DON’T BOTHER WITH the back room at Café Select. Forget the basement of La Esquina.The new place to be in Soho is the burnt out meth lab on Wooster Street. Beginning July 2 at the Deitch Projects annex on Wooster Street, you’ll find an artistic mishmash so thought provoking and racy that it will give the neighborhood’s usual debauched haunts a run for their (rolled up) money. I’m talking jars of mystery meat and faux fetuses, strewn kitty litter, a library, visual and auditory deconstruction, Chinese herbs, astrological pelts, the aforementioned meth lab, a blown up RV, aquarium rocks and a replicated penthouse art gallery. Jonah Freeman and Justin Lowe, two New York-based artists completing their third collaboration, are the architects and alchemists behind this secret world.Welcome to the Black Acid Co-op.

For a quarter of a century, Parkett has been putting out limited and very nice art books you likely couldnt afford by artists you most definitely have.

LETS GET THE obvious question out of the way: A snatch block is the part of a crane that the hook is attached to. Given that the co-owners and curators of Snatch Block Projects are hard-core steel welders, this seemed like a natural name for their new art venue.

Last week, the Joshua Liner Gallery seemed more like a museum of dreams, themes and schemes than a mere gallery. The Mike Davis paintings in the exhibit Stories From the Other Side of the Bridge had a centuries-old quality with a layering, craftsmanship and attention to detail that one doesn’t encounter often. Of course, there’s a twist to these twisted narratives that border on the surreal.

This first-ever biennial celebrates Bushwick pre-gentrification but also pre-industrialization, back when the neighborhood was a crafty village of artisans.The show encompasses three galleriesNurtureArts, English Kills and Pocket Utopiamixed media and many more artists.

Vito (son of Julian) Schnabel, Dan Parker and The Bruce High Quality Foundation curate the second installation of Smithumenta, an intimate but vibrant group show in the smallish studio of Ray Smith.

For as long as I can remember, the Lower East Side has always been a hotbed for creative minds, even during the dark (some would say glorious, but that is debatable) days of squats and heroin addicts.

Investing in and collecting art is more than just buying your friends paintings at discount prices while theyre still struggling to succeed (though thats part of it!) Theres strategy involved, and these days, investment in something you can hold in front of you, seems like a sound policy.

For its annual Party in the Garden fundraiser this coming Tuesday, MoMA is lowering the posh event’s after party ticket price to $100 from $250 in hopes of bringing in a younger crowd. To help lure even more young’uns, hip-hop star Estelle and DJ Cassidy are slated to take the stage. New York Press had a chat with Elizabeth Pizzo, Assistant Director of Special Programming and Events at MoMA, to chat about young people, art and just how crazy museum parties can get.

In the No, a thought-provoking exhibition at Andrew Edlin, challenges some of our basic assumptions about outsider artists. The mythology is that outsider artists exist in a state of “not knowing.” They live in a kind of innocent ignorance about the mainstream art scene and often about the world at large. The question becomes how much does our fascination with the artist’s own back-story affect our response to the work.

The Terrible Horrible Temp-to-Perm Debacle begins with the anti-hero, a 33 year-old, barely functional alcoholic and failing writer, waking up in bed next to a dead woman with no recollection of what happened the night before. To make matters worse, he’s late for his temp job.

I’m not sure if sweat or sand will ruin a Kindle, but it seems the book we’ll all be toting to the beach or trying to read on the subway this summer is native Dubliner Colum McCann’s Let The Great World Spin, which uses Philippe Petit’s famous tightrope walk as a starting point. Tonight, he brings his book and his scruffy little writer punim to BookCourt.

FLIP TO THE third page of Brantly Martin’s first novel, Pillage. It’s blank. Except for one short sentence about snorting coke. See those blocks of text, with justified margins, on the next page? Stream-of-consciousness references to the directions found on a disposable syringe, 60 different jet-setting geographical destinations, drug terminology—all offered up without commentary.

In the black and-white photos that captured Dee Dee and Vera Ramone’s 1978 church wedding, life looks like punk rock’s answer to I Love Lucy. Ex-teen runaway Vera Boldis lovingly eyes her mop-topped man-child from beneath a pinned-up lace veil. The Ramones bassist and main songwriter, wearing a wide-lapelled white tux instead of his usual rough trade leather and torn Levi’s, smiles back at her. More than 30 years later,Vera Ramone King has penned a vague but emotionally wrought memoir, Poisoned Heart, about her tumultuous time with the idiot savant behind “53rd and 3rd” and “Rockaway Beach.”

A Drifting Life is the autobiographical account of Yoshiro Tatsumi’s humble beginnings as a manga artist. A contemporary of Osamu Tezuka, Tatsumi describes the struggle of just trying to make a living as a young artist in post-war Japan as well as the genesis of “gekiga,” a term he coined that translates roughly as a “theatrical story.” In an era where manga was only being written for children, gekiga dared to cater to adults with darker, more serious themes.

These days, some men and women may be a little more hesitant to look for love online (or sex, or anything) after the recent headlines about a Craigslist Killer. But author Julie Spira has proudly had over 300 dates with guys she's met while cruising the Net, and she's not stopping yet. We spoke to Spira, whose recent book, The Perils Of Cyber-Dating: Confessions Of A Hopeful Romantic Looking For Love Online, was published last month about what it takes to find someone via a website, the best guidelines and whether you should be scared to meet a stranger you meet online.

The last reading this season in the beautifully designed periodicals room at NYPL, this event features magazine editors introducing writers they like.

The subtitle of your book is “How the World Became A Corporation and How to Take It Back.” It seems like a lot of people are discussing the former, but no one seems to have a clear idea of the latter. I don’t think too many people are even suggesting how we got into this. The New York Times Magazine last weekend was filled with pieces by people willing to make excuses for themselves for the decisions that led them into personal debt and the banks and companies that took the country to near-bankruptcy; but they seem to be admitting that a little bit of greed will help us get through this momentary aberration of properly functioning markets. And almost no one except real loonies is willing to look at whether or not this crisis is a function of a debt-based economy.

99 Drams of Whiskey By Kate Hopkins, Out Now Booze blogger Hopkins goes on a trip to explore the whiskey made in Ireland, Scotland and the United States while tossing in the history of the water of life along the way. To Sound in the Know: Hopkins blogs about all things alcohol related at The Accidental Hedonist. Shop Class as Soulcraft By Matthew B. Crawford, Out Now The PhD turned bike mechanic pens a quasi-self-help, philosophical polemic on the tangible and psychological value of working with your hands in a world of cubicles and instant-message meetings. To Sound in the Know: While Crawford does run his own small bike shop, he’s also a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia. So this grease monkey isn’t all hands.

Thaddeus Kosciuszko was an American military hero, but he’s the least-remembered of the key members in the American Revolution. We remember the Bens (Benjamin and Benedict), Johns (Adams and Hancock), Toms (Jefferson and Paine) and Georges (Washington and Mason), but not him. This is made more curious by the fact that, according to Alex Storozynski’s compelling biography, The Peasant Prince: Thaddeus Kosciuszko and the Age of Revolution, there are more statues of Kosciuszko in this country than anyone other than George Washington.

Keemo, a smooth - talking guy with a friendly smile, spends his Friday nights on the corner of West 43rd Street and Broadway wearing a blue shirt and carrying a yellow sign. He might ask if you like stand-up comedy. If you say yes, he’ll whisk you three busy blocks west—dodging tourists and hurtling past the corpse of the Virgin Megastore—before ushering you down a dingy flight of stairs under Sweet Caroline’s Dueling Pianos. The club down there—Ha! Comedy Club NYC—is anonymous and unheralded.

"Where's the fucking cap for this thing?” It’s a few minutes until show time and Marc Maron is pissed. Flanked by a half-empty pack of nicotine gum and the ever-rotating “Shame Wall”—today featuring, from top-to-bottom, images of Gerald Ford, a bowling Nixon, George W. Bush, a most-likely Photoshopped gun-toting Bush 41 and a surprisingly presidential-looking Ronald Reagan—he shuffles papers angrily around his table, searching for the cap to his highlighter.

You may not know what The Lonely Island is, but you’re probably probably familiar with its members’ work. Or at least its members’ members. The group, which created the infamous, Grammy Award-winning Saturday Night Live Digital Short “Dick in a Box” with Justin Timberlake, has spawned plenty of imitators, but its brand of bawdy, ballsy humor isn’t easily replicated. The Lonely Island comprises Andy Samberg, Jorma Taccone and Akiva Schaffer—all friends since their formative years growing up in Berkeley, Calif. Moving in together after college, the guys began posting satirical shorts on their website, thelonelyisland.com, buzz began building and, in 2005, all three were offered gigs with Saturday Night Live (Samberg as a player, Schaffer and Taccone as writers). Suddenly, SNL was funny again thanks to the trio’s Digital Shorts (and the Internet even funnier, it seems—the group’s most recent hit, “Jizz in My Pants,” which aired on the late-night institution in December, has been viewed close to 22 million times on YouTube).

After staging the hugely successful ROFLCon in Boston last Spring, Tim Hwang and a gang of fellow Harvard brainiacs have found themselves with a hit meme on their hands: Getting the stars of the Inter

Sitting in the shadows of ASSSSCAT watching celebrated improv gurus effortlessly weave narratives of complex human relationships is nothing short of awe-inspiring. Where do these performers come from?

In addition to being a bored temp turned unlikely political pundit, David Rees is also kind enough to buy lunch for freelance writers who suddenly find themselves without a day job. “I’m a bleeding heart liberal cartoonist, so I can buy you a sandwich. If I drew Mallard Fillmore, I’d tell you to pull yourself up by your bootstraps and buy your own sandwich,” Rees muses as he opens his wallet and pays for two falafel sandwiches from a lunch truck in Murray Hill. It is an overcast October afternoon and Rees has just gotten out of a recording session for the animated series of his wildly popular

LADIES GOTTA work that shtick. Kathy Griffin attempts to stay on her self-imposed D-List. Sarah Silverman continues to offend with her gross-out girl humor delivered with a kewpie-doll grin.

BY DAY, HELEN Hong is steadily employed as a TV producer. By night, however, she’s a stand up comedian and the mastermind behind a crew of four funny ladies known as “Little Ethnic Girls.” Somewhere in the midst of all this, she finds time to date—and talk about it. “One joke I love doing is the one where I talk about my huge Asian tits, since all the Asian guys I date don’t seem to like big tits.” She volunteers that “huge” for Asian guys is apparently 36A. Much to her chagrin, Hong also has to endure the awesome ethnic guessing game as proposed to her by potential suitors. “I call it racist Jeopardy,” she says before volunteering that her background is Korean. Since another Korean comedian has already made a name for herself in regard to talking about dating, sex, body-image issues and immigrant parents, one has to wonder if Hong is a little miffed at being beaten to the punch.

BENARI POULTEN IS a resident of Astoria, or at least he was until his commitment to civic duty granted him a year-long vacation in scenic Iraq. In addition to playing the role of the opening hype man for the weekly Shoot the Messenger comedy show at the Green Room Theater, he’s also a regular at comedy spots Comix, People’s Improv Theater,The Tank and Rififi. “I think I’ve done everything that has been done,” Poulten remarks. “Even the places that have closed down.” One would be hard-pressed to find a comedian more qualified to skewer the political process and foreign affairs than 31-year-old Poulten.While other comics passively rely on newspaper headlines and sound bites for material, Poulten has already served as a Congressional Aide to Rep. Marty Meehan (D-Mass) as well as a staffer for the 2004 Kerry campaign. And he’s not just talk; Poulten has also spent the better part of the last decade enlisted in the Army Reserves as a print and broadcast journalist, having recently been promoted to Sergeant First Class.

Stepping in dog shit on the way to clubs. Putting your self-esteem in the hands of a drunken stranger. These are a couple of the funnier answers I got when I asked some comics from around town what the hardest thing about performing stand-up in the city is. Nate Bargatze, however, was uncharacteristically straight with me. “The toughest thing about being a New York City comedian,” said Bargatze, “is the competition.” The local joker, who you may have seen on Comedy Cen

EARL DAX THOUGHT he was through with the HOT! Festival. After helming the annual queer theater event in 2006, the ubiquitous Downtown culture guru had moved on to events like Weimar New York and Tingle Tangle, plus a seemingly endless amount of globetrottingin the last few weeks, he jetted from the U.

The Fourth of July fireworks, at least the official ones, won’t be visible from Brooklyn rooftops this year as they’re being shot off over only the Hudson River. Prime views will be between W. 23rd and W. 59th streets, which means you’re headed to the far West Side or taking the PATH if you want to check out the display. Any way you slice it, group displays of patriotism can be a shitshow, so here are some tips to make sure you’re as prepared as possible to celebrate your independence.

Looking for something to do during this year’s annual NYC Gay Pride, which celebrates the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall riots? Aren’t we all? Here’s a selection of activities and events to get the party started.

AMANDA PALMER WAS fresh off a sold-out show for 700 at the Highline Ballroom in Chelsea. And author Neil Gaiman, his best-selling novella Coraline having been adapted into a feature film, could have sold just as many tickets on his own.

Roaming around the loony hallways of Craigslist's Missed Connections is a good way to waste your day but a sad way to waste a night. Down in Tribeca, the unintentional hilarity of sad, horny women has been transformed by professional comedians into, one would hope, hilarious monologues.

While the New York City Opera has, in the last year, come about as close to a near death experience as an organization can without actually flatlining, it seems to be on its way to registering a steadier pulse. Defibrillators ready? All clear! A distinct sign of life, this week the tenacious company will present three free concerts at the sprawling and always-eclectic River To River Festival, which has successfully made lower Manhattan a hot spot for engaging performing arts—including all kinds of music, film, dance and theater—during the often-grueling summer months every year since 2002. Notably the NYC Opera is the only act that will actually perform from “river to river.”

MoMA’s “Yanks in Britain” film festival somewhat incongruously opens with four Brits in Britain in Richard Lester’s 1964 mockumentary A Hard Day’s Night.We’re not complaining. Shot at the height of their popularity, the guys in The Beatles are playful and young and cute as fuck.This was before John got all into peace and Paul became a redheaded prune.

This is part circus, part dance party and part benefit for the STREB extreme dance academy at one of Williamsburgs coolest places, school founder Elizabeth Strebs massive warehouse of acrobatic wonder. Tonight in addition to some regular Strebbing, DJs Wolf Lamb spin and the magnificent Smirk and BabyBunny perform their musical circus.

Russians are more than just nuclear missiles, gaudy mansions, vodka and gulags.They also have ridiculously sexually ambiguous boy bands like Chelsea, a group from Moscow that is making a rare stateside appearance at this free festival. Of course, there will also be traditional dancing and food; but really, Chelsea is worth the trek.

IT'S ALMOST NEVER a good thing when, sitting among hundreds in a theater, a strong and distinct aroma fills the room. However, entrepreneur Stewart Matthew and veteran perfumer Christophe Laudamiel mean to do precisely that with 23 scents as part of a 40-minute “operatic” work that bucks genre classification and aims to pioneer new forms of artistic expression.

Since there's no real good way of preserving dance, new pieces must constantly be made.This festival at Dance Theater Workshop corrals together a bunch of the makers of these new pieces including three bright young choreographers: Gregory Dolbashian, Sara Joel and Sydney Skybetter.

There are myriad unpredictable elements to take into account when performances take place outside a traditional theatrical setting. For Untitled Corner, the site-specific collaboration between Daniel Arsham, Jonah Bokaer and Judith Sanchez Ruiz, one such consideration was the fact that office workers from the 60 stories looming over the space, One Chase Manhattan Plaza, might be viewing the performance. At the same time, for the four lunch-hour performances, there is likely to be the interaction of a steady stream of traffic through the revolving doors at the front of the 1964 Gordon Bunshaft skyscraper.

They are the aspiring youngsters who dream of making it to the major stages such as those where American Ballet Theater and New York City Ballet have been performing this spring. A few blocks south of Lincoln Center, the 48 entrants in the New York International Ballet Competition will strut their stuff over five evenings at the Rose Theater, as judges scrutinize their every pirouette and bourrée, winnowing down their ranks until the final gala Sunday evening, when the medals are awarded.

Pam Tanowitz’s latest dance, Be in the Gray with Me, glancingly alludes to dance history. But she took a most up-to-the-minute approach in selecting one of the composers for her score. Seeking an additional contemporary Russian composer to complement a piece she had selected by Vladimir Martynov, she identified Pavel Karmanov through a Google search, downloaded some compositions and then e-mailed him through Facebook.

I don’t know if you’ve ever been to the Staten Island Ferry Terminal. I’ve been once. It was OK. But if you’re on your way to Staten Island anyway, check out Naomi Goldberg Haas’ contribution to the River To River Festival via the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Sitelines program, a dance in which a dozen dancers of all shapes and sizes commandeer the terminal to perform to Minimalist composer Michael Nyman’s brass compositions.

A buck fitty is a lot for a party, but the reason we’re listing it is because entrance to this party/exhibit at the Aperture space includes a print by one of our favorite photographers, Thomas Allen, who takes close up shots of cut out characters from books. The night also includes a performance by The Willowz, the garage-rock trio.

Ever wonder which dances dancers like to perform versus which ones they are just contractually obligated to? This event, in which Peter Martin, New York City Ballet’s head honcho, who asked regular ol’ dancer Jenifer Ringer to pick a couple of dances dancers like to dance, answers the question. (They like, apparently, Balanchine’s Valse-Fantasie and a world premiere by Principal Dancer Ashley Boulder.)

With so much to celebrate in connection with the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre’s 50th anniversary, it’s great news that New Yorkers get a second, very different opportunity to view the company this season. Its annual December City Center season is a longstanding tradition, but this is only the second time around for their on-the-eve-of-summer week at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. It serves as a festive coda to the company’s extensive 26-city tour, which launched in January in Washington, D.C. at the Kennedy Center, with the entire first family in attendance.

These days, Camille A. Brown is definitely one of the city’s young choreographers on the move—highly visible and prolific, quietly acquiring a solid representation as someone to watch. This week, she offers her first evening of work in two and a half years although her choreography has had some notable showcases since then. In 2007 alone, the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater commissioned a work, and she gave notable solo performances at Fall for Dance and on the E-Moves series. In two weeks, her recent Those Who See Light will be performed by Philadanco at the Joyce Theater.

June 6, Baryshnikov Arts Center, 450 W. 37th St. (betw. Dyer 10th Aves.); 3:30, $20.

Shakespeare by the water. For Free. I once saw Cat Power at Castle Clinton. She talked to a squirrel for 10 minutes.This must.

Reeling from the death of a loved one, a tough daughter must also grapple with her pill-popping shrew of a mother, who seems intent on destroying both herself and her family. No, I’m not writing about the recently closed August: Osage County. Carole Gaunt’s new play Dance of the Seven Headed Mouse just bears an overwhelming resemblance to that instant classic. And she has done herself no favors by conjuring up comparisons to Tracy Letts’s sprawling American tragedy.

It turns out The Princess Diaries may not be such horrible preparation for Shakespeare. Anne Hathaway, starring in the Shakespeare in the Park’s rendition of Twelfth Night (Anne Hathaway was also the name of Shakespeare’s wife, for those interested in cosmic coincidences), was the show’s biggest draw—and greatest potential liability, but she gives an impressive performance as Viola, a shipwrecked aristocrat posing as a male servant.

Broadway performer Anika Larsen (All Shook Up, Xanadu) has written a musical valentine to her multi-cultural family in Shafrika, The White Girl, but good intentions aren’t enough to prevent Shafrika from feeling overblown and overwritten.

Imagine actually sitting in the audience of the door-slamming show within the show in Noises Off!, the one in which everything that can go wrong does. That’s pretty much what happens when you buy a ticket to see machines machines machines machines machines machines machines. The key to the show is right there in the title: Why repeat something once or even three times when you can do it seven?

The hippies are long gone, but you’d never know it from The Pied Pipers of the Lower East Side, now playing at P.S. 122. A painfully prolonged look at four young activists living rent-free in exchange for running a vegan café, the entire show is a mass of contradictions and implausible characters.

Can someone please send copies of the film Network to playwright Theresa Rebeck and everyone at Playwrights Horizons? If anyone involved with Rebeck’s new satire, Our House, had bothered to watch the Paddy Chayefsky classic, they would have had second thoughts about putting on Rebeck’s latest potshot at the entertainment world—this time focusing on network news and reality TV.

After a season crowded with overblown musicals, dead-on-arrival revivals and inert comedies (and that’s only counting Broadway shows), Next Fall and its charismatic cast comes as a breath of refreshing air.

Don't be mislead, the Antidepressant Festival is not a cry for help—but what’s going on here? Are these plays or psychiatric sessions? You can be the judge by taking in one, or many, of the 17 shows presented by the Brick Theater as part of the fifth Antidepressant Festival running from June 5 to July 4.

Being strange, stupendously superstitious creatures, theater makers rarely offer predictions about new work. Distinctly averse to terror, they take pains not to irk those fickle goblins, critics. As they value their lives, they know it won’t behoove them to speculate how those essential varmints, the audience, will react.