Great Day / Trip

This was one of those magnificent spring days that is just about perfect, brilliantly sunny but cool. Were it in the fall, today would have been called "crisp", and we'd be dreading the freeze to come. But it's spring, and things can only get better even than this wonderful day. If you had things to do and places to be, out of the house, this was an ideal time to tend to them.

One of the things I needed to do out of the house was take this picture of wisteria on the wrought-iron fence that separates my front and side yards.

I decided yesterday I wanted to get pix of the Great Falls of the Passaic (River, that is; Newark's river) in Paterson, as part of an occasional series of posts about things to see a short hop from here. Newark is a great place in itself, but there are hosts of wonderful places within striking distance in all directions because of Newark's centrality. We are almost exactly at the center of Megalopolis, so there is of course a lot to see from the middle of a complex of 55 million people. A short ride west of the Northeast Corridor, however, and you're in wide open spaces, where nature obliterates all sense of being in one of the most populous regions of the entire planet.

Yes, that is part of New Jersey, the most densely populated state in the Union. Up on Garret Mountain above Paterson, you can see the cars on I-80 (out of frame of this picture; I have them in other pix), which look like tiny models on a Hotwheels track, and the buildings in Downtown Paterson, and all the way over to highrise apartment buildings in Fort Lee, but that's not what impresses. The gentle mountains passing into the distance connect you with the planet on which people and all their works are just the tiniest coating of dust. You can hear the traffic on I-80, but it's not so loud as to intrude upon a reverie. No, this is not the astonishing, consuming silence I heard, as for the first time, at the Grand Canyon, when I looked out over the abyss to the far side of that great emptiness, and heard NOTHING. But it's pretty serene nonetheless. Certainly the view is expansive, and it opens the soul.

I didn't get the urge to head to the Great Falls on our river until early afternoon yesterday, and realized that by the time I could get myself together and out to Paterson, the Falls would be mostly in shade, since they face east. I had been there once before, late in the day, and did not want to repeat that mistake. So I listened to the weather forecast and when I heard it would be sunny today, I forced myself to go to sleep early last nite. Several things that I needed to do before I left, expected and unexpected, delayed me. One tire needed reinflation by the compressor I bought from Auto Zone on Springfield Avenue, that plugs into the cigaret lighter of my car that would never be used were it not for refilling tires and recharging my cellphone. Still, I got underway in time to get to the Falls before the sun had moved too far behind them. I had to take the Parkway to get there quickly, but afterward I dead-reckoned my way home on local, more scenic roads. You may not appreciate how much you rely upon the sun to find your way around, but on a sunny day when you're trying to get from Paterson to Newark thru areas you don't know, it is an enormous aid to see the sun and know that if it's X o'clock, the sun is south/west.

The Parkway is one of the prettiest superhighways to be found anywhere (did you know that "freeway" originally referred only to freedom from cross-traffic and stop lites, not from tolls?), but it's still not really scenic in North Jersey. In 'my area' (that is, where I went to high school, Monmouth County) and farther south, taking the Parkway is indeed like driving thru a park, but that becomes a little dull after a while.

By the way, I am hostile to the recent reduction in speed limit to 55mph on a stretch of the Parkway that had a 65mph limit until a few weeks ago. The excuse, that the change is intended to save lives, is patently false. It seems actually to be intended to bring in revenue to the financially strapped State government thru speeding tickets handed out by the bushel basket. We could eliminate essentially all traffic deaths if we lowered the speed limit to 10 miles per hour, everywhere in New Jersey. If we care so deeply about saving lives, why not do that, and have zero traffic deaths?)

Lambert Castle on side of Garret Mountain, Paterson, NJ

All in all, I traveled 40 miles and took 197 fotos (I must be stopped!) in Paterson (for the most part) and Newark. In lite of my experience the last time I had over 150 fotos to process thru my graffics program, I have adjusted downward the estimate as to how long it takes to fix a typical pic, from 4 minutes to more like 3. Still, I have almost 10 hours of foto-fixing ahead, and offer only samples today of what is to come. Tune in tomorrow (organ music swells) for the continuing story of Newark USA.

When I got back to Newark, I wanted to check out something Gaetano sent me a link to, a picture of the Lake in Branch Brook Park near the lions that showed a fountain in the middle of the lake. There was no such thing last year, so I wondered if this was new or the picture was very old. It's all new.

Fabulous but Fake. The foto of the lion and fountain above is as it came out intensified by my graffics program's auto settings. The next foto shows it as it turned out when I tried manually to make it look as it appeared to me. But what the scene actually looked like is somewhere between the two. I know that there is an expression, "The camera doesn't lie", but that expression is wrong.

Not Fake. I saw at least one, and possibly two herons today, in Newark. I zoomed in on this first from the near shore of the lake. The bird was on the far shore, and I think I must have gone into digital zoom, because the picture is not as clear as I'd expect it to be in optical zoom.

This next picture shows at once the smaller fountain (two were restored), at the southern end of the Park, and a heron on the far right (either a different one or the same, athletic heron that flew 2,000 feet or so to get there before I could walk there).

I had such a good day today that I taunted my sibs (in Texas, Nevada, and California) with some pix and this closing note:

I hope you all had a good day too, but how good could it be? You don't live in Newark, nor even New Jersey anymore.

Large fountain in the middle of the lake within Branch Brook Park near Cathedral, backlit by late sun, April 30, 2008.

SO good a day did I have, indeed, that I waxed poetic — helped, I readily confess, by a little rum and Coke at the end of a strenuous day.

I fotograf what there is to see, but aspire to more, what I hope will be. So please indulge me now — in Whitmanesquerie. (I have been attacked in print for supposedly imitating rather than merely emulating Walt Whitman in one my few attempts at poetry — a work that someone else, not I, selected for a printed compilation — so I'll rest content in expressing myself, no matter what others may think (or feel):

O land of cherry bloom and brick built high,
O favored place in garden state,
Of heron, duck, squirrel, and jay,
Folk of skin so varied, fine,
At peace in Nature's deft attire.

This New Work, on beauteous Earth.
Our Home,
Our Trust,
Our favored, blessèd Hope.
Our Promise to ourselves and all those yet to be:

Newark.

Gallery Aferro Shows

(Very long post, with 39 fotos.)

Gallery Aferro had an opening reception for three shows the evening of Saturday, April 19th. I met Lisa outside the Gallery. She was coming from two video-game events at two colleges, Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken (from which one of my brothers graduated with a B.S., you should pardon the expression, in Electrical Engineering) and one at NJIT. I came directly from Vailsburg. (Speaking of B.S., perhaps you've heard that Stevens was originally to be called "Stevens Hoboken Institute of Technology", but the abbreviation didn't look right on the sweatshirt. Old joke, I know, but new to anyone who never heard it.) I figured we'd arrive around the same time, and just as I was about to enter the Gallery, I saw her rounding the corner from Washington Street. Good timing.
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As we entered the Gallery, the first thing to see was this great big circle made from wooden ladders. (Back Track by Brian Wondergem, $5,000).

Alongside it, even farther forward on the front platform was this wooden wheeled bicycle (Bike Rack/Ghost Rider, Brian Wondergem, $3,500).

I put on my best Archie Bunker/Luddite demeanor and remarked that this was a hell of a waste of ladders and a bike. Lisa was not amused. We proceeded inside. Near the front of the inner space were these two works by Stephanie Standish (left: This Side Up, $75; right: Mistake Series 2, $150).

We proceeded down the left (western) wall to the back, where we checked out this computer flash animation, When I Was President by Alan Bigelow ("NFS", which I take to mean "Not For Sale"). My camera struggled with auto-exposure and autofocus with videos, and I know of no manual override. In this first view, you see the opening screen, which shows the White House behind the title. As you move your cursor to a circled letter of the word "PRESIDENT", it enlarges. Click on it, and some further text comes up. Here, Lisa's hand is on the mouse. She read the text aloud, which was very helpful because my attention was diverted to lining up other pix.

The text tells, in past tense, a fable about the Presidency of the artist and the kinds of things he worked to accomplish, typified by a key word written large. Cute, with a twist at the end.

In the middle of the room near the Bigelow piece was another large work by Brian Wondergem, a rope ladder between wood ladders (No Return, $5,000). I had to wait a bit at times to try to exclude recognizable people, since I didn't want to show them against their will here. But this was not always easy, because this was the best-attended event at Gallery Aferro I've ever been to.

You can see in the foto above paired computers on a table against the eastern wall. On them was playing Robert Ladislas Derr's two-channel video (7 minutes, "POR", which I take to mean "Price On Request"). On this first monitor appears a young man, seen from behind, banging his head against a wall.

On the far monitor you can see his head breaking thru the wall. Not all of us manage to break thru the walls we bang our heads against. Congrats. Have an aspirin. I suppose the artist owes this success to his hardheaded approach to art. And to wallboard rather than brick.

The front of the east wall on the first floor was given over to Pieces of Sky by Tracie Lee ("36 groups of 7 consecutive paintings, $700/group"). In the foto below you can see the front desk at which you can pick up a 4-page price list with the names and descriptions of the works on view.

That gives you a fair idea of what's on the first floor, tho I certainly did not show everything. We then headed to the second floor via a long stairway. The second floor holds two exhibits, Kevin Darmanie's sophisticated-cartoon art and a group show of physical and electronic pieces.

This assemblage (Colcha, by Doris Caçoilo, POR) comprises a number of elements, chief of which are two crocheted hangings.

Between the two hanging fabrics is this booklet. I don't know if the little shelf that holds the booklet and some cards with the piece's name was hung for this work or the artist merely took advantage of an existing structure on the wall.

Nor do I know if "Colcha" is the same to the artist as dialectal "culcha" for "culture". In trying to induce Gaetano to meet me at Gallery Aferro, I urged him to get some culcha and said, "One of the shows is cartoons. You like cartoons, don't you?" He commented that his life is a cartoon, and didn't show up. [Update: Emma Wilcox advises: "I wanted to mention that according to the artist, Doris Caçoilo, "colcha" is a Portuguese word for a bedspread or an outer covering, usually decorative, for a bed. http://thecolchaproject.org/"]

In the overview above of the Networked end of the room, you can see what appeared to me to be a lace hanging. I found it to be very different when I got up close to it (Beatrice Coron's ElectriCity, I believe, "cut tykek (should that be tyvek?), POR), but had enormous trouble trying to show exactly what it is. Here, I used existing lite, which produced this picture, that shows that it is dark material cut away to show little figures. But the actual figures tend to blur into the background.

I turned on flash and tried again. This time, the material reflected too much lite but you begin to see that there are a whole bunch of tiny figures on a grid of concentric circles held together by spokes. Again, this does not do justice to the piece.

So I processed the second picture in my graphics program to produce a negative, b&w image and zoom in on the clearest portion. I find it an amazingly detailed and fascinating work.

Self-Portrait. Thanks to a little magic by Queens artist Visakh Menon's Self Portrait Abstractor (2007, POR), I was able to take a partial picture of myself as generated by computer.

In case this foto did not turn out, Visakh (if I may be so bold) made a screen capture of that for me. That's what his hand is doing in the foto below.

Let me 'splain. The artwork comprises a videocamera and projector attached to the computer. The glaring lite is needed to illuminate the person to be shown, who stands in front of the keyboard. The subject then clicks the mouse and a geometric shape (rectangle, triangle, circle/ellipse) selected randomly by the computer as to shape and size, flies onto the monitor and becomes a little window thru which you can see part of the video image. You keep clicking and trying to arrange where you want the next bit of the picture to appear, tho sometimes it pops up at a point other than where the mouse pointer sits. It's like soaped-up windows being stripped of the soap so you can see thru the window, except that here you poke geometric holes thru the blackness to reveal your own image. Very cute. And if you are lovely, as am I, you end up with a wonderful picture before you (of you). Here's the screen capture, which Visakh sent me by email.

Lisa and I chatted a bit with Visakh and a friend of his (also originally from India) who had come from New York to see the show, and it occurred to me only on the following day that I hadn't inquired as to other artists who were present that nite. Perhaps they should have done something like the Newark Museum did with the opening reception for its Indian fotografy show, put purple ribbons (or, better, nametags) on the artists who were present so we might talk to them about their works. Perhaps Emma and Evonne didn't want us bothering them.

The other end of the second floor was wholly occupied by Kevin Darmanie's one-man show. When I arrived, Emma warned me that Kevin had stepped out. He was still missing after more than an hour, and Evonne said he had been up all nite so might have gone home to rest his eyes, but might not wake until morning, missing much of his own show. He did, however, come back after about 9pm, and appears to the right of the title above, speaking to a man who very much liked his work. The following view shows Kevin's entire end of the second floor. The foto seems fuzzier than it is, because the dratted people are moving.

This next piece is one of two that Kevin finished only that very day (Rejection!, $900). He said he'd been up for four days trying to get some new materials ready and to select some older materials to go with them. But this show is entirely different from the one in Jersey City last month.

I don't think Kevin needs to worry about rejection.

You can't see it for the people reading the texts, but this next work (This Is Why People Believe In God!, $900) has a giant "Thoom" at the base, pair to "Boom" above (also $900). The drawings may seem simple, but they have a lot of detail and texts that make a philosophical statement. You really need to read the internal captions.

I asked Kevin if he had a favorite work in the show. He said he liked the monkey wall, for one, but didn't have a single favorite piece, no.

In the assemblage of distinct pieces below, I took the black platform as part of the work and would never think to step onto it to get a closer look at the extensive texts written small on some of the individual drawings. Later on I saw footprints on the covering, so other people did not perceive it so. As a little boy, I was taught not to step on or touch things like that. The child is father to the man, and here I am 63 years old and still behaving like a respectful little boy. I blame the parents.

Here's a closer view of one of the works above. I think it is The Mask (ink on paper, NFS), which is described as a "work in progress". Note that one balloon has no lettering in it yet. I suppose that once it's complete, Kevin will offer it for sale.

The largest work is a "site specific arcylic" mural, Thank God For The Crate (POR), in front of which are some benches for people to rest and appreciate the intricacies.

As I was lining up a shot of a key part of the mural that explains the physical crate nearby, a young man walked by in loose shorts. I was going to delete that foto but decided to look at it at full size, whereupon it struck me that the rectangles in the pattern of the cloth echoed the rectangles in the drawing, so the pants were like urban camouflage gear, which might help the wearer blend into brick or brownstone walls better than would solid-color pants.

This foto shows the name of the mural, as well as the summary of its overall message.

The crate shown and discussed in the mural is represented in three dimensions nearby.

I asked Kevin if he had ever been inside the crate other than to put the furnishings into it. He said yes, he'd sat in it to get a sense of what he was portraying. He didn't see what was coming. I asked if he'd be willing to sit inside for a picture. He was a little surprised, but played along. What a good guy!

Now that he's done with the crate, he can let it go (POR).

I don't know if the hand-printing in Gaetano's cartoon life is as careful as Kevin's printing in these many works. I complimented him on his neatness, and said he got fewer words wrong (my older sister and I go thru the world proofreading). But unless I'm mistaken, something's missing from this balloon:

Speaking of balloons, at the base of the stairway up to 2 appears this cluster of helium balloons in gold and silver mylar. On descending the stairs after reviewing the second-floor shows, I saw a young woman taking close pix of the balloons (that's her elbow in the first foto below). Only on looking more closely at what she might be fotograffing, did I notice that the balloons each bore a line of text. They were not just decorations for the opening but an artwork (Suspended Sentence by Darren Jones, POR). Helium balloon is an evanescent medium, since no matter how tite you may think the seal, the gas inevitably escapes, presumably thru the seal rather than past the mylar membrane. But you can refill balloons, with helium or air.

The balloons were reflective, so I got another picture of myself, tho I didn't realize it until I reviewed the pix in my graphics program. In this closeup, you can see, in the rightmost balloon, me taking the picture, with Lisa behind, distorted by the contour of the reflective surface, as by Coney Island mirrors. In the two balloons to the left appears, I think, Newark artist Matt Gosser, who is also Director of the NJ School of Architecture gallery at NJIT. My pix are not close enuf, however, to show the individual texts. To read them, you'll have to get to the Gallery.

I introduced Lisa to Matt, since I had mentioned to him a few minutes earlier that a friend of mine had been to a gaming event at his institution, NJIT, earlier that day. He said he may very well be teaching a course next semester on the history of video games. I joked, "Chapter 1: Pong". He said, no, actually there need to be a couple of chapters before that about the history of games more generally, then of arcade games and such, before you even get to Pong, which may or may not be the first at-home video game. I mentioned Simon as an electronic game that was not a video game, and Matt said that that was certainly one such. I saw Simon, but never played it. There was a bartender at Ty's, a (gay) bar in the Village, who was amazing at Simon. My memory was good in those days (no longer!), but there's no way I would compete with him on that.

Samuel Morse Painting by Newark artist William Oliwa "who has been exploring the possibilities of basketry and sculpture with'live' functional cat 5 cable" (Emma Wilcox).

Lisa and Matt spoke a bit, but then I distracted Lisa, and Matt wandered off. I should have said something like "See you later", but the social graces abandon us after too many hours on too many days spent at the computer. That's one reason I try to induce Lisa, Ingé, and/or Gaetano to join me at these things. Their social graces are better than mine. Lisa even reproached me for being too harsh on Redsaw's Filmideo in this blog April 4th. I told her I had received, some days earlier, criticism from a video 'artist' represented at Redsaw that nite, who attempted to condescend to me over that, so I told her off. I won't show the respective emails. Suffice it to say that I was right and that 'artist' wrong. Lisa argued the point, and the only thing she and I could agree on is that each of us is always right. Which is odd, because we disagreed.

After an initial review of all three exhibits, I checked out the refreshment table, made a donation, and decided to have some wine. There was no white wine bottle open, so I found the corkscrew and started to open a bottle of chardonnay. Evonne Davis (one of the co-owners of Gallery Aferro, along with Emma Wilcox) saw me clumsily plodding along with that and offered to open the bottle for me. I figured she was more adept so of course turned the task over to her. The dratted cork broke in two partway down inside the bottle! I could've done that. But Evonne quickly redeemed herself and defeated the ornery barrier. Then the wine flowed. I found again that I don't much care for wine, but it's pretty much de rigueur at these events, so I conformed.

There's a lot to see that I didn't fotograf and a lot of detail that the fotos above could not show. If you'd like to see the three shows for yourself, they will be on offer thru May 17th. For the Gallery's hours, check the Gallery Aferro website.