THEATER: Mime-bashing never goes out of style, but don’t you wonder what stories an off-duty mime could tell you? In “It Goes Without Saying”, actor and mime Bill Bowers takes audiences along a hilarious and heartfelt tour from his Montana childhood (“not exactly a hotbed of mime”) to the rough and tumble life of a mime on the streets of Times Square. The 75-minute tell-all, which the Times calls “zestful and endearing”, received a “rapturous response” when it premiered at the Rattlestick Theater last fall. - John Del Signore more ›

. Perhaps with a little Martin Amis and Zadie Smith in the lineage. Not bad sires, all in all. more ›

Over at Beatrice, Emily Gordon is blogging about this past weekend's New Yorker Festival. She puts Jonathan Franzen and Zadie Smith into the high school popularity paradigm, hears Steve Martin play banjo with Earl Scruggs and gets to revel in a Tom Cruise as dog impression. Gothamist didn't get to make it to this year's festival (we were a little slow to pull the intellectual cognoscentic trigger), but we will try to right that by getting the insane collection of 4,109 New Yorker issues on eight DVDs. more ›

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 from $5 to $50, most being in the $15-30 area, and the programs range from the highbrow (reading by Ian McEwan, Town Hall Meeting on Iraq) to the delightfuly low (A Salute to the Three Stooges). Here's a list of the programs. more ›

We were glad to see that we weren't the only ones amused by the Times's editorial about Flux Factory's "Novel" installation. One almost wonders whether this bit of preaching is an editorial joke on readers, since it is hard to imagine such a complete lack of playfulness. The project sounds intriguing, and we hope to go see what architects dreamed up as concentration pods and what the subjects manage to produce. more ›

David Amsden, Writer more ›

This Sunday, Masterpiece Theatre brings us part one of White Teeth, adapted from Zadie Smith's sprawling novel about two families, one Indian, the other British-Caribbean, in 1970s London. Gothamist and practically everyone else seemed to be reading White Teeth in 2000, and why not when a book is so funny, sad, moving, and distinctive in voice. more ›