Parade Last Friday, Walking Tour This Sunday

This and the next foto show the staging area just before the parade's start.

Day 2 of the Open Doors 2009 arts whirl started off with the "Official Opening Celebration", the Second Annual Newark Arts Parade organized by the Barat (like "Barrett") Foundation. Last year it was called a "Puppet Parade", but the large art objects taken from animal forms are not puppets in the ordinary sense.

I missed last year's parade and was late getting to this year's. Fortunately, the event started late, so I saw it step off, with Chandri (mother) and Ariana Barat (dauter) at the right and left sides of the leadoff banner as you look at it in the video (see below).

Mayor (Cory) Booker was in the crowd before the march, and graciously posed for pictures with various people. Unfortunately, just as I tripped my shutter, he was moving again after being stationary for other people's cameras. The girls in yellow are a team of jump-ropers.

Here, the parade passes the pavilion over the Military Park underground garage opposite the New Jersey Performing Arts Center. I thought it would have been good for the parade to go up onto NJPAC's grounds and have the band perform a couple of numbers with NJPAC as background. Or perhaps there could be two bands. If Shabazz performed, wouldn't Weequahic High want to perform as well? They could alternate position in the line of march, with one high school leading off and the other following up the end of the parade, one year, and the reverse the next.

The parade passes Trinity & St. Philip's, the Cathedral for the Episcopal Diocese of Newark, which has scaffolding on it for repairs. I was glad to see that, because it was beginning to look a little run-down, especially the steeple and the nonworking, four-sided clock.

I took a video of the parade's start, and as I was holding the camera high to clear the heads of people walking alongside the parade, Harold, a guy I had met on a Newarkology walking tour (see below) and at the Jewish Museum of New Jersey, came by and remarked that he knew who was taking the pictures! You can see the video at full size on the Blip.tv site. I have had inconsistent results with the size of the player I have embedded in previous posts, but you can get to that video (just short of 5 minutes long) by clicking HERE. (The shaved-headed man jogging toward the front early on is indeed Mayor Booker.) The banner with a big "40" on it is for the 40th anniversary of the Newark Boys Chorus School.

I don't know if the commuters held up in traffic knew what it was they were seeing. We who are tied into the Newark art scene like to think that Open Doors and other art events are well known in the general public, but I suspect that is really not the case. Certainly there should be lots more people, especially from the suburbs, attending Newark art receptions, galleries, and the like.

Here, Shabazz marches past Gutzon Borglum's Wars of America, his largest work in bronze.

The video is grainy because I took it with my little Olympus camera whose main use is stills. I haven't yet found the charger for my Canon video camera, which I hope will do a better job with videos in the future. But my video is documentary coverage, not high art, and gives a good feel for the event.

Seahorse, land horses.

The route of march went from outside the Barat Foundation's HQ (765 Broad Street; entrance on Bank Street) up Broad Street, right on Park Place, to Center Street, down thru Military Park, back onto Broad Street, thence back to Barat HQ. The entire parade took just over 3/4 of an hour, and gave a colorful, musical start to Open Doors '09.

In sunny weather, some of the views above would be spectacular, the colors briter, and the images sharper, for much better lite. The dismal weather of a late October day drastically reduces their appeal. Now, why is this arts bash held in late October, again?

Here, the line of march passes the main entrance of 744 Broad Street, Newark's tallest building.

Walking Tour of the Weequahic Section. Jeffrey Bennett,webmaster of the Newarkology website, will guide a walking tour of Weequahic Sunday afternoon, with special stress on the history of the area as the premier Jewish neighborhood of Newark until the early 60s. The Newarkology website is rich in the city's history, and Jeff knows a lot about that history, especially for a young man. I have been on that tour, and shown pix from it here, but they were lost from the Internet when AOL closed all subscribers' online storage spaces.

The tour will begin at the T-intersection of Lyons and Elizabeth Avenues, near the Divident Hill pavilion, at 2:00 PM, Sunday, November 1st.... The meeting place is accessible via public transit. There are many busses that go through Weequahic. Use the NJ Transit itinerary planner.

The tour will last 2 hours, 30 minutes and will run in all weathers except steady rain, snow, or weather below 20 degrees. If the weather is threatening, please check the front page of www.newarkhistory.com for an announcement of cancellation.

The cost is $10 per person for first-timers, free for people who have already been on one of my tours. Children (18 and under) can come for half price.

Any questions, please email me at jsbennett70 REMOVETHIS@yahoo.com (remove the REMOVETHIS spamblocker).

Among the stops are the little stone temple with oculus at Divident Hill (on the original dividing line between Newark and Elizabeth), Weequahic High School, and the Philip Roth house. Jeff also tells of the Newark connection to the (fictional) tale of the little Dutch boy who put his finger in a dike to save his town from flooding.

Open Doors '09, Day 1

I attended 7 or 8 (depending on how one counts) of the myriad events of this year's Newark Arts Council's arts bash. The first was Art in the Atrium@Lincoln Park, presenting Chris Cumberbatch in cooperation with the Lincoln Park Coast Cultural District ("LPCCD"), at 460 Washington Street, a couple of blocks south of Kinney Street. Art in the Atrium ("ATA") is an organization from Morristown that displays artworks in the 6-story atrium of the Morris County Administration and Records Building on Court Street.

[F]ounded in 1992[,] the organization has been showcasing fine art by established and emerging African American artists as well as providing an introduction to African American appreciation to the community with a special emphas[i]s on school-aged children.

The show was in a spacious, energy-efficient ("LEED") townhouse with lots of stairs. Forget about trying to live in one of these houses if stairs are a problem for you. On the first floor up (over the ground floor, so it would be called in Europe, the first floor; here, more likely the second floor) appeared this large poster explaining the features of this "green" housing. (It's not green in color.) My camera had trouble focusing on this flat surface. I don't know why. The text should still be readable, in case you want to know what LEED is.

I climbed the stairs to the second-floor entrance, and as I reached the landing outside the door, where a few people were talking, an elderly (black) gentleman ("elderly" = older than me; or, if you want to be elementary-school grammatical, than I [am]) made me welcome. He introduced himself, and I think his name, last or first, was "Herbert", but I see no such name at ATA's website. I'm very bad with names; and faces; pretty good with ideas, tho. He didn't know me from Adam (save that I'm a little younger than Adam) but he was solicitous to make sure I had all the information I needed about the event.

The place was well-staffed with people from ATA and LPCCD to answer questions. There was a suggested donation of $10, but since I was just there to take pix and report on the art and the sponsoring organizations, not drink or eat anything, I ignored that suggestion. A young woman named Fiami (like "Miami") recognized me shortly thereafter and asked if I was going to write something about this event. I assured her that that was why I was there. Altho she had seen my blog, she wasn't sure the artist had, so she took my card and said she would find him and introduce us. I said that was great, and I would be looking around and taking pix in the interim.

Note the multicolor-painted palette in the corner, low, as an artwork.

Chris Cumberbatch is from Bayshore, Long Island. ATA is from Morristown. Newark is an ideal midway venue, and not just for those two places. There are two other places much in the news this week, New York City and Philadelphia, each arts powerhouses as much as sports powerhouses, for which Newark is a good midway venue. The Barat (like "Barrett") Foundation is helping to popularize the idea of Newark as a meeting place for artists from other places as well as Newark.
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Chris does very interesting work. I heard him explain something of his biography and talk about some of the things he has done, to a man and a woman surveying the works in a back bedroom of this model home. He said that he has been working in art since early childhood and it helped him deal with the early deaths of various members of his extended family, ending with "My mother's upstairs." I wasn't sure if that meant she too had already died, before she could see this one-man show. One work he mentioned is a mural he did in his church that climbs the walls and covers the ceiling. The elegantly suited man turned to the woman and said, 'What do you think? A lecture series?' More about who they were, later.

Much of his work in that show was on found wood, which at once adds character to the shape and surface, and recycles.

As Chris was talking to them, I listened, and Lynn Presley of the Catfish Friday women's art collective arrived in that area. We waved at each other and waited to talk until after Chris was done explaining his work. When the two people he was talking to moved on, he turned to me to answer any questions I might have, and I said he'd already answered some.

I did ask, however, if he had always been doing anthropomorphic trees. No, this is a recent theme, and he does other types of work as well (as you can see from other fotos). Oddly, I completely forgot to ask if Chris would pose for a picture by his favorite piece in this show. I may have to tie a string around my shutter finger to remember to ask other artists to pose in the future. But I'm pretty sure the man in this painting, Dream, is he.

An LPCCD volunteer on the third floor was handing out gift bags that included a rolled up Black History Calendar 2010: The Art of Keith Mallett (by the Judith Roth Studio Collection of Mendham, NJ) and some Halloween candy. There are noteworthy items from different years on almost all the date squares throughout the year. Very educational (assuming it's accurate). The background color is greener than appears in this foto, but I couldn't get it right no matter how I fiddled with my graffics program.

I later ran across the man and woman to whom Chris had been talking, and asked what organization they were with: Newark Public Schools ("NPS"). So I had an opportunity to get an answer to a question I asked here about whether Newark is one of those districts that has cut art-education programs. The woman said no, and the man chimed in, quite to the contrary, art programs have, if anything, been expanded in the NPS. I was very happy to hear that, and said I was asking in part for a fotoblog about Newark that I write, and handed her my card. She looked at it and a lite of recognition came on. 'Did you do a piece about the Teen Arts program at the Newark Museum?' Yes, I did. It turns out she had seen that March 25, 2008 entry, and was in one of the pictures (the fifth; her hair is much longer now): Dr. Gayle W. Griffin. So the lecture series she and the gentleman with her were talking about would be for NPS.

Chris's mother actually had been upstairs, in the model home, and said she really liked this painting on a found door, which I had already fotograffed. I thought of it as a black Gabby Hayes (tho more serious in demeanor), but very few people nowadays have any idea who Gabby Hayes was.

Dr. Griffin and I spoke briefly. I asked why the School of Fine & Industrial Arts that used to be in Arts High closed, and she said that it was a budget issue. She also said it focused on applied arts, the crafts related to things like the construction of interiors, such as of Symphony Hall, which you could see out the back windows of the model house (below). I said I'd never been inside it, and she said I must, that it's beautiful. I said I thought the timing of shutting down the program was bad, considering how important the arts have become to Newark since it closed. She said the arts have always been important in Newark.

Lynn Presley later told me that the gent with Dr. Griffin was the new head of the NPS arts program, Sean (Somebody). Lynn herself had been at an earlier opening reception for a show at UMDNJ that she was actually in, but which reception, and show, had not been mentioned in the Newark Arts Council's calendar or much of anyplace else, for that matter. She didn't know why they didn't publicize it. Perhaps the art was intended only for the UMDNJ internal community. In any case, I turned to Lynn (shown here) and said, "Nice house, huh?" 'Very nice house.'

It was after 8pm by then, and I wanted to see if I could get to the 744 Broad Street show's opening, so bid Lynn farewell and got to 744 just before the 8:30 official end time, hoping that they weren't sticking too closely to schedule. I didn't see anything like an open door on the Clinton Street side of the building, and a woman standing nearby said I'd have to enter thru the main entrance in front. When I got there, the woman at the security desk said it was supposed to end at 8:30, but she'd sign me in. I started to spell my name, then pulled out my card to ease the process. She wanted me to show a driver's license or such! I was surprised, unpleasantly, and decided I wasn't going to put up with that just to see the last few minutes of an event that might even have ended already. So I said, 'Never mind' and left, annoyed.
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I highly disapprove of the Private Police State that has arisen in this country in recent years. It couldn't exist without the active or passive assent of people abused by it. I was in no mood to be treated like a criminal, so went on my way, and would see that show (tho not its opening reception) on Sunday (Day 4, to come).

Win 2 Smokey Robinson Tix!

Note, 10/25/09: I have been out and about at various Newark Arts Council Open Doors 2009 events taking a great many fotos. In the course of 7 events that took me to 7 galleries and 7 outdoor murals, I took 441 fotos. Altho over a fourth of those are of labels for identification purposes, fixing all the substantive fotos in ruf will still take at least 8 hours of work at my computer, before I can even begin to select those I'd like to fix in fine. Some of the fotos I'd like to use need to be cropped and resized. Then I have to decide what to say about the events and the particular artworks shown. Etc. So my discussion of these events will be delayed a bit. In the interim, if you are interested in more information about Newark, there are 7 blog entries on this webpage, which contain many links to other pages of information and perhaps fotos that you might follow until I can get a new entry online.

Regular readers of this blog will know I am gradually increasing the types of things I do here. I started with text only, then added a foto or two, then made this a fotoblog with many fotos, then added video, then added audio-only, then added a foto slideshow. Now I'm adding — perhaps for one time only — a chance for one lucky reader to win two FREE tickets to the Smokey Robinson concert at NJPAC next Wednesday, October 28th. I suppose I could tell you now how to enter for your chance to win. But I'd rather give you some background first. If you're impatient, search for "How to Win", and read the rest of this post after you have entered.)

This and the next 3 fotos show the Avon Avenue unit (1 Avon Avenue; (973)824-.8500; Fax (973)824-9851) of the Newark Boys & Girls Clubs.

The sublime Smokey is performing his only NY/NJ metro area concert this year in NEWARK, to benefit the Boys & Girls Clubs of New Jersey. This is a very smart move on his part, because there are a lot of kids (both boys and girls) who have no idea who Smokey Robinson is, and their parents can take the kids to show them how wonderful he is and thus impress the kids that their parents really were young once — and maybe even cool.

The Boys & Girls Clubs are a major player in offering safe places for kids to be active and even learn something apart from school. My sister Sue Ann in Long Beach, California (tho born and raised in NJ) works for the B&GC of Long Beach, and I'm sure she would be delited to know that my fotoblog is helping to publicize this benefit — as tho anyone should have to help publicize a Smokey Robinson concert; who WOULDN'T want to see Smokey Robinson in concert? This concert has been on my public online calendar for nearly two months, and tho I have recently recommended that people check that calendar for Newark Arts Council events this weekend, there are other events listed, beyond this weekend, including well into November.

Newark's B&G Clubs stand to benefit from the Smokey Robinson benefit. So why isn't that concert mentioned at the Newark B&GC website? There's a search box at the top, into which I first typed "Robinson" and got no results. I then typed "Smokey" and again got no results. What is wrong with these people? A great star comes to NJPAC, in Newark, to perform at a concert to benefit Boys & Girls Clubs in New Jersey, and our Newark B&GC doesn't even mention it? That is astonishing. Or is the proper word "appalling"?

This parents' pickup area at the back of the Avon Avenue Unit is literally within sight (left) of Downtown's skyscrapers, and would appear to be on a hill, since the tops of Newark's tallest buildings barely rise above the blacktop of the Avon Avenue Unit's parking lot.

The Newark B&GC operates three "units", in their own buildings. I showed two pix of the Westside Unit a year ago, October 22, 2008. Now I see from the B&GC Newark website:

This Club is temporarily closed. BGCN is exploring options to relocate the Club to Westside Park. Until then we are at 13th Avenue and South 17th Street Schools assisting each school with their extended day program. For further information please call 973.242.1200.

No explanation is given as to WHY the Westside unit is closed. Anyone?

This and the remaining fotos in today's blogpost depict the Broadway Unit.

I have in recent days been receiving a number of press-release kinds of notices from organizations I was not previously in touch with, which suggests that they think there is a fair readership for this blog. I don't know how many people read this — or just look at the fotos, which is fine with me — because I have the free version of Google Blogger, the service that hosts this blog. To get stats, I'd have to pay some fee each month. Artist Rebecca Jampol of cWOW told me at the NJIT show that there are a couple of places I can go to on the Internet, like Google Analytics, thru which I can find out how many people, from where, etc., visit this blog. I told her I'm not sure I want to know.
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What I do know is that I receive email from people who come across it by chance in searching for information about this and that in Newark. There are many times when something plus "Newark" will produce a "Newark USA" post, at some relatively high place in the results of a Google, Bing, or Ask.com search. But I see only 10 "Followers". I investigated what is meant by "Follower", and it turns out that it refers only to other bloggers on the Blogger service who want to be advised when this blog is updated. It does NOT mean that there are only 10 people (who do or do not write on the Blogger service) who check for updates. Thank goodness. But I'd still do this even if there WERE only 10 people reading. Like most people who 'follow their bliss', I do this mainly because I want to, and because I am, to my mind, doing my bit for a good cause: correcting the absurd, negative notions myriad people have about Newark. How many people read it is a matter of very little importance. My Simpler Spelling Word of the Day website is a project I have updated for every single day since June 1st, 2004, even tho the most "hits" I have ever had on a single day (according to tracking by the services that have hosted it) is something like 57, and some days there are only 6 "hits". I don't pay that no nevermind.

Here, I'm on the outside looking in of a playground at the Broadway Unit. Friday nite, Williamsburg (Brooklyn) artist Fred Gutzeit spoke about commonplace objects like chainlink fences, and I told him I love chainlink fences. I took this foto over a month earlier.

Walt Whitman (a member of the New Jersey Hall of Fame) had something to say about the impulse to produce works that others may not see, in "I saw in Louisiana a live-oak growing". I quoted a small part of that poem on April 9th. Here's a slitely longer quote:

All alone stood it, and the moss hung down from the branches;
Without any companion it grew there, uttering joyous leaves of dark green, ...
But I wonder’d how it could utter joyous leaves, standing alone there, without its friend, its lover near — for I knew I could not; ...
and though the live-oak glistens there in Louisiana, solitary, in a wide flat space,
Uttering joyous leaves all its life, without a friend, a lover, near,
I know very well I could not.

A lot of teenage girls have babies, deliberately, so they will not be alone and unloved. Many of those babies end up in deep trouble, because the children who had them were not prepared, emotionally, financially, or in any other way, to raise a child. Many other children have working parents who might take good care of them if they had the time, but they don't. The Boys & Girls Clubs are places that supplement parents, supplement the schools, and put faces and voices — smiling faces, gentle voices — to the concept "Society", and help kids find their own unique place in Society. This is work worthy of the best of us. Many of the people who do it, do so because they want to, indeed have to, do it. They are our very own live-oaks, uttering joyous leaves because that's what live-oaks do.

Smokey Robinson may not sing lyrics about the Boys and Girls Clubs, but at NJPAC on October 28th, what he does sing will help those clubs throughout New Jersey. And so we get back to the offer of 2 free tix to next Wednesday's concert at NJPAC.

How to Win. Any reader who would like to win those two free tickets sends me an email, at ResurgenceCity{on}aol.com. (That's an "at-sign" that I hope spiderbots for spammers do not pick up.) The text should be words to the effect,"I would like to win the two tickets to Smokey Robinson's Newark concert for the Boys & Girls Clubs of New Jersey", along with your name and address as it appears on a foto ID such as a driver's license. The message need not use those exact words, but should make that point and speak to no other matter. (I'd love to hear from you on other matters, of course; just not in that particular email.) The sender of the 8th email I receive will win the tickets.

I then forward the name of the winner to my contact at the public-relations firm that awards the tickets, and he will forward that information to the will-call window at NJPAC. Then all the winner has to do is show up on Wednesday, October 28th (the concert starts at 7:30pm) and present foto ID that conforms to the info given in the email, and voilà!, s/he and a guest are in.
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Don't hesitate to try for these free tickets, because many of the people who find this blog do not read regularly; many who do read regularly check it only once a week or so; others reside far from Newark and check here only now and then to see what's going on in the city they grew up in; and others will assume that someone else has surely won by now, when in fact no one had yet won. It's email. You won't waste a stamp.
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As I say, I may never again be in position to give away free concert tickets, so if you'd like to see the magical Smokey Robinson at NJPAC next Wednesday, send me an email in a hurry, because no email before or after the eighth as time-stamped by the originating ISP will win. And, winner, if you have a digital camera, please take a couple of pix for this blog and send them to me for use here. I'm sure we would all like to see them.

OD'ing on Art

It is fitting that the Newark arts whirl in late October each year is called "Open Doors", whose initials equally stand for "overdose". The unfortunate fact is that so much is happening in so many places, at the same time or overlapping, that it is very hard for people to figure out what they can and cannot get to. And no one person can see it all, because there are events opposite events. I have created a public online calendar for events of various types, from art to sports to political rallies, that I think might interest my readers. This week is particularly busy, starting tomorrow. If one chooses the "Day" tab at the top of my online calendar, the resulting layout shows graffically how events conflict and overlap. I don't know of any other place where you can get this kind of visual guidance. So I present below the four intense days of Open Doors 2009, as updated late Wednesday nite from the list at the website of the Newark Arts Council (NAC). (I feel the need for some legalese disclaimer of liability for errors here: this blog makes no representations that the information below or on the associated Resurgence City online calendar is complete or correct, and all such information is offered on a best-efforts basis. Readers are advised to contact directly the offerors of any event in which they are interested. Now, don't sue me if you miss something because I left it out or had the time or location wrong.)

The map below of the 29 Open Doors venues is online at the NAC website. I don't imagine NAC will mind me showing these two graffics to publicize their hard work. If you want a printout of the map before you can get to any Open Doors event, you can go to its location on the Internet and print from there. I have Windows Vista on my new laptop, so MSIE won't let me print directly, but tries to force me to use something called MS OneNote, which is part of a 60-day trial of MS Office 2007 that I refuse to install; so I can't print that way. But there's always a workaround. I can right-click on the .JPG and Copy the image into my graffics program or word processor (in my case, WordPerfect 11), and print from there. I can also go to the URL thru my AOL software, which does allow me to print (I choose B&W for a crisp print). You may have your own workaround. There's almost always a way.

This map appears in the Star-Ledger hardcopy supplement Newark Live as part of "A complete guide to Open Doors 2009" that will be available at most, if not all, the participating venues. (Altho the top of the Newark Live cover says "ONLINE AT: NJ.COM/NEWARK", I do not see the entire text of that guide, or anything like it, at that website.) Lowell Craig of Index Gallery told me at the NJIT reception last Saturday that the S-L got some things wrong, which should hardly surprise, given how large and complicated an event OD has become. He also said that a map and guide to the Arts District that he and Kati Vilim developed has been updated for Open Doors '09 and should be available thru the NAC this weekend.

I hope my calendars are accurate, but you can go to the NAC event list, which is presumably the most authoritative source, and check for yourself. (Is "NAC" said as letters, N-A-C, or pronounced like "knack"? Anyone?) More information, such as address and the website URL or fone number of a particular venue, will appear if you go to my calendar and click on any event. The screenshots below are not themselves clickable, and may not be fully legible at this resolution. They are definitely legible online, however.

Introductory poster to Krueger-Scott Mansion show at the Robeson Galleries on the campus of Rutgers-Newark, one piece in which appears in the foto above.

Thursday is often Newark's busiest day for art events, and October is our busiest month. Only in October are you likely to find more events on other days than Thursday.

Friday kicks off with the Barat Foundation's art parade in the streets, which I missed last year but do not intend to miss this year. Then there's the Gallery Crawl (with a trolley for transport), in which many galleries are open later than usual. The capper for me is a newly announced event at Rupert Ravens Contemporary, 'the largest commercial art gallery under one roof in North America' and a major player in at least New Jersey arts. Rupert always does a great job of choosing what to put next to what else. Aljira exhibits a bunch of works created with animal blood suspended in plexiglass by Jordan Eagles. I first saw such works at Rupert's.

Saturday's big events for me are the Murals Tour and Catfish Friday's show near the Rodino Federal Office Building.

Sunday's big thing is the artists' studios tour, but the Newark Museum also has free admission from 3-5pm for endless (looped) showings of a wonderful 5½-minute 3D movie, New Work: Newark in 3D. Once you have seen it once or twice (or more, so you might figure out where some of the shots were taken), you are free to wander all parts of the Museum. (Of course, if you reside in Newark, you are free to enter the Museum's 80 galleries during normal hours any day.)

In addition to all the events and locales I specifically mention in the calendar, there are a number of places participating in the Studio Tour only, on Sunday, that are mentioned toward the end of the NAC Open Doors information page.

Objects in exhibition, "A Journey from Ancient Times: Peruvians in New Jersey", at the Newark Public Library, thru December 31st. The stained-glass skylite over the atrium, as well as some overhead lites, are reflected in the glass top of the case.

Dare I say that Open Doors has become too big an event to fit into a single four-day weekend, even with a couple of outlying events? It may be time to extend it judiciously, starting with a full workweek with bracketing weekends. This year, there were events on both days of the prior weekend, but Monday thru Wednesday saw not a one.

Another display case in NPL Peru exhibit.

We might also want to move OD earlier than late October. I don't know why late October was chosen, but it's always a good idea to review things periodically and ask if the reasons that produced a given schedule still hold. If not, we might want Newark's big arts bash to occur in warmer weather than we can count on in late October (tho the next few days are expected to be warmer than the stretch of miserably subnormal days we suffered over the past week and more).

"Lord of Miracles" poster in NPL show.

I don't know how the trolley that provides transportation for the Gallery Crawl and Studio Tour is supposed to work. Is there only one trolley (cute little bus, actually), and a rigid schedule, in-and-out, at each stop? Are there several vehicles, and you get off one and get onto the next at some reasonable interval? If the number of galleries in the Gallery Crawl is too large to give the casual visitor who doesn't know which s/he will want to spend more or less time at, the length of the Gallery Crawl should be increased from the current 3 hours to more like 5 or 6. Same with the Studio Tour, now set at 6 hours. And would it really be impossible to have two successive weekends of Gallery Crawls on one day and Studio Tours the next? I cannot be the only person who looks at the calendar graffics above and finds it nearly impossible to choose what to attend and what to skip.

Rupert Ravens Contemporary foto of Jan Huling artwork in Ravens show opening Friday.

The closing party Sunday should assuredly be longer than two hours. And is there to be entertainment at the opening reception at 33 Washington?

Ethan Cohen Fine Arts foto of Bernard Williams artwork for Rupert Ravens show.

Perhaps the purpose of this arts bash is to give everyone a taste of Newark arts as to whet their appetite for extended visits on other occasions, but when an arts whirl becomes an impossible arts CRUNCH, there will be two competing impulses on the part of potential visitors: (1) accept that they face a mad swirl, during which they will inescapably miss something they'd like to see (and that they might see so much that they forget which was which, in the fashion of the 1969 movie, If It's Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium), and contént themselves with what they can see, not lament what they can't; or (2) stay home, because it is all too confusing.

Rupert Ravens Contemporary foto of Christopher Hart Chambers artwork.

At least with the graffical calendars above, people can see what happens at any given time, and perhaps decide among the main events that occur at exactly the same time. I couldn't figure out any of this from the nongraffical list last year, and the nongraffical NAC event "Calendar snapshot" hardcopy handout at the NJIT show last Saturday is equally mind-boggling.

The screenprints of the "Day" view of my online calendar are only indicative of the kind of information you can find at that calendar itself. To the extent they are legible and you don't need to click on anything for further information, they are a handy overview of the arts crunch. If you want your own hardcopy, just go to the calendar yourself, in your own browser, and you can print the "Week" or "Day" view (via the clickable "Print" link at upper right of the screen). I select, under "Preferences", "Landscape" on the "Layout" tab, and under the "Paper/Quality" tab, "Black & White" rather than "Color" to get a crisp, dark printout.

Kevin Darmanie artworks in Pequod Deck, Rutgers-Newark. The Pequod Deck is a very small exhibit area at the right side of the Starbucks inside the Robeson Campus Center.

(If you have items you'd like added to the Resurgence City online calendar, please check sample entries for the types of (brief) info that belong, such as date, beginning and end times, a capsule description of the event, address, and website/telefone number for more information. Send those specifics to me at ResurgenceCity{on}aol.com. (Yes {on} is an attempt to convey the sense of an at-sign without showing one, to keep spiderbots from picking up my email address for spam.) I will, however, place on that calendar only events (in the arts, performing arts, sports, public affairs, and intellectual realms) that I think will interest my readers.)

Rupert Ravens Contemporary foto of a Fred Gutzeit work.