Quell Your Cookie Cravings for a Cause
This Sunday, MooShoes (78 Orchard St) is hosting a vegan bakesale to benefit our friends at Woodstock Farm Animal Sanctuary. They’ll be peddling home-baked goods alongside gems from Blossom and Babycakes (pretty, pretty cookies pictured above). MooShoes will be giving 10% of all in-store and online sales that day to Woodstock too. So, stop by between noon and 5PM to shop, socialize, and cram your face, all for a good cause.

Boobies
Speaking of causes, if you’re looking for something to do Monday night, catch Philly’s rapper/singer/performer extraordinaire, Amanda Blank at Bellhouse performing a benefit for Keep-A-Breast.org, an organization that works to eradicate breast cancer by exposing young people to methods of prevention, early detection, and support through education and events like this. Get $5 off your ticket with the code IHEARTBOOBIES. Blank’s performances are legendarily party, as the kids say, and you can here some of her music on her site and, one of our favorites, Make It Take It, here.

Manhattan, the New Brooklyn

It seems there’s a little jealousy brewing over in the wee borough of Manhattan for the awesomeness explosion that is the Brooklyn Flea. The Big Social—a collaboration between four media-/architecture-/real-estate-type Manhattanites—is celebrating the inauguration of the Hester Street Fair this weekend in the open-air park at the corner of Hester + Essex in the LES. According to the organizers, the fair will be much smaller than it’s gigantically obese brother in Brooklyn, featuring a list of vendors that is “curated very carefully.” There should be about 60 booths in all, split pretty evenly between local crafters, foodies, and purveyors of things vintage, and the market will be open both Saturday and Sunday.


See That Dog?
Back over in Brooklyn, if you ever walk the stretch of Bergen between Court and Smith over in Boerum Hill, you’ve likely noticed the bizarre, monster-size, translucent ant with a top hat sculpture in the up-until-recently vacant old factory there. Well, that ant is happens to be the brainchild of artist, Xavier Roux, and it’s guarding the main exhibition hall of The Invisible Dog, the new thee-story arts center in the ‘hood. This weekend marks the center’s official opening, with their store opening party tonight, and open studios all day Saturday. Photo, Malcolm Brown.

Early Violet
Finally, Brooklyn’s indie darlings…er, like, one of Brooklyn’s 5 million indie darlings…The National are set to release their highly-anticipated follow-up to The Boxer, High Violet, on May 11. Today, via The New York Times, the band posted a high-quality streaming preview of the album. So that’s a good 18 bonus days of quality moody listening enjoyment there. Check it out along with writer, Nicholas Dawiduff‘s profile of the band.