The final, telling image of Mike Daisey's "The Last Cargo Cult," playing at the Public Theater through Sunday.

The glass bowl filled to the rim with dollar bills didn’t look like any old tip jar. Resting on the wood table behind which Mike Daisey had just performed his intellectually bracing and laughter-from-the-gut inducing monologue “The Last Cargo Cult,” the bowl of money seemed to glow. Maybe it was just the lights — the lighting design had made a set of piled-up cardboard boxes look like, at various times, volcanoes, the remains of Ikea shopping sprees, and the cargo of the title, so-named after the cargo dropped in the South Pacific by the U.S., to establish military bases during World War II.

But equally plausible was that Daisey himself had conjured the effect with his performance. Maybe his well-told stories —of sleeping with a pig, renting instead of owning, the ritualistic uses in the South Pacific of a mask from Scream, and the four mini-fridges stacked on top of each other in the dorm of his micro-ivy college — had put the audience into a trance about the green stuff. We weren’t inclined to worship it, that’s for sure, but Daisey had made us see it differently.

He’d talked about money throughout the show — the description that stuck in my mind was how money is just a bunch of pieces of paper cut into the same rectangle-shaped size, with no value. Of course the money in the bowl did have value: Ushers had passed out the bills to the audience, and it was our choice whether to give them back, add more, or keep them. The total amount distributed was equal to the amount Daisey had been paid for the performance, he told us, and it was a complete gamble on his part whether he'd get it back. Brave and worthy soul, this one.

On opening night, the bowl was full. But sitting there, it meant so much more than the dollar amount. In the exchange, the money’s value was transformed, from dollars and cents, to that of the bond between performer and audience, making its value, well, priceless. Now that's some pyramid scheme.

So if I were you, I’d get myself a ticket to "The Last Cargo Cult" and get ready to fill up the glass bowl – and save a few dollars for the Public Theater, which has been so supportive of Daisey and his wife/director Jean-Michele Gregory, as they noted with a champagne toast on opening night. Performances run through Sunday.

When Wall Street imploded, Eric Fischl went to the Andalusian town of Ronda to paint the Corrida Goyesca. With the bullfighters dressed in 18th century attire, the scenes evokes Goya, with Fischl's stamp of warm color and light. The exhibition of eight paintings runs through December 19 at Mary Boone Gallery, 541 W. 24th St., www.maryboonegallery.com.

	Julia and David Koch

Mayor Bloomberg may have worn a red tie to reference the rich hues of India at the White House State Dinner last evening, but he just as eaisly could have been representing New York's (holiday) red state of mind the same evening: At New York City Ballet's opening night, red was the favored color: Balanchine's "Rubies pas de deux" was on the program, in which red costumes sparkled, as they did in the world premiere of "Naive and Sentimental Music" choreographed by Peter Martins, which included bright red costumes designed by Liliana Casabal of Morgane LeFay. And then there were the guests, representing New York's power grid: the ladies, of course, dressed in red; the tables decorated with an assortment of deep red and orange flowers, and the dinner napkins, yes, red. The lady in red who made the biggest splash: Julia Koch, wife of David H. Koch, after whom the ballet's home has been named, in recognition of his $100 million gift. Mr. Koch, too, wore red: not a tie, but rather ruby and diamond studs he bought at Tiffany & Co. Were there lobbyists and heads of state? Perhaps not, but there was Bill Cunningham snapping away for The New York Times, Sean Driscoll of Glorious Food presiding over the serving of Baked Alaska, and the company of New York City Ballet taking over the dance floor: Now that's a party.

Please click here for photos.

Adam Gopnik, Billie Tsien, Martha Parker, and Tod Williams

Click here for photos.

We were in luck at the Folk Art Museum gala last night when the first person we laid eyes on was its president, Laura Parsons (wife of Citigroup chairman Richard Parsons). Ms. Parsons was sitting with Raffaella Cribiore, a curator of papyri at Columbia's Rare Book and Manuscripts Library. We learned about two works in Ms. Parsons's personal collection: A self-portrait by Clementine Hunter and Hale Woodruff's "Cotton Pickers," which hangs in her living room.

Over by the silent auction table, Barry Briskin, the chairman of the museum, was talking with Robin Schlinger. "This is a really great event. All the proceeds go to education, which is so important," Mr. Briskin said.

We met Phyllis Kossoff and Jan Willem van Bergen Henegouwien (phew!). We admired the red ribbon on the lapel of Paul Baerwald, which he received, he said, for making a donation to the Actor's Fund at a performance that day of Manhattan Theater Club's "The Royal Family." "It's a great play," Mr. Baerwald said.

We saw the guest everyone was referring to as both "the most handsome man in the room" and "Uma's guy." That would be Arpad Busson. Uma, as in Uma Thurman, was not present. Busson is tall with a serious yet boyish face and Calvin Klein model's haircut. Others we spotted and admired without taking a photograph: Gillian Miniter wearing the hot color for November, an emerald green; Dorothy Lichtenstein, and Taryn and Mark Leavitt, whom we know for their leadership at Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival in the Berkshires.

Our lens caught up with the chairman of Yale University's corporation, Roland Betts, his wife, Lois, and friend Dianne Renwick -- right before Mr. Betts took his wife to the dance floor. Near the tables designated for the young professionals, we found Ashley Mohr and Matt Mitchell admiring the view from Tribeca Rooftop.

Adam Gopnik told us that after recently giving a lecture about van Gogh, he still feels that "Starry Night" "looks like the greatest painting of modern times." Later, Mr. Gopnik and his wife walked over to the architects Billie Tsien and Tod Williams and posed for a photo. Ms. Tsien and Mr. Williams designed the American Folk Art Museum and are now working on the Barnes Foundation's downtown Philadelphia structure; they'll be attending a groundbreaking ceremony this Friday in Philadelphia, though Mr. Williams told us they started digging the hole in the ground yesterday.

One of Mr. Gopnik's dining companions was the executive director of the museum, Maria Ann Conelli. Their meal: a poached pear salad with pine nuts, their choice of filet mignon with broccolini or grilled salmon with quinoa, and a baked caramelized apple tart.

Yaz Hernandez introduced us to some of the guests at her table, including composer Marcos Galvany, who divides his time between New York and Washington, D.C. and is working on an opera that is set to premiere at Carnegie Hall on April 10, related to the story of Easter. He said he's heard the Vatican may be interested in hosting a performance.

Alas we were not the ones who put in the winning $14,000 bid for a week's trip to Tuscany -- but we did get to watch the suspenseful auction. And we also got to share hellos and hugs with good souls we haven't seen in a while: pianist Bruce Levingston and American Folk Art Museum trustee Lawrence Benenson. All in all, a folksy night.

Photo by Getty Images.

“I hope only to stretch myself to some how reach the light.” —David J. Lista

“I chuff my way into another day/as ice glints on the razor wire.” —Jorge Antonio Renaud

“Today I ate BBQ chicken with a plastic spoon. Sound impossible? Well, eighteen hundred inmates did it. Usually we eat with a spork.” —John Yarbrough

WNYC and the PEN America Center present a showcase of work written by participants in the PEN Prison Writing Program. The event, titled “Breakout: Voices from the Inside,” is a benefit with ticket prices starting at $50, to support a low-profile PEN project that certainly deserves a much higher profile. Excerpts from stories will be read (and streamed live on the wnyc.org Web site) by, among others, Lemon Andersen, fresh off the success of “County of Kings” at the Public Theater; John Turturro (most recently heard in the latest Transformers film), writer Mary Gaitskill, writer/actor Eric Bogosian, and Jamal Joseph, who wrote poetry and earned two college degrees while incarcerated for his participation in the Black Panther Party, and has since become a spoken-word artist on Def Jam Poetry, chairman of Columbia University’s Graduate film department, and artistic director of the New Heritage Theater in Harlem.

For 28 years, working with bare-bone budgets, the PEN Prison Writing Program has guided thousands of people behind bars in the art of writing. This takes place through the distribution, to between 3,000 and 4,000 prisoners annually, of the “PEN Handbook for Writers in Prison,” with chapters on fiction, nonfiction, poetry, screenwriting, drama, and rewriting. The program also runs a writing contest, and the most promising applicants — about a hundred a year — are paired with professional writers for mentoring through snail mail correspondence. About 70% of the mentorships last through three letter exchanges, and some last much longer.

At various times, the program has narrowly escaped the chopping block. There have also been times when it has been able to do even more: A grant once made possible post-release programming, offering writing classes to people who had just gotten out of prison. “It’s a very troubled period of time, when they’re reintegrating back, so having a skill they’re practicing is a very important thing,” says the program’s director, Jackson Taylor, adding that education dramatically reduces recidivism.

The program’s key achievement isn’t helping prisoners get published or mentored, but rather, quite humbly, to help them make writing a regular part of their lives, which brings its own benefits. “Writing is a skill that generates other skills,” said Mr. Taylor. The theory behind the program is that all prisoners can learn to write. “We believe very strongly that writing is a skill that can be practiced, and writing well is useful in almost every avenue of employment. Part of what our job is to teach them what to practice and how to practice.”

Has a genre of prison fiction emerged from the program? Mr. Taylor, who also runs the New School’s Graduate Writing Program, answered that the fiction produced by prisoners covers a range of themes. Some express contrition; others proclaim their innocence; others “percolate with ideas about home life, family, and that’s when you sense that these 'prisoners' or 'inmates' are human beings who for some terrible reason have had something go wrong in their lives."

Mr. Taylor notes just how important it is to have the stories of prisoners out in the open. “The system doesn’t want you to see. I tried to see a prisoner last year, Charles Patrick Norman, down in Florida. He’s entered our contest, I just love the guy. And even with PEN’s backing and going through all the proper channels, I wasn’t allowed to see him. I think that’s wrong, people need to have access. They’re already isolated enough,” Mr. Taylor said. The PEN Prison Writing Program is one way prisoners can gain access — and we can gain access to prisoners. “I’ve read pages and pages of human despair…all I can do is connect in this small tiny way,” Mr. Taylor said.

Here is the excerpt that will be read from the writing of Charles Patrick Norman:

Dear Diary, I grow flowers. I’ve been doing this all my life, off and on. Some of my earliest memories are of holding onto my grandmother’s skirt as she tended her flower and vegetable garden in the country near Redwater, Texas. At Railford, in late 1980, I finally got permission to order flower seeds, germinate them under lights and grow them around our housing area. Everyone loved the colorful blooms, with a few exceptions, and I got approval to extend the flower program. Over the years, transfers came to many different prisons across Florida, and I continued growing flowers. Years after I left Railford, an old man arrived on the transfer to Polk, where I’d been a couple of years. He told the admitting guards, “Charlie Norman must be here.” They told him yes, he was right. How did he know? He gestured to the flower beds in the visiting park, the lines of flowers along the sidewalks, and told them the instant he saw all those flowers, he knew I was here. No one else in the prison system did that.

And so for one night, an audience in the studio and on the web will be invited into the world behind bars.

“Breakout: Voices from the Inside” takes place tonight, November 9, 7 p.m., WNYC’s Greene Space, at the intersection of Varick and Charleton, tickets start at $50. On the web: http://bit.ly/cLeFD. Phone: 212.334.1660 ext 120.

The New York Public Library's new logo.

Patience and fortitude are still keeping watch at the New York Public Library’s flagship Fifth Avenue entrance, but the world is changing around them, and so, in a fashion, are they.

The Library has a new logo developed in-house and based on its iconic lion statues. It is a bold graphic inspired by the design of stained glass, complete with a circular frame. The former logo was also a lion, but with finer detail that apparently made it difficult to read in contexts like Twitter.

The logo isn’t the only thing changing. At its annual gala last week, the library introduced new messaging in the official gala video (available on YouTube), this year produced by a new team of outside vendors: Mark Katz of the Soundbite Institute, Tim Miller of Big Chief Entertainment, and James Percelay of Get Real Productions. The goal, Mr. Katz said, was to position the library as “an unrivaled ‘human-powered search engine,’” in an age of Google, Yahoo, and Monster.com.

Three librarians appear in the video to tease out the point. After Mayor Bloomberg describes a librarian's human touch, career specialist Janice Moore-Smith says, “Online job sites, they can’t do that.” Reference librarian David Smith says helping writers requires creativity and “if you’re pro-active, you anticipate what their needs are." And children’s librarian Julia Chang explains the difference between her and an Internet search engine: “Even though Google will give you the thousand hits that they give you, a children’s librarian can always refine your search and always track the right sources for you and be able to analyze those sources.”

It's the last minute of the video, though, that feels ready to be repurposed into a primetime public service announcement. It begins with a question that makes a great tagline, “What are you searching for?” Cue the inspirational music, and watch more than a dozen people of diverse ages and ethnicities answer: “A job in fashion,” “a really good mystery,” “references for my thesis,” “my family tree..." Mayor Bloomberg’s answer is, “What’s going to take this city forward” Hilary Knight, Eloise’s illustrator, says, “New ideas.” One of the antique expert Keno brothers answers, “The next great treasure.” The author E. Annie Proulx says, “Information on the kauri trees of New Zealand in the 19th century.”

The video ends with a woman’s voice repeating “What are you searching for?” with a black screen showing a skinny white rectangular box, mimicking search boxes on Web sites. This minute has emotional impact and captures the incredible range of ways people use the library. It's about time it got its own fancy commercial.

I’ll be searching for it, along with those snappy new lions.

Preparing for First Hand Grenade Throwing, Southern Israel, 2005. Courtesy Rachel Papo and ClampArt

Good morning!

A great event to get to tonight is the free, public opening of the contemporary art installations presented by New York City Opera in its renovated house. The setting is the very, very special Promenade, with its Elie Nadelman sculptures. And since there's no performance tonight, it is your prerogative to dwell luxuriously here instead of worrying about getting back to your seat.

What you'll see: In addition to E.V. Day's manipulations of City Opera costumes, suspended in air, City Opera is presenting photography exhibitions along the perimeters of the red-carpeted balconies. Make sure you ascend to the first balcony, for the display of work by Rachel Papo, who is among The New York Sun's distinguished photographers (see some of those assignments here), and who last month won the Lucie Award for the International Photographer of the Year - Deeper Perspective Award.

Who you'll see: In addition to the artists -- both Papo and Day are strong, intelligent women who will invigorate you in a moment -- you'll likely hear from the guy in charge of making City Opera matter: George Steel. An elegant man, and one to pay attention to especially in the next few weeks. And then there's E.V. Day's husband, Ted Lee, author with his brother Matt of a new cookbook on Southern cuisine.

What does this have to do with opera? The photograph above is part of a series that has thematic resonance with the first opera of City Opera's season, "Esther." As City Opera's press department advised us, "Drawing from her experience as a teenager serving in the Israeli Air Force, Rachel Papo depicts the subject’s negotiation of the often contradictory roles of soldier and adolescent girl. The image echoes the struggle of Esther, who was also a teenager at the time she was called to risk her life to save her people from annihilation."

Dress: Make some effort! Color would work well here (remember, you'll be on a red carpet!)

Details: The preview takes place tonight from 5 pm to 8 pm at the David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center, to the left of the fountain. "Esther," by the way, premieres on Sunday.

Photo by Getty Images.

“I hope only to stretch myself to some how reach the light.” —David J. Lista

“I chuff my way into another day/as ice glints on the razor wire.” —Jorge Antonio Renaud

“Today I ate BBQ chicken with a plastic spoon. Sound impossible? Well, eighteen hundred inmates did it. Usually we eat with a spork.” —John Yarbrough

At WNYC’s Greene Space this coming Monday night, the PEN America Center has organized a showcase of work written by participants in the PEN Prison Writing Program. The event, titled “Breakout: Voices from the Inside,” is a benefit with ticket prices starting at $50, to support a low-profile PEN project that certainly deserves a much higher profile.

For 28 years, working with bare-bone budgets, the PEN Prison Writing Program has guided thousands of people behind bars in the art of writing. This takes place through the distribution, to between 3,000 and 4,000 prisoners annually, of the “PEN Handbook for Writers in Prison,” with chapters on fiction, nonfiction, poetry, screenwriting, drama, and rewriting. The program also runs a writing contest, and the most promising applicants — about a hundred a year — are paired with professional writers for mentoring through snail mail correspondence. About 70% of the mentorships last through three letter exchanges, and some last much longer.

At various times, the program has narrowly escaped the chopping block. There have also been times when it has been able to do even more: A grant once made possible post-release programming, offering writing classes to people who had just gotten out of prison. “It’s a very troubled period of time, when they’re reintegrating back, so having a skill they’re practicing is a very important thing,” says the program’s director, Jackson Taylor, adding that education dramatically reduces recidivism.

The program’s key achievement isn’t helping prisoners get published or mentored, but rather, quite humbly, to help them make writing a regular part of their lives, which brings its own benefits. “Writing is a skill that generates other skills,” said Mr. Taylor. The theory behind the program is, of course, that all prisoners can learn to write. “We believe very strongly that writing is a skill that can be practiced, and writing well is useful in almost every avenue of employment. Part of what our job is to teach them what to practice and how to practice.”

We asked Mr. Taylor, who also runs the New School’s Graduate Writing Program, “Has a genre of prison fiction emerged from the program?” He answered that the fiction produced by prisoners covers a range of themes. Some express contrition; others proclaim their innocence; others “percolate with ideas about home life, family, and that’s when you sense that these 'prisoners' or 'inmates' are human beings who for some terrible reason have had something go wrong in their lives,” Mr. Taylor said.

At the event, excerpts from stories will be read (and streamed live on the wnyc.org Web site) by, among others, Lemon Andersen, fresh off the success of “County of Kings” at the Public Theater; John Turturro (most recently heard in the latest Transformers film), writer Mary Gaitskill, writer/actor Eric Bogosian, and Jamal Joseph, who wrote poetry and earned two college degrees while incarcerated for his participation in the Black Panther Party, and has since become a spoken-word artist on Def Jam Poetry, chairman of Columbia University’s Graduate film department, and artistic director of the New Heritage Theater in Harlem.

Mr. Taylor notes just how important it is to have the stories of prisoners out in the open. “The system doesn’t want you to see. I tried to see a prisoner last year, Charles Patrick Norman, down in Florida. He’s entered our contest, I just love the guy. And even with PEN’s backing and going through all the proper channels, I wasn’t allowed to see him. I think that’s wrong, people need to have access. They’re already isolated enough,” Mr. Taylor said. The PEN Prison Writing Program is one way prisoners can gain access — and we can gain access to prisoners. “I’ve read pages and pages of human despair…all I can do is connect in this small tiny way,” Mr. Taylor said.

Here is the excerpt that will be read, written by prisoner Charles Patrick Norman:

Dear Diary, I grow flowers. I’ve been doing this all my life, off and on. Some of my earliest memories are of holding onto my grandmother’s skirt as she tended her flower and vegetable garden in the country near Redwater, Texas. At Railford, in late 1980, I finally got permission to order flower seeds, germinate them under lights and grow them around our housing area. Everyone loved the colorful blooms, with a few exceptions, and I got approval to extend the flower program. Over the years, transfers came to many different prisons across Florida, and I continued growing flowers. Years after I left Railford, an old man arrived on the transfer to Polk, where I’d been a couple of years. He told the admitting guards, “Charlie Norman must be here.” They told him yes, he was right. How did he know? He gestured to the flower beds in the visiting park, the lines of flowers along the sidewalks, and told them the instant he saw all those flowers, he knew I was here. No one else in the prison system did that.

And so for one night, an audience in the studio and on the web will be invited into the world behind bars.

“Breakout: Voices from the Inside” takes place on November 9, 7 p.m., WNYC’s Greene Space, at the intersection of Varick and Charleton, tickets start at $50. On the web: http://bit.ly/cLeFD. Phone: 212.334.1660 ext 120.

The head of New York Landmarks Conservancy, Peg Breen, with honorees George Kaufman, Robert Morgenthau, Baroness Mariuccia Zerilli Marimo, Tommy Tune, A.E. Hotchner, and past landmark and host Liz Smith.

The New York Landmarks Conservancy has a way of making the business of galas -- gathering people to eat smoked salmon and filet and cheer for some "honorees" -- fun. In fact, after sixteen years, the organization has it down to an art and science, as it proved tonight in the 16th edition of the "Living Landmarks" gala, held at Cipriani 42nd Street.

The method relies on the queen of entertainment writing, Liz Smith, who knows a thing or two about entertaining. She is a gracious, intelligent, witty, warm, and multi-talented host. She makes the evening into an event.

There are some celebrities involved -- Bill Cosby was on the premises to introduce honoree George Kaufman, who brought back Astoria Studios, and with it, a lot of film and television business, not to mention tourists.

Part of the fun is that the honorees are asked to talk about why they love New York, and what New Yorker doesn't love that. Broadway star Tommy Tune said, "The creativity is so thick, you wake up in the morning and your brain starts going. It's fertile ground." Baroness Mariuccia Zerilli Marimò, in a charming Italian accent, said, "New York is so wonderful because it's not a city. It's many cities."

Humor is always welcome at such affairs. Tonight it came from New York County's celebrated District Attorney, Robert Morgenthau, who is famously headed into retirement. He recalled having lunch with Sam Waterston, who plays a character on "Law and Order" based on Mr. Morgenthau. "I understood he was getting $25,000 an episode, so I said to him, 'When you're getting to retire, let me know, because I want your job.'" Watch out Mr. Waterston.

Even the band leader -- that would be past honoree Peter Duchin -- brought levity to the most mundane proceedings. "Please find your seat and sit on them," he said before the lights went down and the hands started passing around the bread baskets.

As for the photographer -- well, this year, that guy wound up as an honoree: Bill Cunningham of The New York Times became a "Living Landmark," described as "the Edith Wharton of photography."

But he wasn't the only one snapping: Here are some photos we took.

Jessica Tisch and Emma Bloomberg

When we saw Mayor Bloomberg's eldest daughter, Emma Bloomberg, last night at the New York Public Library's gala, we naturally asked her when and for whom she planned to vote today, Election Day. Ms. Bloomberg told the Sun she'd be up early to vote for her dad, the mayor of New York City, Michael Bloomberg, who is running for his third term. "I'm voting early because then I'm working subway stops to make sure everyone else does," Ms. Bloomberg said, specifying her territory as between Tribeca and Houston Street. In order to do so, she's taking half a day off as a vacation day; in the afternoon, she'll be back at work, the Robin Hood Foundation.

Next, naturally, we asked her what she was reading. "I just finished 'In the President's Secret Service,' which you should read," Ms. Bloomberg said, addressing the recommendation to a friend, Jessica Tisch, who has worked in the counterterrorism unit of the New York City Police Department. Next? "Today I downloaded Joyce Purnick's new book," Ms. Bloomberg said. That would be: "Mike Bloomberg: Money, Power, Politics." Guess it's always good to be informed about the candidate you're campaigning for.