By Cris D’Annunzio - http://www.cdannunzio.com/blog/

Chazz Palminteri is currently performing his terrific one-man show, “A Bronx Tale”, at the Venetian in Las Vegas.  This, of course, is the show he performed decades ago that got Robert DeNiro’s attention and led to the film by the same name – not to mention launching Chazz’s career.  I saw the more recent performance of this show that Chazz has been touring, both in New York and Los Angeles, and I highly recommend it – particularly if you can see it in Vegas.

Why particularly in Vegas?  Well, because the story Chazz tells is about his relationship with – what the audience can only assume is – a mob boss.  I say, “what the audience can only assume is a mob boss” due to the fact that there is never any mention of the mob – which is interesting in and of itself (more on that later) but particularly here, since the last time Vegas, Baby was actually Vegas, Baby was when the purported “mob” ran the place.

What you see in “A Bronx Tale” is a boy – Cologero or simply, ‘C’ – learning to be a man.  From his father, yes, but also and especially, from our “mob” boss – Sonny.  Sonny teaches C the value of community and how to conduct himself as a gentleman.  And whether they love him or fear him because of what he does, everyone – including C’s father – respects Sonny for the man he is.

The qualities that Sonny exhibits – and passes on to C – are rarely seen in today’s so-called men.  But that’s an entirely different diatribe.  My point is, that when Vegas was supposedly run by guys like Sonny it at least had class.  It was an adult playground where you could dress up, see a show, have a nice meal and do a little gambling.  Now it’s a poor excuse for Disneyland where flip-flop and t-shirt wearing parents drag their ragamuffin kids around at all hours of the night and day.  An interesting contradiction for Chazz’s show.

What happened?  Sadly, Corporate America took over.  And the same can be said for the Mob.

Now before I go any further, let’s get one thing straight:  according to yours truly, there is no such thing as the Mob or the Mafia or La Cosa Nostra or any of the other euphemisms used to describe an alleged group of predominantly Italian-Americans involved in “organized crime”.  Never was.  First of all, organized crime is somewhat oxymoronic, isn’t it?  But that’s beside the point.  Like Chazz Palminteri, I too grew up in a neighborhood that was heavily populated with those of my own ethnic heritage.  The reason there is no mention of the Mob in “A Bronx Tale” is because we never used that kind of terminology.  I should know.  My father – for lack of any other way of describing him that you may understand – knew people, was supposedly connected, whatever.  According to my mother, he was simply a good-for-nothing dago bastard, but that too is an entirely different story.  To the best of my knowledge and observations, there were no secret societies, no hierarchies, no bosses, under bosses, capos, etc…  There was never even talk of “This Thing of Ours”.  All that stuff was invented by Hollywood and the Government to sell tickets and justify some G-man’s salary.  But I digress.

What’s for sure is that if there ever was anything such as the Mob, it certainly doesn’t exist anymore.   For all the supposed indiscretions and illegalities that the Mob is reported to be involved with, what people fail to recognize is that its essential function was to provide security and protection.  If you didn’t have deep pockets or couldn’t speak English very well, the Mob was your insurance company.  And unlike premiums, you got something for your payola.  If there was every an accident or a need, there was always money, flowers or food generously donated by your local ghoomba.

But then, Corporate America took over and it all went downhill – just like Vegas.

Case in point:  A seventeen year old girl needs a liver transplant but her insurance company – Cigna – refuses to pay for it.  She dies.

Now the girl’s mother is obviously upset so she pays a visit to the Cigna headquarters in Philadelphia – where the CEO of the insurance company no doubt lives in a mansion on the mainline and sends his kids to Haverford thanks to all the premium payments this mother and others like her have paid.  Does the mother go there seeking money, retribution?  No, she goes simply asking for an apology.  What happens?  She gets heckled, flipped off and is summarily shown to the door by the capos, underbosses, soldiers and other ghoombas otherwise known as the Cigna employees.

All I can say is, this would have never happened in the neighborhood I grew up in.  Or where Chazz grew up either.  But like he says in the conclusion of his show, maybe this is just another Bronx Tale.

By Cris D’Annunzio - http://www.cdannunzio.com/blog/

If you’ve ever envied Sting’s sex life, you can stop right now. According to the singer’s daughter, her dad knows squat about Tantric sex!

Coco Sumner says her father’s legendary prowess — which was said to include eight-hour marathon sessions with his wife, Trudie Styler — was actually a tongue-in-cheek story fabricated by his pal, rocker-activist Bob Geldof.

“Bob Geldof made up this thing and it stuck — and it’s an international joke!” the 18-year-old actress moans in the new issue of the U.K.’s Love magazine, out Monday. She adds that the fictitious story has haunted her for her entire young life.

Says Coco: “It’s embarrassing when people bring it up. I don’t really have anything to do with my parents’ sex life. They love each other. So what?”

Tales of Sting’s seduction techniques were first revealed in the 1998 biography “Sting — Demolition Man.” However, the former Police front man eventually back-pedaled, saying that any discussion of Tantra with Geldof was the result of a “bitching” session.

“We were chatting and talking about having hours of sex. It then became really a joke which went around the world like a forest fire,” Sting said.

“I’m definitely not going to deny it, or confirm it,” he then teased London’s Evening Standard. “Yes, I do a lot of yoga. I’m not an expert on Tantra, but it’s about trying to establish everyday normal things like walking, eating and making love with an element of the sacred.”

And while Coco denies that her parents have loved each other for a very long time, Geldof is sticking to his story — but still can’t imagine why his friend would want to do anything that physical for an extended period of time.

Says Geldof: “I said to Sting, ‘Why would you want it for eight hours? It must be so boring. must have said, ‘Get on with it!’?”

Brad Pitt was an ‘artist’ with marijuana before he ditched his smoking habit to become a father

He’s better known for his movie career and famous brood, but Brad Pitt says he was once an “artist” when it came to marijuana.

“I certainly had my day,” the father of six told HBO’s “Real Time” host Bill Maher in an interview Friday.

Maher, who said the actor’s portrayal of a pot smoker in 1993’s “True Romance” was “one of the great stoner performances,” also told a story in which he witnessed Pitt rolling “the most perfect” joint he had ever seen at a New Year’s Eve party.

“I’m an artist,” the actor brazenly responded.

Though the “Inglourious Basterds” star had fun during his earlier days, the actor admits he ditched the habit when he became a father to his six kids – Maddox, 7, Pax, 5, Zahara, 4, Shiloh, 3, and twins Knox and Vivienne, 1 – with partner Angelina Jolie.

“I’m a dad now,” he explains. “You want to be alert and my eyes used to glaze over when I did that.”

Pitt’s penchant for pot also began to affect his acting career.

“I liked to smoke a bit of grass at the time, and I became very sheltered. Then I got bored,” Pitt told Parade magazine. “I was turning into a damn doughnut, really. So I moved as far away from that as I could. I was done.”

Whatever the Chinese calendar says, this could turn out to be the year of the cougar on American television.

A “cougar,” for those who have been hibernating, is a middle-aged woman either prowling for or finding herself involved with a measurably younger man.

Television did a test run last season with TV Land’s painful “reality” show “The Cougar.” This year, praise the Lord, cougars have moved into the more comfortable den of scripted comedy - led by ABC’s “Cougar Town,” a sitcom that debuts Sept. 23 with Courteney Cox as the cougar.

Cox practically purred this weekend when she talked to TV writers about the show - noting she’s seven years older than her real-life husband David Arquette.

“I’ve been blazing that trail for years,” she said. “I think it’s great to be a cougar.”

This fall, she won’t be prowling alone.

Laura Leighton’s Sydney Andrews, returning to the CW’s revived “Melrose Place,” immediately moves in on the young. Rebecca Romijn’s Roxie on ABC’s new “Eastwick” starts off with a young fellow, and Susan Ward’s Chloe Kmetko on ABC Family’s “Make It or Break It” tries to pass herself off as her teenage daughter’s sister.

Equally revealing, “cougar” is now casual TV banter. On the season premiere of “Flipping Out,” Jeff Lewis calls his divorced assisstant Jenni a “cougar” even when she protests she’s 36, not 40.

Cox turned 45 in June, and she opens “Cougar Town” with a shower scene where she inventories her body, dislikes everything and concludes she’s starting to resemble a farm animal.

Sure. And chocolate mousse tastes like peat moss and Lamborghinis drive like lawn mowers.

Cox disproves her own point minutes later with a lingerie scene that would make the cast of “Gossip Girl” gasp.

But the deeper point of the opening scene, suggested Cox, is to reinforce how turning 40 unleashes a lot of self-doubt for real-life women.

“It’s hard,” she said. “It would be really scary if I wasn’t married and I had to go back out there again.”

By that premise, a cougar is simply a woman who has decided to defy destiny and maybe enjoy a little turnabout.

The exotic fascination of the older woman-younger man is hardly new, of course, predating even Mrs. Robinson. Eva Longoria’s Gaby was not the first bored housewife to covet the pool boy.

The most succinct summation came years ago on “Ed Sullivan” from a somewhat less likely cougar, the late great Moms Mabley.

“The only thing an old man can give me,” she said, “is the phone number of a young man.”

But for the “cougar” concept to work as a weekly show, said Bill Lawrence, “Cougar Town’s” executive producer, it can’t be just a wink-wink, nudge-nudge one-liner.

“If every week this show were about what young man is Courteney going to sleep with,” he said, “that’s the Samantha from ‘Sex and the City‘ show, and I don’t think people would respond.”

The heart of “Cougar Town,” he said, is how a divorced middle-aged woman puts her life back together - and why it’s harder for her than for her divorced middle-aged husband.

“Because,” said Lawrence, “it is ultimately still a sexist and misogynistic society.”

dhinckley@nydailynews.com

Sopranos” producer David Chase remains coy about the possibility of a big-screen followup to the hit HBO show,but loose-lipped cast members are suggesting a script is already on the page.

It’s been speculated that a major holdup to the big-screen version is a strong reluctance on the part of James Gandolfini to sign on to the project.

But, according to a chatty Lorraine Bracco, that rumor is way off the mark.

“I don’t think it’s that at all,” says Bracco about Gandolfini’s supposed cold feet. “I think it’s really trying to get the right script. Without the right script, it’s really not worth doing.”

Bracco isn’t shy about making her concerns heard. “We’ve all talked to David to give him a kick in the booty to get it right,” she says pointedly.

While HBO mouthpieces yesterday shot down any talk about the existence of a script, claiming it is “just rumor,” Steve Van Zandt recently added to the buzz.

The “Sopranos” alum and Bruce Springsteen bandmate let slip to a Belfast newspaper that his character, Sil - who was struggling for his life in the show’s abrupt ending - “is still alive.”

Go figure.

And Bracco doesn’t sound like she’s planning to stop at just one movie.

“I want us to be like ‘Sex and the City‘ or ‘The Bourne Identity,’” she gushed. “I want to make a million of them.”

PARIS — Spending an idle morning watching people look at art is hardly a scientific experiment, but it rekindles a perennial question: What exactly are we looking for when we roam as tourists around museums? As with so many things right in front of us, the answer may be no less useful for being familiar

At the Louvre the other day, in the Pavillon des Sessions, two young women in flowered dresses meandered through the gallery. They paused and circled around a few sculptures. They took their time. They looked slowly.

The pavilion puts some 100 immaculate objects from outside Europe on permanent view in a ground floor suite of cool, silent galleries at one end of the museum. Feathered masks from Alaska, ancient bowls from the Philippines, Mayan stone portraits and the most amazing Zulu spoon carved from wood in the abstracted S-shape of a slender young woman take no back seat, aesthetically speaking, to the great Titians and Chardins upstairs.

The young women were unusual for stopping. Most of the museum’s visitors passed through the gallery oblivious.

A few game tourists glanced vainly in guidebooks or hopefully at wall labels, as if learning that one or another of these sculptures came from Papua New Guinea or Hawaii or the Archipelago of Santa Cruz, or that a work was three centuries old or maybe four might help them see what was, plain as day, just before them.

Almost nobody, over the course of that hour or two, paused before any object for as long as a full minute. Only a 17th-century wood sculpture of a copulating couple, from San Cristobal in the Solomon Islands, placed near an exit, caused several tourists to point, smile and snap a photo, but without really breaking stride.

Visiting museums has always been about self-improvement. Partly we seem to go to them to find something we already recognize, something that gives us our bearings: think of the scrum of tourists invariably gathered around the Mona Lisa. At one time a highly educated Westerner read perhaps 100 books, all of them closely. Today we read hundreds of books, or maybe none, but rarely any with the same intensity. Travelers who took the Grand Tour across Europe during the 18th century spent months and years learning languages, meeting politicians, philosophers and artists and bore sketchbooks in which to draw and paint — to record their memories and help them see better.

Cameras replaced sketching by the last century; convenience trumped engagement, the viewfinder afforded emotional distance and many people no longer felt the same urgency to look. It became possible to imagine that because a reproduction of an image was safely squirreled away in a camera or cell phone, or because it was eternally available on the Web, dawdling before an original was a waste of time, especially with so much ground to cover.

We could dream about covering lots of ground thanks to expanding collections and faster means of transportation. At the same time, the canon of art that provided guideposts to tell people where to go and what to look at was gradually dismantled. A core of shared values yielded to an equality among visual materials. This was good and necessary, up to a point. Millions of images came to compete for our attention. Liberated by a proliferation, Western culture was also set adrift in an ocean of passing stimulation, with no anchors to secure it.

So tourists now wander through museums, seeking to fulfill their lifetime’s art history requirement in a day, wondering whether it may now be the quantity of material they pass by rather than the quality of concentration they bring to what few things they choose to focus upon that determines whether they have “done” the Louvre. It’s self-improvement on the fly.

The art historian T. J. Clark, who during the 1970s and ’80s pioneered a kind of analysis that rejected old-school connoisseurship in favor of art in the context of social and political affairs, has lately written a book about devoting several months of his time to looking intently at two paintings by Poussin. Slow looking, like slow cooking, may yet become the new radical chic.

Until then we grapple with our impatience and cultural cornucopia. Recently, I bought a couple of sketchbooks to draw with my 10-year-old in St. Peter’s and elsewhere around Rome, just for the fun of it, not because we’re any good, but to help us look more slowly and carefully at what we found. Crowds occasionally gathered around us as if we were doing something totally strange and novel, as opposed to something normal, which sketching used to be. I almost hesitate to mention our sketching. It seems pretentious and old-fogeyish in a cultural moment when we can too easily feel uncomfortable and almost ashamed just to look hard.

Artists fortunately remind us that there’s in fact no single, correct way to look at any work of art, save for with an open mind and patience. If you have ever gone to a museum with a good artist you probably discovered that they don’t worry so much about what art history books or wall labels tell them is right or wrong, because they’re selfish consumers, freed to look by their own interests.

Back to those two young women at the Louvre: aspiring artists or merely curious, they didn’t plant themselves forever in front of the sculptures but they stopped just long enough to laugh and cluck and stare, and they skipped the wall labels until afterward.

They looked, in other words. And they seemed to have a very good time.

Leaving, they caught sight of a sculptured effigy from Papua New Guinea with a feathered nose, which appeared, by virtue of its wide eyes and open hands positioned on either side of its head, as if it were taunting them.

They thought for a moment. “Nyah-nyah,” they said in unison. Then blew him a raspberry.

On Avenue J in the Midwood section of Brooklyn, a small cup of coffee costs $1.39. An 18-stick package of gum is $1.49. And at Di Fara Pizza, the price of a plain cheese slice: $5.

Crowds form at the counter at Di Fara and spill onto the sidewalk. They are not an angry mob, but a hungry one. Some order two slices, for $10, and some, like Frank Mancino, a retired electrician from Bath Beach, Brooklyn, whose girth is a statement about his allegiance to pizza in general and Di Fara in particular, order a whole square pie, for $30.

“Worth it,” said Mr. Mancino, 64, between bites on Wednesday afternoon. “It’s like they dug up my grandma and she made the pie.”

Di Fara, one of the most acclaimed and sought-after pizza shops in New York City, now sells one of the most expensive — and still-sought-after — slices in New York City, on a no-frills Brooklyn block next door to, of all places, a 99-cent store. The price of a slice increased to $5 on July 1, up from $4, the cost for the past year and a half. Just about everything else went up as well: Plain round pies are $25 and specialty square pies are $35.

There are those who have called Di Fara and left nasty messages on the answering machine, and there are those who have made a special trip to Midwood in recent days to find out what a $5 slice tastes like.

And yet, the owner, Domenico DeMarco, 72, a founder, remains undisturbed by the commotion, cutting fresh basil over bubbling pies with a pair of kitchen scissors.

“I use the top ingredients,” said Mr. DeMarco, whose accent still echoes Provincia di Caserta in Italy, where he is from; it is an ethos that adds to the Di Fara mystique, and perhaps to its prices. “Other pizzerias, I don’t think they use the top.”

The price of a slice has long been one of the city’s unofficial economic indicators, and the increase at Di Fara has led to intense analysis among New Yorkers about what, exactly, it indicates: a deepening recession, an easing of the recession, rising inflation, savvy marketing, price gouging, or commodity prices on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange? Or, simply, Mr. DeMarco — a bespectacled maverick of the New York pizza world, who insists on making every pie himself — being Mr. DeMarco.

Even Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg joined the debate, though he was careful not to say whether he was for or against a $5 slice. “The real question, relative to the local economy, is whether people are trading up from a $2.75 slice or down from a $25 entree,” the mayor said in reply to a question on Thursday. “And from what I hear in the subways and on the streets, it’s probably a mixture of both. But if you’ve ever had a really great slice of pizza, you know there are worse deals.”

And there is an underlying concern about a ripple effect. Other pizzerias “might follow suit,” said Adam Kuban, 35, the founder of Slice, a pizza-focused blog that reported the new price. “Some people might think, ‘Mine is at $2.50 or $2.75, maybe I can raise it to $3.’ ”

Behind the counters at a number of city pizzerias, the $5 Di Fara slice has sparked some grumbling. “I don’t agree with it,” said Francesco Taormina, 42, manager at Rizzo’s Fine Pizza in Astoria, Queens, where a plain slice costs $2.50. “I couldn’t possibly think of any slice that could cost that much.”

Of course, Mr. DeMarco believes his pizza is worth the money, and many of his customers believe so as well, arguing that in a city where rents, tolls and subway fares keep climbing, paying more for what many consider the best pizza in New York is entirely reasonable.

Mr. DeMarco uses imported ingredients. The flour, extra-virgin olive oil, San Marzano tomatoes, buffalo mozzarella cheese and Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese are all brought from Italy, and the basil is from Israel.

The only person who makes a Di Fara pie is Mr. DeMarco, because, in his words, “I believe only one guy should make the pizza.” When Mr. DeMarco is not available to make the pizza, Di Fara shuts its doors, as it did for several weeks in January while Mr. DeMarco recovered from a car accident.

A $5 Di Fara slice is thin and crispy, the dough a few seconds shy of burnt, topped with a tangy, subtle sauce, served on a paper plate, over a sheet of wax paper, in an overheated 44-year-old pizzeria with a worn floor, a drippy air-conditioner and a handwritten sign reading, “Bathroom is out of order.”

On Wednesday, Chris Alese, 28, an off-duty police officer, waited an hour and 20 minutes, paying $61 for two pies and four drinks for his group. “It’s unbelievable,” Mr. Alese said, referring to the taste. “You’re going to pay for quality.”

Murat Ugur, 23, was not as impressed. “So-so,” he said Thursday, biting into a slice. “A little oily.”

Margaret Mieles, Mr. DeMarco’s daughter and Di Fara’s manager, said a number of factors went into the decision to raise prices. The shop has always used expensive imported ingredients, but in the past six months Mr. DeMarco has been more generous with them, part of what she called his new “heavy hand.” As a result, she said, more supplies are being ordered more often.

The increase in the city’s sales tax was another reason Di Fara raised its prices, Mrs. Mieles said, since the tax is included in the price. (The tax rate goes up half a percentage point on Saturday.) She denied speculation that the price increase was to make up for a recent reduction in the pizzeria’s hours of operation. It used to be closed on Mondays, but is now also closed Tuesdays. Her father wanted — and needed — the rest, she said.

Those hoping the new prices are temporary, like those hoping the wait for a slice will get shorter, will be disappointed.

“We will never, ever lower the price,” Mrs. Mieles said. “It can only go up. It can never come down.”

Bobby Allyn contributed reporting.

Called plainly “Cannabis,” a new $1.99 application for Apple’s iPhone and iPod Touch lets you find medical marijuana in the 13 states that have such laws, and lawyers in the 37 others that don’t.

For overseas users, it also guides you to the friendliest Amsterdam hash bars.

The app is the creation of AJNAG, or Activists Justifying the Natural Agriculture of Ganja, a Los Angeles-based online group created in 2006 to “connect, educate and empower individuals on the cultural, economic, and medicinal benefits of legalization, production, regulation, distribution, and taxation of Cannabis sativa,” according to the group’s Web site.

Jonesin’ for some (legal) weed? Yes, there IS an app for that.

AJNAG says it’ll donate 50 cents for every purchase of the “Cannabis” app to an as-yet nonexistent “cannabis non-profit reform fund, which will be set up once the application reaches 1000 subscriptions.”

“Our goal is to put the power of cannabis change in your pocket while you enjoy the most sticky and potent iPhone application available!,” the Web-based brochure claimed.

Requests to Apple seeking comment were not immediately returned.

INDISCRIMINATE gluttons and discerning gourmands alike have long been crazy for pizza. But over the last few years, they have elevated their passion to a vocation, sending pizza into a whole new stratosphere of respect. It isn’t just loved, and it isn’t just devoured. It’s scrutinized and fetishized, with a Palin-esque power to polarize.

Does a wood-burning brick oven yield more flavorful crusts than a coal-burning one? Which flour lends the most character to dough? Is buffalo-milk mozzarella a silky blessing or watery curse?

On such questions the most durable of friendships have foundered and the most principled of pizza makers — pizzaioli, they are now called — part company.

“We’ve gotten all of a sudden into this ‘authentic’ scenario,” said Michael Ayoub, owner of Fornino, a pizzeria in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, referring to the expanding legions of self-regarding artisans around town. “The only thing they haven’t brought over is the water from that polluted Bay of Naples.”

The flashiest restaurateurs want in on pizza; so do some of the most classically trained, critically acclaimed chefs. Stephen Starr, the owner of Buddakan and an owner of Morimoto, two of the grandest and gaudiest Asian restaurants in downtown Manhattan, has lately spent much of his time in New York eating his way through the city’s older and newer pizza parlors, on a gut-busting mission to figure out what works best and how to replicate it in Philadelphia, his base.

Pizza is the latest fascination of David Myers, a celebrated Los Angeles chef who has turned from progressive cuisine at Sona to mozzarella and San Marzano tomatoes at Pizzeria Ortica, which he opened early this year in Costa Mesa, Calif.

Pizza is the obsession of Mathieu Palombino, who once ran the kitchen at BLT Fish, an expensive Manhattan restaurant, but now steers Motorino, a modern pizza parlor in Williamsburg, that opened late last year. Jean-Georges Vongerichten, too, has gotten into the act. He’s an investor in Co., the Chelsea pizza place whose debut in January attracted the sort of food-world buzz once reserved for fussier fare.

Pizza connoisseurs bicker endlessly about where to find the best pies. And thanks to the brisk pace of high-profile openings in New York over the last few years — and especially the last six months — they have more serious local contenders than ever to bicker about.

Many give the crown to Lucali, which opened in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn, in 2006, and charges $34 (cash only!) for a pie with cheese, tomato, pepperoni and mushrooms. Others swear by Zero Otto Nove, which came along a bit later on Arthur Avenue in the Bronx.

I’ve heard plugs for the misleadingly named Salvatore of SoHo, which began churning out coal-oven pies in a Staten Island strip mall last year, and for Kesté, which unveiled its gorgeous tiled oven in the West Village in March, a pizza-mad month when other instant favorites, including Anselmo’s, in the Red Hook section of Brooklyn, made their debut.

Over recent weeks I visited those restaurants and others that belong to this current chapter in pizza worship.

I looked for the most dependable pizza verities and the most enjoyable pizzas, and didn’t confine myself to one style: Neapolitan, Roman (thinner, more crackerlike crusts) or Sicilian (deeper, though not deep-dish, pies).

I did, however, confine myself to places that have opened since 2004, the year that, by my reckoning, inaugurated the chapter in question. That was when Franny’s opened in the Prospect Heights section of Brooklyn and Una Pizza Napoletana fired up its oven in the East Village. Both brought a new kind of cachet (and vanity) to pizza making and pizza eating in this city. Both changed its demographics.

I did not include predecessors like Patsy’s, Grimaldi’s or Di Fara because they’re products of less self-conscious pizza times. Back then a dismissive telephone greeting like the one I once got at Una Pizza Napoletana (“Hello, Una Pizza, we don’t deliver!”) would have been more surprising, and a recording like the one at South Brooklyn Pizza, in Carroll Gardens, would have been laughable. The British-accented voice in that recording used the phrases “exclusive, votive-lit hideaway,” “hand-crafted” and “custom-made” in the span of 30 seconds, and mentioned an “1890s Napoleon brick oven,” creating ambiguity about whether an Italian region or French emperor was being referenced.

I paid special attention to places less than a year old. There are scads of them.

Why?

“The economy the way it is, pizza’s perfect,” said Mr. Starr, who noted that pizza is relatively gentle on the budgets of consumers and providers.

“I have training at high altitude, with all these big restaurants,” he said, “and this seems a lot easier — less money, less pressure. You’re concentrating on one thing rather than sous-chefs and pastry chefs.”

Casting pizza as art and fostering a cult around high-level pizza making are in the interest of food scribes, whether they work for established periodicals or self-financed blogs, because money is tight in those quarters, too, and it’s much more affordable to canvass the pizza landscape than to mull over Masa.

Pizza suits the casual ethos of the culinary moment, and it fits in with the intensifying reverence for all foods Italian. What’s a French-focused chef to do? Terrance Brennan’s answer at Bar Artisanal, which he opened in TriBeCa in April, is the pissaladière, the French version of pizza given little previous exposure.

On my pizza rounds I developed some firm convictions, but mostly saw that few rules can’t be contradicted, and few generalizations hold.

I believe by and large that Neapolitan pies — if they can avoid soupiness, as they did at Motorino — are the most appealing. Yet the pan pizzas at Veloce Pizzeria, which opened in the East Village a month and a half ago, pleased me every bit as much. Sara Jenkins, the chef who supervises their production, said she isn’t sure whether to call them Sicilian or grandma style. Whatever their proper tag, these denser, richer, square pies were superb. The nicely charred crust — with a dough of potato, durum and fine zero-zero flour — was firm enough to support a generous measure of toppings. Its extra-crisp edges had the salty, zingy flavor and texture of a frico. And the toppings were first-rate, the mushroom pizza showcasing a bevy of hen-of-the-woods.

I believe that firmer, less runny cheese works better most of the time, and yet the Pugliese pie at Motorino, which uses wet-centered burrata, was a masterpiece, the burrata lending the pie an opulence and creaminess.

Crisp crusts, it turns out, aren’t so difficult: most places I visited had mastered that much. But crusts that are crisp without being dry — that have some give and suppleness — are an altogether trickier matter. That’s where Lucali, for example, fell down, though the ratio of mozzarella to tomatoes on its plain pie was faultless, and the tomatoes had a beautiful, round flavor.

Crusts with character and complexity are also rare. Salvatore of SoHo, a charming restaurant whose flame-throwing coal oven gave its crusts a formidable char, was slightly disappointing on this score. The crusts were one-dimensional. And a pie that advertised sausage had precious little of it.

An attractively charred look doesn’t mean an appealingly charred taste, as Zero Otto Nove illustrated. Its pies were lovely to behold — and insipid to eat. Zero Otto Nove illustrated, too, that breathtaking ovens and grandly stated goals don’t guarantee excellence, or even enjoyment. I got almost no pleasure from the soggy pies at Kesté — including one with sausage that could have come from a Jimmy Dean’s freezer package — though Kesté, too, introduced itself as many discerning cuts above a run-of-the-mill slice joint.

Indeed, the wave of ostensibly principled pizza restaurants since 2004 has produced a mixed bag. Along the broad middle stretch of the spectrum, between undistinguished and outstanding, I’d place L’Asso, in NoLIta; Tonda, the East Village redo of the restaurant the E.U.; Toby’s Public House, in Greenwood Heights, Brooklyn, which has fine tap beers and a pubby warmth; and Luna Rossa, in Carroll Gardens, whose pies are the best in this little bunch.

I put Tonda in the bunch less for its pizza, which isn’t so distinctive, than for its attractive setting, attentive service and side notes like respectable salads and snacks. Such niceties matter: friends who accompanied me to multiple pizza places said they might be most likely to return to Roberta’s, in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn, even though most of its pies were limp and otherwise flawed. They liked the hipster vibe and ultra-casual outdoor area.

The combination of an utterly soothing or attractive ambience and pizza to swoon over is uncommon, and just as uncommon is consistency, the quality that eludes and bedevils the sporadically transcendent, ultimately frustrating Co., for example.

Co. is the work, principally, of Jim Lahey, one of the city’s master bread makers. His best crusts have a flawless degree of saltiness and are spectacularly blistered. His best pizzas — for instance the popeye, which weds crisp spinach and a molten mix of three cheeses — reflect as much thought for the toppings as for their bed.

But his blisters sometimes cross the line into soot, and on the same recent day when I had yet another terrific popeye, I had an undercooked margherita with a few tiny, shriveled basil leaves and a stingy measure of tomato and cheese, too. What an odd pizza. What a strange place.

The popeye got me thinking about how much some great pizzas and some great salads have in common. The interplay of cheese, leafy green (or other vegetable) and crust in a pizza isn’t so fundamentally different from the interplay of leafy green, cheese and croutons in a salad. There’s just been a reallocation of the starring roles and cameos.

For that matter a great pizza and great pasta are kinfolk. What’s a margherita, after all, but a canvas for tomato, cheese and herb with less slickness, more crunch and more portability than noodles? Many of the flavors are the same.

And be it salad, pasta or pizza, the surest element of success is balance. For pizza that means crispness shouldn’t come at the expense of tenderness, the crust can’t steal the thunder from the toppings, and toppings can’t run roughshod over the crust.

As for toppings, they should add a whisper of sweetness or murmur of heat to the milky, tangy, wonderful white noise of cheese. All of the pizza places in my list of new-generation favorites understand this. And almost all of my favorite pies exemplify it.

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Kenny Golde is a film director, writer and producer, novelist, photographer and public speaker. He has appeared on the CBS News in Los Angeles, dozens of radio programs including the nationally syndicated Thom Hartmann Show (both can be seen by clicking here), and has a feature article on “The Do-It-Yourself Bailout” appearing on nationwide newsstands in the September issue of Consumer Reports.

His recent film credits include the WWII drama “Glass House,” the soon-to-be released “Uncross the Stars,” starring Academy Award nominee Barbara Hershey and Golden Globe winner Ron Perlman (www.uncrossthestarsmovie.com) and “The Job,” starring Daryl Hannah. He wrote and directed for the Lifetime Television series “Intimate Portrait,” interviewing dozens of celebrities and personalities including Quentin Tarantino, Billy Joel, Arnold Schwarzenegger and John Travolta. Golde lives in Los Angeles (www.kennygolde.com).