How can we be so sure that they’re not really a type of Stephen Colbert-style performance art group?

Case in point:

While in Times Square launch a public service drive called “I Participate,” the mayor told MTV that he’s betting on Lady Gaga to take home the most trophies at the upcoming Video Music Awards.

I hate my body.

You can’t win with these people:

It’s O.K. if P.S. 1 wants to show vulvas in extreme close-up. (I don’t believe in censorship.) What’s not O.K. is that the only warning to parents was a tiny sign at the entrance to the gallery. The wording was clear — “These galleries contain graphic imagery. Parent/adult discretion is advised” — but the size and style of the sign made it unlikely that any harried parent would even notice it.

P.S. 1 is hardly the only local museum that has let me down. A Takashi Murakami show at the Brooklyn Museum in 2008 was a major draw for parents and kids. The first piece on display, a teaser in the museum’s lobby, was a playful sculpture of cartoonlike characters, which made my sons want to see more.

So it came as a shock when, entering the main exhibition space, we were greeted by a masturbating cowboy spinning a lasso of his semen.

A preview of the next installment of MTV’s Real World, shot this season on Pier 41 in Red Hook:

The look of the Red Hook apartment feels equally premillennial. It is in a converted old warehouse with a canoe propped up outside. The show introduces cast members in different spots all over Brooklyn — Brooklyn Heights, Coney Island — as if it were a single neighborhood spackled with pizza and Junior’s cheesecake rather than a place of varied neighbors. The fantasy is that the yuppies never invaded, and the $7 million brownstones and $25-a-pound wild salmon don’t exist.

As [Salt Lake City-raised] Chet explains when he lands in the borough, speaking just under the Brooklyn Bridge: “Brooklyn is usually spoken of as more of a place you don’t want to end up.” He is worried he might be shot. Some intervention would have helped him realize that there’s little chance of that outside the River Cafe.

Location Scout: Pier 41.

Just like a three-card monte game where the rube walks away a winner:

I was trying to find out from a very harried looking cameraman why a full film crew was following around the worst dressed group of young people at last night’s packed Semi Precious Weapons show at Rebel.

“They’re nobodies,” said the cameraman trailing them around the club. A friend whispered to me that they weren’t just any nobodies, they were the cast of the new The Real World in Red Hook. The lights, cameras, VIP status, bottle service and fawning by wannabe socialites was explained.

MTV had the kids well trained. “I’m sorry I can’t divulge that,” the cast members would tell me when I pressed them for any details on life in the Pier 41 house. But Chet Bannon, the Mormon who the producers are trying to have de-flowered, was too nice not to talk. By far the most suave of the yahoos, he was wearing an H&M scarf, Elvis Costello glasses and had his short blonde hair spiked. Best of all, he admitted that they were indeed the cast of The Real World.

“I love glam rock,” Chet told me as he sipped a Shirley Temple, “you just don’t see anything like it in Salt Lake.” As if on cue, Justin Tranter, the mascara-wearing, teased, peroxide-haired frontman of the Weapons, put a medallion around Chet’s neck, whispered something in his ear, then strutted off.

“Wow, that’s just so cool,” Chet — who’s engaged to a girl back home — gushed.

There was trouble in paradise, however, and the young man needed to get something off his virginal chest. “When we go to Williamsburg we get harassed. The hipsters throw things at us and say ‘Why are you here? Go home! Ten years ago none of them were there either.’” He looked hurt and wondered, “Why are the hipsters so small minded?”

You know, the ones co-opting the white supremacist message of “not anti-black but pro-white”. This is obviously fake:

They’re straight, they’re proud and they want to beat up gay people.

Such is the mixed messages sent by the Reggae record label [name redacted so as not to encourage stupid publicity stunts] who announced this week that they’re planning a “Straight Pride Parade” in Brooklyn for late August.

The announcement came via a blog post, although the group hasn’t apparently taken any steps to make this dream a reality.

But the announcement alone may have given them exactly what they wanted -– press for their album “18 Karat Reggae 2008: Global Warming.” They have also ruffled the feathers of area Lesbian, Gay, Bi-Sexual and Transgender (LGBT) residents who have lashed out against the violent lyrics against homosexuals in their ditty “Hit Them Hard.”

The not-so cheery chestnut, written by [name redacted so as not to encourage stupid publicity stunts] -– the Reggae rapper, not the piece of office equipment -– encourages listeners to attack “all men who visit men backyard and leave all the women to starve,” according to the lyrics.

Officials from the independent record label defended the lyrics, claiming that the song is not homophobic, but “pro-family.”

Their parade is also going to be pro-family as well, they claim.

“The Straight Pride Parade is a chance for heterosexuals to gather together and proudly embrace their sexuality,” according to a statement sent out by the record label, who claims that the album has suffered financially due to criticism from the LGBT community. “Adults are encouraged to bring their children along for the celebrations, as the event will be family oriented,” the statement read.

Organizers said that the parade will celebrate “reggae, dancehall and family in love and unity.”

“I sat quietly and watched as they cancelled artists like Buju Banton, Sizzla Kalonji and Capleton,” [name redacted so as not to encourage stupid publicity stunts]’s president explained. “But when the gay community went after [name redacted so as not to encourage stupid publicity stunts] artists like [name redacted so as not to encourage stupid publicity stunts], [name redacted so as not to encourage stupid publicity stunts] and [name redacted so as not to encourage stupid publicity stunts] we decided that we must make a show of strength.”

“The Straight Pride Parade is a great idea,” said rapper [name redacted so as not to encourage stupid publicity stunts], who identifies himself as a “dancehall sensation.”

“When a song like ‘Hit Them Hard’ by my label-mate [name redacted so as not to encourage stupid publicity stunts] can be banned just because it stresses the importance of a male and a female in every family, it is a sign that heterosexuals need to wake up,” he said.

. . .

Terrance Knox, co-president of the Lambda Independent Democrats, the borough’s leading LGBT political club, said that the “so-called parade is nothing to be proud of.”

“My whole thing is that whoever you are, be proud about it,” said Knox. “But this Reggae song is steeped in homophobic rhetoric.”

. . .

Knox added that the anti-gay obsession of some reggae groups like [name redacted so as not to encourage stupid publicity stunts] raises the question of their own sexuality.

“The more these so-called artists obsess about gay men, the more they sound like tortured guys on the down low,” he said.

Severe ramifications from the recent writers’ strike continue to wreak havoc on a fragile American culture:

Dreaming of showing it all on reality television? A new school has opened to show you the ropes.

The New York Reality TV School — brainchild of theater coach Robert Galinsky, who has trained reality-TV stars for years — began classes on 19th Street in Manhattan yesterday, offering lessons in jumping from real world to “reality.”

The school — which claims to give students a “competitive advantage” over other potential contestants — provides one-time workshops for $139 and five-week workshops for $299.

Do it, do it, do it, do it:

It seems that Brooklyn might not be ready for the “The Real World.”

The MTV reality series is heading to the borough for its 21st season, possibly starting production this summer for four months, says Jim Johnston, the executive producer of the show.

Johnston says the network is considering various areas that are Manhattan-accessible — Greenpoint, Williamsburg, Dumbo, Park Slope, Cobble Hill, Brooklyn Heights, Carroll Gardens, Red Hook and even Coney Island — but nothing is locked down.

“Just the sound of ‘The Real World: Brooklyn’ [has a ring to it],” Johnston says.

The current style of pants is too tight anyway:

A pervert with a Metro-Card and a camera likes to zoom in on the groins of male subway riders and then post his videos on the Internet, The Post has learned.

“The bulge on him just brings so much to the imagination . . . and the fact that he was oblivious to my filming is so great,” the 27- year-old filmmaker — who calls himself househead7d5 — gleefully recounts.

On another of his dozen clips, titled “sexy guy on 5 train,” as the subway pulls into 86th Street, househead7d5 tilts up from the man’s crotch, briefly, to his face.

“See this guy, and he sees me back,” says the description.

Because nothing shown on these videos isn’t already on public display and houshead7d5 is not earning money from his voyeurism, there is technically nothing criminal or actionable about his work, say attorney Rosemarie Arnold and other legal experts.

If by “pizzazz and energy” you mean inflexible food co-op rules and double-wide strollers, then yes, it will surely be a hit:

Producers are giving Park Slope the star treatment with a pilot by the same executives who brought “Sex and the City,” starring Sarah Jessica Parker, and “Melrose Place” to TV.

According to industry sources, Darren Star, who created those smash shows, has teamed with Sony and NBC for a proposed series about a group of affluent characters who live in the upscale Brooklyn neighborhood.

Sue Kramer, who wrote and directed the 2006 romantic comedy “Gray Matters” starring Heather Graham, Bridget Moynahan and Molly Shannon, is writing the script.

“It’s an hour-long dramady,” Kramer, who lives in Park Slope, told Page Six.

“It takes place in Park Slope and Park Slope is one of the characters in it. Park Slope has so much juice, just like Manhattan. It’s got a lot of pizzazz and energy.”

. . . then the terrorists will have won:

Philippe Petit, the French aerialist and juggler whose unauthorized 1974 tightrope walk between the Twin Towers is the subject of the documentary Man on Wire, which plays at the Tribeca Film Festival this week, doesn’t really approve of the Freedom Tower. “I stay away from politics because I am just a street juggler,” he says, “but I can tell you secretly that I am very unhappy to not have two towers being built, because I could offer to dance again — a dance of freedom, of victory, of ‘We shall not be doomed.’”

. . . and Gossip Girl is Dynasty in a co-op apartment:

In fact, the show has resurrected the potential for scripted dramas to be effective social satire — to present a world more accurately than a “reality” program can. Gossip Girl presents a wealth-eye view of the city, but because it is a cartoon we can laugh along with the conspicuousness of the consumption. Living among the wealthy in New York is an experience of queasy ambivalence — we find their antics both mesmerizing and icky. But on Gossip Girl, we do not have to judge them, or ourselves. The show mocks our superficial fantasies while satisfying them, allowing us to partake in the over-the-top pleasures of the irresponsible superrich without anxiety or guilt or moralizing. It’s class warfare as blood sport. And, as Blair Waldorf might say, that’s entertainment.

Which is the post-modern existential condition of our 21st century city:

Of all days, Jane Pollicino chose Thursday to show up for volunteer work at the Tribute WTC Visitor Center opposite ground zero. The tribute center seeks “people whose lives were profoundly changed by September 11th” to lead visitors around the site and convey the personal dimension of the story. (Mrs. Pollicino’s husband, Steve, was a trader at Cantor Fitzgerald’s office in the World Trade Center, where he died.)

And of all places, Mrs. Pollicino came up from the subway at the exit on Church Street adjoining the yard of St. Paul’s Chapel.

“It took my breath away,” she said.

For there, on one corner of the great iron fence around St. Paul’s, were hundreds of tributes to the dead: photos, flowers, candles, stuffed animals, American flags by the dozen, Mass cards, F.D.N.Y. T-shirts and a firefighter’s turnout coat, interspersed with handwritten valedictories. Two nearby trees were even in leaf. It was as if seven years had rolled back all at once.

Closer inspection showed a few signs taped to the fence. They said, “Film set.” This remarkable evocation turned out to be a matter of stagecraft: an art-directed simulation for a location shot in the movie “Julie and Julia,” based on a book by Julie Powell in which she sets out to make every recipe in Julia Child’s “Mastering the Art of French Cooking.” The brief scene on Church Street involves Amy Adams, as Ms. Powell, emerging from the subway and walking by the memorial-draped fence.

No chance. There’s always some jackass somewhere . . . :

One Monday last month, the Contigianis staged a New York version of the Day of Slow Living (“It has to be a Monday, the worst day to try to slow down,” Bruno explained). As part of the celebration, Bruno was issuing phony speeding tickets to pedestrians rushing through Union Square. He was wearing a police badge and cap, mirrored sunglasses, and a sandwich board proclaiming, “Caution! Speed-walking camera in action!” Wielding a stuffed turtle with a “STOP” badge on its belly, he flagged down passersby and handed them postcards printed with fourteen “slowmandments.” (No. 4: “Write your text messages on your cell phone with no symbols or abbreviations and get in the habit of starting with ‘Dear . . .’ ” No. 7: “Avoid being so busy and full of work that you don’t have time for yourself and the delight of thinking about nothing.”) “Read once a day and keep the doctor away,” Bruno counselled one woman who stopped to pick up a brochure. “You will be on YouTube!” he shouted gleefully to another retreating figure.

. . . no, the pathetic thing is that the model for what it means to be a woman living in New York is the creation of a misogynistic gay man:

[Name redacted so as to mitigate obvious over-the-top self-promotion], who is 27, came to New York soon out of Georgetown University four years ago. Along with many of her peers, she was drawn in part by HBO’s comic but near-anthropological chronicle of the living and mating habits of a certain set of New York’s single women.

Ms. [redacted] knows the adventures and misadventures of Carrie & Company by heart, and she uses them as something of a road map for her own life.

She frequents sleek and buzzworthy bars with her girlfriends. She has danced at Bungalow 8, the celebrity-rich club in West Chelsea. She has devoured cupcakes at Magnolia Bakery, and she can sprint in five-inch heels. And, of course, she has written publicly about relationships, both for Time Out New York and on a blog of her own, among other places, with all that entails.

Ms. [redacted] has taken her devotion to “Sex and the City” further than most. She dated a onetime boyfriend of Candace Bushnell, whose column in The New York Observer inspired the television series. For the British version of the magazine Marie Claire, Ms. [redacted] analyzed how her life compares to the lives lived in the series.

“If Carrie Bradshaw were coming to New York today,” Ms. [redacted] says with no hint of self-consciousness, “she would be me.”

Ms. [redacted] may be extreme. But she is hardly alone.

It has been a decade since “Sex and the City” arrived on television, yet the adventures of Carrie and her pals continue to enthrall. This spring, even as Sarah Jessica Parker, the star of the series, turns 43, the “Sex and the City” movie will make it to the big screen. Although the film won’t officially arrive in theaters until May 30, Carrie fever is running so high that the publicity campaign began almost the moment plans for the movie were announced.

Yet young women coming to New York these days in search of Mr. Big, or at least the perfect Cosmopolitan, are finding that money and technology have altered the urban paradise that Carrie inhabited.

The city has become such an expensive playground that much of what Carrie and her friends took for granted — a Manhattan apartment, taxis for any trip longer than a half-dozen blocks, dinner at the newest four-star restaurants — is no longer easily in reach of a young woman on a budget, much less a young woman on a writer’s budget.

. . .

Alyssa Shelasky, another New Yorker who tried to follow in Carrie’s footsteps, discovered just how fast one’s fortunes could rise and fall on the Web two summers ago, when she was asked by Glamour magazine to write a blog about finding love again after a particularly heart-rending breakup.

The blog made it tougher.

“Men were freaked out by it,” Ms. Shelasky said the other day over coffee and a brownie at City Bakery on 18th Street.

With long, soft brown hair framing her open face, Ms. Shelasky has a down-to-earth, girl-next-door quality. But it is hard to be the girl next door when you’ve also been the girl about town on the Internet.

“Within five minutes on the computer,” she said, “men could find out everything I had done the night before and the night before, and that this guy did this and it really turned me on.”

In many respects, Ms. Shelasky is Carrie rewritten for the Internet age. “If I didn’t like a guy or never called him back,” she recalled, “a few childish men in particular would use the blog to retaliate.

“They would be like, ‘This is Sneakers Guy, we made out, and she was like this,’” she said. “And I was like, ‘Wait, this is my blog, and I get to decide how much of me we discuss.’”

$57 million from old seats is a tidy sum. But add $25 baggies of dirt to that, and you’ve got a lot of money:

The Yankees and Mets are in secret talks with the city to buy their old ballparks before the wrecking balls hit — so they can plunder them for lucrative memorabilia to peddle to fans, The Post has learned.

A spokesman for Mayor Bloomberg confirmed the negotiations but would not say how the deals might go down — specifically, whether the city would hope to get a lump sum from the teams or a percentage of the profits of any sale or auction of items.

“At other stadiums, everything from the scoreboards to the dugout urinals have been snatched up by fans, but Yankee Stadium is in a whole other league of collectibles,” said Mike Heffner, president of Lelands.com, which has handled several stadium garage sales.

“Each brick could sell for $100 to $300,” Heffner said. “I doubt we’d have any trouble selling every seat in the house for as much as $1,000.

“With its huge fan base, Shea Stadium will also fetch a big payday.”

Yankee sources and a Mets spokesman separately confirmed the teams’ negotiations with the city but refused to give details, citing their ongoing talks.

While the city owns the two stadiums, experts said the teams are in a far better position to bring in bigger bucks from a sell-off because of the emotion factor.

A tiny baggy of infield dirt from Yankee Stadium could fetch $25, experts said.

You can even trademark white briefs:

Times Square’s Naked Cowboy is trying to take a $6 million bite out of a giant candy corporation, charging it stole his identity by dressing an animated blue M&M in his skimpy trademark outfit.

The nearly nude street performer, whose real name is Robert Burck, has his tighty whities in such a bunch over a massive video billboard showing the candy in a white hat, boots, guitar and underwear that he’s filed suit against the mighty Mars candy corporation.

The case of Naked Cowboy vs. The Men From Mars will be heard in Manhattan federal court.

. . .

“My initial response was like, ‘Wow that’s cool,’ ” said Burck, whose claim to fame is playing guitar at 45th Street and Broadway, strategically holding the instrument over his briefs to make him appear to be naked.

“The artist seeks to create the world in his own image. Obviously I was overjoyed,” Burck said in a phone interview with The Post yesterday while taking a break from the cold.

“It took years for people not to say that’s a stupid idea.”

But it didn’t take long for the Naked Cowboy to realize that a major corporation was cashing in on his ingenuity and hard work with the billboard designed to attract customers to M&M’s Times Square store.

“All I’ve got is my underwear. It’s the most brilliant thing that’s ever been created from a marketing perspective. You can’t stop it,” said Burck, 37, who said he filed suit on the advice of lawyers and trademark experts.

If you’re the type of person who might enjoy owning Brooklyn Paper editor Gersh Kuntzman’s ankle cast then either a) you’re way too obsessed with the minutiae of local news and you might want to seriously consider doing some other things with your time or b) you have way too big an apartment, in which case I have several boxes of books and records you might be able to store for me. Regardless of which it is, I feel sorry for you. From the eBay description:

Get the actual cast worn by legendary Brooklyn journalist Gersh Kuntzman after he broke his ankle in January! Not only is the cast signed by Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz, but all money raised in the sale will go towards Markowitz’s Camp Brooklyn charity. This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to own a piece of journalistic, medical and political history — the very cast worn by an award-winning journalist, signed by a future mayor of New York City, and written about in countless Kuntzman columns! This cast’s authenticity is guaranteed and the winning bidder will also receive a high-resolution digital photo of Markowitz signing the historic cast. A priceless collectible.

Slow week? Recycle that exciting story about snorting lines* and stealing Christmas trees**:

We met the guys by the pinball machine. It was a couple of days into the New Year, and we were out at Barracuda in Chelsea, both of us bored and looking for trouble. I’d just gotten back from visiting my family for the holidays and the best way to wash all of that feel-goodness off seemed to dive right into the sluttiest bar on the West Side. For some reason Will and I always seemed to have more luck pulling a boy when we were cruising together, so I called him up and he was glad to join me for the sport. It all started out so innocently, though, that neither of us had imagined the coke-filled orgy that ensued.

. . .

“What’s up?” I was puzzled, but there was something about Paul that was so thrilling. His upbeat, slightly crazy attitude made everything seem like an adventure, so I was willing to wait and see what happened next.

“He’s getting coke,” Will whispered to me. Oh, we were in the middle of a drug run. Well, sure, whatever the boy needed to get the party going. In a few minutes Paul returned and jumped in the front seat of the cab.

“All right boys. Onward and upward we go,” he said, a big smile plastered across his face. Will and Max remained frisky in the backseat until Paul jumped out of the car again. This time we were stopped at a red light in the East Village, closed in on all sides by trash cans, half-melted mounds of gray snow and boys and girls hurrying between bars, bundled in thick scarves with creative knots. Paul pounced on a dark shape and rushed back to the car.

“Merry Christmas!” he yelled. He yanked open the back of the cab and began stuffing a discarded fir tree in our laps. The needles stung and poked.

*Ugh, please no more cocaine stories . . .

**No need to get the timing right but this would have worked a little better next week, no?

The downside of the mayor’s plan to install crappy public art around the city? It’s emboldening scofflaws:

The creators of the 8-foot-tall bench that captivated some New Yorkers when it mysteriously appeared on Houston Street last week don’t want their guerilla art installation back.

“All this work, once it’s installed, it’s kind of just left to the fates,” said Tod Seelie, who collaborated with street artist Brad Downey on the bench and photographed its stealth installation in the middle of the night. “The idea is to see how time changes it.”

The bench, which first appeared on a median strip on Houston and Suffolk streets last Monday, was taken down last week, and it’s now looking like it will be scrapped. City sanitation crews already have been contacted about hauling it away from the Department of Transportation warehouse in upper Manhattan, where it is waiting to be claimed.

. . .

Among those applauding the effort was Christina Ray, who hosts Conflux, an annual art fair in Brooklyn that celebrates artists like Downey and Seelie. “The bench is a bold statement,” she said. “It’s so public and unmistakable, it’s a kind of stop you in your tracks kind of intervention. A pedestrian clearly has to address it.”

The city’s transportation department took the sculpture down last week after it was unable to determine where the bench came from. Officials feared that since the bench was improperly affixed to the street, it could become a safety hazard.

“We do discourage renegade artwork, but we consider public art critical to vibrant street life and we are working to begin a program that allow for the temporary installation of art in some of the city’s public spaces,” an agency official said. “he bottom line, with this one especially, is safety.”

Will they be fined for littering?

Get ready for more Tilted Arcs . . .

There’s no guarantee that your attorney isn’t quietly going home and turning your embarrassing custody battle into a song:

The skills of successful litigators with three decades in the law profession include the ability to craft an unfortunate situation into a lawsuit and arrange the evidence into a persuasive argument. But producing songs from those experiences and scoring them to electric guitar riffs is a more unusual skill, the domain of one lawyer, Lawrence Savell, who does his part to bring the insider world of high-power litigation to the masses.

A partner at Chadbourne & Parke, Mr. Savell, who just turned 50, waxes poetic on the intricacies of seeing opposing counsel and of emotions running high on late nights. This year, he produced his fourth album, “The Lawtunes, Live at Blackacre,” while earlier albums have had holiday themes to their songs.

. . .

Slightly hokey but with earnest charm, the songs cover topics with which lawyers are all too familiar. The lyrics are filled with references that include emerging issues like electronic discovery, the joys of reviewing briefs in early morning hours with cold take-out, and imaging the life of Santa Claus’s general counsel.

“The inspiration is really just working as a lawyer and trying to find, especially at the holidays, a little bit of humor in what we do, and not to take ourselves so seriously,” Mr. Savell said.

There are love songs to law and inspirational ballads, like “Law Man,” which Mr. Savell describes as “a hard-pounding and blunt explanation of exactly what it is that lawyers do.” The title character offers his fighting services to any lawyer facing the wrong end of a lawsuit, or losing a promotion to nepotism.

Wait for it, wait for it . . . your Carrie Bradshaw moment is here:

Is something missing in our lives that we’re trying to replace with spa services?

If there’s one thing we need, it’s more overweight 1980s sitcom stars in the role of Edna Turnblad in Hairspray:

[George] Wendt, who played Norm Peterson . . . on “Cheers” for a decade, fills out a cast that includes such other big names as former *NSYNC boy-band member Lance Bass and former “Hollywood Square” Jim J. Bullock.

Wendt follows in the footsteps of other heavyweights who played Edna, including John Travolta who starred in this year’s movie-musical version and legendary drag actor Divine, who starred in John Water’s original 1988 film.

(Since when did “Jim” J. Bullock start using vowels? Or am I just not a big enough Jim J. Bullock fan?)

*Sorry, dude — I didn’t realize how much weight you lost since the early ’90s — you look good, by the by!

Broadway producers look for that lucrative tween market, which obviously has more cash than it knows what to do with:

For Broadway producers, 10-year-old Jamie Carroll looks like an ideal theatergoer: she downloads scores off of iTunes, is a fervent proselytizer when she likes something and has lots of friends, two of whom she brought along to a recent Saturday matinee of “Legally Blonde.” “A lot of my friends say it’s the best musical they’ve ever seen,” she said.

Maybe. But Jamie’s father and her 14-year-old brother would not join them, considering the show too girly. Even her mother, Tacey Carroll, was only present as a chaperon: “This is a little more for them,” she said, echoing several other mothers at the theater, one of whom even dropped off her young charges and went shopping.

And that’s the rub for Broadway producers, for whom teenage and tween girls have become the demographic of the moment, wooed by marketing campaigns and featured as central characters in a flurry of shows in development, including “13,” about a teenager from New York who is transplanted to Indiana; “Princesses,” which is basically “High School Musical” meets “Gossip Girl”; and a musical adaptation of the movie “Clueless.”

Increasingly, though, some worry that the sugar-and-spice enthusiasm may be misplaced, because while teenagers and tweens may be helpful in creating a hit, they are far from enough to ensure one. For that, you still need grown-ups — lots of paying grown-ups — to want to come to a show.

*Just kidding, Mr. Mamet! We can’t wait for that Duran Duran thing to end to see your next play staged!

Hey, at least you got a book out of it:

A new book by a New York City Teaching Fellows dropout raises questions about recent changes in the public schools — in particular, the alternative certification program the author quit.

The author, Dan Brown, joined the Department of Education program, which pulls high-achieving young people and career-changers into public schools for two-year teaching stints, in 2003. His “The Great Expectations School,” which is climbing the sales charts, recounts why he quit after just one year, a resignation following what he describes as so much stress that he had to begin taking medication to stave off premature hair loss.

. . .

Mr. Brown called his experience “triage.” One lesson, he said, was: “Don’t smile for the first several months of school.” Another instructed him to post a public schedule of what would be taught each day.

None of this, he writes, helped him understand how to keep his rotating roster of 26 (and sometimes more) fourth-graders from throwing their chairs, punching each other in the face, and throwing frequent tantrums.

At one point he portrays himself as so at sea that he turns to journalist Ron Suskind’s biography of a former U.S. treasury secretary, “The Price of Loyalty,” for management ideas. “What would Paul O’Neill do?” he asks himself about his classroom.

. . . to have enough to turn them into art is the real question:

A Brooklyn sculptor has found a new use for the parking and sanitation tickets he’s received -he’s turned them into protest art.

Using the tickets, along with foam and wire, Osaretin Ighile has fashioned what he calls “Mayor’s Bust.”

The likeness of Mayor Bloomberg chomping on a stogie was displayed on the steps of City Hall for an hour yesterday.

“This was created out of my personal experience. I live and work in Brooklyn, and these are tickets that I have gotten over time. Most of them unwarranted,” said Ighile, a Nigerian immigrant.

Some parents send their children to Montessori school. Others, the Blue Man Group:

Bright colors, fun music . . . blue heads? While those are all staples at Blue Man Group shows, only the first two will be common elements at the theater group’s preschool next door to its 434 Lafayette St. theater, the Blue Man Creativity Center Early Childhood Program. Gearing up for its first year of operation for 2-through-4-year-olds, the center pulls from the sights and sounds of the Blue Man Group, focusing on “sensory tactile experiences” that help children grow emotionally and creatively.

“We draw inspiration from the educational philosophies that children do some of their most important learning through play,” the center explains on its Web site, theblueschool.net.

With a logo that incorporates a splash of paint, an electrical plug and a DNA double helix and a Web site that includes everything from a white paper on tot conflict resolution to a link to the Blue Man Group’s online create-your-own-art game, the program looks to address the needs of the whole child by way of creative expression. According to the school’s philosophy, such expression is a means of exploring and understanding both one’s own emotions and those of others.

. . .

The Blue School expects to eventually run through the eighth grade.

Apparently the thinly veiled furvert campaign lost its punch and now those mini-storage pimps are experimenting with a more provocative strategy:

A Manhattan Mini Storage billboard on Manhattan’s West Side Highway is again stirring up both opprobrium and approbation.

A large sign at 44th Street and Twelfth Avenue shows a wire hanger with the words “Your closet space is shrinking as fast as her right to choose.”

Because of course the YouTube demographic is closely aligned with the big-time New York City developer demographic:

A video posted on Coney Island developer Thor Equities’ Web site and YouTube last week has ruffled some fins out in the seaside neighborhood.

The clip, which opens and closes with the Mermaid Parade logo, features costumed revelers professing their love of Coney Island and the parade. Then, in the last few seconds, a woman wearing a Viking helmet slips in: “The spirit of Thor matches that of Coney Island!”

The woman was Digna Rodriguez, a Thor Equities employee.

The video was designed as goodwill promotional material and showcased the High Steppers, a Brooklyn-based marching band Thor Equities sponsored in the parade. Absent from the video were the many protesters who marched in the parade to “Save Coney Island.” Many fear Thor’s proposals to transform Coney Island into a year-round attraction with upscale hotels will wash away the local character(s).

And see what you get when you renege on plans to save some dumpy old building? They revoke your ability to mediate experiences on the internet:

“Thor has just been sent an email,” Dick Zigun of Coney Island USA, the group that runs the Mermaid Parade, wrote on his Web site, “informing them that they have NO PERMISSION to use the name or logo MERMAID PARADE within their FUTURE OF CONEY ISLAND logo such as they have done at the start and finish of the YOU TUBE piece.”

See also: “thorothunder”’s Thor at Coney Island’s Mermaid Parade YouTube Video.

Oh god, performance art is so 1983:

At slack tide off Red Hook, Brooklyn, there are usually lots of things floating in the water, most of which you would not want to touch without the help of a good hazmat suit. But just after sunrise yesterday, something truly strange was bobbing there in the shallows near Pier 41: a submarine fashioned almost completely from wood, and inside it a man with an obsession.

The man, Duke Riley, a heavily tattooed Brooklyn artist whose waterborne performance projects around New York have frequently landed him in trouble with the authorities, spent the last five months building the vessel as a rough replica of what is believed to have been America’s first submarine, an oak sphere called the Turtle, said to have seen action in New York Harbor during the Revolutionary War.

Mr. Riley’s plan was also military, in a sense — though mostly metaphorical, given that he is an artist. He wanted to float north in the Buttermilk Channel to stage an incursion against the Queen Mary 2, which had just docked in Red Hook, the mission objective mostly just to get close enough to the ship to videotape himself against its immensity for a coming gallery show.

But when his sub was stopped by a New York City police boat around 10 a.m., the outcome was not metaphorical at all: Mr. Riley, 35, and two friends who had helped tow him were taken into custody by a phalanx of law enforcement officials, and their excursion briefly raised fears that a terrorist attack might have been under way.

. . .

Mr. Kelly said a New York police detective assigned to the department’s intelligence division who was aboard the Queen Mary 2 yesterday morning first spotted what looked like a hobby-shop submarine towed by a flimsy rubber raft manned by Mr. Riley’s two friends. He called the department’s harbor patrol, which dispatched three boats to the scene along with a helicopter, joined later by the Coast Guard and a hazardous-materials truck.

Still, Mr. Riley, who emerged from his rusty hatch without the tall-boy can of beer he had taken into his vessel when it launched about 9:15, managed to make it to within about 200 feet of the bow of the ship, at a time when officials say harbor security is a critical factor in guarding against terrorism. From a nearby pier, several of his friends and his art dealers shouted congratulations through a chain-link fence.

The only thing funny about this is that early reports — see, for example — had Riley’s name listed as “Philip Rey,” of G.I. Joe fame.

Earlier: Oh Those Mischievous Mariners . . .