Stacey Brook is a Writer, Blogger, Author

Blogger Rick Juzwiak’s brain is a black hole of pop culture references. His pool of knowledge runs as long as Quentin Tarantino’s Netflix queue, as wide as the spread of autotune, and as deep as a four year-old pageant girl’s cosmetic bag. He describes his brain as “a YouTube K-Hole,” in which anything and everything can trigger the activation of a cultural tag or nostalgic playback. Like when he compares an unfortunately made-up contestant on “America’s Next Top Model” to Chester the puppet from 90s MTV show “Sifl and Olly.” Or contrasts “Up,” the loveable animated Pixar film with “Up!,” Russ Meyer’s decidedly less kid-friendly softcore romp. Or connects an utterance from Jersey Shore’s Mike “The Situation” to a line from the trailer for “Cool As Ice.” (That’s Vanilla Ice’s 1991 “musical romance.”)

“When you expose yourself to all this crap, it’s gonna hang around and manifest itself in bizarre ways,” he says.

For the last four years, this Williamsburg resident has spent a minimum of ten hours a day in front of television and computer, consuming and dissecting popular culture using the quick-wit of a Judge Judy worshipper (“I watch her every day”), the hard-boiled clarity of a music journalism major, and the originality of an acute, perverse, and achingly honest entertainment devotee. He is a distinct and refreshing voice in a sea of muddled cultural commentary.

As one of VH1’s full-time TV bloggers, Juzwiak has made a trade out of the reality show recap, a mixed media collage of screenshots, sound bytes, moving gifs, hilariously photoshopped still frames, and biting commentary that isolates all the most ridiculous moments of the network’s chaotic life-behind-glass experiments. He spends Monday through Friday reviewing clips, reading celebrity “news” (“I use that term loosely”) and interviewing the uninhibited stars of VH1 shows like “Rock of Love,” “Celebrity Rehab,” and the new “Frank the Entertainer … In a Basement Affair.” His strength lies in deftly summarizing the lunacy of the events that transpire from week to week, and in highlighting the indelible personalities of each series, be they lovable, flighty, or antagonistic. And of course, he imbues all of his coverage with the signature Juzwiakian cultural cross-pollination.

“The first episode of the first season of ‘Rock of Love’ is just ‘Beyond the Valley of the Dolls’ written in 2006,” he says. “Except they couldn’t show full nudity.”

When he’s not at VH1 headquarters in Times Square, “a place I’d never go if I didn’t have to go there every day,” Juzwiak is buckled down in his apartment off the Graham Avenue stop, with his oft-blogged about cat Winston, culling material for his personal pop culture blog, the fourfour (www.fourfour.typepad.com). The carefully cultivated mélange, named for the four-on-the-floor beats of disco and house music, was started by Juzwiak as a mode of expression for his entertainment encyclopedia of a brain, and has come to house one of the most eclectic, elevated collections of pop culture musings on the web.

Juzwiak’s obsessions are easily identifiable (pageants, house music, and horror flicks just to name a few), but anything wild, wacky or off-putting that crosses his path is game for exploration. Like the surprising pervasiveness of confederate flag-decorated merchandise on the Wildwood boardwalk. (“Wildwood is a body louse clinging to a sweaty shaft of hair in the Armpit of America that is New Jersey,” he writes in one post.) Or the nostalgia-ridden documentary “The Rocka-fire Explosion,” about a fanclub’s longtime obsession with an animatronic band. Or the dramatic declines and desperate pseudo-comebacks of R&B’s greatest divas, Whitney and Mariah.

Juzwiak also has a knack for collating and summarizing content for his audience via a variety of creative, web-friendly presentations, like his “I’m Not Here To Make Friends” montage (eventually adapted for a segment on “This American Life”), a video compilation of the endless times reality stars have verbally expressed what, since season one of “Survivor,” no one has really needed to say. He even created a video mash-up of the best moments from Celine Dion’s 2007 2-DVD set, not because he particularly likes Dion’s music, but because he simply finds her to be a compelling character. Juzwiak has admitted to being susceptible to the so-bad-it’s-good category of entertainment, seeking out honesty, and judging things on pure entertainment value versus critical expectations.

“It’s all about taste,” Juzwiak says. “I believe taste is not so much about what you like, but why you like it. And for critics, it’s about how you like it.”

Juzwiak is especially skilled in conveying this “how” via his fourfour reality show recaps, which allow him to tackle non-VH1 programs in the format he so loves. In the past, Juzwiak has covered shows from “Project Runway” to MTV’s brilliant if short-lived reality series, “The Paper,” and fans of the blog now petition him to cover new programs that may appeal to his varied sensibilities. Ultimately Juzwiak only has enough time to give a few shows the full treatment, like “America’s Next Top Model,” the recaps of which earned The fourfour its devoted audience, and Juzwiak his VH1 job; and which often take over ten hours to produce.

“Jersey Shore” is another series that was pretty much guaranteed coverage by Juzwiak, on account of the extreme personalities of the cast members (“they’re salacious and ridiculous and weird looking”), and Juzwiak’s own South Jersey origins.

“I think the most New Jersey thing you can do is choose to go to New Jersey,” Juzwiak says of the cast’s relative dearth of New Jersey natives. “To choose to align with that culture says a lot more than if you’re just born there. I think they fit in just fine.”

Rich explains that, like many of the VH1 reality shows he covers, “Jersey Shore” is a reflection of our culturally narcissistic societal tendencies.

“When I watch [reality television], it really is anthropological. It is looking at culture and understanding a way of life. This is just another group that hasn’t been examined.”

Juzwiak’s profession does have its pitfalls. What qualifies as escape for most people is always tied to work for a blogger. And with so much information and entertainment in circulation, the blogger is never off duty.

“I’m in this situation where I’m basically working day and night,” says Juzwiak. “But if something awesome happens, how the hell could I not share how it affected me? I would not turn my back on potential content. Ideas are hard to come by.”

It’s clear Juzwiak was built for this sort of thing.

“I’m extremely content in that I get to express myself to the fullest,” he says. “The only thing that holds me back is being tired. And it’s tough because it’s just a stupid blog. But it matters.”

Zach and Wen Schieffelin think a lot about how people travel through the city. The two managing partners of Carbon(-) (pronounced “carbon negative”) have long had the matter of personal transport in their purview. In 2001 the couple launched Vespa Soho on Crosby Street in Manhattan. Five years later it was the largest Vespa dealership in the US. A couple of years later, they opened McCarren Motors in Williamsburg, a shop initially envisioned as “Vespa Brooklyn.” But because they were not able to secure an exclusive dealership with Vespa in the area, the shop was eventually realized as a provider of a more diverse selection of two-wheeled, motorized vehicles.

Carbon(-) caters to the needs of a city that is becoming increasingly crowded and increasingly sold on more efficient forms of transportation. By carefully and extensively sampling everything from electric bicycles, to scooters, to no-gas motorcycles, to regular bicycles, many of which have not been available in the United States until now, Zach and Wen have positioned themselves as expert curators of modern, environmentally-friendly transportation vehicles.

“Our job is to try everything, and sell only the best of the best,” says Zach. “Because within any given product segment, there’s a huge range of quality.”

Carbon(-) breaks down its transportation offerings into three categories: “Less Gas,” “No Gas,” and “100% Human.”

The “Less Gas” group is comprised mainly of gas-powered scooters like the Kymco, an Taiwanese-crafted vehicle that Zach and Wen rate “Best of Breed” for value. The Vespa, the duo’s top scooter pick for design, will not be carried at Carbon(-), although the store is a certified Vespa parts and service location.

A scooter’s emissions are significantly lower than those of a car. The gas costs are negligible for a rider whose typical use pattern usually involves a regular inter-borough commute and the running of errands a few days a week. For a vehicle so compact, parking is a breeze. And Zach insists that with the proper gear, you can ride all year round.

In the “No Gas” category are the electric bikes and motorcycles. These vehicles utilize lithium-ion batteries (just like cell phones) that easily charge from a standard wall outlet, and they have the amazing benefit of being totally silent. Zach, who jokes about being a polite hell-raiser (“May I raise some hell please?”) notes, “When you’re riding an electric, you never bother anyone.”

In addition to being gas-free, electric bikes present no fire hazard, and they can be taken indoors. They’ll give you the push if you don’t feel like huffing up the brutal Williamsburg Bridge incline, for example. And if you ever run out of charge, well, it’s a bike! Put feet on pedals and push.

“They’re a good fit for where technology is today, and the application of those technologies,” says Zach.

Carbon(-)’s “100% Human” category is proof that regular ol’ bicycles can be just as trustworthy as their motorized counterparts. Many of the bicycles are based on classic European designs. The Amsterdam from Electra Bicycle Co. is a sleek, hand-pinstriped model with a fully enclosed chain guard (so your pants don’t get caught), a skirt shield (to prevent your clothing from getting caught in the spokes), and a generator lighting unit (no batteries required). Electra’s Ratfink Cruiser looks like a souped-up chopper, with low seat, high handlebars, and a shiny grass-green frame. As with the motorized bikes, all of the accessories are geared toward practicality and easy transport, including panniers to accommodate groceries, back-end platforms to bolster larger items, and seats to carry small children in comfort and safety.

Bicycles are the most affordable category at Carbon(-), with prices ranging from $500 to $1,200. Gas-powered scooters are priced from $1,600 to $7,000. And the electric bikes range from about $2,500 and up, topping out at the $10,000 Zero Motorcycle. These prices may cause some sticker shock at first, but Zach and Wen make compelling arguments about the practicality and cost-effectiveness of even the more luxurious two-wheeled vehicles.

“With a gas-powered scooter, one can finance, insure, and gas up for the price of a monthly metrocard,” says Wen. “And a metrocard doesn’t have value in and of itself.”

They will construct your payment plan, insure you, and even send you down the block to Sharky’s Driving School to test for a motorcycle license, which is required for all gas-powered vehicles that go above 30mph, even scooters. They’ll outfit you with the perfect accessories—jackets, gloves, add-on compartments. And they’ll service your bike every couple of months. You’ll have ongoing support from a boutique bikery who keep you in the environment-friendly fast lane.

On the front table at Bedford Avenue’s independent bookstore, Spoonbill and Sugartown Booksellers, Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird’s alterna-science volume, “The Secret Life of Plants,” rubs bindings with Yoko Ono’s manual of strange tasks, entitled “Grapefruit: A Book of Instructions and Drawings,” and “Wabi Sabi,” Leonard Koren’s zen guide to imperfect beauty. “B is For Beer,” Tom Robbin’s children’s book,  squats next to Herbert L. Edlin’s craftsman’s guide, “What Wood Is That?” (complete with wood samples). Just a few volumes away is Jack Monin’s highly popular (and educational) “Anal Pleasure and Health.” Populated by obscure design books, resuscitated (revived and illustrated) reference books, obscure philosophy tomes, and super-niche bestsellers, the table is a testament to Spoonbill’s commitment to presenting the community with more elevated and varied offerings than your average page-peddler.

The store, which will celebrate its tenth anniversary this November, was originally conceived as a vendor of used art books, until childhood friends and co-owners Miles Bellamy and Jonas Kyle realized there simply were not enough of these books readily available to fill an entire store. What they cultivated instead is a unique combination of used and new offerings; their shelves housing carefully selected antique volumes and underappreciated works pulled from the backlists of popular  publishers.

“There are a lot of backlist books that are really great—books that Borders and Barnes and Noble don’t feature. “The Secret Life of Plants,” for example, has been in print for 35 years, and if you put it out, people will buy it,” says Kyle.

With a focus on the visual and graphic arts, photography, and creative source material, they have managed to position themselves as the ideal reference house in a neighborhood full of artists and creative types. “Artists don’t necessarily want art books, they want books with interesting imagery,” Bellamy remarks.

If you walk into Spoonbill with a specific title in mind, there’s a very good chance you won’t find it.  The stock in the store is selected by a handful of employees, all guided by personal taste and whim.  Spoonbill doesn’t house a travel section or a science section, but there is a cooking section, “just because,” says Bellamy.  None of the areas of the store are labeled, though in 2001 there was an entire cabinet devoted to a “Red Section,” full of books that had no connection to each other aside from the color of their covers. Spoonbill carries an $85 book on iconic indie rock group “Sonic Youth,” a $350 collaborative objectzine called “Tiwimuta,” and “The Cunt Coloring Book,” $8.95 (one of their consistent bestsellers), but they don’t carry new copies of “The Fountainhead” or “A Tale of Two Cities.”

“I’ve had people tell me they intentionally walk on the opposite side of the street to avoid temptation,” says Bellamy.

Both raised in Manhattan and born to artist parents, Bellamy and Kyle met at Bronx Science when they were fourteen, and immediately bonded over their love of literature.  Books were romantic objects—the center of all social activities. Instead of getting together at rock shows on the weekends like other kids their age, the two friends would take blankets up to a rooftop and read poems, books strewn everywhere. “We were the nerdiest of them all,” Kyle boasts.

After Bellamy’s father Richard Bellamy, a prominent figure in the art world, passed away in 1998, Kyle received a call from his friend asking for help building shelves in a new bookstore venture. The two became partners shortly thereafter and, abandoning their initial plan to open a store in Manhattan, they landed in 1999 in the location on Bedford Avenue they still inhabit today.

Though the friends share many similarities (“In some ways, I think we’re both frustrated authors,” Kyle says.) Bellamy and Kyle represent the yin and yang of independent bookstore ownership. Kyle is the businessman, willing to stock the store with bouncy balls and pig catapults to help keep the business afloat. He is happy when the bookstore is overflowing with books, less concerned with order and more with the energy of the affair. He shares with Miles a commitment to buying out of the back of the publisher’s catalogs, but is still tempted to carry authors and titles that others in the store deem as “borderline too popular,” like Malcolm Gladwell or Miranda July, or even Twilight. He knows that when “everyone in the neighborhood thinks Werner Herzog is the last noble savage,” it’s worth it to carry the man’s diaries, and to put the books by the register. He talks about how bookstores used to be like stationery stores. “It’s not romantic to sell postcards and moleskins, but they sell really well,” adding that the hand shadow puppet cards are the bestsellers in the whole store.  He knows bookstores can be intimidating and doesn’t want his customers to feel “imperiled in their intellectualism.”

Bellamy is the purist, more definitively committed to the preservation of his initial dream—to nurture a high-end, arts-focused bookstore. He favors obscure titles and resurrecting old illustrated books from the dead.  An organizational junkie, he can’t walk past a table stack without straightening it, occasionally slipping a selection he doesn’t care for under a stack of one he does.  Though he is in favor of carrying certain contemporary authors like Kazuo Ishiguro and Jonathan Lethem (another onetime classmate of Bellamy’s), he generally resents his back table of bestsellers.  (“Everyone likes Murakami but me.”) He revels in special projects like the culling and pricing of selections for a recent summer poetry cabinet featuring rare selections from the 70’s.  “It’s certainly more fun than ordering more copies of Lolita,” he said of the task.

In spite if their divergent stocking/selection philosophies, together Bellamy and Kyle seem to have found balance, and for the past decade have offered the residents of Williamsburg a trove of resources that caters to the neighborhood’s curiosity.

When longtime Williamsburg residents Art Guerra, Seren Morey, and Jody Bretnall talk about paint, they don’t talk in standard shades of color, they talk in cultural references. Pigment PY24, also known as Flaventhrone, isn’t an off-white, it’s the pigment responsible for the cream-colored Buicks of the 1970s. Perylene Green Black (PBLK31) isn’t a dark green, it’s the hue used to paint stealth bombers, which incidentally, is “the most expensive pigment in existence,” says Guerra. When giving the WG a demo on mixing Guerra Paint’s pure and potent pigments into a white base to make the high caliber, endlessly customizable paint the shop is known for, Bretnall doesn’t make a red, he makes PR170. “The Original Ferrari Red.”

While painting a billboard in the East Village back in 1984, native San Franciscan Art Guerra made a discovery that would change the course of his career. He saw that large industrial jobs like billboard painting and automotive coloring combined pure chemical pigments (colorants) with large quantities of clear or white base to create colored paint. The systematic addition of these pigments to bases allows for great control over the saturation of a paint color, and a small amount of pigment can go a long way in coloring a base if the pigment is pure.

Guerra immediately recognized the value in the industrial pigment/base methodology, recognizing it could be both liberating and cost-effective for private artists. As a result, he has spent the last 23 years, with the help of Bretnall and Morey (who are husband and wife), trying to uncover the secrets of the intensively scientific pigment production process from the often uncooperative art material industries, whose bottom line is better served by offering artists more expensive premixed paints that don’t allow for nearly as much clarity or control. In their Williamsburg warehouse on Wythe Avenue, Guerra and company apply the knowledge they have culled doggedly over the years, taking pigments purchased from industrial art suppliers and uncovered in ancient warehouses, and prepping them for private artists’ use. Though they do sell pigment in the raw powder form used in big industry, Guerra’s most valuable service is their conversion of the powder into liquid dispersions that are often ten times more potent than dry pigment, and more easily added to paint bases.

“We’ve introduced this whole new technology, which has never been done before in the private artist world,” says Guerra.

Greenpoint-based artist and documentarian Bill Page, who has known Guerra since 1975, reminisces, “I started using [Guerra’s] paint before it ever went on the market. He would bring it over to my studio, when he was experimenting with for himself. The additives that you can get, the textures that you can get, the surfaces that you can get—it was beyond what artists knew they could get when Art started offering this.”

With the help of Morey, the chief financial officer, who began working for Guerra in 1998, and Bretnall, who came on as chief operating officer in 2003, Guerra, now the company president, managed to turn his dream into a legitimate business. All three were part of the initial wave of artists who settled in Williamsburg back when it was still, as Bretnall says, “a you-don’t-go-out-after-dark kind of place,” (Bretnall is originally from Philadelphia, and Morey from Massachusetts) and the team’s working dynamic reflects the comfort of people who have lived the last fifteen-to-twenty years running into each other at Kasia’s on Bedford and socializing at artist hangout The Right Bank on Kent and Broadway—until it closed in 2003.

Now, on any day but Sunday, one finds Bretnall manning the Guerra Paint front desk at the 13th Street shop (between A and B) in the East Village where the retail end of their business is located, designing the team’s new business cards or thumbing through industrial pigment manuals. Bretnall and Morey’s newborn baby girl, Maia June, might be slung at Morey’s midsection, miraculously sleeping as her mother zips around, taking inventory of the shop’s impeccably organized rainbow of liquid squeeze bottles and glass vials. Guerra, short and sprightly with his grey hair pulled back in a George Carlinesque ponytail, could be drawing a color wheel on the back of a greasy pizza box, or helping a quirky customer who only paints cat portraits and “love, love, looooove[s] glitter.”

Or maybe one can find the trio in their Williamsburg factory, rubber-gloved and safety-goggled, mastering the science of light and color, spinning chemicals into Quinachridone Gold (PO49).

Guerra, Morey and Bretnall all admit that though the system isn’t difficult to master, it does require some initial instruction. Says Guerra, “The big fly in the ointment is that we have to teach every artist that comes in here how to use this. We have to like, coach them, teach them, be willing to put up with lots of phone calls.”

But he insists once artists get the hang of mixing, all they have to do is pay attention to measurements, and they can create that same color over and over again, indefinitely.

“It’s like cooking,” says Bretnall.

“There’s a real dedication and loyalty that happens, because you can’t get [our pigments] anywhere else,” says Morey. “Also, you save a lot of money, and you make much better paint.”

A South Williamsburg-based company, Michael Allen Inc., who create plaster special finishes, have been using Guerra pigments for almost a decade, and owner, Cookie Brindle counts them as an integral part of their business. “We buy literally hundreds of pounds of pigments a year from them. Having access to them has made us better colorists, and known for cooking up beautiful colors.”

Another customer, Ben Knight, a North Carolina-based painter has been maximizing the capabilities of Guerra’s wares since 2003, says, “I recommend [the pigments] to everyone I know who paints.”

When asked what generally defines Guerra’s customers versus buyers of premixed paint, Bretnall says, “It’s usually a relatively non-consumer perspective.” This works in perfect balance with an organization whose primary objective is clearly not profit. “My goal was to have artists paint for pennies,” says Guerra. Though the store is robust enough to survive even in the tough economy, Guerra Paints operates on a business model that has an Artists-for-Artists mantra at its core. (Both Morey and Guerra are painters themselves, and Bretnall is a musician.)

Knight says, “If you are a serious artist and you don’t have a trust fund, a backer or even a gallery to help you pay for the sheer quantities of paint required to experiment and create, then this is the stuff you have got to use. It levels the playing field.”

The relative affordability of Guerra’s wares definitely accounts for its lack of competitors. That, and that fact that the pigment production system Guerra, Morey and Bretnall have mastered took over two decades to perfect. The expertise of the Guerra team is revered by their customers.

Knight says, “When you come to their store, you feel like you have been anointed into the world of the painting gods, and now it is your responsibility to create the most beautiful work anyone has ever seen.

After 23 years, Guerra Paints is still one of the only companies in the world producing pigments for artists’ personal use, and offers more colors than any other pigment distributor. In fact, Guerra is so specialized, in many instances they have the world’s supply of pigments on the verge of extinction, colors that have been discontinued for decades due to lack of demand from big industry. It’s not uncommon for Bretnall or Guerra to stop at the sprawling grid of color dispersions on their shop’s front wall and point at a color that will no longer exist after their supply has been tapped.

“Remember those ugly kitchens in the 1970s?” Bretnall asks. “Pigment Green 10.” He points to a shade of green slightly brighter than pea soup, also known as Nickel Azo. Guerra’s warehouse holds the last  250 pounds ever made.

“That’s the ugly ass green of the 70s,” says Bretnall. “We still have it.”

Not all of us are natural students, and many of us no longer have the patience to endure long lectures or do homework on a regular basis. But there are very few of us who don’t appreciate the value of acquiring a new skill set, especially one that’s fun, even to the point of relative uselessness. The WG took the time to sample some of the neighborhood’s most intriguing classes, some of which have more practical applications (flower arranging), and others that are more difficult to apply to everyday life (aerial tricks!). Williamsburg/Greenpoint is a collection of creative minds that need constant stimulation, and though the internet can teach you a lot of things, there’s something to be said for taking a stroll, rolling up your sleeves, and seeing what live instruction has to offer.

Pickling (Canning) Class
at The Brooklyn Kitchen
616 Lorimer Street
(718) 389-2982

The Brooklyn Kitchen offers some of the wildest, most delectable classes around, even appealing to kitchen-phobes and self-proclaimed non-cooks like myself. I can barely manage to turn out an al dente pasta, or save a Pillsbury roll of cookies from the burn of neglect, and yet, when I heard there was a knife skills class available at the BK, it was all I could do not to pre-order myself a set of Ginsus. The classes range from $25-$75; some are demonstration-based, others are more interactive. The pig butchering class sends you home with eight pounds of swine, while the pickling class urges students to bring any vegetables they’ve been “dying to pickle” for a week-long test run in the brine jar. The cake decorating and fondant classes are taught by a contestant from the Food Network Challenge. The BK’s staff is slightly disaffected, but eventually they warm up, and it’s clear they’ve got good instincts about what off-kilter classes might add gas to your fire.

After perusing the options, I decided to take a pickling (specifically, canning) class with Bob McClure, of McClure’s pickles. The first thing I learned is that if you go into a canning class, you’re going to come out smelling like vinegar. But isn’t that a small price to pay for learning how to turn your seasonal vegetables into salty, savory, sometimes even spicy, preserved delights? McClure will teach you what to look for in foods you pickle, how to sterilize your equipment, and, most important, how to keep tabs on your PH levels so you don’t infect your friends and family with life-threatening bacteria.

The main drawback of the pickling class was that it involved a lot of standing around. I would have liked to get my hands dirty a little, but the demo kitchen is small, and it turns out canning, which involves hot glass and scalding water, is kind of a dangerous process (not ideal for group participation). I’m also a huge proponent of instant gratification, and there was something anticlimactic about watching a man prepare something for an hour only to hand you a jar and tell you to wait a week to consume its contents.

New classes are posted at the middle of each month on the BK’s website and sell out quickly, sometimes within one or two days. The next round will go up on March 16, and April is Egg Month, so expect new classes to be breakfast-themed. Learn more here.

Ikebana
at Rose Red & Lavender
653 Metropolitan Avenue
(718) 486-3569

The last place I ever expected to find myself on a frigid weekend night in early March was among chirping birds and sweet bouquets, arranging flowers. But I was thrilled to spend two hours at Rose Red & Lavender, a charming full service flower shop by the Graham Avenue L train, to try my hand at Ikebana, the modern, minimalistic Japanese art of flower arranging. Joining me around a wooden table heaped with fresh tulips and irises, broad, waxy leaves, and twisted willow branches, were six other ladies, many of whom had been directed to the shop’s perpetual indoor Springtime by an email tip from Daily Candy. (“This place is only three stops out of Manhattan—not so bad!”)

It turns out Ikebana’s core rules are quite recession friendly (not many flowers are needed in this art), and you pretty much can’t go wrong so long as you follow a few simple guidelines, which were laid out for us by Lisa, the instructor. A few blooms, tufts of twisted grass, and artfully placed stalks of curly willow will qualify your masterpiece as a genuine interpretation of Ikebana, as long your elements are arranged to represent the three levels of the life cycle (heaven, man, earth). My arrangement was the picture of minimalism—three long, slender white iris stalks courting the heavens in various stages of bloom. With Lisa’s cheery encouragement, I was actually proud of my living composition. And since irises are a pretty hearty breed, it took me nearly six days to kill my pristine arrangement with the neglect I show all plants unlucky enough to enter my apartment.

Though the class didn’t necessarily impart any skills or sage advice you couldn’t learn from a book, the luscious atmosphere and warm group vibe made the evening worthwhile. The cost is $125 for a series of three classes, with an arrangement to take home each session. I was most excited about keeping the gardening clippers. Owner Kimberly is open to suggestions for future classes (English arrangements? Topiary?), but composting is up next. So get your ish together and get over there. Click here for details.

Walk-In Crafting
at Spacecraft
355 Bedford Avenue
(718) 599-2718

A brief mention on my Facebook status that I had taken a crafting class at the recently-opened Spacecraft on Bedford prompted immediate responses from four of my friends, like, “That was my new years resolution—be more crafty!” or “Can I come with? Please?” Apparently there is more than enough interest in crafting for this place to take flight.

Christina and Stella, the lovely ladies of Space-craft, want their store/workshop, tucked just north of the Williamsburg bridge, to be a place where people come to hang, meet people, and craft. To that end, Spacecraft boasts a menu of over 20 affordable craft projects you can walk in and pick up at any time-including stamp making (foam and rubber, $15-40), sculpting (beeswax and clay, $20-35), and decorating (cards, clothing, and even a skateboard, $10-45). Want to make something out of sculpey? Walk on in. I can already think of a Halloween prop I will be making out of papier mâché.

A wide range of materials are at your disposal—from felt and plaster to appliques, rhinestones and seaglass. Kids can make the most decadent crowns in town with all the glitter in this place, but tools are also available to make polished, professional projects. The 12-year-old me wanted to commandeer a t-shirt and drench it in glitter puff paint before bedazzling the bejeezus out of it, but for my initial foray into Spacecrafting I chose to quell my grade school instincts and decoupage a wooden box instead. Christina had enough foresight to drape me in a massive denim apron before I began to inexpertly brush the grainy surface in white paint and plaster it with a photocopied image of an octopus from the store’s overflowing box of stored images. Though I had decoupaged a few times before, I asked a question a minute during the octopus application phase of Project Wooden Box, and Christina and Stella answered my queries with easy patience. It was like a private tutorial. I finished my session with a beautifully matted, sparely decorated treasure box in hand, prompting Christina to comment, “You’re probably still carrying around your sense of Japanese minimalism from the flower class.”

The one downside to Spacecraft’s open crafting is that it only takes place during store hours, which during the week fall during the normal working hours of 10am-6pm. But plenty of classes are available on weekends or in the evenings, including the upcoming kids series Art in the City (March 10, 17, & 24) and a three session screenprinting tutorial (March 25, April 1 & April 8) that costs just $175 and sends you home with the materials to print in your living room.

Aerial Silks
at the Skybox
342 Maujer Street

When people think of New York, they think of small spaces. Cramped apartments, cubicles, tiny office kitchens. Brooklyn has changed that a bit, with the loft and the warehouse and the sprawling park, but I still never expected there to be a place where you could practice trapeze indoors right in my own backyard.

The Skyhouse is a warehouse cabaret—half lofty space, half plush, high backed velvet couches, props, and circus equipment. Co-founders Jordann Baker and Anya Sapozhnikova started the space as part of the new incarnation of The House of Yes, a creative collective and one-stop shop for the production of lavish DIY circus productions. With 32-foot ceilings, the Skybox is the only spot in the NY metropolitan area created specifically for the practice of aerial stunts, and when you walk in to a set of advanced students doing “the Tick Tock Drop,” wrapping their legs in purple silk 20 feet in the air and hurtling to the ground as it unravels, you are awed by what can be accomplished when people are given some space to work with.

Though clearly aerial enthusiasts are intense about their craft, my classmates were are also quite sweet, and immensely graceful. Aerial and circus sports are especially popular with dancers, actors and others looking to add another layer to their breadth of performance skills. The class is adaptable to many skill levels, which made it easy for me to enter as a beginner on a day when some well-trained people were also on the mats. I spent most of the session learning to inch up the silks like a caterpillar, and a few minutes at the end attempting to do some tricks, my arms spread like wings, and my body contracted in an upside-down tuck position. I woke up the next day with a soreness in my arms that I haven’t experienced since lugging two gallons of paint from the Manhattan Home Depot all the way to Clinton Hill. Joanna assured me the strength comes quickly with practice. Perhaps if (when?) I try again, I’ll only be in one gallon’s worth of pain.

The Skybox also offers classes in Lyra (the aerial hoop), static trapeze, and even hula hooping. Ballet classes focus on helping you improve your grace in the air, and open workshops on stilting, juggling and other circus tricks are also available on a weekly basis. It is necessary to email or call in advance for class reservations (class sizes are small to give the necessary focused attention) so instructors can account for varying levels of experience in advance. Classes are $25-30, depending on class size, which is expensive if you’re a regular, but not too much to ask for the gift of temporary flight.

In the paper-and-ink universe of Brooklyn poster artists Kayrock and Wolfy, of Kayrock Screenprinting, the indie rock band Oneida sounds like two yellow chickens pecking their way through a hypnotic funhouse background. Or like double monkey gargoyle heads floating against a honeycomb pattern of primary colors. Or serpentine dragons and medieval beasts worthy of fairy tales, slinking through a sea of blood red around a light-blue Care Bear. Basically, the band sounds like anything Kayrock and Wolfy’s prolific imaginations squeeze through their aluminum screens.

Oneida’s lead singer, Bobby Matador, who describes his band as “loud, fast, and repetitive,” says, “One of my favorite posters that Kayrock and Wolfy ever made for us was just a bunch of shit that Kayrock took from Tin Tin comics and a Hawkwind album cover. You really don’t ever know where it’s gonna come from.”

Since they began working together in 2000, the Kayrock duo have spent their days designing and hand-pulling promotional posters in a two-story, graffiti-ensconced warehouse in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, precisely saturating archival paper with ink from plastic quart containers, swapping out screens while aligning print registers, and tweaking last-minute designs. On machines cobbled together from old printer parts, Kayrock Screenprinting gives hundreds of bands identity on paper, churning out designs for such groups as Tall Firs, Les Savy Fav, Deerhoof, and Tiger Mountain. This isn’t a matter of glossy, label-sanctioned photos slapped with crass and impersonal “Fill in the Date” footers. Kayrock and Wolfy create original posters for tours and know the bands they are hired to represent on paper, often intimately. The work is always informed by the music, and lovers of both music and art are drawn to them. Their creations are a far cry from the flimsy promotional one-sheets that propagate modern-day music venues and construction site walls. In a world of pummeling advertising, they are rare promotional artifacts that make you slow down and stare.

Matthew Caws, guitarist and lead singer for Nada Surf, recalls how he first came upon the team’s work. “I worked at Earwax, a record store in Williamsburg, for a couple years. More often than not, there was a poster for an upcoming show hanging in the store. I began to notice that the really great ones were all made by Kayrock and Wolfy.”

Kayrock and Wolfy’s reputation has put them at the vanguard of their industry. But that industry is in upheaval. New York poster art is going through a period of remission. Though New York City is spilling into its outer boroughs with artists and musicians, high quality, thoughtfully designed, rock-concert poster art has become less visible than it has been in the past years. A combination of the impractical cost of living and setting up shop in New York, limited venues for public posting of grassroots artwork, and the rise of internet promotions has resulted in diminished exposure for this art form.

“You don’t see a lot of homegrown poster art in New York,” says Matador. “That’s just a fact.”

The earliest American concert posters date back to the 1940s and ‘50s, and were mainly straightforward designs, bold and purposely simple, dominated by negative space. But by the ‘60s, San Francisco had become the Mecca of poster art, thanks mainly to the ongoing poster series commissioned by legendary promoter Bill Graham for the Fillmore Auditorium. The expansive catalog of concert posters created for bands like the Doors, the Grateful Dead, Santana, and Led Zeppelin gave rise to the first legendary rock poster artists like Wes Wilson, Rick Griffin, and Stanley Mouse. Their psychedelic designs defined the look of a generation and served as a visual translation of the ideals of ‘60s hippie rock.

It wasn’t until the 1970s that New York developed a signature poster style, and when it finally came around it was connected to punk. Unsurprisingly, it was raw, rich and full of rebellion. New York artist Arturo Vega, who designed the Ramones’ iconic eagle seal, says the punk era was “a fresh start. Like, let’s get rid of all the unnecessary adornments and decorations, and do it the best you can any which way you know how.” The posters from this period embody this gritty DIY attitude with scrawled text and low-res images on smudged, disposable sheets of cheap copy paper in black, white, and shades of gray. Vega recalls that his first poster for the Ramones came from a photo-booth photo. He says, “I just blew up an image I had taken for twenty-five cents.”

Raymond Pettibon’s cartoon-centric, politically charged, anti-authoritarian illustrations for Black Flag carried forward the punk aesthetic into the 1980s. Steven Blush, author of American Hardcore says, “Hardcore flier art culture comes out of Black Flag fliers: The way it was done. The attitude that it had. What it was saying. Pettibon started that. The artists were always so important because they conveyed the vibe of the music and the vibe of the scene.”

In the 1990s, artists began experimenting with screenprinting, injecting craftsmanship and vivid color into an art form that for almost two decades had been defined by the absence of these elements. What was formerly produced by and for the everyman began to take on an air of exclusivity. “Guys like Frank Kozik and Coop and the whole era of ‘90s high-color artists made great posters, but they’re really only made for collection,” Blush says. “The intent of it is not as a mode of communication. It’s lowbrow, but it’s high art.”

The current climate of New York’s art world has only helped to propel posters further in the highbrow direction. They have become less affordable to produce, more difficult to post publicly, and less practical and effective as an event’s sole form of promotion. “When I moved to New York in ’74, people could get a loft for 90 bucks and stay forever,” says Bob George, founder and curator of the Archive of Contemporary Music. Now “you’re competing with every rich person in the world who wants to live in a major city. Your competition for space is the whole world and that makes a big difference.”

With Manhattan open only to the world’s wealthiest, the spirit that propelled poster movements in the past has, as Blush points out, “moved across the bridges.” When it costs $4,500 a month for 900 square feet of city studio space and your screen-printing operation requires a full-scale printing press, 10-foot-tall drying racks, multiple computers, reams of poster-sized paper, and an endless number of screens, you’re simply forced to set up shop out where space is cheaper. Garrison Buxton, co-owner of Peripheral Media Projects—six stops out of Manhattan on the L train—says, “If Peripheral really wanted to ramp up the production end, we probably wouldn’t be doing it in New York, or we would be moving it a little bit further out so we could have more space to get an additional press, and additional racks.”

But even if you cross over the East River, there’s no guarantee you’ll find the space you’re looking for. Standard Motion Design’s Jon Setzen, a graphic designer and poster artist who creates art for Southpaw, a club in Park Slope, Brooklyn, specializes in posters with a worn-in, vintage flavor. His inability to secure sufficient studio space has directly impacted his production methods. Setzen foregoes screen-printing altogether, producing instead high-quality offset prints that he has printed out of state. The outsourcing makes operations like Kayrock Screenprinting all the more valuable, as Kayrock and Wolfy often print runs out of their large Williamsburg studio for artists who aren’t lucky enough to have as much space.

The struggles of the music industry haven’t helped poster art either. With the continuing struggle of major labels, the responsibility for procuring creative promotional materials has shifted to the musicians themselves. But can a New York area band that is paying $50 an hour for rehearsal time, saving money for recording sessions, and wrestling with skyrocketing rent, afford to commission limited-edition silk-screened posters for individual gigs?

It depends. Kayrock quotes a hundred-print run for a standard-size 13-by-20-inch, two-color screenprint at $350, including both design and printing costs, but stresses their willingness to work with in bands’ budgets. Most poster artists, perhaps hoping that their efforts will drum up more future business from the acts their work will promote, are willing to do the same. Jeff Sheinkopf, a poster artist in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, says, “Usually it comes down to about a dollar or two per poster, but if a band says, ‘We’ve got 100 bucks to do this,’ I’ll make it work. I know the posters are gonna be used, I know they’re gonna be up somewhere.”

Even if the financial hurdles are cleared, poster art still faces the problem of finding places to be hung. The New York City Department of Sanitation’s Digest of Codes forbids the posting of stickers, posters, or any other promotional materials on public or privately owned property—that means no posters on lampposts, phone booths, or trash receptacles. And it’s not a smart idea to test your luck. Bands have many cautionary tales of tickets, high fines, and arrests to share. Sheinkopf, who also plays drums for Brooklyn-based band Tigers and Monkeys, says, “I have had police and sanitation workers threaten. Luckily I’ve never actually been ticketed or arrested, but plenty of times I’ve been standing while they watch me pull down every poster that was put up.” Mikey Palms, co-owner of Brooklyn’s Southpaw, tells of an artist who was arrested for putting a sticker up on Second Avenue. “In New York, every inch matters,” he says. “Somebody owns every inch of everything.”

The colonization of Manhattan by chains has converted former poster-friendly blocks like St. Marks Place from a hub of independently owned businesses into an string of low-fat yogurt outlets and chain fast-food joints. As Manhattan becomes shinier and more sanitized, space that was once prime for posting becomes taboo. Starbucks certainly isn’t jumping to tape up screenprints for shows at the Mercury Lounge. George notes, “When you have corporate stores, nicer stores, they have an image to protect, so they are less likely to put up a poster.”

Posting laws in other boroughs reflect the rules in Manhattan, and bands and artists looking to display works that were once part of a guerrilla marketing spirit, now find themselves knocking for permission on the doors of Brooklyn record stores, bookstores, coffee shops and cafes.

Some artists aren’t bothered by the shift in posting etiquette, arguing that the expense and craftsmanship that goes into the posters demands that they be hung in controlled environments. Peter McGouran, founder of East Williamsburg screenprinting studio Polluted Eyeball, says, “When I started to put up fliers I began to think more along the lines of, it’s gotta last longer. I don’t necessarily believe that you have to do as many, just get them to good locations.”

But artists who long for the days they were able to attack the city with one-sheets and a staple gun have had to find new ways to distribute their work. Kayrock and Wolfy, for example, have been experimenting with a system in which they print one or two-color screenprints on medium to light paper stock, and fold these 11-by-17-inch sheets into eighths for distribution around town. With this unique delivery system, Kayrock has created something that is far less disposable than the average flier giveaway. If it ends up being left out on the kitchen table in a Brooklyn apartment and catches the eye of a random visitor, it has accomplished it’s mission. “Everyone who comes to that house will see that poster. It has a role even after advertising a specific event, for us as artists,” Kayrock says.

The obvious place for rock posters is on the walls of the rock clubs. Unfortunately, venue support of the independently produced gig posters has flagged. As the New York rock club scene is slowly consumed by entities like Clear Channel and Bowery Presents, bulletin boards and glass showcases that once boasted bold, event-specific, silkscreens now display too-slick, label-supplied glossies that blend in with other mass-produced visual noise. Venues don’t want to spend the cash to produce materials they can get from the labels for free. Peripheral’s Buxton says, “As long as profit is the sole motivator and it’s just about kind of appealing to mass audiences, the clubs are not a good incubator for really cool, hands-on creativity.”

Even the Knitting Factory, which once actively encouraged original artwork to promote shows, now tends to have a skeletal bulletin board instead. “The people that felt really adamant about posters at the Knit are no longer there,” Wolfy says.

Southpaw is a rare exception. It continues to commission original show posters. “I feel like people want to associate the music with something else,” Palms says. “If it’s either for identification or to function as a reminder or if it’s just an aesthetic, it’s nice to put a poster outside that advertises an evening for your band.” In that spirit,  Southpaw has transformed itself into a veritable rock-art museum, with entire walls given over to posters for previous gigs, for such band as Clinic, OXES and the Beatnuts.

But Palms knows he is in the minority as far as club owners go. “In New York especially, we spend so much time trying to keep our places floating that it’s hard for us to rely on entrepreneurs to actually do something and follow through with it,” he says. “Maybe we feel it isn’t necessary.”

His last point is probably closest to the truth, thanks to the internet. With venue websites that list full concert schedules weeks, and sometimes months in advance, it is hard for a club to justify spending extra money on seemingly inefficient guerrilla marketing tactics. Bands have MySpace pages and newsletters, while blogs like Brooklyn Vegan track the status of popular shows right up to the on-sale date. Often, posters won’t even be ready until long after tickets are sold out.

Lately, concert promoters have shifted toward distributing thumbnail-size images to announce upcoming events. The Village Voice’s “Sounds of the City” blog routinely features jpegs of intricately illustrated and brilliantly Photoshopped New York-based show posters and fliers, many of which will never actually be printed. That these images are still referred to as “posters” and “fliers” suggests the strength of the art form’s roots even as it is swallowed by new technology.

Though Kayrock and Wolfy don’t mind supplying their design jpegs to bands after printing, they never take jobs that aren’t destined for paper. But aspiring poster artists whose names aren’t so intrinsically connected to screenprinting who hope to make money have no such scruples. Sheinkopf, who also designs interactive e-cards for major label acts, says, “You’re not really getting the full picture when you see a poster as a three-inch image, but if I’m going to get an email from a band, I’d rather see a cool, really interesting thing that they’ve had designed than just a text thing saying ‘Tickets on sale tomorrow.’”

Still, three years after a thumbnail image is blasted to an email list, it is long lost in cyberspace. Yet a Kayrock-designed Oneida print, the band’s name in doughnuty yellow letters above a crumbling castle on the edge of a dark gray sea cliff, currently hangs in Brooklyn’s Earwax records and has been hanging in the store since 2005. Taking into account this kind of longevity, the posters being produced now are often commissioned more for their commercial value than their promotional use. “The way our business is going, posters become merchandise,” says Wolfy. “You’re buying into the branding. Like Radiohead—it’s a corporation, not much different.”

The demand from fans for these kinds of tokens is apparent. “Music is such a passionate thing for so many people. To have something visually that you like, that has a name of a band you like from a show you went to that was a good night—it’s a great token of the evening,” says Setzen. As Wolfy says, “Posters are the physical representation of an ephemeral experience.”

Fittingly, poster art has been carving a place for itself on the museum world’s white walls over the past few years. At last year’s “Summer of Love” exhibit at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, an entire wall of classic ‘60s psychedelic posters greeted visitors as they entered. The Museum of Modern Art in New York holds in its permanent collection posters for bands like the Grateful Dead by such poster artist legends as Wes Wilson and Victor Moscoso. And both Raymond Pettibon and Tara McPherson –innovators concert poster design—showed in private galleries in Manhattan in the past year.

But poster artists are driven by more than the chance at art-world stardom. “I like the feeling of having something in my hand,” says Buxton, a sentiment echoed by many of the artists who long for simple tactile pleasures and physical proof of their artistry and hard work in an increasingly digital age. Ultimately, it is the expression of these intangibles that make poster art such a potent and necessary form. As Bob George points out, “I bet in any era, at any time, in any year, you could probably put together a great collection of really nice, classic posters.”