SEPTEMBER
1. Que cherchez-vous, la belle? Catch the Met’s Carmen on a giant screen at Lincoln Center.
2. Probably the world’s oldest and richest skate rat, Tony Hawk shows off at the Vert Jam at Pier 54.
3. Yo, Governors Island raps: Nineties hip-hop dream team Nas, Black Star, Raekwon, GZA/Genius, Mobb Deep, and—if you wait long enough and she’s feeling up to performing—Lauryn Hill take it to the harbor.
4. Summer’s still going strong out in Long Beach, with Interpol jamming at the Quiksilver Pro surf festival and the Electric Zoo technofest on Randall’s Island.
5. Labor Day! Celebrate by eating your weight in jerked foods at the West Indian American Carnival Day Parade near the Brooklyn Museum.
6. Then return to the dire dance-music-free reality of things by listening to Thomas Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum at 92Y.
7. Then again, you could seek sanctuary in soothing seventeenth-century chamber music at the Immanuel Lutheran Church on the Upper East Side today.
8. Drink, shop, and try not to think about how unfabulous talk of a double-dip recession is at the third annual Fashion’s Night Out, which opens Fashion Week.
9. Dick Cavett, 74, and Mel Brooks, 2,050, chat in an hourlong special on HBO.
10. Counterprogram Fashion Week at Pig Island II, where twenty NYC chefs prep pork.
11. The 9/11 memorial at ground zero opens to the family members of victims. It’s also the Jets’ season kickoff, against the Cowboys.
12. Choose your own diva: Bernadette Peters in Sondheim’s Follies, or Marc Jacobs presenting his Spring 2012 collection.
13. A great day in celebrity fiction: Ice-T’s Kings of Vice; Tyra Banks’s Modelland.
14. Ultimate Comics Spider-Man, No. 1 on sale, with the debut of the blatino Miles Morales as the titular web-slinger. Glenn Beck has presumably not gotten over this yet.
15. Marty Markowitz wants you to read! Brooklyn Book Festival opens, through September 18.
16. Friday-night-flick bright-young-thing-off: See Mia Wasikowska in Restless or Carey Mulligan in Drive.
17. Attention, outer-borough locavores: Did you know you can enter the “best livestock” competition at the Queens County Fair today? The fair also has hayrides, a corn maze, and a pie-eating contest.
18. Take a free art class at the just-reopened National Academy Museum, on Fifth Avenue and 89th Street.
19. If you thought Mad Men wasn’t retro-sexist enough, try NBC’s The Playboy Club, premiering tonight.
20. Contemplate David Byrne’s sculpture-audio blow-up globe installation under the High Line at West 25th Street.
21. Beirut plays klezmer-chic indie rock at Terminal 5.
22. Walruses and tutus: Paul McCartney’s first dance score, Ocean’s Kingdom, premieres at the NYC Ballet.
23. Red State, Kevin Smith’s tea-party sexploitation fantasy movie, opens.
24. Yanks take on the Red Sox in the House that Steinbrenner Built.
25. If you thought The Playboy Club was too retro-sexist, Pan Am premieres on ABC.
26. Break out your Grendel’s mother suit and hear poet Seamus Heaney at 92Y.
27. Kate Beaton celebrates her satirical comic, Hark! A Vagrant, at Housing Works Books.
28. Season two of Luther is back on BBC America.
29. Hungry? Not drunk? NYC Wine and Food Festival starts.
30. Roman Polanski’s Carnage opens the New York Film Festival.
OCTOBER
1. NY Burlesque Festival’s Saturday Spectacular at B.B. King’s.
2. Attention, damsels, and those in search of damsels! Medieval Festival takes over Fort Tryon Park.
3. Last day of the Cy Twombly show at MoMA.
4. Parks and Recreation in book form: Pawnee: The Greatest Town in America.
5. Beer connoisseurs discuss the Japanese craft-brewing industry (complete with tastings of its products) at Japan Society.
6. Meet up with your former Park Slope friends in Montclair, New Jersey, to see Elvis Costello at the Wellmont Theater.
7. George Clooney’s Ides of March opens, reminding us of a long-ago pre-tea-party time when the weird campaigns were Democratic.
8. Here’s to the last night of Elaine Stritch’s latest stint at the Cafe Carlyle. Isn’t she a gas?
9. Poly Pride Weekend—for nonmonogamous New Yorkers—holds a super-massive cuddle party.
10. Columbus Day! Eat Italian sausage and try to forget Snooki while watching the parade.
11. Hunker down at home and watch the GOP-primary debate—all questions limited to the economy. Play a Shameless Demagoguery drinking game; you’ll need it.
12. Wynton Marsalis’s 50th-birthday blowout, with concerts all weekend at Lincoln Center.
13. Exhibition of Alfred Stieglitz’s collection at the Met opens, including works by Picasso, Matisse, Brancusi, Kandinsky, and O’Keeffe.
14. Kick off your Sunday shoes and go see the Footloose remake!
15. Comic-Con, the center of the still-thriving nerd economy, opens at the Javits.
16. Last day to drive by the pop-up BMW Guggenheim Lab on East Houston Street.
17. Another side of Bob Dylan: painter! At the Madison Avenue Gagosian Gallery.
18. Anna Netrebko sings as a lunatic queen in the Metropolitan Opera’s Anna Bolena.
19. Odd Future plays Terminal 5.
20. Colson Whitehead talks literature, zombies at McNally Jackson.
21. A cool-sounding exhibit at the Guggenheim, built around Kandinsky’s Painting With White Border.
22. If you can’t wait to see Audra McDonald in Porgy and Bess, she’s performing at Carnegie Hall tonight to hold you over.
23. Take advantage of free Sundays at the Studio Museum of Harlem, see Lyle Ashton Harris’s portraits (or any of the other current exhibitions) on their last day.
24. See two accomplished ex-crackheads—NYT media reporter David Carr and actor Samuel L. Jackson—talk things over at the Times Building. Also, Drake releases his new album.
25. John Williams, composer of every sentimentally soaring movie soundtrack ever, conducts the NY Philharmonic through some of his highlights.
26. Browse French Revolution–era drawings by David, Delacroix, and Prud’hon on loan from the Louvre at the Morgan.
27. Winter is coming: The Bryant Park skating rink opens.
28. Justin Timberlake, 30, stars in a movie where anyone poor over 25 dies, called In Time.
29. The Forsythe Company performs I Don’t Believe in Outer Space at BAM. For those who don’t believe in football, Columbia plays Yale, at home.
30. Pre-Halloween creep-out double feature at Film Forum: The Day the Earth Stood Still and The Birds.
31. Dress as Jonathan Franzen (bring a bird as your date) to Granta’s literary Halloween party at Housing Works.
NOVEMBER
1. The Met reopens its Islamic Art galleries.
2. Feist at BAM.
3. The Schola Cantorum de Venezuela performs as part of Lincoln Center’s White Light Festival.
4. Sneak hundreds of tiny burgers into A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas or hundreds of tiny pills into My Week With Marilyn.
5. Watch the Throne! ’Ye and Jay grace East Rutherford.
6. NYC Marathon. Don’t drive anywhere.
7. Last chance to interact with the machines at MoMA’s “Talk to Me.”
8. Sam “Jack McCoy” Waterston howls as King Lear at the Public tonight.
9. Geek-chic Darcy James Argue’s dystopian mash-up Brooklyn Babylon at BAM.
10. Dyspeptic divorcé Louis CK plays the Beacon.
11. The Radio City Christmas Spectacular kicks off, this year adding 3-D visual effects, with which the already computer-generated-seeming Rockettes are forced to interact.
12. Appreciate the New Museum’s façade’s rose boutonnière before it comes down.
13. The Jets face down the hated Patriots, Tom Brady’s hair.
14. Fabio Luisi conducts the Vienna Symphony Orchestra through Beethoven and Brahms at Lincoln Center.
15. The original Xbox title, Halo: Combat Evolved, is remade for the 360 and rereleased.
16. Candyland California girl Katy Perry’s at MSG.
17. Sonnambula: A meta approach to Bellini’s opera—with bonus creepy puppets!—at Here.
18. Cheyenne Jackson at Carnegie Hall, backed by the New York Pops.
19. Come pet 200 breeds of puppies and kittens at the Javits Center.
20. Robert Ashley’s opera That Morning Thing goes up at the Kitchen, as part of Performa 11.
21. Sapphire and Sherman Alexie talk prose, poetry and, presumably, Precious at 92Y.
22. Taylor Swift sings about you dumping her at MSG.
23. For grown-ups, Jason Segel’s Muppets movie; for kids, Hugo, Scorsese’s adaptation of The Invention of Hugo Cabret.
24. Thanksgiving. You hungry? How about grateful?
25. Black Friday: Do your part to prop up the economy by engaging in the free-for-all at Macy’s.
26. As long as you’re looking for something to put under the tree, drop into the West 24th Street Gagosian outpost for the final day of the Richard Serra exhibition.
27. Last night to see Frank Langella as a cutthroat financier in Man and Boy on Broadway.
28. See Calder’s Tree standing mobile at Pace, exhibited publicly for the first time in its full, massive glory.
29. Tour the entirety of the universe in an evening at the Hayden Planetarium.
30. Joan Didion discusses her achingly sad new memoir, Blue Nights, at Symphony Space.