'Tipsy'

This is the time of year when my evergreens throw new growth, much lyter in color than old, from the tips of twigs, which produces quite a contrast. Here is the view from my home office (third floor of my three-story house) of one area of my very tall spruce(?) tree, the top 20 feet or so of which was broken off by Superstorm Sandy.


And here is a view down to a very large, spreading yew, which has even more extensive lite-green tips.


I have a lot of evergreens in the four small yards all around my house, including English ivy that is bit by bit taking over much of the yard and climbing trees (as you can see on the trunk of the spruce shown above); a boxwood shrub at the front left corner of my front yard; several azaleas; one surviving rhododendron; and a mass of bamboo perhaps 15 feet tall that survives winter's cold. There is thus always something green in some part of my property, which brings some cheer even in the worst of winter. In springtime, when lite-green shoots appear, they briten not just the tree or shrub but also my mood.

Bears' Home-Game Season Opener

Long post, some 2,500 words, with 32 fotos.

The Newark Bears minor-league professional baseball team has its season-opening home game this evening at 7:05pm, followed by fireworks. The last game I attended was the home opener in May 2011, from which I show pix today.


There were mounted policemen to provide security and atmosfere.


Kids esp. liked the horsies, but I'm pretty fond of horsies myself. At least my older sister and I took horseback riding lessons in the Leonardo section of Middletown Township (Monmouth County) when we lived there in the mid-1950s. But the last time I went horseback riding was in the Breckenridge area of Colorado in the early 80s (I think). I don't know that I can ride anymore, after my knee surgeries, or if the bowing (bóe.wing) around the horse would cause problems.


There are, in any case, no riding stables in Newark, so I don't have to test. Horseback riding in one or more of our major parks is something for the city's boosters to think about: for-rent horses and a bridle path. Anything that can distinguish Newark, in a good way, from other cities in the region would help us promote tourism.


Also outside the Stadium were this police motorcycle and boat.


A man dressed as Batman was also in attendance. This foto shows him with some NPD officers. (A gentleman I met that day took this foto and sent it to me. I told him I would credit him, but don't know what I did with that email, so don't have the name to show. If he sees this, I ask him to contact me so I can give him that credit. For the time being, I am copyrighting it in my name to preserve a copyright, and will change that notice to show his name once I hear from him.)

Foto courtesy of and © L. Craig Schoonmaker 2013.

I showed other pix of Batman, and the Batmobile, on November 3, 2011.
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Gaetano treated me to the game, and we met outside Bears & Eagles Riverfront Stadium, which is between Broad Street and McCarter Highway, by the Passaic River.


That 2011 home opener was in the morning, so the festivities were presumably much more elaborate than they will be tonite.


Several Newark Public Schools bused kids in (note the familiar yellow school buses above), presumably for free admission. That at once gave the kids a treat, worked to give them a feeling of connection to the team (so the Bears might build a loyal following among the young), and gave the stands a more-occupied look than they would otherwise have. Attendance at Bears games has been miserable for years, and the current owners just don't seem to know how to bring more fans to the Stadium. Part of it has to do with the fact that this minor league is independent, and has no "farm teams" from major-league franchises. Still, the current league has an interesting geograffic spread: Rockland [NYState] Boulders, Québec [City] Les Capitales, Trois-Rivières [Province of Québec] Aigles, Grand Prairie [Texas] Airhogs, Laredo [Texas] Lemurs, New Jersey Jackals [Little Falls], Wichita [Kansas] Wingnuts, Fargo-Moorhead [North Dakota] RedHawks, and Amarillo [Texas] Sox. (I thought the absence of a color before "Sox" odd — until I realized that "amarillo" is a color: yellow, in Spanish.)


I don't understand, frankly, why Newarkers feel so little attachment to the Bears and spend so little time in that splendid Stadium, with its great, green lawn and terrific views of near-in skyscrapers. I have had a number of emails from Frank McCree, a frequent reader who has provided some statistics to indicate how bad things are as regards attendance at the Stadium, and I plan to address that issue soon.


Before the game began (in 2011), the schoolkids were allowed to go down onto the field and see things from a perspective they would not otherwise get.




Gaetano and I did not test whether adults could also go down onto the field.

The Stadium is in the northern portion of the Downtown Broad Street corridor, the area to which the IDT building is central. This foto shows the Gateway Center area, which is separated from the Stadium area by a stretch of parks and low-rise buildings. Note the gray drawbridge that carries trains over the Passaic River from Newark Penn Station eastward.

In this picture, you can see some of the kids, but also the picnic-style tables at which you can eat the refreshments available from various concessions while not missing a minute of the game. I have eaten there, and it is exceeding pleasant.


While the kids were wandering, groundskeepers tended to last-minute preparations for the game. Here, some mechanical device supplements the manual work of another man.


And here, the man hoses down the exposed ground (to hold down dust?).


You can see the magnificent results of the great care these groundsmen provide. This vast lawn contrasts with the highrise buildings of the Downtown business district's southern (Gateway) area, at left, and northern (IDT) area, right (did I really have to say "right"? or did my mention of "left" before, compel the conclusion that the second area mentioned was at the right? Is "right" really redundant, superfluous, or annoying, or just reassuring? These are issues that writers must contend with all the time. Do we say too much and annoy people for essentially repeating ourselves? Or is a certan amount of repetition actually essential?). Few ballparks have so close-in a setting to a major city.


Unfortunately, not all parts of the Stadium are as well tended as the lawn. Here you can see that letters are missing from the names of two Newark players who went on to the major leagues, Ray Dandridge and Larry Doby. I am told that those letters are still missing, two years after I took the foto below. Why?


Numerous local public officials took to the infield (mostly in business clothes, not team uniforms), including the two most important, Essex County Executive Joseph DiVincenzo and Newark's Mayor Cory Booker (you can decide for yourself who is more important).


Booker did wear a (modified?) Bears 'jersey' top rather than jacket, but his dress shirt and tie were under it.


Booker graciously agreed to pose for pix with fans.


Various reporters, fotografers, and videografers were in attendance.

Note the blue-gray drawbridge in the background, which carries traffic on Interstate 280 over the Passaic River.

Among the fotografers was Gary Barat (like "Barrett"), a principal of the Barat Foundation, which uses the arts to help bring out the best in young people. I introduced Gaetano and Gary, then Gary went on his way to take more pix.

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Sidebar. I learned by email notice from the Foundation yesterday that Gary's wife, Chandri, and dauter Athena, were (jointly?) awarded the honor of "Garden State Woman of the Year 2013" by the Women's Center for Entrepreneurship Corporation, in a ceremony in the Fairleigh Dickinson Mansion May 15th. Congrats!
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The Foundation recently installed two sea-lion "Animodules" at the Turtle Back Zoo in West Orange to celebrate the return of sea lions to the Zoo. At the dedication of those animodules, Chandri (Executive Director of the Foundation), was, alas, fotograffed with Governor Christie. I suppose avoiding such a thing is hard in such a circumstance, but I wouldn't want to be seen in a picture with Christie. "Animodules" are explained at a slitely out-of-date webpage at the Barat Foundation's website, which refers to the third year of the Arts Parade, when that Parade has marched for four years. Regular readers of this blog will have seen many pictures of animodules, in the Parade, in Washington Park, in Barat Foundation HQ, and other places. Now there are two on permanent(?) display in the Turtle Back Zoo. I must get there sometime.

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In the foto above you can see the relaxed sort-of uniforms that at least some Newark schools now require. I highly disapprove of school uniforms and the regimentation they bespeak, but many people argue that they keep kids from imposing on their families to spend outlandish amounts on expensive clothes and shoes, and work to minimize robbery of students by people eager to relieve them of their fancy shoes.


Here, the Newark Fire Department had an information/recruiting table. I have great respect for firemen, and the NFD is a fully professional department that works out of a number of historic firehouses of distinguished architecture. The Newark Museum includes a Fire Museum in a small building separate from the main Museum, alongside the sculpture garden. Each June, Washington Street from Central Avenue to Broad Street is closed for an "Antique Fire Apparatus, Muster and Parade" that draws equipment from numerous fire departments and private owners from all over North and Central Jersey. I showed the 44th annual event here on July 9, 2011. The 46th is to take place on Sunday, June 2nd, 12 noon-3pm. In 2011, the NJ Hall of Fame induction ceremony was held at NJPAC on the same day as the Fire Muster, so that was a very good time to be in Downtown Newark, which is largely deserted on Sunday afternoon, even in fine weather. This year, however, the June 8th induction ceremony was canceled because of a government reorganization, which seems odd, in that I thought the HoF was a private organization.


The fence around the ballfield has, in more prosperous times, been lined with ads. Now, the space where no ads appear is covered by brick-patterned paper. Perhaps when the economy recovers fully, large areas that now look like a brick wall will instead be plastered over with advertisements. Is that an improvement?


Here is the Bears' dugout. You can see some of the players and their understated uniforms that year. I think there was more red in prior years' uniforms.


Cheerleaders and entertainers perform on the roof of the Bears' dugout, facing the crowd. I suppose that produces some racket over the players, but don't know how well insulated against sound that roof is. The noise is, in any case, part of the excitement of the game, and may help the players stay 'up' for the game.


Here is a closer view of some of the performers.


During breaks, cheerleaders, some very young, did routines close to the crowd on the grass alongside the path to first base.


Bears games are more than baseball games. There are occasional breaks in the action in which things like hobby-horse and sumo-costumed races take place to engage the children. I find that to be somewhere between charming and so-cute!, not all deadly-earnest athletic competition by paid combatants.


Park admission is only $10. And for that, several nites per season, you get fireworks! (I took this foto after a game in May 2007 of the fireworks over the scoreboard area.)

Blocked Murals

On April 21st, I showed as the fifth foto that day a picture of two murals that the new Mormon Church on Orange Street at Burnet Street now blocks. I didn't remember where I had put my fotos of those murals, but ran across two of them when I was looking for fotos to use in connection with a post about the Newark Bears' home opener this coming Friday. Here's the wider view.


And here's a slitely closer view. I couldn't do a real closeup then, because there was a fence in the way.


I thought I had taken closeup shots of these murals, but didn't know when and did not index them. In looking thru such fotos as I did index, thru Windows Photo Gallery, I found another mural that has since been hidden behind new construction. This was on the west, outer wall of the Prudential Center before the Courtyard at Marriott Hotel was built, which now blocks it. I must check my fotos of that building in early stages of construction to see if they were removed before the hotel was built.
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I have not yet shown the progress pix I took of the hotel during various stages of construction, because I have not yet taken pix of the completed structure. Parking in that area is hard to find, and I haven't been to that vicinity by public transportation since the building was completed. In any case, here is that mural. Or perhaps the three panels should be considered three murals, perhaps on some kind of mural cloth that made it possible to move them.


After much difficulty, I did find fotos of other graffiti-style murals in the same vicinity as the Mormon Church, but they are not the same. I found them in a "Used" directory, but I don't find any blogpost in which I might have used them, so perhaps I moved them in anticipation of a use that did not materialize. This bears further investigation. But not today.
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Perhaps we should be glad that there is new construction in the city to block old murals. But it seems to me a little sad that we could not have both established murals and new construction that don't interfere with each other.

Robeson Satellite Gallery Shows

I discussed the current exhibition in the Main Gallery of the Rutgers-Newark Robeson Campus Center, on May 6th. It closes this Thursday at 5pm.


While I was in Robeson, I checked out the satellite galleries briefly, starting with the Nova Gallery (above) just outside the entrance to the Main Gallery. These satellite galleries are all open as long as the Campus Center is open.


Then I walked to the Pequod Deck down the hall and alongside the Starbucks. There were two walls in that small display, above and below.


This sign explains the exhibit.


Above a seating area of the Starbucks in the vicinity of the Pequod Deck is this mural, which does not appear to be part of the Pequod Deck exhibition but is striking nonetheless.


Then I went up to the MLK Boulevard level (2d floor) to the Orbit Galleries. I came to Orbit II first, which holds a few fine works by the distinguished painter Ben Georgia, who was born in Jersey City.


Two more are a bit down the hall, sharing a bench.


And this other has its own bench.


I didn't see a plak describing the exhibit, but found this info on the Robeson Galleries website.

“Primary Essences: Ben Georgia” Jan 22 – June 4, 2013

For painter Ben Georgia, abstraction offers the possibility of a fresh mode of communication. Georgia seeks a language that surpasses representation and the fleeting concerns of the moment, reaching towards expressing the emotional depths of human experience. Georgia writes, "I work to create something on the canvas which is not of this concrete, external world, and [and?]imaginary vision which I see from the start on the blank, white canvas and where the beauty and strength of the painting compensate for and counteract the tragedy and decay of life." Ben Georgia is a New Jersey native who attended Rutgers Newark in the 1960s. His work has been exhibited in dozens of exhibitions in the nearly thirty years of his professional artistic practice, and can be found in many public and private collections throughout the United States, Europe, and Hong Kong.

I wondered if "primary" in the exhibition title referred to "primary colors", but the article on that subject in Wikipedia suggests it does not, since that term refers to either red, green, and blue, or cyan, magenta, and yellow. Georgia uses bold, uncomplicated colors in strong blocks. Very handsome works in this group, I think.
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Walking further, I found Orbit Gallery I, which contains a few works whose creator I knew immediately, since I had seen a number of his works at Solo(s) Project House. In fact, I might have seen this very one, or something very like it, at Solo(s).


Here's the sign (or label, or plak) explaining this show.


And here are the other two large paintings.


There is more art on the walls of various hallways in the Campus Center, but without plaks.


An "urban campus" might conjure, in some people's minds, images of grimy, graffiti-covered walls, bad and broken liting, cracked plaster, and other ravages of neglect. Not so Rutgers-Newark, which is urban in all the best senses: cultured, refined, and busy but with landscaped areas of peace and sociability.

PSE&G Arrogance and Inefficiency

I had a matter relating to my electric and gas bill that I needed to talk to someone about. I foned the number on the bill, and was connected to an INSANE and ABUSIVE set of menus that would not permit me to speak to an actual person. Round and round we went, with this dopy female voice refusing to let me speak to someone, but repeating information I had already heard. Pressing 0 (zero), which in some menu systems will send you to a human being, did not work. I then said something like "I need to speak to someone" more than once in 20 seconds. The menu system theretofore had said, when I said that only once, 'I understand that you would like to speak to someone' but then went on to say, 'Many questions can be handled by our automated system', and then refused to send me to a person. When I refused to listen to that repeated, shunting language but interrupted to say "I must [or "need to"] speak to someone", the automated system FINALLY sent me to a queue to wait to speak to an actual human being. That is insanely abusive, and should be forbidden by the NJ Board of Public Utilities.

This foto, taken in or before 2004 (my records aren't clear; that's a long time ago, and I'm not sure that "EXIF Information" (which shows the date a foto was taken) was even stored to digital cameras in that day; it assuredly does not appear in my early fotos, even tho Wikipedia says that EXIF information started to be recorded in 1998), shows the view of Downtown Newark from the Jackson Street Bridge over the Passaic River to Harrison, shortly after dawn, when the very-low sun turns the reflective PSE&G Building golden. I mentioned this in connection with a small painting by Ian Costello in Rutgers-Newark's Senior Fine Art Exhibition. Other fotos today are also old, and mostly small, in that when I first started putting fotos into blogposts, the camera with which I took fotos did not have high resolution or I was loath to put big fotos online, because of low-bandwidth issues. Sometimes I take reserve fotos of things I expect to talk about frequently into the future, but the PSE&G Building was not one of the objects I expected to speak of often, so I did not accumulate a stash of fotos to call up whenever I mentioned PSE&G. Perhaps I should increase the list of such sights, which has heretofore included, for instance, the Newark Museum, Newark Public Library, and Cathedral Basilica of the Sacred Heart. Pix taken long in advance of my use of a given foto would in essence be "stock fotos" rather than pix specific to a given post. I don't think, however, that there is any ethical dilemma in using such fotos.

I made a payment arrangement with that human being once I had clarified why my bill was absurdly high. She said I had received estimated bills for the two prior months, and a bill from an actual reading only in the third month. But why, I asked the pleasant woman (Linda? Glenda?) I spoke with, should I ever receive an estimated bill, when PSE&G now has equipment within trucks by means of which a meter reader need merely drive down the street to remotely read all the meters along the way? She said that yes, (some) meter readers have such equipment, but if (for some unspecified reason), the employee was called off his route, he would not thereafter return to where he left off, but issue an estimated reading! How DARE they?
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For what reason would a meter reader ever be called off his (or her) route? And why WOULDN'T s/he return on a later date to where s/he left off? That is inexcusable.


Once I had made my payment arrangement, I called (after my payment to Visa had cleared) a number given to me by the automated system by which I could pay the start amount by credit card. Again I was connected to a defective menu system — AND told that I would have to pay $3.95 to use that abusive system! I didn't have quite enuf money in my Visa account to pay the full required amount, but was within $6 of it.
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I went thru the process of paying by Visa credit card THREE TIMES, encountering problems along the way. For one thing, my cellfone permits only so many numbers to be entered into its memory before it just stops transmitting further numbers, so, in that the PSE&G system asked for many, many digits, I would have to clear many digits along the way in order to proceed. Twice I got the message, "I don't understand what you entered" followed not by "Please try again" but "Please call back later"! Huh? I have to make a whole new call and go thru all those menus again to make my payment? Hey, I'm paying YOU. You're not paying ME to go thru all this b.s.


Once I finally found a way to make that payment, I had to call a different number to report the confirmation number of that payment, but there was, even after I said "I need to speak to someone" twice within 20 seconds to be put into a queue to speak to a human being, a wait time of 33 minutes! The system did, thankfully, afford me the opportunity to request a callback, which I did, and was told someone would call in 32 minutes.
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True to their word, PSE&G did have a (polite) man call me exactly on time, or even a minute early. I gave him the confirmation number I got for my payment. It took nine minutes, however, for him to check that out and decide what to do, which is to roll in the $5.67 shortfall into the remaining payment-arrangement payments rather than have me make that additional payment now. And everything was copacetic.


My issue is not with the PEOPLE I spoke with, who were polite, even cordial, and sensitively accommodating, but the crazy and circular set of menus you get when you try to contact PSE&G by fone. How much money are they saving by not just connecting us to a human operator who can then, intelligently and efficiently, direct our call to the appropriate department? How many jobs is PSE&G stealing from hardworking New Jerseyans in order to give customers unbearably abusive, prerecorded "service"? And how can any executive justify such rude, abusive, and INEFFICIENT service to customers? Come on, PSE&G, you can do much better than this. "Pennywise and pound foolish" must not be the working motto of New Jersey's largest utility, based in Newark.
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People are just SO much more efficient than the mechanisms available today. Yes, a machine can record the account number and verify our call-in number in preparation for our speaking to a human being. But beyond that, mechanisms are in large part HUGELY inefficient. A public utility has no competition, so might think it doesn't need to be considerate of "customers" (captives). I would remind the executives of all utilities of what happened to the most arrogant of all public utilities, "Ma Bell" (AT&T), which we BROKE UP into many competing and mutually hostile smaller companies. Do we have to do the same to PSE&G, JCP&L, and any other utility that may exist within the State of NJ?
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Make no mistake, executives of NJ's utilities: we assuredly CAN just take over your companies and operate them in the public interest, throwing you out of work, with no "golden parachute" float to the ground. Further, the State of NJ, on taking over any abusive utility, can void every single contract that insulates executives from retribution for abuse, then prosecute them and even send them to PRISON for their misdeeds. Indeed, the State can even hold culpable the lawyers who write abusive "contracts". So don't pretend that you can play tuf with us, because we can not only crush you as regards your public reputation but also send you to PRISON, any time we want. If you have seen any of the "Scared Straight" documentaries or shorts, you might not want to go to Rahway.