Bruce Lee stands in the ready position inside the entrance to the New York Martial Arts Academy, in Williamsburg. He is shirtless, bending at the knee, twisting slightly to his right, every muscle on his rippling torso obedient to his will.

It’s a movie cut-out of Bruce, mind you, a still photograph taken from a fight scene in Enter the Dragon. But this image has been enlarged to life size, and is lifelike enough for me to approach with reverent caution.

This is the enduring, iconic image of Bruce Lee, in a fight to the death, as it should be. His face and chest are slashed and bleeding, but his wounds are only skin deep. Blood streaks like war paint down his glistening body. His hands are up, his eyes are ablaze.
Andy Warhol, eat your heart out

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Ten Years of Music – A Williamsburg Oral History: 2002-2012

Tod Seelie, 33, moved to Brooklyn in 1998 to go to Pratt Institute in Clinton Hill because it was the least expensive school that accepted him. And that says a lot considering the annual tuition was $30,000.

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These days, small papers such as this one occasionally suffer crises of vocation. If one listens only to the lamentations of major-market media, one has to conclude that newspaper work is in its death throes.

As New Yorkers, we might pick up a newspaper in a fit of nostalgia or when we need to box our breakables, but in general, it is a far-from-essential part of our daily routine. This is the era of Twitter feeds and 24-hour cable news, after all. What need do we, technological sophisticates, have for a thick stack of broadsheet pages that you actually have to pay for?

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I first met Fred Tomaselli in the early 1990s, after he moved to Brooklyn from the West Coast and established a studio in Williamsburg. Word was out about his densely crafted paintings with psychotropic drugs embedded in resin. Flash forward to a hot summer evening in 2010, when Tomaselli took time to discuss his work, its influences, and his mid-career survey at the Brooklyn Museum.

I met Tomaselli in his second-floor studio, where the walls were hung with paintings ranging from finished ones completed in the early 1990s to a piece still in-progress. On a work table nearby sat a scale model of the Brooklyn Museum exhibition space, with postage stamp sized repro ductions of his paintings.

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By Elvire Camus & Arnaud Aubry

Tattoos everywhere. On every arm, calf, neck, and back. On boys and on girls. Not only a tiny butterfly on a wrist or a “Mum” etched on a shoulder, but whole sleeves and chests covered with Japanese or traditional American tattoos. That’s what the “hipsters” of Williamsburg/Greenpoint proudly display as they stroll along the streets of their neighborhood. But not only hipsters. This phenomenon now decorates a much wider slice of the population, including lawyers, bankers, doctors, and cops. Interviews with tattoo artists, teachers, residents, and sociologists helped us to understand that tattoos—formerly for those on the margins—are now the new aesthetic for North Brooklyn.

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