During a let-up in Saturday's cruel thunderstorms, a group of face-painted children, bubble-blowing adolescents, drum-thumping pot-bellied men and conga-lining women gathered at 79th and Fifth to protest the city's 80-year-old cabaret laws.

It was a distinctly un-Manhattanish affair, with much more talk of making it to Burning Man than to the nightclubs these dancers were there to defend. Likewise the afternoon's action was much about smiley, hands-in-the-air physical movement than the usual political fare--maybe on account of the nearby "Police Mobile Command Center" and the barricades of the Mayor's nearby townhouse, target of the demonstration.

It was the first event organized by the Metropolis in Motion, which bills itself as an open-air dance movement. "We view this as a beginning," said co-founder Julie Ziff Sint afterwards. "A great, positive, wonderful beginning."

Last year, attorney Paul Chevigny and former ACLU executive Norm Siegel filed suit against the city's harsh limitations on local dancing. Their argument--based on First Amendment rights--was thrown out early this year. (A Saturday handout said an appeal is pending.)

Flyers also had some choice quotes from Mayor Bloomberg: "We have dance police. This is craziness," he had said at a 2004 press conference. More recently, according to Metropolis, the mayor has defended the laws. (A call to his office was not immediately returned.)

So the dance-filled protest was held just a waltz away from Mr. Bloomberg's elegant townhouse, where surely children are not allowed to boogie barefoot with strangers. Police officers outside his door said the Mayor was not at home.

Luckily, Mr. Siegel was in attendance: he spoke to the crowd about his desire for dance, though left before showing off serious moves.

See also: Sunday's NY Post.

- Max Abelson

St. Luke’s–Roosevelt Hospital Birthing Center

After the 2002 birth of her first son, Gavin, turned into a 24-hour ordeal, freelance graphic designer Lana Lê, 36, decided to try hypnobirthing, a drug-free relaxation method, for her second. After a rocky cab ride to the hospital, the expectant mother hopped into a warm bath (ker-splash), while her husband of five years, Peter Hall, cued up some soothing ocean sounds. “It was painful in my back, but the technique really worked for me,” Ms. Lê said. And her pug-nosed, wispy-haired new arrival, named for the poet Dylan Thomas, seems pretty content as well, even though his big brother likes to bounce him on his knee “violently, like a catapult,” said Mr. Hall, 40, a design writer for Metropolis magazine. The family lives in a two-bedroom in Park Slope, where they’re routinely chastised by neighborhood biddies for taking Dylan on walks in the chilly fall air. “People seem to think newborns are public property,” Mr. Hall said.

From the artists who called themselves (after Nietzsche) Die Bruecke (the Bridge) in 1905 to the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) group in the 1920's, advanced painting in Germany displayed a heavy-handed truculence and bitterness that was more directly addressed to the solar plexus than to the subtleties of aesthetic sensibility. It was designed to challenge public complacency and undermine accepted taste, and it amply succeeded in both of these endeavors. There was no mistaking the visceral impact of these paintings-even when the subject was a naked romp in a leafy countryside, which it frequently is in the work of the Bruecke painters. The depictions of urban life were almost invariably sinister and macabre.

It's no wonder, then, that in its heyday, painting of this persuasion met with a good deal of resistance and, at times, even outrage. In some quarters, moreover, it still does. People who have somehow come to terms with the bizarre inventions of Surrealism, the high jinks of Dada and numerous other assaults on respectable taste still draw a line when it comes to the excesses of German Expressionism.

The reasons for this resistance are anything but obscure. German Expressionism in both its Bruecke and Neue Sachlichkeit phases is incessantly intemperate in feeling, implacable, inelegant or overemphatic in its painterly facture, and fatally inclined to caricature even in depictions of subjects it means to exalt, never mind those that are explicitly targeted for satirical demolition. Its nude female figures (a frequent motif) are among the most unlovely in the canon of Western art, and deliberately so: They're modeled not on the bodies of living persons, but on the stylized distortions of primitive tribal sculpture-and thus have the effect of mocking European cultural pieties. Male figures, too, often look demented, debauched, or otherwise abnormal and sinister. Such are the paradoxes of the German pictorial sensibility, however, that this affinity for distortion, dementia and the macabre is often combined with a peculiarly Teutonic sentimentality-an inverted sentimentality, to be sure, but all the more cloying for its vehemence.

And yet, owing to the tragic fate of art in the Nazi era, when Hitler embarked upon his remorseless campaign to eradicate all "degenerate" art from the Reich, the United States became the principal haven for many of the people closely associated with the modernist movement in Germany in the 1920's-art collectors, art dealers, art historians and critics. As a result of this migration, German Expressionism found a new home, so to speak, in the American art world. Major private collections of German art were assembled in New York, Chicago and St. Louis, and German Expressionism was accorded an honored place in our museums. Two of its major talents-Max Beckmann and George Grosz-spent their final years living, painting and teaching in New York, and exerted a considerable influence on American painting.

In this connection, it's worth recalling how different things were in France. As late as 1977, when the Pompidou Center opened in Paris, there wasn't a single German painting to be seen in its extensive modern collection. French officialdom, though it had managed to live with the humiliations and impositions of the Nazi occupation during World War II, avenged its tattered honor in the postwar years by refusing to recognize the achievements of the "degenerate" German artists condemned by Hitler.

The latest manifestation of New York's keen interest in the German avant-garde is the Neue Galerie itself, the recently established museum devoted to German and Austrian art. In some respects, you could hardly ask for a better introduction to the 20th-century German avant-garde than the current exhibition, Arcadia and Metropolis: Masterworks of German Expressionism from the Nationalgalerie Berlin . It features excellent examples of work by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Max Pechstein, Karl Schimdt-Rottluff, Emil Nolde and Erich Heckel ( Bruecke painters), and equally excellent examples of Otto Dix and George Grosz ( Neue Sachlichkeit artists). There's even a dazzling collage by a Dada artist, Hannah Hoch, who is not usually represented in such surveys.

But it must also be said that the Arcadia and Metropolis show doesn't come close to giving us an adequate account of the German Expressionist movement. The Blaue Reiter group, dating from 1911, is omitted (probably because its leader, Vasily Kandinsky, was Russian); and two early paintings by Max Beckmann hardly offer a clue to his later achievements, which in my judgment are among the greatest in modern painting.

It will be interesting to see, by the way, what scale of attention is given to German avant-garde when the Museum of Modern Art reopens in its expanded facilities in November. Meanwhile, Arcadia and Metropolis remains on view at the Neue Gallerie, Fifth Avenue at 86th Street, through June 7.

The Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the American Bourgeoisie, 1850-1896 , by Sven Beckert. Cambridge University Press, 492 pages, $34.95.

The French banking scion Salomon Rothschild, visiting New York in 1860, predicted inaccurately but insightfully that within 20 years or so, the young Republic would transform itself into several countries ruled by kings and hereditary aristocrats. His reasoning was strictly Parisian: "Here, as everywhere else, there are two quite distinct classes, one that loves to see, the other that loves to be seen," he wrote. "Right now, the first class can find only an occasional foreign prince or some Japanese ambassador to satisfy its fancy; the other class, to its great regret, has nothing to show." (Meanwhile, Rothschild added, American politicians "offer to the people nothing but the sight of their careless dress and their untrimmed beards.")

In a sense, the baron was quite correct. In the decades following his visit, the United States acquired exactly what he thought it desired and deserved: a class of people worthy of being seen. And their Paris then as now would be New York, a city that Rothschild on the eve of the Civil War had found a place of such squalor that it made a Moroccan slum look like "a waxed ballroom." How this transformation occurred is the subject of Sven Beckert's The Monied Metropolis, which begins in 1850 and ends in 1896 by which time the city resembled its current-day self far more than it did the rough-and-tumble port town of the mid-19th century.

Of course, New York has always had an upper class. But in the 1850's, its leaders included men like Peter Cooper, a "self-made millionaire glue boiler" who kept only two servants and allegedly had to be coaxed into donning a dress suit when he co-hosted a reception for the visiting Prince of Wales. By the 1880's, after Cooper's death, his son-in-law would employ 14 servants and redecorate Cooper's simple Fifth Avenue house by adding marble staircases, stuffed peacocks and a clock mounted on a bust of Napoleon.

According to Mr. Beckert, what changed in those years was that wealthy New Yorkers acquired a new sense of solidarity and self-confidence a sense, one might say, of their own class (for which he uses the insufficient and somewhat misleading term "bourgeoisie"). At the same time, of course, they were acquiring wealth itself on an unprecedented scale. But just as important, in Mr. Beckert's analysis, is the fact that the previously disparate communities of merchants, bankers and manufacturers (who before the Civil War often regarded one another with suspicion) merged into a united front to protect their common interests from the city's great unwashed.

Already in 1850, the New York Herald was rallying its genteel readers around quality-of-life issues that would resonate in Giuliani's Manhattan: The "swearing, drinking, silly boors" of the Bowery, the newspaper complained, had "destroyed all enjoyment" of carriage-driving on the city's streets. (Squeegees, anyone?) By the late 1860's, upper-class New Yorkers, arguing that "it is not safe to place the execution of the laws into the hands of the classes against which they are principally to be enforced," banded together in a failed effort to restrict voting rights based on property. In 1877, when railway workers went on strike, young socialites camped out at the Seventh Regiment Armory, bayonets at the ready fortifying themselves for class warfare with meals catered by Delmonico's.

And by the end of the century, the Astors, Morgans and others could with a lack of irony that would have pleased Salomon Rothschild attend a costume ball at the Waldorf-Astoria at which celebrants dressed as Old World aristocrats. Caroline Astor wore a dress emblazoned with $250,000 in gems; lawyers and bankers appeared in pink satin and silk hose; no fewer than 50 of their wives came as Marie Antoinette. Meanwhile, Pinkerton detectives guarded the ballroom against "men of socialistic tendencies." (In fact, wealthy female New Yorkers increasingly aspired to become not just costume-party aristocrats, but real ones: Thanks to marriages of mutual benefit, there would eventually be 42 American princesses, 17 duchesses and 136 countesses.)

As Mr. Beckert writes, "a class that once had shaped its identity and sense of self in opposition to the degenerated European aristocracy now defined itself increasingly by 'blood.'" Before the Civil War, the banker August Belmont, a Jewish immigrant from Germany, reigned supreme over New York society and politics. By the 1890's, Jews had been forced out of the Union Club and Jewish organizations barred from mention in the newly founded Social Register.

The Monied Metropolis began as Mr. Beckert's Ph.D. dissertation at Columbia University. With its emphasis on class formation and the struggles of bourgeoisie versus proletariat, it almost feels like a product of the Columbia of half a century ago, when Richard Hofstadter and his disciples hunched over their typewriters, hell-bent on exposing the antidemocratic hypocrisies of the American elite. By and large Mr. Beckert, who now teaches history at Harvard University, proves that even in our own post-Marxist age, this approach to history can still bear fruit. But his old-fashioned analysis, with its emphasis on politics and economics and its slighting of culture, tells an incomplete story.

In particular, Mr. Beckert largely neglects New York's all-important role as a crucible of consumerism. Its department stores and emporiums ushered in a culture of conspicuous display, in which people defined themselves by what they could afford to buy. Its newspapers and magazines fed the lumpen middle class a steady diet of Vanderbilt weddings and balls at the Waldorf, in breathless columns and full-page rotogravures. The continuing division of Americans into those who see and those who are seen predicted by Salomon Rothschild in 1860 began in 19th-century New York, but Mr. Beckert never frames this as clearly and elegantly as Rothschild did. (In fact, he doesn't even include Rothschild's remark in his book.)

And Mr. Beckert scarcely acknowledges that throughout the period he chronicles, there were authors and thinkers who were only too aware of the transformations happening around them, and of the strange fruit that sprouted when a home-grown aristocracy took root in democratic soil. But these voices go unheard, except for a couple of epigraphs from Henry James and Edith Wharton. Both those authors wrote books that might easily have had the same subtitle as Sven Beckert's, and they reached some of the same conclusions without benefit of hindsight.

Adam Goodheart, a writer in Washington, D.C., is a member of the editorial board of The American Scholar.

The cover of the Frogtown Times featured a Hmong couple kissing, for Valentine's Day, a picture taken by Anthony Schmitz. My old friend Tony started the paper four years ago, edits it, writes most of it, takes all the pictures, sells the ads and delivers much of its 8,000 free circulation, too. He'd probably print it if he was able.

The picture was a coup because Hmong people are traditionally private about showing affection. And it was typical of my friend's work because he's so immersed in people's lives. He emphasizes his poor neighborhood's strengths, and urges residents to become less passive about city government. So while he covers horrific incidents, like a 74-year-old man being forced out of his house by drug dealers and made to live in his car in the alley, he devotes much more ink to heroes, like the 50-ish woman who took an aluminum baseball bat to the back of a pit bull who was mauling a neighbor. ("Clobbering an animal ran counter to her nature, but Henkes knew what she had to do," Tony wrote.)

"I started the paper when there was a problem with absentee landlords not paying for garbage removal," Tony said. "I looked around and I didn't see anybody with my skills. If I didn't do it, no one was going to. Some trees have suffered, but it's been a way of making something out of nothing, which is good."

I met Tony in 1976 when a bunch of Harvard friends and I went out to Minneapolis to start a weekly that we called, grandly, Metropolis . Tony was a local hire. He had grown up in a small German Catholic community called Waconia, the son of a mechanic, and was many things I wasn't–thoughtful, soft-spoken, modest, outdoorsy. What we shared was literary life and a highly critical outlook. The differences and the similarities have made us close friends. Often over the years when I've struggled with a piece of writing, I go to the top of the story and write, "Dear Tony," trying to think of how I'd express myself to him.

Tony has the most progressive value system of any journalist I know. No one else I know prints want ads in Hmong. Or uses his journal to shut down crack houses. Or counsels his readers, after a spate of violence, "The world may not be perfectible but that doesn't excuse us from acting as though it is."

Now there have been times when my friend's socialist flat-lander values have struck this striving elitist as a wee bit stifling. I remember visiting some New York media operation with him and Tony wandering out afterward, shaking his head over all the people "strapped to desks." Hey, they love their desks! Or there is Tony's line on those who struggle so nobly and ceaselessly to inform us about the latest Clinton scandals– "They're breathing each other's gas." (Now who could he mean?)

The do-goodism of the Frogtown Times is bearable because it's so laced with dark humor. "Tony's a real idealist but with this incredible degree of cynicism," said Cynthia Crossen, a Metropolis veteran who is now a senior editor at The Wall Street Journal . "It's Garrison Keillor meets David Lynch."

For instance, a piece Tony printed under the byline of a former crack addict offered the addict's instructions on how to haul your drugged-out spouse home: "I learned that you get somebody by the belt with their arm around you, and as long as you make sure you hit the wooden parts of the railroad track, you can carry them down."

I have good reason to write about Tony now because he just published his second novel, Darkest Desire: The Wolf's Own Tale (Ecco Press). The novel is a blackly revisionist treatment of the Grimm brothers as selfish writers who exploited peasant subjects. Janet Malcolm crossed with the Black Forest. The book has gotten fine reviews. The normally restrained Kirkus Reviews called it "an artful, ironic updating of venerable material, done with zest and great originality."

The story is a delight. At their campfire one night, the Brothers Grimm are approached by a villain of their tales, Wolf. They panic until the animal speaks to say he means no harm. He says his wolf fellows have ostracized him for desiring the flesh of young children. The Brothers set out to cure Wolf–and of course to get some more material.

My friend's book was initially rejected because the strong whiff of pedophilia made some editors uncomfortable. Wolf's desire for young children is never pathologized. No, Tony is too much the Midwestern fatalist to do that. The book sort of honors Wolf's intoxication with children's smells and rosy flesh. "I know there's an aspect of Catholicism here, of which I got a major dose as a child, that there's something deeply screwed up about everybody, and you can struggle against it but only win by so much," Tony said.

Now the book is being published here, in Italy, and in Germany. "This is just naughty enough for me," the Italian publisher said.

When Tony read at St. Paul's Hungry Mind Bookstore this winter, he faced a problem your average ethereal novelist never would. Employees of the Exstacy House picketed the reading on free-speech grounds. They sell pornography in the Frogtown neighborhood of St. Paul, and they were angry because maps of police activity Tony publishes in the Frogtown Times pointed to the store as being the epicenter of prostitution arrests.

After we delivered papers, Tony and I went back to the house he shares with his wife, Patricia Ohmans, and their two daughters and opened some Leinenkugel's beers. I took the side of the picketers. How could he pressure the Exstacy House to leave town even as he is trying to sell his own perverse view of human nature?

Tony laughed. "It is something of a contradiction." Then he went on in his usual stubbornly independent fashion.

"As a First Amendment thing, I really don't care that there's a porn video store here. But then that's where prostitutes gravitate, and johns who stop to eyeball women and howl at them. And these men are not capable of discriminating whether a woman is in the prostitution industry or someone's daughter just going about her life. Prostitutes and johns and dealers are stealing thousands of dollars from the people who read my paper. Poor people's greatest wealth is in their homes. This is the main thing they're going to save in their life, and it's precisely the value that is undermined by prostitution. They're being screwed. It's like a secondhand-smoke issue."

We never reached that degree of engagement back at Metropolis . Our weekly lasted less than a year, foundering on the shoals of overweening ego, ambition and too much money ($350,000 or so). The paper's smart tone and graphics changed Minneapolis papers forever. "There was nothing we wouldn't write about, and it made the existing journalism look stodgy," said co-editor James Gleick, now a celebrated author. But Jim admits he hasn't looked at the paper for years, and for my part I'd be afraid to. My work was long-winded and self-indulgent. (Rather, more long-winded and self-indulgent.) "If I had to read it now, I'd say, oh what talented but annoying children," Tony said.

We were the perfect proto-yuppie experiment: in it more for ourselves than to serve others. Most of us soon left Minnesota, with nice-looking clips. We all went on to worthy things. But Tony's work is just worthier. When I called up my old Metropolis friend Rich Turner, now a writer at Newsweek , to talk about journalistic values, he offered a caustic riff on the varieties of midlife vocation we see around us: "They're writing for the appreciation of their peers or they're on some track in the celebrity culture to get on TV or they're scared of getting fired or they're on the path to burnout. I'd say those are pretty much the subsets."

I'd contrast Rich's deadly list with the ideal Tony has always had for employment: Do something that if you weren't doing it no one else would.

The issue of the Frogtown Times I delivered had stuff I don't see anywhere else. A photograph of a glass tube in which a convenience store was selling artificial flowers–to dealers who threw away the flowers to use the tubes as crack pipes. Valentine's Day advice from a group of local "love doctors," three area bartenders. ("You want to make sure you don't drink too much. That's usually where the problems start," one essayed.) And throughout the issue, Tony's quiet voice, urging engagement.

"I've earned the right to shoot my mouth off," he told me as we were delivering papers. "It's not as if I blew in yesterday. If I want to say something, I say it."

I think it was just after that that a guy came back to our delivery base, Tony's old Buick Electra, its trunk propped on a broomstick, and went on a tirade about litter before thrusting the paper back at its editor, publisher, writer, photographer and deliveryman. Tony thanked the man and took it back.