THEATER: Lisa Kron’s solo play 2.5 Minute Ride, which won an OBIE when it premiered at the Public Theater in 1999, is currently being revived with Nicole Golden as the autobiographical “Lisa.” The play concerns Lisa's attempts to make a documentary about the life of her father, a German Jew who survived the Holocaust but lost his parents at Auschwitz. 2.5 Minute Ride finds him, in his later years, a blind diabetic with a heart......

THEATER: Under the Radar, arguably New York’s most exciting theater festival, begins today at The Public Theater and a few other odd locations like the Whitehall Ferry terminal. (There are also a few shows at the Classic Theatre of Harlem, P.S. 122 and The Kitchen.) One of the most buzzed about site-specific shows is Etiquette by the London company Rotozaza. It was a surprise hit at last year’s Edinburgh Festival; here the experience takes place......

READING: It's another First Tuesday event at McNally Robinson, and this time around author and activist Mark Crispin Miller invites Anthony Lappe to center stage. The executive editor of the Guerilla News Network also produced an award-winning documentary on the war in Iraq for Showtime. More recently, he's created a graphic novel called Shooting War with illustrator Dan Goldman, which is "a spoof of the network news, the war in Iraq, and the burgeoning 'citizen......

Reader Stephen wrote us with a holiday-related request: I don't know how else to handle this. I called the police and they told me to keep them, and that if I turned them in to the police they'd just auction them off. Anyway, I found about $200 worth of DVDs at the Citibank ATM [below 23rd Street in Manhattan]. They were new, unopened in a Virgin Megastore bag. I left my number there but who......

Word on the street is that Union Square's mammoth Virgin Megastore is closing up shop sometime between now and February 2009. Billboard reports the space is "being offered by a real estate broker for 2009 availability. According to retail sources, New York-based Winick Realty is shopping the space and has sent out packages highlighting its features." The 58,000 square-foot space is being offered together or subdivided and may become another retail space or (wait for......

EVENT: Tonight, as part of the recurring Upstairs at the Square event, Nellie McKay plays tunes from her latest, Obligatory Villager and host Katherine Lanpher talks with author and filmmaker Antonio Monda. Monda's new book Do You Believe? Conversations on God and Religion will hit shelves soon -- and tonight he'll relay the discussions he had about religion with folks like Spike Lee and David Lynch. 7pm // Barnes & Noble [33 E 17th St]......

Earlier this year bootleg DVDs became even more illegal in New York, and now there's a new way "the man" is cracking down on the bootleggers: with puppies! Metro reports that: “Dogs are used to sniff out bodies, bombs and drugs,” said Malcolm, who’s now the chief of worldwide anti-piracy operations for the Motion Picture Association of America. “We just needed to see if they could be trained to smell the unique chemicals in DVDs.......

To drum up interest in Creative Suite 3, Adobe put up a new interactive billboard on 14th Street outside the Virgin MegaStore this morning. From NY Times:As pedestrians walk past the wall, infrared sensors will lock on to the person closest to the wall, who will then be able to control a projected slider button at the bottom of the wall. As the selected pedestrian continues walking and moves the slider along, the wall......

EVENT: The New York Book Club at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum presents…"Breaking News: How the Associated Press Has Covered New York City". The panelists include "Hal Buell, longtime AP photo editor who put images of the Vietnam War in newspapers across America; Richard Drew, AP photographer who has covered New York events including 9/11; Edie Lederer, longtime UN correspondent and first woman to be the foreign chief of bureau; and Valerie Komor, corporate......

If you've ever wondered what the big deal is with fear-mongering over "big-box stores" and anonymous-looking architecture, The New York Sun directs your attention to Union Square. Once an aesthetically vibrant town point of commercial assembly, and it will probably always remain as such, the square is developing a severe style deficiency with all the warmth of a mall food court. James Gardner assesses the latest development around 14th Street:The larger of the two,......

READINGS: Russell Simmons has written a self-help book and will be at Border's today promoting it (okay, now all of this recent noise he's making makes more sense)! It's called "Do You! 12 Laws to Access the Power in You to Achieve Happiness and Success." None of the laws include any of these three words. 1pm // Border’s [100 Broadway] // Free As we mentioned a few weeks ago, Tim Gunn will be reading from......

EVENT: McSweeney's Presents an all-star benefit will feature an indie-rock supergroup made up of Dante Decaro and Hadji Bakara (of Wolf Parade), Nick Diamonds and Jamie Thompson (of Islands), Amber Webber (of Black Mountain) and Syd Butler (of Les Savy Fav). Authors Joshua Davis (Underdog), David Rakoff (Fraud) and Rodney Rothman (Early Bird) will also be on hand. And that's not all! Daily Show correspondent John Oliver will be on hand for some laughs. All......

Shortbus (directed by John Cameron Mitchell). Sure, Shortbus, John Cameron Mitchell's long-awaited follow up to his inspirational transsexual musical Hedwig and the Angry Inch, has a lot of explicit, "real" sex in it, but the real turn on for the filmmaker is obviously New York. As the camera swoops around the gorgeously constructed mini-Manhattan and Brooklyn models, you can't help but feel your heart soar with love for our crazy, dysfunctional, and beautiful city. After......

If Justin Timberlake is being credited for bringing sexy back, then the Scissor Sisters can be credited for bringing disco, fun and colorful stage shows back. The (mostly) New Yorkers are back in town tomorrow night, taking the stage at MSG. Babydaddy recently took the time to answer some questions for us (he's the one in the pink pantsuit). Let's get this out of the way, where did your band name originate? Friend of Jake's......

DISCUSSION: Tonight Thurston Moore and Jim Jarmusch will have a little talk, titled "Transforming New York: Music and Film at Night". This is in conjunction with Doug Aitken's sleepwalkers, so Aitken will be there too, and the three discuss nighttime, just after the sun goes down. 6:30pm // MoMA [11 W 53 St] // $10 SIGNING: Ron Jeremy has gone and written a book, of course, it's as dirty as most of his films. You......

It’s been a couple of year since Baltimore auteur John Waters has brought a new movie to the silver screen but that doesn’t mean he hasn’t been as busy as ever. Whether it’s guest starring on TV shows or curating art exhibits, Waters puts his distinctive, off kilter imprint on anything he’s involved in, even the lowly mix tape. After adding oddity to your holiday soundtrack with his Christmas CD A John Waters Christmas, Waters......

THEATER: The Sisyphean life of an “emerging” playwright is often confined to a seemingly endless series of play readings, half-baked workshop productions, and audience-feedback bull sessions that often culminate not in a real production but more of the same. Tonight a group of theater people get together to bitch have an exchange about this now-entrenched play development process. The symposium is moderated by Time Out NY theater critic David Cote and features Richard Nelson, Playwright......

Things are starting to pick up around here. The weather was nice, people were out leaving the cave from the post-New Years hibernation and getting back on their feet. It's still coming around, but the rock scene is starting to show some life as well... Matt & Kim Shake Up Studio B There was one show everyone seemed to be talking about this week, and that was the big Matt & Kim homecoming at Studio......

READINGS: Brooklyn-based writer and publicist Jennifer Gilmore reads tonight at Coliseum from her buzzy debut novel, Golden Country, which follows the intersecting lives of three Jewish American families from the 1920s through the 1960s. - Krissa Corbett Cavouras 6:30pm // 11 W. 42nd Street [across from Bryant Park] // Free EVENT: Michael Gray, the Duke of Dylanology, will school us in Bob tonight. He "uses a surprising selection of great records and rare video footage......

FILM: The Fusion Film Festival runs thoughout the weekend. The festival was founded in 2004 by NYU students and aims to "highlight the excellence of female filmmakers within the student body and the industry" as well as to inspire future filmmakers. The event is comprised of student screenplay readings, film screenings and in competition, a Master Class, Industry Screening, Retrospective, Industry Panel, and of course...the after party. All weekend // Times and Locations here SIGNING:......

Of course, after the storm of '06 hits we suggest snowball fights. Prior to the snowfall, however, we offer up the following... BENEFIT: Just when we were talking about band gear getting stolen from the streets of this city, it's done and happened again. Bravo Silva's guitars were stolen last weekend and this weekend deejay crew Finger on the Pulse will donate the proceeds from their weekly party to raise money for them. Raffles and......

Perhaps concerned that the weekend would be slow, the media got itself wrapped up into a "Cyber Monday" frenzy, claiming that people would go wild on the Internets after maybe not going so wild at the mall. Gothamist loves us some online shopping, but what about when it's December 24 and you realize you're headed to a party where you need to offer up a gift with a value not exceeding $10? Then it's off......

-Some NYU kids, angry about unfair DRM on their music, took to the streets, er, the Virgin Megastore. -The troubles at Brooklyn Tech continue. -After a very long time the FDNY reached a ">tentative contract with the city this week. -The mother in that gruesome family suicide wrote a note warning her own mother. -Cirque du Soleil may be getting a theater in New York. -Star Wars origami. Why not? [via Coudal Partners] -The prestigious......

Andrew and Evan, Glassblowers...

So it's almost time to go home for the holidays, and you as a New Yorker have to bring the best presents. You know that right? The rest of your non-New Yorker friends and family look to you for your urban hipness, don't let them down. We, of course, suggest the gift of music. Local music. Music that isn't on MTV, because they get that outside of New York. We went to the local music......

Forget salsa workouts or striptease exercises - it looks like Punk Rock Aerobics is the latest exercise trend to come to a gym (or your own living room) near you. A Daily News reporter tries out the workout's moves which were made up by Maura Jasper and Hilken Mancini when they listened to punk rock while watching Richard Simmons. Well, genius has to strike somewhere. It doesn't seem like there are breaks for cigarettes, drinking,......

Is Crayola's Bittersweet a deeper shade of Orange? Gothamist wonders this because the Post says New York's increased security measure in a time of orange means NYC is at Orange+. But not even Super Orange can deter NYers from getting their Christmas shopping done: One shopper tells the Daily News, "I just healed from an aneurysm, so nothing is going to stop me. I'm not going to live in fear. Our time is our......