On Sunday, along with Conservators from the American Institute for Conservation Collections Emergency Response Team, MoMA will be hosting a free presentation from 12 p.m. to 2 p.m. for the public on how to conserve paintings, drawings, books, and other archival works damaged in Hurricane Sandy. The presentation is also intended for the many artists and galleries (like non-profit art publishers Printed Matter) who had works damaged as a result of flooding. It will be held in MoMA's Celeste Bartos Theater, in the Lewis B. and Dorothy Cullman Education and Research Building, at 4 West 54 Street. You can also download the guidelines for immediate response for collections here. It gives step by step measures for conserving water-damaged art in various mediums, including library and archive collections. The guide also provides a list of suppliers and emergency services that can provide some of the services listed. The guidelines are also available on MoMA.org.
If you can't make it tomorrow and would like to receive advice from the the American Institute for Conservation, call AIC's 24-hour assistance number at 202-661-8068. You can call the same number to arrange for a team to come to the site and assess damage and help with salvaging.
Meanwhile, MoMA PS1 director Klaus Biesenbach is organizing a relief mission to the Rockaways tomorrow at 10 a.m. Volunteers are asked to meet at the MoMA Education Wing, 4 West 54th Street and must be able to spend the whole day in Rockaway -- the bus back to Manhattan will be leaving Queens at 6 p.m. Biesenbach is currently taking head counts on Twitter for the trip, so if you'd like to help, please reach out via Twitter ASAP. Biesenbach is stressing on both his Twitter and Facebook accounts that volunteers be aware that tomorrow's trip is "not a holiday excursion." He is asking for volunteers to bring large garbage bags, thick work gloves, bottled water, battery-operated flashlights, batteries, generators, gas, candles, gas-powered pumps, lanterns and food. Those who can't make the trip are still encouraged to drop off supplies. Volunteers should wear rubber boots and bring cameras to "document the damage in Rockaway and create awareness."
RELATED: Ways You Can Help Hurricane Sandy Victims, From Volunteering to Donating
Above: Destruction in Breezy Point, Queens, on the Rockway penninsula. Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images
Below is an open letter to Mayor Bloomberg from members of New York's art community encouraging support for, and assistance towards, areas devastated by Hurricane Sandy. For more ways you can help, please follow links at the bottom of this story.
Adorable Japanese clothing line Syrup launched a line of clothing inspired by the Swedish-Finn childrens' book series 
All business. [
Surprise, the 50 Shades of Grey clothing for kids on Etsy is just horrendous. [
Ye Olde over-sharing. [
Serve with sawdust hash. [
Good morning. [
Katherine Hepburn giving us the Awesome Bitch Chills. [
Omnomnomnivore. [
Elvis' house of beauty. [
Homer Simps-za. [
Never change, Law & Order: SVU. [
Nooooooo! Nicholas Ghesquière is leaving his position as creative director of Balenciaga! No word on why he left, who will take over and what he'll do after. [via 
Victoria's Secret, of all organizations, saved the National Guard's 69th Infantry Regiment on Lexington during Hurricane Sandy, restoring full power and Internet, as well as loaning them equipment. Go, angels! [via 
Our minds are blown: these socks, made sometime between A.D. 250 and A.D. 420 -- that's over 1,600 years old -- wouldn't look out of place on, say, a Prada runway. [via 
These are the uniforms for the workers at the Interieur Design Biennale, made by Norwegian designer Damien Fredriksen Ravn. My god, we wish we had worked that festival. [via 
Check out these Tarot cards made by Michael Willis for Kenzo. Psychic chic! [via 
Everyone can breathe easy now: Heidi Klum's 
We dig these PRO-Keds x Woolrich kicks. Hopefully we'll be able to get a pair before that 
New York-based artist Desi Santiago is working on a huge installation for the Lords South Beach Hotel (1120 Collins Avenue) called "The Black Lords." The artist's work has been seen here in NYC at Deitch Projects, MoMA PS1, Mathew Marks Gallery and the Metropolitan Museum of Art and he's know for elaborate theatrical and performance pieces. In South Beach, he plans to transform the hotel into a "ravenous black dog named Gypsy" that will tell fortunes and respond to visitors questions with sound, lasers and smoke. Perrier is sponsoring the installation and they are having a big VIP opening on Tuesday, December 4, but "Gypsy" will be on view all week from 11 a.m. to 2 a.m. daily.
We just received word that Vito Acconci has been named Design Miami's 2012 Designer of the Year. Born in the Bronx, New York, the acclaimed artist has also been commissioned to design a playground that will be built in Miami's Design District by 2014 and that is based on "The Klein Bottle" -- a structure conceived by the German mathematician Felix Klein. (That's Acconci's design above.) Past winners of the award have included Zaha Hadid, Marc Newson and Konstantin Grcic. 
You're probably noticed airplanes pulling advertising banners over your favorite beach during the summer. Now imagine what those banners would look like if you gave 15 artists free rein to design the message or the image. The Morgans Hotel Group is doing just that in a cool project called "Plane Text" and several artists have already committed to the project including: Ed Ruscha, Richard Prince, John Baldessari, Jack Pierson, Gary Simmons and Jenny Holzer. The art will be airborne daily starting on December 5th. Look up! [image via 
Sculptor Peter Anton is building a full-size carnival ride called "Sugar & Gomorrah" for Art Miami (Midtown Miami, 3101 NE 1st Avenue). You'll be able to "ride into a winding tunnel that snakes through tumbling pillars and images of fire meant to evoke Sodom and Gomorrah-like destruction...and encounter a wonderland of larger-than-life sugary treats while listening to Lesley Gore's 1965 hit 'Sunshine, Lollipops and Rainbows." Sugary treats + Lesley Gore = We'll see you there. (Above: Anton with giant candy from his 2009 "SWEETLIFE" exhibition in NYC.)
There's a new fair called 
Louis Vuitton (170 NE 40th Street, Miami) just opened a temporary store in the Design District and they had the Los Angeles-based artist RETNA design a mural for the facade. 
Well folks, it's been a long, strange trip and tomorrow night it'll all be over (or will it just be starting?). Whether you're voting for Barry or Mittens, forget about partisan politics for a moment and unite with your fellow party people at these Election Night happenings around New York City. Check out our recs below. 
1. Put Amsterdam back on your European vacation itinerary. The city's
mayor, Eberhard van der Lann, announced that they won't be going along with the national government's ban on weed sales to tourists -- a law already in effect in the south of the Netherlands. Eberhard admitted that the ban would only drive the market underground and lead
to turf wars and unregulated sales. "They will swarm all over the city looking for drugs," he told Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant. "This would lead to more robberies, quarrels about fake drugs and no control of the quality of drugs on the market. Everything we have worked toward would be lost to misery."
[via 
2. In the wake of Hurricane Sandy, Google has launched "crisis maps" that include before-and-after photos of the devastation, traffic reports, gas availability updates and more. [via 
3. Big news from TLC today (and, no, nothing regarding Honey Boo Boo or half-ton moms, this time we're talking about the pop R&B group): T-Boz and Chilli announced plans to record their first album in ten years and go on tour, possibly with a hologram of the late Lisa "Left Eye" Lopes. [via 
4. A big congrats to Kristen Bell and Dax Shepard -- they're expecting their child together. Another addition to our 
6. You can now post all of your high-contrast, sepia-tinged Instagram photos on the web. The photo-sharing app is launching Pinterest-esque online profiles (like the one above) over the coming days. [via 
7. After Hurricane Sandy caused damages and disruptions to many polling locations, Governor Cuomo has signed an executive order allowing New Yorkers to vote from any polling place so long as they present an affidavit. [via 
M.I.A. is doing it wrong. For years critics and marketing execs have been telling her that if she were to choose a single medium -- art, music, politics, whatever -- she'd be more successful. But that's success on their terms, not hers. And above all else, M.I.A. has made a name for herself over the past seven years by not caring about their terms. This is a woman who is deep-down, ground-in, almost genetically punk rock. She's perhaps the most fiercely political performer active today, and that creates friction when the mainstream comes courting. The mainstream wants the music, not the message; the pretty wallpaper, not the hard questions; the style, not the substance. And even if M.I.A.'s substance is, at times, thoroughly inscrutable, there's no questioning she presents herself the way she wants to, not the way she's been told she needs to. She's not safe. You don't know what she'll do next. Unlike many of her celebrity contemporaries, she refuses to fade into the background, and she's been rewarded for her temerity. M.I.A. is the only artist ever to be nominated for an Academy Award, Grammy Award, Brit Award, Mercury Prize and the Alternative Turner Prize. More importantly, she's raised awareness of the strife caused by the civil war in Sri Lanka -- the conflict that displaced her family and precipitated her move to the U.K. as a child refugee. 
The 37-year-old provocateur (aka Mathangi Maya "M.I.A." Arulpragasam) has released three full-length albums and a handful of mixes. (A recent mixtape, Vicki Leekx, is available for free on the Internet. At one point during the half-hour mash, she quips, "I'm not saying it should be freer, I'm saying music should be free," which, one imagines, was met with tight-lipped exhaustion by the suits at her label, Interscope.) She's also a visual artist, famously having gotten her start by designing album covers for Justine Frischmann of Elastica, and selling some of her early work to Jude Law. It's that part of her career--although, speaking with her, you get the sense that she'd never call what she does a "career"--that she's concentrating on now. "People have heard the journey through music," she tells me one recent evening over coffee at a hotel in TriBeCa. "Now it's like exploring the journey to this point through visuals."
M.I.A. hasn't had an easy go of it these last three years. She had a son, Ikhyd, with former fiancé Ben Bronfman in 2009, but ended the engagement with him last year. She moved from Bed-Stuy in Brooklyn to Brentwood in L.A. -- about as wild an oscillation on the socio-economic scale as you're going to get in the U.S. -- and finally to London, to be closer to her family. Her third record, Maya, released in 2010, courted controversy for the redhead genocide depicted in the video for "Born Free," directed by Romain Gavras, which was pulled from YouTube the day of its release. That year she was the subject of Lynn Hirschberg's deeply unflattering profile in The New York Times Magazine, which she claimed to be innacurate after its release and was awarded a printed correction for having been misquoted. She remains a vocal supporter of Julian Assange and WikiLeaks, composing the theme song for his television show, The World Tomorrow, and attending Assange's press conference in London last August when he was granted asylum by Ecuador. She's spoken out on a number of hot-button issues, from the violence in Sri Lanka and the plight of Palestinians to the U.K. government's response to the London riots of 2011, and she's gotten more than her fair share of hate mail because of it. The lady has opinions, a Twitter feed and a platform -- and she isn't afraid to use them. "Maya breaks rules, and I think people celebrate that and get really excited, until she breaks one of theirs," says Loveridge. 
In putting together the book, M.I.A., she says she was forced to examine the last few years of her life. It was a valuable exercise: she went backward to move forward. "The first album is about dealing with these voiceless people in the jungle in Sri Lanka," she says. "The second one was the same situation, just extending it out to the rest of the world...and putting them on the map. The last one was me engaging with the Internet because that's how our generation deals with shit now." In August, she took to Twitter to release details about her fourth full-length album, due out next year. Along with some invectives against critics and those who have done her wrong, she wrote that it sounds like "Paul Simon on acid." (Two tracks are already on the Internet: "Bad Girls," which was on Vicki Leekx, and a preview of "Come Walk With Me.") 
The album is titled Mathangi, after M.I.A.'s given name, and in tribute to the goddess. M.I.A., who was raised with no specific religion, notes that there are more than a few unnerving similarities between herself and the Hindu deity. Matangi's mantra is "Aim," M.I.A. backward; she's the patron goddess of outcasts and the disenfranchised; and "her Mudra," M.I.A. explains, "which is basically like all these yoga movements on your hands, is the middle finger -- to top it all off." For M.I.A., the discovery taught her that her sense of herself as an artist-- someone who is able to create, no matter the medium--is time-honored and respected. Not weird. Not wrong. 
FIERCE 
D.I.Y. 
BUFFALO
WET 
YUM 
DAPPER 
ARTY PARTY 
OPTICAL 
PSYCHEDELIC
Even over the phone from Björk's cottage house in Reykjavik, visions of giant bears, swaying forests and gyrating landscapes are dancing in my head. I'm thinking of her first video, 1993's "Human Behaviour," directed, with trippy childlike esprit, by Michel Gondry. There's the epic "Joga" video, also by Gondry, in which the surrealism of Iceland's landscape melts into bits of clunky 1997 computer renderings. Or 2007's "Wanderlust," directed by New York's Encyclopedia Pictura, a stereoscopic trip down a rippling CG river. This is the world I imagine Björk lives in. 
How did this new video come about?
You spend a good deal of time in Brooklyn, too. How do you like living in New York?
What do you like to do when you're in New York? 
The Alexander Wang sample sale line keeps getting mistaken for a line of people waiting to vote. Glad to see that fashion people have their priorities straight. [via 
Love this necklace by Dana Walden jewelry and love even more that 100% of proceeds will go towards Hurricane Sandy relief. [via 
Just a day after news came out that Nicolas Ghesquière 
We're a little obsessed with the fact that 
The Victoria's Secret Fashion Show tomorrow will feature real, taxidermic snake eyes. We're grossed out but intrigued. [via 
When asked last night if Anna Wintour is her rival, Carine Roitfeld responded "Never. This, the press tries to do. I've worked with her. She's very helpful. We're so different, but I think she's very special." [via 
Chanel No. 5, arguably the world's most famous scent, might be banned in the EU because a lot of its ingredients are allergens. [via 
Check out these cuckoo crazy shots by Geoffrey Lillemon for fashion eccentric Bernhard Willhelm's Spring/Summer '13 women's collection! [via 
Community's 
1. Lil' Wayne has 
3. There's a new box set from no-wave relics Mars, one of four bands on Brian Eno's classic No New York compilation. Rehearsal Tapes and Alt-Takes NYC 1976-1978 will be out on three cassettes from Anòmia records. [
6. But don't Instagram your ballot -- it's a misdemeanor in New York! (Sharing your ballot can be seen as evidence of voter intimidation.) See other states' laws 
7. New York City parks, playgrounds, and beaches 
This is sort of irrelevant, but funny nonetheless! [via 
Second best Tweet of the night, courtesy of Invisible Obama.
Best knock knock joke of the night. [via 
Mitt's next chapter. [via 
Sarah Palin was giving us Tan Mom meets Lisa Vanderpump. [via 
"Three Wolf moon." [via 
Dope. [via 
