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.

Jonas Kyle, the more business-minded of the Spoonbill & Sugartown co-owners, is willing to carry bouncy balls and pig catapults to keep the business afloat.

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.”

Employee Claire Wilcox holds up a copy of “Dies: A Sentence,” an experimental work of fiction by Vanessa Place published by Les Figues Press.

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.

On a recent Monday morning, five days before she’s due to appear at Iguapop Gallery in Barcelona for a solo show of her artwork entitled “Silent Heroes,” Williamsburg artist Tara McPherson wipes teal paint off a palette knife, the only dirty instrument in her impeccable storefront studio on South 1st Street. Three paintings, two on the wall and one perched on an easel are in various stages of progress. The canvases (her first on linen —she usually paints on birch) each features one of McPherson’s signature beautiful babes, and each incorporates little blue, embryonic globule-like creatures—the latest additions to her fantastical world on paper. McPherson had just been asked to contribute an additional six more drawings to the exhibit, as songwriter Devendra Banhart had pulled out at the last minute (“What? A musician being flaky?” she joked), and all but one of the new pieces were still in early phases, just sketched enough to recognize the incorporation of McPherson’s tiny unsung heroes in each.

With a book signing at a comic convention on the weekend’s horizon and dinner plans with friends who only have the pleasure of seeing McPherson intermittently as she travels the globe in promotion of a new art book, collectible toys and gallery shows, McPherson estimated she would be up working in the studio to the sound of Spanish language tapes until 5am every morning until her departure. And yet, as she sat on a Victorian olive couch in her studio, blond-banged and smoky-eyed, sipping on an iced coffee from Verb on Bedford at 11am, she was calm as the early summer air.

“I work great with deadlines. If it’s like, ‘you have an art show in a year,’ I’m like, all right, I’m gonna go to Hawaii.  Hang out on the beach for a month. You tell me this is due Friday, and I can organize my life around that.”

For the last fifteen years McPherson has been planning her life and schedule around the creation of a world comprised of distinct line drawings and illustrations that are both twee and devilish, sweet and heartbreaking, enlightening and soul-crushingly sad.  Over time, McPherson has assembled a collection of coy, sleek and humanistic mutant/freaks—men and women with their hearts cut out, unicorn girls impaled through the abdomen by horned sea creatures, phantoms whose bodily malfunctions and abnormalities symbolize everyday battles of heart and spirit.  She has populated the world of rock poster art, collectible toys and most recently, fine art, with her cast of other-worldly characters—a child vampire named George, blossoming skull-flowers, buoyant, wide-eyed balloons named Mr. Wiggles, all of whom relay the most basic of human emotions, impulses and desires.  Even the most deplorable and unappealing of attributes—helplessness, selfishness, heartache—are portrayed with a macabre loveliness.

Tara McPherson’s painting “Laughing Through The Chaos Of It All,” (Giclee Print, 2009).

“She’s dealing with love and loss in her work,” notes Jonathan Levine, owner and proprietor of Jonathan Levine Gallery in Chelsea, where McPherson exhibited her first solo painting show in 2007.  “That sort of human condition is the main theme although she’s gotten into other sort of metaphysical ideas as well.  Her most personal work is about unfulfilled love, the nature of the heart, which is something a lot of people relate to.”

McPherson’s ability to construct images and worlds that people can relate to is only half the achievement. The other half is a result of an unfailing commitment to her craft.  Having grown up in Los Angeles, with most of her family originally hailing from Hawaii, she brings some of that California sunshine to Bedford Avenue, often punctuating sentences—especially those about her work—with “Yay!” (“And then he offered me a solo show, and I was like, “YAY!”).  Yet this four-year Williamsburg resident’s work ethic is distinctly that of a New Yorker.

“What I love about New York is that it is tough to live here, and if you can’t cut it, this city will just eat you up and spit you out,” she says.  “I like that you have to bust your ass, and up your level of production. You have to want it to thrive.”

And yet, McPherson’s devotion to her work keeps her away from the city that fuels her productivity. She has traveled so much in the past year, when she has reached with her tattooed arm for the keys to her Bedford area apartment, it hasn’t been to stay for longer than two weeks—just enough time to grab a coffee at Verb, eat some Korean (“I crave Dokebi!”), and DJ a quick gig at Union pool, “where all my friends work.”

“Just like artists tour to support their album, I tour to support my artwork,” she says.  “I am very goal-oriented. I know what I want to do. And if it takes me four years to do it, that’s fine.”

For example, two years ago, McPherson had a meeting with Dark Horse Comics about putting together an art book of paintings that, at the time, existed only in theory Seventeen paintings later, Dark Horse released Lost Constellations, Tara’s latest art book (her second produced by Dark Horse)—the tome she is currently on tour to promote. The book highlights among other things, the work done for McPherson’s 2007 solo show at the Jonathan LeVine Gallery, a three-painting series called The Weight of Water, that explores, through surrealist female portraiture, the element in its three natural states.

Now a forerunner in a fine arts movement most recently dubbed as “Pop Surrealism,” (McPherson doesn’t think the term “lowbrow” applies to her artwork—“That’s hot rods and stuff,” she says), she plays with the physical manifestation of thought, depicting beautiful women with lavish, bubbling flowers sprouting atop their heads.  She intentionally blurs the line between underwater and starry, atmospheric environnments to show “how the deepest of the oceans are just as foreign to us as the depths of space.” Her contemporaries include talents like Esao Andrews, Jonathan Viner, Marcos Chin and Eric White, all artists who dabble in dreamlike imagery with dark edges, and many of who share McPherson’s passion for representing the female form.

What sets Tara apart from most of her fine art world compatriots is her willingness to explore the more commercial aspects of artisanship. McPherson first made her mark on the rock concert poster circuit, a world that straddles the line between consumable artifact and art for art’s sake. She embraces her name as a brand and her images are well-suited for merchandising. Her new line of toys, called Gamma Mutant Space Friends, was released just a few months ago by Kidrobot.  Her website now offers a slew of McPhersonated products including faux-suede pillows, lighters, laptop skins, and a set of semi-permanent car decals. “I wanted to do more merchandising and cool stuff—stuff that I like to get,” she says.

This marketing/promotional aspect of the industry is one of Tara’s unfailing strengths. Because of the accessibility of her images and the easy relationship viewers have with her artwork, Tara is one of a handful or artists who has been able to forge a career that is both as successful in the commercial realm as it is in the world of fine arts. She even teaches a class at Parsons called, “The Dark Side,” on how to explore a narrative in your artwork, and make it commercially viable as well as gallery friendly.

Tara McPherson is currently on tour promoting her second art book, Lost Constellations and will be a part of the American Artifact Rock Poster Art Show in NYC on October 15.). See more of McPherson’s upcoming events, work and products at www.taramcpherson.com.

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.