You can't make up New Jersey stories like this...

"Her name was Hope Diamond, "the Gem of the Exotics."
She was a shapely, dark-haired burlesque queen, performing through the 1950s and ’60s from Buffalo to Toledo, as a headliner in places like Union City’s old Hudson Theater.
This week she will be on a different stage with a different name — accused of taking cash that did not go into a garter belt, but rather into Jersey City’s tumultuous mayoral campaign."

Ah, burlesque!  "New Jersey was once a hotbed of girlie shows, benefiting from the exodus of performers leaving New York after striptease was banned by Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia in 1942. The Garden State was one of the last holdouts as burlesque gave way to strip clubs, with local theaters continuing to offer old school comedy into the early '70s.

The famed Minsky Brothers produced elaborate spectacles featuring a cast of 40 at the Adams Theatre in Newark. The city was also home to the Empire Theatre, a vaudeville house that had been presenting racy entertainment since 1912.

(Want more about Asbury Park scandals, scoundrels, and successes?)

Other haunts included the Hudson Theatre in Union City and the Savoy Theatre in Asbury Park.
Venues were usually in immigrant neighborhoods and ethnic stereotypes were joke fodder, laughs springing from the misadventures of Irish cops and German butchers. Burlesque was racially segregated, dying out just as the civil rights movement was beginning to take hold.


The word burlesque is a French term for caricature and it also links to burla, Italian for joke. The etymology may have foreign roots, but the American style is an original, a mix of glitz and satire with costumes as colorful as the language."

Fun stuff from today's Star-Ledger.  Unfortunately, the people of Jersey City resented being stripped by this once-titilatting burlesque queen.

Keep writing,

Maureen

Just Bragging about Someone Who Graduated from St. Joe's in West New York...

Photographer and videographer Mauro Altamura received his MFA from the Visual Studies Workshop/SUNY Buffalo and his BA from Ramapo College of New Jersey. He has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, and the New York State Council on the Arts, among others. His photographs have been published in Aperture Magazine and La Recherche Photographique. Altamura is also a short story writer and an Assistant Professor of Photography at New Jersey City University.

This particular series of his work has been created by scanning well-known, historical photographs from textbooks, and cropping out all information except the solitary individual. Altamura explains, “The person stands alone, isolated from his/her context and any intended meaning. These anonymous people may be in a picture that is famous, but in that relationship their image exists solely as the non-identified bystander or a figure that is part of the overall composition and form of a photograph. They have become, in essence, non-persons. By physically dissecting the image to reverse the figure/ground relation, by making the anonymous person the sole occupier of the picture plane, I am attempting to deconstruct and flip the hierarchical authority of the image. The issue, therefore, is to construct a model that reveals the unacknowledged and by extension (and metaphor) considers alternate histories and people. These people, who have been unknowingly photographed, who are part of the photographer’s ‘composition’ are the anonymous and the unrecognized. This work is an attempt to prioritize their individual existence.”

His work has appeared in shows at City Without Walls in Newark and VertexList in Brooklyn, NY, as well as solo exhibits at the State Museum of New Jersey and the Jersey City Museum, where his work is part of their collections. Mauro Altamura's work also appears in many other public and private collections including those of the Museum of Fine Art in Houston, and the Polytechnic Institute in Tokyo, Japan

Keep writing, Mauro, et. al.,

Maureen

Photographer and videographer Mauro Altamura received his MFA from the Visual Studies Workshop/SUNY Buffalo and his BA from Ramapo College of New Jersey. He has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, and the New York State Council on the Arts, among others. His photographs have been published in Aperture Magazine and La Recherche Photographique. Altamura is also a short story writer and an Assistant Professor of Photography at New Jersey City University.

This particular series of his work has been created by scanning well-known, historical photographs from textbooks, and cropping out all information except the solitary individual. Altamura explains, “The person stands alone, isolated from his/her context and any intended meaning. These anonymous people may be in a picture that is famous, but in that relationship their image exists solely as the non-identified bystander or a figure that is part of the overall composition and form of a photograph. They have become, in essence, non-persons. By physically dissecting the image to reverse the figure/ground relation, by making the anonymous person the sole occupier of the picture plane, I am attempting to deconstruct and flip the hierarchical authority of the image. The issue, therefore, is to construct a model that reveals the unacknowledged and by extension (and metaphor) considers alternate histories and people. These people, who have been unknowingly photographed, who are part of the photographer’s ‘composition’ are the anonymous and the unrecognized. This work is an attempt to prioritize their individual existence.”

His work has appeared in shows at City Without Walls in Newark and VertexList in Brooklyn, NY, as well as solo exhibits at the State Museum of New Jersey and the Jersey City Museum, where his work is part of their collections. Mauro Altamura's work also appears in many other public and private collections including those of the Museum of Fine Art in Houston, and the Polytechnic Institute in Tokyo, Japan.

Rush Limbaugh is a Traitor...

Watch New Jersey's own Jon Stewart throw the Bible in the faces of Limbaugh, Robertson, and Maddow.  You know, when I was a kid, the nuns used to tell us that this was the sort of stuff that made Jesus cry on the cross.  They were right. 

Today's Jersey Words:

“We had an administration which was not focused, as it should be, on terrorism and that’s understandable,” said Kean, the former governor of New Jersey, who was appointed to head the National Commission on Terror Attacks against the United States in 2002. “They were focused on health care and global warming and the economy. That’s very understandable. Secondly, we weren’t really focused on Yemen and the terrible things that are happening there. Now we are and that’s a good thing. And, thirdly, there were holes obviously and the [intelligence-gathering] system wasn’t working well. We found out it wasn’t working well, and the president understands it’s not working well and now we’re focused on fixing it.”


...Former NJ Governor Thomas Kean, Jr. December 30, 2009

Keep writing,

Maureen

Again, the Shore in Winter...

On the beach at night,


Stands a child with her father,

Watching the east, the autumn sky.Up through the darkness,

While ravening clouds, the burial clouds, in black masses spreading,

Lower sullen and fast athwart and down the sky,

Amid a transparent clear belt of ether yet left in the east,

Ascends large and calm the lord-star Jupiter,

And nigh at hand, only a very little above,

Swim the delicate sisters the Pleiades.From the beach the child holding the hand of her father,

Those burial-clouds that lower victorious soon to devour all,

Watching, silently weeps.Weep not, child,

Weep not, my darling,

With these kisses let me remove your tears,

The ravening clouds shall not long be victorious,

They shall not long possess the sky, they devour the stars only in

apparition,

Jupiter shall emerge, be patient, watch again another night, the

Pleiades shall emerge,

They are immortal, all those stars both silvery and golden shall

shine out again,

The great stars and the little ones shall shine out again, they endure,

The vast immortal suns and the long-enduring pensive moons shall

again shine.Then dearest child mournest thou only for Jupiter?

Considerest thou alone the burial of the stars?Something there is,

(With my lips soothing thee, adding I whisper,

I give thee the first suggestion, the problem and indirection,)

Something there is more immortal even than the stars,

(Many the burials, many the days and nights, passing away,)

Something that shall endure longer even than lustrous Jupiter

Longer than sun or any revolving satellite,

Or the radiant sisters the Pleiades.
 

... On the Beach at Night by Walt Whitman, Camden 
 
Keep writing,
 
Maureen

East Brunswick Woman Finds Treasure Trove of Historic Photos from Nazi Era...

When Kim Ciak searched through her grandparents' attic to look for her late mother's Elvis Presley bubblegum cards, she instead, to her great surprise, found photographs — wrapped in linen, stored inside a hope chest — of Adolf Hitler and other high-ranking Nazis.
The slide-sized photographs, her grandmother told her, belonged to her late grandfather, Julius Dobrzynski, who served in the U.S. Army during World War II and whose duties included defusing live bombs.
Ciak took the photos home with her that February day, placed them in her hutch, and didn't look at them again until after her grandmother passed away in September.
"The photos were interesting, they were very interesting, but I really didn't know what I was looking at," the 23-year resident of East Brunswick said. "It was time I found out."
Last month, still puzzled by the photos, Ciak, a 1985 graduate of St. Mary's High School — now Cardinal McCarrick High School — in South Amboy, sought the help of her former history teacher, Frank Yusko, now a teacher at Spotswood High School.
After receiving an e-mail from his former student, Yusko and his colleague, German teacher Dianna Altmiller, met with Ciak and they both determined the photos were of the 1936 Nuremberg rally.

Kim Ciak, Frank Yusko, and Dianna Altmiller with the Schonstein photos.

"I was able to explain to Kim that every one of the Nuremberg rallies has a theme, and this rally was themed "The Rally of Honor,"' Altmiller said. "The photos had been taken in 1936, the third year after the rallies had moved to Nuremberg."
Ciak said each photo is numbered. The number goes up to 100, but 20 photos are missing, she said.
She doesn't know how her grandfather obtained the images. However, according to Yusko, it was common for military members to collect various souvenirs during their travels.
According to Altmiller, the photos were taken by Otto Schonstein, a Nazi sympathizer.  "He was a photographer who was very innovative, one of the people in the forefront of a stereoscopic photography, which was meant to show scenery and is the predecessor of our panoramic view," Altmiller said. "He was part of Hitler's unspoken propaganda team."

A Schonstein photo of Hitler in Munich, Germany 1939

Altmiller added the photos were likely part of an "elaborate" hardcover commemorative book that included transcripts of speeches, tickets to rallies and numerous newspaper articles.
"In the front cover, there would be this little door that opened up, and inside the door, there would be a 3-D viewer," she said. "You would take the viewer out and look at the book. It was a souvenir book similar to what you would pick up at the World's Fair, but this was the deluxe model."
Ciak said she found the photographs "surprising."
"It makes things hit home more, because you're not seeing these photos in a text book," she said. "Now you're seeing actual photos of these people." Altmiller agreed.
"They were absolutely chilling to look at," she said. "I teach this, I've seen video, I've read books, and I have been in Germany to study, but when you have seen someone's actual photos, it almost puts you in that place at that time."
Both Altmiller and Yusko said they have since shared the images with their classes. Altmiller said her classes were "taken back" when they saw the pictures.
As for the missing images, both instructors told Ciak to keep searching.  "I told her that a museum or a historical society would be very interested in having these," Yusko said. "When she first told me about them, I was expecting them to just be old photographs that perhaps a German family had taken, but when I saw them, I knew immediately that she had something extraordinary. It was a pretty historic find."

.....Leo Rommel, The Home-News and Tribune, New Brunswick, December 14, 2009

Nazis in the attic!  Disturbing!  Really, this is  a great find and a great follow-up by Spotswood educators.  According to a comment placed on the THNT website, the  Dobrzynski family will donate these stereostopic photos to the United States Holocaust Museum.

Today's Jersey Words:

We land in the fields where

the monarch butterflies go.

And we pray.

We pray for the living and the dead,

And I wake up praying,

And put on my work uniform,

And go to my shift factory job

Where I write this poem.

... from Mr. Danish and the Butterflies by Joe Weil, Elizabeth in What Remains

Keep writing,

Maureen

Girls Gone Critter...

Rachel (straight & engaged!) and Nicole (bisexual) are adorable, genuine, hopeful, and actual friends in the cutest geeky-ist way ever. On Anyone But Me, this ease translates into an on-screen lesbian relationship that really rings true, if often awkward. Their chemistry gives the show an emotional & hilarious kick that keeps viewers coming back for more.

But I know what you’re asking yourself — WHAT IS A CRITTER? What does it mean for these ladies to be referred to as the highest honor in the land, CRITTERS OF THE YEAR? Let us explain, as a Top 100 Critters of the Century list is surely around the corner.

Nicole Pacent and Rachel Hip-Flores (Piscataway)

* Critter: A critter is someone who does things that normal people do in a way cuter than the average person. It can be used as a noun, adjective, or a greeting. Examples of critter behavior are as follows: being super cute and fun all the time, not causing drama, wearing hoodies that make you want to cuddle no matter what your relationship is, a stranger being super nice for no reason for no personal benefit for themselves, making the best out of awful situations, always being up for anything.

Critter is totally not a sexual term at all, although obvs we’ve probs all had sex with critters, it is by no means a qualification for the term.

...this from "Top 20 Icons of 2009"

Rock on, Critters!

Keep writing,

Maureen

New Poetry from Stacey Balkun...

Unlearning How To Walk Through New York City


I pull the rush from my steps like weeds, end

this relentless curiosity that

sprouts from old sidewalk cracks, begs for answers

scaffolding and alleys cannot offer.


My legs are ready to journey, to leave

this urban life behind and settle down

south, ready to set down the nightly wail

of sirens for floating songs of bullfrogs.


I want to see trees take over, reclaim

their own lost wood, vines jointed like fingers

that spread across burnt shingles, vines pulsing

like arteries and veins, always growing.


Down new streets I will step without tripping

mosey slow, heart never skipping a beat.

.....Stacey Balkun, Piscataway then, New Orleans now, North Carolina next

Each of us who is frequent traveller to New York City has what I call the "city walk," the extremely fast, purposeful stride of a person who means business and who has an actual destination.  I suppose this is a walk to be unlearned, especially when it becomes a metaphor for one's orientation to life in general.  Weeds and rushes.  Good stuff.

See you at the Newark Dodgefest 2010!

Keep writing,

Maureen

Hilarious Article from Today's New York Times...

Surf, Skin and Jersey. What’s Not to Love?

By NEIL GENZLINGER

In the United States even the most unrepentant, obviously guilty serial killer or multimillion-dollar defrauder is entitled to a defense. It is in that spirit that this writer, an actual resident of New Jersey, steps forward to defend “Jersey Shore,” which seems likely to be the consensus choice for most appalling show of 2009.

The series, which arrived a month ago on MTV, seemed on paper as if it would be just another make-strangers-share-a-house reality show: eight young people of dubious intelligence and accomplishment were thrown together in a lavishly appointed residence in Seaside Heights, about an 80-mile drive from Manhattan, for a hormonally charged, alcohol-fueled summer.

But these insufferable eight were billed as Italian-Americans (though who really knows?), and their display of debauchery and self-absorption was so over the top that it quickly drew complaints of ethnic stereotyping. The cast’s numbingly frequent use of a term for Italian-Americans that many consider offensive hasn’t helped. Just before Christmas the New Jersey Italian American Legislative Caucus called for the show’s cancellation.

But surely “Jersey Shore,” which is broadcast on Thursday nights, must have some redeeming value, mustn’t it? Yes, it must. Herewith, five reasons to like “Jersey Shore”:

1. THE ACTUAL JERSEY SHORE HASN’T BEEN THIS INTERESTING IN YEARS. Sorry to be blunt, but no one has found summer on the New Jersey coast exciting since the shark attacks of 1916.

On the boardwalks you can buy fried dough and fried Oreos, as well as taffy that will undo any dental work you’ve had done in the last 40 years. You can buy overpriced tickets for amusement park rides so timid they’d be laughed out of the kiddie area of a Six Flags. And that’s about it.

You can also venture onto the actual beach, though you might not want to after reading the reports from Clean Ocean Action’s annual New Jersey beach cleanups, in which volunteers collect and catalog trash. Figures from 2008 included 17,957 straws and stirrers, 3,319 tampon applicators, 656 condoms and 165 syringes.
Not that Seaside Heights doesn’t try to do something about the litter problem: the summer before the “Jersey Shore” eight showed up, one of the high points, as trumpeted in a YouTube video by the town’s public relations department, was the purchase of a new beach-cleaning machine, a lime-green Barber Surf Rake. The news has not exactly set the world on fire: in the almost two years since its posting, the video has had only about 650 views. MTV’s “Jersey Shore” YouTube promo, in contrast, has had more than 733,000.

So though Seaside Heights has issued a statement distancing itself from the show, and a state tourism official has expressed concern, everyone involved knows there’s no such thing as bad publicity. Will there be billboards on the highways next summer reading, “If you’re coming here because of ‘Jersey Shore,’ please turn around and take your tourist dollars to some other state”? No, there won’t.

2. MAYBE ‘JERSEY SHORE’ WILL FINALLY KILL OFF THE KARDASHIANS. Anyone truly interested in identifying the most irritating reality show of 2009 need look no further than “Keeping Up With the Kardashians” on E!, now inexplicably in its fourth season.

Maybe people are still watching this show, about a vapid family that has done nothing to earn its fame, because they have been numbed into a sort of trance that creates the illusion of being entertained. “Jersey Shore” should slap them out of that; its brash, bawdy inhabitants make the indolent, overprivileged Kardashians look as exciting as an old “Father Knows Best” episode.

3. YOUNG PEOPLE NEED BAD EXAMPLES. Too many children today are reaching their teenage years armed only with a Disney definition of “bad person”: it’s someone who talks cattily about your wardrobe behind your back, maybe copies a few answers off your math quiz.

They have no idea how much ignorance, narcissism, predatory sexism and hair-gel abuse lurk out there in the real world. Unless they watch “Jersey Shore.” From that perspective the show is a sort of public service.

4. THE ENABLERS CAN NOW BE UNMASKED. Vileness and incompetence love the darkness; the light of day exposes them for what they are. Putting the spotlight on the “Jersey Shore” eight gives us the opportunity to root out all the influences that formed them.

The schools, if any, where they were educated can now be located and shut down. The teachers who so abysmally failed to impart to them the rudiments of civilized life can be fired. The gyms and style salons that seduced them with the lie that physical appearance is more important than personality can be picketed and boycotted. With vigilance we can ensure that no more of our young people turn out the way these ones did.

5. UM, LET’S SEE, THERE’S,

well ... All right, so maybe “five reasons to like ‘Jersey Shore’ ” was setting the bar too high. In truth it was hard enough coming up with four. And anyway “Jersey Shore” is already on the verge of becoming old news: MTV has a casting call up for “people who appear to be between the ages of 18-25” and have had bad experiences as a result of “sexting” nude pictures of themselves on their cellphones. Something to look forward to in 2010.

Great stuff to start the week with!

Keep writing,

Maureen

A Mighty Wind...

Again I reply to the triple winds

running chromatic fifths of derision

outside my window:

Play louder.

You will not succeed. I am

bound more to my sentences

the more you batter at me

to follow you.

And the wind,

as before, fingers perfectly

its derisive music.



..... January by William Carlos Williams, Rutherford

Isn't this poem perfect for today?  I didn't step out of the house once.  Too cold.  Too windy. Vacation and holidays over.  Brrrr!  Who wants to listen to the wind's derisive music, anyway?

Keep writing,

Maureen

Channeling Julie and Julia...

Rollin' with Julia

Okay!  I am trying the recipe that got everything going here on this blog and on Julie Powell's - the fabulous Boeuf Bourguignon that made a nation of foodies rise up and cheer.  My high school friend and her family will dine in the French fashion here tonight.  It's certainly a far cry from the "yellow American on a roll" days at lucnh at St. Joseph's of the Palisades High School in West New York. (BlueJays are the Best!)
I am "browning" small white onions, toasting mushrooms, and making buttered noodles to serve with the beef, baguettes, and crisp champagne.  A tasteful way to start the new year!

Today's Jersey Words:

"Oil is as precious as gold, shorts are acceptable attire for every season, and food, like most things, is best when left to its own simple beauty."

.....Mario Batali, Rutgers University, Class of 1982

     (This Iron Chef majored in Spanish and Economics on the New Brunswick campus. Go figure!)

Keep writing,

Maureen

Stephen Dunn and Mark Doty in Cape May

Sunrise over the jetty, Ocean City December 28, 2009

Join Peter Murphy and the winter prose and poetry crew in Cape May this month.  This teaching and writing series has grown over the years from an informal gathering to a recognized bit of literary sunshine in the frosty months.  Mark Doty's Golden Retrievals poem is still one of my favorites, but Stephen Dunn captures the wintry shore in the poem Walking the Marshland:

It was no place for the faithless,

so I felt a little odd

walking the marshland with my daughters,

Canada geese all around and the blue

herons just standing there;

safe, and the abundance of swans.

The girls liked saying the words,

gosling,

egret, whooping crane, and they liked

when I agreed. The casinos were a few miles

to the east.

I liked saying craps and croupier

and sometimes I wanted to be lost

in those bright

windowless ruins. It was April,

the gnats and black flies

weren't out yet.

The mosquitoes hadn't risen

from their stagnant pools to trouble

paradise and to give us

the great right to complain.

I loved these girls. The world

beyond Brigantine

awaited their beauty and beauty

is what others want to own.

I'd keep that

to myself. The obvious

was so sufficient just then.

Sandpiper. Red-wing

Blackbird. "Yes," I said.

But already we were near the end.

Praise refuge,

I thought. Praise whatever you can.

Keep writing,

Maureen