New Jersey

[Originally written in 2009.  Updated in 2021.]

Prior to graduating from college in 1990, I had no experience with New Jersey.  We had been to New York City a few times, Long Island a few times, and upstate New York a few times, but New Jersey was simply a transit area between the Washington DC area and New York.  When my friend Ken moved to New Jersey to study for his masters in psychology at Montclair State University, living in Bloomfield (Exit 148 from the Garden State Parkway), I visited him several times.  This gave me most of my experience in New Jersey.

From 2009 to 2018 I was going up to New Jersey fairly regularly, to Fort Lee, which is on the NJ side of the George Washington Bridge.  These adventures put me in Edgewater fairly often, Hackensack (county seat for Bergen County), and Paramus with its Garden State Plaza.  Fort Lee is also next to Palisades Park, where my buddy Ken, Dave, and I saw Blue Oyster Cult in 1992 at the Soap Factory, a club that isn't there anymore.  

I started by driving up the Turnpike, then started taking Chinatown buses, private buses which left DC near Bethesda and dropped off across from Madison Square Garden, with the 158 bus from Port Authority taking me through Edgewater to Fort Lee.  Then towards the end of that chapter, I was driving again, this time avoiding tolls by driving due north from Baltimore up to York, PA, then over northeast to Lancaster, Reading, Allentown, then on I-78 over into NJ, 287 north, then I-80 east to 95 and 46, a five hour drive from Northern Virginia to Fort Lee.    

 

Bloomfield.  Bloomfield is fairly run down, with old houses, and no less than 3 strip clubs.  It’s fairly close to New York City and Newark. Close by are Newark, Lyndhurst, and Giants Stadium (in East Rutherford).  Newark has a high population of Brazilians.

 NYC.  Forget driving in Manhattan – that’s for fools and masochists.  What we did was drive to Hoboken (where the Hindenburg crew lived in the 30’s, as the Nazis didn’t trust non-Germans to service the zeppelin) and park there, taking the PATH train into the city, specifically Greenwich Village.  Near Fort Lee there is a shuttle which takes you into Manhattan at 175^th Street.  For much of northern Jersey, the NYC skyline is visible, especially the Empire State Building (now that that World Trade Center is gone).

 Mid-Jersey.  This part includes Trenton, Princeton, and Hillsborough.  On the more recent trips to visit Ken, I visited him here.  The voyage from my area completely avoided the New Jersey Turnpike, instead driving up 95 past Philadelphia and crossing over into New Jersey somewhere close to Trenton, and driving through Princeton.  My friend Jim was married in Princeton (his wife was from there, though she went to Cornell) in 1995.  Since northern New Jersey is pretty much a suburb of New York City, and southern New Jersey is very much a suburb of Philadelphia (particularly Camden and Cherry Hill), central Jersey is really the only part of Jersey that is more or less an independent suburban area in its own right.  Rutgers, the state university of New Jersey, could be considered in this area.  I ended up visiting its main campus in New Brunswick fairly often for a four year period, though not as a student.  

 “Mentertainment.”  New Jersey has an impressive array of strip clubs.  The law says that if the venue serves its own alcohol, the girls have to wear bikinis; one specific club, Frank’s Chicken House, had no alcohol on the premises – just soda and greasy chicken – and completely nude dancers, many of whom were porn stars.  The state has a guide to the clubs, called the “Mentertainment Guide”, which I joked was the “New Jersey Tourism Guide”.  I suggested to Ken (over 10 years ago) that we hit every strip club in the state, to which he reacted in horror: in his county, Essex (when he lived in Bloomfield) alone there must have been 10-15 clubs, and 3 in Bloomfield alone.  As mentioned in my magazines blog, NJ’s convenience stores can be trusted to offer a wide array of porn mags in plain view.  Definitely convenient!

 Jersey Shore.  This starts at Sandy Hook in the far northeast, and runs down the coast to Wildwood.  Asbury Park and the boardwalk are included in this area.  My experience with this is very limited (Sandy Hook and Atlantic City), but to me beaches are pretty much the same everywhere except the south of France or Rio de Janeiro. 

 Atlantic City.  Along the boardwalk and shore, on the southern end.  Remarkably, there is no direct connection between the Atlantic City Expressway and the New Jersey Turnpike: you have to drive through Camden (or is it Runnymeade?) to get to the Expressway.  AC is very much like Las Vegas, but with a beach & boardwalk and nasty weather in the winter.  To my experience, though, the only thing to do in Atlantic City is gamble, whereas Vegas is far more versatile.  On the other hand, if you’re in my area (DC/Baltimore), AC is only 2-3 hours by car, compared to a plane trip for Vegas.  The Viets love to gamble, and love Atlantic City.  And of course, Monopoly was originally designed here: is there an Atlantic City variant of Monopoly?  Go figure.

 Roads.  Aside from the Turnpike and the Garden State Parkway, the roads in Jersey are… unique.  There are a confusing array of state, local, and municipal roads, and the exits are poorly marked: typically they’re posted 5 feet ahead of the exit itself, so that by the time you see it, you’ve already passed it.  Then you have to turn around at a jughandle – because of the concrete barriers running across the median – and go back again.  It really seems that the roads are set up for the benefit of people who live there, at the expense of anyone else: if you can’t figure it out, tough shit, that’s your problem. 

 New Jersey Turnpike.  This opened in the 1950s and serves as a high-speed conduit for traffic coming from Delaware over the Memorial Bridge, all the way to New York City (Final Exit 18 & the George Washington Bridge).  Oddly, it does not hook up with the New York State Thruway.  Most of the traffic on the Turnpike seems to be out-of-state.  There are various service areas which – until recently – had Roy Rogers restaurants, at a time when McDonald’s had bought out and closed most of the ones down here.  There are 18 exits, but they are not evenly spaced apart: the southernmost exits are far apart and then they get closer and closer in as you get closer to Newark and NYC.  The Turnpike also divides into cars-only lanes and truck lanes, changes from being surrounded by forests down south to surrounded by chemical plants further north.

 Garden State Parkway.  This serves as the primary conduit of traffic within the state itself, and most cars on the GSP seem to have NJ tags.  There seems to be a toll plaza every 10 exits or so.  NJ natives tend to orient themselves by GSP exit numbers, though I recall when visiting Hillsborough that the GSP was rarely part of our travel plans – in that part of the state it runs far to the east, near the shore.

The two cross in upper-middle New Jersey, exit 11 on the Turnpike, exit 129 on the Garden State Parkway.  South of the interchange, the Turnpike winds through the middle of nowhere, and the GSP goes east over to the Jersey Shore.  North of the interchange, the GSP goes up in the middle of highly populated areas, and the Turnpike goes up parallel to the river, with exits for the Outerbridge Crossing and Goethals Bridge (to Staten Island), the Holland Tunnel (to downtown Manhattan), the Lincoln Tunnel (to midtown Manhattan), and finally ends at the GW Bridge.  

 Celebrities.  Bon Jovi are not only from New Jersey, they named an album after the state.  Bruce Springsteen makes much of his Asbury Park origins.  Danny DeVito grew up there; and Joe Piscopo was very much in-your-face about his home state.  Frank Sinatra is from Hoboken.  Kevin Smith is from Red Bank, and sets most of his movies there.  Zakk Wylde (Ozzy’s guitarist), the Misfits (who we saw at the Stone Pony in Asbury Park) and Glenn Danzig are from Jersey.  The Seton Hall University radio station, WSOU (89.5) played an impressive array of metal and obscure rock (e.g. “Sabbra Cadabra” and “Megalomania” by Black Sabbath).  What all these celebrities seem to share is a consensus that “New Jersey is f**ked up, but it’s our home and we’re proud of it.” 

Vs. NYC.  My father's side of the family is from Brooklyn, and many of my relatives have that distinctive accent - though for some reason my father didn't.  It seems New Yorkers look down on those from New Jersey, bragging that "we're better than them,"  as if everyone from New Jersey - at least the northern half - is trying to bask in the glow, glory and notoriety properly the exclusive domain of true New Yorkers.   But once you leave that area, the rest of the country makes little or no distinction between Jersey and NYC.  To everyone else, everyone from that area has an attitude problem.  

Magazines

As anyone who knows me well knows, I read a lot of books.  But I also read magazines – of various types.

 Cars.  Since I’m into cars, I’m obviously into car magazines.

 High Performance Pontiac (HPP)(subscription).  By far my favorite.  There is a snobbery in the Pontiac community against ’82 and later Firebirds, because they came from the factory with small block Chevy V8s, instead of the Pontiac V8s the 1955-1981 models had.  HPP does not share this – they will discuss TPI (tuned-port injected) Formulas, LT1 Trans Ams, Bonneville SSEIs, or ’04-’06 GTOs, in addition to the articles on tuning the Quadrajet in your older Firebird, Trans Am or GTO.  A given issue might have features on a ’66 GTO, a ’74 Trans Am, an ‘88 Formula 350, and a ’02 Trans Am all in the same month.

            Another funny thing: unlike Hot Rod and Car Craft, which are based in L.A., and have a “sunny, surfer” attitude, HPP is based in the NY/NJ area, so they have this “forgettaboutit” Sopranos style – and can relate to cars rusting and snow in the winter. 

 GM High Tech Performance.  This focuses on late model EFI (electronic fuel injection) cars – ’82- later Camaros and Firebirds, the occasional Buick Grand National, ’94-96 Impala SS, Bonneville SSEI and newer Grand Prixs, and Corvettes.  Many of the articles are on tuning with laptops, replacing injectors, passing emissions, fixing trouble codes, which us late model guys have to deal with instead of pesky Holleys and Quadrajets.  It seems to be written by many of the same guys who do HPP, so often times there is an overlap.

 Hot Rod.  This is the premier high performance magazine, and I used to subscribe, but after a point it became tiresome.  Much of the features were on fancy, overdone ’69 Camaros with interior work which cost more than some entire new cars, shaved door handles, no A/C, etc.  The tech articles usually featured grotesquely expensive crate engines no one short of Warren Buffett, Bill Gates or Ross Perot could afford.  And with any performance upgrade, the modifications were simple and easy to install, and did exactly what the aftermarket company promised – completely at odds with the reality as us car crafters know it from real life.  The magazine is essentially targeted at gearheads with unlimited budgets – or those hoping to be someday.  ZZZ.

Car Craft (subscription).  Car Craft used to be almost identical to Hot Rod, to the point where I couldn’t remember whether an article I’d read came from one or the other.  Then some time in the late 90s, David Freiburger took over, and completely changed the slant.  Instead of $15,000 crate engine reviews, it was now “how to get 400 HP from a junkyard 350” and a fantastic article on how they got a ’68 Plymouth Satellite they’d bought for $200 to drop 6 seconds in the quarter mile without spending any money at all – ok, they fudged a little, spending $10 at the hardware store for dryer duct (!!!) to make a crude, home-made cool air system.  In other words, Car Craft had turned into a magazine for the REST OF US.  Since then, it’s reverted back to something in between.  Every now and then they’ll do a piece on third generation F-bodies (’82-92 Firebirds and Camaros), which keeps me happy.  In fact, they’d feature so many Camaros that some readers accused the magazine of being “Camaro Craft”.  I actually had two items published: one a tech question on carbs vs. fuel injection in a 1998 issue, and the other was a humorous “bite”: “Pontiac DID invent everything!” 

 News.  I tend to get my news by osmosis: off the radio, TV, newspaper, the Internet, etc. passively without any conscious effort at seeking it out.

 The Economist.  I like this English news magazine, published weekly.   I even used to subscribe to it, but I found that it was too much information; I couldn’t consistently read each issue before the next one arrived, so I’d accumulate a stack of them.  Time, Newsweek and US News and World Report have a very narrow view: if the US isn’t bombing the country, it’s nonexistent as far as those three are concerned.  The Economist brings us news about Brazil, Cambodia, and lots of other countries which are off the US news radar for whatever reason.  The writing is very good, and even the captions for photos are clever and tongue-in-cheek.  I’d classify the politics as centrist, with a very slight pro-capitalist bend.

            As for Time, Newsweek and US News and World Report, I’ll buy them when they have a particular cover story I’m interested in, but that’s fairly rare.  If anyone had the idea that Americans are insular and provincial, these magazines would be potent support for that view.

 Music.  Of course I’m heavily into music, so of course I’ll read music magazines.

 Classic Rock.  This is by far my favorite.  It’s an English magazine.  They’ve heard of bands like Hawkwind and Opeth, and aren’t afraid to cover them, though for some reason they’re fixated on Axl Rose and Guns N’Roses – to the point where someone complained it should be called “Velvet Guns Monthly”.  They have a “Buyer’s Guide”, reviews of new albums and reissues, and tons of great stuff each time.  It’s reached the point where every issue induces me to make 3-4 purchases, the majority of which I’m highly satisfied with.  I’d subscribe, but the subscriptions are horrendously expensive: $100-124 for a year.

 Kerrang!  This used to be the premier heavy metal magazine, but they used all sorts of horrible typefaces and offset colors.  Moreover, the writers were REALLY full of themselves.  One, Mark Putterford, spent several paragraphs of a piece on Zeno Roth (Uli Roth’s brother) going on about how he had this huge responsibility, which he took extremely seriously, to be generous to new rock stars otherwise the readers would turn off on a bad review by yours truly and the poor would-be rock star would then be condemned to oblivion.  On the other hand, they turned me on to Faith No More back in 1989.

 I really don’t like Rolling Stone.  Occasionally I’ll buy an issue if they have a cover story on AC/DC or Metallica, but my experience and impression has been that like MTV, Rolling Stone considers itself not merely a magazine about rock music but more of an overall arbiter of all things cool: what we should wear, listen to, read, watch, and even think.  It doesn’t help that when it comes to bands I like the most, Rolling Stone either at best ignores them or at worst tends to bust on them.  Whoever runs it really is not someone I’d hang out with.

 Cream was a bit the same, but I haven’t seen them around recently.  I used to pick this one up at the Stars & Stripes (PX bookstore).  Like Rolling Stone, they’d tend to bust on the bands I liked the most.  One writer referred to “the two black-haired goons who used to flank Ozzy in Black Sabbath” [Tony Iommi and Geezer Butler] not even knowing their names.  What a load of crap.

 Hit Parader and Circus I was never into that much.  Both seemed a bit too enthralled with mainstream metal and hair metal – as if they were written FOR and BY metal Neanderthals only mere IQ points above Beavis & Butt-head.  Revolver seems like a more recent version of these.  I couldn’t get into Alternative Press.

 Guitar World.  I used to subscribe to this.  It had tablature and usually focused on metal guitarists.  Most of the columns are by thrash metal guitarists – Dimebag Darrell once had a column, as did Zakk Wylde. I still buy it periodically when there’s a cover story or a song I’m interested in.  Sheet music is not specifically designed for guitars and does not translate directly to guitar, you have to be able to “read it”, which is fairly esoteric and far less practical than tablature.  Tablature is far more direct and straightforward: it has 6 lines, corresponding to the 6 strings, and fret positions for notes and chords.    

Guitar (For the Practicing Musician).  This doesn’t seem to be around anymore, but we used to buy it when it was.  This was the first magazine that had tablature in it, and I still have dozens of issues. They also had a few special editions and a few acoustic editions.  Its format and typeface were more conservative and less metal-oriented than Guitar World.

 Guitar (just plain “Guitar”).  This was the most conservative, oldest, and least interesting, mainly because it had no tablature.

 Politics.

Reason.  This is essentially the Libertarian opinion magazine.  I never read New Republic (slightly liberal) or National Review (slightly conservative) – and because they are both “N.R.” I get them confused anyway.  If I had to pick one where I find myself saying, “amen, hallelujah” (preaching to the choir) it’s this one.  Peter Bagge used to do cartoons for them, too bad he’s not active anymore, now that I finally have a subscription.

While not as flippant and casual as the Economist is sometimes, it’s certainly readable without seemingly like a textbook or manual – enjoyable to read.  Then again, that may be because I tend to agree with it 95% of the time.

 The Nation.  On the leftist side, here’s the voice of socialism.  Christopher Hitchens used to write for The Nation, until the Iraq War came by and he refused to apologize for Saddam Hussein simply to oppose the war.  My friend gets this as a gift subscription from an old friend of hers, whether she likes it or not, as do her daughters from the same benefactor – and none of these three ladies have any use for it.  I read it occasionally to see the other side’s arguments, but it’s difficult to digest, not only because I tend to disagree with it 95% of the time, but also the writing is terribly dense and affected.  Even the “social” parts (arts, books, movies, and music) are horrendously pretentious and verbose.  No one who writes for The Nation seems to have a sense of humor, and they all share the annoying intellectual snobbery that socialists (including Hitchens) seem to have.

 Men’s Magazines.   I’m a guy, so I like to see naked women – in various different contexts.   Back in the old days (which for me means, the 1970s), many of the lower end stores, like Dart Drug, used to have ALL of these out on racks in the middle of the store.  Not behind the counter, not in plastic wrap or brown wrappers, nothing.  Talk about a trip!  Now we have to go to New Jersey, where it seems every convenience store has an astonishing selection of the nastiest, skankiest magazines you could possibly imagine ever existed.  In my neck of the woods, even in liberal Maryland, this is unheard of.  Anyhow.

 Playboy.  Supposedly the classiest, but we still get full frontal nudity.  I can’t recall the last article or interview I read.  The cartoons are a hoot, though.  The women can be counted on to be stunning but often classy as well.  I suppose you could consider it upscale, respectable porn, even if it is a bit dull sometimes. If a mainstream celebrity (e.g. Victoria Principal or Kim Kardashian) wanted to pose nude, she’d do so “tastefully” in Playboy.  Each issue would have an initial pictorial (usually the celebrity one), then the famous centerfold – 80% white, 20% black or Asian – and finally a second pictorial, which was frequently one of these “Girls of the [College Division]” things.  The second pictorial could be counted on for some full frontal nudity.  Unfortunately there would be a “guide to sex in films” which I found less satisfying as a pictorial, per se, but sometimes informative as to certain of the more racier films – these were artsy R rated films and not run-of-the-mill porn.

There was also a so-called Playboy Advisor, to which various dolts and idiots addressed their concerns.  They would alternate from sexual questions to “how do I set up my hi-fi” or “what Porsche model should I buy?”  I found the former to be more pertinent, and the latter would be better served had they been addressed to the magazines which specialize in those areas, NOT Playboy.

 Penthouse.  Ramping up the raunch yet still pretentious in terms of “articles”.  The women are somewhat hotter than Playboy and pose in far more provocative ways, definitely designed to appeal to prurient interests with a minimum pretention of class.  The women look like porn stars or strippers who work on the high end – pretentious porn movies or expensive strip clubs.  It’s debatable whether PH managed to reconcile the two.  PH would have 4 pictorials, and one would frequently be lesbian or guy & girl sex, considerably raunchier than Playboy but still with excellent photography for some pretense of artsiness and “class”.  The Forum featured various erotic stories of dubious plausibility – well written and very imaginative and entertaining, to be sure, but not representative of the social life of anyone we knew personally or even remotely. 

 Hustler.  Ok, this magazine has no illusions of class whatsoever.  The cartoons are gross.  The models are attractive but skanky, and it’s hard to enjoy it without feeling nasty.  The models look like low-grade porn stars. I never liked it.

 Mayfair.  This is more like it.  The girls here are natural, busty, and almost (but not quite) “girl next door”, if by next door you mean some town in England.  They struck me as “approachable” (unlike the perfect goddesses in Playboy or L.A./Las Vegas porn stars of Penthouse or Hustler) and normal, but very attractive and very friendly.

The Vladimir Ilyich Code

Recently I caught “The Da Vinci Code” on DVD at last, followed up immediately by seeing “Angels & Demons” in the movie theater.  Having seen “National Treasure” (both of them) earlier, the similarities were striking.  I suppose you could call “The Da Vinci Code” the Catholic version of “National Treasure”, or “National Treasure” the American version of “The Da Vinci Code”.

 Maybe expand the franchise to include a communist version, the “Vladimir Ilyich Code”.  Putin has been murdered, and to solve the crime, the Moscow Militia calls in veteran Kremlinologist – but non-communist – Richard London.  If anyone can get to the bottom of this crime, it’s him!  No one knows more obscure communist mythology, trivia, and minutiae than this man – even veteran Politburo members can’t remember half the stuff this man has forgotten!  Plied with vintage Stolichnaya and some rare Lenin pamphlets, he agrees to take the case.

 He starts in Moscow, but wait – he has to borrow Lenin’s embalmed body to find a crucial clue…

 Which leads him to St. Petersburg, formerly Leningrad, where some Rasputin-oriented clue leads him to….

 Sverdlovsk, formerly Ekaterinburg, where the Romanovs were murdered by Ermakov and his henchmen, which leads him to…

 London!  To Karl Marx’s grave, and the tombstone provides the obscure and counterintuitive hint to another clue in…

 Beijing!  It turns out something to do with Chairman Mao – oops, can we borrow his embalmed corpse for a bit? – will lead us closer to the answer, in…

 Hanoi! Something Ho Chi Minh wrote way back when, before he died in 1969, will tell us to go to…

 Paris!  Where he helped form the French Communist Party in 1920, but wait, his clue leads us back to….

 Moscow!  And the killer is….