Upper WET Side
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2/9: Your Weekend Forecast on the 7′s
February 9, 2012
The Glamour Girls canvases of Holly Suzanne Rader — exemplified here by a detail from DICK & CANDY — are on display during a reception for GLAMit, this Saturday evening at Glen Goldbaum’s two neighboring Bridge Avenue salons.
His parties, alive with art and music and anybody-who’s-anybody people, are precisely the sort of under-the-radar events that you’d spend all night seeking out if you were looking for that elusive “something completely different” — the kind of happenings that should by all rights be too-cool and impossibly exclusive, were it not for the fact that they’re fully free of charge and open to friends old and new.
Last we looked in on Glen Goldbaum, the superstar Manhattan stylist turned catalyst for a creative new vision on Red Bank’s west side was hosting an event branded as Bewitched, a “magical evening of fantasy, hair, art and more” that transformed his two neighboring Bridge Avenue hair/ eye/ makeups (Glen Goldbaum 72 and Lambs & Wolves Den of Beauty) into an environment populated by winged fantasy characters, live mannequins and guest conceptualizers from Asbury Park’s Cookman Avenue “Arts Bloc.”
This Saturday, Feb the 11, the “Left Bank” block opposite the NJ Transit station stop will be the scene for GLAMit, a solo art installation (keyed to New York Fashion Week 2012) that celebrates “old Hollywood glam with a modern feminine edge” through the paintings and three-dimensional work of Holly Suzanne Rader. The Tennessee-bred artist will be on hand for a reception that spotlights her unique miniature paper dresses (composed of paper mache, vintage book pages, clip art and assorted items) as well as her Glamour Girls paintings — a series of homages to “retro bombshells, lusty pin-ups and the timeless Hollywood divine” that are “candy coated” with the artist’s engagingly repurposed found objects.
“I feel that the dress is more than a garment…it tells a story,” says Rader of her magnificent minis. “This collection is inspired by nature, poetry, fairytales, historical heroines, daydreams and other romantic notions.”
The Saturday reception, too groovy to be contained within a single storefront space, runs from 7 to 10 pm — with Rader’s art remaining on display through February and March — and we get off on telling you where else to go this weekend, beginning with a Friday fricasee that lies right around the clickable corner.
1/12: Lighting Up January’s Lulldrums
January 12, 2012
Light of Day luminary Bob Benjamin — pictured with beaming Boss at a way-long ago benefit show at Starland Ballroom — is the subject of JUST AROUND THE CORNER, the doc feature that screens at Asbury’s Showroom this Thursday through Sunday (and goes on sale at select events in the extended LOD weekend).
“Michael J. Fox has no Elvis in him.”
That was punk folkie Mojo Nixon in his 1987 hit “Elvis is everywhere,” citing the clean-cut young star of TV’s Family Ties as “the evil opposite of Elvis, the Anti-Elvis” — even though Fox as Marty McFly had technically already invented rock and roll in the first Back to the Future movie.
Michael J. Fox had also by that time starred (with Joan Jett!) in the film Light of Day, a story about an un-Partridgelike musical family with a title song penned by Bruce Springsteen. That film has gone on to lend its name to an annual series of benefit concerts dedicated to Parkinson’s Disease research, while Fox — who of course since that time has become one of the most publicly profiled victims of the disease, in addition to the most dynamic advocate for its cure — joined Jakob Dylan, Southside Johnny, Lucinda Williams, Gary US Bonds, Goo Goo Doll John Rzeznik, Live-wire Ed Kowalczyk, Smithereen Pat DiNizio, basso Soprano Vincent Pastore and Th’ Boss in the parade of performers who’ve stepped on stage in support of the Light of Day Foundation.
Somewhere, Mojo Nixon is sorry; as sorry as he is for inferring that Debbie Gibson was pregnant with his two-headed love child.
If anybody paces Michael J. Fox in the drive toward a Parkinson’s cure, it’s NJ music promoter, artist manager (and fellow Parkinson’s patient) Bob Benjamin, who teamed with Tony Pallagrosi of Concerts East to assemble the first Light of Day event in 2000 — itself a more organized version of a loose jam session birthday party/ fundraiser for Benjamin at Red Bank’s Downtown Cafe in 1998.
And, if anyone can lay claim to representing the public face of the concerts, it would hands-down have to be Joe Grushecky, the original Iron City Houserocker (and honorary Shoreguy) whose friendship and intermittent professional partnership with Springsteen has been the real deal for a generation. The Pittsburgh-based client of Benjamin’s hasn’t missed a Light of Day benefit in Jersey since its inception — and as the 12th annual edition of LOD returns to Asbury Park beginning today, January 12, it’ll take the form of an ever-expanding, de facto festival that encompasses some 20 separate events over 95 hours, ten varied venues, one big sold-out flagship fundraiser, a country ramble, a Boardwalk Crawl trifecta, a morning-after brunch, a kiddie koncert, and, right TONIGHT, a way-out Rock ‘N Bowl-a-Thon that promises the participation of everyone from WCW champ Diamond Dallas Page to political scandal celeb Ashley Dupre.
The Blues is a Chair, and We Don’t Care
August 21, 2011
Blues IN a chair: Branded entertainer BB King is the thickening agent in the BBQ sauce, as Ribfest comes to the corporate gazebo of the Pee ‘N See Arts Center this weekend — a weekend that further features some intriguingly affordable options to hear The Blues, whether real or imagined, in all its myriad hues.
Let us tell you ’bout The Blues. Actually, don’t listen to us — as much as we live the blues every hour of every day, we’re in no position to tell you what The Blues IS any more than the legion of po’boy-wearin’ poseurs who purport to purvey the Real Thing, three sets nitely.
All we can tell you with any certainty is what we like (anything by Howlin Wolf, older Fat Possum, newer Slim Harpo, The Stooges, Captain Beefheart…us and Jon Huntsman…plus Shore goodguy Gary Wright, who recently blew us away with a brief but astonishing set of solo folkblues right here at the historic house where we hang our hat). That and the fact that Asbury Blues is Temporarily Closed like Venice is temporarily sinking.
THAT, and the fact that John Lennon said “the blues is a chair.” Can’t argue with that.
This weekend, like so many other weekends up and down the Upper WET Side and all around the calendar, offers a shipload of opportunities to get a handle on this inscrutable commerce we call The Blues — from old-timey victrola back-porch scratch ‘n skronk, to matching jacket/union-card casino showband clam ‘n pomp. From barely-blues classic rock repositioning, to beyond-blues jam culture mixology and everything in between all those things, which, this being blues, ain’t a huge patch of turf.
What makes THIS particular weekend extra relevant is its almost cosmic confluence of events that illustrate the very State of the Blues in 2011: the tightly controlled and vetted museum-piece kind; the thinly veneered showbiz kind by which soulless suburbanites get to live with themselves one more day at premium-seating prices — and the intimate, almost underground vein that points most directly to the amazing past AND hopeful future of the form. It’s a tour that begins with a freebie festival on Saturday morning, and a kid-gloves flip of the vintage 78…
