I have been unable to update this blog for MONTHS due to circumstances wholly or mainly beyond my control, including TWO laptop computers that crashed beyond my ability to overcome; a bizarre substitution of English as the operating system for a new laptop computer I felt compelled to buy, with AFRIKAANS, a language I do not read; eonomic and transportation issues caused by a TREE falling from a neighbor's property onto my car in my back yard and smashing the rear windshield; and various related stresses and strains on my mental and emotional resources. I have also developed serious issues related to walking (and thus to even gettinig to public transporation), in that I have bad knees and have developed a serious balance problem that has caused me to fall from time to time, probably within less than three weeks of the last fall.
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I have certainly not abandoned this project, which I started in mid-2004. I have accepted that I will never be able to backfill the missing dates, but hope to restart the blog with current posts going forward. Here are some of the topics I hope to address.
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Most recent and most important, an eventful Saturday in my neighborhood.
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Other topics include:

Early spring-flowering bulbs in my yards (daffodils, jonquils, hyacinths, paperwhites)
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Late-spring flowering bulbs (tulips, simple and double; paperwhites)
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Ebullient wisteria

Today's only illustration is this one cluster of wisteria blooms outside my window on May 10th.
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Giving up on my severely damaged and malfunctioning old (1992) car and reverting to Newark's dense network of public transportation. My friend Jerry in Manhattan says I should also investigate whether this area has “SCAT” transportation for “seniors” that will pick you up, take you somewhere, such as the supermarket, and then take you home again. My first Google search showed such a service in Monmouth County, where I lived from fifth grade thru high school, but not Newark. I'll do more research on this before I write that post.
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Exploring other services for “seniors” that I and some visitors to this blog might avail themselves of.
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Slobs making a mess of my property's frontage.
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An emerging fashion industry in Newark (an article about which my friend Joe in Belleville sent me link to).
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Growing veggies in my yard and garden window.
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And more.

Newark is, for the most part, a great place to live, but there are always a few people who ruin things for the many. Their deviant and destructive behavior must be identified with specificity (as tho they don't understand that it is wrong) and condemned.
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Others of my projects have also been set back severely by all the problems I have encountered, and it will take some juggling for me to update this blog and those other projects. So don't expect a new post here every day, but maybe I can put up something new, profusely illustrated, as usual, every few days. Please check this space from time to time. I thank you for your patience.

(Stained-glass skylite seen past a column in the Newark Public Library's Main Building)

I have been unable to publish updates to this blog because of a series of odd, and nearly calamitous, events, the most devastating to my blogging work being that TWO laptop computers in a row CRASHED beyond my recovering.  After a great deal of delay and finding that I could not fix the problem/s myself, my friend Joe from Belleville told me I just have to have a computer, so I bit the bullet and bought a new one, a Dell Inspiron 15 3000 laptop, from Staples on Bloomfield Avenue in Bloomfield.  (I am annoyed that I do not know how to pronounce "Inspiron", and that uncertainty confirms me in my decision many years ago to work on a radical respelling system for English.)
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The new computer comes with NO user manual, printed or electronic, except for a "Quck Start Guide" of 11 pages, each about 4" x 6", in small type!  We are just to be born knowing.
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Unfortunately, this new laptop, like the second one that crashed on me, came with Windows 10, an appallingly stupid, difficult, and opaque operating system that will take a very long time for me to master, if indeed any mere mortal can ever truly master Windows 10.
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I may still have to have my older laptops — one or both — repaired, at least to the point of offloading all my important data, even if I never again use the equipment itself.  Staples offers repair service, for $160 per machine at least for the initial evaluation.  I don't know if actual repairs will exceed that.
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You'd think that a college town like Newark (45,000+ students in junior and senior colleges) would have to have expert computer-repair shops, but I don't know of any, so unless someone among the readers of this blog has a well-based recommendation, I would have no information but what I can find in the Yellow Pages or online reviews.  My friend Don in Manhattan has a very unfavorable opinion of Staples' repair service, but I'm not persuaded he has a solid evidentiary basis for his jaundiced view.
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It will take me a very long time to create the directory structure (in Microsoftese, "folders") with which to store my work into the future.  My brother Alan gave me the second laptop that crashed, and I had barely deleted his folders and created SOME of my own before that hand-me-down computer failed.  I had recreated some of my directories, and recovered some — but not all — lost logins and passwords, but not yet gotten around to creating backups on CD/DVD disks when that computer (a Toshiba) crashed, so all the work I had done in the two or so months I was forced to use the Toshiba was LOST.  The failure to back up was in part a result of everything taking me something like FIVE TIMES as long to do in Windows 10 and the replacement programs I was forced to learn than it would have on my years-old laptop that crashed first (an Acer).
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Fortunately, I did have backups for a lot of fotos I had taken before the CD/DVD drive on my Acer stopped working years ago.  I thereafter bought a 500 GB external hard drive (Simple Drive brand), but for reasons unknown to me, it stopped being recognized by my computer!  So TWO backup systems failed!  As Robert Burns observed "The best laid schemes o' mice an' men | Gang aft a-gley". How many backup systems must we employ?  Apparently more than two!
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Now there are "cloud" storage systems I might use, but I have to LEARN them, and every minute taken to learn something new can displace more than twice the time, due to mental and emotional energy, that should go to the work I'd rather be doing.
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I also did manage to retrieve from the SD chip in my present camera, fotos going back a few years that I hadn't entrusted to storage only on my laptop/s and Simple Drive external hard drive.  And when I was having these horrendous computer problems, I was still taking some pictures for use in this blog.
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I thus have lots of fotos to use here on various topics, chief among which, if there be time before Amazon makes its decision about where to site its "HQ2", a post of many points as to why Newark would plainly be the best place for HQ2, and lots of fotos with which to show that in visual terms, more than just textual argumentation.
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Unfortunately, not all those fotos are easily uploadable to or accessible from Google Photos, the appallingly inferior successor to Google's Picasa Online Albums, which is very hard to work with.  On my account, the option to create a new album (as for HQ2) is grayed-out.  I don't know why, nor if there's any fix available.  Maybe I have to create a new account.  Nothing in the computer world makes any sense anymore, and if you go online to find a fix, you might be steered wrong, as I have found on a number of occasions in trying to cope with all the changes between Windows Vista and Windows 10.
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I found, in composing this post, that there is a way WITHIN Google Blogger, to upload fotos from my hard drive directly into a post, but I need to see if there is enuf storage allowance in Blogger for the many, many fotos I would want to use here. A great feature of doing things this way is that if you hover the cursor on the picture, you can click to enlarge it to its full size! For right now, then, this post has only one foto.  If I can find a way to add fotos to Google Photos or another (free) service from which I can insert them into this blog without exceeding my allowance in Blogger, I will add more illustrations within a few days, and place a note atop a later post to advise that pix have been added to this post.  I don't know how long it will take me to get back to frequent posting, but you might stop by now and then to see.  Thank you for your indulgence.

I have a great many fotos online, mainly in Google Photos, the massively inferior successor to Google's older foto service, Picasa Web Albums. The present tally of my albums in Google Photos is 61. Over a third of those are "Blogpix" albums, which have about 500 pix each. The Blogpix21 album has only 493, but I didn't want to split pix for a single post between albums, so decided just to leave 7 spots unfilled. My "Portraits" album has over 614 pix, however, and I may have a few more to add, but I'll have to check whether I have already added them.
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The following URL, https://goo.gl/photos/hzwm5YbcCsXJBbWa7, will take you to the entire Blogpix21 album. If you would like to see a slideshow of all those fotos that will stream without your having to click on anything after the initial click, you can start a Slideshow by going to the icon at top right that comprises three dots in a vertical row, then choosing the top option.
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In Picasa Web Albums, you could choose to show or hide captions, and I could lift the album into a viewer at the end of this post, but I don't see a way to do either of those things in crappy Google Photos. Why would Google change things to be hugely WORSE than the older service?
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I think that Picasa also allowed me to direct readers to an overview of all my albums, but I don't see how to do that, either, in astonishingly deficient Google Photos.
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I see that once I moved my pix to Google Photos, I stopped placing captions on them, because doing so was not intuitive but seemed complicated, so many of the fotos will be unclear to most viewers as to what exactly they show. I'm not persuaded that if I had taken the time to place a caption on every foto, they would appear in a Google Photos slideshow.
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The first five fotos in the Blogpix21 album are screenprints of TV listings that I have used, or intend to use, in others of my blogs than "Newark USA". You needn't struggle to figure out what I was trying to illustrate. They are not specific to Newark. The bulk of the remaining 488 pix ARE specific to Newark and its environs.
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Would You Like to Make a Game of Identifying Fotos, Anyone? Perhaps the most Newark-savvy readers will welcome a chance to identify the subject of fotos I did not caption. I have long assumed that I am the only person on Earth (or, for that matter, anywhere else) who can identify all my Newark fotos (and in some cases only by locating them in the appropriate directory on my hard drive, so I can see the context in which they were taken), so an assistant devoted to indexing them couldn't really fulfil that function. But maybe there is someone out there who is supremely knowledgeable about Newark, has attended the same events and traveled the same streets and parks as I have, so could identify a large proportion of the unidentified pictures in my Blogpix21 album. Perhaps you know some self-important Newark snob you'd like to challenge to identify these pix. No, I guess that's unrealistic. Nobody here is a stuffy, self-important know-it-all, haughty and dismissive of others. But maybe you know somebody who likes to think they know more than everybody else. Not likely, among modest Newarkers, but within the realm of possibility.
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Turning Away from What Was, for Months, My "New Normal", to Get Back to My Old Normal. In any case, I have posted rarely to this blog since the beginning of the year because of severe complications in my life, such as getting a modification to my mortgage, which was extremely stressful. And the weather was a big disincentive, in that I hate the cold. Parts of early winter were mild, but, peculiarly, later parts were dismally gray and cold, as tho winter were toying with us, teasing us with the hope of mild weather from start to end of the season, but then switching to cold weather that just would not quit.
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I have created a Blogpix22 album, and already have 21 pix in it. I'll have to see if I can add captions easily, and if they will appear if a visitor runs a slideshow. I also want to create an "FOTD" album, for pix to use in "Foto Of The Day" blogposts as fill-ins for when I have no major topic to address. Again, I'll have to investigate whether I can caption those fotos. But not today.

I have commented here that the quarters of Newark Print Shop ("NPS") on University Place at Campbell Street, one block north of Market Street, were too small to display more than a tiny fraction of the wealth of art created by its artists. That has been fixed. NPS has moved to the new building added to the long-ago Hahne & Co. department store in what had been an empty space on the Halsey Street side of the complex, at New Street. (The department store, and thus the building, is generally referred to as "Hahne's". In case you don't know, "Hahne's", despite a spelling that powerfully suggests — indeed, almost demands — a "broad"-A (or short-O, the same sound), is actually pronounced with a long-A as if written "Hanes", like the underwear company. I don't know why.)

This is the signature of the artist who created this wonderful mural. Curiously, the website I found for this artist suggests that Layqa Nuna Yawar is just another name for the artist heretofore known as "Lunar New Year", who also did a mural in NPS's old space on University Place.

To celebrate its reopening in a new, hugely larger space in conjunction with Rutgers-Newark, NPS held an opening celebration and art-show reception on February 3rd. Today's fotos are from that "Transitions" show.
It was, as you can see, very well attended, with crowds that could never have fit(ted) in the University Avenue space. Among the people attending were my friend Jerry, who often comes in from Manhattan to join me at Newark art events, and me. Tho you might think that "and me" goes without saying, the fact is that I have missed a number of art shows in the cold-weather months, and if Jerry is stopped from attending by rotten weather, I am generally disinclined to go alone, even tho I often see people I know there.
Jerry had already made a circuit of the exhibition by the time I arrived, perhaps 20 minutes later, and was sitting on a comfy padded bench near the entrance to the space. After I said hello, I made my own circuit, taking pix.
The liting was iffy. It seemed pretty brite to the human eye, but I had to use flash for a number of fotos, because my camera's 'eye' needed more lite. That produced problems in a number of cases, because altho I tried to take pix from off to the side to avoid reflection of the flash, I was unable to get over far enuf in some cases, due to the odd configuration of the space and to other attendees' being in the way.
Another problem you can see in some of these fotos is a dark oval at upper left of 'landscape' fotos and upper right in 'portrait'-orientation fotos. That seems not to be something I can fix. I tried thoroly cleaning the lens from the outside, but that did not work. Perhaps a cluster of sensory pixels were somehow destroyed within the camera's electronics. Perhaps if someone could take the camera apart, s/he could clean that area and the sensory pixels would work perfectly fine. I don't know, but have cropped out that spot in a number of the fotos I show today.
The fotos do not do justice to the artworks, and to appreciate them fully, you would need to see them in person. I don't know if the "Transitions" show I fotograffed is still on view. I see no mention of it in a cursory review of the NPS website, but I'm sure that whatever is on view is worthy, in that a lot of wonderful things are being made and displayed at NPS, probably most of them by Newark artists, but possibly also artists from surrounding areas. You can find the Shop's hours and contact info at the website.
An additional advantage to seeing the art in person is that most of these works are available for purchase (thus "Shop" is a highly appropriate part of that organization's name), and since they are prints rather than one-of-a-kind, they might very well be affordable on the budget of people not in the class of a Renaissance patron of the arts. Or even our own 19th Century robber-baron patrons of the arts.

After I had taken many of the fotos I wanted, a young (white) woman (I specify race to help the reader visualize; absent such information, a black reader might visualize a black woman; an Oriental reader, an Oriental woman; a white reader, a white woman. Description is not discrimination.) approached me and asked if I were the "Newark USA" blog guy. Yes, I said, and she told me she had read my blog months before she moved to New Jersey from Brooklyn. That was good to hear. I didn't ask if my blog had anything to do with her move.

While we were talking, Jeremy Johnson, Executive Director of the Newark Arts Council, who also approached me about my blog, at a Newark Public Library art show a year or two earlier, came up to say hello, so we were then a conversational group of three. See, you might not need to carry a friend with you to Newark art events, because Newarkers are friendly. Heck, New Jerseyans in general are both friendly and mannerly, so you might have a very good time if you go by yourself. I think I made mention of how big the turnout was for this show, and what it said about the vitality of the arts in Newark. I joked with him that "It's all me, you know" — that is, that Newark's resurgence is due (very largely) to my efforts to show in unmistakable, unfaked fotos how good this often-slited city has become. Again. Indeed, Newark may now be better than ever before, a more balanced city as regards demograffics, industries, and arts, both performing and visual. We're not all the way back, I grant. Apparently in The Olden Days (long before I moved here in mid-2000), Newark actually had a nitelife! Petula Clark's wonderful 1964 recording of "Downtown" is plainly not descriptive of today's Newark. We'll get there. [Revisions to be made from here on out. Sorry for delay.]

I mentioned to the young woman that I had been unable to put up as many posts in recent months as I'd have liked, due to various concerns and the need to tend to urgent financial matters, such as staving off foreclosure on my house. Even after I had managed to get a mortgage modification I could afford, I had to take some weeks off to recover from that stressful period of uncertainty.
I also needed to sort thru HUNDREDS of fotos I continued to take during my posting downtime, and that in itself was daunting. Jeremy said that I need an assistant, and he's quite right. The main task with which I need help is indexing thousands of fotos I took after the index I did start years ago. The problem, however, is that only I would know what many hundreds of those fotos relate to.
In any case, all kidding aside as to who is responsible for Newark's resurgence, I do feel some pride of participation, but only report what I see. As for the people who have actually produced the greatest effects, I generally give the greatest credit to former, somewhat disgraced Mayor Sharpe James, who, first, brought the New Jersey Performing Arts Center to Newark and then rammed thru a great Newark Arena, now called The Prudential Center. Incoming Mayor (now U.S. Senator) Cory Booker — who is presently doing the Nation's Liberals proud — thought the Arena a wasteful project we could not afford, and vowed to stop it. But Mayor James caused dozens of vertical girders to rise from solid concrete anchorages on the site before Booker could take office, and once the project had started, it would have been extremely difficult and embarrassing for Booker to undo what James had started, and tear down what had already started to rise.
Booker later recognized his mistake aloud, and at the opening dedication of The Rock, graciously acknowledged Mayor James (who was in the dedicatory group, not yet in PRISON), saying that the Arena was a great addition to Newark, and boded well for the future of the city. I don't think anyone truly anticipated how astonishingly successful and important The Rock would become. It has been ranked 23rd in the world and 6th in the U.S. in attendance for concerts by almost any major act you care to mention. It opened with 10 concerts by Bon Jovi, and after a few years even The Boss, NJ's other great act, Bruce Springsteen, played The Rock. Better late than never.
The nickname "The Rock", which the Arena quickly acquired, came from the logo of Prudential Financial, the Rock of Gibraltar — tho that logo derived from the observation of a brilliant Prudential executive who saw Laurel Hill in the Meadowlands (just before the Turnpike exit to Newark as you go south) when it was much taller, before, astonishingly, the top was removed for gravel and other construction material — and thought of the Rock of Gibraltar as shorthand for rock-solid insurance and other Prudential products.
Between Mayor James's two great projects, Newark has seen an enormous growth in respectability, even prestige, largely obliterating former mental connections between "Newark" and "Riots", and reconnecting Newark with its natural, metropolitan hinterland across North Jersey. People from the 'burbs ( both suburbs and exurbs) ventured in to see a hockey game, rock concert, opera, performance by a major orchestra — even the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey circus, which will play some of its last dates here (why doesn't some major corporation or mega-rich individual buy that circus, tell PETA to go f* itself, put the elefants back in to fill the seats with people, and restore this grand tradition?) — and got home alive to tell about it!
So thank you, Mayor James, for giving us the tools to attract topnotch performers of many types.
The other most important contributor to the rehabilitation of Newark's reputation, and attractiveness to real-estate investors, is our extraordinarily vibrant art scene. Newark is undeniably and unassailably not just New Jersey's greatest arts star but also one of the Nation's great art centers. As a consequence, in addition to sports and music, outsiders associate Newark with glorious and diverse visual arts. I might list the major contributors to Newark's veritable Renaissance, but I dare not risk leaving somebody out! Regular readers of this blog and viewers of its multitudinous fotos of artworks will have a pretty good idea of who the movers and shakers are.
This is a great time to be a Newarker. I feel like JFK announcing his pride in a great city: "Ich bin ein Newarker."

I've got to examine the coding of this post to find out what happened to the fotos I thought I had inserted. I'll get to that when I can.

I have been attending art shows at the gallery of NJIT (the New Jersey Institute of Technology) since late 2006. When I was growing up in Middletown Township, Monmouth County (NJ, of course), there was no "NJIT", only the "Newark College of Engineering". I don't know when the overall institution changed its name, nor why, but there still is a Newark College of Engineering within NJIT. Maybe the change of name of the university (and yes, the "Institute" is a university) arose from reticence to associate the institution with "Newark" in the Bad Old Days. Or maybe, less dark-and-conspiratorially, because the people in charge of the institution wanted to broaden its scope to have it seen as the premier technical university in the State of New Jersey. But nowadays no one outside the university ever hears "Newark College of Engineering", only "NJIT".
I show today some fotos from the first art show at NJIT that I attended, in late 2006. These are left over from the fotos I used here then. I might have used some from much more recent art shows — and I have attended many — except that I have YEARS of indexing of fotos to do before I can FIND fotos specific to NJIT art exhibitions. I'm happy to be able to use these old fotos. I took them, so should use them. Alas, they are not very good (let's not say "crappy", OK?), because the camera I was working with then was not as good as the camera I use now. I was then using an Olympus camera (Japanese). The camera I use now is a GE (General Electric). Despite its American name, it might still have been made in Japan, but I'm not sure of that. In any case, my GE is a great little digital camera, which I unhappily chanced to HAVE to buy, in that my last (Olympus) was STOLEN when I had to ditch it outside City Hall when I had to pay my water bill, urgently, and the security people would not permit me to bring a camera, as such, into the building — which is ridiculous, in that they permitted cellfones with built-in cameras. I don't know how a thief managed to find and steal my Olympus, because I put it in a place that I felt no one would look, and I didn't see anyone in the vicinity watching me as I stashed it. But many thieves are more clever than wise, so steal rather than work. Kill them all! Chop them up for parts for decent people waiting for organ and tissue transplants. Win-win. The rest of us will then be safe from predation. A close friend of mine lost his father when there were no available donors for an organ transplant he needed, all the while subhuman scum lived a life of leisure at public expense in prison. This society values criminals more than decent people, and that's got to change.
If that seems unduly harsh, suffice it to say that I have lived for 72 years and seen that incarceration does not work. Think about it. We "punish" people by putting them into comfortable surroundings for which they pay nothing. They have free room and board, which means they pay no rent, buy no groceries, and do no cooking to maintain themselves. They pay nothing for heat, hot water, or electricity. They are required to do NO WORK of any significant kind, nor even attend classes to make up for educational deficiencies. Oh, maybe some of them have to peel potatoes or run a washing machine and dryer for a few hours a day. Big deal. Prison is a forced vacation. And we wonder why a very large proportion of the people released from prison do something immediately thereafter to return them to prison! Plainly we do NOT intend to end the predations of human predators upon decent people.
Would something less than death work to end criminality? How about flogging? amputation of offending hands? A significant portion of the human race is slime, and can be controlled only by draconian punishments. A society that cannot bring itself to be harsh consigns itself to be endlessly victimized by the savages among us. Ultimately, even the savages would rather become civilized than to live a wretched existence outside the bounds of civilized society. I have, in this blog, addressed crime even in my generally very good, semi-suburban neighborhood filled with middle-class and working-class black people who did everything right in life but are not safe even in their own community of other hard-working, middle-class and working-class people. I'm tired of it. I want the criminals, not the decent people, to fear for their lives. I want them to be scared damned near to death of the wrath of indignant society, which no longer accepts criminality in any degree. When I was growing up, there was, from 1956-1958, a TV show about West Point, the governmental military academy on the Hudson River not far from where my father grew up. We visited its beautiful campus. In any case, the most memorable thing about that show for me was the unison, emphatic declaration of cadets, "No excuses, SIR!" An excuse is different from an explanation. If you have a genuinely good reason for what you've done, you are entitled to articulate it. But no weasel words! (I feel a little guilty about impugning the reputation of weasels, innocent wild creatures.)
OK, boys and girls. That's enuf political preaching for today. I have looked out the window to see if my driveway is sufficiently free of snow, ice, and slush for me to take my car safely down between retaining walls at the sidewalk, and am not at all sure I can do that, so might not myself attend this evening's art-show opening reception at NJIT. Besides, my friend Jerry, with whom I attend many Newark art openings even tho he lives in Manhattan — see? I'm doing my part to promote Newark arts outside of Newark's boundaries — is not available to join me, and I am more than a little tired of attending such things alone. Yes, I do generally see people I have come to know from earlier art events. But there's a difference between acquaintances you encounter momentarily at an art show and a friend off whom you can bounce reactions, as well as discuss what's going on in your lives. I'll see how I feel as the hour draws near. But if I were a betting man — and I'm not; the closest I generally come to gambling is buying 2 lottery tickets in a given week, one for Pick 6 and the other for Mega Millions (which I always thought, until I looked it up today, was one word, but turns out to be two!). I've been opting for an annuity payout, because I dislike the idea of sacrificing a hefty chunk of the payout to get money right away. But now that I'm 72, maybe spreading out payments over 26 years isn't the wisest thing to do, esp. for a single person who has no children. I suppose I could, by my Will, assign annual payments after my demise to some worthy cause, say, a program for at-risk Newark youth or intensive rehabilitation services for felons released into Newark from state prisons. I should think about this. Or, I could just give up part of a payout by choosing the Cash option, and manage the money myself rather than trust it to others. Of course, that all depends upon winning, doesn't it? And I don't like the odds. But if the very most I ever spend on the lottery is $4 a week, for the two Pick 6 and Mega Millions draws (I stopped buying Powerball tickets when they raised the price to $2, for no additional chance to win), the little bit of fantasizing about what it would be like to win the lottery is worth the price, to me. A little fantasy about a lot of money goes a long way. For me.
To return to my narrative as to how I came by my current camera, I knew immediately upon discovering that my Olympus had been stolen, that I must always have a digital camera with me, so walked to the Radio Shack that was then — but, tragically, no longer — open in Newark's tallest building, 744 Broad Street , and looked for a new camera, whereupon I chanced upon my current, terrific and compact GE digital, which takes both stills and videos. In any case, I cannot go back in time to take pix with my GE, so the fotos I show today taken with my old Olympus will have to do.


Returning to the présent, I presént below the text of the email invitation to tonite's opening.

Guy Ciarcia – The Alchemist Series
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The College of Architecture and Design (CoAD) at NJIT is honored to present an exhibition of Guy Ciarcia’s most recent artistic endeavor…. "The Alchemist Series". This body of work contains several dozen digital drawings created using Photoshop and photo montage/collage techniques. Trained in the traditional arts, Guy borrows compositional strategies and iconography from the antiquities, the Italian Renaissance and Surrealism/Dadaism. Non-denominational religion, psychology, imagination and spiritualism are themes explored in Guy’s Alchemist series.
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"Guy Ciarcia – The Alchemist Series" will be on view to the public from Monday, February 13 through March 10, 2017 with an opening reception with the artist, live entertainment and refreshments from 5-9 pm on Monday, February 13.
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CoAD Gallery is open from 9:30 AM to 4:30 PM Monday through Friday with other times by appointment. CoAD Gallery is located on the second floor of Weston Hall, NJIT campus (on the corner of MLK Blvd. and Warren St., Newark). For more information about the exhibition, please contact the gallery director (Matthew Gosser) at: smatt_nj@yahoo.com.

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How are we to pronounce "Ciarcia"? If the name is Italian, and is pronounced in the Italian fashion, it would be chór.cha, where O stands in for what we are taught is "broad-A", as in "father. But a great many Italian names are, in the United States, anglicized, sometimes in unpredictable ways, so that artist might say his name as see.yór.see.ya or chór.see.yà or even see.yór.cha How are we to know? That's why I am a spelling reformer.

Channel 13, which was assigned to Newark but stolen by New Yorkers, is in one of its many begathons ("pledge breaks"). Neal Shapiro, President and CEO of NET, has been claiming on-air of late that channel 13 is experimenting with only two hours of pledge breaks a week, on Thursdays, but I present below screenprints of begathon programming from the listings of TVGuide.com for this Saturday and Sunday. Only two hours on Thursday? I guess Shapiro doesn't count weekends, because as you can see below, there are HOURS and HOURS of begathon programs on both Saturday and Sunday. And they're mostly crap, including medical advice that is almost certainly quackery.

I didn't trouble to print the screens for the entire 24-hour day, either day, but you get the picture. Essentially the entire schedule on Saturday and all but a few hours in the middle of the evening Sunday were taken up with Thirteen's revolting begathon programming, which is even worse than that stolen station's regular programming. Channel 13 has three stations, 13.1 (the main station), 13.2 (children's programming 24 hours a day — yes, 24-hour programming for CHILDREN; I guess Thirteen thinks that children are up all nite), and 13.3 (VeMe Spanish-language programming). During the day, BOTH 13.1 and 13.2 are given over to children's programming all day long, except for an hour and a half for Charlie Rose and Tavis Smiley. TWO stations given over entirely to children! That is supposed to be broadcasting in the public interest? I don't think so.

The remainder of Thirteen's programming is mainly British crap and music, with the occasional American news and public-affairs program, such as PBS NewsHour and Washington Week. But 13.1's schedule is dominated by British dramas, with a couple of Britcoms, as tho everything Britain produces is pure gold. It is not. Am I the only person in this country who knows that WE ARE NOT BRITISH? I have an ancestor who was a soldier in the Continental Army that threw the British bast* out of here. Newark has a distinguished statue of General Washington, under whom my ancestor served, at the corner of Broad Street and Washington Place by distinguished sculptor J. Massey Rhind. Thomas Paine worked on an early draft of "The Crisis" ("These are the times that try men's souls...") in what is now Military Park but was then called "The Training Place".

As for Newark, WNET actually had a studio in One Gateway Plaza when I moved here in June 2000, but closed that many years ago and moved all operations to Manhattan. When Superstorm Sandy hit this region, there was NO information specific to Newark or the Newark Metropolita Area broadcast on 13, just what one might infer from the conditions that WNET did broadcast about NYC. Not good enuf. The FCC scattered licenses widely across the Nation's geography to provide localities with programming important to localities, but private parties have been allowed to buy up stations in one location and move them to another. Why?

In any case, if Newark's City Government will not sue in Federal Court to have New Yorkers unhand NEWARK'S Channel 13, the only thing Newarkers can do to show their displeasure is to BOYCOTT Thirteen's "pledge drives" (begathons) and refuse to give so much as 1¢, once, much less hundreds of dollars a year as a "sustainer" who gives every month. Tell 13 to go ... elsewhere. If you managed to miss this weekend's begathon, don't be too relieved, because another will be upon us before you know it. And there's that Thursday pledge break Shapiro spoke about.

WNET is a broadcasting EMPIRE based in the Empire State, not the Garden State. Be not fooled: "NJTV" is controlled by New YORKERS, not New Jerseyans, so don't give to NJTV either. If you want to support Newark public broadcasting based in and dedicated to New Jersey, you have no option but WBGO, jazz radio  '88 FM. You can find information on supporting that worthy station online, and can listen to a live stream 24 hours a day on the Internet. That works even when you are not in your browser, so you can have the best of the world's jazz playing while you are working in your word processor or other programs. As I write, a song in Portuguese is playing in the background.

The foto just above shows BGO's HQ on Park Place in Downtown Newark. In addition to its broadcast studio, this compact building also houses art shows and permanent exhibits of jazz greats who have visited BGO. Newark is very lucky to have such a quality broadcaster on our territory, but it is no less than Newark, and our suburbs, deserve.

After a couple of months of inactivity, Gallery Aferro is roaring back with a number of events starting tonite, undaunted by our 9" of snow a couple of days ago. I, however, am stopped cold, for being snowed in. Before the snow started, I took the car up some 80' of my sloping driveway to park behind the house in order to use my back door in unloading heavy items from a trip to the supermarket. There are 16 steps from the sidewalk up to my first floor, but only two steps down from the backyard.



I was last there was early evening, October 21st. I took the pictures below on that occasion, and use them between paragrafs of Gallery Aferro's email announcement of tonite's event. My pictures relate to Gallery Aferro, but not to tonite's shows.

This Sat: Spring Reopening

This Sun: Artists @ Newark Museum  * * *

Spring Reopening with 3 new shows + reopened gift shop!
Only Home: Kevin Durkin <.i>Curated by Jacob Mandel
February 11 - April 1, 2017

Main Gallery

Respond in Kind: Jacob Mande

February 11 - April 1, 2017

Liminal Gallery

Lawless Innovation by a Timeless GenerationAlex Scott Cumming
In collaboration with Ngu Asongwed and Jasmine Mans
Activate: Market Street 11

Art Shop Featured Artists:
Kevin Durkin and Faith Ringgold

All at Gallery Aferro, 73 Market Street, Newark NJ
February 11, 7-10 PM

On the occasion of his solo exhibition, we will be offering [a] new work by Kevin Durkin in Art Shop: Two Mountains, screen print, 12x16, 2017, edition of 22

We hope to see you there. Also, there will be pierogis.



The sign shown below relates to the foto above.


Permit me to make a little suggestion to Gallery Aferro (and, indeed, to all galleries in Newark): Put an identifying logo on every sign you place by an artwork so that people who fotograf those signs can know immediately what gallery they relate to. I am surely not alone in taking lots of pictures of the signs by artworks as a visual notepad by means of which to identify what that artwork is. Having a logo in, say, the top right corner of each sign would enable us to keep track of where that artwork and sign appeared. Especially valuable would such ID's be on occasions such as Newark's annual artstravaganza, "Open Doors", when we attend more than one event in a given day.

I have started in earnest to fill in the bulk of blank dates in this blog in the past couple of months due to my being overwhelmed by other matters. I have some 57 foto albums on Google Photos, comprising over 13,000 pix of Newark and its environs that only I can see, so have decided to make those fotos accessible to readers of this blog.

Today's post will serve as guide to all those albums. As I add a new album, I will note that in the text below, as NEW:, and then post a link to the album newly made accessible to outsiders.  If I manage to get myself together and put up other posts about other matters, I will MOVE this post ahead of any such post, and place a notation such as "To see the guide to my albums on Google Photos, click here." That is not yet a link, however, because this is the post that will serve as that guide. Now, the index to those albums, with clickable links. There are, at present, only two such albums on offer.
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[Part 1] My "Portraits" Album.
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Google Albums, Part 2:  Branch Brook Park (stored to September 30th).

On November 17th, I estimated that I might have placed in this blog some 10,000 fotos.  Then, I went to Google Fotos, the hugely inferior successor to Google Picasa Web Albums, and added up the 57 albums of fotos that I have stored to Google Photos. Assuming I added things up correctly, I have used ABOUT 12,343 pix in this fotoblog since I started it in June 2004. That counts only the fotos I have put online. I have taken a great many other fotos that I have not (yet) put online, probably more than twice as many. (By the way, have you noticed that the word "twice" has vanished from the English language as used in media, and esp. commercials? Everything is now "two times" or "2x". I don't know why advertisers now hate the word "twice", and have banished it from TV, but it's gone. Not for me, it's not.)
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I have been hung up in trying to finalize an extremely long and complicated post about my experiences in this year's "Open Doors" artstravaganza in October. So I have decided to put up 57 posts to show the 12,343 fotos I have placed in "the cloud" for people who would like to see them. What, after all, is the point of having fotos online if no one knows how to get to them?


I'm starting with my "Portraits" album, because I added to it during this year's Open Doors event. Click above to go to that album's fotos. The preponderance, tho not every single one, of those fotos are of Newark artists. Once you are at that album, you can click on the three vertical dots at top right to select "Slideshow", whereupon you can sit back and watch the parade of 614 fotos, that show you the richness and depth of Newark arts.
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Not every foto shows an artist. My definition of "portrait" for this purpose is a foto of a particular, identifiable person, so, scattered among the fotos of artists active in Newark, are some pictures of 'civilians' in which you can see people from Newark and its suburbs who are engaged in Newark arts.
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I will be creating a post in which I index all of the 56 other albums, with clickable links. But not today.