Patrick Robinson and Virginia Smith.

Parsons has produced more fashion stars (think the Proenza Schouler guys, Jason Wu, Marc Jacobs and Tom Ford) than Barney’s can stock. The school’s 2013 fashion show will be attended by big-name store buyers, magazine editors and movie stars, all on the lookout for the next big thing primed for Seventh Avenue success. Hosted by the school’s Executive Dean Joel Towers and Dean Simon Collins as well as alumnus Patrick Robinson, the show’s front row will be stocked with the power players who rule Fashion Week at Lincoln Center. Dress for the style press.

Pier Sixty, Chelsea Piers, 23rd Street and the West Side Highway, (212) 336-6060, 11:45am, by invitation only.

Karl Ove Knausgaard.

The first book of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s six-volume autobiographical novel My Struggle was published in Norway in 2009 and the final volume in 2011. The books have since sold half a million copies there, a number that represents something like one in ten Norwegians. Still, when the first volume of My Struggle was published in the United States last year, translated by Don Bartlett, it was thanks to a small non-profit in Brooklyn called Archipelago Books, which in turn relied upon the New York state government and charitable foundations to subsidize the effort. Narrated by the author, whose family and friends are the central characters, Mr. Knausgaard's books recount his life in full, from the most banal memories to the most important events. Upon the publication of Book Two and a paperback reissue of Book One by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Mr. Knausgaard has won a very loyal English-speaking readership. It turns out that assembling IKEA furniture while contemplating the meaninglessness of our lives transcends the boundaries of nationality and language. As Mr. Knausgaard writes, “As is always the case with books that seem to be groundbreaking, they put into words what for me had been suspicions, feelings, hunches.”

My Struggle is not a challenging read nor is it especially experimental in style, but it’s easy to see why American publishers passed on it. The first problem is the title. It’s uncomfortable reading My Struggle on the subway. In England they solved this problem by publishing the books with different titles. In an interview with CBC Radio in February, Mr. Knausgaard said he almost called the books Argentina, because Argentina, where he had never been, won the World Cup in 1978, when he was 10. He also likes Borges. I trust all will be explained in Book Six, where Mr. Knausgaard apparently takes 400 pages to discuss Hitler.

Then there’s the book’s self-centeredness: the story of My Struggle is the story of being Karl Ove Knausgaard. Book One describes his childhood and his attempts to understand his father, who declined in middle age from a short-tempered family man to a divorced alcoholic, and who ended his life as a deranged shut-in in a house that was basically a three-bedroom toilet. Book Two, “A Man in Love,” which has just been published, focuses on Knausgaard’s move to Sweden in his early thirties, where he falls in love, has three children, and writes his second novel. Such narrative summaries are only rough approximations of the paths of the books, which move haphazardly through time. Sometimes Knausgaard describes a scene as it happened, recreating meandering conversations in a bar or over dinner, or through diaristic recollections of an outing to the movies or to a party. In other passages he pauses for essayistic considerations of Constable’s paintings, Paul Celan’s poetry, Foucault’s The Order of Things, or the differences between Sweden and Norway. Knausgaard is willfully disinterested in what might be “worth writing about.” No detail is too small, from fashion trends (“She too had knee-high, black boots. It was this winter’s fashion, and I wished it would last forever”), to schedule conflicts (“The clock on the department store wall said ten minutes to three. Perhaps it would be best to have a haircut now to avoid having to rush it at the end, I thought.”) Still, as one of Knausgaard’s friends remarks to him, “You can spend twenty pages describing a trip to the bathroom and hold your readers spellbound.”

My Struggle Book Two begins with a family outing in an amusement park. At Fairytale Land, “everything was of the poorest quality.” Knausgaard cannot see the fantasy of the place. Instead he observes the cigarettes, dinginess, and the details of class and origin that encode the world around him. The family watches a small circus where a “stout manly-looking lady, probably from somewhere in eastern Europe” performs depressing tricks with a small dog and a hoop. They watch a middle-aged fire breather who has “several spare tires rolling over his harem trousers.” A so-called “cowboy town” is “a pile of sand with three newly-built sheds labeled, respectively, ‘Mine,’ ‘Sheriff,’ and ‘Prison.’” The cotton candy attracts wasps, the sun is boiling hot, the children are overexcited and Knausgaard’s coffee tastes bitter. The ponies at the pony ride stubbornly refuse to walk.

The children take no notice of these details. They are enthralled, and the parents humor them. They keep their irritation with each other and with their offspring at a low simmer. When one of his daughters pretends to be invisible, Knausgaard dutifully pretends not to see her.

This introductory scene might seem slight, but it contains the themes that most concern Knausgaard over the course of thousands of pages. The difference between what Knausgaard notices in the amusement park and what his children do speaks to the difficulty of connecting our present selves to our own memories. “From my own childhood,” he writes, “I remember only a handful of incidents, all of which I regarded as momentous, but which I now understand were a few events among many, which completely expunges their meaning.” As always in Knausgaard the presence of death and decay looms over bland, everyday things. It’s also a scene about identity formation, and the extent to which any action on his part can alter his children’s growth. “In abstract reality I could create an identity, an identity made from opinions; in concrete reality I was who I was, a body, a gaze, a voice,” he writes. “That is where all independence is rooted.”

Mr. Knausgaard’s writing is entrenched within the body, bounded by his own form’s perceptual limits, where any idea of continuity of the self is only an abstraction of the body’s passage through time. “For the heart, life is simple: it beats for as long as it can. Then it stops,” wrote Mr. Knausgaard at the beginning of Book One. Insofar as there’s a compelling narrative tension in My Struggle, it’s here: physical life, while finite, propels him relentlessly. The heart’s metronomic constant sustains, but it also confines: what Mr. Knausgaard documents is its ceaselessness, and the accompanying observations, thoughts, and opinions that cannot be turned off, stowed away, or influenced into more seemly directions. This is not “stream of consciousness”—Mr. Knausgaard does not play with language to construct an unending barrage of perception—but rather a more orderly recreation of the spectrum from monotony to eventfulness in any given life, accomplished through pages and pages of monotony alternating with pages and pages of eventfulness. Through its size and scope but bounded by the phenomenological experience of one man, to read My Struggle is to trap oneself in another person’s heartbeat-bound life—a reading experience that offers a window out of one’s own similarly limited experience.

The rest of the book tells the story of Knausgaard’s evolution from ambitious young writer in Bergen, Norway to family man in Sweden. Knausgaard moves to Sweden after the failure of his first marriage. At the time, he writes, “I weighed 101 kilos and had no hope for the future.” Over the course of the next few months, Knausgaard finds an apartment. He begins running in the park. He reconnects with Linda, a woman with whom he fell in love at a writer’s retreat in Norway several years before. That encounter ended with a melodramatic display of self-pity—Knausgaard broke a glass and then cut his face with it, much to everyone’s embarrassment. This time things go right: now Linda loves him back. They move in together and she becomes pregnant with their first child. Knausgaard writes his second novel, which turns out to be more fulfilling than having kids. Then, second and third children follow. Being a stay-at-home dad, as Knausgaard was for some time after the birth of the first child, did not suit him very well. “As a result I walked around Stockholm’s streets, modern and feminized, with a furious nineteenth-century man inside me.” By the book’s end, the fury has abated. He likes being a dad, but it’s not enough.

Knausgaard acknowledges that lofty questions about finding meaning will make some readers scoff. “For who brooded over the meaninglessness of life anymore?” he asks. “Teenagers.” This does not deter him a few pages later:

Everyday life, with its duties and routines, was something I endured, not a thing I enjoyed, nor something that was meaningful or made me happy. This had nothing to do with lack of desire to wash floors or change diapers but rather with something more fundamental: the life around me was not meaningful. I always longed to be away from it. So the life I led was not my own. I tried to make it mine, this was my struggle, because of course I wanted it, but I failed, the longing for something else undermined all my efforts.

Art frees us from sameness; without it we are trapped within our own material circumstances and our own cognition, but what works once to take us beyond ourselves becomes artificial and inadequate over time. In Knausgaard’s world, which despite being in Stockholm is altogether too much like Brooklyn, a defamiliarized perspective no longer exists in physical space. “Whereas before man wandered through the world, now it is the world that wanders through man,” he writes. My Struggle, then, abandons the search for an outside, presenting instead a comforting stream of familiar experience, “in which the perfect contrast between the coffee cup’s cold, hard, white stoneware and the coffee’s hot, black liquid was only a temporary stopping point on a journey through the world’s noumena and phenomena.”

editorial@observer.com

STEAL THE MENU: A MEMOIR OF FORTY YEARS IN FOOD

It’s hard to believe in these gourmet-mad times, but 40 years ago the U.S. had “no radicchio, no world-class restaurant, no foie gras, no Sichuan food.” So recalls lifelong food writer Raymond Sokolov in this entertaining memoir. Mr. Sokolov fondly recollects his tenure as the Times restaurant critic in the mid 1970s, just as the city’s food scene was coming alive, launching a “covert plan to overthrow established order in the New York restaurant world,” lambasting snobbish French restaurants (the since-reformed La Grenouille) and championing the elegant, pared-down nouvelle cuisine arriving stateside (the late, beloved Lutèce). Ever irreverent, he reviewed dog food and dueled with the White House chef over the recipe for Tricia Nixon’s wedding cake.

The book doubles as a breezy, ranging history of American food, and the sociopolitical events that shaped it, like the 1965 Hart-Celler Act, which allowed a flood of Chinese immigrants to bring their local cuisines to New York. His four-star review of a Hunan pioneer led to accusations of bribery, and the arrival at his house of the confused proprietors, who thus thought they were supposed to bribe him.

The food revolution has been “more potent across the breadth of most modern societies than the avant-garde achievements of any other modern art,” he argues, and while it’s a pleasure to read about decadent meals in Vegas and Copenhagen, he’s a down-home guy at heart, happiest when correcting assumptions about everyday foods (the lime vs. the Key lime, “don’t get me started about the yam,” etc.) and remembering treks through the heartland in search of the country’s best barbecue, registering “an honest blow for the stubborn practitioners of quality, tradition and, sometimes, worthwhile innovation.” —Andrew Russeth

THE WORLD IS A CARPET
ANNA BADKHEN
(Riverhead Books, 288 pp., $26.95)

Collecting kindling, watching copulating camels, quieting crying infants with opium, baking naan and gossiping over the loom: these are but a few of the activities that Anna Badkhen vividly captures in her account of daily life in Oqa, a tiny desert settlement so remote that it doesn’t appear on any map. In The World is a Carpet, Ms. Badkhen, a Leningrad-born foreign correspondent who began visiting northern Afghanistan long before 2001, charts the process of weaving a carpet over the course of year. Like so many pieces of yarn, she weaves the words of Persian poets, Western explorers, contemporary journalists and scholars into her narrative, enriching her own account with those that came before. As the Taliban begins laying claim to villages near Oqa and rumors of atrocities travel across the desert, Ms. Badkhen evokes the many invasions that have wracked the land for centuries, from Alexander the Great to Genghis Khan, Soviet armies to American troops.

Ms. Badkhen’s keen observations and compassionate portrayal of the people she lives with are sometimes undermined by her occasionally overwrought writing style. Words too conspicuous to overuse, like “crepuscule” and “strabismic,” resurface repeatedly.

Despite these distractions, Ms. Badkhen’s prose is predominantly poetic, and she delivers a powerful, unsentimental study of life persisting in extreme conditions. Perhaps the greatest testament to her success is that, upon reading the final page, the reader wonders how the people populating her narrative are faring, and desperately hopes that they are all right. —Zoë Lescaze

“Look, I made some big mistakes. And I know I let a lot of people down. But I’ve also learned some tough lessons,” he says in the video, which opens with a family scene of the former councilman and his wife, Huma Abedin, having breakfast in their kitchen with their young son.

“I’m running for mayor ’cause I’ve been fighting for the middle class and those struggling to make it my entire life. And I hope I get a second chance to work for you,”  he says into the camera in the 2-minute, slickly-shot reel.
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The opening night celebration of the Manhattan Cocktail Classic—which drew 2,900 aficionados, arrayed in tuxedos, sequined gowns, lacy sheaths, smoking jackets, velvet blazers and all manner of hats and feathered plumes—was a lavish, debauched spectacle befitting the outsized, increasingly dominant role that craft cocktails have come to play in the city’s drinking culture. Tickets, despite costing $195 to $395, sold out rapidly.

The press invitation had cautioned us to eat dinner beforehand—though there would be food—and to pace ourselves, both of which turned out to be not so much advisable as mandatory for staying upright throughout the four-hour bacchanalia. There was music and dancing, along with stilt walkers and living statues, plus sweet and savory edibles, but all these offerings paled in comparison to the drinking: 73 different cocktail stations, many of them serving multiple varieties of specialty cocktails, splayed over four massive floors of the library.

There was such an abundance that revelers would frequently take only a few sips of a drink before abandoning it in search of the next and possibly better drink. Waitstaff (about 600 people were working) wandered the fête, swaybacked under the weight of buckets laden with half-full glasses, gingerly stepping through the increasingly drunk crowd. A crowd that was not only under the influence of excessive quantities of alcohol, but in the grips of a mania. How else to describe the rage for craft cocktails that has swept the city of late, leaving in its wake a thirst for ever-more elaborate concoctions and an army of tipsy devotees who think nothing of paying $18 apiece for them?

Jay Beam—“B-e-a-m, as in Jim Beam”—a bowler-hatted aficionado, and his companion, Joyce Darbyshire, were clutching cans of negronis, a new product for enthusiasts on the go who don’t want to haul around the raw ingredients: gin, sweet vermouth and Campari.

“We used to drink wine, but, well, wine is just wine,” said Mr. Beam.

“We just got so into cocktails, they’re fascinating,” Ms. Darbyshire explained. (Yes, that’s her real name.) “Reading up on the history of a cocktail, then going into a bar and watching someone make it for you …”

“Of course, when you get a glass of wine, it’s not like it’s just someone pouring a glass of wine,” Mr. Beam interjected, “but cocktails are an art, a craft.”

“It’s an alchemy!” exclaimed Ms. Darbyshire. “You wonder, ‘How did you ever think to put that and that and that together?’”

When neo-speakeasies like Milk & Honey and Please Don’t Tell first started opening their unmarked doors in the late ’90s and early aughts, they helped to revive an American tradition that had been largely moribund since Prohibition—when the craft disappeared under the constraints of grim ingenuity—bootlegged booze being often very bad. Rather than accentuating good spirits, 1920s drinks were designed to mask inferior ones, resulting in scarcely quaffable creations like the Alexander, made of gin, crème de cacao and cream. And when it came to bad drinks, the hangover was a long one.

The speakeasies took a craft which had been straitlaced and relatively unimaginative in even the best bars and transformed it into something inventive, edgy and exciting, reviving forgotten classics, pushing the envelope and educating barflies on the differences between Woodford Reserve and Maker’s Mark. Cocktails went from being the thing you had before or with dinner to an event in and of themselves. The hush-hush appeal of the speakeasies, and the theatricality of a lot of the bartending that went on there (Apotheke put their bartenders in lab coats), only made the movement more irresistible.

A decade later, a scene once contained to neo-speakeasies has reached a level of total saturation. Neither the scuzziest dive nor the most beer-and-a-shot-centric sports bar seems exempt from the froufrou cocktail menu.

“In the 1990s, New Yorkers were drinking gin and vodka martinis. Now people are walking into bars demanding drinks with carambola and spicy honey,” said Raff VanCouten, who manages the bar program at the whiskey bar Maysville.

My local wine store in Bed-Stuy carries both Aperol and Damson gin liqueur (just the libations a Brooklynite might need to pick up on the way to a barbecue), and the Greene Grape market in Fort Greene offers not only aromatic bitters but orange, lavender, cardamom, chocolate, Peychaud’s and barrel-aged whiskey bitters.

“You can’t open a restaurant now without having a specialty cocktail list,” Anthony Caporale, an instructor at the Institute of Culinary Education, told The Observer. “Having one doesn’t make you better and different anymore. But not having one ensures that you’re different—and worse.”

Cocktails are a natural fit for a city in love with connoisseurship, status and drinking. As Moby, who no longer drinks, said in a Believer interview last year, “Certain places have a specific or accidental utility. Perth, Australia, is a great place to be a surfer. And lower Manhattan is a district for drunks ... No one comes to New York to be healthy; they come in listening to ‘Walk on the Wild Side’ and get off the plane wanting to get drunk.”

In addition to be a rather boozy city, New York is also a very competitive one. Bars now vie to outdo each other with expensive and edgy concoctions. Bacon bourbon or a salt pork Campari no longer seem shocking; nor does the $200 price tag on a martini made with 1950s Gordon’s gin (not a spirit known to improve with age) at the Experimental Cocktail Club.

The spread of the craft cocktail movement has also meant a glut of fine but ultimately forgettable cocktails—the infinite variations of the gin, St. Germain, lemon and soda water cocktail, invariably named after a street by the bar to disguise its sheer ubiquity—along with some truly terrible ones.

By the time I made it to the Manhattan Cocktail Classic gala, I had been drinking heavily for the better part of two weeks and was very familiar with the multitude of ways that a cocktail can go wrong.

There had been cocktails of cotton candy vodka and blue curacao, drinks with essence of leather and hints of lilac, meat-flavored martinis, a shot of something called ass juice, and a large, flaming tiki mug filled with condensed milk, Jamaican rum, Bacardi 151, Grand Marnier, Lillet Blanc, orange juice, lemon juice, angostura bitters, absinthe, cinnamon and mint.

I had downed cocktails that cost more than entire dinners. I had been pleasantly tipsy and I had been fairly drunk.

I had set out to try both the strange-sounding combinations that give off the whiff of potential brilliance and the multitude of terrible drinks that have thrived parasitically on the city’s thirst for bespoke cocktails, from the celebrated cocktails at Angel’s Share to the daiquiris made with real marshmallow Peeps at an Astoria sports bar.

And so it was that I found myself one evening in the Dakota Bar, an Upper West Side establishment, willing myself, against my every natural impulse and inclination, to order the Ice Scream Soda, a $14 cocktail of cioccolato liqueur and Ketel One vodka, topped with club soda and served on the rocks. Besides the name, which was ominous enough, it was worrisome that the “cioccolaco liquor,” as it was written on the cocktail menu, was either misspelled or a mysterious spirit that Google had yet to learn about.

Sipping the mud-colored concoction from a straw, I found that the fizz of the soda assaulted the tongue first, and then the burn of the vodka struck, “like an attack from behind enemy lines,” as my drinking companion put it. It would have tasted very like a watery egg cream if not for the piercing flavor of rubbing alcohol. The chocolate manifested itself as a kind of chalky undertaste, which called to mind Mia Farrow’s criticisms of the sedative-laden chocolate mousse in Rosemary’s Baby, filmed at the Dakota, the nearby landmark from which the bar takes its name. Otherwise, the connection between the recently opened bar and the famous co-op seemed tenuous.

Poorly executed and ill-conceived drinks are two of the most common bugaboos of the craft cocktail movement. Many bars hire cocktail mavens to create menus for them but don’t follow up by hiring bartenders who are seasoned or skilled enough to execute them. Even a twist on a classic can often be disastrous in the hands of bartender who doesn’t know what he’s doing—a misfortune that recently befell Sarah Fina, a bartender at Red Rooster, when she ventured out to a new bar in Clinton Hill.

“They put an old-fashioned in a shaker and started shaking and I was like, ‘Oh no, don’t do that! You’re bruising the bourbon!’” Ms. Fina said. “A lot of places try to do all these fancy things, and they don’t even know the basics.”

Of course, innovation is a large part of what makes cocktails so delightful—it’s the thrill of the unknown and the desire for new tastes and sensations—food and drink being two of the places where people are willing to splurge. Just as Chanel perfume is an entry point into the brand for those who cannot afford the clothes and shoes, so a cocktail, even at $20, offers an attainable luxury experience: a comfortable seat in a pleasant setting, an attentive bartender, a chance to sample a different kind of lifestyle without buying a $200 dinner.

There are bound to be some bad cocktails and spectacular fails as the form evolves. But even a $20 bill for a disappointing drink doesn’t seem so bad in the grand scheme of things—unless, of course, the drinker succumbs to that all-too-familiar temptation to just have one more.

Seemingly counterintuitive combinations are often among the most delicious. Shrubs—or colonial-era cocktails made with fruits preserved in vinegar, have recently been revived to the delight of many. And who would have predicted the widespread popularity of a vodka, clamato, Worcestershire sauce, angostura bitters, lemon, pepper, olives and celery cocktail otherwise known as a Bloody Mary? As Wayne Curtis has noted in the pages of The Atlantic, both martinis and Manhattans came from “the freakish idea of mixing wine and spirits.”

But there are limits. Almost every bartender I talked to agreed that making a good cocktail was a matter of balance (sweet, sour and umami—the bitters) and there are some ingredients that just don’t seem to blend in any agreeable way.

“We’ve all had failures before we found something we could get behind and put on a menu,” said Douglass Miller, an assistant professor at the Culinary Institute of America, ruefully recounting his own Waterloo: “Fish sauce. I couldn’t make it work. I was trying fish sauce and bourbon drinks. Also, carbonated milk. It’s big in Japan.”

Of the two cocktails I tried at the well-regarded speakeasy Angel’s Share, one was the nearly unquaffable tiki drink—named, rather fittingly, the Devil’s Kick—and the other was perhaps the most unexpectedly lovely and surprising drink I have ever had the pleasure of sipping: a cocktail of white truffle and pear vodka, grapefruit puree and tonic.

At Apotheke, a cocktail lounge in Chinatown, I had the misfortune of meeting the White Widow, a frothy mauve drink made of white rum, hemp milk, hemp seed, orange blossom, water, egg white and heavy cream. I inherited this from a friend, who declared that drinking it was “like licking an attic” and persuaded the server to bring her a delicious elixir of vodka, lemongrass and cilantro instead. Sadly, my own drink—the Pancho Villa (mezcal, grilled corn, poblano pepper, agave nectar and lime)—was just as unpalatable. It tasted like a charcoal briquette soaked in tequila.

“The problem,” said my friend, eyeing the White Widow warily, “Is that no one would want to kiss you after you’d been drinking this.”

But the real problem was that the drink not only seemed likely to snuff out the possibility of romance, but “possibility” as a general category, betraying the promise that is built into a cocktail. A cocktail, particularly a good one in a pleasing setting, seems not only to open up possibilities, but to suggest that one is clever and brave enough to take advantage of them. A fundamentally cosmopolitan beverage, it carries with it the allure of the city—as a place where anything can happen and often does—while suppressing more sober realities: the incipient hangover, the long subway wait late at night, the profound statements that will sound pompous in a less forgiving light.

A cocktail is a fundamentally aspirational drink, one that confers on the drinker the flattering sheen of urbanity and suggests an attractive, idealized self: daring, adventurous, sophisticated. The kind of person who might not be invited to an endless circuit of cocktail parties and galas, but would like to be.

As the night wore on, the mood at the Manhattan Cocktail Classic changed in the way that parties do—imperceptibly at first, a rising volume, the women doing the little foot-shifting dance they do when their feet start to hurt—and then, seemingly, all at once. Shoes came off, people began to take photos of themselves with breadsticks and straws in their mouths, miming the act of smoking a cigarette in a fancy holder, and couples started to lean against each other in the sort of dog-tired slump that you most often see late at night on the subway. Suddenly, the corridors were bathed in the eerie glow of iPhones as revelers abandoned the here and now, hoping for a fix in the form of a promising electronic communiqué.

By midnight, the evening’s early magic had all but worn off. There were broken glasses and emergency stain removals. I mistook a woman’s smeared glitter eye shadow for tears. The crowd around a food station with mini take-out containers of sesame noodles blocked the better part of a hall—I myself had consumed three such containers, along with a twist of salted caramel, a dollop of absinthe and burnt sugar ice cream, two cheese-encrusted breadsticks, a tiny mound of gravlax soaked in gin and juniper, a bourbon profiterole, an acorn soda, a celery soda, and the better part of four cocktails.

Soon, the lines for the bathrooms were snaking into the halls. I spotted one woman making off with several loaves of bread from the table upstairs. Another whom I’d stopped to question about her passion for cocktails shrugged. “New York’s an alcoholic city. Does it matter what you drink?” she said, excusing herself to go get another one before they stopped serving altogether.

—Additional drinking by Laura Kusisto, Jessica Yusaitis Pike, Feliks Pleszczynski, Emily Anne Epstein, Hunter Walker and Kara Bloomgarden-Smoke.

kvelsey@observer.com

According to the allegations, the former assemblyman once lamented the existence of statutory rape laws in the presence of a 14-year-old intern. Mr. Lopez demanded massages from female staffers, including one who cried and expressed her discomfort as a former rape victim. At a bar one evening, he grabbed an employee’s hands from across the table. When she tried to pull away, he tightened his grip. When she began to cry, Mr. Lopez said he’d release her only after she counted to 60. When she did, he stared at her for the full minute.

After resigning from his Assembly seat on Monday morning, Mr. Lopez is said to be contemplating a seemingly unfathomable second act: running for City Council. Given the accusations against him, what’s more surprising is that even his detractors acknowledge that Mr. Lopez actually has a viable path to victory.
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Ryan Serhant, at home and on TV.

7:45 AM: Ryan Serhant, the former hand model/soap opera actor-turned-real estate superstar, beats The Observer to his Tribeca office by an hour. “I’m always the first one in,” brags the 28-year-old broker at Nest Seekers International, a boutique real estate brokerage firm.

He has been up since 4:23 a.m, was at the gym by 5 a.m. and in the office shortly thereafter. When we offer to go for a bleary-eyed coffee run, he yells from his office, “Don’t forget to write about how you were an hour late!”

8:30 AM: It’s time for a team meeting with Mr. Serhant’s partner, Nick Jabbour, assistant Olivia Robertson and broker Mariana Pomerlian.

As one of three realtors on Bravo’s Million Dollar Listing New York, Mr. Serhant plays the part of a rakish bad boy on TV. (He once threw an open house with nearly nude women and an Eyes Wide Shut theme.) But despite that playboy rep, Mr. Serhant is an extremely serious broker with a sterling reputation: he and Mr. Jabbour have put the relatively small Nest Seekers on the map since Mr. Serhant began working for the company four years ago. (According to Mr. Jabbour, the group now manages about $50 million in estates in New York City as well as $10 million in Miami and has at least one $7 million space in L.A.) Last year, Mssrs. Serhant and Jabbour earned a spot on The Real Deal’s “Top Manhattan Agents” power rankings, with a combined listing volume of more than $114 million.

9:00 AM: We jump into an Escalade with Mr. Serhant’s driver, Yuriy, and stop by his apartment. If such a thing is possible, Mr. Serhant has upgraded his already luxe lifestyle for the show’s second season: He moved from 20 Pine Street to a West Chelsea apartment furnished by Nikki Cheng at BoConcepts. He’s got a new storefront office in Tribeca, where he manages a team of 12.

And that Escalade? That’s new too.

Mr. Serhant is unapologetic about his reality TV stardom. “Someone with a father or brother in the business here, they might not need the show,” he says, a veiled dig at former co-star Michael Lorber, the son of Howard Lorber, chairman of Douglas Elliman and president and CEO of Vector Group Ltd., who left the show after season one.

Mr. Serhant was only 25 when he was approached by Bravo (his work at 99 John Street had made him the youngest sales director in New York City). He says he saw the show as a mountain ledge from which he could either climb to the summit, or fall very quickly.

“Friends cautioned me, ‘Don’t do it. You don’t want to be like the Kardashians. Just build up a credible business,’” Mr. Serhant chuckles. “But that just seemed boring.”

9:15 AM: We make a quick stop to look at some construction not far from the High Line. Mr. Serhant has a vested interest here, because he plans to rep the only non-rental condo on the block (which he asked us not to disclose). “West Chelsea, this is the next frontier in real estate,” he says. He talks about apartments going for $3,000 per square foot.

9:30 AM: We walk through a space on East 17th Street. Mr. Serhant is representing the owner, who wants to lease the 6,000-square-foot apartment for $25,000 per month. The potential tenant enters with his broker and, after a five-minute tour, they agree to fax over their signed contract.

9:45 AM: Mr. Serhant picks up his brunch: a Monster energy drink and a protein bar. “Most people are lazy,” he says. “Most people want weekends. People don’t want to wake up early. People want to go home and watch reruns of How I Met Your Mother.”

“Or Million Dollar Listing,” we joke.

“Exactly,” Mr. Serhant says, not joking.

Making deals.

10:30 AM: We’re uptown for a developer meeting at Young Woo & Associates to discuss a listing for 200 11th Avenue. Though Mr. Serhant doesn’t have the listing yet, he really wants it, and his presentation to Mr. Woo—known to be a little eccentric—is to give him a print by French photographic surrealist Allistair Magnaldo that features a girl who has built a ladder to reach the stars.

“I want to do something like that,” Mr. Serhant says confidently. He then slides another batch of photos across the table, having broken into the building across the street with a photographer to take pictures of the Sky Garage, which he then sent to Spine3D, a company that does photorealistic prints. Now the pictures include a car in a hot air balloon, floating up as if to try and glimpse inside the penthouse.

There is a second of silence, and then Mr. Woo slowly begins to clap.

11:45 AM:  From the car, Mr. Serhant calls a client to give her some good news: her offer of $890,000 was accepted at the Setai downtown.

12:00 PM: Lunchtime, but not for us. Mr. Serhant has prepared a personalized book for a potential buyer, a law student looking to stay in the West Chelsea. He shows her two properties. The first one is a fixer-upper in a co-op; the second one has a bedroom that the woman finds “too small.” Within 10 minutes of driving away, the woman’s father calls and tells Mr. Serhant to make an offer on the first apartment.

1:15 PM: Heading back to Nest Seekers’ HQ in Midtown, Mr. Serhant is going over the contract for a building in West Chelsea. Once sold, Mr. Serhant tells us, it will be converted into residential condos by a developer, whom he is representing, and he will receive $1 million in commission.

1:30 PM: Powwow at 415 Madison with Eddie Shapiro, CEO of Nest Seekers. They discuss the recent meeting at Young Woo & Associates, and then Mr. Shapiro hands out his latest assignment for his famous broker: start marketing in Brooklyn.

“We’re going to start listing around Brooklyn Heights area,” Mr. Shapiro grins, “but we need to find another name for places around there. Let’s get creative.” Mr. Serhant looks less than thrilled; the word “Brooklyn” has frozen his face like he’s in the middle of a sneeze.

1:45 PM: Explaining he “doesn’t usually do this,” Mr. Serhant stops for lunch: a tuna panini at Pax. To go.

2:00 PM: Back in the car, Mr. Serhant manages a quick phone interview with a local Pennsylvania newspaper in anticipation of a speaking engagement in Lehigh Valley.

“I want to leverage as much opportunity from this experience as possible,” he tells The Observer. Currently, he’s hitting the luxury property lecture circuit. “No one is educated about the market,” he says, finishing off his lunch in three bites. “So many people get into real estate because they are fascinated by quick money, which doesn’t really exist, and they are fascinated by the idea that you don’t have to have an education to go into business. So a lot of idiots get into real estate.” (We decline to mention that Mr. Serhant’s reality show does little to contradict this perception, cutting months-long deals into minutes of TV narrative.)

Erin Wicomb and Serhant

2:30 PM: Weekly sales meeting with Nest Seekers broker Amjad Pervez. Together, they are co-marketing a new condo in Kip’s Bay. At 90 days, they’ve already hit the 65% sold mark.

3:30 PM: In the financial district, Mr. Serhant is consulting for Erin Wicomb, the VP and cofounder of Equity Mavrix Group, who is working on the company’s first 40-plus unit condo building in the area. “You always want a walk-in closet, you always want a double vanity,” Mr. Serhant proclaims. “Hell or high water, you need a washer dryer. Yes, in the apartment.”

The developer takes the broker’s word as gospel. “We need to consult with the best,” he says, “and Ryan knows what buyers will want.”

4:30 PM: We head back to Mr. Serhant’s apartment in West Chelsea. His stylist is there with suits for Mr. Serhant’s upcoming LA trip. To keep The Observer occupied, he plays the week’s yet-to-be-aired episode of Million Dollar Listing.

It’s a surprisingly emotional episode, as the lives of all three brokers are suddenly disrupted by Superstorm Sandy. His co-stars shack up with family or significant others, while Mr. Serhant has a very un-reality show moment of self-awareness in a voice-over confessional.

“In moments like this, moments of chaos, moments of crisis, people go to their loved ones. You go to your girlfriend or your family or your friends,” he says, while we see an image of him sitting alone on the steps of the Financial Building, cold-calling former flames.

“I’m alone. When the city shuts down and everyone is taking a pause to be with their loved ones, um, I’m completely alone.”

We look at Mr. Serhant, who is standing next to the TV, to see if he’s watching himself, but he is not. He is deciding which tie to wear on Marie Osmond’s show next week.

5:00 PM: Back in the Escalade, Mr. Serhant is on his way to meet an interior designer to discuss a client looking for a three-bedroom in Soho for $8 million when he gets another good-news phone call: the seller accepted his client’s offer of $14.9 million for an apartment at Trump Fifth Avenue. It’s the first unit Mr. Serhant has sold in the building.

It’s been seven hours since he tossed back his Monster energy drink, but he is pumped. Only seven more hours to go before Mr. Serhant can sleep, when he will congratulate himself on another successful day, eager to start it all over again four and a half hours later.