Ass-Watching Disparaged
"'I don’t know who comes to the boardwalk and says, 'Let’s go to the boardwalk and find out how many asses we can see.'" —Wildwood mayor Ernest Troiano clearly hangs out with different people than you do.
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'Not Fade Away': 5 Years After 'Sopranos,' Does David Chase Still Hate People?
Amy Monaghan: Talk to me about how, as a "Sopranos" fan, you felt about the news of a David Chase movie at long last, the coming-of-age-in-Jersey film Not Fade Away, which we are here to dismantle today.
Sean Burns: Mostly I wondered what took him five years. I knew Chase had taken off to France for a while, presumably hiding from the folks with torches and pitchforks after that "Sopranos" finale. But he has such a distinctive cinematic sensibility, I thought he'd be making movies a lot sooner.
Amy: His distinctive cinematic sensibility? Remember, I'm the only person on the planet to never watch "The Sopranos." No, wait, I [...]
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The Last of the New Jersey Tomatoes
It's been a rough month. In one small bright spot, there is the fact that, right now, in November, after the hurricane, after the first snow, you can eat a better-tasting tomato than you have eaten all year. (Thanks, global warming.) Over in Park Slope, Scalino on 7th Avenue and 10 Street is still serving up a "Jersey Tomato Salad," but not for long. Go today or within the next week, because the guy who runs the place told me that's as long as he'll have this particularly fantastic batch of tomatoes he gets from a farmer he knows who probably likes Bruce Springsteen.
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Tucker Carlson Calls Bob Mendenez a "Latin Lover"
Did you stare at your computer until midnight waiting for Tucker Carlson's blog exclusive about an elections sex scandal? Of course not—it was Halloween, and there's still this power outage thing for millions of people, and who cares. But many conservative pundits on Twitter did stay up past their bediimes to see what the Daily Caller website would post, even though some other wingnuts on the Internet had already claimed the scandal was something about Senator Bob Menendez. The hot news finally went live, hours after the promised midnight posting: The Daily Caller claims that a lawyer in the Dominican Republic got two legal prostitutes to look [...]
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'Tunnel Of Love' At 25
1987 was a tough year for New Jersey's Bruce Springsteen fans. After our hometown hero conquered the world on the Born In U.S.A. tour, he broke our hearts by marrying a model who he'd first seen in a .38 Special video and summoned to a backstage meeting arranged through his manager. Julianne Phillips was a former cheerleader from Oregon who lived in L.A., about the farthest thing from the kind of Jersey girl Bruce had been singing about so well for so long. And when he ditched the E Street Band for his new album, and posed on the cover wearing a blazer and a bolero tie, [...]
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Titus Andronicus, "A More Perfect Union"
"The New Brunswick performance was a particular bright spot in a day packed with highlights—we were shooting Titus playing a basement show at a place called Fuck Mountain. The show was wall-to-wall with college kids who were really fired up to see the band return to their low-ceilinged roots." —New Jersey director Tom Scharpling talks about the extra live footage he recorded while making his video for New Jersey band Titus Andronicus's “No Future Part Three: Escape From No Future” back in February. Like the performance above, for example. The idea of being "proud" to be from New Jersey is a weird one. ("Hey Eddie, can [...]
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The Hurricane's Terrible Insult to the History of Metal
Won't you extend your lighters as we send out this classic power ballad to reality star, Broadway diva, hair metal frontman and "Gilmore Girls" player Sebastian Bach? For him, it's bad times, for a change. Real bad times: "Original Skid Row & KISS fans, I have bad news for you. Gone are irreplaceable items, such as my KISS Gargoyles from the 1979 tour. KISS pinball machine. Skid Row master tapes, video & audio, concerts, master tapes from Oh Say Can You Scream etc. Boxes & boxes of one of a kind Skid Row memorabilia, from the first tour to our last, all stuff I collected on the [...]
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No More Reason To Go To Jersey
"The culture in Hoboken is driven by reality TV now. A lot of the bars downtown are fighting with each other for who has the most giant TVs. That's what Hoboken nightlife has become." —So long, Maxwell's.
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Chris Christie Really Enjoying This "Insulting the Republicans" Thing
"You can’t expect to be a leader of all the people and be divisive. Someone asked me, Why did Mitt Romney lose? And I said because he got less votes than Barack Obama, that's why." —New Jersey Governor Chris Christie has decided to keep his new, post-Sandy personality.
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Feist, "Graveyard"
This new Feist video is really good. Directed by Steven Spielberg, it's basically a remake of Schindler's List, with a red butterfly in place of the little girls' coat. No, it's really good. And no, it was not directed by Steven Spielberg. It was directed by Keith Megna. The lyrics of the song are nice to listen to today while we hope that electrical power comes back to lower Manhattan, and hope even harder that New Jersey, which is in worse shape than anywhere, can start what will be a long, tough recovery. Let's hope that benefit helps.
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"You Can't Go Home": Riding Shotgun With Titus Andronicus In New Jersey
"You're getting a real behind-the-scenes look," Patrick Stickles deadpanned as he steered a blue whale on wheels down Rock Road, the main drag of Glen Rock, New Jersey. It's mid-afternoon on a dreary Monday. The lunch crowd (presumably made up of people who don't commute to NYC) were sitting at scattered tables at scattered restaurants on either side of the drag. Storefronts looked abandoned rather than empty. The air was suburban-still—listless. We were en route to Rock Ridge Pharmacy, which Stickles noted I might remember from the song "No Future Part Three: Escape From No Future" from his band Titus Andronicus' second effort The Monitor. Also: There was the Glen [...]
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The Book Of Jersey
What is the great New Jersey novel? Here is a list of candidates with varying degrees of suitability for the title. (I agree with the ultimate selection.) There are also a couple of decent collections of New Jersey short stories which those who are predisposed to enjoy that sort of thing might want to check out: Gary Krist's The Garden State and Tom Perrotta's Bad Haircut are the first two that spring to mind. But of course we're all holding out for Dave Bry's Jersey Mayhem: New and Selected Stories. Get to work, Bry!
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Rich People Actually Don't Understand Business Either
Remember how a former co-CEO of Goldman Sachs became governor of New Jersey and then became CEO of a derivatives brokerage that then had a $191.6 million quarterly loss (its fourth quarter of loss!) and was probably going to file for bankruptcy and was suspending from doing business by the Fed? Makes you think.
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Newark Mayor Admits "Jersey Odor" Crisis Is Low On His Agenda
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I've got 99 problems and that ain't one RT @davidbitton I'd like to know what can be done about the smells around exit 15E on the Tpkless than a minute ago via web Favorite Retweet ReplyCory BookerCoryBooker
It's a fair point. That smell is going to be there long after we're all gone.
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New Jersey Drinking Even Less Dignified Than Usual
If you are drinking at a TGI Friday's in Jersey you are probably better off sticking with the well brands. Also, if you are drinking at a TGI Friday's in Jersey you probably did something really, really terrible in a previous life, because that is like set-fire-to-an-orphanage karma right there. [Via]
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The Water Is Full Of Doody
Back in 1987, when the Supreme Court of the United States affirmed New York's jurisdiction over the Statue of Liberty, then-mayor Ed Koch said, "The Statue of Liberty will continue to stand exactly where she has stood for 100 years—on an island belonging to the State of New York, facing us and showing another side of her personality to New Jersey." Twenty-five years later, it seems the Garden State is getting its revenge, pumping 200 million gallons of liquid doody into the Lady's maritime surroundings.
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Chris Christie Will Do Literally Anything, Including Be Nice To Barack Obama, To Get Bruce Springsteen's Approval
Chris Christie's sudden respect for Barack Obama has enraged conservatives and the Romney campaign, but it makes sense when you remember that Chris Christie loves Bruce Springsteen more than anything, and a disaster just hit New Jersey, and Springsteen will obviously do a benefit. But Springsteen, who is such a Famous Democrat that he actually campaigns with Obama, refuses to have anything to do with Christie. What might change Bruce's feelings for the Republican governor of New Jersey? What might make The Boss finally give a little love back to his biggest (!) fan, Chris Christie?
This should do it:
Springsteen To Perform At Sandy Benefit [...]
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Where's Jesus' Mom Now?
"A car wash attendant in New Jersey claims to have seen an image of the Virgin Mary holding baby Jesus on the window of his car wash, reports the Times of Trenton. Alex Leiva attempted to take photos of the window image, but he dropped the phone. In the amount of time it took Levia to pick the phone up and try and snap another photo, the image had almost disappeared."
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Bears The Only Natural Thing Left In Jersey
“Bears are a symbol that not all of New Jersey has been paved over by subdivisions and strip malls. A lot of people living in bear country oppose the hunt, but it’s hard to sell condos to people from Brooklyn if bears are going through the neighborhood.” —Jeff Tittel, director of the New Jersey Sierra Club, discusses the state's annual black bear hunt, which runs through Saturday.
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America's Tent Cities
"All over the country, in the last few years, police have moved in on the tent cities of the homeless, one by one, from Seattle to Wooster, Sacramento to Providence, in raids that often leave the former occupants without even their minimal possessions. In Chattanooga, Tennessee, last summer, a charity outreach worker explained the forcible dispersion of a local tent city by saying, 'The city will not tolerate a tent city. That’s been made very clear to us. The camps have to be out of sight.'" —"Homelessness is not a side issue unconnected to plutocracy and greed." Although don't remind Jersey gov Chris Christie about his plans [...]
