a whopping $16,250. A photo of John Lennon and Paul McCartney singing in harmony at the microphone quickly jumped to $30,000. The high price of the night belonged to an image of the Fab Four with their backs silhouetted against a sliver of light.

As bidders dropped off one by one, the battle for that photo became a showdown between an anonymous phone bidder and a bidder in the room. The price teetered around the $38,000 mark, and the phone bidder, judging by his representative’s response, seemed to mull the price. The tense seconds ticked by.

“If someone doesn’t round it off to $40,000, I’m gonna cry,” said auctioneer Cathy Elkies, who was met with laughter — and the requested bid.

“C’mon, what’s another thousand?” she teased, when the applause died down. The price shot to $50,000 and kept climbing, going at hammer for $55,000. Upon close, the crowd erupted into a cheer. A flushed but grinning Elkies stood proudly at the podium.

“This is a room where people want to have fun and be engaged,” she told The Observer after the bidding. “You want to bring personality into room, and they’ll spend more because they feel you’re on their side… this kind of interplay between two bidders is amazing. It’s as fun as it gets.”

After the auction, The Observer caught up with onetime Lennon girlfriend May Pang, a curvy Asian woman with a black shaggy bob, as she chatted with her friends and Beatles memorabilia hounds.

“I didn’t buy anything, I just wanted to see what Mike saw in 1964,” she said. “I don’t need the pictures, I have them in my mind.”

She then proceeded to whip out her phone, and flip causally through her own never-released photos of Lennon, assuring The Observer that her private collection was priceless.

Dancers Perform On Vanishing by Jonah Bokaer

At the Guggenheim's rotunda on Thursday evening, five dancers, accompanied by John Cage’s solo cello piece One⁸, performed On Vanishing, a new work by the young New York-based choreographer Jonah Bokaer that the museum had commissioned in conjunction with its current exhibition, Lee Ufan: Marking Infinity.

Audience members, including Mr. Bokaer's mother, leaned against the museum's low, spiraling railings, and watched the action unfold on the marble floor below, where three person-sized sheets of white paper sat next to a Lee Ufan sculpture called Dialogue, which consisted of a steel wall and two large stones. The setting alluded to Mr. Lee’s 1969 Things and Words piece, for which he exposed three sheets of Japanese paper to the elements and then exhibited them inside a museum.

During the performance, the dancers—who included Mr. Bokaer—interacted with each other in and around the sheets of paper and Mr. Lee’s sculpture. They created sounds with the paper, slapping it, shaking it, and crumbling it into a wad in order to communicate and interact with one another. At one point, three dancers each curled into a fetal position on one of the sheets and scrunched the paper together to form a cocoon around themselves. “I loved the paperwork!” one audience member chirped to The Observer.

Mr. Lee, the artist for whose retrospective the "paperwork" was commissioned, was a pivotal figure in the Japanese Mono-ha and Korean monochrome movements. Mr. Lee frequently utilizes austere industrial and natural materials, like rock, steel, and glass in his spare sculptures, which seem to engage in conversations with their viewers and the sites in which they are installed about what is seen and unseen in the world. In a Western museum, it looks like accomplished work by a long-forgotten Minimalist or Post-Minimalist.

Mr. Lee’s paintings are similarly understated, often consisting of single brushstrokes that begin firmly and slowly disappear as they cross the canvas. “The work literally evaporates,” Mr. Bokaer said of Mr. Lee’s paintings, a comment that recalls the title of the choreographer's work, On Vanishing.

Being performance-based and site-specific, concerned with the metaphysics of presence, and immersed in the abstract vocabulary of space, Mr. Bokaer's performance proved to be an ideal analog to Mr. Lee's work. At the same time, it went beyond being a mere supplement, becoming a nuanced expansion on Mr. Lee's piece, particularly by introducing a comparison between dance and sculpture.

“Dance is very ephemeral, whereas the sculpture is much more concrete,” Mr. Bokaer told The Observer of his thinking about the relationship between his choreography and Mr. Lee's piece, Dialogue.  However, “Lee Ufan’s philosophy [is] wonderful source material for dance, particularly his use of space, how line is used, how form is used, and absolutely, how the artist thinks about materials.”

Hollaback! aims to bring an end to street harassment

When Samuel Carter’s female friends told him about their experiences on the streets of New York City — taking a roundabout route to dodge areas where creeps frequent, being afraid to go out at night, and not taking a job because of feeling unsafe in an area — he was blown away.

“Everyone had a million stories about street harassment!” he exclaimed. And so he helped found Hollaback!, a public awareness and data collection movement dedicated to exposing crimes of public harassment and creating an urban space where women and members of the LGBT community can feel comfortable walking down the street.

Hollaback! encourages victims to snap a quick picture of the situation — here’s looking at you, creep! — for the purpose of documentation. The idea is that modern day technologies, such as the cell phone camera, can serve as witnesses— and deterrents.

“When people introduced the cell phone cameras into the situation, it was as if there was another person there – an objective third party,” Carter explained.

But Hollaback! is not satisfied with enabling victims with cell phone cameras; it wants to motivate bystanders to intervene.

To do this, Hollaback! teamed up with Nicola Briggs — the woman who cowed a condom-wearing flasher in the subway last year and became an overnight sensation — and launched its “I’ve Got Your Back” campaign, whose goal is to create an interactive map that displays the locations of instances of harassment and the bystanders who intervene.

But don’t worry, even if you feel awkward or uneasy about confrontation — as any typical New Yorker would be — you can still show your support! The app will include a Facebook-inspired “we’ve got your back” button which users can click to relay virtual feelings of goodwill from a thousand miles away — a truly democratic process.

Hollaback! doesn’t offer a definition for sexual harassment. “We leave it up to the victim to decide what that line is,” Carter explained, “because we don’t want to impose a definition on the world. We’re much more interested in that gray area. We want to create a space for people to talk about what sexual harassment is.”

Carter does insist, however, that every woman “has the right to define her own self instead of being defined by some creep’s point of view.”

Yesterday, as the fundraising drive reached its 36-hour countdown, Carter compared Hollaback!’s campaign for safer streets to “what we did collectively as a society in the 70’s and 80’s — make the work place safer.”

The drive closes today and there will be a rally tomorrow featuring community and health speakers such as Katherine Diaz of Da Urban Butterflies and Sarah Combs from the Helen B. Atkinson Health Center. The event will take place at 5:30 p.m. on 116th Street and Lexington Avenue, where women and supporters can gather in a show of solidarity.

Donations are welcome. Creeps are not.

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.

A view into Miss Bugs' "Parlour"

Even after a visit to Miss Bugs’ boudoir at the Brooklynite Gallery in Bed-Stuy, it’s still rather hard to describe the artist. For one thing, the artist insisted that The Observer not describe her at all, outside of the female pronoun — this despite the fact that she is actually two people.

“We are two artists, who work together, to create this,” she explained gesturing to the work that surrounded her. She (or, the one speaking anyway) spoke in a courteous Bristol accent. There were works that combined stencil, silkscreen, collage, and Photoshop — nippled femme fatales, a triptych of “fuck you” slogans on scratchcards, and sinuous women with elephantine headpieces comprised of birds from M.C. Escher’s famous plane-filling motifs.

“She’s half-invisible, you can see the background,” Miss Bugs said, pointing to one of the figures with an M.C. Escher headpiece. “You go somewhere, you see something, you remember that face, you can kind of reconstruct a picture. It’s kind of ghostly, like warped figures. Memory plays tricks.”

Miss Bugs described the theme of the exhibit as “childhood-like memories fading in and out.” She achieved this effect by using the rich red damask wallpaper of the gallery in her artwork, so that bits and pieces of the figures faded into and became one with the wallpaper.

While waiting to be introduced to Miss Bugs we stood near a man in a cowboy hat, who, upon discovering that The Observer hailed from Ohio, proceeded to bellow, “O! H! I! O!” followed by, “I love ho’s! I love ho’s!”

There was a wrecked car in the backyard, which had been spliced in half to fit through the gallery door and then reassembled. Outside, an artist offered us his business card, taking out a pen and a wad of brown paper. He drew all his cards by hand, he said, “because I like to pass my energy.”

Miss Bugs spoke in a lilting voice and recalled the faces she cut from fashion magazines and Photoshopped into her portraits, “We hijack them. A lot of our work is just stolen from other artists and then patched together, that’s the idea.”

Her gallery of aggregated collages revealed that she also "stole" prolifically from the likes of Man Ray, Klimt, Takashi Murakami, Bansky, Leonardo De Vinci, and Stanley Kubrick, to name a few.

On our way out, we overheard a woman inquire, "Was the artist actually here?" Looking behind us, we caught a glimpse of Miss Bugs sitting on the steps of her own gallery, a casual observer in the crowd.

Les Nubians on their makeshift stage.

Yesterday, The Observer was in the unfamiliar territory of the Walt Whitman Housing projects of Greene County, Brooklyn, where a Nü Revolution was taking place in the form of a musical performance by Les Nubians, a band led by the French-born Afropean sisters Célia and Hélène Faussart.

As The Observer walked through the neighborhood to reach the Soul of Brooklyn festival’s Monday highlight, stereo sounds boomed from the midst of tall red-brick apartment complexes, where a packed audience in a dingy basketball court watched as the youth dance group Ambassadors for Christ took center stage.

“They look so serious,” a hefty lady sitting next to The Observer complained. It made sense; after all, they were dancing to the tune of “Waiting On The World To Change.”

Unwilling to wait on the world was the founder and executive director of Soul of Brooklyn, Laurie Cumbo. A neo-Malcolm X for her people, Laurie dreamed up the festival events, including this one, to break the cycle of cultural deficiency and social stigma that pervaded the projects.

A contagiously enthusiastic Laurie gesticulated and shouted into her microphone: “You had a Harlem week? Now we gotta start a Brooklyn week!”

Indeed. When the Grammy Award nominated Les Nubians sisters appeared—in tall fros and white face paint (a tribute to Fela Kuti), and wearing eccentric black dresses made by designer Clark Sabbat (whom the sisters referred to as their Haitian brother) and jewelry from all over the world—they certainly were a celebration of the African diaspora. Célia had a special name for the duo’s style, “pirate,” and expounded in an endearing French accent, “because we wear things made by our people and like pirate, we put them like it’s our treasure.”

The duo delivered by rolling out a soulful mixture of R&B, hip-hop, and Afrobeat. The music started out with a fast and booming drum rhythm, and The Observer found herself grooving along.

Hélène invited everyone to stand up—“unless you’re invalid.” She called all the children to come to the front, and a boy rode his bike up to the stage to touch Hélène’s toes (he told her he didn’t like them). After the show, the same boy found an opportunity to point out Hélène’s cigarette and ask her why she smoked. Quickly dropping the cigarette into her bag, Hélène responded, “Célia smokes. I don’t.”

Moments later, Hélène stood in relative privacy behind a U-Haul truck and lit a cigarette, conceding to The Observer, “Smoking is a very bad European habit. We’re bad Europeans. I’m working on quitting.”

In addition to quitting cigarettes, Hélène has another life goal—attaining a universal passport. She believes in 21^st century global interconnectedness with a passion that caused her to stumble in her English: “My gas emission, my gas pollution—the whole fucking world, not only your fucking city! The whole world is affected by that…all of us!”

By 9 p.m., the basketball court had been cleared. The pop-up show had disappeared just as suddenly as it emerged and the neighborhood resumed its daily hum. Célia was looking for the right words to describe the significance of playing music on a basketball court in the projects.

“It’s their home,” The Observer suggested.

“Yes!” she quickly agreed, “The show’s for them first.”