For all the panache that City Opera has shown under the leadership of its outgoing general director, Paul Kellogg (particularly in its updatings of Handel operas), the State Theater has hardly been a hotbed of activism during his 10-year reign. But then, what American opera company has?

A great deal has been written about why European audiences clamor for stagings that cause acute discomfort, whereas American audiences tend to regard opera as good for nothing more than an evening of highbrow escapism. Certainly the fact that the operatic canon is almost entirely European in origin and subject matter has a great deal to do with it. And so does the fact that most European opera houses owe their existence to the more or less automatic largesse of the state—not to the whimsies of private benefactors. Moreover, since virtually all great operas are, at bottom, attacks on the status quo, there may be something inherent in the form that goes against the essentially optimistic American grain.

Which raises the question of whether City Opera’s invitation to this agent provocateur isn’t like asking the fox to run the henhouse. Back when I was a regular at Salzburg, I grew tired of Mr. Mortier’s bad-boy exertions. I walked out of a Così fan Tutte in which Karita Mattila’s Fiordiligi was obliged to sing “Come scoglio” while holding the leashes of two nearly naked, muscle-bound extras as they nipped at her ankles, doggie style. (So that’s what this paragon of romantic fidelity was singing about!) But when I eventually returned to a less silly, more sedate Salzburg run by a new intendant, I missed those post-opera drinking sessions at the Café Triangel during which everyone got high on the little Belgian’s latest outrage.

Mr. Mortier was dead right about one thing: If opera is to live, it has to be talked about (and I don’t mean chatter about why some fast-rising Bulgarian soprano will “never” be Maria Callas). I say, let the feathers fly—not only backstage, but into the lobby of the State Theater and across the plaza, where the Met’s new general manager, Peter Gelb, is busy getting that old dowager re-engaged. The most salutary thing that could happen to opera in New York would be for the David and the Goliath of Lincoln Center to go head to head. May the best—not necessarily the biggest—man win.

AS THE MORTIER APPOINTMENT was being announced, I happened to be in Cleveland, where another round of musical chairs was taking place. This one involved the reappearance of the Cleveland Orchestra’s former music director, Christophe von Dohnányi, who was returning to conduct a benefit concert with this great band for the first time since he left in 2002.

The 18-year marriage between the patrician German taskmaster and an institution that George Szell built into the world’s most seamless orchestral ensemble is widely regarded as one of the most successful matches in recent memory. But his successor, the young Austrian Franz Welser-Möst, quickly made no secret of his intention to correct what he saw as the failings of the Dohnányi regime—chiefly, a lack of spontaneity and warmth in the playing.

Having heard a great many Welser-Möst concerts in the past few seasons, I was curious to hear whether the orchestra had indeed changed as much as the new man wanted it to. The Cleveland players are at once the most distinctive American orchestra in their devotion to precision and balance, and also thoroughbreds who respond instantly to whoever happens to be on the podium. That they were poised to do their old maestro’s bidding in two 19th-century warhorses (Schumann’s Symphony No. 4 and Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony) was immediately apparent.

Mr. Dohnányi has always been a top-down conductor: Every detail seems to emanate directly from his muscular, all-controlling style. The result casts architectural elements in high relief. It’s a determinedly grounded approach that worked better for the ruggedly assertive Beethoven than for the more poetically questing Schumann, and the audience gave Mr. Dohnányi a standing ovation. Yet in both works I felt instructed rather than transported: Admirably rock-solid, these performances never really took off.

I could only imagine what they would have been under the more laissez-faire baton of Mr. Welser-Möst: Structural relationships might have been obscured in favor of momentum; seriousness sacrificed for sensuousness.

The return of the old maestro made me nostalgic for the orchestra’s current maestro, who—like Mr. Mortier—seems to have his musical ear tuned buoyantly to the future rather than to the past. As I whispered to the orchestra’s executive director, Gary Hanson, after the performance, “It was a fine homecoming for Christophe, but I’ll take Franz.”

But there's still something refreshing about a person so willing to talk about every aspect of his theoretical campaign before so much as hiring a press secretary.

Yesterday, we chatted about some of the specifics of the Catsimatidis '09 agenda.

The price for the campaign? $30 million. "If it's going well and I want to spend 40, I'll spend 40. It doesn't matter."

In which party? "Most likely the Republican Party. I mean, I'm not a left-wing Democrat. I'm a Rockefeller Republican, the way Bloomberg Republican."

What makes you a Rockefeller Republican?

"I'm pro-people and pro-business."

And your vision for the future of New York?

"My number one concern is not chase the middle class out of New York.
Do you want to turn New York into a downtown Detroit or downtown Cleveland? I love New York. I don't want to do that."

And what's that like?

"Downtown Cleveland? There's nobody down town except the people on welfare," Catsimatidis said. "You know, you need a mixed society, you need a little bit of everybody.

Everybody?

"When you talk about illegal aliens, they have a purpose too. I want illegal aliens, and I'll support them if they're paying their taxes, hard working families. But if they're here to live off the rest of us, then I'm not going to support them. If they're here to commit felonies and murders, I'll have them on the first boat out. You know, if it's within my power."

More Catsimatidis after the jump.

JC: I'm willing to spend $30 million," he said. "That was a statement I was giving to people.

Azi: That sounds like a confirmation. Are you going to run?

JC: Most likely.

Azi: In which party?

JC: Most likely the Republican Party. I mean, I'm not a left-wing Democrat. I'm a Rockefeller Republican, the way Bloomberg Republican.

Azi: In what policy matters are you a Rockefeller Republican instead of a left-wing Democrat?

JC: I'm pro-people and pro-business.

Azi: Bloomberg raised property taxes ---

JC: We had a little bit of a loss with 9/11. He did what he had to do because of the problems the city was in. I don't want to raise taxes.
My number one concern is not chase the middle class out of New York.
Do you want to turn New York into a downtown Detroit or downtown Cleveland? I love New York. I don't want to do that.

Azi: I've never seen those two areas, what are they like?

JC: Downtown Cleveland? There's nobody down town except the people on welfare. You know, you need a mixed society, you need a little bit of everybody. I'm not looking to chase the poor out. I'm not looking to chase the middle income out. I'm not looking to chase the rich out. I want everyone.

[skip]

New York is a great melting pot.

When you talk about illegal aliens, they have a purpose too. I want illegal aliens, and I'll support them if they're paying their taxes, hard working families. But if they're here to live off the rest of us, then I'm not going to support them. If they're here to commit felonies and murders, I'll have them on the first boat out. You know, if it's within my power.

Am I saying anything illogical?

Azi: It sounds pretty unambiguous. Have you spoken with Bloomberg about what it's like to run and govern?

JC: No. I think he's aware I'm thinking about it.

Azi: When you get into the specifics about how much you'll spend ---

JC: I threw out the number of $30 million. If it's going well and I want to spend 40, I'll spend 40. It doesn't matter. I think Bloomberg could have won with half the amount he spent.

Azi: Then why did he spend so much?

JC: He's a lot richer than I am. I'm not poor but I'm not that wealthy.

Azi: Dick Parsons is reportedly thinking of running.

JC: He's a very fine person -- but I'm not sure he's going to run. That's my opinion.

Azi: I called over to the Board of Elections and they said you're still registered as a Democrat. Do you know when you might change that?

JC : When we hire an election lawyer in the next couple of months, we'll talk to him about it. I was a registered Republican in the 1980s, pre-Bill Clinton.

Azi: Why would you run for mayor as a Republican?

JC: Because I'm a moderate business man. I don't' think a moderate businessman has a chance in hell winning the Democratic primary.

-- Azi Paybarah

"What happened was that Bruce was getting to the point in his life where he wants to do some philanthropy,"
Rich Moore, managing director at RBC Capital Markets, told us. "There is no liquidity to joint ventures because he has to sell a building in order to make any money."

In return, Ratner is getting $60.8 million to play around with, a 3.9 percent stake in Cleveland-based Forest City Enterprises, as well as a seat on the parent company's board of directors.

Since last Thursday's after-close announcement, the cousin company's stock price has fallen about $4.

-Matthew Schuerman

Betty Comden and Adolph Green wrote those lyrics way back in 1953 for Rosalind Russell to wail in Wonderful Town. Had they known then what would happen 53 years later, they might have filed an early injunction against a sophomoric, confused and frankly filthy little movie called The Oh in Ohio. Is it too late now?

This is a mindless comedy about sex that is never remotely funny, with a cast that is never remotely sexy, and which, in one case, is downright revolting. It has the grave misfortune of starring Parker Posey, who manages the remarkable miracle of working endlessly without knowing the first thing about acting. Ms. Posey is a cheerful but inept poster girl for the “I Try But No Can Do” School of Dramatic Art. In The Oh in Ohio, she grins, chirps, rolls her eyes and chews the scenery through the overtaxing role of Priscilla, a Cleveland P.R. agent who, on the surface, has it all. She’s pretty, successful at her job and happily married. Her husband (Paul Rudd) is a biology teacher in the Cleveland public-school system, so his depression is understandable.

But there’s more. Priscilla is sexually dysfunctional. In fact, she has never had an orgasm. So her frustrated husband has been driven to such a low level of self-esteem that he gains weight, stops shaving, turns into a pudgy, morose slob and moves into the garage. Priscilla seeks counseling. A marriage counselor advises, “The center of the self is the penis.” Liza Minnelli, of all people, livens things up in one all-too-brief cameo, playing a bleach-blond sex therapist who teaches masturbation classes like a ticking metronome in pink spangles, barking: “Liberate your labia!” and “Value your vulva!” Priscilla moves on to banana lube and sex-toy technology, but once she discovers the invention of the vibrator, she turns into an insatiable sex addict, achieving “13 and a half orgasms a day,” none of them with her husband.

Naturally, he leaves her for good, but she doesn’t care: She has her vibrator. She even wears it to her company’s board meetings, jerking and screeching all over the conference room like a ballistic chainsaw. He sleeps with one of his students. She becomes a raging slut in mark-down, off-the-rack Anne Klein knockoffs, goes the lesbian route with luscious Heather Graham, who was wise enough to have her name removed from the credits, and (this is the gruesome part) finally achieves sexual ecstasy for the first time in her life with Wayne the Pool Guy, a tub and drain installer played by—Danny DeVito??? Clearly, this is a woman who needs hospitalization.

Danny DeVito in a bathing suit and ponytail? An entire movie set in Cleveland? Legendary Liza Minnelli in a walk-on? All painful proof of how low movies have sunk. Billy Kent, the director making his feature debut after a career in MTV parodies, should go back to hemorrhoid commercials. Adam Wierzbianski, the writer of a script that was born dead, is the managing director of a Polish newspaper in Brooklyn. I mean, you can’t make this stuff up. Parker Posey is a spectacularly mediocre actress who tries too hard. Paul Rudd is a versatile actor who doesn’t try at all. Neither of them have the range, subtlety or comic timing to carry off a movie this broad.

At any rate, The Oh in Ohio has no clear idea what kind of movie it wants to be in the first place; it just titters and smirks and jerks all over the place. The title is a takeoff on the French porno book Story of O (O for orifice, in Ohio?), and it does tell you more about female anatomy than The Vagina Monologues, but there isn’t a provocative moment in the whole thing. Sexual dysfunction in modern relationships of all kinds is a serious subject for a movie. Sexual Healing, a new reality series on Showtime, is devoting an entire season to it, premiering July 21. Reducing so much contemporary pain, genuine anxiety and psychic therapy to 88 minutes of trashy jokes is a pathetic underachievement, even for amateurs.

Granny Moreau

A more rewarding and thoughtful treatment of sex can be found in the French film Time to Leave. It’s the second in a planned trilogy of works about death and mourning by François Ozon following Under the Sand (2000), which starred Charlotte Rampling as a widow unable to accept the drowning death of her husband.

Time to Leave stars French heartthrob Melvil Poupaud, star of James Ivory’s Le Divorce (he was the self-centered poet who left his pregnant American wife, played by Naomi Watts, for another woman), as Romain, a handsome, 31-year-old gay fashion photographer who is dying of a fully metastasized cancer. With only a 5 percent chance of survival, he makes a sobering decision to forgo chemotherapy and not fight a hopeless cause. Turning cynical, he alienates his family, breaks up with his loyal boyfriend, does too much cocaine and hides his diagnosis from everyone except his most trusted confidante—the wise, free-living, fiercely independent grandmother he has adored since childhood.

Dispensing sound advice with an arsenal of pills and vitamins, Jeanne Moreau has never been more poignant. In one unforgettable scene, she even shares her bed with her grown grandson, warning him that she sleeps in the nude. Only Moreau could carry off a scene that edgy with such an absence of risk. She just gets juicier with age.

Romain’s short stay in the country house where he spent the summers of his youth is the centerpiece of the film, during which his vulnerability is met with a big and understanding heart. The visit rekindles his benevolence; he stages a tender reunion with his boyfriend and his estranged sister; and, in an astonishing scene, he sleeps with a woman whose husband is sterile, giving them the child they desperately need for their own survival.

Mr. Ozon has a passion for the intense 50’s Hollywood “women’s pictures” of Douglas Sirk, but this time reverses the suffering by making his soap-opera heroine a gay man. The result is a mature, fiercely contemporary approach to death that never drifts into easy tears. Much of the film is told in flashbacks, and at least one of the memories is very funny when the adult Romain watches himself as an adolescent prankster, peeing in the holy water, then giggling as churchgoers bless themselves with it. A master of emotional control, the director keeps the mood surprisingly light between the sex, the anger and the sadness. Not a moment rings false. Deeply touching and brutally frank, Time to Leave is an evaluation of how a young man makes preparations to die and comes to grips with the cruelty of fate, finding himself in the process and succeeding with authority, dignity and grace.

Hail Mr. Macy!

In the week’s triptych of films about sex and gloom, David Mamet’s controversial Edmond, directed by Stuart Gordon, is the nastiest and most relentlessly depressing. A bland, miserable and dour-faced man in a Brooks Brothers suit goes mad on the subway, brandishing a knife. This grotesque and sometimes pretentious screen adaptation of an early Mamet stage piece examines the downward spiral of one of the little gray people in the societal skeleton of insignificant Mr. Cellophanes you would never notice in a crowd. You might not notice the movie either, were it not for a galvanizing, three-dimensional performance by William H. Macy in the title role that can only be described as electrifying.

A man known only as Edmond leaves his office exhausted, enraged and fed up with his banal life, drops into a shop with tarot cards in the window, and consults a fortune teller who tells him, “You’re not where you’re supposed to be.” Taking the old crone’s words literally, he insults his wife (Rebecca Pidgeon), walks out of their empty marriage with cruel rejection and begins an odyssey to the dark side. A stranger in a bar (Joe Mantegna) enables dormant prejudices against gays and blacks and reinforces the reasons real men don’t eat quiche: “pussy, power, money, release, gratification.” Revitalized and determined to get laid, Edmond wanders aimlessly through peep shows, tattoo parlors and numerous forms of credit-card prostitution, bargaining with whores, even demanding change and, in one case, a refund. Like Peter Finch in Network, fed up and unwilling to take it anymore, he’s a loser who has wasted 47 years of his life in a fog, but Edmond finds that instead of power, respect and a drop of that milk of human kindness the poets write about, he finds only treachery and betrayal.

Battered, bloody and ripped off by pawnbrokers, thieves and pimps, Edmond loses his wallet, his identity and his grip on reality, slides farther down the rabbit hole and ends up in dragon country. Before his night of debauchery and self-destruction ends, the movie erupts in a volcano of violence, and the diminutive sad sack everyone took for granted commits a murder that lands him in prison chains for life. The last time we see Edmond, beaten and sodomized by a burly black cellmate, he’s bald, covered with tattoos, unrecognizable behind a long Smith Brothers cough-drop-box mustache, and still questioning the meaning of Heaven and Hell before climbing into the arms of his lover with the ultimate resignation that infinity is nothing but darkness and doom.

Mr. Mamet is after something here, making you recoil from filthy Mametspeak shorthand while he struggles to make a profound and meaningful statement about the hypocrisy of rednecks, with the warning: Be careful of the people you hate, because you might just end up one of them. Edmond ends up in eternal damnation. But where is the surprise in getting there? The problem is that he is already so insane when the movie opens that the slide isn’t far off the graph. Also, there are too many of Mr. Mamet’s trademark show-off distractions in the script that only manage to annoy instead of clarify (the constant re-emergence of those tarot cards, the baffling use of the number 115 on doors and clocks). Ultimately, I feel the subject of the ordinary man who goes over the edge was explored with more coherence and empathy by Michael Douglas in the 1993 film Falling Down. But there is no question about the inspired tragedy and incinerating fury of Mr. Macy’s bravura center-ring performance. Your mind rarely digresses from the creative power of his hand on your pulse. He is supported darkly but stylishly by a stark parade of lacerating cameos from Julia Stiles, Denise Richards, Mena Suvari, Dylan Walsh, Debi Mazar and others. They’re on a trip, but who wants to tag along for a ride that makes you want to kill yourself?

Betty Comden and Adolph Green wrote those lyrics way back in 1953 for Rosalind Russell to wail in Wonderful Town. Had they known then what would happen 53 years later, they might have filed an early injunction against a sophomoric, confused and frankly filthy little movie called The Oh in Ohio. Is it too late now?

This is a mindless comedy about sex that is never remotely funny, with a cast that is never remotely sexy, and which, in one case, is downright revolting. It has the grave misfortune of starring Parker Posey, who manages the remarkable miracle of working endlessly without knowing the first thing about acting. Ms. Posey is a cheerful but inept poster girl for the “I Try But No Can Do” School of Dramatic Art. In The Oh in Ohio, she grins, chirps, rolls her eyes and chews the scenery through the overtaxing role of Priscilla, a Cleveland P.R. agent who, on the surface, has it all. She’s pretty, successful at her job and happily married. Her husband (Paul Rudd) is a biology teacher in the Cleveland public-school system, so his depression is understandable.

But there’s more. Priscilla is sexually dysfunctional. In fact, she has never had an orgasm. So her frustrated husband has been driven to such a low level of self-esteem that he gains weight, stops shaving, turns into a pudgy, morose slob and moves into the garage. Priscilla seeks counseling. A marriage counselor advises, “The center of the self is the penis.” Liza Minnelli, of all people, livens things up in one all-too-brief cameo, playing a bleach-blond sex therapist who teaches masturbation classes like a ticking metronome in pink spangles, barking: “Liberate your labia!” and “Value your vulva!” Priscilla moves on to banana lube and sex-toy technology, but once she discovers the invention of the vibrator, she turns into an insatiable sex addict, achieving “13 and a half orgasms a day,” none of them with her husband.

Naturally, he leaves her for good, but she doesn’t care: She has her vibrator. She even wears it to her company’s board meetings, jerking and screeching all over the conference room like a ballistic chainsaw. He sleeps with one of his students. She becomes a raging slut in mark-down, off-the-rack Anne Klein knockoffs, goes the lesbian route with luscious Heather Graham, who was wise enough to have her name removed from the credits, and (this is the gruesome part) finally achieves sexual ecstasy for the first time in her life with Wayne the Pool Guy, a tub and drain installer played by—Danny DeVito??? Clearly, this is a woman who needs hospitalization.

Danny DeVito in a bathing suit and ponytail? An entire movie set in Cleveland? Legendary Liza Minnelli in a walk-on? All painful proof of how low movies have sunk. Billy Kent, the director making his feature debut after a career in MTV parodies, should go back to hemorrhoid commercials. Adam Wierzbianski, the writer of a script that was born dead, is the managing director of a Polish newspaper in Brooklyn. I mean, you can’t make this stuff up. Parker Posey is a spectacularly mediocre actress who tries too hard. Paul Rudd is a versatile actor who doesn’t try at all. Neither of them have the range, subtlety or comic timing to carry off a movie this broad.

At any rate, The Oh in Ohio has no clear idea what kind of movie it wants to be in the first place; it just titters and smirks and jerks all over the place. The title is a takeoff on the French porno book Story of O (O for orifice, in Ohio?), and it does tell you more about female anatomy than The Vagina Monologues, but there isn’t a provocative moment in the whole thing. Sexual dysfunction in modern relationships of all kinds is a serious subject for a movie. Sexual Healing, a new reality series on Showtime, is devoting an entire season to it, premiering July 21. Reducing so much contemporary pain, genuine anxiety and psychic therapy to 88 minutes of trashy jokes is a pathetic underachievement, even for amateurs.

Granny Moreau

A more rewarding and thoughtful treatment of sex can be found in the French film Time to Leave. It’s the second in a planned trilogy of works about death and mourning by François Ozon following Under the Sand (2000), which starred Charlotte Rampling as a widow unable to accept the drowning death of her husband.

Time to Leave stars French heartthrob Melvil Poupaud, star of James Ivory’s Le Divorce (he was the self-centered poet who left his pregnant American wife, played by Naomi Watts, for another woman), as Romain, a handsome, 31-year-old gay fashion photographer who is dying of a fully metastasized cancer. With only a 5 percent chance of survival, he makes a sobering decision to forgo chemotherapy and not fight a hopeless cause. Turning cynical, he alienates his family, breaks up with his loyal boyfriend, does too much cocaine and hides his diagnosis from everyone except his most trusted confidante—the wise, free-living, fiercely independent grandmother he has adored since childhood.

Dispensing sound advice with an arsenal of pills and vitamins, Jeanne Moreau has never been more poignant. In one unforgettable scene, she even shares her bed with her grown grandson, warning him that she sleeps in the nude. Only Moreau could carry off a scene that edgy with such an absence of risk. She just gets juicier with age.

Romain’s short stay in the country house where he spent the summers of his youth is the centerpiece of the film, during which his vulnerability is met with a big and understanding heart. The visit rekindles his benevolence; he stages a tender reunion with his boyfriend and his estranged sister; and, in an astonishing scene, he sleeps with a woman whose husband is sterile, giving them the child they desperately need for their own survival.

Mr. Ozon has a passion for the intense 50’s Hollywood “women’s pictures” of Douglas Sirk, but this time reverses the suffering by making his soap-opera heroine a gay man. The result is a mature, fiercely contemporary approach to death that never drifts into easy tears. Much of the film is told in flashbacks, and at least one of the memories is very funny when the adult Romain watches himself as an adolescent prankster, peeing in the holy water, then giggling as churchgoers bless themselves with it. A master of emotional control, the director keeps the mood surprisingly light between the sex, the anger and the sadness. Not a moment rings false. Deeply touching and brutally frank, Time to Leave is an evaluation of how a young man makes preparations to die and comes to grips with the cruelty of fate, finding himself in the process and succeeding with authority, dignity and grace.

Hail Mr. Macy!

In the week’s triptych of films about sex and gloom, David Mamet’s controversial Edmond, directed by Stuart Gordon, is the nastiest and most relentlessly depressing. A bland, miserable and dour-faced man in a Brooks Brothers suit goes mad on the subway, brandishing a knife. This grotesque and sometimes pretentious screen adaptation of an early Mamet stage piece examines the downward spiral of one of the little gray people in the societal skeleton of insignificant Mr. Cellophanes you would never notice in a crowd. You might not notice the movie either, were it not for a galvanizing, three-dimensional performance by William H. Macy in the title role that can only be described as electrifying.

A man known only as Edmond leaves his office exhausted, enraged and fed up with his banal life, drops into a shop with tarot cards in the window, and consults a fortune teller who tells him, “You’re not where you’re supposed to be.” Taking the old crone’s words literally, he insults his wife (Rebecca Pidgeon), walks out of their empty marriage with cruel rejection and begins an odyssey to the dark side. A stranger in a bar (Joe Mantegna) enables dormant prejudices against gays and blacks and reinforces the reasons real men don’t eat quiche: “pussy, power, money, release, gratification.” Revitalized and determined to get laid, Edmond wanders aimlessly through peep shows, tattoo parlors and numerous forms of credit-card prostitution, bargaining with whores, even demanding change and, in one case, a refund. Like Peter Finch in Network, fed up and unwilling to take it anymore, he’s a loser who has wasted 47 years of his life in a fog, but Edmond finds that instead of power, respect and a drop of that milk of human kindness the poets write about, he finds only treachery and betrayal.

Battered, bloody and ripped off by pawnbrokers, thieves and pimps, Edmond loses his wallet, his identity and his grip on reality, slides farther down the rabbit hole and ends up in dragon country. Before his night of debauchery and self-destruction ends, the movie erupts in a volcano of violence, and the diminutive sad sack everyone took for granted commits a murder that lands him in prison chains for life. The last time we see Edmond, beaten and sodomized by a burly black cellmate, he’s bald, covered with tattoos, unrecognizable behind a long Smith Brothers cough-drop-box mustache, and still questioning the meaning of Heaven and Hell before climbing into the arms of his lover with the ultimate resignation that infinity is nothing but darkness and doom.

Mr. Mamet is after something here, making you recoil from filthy Mametspeak shorthand while he struggles to make a profound and meaningful statement about the hypocrisy of rednecks, with the warning: Be careful of the people you hate, because you might just end up one of them. Edmond ends up in eternal damnation. But where is the surprise in getting there? The problem is that he is already so insane when the movie opens that the slide isn’t far off the graph. Also, there are too many of Mr. Mamet’s trademark show-off distractions in the script that only manage to annoy instead of clarify (the constant re-emergence of those tarot cards, the baffling use of the number 115 on doors and clocks). Ultimately, I feel the subject of the ordinary man who goes over the edge was explored with more coherence and empathy by Michael Douglas in the 1993 film Falling Down. But there is no question about the inspired tragedy and incinerating fury of Mr. Macy’s bravura center-ring performance. Your mind rarely digresses from the creative power of his hand on your pulse. He is supported darkly but stylishly by a stark parade of lacerating cameos from Julia Stiles, Denise Richards, Mena Suvari, Dylan Walsh, Debi Mazar and others. They’re on a trip, but who wants to tag along for a ride that makes you want to kill yourself?

Now comes a new piano concerto (a real rarity these days) by Marc-André Dalbavie that eschews competition altogether. The piece had its American premiere on Jan. 5 in Cleveland, Ohio, performed by the splendid Norwegian pianist, Leif Ove Andsnes, and the Cleveland Orchestra conducted by James Gaffigan, an assistant conductor who was substituting for the ailing Franz Welser-Möst. It’s the most exhilarating example of the form I’ve heard in years—a display of no-contest concerto writing in which everyone wins, especially the audience.

Two years ago, in January 2004, I traveled to Cleveland to hear Pierre Boulez conduct the Clevelanders in Mr. Dalbavie’s Concertate il Suono, an all-orchestral work that separated the players into little clusters throughout Severance Hall. The piece was a mesmerizing exercise in unity achieved through disunity—a merging of 100 voices that hovered in some mysterious atmosphere between celestial harmony and rude cacophony. With his Piano Concerto, which was given its world premiere at the London Proms last August, the music has rushed to earth, as if the 44-year-old Frenchman were a downhill racer doing the slalom of a lifetime.

Here are my notes, written during the first of what I hope is many hearings of this marvelous work:

“First movement (allegro): Orchestral growling in the deepest registers—some primordial place of pre-tonality. Arresting declaration by piano (‘I’m here!’), which then takes off on a vertiginous descent of double octaves. Octaves diminish to single scales, then ascend a little way back up—like the spray when a waterfall strikes the river ledge: Czerny on a tear. Rude burst of brass (cautionary note?). Swirl of orchestral color. Gorgeous buildup of overlapping sounds. Everything begins to connect, turn on itself, even pause to hold its breath (haze of strings), yet remains purposeful and transparent. Both time and space expand, shrink, according to a new creator’s law. Somehow the opening descending figure is always visible, like Saarinen’s St. Louis Arch. Ears, eyes, nervous system constantly engaged—the little yelp from the brass; the sweet clarinet doodle. Piano dances like a dragonfly, taking on color and energy from the orchestra and giving it back in return. Movement ends with a resounding flourish of the opening downward run.

“Straight into second movement (andante) without pause: The piano alone in a little rising figure—a somber, pensive reverse echo of the previous descents; silence of orchestra is palpable. Violas and cellos enter almost imperceptibly—amber glow from stage left, gradually irradiating the violins. Another yelp from the garish horns; piano returns to the downward skitter—right hand only—then tries out some Shearing-like chords that cloud the journey with a touch of blue. Interplay between the ‘conscience’ of the piano and the ‘universe’ of the orchestra: not confrontation, but mutual enlightenment.

“Straight into third movement (presto) without pause: Piano on a roll: tidal surges up and down keyboard; orchestra booms big chords at its own speed—slower but not foot-dragging. Piano resumes the old racing descent; strings and winds decide to join in the downhill fun. A brusque march (what’s this—Mahler?); then a coda in which piano and orchestra lose all moorings (kids at recess) before everyone joins hands for a final run down that hill, hitting bottom with a mighty unison bang.”

The scintillating interweaving in the concerto was inspired, as is often the case with Mr. Dalbavie’s music, by an extra-musical source: Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, which is narrated by the principal characters’ distinctly different voices. The composer’s intention was not to tell the story prismatically, in the manner of, say, Kurosawa’s Rashomon, but rather to replay that downhill run with changing colors and contexts so that it always sounds new. Indeed, the concerto is only the heftiest entry in an ongoing piano cycle, which also includes a piano solo, a piano trio with horn and a piano quintet with winds. In each of the works, the run is both catalyst and still point. In a program note, Mr. Dalbavie said, “Each of these piano pieces is, in a sense, the same music, but it doesn’t sound like the same music, because the different colors of the instruments change it.” To paraphrase T.S. Eliot, in the beginning is the end and in the end is the beginning.

If this sounds pretentious or abstruse, the Cleveland performance was nothing of the sort. Mr. Gaffigan, a cherubic young man of 26, was fearlessly in charge of the extravaganza, which was bookended to telling effect by Debussy’s early tone poem Printemps, all color and light, and Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, grandly declarative in the old-school way. He’s a conductor of real promise, combining muscular energy with unabashed lyricism.

Mr. Dalbavie had Leif Ove Andsnes in mind when he composed the concerto, primarily because of the 35-year-old Norwegian’s extraordinary subtlety of tonal palette. His fleet pianissimos made themselves felt, rounded and limpid, even when the orchestra was going full tilt. Like the Clevelanders, he’s incapable of making an ugly sound. No one sits at the keyboard with such unassuming naturalness as Mr. Andsnes. Observing how his whole upper body seems to curl symbiotically into the big instrument, I was reminded of an encounter several years ago at Carnegie Hall during the intermission of one of his recitals. A young man introduced himself as a boyhood friend of the pianist’s, and when I asked whether his old pal had always played with such apparent effortlessness, he replied: “Yes—he was just like this as a boy. He had a wonderful teacher in Norway who told him that the most important thing about playing the piano is to obey the law of gravity—to sort of fall into the music.”

Which leads me to suggest that perhaps Mr. Dalbavie should turn to another literary source and give his downward-racing concerto a title that fits it to a T: Gravity’s Rainbow.

Now comes a new piano concerto (a real rarity these days) by Marc-André Dalbavie that eschews competition altogether. The piece had its American premiere on Jan. 5 in Cleveland, Ohio, performed by the splendid Norwegian pianist, Leif Ove Andsnes, and the Cleveland Orchestra conducted by James Gaffigan, an assistant conductor who was substituting for the ailing Franz Welser-Möst. It’s the most exhilarating example of the form I’ve heard in years—a display of no-contest concerto writing in which everyone wins, especially the audience.

Two years ago, in January 2004, I traveled to Cleveland to hear Pierre Boulez conduct the Clevelanders in Mr. Dalbavie’s Concertate il Suono, an all-orchestral work that separated the players into little clusters throughout Severance Hall. The piece was a mesmerizing exercise in unity achieved through disunity—a merging of 100 voices that hovered in some mysterious atmosphere between celestial harmony and rude cacophony. With his Piano Concerto, which was given its world premiere at the London Proms last August, the music has rushed to earth, as if the 44-year-old Frenchman were a downhill racer doing the slalom of a lifetime.

Here are my notes, written during the first of what I hope is many hearings of this marvelous work:

“First movement (allegro): Orchestral growling in the deepest registers—some primordial place of pre-tonality. Arresting declaration by piano (‘I’m here!’), which then takes off on a vertiginous descent of double octaves. Octaves diminish to single scales, then ascend a little way back up—like the spray when a waterfall strikes the river ledge: Czerny on a tear. Rude burst of brass (cautionary note?). Swirl of orchestral color. Gorgeous buildup of overlapping sounds. Everything begins to connect, turn on itself, even pause to hold its breath (haze of strings), yet remains purposeful and transparent. Both time and space expand, shrink, according to a new creator’s law. Somehow the opening descending figure is always visible, like Saarinen’s St. Louis Arch. Ears, eyes, nervous system constantly engaged—the little yelp from the brass; the sweet clarinet doodle. Piano dances like a dragonfly, taking on color and energy from the orchestra and giving it back in return. Movement ends with a resounding flourish of the opening downward run.

“Straight into second movement (andante) without pause: The piano alone in a little rising figure—a somber, pensive reverse echo of the previous descents; silence of orchestra is palpable. Violas and cellos enter almost imperceptibly—amber glow from stage left, gradually irradiating the violins. Another yelp from the garish horns; piano returns to the downward skitter—right hand only—then tries out some Shearing-like chords that cloud the journey with a touch of blue. Interplay between the ‘conscience’ of the piano and the ‘universe’ of the orchestra: not confrontation, but mutual enlightenment.

“Straight into third movement (presto) without pause: Piano on a roll: tidal surges up and down keyboard; orchestra booms big chords at its own speed—slower but not foot-dragging. Piano resumes the old racing descent; strings and winds decide to join in the downhill fun. A brusque march (what’s this—Mahler?); then a coda in which piano and orchestra lose all moorings (kids at recess) before everyone joins hands for a final run down that hill, hitting bottom with a mighty unison bang.”

The scintillating interweaving in the concerto was inspired, as is often the case with Mr. Dalbavie’s music, by an extra-musical source: Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, which is narrated by the principal characters’ distinctly different voices. The composer’s intention was not to tell the story prismatically, in the manner of, say, Kurosawa’s Rashomon, but rather to replay that downhill run with changing colors and contexts so that it always sounds new. Indeed, the concerto is only the heftiest entry in an ongoing piano cycle, which also includes a piano solo, a piano trio with horn and a piano quintet with winds. In each of the works, the run is both catalyst and still point. In a program note, Mr. Dalbavie said, “Each of these piano pieces is, in a sense, the same music, but it doesn’t sound like the same music, because the different colors of the instruments change it.” To paraphrase T.S. Eliot, in the beginning is the end and in the end is the beginning.

If this sounds pretentious or abstruse, the Cleveland performance was nothing of the sort. Mr. Gaffigan, a cherubic young man of 26, was fearlessly in charge of the extravaganza, which was bookended to telling effect by Debussy’s early tone poem Printemps, all color and light, and Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, grandly declarative in the old-school way. He’s a conductor of real promise, combining muscular energy with unabashed lyricism.

Mr. Dalbavie had Leif Ove Andsnes in mind when he composed the concerto, primarily because of the 35-year-old Norwegian’s extraordinary subtlety of tonal palette. His fleet pianissimos made themselves felt, rounded and limpid, even when the orchestra was going full tilt. Like the Clevelanders, he’s incapable of making an ugly sound. No one sits at the keyboard with such unassuming naturalness as Mr. Andsnes. Observing how his whole upper body seems to curl symbiotically into the big instrument, I was reminded of an encounter several years ago at Carnegie Hall during the intermission of one of his recitals. A young man introduced himself as a boyhood friend of the pianist’s, and when I asked whether his old pal had always played with such apparent effortlessness, he replied: “Yes—he was just like this as a boy. He had a wonderful teacher in Norway who told him that the most important thing about playing the piano is to obey the law of gravity—to sort of fall into the music.”

Which leads me to suggest that perhaps Mr. Dalbavie should turn to another literary source and give his downward-racing concerto a title that fits it to a T: Gravity’s Rainbow.

They spend a few paragraphs on Forest City’s ability to take public subsidies and use them to make a profit by developing in run-down city neighborhoods that other companies wouldn’t touch. Another worthwhile read examines the company’s tortoise image on Wall Street.

We’re still waiting for that big overview that tells us what the company is all about—and of course we can't wait to hear them talk about New York City!

-Matthew Schuerman

But when we got there, Mix It was gone too. The premises looked much the same, except the reception desk was decorated with porcupine quills and rolls of silver birch bark. The restaurant was now called Porcupine. (Perhaps the name was symbolic: Porcupines, in case you didn't know, aren't carnivores but arbivores; they like to gnaw through the bark of trees and dine on the soft, juicy stuff underneath.)

It turned out that the owner of the Porcupine, Jacques Ouari, had decided to ditch the short-lived Mix It and start over with a new chef and a new name. The chef, Matthew Weingarten, previously worked with Katy Sparks at Quilty's and at Tuscan.

Porcupine's tavern-like room was full and bustling when we arrived. Jaunty French music was playing in the background. A long mahogany bar running almost the length of the restaurant has a patina suggesting the place had been around for years, not weeks. It looks like an out-of-the-way workers' bistro in Paris with the requisite wooden tables, dark-red leather banquettes, giant mirrors, pressed-tin ceiling and burnished gold-brown walls.

A young woman sat down at the bar, and the bartender brought her a taste of the house pinot noir. She shook her head. "Can I have something a bit … er … fuller?"

"Cabernet is the fullest; pinot noir is the lightest," he replied, and then brought over three more glasses of wine for her to taste. "Smells really good," she said and, after taking a sip, settled on the Cabernet.

I was impressed. I've been to some restaurants recently where wine by the glass costs around $12 without a tasting beforehand; at Porcupine, 10 wines by the glass are listed on a blackboard, priced between $6 and $9, and you can sample to your taste. The international wine list of around two dozen bottles each of red and white has many good deals.

The food at Porcupine is also inexpensive, with main courses for dinner running between $16 for pasta to $25 for a steak, and a complete brunch for $12. Mr. Weingarten describes his food as "American rustic." Many of his imaginative dishes reflect an Italian influence, too, and the emphasis is on fresh, seasonal ingredients.

When you sit down, you get a board of crunchy peasant bread with three varieties of radishes and butter. The menu arrives on what appears to be a large pad, with sheets of blank pages underneath. For comments, perhaps?

I began with yellow tail (the new yellow fin; it's as de rigueur on menus these days as tuna tartare was a year ago). Mr. Weingarten serves it in generous, thick slices, topped with shaved Jerusalem artichokes, black radish and celery root in a vinaigrette made with toasted almonds, wild oregano and smoked chili fIakes. It's excellent, as is the slow-roasted cauliflower that reminds me of one of my favorite childhood dishes-cauliflower cheese-taken to another level. The dish, based on a Ligurian recipe, consists of whole roasted cauliflower seasoned with toasted fennel seeds and Aleppo pepper and served with a creamy walnut pesto and a compote of plump dried cherries marinated in red wine. My companion enjoyed it so much she asked for the recipe.

Oysters arrive on a bed of stones, served under a browned and bubbling gratiné with a green peppercorn mignonette and a garnish of shredded Asian pears. It's an odd combination, but I liked it. A dark-green lettuce soup is seasoned with tarragon, parsley, chives and lemon tapioca pearls. Perhaps a tad less tarragon could be used, but the soup's good nevertheless.

There is, however, a thorn in the side of Porcupine's kitchen, and that's overcooking, which spoiled several dishes that would otherwise have been terrific. It marred the halibut that came with artichoke purée, Jerusalem artichokes, pancetta and a toasted hazelnut vinaigrette. It also marred the breaded pancake of braised veal breast layered with apricots and herbs. Suckling pig with apples and pomegranate seeds was overcooked too. It was redeemed somewhat by the skin (called "crackling" in England and considered the best part), which was light, crisp and not the least bit fatty.

Other dishes made up for the overcooking. Rabbit ragu over hand-cut pappardelle was simply wonderful, a Piedmontese recipe made with sofrito, pancetta carrots, unsweetened cocoa and wild herbs. It was surprisingly light and delicate. For lunch, there is a fine grilled lamb sandwich with red onion and arugula on toasted sourdough rye spread with a mixture of prunes pounded into softened butter with chopped hyssop leaf, which adds an anise flavor; house-made gravlax is strewn with fried capers and served with lemon pickle, tomatoes and a warm broiled bialy on the side.

Apart from gelati, there are just three desserts, and they make a good finish to the meal. An Anjou pear is cooked in red wine with cardamom, vanilla and bay leaf and served with almond custard. A crumbly Italian torte, made with layers of chocolate and ricotta with grappam, comes with crème fraîche whipped with cream. There is also an artisanal cheese board with chutneys and country bread.

Porcupine is a welcome addition to this neighborhood on the edge of Soho (as is the new bookstore down the block). As for the vanished restaurant, that was Bar Tonno. Apparently it will re-open serving sushi. What's the Japanese for "mirage"?

As the authors put it: "The fiscal crisis of the late 1970s never really ended -- it simply went into remission."

Their point is that -- unlike, say, Cleveland -- New York doesn't suffer from the fiscal problems that plague most of urban America: middle-class flight, abandonment, and an overall evaporation of the tax base. New York's "crisis" is that it continues to spend a lot of money on services, straining one of the richest tax bases imaginable. Now you can justify this, and quibble with their claims about how much damage high taxes do -- or even say the city should spend more on, say, the subways -- but it's hard to disagree with their point that the city workforce of around 300,000 people (that's more than 1 in 1,000 Americans) has something to do with the huge costs.

Siegel and McMahon put it in terms of what used to be called "the British disease...the economic sclerosis suffered by liberal democracies held hostage to the demands of politically powerful labor unions and social service providers."

How politically powerful? Well, the Democratic candidates for mayor do seem to prefer hammering Albany and Washington to talking about where the city spends its money.

UPDATE: The whole thing is now online.