Monthly Archives: March 2014

I’m a Stage 4. I’m Santa Claus

18 Tuesday Mar 2014

Posted by in Concepts, Men

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , ,

santa

BY FRANK TERRANELLA

If you’re like me, you receive a ton of junk email every day. A lot of it still comes via U.S. mail. Most of it now comes via e-mail. While it’s rare to receive a harmful junk mail from your mail carrier, our email is full of potential viruses and dangerous offers.

Many of us have friends who forward stuff they find interesting. One of those emails recently included the following:

THE FOUR STAGES OF LIFE:
1) You believe in Santa Claus.
2) You don’t believe in Santa Claus.
3) You are Santa Claus.
4) You look like Santa Claus.

I was struck with the profound truth of this. The very young are in Stage 1, and cross over to Stage 2 when they go to school and talk to the big kids (or their older brothers). You stay in Stage 2 until you have children, and then, suddenly, you cross over to Stage 3. And when you get to the right side of 50, the odds are you cross over to Stage 4. OK, only some of us make it to Stage 4, but put a white wig and beard on me, and I’m Santa.

All this is just another reminder of the journey we all make as we age. Looking back, it’s been an interesting trip, and I have enjoyed each of the four stages, but particularly the first and third. However, I wonder whether somewhere on the road ahead is a Stage 5, where due to senility, I return to Stage 1. That would really be the circle of life.

My Manhattan

17 Monday Mar 2014

Posted by in Art

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, ,

supreme

BY JULIE SEYLER

I am endlessly frustrated with Manhattan. It’s too crowded, noisy, and superior. But like any relationship, the passion, and the connection to what is beautiful within the mess, keeps me in there, and falling in love over and over again. There is so much beauty.

Empire State Building. Early evening.

Empire State Building. Early evening.

Sometimes, where it’s least expected. It’s why, after 26 years, I intend to grow old here.

Pilings along the Hudson River.

Pilings along the Hudson River.

Marilyn on city street

Marilyn on city street

A door from one of the buildings at St. John the Divine.

A door from one of the buildings at St. John the Divine.

The U.S. Senate; an apt. bldg on 2nd Ave.

The U.S. Senate; an apt. bldg on 2nd Ave.

McDonald's on Essex St. Manhattan

McDonald’s on Essex St. Manhattan

At the Met.

At the Met.

For the Love of Coca-Cola

14 Friday Mar 2014

Posted by in Confessional

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , ,

IMG_7236 IMG_7237 IMG_7239

BY JULIE SEYLER AND LOIS DESOCIO

From Julie:
Coca-Cola was 68 years old when I was born, and it’s still here, trying to compete and stay relevant. But, as we all know, everything grows old. Coke’s latest quarterly earnings indicate it may be getting frayed around the edges because for the first time in its 127 year history it is no longer the Number 1 brand. As the population embraces energy drinks and smoothies spiked with whey protein, Coca-Cola has taken a hit.

No doubt, Coke, like all of us right-sided 50 year olds, will figure out how to reinvent itself and age with grace. It’s already taken a Botox injection with its partnership of Green Mountain Coffee. So no doubt Coke will be around for a while, but it does make me wonder: will it still be in the American tapestry of familiar icons in 2114?

Maybe the revolution against sugary drinks will have been so successful that the old timers (i.e. today’s one year olds) will be reminiscing about a soft drink they heard about called Coca-Cola. Farfetched, but not unimaginable, because things always change and nothing is forever.

___________________

From Lois:
I never drank the stuff, but so many things went better with coke – movies, music … traffic circles. The brand managed to bottle more than just fizz and syrup, and for me, it was the visuals that came with Coca-Cola that remain a steadfast reflection of some of the times of my life.

Growing up, the Coca-Cola Bottling Plant was a beacon on the Asbury Park Circle. It was where Route 66 met Route 35, and when giving directions to anyone who was a novice with the navigation of a New Jersey traffic circle, the building was a landmark; the swirly script of red letters a signpost:

“Go the the right,” or “Go to the left,” of the “Coca-Cola building,” I would say.

Today, the building is still there, but it’s shuttered and an eyesore. Coca-Cola left in 2011, and like the traffic circle that it had decorated for decades, it will most likely, and soon, become a thing of the past.

And then there’s the bottles. And all that they have spawned (coke-bottle glasses and green sea glass for starters). What was, and what remains, one of my very favorite movies, is the 1981 foreign film from South Africa, “The Gods Must Be Crazy,” about a coveted coke bottle and its impact on the human condition. The film’s director, Jamie Uys, decided the coke scenes in the movie should be centered around African Bushmen in the Kalahari Desert. He went on an exhaustive search to find, and eventually film, “the real thing”:

So, while we’re at it, and for old times’ sake, let’s join virtual hands, and sing, in harmony, for the love of Coca-Cola:

New Jersey Beach Looks Like a Million Bucks

13 Thursday Mar 2014

Posted by in Men

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, ,

IMG_7564-3
BY BOB SMITH

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers recently began a beach replenishment project in Bradley Beach. The plan is to dump over a million cubic yards of sand onto the beach between Asbury Park and Avon-by-the-Sea, a few miles south. For scale purposes, a cubic yard takes up about the same amount of space as a normal-sized kitchen stove. What will it cost to gather up, and dump, a million stoves’ worth of sand onto our humble beach? A mere $18.3 million, or about 18 bucks per stove.

It’s a huge project, by any standard. The entire shoreline replenishment project may cost as much as $102 million, and is supposed to cover the beaches from Sea Bright to Manasquan. In fact, it’s the most extensive beach replenishment project the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has ever undertaken, and by volume of sand it’s the biggest beach-fill project in the world.

I can personally testify to the gargantuan nature of the effort: night after night, you can hear the monotonous backup beeps of the bulldozers as they push the new sand around on the beach, in the glare of banks of floodlights run by diesel-powered generators on wooden sledges.

IMG_7551
The process is fascinating. There are two tanker ships they use to suck up a slurry of sand from a designated site offshore. Once one of them is full, it moves into position approximately 100 yards off the beach, and hooks up to a floating pipe about three feet in diameter. That floating, flexible pipe connects to a series of rigid metal pipes of similar size connected end to end, and strung along the shoreline.

Affixed to the discharge end of the pipeline on the beach, there’s an open metal box with heavy-duty wire screen walls measuring probably 10 feet wide, by 12 or 15 feet high, by 10 feet deep. When the tanker is pumping, a gray slurry of watery sand gushes out of the metal pipe, and is forced through the wire mesh, which acts as a filter.

IMG_7562They need that because it seems the best offshore area for grabbing all that sand is located under an area where, years ago, the U.S. Navy blew up old ships, and other cool stuff for fun. Oops, I mean target practice. So periodically, they shut down the flow, and workers climb into the cage to clear out fish, clams, plastic bottles and bags, and any military shells that may have been sucked up by the tanker offshore. That’s a good thing, because rolling over on your blanket to find yourself staring at a hunk of large-caliber unexploded ordnance (i.e., a really big, live bullet) generally doesn’t make for a festive beach day.

Anyway, as the slurry is being pumped out, the jumbo bulldozers continually push it back and forth, away from the discharge end of the pipe, grading and smoothing it to a uniform level from the inland side of the beach down to the surf. Their goal is to restore the beaches to conditions better than they were before Superstorm Sandy, and based on what they’ve completed in Bradley Beach so far, they’ve done that. The beach appears to be just as wide as it was before that storm.

The only problem I have with the project is that they completed the last major beach replenishment project in 2001, and the one before that was some time in the ’90s. Clearly, no matter what we do, the ocean eventually claws the sand right back.

Now don’t get me wrong. As an owner of a home nearby, I’m thrilled that our government sees fit to throw good sand after bad, decade after decade. Maybe they’ll keep funding this kind of Sisyphean fun as long as I’m alive so I’ll always have an expansive swath of beach on which to lay my head.

But is this really a good long-term use of our tax money? I guess it keeps the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers busy. After all, what would they do if it they didn’t have beaches to replenish? Fix our rusted-out, rickety highway bridges? Replace aging water pipes and upgrade the electrical generation and transmission infrastructure so we don’t risk blackouts every summer?

Come on. That stuff’s too easy. And none of it’s half as much fun as pushing around a million stoves’ worth of slurry in the world’s biggest sandbox.

The Stuff of My Stuff

12 Wednesday Mar 2014

Posted by in Confessional, Men

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , ,

my stuff 3

BY ANTHONY BUCCINO

Whatever happened to George Carlin’s stuff?

Actually, I don’t care what happened to the entertainer’s stuff. His stuff was crap. My crap is stuff. He would say so himself, except he’s gone, and as an atheist, probably not far. But as for me I’ve been thinking about my stuff as I sit here in my man cave/bunker/warehouse with about 60 of those white storage boxes full of my stuff.

I’m not a pack rat. I’ve been writing for more than 40 years, and I don’t have any notes from before 1971, more or less. So, I’ve got a lot of notes about stuff I wrote about, and probably a lot more notes about stuff I wanted to write about but haven’t done so yet. And boxes of books that I used in my research. And more boxes of books I intend to read when I get some time. I can’t bear to part with any of them.

Some of these boxes I had taken down from the attic where there are just as many boxes as the beams will hold. I was looking for something, and I probably found it, but haven’t gotten around to bringing the boxes back up, yet.

While the boxes were handy, I went through them and discarded all the junk. That eliminated almost two boxes. I filled those two boxes with accumulated knick-knacks, opened playing cards, souvenirs and such, Mom’s swizzle stick collection and such, then labeled them so they are ready to go up to the attic.

I compare these sagging white boxes surrounding me to the various hard drives hooked up, and others standing by my computer. It’s probably a close comparison as to which hold more data. But that’s not what got me thinking about my stuff. A power surge or a burst water pipe would certainly have me moaning for all the lost treasures in my stuff. But, no, that’s not it either.

It’s all about what happens to my stuff when I’m not here anymore to take care of it, to sift through it – looking in just the right box for the right piece of paper, or photo, or book, that I need to somehow complete my thought. With the computer I can put in a word or phrase, and I get rows and rows of documents where that word or phrase appears. With these white boxes and the ones cooling in the attic, the sorting algorithm is in my ever-shrinking pack of grey matter.

When I’m gone, what will become of my stuff? Will my surviving relatives declare my stuff as crap, and send it off to the Happy Hill Recycling Farm? Already, I know someone in whom this collection cluttering the basement incites a near grand mal seizure at the mere thought of dumping all this stuff without my aging muscles to bag, lug and tote to the curb.

The books, in several trips, would go to the local library’s annual used book sale, and those not sold to be refreshed into new books some day. My notes and scraps of ideas? Oh, where will they go without me? I suppose the truth is that if there is no extant published version of what I may have produced from my stuff, online or in print somewhere, the thoughts and background stuff will be surely tossed.

I get it. I have to get rid of my stuff so the next guy has a place for his stuff. But first, he has to get rid of my crap so he’ll have a place for his stuff.

Hats are Off, and ‘Out’

11 Tuesday Mar 2014

Posted by in Concepts, Men

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

, , ,

men in hats

BY FRANK TERRANELLA

There’s a line in the Stephen Sondheim song “The Ladies Who Lunch,” from “Company,” in which the character played in the original production by Elaine Stritch asks, “Does anyone still wear a hat?” That was in 1970. Now, more than 40 years later, those of us who remember them can still ask, “Does anyone still wear a hat?”

The answer is almost no one, male or female, wears a hat for fashion. The only time I see hats on women is when I pass near an African American church on Sundays. There are no hats on fashion runways; no hats on the red carpet at the Oscars. There are no hats in most churches.

Those of us over 50 know full well that it wasn’t always like this. Men and women used to wear hats. Just watch any movie made before 1960. Men wore hats to work. Men wore hats to the ballgame. And I’m not talking about baseball caps. They wore real hats, like fedoras and derbys and homburgs. In summer, they wore straw hats. My grandfathers wouldn’t think of going “out” without their hats.

pat in hatWomen’s hats were an entire industry. Women wore a different one with every outfit. If you wore a coat, you wore a hat. And it wasn’t just for well-off women. Even working women in the movies and television wore hats. Even hard-boiled dames in Raymond Chandler stories wore hats. Lois Lane picked up her hat every time she was leaving the Daily Planet building.

Head coverings were actually required in many Christian churches until the 1960s. I remember there was a nun at the front door of my church who used to pass out handkerchiefs and tissues to girls who forgot their hats. And of course, Easter bonnets were a real thing back then. Women wore elaborate hats to Easter services. And the hat was the chief attraction at the Easter Parade.

The women’s hat industry was so big that they had a special name for a person who designed, made, trimmed, or sold women’s hats. He or she was called a milliner. It’s a word that has disappeared from our world like cobbler and blacksmith.

If I had to speculate at the one event that helped to killed men’s hats, I’d say it was the appearance of President Kennedy at his inaugural in 1961 standing in sub-freezing cold without a hat. Apparently, he wanted to have photographs showing him hatless next to President Eisenhower and Vice President Nixon, both of whom were wearing hats. That was supposed to show that he was a young man of great vigor. It sounds to me like something Vladimir Putin might do today.

Anyway, apparently hat sales plummeted after that as America bought the idea that hats were old-fashioned. And when soon afterward the Catholic Church dropped the requirement that women wear hats to church, the writing was on the wall for milliners.

Of course, hats have never gone away completely. Every so often some celebrity appears wearing a porkpie, a pillbox or a Panama hat. But the days of regular men and women wearing hats for fashion are probably over.

Today, hats are worn for utilitarian purposes — to keep our heads warm in winter and protect them from the sun in the summer. But although I hated as a boy when I had to wear a hat when I got dressed up for a special occasion, I did like looking at other people wearing them and I still do.

Does anyone still wear a hat? Well, now that I’m a grandfather, maybe I’ll start wearing a hat to look the part. I’ll bet I could rock a fedora.

New Jersey State Officials and Soil Safe: ‘Perfect Together?’

10 Monday Mar 2014

Posted by in News

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

, , ,

P1230780

BY JULIE SEYLER

Have you ever heard of Soil Safe? I hadn’t until I read an article in The New York Times about how the state of New Jersey wants their business.

The Soil Safe Web site explains the “beauty” of what they contribute to the world. They specialize

in the recycling of soils contaminated with a variety of petroleum products and heavy metals. Since our founding, Soil Safe has processed over 18.5 million tons of contaminated soil from over 40,000 successful remediation and construction projects.

While I wish I had the time to investigate whether that 18.5 millions tons of contaminated soil has been as successfully remediated as Soil Safe claims, it seems their boasts are sufficient for New Jersey. The state intends to use their dumping trucks to lay some toxic waste in the vicinity of the Rahway River in North Jersey. This particular site is a little wildlife haven for diamondback terrapin, yellow-crowned night herons, and bald eagles, but it appears it shall be thrown under the wheels of the trucks because there are big bucks to be made. When weighing billions of dollars against the health and safety of the citizens of New Jersey, and their environs, money is talking way louder.

These are the facts according to The Times:

1. Soil Safe will dump enough petroleum-contaminated soils to create a 29-feet-high mound of garbage in North Jersey between Staten Island and the Arthur Kill. (I am pretty sure this area may already be an environmentally-polluted area, or is very proximate to another landfill dumping site. Could the unsaid perverse reasoning of it all be that it really doesn’t matter, given what’s already in the ground around there?)

2. Since the plan was first floated, back in 2010, to as recently as last year, various experts within the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection have verbalized the fact that dumping this much contaminated soil could have severe consequences on the environment. One grave concern would be a flood. In such circumstances, that mound filled with soil laced with oil could collapse into the water.

But what’s a little pollution in the riverbed? The agency, whose goal is to protect the environment, gave conditional approval for Soil Safe to proceed.

The Times made a connection with the workings of New Jersey politics. It looks like profits are to be made, either though direct distributions to the pocketbooks of certain well-connected people, or to the campaign coffers of others.

For example, Soil Safe is a client of Bob Smith, duly elected state senator of the 17th Legislative District, Chairman of the Senate Environment Committee, and a lawyer in the firm of Bob Smith & Associates. The Times stated that Senator Smith “represented Soil Safe at a hearing before an elected county board.” That means the chairman of the state Senate’s committee that oversees the environment got paid for representing a company that deals with materials that contaminate the environment. Not sure what happened to conflict of interest concerns.

At the moment, Soil Safe pays the three landowners of the future dumping site rent of $75K a month. It is unclear to me what they could possibly be renting. Are they paying “rent” for the right to be guaranteed the contract to dump? But this is a paltry sum because “if the deal goes through, (Soil Safe) promises the owners many millions of dollars in tipping fees.”

What are tipping fees? Another way of saying, “pay-off”? Or, “thank-you”?

There are other politicians that are benefiting from a connection with Soil Safe. The State Senate President Stephen M. Sweeney is logistically close, being that he serves out of Gloucester County, and Soil Safe runs operations out of the same county. Mr. Sweeney and the county both seem to have gotten a little richer from the generosity of Soil Safe.

It also appears that Governor Christie has a hand in the pie, if not exactly directly, through the throwing of political favors. But that’s a whole different story on a different day.

In Naples, it is said the Camorra controls the garbage, and makes the money. In New Jersey, we anoint our duly elected officials to be our Camorra.

The Smoke and Mirrors of ‘Beauty’

07 Friday Mar 2014

Posted by in Concepts

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

, , , ,

Beauty in the mirror

Let’s put beauty in the eyes of the older.

BY LOIS DESOCIO

Recently, while sitting at a bar with a 62-year-old male friend, he looked at the ebullient, smooth-skinned, 20-something bartender, then looked at me, and said: “Ah, to be young and beautiful again, right?”

“Been there, done that,” I said. “If she’s lucky, she’ll be 59 some day.”

While I don’t see myself as falling victim to the coveting of youth, and I’ve held on to my wrinkles (for now), I was never a Hollywood sexpot. And I’m not 81. Like Kim Novak.

That collective consciousness that judges women by how they look, was shoved, at Ms. Novak’s expense, in the faces of anyone who watched the Academy Awards last week, and was privy to the subsequent chatter, tweets, blogs, and mean-girl bashing about the pillowed lips, the skin-tight cheeks, and the raised eyebrows of Ms. Novak.

While I admit to having been taken aback at first by her looks, the irony and the hypocrisy of my reaction quickly took center stage. What happened to what we all know, and learned in kindergarten – don’t judge a book by its cover?

And don’t assume Ms. Novak sees herself as so many others did – the aging screen siren, who can’t face the truth, or much less a mirror, so she, out of desperation to stay young and beautiful, altered her face ineffably.

I applaud her, and I choose to believe she feels good about how she looks. She felt confident enough to face a Hollywood audience mostly half her age, and less.

Let’s add women who choose to take advantage of the latest dermatological advances to the list of the non-judged – to the list of those who know that aging gracefully is not about how others perceive you, or how much you choose to nip, tuck, pull, plump, lift, or allow to sag, but how you feel about yourself, and how you are allowed to take steps to maintain that credo in whatever way you choose.

A little pearl of prudence did roll out from under all this fray in the form of 31-year-old Lupita Nyong’o, and her speech at a Black Women in Hollywood luncheon days before the awards. It centered around her wish, when she was a young girl to “wake up lighter skinned,” and how it took “validation” from “a celebrated model …” to pull herself up and out of that … seduction of inadequacy.”

“…she was dark as night,” Ms. Nyong’o said. “I couldn’t believe that people were embracing a woman that looked so much like me as beautiful. Now I had a spring in my step because I felt more seen, more appreciated by the far-away gatekeepers of beauty.”

While Ms. Nyong’o’s words are a wretched, and disgraceful, reminder that even a by-any-standards-breathtakingly-beautiful (inside and out, it appears) young woman can fall victim to the societal “rules” of beauty, it also highlights her emergence away from that, and a grasping of the wisdom that, simply, beauty really does come from within.

This conversation is nothing new. But I’m hoping that the timing of Ms. Novak’s public thrashing, which came on the heels of Ms. Nyong’o’s personal confession, will at least nudge this next generation of women to kick that societal pendulum, which has been frozen closer to “you’re inadequate,” towards “everyone is beautiful.”

And I hope I’m lucky enough to be 80 someday.