Newark USA

Stronger Signal for NJTV?

2012-02-01T05:03:00.002-05:00

The New York company that was given the New Jersey Network by our obese state-traitor has heretofore done a really bad job of getting its materials to New Jerseyans. For months I have been unable to get anything at all at channels 50-1, -2, or -3, which I used to be able to get at least some of the time, over-air. (I don't have cable TV, just cable modem.) In recent days, however, I have been able to get something on 50-1, sometimes. It's not strong enuf to get on all three of the floors of my house where I have a TV and digibox, but I can sometimes get something on one set or another. (Before the transition to digital broadcasting, I also had a small TV in the basement that I could watch while playing pool and waiting to clear the lint trap in the dryer. But I didn't buy a digibox for that set, in part because of expense (the Federal Government offered only two coupons for a discount on digiboxes) and in part because I didn't know if the antenna down there was good enuf to pick up a digital signal.)

Inasmuch as I don't have fotos specific to today's topic, I present today some further pix [http://newarkusa.blogspot.com/2011/09/ribbon-cutting-schools-stadium.html] of one of my favorite Newark sites, the astonishingly beautiful new Schools Stadium at Bloomfield and Roseville Avenues. Television is in effect an electronic stadium, theater, or window out onto the world, so these fotos are not completely unrelated to today's topic.

(In trying to link to the Stadium's location in MapQuest, I found a description of this wonderful city at http://mqvibe.mapquest.com/. That description has several sections, in a New MapQuest feature I hadn't even been aware of. That was not, however, what I wanted to link to. I had to find a way to get to "Classic" MapQuest to show you what I wanted to show, the intersection where the Stadium lies. [http://classic.mapquest.com/maps?city=Newark&state=NJ&address=Bloomfield+Ave+%26+Roseville+Ave&zipcode=07107&country=US&latitude=40.77042&longitude=-74.18325&geocode=INTERSECTION]. For my part, I hope to check out, over time, the New-MapQuest description webpage, as above, to see what it has to offer. You never know if someone else's version of an Introduction will agree with your own version of what people should know from the outset. Suppressing someone else's intro may leave your readers deprived of info they would really like to have.)

Digital broadcasting is a crappy technology that manifestly does not work right. The public was sold a bill of goods when the Federal Government wanted to sell enormous amounts of bandwidth to multibillion-dollar corporations, and everyone was forced to buy a digital converter for each TV set they wanted to watch without cable. We were promised dazzling picture and sound. What they didn't tell us is that many areas of the Nation would be blacked-out, because the signals just wouldn't reach far enuf. So now we have digital in the mathematical sense: two conditions, on and off. You either get great picture and sound, or you get nothing — at best a scrambled picture and no sound, or a black screen.

In any case, let us consider an interplay between Newark's sports facilities and broadcasting. If WNET had not been stolen from Newark by rich New YORKers, high-school football games or at least hilites might be broadcast for Newarkers' own elucidation, by WNET. And major Tristate (or wider) athletic events might be staged at Schools Stadium (a) because the facility, in itself, is wonderful, and (b) because a broadcaster in the Nation's largest TV market might think it worthy, in terms of potential audience, to cover them. That is, tho a WNET located within and faithful to Newark might broadcast events from Newark's own Schools Stadium for the information of Newarkers, any such broadcast could be viewed by people throughout the enormous Tristate Metropolitan Ara. Thus, the existence of a wonderful stadium in Newark, in combination with the existence in Newark of a television station that can reach 22 million people, might produce TV-worthy athletic events in Newark. "If you build it, they will come" — if there is a TV station in that market. We've built a remarkable stadium. When do major interscholastic events arrive?

Broadcasters have not increased signal strength, at least not enuf to compensate for the weakness of the digital-broadcasting technology, to produce a brilliant picture with sterling sound from a signal of legacy strength. As things stand, a single passing airplane can knock out even the stronger stations here for as long as two minutes at a time.

Moreover, the owners of broadcast licenses are not living up to their obligations, as for instance to provide an Electronic Program Guide (EPG) at all hours the station is on. On rare occasions, I get the message "EPG Not Found". Other times, I get incomplete or incorrect information. For instance, I might with one button on the remote get a list of several programs over the next several hours, by title and time only, but when I press any entry in that list for a specific program's description, no information appears. Sometimes the entire list is blank. Sometimes a time period, of as much as a few hours, is skipped.

Is it really too much of an imposition upon the holders of these invaluable licenses to "the people's airwaves" to require that they put up a correct and complete EPG? The broadcasters of course MUST know, long in advance, what they're going to broadcast, or they couldn't put it out on the airwaves on time. So what is the problem with telling viewers? An accurate and complete EPG is esp. important in that TVGuide.com does not include all the stations of our region in its grid.

The refusal of broadcasters to live up to their responsibility to broadcast an accurate and complete EPG is a small part of what Newton Minow, among other critics, meant (see my post of January 14th) [http://newarkusa.blogspot.com/2012/01/open-mind.html] when he spoke to the obligation of broadcasters to operate their public trust in the "public interest ". That is, over-air broadcast wavelengths are "the people's airwaves". They do not belong to the private broadcasters who are given a temporary and revocable license to use them. Broadcasters are entrusted with those wavelengths, but only if they use them in the public interest. Alas, the FCC allows broadcasters to get away with not living up to their responsibilities. Broadcasters in fact abuse us endlessly. All three of the legacy networks (ABC, CBS, NBC) show infomercials at ridiculous hours, as early as 7pm, not just in the middle of the nite.

In our area, the best use of digital broadcasting is plainly by WPIX, which has three subchannels in English and one in Spanish. PIX manages to provide programming for all these channels, 24 hours a day on at least the English-language stations. (The Spanish programming, "Estrella [which means Star] TV", seemed consistently crappy to me, even given my poor Spanish, so I turned that subchannel off months ago, by deleting it, thru "Channel Edit", from the list of stations that are presented for my consideration by my digibox.)

CBS, by contrast with WPIX, has had only one channel since the inception of digital broadcasting, tho in recent days I have sometimes gotten a blank channel 2-2. The most I have seen there is a large blue-green square bouncing in the middle of a black screen, to the accompaniment of a single musical tone . Does that indicate that CBS is finally going to broadcast on a second subchannel? When? What will that new subchannel show? WCBS can't even program its entire schedule on channel 2-1, without infomercials. How is it going to program a channel 2-2?

It's a good idea to rescan a digibox every couple of months, to see if there are new stations. After I drafted the first part of this blogpost, I did rescan, and found a bunch of new channels. There are now four channels 23, two in Spanish and two in Hindi(?). But they are too weak to be clear in my area, and they are not listed in TVGuide.com. There are also some channels in the range 60 to 67, mostly in Spanish, Chinese, and Korean.

I don't know if the soccer net stays in the place shown here, behind the football goalpost, or is moved in front of it during a game. The wide base of the goalpost would be a big barrier in the way of the soccer net. But a regulation soccer field ("pitch") is longer than a football field. Perhaps in the U.S., dual-purpose fields compel a shorter soccer pitch.

If the reason I now sometimes get channel 50-1 is that NJTV has boosted its signal a little, then they should boost it even more, so that I and many other people in NJ can receive it clearly, on any floor of their house. Channel 50-2 has, however, vanished. 50-3, which is audio only, still showed up, but it has always seemed to be a mere reading of extended news stories, that come across as being read by volunteers reading for the blind. I thought of doing that many years ago, but am now too busy. Public schools could offer extra credit to high-school students for reading to the blind in audio recordings, radio, and channel 50-3. I participate in online Harris Polls, and one question often asked is if I think that schools should require community service of high-school students. I always answer no, because kids should offer service to others from the heart, not because they are forced to.

I have not yet attended a football (or other) game in Schools Stadium — and Gaetano mentioned that his sister has wanted to jog there but found the gates always locked against community use — but I hope to, someday. I went up into the lower (visitors') stands for pix when the Stadium opened, but did not climb to the top of the much-higher home stands for the best view. I can do that when/if I attend a football game, track meet, or other event — marching-band competition, fife-and-drum contest, massed-chorus concert or competition, outdoor art show and sale, whatever — to be held there. Newark now has two fine stadiums, Schools and Bears. Now let's find good uses for them both.

Pix of Current Solo(s) Art Shows, Part 1

2012-01-31T01:49:00.006-05:00

There are presently four art exhibitions under way at Solo(s) Project House. I attended the opening reception last Friday, and took too many fotos to show in one blogpost, so will deal with the most prominently hilited exhibition, Shoshanna Weinberger's "What Makes My Hottentot So Hot" (on view January 27-March 2).

The dark shadow in the foto above was cast by a structural pole that wasn't always there. I don't know how recently it was installed, but I consulted my fotos of the same area from earlier shows, and it wasn't there.

Here is the description of the Weinberger show from the Solo(s) email notice.

Weinberger presents a body of work that is driven by the history of exposé, beauty and form inspired by the real-life story of Saartjie Baartman the "Hottentot Venus."

"I find Baartman's life both captivating and horrific; living as a specimen perpetuating the myth of "otherness" that can still be found today fascinates me as a woman and an artist."

Weinberger identifies with Baartman physiologically and politically, making personal connections of awkwardness as a female growing-up in a society obsessed with attaining beauty result in imagery that depicts this as distorted excess. Malformed and decapitated bodies, with long cornrow braids, un-kept locks, and pigtails, mutations of multiple-mouths, nipples, breasts, and buttocks, create a sense of familiarity, confusion, humor and tension.

Contemporary connections of Baartman's subjugation are found in references to modern-day strip-club dancers, West-Indian Dancehall performers, cultural stereotypes, Hollywood icons, prostitutes and circus sideshow freaks to name a few. These figures are tangled, hogtied and suffocated with props associated with femininity such as thongs, bras, high-heels and jewelry. Forms are placed on a scallop shell akin to the mythological Birth of Venus story. Incorporating Botticelli's Birth of Venus scallop shell into a new psychology of presenting the birth of femininity found in bars and graffiti stalls declaring love found or lost. These drawings allude to the psychology of coexisting in human and animal form as well as forms grotesque and sexualized.

Weinberger was born in Kingston, Jamaica, to Jamaican-mother and American-father. She currently resides in Newark, New Jersey. She completed her undergrad degree at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and received a masters degree from Yale University, Yale School of Art. Exhibiting for the past decade, Weinberger's work has been glorified across the country at the Spertus Museum in Chicago, Illinois; The Jones Center for Contemporary Art in Austin, Texas; and Carol Jazzar Contemporary Art in Miami, Florida just to name a few. She has also been featured in the National Biennial Exhibition National Gallery of Jamaica, Kingston in 2006 and 2008.

After I had taken fotos of the artworks, I looked around the room and guessed who might be Ms. Weinberger. Then I asked Rebecca Jampol, principal of Solo(s), if the artist was there, and she said yes, then introduced us, telling her that I have a blog about Newark. Sure enuf, it was the woman I had guessed. I told her that in these exhibitions I like to take a foto of the artist by their favorite work. She looked a little startled or flustered, as artists sometimes are when asked to select their favorite piece. But she had one, this one, a 3-dimensional piece employing a mirror as well. I told her that I had taken a couple of pix of that already and thought it was too low to show in the same foto with her.

I don't know why, but sometimes when I take a foto of something in darkness, I get pale circles on the dark background. Does anyone reading know why this happens and what I can do about it?

So she chose a larger and higher 2D piece. I told her that I had decided, in looking around at the crowd, that she was probably Shoshanna Weinberger, from the description in the email, because she had a Jewfro/Afro thing going with her hair. She smiled to say she could see that. I took my customary two fotos, one with and one without flash. I have tried and tried to decide between them, but couldn't. So I show both. You decide which is better. Here's the one with flash.

Here's the one without.

The reception was very well attended, with people spread out thru the original Solo(s) space at the back of the building, the lobby, and the Stage Eatery, Gallery + Venue space at the front of the building.

The bulk of the artworks are large-format and intensely colorful.

Most are 2D, but there are two brite, reflective sculptures, also intense in color.
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For more info and pictures of her artworks in various categories, check out www.shoshanna.info. Solo(s) Project House is located at 972 Broad Street (Newark, NJ 07102), just south of the Rodino Federal Office Building. It is free and open to the public, Wednesday-Friday from 12-6pm.

www.solosprojecthouse.com
info@solosprojecthouse.com

Second 'Pulse' in Newark

2012-01-29T23:59:00.002-05:00

I attended the opening reception for the current art shows at Solo(s) Project House on Friday evening early. I have preliminarily fixed all the fotos but not yet chosen which to show, resized them, etc., nor written the text of my discussion. So let me discuss now something I saw on the way back to my car.
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I had to park a block and a half away up Broad Street, in the first parking space at City Hall just past Franklin Street. When I approached that corner heading back, I saw an SUV parked just behind my car, and two gentlemen doing something, which turned out to be stocking a dispenser for a new free newspaper. I saw a poster on the dispenser that said "NJ Pulse", so asked what it is, in that the only media "Pulse" I know of around here is the website Newark Pulse, which sends out a weekly events e-newsletter each Tuesday. No relation.

The gent in the suit (a Mr. Baldeo) said the paper started in Paterson, but has now broadened the area it covers. I introduced myself, mentoning my fotoblog, then asked how much it costs. When he said it's free, I asked for a copy, and for his card. He gave me a copy, and said his contact information is on page 2 of the paper, so I started to head out but realized I should ask if he'd pose for a mention in my fotoblog, to which he consented. I then went into my car and saw that he or his helper had put a copy under my right-side windshield wiper, so now I had two. I was going to give one back, but decided I could just leave it somewhere for someone else, as for instance in the newspaper rack at the NCC Pathmark shopping center on Bergen Street.

Here is the front page. Today I looked thru the paper and found some odd things. There's a lot more about Paterson, in which I am little interested, than about Newark. The Newark story about "African Americans" blasting the City Council over Dominicans is a reference to various members of the Council making remarks that honored a Dominican store owner who had been killed. Some non-Dominican blacks in the audience complained that when their own people are killed, they don't get that kind of honor. Let us for the record point out that the bulk of Dominicans ARE black, as Americans view things. The CIA World Factbook says the population is "mixed 73%, white 16%, black 11%"; Wikipedia clarifies that "The multiracial population is primarily a mixture of European and African, but there is as well a significant Taíno [Amerindian] element in the population ... about 90% of the contemporary Dominican population has West African ancestry to varying degrees", but the Dominican culture does not gladly admit to that. In any case, a lot of Newarkers would be appalled, if not puzzled, by one group of blacks complaining that another group of blacks received some attention, given that our mayor and a majority of the Council are black. The entire story struck me as odd, and perhaps exaggerated, exacerbating tensions over what was probably (I wasn't there) a trivial incident.
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Another couple of oddities leapt out at me. A story about Governor Christie appointing an openly gay man to the State Supreme Court referenced antigay comments left by pseudonymous person/s at a YouTube video. And the contact info for Mr. Baldeo appeared below a story that makes the odd and incomprehensible claim that his organization, Christian Heritage U.S., "has authored and passed the first law of its kind that requires the U.S. Government to recognize the Christian Heritage of the United States". Since when does any private organization pass laws that require the U.S. Government to do anything?

Plainly the United States has a culture that is dominantly Christian, and I don't know a single person who denies that. How could we, when our biggest holiday, Christmas, dominates the culture for over a month every year? What we do deny, however, is the idea that non-Christians and nonreligious Americans are somehow less fully American than self-styled American "Christians" — many of whom don't act very Christian toward other people.
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When I met Mr. Baldeo, I thought he was Indian or Pakistani. Now I see that his name is Sirrano Keith Baldeo. I have seen the surname Serrano among Hispanics, and Baldeo looks like it could be Spanish, Italian, or something else descended from Latin. Some Jews (Sephardic) have Latin-form names. Mr. Baldeo would seem Christian. Fine. But it is both inappropriate and inadvisable for a (dark-skinned) member of an ethnic minority to be looking down his nose at religious minorities. Intolerance begets intolerance, and people who play one group off against another — be it "blacks" vs. Dominicans, straight people vs. gay people, or Christians vs. non-Christians and the nonreligious — do us all a disservice. This concludes my Sunday sermon.

Four Art Shows Open Tonite at Solo(s)

2012-01-27T11:53:00.009-05:00

I got email notice from the Solo(s) Project House of the opening of four art shows in various parts of 972 Broad Street (near the Rodino Federal Office Building) tonite. I am unclear, however, as to whether there are two receptions, one from 6-9pm and the other from 7-11pm.

This is a section of last month's Marc D'Agusto show at Solo(s).

The main exhibit, "What makes My Hottentot so Hot" by Shoshanna Weinberger, concerns Saartjie Baartman, "the Hottentot Venus". This is at least the second art show in Newark that has been concerned with that famed woman (also known as Sarah Baartman) whose steatopygia (shelf-butt) made her a freak-show favorite in Europe in the early years of the 19th Century. The other was at the Submerged Gallery in September 2010. (See my blogpost of October 19th, 2010 and search for "Marasela".)
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A second exhibition, a group show, is "Why Are You Yelling at Me!" (shouldn't there be a question mark there somewhere?).

Aggressive art confronting the viewer in scale, color and subject matter. Art that is "yelling" so to speak, open-mouthed and without shame. Each work dares you to pass by without taking a moment.

The third show, "Hannah Craft: the Child Looks up And...", appears to be a holdover from a month ago. It occupies the part of the lobby closest to the main gallery on the first floor. I showed one foto earlier of this feathery installation at the end of my post of December 29th. Here's another.

The fourth show is "Paintings by Christine Wagner". I showed others of her painting here on August 29th, 2010.
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I hope to get to all these shows, but am not sure I'd arrive before 9pm, so may miss one of the receptions, unless there is only one reception, from 7-11pm.

Not Dead

2012-01-23T14:42:00.026-05:00

In that I don't have fotos specific to today's topics, I show some pix of the Newark Public Library from February of last year, plus a foto of a flyer I received in the mail Saturday about this year's Black History Month programs. NPL is a place filled with a jumble of information, ideas, and images that librarians have somehow reduced to a semblance of order. The Dewey Decimal System goes only so far, tho, and there are many visual materials on the walls and in display cases, all within a magnificent building in a great location.

Gaetano complained by email yesterday about my not having posted anything here since the 15th, and asked: "Are you Dead?" I replied, over multiple emails:

I'm in semi-hibernation.... I have done some drafting, but the mood has not struck me to finalize things. This week I'll be more active, because there are ART events on the 26th and 27th. I'm sure you look forward to my art mentions. [Gaetano complains about my spending too much time on 'artsy-fartsy' matters.] * * *

Another problem is that some of the materials I have are lengthy, or too short. Or I don't have pix. For instance, last Wednesday, Wendy Williams had Queen Latifah on her show, and they spoke about how far they go back, and that they are both from "Jersey". Wendy asked Dana (Owens, QL's real name) how long it's been since she was back in Newark, and QL said Christmas. She hesitated a moment, as tho her family is not really in Newark proper anymore, but that could mean they were in 'Greater Newark' -- Irvington or the Oranges or something.

Most of the text in this flyer is probably not readable at this resolution, but you can find a complete listing of this year's Black History programs at the Library's website.

To make a longer post, I want to bring in the discussion of jury service, mine and your experiences. Because when I was there, the orientation mentioned that Wendy Williams served a few weeks earlier. I think she lives in Verona now, tho she is originally from Ocean Township, near where my grandmother lived for decades, and then others lived for several years. I have fotos from the parking structure (Veterans Courthouse garage) and of the Courthouse entrance that I have not yet used. But putting all these things together might make the post too long and complicated. So I either have an item that is too short, with no fotos, or too long, with fotos.
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I have some things to talk about in connection with a conversation I had with an elderly black gent (about my age, that is to say) who lives in Irvington and pays more than twice my property tax on a lot about the same size. He also bought into that con of buying insurance for the water pipe between the curb and house, which I wanted to warn people not to waste money on.
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Then there are several education-related issues I could draw together, such as a course being offered on why Newark schools have not been returned to local control despite improvement in test scores; the pointlessness of school advisory board elections in any form; nonpartisan elections without statements of attitudes; etc. I have lots of pix for that discussion, but unless I break it into several parts -- which I suppose I could do -- it will go much too long.

That made Gaetano think of this:

I went to a lecture the other day at One Day University and a famous Prof. Anne Nelson from Columbia talked for an hour on several topics of Journalism and Print -v- On-line Media and pros/cons of both. She mentioned how one famous report -- I forget now -- had to cut its articles from 800 words to 200 words as they were not being read, and showed scans of where people's eyes focused on-screen when reading articles and they are in the shape of an F pattern so lots of words get lost! Interesting stuff.

Centennial Hall, where the opening reception for Black History Month, "Langston, We Love You Madly!", will be held Wednesday, February 1st, from 6-8pm.

I then further remarked:

One reason I use a lot of fotos, [and try to place] about one per screen, is to keep people interested in reading on. To the extent the fotos are worthy in themselves, people get some value from the pix if not from the text.

Also yesterday I got an email from someone I hadn't heard from in a long time, Dan C. of NYC, asking "What kill[ed] the Daily Newarker"? I replied:

I don't know why The Daily Newarker went out of existence. It was never really daily, but you'd think that a GROUP of people would be able to maintain a website. I've been pressed by other matters in the past week -- and it's been cold, so I am semi-hibernating -- so haven't updated my own blog, tho I have drafted some things that I might finalize [for Monday]. But I am one person. You'd think that there would be enuf interest and energy in a small group to keep The Daily Newarker going.

This and the next three fotos show portions of the James Brown African American Room.

I've been distracted by financial matters, reorganizing some things in my house (which has produced problems remembering where things are now!), posting to my political blog about topics raised in this primary season, thinking about repairs necessitated by water damage to my house (I think there may be some home-repair programs I, being "elderly", can qualify for, but to find them, I need to do some research, which takes away from other matters), drafting language and adding to appendixes for a book I am gradually writing about spelling reform, etc. There's only one of me, and I tend to lose focus since I have so many things to address. It all merges together, in stream-of-consciousness fashion, like so:

Wendy Williams and Queen Latifah; Wendy was raised in Ocean Township, near West Allenhurst, where my grandmother lived and then my father, one brother and one sister, and mother (my parents were then separated but my mother moved into a big house my brother massively enlarged to accommodate everyone, to help with my father in his last months of terminal cancer). I think Dad was born at home and died at home — different homes, in adjoining states. He used to like us to drive him to Manasquan Inlet to watch the boats coming and going, and the seagulls flying overhead. Ocean Township doesn't actually touch the ocean. Newark does, tho we don't generally think of Newark Bay as an arm of the Atlantic Ocean. We have seagulls as far as Bergen Street, at least. Last nite on The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show on Antenna TV, Harry Von Zell offered a joke about gulls flying over someone, and George cut him off with the punchline about how could he see at that distance if they were gulls or boys. Queen Latifah was born in Newark but raised in East Orange, and has lived in Colts Neck (tho I don't know where she presently resides), which adjoins Middletown Township to the north only a few miles from where I lived during high school. Now my high-school class (MTHS Class of '62) is planning its 50th Year Reunion, and I'm helping a tiny bit. Wendy lives in the Newark Vicinage and did jury service in Newark. Gaetano and I were, separately, also called. I liked talking to a guy from Irvington, and should discuss the issues that conversation raised, and things I think should be done differently as regards jury service in Essex County.

Speaking of dead, one of last nite's episodes of Too Close for Comfort on Antenna TV (channel 11-4) concerned the main character, "Henry Rush", turning morbid after his father died, and realizing that he has very few current friends. Who will give the eulogy at his own funeral service? Ted Knight, the actor who played "Henry Rush", was actually dying at the time, and succumbed at age 62. I'm 67. Will there be a memorial service for me when I (finally) go? Who would organize it? My family is scattered over several states, and some of my friends have died. Most older people have very few "friends", and fewer as years go by and they start to die. Most people make their closest friends early in life, in high school, college, or the military (in the case of "Henry Rush"). They move away, you lose touch. Antenna TV has lots of "classic" TV, and just about everybody you see in those shows has died. Last nite, Ted Knight appeared in a bit part in an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents on the same channel an hour or so after the morbid episode of Too Close for Comfort.

I should add to my gay blog more often. Should I also start a spelling-reform blog? Would I have time? Energy? I have kept up my "Simpler Spelling Word of the Day" website for 7½ years, starting June 1st, 2004 (2,792 days); my political blog even longer, tho fewer entries (1,163 posts, starting April 15, 2004), and my Newark blog for almost as long as my polblog (1,644 posts, starting May 11, 2004). But I've been very lax about adding to my gay blog (only 61 posts since August 24, 2005), since there is still so much wrong with the gay world and gay media that addressing all the changes that need to be made is discouraging.

This is the James Brown for whom that room is named, not the famed soul singer, nor the Paterson artist who has exhibited in Newark and has at least one large painting in the Newark Museum a few blocks away.

Maybe I'd be better off just using most of my 'spare' time (that is, apart from my work for this blog), working on my spelling-reform book (probably to be published in Kindle form) and its many appendixes, one of which is to be the 40,000 most common words in English, respelled phonetically. And I should do that at the same time as I create a Listener's Wordfinder that shows all the accepted pronunciations for those 40,000 words, which can be as many as 6 for the 5-letter word "atoll". Maybe I can get help with some of my projects, such as making a really useful website from my skeletal TourismNewark.org website and spelling out all these different pronunciations. That reminds me of my project, "English Everywhere", which would send out American college and even high-school students for a year or more abroad, during which they would create the texts for English street signs, business signs, plaques in museums, etc., so that travelers from all over the world could travel more comfortably and understand more of what they see.

I saw a teaser on one of the evening news shows about people who volunteer to help with intellectual projects, but I can't remember which network it was (since I switch between the evening newscasts, in English and Spanish, during commercials or when a given segment doesn't interest me), to see if it would be of help to me, nor do I know what search term to type to find that story on the network-news websites. Getting back to Antenna TV, why does the opening of Maude show the drive up the West Side Highway in NYC and across the GWB to NJ, when the Findlays are supposed to live in Tuckahoe, which is in Westchester County, on the east side of the Hudson? And what about the horrible words of the opening theme, "Joan of Arc[,] with the Lord to guide her[,] She was a sister who really cooked"? Why was there no outrage nor controversy about saying of a woman who was burned at the stake that she "really cooked"?

And on, and on, and on. One thing leads to another and another and yet another. What I separate into different projects and blogs starts as one long interconnected internal conversation. I try to do written To Do lists and topic lists, in tables I can sort on various fields, but it's hard for me to separate things that seem to me linked, and to prioritize which I should deal with when. How do I divide a long discussion of school issues? Do I address all of them in the same week or spread them over two or three weeks?

On June 27th, I made a list of 27 topics for this blog. 13 (and a fraction of those topics) remain unaddressed. And that doesn't speak to other topics that have arisen since then. I created a table of topics and where fotos I might use in connection with them are stored on my computer, but I haven't updated that in a couple of months. I have a separate table, also not updated recently, of fotos I need to take. Then there is the issue of whether to backfill as I find the time, focus, and energy to produce blogposts, or just leave the gaps in the past and march only into the future.

Now you have an idea of the jumble of things I deal with. It doesn't help that I have no regular sleep cycle, but can wake up at 7am one day and 7pm another. Dismal gray days make me want to stay in bed, since the desk in my home office faces windows out onto the weather, and the sky is a very big part of the view in Newark. When I was living in Manhattan, the sky was hemmed in and small. But here, it's a large part of the view, so when the sun is shining, my view is glorious. When we have a stretch of dismal, short gray days, followed by long nites, I can get a little dismal myself. (My brother Alan moved to Las Vegas, and is surrounded by brite sunshine almost every day. He says it's the best move he ever made.)

On any given day, even with coffee and hot chocolate to jazz me with caffeine, I can never get done more than a small portion of that day's To-Do List. And it doesn't help that I'm 67 years old, so my ambitions exceed my energy. I might still work 12 hours on the computer for my various projects, and make meals, feed the cats, and do a little housework on one day, but the next day I might work only 4 hours on the computer, and that's nowhere near enuf to make a significant dent in what I have to do.
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It's little short of amazing to me that I ever do manage to stick to one topic and get anything done at all.

Downtown Newark needs more residents to enjoy the Library at their leisure, to wander the halls and read the plaques in the display cases. The skyscraper beyond the Library, above, is supposed to be turned, eventually, into residences for married Rutgers students. When is that conversion going to begin?

Good Day for NJ

2012-01-15T23:50:00.017-05:00

If you have not seen my discussion of the TV show Open Mind, nor my update to my post about car trouble when I tried to get to the Index and Kedar art receptions, please scroll down to those posts.

I was looking for something to watch on TV this evening after the Chris Matthews show at 10:30, and came across the Golden Globe awards, just as Newark's Queen Latifah was introduced. So I didn't turn off right away, which I would ordinarily do. She in turn introduced a clip of The Help. I was about to channel-surf away again, when it turned out that the big NJ-connection award came up, Best Actress. As widely anticipated, Summit and Bernardsville's Meryl Streep won! It was her 8th Golden Globe win, and the talk before the awards was that she is America's greatest actress of all time. This time she was up against Glenn Close (a woman with, oddly, a man's first name), who seemed a couple of decades ago to be the Nation's greatest actress — and beat the lady from Connecticut (who has won only 2 Golden Globes).

I have no fotos specific to today's two topics, so present, as one of my "Church Sunday" features, some fotos of what may be New Jersey's greatest building, the Cathedral Basilica of the Sacred Heart in near north Newark. I also show one foto of the most expensive house ever built in Newark.

Then, when I went onto AOL to see if that news was up, I saw a foto of Leonia's Peter Dinklage over a headline about his dedicating his Golden Globe, for Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role, to a fellow dwarf who was injured in a disgusting incident of "dwarf-tossing" in England. That was not a case of dwarfs volunteering to be tossed, for money, in a controlled entertainment with appropriate safety precautions. No, some drunk just picked this guy up from where he stood on a sidewalk outside a pub and threw him into the air (or dropped him; two different descriptions of the incident occur in one news story). He landed badly, after a fall of only about three feet, but that was enuf to aggravate a pre-existing spinal condition. (Three feet represents 3/4 of the guy's height of 4'2".)

If you don't recognize the name Peter Dinklage, you should. Everyone in NJ should. He came to fame in the wonderful indie film, The Station Agent, which was set in Newfoundland (nue.fóund.land), Passaic County, NJ, and written by another New Jerseyan, Thomas McCarthy. I discussed it here on February 20, 2006. (The Internet Movie Database said Dinklage was born in Morristown, which is what I reported in 2006. Wikipedia says he was actually born in Leonia and raised in Mendham Township, but went to the Delbarton School in Morristown.)

Leonia is the next town north of Palisades Park, where I lived the first nine years of my life. I like seeing the connections to my life of the things I see in the news. Leonia has undergone something of the same demograffic transformation as Palisades Park, which tho almost wholly white when I lived there, is now 51.5% Korean, the highest concentration of any town in the United States. Leonia is 26.5% Korean. You'd think that California towns would be more attractive to Koreans, given how much closer they are to Korea. In February 2009, there was a church with Korean services in the Forest Hill section of northern Newark, but I didn't see a listing for one in a search today in either Google or Bing.

Oprah in Mendham. Oprah Winfrey visited Gov. Christie at his home in Mendham (Somerset County; next town over from Peter Dinklage's Mendham Township) for an interview broadcast on her new show, "Oprah’s Next Chapter", this evening, on her "OWN" cable network. The promos I saw for that show, which premiered opposite the Golden Globes so might have had a diminished audience, focused on the Governor's weight issues and his concerns about how his weight might impact his family. A news report about the interview says Christie also addressed some political matters. I don't have cable TV, and wouldn't watch Christie anyway, but am vaguely curious as to what he meant by his concern about how his weight could affect his family. (Tho Christie was born in Newark, got his legal education here, and practiced law here, he was raised in the 'burbs. NJ provides a Governor's Mansion, Drumthwacket, in Princeton, but Wikipedia says that Christie "uses the mansion for Sunday dinners and official functions, while living in his private home." At least he hasn't sold it (yet), as happened to California's governor's mansion in a suburb when Jerry Brown refused to live in that newly constructed mansion that took the place of one in Sacramento proper. The State of California sold it during Brown's second term, whether at Jerry's instance or not. Now Jerry Brown is governor again, but there's no official residence for him to live in. That is just plain dopy, and perhaps Christie won't want to be regarded as flaky the way Brown was when he was blamed for selling California's Mansion.

Maybe Newark should have a Mayor's Mansion, as NYC has Gracie Mansion. Why not put the magnificent but presently unused Krueger-Scott Mansion (foto above) to that use? Newark/NJ taxpayers have already put something like $7M into it but it lies useless, a magnificent gravestone rather than litehouse on MLK Blvd. For other pix of that building, see my post of September 25, 2008.

Did Christie mean that he is concerned he will die soon because of his disgraceful tonnage? Christie has not heretofore confessed to how much he weighs, but it cannot be less than 300 pounds. He is 5'11" tall. I saw him in person outside NJPAC at last year's NJ Hall of Fame induction ceremony, and the speculation I saw online that he weighs 286 has to be wrong, far on the lite side. I have done a mental comparison between Christie now and Gaetano at his heaviest (405 pounds, as I recall, before he lost over 200 pounds), and I suspect Christie is closer to 400 than to 286.

Christie has already had a hospitalization, recently, so has reason to be concerned that he might be leaving his family soon. And it's all due to his refusal to stop eating. That is a self-inflicted injury due to a worldview of gluttony, a type of selfishness, that fits in perfectly with his politics of greed. Selfish people rarely understand that selfishness is often not in their best interest. Would that all the greedy Radical Rightists of the world would die from their greed, but there is no such thing as divine justice, so it looks like decent New Jerseyans will have to fite Christie and his ilk for at least a couple more years.

Oprah has had other programs about New Jersey topics, tho never, to my knowledge, produced in NJ. For instance, she hosted Mark Zuckerberg's announcement, alongside Mayor Booker, of a $100 million matching grant to Newark Public Schools on her former over-air show, Oprah, on September 24th, 2010. Here we are well over two years later. Does anyone know what, if anything other than the intial surveys of opinion about what should be done with the money, has in fact been done with that money, or any fraction of it?

'Open Mind'

2012-01-14T23:59:00.017-05:00

When I went downstairs (from my third-floor home office to my first floor) to make lunch today, I turned on the TV and found, at noon, something I didn't know was still on television: The Open Mind. This is a PBS discussion program — not to say "talk show", which is much too frivolous to apply to The Open Mind— that has been on TV for over 55 years! That is to say, it was on TV even before I (now 67 years old) even started to watch serious public-affairs programming. It is hosted now, as at its origin, by Richard D. Heffner, who was identified by a written subtitle onscreen as the 'Dowling Professor of Something or Other at Rutgers University'. The guy is over 86 years old, and looks great for that age. Moreover, he is apparently still teaching — HOW? (at the New Brunswick campus, I assume, to which he commutes from NYC).

In that I don't have fotos on point for the bulk of this discussion, I offer today some fotos of the NJ State Capitol and its vicinity in Trenton. You will see the connections if you read on.

The show "currently originates from the studios of the CUNY Graduate Center and airs on public broadcasting stations nationwide." Golly. I started college in the Freshman Program at the Graduate Center (of the City University of New York) in 1967. Small world, no? The Graduate Center was then on West 42nd Street between Fifth Avenue and Avenue of the Americas (often improperly called "Sixth Avenue"), but is now in the old B. Altman department-store building on Fifth Avenue and 34th Street.

Even more startling to me than the fact that this show is still going, with its original host, is that today's guest was Newton Minow (pronounced mín.oe, with a short-I, like "minnow" — tho you wouldn't know that from the spelling). Minow was JFK's Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission. On May 9, 1961, in a speech before the National Association of Broadcasters ("NAB"), Minow famously denounced American television as "a vast wasteland". It was, alas, nowhere near so vast nor nearly so desolate a wasteland then as it is now, more than 50 years later. Indeed, compared to today, television then was in a veritable Golden Age. For one thing, HALF as much time was given over to commercials! The Wikipedia article on Minow's NAB speech says:

Minow often remarks that the two words best remembered from the speech are "vast wasteland," but the two words he wishes would be remembered are "public interest."

He made that same point today on The Open Mind. He also said that Edward R. Murrow called him and said "You stole my speech". Minow was puzzled. He recalled today the earliest reactions he got from prominent people.

Ambassador [Joseph] Kennedy [father of JFK, foned and] said, "Newt, I told my son that was the best speech since his Inaugural Address. You stick with it, you do what you’re doing … anybody gives you any trouble … you call me … good-bye" … hung up.

The next call was from [legendary CBS newsman] Edward R. Murrow, who was then … had left CBS and he was running the US Information Agency for the government. And he called and he said, "Newt, you stole my speech".

HEFFNER: (Laughter)

MINOW: I said, "What do you mean?" He said, "Don’t you remember the speech I gave in your home town of Chicago two years ago". And I said, "Ed, I’m sorry … I’m not familiar with it." He said, "I’ll send it to you. You stole my speech".

Well, I read his speech and he was right because he gave the same speech, two years earlier to the news directors in television.

Great minds think alike. I assume that Murrow's and Minow's speeches were not really "the same" but made the same major point. (Note the two R's in "Murrow" but one N in "Minow" — again, you can see why I'm a spelling reformer.)

Curiously, there is a transcript of this show available online, but not a podcast. You'd think a podcast would be a lot easier to generate. But perhaps it's substatially more expensive to distribute.

In WNET promos several years back, celebrating the creation of WNET from Newark's WNTA, Edward R. Murrow (who notoriously was always seen smoking a cigaret, so 'cool' was he — until he died from lung cancer, the moron) spoke to the historic nature of that event — even tho, according to Minow, today, there were already public TV stations in Minow's hometown, Chicago, and Boston. What might have been different is that the commercial stations of nearby NYC joined together to fund the takeover of a (rival) commercial station within the Tristate Metropolitan Area and convert it to noncommercial use (so it would no longer compete for advertising dollars).

Detail, NJ State Capitol Building, Trenton. Most state capitols are wonderful buildings. I've seen (and fotograffed) perhaps 30 of them.

Wikipedia's article about WNET says that the first broadcasts of WNDT (its original call letters, for "New Dimensions in Television") were out of the (then) Mosque Theater, now Newark Symphony Hall. Perhaps they originated from behind the door to the Government Access TV Studio I showed here as the 7th foto on October 30, 2011.

Symphony Hall, flanked left by the Newark Boys Chorus School and right, two doors down, the Symphony Hall Box Office. I don't know why the box office is not at the main entrance. Seems odd to me.

The Wikipedia article about WNET (the call letters for which then stood for "National Educational Television") contains, a bit earlier than what I have heretofore cited, this interesting paragraf (well, interesting to me at least):

Outgoing New Jersey governor Robert B. Meyner [pronounced míe.ner], addressing state lawmakers' concerns over continued programming specific to New Jersey, and fearing the FCC would move the channel 13 allocation to New York City, petitioned the United States Court of Appeals on September 6, 1961, to block the sale of WNTA-TV [predecessor to WNET]. The court ruled in the state's favor two months later.

Why has no NJ nor Newark official since then done anything whatsoever to stop the transfer — lock, stock, and barrel — of Newark's TV station to NYC? Gov. Christie made everything worse by turning over to WNET the whole New Jersey Network as well! What is wrong with this state? Why hasn't Mayor Booker sued in Federal court to have WNET returned — lock, stock, and barrel — to Newark? A Federal court found in our favor once. Maybe it will again. And maybe the FCC, without need of a lawsuit in Federal court, will find that WNET, and the NJN stations, have been improperly moved from their cities of license (in New JERSEY), and thus order the return of WNET to Newark and the NJN stations to their NJ cities of license.

But the FCC is not going to do that of its own instance. Someone has to demand it, somebody in power. Are you listening, Mr. Booker? Newark is not a colony of NYC, to be denuded of its resources by rapacious outsiders. The best of NET can perfectly well operate in Newark. I once saw, for instance, the (very striking) Rafael PiRoman in Newark Penn Station, boarding the same train to Manhattan as I did. So he is perfectly willing to work in Newark, as, we must assume, is Steve Adubato (the Younger), whose father (at least) lives in Newark, and who may himself live here.

I wondered if either of the Adubatos is in the (one-volume) Encyclopedia of New Jersey. I recently discovered, in reorganizing some things in my house, that I had indeed bought that expensive, large-format book several years ago but forgot that I had done so. My cats knocked it down from a shelf on an open bookcase — which cats can do, no matter how high a shelf or how titely you think you have wedged the books — and I decided, this most recent time a cat knocked it down(!), to move it to my bedroom bookshelf. I don't let the cats into the bedroom, even tho it might be nice to have them sleep near my head, precisely because they knock things down.

In any case, neither of the Steve Adubatos (Adubatoes?) has an entry in that encyclopedia, so I won't be offended that I don't either. Then again, neither does WNET, so the Encyclopedia does not recognize WNET as a Newark station. Hm.

State office building immediately alongside the Capitol, Trenton.

In my junior year of high school I attended a mock legislature in Trenton sponsored by the YMCA/YWCA youth groups Hi-Y (boys) and Tri-Hi-Y (girls). I was in one of the Senate groups. We met in the Senate chamber of the state Capitol building. At one session, Governor Meyner (my hero for defending NJ's broadcast needs, above) addressed us, and during the Q&A that followed, I asked a question that he answered. I do not remember the question, but do remember that he was an impressive, forthrite man who did this state proud. During that same mock legislature, the guy who won the vote for mock-governor was somebody whose first name was "Craig", pronounced kreg, rather than as my parents pronounced it, kraeg. I never liked kraeg, but loved kreg as soon as I heard it, in Trenton. The family however, used my first name, "Lee".

Capitol dome seen beyond a handrail alongside a stairway to the second floor.

When I studied U.S. history and learned about Robert E. Lee, the worst traitor any country ever had the misfortune to suffer, I turned off to that name. (There was a restaurant, on the water or even on a pier in the Keyport area, that we used to pass on trips between North and Central Jersey, named the Robert E. Lee. That irritated me.) Six years after that mock legislature, I shifted from "Lee C." to "L. Craig", thanks to that day in Trenton. I thought it was a monumental decision, but my mother pointed out that my brother, named at birth "Paul Brian", was known in the family as "Brian" / "P. Brian", so my name-change wasn't hard for the family to accept. I, of course, liked to refer to my (older) brother as "P. Brain".
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Which brings us back to The Open Mind. Here we go all around the mulberry bush, but we end up where we started!

The Empire State Building and its broadcast tower for all major television stations in the Tristate Metropolitan Area.

If you are up and wondering what to watch on TV some Sunday at noon, check out The Open Mind on channel 13. It's a low-key, high-brow but not hifalutin talk show on Newark's stolen TV station, WNET, presided over by a Rutgers professor.

Index and Kedar Art Receptions Saturday Evening

2012-01-13T04:58:00.012-05:00

The two art organizations that share the second floor of 585 Broad Street are having an art reception tomorrow from 6-10pm. The Index Art Center sent out this description.

See I'm not paranoid, I'm right!
These seven artists explore the themes of paranoia, conspiracy, and perceptions of government
or corporate control. The murky boundaries they explore lead the viewer to question what is real and what is constructed and who is in control.

Exhibiting artists include:
Aileen Bassis
Gary Duehr
Joseph Farbrooks
Kristal Romano
Traci Shipley
E. Danielle Slaughter
Olivia Wilber

Main Index gallery at last month's reception. I used the better fotos on December 13th, and forgot to put aside some good pix for the next show. I am having a lot of trouble with indoor liting with my present camera. I've got to check out the type of lite (incandescent, fluorescent) and see if there is a setting in my camera for that type of lite that might yield better results.

January 14 through February 2nd
Reception: Saturday Jan. 14, 6-10pm

Also exhibiting-
Reception Room: works by Vanessa Lucas
27 Mix: works by Gavin Gewecke

INDEX
585 Broad Street
Newark, NJ 07102
www.indexartcenter.org
index.gallery@gmail.com
Gallery ph. 862-218-0278

Gallery hours:
Thur: 6-9 pm
Fri: 1-4 pm
Sat: 1-4 pm
Viewing appointments are welcome

Reception room last month.

I rely for the info about the Kedar Studio of Art's exhibit, upon Newark Pulse's newsletter entry.

The Kedar Studio presents Living City, art, pottery, photography and precious objects that look at the urban setting as an amalgamation of manually constructed objects of common materials.

Join us for some refreshments, sort through our vintage records, hear some great sounds and do some post holiday shopping.

One corner of Kedar last month.

Artists Include:

Jerry Gant — sculpture
Lisa Conrad — works on paper
Marco Munoz — photography
Steve Jaskowak — pottery
Tiffany Asraf — necklaces
Ellen Glynn — rings, sculpture
Miranda Lark Maher — bracelets
Olivia Yeatman — earrings
Joanne Rejevich — knits

Kevin Darmanie, proprietor of Kedar, has developed a very good sense as to what kinds of things to display in Kedar's small space.
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585 Broad is on the west side of Broad Street north of Aljira and across from Monsignor Doane Park, the little triangle above the northern end of Military Park and the Episcopal Cathedral, Trinity & St. Philip's. Index and Kedar are up two steep flites of stairs. There is no elevator.
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Update: I headed out to my car to drive to these receptions a little before 9:30pm, only to find that not only was one of my tires very soft, but the battery was also too low to start the car. (I mentioned here January 4th that cold weather is very hard on batteries. Then I heeded what I had said to see if the problem I've been having with a couple of remote controls in my cold home office was remediable by warming them. I put them on the coolest part of an oil-filled electric radiator that I keep by my desk, and sure enuf, they work better now.)
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Getting back to my car troubles, I have learned from experience to keep both an air compressor and a battery booster pack in the trunk, so could solve both my problems without waiting on the AAA. But by the time the car was ready to go, it was 9:55pm. It would take me 25 minutes to drive, park, and get upstairs at 585, and the receptions were scheduled to end at 10pm. So I went to the supermarket and got eggdrop and hot-and-sour soup from my local Chinese takeout, China House on South Orange Avenue, on the way home instead. They know me there, and know better than to put plastic flatware or napkins into the bag, since I eat my soups at home. "Waste not, want not."
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At the supermarket beforehand, I looked for broccoli crowns, to add (with shaved carrot, diced onion, etc.) to eggdrop soup for vitamins and potassium. The East Orange ShopRite often has broccoli crowns on special, but there was only one small crown of regular broccoli in the display. The rest was broccoli rabe (pronounced rob, tho it looks as tho it should be pronounced with a long-A. There's an alternate spelling that is also unclear, "raab". You can see again why I am a spelling reformer). I had to look up whether broccoli rabe's leaves are edible, or only/mainly the crowns and stalks, as with actual broccoli. Wikipedia says the leaves are edible too. That article, which treats that plant under "rapini", says it is actually related to the turnip rather than to broccoli (which is in the cabbage family). Fortuitously, broccoli rabe is also high in potassium, so I'll see tomorrow if I like its flavor in eggdrop soup. Tonite I ate some hot-and-sour soup instead. If you are not familiar with h&s, but like some spicy foods, try it sometime. It's heavy in vegetables and lite in meat, but one of my favorite foods, and holds up well to the addition of meat (for me, mainly pork, tho it comes with tiny bits of beef). I eat a lot of soups, mainly eggdrop and h&s, but also tomato, lentil, and vegetable. Soup is esp. good in cold weather, and for people concerned about their weight. Gov. Christie should eat a ton of it. And probably could.

Artist Talk at NuMu Today

2012-01-12T04:18:00.001-05:00

Matt Gosser, a major figure in Newark arts as artist, curator, and director of the NJIT art gallery, sent out an email notice earlier this week of an event today.

On Thursday I'll be giving an artist talk at the Newark Museum as part of my art residency — on the second floor. I think there will be some refreshments available at 4pm and the talk starts at 4:45. It'll be a general slideshow of past work and process with a little bit about the work I'll be doing for the residency. Should be done by 6pm.

I asked for clarification of a couple of points, and he provided this further information:

it's a free event at the newark museum. the talk will be about past ar+ch exhibits and how what i'm doing at the residency fits into that. probably not too much about curator/director [of the College of Architecture and Design at NJIT].

Matt is perhaps best known for the Ar+cheology exhibitions, of artworks created from things found at old buildings before their demolition. Here, for instance, is a sculpture he made for one such show.

Free Museums Today

2012-01-08T09:07:00.004-05:00

It's the first full weekend (Saturday and Sunday) of the month again, which means that Bank of America debit and credit cardholders can get in free (with foto ID) to 150 museums around the country. I meant to mention this on Friday but didn't get to it. My sleep cycle has wandered again, and I'm working long hours on my various projects without regard to the hour of day or nite. Alas, if I sleep thru most of the day, I can't get to these museums. Well, I'm in time to alert some readers to the Sunday half of the free-museums weekend. I had a short day yesterday and went to bed relatively early, so might successfully reset my waking cycle so I'm up early enuf to enjoy the whole of winter's short days.

Participating institutions in North Jersey are the Newark Museum and Aljira (Saturday only for Aljira; sorry) in Newark; the Liberty Science Center in Jersey City; the Montclair Art Museum (I'll let you guess where that is); and the Morris Museum, Morristown. I just renewed my Newark Museum membership, so I get in there free anytime I want. I don't know that I'm up to traveling anywhere else today, but I'll see. Montclair is an easy trip by car.
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If you are a BofA cardholder who lives outside Newark and can get in to the city readily, this might be a good day to check out NuMu. (Newark residents with appropriate ID get free admission to the Newark Museum thanks to the financial support that the City of Newark provides year-round.)
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This is the last day to see "Feasting with Family and Friends: Christmas in the Ballantine House", a recreation of a Victorian Christmas dinner in the mansion of the famed brewing family, which is part of the Museum. I have seen this in a prior year. I missed out on the art-quilt show, which closed on December 31st. The 100 Years of Tibetan Art exhibit is still going, tho.

Kris Humphries, Laura Prepon, and Chelsea Handler

2012-01-06T23:59:00.039-05:00

I saw on TV or Internet news that the husband of Kim Kardashian's short-lived (72-day) marriage is a New Jersey Net, and was booed when he took to the court for the first time after the divorce was announced. I was astonished at that unfairness, given that Kris Humphries is manifestly the victim here. And why would a basketball crowd take the side of an empty-headed nobody of a bitch like Kim Kardashian, over a legitimate, remarkable basketball star?
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When I did a search today of this booing business in preparation for this blogpost, the first search result was an odd story in The New York Observer, entitled "Brooklyn Nets’ Kris Humphries Booed Off D.C. Court". I had found the info I wanted, but was indignant at the absurd reference to nonexistent "Brooklyn Nets". So I left the following comment:

There is no such thing, yet, as the Brooklyn Nets. The team is the New Jersey Nets. New Jerseyans are very tired of being disrespected by New Yorkers. The present Nets could -- indeed should -- be called the Newark Nets, given that their home court is at the Prudential Center in Downtown Newark. The "New York" Giants, Jets, and Red Bulls all play their home games in NJ. Believe it or not, New York City ends at the Hudson.

I hadn't known that Humphries has played for the Nets since 2010. But, then, I don't follow sports in general, and have never seen a pro-basketball game (tho I'm working on Gaetano to take me to a Nets game before that team departs for Brooklyn; I can't afford a ticket of my own, and am not about to go alone even if I could afford a single ticket). Indeed, none of the coverage of the Kardashian divorce that I have seen on TV made any mention of Humphries' playing for NJ. Why is that?

Plainly, I would have no fotos of Kris Humphries, Laura Prepon, or Chelsea Handler to place here (tho I do show, below, a screenprint of a video from the Chelsea Lately website that shows both Mses. Prepon and Handler). So, instead, I display some pix of Kris Humphries' home venue, the Prudential Center in Downtown Newark. I have THOUSANDS of pictures of Newark for which I may not have ideal connections to use here, but I also have many topics for which I have no fotos, so I shall use such fotos as seem at least tenuously appropriate here, until I have exhausted all fotos that are only vaguely appropriate, which is not likely EVER to happen, in that I continue to take many Newark fotos for which I have no immediate use.

I heard that Ms. K objected to living in Minnesota, Mr. Humphries' home state, but not that the Mr. played for a New Jersey team, so the couple were staying in a Manhattan hotel — rather than their own house or apartment in New Jersey. At least Ms. Kim did not publicly decry the idea of living in Newark (thank goodness). Humphries' team is based in Newark. Why doesn't he live in Newark (as in the luxury, highrise apartment tower 1180 Raymond Boulevard)? I might boo him myself, for that, except that I wouldn't want anyone to think I was taking the side of the publicity-whore twit, Kim K. (Oddly, K. Humphries has two sisters, whose names also start in K, "Kaela" and "Krystal".) (In my Fanetik spelling system, all K-sounds are represented by the letter K, never by the letter C.)
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New CBS Sitcom's NJ Connex. Laura Prepon, best known for her role in That '70s Show, was a guest on Craig Ferguson's late-nite talkshow tonite, and something she said made me think she's from NJ. She is: from Watchung. It seems to me from a little reading, that "Watchung" is an inappropriate name for any muncipality in Somerset County, because the Watchung mountains are(?) northwest of there. There is, interestingly to me, a "Newark Mountains" portion of the Watchung Range. The Wikipedia article's "Geology" section of its Watchung Mountains article contains this information:

200 million years ago, magma intruded into the Newark Basin, then an active rift basin associated with the breakup of the supercontinent Pangaea. The magma was initially contained within the sedimentary strata of the basin, forming large intrusions like the Palisades Sill, but it ultimately broke out to the surface through large, episodic eruptions. The Watchung Mountains were originally formed from these eruptions, consisting of three separate flood basalts that may have filled nearly the entire Newark Basin. Each time the basin filled with basalt, which cooled into blocky trap rock, a period of limited volcanic activity followed, allowing sediment to be deposited on top of the previously erupted layer of basalt. In this way, the Newark Basin became layered with alternating strata of Watchung basalt and Jurassic sedimentary rock.

I didn't know that. I suspect almost nobody else knew it either. But it's interesting, no? — if not for the geological deposition (deposits) information, then at least for the "Newark basin" stuff.

Chelsea Handler co-stars with Laura Prepon (pronounced prée.pon or prée.paun) in an upcoming NBC sitcom that is to start next Wednesday, Are You There, Chelsea? In it, Ms. Prepon is to play Chelsea Handler, who is also in the cast, but playing someone else (Chelsea's sister?, a "bitch", according to Chelsea)! Ms. Prepon, in response to Ferguson's obvious question as to why Ms. Handler wouldn't just play herself, said that Chelsea didn't want to go back to those days. She had done that already.
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Here's the program description from Wikipedia:

The series follows an outspoken woman, Chelsea Newman (a character based on the real Chelsea Handler and the show's main protagonist) and her circle of working-class twenty-something friends in New Jersey. Though the narration and observations [are] of the fictional Chelsea, most of the situations were inspirations from Handler's book, which is based on her early career in her twenties.

In the show, as I see from the promos airing now, the Chelsea Handler character is brunette, tho Chelsea's current TV persona is blonde. Hm. ("Blonde" with an -E is the feminine; "blond" is masculine. How nice. While I'm discussing linguistics, the male form of "brunette" is "brunet", pronounced the same, tho you'd think, since it is from French, that the masculine without the -TE would be pronounced with a long-A and silent-T, like "ballet" or "bouquet" — or Hyacinth "Bucket" (that's a PBS Britcom reference), but it's not. The usage note at "blonde" on Dictionary.com is wrong about "blond" being the more common form. "Blonde", for both women and men, is far and away the more common form, following the rule I have long observed, and which helped make me a spelling reformer: the worse spelling is almost invariably the one we remember and tend to use. For instance, "gage" is never seen, but "gauge" is all over the place.)

Wikipedia says that the program is based on Chelsea Handler's actual life, and is to be set in New Jersey somewhere. But where? Chelsea was raised in Livingston, a suburb in western Essex County, 8 miles west of my house in Vailsburg, western Newark. Is Newark, the county seat and main city of the region of Chelsea Handler's youth, going to be featured in the show? That would be great, if the mentions of Newark are favorable or neutral. But did Chelsea herself, and will the show, ignore Newark to skip directly to Manhattan when it goes beyond Livingston (or whatever the base town is to be called in the series)?
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I am offended that a lot of celebrities with substantial Newark connections do not proudly mention those connections. Is it really possible that Chelsea Handler, who left NJ for L.A. when she was 19 — so much for the sitcom's "circle of working-class twenty-something friends in New Jersey", in that Chelsea left for L.A. before her 20s — had no connection with Downtown Newark, less than 12 miles from her family home in Livingston?

The foto above shows the vicinity of Prudential Center before three small buildings that front on Market Street closest to the camera were torn down to make a larger Championship Plaza.

Chelsea Handler has a cable television show, Chelsea Lately on the E! cable network, that I used to watch occasionally when I had cable TV instead of just cable modem (because of the absurd costs of cable nowadays). Wikipedia says:

From her work on Chelsea Lately, Chelsea Handler is ranked on the Forbes Celebrity 100 at number 98.

That Wiki article shows a foto of her as blond, with, perhaps, some gray coming in. (More than incidentally, Forbes Magazine was established by the father of Malcolm Forbes, who lived in, and was politically active in, NJ.) What is Chelsea's natural hair color?
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There is currently, on the Chelsea Lately website, an interview with Laura Prepon that discusses why Prepon plays Handler in the NBC sitcom, and mentions their both having NJ connections. I'm glad I had to research this topic, in that I now know there are some videos from Chelsea Lately online.
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There are so many NJ connections that the general public does not know about. If they did, this much-disrespected state would be drastically better appreciated.

Two More Media Mentions of NJ

2012-01-05T23:59:00.020-05:00

Melissa Rauch, who plays "Bernadette Rostenkowski", girlfriend of "Howard Wolowitz" in the CBS sitcom The Big Bang Theory, was the second guest on The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson last nite. She mentioned learning to drive in New Jersey, and that she loves all the Housewives TV shows, esp. the "Jersey" version.

In that I have no fotos of the TV matters discussed, fotos today are progress pix of the construction of the Marriott Courtyard Hotel alongside Prudential Center at Broad and Lafayette Streets, part of the revival of this fine city. This first picture shows the concrete columns going up in late August (2011).

So I looked up Melissa Rauch in Wikipedia. It turns out she was born and raised in Marlboro (Monmouth County), NJ, two towns from Middletown, where I grew up. When I was young, there was a state mental hospital in Marlboro, and my grandmother's second husband (my functional but not biological grandfather) spent a short time there for something gone awry. I think he had electroshock therapy, and it did him a world of good. Still, "Marlboro" in my area meant "loony bin", as "Bellevue" does in NYC. The hospital closed in 1998, after abuses were exposed by Essex County's Richard Codey, who went undercover there! The Wikipedia article on the hospital talks about some things, like ghosts, mentioned by Weird N.J. magazine. One of the things that has been featured in Weird N.J. is "The Evil Clown of Middletown", which I used to pass every day on the school bus to Middletown High. I have shown here Newark fotografer John Masi's foto of that clown, on November 10, 2009.
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Wikipedia also says that she "is currently starring in the comedic stage show 'The Realest Real Housewives'." Tho "Howard"'s (Jewish) mother refers to "Bernadette" as a "little Catholic girl", the actress who plays her is actually Jewish.

The original lead character in The Big Bang Theory, "Leonard Hofstadter" (played by Johnny Galecki), is supposedly from somewhere in NJ, and his mother (played by Christine Baranski), who still lives somewhere in NJ, has made a few appearances on the show too. But the actors who play "Leonard" and his mother have no NJ connection themselves. Galecki was born in Belgium, where his U.S. Air Force father was stationed at the time. The family moved to Illinois when Johnny was 3. Baranski was born in Buffalo and now lives in Connecticut. I think the audience is expected to assume that Leonard's mother lives in and teaches at Princeton. Wouldn't it be great if the show decided to make her a professor at Rutgers-Newark, UMDNJ, or NJIT, in Newark, and mentioned how easy it is for her to catch a plane to L.A. to visit her son, from our great airport?

The artist's conception of the building shows a 6-story structure, faced in brick (how appropriate, for Brick City).

House. Speaking of Princeton, I generally don't watch dramas, except an occasional classic movie or mystery, so did not know until a chance discovery a few days ago that the medical drama House is set "at the fictional Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital (PPTH) in New Jersey. The show's premise originated with Paul Attanasio" — who, tho born in the Bronx, moved to Teaneck as an adult.

Here are two fotos from late October. The reinforced-concrete skeletal structure is about halfway up — enuf to block the banner (if it was not taken down).

Gaetano loves House. I told him that I deeply resent the lead character, an American doctor, being played by a Brit. I do not understand why actors from Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand get to just march across the border and take very good jobs away from Americans. There is plainly no actor shortage in this country, but, indeed, an extremely high rate of unemployment among American actors. So why are foreigners allowed to come here and steal American jobs from Americans in (the United States of) America? It's not as tho the characters are supposed to be British or Australian. No, these foreigners put on an American accent to pretend to be Americans. I am deeply offended, esp. by people like William Shatner, a Canadian who has taken jobs away from American actors since 1958 but never taken U.S. citizenship in over 53 years! He and every other foreigner who refuses U.S. citizenship should be deported and forbidden even to visit this country for the rest of their lives.

I haven't stopped by recently to see how far along the project is now. I also did not get early progress pix of the enlargement of the Newark Screens movie theater complex at Springfield Avenue and Bergen Street, which I heard is being done thru an investment by Newark's own Shaquille O'Neal. Much of the outer structure is already done.

Why hasn't any major TV show been set in Newark? Produced in Newark? Oh, the new PBS children's series The Electric Company has filmed at least occasionally in Newark, but it's set not here but in NYC (if any specific location can be inferred).
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Newark could reasonably serve as base for TV shows of any number of genres, from medical to legal or crime, to musical. We have a great big teaching hospital (UMDNJ), two schools of nursing, two law schools, a Federal Courthouse, a state courthouse, a school of dentistry, the Nation's first high school of the arts, a major sports arena and performing arts center, major museum, distinctive skyline, and any urban problem you care to name, being dealt with by dedicated police, firefiters, elected officials, nongovernmental social-service and arts organizations, etc., etc. Newark is a lot more like other midsize U.S. cities (tho better in most regards) than is either NY or L.A. Some smart producer should set some quality drama — or comedy — here. And make it here, with American actors.

Gasliting and Recycling in South Orange

2012-01-04T23:59:00.025-05:00

My neighborhood, Vailsburg, is what I call a "peninsula surrounded by land", the odd-shaped westward extension of Newark beyond the Garden State Parkway. It is surrounded by the City of East Orange on the north, the Townships of Irvington and Maplewood on the south, and the "Township of South Orange Village" (I kid you not!) on the west. My house is a mile or less from all four of the surrounding towns, so I'm in and out of most of them all the time. To get to Downtown Newark via 18th Avenue (which is at the southern end of my block), I have to drive thru a corner of Irvington. There's a Pathmark Supermarket in South Orange that contains a branch of my bank, Bank of America. And the nearest ShopRite Supermarket is in East Orange. I only occasionally get to Maplewood, but it seems nice, and there is an artist there, Nancy Tobin, who has exhibited at Rupert Ravens Contemporary in Downtown Newark. Maplewood and South Orange arts sometimes compete with Newark arts, which must stop. The Newark Arts Council should try to subsume the S.O. and Maplewood arts communities into its annual artsplosion weekend, "Open Doors", either by drawing their artists into Newark venues for the weekend or, perhaps more difficult, extending the intervenue shuttle trolley to them. The Walsh Gallery of Seton Hall University and the Pierro Gallery in South Orange and the 1978 Maplewood Arts Center are venues that a Greater Newark Art Trolley could connect to Downtown's many venues, as are the Valley Arts District and Yema Gallery in Orange, a municipality that just barely misses, by about two blocks, adjoining Newark.

Soon after I moved to Newark, a colleague from England and his female housemate came to visit for a week or so, and Maria really liked South Orange. Jeremy and she had coffee at the Starbucks underneath the railroad station more than once, and they liked the village feel of the place. I very occasionally meet my friend Ingé there to catch up over coffee. Trains run to Midtown Direct from the South Orange station, which is one way to go if one wants to live in my area but commute to Manhattan. There is also the 107 bus, and trains from the Brick Church Station in East Orange, which may have more low-cost parking available.
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At least a large part of the Village of South Orange has gas streetlites. Altho there are mechanisms now to turn the gas off each morning and on each nite, I heard from someone that the ones in S.O. are on 24 hours a day, which seems wasteful, of both energy and money. (Do those lites use ordinary natural gas, from PSE&G?) These gaslites give off a subdued glow, as against the glare of other types of streetliting. ("To gaslite" is a verb that probably few people now know, but my generation understood very well, from a Charles Boyer and Ingrid Bergman movie from 1944.)
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Each year around Christmas, many of the poles that support these gas lamps are festooned with evergreen garlands, which gives the village a very festive feel. I decided to try to take some pictures of these festive lites to send to Jeremy and Maria, but discovered when I tried to do so last Saturday that my camera could not capture the scene. Selecting ambient lite (no flash) produced fotos too washed out by the glare of streetlites and automobile hedlites; and flash didn't cast far enuf, so distant objects were in the dark. Even when I put the camera on a tripod to minimize movement and thus blur, I couldn't get a good picture at nite. The first foto today (above) is much manipulated in my graffics program to even approximate what the human eye sees.

While I was setting up my tripod near the train station, a passing man asked if I was taking pictures, and when I said yes, asked if I'd take a picture of him. I asked, "Do you want me to take a picture of you?" He replied, "Yes, I'm very vain." I asked if he had email to which I could send the foto (yes), gave him my card so he could send me his email address, then took three pictures of him and his lady friend. (This kind of outgoing friendliness is commonplace in Newark and near-in suburbs. When I had moved to another area and set up my tripod, a polite young black gent asked if I was taking a video, but had no followup question when I said 'no, only fotos'. It occurred to me only later that sometimes my present camera does better as regards exposure and focus with videos than with still fotos.) I tried different lite settings, and show immediately above and the two fotos below the three fotos I took, in chronological order, so you can see the kinds of things I have to deal with.

The first foto, in chronological order, shown above the last paragraf, was taken without flash. The problem may be not so much that the camera can't take in enuf lite to create a picture, but that it cannot set its programmed autofocus and autoexposure if the lite is too dim to detect things to begin with. The second foto in chronological order, immediately above, was taken with flash, from perhaps 15 or 20 feet away. Despite my best efforts to adjust it in my graffics program, it is essentially useless.

I then moved the tripod closer and took the third foto, just above, with flash.
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Those fotos above are as I took them, tho improved, sometimes drastically, in my graffics program. I deliberately included the firehouse behind, with its lited Christmas tree. If I were concerned about portraiture, I would crop out much of the background, as in the two pictures below, made, respectively, from the ambient lite (first foto) and closer flash foto (third foto) above.

As it happens, the gent who asked to be fotograffed has not, in the intervening five days, sent me an email address to which I might send these fotos, so I'm just putting them up here. Maybe he or someone he knows will see them.

There is, alas, glare on the faces from the flash. Can't be helped.
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I then took a foto of the area that couple had posed in, without them, which I show as the first foto today. It represents the best that my camera and graffics program could do with the image data recorded by the camera. I think my older camera, which broke as I was getting ready to cover the Newark Peace Education Summit in May, handled low-lite situations better than my newer camera. I had hoped that a newer camera would be better in every way, but the newer camera was also much less expensive ($90, as against $380 for my older camera). I dared to hope that the difference in price was due not to a reduction in quality but only to the economics of mass production as digital cameras became widely popular. Perhaps not.
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Then I walked up to where South Orange Avenue and Irvington Avenue diverge, and passed this sign along the way. I don't let my cats out, so, altho there are possums and raccoons in my neighborhood, I'm not concerned about rabies. I also don't know whether this clinic is restricted to residents of South Orange, or is an Essex County or private-organization function not restricted to one municipality.

This is the best I could do with fotos from that area that I hoped would show the many festive streetlites along SOA. This dark view looks east on SOA.

I used flash to shut out glare, but it shut things down too much. In these nite shots from my tripod, I also used the self-timer (at 2 seconds, not 12) so I would not move the camera in pressing the shutter button. Still, some of the fotos were fuzzy, presumably because the sensor did not have enuf lite to work with. Another thing that might have been working against me is the cold weather. I don't know that cold interferes with the proper operation of my camera, or digital cameras generally, but I do know that cold weather is very hard on batteries. In any case, here is a view looking west on SOA.

I then gave up for the nite and walked back to my car in one of the municipal parking lots that are free after 6pm (50¢ an hour from 8am-6pm — Newark needs such free or inexpensive municipal parking), and passed this appealing bottle-recycling receptacle.

Nearby was this solar-powered trash compáctor.

I remembered that I was struck by such a device on display at an Essex County Business Expo at Bears & Eagles Riverfront Stadium in Downtown Newark in late June 2008. Tonite I tracked down my fotos of it at that wonderful Stadium in the daylite.

Such a device sounds great, if not critically important, except perhaps for locations where regular trash receptacles overflow between garbage collections.
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We had rain that day in the Stadium. I don't know if mere sunlite thru clouds is enuf to power these trash compáctors, or only brite, direct sunshine will do. A trash compáctor would seem to require a fair amount of energy. If a small solar collector, which appears to occupy only the top of the box, is able to power a trash compáctor, sunlite must be a lot more powerful than the defenders of fossil fuels want us to believe.

I'm going to try to get to 'beautiful downtown South Orange' (that's an allusion to Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In) during daylite before Twelfth Nite (I hope the garlands are still in place till then) to see if I can get good fotos in daylite of the village's festive gaslites.)
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"Village" is an odd word to associate with the Nation's most densely populated/urban state, NJ. But, then, for a lot of us, "the Village" means Greenwich Village, and "the East Village" means an area to the east of Greenwich Village, in the most densely populated boro of the Nation's most densely populated city, New York. NYU stirred up a ruckus today in announcing its intention to tear down much of its Greenwich Village campus and rebuild it much taller. Some of the neighbors are in an uproar over the transformation of the relatively low-density Village into a neighborhood more like packed Midtown. I don't give them much chance of stopping that inevitable march to high density. After all, I was forced out of Hell's Kitchen when all the empty lots around me were filled in, and my landlord wanted me out, to the point of buying me out (tho they reneged on part of the buyout). Still, I accepted the inevitable, that I would be priced out of Manhattan, and made a great decision, to move to semi-suburban western Newark, within less than a mile and a half of Seton Hall University and 2 miles of the center of South Orange Village. I have a bus at the corner that goes to Newark Penn Station, then on all the way to Jersey City thru the Ironbound. But my own block is so quiet that if ten cars an hour pass after about 10pm, that's a lot.
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(If you see me out and about and would like me to take your picture at whatever event we meet at, just let me know, and follow up with an email address to send the foto to. I ordinary take one foto with flash and one without. And I ordinarily have lots of capacity on my camera's memory chip, unless I've been taking video.)

SHV No More

2012-01-01T23:59:00.007-05:00

This "Church Sunday" at Newark USA I follow up on a series of posts about the great stone church in my neighborhood, Sacred Heart of Vailsburg. Despite efforts by the depleted Catholic congregation to save the church, the Archdiocese was intent on closing it down, and did so July 1st of 2010.

I then heard that the stained-glass windows, statues, and other things from the church were being moved out. I feared that that signaled possible demolition of the building once it had been looted. Some former parishioner mentioned to me during a small action outside the church before it closed, that the copper in the massive roofs had to be worth a lot of money.

This foto shows the most salient feature of this church, after the two uneven towers: a high relief above the main portal. This used to be lited at nite, regularly. I have seen it lited on occasion long after the Catholic Archdiocese closed out the Sacred Heart congregation, but not regularly.

Only recently, I noticed a banner on the front of the church, but it was too dark for me to see from the avenue, and too cold to park and look closer to see what it said. One nite I did stop and took some pictures, but they didn't turn out well due to poor lite. Then today I walked over in late afternoon and took pictures in better lite.

Jeffrey Bennett of the Newarkology website updated his South Orange Avenue page to incorporate the new information:

In Sacred Heart's heyday 1500 worshippers would come for mass, but by the 2010s that number had dwindled to 150 and the congregation could not afford things like a $1,000,000 expense to water-proof the facade. In July 2010 Sacred Heart dissolved and the building was leased to a Baptist congregation called the "Positive Proof Deliverance Church," headed by Bishop Frank Garris.

That paragraph contains a link to an article from the South Orange Patch last June about the dispersion of various artifacts from the church that concerned me. Tho the building is only five blocks from my house, I usually drive away from it rather than past it and in any event keep my eyes on the road, so didn't notice the banner until a couple of weeks ago when I had to slow for a red lite.

Sacred Heart was started three years before my house was built, and dedicated in 1929 by Fulton J. Sheen, later the Bishop Sheen of 1950s television fame.

The Internet shows the prior location of Positive Proof Deliverance Church as 186 West Market Street, Newark, NJ 07103, and says it's a Pentecostal church. I didn't think Pentecostals had any bishops, and I was pretty sure Baptists did not have bishops. An Internet search today reveals that one Baptist church did consecrate a bishop in 2007, the first in the denomination's entire history, then 105 years. I didn't find a website under the church's own domain name. Then I thought to do a search on "Bishop Frank Garris", whereupon I did find a website.

In any case, I now know why there was scaffolding on parts of the church, and why new copper flashing had been placed on the towers: to make the building fit for occupancy by another church.

I think these frosted-glass windows were once stained-glass. Protestant churches aren't as keen on stained glass as are Catholic churches, so Positive Proof may have been happy the stained-glass windows were sent elsewhere.

The building is at the corner of South Orange Avenue and San(d)ford Avenue. (The medial-D of Sandford is used on street signs south of South Orange Avenue, but not necessarily north of it. And the roadway becomes Sanford Street when it passes into East Orange.) Sacred Heart of Vailsburg used a Sanford Avenue address (481 Sanford Avenue, Newark 07106). Positive Proof's website uses an SOA address: 1046-1058 South Orange Avenue, Newark, NJ 07103. The zip code is wrong, a carryover from their former address on West Market Street. They were able to keep the same fone number, given that the old and new locations are less than 3 miles apart: (973) 624-3500. I don't know if Positive Proof has bought or leased, nor if it took over the entire three-building complex from South Orange Avenue to Fortuna Street or only the church building.

As a nominal Catholic culturally (atheist religiously), I would have liked to see SHV remain within the universal church. But I'd much rather have that magnificent building, largest parish church in the Nation when it was built, in use than vacant. So, better Protestants than nobody at that key intersection of this area's two most important thorofares, the heart of Vailsburg. Let's hope they keep the neighborhood vital in bringing renewed life to this historic building.

Bridal Party

2011-12-31T13:09:00.003-05:00

So much happens around me as I travel thru Newark that I can't speak to it all, nor especially in timely fashion. Two such serendipitous moments occurred on May 15th, when I was trying to get to the Tibetan march to the Passaic in which Buddhist monks were to pour most of the sand from the mandala in the Newark Museum into the River during the Newark Peace Education Summit weekend. As I drove up Washington Street and arrived at Central Avenue, I saw a group of people who had apparently emerged only recently and nearby from a wedding.

I took a picture, then drove on to try to find out when the Buddhist monks were to head off to the River, and saw the wedding celebrants again, forming in front of a large brick wall for fotos.

Tamara of Newark Pulse had an all-Newark wedding this past year. There are many outdoor places where a bridal party might take wonderful pictures, as, for instance, in Branch Brook Park during the Cherry Blossom Festival. But I would not for an instant quarrel with the choice of this bridal party in taking pictures before a brick wall in Brick City not far from the Newark Museum. It all depends on what you want to remember, and there is so much good to choose from in Newark, a city with intensely urban backdrops, such as brick walls aplenty, of many different hues, and joyously natural backdrops, such as blossoming cherry trees in bloom or the lush plantings outside NJPAC. I was very, very pleased to see this bridal party stake a Newark location for group fotos.
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I later found the Buddhist march and followed it to the Passaic River, where I saw this post-'marital' pair of geese with their adorable babies.

Newark is a place for weddings, babies, nature, and bricks. Among many, many other things.

Last Solo(s) Show of 2011

2011-12-29T23:59:00.000-05:00

I attended, briefly, the closing reception on December 16th of the last art show of the year at Solo(s) Project House. There was also supposed to be a holiday party after the artist Marc D'Agusto spoke, but the (odd)choice of a Thursday rather than Friday or Saturday produced poor attendance, so things wrapped up early. Still, there were things well worth seeing in that double exhibition, by D'Agusto and Hannah Craft. I'll show a few now and save a few pix to enliven the announcement of the first Solo(s) show of the new year, whenever that might be.

Several of D'Agusto's paintings have graced the hallway between the lobby and main exhibition space of Solo(s) Project House for months. But the show in the main space was new to me.

D'Agusto's work entails a lot of architectural imagery, of constructed buildings and ruins of buildings, rust, etc.

The Solo(s) institution allows alteration of the exhibition space in ways you don't expect of most galleries, so that concrete dust and fragments on the floor are part of the wraparound experience you walk thru rather than merely look at.

There were things on the floor, on the walls, even hung from the ceiling.

D'Agusto's severe, hard paintings and sculptures were paired with soft, feathery hangings just outside the main exhibition space, by Hannah Craft.

Solo(s) remains one of the most inventive of Newark's exhibition spaces, and I look forward to whatever 2012 — which we can all finally say with "twenty" at the beginning: 20-12 — will bring.

Aside: Before the Millennium began (on January 1, 2001, not 2000, since there was no year 0, only a year 1 from which each millennium dates), I wondered how long it would be before we would say "twenty" in the name of years. I had heard, but doubted, that the proper rendering at the time of a year like 1905 was not nineteen-oh-five but nineteen-five. That wouldn't make very good sense, because that would produce "195", not "1905". In any case, a few people started saying "twenty" only this year: "twenty-eleven" — which would more mellifluously have been said "twentyleven". At the beginning of the year, very few people said "twenty". After about August, it became more common. But many of us have held out until 2012. I expect that next year everybody will be saying "twenty-twelve".

Curiously, there has been a revision after the fact, of earlier years to "twenty"-somethings: well, at least "twenty-ten". Nobody said "twenty-ten" at the time, but you may hear it in the future. I doubt we will ever hear "twenty-eight" or "twenty-oh-eight", but we'll find out soon, once the "twenty" habit has been established with twenty-twelve.

Part of Hannah Craft's installation at the ceiling outside the main exhibition space.

Clock-Tower Area of NJIT

2011-12-27T06:37:00.016-05:00

On June 27th, I made a list of 27 topics I thought to address in this blog. Today, I reviewed it and found that I had addressed 13½ of them. Exactly half. Today's topic was on the list as undone, and now I get to check it off too. Don't you just love checking off items on a To-Do list? It's one of my favorite things.

Frequent visitors to this blog may have noticed that I'm partial to public clocks and clock towers, of which Newark has a fair number. I'm not sure I have even discovered all of them. After all, I've lived here for only 11½ years, and haven't been to every neighborhood of this extraordinary city. I shall, in due course, get to all neighborhoods, if not to every block.
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There is one clocktower I have seen many times, in the central plaza of the New Jersey Institute of Technology. I was exiting the Robeson Campus Center of Rutgers-Newark (adjacent to NJIT across MLK Boulevard) after an art reception last May when I heard music from up the hill. I walked up and found it coming from this clock tower.

Once I had taken a picture of the tower (partly washed out by the brite sun, alas), I looked around at parts of the campus I hadn't fotograffed before.
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NJIT is behind the old Central High School. (I showed pix of the exterior of the new Central High in a post from November 2010 and interior on December 17th of this year. This next foto shows the Summit Street side of the earlier Central High. I don't know if that was the main entrance, or the main entrance was the one on "High Street" (now MLK Blvd). In any case, both façades have some architectural detail appropriate to the era in which the old Central High was constructed (I don't have a year). The old Central High is nothing like so magnificent as the new. See? Some things in the New Newark are BETTER than their equivalent in the Old Newark.

The clock tower is on a bricked plaza, and some brick paths lead out from the plaza, as is appropriate for Brick City.

The litter receptacles, benches, and other elements of the plaza are dignified and handsome, as befits a campus that has a school of architecture and design.

NJIT is definitely an urban university, but it doesn't have the cramped feel of some other urban colleges (e.g., Lehman or Hunter in Manhattan). Beyond its own campus, there are the campuses of other nearby universities, from Rutgers on the east (and little Berkeley College in a single building on Broad Street) to the University of Medicine and Dentistry (UMDNJ) on the west. There are dormitories on both the Rutgers and UMDNJ campuses, and University Centre (deliberately spelled wrong, in the affected British fashion) provides student housing near NJIT. I wouldn't ordinarily link to a commercial video, but a University Centre video shows a housing center with extraordinary amenities that many people would not associate with Newark. I can't vouch for the claims, but it sounds like a great place to live for students from a number of different colleges, not just within Newark but as far afield as Bloomfield College to the north and Kean University to the south.

There is an overpass between Fenster Hall and another building. That overpass frames the clocktower, looking south, and a seating area, looking north.

When I was growing up, there was no such thing as the New Jersey Institute of Technology. It was then known as "Newark College of Engineering", and was very famous and prestigious here in NJ. Was "Newark" replaced by "New Jersey" to be more inclusive, or just to remove the taint of the Riots and the bad reputation of Newark after the 1967 Riots? The name change was made in 1975. Earlier, the "University of Newark" was annexed by Rutgers—The State University of New Jersey, and made the "Newark campus" of "Rutgers", commonly called "Rutgers-Newark". Again, was that done as a step up, or a step away from Newark? How about the "New Jersey Performing Arts Center" (NJPAC: said like "en jay pack")? Why not the Newark PAC?

I'd like to see some pushback, to restore the prominence of "Newark" in the name of various institutions located in Newark. Maybe we need not rename existing things. After all, to have "New Jersey" this or thats in Newark does suggest Newark's centrality to New Jersey, Newark being the effective cultural capital of NJ as NYC is the cultural capital of the United States. Jersey City may have renamed its teachers college to "New Jersey City University", but J.C. all too commonly deludes itself into thinking itself the "Sixth Boro" of NYC. Mind you, few to no New Yorkers think of Jersey City as a Sixth Boro, but if that delusion makes Jersey Cityans (-ites? something else?) happy, fine. Newark harbors no such illusions but is solidly within New Jersey, and happy to be so. J.C. would be much more important as a second boro (Boro of Hudson) in a Greater Newark, along with Elizabeth as a third boro (of Union), than as a sixth wheel to NYC.
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Even if we accept past name changes that removed "Newark" from this and that, we might push for some great new things to bear the name "Newark" as proudly as many things in Manhattan are called "New York" this or that. When Prudential builds its new headquarters building, which it should make its very tallest Prudential building worldwide, perhaps its name should not be just "Prudential Tower", which is the name of various Prudential buildings in places like Boston and Tokyo. Nor "Prudential Center" — we have one of those already, an arena — but, say, "Prudential Pinnacle at Newark".

Thank goodness the Newark Museum never changed its name to the "New Jersey Museum". They're not ashamed of Newark. I guess I will renew my membership, after all, which expires on the 31st. I'll just ignore some (temporary?) financial stresses and assume that since I've made it past many financial ups and downs in my 67 years, I'll overcome this one too. When I was young, I looked slitely like Mad Magazine's Alfred E. Neuman, and I certainly identified with his slogan, "What, me worry?" When you make it past multitudinous alarums and excursions to age 67 (as I did last week), that can become a personal motto of power — esp. if your short-term memory has weakened and you just can't remember your problems! A fool's paradise is still paradise.
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If I win the MegaMillions jackpot of $206M tonite, I might just build a great Newark tower myself, and fill it with organizations and staff to work on my various projects, plus draw in the doers and dreamers in this region, into a gigantic, creative co-op to work on many artistic, political, and social problems of this benited planet. All the tenants would have access to a great, low-cost cafeteria, and to tenant lounges where they could mix in a relaxed, nonformal setting, and stimulate each other's creativity thru such contact with people outside their own areas of specialization. Of course, I suppose it's possible I won't win the lottery. But a lottery ticket is an admission ticket to a splendid world of "what ifs", isn't it?

This view out from the central portion of the NJIT campus shows a university building close in, and the Colonnade Apartments, by "starchitect" Mies van der Rohe, in the distance. Not every university's school of architecture is within blocks of major works by the father of modern architecture. The Colonnade and two Pavilion Apartments buildings comprise three Mies buildings. In Newark.

My Christmas Card (Another Man's Video) to You

2011-12-25T10:21:00.010-05:00

[This is a block-copy of a post from last Christmas. I am repeating it not because I don't have other things to put up, since I always have much more to put up than I can deal with; nor because I get lazy around the holidays, because I'm sometimes tired but never lazy; but because it says what I want to say again, and incorporates a wonderful Christmas video (not of my creation; my video skills are nowhere near up to such a wonderful creation). I showed here a week or so before 2010's iteration of this post a bunch of fotos of the crèche in St. Lucy's that the video below also deals with. My fotos were taken mainly without flash, so have less glare than some of the fotos in the video slideshow below. Unlike my post of Nativity-scene fotos, the video shows the church overall and various things on its grounds as well as the enormous crèche. Even if you remember the video somewhat from prior years, you may nonetheless enjoy it this year. I did. More than once, I find it so wonderful. If you click on the link above the video and the picture does not come up, but only sound, click on the embedded image of the start of the video. Then both shifting images and sound should come up. You can click on the TV-screen icon to blow the video up to full-screen size. If "St. Lucy" doesn't sound familiar, think of the Italian, "Santa Lucia".]

It's that time again, when I think of a magnificent video slideshow with music, by "charles1789", of many fotos of St. Lucy's Church at Christmas (http://blip.tv/file/733465/ — 8 minutes and 42 seconds long), to music by Andrea Bocelli and the late, great Sergio Franchi and Luciano Pavarotti. I embed the video here, but the explanatory text on Blip.tv below the video is worth reading.

Koats4Kids Tuesday at JFK Ctr

2011-12-19T23:59:00.003-05:00

I mentioned the first Kars4Kids winter coat giveaway in Newark last December 21st. This year's event occurs Tuesday, December 20th.

A press release about this year's event says, in part:

Kars4Kids car donation program announced today that they will be hosting their 2nd annual coat giveaway in Newark, New Jersey next week. The event was planned in conjunction with Mayor Cory Booker’s office, and the mayor is expected to attend the event.

"After the enthusiastic response we received last year, we knew we had to do this again in 2011," said a Kars4Kids spokesperson, "there is so much pain in the economy right now, and everything we can do to ease that pain even slightly is so important."

Last year’s coat giveaway took place at multiple locations throughout Newark, with lines stretching in some areas for many blocks. To ease congestion and for a smooth distribution, this year[']s event will be held at one central location in the heart of Newark[,] at the JFK Recreation Center[,] 211 West Kinney Street[,] at 11:00 am [till the coats are gone,] and is open to the public.

The giveaway comes just as the weather begins to turn colder and winter really starts to take hold on the east coast. [Winter actually starts a half hour after midnite Wednesday into Thursday.] "It’s unacceptable to have kids that simply do not have adequate winter wear," said a Kars4Kids spokesperson yesterday[.] "[W]e as an organization and a society have an obligation to do everything in our power to ensure that every child, wherever they live, whatever background, religion, or ethnicity, has a coat that can protect them from the winter weather. We are coordinating closely with Mayor Cory Booker and we hope to see him there, wearing a Kars4Kids T-shirt and helping distribute the coats."

Local law enforcement agencies will be on hand for crowd control and to ensure orderly distribution. There will be a cordoned[-]off area for media and press representatives

Where:
JFK Recreation Center
211 West Kinney Street
Newark, NJ

When:
Tuesday[,] December 20th at 11:00 am

Kars4Kids is a 501(c)(3) charity operating nationwide.

There are a video and some fotos of one of the sites used in last year's koats giveway, Bears & Eagles Riverfront Stadium, which would seem to me a better location than the JFK Center, for having a lot more space out front. I hope Kars4Kids judged the space requirements correctly.

Master Plan Open House

2011-12-17T23:59:00.014-05:00

I attended the December 7th Open House at which members of the general public could review the proposed changes to the City of Newark Master Plan. That Open House, and another on December 10th, were held in the cafeteria ("Dining" area) of the magnificent new Central High School on 18th Avenue.

There were tables, to the left in the foto above, at which one could review maps of the present and proposed plan, by neighborhood. On the right were tables with presentations by subject matter. If you had a suggestion, you could write it on a PostIt and place it on the poster in that area. I wrote that we need marinas and housing on the Bay and River.

The meeting was not crowded, but I saw some familiar faces, including James Street activist Bill Chappel and the Ironbound Super Neighborhood's Lenny Thomas. Bill found the man who did much of the drafting of the revised maps, and I listened in to a discussion of why the James Street Commons Historic District is included in the Downtown Business District rather than University Heights. Bill finds the behavior of some of the 45,000 college students nearby to be objectionable at times, and is pleased to put at least some distance in the public mind between James Street and the kids.

After the people in attendance had had some time to review the materials on display, a couple of officials made brief presentations. I spoke to one of them, to mention my concerns about some of the things I noticed, and to make a general point. He was Arcelio Aponte, Director of Operations & Management of the Economic and Housing Development section of the Office of the Deputy Mayor. He recognized me and said he had been on my blog earlier that very day, so saw my mention of wanting to attend.

The overall point I wanted to make is that I'm afraid the master plan is too timid, and not nearly aspirational enuf. I said I would like to see highrise housing authorized to ring our big, largely empty county parks, like the one in my area, Vailsburg Park. That would increase the use of those empty spaces. The only county part that seems well utilized is Branch Brook. I used Manhattan's Central Park as an example of what I would like to see develop in Newark, and made the point that not only would the park make for a spacious view from the highrises, but the highrises would also make for a better, urban view from the parks. That is to say that part of the magic of Central Park is the views out from it, not just into it.

The "Light refreshments" were sandwiches and iced tea or lemonade. I was surprised that there was no coffee, which I would have had. I don't care for iced tea, esp. in cold months. Hot tea, sometimes. Green tea. The tea in Chinese restaurants, sure. But not iced tea.

I said Newark's planners should prepare for greatness. He saw that as a return to Newark's past (before the vast loss of population to white flite), but I said no, we should think bigger than Newark's past. I asked if there have been discussions with near-in parts of our area, such as East Orange and Irvington, to coordinate the development of a Greater Newark. I said that part of great cities is great physical size, and Newark's current 24 square miles doesn't cut it. We need to expand geographically, as by annexing at least the more urban areas like E.O. and Irvington, both of which are so depressed and financially stressed that they should welcome annexation. I don't recall whether I made the point that the state has wanted to reduce the costs of municipal government thru shared services, but merging municipalities more than just services would be even more helpful.

I reviewed the maps of my area, Vailsburg, and consulted the legend to find the meaning of the color my immediate neighborhood was printed in. It indicated single-family housing, so I mentioned to Mr. Aponte that I think we should (in line with a more ambitious Newark) permit highrises on major thorofares, such as South Orange Avenue in my area. I realized only later that the present proposal might not permit the (disparagingly-named) "Bayonne boxes" that have sprung up in profusion, here as elsewhere in the city, in that many of them are set up as two units, or even three, as allows a person of middle-class income to offset some of the costs of buying their own home by renting out part of it. I think we must permit that, whether we encourage it or not.

I mentioned to the woman tending the Vailsburg table, who lives on my street closer to SOA, that there are some small apartment houses presently, and that as long as most housing is single-family, that shouldn't be a problem. I mentioned that I think the upkeep of the housing and the curb frontage is better in the owner-occupied houses than in absentee-landlord houses. (That might obviate objections to Bayonne boxes with more than one dwelling unit, in that they would be owner-occupied housing.)
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We got to talking about my seeking a mortgage modification on my own house, and that the whole subject area is very complicated. She said that the Urban League has a housing counselor who might be able to help me, and gave me her fone number and email address. I'll have to frame my questions and contact her.

I spoke with a young man at the open space/parks area, and mentioned that I think we need a lot of vest-pocket parks in areas of low-density housing, because tho most have modest yards, few homeowners have a private basketball (half-)court or any of the other amenities (water wall, chess/checker table, handball court, badminton court — whatever) that a vest-pocket park would have. I asked if there was provision for such parks in the proposed master plan. He said yes, and pointed to an item on the poster. I think that "vest-pocket park" makes the point better than a reference to parks or community gardens in vacant lots. Words have power, and the term "vest-pocket park" is familiar to many people from its use in Manhattan, so it has a certain panache that the other wording does not. Community gardens can be tricky, tho they are certainly worth attempting, in sunny locations, with raised beds.
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As I was getting ready to leave the cafeteria, North Ward artist Noelle Lorraine Williams was entering. I greeted her and cued her in to how materials were organized.
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I then took some fotos of the great open area from the main entrance to Central High. We didn't have any such gathering place and atrium in my high school, Middletown Township H.S. in Monmouth County. There is some artwork around the new Central High's atrium. And there are some comfy chairs for rest and socializing. I don't know how crowded this wide-open space ever gets, in that I was there well after regular school hours. After hours, it seems palatial, so some titefisted people might resent this splendid new building. I think it's a good idea to show kids how much society values education, and allow them to enjoy their surroundings when at school. Besides, it's already built, so there's not much point to complaining that it is too luxurious. I thought I'd raise the issue, to argue a different point of view, that great buildings are part of a great city, and great schools deserve great buildings.

There were some handouts at the various tables, but I had to ask if they represented materials on the website, because, bizarrely, the URL of the website did not appear on any printout I saw. That is a very serious oversight, which I correct here: http://www.newarkmasterplan.com/. You'd think it would be .gov, but it's .com. Some of the webpages I looked at within that site loaded very, very slowly on my machine, but did eventually come up. Other parts of the City's website are linked to from that website. For some incomprehensible reason, the type on most pages is GRAY rather than black, and tiny. Who is responsible for such stupidity?

Artist Talk, Holiday Party at Solo(s) Thursday Nite

2011-12-15T05:26:00.011-05:00

There are two interconnected events at Solo(s) Project House tonite (why Thursday?), one an artist's talk, the other a holiday party afterward.

Solo(s) Speak: MARC D'AGUSTO
View: "OF METAL & BONE"
Followed by: Solo(s) Project House Holiday Celebration!

This Thursday, December 15, 2011
7 - 10 PM
Refreshments Served

Thursday, December 15th join us for a holiday-inspired evening of cocktails and conversation with featured solo artist Marc D'Agusto. D' Agusto['s] body of work, "OF METAL & BONE" is currently on display at Solo(s) Project House and opened during the 2011 Annual Newark Open Doors Tour in October. We invite you to take a final glance at it, speak to the artist and stick around afterward for the Solo(s) Project House Holiday Celebration.

ABOUT:
MARC D'AGUSTO, "OF METAL & BONE"
October 21 - December 16th

"Shifting through the rubble of contemporary life, my work examines the nuances of transformation. I address catharsis and the shedding of the old self to the essence of becoming a renewed generative identity, the journey of ruin to renewal."

D'Agusto's work explores traces of discarded history, addressing new beginnings through his own UNIQUE process. Through a series of layering actions: build up, peel away, scrape down, and build up again -- he has developed a ritual manifestation of our daily movement through life.

With a subtle wink to post-apocalyptic imagery this journey of ruin to renewal utilizes images of buildings, architectural forms and constructed spaces as an allegory for the framing of the human body and mind. Iron and concrete is the skeletal frame, glazing and veneers the skin and dressing; the illusion of space, memory and thought. Remnants of images often appear in his work reminiscent of excavated artifacts, relics of a deteriorating past, memories of events or places.

http://www.marcdagusto.com/

Foto from an April 2011 show at Solo(s), not of Marc D'Agusto's work. The man on the right is Kevin Darmanie, owner of the Kedar Studio of Art. I don't know who the woman is.

Artists sometimes have a very skewed idea of what people want to see, and D'Agusto's website is one of those that bear no resemblance to what the ordinary person wants to know and see. It is apparently skimpy on images and information (you have to click farther into the site than you would ordinarily expect, to find more pictures). In this case, less is definitely not more. Websites should not be puzzles you need to spend a lot of time to figure out. They should, instead, be portals wide open to obvious inquiries, so people find, immediately, what they are looking for.
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Artists may sometimes need ordinary people around them to interface with the wide (real) world. They sometimes create websites that are so bizarre and unhelpful that regular people cannot make sense of them. An art site that should be rich in images can turn out to be severely impoverished, visually, as is D'Agusto's. What was he thinking? I may have presented more pix of his work than his website initially seems to. See my posts of May 28, 2010, July 20, 2010, and March 25, 2011.
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In any case, tonite's double event is at Solo(s) Project House, 972 Broad Street, Newark, NJ 07102; www.solosprojecthouse.com; info@solosprojecthouse.com.

About the Solo(s) Project House
The original Latin and Greek roots of PROJECT mean "something that comes before anything else happens", and that is precisely what Solo(s) Project House is in a nutshell; evolving projects around a completed one. A space where gallery and studio are elbow to elbow, where the rigors of creation are coupled with the satisfaction of completion. The gallery is a sound stage upon which the house residents can imagine their months of creativity displayed from beginning to end. A true partner in the exhibit process, the artists are [or artist is] commissioned with a curatorial role that gives the visitor a 360[-]degree view of the creator[']s vision. Far from an original white[-]walled space, SPH is a home for experimental installations, avant[ ]-garde performance art and a myriad of media art. With an ever[-]evolving pool of artists from various cultural and personal experiences[,] SPH is a true melting pot of artistic expression.

I have inserted a few grammatical and punctuation corrections or additions. Artists are not to be expected to be grammarians, any more than grammarians can be expected to be artists. These are entirely different disciplines. I would not dare to suggest so much as a fraction of an inch variance from a single line of an artist's drawing or painting. But I know English grammatical, syntactical, and punctuation conventions, which we cannot really expect artists to know as well as writers do. To each his own.

Solo(s) Project House is located at 972 Broad St. Newark, NJ 07102. SPH is free and open to the public Wednesday-Friday from 12-6pm.

Today's other foto is of a sign outside the Rodino Federal Office Building, which is right alongside 972 Broad Street, where Solo(s) resides. I saw and fotograffed this sign after a Solo(s) reception, to show what I regard as a preposterous and indefensible waste of taxpayer dollars, a project to clad a perfectly good Federal building in different materials. Why? Are the windows leaking? If they are, surely we don't need to replace the entire exterior, but only fix the leaks. If they are not, why on EARTH are we wasting hundreds of thousands of even millions of dollars on replacing the perfectly good and distinguished white-concrete exterior of the Rodino Building now in place with a different exterior? That would be an absurd waste of money even if the Nation were flush with cash. When we are desperate to cover expenses for necessary public programs, such as helping poor people with heating over the winter, this re-cladding is inexcusably, indefensibly OUTRAGEOUS.

New Jersey on TV

2011-12-13T23:59:00.028-05:00

Long post, over 2,600 words, with 26 fotos.

I was watching some television after 11pm last Friday, and thought I might let you know how I see TV. Remember that tho I was born in NJ, I lived in Manhattan for 35 years, so am especially acutely aware of this hugely underappreciated and oft-denigrated state, not just of this appallingly underappreciated city, now that I'm back home. New Jersey is supposed to be innately funny, along with placenames with a K-sound. I don't know why. But NJ is often made the butt of jokes. Recently, however, NJ has become very often mentioned in national media.
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At 11pm, I watched an episode of the CBS sitcom The Big Bang Theory, now in syndication in our area on channels 5 and 9 (both owned by Fox). The character "Leonard Hofstadter", played by Johnny Galecki, is from New Jersey. I don't think the city/town is ever specified.

Today's fotos are from the Index Art Center and Kedar Studio of Art opening receptions last Friday evening. If I know the artist, I state it, but there were a lot more artists than the prior notices had indicated.

At 11:35, I turned to The Tonite Show with Jay Leno. In his monolog, Leno attacked Jon Corzine for continuing to think, in the private sector, like a U.S. Senator. Corzine was Senator from New Jersey.

Then Leno mentions an invention out of Stevens Institute of Technology that will turn off a cellfone automatically when a person starts to drive. Stevens is in Hoboken — New Jersey. Both my brother Brian and our effective grandfather (my grandmother's second husband, so not our biological grandfather) went to Stevens.

Then Leno makes a 'joke' about the [hideous, loathsome] bear hunt in New Jersey, saying that the hunt isn't going well because when the bears heard they were in New Jersey, they shot themselves. So very (un)funny. (Why doesn't the State just sterilize a significant portion of the bear population? And deer population? We tranquilize and tag bears that wander into the yards of suburbanites. Why don't we sterilize them at the same time?) There were, remarkably, three mentions of New Jersey in one Leno monolog, tho people might not have been aware of that because "New Jersey", as such, was not mentioned in all three.

Bobbleheads in painting by David Dziemian, with the painter shown putting them in place (I assume).

I switch to Letterman for the Top 10 list, and Letterman mentions something that happened in Kandahar, Afghanistan, then says that he and Paul Shaffer were in Kandahar, well, not downtown Kandahar, but in the suburbs. And Paul says "Short Hills". That's in New Jersey (our county, Essex), not Afghanistan.

I turn the TV off for a while, to tend to email and online news. When I look up and see the time is 12:51am, I turn the TV on, late, for The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson. In the email/Tweets segment, Ferguson says something about 'classy, fancy Princeton University' seeming even classier for being in New Jersey. He then says that that's the perfect offense to everyone, because it insults Princeton for being in New Jersey, and insults everyone in New Jersey outside of Princeton too.

After Ferguson, an (old, syndicated episode of) Comics Unleashed includes a comedian talking about Whitney Houston and Bobby Brown. Whitney Houston ("the most awarded female act of all time, according to Guinness World Records") is from Newark — New Jersey.

Later, the repeat of a Tonite Show from a week ago includes Mike ("The Situation") Sorrentino of Jersey Shore fame. He is actually from New York State, but gained fame (and fortune — he mentioned to Jay that he owns a Ferrari and Lamborghini!) in New Jersey.

This is all in one nite, Friday, December 9, 2011 (tho Ferguson's show starts after midnite, so his "Friday" show is technically on Saturday, as is the 3:05am repeat of the Tonite Show).

Left wall shows Dziemian paintings; right wall, fotos by Warren Young. The crowd has mainly retired to the well-occupied Reception Room for drinks and conversation. No food or drink is permitted in the gallery.

Apart from what I saw in this one nite, other prominent NJ mentions have appeared this week, in TV and other media.

Chris Christie was 'dissed' and subjected to "the people's microfone" (a group of unamplified people repeating in unison one speaker's words) in Iowa when announcing his endorsement of Mitt Romney for President on Wednesday.

I'm 'lichen' this foto.

That rambunctious incident was captured in a Fox News video broadcast in Philly. Chris Christie is (obviously, for being the Governor) from New Jersey. Unfortunately.

This foto would seem to be sideways, if one can judge by the streaks of rust running 'down' to the left rather than to the floor of the gallery.

Christie even made an odd New Jersey reference at the time:

The governor waited for them to finish and tried to make light of the situation.

"I hope you all enjoyed it," Christie said. "They'll be working at the Marriott down the street. Please remember to tip your waiters and waitresses, all right? Now let's see, where was I before I was so New Jersily interrupted?"

Reception Room works by Benjamin Griffin. Management seems to have curbed the indoor smoking for at least part of this reception. Permit me to express the thanks of all nonsmoker visitors for that consideration.

Chris Christie was born in Newark, and went to Seton Hall Law School, in Newark.

I think it might have been Craig Ferguson, also this week, who was talking with "Geoff Peterson", his robot-skeleton sidekick, about the two of them replicating the interplay of famous comedy duos.

Remaining fotos today are from the Kedar Studio of Art, the same nite. This first shows one large painting and a number of smaller works.

Ferguson's first thought was Laurel and Hardy, but Craig (Ferguson, not me, nor Lowell Craig of the Index Art Center) didn't like that because he'd have to play the fat one (given that Geoff is only bones, not really "skinny", nor "skin and bones", because he has no skin). Then Ferguson thought, naturally enuf, of Abbott and Costello, but again didn't want to do that because again he'd have to play the fat one. Abbott and Costello were both from New Jersey. He might also have mentioned Martin and Lewis — and Jerry Lewis was born in Newark. New Jersey.

This is the rest of the large painting shown above.

New Jersey or New Jerseyans appear in media in other situations all the time. When I see Shaquille O'Neal or Queen Latifah in a commercial, or hear Queen Latifah in a voiceover, I think "New Jersey" — and, more particularly, "Newark!", for both Shaq and Latifah.

These bracelets made from forks are among the jewelry and many other small-scale artworks at Kedar.

Shaq was, indeed, on Jimmy Kimmel Live! this past week, with his little girlfriend, who actually picked him up and carried him on her back several feet. When Kimmel tried to replicate that, he failed, miserably.

Kevin Darmanie, owner of Kedar Studio, has hit his stride with small pieces suited to his gallery's small space. This foto makes some of them seem even smaller, because the young man is unusually tall.

Jersey Shore is referenced all over the tube and in other media, as is the show The Real Housewives of New Jersey. Another nationally-shown cable TV program is Jerseylicious. Alas, there are not, as yet, any shows about or set in Newark. The atrocious, evil cable show The Sopranos did show some Newark sights now and then. Someday, perhaps, a moral, admirable TV show will be set in Newark. If our stolen TV station WNET were still in Newark, rather than NYC, it might create a nationally popular TV show one day. But WNET was moved — lock, stock, and barrel — to New York City, and focuses NO attention on its FCC city of license. Why the HE...CK doesn't Booker sue in Federal Court to force New Yorkers to unhand our TV station?

This bin of small, mounted fotos by Colombian-born Newark fotografer Luisa Pinzon, is one of two I have seen in recent months. The other was at the Art Kitchen this summer, when I took a friend who came to visit from NYC. Earlier this month, Luisa was holding an auction for fotos in a themed collection called "Fashion Fades, Style is Timeless", which was on view at the Coffee Cave. Alas, the link she sent in an email did not work. Her website also does not format correctly on my machine, even at a higher resolution (1024 x 768) than I usually work at (800 x 600). On some pages, she has lite gray text on a white background, which is very hard to read. It is possible to make a webpage adjust to whatever resolution a visitor uses, and to use crisp black type on white for legibility. Webmasters have to think about what the viewer needs, not just what the webpage publisher wants to show. My blog, for instance, sometimes has fotos that overlap text in the right column when first they appear, but once newer blogposts are added above, the earlier posts are pushed lower, and the text in the right column clears the wide fotos. I suppose I should strive to put only vertical fotos in early positions, but I really don't know how far down the text in the right column goes, and it gets longer over time.

Steve Buscemi (which he pronounces bue.sém.ee, not the more-like-Italian bue.shém.ee, which I had assumed is the way it was said) hosted Saturday Nite Live last week, and mentioned that he is in the HBO series Boardwalk Empire, which is set in Atlantic City. That is, in New Jersey. (Alas, that series is made in NYC, not any part of NJ. I find that detestable and indefensible.)

Checking TV listings, I might see This Old House, and think, "Kevin O'Connor [the host] graduated from St. Benedict's Prep in Newark."

At any time, a commercial for the Broadway show Jersey Boys might appear. The show is about The Four Seasons, three of whose singers were born in NJ (2 in Newark) and all of whom were raised in NJ.

This odd foto is by Spencer Frohwirth, whom I showed, in a video, as the dj at a Solo(s) Project House reception this September. I took his card from the dj table, and it says "Mixed Media Sculptor", "Music Producer", and "Art and Music Educator". No mention of fotografer.

Even The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show, which airs on Antenna TV (channel 11-4) at 2:00 and 2:30am Sunday thru Thursday (technically Monday thru Friday, given the 2am start time), sometimes mentions New Jersey.

George met Gracie in New Jersey. And George mentions having played Red Bank and Newark during their vaudeville days. In fact, I've heard Newark mentioned in more than one Burns & Allen episode. I think I might also have heard a reference to Newark in an episode of Maude (which is shown on Antenna TV at 10:00 and 10:30pm Monday thru Friday), and an episode of All in the Family (9:00 and 9:30pm). "Edith Bunker" has family in NJ.

An episode of The Jack Benny Program (Antenna TV, 3:00 and 3:30am) this week mentioned Molly Pitcher, a heroine of the Revolutionary War Battle of Monmouth (the county I lived in from age 9 or so to 20, but in Middletown Township, not Freehold, where the battle took place. I have been to the Freehold battlefield. There is, alas, nothing to see there).

And yesterday, AOL news hilited this story:

After a week of surprising challenges to his authority, Vladimir Putin faces a new one from one of Russia's richest and most glamorous figures – the billionaire owner of the New Jersey Nets says he will run against Putin in March's presidential election.

The story goes on to mention that the current Russian President has a Facebook account. That of course makes, in my mind, a second connection to New Jersey, and more particularly to Newark, of Mark Zuckerberg's $100 million matching grant to Newark Public Schools. I do not know if any of that money has been applied to the schools yet. Moreover, the credit at the bottom of the article mentions a reporter in Newark. So Newark is again connected to aspirations to the presidency of Russia.
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Has there ever before been a time when there was so much about New Jersey in media? I certainly can't remember any such time, but I'm only (a bit short of) 67. Perhaps 70 or 100 years ago New Jersey was mentioned more. But I doubt it. Of course, not everyone knows that all these things they hear about have a New Jersey — and also, in some cases, Newark — connection. But we do, don't we?

These are rings, made from copper. I have several copper bracelets for men that I bought at either the Collingwood or Englishtown flea market, in Monmouth County. My father liked to go to the flea markets. In his last months of terminal cancer, he couldn't drive himself, so my sister Sue Ann took him most weekends, but every now and then I spelled her, and bought (on separate occasions) a great teddy-bear cookie jar and my copper bracelets, while wheeling him around. I could see why he liked that place.They also held an indoor auction, which I didn't mesh with. It occurs to me only now that I almost never wear these great copper bracelets, perhaps because I associate them with the sadness of my father's last months. But I shouldn't feel that way, because I bought them when we were together, so wearing them should give me a connection to a happy moment in a sad time. My father and I were very different, but shared some enthusiasms, such as these flea markets and spring-flowering bulbs. My only quarrel with him on the latter is that he insisted I get up early in the day to plant them, whereas I was always a late-day kind of guy. But my front yard is filled with spring-flowering bulbs. Dad would approve.

Confusing Visitor Statistics

2011-12-11T21:55:00.005-05:00

There are conflicting statistics about how many people visit this blog, from two different internal sources at Google. The host of this blog is Google Blogger, and it has a "Stats" section that gives me one set of statistics. There is another service, Google Analytics, that gives entirely different statistics.
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I heard about Google Analytics from Newark artist Rebecca Jampol (now principal of Solo(s) Project House) during a brief conversation at an art show at the NJIT gallery many months ago, so opened an account there. This is a screenprint of today's report, which shows 3,933 visits and 6,170 pageviews over the last month. The bounce rate and short time, little more than a minute per visit on average, show that many people were looking for one thing in particular, or just checking out the fotos rather than reading an entire post. That's fine with me.

But here is the summary report of visits from Blogger Stats, which shows 11,174 pageviews for the same month. It does not break out the number of visits.

Now, Google Analytics' map of where visitors are located.

Here is the map at Google Blogger's Stats area, which includes a list of the top several countries by visits.

Here, however, is the list of countries at Google Analytics.

So, which do I believe? Why do they differ? Naturally, I am tempted to believe the higher numbers, but that produces a conflict, in that Blogger shows almost twice as many pageviews, but far fewer countries.
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I guess I'll never know. But it doesn't really matter. I'd do this blog if there were only 100 visitors a month. I might not put as much time into it, but I would always hope that someday this blog will be mentioned favorably in some prominent way, as by a major celebrity, and there will then be a huge archive of texts and fotos for new readers to see.

Index/Kedar Tonite, Master Plan and Red Bulls Saturday

2011-12-09T16:48:00.012-05:00

I saw Kevin Darmanie, proprietor of the Kedar Studio of Art, at the closing of the 2+2 exhibit at NJIT and asked what's next for Kedar. (Kevin is a pop artist who works in sophisticated, adult cartoons, and "Kedar" is the name of one of his principal characters; but here I meant "Kedar Studio of Art".) He said that on December 9th he's opening a new show, and I asked if Index (Art Center, which takes up most of the same floor of 585 Broad Street) is going to open something the same nite, as they usually do. Kevin thought Index was going to do a fotografy show.

Fotos of artworks today are from previous shows at Kedar and Index. This is a pair of small paintings by Victor Davson, in a Kedar show.

I expressed the hope that it wouldn't be b&w, but color, and said something I've often thought, that if the original fotograffic process had produced color, nobody would be working in black-and-white. As soon as I said it, to an artist, I realized that some artists, seeking a different vision, might opt for monochrome, and Kevin said aloud that some artists might be more inclined to work in monochrome if the bulk of fotografy were full-color. Indeed. But, I think now, they might not all settle on black, white, and shades of gray, but other base colors and their shades: purple, blue, red, etc., not a single standard for art(sy-craftsy) fotografy.

Small artworks at Kedar.

In any case, I saw the email announcement for the new Index/Kedar shows Tuesday (sent shortly before midnite Monday, and thus too late for that event to be included in the Newark Pulse weekly events newsletter, which comes out on Tuesday. Here is the text:

Transposition

This exhibition will feature work by painter DAVID DZIEMIAN and photographer WARREN YOUNG. The work of these two artists seem[s] to take on new rolls [roles?] through the use of traditional mediums. Areas of paint and texture are explored through the lens. Spacial relationships, perspective and reality are examined using the brush[.]

December 9 through January 4th
Reception: Friday Dec. 9, 6-10pm
Also exhibiting -
Reception Room: works by Benjamin Griffin
27 Mix: works by Gavin Gewecke

INDEX
585 Broad Street
Newark, NJ 07102
www.indexartcenter.org
index.gallery@gmail.com
Gallery ph. 862-218-0278

Gallery hours:
Thur: 6-9 pm
Fri: 1-4 pm
Sat: 1-4 pm
Viewing appointments are welcome

Truly monochrome painting, all-black, marred by reflections at September show at Index.

So I shall endeavor to get there tonite. Ordinarily the Index email would include mention of Kedar's offerings the same nite, but not this time. In that Kevin said he was planning something for the 9th, I assumed that there will be something on offer there tonite too. I don't know if Kedar has a mailing list, but in any case, I'm not on one for them. So I checked Kedar's Facebook page and found this:

Join us this Friday for Kedar Art Exhibit of Jewelry and Fine Craft featuring among others, jewelry by SamKa.

Artist and jeweler Samantha M. Katehis specializes in creating detailed figurative pieces out of wax.

Master Plan Open House. I mentioned here Wednesday that there were to be two displays of the Master Plan as now envisioned, at Central High School, on Wednesday and Saturday, and that I hoped to get to one or the other. Since the Wednesday showing was in the evening (5:30-8:00pm) but the Saturday showing at 10:00am-12:30pm, I went to the Wednesday event. I'll show fotos and discuss my experience of it later. If you go tomorrow, let me cue you in to what you'll see. There are a bunch of tables on the left as you enter, which show the different areas of the city, with two maps that may look the same but are actually of the current zoning (left) and proposed new zoning (right). On the right wall are tables by subject-matter area. You can write a comment on a PostIt and place it on the relevant poster for their information later.

Index Reception Room.

Red Bulls Open House. Tomorrow (Saturday) from 10am-6pm, the "New York" Red Bulls are having an Open House at their magnificent, 25,000-seat stadium in Harrison, a half mile in from the Newark line — in New JERSEY. Are you as sick as I am of New York sports teams playing in NJ but still calling themselves NY teams?

Another work from a Reception Room show.

I have to check with Gaetano if he's going. He took me to a Red Bulls soccer game on Fan Appreciation Day, April 24, 2010. I attended to see if I could get into soccer, but mainly to see the stadium ("arena", they call it) from the inside and up close from the outside.

I show today some of the fotos I took of the area then but meant to use long before now. I'll use others shortly before the home opening of the 2012 season, on March 25th.

In this next foto, you can see Gaetano in the foreground and much of the Newark skyline in the background.

The announcement text of tomorrow's event reads:

Your holiday shopping struggles are over! Come to Red Bull Arena on Saturday, December 10th from 10am to 6pm to select the best 2012 season ticket seat locations and purchase discounted Red Bulls merchandise.

While you're here you'll also have the opportunity to:

o Take a penalty shot on the pitch
o Get a behind the scenes tour of the Red Bulls locker room
o Meet a Red Bulls player.

They originally said that only people who RSVP'd before 3pm today would be admitted, but they relented, and a notice says "Please just arrive prior to 4pm in order to guarantee that you'll be able to take part in all the fun elements!"
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Gaetano and I each got an autograf on a Red Bulls poster last year from Juan Pablo Ángel, then a star player with the Red Bulls but now playing for Chivas USA. The guy had real charisma, a term much overused. When he looked up at you before signing the poster, he made you feel like he was really connecting with you in particular, not just acknowleding one of a very long line of nameless fans. That's an extremely rare quality. And very sexy.

The last foto today shows part of the Reception Room during an opening reception at Index. They get a good crowd, but I can't always stay as long as I might like because they allow smoking. Doesn't Newark have an indoor-smoking ordinance? It should have.

Master Plan Hearings Tonite and Saturday

2011-12-07T12:54:00.014-05:00

For some reason I do not understand, today's first two graffics were originally not appearing. Altho I subsequently deleted and then uploaded them again, and they worked, I'm leaving this informational note in case they vanish again. The first graffic is text that is largely covered by the block-indented quote below. The second contains the dates, times, and location of the meetings: tonite, Wednesday, December 7th, from 5:30-8:00pm, and Saturday, December 10th, from 10:00am-12:30pm, both at (the new) Central High School, 246 18th Avenue, between Boyd and Livingston Streets.

The City of Newark is revising its Master Plan and is asking for feedback.

The email from Lenny Thomas of the Ironbound Super Neighborhood says:

The Master Plan Round I back in the month of July was the beginning of the plans for the future of Newark. Now there are two meetings scheduled for the month of December, Master Plan Round II. The Master Plan is the plan for the future of Newark on a neighborhood by neighborhood basis. The Master Plan determines what kind of neighborhood you will live in by setting down things like what kinds of business can be put in your neighborhood, what kinds of houses can be built, which neighborhood services you will have and even the kind of police protection you will receive. It is important that your voice be heard. Without your voice, others will be making the decisions on the community you will be living in. The meetings will take place this Wed. evening and Sat morning at Central High School. Please see attachment for details on time and place.

There are many people who will be going. If you have transportation and can help someone else get to the meeting, please reach out to your neighbors or let me know. If you are in need of transportation please reach out to me or contact Nancy Zak at 973-589-3353 X202. It is important that our voices be heard so we can have the community that we have worked for.

I don't know how the new Master Plan is to differ from the one it is intended to replace, nor how long ago that one was promulgated. But I suppose I should attend one or the other of the community meetings ("open houses"). I present, below, a wide view of the announcement. I have placed a closer view, above, of the purple part that is unreadably small at the resolution below.

Besides, I've never been inside Central High (shown below), and this is my chance. Gaetano is thinking of attending one or the other hearing too.

2+2; Free Museums; Boycott WNET Begathon

2011-12-03T23:46:00.007-05:00

Statue at entrance to CoAD building.

2+2. Today's fotos are from my trip to the spare "2+2" art exhibition that closed last Monday at the College of Architecture and Design gallery on the campus of NJIT. The concept of the show was explained on a flyer thus:

The exhibit, "2+2", is the result of two curators, David Smith and Matthew Gosser, wanting to work together on a project. The premise of the exhibit was for each ruator to select two artists who also work closely with another artist. These artists could be siblings, lovers, or studio-mates who influence each other's individual artwork in subtle or not-so-subtle ways. Two works of art from each artist were selected to be in the exhibit. The artists included in the exhibit are: Andrew Baron + Suzanne Kammin, Evonne M. David + Emma Wilcox, Peter Owen + Alison Owen and Andrew Demirjian + Dahlia Elsayed.

I think the curator David Smith is perhaps better known as DC Smith, a co-founder of Index Art Center. I think.

Paired paintings, Some Heavy Indulgences by Dahlia Elsayed.

Free Museums. (a) The first weekend of the month has rolled around again, which means that holders of Bank of America debit or credit cards can get free admission to 150 museums around the country, including 7 in NJ, 2 of them in Newark.

NEW JERSEY

Cherry Hill
Garden State Discovery Museum

Jersey City
Liberty Science Center

Millville
WheatonArts and Cultural Center

Montclair
Montclair Art Museum

Group of paintings by Suzanne Kammin (Solitude — Spring — Visitors — Sounds — Winter Animals). My camera had a lot of trouble with the lite in this show. It seemed pretty brite to the naked eye, but too dim for my camera.

Morristown
Morris Museum

Newark
Aljira, a Center for Contemporary Art
Newark Museum

Oceanville
The Noyes Museum of Art
of Richard Stockton College

The "Museums on Us" website has links to the various participating institutions. There are also participants in NYC and Philly.
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(b) Members of the Newark Museum and Liberty Science Center get free reciprocal admission to the other institution on Sunday, December 11th. I have yet to get to LSC, but I don't know if there is free parking anywhere near it. And I don't know if it is intended for children, or for adults as well.

Detail, Single File, From The American Heritage Series, by Evonne Davis. I didn't realize when I took this picture that another hanging block of wood in the window area in front of the venetian blinds at the right was also part of this work, so this is a "detail" rather than complete view.

Support NJ Public Broadcasters, Not WNET! Channel 13, Newark's stolen TV station, is running another of its disgusting begathons, offering some of the worst programming in the history of television in the process. WNET also runs commercials before and after programs, which it pretends are mere announcements from corporate supporters but are plainly commercials. So not only do you have to put up with commercials from channel 13, but you also have to put up with being attacked every few weeks by demands that you send them money! No. Don't do it. Don't send them a dime.

Chalk listing, Lure of of the Local (repeat), by Emma Wilcox. The two-column list appears to be anagrams, but of what, I do not know. To the right is "Retort re: Carpetbagger", but that phrase cannot be the original of the anagrams, because there are no G's in the list and no S's in "Carpetbagger", so I didn't look further.

If you have money to donate to PBS stations at present, please do not reward WNET for having stolen not just WNET itself, which is assigned to Newark, but also the entire New Jersey Network from the State of New Jersey overall — which our vile (one-term?) Governor not just gave away but actually PAID them to take out of this State.

Newark needs a TV station of its own, but no one in City government seems to have thought to demand of the FCC that it compel the return of Newark's TV station to Newark, nor to sue in Federal Court to force channel 13 to return all of WNET's operations to Newark.

Painting Intersection 2, by Peter Owen.

We have one public station left in this area, WBGO jazz radio, which also does some public-affairs broadcasting, such as "Newark Today", a monthly call-in show with Mayor Booker. A podcast is available online.

Painting Intersection 1, by Peter Owen. I don't know what this is supposed to be, but it reminds me of the bus-ramp over Ninth Avenue to the Port Authority Bus Terminal, near where I used to live in Manhattan.

If New Jerseyans would support only NJ public stations, WNET might get the message that its rapacious behavior in stealing both WNET and the New Jersey Network, and then WNET's disgraceful ignorement of Newark, its city of license, and NJ more generally, is offensive, and channel 13 has a moral, and possibly even legal obligation to devote far more time to Newark in particular and New Jersey in general than it does. So if you are inclined to support public broadcasting in our area, please support WBGO, not WNET. Keep NJ money in NJ — Garden State broadcasting needs NJ lettuce.

Painting It Also Spanned Seasons by Dahlia Elsayed. This foto didn't turn out right. In person, it appears to be a map of sorts, perhaps of parkland.

Transportation Mis/Information

2011-11-30T23:59:00.021-05:00

I mentioned here last Wednesday the CHEN College Town shuttle, and saw this map of the three routes at one of its bus stops, when I walked down Warren Street to the College of Architecture and Design gallery of NJIT this Monday for the closing reception of the 2+2 exhibition. The dark spots top and bottom middle are bolts to the supporting post, joined by a faint line of corroded metal.

Nearby was an electronic sign with info about the next bus. I tried to get the "crawl" along the bottom, but missed all except the tail end.

I do not understand what the two numbers joined by an ampersand are supposed to represent. Two buses?

Notice anything wrong? "Kearny" is misspelled on this electronic sign, tho it is spelled right on the map shown above.
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I tried to get a sharper picture than the ambient-lite shot above, but when I snapped a flash foto, the letters and numbers turned out to be unreadable, perhaps caut in some mid-phase stage that was illegible. I took a second flash foto, to no better effect. Why?

When I returned to my car (the shuttles don't go near my house, and I'm not a student, tho I might like to take some computer and digital-fotografy courses from some college, perhaps ECC, which is free for old folks), I was about to open my driver's-side door when a metallic-silver Town Car (or similar) limo pulled up and the driver hailed me. Now, that's a change. He asked how to get to Florham Park. I was a little surprised, tho not at being asked for directions. I've been asked for directions a lot, including, among other places, Seneca Falls, NY, which I had never been to before (my father and I were visiting a town the family had lived in before my birth, in The Olden Days), and had arrived only about 20 minutes earlier; Ottawa, Ontario; and, I think, in then-Leningrad (present St. Petersburg) — in Russian! No, what I was startled at is that a limo driver with passenger would have no GPS and would be so lost as to be at Lock and Warren Streets in Downtown Newark when he was supposed to be driving to Florham Park.
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I had to think. I told him that he was in the wrong county (Essex, when he should have been in Morris), not just city, and that the only way I know to get to Florham Park is via South Orange Avenue. But how to get to SOA from Lock and Warren? There was a curving road feeding into Lock, which screwed up my perceptions, since the rectangular grid had been skewed by that curve. I thought a bit, then realized I had a three-county road atlas on my car's back seat, which I reached for. I showed him that SOA is designated 510 (an Essex County designation, I thought), and that it does indeed go directly to Florham Park. (I sometimes say that "South Orange Avenue goes everywhere", and, in a sense, it does, for being connected to the continental road network that connects most parts of the U.S., Canada, Mexico, and points south.) Alas, the print on the map was small and the liting bad, but I realized that MLK Boulevard was just four blocks away down Warren Street, and if he took a right there, he should intersect SOA in a half mile or so.

Only after he had driven off did I realize that MLK does not quite intersect SOA, but actually hits Springfield Avenue one block east of the start of SOA. I had, I think, told him there was a big courthouse at the right road. Afterward, I hoped he either realized that the back of the Old Essex County Courthouse was a courthouse, or that he would mistake the Hall of Records a block above as the courthouse I meant, so made the right turn at Springfield, whereupon he would see the 510 sign for SOA at most 200 feet off to the right. But at least he would know to ask the next person he asked, where South Orange Avenue is, if he drove beyond it.
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After that limo driver pulled away, I pulled out of my parking place straight ahead, ran into Central Avenue, made the left, then left again on First Street to go to the Bergen Street Pathmark — and realized that I could have told the driver to go that way, because just after the B St Pmk parking lot was SOA! But you might often drive places readily without realizing how to tell other people to follow the same route, and the driver didn't write anything down, so might not have remembered. Ah, well. I tried.
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When I got home and checked the .PDF Downtown Business District map that I have stored on my computer Desktop, as to what I had told the limo driver, I confirmed my error, but found another, this one in the internally illuminated map of the NJIT campus that appears in this next foto and which I compared to my .PDF map.

As you can see from this closer view zoomed in on via my graffics program, that map shows "Academy Street" for what is, according to my Business District map, Raymond Boulevard. I know that if you drive up Raymond Boulevard, you merge into Lock Street.

Note "Academy Street" at upper right (this map, designed to show people where they are relative to the streets around them, varies from ordinary map conventions; the top is northeast and bottom, southwest). The odd-shaped white blotch is the back of a flyer that some inconsiderate moron taped to the map but which disconnected at one side and folded over.

Here's that area as shown on the Business District map. Who's right, the makers of that map or the makers of the NJIT campus map?

I checked my other .PDF map, the Official City Map, to be sure that my understanding was based on the official street names.

So it would seem that somebody at NJIT goofed. As to whether the CHEN "Next Bus" electronic sign's mistake ("Kearney") is NJIT's, CHEN's, or someone else's, I do not know. But society has got to be more careful, and proofreading must be appreciated for the valuable skill it is. Proofreaders are not dispensable. Organizations and businesses should at least run things past a few different sets of eyes before committing texts to maps and signs. It's embarrassing when a university, or group of universities, makes conspicuous mistakes.
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(My two .PDF maps used to be available for download from GoNewark.com, but seem no longer to be offered there. Why the heck not? Shouldn't the "new" version of anything also be "improved"?)

No Acorns, No Explanation

2011-11-29T23:59:00.003-05:00

I have mentioned that my oak trees produced no acorns again this year. I wondered if I could get an explanation from the State agricultural extension service as to why this has happened a lot recently, but never before. So I searched for an email address and sent off this inquiry.

For, I believe, the third time in four years, my oak trees have produced NO ACORNS this year. The first occurrence of this phenomenon was 2008, when there was a widespread failure of oaks in the Eastern United States to produce acorns for the first time anyone could remember. The next year, however, acorns were back. But I don't think there were any last year and I have seen none in my neighborhood (the Vailsburg section of western Newark) this year. I have a number of oaks, including at least one that is about 70 feet tall. I'm worried about the squirrels. Do you know what is going on, and whether there is anything to be done about this? Please advise.

In a normal year, this closer view should have revealed at least some acorns. Not a one.

I received a reply, but it wasn't very helpful.

Most current research into “mast” production (tree seeds such as acorns, samara from maples, and various nuts) shows a correlation between environmental conditions and the volume of seed produced, but the specific causal agent (heat, water, light, etc.) has not been identified. Most likely seed production is influenced by a mix of these factors. During the past 10 years we have experience[d] extemes in temperature and water (i.e. droughts and flooding.) Trees do not always respond immediately to the weather but can lag 2 to 3 years behind an event. The most important point is that lack of acorn production is not a reliable indicator of overall tree health.

While acorns are an important food source for squirrels, squirrels are adaptable scavengers and will survive the winter.

Jan Zientek
Senior Program Coordinator
Agriculture and Resource Management
Cooperative Extension of Essex County

Last year, I broke up and tossed out some carrots for the squirrels, but they didn't seem to like them very well. They, or possums or raccoons (Vailsburg is semi-surburban and thus, nowadays, semi-wild for some hardy species that have moved back into areas they had evacuated decades ago), did eat some of the carrot chunks, but not all. Since Mr. (Ms.?) Zientek said the squirrels should survive this acornless winter, I won't try that again. Perhaps the squirrel population adjusts well to the availability of food, so doesn't produce many babies in lean years. I hope.

Nite Lacrosse at NJIT

2011-11-28T01:12:00.002-05:00

This evening, when I drove to the closing reception of the latest NJIT art exhibition, I took a parking space a few blocks away because I didn't know if I'd find a spot closer. That vicinity is quite congested much of the day and into the nite, in that it's part of an area that has very much the feel of a residential-college town. There are students everywhere, walking to and from classes and extracurricular activities, waiting for the shuttle bus, and participating in sports practices. As I walked from where I parked on Lock Street near Warren, I saw some young men on the britely lited football/soccer field. They appeared, however, to be practicing neither football nor soccer, but the one sport we got from American Indians, lacrosse.

The field remains level while the sidewalk slopes downward. I wasn't sure I'd still be able to take a foto of the goal area until I got to that point. Fortunately, I could.

I wasn't quite certain of that, however, since I initially couldn't see clearly the implements they were using. When I saw a couple of guys standing still, I was able to capture the sticks in a foto to check later. The modern version of the lacrosse stick they were using looked too small. But I later checked the Internet for images of lacrosse sticks and, sure enuf, that's what they look like now. You can see here what lacrosse sticks used to look like, when I first became aware of the game. My brother Brian played it at Stevens (Institute of Technology, in Hoboken).

Wikipedia says that lacrosse is gaining in popularity. It's still not very popular, as team sports go, and especially spectator sports. But we've got lacrosse in Newark. We've got all kinds of things in Newark that people might not expect, including two beautiful green sports fields often lited at nite on the campuses of two adjoining colleges, NJIT and Rutgers.

First Church

2011-11-27T14:09:00.007-05:00

This "Church Sunday" at Newark USA, I present some recent fotos of Newark's oldest church, a bit more than one block south of the Four Corners on the east side of the street. All Newarkers know the building, seen here with the former First National State Bank Building in the background.

The bank building, one of three in Newark designed by Cass Gilbert, the architect of the Woolworth Building in Lower Manhattan and the U.S. Supreme Court Building in Washington, DC, is to be transformed into an Inter-Continental Hotel. (Wikipedia offers a different architect, Hirons and Dennison, and I cannot judge between the two sources. But the spare form of the structure doesn't seem to me to accord with the Hirons firm's Beaux-Arts and Art Deco inclinations. In any event, both architectural firms produced very distinguished works.)
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When I passed by the bank building on October 23rd on my way to the Open Doors art exhibit in Symphony Hall, there was little sign of actual construction. There was a barrier in front of the entrance, but since it was Sunday, I couldn't tell if there was any work already started but not in progress due to the weekend.
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The First Presbyterian Church's location and age show how long Newark has had a well-established street grid, which is part of Newark's historicity. Newark is the third-oldest major city in the United States, after only New York (c. 1625) and Boston (1630). The sign below speaks to key points in the history of the church, and city. Note the 1748 entry, the first commencement of what came to be known as Princeton University, after it moved from Newark. "Princeton" was founded in Elizabeth in 1746 but moved to Newark the next year, then remained in Newark nine years, until it moved to Princeton in 1756. Had it remained in Newark, and otherwise developed the same, its prestige would attach to Newark, not Princeton.

Not mentioned in the church's history given by the sign is that one of its ministers was the Rev. Aaron Burr, father to the notorious killer of Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr, Jr., who was born in Newark. That's not a distinction we should cherish, but it is an undeniable part of Newark history. Nor should we glory in the theocratic origin of what became the First Presbyterian Church but started as a Puritan church.
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Old Newark has a webpage about the history of the church and its theocratic tendencies.

From "The WPA Guide to 1930's New Jersey":
"Whatever the origin of its name [a controversy not mentioned on this Old Newark webpage], Newark was unmistakably founded as a theocracy with the Puritan Congregational Church securely in control of village affairs. The church quickly erected a barrier around the religious freedom won by emigrating from New Haven. Church membership was a prerequisite to owning land, holding public office and voting. The church maintained such strict supervision over personal and public life that early Newark was more Puritan than much of New England itself."

I hadn't noticed before I passed by on October 23rd that there is a second church-like building on the grounds, smaller and lower, without a steeple. It seems to be the "Old First Presbyterian Church", and the taller building is more recent. Anyone interested in more detail as to the history of the two buildings might check the history at a different Old Newark webpage. There is a sign at the right side of the lawn that uses the term "Old", but I hadn't seen that as specifying the second building, just pointing out that the large building is old. The sign with key dates, which is to the left of the tall building, also uses the word "Old", which explains my confusion.

The sign to the right in the foto above, near the sidewalk, speaks to the church's importance to Newark's history. I do not find a website for the church as a going entity. Perhaps the congregation doesn't regard the Internet as an important recruitment tool. Or perhaps the current members of the congregation don't feel the need to recruit.

Open Doors '11, Part Last; Attendance; and NJIT Closing Reception on Monday

2011-11-23T23:59:00.012-05:00

As I said last Friday, the last event I saw any part of in this year's Open Doors art weekend was the end of the Washington Park Arts Festival. I took only a few pictures of people packing up to leave.

But Newark artist Ing-On Vilbulbhan-Watts offered me some of her pix, many of which I show below. In this next foto, mine, you can see her, holding two padded containers in which, I think, were rolled-up copies of her peace poster as signed by lots of people at her table in the festival. I discussed that project here on July 28th.

Kareisha Avestel, a Barat Youth Initiative volunteer, took care of Ing's Peace Project during the Festival. (Remaining fotos today, including a number that show diverse people offering their thoughts on her topic, "What does 'Peace' mean to you?", are courtesy of Ing-On Vilbulbhan-Watts, who retains all rights. Thank you, Ing.) All fotos today relate to the parkfest, tho the text speaks to three distinct but interrelated topics.
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These first fotos show members of the Organización Carnavalesca de Santiago en New Jersey, a Dominican group that snapped enormously loud whips in the Arts Parade.

During the parade, the group wore intricate masks, but they started to come off once the group reached the park.

I don't know what the ebulliently colorful costumes were supposed to represent, but they certainly britened the day.

In the park, the Aztec Dance troupe, Kalpulli Huehuetlahtolli Danzantes, which merely marched in the portion of the parade I saw, actually danced. Ing-On saw the dancing in person. I saw it only thru her pictures.

Piece of the Puzzle. I wondered aloud here on November 14th why there aren't tens of thousands of suburbanites attending Open Doors in Downtown Newark each year. Gaetano thinks he may have a partial explanation, and offers some thoughts on a solution.

I have heard people over the years say that they are not afraid of coming to Downtown Newark but, if they are driving, they may be afraid that if they go off-route, there are "sections" if they get lost in that are NOT good.

I tend to agree there are "sections" of Newark that 'are' actually not that good due to gang activity! I would even be a bit hesitant to pass thru them.

I tell family and friends who drive to my place to make sure they don't turn off in wrong direction because I don't want them in areas where there is gang activity.

I think if we offered some transportation services (bus, etc.) from train stations at wealthy areas (Montclair, Livingston — wherever — and back again, more people might come to events in Newark.

Organizers of Downtown Newark events should offer such things as group discounts if 20 or 30 people from Montclair want to come to a Newark event, and bus them to and from.

We need to think of more ways that would encourage people to come to Newark, and once they are comfortable they just might continue coming on their own.

I replied:

I hadn't thought of that. But in regard to public transportation, that is NOT an issue, because Newark Penn and Broad Street Stations are both in safe areas, and the lite rail system from Broad Street Station goes to Newark Penn, which is a short walk to PruCenter. And the lite rail system also goes to NJPAC. Perhaps we need to publicize the way to get to NJPAC, NuMu, PruCenter, and the various galleries by safe public transportation. AND consider what mistakes people driving in might make that could get them in trouble — not that carjacking is a big problem here, so that if people merely pass thru questionable neighborhoods and their car doesn't break down, they don't risk much of anything. We've got to get people thinking about this.

There used to be a Loop bus that connected cultural venues Downtown, but it seems to have vanished some time ago. Maybe we need to reestablish that shuttle if it was indeed abolished — and why would it have been? How much did it cost? How much should we charge on a new Loop, for a whole day's off-and-back-on passage? This is the kind of thing we should all be discussing.

A couple of months ago, I spoke with someone who was active in organizing the Halsey Street Block Parties, which have also been seriously under-attended, about busing in people from senior residences, public schools, and our various colleges, who said that there had been discussions of such a thing, but inadequate financing sank that idea. There are shuttles that connect the various campuses and other locations. The College Town free shuttle organized by CHEN (the Council of Higher Education in Newark), even as far as Harrison and Kearny. Perhaps we need only make students of all these institutions aware of the stops close to the various venues, in publicity just before events, to get more college kids after classes or out of dorms and into the many free events open to them.

I don't know what kind of free or low-cost shuttles are available to senior residences or senior daytime activity centers. Again, it might just be a question of reaching people to alert them to events and how they can get to and from by public transportation right to the front door of their local community center.

Similarly, the Newark Public Schools might make buses available for students of appropriate age from various schools to appropriate art events. I don't know how much is already available, as against what we would have to create. Do Newark schoolchildren get an NJTransit bus pass for free rides? Only to and from school? Only during certain hours, to any destination? I don't know, but someone must. Plainly the Halsey Street Block Parties could easily accommodate busloads of kids and senior citizens. As to whether the various galleries are prepared to receive one or more busloads to their opening receptions, or at other times, I cannot say. But even if not every gallery would welcome hordes of kids arriving all at the same time, some might, and could work with the schools to stagger arrivals and departures to avoid overcrowding, and to permit a guided tour by gallery staff or school staff given an orientation prior to a bus trip. Wouldn't it be great if art educators in the Newark Public Schools, and in those of other municipalities outside City Limits, understood what a treasure Newark arts offer to impressionable kids. A field trip to an art gallery or tour of cWOW's murals or leisurely stroll thru an outdoor arts festival in Washington Park, or concert in Lincoln Park or PSE&G Plaza could make quite an impression on kids, and create affection for this city that could last the rest of their lives.

Closing Reception Monday. One show I was not able to get to during Open Doors is still open, but not for long. Here is the email invite:

Hello!

Please join us for the closing reception for our current exhibition: 2+2. It will be on Monday, November 28 from 5:30pm to 8:30pm and light refreshments will be served. below is a little information about the exhibit and the participating artists. The College of Architecture and Design Gallery is on NJIT campus in Newark, NJ. The address is 367 Martin Luther King Blvd. on the corner of MLK and Warren Street.

The premise of the exhibit was for each curator (David Smith and Matthew Gosser) to select artists who work closely with another artist. These artists could be siblings, lovers or studio-mates who influence each other's individual artwork in subtle or not-so-subtle ways. Two works of art from each artist were selected to be in the exhibit. The artists included in the exhibit are: Andrew Baron + Suzanne Kammin, Evonne M. Davis + Emma Wilcox, Peter Owen + Alison Owen and Andrew Demirjian + Dahlia Elsayed.

If you need any assistance, please call 973-596-3080.

Sincerely,
Matthew Gosser
Director, CoAD Gallery

The hours are a little earlier than usual for NJIT receptions, probably because, for some reason, this one is on a Monday rather than Friday.

In any case, I will probably be able to see the last remaining exhibition from this year's Open Doors event, this coming Monday.

Boycotted Robeson Center Panel on 'Queer Newark'

2011-11-21T23:59:00.051-05:00

Today's discussion is mainly for adults, but also for teenagers who are already sexual in their thinking.

Fotos today are from the little Gay Pride march up Halsey Street into a litely attended gay (and lesbian) festival in Washington Park in late June 2010. I was a little late arriving (what else is new?), so the first few fotos show marchers from the back. I am not protecting their identity, and they were marching openly. I didn't get to this year's event — there's only one of me, and I can't get to every event in the busy New Newark — so don't know if it grew any.

Madness has seized control of the Robeson Center at Rutgers-Newark. Its staff permitted a one-day conference to be held on its premises that was called, insanely, "Queer Newark". Let me make clear, for people who just don't know, or have been misled by the propaganda of bizarre gay and lesbian self-despisers, that the word "queer" is the exact equivalent of "nigger". It is profoundly and permanently offensive to the great preponderance of people for whom it is intended. It cannot be "rehabilitated" or "reclaimed", but will always be absolutely unacceptable in polite company. It must NEVER be used by straight people — EVER. If Rutgers-Newark would not smile upon a symposium titled "Nigger Newark", it should never have approved of even a one-day program called "Queer Newark".

Moreover, how do you compensate for long-term, indeed historic refusal to recognize the contributions of gay or lesbian Newarkers, as the materials for the "Queer Newark" program spoke of doing, by means of a ONE-DAY program?

Here is the text put online about this program by Newark Pulse:

Date: Saturday, November 12, 2011

Time: 9am-5pm

Location: Paul Robeson Center - Rutgers - Rm 231

Cost: Free

Rutgers-Newark partnered with community leaders to present "Queer Newark: Our Voices, Our Histories," a free, full-day, oral history conference examining gay life in Newark. It will be followed by an evening of entertainment at The Coffee Cave from 6-9 p.m. Newark Mayor Cory Booker will welcome participants and guests.

"The city of Newark, New Jersey has a fascinating and well-documented history. There are studies of its rich cultural, musical, and literary legacy, its educational system, political life, religious life, immigrant roots, and history of racial conflict," said Prof. Beryl Satter of the Federated Department of History at Rutgers-Newark and conference co-chair, "yet, there is one group whose undeniable contribution to the city’s life has rarely been the subject of historical or academic study -- Newark’s LGBT community. The Queer Newark conference is a way to rectify this omission."

This is the front of the march. Two white people, both female? Why is that? Do white gay men have to sit in the back of the bus, in their own march, in Newark?

Three generations of LGBT Newarkers will be on hand to reflect on their lives as LGBT people in the city of Newark. Panelists will discuss everything from childhood experiences to religion and spirituality during the moderated discussions. Community members, historians and scholars of Newark history and LGBT history and studies are encouraged to attend.

Is that an unusually broad-shouldered woman? Or not? If not, why is he wearing women's clothes? Perhaps a white patch of fabric on her hip makes this actual woman look like a "drag queen", in visually narrowing her hips. I am among the many gay men who have never had the problem of being gender-nonspecific. My proportions, chest hair, facial hair, etc., have always plainly marked me out a man. I feel very sorry for gay men who have been tempted to conceal their manhood because they could. Very sad — but nonetheless contemptible. Other people may not see you naked, but you do, and you know what you are. Be what you are!

According to Darnell L. Moore, former chair of the City of Newark’s LGBTQ Advisory Commission and conference co-chair, "This conference will be the beginning of a larger, ongoing project that we hope will foster an intergenerational discussion of LGBT life in Newark. It will also be the foundation of an archive on LGBT Newark that can be used by historians and by future generations. This is a major first step towards preserving the history of LGBT Newark and bringing these voices and experiences into Newark’s broader communal history."

More Info: http://queer.newark.rutgers.edu.

The website actually uses the insane term "LGBTQ" — for Lesbian [which must always appear before "Gay", because gay men are second-class citizens in their own "community", even tho they constitute the great majority of all members], Gay, 'Bisexual' [a mythical, nonexistent creature], 'Transgender' [another mythic, nonexistent creature], and 'Questioning' [people so moronically un-self-aware that they don't know what the heck they are]. Relatively few gay people, be they teenagers or grownups, do not know full well that they are gay, but all the organizations adjust around the few, maladjusted losers who at least pretend not to know what they are. My friend and fellow gay militant, John Lauritsen, has used the term "synthetic insanity", which refers to people who PRETEND to an insane stance they do not in fact believe but cleave to because it is politic in this demented age to do so. They pretend to think they are women, when they are actually men and know full well they are men, because society has been persuaded that it is biologically possible for someone to be other than what one's genes mandate. It is not.

There is in fact no such thing as an "LBGT...etc." community. The different constituent groups of that preposterous, synthetic "community" have nothing to do with each other. Gay men do not crave being surrounded by lesbians, but do not generally feel comfortable saying aloud that they don't want anything to do with lesbians, but want to be alone with men. Lesbians do not want to be surrounded by gay men. Fortunately for them, given the bizarre double standard that straight society has, regarding men's rights and women's prerogatives, lesbians generally do not hesitate to say they want men to leave them alone. No gay man or lesbian wants anything to do with "bisexuals", but hold them in contempt. And all well-adjusted gay men are puzzled by "transsexuals", who pretend to believe that they are not what biology, and their eyes and hands, tell them very plainly they absolutely and unequivocally are. Sometimes "transgendered" people make themselves entertaining in their flamboyant make-believe, but they are basically seen by everyone on Earth as tragic lunatics. Madness is not a form of happiness. Quite the contrary, the insane are almost uniformly miserable, and we do them no favor in pretending to believe that they are sane but the world is mad.

People in straight society have been so misled about the entire issue of homosexuality and/or lesbianism that they tend to believe whatever they are told by "LGBT[Q...I...you-name-it]" organizations. Little do they know that such organizations are, for the most part, headed by self-despising losers who were raised to be heterosexual and have NEVER been able to overcome that early training. As each generation of would-be activists, who start out with good sense enuf to be indignant at the way they have been treated, enters those organizations, they accept what they were told, first by straight society, then by the insane organizations that have themselves been unable to repudiate that heterosexual training. Only later, by years, do they grow beyond such nonsense, and realize that the things they were required by those organizations to say, are nonsense, then leave those organizations of sad, psychologically deformed losers.

Still, they don't denounce the b.s. that the organizations they belonged to inflicted upon society, to correct the record. Rather, they just leave those maladjusted, ridiculous organizations. Alas, that leaves the organizations always under the control of maladjusted losers, and always spouting antihomosexual b.s.

These beautiful young men, carrying between them a banner with the term I offered in 1970, are exactly the kind of thing that makes me very proud to be homosexual. They are stunning, and proud to proclaim to the world that they are gay. Alas, there are in Newark no gay bars, coffeehouses, or ANYthing in which gay men might meet each other to "hook up" and perhaps even fall in love. Yes, men do fall in love with each other. Powerfully, manfully. But even if we don't fall in love, we sure do like to 'get busy', and make each other physically, if not also emotionally, happy. Why can't we state that plainly, in a society in which sexual crudity of all kinds is all over the tube? You can't tune into a single CBS sitcom, or some NBC sitcoms, without being hit in the face by heterosexual obscenity — all the while straight society pretends to be pure, and glowing, and noble, not ever hot for sex for the sake of sex. Truth be told, a lot of straight men would love to have, with women, the fast-and-loose, sex-for-the-sake-of-sex (which is good enuf) twos, threes, fours and mores, and when-it's-over-let-it-go—easy,-without-recriminations attitude of casual gay sex. Gay men have no problem with sex as recreation, which may lie behind the vicious denunciation of homosexuality by so many straight men, because they are ENVIOUS of gay men's not demanding more than sexual reciprocity in order to give sex on demand.

To attend a conference called "Queer [Anything]" would 'confer' legitimacy upon the use of that despicable term, and THAT, I will not do, so I refused to attend.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, gay men had many discussions, in many forums, about which terms were acceptable, and which unacceptable, and why. In addition to "homosexual", "gay", and "lesbian", there were other terms for gay men, lesbian women, and businesses, publications, organizations, and such intended for such audiences, some of which were then and are now generally regarded as disparaging ("fag", "faggot", "fruit"; "dyke", "bulldyke", "lez"; etc.). There was NO agreement over whether "homosexual" could apply to both men and women, nor whether terms like "homophile" (for organizations and publications) were self-assertive or self-denying.

In time, a general agreement, tho not unanimous consensus, emerged. "Gay" is OK; "lesbian", for women, is also OK; "homosexual" has a medical sound to it, but is not offensive. But terms like "fag", "faggot", "fruit", "nancy boy", "poof[ter]", "fem", "dyke", "bulldyke", "lez", "drag queen", "tranny" (which is, in any case, ambiguous; does it refer to "transvestites", people, even heterosexuals, who dress in the clothing of the opposite sex, or "transgendered" people, lunatics who wish they were the sex they're not?) — and "queer" — were irredeemably offensive. There is no such thing as a "gay woman", any more than there is such a thing as a "lesbian man". Nor is there anything bizarre ("queer" in its original meaning) about homosexuality, which is extremely commonplace, much more than, for instance, lefthandedness. Dictionary.com defines "queer" thus:

1. strange or odd from a conventional viewpoint; unusually different; singular: a queer notion of justice.
2. of a questionable nature or character; suspicious; shady: Something queer about the language of the prospectus kept investors away.
3. not feeling physically right or well; giddy, faint, or qualmish: to feel queer.
4. mentally unbalanced or deranged.
5. Slang: Disparaging and Offensive.

a. homosexual.
b. effeminate; unmanly.

If Dictionary.com knows that the use of the term "queer" for homosexuals is "Disparaging and Offensive", why doesn't the Robeson Center of Rutgers-Newark? Definitions 2 and 4 are also offensive, so why on Earth would anyone rush to EMBRACE "queer" for themselves?

Lesbians have NEVER been called "queer" by straight society. The embrace of the term "queer" for themselves by some lesbians is grotesque in every way.

If reality controlled, I would have to be recognized as the single most important gay figure in Newark, not just now but in this city's entire history, for having put forward the term "Gay Pride" as it is now used, in the committee that organized the first, annual gay (and, alas, lesbian) march commemorating Stonewall — which was a gay MEN's bar of which I had been a regular customer, not a "gay and lesbian" bar as it has now been recast. Homosexuality had, before then, been regarded as profoundly shameful, "the Love that dare not speak its name". The power of the term "Gay Pride", thus, was in completely reversing the assumption, from shame to pride.

"Gay Pride" moved the goalpost, in a good way: closer to the great preponderance of people, who understand the importance of self-respect, and who respect themselves, so expect other people to respect themselves. "Pride" is one of various terms for "self-respect", or "self-esteem", a feeling that educators in recent decades — and most especially since 1970, when I put forward "Gay Pride" — have made plain to society at large is quintessential to a person's healthy functioning and future success.

"Gay PRIDE" went beyond defending against assertions that gay men should be ashamed of themselves. It asserted that we are entitled to feel good about ourselves and what makes us, us. It tells gay men that homosexuality is ennobling, and that it's a very good thing not just for ourselves but also for society that some men see other men not as dangerous competitors we must vanquish, no matter how much harm we might do to others in order to vanquish them, but primarily as a source of esthetic, emotional, and physical pleasure.

The term "Gay Pride" has, thus, been transformative in a way that the title for the weekend of events we were organizing among host-city organizations and wanted to unite under a single title, might NOT have been if we had gone with the original thought, "Gay Pride Weekend". My thinking was that "power" is something that depends upon numbers and outside forces, but "pride" is something that depends upon nothing but yourself, internally. You could be in a gay community of a million in a great metropolis like the NY Tristate Metropolitan Area but still not be confident in yourself nor proud in your feelings about men.

Conversely, however, you could be proud of your nature, and your feelings for men, in total isolation from other gay men, hundreds or even thousands of miles from the nearest gay bar or community center. So gay "pride" was a much better term for a movement intended (remember, it was 1970, and we were inventing all of this) to make gay men feel good about themselves, than gay "power", which for most gay men, all around the Earth, would then, and still, to this day, be unattainable. Despite the nonexistence in most places of even the tiniest shred of gay "power" in their locality, every single gay man, in India, Cameroon, South Africa, China, Brazil, and every other place where there is not so much as a single gay bar or organization, could feel pride in their feelings for men if they understood themselves and how ennobling those feelings can be in a man's life.

Mind you, not every feeling that some people attempt to force upon gay men, or seduce them into, is wholesome, and gay men are often pushed to embrace insane and ugly attitudes, such as sado-masochism. Gay Pride is at once an antidote to the ugly, vicious, and insane misrepresentations of homosexuality that straight society's antigay propagandists promote, and to perverted, sado-masochistic attitudes that sexual degenerates proselytize for gay men to embrace — but which we must refuse.

I reject the entire idea of "loving yourself", which is sometimes used as justification for autoerotic self-absorption, as lunacy. No, love comes from one person and attaches to another, not himself. Esteem yourself, respect yourself, yes, to be sure. But "love" yourself? That's freaky.

Newark is large enuf a city to, in most places on Earth, be a center of homosexual in-migration. But Newark is also the second city of the greatest city of the entire world, and largest city of the United States, New York. Newark and Jersey City, in NJ, cannot compete with Manhattan for in-migration of gay men — unless we find something unique by which to distinguish gay life, present or future, here.

In speaking of preferences as to terminology, I am not just talking here of my own viewpoint, without evidence as to how other men feel. I long ago placed upon my "Mr. Gay Pride" website a poll of visitors, which currently shows this result:

If you add up the votes that favor the term "gay", you will find that they amount to 74% of responses.

If importance to changed perceptions of homosexuality were the criterion, I should always be among the first people ever thought of when gay groups think of a Grand Marshal for a "Gay Pride" Parade — which wouldn't even have that name were it not for me. But in fact I have never been invited to be Grand Marshal of ANY "Gay Pride" Parade. Nor, however, would I consent to lead off a heterosexually organized march that repudiated the very concept of Gay Pride, in insisting that men and women "belong together". No thank you. I reject the idea that men and women "belong together" — not in bed, and most assuredly not in a march for the right NOT to be compelled to go to bed together.

I'm used to being overlooked, ignored, and actively disregarded when other gay people (or fictitious "LGBTQ...I...", etc. people) are honored. You see, I am a gay MAN, and refuse to identify with nor bolster lesbians, with whom I do not in any way nor to any degree identify. Oddly, that seems to have annoyed a lot of lesbians, even those who insist upon women-only organizations and events. All-female is fine; all-male, a crime against humanity!

I also actively object to the idea that gay men are not entitled to a unique identity but must always subsume their identity into an all-gender (i.e., non-gender: castrated, emasculated (for gay men) or de-feminized (for lesbian women)) identity. Biology — that is, actual science — permits of only two genders, or sexes: male, marked by an XY chromosomal configuration, and female, marked by an XX chromosomal configuration. Anything and everything else is ANTI-scientific nonsense that society needs actively to suppress, like Creationism and its assertion that people and dinosaurs roamed the Earth at the same time.

Kids were playing in another area of Washington Park — which is rather a small park, as, for instance, against NY's Central Park; it is rather more like NY's Madison Square or Bryant Park in size — at the same time as the Gay Pride Festival was running. Newark is very adult about these things, and doesn't worry that gay people are out to molest children, a favorite, wicked slander from the Radical Right.

There are no chromosomal "mistakes". That is a kindly, scientific way to address the crazy idea that God — 100% infallible God! — somehow "made a mistake" and put a woman into the body of a man, or the other way around. Kindhearted people have wanted to accord logical and scientific credibility to the notion that "transgendered" people could indeed exist — but on the basis of what scientific theory?

Why is there this big portion of Washington Park without grass? It cannot be because events are held there, so the grass would be beaten down. Grass is one of nature's most resilient plants, and thrives on beat-downs you might think would kill it.

Why are so many people desperate to accommodate insane renunciation of biology? Society does no favor to lunatics by pretending to believe they are right in their insane beliefs — be it that a modern-day, 6'7" man really is Napoleon Bonaparte, or that a confused, self-despising 20-year-old man is really a woman. Yes, all of society, all of science, reason, and reality is wrong, but YOU who say God (who, by definition, is incapable of error) made a mistake, are right. NO! Stop this nonsense. Society must tell lunatics that they are out of their mind, and need to let go of their insane delusions and embrace reality.

No one really believes that "Chaz" Bono is a man. Not one single person on Earth really believes that a person who has no male sexual organs, but every single cell in whose body bears the XX chromosomal configuration, is a man. Not one single person on Earth. So why are we endlessly assailed by lies from media that Chastity Bono, after a double mastectomy and being pumped full of male hormones, is a man, always referred to as "he"? If you dare to challenge that assertion on the Internet, your comment is likely to be deleted as tho "hate speech" — for simply telling the biological truth that every single person whose chromosomal configuration is XX is beyond contention FEmale. Are all those women who had double mastectomies because of breast cancer now men? No, they are not, and Chastity Bono is not, no matter what she may call herself.

Chastity Bono is "collateral damage" to a Castration Conspiracy designed to destroy gay men surgically because society refuses to accept the masculinity of men oriented to men, even tho there is nothing more masculine than sex between men, in which there is no woman present. Gay men do NOT regard themselves as a kind of woman, but fully as men. WE don't have pink shower curtains, with pantyhose drying over the shower bar; nor duvets nor dust ruffles nor a dozen pillows on the bed. Quite the contrary, we have to question the masculinity of heterosexual "men" who consent to be emasculated by super-feminine decorating. Nor should anyone else ever think gay men less than men, but always as ONLY men. In the same way, no one should ever think of lesbians as anything BUT women. (That is not to suggest that I speak for women, but only that I imagine that lesbians resent the suggestion that they are somehow less than women.)

In promoting the idea that lesbians are men born in the wrong body, Ms. Bono is an enemy of lesbians, for telling the world that lesbianism is fake heterosexuality and gender confusion. She is also a deadly enemy of gay men, in telling the world that homosexuals would be much happier and better off if they would just let the doctors chop off their genitals and pump them full of female hormones.

This was one of the PERVERTED parts of the Washington Park 'gay' festival, a table at which dozens of CONDOMS were offered, but which table was staffed by a woman, probably lesbian. Lesbians NEVER need a condom. Never. So why would anyone put a LESBIAN in charge of a table filled with condoms? Only MEN are imposed upon to, or even can, use condoms, so putting a LESBIAN in charge of a table loaded down with CONDOMS is truly grotesque. Such grotesquerie is what happens when gay is equated to lesbian, such that lesbians intrude upon gay men's sexual privacy. Disgusting. Truly, truly MONUMENTALLY revolting.

I received, this week, an email from a gay writer in NYC, Perry Brass, that purported to list the ten most important gay activists of all time. I was not on that list. That is, alas, same-old, same-old. Mind you, I did NOT, for the most part, participate in typical "activist" actions, demonstrations and sit-ins. But I did help organize the first annual march of the type now generally termed — because of me — "Gay Pride" parades, and did march (an activist activity, in anyone's judgment) in at least two of the first three such parades in NYC.

It's more than a little annoying when even straight allies in defending gay rights send women to gay events. Alas, since gay men refuse to tell lesbians to get their own events, and gay men will stand on their own, always, straight organizations cannot know how offensive it is to gay men to be treated as lesbians.

More to the point, my linguistic activism, "Gay Pride", has affected the perceptions of at very least a BILLION people in the First World, and possibly as many as, or even more than, THREE BILLION people all around the world. What other person on that list has had nearly that impact? No one.

Wide view, from the far side of Washington Street outside the Newark Museum, of the setup for the gay festival in Washington Park.

People who have seen historic footage of the first few marches may have seen me there, near the front. I think that in the first or second march I was wearing a white, long-sleeved shirt, of ("pirate") puffy sort, and may also have been wearing a floppy straw hat against the sun. Such fotos or videos as I have seen do not, alas, record me in verbal clashes with pushy lesbians who felt that gay men had no right to be anywhere near the front of the march that gay men organized.

It is not, mainly, my purpose here to complain about the craziness of New York City "gay" marches, community centers, or anything else — nor of the Gay Men's Chorus's always having a female soloist, because all GMC concerts must be heterosexual in form — so much as to encourage gay men in Newark to REFUSE to let lesbians impose upon them in any way, but always to be proud to be MEN attracted to and, if we are lucky, in love with MEN who love them.

I do not resent lesbians' being lesbians, but only their insisting that gay men identify with lesbians and let them dominate The Movement. Gay men and lesbians have nothing intrinsically in common. Gay men must stop letting outsiders define them, but must refuse pressure to identify with the opposite sex and give up their masculine purity to accommodate people who are nothing like them. My defense of gay men's right to an all-male identity is of necessity also a defense of lesbians' right to an all-female identity. Why don't lesbians see that?

This statue of Seth Boyden, a Newark-based inventor whom Thomas Edison (whose first laboratory was in Newark) called the greatest American inventor, stands in the incomprehensibly barren area of Washington Park. There should be grass there as much as anywhere else in the Park.

I do not expect Newark to have a major parade on Broad Street each "Gay Pride" Day, even tho the term as it is now used does derive from a current Newarker (altho I lived in Manhattan when I put the term forward). I reject the idea that gay men have some special bond to lesbian women, so must always organize with and march with them. How supremely bizarre this notion is, that men and women must march together to assert the right not to be pushed at each other!
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Rather, I hope that gay men in Newark will learn to think of themselves before they think of anyone else, and see themselves as the norm before they EVER compare themselves to anyone else. We must be the men we are. Love the men we love. Crave the men we crave. And never apologize to anyone for being who we are.

Regular readers of this blog will know that I rarely discuss gay issues, largely because there is almost nothing for gay men in Newark (otherwise I would include gay items regularly, since gay events are part of the world I report on) but also because my capsule profile at top right always includes mention that I put forward the term "Gay Pride" as it is now used. I would, however, be seriously remiss in not objecting to antihomosexual bigotry — albeit unintentional — by a major Newark institution, such as the Robeson Center of Rutgers-Newark. And now, ladies and gentlemen — or should I say "gentlemen and ladies", since some women object to "ladies first", and men are far more important to me and all other gay men than are women? — I will step down from my soapbox, hoping that straight people among my readers will have learned something that no one else will tell them.

Restored Fotos

2011-11-20T23:59:00.006-05:00

I got an email today from a student at NJIT who is doing a project on the three buildings in Newark by the famed "starchitect" Ludwig Mies van Der Rohe, asking to see the fotos that had appeared in two of my blogposts but which disappeared when AOL closed all subscribers' FTP spaces. I tracked down the fotos on my hard drive to send to him.
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Once I had found them, I decided I might as well restore them to those two blogposts, those of April 3rd and 11th, 2006.

Two Houses and One 'Apartments'. Another foto that disappeared from my blog (the post of February 4, 2007) shows three distinguished structures in one picture (left to right): the Plume House (1710), the Episcopal House of Prayer (1850), and the south tower of Mies's Pavilion Apartments (1960). I'm not presently planning to restore the fotos to that post, but thought I'd show this one here, in part to show the rich architectural history of this city but also to show that even tho the Pavilion Apartments building is seen from the southeast here, it looks the same as in the views from the northwest and southwest, due to Mies's uniform design all around the buildings.

Open Doors, Part V: 570 Group Show

2011-11-18T23:59:00.013-05:00

I have delayed putting up this discussion of my last experience of this year's Open Doors artsapalooza because it was too depressing. But I can't move on until I get it out of the way. I have some fotos of the outdoor arts festival from Newark artist Ing-On Vibulbhan Watts that I can add to a very few of my own from the closing moments of that event, which I mostly missed for having to go home to recharge my camera battery. But I did not myself really attend that event, so will merely show fotos with little commentary. (Now, won't that be refreshing?) And that should close out this blog's coverage of OD '11.

The first fotos today are of Kevin Blythe Sampson's area of the show, which I liked. So they should serve as positive counterweight to the negative things I discuss in the text.

There is ordinarily one Newark Arts Council group show in each year's Open Doors. This year, I thought it was at 570 Broad Street, across Fulton Street from Peddie Memorial Baptist Church. But I was later given to think that there were two NAC group shows, one at the Adrienne Wheeler Gallery, which I was unable to get to (inasmuch as we had a freak snowstorm just before the last day that show was to be open, the Monday after the Open Doors weekend, and I was snowed in), and the other at 570 Broad Street, which, unfortunately, I did get to.

Kevin said that this work was more like what he expected to do at the Venice Biennale this summer, but he got sidetracked into a different presentation there. He explains his central piece as Sarah Palin leading her army of rats down a yellow-brick road, and trailing a wagon filled with the baggage of the Radical Right, which includes a Confederate battle flag emblazoned with symbols of the Ku Klux Klan. He's such a timid little guy in his artistic expression, isn't he? Come on, Kevin, don't hold back. What do you really think of Sarah and the Tea Party?

The Wheeler Gallery show did not seem to have the imprimatur of the Council as an NAC group show. It may have been much better than the 570 show, but I didn't see it. For one thing, Anne Dushanko-Dobek was a participating artist at the Wheeler show, and I like her work. For a second, I have seen a little of Adrienne Wheeler's work at a Catfish Friday group show, and am inclined to think she has good taste. For a third, and most tellingly, the 570 show was AWFUL, an unbelievable mess.

I do not set myself up as an art critic, but merely offer readers my perspective. From my perspective, the 570 show was crap. I hate to say that about anything the Newark Arts Council ("NAC", said as letters, N-A-C, not a word) organizes. But somebody fell down on the job, fell asleep at the quality switch, or otherwise f...ouled up in putting together this year's NAC group show.

I asked Kevin, who often works with found objects, where he found the rats. He said, in a dollar store. I've never seen plastic/rubber rats in a dollar store, but, then, I wasn't looking. Perhaps they're a Halloween item.

Not everything in the show was awful, of course. One of my favorite Newark artists, Kevin Blythe Sampson, had a major piece there, which I found out almost instantly upon arriving, in that he saw me enter and said hello, and when I asked if he had anything in the show, he pointed me to his area. There were also good things by Lori Merhige (which I had already seen at Solo(s) Project House; see my post of November 5, 2010) and other artists. Only a portion of Lori Merhige's Solo(s) show appeared at 570, scattered over a large, and mainly empty area. Why?

Unfortunately, the liting in the exhibition space at the time I was there (very late afternoon, with sunshine streaming in low from the west) was execrable, and I couldn't get a decent foto, with or without flash, of Kevin's piece, including the artist, in that the piece looked east, so the sun was behind it.

I mentioned to Kevin, when I checked my first, discouraging foto of him beside it in my camera's little monitor, that I have had great difficulty taking pictures of black people except in the clearest and britest of lite. He wasn't taken aback at all, but merely said "Photoshop". Yes, I do need to manipulate fotos in a graffics program, tho mine is Jasc Paint Shop Pro rather than Adobe's Photoshop. The two programs do much the same thing, but Adobe's costs hundreds of dollars, whereas Jasc's came free with the purchase of my computer. Guess which I'm going to use, when the choice is spending hundreds of dollars or working with what came free with my computer.

When a foto seems unusable even after processing in Jasc, I don't think, "I should have Adobe", but assume that Photoshop wouldn't have solved the problem either.

Kevin's piece also spilled onto nearby columns and wall areas.

I do have an account on Adobe's free Photoshop Express online service, but its foto-improvement features are slender, and I find the site very hard to work with. It is not the slitest intuitive.

Kevin's great, political piece was among the good areas in the show, which comprised the majority of this sparse, odd exhibition. But two particularly awful and offensive pieces (of crap) marred the show overall, and dragged everything else down with them.

That show was curated by a woman from outside Newark. She was born in Minneapolis and has lived and worked since 1999 in Queens. So why did the Newark Arts Council entrust its group show to someone from outside Newark? That's insulting to Newark arts.

Kevin's "Occupy Newark" wall was, happily, the last thing a visitor might see on leaving the show.

We have curators in Newark, who would have done — had to have done — a better job.

The Star-Ledger's Dan Bischoff described this piece: "Works at this exhibition — such as 'House,' by the now Detroit-based Osman Khan, using fluorescent tube lights, aluminum pipe fighting [fittings?], wire electronics and wood — put an urban focus on the financial crimes in the housing market that crippled the world economy, and illustrate the fragility of our 'recovery.'" Fine, but did it have to be so big? The thing was perhaps 8 feet tall, and empty within. Surely the same point could have been made equally well at half that size or less, and left more room for other things. But there was plenty of room the curator did not use.

Did anyone at the NAC, such as Linwood Oglesby — the refined head of the Council — review the curator's proposed exhibition? Or did the NAC give her free rein, to do as she might? Artistic freedom sounds great, but what if it produces unbearable crap? Shouldn't someone of better taste have stepped in to prevent an offense to the Newark arts community, and to anyone outside that tidy group who ventures near — but because of an appalling show, goes away with a terrible view of Newark arts?

In regard to this particular show, JJ could have saved herself three syllables, and called herself "Jennifer Junk", because that is what the "Call & Response" exhibition turned out to be: junk, because of two 'artworks' in close proximity, both of which literally relied upon and created junk. Much of the rest of the show was OK to good. But two works that were just plain awful ruined everything else. It's like a counterfeit $20 bill having the face of Michele Bachmann, of Junkermeier's home state, rather than Andrew Jackson. Even if every other detail were right, the bill would still be worth nothing — not $20, not $1; nothing. Andrew Jackson was bad enuf, for having been one of the worst Presidents ever. But Michele Bachmann on the $20 bill? Absurd and intolerable. The 570 show that Jennifer Junkermeier put together was equally absurd and intolerable.

Typical portion of this dismal show, almost empty, and filled with litter.

It's the old "one bad apple spoils the barrel" phenomenon, when what is bad is so bad that it not only affects everything it touches but also drives the good right out of your mind. In the "Call & Reponse" show, there were two bad apples, one involving plastic garbage cans piled four-high above plastic cups thrown upon the floor to be blown about by fans arrayed nearby; and the other entailing willful littering, in which people were to rip sheets of paper into pieces and throw the pieces up into the air, to fall to the floor, possibly also to be blown about by the fans on the other side of the other contemptible "artwork". Some people instead made paper airplanes that they threw past the immediate vicinity of the 'artwork', as spread the trash farther. This is the kind of indefensible garbage that gives modern art a bad name. I want Newark arts to tell the world that Newark is NOT a place for bizarre personalities to vent their frustrations and inartistic aggressions upon the world.

The crowd at the closing reception was sparse. Perhaps others had heard how bad that show was, so stayed away.

How did Ms. Junkermeier justify this travesty? Oh, with the kind of absurdist drivel that so much writing about art is. Here is the description from the NAC website:

"Call & Response" is a group exhibition and part of Open Doors 2011. The exhibition includes the work of twelve artists exploring formal and theoretical structures and systems in three and four dimensional forms within the context of international current events that have caused economic, political, and social disarray. The exhibition theme addresses such cataclysms as the recent break down of world financial systems to the BP oil leak in the Gulf, and other instances where traditional structures and systems proved outdated and obsolete subsequently unveiling the increasing need for innovative resolutions.

This is one of the pieces I liked, by Lori Merhige. But I had already seen it, months earlier, at Solo(s) Project House.

The title of the exhibition makes reference to a term used in music referring to a succession of two distinct phrases played by different musicians, where the second phrase is heard as a direct commentary on or response to the first. In terms of the exhibition, the artists (in varying degrees) have translated 'call & response' into three and four dimensional forms working together to develop individual site-specific works creating an active 'call & response' scenario within the exhibition space. Included work 'responds' to one or more of the following 'calls': the Exhibition Space (The Hyperlocal), a response to the physical, architectural, environmental structure(s) of the exhibition space; the Exhibition Place (The Regional),a response to the physical/conceptual/social/historical structure(s) of the site, the building, the neighborhood, the city, people, the community, the resources, or products, of Newark, NJ and/or the Exhibition Time (The Global), a response to the "break down" of political/social/economic structures or systems that are transpiring now, in 2011, with effects of international scope.

Another litter-strewn, mainly empty area of the show. The metal crown on a stand in the background is also Lori Merhige's, and was also part of her Solo(s) show.

By playing with scale, movement and form using a range of materials from found objects, industrial products and plants to light, technology and dangerously high-powered magnets in a variety [of?] mediums ranging from installation, sculpture, social interventions and performance[,] each artist creates new situations in 'Response' to the 'Call' (and vice versa) of the world around them that is in need of alternative visions.

What is that 319-word verbal morass supposed to mean? The words make little sense. The exhibition made less.
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I do not pretend to be avant-garde, but only a sensible person. That is hard enuf to be today, when all kinds of lunacy are foisted upon the general public as normal, even admirable.

This foto, shifted slitely leftward, shows again the void that much of this show was. A newcomer to Newark arts would be justified in thinking there just aren't artists and art enuf in Newark to fill even this one relatively small vacant office space. That is nothing like the truth. Dozens of artists and hundreds of artworks had to have been rejected to produce so barren a show.

What was so offensive that it tainted every good thing in the 570 show, is that these two despicable "art"works appeared in the very middle of the show, not off in the periphery,where you might pass over them quickly, then ignore them. No, you had to see them pretty much immediately upon entering the exhibition, then pass close to them as you negotiated the rest of the show. The choice to make them central to the exhibition, and not peripheral, was Ms. Junkermeier's. Here's the first, seen from the side.

Here's the second.

So prominent, and so disgusting, were these repulsive pieces that you couldn't just pass over them to other, better things, and let go of the crap that they were. They were CENTRAL to the entire show. Why? What was she thinking? Perhaps litter and trash on the floor is rebellion in Minneapolis, or (far less likely) Flushing, Queens. In our area, however, it is what we struggle AGAINST every day, in the central cities of the Tristate Metropolitan Area — 22 million people trying to find neatness and order. We crave order and cleanliness. Disorder and litter depress us.

No, please don't.

To be rebellious around here, as regards litter, an artist would have to produce a robotic Felix Unger, but speeded up in its cleaning many times, as, say, the Unger 2000 Kleenbot.

This is a wide view of the mess that that "artwork" created. What the hell were the 'artist' and curator thinking?

Not only was the 570 show appalling, but the liting was also dismal, much too dark to make me want to stay around. So I left, to go to the (much, much better) "Blackface" exhibit (see my post of November 2nd), and then home.

Outside the taint of that trashed floor, but in gloom, was this interesting interactive piece. Tho it may have required ambient darkness, the bulk of the exhibition was lited by daylite outside the windows and only occasional incandescent lights, and not even floodlites, just regular litebulbs.

I do not know what seized control of the NAC's collective mind and voided its better judgment, in approving this group show, but I hope that it is a one-time aberration and, in the future, clearer minds will do a much better job of reviewing proposals and the finished shows that result before any innocent visitor is wounded, misled by some weirdo's appallingly bad judgment into thinking that the one bad show they saw represents Newark's generally excellent art scene.

The last good lite at the 570 Show is nearing its end, as the sun sets behind me. My shadow appears among the pillars.

There were no paintings at all on the walls of the weird 570 show, whereas the NAC's Open Doors group shows have always, in my experience, had many paintings. This year's show was a jolting, horrifying change from what we who have attended earlier Open Doors events had come to expect. Not all change is bad, of course, but this was.

Open Doors '11, Part IV: 'Creation Nation' Arts and Peace Parade

2011-11-14T23:59:00.012-05:00

Very long post, over 4,400 words, with 31 fotos and one video.

Newark is finally getting it right. It's taking a while, but the annual Newark Arts Council's "Open Doors" arts whirl is a splendiferous event that a great many more people need to attend. Now that we have a great event, growing larger each year, we need to find a way to bring people to see it.

See the tiny marcher?

Today's topic is out of order, chronologically. I have discussed other features of this year's Open Doors weekend before it, but the parade was actually the first event of Open Doors 2011 that I was able to attend, on Sunday, the third and last day — which should as well be the biggest day — of the aptly named OD weekend, if we regard "OD" as the abbreviation for "overdosing" on art. Car trouble kept me from the first two days, Friday and Saturday. But on Sunday I bused in to the parade, arriving five or ten minutes late, when the leadoff marching band, from the South Ward's Shabazz High School, had already started off. I walked as quickly as I can, given my defective knees, which 3 surgeries did not fully repair. Ideally, a videografer would have run to make up lateness, and get to the head of the march pronto. I cannot run. At all.

Creating this discussion was complicated, in requiring me to combine 13 short videos into an overview of the parade as I experienced it. I also put some still fotos into the merged video, better to segue between the many short, and abrupt, videos, but I initially caused each still foto to stay onscreen too long. So I needed to shorten the time the stills appeared. It turns out that Microsoft's Windows Movie Maker has a default of 5 seconds for a still foto, and I didn't see a way to shorten that to 3 seconds, which I thought might be better. 5 is a tad longer than I'd prefer, but OK. If you think the fotos in the video that appears at the end of this post stay onscreen too long, blame Microsoft, not me.

I was in any case fiting two realities. First, I did not know how long the two marching bands would play, nor when they would start any given song or percussive passage. Both bands spent the bulk of their time on drums and cymbals. Actual musical numbers were few and far between, something the bands and the Barat Foundation might want to fix next year. A marching band should be much more than percussion. It should play things like "The Stars and Stripes Forever", "America the Beautiful", and, here in NJ, "My Garden State" and anything else local. Newark does not, to my knowledge, have its own song, equivalent to "New York, New York" (or, to scan the same way, New-ark, N-J?). How about a competition to create one, to be played in every Arts Parade hereafter?

Second, I knew that video eats up chip ("camera card") memory quickly, and that I had only something like 19 minutes of video if I took no still fotos, but that each still foto ate into the time available for vids. So I dared not run video longer than absolutely necessary, or the card would fill up. As it happened, despite my being stingy with video time, my 4GB card did fill up, and I missed the end of the band faceoff in Washington Park. I then walked to Radio Shack and bought an 8GB chip, but did not return to the Park because in the intervening half hour or more that would have transpired before I could get back, the band faceoff would surely have ended.

This discussion was also delayed by my having made two starts on this text, then having to combine them, in some sensible order, and excise things that didn't fit together. I had to lift the first line of each paragraf into a separate document screen to try to make better logical connections, but there is often more than one place where a paragraf fits, for instance, one chronogically and one thematically. So if the narrative seems bumpy and disjointed, think of it as flashbacks in a novel that interrupt the flow but add necessary information. People's minds rarely follow an A to B to C track. Rather, we often get sidetracked by something that we think of at B, and only after following that sidetrack, backtrack to where we had been, in order to move on to C and the rest of the logical order of the original storyline. And of course I had to choose which fotos to use, resize them, upload them to Picasa Online Albums, caption them, and lift the URLs into this text, as usual. (If you do a fotoblog and know of a less complicated and time-consuming way to do this, please let me know.)

The Parade was originally supposed to start at the Peace Mural just south of Lincoln Park on Broad Street, which I showed here May 24th. Roadwork apparently forced a change of plans, and the Parade started, as the Arts Parade had always started in prior years, from the Foundation's HQ on Bank Street at Broad Street.

Last year, I managed to arrive just before the start of the Parade, but was late this year by five or ten minutes. As I got off the #1 bus at the Four Corners, I heard a band, so hastened up the one block to Bank Street, and saw that the Shabazz marching band had led off the march and was on its way up Park Place.

I turned on the video function of my camera and rushed to catch up with the head of the Parade, trying my best to hold the camera steady. I did not, however, manage very well, and the video of that portion of my coverage is jouncy. Sorry, but my camera doesn't have steady-cam (or "Steadicam") functionality in movie mode, and I had to point the camera at the band at the same time as I had also to look at my surroundings and navigate various challenges, like curbs and fences. I think my camera actually does have some stabilization function for fotos, but not for movies.

The band stopped a while on Park Place to perform, which enabled me to catch up and take steadier footage. The Shabazz band then moved on, but I stayed still on Park Place to see what else would come along.

The camera averages out loud noises with soft, so you won't hear how very, very loud the snap of whips by a Latino performance group was. I don't know how those whips were constructed, but the sound they produced was like cherry bombs going off every few seconds.

Following that group of young whippersnappers was the East Orange Unified Marching Band, led off by some kids from Cicely Tyson High School of Performing Arts. Curiously, there was no orange color to the uniforms nor banner of that group, whereas some things in "the Oranges" (Orange, East Orange, South Orange, West Orange, but no North Orange!) do employ the color orange (such as the South Orange Performing Arts Center in its street banners on lampposts). The "Orange" in these placenames refers to the House of Orange, a noble family that originated in southern France but is famous in the English-speaking world only for the Dutch king William who became King of England upon marrying the female heir to the throne, Mary — and thus we got the College of William and Mary in Virginia.
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I also don't know why the powers that be in East Orange chose to name a school after Cicely Tyson. From what I found at Wikipedia, she has no connection whatsoever to East Orange. She was born in Nevis, an island in the West Indies best known as the birthplace of Alexander Hamilton, the great patriot of the American Revolution and founder of the American Industrial Revolution, in Paterson — yes, OUR Paterson, in NJ. I really am tired of all the things around here named for people who have absolutely no connection to our area. There are worthy black people who DO have a connection to this area, but parks, playgrounds, high schools, etc., in Newark that are named after people should have some actual connection with Newark. Hank Aaron has none. Malcolm X has none. Martin Luther King, Jr., has almost none. So why have we named playgrounds, high schools, and streets after these strangers?

We have a Washington Street, Park, and Place because George Washington actually spent time here. Lincoln actually did speak near what was renamed Lincoln Park after his death. MLK did visit Newark. But did Malcolm X spend any time here? If not, why do we have a high school named after him, but not as "Malcolm X [High School]", but "Malcolm X. Shabazz"? "Shabazz" was a late-life surname for him. But, again, who is Malcolm X to Newark? Nobody, that's who. The Wikipedia article on Malcolm X does include the term "Newark", but in connection with the people who killed him! Is this really a connection we should cherish and enshrine in the name of a public school? I don't think so. If someone has no actual connection to Newark, we should be very wary of naming ANYthing for him or her. Harriet Tubman is another example of a person who has absolutely no connection with Newark but has a school named after her. Why?

Yes, Newark is part of the United States, and Malcolm X, MLK, and Harriet Tubman were important in U.S. history, but that is not, to my mind, sufficient reason to name anything here after them. Washington, DC is the ceremonial capital of the United States. It is enuf that something important THERE be named for people of national significance. Newark is not (at least not presently) the capital of the United States. Places of honor within Newark should go to Newarkers, or, at highest dilution, to New Jerseyans.

In the years after white flite brought black political power to the fore, black pressure groups started naming things for black people who had no connection whatsoever to Newark or New Jersey, and white Newarkers didn't object, out of misplaced guilt over racism of which Newark and New Jersey were little guilty. Neither Newark in particular nor New Jersey more generally was a focus of vicious racism. Yes, there was police misconduct — where isn't there? against all kinds of people — one incident of which produced The Riots. But in general we have little to apologize for. So let us restore the name "High Street" to what was renamed "Martin Luther King, Jr., Boulevard". There is a plaque about MLK outside the Federal Courthouse, and that very large, architectually distinguished, modern Courthouse is named for him. That's enuf. Let us rename Shabazz high school to whatever it was before ("South Side", I think), or for someone with an actual Newark connection, like Jerry Lewis or Shaquille O'Neal — a black man who was actually born in Newark and is now investing in Newark.

In any case, in talking about the difficulty Newark has in attracting tourists and bringing in suburbanites to Newark events, such as the Arts Parade and Open Doors art festival, we need to talk about the (African) elephant in the corner: the perception by outsiders that Newark is a "black city", where white people are not welcome. (I love the great ears of the African elephant, and hate the puny little ears of the Asian/Indian elephant. I think the human creature is preprogammed to find beautiful certain things, like palm trees, African elephants, and horses. I haven't a shred of proof for that surmise. But notice, in the video at the end of this post, if not earlier in the still fotos, that the largest "animodule" near the very beginning of the Arts Parade is an African elephant.) We must endeavor to make white people (and Orientals, and every other group) fully welcome. I am white, and am fully as much a Newarker as anyone else. Happily, in today's Newark, white people are essentially never hassled over their race, and blacks and whites get along famously. I have heard that there was a time when white people might well have been hassled. That was decades ago, but outsiders don't know that. We need to find a way to get that thru to them.

The major arts figures in Newark, be they black or white, also accept everyone for who they are and what they can do for Newark. Race is nothing in the New Newark (NEWark?), and suburbanites who are still fearful of Newark on the basis that it is filled with black people who hate whites and will give them a hard time, if not even beat and rob them, need to get over that ridiculousness and venture into Downtown Newark with no more trepidation than they would venture into Vermont. This blog tries, by implication, to dispel irrationally excessive fears about black victimization of whites in today's Newark, in that I am an old white guy who walks freely around Newark, taking fotos and videos that never capture ANY anti-white hostility or violence. But sometimes you can't imply but must state: Newark is NOT an urban hellhole, NOT a nest of antiwhite thugs, NOT a place where it is dangerous to be white. Now, look at the pictures and video, realize who took them without once being hassled, and accept that Downtown Newark is NOT dangerous to white people! Reconceive Newark as Vermont at the end of summer, when a lot of people have dark tans. Got it? That's Newark today. Everybody's white, everybody's black, everybody is every race and no race, and nobody gives a d...arn.

An odd thing happened, as Chandri Barat told me, the week before the Parade. The Weequahic High School Marching Band, close-in rival to Shabazz, for both high schools being in Newark's South Ward, was originally scheduled to perform in the Parade too. That would have put the two schools into their best competitive mode. But mere days before the Parade, Chandri called to confirm the time and place where the Weequahic (formally pronounced wee.kwáe.yik but informally wée.kwaek) band was to muster, and was told that the band would not be performing after all. No explanation. They just canceled. What the he...ck? What IDIOT in school administration came to so indefensible a decision? Were they afraid that Shabazz is so much better a band that Weequahic would be humiliated in head-to-head competition? How do we avoid such a conclusion? East Orange went head-to-head against Shabazz, and held its own. Was it, then, fear of BOTH the East Orange Unified Marching Band AND Shabazz? Contemptible in any case. If you agree to participate in a parade in Downtown Newark, live up to your commitment. Whoever made the decision to withdraw has dishonored the entire school community. Shame!

The full name of the parade was the "Creation Nation" Newark Arts and Peace Parade. But there was a noticeable military presence in it. I guess that's an example of the military's casting itself as peacemaker rather than warmaker. That's more than a bit disingenuous, isn't it? I am very worried that the United States has taken to the kind of glorification of militarism that proved the downfall of Germany and Japan in my lifetime. I hate militarism, and regard the U.S. military as a temporarily-necessary evil that we should be working hard to make UNnecessary. The first two letters of that last word suggest one mechanism by which we might do that. A large portion of the Nation's deficit problem derives from massively excessive spending on "defense", but the defense portion of the budget is sacrosanct in this militarist age. Congress will gladly cut home heating assistance to the poor, but not the preposterous spending on militarism.

In this year's Parade, there were two marching bands and two floats. Never before had there been floats in the Newark Arts Parade. There may have been at least one marching band, but I don't recall for sure, and am disinclined to search thru my records to see if I could find out.

I think the parade went very well, tho it was still, despite its substantial expansion this year, not nearly as large as it should have been. Nor was it held at a good time, in that there are very few people in Downtown Newark on Sunday to appreciate a parade.

At the 570 Broad Street closing reception later on Sunday, I discussed this briefly with Linwood Oglesby, the Executive Director of the Newark Arts Council, which coordinates each year's "Open Doors" artstravaganza,. He conceded that Sundays afford the parade an easy go, for not interfering with (relatively nonexistent) traffic, but do not accord the parade a major audience of people who do not gather for the express purpose of seeing the Arts Parade or attending other Open Doors events. When, then, would be an ideal time? Friday would interfere with rush-hour traffic. Sunday is desolate Downtown. 'How about Saturday?', I wondered aloud.

Not just the Parade but the annual Open Doors extravaganza around it should be well known by now throughout this region, but seems not to be. Why is that? Are local media averse to reporting on art events? Is Open Doors in fact well reported by the Star-Ledger, News 12, and other local media, but people just don't care to come by? Are people in the suburbs still afraid to attend events in Downtown Newark, a very safe area? Are Newarkers uninterested in art? Are even Newarkers from safe neighborhoods like Forest Hill afraid to attend art events Downtown in their own city? I just don't get it. Why isn't Open Doors attended by scores of thousands or even 100,000 people over the three days, from throughout North Jersey, at the least, and even from NYC? I really do not understand. I lived for 25 years within a block of the International Food Festival on Ninth Avenue in Manhattan, and in the weekend with the worst weather in all that time, that street fair had perhaps 250 times as many people attending as all of Open Doors. NYC is not 250 times as populous as Newark. There's something else at work. We need to find out what it is — tho I think we all know — address it, and overcome it.

Do the various local websites, the "Local" blogs of The New York Times and the hyper-local "Patch" websites of the national Huffington Post/AOL media powerhouse, not announce upcoming events in Newark's magnificent Open Doors artswhirl? If not, why not? Does the NAC send announcements to the Maplewood Patch, Belleville Patch, etc.? If so, are they well written and concise, and do they attach comprehensive information for perusal by reporters who want more info?

I'd like us to narrow down where the problem is. Is the NAC doing everything right, but the various suburban media are not carrying the story? Or has the NAC failed to reach out to the suburbs, with materials designed to reduce or eliminate anxiety about racial animus from Newark blacks toward suburban whites, or concerns about crime, or anything and everything else that interferes with white people from the suburbs' coming into Newark? I have seen the press release sent within Newark art circles, and it does not address fears of racial harassment and crime. The thinking of the writers of press releases may be that it is best to avoid such topics, on the theory that you don't want to dredge up unspoken fears. That is exactly the wrong approach. Not confronting the issues and rebutting misconceptions is a strategy geared to failure, and Newark has failed, for ten years of Open Doors weekends, to bring in the hordes of suburbanites who comprise the bulk of the Newark Metropolitan Area's 2 million people.

I hope the guy holding the drum had hearing protection.

I am not at all persuaded that the NAC or anyone else has done adequate market surveys to find out who hears about Open Doors and who does not; how (newspapers, here and in Jersey City, Bergen County, NYC, etc.; Internet; TV; radio; word-of-mouth); why people who do hear of Open Doors do not attend; etc. People who attended the 570 Broad Street group show were handed a survey as they entered, but that reached only people who were actually attending an Open Doors event. Have we foreclosed upon ourselves, in assuming that we can't do a thing about people who are afraid of Newark? Have we made any significant or effective efforts to tell people that Downtown Newark is as safe as any major city anywhere in this country?

Events in Downtown Newark like the Fire Muster each June and Open Doors each autumn do not attract the many thousands of people they should, not just from the "urban" areas of Essex County, like Newark, East Orange, and Irvington, but also from all our suburbs, in Essex, Union, Hudson, Bergen, Passaic, and Morris Counties. Can it truly be that people are still afraid of Newark as mythical "Urban Hellhole", like "The Big Bad Wolf" or "Boogieman" that will get you if you don't watch out, even tho crime Downtown is nearly nonexistent? Yes, parts of Newark still have a serious crime problem, but they are bad parts of bad neighborhoods, mostly involved with the drug trade. Areas free of the drug trade, like the entirety of Downtown, are almost entirely free of crime, esp. given that the NPD provides good coverage to ensure safety to visitors.

If no one knows why few outsiders attend Newark events, somebody has got to do studies to find out. We have colleges and college students in Newark that could easily do such studies, for credit, be it academic credit accorded to students or media credit accorded to faculty.

In any case, the Barat Foundation's parade this year was a great event, and showed off "Beautiful Downtown Newark" as what it is: beautiful. I hope future such parades will only get bigger and better. Yes, the marching bands this time were pretty much wholly black (as you can see from the fotos and video), but nobody was put off by that. In the future, marching bands from predominantly white schools will, hopefully, also take part. Does Columbia High, a joint venture of South Orange and Maplewood, both of which well-integrated suburbs border on Newark (and more particularly Vailsburg, my part of town) have a marching band? If so, the Barat Foundation should most definitely urge them to send a band. Most, tho not all, Essex County suburbs are a lot blacker than suburbs in most of the rest of the country. But I must wonder if we are getting even black and Hispanic suburbanites from places like Maplewood and South Orange, or semi-urban areas like East Orange and Irvington, to Open Doors and other events.
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All near-in municipalities, whatever their racial composition, should be striving to be included in future Newark Arts Parades, just as marching bands from the entire Tristate Metropolitan Area vie to be included in Manhattan's St. Patrick's Day Parade — despite that march's notorious antigay bigotry. I assume that the Newark Arts Parade has no such bias, but would be happy to include a gay marching band, or gay men's chorus accompanied by a couple of drummers and cymbalists, perhaps on a float with amplifiers for voice. Another, similar float could accommodate the Newark Boys Chorus, our internationally acclaimed youth choir.

Hopefully the road work that kept this year's parade from starting at Lincoln Park, as originally intended, will not prevent the parade from marching that mile and a third on Broad Street next year. You will see in the video below that Athena Barat wanted the parade to march in a loop around Military Park, but the police, who had been told it was to go directly from Park Place to Washington Park, did not accede to that wish.

A word of advice to the Barat Foundation: put much larger wheels on the "animodules" that have to be pulled over Newark's rough streets. Six- or even ten-inch wheels would not be too big. The back wheels of the four-wheeled, uprite, wire shopping carts that people who don't have cars pull groceries home with, would do very nicely, and such wheels have got to be readily available commercially. Or the Barat Foundation could put out a call for donation of such wheels. I have a couple on a mangled shopping cart in the basement that I could part with. Indeed, even the smaller, front wheels of such four-wheeled shopping carts would be a great improvement over the, what?, casters now employed.

Now, my video overview of the "Creation Nation" Newark Arts and Peace Parade. The sound is not as good as I would have hoped, in that my camera dropped a lot of frequencies, so the bands don't sound nearly as good in the video as they did in person. Perhaps by next year I will have learned how to use my Canon videocamera, and it will have better sound, in-zoom focusing, and other features that would have made this video a lot better. But this 20-minute composite video should give you a sense of the parade. To the kids who performed in the Shabazz-East Orange faceoff in the park, we're proud of you. You did a great job — even if the tinny audio from my camera doesn't do you justice.
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If only the NAC would move Open Doors to the end of September, as it did last year, rather than the end of October, we could get more of the people who are willing to attend outdoor events in warmer weather. The foto below should be clickable, but if it's not, you can go directly to the video's place on Blip.tv, http://blip.tv/el-craigo/creation-nation-newark-arts-and-peace-parade-5734393.

The highstepping, bouncing, and dancing that is partially concealed in this video because of spectators on a horizontal surface is why I want to see a marching-band competition in Bears & Eagles Riverfront Stadium, so that everybody can see the intricate choreografy of our area's marching bands, without obstruction. Somebody, please organize this, and bring in bands from this entire region to strut their stuff.

North Star High's Playground

2011-11-09T23:59:00.002-05:00

There is a newly enlarged North Star Academy High School (a charter school) in Downtown Newark that now spans from Washington Place to Central Avenue. The original structure faced Washington Place. This is the new, Central Avenue side. (There are other North Star schools in Newark, including one in my neighborhood, Vailsburg, that used to be the Sacred Heart School and serves as my local polling place for all elections.)

I have progress pix of the expansion in various stages that I will show at some other time. What I noticed three days before Halloween, as I was passing by in mid-afternoon, is that Washington Park serves as the playground for this urban high school that has no playground of its own.

In like fashion, the Adelaide L. Sanford Charter School uses Lincoln Park as its playground.

It wasn't until I fixed these pix in my graffics program that I noticed the kid in costume on the right.

Well, I think it was a kid in costume.

Downtown Halloween Bash, Bashed by Weather

2011-11-08T23:59:00.015-05:00

Activists for Downtown revival mounted two Halloween-themed events on the Friday before Halloween, but bad weather did both in. Perhaps that's appropriate, given the death-oriented nature of the odious Halloween holiday. Halloween is not observed in my neighborhood. That saves us some money in buying candy, and time in handing out candy, but it deprives older people of a connection to their youth, and robs young Vailsburgers of a customary rite of youth in the United States. I don't know how widely within Newark this non-observance of Halloween is, so would appreciate some feedback from elsewhere in Newark.

Man in a costume of exaggerated Western attire, on Edison Place.

In my non-observant area of Newark, we are also spared the nitemare that places like Detroit go thru with "Mischief-Nite"-on-steroids, called in Detroit "Devil's Nite" or "Hell Nite", which produces many arson fires that burn houses to the ground. We in NJ never had a serious problem on October 30th, and "Mischief Nite" amounted to almost nothing. Thank goodness. New Jersey is a very moderate state, not given to extreme behaviors of any kind.

The liting of the big-N symbol of the Newark Downtown District on Edison Place near Mulberry Street produced a neither/nor situation for my camera, neither brite enuf for me to get a clear picture without flash nor close enuf for me to get a good picture with flash. This is the best I could do — without flash.

I have mentioned that the non-observance of Halloween in my neighborhood has little to do with a religious aversion, but mainly with concerns about safety. Those urban legends about razor blades in apples (as tho kids are pleased to accept apples in lieu of candy) or Ex-Lax given out as candy, are apparently taken very seriously here. Or perhaps the concern is for homeowners' opening the door to miscreants.

Very good male, guitar-playing singer near Brick City Bar & Grill on Edison Place.

There is, however, in some groups within society in this area, an aversion to Halloween on religious grounds. I was waiting to check out at the East Orange ShopRite before Halloween when I heard two checkers and a third young woman in effect debating the observance or non-observance of Halloween. One checker said her church didn't observe it, but she didn't give a reason. The other checker thought Halloween was just fine, while her friend was expressing reservations. I piped in to say that some religious people regard Halloween as "the devil's holiday", and the second checker's friend then repeated that — yes, Halloween is the devil's holiday. In short, for some people, Halloween does not verge on devil-worship, but actually goes over the verge.

Barely visible in this picture, because of the bad lite, is a table of people enjoying the evening outside Newark's short "Restaurant Row" of Brick City Bar & Grill, Loft 47, and Edison Ale House, all on Edison Place opposite the magnificent Prudential Center arena.

In any case, Halloween effectively does not exist on my (very long) block (over 1,000 feet). But organizers of festivities Downtown did try to create two festive events on the Friday before Halloween.
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How do you pronounce "Halloween"? (I imagine very few people now spell it "Hallowe'en".) I grew up, here in NJ, pronouncing it hòl.a.wéen, with a short-O before the two L's. In adulthood, I looked at the spelling and could not justify a short-O for a written-A, so switched to hàal.a.wéen, with a short-A, which you can hear in many parts of the country. As a spelling reformer, I believe that spelling and sound should always correspond. So either we say hàal.a.wéen, with a short-A sound, and write "Halloween", or say hòl.a.wéen, with a short-O, and write"Holloween".

Pavilion over display space for John Masi (like "Massey") Photography. John is based in Bloomfield, but is a very active participant in Newark arts in particular and NJ arts more generally.

Two Locations, Scant Crowds in Either. There were two overlapping Halloween events Downtown on October 28th. The first, from 12 noon to 7pm, was on Edison Place between Broad and Mulberry Streets, sponsored by the Newark Downtown District.

Newark has its very own glass-blowing and -shaping atelier, GlassRoots. Its management needs to conform its demonstrations to the entire complement of hours of the Halsey Street Block Parties less than a block away. By the time I took this picture, it was already after 7pm, so the demos had presumably ended. Please, Glassworks, don't end your wonderful demos (which I have seen) before the Block Party ends. Extend yourselves to draw in everyone to the very end of the Block Party. I imagine that for most people, glass-working is intrinsically exciting, for involving very high temperatures and, thus, danger, as well as shaping things of beauty that combine form and any of the qualities of transparency, luminescence, and translucence.

The second event of the pre-Halloween celebration of October 28th was the second (and last) Halsey Street Block Party of 2011, on Halsey between New Street and Central Avenue.

I loved the outdoor, wood-burning heater, which was in use in both of this year's Block Parties, but was cordoned off so far from people passing by that it warmed no one. You can see supplies of firewood for it on the right.

The weather was bad, and the Block Party was badly attended both because of the cold, and because the originally scheduled date, Thursday, was rained out. Many people who might have attended on Thursday in good weather might have assumed that the entire event was rained-out, so did not even check to see if the next day was the rain date.

Newark is in the Earth's climatic "temperate zone", and we cannot count on good weather for outdoor events outside the period late-May thru mid-October. In the spring, early-June is safer than late-May. In the autumn, mid- to late-September is much safer than any part of October. And of course, for street events, any time in the summer is better than any time in any other season.

Despite that self-evident weather reality, the sponsors of the Halsey Street Block Parties refused to hold their outdoor festivities during the summer, but waited until cold, wet weather was upon us. How STUPID can they be? I don't like to be harsh, but stupidity is stupidity, I have NO patience with stupidity on the part of people who aren't actually stupid, and we can't afford stupidly to ignore the realities of Newark weather. (I have repeatedly been tested at "very superior" intelligence, but have appropriate patience with people who just don't have the intelligence to do this or that. When people who are NOT retarded ACT retarded, I get furious.)
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Of what value is the planning and expense the organizers of the Halsey Street Block Parties go to (not to mention the effort they expend) if nobody attends because the weather is MISERABLE? And what of the vendors who paid good money for bad weather? Were their payments refunded? They should have been. I would have done so had I been in charge. Did the City of Newark hire as event coordinators people born and raised in South Carolina or Georgia, who had no idea how few months in Newark are suited to outdoor events? Or did those event coordinators assume that people are more inclined to venture outdoors in (very) cool weather than most New Jersyans in fact are?

Krystle Cortez tends an Index Art Center table displaying works by what I told her I assumed were — and proved to be — works by the Hungarian-American woman artist Kati Vilim. Krystle knew me for having shown her by her portion of the Rutgers Fine Arts Senior Thesis exhibition in April of this year (10th foto of my post of April 21, 2011). I don't know why Kati was not tending a table of her own works.

There is a relatively short climatic window for outdoor festivities in Newark. The optimal outdoor-event season in Newark runs, longest, from late-April thru late-September. There may be some splendid weather outside that window, but it's a numbers game, and the numbers are against us outside that 5-month period. Indoor events can run year-round, since Newark is not within the Arctic Circle. And "the season" for indoor art and music events runs thruout cold weather, as to give us something to do outside the home for the six or seven months of short days and long nites when you don't want to spend much time outdoors but are willing to go out, briefly, in order to get to something worthwhile outside the home.

27 Mix had its table outside its own restaurant this time, as one might always expect but not always find. Despite the cold, one of the men tending it had bare skin on his forearms. I do love a man in a uniform. Who doesn't?

I didn't get to the Edison Place event, scheduled for 12noon to 7pm, until about 6:40pm, so don't know if it had worked earlier. It was almost empty by the time I got there.

This is a side view of the bandstand near the Central Avenue end of the two-block Halsey Street Block Party.

The second Halloween-themed event, on Halsey Street about 6/10 of a mile away, started at 5:30pm, so by the time I got there, just before 7pm, it should just have been entering prime time. But because the weather was so cold and intermittently wet, almost nobody was there. That made me mad at whatever idiot made the decision to cancel block parties in warm weather but hold them in cold weather. How does anyone get that stupid? Did s/he take classes? And is there no smart person in City government above to veto such idiocy?

Art pavilion. The people tending that tent were enjoying some of the food on offer, while waiting for customers.

This is not, presumably, the end of time for Newark (an asteroid missed Earth this week), so the authorities who messed things up royally this year will have a chance to repent and do things right next year. Are they listening for feedback from people who attended or would have attended? If so, permit me to offer the following advice: "Shape up and fly right."

I think these are probably college kids, from one or another of the several post-secondary institutions in Newark. The Block Parties are held only two blocks from a big Rutgers dormitory, but Newark art institutions and the Halsey Street block association have seemed unable to attract these Rutgers kids to Downtown Newark events. Mind you, Rutgers felt the need to create dormitories in Downtown Newark because of demand, but Rutgers-Newark kids seem less than fully immersed in the city they chose to surround themselves with. Why is that? Did they actually just want the experience of undergrads living in isolation from their surroundings and exchanging worldviews in impromptu bull sessions within dormitories, isolated from the rest of the world? Has anybody studied this?

The last visual today is a video, in bad lite approaching dark, of the band that played near Central Avenue (you might see more detail by leaning in close to, and higher to, the monitor). The band "covered" a popular song, albeit very well. Do they also play and sing their own songs? I don't know, because it was too cold for me to stay around to listen to anything else they might play.
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The band is the "Halsey Street High Rollers". The bandstand was, unfortunately, located in poor lite. Some of the group's professional musical quality comes thru in this video, but my little camera, which I use mainly for stills, doesn't pick up the full range of sounds necessary to convey the fullness of their music. The saxophonist, at the far left, rear, came up on the platform a bit late, and was scarcely visible behind another band member for at least the following 7 minutes that this video records. The band should correct oversights like that for future performances, and the organizers of Halsey Street Block Parties need to provide decent liting for live performers, and for the audience, more than just for people taking videos of a performance.
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Near the opposite, southern end of the Block Party, at New Street, was a d.j., to play pre-recorded rather than live music. The d.j. and live band were almost two full blocks apart, which is good planning. But the best planning that does not take the weather into account is BAD planning.

Now, a video, 7 minutes long, of a very-local band to the locus of the party, the Halsey Street High Rollers. If the still foto below is not clickable, you can go directly to the video's location on Blip.tv, http://blip.tv/el-craigo/halsey-street-high-rollers-5723712.

AAA Tow, in More Than One Sense

2011-11-07T23:59:00.001-05:00

I have mentioned that something in my car broke, and I had to have my car towed to my local repair shop, General Tech (at South Orange Avenue and Monticello Avenue in Vailsburg). The belt that drives the alternator broke (I guessed right), so the entire electrical system was knocked out. So I had to have the car "towed". (The "idle pulley" flew off and broke the long belt that wraps around multiple things and is something like four feet long, much more complicated an arrangement than I had visualized.)

Tho AAA provides what we still call a "tow" but it is actually, nowadays, more common for the car to be hoisted up onto a flatbed truck and carried rather than towed. I'm a member of the American Automobile Association, so was able to get a 'tow' the 3/4 of a mile or so, without charge.

I rode in the cab with the driver, who was not the guy I usually deal with, from Lanark Avenue, just inside Newark (Vailsburg) from East Orange. This guy was from Maplewood, with which I am not very familiar, even tho Maplewood borders on Vailsburg. The weather was crappy, raining litely, and I mentioned to the driver that working outside must have its disadvantages. He said he likes the rain, so that was fine. But snow was another matter. Within days, we had our freak early snowstorm. I hope his truck has a good heating system.

He's a big guy, who was able to roll my little car back along the curb by muscle power so he could make room to align the truck, which theretofore had insufficient space in the front. He also knew where SOA and Monticello Avenue is. Once we got to General Tech, I went inside to ask the boss (Chuck de Groot, a black guy with a Dutch name, just like mine), where the towtruck driver should put the car in his crowded lot, and he indicated what seemed to me a fairly tite space.

The towtruck operator wasn't fazed in the slitest, but appraised the situation, confidently lined things up, and backed up toward the assigned space, coming perilously close to one of the vehicles awaiting service. The lot is always pretty crowded, inasmuch as General Tech does quite a business. That's what happens when you stay in the same location for a long time and do good work. Repeat business and word-of-mouth keep things buzzing — along with the insistence of cars on breaking down from time to time.

The driver let the car down as far as gravity would take it.

Then he pushed it off the bed by muscle power into its final position. I said my thanks, and he went on his way to the next AAA assignment, having done a triple-A job for this satisfied Club member.

Open Doors, Part III: Visual Splendor at Rupert's

2011-11-06T06:02:00.003-05:00

The wretched national and world economy — go, Occupy Wall Street! — has done serious harm to Newark arts, but the city's art community is hanging in there. Newark's most distinguished arts entrepreneur, Rupert Ravens, has of late been mostly absent from Newark, tho active in Manhattan. Still, he felt the tug of Newark arts for this year's Open Doors, and even tho he couldn't mount a full-scale exhibition in his enormous, 33,000-square-foot space at 85 Market Street, he did fill the ground-floor windows of the former Furniture King building with wonderful things.

Right window.

When I ventured Downtown by bus (my car being inoperable at the time) early Sunday, October 23rd, the last day of this year's Open Doors extravaganza, Rupert Ravens Contemporary (gallery) was looking desolate and locked-up. But when I headed home by bus to recharge my camera battery, the window gates were up, and there was color and form to be seen.

Left window.

Once I had charged the battery and headed back Downtown by bus, I got off at Washington Street, not just to walk up to the arts festival in Washington Park (which I could also have approached by walking up Broad Street farther on) but also to check out what was on offer at Rupert's, which is exactly opposite the bus stop on Market Street short of Washington.
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The two windows hilited three artists, two familiar to me in the right window, and one new artist in the left, larger window.

The two familiar artists were Stephanie Nagorka, who works in nearly-glowing free-form ceramics, and the artistic genius of Orange, NJ, Rich Wislocky. Rich is, as many artists are in their youth, an odd young man, but his work is incandescent — perhaps literally, since artificial lite is an important part of his work. I mentioned to Rupert that Rich, whom I have interviewed on video, had said I should come by his studio someday. Orange starts about two blocks outside Vailsburg (my part of Newark) and isn't very large, so his studio can't be far. Rupert said he could take me over someday, and told me something of Rich's setup. I asked if Rich was making any money from his art, but Rupert said that in these hard times, few local artists are making money.
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Let me observe here that artistic talent seems much more widely dispersed that the economic support for it. But, then, Vincent van Gogh sold nothing to anyone but his brother during his lifetime. I suppose that's not of much reassurance to artists who'd like to see some acknowledgment and financial reward during their lifetime. Do financially unsuccessful artists die believing, fervently, that their genius will be recognized after they're dead? That's a hard way to have to deal with the world, isn't it?

Unfortunately, Nagorka's and Wislocky's works were a bit hard to see thru the reflective glass. The large forms in the other window were also hard to see clearly because of reflections.
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I tried the door. Locked. Then, as I was lining up shots, Rupert came out to say hello and invite me in to see the Ferrer window up close, with no glass in the way, and in different liting. The Wislocky area was backstopped, so I couldn't fotograf it from inside the gallery. And the works faced outward, so I'd have been able to show them only from the back.

The Ferrer "Billowing Beauties" turned out to be inflated by fans and illuminated by floodlites. Here, Rupert makes a minor adjustment.

I tried taking pix with ambient lite, and with the camera's flash on, to differing effect.

This slite variation on the first foto today is shifted slitely to the left, which gives it a slitely different briteness and glow.

And this view farther to the side brings out the horned or tentacular look of one of the shapes.

Rupert has shown other inflated art, as by AK Airways, but these Ferrer artworks are much richer in form and color.

The forms are abstract and the colors impart lushness to them. From inside the gallery, they make quite an impression.

I was able to take one foto of the Nagorka ceramics from inside the gallery, but their richness and gloss didn't come thru, and they were mostly angled out the two windows, the large window facing the street and a short window facing the entrance.

Stephanie Nagorka's ceramics.

I looked back beyond the windows and saw in the distance a manipulated foto by Keyport's political artist and one of my favorite NJ artists, Grace Graupe-Pillard. I say "favorite NJ artists" because I am now familiar mainly with the arts in Newark, but hold out the possibility that there are artists elsewhere with whose work I am not familiar that I might like fully as well. Probably not better, tho.

Anne Ferrer is a welcome addition to the long list of international artists who have shown in Newark galleries.

Pix from Batfilming

2011-11-05T23:59:00.003-04:00

Gaetano managed to get Downtown during the filming session in Newark of The Dark Knight Rises, and took these five little fotos. I say "little" because his cellfone camera was set for 320 x 181 pixels, and tho I can trim fotos down, blowing them up in my graffics program doesn't work very well. So I present them at their original size, only set to display at screen resolution 72ppi. This first shows a "Gotham" Police Department SWAT-team truck. (The first 5 fotos today are all courtesy of Gaetano Lardieri, who retains all rights in them. The last is mine.)

These next two show a "GPD" police car outside Gateway Center. You can tell from the slope-topped car-bomb barriers.

I don't know which side of Gateway Center the car was parked on, tho. Mulberry Street or Market Street seem most likely, because they are much wider than Commerce Street.

The cars even had Gotham City license plates. No state designation, but some police departments, such as NYC's, do have their own plates. Next time I see a police car here or in NYC, I'll look to see if the state is, um, stated.

The Military Park Subway ("lite rail"; yekh — I prefer "subway") station has been altered to show "GTA Gotham Transit Authority" Military Park Station, with three subway lines that pass thru that station. Note the map of the system, which shows Gotham City to comprise at least two islands. Gotham, like Newark, has a Military Park. That may be the only thing about Newark recognizable in the film.

NYC was added this weekend to the places where the film is being made, so there will be a jumble of scarcely recognizable locales in the film, unlike the original Superman film in which the NY Daily News Building on 42nd Street was distinctly identifiable as the home of the Daily Planet of "Metropolis".
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There are a few more fotos of the filming at the West Ward Patch, and Gaetano also found an album of 48 fotos online, but few may be from Newark. There do not appear to be captions on those fotos, but I see "The Trump Building" in the background of one, and Newark does not yet have any Trump buildings, even tho Donald Trump said a few years ago that he foresaw good real-estate prospects for Newark. It would be nice if he'd put his money where his (very large) mouth is. Investments in Newark are likely to be substantially wiser and safer than in Atlantic City, in that there are a number of industries in Newark, but only the gambling and tourism industries in A.C. Mind you, I am assuredly not trying to take anything away from Atlantic City. NJ cities must not compete destructively with each other, but try to work synergistically so that everyone benefits from improvements in any of the state's cities. Note the word "cities". NJ has too many people in suburbs, and must backfill its partially depopulated historic cities, whose infrastructure is already in place so does not have to be built anew to accommodate large increases in population.
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The last foto today is of another Newark lite-rail station, not involved in the Batfilming, which I fotograffed October 23rd on my way to the arts festival in Washington Park. Note that the canopied stairwell on the right has lettering toward the top that distinctly still says "CITY SUBWAY". I much prefer that. "Lite rail" sounds litewate. "Subway" is muscular — and completely accurate at that point, since the rails do run underground.

What's in a name? A lot. Let's restore the "Newark City Subway" designation to the original system, and any extensions made to it. We can let new, wholly aboveground rail lines carry the "Lite Rail" designation if need be, but NYC has long stretches of ground-level and even elevated rails, yet retains the term "subway" for all of them. Perhaps we could even give the lines numbers or letters, as in the "GTA" system (say, "A Line" for the original subway and its extension to Grove Street, and B for the Penn Station to Broad Street Station line. That's easier than "Grove Street line" or "Broad Street Station line", isn't it? (A and B are probably advisable, given that #1 and #2 have unfortunate connotations.) Why would Newark want to abandon its muscular history?

Sylvia's in E.O., Free Museums

2011-11-04T11:50:00.004-04:00

The East Orange ShopRite has a very special event tomorrow, a fund-raising full dinner for $9.00, to benefit the American Cancer Society.

This is a foto of a sign that I took Thursday evening. If it is hard to read, there's no helping that, because the sign was inside a plate-glass window, so I could not use flash.

If you can't read the fine print alongside the line about raffle prizes, it says "(drawings from signed petitions, you don't have to be here to win)".
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In case you don't know, Sylvia's is a very famous Harlem restaurant that serves traditional "soul food" of Southern origin. If you have never been to a soul-food restaurant, and live not far from the East Orange ShopRite (as I do, less than 2.5 miles), you might want to see if you like Sylvia's food. I have had some of Sylvia's canned food, but never a full meal. I'm intrigued.
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Free Museums. Bank of America's "Museums on Us" weekend is upon us again. Every first weekend (Saturday and Sunday) of the month, Bank of America debit- and credit-cardholders can get in free (one admission per card, with foto ID) to a bunch of museums around the country. In Newark, the participating institutions are the Newark Museum, both Saturday and Sunday, and Aljira, Saturday only. Always check the website before heading out, because the participants change over time. I haven't been to either the Montclair Museum of Art or the Morris Museum in months, so it may be time to check one or both again.

Batman in Newark

2011-11-03T11:59:00.014-04:00

Frank McCree and Gaetano both alerted me to filming today and tomorrow in Newark, of a new Batman movie, The Dark Knight Rises. This is a major motion picture, as was the updated War of the Worlds starring Tom Cruise, which also filmed in Newark. They are by no means the only films nor TV series to have used Newark locations. The Star-Ledger on Tuesday listed more. I showed pix of Halsey Street on April 4, 2008, whenCadillac Records was being filmed here. This is of course all to the good, but few people know when Newark stands in for "Gotham City" or some other locale.
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Gaetano and I saw a recent version of the Batmobile at Bears & Eagles Riverfront Stadium during the opening of the 2011 Newark Bears season, which Gaetano treated me to. I got a foto of the guy dressed up as Batman.

I didn't notice at the time, but it appears from the drawing on the left that the bear mascot of the Newark baseball team is left-handed! How very interesting. Or odd.

I don't want to seem a spoilsport, but I was never a great fan of Batman. I thought the comic too dark, and much preferred Superman — tho, as a gay kid, I did love the idea of Batman and Robin being an inseparable pair. That was wonderful. But the comic's action always took place at nite, so was always literally dark.
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Here, Gaetano stands by the Batmobile. He needs to buy a new pair of jeans. The ones he's wearing are a ruin, and he can assuredly afford new ones. I never did understand the ragged look.

This is an interior view of the Batmobile in Newark, showing the Batphone.

And here's a wider view of the Batphone area, showing Batman's devotion to fiting drug abuse, thru D.A.R.E., "Drug Abuse Resistance Education".

This wide view of the Batmobile doesn't show the Batman-specific features well, tho the car looks great. Chevrolet celebrated its 100th anniversary today, and its massive sales over the decades have made it, according to CBS News this evening, the best-selling automobile brand of all time.

This closer view shows the Batdetails much better.

Little did we know — probably any of us, meaning not just Gaetano or me but also the 'guy' dressed as Batman ("Gaetano" is pronounced like "guy"-TAH-no; in my Fanetik system, gie.tón.oe) — that a new Batman movie would film partly in Newark. It has also filmed in Los Angeles, Pittsburgh, and Jodhpur, India. So Newark's part in the production is not massive, and the skyline or anything else recognizable as part of Newark is not likely to appear. Too bad.

The view from the stands in the ballpark, near which the Batmobile was parked, is striking, and decidedly recognizable. Gaetano and I took a bunch of fotos of our morning in the Stadium, but I had not been able to use any of mine before now. Given that the event occurred on May 26, 2011, you can see that I am very serious when I say that I am WAY backed-up in this blog. I will use some of the remaining fotos from opening-day 2011 in advance of the Bears' opening-day 2012.
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There is so much good and interesting about today's Newark, at least to me and my regular readers, that I cannot cover it all. Newark needs and deserves the kind of dedication from many observers that NYC has long had. Yes, New York is the greatest city of the Western world, and arguably the greatest city in the history of mankind — not in population, of course; Tokyo-Yokohama is the world's most populous metropolitan area, and Chinese, Latin American, and Third World cities have become immense due to migration from impoverished hinterlands. But in terms of its impact upon world culture, finance, and politics, and especially given that the HQ of the United Nations is located in Manhattan (I worked there, very happily, for several months in 1966), NY is almost inarguably the greatest city that planet Earth has ever had.
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Still, Newark today has so much happening, and has long had many things going for it that no one had reported, that it would take a dozen enthusiasts posting illustrated reports to the Internet every day without fail to do justice to this great city.

Kids from various local schools were admitted free to the season-opening celebration, and allowed to walk around the field. Gaetano and I didn't know if just everyone present at that same time could go down onto the field, or only schoolkids. So we contented ourselves with the view of kids walking and running in that beautiful, verdant island amid the concrete and blacktop of a major American city. The kids' view of the buildings outside the park may or may not have been as good as ours. But they got to walk on a field of dreams. Whether playing professional baseball, minor- or major-league, is still a dream for many American kids today, I do not know. But I'll tell you this much: if I get the chance to walk the beauteous, green field of Bears Stadium on opening day 2012, I'm going to. And I'll take pix to show you what I see from that vantage point.

Black People in 'Blackface' Show in Open Doors '11

2011-11-02T23:59:00.011-04:00

One of the more unusual exhibitions in this year's Open Doors arts weekend was "Blackface", in a "pop-up" gallery open only for the three days of the Open Doors weekend, on the north side of Market Street west of the old Newark Paramount Theater. I hadn't heard of that show, perhaps because I didn't have time to read thru the entire 14 pages of exhibition descriptions in the Newark Arts Council's .PDF overview of the weekend. But I ran into Newark artist Pete Tuomey at the 570 Broad Street group show and he mentioned it as one more stop he wanted to make that day (Sunday), and I ascertained from him where it was so that when I left 570 I could head there too.

I wasn't enthusiastic about doing more walking, but when Pete said that that temporary gallery was on Market Street near the Four Corners, I realized it wasn't significantly out of my way, because I had to walk to the Four Corners to catch my bus anyway (my car was out of commission at the time — a downer, as we used to say; does anyone still say that?).

There were three participating artists, Serron (stress on the second syllable), who is, I believe, primarily a painter, and two fotografers. The one artist I know to be a fotografer is Erik James Montgomery, because I saw a bizcard for him and took it for later reference. I didn't see a bizcard for the third artist. I tucked into a pocket of my waistpouch the folder that explained the exhibit's premise, but cannot find it. If I do find it, I'll add that information here later. Or perhaps when I send email to the two artists for whom I have addresses, they'll provide that info. Serron and (Mr.) Baja Ukweli did the 3-dimensional works.

In looking for more information on the Internet, I found a video of the event on YouTube by "MrJimmy627". I am delited to direct attention to that video, so you can see that somebody takes even shakier videos than I do! There are a bunch of other videos that are available to view when the Blackface video ends. At least some of them are of Newark events. I haven't had time to watch the others.

I found a brief article about the show on the South Ward Patch, which lists another artist, Paul "pOs" ChinNery. So maybe that's the third member of the group. As to whether he is a fotografer or creator of the soft sculptures in the show, I do not know. ("South Ward" pushed together in a domain name looks like the ordinary word "southward".)

I asked Serron if people were expected to stay outside the chain in this artwork. He said that for the most part, people did know to stay outside the chain, but when the crowd was heavy, that boundary was violated.

I had seen some of Serron's work in the "F*#k Curators!", one-nite art show at Index Art Center on August 28th, 2010. I showed some pictures of that show in my post of January 3, 2011. I also showed some fotos of Serron's works from the "Curators" show in my post of September 22, 2010, including two (fourth and seventh in sequence) that were in the "Blackface" show, so I did not fotograf them again.

I introduced myself to Serron and mentioned that I had met him at another show and had intended to get a foto of him by his favorite work, but when I reviewed my fotos later, I didn't have any such foto. He said that that is probably because he does not pose by his art. He feels that that's sort of like standing on a soapbox, and wants the work to speak for itself. Which it does, powerfully but ambiguously, as almost all "message" art is ambiguous. I write, and try to make things unambiguous, thru words, which can be very good for precise expression (tho you wouldn't know it by a lot of the writing one sees about art).

Interestingly, I'm pretty sure I chanced to catch Serron as a spectator at the 570 group show, but he's not standing by any of his works. I didn't know he was in the picture until I was fixing pix in my graffics program.
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I asked him what kind of name "Serron" is, and he said that it's apparently something his mother made up. She had originally thought to name him "Sirhan", but when Sirhan Sirhan assassinated Robert Kennedy, she altered it to "Serron". His last name is not so exotic: Green, no final-E.

I asked where he's from, and he said Newark. Followup: what part of Newark? Turns out he's from about 7 blocks from me in Vailsburg. The only other artist I know who lives in Vailsburg is Alonzo Kennerly, whom I have run into at the 18th Avenue McDonald's (which has perhaps the handsomest plantings outside the restaurant I have ever seen at a McDonald's).

The fotos in the show depict black people in blackface. Serron said white people in blackface would have been in deep trouble at that show. The South Ward Patch article, by Christina Turkington, explains the concept. I do not, however, know if this summary is hers or is taken from the brochure for the show.

Blackface built on the negative, twisted view that some people had about Blacks and WANTED to be true, so they can point their fingers in disgust while laughing.

We believe that African Americans are still playing into the roles that others have set up for us to be portrayed as. This project will show all the aspects in our culture that demonstrate that we are playing into these roles, whether we want to admit it or not. Many of us are guilty on some level. This is why we want to invite you into THE BLACKFACE EXPERIENCE. Are you performing in blackface? WAKE UP!

The fotograffic images are striking, and seem comedic, but very 'dark' comedy. The colors are gorgeously brilliant and intense, and the focus crisp, even in the large-format reproductions that were on view.

Many of the artworks, in all media, relate to the era of segregation in the U.S. South, of which Serron and the other artists would have no personal experience, because they are much too young. There is a fine line between remembering that past for its lessons, and wallowing in The Bad Old Days. Too much wallowing, and you risk being thought to be whipping a dead horse, and being advised to "get over it" because "that was a long time ago" and "has no relevance to today".

The word written across this soft sculpture is not "Showt" but "Showtime", continued on the right.

The question, then, is, "Do these images have any relevance today?" If so, can either the artists or the viewer bring them home to issues affecting today's black Americans? In the famous phrase from Governor McGreevey, I am a gay American, and there is plenty of pain and ugliness gay men could wallow in. But how much would a show like "Blackface", but about gay men, offer, in a positive way, to encourage us to take advantage of today's opportunities and expand them by judicious pressure? Such an art show, which would be much harder to conceive of in striking images, might be titled "Straightwashed", for the pressure to "pass" for straight that very nearly crushed the life out of gay men for so long, and even into today, along with the inclination of straight society to claim as heterosexual every single famous gay person unless that was just impossible, as in the case of Richard the Lionheart, Walt Whitman, or, now, Ricky Martin or Neil Patrick Harris.

How much dwelling on history is instructive, and how much seems like masochism, or even embracing the awful past with fondness? Are we to understand the past as The Bad Old Days? Does lingering on negative things as the "Blackface" show does, verge on regarding The Bad Old Days as The Good Old Days? What, exactly, is the point? Is it to exact revenge? reparations? Apologies?

And might this engender invidious comparisons? "You have a black mayor and dominantly black council at the local level, and a black President. We [gay men, Latinos, Orientals, South Asians, whatever] have no such power nor representation. What are you complaining about?"

In any case, the "Blackface" show is no longer on view. Serron said it was closing at 10pm that nite. But you can see here and in the video I link to above, a fair representation of what you missed.
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I was amused to see this red sportscar up on blocks. I suppose it is a satire on advertising that shows the glamor of sportscars without causing people to consider the costs. (I have a sporty — but inexpensiv — red car that wasn't on blocks but was nonetheless unusable that day, so this picture was specially poignant to me.)

This edgy art show fit(ted) perfectly into Newark's Open Doors weekend. The ruf, exposed, lite-brown brick was a perfect backdrop to the art, esp. in Brick City. Kudos to whoever selected the space. I don't know how many other art extravaganzas in how many other cities this show would have fitted.

Street Artists

2011-11-01T07:00:00.001-04:00

Among the things I have hoped to see appear in Newark are the street artists you can see in Times Square and various outdoor art fairs elsewhere, who draw sketches or caricatures of people at outdoor tables. Little did I know we already have some, which I discovered in walking to the bus after visiting the art show within the Symphony Hall building.

I found two such tables a couple of blocks south of Market Street, on the west side of Broad Street. How long these artists have been at work there, I do not know.

Curiously, there was an outdoor arts festival underway at the same time as I took these fotos, in Washington Park, 3/4 of a mile away, but these guys weren't participating. Did they know about it and simply choose not to set up there? Or are they outside the established lines of communication between the Newark Arts Council and such artists? I don't know, but I am glad to see that there are sketch artists at work in Downtown Newark.

Packard Lofts

2011-10-31T23:59:00.002-04:00

As I walked to the art display at Symphony Hall on the last day of Open Doors '11 (see discussion yesterday), I chanced to see a new apartment complex in two adjoining, renovated buildings on Broad Street near East Kinney Street (Broad apparently being the dividing line between East and West Kinney).

Packard Lofts employs the stylized font of the old Packard car company. That luxury car was known, among other things, for spare tires stylishly mounted in housings on the front fenders. My mother had a Packard for some years (before I was old enuf to remember), and loved it. The disappearance of Packard, as of Studebaker, which took it over, is due to the indiscriminate monstrousness of the free-enterprise system, which destroys good things equally with bad. Often, what survives is not the best but only the best-backed, financially.

The Packard Lofts buildings used to house a Packard dealership, and now offer luxury housing rather than luxury cars. I hadn't heard one word about this apartment project. I just happened to walk past it and see how clean and new these distinguished old buildings looked, then saw the sign that they are ready for occupancy as new loft residences.

I have no idea how expensive those apartments are, nor whether they are rentals or condos, but I'm glad to see someone working on new, upscale housing to bring prosperous people to Downtown Newark. Many such new residents will need 2D art to hang on their new, bare walls, or 3D art to fill corners or foyers, which could prove a boon for Newark art galleries. I imagine that apartments in the Packard Lofts complex will be substantially less expensive than comparable apartments in Manhattan, Hoboken, or Jersey City. They are perhaps a two-minute walk from Symphony Hall in one direction and Solo(s) Project House in the other; and a 15-minute walk from Newark Penn Station (and its quick connections to Downtown and Midtown Manhattan via PATH and NJTransit trains), NJPAC, and the Newark Museum. There are as well buses to many places that stop on Broad Street right outside the front door.

Open Doors '11, Part I: Symphony Hall

2011-10-30T23:59:00.011-04:00

This is a post about Newark arts. People who, like my friend Gaetano, aren't interested in things "artsy-fartsy", are forewarned that not only today's but other posts to follow in the next few days will sum up my experience of this year's Open Doors artstravaganza. But they will all bear headings that include "Open Doors". Posts without those words will not be about our annual, cram-jammed art weekend.

Tho I would ideally like to do my reports on this year's Newark Arts Council's artswhirl in chronological order, the first event I got to, the Barat Foundation's "Creation Nation" Newark Arts Parade, is complicated by the need not just to integrate fotos and text, as usual, but also to combine 13 video snippets into one video overview. That in turn is complicated by the fact that I arrived about five minutes late, so had to rush to catch up to the head of the parade which was two blocks away. The camera bounced as I moved, and I have to decide whether to give up on the first couple of bouncy vids or if a mere notation of explanation would suffice (along with a plea to viewers to hang in for the chunks that are steady).
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So I'll skip to the second event I attended, a group show by three women at an improvised art gallery in two rooms of the Symphony Hall building, outside the theater area.

I took some pictures of the outside of the entrance to the main auditorium, which was not open. The pleasant (black) guard sitting outside, by a sign about the art show, asked if I knew of the history of the building, and I said I did. He mistakenly(?) said it opened as a mosque, when, I believe, it was actually just called the "Mosque Theater" — tho why it should have been called that, I do not know.

This foto, of the façade of Symphony Hall, is marred by lite from behind. I should have walked to the far side to avoid that, but I had already done a lot of walking, and my knees protested that enuf was enuf, esp. since I had to walk at least back to the Four Corners to catch a bus home, and perhaps a lot more if my camera's battery held out.

Two display cases flank the entrance. They both contain only the Greek drama and comedy masks. That is a preposterous waste of display space that could be used to present something of the history of the building and the famous performers who have appeared there.

One might be given over to a collage with text about the "Mosque Theater" era, and the other to the "Newark Symphony Hall" era. The NAC could sponsor and judge a competition to design such displays. Different artists might fill the two different cases.

A fine chandelier (lantern?) is centered over the entryway, and you can see an elegant ceiling beyond.

An elegant mailbox (perhaps 18" or 24" tall, at most) is on the front wall to the left. I don't know if it is in use for collections, but it appears to have a shiny new keyhole area. Mailboxes of any kind are few and far between in Newark. I still don't know, after more than 11 years living here, if letter carriers are supposed to pick up outgoing mail from the front of houses. We didn't even have that service in suburban Middletown Township, Monmouth County. So why would I feel we have it in a city like Newark? Consequently I dare not just leave something stamped and on the porch if it is important that it reach its destination. Rather, I feel that I must travel several blocks to the mailboxes outside the Vailsburg Post Office.

Beyond the left wall where the mailbox stands is a door to a TV studio run by the City.

As I was taking these fotos, one of the artists came out and conferred with the guard about moving inside, one of the hand-lettered signs (that said something like "Gallery Open"), that was leaning against one of the Hall's Ionic columns on the inside of the sidewalk. I think there was a second on the outside, facing the street. I told her I thought it was probably better to leave it there, where people who did not look inside the windows might see it.
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That might have been a bum steer, and if it was, I apologize (too late, sadly). There should indeed have been displayed in the window a sign, computer printed, that said something like "Free Art Show Open Today", with an arrow toward the entrance.

That artist, Ruth Bauer Neustadter, was disgusted that so few people had stopped into the show, and was especially furious that the printed calendar of events and guide handed out by the NAC did not include their show. The first nite, Friday, wasn't so bad, she said, with about 40 people. Saturday, however, saw only 8, all day. And Sunday wasn't doing much better. She plainly had a point. Symphony Hall is far from most other galleries that participated in Open Doors, but only one block from Solo(s) Project House. Did the NAC arrange for there to be signs at Solo(s) and Symphony Hall directing people to both venues, to create synergy between them? Indeed, now that I think about it, there should, in future Open Doors events, be directional signs outside every venue and shuttle stop with arrows to other venues reasonably nearby, with distances. Picture those posts on Pacific Islands during World War II with arrows labeled "San Francisco", "Honolulu", "New York", "Chicago", "Tokyo", "Manila", etc., with miles to each, or comparable poles in Europe pointing to U.S. cities, Berlin, London, Paris, etc., climbing high up the post. NAC versions need not be so chaotic, but, then again, why not capture that exact feel with directional signs that show the richness of the Open Doors event and even overpower visitors with a potent display of how many venues are participating?
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I was sure there are fotos of such signposts online — and thinking that McHale's Navy, which is now on Antenna TV locally (channel 11-4, 2:00 and 2:30pm), might show them. But I can't stand that show, so haven't looked for them there. I did, however, find a great example, which you can see below. Note the second sign down on the right! This is a Department of Defense foto, so I assume that it is public-domain, that is, that taxpayers are free to use fotos generated with their tax dollars.

Solo(s) may or may not have been open Sunday. The sandwich board that is usually outside when it has receptions was not on display. Nor was there any sign outside Solo(s) pointing to the Symphony Hall show ("...one block south"). Such a sign would have helped Solo(s) bring people in too, in making them aware that there was more than one place to go in the same vicinity, so they need not rush off elsewhere.

There were two exhibit areas in Symphony Hall, a small front room with windows onto the sidewalk, and a larger, windowless room. Above, Ruth consented to pose for me by one of her works, on the wall near the entrance to the exhibit from just off the street by 10 feet or so. Below is a wall of her paintings in the larger room.

This next view shows a wider view of the larger room with its striking dark ceiling. By this time, the battery icon in my camera's monitor was flashing red, indicating low power.

I managed to get in this next picture of another area of the larger room. That there is only one person in this view (artist Kylie Lefkowitz; see two fotos of her work at my post of May 14, 2010) is not the fault of the venue, which is fine, but of the publicists at or hired by the NAC. The venue should be used in future Open Doors events, but tied in to other venues nearby.

I also managed to get this foto of the small display area with windows. Then I had to turn the camera off because the battery was almost completely drained.

As I walked toward the bus at Market Street to head home to charge the battery, I was able to take a very few more fotos because the battery came back a bit after I turned the camera off. But I couldn't take pix at any other Open Doors venue until I had made an 8½-mile roundtrip by bus and taken an hour to charge the battery.

Busy, Busy, Busy

2011-10-29T05:52:00.009-04:00

Fotos today are of the view from the Newark Arts Council's group show last Sunday, on the 14th floor of 570 Broad Street. Reflections off the glass of the windows and distortions from acute angles out the windows made it hard or impossible to get sharp fotos, esp. of distance views. The human eye, viewing these scenes directly, would screen out most of these distortions. But you can get a sense of the scene from these poor fotos

Thursday this week, I had to get my car towed from in front of my house to General Tech, 3/4 of a mile away, riding in the cab with the driver. Friday, I had to get to the Essex County social-services office to be trained in the use of my brand-new EBT ("Electronic Benefit Transfer") card for food 'stamps', which are now managed by means of an ATM-like card rather than paper stamps. The qualifying income levels were raised recently, so altho I had not qualified two years ago when first I inquired, I do now ($1,670 per month for a single person is the upper cutoff). (There is no shame in applying for Government benefits you are "entitled" to. The money circulates immediately into the economy, so you are helping not just yourself but others as well.)

Few people work this high up in Newark, so few see the great views that such height affords of this great city. (Some of these fotos are very similar, but all are at least slitely different.) For some reason, the buildings in the distance seem to tilt outward, whereas perspective usually makes them seem to tilt inward. I tried the Perspective Correction Tool in my graffics program, but the result looked scrunched.

Then I went food shopping at the Bergen Street Pathmark — over the parking lot of which flew 7 or more seagulls moving too fast for me to fotograf. Then I went home, partially unloaded the car and had something to eat. Then I went 4 miles Downtown a second time that day, to check out a pre-Halloween event on Edison Place that started at noon, and then the second, and last, Halsey Street Block Party of this year between New Street and Central Avenue. And today is the closing reception for a group show at the Adrienne Wheeler Gallery, from noon to 6pm. The New Newark could drive a young man ragged, and I am feeling more than a little frayed.

The building closest in is Peddie Memorial First Baptist Church, one of the few grand stone Baptist Churches anywhere that have a dome as well as steeple (or, here, two steeples). The building beyond is where Essex County social services are located, the former Firemen's Insurance Company Building.

Here's the description of the Wheeler show that I received from Anne Dushanko-Dobek, one of the artists.

"64/169"
A Resolution, An Exhibition

Curator, Adrienne E. Wheeler

Adrienne Wheeler Gallery and the Newark Arts Council present another installment in a series of exhibitions during 2011 and beyond in celebration of People of African Descent, to recognize the rich cultural diversity of communities on the African continent and in the Diaspora with respect to the following resolution:

In the distance here you can see the headquarters city of the United Nations, New York, past the Red Bulls Arena, a magnificent soccer stadium in Harrison, just over the Passaic River from Downtown Newark.

On 18 December 2009, the United Nations General Assembly proclaimed the year beginning on 1 January 2011 the International Year for People of African Descent (A/RES/64/169).
"The year aims at strengthening national actions and regional and international cooperation for the benefit of people of African descent in relation to their full enjoyment of economic, cultural, social, civil and political rights, their participation and integration in all political, economic, social and cultural aspects of society, and the promotion of a greater knowledge of and respect for their diverse heritage and culture.

The General Assembly encourages Member States, the specialized agencies of the United Nations system, within their respective mandates and existing resources, and civil society to make preparations for and identify possible initiatives that can contribute to the success of the Year."

Adrienne Wheeler Gallery, the Newark Arts Council and the artists presenting their works in this exhibition fully support this resolution, and encourage other artists, galleries, museums, and cultural institutions to join us in promoting this important initiative.

These views of NYC are very oblique to the wall from which I took them. The exhibition space did not occupy a space on the wall closest to Manhattan, from which the view would presumably be much better (and fotos, much easier to take).

Artists:
Manuel Acevedo
Robert Blackburn
Terry Boddie
Jose Camacho
Cicely Cottingham
Laura Cuevas
Victor Davson
Anne Dushanko Dobek
Mel Edwards
Jerry Gant
Gladys Grauer
Ayanna V. Jackson
Ben Jones
Susan Lisbin
Ujima Majied
Carlos Mateu
Ibou Ndoye
Zethray Peniston
Rose Ranov
Eric Rucker
Juan Sanchez
Toni Thomas
vanOs
Manny Vega
Raul Villarreal
Leonard Waldon
Bisa Washington
Irene Wheeler
Nathan Williams

On my way home Friday, I noted that many ugly, old, merely-functional streetlites along Market Street have been replaced by much more decorative and appealing fixtures that tourists would not mind seeing in their fotos of Newark sights. I am particularly pleased that almost all the streetlites around the Old Essex County Courthouse at Market and Springfield Avenues, have been replaced by visually pleasing streetlites, except for one ugly old stanchion that also supports the traffic lites at the apex of the eastward-pointing triangle where Gutzon Borglum's 'Seated Lincoln' statue sits.

I would have taken pictures to show what I am talking about, and then searched for fotos to contrast today's streetlites with those of years past, except that when I got to the Courthouse after dark, the floodlites that have always shown its splendidness were off. What happened? Has the County of Essex decided to save taxpayer dollars in this tuf time by turning off the lites on the Historic Courthouse? I surely hope not, since it is one of the glories of this fine city, and should be available for fotos by tourists 24/7/365. To build a tourist industry, you must be consistent in the hours of tourist attractions. With outdoor attractions, that may well mean illuminating them 24 hours a day.

I had never realized that the J. Massey Rhind statue of George Washington at the southeast corner of Washington Park was in an area demarcated into a pentagon by paths. How appropriate for our first top general. This fine statue, by a renowned sculptor represented in Statuary Hall in the U.S.Capitol, is still not illuminated at nite. It should be.

Rigorous Day

2011-10-23T23:59:00.007-04:00

I did make it to the last day of this year's Open Doors artstravaganza, by bus. This was a tuf day for El Craigo. (I don't know if I was first to call myself that, or if it was my "Itty-Bitty Baby Sister", Trina (she's only 65). In any case, it derives from "L. Craig" [Schoonmaker] and is the term I use as the 'show'/producer name for my (currently) 63 videos, mainly about Newark, at Blip.tv. If you go to any of those videos and then click on the blue "El Craigo" below the title of that video, you will be presented with a list of all of them, which you can then navigate to view any you might be interested in.

Today's fotos are of things I saw along the way, between art events, today. Putting together fotos and text to describe the various art events will take a while, but here are things I found of interest while moving from place to place. First, I had never looked closely at the design in the window of 239 Washington Street and only today realized it is a street map showing the building's place.

I took 188 fotos and 13 short videos in the course of the day. Alas, my camera's memory chip couldn't store all that, so cut me off before I could finish covering the marching-band faceoff in Washington Park.
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I left Washington Park and walked to the Radio Shack at 744 Broad Street (Newark's tallest edifice, the National Newark Building), to buy a second camera card. I could have bought a second 4GB chip for $12.99, or an upgrade 8GB chip for $14.99. Naturally, I went with the 8Gig chip, a much better deal. When I looked at my receipt later, I discovered that that chip was on sale, but is usually $19.99. Neato keen.

Chrysanthemums backlited by the sun, on Broad Street. My own chrysanthemums are more spindly, probably from a combination of less lite and poor soil I am gradually enriching year to year with fallen leaves.

I also tried to buy a second battery for my camera, but they didn't have one on hand. I have to go to Radio Shack's, Best Buy's, or someone else's website and order one (or more) for delivery days later, which could do me no good today. I had, weeks ago, bought a battery charger from Radio Shack (for $50, I am appalled to report) that can operate from a household electrical outlet or from a car's cigaret lyter or auxiliary outlet. But I didn't have use of my car today, as either transportation or a battery-charging station, because its entire electrical system is out. Robert Burns's observation that "The best laid plans of mice and men, gang aft agley" remains in force. ("Agley" — which means "awry", pronounced a.ríe, not áu.ree — by the 'wey', has three pronunciations because of its ambiguous spelling: a.gláe, a.glée, and a.glíe. Don't you just love the spelling of English? I don't. I hate it.)

I had never noticed this green-striped building, seen here from New Street. What is it, and why does it have stripes?

I asked the helpful young woman behind the counter to open the packaging (like Fort Knox) for me so I could use the card immediately, which she did, with scissors. (I sometimes provide a little racial descriptor for people I meet in Newark, since, absent such, everyone will visualize their own race when they read "young woman". I like to point out, by implication, how nice most black people are to everyone in Newark. Here, I might almost have skipped such a descriptor, because the young woman in question appeared to be a mix of black and white.)

These large drawings were outside the former Hahne's Department Store, on Broad Street.

There didn't seem to be a thin plastic storage box to hold the chip when it's not in the camera. Or did I just miss it when I saw the card pop out of its plastic jail? There certainly should be such a storage case. But I don't have one.

There used to be a railroad terminal entrance on Broad Street near the present Prudential Center. Neither the terminal nor the railroad exists anymore. Is the roofless canopy outside Aljira meant to echo this roofless canopy on the other side of Broad Street and down half a mile?

Not having such a case, I put the extra chip into a compartment of my wallet, next to my Medicare card. I didn't dare store it in the same pocket in my waistpouch as the camera, in that I have twice now lost things I accidentally pulled out with the camera.

From 744 Broad, I walked all the way down to Symphony Hall to see the art exhibition there, hoping to see the theater area as well. Alas, that part of the building was not open. While taking pix in other rooms on the ground floor of the Symphony Hall building, my battery ran out! I was thus confronted with two alternatives: (1) continue in my travels to other art venues without being able to take pictures or videos; or (2) take a bus all the way home to Vailsburg, some 4 miles, and recharge the battery at home, then return Downtown, by bus a second time in a single day, and only thru such a time-consuming process be able to take pix and vids to my heart's content. One of the artists at the Symphony Hall show, Ruth Bauer Neustadter, and I thought about it aloud, and agreed that I needed to go home to recharge the battery. It was then 1:20pm. What neither of us knew is whether I'd have the energy and force of will actually to make a second roundtrip Downtown.

Ornate roof on Broad Street. Street level of many old buildings may be marred by tacky business signs, but if you look above the first floor, you may spot some appealing architectural detail.

I did. I am a real trouper for Newark arts, I am.
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Once I got home, I climbed the 16½ stairs from the sidewalk to my front door, then the 26 stairs within the house to my home office on the third floor; put the camera battery on to charge; copied off to my computer and backed-up onto my external hard drive the fotos and videos I had made earlier in the day; checked email again; played the 13 short vids I had made; and looked at the 50 or so fotos I had taken theretofore. After an hour, the battery was fully charged. Then I put the battery back into my camera; walked down the 42½ steps to the sidewalk and two blocks to the bus stop; waited for and caut the #1 bus; and headed Downtown for the second time today. Happily, I get a half-price break on the fare because I'm old, $1.05 on NJT for two zones. So the imposition of that double roundtrip Downtown was mainly temporal, not monetary. I took the #31 bus home, both times, for 75¢ each time. I don't know why there's a difference.

Logo on façade of the Newark Boys Chorus School, which is near Symphony Hall. I hadn't noticed the one bowtie for three boys. Perhaps some future Open Doors weekend, the Boys will sing at the opening or closing reception for the group show.

I got off the bus at Washington Street and crossed Market Street, first to check out Rupert Ravens Contemporary, which showed the first signs of life in months, then to walk up to Washington Park to see the end of the outdoor arts festival, and then to attend the closing party of Open Doors 2011 at 570 Broad Street. I took fotos along the way and at 570, and will show many of them over the next few days.

Banner by Trinity & St. Philip's Episcopal Cathedral. Is that to be an outdoor event? In November?

I have not gone to Newgin to figure out how much I walked today, but it was a lot, and I encountered some resistance from my (fortunately) aging body. I hope my arduous day of busing, walking, climbing, descending, walking, busing, and more walking and busing and walking and climbing will prove good for me. Friedrich Nietsche observed that "What doesn't kill us makes us stronger". I hope!

As I was chatting with someone who was waiting for the same bus as I (on the final leg of my wanderings today), he spotted this super-streamlined sports car behind me on Market Street. He thought it might be a Maserati, but I don't know that to be a fact. I tried to get a picture, but the camera was set to no-flash, and ambient lite wasn't brite enuf. The traffic lite changed before I could set my camera to flash, so this is the only foto I got of it. It's nice to see expensive cars and stretch limos in Newark from time to time.

None of the four friends and couple of relatives I suggested join me did in fact join me for any of today's events. It's always good to go to art shows with someone, since s/he is likely to notice things you don't. But I had so many places to go today that it would have been very hard on anyone else to accompany me. In the alternative, I would have missed a lot had I had to stay with a friend. BUT, Ingá has a car, so getting around would have been a lot easier, and maybe I could have charged my camera battery without having to go all the way back to Vailsburg. Ah, well. I managed.

View from Military Park.

Now, I have only to run all 188 fotos — or at least all those that are not too fuzzy to be usable — thru my graffics program (at about 3 minutes each), decide what to say about each venue, select and resize appropriate pictures, upload them to Picasa, caption them in Picasa, lift the code to display the fotos in this blog, place that code in an appropriate spot, put in formatting codes, upload the compiled blog text and illustrations, proofread it, and make the corrections. I think I will do more than one post, by venue, to simplify my task.

Saturday at Home

2011-10-22T23:59:00.005-04:00

I couldn't get my car fixed today, and wasn't up to trying to get to several art events in this "Open Doors" weekend by NJTransit bus, then Newark Arts Council shuttle-bus, then home by NJT bus again, accomplishing nothing on the way home for want of the flexibility and lugging capacity of a car. So I decided to sit out Saturday at home, and save my energy for the reduced number of art events on Sunday. And why is that, anyway? Why isn't the Sunday of the Open Doors weekend filled with as many events as Friday and Saturday? Sunday is the best day for suburbanites to visit Newark. There's lots of free parking on the street, and nothing to do in the 'burbs but watch television. Saturday gives suburbanites a chance to recover from the workweek. Sunday should be not only a full member of the Open Doors weekend but perhaps even its biggest day!

A yellow tree in front of the house nextdoor contrasts with a different kind of deciduous tree to the left (an oak), whose leaves have not yet started to change, and an evergreen in front of my house, in the color medley that permits a hundred million people in this country to consign themselves to summer's end in the splendiferous colors of fall. I have many evergreens on my property to see me thru to spring.

The leaves have started to change, and to 'fall' — the preferred American term for what in Britain is preferentially termed "autumn". The soonest I can get my car fixed is Monday, if then, but before long I'd like to take a drive thru Somerset County or maybe other semi-rural areas to take in the fall colors. Are the leaves already gone in Sussex County? I thought maybe I'd like to check out High Point. I was there as a child (my parents took us; I did not go on my own). How about Warren County? I might check out the Delaware Water Gap (been there, same way). I'm not driving to Vermont. Been there too, tho, on my own.
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I don't know what kind of tree the foto above captures. My entire block is lined with them at curbside. They produce yellow flowers in clusters, in June, mostly on the crown. Those flowers then turn to papery green, then brown seed pods. And the leaves turn, to a cheerful yellow, sooner than other trees' leaves change to whatever color, like oaks' dull brown. Oddly, my 70-foot oak trees seem not to have produced acorns again this year, as tho they have been permanently damaged by whatever phenomenon it was 3 or so years ago that produced the first season without acorns, across much of the Eastern United States, that anyone could recall. Since then, oaks in my neighborhood have dropped acorns only once. My cousin Faith's oaks, in Bergen County, produced massive amounts of acorns last year, however. What is going on?
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Note: I did not see until I went to upload today's post that yesterday's was the 1,600th of this blog, even.