WONK WEEK.(The Talk of the Town)

So many dignitaries, so little time. At MOMA last Wednesday night, a money manager whose wife had just given birth to their first son held a glass of white wine, surveyed the throngs, and said, "I need to spend more time in Davos, so I can recognize these people." He was at the opening-night party for the Clinton Global Initiative, which coincided (by design) with the meeting of the United Nations General Assembly, bringing every politico, pundit, despot, philanthropist, First Lady, and diplomat of note to town for a whirlwind few days of posturing, glad-handing, do-gooding, and future-plotting. On the museum's second floor, the money manager, while eating short ribs, met a deeply tanned Friend of Bill, a trial lawyer with slicked-back hair and a private jet (on which, he said, the former President has ridden several times). "I don't know that there'll ever be another asbestos," the lawyer said, assessing the future in his own resigned way.

Such is pretty much the routine at the city's annual wonk week, when midtown hotel lobbies and East Side restaurants swell with international eminences (Argentines at Nello's, Congolese at the Waldorf), and the social order, for a brief moment, is realigned. Jalal Talabani snubs Woody Allen at Circo and is applauded anyway. Alyssa Milano stands ignored at the Sheraton while, nearby, the space-tourism entrepreneur Richard Branson is trailed by groupies. One veteran conventioneer, having just spent an afternoon at a panel with Warren Buffett, Barbra Streisand, John Glenn, and Shimon Peres, regarded the experience with a kind of weariness. "I feel the same way about classical music," he said. "Six months later, I'll look back and decide it was interesting."

And yet only in the most weirdly thrilling of weeks could the smug Holocaust denials of the Iranian President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, have receded from memory so quickly, upstaged by the antics of Venezuela's Hugo Chavez, who stood at the General Assembly Hall lectern, waving a copy of Chomsky's "Hegemony or Survival" and complaining about the lingering smell of sulfur in the air. Neither man was content to preen for U.N. delegates alone. Ahmadinejad decamped to the Barclay Intercontinental on Wednesday evening, for a meeting with the Council on Foreign Relations, and the following night he hosted a party at the Hilton. Chavez, meanwhile, channelled Castro circa 1960, appearing triumphantly in Harlem, dressed in symbolic red, with Danny Glover at his side, offering Venezuelan oil to America's urban poor.

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