$mall ¢hange, Hardest Working Mofo DJ in Williamsburg
(“Won’t Stop, Can’t Stop,” be his motto)

On the scene since the early 90s, world-renowned DJ $mall ¢hange, 37, has a crazy amount of energy. He does weddings, corporate and public events, and alternative dance parties at undisclosed locations. He was featured in the New York Times with his huge collection of 40,000 vinyls, and has a long-running weekly show Monday nights from 11pm – 2am on WFMU. $mall ¢hange is also on East Village Radio on Wednesdays from 4-6pm His tastes run the gamut from house to 70s disco to variations of Michael Jackson in different languages, dub, and funk. I like him because he isn’t just one thing.

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By Jeanne Fury

Our latest cover artist is Linda Zacks, a Williamsburg resident for many years. An illustrious career to her credit, she rode the web boom, first at a Soho start-up and then as the Design Director for VH1’s website. Since going solo in 2004, she’s been hunkered down in her laboratory in Brooklyn, called “Extra Oomph,” concocting pieces that throb with creative energy.

Zacks was chosen as a “fresh” artist in the 2007 Communication Arts Advertising Annual. Her work has been featured internationally in art and design magazines such as HOW, Step Inside Design, Hong Kong’s IdN, and CMYK. Her recent exhibited works include a mural project in the Paris subway; a “crazy A” for an Adobe campaign; and colorful characters for Nickelodeon’s teen network The N.

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Joe Amrhein stands in the glare of a floodlight and surveys the rising clutter that crowds this giant brick cavern, a towering old boiler room that he must transform, in two short weeks, into an extension of Pierogi 2000, his small but influential art gallery a few blocks away. “It’s starting to fill up in here,” he says with a satisfied smile. “We’re already running low on space.” Earlier, Amrhein ushered in two sizable arrivals: the six-foot wooden crate that holds an 800-pound sphere made of security monitors, and an even-larger metal crate containing a four-and-a-half ton piece of Antarctic ice.

Just a week earlier, this defunct boiler room in a factory on Williamsburg’s North 14th Street looked like the backdrop for the dramatic confrontation of a film noir. The room’s dirty brick walls stretch nearly fifty feet to the ceiling, where a metal catwalk spans the room’s width. Birds swing in and out, perching on the broken panes of a window, where a dim light ekes through decades of grime. A brick boiler, built in 1931, stands like an industrial mausoleum with hinged, steel portholes and a melange of pipes turning at right angles, winding across each other and doubling back, as if Jules Verne had contributed the first sculpture to this new expedition.

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