the cave of archaic remnants

oriana on 20 Nov ’13

space type: art studio & performance venue | neighborhood: crown heights | active since: 2012 | links: facebook

The Cave is a huge basement studio in an artists’ loft building in Crown Heights. It’s a multifaceted space: part performance venue, part rehearsal studio, part gallery, part community gathering space, and it’s inhabited by a collective of musicians, dancers, sculptors, and artists.

all photos by Alix Piorun

Currently the Cave is being used as a set for an immersive dance performance called “The Cave: Archaic Remnants and the Methods of Transfer.” That name encompasses the space (the Cave), the dancers (Archaic Remnants), and the musicians (Methods of Transfer). The set, sculptures, and installation were designed by Laura Cuille, and nearly a dozen artists contributed music, dance, choreography, and more.

There will be one final performance of this unique site-specific piece on November 21st—buy tickets here. But first read my Q&A with Laura and two other contributors, Don and Arielle.

brooklyn spaces: Laura, how did the idea of this performance come about?
Laura: We all came into this space a year ago, and there was already music going on, and visual arts, and movement, but it was really loose and divided. At the time I was making life-size sculptures, and the idea of working with music and dance was in the back of my head. I was actually looking for a different space to install the sculptures, but then I realized I could put them here. So I started building the set and it just clicked that this was something we could all do together and all build off of to make it a whole.

brooklyn spaces: Don, how did the music come together? Were you inspired by the sculptures?
Don: We were collaborating together but separately, if that makes sense. The energy of creation ended up bringing our practices to a solid line instead of two parallel lines. Laura and I are kind of the same, as far as the way we work. I’m the audio version of her.

brooklyn spaces: Arielle, what’s your role?
Arielle: I’m behind the scenes, helping. I’m like the host.

brooklyn spaces: How would you describe the show to someone who hasn’t seen it or will never seen it? What are you trying to evoke with the performance?
Don: I would call it a Pompeii cave sculpture with visual stimulation and movements to cinematic music. It’s not that I wouldn’t call it dance, but I think it’s a little different. It’s almost like live shadow puppets feeding off of the music.
Laura: I think the theme is really universal. I was reading Carl Jung’s The Red Book while I was working on this piece—I’ve always been inspired by music and literature to drive me in my art. And I’ve always worked with the human figure because that’s all we can really perceive of. With the Cave it came to me like a spark, because I was just dealing with raw human emotion and psyche and all the things that are at the root of what drive us and have not changed in the history of human existence. All the other shit in society is basically just decoration and different ways to confuse what’s actually driving us, which is really raw and primal. The symbol of the Cave, and then the dance and the music—it explores all these themes, the primal human condition, confusion and pain and all these things, and accepting it more than trying to find a conclusion to it.

Arielle: Piña Bauche’s dance troupe describes themselves as a “theatrical dance company,” and they use that notion of theatre. There’s something so cinematic about the music in this piece, there’s a sort of theatrical interpretation of movement, symbols that come across with the sound as a sort of shadow and reflection of the dance. And the music, it feels like a movie score. The way it builds and falls is really cinematic. And also, the idea with this piece is that you stay in the Cave, you never leave it. After most performances you leave a space immediately, so whatever experience you’ve had or however it’s affected you, you take it with you, alone. But for this, we’ve brought other artists and musicians to continue performing after the performance, incorporating the vibe or energy from the show. That way, for the audience, whatever feelings you’re having, you don’t have to be isolated with them and you don’t have to just leave. So this isn’t an isolated performance, it’s a performance within a context, within a space, and within what’s to come afterward.

brooklyn spaces: Have any of you ever done a site-specific, multi-faceted performance like this before?
Arielle: No, it was new for everyone involved.
Don: But doing it all this in the space made it really comfortable, almost like playing in my living room. Which is not to say that I didn’t get nervous; I definitely did.
Laura: I agree, the process was so natural. It just moved so easily and so magically.

brooklyn spaces: What are your thoughts on being an artist in Crown Heights these days?
Don: I love it here. I think it’s the perfect blend of people. It’s all ages, and it’s not loud; Bushwick, which I do love, is just a lot louder. People are working really hard all over the place there, but Crown Heights is a little more mysterious, there are all these random things happening. There are a bunch of people doing really cool things right in this building. There’s a dude building boats! Tug boats, like pure wood, cedar and stuff. The people around here are so interesting, and there’s so much passion.
Arielle: This neighborhood is a lot more community based, and a lot less commercial. It just seems so natural.

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Like this? Read about more unconventional performance spaces: Gowanus Ballroom, Gemini & Scorpio Loft, Brooklyn Lyceum, Dead Herring, Bushwick Starr, Cave, Chez Bushwick

285 kent ave

oriana on 11 Nov ’13

space type: music venue | neighborhood: williamsburg | active since: 2010–2014 | links: twitter

Update, January 2014:

No one expected 285 Kent to last forever, and news of its closing was just released. It’s not worth making any grand claims about the death of DIY or the condo-ification of Williamsburg; all those things have been said, and countered, and re-said, and re-countered. Whatever—the scene moves on, new venues will spring up, and the hyper-rich will galavant along the waterfront and probably not even know what went on there before they came.

285 Kent closing is kind of a big deal, though, even if only as a high-profile sign of the times. The space has been memorialized in some terrific oral histories over the last few weeks, from Animal New York to Village Voice to Fader, not to mention the one on Noisey made up of a pastiche of Yelp comments. They’re all worth a read if you want to get a little nostalgic.

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Original post, November 2013:

One of the hubs of North Brooklyn’s DIY music scene, 285 Kent is an all-ages venue for cutting-edge music across genres. On the Williamsburg waterfront, across the street from the about-to-be-demolished Domino Sugar Factory, 285 Kent neighbors several other underground stalwarts like Glasslands, Death By Audio, Ran Tea House, and Cameo Gallery.

Trash Talk, photo by Day After Day

The space has seen several incarnations; in the mid-2000s it was Paris/London/West Nile, focusing on progressive electronic music, and before that it was Bohemian Grove (not the Bohemian Grove in Bushwick), hosting progressive raves. PLWN was started by the Shinkoyo Collective, an ever-expanding group of artists and musicians who were also behind the original Silent Barn and many more spaces across the country. Along with other Brooklyn DIY promoters, the space has been run at various times by Todd P., Babycastles, and John “Rambo.” These days 285 Kent’s booking and curation is handled by Ric Leichtung, who is also cofounder of Ad Hoc, a quarterly zine and network of taste-making music blogs.

Candy From Strangers, photo by Nicky Digital

This is the obvious point at which to mention the awful hyper-gentrification of Williamsburg, and the fact that no matter how beloved 285 Kent and other similar DIY institutions are, it’s hard not to be cynical about the likelihood that they will last much longer where they are. I guess the least pessimistic thing to say is this: go see shows at 285 Kent, as often as you can; get exposed to excellent, cutting-edge music and support the last gasp of underground Williamsburg before all that’s left is horribly shiny luxury glass condos and preposterously upscale bars for bankers.

But first check out my Q&A with Ric & Kait, who oversees daily operations.

Friends, photo by Richard Gin

brooklyn spaces: Is it a tremendous amount of work to run a space like this?
Ric: Yes, definitely. When I first started working here I was also writing for Pitchfork and Altered Zones, and it really snowballed. When you start something it’s difficult, and usually the more you work at it the easier things get. But 285 just keep getting higher and higher profile bands more and more often, and I couldn’t do it all myself. I needed a partner, and I was really lucky Kait came along.
Kait: He was starting his days at 9am writing, and then running a show until 4am. For months and months.
Ric: Yeah, but now it’s amazing. Kait’s the backbone.

Rival Mob, photo by Lukas Hodge

brooklyn spaces: If you had to be a bit reductive, what would you say is the musical personality of 285 Kent?
Ric: We basically do whatever we think is culturally relevant right now. We do a lot of buzz-y, hype-y shows, but we also do a lot of hardcore shows and progressive dance and experimental music nights.
Kait: There’s such a crazy variety. I can show up on Tuesday and work a rap show, Wednesday a local indie band, Thursday a rave, Friday a hardcore show. And it’s always really cutting-edge, underground stuff.
Ric: The goal is to create a space where there’s a lot of exchanging of ideas and cross-pollination. Lately a lot of punk and hardcore kids have been coming to the dance parties, which you really don’t see anywhere else.
brooklyn spaces: Do they dance?
Kait: Yeah! They just totally love music.
Ric: But then we also recently had a string of a really great hardcore shows. We hosted this festival our friend Adam Weitz put together, New York’s Alright, and it was very comprehensive, everything that is next level in that community.

Sharpless, photo from Village Voice

brooklyn spaces: Didn’t you guys do a big show here for CMJ?
Ric: Yeah we hosted the Pitchfork showcase, which was really special. But it was unofficial; we didn’t have any CMJ shows here this year because we’ve chosen not to participate in the festival.
brooklyn spaces: Is that something you want to talk about?
Kait: I think it’s something we should explain. My personal point of view—not affiliated with Ad Hoc or 285—is that buying a badge and not being guaranteed entry to a show? That kind of sucks. I think if you really want to see a band, you should pay the cover and support the artist. We don’t make a profit from the door. We cover our PA and staff, and the rest goes to the band.
Ric: In my opinion, the real issue with CMJ and other citywide festivals is that money only goes to the top-tier artists. Bands that should be getting $500 to $1,000 a show, they’ll be low-balled into playing for really cheap, in exchange for publicity or the opportunity to play with a really big band. The best things that were going on during CMJ this year were our Pitchfork showcase, the Arcade Fire warehouse show, and the Fader Fort, and none of that was official CMJ. It’s bullshit. They don’t pull their weight, that’s why we choose not to work with them.

What Cheer? Brigade, photo by Tod Seelie

brooklyn spaces: Okay, tell me about a particularly fun or crazy show you’ve had here.
Kait: One of my favorite nights was the Mutual Dreaming Future Times party. The promoter Aurora brought in this huge army-surplus parachute, and we hung it up inside, suspended by the pipes in the ceiling. It took hours to set up, but the place looked really, really cool. Then it turned out that there was a blizzard that night, but we still opened up because why not? And people came and were kind of stuck here, so we just partied all night, everybody in this giant parachute, in our own little bubble. It was amazing.
Ric: One of my favorites was Dreams 3.0. It was just a super forward-thinking lineup, with Pictureplane, Grimes, and Arca, who’s now producing for Kanye West. We’d done a show with this guy Arab Music a few months before, and he had such a good time that he just came back for no fucking reason to this already bonkers party, and he brought A$AP Rocky with him too. It was insane. The show went all night, Grimes didn’t go on until 3am. That’s probably the show we’ll be remembered for; it was just everything that was really really sick at that moment, in 2011, all at once. But we still do really cool stuff now, in 2013!

Tearist, photo by Chris Becker

brooklyn spaces: In some ways you bear a real responsibility, as one of the people driving this scene; you have to not know just what music is important now, but what will be important tomorrow and next month. Is that a lot of pressure? Or is it just really exciting?
Ric: I think it’s really exciting.
Kait: It’s scary sometimes, too. Sometimes I wonder, “Am I totally off on this?” But then: nope. We just do what we think is cool.
Ric: There’s this guy DJ Rashad who we really love, we started booking him a couple of years ago and no one would ever really come to the shows. And then all of a sudden people start listening to his album, and suddenly he’s the #1 electronic album from Spin, he gets a top-10 on New York Times last year, all this sudden acknowledgment. That felt really good. Or one thing I really love about this space is that I feel like we’re bringing dance and electronic music to the DIY punk-rock demographic. I wasn’t really interested in that kind of music before, but then I had some kind of epiphany and I realized this stuff is amazing and progressive in so many ways. I would say it’s kind of a weird secret agenda of ours to make dance music cool again.

Ice Age, photo from Stereogum

brooklyn spaces: I think when a booker is at the forefront of some genres, there is often an assumption that you’ll know what’s at the forefront of all the genres.
Ric: That’s what we hope.
Kait: Yeah, it’s pretty cool. On the weekends especially, we get people who have no idea what to expect, they just walk up and check out the show. We get people dressed up like they’re going clubbing wander into a noise show. And they’ll stay!

Pictureplane, picture by Andrew St. Clair

brooklyn spaces: I wonder how much longer that juxtaposition will be possible, with the way Williamsburg is going. I know it’s a bit played-out to talk about the death of this neighborhood, but being right here, with the Domino Sugar Factory about to get torn down across the street, how do you guys feel about it all?
Kait: I think it’s kind of cool, actually. I’ve had many conversations with Todd about this, because he did lay the groundwork for the DIY music scene in this area in the last decade. He’ll get really philosophical about it, very nihilistic. But I feel like all of this is bringing back that fuck-all attitude, which makes it really easy for us to just do what we want, you know? We have no idea what’s going to happen in two months, so let’s just make this place as cool and as fun as we can for as long as we can. It’s empowering. We’re laughing in the face of progress or whatever.
Ric: It’s true. It does sort of feel like there’s a death clock, but it’s okay.
Kait: Yeah, it’s like, fuck it. Fuck your death clock. Because it’s not like we’re just going to stop, even if we do lose this space. I can’t imagine Ric not booking shows, and I can’t imagine not working in a space like this. I’m here all the time and it’s just where I want to be. Sometimes it smells bad, sometimes shit breaks, but the staff is amazing, everybody works really hard to keep it all together.
Ric: It’s like a little family—not to sound too trite. And we’re planning other things all the time. We’re putting on a show in a church in LA with Julianna Barwick and Mark McGuire from Emeralds. And there’s going to be some pretty crazy stuff during New Year’s Eve—stay tuned for that.
Kait: Oh, I don’t even know about that. Is it DJ Rashad?
Ric: Maybe. It’ll be good.

285 Kent interior, picture by Nick Kuszyk who did the murals

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Like this? Read about more DIY music spaces: Fort Useless, Death By Audio, Shea Stadium, Silent Barn, Monster Island, Bushwick Music Studio, Newsonic

exapno (metropolitan exchange building)

oriana on 14 Oct ’13

neighborhood: downtown brooklyn | space type: music coworking | open since: 2010 | links: website, facebook, twitter

Founded by husband-and-wife composers Lainie and Jascha, Exapno is a coworking space for the musically minded. For a very low monthly fee, musicians (primarily “new music” composers) can rent desk space, giving them a quiet place to work on their music, network with other musicians, and give and attend performances. It’s built on the concept of a writers’ space, inspired by Paragraph in Manhattan, where Jascha was once a member.

Qubit performing; photo by Lainie

Interestingly, Exapno is just one of myriad small businesses currently residing in the fascinating Metropolitan Exchange building. The massive MEx—a 45k-square-foot, seven-floor former bank—is owned by designer Al Attara, who is striving to make it a creative startup hive. Attara has owned the building for more than three decades, but for years it was on the city’s “urban renewal” chopping block, meaning that it could be reclaimed and torn down at any time. About six years ago the building came off the list, and since then Attara has invited in a wide universe of creatives, from avant-garde furniture designers RockPaperRobot to bio research lab Genspace. The sixth floor is all architects; the fifth floor has several food importers, from chocolate to tea to fish; and the fourth floor is media-oriented, with groups like Seed Magazine and Good News Planet, a website that only prints good news. (To read more about MEx, check out this New York Times piece from back in 2011.)

MEx fifth floor, photo by Maximus Comissar

Working within this amazingly diverse community of creative entrepreneurs, Exapno is thriving—as much as it can. With a cap of around 20 musicians monthly, and restrictions such as the inability to leave instruments overnight or to put up walls or soundproofing, Exapno may have reached its growth capacity. Ultimately they may relocate to a space where they can have more control and freedom, but in the meantime they’re happily staying put. Exapno, a 501(c)3 nonprofit, is always seeking donations, and the group is open to new members—find out more on their site. But first, read my Q&A with cofounder Jascha and musician member James.

Jascha & James on left, photo by Maximus Comissar

brooklyn spaces: What does Exapno mean?
Jascha: My wife Lainie is a huge Marx Brothers fan, Harpo in particular. In his biography, Harpo talks about how when he toured Russia in the ’30s, he would see posters advertising his show, with his name written in Cyrillic, and it looked like “Exapno Mapcase.” I think we’ve only ever run into one other person who got the reference.

brooklyn spaces: How did the space get started?
Jascha: Since at least the early 2000s, Lainie had been wanting to create a performance space that was cheap to rent out, and that could function as a community nexus, a meeting place for young musicians, a way to get into the scene. Eventually we met Al, the wonderful man who owns this building. He’s incredible; instead of turning this place into condos or office space and making millions of dollars, he has filled this sort of ramshackle building with startups and indie businesses and nonprofits, just because that’s what he believes in. Anyway, Al agreed to rent us the space for whatever we could pay, so it’s sort of by his good graces that we’re here at all.

Wet Ink, photo by Lainie

brooklyn spaces: What’s it like being a member here?
James: It’s an amazing resource and access to a great community. All musicians needs space where they can make noise or quietly write music that will one day become noise, and it’s awesome to be able to get that for such a low monthly fee.

photo by Maximus Comissar

brooklyn spaces: What connects all the members? Does everyone write or make a similar kind of music?
Jascha: We rapidly discovered that with a really cheap rehearsal space, we had to find artful ways to deflect requests from garage bands or that sort of thing. That’s what’s nice about “new music”: occasionally it’s a little loud, but usually it’s like a string quartet, or a vibraphone and singer. It’s much more manageable in terms of neighbors.
James: It’s somewhat self-selecting. You can’t leave equipment here, you can’t make a lot of loud noise, so that disqualifies, say, a punk band that wants someplace to rehearse every night. Plus almost everyone I know in the “new music” community tends to be project-oriented, as opposed to in a definitive group. Which is why a resource like this is so important: we don’t have a whole band where each member can pitch in $20 a month for a space.
Jascha: There are a lot of things about music and musicians that are really quite antisocial—making lots of strange noise, leaving stuff everywhere, taking up lots of space with pianos and drum kits—so we’ve had to modify things. There’s a lot more we could be doing if we had a space we could control, but then we’d have to pay an awful lot of money. And actually, it feels like the people who mainly used the space two or three years ago are starting to move on to other things. Now I feel like the people who need the space are people we don’t know, so we need to work on getting the word out.
James: I’ve noticed a lot of new younger composers here. Suddenly there’s this new generation of really positive, spirited people doing all sorts of weird stuff, and a lot of it’s happening here.

String Noise, photo by Lainie

brooklyn spaces: Do you have any famous alumni?
Jascha: Within the modest world of the New York new music scene, sure. Dither is quite well known; they’ve been around for years and get props from major composers. They do an event every year called the Dither Extravaganza [this year’s is on October 26th, at the Gowanus Loft]. Our artistic advisory board also has some heavy hitters in it, like Morton Subotnick and Paul Lanksy.

brooklyn spaces: What’s your relationship to the neighborhood?
Jascha: The location is awesome, it’s a great hub for music. Brooklyn Academy of Music has been here forever, and recently two major venues moved in around the corner: Roulette and ISSUE Project Room. But we’re proud to say we beat them here.

Sweat Lodge, photo by Lainie

brooklyn spaces: What are your thoughts on being an artist in Brooklyn these days?
Jascha: Well, when we started this space, Lainie and I were living in Chelsea, but most of our music friends lived in Brooklyn, and increasingly the concerts we were going to were in Brooklyn too. The center of gravity for our scene—and so many other artistic scenes—has been shifting here more and more. Brooklyn is incredible right now; there’s just so much creative activity here.

Exapno rooftop, photo by Maximus Comissar

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Like this? Read about other coworking and skillshare spaces: Time’s Up, Pioneer Works, Bushwick Print Lab, Arch P&D, Urbanglass, 3rd Ward, Brooklyn Lyceum, No-Space

see.me

oriana on 23 Aug ’13

space type: art gallery | neighborhood: long island city | active since: 2013 | links: website, facebook, twitter

You’ve probably heard of See.Me already. The organization used to be called Artists Wanted, and they were well known for their Art Takes Times Square projects, where artists could compete for the chance to see their creations writ huge on a Times Square billboard. Or you may have heard of the group’s founders: William Etundi, who used to throw the massive Danger parties, and Jason Goodman, one of the founders of 3rd Ward.

At the Exposure exhibit

See.Me is an amalgamation of the awesome skills and ideas from all of those projects. It’s an interactive online platform where artists create profiles to showcase their art (unlike those on Facebook, Instagram, et al., See.Me keeps none of the rights to these images) and seek donations of any amount to fund their endeavors. See.Me also has a terrific new gallery spaces in Long Island City, where they show works by the site’s “power users” in perpetual rotation, and the group continues to hold awesome contests and throw sprawling art parties, gatherings, and shows. Here’s their own intro video:

Their latest contest is called Creatives Rising, which will culminate in a massive exhibit in and around the See.Me gallery in October. Work from winning artists will be projected on the face of a 30-story condo behind the gallery (possibly with help from the Illuminator!), and hundreds of contest participants will see their work on display during the event. It’s not too late to join the fun—go here to create your own See.Me profile and get started.

But first read my Q&A with See.Me’s Outreach Coordinator, Annie Laurie!

Art Takes Times Square

brooklyn spaces: Art Takes Times Square must have been an incredible project to be a part of.
Annie: Yeah, it was. It was really fun and we got an amazing response from the community. That was when we were still Artists Wanted, and we were basically only doing competitions, but they were really ambitious competitions that no one else was doing. People had been trying to get art in Times Square for a long time, but we were the first ones to do it.

brooklyn spaces: What’s the secret? How come you guys got to do it when no one else could?
Annie: It was all Will; he’s got insane connections. His ability to disrupt things is incredible. He’s kind of into disruptive parties, that’s his thing. To pull something off like that was a real feat, but he had a bigger vision, and that’s what See.Me grew out of.

brooklyn spaces: So can you summarize See.Me’s mission?
Annie: Will wanted to take this huge community of artists we’d been building and transfer it into a new kind of social network. See.Me allows you to build your own profile that looks like a website. It’s beautiful, with a great layout; it really makes your work look better. And on top of that there’s an amazing community that’s supporting you. You can get support through Twitter or Facebook, or people can donate money—even just a dollar—if they like your work. You can use your page to sell artwork, concert tickets, whatever you want. And on top of the social network, we still do competitions to find new talent and emerging artists, and we host crazy fun events all the time. So See.Me combines a social network with real-life events.

Story of the Creatives opening at the Angel Orensanz Foundation

brooklyn spaces: How many artists have See Me profiles now?
Annie: We just reached 800,000! We grew really fast, which is so exciting.

brooklyn spaces: And it speaks to the fact that See Me found a need and was able to fill it in a really effective way.
Annie: Totally. I think people are sick of Facebook; they don’t want to have their art on there. We’re trying to fill the needs of artists—artists want a community, they want feedback, they want financial and social support, and they want to share their work with the world.

brooklyn spaces: Are the users primarily visual artists? Photographers, sculptors, that kind of thing?
Annie: You can be any type of creator. I love seeing the new communities pop up. For example, we just integrated Soundcloud into the site, and now I’m seeing tons of amazing musicians using their portfolio page to post music, videos, album artwork, and raising money to support their visions. Our fastest-growing areas are music and fashion, but the majority of users are still visual artists and photographers.

From the Exposure exhibit

brooklyn spaces: Tell me about the gallery space. Has it always been a gallery? Has it always been the home of See.Me?
Annie: We just moved here in January, and we love it. It’s a lovely gallery, and it allows us to showcase our artists’ work at all times. We don’t take any commission; if anyone sells a piece in here, it’s all theirs. We’re not exactly against the gallery system, but we kind of are. We want to give artists a chance to get their names out there without gallery representation.

brooklyn spaces: Tell me a bit about the different events you’ve done.
Annie: We just had a big exposure show for photographers. Before that we did a solo exhibition for Jun Kim, and Cinders Projects produced a printmaking show in the gallery. We’re very open if somebody wants to use our space for a show; we’ll help them out in any way we can. Our biggest event is coming up in October: the Creatives Rising exhibit. We’re going to take over this space, the adjacent warehouse, and Rockrose Park too, and we’ll be projecting the winners’ art onto the Linc LIC building right behind us.

At the Jun Kim exhibit

brooklyn spaces: What’s the goal of Creatives Rising?
Annie: It’s to get people using See.Me in a more meaningful way, seeing what See.Me can do for them. The campaign is about helping artists becoming their own representation, giving them the tools and the power to succeed without a gallery or a record label or anyone telling them what’s good. We’ll be showing lots of different artists’ work at the Creatives Rising exhibit, including a fashion line and bands and sculptures in Rockrose Park.

brooklyn spaces: What are See.Me’s future goals?
Annie: We’re working on a lot of ways to make it easier for artists to interact with each other, to build community. One example: if you need help and support with a project, soon you’ll be able to contact people in your area and figure out how to make something happen together. I’m really excited about building the community aspect of what we do even more.

The See.Me team

brooklyn spaces: Why did you choose Long Island City for the gallery, and what’s your relationship with the neighborhood? I think this is such a fascinating area.
Annie: It is, and it’s growing; it’s one of the fastest-growing startup and art scenes in New York. It’s really exciting to be part of that.

brooklyn spaces: Are you collaborating with other arts groups in the neighborhood? There are so many amazing things out here: Flux Factory, 5Pointz, Museum of the Moving Image, PS1…
Annie: We haven’t done a lot of collaborations yet since we just got here, but we’re definitely planning to. I’d love to do an all Long Island City arts day! We’re very open to collaborations, and creating a vibrant art scene in LIC is one of our main goals for the future.

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Like this? Read about more art galleries: Wondering Around Wandering, #OccupyWallStreet art show, Ugly Art Room, 950 Hart Gallery, Concrete Utopia, Invisible Dog

brooklyn lyceum

oriana on 5 Aug ’13

space type: performance venue | neighborhood: park slope | active since: 1910 | links: website, facebook, twitter

This is by far the oldest space I’ve written about. It was built in 1910 as a public bathhouse, boasting 100 showers and the largest indoor pool in the country. You can still see evidence of its past on the façade: etched onto the top are the words “PVBLIC BATH,” and there are two entrances, one each for men and women. In the late 1930s, as part of a WPA project headed by Robert Moses, it was closed down, and then reopened in the early 1940s as a gym, which it remained for about two decades. After that it changed hands several times, going from a mattress warehouse to a transmission repair shop, among others. Then in 1994, Eric Richmond bought it to turn it into an arts center.

an early sketch of the Lyceum

In its current incarnation, the cavernous Lyceum plays host to an astonishing array of artistic events, from plays and performances to fitness classes and sprawling galas. Some highlights from the past two decades: performances from Fiona Apple, Polyphonic Spree, Yo La Tengo, Upright Citizens Brigade, Amanda Palmer, and Black Dice, plus festivals like KingCon Brooklyn, Oxheart’s Canvas, NY Zine Fest, and the Brooklyn International Film Festival.

The Lyceum also has a daytime marketplace for coffee and local products, and soon there will be coworking space available during the days as well. And the building is available for rental, so if you’re looking for a really unusual place for that’s steeped in Brooklyn history for your shindig, you’ve probably found it. In the meantime, check out my Q&A with Eric Richmond.

 

brooklyn spaces: What’s it like being the caretaker of such an immense old space?
Eric: We got involved with the property in 1994, and we’re just constantly working on fixing it up. We’ll fix something, have some events and shows to generate more revenue, then fix something else, then have more events and shows, like that. Most of the basics are done by now, but there’s always more work to be done.

Holiday Craft Market, pic from Markets of New York

brooklyn spaces: What was the area like when you got here?
Eric: This wasn’t a good area, not even close. There were gang members on the stoop, people getting shot in the subway. When we first started working on the building, we went out into the neighborhood and talked to as many of the older residents as we could, to try to get them excited about what we were doing. By and large, the response was, “It’s a beautiful building, but I want nothing to do with it.” There had been such bad things happening on this block for four or five decades that everyone would avoid it. I heard from one woman that some kids had died in the building; they cut a hole in the fence of the balcony and dove in the pool, which was only about two feet deep at that end.

pic from Cabalaza

brooklyn spaces: So what did you have to do to get the older people to start coming here?
Eric: Oh, I never got them. I made the effort, but it never worked. But then things started changing in the neighborhood anyway. In 1998, a bunch of kids across the street tried to build a bomb and blow up Atlantic Terminal. It hit the news big-time, the Feds swooped in, and the city started making a serious effort to clean up the neighborhood. There were drug busts two or three times a week for about six months. A retired policemen once told me that the area around Union St and 5th Ave had one of the highest concentrations of crack dealers in the city. So they had to root out that kind of stuff.

at Oxheart's Canvas, pic by Carlos Henriquez

brooklyn spaces: Wow. 1998 wasn’t that long ago.
Eric: Right. So all I did was hang on long enough, you know? I mean, I cleaned up the best I could in the meantime, but for a long time, 4th Ave was just a dumping ground for everything. There were times when car doors would get thrown over our fence, bumpers, giant piles of concrete rubble, even a wardrobe. One time, about two dozen huge red plastic letters showed up inside our fence. So I played Scrabble with them, and what did it spell? Associated Supermarket. I walked up the block, went into the store, and said, “You guys just dumped your old shit in my yard. Come deal with it.” They said, “We didn’t dump it!” I had to lay out the letters and show them.

hoop meditation class

brooklyn spaces: So are you seeing positive effects of the huge influx of new people in the neighborhood? Are you getting more foot traffic?
Eric: It’s hard to tell because the café is on hiatus. Now there are six places around here where you can get a great cup of espresso, so we have to figure something else out. We’re going to be opening a fairly large coworking space in a couple of months, so it’ll be interesting to see how that goes.

from Oxheart's Canvas, pic by Nicole de Waal

brooklyn spaces: Do you have some favorite events or performances that have happened here?
Eric: We had a rock musical early on that was really tremendous, it was based on David Bowie. About a decade ago we had a Broadway dancer choreograph the musical On the Town with songs about New York. That was one of the best shows I’ve ever seen. A year or so ago we had a Rocky: The Musical workshop here; they took over the whole space, built a ring, did all their rehearsals and some performances, and then went off to Germany to perform there. There have been some amazing music acts, too: Fiona Apple, Yo La Tengo, stuff like that.

Civilians theater company, pic by Adrian Kinloch

brooklyn spaces: Are there some lessons you’ve learned from doing this for so long?
Eric: Lately we’ve been thinking a lot about what we’re trying to accomplish, and working toward being more intentional. It’s important to make the events conform to the building, instead of trying to force the building to conform to the events.

from Oxheart's Canvas, pic by Ralph Andre

brooklyn spaces: So are there particular things you’d like to have more of?
Eric: We’ll probably be reloading the music and performance end of what we do. I mean, I love music, I love bands, but loud band just don’t work here. When a DJ comes in, you can tell him all you want about sound level limits, but he won’t pay any attention. People always say “Why can’t it be louder?” Well, because you’re not in a club in Chelsea. I don’t have eighteen-inch brick walls, we’re not in an abandoned warehouse, you’re not going to piss off my neighbors. That limits some of the higher-profile events, but that’s fine. We’re not trying to get Jay-Z to come play here; I’d rather have more Bar Mitzvahs.

Juste Debout dance contest

brooklyn spaces: Are there other things you want to talk about about your experiences here? You’ve been doing this a long time; you’re part of old-guard Brooklyn.
Eric: That’s a sad thought, but probably true. The only thing I can say is that Brooklyn’s changing. It’s changing like wildfire, and it’s good to see.
brooklyn spaces: It’s nice to hear that. When I talk to people in Williamsburg or even Bushwick, the feeling is, “It kind of sucks; we’re about to get priced out.”
Eric: Well the problem is, they didn’t buy. People who are in a space temporarily don’t tend to think about being part of the infrastructure. They have an itinerant arts ethos and style that has to up and move all the time. You’re going to see them in Brownsville next, and then East New York, and then Ocean Hill.

upper floor of the Lyceum being used as a gym

brooklyn spaces: Yeah, and then Detroit. Because we’re running out of places to go.
Eric: Well, it’ll take a long time. I go to Williamsburg and see all the people there, all the development, it’s unbelievable. I remember getting held up a couple times in Williamsburg; now it’s got athletic facilities and tens of thousands of people milling about every weekend. I think it’s a good thing. When I go to Bed-Stuy and see Dough, the best doughnut place in the city, right next to the projects, how is that wrong?

Face the Music, pic by Kaufman Center

***

Like this? Read about more historic buildings: Brooklyn Historical Society, Bushwick Schoolhouse, Breuckelen Distilling Co., Broken Angel, South Oxford Space, Trinity Project

silent barn redux

oriana on 17 Jul ’13

neighborhood: ridgewood | space type: music, art, events | active since: 2013 | links: website, facebook, twitter

By now everyone probably knows the storied history of the Silent Barn. The band Skeletons started the DIY venue in their Ridgewood apartment in 2005 (which I profiled back in 2009), and until 2011 it was a raucous, dingy, rollicking good time—and then they got ransacked. Around $15k worth of equipment was destroyed, and then the city came in and evicted them. That probably should have been that, but the Silent Barn launched a Kickstarter, which brought in more than $40k. So they decided to start over, but this time, to be as legit and legal as they could be.

the Husk; photo from Showpaper

Fast forward to early 2013, and the Silent Barn 2.0 opened its doors in Bushwick. The new incarnation is definitely a continuation of the Husk (which the original space is now called), on a much bigger scale. The building itself is a lot lager—three floors and a yard, with eight bedrooms, thirteen roommates, three stages (or more, as needed), an art gallery, a dozen art and recording studios, and on and on. The scope is bigger too; in addition to music shows nearly every night, there’s the Babycastles videogame collective, science art, Aftermath Supplies artist reuse shop, multimedia video art events, a supper club, piñatas, theatre groups, and a whole lot more. And the community involvement this time around is huge: there are about 150 people participating, in various degrees, in the conceptualizing and running of the space. Administration is framed on the metaphor of a kitchen, and there are about 60 Chefs, each responsible for keeping a small aspect of the Barn going. It’s all volunteer, all consensus, and all making it up as they go along. It is, I think, pioneering a new way to do DIY—intentional, flexible, transparent, and innovative. (Want to join in the fun? Go here.)

Here’s a short Q&A with Katie, the Press Chef, and below that I asked two questions of a dozen different Barn members: 1) What’s your favorite event you’ve participated in here, and 2) Why, out of all the myriad ways you could be spending your time, is Silent Barn where you want to be?

brooklyn spaces: From the structure of the collective to the special vocabulary to all these working groups—did that evolve spontaneously as you figured it out, or was there a model you were working from?
Katie: We’re making it up as we go. We have weekly Kitchen meetings with all the Chefs, and part of that is Stew, which is all our discussion topics, whether it’s what murals are coming up or how to deal with conflict resolution; everything goes in the Stew and we work it out together.

all pix by Alix Piorun unless noted

brooklyn spaces: I love that. I feel like this space is really breaking new ground in a lot of ways, sort of changing the meaning of DIY in Brooklyn.
Katie: Well, there’s a responsibility here. Places come and go, you know? When the Husk was ransacked, we had such a huge reaction from the community, so it was our responsibility to do things the right way. After the Kickstarter, we could have re-opened the next day—and then probably gotten shut down again. So we decided to focus on longevity. I think we’re really on the right path. People always try to define DIY; we’re still doing it ourselves, we’re just doing it differently. It’s not like we’re trying to change the model for other spaces; this is just what we have to do. Plus look at this! This place rules! This never would have happened if we hadn’t taken the route we took.

Martha Moszczynski’s painting and piñata studio

brooklyn spaces: What are your thoughts on the neighborhood? What’s it like being in Bushwick now, especially after having been in Ridgewood?
Katie: We’re really trying to make ourselves an asset to the neighborhood. We go to community board meetings every month. We want people to know us and recognize us, to know that they can come to a show or book a show or play a show or put up some art. We really want to find new ways to integrate with the community and make our presence a positive thing.

***

brooklyn spaces: What’s your favorite event you’ve participated in here?

Katie: I like the ones that seem to be holistic Barn, like when there’s a house show and a complimentary show downstairs. Like the Modular Equinox, which took place in every single room. It was really neat to have that kind of foot traffic everywhere, even in the “private” areas.

Tricia: Lani’s birthday party. We had been holding our breath waiting for a liquor license for so long, and I think that was the first show where we’d really come into our own. It was this giant wild night, everyone went crazy, just the whole Barn partying.

Joe Ahearn (Showpaper): This question never gets easier. I’ve seen / thrown / taken part in easily over a thousand shows at Silent Barn! My favorites are those that come out the blue from old friends, the ones that have strange challenges, the ones with moments that feel like magic, the ones that somehow discover a new way to use a place that thousands of bands have been playing with for years.

zine library

Mila (website): I trust that if I show up on any given night, I will see something intriguing. One evening that stands out is the Public Meeting we had in May,“Women in DIY.” It was amazing to see the room filled with women who have done really extraordinary things. It felt supportive and positive, inspiring and motivating, to be a participant in this community.

Theresa (Internal Events Chef): The Wild Boys Immersive Party, which had performances, dream machine, food, piñata, art, community costumes, etc.

another living room; sometimes transforms into the Hawkitori Dinner Club

Larissa (Paesthetics Octopus): No offense to the events (and I’ll give another shoutout to that Modular Solstice night when there were three completely different events going on simultaneously), but it’s the times in between the events and the things that happen because events are going on that I most remember.

Arielle (Aftermath Supplies): My favorite events are the ones I don’t show up for on purpose. I’ll be working in the shop or my studio and there will just be someone singing their heart out or the most nasty thrash band totally destroying. I stumble into the show room with total awe and appreciation of what’s going on and that I happen to be there to witness it.

Deep Cuts (barber shop + record shop)

Nathan Cearley (Dark Cloud Chef): On the one hand, I really love the Modular Synthesizer Solstice and Equinox shows I curate here, because I always include so many individuals who are part of the community and have such crazy visions about weird electronics. On the other hand, I really love our weekly administration meetings because it’s crazy how much we get done for a group with no traditional top-down hierarchy. Both “events” speak to the possibility of surprise still existing in such a dead, predictable, monotonous society.

***

brooklyn spaces: Why, out of all the myriad ways you could be spending your time, is Silent Barn where you want to be?

Brandon: I used to do house shows in Michigan, and the intimacy and humanity of that scale of cultural happenings was really important. When I moved to New York I was so depressed, going to all these crappy clubs where they tally at the door how many people paid for your band. It just sucked. And then I found the old Barn and it was so different. It’s a way to exist in New York and interact with other people on a much more human level.

Gravesend Recordings / Future 86 Recording Studio

Katie: I think that’s what a lot of our answers are, actually. I’m from a small town in Mississippi, where there aren’t any clubs or bars or anything, so it’s only DIY stuff, jamming with your friends, playing in someone’s basement or on the beach or whatever. And I was so depressed when I moved to New York too; I got stuck in this dorm with these people I didn’t get, and the Husk was the first place I felt at home. It’s home and family, that’s why we do it.

Larissa (Paesthetics Octopus): I love working toward the future of Silent Barn along with all these other pretty incredible people who all have such different talents and viewpoints, knowing that I might never had the change to even meet them otherwise.

backyard during Warper blockparty

Tricia: I’m here because I can be. I can’t think of anywhere else that would say, “Hey neuroscientist, come have a space!” Not only can I learn about art and music and DIY culture, but I can collaborate with artists. It’s just amazing to do science and art in the same space. And to show it to people who want to see it!

Theresa (Internal Events Chef): Being here lets us work with a bunch of people who are good at things we’re not good at. For a recent show, Martha made a huge dick piñata for us. It would have taken me ages to figure out how to make a dick piñata! There’s so many skillsets here. You can just email the Kitchen saying, “I need this weird thing. Does anyone have it or can anyone do it?” and you get three emails back saying, “I can do that!”

another living room; paintings by Devin Lily, photography by Nina Mashurova

Arielle (Aftermath Supplies): The constant friction and motion of interacting with people, art, life, and general day-to-day bullshit, like emptying trash cans or drinking coffee and sharing “that time I puked” stories over a taco. Navigating a place that is a whole made up of parts, and all the interesting drama that brings about, while ultimately having a community of people who’ve got your back. A second place to call home, to take creative refuge in.

One the living rooms; art by Lena Hawkins, Lani Combier-Kapel, Jen May

Lani (Volunteer Chef): It’s easy to get wrapped in bar culture here, or to just go to a show and leave to go home, fall asleep, and go to your 9–5 job. That’s not the life I’m interested in; I want to be immersed in the art and music that happens here. Being involved in Silent Barn satisfies a part of my personality that helps me grow as an artist and musician.

Eli (Art Chef): Silent Barn is an excellent experiment in joining art, life, and politics. We’ve managed to corral so many brilliant people and force their conflicts and concordances into creating something with the potential to be truly new and exciting.

Nina (hosts Phresh Cutz): It’s this great community environment that really supports experimental ideas or any kind of creative thing. My whole life, the events I’ve really enjoyed and been inspired by have been in community-based creative art spaces like this, so it’s really great to support that and help facilitate it by giving people space to do what they want to do.

Phresh Cutz, photo by Meghan O’Byrne

Kunal (Babycastles): The thing that’s important is the promise of this strange experiment actually producing something of immense value to the world. Once we get all the pieces solidly in place, a massively successful mechanism of including participation from almost anyone interested, a successful “community-building” pathway for any new voice interested in gathering and growing any piece of culture inside of a stew of culture, successfully extending the value of all this community, strengthening the celebration to our direct neighbors and thereby to the city as a whole as a truly exhaustively functioning projection of the social ecosystem that the world should be, the potential for the thing to be so strong that it continues to channel and nurture and organize new voices in art and communication almost entirely, and finally, some sort of flowering and seeding aspect, where the energy is too much for the small space, and the vision encompassed inside starts to blow up, fly with the wind to surrounding areas, and just take over life in the city itself, and the ideas propagate strongly and successfully. Stuff like that.

Hieroglyph Thesaurus performing

Joe Ahearn (Showpaper): Silent Barn acts as an artistically inclined autonomous zone, where we get to make the rules and share the work we want and are excited by. I don’t think it’s too different than the DIY ethos of other collective art spaces in Brooklyn and around the world throughout history, but I happen to live here and want to be able to participate directly in the culture I consume, and this is as solidly sustainable a way to do so, on my own terms, that I’ve found in New York.

Mila: The Barn is a place where my ideas about what I can and can’t do are constantly challenged. I am constantly forced to reexamine how I think and how I do things, because infinitely more is possible, permissible, and at stake. Plus it feels like family.

Title:Point theatre company’s desk/workspace.

Nathan Cearley (Dark Cloud Chef): I participate in the Silent Barn because it’s giving vitality and substance and life to the concept of constructing our own world—a concept that I find hyper-American but strangely near extinct in this country today. I love experiencing the art and ideas that all these diverse individuals create and, in a broader sense, I love helping to create the space that makes that human freedom possible.

***

Like this? Read about more collectives: Flux Factory, Monster Island, the Schoolhouse, Hive, Bushwick Project for the Arts

acme studio

oriana on 31 May ’13

space type: photo studio & prop house | neighborhood: williamsburg | active since: 2010 | links: website, facebook, twitter, tumblr

Listen, I’ve been to a lot of wacky spaces through this project, but Acme is one of the wackiest. It’s just teeming with the wildest array of things—figurines and furniture and statues and taxidermy and instruments and tchotchkes of all shapes, sizes, and hues. Even the bathrooms are like tiny stuff galleries! And the most amazing part? It’s the most organized chaos I’ve ever seen.

photos by Maximus Comissar unless noted

Acme is a one-stop shop for your film and photo needs: run by industry veterans, they can do everything from designing and custom-building a set, to supplying a dizzying array of props, to shooting the whole thing. And they certainly have done all that, for increasingly high-profile clients, from Missy Elliot to Zac Efron to Heidi Klum. They shot the David Cross cover for Brooklyn Magazine, hosted the secret premier of season two of Girls with HBO and Flavorpill, and throw fabulous fundraisers for the Burning Man camp A Cavallo. And they also hold benefits, parties, lectures, classes, and more, and are always open to new ideas for fabulous uses of this fabulous space. So hit ‘em up with your ideas, and go check out an event or two! But first read my interview with operations manager Brian Colgan.

"Girls" screening, photo from Acme's tumblr

brooklyn spaces: How did this all come about?
Brian: It was started by Shawn Patrick Anderson, a set designer and prop stylist. He had a storage and workspace down by the Navy Yard that was full of all this crazy stuff, and people kept wanting to do photos and videos there. He had a series of kind of high-profile shoots there, like Sonic Youth and the band Chairlift, and finally he was like, “What if this could actually be a thing?” Most studios are just a big empty white box with a cyc, that big curved white wall that you do the photo shoot in front of. They’re totally sterile and boring, and you have to bring everything in with you. So the beauty of Acme, what Shawn realized people were responding to at his studio, is why not have a crazy amount of stuff in the studio that people can use in their shoots?

brooklyn spaces: So are you guys actively amassing more stuff?
Brian: We’re always amassing more stuff. There’s so much stuff! It’s really a question of deciding what makes sense to keep, which is always tough.

brooklyn spaces: Especially when you’re trying to impose order on such an eclectic collection.
Brian: Exactly. For instance: we have a lot of taxidermy, which is hard to get in the city, because it’s really expensive and fragile. So we were like, “Okay, let’s be the taxidermy people.” Now we’re always looking for more. There are definitely holes we can fill in the New York City prop world.

brooklyn spaces: I had no idea there even were prop shops, let alone so many that you have to make an identity for yourself among them.
Brian: Oh yeah, there’s a bunch of places. A lot of them specialize in modern, clean, white stuff, because so many people want that. We’ve decided we want to have the most unique, weird things. When someone’s like, “Where can I get a furry armchair?” someone else will tell them, “You’ve got to go to Acme.” I get the craziest requests. Like, “Do you have ten person-size Mountain Dew cans?”

brooklyn spaces: What?! Do you?
Brian: No, but I usually know who does. The film and photo community in New York is small but growing, because the city seems to have realized that there’s a lot of money in this. If you go out to LA, there’ll be a guy whose entire operation is, like, John’s Life-Size Mountain Dew Cans. But in New York, with real estate at such a premium, no one can afford to store all that. Someone called the other day to see if we had a log cabin. An entire cabin! It’s definitely a wacky world.

brooklyn spaces: If a band comes in here and is like, “We want to use the life-size disco ball, that taxidermied deer head, and the paint-covered inflatable baby,” would you be like, “Ooh, Sonic Youth used those same props”?
Brian: Nah, we’d just let it go. Even if things get reused, the application is going to be different or the lighting is going to be different or whatever. And anyway, if you brought twenty people in here and had them pick the coolest object, they’d pick twenty different things. We’re all inspired by a different taxidermied animal.

dressing room

brooklyn spaces: Who are some of your favorite clients you’ve had or favorite projects you’ve worked on?
Brian: It’s always fun to travel, which we do a fair amount. We just did probably our biggest job ever, a Diet Coke commercial down in Nashville with Taylor Swift. As for things we’ve done here, one of our most ambitious projects was building a huge multi-level snow cave for a Heidi Klum fashion project. When Heidi got here, she was like, “This place is crazy!” She made her mom come, she told her friend to cancel her flight, and they all just stayed and hung out. All types of people come in here and are like, “Whoa, this is so amazing! You have the coolest job ever!” and I’m like, “Oh, right, I do.”

Heidi Klum set, photo from Acme's tumblr

brooklyn spaces: And you guys have other kinds of events here as well, right?
Brian: We do. We have this awesome space, and so many people need space, so I’m really excited to share it. We’re open to anything, for the most part. Well, I do get a lot of calls where people are like, “Okay, we’re gonna have sixteen DJs, five bars, and six thousand people!” Which: no. None of that. But we’re pretty open to reasonable things. We had a writing group in here recently, like fifty folks writing in total silence. We’ve had swinger sex nights, we’ve done underground dinner parties, we had a big Ethiopian coffee ceremony with Bunna Café. After Hurricane Sandy, Observatory, the event space in Gowanus, got flooded, and they called and were like, “We’ve got this lecture coming up, the speaker is on a plane from London right now, and we don’t have a space.” So we had that here, which led to Observatory scheduling other things here, including some taxidermy classes. Basically, we have this cool space, so why the hell wouldn’t we share it?

wood shop

brooklyn spaces: I love that! That seems like such a Brooklyn ethos. What are your thoughts about Brooklyn these days, especially this hyper-gentrifying part of Williamsburg?
Brian: When we first opened Acme three years ago, we got a lot of resistance from people about shooting in Brooklyn, but now celebrities want to come here, sometimes more than Manhattan. Not to knock studios in Manhattan, but why would you want to shoot there? Just trying to load things in is impossible. And this is such a thriving area; right on our block we’ve got Mast Brothers, the Brooklyn Art Library, About Glamour, and there’s new stores opening all the time. I definitely love being in Brooklyn. The creative class has absolutely moved over here, so it seems like a natural place to do creative things.

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Like this? Read about more film industry spaces: Film Biz Recycling, Running Rebel Studios, Factory Brooklyn, Bond Street Studio

gemini & scorpio loft

oriana on 20 May ’13

neighborhood: gowanus | space type: art & events | active since: 2011 | links: website, facebook, twitter, flickr

G&S Glitter Ball, NYE 2013 (photo by Linus Gelber)

For ten years, Gemini & Scorpio have been throwing huge, immersive themed parties, consistently positioning themselves at the forefront of the NYC underground art-party world. Along with a few other beautifully creative affairs—Rubulad, Dances of Vice, Shanghai Mermaid, Cheryl, various Winkel + Balktick shindigs—Gemini & Scorpio curate the most creative, daring, and over-the-top events that Brooklyn has to offer. Whether it’s jazz bands in a Russian banya, a steampunk Burning Man fundraiser, an old-meets-new electro-swing dance party at Lincoln Center, or a New Year’s Eve glitter explosion, Gemini & Scorpio bring together dancers, music, and performers around lavish themes to create unforgettable occasions, party after party after party. And that’s not all: G&S also curate a weekly events listing that is second only to NonsenseNYC for finding the most fantastic things to do any day of the week. Sign up here!

After years of being nomadic, Miss Scorpio found a permanent home for G&S in a repurposed Gowanus woodshop. Now, in addition to lavish monthly parties, the loft hosts lectures, dance classes, plays, photo and video shoots, and more. And after spending months on demolition and build-out of the new space, Miss Scorpio reached out to the community she has provided with so many fantastic experiences to ask for help with the next stage of development of her space—and successfully raised more than $32k through Kickstarter. In the short term, this will mean new floors, walls, and ceiling for the loft, and in the long term it will allow G&S to keep bringing us all the best, most magical affairs—the uniquely beautiful experiences that make Brooklyn the most spectacular place to be.

photos by Maximus Comissar unless noted

brooklyn spaces: Let’s start before this space: tell me how you became one of New York’s most creative party mavens.

Miss Scorpio, photo by Linus Gelber

Miss Scorpio: It was a pure accident that started with a website about online dating. This was ten years ago, when online dating was mostly considered weird and sad, but Miss Gemini and I wanted to show people that it was actually this fabulous thing, like eBay for dating. We thought you should never just do dinner and a movie with your online date; you should do something interesting, so that even if the date sucked, at least you’d have had a cool night. So every Friday we put out a list of unique things to do with your online date, and then we started throwing “singles parties that don’t suck.” Well, they didn’t suck to such a degree that we couldn’t keep couples out! We started with a Valentine’s Day party, then we did one for Halloween, and another one for New Year’s, and now it’s ten years later and this is all I do.

brooklyn spaces: What elements are necessary to make a Gemini & Scorpio party?
Miss Scorpio: First there has to be a theme, something a bit off-beat and unexpected that gives people an excuse to dress up. Live entertainment is another factor that’s really important: there’s generally a whole evening of programming curated to the theme. A G&S party isn’t one you drop into casually on your way to something else; our ideal party guest is one who leaves the house knowing that they’re coming to see us, dresses to the theme, and stays with us for the whole night.

brooklyn spaces: Tell me about some of your favorite parties.

banya party, photo from G&S

Miss Scorpio: I always enjoy the Lost Circus steampunk party, and also the banya parties, which we’ve been doing since 2006. A fantastic recent party was a sci-fi mashup called Cantina at the End of the Universe. It was a Star Wars Day party—I’ve been wanting to do that party for four years, but I had to wait until May 4th fell on a Saturday. One of the headliners was Big Nazo, this incredible alien monster funk band. They played the Masquerade Macabre Halloween party that I co-produced with Rubulad in 2010, which had one of my favorite moments of any party I’ve ever done. Big Nazo was onstage being joined by the five-piece Raya Brass Band, and I was leading a parade from our other party location, headed up by Extraordinary Rendition, a fifteen-person brass band. Big Nazo and Raya were supposed to be done when we got there but they weren’t, so we had like thirty people onstage jamming, along with these enormous alien monster puppets, and the crowd just lost their shit. It was beautiful. [Video of the madness here.]

Big Nazo, photo from G&S

brooklyn spaces: Who are some other favorite performers you’ve worked with?
Miss Scorpio: There’s definitely a family of performers that I book again and again. Sxip Shirey is an absolute genius composer and musician, and every time he plays I’m excited to hear it, especially when he performs with the incredible beat-boxer Adam Matta. The Love Show dancers are wonderful, they combine classical dance training with a cabaret attitude and fantastic costumes. Shayfer James is a terrific dark rock musician who deserves a much bigger audience than he’s getting. Sometimes I take on artists as a personal cause, and keep booking them until people realize how incredible they are.

G&S piano

brooklyn spaces: Have you ever had someone get so big that they outgrow your parties?
Miss Scorpio: Yes! After I booked the Hot Sardines for my Lincoln Center Midsummer Night’s Swing two years ago, their career has exploded and they are now booked constantly. That’s happened with a bunch of circus people I used to book as well. But it’s a good problem to have. I’m very proud of my talented friends.

brooklyn spaces: Okay, let’s talk about this space. How long did you spend looking for it, and what shape was it in when you found it?
Miss Scorpio: Four years of constant searching, and in the end it was a random Craigslist find. The moment I walked in, I knew this was it, even though it was completely wrecked. There was plywood over all the windows, the floor was rotted in multiple places, there were strange pipes everywhere, the ceiling was half rotted out, there were signs of a recent fire. It was terrible.

a few months after move-in

brooklyn spaces: How long did it take you to get it into shape?
Miss Scorpio: First there were two months of just demolition. Everything you see, all the walls, we did it all. We re-laid much of the floor, using wood repurposed from other parts of the space. Once we got bathrooms up—with walls—I knew I was ready to let people in. The first party we did here was Swing House, one of my 1920s remix parties. Everybody loved it, but it was a party in a construction zone.

fixing the rotted floors

brooklyn spaces: Tell me about some of the non-party events you’ve had here.
Miss Scorpio: We’ve hosted a few lectures in conjunction with Observatory that have been great fun. We had one called “How to Trespass” with Wanderlust Projects, and another with my boyfriend, lexicographer Jesse Sheidlower, called “Sex in Dictionaries.” We just had a storytelling event, “I’m Tawkin’ Here,” which was all New Yorkers and New York stories. Brooklyn Swings does a weekly swing-dancing class. We hosted an immersive, participatory version of Midsummer Night’s Dream staged by Shakespeare Shakedown. I’m always looking for people who are doing innovative, interesting things and could benefit from having access to an affordable art space.

Meet Me in Paris Cabaret, photo by Binnorie Artwork

brooklyn spaces: What’s your relationship like within the rest of the underground arts community? I feel like, of everyone I’ve interviewed, you really know every single person in the creative class in Brooklyn.
Miss Scorpio: It’s an extremely tight-knit community. It’s not just me; I think we all know each other. But because I do the event listings, I have a good sense of what everyone is up to. Even if I don’t know someone personally, I can tell you what arc their work has taken over the last ten years.

G&S rooftop view

brooklyn spaces: Last year when you and I were doing Occupy Sandy volunteering together, you told me you once did the listings on your phone from Paris.
Miss Scorpio: Oh yeah. Another time I did them from a tethered connection in an RV on the way to Burning Man. Everywhere I’ve traveled, I’ve brought the listings with me. I consider it my community service, a way for me to give back to the people who trust me and honor me with their presence at my events.

 

 

G&S rooftop art

brooklyn spaces: What advice would you give someone who wanted to do what you do?
Miss Scorpio: I’d say definitely don’t get into it for the glamour! Ninety percent of what I do is spreadsheets and emails. Maybe by 11 or 12 on a party night I’ll finally get to get into costume and have a few hours of fun, but for the most part it’s a job like any other. For me the payoff is conceiving something and then seeing it become a reality.

brooklyn spaces: What are your plans for the future—ten more years of this?
Miss Scorpio: Oh gosh, I don’t know. It does seem like I’m pretty committed to the New York cultural underground, but I couldn’t tell you what will happen in my life in the next ten years. I hope it’s big and exciting.

***

Like this? Read about more underground nightlife: Rubulad, the Lab, Red Lotus Room, Newsonic, House of Yes, Gowanus Ballroom, 12-turn-13

broken angel

oriana on 15 Mar ’13

neighborhood: clinton hill | space type: living space, maker | active since: 1979 | links: facebook, flickr

This article was written for Hyperallergic. See the original here.

Most of the coverage you’ll find about the Broken Angel, a handmade architectural marvel in Clinton Hill, begins the story in 2006, when there was a small fire that started all the trouble. That’s the year the tale switches from one about brilliant bohemian artists building their crazy dreamhouse to one about an eccentric old man overwhelmed by legal troubles, shady business partners, and the strangling bureaucracy of the city.

Before I delve into a little history of this incredible space, here’s the time-sensitive part: there’s a block party tonight to say farewell to the Broken Angel, which was originally organized as a small, ten-person gathering but has ballooned to an enormous, two-part spectacle, with over 900 people planning to attend. The festivities begin outside the house itself (4–6 Downing St.) for a family-friendly fête, and will then move to the Irondale Center for a fundraiser turned Brooklyn underground extravaganza, filled to the brim with dancers and performers and tall bikes and DJs and many, many surprises.

And now please read on to learn more about the mad genius whose work is being celebrated.

Arthur Wood has been likened to an American Gaudí. The Broken Angel has been compared to LA’s Watts Towers and Austin’s Cathedral of Junk. Borough President Marty Markowitz called it “a Rubik’s Cube of a spaceship.” It’s been termed vernacular architecture, folk art, outsider art, and—naturally, by some—a frightening eyesore. In its heyday, the Brooklyn Angel was surely the most strikingly unique sculptural works in all of New York. Tragically, much of it has been dismantled in the past decade, and what’s left is not likely to last much longer.

Arthur Wood (who is now 84) and his wife Cynthia (who passed away in 2010) bought the former Brooklyn Trolley headquarters at a city auction in 1979. They paid a mere $2,000 for the four-story, 10,000-square-foot building. And then they began to turn it into art.

Cynthia & Arthur in 2005

According to Shannon Kerner, a close friend of Arthur’s, the Woods began by tearing out the walls and floors and creating many different-sized rooms, some four sweeping stories high, others only five feet. The main staircase was a series of ladders and bridges. Most of the wood and other materials used were salvaged from the streets and garbage dumps, and the space was filled with handmade stained-glass windows Cynthia created from found glass and bottles. In the basement Arthur built a hot tub with a waterfall. And the best-known element of the Broken Angel was on the roof: the Woods constructed a spectacular forty-foot wood-and-glass sculpture on a mirrored platform, which made the whole structure seem to be floating in the clouds.

Shannon describes the rooftop sculpture:

The roof structure branched into two towers. The front one had a huge camera obscura which gave a 360º view of the neighborhood (seven flights up!). You could see blocks and blocks in great detail on a huge white linoleum table scavenged from the street. There was a sweet wooden deck up there too, for stargazing (Arthur loves inventing star-gazing equipment) or hanging out or making art. The back tower was a cool sculpture; you couldn’t hang out on it so much, but you could tangle yourself in its branches (I use the term “branches” metaphorically). In the back there was also another deck that was all stucco, it was like being in the Southwest U.S. The house was an amalgam of all kinds of amazing environments!

Brandon Stanton from Humans of New York, who interviewed Arthur in 2011, said, “Arthur’s sparkling ideas were built with other people’s trash. The concepts were towering and glistening. The realities were made of plywood.” The Woods spent decades creating their masterpiece, finishing major construction in 2002. On their son Chris’ Flickr page (from which all the photos in this post are taken), he said his parents “creat[ed] a home which brought mystery, magic and magnificence to a small cul-de-sac in Brooklyn.” The Village Voice deemed it the “Best Urban Folly” of 2001. In 2002 the New York Times wrote: “Depending on the angle, Broken Angel may resemble a blimp impaled on a church or a laboratory from which some mad scientist might launch a pedal-driven flying machine.” In 2004, Michel Gondry used the Broken Angel as the backdrop for Dave Chappelle’s Block Party. It represents the kind of fantastic treasure that revitalizes your excitement about your neighborhood, that renews your faith in art triumphing over everything—up to and including reason.

And then in 2006 there was a fire. It was small, on one of the top turrets. There was minimal damage and no one was hurt, but that was the point when things began to go downhill. The firefighters on the scene deemed the building unsafe to enter, and the Department of Buildings was notified. They immediately ruled the place unfit for occupancy and evicted the Woods, who were arrested a few days later when they refused to leave. To bring the building up to code—including tearing down the forty feet of additional structure on the roof—would cost around $3 million.

The community rallied around the Woods, including Pratt architecture professor Brent M. Porter, who, along with seven of his students, tried to prove that the building was, in fact, structurally sound. When that didn’t work, the Woods partnered with real estate developer Shahn Andersen to bring it up to code and convert it into condos and art studios. This was a hopeful moment, where it seemed that Arthur’s full vision for the Broken Angel would finally be realized, saving the fantastical space and even opening it up to artists and the community.

On Brownstoner, a commenter named phyllyslim recently talked about having considered joining the project, and the plans Arthur had for it:

The building was [going to be] transformed into a “museum of light” as he termed it… There was to be a parabolic dish in the cellar where light from a prism in the then existing cupola would be directed… There was to be the “cathedral of light” in the front addition where schoolchildren would come to play with interactive exhibits in light, and much more.

In addition, Brownstoner reported at the time that Arthur planned to cap it all off by creating a huge whale out of an old helicopter and hanging it from the building.

Arthur's blueprint for the finished project

After the fire, the Chris Woods wrote, “Many of you wonder what the hell my parents are doing with that building. They have always been building an outline of a dream.” And sadly, as with most such spectacularly unlikely dreams, this one was not to be. There followed three years of complicated legal and financial troubles, with loans defaulted on, trusts broken, promises unkept, and money gone missing. Shahn and Arthur went from collaborators to litigious enemies, and the property was foreclosed upon by the lender, Madison Realty Capital, in 2009. By then Broken Angel had been mostly gutted, the majority of its superbly unique elements removed. Shortly thereafter, in 2010, Cynthia lost her long battle with cancer. Arthur has been in and out of the building ever since.

Many feel that Arthur has been unfairly treated by the city and its emissaries. Arthur himself believes the Department of Buildings started the fire in order to come in and condemn the building. In 2007, Brownstoner noted “the intense level of scrutiny and apparent lack of straight dealing [Arthur and Shahn] received from both DOB and the courts,” and Chris wrote: “The department of Buildings and the City of New York should drop their campaign of harassment and recognize that Brooklyn wants the building that Arthur Wood envisioned, not another boring box of bricks. Why is our building under such scrutiny while other buildings in NY have actually collapsed?”

And the fight to goes on. Says Shannon, “This type of structure belongs in New York, in Brooklyn. We need places like this! Instead of tearing it down the city should have worked with him to preserve it, make it safe to their standards, sure, but make it better.” Shalin Sculpham, another friend of Arthur’s, told the New York Daily News, “It’s one of the weirdest, most beautiful buildings in New York—and his life’s work. And it’s being taken away.”

Now the city has given Arthur one more final notice, so barring another stay of execution, March 30th, 2013 will be Arthur’s last day in his home of nearly thirty years. Shannon says they chose to have a block party to give people a chance to say farewell to Broken Angel, “to wish Arthur well and maybe sing him a song or dance him a dance or do something to show their support of the situation. They could bring all their favorite memories of the space, shake his hand, share some cookies…” Chris has said that they would like to put together a time capsule to hide in the building, so people can bring something small to contribute to that. Ever hopeful, friends have put out an open call for (pro bono) legal help (contact brokenangelbk@gmail.com to get involved!), and a donation page has been set up, in the hopes of raising $50,000 to keep on fighting.

the Woods' stove

So this could really be the end of Broken Angel, but people have been saying that for nearly a decade—if not longer. Arthur is old now, and tired, but he’s still feisty, and he has support from many different corners. And after all, for someone who created the miraculous Broken Angel out of salvaged bottles and boards, would it be so unreasonable to hope for a few more years to keep creating miracles within it?

***

Like this? Read about more historic buildings: Brooklyn Lyceum, Brooklyn Historical Society, Bushwick Schoolhouse, Breuckelen Distilling Co., South Oxford Space, Trinity Project

time’s up

oriana on 10 Mar ’13

neighborhood: williamsburg | space type: community space, skillshare, activism | active since: 1987 | links: website, wikipedia, facebook, twitter, flickr

Environmental-activism nonprofit Time’s Up is actually one of the very first spaces I profiled when I started this project. (Read the original post here!) But that was two whole years ago, and more importantly, I just got a new (used) bike of my own from these guys, so I wanted to remind everybody how wonderful they are. They’ve also got all sorts of new initiatives and fun things in the works, so it seemed like a great time to revisit.

open workshop, pic by Eilon Paz

Time’s Up is a volunteer-run direct-action environmental group. Their most visible project is the bike co-op, which does three main things: 1) acquires, refurbishes, and sets people up with terrific, city-friendly used bikes (like mine!) for a donation of about $200; 2) leads bike repair workshops, teaching you how to fix all the different parts of your bike, including one class per week that’s for women and trans only; and 3) opens their doors three nights a week to anyone who wants to use their vast array of tools and talk to their incredibly knowledgeable mechanics while working on your own bike. (Check their calendar for dates and times.) They also hold lots of group bike rides and work on campaigns to support causes like anti-fracking, alternative energy, and safer streets, and they’re working to turn the space into a community gathering spot, with new plans like a bi-weekly movie night.

Read on for my Q&A with Keegan, one of the bottom-liners of the bike co-op and the guy who sold me my fabulous new bike!

Keegan fixing a bike, pic by me

brooklyn spaces: How would you define the Time’s Up mission?
Keegan: At heart we’re an environmental group, and because we’re in New York City, that means trying to find sustainable ways to live in an urban environment. Bike activism is a big part of it, because bicycling is sustainable transportation, and we want to make it so that everyone feels comfortable biking in the city. That means creating safe spaces, like bike lanes, but there’s always going to be a place where the bike lane ends, so we really need the streets to be safer in general. The NYPD needs to be ticketing motorists, and when cyclists and pedestrians are killed, they need to be doing proper investigations. We’re having a ride to advocate for this on March 21—everyone should come join us!

soooo many bikes! pic by me

brooklyn spaces: Where do you get the bikes you refurbish?
Keegan: We buy them in bulk, these Dutch-style Japanese bikes called mamacharis, which means “mother chariot.” They’re terrific city-friendly bikes. They’re upright, with full fenders so you can ride them in any weather, and really good brakes so they’re safe. Basically everybody rides mamacharis in Japan, they’re hugely popular. The government actually tried to ban them, because they thought it was too dangerous for women to be riding with a child on the front and a child on the back and all the groceries too. But the women of Japan rose up to defend their bicycles, and they won, the mamachari didn’t get banned.

shipment of used bikes, pix by Steve McMaster

brooklyn spaces: Tell me about some of the group rides you guys do.
Keegan: We have a monthly moonlight ride through Central Park and another in Prospect Park, there’s a Peace Ride that goes through various peace sites in Lower Manhattan, and we have some goofy theatrical rides, which are also direct actions, like we dress up as clowns and call ourselves the Bike Lane Liberation Front. We crash into the back of cars, like “Oh hey, what are you doing in this bike lane?” and give out fake tickets, stuff like that.

group ride, pic by Rich Johnson

brooklyn spaces: Are you guys part of Critical Mass?
Keegan: Critical Mass is leaderless and worldwide, but we used to help facilitate it in New York a lot, often just by showing up. Sadly, that ride has gotten smaller and smaller due to a massive police crackdown. It’s the same reason they shut down Occupy Wall Street: they don’t want to look like they’re allowing a political demonstration. This last month there were four riders and fourteen police vehicles! So now we do First Friday rides instead—those get forty or fifty people and zero police.

fixin’ bikes, pic by Eilon Paz

brooklyn spaces: How many people are involved in Time’s Up?
Keegan: Our volunteer base is pretty huge, we have about fifteen hundred people. It’s a big, amorphous, fun group. It’s also very much a community.

brooklyn spaces: Do people come here and say “I have a wacky bike idea, can you help?”
Keegan: Oh yeah, ever since Occupy Wall Street, when we built energy-generating bikes to offset the gas generators in Zucotti Park.

energy bikes in Zucotti Park, pic by David Shankbone

brooklyn spaces: You guys used those after Sandy too, right?
Keegan: Yeah, although the bikes that were in Zuccotti were taken by the NYPD and mostly broken. We had three up and running when Sandy hit, and we deployed them right away, on the Lower East Side. When the LES got power back we took them to the Rockaways. We were also doing group rides out there three times a week, delivering goods. Through Occupy Sandy, we got funding to build fifteen more energy bikes, and some of them are still in the Rockaways. The People’s Free Medical Clinic is using two of them instead of getting hooked back up to the grid.

energy bike in the LES, post-Sandy, pic by Margot Julia DiGregorio

brooklyn spaces: How did Time’s Up end up in Williamsburg?
Keegan: We used to be at 49 East Houston St., and we got kicked out of there when the owner sold it to a developer. We were scrounging around for space and we did a direct action in Williamsburg when the Bedford Ave bike lane was taken out, a mock funeral for the lane. We got quite a bit of press for that, and the landlord here, Baruch Herzfeld, who’s a pretty dramatic and funny bike advocate himself, really liked what we were doing. This space was actually previously a bike shop, and he let us move in and take it over.

bike forks, pic by me

brooklyn spaces: Do you feel that being in Williamsburg has had an affect on the space, the mission, the way it’s run, that sort of thing?
Keegan: Definitely. Being here dictated so much of what we did for the first couple of years, because we’re right on the borderline between Chasidic Williamsburg and hipster Williamsburg. When we opened the co-op, we had a shocking number of Chasidic people coming in to fix their bikes, both men and women. It’s really interesting to see them come here and work alongside a bunch of hipsters who obviously have very different values, and then they find out that they’re really not so different: they all want to work on their bikes, they all want to live cheaply and sustainably.

tools! pic by me

brooklyn spaces: Tell me a nice fond memory you have from your time here.
Keegan: It’s all pretty good. After every single workshop I’m like, “Wow, that was great!” I just helped this guy fix his bike who does the programming for the tiny theatre down the block, Spectacle. I also got to help a woman who had been hit by a car. It’s just so much great community building; we all become friends by the end of the night. Every workshop is a terrific experience.

***

Like this? Read more about community spaces: No-Space, Trees Not Trash, Bushwick City Farms, Brooklyn Free Store, The Illuminator, Occupy Wall Street art show, Books Through Bars