Mad Dooley Gallery’s One Year Anniversary: May 18 - June 9

Mad Dooley Gallery’s One Year Anniversary: May 18 - June 9

Source: beaconarts.org

Posted by Stowe Boyd 17 May Permalink
Community Free Day and10th Anniversary of Dia:Beacon ⇢

from Dia:Beacon website

Ten years after Dia:Beacon opened its doors, Dia Art Foundation will inaugurate an anniversary celebration encompassing a yearlong schedule of exhibitions, programs, and events, beginning with Community Free Day on May 18, 2013. Throughout the day, visitors will be offered free admission to Dia:Beacon’s 22 galleries dedicated to landmark works that artists including Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, Richard Serra, and Andy Warhol produced with Dia’s support. A new collection room dedicated to the works of Alighiero e Boetti will open that day. Other free events will include a public reading of On Kawara’s One Million Years and a multimedia program for children and families.

Dia:Beacon’s 10th Anniversary public programming is made possible with major support from New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature. Dia’s Community Free Days also receive generous support from AT&T and the Dyson Foundation.

Posted by Stowe Boyd 17 May Permalink

thisbigcity:

Great video: IBM develop a young girl’s idea to build a flashing crosswalk to remind drivers that pedestrians are coming.

Source: thisbigcity

Posted by Stowe Boyd 16 May 144 citycollaboration Permalink

Urbanite’s wellbeing is improved by green spaces

A long-term British study unequivocally proves that adding green space to urban centers helps people’s wellbeing significantly.

Would you be happier living  a greener urban area?

This study draws on 18 years of panel data from over 10,000 participants to explore the self-reported psychological health of individuals over time and the relationship between urban green space, wellbeing and mental distress. Findings show that urban green space can deliver significant benefits for mental wellbeing.

The impact of green space was examined through a positive, evaluative measure of wellbeing - life satisfaction - as well a more experiential marker of psychological ill-health - the General Health Questionnaire (GHQ) scale. By using a fixed effects analytic approach more common in economic analyses, the green space effect was estimated without being biased by the personalities of the survey respondents.

Data was derived from the British Household Panel Survey, a nationally representative longitudinal survey of households in the UK that ran annually from 1991-2008, containing over 5,000 households and 10,000 individual adults.

Local area green space was derived from the Generalised Land Use Database, which classifies land use at high geographical resolution across England, and has been applied to 32,482 Lower-layer Super Output Areas (LSOAs) - a standard geographic unit used to report small area statistics.

Our analyses suggest that people are happier when living in urban areas with greater amounts of green space. Compared to instances when they live in areas with less green space they show significantly lower mental distress (GHQ scores) and significantly higher wellbeing (life satisfaction).

The analysis also made it possible to compare the beneficial effects of green space with other factors which influence wellbeing. In comparative terms, living in an area with higher levels of green space was associated with improvements in our wellbeing indicators roughly equal to a third of that gained from being married, or a tenth as large as being employed vs. unemployed.

We need some parks in Beacon, especially along Main Street.

Source: ecehh.org

Posted by Stowe Boyd 15 May Permalink
Dim Sum Go Go Peking Duck
The dim sum and other food at the Dim Sum Go Go is really great.
A number of friends said they thought the new restaurant was owned and run by the same folks that ran Dim Sum Vault: this is not true. It is owned and run by the folks who own Dim Sum Go Go in the Two Bridges neighborhood of Chinatown in NYC.
The dim sum is ordered from a menu, not strolled around in carts. I like the  dim sum. The noodle soups are a bit bland, though. I hope they add some of the more adventurous menu items from NYC, mentioned in this review.

Dim Sum Go Go Peking Duck

The dim sum and other food at the Dim Sum Go Go is really great.

A number of friends said they thought the new restaurant was owned and run by the same folks that ran Dim Sum Vault: this is not true. It is owned and run by the folks who own Dim Sum Go Go in the Two Bridges neighborhood of Chinatown in NYC.

The dim sum is ordered from a menu, not strolled around in carts. I like the  dim sum. The noodle soups are a bit bland, though. I hope they add some of the more adventurous menu items from NYC, mentioned in this review.

Posted by Stowe Boyd 11 May 1 Permalink
A warning to gardeners in the Beacon NY area: cold snap coming, with temperatures dropping to the low thirties Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday. Get your tomato plants under some cover.

A warning to gardeners in the Beacon NY area: cold snap coming, with temperatures dropping to the low thirties Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday. Get your tomato plants under some cover.

Posted by Stowe Boyd 11 May Permalink
May 2013 E-Newsletter: Hudson River Valley Greenway, Hudson River Valley National Heritage Area ⇢

Park Closed: Madam Brett Park Due to City of Beacon repairs to Tioronda Bridge, Madam Brett Park will be closed to the public from April 29 to Nov. 1, 2013. No vehicular or pedestrian access will be allowed.

Posted by Stowe Boyd 11 May Permalink

nasdaq:

We’ve all heard the advice: “ABC: Always be charging!” It’s a fact of life in our digital device-dependent age. But what if you could power up your devices and get in shape too? To celebrate national bike month, check out this ingenious battery-powering system from Siva Cycle. If you like what you see, you can even back them on Kickstarter.

Posted by Stowe Boyd 10 May 6 nasdaq Permalink
The question of what kind of city we want cannot be divorced from that of what kind of social ties, relationship to nature, lifestyles, technologies and aesthetic values we desire. The right to the city is far more than the individual liberty to access urban resources: it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city. It is, moreover, a common rather than an individual right since this transformation inevitably depends upon the exercise of a collective power to reshape the processes of urbanization. The freedom to make and remake our cities and ourselves is, I want to argue, one of the most precious yet most neglected of our human rights.

- David Harvey. The Right to the City (2008)

Source: notquitenative

Posted by Stowe Boyd 8 May 2013 28 adhocratic Permalink
The trouble with the rat race is, even if you win, you are still a rat.

-

Lily Tomlin

I have spent the past few years downshifting.

Much less travel. Moved to a small city 65 miles north of NYC, and slowly 30 plus years of living in exurbia has evaporated, leaving me grounded on the Hudson river, at the foot of Mount Beacon.

I walk everywhere, and hardly ever drive. I train into New York regularly, and ride the subways when there. Nearly everyone visits New York, so I am now more often being visited than being the visitor.

We put in a large vegetable garden — in fact, we are slowly converting much of our double-lot yard into food bearing purposes, like the onions along the side of the house on both sides of the wrought iron fence that frames our property. I just finished painting that fence, and soon I’ll be painting the front porch, and working on a new patio with my son and wife. 

We intentionally avoid buying things, we buy local eggs and produce, and we had spinach and kale from our hoop house all winter. Soon, we’ll be raising our own chickens: we have the corner picked out in the yard, behind the garden.

I worked with some other locals and got a grant to paint sharrows on Main Street. Those are chevron-shaped street marking to indicate the roadway is to be shared with bicyclists. They were completed last week. My next goal is to convert Main Street to a true ‘shared space’, where you remove the curbs, traffic signs, and road markings, and where the cars have to slow to a crawl to move through an area shared with people and bikes: where the drivers have to make eye contact, and the demarcations between road, parking, and sidewalks are eliminated. Could take years.

I am working regularly, but I stopped hustling consulting gigs with startups. I have moved to media work almost exclusively: writing, speaking, executive briefings, reports, interview series, conferences.

I’d like to teach, perhaps, but otherwise, I am content to weed the garden, write about technology’s reshaping of the human psyche, and try to describe what’s coming next to a skeptical, distracted, and forgetful world.

There may still be a race, out there, but I am just working on handicapping it, making odds, and not being one of the rats.

(via stoweboyd)

Posted by Stowe Boyd 8 May 2013 19 stoweboyd Permalink

About

Advocating a walkable Beacon NY.

Think small, change big.

Sign up for the newsletter

Stowe Boyd, editor.

Also writing stoweboyd.com and underpaidgenius.com.


Ask away

Hot Now

  • Dangerous Walking On Main Street: We Need A Main Street Association | The city isn't enforcing the requirement for landlords shoveling the street in front of empty store

  • Beacon’s David Rees Is One Of The Founders Of Strike Debt Local comedian, author, and activist, David Rees, is one of the founders of the Strike Debt project, an offshoot of the Occupy Wall Street movement

  • City Takes Ten Feet Of Key Food's Parking Lot | Actually a part of the Beacon Chamber of Commerce Market Square renewal project

  • Could Beacon Join The Artisanal Manufacturing Movement? | it would be great if small-scale artisanal manufacturing could grow into something larger, here

  • Main Street Sharrows | Grant for bicycling signals painted on Main Street