That's wonderful, standing up for the compassionate religion. Are we seeing a little perestroika in establishment Jewish opinion?

Andreas Killen definitely thinks so. An assistant professor of history at the City College of New York, he has a good eye for detail, an impressive appetite for research and a weakness for overstatement. All come into play in 1973 Nervous Breakdown, which bears the presumably unique distinction of sharing a title with a Lester Bangs rock review (of the Rolling Stones’ Goat’s Head Soup). It’s not unique in making great claims for the 70’s: Bruce Schulman and David Frum, to name two, have published books doing so. And they’re absolutely right. The 60’s may get all the attention, but it’s that decade’s polyester-clad kid brother that saw the real transformation of American culture. One of the emblematic 60’s lines is Bob Dylan’s “But even the president of the United States / Sometimes must have / To stand naked” (the words don’t scan any better sung). With Watergate, it came to pass. However badly, the Vietnam War did end. Feminism came of age. And Hollywood demonstrated the wonders of trickle-down aesthetics.

Mr. Killen’s first chapter gives a good sense of his cannily associative method: He begins with the news on Jan. 1 of the plane crash that killed Roberto Clemente, the star Pittsburgh Pirates outfielder. This takes him to the opening later that year of Dallas/Forth Worth Airport. He then dwells on the growing dissatisfaction with air travel, also noting that 1973 saw the first female copilot in an airliner and the first male flight attendant. Skyjackings proliferated, which provides his next section. Finally, Mr. Killen ponders the year’s most-talked-about book, Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying.

As an organizing principle, this is smart, stimulating and sometimes startling. (Who knew that DFW hired the pioneering earth artist Robert Smithson as a consultant? Smithson, by the way, died in a plane crash—and, yes, that was in 1973.) It can even be illuminating. There’s an eerie suggestiveness in the fact that the World Trade Center, designed by Minoru Yamasaki, opened four months before the final decision to level Pruitt-Igoe, the notorious St. Louis public-housing project, also designed by Yamasaki. Too often, though, Mr. Killen seems to be playing a critical-studies parlor game: six degrees of 1973 separation. (And it’s not always 1973. The first demolition at Pruitt-Igoe took place in 1972. Nixon didn’t resign, of course, until 1974. It was in 1969 that Andy Warhol founded Interview, whose status as the Almanach de Gotha of 70’s celebrity culture accounts for the artist’s presence in Mr. Killen’s alliterative subtitle.)

Furious, often incongruous juxtaposition is the engine that drives 1973 Nervous Breakdown. It’s not furious enough. For an enterprise like this to succeed, it needs a crazed sense of obsession, the centrality of 1973 as not just construct but compulsion, a calendrical equivalent to Rocket 00001 in Gravity’s Rainbow: A screaming comes across the sky, and that screaming needs to be 1973. Instead, Mr. Killen has hyperbole do the work of mania. “These days,” he tells us, “scarcely a week goes by without some further reminder [of the 70’s].” That depends on how scarce your definition of “scarcely” is. “Lance Loud’s coming out on television [as part of the PBS reality-TV series An American Family] would become one of the landmark events in the medium’s history.” Well, there are landmarks and there are landmarks. Blaxploitation movies were “immensely popular.” Yes, in the sense the New York Dolls enjoyed “wild popularity” (the better-selling of their two albums peaked on the U.S. charts at No. 116).

Andreas Killen hasn’t so much rehabilitated 1973 as overinflated it. Still, he demonstrates notable forbearance in at least one respect: This must be the only book on the 70’s that ignores disco—this despite the fact that the first disco record, Manu Dibango’s “Soul Makossa,” became a hit in (when else?) 1973.

Mark Feeney, the author of Nixon at the Movies: A Book About Belief, is on the staff of The Boston Globe.

The Clientele, a trio from London, languishes in just such a purgatorial haze. Having played together since 1997, they approach their ethereal chamber pop with retro swagger, drawing ill-advised comparisons to Scotland’s Belle & Sebastian and rather less ill-advised comparisons to Galaxie 500 and the Zombies. Both Suburban Light (2001), a collection of singles, and The Violet Hour (2003), their first full-length album, were hallmarks of the genre—a full, distinctive, contemplative sound anchored (or perhaps not) by dreamy arpeggios and foggy vocals. Not much has changed with Strange Geometry (Merge), their most recent effort, which upon first listen is a boon, then later becomes a curse. The album is an enjoyable, mildly frustrating pastiche of the band’s own oeuvre. The insidious track “E.M.P.T.Y.” pretty much captures it: It starts off well enough, with Alasdair MacLean singing plaintively, “When the night air comes to me / I wonder if the days I’ve lived through count,” which elicits an empathetic pang from the listener. Then the chorus answers “E-M-P-T-Y,” and the listener has been put down by the cheerleading squad for the damned.

Strange Geometry is discomfiting in its complacency. The new songs blend into the old ones, confusing their original brilliance and muddying one’s perception of the band. They’ve added water to a perfect glass of lemonade: It still tastes good, but not as good as you remember.

And then there’s Minus Story, a band as delightfully surprising as it is obscure—in brief, still a ghost. The Captain Is Dead, Let the Drum Corpse Dance!, their first album on Jagjaguwar—a small label with impressively good, if not exotic, taste out of Bloomington, Ind.—was a mini-masterpiece of lo-fi psych-pop. It was underrated and made little headway. One suspects this is because trying to place Minus Story in some kind of canon is about as hard as finding their hometown of Boonville, Mo. It’s a process of triangulation and relative distance. Their small hamlet is either 105 miles east of Kansas City, a three-hour drive from St. Louis or just north of Springfield. Likewise, Minus Story’s lead singer, Jordan Geiger, is either a stone’s throw away from the reedy, nasal timbre of the Decemberists’ Colin Meloy or a town over from Jeff Mangum of Neutral Milk Hotel.

The Captain Is Dead peeled from one rollicking dirge to another, hardly pausing to take stock of the genres it laid to waste. Minus Story had nicknamed their recording style “Wall of Crap”—almost a self-fulfilling prophecy. Conversely, their newest album, No Rest for Ghosts (Jagjaguwar), is a more subdued, production-heavy affair, with the band smoothly sliding from one reference to the next. “I Was Hit,” the album’s first track, begins just east of the Decemberists, than heads north to Radiohead with an acoustic/electric hybrid bridge reminiscent of “Paranoid Android.” What keeps Minus Story from sounding derivative, however, is their subtle, even gentle approach to a manifestly bizarre morbidity.

The album’s tone is best summed up by a story told by Mr. Geiger in an online interview: “Driving through some mountains in Pennsylvania at about 4 in the morning, while everyone was asleep, [guitarist] Andy [Byers] and I came around this corner and saw a deer sitting on the side of the road in the headlights of a state trooper’s car. It had a huge bloody hole in its stomach with innards coming out. It was licking at the wounds. It was really fucked up, but beautiful in a weird way.”

Minus Story are consumed by the shadow zone between life and death, the transformation of the corporeal into the chimerical. Similarly, their sound slips in and out of familiar hooks and melodies. This transience, as it applies both to the human condition and to their music, can be gruesome and melancholy. “Little Wet Head,” a deceptively peppy pop song that describes in gory detail a parent being devoured by its progeny, is horrifyingly visceral. “Choke me down / Push me out,” repeats the up-tempo chorus to a soaring piano punctuated by jubilant hand-clapping.

Now that’s fucked up!

On the other end of the spectrum is “There Is a Light,” a melodic waltz, sweetly sung. Mr. Geiger, apparently in spiritual form, comforts the living: “There is a song you hear when you die / No clapping of hands or voices on high / But out of the dark the voice will arise / So close to my ear / My old lovers sigh.”

Beautiful … in a weird way.

Picasso needs no introduction; he has long enjoyed a fame that's universal in scope. This doesn't mean that his work is universally understood, however: In Picasso's case, it has often meant the opposite. What many people think they know about Picasso has far more to do with his public persona-his sex life, his politics, his longevity, his fecundity in creating a variety of styles in a variety of media, and his unembarrassed love of the limelight-than with his artistic achievements. Such has been his celebrity that his name is now synonymous with the very idea of the artist-genius, even among people who remain baffled by his work.

Max Beckmann, on the other hand, has never enjoyed a celebrity on this scale, even in America, where he lived and worked as an émigré in the last years of his life and as a teacher, first in St. Louis and then in New York, influencing an entire generation of American painters. Moreover, Beckmann's private life, which was centered on a long and happy marriage, remain private, and his politics-insofar as he can be said to have had any-were limited to his opposition to the Nazi regime in his native Germany, which famously declared art of his persuasion degenerate.

Yet, despite Beckmann's opposition to the Nazi regime, his German background has been a problem for many art lovers. This has less to do with politics than with style and aesthetics. The fact is, for a majority of the art public in this country, the school of Paris-Picasso, Matisse, Leger, Bonnard et al.-is greatly favored over that of the modern German school, which for tastes nurtured on Parisian aesthetics is often found to be too harsh, too strong, too naked in feeling.

Even if you reject this criticism of modern German art as a caricature, as I do, it has to be acknowledged that it exists, and it has sometimes proved damaging to Beckmann's reputation. In the presence of a powerhouse talent like Picasso's, however, Beckmann's strengths as a draftsman and painter show to great advantage, and he emerges in the current exhibition as a powerhouse himself-and does so without the presence of a single example of his finest work, the great triptychs of the climactic years of his maturity.

In this connection, it has to be said that it's one of the downsides of this Picasso-Beckmann standoff that it's mostly limited to smallish paintings and works on paper. (The few sculptures hardly seem to be part of the show.) By the same token, it's one of the upsides of the exhibition that it makes us all the more eager to see a Picasso-Beckmann show on a far grander scale. Not until we have an opportunity to see Guernica (1937) and other Picasso paintings on a similar scale in the same space as some Beckmann triptychs will we be in a position to make a definitive judgment of their respective pictorial achievements.

Meanwhile, in the show that we've been given at Feigen, Beckmann more than holds his own. In the very first room, Beckmann's Oyster Eaters (1943) commands a painterly sensuousness that triumphs over Picasso's schematic Bouquet (1969), just as his radical Crouching Woman (1930) renders Picasso's more delicate Femme Dormeuse (1937) almost mute. For this viewer, anyway, even Picasso's more powerful Femme Assise en Robe Grise (1943), with its emphatic black structure, has too formulaic a look to be persuasive.

The really big surprise in this exhibition is its revelation of Picasso's keen interest in Beckmann's paintings, which seems to have had a longer history than any of us suspected. Once we've been alerted to this connection and its implications, both Beckmann and Picasso emerge somewhat changed for us-changed, that is, from powerful individualists into comrades in pursuit of very similar goals.

Beckmann-Picasso/Picasso-Beckmann remains on view at Richard L. Feigen and Co., 34 East 69th Street, through Jan. 31, 2005.

It was a hit, a palpable hit, and it was one big mess.

The original show called St. Louis Woman was a 1946 Broadway flop for which Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer wrote some classy songs like "Come Rain or Come Shine" and "A Woman's Prerogative." (Not even Pearl Bailey could save it.) It didn't play any better when the "Encores!" series resuscitated it at City Center several years ago. Now, set in part to an orchestral suite that Arlen made of his score, and with a "New Concept" by the indefatigable Michael Smuin (whose A Song for Dead Warriors is an old D.T.H. standby-and another mess), St. Louis Woman is more disappointing than ever.

Here's the story, from its first tired cliché to its last: A thuggish club owner, Biglow Brown, has a loyal and loving gal, Lila, but he throws her over for the gorgeous Della. Also hot for Della is Little Augie, a top jockey. Biglow goes for Augie, but is shot down-rooty-toot-toot-by the abused Lila. That's it. However, there's an hour's worth of music to get through. The result is vamp, vamp, vamp. Everything is overextended-the interminable duets, the interminable solos, the tango that seems endless not just because it's so long but because Smuin has nothing to say about tango; he's just exploiting it. Everything is filler.

The "concept" consists of the carnival-like figure of Death-a big guy in white socks, the briefest of black briefs, black-and-white tails and splotches of white make-up. This Death is a real pest, rushing on- and offstage (he's the filler inside the filler), flinging himself into splits and ominously fingering no-good Biglow Brown. Sure enough-bang, bang-Biglow's a corpse and Lila's led away by the cops, leaving Della and Augie to their happy ending. You think the ballet's over, but hold on-Death is back, swirling around with half a dozen girls in black and bondage. Eventually they go away, and we're in yet another new scene-or new ballet?-at the racetrack, with the boys doing jockey things and the girls strutting around with little parasols. Revelations , anybody? Everyone gets a cheerful new costume except the mysteriously acquitted Lila, the rooty-toot-tooter, but as a consolation prize she gets to do some fouettés.

The production is an overpowering assault on the eye. No expense has been spared. The redoubtable Tony Walton designed the glaring and discordant sets with Matisse on his mind; Willa Kim's costumes are garish and overstylized and constricting. And then there's the violent lighting-mostly a shrieking red-orange. It's as if the designers had conspired to distract you from what the dancers are doing. And what are the dancers doing? Generic ballet steps crossed with generic social dances: It's all "period" without being anchored in any given period. Augie gets to whip off the usual pirouettes and double-air turns and jetés. The two leading girls do all the things ballerinas do. But nothing is to any purpose, because Smuin doesn't have dance ideas, he has concepts. There is exactly one amusing and original passage-not for the principals, but for a couple in yellow who emerge from the corps, show off some witty and amusing lifts and throws, and vanish back into the crowd. Who are they? Why are they? We'll never know.

Some of the songs from the original show are sung as well as played-that helps a little, though when a ballet depends on words you know you're in trouble. Other Arlen-Mercer songs-"One for My Baby," "Accentuate the Positive," "That Old Black Magic"-have been insinuated into the score (it's not clear by whom). As for St. Louis Woman being a "Blues Ballet," no: D.T.H. isn't dancing the blues, it's dancing commerce.

The dancers looked good in it, though, especially Tai Jimenez as Lila. She was equally impressive in Frederick Ashton's Thaïs pas de deux, a piece of exotica that can register as camp, as it did a few seasons back when the Royal brought it to Washington. Jiminez is a lyrical dancer-something of an anomaly in a company that tends to hit hard rather than stroke or burnish. That tendency was apparent in the company's refurbished Serenade . Staged with exemplary efficiency by Eve Lawson, until recently ballet mistress of the Balanchine-based Miami City Ballet, Serenade did credit to the company without being right for it. Andrea Long, who spent nine years at New York City Ballet, is a forthright, energetic dancer, but she's anti-lyrical and lacks the tragic capacity the key role in Serenade demands-bizarrely, she keeps smiling. In The Four Temperaments , however, she was a galvanizing "Choleric." Four T's is a ballet that can be nailed, and D.T.H. nailed parts of it. (You can't "nail" Serenade .) They also did honorably by Fancy Free , Jerome Robbins' brilliant and timeless period piece, which came across as a rebuke to the fakeries and longueurs of St. Louis Woman . Even Robert Garland's New Bach , an homage to (or rip-off of) Balanchine's Concerto Barocco , gave some pleasure, if you forgave the cute little disco accents. Well, no one ever accused Dance Theatre of Harlem of excessive good taste.

Pilobolus Dance Theatre, a very different kettle of fish, just ended a rich and satisfying four-week season down at the Joyce. You may not like everything they do, but there's an inescapable sense of active intelligence here-a sense of serious people working out their ideas and polishing the results to the highest shine. This deservedly popular company was founded back in 1971 (two years after D.T.H.) by a trio of Dartmouth undergraduates, encouraged by their teacher, Alison Chase. Chase and several of the original Pilobuli are still directing the company; their colleague Moses Pendleton has gone his own way, as has Martha Clarke, the company's best-known alumna. It was Chase and Clarke who first performed the women's roles in the 1975 Untitled , still a startling and unsettling work, with the two women towering over the scene as they float along, each one carried on the shoulders of a hard-working guy who, except for his bare feet, is shrouded beneath the woman's billowing skirts. When these men eventually are birthed, as it were, they tumble out naked; two other men, strolling by, are clothed. Amazing images follow in rapid succession: the two women-monumental like Picasso's beach women, only with wide-brimmed straw hats and picnicky white dresses-soaring high over the landscape; the four men sometimes in need, sometimes in contest. The movement is clever and convincing, but what you're transfixed by are the images.

From the start, Pilobolus has been sculptural rather than musical. Its six dancers collaborate with each other and the choreographers to invent and refine striking poses, extreme situations for the body, intense configurations and confrontations, rather than to provide kinetic excitements. In Star-Cross'd , a piece new this year, Alison Chase has given us a superb example of what the company does best. When the curtain goes up, the stage is black except for the eerie red lighting concentrated on five bodies hanging on ropes from up above, and a sixth on the floor. They're wearing skin-tight flesh-colored body stockings, and they look more naked than if they were naked. They swing through the air, they meet and separate, they descend to earth and rise again, they cling to each other and clash with each other-they're astral bodies at play. The vocabulary is limited-Pilobolus dancers are always being swiveled on each others' hips or being passed from one set of shoulders to another-but the emotional range is large. At the end, the central male dancer, dangling high above the stage, pulls his love up to him for a final star-lit, upside-down kiss. Despite its agitations, this is a tender piece; it may be set in the cosmos, but it never strives to be cosmic. Pilobolus is too smart to be pretentious.

A word about a dance phenomenon that refined my ideas about being stuck in hell: the Seventh New York International Ballet Competition. Twenty-four couples from all over the world turned up at Alice Tully Hall to attempt a duet by Jose Limón, Bournonville's Kermesse in Bruges pas de deux and the grand pas de deux from La Bayadère . It was the lunatic notion of those in charge that the dancers not be told what they were to dance until they arrived in New York three weeks before the competition began. Except for a Danish couple, they were clearly all unacquainted with Bournonville's style (it can take a lifetime to master), and because they were almost all minor-league talents, they were helpless before the exacting demands of La Bayadère . One night I watched 12 couples miss the point of the Bournonville, another night I saw 12 couples nervously pick their way through the notoriously difficult Petipa. Watching all this was like having formaldehyde dripped into your veins. What were the organizers dreaming of? And how embarrassing for the great Natalia Makarova, "chairperson" of the jury and famous both for dancing and for staging La Bayadère , to be presiding over this travesty.

The jury made the best of a bad situation, for the most part distributing the medals judiciously-not that there was much choice, given how few even modestly interesting dancers were in competition. (Tellingly, no gold medal was awarded to a woman.) The ceremonies at the closing-night "gala" were stunning in their self-congratulatory fatuity. And then came the big announcement: Because the competition was such a wonderful success, from now on it would be held every other year, not merely every third year. Forewarned is forearmed.

The stark decor, a mixture of meatpacking utilitarian and high-tech chic, is like a stage set for a play that takes place in the brasserie of a European railway station during the war. The walls are scarred brick, the floor distressed concrete, and the booths (complete with wooden overhead luggage racks) were taken from Belgian trains. But much of the patina and industrial feeling are lost in the wake of the flat, rust-colored paint covering the ironwork and ceiling. Booths separate the mirrored front bar from the dining room, which is lit by photographic lights on overhanging square grids. Polished wood tables are inlaid with orange circles and rectangles that glow in the reflection of votive candles. The open kitchen is so bright, it's hard to see the rest of the room when facing it (a shield over the lights would help). The mezzanine houses a quieter, if somewhat claustrophobic, dining room. We were shown up here on a Saturday night, when the crush at the door was so intense that you could barely get inside. When we returned on a Sunday night, the restaurant was half empty. We sat downstairs next to a friendly Giants fan, smarting from the afternoon's defeat, who kept leaning over to our table and chatting as if still at the game.

Perhaps it was his stint beneath Barneys that gave Mr. Strausman the idea for having both a designer and bridge line, like Calvin Klein's cK or Donna Karan's DKNY. If Campagna is Mr. Strausman's designer collection, Chinghalle offers his bridge line: pared-down, simpler fare that, like the decor, has something of a 40's feel, with dishes such as Waldorf crab salad. At first glance, the food looks like a bargain, with main courses under 20 bucks. But this is deceptive, since most first courses are in the double digits. The dishes are generous and accessible, but the kitchen-under chef de cuisine Matthew Gavzie, who worked with Mr. Strausman at Fred's and Coco Pazzo-is still settling down.

Start with the wild boar sausage and you won't be disappointed. Thick, moist slices, tasting faintly of fennel and garlic, arrived on a bed of syrupy beans that had been perfectly cooked and flavored with molasses. The grilled calamari was also wonderful: lightly breaded, charred and tender, needing nothing more than a squeeze of lemon to please.

One of the dishes was listed as "Three frog legs with lemon and parsley." Why three? This question really bothered my husband. "If you sell an uneven number of orders, what happens to the extra leg?" he asked the waitress.

"Lots of people ask that question," she said, laughing. "I don't know."

But when she set the plate in front of me, there were four legs. (The menu has since been changed to simply read "frog legs.") I tried to interest my 12-year-old son in a bite, adding the standard line ("It tastes just like chicken"), but he refused.

"Mom, I don't want to eat an amphibian, O.K.?"

He was right to avoid the amphibian. Its large limbs, garnished with lemon and parsley, were tough and tasteless.

He ordered the grilled pizza of the day to start, and it was a wise choice. The thin, crisp crust was dripping with melted cheese (not just three, as advertised, but four: Gruyère, Parmesan, Taleggio and Gorgonzola-but who's counting?).

After tasting a few dishes, I began to wonder whether someone had told the kitchen to avoid salt. A chopped salad made from a selection of lettuces with tomato and cucumber was fine, except it badly needed salt. So did the soggy French fries, which were served with three indistinguishable dipping sauces. Cornish game hen, prepared like coq au vin, was way overcooked-and under-salted.

The food here isn't something to think about. These are dishes to hunker down over on a cold night with a good bottle of Sangiovese from the well-priced and largely Italian list. St. Louis pork ribs were so moist and tender that they literally fell off the bone when dipped in the bowl of spicy sauce. The strip steak looked a bit meager but had an excellent beefy flavor that was deepened by a fine sauce Diane (a brown sauce with cream and red wine vinegar). On a Sunday evening, the grilled fish of the day was salmon, a thick fillet cooked rare in the middle and served on a raft of fat asparagus spears and roast potatoes.

If, like my son, you are a devotee of the Astérix comics, you know that every adventure ends with a feast of wild boar. So one night, having begun dinner with wild boar sausage, he went on, unfazed, to consume a bowl of penne topped with "chinghalle" sauce. It was almost as good as the sausage. The boar, which is not from France but Texas, was braised in red wine with tomatoes and shredded over the pasta. "Baked cavatelli with Sicilian casserole" turned out to be tuna casserole, homey and satisfying, made with canned Italian tuna mixed with mushrooms, bread crumbs and Parmesan cheese in a rich béchamel sauce.

Service is very friendly, but there was a long wait between main courses and desserts. The latter are still being worked on, but they include a minimalist banana split that could use more toppings (how about some brownies and M&M's?), and a Valrhôna chocolate cake would have been good had it been warmer. A key lime tart and an ice cream sandwich made with chocolate-chip cookies and vanilla ice cream were nothing special.

Chinghalle is already wildly popular, but it is also wildly uneven. "I have a question," my son asked halfway through dinner on our second visit. "Is the food in a restaurant usually better when you're seated right by the kitchen?"

He's catching on fast.

CHINGHALLE

*

50 Gansevoort Street

242-3200

Dress: Casual

Noise level: High but bearable

Wine list: Mostly Italian, reasonably priced

Credit cards: All major

Price range: Main courses $15 to $21

Dinner: Sunday to Wednesday, 5:30 p.m. to midnight; Thursday, Friday and Saturday, 5:30 p.m. to 1:30 a.m.

Among others in the hushed dining room the other day, there was Anne Cox Chambers, the communications heiress and former U.S. Ambassador to Belgium, lunching confidently alone. There was arts patroness Maureen Cogan sitting next to a woman with a crown of yellow hair. There was Judy Peabody with photographer David Seidner and real estate executive David Jackson. And on April 23, Viscount David Linley, the 37-year-old British craftsman–and the son of Princess Margaret, beloved sister of Queen Elizabeth, and the world-class photographer Lord Snowdon–was enthroned on a banquette.

Happy, but jetlagged from a tour of some of the West Coast Neiman Marcus stores that sell his fine line of decorative household accessories made in wood, Viscount Linley ordered a cheeseburger. "An American cheeseburger with French fries, please," he told the elegant maître d' who took his order. "I reckon if you stick to the same thing every day for lunch when you are traveling, you know where you are. And it is one less decision to make."

This sort of mental decisiveness must run in the family. Queen Elizabeth rarely worries about what to give for presents, thanks to her nephew. Recently, when the Queen toured South Korea, she presented First Lady Lee Hee Ho with a David Linley wooden inlaid box lined in velvet. Last year, when she traveled to Kuala Lumpur, she gave the Malaysian queen a different Linley box. Yet another Linley accessory was given by the Queen to the Crown Prince of Brunei during a royal visit.

"We arrived in the States the day before yesterday and started off our tour at the Neiman Marcus at Fashion Island at Newport Beach. Best day we ever had tradewise," Viscount Linley said, beaming. "America is wonderful. A huge percentage of our core business is here, our core business being our commissions."

Since opening his business, called David Linley & Company, in 1985, the Viscount's made-to-order commissions in the United States have ranged from a grand table for the board of trustees at the Metropolitan Museum of Art to various boxes and decorative follies he has designed for Blaine and Robert Trump's country house in upstate New York. In terms of ready-made items, the line goes from $16 doorstops to a $350,000 cabinet made in collaboration with the Sèvres porcelain company in France. Bergdorf Goodman is the exclusive outlet for Linley in New York. A special line called the Metropolitan Collection, inspired in part, Viscount Linley said, by the Sutton Place apartment of fashion designer Bill Blass, which he visited last year, was launched at a cocktail party April 27 at the Fifth Avenue store. A small dinner followed at Nan Kempner's Fifth Avenue apartment.

"I like to say we can make anything in wood," Viscount Linley said. The "we" is not only royal. Viscount Linley speaks in the plural tense to credit his 30-plus staff toiling back at the Linley studio on the Pimlico Road in London where, last year, he reported more than $8 million in total sales.

Ever expanding, Viscount Linley recently teamed up with the interior design team at Ralph Lauren and was commissioned to decorate a private yacht to be docked in New Zealand. "People have tried to get us into the boat business for some time, but it was Hamilton South, president of Ralph Lauren, who convinced us," he said. "There are so many super yachts being built nowadays. I don't know where the people go with them. Because the people who can afford them haven't got the time to use them."

His design for the yacht was not unlike the composed elements of the Carlyle dining room. "Rather than turning it into a rich caravan, it was like this room," he said, eating his American lunch. "Nothing to suggest there's anything out of the ordinary about your life."

He paused. Smiled at the woman to his left sitting at the next table. "We're pretending not to listen," she said coquettishly.

"Feel free," Viscount Linley responded.

From Newport Beach, he traveled to the Neiman Marcus in Palo Alto. "Silicon Valley! How exciting. It's like a gold rush there, isn't it?" Next stop was St. Louis, which he pronounced properly and then corrected himself. "Louis," he said, almost whistling the name in French. "I had an interesting time; very sensible pace of life in St. Louis."

A gathering at the Neiman Marcus store there brought him in close contact with his adoring customers. "Doorstops sold extremely well yesterday in St. Louis, let me tell you. I signed them all." Questions about his personal life and the royal family were not bothersome. "I dodge the bullet. If someone raises their hand and asks about them, I start talking about cabinets and they fall asleep."

Viscount Linley did allow that reports of Princess Margaret having been severely burned by bathwater during a recent holiday in Mustique are highly exaggerated. London tabloids say she is so ill she will miss the wedding of Prince Edward and Sophie Rhys-Jones on June 19.

"She burned her feet terribly and it hurts like crazy, I think, but it is not life-threatening," he reported.

"Everyone in St. Louis seemed pretty excited that my wife Serena is having a baby in June," he said, then smiled. "They all clapped. That was really sweet." Viscount Linley and his wife, the daughter of Viscount Petersham, a rich Anglo-Irish peer, recently put their London flat, in a former school in Battersea, on the market and are looking for new digs. The Linleys also have a house in Provence.

The bill came: $93.64 before gratuity.

"Hmmm," said Viscount Linley, a curious guest. "The next time you're in London, I'll take you to lunch at a wonderful Scottish restaurant I know."

Where?

"McDonald's," he laughed. "Ever heard of it?"

Billy's List: Quiz time!

1. Who is Huey R. Freeman?

a. Editor in chief of DNR , the men's wear newspaper.

b. The hero of The Boondocks , a new syndicated comic strip.

c. Henry Kissinger's best friend.

2. Astounded by the high cost of estate gardening at the new country place, who recently said, "I know now why plants are green–they're the same color as money"?

a. Michael Caine.

b. Lynn Nesbit.

c. Anne Bass.

3. According to The Wall Street Journal , who has the longest waiting list in Silicon Valley?

a. The makers of Range Rovers.

b. Child psychiatrists.

c. Ariel Bunker, designer of extraordinary wine cellars.

Answers: (1) b; (2) a; (3) b.