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Let me preface by saying that I know nothing about woodworking accept that I admire it and find it beautiful, a way of using your hands to make something permanent and useful, and if you can make it pretty that's just icing on top of the cake. Ariele Alasko is 27, attended the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn and has lived in New York for close to a decade. I have been following her blog and Instagram for quite sometime because I admired the beauty of her pictures, and the unique quality she brings to her work, which she makes entirely by hand. One spoon taking 4 to five hours. Products as varied as wall panels, head boards, coffee tables and the now infamous spoons, she all sells on her website. What began as a blog where she shared her hobby of woodworking online to the delight of friends and peers has transformed into a very robust following of admirers from around the world who purchase her one-of-a-kind merchandise like hot cakes, the few times she actually has shop updates throughout the year. Her hobby, her passion became her means of making a living.
When I decided to email her, after having glanced at the FAQs on her website where she casually mentions studio visits, I wasn't expecting a reply. I thought to myself she probably gets hundreds of emails a day about possible commissions or fan inquiries or business opportunities. But to my surprise and delight she replied to my email two weeks after I had questioned about a possible studio visit to meet her and see her gorgeous workspace. She told me I could come by whenever because she was their daily, currently boxing up shipments of spoons and bowls to be delivered around the world. I quickly wrote back and we arranged a day and time.
Her studio is located in Bed Stuy, the neighborhood right above where I'm currently staying in Crown Heights. About a 25 minute walk and just as many blocks with likely rain, I decided to take the subway which ultimately took me much longer, I should have just risked the weather. The 4 into Manhattan, then the A back into Brooklyn, then the G deeper into Bed Stuy got me into the correct neighborhood. The studio is a gigantic 6 story charcoal gray industrial building in a relatively residential section just a few blocks from the train. I took the elevator up to her floor and rode with two older Hasidic Jewish men, and another young man who looked at me with curious focused attention, probably just wondering why someone he's never seen in the building is going to the top floor. I walked in and it was very dark. There were sheets hanging up, boxes toppled over each other stuffed in the corner and I yelled out, "Is anyone here? I'm a little early. Just want to barge in." A tiny young woman with cropped bangs and a yellow pleated skirt with flats on pulled back the dark sheet separating the rooms, and said,
"Yeah, can I help you with something?" This wasn't Ariele, I would have recognized her from the pictures on her blog. The young woman looked surprised and knowing all at once. Maybe this happens a lot I thought, visitors coming to gawk.
"I'm here to visit Ariele. Pretty sure she's expecting me." I replied.
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| studio |
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| mazie |
"Oh for sure, yeah, she's in her studio, it's right through that door." She pointed to the door literally beside her and I walked through and was immediately greeted by the growl of her dog, Mazie. In pictures, mostly via Instagram, Mazie is famous, routinely getting up to 10,000 people liking her grinning jowls, and her almost alarming ability to pose in any position. She's a model, well a dog model. A pit bull / boxer mix, with brown and white fur and short stubby legs, her growling quickly switched to sniffing and circling me, making sure it was okay that I be there. Ariele was wearing all black, hair pulled back into a messy bun, her eyes an unnerving turquoise. We started to talk almost immediately as if we had been friends for years. She showed me around her studio and what she was currently working on, and one of the first things I asked her, to get the awkwardness out of the way was how often she had visitors.
"Almost never. I do get emails a lot of the time with people asking to come meet me, and Mazie especially, but I largely ignore them. For some reason I was looking through my emails, and noticed yours and you just seemed really nice so I thought why not have a visitor." She laughed after she said this. You could sense both her humility and her awareness of just how strange and peculiar her situation is. I then asked her about how she reached her audience, probing into how you can turn something you love into something a large following loves, therefore making a career.
"I don't really know how it happened, one day it was normal, people I knew, then the next day I just had a bunch of new people liking my pictures, following me. You have to understand, I had my blog, (brooklyntowest.blogspot.com) which had been featured on Design Sponge before I even knew what Instagram was. So I was booking commissions and selling small pieces here and there, but once Instagram came around, I found it a much easier way to market my work and reach a much larger amount of people. I barley blog anymore."
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| view from the roof outside |
After we chatted about her life in Brooklyn, the changing demographics of her neighborhood, and some of the local spots she frequents, she started to ask about me. I told her why I was in New York, about my new blog, what I would love to do with my life and about the possibilities of me moving here permanently. "You should just do it," she said succinctly with a smile. Success for Ariele came because of not only her talent and work ethic, but because of her character and desire to succeed. What began for her as a blog became something more because she worked at it. Throughout the industrial building where she works with various painters, photographers, graphic designers, sound mixers etc. everyone is focused, doing creative things. It's an environment that thrives on the belief that you can do what you want, that you can be an artist. For Ariele, she's right at home.
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Later that afternoon I took the train to Nolita, a small ultra glamourous neighborhood with designer show rooms, extravagant bars and trendy coffee shops lining the side streets, to wait in the McNally Jackson bookstore for the event that was taking place that night at 7. Emily Gould was going to be doing a Q & A and reading from her new book "Friendship". Having been just released last week and knowing about the upcoming event, I bought and read the entire 255 page book in 3 days. I wanted to be prepared. The novel centers around a relationship between two on the brisk of 30 female friends, whose careers, housing situation, and love lives are in shambles. I thoroughly enjoyed the book and the way it handled and explored the ups and downs of a very specific female friendship.
Gould had previously been a notorious online blogger, and internet personality. Her blog Emily Magazine was in the over sharing vein, and she was funny and honest, the right people took notice and voila she was co-editor of Gawker.com, until she wasn't anymore. She also co-owns the independent book publishing company Emily Books which seeks out old and out of print female writers to republish their work, with the hope that the unnoticed work of the women who wrote decades ago to little acknowledgment may have an audience hungry to read their work today.
The Q & A was moderated by another young female writer, Elif Batuman. A non-fiction writer, who is a frequent contributor to the New Yorker magazine writing about Turkey and Eastern Europe, as well as having a book on Russian literature, the conversation was both funny and at times uncomfortable. The crowded room in the basement of McNally Jackson focused their attention on the two women who talked back and forth about female vs. male writers, fiction vs. memoir, Batuman's obsession with Karl Ove Knausgaard, Gould's roller coaster career. I found it quite strange these two writers were put together in the first place, one who writes fiction, the other non-fiction, one fascinated by the strange personal novels of a white Norwegian man, the other having claimed to not reading any straight white male writers since high school. Quickly Gould said something along the lines of them having the same publisher, and suddenly it all made sense.
Gould said something I thought while perhaps honest was quite shocking, "Anyone who told you in life 'Just follow your passion, and the money will come' is completely full of shit. That's bullshit." The audience laughed at the honesty Gould is known for, but it seemed to me the collective air of the crowd had been kicked out of them. Having previously glanced around the room with many young people, like myself, books in laps, soaking in each word, the response was palpable. I believe many who were listening to Gould were aspiring writers, bloggers even, hoping to turn their work into something more, something like art, something that she had done. While I don't think Gould was being negative, I do think her words stung. I was listening to a woman who had been beaten down by the literary world of Manhattan. She thought she had caught the break everyone needs 8 years ago, with a fabulous job, a reputation, a voice, but it had been taken from her and she had to start from scratch.
Afterwards I waited in line for her to sign my book, and once I got up to the front I stumbled over myself trying to say something smart in comparing her novel to one I had read a couple years ago. That novel, "How Should a Person be?" was also about a female friendship and the notion of what makes something art, how an artist comes to be. Gould nodded that of course she had read that book, and she quickly scribbled her signature and thanked me for coming. As I was making my way back towards the stairs to exit I noticed Elif Batuman, the moderator in the Q & A, just finishing up a conversation, she was taller than she looked from a distance. Her jet black hair falling over her shoulders. I walked right behind her and began to speak, "I thought you were really funny tonight, and I enjoy your pieces in the New.." and before I could finish my compliment, her half open eyes looked away from me in the opposite direction and she patted one hand on my back, literally pushing me aside and said, in her deep, deadpan voice,
"You should just buy my book."
I walked outside the store into the muggy side streets of Nolita and thought about success. Here was an extremely talented, well spoken, intelligent writer, whose work gets published by the most highly reputable magazine in the country and her response to a strangers compliment was about the bottom line, money. Maybe she was having a rough day, maybe she didn't care what I had to say, maybe she just wanted to sell her book. Either way I left shaken and found myself riding home alone on the subway, the first time that has happened to me since getting in New York, the air conditioning howling, the silence deafening. I thought about the way Ariele talked about her work, the enthusiasm in her voice, her passion for Brooklyn, and thought about how encouraging her words were especially in comparison to the harsh truth spoken by Gould in her response during the talk and the cold response of Batuman in her reaction to me. Maybe success is about how you perceive what you've already accomplished. For right now, I feel pretty successful. I may not be making any money, or receiving any acclaim but I am doing something I love, in the city I've always wanted to be in, and for right now I think that's enough.
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| the R |
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