the rix mix

Labels: Christmas, holidays, New Jersey, Newark NJ, postcard

Labels: Fine Cuisine, gin mill, Newark NJ, postcard

Labels: cuisine, New Jersey, Newark NJ, postcard

Still haven't installed the window a/c. Last year I had to use it in May. Two 90+ days but it's dropping down to 80 Friday & staying in 80s all next week. But I may get it going over the weekend, becoming muggier, & the traffic picks up on the street after 6 am,  with garbage trucks passing  as early as 4. Some nights I keep the fan on & if noise wakes me early I close the window & get the cool, white noise going.

Newark NJ City Council passed a sad, disturbing law. All restaurants seating fewer than 20 persons (pizzerias, Chinese, fried chicken, etc) must post armed guards after 9 pm., or close. A lot of these eateries have bullet resistant plastic protecting the employees, & security cameras, but these don't protect the customers.  Response to Newark cop shot to death at Texas Fried Chicken & Pizza, a drive-by, the alleged perp aiming at someone else who escaped unscathed.  Cities must have some safe neighborhoods. They stabilize property values, middle & working class people buy & renovate homes in those neighborhoods. Newark has some attractive  neighborhoods, but it has no safe neighborhoods. There are murders in Ironbound, murders in the north ward's Forest Hills & Roseville. Weequahic & Clinton Hill are overrun with gangs, although during the day many of their tree-lined streets appear deceptively   quiet & suburban.  There are murders around Beth Israel Hospital. No part of Newark is safe anymore. An off duty cop can't buy a slice of pizza. A few weeks ago there was a slashing in front of Penn Station. . It was  personal dispute, not a mugging.  But it still bothered me. I've always felt safe around Penn Station, even at 4 am waiting in the concourse for the first train out. There's always a transit cop in sight.

Suburban white folks got little  to worry about.  Sure, some of the crime travels beyond Newark. Profitable white suburban demand for drugs invites it.  But most of the crime stays right where it is. Don't complain how much it costs to keep it there. The economic devastation of the young black urban male is almost incomprehensible to suburbanites. Newark is a city where a part-time $8-an-hour job gets a hundred applicants.

Labels: Newark NJ, weather

Labels: gin mill, New Jersey, Newark NJ, postcard

My older brother Jim had an afternoon paper route. He delivered 80 or more newspapers, six days, earned less than the morning routes but didn't have to collect or get up at 5 am. His territory was the west end of town. There were a lot of territories. Every delivery day he rode his bike with the enormous handlebar basket to the distributor's garage, folded his papers with the other paper boys , stuffed them in the basket, & pedaled his route. Occasionally, he let me ride along & help - maybe I saved him ten minutes if that; in exchange he'd take me to the 5 & 10 & buy me a 45 record. He'd also buy one for himself. Every town had paperboys riding bikes morning & afternoon, & a few older people delivering by car.

My dad subscribed to two papers, Newark Evening News & Elizabeth Daily Journal, both long defunct. All the other major papers (except NY Daily News) were at the public library up the corner, I passed it every day as I walked to & from school. Because newspapers were so popular, newspaper collection drives were major fund-raising events. All papers were saved, bundled & tied (a tedious chore), & stacked out of the way in anticipation of the Boys Scouts drive. The drive was a big volunteer day, widely promoted & tightly organized. Dads with station wagons or, better yet, pickup trucks, were sought after. A trailer was rented & parked at the central collection point. Bundled papers were put on the curb. The elderly received special "in house" service.

Newspapers were in decline long before the internet. 35 years ago, careers in newspaper work, in the newsroom, offices, & plants, were considered iffy, very much a gamble, because the industry was shrinking overall, & technology was eliminating many of the skilled, union positions. The use of stringers was increasing; part-time pieceworkers covering local government meetings & high school sports. I did some stringer reporting & knew I was no more than an amateur dabbler, at best the writer equivalent of a paperboy, & paperboys were more important. For me, columnists were the stars. Younger general interest columnists were rare & worth envying. Pete Hamill was a popular model for this writing, if one wasn't seduced by the gonzo style of Hunter S. Thompson.

I was able to write a regular local newspaper column only by doing it for free, & with that pay there was no way I would stick my neck out very far over local political issues. I didn't need enemies. I also saw no reason to develop a consistant style, so I bought a couple of anthologies surveying American newspaper column writing dating back to the colonial era & let those inspire many of my pieces. After all, one of the most famous columnists of all time was a cockroach named archy who wrote his columns in lower case free verse poetry by diving headfirst on to a typewriter, approximately the same method I have for poems. The only battle I had with an editor concerned my use of the ampersand (I lost). Other than that, the young editors at the weekly chain were so glad to have my oddball 400 word space-fillers that they wouldn't even correct my punctuation, assuming it was deliberate & they would offend me by applying standard rules. Many "personal" bloggers write like local newspaper columnists from back when thousands of small cities had a daily or a popular weekly (Anyone remember Erma Bombeck? Every paper that ran her column had its own homegrown humorous homemaker).

An article in the New York Times got me thinking about this: As Cities Go From Two Papers to One, Talk of Zero. Over the next year, possibly over the next few months, some major American city will become the first with no major daily newspaper. Why? Sadly, it might not be because the last newspaper is unprofitable, but because the parent corporation greedily gobbled up newspapers, incurring huge debt loads it cannot pay off. The media empires are toppling themselves when leaner, independent newspapers are finding ways to keep going. There's still a demand for dailies, but newspapers need the flexibility to adjust to the market. They won't be what they were, but they'll still provide important coverage of local news, politics, & sports, conceding geography where they compete with newspapers better positioned to cover those areas. A website will be a crucial part of the operation. I read the New York Times online much more than I ever did the print version. Yes, I feel like I'm cheating.

Labels: about writing, growing up, in the news, Newark NJ

The Star-Ledger announced today more than 200 non-union employees had signed up for buyouts, achieving the second of three goals set by the ownership to avert a sale or shutdown of New Jersey's largest newspaper.

The newspaper also appeared to be close to a settle­ment with its union drivers, which must be achieved by Oct. 8 to meet the final condition. An agreement with the mailers union was ratified last month.

Publisher George Arwady said in an email to the staff that discussions with the drivers union are continuing and stressed that the deadline is final.

"I urge the Drivers to vote 'yes' to protect their own jobs and those of everyone else who works at The Star-Ledger," Arwardy said in his email this evening.

Nobody has a long-term solution for this. Newspapers are dying, have been for decades, cable news & the internet just hastened the process. The Star-Ledger has been handicapped by needing to function as an all things to all people newspaper. It couldn't regionalize like Asbury Park Press, now centered culturally in provincial Red Bank NJ. I can buy the APP at the 7-11, but this is a fringe area. The Ledger views itself as a newspaper for the state generally in politics & high school sports; & as a news source for the entire northern part of the state despite sharing the geography with a few other dailies. To be sure, the Star Ledger missed some opportunities. The byzantine website should have been redesigned a few years ago. But the basic problem remains real circulation & advertising revenues, & the pressures of those force newspapers to downsize & specialize, cut back on field reporting, investigative journalism, & in-house columnists.

I grew up in era when print journalism was an enviable vocation for young writers. Even the writers covering Unon County high school sports for the old Elizabeth Daily Journal were demigods. The pub across the street from the Journal home on North Broad was legendary for every kid who worked on a high school newspaper in the county. Reputedly any word uttered in that bar by a Courthouse politician was considered off-the-record. The Daily Journal is long gone, done in by similar pressures the Ledger faces, & ironically by forced expansion of the Star-Ledger itself into the Journal's territory as Newark's economy declined. Many of my high school classmates probably thought I'd work at the Journal, maybe become what the Ledger's Paul Mulshine is now; a curmudgeonly but oddly forgivable (by me) conservative columnist, Jersey raised & educated. But few newspapers can afford to carry a real spectrum of local opinionators on staff, stalking through city halls, pestering board of ed members. They were in fact already disappearing in the Seventies. Mulshine is a fortunate survivor of a once-thriving breed.

Labels: about writing, in the news, New Jersey, Newark NJ

With the lovely weather comes a flurry of gun violence in Newark & Irvington. Not unusual - same thing in Philly & Chicago. & covers all the categories: robbery, gang assassination, drive-by, collateral damage, mistaken identity, sociopaths on a lark, innocent college student in front of his own home, & one remarkable mano-a-mano gunfight between two gangbangers who killed each other. As these events are reported in The Star-Ledger Breaking News, the predictable comments show up beneath the stories. Those who believe every murder must have a motive. (Really, what's more tempting than possessing an illegal gun you haven't fired?) The police aren't doing their jobs. Citizens won't let the police do their jobs. It's the parents' fault. It's Mayor Booker's fault. It's not his fault. Irvington used to be such a great town in the 70's. (No, it wasn't. It's just worse now.) My favorite are the shrill cheerleaders who leave comments like, "C'mon PEOPLE , we have to get TOGETHER & take back OUR neighborhoods from the gangs." Those could be laptop missives from Newark's 24/7 security high rises with underground garages. Easier said than done. If you complain about the gangbangers on your block, & they find out you're complaining, you might as well nail your doors shut, board up the windows & never come outside again. The gang isn't in your neighborhood, you're in the gang's, & the only sane choices are to become part of the scenery or move out.

I like the mass arrests of 20 & 30 gangsters in one neighborhood, coordinated busts involving several law enforcement agencies with bench warrants. I don't know if the various charges stick, most probably not. But I figure it's disruptive of gang middle management. You can't get at the guys at the top easily, & some of them live out in expensive suburbia - you can tell where they live from the unimaginative one color living room walls & drapes, & cars in the driveway worth more than the houses. Busting the street dealers & soldiers does little except keep the county jail & public defenders in business. The vast majority of those bottom feeders are very young, semi-literate, stupid, poor, expendable, & not going far in the organization. They can't be trusted to manage money for the simple reason that they can't add & subtract. They couldn't make change working in Burger King even if the cash register announced, "Put the ten in the drawer with the other tens, give the customer one dollar, two dimes & three pennies." They can only handle easy whole dollar transactions while keeping track of the stash, playing with the walkie talkie, practicing a slow-mo walk in the street, self-consciously scratching their stomachs because their teeshirts are too long & they can't stick their hands in their pockets, & not tripping over the kid on the little bicycle. So a bagman comes by on the hour to pick up the loot before it gets miscounted, lost or stolen. Take out enough guys who can do basic arithmetic & also have somehow obtained a driver's license, & a gang is forced to promote hopeless teenage morons into jobs that require more brains than a willingness to kill anyone, anywhere, for any reason.

This strategy of targeting middle management worked very well on the Mafia - granted, a different, more diversified sort of enterprise. The higher the stupid, violent guys advanced in the Mafia due to frequent, unexpected job vacancies - business must continue - the easier it became to pick them off, turn them into rats. They were also more inclined to sloppily kill each other over career opportunities, compared to the smarter wiseguys who knew the value of stealth & invisibility.

It is really in the best long-term interests of gangs to support better urban schools & encourage their recruits to hang in there through 9th grade even if they've turned 18.

Labels: New Jersey, Newark NJ

He's guilty. Sharpe James was mayor of Newark for 20 years, which is 8 years too long for any big city mayor. He did a lot of good for Newark. His first two terms in office were better than good, when he had something to prove about Sharpe James. From the start he flaunted the kind of lifestyle that holds a mesmerizing, vicarious appeal for people who will never drive luxury cars, take sumptuous Caribbean vacations, & party at the homes of pop music stars & professional athletes, & which angers powerful people who prefer to hide behind false modesty.

During his 5th run for mayor in 2002 against a surprisingly strong Cory Booker (elected mayor in 2006), I took to calling Sharpe James "Mayor 99%" after he accused Booker of "not being black enough." Insulting to every resident of Newark. By then, James presented an image of a Newark that was 99% black, at least after regular business hours. This perception may have seemed like a necessary corrective when Kenneth Gibson took over city hall in 1970 from the corrupt Addonizio regime, but it turned out to be a lousy long term strategy. Newark is actually a little over 50% African-American now with a growing Hispanic population, & is badly in need of more middle class property owners of any race or ethnic group. I thought James practically invited white folks to enjoy Newark's new & improved downtown attractions & then leave. He did this not out of pride in Newark as a great center of African-American Culture, but to maintain his personal power, perks & privileges a little longer. Meanwhile, gangs far more violent than the old organized crime had taken over large swaths of the city, shooting children, terrorizing neighborhoods, making a mockery of the police & of common decency. The gangs imitate video games the way the mob used to imitate movies. James' own core constituency - the thousands of people earning decent wages on the city payroll, Newark's faithful middle class - finally abandoned him.

Yet, based on the evidence making it into the newspapers, I 'm not convinced the government case against Sharpe James & his ex-girlfriend Tamika Riley was all that strong. It had more than a hint of the conspiratorial "they" being out to humiliate James. If it sends a cautionary message to other politicians, I suppose it was worth it. But we're supposed to think, "Well. this fraud must be just the tip of the iceberg, so throw them in jail." Problem is, they didn't show us the rest of the iceberg. So if two more black people from Newark go to prison, what's so unusual about that?

Labels: in the news, Newark NJ

Crash!

The crash scene at South 12th Street and Ninth Avenue this morning.

Two suspected car thieves led Orange police on a chase this morning into Newark, where they crashed a stolen car into an electricity pole, law enforcement officials said.

The two suspects were very seriously hurt, the officials said.

The chase began at about 9:30 a.m. in Orange, where police noticed the suspects breaking into cars, law enforcement officials said. The suspects rammed an Orange police cruiser before heading into Newark, where they crashed at the intersection of South 12th Street and Ninth Avenue, police said.

No one else was injured, police said.

A remarkable slice of a Newark neighborhood photographed by Matt Rainey for the Star-Ledger. The wreck itself. Crime scene tape. The crazy excitement is over. A lone cop waits for the flatbed wrecker truck to arrive & scrape up the mess. Gray day. Run down houses retaining some working class dignity. Unkept backyards. For rent sign. Street in need of repaving. Gang graffitti sprayed on the driveway. Dead grass. Cracked sidewalk. & down on the corner, the bored remnants of what was no doubt a large, agitated crowd of unemployed young males. A picture of a 'hood.

Labels: culture, in the news, Newark NJ

I'm disappointed by the unexceptional reporting & commentary coming out of the Star-Ledger over the past week. The venerable Newark newspaper had a tragic & frightening story dropped on its doorstep last weekend, a terrible crime, & a pivotal event with a half-dozen & more angles; murder, police investigation, politics, citizen outrage, public safety, human interest, city history, & now immigration. The paper needed to be on top of & inside this story in every way. But it couldn't summon up the kind of concentrated focus it delivered (& won a Pulitzer) for the more investigative tale of the Jim McGreevey scandal & resignation. Even the resident misanthropic columnist, Paul Mulshine, should have been politely asked to go up to Ivy Hill or over to City Hall; Paul at least knows that where innocence & evil collide, often so do clarity & sentiment. Perhaps the Ledger's confusing website is part of the problem, & I haven't read everything there is to read in the blog section. It's difficult enough to get back to a web page one has read. The tags are useless. Breaking news favors TV cameras & sound bites, but a local newspaper still has the edge in breadth, depth, & reflection. Most likely, the Star-Ledger is understaffed.

Labels: Newark NJ, what I'm reading

In July 1967, I was driving a pickup truck for Brown Hardware & Locksmiths of Roselle Park NJ. I was 18. I liked the job. I liked driving. The small company had just bought a new blue Chevy pickup truck with an extended bed, removable racks, & a loud AM radio. Usually, I made two delivery runs, one in the morning & one in the afternnon, occasionally an all-day. Sometimes the work was heavy & I had full loads; 60 pound crates of locksets for construction sites, aluminum ladders, spools of electrical wire, fragile boxes of long fluorescent bulbs. Sometimes I carried only a couple of items. Some runs there were a lot of stops & I had to rush, other times I had only one place to go. The deliveries ranged through Union, Middlesex, & Essex counties, & even farther afield, a rare drive down to Monmouth or out through Somerset. I routed them ahead of time. I rarely got lost or ran late. If I finished early, which happened often, the boss didn't much care what I did with the extra time as long as the deliveries were done. Once-a-week I brought the truck home on company time & washed it in my driveway. I loved that truck. I loved my pretty girlfriend. I was in a band.

On the afternoon of July 13, a warm Thursday, I had a single delivery, a few heavy boxes of sheet metal screws to a machine shop in Newark somewhere around the edge of the Central Ward, arriving there a little after two pm. It was tough neighborhood of rundown houses & hard-pressed small businesses in old brick buildings, but not scary. The street had potholes & trees. I'd been there before, so rather than go through the hassle of backing up to a crumbling loading dock, I decided to park on the street & hand truck the boxes through the front door, past the office, & directly on to the shop floor. Then I'd head to the Dairy Queen in Cranford, a summer hangout for cute high school girls, & have a root beer float before going back to the store & setting up the next morning's run. Why do I remember this so clearly?

After I'd dropped off the boxes, stashed the hand truck, & was about to climb into the driver's seat, I heard a woman say, "Hey, white boy." I turned & saw an old black woman sitting in a rocking chair on a porch across the street. She was very old, wizened even, with uncombed gray hair, a crone.
"Yeah?" I said.
"You all done here?" she asked.
"Yes I am," I said. "Going home."
"Good. Now you listen to me, you get out of town right away, don't be hanging around."
I had no idea what she was talking about. I nodded, got in the truck, & went to the Dairy Queen.
How did she know? Wednesday night there had been a limited disturbance in Newark over a false story that a black cabdriver had been beaten to death by white cops, some windows broken, some looting. Heard about it on the radio, it was over. The "riot" didn't begin until Thursday night.

By lunchtime Friday, crazy rumors were going around Roselle Park, a small, all-white town about five air miles southwest of the Newark border, but much more distant in every other way. News reports were wildly inaccurate, contradictory. But it was all bad news. Newark was turning into something like Watts in 1965. At the little Spa Diner, a customer seriously said there were caravans of armed black men headed for suburban Union County. Outside agitators in Elizabeth. Trenton, Atlantic City, Paterson all gonna go. Yeah, right. Paranoid bullshit. Fear. Whoever was already in that part of Newark wasn't gonna get out of it. More bothersome to me was that my rock band had a gig that Saturday night at a Rutgers-Newark frat house. It was canceled. We never again accepted a job in Newark. Fear. There were no deliveries to the machine shop in August, probably because it was a minor account & the road salesman wouldn't go there anymore. Fear. I left the employ of Brown Hardware in late August & without enthusiasm enrolled in Bloomfield College full-time. I wanted to keep the driving job & go to night school at a junior college, but I needed the student draft deferment. That was fear, too.*
***
In 1995, I went to see Allen Ginsberg & Amiri Baraka reading together at Essex County Community College in Newark. It was a great night, two old poet friends on stage, both with deep roots in Newark. They sat at a table afterward & signed books. They were both tired, Amiri hardly looking up to see who was standing in front of him. I slid a copy of his book, Raise, Race, Rays, Raze across the table. It's an out-of-print paperback collection of prose pieces that includes essays about those insane nights & days in 1967 when the State of New Jersey declared open warfare on the black people of Newark, people even an 18 year old, naive white kid knew had never not been under siege. Amiri looked at the book, looked at me, looked at the book again, & said, "Man, you're old." He autographed it. Allen glanced over, saw the book, & chuckled.

* Although this was nothing compared to being drafted, it was the point at which the Vietnam War forced me in a direction I didn't want to go, & not the best direction. Working & part-time school was a sensible arrangement for me. I knew it. But that's another narrative.

Labels: growing up, Newark NJ