The Lo-Down Culture Cast

Artist Marja Samsom

Host Traven Rice spoke with Lower East Side artist Marja Samson. Samsom is an international artist and filmmaker, whose work confronts and exposes cultural issues with elegant wit. Poised within 1970’s international avant-garde, her early works are experiments in self representation.
Her embodiment and simultaneous commodification of the character "Miss Bhave" and "Miss Kerr" pose an elegant, tongue-in-cheek dissection of glamour. Samsom’s current photography explores relationships between objects that illuminate with a pinch of wicked playfulness. Her practice is daily exploration: making 'something out of nothing'.
Samson was born in the Netherlands, raised in Europe, and spent time in New York City while exhibiting internationally. Deciding to stay in New York, Samsom created an underground word-of-mouth salon, the ‘Kitchen Club’, in the East Village. It developed into the legendary downtown eatery of same name on Prince & Mott Street. Curating both menu and restaurant space, Samsom actualized her Kitchen Club as a "gesamtkunstwerk" and hosted a radio series "Cooking up a Storm" on Art International Radio, where she was selected for a residency at the Clocktower Gallery with a storytelling performance ‘Shrine’ dedicated to her sister.
Recently, she completed a number of performances at Participant Inc. her work is currently included at H’ART Museum, Amsterdam. She lives and works in Downtown New York City. 
#podcast #interview #arts #lowereastside #film #culture #podcastclips #nyc #nycart

Founder and Executive Director Mark DeGarmo of Mark DeGarmo Dance

A conversation with founder Mark DeGarmo, who has been based on the Lower East Side for over 30 years.
As an artist and scholar, his work investigates embodied imagination, improvisational composition, and nonverbal/non-discursive ways of knowing. Thus far in his professional choreographic career, DeGarmo has created over 100 dance and performance works and directed multiple tours in 13 countries.
The themes of his choreographic work are varied. Since 2022, he’s been exploring dance video. Since January 2019, he’s performed monthly improvisations broadcast in his “Moveable Moments” series.
His Mexican family, friends and colleagues inspired me to investigate Mexican culture and Frida Kahlo for the last 30 years. The result was a six-year creative process with a female-female cast in “Las Fridas.”
Mark DeGarmo Dance provides high quality, interdisciplinary arts programming for NYC public elementary school students who live in economically challenged and disenfrachised communities.  Partnerships in Literacy through Dance and Creativity© is MDD’s evidence-based seven-year interdisciplinary program. Partnerships empower elementary students to use dance, movement and creative writing as lifelong tools to fulfill their highest potential.
This is a Lower East Side NYC Cultural Podcast with Host Traven Rice

The Lo-Down Culture Cast - "Your Faithful Reader"

Host Traven Rice talks with director Miriam Wasmund and performer Liz Dutton about "Your Faithful Reader," an experiential theater performance that merges the worlds of acting and dance with real letters.
Participants were mailed writing prompts—suggestions of letters they may want to write: to others (known and unknown), to themselves, to their most beloved objects, or even the intangible.
The response was pages of heartfelt words, ranging from the romantic and fun to the most honest and brutal truths.
Now a company of actors, dancers, and creatives have given the letters (both anonymous and signed) new life in "Your Faithful Reader." 
Performances of the current iteration are January 30 - February 2 at Teatro Latea (107 Suffolk St.)

The Lo-Down's Lower East Side NYC Culture Podcast - "It's A to Z: The Art of Arleen Schloss"

Lower East Side NYC arts and culture podcast host Traven Rice interviews Filmmaker Stuart Ginsberg about his new film "It’s A to Z: The Art of Arleen Schloss." Schloss was a downtown performance artist who invited other artists to collaborate and perform with her on a weekly basis. 
The film explores Schloss’s creative work and evolution and how it changed over time. A highly original cross-disciplinary artist, she was known for her boundary-pushing, idiosyncratic performance art, video, and installations.
Through exclusive never-before-seen archival footage shot by Schloss herself and mixed with commentary from people from the scene, we trace Schloss’s story and see, from her point of view, the texture of New York City's downtown art scene from the 1970s through the 1990s.
Known as an “artist’s artist,” Schloss became influential through A’s, her loft space that was a hub for genre-defying music, gallery shows, performance art, films, and other happenings. A hotbed of experimentation, A’s featured the work of Jean-Michel Basquiat, Eric Bogosian, Glenn Branca, Kim Gordon, Shirin Neshat, Thurston Moore, Alan Suiclde, Ai Wei Wei, and John Zorn, among others.
#artist #podcast #artsandculture #interview #lowereastside #film #nyc #nycart #performanceart

Gary Guarinello of Catalyst Records

Host Traven Rice spoke with Gary Guarinello, founder of Catalyst Records in Essex Market, for this episode of The Lo-Down Culture Cast. Gary is a drummer and a music lover who is also a former butcher. He was working at The Market Line Food Hall at Ends Meat when he pitched the idea for a record store, which he opened in 2022.
When the food hall shut down in the lower level of Essex Market, he moved Catalyst Records upstairs, across from Top Hops Beer Shop, and began hosting live music events, podcasts, and other local art openings and book signings.

Author Dan Slater's "The Incorruptibles"

Host Traven Rice spoke with author Dan Slater about his new book, "The Incorruptibles - A True Story of Kingpins, Crime Busters, and the Birth of the American Underworld," which focuses on the true stories of the Lower East Side underworld and the secret efforts by wealthy uptowners to eradicate them during the late 1800's and early 1900's.
It's a "harrowing, true-life tale of an immigrant underworld, a secret vice squad, and the rise of organized crime" in New York City. And most of it took place right here on these very neighborhood streets, as waves of Eastern European Jews were immigrating to the U.S., (pre-WWI) and in turn created one of the largest ghettos in the world.
In the mayhem of these teeming streets, a dense web of crime syndicates emerged.
Slater writes: "Gangs of horse poisoners and casino owners, pimps and prostitutes, thieves and thugs, jockeyed for dominance while their family members and neighbors toiled in the unregulated garment industry. But when the notorious murder of a gambler attracted global attention, a coterie of affluent German-Jewish uptowners decided to take matters into their own hands. Worried about the anti-immigration lobby and the uncertain future of Jewish Americans, the uptowners marshalled a strictly off-the-books vice squad led by an ambitious young reformer [Abe Schoenfeld].
The squad, known as the Incorruptibles, took the fight to the heart of crime in the city, waging war on the sin they saw as threatening the future of their community. Their efforts, however, led to unforeseen consequences in the form of a new mobster class who realized, in the country’s burgeoning reform efforts, unprecedented opportunities to amass power."
Dan Slater is the author Wolf Boys, which was a Chicago Public Library best book of the year, Love in the Time of Algorithms, and The Officer & the Entrepreneur. His new book, The Incorruptibles, was selected as an editors' pick by the New York Times Book Review. A graduate of Colgate University, New York Film Academy, and Brooklyn Law School, he has written for more than a dozen publications, including the Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, New York magazine, the Boston Globe, The Atlantic, Texas Monthly, The New Yorker online, and GQ.
 

Filmmaker Claire Ayoub

Host Traven Rice spoke with writer-director Claire Ayoub for this episode of The Lo-Down Culture Cast. Claire's first feature film, Empire Waiste, is out now. The boundary-pushing film tells the story of Lenore Miller (Mia Kaplan) an overweight, insecure teen whose talent for fashion is discovered by her confident, plus-sized classmate Kayla (Jemima Yevu), forcing her into the spotlight—and into the path of both bullies and new friends. 
Claire shares the story of her brave journey to get the film made and how it stemmed from her own childhood fears and challenges.

Claire is a writer, director, and performer on a mission to create entertaining, educational, and empowering stories through her production company Try Anyway Productions. Claire launched her career in the New York City comedy scene as a member of the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater where she wrote, directed, and performed both sketch comedy and storytelling shows.
The EMPIRE WAIST script was named the #1 Comedy on The Black List and selected for both the Black List Feature Lab and Cassian Elwes Independent Screenwriting Fellowship at Sundance. The film has since won Best Empowerment Film and Best Social Impact Film at Sedona International Film Festival, Wavemaker Award: Best Future Wave Feature, and Best Feature at the Coney Island Film Festival.
Claire is also the creator of The Gyno Kid, an award-winning solo comedy show about growing up as the child of small-town gynecologists that encourages audiences to laugh and learn about their bodies.

Musician and Activist Fury Young

This week's episode of The Lo-Down Culture Cast features a conversation with musician and activist Fury Young. Fury grew up in the neighborhood, and recently released Tree Indeed, his first solo EP as a musician. His music is "artland rock meets surrealist rap, a melodic record about growing up in the LES and life."
 
His late father, the artist and social worker Lee Brozgol, helped turn a once derelict building on Eldridge Street into a fully functioning co-op back in the 1980's.
 
Fury is also the Founder of FREER Records, the first known non-profit record label for prison-impacted musicians in the US. 

Luis Fernandez of "Forsyth Fire Escape"

"Culture Cast" Host Traven Rice speaks with Luis Fernandez, a partner in the popular "Forsyth Fire Escape" (of the amazing scallion pancake burrito creation) which started in 2021 during Covid. Founder Isabel Lee created the "burrito" with inspiration from her Chinese and Thai roots and Luis's Dominican background. During the pandemic, they served burritos out of their apartment by lowering them in a bucket off of their fire escape.
The burritos were an instant hit and when they started to gain traction, their landlord served a cease and desist letter threatening a lawsuit by the end of the day. So they pivoted and partnered with their local bodega, Don Juan's on Forsyth Street, to serve burritos, which sold out every Sunday, on a preorder basis.
They also created other special events and pop ups. They have since opened a 6-month residency at Olly Olly market in Chelsea.
Luis is prepping for a new solo popup project, "Feitos," coming back to Don Juan’s Deli on the corner of Forsyth and Broome on Sunday, Sept. 8th. The premiere item on the menu will be a Dominican-style fried chicken sandwich that you can pre-order here.
He’s also an indie rap musician, makes paintings and has a clothing label. He's been featured in Grub Street, Eater, and Bloomberg's "50 Ones to Watch."

Remote Theater Project's "Thank You For Listening"

Host Traven Rice spoke with Alexandra Aron, Founder and Artistic Director of Remote Theater Project, about the upcoming production that will take place in Sara D. Roosevelt Park on Saturday, June 8th at 2pm and 4pm.
The show, titled "Thank You For Listening," is a community engagement project that's been in the works for over a year.
It's based on conversations and workshops with three different communities that intersect in the park; the unhoused community, Chinese seniors and more recently, migrant workers who are temporarily living in hotels near the park.
The team explains the background of the project here: "In September 2022, Remote Theater Project produced "Embrace the Tangle" as part of Little Amal Walks NYC, a project involving over 1,000 community members in the Lower East Side/Chinatown.
The event was a celebration of diverse communities coming together to welcome newcomers, like Little Amal, a Syrian refugee. How can we continue build on this experience to connect diverse groups of people who share the same public space? From this question, The Sara Roosevelt Park project was born."
Playwright Carmen Rivera wasn't able to join the conversation in person, but did offer some thoughts about her experience with the project in a phone interview with us after the episode recording. 
“We’re living in this divisive time when everyone is screaming at each other," she said, "so let’s take a step back  and remember that we are living on the same planet. Everyone wants to be heard - giving space to their stories, and giving space to the idea that we should all listen to each other was the work...'open your heart’ is what we want to say with the piece."
In the play, the park itself is a character. Carmen said, in thinking about bringing everyone's stories together, she thought, “Where can we find intersections? So …it’s the park…what has the park seen? For me it was, let’s bring the park to life….so we started exploring the history of the park and also the relationship the community has to the park."
The park has been a witness to the community and their struggles.