You guys hear that Kickstarter has a mobile app now? Pretty cool stuff. Unless you’re the type that has a few too many out at the bar and then feels the need to get any and every project off the ground, regardless of whether or not it would ever be useful. One way to avoid that is checking out a few of these local campaigns we’ve selected, that pique our interests. Things like Brooklyn’s first dinner cruise, reviving a DIY space and helping the creator of Fritz the Cat make a movie about Coney Island.
Here’s a great future summer date (not Valentine’s, February’s too cold for sailing): Brooklyn’s first dinner cruise. Leave from a Greenpoint pier and take a three-hour tour cruise around the New York harbor while chowing down on seafood and enjoying the cruise. The Water Table is a pretty ambitious undertaking, but it would definitely make for a nice evening out.
Or you could throw your financial muscle behind reviving Williamsburg DIY art space Dead Herring. Dead Herring hosted people like Kurt Braunohler, Reggie Watts, The Pains of Being Pure at Heart and Titus Andronicus in what looked like completely anarchic shows, judging by their fundraising video. But, they had to move somewhere else and are asking for everyone’s help in getting the space ready for it’s grand opening. So when you think about it, it’s more of a DIO (Do it Ourselves) instead of a DIY, huh?
Be bookish and help get the first edition of a coffee table book with pictures of comedy legends on the shelf. Seth Olenick is a photographer based in Brooklyn who’s been taking portraits of some of comedy’s brightest comic stars over the last six years. He’s turning that experience into a 250 page book, Funny Business, with 200 portraits of people like David Cross, Aubrey Plaza, Donald Glover and Jane Lynch.
Here’s one that piques my interest, having been a self-published author who went on a book tour myself: help fund a book tour that also teaches people at each stop about the self-publishing game. Rami Shamir, m. craig, Lynn Casper and Magda Rachwal have already formed two of their own independent presses (Underground Editions and Papercut Press). Now they want to go on book tour where they teach workshops on independent publishing and work on getting an independent distribution model up and running.
And finally, you can help Brooklyn native Ralph Bakshi get his Coney Island movie, Last Days of Coney Island, up and running. Seeing as how it’s only a matter of time until evverything in the beach neighborhood is brought to you by Applebee’s, a trippy animated movie about cops, the Mafia and political overtones is a good way to help people remember that Coney was once a weird, weird place.