south williamsburg – brooklyn spaces

uniondocs

oriana on 27 Feb ’14

space type: movies, event space, nonprofit | neighborhood: williamsburg | active since: 2005 | links: website, facebook, twitter

UnionDocs is a center focused on documentary art in all its facets. They put on about 100 events a year—primarily screenings, but also workshops, panels, radio-listening events, photography lectures, discussions, and more. These events have an “intensive” model, bringing together a gathering of people around a certain film, genre, topic, or theme, and are intended to encourage lively dialogue and critique. Some are collaborations; UnionDocs has worked with a wide variety of partners, from Harvard’s metaLab to the Northside Film Festival. And for those who can’t make the presentations, UnionDocs also engages critical writers to do essays and articles about the work they show.

all photos from UnionDocs

Another big part of UnionDocs is the CoLAB, a collaborative studio fellowship program that brings together twelve artists per year, six from the United States and six international, to produce short documentary works around a specific theme. These films often go on to the festival circuit, and have been shown at the Tribeca Film Fest, BAM Cinemafest, Doc NYC, MoMA’s Doc Fortnight, and many more. At this point more than 70 media artists have come through the CoLAB program.

CoLAB fellows, 2013

Finally there are longer-term productions, which come in different forms. The latest is a multi-year project called Living Los Sures, a “collaborative web documentary” about South Williamsburg. UnionDocs describes the project as “part omnibus film, part media archaeology, part deep-map and city symphony.” That project will be finished later in 2014, and there will be screenings, activities, and many other events to celebrate it.

Living Los Sures screening

Be sure to keep an eye out for that and all the other incredible work UnionDocs has to share—but first read my Q&A with Christopher Allen, UnionDocs founder.

brooklyn spaces: Give me a quick history of how this all got started.
Christopher: I actually moved into this building in 2002, and in 2003 a few close collaborators and I took it over and started turning it into an art collective. In 2005 we became a nonprofit, focusing primarily on the intersection of politics and art, which led us into documentary work. In 2007, most of the original people involved were heading in different directions, including myself, so we all moved out of the building and set up a sort of residency model. And then, a bit later, in 2009 I came back and make this my full-time venture with a proper staff.

Color Series and Veils

brooklyn spaces: What would you say is the theme or mission statement of Uniodocs?
Christopher: We present and produce documentary art, and we’re interested in taking our audience on a journey through a variety of different subjects. We basically use documentary as a starting point to a broader conversation that can engage many different disciplines and areas of expertise, and hopefully get people excited and aware about things happening in the world.

Hybrid Forms of Documentary

brooklyn spaces: Tell me about a couple of your favorite UnionDocs events.
Christopher: Let’s see. Pretty early on we had an event with the artist Christo and the documentary legend Albert Maysles, which was incredible. It was a real surprise that we were able to get Christo here, and I think he liked it a lot. In 2007 we did an event with Laura Poitras; she’s an amazing filmmaker with an incredible vision, and she’s so tough and daring. Laura was the key person to break the Snowden story, so she’s a big inspiration for us. It’s amazing to be able to look back and say that before Laura Poitras was a global name, she was here talking with an audience of like forty people. One really different favorite event of mine was very recent, it was curated by our director of the CoLAB, Toby Lee, all around the idea of the “uncanny valley.” It was a series of films and lectures about things that appear to be real but are not, and what happens as they get closer and closer to being real. In addition to films, there was a performance by a master puppet artist and a talk by a scientist. It was a wide-ranging discussion that took people on a real intellectual journey. Our events are really geared toward a conversation, and often we have an audience that really shares and dives into deep questions with the filmmakers. There aren’t so many spaces where people can articulate their opinions in public in the flesh, so there’s something about that, that ritual, even if it seems anachronistic, that’s kind of a vital thing.

Megapolis Audio Transmission

brooklyn spaces: I’d love to hear some more about the Southside documentary project Living Los Sures. What was the inspiration for that?
Christopher: It started four years ago, when we were given a disintegrating copy of this incredible documentary film that was shot in this neighborhood in 1984 by Diego Echeverria. What we’re doing is making the original film accessible to people in many different ways, like restoring and annotating it, and working with the community to mine it for other stories and populate it with other memories. A lot of the people in it are still in the neighborhood, and it’s great to look back at the work and try to understand it, and also to update it and challenge it and work with it in different ways. Diego has been very generous with us; he’s overjoyed that the film is being restored, that there’s a group of young artists who are re-engaging with the ideas in it. A whole set of short documentaries around the same ideas have come out of the CoLAB as well, like Toñita’s, which investigates one of the last remaining Puerto Rican social clubs in the neighborhood, along with a whole cast of characters there, including the matriarch of the club who’s been keeping it going all these years.

summer backyard party

brooklyn spaces: UnionDocs clearly has a very involved and nuanced relationship with the neighborhood and community. Can you talk a little more about that?
Christopher: We’ve always tried to find ways to connect with the people in our neighborhood, but the Living Los Sures project has been really successful because we’ve been able to meet residents where they’re at; we’ve done screenings in church basements and schools and other community institutions. This project is a way for us to use our interests and talents to help preserve the legacy of this neighborhood, to create new relationships between neighbors, and to try to have a greater sense of place here. Lots of people think of the Southside as just a part of Williamsburg, but it has a very distinct history and population. This project is really devoted to celebrating it.

brooklyn spaces: It seems also like a really crucial cultural history. Are there other records to draw from? If people wanted to learn more about the history of this neighborhood, where would they go?
Christopher: There’s not that much that’s been written. A lot of organizations that are doing great work, they haven’t had a lot of time to document it because they’re out there making things happen. But there’s an effort toward cultural history now. The housing organization Los Sures HDFC is interested in starting a museum, and El Puente has been working on a sort of people’s history of the neighborhood. We’re trying to work with both of those organizations however we can.

Radio Boot Camp

brooklyn spaces: What are your thoughts on working and making art in this part of Brooklyn right now? Do you think the Southside is in danger of being overtaken by gentrification?
Christopher: I’ve always liked the energy here, it’s always felt very vibrant and exciting. The wave of new businesses and new residents is not stopping, but I don’t think the long-standing community will be pushed out in the same way that has happened in other places, largely because the community is organized, and many people own their property. I have a lot of hope for this area; the development is not all good, but it’s inclusive in some ways. If new residents can be open to the people who helped to preserve this neighborhood when it was bombed out and the landlords weren’t paying attention, then I think there’s a lot of positive things in the future for the Southside.

Views from the Water

brooklyn spaces: What are your goals for the future of UnionDocs?
Christopher: We’re looking to continue to do exciting events that are cross-disciplinary and bring lots of voices into the conversation, and we’re trying to do more with the community we’ve brought together. I don’t think our vision is to become bigger and bigger and bigger; it’s more about improving the quality of what we’re already doing. But there’s also the possibility of taking the model we’ve established and doing it in other locations. There’s been a lot of interest from folks who have come through our collaborative program, especially the international folks; they go back to Turkey or Peru or Paris or Tijuana and want to do something like this where they’re from, so we’re thinking about how that could operate and what it would look like.

***

Like this? Read about more theatres: Spectacle Theatre, Bushwick Starr, Clockworks Puppet Studio, South Oxford Space, Cave of Archaic Remnants

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

dead herring

oriana on 23 Jan ’13

space type: apartment & music | neighborhood: williamsburg | active: 2007–2013 | links: myspace, facebook, twitter

For most of its run, Dead Herring—an apartment that sometimes doubled as a DIY music and occasional theatre space was fairly averse to any sort of press. That’s just part of the fun of running an underground apartment venue—some measure of paranoia is often called for. But Dead Herring closed Feb 1st, 2013, right after an amazing commemorative closing show, featuring the Immaculates (a band that was formed at a Dead Herring party), Moonmen on the Moon, Man (who broke up and then reunited just for this show), Necking!! (one of the Dead Herring creators’ band), and special secret guests.

Cuddle Machines, photo by Nicki Ishmael

Read my interview with housemates Liz, Nicki, Jeff, and Andrew, which took place on the eve of the end of Dead Herring, below. For more pix from Nicki, there’s a terrific six-year DH photo retrospective at Impose Magazine. And be sure to check out their new space in North Williamsburg, Cloud City!

show posters, photo by Maximus Comissar

brooklyn spaces: Tell me a quick history of how this all got started.
Jeff: Liz and I went to college together in California, and we both lived in this co-op called Cloyne Court Hotel in Berkeley that used to have shows in the kitchen, in the basement, wherever. The first time I went there Nerf Herder was playing, and I was like, “Whoa, this place is awesome! I’m moving in here next year!”
Nicki: My band played there once, it was like nothing I’d ever seen before. There were kegs in the quad, there was a room no one could go into, there was the most disgusting bathroom I’d ever seen in my life, it was covered in graffiti, and just everyone going crazy and hanging off pipes. It was so cool.
Jeff: And then years later I wound up living across the hall from Liz and Nick in the McKibben Lofts.
Liz: Nick and I are the ones who started Dead Herring. We had a couple of shows at McKibben, and when we heard about this space, we thought it would be great place to continue to do that. Nicki moved in six months later, and Jeff moved in in 2008, and Andrew moved in two years ago, in 2010.

Bare Wires, photo by Nicki Ishmael

brooklyn spaces: What was the first show?
Nicki: It was Maneguar, Pterodactyl, Golden Error, Marvel & Knievel, and Nonhorse.

brooklyn spaces: Do you all book shows?
Liz: I don’t. Nicki books all the music now, Jeff does the variety shows, and Andrew has brought some plays in.
brooklyn spaces: Nicki, is there a succinct way to characterize what kind of music you book here?
Nicki: No, not really. We used to have a lot more experimental noise shows when Nick lived here, because he was into experimental noise music and he booked that. I’m more into punk and rock and indie pop. I don’t know, it just depends on what comes together. If there’s a band coming through that we know, we’ll book around them. Or if we see a band we really like we’ll tell them to come play here. It used to be easier for bands to find us when we used the MySpace page, but that just became too much, we were getting like fifteen emails a day. None of us is a full-time booker, you know? When I have ten minutes I’ll IM people, like, “Hey, you want to play a show?”

photo by Maximus Comissar

brooklyn spaces: Tell me either the coolest or weirdest thing about living in a place where there are shows.
Nicki: A funny thing is that people don’t realize that we live here. People come here for shows and then they’ll come over for a potluck and be like, “Oh, wow, it looks so different. I didn’t know you had a couch.”
brooklyn spaces: I think that’s part of the charm of these spaces, that you know while you’re watching this band you’re sitting on the roof of someone’s closet or washing your hands in their kitchen sink.
Jeff: Did you read the article about the new Silent Barn in the Village Voice? They were saying how most DIY spaces are illegal, like no one can talk about it, which has kind of been our thing. But now the Silent Barn is like “No, this is completely legal.” They’re going to get a liquor license and whatever. One of our old roommates, Joe, who’s part of Showpaper, he lives there now.
Andrew: I had a lot of conversations with Joe when he lived here about this whole thing, about how all these spaces are somewhere along a continuum, like how much are they a house, and how much are they a venue? Silent Barn has always been basically a venue, even though people live there. We’re really a house that has shows once in a while.

Golden Error, photo by Nicki Ishmael

Nicki: We have to tell people all the time that they can’t have their birthday party here, or their mud-wrestling party. We’ve gotten a lot of weird requests over the years. But overall it’s fantastic, this house pretty much made my life in New York. I met all these people, I found something to do and a community to be in. I had no idea there was a music scene that was this small and this amazing here. You have these moments where you realize this is happening in your life and you created it and you’re a part of it. It makes me so happy. It’s so great when you have a whole bunch of bands come in at the beginning of the night, you’ve never met any of them before, and at the end of the night they’re all giving you giant hugs and saying this was the best show they’ve ever played. It’s so amazing that we had the opportunity to do this.
Jeff: People really appreciate us just trying to make an awesome, fun night, and when everybody’s stoked on it, it’s a good feeling. It’s great when really talented, amazing people have a great time performing here.
Andrew: We just had a theatre show that did a three-night run, and It was like we were living in this little theatre that everyone was a part of. I don’t know if you could achieve that in any other setting.

photo by Maximus Comissar

brooklyn spaces: Do you think that being in Williamsburg has affected the space?
Nicki: I really like that Death By Audio is so close, and 285 Kent, and Glasslands. It’s nice that there are still a few really good spaces around here. And I feel like living off the L and the J is convenient, a lot of people can come out to shows here. I don’t always want to go all the way to Bushwick, but people seem happy to come all the way out here, which is awesome. Jeff’s shows get put up on the Nonsense NYC list sometimes, and people come here from wherever because they’re like “Oh, I know where that is, I can get there.”
Andrew: For a performing arts venue it really makes a difference if it’s in a part of town that people want to go to.

Teenage Nightwar, photo by Nicki Ishmael

brooklyn spaces: And it’s nice to see that there are still places like this in Williamsburg. A lot of people think that all the creativity is gone from this neighborhood, but that’s not true. It’s just a little harder to find. Anyway, tell me about some of your favorite shows.
Nicki: My favorite “I can’t believe I actually pulled this together” show was when Forgetters played here, Blake Schwarzenbach of Jawbreaker’s band. So many people I know have loved his music since we were like sixteen years old, and he played in my living room! And we had this band called Leg Sweeper come, they played with our friends’ band Sleepies, and they were so excited about playing here, and we were so excited about having them play, and after the show we all hung out until 5 in the morning, and everybody slept over, and we made waffles in the morning, and it was magical. Or another one, after The Men played, we had a limbo contest with the guys in the band, which was so ridiculous and fun. I think the craziest show we ever had here was Calvin Johnson and Chain and the Gang. When I introduced Chain and the Gang, everyone just freaked the fuck out.
Liz: That show was my teenage dream come true. I was so thrilled, I couldn’t believe he was in our house. He got here early, and we were trying to set up, and our old cat was sitting on the bar, and he sang a song to the cat! It killed me. My other favorite moment was when Social Studies, our friends’ band from San Francisco, played last year. Right before they started to play my favorite song, someone cut in and said, “We just found out the Giants are going to the World Series.” The whole crowd was full of people from California, and everyone was so so so excited.

photo by Maximus Comissar

Andrew: I’m from Minneapolis, so when our friends’ theatre group came from Minneapolis to do their play, it was really exciting for me to get to share this space with them. They used to live in a space like this in Minneapolis, and one of them had a space like this in Baltimore before that where my theatre troupe performed, so being able to return the favor was really gratifying.
Jeff: I like all the variety shows, I guess. Oh and Reggie Watts, that was awesome. And Corn Mo.
Nicki: And the ventriloquist! And the magician who sawed a woman in half! And the guy from Cirque de Soliel who took all his clothes off and climbed all over the entire audience! And the lady who juggled with her feet! I know it sounds like we’re making this stuff up, but we’re not.
Jeff: Yeah, we’ve had some crazy stuff.

Hunters, photo by Nicki Ishmael

brooklyn spaces: What advice do would you give to other people who want to do something like this?
Nicki: Be nice. That’s something we try really hard to do. Now we’re friends with all the bands and performers and other DIY spaces in the city. That’s why we’re not super nervous about going into the new space. We feel like we’re not going to be alone, because all these other people are going to support us. All the DIY spaces are kind of in it together.
Jeff: Yeah, it sounds cheesy but we really feel like we’re part of a community. And we’re good at welcoming people in and having a positive vibe about everything.
Nicki: That makes it a lot more fun for everyone. We want to have fun too!

***

Like this? Read about more apartment performance spaces: Silent Barn, The Muse, Cave of Archaic Remnants, The Schoolhouse, Greenroom Brooklyn, Newsonic, Jerkhaus