Friday, September 10, 2004
Sunday's forecast looks excellent for The Glen Jones Programme featuring X-Ray Burns broadcasting live from the Asbury Park Boardwalk, in front of HoJo's next to Convention Hall Pier. It's great that Glen & X-Ray are going back to Asbury after skipping a year. Glen cut way back on live remotes when he started his second WFMU show, Jonesville Station, an interview program requiring a lot of prep work. But when it comes to Jersey boardwalks in general & Asbury Park in particular, Glen is a True Believer. He never lost hope in Asbury Park, & to prove it he's broadcast from the olde Howard Johnson's many times, events that are part tiki beach party, part reminiscent of the American Bandstand weeks in Atlantic City back in the late Fifties. Glen's also broadcast from Wildwood. Unfortunately, he never found a satisfactory location at Keansburg or he would've done shows there also.
I don't get out to many WFMU "events," & some of those I attend only because I'm a veteran DJ who ought to be there. But Glen & X-Ray in Asbury is different. I've written many times about how completely at home I feel on boardwalks. Even Asbury Park at its worst has failed to unnerve me totally; with the familiar, reassuring clunk & creak of the boards under my feet, the geometry of sea air faded wood stretched out ahead like a drawing exercise in visual language, plus my memories of better days & nights, I imagine the place as a small, abused section of a single great boardwalk that runs all the way to Cape May City, that cannot go forever without being healed, if only through a resurrection of myth. This is, I think, exactly how Glen Jones feels when he's there.
The broadcast is this Sunday 9/12, noon to 3 pm, beneath the overhanging orange roof of a legendary Howard Johnson's that refuses to shutter, a few steps from Madam Marie's tiny shack. Kids are welcome. You can fish, frolic in the surf, drink beer, pig out on greasy boardwalk food, sleep the afternoon away on the beach, & afterward stroll down to pretty & pleasantly boring Ocean Grove & experience for yourself why these two towns have always been linked in uniquely yin-yang relationship. You can convince yourself, as both Glen & I did long ago, that Asbury Park hasn't died, it's just semi-comatose.
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"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be." Thomas Jefferson
I don't get out to many WFMU "events," & some of those I attend only because I'm a veteran DJ who ought to be there. But Glen & X-Ray in Asbury is different. I've written many times about how completely at home I feel on boardwalks. Even Asbury Park at its worst has failed to unnerve me totally; with the familiar, reassuring clunk & creak of the boards under my feet, the geometry of sea air faded wood stretched out ahead like a drawing exercise in visual language, plus my memories of better days & nights, I imagine the place as a small, abused section of a single great boardwalk that runs all the way to Cape May City, that cannot go forever without being healed, if only through a resurrection of myth. This is, I think, exactly how Glen Jones feels when he's there.
The broadcast is this Sunday 9/12, noon to 3 pm, beneath the overhanging orange roof of a legendary Howard Johnson's that refuses to shutter, a few steps from Madam Marie's tiny shack. Kids are welcome. You can fish, frolic in the surf, drink beer, pig out on greasy boardwalk food, sleep the afternoon away on the beach, & afterward stroll down to pretty & pleasantly boring Ocean Grove & experience for yourself why these two towns have always been linked in uniquely yin-yang relationship. You can convince yourself, as both Glen & I did long ago, that Asbury Park hasn't died, it's just semi-comatose.
Add YOUR comments here
