In the paper today, Kurt Gottschalk uncovers what's happening at this year's Performa. To kick things off, the performance art biennial had a party at MoMA on Sunday night where Fischerspooner, clad in wacky silver outfits and sneakers—and kneepads!—from sponsor Asics, played its hits, including  Electroclash anthem "Emerge," to a crowd gearing up for a few weeks of off the wall performance spectacle. Check out the performance after the jump.

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White Hills, the Brooklyn-based band that we profiled a few weeks back, is still working on its new record, but as a teaser has dropped a video for the song "Dead." Check it out after the jump.

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Undeterred by the death on Ron Asheton, Iggy Pop has revealed to the BBC that The Stooges will tour in 2010. Having seen a rather good New York Dolls reunion earlier this year, we won't hate on the idea too much, but needless to say, we're wary.

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With the closing of divisive Avenue B nightclub Le Souk, the thoroughfare, according to EV Grieve, is now down to one hookah bar. Paired with the recent ban on flavored tobacco (a trip to the Nat Sherman store on 42nd Street this weekend revealed that many of the brand's flavors are no longer for sale under their former names—"Hint of Mint" cigarettes are now sold as "Hint" menthols), things are looking grim for recreational smokers in New York.

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There has been plenty of animal sex happening lately; just this weekend we saw countless bodies wriggling out of their creature costumes to better grope. Now BuzzFeed passes along the news that bats love blowjobs. That isn't one we spotted happening in our travels on Halloween night, but the science sounds convincing...

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It might be startlingly dark out, but brave the night to see Fuck Buttons with Growing and These Are Powers at Bowery Ballroom, 6 Delancey St. (betw. Bowery & Chrystie St.), 212-533-2111; 7:30, $15

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Last night the Guggenheim hosted its First Annual Art Awards show, bestowing glory upon Mary Heilmann (artist of the year), Connie Butler (top curator) and featuring a set by the Fiery Furnaces. While we're all for fancy art folks congratulating one another, we're having more fun here, with HyperAllergic's list of the 20 Most Powerless People in the Art World.

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Tonight Dum Dum Girls plays with Kign Khan & BBQ at the fuzzed-out, rockiest gig in town. Bowery Ballroom, 6 Delancey St. (betw. Bowery & Chrystie St.), 212-533-2111; 8:30, $15

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Tonight, Cymbals Eat Guitars, on the heels of some killer CMJ shows, will play Williamsburg at Sound Fix Records, 44 Berry St. (at N. 11th St.), Brooklyn, 718-388-3843; 7, Free.

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Costa-Gavras' late-1960s film Z gets the Criterion treatment with the new DVD release this week. Our own Armond White has written a piece on the Criterion site. In it he writes: 

"Costa-Gavras’s 1969 political assassination thriller Z appeared at the end of a decade of burgeoning cultural change and rampant paranoia. In the United States, this Algerian-French coproduction sparked a sensation, not just relaying the European political crisis but perfectly capturing a global mood of apprehension at a moment when America was at its most vulnerable, our domestic security seemingly breached by the consecutive concussive shocks of our own political assassinations (John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, Dr. Martin Luther King, Robert F. Kennedy). Based on true events, the film vividly imagined and uncovered the machinations behind the May 22, 1963, killing of the Greek social democrat and pacifist Gregoris Lambrakis in Thessaloníki. It made the fact of political murder cinematically real, as no Hollywood film at that time could dare. And by borrowing Hollywood action techniques, the Greek-born Constantinos Gavras raised the genre to a new level—one that he would define as his own."

Read the entire piece here.

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