The Brooklyn Artists Gym is stepping up to the next level and looking to bring a Gallery Director on board .

According to a recent email from Peter Wallace, who runs the Brooklyn Artists Gym, they are looking for a Gallery Director who can give the BAG Gallery “a solid, fresh and fiscally fruitful direction.”

Clearly, they need someone with imagination, energy, excellent collaborative skills and terrific abilities in self-direction and follow-through.  “We need someone who knows the New York art scene and can think outside that box. According to the email, they are open to new ideas and new ways of doing things,” Wallace writes.

Here’s what they’re looking for in a Gallery Director:
•    A vision and plan for the BAG Gallery.
•    Execution of that plan.
•    Working with artists both at BAG and elsewhere.
•    Working with curators.
•    Creating and implementing a marketing plan.
•    Taking responsibility for the finances of the gallery.
Salary is by commission.  (Commission is very broadly defined.)

Applications are being accepted until they find the right match. Take a look at their new website to get an idea of who they are: www.brooklynartistsgym.com
•    Email: peter@brooklynartistsgym.com.
•    Subject line: GALLERY DIRECTOR APPLICATION
•    Include: Current resume; Statement of what you want to do; Three references.

Brownstone resuce: NY Times

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Simone Dinnerstein’s PS 321 Neighborhood Concerts presents Face the Music, an ensemble of 20 classically-trained musicians ranging from sixth to twelfth grade in a concert called “Beating Down the Doors.” In residence at Kaufman Center and founded in 2005 by Music Director Jenny Undercofler and composer Huang Ruo, Face the Music breaks the boundaries of classical music education and performance.

“Beating Down the Doors” brings Face the Music’s youthful energy to works by five living composers. The centerpiece of the concert is the world premiere of Liquid Timepieces by composer and PS 321 faculty member Joseph C. Philllips, Jr. Commissioned for Face the Music by Simone Dinnerstein and PS 321 Neighborhood Concerts, Mr. Phillips’ piece is cinematic in its intensity and expansive sound.

The teen members of Face the Music will also present four of their favorite works: Graham Fitkin’s sax-heavy Mesh (1992); Marcelo Zarvos’ foot-stomping “Memory” from Nepomuk’s Dances (2002); Nico Muhly’s stop-and-start How About Now (2006); and Jacob TV’s Lipstick (1998), with a playback mix based on clips from American talk shows.

Face the Music’s young players will talk to the audience between pieces and take questions at the end of the concert, making this an excellent opportunity for families with children.

Of his new piece, Liquid Timepieces, Mr. Phillips says, “The years 2010 and 2011 are anniversaries of composer Gustav Mahler’s birth (1850) and death (1911). I wanted to celebrate these ‘Jubilee Years’ by writing a work that honors the profound influence Mahler’s music has had on my musical thinking. Liquid Timepieces is my hommage to Mahler.”

A chart-topping pianist, Ms. Dinnerstein founded the PS 321 Neighborhood Concerts series at the public school her son attends and where her husband teaches. The performances, which feature musicians she has admired and collaborated with during her career, is open to the public and raises funds for the school’s Parent Teacher Association. The musicians performing donate their time and talent to the program.

Here is an excerpt from Repeat Until Rich, a new memoir by Brooklyn’s Josh Axelrad about winning and losing $700,000 as a card counting Blackjack player. It was reviewed and excerpted in today’s New York Times.

They called themselves Mossad after the Israeli intelligence agency. The key honcho was a guy named Jon Roth. I met him just once, and then everything started. I took the subway one evening to Park Slope in Brooklyn, buzzed at the address my contact had given, and was let in by a tiny brunette who introduced herself as Bridget Gould.

She showed me up the stairs. The building was a brownstone, singleresidence — all Roth’s. He was a retired millionaire from Wall Street. Israeli-born, charismatic, three to six years older than myself. I knew these things from Garry Knowles, my mentor.

At the second fl oor, I saw a person dealing cards. A dining-room table had been converted into a blackjack table. There was green felt spread over it like a partial tablecloth. Two strangers sat on the player side, chips in the betting squares in front of them. The dealer was Roth, to whom Bridget presented me.

“You’re Garry’s guy?”

“Right.”

He shrugged in response — not without warmth, I thought.

I can’t say what I expected, but he was certainly a human being: large head, heavy build. Either he was muscular or he used to be. His hair was a few inches long, and his brow was pronounced. He might in a previous life have been some kind of ape king, a silverback.

The others sat watching me quietly.

Roth said to one of them, “Chuck, you want to check this guy out?”

“For spotter?”

Roth gave the thumbs-up. The person named Chuck was dark-eyed, perhaps Greek or Latino. He was physically attractive, and it bothered me. My habitual nervousness had been about doubled since I got off the subway, but as I shook Chuck’s hand, it grew worse. I would never fit in with these people.

He led me to a sofa at the end of the room, where he handed me a “shoe” to count down. That’s a big deck made of multiple decks mixed together, six in this case. As we sat, he went over the rules. He would remove a dozen cards or so, then time me as I counted the rest. I had to do it ten straight times, pretty fast, with a limited number of errors.

I passed this test. Shortly after that we had a pizza break. Roth ate standing up, as did Chuck and a bearded guy, Aldous. They were discussing an upcoming trip.

No one addressed me again until Roth had finished his pizza and lit a cigarette. “Ready for the table test?” he asked.

“I hope.”

This was the final exam. Crusts and paper towels were stuffed into the grease-bruised pizza box. Roth began stacking the deck. The Aldous guy sat on one side of me, Chuck on the other.

Continue reading Vegas in Park Slope? →

Over at Now I’ve Heard Everything, check out the very funny video by Jewmongous performing They Tried to Kill Us (We Survived Let’s Eat) which claims to explain the story of Passover “according to Wikipedia.”  Jewmongous will be appearing at 92Y Tribeca on Saturday, April 3.

Appearing tonight at The National Underground will be The Demolition String Band who go from country to flat out hard rocking.  Details here.

–Eliot Wagner

Pilar Guzman, formerly the editor of Cookie, Conde Nast’s now-defunct parenting magazine is starting a new parenting website called Mom Filter from her Park Slope home.

Here’s the story from the NY Observer sent to me by Verse Responder, Leon Freilich.

“It was definitely a tough experience,” said Pilar Guzman—the popular editor of the mom magazine Cookie, which folded in October—from her place in Park Slope. “I was the rookie who got to do it for five solid years without interruption. It was definitely rough having the rug pulled from under you.”

Ms. Guzman said she’s been concentrating her efforts on two pursuits: wrapping up a cookbook for Cookie and creating a Web site.

The Web site will be called momfilter.com, which she described as a lifestyle site for the modern mom. She’s looking for funding now, and is hoping for a launch date in the fall. She’s working on the site with Yolanda Edwards, another former Cookie editor.

She said she’s excited about the prospect of turning herself over to the Web, and said Cookie could have survived if Condé had invested significantly in the magazine’s Web site. “We had sort of a limited capability of what we could do online, as I’m sure you’re well aware,” she said.

And how has she taken to the transition from 4 Times Square to life at home in Park Slope? “I wasn’t Anna or Graydon, I rode the subway every day!” she said. “If you have your feet on the ground, then that fall from grace is not a fall from grace. It’s like a loss of any job.”

http://www.observer.com/2010/media/exiled-cond%C3%A9-editors-lost-years

On April 15, 2010, Brooklyn Reading Works presents its monthly writers’ program on “tax day.”  This happy accident, observed last summer in a casual conversation with John Guidry of Truth and Rocket Science over coffee, resulted in the idea for a panel called “The Truth and Money,” a reading and Q & A with three authors whose work has taken on money in some significant way.

Our three panelists are:

Elissa Schappell, a Park Slope writer, the editor of “Hot Type” (the books column) for Vanity Fair, and Editor-at-large of the literary magazine Tin House. With Jenny Offill, Schappell edited Money Changes Everything, in which twenty-two writers reflect on the troublesome and joyful things that go along with acquiring, having, spending, and lacking money.

Jennifer Michael Hecht, a best-selling writer and poet whose work crosses fields of history, philosophy, and religious studies.  In The Happiness Myth, she looks at what’s not making us happy today, why we thought it would, and what these things really do for us instead.  Money—like so many things, it turns out—solves one problem only to beget others, to the extent that we spend a great deal of money today trying to replace the things that, in Hecht’s formulation, “money stole from us.”

Jason Kersten, a Park Slope writer who lives 200 feet from our venue and whose award-winning journalism has appeared in Rolling Stone, Men’s Journal, and Maxim.  In The Art of Making Money, Kersten traces the riveting, rollicking, roller coaster journey of a young man from Chicago who escaped poverty, for a while at least, after being apprenticed into counterfeiting by an Old World Master.

This event is at 8:00 p.m. on Thursday, April 15, 2010, at the Old Stone House in Washington Park, which is located on 5^th Avenue in Park Slope, between 3rd and 4^th Streets, behind the playground. $5 donation includes refreshments.

Read about all the Brooklyn Reading Works events at Only the Blog Knows Brooklyn and the BRW website.  For info on the Old Stone House, its role in the Battle of New York (1776) and contemporary life in Park Slope, go here.