Fifteen artists all of whom have registered for this years Bushwick Open Studios will have exactly three minutes to explain what they are showing during BOS, and why it is important. Jen Hitchings, Meenakshi Thurikode, Wendy Klemperer or Kweighbaye Kotee from Bushwick Film Festival are among the invited artists to participate in this “intellectual vernissage.”
Bushwick Art Crit Group is a newly formed “networking and creative development community that seeks to give Bushwick artists a nurturing place to share about their work, and to receive feedback,” says their website. Tonight at 7PM, the group will meet for the second time at the gallery of Brooklyn Fire Proof under the lead of artist Christopher Stout who founded the initiative. The admission is free, and everybody is welcomed to join the discussion.
Bushwick Art Crit Group was launched in March 2013, and meets bi-monthly. To learn more about tonight’s event, check out our Events Calendar and read an article by Holly Shen Chaves at Arts in Bushwick Blog.
This weekend the New Museum celebrated its third year of IDEAS CITY, a collaborative initiative that seeks to use the arts to revitalize urban space as a forum for discussion and culture enrichment. Among the hundreds of participants, two women, Meenakshi Thirukode and Jasmine Wahi, push the mission of the three-day event, truly challenging the concept of art and space, and art in space. Brought together serendipitously and slightly prophetically, Thirukode and Wahi have combined their art world/business savvy with their passion for the expansion of art in public urban spaces to create the timely Project for Empty Space(PES). The foundation, brainstormed by the partners in 2010, focuses on transforming under-utilized or typically non-art spaces into temporary performance art venues. They seek to change perceptions and to stretch the impact of art in an urban environment, making it more accessible to the city’s entire population. As a second act to this weekend’s collaboration with The Other Theater, Etiquette for Lucid Dreaming, PES will host the event again, this time at Brooklyn Fire Proof in Bushwick on Tuesday May 7th.
Plain PBR/whiskey consumption doesn’t really cut it for you. You want to drink while engaging your literary brain in some meaningful activity like listening to a poetry slam. You think you’re a forgotten species? Not in Bushwick! After a new library opened in Bushwick this week, the literary fun continues! Here are four literary events in Bushwick this weekend to make you weep with joy!
All photos by Daryl-Ann Saunders unless otherwise stated.
It took us about three days to recover… but we are back. Bushwick Daily Holiday Party was very likely the coolest holiday party of all times, and we’re so happy we spent it with you!
On Sunday night, the weather sucked; it was drizzling and the Bushwick warehouse promenade wasn’t exactly inviting. However, Bushwick Daily team was running around Brooklyn Fire Proof like a bee hive, hanging photographs; preparing the ultra-fabulous photo booth; setting up the bands and sipping whiskey. To warm up! …And then you guys stared to come, and suddenly the house was full, the strobe lights in the photo booth where bleeping, and everybody was having fun! Bushwick Daily Holiday Party was an excellent example of terrific team work. Pure love was floating in the air, and once the party started there was no end to it. Or wait, we just don’t remember it….
Happy Holidays from Buswhick! (photo via @Daisy_Elizabeth Instagram)
If I said ‘jingles’ last week, I have to say JINGLES this week. The Holiday season arrived in Bushwick in all its power of a million Christmas lights from Family Dollar. Our top event + things to do selection this week naturally has to belong almost exclusively to the Holiday spirit and spirits. Enjoy responsibly, friends!
At The Narrows (all photos by Kaitlin Parry for Bushwick Daily)
Let’s face it, there’s no real reason for you to drink at a bar during the next couple months. …But since curtailing your alcohol intake simply isn’t an option, two Bushwick bars—The NarrowsandBrooklyn Fire Proof—are planning to set-up heated outdoor areas to keep you warm and fuzzy without having to drink half a dozen Hot Toddy’s.
According to the bar owner, the planned set-up for The Narrows is going to include a sort of futuristic, infrared heating system for the bar’s annex area that will pipe in warm air from three different angles.
Hey My Music Ragers! Hope everyone survived Thanksgiving with their families, friends or that devious talking fridge that begs to fill up your stomach. Either way, what better way to unwind and shed the haunted leftover T-G weight by dancing at a couple of live music shows in the hood this week? Get back into the BK groove of things and remember diet pills never work.
Is it fall yet? I don’t know how about you but I feel like snuggling the fabric out of my blanket! I would read poetry books and watch good movies…. Now we have these five great events in Bushwick (and beyond) where you can snuggle with a greater style than ever. (Quick question for a poll in the comments section: Is it ok to snuggle a blanket in public?)
Here is our very snugly selection of events for this week: (more…)
Bizarre ethos, synthesizers, weird gadgets obtained via eBay, girls, UFOs, experimental process. Electronic band Paradise Club is celebrating their freshly released album in all their Bushwick weirdness this Thursday, August 16 at 8pm at Brooklyn Fire Proof. The night named after their album Soundtrack to a Car on Fire, will feature 4 other bands of a similar experimental mindset (Water Brain, Rarefaction, H.Honne Wells and Fall of Another Year).
You probably saw Paradise Club performing in AIRPLANE, Factory Fresh or Bar Matchless last Thursday. The band is also preparing a collaboration with Jason Andrew and Norte Maar on an installment of Cage Transmitted series. Before we see Paradise Club in action, we used this opportunity to chat with the members of the band, Eric Trosko and Kiowa Hammons, about their creative process, their inspiration for the album, and mainly why cars on fire…
How did it all begin? When did you realize you’re a band, not just two guys making sounds?
Eric: We have been making music together and with other people for a number of years now. There was just a point where it was just us two left and we decided to let machines do the work that would have been done by other members. This really freed things up and allowed us to engage in the kind of experimentation and discovery that we had always wanted to. This is when Paradise Club really came into being in the springtime of 2011.
Kiowa: It felt like we were both struggling to incorporate more chaotic elements and performance art practices into the music we were making, and the decision to just start from scratch with a new name, line-up, and instrumentation really opened up the possibilities for a new sound. There can be a lot of clichés associated with branding a collaboration as a “band”—mostly associated with the celebritization of musical groups brought on by rock and pop, and that’s not where we wanted to go with this project. But I think we’ve sort of achieved a good balance between what essentially makes a “band”—which is people making music together, with trying to create something more bizarre and unique by bringing in the elements of more art based practices; such as performative actions, visual art, weird manifestos, etc…, while still incorporating a band ethos into the music. This helps to connect the sounds to people as somewhat structured songs with ideas, motifs, and emotions embedded in.
I like to think of bands as little mini-cults—a group of people who believe in certain ideas spend a concentrated amount of time building on said ideas and create different ways to express them, then the group start preaching these ideas to the people in the hopes that they’ll believe in them to. The interaction of ideas and energy grow into a collective unconscious, channeled through sounds, and then you have something.
I’d like to think of our music achieving a visceral effect similar to the distortion of sound when under water, or the audio physicality of a good nitrous oxide trip….
Kiowa: This is like trying to describe a mugger for a police sketch or something…so far I think we’ve kind of hidden behind naming the music and musicians that have influenced us rather than trying to put the actual sounds into words. I’d like to think of our music achieving a visceral effect similar to the distortion of sound when under water, or the audio physicality of a good nitrous oxide trip. Eric a while back just started calling it “Soft Skull”, I think it is good to have a new way to describe something new.
We are a Bushwick band. These streets with their once desolate warehouse and factory canyons and its whore lined streets are our inspiration. 12 years ago burning cars were as common as overpriced cafes are now. “Soundtrack to a Car on Fire” is a fairy tale of an apocalypse long past.
What is the favorite music instrument/gadget you are using?
Eric: I don’t really have a favorite. I have the most experience with guitar but it really only plays a minor role at the moment. The Minimoog is really the backbone of our sound on this release. It is the starting point of everything we do. I am hoping to incorporate more instruments in the future.
Kiowa: For me it’s the saxophone. I find that the tone of the instrument can both blend in with the atonal nuances as well as punctuate the more chaotic noises of the music in interesting ways. Plus I enjoy the physical challenge of the instrument; particularly its connection to human breath. There reaches a point with these songs that I feel like I’m going to pass out, and that’s when I know that we are playing at our best.
Can you describe your 1st album? What influenced its creation the most?
Eric: It is the best results of our experimental process. We wanted to entertain ideas that are largely out of favor and fit them into the form of a pop song. Basically most of the music we hear today sounds like it is made for pussies; we are inspired by our opposition to this. The pop song format with all its convention is still the best way to advance the anti-pussy agenda. We try to keep it real and tactile. Real sound, real pain, real joy, real love, real dreams, no pussies…
Kiowa: The album is sort of a layer cake of different noises and atonal drones stacked and blended together to make something akin to a song. Sort of like looking at a cartoon rendition of the earth’s soil: you have the inner and outer cores, the mantle and the crust, with some dinosaur fossils, oil, and dirt; all crushed and fused together—now just think of this diagram as an audio experience…Lyrically, we tend to write songs about what we know: girls, political strife, and UFO’s.
There wasn’t any one particular thing that influenced the making of the album, beyond just coming to a point where we had been playing these songs awhile, and the order of the songs fit, so it was like “when are we going to record this stuff?” Plus we were able to work with our friend and master sound guru, Lou Sherman, so the pieces just fell into place.
Basically most of the music we hear today sounds like it is made for pussies; we are inspired by our opposition to this. The pop song format with all its convention is still the best way to advance the anti-pussy agenda. We try to keep it real and tactile. Real sound, real pain, real joy, real love, real dreams, no pussies…
You are very close to visual arts. In fact Eric, you are a painter as well. Do you see the connection between your music and your art?
Eric: No matter what I am making it is always the same approach. Musical sound is just another material to work with. What I like about working with musical sound is it exists in time, space, and can even be felt, yet it remains invisible. I think of our songs more as places that can be visited rater that something to just listen to. I like the collaboration of music rather than just toiling away alone in an art studio.
Kiowa: Looking at music and being in a band as more of an artistic project, similar to creating a painting or sculpture but with sounds, seemed like a better outlook to produce the music that we were trying to create.
Why the name “Soundtrack to a Car on Fire”
Eric: We are a Bushwick band. These streets with their once desolate warehouses and factory canyons and its whore-lined streets are our inspiration. 12 years ago burning cars were as common as overpriced cafes are now. “Soundtrack to a Car on Fire” is a fairy tale of an apocalypse long past.
Kiowa: When a car burns it takes some time as the metal slowly melts and its flammable guts ignite. In my mind’s eye I can picture the act of a car (or any object for that matter) burning with a certain rhythm pattern; with the sight of the flames flickering and the thing itself slowly smoldering… creating a sort of visual opera. Our music has that kind of beat to it—long intervals of entropic destruction leading to a dead simmer and stillness—leaving only junk and ash and fumes for someone to sweep up.
Lazy, lazy are the dog days of summer. All an average Bushwick person wants to do is to ride a bike through the sprinklers. In Bushwick, we report less events than on very productive weeks but this week’s events are truly awesome, which in the end is an equation we like. Here is what you should not miss!
Here at Bushwick Daily, we are really proud because we are helping to put up some really weird experimental electronic bands. It started with Paradise Club, a band of Eric Trosko and Kiowa Hammons, who just recently released their debut album titled Sountrack to a Car on Fire (note: we love the name among other things). So we were like, hey why don’t we do a release party, and Paradise Club were like hey, why don’t we invite more bands. This Thursday, at 8pm the madness starts at Brooklyn Fire Proof. The admission is free (sweet), and additionally you will see Water Brain, Rarefaction, H.Home Wells, Fall of Another Year. This entire electronic craziness will be accompanied by trippy video projection by visual artist Lars Rasmussen. See ya all there on Thursday!
Another great event to be held at Brooklyn Fire Proof this week is (most likely) the greatest Bushwick reading series curated by Mike Lala and Eric Nelson, Fireside Follies! Fireside Follies has had a great summer run, and this Friday will be hitting its finale, so don’t miss it. You can look forward to awesome readers Robert Tumas, Chiwan Choi (Abductions), Kendra Grant Malone (Everything is Quiet) and Dan Magers (Partyknife).
Music in the courtyard, films in Bushwick Community Darkroom and, above all, 25 vendors and 13 shops to provide you with fresh produce and flea items The event is organized by Bunna Cafe, Bushwick vegan pop up Ethiopian restaurant (yum)!
Sardine is one of the most lovable shops/galleries in Bushwick. Run by Lacey Fekishazy, Sardine carries a bunch of super cute jewelry and other accessories made by Brooklyn artists. Additionally, we love their gallery! This Wednesday, Sardine will open a solo show of Gabriel Hurier titled Drift. Swing by and say hi to this friendly folk.
Presentation Party Night is one of the nicest events we have in Bushwick. The evening consists of 6 short presentations and Q&A on any topic followed by free beer and food while it lasts. This time the presenters will talk about Aesthetics, L Train History (we wanna know!!), Cider (hmmm), Self-Confidence (needed), History of Riddles, PPN Past, Present, and Future! The best news is that PPN is celebrating 2 years this month! Congratulations and happy birthday to everybody involved, and keep up the good work!!
The event is organized by Bunna Cafe, Bushwick vegan pop up Ethiopian restaurant (yum)!
BUSHWICK GARBAGE http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZqFpDLqg3o
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