ExtravaDanza!

If you love throwing money at vaguely worded, half-baked Internet "performance art projects" as much as you love Who's the Boss, do we have a Kickstarter for you! Meet Louis Crisitello Jr. and Hugo Ball, the creators of the $2,100 fund-raising campaign for something called "Danza Did It."

We'll let them explain:

Also, it will be a documentary podcast thing that has a liminal relationship to Tony Danza:

It is our ambition to conduct a series of revealing interviews with celebrities, politicians, artists, and everyday Americans who have been at the center of a media storm and have had their names plastered in headlines throughout the world. As avid fans of documentary film, we are originating the term “Documentary Podcasting.” We are observing the exploitation of wanted and unwanted celebrity.

Finally, visitors to our website will have opportunities to submit original content and compete in prize-winning contests.

So wait, is Danza Did It itself an example of the exploitation of wanted or unwanted celebrity? What kind of Danza-Jörmungandr are we looking at here? We might never know ... unless you cough up the other $1,864 in the next 12 days.

If you are reticent about parting with hard-earned money, Mr. Crisitello is offers up a transparent plan detailing how your contributions will support Danza Does It:

A portion of our funds will first go to pay for and fulfill our Kickstarter rewards. In addition, we need to purchase some quality audio equipment for our podcast as well as ancillary software and hardware. Lastly, we need to purchase select art supplies to bring some of our eccentric Tony Danza related ideas to fruition. Though we plan on finding followers via word of mouth, a small portion of funding will go towards our marketing efforts. Any additional or excess donations will be put to use for the planning and implementation of our Tony Danza-themed "ExtravaDanza Convention" that we hope to make a reality.

So what will some of these Kickstarter rewards look like? Well, for only $250, you can get a promise for tickets to a convention "when and if it happens," as well as a Photoshopped picture of you hanging out with the Danza. But that's not all!

We swear to God, if this turns out to a fund-raiser for Tony Danza's mayoral bid, we will consider pledging at least 10 dollars. We just hope Danza didn't do it first!

" There’s a saying on the internet," Mr. Scheele began. “Pics or it didn’t happen”.

"In other words, if something is real, if it actually happened, there will be pictures to back that up.

But what if something DIDN’T actually happen, but there are STILL pictures of it? Does that mean it DID happen? If something is fake, how much evidence does it take before it becomes real?

That’s the question we’re trying to answer.

So, on February 2, 2013, we are faking a marathon. "


The idea behind Run Free 2013 is simple.
Step One: People give Ridiculo.us money.
Step Two: People receive packets of marathon materials (racing bib, program, safety pins, and a "running time" included in the Kickstarter donation).
Step Three: The night before the race, people blop out social media droppings about their growing excitement for the race. (Facebok, Instagram, Twitter, Linked'In, J-Date, MySpace…whatever!)
Step Four: The day of Run Free, post pictures of you and your friends participating in the marathon.
Step Five: Everybody on the Internet is like "What is this Run Free marathon everyone has been social media-ing about?"
Step Six: ???
Step Seven: Profit.

If enough willing bodies join in, Mr. Scheele's team hypothesizes, they can "prove" that it takes a certain amount of people participating in a photo hoax to convince the rest of the world it's for real. (Though the data seems a little murky: for instance, how will Ridiculo.us measure the "tipping point" that will formulaically prove that readers are duped after X amount off photos?)

Of course, you don't need to fund a Kickstarter to study the trend of doctored pics going viral: Hurricane Sandy provided ample evidence for Snopes.com and Buzzfeed to compile a list of fake photos and intel; even providing some insight into why anyone would knowingly try to deceive people on social media.

(Did we mention that Ridiculo.us is owned by the Wonder Grove, a group that's vaguely worded "adventure-capitalist" rhetoric boils down to a service that offers viral marketing? Do we have to?)

"Okay, but there's a difference between what we're doing and what Ryan (Holiday) did," Mr. Scheele told The Observer by phone Saturday evening, just one day after Mayor Bloomberg had officially cancelled New York City's real marathon. "We're being very obvious about this not being a real race. You can read about it on the Kickstarter page. We're promoting it as fake. We're…"

"…talking to the media?" We suggested.

"Exactly."

Fair enough. But that doesn't explain why we should donate money, time, and effort for some big Internet hoax that apparently has no intention of trying to actually fool anyone?

That's when Mr. Scheele told us a story. A story that had us dying to fund this project.

"The way we came up with this idea," he said, "Is that I have a friend…well, I think everybody has this friend…that cannot stop talking about how there marathons. Even if they acknowledge it's terrible and painful and not even that great for your body, they are constantly talking about it. And then they say, 'Well, you do it so you can say that you did it.'"

"This is a way for people to say they 'did it' and photographic proof, without actually having to run a marathon."

Jesus, why didn't he just say that in first place. Forget the warmed-over social media commentary pitch. If there was something, anything, we could do to make our marathon training friends shut the hell up--not that we don't love them and admire what they are doing but Good God it's like listening to a two hour sales pitch on a really in-shape cult--we would reactivate our credit cards a heartbeat.

Mr. Scheele tried to continue telling us about the Incredulo.us success od their first (and only) other Kickstarter: A 50 Shades of Grey spoof book, 99 Shades Of Grey, where each page was printed in a variation of the color. The monetary goal was $600, to cover printing costs. The group raised more $10,000 for the project.

But our minds were elsewhere. Hey, did Scheele remember that op-ed from The Onion, titled "I'm Truly Sorry For This, But You're About To Hear All About The Last Marathon I Ran"?

He had not.

"It's like this insufferable guy with an alarming amount of self-awareness, profusely apologizes for talking to you about his marathon regime. Here, we have to email it to you. It's just like what you're talking about, with those friends who just do not take the hint!"

The logo for Run Free 2013 (Kickstarter)

Mr. Scheele said he actually didn't have anything against people who ran marathons, and was actually offering free registry to anyone who had entered the NYC Marathon. "I had friends who spent months training, and hundreds of dollars in canceled hotels, flights, and marathon materials, so this way they can still feel like they participated."

"Okay, but read this part," we said, emailing him a link to our favorite quote from The Onion article.

" Believe me, if I could stop myself from talking about this, I would. But I can't, and so I'm going to tell you all about my personal best time, and you're going to think to yourself, "This guy's the fucking worst." But here's the truly awful part: Out of politeness, you will have to pretend to be impressed by that number, even though to you it will seem completely arbitrary and hold no meaning at all."

Right? Aren't those people the worst?

"The Onion is actually a great example of what we were talking about," Mr. Scheele said. "They are quite openly a satirical, fake news organization, yet they have repeatedly had their articles re-posted as fact by people who are seemingly incapable of operating a search engine (for examples, see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Onion#The_Onion_taken_seriously)."

Except that blurgh, The Onion's goal—unlike Incredulo.us's-- isn't to conduct a "social experiment" (Scheele's words, not ours) to create "convincing propaganda" (see above) about an event that never happened. The Michigan founders of the fake newspaper did not create their product to answer the question, "Will (people) buy into it being real, even when a quick Google search will tell them it's not?" (The fact that people confuse The Onion's satirical headlines often enough to warrant its own website is an added bonus, not part of a lazy use of the scientific method. )

But no matter how much Mr. Scheele sounded like a viral marketing apologist—"We'd take corporate sponsors if they had the right attitude and believed in the project," he said at one point--we couldn't help being excited.

"How much money do we have to spend to give ourselves the best running time?" We asked feverishly, imagining the looks on our parent's faces—the only people who would be fooled by the Run Free con—when we produced pictures proving that we sometimes went outdoors and exercised.

"Um, that will probably be a combination of factor," Mr. Scheele said. "Like the amount of money donated, and who donated the earliest."

"So if we pledge $100 the moment the site goes live, we can guarantee that we'll "win" the marathon?"

"I mean, that's a possibility, sure. But we're really in this to have fun," Mr. Scheele said. "That's why we encourage groups to sign up with the Race Team Party Pack." The $100 pledge "includes SIX full registrations PLUS limited-edition racing headbands." If you add $50, everyone gets medals, too, according to the Kickstarter page.

"The more people you have 'running,' in the photo, the more this will look like a believable race. Points for creativity, sure. And you can take as many pictures as you like till you find the perfect shot." The best photos will be curated on our website, Runfreerace.com."

"Oh my god, we could all be the Ridiculously Photogenic Guy," we murmured to ourselves, overwhelmed by the implications. "The New York Times would have to find an entirely new trend story about people who look attractive in fake marathon photos."

"We just want this to be a big, fun community project, and maybe we can learn something from it, too" Mr. Scheele said.

"Totally," we agreed, trying to login to our PayPal account before remembering we had forgotten the password two months ago.

Run Free might not be able to answer its own question on the amount of validity needed to "prove" a fake picture, but it could certainly help put a price point on a person's desire to "prove" they ran a marathon. And never, ever want to talk about it again.

*As of last night at 11 p.m., Run Free had already surpassed it's goal of $999 by double.

Last week, +POOL, that brilliant, crazy, possibly over-designed, possibly perfectly designed project that places a floating, self-filtering pool in the East River announced it was going to try and raise $1 million in the next six months to make its aquatic dreams come true. It is a prospect, which makes The Observer giddy with child-like joy. Swimming in the river, in river water no less.

That youthful excitement is infectious, especially when talking to Dong-Ping Wong, one +POOL’s founders. “It's a simple idea that didn't really come from anywhere," he explained in an interview. "As for ‘Why the idea?’ It was a combination of a few things, a hot and sweaty summer looking at the water, taking the train over the water, and riding my bike over the water but never really seeing it at all. I’m from San Diego, we use and view water very differently than we do from here."

Not that New York should be more like SoCal—heaven forbid—but it is true that we all live on the water (four out of five boroughs are on islands don't forget) and yet so rarely do we get the chance to interact with it.

Even with the funds, building the pools is not going to be easy. After all, the Olympic-sized +POOL will have to filter more than 500,000 gallons of river water a day to make it clean and safe. We wont say ‘make it swimmable’ because there are a few brave souls who take daily plunges in New York’s rivers already, but lets say, for the rest of us who still can’t shake the thought of local Superfund sites, +POOL has you covered.

The team has been working with engineers at ARUP and ecological consultants at One Nature to study the mechanical and environmental aspects of the pools filtration system, and they have learned all about enterococci and fecal coliform from professors at Columbia University. You don't have to go much further than that to understand the stream of contaminants that +POOL is trying to eliminate.

The feasibility of designing such an intricate filtration process is just one of the many issues surrounding the project, but Mr. Wong isn't worried. “When we first put it out there, it was three of us, and we all had similar reservations, cynicism," said Mr. Wong. "How will it work? Will anyone care about it? I mean not every New Yorker will really want to swim in the East River. But the more we looked into it, the more it seemed that not only is the technology already there, it just hasn't been thought of this way. I mean all the technology exists in some way or another.  In a weird way, the more we learned about it, the more the idea was right there in front of us."

More than a few New Yorkers seem to agree with him. The project first showed up on Kickstarter last year, but now the team has launched its own campaign, and even so, it is goingly swimmingly.

“Because it’s off of Kickstarter now, the audience is different that it might have reached on that website," Mr. Wong said. " Kickstarter is an awesome, basically readymade community, but what's great now is we’re also reaching a lot of people direct from the local community who we wanted to talk to anyway. In some ways the benefit of this campaign is that people are seeing it for the second time. The fact that we're still at it, is making people maybe even more excited than we were in the beginning.  It continually re-legitimizes this project.”

It’s hard not to compare any new park idea, especially one that springs so evidently from the same architecture and design world to that high-flying and High Line or low-lying Brooklyn Bridge Park did.

"This all could be a potentially new model for how architecture can be made," Mr. Wong said. "For us The High Line was so exciting to see happen. It started with two guys and took ten years. We feel like the pool has that kind of same potential."

The project is spilling over into other cities as a result. Tokyo, London, Cape Town and at least a few other cities have contacted the team about getting their own +POOLs. Right now, in fact, +POOL, has a sister endeavor in Sydney with a local city rep who is shepherding the idea through it’s very early stages along the same parallel municipal and city support that +POOL went through here. It’s an idea that came from the mayor of Syndney who had early on tweeted his support of the project.

“In many ways, they’re already ahead of New York in the way that they view their waterways,” Said Mr. Wong, “But there are a some places because of industry, shipping, where they still need a lot of work to actually clean it and besides the barriers are safe to swim in from wildlife. You know, sharks and all.”

It’s not a bad piece of branding if they wanted it.  In a world full of sharks and—ahem—contaminants, +POOL remains an idea worth diving into.

Current musical luminaries such as Robyn, Hot Chip, Owen Pallett, José González and Scissor Sisters have all signed on, but it remains to be seen whether the LP will ever see the light of day. While in the past Red Hot's projects have been funded by major record companies, this latest venture is relying on a Kickstarter campaign to raise money for production costs. It’s a commercial decision which both speaks to Russell’s massive cult following and, sadly, his still relative unknown status in the wider public’s perception. The target is set for $55,000, of which only $12,000 has been raised so far.

Can this house be saved?

The saga of Broken Angel House, the hand-crafted Clinton Hill mansion of bizarre angles and strange art, has taken a somewhat odd, though not altogether unexpected twist.

Christopher Wood, the son of artists, house-crafters and erstwhile owners Arthur and Cynthia Wood, has launched a kickstarter campaign to transform the house into a museum, thus staving off the last stages of foreclosure proceedings, Curbed reports.

All things considered, it's really no surprise that Mr. Wood, a sprightly octogenarian, has taken to crowdsourcing, today's go-to source for creative campaigns and lost causes.

Mr. Wood  and his late wife Cynthia bought the 10,400 square-foot property at city auction in 1979, a "wrecked and ruined" "empty shell of a building," according to the campaign, that the artists set out to transform "into something magical and majestic" with stained glass windows made from broken bottles and concrete angels with brick wings in the rafters.

The result—a weirdly beautiful mansion—was not, unfortunately, built up to code, as the city discovered after a fire destroyed part of the building in 2006. So the couple decided to fund the costly renovations that they needed to make with an ambitious condo-conversion plan—a not altogether terrible idea given that the house was located at the rapidly gentrifying intersection of Clinton Hill and Bed-Stuy and had recently starred as the backdrop of Dave Chappelle's Block Party.

But the recession hit, plans fell through, Ms. Wood was diagnosed died of cancer, and the house found no buyers when Mr. Wood  put it on the market. Madison Realty Capital, which gave Mr. Wood a $4 million mortgage to carry out the plan, now owns the house, although Mr. Wood has yet to be evicted.

The kickstarter campaign is trying to raise $50,000 with a huge collaborative art project—selling one-inch art spaces on the outside of the house for $20. It would, of course, be only a small step towards preserving the house. But for an artistic borough whose creative side is so often expressed via tote-bag stenciling artists, hipster taxidermists and artisanal picklers,  Broken Angel House seems like a uniquely worthy cause.

kvelsey@observer.com

Mr. Platzker at Seattle's Space Needle.

"The old paradigm that I'm trying to get rid of is that space is for governments and the super-rich, and it takes years, and it costs millions of dollars, and I say this is just wrong" said Peter Platzer, an Austrian-born former CERN physicist and hedge fund quant who was in town to promote his start-up NanoSatisfi. "It's the democratization of innovation. We're going to let people write their own space experiments."

Mr. Platzer's idea is this: Equip a small satellite with an open-source processor (Arduino, if you're into that sort of thing) and 25 sensors, including a camera, Geiger counter, spectrometer, etc.; Launch the thing into orbit; Rent space on the satellite to anyone with a few hundred dollars, the ability to write some simple code and the desire to play in the heavens. From there the possibilities are endless: Amateur astronomers, budding physicists, video game designers or hopeless romantics could find a use for the service, Mr. Platzer said:

"You could program the satellite to send your girlfriend a text message from space. 'Happy birthday, I love you.' Once you put the power of space into the hands of the people, who knows what they'll come up with."

For Mr. Platzer, the project represents the convergence of lifelong interests. Born in Vienna and trained as a physicist at the Max Plank Institute and CERN—European Organization for Nuclear Research—he feared that the slow-pace of the space bureaucracy would prevent him from getting meaningful work done, and decamped for the private sector. He traveled the world for Boston Consulting Group before earning an MBA at Harvard Business School and building quantitative trading programs for a series of investment funds, including Deutsche Bank and The Rohatyn Group. Technology advanced, and private money began to find its way into space exploration, and Mr. Platzer saw a chance to rekindle his early passion. He enrolled at the International Space University in Strasbourg, France, and began developing the project that would become NanoSatisfi.

With the Kickstarter launching today—he's hoping to raise $35,000, but says he'll launch the first satellite regardless of whether he meets that goal—Mr. Platzer sat down with The Observer to talk about his path from Wall Street to the edge of the final frontier.

You were trained as a physicist, but spent the bulk of your post-graduate years in finance. What happened?

Did I always want to do space? Yes. When I was finishing my physics degree, and I vividly remember someone telling me the story of a scientist who worked on an instrument for 15 years so that he could get data and write a paper and get tenure, and then when the instrument got launched, the rocket blew up, and with that his career went out the window. I didn't want to go into a field if I didn't see a potential other than to be massively frustrated.

So management consulting...

I got hooked on the idea that you can take large, amorphous problems and break them down into pieces that you can than solve and put back together again, because that's exactly what you do as a physicist. Why is a bird flying? It's not concrete, so you break it down—what forces are working on the bird—and then you build a model from that and you can start making predictions and see if they come true. And that's what management consultants do.

And from there to quantitative trading...

I was working on the Singapore Stock Exchange, and I was doing a lot of capital markets analysis, doing a lot of research into understanding that whole universe. I remember, I was walking down the street in Singapore, and I said, wouldn't it be fun to write a computer program to trade the stock market? I said, 'That's way too much fun, it can't be possible. Stop dreaming Peter.' Two years later I'm sitting in Harvard Business School, and we go around and introduce ourselves. So I tell my story, and the next person over introduced himself and said, for the last six months I've been writing a program to trade the markets.

Needless to say, we started talking, and four months later we started a company to do exactly that.

What's different about Space now?

You feel it stronger in the Valley than here, but there is a huge push to the private sector. Money starts to be available. If you were to ask NASA today, 'How long will it take to put a man on the moon?' They'd tell you, 'Give us 25 years and half-trillion dollars.' And in the '60s, when they had nothing, it took them eight or nine years to do the same thing. They could not do today what Elon Musk just did. It's like the Bannister mile has been broken. No one thought you could break a 4-minute mile, and then Bannister did it and within six months, six other people did it.

OK, so we can rent some space on your nanosatellite. What then?

You can do really cool things with earth observation with nanosatellites, such as mapping the ocean temperature, mapping rainforests, atmospheric density, space weather. One of the experiments that I would want to run is measure the magnetosphere, which shields us from solar radiation, to get a sense of the shape of the earth's magnetic field. I think people will want to take pictures of planet—hobby astronomy is a $100 million business every year.

But I purposefully don't try to think about it. If I had asked you in 2008, how many applications will be on the App Store, what are people going to do with it, I doubt we would have come up with even a fraction of the 600,000 applications that people invented. Maybe Brad Pitt wants to buy Angelina Jolie her own personal satellite. He buys her all sorts of other crazy things.

The proposed LowLine (Kickstarter)

Efforts to raise money for the Delancey Underground--also known as the Low Line--have taken off, thanks to private fundraising on the website Kickstarter.com. Back in September, when we talked to the founders of the project, ex-NASA scientist James Ramsey and RAAD partner Dan Barasch, they had low expectations about raising any money from the city.

It's predecessor, the West Side High Line, had gotten some public money, but was built in a different era, Mr. Ramsey told us. "The recession hadn’t hit, and it was right after 9/11, when the city was looking to put money in an urban renewal project."

Their mission, as stated on their fundraising page:

We want to transform an abandoned trolley terminal on the Lower East Side of Manhattan into the world’s first underground park. It will be a new kind of public space, using solar technology for natural illumination, and cutting edge design to capture and highlight a very special industrial space.

In order to develop their plans for underground green space--which would require "tens of millions" of dollars-- alive, the group has started a Kickstarter.com page to raise money from private donors. The surprising part might be how well its doing. In little over 24 hours, the LowLine has already received $23,678 in pledges. By Apr 6th, the group must raise another $76,322 in donations in order to hit its $100,000 goal.

Even with $100k in their pockets, the RAAD group will still face a bevy of hurdles, financial and otherwise, before they can begin turning the old Williamsburg trolly terminal into an underground paradise. The local community board will obviously play a huge part, as C.B.3 has spent decades negotiating the above-ground space between SPURA (Seward Park Urban Renewal Area) project, and the people still living in the Lower East Side's tenement buildings.

But, as RAAD's team was quick to remind us, the High Line also received pushback from club owners and city planners, and got most of its money made in private donations.

It's taken several months to get off the ground, but at least this KickStarter campaign is a good first step to proving that there is at least some interest--and money--behind the Low Line.

Kristen Schaal gets grilled

This is the best idea for a web series we've heard in awhile. Inside the Actor's Studio Apartment like Cribs, sort of, if Cribs was just one messy room inhabited by some of your favorite comedians. And let's face it: Who doesn't want to see how semi-famous New York actors live?

Take it away, Kristen Schaal!

Actually, Studio Apartment is actually just an awkward satirical talk show, in the vein of Zach Galifianakis' Between Two Ferns. It's still the funniest thing we've seen all week. If you have a couple bucks, throw it over to host Daniel Bowers so he can continue showing us the lofts and living spaces of funny people.

Feel the power. (Alex Pincus)

New York architect Alex Pincus was, like most architects, daydreaming about a mundane problem—unattractive wall sockets—when he had a touch of divine inspiration.

"It’s an architectural problem that bothers me, because it’s ugly, there’s no good solutions, and even the ones that are out there aren’t very compelling," Mr. Pincus told The Observer earlier this week. "And I was thinking about different patterns of sockets that were interesting to me, and I tried to change it up. And I had this vision of a cruciform grid of plugs, on the floor or on the wall. At some point, I remember looking at this standard, 1990s, sorta cream-colored power strip, thinking of how ugly it was, and that’s when the idea came to me."

What came from this design daydream was Higher Power, a cross-shaped power strip that is both arch and attractive, not to mention functional. By adding two armatures to a standard-looking power strip, those bulky plugs for the laptop and the alarm clock now all fit without blocking any of the other sockets. Mr. Pincus described it as the dumb idea that he simply could not shake, so he created a rendering and posted it to his website last year. Someone at Boing Boing noticed it, and from there it got picked up by Wired and bounced around the Internet for weeks. "When it shut down my website, that's when I realized this could be real."

Over the past year, Mr. Pincus and his friend and collaborator Rob Howell, a South Carolina developer (they call their outfit Means of Production), have been refining the design in partnership with a Kentucky electrical engineer. They have sourced materials, prototyped, even found a Chinese manufacturer to make the thing. The hope is to have 5,000 Higher Power surge protectors on store shelved for $29.99 by this May. All it will take is $27,500 on KickStarter, of which they are currently one-third of the way there since launching their campaign last week.

Religious icon? Design icon? (Alex Pincus)

Mr. Pincus said he hopes this can become a mass object that still has appeal for the design cognoscenti. "It would be great to have it at Target, but I wouldn’t mind having it at Moss, either," Mr. Pincus said, referring to the ostentatious Soho shop. "That’s where the gold-plated one comes in, gold-plated limited edition." Like the project itself, the limited edition idea is meant only half-jokingly. "It’s actually pretty simple, because the guts are the complicated part, the wrapper’s pretty easy. I’ve already got a couple wrappers around my house. Nothing out of gold, yet, but it’s pretty simple." An 18-karat option is currently on offer for the top Kickstart of $5,000. It will be one of an edition of five, and the creators promise to hand-deliver it anyone in the United States.

If it seems like Mr. Pincus is winking as he describes his vision, he insists the project is as earnest as a congregation's prayers. He recognizes the potential humor in his creation, but as his dramatic and rather sardonic Kickstarter video shows, crosses have indeed been a part of the design canon for millenia. "I’ve always had an interest in religious iconography, it’s always held a special appeal to me and it’s appealed to me in architecture and photography," Mr. Pincus said.

"I didn’t want to make it kitschy. I like kitsch, but it’s not how I design."

The proof is in the response to the piece. Not only has it been worshiped by designers and techies but also Christians across the country. "What I’ve found pretty eye-opening throughout the process is that everyone looks at it through their own eyes," Mr, Pincus said. "So if you’re an ironic, jaded person, it’s funny and you can laugh at it. Yet I’ve literally gotten emails from multiple ministers and pastors saying that they love it and it would be a great tool for fellowship with their congregations, and I’ve had Christians ask me if they could use it as a logo for their ministry."

"I’ve tried to be not non-committal but open to various meanings and interpretations," he added. "And I think that’s a lot more fun than just making a kitschy joke piece. Which is why there’s not a menorah yet."

mchaban [at] observer.com | @MC_NYC

Logo, by Jacob Weinstein, coming to a chip clip near you. If you live in Brooklyn.

Yesterday a Kickstarter announced the arrival of The Classical, yet another daily web publication dedicated to the burgeoning world of alternative sportswriting. This one is the brainchild of a cerebral fraternity of sports and culture bros, including Bloomsbury editor (and rumored pub-trivia powerhouse) Pete Beatty, Pitchfork and Village Voice vet Tom Breihan, Yahoo! blogger Eric Freeman, Wall Street Journal columnist David Roth, and University of Michigan fellow (and former New York Sun editor) Tim Marchman.

Judging from the pitch, The Classical will out-Grantland Grantland. In addition to regular columns and quickie blog posts, the editors have threatened a 25,000-word piece on 1938 Hall of Famer Pete Alexander, as well as contributions from prizewinning novelists and “guys and girls we went to school with who are unappreciated geniuses.”

“We will strive to someday publish something as amazing as Colson Whitehead's Grantland dispatches from the World Series of Poker,” Mr. Beatty wrote Off The Record.

Like Grantland, The Classical’s name is an obscure reference. The name refers to the first track off The Fall’s 1982 album Hex Enduction Hour.

“It is probably fair to describe The Classical as post-punk sports journalism,” Mr. Beatty said.

Unlike Grantland, which is published by ESPN, The Classical lacks big corporate funding (hence the Kickstarter idea).

“We're way smaller, way more seat-of-pants, with no giant corporate funding (yet),” Mr. Beatty said. “The more natural comparison for us is The Awl (but about sports).” Most of the contributors have at one point been in the orbit of Bethlehem Shoals, who wrote the sports blog FreeDarko and now contributes to the Awl.

In order to make a safe space for smart sportswriting (and commenting), they’ll have to raise a steep $50,000 in Kickstarter pledges. According to Mr. Beatty, the founders have constructed a first-year budget based on web infrastructure costs, paying a publisher—a shadowy figure still working out an arrangement with his full-time employer—to rustle up advertising, providing a “nominal” staff salary, and manufacture of “at least several hundred chip clips," a gift for donors.

As of this writing, they’ve raised $9,234, including support from those who have been there: Longform.org founder Max Linsky, Longreads founder Mark Armstrong, and Awl founding editor Alex Balk.