A Mother’s Loss and a Mayor’s Unwelcome Sympathy

Ramin Talaie/Getty Images Carol Gray, the mother of Kimani Gray, 16, was escorted by City Councilman Charles Barron, right, as she arrived on Saturday for her son’s funeral. Mr. Gray, according to the police, had pointed a gun at two plainclothes officers, who shot him.

For several days and through various channels, the office of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, a firm advocate of gun control, as well as the mayor himself, had tried to contact the family of a Brooklyn 16-year-old who was killed by plainclothes officers after the police said he had pointed an illegally obtained revolver at them.

It would have been an unusual moment of private condolences offered to the family of Kimani Gray: Mr. Bloomberg has described the deadly shooting as justified based on the police account.

It is perhaps even more unusual that the efforts have, so far, been rebuffed by the mother of the teenager, Carol Gray.

“We weren’t interested in the photo op,” said Kenneth J. Montgomery, a lawyer representing Ms. Gray. “In the totem pole of important things and important emotions, that would come somewhere at the bottom.”

Mr. Montgomery said the mayor’s office had reached out to him through different avenues starting several days after the March 9 shooting, including through its community affairs staff in Brooklyn and the office of Councilman Jumaane D. Williams. A representative of Dennis M. Walcott, the schools chancellor, also tried to set up a meeting.

But in a sign of the tense atmosphere that has gripped the East Flatbush neighborhood where the shooting took place, each of those attempts was met with a polite but firm no, Mr. Montgomery said.

The police said the two officers shot Mr. Gray after he brandished a .38-caliber revolver - loaded with four bullets - and pointed it at them. The gun was recovered at the scene, the police said.

But distrust of the Police Department fueled contradictory accounts of the shooting, including some that questioned whether Mr. Gray had been armed at all. Anger exploded into several days of demonstrations in the neighborhood, drawing in local elected officials, anti-police activists and other protesters from around the city.

It was against that backdrop that the mayor sought to contact Ms. Gray late that week. For some, it was too late.

“He did not reach out when he should have to the family,” said Councilman Charles Barron, who has had close contact with Ms. Gray. “He made some feeble attempts through other folks later on. But the mayor knows how to get in touch with people when he wants to.”

Mr. Bloomberg brought up his efforts to reach the family during a recent interview on gun control with The New York Times after being asked about his sense of personal outrage at gun violence in the aftermath of the Newtown, Conn., school shooting.

“I give eulogies at cops’ funerals,” the mayor said. “I call parents when their kids are killed. You know, sometimes I don’t get to them. There’s this 16-year-old” - he said, referring to Mr. Gray - “I’ve tried, and the woman, the mother, is not taking any calls, changed her phone number so I can’t, but I did reach out.”

What set the police shooting of Mr. Gray apart from others where the mayor has met with victims’ families is that the police said he had been armed with a gun, and Mr. Bloomberg said the shooting appeared justified. The mayor’s office could not immediately provide an example of another time when Mr. Bloomberg had offered condolences in such a situation.

Nor, however, do there appear to be many recent instances of the mayor or other top city officials being prevented from directly offering condolences to the victims of police shootings.

In 2006, days after the police’s fatal shooting of Sean Bell, who was unarmed, Mr. Bloomberg met privately with the family. And following the October shooting death of Noel Polanco, an unarmed National Guardsman, the family accepted a private visit from Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly, who offered condolences, even as the relatives were calling for a full investigation of the shooting.

“Anytime a young person is killed it is a tragedy not only for the family, but also for the community and the city,” said John J. McCarthy, a mayoral spokesman. “The community was clearly upset about the incident and he felt that calling the family was the right thing to do.”

But for Mr. Montgomery, such a call would serve little purpose. “I don’t know why he would reach out,” he said. “I’m much more interested in seeing him pushing the powers that be to get an investigation done.”

Michael Barbaro contributed reporting.

Baseball Fan Clubhouse Gets an Art Gallery

An art gallery in the middle of a building devoted to baseball may strike some as a culture clash, but Major League Baseball will try to change that view with the launch of the M.L.B. Fan Cave Art Gallery on April 4 in Manhattan.

The gallery’s first featured artist will be Thierry Guetta a k a Mr. Brainwash, who was the subject of the Banksy film “Exit Through the Gift Shop.” In a phone interview on Monday, Mr. Guetta said that while he was not a baseball fan per se, he wanted to contribute to the gallery because, “Baseball is a part of America. It is something important and brings joy to people.”

Due to time constraints, Mr. Guetta said only two pieces would be baseball-themed. “I had a piece that I twisted into baseball and there was one that was made for the show,” he said.

Other contemporary artists, who are yet to be announced, will follow Mr. Guetta and their work will be on display throughout the rest of the baseball season. The curator of the gallery will be Kerri Lisa, who starred in the reality television series “Gallery Girls” on Bravo.

Established in 2011, the M.L.B. Fan Cave on 4th Street and Broadway has been host to baseball fan events, player interviews and a concert series. Nine fans also live in the building and watch every Major League Baseball game for an entire season. They then create videos, blogs and other digital content to chronicle their experiences.

Art buffs and baseball statheads can visit mlbfancave.com for more information.

Solid Sales for ‘Pippin’ and ‘The Nance’ on Broadway

Two of the highest-profile Broadway shows this spring, the musical revival of “Pippin” and the new Nathan Lane play “The Nance,” had solid ticket sales during their first weekend of performances, according to data released on Monday by the Broadway League, a trade association of theater owners and producers.

“Pippin,” which has not been on Broadway since the original Bob Fosse production ended its five-year run in 1977, grossed $199,935 for just two performances â€" 87 percent of the maximum possible amount - a very strong start for the show, which had a critically acclaimed run this winter at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Mass. The musical, by Stephen Schwartz (“Wicked”) and Roger O. Hirson, follows the title character on his journey to find purpose in life; the revival, directed by Diane Paulus (“The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess”), blends circus acts and acrobatics with some of the signature Fosse choreography.

“The Nance,” a play about 1930s burlesque starring the two-time Tony Award winner Mr. Lane (“The Producers”), grossed $199,627 for four performances, or about 53 percent of the maximum amount - a healthy number for a play in its first weekend.

Another new play, “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” meanwhile, opened on Wednesday to some of the worst reviews of the theater season. Usually such notices would kill a show quickly, but a spokesman said that ticket sales have been relatively steady; the play grossed $357,127 last week, or about 40 percent of the maximum possible.

The new musicals “Cinderella,” “Motown,” “Kinky Boots” and “Matilda” all had strong ticket sales last week, a positive trend compared to last fall when musicals like “Scandalous,” “Chaplin,” and “Bring It On” struggled at the box office and ultimately closed.

The five top-grossing shows on Broadway last week, in order, were “Wicked,” “The Lion King,” “The Book of Mormon,” “Lucky Guy,” and “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark.”

The mega-hit “Book of Mormon,” which has been repeatedly breaking box office records in New York and on tour, set another one last week after the musical opened in London on Thursday night. Despite receiving some mixed reviews, “Mormon” broke records for the highest single day of ticket sales in the history of both the West End and Broadway, grossing about $3.2 million on Friday, according to a spokesman for the musical.

Over all last week on Broadway, musicals and plays grossed $21.7 million, compared to $20.8 million the previous week and $23 million during the same week last season.

Aviici Turns to Nashville for Ultra Music Festival Show

Karsten Moran for The New York Times Avicii performing in 2012.

MIAMI â€" The Swedish producer and D.J. Avicii is known for catchy house music like the hits “Levels” and “Silhouettes.” But on Friday, at the Ultra Music Festival here his one-hour set more resembled a Nashville concert than a performance by one of the stars of electronic dance music dance.

In a preview of his as-yet-untitled debut album, due this summer, Avicii shared the stage with the country and bluegrass artists Mac Davis, Audra Mae and Dan Tyminski, as well as three members of the alternative band Incubus. It was a set unlike any other at Ultra, which spanned two weekends this year for the first time, featuring seven stages and more than 200 D.J.s.

Mr. Davis has had a long music and acting career that included writing songs for Elvis Presley, including the 1970s hit “Baby Don’t Get Hooked on Me.” While Avicii manned the mixer on Friday, Mr. Davis performed with the singer and rapper Aloe Blacc, who sang “Black & blue,” a song Mr. Davis wrote with Avicii. “How am I ever going to get my head on straight,” Mr. Blacc sang as Ann Marie Calhoun played the violin.

Mr. Blacc opened the night with “Wake Me Up,” a collaboration with Avicii and Michael Einziger, the Incubus guitarist, and the first single from Avicii’s album.

Ms. Mae sang “Addicted to You,” a song Mr. Davis also wrote with Avicii and later played kazoo on “Road to Hell.” Mr. Einziger and his bandmates, the bassist Ben Kenney and the drummer Jose Pasillas, provided backup.

Avicii, in an interview the night before his Ultra performance, said he and his management team had decided that Ultra was “the perfect place” to preview
the album. “It was the live streaming,” he said of the festival’s Web streaming this year, adding, “This is the most interesting time for electronic music right now, because it has never been this big before.”

His fans, though, seemed a little subdued during the set, which was sandwiched between performances by Cazzette and Tiësto, who played more traditional, higher-energy house sets. Avicii “turned off quite a few people, but I think it is going to win over a lot of new fans,” said Adeeb Hakim, 27,of Long Island, New York, who attended the show. “I am just really proud of him for doing something like that. It was very risky.”

Mr. Davis said he collaborated on two tracks for the Avicii album. Neil Jacobson, senior vice president of A&R at Interscope Records, first contacted him about writing with the 23-year-old Avicii. “They dragged me out of retirement,” said Mr. Davis, 71. “We were in the studio within a week and wrote together and hit it off.”

“When I wrote songs for Elvis Presley I sat down by myself and wrote a song,” he went on. “This process of co-writing and jamming is new to me, but it is a great process. You cut something to a click track and he does his magic on it. He calls me ‘yo, bro,’ and I call him ‘genius,’ and he is.”

Producers Will Create a ‘Russian’ Supper Club for Relaunched ‘Natasha’ Musical

A vacant lot in Manhattan’s meatpacking district is being transformed into New York’s latest theater spectacle, a sexy Russian supper club that will be the new home of “Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812,” Dave Malloy’s acclaimed electro-pop opera that ran at Ars Nova last fall.

The Broadway producers Howard and Janet Kagan (“Pippin”) announced on Monday that they were teaming up on the $2.5 million venture with Randy Weiner, a lead producer of the site-specific sensation “Sleep No More” in West Chelsea, and Simon Hammerstein, Mr. Weiner’s partner in the Box nightclub.In an interview Mr. Kagan said that “Comet,” based on part of “War and Peace,” will run May 1-Sept. 1 in a temporary structure at the corner of West 13th Street and Washington Street near the High Line, in a lot owned by Romanoff Equities.

The 6,000-square-foot structure, to be called Kazino, will have an authentic Russian menu and bar as well as singers, cabaret artists, and possibly a contortionist or two who will perform before and after “Comet.” (Patrons can dine and drink there without seeing the show.) Mr. Kagan said he was aiming for “a fully immersive, party atmosphere experience similar to ‘Sleep No More,’” the hallucinatory mash-up of “Macbeth” and Hitchcock.

He said he is currently talking to theater owners about another ambitious idea: Turning a Broadway house into an even bigger version of Kazino by putting a giant platform of tables, banquettes and performing space over the orchestra seats, and staging “Natasha” there next season.

Mr. Kagan, a board member at Ars Nova, said he and his wife were entranced by the show there, which featured a modest menu and a bottle of vodka on every table. They connected with Mr. Weiner through his wife, Diane Paulus, who is the director of “Pippin.”

“Randy immediately thought the show would work best in a true nightclub environment,” Mr. Kagan said. “Kazino won’t be as racy as the Box, and won’t be open til 4 a.m. - the community board didn’t want that - but it will have an original, glamorous, exciting feel. I think it will become as much as a phenomenon as ‘Sleep No More.’”

Many of the original “Natasha” cast members from the Ars Nova production are set to reprise their roles at Kazino. Rachel Chavkin will again direct.

Philadelphia Orchestra to Collaborate With Opera on ‘Salome’

The Philadelphia Orchestra has programmed a concert performance of the Strauss opera “Salome” for next season. Now, they are calling in the experts. The orchestra said on Monday it would be collaborating with Opera Philadelphia to create a semi-staged version of the work, to be performed in May 2014. Kevin Newbury will direct and Vita Tzykun will design the production, to be performed in the orchestra’s home, Verizon Hall at the Kimmel Center, which has no proscenium. “It’s a bit of a feat to try to imagine a theatrical mash-up, if you will,” said Allison Vulgamore, the orchestra’s chief executive and president.

Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the orchestra’s music director and an experienced opera conductor, will lead the performances. Ms. Vulgamore said there was little overlap between the opera and orchestra audiences, and the collaboration in part was designed to bring opera lovers into the concert hall and symphony lovers to Opera Philadephia shows. It was the first joint endeavor by the two parties, although the Philadelphia Orchestra has presented concert versions of operas in the past.

Fold Up Your Handkerchiefs: Books Have Gotten Less ‘Emotional,’ Study Says

If you find you’re crying less while reading and throwing fewer books across the room, there may be a good reason. English-language books became steadily less “emotional” over the 20th century, according to a new study crunching billions of words via Google’s Ngram database.

In the study, published in PLOS ONE, researchers at three British universities tracked the use of “mood” words sorted into six main categories: anger, disgust, fear, joy, sadness and surprise. The researchers identified a “clear decrease” in overall use of mood words over the 20th century, with only words relating to fear increasing in the last several decades.

The draining of feeling from books could not be attributed simply to an increase in the number of technical and scientific publications, the paper said. The findings also held when the researchers looked only at fiction, where they found what they called “a real decrease in literary emotion.”

The study also found evidence of marked divergence in the relative emotional content of British and American English beginning in the 1960s. (Guess whose upper lip got even stiffer) It also identified notably “happy” and “sad” periods coinciding with historical events. World War II, for example, saw a “sad peak,” while use of happy words spiked in the 1920s and again in the 1960s, before the Anglophone world settled into another “sad” period starting in the 1970s.

The study is just the latest attempt to use huge digital databases to track broad emotional shifts across decades. In a study published last year, researchers found that the use of “individualistic” words like “independent,” “unique” and “personal” increased in American books between 1960 and 2008, while “communal” words like “team,” “collective” and “union” did not.

Some scholars, however, have questioned the methodologies of such studies. In a post at Language Log, the linguist Mark Liberman wondered if that 2012 result reflected a change in words people used to describe individualistic and communal thinking, rather than an actual change in thinking.

Sale of Pre-Columbian Art Falls Short of Expectations

Sotheby’s weekend sale in Paris of pre-Columbian artifacts earned about $13.3 million, well below the pre-sale estimate of $19 million to $23 million, according to the auction house.

Four Latin American nations â€" Mexico, Peru, Guatemala and Costa Rica â€" had objected to the sale, and the controversy was publicized heavily in the European media. About half the items from the Barbier-Mueller collection sold in the face of assertions by the four nations that more than 100 of the 313 lots had been illegally exported in the 1900s.

In a statement after the sale, Guillaume Cerutti, president of Sotheby’s France, said, “Despite having achieved less than expected, these results are good considering the context in which the sale unfolded.” Sotheby’s denied that any items were illicit and said they had all been properly researched.

Sotheby’s said the sale still set a world record for an auction of pre-Columbian items. According to the auction house’s Website, the $13 million in sales far outpaced Sotheby’s own recent sales of pre-Columbian works, which totaled $12.7 million over the previous five years.

An Old Prescription for Sour Faces

Robert Stolarik for The New York Times Clowns from the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus performed on Monday in the waiting room of the Children’s Hospital at the Brooklyn Hospital Center.

When the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus made its first appearance at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn last week, it marked a return to the borough where it was born in the 19th century. The circus revived another tradition on Monday, when it staged a performance for young patients, staff members and other guests at the Brooklyn Hospital Center.

The performance featured the familiar circus clowns, who elicited smiles from children being treated at the hospital. That same desire â€" to bring a little joy to a place often in need of it â€" was the reason Ringling Brothers had for decades performed outside Bellevue Hospital, now called Bellevue Hospital Center. Back then, the circus went all out for its hospital shows, which would also attract nearby residents, even bringing along some of its elephants.

“Dr. Ringling’s medicine is of the finest quality, easy to take, good for almost any ailment; children love it and adults enjoy it,” Dr. William F. Jacobs, Bellevue’s medical superintendent, told The New York Times in 1946, when about 6,000 people, many of them children, watched the show. “I’ll prescribe it any time in same dosage for young and old alike.”

From 1960:

From 1944:

Swinton Under Glass: New Offering From MoMA

On Monday, among the second-floor contemporary-art galleries of the Museum of Modern Art, visitors are happening upon an unexpected sight: the actress Tilda Swinton lying on a mattress in a glass box, apparently asleep. Ms. Swinton, an Oscar winner for the 2007 film “Michael Clayton,” has brought her performance piece “The Maybe” to MoMA, 18 years after she first performed it for a week in the Serpentine Gallery in London.

She has also lain at Museo Barracco in Rome, and on Saturday she began taking up residence at the MoMA in the Agnes Gund Garden Lobby. In the piece she wears plain clothes and moves occasionally, MoMA’s spokeswoman, Margaret Doyle, said by telephone on Monday. A description card accompanying the piece - its only explanation - reads: “Living artist, glass, steel, mattress, pillow, linen, water, and spectacles.” Ms. Doyle said Ms. Swinton would perform the piece periodically this year, and that a key part of the conception was to have no published schedule in advance.

‘The Flick’ Prompts an Explanation From Playwrights Horizons

Sara Krulwich/The New York Times From left, Louisa Krause, Matthew Maher and Aaron Clifton Moten in “The Flick.”

The artistic director of Playwrights Horizons, a leading Off Broadway company that produces new American plays, took the unusual step on Saturday of e-mailing 3,000 of the theater’s subscribers to explain his decision to produce Annie Baker’s new play “The Flick,” whose three-hour length and periods of long silence have infuriated some audience members.

The letter, posted below, is the first of its kind for the artistic director, Tim Sanford, he said in a telephone interview on Monday. He said it was “not an apology,” but rather an attempt at “community engagement” over a play that has been embraced by critics - and recently won the prestigious Susan Smith Blackburn Prize - but has prompted threats of subscription cancellations by some people walking out at intermission. Mr. Sanford said about 10 percent of the audience were bolting the play at the interval during the first week of performances in February, but those numbers have diminished since.

While Mr. Sanford said he did not care if people canceled subscriptions over “The Flick” - “it’s a great play and our theater is not for everyone” - he added that his e-mail was only prudent as Playwright Horizons prepares for its next subscription renewal campaign for the 2013-14 season.

“I wanted to explain my thinking to our subscribers and also explain our mission as a writer’s theater, in hopes of making this a teachable moment,” Mr. Sanford said. “I had no idea it would be a polarizing show, and I tried to be careful in the e-mail not to rehash why I loved the play. I didn’t want to get into an argument. It’s more about saying, ‘I respect your right to dislike the play, and I hope you understand why we chose to produce it, and respect our right to stand by it.”

Asked if he considered letting the play speak for itself, Mr. Sanford said his e-mail was not meant to be a full-throated defense, but rather a means of sharing his thinking with subscribers. The e-mail notes, for instance, that he did not think the play would run three hours when he decided to produce it, and it disclosed that he, Ms. Baker (the Obie Award-winning author of “Circle Mirror Transformation” and other plays), and the play’s director, Sam Gold, considered making trims and dropping entire scenes. Ultimately they sided with other feedback urging them, in Mr. Sanford’s words, “not to cut a second.”

His e-mail was sent to subscribers who had already seen the show; Playwrights Horizons has approximately 5,200 subscribers. He said he has only received positive feedback since sending it, and did not know if any subscriptions have actually been canceled. Below is Mr. Sanford’s full e-mail:

Dear Friend,

The Flick has stirred up so many emotions, both positive and negative, in audiences that I thought I would reach out to all of you and share my thoughts about it. I have to admit I was not totally prepared for it to be such a polarizing show. I love Annie’s work and thought this was just the play to introduce her to a wider audience. Here are three characters rarely portrayed on the stage these days and Annie imbues them with such humanity and integrity. Here is how she describes them in our artist interview:

“A female projectionist, on whom the men in the play projected their fears and fantasies…this like “unattainable” girl up there in the shadows who was dying for someone to get to know her “for real”… a 35-year-old Red Sox fan who was worried he’d be working there for life… and a young film buff who came from both a different race and class background than the other characters in the play. They all started emerging from the movie theater set in my mind. Also, the main characters in the play are a black guy, a woman, and a Jew (although I no longer make Sam’s Jewishness obvious). And that was important to me when I started writing the play. Three of the great “Others” of American cinema, all of them victim to extreme stereotypes. And yet what are Hollywood movies without blacks, Jews, and women I wanted these people to be quietly (maybe even unconsciously) fighting against their respective pigeonholes. And I also grew up knowing lower-middle-class Jews, hyper-educated black people, ad women who wear baggy clothes and no makeup, and yet it is so rare to encounter any of those people in plays and movies. It feels like those people are like forced to wander outside of and on the periphery of plays and movies. So I literalized that â€" they’re like cleaning up everyone else’s crap AFTER the movie is over.”

I hoped that Annie’s palpable love and compassion for her characters and the play’s fairly straightforward plot about a developing ethical workplace quandary would win you all over.

Of course I had some trepidation about its length. Theatergoers rarely encounter three-hour plays these days even though most classic scripts from earlier ages routinely clock in well above that length. When performances began and some of you walked out at intermission, emphatically expressing your displeasure to our House Manager, we had lengthy discussions about what to do. Could we make internal cuts within the scenes or could whole scenes go Were there places to pick up the pace Each scene seemed to have important reasons for being there. And what about those long silences between lines Here are Annie’s thoughts on this subject:

“I’m just trying to accurately portray the people who live in the movie theater inside my head, and I guess there’s a lot of moments of not-talking in that movie theater inside my head. All the walking and sweeping and mopping and dustpan-banging â€" there’s a whole symphony happening that Sam and the actors orchestrated… But I wouldn’t call that silence. I think there’s actually very little ACTUAL silence in this play. But yeah, my favorite moments in all of my plays are usually moments when people aren’t talking.”

Did we know we had programmed a three-hour play when we chose it No. I don’t think Sam Gold, the director, did either. But after our initial concern about walkouts, we began to pay attention to the other voices, the voices that urged Annie and Sam not to cut a second, the voices imbued with rapture for a theater experience unlike any they had experienced and for a production that stayed with them for days, even weeks afterwards. And it became clear to me that every moment of the play and production was steeped in purpose. Annie had a vision and this production beautifully executes that vision. And at the end of the day, we are a writer’s theater and my first responsibility is to that writer.

My goal is not to dissuade any of you who disliked the play. I would rather evince passionate dislike than a dispassionate shrug. I imagine that most of you have read the many good reviews about the play and then most recently the fact that the play won the prestigious Susan Smith Blackburn Prize. If you read these stories and continue to say to yourself, “I still don’t know what they see in it,” I applaud your independence of mind. Hopefully that free-thinking will swing to our favor in your response to other productions of ours.

Our hope is to cultivate an audience that trusts the underlying integrity of our decision-making process. We are the only theater in New York (and practically the country) devoted solely to the premiere of new American plays and musicals. We use our Subscriber Bulletin to share with you what excites us about an upcoming play and to convey the passion that went into its selection.

The business of putting on new plays is not empirical. We follow some rules and rely on experience, but we’re also following our hearts. And we appreciate that you are taking a risk and putting your faith in us when you sign up with us. We are dependent upon your willingness to take that ride with us. We need you.

So thank you for caring enough to complain or to praise. Perhaps we can all agree that whatever values we look for in the theater, we all stand on the common ground that it is a vital and important art form that we look to to illuminate the human experience with complexity and integrity.

Warm Regards,

Tim Sanford
Artistic Director

MTV Video Music Awards Show Coming to Brooklyn

Victor J. Blue for The New York Times The crowd outside a Barbra Streisand concert at Barclays Center in October.

Some things just get better when they move to Brooklyn â€" Walt Whitman; Arthur Miller; the former New Jersey Nets â€" and MTV is hoping that one of its signature institutions will benefit from the aura exuded by the borough of Spike Lee, Chris Rock, Coney Island and artisanal pickles. On Monday the network announced that its 2013 MTV Video Music Awards will be held on August 25 at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, marking the 30th year of that program, which in recent years has been held either in Manhattan or Los Angeles.

The Video Music Awards are a crucial display of MTV’s cultural capital, bringing together diverse sides of the music and entertainment industries, creating unexpected interactions between performers (like, say, a famous meeting between Kanye West and Taylor Swift at the 2009 show) and occasionally handing out trophies shaped like astronauts (a reference to a popular MTV ad campaign of long, long ago). But the show could use a little razzle-dazzle in the ratings: last year’s awards, hosted by the comedian Kevin Hart, were watched by 6.1 million people, less than half of the 12.4 million who watched in 2011 â€" possibly a result of the 2012 show being scheduled on a Thursday, and on the same night as President Obama’s nomination speech at the Democratic National Convention.

No host was immediately announced for the 2013 awards, which will be held on a Sunday. But hey - isn’t Jay-Z from Brooklyn

In an Area Plagued by Violence, a ‘God Squad’ Hits the Streets

Michael Nagle for The New York Times The Rev. Terry Lee, a member of the 67th Precinct Clergy Council, led a prayer during a vigil in East Flatbush, Brooklyn, on March 11 for Kimani Gray, a 16-year-old man who was shot and killed by the police. The council was formed in 2010 to try to improve relations between the police and residents in the area.

The Rev. Gilford Monrose was asleep in his Brooklyn apartment on March 9, when a text message from another pastor knocked him from his slumber: BROOKLYN: *POLICE SHOOTING* E52 ST X SNYDER AVE, LEVEL 1 MOBILIZATION CALLED. It was 11:39 p.m., and Mr. Monrose was about to begin the most trying week of his life.

Since 2005, Mr. Monrose has been the pastor at Mt. Zion Church of God on East 37th Street in East Flatbush, a densely populated neighborhood where many residents have roots in the Caribbean. His church is within the 67th Precinct, long referred to as one of the two deadliest precincts in New York.

The facts â€" 75 shootings and 15 murders in 2012 â€" back up that claim. Death notices by text messages are nothing new to Mr. Monrose. The victims’ names haunt him: Patrick Mondesir, 21. Shantel Davis, 23. Trevonne Winn, 24. All killed within the 67th Precinct.

What is notable about Mr. Monrose, 37, is how involved he’s become in the aftermath of these violent deaths. In late 2010, he helped found the 67th Precinct Clergy Council, an affiliation of local clergy. The group’s goal was simple: religious leaders would act as liaisons between residents and the police in an area where tensions between the two groups run high.

The clergy council appointed Mr. Monrose as president. From the beginning, he insisted the group would be hands-on. When there is a shooting, members head to the scene, wearing yellow rain slickers emblazoned with the council’s name. They speak to the press, comfort mourners, soothe angry witnesses. They visit wounded shooting victims. When a family cannot afford a funeral, they raise money.  “Our role,” Mr. Monrose said, “is to diffuse a potential disaster in Brooklyn.”

Mr. Monrose quickly divided the 3.4-square mile area into 14 sections, assigned each part a sector head, and christened his response team the God Squad.

On March 9, police officers shot and killed Kimani Gray, a 16-year-old who the police said had pointed a gun at officers. Mr. Gray lived and died within the 67th. He was petite, baby-faced and popular. The shooting tipped off what Mr. Monrose called “a perfect storm” in the area. For days, the neighborhood roiled with anger, and young people met nightly to march down the neighborhood’s main thoroughfare, Church Avenue. Sometimes, they turned violent.

“We’ve been saying that this type of thing could happen for a long time,” said Councilman Jumaane D. Williams, who described a neighborhood strangled by a lack of resources and heavy-handed police officers. “There is a breaking point where people say, ‘We’re tired.’ And when you’re in pain, and when you’re angry, you do things that are counterproductive.”

The clergy council had been tested before. On June 14, 2012, officers shot and killed Shantel Davis, an unarmed woman traveling through the precinct in a stolen car. A crowd quickly gathered at the site of her death. They chanted “murderers,” as investigators worked the scene.

Clergy council members dropped everything and ran to the crowd. “It was an emergency situation,” said the Rev. Charles Galbreath, 29, the group’s treasurer. “Being present, being there to offer prayers,” he said, “was critical.”

But the events of Mr. Gray’s death would test the council like never before.

Mr. Gray died on a Saturday night. The next Monday, said Mr. Monrose, “all hell broke loose.”

“I’m in a board meeting at the church and my phone starts to ring off the chain,” he said. Some of Mr. Gray’s supporters were marching down Church Avenue, overturning trash cans and throwing debris at officers.

Mr. Monrose ran outside, where he met Mr. Williams. As the group whipped past neighborhood institutions â€" the Trini Breakfast Shed, advertising hot roti; the Botanic du Roi Salomon, selling religious knickknacks â€" the pastor and the politician followed on foot. “We literally ran from Nostrand Avenue up to 55th Street behind the crowd, trying to get in front of them, yelling, ‘Don’t do this, don’t do this,’” Mr. Monrose said.

The group stopped at 55th Street. Officers in riot gear surrounded them. Police helicopters buzzed overhead. “I went to the police,” said Mr. Monrose, “and I said to them, ‘Please, let me talk to the young people so that no one could be arrested, and we don’t have a blood bath in the streets.’”

Eventually, an officer handed Mr. Monrose a bullhorn. “I had that bullhorn in my hand for about three hours,” he said, “praying, giving instruction, giving the microphone to a few community leaders, young people, just trying to maintain the crowd. And we maintained that crowd.”

Around 11:30 p.m., Mr. Monrose instructed everyone to join hands. They obeyed. The Rev. Terry Lee, another clergy council member, took the horn and silenced the group. “What we need is love,” he shouted. “Everybody say ‘love.’” The crowd responded: “Love.” They prayed. And then the group erupted into shouts: “Justice!” A woman fell into her neighbor’s arms. “Justice! Justice!” By 12:05 a.m., fewer than a dozen supporters of Mr. Gray remained at the corner.

While other precincts have clergy councils, Mr. Williams said this council stood alone in its street-level approach.

Tracey Winn, 41, first met council members when her son, Trevonne Winn, was fatally shot outside his uncle’s Crown Fried Chicken shop in 2011. She lives in Rock Hill, S.C., and flew to New York the day after his death. “On the news I asked to find out: ‘Who is the person in charge of the 67th precinct’ This was Pastor Monrose,” she said.

The council raised the money to send Mr. Winn’s body to Rock Hill. Mr. Monrose and Ms. Winn are in constant contact. “He’s been a person who, like no one else, has kept me going,” she said. “It’s been two years and he understands: It feels like it happened yesterday.”

The council has faced challenges. The group operates independently from the Police Department, and has no funding. Their efforts are also limited: On March 13, two nights after the march for Mr. Gray, a rally ended in more than 40 arrests, despite the clergy’s presence.

Mr. Monrose said the council’s role was not to assign blame  â€" Who had a gun Who pointed first

“That’s going to be hashed out in the court of law,” he said.  The council’s job is to keep the peace and provide comfort, he said. “And how we do that is we have to be in the streets.”

A Breakup Letter From My Chemical Romance

Chad Batka for The New York Times Gerard Way, in the air, with My Chemical Romance in 2010.

My Chemical Romance, a band known for its dense, intensely strained instrumental textures, darkly poetic if often mysterious lyrics, and elaborately theatrical performance style, announced its breakup on Friday evening after a 12-year career that produced four highly regarded studio albums (most notably “The Black Parade”) as well as two live discs and a handful of EPs.

The reason for the sudden, unexpected split is - well, even after a 2,200-word essay, posted on TwitLonger by Gerard Way, the group’s singer, and apparently the instigator of the split, no one is quite sure. But the decision appears to be the result of a change in Mr. Way’s feelings about performing rather than any differences, creative or otherwise, among the band members.

Mr. Way made a point of saying what the reasons were not.

“I can assure you,” he wrote, “there was no divorce, argument, failure, accident, villain, or knife in the back that caused this, again this was no one’s fault, and it had been quietly in the works, whether we knew it or not, long before any sensationalism, scandal, or rumor.”

Instead, he attributes the breakup to an understanding the group had when it was formed in 2001 - a “fail-safe” or “doomsday device,” as he called it, which would detonate “should certain events occur or cease occurring.”

Those events appear to be a realization, which came to Mr. Way during a performance in Asbury Park, N.J., on May 19, 2012, that it was simply time to stop. After experiencing what he described as “a strange anxiety jetting through me that I can only imagine is the sixth sense one feels before their last moments alive,” he went onstage and found himself, for what he said was the first time, detached from the performance - more taken with how blue and vast the ocean looked than with the large audience.

“I perform, semi-automatically, and something is wrong,” he wrote. “I am acting. I never act onstage, even when it appears that I am, even when I’m hamming it up or delivering a soliloquy. Suddenly, I have become highly self-aware, almost as if waking from a dream. I began to move faster, more frantic, reckless - trying to shake it off - but all it began to create was silence. The amps, the cheers, all began to fade.

“All that what left was the voice inside, and I could hear it clearly. It didn’t have to yell- it whispered, and said to me briefly, plainly, and kindly - what it had to say.

“What it said was between me and the voice.”

Starbucks Is Headed for the Port Authority

Yana Paskova for The New York Times A new Statrbucks is scheduled to open soon next to Casa Java coffee shop at the Port Authority bus terminal.

They may have to rename it the Port Authority Buzz Terminal.

Commuters passing through the city’s main bus depot in Midtown already have several options for a place to grab a cup of coffee. There are cafes on all levels, including a large Au Bon Pain outlet that faces Casa Java, a shop dedicated to serving coffee in a range of strengths and flavors.

But unlike just about every other major transportation hub in the metropolitan area, the bus terminal has never had a Starbucks. Commuters craving Frappucinos have had to walk as much as a block in any direction to sate their thirsts.

That void is scheduled to be filled this spring when a Starbucks opens side by side with Casa Java on the main floor of the terminal, on Eighth Avenue between 40th and 41st Streets. It will fill a space left vacant when a Zaro’s bakery closed a couple of years ago.

“If you had to draw an X at the most prime spot in the terminal, that would be it,” said Stephen Napolitano, the terminal’s general manager. “That’s my Fifth Avenue, if you will.”

Yana Paskova for The New York Times The Cake Boss Cafe opened late last year at the Port Authority.

Mr. Napolitano said he believed all of the cafes could coexist because there are so many customers to serve. He said about 250,000 people flow through the building each weekday. Most are commuters, but some get on or off long-haul buses.

The Starbucks lease is part of an effort to revive some of the moribund ground-floor spaces in the building. Late last year, the first Cake Boss Café opened in the storefront in the northeast corner of the terminal on 42nd Street.

That space, which once housed a Duane Reade drugstore, sat vacant for years while a developer, Vornado Realty Trust, tried to arrange to construct a 40-story tower over the north wing. Another main-floor space in that wing is being filled with a two-level branch of PNC bank, the first full-service bank branch in the building, Mr. Napolitano said.

He said the Port Authority had decided to stop waiting for a resolution of Vornado’s interest in the “air rights” over the tower and to find tenants for the building while West Midtown is on the upswing.

“The decisions were made to move forward and whatever happens with the air-rights deal will happen,” Mr. Napolitano said. “That’s why you see the Cake Boss in there now.”

Producers and Set Designer to Get Lifetime Achievement Tonys

The theater producers Bernard Gersten and Paul Libin and the set designer Ming Cho Lee will receive lifetime achievement honors at this year’s Tony Awards, the organizers of the event announced.

Mr. Gersten, who turned 90 in January, is stepping down this summer after 28 years as executive producer of Lincoln Center Theater, where he and artistic director Andre Bishop oversaw Tony-winning hits like “War Horse” and “South Pacific.” In the 1960s and ‘70s he also helped run the Public Theater and develop two acclaimed musicals of that era, “Hair” and “A Chorus Line,” which ultimately transferred to Broadway.

Mr. Libin is producing director of Jujamcyn Theaters, which owns five Broadway houses and has invested in shows during his watch like the Tony-winning plays “Clybourne Park” and “Angels in America.” Mr. Libin, who is also the owner of Broadway’s Circle in the Square Theater, is a former chairman of the Broadway League, which helps administer the Tonys.

Mr. Lee, meanwhile, has worked in opera, dance, and theater, and won a Tony for set design in 1983 for the Broadway play “K2,” which was set on a ledge near the summit of the famed mountain. The awards will be presented at the 2013 Tonys ceremony on June 9 at Radio City Music Hall.