Saturday night in Hoboken. Art time. Party time. And I was in the mood for both, having spent all afternoon staring at only three my own photos in Photoshop and learning new moves and tools through trial and error with a good friend who’s slightly more proficient. So I made my way down to the opening reception for “I Love My Life,” a major fall group art show at the Eureka Art Gallery, 259 First St. (Park-Willow), accessible for the night through the rear garden courtyard (pretty twinkling lights) around the block on Newark Street.
Not many photographs up, but plenty of eclectic art created by 35 artists in many media. Roland Ramos, a mover and shaker in the Hoboken art scene, put it all together. Lovely space, as you’ll see below.
In his intro to the show Roland recalls how he shared with a dispirited woman friend going through difficult times that her new mantra should be “I Love My Life,” and how she should keep saying it ”until it says you.” This is a very wise idea. Everything in the show is tied to this mantra “I Love My Life.” Positivity is indeed what we need in bad times, in fact at all times. Be here now was a theme of my Saturday.
Of course I schmoozed with some Jersey City art scenesters, and took snaps as I headed home. Didn’t get names. But we’ll meet again. Everyone’s looking forward to the Jersey City Art Studio Tour on Oct. 3 and 4, when 600 artists’ works will be on view in dozens of galleries and public spaces and the Downtown Jersey City art scene will be rocking. I’ll have three of my photos in a group show. I love my life.
Roland’s I Love My Life show, open Monday through Saturday from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m., will be on view through Saturday, Oct. 10, and have a closing reception that night beginning at 7 p.m.
This is not a political blog; you’ll have to go elsewhere for that. But I find this odd photo says a lot and I’m showing it. The very hour I saw it in the viewfinder, while relaxing on a bench on Washington Street, which is Hoboken’s main drag, the candidates for mayor in the upcoming special election were playing beat the clock in delivering their nominating petitions to the County Clerk’s Office in Jersey City. The deadline was 4 p.m.
A little background: Hoboken is having its third mayoral election of the year because the cute 32-year-old lawyer most recently elected mayor resigned after only a month in office. He was one of 44 people, three of them mayors of New Jersey municipalities, arrested on corruption charges in late July. Charged with accepting $30,000 from a “cooperating witness” secretly working a sting operation for the FBI, and having been caught on tape saying some very unbecoming things over dinner in a diner just before allegedly taking some cash in an envelope as he and the “cooperating witness” parted in the parking lot (New Jersey’s image to the rest of the world), the photogenic young mayor’s face was prominent in newspapers from coast to coast. The “reform” candidate he had beaten by a few hundred votes in the June runoff is now serving as acting mayor. Both were on the City Council, and as council president she stepped into the Mayor’s Office when he stepped out. She’s now running in the special election, as is another councilwoman whose “reform” credibility has been questioned because she allegedly forged a secret alliance in the May election with another council member, who’s considered to represent the old “business as usual” Hoboken. His father, who served as mayor for most of the Nineties, did prison time after an earlier scandal involving developers and bribes.
So did the two ladies meet the 4 p.m. filing deadline to quality for the November ballot? The county clerk has been saying yes, but another candidate — herself a former Hoboken municipal court judge – says no, that the acting mayor filed her petitions a few minutes after the hour and should be stricken from the ballot. This ”is it a mountain or a molehill?” dispute, which involves time stamps on documents and disputes over notarized signatures, seems headed to court. Meanwhile, another candidate who’s been on the council and school board before, and has been serving on the local sewer authority board for 22 years, is also running, along with a few other contenders, and no one is talking, or being asked, about any real issues.
The current turmoil and fingerpointing is nothing new. Last year’s big news was that the City Council refused to pass the budget until way past the legal deadline, blaming the lame duck mayor for keeping the council in the dark as to its contents until the last minute, when his familiar budget balancing tricks were seen not to have worked. That mayor in turn blamed the council for not going along and doing their legal duty to pass it. So the state government stepped in and appointed a fiscal monitor, who found the budget had been being ”underfunded” for several years and promptly raised Hoboken’s city taxes 47 percent, later adjusted down to 23. Ouch and groan!
Then came the May mayoral election, with a crowded field and all the candidates claiming to have ”new answers” to “old problems.” Then the June runoff with the narrow results, then the July corruption arrests and the mayor’s resignation, then a relative quiet August and now a September that’s awakened simmering ambitions all around. The special election is being held the same early November day New Jersey will elect its governor for the next four years, which means Republicans in Hoboken will be sure to vote, as the GOP candidate for governor actually appears to have a chance of unseating the millionaire Democrat (who lives in a Hoboken penthouse, built on the site of the old Maxwell House coffee plant) now winding up his first term. This means some Hoboken voters who couldn’t be bothered to vote in a city election may come out. And this GOP candiate is running on an anti-corruption platform, having sent scores of politicians to prison on corruption charges (including the above mentioned Hoboken councilman’s mayor daddy) during his tenure as the Bush-appointed U.S. attorney for New Jersey. Personally, I don’t think the state’s voters would be wise to hand over the governor’s job to someone who’s never had responsibility for running anything more complicated than an office full of prosecutors and assistant prosecutors, but despite having his own ethical lapses like being stopped speeding in an unregistered vehicle and giving a soon-to-be-former subordinate a $46,000 personal loan and not declaring the interest as income on his income taxes, having “corruption fighter” attached to his name may just do the trick.
My perennial questions: Can any of these people add? Can they balance municipal budgets without tricks like selling this or leasing that? Can they work together for what used to be called the common good?
The only thing I’m sure of is that there are clouds over Hoboken these days, and not the fluffy white kind.
Maybe it’s because I grew up in Kansas, where it is the state flower, but I love every sunflower I see. And yet I’ve never tried to grow one; there’s no spot in my garden that’s right. Luckily, Jersey City Heights has lots of sunny front yards where they do grow tall. Just yesterday, I found there’s a 6-footer in front of a house across the street. Voila! Does seeing it make you as happy as it does me?
What casting directors and agents want to see nowdays is not necessarily the one perfect headshot, a mutual friend was explaining as I started taking pictures of Kathi Carlson a couple of summers ago. The people doing the hiring today want to see all the characters you can play, this actor and model said, and you need a selection of good shots so you can present an appropriate image for whatever part you’re seeking. Glossies with resumes on the back are still a necessity, but actors now are submitted for work with electronic images e-mailed to decision makers whose desks may be across town, or across the globe.
We were working with the available light streaming through Kathi’s living room windows, which was abundant (though variable, due to clouds, and eventually fading as the sun moved), and added fill light from incandescent bulbs in several lamps with their shades removed. I’ve always been comfortable using improvised lighting; it’s far preferable to flash-burning people’s faces. And digital cameras get better results with it than film cameras ever did.
As our friend Gary worked to call forth all the personas Kathi might take on for a stage play or a movie or commercial, I learned a lot about collaborating with performers. Gary and Kathi had just finished taking an acting class together, and with trust, trickery and a few acting exercises that afternoon we produced more than a dozen usable photos that suggest Kathi’s range. She was set to look for work. It was about that time that she quit an office job in the suburbs to put her energy into pursuing a show business career. It’s all paid off.
Flash forward two years, and Kathi’s been in one theater or film production after another in and around New York, and I’m now lighting my subjects with synced strobes that give consistent results frame after frame in my own well-equipped studio. And the trust and tricks still work their magic. Thanks Gary!
Last spring, Kathi hilariously played an android actress cast in TV soap operas and corny frontier family dramas in Alan Ayckbourn’s early-80s satiric comedy “Comic Potential.” (pictures way below).
Kathi has just been cast as Irina Arkadina in a new Americanized adaptation of Chekov’s “The Seagull” that will be performed in Manhattan by the Curan Repertory Company at The American Theater of Actors from Oct. 28 to Nov. 1. While Kathi often plays “mother” roles, Arkadina is not your run of the mill mom. I’m looking forward to seeing what she does as the big-ego stage actress reluctantly dealing with a neurotic son while trying to hold onto a fickle poet lover as well as her own fading stardom – a role of many nuances attempted by almost every great Russian, British and American actress of the past century.
Kathi Carlson is one of those performers who isn’t afraid of challenges, knowing how much they can stretch one’s talent and make the performing life exciting. Having gone skydiving for a recent birthday thrill, nothing will stop her from creating a memorable Arkadina this fall.
Kendra Shank is a fabulously gifted and inventive jazz singer. She works jazz originals and standards in unique ways, pushing them to abstraction yet never losing the thread. She’s led her own quartet for about 10 years, and was a West Coast singer based in Seattle before moving to New York in 1997. Born in California, at 19 she began her career playing guitar and singing folk and pop in the subways and sidewalk cafes of Paris. A Billie Holiday recording eventually prompted her to pursue a jazz career. Shirley Horn brought her to New York to perform as her guest at the Village Vanguard and co-produced her first album in 1994. Kendra Shank played guitar on Abbey Lincoln’s “Over the Years” CD as well as issuing her own “A Free Spirit: Abbey Lincoln Songbook” in 2007. With four albums of her own receiving critical acclaim over the years, she produced her fifth — “Mosaic” — in April 2009 and toured to promote it, drawing great reviews everywhere.
I’ve been a fan since Halloween 2008, when she and her group played a gig at 55 Bar, on Christopher Street near Seventh Avenue in Greenwich Village. Small and intimate, downstairs, unpretentious, no food, no cover charge — just my style. I wish a young couple at the bar hadn’t chattered continuously, and the lighting wasn’t particularly camera-friendly. But the singer and her longtime associates — Frank Kimbrough on piano, Dean Johnson on bass, Tony Moreno on drums, plus the young saxophonist who joined them for some songs — had me enchanted and impressed. I’ve since learned that not only has Kendra Shank played every important jazz venue, she’s taught clinics at music schools and at the New School. The quartet plays at the 55 Bar now and then. She must like it. Both brilliant and down to earth, Kendra Shank is the real deal.
I’ll always photograph panoramas like this, which I call “The Passaic River Flows: Indians, Farmers, then Industrialists and Neglect, Now Rebirth.” Such landscapes contain stories and relationships that words and statistics piled together, even with great skill, cannot convey. The Passaic River meanders along through New Jersey for 80 miles, and its Great Falls in Paterson once ran that early city’s silk mills and are still considered a scenic wonder, but just before the Passaic empties into Newark Bay it flows through one of the most urbanized and industrialized areas in the nation.
Only 400 years ago, before Henry Hudson and the Dutch came, the Lenni Lenape Indians fished its waters. Only since the early 1970s have there been efforts to clean up the river, and the water quality is still not great, though high school and club rowing crews have been using it for decades. Certainly no commercial fishing is allowed and no one is supposed to eat anything they catch in the lower stretch of the river. For more than a hundred years factories lined the river, operating 24/7, and dumped all of their waste into the water. Just google Dioxin and Diamond Shamrock and Agent Orange for a few facts about what still lies in the river’s sediments.
In my photograph, Newark is on the left, Harrison on the right. Newark has redeveloped many acres over the past decade or so; the New Jersey Performing Arts Center is visible, as is an improved McCarter Highway and a light rail system. Harrison is busy, too, with condos and commercial buildings going up and a world-class soccer stadium under construction for the Red Bulls where acres of old red brick factory buildings once stood.
I don’t know of any other American landscape that’s gone from pristine ecosystem to total heedless exploitation and degradation, then been an abandoned wasteland for decades before ultimately seeing as much rebirth.
Often I emerge from my office about 4 and can’t resist pointing a camera at a bouquet from the garden caught in ”perfect” light streaming through a living room window. Snap, snap, click, click, and in minutes friends around the world are admiring them in e-mails and on Facebook. These zinnias, grown from seed because sprouted ones never do well, were lighting up the room August 10 of this year. No flash, just available light, and if you’re wondering, yes I did some simple manipulation using a ”brush” filter.
“Beauty is not caused. It is.” So said Emily Dickinson several generations ago, and it’s still true. Last May, I asked Hannah Plotka to pose for portraits for use in an ad I was putting together for the playbill for Hudson Theatre Ensemble’s “Rapunzel.” In HTE’s 2007 production of “The Miracle Worker,” Hannah played one of the children at the school for the blind in Boston that Annie Sullivan leaves when she is called to be Helen Keller’s teacher in Alabama. Hannah’s father David has played feature roles at HTE, and Hannah volunteers there, so Hannah was the perfect portrait subject.
My greatest fear going in was that she might feel exploited; after all, who needs to hold still for a portrait when you don’t need one for school and you’re not looking to work as a professional model or actress anytime soon. Determined not to pressure Hannah to be anyone but herself, I was happy to meet her mother and learn she was of the same mind. Hannah would not be getting a Jon Benet Ramsey makeover for the shoot. Fancy sunglasses and bracelets, fine and fun. Makeup, not much. No costumes. Hannah wanted to be photographed wearing her grandmother’s pendant. Years from now when she perhaps has grandchildren of her own, Hannah will be able to show them how beautiful she was the spring when she was no longer a little girl but not quite yet a teenager.
