ART: The Bronx Museum of Art is getting on board the First Friday bandwagon. They'll be opening their doors every first Friday of the month for free, and add a little something extra each time. Tonight their theme is “Say it Loud! I’m Black & I’m Proud” in celebration of Black History Month. There will be a tribute to the late James Brown, and a showcase of independent artists paying tribute to black music. Friday......

EVENT: Julian Schnabel will be screening clips from his latest flick, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly tonight. Lou Reed, who Schnabel recently documented in Lou Reed’s Berlin, will also be on hand. 7pm // Apple Store [103 Prince St] // Free READING: The Desk Set's "Drinks with an Author" series continues tonight at Greenpoint's WORD. This evening chat with Kara Jesella and Marisa Meltzer, authors of How Sassy Changed My Life: A Love Letter......

October 22: Wine Dinner at Aix This five-course wine dinner will feature nine top wines from Alsace, Austria and Germany paired with regional dishes such as Alsatian Onion Tart with Thinly Sliced House-Smoked Brisket and Raclette Fondue and Riesling-Marinated Poulet Rouge with Glazed Baby Turnips and Carrots Crispy Sauteed Spaetzle, and Riesling Jus. Doesn't that sound like fall to you? $125, tax and tip excluded. For reservations, call 212.874.7400. 7pm, Aix, 2398 Broadway at 88th......

October 6: Strategies for Building a Balanced Wine Collection The experts at the Italian Wine Merchants can show you how to build up your wine collection beyond those bottles that were left over from your last party. During the course of the afternoon, you'll taste eight Italian wines including vintage Barolo, Brunello, Super-Tuscans, and more while sampling assorted antipasti. $125 per person. Reservations required and can be made online or by calling 212-473-2323 x106. 1:00......

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,......

Breach (directed by Billy Ray) Small, character-driven thrillers are practically tailor made for the home viewing experience, especially the kind made by director Billy Ray. His last movie, the excellent real-life journalism scandal movie Shattered Glass with Hayden Christensen and Peter Sarsgaard really ripened the second time around on a smaller screen. TV is good medium for seeing the real gradations of creepy in Ray's complex characters. His second film also tackles understanding a morally-suspect......

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.......

READINGS: Papermag points out an interesting reading tonight for "Queens of the Kingdom: The Ultimate Gay and Lesbian Guide to the Disney Theme Parks." Authors Jeffrey Epstein and Eddie Shapiro explain how to have a gay ol’ time in Disney World. Their guide (now in its second edition) features “fairy facts,” culinary suggestions and where to find the “gay goodies” like Ellen Degeneres’s Ellen's Energy Adventure ride. Tonight’s reading is hosted by Michael Musto and......

Paris Je T'Aime (directed by various filmmakers including Olivier Assayas, Wes Craven, Alfonso Cuarón, Chistopher Doyle and Nobuhiro Suwa): There have been nearly as many cinematic love letters written to Paris as there have been to New York, but that doesn't mean that moviemakers aren't still falling hard for the city of lights. 21 directors made 18 short films for the new omnibus movie Paris Je T'Aime which comes to New York theaters this Friday.......

READING: John Sellers will be reading from his book, Perfect from Now On: How Indie Rock Saved My Life, tonight. Idolizing bands like Joy Division, Sonic Youth, Pavement and Guided by Voices, the book outlines how he developed his taste in music. It reads more like a blog, than a book, which makes sense since Sellers has one. 7pm // Barnes & Noble [675 6th Ave] // Free MUSIC: Todd P brings The Thermals (pictured......

The Brooklyn Record points us to an article in the Brooklyn Downtown Star reporting there may be some hiccups in getting this whole Music Hall of Williamsburg thing off the ground: "Combined with the Galapagos Art Space next door, which also serves alcohol to guests, the two venues would offer roughly 12,000 square feet of bar on a block zoned for residential as well as commercial use. The Music Hall of Williamsburg - 8,000 square......

Joseph Barbera, one part of the famed cartoon duo Hanna-Barbera, has died at the age of 95. In his life, which started out in New York (Little Italy and then Flatbush), he created Tom and Jerry, Huckleberry Hound, The Flintstones and also worked on The Smurfs...all of your childhood favorites, over 100 cartoons in 4 decades. While in New York Barbera attempted banking, playwriting and amateur boxing. He then sent a sketch to Collier's magazine......

December 7: Alex Prud’homme at O&CO. Join Alex Prud’homme, Julia Child's grandnephew, as he recounts stories about Julia and reads from her memoir, My Life in France, which he co-authored. He will also be available to sign books, which might make a great present for someone on your holiday shopping list. O&CO. store, Grand Central Terminal, Graybar Passage--Lexington Ave & 42nd St. (212-973-1472), 6:00 pm, Free. December 8 - 17: Gingerbread Homes for Animals Pastry......

This weekend Hollywood says what moviegoers liked once, they'll sure love twice as the sequels The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift and Garfield: A Tail of Two Kitties hit theaters. Now you may be asking yourselves, did we really need another movie about bad boys in fast cars or another flick about a fat, talking cat? Apparently, we did and they both needed to be set in an exotic international local, Japan and England,......

Over the weekend, Gothamist started to read Julia Child's My Life in France. A collaboration with (and completed by) her grandnephew Alex Prud'homme, Julia gets to describe her experience living in France after World War II, falling in love with cooking, and loving her husband, Paul. And there's writing Mastering French Cooking, too. While the book is absolutely wonderful, we faced the problem of being totally hungry for whatever Julia would describe. Roasted chicken, quenelles,......

Yesterday we witnessed a friend taking photos of things he had written "Scene From My Life, Brooklyn, NY" on. Napkins, menus...things around a bar in Red Hook. It was for a website of the same name, SceneFromMyLife.com. An amazing idea that has people from all over the world photographically document one week of their life. The concept is simple. Each day, one new photo will be posted on the site. A photographer is assigned to......

If Gothamist was running a school, we'd be suspicious of a group called the "Yogi Bear Sunday School" even if they were performing non-religious pageants, because once you try to meld a Hanna Barbera cartoon character and the idea of Sunday school, there are bound to be problems. PS 274 had problems when the Yogi Bear Sunday School handed out Christmas stocking with religious materials - a no-no in a city public school. The Post......

Fact: Thunder Road is the greatest song penned by an American songwriter in the last 30 years. This is an unarguable, unassailable, unquestionable truth. If you don't believe us, check out the giant three-disc reissue of Born to Run that Columbia Records put out last week. Even McSweeney's loves Bruce Springsteen! Check out their list of "Bruce Springsteen Songs, If the Title More Accurately Reflected the Subject Matter:" "You and I Are Confronting the......

From the musical stylings of the composer who brought us Dracula and Jekyll & Hyde, New York City now has a theme song. The city's tourism arm, NYC & Company, commissioned Frank Wildhorn to write a song about how wonderful New York City is, and now we have "New York: For the Time of Your Life." The NY Post says the song is a "splashy, big-band-style number belted out in a brassy, Sinatra-esque voice," and......

Not that we'd wish a ride in an ambulance on anyone, but here's a new site dedicated to the paramedic stylings of a certain rockers: It's The Night David Lee Roth Saved My Life. Inspired by news that Roth is now working as a paramedic in NY, the site will be a venue for people who have been, well, saved by Diamond Dave.In New York City's emergency rooms, medical care is undertaken by two different......

With all this talk about Fahrenheit 9/11 there is another important film that has gotten pushed to the wayside. Narrated by Morgan Freeman, The Hunting of the President is a documentary on Clinton's battle against a right wing attack lead by Kenneth Starr. Digging deep into the the smear campaign that culminated towards the end of Clintons presidency, Tina Brown (for the Washington Post) calls the film, "more damning than 'Fahrenheit 9/11.'" The official website......

The weekend's weather (graphic from the NYTimes.com) is a joke, save Sunday. It's summer! Please, Mother Nature, stop being so mean. You hate us, don't you? We KNEW it. Some indoors stuff to do: Coolfer's Music Picks, read Gothamist Weather to understand why it's raining, see a movie, try out a new recipe, or flip through Clinton's My Life at a local bookstore - that'll take up a couple hours........

Oh, my God, reading reading Michiko Kakutani's Books > Books of The Times: The Pastiche of a Presidency, Imitating a Life, in 957 Pages" href="http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/20/books/20CLIN.html?hp">review of former President Bill Clinton's memoir, My Life, provided so many laughs in the morning. It's Michiko at her book report bitchiest, calling it "hurriedly written and even more hurriedly edited." Bill was probably feeling the pain while reading it. She's so becoming the secret poster girl of the Republicans......

Gothamist would rather lick a subway pole than go to most conferences, but there are the rare exceptions. The second annual Good Experience Live was held on Friday at the surprisingly swank New York Historical Society, and, perhaps in an effort to keep things democratic, we managed to slip in unnoticed among the internet cogniscenti. Despite being late, hungover, and covered in a thin layer of cat fur, we enjoyed many of the presentations, including......

Gothamist was walking by the uptown office's neighborhood joint, Cafe Luxembourg, when we spied writer-director Nora Ephron inside having brunch and animated conversation with tablemates (one probably being husband Nicholas Pileggi). Gothamist has literally going running on the sets of You've Got Mail during college and Nora Ephron lives at the Ansonia - a few blocks away from the uptown office - so Gothamist would like to feel she's a kindred spirit of sorts. But......

Po Bronson's latest book, What Should I Do With My Life?, is reviewed in today's New York Times' Book Review. Needless to say, that's the question that's replaced "What's the meaning of life?" The review notes that his personality more or less dominates some of these interviews with people who have changed their careers and lives, with a lot of soul searching (or not enough). That got me thinking about my interaction with him -......