Chau-Giang Thi Nguyen and R. Couri Hay

World-renowned concert pianist and painter Chau-Giang Thi Nguyen, known to her friends as Coco, spent last Wednesday morning running around her gigantic two-floor apartment in Soho preparing for an “artist showing” that was to be held in her honor that evening at the BoConcept store on Greene Street. There, the walls were being covered with the Vietnamese-born artist’s paintings: bright splashy watercolors, some of which had already been bought by the litany of notable New York names that make up the 37-year-old’s inner social circle.

“I’m having all my friends wear traditional Vietnamese dresses made by my friend Duc Hung,” Coco told the Transom, motioning to her own walls, where the exotic gowns hung like art. Mr. Hung himself sat quietly nearby, an old friend from the Hanoi School of Music and Fine Arts, where Coco studied from age 8. (It was still the morning, so Coco was in daytime Missoni.)

“We’re collaborating on an underwater opera as well,” she said, while Mr. Hung smiled bashfully. This type of collaboration is not unusual for Coco, who runs her home like a cultural salon for all types of creatives, from gallery owners and tech entrepreneurs to celebrities and artists.

In Vietnamese, Ms. Nguyen's name translates to “river of diamonds,” an apt description of Coco’s place in New York’s social milieu. In her hallway, there are photos of the social fixture with Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt on the red carpet, back when she was engaged to the Oscar-winning TV and movie producer Brian Grazer. (Their relationship lasted five years; she got to keep the ring, and they remain friendly.) So is a picture of Paul Allen sitting in the foyer at her grand piano. Di Modica, the Italian artist who created the Wall Street Bull sculpture, is a frequent guest, as are the photographers Peter Beard and Arthur Elgort, whom she estimates have taken 800 and 400 photos of her, respectively.

“We met in Soho,” she said of Mr. Elgort, “back when I was studying at Juilliard for music and was taking classes in the morning and night at Fordham. We were somewhere where there was a piano with sun shining on it, and I just began to play. The next day he sent over like 20 photos he had taken of me as a gift.”

“I had no idea who he was, so I would give them away as gifts to people at the hair salon,” she continued.

When we arrived at her apartment, she had just been messengered a copy of Eric Schmidt’s book The New Digital Age, which had come out the day before. Page Six has had a field day romantically linking the Google exec to the pretty Vietnamese artist, though she shies away from the topic.

“We’ve known each other for five years,” she said. “He’s my adviser and also bought some paintings.” Asked to describe the relationship or his capacity as an adviser, she held firm: “We are good friends.”

A source close to the couple told the Transom, “Eric is always telling Coco she is the smartest person he knows, and vice versa.” He is also helping her create a YouTube channel so she can showcase her work and that of her friends to young Vietnamese children. (She is looking to have Digital Age translated into Vietnamese.)

If Coco can act as a sort of accidental muse to boldfaced names, she has plenty of her own talent to go around too. Last September she played a solo concert at Carnegie Hall, and this summer she will be going to Monaco with Robert Redford and several artists to showcase their work at the region’s largest museum, Océanographique. The classically trained Coco will be the only performer of the bunch, and her performance will be accompanied by a giant coffee table book of her artwork, published by Rizzoli. “Most people give away CDs, I give away art books,” she told the Transom.

“Well, I also give away my CDs,” she added.

She gave away a lot more that day than just CDs: before the interview, Coco generously offered us not only one of the bespoke Vietnamese dresses, but a piece of original artwork as well. And if we wanted a signed copy of Digital Age?

“That shouldn’t be a problem,” she said.

Alex Karpovsky at Red Flag screening. (Getty Images)

And his fans aren’t always those you might expect.

Just last week, the Transom was walking through Union Square with Mr. Karpovsky, en route to lunch, when an older man stopped the actor on the street. He just really wanted to say how much he liked the show. Mr. Karpovsky estimates that this happens "a couple times" a day.

And in case we didn’t believe him, cut to Lincoln Center last Friday night, where Mr. Karpovsky was playing host to a double screening of his two most recent directorial efforts and old Russian men made up a sizable chunk of the Karpovosky fan club.

Then again, it was all the way up at Lincoln Center, and the movies--which were picked up by Tribeca Films for distribution--had an earlier screening on Wednesday downtown. That one ended up making it into Page Six, if only to note that his two much more private male co-stars, Adam Driver and Christopher Abbott, were in attendance.

At Lincoln Center, Mr. Karpovsky held court over approximately 50 people, talking about the films, Red Flag and Rubberneck, both of which were made three years ago. In the former, Mr. Karpovsky plays himself as a kind of fatalistic Larry David/Woody Allen sad-sack shmuck on a cross-country roadtrip to promote his (real) faux-documentary, Woodpecker. (With us so far?) In the latter, a psychosexual thriller, he plays a creepy scientist who indulges an unhealthy obsession with a coworker after a one-night stand.

Surprised by Mr. Karpovsky’s output? Don’t be. In the time of B.G. ("Before Girls”), Mr. Karpovsky was a reasonably prolific filmmaker, with other movies like Trust Us, This Is All Made Up, The Whole Story and the aforementioned Woodpecker. He's acted in dozens more.

And if this is Mr. Karpovsky's big moment--his arrival on the scene, as it were--he's not going to let it fly by with false modesty. Though he doesn't read the oceans of commentary, nor the commentary on the commentary, about Girls that's practically inescapable if you read newspapers, magazines or the Internet, he does manage to find out what's being written about himself.

"I just have a Google alert for my name," he said. "Though it's quite porous."

With an inescapable cloud of Girls-fame hanging over him, Mr. Karpovsky did confess that fans often confuse him for Ray, as have recent interviewers. But the truth is that there’s less of Mr. Karpovsky in his most famous character than one may think. Ray is a Greek Orthodox orphan while Mr. Karpovsky comes from a Jewish family in Boston, where his father is a scientist. Ray is sour and prone to screaming matches over stuff like (literal) garbage while Mr. Karpovsky is harder to ruffle.

"They'll just use Ray and Alex interchangeably," he said, referring to journalists and Internet fans alike. "Sometimes I let it go. Other people will say 'That's the most Jewishy-Jewy motherfucker. How is he not Jewish?'" -Drew Grant

Joey Ramone's passport. (Courtesy of RR Auction)

It’s rare to find a passport for sale by a reputable vendor, but if you can pass for a young man named Jeff Ross Hyman, then the New Hampshire-based RR Auction has an item you might be interested in. Sure, the current bid is $4,840 for the international identification card once owned by Joey Ramone, but it’s worth every penny.

In fact, each of the 81 lots currently up for auction in the Joey Ramone Collection is a priceless piece of punk-pop history, as evidenced by the bevy of fans lined up outside The Bowery Electric on February 7, hoping to catch a glimpse of the artifacts during a special two-hour display. They might have been surprised by the contents.

Though RR deals mostly in signed items such as: letters, photos and books, according to the company’s vice president of marketing and sales, Bobby Livingston, there’s always room for exceptions—especially when it came to Joey Ramone.

“We actually got to know Joey back in the ’80s,” Mr. Livingston told the Transom when we caught up with him at the Midtown Sheraton earlier this week. “He showed up in Amherst one day outside our building looking to buy autographed Rolling Stones cards.” When the frontman couldn’t afford the $500 or so for the card he wanted, Mr. Livingston recalled, he jumped back into the van to bum the cash from his band’s manager.

“He was just such a sweet kid, and so incredibly passionate about collecting autographs,” Mr. Livingston recalled. Ten years after his untimely death, the story came full circle when RR was approached by Joey Ramone’s estate to help with the selling of the punk rocker’s personal collection. (The proceeds from the Bowery viewing went to the Joey Ramone Foundation for Lymphoma Research.)

There are some surprises beyond the usual concert memorabilia and signed posters. Like two electric guitars, an Epiphone with a sunburst finish and a Stratocaster-style Ibanez Roadstar II. Who even knew the Queens-born singer could play?

“He knew how to pluck out songs,” Mr. Livingston said. “But he only used the A and the E strings.” So far, the guitars are a steal, with the highest bids currently at $1,264 and $1,152, respectively.

More prized, apparently, is the artist’s record collection. There are 97 albums in the lot, only a handful of them from the Ramones’ contemporaries. Aside from some T. Rex, Iggy Pop and Cheap Trick records, the itemized lot contains some unusual picks: Ike and Tina Turner (Workin’ Together), The Righteous Brothers (Greatest Hits), The Four Seasons (2nd Vault of Golden Hits), The Allman Brothers Band (At Fillmore East), Canadian tweenyboppers the DeFranco Family band (Heartbeat, It’s a Lovebeat) and Peter, Paul and Mary (10 Years Together).

If we had to pick one item to bid on, it’d be a toss-up. On one hand, there’s Joey Ramone’s Rolodex—Geffen Records! Lucinda Williams! Wayne Kramer! Sushi restaurants in the city! But really, it’s only valuable if no one has changed phone numbers since 2001, which might explain why it’s only going for $533 at the moment.

On the other hand, there are the front man’s scribbled musings on various scraps, like lyrics to the unreleased “Elevator Operator,” penned on an Alka-Seltzer box; his thoughts on watching Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction for the first time, written on Hotel Buena Vista stationery; and a ripped sheet of notebook paper with the author’s thoughts on capital punishment: “Slowly sinkin drifting off subconsious / You get what you see / Death penalty should be reinstated / A life for a life.”

And yes, that’s the original spelling.

Of course, the sartorial collector won’t be disappointed either, not with the array of ammo-adorned belts and leather pants, the official Simpsons bomber jacket (from when the Ramones lent their voices to the cartoon), the Late Show and Beavis and Butt-head T-shirts and the studded fingerless gloves.

But you’ll want to hurry hurry hurry. With the online auction ending this Thursday at 7 p.m., by the time you read this, you’ll only have about twenty-twenty-twenty-four hours to go before the last bids are tallied.

Tao Lin (Wikipedia)

If you were wondering what kind of people fork over money for a class taught by the guy who live-blogged Hurricane Sandy for Thought Catalog while on Ecstasy, well, they’re pretty much what you’d expect.

“Suck it, Paul Dano!” crowed one young Williamsburg resident, referring to a play in which the actor had recently appeared. “I say ‘James Franco’ whenever something bad happens,” said another.

Finally, Mr. Lin arrived in his signature hoodie and plaid shirt. He kept his eyes cast to the floor and mumbled questions so softly that his students looked at each other, confused, until someone had the courage to ask him to repeat himself.

The topic of the night was George Saunders’s short story, “CivilWarLand in Bad Decline.”

“I’m surprised that so many of you got the thing with the ghosts,” Mr. Lin said. “I didn’t get that part at all. I also felt like the language was too idiomatic.”

Later in the two-hour session, the author of Shoplifting From American Apparel explained that Mr. Saunders operated with the premise that art has a moral function, and questioned the effectiveness of stories written by a man who once claimed in an interview to “know nothing.”

“Saunders reinforces what I already feel. Curtis Sittenfeld [whose work was also read in the class] forces you to relate to someone else’s point of view,” Mr. Lin said. Additional words of wisdom included “selling out is very moral,” and “I think you are making the world a worse place,” in reference to something the Transom said about art, reality or some such.

Nevertheless, the dozen and a half students attending the class—who ranged in age from slightly younger than Mr. Lin’s own 29 years to a woman who talked about working at a bank “before you were born”—seemed satisfied. Later, on the train, Mr. Lin told the Transom that we should have come a week earlier, when he had taken “a lot more drugs” before his lecture. Then he tried to sell us some sunglasses he said he had stolen from LensCrafters before kneeling on the floor and scooping up the dust of an Adderall tablet, which he had accidentally stomped with his boot.

Olivia Wilde, Harvey Weinstein at 'Butter' (PMc)

Last night at the Cinema Society's after party for the premiere of the dark satire Butter, The Observer found Animal Practice's Justin Kirk lounging around on one of the black leather couches at Double 7, just one day after his show's second episode.

Animal Practice has been getting a lot of love, so much so that New York magazine dedicated four whole pages in this week's issue to its star. Not to Mr. Kirk--who had just finished up the last season of Weeds, on which he stole the show as Nancy Botwin's free-spirited brother-in-law Andy--but to Crystal, a capuchin monkey who earns $12,000 per episode on the NBC hit.

We just had to ask ... did Mr. Kirk feel a tiny bit jealous of all the monkey business?

"Whatever, I've been in New York magazine before," the actor replied with faux bravado.

"It's been great working with Crystal; she's bringing a lot of good press to the show, and the whole cast has just been so fun to work with." Mr. Kirk had adopted the glazed-eyed monotone of someone who's just been on too many junkets. We waited.

"Honestly, the whole press thing has been such a circus. I'm just glad that the episodes are now airing, and that the whole show can just ..." He held his arm out straight and dipped it up and down.

"You know."

We couldn't resist. "Has it literally been a circus?"

Mr. Kirk smiled and rolled his eyes. "Yes, yes. Gotta love the monkey."

Meanwhile, the movie's stars Ty Burrell, Alicia Silverstone, Yara Shahidi, Olivia Wilde and Jennifer Garner all made entrances at the nightclub (only Ashley Greene and Rob Corddry dipped after the screening), along with Dominic Cooper and Kelly Bensimon.

There was a noticeable tension between Ms. Garner, wearing a hip-hugging red dress, and Ms. Wilde, in a flowing green gown: the two never posed together for pictures, sat at opposite tables all night, and didn't so much as look at each other, while their publicists hovered by their clients' arms, shooting wary eye-daggers in each other's general direction.

Butter's director, Jim Field Smith, was holding court near the bar. Before the film, we had snuck in late and stood in the back of the theater as Mr. Smith introduced the movie, using a very complicated roller-coaster metaphor that we won't even try to recreate here. When he got to the part about it being a a subversive, dark satire, producer Harvey Weinstein turned to us and agreed: "That's true, it's very subversive."

The British Mr. Smith is best known for Matt LeBlanc's comeback on his show Episodes, another "dark, subversive satire" about American culture, as seen through the eyes of two British screenwriters who move to Hollywood and clash with all the oafish, West Coast stereotypes. As his new movie is an Election-style commentary on the politics of the Iowa State Fair butter-carving contest, we wanted to know one thing.

"Why do you hate America so much?"

"I don't!" He exclaimed. "Look, when it comes to elections and government politics, the British are even more insane than you guys. I like America. I think the film redeems the culture that at first you think it's making fun of."

(To be fair, despite Mr. Weinstein's statement, Butter is not that dark or subversive, although it does qualify as a satire.)

And what about that five minute roller-coaster metaphor speech?

"Oh God, what was I going on about with that?" He moaned. "I don't even like roller coasters."

We didn't bother asking how he felt about monkeys.

Senator Charles Schumer.

“It’s gone viral!” Senator Charles Schumer cried, summarizing Internet Week. Mr. Schumer delivered the keynote address this year, during which he announced his desire for a working group aimed at making New York America’s tech capital.

Mr. Schumer also boosted his own Brooklyn bona fides.

“Close to my house, there were these Jelly Pool concerts that had a hip, artistic crowd,” he recalled. He was referring to the Jelly NYC concerts at Williamsburg’s McCarren Park, a veritable hipster ground zero. “I daresay there are couples because of these concerts!”

His love of trendy Brooklyn concerts aside, Mr. Schumer seems not to understand the Internet. “Sometimes I do type in a topic if I want information,” he admitted of Twitter. Apparently the speed bumps on the information superhighway run both ways. Referring to Senator Patrick Leahy’s Electronic Communications Privacy Amendments Act, Mr. Schumer asked the crowd, “Is anyone here familiar with Leahy’s bill?” There was no response.

ddaddario@observer.com :: @DPD_

The bear, one of an edition of three in the world, is owned by the art-dealing Mugrabi family (the other two belong to billionaire Steve Cohen and The Observer's own Adam Lindemann, who recently hailed the bear as a masterpiece on Art in America's website). The Transom hears that auctioneer Phillips de Pury had previously attempted to beat Christie's to the Mugrabis's bear with a cool $10M guarantee to sell it. The Mugrabis turned it down, along with an $8M offer on the bear from an unidentified private buyer. Instead, they chose Phillips competitor Christie's--despite no such guarantee--which is putting the massive sculpture on the auction block this Wednesday. Christie's estimate? $4-6M.

What drove the decision? Placement, placement, placement, says Alberto Mugrabi. Not just for the bear's prominent five-month berth at Seagram's Plaza. Mr. Mugrabi also said Christie's will find the bear a good permanent home, which is particularly interesting given that the Mugrabis first purchased the bear from none other than Christie's owner Francois Pinault.

The Mugrabis have placed a heavy wager on a big bear, and Christie's along with it.

At the party, the Transom sidled up to Brett Gorvy, Christie's co-head of contemporary art. Where would he like to see the bear resurface? Sorry, New York: "I'd love to see a major city buy it, in Russia, or Asia, or the Middle East." --Sarah Douglas

“I thought about doors on the Lower East Side covered in stickers—what the LES used to be,” Mr. Johnson told the Transom, standing in front of one of his neon-hued creations. “It’s like New York City for real, going back to that sticker and skateboard culture.”

Mr. Johnson, who is 6-foot-4 and has red hair, is New York royalty of a sort. His father, Richard, is the former Page Six czar and current dean of the Daily’s scandal coverage. His stepmother, Nadine Johnson, oversees a fashion-and-lifestyle PR company.

Her firm doesn’t represent the artist, but it helped out a bit with the reception.

Mr. Johnson originally took up residence in the neighborhood surrounding the gallery in 2004, he said, before it became a tourist hub. “The Lower East Side was more fun then.”

nfreeman [at] observer.com | @nfreeman1234

• One thing they never tell you about Harvard is that it's crawling with rats. After a long night of coding, around 6 in the morning, I used to like to walk down to the Charles and watch the Radcliffe crew team row their boats in the cool calm of dawn. There was a certain beauty to this ritual, the code swimming in my head, the swoosh of the ladies' oars as they came to the catch, the knowledge that soon they would all be updating their status on my Web site. But I couldn't walk out of Kirkland without the big green door slamming behind me, and then all the rats would rush out of the bushes onto the chemically treated lawn of the quad and then out the west gate and onto JFK Boulevard and over to the Dunkin' Donuts to find some crumbs. That was my Harvard. It was a hell, but not a hell of my making. I had to get out. I had to fly. I flew west.

• Yeah, I saw that movie about me. It got some things right and got some things wrong. Sure, I wanted to join a final club. Yeah, I once took a BU chick to a bar. Fine. Something the movie left out is that I really like to quote famous lines of Greek and Latin. I don't just speak code. One of my favorites is: Non serviam. Do you know what that means? Do you know who said it? I bet you don't. Homer is my favorite, but I love them all, even that humorous plagiarist and propagandist Virgil. Another good line is from Aeschylus. I'll go easy on you, no Greek. W. H. Auden rewrote it in English like this: "The earth is an oyster with nothing inside it,/ Not to be born is the best for man." But never be born and you can never join Facebook.

• I am now the Achilles of the Internet, but no Paris will slay me. My hubris has made possible the digitalization of your life. Click SHARE and think of me. Edit your profile to include that great new job you just took, and think of me. Scroll down through your status updates, and hear my voice in your head. Tag that picture of you and your mom when you were 3 years old, and thank me for the memories. Press the INFO tab for that guy who pitched for your Little League team and, oh, he's got a couple kids now, a couple more than you and me. Click NEXT over and over as you scan through all those photos of your ex-girlfriend and her new husband, and know that I'm there, too, looking over your shoulder, weeping right along with you, tears for a love that you two could have had if only she hadn't checked your email and caught you flirting with your other ex, the one who's now a lesbian and runs a vegan restaurant in Austin, Texas. Go to the restaurant's page and click LIKE, and don't let your tears drip into the keyboard. Back to the NEWSFEED. Stop being so sad, press SEE ALL for EVENTS--surely there's somewhere you can go. I'll be there, too. I'm everywhere. I am the 500 million and the 25 billion. I'm everything. You are just you, and I'm you, too. Except you're not me. Which way I fly is Hell; myself am Hell.

Mischief & Mayhem are careful to call themselves a "collective," not a "company." The five founders share a frustration with unoriginal stories, soft censorship and a lack of authority within the publishing industry on the part of authors and readers. They are stubborn and fed up and eager to tell editorial horror stories: editors reading a manuscript once, if at all; editors being laid off two weeks after accepting a manuscript; new editors quitting two weeks before the galleys are completed; offers from publications for free ad space to publishers without enough money to typeset ads; publicists not knowing how to spell an author's name. The Mischief & Mayhem motto is "Because we beg to differ but refuse to beg."

'We're trying for something that isn't wholesome,' Peck said. 'Wholesome is everywhere.'

Mr. Peck, in a pinstriped suit and a purple ascot, stood on a small, elevated stage greeting guests. He is still famous (and infamous) for the scathing reviews he wrote for The New Republic.   

"Now I'm Mr. Nice Guy," he sighed, passing out drink tickets to the press. The feeling in the room was energetic but also a little frightened. What they are doing is not very complicated, but Mischief & Mayhem is attempting to change the way books are published. With OR Books, which is named for its founders John Oakes and Colin Robinson (together they make up half of the business's payroll), they sell directly to customers either e-books or print-on-demand paperbacks. If there is a high demand for the book--if they can move roughly 5,000 copies--the rights are sold to a traditional publisher. The first book published by OR, Going Rouge, an anthology of writing critical of Sarah Palin, was sold to HCI in Florida. It became a best seller. Not dealing with Amazon or Barnes & Noble allows authors a larger cut of the profits, around 50 percent. Authors do not receive an advance, but they stand to make substantially more money if their book sells. The imprint will focus on mid-list books that sell between 5,000 and 15,000 copies, an area of publishing that the founders say is disappearing, eclipsed either by one big blockbuster or many small releases each season.

"I think all signs point to go," Mr. Peck said. "We're not outsiders, and we're not running around with bombs in our hands. We're trying to make publishing better for writers and readers. We're trying for something that isn't wholesome. Wholesome is everywhere. Hey, do you need help with that?" He said, turning to the female dancer, struggling to climb back onto her cube. She was one of Mr. Peck's students at the New School.

"No, no," she said. "I'm O.K." The Observer scribbled notes in a black notepad. A middle-aged woman, smelling of white wine, scoffed, "That's so analog."

"The system is broken at the core," Mr. Oakes said, huddled in one of the room's darker corners. "That's not news." He said the "traditional" industry is as excited as he is about this new model, save the editors. "They still are resistant to this new approach. I feel that we can collaborate very successfully with traditional publishers, but they need to be open to some new ideas. I've been in this business since 1985. It was about the time the personal computer was widespread. People thought that was gonna save publishing. The only thing that's gonna save publishing is to start over."

The imprint's lead title is Ms. Dierbeck's second novel, The Autobiography of Jenny X. Mr. Gibson was the chief editor, but all of her fellow founders have had a hand in editing the book, watching it evolve from draft to finished product--a round-table scrutinizing the collective calls a "resource" they will provide authors. The novel focuses on a dysfunctional marriage. The wife, Nadia, has a torrid past with a former junkie, Christopher, a violent radical activist, now serving a 30-year jail sentence, decrepit and miserable. The book is structured around the collision of these two plots. When Ms. Dierbeck was shopping the book around, commercial presses worried it might offend readers. They were concerned with Christopher being an "antihero." One press asked her to make Christopher "better-looking."

"Any material that takes risks in any way is really under pressure to be removed from mainstream publishing," Ms. Dierbeck said. Her first novel, One Pill Makes You Smaller, was published by Farrar, Strauss & Giroux in 2003. She received a $30,000 advance and the book earned out, barely; it was critically praised, but not a blockbuster. She is Mischief & Mayhem's guinea pig, but she is happy to be if it means creative control of her work. "The pressures are, essentially, financial, but from the artist's perspective we see things we're really concerned about: 'Brilliant book, this is great, on page 25 a child dies; can you remove that?' They don't actually say the book won't sell, but that's the subtext. The other subtext is, 'Change it or we won't publish the book.' Fiction is in danger right now. I feel that commercial pressures have intensified to the extent that editorial feedback feels closer to censorship."

While the content of the group's published fiction is not "wholesome," to use Mr. Peck's word (he cites a scene in his unpublished novel in which a gay character attempts to infect others with H.I.V. as particularly pugilistic to mainstream editors), the founders are also not avant-garde provocateurs. Mr. Peck is an outspoken anti-modernist who believes that the moment Stephen Daedalus goes to college in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, literature took a "wrong turn." Mr. Furst is a graduate of the decidedly wholesome Iowa Writer's Workshop. There is nothing in Ms. Dierbeck's new novel that comes close to the discord of the sex scene between a middle-aged man and an 11-year-old in One Pill Makes You Smaller.

After a few $10 vodka-and-tonics at the bar, everyone circled a stage in the front of the room.

"The publishing revolution is here," Ms. Dierbeck said to the group. "Commerce has started terrorizing art. She's getting beaten up. Right now, tonight, art is free." The crowd applauded.

Mr. Furst took the stage. "I'm going to talk to you about the books we are gonna publish," he said, explaining they were looking for fiction that will "fuck you up." Mischief & Mayhem is currently considering manuscripts by Helen Dewitt and Mike Heppner but will initially serve as a vehicle for the founders to publish their own work. Next will be Mr. Gibson's novel. Mr. Peck's own novel, The Garden of Lost and Found, is tentatively fifth on the docket. It is a victim of all the industry problems the collective is against, having gone through different editors, multiple imprints, buyouts, layoffs, even deaths. He called the long-unpublished book "cursed."

"It's put two companies out of business," Mr. Peck said. "Seven editors have been fired, one editor--Robert Jones--died. I tell people to know what they are getting in for. When we finally schedule it for publication, Mischief & Mayhem will probably go bankrupt."

mmiller@observer.com