Brunswick Community Garden

Harvest Time at the community garden, or at least clean up time. All the flowers gone. Maybe next season I’ll try to write something more substantial on the community garden, which is pretty cool and fascinates me, but I know little to nothing about it. Please notice the cute kitty.

Boomerangs Gone

Gosh Darn it. I hate when this happens, finding new closure of a business in the neighborhood. Boomerangs on Brunswick Street, called itself a “re-sale and consignment shop.” Had lots of stuff I never bought. Why do I need vintage when everything I have is old already, I’m just waiting for it to come back in style. Actually, the people running this place were very nice and one time I did have a real find, a Bob Dylan Bootleg C.D., one of the unreleased Basement Tapes, with the very bizarre “Sign of the Cross,” and a Big Bill Bronzy CD, which cost only four bucks. That’s pretty cool I thought, but I guess in this day and age, Bob Dylan bootlegs ain’t enough to do it. I suspect it was a victim of the recession and not of the gentrification since there is a for rent sign, if it was gentrification there might be a Gap or Starbucks there already. They have an out of date myspace page with some images of their. It didn’t last too long actually, only about a year or so I gather, new store for old stuff. After you live in the same place for a few years, you get to play a mental game, ‘What Used To Be Here,” when you walk around and notice what has gone. Strolling Brunswick is now less fun.

Ringo & Popeye

Using a string tied to a stick, and the stick propping up a cardboard carton, my brother caught a sparrow by putting bread on the grass underneath the carton then pulling the string when a hungry bird flew down. He told my sister and I that we could keep the sparrow as our pet. He said the sparrow's wing was injured and he would never fly away.

We named the sparrow Ringo. We kept Ringo in the carton and fed him bread, but he wouldn't eat. Sitting on a nest of shredded newspaper, Ringo barely moved or chirped. In a couple of days, the box was empty. Where is Ringo, we asked our brother. He pointed to the hill in the back yard. He said Ringo dug a hole and crawled in.

We went to the hill and dug up the fresh dirt with spoons. We called to him... Ringo, Ringo. Finally I saw feathers and grabbed. Ringo was covered with tiny green worms. My sister screamed and I started to cry. I threw the carcass down and we ran into the house, wailing with tears. Nothing was explained to us. Our father told us to shut up and made my brother put what was left of Ringo back in the ground.

A few months later our grandfather died. We called our grandfather Popeye and our grandmother Nana. Popeye was the greatest. All the other relatives hated us, called us disrespectful, ill-behaved. Popeye would walk with my sister and I down to the corner store, buy us candy, baseball cards, water pistols, whatever we wanted. He loved us.

One day, my mother told my sister and I that Popeye was asleep and wouldn't wake up. We were dropped off at a baby sitter while the rest of the family went somewhere. Later in the day, the entire family and many of the neighbors gathered at our house. It was like a party. There were platters of food on the dining room table. The adults drank booze and the children drank soda. Everyone was talking about Popeye. Nana kept hugging everybody. We kept asking, when will he wake up? When will he be back? My father said, if we weren't quiet we'd have to go to bed, even though it was the afternoon.

Ken Bastard Assembles The Machine

Ken Bastard, now in youthful middle-age but still fair-haired, was a punk rock artist when being a punk rock artist was new and original. He has kept the dream alive by continuing to produce striking, relevant and compelling paintings. I’ve talked with him a few times, mainly at some bars we sometimes frequent. We shoot the breeze when we bump into each other walking around the neighborhood. One of the first blogs I wrote on J.C. Art was about a project Ken was working on a few months back. He’s an interesting guy, a gentlemen and the nicest “Bastard” I’ve ever met.

The Jersey City Art Community—dozens of folks— turned out for the opening reception/party of “The Machine,” new paintings by Ken Bastard at LITM, Newark Avenue’s best art gallery bar & bistro (at least on the Northside). The postcard announcing the solo show—it runs through November 29th—claims Ken is the LITM “Artist in Residence.” The bar was packed, two, three people deep, manyof the tables were filled. I suspect the turn-out indicated the high degree of regard Ken is held in by his colleagues, fellow artists and kindred spirits. Or maybe they were emailed the same invitation I received: “Be there or die.”

Judging by the attendance, the opening of The Machine is arguably the most important post-Artist Studio Tour event of the fall in Jersey City. Ken was drinking non-alcoholic beer and wearing a Ramone-style Biker Jacket. I asked him, “What are the paintings about?”

“The usual,” he said, his eyes mischievously twinkling, “death, misery and despair.”

In authentic punk rock fashion, he was kidding and being honest at the same time. Some of the images were violent, like an old man confronting a cop in riot gear, or face down bodies from Jonestown. But the other images I saw were of a body surfing at a mosh-pit, or my favorite, a hand reaching out of field of tall grass. They were intelligent and funny—the humor might have been dark, but there was more humor than darkness. The depictions were expertly drawn, the color schemes dynamic without being glaringly shocking. I found the art refreshingly flippant. Rock & Roll, pop culture, comic books, you could see a lot of these influences. A unique mind-set is palpable, many aspects of which you can identify with—even though that identification may surprise you.


The work, according to Ken, was done in a burst of a few months—approximately 100 pieces comprise The Machine—inspired by various ideas, things seen on television, or flipping through magazines or remembered. “I’m really just an illustrator, I just make paintings out of the illustrations. It’s the same thing I’ve been doing since I was a teenager.”

Critics and artists love to banter and bicker about terminology, like differences between illustration and painting. I don’t quite see the purpose in making these distinctions. Ken’s work though does not stand still. You feel activity and movement in the image painted, like the best Comic Books, oh, I’m sorry, I mean Graphic Novels. They may look like snap shots, a frozen moment, but they feel energetic, they seem to include the moments before and after the specific moment depicted on the canvas. They contain a vibrant complexity.

The hand in the grass picture, I looked at it for a while, and he not only captured a surreal image—the juxtaposition of the hand and the long blades of green—but you can also feel the breeze in the grass. Whose hand is it, why is it in the field, what is the hand reaching for?Is it a severed hand? Like many of the paintings in the show, this one seems to entrap the viewer into its own individualized narrative.

I’ve been having some personal health issues and I cannot drink for a while, so I couldn’t really hang out at the opening very long. It had been a long day at the day job. I wasn’t able to spend much time socializing. I’m sorry about that. During the reception party, a video of Ken painting was projected on screen covering the back wall. Behind the screen were a series of smaller paintings that would be unveiled later in the evening. Ken told me there was going to be another video shown later in the evening. I missed these things.

It was fun to see the art crowd. I know some of them slightly, and have even blogged about a coupla three as well. I never saw them all in the same place before. Familiar faces, friendly neighbors, showing solidarity and support. Ken told me a few months ago that he was working on something big. I guess he was assembling The Machine. Punk Rock was about celebrating even when there was nothing to celebrate. That wild, brash and witty aesthetic is on display at LITM. We haven’t seen that sensibility for a while. It may no longer be revolutionary, but Ken has made it new and fresh once again.

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The Day After Election Day 2004

He wasn’t finished expressing himself about the election. “That a right-wing administration motivated by the insatiable greed and sustained by murderous lies and led by a privileged dope should answer America’s infantile idea of mortality—how do we live with something so grotesque? How do you manage to insulate yourself from stupidity so bottomless?”

They were some six to eight years out of college, I thought, and so Kerry’s loss to Bush was taking a prominent place in the cluster of extreme historical shocks that would mentally shape their American kinship, as Vietnam had publicly defined their parents’ generation and as the Depression and the Second World War had organized the expectations of my parents and their friends. There had been the barely concealed chicanery that had given Bush the presidency in 2000; there had been the terrorist attacks of 2001 and the indelible memory of the doll-like people leaping from the high windows of the burning towers; and now there was this, a second triumph by the “ignoramus” they loathed as much for his undeveloped mental faculties as for his devious nuclear fairy tales, to enlarge the common experience that would set them apart from their younger brothers and sisters as well as from people like me. To them Bush Junior’s was never an administration but a regime that had seized power by judicial means. They were meant to be reclaiming their franchise in 2004, and horribly they didn’t, leaving them with the feeling, along about eleven last night, not only of having lost but in some way or other having been defrauded again.

From Exit Ghost by Philip Roth

Remembering to Vote

Seems I intro every political entry here with the disclaimer that I don’t want to write about politics. Yet, politics comes up all the time. I fear involuntary recruitment into the political blog-o-sphere, I don’t want to get caught up in the debates, and I need all my will to resist the powerful draw of the soapbox.

Nonetheless, New Jersey (and Virginia), in spite of voting in overwhelming numbers for Obama, went republican in this year’s Governor’s race.

I love to vote. I love going into the school where I vote in my district, saying high to the women, well, they’re mainly women, almost all Spanish, one lives in my building. Voting reinforces the small town feel of Jersey City, and it’s just a remarkable feeling I always get, realizing this moment is being repeated in schools and other places all across the land that I love best.

I don’t understand people who don’t vote, or who do not vote in non-presidential elections. On my father’s side, I have a direct descendent who fought in the American Revolution, I feel I owe it to him, John Henry Herrick. Getting frost bite at Valley Forge, I can’t take that for granted by being lazy. Not voting is intellectual laziness, I don’t accept a justification. His frost bite was not in vain!

The problem of course is a candidate like John Corzine. I just never warmed up to the guy. He got my vote, don’t get me wrong, both as Senator and Governor. I’m a Democrat. I rarely contribute money, and I don’t get involved in political activities beyond observation. But I always vote Democrat. I’m Blue. Even though the politicians often fall short, steadfast, loyal and true are my constant aspirations.

I’m a New Dealer. My political philosophy, in a nutshell, is based on the Sermon on the Mount and the Songs of Woody Guthrie. I don’t like the two part of the two party system any more than you do, but third parties just are not going anywhere. Ralph Nader is a douche bag. Every election, you have two choices and one choice will be closer to your political philosophy. This assumes you have a political philosophy, or more accurately, assumes you are aware of your political philosophy. I am not trying to convince anyone of the superior righteousness of mine, and I have friends and family members who vote republican, either all the time, often or some of the time. Although since I was old enough to vote, I’ve voted for a republican here or there—NEVER FOR PRESIDENT—but ever since the Monica Lewinsky mess, when the constitution was abused to impeach one of the greatest presidents, William Jefferson Clinton, I will never vote for a Republican in any capacity. The last eight years of that abomination called George W. Bush has only solidified my position.

That is just me. I’m just being honest, in this observation of our first, post-Obama election. Corzine is kind of a douchey guy—who the heck doesn’t wear a seat belt? I can’t think of a New Jersey (or any state I suppose) Governor that I loved, or even liked a whole lot. Actually, the gay guy wasn’t so bad. But good Lord, Whitman? Kean? give me a break, and I think I might have cast a vote for one of them during the pre-Monica days, probably because the Democrat candidate wasn’t appealing in any way. I justified this vote in another way. Like it or not, there will always be Republicans and sometimes your party wins and some time the other party wins. Moderate Republicans are good things because they have a moderating influence on the Right Wing nut jobs, but in my opinion, this has not been the case. The Moderate Republicans give the whack jobs like George W. Bush and Sarah Palin cover to make this country into a two tier fascist society where the rich get richer, the middle class dissolves and lives become one of drudgery, exploitation and emptiness.

A popular argument is that these are just state issues. That a Republican Governor in our blue garden state any no big thing, we’re still blue when it comes to the presidential. I don’t see it that. I see the political system as a huge infrastructure, local, state, federal, all moving together and if you believe in say, a New Deal, then voting against the party impedes that New Deal. Maybe you don’t believe in the New Deal, that’s up to you.

So, it’s easy to vote against Corzine. Shoot, I held my nose when I pulled the lever. The economy is in the crapper, and under Corzine, corruption has been rampant among our state’s Democrats, with the famous sting operation over the summer. Not much campaigning around these parts was there—who had more cooties, Healy or Corzine?

I read this in the morning’s New York Times: “In Hudson County, a party bastion where a number of Democratic officials were charged, only 39 percent of registered voters cast their ballots, county officials said”

The republicans got in because voters didn’t turn out, couldn’t be bothered. I want to say, who can blame them, but you know, you are wrong. Even if you don’t have a great-great-great-great grand pappy who lost toes at Valley Forge (I don’t know how many greats), it’s what America is all about.

I hate post-election day news, the circle jerk of spin and skin-deep analysis. Is this a referendum on Obama? Sick of Liberal Policies? We are a bunch of lazy, television addled, attention deficit disorder children. Eight years of Republican rule at the federal level has left this economy in the worst shape since the Great Depression. Very little improvement of the economy is done at the state level. What we need is more effective government, not less government. Has Obama accomplished what promised? Of course not, but it’s only been ten months, morons. Christie seems like a nice guy, he’s a Bruce Springsteen fan, and maybe he is not a nut job like Palin or Newt Gingrich or those other pieces of crap. But he was appointed by George W. Bush, and now he is the Governor. Ugh. On the other hand, Corzine was an uninspiring leader. He has a lackluster record at best. The field of Democrats in the state are not only thin in ranks, but tainted by corruption. The absence of enthusiasm surprised no one.

Remember that South Park episode, the election between a douche and a turd? (I don’t watch TV, I have every season on DVD). Yes, it is not a great choice, but just because you don’t cast your vote for Vader doesn’t weaken construction of a Death Star.

But the sun is shining, I’m not in the hospital, I’m writing on my blog and listening to some Bob Dylan. When all is said and done, everything is not political. And life can offer an abundance of beauty if you keep your eyes opened. Yesterday, I voted and I love to vote. It’s not my only love. Today is another reason why I'm thankful for the other loves.

139 Newark Avenue: Shades of Gray

A follow up to the original post about façade falling from the building at 139 Newark Ave., you would think that was enough. But stuff is still happening with this seemingly semi-safe building. Notice the sidewalk, see the two different tones of gray. They’re similar, but not exact. The gun metal concrete gray color scheme came with the Summer-long streetscaping project. See that the shade in of the sidewalk in directly adjacent to the building (right under the orange warning to fire fighters not to enter the building in case of fire), see how shiny it is—it was just recently painted when I snapped this shot. The gray does blend better than the more beige, old concrete—but why this faux streetscape side? Well, the cop informed that there were some buildings that could not be streetscaped, the sidewalk directly in front—the sidewalk sections directly adjacent to the building—is above a foundation that is too old to withstand the rigors of replacement. There are buildings other than 139 Newark Avenue sidewalk that also have painted over faux streetscaping. Most of the others are like 139 Newark, empty, fallow, stores haven’t been in there for a few years. (No wonder all 99 cents stores charge more than 99 cents, there’s no competition!) The police officer told me that replacing the sidewalk was now the responsibility of the building owners, not the city. I do not know if that means the sidewalk must be replaced by the owners eventually; or that they must replaced if the building is torn down. Some of the building foundations cannot withstand replacing a sidewalk, reassuring isn’t it?

But shades of gray are not the only 139 Newark Avenue story. There’s also scaffolding. See. Saw the guys putting it up.

How nice the scaffolding frames the spray painted orange warning to the firemen not to enter the building in case of fire.

A week or so before, I snapped pictures of the interior, through the glass of course. There are plans and permits and such, something about six studios, I don’t know if that means residential or not. Just what we need, more condos! Actually, I wish the developers and owners well, as I do the politicians and city officials who approved this project. I also hope that safety of the public was the first consideration in approval and the first priority of the everyone involved.