Gabriel Cohen and Jolie Signorile bonded over the apocalypse

Jolie Mae Signorile, top, Gabriel Fredericks Cohen, bottom

Name: Gabriel Fredericks Cohen and Jolie Mae Signorile
Ages: 25
Hometown: New York and Long Island, NY
Current town: Brooklyn, NY
Job description: Designers
Bio: Founders of lifestyle brand, Fredericks & Mae (JMS: "All the silk-screening happens at Flux Factory, but our Fredericks & Mae studio is in my basement in Bed-Stuy.")
Select links: “Arrows, Wings and Beautiful Things” (Anthology Magazine); “Fredericks & Mae Arrows” (Trendland); listed at Partners & Spade

Describe your current state of mind.

Jolie Mae Signorile: That is not one of the ones I’ve been asked before. It’s post-holiday so we’re in a place where we think about what new things we want to keep and continue. There are some new projects and collaborations on the horizon potentially. I don’t want to say that they’re happening yet but they might happen…potentially having something that could be fabricated, which is a whole new part of my brain because usually the conversations are confined by: “Is it something that we have in our vocabulary?” So that was what we were talking about before you got here.

Gabriel Fredericks Cohen: I think, broadly, it’s a pretty expansive time. We went full-time a little over half a year ago.

Kae Burke believes service upgrades are best delivered with a smile

Name: Kae Burke

Age: 28
Hometown: Rochester, NY
Current town: Brooklyn, NY
Job description: Performer; costumer; builder
Bio: Co-founder of House of Yes and female circus troupe, Lady Circus, with Anya Sapozhnikova; founder of Make Fun sewing workshops; spearheaded a team of astute MTA Service Specialists throughout New York's subways during the MTA's fare hike in 2008
Upcoming projects: Starring in The Ambitious Show at House of Yes (Jan. 20th)
Select links: "Fun House" (Brooklyn Based); "Kae Burke and Brett Lord" (YouTube); "Maison d'Ordure" (Brooklyn Rail); "Circus of Circus"; "House of Yes" (Wikipedia)


Describe your current state of mind.


Anxious in a positive way and then tired. I’m so excited by that I’m exhausted.


Why are you anxious?


Producing a show that opens next Thursday. That’s pretty easy because that's just communicating with a lot of people and making sure everybody is on their shit like they should be. Then we're taking Lady Circus, and Bro Circus, and [Orchestra] to Austin at the end of the month. And that's like a totally new development that happened this week. And I’m training for a doubles aerial routine with Anya Sapozhnikova that I've never done before. 

Mark Krawczuk proudly speaks marketese

Name: Mark Krawczuk

Age: Late 30s
Hometown: Northern Delaware
Current town: Brooklyn, NY
Job description: Event producer
Bio: Founded WeMakeCoolSh.it with Matt McGregor-Mento, a creative consultancy; recently collaborated with artists to install a WiFi Intranet on the L train for L Train Notwork; created the Noodle Truck, which led to the Lost Horizon Night Market with Kevin Balktick
Upcoming projects: The next Night Market (early February); a slew of secret projects (“I don't want to tell too many people, because I don't want it to die underneath the weight of curiosity.")
Select links: "All Aboard New York City's Geek Train" (Wired.com); "Brooklyn Group Launches Intranet on L Train During Morning Rush Hour" (NY Daily News); "L Train Notwork Behind the Scenes" (vimeo); "A Culinary Treat for Maker Faire Attendees: A Secret Noodle Truck" (YouTube); "All The World's A Stage, Even the Back of a Truck" (NY Times); krawczukindustries.com


I’ll record [the interview] and I’ll send you a copy. We’ll see who wins.


Documentation within documentation. All right, sounds good.


Last night, I had this idea for an experiment. I wanted to set up a tent on my roof. I borrowed a pop-up tent and I built sides around it. I only invited a few people who I knew aren’t afraid of hanging out in the cold. And it was a success; I set up the tent, it was super windy, I had walls, and it was warm inside. But it was a total fail in that it never stopped flapping in the wind. So I think I’m going to get a different tent to do it. 


Then Robyn Hasty came over. She was one of the people who was going to hang out in the tent if it actually stood up (but instead, it turned into people coming over to my house to eat chili) and I was making fun of her for not documenting her work.

Porter Fox has been dubbed camp cook

Name: Porter Fox

Age: 39
Hometown: Southwest Harbor, ME
Current town: Brooklyn, NY
Job description: Writer; editor; sailor; builder
Bio: Founder and editor of Nowhere Magazine, an online travel journal; crew member of the Ocean of Blood, which recently built five sculptural boats in Brooklyn and floated them down India's Ganges River for two months; also a member of former Swimming Cities Serenissima and Switchback Sea, and Miss Rockaway Armada raft projects
Upcoming projects: Finishing a book about father's career as a boat builder and a 2,000-mile sail up the coast of Maine in the first boat that his father built; writing a magazine piece about the Ocean of Blood's journey traversing the Ganges, and a multimedia gallery show about the trip; "real project: cleaning my room. I had a writing studio in Dumbo, but it moved back when I moved into the Chicken Hut and started working from home. I'm trying building a writing studio now. It's fun but it's really a procrastination technique.")
Select links: writingofthedisaster.com


Describe your current state of mind.


I feel like I just walked out of a hamam where an old man scrubbed all the skin off my body with a brillo pad, bludgeoned me with his fists, cracked my neck and smacked my head around. I feel raw - this heightened sense of awareness and with a little bit of fear. And that's a good thing. I feel very alive.


What's your fear?


I feel very sensitive to everything, not emotionally sensitive, but my senses feel piqued, you know? I notice things that I didn't know before about myself and other people. I have a very acute sense of time and of time passing, what's meaningful and what's not, of kindness and generosity, and all of the good things about people and appreciation. I feel very humbled. I don't think I'll ever take anything for granted again. It sounds dramatic, but it's the truth. 

Paula Segal envisioned New York as the city for grown-ups

Name: Paula Z. Segal

Hometown: Soviet Union; Italy; Boston
Current town: Brooklyn, NY 
Job description: Rabble-rouser for social justice 
Bio: Recently worked with Swoon on a project in collaboration with Sao Paulo Museum of Art; founder of 596 Acres; employed part-time at Rankin & Taylor, a law firm specializing in civil rights and criminal defense; law graduate from City University of New York ("I am looking to do sovereignty, land use law and everybody's crazy schemes for a long time to come."); developed Know Your Rights workshops at CUNY; adjunct professor in the English department at CUNY; former member of the Empty Vessel Project
Upcoming projects: Fundraising for another set of posters for 596 Acres ("We would love some money to fund our set of signs and to start to spread the model to other boroughs; it's tax deductible.")
Select links: "By Paula Z. Segal" (Occupy Writers); "A Ship of Freethinkers, Hemmed in By Landlords" (NY Times); Occupy Department of Buildings


How long have you been back in the States?


Five or six weeks.


Where were you before that?


I was in Brazil for two months working on a project with Callie. She left and I stayed and lived in Sao Paulo, in the context of the world of our project. Once the art part of the project was up and running on its own, I just lived in that other world and taught English classes in a squatted hotel in the city center, where there were 80 families that had been living there for a year with a group that's calling themselves the cultural nucleus - that's doing support work for the landless workers movement that's taking over these abandoned hotels and factories in the city center in Sao Paulo. 


It's interesting because there's a lot of push and pull. Just like here. Gentrification is like a cog, a machine. So the same areas that have been emptied out of factory and industry, where there are no jobs, it's also an area that's slated for a big revitalization project. So we were staying in an abandoned hotel that had been purchased by a gallerist friend of a curator that had invited Callie to come do this show in the first place. Because he had the idea that in ten years or so, after the top down gentrification is done, he will renovate the hotel and turn it into a hotel for all of the people who are going to come see all of the new arts institutions in the city center. 


In a really similar building, about 300 families lived there because it was empty. It was the old Hotel Columbia, and landless workers had moved into buildings. People who lived on the periphery, in the shacks, had come from outside the city because the [regions] they had come from didn't have jobs; they were commuting three hours each way to get to where there was work. They got organized while they were on the periphery. One day in the middle of the night, they had come to the city center on buses. The police were already there and [the workers] just picked an empty building at random. It's how they ended up in the Hotel Columbia. And they got inside. The law there is really different.