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The young, fabulous, cheap beer-swilling, performance-loving-but-not-if-they-have-to-pay-much-for-it people, that is.

It’s TAKEOVER time at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. On Saturday, September 27, the Citadel of Culture will throw open its doors from 9 p.m. to 4 a.m. for a building-wide art party. A $20 advance ticket gets you live music, movies, video art, weird recreational activities and some of the best people-watching money can buy. Beer is $3. And, umm, get there early. By the time I arrived at around 11 p.m. for the first one last November, the place was packed and an army of skinny, shivering, strangely dressed barbarians (i.e. people under 40 living in Brooklyn) jostled at the gates in an uneasy face-off with the definitely not amused security guards.

No, this isn’t the audience (close, though).

It’s “The Warriors,” (Paramount Pictures/Photofest) Walter Hill’s 1979 film about the Coney Island gang that will be shown as part of a mini film festival celebrating Brooklyn (naturally). There will also be a celebration of beer in film. Audience participation welcome.

Meanwhile, Sufjan Stevens will hold court in the Opera House:

Sorry, he won’t be performing, but serving as curator for an evening of music that includes St. Vincent, Naomi Shelton & the Gospel Queens and the Brooklyn Youth Chorus singing Nico Muhly’s “The Sweets of Life.”

Everybody loves Nico these days. He’s everywhere

St. Vincent’s “Jesus Saves, I Spend”

And, of course, because this event is marketed to folks in their 20s and 30s, and we, apparently, were born missing attention spans, there will be a Rec Room lounge, complete with Wii, Guitar Hero, ping-pong and an arcade, video art and DJs, including Vikter Duplaix:

“Make a Baby.” Kids, don’t try this at home.

I’m going to be there, blogging, drinking, scouting for the limited complimentary tote bags being thrown around courtesy of Urban Outfitters, drinking, maybe taking in some art, drinking and conducting a highly scientific study to determine whether any of the folks at TAKEOVER will be at BAM’s increasingly ridiculously misnamed Next Wave festival, which starts on the 30th.

Sure, white people will go for a black president:

Just don’t expect us to dance.

“Fela!,” the new off-Broadway musical about the Nigerian political activist and Afrobeat pioneer Fela Kuti, opens today. I caught a preview last week, and am happy to report that it blows most made-for-children-and-idiots Broadway musicals out of the water. I am even happier to report that some of the white audience members almost obeyed a call to dance, including the ancient, irritable theater critic next to me.

Impressive stuff. We can thank this man:

Sahr Ngaujah as Fela Kuti

O.K., credit might also be due to the show’s director and choreographer, Bill T. Jones, who has figured out how to move from concert dance to musical theater in a way that still eludes Twyla Tharp (No, you cannot convince me that her Billy Joel musical, “Movin’ Out,” was anything other than a travesty. Let’s not even talk about “The Times They Are A-Changin,’” please.).

“Fela!” is still musical theater, a distinctly limited genre that doesn’t tend to encourage nuance and sophistication (for Jones at his absolute best, check out “Reading, Mercy and the Artificial Nigger.”) And the cast, Ngaujah aside, is solid but not transcendent, particularly in the dance passages; their abilities pale next to companies like Urban Bush Women and Evidence.

Nobody does Fela quite like Evidence. This clip is from “Grace,” set to Fela Kuti’s “Shakara.”

But Jones has plenty of subversive fun, and, despite a few hokey moments, the work builds to a grippingly powerful finale. Check out this Soundcheck interview with Jones. And then get thee to the “Fela!” box office.

L-R: Aimee Graham, Irish Wilson, Marcus Phillips, Corey Baker, Jill M. Vallery, Rujeko Dumbutshena, Daniel Soto, Lauren Deveaux, Maia McKinney

The first gig I ever had in New York was an internship at Mouth Almighty, a spoken word label. I’m pretty sure it’s defunct now. I do not mourn its passing.

But I thought of it the other night when I made my first visit to the wonderful Bryant Park Reading Room. This “room,” for those who’ve never been, is simply an open-air seating area, nestled in the park and full of books and magazines. It’s open daily into October, from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m., and it’s definitely worth a visit. The Bryant Park Corporation restarted it in 2003; the original Reading Room was run from 1935 until 1944 by the New York Public Library as a service to the many New Yorkers who had lost their jobs during the Depression.

The current room also hosts free events, including a Sept. 10th lunchtime celebration of the Harlem Renaissance that looks particularly promising. I went for a poetry reading by Kelly Zen–Yie Tsai, Shanxing Wang and John Yau:

Ken Chen, the executive director of the The Asian American Writers’ Workshop, which hosted the evening and also holds lots of worthwhile events

I came for the chance to hear Yau (I’ve written about his criticism here), and he didn’t disappoint - I can’t improve on Chen’s introduction of him as a “grizzled western cowboy hero.” Wang was also compelling, though the combination of his heavy Chinese accent and the ambient noise (the perils of outdoor readings!) made it difficult to understand him.

But my Mouth Almighty flashback came when Tsai read:

She began after trying, twice and not very successfully, to get the audience to yell that we “were ready for some poetry.” Poetry folks aren’t really the best yellers, but Tsai didn’t deliver anyway. Stand-up, political activism, performance, sure - just not poetry.

Tsai’s style is well-suited to an informal outdoor setting - better suited, really, than Yau and Wang’s quieter, nuanced work. She’s loud, lively, funny and her words go down easy, so easy that you forget them as soon as they pass. These are the hallmarks of spoken word, and that’s great. But why on earth try to disguise it as poetry? Worse, why preach, as the Mouth Almighty folks always did, about how this rowdy, vulgar form is the answer to the earnest, churchy, pallid world of poesie? That world has its share of problems, certainly. But spoken word ain’t the solution.

This Labor Day weekend, most of the artists I know didn’t plan getaways. They stayed put, luxuriating in the chance to do nothing but … work. On their art.

We’re all familiar with the plight of working class Americans who have multiple jobs but can’t make ends meet or afford health insurance. But we don’t often associate this plight with artists, even though many of them face it.

One terrible example: an email petition has been circulating to raise money for Jillian Peña, a promising young choreographer who sustained severe injuries after being hit by a car on August 11th. She seems, thankfully, to be mending, but she is uninsured. The medical bills will be staggering.

Jillian Peña’s “Mothership.”

You may recall our debate about the $100 million Koch gift, and my mention of the “2003 Urban Institute survey which found that ‘While 96% of Americans value art in their communities and lives only 27% value artists.’”

We don’t hear about artists’ struggles because we don’t see art-making as legitimate work; if I had a dollar for every time I heard a politician pit a “frivolous” cause like the arts against “real” social issues, I could pay off Jillian’s medical fees myself.

Recently, I met with Katherine DeShaw, the executive director of United States Artists, a private organization dedicated to one simple, beautiful goal: giving money to artists, no strings attached. And it’s serious money: $50,000, a decent year’s salary.

“There’s a sense of righting a wrong - it’s been a really, really tough 15 years for artists in this country,” DeShaw said, citing that hateful 96/27 statistic. “As a friend said, ‘You want the painting on the wall, but you don’t want the artist in the living room.’”

USA is only two and a half years old, and the nominating system isn’t perfect; as DeShaw acknowledged, there’s been an imbalance toward the visual arts, and toward male fellows. Too, some people worry that USA is drawing down funds that could be better used in pre-existing systems.

But the good here seems to dwarf the bad. A glance at the fellows shows many worthy recipients, including artists you can see in New York this fall: Paul Chan, who will visit the New Museum this month; Joanna Haigood, the artistic director of Dancing in the Streets’ “Breaking Ground,” which will present its next site-specific Charrette in October and Sigi Moeslinger and Masamichi Udagawa of Antenna Design, whose innovations abound in our subways and streets.

Enjoy. And remember: no artists, no art.

Scenes from the 2006 Dance Charrette

The Collegiate Chorale will open its 67th season on December 8th with Verdi’s haunting Requiem. It is now a sadly fitting beginning, after the terrible news last week of the sudden death of its longtime conductor, Robert Bass.

Bass was 55. He died of complications from amyloidosis, a rare disease in which abnormal proteins are deposited in the body’s organs or tissue.

I interviewed him in 2007, a few months after he had a heart transplant. He was then preparing for a return to conducting, which included requiems by Brahms and Mozart. He described the experience of living with their music as comforting, but added that it had taken awhile to return to his life’s work.

“I couldn’t listen to music right away,” he said, “The rest of me had to settle down, psychologically, emotionally and intellectually, till everything was absorbed and I was ready to go back to this place, and feel it differently and be vulnerable in this new way.”

The chorale’s season will be dedicated to Bass. I plan to be at Carnegie Hall on December 8th, and I’m sure lots of New Yorkers do, too, to remember an artist who had a deep connection to his native city. The chorale is internationally renowned, yet there is something homey about it, something deeply New York.

“This discovery about people in New York, who you think have heard it all and seen it all, and may be a little jaded or a little brusque, has been by and large the opposite: kind, supportive and generous,” Bass said during that same interview. “I’ve experienced it on all levels. It has given me tremendous strength and helped to reinforce a positive outlook. You have to keep that with you when you get better and you go on. Let’s assume I get all better and I go on. I want to keep that feeling and that relationship with people.”

A few reasons to go see Jack Ferver’s “Meat,” showing tonight at the Dixon Place, and September 4-6:

1. Ferver, in the flesh:

2. In addition to its more outrageous aspects, “Meat” offers a nuanced and surprisingly universal exploration of sexual desire. It’s worth seeing for the eye-play alone.

3. Ferver can scream like nobody’s business.

4. “Meat” is a diptych: The first half builds on material Ferver has adapted from a New Museum split bill that he shared with this:

But the second half is all new, and it attempts to understand the infamous astronaut lady - you know, the one with the diapers …

5. “Meat,” which boasts $15 tickets, is part of HOT! The 17th Annual New York City Celebration of Queer Culture. It’s a reminder of how queer culture, with its wonderfully elastic notions of identity, is New York culture. Go celebrate yourself.

6. The Dixon Place’s new home, which has been in the works since God was a teenager, is slated for its grand opening this fall. I already miss the grungy, homey “old” Dixon Place. Go check it out before it disappears.

In honor of the art of politics, and the politics of art, and these conventions that we all love to hate but watch anyway, I bring you:

Burning Dems: Fear and ecstasy from Denver to Black Rock City.

This blog (full disclosure, it’s run in part by a friend of mine) has a strange and short life. As the introductory post explains:

“Sometimes life doles out coincidences so remarkable that to not act would be crazy. Insane. You’re walking down the street when the ice cream truck is giving away free cones. You say “Yes I can. I can eat that cone.” Prince shows up unannounced in Prospect Park to play a set with Maceo Parker. You say “Yes I can. I can go to that concert.” When Burning Man and the Democratic National Convention fall on the same week and readily present themselves as dueling extravaganzas, we said “Yes we can. Let the blogging begin.

So for the this week of fire and politics and parties, we’ll chatter about what each event does right, or wrong. And why they matter. Or don’t.”

If you do not see the video please install the latest flash player.

Maybe next time around the conventions could be held at Burning Man …

Last weekend, I had one of those wonderfully strange New York adventures, courtesy of a friend of a friend of a friend who happens to be a pastry chef at one of the city’s elite restaurants. It’s the kind of place I won’t be able to afford to go to until I’m wearing dentures (which, hopefully, will be strong enough to allow me to enjoy the experience fully). Luckily, though, it didn’t cost anything to be snuck into the kitchen after midnight, following a circuitous path through the restaurant’s industrial, decidedly unglamorous bowels until we got to a little warren of marvelous rooms full of (mostly) men in white, vials full of all manner of strange edible items, mysterious machines and, most importantly, beauties like this:

Now you see it …

The juxtaposition between end product and work area was surreal. It reminded me of the few times I’ve been ferreted backstage at New York City Ballet, only to watch the ethereal creatures I had just seen on stage sweating and swearing like sailors while ripping off their pointe shoes and searching for cigarettes (it’s a rare interview I’ve conducted with a ballet dancer who didn’t light up a cigarette, only to immediately snicker and bark “This is OFF the record!” Fabulous.)

Now you don’t…

And it also got me thinking of how often food is used by artists or art organizations to signal all manner of things about themselves. We do this all the time in other areas, of course - not for nothing was Hillary Clinton downing shots and slices on the campaign trail, and there are particularly interesting parallels between the consumption of food and art, and how we use our actions in both of these realms to advertise our adventurousness, or financial status (as I just did at the start of this post), or even our deeply rooted political and social beliefs. Not for nothing does the politically minded Bread and Puppet Theater ask its audience to break bread with it after shows.

And, speaking of City Ballet, you may recall when one of its marketing initiatives, “Girls’ Night Out,” which featured girl talk with female dancers and, of course, desserts, raised the hackles of some female dance goers, who felt that offering sweets and gossip as an enticement wasn’t doing this serious art form, or feminism, any favors. Like it or not, the company was saying some very particular things about ballet with this ticket deal - if there was alcohol on hand, you can bet it was champagne. No cheap beer and twinkies here.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, when Nature Theater of Oklahoma presented “No Dice,” its lyrical and absurd epic of the every day, sandwiches, soda and candy was served. I had PB&J, a Pepsi and M&M’s - delicious, and the perfect meal to present your company as egalitarian and every man (not to mention a fine riff on dinner theater, a phenomenon whose explanation lies beyond my limited critical powers). The directors even made the sandwiches for us.

Interestingly, alcohol and food are often available during shows at some of the younger theaters and performance series around the city, which often present themselves in opposition to the status quo of stodgy old institutions, where it’s a mortal sin to sneak food or beverage into the theater. These younger places want to have their beer and see their art, too.

Finally … you might remember this post of mine way back in June about FIAF’s “Crossing the Line” festival. The curators Lili Chopra and Simon Dove are looking to explode boundaries between genres, and to cross-pollinate all manner of cultures. So it makes sense that they would bring food into the mix. Check it out: something to add to your calendar.

So, a couple of months ago I found myself in a hotel bar in Durham, North Carolina, with Meredith Monk. Really.

I had made the tragic mistake of ordering a margarita (don’t ask) and, seeing that the night wasn’t salvageable, muttered something about going up to my room to drown my sorrows in whichever channel happened to be holding a “Law & Order” marathon that night. I muttered this quietly because, really, who wants to admit a weakness for “Law & Order” to one of the endlessly imaginative, uncategorizable artists of our time? The woman is insanely cultured - and happens to be a practicing Buddhist.

She also, apparently, has good hearing. Immediately, her eyes lit up, she got this big goofy grin on her face and gushed, “I love that show!”

Of course she does. She’s a New Yorker, after all.

I’m always struck how many people in this city have a big thing for the show. You might remember that I got into a bit of trouble with one of my readers for saying that “Sex and the City” tied into a deep-seated New York mythology, hence its popularity:

“Interestingly, ‘Sex’ the series was predicated on another myth, the myth of E.B. White’s three New Yorks. ‘Sex’ dove into the New York of the settlers, who come in quest and lend the city its passion (o.k., the three New Yorks is totally cliched. Bear with me). This New York is made for lovers, not spouses: the frothy incandescence of the first kiss, the bloody surface wound of the unreturned phone calls.”

I think the L&O phenomenon can be traced to another New York myth, one that’s just as powerful and, in its own way just as romantic, but rooted in darker feelings about the city: New York as labyrinth of dark alleyways and empty streets, where anything might happen - and not in a good way. As the city has gotten so much safer and, some feel, so much blander since the free-for-all years of the 1970s, a show like L&O, which is shot entirely on location in the city and teems with New York archetypes, offers safe little “authentic” thrills of menace.

So, anyway, while we’ve been discussing frivolous things like waterboarding and why the Olympics stink, one of the L&O stalwarts, Chris Noth, aka Criminal Intent’s Det. Mike Logan, has quietly exited the show (again). I thought a moment of silence was due - despite the fact that he will be appearing in numerous L&O marathons long after we’ve all exited this earth. Let’s just hope Noth hasn’t left to film anymore “Sex and the City” movies.

Logan is one of those New York archetypes, of course - the hard-drinking cop with the checkered past, big temper and bigger heart.

We wish you well, Logan. And if you happen to come across a ditzy, diminutive blond teetering on her Manolos, run like hell.

**WARNING: This post contains a very big photo of a man’s head**

Did you all see the sky last night, around 7:45? It was incredible - luminous, clear, and the air was at that perfect temperature where you forget that such a thing as temperatures exist. If New York weather were like this all the time we wouldn’t have any culture (insert joke about perfect climate of some city - you know the candidates - that we all secretly wished we lived in much of the year).

Thankfully, this weather has arrived at a time when there is, in relative terms, precious little to do around town, and when most of us, if we aren’t on vacation, have slipped into that dreamy, somewhat removed state known as “girding our loins in preparation for the madness that is the fall arts season in New York.” It’s a Quixotic effort to build up reserves of calm.

I’ve been reading Oscar Wilde’s “The Critic as Artist,” which, fittingly, opens “With Some Remarks Upon the Importance of Doing Nothing.” This should be required yearly reading for all New Yorkers (that phrase, at least). In fact, maybe it should be our book club pick - no, I haven’t forgotten. I’m just slow.

I’ve also been thinking about some of the art I’ve seen lately - being able to really reflect is a luxury that I don’t always have, especially if I’m reviewing every night. Truthfully, much of the work I encounter doesn’t engender an awful lot of reflecting; it’s not great, it’s not terrible, it’s just there, like a polite dinner guest whose name you keep forgetting.

This has been the case for most shows I’ve seen at the Fringe festival, this year and in past years. But it wasn’t true of “Zombie,” which I mentioned last week. Its run ends tonight at 7:15, and you should check it out if you have nothing to do, and want to be seriously disturbed:

And you wonder why he’s stuck in my head …

Bill Connington adapted this one-man show from Joyce Carol Oates’ novella about a sexual psychopath. Oates tends to annoy the hell out of me, but here her words were murderously good (though they do seem, at times, to be straying uncomfortable close to linking homosexual repression and pedophilia - made me a little squirmy). Connington’s adaptation and Thomas Caruso’s direction are old-fashioned in the best possible way: they don’t try to reinvent any wheels or be strange for strangeness’ sake. They’ve got powerful material, and they stay out of its way.

But thinking about the idea of solid, traditional theater made me think of one of the events that I’m most excited about for the fall, a highly opinionated festival that promises to offer a wholly experimental take on theater: “PRELUDE ‘08.” I’ll be writing more about this as we get closer to the September 24 start date, but just wanted to make sure it’s on everyone’s radar.

O.K. Go back to daydreaming - hope you can get this photo out of your head.