\'Dead Accounts\' to Close on Broadway

Sara Krulwich/The New York Times From left, Norbert Leo Butz, Katie Holmes and Jayne Houdyshell in “Dead Accounts.”

“Dead Accounts,” Theresa Rebeck's play starring Katie Holmes and Norbert Leo Butz, will close on Sunday, Jan. 6 at the Music Box Theater, the show's producers announced on Thursday. When it closes the show will have played 27 previews and 44 regular performances.

Directed by Jack O'Brien, “Dead Accounts” is a comed y about a prodigal son who returns home to Cincinnati from New York City. The play opened to mixed-to-poor reviews on Nov. 29, with Ben Brantley in The New York Times saying it “seems to float out of memory even as you're watching it.”

Despite the presence of Ms. Holmes in a major role - an example of star casting now common for new plays on Broadway - the production has struggled at the box office. For the week ending Dec. 23, it made just under 25 per cent of its potential gross at the Music Box.

Ms. Rebeck's last Broadway play, “Seminar,” closed after 191 performances and 26 previews.

City Agency Warns of Local Fiscal Problems Ahead

Whatever happens in Washington as the deadline for a fiscal deal approaches, New York City is facing some daunting financial topography of its own in the coming year and beyond, the city's Independent Budget Office warned on Thursday.

While manageable budget gaps are projected, the budget office says, those gaps fail to account for two major variables: the costs of labor contracts and of the Hurricane Sandy recovery.

“There is little money set aside in the budget for contract settlements covering years prior to 2013, and the mayor's assertion that any wage increases covering those years would have to be paid for by productivity is impractical,” according to the budget office's latest fiscal outlook. “This stance may well be untenable for the next mayor.”

Assuming that workers whose contracts expired in the 2010 fiscal year or later settled fo r annual compounding raises of 2 percent for the next two contract years and that teachers conform to the established pattern of two compounded raises of 4 percent, the cost to the city would be an additional $3.8 billion through next June alone â€" not counting more pension contributions and related expenses.

Regarding Hurricane Sandy, the budget report says, “The possibility that the city will indeed have to shoulder some of the cleanup and recovery costs - as well as expenditures to mitigate devastation from future storms - remains very real.” Also, the storm's long-term impact on the local economy is uncertain.

Substantial cuts to libraries and after-school programs are forecast, as are the shrinking by attrition of 395 Correction Department jobs next year and, in 2014, the elimination of vision screening for kindergarten students.

Among sources of new revenue, the analysis says, the city's Transportation Department expects to raise $6.8 million fro m 428 new multi-space parking meters in Lower Manhattan and an additional $4.8 million in 2014 by increasing parking meter rates south of 96th Street to $3.50 an hour, up 50 cents.

“Over the past few years the city has weathered a number of diverse challenges, from the economic storm of the deepest national recession since the 1930s to the post-Christmas blizzard that knocked out much of the city's transportation routes for days to the most recent superstorm,” the budget report concludes. “The fiscal difficulties that lay ahead for the next mayor and City Council may be more prosaic than a historic recession or mammoth storms, but the potential challenges remain no less real.”

Swift Holds On to Top Spot in a Big Week for Music Sales

Taylor Swift held on to the No. 1 spot on the Billboard chart for a sixth week, beating releases by T.I. and Bruno Mars, as well as the “12-12-12” charity album, in one of the biggest sales weeks of the year for the music industry.

Ms. Swift's “Red” (Big Machine) sold 276,000 copies in the week that ended Sunday, according to Nielsen SoundScan, the period when most - but not all - last-minute holiday shopping took place. She may also get a boost in next week's chart, which will include Christmas Day, a big day for music sales as people cash in gift certificates from online stores like iTunes and Amazon. If sales of “Red” stay strong, the album could cross the three million mark next week.

The rapper T.I. opened at No. 2 with 179,000 sales of his new album, “Trouble Man: Heavy Is the Head” (Atlantic), beating the No. 3 record, Bruno Mars's “Unorthodox Jukebox” (Atlantic), by fewer than 2,000 copies. Close by at No. 4 is One Direction's “Take Me Home” (Syco/Columbia), with 177,000 sales. (SoundScan's publicly reported sales numbers are rounded to the nearest thousand.) The fifth most popular album was Michael Bublé's “Christmas” (Warner Brothers), with 148,000 copies sold.

The most surprising showing on this week's chart, however, is “12-12-12: The Concert for Sandy” (Columbia), a compilation of 24 tracks from the all-star benefit concert at Madison Square Garden on Dec. 12. Although the concert was broadcast on many television channels, radio stations and Web sites, and had been predicted to sell up to 150,000 copies, according to Billboard, it sold only 82,000.

One reason for the relative lack of interest might be the album's track list. Although it fea tures the likes of the Rolling Stones, Paul McCartney, Bruce Springsteen and Billy Joel, it omits Kanye West, one of the few non-baby boomer acts on the bill. It also lacks perhaps the most talked-about moment of the show, Mr. McCartney's performance with surviving members of Nirvana in a song called “Cut Me Some Slack”; instead, a studio version of that song is on sale as part of the soundtrack to “Sound City,” a forthcoming film directed by Nirvana's Dave Grohl.

Flooding Is \'Worse Than Normal\' in Storm-Hit Communities in New Jersey

A picture of 12th ave in Seaside Park flooding is unreal. What happened to Barnegat Bay since Sandy? #thenewnorm #dunes http://t.co/69ojirNQ

- Dominick Solazzo (@DominickSolazzo) 27 Dec 12

Storm weary coastal communities in southern New Jersey awoke to more flooding on Thursday, with high tide bringing waters that lapped the bumpers of fire trucks and sent debris and at least one refrigerator floating down submerged streets.

“This is worse than normal,” said Paul Daley, acting director of the Office of Emergency Management in Toms River, where some low-lying areas were awash with waters that he guessed reached a depth of three feet. 

Mr. Daley said that no evacuation orders were given, but that people in affected areas, like Silve rton, East Dover and Green Island, were urged to move their vehicles to higher ground and stay with friends or family until the water receded.

Photos posted to social media sites showed streets turned into rivers in other communities too, among them Ship Bottom, North Beach Haven, South Seaside Park and Lanoka Harbor. In Brick Township, the Office of Emergency Management closed access to the township's part of the barrier island because of flooding and high winds.  High tide for the ocean was at dawn, and for the bays around 11; by early afternoon, the f loodwaters begun to recede.

Sgt. Keith Reinhard of the Brick Township Police Department said that areas that usually received flooding saw waters slightly higher than normal, but that as far as he could tell, only streets, rather than homes, were affected.  Yet Mr. Daley, of Toms River, said several homes that were in the process of rebuilding and renovating from damage wrought by Hurricane Sandy took on water again. He also said it was the second time since that superstorm that the floodwaters had reached such unusual heights. 

“It may be because there's so much garbage and sand in the inlets,” he said, “Nobody really knows why.”

With Boxing, Man With Troubled Past Teaches Bronx Youths a Better Way

Earl Wilson/The New York Times Boxers training at a gym in the South Bronx started by Fernando Laspina as a way to give young people an alternative to the neighborhood's gritty streets.

On a recent night in the South Bronx, Fernando Laspina peeked out the front window of El Maestro and Juan Laporte's Boxing Gym and saw a cold, steady rain falling on the dimly lighted, rugged streets of his troubled youth.

“When I was teenager back in the early 1970s, I used to run around like crazy all along Southern Boulevard out here,” said Mr. Laspina, shaking his head. “I was a leader of a street gang called the Savage Skulls. I was young and very foolish at that time and I paid for it by going to jail.”

Mr. Laspina, now 57, took a step back from the window and captured a much brighter scene in its dusty reflection: dozens of young men scattered in and around a tattered boxing ring, sparring, jabbing at speed bags and jumping rope.

“This is my dream come true,” said Mr. Laspina, turning toward the stable of young boxers with a proud smile. “By keeping busy in here, they are not out there getting into the kind of trouble I got myself into when I was a kid. To have a place like this has been a goal of mine since I got out of prison, a promise I am still keeping to my mother.”

Mr. Laspina, who juggles his role as the executive director of El Maestro with his day job as an afterschool coordinator for the New York City Housing Authority, is now hailed as a hero on the same streets he once terr orized.

“I've known Fernando since the mid-1970s,” said Ramon Jimenez, a lawyer and political activist who lives in the neighborhood. “In the 40-plus years I've spent in the South Bronx, I've met many politicians, and many famous people, but I've never met anyone with the dedication, commitment and endless energy and refusal to be defeated like Fernando ‘Ponce' Laspina - his story stands above the rest.”

Mr. Laspina, one of 18 children born in Ponce, Puerto Rico - “that's where I got my nickname,” he said - was 15 years old when he and his family settled into the area, which was already crawling with street gangs.

“I couldn't speak English and I had some trouble fitting in,” he said. “Before you knew it, I was getting jumped and guys were robbing what little money I had. I actually joined a gang to help protect myself.”

His mother urged him to leave the Savage Skulls, and Mr. Laspina, who by then was pretty good with his fists, t ried obliging her in October 1973, when he signed up to join a boxing organization run by the Police Athletic League. Later that same week, he was arrested for extortion and sent to Rikers Island.

Under the headline “5 in Bronx Youth Gangs Indicted in Merchant ‘Protection' Racket,” an article in The New York Times published on Oct. 19, 1973, began, “Scores of shopkeepers in the South Bronx have been terrorized by street gangs into paying ‘protection' money to escape beatings, arson and robbery.” The article named all five who were indicted, including, Mr. Laspina, who was 18.

“My mother was crushed, and it really hurt me to let her down like that,” he said. “That's when I promised her I would never let her down again and that when my legal troubles were behind me, I was going to turn my life around.”

After spending nearly a year on Rikers I sland, Mr. Laspina was freed on bail while awaiting trial. After a conviction and much legal wrangling, he served another year at the Elmira Correctional Facility in Elmira, N.Y., starting in 1975. While in prison, he earned a general equivalency diploma.

Shortly after his release, Mr. Laspina joined Mr. Jimenez and a band of students and faculty members in a successful challenge to plans to shut Hostos Community College or merge it into another institution during the city's fiscal crisis.

“It was the only bilingual college in the area and it was on the brink of closing down,” Mr. Laspina said.

He soon enrolled at Hostos, where he received an associate's degree. He went on to Lehman College, where he received a Bachelor of Arts degree, and then to Buffalo State University, where he earned a master's in Latin American studies.

Earl Wilson/The New York Times Mr. Laspina, right, working with a boxer at his gym, which he helps maintain with his own money.

In 1987, he returned to Hostos and began a 10-tear stretch as an adjunct lecturer in Latin American and Caribbean studies. In 1997, he began working in the Bronx for the Housing Authority, counseling on and teaching a variety of subjects to students from first grade through high school.

In 2003, Mr. Laspina founded his dream organization, which is run by volunteers.

“My mom lived long enough to see it,” said Mr. Laspina, whose mother died in 2007. “She lived long enough to see me turn my life around and fulfill that promise.”

El Maestro has been at its current location, 1300 Southern Boulevard, next to an abandoned lot, for two years, having moved, Mr. Laspina said, because he could no longer afford the almost $4,500 a month in rent for the old site. He now pays $3,000 a month, some of which comes out of his own pocket.

The organization's two main missions â€" it serves as both a cultural center and a training center â€" are spelled out on each side of the long, red awning above the front door. The south side of the awning, which reads “El Maestro Inc.,” is a center of Puerto Rican culture and heritage named for Pedro Albizu Campos, the deceased Puerto Rican nationalist leader who was known as El Maestro (The Teacher).

The north side of the awning, which reads Juan Laporte's Boxing Gym, is named for the former featherweight champion who was born in Guayama, Puerto Rico, and is a friend of Mr. Laspina's.

Julio Pabon, a South Bronx activist and a local businessman who ran with a street gang named the Young Lords in the 1970s, called Mr. Laspina “a good example of what the Bronx has to offer.”

“Most of my friends and Ponce's friends are either dead or in jail,” Mr. Pabon said. “Ponce didn't just survive; he is now helping other people survive. In the South Bronx our schools are not the best and our role models are few and distant. We have a very high unemployment rate, one of the highest obesity rates in the country, violent crime and inadequate housing, so the deck is stacked against any young person here who is trying to make something of their life.

“Without Ponce, I can't imagine where these kids would be today.”

Mr. Pabon was talking about children like Jeffrey Cuadras, an 11-year-old from the neighborhood who is learning how to box.

“I like coming here because I feel safe,” said Jeffrey, lacing up a pair of gloves as he peeked out the front window of the gym. “There's nothing out there but robbers and drug dealers, and I don't want to end up like that.”

Lenore Norman, a Quiet Force for Landmarks Preservation, Dies at 83

Neal Boenzi/The New York Times Lenore Norman, executive director of the Landmarks Preservation Commission, with Gene A. Norman, the commission chairman, at a hearing in City Hall in 1984. They were not related.

If you love New York City's architectural heritage, you owe a debt of gratitude to Lenore Norman. Chances are, you didn't know that. She would have been pleased.

Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times Ms. Norman was credited with paving the way for the designation of the Woolworth Building as a landmark.

Ms. Norman died Dec. 21 at home on the Upper West Side. She was 83.

It was not her style to operate in the foreground. During her years as executive director of the Landmarks Preservation Commission, from the mid-1970s to the early '80s, she was content to let the commissioners, developers, advocates and lobbyists occupy center stage. It was unusual to hear her say much at public hearings and rare to find her quoted in news articles.

Ms. Norman did her work behind the scenes, running the small agency and helping conduct the vital meetings that led up to the commis sion's designations and regulatory actions. If Dorothy Marie Miner, the agency's longtime counsel, was the “bad cop” in some applicants' eyes - that is, the unbending enforcer of landmarks law - then Ms. Norman played the “good cop,” ever sympathetic to applicants' concerns and usually persuasive that all would work out in the end.

“She had a nice sympathy for the human beings at the other end of government authority,” said Kent L. Barwick, who was the chairman of the Landmarks Preservation Commission from 1978 to 1983.

“By the time I got there, she was very much the stable, balanced center of things,” Mr. Barwick said. He inherited Ms. Norman as executive director from his predecessor, Beverly Moss Spatt, and passed her on to his successor, Gene A. Norman. (That's a telling measure in itself; the fact that Ms. Norman served as executive director fo r three chiefs of much different temperaments and backgrounds.)

Mr. Barwick credited Ms. Norman with helping pave the way for the designation in 1983 of the glistening, Gothic-style Woolworth Building in Lower Manhattan - the “Cathedral of Commerce” - as an exterior and interior landmark. At the time, the tower still served as headquarters of the F. W. Woolworth Company, which had long opposed landmark status.

“Lenore met a number of times with the management of the Woolworth corporation to defuse their antagonism,” Mr. Barwick said. “Their antagonism was not easily defused.”

Ms. Norman herself spoke of the difficulties she and her colleagues faced in the commission's early years and how the impetus for a lot of designations came from cohesive old neighborhoods. In a 2008 oral history, conducted and transcribed by the New York Preserva tion Archive Project, she said:

Well, the commission was new; relatively new. The whole idea of preservation was not something that people really understood, and of course all of the larger institutions and buildings, for the most part, fought it. It was the communities, basically, where the grass roots sort of came through and really understood what this meant for their neighborhood, like Brooklyn Heights and Greenwich Village and that sort of thing.

None of this is to say that Ms. Norman was the preservationists' unquestioned friend. Her insistence on deliberative procedure sometimes infuriated advocates who believed New York's historical patrimony was crumbling under the bulldozers while the commission plodded and dithered.

“There was a solidity to her,” said Anthony C. Wood, a former staff member of the commission who went on to become an ardent, outspoken preservationist. “I like the phrase ‘unflappable,' because th ere were, over the years, a number of us who tried to flap her.”

Mr. Wood, the chairman and founder of the Preservation Archive Project, added: “She was a public servant in that unsexy, unthanked way. Somebody had to do it. And somebody had to do it by the rules.”

After leaving the landmarks agency, Ms. Norman served as director of intergovernmental affairs at the city's Department of Buildings. For the last 15 years or so, she had been co-chairwoman of the preservation committee of Community Board 7 on the Upper West Side. She stepped down about three months ago when her cancer made it impossible for her to continue working.

Scott M. Stringer, the borough president of Manhattan, declared Dec. 4 to be Lenore Norman Appreciation Day, although she was by then too ill to accept the proclamation from him in person. The document credited her work in developing the “first comprehensive survey to identify New York's most worthy structures and districts,” creating “a special district to preserve Broadway theaters,” and inaugurating programs “to salvage archeological artifacts unearthed in construction.”

The proclamation spoke of Ms. Norman's “grace,” which was a reflection of her dignified bearing. That is why her husband, Milton Norman, had always objected to the Woolworth executive who long ago said that the company had been persuaded to accept landmark designation “by three little women in tennis sneakers” - meaning Ms. Norman, Ms. Miner and Ms. Spatt.

“Lenore Norman would not go to a meeting in sneakers,” her husband said. “She wouldn't take out the garbage in tennis shoes.”

In Performance: Brandon J. Dirden of \'The Piano Lesson\'

August Wilson's play “The Piano Lesson” is about a family at odds over the fate of an intricately carved piano with a multigenerational history. In this scene, Boy Willie, played by Brandon J. Dirden, explains why he wants to sell the instrument, much against the wishes of his sister. The play continues through Jan. 20 at the Signature Theater.

Recent videos include Alice Ripley singing a medley from “A Civil War Christmas” and Tracee Chimo in an e xcerpt from “Bad Jews.”

Coming soon: videos from Baba Brinkman (“Ingenious Nature”), Will Chase (“The Mystery of Edwin Drood”) and others.

Steinway Decides to Keep the Keys of Its Kingdom

The corporate owner of the piano maker Steinway & Sons says the company is no longer is up for sale. In a news release issued Wednesday, the company â€" Steinway Musical Instruments Inc. â€" said that in July 2011 it began studying the possible sale of itself or its band instrument division. Several expressions of interest came in but the company decided against them. It also said it was shutting down a possible deal to sell the band unit to an investor group led by two board members.

Michael Sweeney, the company's chairman and chief executive, said none of the “strategic alternatives” being considered would increase shareholder value more than what the company was already doing. Recent good financial news may have something to do with the decision . While Steinway Musical Instruments reported flat sales ($89 million) for the third quarter ending Sept. 30 over the same period last year, it also reported an increase in gross profits of 13.1 percent, to $29 million and a jump in per-share earnings.

The company, based in Waltham, Mass., is a conglomeration of well-known instrument-making names along with Steinway, including Selmer, Conn and Leblanc. It also owns Steinway piano showrooms and ArkivMusic.com, which sells recordings. Shares are traded on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol LVB â€" for Ludwig van Beethoven.

Game Theory: The Awkward Adolescence of Gaming

Atlus While Persona 4 Golden is something of a cultural phenomenon in Japan, in America it will likely forever be relegated to niche status.

Jenn, Chris, Stephen and Friends,

As I look over our correspondence so far, I see us grappling with what video games mean and how we might best articulate that meaning to the world at large. Yet despite every past attempt to illuminate this sprawling, nebulous new art form, gaming seems to have retained its cloistered air.

That's beginning to change. Many of the biggest controversies of 2012, some touched on by Helen, were fallout from the ongoing war between longtime gamers and onrushing agents of change. Video games seem to have entered an awkward cultural adolescence; shoved, grumbling, into a Sunday suit and taken out for the whole town to see. So, how best to go about introducing them to the neighbors?

Chris, you write that gaming is like ballet. To your eye, “The players of Call of Duty and Halo have more in common with ballerinas than either might like to admit.” First of all: Heh. Second of all: I've always been partial to the music comparison myself, but whether we choose dance or melody, the analogy is crucial for understanding how games function, and why they've been slow to find mainstream acceptance.

After all, playing a game isn't like listening to music; it's like performing music. Playing a game isn't like watching ballet; it's like dancing. I imagine introducing a friend to orchestral music by putting on a recording of the New York philharmonic, handing him a violin, and informing him that if he'd like to hear Joshua Bell's solo, he'll have to play it himself. No wonder this stuff has been slow to catch on!

Stephen, you lament, “If only more modern video games felt more like games and less like wannabe movies!” Yet I felt many of 2012's best games did precisely that. They eschewed the cinematic trappings of the Call of Duty series and chose instead to drown us in glowing score-counters, abstract rules, twitchy reflex-tests and good old-fashioned high-score challenges.

All of the terrific i ndie games Jenn highlighted today embrace video-game-ness over cinematic storytelling. In particular, the graphically primitive (fantastic) iOS game Super Hexagon wouldn't look out of place in a 1980s arcade cabinet. It's a pure old-school challenge where failure comes fast and often, and mastery is the realm of the touch-screen-savant. Fun? Yes. Welcoming? Not really.

Another of my favorite games of the year, Persona 4 Golden, a newly remastered version of the 2008 Japanese role-playing game Persona 4, also embraces video-game-ness at the cost of accessibility. The setup is irresistible: Players assume the role of a high school s tudent in rural Japan who, in addition to juggling classes, exams, girlfriends and after-school jobs, happens to have the ability to travel into his television and fight demons. The game is made by Atlus, the same developer responsible for Lucy's justly-loved Catherine. It weaves elements of “Twin Peaks,” “My So-Called Life” and “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” into something so fabulous that … well, doesn't that description alone make you want to play it?

Atlus A screen shot of Persona 4 Golden.

I wish my non-gaming friends could exper ience Persona 4, but the game comes burdened with all the unwelcoming hallmarks of the most hardcore Japanese games. It's opaque and fiddly, dense with interlocking systems and at times immensely difficult. The version I played is only available on Sony's handheld Vita console, and a single trip through the story requires anywhere from 60 to 100 hours to complete. On the surface, Persona 4 seems destined for massive mainstream success. But while the game is indeed something of a cultural phenomenon in Japan, in America it will likely forever be relegated to niche status.

By way of contrast, Journey and The Walking Dead both smartly circumvent gaming's barriers to entry. The Walking Dead tells a deftly written, emotional story that doesn't require high-level gaming skills to play and appreciate. Journey removes player failure and focuses instead on exploration and non-verbal communication. I'd recommend both to newcomers without hesitation.

Interestingly, both gam es also ask more of the player than dexterity and organizational skill. As board-game critic Quintin Smith pointed out earlier this year, video games are still woefully limited in how they engage their audience. For example, they cannot yet challenge our charisma, our leadership, or our ability to lie. Slowly but surely, that's changing.

At one point in The Walking Dead, I came upon an apparently abandoned car filled with canned goods and supplies. Should my group steal the food, or leave it and go hungry? With no idea what the consequence might be, I decided to steal. That feeling of uncertain leadership, of blindly feeling my way through an unpredictable world, is one of The Walking Dead's most distinctive successes.

I sometimes feel incapable of looking back at games without also looking forward. To me, 2012 showed an encouraging number of video-game creators experiencing a sim ilar sort of restlessness. Though many iterated and improved upon the ideas of the past, more and more began to move not just forward but outward, engaging their ever-expanding audience in startling, disruptive, unfamiliar - and welcome - ways.

â€"Kirk

Join the conversation here.

Broadway to Pay Tribute to Charles Durning and Jack Klugman

Associated Press Jack Klugman and Charles Durning

The theaters of Broadway will honor two acclaimed actors on two consecutive evenings, dimming their lights at 8 p.m. on Thursday in memory of Charles Durning, and again at 8 p.m. on Friday in recognition of Jack Klugman, the Broadway League said on Thursday.

Mr. Durning, who died on Monday at the age of 89, was a Tony Award-winner for his performance as Big Daddy in the 1990 revival of “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” whi ch also starred Kathleen Turner as Maggie and Daniel Hugh Kelly as Brick. He also appeared in such plays as the original 1972 production of “That Championship Season,” and a 1996 revival of “Inherit the Wind,” opposite George C. Scott. He received one of his two Academy Award nominations for his role in the 1983 film adaptation of “The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas.”

Mr. Klugman, who died on Monday at the age of 90, received a Tony nomination for the debut 1959 production of “Gypsy,” in which he originated the role of Herbie. He also replaced Walter Matthau as Oscar Madison in the original Broadway run of “The Odd Couple” before going on to portray that character in the TV-sitcom adaptation, and later appeared in a revival of “The Sunshine Boys” with his “Odd Couple” co-star Tony Randall.

City Hopes Money Grows From Fallen Trees

Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times Some of the trees toppled by Hurricane Sandy along a New York City-owned reservoir in Westchester County. The wood is being sold by the city.

Talk about making lemonade out of lemons. Hurricane Sandy toppled hundreds of trees throughout the metropolitan area, including many in the New York City-owned watersheds along reservoirs in Westchester County. Instead of discarding the downed trees or burning them, the city is selling them.

The City Record, the municipal government's official publication, advertises the sale of about 474,000 board feet (1-f oot-by-1-foot-by-1-inch) of Norway spruce softwood timber and another 5,000 board feet of yellow poplar after what is sanguinely described as a “salvage harvest” resulting from the storm.

The detritus is on four sites comprising about 45 acres in the Westchester towns of North Castle and Mount Pleasant off Nannyhagen Road, Route 120 and West Lake Drive, where Sandy toppled many trees.

The downed or damaged trees will be sold to the highest responsible bidder â€" presumably a lumber company that can cart them off without damaging the land or other flora in the watershed. No price estimate was given, but the average so-called stumpage price for similar saw timber can run about $100 per 1,000 board feet.

The National Association of Home Builders estimates that the average new home is constructed with 14,400 board feet of lumber and related materials.

Around the Kensico Reservoir, some of the downed trees towered 100 fe et or more over the forest floor and were close enough to Nannyhagen Road that when they fell over they blocked traffic for days. Younger â€" and shorter - trees will be planted in their place.

The contract will be awarded to one company, which can then mill the lumber and sell it.

“Hurricane Sandy toppled countless trees throughout New York City's watershed, including many at Kensico that were planted when the reservoir was built roughly a century ago,” Carter Strickland, the city's environmental commissioner, said. “Removing and replacing these trees will improve public safety and aesthetics, while also protecting the quality of the city's drinking water.”

Prospective bidders can contact Amanda Locke, the watershed forester, at (917) 642-6693 or alocke@dep.nyc.gov.

Beached Whale Presumed Dead

Chang W. Lee/The New York Times The whale lay in the shallows Wednesday afternoon.

The 60-foot finback whale that beached itself at Breezy Point in Queens Wednesday appears to be dead, biologists said Thursday morning.

The national fisheries officials who spotted the whale in the morning “have not seen it take a breath” in at least 45 minutes, Robert DiGiovanni Jr., executive director of the Riverhead Foundation, said at 10:45 a.m.

“We can basically say that it's dead,” Mr. DiGiovanni said.

Biologists from the foundation, the region's official marine-mamm al rescue organization, still need to assess the animal and expect to do so in the coming hours, Mr. DiGiovanni said.

A biologist with the National Marine Fisheries Service, Mendy Garron, said that the whale was on National Park Service land, in the Gateway National Recreation Area, and that the fisheries service had contacted the National Park Service “to see if we can get heavy equipment to the site to do a necropsy.”

The park service is also expected to help dispose of the whale's body, Ms. garron said.

“I'm waiting for a callback from their logistics coordinator to see if they have landfills they've worked with in the past or if there is a burial option,” she said.

A Perp Walk of Outstanding New York Politicians

With 2012 just about over, we in New York have reason to hold heads high. We showed over the past year that we remain a leader when it comes to political corruption. It's not easy staying at the top of your game. But we New Yorkers proved, once again, that we have what it takes.

It must be said, though, that New York politicians lack imagination when compared with a fellow named Wang Baolin. More on him in a bit.

First, let's raise a cup to those this year who met the lofty standards of George Washington Plunkitt, the turn-of-the-last-century Tammany leader with a worldview that he neatly summed up this way: “I seen my opportunities and I took 'em.”

Here's to Pedro Espada Jr. of the Bronx (or maybe Westchester), who used to insist that corruption charges against him amounted to a satanic plot. Mr. Espada blithely threw Albany into turmoil when he was a State Senate leader. He wasn't quite so cocky after a jury in Ma y found him guilty of stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars from his own health care network. Then in October he pleaded guilty to tax evasion. He is likely to be headed soon to federal prison. Buh-bye.

When Mr. Espada was riding high, so was another state senator, Carl Kruger of Brooklyn. In April, a federal judge sent him to prison for seven years for helping to keep Albany's kleptocracy a thriving enterprise. One saving grace is that Mr. Kruger did not blubber at his sentencing as he did last December, when he admitted he was guilty of corruption. “I have no one but myself to blame,” he told the judge. As i f that were a revelation.

Let's give a cheer to Hiram Monserrate of Queens, another state senator who helped make Albany synonymous with dysfunction. In various ways, Mr. Monserrate has been a source of almost as many charges as a Triple-A battery. Two weeks ago, he was sentenced to two years in federal prison for having misused $100,000 of taxpayer money for his political campaign. All he'd wanted, Mr. Monserrate told the judge, was to be elected so he could help the poor and the disenfranchised. Guess he just took the maxim about charity beginning at home a tad too literally.

A toast should go to Richard J. Lipsky, a well-connected New York lobbyist whose reach included the likes of Mr. Kruger. He pleaded guilty in January to bribery charges, then “cooperated” with the government - i.e., he kissed and told. His federal reward in Se ptember for having blabbed was a light prison sentence: three months.

Yet another state senator, Shirley L. Huntley of Queens, called a new conference in August to announce not that she had a bill to propose but, rather, that she was about to be indicted on corruption charges. Give her points for clairvoyance. Two days later, she was arrested, accused of dipping sticky fingers in the public till. A few weeks later, voters in her district gave her the electoral heave-ho. In the Bronx, other voters did the same to Assemblywoman Naomi Rivera, the subject of investigations into whether she was a little too nice to her boyfriends, misusing public money to hire them.

Joseph L. Bruno, the former State Senate majority leader, was under indictment once more, charged in May with taking bribes and kickbacks. Another Albany fixture, Assemblyman William F. Boyland Jr. of Brooklyn, was also indicted yet again on bribery charges.

Jimmy K. Meng, once a Queens assemblyman, admitted in court last month that he'd solicited $80,000 to help a friend get off lightly in a criminal case. Mr. Meng's lawyer told the judge that it was the only time that his 68-year-old client had ever had such a “lapse in judgment.” He did not add , “Scout's honor.”

Let's hear it for Larry B. Seabrook, a Bronx city councilman convicted in July of orchestrating a corruption scheme. And for Assemblyman Vito J. Lopez of Brooklyn - Gropez in New York Post headlines - who is under criminal investigation for alleged sexual harassment. And for Representative Michael G. Grimm of Staten Island, also being investigated, in his case for possible campaign illegalities. Comparable allegations swirl around the city comptroller, John C. Liu. Two of his associates, Xing Wu Pan and Jia Hou, are already under indictment.

In short, it was a banner year. Still, New Yorkers could learn from Wang Baolin. We didn't forget him.

Mr. Wang, a former official in Guangzhou, China, somehow built for himself a bank account of $3.3 million. Asked how he'd managed that on a government salary, he acknowledged having taken bribes - but only because he was a model of politeness. “If I didn't take them,” he said at his trial, “I'd offend too many people.”

We sure hope that New York politicians are taking notes. No doubt, Plunkitt of Tammany Hall would've been proud.

Strong Sales for \'Cat on a Hot Tin Roof\' With Scarlett Johansson

Damon Winter/The New York Times Scarlett Johansson.

The Scarlett Johansson-led revival of “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” is off to a strong start on Broadway, grossing $843,215 for its first seven preview performances last week â€" more money than any of the last three Broadway revivals of the play made in a single week, even after adjusting for inflation. Those revivals starred Anika Noni Rose (in 2008), Ashley Judd (2003) and Kathleen Turner (1990) in the role of Maggie, which Ms. Johansson is playing in the new production, whose box-office sales have b enefited from the advent of premium ticket pricing of up to $175 a seat last week.

The production of “Cat,” along with the Broadway revival of “Glengarry Glen Ross” (starring Al Pacino), were the highest-earning plays in a pre-Christmas week that is almost always dominated by musicals.

According to box-office data released on Wednesday by the Broadway League, a trade association of theater owners and producers, the Disney musical “The Lion King” set a box-office record at the Minskoff Theater for an eight performance-week, grossing $2,129,609. “Wicked” was a close second with $2.1 million, followed by “The Book of Mormon” at $1.68 million. The musical “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark” showed softening at the box office, grossing $1.47 million (compared to $1.76 million for the same week last December). And ticket sales for the revival of “Evita” weakened further as its run nears an end next month, grossing $774,870 last week, about $35,000 less than the previous week.

A new holiday show, “A Christmas Story,” continued to sell well, grossing $1.49 million and setting a record at the Lunt-Fontanne Theater for a nine-performance week; most other musicals held the standard eight performances.

Several plays featuring well-known actors have been selling modestly or poorly this fall, and that trend persisted last week in spite of the tourist surge in New York City.

“Dead Accounts,” a dark family comedy starring Katie Holmes and two-time Tony Award winner Norbert Leo Butz, took in $243,154 (or only 25 percent of its maximum possible gross). “Grace,” with Paul Rudd and Michael Shannon, grossed $284,889 (or 31 percent of the m aximum possible amount). Also struggling at the box office were two plays that, like “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” are still in preview performances and have yet to be reviewed: “Picnic,” starring Maggie Grace and Ellen Burstyn, had the lowest gross of the week with $149,300, followed by “The Other Place” (starring Laurie Metcalf) with $149,652.

Over all, Broadway musicals and plays grossed $25.85 million last week, compared to $23.5 million the previous week and $23.3 million for the same week last year.

New York Knights

Dear Diary:

I'm a New Yorker who lives in Charlottesville, Va. Even as the children grew up here, I wanted to make sure that they felt connected to the City - so, Yankees and Giants and frequent family visits.

A long time ago now, when our son was 5 or 6 and we were leaving the Arms and Armor Court at the Met, I asked him if he wanted to say goodbye to the knights. He turned and said in the sweetest possible voice, “Goodbye, knights, see you another day!”

I have really enjoyed these last 10 years of visits to my son, the New Yorker, as he studied at the New School, started a career, planned a wedding and now an imminent move to Virginia to join my business.

On one of his last days in the City I received a not completely unexpected text: “Said goodbye to the knights.”

Read all recent entries and our updated submissions guidelines. Reach us via e-mail: diary@nytimes.com or telephone: (212) 556-1333. Follow @NYTMetro on Twitter using the hashtag #MetDiary.

Game Theory: When Death Makes Us Laugh

A screenshot of Super Hexagon.

Kirk, Chris, Stephen, everyone,

For me, the year's best in video games started and ended with low-budget titles homegrown by independent developers. At a glance, games like Super Hexagon and Hotline Miami appear to share little in common. Both ooze style, at least, thanks to eye-searing colors and crunchy electronica soundtracks. Critics especially noted both for their steep difficulty curves.

Hotline Miami is a blood-spackled gorefest in which the guts and brains of fallen enemies are represented by fat trails of salmon-pink pixels. Bullets ricochet spasmodically, and once an opp onent sees your character, enemies rush in faster than you can escape. A single swift blow and you're dead, game over. “Hotline Miami is an exercise in survival,” the game developer Rami Ismail wrote at Gamasutra. “Any mistake I make is my last.”

Super Hexagon, meanwhile, is a careening acid-trip of a game, almost a tunnel-shooter (just, without any shooting), your cursor orbiting concentric rings in search of escape. Suffer an indecisive moment, any hesitation, and your tiny triangle is already hurtling into the maze's wall. “Super Hexagon is a game,” the reviewer James Cunningham lamented, “about failing to not die.”

It's a return to the oldest of old-school game design, really. As in Pac-Man or Donkey Kong, the ultimate goal is to jump every obstacle and survive the stage. These games demand phys ical knack, but they also hinge on pattern recognition and memorization. In a sense, they are puzzle games.

Both Super Hexagon and Hotline Miami are torture to play. But upon “death,” players - I've taken an informal survey, here - tend to toss their heads backward and giggle riotously.

That's because players are never discouraged. In Super Hexagon, one slap at the space bar (or, in iOS, a tap on the screen) returns you to the beginning of the 60-second stage. In Hotline Miami, too, death is hardly final. “R to restart,” the last screen entreats, and suddenly you are returned to the first entryway of a very short level.

How does a game torture you, the player, without making you stamp off in defeat? It's a fine line to walk, and the makers of both games handle it deftly: These games succeed by making the barrier to re-entry so low. The player, in turn, is never permanently punished. (Some games are needlessly vindictive; Hexagon and Miami are instea d forgiving, in their own way.) “ ‘Dying' isn't the right word,” I recently told a friend, struggling to explain Hexagon's appeal. You don't “die”; you just fail. And you repeat that failure until you succeed.

The ultraviolent Hotline Miami is, at its heart, a character study, driven by a narrator who becomes increasingly unreliable as the story moves forward. Without giving too much away (I hope), Klei Entertainment's excellent Mark of the Ninja employs the very same trope.

Mark of the Ninja is a 2-D action/stealth sidescroller. Sometimes it more resembles a puzzle game. You can either tiptoe or brute-force your way through; to succeed, however, you'll have to do multiple trial runs, committing every obstacle to memory. In a review for Paste, I wrote that, despite my innate gracelessness, “Mark of the Ninja turned me into a meticulous, thoughtful person, pulling from reserves of patience I didn't know I had.”

To play Mark of the Ninja properly, you must play it twice. The first time, that's all just training. By Ninja's second half - New Game+, it's called - a single misstep will send you spinning back to the latest checkpoint. Your ninja's vantage is now limited to the few short paces just ahead, and if your character can see an enemy, that must mean … ! New Game+ plays out exactly the way, I suspect, the designers intended the entire game to play, if only the players themselves could handle it.

It's really, really tough. You'll “die” a lot. And yet the game is never frustrating (except for one ill-conceived sequence where the pacing is off-kilter, and suddenly Mark of the Ninja is not frustrating, but infuriating). It's my personal pick for overall game of the year.

All these indies succeed because they offer deep challenges with low-stakes fai lure. “Challenging your player,” I recently speculated in an e-mail to a colleague, “is very much like challenging a reader. It's how you tell him that you trust him, that you care.”

 

Jenn Frank writes for Unwinnable. Her work has appeared at Motherboard and GameSetWatch, and in Kill Screen Magazine.