Middlepoet, aka Aaron Jackson, is a longtime fixture on Jersey City’s spoken-word scene, having been a key part of the Waterbug Hotel collective earlier this decade and a continued presence at cultural events citywide.
Now the former Poet Laureate of Jersey City is embarking on a somewhat new chapter in his artistic career, with the [...]
The New Jersey Council on the Arts today awarded more than $15 million in grants to nearly 800 organizations, artists and projects, including the troubled Jersey City Museum and four other institutions based in Jersey City.
The council awarded the following grants to local institutions for Fiscal Year 2011:
Jersey City Museum: $77,211 for general operating [...]
- New Assemblyman: Jason O’Donnell talks to the Journal about his new jobs as Bayonne’s director of Public Safety and the Assemblyman representing the 31st District, which covers Bayonne and part of Jersey City. O’Donnell is replacing former Assemblyman Anthony Chiappone, who pleaded guilty this summer to campaign finance fraud.
- Cammarano Sentenced: One of the [...]
One of New Jersey’s most strident boosters now has a seat at the state’s largest paper. Tris McCall, who has graced stages all over Jersey City for the better part of the ’00s, joined the Star-Ledger as a pop music critic earlier this month, working under longtime critic Jay Lustig, who became the paper’s arts [...]
It may seem unlikely, but I’m a hip-hop head. Old school. From the time I can remember listening to anything, rap was there. I didn’t grow up in the inner city, but I didn’t grow up in the suburbs, either. If there was such a thing as the outer city, that’s where I’d be from. [...]
As we noted in this morning’s News Roundup, the Puerto Rican Family Institute plans on using a $30,000 grant from the Horizon Foundation for New Jersey to fund its Diabetes Outreach program. But three other programs operating in Jersey City received grant money from the foundation as well as part of $1.9 million in grants [...]
A shift in the retail scene here in Jersey City began earlier this month when Iris Records owner Steve Gritzan announced that Dec. 12 would be the last day for retail hours at his Brunswick Street store. The response was swift with tearful crate diggers near and far asking: “Why?” Another likely response, this time from some neighbors, was: “There’s a record store on Brunswick Street?” Little did they know, there had been for 13 years.
At the Dec. 16 City Council meeting, local photographer and songwriter Hugh Hales-Tooke regaled the council with a song he wrote about the demolition of the art-deco landmark at 1 Jersey Avenue. “I am mourning the loss of a building,” he sang.
McCall’s new “broadly autobiographical” album takes us all over New Jersey, from the Delaware Water Gap to the Staples at Newport Center. “Many of these songs were written at a time when I didn’t exactly feel welcome in my own hometown,” he says. “Since I have always had a near-religious loyalty to the place where I’m from, you could look at Let The Night Fall as a chronicle of a crisis of faith.”
Cross-posted at Jersey Beat.
Tris McCall’s last record took us on a guided tour of hipster Williamsburg, using both metaphor and keen powers of observation to convey a keenly felt sense of time and place. On Let The Night Fall, McCall’s back in his beloved New Jersey, whether celebrating the Garden State’s unique cultural institutions (“WFMU,” [...]
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