Index Closing Reception Friday, cWOW Opening Saturday

Very long post, over 2,600 words and 19 fotos. Feel free just to look at the fotos.

I have two urgent matters to bring to the attention of office workers who check this blog only during lunch hour Monday to Friday: this notice, of art events this evening and tomorrow evening, and the premature full bloom of the cherry trees in Branch Brook Park. I have uploaded this post first, and am still working on the second (at 12:10pm Friday). I'd like to update this blog more often, but there's only one of me, and on Wednesday I was out and about, taking 143 fotos here and there. I can't spend hours out on fotograffic expeditions yet still create a post for this blog at home the same day.

I gave the description for the Index Art Center's latest, bicycle-oriented (and tricycle, and unicycle) show, "Art Cycle", on March 9th. After only three weeks, that show concludes Saturday, but with a closing reception tonite. I present fotos from that show below, after the announcement of tomorrow's opening.

Postcard graffic for cWOW show, courtesy of, and copyright 2012, City Without Walls.

cWOW Opening, Saturday. Tomorrow, City Without Walls opens its latest art show. Here is the text of cWOW's announcement:

Knot Your Average Knit
Curated by Lovina Purple
Opening Reception Saturday March 31st, 6-8 pm

Knot Your Average Knit, at cWOW's Crawford Street Gallery, was curated by Lovina Purple and examines artwork being created in traditional craft techniques such as weaving, quilting, lace-making, knitting and embroidery. The exhibition features works by artists: Elisa D’Arrigo | Karen Margolis | Christina Massey | Hyo Jeong Nam | Gail Rothschild | Katya Usvitsky; In our New Media Room: paperJAM: a collaboration between Hannah Lamar Simmons and Rebecca Kinsey, with a special performance during the reception.

Art Cycle 2012 Pix. The foto above, and all remaining fotos today, are from the opening reception, March 10th, of Index's "Art Cycle" show that closes tomorrow.



I don't know if this drawing(?) shows New Jersey's Albert Einstein on a bicycle, but it looks like it to me. Given that Einstein lived in a small town, he might well have commuted to work by bicycle. Einstein was, of course, born in Germany. You can't choose where to be born. But you can choose where to live, and die. Einstein fled Germany for the U.S. — for Princeton, New Jersey, to be more precise — and lived in NJ till the end of his life. That is why he was in the first 'class' of the New Jersey Hall of Fame (which each year has its induction ceremony in NJPAC, Newark). (The paragraph about him on the NJHoF website contains some bizarre typos that assuredly should have been corrected long before now.)



This next artwork, despite its pink bicycle, may be my single favorite piece in the exhibition. I don't know where it's supposed to be, but it reminds me of the Asbury Park boardwalk in the summertime. I lived, with my family, not far from Asbury for 12 years, first in Leonardo, Middletown Township; then in Little Silver, for one year; then in River Plaza, also part of Middletown Township (across the Navesink River from Red Bank, and part of the U.S. Postal Service's idea of what "Red Bank" is).



My high school class, MTHS (Middletown Township High School, now "Middletown North") Class of 1962, is holding its 50th-year Reunion the weekend of July 12-14, 2012. We are glad to embrace grads from adjoining classes, if they wish to attend. (One such grad, one year ahead, was Roberta Cheney, who pronounced her name chée.nee, which is the way Dick Cheney and his family also do.) If anyone reading this either graduated with us or knows someone who did but has not yet become familiar with Reunion plans, including a very inexpensive, bring-your-own picnic in Bodman Park, please let them know about the Reunion and have them contact me at Resurgence City (at) aol.com.

This trio of drawings looks like a bike, or, actually, trike, by a flowering cherry tree, so much like Newark right now. If you want to see Branch Brook Park's cherry blossom spectacular, you MUST get there within the next few days!

I rarely got to Asbury because the family usually went to the beach at Sea Bright. I was almost dashed against the rocks of a jetty at Sea Bright once, when perhaps 10 years old, until my mother dragged me to safety and reproached me for getting that close to danger. Aren't mommies great?



After my parents separated — but never divorced; their parents had, in both cases, been divorced, and my parents apparently resolved that they were not carrying on that tradition — my father lived for several years in Asbury Park, in a garden apartment and on the second floor from the top of what I think was (and is now?) Asbury Park's tallest building (ninth foto in my post of October 17, 2008). He had a great view east over the ocean (tho there's really not much to "sea" there) and north to the hills of Rumson.



Tho we tend to use "Asbury" as short for "Asbury Park", there actually is a separate "Asbury, NJ", a locality within Franklin Township in Warren County that has fully a third the population of Asbury Park. That is not the "Asbury" I mean, but ~ Park.)



I'm not a great fan of ocean swimming. I sort of liked the low waves we have at the Jersey Shore, which little kids can body-surf. But I also liked to swim, and the swells of the ocean broke my stride, so I preferred lakes and pools. When we were living in Palisades Park, we sometimes went to Lake Hopatcong to swim in the summer, which was great. My mother would make fried chicken that we could eat, cold, at a picnic table. Cold fried chicken is great; cold steak, not so hot. I don't know what municipality that swimming area/beach was located in, but I think there were ropes on little buoys to rein us in from the deep water.



NJ is a great state for people who like water activities. We have an ocean, big lakes, a huge bay sheltered from the ocean by barrier islands, several great estuaries, the Delaware and Hudson Rivers (also estuaries, in their southern extents, tho there is white water on the Delaware where it is truly a river, above Trenton), and small rivers, creeks, and lakes suitable for canoeing or kayaking. (See 5 fotos of kayakers on the Delaware opposite Trenton in my post of September 24, 2009; search for "kayak" to jump to the first foto thereof.) Returning to today's topic, this next foto shows someone daring to turn the pedal on a kinetic sculpture in the "Art Cycle" exhibition. I am too well-trained not to touch artworks to have done that myself. It occurs to me only now that if it was OK to push the pedal to turn the mechanism, there should have been a sign at that mechanism to encourage people to go "hands-on". Was there such a sign that I missed? I don't think so, and my fotos reveal none.



The following artwork is in miniature, but proclaims the grand "spirit of the bicycle", which was, when it was first invented, hugely liberating, in empowering individuals, including women, to go where they wanted to, when they wanted to, without need of anyone's permission or assistance.



In this next foto, from the Kedar Studio of Art, which shares the second floor of 585 with Index, a young woman views some small but wonderful, architecture-themed works of art by Lisa Conrad. I noticed only now that this woman's dress has fasteners up the back. How did she close them? Some women's clothing appears to hold magic! Or do those women have superhuman flexibility in their arms?



The following foto is a closer view of one of the architectural two-dimensional works by Lisa C (which I misremembered as "Carlson", not "Conrad"). I love architecture, which I regard as the emperor of arts, for creating the framework within which essentially all other art resides. For several years after I moved to the West Side of Manhattan in 1965, my best friend was an architect from Bernardsville (or New Providence?), NJ. He (Gregory Fedoruk) was then and remains to this day, some 47 years later, the only person I have ever known who was my clear intellectual superior in EVERYTHING. I've met some other people who were my superior in SOMEthing, but not EVERYthing, the way Greg was. For instance, he boiled down a one-page flyer I had written for my gay group, Homosexuals Intransigent!, to hand out in Greenwich Village for an NYC mayoral election, to a succinct heading over my text that read, as I recall, "One Man, One Vote. One Gay Vote, One Sympathetic Mayor."



Alas, Gregory wasn't emotionally smart, but was buffeted by intense, irrational feelings of hurricane force. He let people use him, as for "loans" of money. I made what turned out to be a key mistake: I paid him back everything I borrowed that helped me get thru college (CCNY). I thereby ceased to be someone he held in thrall with money, and thus, to his mind, I ceased to be his friend. He was, generally, very unhappy — tho it was hard for anyone outside his head to see why, inasmuch as he was young, brilliant, well-built (due to much effort at the gym), and, financially, somewhere between very comfortable and rich). He worked his way, away from all his friends, claiming that his new role as a group manager at his architectural firm during the workday wearied him of human contact; he then gave away his two (Siamese) cats; and then he committed suicide by taking a warm bath, drinking wine or such, and slitting his wrists to drain his life into the tub. It would seem he wasn't as smart as I thought he was.



He actually did have friends — me for one, and his former lover, the (now-late) gifted artist Christopher Estridge, in whom he could have confided and from whom he could have sought advice, but he didn't want to hear anything we had to say. No, he just slashed his wrists and left us to feel guilty that we didn't see the signs and did not know to act. Thanks so much, Greg. For any of you out there contemplating suicide, think about what your suicide would do to people near you. For those of you who have felt guilt over not being able to prevent a suicide, disown that guilt. You cannot know what is in someone's heart, and cannot read minds, esp. if someone hides from you their feelings and intentions. Rarely can anyone save anyone who is serious about committing suicide, and not just crying out for help. Those of us left behind end up wishing they had cried out for help, because we would have rushed to help. I am, to this day, 40 years later, FURIOUS with Greg that he would not entrust his feelings to me, or even Christopher, a man he said, over and over, that he loved. Gregory left us in pain, thinking we should have been able to see ahead to what he was contemplating, and prevented it. I am not so irrational as to believe that. I know that sometimes people are so willful, and so selfish, that nothing you can say and nothing you can do can keep them from committing suicide. The very most we can ever do in such a circumstance is be glad, in a very sad way, that their pain is over. We wish to God (and even we who are atheists, wish to God, since it's not for us) that we could have saved them. But when we didn't, because we couldn't, not because we wouldn't, we just have to get over it, trying as hard as we can not to hate the person who killed him- or herself when we were always at hand to help. Gregory, I hate you for what you did to me, to Christopher, to your family; and can never forgive you. How could you have kept your awful pain to yourself, when we were there to listen and to help? Your pain should not thereafter have become ours, especially in that we were ALWAYS eager to dull and remove your pain, if that were remotely, humanly possible. But I equally will always love you and be sad that you could not entrust your feelings to me or Christopher or ANYONE. We cared. You did not believe that we cared, but that was on you, not us. We told you, and told you, and told you, in a dozen different ways, but you wouldn't hear it.
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Not that it matters to the person who killed himself, but we who went on can always forgive. Forgiveness is a gift of the living. It means nothing to the person who committed suicide, of course, but it does give survivors the only "closure" they will ever have from a terrible tragedy that will always pull them down whenever they think of it. In this instance, religion is worse than no help, in that some religions consign suicides to eternal damnation. Thanks a lot. That will help us sleep much better, to picture someone we love suffering the tortures of the damned.



In any case, the "Art Cycle" show at Index Art Center closes tonite, so if you want to see it, and the artworks in the Reception Room at the rear of Index, and in the Kedar Studio of Art, make your way to 585 Broad Street, up 23 steps in two steep runs, tonite between 6 and 9pm.



Even if you have trouble with stairs, as I do, you might be able to attend this show. I have to ascend or descend steps like a toddler, both feet to one step before going to the next. Just take your time, and don't feel conspicuous about holding up people behind you. This is Newark. People are nice. They'll wait or walk around.

Church Repairs; Magnolias Abloom

This "Church Sunday" I show some work that has apparently been started recently to repair or renovate a church opposite the 24-hour Walgreens at Main Street (also called Dr. Martin Luther King Jr Boulevard)* and Halsted Streets in East Orange. (Faith Temple #1 Original Free Will Baptist Church, 16 Halsted Street, East Orange, NJ 07018; (973) 414-0900). It may not be clear from this wide view that there are what appear to be stone panels on the lawn to the left. In this first foto, you can see a solar panel on a lite stanchion that the camera distorts to make it seem to be falling inward. It is not. I love these solar panels, which PSE&G is putting up all over the place. That should bring down electric rates, no?



I signed a petition linked to from the website created for this church by Faith Family Jesus directory listing service to save a Christian pastor sentenced to death by the fanatics of Iran, but had trouble filling it in because it wasn't working right until I unchecked a box for registering with ACLJ.org and scrolled clear of a frame at the bottom. I am generally unsympathetic with the stands of Pat Robertson's American Center for Law & Justice. But I signed this particular petition in accord with what I once heard is supposed to be a Chinese proverb to the effect, "Do not ignore a good word from a bad mouth." I'm always glad when Liberals and Conservatives can work together in defense of shared values.



I did not find a website created by that church. Why are so many churches cavalierly ignoring the value a website might provide them?



The letters inside this case need to be reset.



East Orange is not, at present, part of Newark as such, but of "Greater Newark", which is not a political entity, tho it should be. I don't know why Booker is so little ambitious for Newark that he pays no heed to the possibilities of annexing areas around us that could benefit from municipal consolidation. I'll say one thing about Christie: he is encouraging New Jerseyans to rethink the dysfunctional plethora of tiny towns, and encouraging them to enter into shared-services arrangements with their neighbors, and even merge into larger municipalities, better able to serve the needs of their citizens. Our Democratic mayor should work with Newark-born Governor Christie to create a political "Greater Newark", which would fundamentally alter people's perceptions of Newark. Addition of East Orange alone (64,000 residents) would increase Newark's population to over 340,000, an increase of 19%, which would bump us up in the numbers of the Nation's largest cities, and make quite an impression upon outsiders, who would now see us as a city on the move, whereas they may now feel we're going nowhere. This is an outline of what Newark and East Orange, combined, would look like on the map. It suggests, to me, a leftward-looking seahorse.



The magnolia in its last days of flowering by Faith Temple No. 1 reminded me to check the two pink-flowering trees at the northern corner of my block, at Silver and Smith Streets, Vailsburg, before the magnolia (on the right, beyond a weeping cherry tree) dropped its blossoms.



Earlier in the day I got to the Old Essex County Courthouse in time to take pix of the magnolias around Gutzon Borglum's bronze statue, "Seated Lincoln".



When I first arrived in Newark in 2000, that statue was surrounded by white-flowering trees. This old foto is at the smaller size that I was using in pre-Picasa days, when online storage allowances were less generous.The color of the stone columns past the trees is closer to what the eye perceives than what is shown in the fotos today.



Then they were all torn out in a renovation to the area, and replaced a couple of years later by magnolias, a much more colorful flowering tree. It's an ironic choice, given that magnolias are associated with the South. But perhaps the choice was deliberate, to show that because of Lincoln, the South is still part of the Nation — no thanks to NJ's General George B. McClellan, who, aside from organizing forces well, did very poorly in his brief stint as commander-in-chief of Union forces. I suppose McClellan did better as Governor of NJ from 1878-1881 (a three-year term?).



I have to check my camera's settings to find out why a brite day produced dim fotos of the Courthouse area. The stone was also given a much darker color by the camera than it has to the naked eye.



The former MNBA buildings nearby (now Bank of America buildings) are, unwisely, flanked by white-flowering trees, a very poor, drab choice against beige walls.



There are some small, white-flowering bushes or trees in planters near the 22-foot-tall hockey-player statue on Championship Plaza (Market and Mulberry Streets), another bad choice, in that the statue is stainless steel, which is perceived as white. At least those trees are in planters, so can be switched out for pink-flowering trees. And should be. I don't have pix of the white-flowered saplings by the hockey-player statue, but which do you think would be more striking by a stainless-steel sculpture, white flowers or pink? Mind you, white trees do work in some locations. In this wide view of New Street between Halsey and Washington, the white blossoms look rather washed out. (I saw only later that this foto caut someone who parked badly on the right, crowding the space ahead.)



But in this closer view that includes contrasting pink blossoms in the distance, on the campus of Rutgers-Newark, the white blossoms work. Near the Historic Courthouse, which is pale stone, white trees would not do, which I suppose is why white trees were torn out several years ago in the end stages of the renovation of that great Cass Gilbert structure. I hope they were moved rather than destroyed.



This next foto shows something most people would need binoculars to see, a telefoto view of the statues atop the Old Courthouse. I might get an even better view, to show the words more clearly, if I use my tripod on a briter day with greater contrast between the stone surface and the indentations of the carved letters, and zoom in closer, to show each of the three quotation panels with its flanking statues, separately.



This last foto today is a closer view of the Lincoln statue, which shows as well some of the more picturesque streetlites that the City (County?) has wisely placed around the Historic Courthouse, in place of ugly old lites on tall, utilitarian stanchions. There is one odd-looking structure in the background here, tho. Is it a surveillance camera? Whatever it is, might there be a better place for it than in the visual background of this distinguished statue?


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* My impression that "Main Street" is more commonly used than MLK is confirmed at a Flickr foto of that church.

Solo(s) Art Opening Friday; Jazz Events Friday and Tuesday

Except for one concert foto, today's pix are from the last Solo(s) shows I attended, in January. The paintings are by Shoshanna Weinberger. The hanging, wispy artwork in the hallway is by Hannah Craft. The artworks in the Stage café are by still other artists.

A very unusual event is to take place this evening, a combination art show and petting zoo at Rebecca Jampol's Solo(s) Project House. Is Newark's art scene more "inventurous" (I was thinking "inventive" and "adventurous", but thought to combine them) than other cities', or is every art center today inventurous? I don't know. I wasn't much involved in the art scene during my 35 years in Manhattan. Yes, I belonged to the Museum of Modern Art for a few years, and got to the Whitney (main and satellites), Met, and some other art venues on isolated occasions. But I became actively engaged in the arts, as observer, only after I moved to Newark.

ASHLI SISK: "BIG GAME"
March   23, 2012 - May  17, 2012

Opening Reception:
Friday[,] March  23, 2012
7-11 pm

Live Animals
8 - 9 pm

Solo(s) Project House presents Ashli Sisk: "Big Game." The exhibition will live from March 23, 2012-May  17, 2012 and will open with a reception, Friday, March [23rd] from 7-11pm. The opening reception will include [a] live exotic petting zoo from 8-9pm.

Sisk brings to us a survey of fur, fantasy and the portrait of the beast. "Big Game" will introduce viewers to the ever-changing human perspective of a variety of animals. An animal in a dwindling population is branded a mascot and separated from the swarm of beasts. Slipping into extinction where it only exists in medium transforming then into the fantastical beast never alive - and unable to die, a Golem.

"Whether the animal is small or profoundly huge or weird looking, I endeavor to put these animals in a space that reflects the shifting human attitudes towards them - which meditates on the human implications of such attitudes as human animals reflect on nature changing, dying and extinguishing."

The frames and artifacts that surround her paintings serve as part of the work. Within this context also discuss the idea of the museum, and the mortuary, as well as the history of painting. Frames have their own language, expressing time and quality, cost, art conservation, and prevailing attitudes about how art is seen depending on the time period.

"The Art Museum and The Natural History museum Collide - one part Taxonomy, and one part Wunderkammer in this exhibition, the questions I am asking [are], Is there a way to preserve something without changing it completely? Where does the human animal fit in the natural world? And what is the natural world?" - Ashli Sisk

Ashli Sisk is from Northern California, [w]here she attended San Francisco Art Institute. As [a] recent transplant to the East Coast, she attends Montclair State University. She brings to her practice a background in Archeology and Cultural Anthropology, Animal Sciences and Biology, Gnosticism and Theat[er], Magic and Divination.

www.ashlisisk.com

I don't know what all that is supposed to mean. I don't speak "art-ese". But perhaps I'll find out what it means, if I manage to get to the opening this evening, hopefully in time to pet the aminals. (Yes, I wrote "aminals", an obvious confusion that many children suffer, from an N and M, similar letters, occurring in close proximity within a single word. We should never forget the difficulties we had when learning to read English.)



If you want to see this show but cannot get to the opening tonite, gallery hours are Wednesday-Friday from 12-6pm.

Solo(s) Project House
972 Broad St.
Newark, NJ 07102
www.solosprojecthouse.com
info@solosprojecthouse.com

In looking for the date of the last Solo(s) show I attended, I found not just my blogpost about her Solo(s) show (January 31st), but also four other references in my blog to Shoshanna Weinberger. If you are interested in a given topic, whether you know that I have addressed it or are just wondering if I have addressed it, there is a Search box at the top left of this blog into which you can type a search string.



A single word may work better than a phrase. You might then be presented with a number of posts, after your request has been processed, that go back only a couple of years, rather than all the way back thru the nearly 8 years of this blog's existence. If you are not satisfied with what the Blogger service produces in response to a Search request, do not hesitate to contact me directly (at ResurgenceCity @ aol.com — take out the spaces). I can search the entire archive of 1,670 posts since May 2004.

These two small assemblages were in the hallway not far from the main gallery.

Music Events in Newark Friday and Tuesday. Newark's own jazz songstress Carrie Jackson has two events in Newark in the next few days.

Friday, March 23, 2012 7pm-11pm
Carrie Jackson & The Ladies In The Band
Music Tribute to Great Women in Jazz
Tomoko Ohno, pn, Kim Clarke, bs; Dee Ramey, drms
Priory Restaurant & Jazz Club
No music cover / charge
233 W. Market Street, Newark, NJ 07103 973-242-8012
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Tuesday, March 27, 2012 2 pm-4 pm
Free to the public
Carrie Jackson Quartet Music Tribute to Sarah Vaughan
Lou Rainone, pn, Thaddeus Expose, bs, Earl Grice, drms
Institute of Jazz Studies - Rutgers University
Dana Library - 185 University Ave. 4th floor Newark, NJ
973-353-5595

Carrie Jackson is an accomplished performer who sings throughout the NJ/Manhattan area, with various configurations of instrumental accompanists. But her home base is Newark, where she has her own recording company, www.cjayrecords.com.



I saw Carrie's performance in an Essex County Parks summer concert in Weequahic Park in August 2009 (foto above). My blogpost about that concert has links to 4 little videos of portions of the performance. Nowadays I would merge those 4 short videos into a single video, with brief transitions, in Microsoft's Windows Movie Maker, but I didn't know how to do that then. If you check out those videos thru the links in that post, you will find that she is thoroly professional. Pay no heed to the shakiness of the visual portion of those videos. The camera was handheld. In these videos, in any case, the sound was much more important than the picture.

Stage Café "Why Are You Yelling at Me?" show.

Archives, T -x

I started this blog on May 11, 2004. What I said then, I commend to readers' attention now, and esp. to the attention of gay men now crammed-jammed in Manhattan and not much enjoying life in such reduced circumstances. My reference to "T -x" is meant to refer to posts from any date before today ("T").
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When first I put up this blog, I had not yet decided to illustrate all my blogposts with fotos, but in the course of the ensuing almost 8 years, I have put over 8,000 fotos online to illustrate this blog. Here's one from 2006, which should serve as reminder to people outside Newark that the Cherry Blossom Festival in Branch Brook Park is coming up, sometime next month. I don't know exactly when, because the Branch Brook Park Alliance is NOT keeping its website up-to-date! Shame on them.



I update this blog anywhere from one to four times a week, but not everything I speak to will interest every viewer. Fortunately, there are years of archived blogposts that speak to multitudinous topics, clickable from the right column of this blog. So if you are interested in Newark information and fotografs, but don't see anything new on a given visit, you can click on one of the archive links and check out what I have addressed in earlier posts. The bulk of fotos before October 19, 2007 no longer appear due to America Online's having closed down all subscribers' online storage spaces, so if you are interested primarily in fotos, check out archives only from after that date.

Spring Comes to Newark

Long post, some 1,800 words and 23 fotos.

This winter may have been mild, but the arrival today of spring — there's no capital-S on "spring", by the way — was still welcome.



In my yard, the annual bloom of spring-flowering bulbs is well underway. It starts with crocuses, daffodils, narcissuses (largely-white daffodils), and hyacinths.



I have expected the daffodils to spread, thru division of the bulbs, but they seem not to be doing so. Oddly, one tulip has popped up where I planted none, in an area of soil between the slate sidewalk and the retaining wall up to my front yard. My house is on a slope, with the rear of my back yard perhaps 15 feet higher than the sidewalk out front.



A number of other flowering plants have also spread, perhaps by seeds dropped in poop from the birds that ate at the birdfeeder in my front yard in recent years. These leaves look like crocus leaves, but actually give rise, as I remember, to little white, star-shaped flowers long after the crocuses, which are more like pitcher-shaped, have stopped blooming.



I think some tulips have extended farther to the right of, and higher on my sloping front yard, than the trench I initially dug to plant over 100 bulbs that my friend Jerry had rescued from trash put out by a rich church in the Gramercy Park area of Manhattan. That church had been pulling up each year's bulbs to plant new ones each fall, but discontinued that practice the year after Jerry turned bulbs over to me, which I think was the first year I arrived in Newark, 2000.

I bought all the daffodils and hyacinths seen here, but the crocuses elsewhere are a legacy from the prior owners of my house.

Not all of my second-hand bulbs survived, I suppose, but there's still a wonderful display of tulips and some paperwhites from that same gift every spring, usually in April. The tulip leaves start up a few weeks before the flowers appear. The daffodil and hyacinth blooms fade before the tulip blooms appear.



The daffodils and hyacinths may be early this year, thanks to our fourth-warmest winter ever (doesn't "global warming" argue for each year's winter being warmer than any prior winter?). Plants seem to have temperature sensors, or triggers. Sensor seems almost to imply intelligence in a plant. I checked my fotos from last year, which show them to have reached their height of bloom around April 7th. The tulips were at their height by April 28th. (I must check whether the Cherry Blossom Festival has been scheduled for earlier than usual this year. By the time the festival weekend arrived last year, many of the blooms had already died and dropped off the trees because of unexpectedly warm weather the two or three weeks before. This year, the organizers have had plenty of advance warning as to the likelihood of earlier blooming, and dropoff.)



To know for sure how different years' weather affects spring-flowering bulbs, I guess I would have to take pix of the same areas of my yard on the same dates, but I haven't done that. I could set up an alarm on AOL Calendar to remind me. I just checked, and I can set a reminder at least as far in advance as April 2014.

The daffodils may not have spread outward, but may be denser, with more blooms per square foot than the first year after I planted them. May be.

The crocuses seem more variable than the other bulbs. Sometimes they come up literally thru the snow, in late February or early March. This year I couldn't see some of them because spreading English ivy had covered them up. English ivy is considered "invasive", even a plant "pest". I want to move some of it from where I don't want it, instead to where I do want it, to cover the bulk of my sideyard, which is mostly in shade, so not much else will grow there. I have English ivy climbing up some of my trees, which provides cheerful greenery thru the gray days of too much of a Newark winter.

This foto shows two invasive plant pests. The English ivy is obvious. The poison ivy at upper left and right may not be as obvious. I also have some fiercely thorny briars in that same area that I have to watch out for and cut down.

When I trimmed the ivy back, some of the blooms had already died, and the base of the leaves was pale from insufficient lite.



In searching on Google for a report I had heard on TV recently, that spring is more people's favorite season than any other, I found an anonymous blogpost from Macoupin County, Illinois (northeast of St. Louis, MO) which said:

I firmly believe people who leave their outdoor Christmas decorations up do us no favors by prolonging winter’s hold on the calendar. Twinkle lights simply cannot compete with a bright spring day, trust me. I look resentfully upon plastic Santas who linger in the yard too long. Give Santa a break and drag him back into the garage where he belongs, please. I’ll look forward to seeing him again in a few months, after I’ve become fed up with the stifling heat and humidity of summer.

I brought in my large plastic snowman and penguin several days ago, well before the end of winter, for which a snowman and penguin are appropriate. They aren't really Christmas decorations as such, but they became plainly inappropriate when all risk of snow had passed.



That blogger had apparently left that area but returned. I lived in Manhattan for 35 years, but returned the short distance to North Jersey almost 12 years ago. If I hadn't, I wouldn't have any spring flowers to show here. Indeed, there would be no "Newark USA" fotoblog.

This cluster shows the less common flowers in my front yard, all-yellow daffodils, and pink and white hyacinths, in front of a mass of English ivy climbing one of my oak trees. Some blue hyacinths also peek thru in the background. If I remember correctly, the hyacinths came in a box of mixed colors, with no color indicated for each bulb. I thought I could move them once I saw which was which color, but I have just left them where they grew. I'm not a control freak.

I couldn't find the TV news poll about Americans' favorite season. Both Google and Bing confused "season", the astronomical quarter of the year, with television "season", so I got primarily results for things like Jersey Shore and Dancing with the Stars. I find it increasingly hard to find anything I want nowadays thru search engines.



In any case, as I remember the survey, spring was the favorite season for the largest number of Americans, which surprised me. Mine has always been summer, from the time we got out of school for a couple of months, thru today, despite summer's oppressive, steamy reputation (note the seasonally popular songs "Those Lazy Hazy Crazy Days of Summer" by Nat King Cole and "(Hot Town) Summer in the City" by The Lovin' Spoonful.



As so commonly happens nowadays, the poll results appeared on screen too briefly to be read fully before they were yanked. There's something wrong with the people who do television graffics nowadays. They seem to have no idea that graffics that can be read quickly and easily on a computer monitor two feet away don't work on a TV set across the room. And they plainly don't read the text aloud, at a moderate rate of speed, to determine how long a graffic needs to stay onscreen.



I went out this afternoon to check the tulips. Most of the tulips and other bulbs had poked their leaves up against all resistance, sometimes skewering oak leaves in the way.



But I had buried some too deep under masses of fallen leaves last autumn, and had to clear away two wheelbarrowfuls of dead leaves to uncover a bunch of tulips that had not been able to poke thru the matted mass. I am gradually enriching the soil in my yards with each autumn's leaves, and composting goes on not just in compost heaps as such but also in the layer of leaves and twigs I have spread widely across the side and back yards. But too thick a layer of leaves can keep plants from reaching the lite, come spring. Unfortunately, in removing excess dead leaves, I broke off some of the pale, gangly leaf stalks of buried tulips. I hope enuf leaves are left to keep the bulbs going thru this season and into next year.



I'll be more careful about how many leaves I pile on this coming autumn, and check for buried tulip leaves next spring. I've already set a reminder in AOL Calendar for March 15, 2013. And then I'll set a reminder for 2014.



I scattered some bulbs in other parts of the yard too, when I saw a suggestion to place them at the base of trees. They aren't doing as well there, because of more shade, tho they do well enuf, given that the trees don't have leaves during the time the bulbs' leaves are drawing energy from the sun to produce flowers.



I don't know what this little blue flower is. It sort of looks like a wild hyacinth. It was blooming each year perilously close to where I turned my car around to get down my driveway, so last year I moved the two little plants close to a massive oak, several feet from the driveway, and they're doing better there. I think I also put some dead leaves under them to serve as fertilizer. (I was zoomed in too close when I took this picture, because the ambient lite kept me from seeing the camera monitor clearly. When in doubt, zoom out with the camera, and in with the graffics program later.)



This next foto shows a regular hyacinth, by contrast. The leaves and individual blossoms are similar but the flower spike is far more lush.



The sequence of perennial-flower displays in my yard runs something like this: March, crocuses, daffodils, narcissuses, hyacinths; April, tulips, paperwhites, azaleas, and mini-roses; May, rhododendrons, lilies, and masses of purple wisteria; June, phlox, tickseed, and hostas; July, rose of sharon, phlox; August-October, phlox, rose of sharon, some chrysanthemums; November-December, one late chrysanthemum. As you can see, the phlox and rose of sharon persist in flowering for months, and there is almost always something blooming in my yards the entire spring-summer-fall growing season. What a great change from apartment life in Manhattan!