Carolina’s Christmas Window

Penguin. Snow drifts. Christmas Tree.

 

 

 Luis, the resident artist at Carolina’s Laundry, painted holiday scenes on the window the freakishly balmy  Saturday  before Christmas. He painted the 9-11 memorial mural that was there for years and the sign hanging inside, there for 20 years, since the opening of the establishment.

 

 

Carolina’s been closed for more than 18 months. There was a fire in the 4-story building. The Laundromat takes up the ground floor, the other sections are residential units. They are still unoccupied, the residents remain displaced. That’s where the fire started and was mostly contained; Carolina’s was relatively unscathed. None of the equipment was damaged.

Merna, one of the sunniest folks in the neighborhood, also owns and operates the bodega on Newark & Varick, a block away. She’ll improve anyone’s day just by saying hi (her preferred greeting is how ya doin). She named the Laundromat after her daughter, who just finished college but was still doing shifts at both family businesses.  

Family business are the lifeblood of a neighborhood.  Residents here are lucky to have this one back, fresh holiday imagery decorating the corner.

 

 

 

 

Big Bubbles

 

 

 

 

Cold, but not freezing and lacking wind, makes for a better big bubble. I was reminded of that joke, circa 2008 or so when the Housing Bubble burst, I think it was The Onion, “Americans Demand New Bubble to Invest In.”  When I saw this guy in Union Square Park making these big bubbles, the blogger part of my brain flashed: let the metaphors begin.

 

 

 

An intriguing level of ingenuity went into making big bubbles. The solution he dips the two wands in is a secret, from the tip of the wands two long strands of string dangle, their ends tied to together. There’s an artistry in how he swoops his arms so the solution catches sufficient air so a bubble is formed, then he moves the sticks so the strings close this imperfect, amorphous sphere.

Then the blob floats. It only lasts a few seconds, less than a minute. For that moment, you see the invisible. It’s like living in a comic book. People passing through Union Square Park see the bubble, stop, smile while they watch.  There’s brief joy, even wonder, as we anticipate the inevitable burst, the fate of all bubbles. And we hope, can it last a second longer? There's nothing shorter than the life of bubble, but is there anything shorter than life?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I tried to get the shot of that bust. It was always sudden, nanoseconds, no warning. Once broken, the shards were reminiscent of salvia. One moment glob, next moment gob. You have to use your imagination a little to see the actual burst. It made a silent pop.  For another moment, pieces of he shattered bubble lingered. Then everyone ponders, was the bubble really ever here at all?

 I love how the bubbles float, distort, a rainbow shimmers in this ultra-ephemeral surface. Then gone. Bubbles epitomize the temporary.  The performance art potential of giant bubbles seemed apartment. Then the bubble  burst and we went on with our lives. The bubble-masters wands were already in the bucket, ready for the next blob.

 

 

 

 

I Question Dave Van Ronk

 

 

 

 

I haven’t seen the new Cohen Brothers Inside Llewyn Davis yet, but I will. The film is based on Dave Van Ronk, whose music I didn’t follow but as a lover of folk music and all things Bob Dylan, I have always been aware of him. I seem to recall seeing Van Ronk in concert, it was in Central Park, where during my youth they used to have miller or schaffer or dr pepper musical festivals where tickets were only a couple of bucks and it was a great way to spend summer night. I think he opened up for David Bromberg or Leon Redbone. I think he was also at the Fast Folk outdoor festival on the pier in the 1980s. Checking out any type of folk music in NYC you were bound to see Van Ronk and it was always like, Dave Van Ronk, I know the name. I never felt compelled to buy any of his music. His records were not exactly available at the Harmony Hut, Sam Goody’s or Discomat or other surburan music resources supporting emerging personal soundtrack.

 

Anyway, with Van Ronk fever all the rage, I found this bit of journal of a Dave Van Ronk evening, which I’ve revised slightly here. It was originally a Dylan newsgroup posting, written after Van Ronk died of Colon Cancer.

 

About two years ago, I went to this thing at the New School of Social Research in New York, it was Dave Van Ronk with this writer, whose identity i cannot recall, but was not Elijah Wald, who went on to write the biography, the Mayor of MacDougal street (I thought it was, but after emailing him he corrected me; although he did say that Dave did tell him that he did do this clas). 

 Van Ronk did not look healthy, uncomfortable in a classroom setting, with maybe 100 people.

 

Anyway, the panel discussion – it wasn’t a panel, it was just was Wald and Van Ronk, and I think it’s because other panel members were no-shows – was about that Anthology of American Folk, Harry Smith music thing, and Dave Van Ronk was saying how it technically was out of print for a while, but boot leg copies and what not had always been passed around, and they did stuff like played Penny’s Farm then Maggie’s Farm and there was a lot of glowing stuff about Dylan.

 

Van Ronk told this one Dylan story that took place during the 80s, when they were sitting around his apartment talking about the old songs and Dylan was saying how there’s no more tradition, that folksingers or singer song writers didn’t play the old songs before writing new ones any more and Van Ronk told him that’s because of you, Bob. And, soon after, Bob game out with Good as I’ve been to you and later, World Gone Wrong.

 

I also asked this question. It was about when I was growing up, while I liked folk music it was always political to me. It was the 60s folk boom records, like Pete Seeger and Joan Baez and Phil Ochs and Bob of course. It wasn’t until much later, there were these real weird songs of real people, that were evident on the Folk Anthology. I can’t remember how I phrased, although people told me it was an intelligent question and basically, why did the protest thing totally over-shadow folk music.

 

So the writer goes, that’s a very good question, Dave…

 

It was funny. Dave cleared his throat. He said the first divisions were between secular and religious music, and that back in the 20s and such, that the anthology songs were being sung, but so were union songs. There wasn’t the division, and the fact was, that between Woody Guthrie and the Weavers, it was the protest songs that were selling. By the 1960s folk boom revival, the protest songs predominated, dovetailing with the social upheavals of the time.

 

He also told a funny story I will never forget about meeting Mississippi John Hurt. Finger picking was the big thing and there was this anthology song that all the finger pickers, including Van Ronk, learned to pick from. So, when he met the bluesman, he was pretty old and so Van Ronk figured that his fingers were just slowed down which was why when he played the song it wasn’t quite the same. So after talking a bit, the bluesman says how everybody is picking too fast, loosing the subtlety of finger picking, and Dave says they were learning from this one cut so Mississippi laughed and says, they sped up the cut to fit into the wax, I think it might have been on a 78 originally, changed the key and everything. Anyway, so folkies were learning to pick from an artificial version of finger picking.

 

It was a funny anecdote.

 

The following sounds fragmentary, but Dave Van Ronk had a last record, appeared on Prairie Home Companion, right before he died he was getting some attention, the Mayor bio I believe was posthumously published.

 

Gee, wasn’t there just a benefit concert, I think maybe Garth Hudson might have showed up, to pay for Dave’s medical care? Cancer can linger and linger and then take you real quick. Death don’t have no mercy indeed.

Hard to conceive of a new York folk scene without Dave Van Ronk, who stayed around long, longer after it was gone. There was a real integrity to the guy. Anyway, I will always remember asking him that question. He was saving folk music from itself way back when and then in the 90s too and I have to wonder, anybody around who can still save it.

 

Anyway, I remember not liking his last record that got at least NPR and folk music circle attention, it was jazz standards or something. In addition to the Dylan connection, Van Ronk is directly responsible for Hot Tuna and Leon Redbone. I should pick up the new C.D.. Also, I realize I do have some Van Ronk. It’s a collection of Sea Faring Shanties, he sings Haul Along the Bowline. Folk music is also folklore, and just like union songs, sea faring songs fueled the tradition.

 

By reviving a tradition, Dave Van Ronk not only became part of the tradition, he is now a new access point to that tradition. History is never past.

 

 

 

Dave Van Ronk with Bob Dylan backstage at the Phil Ochs Friends of Chile benefit in 1974. I always loved this picture, they both look so soused. I had a friend whose sister brought him to this show. I am still jealous. It was a benefit for Salvador Allende, who was soon assassinated. Ochs wanted the live record to revive his career, but the performers were so inebriated the tapes were deemed unusable. This concert was an attempt at reviving the folk music revival of the early 60s, and was a brief political cause celeb – one of the first, post-Vietnam, Post-Civil Rights – supporting a freely elected socialist. Tragedy all around, and when the next year Dylan attempted a more successful revival of the folk music revival, The Rolling Thunder Review, Ochs and Van Ronk were not invited on that train.

 

4-Alarm Grove Street Fire

 

 

No one needs a reminder of how fleeting life can be, of how security and what you know are illusions, or at least temporary. Your reality and expectations can disappear without notice, less than a second. What you know is gone. Life was one way for you, now it’s another.

We don’t need a reminder that any plan making is potentially futile.

We get that reminder anyway.

 

 

Jersey City was a gelid mess on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. Residual cold rain and sleet from a Nor’easter that we mostly avoided made for  damp and chilly afternoon. A four alarm fire broke out. I got there about two hours, missed the blaze but the smoke was thick, the acrid stench still on the clothes hours after I got home.

Four Alarm fire, Grove Street. Streets were closed off, you could only get so close. Fire trucks were parked on Newark, which runs perpendicular, and a ladder stretched to the roofs, fire fighters climbed the rungs across the street to the backs of the buildings, the sides not facing Grove.

On Grove,  the hoses were going full-force. Everyone was still serious. Water was everywhere. Hoses were hooked to the fire hydrant, over-flow was streaming from the pumps on the truck, mixing with the cold rain and icy splinters of sleet. The smoke hovered around us like a wad of cotton, commuters walking home slipped their scarves over their mouths. You could taste the smoke.

 

 

 

 

 

Three days ago… pizza was being eaten, nails were being manicured… 22 people had homes and beds to sleep in… today, two buildings now rubble… the work went on all Thanksgiving night, Black Friday morning… police just standing guard… “we don’t want people messing with the rubble, it’s dangerous… they come looking for pipes, metal parts, they’re professional scavengers.

So, some firemen and police got some overtime. About eight in the morning, the Boun Appetito awning is on the sidewalk, the Tender Shoots produce bodega proprietors tell me they were working all night putting out the fire.

Come back to town after visiting with Mom for Turkey Day around Six, they’re working still. Big spotlights s on full incandesce, so bright you could read, the Buon Appetito building is entirely knocked down, the cherry picker gizmo was maneuvered between the drooping phone and electrical cables draped between the poles, the few spectators were saying they have to knockdown that building too.

I noticed the shelves were empty in J Nails, the nail salon; the first place I ever had a pedicure, a very rare indulgence, really nice folks, clean, in between customers the owners, Korean, would read their bibles. Their workers were all young women, some Korean but mainly from Central America, they made me feel comfortable. They were sweet. Thick accents, poor English skills, communication was an amusing chore.

Buon Appetito made above average pizza, it was an above average place. I loved their calamari and they would do grilled asparagus and zucchini and a broccoli rabe with sausage. Clean, good food, real friendly staff.  What a great place.

 

These neighborhood joints, you discover them, go frequently for a while and for no real reason beyond whim and circumstance, the frequency fades. Yet, these were good businesses, they were down-home and affordable, like the old neighborhood this part of Jersey City used to be, and yet were not out of place in the new, more exclusive neighborhood emerging, in spite of any resistance. You think of them fondly and when you had a chance to again partake of their business, it was a pleasure.

The day after Thanksgiving – Black Friday, maybe you’ve heard – both buildings reduced to rubble. The businesses in the adjacent buildings were closed, in the apartments above the businesses the lights were off. The effects of this local catastrophe may still be determined.  

It’s shocking to see, the pile of charred rubble. The view from the back of the buildings, more wreckage.

 The actual fire was extinguished in an hour to two, under control in about four, but was enough time for the flame to make these old buildings unstable and uninhabitable. You sense the abrupt loss, the aftermath of destruction. The disaster contained, one moves on. When the disaster is in your neighborhood, that feeling of loss is more tangible and constant. It tarries.  You get a daily taste of anguish, and you know that for at least 22 others, it’s more than a taste. We’ll think of this now every time we pass this hole on the 300 block of Grove Street. The rubble will be carted away, new buildings erected, a process that will take more than a year for sure. We will have the memories of what was here and of the day what was here was suddenly gone. Remember the Thanksgiving of 2013?

 

No lives were lost, just businesses and homes and possessions. Hundreds of others experiencing lesser digress of inconvenience, from the firemen and demolition workers who had to spend Thanksgiving on the job to the more minor detours people who walk this stretch of Grove Street now must take.  Life is shared in a city. Something like this happens, were all affected even though we are all affected differently. You pray for your neighbors affected more severely.

You read about a tragedy somewhere else, you have some empathy. But when it’s where you live, that empathy is more inescapable. You just want to help if you can, you’re compelled to express support or comfort.

These 22 people were being helped by the Red Cross. Without warning, without explanation, Thanksgiving plans erased and they were immediately turned into refugees. By mid-day Black Friday Facebook newsfeeds had announcements of fundraisers for the victims of the Grove Street fire. Living in a city, it is not as eBay and often not even possible to escape the feeling of loss, or the reactions to that loss,

Small businesses are lifelines. They give city dwellers quality of life, the ordinary respites of our day-to-day. A manicure, a slice of pizza with sausage and suddenly the moment you are in turns perfect even if just for that moment. But that can be enough, that can be all that is needed to endure certain days.

That potential of a perfect moment has been burned away. Not forever, just for now.

Those owners and workers in these business, those who lived in the apartments above those businesses, seeing this same rubble we all are gawking at, we can only taste the anguish they have, help if we can, let them know they’re not alone.

 

 

 

 

 

Friday night a paper handbill was taped to a parking meter in front of the once buildings now massive pile of debris. Customers were alerted that J Nails will be in a new location soon. They were being directed to a Facebook I could not find.

Somebody showed up for the mani-pedi appointment, probably get them everybody Friday and they saw this.

We don’t need these reminders. But we get them anyway.

Buon Appetito Website 

 

 

 

 

Urban Realism Building Windows

Blair Urban participated in the Art Activates Alley MuralProject blogged about here. Her website is here.

She painted this water/sky/earth/city mural on Newark Avenue.

Seeing bodies of water always induces a kind of dreamy tranquility. All rivers run into the sea, yet the sea is not filled says Ecclesiastes, a line I never tire of quoting. Murals recently popped up on buildings throughout Jersey City, a city-sponsored project that I am still catching up with and that brought together bare building exteriors with artists and making available municipal cherry-picker vehicles so artists could reach the heights necessary to make their vision a reality.

This vast uncanny, deceptively realistic mural is on the western side of an edifice on the northern side of Newark Avenue.

Water dominates the image, that substances that covers most of our planet and from where our protoplasm-souls crawled out to evolve into our now urban-souls passing by this mural that demands to be noticed as go to work or love during what we call linear time.

 

The water is forefront, yet is essentially blank, a simple suggestion yet lots of room for our minds to freely roam, lots of a sort of nothingness as the obvious focal point, which is clever in and of itself but then nothing about this mural is obvious. It’s not just water but also the equally blank sky that occupies its center-point, a seemingly lack of detail compels our attention, just like looking at real water and seeing the empty sky as your field of view expands seeking the horizon.

That horizon though is a city, the geometric skyline of rectangles, a far away life we assume is more exciting than ours. The foreground is lonely but just as crucial in the framing of the central liquid/sky emptiness – a thicket of tall marsh grass, gently swaying in an invisible breeze. In one corner (often a car is parked here, dammit!) are faintly visible railroad tracks.

In the upper corner is a branch, reddish-pink leaves – we’re in forever autumn and where we are sitting we see the city but also another similar shore to the one we where we now sit, stark and rustic and definitely not urban like our horizon that divides the greenish, overcast sky from the bluish water. What a subtle yet astonishing artistic choice – the sky has a hue of a water, the water the hue of sky, each reflecting the other.

Then you realize, this setting pictured on the wall is a place in Jersey City, the fading tracks are those abandoned Central Jersey Line, unused for more than half a century, those vestiges of our nation’s glorious railroad past, you see along outlying inland areas of Liberty State Park, where closes to Hudson bay there are stretches of grassy shores, from which the view contains both Manhattan and Bayonne, the other rocky inlet. This mural depicts the view of we looking out from our Jersey City Isthmus. What is seen tells us as much about who is doing the seeing as it does about the physical visage that is viewed.

Then we get to the windows, the actual real windows of life as we know it on this building that now and before this painting was a building doing what a building always does, housing occupants for whatever reason its occupants require this housing. The object is as indifferent to the art as the art is to what it depicts and the feelings, thoughts and notions that depiction invokes in those who see it. Here, the artist uses these windows as part of her expression. She doesn’t avoid them or ignore them, she seems to paint around them but in such a way that the windows become surrealistic entities within this watery pastoral of sky and shoreline and distant city. They recall Salvador Dali as they give us an interior doubt that protests against our acceptance of an unqualified faith in the ultimate truth of an exterior reality. The windows have a functional purpose for the building, but the artist incorporates this medium in her message. They are transmuted from functional to the aesthetic, they now seem designed into the whole of the visual. It’s as if the windows only exist because of this painting. The windows new reality is for us to ponder our own assumptions of what is real.

Windows show us things we would never otherwise see, but those places are where we happen not to be. Whether we hope to go there or whether seeing the distance makes us happier with where we are has nothing to do with the window, and ultimately more to do with us – and the unknown future that is part of our burden or mortality – than the there in the distance. Windows show us where we are not while also reminding us we are where we are.

The Windows float in the sky, are incorporated in the city skyline and as part of a distance imaginary heavens above a city of buildings. The windows allow us to dream away the loneliness of the tall grass and tree and abandoned railroad tracks.

 

 

Paint the Car

The story, according to Ray Schwartz and his wife, Beth, is that the car drives like a dream but after a couple of accidents, one involving a NJ Transit bus, it was dented and bland. They offered it to Uta Brauser, founder and proprietress of the oft-beleaguered Creative Grove as an art project.

Throughout the year, Uta has taken refrigerators and used them as canvasses, inviting people to paint whatever, sort of taking graffiti and street art, and the general inclination of visual spontaneity into a public space. Ray & Ben decided why not do something similar to the family vehicle. It doesn’t look that great to begin with, they said, why not turn the beat up automobile into art instead?

So, on the last Creative Grove before the Christmas Sales season is in full swing, the public art project of Paint the Car was held.

 

Interactive Art?

Highly.

Performance Art?

Partially.

I was reminded of those contests where people take turns destroying a car, hammering it with a sledge hammer, or they win prizes, often the car, when people keep their hands on a car and whoever can keep it on for the longest is the winner.

This was about endurance, it was just about passing inspiration. I went early in the event, saw the first squiggly line effacing the freshly washed paint job. Came about back an hour later. More artists were working. Everyone was strangely solemn, not in a overly serious or sad way; but they didn’t want to just create meaningless lines. There was a focus and intention by each person who picked up a brush.

The project was open to everyone, but it seemed most of the folks not only had some talent, but wanted to apply a worthwhile image, no matter how simple or fleeting. A visual idea had formed in their minds and they wanted to express that idea as accurately as possible given the spontaneous nature of the event and the imperfect canvas of an automobile. The process of paint expressing barely deliberated thought was fascinating to watch.

Art argues against conformity. What is more conformist than a solid color car, so bound by design and traffic laws, Paint the Car was a fun art event, but maybe it spoke to an inner desire many of us share. Why must all cars look the same mono-color? Why can’t a car be as unique as its driver?

Creative Grove needs funds to continue. Click here todonate.