We were discussing her past eight years working as a full time artist – six of them in New York City, though she works internationally and can be found showing video, illustration and painting in New York, her native Spain, and recently in Budapest, Havana and Montreal.

Itziar will be showing four of her short films on May 25 at our upcoming arts showcase at the Acheron in Bushwick. Her unique short films, all under 15 minutes will screen between live performances by Claire’s Diary, The Tablets, Tiny Tusks and Bad Behavior – more here.

Featured on these pages for her previous projects in Brooklyn, Itziar is a cultural force unto herself. She will screen “We Could Have Had It All” – a multi-layered digital video inspired by the Adele lyric and concert at Albert Royal Hall, which is a response to the popular lyric by a duet of poems. Basque poet Maialen Lujanbio and American writer Chavisa Woods contribute original poems in their native tongues about the concept of “having it all” inside the historic Teatro Arriaga, a theater in Itziar’s native Bilbao.

Itziar’s digital video titled RETURN interviews Crown Heights residents on the changing dynamics of the neighborhood and what they consider to be “paradise” in a neighborhood full of people originally from the tropics. We’ll screen this film and two others from Itziar’s BLUE WALL PROJECT: THE MUSIC STARTS BEFORE THE DANCE BEGINS and WE, both of which examine the ever-changing face of blocks in Williamsburg, the Lower East Side, and the historic memory that we carry within us.

What originally brought Itziar onto my radar was a giant billboard with tropical graphics that coincided with RETURN, which she designed and put up in 2009 on the corner of Fulton Street and Nostrand Avenue in Crown Heights. It read, “Welcome to the New Paradise/ You, a Lonely Wildcat.”

In our 2009 interview Itziar hinted at her next project: “The only thing I could say is that I may be working with a theater director and performers in order to create a video about group dynamic and behavior.”

I had been invited to stop by Itziar’s studio after I attended a press preview for that very project, which now has a name, Casting THE PERILS OF OBEDIENCE, and was getting ready for a weekend of performances at the Abrons Art Center on the Lower East Side. It was the second iteration of a project started in Spain the year after we first spoke. The performance consists of a live auditioning process, navigated by a director, filmed by a crew and all of it led by Itziar, whose face remained hidden behind giant Mac screens, back turned to audience.

The project is both performance art and a film in progress – collaboration with the theater director Niegel Smith, known for his work as associate director of FELA! According to Itziar, it’s named for “the title of a [Stanley] Milgram experiment about proving how much pain can somebody inflict on some other person on their authority, so it’s questioning a lot about how we all deal with power, it’s a really current concept in my practice in general.”

It was the last week of March when I had stopped into the Abrons Arts Center, just south of the Williamsburg Bridge’s Manhattan side, where actors had been called to audition for roles that were not quite explained to them, and after an exhausting display of their improvisational skills, were also subsequently interviewed in depth about their personal lives to understand, unbeknownst to them, if they fell into one of four personality types: leader, navigator, soldier and anti-leader.

I asked Itziar which roles she was adapting to in the project.

Niegel Smith and Itziar Barrio during Casting The Perils of Obedience.

“I guess I am the leader, the leader of the project!” she offered with another big laugh before pausing. “But I play different roles, because this is a project – especially on the theatrical aspects – I’ve been developing it with Niegel, the director. I’ve been working with him on the state of the project when we select the people and that is a negotiation – sometimes he’s the leader, you have seen me probably assuming his roles. So that is a negotiation all the time, I guess at the end of the day, the entire project, it’s me, for the good and for the bad.”

I asked Niegel – a founding member of the directors’ lab 425D – the same thing. “Sometimes I’m the anti-leader,” he told me, laughing at the prospect, “because I bring a whole set of assumptions based on the theater that she doesn’t and sometimes I have had to push those and you know, ultimately she makes the final call.

“I find myself,” he continued, adjusting, “there are certain ways in which I pushed, there are certain ways in which I have given up control. I was telling Itziar when I first got here – I’m used to walking into the theater and having absolute control, you know?

“So this is very new for me so I’m trying to allow myself space for that, and there are of course a set of choices in this process that aren’t my choices that I have had to make peace with,” he told me.

And such is life – the power dynamics of which fascinate Itziar. In Casting THE PERILS OF OBEDIENCE, each actor called back from the open casting call will find that their role in real life and on stage are mirrored – a byproduct of Itziar’s obsession with the line between fiction and non-fiction. Specifically her work lingers most often on how we each create reality through language and Itziar is great at reflecting it back at us.

“In the fiction and non-fiction, the person and the character, you will see there are things that are related to their personality – I’m super interested in the fiction and non-fiction, so in the video that will come I will definitely deal with both aspects,” she said.

Niegel and casting director Arnold J. Mungioli, of Mungioli Theatricals, chose actors based on personal interviews and improv audition performances with a group, all while Itziar and her crew filmed the process. Then, in callbacks in front of a live audience, the actors set out to perform “sides” or short scenes from three iconic moments in film: the negotiation in Basic Instinct, the tipping scene in Reservoir Dogs, and Bette Davis’ speech in All About Eve.

Somewhere in between the real person and their assumed character emerged the individual roles of the actors, and the audience would participate by reinforcing those roles with their authority. By examining our roles through the lens of these iconic moments, Itziar reveals how much we base our perceptions in fiction.

“I really like using big icons that we all understand and put them in a new realm, to try to talk about, what does it really mean?” Itziar told me while we were at Abrons. It was just like her response to Adele’s concept of having it all, I thought.

“I’m saying, there’s always a story,” she told me, as we shifted to her interest in history affecting this process, “I’m going to write it; I’m going to let it happen; I’m going to the beginning of the beginning; I’m going to the beginning of the casting.”

She seemed to always want to know how everything gets started. And part of this story started half a century ago. In a 1974 article, “The Perils of Obedience”, Milgram, a PhD, summarized his experiment, having taken place in 1961, writing:

The legal and philosophic aspects of obedience are of enormous importance, but they say very little about how most people behave in concrete situations. I set up a simple experiment at Yale University to test how much pain an ordinary citizen would inflict on another person simply because he was ordered to by an experimental scientist. Stark authority was pitted against the subjects’ [participants'] strongest moral imperatives against hurting others, and, with the subjects’ [participants'] ears ringing with the screams of the victims, authority won more often than not. The extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority constitutes the chief finding of the study and the fact most urgently demanding explanation.

Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority.

On average the experiment yields a majority of around 60% of participants that inflict what they believe is a fatal blow to another human – read the study, it’s fascinating. It was the personality traits and roles within this dynamic that fascinated Itziar enough to engage this work and examine, between the lines of fiction and non-fiction, our individual sense of authority that keeps people moving in certain directions.

Itziar watches the live auditions.

That authority is strong in the art world – a hierarchy, Itziar says, that is not breaking down anytime soon. “There are still roles and they’re still very rigid.”

Casting THE PERILS OF OBEDIENCE is a commissioned piece that will eventually become a film and an installation, but for other works Itziar writes exhaustive grants, which she’s grown accustomed to as part of the gig. “I think of art as a job, so what’s going to get you paid?”

“I don’t need to be super known, or this big star or celebrity kind of flavor, thing, you know what I mean? I don’t even know why we need that, to be honest, if it would be a regular profession we would not need that, right? The spectacularity of it. You just work and do things. It requires different things. What is so different from any other profession?”

Well, just ask about what she’s working on next: “I’m going to be analyzing the fist, from the different points of view from the political, the sexual and the social perspectives.”

Oh, that’s what.

Get tickets to see all of Itziar’s films on May 25, along with live music at the Acheron.

The local line up features Claire’s Diary, The Tablets, Tiny Tusks and Bad Behavior. The evening will combine live performances with short films by the artist Itziar Barrio between sets, which delve into feminist oriented concepts and Brooklyn’s cultural landscape.

Featured on these pages for her previous projects in Brooklyn, Itziar is a cultural force unto herself. She will screen “We Could Have Had It All” – a multi-layered digital video inspired by the Adele lyric and concert at Albert Royal Hall, which is a response to the popular lyric by a duet of poems. Basque poet Maialen Lujanbio and American writer Chavisa Woods contribute original poems in their native tongues about the concept of “having it all” inside the historic Teatro Arriaga, a theater in Itziar’s native Bilbao.

Itziar’s digital video titled RETURN interviews Crown Heights residents on the changing dynamics of the neighborhood and what they consider to be “paradise” in a neighborhood full of people originally from the tropics. We’ll screen this film and two others from Itziar’s BLUE WALL PROJECT: THE MUSIC STARTS BEFORE THE DANCE BEGINS and WE, both of which examine the ever-changing face of blocks in Williamsburg, the Lower East Side, and the historic memory that we carry within us.

The live performance line up includes some major up and coming talent, and we’ve been talking about them for a while now. Here’s who they are, in their own words. Join our Facebook event page here, and invite your friends.

Claire’s Diary was formed when Sophie Rae and Isadora Schappell (of Care Bears on fire), Joey Koneko, and Kiri Oliver were strolling through a meadow one day and found the diary of a girl named Claire at the foot of an oak tree. Taking this diary back to their Brooklyn home, they began to sift through the pages of this mysterious diary and translate their discoveries into words and sounds that bring to mind grunge, punk, and surf-rock. Claire’s Diary played their first show at Slutwalk NYC in October 2011 and released their first recorded track, the theme song for Rookie Magazine, ‘Suzy’s Alright’, in October 2011. Claire’s Diary released their double single for “Girl Next Door” and “Build Me A Hero” in November 2012 and released their first full length album in February 2013.

The Tablets are the songs of Liz Godoy. For The Tablets self-titled debut LP she has composed and arranged, as well as co-produced the album alongside Brenden Beu (Male Bonding, Pissed Jeans, o’death). She plays live with a plethora of artists and you can find her playing as a duo or with up to seven musicians from show to show.

In early 2010, following the hiatus of her previous band ‘the fearsome sparrow’, Liz began writing a series of songs that are solely hers. The 11 tracks that make up the self-titled The Tablets debut LP, are more than the sum of their parts; upon listening, you can clearly hear Liz’s wide range of influences from 60′s garage and pop, to dark 80′s and new wave and some of her favorite childhood Mexican girl-pop dance tunes perfectly balanced with gritty shoe-gaze guitars and distorted Farfisa, giving counterpoint to her sweet understated vocals. But Godoy’s songwriting is more than that, as you will hear in the slow-tempo, obscure and heart-breaking “Armistice” and the ominous “Pray a Fight,” she’s determined to keep writing without prejudice, to genre or style.

Bad Behavior formed in March 2012 by Alexa Schles and Cris Neglia when Alexa posted a flyer calling for a drummer that liked bands like the Pixies and Sleater-Kinney. They met up and played with two other musicians, but due to scheduling issues they fell out of touch and only rehearsed twice in 2011. A year later they met up again with no intention of starting a band and found they worked together quite well musically. They fell in punk rock love and Bad Behavior is their ugly stepchild.

Bad Behavior was born in the rehearsal space ‘The Sweat Shop’ in Bushwick after jamming out a rockin’ Black Belles cover. Alexa’s vocal style is heavily influenced by Kathleen Hanna, her lyrics, a reflection of the riot grrrl movement. Cris’ drumming style draws heavily from Brian Viglione of the Dresden Dolls, Janet Weiss, Sean Kinney & Patrick Carney. They continue to rehearse in Cris’ parents’ basement in true DIY fashion, avoiding the cost of a rehearsal space. They continue to challenge each other musically and work ridiculously hard for no reason other than their love of music. Their sound can be described as an old school surf-punk influenced collaboration with overtones of feminism, catchy indie-pop riffs and a dark edge thrown in the mix.

Lauren, Sabrina and Natalie are the pop post punk trio Tiny Tusks. Hailing from Brooklyn, NY, the band made its way to local venues this past August and has been keeping good company ever since, sharing bills with Forgetters, Radical Dads, Mal Blum, GLTR PNCH, and Clinical Trials. Tiny Tusks are finishing up their residence in the studio, so keep an ear out for the release of their record on Bandcamp.

Get your tickets here.

Call us generation Whyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy!?

The recent Brooklyn Heights park memorial to late Beastie Boy Adam Yauch compounded our collective bum-out over revelations about another woman in the 2011 separation of Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon. We’ve re-opened a fresh wound.

It’s a reminder that the perpetual youth of punk ends in death, divorce, and sometimes bad museum exhibits. The generation of people who grew up listening to the Beastie Boys and Sonic Youth does not know a world that celebrates the second-annual “MCA Day,” and doesn’t include the marriage of Kim and Thurston.

Some friends are seriously starting to sound like our parents with sentiments like, “I can’t believe he’s gone,” “How could he do that to her,” and, “Thank goodness Yo La Tengo’s Georgia Hubley and Ira Kaplan are still together.” After three decades of redefining music, art and culture, Kim and Thurston are now redefining their post-punk, post-parenting golden years.

People are definitely not perfect, but our role models for working in creative fields have been these very people whose perfect punk rock résumés have assumed pedestals for over a quarter century. We thought we could trust these over-30s to model a lifestyle we could get into, that would veer away from such clichés.

Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore’s wedding day.

They had shown us how to diversify our creative endeavors through independent media, business and culture. They built their own record labels, fashion houses and captured audiences with unique sounds over decades. We all want(ed) to be them, to emulate such creative and independent success that didn’t stink of the red herring label that bifurcated music in the ‘90s: the sell out.

So how to handle it when Thurston, our cultishly cool punk rock icon, who led us to push the boundaries and question and create, cheats on his wife? And also doesn’t seem to want to stop?

Some have chosen the methods of the establishment, like shaming the other woman. Then there is Kim Gordon’s advanced sexuality publicity tour, kicked off in Elle. The spread is super hot, but Kim is also more than that, which doesn’t come across so much in a glossy photo spread in a chic onesie. What comes across is the battle of the sexes – the age-old story of broken vows – the implied stereotype about Kim’s age and Thurston’s midlife crisis.

It’s like watching John and Yoko turn into Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon. It’s way easier to mourn a guy cut down too early, than to watch a guy derail his legendary creative partnership with his wife, one that seemed to be immune from such human error as deception. Better to burn out than to fade away. On a long enough timeline… anything can happen.

A full 877,000 couples got divorced in 2011, the year Kim and Thurston separated, and the reality is 1 in 4 couples over 50 get divorced these days, citing longevity and less stigma as reasons to move on out of unpleasant or unwanted situations.

What to make of it then, when so many fans and observers seem flabbergasted at the split, when the reality is that over the last 20 years baby boomers have doubled the divorce rate for couples over 50?

I can say from personal experience that the enlightened-intellectual-male-feminist brand that Thurston built for himself, through his art and music – by marrying Kim, by having songs like Thurston Hearts the Who written about him by feminist icons Kathleen Hanna and Bikini Kill – is something that I, in hindsight, hung my hat on as an aspirational quality for my own male partners. How disappointing to think that even someone like him could do something like this, right?

Thurston said in 2010, “Eva [Prinz] solicited Kim to do a book in the early 2000s, and Kim was intrigued but told Eva that I was completely involved with … book lust … and that she should talk to me. Eva had me come up to her office—but I had no interest in doing anything with a corporate publisher.”

Until he did. Women, hold on to your husbands!

Not that I want to wade too deeply into the waters of other people’s personal business, but I have hung out with Eva, Thurston’s alleged “other woman,” and attended Ecstatic Peace events. I know it’s not going to be popular to say this, but Eva runs in a network of super interesting and creative people, and there’s a reason for it – she’s brilliant, talented and yes, beautiful. She is also the kind of woman who many women don’t like because she is liberated and seems to have it all, and very easily. Let’s not make her the punk rock Monica Lewinsky – everything is more complex than it seems.

Thurston and Kim were in a creative and sexual partnership for 30 years. Could it make sense, in a way, that if he was starting to create a new phase of his creative career, particularly chasing his “book lust,” as Kim put it, that his sexuality might also become involved in building that endeavor, as per his previous experience of marrying the woman with whom he writes songs?

Eva Prinz and Thurston Moore by Tim Barber via Print Mag.

I assume when writing this that many people will choose to ignore the complexities and believe that I am placing blame. I don’t mean to blame anyone, my point is the opposite – it’s to ask, how are we all handling this situation? Are we just creating easy-to-pin-down reasoning for why it happened (penis wants vagina), and is it that simple? I’m uncomfortable placing blame on the other woman, which shames her with sexual guilt and perpetuates the establishment’s search and destroy punishment mechanism – mostly endured by women.

Let’s deal with the disillusionment we feel by finding new ways to look at what this all means. Cynicism is easy, especially when hero figures akin to “cool” parents, let us down. But it seems even more unconventional that anyone would think a 30-year creative partnership and long-term marriage didn’t last long enough in the business of rock n roll. Don’t we or haven’t we always expected rock n’ roll relationships to burn out and not fade away? It’s a sign to me that the punk rock establishment has become the parental establishment and old practices die hard.

One of the things that slid into the shaming piece on Jezebel a few weeks back was that Eva’s marriage is “open.” Again, it’s not our business, but could it be that there’s plenty of open flaunting of marital vows across creative partnerships and that the problem here might have just been selfish deception and denial on Thurston’s part? Not the classic wife/whore martyr dichotomy that women have endured since the beginning of (patriarchal) time.

This is something that sexual sage Dan Savage addressed at the Brooklyn Book Festival last year while speaking in a church about monogamy, video below.

“The lie that is propagated by the Oprah-Industrial-Complex,” Dan offered, “is if you are in love, and you’ve made a monogamous commitment, that you will not want to fuck anybody else, because being in that kind of romantic love and making that kind of monogamous commitment means you don’t want to fuck anyone else. This just wasn’t the case. It didn’t take me long to realize this was bullshit – that being in love and making a monogamous commitment might mean you would refrain from fucking other people, but you would still want to fuck other people quite desperately.”

Is it just a matter of being honest about it? Especially after you’ve been together for 30 years? Am I not a feminist for asking that? What occurred when Kim and Thurston announced their separation was a shattering of our conception of this brand of monogamy that is a romantic punk rock creative kind of love, as we had heard about in a 2008 SPIN interview with Michael Azerrad.

You have a famously great marriage, which is virtually unheard of for a rock star, particularly when the spouse is also a bandmate. What’s your secret?

There’s no secret. We’ve never sold each other out on anything. I can easily follow the allure of wanting to go out and be with the boys, and play industrial noise and smoke pot and drink, but nothing replaces the reality of our relationship. I can’t trade that for anything. I can’t think of how or where I’d be without Kim’s influence. And we’re like any couple that’s been together for close to 30 years. There’s a genuine psychophysical connection. Sometimes I feel things happening in me, and I know that something’s going on with her. When you’re married and you have that kind of connection, you become really spiritually, psychologically connected. We grew up together, in a way.

By that logic, sounds like what happened next was that Thurston sold Kim out. Whyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy!?

Dan had made an interesting point at the Book Fest last September, that when monogamy is considered successful, that means never having sex with other people, when perhaps, he suggested, it’s more like sobriety and falling off the wagon, and if you only do it once or twice that’s not terrible (compared to Don Draper, sure). His term “monogamish” deciphers social monogamy from sexual monogamy as is more common with gay men, adding, “straight men would do everything gay men do, but straight men can’t because women won’t.”

For good reason, right ladies?

But Dan added, “We have constructed a definition of love, commitment and monogamy that undermines love, commitment and monogamy by putting it in people’s heads that attraction to others is evidence that your primary relationship is dead, it has collapsed.”

Perhaps it had for Kim and Thurston as is true for many couples, again, not my business, but maybe there comes a time to see other people, not necessarily end the marriage, and maybe it’s close to impossible to do that outside of the construct of the classic midlife crisis affair? In any event that’s what is happening now for this couple, but with the painful addition of breaking up a marriage, family and a bond of trust. How to explain this all to the kids?

It sounds so cliché, right?

Here are more maybes. Maybe the feminist movement doesn’t have any way to address non-monogamy in fighting off a powerful reign of Don Draper types? Maybe for empowered straight women it’s easy to lord it over straight men that their sexual desires tend to be more innately connected with the physical needs, while women trend towards emotional needs? Maybe there is a time once your kids are grown where you start to get selfish about your own needs in the face of aging and after a long time of putting family first? Maybe it’s okay to do what you want to do as long as you are honest about expectations and commitments to others? Which, clearly Thurston was not.

In an increasingly individualized society, with a growing life expectancy, and under personal and public surveillance, we might also consider that it isn’t really possible to lie about cheating anymore without getting caught eventually, so maybe it’s time to take a step towards honesty if that’s how people are going to roll.

So what is the conversation that we need to be having about monogamy and marriage, especially as we expand the definition of who gets to legally marry and monogamy (mythical or not) is increasingly not a given? Will the non-monogamous lifestyle – usually attributed to gay men – merge with our traditional definition of marriage? Is non-monogamy the next sexual revolution?

Anecdotal evidence suggests a few interesting trends: women over 50 are leading the spike in divorce rates; swingers enjoy strong marriages; and that recently the over-50 population has seen a surge in STDs. In a study of patients in the Netherlands, “55 percent of the diagnoses for chlamydia and gonorrhea occurred in swingers, versus 31 percent in gay men.”

I want to believe that the man I partnered up with will share with me the enduring decades-long genuine psychophysical connection that Thurston referred to having with Kim. But if we find a connection with another person along the way, does that negate the deep connection we first, and perhaps continue to feel with each other? Can two things be true at once? What is important to sustaining our creative, sexual and social lives? And maybe whatever that is, it’s ok – if we’re honest.

As Dan says in the clip, “I am not the enemy of monogamy, I am pro-making relationships work.”

The complexity of all of this is certainly getting me down. But as Rob Sheffield wrote in Rolling Stone upon hearing news of Kim and Thurston’s separation in 2011, “Like everything else about Sonic Youth, their relationship challenged our ideas about what was possible. And we should all be so lucky as to spend the best day of our lives doing anything as great as what they did every day for the past three decades.”

Amen to that – especially since life is so short.

Avant garde theater has come up with new language to describe the multi-disciplinary roles of individuals expressing themselves simultaneously as writer/designer/director/performer: New York Neo-Futurists.

This savvy bunch of at once traditional and totally unconventional performers will inhabit the Standard ToyKraft space in Williamsburg through May 18 with their latest production Soft Hydraulics.

An evening of five diverse, one-act plays exploring the relationships between puppet and master that arise in our hyper-kinetic world. Drawing inspiration from online dating testimonials, 1970’s Kung Fu movies, New York City wildlife, parasomnia sleep disorders and the history of modern warfare, these plays adhere to the Neo-Futurist aesthetic of non-illusory, athletic theatre. Exploring the ever-increasing conflict between man and machine in a contemporary context, Soft Hydraulics is rooted in honest storytelling, puppet manipulation and immediate performance. This exciting, new production marks The New York Neo-Futurists first developmental partnership with Williamsburg, Brooklyn’s Standard ToyKraft.

Since these performers were also the writers, it was an interesting combination of actors who don’t necessarily inhabit characters, but rather, tell stories through myriad juxtaposed voices as if to deliver a series of curated thoughts on a matter.

The five parts were disparate, but the theme of puppet and master held strong throughout all the different perspectives and cultural tastes. Particularly interesting was the use of audience members as puppets in the third act “Online Dating” by Dylan Marron.

A foursome of audience members were chosen to come up on stage. The performers attached each participant, one woman, three men, to mini iPods connected to ear buds, topped off with soundproof silencers. They could hear only the instructions delivered by the iPod. Dylan stood behind the audience, intervening to assist at times, but playing the ultimate puppet master from behind the curtain.

The group moved throughout the stage engaging with each other and dutifully and hilariously did what they were told to by the synchronized and highly individualized instructions, complete with props and numbered spaces giving positions.

Meanwhile, the audience listened to audio of various people explaining their encounters with people while online dating. At times these graphic scenes of jealousy, group sex and struggling to find intimacy in the digital landscape coincided with the actions of the puppet audience members who had no idea what exactly they were acting out on stage – much like the hindsight-laden stories shared in the overlaid audio.

The final act, Remote by Cara Francis, referenced something that was particularly on my mind lately – applying the language of the stage to the act of war. That war happens in a “theater” in the language of our national media was a poignant criticism of a society that distances itself emotionally from its own acts of aggression by putting it within the walls of a theater: a space generally removed from reality, in a good way. What do war and theater have most in common? Most of it is bad and very little of it is ever considered universally good – a great point made by this piece.

Thankfully, Soft Hydraulics is universally good, showcases a lot of diverse talent and it’s interesting to boot. I’m still thinking about it a few days later. Catch it while you still can, and check out their weekly production of Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind, which I hope to check out very soon, next time I get into Manhattan.

Get your tickets to Soft Hydraulics right here.

Liz’s latest musical endeavor is a new LP under the guise of The Tablets, songs written by her, and co-produced with partner and collaborator the musician and producer Brenden Beu (Male Bonding, Pissed Jeans, o’death). This mélange of 60s garage infused new wave noise shoe-gaze sounds like a lot of things you want to hear, all at once. The complexity of tastes involved in their new LP defies expectations of another electro-infused Brooklyn band. They even have a farfisa.

The Tablets will perform at Brooklyn The Borough’s upcoming ladycentric rock n’ roll show at the Acheron, May 25, 8pm, alongside Claire’s Diary, Bad Behavior, Tiny Tusks and short films by Itziar Barrio. You should come, maybe?

“My new project, the tablets, the fearsome sparrow,” Brenden followed up from across our tiny table at Little Skip’s, “a lot of the idea behind all of this – because she and I think about this a lot – is to combine what is basically disparate elements and make them work together in a way that sounds new. Those drums sound just like something you’ve heard before, and that guitar sounds like something else you’ve heard before, but you’ve never heard those two things put together. But I think a lot of people hear that and they’re like, I don’t understand what this is, and I’m afraid to listen to it.”

Brenden and Liz have been together since they first met in the San Diego noise scene in 1999 and subsequently formed the bands Tetsunori and the fearsome sparrow. The latter played this website’s first anniversary party way back in 2009.

Their earliest effort, the noisy Tetsunori, pressed an EP mixed by Jimmy LaValle of The Album Leaf, Tristeza and The Locust related work, and the band shared the stage with acts like The Blackheart Procession. Tetsunori had fit into the noise scene in San Diego at the time and had grown a local fan base for a band named after a Japanese Locust fan they befriended who excitedly visited San Diego “to see punk shows” in the ‘90s.

“We just hung out everywhere together,” explained Liz, of early days in San Diego, “and then when we were trying to come up with a name for the band we were like, hey Tetsunori, we’re going to call it Tetsunori! And he was like, no, no don’t do that, Tetsunori is not a good name.

“And we were like – no, it is! Is that ok? And he was like, ‘fine, but you have to let me do the art for all the material you put out.’ So that was the deal and that’s what happened.”

They put out three seven inch records before disbanding and moving on to collaborate as the dream pop duo the fearsome sparrow, far less loud, far more embraceable, one would think. “The funny thing, it’s not like we were ever huge as Tetsunori, but we had a pretty loyal fan base.

“It was an interesting time to be there when we were doing our fearsome sparrow thing because it was a huge noise scene,” Liz continued, her gorgeous long red hair swirled around one of her many collected vintage ensembles to meet her high-waisted trousers in the middle.

“We had more credibility as Tetsunori,” Brenden chimed in as Liz explained.

“We still had people who appreciated it, but I don’t think anybody who loved Tetsunori liked the fearsome sparrow, it was a little weird and frustrating,” she said, adding, “we were always pretty secluded, so it was like, oh well, we’ll just move to New York, and just see what happens there.”

Brenden Beu and Liz Godoy

So they packed up their van, booked a few tours back East and eventually settled in Brooklyn, where they now have an awesome Bed-Stuy basement apartment with a garden three streets over from Liz’s sister, the artist Melissa Godoy and her boyfriend, Juan Pablo (Cabe) Cristerna, who plays in Brenden’s new project, Bookmarks.

Melissa Godoy will join the duo’s performance on May 25 at the Acheron, contributing visuals from vintage projectors she has assembled as a visual complement to her sister’s work. She’s also working on opening the restaurant Calaca, on Putnam Avenue in Bed Stuy this spring.

The fearsome sparrow’s second full-length album, Shimmer, was nominated by the Deli Magazine in their list of the best new bands of 2009 along with acts such as Talk Normal, Sleigh Bells and The Dirty Projectors. But with The Tablets, Liz is putting her range on display, alternating frenetically between her origins in the Mexican pop music of her youth, noise, dream pop and meshing them with her love of a good beat.

“I want it to have grittiness and sound loud, like the beats on The Tablets are pretty straightforward and I purposely want them to have a really strong driving beat because I also love electronic dream pop that’s very mellow and mild, but right now I just don’t find myself in that place, it’s like aaahhhh,” Liz roared, balling up her fist in angst.

That angst shines through on the LP, an eleven song line up whose urgency in the keys pairs well with soothing vocals layered over danceable beats and intricate and gritty guitars. Though Liz and Brenden appear with up to seven musicians on stage for their performances, their normally nimble presentation on the new LP defies expectations with a deep and expansive orchestral sound rooted in Liz and Brenden’s dual skills of musicianship and engineering.

“In college, one of my composition professors said, the limitations of your instrument tell you what to play, and with no limitations there’s no feedback from the world outside your head,” said Brenden, well coiffed, with thick glass frames and a dark Don Draper-like slick, who attended San Diego State and got a degree in electro acoustic music composition.

We had gotten onto the subject of analog versus digital and this musician slash producer slash jack-of-all-tech-trades surely had a complex and thoughtful opinion on the balance between the two mediums. This duo certainly started in one world and landed in another – the art for their early records was shipped from their Japanese friend by mail, not emailed and doctored in Photoshop as is more common these days. Brenden even knows how to splice audio tape, but he tends not to be precious about the analog process.

“It’s about the right tool for the right job,” he offered, and for most people that means the right tool within a budget. For that reason – the high cost of studio space specifically – when it comes to recording, he’s built his own mobile recording rig to bring to living rooms and practice spaces across the borough to record local bands using a compression box to mimic a recording studio. Then he mixes it all down in pro-tools. He’s going to do that for the live recording of our Acheron show on May 25.

“I have this really old guitar that used to be my dad’s,” Liz explained, “and I’ve been trying to write some demos on it, but with garage band and pro-tools and some effects it sounds really awesome. I’ve been even working with a couple of apps on the phone just for demos and I think they’re being used in a way that people would probably be like, that’s not what its for, you know? With the fearsome sparrow, it was just the two of us, and a lot of people would say it sounds really big, and it doesn’t sound like two people doing that, and I guess we kind of thrive on that, we like that.

“A lot of people don’t even know for example The Tablets is mastered in pro-tools and it’s mostly done with digital a lot of people think everything is analog and oh everything sounds so fuzzy and so warm, and it’s like yeah but we worked with a lot of digital technology and with some of our vintage equipment but the way we blended it, and mixed and mastered it, that makes a difference. I think a lot of people had really bad experiences with people working with pro-tools so they say ‘oh digital sucks.’”

But digital democratizes the industry and is what most people can afford these days, and those people are abundant. “It’s like kids everywhere, bands everywhere, all the bands play shows together, like ten bands,” Liz said, of Bushwick’s music scene.

And the reversion towards analog is strong in Brooklyn. It’s a credibility thing, mostly, and The Tablets duo takes a middle of the road position on the analog versus digital question.

“There’s such a debate about it,” offered Liz, “There’s the purists and there are the people that embrace technology then there are the people that are like, no just technology. Honestly, I’m not one way or the other. I think – especially being someone that has very limited resources – I think whatever works to get what you need to get, and to get the sound that you want it to be, it’s all fair game.

“I am a big fan of vintage keyboards, vintage equipment, antique furniture, vintage clothing. I’ve always embraced it, but I can’t be stuck and be like no, it has to be that way or nothing, because then you’re just not going to get anywhere.”

“I will always see myself in a continuum of feminist art makers and activists of all kinds,” Kathleen Hanna said recently, seated across from me in a gray jacket with oversized buttons and a prim short collar, “so I think that’s my hope really for the future is that people who are making specifically political art will feel a part of that continuum, and not feel like they’re all caught out there all by ourselves, because there is a time when we all feel caught out there by ourselves no matter if the continuum is there or not.”

It was the day after the SXSW film premiere of The Punk Singer in Austin, Texas. The documentary on the Bikini Kill, Le Tigre and The Julie Ruin singer and longtime activist, artist and de facto leader of the 90s feminist movement riot grrrl had screened and afterwards Kathleen, producer Tamra Davis and Sini Anderson spoke to the audience.

“Thank you so much for sharing all that, it’s totally amazing,” Amanda Palmer said into the mic at the Q&A, “I’ve never actually recognized myself in someone so much watching that movie, especially sitting here with my husband, we were crying.” Her hands mimicked a flood of tears coming down her face. Afterwards, Kathleen remained to speak with Amanda and the crowd that formed around her for more than an hour after it was over.

Next it was press junket day, and we were all set up on the second floor of the Intercontinental Hotel, an official venue. Seated across a white clothed table were Kathleen, Tamra and Sini, a Brooklynite you’ve seen on these pages before. It was media blitzing, digital DIY style, with the help of a few friends, managers and publicists helping her bring together and publicize her oft-overlooked and underreported punk rock legacy. First with the film, next with an independent record label to release the next project by The Julie Ruin, a band formed around her 90s solo release Julie Ruin. Though Kathleen said she is still waiting to see if she’ll be able to perform with the new line up.

“When you can link back into that [continuum],” Kathleen continued, “it’s really the lifeblood that can keep you going, in that non-competitive way of looking at it, of actually the more I say I was influenced by this and this, is how come I was able – this other woman lifted me up, or this other person lifted me up or whatever, like that’s actually something, it’s all kind of – I’m such a hippie – it’s all sort of is this cycle.”

That cycle, for feminists in the media at least, is gaining serious steam, kicking off in Texas, of all places, with the premiere of The Punk Singer, and the notable Interactive keynote speech by self-proclaimed feminist publishing renegade, Jane Pratt, of Sassy, Jane, and xoJane.com fame. Somewhere across town, Babes in Toyland drummer Lori Barbero, an Austin local, was checking out the new girl band Skating Polly at an the Girls Rock Camp showcase.

Throw in a dash of Sheryl Sandberg’s corporate lady non-feminism in the news lately, and we’re looking at a media convergence of on the one hand, women in the corporate world tipping the scales towards a work lifestyle that accommodates them (for the meta version, watch Kathleen’s 1998 video for the Julie Ruin song Aerobicide, below), and in the culture world, women using digital tools to take control of telling their own stories in a way never before seen. That includes up and coming young women like Claire’s Diary and friends recently profiled here.

(My full disclosure here: I’ve considered myself a riot grrrl since going to meetings in the 90s as a wee teen and have previously met Kathleen before, first when she came to see my band, The Lizzies, play in late 1998 at the now-defunct Brooklyn punk spot Dumba, where Le Tigre debuted. I mentioned this to Kathleen, who remembered our show, but I didn’t mention that it had likely come together because I had been cutting it up with Brad Minus that year, but I didn’t believe his claims to know her and then-boyfriend Adam Horowitz. I told him, the punk that I was, “If you know them so well, then bring them to my show this Saturday!” And then he did. Love that guy. Kathleen and I met again in 2000 when a college friend and I set up a DIY show for Le Tigre in Massachusetts.)

This is a seminal moment for all women, but particularly those of us like myself who grew up with riot grrrl in the 90s, making zines, scoffing at Sassy, dealing with our sexuality in a hyper-sexualized predatory culture and wondering how our mothers weren’t bursting into pieces from all of their responsibilities – emotional, domestic and financial – and wanting it all to be different.

Kicking off the film is Kathleen’s early career with Bikini Kill in the context of the political and social climate of the 90s with the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings and challenges to abortion rights in the Supreme Court. Media like this film, and other older documentaries – like the recently uncovered Dirty Girls, shot in 1996 – have started flowing in the wake of Sarah Marcus’s reported tome on the movement, Girls to the Front, which The Punk Singer follows closely for the first chunk of the film.

“It takes a girl to see that somebody else did it,” Tamra chimed in. “It’s hard to think that you’re doing it all by yourself. There’s a moment in the film, when Kathleen and Tammy Rae are looking back to Barbara Kruger, Kathy Acker and these other artists and so they’re not all alone in this small town trying to find feminism, it’s like, ‘wait it happened before and it’s happening now in this art world how do we take that and use that and give us strength,’ and I think that the more girls see these other influences, they can get inspired and be like, ‘wow you know Sini Anderson directed a movie, Kathleen Hanna started this band, you know they really can make these changes.’”

“I shop therefore I am,” and “Your body is a battleground” were well known Krugerisms, and Acker’s collection of poems, Politics, established her reputation in the New York punk scene in 1972.

It took Kathleen and an army of riot grrrls to bring about the next big radical discussion. What The Punk Singer brings to the fore is how much of a struggle it was – and thus the physical toll it took on Kathleen – to just be a woman, be in a band, expressing themselves in the face of so many hostile people and crowds in the 90s. Insert the line here about how it’s sad that this wasn’t that long ago. This point is at the heart of the film – to show that struggle to younger generations will inform them and allow them to reach back into this continuum, with Kathleen, Kathi Wilcox, Tobi Vail, Corin Tucker, Allison Wolfe, et al in the role of generational matriarchs. Joan Jett is the grandmama.

This visibility is crucial to the continuum.  Listening to Kathi, Kathleen’s Bikini Kill and now The Julie Ruin bandmate and collaborator, reaching back in the continuum to John and Yoko records in The Punk Singer was no surprise. Though it’s not referenced in the film, I immediately thought of the infamous single, “Woman Is The Nigger of the World” from the duo’s last record together Sometime in New York, which kicked off quite a shit storm when the record was released in 1972.

Some of the lyrics, obviously not very well received by the mainstream, nonetheless contained a crucial, and mass-marketed, message for the continuum of feminist ideas.

We make her paint her face and dance/ If she won’t be a slave, we say that she don’t love us/ If she’s real, we say she’s trying to be a man/ While puttin’ her down, we pretend that she’s above us

And:

We insult her every day on TV/ And wonder why she has no guts or confidence/ When she’s young we kill her will to be free

That cycle – Yoko, then Joan, Patti et al – would, 20 years later, bring us Kathleen Hanna and Bikini Kill, amongst a plethora of amazing radical feminist thinkers, artists and makers. Kathleen broke out of the previous cycle as a woman who could say and do radical things without having a famous husband and artistic collaborator to support her through the backlash, though the film portrays the deep and meaningful relationship and marriage that she subsequently came to have with Beastie Boy Adam Horowitz. We hear her struggle with the relationship at first, questioning her attraction to a man who in 1986 released the misogynist anthem Girls, though the group later apologized for their early sexism. In the end she says, you can’t help who you love, and she’s obviously taught the guy a thing or two.

In the film, Adam is shown caring for Kathleen, giving her injections and taking her to the doctor, and at one point, bearded and worried in the waiting room, wondering what could be wrong with his wife. Kathleen went five years and through many doctors without being properly diagnosed with Lyme disease and suffered mightily trying to recover. In the Q&A she attributed the lack of diagnosis to sexism, internalized in that she was embarrassed and minimized her symptoms, but also on the part of doctors who might have inquired about it better, and “part of it was that we were exhausted and didn’t look hard enough.” Now she is at the point where she can appear publically again and hopes to be able to resume performing with The Julie Ruin, but is unsure just yet if she can.

“The 90s were really different in that like you know we were just really into post-modernism and identity politics and talking about the male gaze and objectification and stuff like that,” Kathleen told me in our interview. Here was a generational leap beyond just the public acknowledgement of misogyny that John and Yoko made in 1972 on Sometime in New York.

“So when Bikini Kill was performing we were really like, put your fucking video cameras down this is happening once, you know what I mean?” she continued. “This is happening in this room, which in a way is kind of elitist because it’s like then the forty kids who are at that show are the only people who can participate in it and I really changed my viewpoint on that.”

The lesson, and huge challenge, for the feminists and progressive artists and activists now is to take advantage of the tools of our time without succumbing to its pitfalls, as some riot grrrls did in the 90s, unable to fend off the mainstream media that was portraying them as angry, bitter, man hating punks and came up with the solution of imposing a media blackout.

“The thought of actually documenting ourselves instead of just telling other people not to, it just – we didn’t have the time or the energy for it. I fear the negative side of having all this stuff like – oh yeah, you can make your own movie or you can start your own record label – is that I don’t want other political makers to paint yourself in the same corner that I painted myself into at times where I have to do it all, ‘cause you don’t, you can get help. There’s people who really, really enjoy doing business and you should be friends with those people and have them help you with your projects.”

This acknowledgement of art as independent business was at the heart of what Sini, the film’s director, undertook through the making of The Punk Singer. She chimed in here and said, “Because [Kathleen was] doing it in this punk rock style, you were the tour manager, the booker, the maker of the art, the photographer for the cover, the making of the album cover, doing all of that, doing all of that and the energy thing that you’re talking about. Also in the 90s there was this stigma when you did go outside of your community to ask for anything, you were a sell out and we’re not having that conversation as much anymore, thank god, because people need insurance, it’s not selling out, it’s having some self respect.”

“I have kind of a dorky question,” Amanda Palmer had said after the premiere, “The scene that also really resonated was all these people alone in their bedrooms, and I was that teenage girl and I knew a lot of us and back then we didn’t have the internet and you sort of started your band and you started in this place where there was no internet, it was before that. Now you have it, but it can also be this awful shitty mean place where people can attack you a lot more easily. So I don’t really know what the question is, but you’ve straddled both eras, not necessarily is it better or worse, but how do you feel the pros and cons are now, versus back then when it was just a bunch of people connecting and there wasn’t the internet there to create this weird other player?”

“I feel like the internet is a tool that can be used for good or evil,” Kathleen answered, adding, “There’s so many little pockets of things that it was almost easier for us [back then], because there wasn’t that stuff and it felt really new, and now that there’s the internet people tend to isolate and be on the internet and head snap from thing to thing, but I also don’t believe this idea that the 90s were more authentic than now. I think now is super exciting.” (Watch the entire exchange in the video around 17 minutes.)

Mimicking the corporate media process, but not it’s backers, independent films like The Punk Singer can now materialize from good ideas, garner independent funding on Kickstarter, hire a publicist and find a distributor. To wit, last year’s Kickstarter-funded films at SXSW made up 13% of films chosen for the film festival – this year it almost doubled to 25%, 35 films in all. Meanwhile 17% of film selections at Sundance earlier this year were independently funded using the crowd.

“The technology, to film, edit it and distribute it yourself – it’s incredibly similar to what early punk rock was,” Tamra, also married to a Beastie Boy, Mike D, had said earlier. Kathleen, and Sini and Tamra as well, were showing us once again, how to pick up the tools, even if we did not yet totally know how to use them, just as the riot grrrls had done in the 90s with their instruments and art galleries. This type of freedom of thought and expression is incredibly valuable in today’s digital world, and it’s something that comes naturally, even aggressively so, from Kathleen who has never been afraid to be herself.

“Having that thing,” Tamra said, “telling the truth, that’s the message of her film – it’s speaking out. I think that what the film resonates so well is she tells a very honest story and it comes from her heart. The film really tells a deep story: when you put the blog in a girl’s hang, or a camera in a girl’s hand, or a guitar in a girl’s hand, that they’re not reinventing the wheel, just pick it up and tell your story, tell the truth, that’s so inspiring, and she’s the originator of that.”

“I am starting my own record label to put out our next project, because it just financially makes sense to do it that way,” Kathleen chimed in, “But it’s like, I have a manager that’s going to help us lay that whole thing out and I’m not going to, like, be talking to distributors on the phone myself.”

Kathleen’s attention to detail in this manner is striking. Meeting her in person, it’s clear how much kindness and care she shows to each person who crosses her path. It’s clear that she listens and values the relationships she has with younger women, particularly because she is so mindful of herself and her impact, because she knows the continuum is reciprocal.

“I was saying how it was really hard to take all of the hatred and stuff that had come my way and that I was getting letters from kids that were like you know you’ve really helped me, I felt like I was the only feminist in my school, and whatever, and that’s what kept me going,” she said as we were wrapping up. “So they were saying I was keeping them going, but they were actually keeping me going.

“I got this letter from this young feminist who said she spoke up in one of her classes and said something was sexist and I don’t remember what it was, but it was clearly, clearly sexist – I mean, just glaringly so – and a bunch of the boys yelled at her to get back into the kitchen and I was like, really? In 2013?

“They pulled that out of grandma’s attic box. I was like, how musty and dusty was that one? I just couldn’t believe it. I feel like there’s always this two-steps forward, one-step back, or vice versa, there are good things about that and bad things; progress isn’t linear.”

“That’s a good lesson to learn,” I said.

“And popularity is overrated,” Kathleen added.

The son of the former congressman from the district – a Voting Rights Act district – beyond announcing his new office as a political consultant, was about to clue in his local group of political wonks on news from a recent meeting of district leaders for the Kings County Democratic Party.

Beyond being many things, 2013 is the first big election year in a long time. Particularly the first in many in which Brooklyn’s cycle will not be held at the mercy of the former party boss Assemblyman Vito Lopez (below) thanks to his recent censure over sexual harassment charges. In a way though, he still gets to choose since Seddio’s his man.

The new chosen boss, Assemblyman Frank Seddio (above), has given orders, according to Owens, that the county party will not endorse in any race except for public advocate. The logic is that as the new boss, Seddio does not want to choose poorly in the mayor’s race and upset any of the candidates, lest another win. Nor does he really have a stake in any of the many open seats across the borough, so again, logic goes that he’ll let the party captains duke it out and decide on their own.

“Seddio, I’ll give him credit for this,” continued Owens, “he’s not Vito – the entire atmosphere of being district leader has changed.”

Owens offered, he forsees “incremental cumulative progress over time,” adding that the shift from Lopez to Seddio was akin to the shift from Giuliani to Bloomberg.

“It feels lighter,” he added, “they are more open to rules changes.”

At least with Seddio, another source put it, like Bloomberg, there’s a smile on his face, even if he’s stabbing you in the back.

Going forward though, when delivering his news to the group, Owens made sure to say he’ll point out when he will be using his district leader hat and when he would be shilling for candidates as a paid consultant.

The first time I set foot inside of ABC No Rio was in 1996. I was 15.

Notable memories from that fateful afternoon include standing in a packed basement crowd with my friend Pilar. Moshing chaos was ensuing all around us for a band that drew a lot of spikey hair.

Next I remember a drunken punk rock guy stumbling back towards us and realizing nearly too late that he was unzipping and pulling it out and whoops! He started peeing into the corner, basically over Pilar’s head as we fled the area.

This was long before the days of Willie Mae Rock Camp, but months later I would see God is My Co-Pilot in a low-key early show that warms my memory today. I would connect with independent media in the zine library, and be inspired to write my own.

Eventually my friends Robyn, Shannon, Jess and I started a punk band and played many Saturday afternoon matinees at ABC No Rio with other locals. We were called The Lizzies and we wrote, recorded and released all of our own music. I’m talking about myself a lot because that is my full disclosure in writing this story; truth is, I’ve been writing it for a long time.

I arrived at ABC last Saturday, sixteen years after that first matinee for a record release party celebrating the first full length release from the local girl band Claire’s Diary. The record will be released worldwide on iTunes today. It was the first time it really sunk in how far things had come.

Moms and Dads and sisters and classmates and teachers all packed into the gallery to cheer on all the bands. Unfortunately I missed the first act, Kelly Montoya, but I heard good things.

I pulled back the big cloth draped across the doorway – everything looks exactly the same, mics still shock singers unless draped in a sock – just in time to see the second act, Tiny Tusks.

Comprised of Sabrina (Bass), Natalie (Guitar, Vox), and Lauren (Drums, Vox) – who has previously contributed to this site and our Queerespondence party series – Tiny Tusks left it on the stage. These ladies shifted from obvious emo and hardcore roots to punky riot grrrl flavor and their sound was intense. They have been playing out for a year and are about to go into the studio to record their material. They have a demo up on bandcamp.

Next up was Tin Vulva who were quite impressive. Comprised of Kat Wong (Bass, Drums, Vox), Sarah Soller-Mihlek (Guitar, Bass, Vox) and Vanessa Rondon (Drums, Guitar, Vox), their record will also be officially released soon. These ladies have power and their stage presence was fierce. Through raucous lyrics addressing catcalls on city streets channeling angst through powerful riffs, their message hung heavy even in that room (for all you sound snobs). I bought their split 7” with No TV Tonight.

The event was curated by Fake French, whom I applaud for putting together this line up to build anticipation for the afternoon’s headliner.

Claire’s Diary hit the stage and the crowd surged to the front of the room. The bands presence and confidence feed their intricate sound and sharp cues. Singer and guitarist Sophie Kasakove is a star with an ease of technical skill that far surpasses any other star I’ve seen to date, and certainly anyone I’ve seen on their way to Brown next year. She’s also the editor of Grrrl Beat.

The spunk of drummer Isadora “Izzy” Schappell and charm of synth player Kiri Oliver remind me of my friend Allison Wolfe helming a Bratmobile show. The rhythm and keys add pop synth at times and darkness at others. The band’s token guy, Joey Koneko, has a style all his own and he doesn’t fall to the backdrop as some guys tend to in mostly lady bands.

From the first note of the live set Claire’s Diary blew me away. The maturity of their sound and the deepness of their message really hit home how even just a little bit of encouragement will go a long way towards motivating young women to own the stage like these young women do.

Willie Mae Rock Camp and Rock n’ Roll Camp for Girls are huge factors in turning out talents like these young ladies (and lad) so early on – Claire’s Diary are literally ahead of their time.

And ahead of this year’s SXSW 2013 premiere of Sini Anderson’s documentary The Punk Singer on the life of Kathleen Hanna, I relished seeing all of these young girls take to the stage without hesitation and do what it is that riot grrrls have always done, and turn it up to 11 for a new generation.

Go see Claire’s Diary, Tiny Tusks, The Tablets and Bad Behavior at the Acheron on May 25, 2013.

Along with the graffiti artist taeOne, the three of us were standing around one of the world’s grandest cultural jewels talking about the best strategy for illegally vandalizing things in New York City. At the New York City Ballet, inside of a building named for the reprehensible industrialist David Koch.

“One thing we learned is doing it during the day is a much better idea,” Patrick told us. “That alone has been a much better plan.”

“What is the advantage?” asked taeOne.

“It just looks like you’re supposed to be doing it,” Patrick answered. “It looks a hell of a lot better to the cops.”

There are at least some parts of town where that is true – and they were nowhere near where we were standing, under the forty-foot tall ceiling of this luscious alter to New York’s cultural dominance. It was a world away from where the FAILE tower, open to the public through February 17 and installed through the spring, was first conceived.

“We’ve always been working in the studio while working in the street,” he continued later. “The first apple box we ever found was in the street – it was leftover from a film set, they forgot it or something – in Williamsburg. We said, ‘Shit, this is a really beautiful box’ and we brought it into the studio and painted it and printed it and started just stacking them – small stacks and big stacks – and eventually that led to this. You find a lot of things just stumbling across the landscape.”

Is it totally serendipitous? I asked. “Totally serendipitous.”

In fact many rising artists have taken to Brooklyn’s streets over the last decade and a half, as FAILE has, to proclaim their messages through various forms of what the NYPD calls vandalism. Wheat pasting, painting, spray-painting, stenciling, are all acceptable mediums of street art – now this so-called vandalism has the potential to propel international art careers.

“It’s just a vehicle for the work,” Patrick Miller said of working in the street. “I hate it when people pigeonhole street art and graffiti as specific things because a lot of these artists are great artists, it’s just a medium they choose to work in – that doesn’t mean they’re not artists.”

He may have been referring to the attitude that much of the New York art work has had towards the nascent, but now booming, street art style, which was recognized and promoted in the mainstream art world only outside of New York until the last few years.

FAILE’s ultimate success in New York sprung from being featured in both a Banksy show – Cans, held in a train tunnel - and a week later, at the Tate Modern. In London. That catapulted the duo through the cultural hoops over the ensuing four years to collaboration with the ballet in New York, as unexpected as it may be. It’s as if they’ve made a career oscillating between the high and low, enabling an average amount of street and fine art world credibility: a difficult feat for rising stars in the digital age.

“I feel good about it,” Patrick said of the collaboration. “I think for [the ballet], here was an institution built on the modern, cutting edge – really pushing it, being very much about incorporating fine art and contemporary musicians at the time, pretty cutting edge.

“Balanchine was like kind of a revolutionary in that sense and that spirit we can all relate to. While at first, when the project started, it was, like, very small and not that interesting, and we [told the ballet], ‘Eh we don’t think it’s such a good thing, why don’t you let us pitch something back.’ And we had wanted to do sort of this monument valley tower kind of idea and there are not very many spaces with forty-foot ceilings and you can walk around the rings.”

And voila, collaboration was born. A performance of the ballet on May 29 will include a small FAILE box as a gift with the purchase of a $29 ticket, collectible bait for the Brooklyn set so desired by traditional cultural institutions such as this. “With the New York City Ballet Art Series,” says the press release, “the Company plans to engage with a new generation of visual artists and audiences.”

Isamu Noguchi, Julian Schnabel, Francesco Clemente, Helen Frankenthaler, Roy Lichtenstein, Keith Haring, Santiago Calatrava, Per Kirkeby, and others, have created artworks and other visual elements for NYCB performances in the past. In the permanent art collection are Jasper Johns’ Numbers, Lee Bontecou’s Untitled Relief, and Elie Nadelman’s Two Female Nudes and Two Circus Women.

Worlds away from such recognized modernists, in the chaotic landscape of street art, timelines and structure are still key.

“If you don’t have a timeline it’s really hard to work in a lot of ways,” Patrick told us as we were wrapping up. “Like downstairs [on the mezzanine] we couldn’t hang the paintings, so we had to make stands for them to be on, and all of a sudden it was like, ‘Wow this totally looks like much more sculptural paintings, we can put them back to back or anywhere’ so all those things led to that.

In fact, pointing to the tower surrounded by gawking press, he added, “This originally came from a column in a gallery space, and we were like, ‘What the hell are we going to do with this column? Its terribly ugly’ and we were like, ‘Let’s make a tower out of it. A short tower.’”

What was I looking for exactly? Paint stained boots, inked hands, tattered outer garments or any other sign of urban wear and tear. To my dismay all I saw were suits and gowns.

Occasionally, a bearded Converse type would cross my path and spark my interest but no one truly emitted the graffiti artist vibe I was in search of. After all, I was in the David Koch Theater, at the New York City Ballet of all places, not your go-to local spot for the illegal street artist set. But for this moment in time, it participated in an historic moment for the graffiti street art community and I was certain some of my compatriots would be in attendance.

Graffiti and street art are mediums for the people and by the people. The FAILE Tower (open to the public through February 17, 2013) is rooted in a message of positivity and concern for the people. I got the chance to interview half of FAILE, when I was introduced to Patrick Miller (pictured, left) and we got to talking about his experience working in the street.

“We started with street art to get the work out there – we didn’t have to ask permission from anyone,” he told me. “We didn’t need a gallery or anyone to say you can do this – illegality aside. It gave the work a discourse in the street in public and a lot of people connected with that on the way home from work.”

“FAILE Supports Single Moms” and “1-888-Loves-You” are just a few of the phrases that have graced their street art and now here on the tower in Lincoln Center. It is odd to see a pledge of faith and support for single mothers in one of the epicenters of New York’s notoriously selfish social set. This is where FAILE won, by bringing their messages of hope from the streets, where it is much needed, to the elite, who need to be awakened.

The tower bridges the gap between the working class and the high class and in so doing inspired my first ever trip to the New York City Ballet, somewhere I honestly never thought I would be despite going to high school a block and a half away. As a street artist myself, I was proud of the FAILE monument. My tag may not have been on it, but my spirit and the spirit of every other graffiti artist inhabits the monument and that is its most resounding quality.

The end of the night approached at 8:30pm; the bar was about to close and still no luck. I made my way towards the bar for one final glass of beer and out of the corner of my eye I saw a gentleman pull out the quintessential piece of graffiti paraphernalia, the black book.

For those not in the know, the black book is the preferred sketchbook in the graffiti world. I darted towards this black book, blowing past gowns, suits and young ladies staring blankly into their cell phones. I made my introductions to a trio of plainly dressed and low key folks, the keepers of this particular black book.

I asked if I could catch a tag in the book and was handed a chisel tip Sharpie marker, my favorite black book tool. After going to town on the two pages I was allotted, a hooded man tapped me on the shoulder and asked to have a look at the book. I passed it off and got straight to finding out with whom I was speaking.

“So you write?” I asked a very lovely and unassuming person, well dressed but definitely not part of the suit and gown set. I gave this person a quick bio and received a look of approval.

“I am ENX,” I was told, to my astonishment.

This whole time I had been looking for someone who might fit the description of an ex-con. I did not think the first graffiti artist I would meet at this soiree would be so nice. So goes the graffiti world and that is why I love it.

ENX has been wheat pasting and sticker bombing the city as of late and I was very familiar with the work. ENX introduced me to another member of the trio who goes by the writer-alias Set. A legendary writer in his own right, Set has worked with some of the most esteemed bombers of all time. I looked down at his pants and sure enough, white paint everywhere.

Set was a big inspiration to me as a young graffiti artist growing up in New York City and I had finally found what I was looking for at this party – real life graffiti artists. Recently, ENX has been putting in work on the streets with one of the graffiti world’s most legendary and enigmatic writers, Cost, of Cost and Revs fame.

While talking to Set I remember this fact and blurted out, “Wait, you guys bomb with Cost don’t you?”

Smiles popped up left and right and ENX called out, “Adam, come over here.”

I see the hooded gentleman who had politely asked to tag in the black book after me approach us and I realized, this was none other than Cost. I was embarrassingly excited, falling over myself with delight.

Cost and Revs invented and championed many of the techniques that are commonplace in street art today. The wheat paste, large-scale roller pieces and sticker bombing specifically. Not only did I find a graffiti artist, but also I found a legend that invented the very techniques that FAILE appropriated for their tower.

He stood before me in scuffed boots, baggy jeans and a tattered Carhart jacket. Here before me was the anti-artist for whom I had searched. I spent the majority of our conversation praising him and his work with Revs. His humility was instantly apparent.

Graffiti artists tend to be anti-social, but after a few minutes he opened up and seemed excited to be talking shop. Graffiti is in its essence one of the most antisocial activities humans engage in. After all, we spend our nights writing our names on your things.

“That means a lot to me man. You don’t get a lot of compliments in this world,” he beamed as I mentioned a specific piece of his: a tribute bill he posted in the early 90s for the classic Hip Hop album “Word…Life” by the rapper OC.

“I was actually friendly with MC Search at the time,” he continued, about OC’s then-manager, “and he put me on.”

He seemed thrilled I knew such a random piece, but little did he know that very image has adorned my desktop for years.

Cost was less interested in commenting on the FAILE tower and its implications in the art world, and more interested in asking me about my graffiti career and discussing the current crop of up and coming writers on the street.

Just on the heels of interviewing Jilly Ballistic, one of NYC’s rising illegal graffiti artists, I told Cost of her current wheat pasting campaign on the subway system that appropriates MTA advisory poster graphics to deliver her own messages.

I spoke of her work and a few other artists I have met recently and Cost was all ears, almost as if he was sizing me up. Here was a legend in the street art world, the very man who invented the techniques used by FAILE and Jilly Ballistic, and here I was being quizzed by him. He is a dedicated soldier in our graffiti community and his sincere love for the art was made apparent in that very moment.

The event was now well over, the catering staff was closing up shop while the four of us stood underneath a staircase looking as sketchy as could be. The suits and gowns were gone, FAILE was long gone but the man who invented modern wheat pasting as we know it was not budging.

We gave each other our daps and out of his pocket came two of the iconic Cost and Revs middle finger stickers.

“Take these man, I really appreciate everything you said,“ he told me.

I smiled harder than I have in years, walked out of the New York City Ballet and put a Cost and Revs sticker on the nearest mailbox I could find.

It’s these natural moments that seem counter to time and space that Ryan enjoys most in his photography. Zooming in on a daytime moon, or a patch of forest on the side of a mountain, or a few waves in a giant lake, he deducts gravity, time and space leaving the observer grasping for a way to understand what it is they are viewing. “My photos are landscape photography without a horizon line.”

“I really like the fog,” he says, of his dozen fog prints. “How fog moves, it’s just too cool to believe.”

Adding: “The biggest inspiration in the last three years – which has been totally unconscious and I didn’t do it on purpose – has been all of David Attenborough’s documentaries because Dave watches them to go to sleep every single night. It’s also weird because they’re on while I fall asleep so I feel like it’s subconscious.”

Ryan’s partner David Harper is the curator of BAMarts at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and full disclosure, he and I went to punk shows together a lot in our younger days. David’s many curation projects in New York and beyond also connected the talented duo to the brand new Shandaken Project in upstate New York where artists and writers can go to disconnect during summer residencies. Ryan spent a month there in 2012 after opening a solo show in July called Tide Study that included his natural images at Charles Bank Gallery.

About two hours north of New York City, “The Shandaken Project supports experimentation by emerging and mid-career artists, writers and thinkers, and curators and other producers of culture with free residencies that include room, board, and studio space.”

For a small group of artists – only three live here at a time – working in the high paced, high stress environment that is the New York art world, the sustainable studios dotting the perimeter of the Saltbox-style house hope to be high-impact respites. Surrounded by national forest, the 250-acre property has stunning views and a spring-fed lake. The main house with four bedrooms and limited internet access, but a plethora of manual tools, sits on the plateau of the mountain. An arts supplier and hardware store are about 15 minutes away by car.

“In the wake of 2008, younger and mid-career artists took heavy blows from a financial meltdown that stripped them of one support system after another. And as the art industry becomes increasingly professionalized and cities, particularly New York City, become more restrictive and gentrified, it becomes harder for artists generally to avoid colluding with the marketplace.

We believe that 2008 was an object lesson about the unsustainability of top-down funding models, and that in coming years, capital will assert itself with increasing ferocity in the field of ideas. The Shandaken Project exists to address these problems: by focusing on community development and support, and creating a space where experimentation, process, and research are privileged as ends in and of themselves.”

“The property on which Shandaken Project residencies take place is nestled on a completely private mountaintop, with an intentional focus on an individual experience of place,” the founder Nick Weist wrote to me over email.

Nick, formerly the Marketing Director of Creative Time, spent time upstate on a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farm, and incorporated maintenance and growth of a large edible garden into the project. Every resident – only three live there at a time along with Nick – must spend 3-10 hours in the garden per week tending and harvesting their own delicious fresh produce while reconnecting with each other and the land.

“As such, while there, the residents and I are empowered to easily disconnect from major media outlets: in my case for four months and for the residents up to six weeks at a time,” he wrote.

During Ryan’s time at Shandaken he cleansed his palate after putting together a big show, hiked and allowed himself the space to explore and play with the mechanics of nature and the line between natural and synthetic.

While there he whittled a dead tree into a striking white forest sculpture, created stalactites with synthetic materials and honed in more on his performative skills. All examples of work that existed outside of the marketplace, but whose process is meant to lay the foundation for work still to come. For Ryan that’s preparation for a solo show this spring.

“I did this performance when I was up there,” he started to tell me, smoking a cigarette on his balcony overlooking a maze of Williamsburg buildings old and new.

“There was a big party for all the people who donated to the Kickstarter to build the studios. It was the day after the opening day of the Olympics and since I knew we didn’t get to see it, I was determined to put on my own opening ceremony at Shandaken. So I built an Olympic torch – it was a beer-amid – I insisted on the fact that I had to drink every beer to make it. So I had to drink 88 beers. Minimum 8 beers a day for like 14, 15 days.”

And how was this all received by the supportive Kickstarting crew?

“Ryan’s performative piece was a moving reminder that a small community of people, if it’s lucky enough to include a talented, motivated artist like him, can mark world events without relying on corporations to guide our experience,” Nick told me. “I’ve never partaken in a more fun or satisfying celebration of the Olympic spirit, which in this case was distilled into a floating, flaming tower of red, white, and blue beer cans.”

Later, someone compared the performance, which included smoke bombs, to a Richard Prince-like show of patriotism.

“I don’t know,” Ryan responded, “I just really like America. Maybe growing up in the South had a lot to do with it. There are a billion things I can do here that I would not be allowed to do anywhere else.”

His next show, sometime this spring, might delve into that concept or not, but ultimately, Shandaken’s success was similar. “It’s nice to go away,” Ryan continued, as I was getting ready to leave his lovely loft.

“I didn’t even think about, ‘I wonder if someone commented on a photo of mine today?’ It just never crosses your mind, which is awesome because I’m probably thinking about that way to often or more than I’d like to.”

Sign up here to learn more about Shandaken Project and be the first to know when they announce details about the 2014 residency year.

Steam Powered Man - The Velcro Lewis Group from Velcro Lewis Group on Vimeo.

“You can’t hug an mp3!” Dominique Miniaci told me over grilled cheese sandwiches at the Chat n’ Chew, just outside of Union Square recently. “It’s sound and it’s also the artwork and the physical holding of the product that’s cool, that’s artistic and something you feel close to.”

Beautiful and young, this businesswoman – formerly a distributor of coffee as per her family business – now distributes something else. Vinyl.

Along with her bearded partner and East Village Radio host, Mike Newman, they run Beyond Beyond is Beyond Records, an offshoot of Newman’s EVR show by the same name.

“The overarching word would be psychedelic,” he said between grilled cheese bites. “That just narrows things down for people. It’s not like you have to be on psychedelics to enjoy it, but it works as an overarching thing.”

This local Brooklyn brand – shorthand BBiB – has been a radio show for four years and a regular record club since October 2009 for friends interested in listening to high quality vintage audio (Shhh! No talking!). Now, BBiB also releases records and digital audio via Bandcamp as a carefully curated selection of psych sounds. Each arm is an organically grown offshoot of Mike’s musical tastes combined with his ease at amassing cool friendly music lovers on the radio every Friday afternoon, and beyond.

“I think we have a lot of good shit to offer,” Mike continued, “And with this kind of music too, the consumers and the bands all generally dig vinyl, the bands are like, ‘Oh man I want to get my record made, they don’t care if a CD is made.”

The duo decided to join forces to start the label early in 2012 and began planning their debut releases, especially during a trip to Austin Psych Fest in March. They put it out into the ether that they would be starting a new label, and recommendations abounded on who they might consider for curation, like their first release in November, Run Slow, by Prince Rupert’s Drops.

“Prince Rupert’s Drops was a recommendation from our friend Chris Millstein,” Mike told me, referencing the head manager and buyer at Kim’s Music. “We told him we were starting a label and he was like you guys have to check out this band Prince Rupert Drops. He saw them open for Endless Boogie, and we’re big Boogie fans and we were like, ’Oh shit we haven’t even heard of them.’ But we saw them and we instantly knew there was something super special going on. They’ve been playing together for years and they’ve never had a record. “

So Mike brought his ear to the table, and helped make sense of and curate three years of recording sessions with a band that had formed in 2005. The sessions included “original bassist Brad Truax (Home, Dan Melchior’s Broke Revue, Interpol, to name a few).. acclaimed comics-artist Leslie Stein (guitar, vox), fellow former Broke Revue-er Bruno Meyrick-Jones (guitar, vox), former Osprey Steve McGuirl (drums, percussion)… multi-talented bass-player Chad Laird (Land of Tomorrow, Jantar).. and synthesizer-sorceress Kirsten Nordine (Jantar).”

“So it was actually a lot of fun to sequence,” Mike continued, “and we were all bouncing ideas off of each other about how the songs got sorted out, a song from this session, one brand new one and then this, you know, Bruno and Leslie having a female song and then one with Bruno singing and then one with Chad and Leslie harmonizing, and it was just like and we wanted to put something together that had that textured old feel. It sounds pretty cohesive.”

The second release, out in February 2013 comes from Helsinki-based four-piece Kiki Pau, recently heralded for the musical shift they’ve taken on this third album by the digital pages of Spin Magazine as “…woodwinds, hand drums, and guitar twang tracing links between pagan rituals under the midnight sun and Indian ashrams half a world away.”

Though the record is effect heavy, and songs are long (and rewarding), Mike says, you need guys like Kiki Pau – Henrik Domingo, Pauli Saarikivi, Olli Juvonen, and Aleksi Gustafsson – to be the brains behind their big textured sound.

“The brain has to figure out how to carry it out, not the equipment, not the effects,” Mike said of the recording process. Adding, “I think sometimes the limitations are good.

“I even hear musicians saying that in the studio they’re so inundated with, ‘You can do whatever the fuck you want’ because you can cut and paste everything, and because of that everyone’s just overwhelmed.”

Though Dominique, Dom for short, admits their vintage big rock psych sound “is not the easiest sell,” it certainly pays off for the right listener, and it’s those audience niches that will be the future of the way the music industry does business. “It’s something we have to accept – the future is now.”

“If someone takes the time to listen, they’re going to get blown away,” Mike said. “But it’s one of those things where you play the first single and the lyrics don’t come in until 5:15 and there’s a slow build up. If you’re the kind of press person that needs to hear stuff – like gimme the vocals! – it’s not going to be there. If you give somebody the right idea of what they’re in for, and it’s the right person that would like that, they’ll check it out.”

What it comes down to though is pretty simple. “I just like forcing everyone to enjoy my taste!” Mike admits. But it’s his love of music, unique taste and knowledge base that gives him the credibility to do so. At least that’s what he told folks who asked why he always gets to pick the records at record club. Simple, he said, “Because I’m cultivating a thing, as opposed to somebody’s going to bring in the Flashdance soundtrack.”

There is a timeless quality to the sound that Mike is cultivating, captured by the first two releases, that is pure rock, cutting to the core of the psych genre and redefining it for a modern collector. Perhaps that timelessness is inspired by Mike’s day job as head writer of the syndicated radio show Nights with Alice Cooper, just up the street from our Chat n’ Chew table, where Mike eats regularly, “for the music.”

Upcoming BBiB releases in 2013 will include MMOSS and Quilt split 10″ record and a JJUUJJUU release in March/April. Then Mystic Swedish Nomads, Our Solar System in April/May and Velcro Lewis Group (last year’s “Steam Powered Man” video, below) in the summer.

The most refreshing thing about Mike Newman, besides his long hair and easy demeanor, is his point of view. According to Dom, his musical taste is “a place for people to go when they want to cut out the noise and seek a curated selection of music.”

“There’s not really a leader, or producer type anymore, that tells the artist, add this or add that.” Dom said of her partner. Adding, “I’ve never been to a record club and not liked the record.”

So far we’re psyched we can say the same about the label, too.

“It’s official, we are doing a Bloody Mary/Redhead (Bloody Redhead!) tasting on Dec. 16 from 1-4PM at Waterfront Wines,” said an email that landed in my inbox recently.

The sender was a farm share friend of mine, Cindy List, the purveyor of a popular local hot sauce, which I was lucky enough to get my hands on recently. I soon learned it is on its way to becoming a Brooklyn household staple.

Starting with her close group of friends who would come over with empty jars, Cindy’s Redhead Hot Sauce is a delicious homemade success now making its way onto the local market. Local bars featuring this unique blend in their bloody mary mixes include Sample (152 Smith Street), Ciro’s (307 Smith Street) and Bar Corvo (791 Washington Avenue).

Stop by Waterfront Wines this Sunday to try it for yourself and look out for where to get your own jar soon.

“Sharon’s pulling in the favors!” Jessica Larrabee jokingly cried over the phone from a Wheaton, Maryland number recently while her bandmate in She Keeps Bees, Andy LaPlant, and I listened. She was explaining how it came to be that Sharon Van Etten was back on the PR beat, pushing these kids.

“She’s a dear friend, we’ve known her for years now – she’s like a sister to me,” Jessica continued. “I’ve been so happy to see all the blessings that have come to her. She’s incredible. It was really humbling when she was like, come play on my record.”

You. Must. Write. About. This. Band. Was the message I got, and I obliged, and here we are. They’re playing this Saturday December 15 at Cameo Gallery with Speck Mountain and a special guest – wonder who that could be!

After meeting in Brooklyn eight years back, the duo that are She Keeps Bees have put out a slew of independent efforts and toured them across the U.S., even scoring an overseas label and booking agent. Huzzah!

But the same luck has evaded these two in the states, where like many of their indie brethren they struggle to find a booking agent to fight for the last remaining dollars flowing in the music industry: live shows.

“We’re trying to be a real band that does, like, planning,” Jessica said. “It’s just us, so.”

“We’ve been the label ourselves – in the states we hire as we need – but the distribution and stuff, if you order from our online store, you’re getting it from us, along with little prizes and notes and stuff.”

Though a small label in the UK (“We were their bastard child rock band,” Andy said) has released their efforts abroad and even helped secure them a booking agent there and in parts of Europe, it hasn’t been so easy.

“Here, not so much,” continued Andy. “We’ve been booking ourselves for the last couple years in the states which is difficult but you get some interesting shows.”

How interesting?

“We end up playing house shows and things that wouldn’t normally happen through traditional channels.” So you get really close to fans? “Sometimes sleeping in their living rooms,” he added.

But these days that’s the way things go, right?

Jessica pipped up, “The idea that there’s no one way anymore – I mean in the 70s my Dad was playing drums in house bands and there was no way for them to gain enough money to go and record, because it was just impossible – now there’s all these different avenues to allow bands to do what they need to do. Sometimes I feel like a label comes in, and if they’re taking rights, you better love that label; you better love being a part of that community and that family and help support other bands that that label is going to put out.”

Adding, “For us it was like, we’re just holding on to [our publishing rights] because right now we can live and do what we want without having to actually ask anybody, ‘Can we do that?’”

Is that freedom or what?

“We’re letting the universe surprise us, that’s sort of the mantra of 2012/2013 – no one really knows what the hell is going on!”

Buy Tickets to see She Keeps Bees with Speck Mountain and a special guest at Cameo Gallery this Saturday, December 15, 2012.

Suede Jury " Soul Sista" Music Video from ANDM on Vimeo.

This Friday artists taeOne and THANEONE, otherwise known as Partners in Crime, are kicking off their inaugural monthly party at Bushwick spot The Lab with a special live performance by Suede Jury and LEX from Sinistah Circle.

Here’s a photo collection of the duo and some of their (legal) art getting made on a roof somewhere in Brooklyn – click through below for a taste of what these guys have been creating recently.

We’ll also see some visual and performance art at this unique new space – don’t miss out! There will be a full bar and 3 varieties of macaroni and cheese will be served. RSVP for reduced $6 admission, otherwise $8 at the door.

Since the current public advocate, Bill deBlasio, is ditching his post to run for mayor, the site’s Insider blog had a few things to say about who might replace him. We thought it was ripe for picking.

On the phone with James today, she told us, “Crain’s represents what Crain’s represents.”

Adding, “If people are interested in supporting me, the next 30 days are critical to the campaign. I urge progressives to go online and donate what you can.”

Here’s the premise.

Last week, The Insider wrote about the ramifications on the race of the fact that the frontrunners in the other citywide contests are white: Council Speaker Christine Quinn for mayor and Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer for comptroller. That makes New York City labor unions with large minority memberships more likely to back a person of color for the other citywide office, public advocate, insiders say.

So let’s reference ourselves and base this conversation about citywide office on the color of a candidate’s skin? Ok. Um. Go on.

Ms. James, who is African-American and has strong labor ties, would seem to be a logical choice. However, her weak fundraising has raised concerns among some top union officials, who have been discussing the prospect of finding another minority candidate with strong labor ties to enter the race, two union sources said. Whether Ms. James comes through with better numbers in her January campaign finance disclosure may determine whether those plans go beyond the discussion phase, said one top New York City union official.

Logical is a funny word to use here. Translation: Ms. James is the right color for progressives, but does not have the big business dollars to help elect her.

“It’s being actively discussed, and there have been discussions going on about whether or not to reach out to people,” the official said. “It’s finally been decided we’re going to wait until January and see what happens.”

Through her first year of fundraising (ending in July,) Ms. James had raised $271,000 while burning through $128,000—leaving about $143,000 on hand. Along with the low figures, her high burn rate has also raised some concerns among union officials.

Translation: Numbers, numbers, numbers. Since James doesn’t take money from real estate developers we’re not sure she can win so maybe we’ll choose someone else.

Of course, the argument could be made that the unions should simply give to Ms. James now in order to ensure her viability. Ms. James (unlike some other female candidates running this year, like Manhattan borough president candidate Julie Menin, who has Wall Street ties) does not represent an affluent district and is more reliant on big institutional players such as labor.

Oh! You could make that argument, huh? Maybe a few graphs up would have been better. ALSO, REAL REAL ESTATE IS A BIGGER PLAYER THAN LABOR. And really, who are we talking about here, Crain’s?

A adviser to her campaign told The Insider, “In Tish exploring a run for citywide office, she is getting encouragement and support from all over the city including from a number of civic, elected and labor leaders.”

That’s because she has already advocated for the public. Actually doing the job makes you better at doing it.

If Ms. James were to falter in January, a likely place to pluck a new candidate would be from borough president races. Brooklyn state Sen. Eric Adams would be one possibility, but seems to have a relatively clear path in his current race. A stronger possibility would be Queens state Sen. Jose Peralta, but another union official said that Mr. Peralta seems strong committed to running in the multi-candidate, highly competitive Queens borough president’s race. Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz Jr. would have been a logical pick, but he recently announced that after eyeing the public advocate job he would run for re-election.

Falter? You mean if she doesn’t have enough money? What is enough? And why are you so obsessed with LISTS, Crain’s? The best candidate to be PUBLIC ADVOCATE is probably not another male politician seeking to become borough president or mayor someday, but someone with progressive values and a reputation for being the David to Big Business’s Goliath, ahem, like Letitia James.

Also running for public advocate are Brooklyn State Sen. Daniel Squadron and former congressional candidate Reshma Saujani, who is of Indian-American’s descent but does not have strong labor ties.

So a white guy who should stay in Albany and a lady with big ties to big business, both with big money fundraising operations, are waiting in the wings.

So, Crain’s, is this really how you treat a lady?

This collaborative installation will include recent works by these native New York street artists and feature live performances by Suede Jury and LEX who will be rocking their taeOne produced songs. The night will be topped off by a special performance art piece by local artist Carolanne Leslie and DJ Susan Z. Anthony will be on deck to keep the party going.

There will be a full bar and 3 varieties of macaroni and cheese will be served. RSVP for reduced $6 admission, otherwise $8 at the door.

Suede Jury

Design-minded Brooklyn native Suede Jury intricately weaves all forms of poetry into his music. Every line is carefully crafted to convey a message, image, or concept — delivered w/ his signature bass-heavy tone & multi-syllabic stutter-step. He draws influence from the early ’90s, arthouse films, Africa, women, coming of age in BK, & touches on themes of personal triumph & the human condition. Here’s his latest video with Submarine Bass Face, and a taeOne produced beat below.

taeOne

Born and bred in Washington Heights, notoriously a hotbed for hip hop, taeOne first dabbled in the scene as a graff writer, roaming the streets and subway tunnels of New York’s underground. After getting popped by the cops for vandalism, he got his hands on a Akai s20 and decided to use his creative energy less illegally as a beatsmith. taeOne curates a sound that captures and expands on the spirit of 90s hip hop. Naming the Beatminerz, Organized Noise, and Jay Dee as influences, no sound or tempo is off limits. Here’s a classic tae remix.

LEX

A son of Queens, LEX is a fan and student of Hip Hop, first and foremost. His music represents everyday life and struggle that most city dwellars can relate to. He looks to reach listeners through content that is honest, yet creative. A member of the rap group, Sinistah Circle and New York Rhyme Exchange collective, LEX is an MC who has been recording and performing since 2002. This is some real rap ish.

THANEONE

Otherwise known as Niger Miles, a creative director and filmmaker originally from Harlem, THANEONE has been getting up on walls since he was a wee one. Here’s his (dirty) reel.

See you at The LAB!

“I don’t know I might get in trouble for saying this – I was concerned that it was looking too much like a cold-ass Chelsea show where there were just smaller frames on the wall in a large space and it looked kind of stark.”

But the show, American Landscape, is stark in a different way. In fact, it is a local, accessible reminder that artistic expression might be the last truly free realm to explore the interdisciplinary matters of modern life, environment and politics.

Juxtaposed against the early artists of the Hudson Valley style, whose creative re-creation of the manifest-destiny era American landscape lacked substance if not beauty, these modern artists toil in the devastating industrial quandaries of our society.

The show is open through December 16 and features work by Marin Abell, Josh Bricker, Chad Curtis, Dymph de Wild, Ben Finer, Daniel J. Glendening, Peter Lapsley, Jan Mun, Tom Pnini, Leah Raintree, Rick Reid, Corina Reynolds, Greg Stewart and John Wanzel.

These artists are “united through a heightened sense of awareness to their immediate surroundings seen through the lens of the American landscape; a landscape shaped by unseen socio-political forces, constantly shifting cultural paradigms, and the dizzying flux of construction and destruction.”

Dan, who took me on a tour of the work recently, is an artist and the organizer of the show, but not a curator he says – admitting there might be a slight conflict in showing his own work as a curator. He put together the original environmentally focused concept and assembled participating artists from nearby corridors of the artist collective Wassaic Project.

“I’m not going out and picking which works go into a show,” he said, adding, “Giving the power back to the artist to show what they really want to show, and what fits in, and what gels with everyone else’s work” is most important to him.

“Why does this model still exist?” he continued. “Where it’s like – private gallery space, curator is the middleman and the artist seems to come last, when they’re really driving the boat, you know what I mean? That was really important to me too.”

That sort of intermediation might have banished Dan’s piece liminal: Powered by Newtown Creek from the gallery space. This industrial concept was a particularly interesting twist on an environmental catastrophe, but indicated a way in which one might create opportunity out of crisis.

Everything in the show has substance and weight, as this piece does, with the refreshing element of play added to each. In 2010, Dan and his best friend got in a canoe, rowed down the Newtown Creek and collected sludge filled with oil and minerals leftover from the last 100 years of industry, refined it and used it to power a billboard that read “Powered by Newtown Creek.”

Greg Stewart and Dymph de Wild’s contribution is a fully functioning artpocalypse cabin, complete with survival suits, decorated with  remnants of discarded mass consumerism, unveiling a little humor in destructive tendencies. According to the statement it was “designed for the chaos spawned from migration and adaptation in the areas between urban and rural environments.”

A recent Parsons MFA graduate, Josh Bricker’s video contributions are a fascinating reorganization of video data points. Entitled God Bless De-territorialized America (endo-colonization in the age of techno-fetishism) (2012), this video is crowdsourced from amateur fan footage off YouTube. Josh seamlessly transitions each video of national anthem fireworks, bombers and singers into one seamless stadium experience. Dan tells me, “He takes it to a nicer space where there’s room for critical thinking.”

Josh’s second video is Time Labor Money, actually three videos displayed in triptych, pulling together those specific relevant data points from episodes of Discovery Chanel’s Deadliest Catch series and put them in a sequence that unveils the way those three things play out in the landscape, with hilarious results.

“There’s definitely a humorous quality,” said Dan, “A lot of it comes down to the absurdity of the modern condition.”

Over a span of 100 years (and including the largest oil spill in American history*), in excess of 30 million gallons of oil has leaked into Newtown Creek, a 3.5 mile long body of water that forms the border between North Brooklyn and Long Island City. The “soft- bottom” that remains to this day is a 5 to 10-foot thick layer of immensely viscous sludge composed of petroleum, raw sewage, heavy metals, and decaying organic matter, which hovers above the “hard-bottom” of Newtown Creek. After the E.P.A. instituted an investigation of the primary parties responsible for the notorious spill and the designation of the creek as a Superfund site, the existing oil marinating in the water is referred to as “free-product.”

For this project, 10 gallons of sludge was harvested from Newtown Creek with a 25-foot long manual bilge pump attached to a canoe. It was then refined using a waste-oil processor equipped with dual-pole polymer filtration beads that absorb any material that is not petroleum-based. The resulting product was poured into a 3 kW diesel generator that provided power for a handmade, back-lit billboard that read “Powered by Newtown Creek” and functioned as a temporary public installation near the East River entrance to the creek in April of 2010. The billboard, generator, and video documentation were shown as artifacts of this engagement at The Kitchen the following June.

At the Brooklyn Night Bazaar in Williamsburg this past weekend I was thrilled to check out all the DIY designs, live music and tasty and inventive snacks on hand (peppermint patty CAKE, omg). They’re going strong Fridays and Saturdays through December 22, 6pm until midnight.

Thousands of locals came out to see the crafts and culture and share it with friends this holiday season. Tweet about your favorite DIYer @bklyntheborough or use #BKLYN if you see any good items out in the markets and get a retweet.

I stopped by a ton of booths to talk to local DIYers and document how and where these independent folks do what they do. The aforementioned peppermint patty cake was the concept of lifelong baker Meghan Daly, whose company Daly Pies, has a firm motto. Eat what you like. Who doesn’t like peppermint patties?

Victor Spinelli’s giant photograph of a naked lady in a crazy looking giant old helmet drew plenty of people up to his table full of prints mixing photography and painting. Turns out that Victor has released two books and photographed Michael Phelps pretty much in the buff back in 2008 along with the entire US Olympic Swim team.

From a vintage suitcase nearby sprung bow ties by the adorable Wonder Lee made from reclaimed items like Legos and comic books. This inventive local artisan is usually on North 7th Street wares on hand, and sells via a website where you can watch a BEX video that features her signature Lego stylings.

The Jewelry selection at Brooklyn’s artisan markets is always fierce. Melissa J Tyson’s necklace and earring designs are sophisticated and wearable, with beautifully textured surfaces and unique and light natural shapes. She has done some beautiful custom pieces for repeat customers and offers classes on how to make your own at The Bloomfield School in Gowanus.

Another Bloomfield teacher, Kerrie Yeung was nearby with sophisticated earrings and rings as seen on her Etsy page. Her chunky carved silver rings are gorgeous and simple.

For brightly colored natural necklaces we went for Imprint by Eileen, who blogged about her table at the Bazaar. Eileen has been in business for one year and is going strong.

The last jewelry table I saw was With Roots, which was not convincingly a jewelry brand upon first look. The concept: live moss plants inside glass shaped in beautiful and unique ways creates a wearable terrarium. No, you don’t have to water it, it self sustains. Who knew?

We’re definitely going back for a pull through scarf from Arin Maya – Made, which can also be found on Etsy. Arin is also a singer as seen on SoundCloud.

The star of our short video has to be Mark from Top Shelf Premium Vintage, whose shop is by appointment only and features some real premium moments from the past.

While we were there we met Imran Khoja and signed up for the curation site he founded called Designed Good, which features unique products with good stories every week.

I also got to meet Brandt, an architect at thefuturefuture, whose got a good design philsophy. And just when I thought I’d get out before ruining my dinner, Joseph at Dreamscoops made me (ok he didn’t MAKE ME) try a few bites of sea salt and caramel ice cream and their Grumpy’s Cafe latte ice cream. They were both so good, I couldn’t decide which I liked more.

We also said hi to General Assembly Tees, Baked in Brooklyn, It’s a Cuppie, Greenpoint Trading Co., Ayaka Hara rings, Rosamund Grill and Dub Pies.

Thanks to all the artisans who participated in our video and the many of you whose tables were so great. I’ll be visiting more markets all season and hope to see your DIY business on my travels.

Share more with the borough: if you have a local DIY business, retail or Etsy store, send a link to your YouTube video  about being a local artisan to news at brooklyntheborough dot com and we’ll post a YouTube playlist of all the submissions every Friday this December ahead of the weekend holiday markets.

Read more about our campaign to create DIY media – LOCAL ORIGINAL LIVE CONTENT – for and by Brooklynites by visiting IndieGoGo.

This weekend has a few things for the kids: Saturday, December 1 Noon-6pm, Brooklyn Holiday Book Fair Presented by Honey & Wax Booksellers; Pete Hamill Reads the Gift of the Magi + The Christmas Kid at 4:30 pm. “Rare, vintage and out-of-print books from independent booksellers from all over Brooklyn. Antiquarian maps, prints and ephemera. Get to know emerging local booksellers, jump-start your holiday shopping and be surprised by books you didn’t even know you wanted.”

Hop the train downtown between 10:30am-5pm, where Brooklyn Friends will host their Winter Festival & Artisan Craft Fair.

On Sunday December 2, Cobble Hill’s PS29′s fourth annual “Eat Pie and Shop” will go from 11am to 4pm and include “a Holiday Gift Fair, Pie Social and celebrity-judged baking contest, with proceeds benefiting the local school’s PTA funded arts and enrichment programs.”

If you’re really just to busy to shop during regular business hours, on Friday and Saturday nights through December 22, Brooklyn Night Bazaar is combining your need to shop with your desire for food and live music in Williamsburg. Look for us there!

As the bulk of the shopping for adults (or those resembling grown people) will be done at night, while drinking, on December 8 Gowanus NITE Market creators “are excited to partner with Film Biz Recycling as they occupy their raw and quirky 10,000 square foot warehouse in the heart of Gowanus” with artists and beer. That is a nice way to loosen the grip on your thinning wad of cash.

Nearby during the day on December 7 and 8, Crafted at the Canal will feature Llaves Designs, New York Clocks, Wild Edge Designs, Recycle-A-Bicycle Jewelry, Wonder Lee 123 Designs Inc, Surname Cycling Goods, La’ Elle Chalkboards and Designs, Ollielulu, Bexbuckles co, Tri-Lox, Planet Ert, Ancora Bags, Film Biz Recycling, Woodknot Design, rubberpieces, Shea Yeleen, Matthew Lusk’s Bright Ideas, Coil + Drift.

Brooklyn Lyceum‘s 5th annual holiday Marketplace will run from 11am-7pm on December 15/16 in Park Slope. If you’re up in Williamsburg, hit 3RDWard‘s 6th Annual Holiday Craft Fair that weekend too. “Come early, and you’ll score a limited-edition 3rd Ward tote bag filled to the brim with good stuff from all of our vendors. Supplies are limited, but if you’re one of the first 200 people here, we’ll give you some goodies.”

On December 15/16 and again on the 22/23, Brooklyn Craft Central will feature two days of different local merchants at Littlefield in Gowanus. We liked their weird squirrel bird poster so much we linked it right up there.

As always, Artists & Fleas features local hipster crafts in Williamsburg; and the Brooklyn Flea vendors are kickin’ it at One Hansen Place in Fort Greene with a special holiday market the weekend before big J’s bday, December 22-23.

Visit Dom from Made in Brooklyn Tours and get behind the scenes access to the maker movement in Brooklyn to learn who is making things locally by neighborhood. December 15: Gowanus!

Did we forget about you? Email us at news at brooklyn the borough dot com. Tweet @bklyntheborough or #bklyn if you have a spot at a local market and we’ll let people know you’re there.

The inaugural year of the project was an interesting and new twist on community filmmaking. It’s not a festival, but a “film challenge that brings communities closer together by inviting filmmakers of all levels to create short narrative or documentary videos of their block using only their block’s residents as cast and crew.”

The concept was developed by founders Ryan O’Hara Theisen (whose work with Lucky Branded Entertainment we’ve seen before) and Mary Crosse, both filmmakers, who realized that though they lived in close proximity to many interesting folks right on their block, they struggled to engage neighbors to say more than just a passing hello. On My Block Films was born to create instant community through the filmmaking process, which brought forth 16 films made by teams of residents on blocks all of the city. They screened the five minute shorts at White Wave in Dumbo on November 14.

“The screening sold out the night before, and night of every seat was filled and people stood to watch where they could,” Rachel continued. “I had the chance to interview guests, judges and filmmakers and ALL had encouraging, positive comments on how being apart of this process has made them consider and appreciate their neighbors and block. Every single person I talked to said that they know OMB will reach more blocks next year. Many hope that the challenge happens more than once per year and in more cities.”

The big winner of the night, taking Best Documentary and Best in Show, was made on Snyder Avenue between 31st and 32nd streets in Flatbush. Directed and edited by Andrew Thomas, BIKES & BEATS stars resident Quentin Jean and explores the creative similarities between bike street riding and music production. Neighbors Chaz Taylor and Orin Thomas served as production assistants.

Best Narrative went to a bunch of cute shaggy-haired kids starring in Le Petit Fairytale - made on Union Street between Henry and Clinton Streets in Carroll Gardens – where two brothers get inspired by a mysterious girl and their adventure on their block together.

These Vimeo shorts are already popping up on web searches as related to their physical block, creating a whole new way of connecting people with dynamic local content. We’re excited to see more shorts from this dynamic local non-profit.

BIKES & BEATS

Le Petit Fairytale

Check out our slideshow of the winners and head over to On My Block’s page to watch all the entries.

For many journalists, the recession meant that though many of us were collecting unemployment, we could begin to experiment with the blog format without traditional media managers looking over our shoulders. Innovation started happening on these pages at the edges of the industry and there was no going backwards.

Brooklyn The Borough’s new model was developed outside of the mainstream media, yet is imbued with the lessons of traditional media’s ethical platforms for reporting and discovery. The only thing that has changed here is the business model – now it includes you. We’ve created a new role for independent local business in media, that reflects our new freelance economy and gives creative people a local platform to bring in new customers and up cycles that desire to support a local free press by and for the people.

The hierarchical structure of traditional media and the business interests that support it means that power and money are centralized with information, repackaged and filmed or printed up nice and pretty for consumption. That is a passive action.

The inherent problem the internet poses to this model is that replicating the passive hierarchical structure here is antithetical to what the internet naturally wants to be: a horizontal network of equal interests who all have something to say.

Don’t get me wrong – there is much value in the vaunted halls of American journalism and scholarship and the daily reporting done all over the world. The people who bring you those stories are professionals and they should be compensated as such. Frankly, if we want this type of honest journalism to flourish, public media and non-profits like ProPublica are the way to go. There just isn’t one way to do things anymore, there are many.

As the world moves to a mobile digital platform, our devices have become our megaphones out to the world.  Local Wikis have popped up to crowdsource the local knowledge base of colleges and towns across the country. On twitter we have seen private people instantly transform themselves into citizen journalists, relaying what they see. Many of our mainstream media networks have begun culling this citizen data to report on their communities. Many more will follow the crowdsourcing trend and try to profit from it. They will want you to give them your time and your content for free and they will sell advertising based upon that value.

There is no financial or reputational reward for citizens who distribute information in this way. Information and profits are centralized with the media company. This is especially true for performance and art related content. Media organizations want your video, interview and special streaming audio for free, but don’t feel comfortable posting links to where an audience can actually support artists financially.

Here is why we need cooperative public media: so that our local information systems are kept democratic and reward quality content creators, not pageviews. Citizens, artists and DIY businesses should have as much of a voice in local media as any corporation. Those free speech values are overwhelmingly supported by the creative and independent commercial ventures in Brooklyn. Now this new central media information source will connect us all in the same decentralized way we share and learn in real life.

Many of our formerly independent local news sources are now mediated by their corporate interests. News Corp owns The Brooklyn Paper, AOL owns the Patch blog network, and by the looks of local web ads, the dominant local blogs in Brooklyn sway heavily in the favor of local real estate interests.

Local food entrepreneurs need more than Groupon and Yelp. Many of us live here and actively participate in the cultural landscape Brooklyn offers; now that landscape requires its own cultural media and digital economy that is not the passive consumption experience offered by Time Out, Ticketmaster and iTunes.

Brooklyn The Borough’s new model for cooperative public media taps into the cooperative culture that has taken hold all over the borough. In fragments on blogs, we see citizen journalists popping up where they see a void in relaying crucial information, building blogs and live streams for local bands to promote themselves and artisan e-commerce is booming. Let’s get together and build a place for everyone to connect these dots, share art, dialogue and the necessary information to be informed citizens who support our local economy.

Brooklyn The Borough is a platform that builds out into the digital world what our real physical culture is eating, seeing, doing and sharing. It connects people to local ideas and resources in a natural word-of-mouth way that supports our independent culture and economy. The more of us reporting on it from all angles and interests, the better quality information we’ll get.

People follow information that provides substance and connection to their interests and we’ve built with that in mind. By getting rid of banner ads and building a borough-wide skill and resource share forum; Indie Interchange marketplace for local sales, openings, deals and tickets; and a central events calendar for art, music and civic events, we will engage all corners of Brooklyn to participate in sharing and expanding our local knowledge base of culture by inviting the crowd to participate. But it will take all of us to join in one tiny little piece at a time and contribute actively to make this community a success.

We’d like to work on sustaining our local DIY culture all year around by expanding their audience and informing people about the DIY culture and cooperative lifestyle all around the borough. This sounds better than swooping in on Tuesdays and Thursdays to call our artisans trendy.

Here, independent speech and independent commerce go hand in hand. Forums for sharing resources and local sales of deals for food, art and live music will live next to citizen and cultural reporting on the real time news happening all over the borough. The more you contribute content, the more visible your reputation and your business will be to the community and you can translate that cultural capital into real sales in the same place.

If you’re an author with a new book out, contribute an essay or excerpt of your book and we’ll link to where readers can buy it. If you have a band, post your new video or audio stream and link to where people can get tickets to see you. If you run a movie theatre, post reviews of the films you screen and we’ll post ticket links. If you run an art gallery write about the artists you love and add your opening event to the borough’s events calendar for maximum draw.

The incentive will be to contribute content that reflects your experience, art and business in Brooklyn. Everyone can contribute to the community, on whatever topic they choose, and all authors will have profiles that denote their business and interests, as they desire. As in life, the source of information will mediate the trust we have for the content. Editors of the site will copy edit and post the content, meaning that quality will be top priority and you won’t get stuck with a libelous Yelp review.

We are offering initial memberships through our crowd funding campaign on IndieGoGo.com. Your membership in the community is tax-deductible and supports the maintenance and growth of the community. Everybody starts out with a two-year membership and a profile customized with any relevant social media, video and live stream embeds. If you have a YouTube, uStream, SoundCloud, podcast, eBook, etc, your profile links up with it directly.

Brooklynites ($5 or $15) are content creators – artists, musicians, writers, filmmakers – who are seeking a local audience for their material: journalism, photography, theater reviews, fiction, featured local art, music, movies and ideas.

Beta Testers ($25) get to be the first to build a profile and give the new crowd sourcing content system a whirl in early 2013.

Indie Interchangers ($60) are local small businesses, blogs and venues seeking new audiences by promoting content, events, tickets, openings, sales, and digital coupons. Interchangers can set up a free profile right now to start.

You only share profits – a small percentage based fee – if you make them from selling deals or tickets through our pages. Those dollars are also reinvested into maintaining and growing the site and producing community events. If you only want to promote your stuff and don’t want to sell through Brooklyn The Borough, then just become a member at your level and start uploading your content. Write it off your taxes, and boom – you’ve just created a new two-year promotional revenue stream for next to nothing, and it does good in your community by creating a public media platform for everybody.

Anyone who signs up can post any combination of multimedia content like text, music, podcasts and video. Instead of ads alongside the content, each article will have tags – notable topics mentioned for the local people, places, things or events that are discussed. Click on tag links to delve further into information on specific topics for natural active discovery led by you, the reader.

This content is already being created by you – for four years it has filled my inbox everyday about the people, places and amazing cultural experiences this borough has to offer. Here is a platform for all of us to share it, because I can’t do it alone – I need your help.

Join Brooklyn The Borough and support cooperative public media for Brooklyn’s future, and keep independent business and speech strong in our Bohemian burg! Support our IndieGoGo campaign right here.

With the rest of the world, Brooklyn The Borough is changing.

We are inviting you to join us in a borough-wide effort to build a new model for local media in Brooklyn with our newly launched campaign on IndieGoGo.com.

Your tax-deductible membership contributions will pay for a staff of editors and engineers to get the new infrastructure off the ground and running. Membership dollars will continue to support the operation and growth of a new type of public media for Brooklyn.

This is massively complex and yet really simple. We need a new kind of media for a new era – internet public access if you will. Media that is for us and by us, that tells the truth as best as it can, reflects our cultures, and informs us about our community wherever we go across devices.

I’ve been personally committed to this vision since founding Brooklyn The Borough in 2009. I’m a native of New York City, an interdisciplinary media professional with a love for NPR and a background in political science and history; and I’ve been working at building this concept for over four years.

Brooklyn has co-ops for food, cars and housing – so I thought why not our media? Cooperative Public Media will offer the best way for us to connect with each other locally, share ideas and resources and pass on the latest local deals at our favorite independent shops and restaurants, strengthening the economic backbone of our community.

This project needs you. Together we can establish a forum for people to share skills and resources; an Indie Interchange for local discount deals and ticket sales at a fraction of the cost and with a maximum local audience potential. Plus, tourists can use it to find fun things to do when they visit.

On Brooklyn The Borough you can own your own revenue streams and information. We are not in this to centralize profits or data, as many internet companies are; we live here, we love Brooklyn and we want everyone to benefit from connecting in a new digital way.

This isn’t a land grab; it’s a cooperative development. It’s an invitation to your piece of the local digital landscape. Let’s experiment with organizing and building a free press for and by the people of Brooklyn. Just like a wiki, but way better.

Many of us have moved on to a digital media based economy and our businesses don’t really have a good place to share local information with us anymore. Local group deals sites have swooped in to this space in our local economies and enticed businesses – with some success and some failure – to participate in discount group deals that push the boundaries of a small business’s margins and yet rake in upwards of an 87% profit margin for themselves. That is our money leaving the community.

Similarly, ticket companies sign non-competitive contracts with music venues for large sums of money to handle digital ticket sales. Both venue and buyer are paying growing fees and locked into contracts with fine print. These companies then merely license tickets to concertgoers, which means our cultural engagement is subject to their approval. (Seriously, read the fine print.)

Either way, local businesses, venues and performers have profits skimmed off the top of their margins. The end result is stalled innovation and negative financial impact on creative expression. Plus, Brooklynites are no better for it when their money leaves town.

Instead of continuing to accept this losing deal from third party corporations, we can join together and build a system that works for us. When member businesses make a sale through the new Brooklyn The Borough, a small transactional fee goes towards supporting the continued operation of a free press by us all without traditional display advertisements. The side impact of this model eliminates the financial risk of the group deal and contractual obligations of the ticket seller. All proceeds will be reinvested in growing the community by creating jobs and innovating new media technology to keep the ball moving forward. We have a lot to build.

The necessary foundation for this new model is already complete. For a tax-deductible $25 contribution you can be one of our first 500 citizen reporters to contribute content about your Brooklyn in our month long beta test starting in January. If you own a Brooklyn business your a tax-deductible contribution of $75 will make you a founding member of the Indie Interchange to promote local deals, sales and grand openings right out of the gate. Our readers will know you support free speech and an open internet.

Brooklyn’s best local events calendar will exist only once everyone who has an event is able to add to it. Individuals can add content for as little as a tax-deductible $5 membership contribution.

Local venues can contribute at the tax-deductible $150 level to promote listings, related content and ticket sales for two years. Venues may choose to use our ticketing service when it launches (with a small transactional fee) or link up their preferred service for sales conversions for the basic cost of their membership. Instead of leaving town, those small fees are reinvested into content about the events and people influencing culture in Brooklyn.
Our venue partners will have first access to use our live streaming platform for local performances over fair access wireless broadband provided by the local carrier WiFi NY - a local member-supported, non-commercial carrier-class internet network. Video and audio downloads of these live performances will provide additional revenue streams for our many underpaid local musicians who can establish their own channels.

We have a big vision for cooperative public media in Brooklyn, but right now we need your help in spreading the word that this is possible, and we can support it right now. Contributions as little as $5 are a big vote for this project to go forward. There are many levels and perks to entice you.

The details are up on Indiegogo.com. All contributions are tax-deductible and will support the building and growth of Cooperative Public Media as a new way of doing local business and informing the community and the world about the best of Brooklyn.

Before this campaign ends, on December 3 the world’s telecommunications regulators will meet in Dubai to negotiate new treaties. Next year will bring many changes to the internet landscape with the expansion of the number of top level domains (.com, .edu, and .net will soon also include .google, .amazon and maybe even .nyc). Soon we will see a big shift in what the internet landscape will look like. Now is the time to establish a horizontal media network among our citizens that acts as an equal playing field to report on our culture and community concerns.

It may sound complicated, but it’s not. Much was done to protect the people’s interest in TV and radio airwaves from the start of the information age. Now we can build similar protections into our public digital system by letting everyone have a hand on the turning wheel.

I had been dumpster diving myself for a few years around the city and Brooklyn.  At the encouragement of my mother (thanks mom!) I decided to make a film about what I was experiencing.  I knew I wanted to shoot the film in the “Direct Cinema” style, and for that, I approached some regulars I’d seen around at night.  I explained myself and my intentions, and they agreed to participate.  The film is actually a composite of four different nights.  All the different characters happened to be there all the nights we shot, and so it seemed natural that I cut it into a single night.

It’s incredible the amount of waste generated by our society on a daily basis.  Despite the inherent efficiency of centralized distribution in a big city, huge amounts of food are discarded every day.  I think it comes out to something like 450 pounds of food waste per person per year.  The first challenge is getting people to recognize this is not sustainable, and hopefully to change their practice.  For this film, I took the approach of show don’t tell.  Rather than hammer home some facts about waste, etc, I sought to let viewers see it for themselves.  Beyond that, I also wanted to share the sense of adventure involved.  It can be quite fun to go out on these night missions, and to share that via a sense of mystery, humor, and reveal was a goal of mine when editing the film.

It’s easy to indict Trader Joes or other large grocers for the waste.  But that fact is, Trader Joes does donate a large portion of their food to food pantries such as City Harvest.  Despite their best intentions, things like sell-by dates, broken packaging, and messy containers prevent them from donating – and charities from accepting.  Grocers often don’t have the resources to clean up a pallet of tomato sauce in the case that one is broken and soils the rest.  Or a carton of eggs in which one cracked egg spoils the bunch.  Finally, and perhaps most interesting, is the role of consumers.  Especially in high end stores, it is the preference and expectation of consumers that condemns a bunch of bananas on account of a few bruises.  When we pay top dollar, we expect perfection.  Cosmetic blemishes rarely affect the flavor or quality of produce, yet our dismissals fill the dumpsters.

Thankfully YouTube has allowed our account to upload more than 15 minutes at a time because this is seriously a great video. Last but not least in our Book Fest video series this year came from the last and likely largest panel of the day featuring Dan Savage.

With marriage equality on everyone’s lips, it still seems valid to ask the question, “Why marriage?” and “Why monogamy?” Our authors weigh monogamy, marriage, its alternatives, and what it all means for how we live today. Syndicated sex columnist Dan Savage (The Commitment) has advocated “monogam-ish” relationships; anthropologist Christopher Ryan, Ph.D. (Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality), argues that monogamy isn’t inherent to humans; Kristin Davis (The Manhattan Madam’s Guide to Sex), aka “The Manhattan Madam,” will provide her insights into the tangled web of sex and commitment; and Eric Klinenberg (Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone) examine what these changing attitudes look like at a societal level. Moderated by Kate Bolick (upcoming Among the Suitors: Single Women I Have Loved).

Watch the video at 19:45 as the openly gay pastor of St. Ann’s church pipes up and introduces himself to the liberal gasps from the audience. He belies their anxiety and says, “The foundations of this church haven’t shaken to the ground because we grasp for an honest conversation about human relationships and human sexuality,” adding later, “I just want to say a public thank you to Dan Savage for It Gets Better.”

Towards the end of Brooklyn Book Fest we headed over to the Brooklyn Historical Society's gorgeous old library for "Power to the People: Grassroots Revolution in the Post-Hope Era."

Tariq Ali (The Obama Syndrome), Todd Gitlin (Occupy Nation), and Marina Sitrin (Everyday Revolutions) discussed the necessity and effectiveness of individual action in the political sphere, which was moderated by Laura Flanders (The Nation).

The panel dug into "What's the connection between social change and electoral politics? Does the hope we can truly believe in come from the ground up? And what can we learn from the peoples’ revolutions from around the globe?"

Ali's comments, about six minutes of them before our memory space ran out, delve into a very interesting theory about the extreme center of politics, where the powerful center drowns out a spectrum of variety.

After Baratunde Thurston's panel at the Brooklyn Book Fest we decided to stick around for the next panel – "The Nation Presents the Twilight of the Elites" – featuring Rachel Maddow stand-in Chris Hayes author Michelle Goldberg, and moderator Richard Kim.

They sought to discuss "In the wake of the Fail Decade, Americans have historically low levels of trust in their institutions. How did we get here?"

Goldberg argued that right wing populists, and not Hayes's plutocrats, are the biggest threat to American politics. In this video, Hayes responds to his critics and takes a really long time just to tell us that OWS and the Tea Party have enough in common to be friends. 

At this year's Brooklyn Book Festival authors Baratunde Thurston, Rebecca Walker and Wesley Yang discussed "The Politics of Identity—Do They Still Matter?" moderated by Amitava Kumar.

The authors discussed "the stereotypes we still have of each other, both positive and negative, and examine the ways we run from and cling to various aspects of identity, race, and heritage."

Thurston in particular was late, but stirred up the crowd with his pronouncement that post-racial America is some bullshit, and other conversations he's had.

“I met [Andy Warhol] in 1963 when he was unknown and immediately liked his work and immediately collected him for like $200 – huge paintings, 12 feet tall, which I still have. I realized that he really had talent,” Ultra Violet told me at the press reception for the show. “I have an eye, some people don’t have an eye and have to wear glasses because they can’t see [ED Note: Is she making fun of me?]. I look at things. I have an eye and I collected everyone that one should collect. I was born with an eye. I make art and I have a studio in Chelsea.”

The Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) continues on with their year-long 150th birthday party by featuring the bizarre (and awesome) looking Cirkus Cirkör, a Swedish circus troupe arriving on our shores with the US premiere of Wear it like a crown - a tragicomic, and at times, absurd piece. These performers are interested in exploring chaos and "the transformation of risks into opportunities—taking our failures, fears, and shortcomings, polishing them up, and wearing them with pride, like a crown." Via BAM:

On a revolving stage, six performers move through a world of illusions, shadow play, knife throwing, acrobatics, and juggling, searching for one another and wrestling with their own individual dilemmas along the way.Wear it like a crown is the final part of Cirkus Cirkör’s trilogy utilizing the human body as its inspiration. The first part, 99% unkown, took its audience on a journey among cells and neurons; the second, Inside out, followed the heart. In Wear it like a crown, director Tilde Björfors tackles the left and right hemispheres of the brain.

“I am interested in the order inside, that which is uncontrolled and chaotic,” said Björfors. Upon hearing Karijord’s song for the first time Björfors said, “It was as though someone had set the issues that occupy me to music.” On her collaboration with the company, Karijord said, “I am attracted by the risk taking, the beauty and the darkness. In writing my music, these elements are central. [“Wear it like a crown”] is about not hiding your fear, about people meeting when they dare to show how vulnerable they are.”

Inspired by a desire to change the world, Artistic Director Tilde Björfors founded Cirkus Cirkör as an independent contemporary circus group in Stockholm, Sweden in 1995. Grounded in art and education—and with a propensity for thrilling action and daredevil humor—Cirkus Cirkör tours widely to critical acclaim throughout Europe and Asia, extending its reach through educational programs that impact 20,000 young people every year. In addition, the company’s internationally renowned program Cirkuspiloterna was Sweden’s first professional full-time course of study for circus artists.

Rebekka Karijord has composed music for a number of films, drama series, plays, and dance performances throughout the world. She has released three critically acclaimed albums in Europe, and in the fall of 2011 Karijord released her latest album The noble art of letting go in the US, which features the song “Wear it like a crown.”

You can attend the opening night party at BAM on June 1, and catch the limited run through June 3. Watch the video for Wear it like a crown below.