DIY Bar Fighting

Thought DIY only applies to music and art shows? Think again. The fine people over at Chief Magazine have provided their very own DIY science experiment. The subject? What beer bottle brand makes for the most impressive (and cool looking) bar fight weapon when broken? As shown by a couple of hipster gals in lab coats, it’s suprisingly difficult to break a bottle correctly. The next time you plan on stabbing someone in a bar, the girls suggest you order either a long-necked Corona bottle or (suprisingly) one of those somewhat stubby Red Stripe bottles. Check out the full article here. It’s part of a larger Chief series called ‘Science Can Kill,” that offers plenty of other juicey tidbits of knowledge, like how to dispose of a dead body from a rooftop and how to avoid a horde of zombies.

Glasslands Gallery

This Thursday, Glasslands Gallery is putting on a show featuring Donkey Flamingo, Brightside, Suckers, and DJ Ryan Rasheed. For those of you who who’ve never heard of it, Glasslands is gallery space that was started up in 2006 by artist Brooke Baxter, with help from Rolyn Hu, a real estate broker. The purpose of Glasslands is to provide an art space for the entire artist community in Williamsburg. So, while they do provide a pretty lively venue for bands, Baxter and Hu’s main idea was to provide space for individuals to work together on larger, ongoing fine art pieces with other members of the community. The idea is to focus on the creative process itself, rather than the finished product, and this sentiment showcases how Glasslands is a microcosm of the entire DIY scene in Brooklyn. Here, artist and observer are never really considered static terms, and the level of mass participation in a project is more imortant than its overall outcome. For more info, you can check out Brooke Baxter’s website. You can also check out who’s doing what at the gallery on Brooke’s myspace page, where’s there’s a schedule of events.

Awesome DIY Music Videos

I think Japanther has some of the most awesome home made music videos out there. If you don’t know who they are, Japanther is a Brooklyn-based punk band comprised of two members who sound like they could have fit in during the Ramones era New York City punk scene. They are also one of the bands that is most visable, and most prolific in the DIY music culture. They have had (since 2006) an amazing music video of the song “Divorce” up on YouTube, and it seriously looks like a cross between Psychedelic 60’s era Jefferson Airplane videos and public access television from the 1980’s. You can check that video out here, but for a real taste of the band’s video making skills, check out their website’s video section. What particularly struck me was the science-experiment animation from the video for “Evil Earth.” It absolutely looks like it was drawn in a high school history class, but the effects intermixed with a live performance are pretty impressive for an underground music video. The band’s out in Montana right now, but they’ll be back playing live shows in New York at the end of the month, and will be playing at Pratt Institute on October 13th.

More on Todd P…

So as I said earlier, Todd P is one of the event organizers and promoters who is making the whole DIY scene in Brooklyn possible. He’s been putting on shows here for over six years, since coming to New York from his hometown of Portland, Oregon. He’s been called by the Village Voice as the “Best Thrower of No-Bullshit Far Flung Indie Rock Shows” in New York. Here’s a link to a larger Village Voice profile of him. I’m going to track down Todd and (hopefully) rip him from his busy schedule enough to sit down for an interview, to learn about how he got started, what kind of stuff he is planning with the Silent Barn and other venues, and what the whole movement means to him. Coincidentally, he’s looking for interns if you’re an interested hipster. To read even more about Todd, check him out at Chief Magazine.

Initial Impressions on a Space in Transition

Standing outside of the Silent Barn is an experience in itself. Nine stops deep into Brooklyn on the L line gets you across the street from a scrap yard, complete with a junked car spray-painted red, white and blue on top of an elevated trailer. You stand in front of a broken-knobbed door attached to graffit tagged, unidentified building. The only sign for the Silent barn is “(…)” followed by a tiny drawing of a barn, written in black sharpie ink.

The lack of visual stimulus endes immediately once you enter the space. A whirling juxtaposition of colors, shapes and words is splashed across the walls; it appears as if the decorator was a demented circus clown tripping on LSD. And that’s a good thing.

When there’s a show going on, the Barn is stuffed with Brooklyn’s chaotic cross-sampling of hipsters. The crowd includes tranvestites in their 50’s, but once the music starts playing, everyone starts thrashing like they’re sixteen again. An hour before the show, the place is only just starting to buzz. Todd P and the roommates are building a stage in the middle of the kitchen, caually taking drags off cigarettes and sips off bottles of Budweiser. Various audio cables are being plugged into their respective outlets, and the happy melancholy of an indie rock band is permeating from speakers positioned throughout the living room.

Walking around the Silent Barn, you get the sense that you are in such a fragile, temporary space. It can’t last, it won’t last – eventually the place will go down, be shut down, or worse, turned into a Starbucks like Williamsburg and further west.

No time is this fragile component of the Barn more noticable than when the place is in transition from apartment to underground party space. Bedroom doors are not yet padlocked, and people are relaxing on couches, that at least in this light, still look comfortable and clean, before a dancing hipster spills his beer (or maybe his vomit) all over them.

It’s nice to have this twilight time as a frame of reference, and it punctuates what the term DIY means in Brooklyn; five roommates turning their couch and arcade game filled living room into a self-styled venue featuring acts touring the likes of the Knitting Factory, Bowery Ballroom and other New York City music landmarks.

On Saturday, Pterodactyl, Numbers, Team Robespierre, Bears and Brown Recluse Sings will be playing. Doors open at 8:00 PM, and more posts to come after the show.

Silent Barn, This Thursday

First on the agenda is one of the key points on the Brooklyn DIY map. I’ve been in contact with John, one of the roommates/promoters of Silent Barn. Silent Barn is a warehouse turned communial living space turned underground music mecca. It’s one of the most unique and important venues that’s defining Brooklyn culture right now, and on Thursday it will host a bevy of acts influencing the music scene here, like Silver Apples, a pychedelic electronica duo, and Ex Models, an electronica and industrial group whose sound seems influenced by the likes of the Talking Heads and hardcore punk bands like The Refused and Black Flag. The Moon Upstairs and Tristan Perich are also slated to play. The show starts at 8:00 PM, but I’ll be there early to see how the roommates turn a living room and kitchen into one of underground Brooklyn’s most blistering, sweaty and raucous stages. For a little more info on the venue, you can check out their myspace page or Todd P’s website. Todd P, who’s been written about by The New York Times, the Village Voice and Chief Magazine, is Brooklyn’s number one underground music and show promoter, and source of all things DIY. More on him will come later, and on Thursday night (or more likely early Friday morning) I’ll tell you how the show turned out.