In its’ short existence hip-hop music has found a way to captivate people of all cultures. Now Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn has bred a Bengali rapper named Brooklyn Shanti. Although he’s gained the respect of his hip-hop peers, his family has not been as open to the idea of him becoming a hip-hop superstar.

There’s something innately seductive and cinematic about watching a video that slides from soft to razor sharp images in videos like Cohen’s. And aspiring filmmakers don’t need the operating budgets of the Kony 2012 team to create something that hundreds of thousands will watch.

A great eye and a DSLR can get the job done.

Cohen’s most recent video was posted March 26 and follows the work of watchmaker David Sokosh as he handcrafts timepieces in his workshop in the second episode in a series called “Made in Brooklyn.”

“I’ve been living in Brooklyn for seven years, and I just put a list together of people I thought would be interesting to profile, “ Cohen says, adding that he takes inspiration from blogs like Forgotten New York and Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York. “And it just became this homage to Brooklyn and how many cool people are here creating and making things,” he says.

While the idea of spending four-minutes in a little workshop might seem dull, Cohen finds the detail work of local specialist craftsmen like Sokosh fascinating. “Watching him break it down screw-by-screw and piece-by-piece, is really amazing,” Cohen says.

And people seem to agree.

His previous video, “The Violin Maker,” which featured luthier Sam Zygmuntowicz, racked up 100,000 views in 10 days and was picked up by Gizmodo and HuffPo, among others.

“I’ve wanted to make these kinds of profiles for a long time,” Cohen says. “And I think it’s kinda the future of what I do.”

While Cohen is an experienced photographer, these are his first video profiles. The “hyper detail shots” in his video pieces allow people to appreciate the skill involved in what his subjects are doing, Cohen says.

And using the top-notch Canon 5D Mark II doesn’t hurt either. Still, all his equipment together only totals around $3,000, he estimates.

“It’s not a starter kit, but it’s not the highest of the high end kit. It kinda fits right in the middle,” Cohen says. “I bought everything when I was starting off on my own…so I was definitely on a budget.”

With the meshing of HD video and high-end digital cameras, the Brooklynite says it was a natural transition for his business. The problem is, he’s not getting paid for these videos.

“We’re still kind of figuring that part out. If anyone has any ideas for me, I’d be happy to, you know, listen to ‘em. That’s for sure,” he laughs. Cohen relies on his commercial photography to pay the bills.

Cohen works with editor Michael Hurley to shoot and edit the pieces quickly. The piece is a hybrid of careful planning and “fly-on-the-wall” documentary-style shooting—The Violin Maker was shot in cinéma vérité style along with a quick 15-minute interview. Although the actual shooting is done in an afternoon, Cohen believes it important to establish a relationship and scout out the space before a shoot.

“It really helped to have all that information instead of going in and then shooting for hours and seeing what you get. So you already know what the narrative is going to be like,” Cohen says.

Lone artisans will continue to be what Cohen trains his lens on in his next video as well—he ‘s shot a profile with “a female metal smith jewelry maker” that should be posted in the next week or two.  Future episodes will feature a shoe maker, a bespoke atelier, and a perfumer.

“I feel like there’s a resurgence of interests in things made in America and even more so with New York,” Cohen explains of the Brooklyn-made products and producers he features. “There’s just that intimate connection I think people enjoy.”

Sruthi Sadhujan Performs a Poem, Photo Credit: Hrishi Poola

This past Saturday bright red walls and loud oil paintings of nude, cream-colored female bodies encircled the tiny stage located at the heart of the small space at the Two Moons Café in Park Slope. A sea of wooden chairs lined up close to the platform. There was hardly any room to walk.

As the spectators chattered, a woman stood up in the crowd. She walked through a predominantly South Asian audience toward the stage for the first time.  Shubha Bala, a second generation Indian with roots in Toronto, stood firmly with her right hand gripped around the microphone.

She had a story to tell– Spoken word style.

Spoken word is a form of poetry or storytelling recited in first person, usually from the poet’s point of view. In Mark Eleveld’s book titled the Spoken Word Revolution, spoken word artist Saul Williams described his poetry as “incantations, spells or prayers to be recited in the darkest caves and the highest mountain top.”

Subcontinental Drift, the host of the event in Park Slope, is the only South Asian spoken word series organization in New York City. The idea for the organization was conceived by a group of South Asians in Washington D.C. in 2007. The goal was to create a community space for South Asians, who call each other desis. In Sanskrit the word means “one from our country.” The term is used to refer to people from Pakistani, India, and Bangladesh.  Sri Ram Gopal, one of the organizers said the motto of the group was to showcase the basement talents of the districts desis.

On Saturday, the basement, of course, happened to be in Brooklyn as Bala’s words rang through the room. She read “Chatter Chatter,” a poem reflecting on her experiences at the Gujarat riots of 2002, one of the worst communal uprisings in in the region between Hindus and Muslims according to Human Rights Watch.

The room fell into silence as exposed first-hand accounts of the violent episode. “They raped them, and cut up their vaginas in front of their mothers.” Bala said. Her voice trembled as she read that line.

“It was an emotional moment for me, she said. “I would not have done ‘Chatter Chatter’ to a different group than ‘Subcontinental Drift.’ It was incredibly important for me to share my soul to a group of people that would understand what I was saying.”

One of the members of the audience, Sini Stephan, a 23-year-old student was in awe from Bala’s poem. “Every word she was saying captivated me. Each word formed images in my mind,” she said.

The first open-mic series for Subcontinental Drift was held at the Science Club in Washington D.C. five years ago on March 14^th, 2007. “The place was packed,” Gopal said. About 75 people attended. “What made it amazing for me was the revelation that there were so many artistic desis in D.C.,” Gopal said.

The series spread through word of mouth to Chicago in 2010 then to New York City in February 2011. Karthik Raman, one of the co-founders for the New York division, said the South Asian American community lacks a space for cultivating artistic backgrounds. “We use art as a tool to get you into college. It’s like a thing you put on your resume,” he said. “You become pressured into being a professional, so you don’t make the time to play the guitar or whatever awesome thing you were doing before.”

Sruthi Sadhujan a 24-year-old private brand developer for Macy’s merchandising division has been performing with the Subcontinental Drifters group for a year and three months. She didn’t discover spoken word poetry until she attended college at University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. “My parents were incredibly strict,” she said.  By performing spoken word Sadhujan has been inspired to investigate her struggles as both a South Indian and American. “It helped me explore myself pretty thoroughly,” she said.

The organization in D.C. plans to start a theatrical event featuring South Asian playwright and actors later this year.

Corrections:

When this story was originally published 3/23, we incorrectly stated that:

-Sri Ram Gopal conceived the idea of Subcontinental Drifters.  It should have read that it was started by a group of South Asians in the Washington D.C area.

-Sri Ram Gopal was a project manger. It should have read that he was a policy analyst.

-The organization plans to start theatrical event featuring South Asian playwright and actors later this year. It should have read that it was the group in D.C.

We regret the error.

David Rees, master pencil sharpener and comedian turned his hobby into a profession.He now runs a pencil sharpening business from his home that earned close to $10,000.00 last year. Last month, he shared his techniques with others by reading from his manual at Pete’s Candy Shop in Brooklyn.

In the dressing room of the Galapagos Art Space, DUMBO (Photo: Anna Codrea-Rado/The Brooklyn Ink)

A warm red glow washes over the leather booths of the Galapagos Art Space. The tables – later to be filled with couples, birthday and bachelor parties – are separated by a central walkway that’s suspended over water. The Dumbo theater’s staff is busying themselves with preparations for the evening’s performance of the Floating Kabarette.

In a matter of hours, performers will emerge onto the walkway, strut up and take to the stage. For the audience, a night at the theater means watching their performance. They’ll only see what is put in front of them, what’s displayed on the stage.

But what happens behind the scenes?

Through the steel door marked “Stage door,” a concrete labyrinth winds through the bowels of the theater. A smell of chlorine wafts along its corridors.

The first dancer arrives. Her voluminous ebony hair emphasizes her slight frame. With feline caution, she plods onto the stage that’s still wet from being cleaned earlier in the day, sits cross-legged on the floor and stretches out. A few feet away, the stage manager is atop a ten foot ladder, changing light filters. The red curtain is drawn across the stage.

*

Anna Codrea-Rado/The Brooklyn Ink

Two dancers stand before the mirror in the main dressing room. Their eyes are locked in concentration as they draw Cleopatra lines along their eyelids. The harsh light from the fluorescent bulbs above the mirror make their faces look deceptively severe. Among the make-up bags lining the ledge of the mirror, an oversized bag of pretzels is propped up against the glass. Its contents gradually diminish over the course of the evening as performers reach into it, replenishing themselves after their act.

On the other wall, two mirrors hang next one another. Another dancer with dirty blond hair, sits in front of them gluing on false eyelashes.

The host’s booming voice rings from downstairs as he warms up.

A voluptuous woman in a leopard print, faux-fur coat bursts into the room. She unbuttons her coat to reveal a sparkling red dress; the light catches its sequins. Her arrival makes the already-cramped room suddenly feel smaller.

The lady in red steps out of her dress and prances around the dressing room in black underwear. The stage manager appears. “Half an hour call,” he says to a chorus of, “Thank you!”

A girl with bleached-blond hair scrapped into a topknot, revealing a chunk of pink underneath, maneuvers a suitcase past the girls preening in the mirror. The dirty blonde steps past her, flips her waist length hair over her head and fills the room with the smell of apple sours from her hairspray. She twizzles her curls relentlessly, fixing them up and then tugging them back down.

“I can’t tell if my hair looks dumb,” she says to no one in particular.

One of her colleagues responds, “It does not look dumb.”

As the lady in red pats vibrant red glitter over her lipstick, the host calls, “Have a great show everyone.” The first act is called to the stage, and the dressing room clears out.

*

Anna Codrea-Rado/The Brooklyn Ink

Less than ten minutes pass and the dancers drag white boxes, props from their act, off stage. They change out of their costumes as Dead or Alive’s “You Spin Me Round” pounds from the front of house and whoops emit from the crowd.

The ebony-haired dancer takes a red wig of a plastic bag and tucks her locks into it. She stands on tiptoes, leaning on her elbows as she paints black teardrops beneath her eyes. She takes a step backwards to examine her work, then leans back into the mirror and pulls the line further down her cheek. Her mouth is slightly open as she replicates the pattern on the other side.

A narrow corridor juts out of the back of dressing room. She steps into it, plugs her iPod headphones into her ears and robotically jerks through her routine.  The synthetic red wig sticks to her face.

*

Two aerialists push a yoga matt up against a wall. One sits with his legs stretched out, toes in point. The dirty blonde curls up next to him and puts her head in his lap.

“The pain tolerance is the worst,” he says. “If you can deal with that, you can do it.”

The rhythm of the muffled music from the front of house is abruptly interrupted. The three stop their conversation and exchange quizzical looks. The stage manager runs up the stairs, leaps over them and darts out the door that leads to the auditorium. The crowd chant of “Kris, Kris, Kris!”

Five minutes pass and still no music can be heard. The three have resumed their conversation. Eventually the music starts up. The show goes on.

The ebony-haired dancer appears. She stands in front of the matt. “They kept telling me ‘go on,’ ‘don’t go on.’” She’s agitated. A colleague comforts her. She goes back into the dressing room and stands in front of the bright mirror.

She wipes the black teardrops away from her under her eyes. “It feels so good to take everything off.”

*

Anna Codrea-Rado/The Brooklyn Ink

A bald, suited man appears from the stairwell halfway through the evening and hands out the paychecks. The host looks at his before folding it in half and tucking it into his breast pocket.

The aerialists have performed their act. They bid everyone goodnight and leave.

The ebony-haired dancer pulls on a pair of grey, faded jeans and black jumper. She loosely pins up her hair. A few strands fall out the back. She packs away the red wig into her suitcase.

“Where,” she asks, “are my drinks tickets?”

Frame grab from the David Wojnarowicz film, "A Fire In My Belly," with ants crawling on a crucifix. Photo courtesy of AP.

“HIDE/SEEK: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture” is the first major museum exhibition to center on how sexual identity and gender have shaped modern art. It also emphasizes the influence of gay and lesbian artists in the last century.

“The Brooklyn Museum is uniquely positioned, I believe, to host this landmark exhibition since New York is where many of these artists and their subjects discovered their voice and where the gay rights movement was launched,” said Brooklyn Museum Director Arnold L. Lehman.

The exhibit first appeared at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery from fall 2010 to February 2011.

The Catholic League and others protested the 4-minute segment of the film, “A Fire in My Belly” by late artist David Wojnarowicz, when it was part of the Smithsonian exhibition.

They called it sacrilegious for showing a crucified Jesus figure with ants crawling over it. Wojnarowicz created the film as a response to those suffering through the AIDS epidemic, which greatly impacted the gay community. He expresses this idea in the film with images, such as the crucified Jesus, of loss, pain, death and suffering. Wojnarowicz died of AIDS in 1992, and the film was never finished.

Following the protests, the Smithsonian pulled the piece just a month after the exhibit opened.

Frank O'Hara painted by Neel. Photo courtesy of Brooklyn Museum.

Catholic League president Bill Donohue, in a statement last week, criticized the Brooklyn Museum for keeping the film segment in the exhibit. He called “HIDE/SEEK” an “ anti-Catholic exhibit” shown at “New York’s most anti-Catholic museum.”

But Donohue said the Catholic League will not stage a demonstration outside the Brooklyn Museum. He cited two reasons for this decision: “a) we won the big prize when Smithsonian officials voluntarily bowed to public pressure and withdrew the vile video, and b) the video has been shown many times since at other venues across the nation.”

In response to its critics, others have spoken up in support of the film.

Councilwoman Letitia James (D-Brooklyn) agrees with the museum’s decision to keep “A Fire in My Belly” in the show. “Freedom of expression is the pillar of democracy, and much is to be gained from the entirety of this show. Censorship has no place in a free society,” she said in a statement.

At a special “HIDE/SEEK” preview Thursday morning Brooklyn Museum Director Lehman and the exhibition’s two curators, Jonathan D. Katz and David C. Ward sought to blunt the criticism from Catholics. “I just wanted to make an offer that, if I can be of any service to the Bishop of New York in terms of teaching him the iconic tradition of his faith I would he happy to do so,” curator Jonathan D. Katz said with undisguised sarcasm.

The point, Katz explained, was that “throughout the history of Catholicism the singular metaphor for human suffering has been the body of Christ. It’s been deployed from the very beginning of Christian art.”

Museum Director Lehman, describing the exhibit, said, “‘HIDE/SEEK’ traces the expression of sexual identity through the major movements of realism, abstraction, pop art and conceptual art, framing portrait making in America in a new and illuminating way. ‘HIDE/SEEK’ brings together works by iconic figures in American art and artists who forged the way for free and open representation of sexual difference.”

The exhibit, Lehmann added, “explores the unexamined impact of gay and lesbian artists on the portrayal of personal identity.”

Walt Whitman by Eakins. Photo courtesy of Brooklyn Museum.

“HIDE/SEEK” features approximately 100 works of art from 67 artists. The pieces, which span 100 years, from the late 19th century to today, include a range of media, from paintings to photography, to film and music.

Most of the artwork is from the original show at the National Portrait Gallery. About five pieces had to be swapped out because some of the loaned works were no longer available.

The exhibition’s pieces include a Thomas Eakins’ photo of Walt Whitman (1891; printed 1979), who is believed to have been homosexual; “Ram’s Head, White Hollyhock-Hills” (1935) a painting from Georgia O’Keeffe, an artist known for her suggestively sexual work; the Alice Neel painting of gay poet Frank O’Hara (1960); Yayoi Kusama’s photo “Homosexual Wedding;” Nan Goldin’s photo of two drag queens, titled “Misty and Jimmy Paulette in a Taxi, NYC” (1991)’ and the Annie Leibovitz photo, “Ellen DeGeneres, Kauai, Hawaii” (1997), shot the same year DeGeneres announced she was a lesbian.

It also features gay artists such as Robert Mapplethorpe, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and Keith Haring.

This extensive exhibit, however, gives prominence to Wojnarowicz’s film. A four minute truncated version of the film is shown together with other contemporary pieces. There is also a separate room that features a timeline of its history and longer versions of the film.

“HIDE/SEEK” is not the first controversy for the Brooklyn Museum. In 1999 the Catholic League led a demonstration in front of the museum protesting the exhibit “Sensation,” which featured a painting, “The Holy Virgin Mary” by artist Chris Ofili, in which cutouts of female buttocks and genitalia from pornographic magazines were displayed together with real elephant dung.

Then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani threatened to pull $7 million dollars of funding from the Brooklyn Museum. The battle between Giuliani and the Brooklyn Museum ended up in the courts, which ruled in favor of the museum.

The artist is calling himself a “Vigilante Gardener” because of the not-so-legal project. Bieber spent 3 hours a week on the garden over the summer, eventually producing a film about the project.

A video from the exhibition, which includes a film depicting ants crawling on a crucifix, was pulled from the National Portrait Gallery in Washington D.C. last year after the work provoked public debate.

This exhibition, entitled “Hide/Seek,” is reportedly the first major in a museum show to consider gay themes in art history. The museum has received many letters protesting the exhibit since its announcement.

The tattoos on Dragonfly's hands were done using the Maori hand-tapping method. (Anna Codrea-Rado/The Brooklyn Ink)

Many of Dragonfly’s tattoos, including the ones on her face, were done using the “ta moko” hand tapping method. The skin is pierced with a small tool before inserting the ink.

Dragonfly would rather "lose her nose" than get rid of the tattoos on her face. (Anna Codrea-Rado/The Brooklyn Ink)

Dragonfly, 39, had already tattooed the stars on her chin herself when she met a Maori tattoo artist named Inia. She asked him to tattoo her in the traditional ta moko way.

The process was, she says, “very painful” but one she endured because the Maori style was something she’d wanted for a long time.

The tattoos on Russell's fingers stand for "all cops are bastards." (Anna Codrea-Rado/The Brooklyn Ink)

Dragonfly, who is homeless, says she knows her tattoos have “closed doors” for her, but they are a part of her, she would rather lose her nose, she says, “than get rid of them.”

Her boyfriend Russell’s tattoos make political statements. He’s a squatters’ rights activist and has the squatters’ symbol – a circle with a zigzag arrow pointing diagonally rightwards – emblazoned on his right hand.

The three dots between his left thumb and index finger are the “mi vida loca” motif, meaning “my crazy life” in Spanish.

The tattoo on Russell's right hand is the squatters' rights symbol. (Anna Codrea-Rado/The Brooklyn Ink)

Russell’s first tattoo was a “poke ‘n’ stick” when he was 13.

Dragonfly says she’s familiar with the method, which involves using a sewing needle to make an incision in the skin which is then filled in with pen ink, none of her tattoos were done like that.

Dragonfly tattooed Russell a month ago. The letters “A, C, A, B” across his fingers stand for “all cops are bastards.” Dragonfly says she’ll eventually to redo its ink work because she’s not happy with it at the moment.

See more of Brooklyn’s inked