The holiday-time movie releases are starting to pile up with their usual feverish frequency. Some have Christmas themes, like the widely reviled Vince Vaughn vehicle Fred Claus that’s already roadkill on the lost highway of cinema history; others, like Ridley Scott’s American Gangster, are timed to make an impression as close to Academy Award-voting season as possible. Here are some of the biggest gorillas set to dominate New York’s screens in the next six......

MUSIC: Frequenter of the Hotel Chelsea, Country Joe McDonald (pictured at Woodstock) will be taking the Joe's Pub stage tonight to perform a tribute to Woody Guthrie where he "deftly conveys all the charm, talent, and social and political consciousness of the legendary folksinger from Oklahoma." 7pm // Joe’s Pub [425 Lafayette St] // $30 EVENT: Move over spelling bee...The Define-a-Thon Word Challenge hits Brooklyn tonight. The competitive word challenge is good for the spelling-impaired,......

Holy smokes! Giant fish on the MTA, Paris Hilton in jail, then out, then in again, Al Gore, goatses, blumpkins, Matt Damon, and baby art critics! It's been a busy week across the Ist-A-Verse, and here's a smattering of what's been going on. In Gothamist's neck of the woods, they found out that many things are possible: A man caught a 40+ pound fish off the Rockaways and took it home on the subway. Graffiti......

There's so much going on across the Ist-a-Verse that it's almost impossible to keep track these days. Fortunately, we do it so you don't have to! Londonist took a walk through Oliver Twist's London, thanks to a gorgeous map layer for Google Earth. They also caught up with modern-day fictional London, with the Fantastic Four and 28 Weeks Later. It was a week of insanity over at DCist. They started the week off with......

Today many will gather at Strawberry Fields in Central Park to hold vigil on the anniversary of the death of John Lennon, which took place 26 years ago today. The NYCLU has asked the city to lift the ban on music at Strawberry Fields for every day of the year, not just twice a year for Lennon vigils. Yoko Ono, who says she is still struggling to forgive the Mark Chapman, recently made a call......

EVENT: Tonight PowerHouse books is having a signing event for the release of photographer Ron Galella's "Disco Years". This visual diary of the New York club scene in the 70's and 80's is sure to make you nostalgic for Studio 54 - even if that was before your time. 5:30 to 7pm // Rizzoli Bookstore [31 W 57th btw 5th & 6th] // Free THEATER: The workaday lives of office temps are brightened by rumors......

Reading is a necessary part of many airplane trips. And books haven't made the list of prohibited items - yet. But for some reason, airport security at one of the area airpots (probably JFK) gave Harry Potter author JK Rowling a hard time about her manuscript for the seventh book in the series. On her website, she writes: The heightened security restriction on the airlines in August made the journey back from New York interesting,......

READING: READINGS: Looks like literary talent might just be genetic - 26-year-old Owen King, son of best-selling spookmaster Stephen King, has a collection of a novella and short stories out and is reading tonight at the Astor Place Barnes & Noble. We're All in This Together has been called "compelling" and "imaginative", and having a famous father can't hurt, right? - Krissa Corbett Cavouras 7pm // Barnes & Noble [4 Astor Place] // Free THEATER:......

Thanks to Product Shop NYC (who also reports that the New Year's Eve act at Madison Square Garden will be...The Black Crowes), Gothamist is salivating over this year's New Yorker Festival line-up. Edie Falco! The RZA! Ricky Gervais! Trey Parker and Matt Stone! Sleater-Kinney! And Wallce and Gromit in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit! The New Yorker Festival runs September 23-25, and tickets will go on sale on August 25. The tickets range in price......

An editorial in today’s Times reminds us that prison isn’t just a plot twist in the stories of powerful people like Martha Stewart and Judith Miller; a lot of people spend a lot of time there, and we could do a better job of making that time about rehabilitation. Thanks to Lauren Cerand at Maud Newton, we see that this Sunday at Pier 63 (Hudson River at West 23rd Street) Books Through Bars is having......

For a while now Music For America has been providing us with endless amounts of entertainment, events and information. Tonight is no different, and if you're in NY (and c'mon, who of us aren't?) then The Songwriter's Beat will entertain you in the name of Democracy over at one of Gothamist's favorite establishments, Cornelia Street Cafe. For those not privy, The Songwriters Beat is an all-acoustic show with 4 singer songwriters all given a......

Jessica Delfino, Dirty Folk Singer/Stand-Up Comic...

It seems that the networks want to take a page from the HBO playbook and run shorter flights of series, say a 13 week series that runs without repeats, vs. the traditional 22-24 week series stretched out over much longer 30+ weeks. ABC will roll out the 13 week Stephen King series, Kingdom Hospital, and Fox points to its success with The O.C.'s debut in the summer. What we get to look forward to: More......