Morgan Taylor, a Brooklyn-based illustrator/musician, has created a little yellow cone headed alien creature who's enchanting kids and adults alike. The little guy is called Gustafer Yellowgold, and the brainchild of Taylor joins him on stage via animated projections. The mellow songs have grabbed the attention of parents and kids alike, but Taylor has also crossed over to the indie world opening for bands like Wilco and The Polyphonic Spree. As for Gustafer, it's been......

New Hampshire native Nat Baldwin has some serious ties to Brooklyn's music scene, even though he still lives in his home state. His latest album, Most Valuable Player, is due out in April and was recorded in (Dirty Projector) Dave Longstreth's living room (Baldwin used to be the band's bassist). Longstreth also plays guitar on the album, which was produced/engineered by Grizzly Bear's Chris Taylor. Baldwin reached the stage after taking a pass on the......

Wildly successful young chef and restaurateur Michael Psilakis – whose Anthos is one of only two Greek restaurants in the world with a Michelin star – refined his talent not in culinary school but in the kitchen beside his Greek mother during his childhood on Long Island. After earning a business degree, he found himself drawn back to the food world, where he worked his way up from waiter to owner of the Long Island......

Drawing on his roots in the fecund 1970s East Village avant-garde film scene, critic J. Hoberman has spent his three decades at the Village Voice introducing readers to the more adventurous cinematic worlds awaiting beyond the realm of Hollywood. He is the author of nine books, most recently The Dream Life: Movies, Media, and the Mythology of the Sixties, which was described by Slate as "an extraordinary publishing event." To commemorate his thirty years at......

One Ring Zero is an unusual Brooklyn band headed up by Michael Hearst and Joshua Camp, with a troupe of musicians and lyricists filling out their ever-morphing sonic tribe. Their lyrics have been written by some familiar names: Jonathan Lethem, Margaret Atwood, Paul Auster and Dave Eggers are amongst them. This year they enter their 10th year of making music, and this Friday they'll be at Joe's Pub celebrating on stage. Join in on the......

At the 1968 Democratic Convention, anti-war activists were denied permits to demonstrate by the city and spent most of the week getting their skulls cracked courtesy of the Chicago Police Department, witnessed by a television audience of over 50 million. A year later, eight of the most high profile radicals – guys like Abbie Hoffman and the Black Panthers' Bobby Seale – were tried on charges of conspiracy and inciting riots. The courtroom was......

Next Wednesday a cornucopia of comedians (Dave Attell, Louis C.K., Artie Lange and more) will gather at Town Hall for the The Gerry Red Wilson Foundation Comedy Benefit. Greg Fitzsimmons is one of the comedians responsible for putting together the show, which will raise awareness about meningitis (a disease that struck three people in his life, one of which was Gerry Red Wilson). You can buy tickets here. When not making one of his many......

Kaki King (MySpace) is a guitar player and singer-songwriter from Atlanta, Georgia. She lived in Brooklyn for 7 years until last summer, when music started taking her on a permanent tour around the world. Her upcoming album is called Dreaming Of Revenge and will be released March 11th on Velour Records. King was nominated for a Golden Globe for Best Original Score for the music she played in the Sean Penn film Into the Wild,......

Damien DeRose, aka Peasant, tip-toed into our playlist last year just before playing Gothamist House at CMJ. Hailing from Doylestown, PA, his small town sound has been calmly floating around this city with more and more frequency -- enchanting everyone within earshot. This Thursday he's back to play the Brooklyn Vegan show at Pianos (tix). Exposure.mp3 - Peasant How did you come up with "Peasant" as your performing name? I just knew I didn't want......

Neil O'Fortune and Clams Casino co-produce and co-host the Smells Like Tease Spirit! a 90s Burlesque Tribute tonight at Galapagos Art Space. Clams Casino is a burlesque performer, producer and writer who you can find entertaining anywhere from the Coney Island boardwalk to The Slipper Room. Together her and partner Neil O'Fortune have created a bevy of Burlesque shows for New Yorkers, as well as some non-Burlesque fun like the monthly, live-on-stage game show, What's......

24-year-old chef Jessica Floyd has been working between 14 and 17 hours a day for the last two weeks at Islero, the new “modern Spanish” restaurant on 50th Street. The chef, who also handles the pastry program, hasn’t had a break since the place opened 11 days ago, and things aren’t slowing down any time soon. Islero will open for lunch service on March 3rd, and Floyd’s working on a bunch of ideas, such as......

They’ll deny it, but most college students who write plays harbor some secret fantastic hope that their new opus will be hailed as the arrival of a fresh new voice and open on Broadway to triumphant acclaim. It obviously never happens, except when it does: 28-year-old Lin-Manuel Miranda, originally from Washington Heights, conceived the musical In the Heights as a sophomore at Wesleyan. After graduating, the show, a hip hop and salsa-inflected homage to his......

Brooklyn-based quintet The National have spent the last nine years slowly and steadily evolving from bar-band hobby to indie rock royalty, a success built out of old fashioned techniques like laborious songwriting, tireless gigging and the organic cultivation of their own distinct sound: a bruised, moody elegance that swells and crashes under the dreamy baritone of front man Matt Berninger. Their fourth and most recent album, Boxer, was a usual suspect on critical top ten......

Italian pianist Stefano Bollani has been known to play everything from Pet Sounds to Prokofiev. As a kid he could keep up with Scott Joplin recordings sped up from 33 to 45 rpms, and even today the 35-year-old, classically trained, composer is nothing less than rousing (Check out Marian McPartland's Piano Jazz on NPR.org). Twelve years ago Bollani was touring with Italian pop star Jovanotti when he caught the ear of famed trumpet player Enrico......

Train muralist James Top (aka JEE 2) was part of the legendary Odd Partners in the 1970s. The Brooklyn crew bombed with throw ups and block letters; they were highly regarded and had a strong presence in the city. These days Top has taken his art indoors -- teaching a graffiti class in the Bronx and, this weekend, opening his first New York exhibit. Afrology opens this Friday and includes the debut of seventeen variations......

More than just a funny comedian, Elon James White (myspace) is becoming a notable force for his efforts to introduce new audiences to the sometimes overlooked diversity of talent within the world of black comedians. In other words, there’s more to black comedy than you might think by watching Def Comedy Jam. By creating The Black Comedy Project with comedian Baron Vaughn, White has helped cultivate an expanding community of artists who might be classified......

Listening to Philadelphia duo Pattern is Movement for the first time can perhaps best be described as taking a ride through Disney's "It's a Small World After All", with each country representing a different period of music. It's a lot to take in, as sounds of the past are layered upon each other to create modern arrangements unlike anything you've heard before, while somehow remaining distantly familiar. The band will bring their unique sound to......

London-based solo musician Yoav is a singer/songwriter who works hard to go beyond the usual “man with a guitar” conventions. By looping beats created with his voice and acoustic guitar, his songs are often inflected with an unusual drum 'n' bass flavor. His debut album Charmed & Strange crystallizes this aesthetic with an effect he describes as “DJ-ing with my guitar.” Yoav plays Mercury Lounge Saturday night at 7:30; tickets cost $10. You recently toured......

Staten Island singer/songwriter Ingrid Michaelson found fame through the small screen before hitting airwaves nationwide. Last year one of her songs was featured in the season finale of Grey's Anatomy (video), only to be followed by another one of her songs being picked up for an Old Navy ad (video). Needless to say she went from getting write-ups in the Staten Island Advance, to getting them in the NY Times. With plans to leave the......

Brendan Canty is the drummer for Fugazi, the rightly revered D.C. post-punk band whose page on the Dischord Records website still states "1987 - present." The group hasn’t played together or released an album since their phenomenal seventh LP, The Argument; in 2002 they embarked on what is looking increasingly like a permanent hiatus. Like his bandmates, Canty has been consumed by various other creative projects: he’s produced albums for Ted Leo and The Thermals,......

For the past four decades, Richard Foreman has challenged and fascinated audiences with a deeply idiosyncratic aesthetic incorporating traces of vaudeville, Jungian philosophy, slapstick, surrealism and myriad other disparate sources to create what he calls the Ontological-Hysteric theater. His newest “theatrical machine”, called Deep Trance Behavior in Potatoland, is the third in a series of works that heavily emphasize video projection, this time shot on location in Japan. The live performance in Deep Trance has......

Kate Sullivan co-anchors CBS 2 News This Morning on WCBS along side Maurice DuBois every weekday morning. She is a native of New England, attended Notre Dame and came to channel 2 in April of 2006 from KATV in Little Rock, Arkansas, which is ranked #57 on the list of biggest television markets. We recently paid her a visit at the studio and asked her some questions. Did you always want to come to New......

Professor, author and activist Robert Thurman is widely regarded as the leading American expert on Tibetan Buddhism, having been a major force in the widespread introduction of Tibetan culture and religion to the west. In 1962, Thurman became the first American ordained as a Tibetan Buddhist monk, but after a few years he shifted from strict monasticism to the more conventional lifestyle of an academic. Though currently on sabbatical to write another book, Thurman remains......

A veteran of Nobu and Ruby Foo’s, Chris Cheung was hired 5 months ago to replace Patricia Yeo at Monkey Bar, the red satin and black lacquer midtown institution known primarily for its, well, monkey theme. In an effort to reemphasize the food quotient of the restaurant, the 38 year-old chef maintains an inventory of global tastes and reassembles them using the template of traditional Chinese food: The curly fries, for example, that come with......

Craig Wedren is the former front man for the sorely missed D.C. band Shudder to Think, a group that seemed to intuitively grasp all the overlooked possibilities of the late-80s/early 90s post-punk landscape and render them into a sound that was at once startling, bizarre and irresistibly catchy. Since the band’s end ten years ago, Wedren has made a career as composer of soundtracks for movies such as Wet Hot American Summer and The Baxter,......

In early 2007, The New Yorker writer George Packer published an enthralling article about the desperate plight of Iraqis who had assisted the American effort in their country and were being hunted down as a result, with little or no U.S. protection. Betrayed, Packer's first play, is based on interviews conducted while in Iraq for the sixth time to research his article; the fictionalized account concerns three young Iraqis – two men and a woman......

In 2003, Sopranos star Michael Imperioli opened the intimate Studio Dante theater with his wife Victoria, who designed the elegantly formal space. In his capacity as director, producer and actor, Imperioli has been busy turning the theater into a well-regarded hotspot for new plays. The current production is a solo show by Glasgow native Russell Barr entitled Sisters, Such Devoted Sisters. In the largely autobiographical play, Barr plays Bernice, a drag queen who herself portrays......

The 21 Club opened on New Year’s Eve 1930 at 21 West 52nd Street as a speakeasy and restaurant. Legend has it that when powerful gossip columnist Walter Winchell was banned from the club, he ran an item wondering why the 21 Club had not yet been raided by Prohibition agents. (Winchell, of course, was the inspiration for the character of J.J. Hunsecker in The Sweet Smell of Success, which features several scenes at 21.)......

Luigi Di Palo, a youthful 56-year-old better known as Lou, runs Little Italy’s century-old Di Palo’s Fine Foods with his brother and sister. The store started out as a latteria, selling only fresh cheese, milk and butter. Di Palo likes to say that he and his family are among the “last of the real, original Little Italy people.” These days the store is a little Italy in its own right with hundreds of Italian specialties......

The bio on Eugene Mirman's website poses the question "Who or what is Eugene Mirman?" and answers, "In 1978, at the age of four, Eugene Mirman emigrated from Russia to seek a better life in America. It fucking worked." Of course, you've probably been familiar with Mirman at least as far back as the summer of '06 when he killed at Gothamist's Laughable Hype show. For any other entertainer, that magical night would have been......