The Jersey City Independent "

Walking into Eonta Space, a private performance space tucked away in Journal Square, you know you’ve stepped into something special. Here, the Van Reipen Collective is presenting “A Little Piece Please,” a 30-minute portion of the Food section of experimental modernist writer Gertrude Stein’s 1914 book Tender Buttons, in which how a word sounds is as important–or more important–than its meaning.

Thirty days. That’s all that remains of an election season that could be said to have begun the day after Mayor Jerramiah Healy was reelected in 2009. Much has changed, but Jersey City politics remains Jersey City politics.

Being surrounded by artists and people from all across the ethnic rainbow, dealing with the harsh realities of city life, expressing your feelings in song–it sounds almost like a typical day in Jersey City, but it’s actually what audiences will find in the Argus Eyes production of the classic Broadway musical Rent.

Called the forgotten Ward by some, Jersey City’s west side boasts what few other areas of the city can. Yet many of the Ward’s features remain underutilized, say residents, and government help and ideas are coming along too slowly.

Scarlet Aquatics–a swim club based in Jersey City, Bayonne and Hoboken–has come a long way since their first incarnation, the Bayonne Mermaids-Starfish swim team, came to life in 1963. The team, started by Tom Wojslawowicz, was originally a small group of Bayonne girls, and later, boys. Now, Scarlet Aquatics has over 150 kids and is the top team in New Jersey.

Cameron Clarke isn’t your average 17-year-old. The McNair Academic High School senior has a 96.1 GPA and is a member of the National Honor Society, vice president of his class and president of the Drama Club. He’s also got a smooth, booming voice and a love of poetry that helped him win second in the state at the Poetry Out Loud memorization and recitation competition in March.

For my monthly do-it-yourself projects, I wait for something or someone to inspire me. This month my inspiration came in the form of a phone book. One morning as I walked into the school office, I noticed a stack of new phone books on the counter. I stood there confused, questioning if people actually still use phone books. As I walked home that night, I noticed phone books everywhere: in front of houses, outside of businesses, and stacked on top of one another in front of an apartment complex.

Jerry Walker, a mayoral candidate as of late January, is playing catch up. That doesn’t mean he can’t win, he maintains, it just means he has his work cut out for him. Indeed, Walker’s mayoral rivals have head starts opening Ward headquarters, holding fundraisers, and sending out campaign literature. They had a head start putting [...]

Reading about a place in a textbook will never quite compare to climbing the steps of ancient ruins, biting into authentic local food or meeting and interacting with people from other cultures. Knowing there’s nothing like the real thing, New Jersey City University professor Tim White spearheaded a new program at the school that makes study abroad programs more accessible to students from different economic backgrounds.

Ward B Council Candidate Esther Wintner had spent so much time criticizing the current administration it seemed as though she must be another Ward E Councilman Steve Fulop supporter. Or put another way, that her criticism, like so many others, was motivated by politics, not policy. But then Fulop’s allies on the Council crossed a line: they tried to change the law to oust Council President Peter Brennan, putting themselves “above the law.”