B Scene Zine, Volume 1, Issue 2

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B Scene Zine

Vol 1, Issue 2, October, 2021

Al Diaz @ Home on The B

Inside:

• Fran Lebowitz on NYC

• Daniel Root vintage photos

• Pinc Louds, the nabe's band

• ENDORSEMENT: Allie Ryan for City Council District 2 Fran Lebowitz

Contents Al Diaz, Street Art

Fran Lebowitz on NYC

Pinc Louds, Music

Half Gallery

Freaky Fridge/Jim Tozzi

Daniel Root, Photography

SUNNY Gallery

Sky Cries Mary, Music

BSZ Launch Party

Walt Fitzpatrick, Art

Frank New on Halloween

Dacia Gallery/EV Gallery

The East Village is Dead?

You’re Doing it Wrong.

It’s a tired refrain: “the East Village is dead. There’s nothing happening anymore. It was so much better 10 years ago.”

What a bunch of intellectual, emotional and physical laziness. If you can’t find soul-lifting engagement and weapons-grade fun along the B and its environs, you’re just not trying. Honestly, that boring claptrap makes us want to French kiss an electric socket. Let’s take a look at the opportunities encountered by Fucking Scott, Feeny and Editrix Abby during a recent fall Saturday. The day started with a three-mile warm-up walk in East River Park then a boxing class in TSP. A meet and greet with friends at Lucky preceded a burger at Whitman’s, a sticker show in a Houston St. garden, a plant show and a zine swap on 1st St, a visit to Freaky Fridge on 3rd, a jewelry making session on C, a flea market on 12th and shopping stops in the LES and Soho.

After dinner options included a soap opera enactment in the LES, dancing at the Drom and second dinner/early breakfast at Veselka. So, stop wallowing in self-pity, immiseration and slacktivism. In roughly 100 percent of the cases, give or take 0 percent, people looking for cultural fulfillment in the East Village have been rewarded. It’s elusive, like trying to find the square root of four. No one can do that; unless they try.

Why Allie Ryan?

Number 1, she wants to save East River Park, scrap the current plan and develop a community-led East Side Coastal Resiliency Project. She also wants to preserve historic buildings and neighborhood-based schools and create real affordable housing. Allie is a LOCAL candidate and that sits well with this hyper-local zine.

Vote Nov. 2, early voting Oct. 23-31.

Fucking Scott, key grip

Kcups, bestboy

Delphine Le Goff, gaffer

Haikustrology by Ron Herczig

Libra

Outgoing you are

So where you go counts extra

New friends are waiting

Scorpio

All signs point to yes

All lights are green and greener

You should be dancing

HELP! D ONATE!

@scotto 777

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When influential first-generation downtown graffiti artist Al Diaz looks back through his decades as a mainstay of the Lower Manhattan street art scene, his thoughts often take him to his earliest memories of the neighborhood and a very specific corner of The B.

"Of course I feel very much at home there. I spent eight years on the corner of 7th Street and Avenue B,” the Graffiti God told B Scene Zine, referring to his years as a Catholic school boy at St. Brigid School. “I grew up right here on the Lower East Side,” he said the other day, flanked by his latest work at the Van Der Plas Gallery on Orchard Street.

Diaz is best known for helping to spark a downtown street art revolution in the 70s and early 80s in collaboration with the late Jean-Michel Basquiat and SAMO© graffiti. But these days the 62-year-old isn’t dwelling on that particular past.

Today, Diaz has abandoned (at least as far as we know) the free-hand spray paint graffiti art style that made him famous in favor of a more structured approach to art that brings together the street, the subway and the studio.

Adopting a text orientation, Diaz is using stencils of letters from subway signs, notably the bold red letters of the MTA WET PAINT signs, to give his ideas public voice.

"Being a New Yorker and all, it's a kind of ubiquitous alphabet, constrained alphabet, that as commuters we see every day," Diaz recently told NY1.

But Diaz hasn’t abandoned the political and social consciousness that drew critical acclaim to his SAMO© work with Basquiat. His current stenciled signs carry engaging, often provocative messages. “WE ARE A RECURRING DISATER,” reads one. “GROWING OLD CAN BE AN UNAPPEALING, TEDIOUS PROCESS,” another begins.

Where does the acerbic writer, critic, wit and quintessential Manhattanite Fran Lebowitz go for a good meal?

She heads to Il Posto Accanto, the remarkable Italian eatery on 2nd St. just off The B.

Lebowitz is fresh off her collaboration with Martin Scorsese on the Netflix series “Pretend It’s a City,” in which she dispenses wisdom gathered during her more than 50 years living in the West Village, W. 57 Street and, now, Chelsea.

Among notable quotes:

“No one can afford to live in New York.

Yet, eight million people do. How do we do this? We don’t know. It’s a mystery to us. We don’t have a clue.

We don’t know but we’re still here.”

“My apartment on West 4th Street in 1970, it was $121.78 a month. People go, ‘Ah! That’s

unbelievable!’ It was expensive. Most of my friends lived in the East Village. They would say, ‘You are crazy to spend all this money on one room. If you lived in my neighborhood on Avenue C, you could have four rooms for this.’”

"Everything in New York is an operatic thing. It’s incredible problems. So you realize that it’s just so hard to live in New York, that when people say, ‘Why do you live in New York?’ you really can’t answer them. Except you know that you have contempt for people who don’t have the guts to do it."

Fran Lebowitz

Run since 1999 by the affable Julio Pena and his wife Beatrice Tosti di Valminuta, Il Posto Accanto has received rave reviews for its food and atmosphere. Here’s what the New York Times said last year: “It is a neighborhood joint with food so spectacularly good that people come from everywhere.” Pena said he loves the neighborhood’s sense of community. “This area has maintained its street cred, you can’t say that about every place,” he said.

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If The B has a favorite band, it's the Pinc Louds. Whether it's their frequent pop-up shows in TSP, or legendary performances in La Plaza Garden, the Louds always bring the party.

Pinc Louds’ lead singer, Claudi, moved from Puerto Rico to NYC in 2015 to fulfill her dream of playing in the subway. Through the underground, Claudi met the musicians (drummer Rai Mundo and bassist Marc Mosteirin) and artists that would turn the project into the full-blown spectacle it is today.

Musically, Pinc Louds draws influences from such diverse artists as Pixies, Billie Holiday, Daniel Johnston and Ismael Rivera. Is it tropical punk?

Garage doowop? Crooner pop? It’s all and none of the above. The best course of action is to let go of all preconceptions and enjoy the band’s unique sound and explosive performances.

Half Gallery

Lucien Smith

Lucien Smith

Incidentals: A Brief Survey 20112021

October 14th - November 10th, 2021

Lucien Smith made his public debut in May of 2011 with a two-person thesis show, “Imagined Nostalgia,” at 41 Cooper Union.

A year later Lucien found himself living in a barn upstate sublet from the writer/director James Ivory. It was here that he began making his “rain paintings,” acrylic two-tones and monochrome abstracts he created spraying paint out of an old-fashioned fire extinguisher. This series became the poster child for a school of art known as zombie formalism, process-based abstraction with a slacker twist.

“Incidentals” now brings together highlights of the last decade. Collectively, the survey show reveals overlaps in Lucien's artistic practice, how patterns and influences and happenstance gel into something uniquely his own. It’s in the aggregate we find where the artist resides.

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"I looked up and I saw the street sign and I thought, yeah, "Ave B, it's the place to be."

Find the Fridge selling his Ave. B Merch on 3rd just off The B.

Jim Tozzi Jim Tozzi is a street artist and puppet fan best known in the neighborhood for his Bert's tit image, which can be found on walls, mail boxes and traffic cones across lower Manhattan.

Daniel Root is a long-time neighborhood resident and a professional photographer and artist whose work photographing Lower Manhattan continues today. Over the years he has photographed everyone from Maya Angelou to Frank Zappa. In addition to traditional photography, his work includes acetates, bright light portraits, composites, photograms and

painting.

“GIMME FIVE MINUTES: Daniel Root’s Production Stills (1984-2005)” at La Mama Galleria, 47 Great Jones St, opens on 11/26 with a reception on 12/4 and closes 12/12.

1980s Buzzards, 169 Ave B. The foot of The B, at Houston, today.

Building at B and 10th, then and now.

Follow this QR code for more of Daniel's then-and-now photos.

The corner of B and 10th.

Left, Life Café, now Maiden Lane. Right, LES Coalition, now Sheen Brothers.

Daniel's fine art and photography career began in 1984, doing production stills for theater, video shoots, television and portraiture for entertainment and corporate clients. This work continues today, appearing in most major magazines throughout the world. Left, Maya Angelou and Ozzy Osbourn.

Waves, a solo exhibition, opens at SUNNY Gallery, 155 E. 2nd, on Oct. 28 and runs through Dec. 11. An opening reception is set for Oct. 28. Benson received an MFA from the Pratt Institute and a BFA from Virginia Commonwealth University. She is known for her large scale abstract paintings that utilize large swaths and globs of paint.

Her style was influenced by early computer painting programs, such as MacPaint and Windows Paint.

"A generation of artists who grew up using a mouse as comfortably as a paintbrush is now coming of age and bringing the giddiness of those formative computer art experiments to good old oil on canvas.

This is exciting news, to judge from Trudy Benson’s solo show at Horton." – The New York Times

Gallery

Why are we featuring a Seattle band in a zine that focuses on The B? Well, the band's front man, its heart and soul, Roderick J. Wolgamott, has lived in the neighborhood for over 20 years and is a familiar figure on The B. Sky Cries Mary's new album Wandering In The Vastness drops on Dec. 11 on Trail Records. A listening party is planned for that date at Lucky, 168 Avenue B. The album was recorded in Seattle; Lookout Mountain, Tennessee; and Brooklyn. The members include Roderick (lead vocals and Lyrics), Ben Ireland (drums, electronics and percussion), Jack Endino (guitars, drums and loops), Kevin Whitworth (guitars, loops and electronics), Curt Eckman (bass, synthesizers) and Debra Reese (vocals, flute and percussion). The album was engineered, recorded and mixed by Jack Endino, who recorded/produced the first Nirvana, Soundgarden and Mudhoney albums.

AND A ELS

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SA S E VEN

B SCENE ZINE LAUNCH PARTY

RUTH E. RUTH

Walt Fitzpatrick Walter J. Fitzpatrick is an illustrator, graphic designer, and musician who lives just off The B. His influences include comic books, horror movies and music.

“Having my hands covered in ink, paint or glue and having to sharpen pencils is love labor intensive and an inspiration in itself.

There is no 'undo' button on an illustration board."

Contact Walt at wfitzpatrick@nyc.rr.com

By Frank New

The roots of Halloween can potentially be traced back to over 2,000 years ago. It is believed by historians that the Celtic pagan festival of Samhain, which marked summer’s end and the beginning of the year's “darker” half in the British Isles, is the precursor to Halloween.

Author Lesley Bannatyne who has covered the subject of Halloween quite extensively, states “Before it evolved into the family-friendly, party occasion we know it as, October 31 was deeply linked to ghosts and superstitions.” Bannatyne goes on to say, “It was seen as a day ‘outside of normal,’ when you act outside of society's norms.” I grew up in New Orleans, a city notorious for supernatural activities, not to mention vampires, and a place filled with spooky locations such as Faulkner House, the one-time home of author William Faulkner whose spirit has been seen in the house turned bookstore. Other key locations in New Orleans include Old Absinthe House, a place that has been opened since the 1800s and is suspected to be haunted by Marie Laveau, Andrew Jackson, and pirate Jean Lafitte. Lastly, another popular spot to seek paranormal activity is St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 which dates back to 1789 and is the oldest cemetery still in existence in New Orleans. It is rumored that Marie Laveau runs through the cemetery at midnight on All Hallows’

Eve. There is only one way to find out …

621 E. 11th Street, New York, NY 10009 - (917) 727-9383 Sherri Wolfgang is known for her figurative works, which draw on Renaissance painting traditions in combination with Old Master painting techniques. Born in New York City, she received a BFA from Carnegie Mellon University, followed by graduate studies at New York University. Her “American Pathos,” which explores the effects of the Great Recession and disintegration of the American Dream among millennials opens Nov. 12, with an opening reception Nov. 18 6-9 p.m.

@ EV Gallery, 621 E. 11th St., Sat. 1-5 through Nov 14

Nicole’s pieces are set in a fictional world and depict a chipping-away at

the dark fears and anxieties of that space. The wall-mounted sculptures are comprised of dozens of layers of fine paper, precision laser cut and reassembled as a three dimensional volume. Basic shapes are extruded and twisted to bring volume, depth, and a sense of architectural space to the normally 2-D medium of paper.

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Brix is a welcoming local wine shop featuring a curated selection of wine from throughout the world, tastings & New York’s most extensive selection of Rose wines in the warmer months.

170 Avenue B

(between 10th & 11th)

New York, NY 10009

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