Saturday, November 30, 2013

weekends are perfect for high quality museum time:

the Frick collection (71 st st and 5 av) has long hours on fridays for free also on sundays pay as you with, the Vemeer plus other dutch painters is an amazing collection (enjoy the girl with the pearl earrings)and the breathtaking W. Turners sea storms landscapes (my fav painter btw). The Jewish museum (92 nd st and 5 av) is free on saturdays (11-5 pm) and they have a great Art Speigelman exhibition (from the little pailfacekids to the Maus to the New Yorker front), int he 1st floor. The Chagall paintings are in the second floor plus a very cool pop modern fashion expo. The short movies in the sounds expo are worth to watch too ( and only 3 min each. The MOMA ( 54st bt 6th av and 5th av) has a very cool photography expo (as always), the Magrite "wait for ever in line" exhibition on the top floor is a must! free on fridays after 4 until 8 pm. Tip: go to the top floor and then go downstairs floor by floor. The Museum of the City of New York (103 rd st and 5 th av)is free if you leave or work in the neighborhood :), if not just buy something in the shop and you will get free entrance! the central park paintings are very nice. The best now is the sandy related photography exhibition. The Whitney museum (madison and 75 th st) is pay as you wish on fridays after 6 until 9 pm. The Indiana installation/drawings is a must seen for a newyorker. And do not forget the MET, the Brooklyn museum and the National history Museum are pay as you wish!

Wednesday, November 27, 2013

where to help tomorrow!

looking for help on Thanksgiving: The Bowery Mission, 227 Bowery (between Prince and Rivington streets), Lower East Side The Bowery Mission, which serves as many as 7,000 meals on Thanksgiving Day, already has 600 volunteers registered for this year, but would be happy to have more, Winans said. Volunteers should expect to work about two hours, either helping to serve dinner or packing and delivering food to the church's partners in all five boroughs. For those who’d rather donate, the Bowery Mission is accepting coats, gloves, scarves, toothbrushes, new underwear, shampoo and toys to package into “blessing bags,” which will be given out to those who come for the meal on Thursday. Meals will be served at 8 a.m., 10 a.m., noon, 2 p.m., 5 p.m. and 7 p.m. Additional meals will be added based on demand. Volunteers are free to show up on Thanksgiving Day without registering beforehand, Winans said. Brother Jimmy’s BBQ, 181 Lexington Ave. (at 31st), Kips Bay Brother Jimmy’s BBQ will be giving out 1,000 free meals to the needy on Thanksgiving Day, in front of its Kips Bay location. The restaurant will need volunteers to help package the food in the kitchen — the meals will include pulled pork sandwiches, mashed potatoes and bottled water — as well as to transport the food outside and begin handing it out at noon. Volunteers are asked to arrive early at 11:30 a.m. To volunteer, contact Leigh Shirvan at leigh@diningentertainmentgroup.com Masbia Soup Kitchen Network, 1372 Coney Island Ave., Midwood For those looking to volunteer in Brooklyn and Queens, Masbia Soup Kitchen Network still needs help serving food and packaging groceries in its three soup kitchens on Thanksgiving Day. “Everyone is welcome,” Alexander Rapport, executive director of Masbia, said Tuesday. “At our main kitchen [in Midwood]…volunteers will be prepping the five pallets of fresh produce we are receiving tomorrow from the Food Bank of NYC. We will freeze the prepped vegetables…to make soup and side dishes.” In addition to bagging vegetables and assembling groceries, the soup kitchen will need help cooking a turkey meal on Thursday morning. Locations needing help include the Masbia Soup Kitchen at 1372 Coney Island Ave. in Midwood, another kitchen at 4114 14th Ave. in Borough Park and another at 98-08 Queens Blvd. in Rego Park. The main kitchen on Coney Island Avenue will be serving meals from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., and the rest will be serving from 2 to 9 p.m. Those interested in volunteering should contact Avi at volunteer@masbia.org or at (718) 972-4446 ext. 209. St. George’s Church, 209 E. 16th St. (between Third Avenue and Rutherford Place), Gramercy St. George’s Church will be serving a community Thanksgiving meal at noon on Thanksgiving Day at the Olmsted Hall. Space for volunteers is limited, but for those who want to help can call the church office at (646) 723-4178. CHIPS, 200 Fourth Ave. (between Degraw and Sackett streets), Park Slope Although CHIPS, a soup kitchen based in Park Slope, has all the volunteers it needs for its Thanksgiving Day meal, it's still looking for food donations. The organization is accepting donations of pies, cookies, cupcakes, cooked food and canned food on the day of its Thanksgiving feast, which will be served from 11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. For those looking to volunteer on Christmas Eve, CHIPS is also looking for helpers for its holiday party on Dec. 24. To donate or volunteer, contact Denise Scaravella at Denise4chips@gmail.com. St. John's Bread and Life, 795 Lexington Ave., Bedford-Stuyvesant St. John's Bread and Life will not be open on Thanksgiving, but it’s already recruiting volunteers for the Christmas season. The church will be distributing food and toys to 2,000 families in December as part of its Sponsor a Family program, and 400 volunteers are needed to sort, assemble, load and distribute the gifts. St. John's will have two shifts for volunteers from 9 a.m. to noon and noon to 4 p.m. on Dec. 14 and 15. Those who’d like to help can contact volunteer coordinator Jennifer Stephen at jstephen@breadandlife.org.

Tuesday, November 26, 2013

Santa con is happening on december 14 at 10 am!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=drnY01eZEyA Santacon is a charitable, non-commercial, non-political, nonsensical Santa Claus convention that happens once a year for absolutely no reason. When is Santacon? Saturday, December 14th 2013 Where is Santacon? Santacon is where Santa says to go Where will Santa say to go? Text “follow @santacon” to 40404. It’s really that easy.

Monday, November 25, 2013

Sunday, November 24, 2013

with hundreds of free museums, NYC offers a great oportunity to smart folks!

Art Makes You Smart Alain Pilon NYtimes By BRIAN KISIDA, JAY P. GREENE and DANIEL H. BOWEN FOR many education advocates, the arts are a panacea: They supposedly increase test scores, generate social responsibility and turn around failing schools. Most of the supporting evidence, though, does little more than establish correlations between exposure to the arts and certain outcomes. Research that demonstrates a causal relationship has been virtually nonexistent. A few years ago, however, we had a rare opportunity to explore such relationships when the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art opened in Bentonville, Ark. Through a large-scale, random-assignment study of school tours to the museum, we were able to determine that strong causal relationships do in fact exist between arts education and a range of desirable outcomes. Students who, by lottery, were selected to visit the museum on a field trip demonstrated stronger critical thinking skills, displayed higher levels of social tolerance, exhibited greater historical empathy and developed a taste for art museums and cultural institutions. Crystal Bridges, which opened in November 2011, was founded by Alice Walton, the daughter of Sam Walton, the founder of Walmart. It is impressive, with 50,000 square feet of gallery space and an endowment of more than $800 million. Thanks to a generous private gift, the museum has a program that allows school groups to visit at no cost to students or schools. Before the opening, we were contacted by the museum’s education department. They recognized that the opening of a major museum in an area that had never had one before was an unusual event that ought to be studied. But they also had a problem. Because the school tours were being offered free, in an area where most children had very little prior exposure to cultural institutions, demand for visits far exceeded available slots. In the first year alone, the museum received applications from 525 school groups requesting tours for more than 38,000 students. As social scientists, we knew exactly how to solve this problem. We partnered with the museum and conducted a lottery to fill the available slots. By randomly assigning school tours, we were able to allocate spots fairly. Doing so also created a natural experiment to study the effects of museum visits on students, the results of which we published in the journals Education Next and Educational Researcher. Over the course of the following year, nearly 11,000 students and almost 500 teachers participated in our study, roughly half of whom had been selected by lottery to visit the museum. Applicant groups who won the lottery constituted our treatment group, while those who did not win an immediate tour served as our control group. Several weeks after the students in the treatment group visited the museum, we administered surveys to all of the students. The surveys included multiple items that assessed knowledge about art, as well as measures of tolerance, historical empathy and sustained interest in visiting art museums and other cultural institutions. We also asked them to write an essay in response to a work of art that was unfamiliar to them. These essays were then coded using a critical-thinking-skills assessment program developed by researchers working with the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. Further, we directly measured whether students are more likely to return to Crystal Bridges as a result of going on a school tour. Students who participated in the study were given a coupon that gave them and their families free entry to a special exhibit at the museum. The coupons were coded so that we could determine the group to which students belonged. Students in the treatment group were 18 percent more likely to attend the exhibit than students in the control group. Moreover, most of the benefits we observed are significantly larger for minority students, low-income students and students from rural schools — typically two to three times larger than for white, middle-class, suburban students — owing perhaps to the fact that the tour was the first time they had visited an art museum. Further research is needed to determine what exactly about the museum-going experience determines the strength of the outcomes. How important is the structure of the tour? The size of the group? The type of art presented? Clearly, however, we can conclude that visiting an art museum exposes students to a diversity of ideas that challenge them with different perspectives on the human condition. Expanding access to art, whether through programs in schools or through visits to area museums and galleries, should be a central part of any school’s curriculum. Brian Kisida is a senior research associate and Jay P. Greene is a professor of education reform at the University of Arkansas. Daniel H. Bowen is a postdoctoral fellow at the Kinder Institute of Rice University.

Friday, November 22, 2013

Giving to others is gonna make you happy! (scientifically tested!). Come on dec 2nd at 5:30 to help NYCares and donate a coat

http://www.newyorkcares.org/events/winters-eve-lincoln-square On Monday, December 2, 2013 the Lincoln Square Business Improvement District and presenting sponsor Time Warner will host the Fourteenth Annual Winter's Eve at Lincoln Square - New York's largest holiday festival - which will feature FREE live entertainment, food tastings from over 30 local eateries at nominal cost, and family fun along Broadway from Time Warner Center to 68th Street. Starting at 5:30pm in Dante Park, Tony Award-winning, Broadway legend Brian Stokes Mitchell will help light the Upper West Side's Holiday Tree. This year's 35 foot Norway Spruce and lighting have been made possible by generous local restaurateur P.J. Clarke's. Old-fashioned silver glass glitter ornaments have been designed by Wendy Addison and Tinsel Trading and the tree will be installed by the New York City Department of Parks & Recreation. Brian Stokes Mitchell will be joined by Rosie's Theater Kids and WABC-TV's Sade Baderinwa, who will lead the countdown. Also at Dante Park's stage will be Frank London's Klezmer Brass All-stars and Bond Street Theatre's Shinbone Alley Stilt Band ensuring an exciting evening for the whole family. The streets, sidewalks, and public spaces will come alive with free music, children's performances and food tastings at three outdoor venues: Time Warner Center, East Broadway and Richard Tucker Park. The food tastings will feature flavors from over 30 different eateries including Atlantic Grill, Rosa Mexicano, The Smith, Bar Boulud, Boulud Sud, MASA & Bar MASA, Asiate, Lincoln Ristorante, American Table Cafe and Bar, P.J. Clarke's and many others. Admission to Winter’s Eve is free, but event attendees are encouraged to bring and donate gently used or new coats of all sizes to Dante Park at 63rd Street and Broadway as part of the 25th Annual New York Cares Coat Drive. Other locations for dropping off coats on the night of Winter’s Eve will be posted here as the event approaches. Visit winterseve.org to see everything we have planned for New York's largest holiday festival.

Wednesday, November 20, 2013

Tuesday, November 19, 2013

toxic NYC

http://www.propertyshark.com/mason/ny/New-York-City/Maps?map=nyc2&x=0.6533333333333333&y=0.5&zoom=0&basemap=default&overlay=toxic&tab=themes&ll=40.7130630998563,-73.8691790385263

Sunday, November 17, 2013

give me your hand, and lets go travel around the world...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_zZmsFZDaM

fireplaces to keep the warmess of NYC

Alewife NYC The white-brick mantel gives the gas-fueled fireplace at this two-story beer bar a homey feel, even when the place is packed. Brewhounds can hunker down with one of the 100-plus international beers by the bottle or one of 28 on tap, but we recommend going with one of the hot punches (often mulled wine or spiked cider), served in a teakettle and ideal for sharing with a friend or romantic flame ($18). 5-14 51st Ave, (between Vernon Blvd and 5th St) Black Mountain Wine House On weekends when escaping the city isn’t a viable option, head to this cabinlike space for a rustic retreat. Your objective: Snag a seat around the wood-burning brick hearth. Though the wine list offers a wide variety of options, sip the mulled vino ($8) to eradicate any chill left in your bones. 415 Union St, (at Hoyt St) Black Rabbit Bar Hightail it to the back of this long, narrow space to secure your spot by the gas fireplace. If the hearthside benches are already filled, you’ll still feel the festive spirit as you sit in a carved-wood booth beneath strings of colorful, twinkling lights. Wash down the traditional German bratwurst sandwich ($6.50) with a whiskey-laden hot toddy ($8), which riffs on the recipe from an erstwhile bartender’s Scottish granny. 91 Greenpoint Ave, (between Franklin St and Manhattan Ave) Brinkley's Station Brothers Tom and Anthony Martignetti are behind this midtown sequel to their Nolita gastropub. This location occupies a landmark building dating back to 1890, and is outfitted with original tile floors, dark mahogany walls and a wood-burning fireplace. Choose from among pubby fare such as a grilled strip steak with sweet-potato fries, a lobster club sandwich and a grass-fed burger. 153 E 60th St, (between Lexington and Third Aves), 10065 The Flatiron Room More than 400 varities of whiskey line the shelves at this bar from nightlife maven Tommy Tardie and cocktail ace Miguel Aranda (Bar Masa, Apotheke). Check out the ancient flooring (the planks are 100-year-old reclaimed wood) while nibbling cured meats, cheeses, oysters and ceviches and enjoying nightly jazz performances. 37 W 26th St, (between Broadway and Sixth Ave), 10010 Lantern's Keep Ease into a seat near the gas-powered, black-laquered hearth and scan the list of tipples, including the frothy New York Harvest (bourbon, applejack, lemon, egg white, red wine; $15). The bar often has limited hours and can be rented out for private parties; be sure to call ahead and make a reservation so you’re not left out in the tourist-ridden streets of Midtown. The Iroquois New York, 49 W 44th St, (between Fifth and Sixth Aves), 10036 Le Barricou As pleasant as it is to dine in the front room of this bistro and nosh on coq au vin, the best seats in the house are hidden in the cozy back room, where you’ll find lounge furniture and a vintage cast-iron stove. Warm up by the wood-burning device and mull the affordable, all-French wine list; nine selections are offered by the glass, 60 by the bottle. We’re partial to the Cahors malbec (glass $11, carafe $32, bottle $44), a spicy, medium-bodied red with hints of cranberry. 533 Grand St, (between Lorimer St and Union Ave) Lobby Bar at the Bowery Hotel MY FAV! You’ll have to battle the hotel’s out-of-town guests to score a seat in the Art Deco–inspired environs, but it’s well worth it if you can secure one of the overstuffed couches or chairs by the gas furnace. Arrive early, pretend like you own the place and enjoy a stiff Negroni ($14), crafted with Bulldog gin, Antica Formula and Campari. 335 Bowery, ( at 3rd St) Union Hall This cavernous, bi-level venue may not fit the textbook definition of intimate, but the flickering stone fireplace is damn cozy. Commandeer the plush couch or one of the chairs near the hearth and settle in for the night with a hot Irish Nut (Bailey’s, amaretto coffee; $10). 702 Union St, (between Fifth and Sixth Aves) Whitman & Bloom Liquor Company This venue is expected to open fall 2013. With his former watering hole Bruckner Bar & Grill destroyed by Hurricane Sandy, Alex Abeles embarks on a new project with the owners of Cask Bar & Kitchen. Bearing a name that references Ulysses, the lit-themed bar will display bookstore antiques. The drinks program will highlight local wines, along with tweaked classic cocktails by Darryl Robinson. Late September. 384 Third Ave, (between 27th and 28th Sts), 10016 The back room with a speak easy living room ambiance and drinks served in a cup of tea, this place is very charming. specially on mondays when they have a live jazz band Norfolk 230

Friday, November 15, 2013

Wednesday, November 13, 2013

gallery Perony is showing an exelent exhibition and a 2x1 dealin starbucks!

Galerie Perrotin and Mary Boone join forces to present a two-space extravaganza showcasing the work of KAWS, the former street artist and limited-edition toy designer and current art-world heavyweight. 909 madison av. UES 2-5pm (thru 11/17): buy one holiday drink at starbucks, get one free: peppermint mocha, gingerbread latte or caramel brulée latte

Thursday, November 7, 2013

Museums state of mind!

this weekend is a museumlicious time New expos in the Whitney, Historical Society, japan Society, MOMA and NYC museum Films in the Morgan library: Poe Double Feature Adapted from Edgar Allan Poe's most beloved short stories, these films are shown in conjunction with the exhibition Edgar Allan Poe: Terror of the Soul. House of Usher (1960, 79 minutes) Director: Roger Corman Philip Winthrop journeys to the Usher mansion to meet his fiancée Madeline. Their union is discouraged by her twin brother Roderick (Vincent Price), who explains that Madeline is cursed by a fatal madness. Philip's attempt to run away with Madeline builds to a terrifying climax. followed by Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932, 61 minutes) Director: Robert Florey A maniacal doctor's failing attempts to prove ape-human kinship result in the deaths of many young women. Medical student Pierre Dupin discovers his experiments and must stop them before it is too late to save his fiancée. Starring Bela Lugosi as Dr. Mirakle. Friday, November 8, 2013, 7 p.m.

Wednesday, November 6, 2013

tonight: sci-cafe in the natural history museum or guiness world records in times sq?

http://www.timessquarenyc.org/events/2320/guinness-world-records-unleashed-arena/details.aspx#.Unqed0qgQQo http://www.amnh.org/calendar/scicafe-the-story-of-the-human-body-with-daniel-lieberman

Tuesday, November 5, 2013

join NYcare today, to discover how rewarding helping others is! (God helps those who help... some old books said!)

Happy International Volunteer Managers Day Nov 05, 2013 If, after volunteering on one of our projects, you've thought to yourself "man, that was really easy and fun," it's because of our volunteer managers. While our staff does a lot of volunteer managing, our Team Leaders are also amazing volunteer managers. Whether they're emailing their group with updates, buying supplies, or coordinating with organizational staff, they do a lot of work to make sure projects run smoothly. Today is International Volunteer Managers Day, when we stop to recognize all the people who go into making volunteering possible - and easy. Our projects simply wouldn't be possible without our Team Leaders, and we want to thank them all for using their spare time to make New York City better. If you're already volunteering all the time, it doesn't take much to go to the next volunteering level. If you've been on 3 of our projects you can apply to be a Team Leader. After reviewing your application, we'll call you in for an interview. If we decide you're leading material, we'll train you and then you'll be on your way to managing your own projects. Thank you once again to all our Team Leaders who work so hard to make our programs successful all year long. If you communicate with a Team Leader today, make sure to say thanks! We will be. - See more at: http://www.newyorkcares.org/blogs/happy-international-volunteer-managers-day?sf19134658=1#sthash.q3pbbyNx.dpuf