Is this the Ferrari Foot Smasher? (photo, by Natalie Brasington, from Entrepreneur.com)

The owner of the $257,000 red Ferrari 458, Julien Chabbott, accused of the foot smashing, could very well be the same man who co-founded the fittingly named "Line Snob" smartphone app (which aims to "tackle" waiting in lines—or crush it with a coupe tire).

In the video, filmed by bystander Damian Mory, Police Officer Felix Recio is filling out a ticket for Mr. Chabbott's car for parking in a no standing zone, for not having a registration sticker, and for not having an inspection sticker, according to an NYPD spokesman and the criminal complaint.

Officer Recio told Mr. Chabbott "I'm writing you a summons. Please stand on the sidewalk," according to the criminal complaint.

Mr. Chabbott, 28, of Midtown South, first tried to snatch the summons out of Officer Recio's hands, then walked inside 147 Mercer Street, the address for The Mercer Hotel, the criminal complaint adds.

Mr. Chabbott, who was reportedly there with girlfriend (and former "The Hills" player) Stephanie Pratt, then returned to the car to announce "I'm leaving."

Mr. Chabbott was "specifically told by the officer to not get into the car and to not leave, and that's exactly what he did," the NYPD spokesman added.

What happens next is, well, see for yourself:

Mr. Chabbott was arrested and charged with second-degree assault (a felony charge), vehicular assault, obstructing governmental administration, and disorderly conduct, the NYPD said.

As for Officer Recio: "He has an injury to his left foot and right hand, he was treated and released, and is out on an injury, out of the line of duty," the NYPD spokesman added.

He pleaded not guilty to charges in Manhattan Criminal Court this morning.

If confirmed, Mr. Chabbott is the same man behind Line Snob, which is "a location-based social network that monitors lines and provides wait times," it says on its website.

In a 2010 Entrepreneur.com article, Mr. Chabbott said he and business partner Eric Adler created the app as "it was the perfect time to use the power of crowds."

As the opening sentence in the article points out, "Eric Adler and Julien Chabbott hate waiting in lines."

He also hates waiting for a police officer to finish filling out a summons, evidently.

An email to Line Snob requesting comment was not returned by press time.

drosen@observer.com 

The atheists are on the offensive, one might say, with Daniel Dennett’s latest book, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon—an attempt to reduce religion and spirituality to a by-product of evolutionary biology. And Dawkins’ The God Delusion, which debunks the conventional monotheistic notion of God without supplying an alternate answer to the question of how the universe came into being, the ancient mystery: Why is there Something instead of Nothing?

On the other hand, defenders of religion, of the very idea of a God, are hard-pressed to explain the cruel, unholy chaos and suffering that pervades a world supposedly created by a loving God.

Neglected in this simplistic bipolar debate is the position staked out by the great Nobel Prize–winning novelist Isaac Bashevis Singer, which emerges more clearly in the biography by Florence Noiville, Isaac B. Singer: A Life, just published in English.

It’s remarkable, however, the way commenters on the new Singer book have failed either to grasp or to articulate the seriousness of Singer’s position, its centrality to him and his work, and the significance it has for the atheism/theism debate.

None has seen fit to give a name to Singer’s Third Position in the debate. So I will: It’s not atheism, not theism, but rather anti-theism, a provocative, profoundly different stance from either of the others. Simply put, contrary to the atheists, Singer believes in a God, but, contrary to the theists, he doesn’t believe in a just, loving or merciful God; he believes in a God who doesn’t deserve worship, a God who deserves our condemnation.

Why has the significance of Singer’s position been lost in the shuffle? Sometimes we get so buried in second-order cultural trend-spotting, in cultural self-examination, re-evaluation—aren’t we on the re-evaluation of the re-evaluation of the re-evaluation of Hannah Arendt at this point?—that certain genuinely exciting first-order developments get lost in the culture wars’ fog of battle.

The new Noiville biography of Isaac Singer is an instance, a slim book that nonetheless advances the growing case that there were in fact Two Singers—and Two Songs, you might say. There was the Original Yiddish Singer and the Easy-Listening English Singer, you might say. (Singer called his transformed English translations “second originals.”)

There’s the familiar warm-and-fuzzy Fiddler on the Roof Singer that brought him an international audience, beginning with Saul Bellow’s translation of his shtetl fable, “Gimpel the Fool,” in a 1953 issue of Partisan Review.

But then there’s the other Singer, Singer the Yiddish writer, the Singer before Singer bowdlerized himself in the course of “supervising” the translations of his works from Yiddish into English. The Original, Yiddish Singer was engaged in a bitter, blasphemous battle with God. The kind of strife he frequently sought to smooth over, self-censor in the English translations of his works.

This was something I’d written about before in connection with the discovery in the Singer archives of a brutal and sexual Yiddish gangster novel he’d written called Yarme and Keyle. Back then (in The Observer, March 10, 2003), I wrote about the controversy that ensued over whether Singer would have wanted some of his Yiddish works translated into English after he died, without his “supervision,” presumably to make them more “palatable.” What appeared to be his desire to keep the two Singers separate.

And it’s probably no accident that the Singer novel that shook me up most viscerally was Shadows on the Hudson (extremely faithful readers may recall my three-part serialized review of Shadows back in 1998). Shadows was the first novel translated from the Yiddish without Singer’s “supervision,” and we got more of a sense of the raw anger at God, the bitter imprecations, the struggle that ravaged him and his characters.

In Ms. Noiville’s biography, there is further evidence for the separation of the two Singers, more harsh outcries against God from the Yiddish Singer.

Consider the remarkable statement that Ms. Noiville has found in an obscure interview with Singer back in 1978, one that reflects views which she contends Singer had been expressing as far back as the 1920’s, though mainly in Yiddish.

She uses it to illustrate what she calls “Singer’s ‘ethic of protest,’ a philosophy that would be his to the end … the point was to show God that he [Singer] disapproved of the way He ran the world, disapproved of His silence and absence of compassion …. Singer insists that because God is evil, man should behave in a moral way … ‘to spite God.’”

Then she quotes from the obscure interview (done in 1978, first aired on Swedish TV in 1985), in which Singer says, “I often say to myself that God wants us to protest. He has had enough of those who praise Him all the time and bless Him for all His cruelties to man and animals.

“I have written a little book which I call Rebellion and Prayer, or The True Protester. It is still in Yiddish, untranslated. It was written at the time of the Holocaust. It is a bitter little book, and I doubt that I will ever publish it. Yes, I am a troubled person …. If I could, I would picket the Almighty with a sign: ‘Unfair to Life.’”

One thing it does is answer the question that seemed to puzzle one reviewer of Ms. Noiville’s book: Why was Singer so “agitated”? Clearly (as any reading of Shadows on the Hudson makes evident as well), what agitated him was his anger at God—and the vexations of theodicy, the subdiscipline of theology that wrestles with the difficulty of reconciling an all-powerful God who is also supposed to be just and merciful.

How one can believe in a just and merciful God who apparently countenances the persistence of evil and unmerited suffering on a vast and catastrophic scale? It would be enough to “agitate” any serious person.

And by the way, now that we know about it, that “bitter little book” Rebellion and Prayer—what happened to it? Wouldn’t you like to read it? Shouldn’t someone translate and publish this key philosophic vision of one of the great writers of the past century? Or should we follow his (apparent) wishes and leave it to languish in Yiddish? Would we then be denying English-only readers of Singer a deep truth about the writer they profess to love?

It reminded me of the kind of controversies over the differing texts of Hamlet and King Lear, controversies which I explore in The Shakespeare Wars. Do the two different versions of Lear’s dying words represent two profoundly differing visions of the play—or of the playwright himself and his view of the moral order of the universe?

Indeed, Ms. Noiville offers two different versions—one Yiddish, one English—of the ending of a Singer story called “The Mirror” that differ in some respects like the two different endings of Lear.

In the Yiddish version, the narrator, a tormented imp, tells us “All the worlds are vile fungi …. Everything was and remains mere confusion, emptiness, and chaos.”

These harsh sentiments are softened beyond recognition in the English translation that Singer “supervised,” and all that’s left is mild questioning: “Is there a God? Is He all merciful?”

As Ms. Noiville exclaims after quoting the two versions: “What a difference!”

But to return to the renewed debate in the culture over atheism initiated by Messrs. Dawkins and Dennett: If Singer seems to offer a Third Way between theism and atheism, there is in fact a Fourth Way.

One that was articulated by my friend Errol Morris, the director of The Fog of War, with whom I’ve had a running series of conversations about what might be called “The Fog of God,” the dilemmas of theodicy as first adumbrated by Leibniz in his 1709 Theodicy, a much-misunderstood book that Errol and I are both fond of.

In any case, one recent winter weekend morning, I took a cab downtown to the Mercer Hotel to have breakfast with Errol and his wife Julie. I brought with me a copy of the Noiville book, and before I ordered my fried eggs I had to read Errol the passage from Singer’s Swedish interview about the “bitter little book” Singer wouldn’t allow to be published in English, his “agitation” (“Yes I am a troubled person,” troubled by God’s responsibility for “the mess in which we are stuck”) and the need to protest, to picket, the Almighty for His injustice to man.

Errol, who is an admirer of the Dawkins book and had, after all, contemplated the mysteries of creation in his Stephen Hawking film A Brief History of Time, offered a fourth alternative to theism, atheism and anti-theism. He suggested that instead of Singer’s outrage at God for His responsibility for the cruelty and suffering of life, we ought to feel a measure of sympathy for the deity for His ineptness—for what Errol called “The Infinite Mediocrity of God.”

It’s a position that offers some heuristic rewards, at the very least. If God exists (and by the way, I’m an agnostic), one doesn’t have to walk around muttering about God’s failures the way Singer evidently did. One can consider Him a kind of Divine Schlemiel who tried His best but just didn’t do a good job of Creation. Whose “best of all possible worlds” just wasn’t very good at all—not because He was deliberately bad, demonic in the way that some Gnostic sects have portrayed the Creator, but rather because He was just divinely mediocre, supremely inept.

I had long considered “Gimpel the Fool,” Singer’s touching but troubling shtetl fable, to be his allegory of the relationship between the Jewish people and God. The Jews, like Gimpel, are always putting their faith and trust in God’s goodness, and His special care for them, in the same way that Gimpel the Fool puts his faith and trust in his cruel neighbors and untrustworthy wives—all of whom conspired to make him miserable, although he steadfastly refused to blame any of them.

But maybe what Errol’s Fourth position suggests is that it is God Himself who is Gimpel the Fool. Just another theory.

One massive, shining, white brick wall, lit from below, stretches the length of the large, high-ceilinged lobby bar in the Mercer Hotel. At one end, a wall of books includes Helvetica: Homage to a Typeface , The Lexicon of Shoes , Palestinian Cabinet Members . Slipcovered chairs and Ikea coffee tables are scattered throughout.

Seated in a corner: Denzel Washington is absorbed by his cell phone. Michael Richards-remember him? Kramer?-leans over to me.

"It's celebrity time," he says.

This lobby bar is meant for hotel guests, friends of hotel guests and associates. But the soft-spoken waitress wearing a black frock isn't inclined to kick you out: She'll just avoid serving you.

Moving from the large, brightly lit lobby bar through a doorway into the small, dimly lit Mercer Kitchen bar next-door: A Little Shop of Horrors rubber tree rests on top of the counter. Rectangular box-glass chandeliers glisten through the room. On this cold night, the temperature inside seems to hover somewhere around 30 degrees. Many coats and hats. A tall, thin, expensive blonde wearing a white suede coat, her nose stuck high in the air, stands in the middle of the passageway blocking traffic, dialing and redialing her mobile phone. She cuts a striking figure, but close up, her meanness dominates her beauty. When her date finally shows up, she dives into revelry.

A red-haired waitress with soft, creamy skin recommends the brioche pudding.

I'm seated against the wall, sipping a ginger margarita, next to a group of Frenchmen in the corner eating dinner. Their table is covered with plates, glasses and utensils.

Gazing out the large glass window, I notice the caged naked mannequins in the Prada store across the street. Suddenly, a massive Great Dane charges through the door, a bolt of canine lightning, heading straight for the French group in the corner! Before they know what hit them, the Great Dane opens up and devours their rolls and butter. He eats right off the table. He's about to go for more when his owners come and retrieve him, but not a word of apology to the Frenchmen. No wonder zey hate us!

Ms. Uma Thurman strolls modestly through, wearing lavender and white.

Downstairs, in the restaurant portion of the Mercer Kitchen: at one end of the space, a white tiled kitchen in vivid relief, a bright stage to the dark theater of the restaurant where the patrons dine. The chefs, sous-chefs and servers are all actors in the play. There are rough brick walls and columns, large mirrors framed in dark wood, candles fixed against them. On one side of the dining area, more Little Shop of Horrors plants on the bar surface. The bartender in short sleeves blows hot air into his hands repeatedly. "I wish I was wearing long underwear," he says.

I pass by two doors opposite each other, with an employee seated on a chair in between. He motions to his right.

Down another flight of stairs, past the boiler room and the engineering room, you'll arrive at a really small dark cellar bar, for those in the know; this one is sometimes open and sometimes not. Now I'm on a bar stool at the counter, waiting for a table.

On my left is a thirtysomething bachelor, with spiky product hair and high-contrast highlights. Spiky removes a thick stack of $20's from his wallet and places the bills on the bar. He's comparing notes with his buddy: "She's got serious separation anxiety-every time she goes back to D.C."

The bartender refills Spiky's drink, takes a $20 and brings him his change.

"So I'm like, 'Listen, I'm not going to call you every day,'" says Spiky. "'And don't ever call me and wake me up when you know how hard I've been working.' I mean, she's got serious separation anxiety."

The bartender keeps refilling. After a few rounds, Spiky collects his stack and leaves three bucks on the counter.

Farther down the bar, a woman in a blouse and jeans wears a massive Russian fur hat, with big flaps coming down over her ears. Fur is everywhere: collars, trim, jackets, coats.

On my way out, I spot the naked Prada mannequins. Baby, it's cold outside.

On the northeast corner of Mercer Street and Prince Street :

Thenakedcagedmannequins are less intimidating than the army of 24 identical mannequins in precise rows, dressed in different Prada outfits. They all have their heads cocked in the same direction, and other than their clothing, the only perceptible difference is lip color-some pink, some mauve. This Prada "epicenter," designed by Rem Koolhaas, exceeds expectations. An Epcot for Stepford Wives. Two giant naked mannequins, possibly 12 feet tall-one male, one female-watch over the others, along with a real live security guard.

A little farther, past the large glass futuristic elevator, is the next phalanx of 24 mannequins, who could come alive and kill at any moment. A long set of stairs, the width of the entire store, descends-and then, directly across, another set of stairs ascends in the opposite direction. There are impossibly high ceilings and an indulgent amount of open, echoey space, with relatively little merchandise. Prada wants us to know that they can afford to have a block-long store and keep it mostly empty: a spectacular design and a statement of superiority. The place is big, but you can't hide. Lots of monitors and screens remind you of the cameras. If you walk down the wrong side of the stairs to inspect the mannequins up close, a guard will appear to let you know that you're in the restricted zone. If you spend too long in the dressing room playing with the settings for soft, neutral and bright light, or watching the film of yourself in the mirror, a friendly voice will ask you if you're O.K.

And at that point, you realize that someone somewhere is watching you in your bra and underwear.

The other kind of dressing room has a glass door that you can fog up for privacy-only some customers get confused and change their clothes without fogging up the glass, said one salesperson.

On the southeast corner of Mercer Street and Prince Street :

L'Occitane en Provence's newest location has yet to open, but when it does, it will be a Mediterranean-lifestyle concept store featuring a combination of gourmet foods (including Oliviers and Co.'s specialty olive oils) and body-care products, as well as candles, fragrances and sunscreens. The location will also include La Table, a tapas-style Mediterranean restaurant; the tables will be decorated with L'Occitane products.

On the southeast corner of Mercer Street and Prince Street :

Monte Bernstein, a regular at Fanelli's, says he's been coming here for 30 years. Faded pictures of fighters plaster the wall of Fanelli's: Joe Louis, Kid McCoy and Rocky Graziano. The absence of music doesn't seem to affect business; neither does the frequently broken heating. A bacon cheddar burger costs $9.75; a steak sandwich, $9.50; a Red Stripe, $4.75. A "Happy New Year" helium balloon clings to the ceiling-from what year? You guess.

But Doesn't Dumb Down

Walk down a narrow flight of steps and through a small red door into a dark mezzanine bar; turn the corner, and whammo ! Entering Matsuri is like being on the set of Raiders of the Lost Ark -in Japan. A wide walnut staircase descends into a cavernous underground space that has a 25-foot-high, barrel-vaulted wood ceiling. Giant magic lanterns covered with Japanese calligraphy cast a golden glow over the room. At one end is a long sushi bar manned by a team of chefs working like maniacs under row upon row of pink-illuminated sake bottles stacked along the wall. You half-expect to see Harrison Ford come crashing through, wielding, if not a samurai sword, at least a bottle of sake.

This is the setting for the cuisine of Tadashi Ono, the brilliant chef whose striking Japanese-French cuisine enthralled me both at Sono and La Caravelle (three stars each in this newspaper). But don't expect to find any vestiges here of the tranquil oasis he created at Sono (or even the dignified glamour of La Caravelle). This place has the pulsing beat and the glittering clientele of a trendy new nightclub.

After my companions and I had been seated one evening, a tall model in a shimmery white chemise drew up a chair at one of the small polished wood tables nearby. The waitress, a young Japanese woman in a blue and white kimono, bowed and handed her a hot towel.

As the model wiped her hands, she asked, "Where's Eric Goode? I want him to know I'm here." I half-expected her to add, "And could you please use that towel to clean my jewelry while you're about it?"

The waitress bowed again and went off to find Mr. Goode, who is a well-known figure on the party circuit and whose other projects include Area, Time Café and Bowery Bar. He's a partner in Matsuri with Sean MacPherson (of Bar Marmont and Swingers), with whom he also owns the Park-the highly successful and hip 10th Avenue restaurant. Also behind this latest venture are Mikio Shinagawa of Omen, a traditional Kyoto restaurant that has been on Thompson Street for years, and, of course, Mr. Ono.

Matsuri is in the basement of the Maritime Hotel, which was originally built as the headquarters for the Maritime Union and later became the infamous Covenant House. The building, a hideous tower of white ceramic tile and porthole windows on Ninth Avenue between 16th and 17th streets, was erected in 1966, the year they finished tearing down Penn Station. Now, the developers behind the Mercer Hotel have turned it into an ultra-hip hotel, complete with an interior garden with magnolia trees.

In Matsuri, no detail has been spared: from the soft red-and-black polka-dot paper napkins to the 18th-century mahogany tansu chests and the glazed ceramic cups used by professional sake tasters (the blue rings on the bottoms of the cups are mimicked on the uniforms). The only off-note is the music, which is ghastly, thumping its way from Asian disco to zydeco in a nonstop frenzy.

"I hate it, too," said our waitress. "It's the same tape every night, and it's driving us nuts."

But the food is another story. At Sono, Mr. Ono produced a complex version of fusion Japanese-French cuisine. Now, given the size of his new place, you might expect him to have dumbed down his cooking to suit the masses, but this isn't the case. There may not be dishes like lobster with chrysanthemum or slow-roasted salmon with green tea sauce on the menu, but the food is nonetheless interesting and imaginative. Just taste his duck breast, which comes out with a perfectly crisp roasted skin and a medium-rare breast underneath and is served with a peppery wasabi-chive sauce. Deep-fried whole sea bass-a tricky dish if ever there was one-is moist and flaky under its crunchy batter. It arrives curled around itself like a piece of sculpture and comes with a lemony ponzu sauce. And even a pedestrian item such as grilled sirloin steak is a nice piece of meat, served with garlic soy sauce instead of the usual beurre maître d'hotel.

The menu has an extensive sushi and sashimi selection, plus a choice of over a dozen small, tapas-like dishes and over half a dozen main courses. The small plates include sardines in a tart plum sauce that cuts the richness of the fish. There's also tofu with eggplant in a soy-ginger broth-the tofu is cut in chunks and deep-fried so the outside is crisp, but underneath it's soft and melting. You can nibble on edamame that are served warm and sprinkled with Japanese sea salt ($4), or splurge on a plate of five thin slices of buttery Kobe beef with a mustard happozu sauce ($16). Vegetable tempura arrives hot and crisp in an airy butter. And lotus root, slivered and braised with soy, sake and red pepper, sets you right on the path to enlightenment.

For $18, you can get a five-piece sushi-of-the-day assortment, which includes yellowtail (the foie gras of sushi) topped with red pepper that gives it just enough of a spicy jolt to bring out the taste of the fish. Pink snapper (it sounds so much more enticing than the regular kind, doesn't it?) gets the sharp citrus taste of yuzu juice and a dash of sea salt. Seared toro-fatty tuna-is topped with a peppery miso paste, while seared salmon gets a dab of a pungent shiso-sesame purée.

Meanwhile, look around the room: It is nothing if not well-dressed, and the customers are mostly cool downtowners with a smattering of artists. They are the sort of people who won't balk at sea eel tempura with green tea salt, which is accompanied by a tiny, whole green chili pepper. And you can bet they've probably tasted the sake black cod at Nobu and find the version offered at Matsuri-which is marinated in sake paste, grilled and served on a lotus leaf-only too familiar. Unfortunately, the portion is too small; I would've liked more.

The only serious loser was the rice pot. The Japanese answer to paella-made with rice, seafood and chicken-turned out tasteless and dry. Two rice side dishes, though, were great. The rice ball looks like a bath sponge, crunchy on the outside and soft within. The "eighteen organic grain and bean" rice is also wonderful. As my Chilean friend remarked, " Que rico super bueno !"

The desserts are also rico super bueno : A fusion of Western and Japanese, they include a wonderful pie made with Japanese pumpkin that my friend described as being "like pumpkin pie times 12." It's hard to choose between the creamy tapioca tart with passion fruit and Japanese pear, the crème brûlée flavored with yuzu and the coconut milk tofu afloat in strawberry water. But the pièce de résistance is Mount Fuji, made with chestnut paste and milk chocolate: It's totally silly, but totally irresistible.

Matsuri has all three of the elements I look for in a restaurant: good food, a beautiful setting and an atmosphere of fun. And if that man in the corner looks like Harrison Ford, it probably is.