He lived to recall the pre-atomic radioactive shadow of Jolson.

Baby faced in Ballrooms actual and imagined, he had been bitten and beamed at by Banjo Eyes and found his one true church:
Wintergardens where the sacrament was the croon and cry of immigrant America, slippery with Yiddish and leaping with long Italian syllables.

And this was his world, the world created by Jews and minstrels and men of gossip and kings of jazz. On shellac and magic Philco, they were more perfect to the heart than sloppy reality. Life in Newsprint was always better than the newsprint-colored world, and what truth, sepia sad, could compete with the cartoon curve of a Dagmar’s hip?

When the winter-white bathtub-colored sky above his city hummed with terrestrial television waves (and the bunny ears bent to catch them), the pictures from the Motorola fluttered and hissed and he knew: there was no love, no laughter, no tears greater nor more authentic than those we would find when persistence of vision fooled our eyes and made us think the flicker was real.

When his city was full of Robert Moses modern, and the Zenith was tube-heated and so sexy-warm to the touch, and in the TV Guide there was a big C next to the talk shows and summertime fun hours; when the children sat Indian-style in Great Neck dens and overheated Chinatown flats and Grand Concourse kitchens and Captain Jack taught us, all of us equal in his eyes whether we be belly-full or belly-empty, about Hal Roach and Moe Howard.

And behind a desk and a cool, Canada Dry he reminded us, like a Buddha, that everything old was alive in the new; and that Tony Pastor knew Weber & Fields and Weber & Fields knew Lillian Russell and Lillian Russell knew Ziegfeld and Ziegfeld knew Fanny Brice and it went on and on and eternally returned to the beginning and the middle and it could not be more beautiful.

When his city hummed with the slap and jaw of the three Card Monte men in a Times Square shattered and burst and smelling of ammonia and weed, everything yellow like old Scratch’s stucco and the vials crunching crisply underneath hurried feet, he insisted we make time for King Vidor and Johnny Ray and a self published author from the Tuckahoe, and it could not be more beautiful.

I looked through a window in his building once (true), a building full of Bialystocks and tragic hopefuls and hope-nots huddled by dairy-creamer creased coffee machines, and I squinted through wire’d windows, dark with soot at any time of the day, out to the Deuceland below; and if you looked through half-closed/half-happy eyes you could see his city, as he saw it, clocks clicked back and El Morocco black and white, a pigeon-colored world turned at dusk to Roxy Rainbow light fogged by camel smoke rings and a Canadian Club just within reach.

I looked into his eyes once, true, and saw Phil Silvers and Cantor and even sweet Veronica Lake in the shark’s teeth tick of the sassy iris.  Pass me your world, dear friend of so many nights, of every age of my life; give me your century, your hungry, sassy Jews, your prat-falling Irish, your Midwestern Cleopatra’s and Neopatras curved of plenty, your crooners, your jugglers, your tin pan beggars and boastful losers, your soon to be’s and once weres; give me your century, the last century, when the arc lights were high and the overture started at 8:05, sing me the song of your century, give me the paint with which you touched up tense reality and made it tender and alive with song and silent film.

And he is the last of this world, and I love him so.

And to love him without irony is to love the hope felt when you were a child and you lost a breath when the blue lights caught the star on stage.

Joe Franklin March 9, 1926 – January 24, 2015

Suis Generis

And apropos of nothing/everything:

The work is actually a continuation of Ahern’s “Borrowed Prey” project, a diptych whose first part examined the connections between humans and the animals that many of us consume. Performed in New York City in the spring of 2012, “Borrowed Prey: Part I” delved into the “farm to table” process, with Ahern’s own forays into hunting, butchering and slaughtering serving as the main basis for the work. In essence, it centered on human-to-animal empathy framed in the context of death. Ditmas Park-based Ahern continues her probe into death in the project’s second part, but this time with a focus on human-to-human empathy.

“Borrowed Prey: Part II” sprung from a very personal place, as the father of Ahern’s then-boyfriend was dying of Alzheimer’s during the same period that the choreographer was in the early planning stages of the project.

“My biggest feeling was that there just seemed like there needed to be a better way to deal with the end of life,” explains Ahern, who first began mulling over the concepts that would serve as the inspiration for “Borrowed Prey” in 2009. “How we die is now so related to this outsourcing of care to other people, just like what happens with animals. But it is very different in that the animals that we eat are killed at the height of their lives, whereas we now often prolong human life to an extent that poses questions about what is ethical in those terms or not.”

During the creative process that culminated in “Borrowed Prey: Part II,” Ahern discussed these questions at great length with two of her collaborators, Park Slope-based dancer Carolyn Hall and composer Anne Hege, who both perform alongside Ahern in the piece. Much as Ahern had been grappling with how to deal with death because of her up-close encounter with suffering, Hall and Hege had also been going through losses of their own, with the experiences of all three women serving to shape the work in a profound way.

“This piece is very personal for me,” Hege says. “My brother passed away four and a half years ago and I had a really negative hospital experience,” explains Hege, who felt as though life support caused her sibling’s spirit to struggle in a way that might not have happened otherwise. “He was kept on life support because he had opted to be an organ donor and there was really a sense of the power of his body, even with all the machines. He had been declared dead, but he was still so spiritually present. I feel like this piece gets at some of that in a really interesting way.”

Indeed, at the heart of “Borrowed Prey: Part II” is a quest of sorts to recover and reconnect to those life-affirming rituals that have been lost in our modern obsession with staving off death until the last possible moment. The 80-minute, multi-disciplinary performance has been informed by a multitude of influences, including “The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying,” Ahern’s training as a hospice volunteer and each performer’s visualization of her own imagined burial process.

“What has been really interesting for me is finding a way to remain emotionally connected but put it into a ritual that honors life rather than grieves for death,” says Hall, whose parents both died shortly before she began working on the project with Ahern. “I think that is actually where this piece journeys for me personally,” Hall explains. “It starts in a place where death is a hard thing to digest to where actually the life that passed is worth celebrating.”

It is Hall who starts off the piece, with a solo that finds her crouched naked on a stark metal table. As she begins to move, eery video images of her shot by collaborator Harrison Owen are projected onto flowing white curtains that surround the performance space.

“The video is a brand new element for me in my work,” Ahern notes. “I think that I wanted there to be a play between what people are actually comfortable looking at – her or the video. Because her solo is a little bit grotesque, as is the video.”

It is striking how vulnerable and alone Hall seems at the beginning of the performance. But as the piece progresses, it moves from a place of isolation to one of interconnectedness, as the performers take the audience along on an evocative journey fraught with emotion that is conveyed through movement and sound.

Long-time collaborators who first worked together 17 years ago, Ahern and Hall share a level of comfort with each other that shines through in their interactions during the piece. At times, one seems like an extension of the other, as they move together in beautiful unison, both dressed in white cotton costumes designed by Naoko Nagata that are reminiscent of burial shrouds.

Throughout the performance, the dancers are constantly navigating a shifting web of tethers that serve as both visual stimuli and a source of sound. Music and movement meld together when the dancers hold onto the strings, as many of them are GameTrack tether controllers that are connected to special pods programmed with sounds composed by Hege. “Depending on how we pull the tethers, that triggers different kinds of sounds and different volumes in different parts of the piece,” explains Hege, who used the open source sound synthesis program ChucK for the project.

The constant shifting of the tethers to different points of the performance space also acts to bring about a sense of expanding connection that eventually envelopes the audience itself, as the piece ends with different spectators being given the strings to hold as the final dance sequence unfolds before them. “When you are tethered to something, it is such a strong metaphor,” Ahern says.

Ahern and Hege plan to further explore these themes of connections and death in future workshops that will focus on community rituals that use movement and sound to support the grieving process.

“I think by people looking at death a little bit more and getting a little bit more connected to it, they may gain a new perspective and see that it is not necessarily so dark and fearful,” Ahern says of her new work. “And I think there is potential for the kind of support that we are currently lacking culturally. Death does happen to a community, so what kind of ritual can we give people to support the grieving process?”

“Borrowed Prey: Part II” runs through Friday, December 13 at Alwan for the Arts. Tickets are available for purchase at Brown Paper Tickets.

Photos by Lori Singlar for the Brooklyn Bugle

Photo by Matt Lambros

Though Williamsburg-based photographer Matt Lambros is a cinephile who appreciates everything from indie films to popcorn flicks, these days he finds himself mainly frequenting movie theaters that have long since gone dark as part of his current photo documentation project “After The Final Curtain.”

It all started several years ago when Lambros tagged along with some friends to see a film at Manhattan’s Village East Cinema. Once inside the theater, which was created in the 1920s by Brooklyn’s own Louis N. Jaffe, he was instantly captivated by its magnificent interior ornately designed in the Moorish Revival style.

“I just remember looking up at the chandelier and saying, ‘Oh my God, the architecture in this place is amazing’…. and that got me wondering about any abandoned theaters around,” explains Lambros, who moved to Brooklyn in 2007.

Lambros eventually discovered the Loew’s Kings Theatre in Flatbush, another movie house built in the 1920s that had suffered a very different fate from the Village East Cinema. Shuttered more than two decades ago, the once splendid theater was sliding into ruin and Lambros was able to capture this eerily elegant decay in a series of images that marked the start of his “After The Final Curtain” project.

“I started photographing the Kings Theatre and from there, I started investigating more and kept finding more (abandoned cinemas) and it just branched out,” Lambros says. “Soon, I had enough (photos) and I decided I’d start a blog about it.”

To date, Lambros has photographed a total of 45 shuttered theaters in the Northeast and Midwest. Having recently returned from a shoot in Detroit, he has been continuing to compile a list of potential subjects located all across the United States. “I have plans to go pretty much everywhere in the entire country… it’s just a matter of getting there,” the photographer notes.

Photo by Matt Lambros

Though reticent to speak about how he obtains access to the movie houses, Lambros does say he is careful to not venture into the buildings alone. He often travels with a small group of friends to the abandoned locales, which can pose a challenge to photograph, since there is usually very little natural light streaming into the interior spaces. Thus, Lambros counts a hand-held lantern, a flash and a strobe among his essential tools. The resulting images are stunning, with a touch of surrealism about them, much like the ruined cities seen on movie screens that fascinated Lambros as a child.

The photographer traces his penchant for shooting abandoned buildings back to his childhood, as his grandmother found an unusual pastime for keeping him and his brother entertained while their mother was away at work. She took them on field trips to old barns and other deserted buildings in and around Lambros’ hometown of Beekman in Dutchess County, a family hobby that lasted from the time he was four until he was eight.

“That (experience) stayed with me,” Lambros says of his childhood forays into abandoned structures. “I just liked to look at the way the buildings crumbled, I visually enjoyed it, so this (project) is an extension of that,” the photographer explains.

Photo by Matt Lambros

The purpose of “After The Final Curtain” is two-fold, as Lambros not only wishes to document the vestiges of these once glorious cinemas, but also raise awareness of their existence in hopes that some may be saved and restored. In fact, the Loew’s Kings Theatre is currently being restored to the tune of $70 million, with an opening slated for 2014. “It’s a gorgeous theater and I’m really happy that it is going to be restored,” says Lambros, who notes that this cinema still stands out as his favorite among the ones he has photographed.

“Seeing those beautiful images of these grand spaces… and realizing that these theaters are actually quite nearby – maybe even just a few miles from your home – gives you such a larger sense of the possibility of discovery,” says Dylan Thuras, co-founder of Atlas Obscura, an online compedenium of unusual places that celebrates the spirit of exploration.

Thuras invited Lambros to give a presentation about his photography project this past summer as part of the ongoing Atlas Obscura Speakers Series, whose lectures revolve around the theme of discovery in the modern world. The August engagement was so popular that Lambros is now scheduled to give an encore talk, entitled “The Fall of the American Movie Palace,” which is being held tonight at Gowanus’ arts and event space Observatory that is run by a group of artists and writers including Thuras.

“These photographs provide this absolute portal to another space, another version of New York,” Thuras notes. “People sometimes feel very cynical and jaded and think everything interesting has been discovered or done and I just don’t think that’s true at all. I think there are really a lot of amazing things out there and I’m excited to be able to bring someone like Matt in to show that to folks.”

Their announcer of 18 years, Ian Eagle, had to wait a little longer to make his Brooklyn debut, calling his first game on Monday when the Nets lost to the Minnesota Timberwolves.

Eagle became part of the Nets broadcast team in 1994 and joined the YES network, the Nets’ television home, 10 years ago. And though he grew up in Queens, coming to the Barclays Center is a sort of homecoming.

“My dad was from Brooklyn,” Eagle said last week, preparing to head out of town to cover the NFL.  “He went to Erasmus Hall for high school, and that was his life, growing up in Brooklyn.”

“After my father got divorced, his first wife lived in Brooklyn, and I spent weekends in Brooklyn with her for the first five years of my life. I remember going to Prospect Park, getting off at the Church Avenue station; she had an apartment on Caton Avenue, and Brooklyn made up a lot of my childhood memories. It definitely made an impression on me.”

Eagle also spent time in Mill Basin, as a teenager frequently visiting a sister who lived there. “I used to go out there about a once a month,” he said. “Growing up in Queens, the only frame of reference I had for an indoor mall was Kings Plaza.”

Eagle’s first impressions of his return to Brooklyn are equally favorable.

“I’m really impressed,” he said. “It’s very tastefully done, not over the top like a lot of the newer buildings. It feels intimate, and the lower bowl feels very close to the action. I went upstairs, too, and for a basketball game, I don’t think there’s a bad seat in the house.”

Of the move across two rivers, from New Jersey to Brooklyn, Eagle said that the first task was persuading the players that it was a good idea. “The biggest challenge initially was convincing players that Brooklyn is a legitimate destination,” he said. “That happened pretty quickly.”

“There’s automatically a fan base in Brooklyn,” he went on. “Knicks’ ans aren’t going to give up their allegiance, but Brooklyn is a proud area, and a number of fans have already accepted this team.

“That’s a byproduct of the pride within the borough. There’s a different vibe with this team.”

While Eagle is enthusiastic about the move, he has no plans to move from his New Jersey home to the Brooklyn.

“I have a 15-year-old and a 13-year-old, and the timing just doesn’t work. But I’ve already done the drive a couple of times and it really hasn’t been that bad at all,” he said.

“I’m Mr. Traffic,” he continued. “I listen to all the traffic reports.”

The Nets’ next home game is Sunday at 3 pm against the Orlando Magic.

Read the full story at Brooklyn Heights Blog

“For years, this question about sustainable food had been bothering me,” says Ahern, a Wisconsin native who moved to Brooklyn 17 years ago and currently resides in Ditmas Park. “I just felt so disconnected from going into a grocery store and buying a piece of meat and not really understanding where it came from.”

A growing interest in the origins of her food prompted Ahern to seek hands-on experience in the “farm to table” process back in 2010. The undertaking resulted in a bicoastal journey that involved hunting for Sika deer in the swamplands along the Eastern Shore of Maryland in the autumn of 2010 and then heading to Seattle, Washington a few months later to learn the art of butchering at Rain Shadow Meats. Ahern eventually spent a day slaughtering chickens at Stokesberry Farm in Olympia, Washington before returning to Brooklyn. Here, she has continued to perfect her butchering techniques at Williamsburg-based Marlow & Daughters.

Ahern’s forays into hunting, butchering and slaughtering serve as the main basis for her new work, “Borrowed Prey.” Though Ahern initially set out to better understand her own relationship with the “farm to table” process, the project took on a broader dimension during the course of her research.

“I felt like I really needed to be able to kill an animal if I was going to eat it… I really was so curious about what that experience would be like and if I would be able to eat meat after it,” Ahern notes. “But what ended up happening right away is I realized it is a project about empathy, more than anything. And it is a project about connection.”

The performer is creating “Borrowed Prey” as a diptych, with part one focusing on human-to-animal empathy and part two centering on human-to-human empathy.

Ahern began choreographing the first part of “Borrowed Prey” during her stay in Seattle last year, often walking straight to her studio after a shift spent carving up carcasses at Rain Shadow Meats. There, her roles as researcher and dancer became fascinatingly intertwined, as Ahern explains. “I started making the movement when I started the butchering,” she says. “So it comes directly out of my experience with all the research… putting it in my body and seeing what would come out.”

The result is a stunning work in which Ahern embodies both predator and prey, right down to her costume by Naoko Nagata that pairs a woolly, pointy-eared hood and furry shrug with a butcher’s apron splattered with fake blood. During a rehearsal at Brooklyn Arts Exchange in Park Slope, Ahern skillfully shifted from the limp stillness of a carcass on a butcher’s table to the playful strokes of a cat toying with a mouse to the skittish hops of a scared deer. Her movements were accompanied by a hauntingly beautiful score by composer Anne Hege that eventually gave way to an eerily distorted recording of Ahern reading text by Dr. Temple Grandin.

Grandin, an autistic and renowned animal behavior scientist, played an important role in the creation of Ahern’s new work. The scientist’s published findings serve as the fourth strand of research (along with Ahern’s hands-on studies of hunting, butchering and slaughtering) that informs part one of “Borrowed Prey.”

“Temple Grandin helped to answer some of the questions that we have about us versus animals,” Ahern notes. “Do animals think? Do they feel?”

Ahern hopes to get people thinking about these questions and many more by taking them along on a 55-minute sensorial journey filled with dance, music, spoken word, interactive touch experiments and open dialogue that leads up to the butchering of a lamb at the conclusion of the work.

The setting for Ahern’s upcoming performances will also provide rich stimuli, as the show will take place inside an actual butcher shop – Dickson’s Farmstand Meats – complete with pungent orders, a massive sausage grinder and a hefty butcher block that will serve as the dancer’s stage at times. Ahern plans to add her own touches to the space with the help of set and lighting designer Jay Ryan. Even such simple decorations as rawhide bundles dangling from the ceiling will serve to further Ahern’s examinations on the inescapable cycles of life and death, as she plans to fill them with decomposing flowers.

“Every aspect of the project is trying to get people more connected,” Ahern says. “It’s not that we just don’t ethically understand where our food comes from, it’s also that we’ve lost something in culture because we don’t participate in that process… by having a connection and empathy, there is more of a wholeness to our lives.”

Ahern will be performing part one of “Borrowed Prey” at Dickson’s Farmstand Meats in Chelsea Market on select nights from April 26 – May 13. Tickets are available for purchase at Brown Paper Tickets.

Photos by Lori Singlar for the Brooklyn Bugle

Brooklyn photographer Chris Arnade writes us about a documentary, Pigeon Keepers of Bushwick, that he’s recently worked on with Rattapallax Productions;

I first noticed the beautiful flocks of pigeons high above Maria Hernandez park in Bushwick last summer. At the time I had no idea that they where part of an old sport.

Brought over by the Italians, Bushwick used to have well over a hundred guys (yes all of them are guys) who kept pigeons on the roofs, now its only about twenty. Not raised to race (thats another sport), they are simply collected and bred and then flown to highlight their beauty. These days, its mostly Dominican and Puerto Rican men, almost all in Bushwick, East new York and Brownsville.

Kept in coops on various roofs, the pigeons are fed and flown almost daily in a game of bragging rights against the other keepers.

Once you view the flocks flowing and swirling high above Brooklyn, catching the shifting sunlight, you start to see the artistry involved. These photos where taken over the last year as I wandered from roof deck to roof deck.

“I played every arena there was,” Dice said during a recent phone conversation. “From Nassau Coliseum, to the Philly Spectrum, to the Garden. I did every arena in the country, like 300 arena shows.”

But in the 1980s, when Dice, now 53, was making the rounds, Brooklyn “didn’t have a big place for me,” he said. While plotting his comedy comeback recently with his agent, he suggested kicking things off –where else?—in Brooklyn.

“I’m from there,” said the Sheepshead Bay native. “I was born there. My people are there, my friends, my family.”

And so, next weekend, Dice, who is still the only comedian to sell out Madison Square Garden two nights in a row, will take the stage at Coney Island’s MCU Park, home of the Brooklyn Cyclones, a stone’s throw from the streets and pizza joints of his youth. “To come back after all this time is a great feeling,” he said. “It’s coming home.”

En route back to his roots, Dice made some detours, and some deliberate decisions. “I went through a bad divorce, and I was like, fuck the career,” he said. Instead, he devoted his energy to raising his sons Max, 20, and Dillon, 17, who he said grew up “emotionally strong and physically safe.”  Though he’s faced some challenges, like being banned from MTV for being too inappropriate, Dice believes an unbreakable will and a certain borough’s “attitude” helped him survive.

“It’s not about fighting,” he explained. “It’s just about standing up for yourself, and having a lot of heart, and that’s what I’m made out of.”

Maybe he’s on to something: in the last year, Dice married his third wife, Valerie; landed a prominent guest spot as a heightened version of himself on the final season of HBO’s Entourage; and rejuvenated his stand-up act with a bunch of dates around the country. Though it’s been a while, Dice promised his new act is simultaneously fresh and nostalgic.

“Some performers get bitter towards what made them a star—I’m not that kind of guy,” he said. “At the end, when I do those Mother Goose poems, the crowd goes crazy because that’s the signature piece they always remember.”

He keeps his material current by staying accessible, something Max pointed out the other day. Case in point: on a recent trip home, Dice took Valerie to Lenny and John’s Pizza in Flatlands (“the greatest pizza in Brooklyn”); and to Kings Plaza; and to Nathan’s Famous in Coney Island. Also a perennial Dice standby: L&B Spumoni Gardens in Gravesend.

Though he is thrilled about the show at MCU Park, Dice continues to look ahead, specifically toward Hollywood. “I like performing live,” he said. “But would I like to do some great movies? Yes.”

He’s already in touch with Barry Levinson about the forthcoming Gotti family film, along with some other opportunities. His heart, though, remains with comedy, a world he revolutionized in the 1980s with his tough, New York style, and his unique ability to “work a stage,” as he put it.

“When Chris Rock was getting ready 20 years ago, I would tell him to pace the stage, and not just stand there, and give people a show,” Dice recalled. “Because no matter how good your material is, if you just stand in one spot and don’t walk around, they get tired of watching.”

If there’s one thing Dice is banking on in the wake of his Entourage renaissance, it’s that audiences won’t get tired of watching—this time around. Armed with new material, he’s eager to get back out on the road, and to delivering jokes in the way only a boy from Brooklyn can.

“I hate to use the word ‘Google,’” he riffed. “If a guy from Brooklyn invented the internet, it wouldn’t be ‘Google.’ It would be, ‘Look it the fuck up.’”

As ever, the man’s got a point.

For tickets to see Andrew Dice Clay at MCU Park on Saturday, October 1 click here

“I’ve always had wanderlust,” the 28-year-old Berke said in a recent phone interview. “I’m always on the move. It’s one of the things that’s really killing me about running the site professionally—I can’t ever leave.”

After attending college at Rutgers University in New Jersey, Berke briefly moved home to write for a trade magazine before skipping town for Lima, Peru. He returned, unemployed, a short time later, and noticed a gaping journalistic hole in Sheepshead Bay. But straight up reportage wasn’t always what he had in mind.

His initial idea, he said, was a blog “where you’re snarky, and making fun of the neighborhood, and complaining about it.” As he progressed, he found himself doing otherwise, if for no other reason than his readers demanded a more serious venture.

“On top of that, I kind of saw the neighborhood in a different way, and started to really enjoy being here,” Berke said. “And now I think it’s one of the best, most beautiful neighborhoods in the whole city.”

He spends his days now covering community board meetings; investigating complaints about building violations; testing out the various authentic immigrant-owned restaurants in Sheepshead Bay; and managing the small staff of writers that works for him. Last year, Sheepshead Bites was named Best Local Blogger in L Magazine‘s “Best of Brooklyn and Manhattan” roundup. Though a ride into midtown Manhattan can take upwards of 45 minutes to an hour, Berke insisted his beachfront community is “very much” a part of the city.

“I hate when people say, ‘It’s really far away,’” he said, in response to my observation that, well, it is. He added, “At the same time, we do get a bit of quiet, and spaciousness, and a kind of beauty the city doesn’t get.”

Sheepshead Bay, in Berke’s view, has an “anti-hipster” attitude; nobody is there to be an urban explorer. The population has changed since his childhood, both in number and in makeup, and is now comprised mostly of Asian and Eastern European folks, along with holdover Irish and Italian immigrants from an earlier era.

Hoping to illustrate this change, Berke told me, “Emmons Avenue used to be a place for great seafood, particularly Italian seafood. Now it’s huge for Turkish food—the best Turkish food in the city is on Emmons Avenue.”

Gone are the so-called five-and-dime stores of his youth, replaced by cell phone huts, drug stores, and other generic establishments. Rent and apartment prices have increased with the market, but also because of what Berke believes is a different sort of gentrification.

“If you run through the markers of gentrifications—the building development, the rise in real estate, the pushing out of an older population, an older demographic, and all of that—it’s all there,” he said. “But it’ll never be called gentrification because the ones doing it are immigrants, and they’re pushing out an old, blue-collar class.”

photo courtesy of Adam Lerner Photography

One of his biggest gripes about Sheepshead Bay is the lack of respect it gets from the city government. For instance, the bay itself is rapidly filling up with sand, “for various environmental reasons,” according to Berke, and needs to be dredged. “The community has been requesting the city dredge it for most of my life,” he said. “And it ignores us.”

Berke is also frustrated by the tourism “renaissance” in neighboring Coney Island and Brighton Beach. While he doesn’t expect Sheepshead Bay to become a tourist destination, per se, he thinks the area should be included in promotional materials for the region. “There’s also things to do in Sheepshead Bay, like recreational fishing, dinner cruises, and an excellent array of waterfront restaurants,” he said, though he was unwilling to name his favorite. (“I run a business,” he explained.)

Not long ago, Sheepshead Bites celebrated its third birthday with a party that drew more than 300 people, and Berke, who recently launched the Bensonhurst Bean, is already planning on more events, like a Brooklyn Cyclones game on August 19 dedicated to Sheepshead Bites. He’s also closely monitoring the release this week of Russian Dolls on Lifetime, a Jersey Shore-style reality show that follows the lives of various members of the Russian-American community in South Brooklyn.

“A lot of people are angry about it, especially when it comes to local Russian leaders,” Berke said. “A lot of people don’t care, and want to be engaged in the voyeurism. The consensus across-the-board is that this is in no way representative of Russians.”

As he follows this story and hordes of others, Berke’s goal is to “fill in the gaps” of news coverage in Sheepshead Bay, a neighborhood largely underserved by the mainstream media—not that he wants (or needs) their attention.

“The vision of the site from the very start of me doing it professionally wasn’t just to build an online community for people to learn about and talk about Sheepshead Bay,” he said. “It was to also create a sense of community, and implement it on the ground.”

Besides, he added, “If there’s some place I’m going to be stuck, it’s definitely not the worst place.”

Coming from a Brooklyn native, that’s one hell of an endorsement.

Stansberry

Chances are, you’ve heard his pitch before.

“Good morning, everybody. My name is Mark. I’m a local filmmaker here in the city. I make animated films and cartoons about this litter girl on my t-shirt; her name is Puddin’.”

Everyday, between 6 o’clock in the morning and noon, 46-year old Mark Stansberry rides the subways selling his DVD, which features six short, hand-drawn cartoons, to the people of New York City for, as he puts it, “a small donation of only one dollar.”

He’s right: one dollar is a relatively small donation, next-to-nothing for many subway riders. For Stansberry, it has meant the opportunity to live his dream.

“I have an agent now, and that’s how I met him—on the D train,” he recalled recently over beverages at Café Pedlar on Court Street. Though he fired that agent last week, he noted, “I have somebody else who wants to represent me. I have somebody who wants to manage me. I have somebody who wants to actually market and license the character.”

Six hours a day on the trains over two years has netted Stansberry a distribution deal for Puddin’ with the digital media company The Orchard (he met the CEO on the subway); steady development meetings with NBC since November; and, he estimates, somewhere between $80-90,000 in cold, hard cash.

“When I started the trains, I wanted to make a little money for the films, support myself, buy supplies, and make more films,” he said. “But now it’s about the huge network, and the people, and the audience, and the brand that I’ve begun to build in the last few years.”

One-on-one, Stansberry, who has loved and practiced animation for as long as he can remember, is more low-key than he appears on the train. The tenor of his voice is softer, his diction less sing-songy and rehearsed. But he is no less passionate about Puddin’ today than he was back in 1994, when he created her.

“Earlier in my life I spent a lot of time in church, and got to see a lot of kids, a lot of little girls,” he said. “So I decided to design a character around one particular little girl, who used to always ask me for money and change in church.”

Puddin'

“Puddin’” was his wife’s childhood nickname, and the character, who is a ten-year old African-American girl, lives in a diverse Brooklyn community, though Stansberry never indicates exactly where. The cartoon also features her older brother Nate, her parents, and her best friend Ling, who is Chinese.

Though he was born and bred in Baltimore, Stansberry insists New York has always felt like home. He arrived here at the age of 19 and interned at a few animation studios, which, he says, “allowed me to look over other animators’ shoulders.” The rest, he says, he learned from books, and while he is respectful of technological advancements like 3-D and CGI, Stansberry prefers more traditional animation methods, and draws every single Puddin’ frame by hand.

The cartoons of the 1970s were, in his view, the height of entertainment, and he spoke wistfully about the days when parents and kids enjoyed these shows together. “Sunday nights, as a kid, the whole family would watch ‘The Wonderful World of Disney,’” Stansberry said. “That’s it. Everybody would watch the same thing.”

Talks with NBC have been difficult because they see Puddin’ as a kids’ show, whereas Stansberry thinks it has a wider demographic. “Based on the feedback I get from people,” he said. “It appeals to everybody, and everybody takes something different away from it.”

After years of weekly separation, Stansberry, his wife, and their eight children (four boys, four girls) are finally all under one roof in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Up until last spring, Stansberry commuted between New York and Baltimore, staying at hostels in the city four days a week and going home on weekends, when he’d burn more DVDs to prepare for the following week’s subway sales.

Stansberry’s time on the trains has molded him into more than just an animator. He is now also a savvy marketing entrepreneur, and a New York City celebrity of sorts, having been featured in various local newspapers and radio programs.

“I don’t have much fear,” he said, but copped to feeling nervous before making his first official pitch on the subway. “I take a lot of risks, as an artist and financially. To me, that was just another risk: to look silly or stupid to some people.”

Most people respond positively to Stansberry’s approach, and he cited the 4 and 5 lines for their particular generosity. He is mindful that his selling tactic might bother straphangers, many of whom would rather be anywhere else at the moment he barges into their lives.

“People are surprised because it’s not the typical, ‘I need help,’ thing,” he said. “I always tell my wife, I wish I could tell people, whether they panhandle or whatever they do…never apologize for being there. That’s the first mistake.”

After all, if he’s learned anything, it’s that New Yorkers are not as hard as they seem. Just don’t tell them he said so.

Check out Puddin’ at Stansberry’s You Tube Channel

Seated in a wooden booth (that sometimes doubles as a stage) in his Prospect Heights watering hole Minor Arcana, Levitt, wearing a green, army-style jacket lined with outspoken pins, commanded nothing like a scary “I’m the boss” vibe on a recent Wednesday evening.  Rather than tout the success of the Coney Island-themed Minor Arcana and his other bar Kings County, in Bushwick, Levitt, who moved around a lot before landing in New York City 18 years ago, was brutally honest about the pressures of owning two bars.

“People think I sit around and drink beer all day,” he said, smiling. Minor Arcana does offer 12 brews on tap, but in reality, Levitt’s life sometimes more closely resembles that of a new parent. “You can never really 100 percent just relax, because some issue could come up at any time. I’m always on call.”

In between worrying about emergencies, Levitt manages to make Minor Arcana and Kings County comfortable, low-key, funky places to grab a drink (or four); take in a burlesque show; enjoy a 2-for-1 happy hour between 4-8pm, and also from 12-2am; or partake in a weekly trivia competition. He’s also kicking off a new party at Minor Arcana on the second Thursday of every month, called Tranz X. It will feature go-go boys and “boy-lesque” performances, and will be, Levitt thinks, one of the only bar events for the gay community in Prospect Heights.

His goal as a bar owner, he said, is simply to keep his establishments “an honest place to have a good time,” and he’s not worried about Minor Arcana being seen as one particular kind of bar or another. “If it’s thought of as a gay-friendly bar, that’s fine with me,” Levitt said.

He thinks that holding numerous events helps his bars stay relevant, and is one of many lessons he’s learned in the three-and-a-half years since he left the finance world to take over Kings County from its previous owner.

“It was like a private club for this guy and his friends,” Levitt said, noting that it has a decidedly different vibe from Minor Arcana. And though both of his bars are in up-and-coming hipster enclaves, Levitt insists he’s not riding any sort of trend. “I like this area because when I first started evaluating places, there were only half the number of bars that are here now,” he said of Prospect Heights.

As Minor Arcana approaches its first anniversary, Levitt reflected on the run-up to its debut, and one ominous trip to a Coney Island fortune teller. “She told me not to open this place, and to hold off,” he said. “I went ahead and did it anyway.”

And did it with a Coney Island theme, to boot; not tempting fate, exactly, but rather as an homage. “Coney Island is a timeless—at least for New York City—place to go and have fun,” Levitt said.

In a way, that’s what he’s tried to create in Minor Arcana. The space is small but ample, with deep lavender walls covered by a handful of framed, retro-style Coney Island advertisements. The bathroom, adorned with rows of tarot cards, is a tribute to Levitt’s (so far) inaccurate fortune, and to the bar’s name: in tarot readings, the minor arcana cards represent the concerns, activities, and emotions of everyday life.

But the real treat at Minor Arcana is its custom-designed, shatterproof glass bar containing a series of dioramas that can be viewed and enjoyed from above. That the rotating, miniature art installations have stirred conversations and debate is no accident, because despite his passive demeanor, Levitt’s thoughtful, even-keeled fingerprint is all over his establishment.Be on the lookout for Levitt and his understated kitsch at this year’s annual Coney Island Mermaid Parade on June 18, which, as luck would have it, coincides with Minor Arcana’s one-year anniversary.

“We’re going to sponsor a float, and have an after-party at both bars, with a shuttle bus between both bars, with a bartender and go-go dancers,” he said, getting excited, both at the idea of a party and of shoving it in fate’s face.

And why not? After all, Levitt’s only regret, he says, is probably similar to that of his many loyal patrons: “Probably those times I’ve had too much to drink,” he said, soberly.

Brown with one of many strange objects in Etsy’s offices

If the décor of Etsy’s headquarters in DUMBO is any indication of what shoppers can find on its extremely popular website, then those in search of an octopus arm sculpture are in luck.

Billed as the only marketplace for buying and selling handmade goods online, Etsy was founded in 2005 by Rob Kalin, Chris Maguire, and Haim Schoppick with the motto “Buy, Sell, and Live Handmade.” Adam Brown, Etsy’s public relations manager, explained why the site is preferable to eBay for a particular kind of consumer.

“I view eBay as more of like a garage sale or a flea market where you’re always trying to get the lowest price,” he said, seated in a conference room meant to look like the inside of a spaceship, I think. “It’s like looking in somebody’s junk drawer of stuff, whereas if you come to Etsy, you’re looking at things that are handmade.”

Etsy shoppers will also find craft supplies on the site, as well as vintage goods, which are defined as items older than 20 years. They depend on consumers to flag potentially illegitimate objects, and the customer support team then investigates the claim.

“We rely on those people in a way to help us maintain the integrity of the marketplace,” Brown explained.  Etsy is nothing if not eclectic, a fact reinforced with a single glance around the office space, which was among the largest and most colorful I’ve seen in my travels around Digital DUMBO (aka NY Digital District).

Initially run out of an apartment in Ft. Greene, Etsy relocated first to an office at Flatbush and Myrtle Avenues, and then on to DUMBO. Staying in Brooklyn was important not only because so many employees live in the borough, but because it felt like home. Oh, and there are creative types nearby. Lots of them.

“We take a great deal of pride in it,” Brown said of Etsy’s DUMBO base. While it’s technically a digital company, Brown thinks Etsy has little in common with the myriad marketing/social media/advertising/graphic design agencies in the neighborhood.

“We just came here more because of the creative side of it than the digital side,” Brown stressed. “I think that wasn’t as important to us as the fact that there are actual artists studios.”

He conceded that being in DUMBO has helped with recruitment, because potential hires want to live in Brooklyn and are aware of the digital opportunities in DUMBO. Etsy employees receive one hundred dollars to spend on the site to decorate their workspace, and while most workers are technologically savvy, the typical Etsy seller need not be.

“Creating an Etsy account is about the same as setting up a Facebook account,” said Brown, because all the user needs to do is input copy and upload pictures. “Obviously the more you are willing to learn about stuff…the greater your chances for success.”

Available for purchase on Etsy are items ranging from earrings to blankets; dresses to pillows; miniature pumpkins to tutus for newborns, all handmade. And buyers can search for items by color, by seller location, by editor’s picks, or by something called “time machine,” that I was frankly too nervous to click on.

The site’s users are overwhelmingly female, and while Brown said they market to men, the ladies have been plenty kind to Etsy, which recently opened up a satellite office in Berlin as part of an effort to enhance its international presence.

“We’re hoping to do a lot more with the idea of social commerce, which means instead of searching for a scarf, there would be more tools to help you find a scarf that would have to do with other people,” Brown said.

Etsy gets 700 million page views a month, and the company is bigger than most in DUMBO, with around 100 employees in the office and a smattering of people around the country who work from home. It’s possible some of them know the derivation of the word “Etsy,” but Brown, for one, wasn’t telling.

“I kind of stopped answering [that question],” he said when I innocently asked what Etsy means. He instructed me to look it up (I did, and found only speculation), and then pick my favorite definition. So let’s go with this: Easy To Sell Yourself.

Which can be interpreted any number of ways.

Source: Brooklyn Heights Blog » Brooklyn Tech
http://brooklynheightsblog.com/archives/21417

“We’ve always taken pride in that even though we do marketing materials for other people, we’ve never done marketing materials for ourselves,” Lemond said recently, sitting at a conference table in the Foundry’s white-walled Jay Street office. “Our reputation has been the thing that’s driven this business.”

It’s a business that continues to grow, having recently spun off Brooklyn United, an arm of the company that focuses specifically on art and creative direction instead of concise brand marketing products, like websites, brochures, or business cards. Szot believes this has been the most efficient way of marrying broad ideas with the finer points of execution.

“We usually see the project from the beginning all the way to the end of production,” he said, noting that their wide variety of clientele—from artists and architects to education institutions and fashion houses—makes it worth walking through the door every morning. (The killer view of the Manhattan skyline probably doesn’t hurt either.)

Szot and Lemond first operated Brooklyn Digital Foundry out of an apartment on Henry and Atlantic Streets in Brooklyn Heights, and moved around a few times before settling in DUMBO two years ago. They have just eight people on staff, allowing them to remain extremely involved in all aspects of a project.

As for why their company and many other digital houses have been relatively immune to the downturn in the rest of the economy, Lemond cited the Foundry’s project-based business model, which he said makes them less vulnerable to market shifts.

Their workload, he said, includes projects “that are already funded, already focused, that have to be developed and completed regardless of the external economy.” Larger advertising houses tend to be account-based, and in bad financial times, accounts are often truncated or yanked altogether.

Neither Lemond nor Szot, both tall, slim, and baby-faced despite splashes of gray hair on their heads (Szot) and in their stubble (Lemond), would say that the Foundry’s small stature allows them to better know their business and be more successful. Instead, they chalked it up to flexibility and diversity of services.

“It’s a grab bag of things people might need,” Lemond said. “Everything from creating assets like photography and video direction and production, all the way to full website development and graphic design, both for traditional and new media.”

The Foundry’s range of capabilities is a bit of an anomaly in DUMBO, where companies often hone in tightly on one specific market or skill. But instead of looking at each other as competitors, the 60 or so digital companies that call DUMBO home are, it seems, each other’s biggest fans.

“Most of the people who run these businesses have grown up and matured through learning from other open, like-minded people,” said Lemond. “So I think there’s a respect for that as a position, and a way of engaging your professional peers.”

And nowhere is this more evident than in Lemond’s work, along with Mike Germano of Carrot Creative and Sam Lessin of drop.io, to re-brand DUMBO as the New York Digital District, a distinction that Lemond insists would promote unity among the companies already there while simultaneously drawing others to invest in the area.

Though he was reluctant to offer advice to anyone thinking of starting a digital agency that could someday land in DUMBO, Lemond is uniquely positioned to do so, having created, along with Szot, a lucrative formula.

“In the early years of our business, we reinvented the wheel every time we turned around, rather than relying on the kind of institutional knowledge that’s out there,” he said after much deliberation.

Lemond noted the overuse of clichés by people in his position, and ultimately settled on something more suitable to his own experience. “Do the things you know,” he said. “But let the things you know be softly defined.”

Works for us. And, obviously, for Brooklyn Digital Foundry and Brooklyn United.

Source: Brooklyn Heights Blog » Brooklyn Tech
http://brooklynheightsblog.com/archives/19353

At just 28 years old, Germano, who grew up in New Jersey and now lives in the Financial District, is a pretty accomplished guy. He served a term as city councilman in Hamden, Conn., from 2005-2007, during which time he founded Carrot Creative, a new media marketing agency specializing in social media.

“We help brands build on social networks, and teach them and help them in great ways for them to have conversations with their customers and really turn brands into people,” he explained. Some of those brands include Crayola, the NFL, Disney, Ford, and the Islands of the Bahamas.

When Germano speaks of his achievements, it’s as if wild success was always in the stars. In high school, he and one of his future business partners, Chris Petescia, built websites that he described as early versions of blogs and social networks. In college at Quinnipiac, Germano furthered his ambitions with Robert Gaafar, who would become Carrot’s other partner, creating sites that helped students sell books and rate professors.

“For me, the Internet was a way for me to break the rules and get my message out there,” said Germano, who wanted me to point out that he was not wearing a hooded sweatshirt, opting instead for a pink gingham shirt and khaki pants.

“Every marketing and business class we took, no one was talking about this,” Germano said of harnessing the Internet’s powers. “We knew it was the future.”

His name is Jonas

At Carrot Creative, which he claims was the first agency to use social networking in 2005, Germano and his team of 15 feel they can truly influence culture by sustaining brands. He shot down the notion that large advertising or marketing houses (some of which have tried to buy Carrot) could ever adequately perform the same services.

“When all these big companies try to hire people to head up their social media, they have no idea what they’re talking about,” he said boldly, pounding on the table a few times, as he did throughout our chat. “I know that fundamentally, they will fail.”

The decision to relocate to DUMBO from Connecticut in 2007 was a simple one for Germano and his partners. They briefly considered Union Square, but felt Manhattan, as he put it, “has a bit of an identity crisis, because there’s so much going on there.”

DUMBO, on the other hand, “was this little oasis of digital.” And once he realized there were so many other startups like his in the region, Germano’s inner politician was stirred to bring people together. He and several others formed the Digital DUMBO monthly meet-ups, which have been going strong—and growing strongly—for more than a year.

Not long ago, Germano joked to pals Sam Lessin of Drop.io and Brian Lemond of Brooklyn Foundry that DUMBO should be declared New York’s “Digital District,” to give themselves and others a louder voice, and it has turned into a genuine crusade.

“We appreciate the individual nature of small companies,” he said. “We need to show them they’re not alone, there’s help out there, and that it’s ok for Manhattan ad firms and brands to bring their money here to DUMBO.”

Which is exactly what they’ve been doing, at least as far as Carrot Creative is concerned. Germano now regularly finds himself turning down business, either because he doesn’t believe in the brand or because it’s not a good fit. But with so many digital companies saturating the neighborhood, is DUMBO starting to feel…a little crowded?

“Competition is always a good thing for the industry,” Germano insisted. “I would rather that. I think in the long run it’s beneficial to me as a company if all the best and brightest agencies that are my competition move tot he same geographic region as me.”

He strongly rejects the notion that digital is over-hyped, saying it’s “in a beautiful exploration stage of both users using it and brands understanding it.” Of course, no matter how harmonic the interplay, Germano understands one thing very well.

“Money speaks volumes,” he admitted.

Though he’s tinkering with the idea of “inevitable” overseas expansion, Carrot Creative and its bright orange couch are in DUMBO for the long haul, which seems advantageous to both parties. Because if the outlook of at least one other person in DUMBO is as sunny as Germano’s, everybody is going to be just fine.

“Digital is the biggest, most important part of having an amazing future in our country,” Germano said, without a hint of hyperbole. Who wants to argue with that?

Source: Brooklyn Heights Blog » Brooklyn Tech
http://brooklynheightsblog.com/archives/18448

Pontiflex co-Founder and CEO Zephrin Lasker, 38,  exudes a similarly laid back vibe. Seated at The Dude’s conference table (bought on Craigslist), he seems at peace in their DUMBO office, which is essentially one large, white-walled room that glimpses the Manhattan skyline. Lasker and his jeans-clad employees are devoted to building, refining, and selling a unique online advertising concept called CPL, or cost-per-lead.

I had absolutely no idea what that meant, but it turns out I’m not alone. “How do I explain to my mom what I do?” a giggling Lasker said he often asks himself.

Despite the fancy moniker, CPL is a fairly no-nonsense approach to advertising. “We are building a system for advertising that lets advertisers buy ads, and only pay for those ads if someone opts in,” Lasker said, leaning back in his chair, hands clasped over his head.

An example: Pontiflex places ads for Huggies on a website like BabyCenter.com. Within the ad is a space to enter a valid e-mail address to sign up for a newsletter for moms. You see the ad, you sign up, Huggies pays, and never once do you navigate away from BabyCenter.com. Companies typically pay $1.25-$2.00 per sign up, but rates vary, and the fee for an ad is split between the host site and Pontiflex.

Cost-per-lead, or as Lasker calls it, cost-per-sign-up, differs from traditional advertising models where advertisers pay for eyeballs only. Pontiflex offers “contextual targeting,” meaning they place ads to sign up for the ASPCA on websites like Dogtime.com, where it’s safe to assume users are interested in animal rights.

The idea for this sort of advertising came to Lasker, a Red Hook resident by way of Baltimore and Chile, when he was working at big ad agencies in the early days of performance advertising on the Internet. But the technology required to implement Lasker’s plan wasn’t yet available.

With the help of “a really big tech team” and some venture capital, Lasker and his co-founders developed the data transfer engine they needed. Pontiflex launched in 2008, and is the first company to use CPL. Their system is in high demand by ad agencies and other institutions around the country, and Lasker claims they have no direct competitors.

“We’ve gotten big pretty fast,” he said sheepishly. “It’s a little scary.”

As for whether this brand-specific advertising model will ever be applied in other mediums, like television or radio, Lasker smiled coyly and said only that Pontiflex is doing some research that he can’t really talk about.

Having started two other companies, Lasker was familiar with the “boot camp mentality” of New York startups. “You get run over in the city pretty fast if you’re not progressive,” he said. “I think it forces you to really do a lot in very little time.”

Pontiflex, which tripled its revenue last year, certainly followed that ethos. So did many other DUMBO-based digital outfits, whose success Lasker attributes, at least in part, to their “blank slate” of a neighborhood.

Brooklyn, in his view, is “hip, but it’s totally scrappy,” much like startups themselves. “We’re not going to have wood paneled offices and drive around in fancy town cars,” Lasker continued. “It’s more entrepreneurial.”

Lasker is no tech-whiz, but he regards the “geek” stereotype as a badge of honor. “For me, it means you think kind of differently, you don’t necessarily fit in,” he said. “And with a startup, that’s great.”

Given the rampant optimism in his industry at present (as witnessed by this reporter and detailed in last week’s New York Magazine cover story), Lasker confessed there’s at least one negative aspect of this booming field.

“There’s a lot of hype,” he said. And while hype can be good, it can also lead to backlash. “You have to be careful. Sometimes there’s just a lot of smoke.”

Source: Brooklyn Heights Blog » Brooklyn Tech
http://brooklynheightsblog.com/archives/18024

“We’re actively hiring!” he exclaimed, sitting in a Union Square diner sipping a soda on a recent evening.

Greenwood believes New York City is the epicenter of the next phase of the internet revolution. “We could not have built PressLift in any other city in the world,” he said. “We’re within a subway ride away from the top PR firms, the media companies, Madison Avenue, and big Fortune 500 companies who we can connect to in a single day.”

PressLift would not have happened without the success of drop.io, which Greenwood described as “a point of exchange on the internet.” Teachers, journalists, architects, and thousands of others use the site to create “drops,” a means of online file-sharing. The service is free up to 100 megabytes, after which point users pay for more space.

The benefit of drop.io for people working on a project together, for example, is that it streamlines communication. Instead of engaging in a long e-mail thread, each member of the team receives an alert when content is added to or changed in the “drop.”

“These are real time points of exchange,” said Greenwood, who lives in the East Village. It is drop.io’s responsibility, he added, to not only use their robust background to power content sharing, but to provide context and relevancy. “We’re building specific applications that are geared to specific users for certain uses.”

Case in point is PressLift, the genesis of which happened very organically. “Among the tens of thousands of users of ‘drops’ were communication professionals,” said Greenwood. “What they wanted to do was share multimedia with a press release—really, a very simple idea. It was actually really hard to do in practice.”

But they worked it out, creating a device for public relations professionals or press departments at places like the Borough President’s office to use to combine the text of a press release with associated video, audio, pictures, or links.

When asked why the Borough President’s office should use PressLift instead of simply creating their own page for that sort of content, Greenwood employed a helpful analogy.

“If you’re an individual company you constantly have a decision: do we buy a desk or do we build a desk?” he said. Using PressLift, which has access to the resources and talent from drop.io, is akin to buying the desk, because, Greenwood added, “We know content sharing really well.”

Drop.io/PressLift also works with Pepsi, Conde Nast, McGraw-Hill, and the Robin Hood Foundation, whose offices Greenwood was headed to later for a meeting, dressed predictably in—what else?—a zip-up hooded sweatshirt.

Greenwood sees DUMBO’s role as a breeding ground for digital start-ups much like some kids see Disney World. “It’s an area where you can imagine,” he said dreamily. “A lot of what we’re doing is trying to imagine where the future is.”

Though DUMBO is historically known for its population of artists, Greenwood doesn’t see himself or his contemporaries as all that different from their progenitors.

“This is a place that encourages and fosters ideas, and helps create this community that promotes them,” he continued. “That’s incredibly valuable, and it’s part of this ecosystem growing in DUMBO, and Brooklyn, and throughout New York.”

Drop.io will host the 15th Digital DUMBO meetup on Thursday, April 29, at their offices in, duh, DUMBO.

Source: Brooklyn Heights Blog » Brooklyn Tech
http://brooklynheightsblog.com/archives/17811

“We really saw this emerging scene here, and there was a lot of buzz, and a lot of excitement,” Harvey, 28, said about why PRPL set up shop on Jay Street when they expanded from Orlando, Florida six months ago. “That’s why we chose to come to Brooklyn and come to DUMBO, because it’s on fire right now from a tech perspective.”

As a digital marketing agency PRPL, which has just 15 employees, helps non-profit agencies and diamond jewelers alike figure out how to best position themselves to customers in a competitive online environment.

“We have a pretty big discovery process where we break down specific goals,” said Lirtsman, also 28, the company’s chief marketing officer and a Kensington, Brooklyn native. “We don’t try to come up with one end-all solution, but try to touch upon those goals and create a strategy.”

That strategy can be anything from ensuring a client’s Facebook presence leads to an online sale to meeting fundraising or volunteering goals. They use proven channels like e-mail programs, newsletters, and social media to execute their plan, and measure which one leads to the most “conversions;” or, in laymen’s terms, which one achieves the goal.

Then they perform tests and analyze data to determine, for example, whether a user is more likely to convert when offered free shipping on purchases over $25, or when shipping is a flat $1.99 site-wide. “We’re constantly optimizing,” Lirtsman added.

PRPL optimized its own presence when it opened up its three-person operation in shared office space in DUMBO last fall. With a growing New York-based clientele that includes companies like Vizio, Better Home and Gardens, and the Jewish news site JTA, Harvey, a partner in PRPL and its chief operating officer, is enjoying the new atmosphere.

“It’s more experiential work, that’s the fundamental difference,” Harvey, who is from Florida, said about the New York market. In Orlando, much of their work involved maintaining clean, well-coded sites, while here, he said, “clients want to blend interactive campaigns with print campaigns to go after 200 coveted advertisers.”

“And they want it done yesterday,” Lirtsman chimed in.

Harvey and Lirtsman are nothing if not passionate about their jobs. They met as suitemates freshman year at the University of Central Florida, and began working together a few years ago when their mutual pal Bobby Jones founded PRPL, then called Hydra Studio, in his garage in 2002.

PRPL has grown quickly, Harvey believes, because of its approach. “We come from an e-commerce mindset, and that allows us to make sure that everything we do…is tied into a business goal, tied to a track-able event, tied into a key performance indicator that we establish to begin with,” he said.

But they juggle an intersection of three realms—business, art, and technology—that is common to most industries these days. “You kind of have these three different forces,” Harvey said. “While in some cases they can feel isolated, they kind of have to come together and bash their heads.”

Much like the DUMBO-based techies themselves, who, while often in direct competition with one another, are also fiercely collaborative. In just the last year, the Digital DUMBO monthly meetup ballooned from a few dozen people to what Harvey estimated was around 500 in March. From the PRPL perspective, which Harvey admits is limited, the draw of DUMBO for techies is more than just relatively cheap rent.

“Everybody in our industry is trying to say, ‘This is digital Silicon Valley,’ and there are people saying, ‘No, these are art spaces,’” said Harvey. “It’s a really cool, competitive environment. It’s up for grabs, and digital is grabbing it.”

And Purple, Rock, Scissors, for one, has no intention of letting go.

Brooklyn Tech is a new series devoted to digital businesses in DUMBO and other parts of Brooklyn.  Have a company in mind that we should profile?  Run one? E-mail us info AT the brooklynbugle.com

Source: Brooklyn Heights Blog » Brooklyn Tech
http://brooklynheightsblog.com/archives/17405