The Kanye Pyramid. (Wireimage c/o Adult Swim.)

“Tru$t U$,” read the sign behind the bar of the Roseland Ballroom last Thursday night, as a couple hundred reporters, ad sales reps, financial backers and celebrities crammed into the performance space to see the Adult Swim upfronts. Well, that wasn’t exactly true—most people weren’t there to see the new lineup of shows that will air on Cartoon Network, or to rub elbows with Lake Bell (Childrens Hospital), Paul Scheer (Filthy Sexy Teen$), Seth Green (Robot Chicken) or Aziz Ansari, who will be doing a voice cameo on Venture Bros. Instead, they were there to see the night’s entertainment: Kanye West.

Somehow, Adult Swim, owned by Turner Broadcasting, has always managed to book the most impossible talent for its upfront events. Two years ago, Jay-Z performed a 50-minute set; last year, T.I. was the main draw. But something about booking Mr. West—who had been the star guest and musical entertainment at the Met Gala the previous week, and would be closing out the season of Saturday Night Live two days later, and whose new album (the title leaked to the press: Yeezus) drops June 18—was an extra-special get.

Mr. West performed on an awkward triangular structure which made it impossible for anyone except those in the very front row to see Yeezy go through the motions of hits like “Clique,” “Jesus Walks,” “All of the Lights” and several new tunes, including “Awesome.” Whether the night’s circus tent/bouncy castle of a set was some sort of commentary about the amount of ironic cognitive dissonance Adult Swim fans actively engage in, or whether Mr. West just didn’t want anyone to see his listless performance (perspiring in front of a mic, mouthing lyrics), we may never know.

There was one portion of the evening when Mr. West decided to get real with the audience, indulging in one of his patented rants:

“So I don’t want no people runnin’ up on me with cameras, trying to, like, sell pictures and shit to magazines, asking me dumb-ass questions, throwin’ me off my focus and shit. Harrassin’ you all muthafuckin’ day. I ain’t no muthafuckin’ celebrity.

“It’s so funny. Somebody asked me, ‘When you do SNL, are you going to do a skit about the paparazzi and shit. And like humanize yourself?’ I ain’t here to apologize to no muthafuckas, man. It ain’t about me humanizing myself. At what point did I become un-human where I have to turn myself back? Or maybe I was demonized, or maybe I was treated inhumane and not human in that type of situation. I ain’t no muthafuckin’ celebrity. I ain’t runnin’ for office. I ain’t kissin’ nobody’s muthafuckin’ babies. I drop your baby and you muthafuckin’ sue me and shit. I’m trying to make some music that inspires people to be the best that they can be. And I don’t want nobody else to ask anything of me! Don’t ask nothing else of me ...
“Hell nah, I ain’t doin no muthafuckin’ SNL skits. This is my goddamn life. This ain’t no muthafuckin’ joke.”

Whether this message managed to reach fans through the lenses of the cell phones held in front of their faces, it was hard to say.

Then again, maybe it doesn’t matter what Kanye West says; it just mattered that he showed up. Over at the VIP bar, two older men from out of town were having a drink. After hearing that the Transom was in the writing business, one gave us a pitch for his own film.

“It’s going to be like The Hangover, except it’s about a finance guy from Kansas who goes to New York for the network upfronts, and like, meets all these celebrities and has all this random sex and gets caught up in the craziness of New York City,” said the man, who happened to be a finance guy from Kansas.

“Oh, and I have another idea,” he continued, “but it’s much darker. It’s about a group of guys on a bachelor party bus, which gets hijacked by a bunch of black thug terrorists.”

“Wait, are they black thugs or are they terrorists?” we asked. The man looked at us, confused.
“What’s the difference?”

We finished our drink and left, a little bit wiser as to what it was that made Mr. West so angry all the time.

“Do you come to these parties often?” asked my companion, her lips at my ear.

Jay-Z was now bouncing to “Who Gon Stop Me,” as Jake Gyllenhaal and Florence Welch rapped along, standing on a table, towering above Carey Mulligan, Tom Hardy, Jamie Foxx and other Hollywood royalty.

Perhaps I do go to a lot of parties, but I had not been invited to this one. In school at Duke, I became close with a man who had gone into film and went on to work on The Great Gatsby, Baz Luhrmann’s new adaptation of the novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald. And just as Fitzgerald got a lot of leverage from his Princeton chums, my friend had smuggled me into The Darby, which came after the film’s world premiere, earlier that night at Lincoln Center, and the official after-party, in the ballroom of the Plaza Hotel.

No, I don’t often come to parties like this, I told my companion.

Corks popped from the flaming bottles, champagne spilled into glasses and the glasses overflowed. I approached Leo in his little nook.

“We spoke earlier, on the red carpet,” Mr. DiCaprio said, his oceans of blue eyes twinkling at me.

“And there are more events to come,” I responded.

And what a string of events it was: a spree of cocktail functions, high-fashion fetes at fancy boutiques, exclusive screenings in secret locations, a sprawling red-carpet premiere that attracted crowds for blocks, a boozy lunch at the New York Public Library, a boozy lunch at the Fitzgerald Suite at the Plaza Hotel, a boozy dinner at the ballroom in the Plaza Hotel, a breakfast at Tiffany, a champagne supper at Brooks Brothers, a star-studded bash at Prada, a Peggy Siegal screening at MoMA followed by a giant bash at the Boom Boom Room, and a Cinema Society screening at HBO headquarters followed by a giant bash at The Lambs Club.

The parties seemingly never ended, as Warner Bros.—thanks to an unimaginable promotional budget (though representatives would not disclose an exact figure) and countless corporate tie-ins—managed to recreate a run of blowouts similar to those that took place on West Egg.

It made sense that they had spun off the movie’s party-heavy storyline into actual glamorous bashes. Mr. Luhrmann took 1920s New York City and made it his own, running the then-emerging skyline through his saturated filter and engineering a boisterous, three-dimensional, thoroughly vibrating version of our city (though the film was shot not on our streets but in Australia, the director’s native land).

With that same approach—one not too different from Jay Gatsby’s own Icarus-esque hubris—applied to the film’s promotion, he’s turned the actual metropolis into a Gatsby-themed pop-up, a traveling party that’s the best possible billboard for the film, a series of super-fancy luxury events that eclipses any movie’s promotional roll-out in recent history.

For two weeks, The Great Gatsby has overtaken NYC.

The first shindig was at Brooks Brothers, the store where two New Haven men in Fitzgerald’s novella May Day go shopping for Welsh Margotson collars. Mannequins bestrode the sloped plaster centerpieces and seemed to be sashaying to the music, which at the moment played Lana Del Rey’s “Young and Beautiful,” the love theme from The Great Gatsby.

After a few coupes of Moët champagne I spotted Mr. Luhrmann, looking dapper enough to have stepped off his own movie’s set. We chatted about my friend from college, and then I asked about this impressive run of Gatsby-esque parties.

“A little partying never killed anyone—or, well, maybe it did,” he said, referring to (spoiler alert!) Gatsby’s death at the end of the movie. “Immediately, the parties and the glamour is what’s attractive. But when we find out that Gatsby’s doing that for a different reason, it’s why the book is so enduring. You’re attracted to it, you’re seduced by it, but then you find yourself going on this human journey.”

This human’s journey took him next to a screening at Warner Bros. headquarters, one of a few screenings set up for those who could score seats. The film is massive, a sensory overload, a wildly kaleidoscopic spectacle that somehow manages to stay relatively faithful to the Great American Novel, all building to that monumental party scene, set to “Rhapsody in Blue.”

After the credits rolled, I raced downtown to the party at the Prada flagship.

The official premiere, the following night, engulfed the whole of Lincoln Center’s grand arcade. An army of photographers and journalists jockeyed for snaps and quotes. Attendees in black tie downed cocktails on the balcony overhead, laughing and waving to people who couldn’t see them, as a giant banner for Samsung, one of the movie’s (many) sponsors, hung below, visible to the masses. And finally the stars, each one positively gleaming, showed their famous faces.

Leonardo DiCaprio, Baz Luhrmann and Carey Mulligan.

I caught Mr. DiCaprio as he was about to go in and watch himself enthrall the audience.

“What I loved about Jay Gatsby was this idea of this iconic American dreamer,” Mr. DiCaprio told me, his eyes wandering up to the sky. “We all can identify with the American dreamer—the man coming from nothing and manifesting his own destiny.”

With no entrée into the party at the Plaza Hotel, I passed the time with cocktails at the Whitney Museum’s annual Art Party, sifting through crowds of young strivers who had purchased tickets and budding socialites with enough connections to land a spot on the host committee. It was the next generation of upper-crust New York grabbing cocktail after cocktail.

“Darby if you can swing it,” came the text message from my college friend, and I hopped in a cab that zoomed between the monolithic towers of Midtown and down into the West Village. The feverish party rang out for hours. I drank scotch from Mr. DiCaprio’s table. I dipped a girl low dancing to Roaring Twenties jazz.

Somehow, the cast (sans Mr. DiCaprio, who had hit 1OAK following The Darby) made it to a lunch the next morning at the New York Public Library, looking fresh as ever. Event host David Remnick was nice enough to take a break from editing The New Yorker to chat with Mr. Luhrmann about the research that he and his wife, Gatsby costume designer Catherine Martin, had done into the inner workings of Fitzgerald’s soul.

“C.M. and I, we imagined we were Scott and Zelda,” Mr. Luhrmann said to the room, where Anna Wintour sat with literary heavyweights like Jeffrey Eugenides, Maureen Dowd, Calvin Tomkins, Philip Gourevitch and Téa Obreht. “C.M. went a bit too far with the champagne exploration ...”

“Baz, you have a much bigger problem with the bottle than I do!” his wife said.

Everyone reached for his or her wine glass.

Then it was time for a panel discussion with the cast moderated by the biographer Dr. Amanda Foreman, who commenced perhaps history’s most glamorous book club with Ms. Mulligan, Joel Edgerton, Mr. Maguire and Isla Fisher.

Not long after the movie-star book club ended, I ran into Mr. Edgerton, who plays Tom Buchanan.

“You read Fitzgerald’s letters, and it’s clear he just wanted so bad to be famous,” the actor said. “He just wanted to get laid and be famous.”

I wondered, aloud, who doesn’t want to get laid and be famous?

Jay-Z.

Mr. Edgerton shrugged.

“I haven’t met anyone.”

Mr. Luhrmann then grabbed me and walked me through the grand hallways of the New York Public Library and out the towering front entrance, where a handful of fans stood beside the two lions calling out for the director, asking for autographs.

“Wasn’t The Darby so fun last night, Nate?” Mr. Luhrmann said, walking down the massive steps. “It just felt like the Jazz Age again?”

The director bounced as if fully refreshed. He was the perfect perennial host for The Great Gatsby. On the street, a car was waiting for him. It would take him to a television interview. Before he ducked in, he went for a double-pump handshake.

“I’ll see you Sunday at the Boom Boom Room,” he said. “Another party!”

I arrived early on Sunday night only to find the space empty, devoid of famous faces. Through the Boom Boom Room’s floor-to-ceiling windows was a glittering panorama: the Empire State Building to the north, and to the south the Hudson River snaking down to lower Manhattan and the unfinished Freedom Tower.

Then things picked up. As the cast took their time to arrive from the screening at the Museum of Modern Art, Katy Perry showed up wearing a colorful outfit she claimed was inspired by Frida Kahlo. (Ms. Perry had been at the Prada event, too.)

“It’s very of Gatsby, it’s very befitting,” she told me, speaking about the run of parties.

Ms. Perry later joined Mr. DiCaprio, Ms. Mulligan, Cuba Gooding Jr. and others in a back section of the Top of the Standard, surrounded by bodyguards. I walked in and saw Baz Luhrmann, who pulled me over to his booth. The director began talking about The Great Gatsby in an intelligent way. I smiled. It was a conversation I had been searching for amid the two weeks of glad-handing, petty arguments, studio politics and celebrity publicists. Mr. Luhrmann talked with stunning earnestness about how The Great Gatsby is the American Hamlet, about how Hamlet is the Bible, about how the New Testament is the first cinematic document, and about how, in the Gospels, Jesus Christ dies at 33, much like the protagonist of his newest film.

What more could I ask of this director, after all of these events at posh places in New York City devoted to his movie, all of them masterminded on some level by Mr. Luhrmann himself, the ringleader, the puppeteer—the boy from Australia who changed his name and became famous?

It’s like you’re Gatsby yourself, I said.

“I’m not Jay Gatsby,” he said. Then he pointed to a man a booth over, a man at the center of this golden top-floor canopy above New York City, sitting with Dasha Zhukova—the partner of Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich—the actress Kristen Wiig and No Doubt singer Gwen Stefani. He was pointing at Leonardo DiCaprio.

“I’m not Jay Gatsby,” Mr. Luhrmann said. “He is.”

Timberlake on Saturday Night Live with Steve Martin, Chevy Chase and Martin Short. (NBC

We knew this weekend's Saturday Night Live would be good--Justin Timberlake being to the variety show what fruit and sprinkles are to plain frozen yogurt ... just something that you know will make the whole supposed treat actually delicious--but did we know it was going to be history-making? Probably not. From Lorne Michaels lifting the Chevy Chase ban to the Jay-Z duet, the return of Stefon, Andy Samberg AND the classic Festrunk brothers, Mr. Timberlake proved once again he's the consummate entertainer: a song-and-dance man who also can also land a punchline.

Which is more than we can say for the majority of guest hosts this year. Below, the five best moments from this weekend's show, along with our favorites.

1. "Five Timers Club"
Can we be real for a second? The moment the concept of the opening monologue was made clear, we knew that Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin would be popping up, since they are constantly competing for the record of "Most SNL appearances ever." Paul Simon, also not surprising. (He always pops in for the opener.) Martin Short and Dan Aykroyd were both unexpected, but not really anything to tweet about. Candice Bergen was totally out of left field, but it was Chevy Chase--who hasn't shown up on SNL since he was banned for verbal abuse in 2007, and hasn't been in the good graces of the program that launched his career ever since he punched Bill Murray in the face during his first alumni appearance 30-plus years ago--who really made this work. Why can't he hang up the phone??

"Wait are you guys friends or not?"
"Exactly."
--Pretty much sums up Chevy Chase's relationship with everyone.

2. "Suit and Tie"
From his forthcoming album, including a special appearance from his best friend/tour partner Jay-Z. Now THAT is how you do a live performance, people.

Also the fact that Timberlake covertly dissed Jay's protégé Kanye West with his zinger, "My hits so sick got rappers acting so dramatic"? BOLD MOVE.

3. "It's a Date"
The Dick in a Box duo AND "two wild and crazy guys" on one game show? The biggest surprise here was how well Bobby Moynihan was able to hold his own as the straight man/losing bachelor.

"Girls can't get pregnant in the summertime/It's a known fact, and that's that/Ladies can't get pregnant in the summertime/So throw away that jimmy hat girl/SCIENCE!"

4. "Weekend Update"
WE HAVE MISSED YOU, STEFON!

"New York's hottest club is Your Mother and I Are Separating ... This place has everything: a shake for breakfast, a shake for lunch, a sensible dinner, those shoes that nurses wear ... and you can dance the night away to the sounds of Donald Duck waking up from a Vietnam nightmare."

5. "Moët & Chandon"
Loved seeing the return of Brookie and her friend, the two wannabe late-night infomercial hosts of classy products, whose biggest claim to fame is that they "aren't porn stars anymore." The original sketch "Swarovski Crystals," was probably the funniest part of that whole Jamie Foxx episode.

"One time I did a weird shoot in Mexico. Two of the girls disappeared, but I'm alive. Thanks champagne!"
"One time I got banged into a sinkhole, but a mole person banged me back up. I'll drink to that!"

Fresh off her scintillatingly sung, er, reportedly lipsynched, rendition of the Star Spangled Banner during Monday's Presidential Inauguration, her Sasha-Fierce-ified GQ February cover and her upcoming performance at the Super Bowl XLVII halftime show, the Second Lady took a digital breath to share something special with her fans: a weekly digital glimpse into the mind of Bey.

In a letter on her website today, Beyonce wrote:

"The BeyHive Blog is my way of showing all the inspiring things I come across every single day. This is through my eyes." She also writes that she'll be featuring fan art on the blog:

"So many of you are making videos, painting—I want to show the world what you do and how much I appreciate you."

Inside her perfectly-tressed noggin this week? A Rebecca Solnit tome, Oscar-buzzed films Argo and Beasts of the Southern Wild, Christopher Marley beetle-mosaic art, a psychedelic pop duo, Oliver Clegg paintings ...

Oh, and shoes.

The blog requires setting up a free account, upon which fans can fully access the Bey-spiration: her picks for inspiring people, streetstyle snaps and maybe, just maybe that macaroni-bedazzled-portrait you've always wanted to send her.

Bey's blog arrives post-Goop (by a certain blond pal fond of naming her kids after biblical tropes) and also features the same glossy, hyper-curated style of a certain lifestyle website by a Mr. Beyonce Knowles (a.k.a. Jay-Z).

Not that we would expect anything less from the multifaceted Bey, the only downside is the weekly release date.

Whatevs. We'll be waiting with Bey-ted breath.

Niki Cheng and Shaokao Cheng at their Chelsea BoConcept store. (PMc)

The first time The Observer met Niki and Shaokao Cheng, it was July, during the opening night of Julio Gaggia’s art show. Mr. Gaggia, the boyfriend of the plastic surgeon Mark Warfel, was preparing his work “Living Art: Chelsea Boy Apartment,” during which he would live for five days as a window display model at the BoConcept furniture store on West 18th Street. He spent the week eating, sleeping, working—and performing other, less-mentionable activities—in a showroom that divided him from gawkers outside with a pane of glass.

While we lounged about on the display furniture, socialite photographer Patrick McMullan brought over a petite woman with short, pixie-cropped hair.

“Niki is one of the few Power Asians in New York society,” he loudly whispered, flourishing Ms. Cheng before us. She smiled shyly and posed for a photograph before excusing herself.

It would be two weeks before we realized that Ms. Cheng and her husband owned the store where we had dropped more than one canapé between the cushions of a $3,000 couch.

In fact, the couple owns all five locations of the Danish furniture store in New York City, and another two in New Jersey. But the stores themselves aren’t the reason Mr. McMullan calls the Chengs “Power Asians.” Rather, it’s the couple’s seemingly innate social instincts, their ability to leverage a fairly cookie-cutter, mid-market design base into a celebrity-filled social whirl. One might say “Only in America,” or (even worse) “Only in New York,” but this wouldn’t exactly cover it. There is a certain type that thrives in Manhattan no matter what they’re selling, no matter where they’re from, no matter how few resources they have upon arriving.

If Darwin were alive today and researching the survival of New York species, he would do well to study the Chengs. They’re not social climbers, per se, but social movers—Gladwellian “connectors” who know everyone from celebrities to the guys with the best drapes in the city. They share their knowledge strategically with other key additions to their ever-expanding Rolodex. For Niki Cheng, 39, and Shaokao Cheng, 41, life is not about climbing a ladder. It’s about traversing the monkey bars that crisscross Manhattan.

“Niki and Shaokao have a wonderfully progressive view of New York society,” said Village Voice scribe Michael Musto. “They mix into their social circle drag performers, club holdouts, top celebrities and the corporate crowd. It’s all-inclusive.”

Last Friday, we met Ms. Cheng for a second time—again at the Chelsea store. While we were there, actress Faye Dunaway came in and had what one could only call a fit of method acting for a sequel to Mommie Dearest. The recently evicted Academy Award winner had come in two weeks ago and bought a piece of art from the store, and now she wanted Ms. Cheng’s help on a new design project.

“I adore this store. I’ve raved about it; they really need to get some of this stuff to London,” Ms. Dunaway told The Observer. “They don’t have anything like it there now.”

Unable to find a confidentiality agreement for us to sign, she stormed out shortly thereafter. (We didn’t get to tell her that there are actually 13 BoConcept stores in the U.K.) It was the kind of scene that no one wants a reporter to witness while writing a profile, but if there was any bad blood, Ms. Cheng didn’t show it.

“Really, don’t be upset,” she told The Observer, rubbing our arm soothingly. “She’ll call back. Anyway, where were we?”

The Chengs are adept at pleasing their celebrity clients, a skill that has come in handy while designing P. Diddy’s home, Jay-Z’s office (bed included), Mary J. Blige’s entire apartment and Estelle’s closet. Susan Sarandon, Lil’ Kim and Patti LaBelle have also used the duo’s interior design services, and Ms. LaBelle sang at the BoConcept flagship store for a Lance Armstrong benefit. They count designers Vivienne Tam, Asher Levine and Zang Toi among their closest friends.

Not that everyone in their circle is a brand name. After Ms. Dunaway left, we rushed over to Astor Place, where BoConcept was sponsoring a tent for a Christmas tree stand run by a Brit named Marco Romero, his girlfriend and his brother. Though he runs a jewelry shop in Greece most of the year, Mr. Romero spends three weeks in December living out of a van selling holiday firs, and Ms. Cheng took it upon herself to decorate the tent that the trio takes shifts in.

Despite a franchise that traffics mainly in large-scale items, Ms. Cheng has a burgeoning obsession with “micro-units”—apartments that are between 250 and 300 square feet.

She wanted to prove that it was possible to use BoConcept furniture to decorate a very small space, and the Romeros provided her with an interesting challenge. Their tent was about seven feet long and seven wide, and the guys had to hunch over even when standing at its tallest point. Empty, the space seemed minuscule. But after Ms. Cheng put down an orange rug, a short shelving unit, an ottoman, a table and two chairs (as well as several well-placed decorative objects), the tent looked like a living room on the Lower East Side.

It’s never quite clear why Ms. Cheng decided to treat Romero and his tent like VIPs, but when it was revealed that a $3,000 lamp from the store broke on the ride over, Ms. Cheng gasped, then turned to Mr. Romero. “We’ll have to get you another one.”

Shaokao Cheng, Cienna Cheng and Niki Cheng. (Patrick McMullan)

Perhaps the random act of kindness was a viral marketing ploy, or stemmed from her own back story of struggle. (Probably a bit of both, if we’re being honest.) Niki Cheng—née Chong—was 25 when she moved to New York in the mid-’90s. She had an architecture degree from the University of Malaysia and a visa that was only good for one year. She was scraping by as a coat-check girl at Von when she met Mr. Cheng, a young banker whose father had given him a $90,000 loan to buy a single-bedroom apartment on Madison and 32nd.

The two were introduced by a restaurant co-worker of hers, and she began relocating her belongings to his apartment after the first date, she said. After a heady three months of dating, Mr. Cheng invited her to move into his place permanently. “He didn’t realize I already had,” she laughed.

But there was a catch: his apartment in Murray Hill would be undergoing extensive renovations for two years. They made a pact: if they could live through the 24 months without breaking up, they would become a pair in the business sense as well. Mr. Cheng also pushed his girlfriend to get a job at a furniture retail outlet that would give her a three-year visa.

One day while working there, Ms. Cheng came upon a catalog that featured a coffee table identical to the type she sold. Except that Ms. Cheng’s outlet was selling her model for $2,000, and this unheard of Danish brand was selling its at $299.

The brand was called BoConcept, and its international franchise operation was just getting off the ground. The Chengs approached the company with the idea of opening a New York store on Madison Avenue, but were turned down. BoConcept’s owners thought that space in the city was too expensive and there wouldn’t be enough room to show the big items. In their view, New Yorkers were not the target market for their oversized aesthetic.

But the duo were undeterred. “We had spent a year putting together research that proved that this store could be opened in New York,” Ms. Cheng said. They also showed their plans to a friend they met at Bungalow 8.

Their friend turned out to be designer Max Azria, who spent 10 minutes calculating the figures the couple had acquired during their research, sketched a number down on his pad, and told them to go for it.

In 2003, BoConcept agreed to let the couple try their hand at a New York flagship for $300,000. “We had everything to lose,” Ms. Cheng said. “They had nothing to lose.” Niki was 28 and Shaokao 30. They had recently gotten married in Hawaii after three years of dating because, as Mr. Cheng put it, “My wife went to three different psychics who told her that marriage would bring us good fortune.” Mr. Cheng and his father remortgaged their houses to pay for the initial investment.

They barely survived the first two years; they couldn’t figure out the computer systems, and there were issues with shipping. Their business model might not have actually worked had Mr. and Ms. Cheng not been so socially ambitious.

With his degree in engineering and hers in architecture, they were able to use their conjoined home-decorating skills for seemingly un-BoConcept-related purposes. When one big-name celebrity client called, nothing from BoConcept would fit in their closet, so Ms. Cheng happily suggested shelves and fixtures that did. Soon, the singer was calling the couple to redesign her living room, and this time they used items from their Dutch catalog.

The fact that BoConcept’s furniture design is somewhere between IKEA and West Elm is somewhat beside the point. What the Chengs have done was take a relatively bland furniture store from a not especially popular Danish franchise and parlay it into a personal calling card.

When the two aren’t peddling 12-piece sectionals, they can often be found at yoga or otherwise getting fit. At 12:54 a.m. Saturday morning, The Observer received a text from Niki, who asked if we wanted to attend a 10 a.m. Bikram session with her. (We pleaded out.)

Later that morning, Ms. Cheng was at the Madison store, dressed from head to toe in brown Juicy velour. She helped hunk real estate agent Ryan Serhant from Bravo’s Million Dollar Listing find items for his move from Pine Street to Chelsea ... which of course will be documented on Bravo’s website. After he left, Ms. Cheng rushed out herself for a private second yoga session of the day, but not before inviting The Observer over for a home-cooked meal the next night with “some friends” that included Ms. Tam and Mr. Musto.
http://youtu.be/JjI2SwrGnHs
A 2010 BoConcept commerical featuring Mr. Musto and Ms. Cheng.

In 2006, the Chengs moved with their baby daughter Cienna from Murray Hill to a $1.7 million, 2,200-square-foot artist’s loft with 12-foot-high ceilings on Fifth Avenue at 29th Street. This is the space, apparently, where you can keep two six-foot ottomans without it feeling cluttered.

Cienna is now 6, their son Eden 3; when we arrived Sunday evening, their mom was running around the gigantic apartment, scooping them up for bed. Ms. Cheng looked ready to fall asleep herself, after making a feast: home-cooked dishes with pork belly, chicken, eggplant and fish, and a lotus soup for dessert. Ms. Tam was there, and Mr. Musto showed up for dessert. Mr. Levine wasn’t able to make it, but the table was more than full.

Mr. Cheng explained that she had rescheduled her meeting with Ms. Dunaway, but was too busy cooking to make it down to the store. So she had the actress come up to her apartment and multitasked.
As we were leaving, Mr. Cheng asked sincerely if we would come back and have dinner when we weren’t on the job. Ms. Cheng had already invited us to their Christmas party and a luxury garage sale they were co-sponsoring this week. They were so nice! How could we decline when they were so generous?

Another rung added to the monkey bars.

By Alex Fine.

Basketball is back. Three weeks after opening night was canceled in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, four months after the Knicks let Jeremy Lin slip out of town, 13 years since the Knicks’ fluke run to the NBA finals, and two decades since Pat Riley’s tough-guy team captivated New York in the early years of the Giuliani era, fans in the world’s greatest basketball city care without cynicism again.

The Isiah Thomas era and the Knicks’ failed pursuit of LeBron James are old news. The Nets’ long struggle for big-city relevance got lost somewhere in New York harbor. When the teams squared off Monday night in Brooklyn’s new Barclays Center, the city had plenty to cheer about: real stars, the top two spots in the Atlantic Division standings and the eyes of millions upon us.

“Brooooooklyn,” they sang in the style of Biggie Smalls—the best rallying cry in American sports—when the Nets scored a bucket. “MVP!” they chanted when Knicks star Carmelo Anthony stepped to the free throw line. The crowd was so loud at times it was hard to believe that the 17,000-plus fans weren’t all cheering for the same side.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg was among them, as were Michael Strahan, Charlie Rose, Richard Gere and, of course, Nets part-owner Jay-Z and his wife Beyoncé. By our count, there were 100 members of the press on hand, including representatives from Chinese, German and Italian outlets. ESPN had 12 journalists at the game, in case you were wondering how the sports network gauged its importance.

In the end, Mr. Anthony missed a jumper that would have won the game in regulation, and the Nets outlasted the Knicks in overtime. It didn’t matter, much.

For a night, we could forget that the Knicks hadn’t won a title in 40 years, forget about Bernard King’s balky knees and Patrick Ewing’s shaky nerves, forget about anything having to do with Mr. Thomas.
New York was back where it belonged, as the basketball center of the universe.

New York is a basketball town, God help us. There’s something in the collective DNA that tells us hoops is the most important sport, some vague understanding that there are neighborhoods where a kid can still become immortal on a playground, some distant memory of the days when teams traveled to media and not vice versa, the days when the Garden earned the right to be called Mecca.

So what if it’s an empty boast? So it’s been 40 years since Willis and Clyde led the team to glory, longer still since the city produced a truly elite player. (Best New York City product in the last 25 years is ... Stephon Marbury?) Basketball is the ultimate confidence sport, and New York is the fake-it-till-you-make-it confidence town. Don’t forget the darker days when the city’s greatness wasn’t a given, the days of “It’s a nice place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live there,” when we could swap tales of Earl “the Goat” Manigault snatching quarters off Harlem backboards—or Willis Reed staggering onto the court for game seven of the 1970 finals, John Starks rising high over Jordan and Grant for a left-handed jam—and recognize a grace and gall and toughness we imagined in ourselves.

Suffice it to say the psychic stakes were high for us Knicks fans setting foot in the Barclays Center on Monday night. Indeed, in the years since Bruce Ratner first broke ground, I often feared that the Knicks’ woes would continue, that the hangover from Mr. Thomas’s tenure, when the team collected overweight players with fatter contracts, would never abate, that James Dolan would remain a pox on the franchise. And that, in the absence of a team they cared about, the fickle masses would give in to the allure of the hottest borough, the newer arena, the team with one owner who’s rich enough to run for Russian president and another who doesn’t simply not suck, but doesn’t suck so much that he’s married to Beyoncé.

Would I blame them? No. Excommunicate? Probably. But something would tear loose from the fabric of my city if New York were no longer a Knicks town.

I can report that a trip to the Nets’ new arena offers temptation enough for a lesser-willed fan to cross over: High ceilings (this is Brooklyn, so exposed ducts, natch) and open sightlines; a thoughtfully curated selection of local food (Spumoni Gardens for the natives, Fatty ’Cue for the arrivistes, Nathan’s for the tourists); instead of the light shows that often mar pregame introductions, a dignified volley of fireworks. Instead of stadium anthems, music that reminds you that Brooklyn belongs to the world. (We have to wonder, though, how big a cut the sound man is getting from Roc-A-Fella Records: with the exception of the periodic Biggie track, it was almost entirely Jay-Z’s catalog.)

Slick Rick played at halftime. He was pudgy, and some of the words were lost in the acoustics, but still, it was a classy nod to New York City’s hip-hop history, and something that’s hard to imagine going down at corporatized Madison Square Garden.

I can also report, happily, that on the evidence of one evening, the fan exodus isn’t happening. Led by Mr. Anthony—reinspired, the sportswriters say, and leaner at the waist after playing alongside Mr. James in the London Olympics—and Tyson Chandler, the biggest man on the court, if not tip to toe, then certainly by the size of his heart, the Knicks have the look of a title contender. Maybe not a favorite, but at least a plausible long shot. It’s not just the fans who think so: the team filled out its roster for this season with veterans like Jason Kidd and Rasheed Wallace, the type of already-rich players lured not by the biggest paycheck but by the best title shot.

So the Nets fans were more numerous, more conspicuous in their “Fan Since Day One” badges (oh really?) and black-and-white Brooklyn gear. Knicks fans were, if not louder, better at the business of being fans. They chanted “Defense” from the first possession and serenaded Mr. Anthony at the free-throw line. Maybe it was simple sports loyalty, as Spike Lee, the world’s most public Knicks fan, tweeted at Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz: “With All Due Respect I’ve Been A NEW YORK KNICERBOCKERS Devotee Since 1967, Not Gonna Switch.” And as Mike Williams, a Knicks fan from East New York, Brooklyn, told us in the spacious bowels of the arena, “Knicks fans have been Knicks fans forever. The Nets are just a novelty.”

But let’s not overindulge in name-calling, at least not in the afterglow of this happy new rivalry. Who cares if the black-and-white-clad masses remember nothing of the Drazen Petrovic tragedy, the Derrick Coleman disappointment, if they had to read the banners hanging from the rafters to know the Nets won a pair of ABA titles in the days before the merger?

Instead, let’s celebrate for a moment the improbable course that led these two teams to their current exalted status. Nets general manager Billy King, who achieved middling results as the decision-maker for the Philadelphia 76ers, bet that by paying heavily for swingman Joe Johnson, late of the Atlanta Hawks, he could convince Deron Williams, his star free agent point guard, to re-sign with the Nets.

Meanwhile, if the Knicks are as good as their early play has promised, the fans will owe the team’s salvation (or at least, above-averageness) to the last figure they’d expect: current GM Glen Grunwald didn’t just play college ball with Isiah Thomas at Indiana University, he was hired by Zeke on two separate occasions. The Knicks are wont to downplay the relationship between the pair, lest they stoke our suspicions that the former GM is still conspiring to ruin the team. Mr. Thomas isn’t so coy: “I love Glen, he’s one of my favorite people on earth,” he told ESPN Radio last summer.

Who cares? Like players, executives come and go: love and hatred for them are fleeting emotions, and for the moment, Mr. Grunwald’s free-agent signing of shot-blocker Mr. Chandler and installation of defensive-minded head coach Mike Woodson (another one of Mr. Thomas’s Indiana pals), are all anyone needs to know.

The Brooklyn partisans can speak for themselves. Mark Anise, a Brooklyn resident who loves his borough so much he had a Nets ‘B’ tattooed on his right bicep on the ground floor of the Barclays Center, told me: “Basketball was the one sport where I always rooted for the name on the back of the jersey. I always said if Brooklyn got a team, then I’d root for the name on the front.”

Never one to mince words when it comes to his love for his hometown, Mr. Markowitz emailed The Observer, “Our fans are so wild, so over-the-top, so proud and so loud that even residents of the outer borough of Manhattan will hear us cheering for the best team in New York and the best team in the NBA, the Brooklyn Nets.”

On the way down to the postgame press conference, I passed an usher with his hands clasped in the air in the shape of the Roc-A-Fella diamond in an homage to Jay-Z. “We’re coming for you, Spike,” a colleague usher said to Mr. Lee, who wasn’t in the arena, or to no one. Or everyone.

Well, let them come—it’s good to have a rival. The great Knicks team of my youth, Pat Riley’s boys, tapped into the ethos of 1990s New York: tough as Charles Oakley, the man who used to ride an exercise bike to the point of tears, and cocky as John Starks, who played his college ball in nowhere Oklahoma, and believed even then that he was better than any of the anointed kings of the NBA. And so we loved them for it.

In the hearts of the city’s sports fans, they were displaced by Derek Jeter’s Yankees: brilliant hardworking men who made their fortune in New York City, tapped in less to the town’s blue collar roots than to the Wall Street princes who defined a revitalized city.

These Knicks aren’t that tough or that classy, and neither are these Nets. But the city doesn’t need an NBA title. Yet. For the moment, it’s enough to care.

pclark@observer.com

Neil's Puppet Dreams (YouTube)

- The best present for the holidays? Ben Savage tweeting last night that he and Danielle Fishel are all in for a Boy Meets World sequel for Disney, titled Girl Meets World.

Topangaaaaa!

- Brad Pitt is not ashamed of that ridiculous Chanel No. 5 ad. In fact, he kind of liked how weird it was.

- Nicki Minaj is stirring up more trouble on American Idol, except this time she's gone after Steven Tyler, calling the Aerosmith singer racist for saying that she would have eliminated Bob Dylan from the show had he been auditioning. Um, to be fair? Dylan never would have made it past the first round, no matter who was judging. Though we're not sure if that makes Tyler racist.

-Neil Patrick Harris has a new web show, "Neil's Puppet Dreams." No, for real. And it is amazing.
http://youtu.be/q3bSbnAXrM4

You don't own Lena! (YouTube)

- Here's Alexa Chung, Tavi, and Lena Dunham lip-syncing Lesley Gore's "You Don't Own Me" like they were in The First Wives Club or something. For feminism and Obama!

http://youtu.be/_M_hcioeOyk
- Mark Sanchez and Eva Longoria are no more after a month of dating. We have to call our lawyers on this one; celebrity relationship whiplash is real and it hurts, people!

- Anderson Cooper is scared Lindsay Lohan is going to steal his job, just like she stole $5,000 worth of clothing from the Scary Movie 5 set. (They had $5,000 worth of clothing on the set of Scary Movie 5?)

- Meanwhile, Robert DeNiro KNOWS that Leonardo DiCaprio is stealing all of his jobs.

- Jay-Z and Beyonce were unable to trademark the name of their child, Blue Ivy. And when you can't copyright your baby, what's the point of having one, right??

Y'all thirsty? (Matt Chaban)

The Barclays Center is open, and like Brooklyn's favorite son who has been performing there all week, the arena lives up to the hype. It may not be universally loved, for its tortured past or rusticated design, but there is no question the Barclays Center is one of the most unique and interesting sports venues in the world. It is certainly the most exacting, with every inch of the place being burnished and detailed. It is like a Swiss watch—everything in its right place—albeit a Swiss watch with a discrete EmblemHealth logo on its face, the kind of thing handed out for a Christmas bonus. You eagerly wear it and just hope no one wants to see the thing up close.

One thing was out of place, though, when The Observer took in Wednesday night's packed Jay-Z concert: drinks, drinks everywhere, but not a drop from Brooklyn.

That is not exactly true. If we wanted a root beer float from precious Cobble Hill soda shop the Farmacy, there they were, 8 bucks a pop. (Get it? Pop? Forget it. You must not be from the Midwest like the rest of us in Brooklyn.) There were Budweiser taps as far as the eye could see, even a few Budweiser-branded Eighteen|76 bars, named for the year of the bubbly brew's inception. There were also rolling Stoli carts sprinkled throughout, reminiscent of the cocktail setups at a wedding reception or the basement of a frat house, with the lines to match.

And there was the expertly curated local food offerings—Calexico, L&B Spumoni, Fatty 'Cue, Cafe Habana, Nathan's—but that only threw into starker contrast the absence of any Brooklyn libations. It is not only the fact that Brooklyn has become home to numerous notable craft brewers and distillers but also the fact that one of them, Steve Hindy of the Brooklyn Brewery, very publicly defended this project for some time, even garnering boycotts from some of the haughtier establishments in the borough. His wares, despite much publicity to the contrary, were nowhere to be found.

There was another problem, as this reporter and his wife swilled a $10 Stella Artois (cheaper than many Manhattan bars, come to think of it). The tickets said the show started at 8 p.m., we had gotten here at 7:35 to be sure we had time for some delectable dinner, which cost a pretty penny, but then again it always does at arenas anymore, and at least the food was generally very good. Around 8, when we asked a very polite usher (everyone was trained by Disney) when the show might start, she said in about 40 minutes. In the end, Jay-Z would not take the stage for another hour and a half.

It is not that this is terribly rude, or that we are terribly un-punk enough not to deal with it. Promise. It is not that, as The Observer was later informed, Jay-Z, no matter where he plays, always likes to take his time, let the excitement built, let the stragglers arrive, let the DJ work his magic, calling out for Brooklyn in the HOUSE? This did not bother us.

What did is that Jay-Z is a part owner in the massive, beautiful, unusual venue we were now inside—and my wife could not shake the feeling that we and the 18,000 or so other fans and affiliates all here to see one man were somehow being made to wait by him so that people might buy more $10 beers, more $13.75 mass artisanal sandwiches. As he relaxed and we waited, the crowd was lining HOVA's pockets.

Don't forget, as Bloomberg food critic Ryan Sutton recently noticed, water is more expensive than soda.

The next day, The Observer inquired with a Barclays Center spokesman about the whole thing. He said the organization had no interest in disclosing whether or not Jay-Z was indeed taking a cut of the concession sales, either as a performer or as a miniscule partner in the operation.

As for the lack of Brooklyn Brewery beer, of Six Point, of Kings County bourbon and Breuckelen Gin? "They have Brooklyn Larger in bottles and cans (they are poured into cups)," the spokesman wrote in an email. But we protested. We looked, there was none. Maybe at one of the bars that we missed, but what about the rest? "I suggest you go back, drink less, and look more closely for the beverages you desire," he responded.

To be sure, The Observer checked with Steve Hindy, proprietor of Brooklyn Brewery, just to be sure of what was going on. Basically, the arena purchased the beer and was working out where to put it still—not every kink had been worked out by opening day, and those who paid the right sponsorships (Mr. Hindy said he could not afford them) seemed to be getting the most attention. We also noticed the Kosher Kiosks had yet to be set up yet. Still, many of the luxury boxes had been outfitted with the craft brews in their mini fridges, one of Mr. Hindy's associates told us. Figures.

Even if he was elbowed aside for the time being, given second-tier status despite being the hometown favorite, Mr. Hindy's love for the project remains.

"Ratner’s Metrotech, Atlantic Terminal and Atlantic Yards are the biggest developments in the history of Brooklyn," Mr. Hindy said. "I believe they make Brooklyn a better place for all of us. I know this was all a very small footnote to the development of the project, but it was a big deal for us at the Brooklyn Brewery. We definitely suffered some collateral damage. But the brewery grew rapidly in the past decade in spite of that, and we will grow 30% this year."

Did we mention the show was—like the arena—unlike anything we had ever seen? Not life-changing, a little too slick, perhaps, but still certainly not the kind of thing one gets to experience on a regular basis. Unless you're a season ticket holder. Guzzling glitches aside, totally worth it.

Photo illustration: Ed Johnson

“We did it!” developer Bruce Ratner crowed a reported 14 times at the opening of his new Barclays Center in Downtown Brooklyn this weekend.

We sure did. Poor Brooklyn, always trying to develop some new civic identity all its own, and always ending up with ... a Barclays Center.

What stands out most about the new home of the Nets is how little it stands out. The arena’s latticework of “preweathered” steel panels is supposed to evoke Brooklyn’s brownstone tradition. But it looks instead like one more bricked-up urban bunker from the 1970s, when panicky municipal authorities thought they’d be fighting a race war. It is almost weirdly provincial for New York, more like a college fieldhouse for a Division III school in Sheboygan.

“So, how did we get here?” an “almost giddy” Mr. Ratner asked at the Barclays ribbon-cutting.

Good question. The answer is that it’s all too typical of how we live now, a game of bait-and-switch that is slowly reducing New York to the level of any other American city, while simultaneously robbing the people who live here.

Full disclosure: my wife’s sister is married to Matthew D. Brinckerhoff, one of the attorneys who tried to stop the city’s lawless use of eminent domain to build this (very dubious) public improvement. But don’t take his word or mine for any of this. Instead, check out the immensely entertaining documentary, Battle for Brooklyn, and/or Norman Oder’s meticulously researched website, Atlantic Yards Report, a sterling example of civic service.

You’ll be appalled if you do. When it was conceived back in 2003, Barclays was supposed to be far more than a mediocre basketball and concert hall named after a scandal-ridden bank. Plans called for a $4.9 billion, 22-acre residential, retail and office complex, creating 10,000 permanent new jobs and 2,250 low-to-middle-income apartments. It would be called Atlantic Yards and would be built over a major MTA rail junction, providing the transit authority with many millions of badly needed dollars in exchange for its air rights.

No less than Frank Gehry was hired on as the project architect, and he produced a fantastic, glowing jumble of skyscrapers around a largely transparent arena with a green field on its roof. Its scale was frightening, but it was a truly audacious plan, one that would have indeed given Brooklyn a world-class, urban core.

Mr. Gehry went about talking up what a great chance this was to “build a neighborhood from scratch”—apparently overlooking the thousands of people and the scores of businesses already located in the area. This would become a common failing, but it helped Mr. Ratner secure some $305 million in state and city subsidies under the auspices of the Empire State Development Corporation (ESDC), one of New York State’s hundreds of largely unaccountable public authorities.

Thanks to the ESDC, no elected politician ever had to take an up-or-down vote on the deal. Mr. Ratner could clear the area using the threat of eminent domain, under the guise of clearing a “blighted” neighborhood. Many of the residents forced out of their homes were, in fact, living in condominiums, but apparently, they were blight condos. Obliging judges quickly rubber-stamped the whole process, ignoring such technicalities and, well, the law.

No serious auction for the property was ever held. When one was hastily slapped together, only one other developer, the Extell Corporation, made a serious bid for one of the hottest properties in New York. Extell actually offered the city more money for the site, including $150 million for the MTA’s air rights—or $100 million more than the $50 million Mr. Ratner originally provided. The bid was still rejected. It was clear that Gov. Pataki and Mayor Bloomberg had chosen Mr. Ratner to develop the site, and no one was going to upset that arrangement.

Once the money was in place, all the grand plans fell by the wayside, and Mr. Gehry was amicably—and profitably—cashiered. Mr. Ratner deftly secured the support of the city’s construction unions by promising 17,000 construction jobs on the project. In an ugly sort of reverse Bonfire of the Vanities, local minority leaders and organizations were quickly bought off and recruited. Longtime race panderer Rev. Herb Daughtry got $50,000 for his neighborhood association, control of 54 tickets for every Nets game and a $300,000 luxury suite at Barclays. Another neighborhood group, “B.U.I.L.D.”—Brooklyn United for Innovative Local Development—was created out of whole cloth, thanks to at least $1 million from Mr. Ratner, and there was even $1.5 million for the late, unlamented ACORN. Their members did their best to keep out and shout down any neighborhood opponents at public meetings.

Meanwhile, Jay-Z was brought in to give the Nets a further minority gloss, leading the Rev. Al Sharpton to sniffle that his mother used to go see Jackie Robinson play baseball for the Brooklyn Dodgers, and now, praise God, “I’m glad I lived to see the color line in ownership broken in Brooklyn, where we’ve gone from Jackie to Jay-Z, where we can not only play the game but we can own a piece of the game. So my mother saw Jackie and my daughters will see Jay-Z—we have come a long way.”

Jay-Z owns an estimated 0.15 percent of the Nets. The real owner is Mikhail D. Prokhorov, the shady Russian oligarch who obligingly took 80 percent of the team and 45 percent of the arena off Mr. Ratner’s hands for a cool $223 million.

All the rest has proved to be smoke and mirrors, too. So far, at least, there are no apartments for anyone, nothing but hundreds of parking spaces for Nets ticket-holders. There aren’t 10,000 permanent jobs for local residents or anyone else, nothing like the 17,000 construction jobs promised. Mr. Ratner is lobbying the state for another $92 million in scarce housing subsidies, saying he can’t build affordable housing with union labor. He’s proposed an alternative: a 32-story building made out of pre-fabricated, modular units, imported from China and assembled at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. This should be interesting, as no pre-fabricated building that tall has ever been erected before.

Anyway, there’s no rush. The ESDC has given Forest City Ratner at least 25 years to complete the whole project. The MTA has allowed Ratner to renegotiate his contract down to $20 million up front, with the rest to be paid over the next 22 years. It has thus left tens and probably hundreds of millions of dollars on the table. (By comparison, two developers recently agreed to pay $1 billion for the air rights over Manhattan’s Hudson Yards.) We may all be paying higher subway fares for years to come so that a Russian billionaire can have a place to party with Jay-Z and Beyoncé.

Yet while the Atlantic Yards is the most brazen and costly such scam today, it is no great departure from business as usual. One need only look at, say, Coney Island, where our permanent government recently put us through the same, depressing paces: enticing the public with fantastic visions of future development that were quietly withdrawn, enlisting local minority support that will doubtless be betrayed, and mindlessly handing over vast piles of taxpayer money to wealthy developers. There are more such projects being planned or executed all over New York. Their legacy will be a sort of public dementia, the creation of a city that we no longer recognize or comprehend.

And we did it.

editorial@observer.com