Hurricane provisions: donuts and coffee at Dough in Bed-Stuy.

The wind is picking up, the streets are emptying and both Bergdorf Goodman and Saks have both boarded up their big, beautiful windows, but in some corners of the city, life is continuing as New Yorkers seek out the real essentials: donuts, booze and coffee.

In Bed-Stuy, Brooklynites were flocking to Dough to get their fix of hibiscus, dulce de leche and cafe au lait donuts and lay in tins of coffee from the Brooklyn Roasting Company. The line stretched nearly out the door at noon, as workers scurried around the kitchen, mixing, rolling and baking to feed the demanding masses. The store was planning to close at 2 p.m. Nearby, Bedford Hill coffee employees were sandbagging the door; the Daily Grind by the Franklin Train C Train stayed open until 3 p.m.

And while many remained at home, huddled indoors to avoid getting wet, for others staying dry looked like a much bigger threat. The Black Swan Pub and Restaurant on Bedford Avenue was buzzing at noon, as was TipTop on Franklin. In Crown Heights, the Fermented Grape was doing brisk business, dispensing wine to help residents pass the long, storm plagued hours to come. Soda Bar was full of revelers, heading off cabin fever with beers and cocktails.

"We're having a hurricane party!" exclaimed the woman who answered the phone. She told us that the bartender would be there until 7 p.m. Milk Bar was also hopping and local bodegas, by and large open, were doing a brisk business in beer and cigarettes.

In Manhattan, however, things are shutting down fast as employees and staff rush back to their homes in the boroughs as the tunnels and  bridges close.

"The streets are desolate, the wind is blowing, everything is closed down, from the restaurants to Whole Foods, we're pretty much under lock down," said Tribeca resident Charlie Walk, the former president of Epic Records. "The Dunkin' Donuts are shut down, the Starbucks are all closed. I think it's probably the first time a lot of people in the neighborhood have made their own coffee."

Mr. Walk said he was most worried about flooding. "If the area gets flooded, you know it's going to be weeks and weeks and weeks. It's not an individual concern, it's a neighborhood concern. It's making sure the storm doesn't shut down a neighborhood for a prolonged period of time."

Mr. Walk, who lives a half-block away from Battery Park, said he'd checked out the water and found that it was "bubbling," but it wasn't planning on leaving.

"We're going to stick it out, I think most people in Zone B are," he said.

Union Square was similarly quiet, one resident told us. As for Fifth Avenue, it was packed with tourists wandering in packs, even though all the stores are sandbagged and empty. Even the Dunkin Donuts were closed, said an employee of a residential real estate company (who had taken a cab from his apartment on the Upper West Side to the company's deserted, and officially closed, Midtown offices).

"I've never seen all the Dunkin Donuts close before, not even during Irene," said the employee. He managed to find a cup of coffee and D&S Marketplace, whose owners had driven into Manhattan to open the story in the morning, but were planning to head back home later in the afternoon.

Fortunately, those in the West Village can head out to Waverly Inn, which is serving dinner tonight as usual, we were told. If you can get a reservation, that is.

kvelsey@observer.com

Mr. Ferver is to play Ms. Kunis’ hard-partying ballerina role in his new play, SWAN!!! His company, QWAN, has re-appropriated Black Swan (a film directed by a straight man and starring, largely, women) for the stage as a gay fantasia on balletic themes. And Mr. Ferver is a performance artist as committed as any ballerina to mastering his art. (His company previously mounted a similar production based on the British lesbian-seduction drama Notes on a Scandal, titled NOTES!!!) SWAN!!! begins its run March 10 at P.S. 122.

A recent SWAN!!! rehearsal at Abrons Art Center on the Lower East Side began with the male cast members demonstrating to the company’s one woman, Jenn Harris, who plays the Natalie Portman role, the “fouetté,” a spin Ms. Portman executes in front of her mirror. Randy Harrison, who plays the Barbara Hershey role and was a star of the Showtime series Queer as Folk, demonstrated a single perfect spin.

“No, in a pirouette you just go around once. You fouetté! Put some fouetté into it,” said Mr. Ferver, spinning his body like a dervish’s. It was agreed that Ms. Harris would spin her finger to indicate the fouetté.

“Remember how I said the bun thing could be a unifying thing?” asked Matthew Wilkas, who plays the Winona Ryder role. Mr. Ferver placed his hands on Mr. Wilkas’ developed pectorals and nodded. “But what about leg warmers?” Mr. Wilkas asked.

“You can do whatever you want!” said Mr. Ferver.

Ms. Harris, a veteran actress who starred in Silence!, another company’s 2005 musical version of Silence of the Lambs, suggested half-shirts akin to the sleeves-only shrugs Ms. Portman wears on film. The performers could wear another shirt underneath.

“I’m not going to wear anything!” shouted Mr. Ferver.

Props were discussed: fake hair buns from the makeup store Ricky’s and fake blood. A pair of ballet shoes was found on the floor of the rehearsal space; the group debated taking them, but decided it wouldn’t be fair to whoever owned them. Ms. Harris would wear silver shoes she already owned; Mr. Ferver would wear black socks.

Mr. Ferver is familiar to many for his work as a regular on the Comedy Central series Strangers with Candy, Amy Sedaris’ early-2000s cult hit. He played a bullied, effeminate teen, a role different only in comic escalation from his real upbringing in Prairie du Sac, Wis., which he described as “Boys Don’t Cry, without the funny parts.”

“Work!” was an expression Mr. Ferver used frequently during rehearsal as an expression of delight. (Other conversational tropes included “Everything!” indicating perfection, and repetition to the point of delirium, as in an scene when Mr. Harrison forced Ms. Harris to eat a cupcake: “Disgusting, disgusting, disgusting, disgusting, disgusting.”)

Mr. Ferver is well known for his more seriously intended performance art. In 2010 at P.S. 122, Mr. Ferver put on Rumble Ghost, an interpretation of the film Poltergeist in which the actor plays both the film’s mother (tormented by ghosts) and himself (same).

His work can divide audiences, and individual critics, against themselves. Claudia La Rocco, writing in The New York Times, said of Mr. Ferver’s 2009 New Museum show A Movie Star Needs a Movie that “Mr. Ferver was born too late” for the personality-driven 1980s performance scene, and added, “Self-love is a grand thing. It can also be limiting, sad, and gross.” Johanna Burton responded in Artforum that Mr. Ferver’s work exists beyond “a proper place and time, since these are categories that camp easily outruns.”

But A Movie Star Needs a Movie’s camp value was bound up in a genuine and painful emotion, the need for recognition. What personal significance there is in the new production—Mr. Ferver said he’d seen Black Swan 12 times, and cried each time—is shrouded behind more amiable, casual humor, with a slightly less tortured spirit. The actors largely remain seated, read stage directions aloud and do not plan to wear tutus.

“When you’re talking about a movie with your friends,” said Mr. Ferver, “you don’t dress up like Mila Kunis.”

As for what constitutes camp, Mr. Ferver pointed to Susan Sontag’s 1964 essay “Notes on ‘Camp.’” “I don’t think we’ve gotten past that essay,” he said. “It conveys the summation.” He added that SWAN!!! offers a particular form of catharsis: “Like a really good laugh with your lover in bed.” Melodrama takes many forms.

The show is a diversion in Mr. Ferver’s busy schedule. He is preparing a collaboration with the sculptor Marc Swanson in Houston and reading Stacy Schiff’s biography of Cleopatra for a future piece. He recently lost his SAG health insurance, for failing to book sufficient gigs, after years of onscreen work that included a stint as the pageboy-wearing “Little Lad” in Starburst ads.

“That didn’t feel like a choice to me,” he said. “I felt very driven to make this work come out of me, and I know that sounds hyperbolic, and dramatic, and antique.”

At rehearsal, Ms. Harris noted Mr. Ferver’s black leather high tops were detaching from their soles. “I know, I’ve been really busy,” he said.

SWAN!!!, despite its smaller scale, is not lacking in Mr. Ferver’s old habit of self-love. As his character performed oral sex on Ms. Harris’ during rehearsal, he instructed her to moan “Jack Ferver!” But ideas come from the entire group. Ms. Harris, for instance, has interpolated Ms. Portman’s Oscar speech into the show. And in rehearsal, ideas fouettéd freely. Mr. Ferver said, “Do something manly!” In response, Mr. Wilkas, imitating the dancer and real-life Natalie Portman beau Benjamin Millipied, made his arm movements choppy in an imitation of a toy soldier.

“I swear I have a performance piece in me,” Ms. Harris said, “where I’ll play his ex-girlfriend”—i.e., the ballerina Isabella Boylston, whom Mr. Millipied was reported to have dumped unceremoniously to take up with Ms. Portman—“who lives on the Lower East Side. She’s probably right around here.”

“Just do one called Ex-Girlfriends,” Mr. Ferver said. “It can go from Jennifer Aniston—to that girl.”

“I’m very choreographic,” Mr. Ferver said later. At some moments, Mr. Ferver more resembles Black Swan’s choreographer character, played by Vincent Cassel, than Mila Kunis’ bad-girl private dancer. (Though it must be said that his sly eyebrow-preens and murmured haaays are more Kunis than Ms. Kunis herself.) He is striving, if not for control, then for a sort of collective perfection. The members of QWAN company are all longtime friends, and their rapport is
obvious. Collaborators on Mr. Ferver’s more personal projects are chosen “by intuition. I never audition anyone. I meet people, and I fall in love.”

At one point in the show, Ms. Harris must kiss Christian Coulson, the British actor who plays Mr. Cassel’s role.

“You guys don’t have to make out if you don’t want,”  said Mr. Wilkas. 

“Everything!” said Ms. Harris.

“I didn’t chew gum when we made out Sunday night,” Mr. Ferver told Ms. Harris. “But my breath is always kinda good. That’s what the boys say.”

Everyone in the room popped a piece of gum, though only two were to kiss, and discussed their ages. “I’m 28. Don’t IMDb me,” said Mr. Ferver, who is in his early 30s. Mr. Coulson’s resistance broke down; the kiss was a hit in the room.

At the end of rehearsal, Mr. Ferver was troubled about an obscure reference to Black Swan. “Does that line make sense?” he asked The Observer. We said that it would make sense to anyone who had seen the movie.

Mr. Ferver looked unimpressed. “If they haven’t seen the movie, then fuck them, frankly.”

ddaddario@observer.com :: @DPD_

The romantic comedy No Strings Attached held onto its audience for a decent third-place showing, and the Oscar holdovers (The King's Speech at #4, True Grit at #8, Black Swan at #10) continued surprisingly strong performances. Best Actor nominee Javier Bardem's Biutiful, at #19, even managed to improve its performance over last week thanks to its emergence from nowhere (on the other hand, the poor producers of 127 Hours, #14, have been unable to capitalize on James Franco's omnipresence).

Perhaps the biggest story here is the relative failure of James Cameron production Sanctum. The 3D spelunking adventure debuted in second place. It should come as a sign to Cameron that not everything he releases is gold--or that Cameron's work plays best in December, when at least half of his audience isn't tied up in the big game.

Your top ten, per The Numbers's weekend estimates:

1. The Roommate, $15.6 million, $6,156 average, debut, Sony

2. Sanctum, $9.2 million, $3,310 average, debut, Universal

3. No Strings Attached, $8.4 million, $2,754 average, third weekend, Paramount

4. The King's Speech, $8.3 million, $3,216 average, eleventh weekend, The Weinstein Company

5. The Green Hornet, $6.1 million, $2,011 average, fourth weekend, Sony

6. The Rite, $5.6 million, $1,864 average, second weekend, Warner Brothers

7. The Mechanic, $5.4 million, $1,986 average, second weekend, CBS Films

8. True Grit, $4.8 million, $1,637 average, seventh weekend, Paramount

9. The Dilemma, $3.45 million, $1,355 average, fourth weekend, Universal

10. Black Swan, $3.40 million, $1,720 average, tenth weekend, Fox Searchlight

ddaddario@observer.com :: @DPD_

The Times doesn't claim to have any Natalie-related "scoops," though, as Millepied seems content to not discuss his Black Swan dance partner (he did the choreography and danced the lead male part in the film's production of Swan Lake). Instead, we get a fun look at the world of wooing high-minded ballet patrons, another stage where Millepied excels. It seems those funding the shows just think he's the prettiest, and loosen their purses accordingly.

“It doesn’t hurt that he has a French accent," admitted School of American Ballet board member and Chanel heiress Coco (!) Kopelman. 

Someone's got to fund the sets and tutus, and other "serious" ballet artists seem a wee bit jealous at Millepied's golden-boy status. What's his real import here -- the dancing or the dollars?

But some go further and cattily whisper that Mr. Millepied’s charisma makes up for his shortcomings as a choreographer, and is the real reason for his numerous commissions. For instance, when the Pacific Northwest Ballet tapped him to choreograph an original work in 2008, it did so knowing that the work would be underwritten by an endowment from the Joyce Theater, the Stephen and Cathy Weinroth Fund for New Works.

Not that any of this matters. Once he Portman have a perfect and beautiful little kid to trot out at fundraisers, no Millepied production will ever have to beg for funding again.

Click for What Twitter Taught Us: Anderson Cooper Gets Clocked in the Face, Egypt-Style

nfreeman [at] observer.com | @nfreeman1234

The announcement shouldn't come as much of a surprise. We witnessed them together at Black Swan's premiere, at the Ziegfeld, and noted in a Scandal Report that on set, they were insufferably cuddly. Page Six noted that Millepied was the needy one of the two. Well, not much of a shocker there.

So, dancers everywhere: put yourselves on the market to work as a film's ballet trainer. You too can wed a famous starlet! 

Click for Scandal Report: With Natalie and Mila in Town, New York Goes Swan-Crazy

nfreeman [at] observer.com | @nfreeman1234

She's very pretty, of course, and her pale complexion, thin body and one-note intensity suffice to give her a ballerina look. That her voice is tiny and monotonous isn't a problem--dancers don't have to sound like Sarah Bernhardt. That her acting is monotonous is a problem--but this isn't a movie that depends on acting of any depth; it's about shocking the audience, not persuading it.

What really matters is that Black Swan deploys and exaggerates all the clichés of earlier ballet movies, especially The Red Shoes, another tale of a ballerina driven mad and suicidal. The heroine of Michael Powell's classic suffers because she's torn between Life and Art. The heroine of Black Swan suffers because she has a destructive ballet mother (as if this were unique), because she has lesbian impulses (they emerge in one of her psycho-fantasies) and because she is frigid--a serious no-no to male screenwriters and directors, who seem to find frigidity personally offensive. Clearly, she has to die.

Before she does, however, the company's impresario-choreographer (Vincent Cassel) does his best to unfreeze her, and when that doesn't work, he sends her home to masturbate--no doubt a tactic he learned from Balanchine and Ashton. Still game, she follows orders, but no go.

BLOOD IS THE leitmotif of Black Swan. It's everywhere, beginning with Nina's skin--stigmata of some sort on her back; seeping from her self-mutilations. It pools out from beneath a closed door behind which, in one of her nightmare fantasies, she's stuffed the body of the friend/rival whom she's offed in a moment of pique. And of course, at the grand climax of the film and of the "perfect" performance of Swan Lake on which the film centers, it leaks out of her midsection as her Odette impales herself and leaps to her watery doom. It's so unfair--and so unrealistic: By killing herself, Nina misses out on her curtain calls.

So Black Swan is Grand Guignol with pretensions to class, and audiences are eating it up. Which wouldn't matter if it weren't recapitulating all the old, ugly misrepresentations about ballet. Dance is about suffering. Art is inevitably linked to madness. (Nina's predecessor, forced to retire, is another self-slasher.) You have to become a monster to succeed--or sleep with the boss. And to be an artist you have to feel ... to live; talent and hard work aren't enough. Get out there, Nina, and have a drink, have some pills, have some sex. Throw those stuffed animals out of your bedroom. Then get up on that stage for one perfect performance and ... curtains!

What did ballet ever do to deserve this?

Black Swan does what Hollywood movies have always done--it spends its energies on getting some surface things right while getting everything important wrong. Darren Aronofsky, the director, applies the same techniques and the same sensibility here as he did with The Wrestler, only with a prettier protagonist. (Mickey Rourke in a tutu is something I'd like to see.) The advance hype has been brilliant. Some of the acting--notably Mila Kunis as Nina's nemesis--is a lot of fun. Portman, aiming for the Oscar rather than fun, is good enough. Why is it all so dispiriting? And are deluded ballet parents around the country going to expose their little darlings to this sadomasochistic trip? There are going to be tears.

editorial@observer.com

"I made the trek to go to the Ziegfeld," the director told The Observer over a glass of rosé. With a mustache seemingly trimmed at Freeman's Sporting Club, Aronofsky looked a tad like Flo Ziegfeld himself. "Never! The first time I've ever had a movie play at the Ziegfeld!"

By this time the action on screen had been transplanted to the St. Regis Hotel - a ballerina statue had been placed in the center, with twinkling music box melodies emanating out from somewhere near it. A pianist tickled the ivories in a side room, where the gold-flecked ceiling-edges curled around the entire perimeter above. The mirrors, cloudy from age, were scrawled with the same smears of red lipstick that haunt Swan Queen Nina (Natalie Portman, who is nothing short of electrifying) as she tumbles in and out of fearful reverie. "WHORE" said the writing on one mirror, echoing a scene in the film. "I had the craziest dream last night..." said another.

The tables reserved for the film's ballet star and her master, played with convivial French lasciviousness by WSJ. Magazine coverboy Vincent Cassel, had paper tablets marked with the same red lipstick motif. Portman was playing the part of the Black Swan for the evening, at least in terms of looks: her dark low-strapped dress hovered largely around her designated seating area, where she giggled with girlfriends and picked at hummus and couscous.

Cassel had his own posse directly across the red mahogany-lined space, and his crew rocked that Parisian gangster look: leather jackets, big sportcoats and fat ties, the prim ladies in fedoras. There was the requisite face-pecking, everyone spoke French and every now and then Cassel would take a phone call (sample conversation: "Oui, oui, oui, blah, blah, blah.")

"I still have a career in France," he told us. "I enjoy, I come and play, and then I go home."

Godard or Truffaut?

"I guess, ehhhh - well, I started by not liking neither of them. But still today I can say that what I like the best of what they did, both of them, is their first movies. When it was, more, let's say, organic. Les Quatre Cents Coups. Yeah, then it becomes too much thinking and not enough emotions I guess."

To not give too much away, let's say there might be some teeth-kissing action between Portman's character and the ballet guru. OK, Vincent: Since we're probably not going to find out anytime soon, is Natalie really a biter?

"I think the first takes, just to make me feel what it feels like."

To have that bloody lip! Then The Observer ran into Mila Kunis, who plays Portman's onscreen doppelganger and ballet company rival. Despite her tendency toward black in the film, Kunis was draped in a dress of glinting white, and after two hours of her seductive barbs (Kunis also gives career-making performance) it was a nice surprise to hear a smile distilled into nearly every word.

Not that Mila was even there as we watched it.

"Every time everybody watches the movie I have to go to a Q&A," she said, ruining the myth that the stars are there when the celluloid flickers on the screen.

Despite living in L.A. instead of New York, we wanted to know the spots in the city with the Mila Kunis approval.

"You know what? I love all of New York, I don't really have a favorite..."

Cop out, we cried!

"I truly have no favorite place in New York - oh yes I do! What's the place that we go to Sunday mornings, for brunch..." she wondered aloud.

"That place we went to a couple times?" a friend chimed in. "Flea Market." That's in the East Village, people. Mark it!

"Flea Market!" she smiled. "I like that place to eat!"

Then we asked the question. When hanging out with Mila Kunis after seeing Black Swan, this can only be called The Question. Here goes nothing: What was it like to film the furious, clothes-torn-off full-on make-out scenes with Natalie Portman?

Mila Kunis gasped.

"That," she huffed, still maintaining that disarming and genuine smile, "is off the record!"

nfreeman [at] observer.com | @nfreeman1234

"He’s not someone hugely famous here — yet,” Needleman told WWD's Memo Pad. "I feel like he is just about to be. He seems like the perfect Wall Street Journal guy. He’s cool, and he really wears clothes really well."

Well that is a nice coat, Vincent! But even if Cassel is appearing in December's much anticipated Black Swan opposite Natalie Portman and Mila Kunis, he may not be the face that can get the Needleman era off on the right step.

WSJ. may be in luck, though: Archrival T Magazine, the style glossy at The New York Times, is rumored to be plastering the ancient Mick Jagger on its December issue. We wouldn't be surprised if Sally Singer, the new editor at T, can't get no satisfaction from her debut issue, either.

nfreeman [at] observer.com | @nfreeman1234