Here, the subways cost a buck-twenty. (Daily News)

On Friday, Mayor Michael Bloomberg had a courtesy visit with the Honorable Han Zheng, his counterpart from Shanghai. This got The Observer wondering what the two might have to discuss—besides who has better soup dumplings—so we turned to global urbanism expert, Columbia professor, Professor Skyscraper himself, Vishaan Chakrabarti and posed this question. Here is what he had to say in an email.

Shanghai is poised to build some 200 kilometers of subway line by 2020.  In New York, where we are building only a few kilometers by comparison, many dismiss this as a necessary act in a growing China.  In reality, our competitors are poised to leapfrog us in most areas of urban mobility, from state-of-the-art transit to zero-emission taxis to high-speed rail.   We need to wake up and smell the construction.

To be fair, under the mayor and governor's leadership, we have more underground infrastructure construction—the  No. 7 extension, the Second Avenue subway, East Side Access and the Third Water Tunnel—than we have seen in this City since the turn of the last century. But we're still behind.

The areas in which Shanghai could learn from New York are primarily in the areas of livability:  great public spaces like the High Line, landmarking historic neighborhoods like Boerum Hill, beautiful waterfronts like the East River, and robust affordable housing efforts like Hunters Point South.

mchaban [at] observer.com | @MC_NYC

That beats New York, whose outgoing Governor flirted briefly with setting up an office over there himself but failed to win funding in his final year's budget.

- Matthew Schuerman

John McDonald and Josh Pickard, the creators of Lure and Lever House, have transformed the space that used to be Time Café on the corner of Lafayette and Great Jones Street into a glamorous, bustling Chinese answer to Balthazar. The restaurant, designed by architect William T. Georgis, is on two levels, with a lounge below where koi swim in a mirrored pool. The red-and-black dining room is decorated with silk tapestries and canopies, antique mirrors and damask curtains in vivid hues of orange, turquoise and green. A line of black leather banquettes, modeled after Chinese imperial beds, separates the dining room from the black granite bar. Paintings by Robert Kushner cover the west wall.

The menu is not of mind-boggling Chinatown length and variety, but instead offers a conservative selection of regional Chinese dishes, including dim sum, barbecue and recognizable classics such as Peking duck, General Tso’s chicken and crispy orange beef. Chef Tyson Wong Ophaso, born in Thailand but ethnically Chinese, trained under Claude Troisgros and worked at Le Cirque, Lutèce, La Cote Basque and Lotus. The dim sum chef, Joseph Ng, trained in Hong Kong and worked in Brooklyn’s Chinatown. He reputedly has over 1,000 varieties in his repertoire and serves around 40 on weekends. So far, though, the chefs seem to be playing it safe: no chicken feet, lungs or tripe.

The staff is friendly and generally efficient, but my first visit felt like a Monty Python skit.

“Peking duck is probably too much for two,” I said, looking at the menu (which lists it for $48). “Do you have it in half orders?”

“Why, then it would be only half a duck!” replied the server (I don’t wish to get anyone in trouble, thus the politically correct, non-gender-specific term). “Ha, ha! Just a joke!”

After taking down our order, minus any duck, the server disappeared and returned after a couple of minutes. “I put in your order ….” The server’s voice trailed away uncertainly. “You ordered a crispy orange beef and … ?” A longer pause followed. “Well, anyway,” said the server, coming back to earth at last and wrapping up the conversation, “I put in your order.”

The server returned a short time later. “This is the beef with broccoli.” We stared down at beef topped with orange peel. “And this is the noodles.” We looked at a silver bowl filled with chunks of fried fish. A busboy set down an oval platter. “Wait!” cried the server. “There are the noodles! Look!” Geronimo! There they were indeed: a few triumphant strands, poking out from underneath a pile of shellfish.

The individual components of this dish, which was made with a pancake of fried egg noodles topped with mussels, diver scallops, shrimp, cauliflower florets, scallions, quartered tomatoes and Thai basil in chicken stock, were very good and fresh. But what were they doing together? The combination of ingredients made no sense.

The main courses proved uneven over several visits. The fish our server had mistaken for noodles was encased in a soggy batter. Lobster with ginger and scallions, cut in chunks and served in the shell, was messy to eat and not worth $42. But barbecue pork tenderloin with a thin, crackling skin was excellent, and the crispy soft-shell crabs were the best I’ve ever tasted, served with four dipping sauces. And the shrimp were perfectly cooked, coated with a velvety black-bean sauce thickened with egg.

Even those dishes normally familiar to New Yorkers in the context of a cardboard container were beautifully executed. Crispy orange beef was pleasantly chewy and spicy. General Tso’s chicken, mysteriously named for a 19th-century war hero, was also very good, laced with scallions and whole dried chilies that permeated the dish with a warm, spicy glow.

As for the moo shoo pork, when the dome was lifted from the silver pedestal dish, what we saw looked like a brain. Actually, it was a cap made of omelet, under which was a nest of tender pork with shiitake mushrooms and greens, to be spooned into delicate mandarin pancakes. A triumph.

Mr. Ng’s dim sum, with thin, silky wonton wrappers, are wonderful, from the subtly peppery wonton soup, the snow-pea leaf and shrimp dumplings, turnip cake and crisp pork pot stickers, to the Shanghai-style soup dumplings with broth inside, topped with flying-fish roe. The soup dumplings are infinitely better than the ones I’ve had at the overrated Joe’s Shanghai.

Desserts included a terrific, gooey warm chocolate cake that was more like a pudding, served with candied orange, and an almond cake with roast peach and raspberry mousse. The mousse-like cheesecake with peaches and blueberries was also terrific, as was rhubarb on a delicate custard topped with a crunch of Chinese celery.

Chocolate fortune cookies arrive at the end of the meal. My fortune added another surreal and comic note: “I’ve had a perfectly wonderful evening. But this wasn’t it. Groucho Marx.”

Actually, I did have wonderful evenings at Chinatown Brasserie, once I got over the size of the check—twice the price of Chinatown.

John McDonald and Josh Pickard, the creators of Lure and Lever House, have transformed the space that used to be Time Café on the corner of Lafayette and Great Jones Street into a glamorous, bustling Chinese answer to Balthazar. The restaurant, designed by architect William T. Georgis, is on two levels, with a lounge below where koi swim in a mirrored pool. The red-and-black dining room is decorated with silk tapestries and canopies, antique mirrors and damask curtains in vivid hues of orange, turquoise and green. A line of black leather banquettes, modeled after Chinese imperial beds, separates the dining room from the black granite bar. Paintings by Robert Kushner cover the west wall.

The menu is not of mind-boggling Chinatown length and variety, but instead offers a conservative selection of regional Chinese dishes, including dim sum, barbecue and recognizable classics such as Peking duck, General Tso’s chicken and crispy orange beef. Chef Tyson Wong Ophaso, born in Thailand but ethnically Chinese, trained under Claude Troisgros and worked at Le Cirque, Lutèce, La Cote Basque and Lotus. The dim sum chef, Joseph Ng, trained in Hong Kong and worked in Brooklyn’s Chinatown. He reputedly has over 1,000 varieties in his repertoire and serves around 40 on weekends. So far, though, the chefs seem to be playing it safe: no chicken feet, lungs or tripe.

The staff is friendly and generally efficient, but my first visit felt like a Monty Python skit.

“Peking duck is probably too much for two,” I said, looking at the menu (which lists it for $48). “Do you have it in half orders?”

“Why, then it would be only half a duck!” replied the server (I don’t wish to get anyone in trouble, thus the politically correct, non-gender-specific term). “Ha, ha! Just a joke!”

After taking down our order, minus any duck, the server disappeared and returned after a couple of minutes. “I put in your order ….” The server’s voice trailed away uncertainly. “You ordered a crispy orange beef and … ?” A longer pause followed. “Well, anyway,” said the server, coming back to earth at last and wrapping up the conversation, “I put in your order.”

The server returned a short time later. “This is the beef with broccoli.” We stared down at beef topped with orange peel. “And this is the noodles.” We looked at a silver bowl filled with chunks of fried fish. A busboy set down an oval platter. “Wait!” cried the server. “There are the noodles! Look!” Geronimo! There they were indeed: a few triumphant strands, poking out from underneath a pile of shellfish.

The individual components of this dish, which was made with a pancake of fried egg noodles topped with mussels, diver scallops, shrimp, cauliflower florets, scallions, quartered tomatoes and Thai basil in chicken stock, were very good and fresh. But what were they doing together? The combination of ingredients made no sense.

The main courses proved uneven over several visits. The fish our server had mistaken for noodles was encased in a soggy batter. Lobster with ginger and scallions, cut in chunks and served in the shell, was messy to eat and not worth $42. But barbecue pork tenderloin with a thin, crackling skin was excellent, and the crispy soft-shell crabs were the best I’ve ever tasted, served with four dipping sauces. And the shrimp were perfectly cooked, coated with a velvety black-bean sauce thickened with egg.

Even those dishes normally familiar to New Yorkers in the context of a cardboard container were beautifully executed. Crispy orange beef was pleasantly chewy and spicy. General Tso’s chicken, mysteriously named for a 19th-century war hero, was also very good, laced with scallions and whole dried chilies that permeated the dish with a warm, spicy glow.

As for the moo shoo pork, when the dome was lifted from the silver pedestal dish, what we saw looked like a brain. Actually, it was a cap made of omelet, under which was a nest of tender pork with shiitake mushrooms and greens, to be spooned into delicate mandarin pancakes. A triumph.

Mr. Ng’s dim sum, with thin, silky wonton wrappers, are wonderful, from the subtly peppery wonton soup, the snow-pea leaf and shrimp dumplings, turnip cake and crisp pork pot stickers, to the Shanghai-style soup dumplings with broth inside, topped with flying-fish roe. The soup dumplings are infinitely better than the ones I’ve had at the overrated Joe’s Shanghai.

Desserts included a terrific, gooey warm chocolate cake that was more like a pudding, served with candied orange, and an almond cake with roast peach and raspberry mousse. The mousse-like cheesecake with peaches and blueberries was also terrific, as was rhubarb on a delicate custard topped with a crunch of Chinese celery.

Chocolate fortune cookies arrive at the end of the meal. My fortune added another surreal and comic note: “I’ve had a perfectly wonderful evening. But this wasn’t it. Groucho Marx.”

Actually, I did have wonderful evenings at Chinatown Brasserie, once I got over the size of the check—twice the price of Chinatown.

Playwright and screenwriter Matt Crowley even had a line, in William Friedkin’s 1970 screen version of The Boys in the Band, about the alleged typecasting of the late Leo Carrillo as the Gay Caballero. Mr. Crowley may have been thinking of Rouben Mamoulian’s The Gay Desperado (1936), which featured Nino Martini in the singing lead role opposite a young, ingénue-ish Ida Lupino and Carrillo overacting (as always) in a supporting part. The widely reported carryings-on in Brokeback Mountain also reminded some reviewers of the supposedly subtextual implications of Howard Hawks’ Red River (1948), with John Wayne and the posthumously “outed” Montgomery Clift, as well as George Roy Hill’s Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), with Paul Newman and Robert Redford—the latter lacking even the gossipy whispers of Clift’s sexual orientation to sustain the subtextual suppositions.

If I choose to digress from what started out as a review of Brokeback Mountain, it is because, for whatever reason, I was never moved or even overly excited by what I finally witnessed on the screen, though I have no quarrel with the superlatives heaped upon the film by most of my colleagues. For example, Heath Ledger as the comparatively quiet and guilt-torn Ennis Del Mar gives as remarkably nuanced and detailed a performance as I had been led to expect, and the always dependable Jake Gyllenhaal as the unrestrained, more emotionally dependent and almost allegorically named Jack Twist isn’t far behind.

The rest of the cast performs above and beyond the call of duty, particularly Michelle Williams as Alma, whom Ennis marries immediately after his tryst with Jack, and Anne Hathaway as Lureen, whom Jack later marries. These are two thankless roles of victimization by disillusion, sexual rejection and abandonment, all in the name of the greater love between Ennis and Jack. Alma’s heartbreak is more palpable than that of the self-sufficient Lureen, but we are apparently not asked to weep for either woman, and certainly not for Alma’s two daughters or Lureen’s son. Still, Ennis turns out to be a more dedicated family man than Jack, who has the foresight to marry the rich daughter of a farm-equipment tycoon, one who is quite happy to take his grandson off Jack’s faltering hands.

Lureen, a rodeo rider, is shown aggressively pursuing Jack in a rodeo bar with the one witty pickup line in the movie: “What’s the matter, cowboy? You waiting for a mating call?” No matter—Jack’s heart is elsewhere. Lureen is quickly caricatured as a ditzy, bleached-blond, chattering busybody. Alma is another story entirely after she catches Ennis in a passionate embrace with his quadrennial “fishing buddy,” and she never lets on that she has seen anything, even when Ennis keeps returning from his alleged fishing trips without any fish. Alma just suffers and suffers and suffers without even being given the compensation of a juicy renunciation scene. All she gets, in fact, is a divorce agreement in which Ennis agrees to provide child support.

What surprised me most about the film was how much larger and more sympathetic Mr. Ledger’s part was than Mr. Gyllenhaal’s. I was surprised also by how gratuitously overextended the narrative was, based as it is on a 1997 short story by Pulitzer Prize winner Annie Proulx. Her story was adapted (and perhaps inflated) to feature-film length by Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana.

There have been reports that both men and women at earlier screenings were seen fighting away tears after the sad ending. It’s been a long time since I cried outright over a movie. Indeed, the only time lately that I even came close to tears was at a screening for the students in my Columbia course on musicals of Richard Lester’s A Hard Day’s Night (1964), whose release I had celebrated in The Village Voice 41 years earlier by describing the phenomenon as “the Citizen Kane of jukebox movies”—a then-startling blurb that ended up being used in the board game Trivial Pursuit.

Why then, after all that time, was I so close to tears? It was coming up on the 25th anniversary of John Lennon’s murder in the courtyard of the Dakota by a deranged fan. As I watched Lennon on the screen in all his joyously smooth-faced youth, belting out his group’s numbers with a comically insolent expression that I didn’t quite appreciate at the time, I mourned the vagaries of time, luck and accident that bedevil our shaky existence.

But again I digress, which is the only way I can manage to get through this unpleasant task. This is to say that I must let my mind wander until I find the ultimate source of my minority (negative) opinion of the film. Perhaps by tracing some of the key scenes through the strands of the narrative, I can isolate my bothersome concerns. Yet first I must ask and answer the question of why I was expected to cry, as if I were watching one of the classic “women’s pictures” of Hollywood’s golden age that were advertised at the time as surefire tearjerkers. These included Irene Dunne’s other-woman travails with a married man (played by John Boles) in John Stahl’s Back Street (1932), and Margaret Sullavan’s travails with Charles Boyer in Robert Stevenson’s 1941 remake. Then, more decorously, there were the non-adulterous, pathos-ridden romantic complications of Leo McCarey’s Love Affair (1939), with Irene Dunne and Charles Boyer, and his own 1957 remake of the film with Deborah Kerr and Cary Grant, retitled An Affair to Remember. And let us not forget Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard in David Lean and Noel Coward’s Brief Encounter (1945), of which Oscar Levant may have been thinking when he memorably defined a “women’s picture” as one in which a woman cheats on her husband all through the movie, and in the end he asks her for forgiveness.

This imputation of self-pity isn’t completely inapplicable to Brokeback Mountain, despite all its breathtaking western mountainscapes. And why not? Both Mr. Lee and Mr. McMurtry are no strangers to lachrymose sentiment, although Mr. Lee’s The Ice Storm (1997) and Mr. McMurtry’s screenplay for Peter Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show (1971), which was based on one of his novels, left me singularly dry-eyed—perhaps because both films tried too hard to make me cry.

The very first scene of Brokeback Mountain takes on an excessively suspenseful tension because of the aforementioned advance hype, as two men in cowboy hats—who have not been introduced to us or to each other—steal glances at each other while waiting for their prospective boss to open the small shed used as a ranch office. It’s as if they are furtively cruising each other, but when the surly boss, Joe Aguirre (Randy Quaid), finally appears, he demystifies them somewhat by greeting them rudely and explaining their duties with a contemptuous tone of voice, as if he didn’t expect them to be capable of keeping coyotes and bears away from the thousand or so sheep they are expected to herd until winter comes.

So here we have two men, more or less on their own, in an idyllic setting that Mr. Lee and his cinematographer, Gustavo Santaolalla, have rendered in all its sky-angled splendor. Eventually, Ennis and Jack begin exchanging their young life stories at the meals they share after a day spent apart in different parts of the mountain. As they bathe more than I have ever seen Wild West characters do, I suddenly realized that these allegedly hard-boiled ranch hands had unusually delicate nostrils for the genre.

And this was the thing with all the cowboys I have ever seen before on the screen: They just never worried about how they smelled, nor how other cowboys smelled. They were occasionally shown shaving, and Eli Wallach had a memorable bathtub scene in Sergio Leone’s epic spaghetti western The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly—but offhand, I can’t remember any western character shooting another because of the way he smelled. It’s a small point, granted, but it involves a degree of genre-destroying realism that paves the way for a strenuously aggressive surge of desire in both men resembling a form of rape-wrestling at night, and continuing as rambunctiously physical horseplay in the daytime. From a distance on horseback, Mr. Quaid’s field boss stares disapprovingly at this uninhibited behavior through his binoculars. The outside world has already started crashing in on Ennis and Jack’s mountain paradise.

The syndicated comic strip The Boondocks recently had two older black characters watching Brokeback Mountain in a movie house and complaining that the heroes aren’t at all “manly” after the first big sex scene. But not to worry—both Ennis and Jack insist afterward to each other, and perhaps to themselves, that neither is “queer.”

Stephen Holden’s perceptively erudite review in The Times notes that the word “gay” was not in common usage in 1963, when the events in the movie begin. Mr. Holden makes an insightfully appropriate reference to Leslie Fiedler’s notorious essay in a 1948 issue of Partisan Review, provocatively titled “Come Back to the Raft Ag’in, Huck Honey.” For decades afterward, people around me were arguing about the essay and its claim that a persistently homoerotic strain manifested itself in serious American literature, with an accompanying diminution of the role of women. (After all, didn’t Rip Van Winkle go to sleep for 20 years to escape his shrewish wife, who conveniently died in the interim?) Yet the subtexts of this phenomenon remain more interesting and stimulating then the textual specificities, at least for me.

Hence, I suppose that my ultimate objection to Brokeback Mountain lies in its stretching out what originally begins as a physical relationship between two young men to, after 20 years, Ennis and Jack quarreling like an old married couple about the forced infrequency of their reunions. Yet what are the odds that they would have managed to stay together if they had been together all that time? The current odds on married heterosexual couples staying the course are no better than 50-50, and that is as true in the red states as it is in the blue.

Besides, the problem of the economic disparity between lower-middle-class Ennis and upper-middle-class Jack isn’t sufficiently addressed in Brokeback Mountain, even though Ennis is rendered virtually immobile by his pressing need to keep his job to support his kids. By contrast, Jack has the means and the time to hop down to Mexico to sleep with male prostitutes. In this, he follows a pattern of promiscuity that raises doubts about the stability of any more lasting day-to-day relationship between him and Ennis.

And just for the record, none of the classic women’s pictures that I mentioned actually made me cry. They were too good for that. All they did was create an aching feeling of loss in the pit of my stomach. I never felt that ache in Brokeback Mountain, despite all the artful acting, writing and direction devoted to that end.

The Last Merchant

James Ivory’s The White Countess, from a screenplay by Kazuo Ishiguro, turns out to be the final production of the team of James Ivory and the late Ismail Merchant (1936-2005). As such, it is a stylistically venturesome exploration of the chaotic world of 1936 and 1937, as seen from the maelstrom of Shanghai’s international community on the eve of the Japanese invasion. Mr. Ishiguro, whose novel The Remains of the Day was adapted for the screen for Merchant-Ivory by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala for their successful 1993 film version, seems fixated on the period just before World War II, a time when no one, East or West, seemed to anticipate the horrors that were to come.

I must confess at this point that I am much more familiar with the historical situation in England at this time taken up in The Remains of the Day than I am with the situation in Shanghai dealt with in The White Countess. I mention my limiting Eurocentrism so that my readers may be alerted to the comparative inaccessibility of some of Mr. Ishiguro’s subtleties in sketching out the political forces at work in this time and place.

The story is centered on a curiously chaste romance between a former American diplomat, Todd Jackson (Ralph Fiennes), and an expatriate Russian countess, Sofia Belinsky (Natasha Richardson). The deeply disillusioned Jackson has actually abandoned diplomacy after the ominous collapse of the League of Nations, which spells the end to the last hopes for world peace. As for the countess, she supports her daughter, Katya (Madeleine Daly), and the rest of her extended family as a taxi dancer and prostitute in a Shanghai nightclub. Though Sofia is sustained by the love of her daughter and her aging aunt Sara (Vanessa Redgrave), she is openly and ungratefully despised for her “dishonorable” activities by her embittered sister-in-law, Greshenka (Madeleine Potter), and her officious mother-in-law, Olga (Lynn Redgrave)—even though they would all be out on the street if it weren’t for Sofia’s ill-gotten gains. For her part, Sofia seems unusually resigned to their contempt in order to keep the family together for Katya’s sake.

The most fascinating fact about Jackson is that he is blind because of some unspecified accident, the traumatic circumstances of which are not revealed until the film’s later stages. The important thing is that Mr. Ivory takes his directorial cue from Jackson’s blindness, and with the assistance of Christopher Doyle, the cinematographer for the much-esteemed Wong Kar Wai, he creates a swirling expression of Jackson’s mental universe that impels me to use the word “phantasmagoric”—an adjective that I never expected to use for a work of James Ivory’s.

Mr. Fiennes performs prodigies of understatement in functioning confidently in all the action despite his handicap. In the end, he helps Sofia rescue Katya from the clutches of her evil family, who conspire to steal the child from her mother and flee to Hong Kong. In the course of opening a nightclub in Shanghai called the White Countess, with Sofia as its centerpiece, Jackson befriends a sinister but outwardly affable Japanese agent named Matsuda (Hiroyuki Sanada), though the irrevocable forces of history finally drive the two friends apart. The film is well worth seeing for its performances, and for the aptness of Mr. Ivory’s Sternbergian mise-en-scène.

Playwright and screenwriter Matt Crowley even had a line, in William Friedkin’s 1970 screen version of The Boys in the Band, about the alleged typecasting of the late Leo Carrillo as the Gay Caballero. Mr. Crowley may have been thinking of Rouben Mamoulian’s The Gay Desperado (1936), which featured Nino Martini in the singing lead role opposite a young, ingénue-ish Ida Lupino and Carrillo overacting (as always) in a supporting part. The widely reported carryings-on in Brokeback Mountain also reminded some reviewers of the supposedly subtextual implications of Howard Hawks’ Red River (1948), with John Wayne and the posthumously “outed” Montgomery Clift, as well as George Roy Hill’s Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), with Paul Newman and Robert Redford—the latter lacking even the gossipy whispers of Clift’s sexual orientation to sustain the subtextual suppositions.

If I choose to digress from what started out as a review of Brokeback Mountain, it is because, for whatever reason, I was never moved or even overly excited by what I finally witnessed on the screen, though I have no quarrel with the superlatives heaped upon the film by most of my colleagues. For example, Heath Ledger as the comparatively quiet and guilt-torn Ennis Del Mar gives as remarkably nuanced and detailed a performance as I had been led to expect, and the always dependable Jake Gyllenhaal as the unrestrained, more emotionally dependent and almost allegorically named Jack Twist isn’t far behind.

The rest of the cast performs above and beyond the call of duty, particularly Michelle Williams as Alma, whom Ennis marries immediately after his tryst with Jack, and Anne Hathaway as Lureen, whom Jack later marries. These are two thankless roles of victimization by disillusion, sexual rejection and abandonment, all in the name of the greater love between Ennis and Jack. Alma’s heartbreak is more palpable than that of the self-sufficient Lureen, but we are apparently not asked to weep for either woman, and certainly not for Alma’s two daughters or Lureen’s son. Still, Ennis turns out to be a more dedicated family man than Jack, who has the foresight to marry the rich daughter of a farm-equipment tycoon, one who is quite happy to take his grandson off Jack’s faltering hands.

Lureen, a rodeo rider, is shown aggressively pursuing Jack in a rodeo bar with the one witty pickup line in the movie: “What’s the matter, cowboy? You waiting for a mating call?” No matter—Jack’s heart is elsewhere. Lureen is quickly caricatured as a ditzy, bleached-blond, chattering busybody. Alma is another story entirely after she catches Ennis in a passionate embrace with his quadrennial “fishing buddy,” and she never lets on that she has seen anything, even when Ennis keeps returning from his alleged fishing trips without any fish. Alma just suffers and suffers and suffers without even being given the compensation of a juicy renunciation scene. All she gets, in fact, is a divorce agreement in which Ennis agrees to provide child support.

What surprised me most about the film was how much larger and more sympathetic Mr. Ledger’s part was than Mr. Gyllenhaal’s. I was surprised also by how gratuitously overextended the narrative was, based as it is on a 1997 short story by Pulitzer Prize winner Annie Proulx. Her story was adapted (and perhaps inflated) to feature-film length by Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana.

There have been reports that both men and women at earlier screenings were seen fighting away tears after the sad ending. It’s been a long time since I cried outright over a movie. Indeed, the only time lately that I even came close to tears was at a screening for the students in my Columbia course on musicals of Richard Lester’s A Hard Day’s Night (1964), whose release I had celebrated in The Village Voice 41 years earlier by describing the phenomenon as “the Citizen Kane of jukebox movies”—a then-startling blurb that ended up being used in the board game Trivial Pursuit.

Why then, after all that time, was I so close to tears? It was coming up on the 25th anniversary of John Lennon’s murder in the courtyard of the Dakota by a deranged fan. As I watched Lennon on the screen in all his joyously smooth-faced youth, belting out his group’s numbers with a comically insolent expression that I didn’t quite appreciate at the time, I mourned the vagaries of time, luck and accident that bedevil our shaky existence.

But again I digress, which is the only way I can manage to get through this unpleasant task. This is to say that I must let my mind wander until I find the ultimate source of my minority (negative) opinion of the film. Perhaps by tracing some of the key scenes through the strands of the narrative, I can isolate my bothersome concerns. Yet first I must ask and answer the question of why I was expected to cry, as if I were watching one of the classic “women’s pictures” of Hollywood’s golden age that were advertised at the time as surefire tearjerkers. These included Irene Dunne’s other-woman travails with a married man (played by John Boles) in John Stahl’s Back Street (1932), and Margaret Sullavan’s travails with Charles Boyer in Robert Stevenson’s 1941 remake. Then, more decorously, there were the non-adulterous, pathos-ridden romantic complications of Leo McCarey’s Love Affair (1939), with Irene Dunne and Charles Boyer, and his own 1957 remake of the film with Deborah Kerr and Cary Grant, retitled An Affair to Remember. And let us not forget Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard in David Lean and Noel Coward’s Brief Encounter (1945), of which Oscar Levant may have been thinking when he memorably defined a “women’s picture” as one in which a woman cheats on her husband all through the movie, and in the end he asks her for forgiveness.

This imputation of self-pity isn’t completely inapplicable to Brokeback Mountain, despite all its breathtaking western mountainscapes. And why not? Both Mr. Lee and Mr. McMurtry are no strangers to lachrymose sentiment, although Mr. Lee’s The Ice Storm (1997) and Mr. McMurtry’s screenplay for Peter Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show (1971), which was based on one of his novels, left me singularly dry-eyed—perhaps because both films tried too hard to make me cry.

The very first scene of Brokeback Mountain takes on an excessively suspenseful tension because of the aforementioned advance hype, as two men in cowboy hats—who have not been introduced to us or to each other—steal glances at each other while waiting for their prospective boss to open the small shed used as a ranch office. It’s as if they are furtively cruising each other, but when the surly boss, Joe Aguirre (Randy Quaid), finally appears, he demystifies them somewhat by greeting them rudely and explaining their duties with a contemptuous tone of voice, as if he didn’t expect them to be capable of keeping coyotes and bears away from the thousand or so sheep they are expected to herd until winter comes.

So here we have two men, more or less on their own, in an idyllic setting that Mr. Lee and his cinematographer, Gustavo Santaolalla, have rendered in all its sky-angled splendor. Eventually, Ennis and Jack begin exchanging their young life stories at the meals they share after a day spent apart in different parts of the mountain. As they bathe more than I have ever seen Wild West characters do, I suddenly realized that these allegedly hard-boiled ranch hands had unusually delicate nostrils for the genre.

And this was the thing with all the cowboys I have ever seen before on the screen: They just never worried about how they smelled, nor how other cowboys smelled. They were occasionally shown shaving, and Eli Wallach had a memorable bathtub scene in Sergio Leone’s epic spaghetti western The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly—but offhand, I can’t remember any western character shooting another because of the way he smelled. It’s a small point, granted, but it involves a degree of genre-destroying realism that paves the way for a strenuously aggressive surge of desire in both men resembling a form of rape-wrestling at night, and continuing as rambunctiously physical horseplay in the daytime. From a distance on horseback, Mr. Quaid’s field boss stares disapprovingly at this uninhibited behavior through his binoculars. The outside world has already started crashing in on Ennis and Jack’s mountain paradise.

The syndicated comic strip The Boondocks recently had two older black characters watching Brokeback Mountain in a movie house and complaining that the heroes aren’t at all “manly” after the first big sex scene. But not to worry—both Ennis and Jack insist afterward to each other, and perhaps to themselves, that neither is “queer.”

Stephen Holden’s perceptively erudite review in The Times notes that the word “gay” was not in common usage in 1963, when the events in the movie begin. Mr. Holden makes an insightfully appropriate reference to Leslie Fiedler’s notorious essay in a 1948 issue of Partisan Review, provocatively titled “Come Back to the Raft Ag’in, Huck Honey.” For decades afterward, people around me were arguing about the essay and its claim that a persistently homoerotic strain manifested itself in serious American literature, with an accompanying diminution of the role of women. (After all, didn’t Rip Van Winkle go to sleep for 20 years to escape his shrewish wife, who conveniently died in the interim?) Yet the subtexts of this phenomenon remain more interesting and stimulating then the textual specificities, at least for me.

Hence, I suppose that my ultimate objection to Brokeback Mountain lies in its stretching out what originally begins as a physical relationship between two young men to, after 20 years, Ennis and Jack quarreling like an old married couple about the forced infrequency of their reunions. Yet what are the odds that they would have managed to stay together if they had been together all that time? The current odds on married heterosexual couples staying the course are no better than 50-50, and that is as true in the red states as it is in the blue.

Besides, the problem of the economic disparity between lower-middle-class Ennis and upper-middle-class Jack isn’t sufficiently addressed in Brokeback Mountain, even though Ennis is rendered virtually immobile by his pressing need to keep his job to support his kids. By contrast, Jack has the means and the time to hop down to Mexico to sleep with male prostitutes. In this, he follows a pattern of promiscuity that raises doubts about the stability of any more lasting day-to-day relationship between him and Ennis.

And just for the record, none of the classic women’s pictures that I mentioned actually made me cry. They were too good for that. All they did was create an aching feeling of loss in the pit of my stomach. I never felt that ache in Brokeback Mountain, despite all the artful acting, writing and direction devoted to that end.

The Last Merchant

James Ivory’s The White Countess, from a screenplay by Kazuo Ishiguro, turns out to be the final production of the team of James Ivory and the late Ismail Merchant (1936-2005). As such, it is a stylistically venturesome exploration of the chaotic world of 1936 and 1937, as seen from the maelstrom of Shanghai’s international community on the eve of the Japanese invasion. Mr. Ishiguro, whose novel The Remains of the Day was adapted for the screen for Merchant-Ivory by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala for their successful 1993 film version, seems fixated on the period just before World War II, a time when no one, East or West, seemed to anticipate the horrors that were to come.

I must confess at this point that I am much more familiar with the historical situation in England at this time taken up in The Remains of the Day than I am with the situation in Shanghai dealt with in The White Countess. I mention my limiting Eurocentrism so that my readers may be alerted to the comparative inaccessibility of some of Mr. Ishiguro’s subtleties in sketching out the political forces at work in this time and place.

The story is centered on a curiously chaste romance between a former American diplomat, Todd Jackson (Ralph Fiennes), and an expatriate Russian countess, Sofia Belinsky (Natasha Richardson). The deeply disillusioned Jackson has actually abandoned diplomacy after the ominous collapse of the League of Nations, which spells the end to the last hopes for world peace. As for the countess, she supports her daughter, Katya (Madeleine Daly), and the rest of her extended family as a taxi dancer and prostitute in a Shanghai nightclub. Though Sofia is sustained by the love of her daughter and her aging aunt Sara (Vanessa Redgrave), she is openly and ungratefully despised for her “dishonorable” activities by her embittered sister-in-law, Greshenka (Madeleine Potter), and her officious mother-in-law, Olga (Lynn Redgrave)—even though they would all be out on the street if it weren’t for Sofia’s ill-gotten gains. For her part, Sofia seems unusually resigned to their contempt in order to keep the family together for Katya’s sake.

The most fascinating fact about Jackson is that he is blind because of some unspecified accident, the traumatic circumstances of which are not revealed until the film’s later stages. The important thing is that Mr. Ivory takes his directorial cue from Jackson’s blindness, and with the assistance of Christopher Doyle, the cinematographer for the much-esteemed Wong Kar Wai, he creates a swirling expression of Jackson’s mental universe that impels me to use the word “phantasmagoric”—an adjective that I never expected to use for a work of James Ivory’s.

Mr. Fiennes performs prodigies of understatement in functioning confidently in all the action despite his handicap. In the end, he helps Sofia rescue Katya from the clutches of her evil family, who conspire to steal the child from her mother and flee to Hong Kong. In the course of opening a nightclub in Shanghai called the White Countess, with Sofia as its centerpiece, Jackson befriends a sinister but outwardly affable Japanese agent named Matsuda (Hiroyuki Sanada), though the irrevocable forces of history finally drive the two friends apart. The film is well worth seeing for its performances, and for the aptness of Mr. Ivory’s Sternbergian mise-en-scène.

KUNG FU HUSTLE

Highly stylized martial arts comedy taking place in an anachronistic version of 1930's Shanghai: The dominant criminal gang invades a slum, but has a very hard time subduing its residents when some of them are revealed to be extraordinary kung fu masters. The battles escalate in audacity until a veritable kung fu genius shows up. With Stephen Chow, Chan Kwok, Kwok Kwan, Yuen Wah, Yuen Qiu and Huang Sheng Yi. Directed by Stephen Chow. In Mandarin and Cantonese with English subtitles.

SEX/NUDITY 2-A woman inhales forcefully and her chest expands to an exaggerated size. One character wears his pants pulled partly down in the back revealing his bare buttocks in many scenes; and a man's pants are torn revealing a part of his bare buttock. A man is bare-chested while bathing. A corpulent man is bare-chested and when he pounds his arm down his ample chest jiggles.

A man caresses his wife's clothed buttocks as she walks with an exaggerated wiggle.

Two men admire a woman as she walks past them.

A married man appears to be flirting with a woman who is not his wife, and says, "Let me give you a physical exam"; she then kisses him on the cheek. A married man has lipstick on his cheek in a few scenes suggesting that a woman has kissed him (she was not his wife).

A woman wears a short and low-cut negligee. We see a woman's bra shoot through the air after she slams into a billboard, and we see a bra hanging from a clothesline. A man sits in his boxer shorts and undershirt.

VIOLENCE/GORE 8-Two men fight with many punches and kicks: one has long nails that cut the other's chest (we see some blood), many ethereal swords fly toward one man, he dodges them, he picks up a large stone wheel, throws it at the man throwing the swords, and the stone dissolves into dust; then ethereal fists sail toward the man and when he is hit we see indentations in his chest and abdomen, and some bloody wounds, and he falls to the ground.

A large group of men with axes surround several men and a woman, and all but one of the men are shot.

A man runs but falls to the ground-his leg is apparently cut off below the knee by an ax-and a man stands over him and hits him with an ax several times (we hear crunching and squishing and see splattered blood on the killer's face).

A man's head is cut off (we see, but not distinctly, his head and body fall to the ground separately).

A man hits a man in the head with a piece of a wooden beam, the man punches the man hard in the stomach, kicks him into the air, slams him to the ground, and then punches his face several times causing his head to be totally pushed into the floor as if he's a cartoon (we hear that his face is pulp, but he's alive).

A man punches a man, he falls off of a balcony, he is hit a few more times mid-air, and the two fight with quick punches; then one stomps and flattens the other's foot. In another scene, a man is threatened by many men with axes, and as they swing at him, he punches, kicks and fends them off, and many men are thrown through the air; the man then stomps on the feet of a few of his adversaries, apparently crushing and flattening them.

A man throws a knife at a woman, it hits a beam above him, the knife ricochets and hits the man in the shoulder; another man throws a knife and hits the first man in the other shoulder, and the second man then stabs the first man twice more in the shoulder by accident (we see the knives sticking out of his body, but he seems fine otherwise).

A man strikes a "toad" pose: he is on all fours, his cheeks and throat swell up, and he jumps toward another man, becoming a projectile: he pushes the man through several walls and then high into the sky. When the airborne man starts falling back to the ground his hands are in flames and he plummets to the ground looking like a flaming meteorite; he eventually pushes out his hands, slapping a man on the ground and making a huge handprint in the ground.

A man falls down a flight of stairs, he imagines seeing a wall of blood flowing toward him.

A man kicks many gang members attacking a slum: we see some crashing through windows, others crashing into balconies, and another man joins in, punching more gang members; the gang members bring out guns, and a man with a long stick disarms them and then beats many men with his stick (we hear many loud blows).

Many ethereal skeletal warriors with swords sail toward a man and a woman, the woman screams, and the warriors turn to dust and two men are left with shredded clothing.

A large number of gang members walk into a slum, a woman is grabbed by the hair, a man is held down onto the ground, other villagers are shoved and forced to lie on the ground, and a woman and boy are doused with a flammable liquid; a man throws a lit lighter toward them, but another man catches the lighter. A man raises an ax to strike a man, the screen goes black and the man with the ax is crumpled in a barrel with a broken back (we see him later foaming at the mouth and twitching).

A man and a woman fight a man, and in a close-up they kick him in the face and head causing his features to become squished; all three then exchange powerful and loud punches and kicks, the woman screams, a man kicks her in the head, she is thrown back against wall, and the woman hits the man in the head with a stick.

A man twists another man's arm like a corkscrew, and then does the same thing to a woman's arm. A man hits and kicks a man and a woman (she has a bloody mouth), the woman screams through the shell of a large bell creating a megaphone, the noise tears a building apart, we see dust and shrapnel and we see a man thrown back through the air (he has a large wound on his head).

A woman hits a man in the head, then punches him repeatedly, then throws him out a window, and we see him crash through awnings and land hard on the ground; the woman then throws a flower pot that breaks on his head (he is fine later).

A man's hair is set on fire, a man throws a flammable liquid on his head to try to put it out, and the fire grows (we see him flailing and see smoke billowing out of the car window) ….

Several boys hold a girl by the hair trying to steal her lollipop, another boy intervenes, the group of boys attacks him with punches and kicks (he has a bloody nose) and then they urinate on him.

A woman beats a man with her slipper repeatedly.

A woman chases a man (the man has three knives sticking out of his shoulders) along a road, they run super-fast, they run and jump, one slips under an oncoming truck, and the other jumps over and crashes into a billboard.

A man throws a firecracker that explodes on another man's head, blowing a hole in his hat (the man is fine).

A woman yells loudly, glass breaks and people cover their ears.

A woman threatens a man by cracking her knuckles and making a fist.

A man is grabbed by two men and forcibly taken to a nightclub.

A boy has large globs of mucous around his nose.

PROFANITY 5-1 F-word, 8 scatological terms, 12 anatomical terms, 8 mild obscenities, 4 derogatory terms for homosexuals, name-calling (numbskull, wimps).

SUBSTANCE USE-A man drinks a clear liquor and appears to stagger, presumably drunk. A man drinks alcohol from a flask in several scenes. One woman has a lit cigarette hanging from her mouth throughout the entire movie; in a couple of scenes she inhales the whole cigarette with one drag. A man smokes a pipe that could contain opium or some other drug. A man smokes a cigarette and a man smokes a cigar in a few scenes.

DISCUSSION TOPICS-Gang violence, fear, poverty, ambition, world peace, greed, blackmail, destiny, effeminate men, power, responsibility, sorrow, mental asylums, martial arts masters, supernatural powers.

MESSAGE-Things are not always as they appear, and people may have well-hidden talents.

The Jamba Juniors

On a recent afternoon in a Starbucks on 87th Street and Lexington Avenue, well-groomed men and women were sipping skim mocha lattes to a soundtrack of Joni Mitchell and the whirring of espresso machines. Right across the street, in the colorful, well-lit Jamba Juice smoothie shop, the well-heeled spawn of those latte sippers were indulging in a growing status symbol.

There were no chairs and little space: a hard place to really hang out. But this Jamba Juice, nestled between a Petco and a wine store, has become a destination for the braces-and-blazers set, a social nexus of the uptown private-school world. With Dalton, Spence and Nightingale just a hop, skip and jump away, privileged teens in cheek-skimming pleats and Hervé Chapelier purses-cum-book-bags cycle through the joint on their way to, from or during school for a naturally delicious sugar fix they can be seen with.

"Do you know how many carbs you're getting?!!" a pink North Face–clad girl, no more than 13, asked her friend.

"Seventy-six."

"We'll come and get some stuff and go shopping or walk home," said Elysabeth Grossman, 15, a ninth-grader at the Horace Mann School who was wearing oversized sunglasses and pricey sweatpants. She fished $4.51 out of her gold purse for her smoothie.

She said that she and her friends, who ride the same bus to Horace Mann's Riverdale campus from their homes on the Upper East Side, have been coming to this location since it opened in September.

Elysabeth was the obvious ringleader of her crew, which consisted of another less-animated girl, a gangly boy in a trucker hat and his friend, who is 14 but who wished to be identified as 15 for this article. Elysabeth remembered her first Jamba Juice experience: summer tennis camp in Stanford, Calif.

She added that her crew has also been known to frequent New York's first-ever Jamba Juice at the Time Warner Center-closer to the shops.

"The Dalton kids must be in heaven," a girl in line said to her nodding friends. Wearing a Dalton baseball cap, she attended the prestigious U.E.S. institution in elementary school, but was now a senior at Columbia Prep.

She was aware of the smoothie's-and the location's-social significance.

"Eighty-sixth, when you're young, is a big place to run into people if you're in school on the Upper East Side," she said.

She was also aware that it was a time in these customers' lives when every accessory-even a beverage-is carefully calculated for maximum social impact.

"What you're doing, and where you're seen, is more important here," she said. "I think people like 'Oh, I'm drinking Jamba Juice' more than the actual drink."

Admittedly, by standing around a popular teenage hot spot asking young boys and girls if they go to school in the area, I was acting like the kind of person about whom my old high school would have sent out safety bulletins.

When I asked two girls-one from Spence, the other from Chapin-how often they came here, they told me, "It's, like, a popular place," followed quickly by:

"We don't, like, hang out here on the weekends."

And with one disdainful sideways glance and a haughty toss of straightened hair, I was dismissed.

-Kathryn Williams

We're all impatient for the memoir to evolve-who needs more cross-eyed mirror-gazing?-but don't expect the first stabs at a less narrowly focused generation of autobiographical writing to be 20-20, or even particularly legible. Case in point is Walter Abish's Double Vision , a memoir that doesn't content itself with a single narrative but ambitiously seeks to lend resonance and perspective to its subject through stereoscopic storylines. Mr. Abish tells two stories meant to enlarge each other: one an account of how he and his Jewish parents fled Vienna in 1938, the other a travelogue of his first visit back to Vienna in the 1980's, a few years after he published his prize-winning novel, How German Is It (1980). Like many pioneering efforts, the new book is deeply flawed, but the flaws are interesting, and in their own way add to the experience.

First, because they are severe, the shortcomings. For a writer generally considered "elegant," Mr. Abish here uses English so infelicitously that you wonder how long he's been speaking it. The book is filled with sentences you have to slug your way out of, like this description of his "exuberant" uncle Phoebus: "Even his dubious integrity in business matters excited in me a sympathetic response-for wasn't Phoebus confirming my picture of him as the black sheep, who finally, as Phoebus did, moved to Sydney, Australia?" Mr. Abish's syntax is so clumsy, his phraseology so convoluted and even his word choice so frequently questionable (is "unappealing" the right word for torture that includes the plucking out of fingernails?), that vast swaths of Double Vision read like a bad translation of itself.

There's also the egregious overuse of the rhetorical question. "Isn't history a form of story telling?" he asks on page 8. "How could I possibly have apprehended that I was being rigorously trained to be a writer? … Was I not being trained in obduracy to wage war on the impediments, such as the blank pages, I was to face years later? Was I not being trained to surmount the hurdles of the text? Did they not see it? How could they have missed it? … Did I not detest myself as a result? … Is it any wonder I sought refuge in play?" he asks-also on page 8. When he's in full throat, the Old World oratory ringing out, Mr. Abish can pack a half-dozen or more self-interrogatives onto a single page. The effect is comical, if you happen to enjoy having an Austrian grandfather clutch you by the shoulder and spray your face with magniloquence.

Some of Mr. Abish's observations have outlived their sell-by date: "Until recently I considered the declaration 'Arbeit Macht Frei' above the [Dachau] concentration camp gates as more malevolently ironic than a solemn avowal," he writes. "I now understand that the intent was primarily utilitarian. For … the misleading signs were essential to the smooth operation of the facilities … intended to allay the apprehension of the new arrivals." As if to make up for these stale banalities, other observations are overblown: "As I left the monument, an exhausted collarless German shepherd limped past, trailing blood …. Clearly, it has to be a message beamed at me!" Relentlessly, everything must signify, until by force of habit he turns the grilling back on himself: "I keep persuading myself that everything I see, every conversation I have, is potential material for future use. But is that so? Most exchanges are oddly dissatisfying; it's as if an unseen caution prevails-on my part? on theirs?"

Wait, it gets worse before it gets better. To say that most of the characters in this book are unlikeable is letting their creator off too easily; it's more that Mr. Abish perversely denies them even a molecule of likeability. One after the other they are supercilious, spiteful, petty, humorless, often sneering and always inscrutably ironic. Irony, in fact, is the prevailing mood, when it doesn't surrender to lassitude. ("There is, I suppose, a certain satisfaction to be derived from the fact that my earliest memory is that of being bored.") Is the reader to blame if he's put off? Precisely how much alienation can we be expected to tolerate? Is that question unfair? What is unfairness, anyway? Why isn't it capitalized, the way it would be in German? How German Would That Be, Huh?

This is the stand-up version of Teutonism, less Fassbinder than Saturday Night Live .

And yet … and yet, it's all of a piece. Consciously or not, the strained syntax serves to underscore the disaffection Mr. Abish suffers-having been uprooted at the age of 6-as both a geographical exile and an exile from his native tongue. The tone-deafness adds to the poignancy of a protagonist who is at home nowhere. And the parade of creeps who never get warmer than a lover with "a wan smile of chagrin"-who else was Mr. Abish supposed to encounter, having grown up isolated from other children, suffocated by bourgeois trappings and afflicted by the sense that he was the wrong child for his parents, a remote, grudging mother and a weak, embarrassed father? "I had known that I was merely a capricious factor and not the ineluctable concept that fed their notion of a family," he remarks with wooden pathos.

Personally, I blame the mom, an aloof, psychically numb character. But if the almost inhuman restraint he endured as a child cramps his emotional connection to the reader, and the stilted syntax mirrors the discomfiture he continued to feel as a displaced adult, the architecture of the book nonetheless comes to the rescue. The book is constructed in alternating chapters: "writer-to-be" sections (young Walter fleeing Vienna for Italy, France, Shanghai and then Israel) taking turns with "writer" sections, in which the adult author returns to his native ground on a kind of extended book tour. What we get are fascinating peekaboo glimpses. A raucous young Tel Aviv, for instance, is filled with colorful embezzlers and spies and Holly Golightly women (barely fleshed out, but maybe that's how it is with Holly Golightly women), a place where thievery is rampant and discourtesy is worn as a badge and "equated with candor," while politeness is "rejected as servile and cosmopolitan-reminders of a disdained European past."

Even better are the rare shots of Shanghai during and after the Allied bombing, when the entire city "lay there, submissive, patiently waiting to be occupied, waiting to place its bottomless resources, its harbor, its bars and whorehouses at the feet of the victors. Shanghai waited the way a courtesan, having just rid herself of a former lover, might timorously await the arrival of the next, still uncertain as to his taste, his experience, his desire for love, determined, however, at all costs, to overcome any doubts she may have had about her fading beauty."

If all his sentences were that pretty, we'd have no problem. As it is, however, we have to rely on the memoir's innovative structure, which lends a kind of expressive credence to the content: Mr. Abish not only gives us acute glimpses of a world in flux, but also has us experience them viscerally through the back-and-forth configuration of the narrative. Match a 1980's scene of self-congratulatory Germans with a 1938 scene in which Vienna is being invigorated by Nazism, and suddenly the whole is larger than the sum of its parts.

It's ballsy for a man who wears an eye patch to talk about double vision. But Mr. Abish has proven himself a ballsy writer more than once before. His latest book gives us greater depth perception than a single line of focus would provide, and proves that the memoir is a more flexible form than it has lately seemed. Double Vision hints at what a new generation of memoir might be capable of-though when it comes to fulfilling its own promise, it blinks big time.

Daniel Asa Rose, former arts and culture editor of the Forward , is the author most recently of Hiding Places: A Father and His Sons Retrace Their Family's Escape from the Holocaust (Simon and Schuster).

At Jean-Georges Vongerichten's 66

I first came to 66, Jean-Georges Vongerichten's new Chinese restaurant in Tribeca, for Sunday dim sum. The restaurant, designed by Richard Meier, wasn't busy at all, unlike Sunday in Chinatown, where waiting an hour in a crowded lobby for your number to be called isn't unusual. My son and I got the best seats in the house, opposite four tropical fish tanks. They supply the only splashes of color in the serene, off-white dining room, and are as mesmerizing to watch as the aquariums at Sea World. A black-and-white spotted eel, its mouth hanging open, gaped as a pilot fish landed on top of the brown nurse shark that was resting on the sand, and stayed there.

"The pilot fish is cleaning bacteria off the shark," explained our waiter, decked out in the ultra-stylish staff uniform, a gray Mao jacket, black pants by Vivienne Tam and gray sneakers. "When he gets off, you'll see he has a mark on his back like the sole of a sneaker."

Mr. Vongerichten's 66 is the 13th restaurant in his far-flung empire, and his sixth in New York. He's a brilliant chef with an astonishing range, from the haute cuisine at Jean Georges and the innovative French-Thai food at Vong, to the Alsatian pizza flambé at the hip Mercer Kitchen in Soho. The look of his new place is much like the waiter's uniform's: cool and minimalist. Located on the ground floor of the Textile Building, a commercial textile exchange constructed in 1901, the restaurant has been cleverly divided into dining areas separated by frosted glass panels and stainless-steel wire mesh, and bathed in a soft, luminous glow from inset lightboxes. The lounge is furnished with tables made by Saarinen; the dining rooms boast Eames chairs and tables that look like white jade but are, in fact, made of resin. For those who can't get a reservation for dinner, a 40-foot-long communal table under a line of red silk banners depicting Chinese ideograms comfortably seats up to 40 diners without the need for advanced booking. The bartenders work behind a frosted glass wall that casts intriguing shadows of them, preparing such cocktails as the Shanghai cosmo (vodka, plum sake and cranberry juice) or a Fragrant Cloud (gin and tonic with elderflower syrup and candied ginger).

The menu at 66, overseen by chef de cuisine Josh Eden, is unusual and varied, ready to satisfy every whim, with choices of small or large plates, soups, noodles, vegetables, rice dishes and main courses. But overall, the food is hit-and-miss. Some dishes, such as a tuna tartare with Chinese celery, crispy lotus root and glistening brown beads of soy tapioca, are unforgettable, definite hits. The scallion pancakes are also wonderful-crisp, floury and light, like chapatis. You could eat plates of them. Prawns with lily bulb and sweet walnuts is a revelation of sweet and salty, spicy and crunchy, served with slivers of dried red chili and pieces of onion.

But the Peking duck, which comes with thin, delicate pancakes and shrimp crackers, was no better than I've had in Chinatown, nor was the shrimp toast with water chestnut or the fried frogs' legs. The black bass was perfectly cooked under a light green-tea tempura batter, but came with a cloying sweet-and-sour sauce. The braised beef chow fun, cut in thick, tender squares and seasoned with lemon peel, was disappointingly bland.

For the most part, the dim sum dishes were ordinary but good. They included a pleasant, non-greasy egg roll with Chinese apricot mustard, shrimp wontons and traditional steamed barbecue pork buns. But the chef stretched things a bit far when he added foie gras to the shrimp wonton, which were saved by a sprightly grapefruit dipping sauce. Leathery dumplings filled with chicken "liquid" were awful. And the lobster wonton soup with celery and chive blossom was dull, not worth the $9. Lobster hargow-wontons topped with different-colored jewels of flying fish roe-wasn't as good as the plain shrimp dumplings.

While we were eating, two middle-aged couples sat down at the table next to us. "I don't want to look at the fish, especially the skinny one," said one of the women, briskly changing places so she had her back to the aquarium. "I was at El Teddy's up the street once, and a fish jumped out of the tank and flopped on the floor right next to me!"

We all stared at the tank where the pilot fish was gently moving up and down on top of the nurse shark. There was an embarrassed silence, like those times when parents watching "suitable" nature movies with small children are unexpectedly treated to a herd of elephants copulating. Then the fish stopped moving altogether. "Do you think they're dead?" asked the other woman finally.

"Fish float to the top when they're dead," responded the fishophobe. She'd ordered a plate of sesame noodles that she proceeded to cut up with her knife and fork. The dish was nothing like your local takeout. It consisted of cellophane noodles served in a small bowl, topped with slivers of cucumber, apples, scallions and bean sprouts that added a surprising twist.

"I like this so much better than going to Chinatown and sitting with people you don't know, eating duck feet wrapped in sausage," said the fishophobe.

My son went red in the face with fury.

"I try one or two new things a year," she went on. "Two years ago, I tried shrimp; it didn't work for me." Too bad, because the fried shrimp wontons certainly worked for us.

And whatever the flaws in the main courses, the desserts brought the meal to an end with flying colors. I've never had them like this in Chinatown. According to my son, the almond tofu, which comes with orange cannoli, is just as good as the almond-cookie ice cream at the Ice Cream Factory on Bayard Street. The tapioca and coconut parfait, served in a pilsner glass with a bright yellow straw half an inch wide, is great: You suck up the fruits chopped inside like a vacuum cleaner, and it comes with an exquisite coconut crisp. The Ovaltine and milk-chocolate pudding with banana rice crisp and coffee froth is a wonderful excess. The yuzu roll with raspberry sorbet is also extraordinary, permeated with a subtle, tart citrus flavor. Chocolate and green-tea fortune cookies add a high note at the end.

After we finished lunch, the pilot fish swam away from the nurse shark and turned himself right side up. True to the waiter's description, the top of his back looked as though the black rubber sole of a sneaker was stuck to it.

A hundred dollars is a lot for a dim sum lunch for two people, even when that bill includes dessert and tea. In Chinatown, where the fish in the tanks end up on the customer's plate, we normally spend around $20, and the tea is free. But when the brilliant chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten is the brains behind the stove, you expect to pay more for your food. But you also expect it to be nothing less than great. I'm sure, in time, it will be.

Revives Lost Art of Cutting

Lozoo means "green tea" in Mandarin, but more people at Lozoo, on Houston Street, seem to be guzzling the house cocktail, which is bright blue. The group at the table next to mine one evening had ordered four. One of the diners, a young Italian dressed in black, grinned as he lifted his glass. "After a couple of these it's like, 'Are my legs on my body or what?'"

But don't be deceived by Lozoo's club-like atmosphere. Yes, it has a long, dark bar and a candlelit lounge where trays of lichi bellinis in tall glasses and luscious-looking pale green drinks are delivered all night long to the young, attractive crowd packed along the black banquettes. But this restaurant is serious about its food, Shanghai cuisine the likes of which you've never seen in Chinatown.

The idea for the restaurant came about when co-owner Greg Kan, a Chinese-American businessman, invited Li Ping (formerly of Kelley & Ping, Obeca Li and Kin Khao) to dine at his grandmother's house in Shanghai. Ms. Ping was so impressed by the cooking of the grandmother's master chef, Wang Yong Gen, that she invited him to open a restaurant in New York. But he had problems getting a visa. "It was a conundrum," said Mr. Kan. "The U.S. government wanted to know what makes him special. But there are no star chefs in China; all the great food is in private houses. He even cooked for Clinton, but the immigration department wanted to see things that don't exist, like magazine articles and reviews." So while the application was pending, Mr. Kan flew the restaurant's future staff to Shanghai to train with Mr. Wang in his grandmother's kitchen. And, five months ago, he went ahead with the opening of the restaurant, without the chef.

Now, at long last, Mr. Wang has made it to Lozoo's kitchen. The menu hasn't changed since I made my first visits back in January, but dishes have been refined and there are new daily specials. One of the first things I was struck by at Lozoo was the meticulous-even obsessive-way the ingredients were cut, and the enormous difference this makes to the taste of a dish. During the Cultural Revolution, Mr. Kan's family (which included a governor of Manchuria, a banker and a well-known poet) fled China. Their chef, Mr. Wang, was sent to a city where he wasn't allowed to cook. Instead, he spent two years specializing in cutting. "It was a lost art," said Mr. Kan. "It's a kind of precision you don't see any more in China. Most people associate this kind of meticulous work with Japan. But, in fact, China and Japan have shared this refinement for centuries."

Mr. Wang's skill is greatly in evidence in his cooking: the four squares of silky tofu, for example, that are stuffed with dried shredded scallops. Two are topped with butterflied shrimp, two with sea bass. They are covered with a delicate creamy sauce made with Shaoxing wine and sprinkled with a confetti of red and green peppers cut into tiny, tiny squares. It must have taken hours to cut those squares, but anything larger would have overwhelmed the dish. The barbecued sirloin is not a slab of steak, but a mound of finely hacked beef. It's served on shredded tofu seasoned with cilantro and sesame oil that does the work of fries. The smooth, white squid has been nicked with a knife into feathers, making it extremely tender and silken, and it comes with a powerful soy-based sauce. Sea bass is minced; you wrap it with pine nuts and pieces of citrussy pomelo into iceberg lettuce leaves and eat it like a summer roll.

The chef loves to play games with textures, cutting different things into exactly the same shape and size, leaving you to guess what you're eating. Caramelized strips of eggplant are cooked in stock with garlic, chilis and a mystery substance (it's chewy sticks of glutinous rice), then garnished with long strips of scallion cut like chives. The eggplant is soft, the rice sticks

almost like chewing gum, but pleasantly so. Eel is done two ways. It's shredded and fried crispy in a vinegary batter, and shares the plate with soft, slivered pieces of the fish mixed with slivers of snow peas.

The former tenant of Lozoo's premises was a health-food store, and the ghost of tofu still haunts the place: It even comes with snails, one of the best dishes on the menu. The snails are sautéed with garlic and chives, wrapped in a tofu skin and deep-fried. The skin is as crisp and light as phyllo dough (you'd never guess it was tofu), and the snails are as plump and garlicky as the ones you'd find in the best French bistro.

The chicken smoked over green tea leaves is extraordinary. The pervasive smokiness makes the meat, which is moist and tender, taste incredibly rich. (It's not.) Also wonderful is a new dish that arrived with the chef, a play on the Peking duck with pancakes we know from Chinatown. But instead of being served in chunks, the duck is minced and piled in a lustrous heap with fried glass noodles, coriander and shredded scallions. Soft pancakes and a bamboo cup of hoisin sauce are served on the side.

I hope the ribs at Lozoo have improved since I first tasted them (they were dull and dry) and I hope the crabmeat-which has the texture of baby food in a whipped egg-white cloud-is less bland. I wasn't much impressed by the green tea shrimp I had at the beginning of the year, but the crunchy butterflied shrimp in a spicy ginger sauce, which also arrived with the new chef, are great. So too are the warm noodles, topped with a sweet and spicy meat sauce and surrounded by cucumber matchsticks, scallions and bean sprouts.

Lozoo serves exciting food with a setting to match. The dining room, which is in back of the restaurant, has a minimal, sleek, black-and-white décor. Strips of recessed lighting cast a soft glow over the room, and lights also peek through the wainscoting, which is made of a tightly packed gray acoustical foam. There's a skylight and a courtyard that will open when the weather gets warmer. When you turn on the faucet in the bathroom, a waterfall shoots down the metal sides of a communal sink.

The sound level in the dining room is low, with a background of gently pulsing music that, in my ignorance, I thought was Japanese techno music. My teenage son set me straight: "It's garage music. That means you can rap to it. If you can't, it's techno."

And there you have it.

Lozoo's Western desserts are terrific. They include a dark chocolate soufflé served in a demitasse with white and dark chocolate mousse, and a chocolate walnut cake that's as over-the-top as any I've tasted and supplies-in one enormous helping-the adult minimum weekly requirement of chocolate. But my favorite is the crêpes, layered in a pile with brandied whipped cream between each one. The pile is sliced in a wedge and served on a bright splash of red strawberry sauce. It's the kind of subtlety that epitomizes the food at Lozoo, and makes this place a find.