Nancy Shevell and Paul McCartney. Photo via Timothy A. Clary/AFP/Getty Images

On a recent morning in the fifth-floor conference room of the Metropolitan Transit Authority’s brick and limestone Madison Avenue headquarters, a public meeting of the board was called to order. The various members representing the audit, governance, bridges and tunnels, finance, and other committees listened patiently as Mark Shotkin, a member of the transit-riding public, made a statement. “Jim and Andrew, your ties are very nice,” he began, spreading a little sugar around the room. “Nancy, your-your-your jacket is very nice,” he added, grinning at Nancy Shevell, the bus committee chairman. Then he got right to the point: “Good morning, everybody, um, garbage and graffiti on platforms and trains—totally disgusting.”

Ms. Shevell, who is tall with raven hair that swings glossily from side to side, wore a striped gray and white sweater, black jeans and sandals, along with an indulgent smile. Having served on the M.T.A. for 10 years—spanning four governors—the trucking executive was plainly at home in the boardroom. There was little indication that she is living something of a Cinderella-at-the-ball moment these days. The New Jersey-born daughter of a trucking company owner, she is now betrothed one of the world’s top recording artists, Sir Paul McCartney. Except for the 1925 Cartier solitaire diamond engagement ring (said to have set the Beatle back some $650,000) sparkling on her left hand under the stark fluorescent lighting, however, the future Lady McCartney still seemed like a Jersey girl—an exceedingly self-possessed, relaxed, collegial and well-manicured Jersey girl, but still.

You don’t meet a prince without a fairy godmother, and Ms. Shevell’s romantic coup—he may not be John Lennon, ladies, but he’s not Ringo, either—is said to have been engineered by no less formidable a yenta than The View’s Barbara Walters, who happens to be her second cousin. “Barbara was her emotional confidante and played matchmaker,” a friend of the couple told The Observer. “She gave numerous dinner parties for them and always made sure to invite people she knew that Paul would want to meet.” The friend added that the broadcast vet also coached Ms. Shevell on how to behave around the musician, helping her to beat out a number of other aspirants for Mr. McCartney’s eye, including Rosanna Arquette. Ms. Walters’s strategy was clear: Look at Heather Mills, and do precisely the opposite. “They took a page from the old regime and made sure not to make the same mistakes.” Among other shrewd moves, Ms. Shevell has made a point of wearing Stella’s designs to various parties, ensuring maximum press coverage (Ms. Mills had done the same thing, but Ms. Shevell is said to have done it with more sincerity and panache). She has also pulled back when the media attention heated up. The couple shunned the press at the recent Costume Institute Gala, and at a New York City Ballet party (Sir Paul has collaborated with Peter Martins to write the musical score for a ballet debuting this fall), she tried to steer clear of photographers, one told The Observer. “She told me that she didn’t like to have her picture taken with people she didn’t know,” he said. “And she mentioned that she wasn’t used to the attention.”

Ms. Walters was asked about her role as matchmaker. “We are very close,” she told The Observer, somewhat coyly. “Nancy is like a second child to me. Her two aunts died of cancer. She’s struggled in her life.”

More than that she wasn’t saying. “The thing about Nancy is that she doesn’t want this article,” Ms. Walters explained in her legendary lisp. “She doesn’t want anything to do with publicity. She’s turned down a piece in Vogue.  She doesn’t want anything to do with music.”

No wonder Mr. McCartney likes her.

Nancy Shevell grew up in a Jewish family in Edison, N.J., the middle daughter of Myron and Arlene Shevell. Myron is the owner New England Motor Freight (NEMF), a large haulage company that does more than $400 million in annual revenues. Like Paul’s first wife, Linda McCartney, Arlene fought breast cancer (she died in 1991); Nancy is a survivor of the disease.

The Shevells have been in the trucking industry since the 1920s, when the family business transported seafood from the New Jersey coast to New York (shades of Boardwalk Empire). During the 1960s, Myron started his own business with his brother, Daniel, but they ran afoul of government investigators, and in 1975 were charged with fraud for alleged involvement with the Mafia. The case never went to trial, but the brothers were forced to surrender control of company and went bankrupt. Later that year Daniel Shevell, aged 39, fatally shot himself. In 1988, after buying the struggling trucking company NEMF, Myron Shevell was accused of colluding with Vincent Gigante, the head of the Genovese crime family. It was claimed in a racketeering lawsuit that Mr. Shevell made illegal pay-offs in return for a deal that would allow his company to skirt union rules. Again the case never went to trial, but Mr. Shevell was barred for five years from engaging in union negotiations.

Despite these difficulties, Nancy gravitated toward the family business. According to the one and only interview she’s ever given, a 2002 sit down with the The Newark Star-Ledger, she loved it when her father brought her toy trucks as gifts. “I used to line them up in my room, right next to my Barbies,” she said, adding, “While other kids would go feed ducks at the park, we would go to my father’s truck terminals, to places like Pennsauken, every single weekend.”

A tomboy streak appears to have persisted into high school, where Nancy played for her school’s all-girl football team. Her interests, as listed in her 1977 yearbook, were skiing, flying, Vermont and, curiously, “boobs.” She went onto Arizona State University, where she majored in transportation—the only woman to do so at the time—and met her ex-husband, attorney Bruce Blakeman, with whom she has a son, Arlen, 19.

Mr. Blakeman couldn’t offer a sharper contrast from her current beau. A die-hard Republican who challenged Kirsten Gillibrand in 2010, Mr. Blakeman is probably best-known for an eccentric political ad which featured a “pitch” from his talking pet dog during a short-lived campaign for mayor in 2009. When contacted about Ms. Shevell’s wedding plans, he was gracious. “I wish Nancy and Paul well, and that’s it. Nancy’s a great mother, and Paul treats my son very nicely.”

Ms. Shevell joined her father’s company in 1983, becoming VP for administration in 1986. As a woman in an overwhelmingly male industry, she was put through her paces. In The Star-Ledger, she recalled one dramatic throwdown with a colleague, adding pointedly, “I don’t know where he is right now but I know where I am.”

Ms. Shevell was appointed to serve on the M.T.A. board in 2001 by then-governor George Pataki, an unpaid post. Though her 10-year tenure came to an end in June, so far no seems to be in any rush to replace her.

According to other board members, Ms. Shevell is well-liked by her colleagues, despite having missed a number of the monthly meetings and openly texting in others. She breezes through her agenda items with a certain practiced efficiency and a firm grasp of Robert’s Rules of Order. Eschewing a driver, Ms. Shevell generally takes the bus to M.T.A. meetings, traveling down Fifth Avenue from her apartment on East 83rd Street. Noted one former board member, “She would talk a lot about bus bunching on Fifth and the fact that the subways are so crowded during rush hour.”

Which isn’t to say she’s been a champion of commuters during her years on the board. “She plays for the company team,” said Gene Russianoff, longtime spokesperson for the Straphanger’s Campaign. “During her tenure as bus committee chairman, they eliminated 570 bus stops, which led to worse service. She didn’t publicly fight the budget cuts. She’s not a thorn in the side of the M.T.A.”

 The origin’s of the couple’s romance are murky, despite the efforts of some of Fleet Street’s finest news hounds. (Indeed, Sir Paul, dubbed Macca by the British papers, recently suggested he may have been voice-mail hacked.)

Reportedly, their acquaintance goes back some 20 years, due to the  proximity of their weekend homes in the Hamptons. (Ms. Shevell’s East Hampton residence, valued at $8 million, is said to be far nicer than Mr. McCartney’s Amagansett getaway.) 

Their romance first became public in 2007, when The Sun reported that they’d been spotted at a South Fork sushi spot. Afterward, the story noted, “Macca put his arm around Nancy after he drove her home—and they kissed tenderly.” Ms. Shevell was legally separated at the time, and Mr. McCartney was busy disentangling himself from his troubled romance with Ms. Mills.

The tabloids also breathlessly reported on a road trip they took in the summer of 2008 on Route 66 crossing seven states in an ’89 Ford Bronco, and another jaunt to Anguilla after the deaths of Nancy’s older brother, Jon, from a drug overdose, and Neil Aspinall, the Beatles’ road manager.

The couple’s engagement was announced on May 6 of this year. The wedding will be in London—a low-key affair (as these things go) with just a few friends and family members present.

And after that? Ms. Shevell has been quoted by The New York Post as saying that she’d love to live here in New York but that they would most likely wind up in England. That’s where the story may diverge from the usual fairy tale. Despite Sir Paul’s fortune of well over a billion dollars, he is famously stingy. (A source close to the couple noted with an eye-roll that during the couple’s courtship, Nancy always bought her own plane tickets to the U.K.) His estate in Peasmarsh, Sussex, might be set on 1,500 acres for privacy reasons, but it’s no palace by any stretch. Moreover, it’s isolated. Ms. Shevell can anticipate a lot of nights watching the telly.

And when she does go out, sources say, she will have her work cut out for her. “Confident, independent women who come over here with money will not have many friends,” warned Helen Kirwan-Taylor, an American journalist whose husband runs a hedge fund in London. “The last thing you can be here is threatening to other women. The things that open doors in New York shut them in England.”

After the M.T.A. meeting, Ms. Shevell told The Observer that she didn’t understand what all the fuss was about. “It’s just not that intriguing,” she said. “Not like his last marriage, which was really intriguing. I’m over 50. I work. That’s it. I haven’t been social and I have a small group of girlfriends. There really isn’t much to talk about.”

She smiled, pushing through the door out to Madison Avenue—presumably late for a bus.

dprince@observer.com

Ryan Trecartin, K-CoreaINC.K (section a), 2009.

Three days before the opening of Any Ever, Ryan Trecartin’s first major museum retrospective in New York, the artist stood at a podium at the Museum of Modern Art for the amFar Inspiration Gala to celebrate men’s fashion. He presented James Franco, one of his fans, with the Piaget Award of Inspiration. Courtney Love, another fan, was in attendance. Mr. Trecartin, who works primarily in video, has a large and varied following; it includes critics, visual artists, novelists, actors, musicians and web-savvy high school students. His popularity enacts his style: his art is a representation of the wandering minds created by the age of Twitter; having a feverishly multitasking brain—perhaps the only kind that exists these days—is the only way to find meaning in his work.

Any Ever, which premiered last year at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, occupies seven rooms on the first floor of MoMA PS1, each of them projecting one of Mr. Trecartin’s films. The setting he has fashioned for each film references what is happening on screen. His installations are, in Mr. Trecartin’s words, “sculptural theaters.” Items from any ordinary middle-class home are present—couches, dining room tables, patio umbrellas—and they can be sat upon or touched, but everything is out of place: mirrors are cracked, luggage rests in suitcases, curtains are draped over blank sections of wall. Speaking of his breakout feature-length film I-Be Area, Mr. Trecartin described his work as “a conceptual part-cyber-hybrid platform that obeys and functions with both laws of physics and virtual-nonlinear reality and potential in Web 2.0/ultra-wiki communication malfunction liberation flow, add-on and debate presentation.” The cluttered environments he creates are central to establishing this frenzied effect. The artist’s realities replace the viewer’s own.

Take The Re’Search, the first film in the exhibition. The space in which it’s screened is strewn with disorderly furniture and piles of clothing. Couches sit on top of wrinkled purses, and random objects rest in unnatural spaces: a dresser atop a police barricade, an upside down sledgehammer on a cinder block. Mirrors line the walls, forcing viewers to confront their reflections.

Easily the most disturbing and violent of all his work, the film opens with two teenaged girls throwing Blackberries at each other by a pool. The camera is in constant, jittery motion, zooming in and out or being shaken by the hand that holds it. At the center of the work are three young girls in a pop band, simultaneously trying to stymie their other friends from joining the group and plotting to kill their fathers. (Father figures are conspicuously absent from Mr. Trecartin’s work, which helps explain the recurring image in The Re’Search of a girl holding a sign that says “Dad ?-2009,” the year the film was made.) Voices are digitally manipulated to sound both monotonous and energized: they are high pitch squeals just slow enough to be barely comprehensible. Mr. Trecartin’s work is an assault of stimuli and ephemera—layers upon layers of superimposed images; a blur of color and noise; a dialogue between scenes taking place in different rooms at different times—all of this is melted together through rapid cuts and editing. But The Re’Search goes even further. It pre-empts the very idea of the viewer’s short attention span, beating the wandering mind at its own associative games even as it references such digressions. The longer you watch, the more you wish for peace and quiet. But the film is unrelenting: it ends with a collage of characters chanting, “Die, die, die.”

As young as he is—he turns 30 this year—Mr. Trecartin’s life has so far been as frenetic as the quick cuts that define the portentous pace of his work. He was born in Texas, grew up in Ohio, attended the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) for animation and film editing, lived in New Orleans during the flood, was exiled to Los Angeles after his house was destroyed (and most of his artwork along with it), and hid out in Philadelphia and Miami, removed from but always circling around the center of the art world. Even as a student at RISD, his films were self-assured and original; he was diligent and constantly working. At age 18, he met his collaborator, Lizzie Fitch, at the RISD campus store. Ms. Fitch plays a major role in all of his films, not just as an actor but also as a set and costume designer. At school, he began to refine his working method, in which collaboration remains key. His films often feature dozens of cast members, all done up in gaudy makeup and garish outfits (most of which he assembles from whatever is on the clothing racks at Target). The actors are like walking paintings, kaleidoscopes of color and texture; they would look at home in both a transvestite nightclub and a trashy horror flick.

Shoots are done wherever Mr. Trecartin happens to be living. At RISD, he lived with several collaborators in what was known around campus as the Pink House. He films almost entirely at night and will commonly work until dawn. The actors do not see the script before shooting—Mr. Trecartin tells them what to say, having actors repeat a line until it reaches the power of a hypnotic incantation; he often keeps the camera rolling during these impromptu rehearsals and it is not uncommon for the b-reel to make it into the final cut. The actors spend most of the day sitting around in costume, taking hours to get into character. For this reason, even though his work is in no way realist, the line between life and representation is blurred; blunder and intent are indecipherable. A fellow student at RISD who has appeared in a number of Mr. Trecartin’s films said the best parties she could remember in college were shoots at the Pink House.

While still a student, Mr. Trecartin posted on the Internet portions of his thesis, a 41-minute film called A Family Finds Entertainment. Like his more recent work, the film defies the basic beginning-middle-end structure we take for granted in any sustained narrative; it is as chaotic and associative as any 10 minutes spent online, but there is still a central thread: Skippy, a tortured adolescent played by Mr. Trecartin, has locked himself in a bathroom. His family and friends urge him to come out. (Critics have read the film as an allegory of homosexuality.) As Skippy performs acts of self-flagellation, downstairs, perhaps in some alternate reality, a wild and nightmarish party rages with several bands playing simultaneously and cacophonously in different rooms. Skippy does leave the bathroom, but immediately rejects the creature comforts of domesticity and flees the house. Once outside, he is hit by a car. A feckless messenger materializes out of nowhere to explain what happened to Skippy, but struggles for some time to find the words. In response to this loss of language, the party in the house reaches a zenith of noisy chaos. Skippy is either raised from the dead or finally ascends toward heaven (though it could just as easily be hell): he joins the party.

When video artist Sue De Beer was a visiting instructor at the Cleveland Institute of Art, she attended a potluck dinner at an apartment on campus. While she was still jet-lagged from a trip to Berlin, the students loaded her plate with chocolate cake and chili, then took her into a backroom and showed her A Family Finds Entertainment, which they had found on the social networking site Friendster.com. Even though exhausted and disoriented, she knew she had seen something special. Back in New York, she told Rachel Greene, then a curator at the New Museum, about the experience. Ms. Greene contacted “Ryan T” on Friendster and requested a video. He sent it to her in her a package that included a broken mirror. Scrawled across the glass were the words: “I totally Googled You.”

In a matter of months, Mr. Trecartin’s work would be exhibited by the Getty, at QED Gallery in Los Angeles, and the 2006 Whitney Biennial where he was the youngest artist on display. As early as January 2006, when Artforum magazine published the first of many glowing reviews, the artist was met with nearly universal acclaim. He was then just 24 years old. As the art world began to recognize Mr. Trecartin as one of the most talented artists of his time, the cult of supporters that discovered him on the Internet only grew. Several of his contemporaries and followers have said with straight faces that he is a god.

The audience’s reactions at the PS1 opening varied widely. People sat in the uncanny private spaces of his installations wearing headphones, their eyes fixed on the screens. Some of them laughed volubly, slapping their knees. Others, their mouths agape, were visibly upset. The exhibition is separated into two sections, Re’Search Wait’s, a series of four films that reference market research and the superficial consumer during the collapse of late capitalism, and Trill-ogy Comp, three films about a corporate landscape where the white collar workers’ full-time jobs consist in working to keep their full-time jobs, a cycle of meaninglessness. The environment Mr. Trecartin has created is far from the typical museum experience. In some rooms, visitors must climb a ladder and get into a bed resting atop a stack of cinder blocks to find a seat in front of the screen. Chairs are attached to weight lifting exercise machines. People sit on metal bleachers positioned in front of an industrial strength fan that keeps the room cold and breezy. The physical experience of watching Mr. Trecartin’s films is as postmodern as the world they represent.

In P.opular S.ky, the fashion designer Telfar Clemens plays a boss holding an incongruously raucous meeting in an RV (appropriately Mr. Trecartin met Mr. Clemens at a party the designer was DJing; by midnight, Mr. Trecartin was doing splits on the dance floor). All of the workers in the film wear drab white clothing and blonde wigs. They desire to “make some new people.” The breaking of glass is a recurring image. Characters shatter mirrors with the edge of a Blackberry. Superficially, the piece is about the most tedious of topics (a business meeting) but it excavates menace out of this tedium: the innocuous objects scattering the room take on the appearance of torture devices—a piece of luggage hangs from a noose, ceiling fans are piled on top of a wooden loft like knives.

“You know what would be really romantic?” Mr. Clemens asks in the film.

What follows is one of the rare moments of pure silence and stillness in Mr. Trecartin’s work as Mr. Clemens fails to come up with an answer to his own question.

“Is that your idea?” Another character responds venomously. Before anyone can reply there is a crash of noise and the mind is back to wandering.

mmiller@observer.com

Neon Bar (2010-2011) by Ashley Bickerton.

The night before his big book party Monday evening in Basel, Switzerland, home to the world’s most important art fair, which opens this week, Ashley Bickerton updated his Facebook status: “Basel, Switzerland. Looks dull as dumpster full of discarded drywall.”

A fixture of the go-go 80’s New York art world—he was called “Neo Geo” then, as was Jeff Koons—Mr. Bickerton fled to Bali in 1993 and has been living there ever since. He’s the art world’s resident iconoclast. At Basel’s spacious Voltahalle, his galleries Lehmann Maupin and White Cube hosted a dinner for 40 people. White Cube director Tim Marlow toasted the artist as “the original bad boy of the East.” One attendee chuckled; a few weeks prior in Hong Kong, during the art fair Art HK, it had been Mr. Bickerton’s 52nd birthday, and he’d tried to convince some people to take off with him for Macao.

After dinner in Basel, tables were cleared for a dance floor. Eighties hits blasted; candelabra blazed; a mannequin sat cross-legged on a vinyl sofa—it looked like a set for a Billy Idol video. A big book party indeed, and not least because Mr. Bickerton’s eponymous work is a big book. It clocks in at 408 pages and could be called a doorstop even if you live in a castle, which many of his collectors—whom the book, at $375, is aimed at—do. (A limited edition is $3,750 and has a cover in Balinese carving.) Authors of the essays run the gamut from art historian Abigail Solomon-Godeau to Mr. Bickerton’s father, a linguist and scholar.

It’s published by Other Criteria, a company owned by Mr. Bickerton’s friend and gazillionaire artist Damien Hirst, who was his neighbor in Bali briefly. (“He hired a bodyguard,” Mr. Bickerton recalled affectionately.) Its eye-popping design is the work of Stefan Sagmeister, another buddy. (Mr. Bickerton calls him “Saggy.”)

For an iconoclast, Mr. Bickerton has lots of friends. It make sense: the art world loves to poke fun at itself. Like any arch-serious court, it needs its jester, even if he’s available only part-time.

The Barbados-born Mr. Bickerton, a compact, wiry man, is youthful. In a British accent softened by years of travel, he speaks astutely, in a sort of staccato mumble. His springy gait and the glint in his eye give the impression he is always on the verge of making mischief.

When The Observer interviewed him in New York last month, he seemed at a crossroads. He had spent a lot of the money he’d made in the recent market boom on a spectacular house on the beach (its entrance gate is one of his elaborately carved artworks). He’d worked prodigiously to produce the pieces—hybrid painting/photographs—at Lehmann Maupin.

He hadn’t been surfing enough. “The other surfers surf much more than I do,” he lamented. “I’m always worried about working.”

His new work is dark. Gone are the idyllic scenes of a few years ago—the dewy fecundity, the voluminously pregnant women, the cherubic babies. In their place are neon-lit bars; obese tourists plopped on bar stools; tattooed whores with reptilian eyes; kids (his own were kind enough to model) who look like zombies.

Mr. Bickerton was brooding. “Usually the gallery schedules my entire time here,” he told The Observer. “This time I’m pretty much on my own.” He gazed around at the patio of the Maritime Hotel, where he’d just ordered a coffee, a lemonade and a coke.

He’d been up until daylight at a party for the young artists Nate Lowman and Aaron Young. He’d stopped by Mary Boone’s dinner for the painter David Salle, whose limelit 80’s paralleled Mr. Bickerton’s. “I preferred Salle’s party,” he said. “The really famous grizzled heads.”

Mr. Bickerton is the quintessential outsider insider. Not to be confused with an insider outsider—some self-taught type who insinuated his way into art’s inner sanctum. (He went to Cal Arts.) People compare him to Gauguin, who fled to Tahiti; he doesn’t like that. He still exists within the art world; the crests and troughs of his career are still determined by its exigencies. He simply lives at a far remove.

Just maybe not as far removed: fairs like Art HK are bringing the art world east. And then there’s the Internet. Mr. Bickerton may have fallen a bit out of touch, but “now, he knows as much as anyone else who’s living in New York,” observed his onetime Williamsburg neighbor, artist Jon Kessler, who visited Lehmann Maupin on a recent Saturday.

“I could never live in New York again,” Mr. Bickerton said, walking through Chelsea. “You have to go to your assistant’s opening. And your assistant’s boyfriend’s opening. I’d never get anything done.” He added, “I have a clause in my contract. I can’t be below 70 degrees.” New York is “a low-roof, gray, concrete parking structure that goes on for infinity.” And yet it was impossible not to detect a hint of nostalgia in his voice. Later he said, “Bali is like a toilet that doesn’t flush but has had a bottle of perfume dumped in it.”

Mr. Bickerton was on a plane to New York for his show when news broke that Osama bin Laden had been killed. Usually he flies direct, but this time he had a stopover in the Doha airport, where, three Xanaxes into his voyage, he staggered over to a set of TV monitors blaring the breaking story.

“I looked around, and thought, I have to do this once in my life. I said, ‘America, fuck yeah!’ People didn’t know whether to laugh or be angry.”

“You don’t really believe that, do you?” The Observer asked.

Mr. Bickerton narrowed his eyes, pondering. “Sometimes,” he said, “the most inappropriate thing is the most appropriate thing.”

sdouglas@observer.com

"This mayor loves to brag how devoted he is to the numbers," said Mr. de Blasio. "This is the fastest growing borough, and this borough needs more fire protection, not less. And the numbers show it."

The crowd of more than 200 cheered. They had rallied in front of the 105-year-old, redbrick building that houses one of 20 fire companies slated to close as part of Mayor Michael Bloomberg's proposed budget cuts.

"The mayor is saying to some parts of this city, 'You're going to be less safe,' and somehow, you're supposed to grin and bear it," said Mr. de Blasio. "That's not right and that's not how a democracy works. That's not the city government doing its job."

Over the past two years, Mr. de Blasio has tried to make the most of his own job as the city's public advocate--a loosely defined, barely funded perch that seems to exist primarily as a bullhorn for citizen complaints.

"My view at this moment is, this is exactly what the office was meant to do," he told The Observer in a phone call late on Friday afternoon.

In recent weeks, Mr. de Blasio has emerged as the most visible critic of Mr. Bloomberg among those who might be jockeying to replace him. City Council Speaker Quinn has generally shunned protests in favor of direct negotiations with Mr. Bloomberg. City Comptroller John Liu has taken a more wonky approach to his job, issuing a steady stream of reports, and Congressman Anthony Weiner has mostly stuck to the impact of federal cuts as they relate to the city.

"I think this mayor in particular understands relative silence as assent," said Mr. de Blasio. "A lot of times that has not been the case, although that's how he likes to interpret it. So, I think it's really important and for the record to show that people are not comfortable with these choices and it will have a very big impact on their lives."

"You know," Mr. de Blasio continued, unprompted, "most people who have become mayor have come up from the grass roots and through a variety of offices and have a natural understanding of what some of these actions do to people and mean for people. I don't think this mayor has that."

By his own account, Mr. de Blasio does.

One year after managing Hillary Clinton's Senate campaign in 2000, Mr. de Blasio was knocking on doors in Park Slope, campaigning to become their councilman. ("Don't forget the school board," he noted, of his pre-Council public service. "One of the finest unpaid offices around.")

For eight years on the City Council, Mr. de Blasio demonstrated a penchant for gathering loud swaths of the city to voice their displeasure with decisions being made inside City Hall. In 2003, the first time Mr. Bloomberg proposed a major round of firehouse closures, Mr. de Blasio threw his 6-foot-5 frame to the forefront of the debate.

He got arrested protesting the cuts, along with his neighbor, the actor Steve Buscemi. ("He lives about five or six blocks away from me," said Mr. de Blasio. "We bonded when we got arrested together.")

This year, Mr. de Blasio is finding less arresting ways to voice his opposition. He helped organize a march across the Brooklyn Bridge this week to protest firehouse closures. Already, he's visited a number of them, appearing with defiant Council members, angry union members and outraged residents.

Then there are the schools, where Mr. Bloomberg's budget proposes laying off 4,100 teachers. Mr. de Blasio set up a phone line where anyone with an opinion can leave a voice message about the mayor's proposed cuts, then hear it posted on Mr. de Blasio's website. Last week, he staged a Parent Day of Action at schools across all five boroughs.

All of which appears to have gotten underneath the administration's skin.

Earlier this month, Mr. de Blasio and Deputy Mayor Howard Wolfson engaged in a protracted argument on Twitter, with Mr. Wolfson saying the public advocate "remained silent in the face of massive ed cuts" in the state budget.

The two are old friends, dating back to their days working on Ms. Clinton's Senate race, when Mr. de Blasio served as the campaign manager and Mr. Wolfson was the spokesman.

"You are our advocate," Mr. Wolfson wrote. "Needed your advocacy in Albany at budget time--perhaps your advocacy then could have helped averted [sic] cuts."

The two met for lunch at Nobu and the bickering ceased, if not the debate.

"Bill has been my friend for more than a decade," Mr. Wolfson told The Observer in an email. "And we agreed to continue to disagree. I think he would have more credibility now if he had been vocal in fighting state cuts."

The administration's position is--more or less--that the person to blame for the city's deep cuts is Governor Andrew Cuomo, who greatly decreased funding to New York City as part of an austere state budget that sought to close a $10 billion deficit. 

Mr. Bloomberg called the cuts to New York City "an outrage," and liberal activists descended on Albany in protest.

Mr. de Blasio was not among them.

"I think a lot of what the governor has done was really important and necessary, showing that we could exercise restraint and think about the concerns of taxpayers while at the same time fulfilling the obligations of the government," said Mr. de Blasio.

"I didn't want the outcome we got," he said on Tuesday. "Wish we had gotten more. But the bottom line is the governor had to balance an extremely difficult budget and that was in everybody's interest, including the future of New York City. So, I just think Wolfson's response misses that larger point."

Mr. de Blasio and Mr. Cuomo are longtime allies. Before he worked for Ms. Clinton, Mr. de Blasio served under Mr. Cuomo in the Department of Housing and Urban Development during the Clinton administration, and the public advocate aggressively promoted Mr. Cuomo's campaign for governor last year.

"You're not going to see Bill de Blasio running around saying, 'Hey look, why don't you send us some more money, Mr. Governor,'" said Hank Sheinkopf, the longtime Democratic strategist who worked on Mr. Bloomberg's most recent re-election campaign and was speaking from a beach on Memorial Day.

"The politics of this is: Albany, the governor, have decided we're not getting the kind of money we used to get," said Mr. Sheinkopf. "Therefore you got to cut someplace. And the best thing to do, if you're going to help your political allies, is to blame Mike Bloomberg, even though he's not responsible."

But, in Mr. de Blasio's view, the cuts forced onto the city could be handled more sensitively.

"I laid out a series of alternative cuts I thought made a lot more sense," he said. Those include reductions in teacher recruitment efforts--about $25 million--and scaling back outside consultants and technological work, some of which is "futuristic, but not as important as a classroom teacher."

Mr. de Blasio suggested there were "less essential pieces" that could be trimmed from the budget before laying off teachers, calling the fight "somewhat ideological."

"It's not that the mayor and his people couldn't find the money in the city budget; it was a choice," Mr. de Blasio said. "And we have to portray it as such. It's not about fiscal responsibility. It's about philosophy."

Whether Mr. de Blasio's noisemaking will have any tangible effect on the city's budget is a matter of some disagreement.

Mark Green, the city's first public advocate--who frequently tangled with Mayor Rudy Giuliani over budget cuts and has subsequently run for office against both Mr. Bloomberg and Mr. de Blasio--said all the haranguing by Mr. de Blasio is late, and not entirely substantive.

"A public advocate should ideally either analytically expose bad policies or propose thoughtful alternatives," said Mr. Green. "Protest letters and rallies taste great but are not very filling."

apaybarah@observer.com

Mr. Kirshbaum is a veteran of New York publishing with 40 years of industry experience, including 10 years as CEO of Time Warner Books (now the Hachette Book Group). Under his watch, Time Warner and its imprints published everything from David Baldacci to David Foster Wallace. In 2005, he started an agency, LJK Literary Management. His return to head Amazon Publishing is a clear sign that New York publishing houses will now be competing against one of their biggest retailers to sign up writers.

"Larry Kirshbaum is a highly admired ... figure in the publishing world," said Peter Osnos, the founder and editor-at-large of Public Affairs. "The fact that he is back in the mix as a publisher is the kind of thing that would catch everybody's attention"

Catch everyone's attention it has, but it has also, for the first time, aroused fear that New York publishing might be facing a full-scale invasion from Seattle.

"What essentially happened is you had six players sitting at the table playing poker, then a seventh player who has more money than the others combined, sat down at the table, and the price of playing poker just went up," said Mike Shatzkin, CEO of the Idea Logical Company, which advises publishers on digital books. "I think it means that the agents are all celebrating and the big publishers are all crying in their beer."

When Amazon began its foray into publishing, it was initially in areas in which it would not compete with the big six, such as self-publishing. Then, in 2009, the company launched AmazonEncore, described as "a new program whereby Amazon uses information such as customer reviews on Amazon websites to identify exceptional, overlooked books and authors that show potential for greater sales." That the imprint launched by republishing a self-published fantasy novel by a 16-year-old was reassuring to publishers. As long as Amazon was offering an encore only to writers whom publishers had turned down in the first place, there were no apparent conflicts.

But with the hiring of Mr. Kirshbaum, it's clear that Amazon will now be competing directly with the traditional houses. Amazon has already outbid its competitors in a number of high-profile auctions, although at least one writer was put off by an exclusivity clause written into Amazon's writers' contracts that stipulates their books will be available only in electronic form for the Kindle, which already has 67 percent of the e-reader market share. "This is a time when these customers are up for grabs," said Mr. Shatzkin. "Amazon has been very conscious of that. They try very hard, if they sell you your device, to keep the business." For instance, any Amazon-published books would be locked out of the Nook, Barnes & Noble's e-reader, which has more than 20 percent of the market share and is Kindle's only real competitor. In other words, if your favorite authors sign with Amazon, the only way you can read their books is on a Kindle.

But whether they are merely trying to eliminate the competition in the reader market, or in the publishing market as well, is not yet clear. To many, it seems the e-commerce giant has both goals in mind.

One agent was pointed about what he thinks is a bait and switch on Amazon's part. "It occurs to me," he said, "that what they have traditionally done is lower the costs of what they're selling so that when it comes to pricing nobody can compete, and then when the competition is weakened or eradicated they can then raise their retail prices, or use the site to sell other nonbook products. Doesn't it seem highly likely that what they may now be doing--and preparing to do--is raise the costs of what is being paid, for advances, and then when the competition, i.e., publishers, are weakened or eradicated Amazon can then behave how ever they want?"

Another person, who was approached by Amazon for hiring advice, had an objection that, though small, perhaps laid bare most plainly the cultural differences between old publishing and Amazon. "They never picked up the tab," he grumbled.

ewitt@observer.com

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Mr. Sandano was an early convert to the digital doctrine of search-engine optimization, the art of goosing a particular website's visibility on services like Google. By currying favor with outside sites and tweaking his content with crucial "key words," Mr. Sandano was able to outrank his competitors whenever would-be customers typed terms like "Vatican tour" into Google.

Before long, business was so good that Mr. Sandano no longer needed to rely on travel agencies and hotel concierges, which generally took a cut of his revenues. As he led his groups of Japanese and Brazilian tourists through the gilded arches of the Holy See, he kept his online secrets to himself. "The church was my passion," he said. "But the Internet was my weapon to build the business."

While conducting a tour in 2004, Mr. Sandano met an American woman whom he later married. He moved to New York in 2006 to be with her and became a full-time SEO consultant to pay his way through a Ph.D. program in art history.

These days Mr. Sandano favors a patient approach to SEO. "To improve in a search, it takes a long time, year after year, like erosion," he said in his marvelous, sing-song accent. "Don't rush things, or they will punish you. You got to respect the Google."

The simple mechanism at the heart of most SEO is the page-ranking system devised by Google founders Larry Page and Sergei Brin when they were still students at Stanford. It determines the relevance of a given website to users by looking at the number and types of sites linking to it.

"SEO is not a real industry," insisted Dan Campbell, founder and CEO of xtractly, a New York-based online data extraction company. "It's a massive, billion dollar accident driven by Google's most brilliant and simple invention. They never stopped to imagine how the market would distort things."

Bryne Hobart learned the vagaries of Google rankings while working at Blue Fountain Media, one of the biggest SEO shops in New York. The 24-year-old college dropout had hoped for a career finance, but the market implosion of 2008 nixed that idea. Instead, he scored an internship writing copy at Blue Fountain, eventually working his way up to managing director of marketing.

As the tech sector began heating up, Mr. Hobart spotted an opportunity to distinguish himself on Wall Street. "I saw all these companies, like Demand Media, getting ready to have these big billion dollar IPOs and I thought, 'Their whole business is based on the kind of campaigns I run every day for clients.' Maybe there is something I can add to that discussion."

He and a colleague, Doug Pierce, had already been attracting a lot of attention with their research on how companies were gaming the system. Work they did at Blue Fountain became the basis of a February page-one story in The New York Times by "Haggler" columnist David Segal, exposing the dark arts being employed by JC Penney. A follow-up wilted the Mother's Day sales efforts of 1-800-FLOWERS. In both cases, coverage prompted Google and its all-powerful antispam enforcer, Matt Cutts, to tweak the engine's algorithms, banishing the sites, at least temporarily, to search-engine Siberia.

In March, Mr. Hobart and Mr. Pierce formed their own company on the side, Digital Due Diligence. His first post, on Demand Media, drew tens of thousands of readers and was passed around internally at the content farm. Mr. Hobart began monitoring other companies that were relying on some of the shadier SEO strategies, and posting these findings online. The idea behind the business was to help hedge funds and venture capital firms assess the risk of investing in companies that relied heavily on search traffic.

Not surprisingly, Mr. Hobart's double game--practicing SEO by day, exposing it by night--soon proved unsustainable.

In April, when DDD published a piece noting that the fashion site Milanoo was attracting a number of sketchy inbound links from sites about football and cars, their work was picked up by the massive industry blog TechCrunch. The revelation embarrassed the venerable Silicon Valley venture firm Sequoia, a Milanoo investor, and earned the fashion site its own spanking from Google. It also infuriated a lot of the partners' erstwhile colleagues, who saw them as turncoats who'd violated the ironclad omérta of the industry.

"Their main angle is whoring for media attention," Aaron Wall, a long-time SEO consultant, complained to The Observer. "People who destroy this trade for their own self-promotion deserve to be called out."

Equally distressed by the post were their employers, whose clients include P&G, Oppenheimer Funds and the U.S. Mint. "They are two of the most valuable individuals in our marketing department, but this was a case of bad judgment," Blue Fountain CMO Alhan Keser wrote on the blog SEOBook. "I came back from a trip on Tuesday and confronted Byrne and Doug about the issue and asked them to stop outing companies."

Instead, Mr. Hobart quit. There was more opportunity, he thought, in evaluating the risks investors incur due to SEO than in performing it himself. "I looked at the attention I was getting for my posts on Due Diligence and just decided that it was time to strike out on my own," he said, noting that he is now scouting office space.

Despite the occasional scandal, search-engine optimization is now a $19 billion business. One of New York's more prolific SEO gurus, who agreed to speak to The Observer anonymously, sees the industry in zoological terms. "It's kind of like we're all gazelles running past a big crocodile" he said. "You just keeping hoping you don't catch the monster's eye."

Rather than simply paying for links, which often means relying on poor quality sites that are easy to identify as cheats, this "black hat," let's call him Merlin, uses his legitimate business as a cover. He created a simple, easy-to-use template for small-business owners looking to build their own inexpensive sites, then sold the templates well below market rate, quickly building a network of thousands of perfectly legitimate websites run by independent users.

Since he controlled the template, he was able to attach a bit of fine print to the footer of each page in the network. "Let's say I had a client who wanted to rank very highly for a keyword, maybe 'squash racket' or 'snow boots.' I had hidden links inside the text at the bottom of all these sites, and I could just turn the switch. Suddenly, 6,000 sites agree my client is the most relevant source on snow boots."

The insistence among SEO experts on defining certain tactics as legitimate and others as underhanded strikes Merlin as absurd. "Ethics, where search is concerned, is a luxury few  companies can afford," he said. "Let's face it, the distinction between 'white hat' and 'black hat' changes all of the time. Those of us who ended up in this business are surprised to discover we're making good money. We're wearing a tie."

Shops that strive to uphold a higher ideal find that many clients arrive on their doorsteps chastened after past transgressions. "We have a lot of people come in who have been burned," said Rhea  Drysdale, CEO of Outspoken Media. "We had a client come in from the world of online poker. They had swapped links with other sites," a practice she considers a no-no. "The attitude was, you had to do it in order to survive. It sounded kind of like a joining a gang; you needed to be initiated."

Mr. Hobart isn't yet 25, but he's already nostalgic for SEO's heyday. "I started off in this game as an intern, writing little articles to improve the look and feel of sites," he said wistfully. "But the time when an intern could get your site to rank are gone. eHow and Demand Media manufacture thousands of articles a day--there is no way to match that scale."

The future of SEO will demand different skills more suited to social media. "That's the scary thing, thinking about how things like Facebook and Twitter will change the game," Hobart said. "It's one thing with Google, trying to outwit the machine. It's different when you're trying to optimize on real people."

bpopper@observer.com