We'll be liveblogging the MTVU Woodie Awards tonight (hopefully Jared Leto won't break our blogging fingers) -- if you're looking for something else to do though, here are some suggestions... READING: Spend an evening with Global City Review contributors Linsey Abrams, Fred Tuten, and Michelle Yasmine Valladare. The publication "celebrates the difficulties and possibilities of the 'global city' and other constructions of community...while honoring the subversiveness and originality of ordinary lives," and reflects on New......

THEATER: The fall theater season gets curiouser and curiouser with the start of The Alice in Wonderland Puppet Festival at HERE. (The festival, which is not recommended for children under twelve, will feature a tea party after every show.) Tonight curiouser & curiouser fuses text from Alice in Wonderland, Through the Looking Glass, Lewis Carroll’s diary entries and his muse Alice Liddell’s memoirs to try to decipher what destroyed their unique friendship. - John Del......

Today on the Gothamist Newsmap: a partial roof collapse on Union St. in Brooklyn, a person under a train at Coney Island and Brighton Beach Aves. in Brooklyn, and a slashing at Dyckman St. and Broadway in Manhattan. Artie Fufkin speaks! Paul Schaffer, who was the musical director of the Blues Brothers, keyboardist for Bill Murray's lounge singer character on SNL, and the bandleader for David Letterman's "The World's Most Dangerous Band" since 1982,......

38-year-old New Yorker Larry Smith has parlayed his extensive magazine experience (Yahoo! Internet Life, P.O.V., ESPN, Might) to create the online magazine that's not only named after him, it represents his vision for the future of populist storytelling: SMITH. Launched on January 6, 2006 (National Smith Day), the site features everything from photo essays to diaries, memoirs, interviews, blogs, and reader-generated content. The site has also spawned two book deals: one for its first webcomic,......

THEATER: It’s “go time” for The Butane’s Group’s Operation Ajax, which ingenuously sets the CIA’s 1953 overthrow of Iran’s first democratically-elected government in the context of a casino. “Constructed from no less than 25 text sources (memoirs, documentaries, plays, poetry, novels, films, reality tv shows), the densely-layered performance explores how the addiction to risk and gambling has become a potent metaphor for U.S. foreign policy.” (For an enhanced theater experience, explore the show’s thorough bibliography,......

Michael Malice, Evil Genius, Editor, Overheard in New York, Subject, Ego & Hubris: The Michael Malice Story...

This week's new film releases are a lovely New York melting pot: ballroom dancing teens, Arab/Israeli anxieties, motor skills-challenged geeks, neurotic female friends, and a thoughtful Polish director thrown in for good measure. Spring may have sprung outside but it's also a great time to be inside at the movie. If you saw last year's documentary Mad Hot Ballroom, you're already familiar with dancing teacher Pierre Dulaine and his work with children around the country.......

Gothamist was a bit underwhelmed by this year's Golden Globe nominees, and we were thinking of not liveblogging. But, gosh darn it as we watched the E! preshow and saw the starlets sparkle their way down the red carpet, we realize it was hopeless, so here we are. Let it be known that: - Keira Knightley looks gorgeous in her white Valentino - and there's something surprisingly youthful about the dress, even though there's that......

No don't worry. Gothamist doesn't plan to subject you to yet another film Top 10 list. If you want a good ... uhm ... "overview" of this year's Top 10 lists, you might want to check-out The Reeler's Top 10 Top 10 lists. (Nos. 10-6 appeared yesterday. The top five went up this morning.) If you're looking for something more traditional, you should probably look at The Village Voice's Take 7 film critics poll. Meanwhile,......

Here we go: it's a huge weekend for year-end Oscar-bait and questions abound. Will audiences flock to see the "forbidden" love of Brokeback Mountain? (And was anybody else as disturbed at Focus Features' obvious attempts to downplay the male love story as much as possible and feature the relationships with the respective wives in every trailer?) Will fans who made worshipped the bestselling novel approve of Chicago director Rob Marshall's retelling of Memoirs of a......

On Sundays, Gothamist runs opinion pieces on issues relevant to life in New York. The views expressed below belong entirely to the author. It only took me two hours to read Billy Crystal's 700 Sundays, about the length of the Tony-award winning play he wrote and turned into the memoir. The success of the play, coupled with Crystal's brilliant sense of humor, prompted me to pick up the sort of book I wouldn't normally read......

Julie Powell, author, Julie & Julia, creator, The Julie/Julia Project...

CONTEST ALERT: We're part of a joint blog contest thing that we don't completely understand, but here's what you need to know: FREE iPod Nano! Filled up with the soundtrack from Elizabethtown. You can enter here, and you should. Seriously. Do it. ART: "For the first time in history, Skewville, America's most subversive street art twins, will be unlocking their doors and allowing the public to explore their secret laboratory..." of their own brand of......

Susan Shapiro, author, Lighting Up and Five Men Who Broke My Heart: A Memoir...

Rachel Johnson, Filmmaker...

So much for that rain yesterday, eh? Today they're saying scattered thunderstorms, high of 84. Gothamist now knows that "scattered" is the forecasting equivalent of "giant shrug." Have you seen the latest issue of New York Magazine? In honor of Bloomsday on June 16--the 100th anniversary, no less!--they've given four writers the opportunity to Leopold Bloom-ize (or should we say, James Joyce-ize) a day's worth of stream-of-conciousness thoughts pouring from the heads of four ordinary......

Check out the NY Observer's article on this year's BookExpo America in Chicago, the big annual publishing event where authors, publishers, and the public come to meet to get excited about upcoming titles, like the Bill Clinton memoirs as well as a slew of books criticizing the current president. The article also shows how the NY publishing world was transplanted in a city where you can smoke indoors - and there's a mention of Anthony......

Franz Lidz looks at the timeless story of the Collyer Brothers for the Times' City section. Two educated brothers, Homer and Langley Collyer, lived in Harlem at the beginning of the 1900s and soon their house would have 180 tons of garbage, much of it newspapers, in it. The main impetus to save was when Homer went blind, and Langley, while taking care of him (like feeding him oranges for his sight), saved newspapers for......

WTC redesign architect Daniel Libeskind is shopping around his memoirs; the Post also reports that he intends to donate the a portion of proceeds to children of September 11 victims. His agent says, "It's going to be a solid memoir for the general reader. It's not going to be experimental or avant-garde." Perhaps a shrewd PR move shrouded in philanthropy, Gothamist was confused at first when we read the Post article: Our eyes skimmed over......

News from Page Six that porn star Jenna Jameson was having her autobiography ghostwritten by NY Times rock critic Neil Strauss instantly made it a must-read for Gothamist whenever it does come out. Yes, it should be a wild and crazy book about being the hottest porn star today, but more importantly, Neil Strauss is ghostwriting it. Strauss' last contribution to pop culture memoirs was with the one of the best books about living the......

An ethics committee in Maryland ruled that Police Chief Charles A. Moose cannot profit from the proceeds of a book deal he made. The committe stated, "Accepting remuneration for services directly and immediately related to an employee's governmental activities violates the prestige-of-office prohibition because, to paraphrase the state ethics commission, those services `go with the job.'" Chief Moose, familiar to the country as the lead police authority in the DC area sniper shootings case last......