Carrie and Keith Do MSG Two of the world's largest crossover Country stars joined forces this winter for a massive arena tour that came through NYC this week. Former American Idol and legitimate breakout star Carrie Underwood opened the show for Keith Urban at a sold out MSG, both dazzling the crowd with song and spectacle. While Carrie's set was slightly less ambitious – a mere 4 costume changes and a fairly pedestrian light show......

Where, like last year, we recap the biggest stories from the New York music scene of the year. Album of the Year: The National - Boxer What this album did better than any other coming out of New York all year was create images. It tells stories worth listening to. The opener, "Fake Empire," sets the tone for the rest of the record...slow and moody, yet brash and almost apologetic. Every song sounds like it......

Led Zeppelin Reunite, Songs Remain the Same Aside from a reanimated corpse Beatles reunion, there is not another dormant band in the world that could cause more excitement getting back together than Led Zeppelin. So, for the first time in 19 years, with Jason Bonham in for his late father behind the drums and the rest of the original pieces in place, the band picked up where they left off, playing a Greatest-Hits set to......

Brooklyn Ink tells us that the first rule of Punk Rock Pillow Fight is you do not talk about Punk Rock Pillow Fight. This is also the second rule, so you have most likely never heard of this underground feathered fight.The anonymous arena for this event is like Fight Club for hipsters. We exaggerate (slightly) but were forewarned not to give away too much about the pillow fight’s underground location in Bushwick. Two rows of......

EVENT: Into anime? It's your lucky weekend, the New York Anime Festival is in town! There will be previews, screenings and panels galore. Check out their website for more details. All Weekend // Jacob Javits Convention Center [655 W 34th St] // $30 day pass, $55 weekend pass SHOP: FIT and the Design Mavens come together for a 3 day shopstravaganza. Tons of designers we're not cool enough to have ever heard of will be......

Is Mayor Bloomberg a big Grey's Anatomy fan? Because he was a witness to Grey's Anatomy star Ellen Pompeo's wedding at City Hall last week.* Pompeo, the squinty-eyed- sorta- Renee Zellweger- doppelganger, married her fiance Chris Ivery in a simple ceremony. According to the AP, the only witnesses were Bloomberg and Deputy Mayor Patricia Harris, and a city clerk's office official performed the ceremony last Friday. We hope that the ceremony was uneventful and happy,......

As GOP crank-yanker Roger Stone recently learned, most Broadway theaters are dark on Monday, so day three of the stagehands’ strike will have the least impact on the city’s economy. The Times has a funny photo in today’s article about stymied Broadway theatergoers; it depicts disappointed Spamalot ticket-holder Cecelia Pan taking her family to a slightly different show: St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Because, you know, with Broadway shuttered there’s simply no other family theater worth seeing......

MOVIE: Guess it's only fitting that Trey Parker and Matt Stone's Team America play somewhere tonight. This Bushwick theater is new and on an outdoor rooftop -- so check the sky before you head out. If it's all clear, get ready for food from their grill, drinks from their bar and the wind in your hair. 7pm // New Moon Theater [97 Moore St, Bushwick] // Free READING: Our favorite cabbie turned author, Melissa Plaut,......

Barefoot in the Park Central Park Film Festival Saturday, 8 pm To close out this year's Central Park Film Festival, five nights of free out door movies in the park, the organizers put it to the people to choose the ultimate date night movie featuring our fair city. Out of Hitch, The Way We Were and Barefoot in the Park, Gothamist thinks the city chose wisely and well. If you've never seen the movie version......

THEATER: With his zany imagination and distinctive bass-baritone voice, Joseph Keckler (myspace) has been generating buzz throughout the gooey honeycomb of the downtown performance art cabaret scene. Tonight he sprinkles his particular blend of whimsical catnip at Dixon Place with Cat Lady, in which a man re-enacts an ordinary day with his mother, who runs a community theater with cat actors out of her home. “Past lives are recalled, songs are sung, and finally a......

Disco Biscuts Bring Something Different to the Pool Sick of all that boring "indie" music polluting your fresh Greenpoint air this summer, Mr. cynical anonymous Gothamist commenter? Well maybe you prefer the jam-trance mania of the Disco Biscuits instead! No? Well a whole crowd of people did, comfortably filling McCarren Pool earlier this week with people who (no joke) bought their tickets on 4/20 @ 4:20 in the afternoon. Those in attendance seemed to have......

Today on the Gothamist Newsmap: a bank robbery on 5th Ave. in Brooklyn, an electric shock at 25th Ave. and 49th St. in Queens, and a shooting on 101st St. and Columbus Ave. in Manhattan. Chazz Palminteri's stage and screen bildungsroman A Bronx Tale will appear again onstage this fall. The off-Broadway play was adapted to a 1993 movie featuring Palminteri, Robert De Niro, and screen newcomer Lillo Brancato. The latter is now facing......

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READING: Check out today's interviewee, Peter Yarrow, tonight at Barnes and Noble where he'll be performing and signing the recently published Puff, the Magic Dragon book. C'mon, you know you've always wanted to hear that song live! 6pm // Barnes & Noble [Lincoln Center] // Free MUSIC: Daft Punk will be rocking Keyspan Park tonight, it's sold out but you can still get tickets on Craigslist. Elsewhere in Brooklyn The Hold Steady, The Big Sleep......

MOVIES: With another version of Hairspray hitting the big screen this summer, it seems to be a season of decades past and, of course, hair! Movies With a View brings back the musical tale of Central Park hippies, small town boys headed to Vietnam and the '60s as they show the film Hair tonight. Deejays at 6pm, Movie at Sundown // Empire Fulton State Park, Dumbo // Free It's the last night to catch Punk's......

30 Years of Kino International Film Society of Lincoln Center In the creation of great cinema, a far-thinking and nurturing distributor is almost as important as the artists they're supporting. This year one of those historically important movie companies, Kino International turns 30 years old and in celebration of their fine work over the years the Film Society is showing two weeks worth of films all originally released by Kino. The movies featured in the......

It's a big outdoor weekend, so good thing there are 51 outdoor pools opening up for the season around the city today (here's a "best of" list). If you prefer to stay dry, here are some options... EVENT: The Afro Punk series begins at BAMcafé tonight. The series kicks off with a spotlight on the Black Panthers, including "an Opening Night discussion with Black Panther co-Founder Bobby Seale, Gloria Rolando’s Eyes of the Rainbow (1997),......

When the son of famed televangelists Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, Jay Bakker, made the decision to be a “gay affirming” pastor, his life was almost ruined for the second time. Financial backers dropped him, he had to let go of some of his staff, and churches he was scheduled to speak at pulled out. Now Jay speaks at a different set of churches. Last Saturday we saw him at the Middle Collegiate Church,......

Bowery Snags Some Big Bands For Small Shows Earlier this week, Interpol (who if you haven't noticed is suddenly on the verge of massive international superstardom) played a local, intimate show at Bowery Ballroom to a select group of friends, label people and fans lucky enough to snag tickets when they quietly went on sale last week. The show was excellent and the band certainly proved that they've got the chops to push it to......

A look at some noteworthy television this week: 2007 MTV Movie Awards (Sunday, 8 p.m., MTV) All you have to know is that Sarah Silverman hosts, so expect wackiness to ensue. Bonus: LAist will be liveblogging, from the ceremony's greenroom. Creature Comforts (Monday, 8:00 p.m., WCBS 2) An Americanized British import from the creators of Wallace & Gromit where people in on the street interviews are animated in clay in the form of talking animals.......

Yesterday afternoon, hundreds of New Yorkers took to Fifth Avenue and participated in the first annual Dance Parade. From whirling dervishes to salsa dancers, from break dancers to hula hoopers, not even the rain could stop the two-hour celebration that started near Herald Square and ended in Wasington Square Park. Here's a brief description from the organizers about the parade's vision:To honor Dance's historical roots: New York has never celebrated the forms of dance......

A look at some noteworthy television programs this week: Nature: Dogs That Changed The World: The Rise of the Dog (Sunday, 8:00 p.m. WNET 13; Wednesday, 9:00 p.m., WLIW 21) The first of a two part look at man's best friend, the dog. Part one looks at the origins of domesticated dogs and inquires about the theory that links domestication to human's trash. A behind the scenes podcast looking into the challenges of filming dogs......

Black Lips Trash Bowery One of the nice things about being a music fan in New York City is that you rarely have to wait very long to see a band you're recently missed. The Black Lips famously played about 6,000 shows at SXSW this year, yet despite our interest in checking them out, we managed to catch them exactly zero times (with our final chance being cut short by that whole collapsing balcony thing.)......

Bright Eyes Twangs Out Bowery Remember those tense hours a few months back when nobody could get Bright Eyes tickets? The chance to see the folk-emo megastar at an intimate club like the Bowery Ballroom was a dream come true for hardcore fans looking to get a first listen at material off the upcoming album. This last Friday and Saturday were the days these kids have been waiting for, and Conor and Friends did......

Brazilian art is scorching hot this winter. Hopefully you made it to the Tropicalia exhibit at the Bronx Museum before it closed this past weekend. Next stop: Ruas de São Paulo, an exhibition on Brazilian street art that begins next month at the Jonathan LeVine Gallery. But, before that gets underway, there’s going to be a must-attend benefit art auction today, January 31, at 7-10 PM, at The Newspace (530 West 21st St., Chelsea) to......

There is tons of speculation all over the Internet about the Oscar nominations for films released in 2006. As an Oscars fiend, we're not going to digress about the calculus of vote-splitting. Instead, we'll point out a couple things we noticed: - Best surprise nomination: Ryan Gosling's Best Actor nomination for Half Nelson; Gosling plays a drug-addicted teacher in Brooklyn trying to help one of his students...it'll be on DVD in three weeks - see......

Premiering tonight on the Sundance Channel is a six part reality series about a tattooed, pierced alterna-preacher Jay Bakker, called One Punk Under God. As the only son of TV evangelical preachers Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, Jay had a pretty troubled childhood what with the scandals over Jim's illicit affair and accounting fraud, the Bakkers subsequent divorce and Jay's descent into substance abuse. However, now Jay has his life more on track with a......

Jagshemash! Borat is a hit. It's getting rave reviews, grossing millions, and definitely the most quotable thing we've seen in ages. But Borat seems to have missed most of the -ist cities, and we were all wondering how the film would have been different if he'd made his way around the world on the -ist tour. In Shanghai, Borat would be observing Inane Learnings of Penis Photos for Make Benefit Glorious Flat World of......

Peelander Z is: Kengoswee, K.O. and Antonio Kazuki Well, we haven’t had had the pleasure of seeing yet for ourselves, despite them playing around New York fairly regularly, but all reports seem to say that a Peelander Z live show is just about the most bizarre thing you'll come across in a downtown rock venue. They label themselves as "Japanese Action Comic Punk", and, dressed up in primary colored costumes, the shows usually consist......

THEATER: A new multimedia opera called Violet Fire centers on legendary inventor Nikola Tesla, who not only claimed over 700 patents but also inspired basically the most wicked band ever. Part of the BAM Next Wave Festival, the show conceptualizes the inner life of the man whose famous “waking hallucinations” led to great breakthroughs in electricity (alternating current, hydroelectric power), wireless broadcasting (radio transmission), robotics (remote control), and mind-blowing guitar riffs. (Ends Saturday!) - John......