I have to say, I’d much rather Jeff Vandam crib from the Villager than write features about the stupid shit people put on YouTube:

On Saturday, Dec. 16, three actresses in their 20s ventured out to Herald Square with a video camera and a surreptitious mission: to approach unsuspecting pedestrians from behind and gently stroke their hair without their knowledge. They filmed one another’s efforts, which for the most part succeeded in failing to attract notice from various hair pettees, bar a few suspicious looks.

A few weeks later, having edited the video and set it to a kind of funky elevator music, the women posted it on YouTube, the Internet video site. Since then, the Hair Petting Game, as it is called, has been viewed nearly 25,000 times on YouTube, and thousands more times through links. The reaction has not been mild.

“Worst video ever,” someone called TheRealWilliamBailey wrote on YouTube, an opinion repeated in various forms by many others. “You should play in traffic.”

Some watched the video and called it harmless, even joyful, though such comments were in a distinct minority. “I want to be indignant about how awful this is, too. I really do,” wrote Caroline, a user on Gothamist.com, one of the first sites to link to the Hair Petting Game. “However, I am sitting in my office laughing hysterically at this video. Am I an idiot, too? Maybe.”

The good thing, if you’re a graffiti writer looking for attention, is to get a newspaper article written about your craft. The bad thing is that you attract too much attention:

The graffiti artist with the notable tag “Backfat” was nabbed Tuesday evening — the same day the Daily News highlighted his prolific scrawlings.

Charles Abarno, 21, was arrested in front of the 72nd Precinct stationhouse and accused of spraying his tag all over buildings, storefronts and awnings in Windsor Terrace and Kensington, just blocks from his home.

He was charged with two counts each of criminal mischief and scrawling graffiti on a public library and a commercial establishment, police said. If convicted, he faces up to four years in jail.

Local residents were delighted, as was City Councilman Bill de Blasio, who represents the area.

“I am extremely pleased he has been caught,” de Blasio said. “Now we need to make sure the appropriate punishment is given.”

Arthur Wood plans to raise the money to preserve the code violation/sculptural element atop his Clinton Hill building by working with developers to turn the property into condos:

Broken angel will soar again, even higher than before, provided Brooklyn’s real estate prices stay in the stratosphere.

Artist Arthur Wood has cut a deal to save his eccentric Clinton Hill creation — one that envisions condos under a rebuilt rooftop sculpture.

“It will be taller, more majestic. We may even light it up at night, and it will be nicer,” Wood, 75, said yesterday.

He rejected offers of as much as $1.8 million that would have destroyed the 108-foot building in favor of one that will preserve it, he said.

He may even lose money, depending on how the condos sell, he added.

“It was tempting to take the money and leave, but I couldn’t do that,” Wood said. “The building is a living entity, and I wasn’t about to abandon it.”

Local developer Shahn Andersen agreed Saturday to buy a 50% stake in the structure, financing the rebuilding of Wood’s creation with potential profits from condos.

“I told Arthur that even if he wasn’t going to partner with me, he needed to do whatever it was going to take to save Broken Angel,” Andersen said.

Chris Wood, Arthur’s son, said his family’s first preference had not been condos — which he called “the nasty C-word” — but rather to create a museum. However, no benefactor had stepped forward.

The deal will allow Wood to meet the city’s deadlines to demolish the parts of Broken Angel that pose a fire hazard, Andersen said, estimating that resurrecting Broken Angel will cost a few million dollars.

(Don’t believe their lies!)

Fortunately we have this important story to establish an agreed-upon definition for “backfat”:

The graffiti tag “Backfat” — ranging in size from a few inches to a few feet wide — has been popping up on buildings, storefronts, awnings, even between subway tracks, all over Windsor Terrace and Kensington.

. . .

“Backfat” is a colloquial term for the rolls of extra weight that bulge along the edges of a too-tight or ill-fitting bra.

A city official who is familiar with the situation said the law is hot on the tagger’s heels.

“The police are on Backfat’s trail. It is being thoroughly investigated and we are coming close to finding him,” the source said.

Overly autobiographical art is not only lazy but often stupidly self-incriminating as well:

The Staten Island gang-banger who allegedly executed two undercover cops during a botched gun deal gloated about the brutal shootings in rap lyrics he later wrote, prosecutors said yesterday.

“You better have that vast and dat Golock / Leave 45 slogs in da back of ya head cause I’m getting dat bread / ain’t goin stop to Im dead,” wrote Ronell Wilson, 24, (in his own spelling) after he allegedly shot undercover detectives James Nemorin and Rodney Andrews with a .44-caliber handgun during an attempted robbery.

Arresting officer Joseph Butta testified yesterday that Wilson had the sick, barely intelligible lyrics in his pants pocket when cops arrested him.

Meanwhile, the Times takes a closer look at the artist on trial:

Prosecutors are making similar arguments across the country this year, in courtrooms in Albany, Oroville, Calif., College Station, Tex., and Gretna, La. Set to drumbeats or scrawled in notebooks, the rhymes of minor stars, aspiring producers and rank amateurs are being accepted as evidence of criminal acts, intent and mind-set.

Defense lawyers usually argue that the lyrics are boastful fantasies, common to the point of irrelevance. Mr. Wilson’s lawyers have indicated that they plan to call a scholar named Yasser Arafat Payne, described in court documents as a rap expert, to make a similar argument.

Funny, because it sure sounds like a theme restaurant:

Coming this week to Chelsea: Harlem! Or at least a blaxploitation-flavored, seventies-fantasy version by Lesly Bernard, who, with Keith McNally, opened the Cold War–themed bar Pravda soon after the end of the Cold War and followed that with the celebrity-studded Clementine. Tillman’s, Bernard’s super-fly new lounge on West 26th Street, comes complete with beaded curtains, tufted leather booths lined with speakers, and sepia-toned photos of old men blowing smoke from their nostrils or playing brass instruments on Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard. . . . “Nothing is more American than 1970s Harlem,” explains Bernard, who quickly adds, “It’s not a theme restaurant.”

Krylon tourism*:

Most of the major graffiti attacks on trains are being carried out by twentysomething Europeans who want to leave their marks where the graffiti culture was born, experts said.

They come from Germany, Italy, France, Spain, Switzerland, Denmark and Norway to spray-paint their murals and elaborate tags — called “pieces” — on trains, fully aware that the Transit Authority will scrub them clean within hours.

The Euro-taggers don’t care that New Yorkers won’t see their work on the rails: their main goal is to take photographs and videos of their handiwork to bolster their reputations on the other side of the Atlantic.

“The majority of the heavy graffiti is being done by foreigners,” said recently retired NYPD Transit Bureau Lt. Steven Mona, who until September 2005 was the commanding officer of the Citywide Vandals Task Force.

“We’ve always had foreigners, but in the last five years we’ve seen an increase.”

When Mona and his team reviewed last year’s graffiti hits, they estimated that 70% were carried out by Europeans.

That includes the graffiti group “MOAS,” or Monsters of Art Scandinavia, which painted its initials on trains stored on “layup” tracks on Utica Ave. in Brooklyn.

Another tag spotted on a train hit on Utica Ave., “Biser,” is identified on the Internet as being from Germany.

*A business opportunity emerges . . . Marc Ecko should invest in some special graffiti camps upstate!

12/12 Update: Current transit bureau chief gets smacked down by the tourism board, forced to downplay report.

He won by a landslide, so what more can he want? Why not immortalize the campaign in a photo exhibition for posterity:

Eliot Spitzer will take over Grand Central Terminal next month with a photo exhibition of images from his campaign.

“The Making of a Governor” will chronicle the stump speeches, handshakes, autographs and exhaustion of running for office — in a series of large black-and-white photos intended to evoke the iconic images of the Kennedy years.

The exhibit is to run Jan. 7-23 at Vanderbilt Hall and may then tour the state.

Photographer Marius Muresanu said he approached Spitzer with the idea after seeing one of Jacques Lowe’s famous images of President Kennedy campaigning.

. . .

He said he spent eight months on the campaign trail and was granted full access — even though the governor-elect has been “known not to love photographers.”

Muresanu is still scouring through thousands of negatives to decide which prints make the cut.

MTA officials said the Spitzer campaign paid $37,500 to rent the space.

The high school student who attended school dressed as Hitler on Tuesday returned to class, jackboots in tow. I think “chutzpah” is the proper term here:

Flouting a possible suspension and the scorn of Jewish groups, a Brooklyn high-school student ejected from class for dressing as Adolf Hitler on Halloween donned the controversial getup again yesterday on campus.

A spokesman for the city Education Department said that Leon M. Goldstein HS will pursue disciplinary charges against 16-year-old Walter Petryk for insubordination, which could result in a 10-day suspension.

. . .

The junior honors student dressed again as the fascist butcher outside the Sheepshead Bay school yesterday for a gaggle of reporters, and dismissed the prospect of suspension — as well as the ridicule of onlookers.

“I’m not worried about it that much,” said Petryk, whose mother delivered the costume to him yesterday and stood by his side.

“I’m not a Nazi. It’s a Halloween costume,” he declared. “People have taken it too seriously . . . I’m not going to go around and kill Jews or anything.”

At one point, the gathering was interrupted by area resident Michael Loweth, 50, who shouted at Petryk, “You’re pathetic!”

“This is ridiculous, kid. Grow up!” he yelled. “Millions of people died for a schmuck like you.”

And I guess “schmuck” is an equally appropriate term.

A costume-provocateur at a Brooklyn high school was removed from class yesterday for dressing as Hitler:

A student at a Brooklyn high school named for a prominent Jewish educator faced a blitzkrieg of trouble yesterday when he arrived dressed as Adolf Hitler for Halloween.

Walter Petryk, 16, insisted his masquerade was a lampoon of the Nazi dictator — but administrators at Leon M. Goldstein HS declared autumn for Hitler and detained Petryk as their “prisoner of war.”

The junior honors student, who grew a moustache for the occasion, was pulled out of his second-period English class and told to remove his beige coat bearing a red swastika armband or risk spending the day in the office.

You would think that people who had family who perished in the Holocaust would refrain from facile Hitler comparisons, but then there they are:

His mother and stepfather, who is Jewish and lost ancestors in the Nazi genocide, defended Petryk’s stance. They rebuffed pleas by the dean to advise their son to remove the costume so he could return to class.

“This is a matter of artistic free expression and a school not being stupid,” said his mother, Diane Petryk-Bloom, who picked her son up at school. “[The dean is] offended by a parody of Hitler — and he’s acting like Hitler.”

Then there’s the issue of “talk the talk/walk the walk”:

Petryk said he didn’t set out to push the envelope as Hitler. But he acknowledged that he made a decision to disguise himself as Charlie Chaplin with a bowler hat and cane on his way to school to avoid ruffling feathers on the street.

“I wasn’t going to get on the subway in a Hitler costume,” Petryk said.

Pussy!

I can’t believe they found a way to make Coney Island classier than it already is but somehow they have:

Architectural renderings obtained by The Post show a grand vision of the famed summer amusement area’s rundown streets being transformed into a glitzy year-round playground and public attraction.

In one image, Stillwell Avenue becomes a fantasy-filled boulevard marked by larger-than-life street furniture, such as a mermaid swimming in a martini glass and a gigantic tattooed elephant.

Take a stand on the issue of economically unsustainable benefits packages for the working man and, oh yeah, support Roger Toussaint’s TWU Local 100 reelection campaign by purchasing official Roger Toussaint transit strike merchandise:

Roger Toussaint’s reelection campaign is hawking $2 signed photos of the Transport Workers Union Local 100 president from the union’s big battle with the MTA.

One photo shows Toussaint at a rally and one shows him leading a march across the Brooklyn Bridge as he headed to jail for leading the three-day December walkout.

A third simply shows an empty bus shelter with a “TWU on Strike” sign.

The photos are going for $2 each, or three for $5. The campaign — through the Web site www.rogertoussaintvictory2006 — also is selling T-shirts. They bear the inscription, “It’s About Respect. NYC Transit Strike 2005.”

“There is a market out there for mementos or memorabilia from the strike,” Toussaint said. “After all, the strike was historic, there’s no doubt about it.”

That market goes beyond transit workers because, he said, the union took a stand to protect pension and health benefits, which resonates with all workers.

. . .

Token booth clerk Gloria Browne, however, said she just might buy a few T-shirts for family members, and a Toussaint photograph for herself. The T-shirts are selling for $17.50.

How could they not mention the Livestrong-esque Transit Strike bracelets which are also on sale? Sweet!

The game of Hipster Or Fresh Off The Boat? just got a lot harder:

I just got my bangs trimmed today,” a woman told her friend as they waited to enter Studio B, a new club in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. “How do they look? Kind of like Jean Shrimpton, maybe? Just tell me that.”

Formerly a Polish dance hall, Studio B is now home to people who want to look Shrimptonesque — or at the very least, retro. A week and a half ago, the opening-night crowd was decked out in Members Only jackets, mod dresses and blouses with foofy neck bows — just like the crowd at every other neighborhood club. But Studio B has a lot of features that are local rarities, among them a brightly illuminated sign, large bathrooms, and a V.I.P. room with leather couches. Nice, clean leather couches.

And unlike its neighbors, Studio B comes with a night life pedigree: the D.J. Justine D. is the creative director, and Todd P., a well-regarded indie music promoter, will book some acts. The proprietors also own the Delancey on the Lower East Side and Studio A, a hipster rock nightclub in downtown Miami.

. . .

The owners have left many of the previous occupant’s fixtures intact; there’s a smoke machine and automated swirling lights that make the dance floor glow (O.K., it is a little Miami). Several patrons said it reminded them of the early rave scene — not always in a good way.

“It’s like the worst imitation of the 80’s,” said Bert Kietzerow, 39, a hairstylist who lives in Williamsburg.

Mostly, though, the retro vibe fits.

“It’s not slick or fancy, it’s cheesy,” said Leslie Hermelin, 27, a music publicist. It’s also enormous (9,500 square feet). At 1 a.m., when the Belgian D.J.’s Soulwax took the stage, the club was jammed, the dance floor a sea of pumping fists and flashing camera phones. Even Mr. Kietzerow succumbed to the beat and the fog.

“That smoke machine is so lame,” Ms. Hermelin said, “it’s cool.”

After abandoning the piece at Bowling Green and using the site as his private showroom, Charging Bull sculptor Arturo DiModica now wants to sue businesses who use the image for advertising:

Arturo Di Modica is seeing red, accusing Wal-Mart, North Fork Bank and seven smaller concerns of horning in on the popularity of the 7,000-pound, bronze “Charging Bull,” which stands in Bowling Green Park.

In a suit filed in Manhattan federal court, Di Modica said Wal-Mart was selling photos of “Charging Bull” without his permission.

And North Fork Bank, based in Melville, L.I., is using the sculpture in a national advertising campaign — also without his permission, he says.

“It must stop,” an angry Di Modica told The Post yesterday.

“I’m tired of seeing all this work done. It’s bad for my career. What they’re selling is not a good representation of my work. It’s destroying my image.

“If they want to sell it, they must buy it from me. I see people making money off my work.”

Di Modica, who spent two years and $350,000 of his own money creating the 16-foot-long bull, trucked it to the entrance of the New York Stock Exchange in December 1989.

He said it was a Christmas gift to the people of New York, but the cops said it was illegal.

They seized it, but after a public outcry, the Parks Department installed it in Bowling Green Park.

. . .

Di Modica said he was inspired to create the larger-than-life bull as a symbol of hope after the 1987 stock market collapse. The artist, who copyrighted the bull in 1998, makes money from the authorized use of the sculpture’s image in movies and advertising.

If Wal-Mart had a sense of humor, they would buy the sculpture and have DiModica put their name on the plaque the artist once proposed.

Location Scout: Bowling Green.

An art history professor is claiming that “one of the great single acquisitions of the last half century” — the one the Met just acquired for like $50 bazillion — is actually a nineteenth-century fraud:

A painting the Metropolitan Museum of Art bought for more than $45 million and hailed as a 14th century masterpiece is a fake, according to a leading New York authority.

The “Madonna and Child” the museum attributes to Renaissance artist Duccio di Buoninsegna was really painted in the 19th century, said James Beck, an art history professor at Columbia University.

The 8-inch-by-11-inch tempera and gold on wood panel was the most expensive single object The Met ever bought when it acquired it in November 2004.

“If I’m right, this is $50 million in . . . money down the tube,” Beck told The Post. “And I’m right. It’s incontestable.”

He ridiculed its “low quality” and said it wasn’t “even a good forgery.”

There are no documents proving its ownership before around 1904, and Beck believes it was painted “in about the 1880s.”

Beck said he began to have doubts about the work six months ago and when he approached The Met, where officials expressed confidence the work is genuine.

There was no immediate response yesterday from the museum or Christie’s, which handled the sale for a Belgian family.

But Met curator Keith Christiansen told The Times of London, “There is no reason to doubt the period and the authenticity of the picture.”

Beck said the best proof that it’s a fake is the way it shows the Madonna and child behind a parapet, an artistic use of space and planes that only came later in the Renaissance. He rejected Christiansen’s claim that the work is “the first illusionistic parapet in European art.”

Refresher course: The Missing Madonna: The story behind the Met’s most expensive acquisition (New Yorker, July 11, 2005).

The controversial play “My Name is Rachel Corrie” has found a new theater:

After an Off Broadway production was derailed, resulting in a theatrical uproar, “My Name Is Rachel Corrie,” the solo show about an American demonstrator for Palestinian rights who was killed by an Israeli bulldozer in the Gaza Strip, has found another New York theater.

Pam Pariseau and Dena Hammerstein, partners in James Hammerstein Productions, are bringing the play, critically acclaimed in London, to the Minetta Lane Theater in Greenwich Village. Previews are to begin on Oct. 5, with an opening scheduled for Oct. 15. The play is to run for 48 performances, closing on Nov. 19.

“We both saw the play and both responded to it very strongly,” Ms. Hammerstein said in a telephone interview yesterday. “We identified with the material in terms of being mothers and were struck by the production and the theatricality.”

Ms. Hammerstein, a daughter-in-law of Oscar Hammerstein II, is a longtime friend of the actor Alan Rickman, who created the play with Katharine Viner, an editor for The Guardian, the London newspaper. They put the play together from Ms. Corrie’s journal entries and e-mail messages before her death in March 2003. It ran for two seasons at the Royal Court Theater in London.

“I’m just really looking forward to engaging people on it, an engagement which can only happen, obviously, if the play is on,” Ms. Viner said.

The updated Mets theme song “Our Team. Our Time” has received terrible reviews:

The new Mets theme song, “Our Team. Our Time,” is so bad that fans are petitioning online to have it killed, the creators are getting death threats and it has been banned to only pregame playtime.

Fans of Pedro Martinez and the first-place Amazin’s compare it to the Chicago Bears’ “Super Bowl Shuffle” or “a bad rip-off of Run-D.M.C. circa 1985.” One fan even insinuated that Britney Spears’ talentless hip-hop hubby, Kevin Federline, could’ve done a better job.

“As a Mets fan, I’m truly embarrassed by this horrible excuse for a song the Mets have anointed the ’song of 2006,’” one writes.

“Aside from the embarrassingly bad lyrics, cheesy dated ‘Vanilla Ice’-style music and lack of melody, it’s stereotyping the team as tasteless, hipless, and classless . . . it’s just stupid.”

Not to sound like a fuddy-duddy, but I think most reasonable people agree that using acid to vandalize subway windows is not a form of free speech:

“I’ve seen it on every line, on almost every train,” said Andrew B. Albert, chairman of the New York City Riders Council, a state-sponsored advocacy group, who said the acid-based graffiti first appeared on subway windows about six months ago. Mr. Albert is a nonvoting member of the Transit Committee, which met yesterday.

He said the most common material used by the new breed of graffiti vandals is Armor Etch-All, an etching acid sold in art supply stores that is used by craftspeople to etch into glass or other materials. To create graffiti with the acid, it is mixed with paint or shoe polish, Mr. Albert said. And when applied to subway windows, it most commonly leaves broad, sweeping, indelible marks, which subway crews cannot remove in subway yards, as they do with painted graffiti.

Transit officials said that most subway windows are vulnerable and pose an expensive problem because they cost up to $130 each to replace. Only the newest of subway cars, acquired since about 2000, are resistant to the new generation of graffiti, because their windows are protected with Mylar, a plastic coating that can be peeled off and replaced.

. . .

The city’s resurgent graffiti problem, on buildings as well as subways, has not escaped the notice of City Hall. In December, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg signed into law a ban on possession of “graffiti instruments,” including etching acid, by anyone under 21. Besides etching acid, the ban covers such things as aerosol paint and broad-tipped indelible markers, which are used by graffiti vandals on buildings.

Opponents of the city ban have said it infringes on freedom of speech. Yesterday, according to The Associated Press, a lawyer said he would file suit today in federal court in Manhattan to challenge the ban as “overly broad.” The lawyer, Daniel Perez, said he was representing seven high school and college students who are supported by Marc Ecko, a fashion designer.

I’m sure Ecko cares about civil liberties and not, say — just thinking out loud here — his “full-scale global fashion and lifestyle company that reported billings of over $300 million in its men’s sportswear division alone in 2002,” but no matter — the suit must go on:

. . . imagine if, during the days when seditious libel was regarded as unprotected expression, the government, in order to deter seditious publications, made possession of a printing press unlawfulunless the possessor of the printing press could affirmatively prove at trial that the printing device would be used for a lawful purpose.

The jury’s verdict is in! This means Alan Feuer can begin working on his book and/or filmscript.

First, note the obvious literary pretensions:

The verdict, coming 20 years after their first victim, Israel Greenwald, was gunned down in a parking garage and 13 months after both defendants, Louis Eppolito and Stephen Caracappa, were arrested at the coat check of a Nevada restaurant, brought to a close a trial that stretched from the gangland prefectures of southern Brooklyn to the palm-lined subdivisions of Las Vegas.

. . .

The verdict was delivered after lunch. As the Federal District Court jury filed into the fourth-floor courtroom, Mr. Eppolito’s daughter Andrea fought back tears and clutched a rosary. Seventy times, one for each of the specific crimes in the indictment, June Lowe, courtroom deputy for Judge Jack B. Weinstein, asked the foreman, “Proved or not proved?” to which, 70 times, the answer came back, “Proved.”

The process of rendering the verdict, reading it aloud, then polling jurors one by one, took 18 minutes, 5 minutes longer than the best case the defense could mount on Mr. Eppolito’s behalf. The fleshy bags beneath his eyes seemed to deepen as the toll of “Proved, proved, proved” cut through the room. Mr. Caracappa sat back in his chair, shook his head ever so slightly and placed his left hand on his chin in a pensive gesture.

Don’t forget the clearly defined good vs. evil framework:

Moments later, at the same microphones, Roslynn R. Mauskopf, the United States attorney in Brooklyn, read from a statement accusing the detectives of perverting “the shield of good” and turning it into a “sword of evil.”

Plus, it’s obvious where Feuer will go with this with his discussion of the trial’s “drama,” “cast” and “characters”:

The trial itself was not immune to a certain level of absurdity. The case, with its “eight bodies,” occupied a three-week federal trial, with insult-laden arguments, subpoenaed book deals and a wildly extravagant cast. The characters ranged from an illiterate sixth-grade dropout who kept secret for nearly 20 years that he had buried Mr. Greenwald’s body at his business, to a Connecticut accountant who stole $5 million and then made amends to the government by secretly recording everyone from the defendants to exotic dancers at a strip club called the Crazy Horse Too.

Indeed, from the very moment when, freed on bail last summer, Mr. Eppolito strolled from the courthouse in a guayabera and diamond-patterned lounge pants, then lifted his hem to show reporters the monitoring anklet clamped to his leg, it was clear that the trial would be no ordinary drama.

Backstory: And When You’re Pitching This Script, Make It Clear That Brooklyn Itself Is A Character; “Nothing Has Hurt People More In This Country Than Wanting To Be In The Movies”.

Hizzoner announced that VH1 will host its annual Hip Hop Honors in New York, providing a convenient opportunity to front with his homeboys Ice-T and Russell Simmons:

“That’s c-o-o-l,” Mayor Bloomberg told reporters at City Hall yesterday after he was given the title by rapper/actor Ice-T.

Bloomberg, surrounded by Ice-T and hip-hop entrepreneur Russell Simmons, announced New York City will once again host VH1’s Hip Hop Honors. He tried his best to fit in as just another homeboy from the ‘hood — albeit one with a few billion dollars.

“Welcome to City Hall, or my crib, as I like to call it,” Bloomberg said to laughter. “Not everybody here understands our language.”

Groan.

“Where else could you have Hip-Hop Week but in New York City,” Bloomberg said, rattling off a list of local notables, ranging from Simmons, of Hollis, Queens, to “me, Mike B,” from Manhattan.

He got high praise from Simmons, who endorsed his 2005 mayoral reelection, and Ice-T, a star of “Law and Order: SVU,” who said he was surprised by the invite to City Hall.

“My people said Bloomberg’s cool,” Ice-T said as Bloomberg smiled and blushed.

“On the street, I think that’s the highest accolade he could ever achieve. When we showed up and I met him, I felt it too. You can feel it when you touch a playa’s hand.”

No! Please make it stop!

Backstory: It Could Be Just Me, But The Mayor Is Probably The Last Person I’d Want To Rap About; Mayor Mike: Rockin’ the Mic Left and Right.

In the literary free-for-all that the “mafia cop” trial has become, Brooklyn itself becomes a character:

It could be argued that one of the most intriguing characters in the trial of Louis J. Eppolito and Stephen Caracappa is not a person, but a place. As absorbing as the witnesses, the lawyers and the two defendants is the borough of Brooklyn, which has arisen in the trial as something like an empire of the ill-fated and often illicitly employed.

Countless times, Brooklyn — or specifically southern Brooklyn — has been painted as a universe of two-bit deals and three-time losers, of gangster bars and catering halls and auto-body shops. It has come to seem in testimony like a world where people are forever swapping envelopes of cash and owing money to their loan sharks and their mothers — a world of which a witness could say, without a whiff of irony, “I was having some bad times and I committed bank robbery,” or “a few times back in the 80’s people paid me to make their cars disappear.”

. . .

Countless times, Brooklyn — or specifically southern Brooklyn — has been painted as a universe of two-bit deals and three-time losers, of gangster bars and catering halls and auto-body shops. It has come to seem in testimony like a world where people are forever swapping envelopes of cash and owing money to their loan sharks and their mothers — a world of which a witness could say, without a whiff of irony, “I was having some bad times and I committed bank robbery,” or “a few times back in the 80’s people paid me to make their cars disappear.”

Backstory: Alan Feuer’s other article about the literary flavor in a murder trial; Feuer is obviously making notes for a wonderful script and/or novel.

Astorians Coming Together to show that they are interesting, too:

While taking a ride on the N or W trains to Astoria these days, one is likely to notice a musician hauling a guitar or an actor reading a script or maybe a young artist sketching the city views from the elevated tracks.

With proximity to Manhattan, public safety, good cuisine and still-affordable rents, Astoria and neighboring Long Island City have been seeing a migration of newcomers in recent years — many belonging to the creative set.

Now these artists have a place to congregate in the form of a monthly gathering that kicked off last week.

The idea is “to give people a nice chance, in an intimate setting, to meet each other and get to know each other,” said Andrea Reese, a writer, performer and one of the founders of the group B-QUACK, which stands for Borough of Queens United Artists Collective Kum-Ba-Ya.

The first meeting was held last Thursday night at Waltz, an artistic-minded coffee shop on Ditmars Blvd. More than two dozen artists, playwrights and musicians mingled at the inaugural event.

“There was a feeling of a lot of excitement,” said Reese, an actor in a one-woman show about Jackie O. “It was really a lot of fun.”

B-QUACK is the brainchild of five locals: Reese, performer Jen Ryan, director and theater editor Leonard Jacobs, designer Rik Sansone and David Gibbs, a publicist.

. . .

“We’re a little tired of hearing about Brooklyn,” said Jacobs, who moved to Astoria from the Theater District three years ago after the notion of artists being able to afford Manhattan rents turned into “a laughingstock” and after many Brooklyn neighborhoods became nearly as expensive.

“It is time for us to say we are here, we are interesting,” Jacobs said.

More proof that an unhealthy obsession with Broadway shlock is actually a sickness:

A starstruck accountant embezzled nearly a half-million dollars from a Midtown clothing company — then blew the money on Broadway charities, theater tickets and flowers for her favorite female stars.

Jennifer Smith, 35, lavished $3,000 worth of flowers on such celebs as “Wicked” star Kristin Chenoweth, Oscar-nominated actor Catherine Keener, who played Anna in off-Broadway’s “Burn This,” and Anne Nathan of the Broadway hits “Thoroughly Modern Millie” and “Chicago.”

Also presented with purportedly purloined petals were Jennifer Laura Thompson, who played Frieda Bauer in “Pardon My English,” and Cherry Jones, who wowed the critics as Sister Aloysius in “Doubt” at the Walter Kerr Theatre.

Her favorite star was Chenoweth, who played Glinda the Good Witch in “Wicked” at the Gershwin Theatre. Chenoweth got flowers four times from the accused embezzler, who sent them to the star’s home address, prosecutors said.

. . .

The theater-minded charities Broadway Cares and Carnegie Hall Society also benefited from her looted largesse, prosecutors said.

Smith, who has two prior Manhattan embezzlement convictions totaling $58,000, was apparently dissatisfied with the $65,000 she earned as the personal assistant to James Ammeen, owner of Neema Clothing, a manufacturer and importer.

Ammeen had discovered the two years’ worth of alleged thefts only after he fired Smith last June. She was canned after she kept calling in sick, even claiming falsely that she had cancer, only to be spotted at — where else? — a Broadway theater by the boss’ wife.

The Times’ Alan Feuer shows how overenthusiastically pitching your film script can get you into big trouble, even years later:

Just beneath the surface of the federal trial of Louis Eppolito and Stephen Caracappa is a cautionary tale about the entertainment age. If one were a screenwriter or, say, one of the half-dozen authors writing about the case, one might propose a work titled, “The Deal Got Him: How a Former Lawman Was Charged With Conspiracy Because He Tried to Get His Movie Made.”

Mr. Eppolito, 57, a retired New York detective, has found himself in exactly this situation. After leaving the police force in the early 1990’s, he went to act in films and write scripts in Las Vegas, where years later he was charged with his former partner, Mr. Caracappa, 64, in a federal narcotics case.

The drug case in Las Vegas revived the government’s desire to pursue a much bigger and much more gruesome case against the two men — accusations that they had killed at least eight people for the mob. That case, based on events said to have occurred in Brooklyn in the 1980’s and early 1990’s, was in jeopardy of being voided because of a five-year statute of limitations — which is where Mr. Eppolito’s writing career comes in.

He has always had a touch of the poet in him, penning “Mafia Cop,” a book that describes his break with the Brooklyn gangsters in his family, and scripts like “Turn of Faith,” a cop-mob-priesthood potboiler produced by the former lightweight champion Boom Boom Mancini. And yet his current troubles began in 2004, prosecutors say, when a government informant with a micro-recorder approached him in Las Vegas, posing as a rich accountant with investors interested in his next script.

If you believe the government the informant, Steven Corso, risked his life recording Mr. Eppolito boasting about all sorts of gangsters he knew and then agreeing to secure an ounce of methamphetamine for some Hollywood big shots. Mr. Corso seemed, after all, to hold the keys to the film world and was, therefore, a man Mr. Eppolito wanted to impress.

But if you believe Bruce Cutler, Mr. Eppolito’s lawyer, Mr. Corso was “a defrocked C.P.A.” and a man worthy of “a nice smack in the face,” who played upon his client’s celluloid dreams to entrap him.

Even though Mr. Corso recorded Mr. Eppolito saying some fairly rough things on tape, Mr. Cutler has argued they were not criminal things — and not even, in the factual sense, true. They were rather fictions produced by Mr. Eppolito’s Brooklyn-steeped imagination — “Mafia folklore, stories,” Mr. Cutler said — the very thing that made his client worthy as a writer.

What is not in dispute is this: one ounce of methamphetamine said to have been procured by a struggling screenwriter for some “Hollywood punks,” as Mr. Cutler called them, has allowed the government to jump across the statute of limitations and indict the two detectives in a continuing criminal conspiracy — recall the title from above? — that stretched from the streets of Brooklyn to the subdivisions of Las Vegas.

Which may be why Edward Hayes, Mr. Caracappa’s lawyer, had this to say in his opening arguments last week: “Nothing has hurt people more in this country than wanting to be in the movies.”

(It’s Fuhrmanesque, no?)

The Times reports that the upcoming trial of mafia-linked cops Louis J. Eppolito and Stephen Caracappa has attracted a boatload of literary carpetbaggers:

Depending on whom you ask, when you ask them and how honest they are, there are four books and a movie, five books and a movie, four books but no movie or five books but no movie about the federal racketeering trial of Louis J. Eppolito and Stephen Caracappa in the works.

The trial, which began yesterday with jury selection in Federal District Court in Brooklyn, has become the latest scoop for the disheveled band of newspaper reporters who write about the courts and has led, in at least two cases, to a literary luncheon and a book deal. It has also served as a midcareer change of pace for two investigators on the case who have cashed in on their inside knowledge, signing book deals of their own.

Almost from the day last March when Mr. Eppolito, 57, and Mr. Caracappa, 64, two former New York police detectives, were slapped in handcuffs over dinner in Las Vegas, literary agents and Hollywood types have descended on the case. There were articles in Playboy and Vanity Fair, not to mention the city’s newspapers. At a pretrial hearing in September, Mr. Caracappa’s lawyer, Edward Hayes, mused aloud that every member of the prosecution team, except the two chief prosecutors, seemed to have a book deal.

That Village Voice article about The Game appears too good to be true. Gawker reports that the story seems to have been Blaired into existence:

Here’s what we know: This week’s Voice had a cover story by hotshot young Nick Sylvester reporting that men around New York are using Neil Strauss’s The Game, about pickup artists and their techniques, and that women are increasingly aware of this and outsmarting their would-be seducers. We know said cover story has been removed from the Voice website. We know that the Voice’s acting editor-in-chief Doug Simmons, to whom we were referred when we called because the paper’s PR director has left the company, hasn’t returned our message. And we’re reliably informed that the newsroom — such as it is anymore — knows some sort of big shit is going down but isn’t being told what.

Here’s what we hear/speculate/gather: People quoted in the story claim they never spoke to the reporter. Editors at the paper now believe Sylvester likely fabricated material. Writers at the paper believe this is because young Sylvester — a former Harvard Lampoon kid who writes criticism for the Voice and indie-music reviews for Pitchfork — didn’t quite get the whole big-reported-cover-story thing, which he wasn’t really ready for and which Simmons was pushing him to do. Simmons, merely the acting editor, is trying to make a splash so he can get the job permanently. This is not the sort of splash he had in mind. Sylvester may or may not have fainted in Simmons’s office while being berated. And everything in the usually boisterous office is being kept very need-to-know.

Gawker supplies cached Google links here.

Meanwhile, the editors of the Voice explain in part what happened:

Early Wednesday morning, the Voice learned that the concluding section of this week’s cover story, “Do You Wanna Kiss Me?” by senior associate editor Nick Sylvester, contained fabricated material. In that section, Sylvester says he met at a New York City bar with three TV writers who had flown in from L.A. to test their updates of pickup techniques from Neil Strauss’s book, The Game.

That scene, as Sylvester now acknowledges in the statement below, never happened.

We have removed the article from the Voice website and begun a review of the entire piece. Sylvester has been suspended.

What follows is Sylvester’s statement:

“Dear Voice Readers,

“I did not meet Steve Lookner in New York at Bar 151. The trip and my encounter with him, DC, and Vali did not happen as I reported, or at all. . . .”

The Post reports that transit union officials are selling autographed copies of the posters carried on the picket lines during their recent (illegal!) strike:

A top union official is trying to “strike” it rich by selling autographed copies of the walkout posters transit workers carried on the picket line.

Eladio Diaz, who brags he was the Transit Workers Union Local 100 “executive board member who made the motion” to strike, says the placard is signed by him and a slew of board members and other union reps.

With the posters currently going for $15, Diaz is unlikely to make a dent in the millions in fines faced by Local 100 and its members, but New Yorkers and transit officials said it was outrageous to profiteer from the strike.

“I think it’s totally inappropriate. It appears they’re gloating,” said MTA board member Frank Powers.

“There’s nothing to be proud of. Look at the discomfort they caused the city. They should be ashamed of themselves,” he added.

But Powers said he’s not surprised because “this is America.”

On the horizon — a CBS reality program about Upper East Side prep schoolers, modeled on “Laguna Beach”:

CBS is about to turn a swanky Upper East Side prep school into a reality TV set.

The untitled show will center on a group of students from $25,000-a-year York Preparatory School, alma mater to Liv Tyler and Kelly Klein, and will be modeled after MTV’s hit reality series “Laguna Beach,” which follows a California high school clique of mostly gorgeous, tan blondes as they navigate love triangles and spending sprees.

This is all very fortunate, now that we’re caught up on all of the Gossip Girl novels.