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Drooling on the Pillow

Wednesday, March 15, 2006

Monumental Jersey 

Peter Applebome, who writes the Our Town column for the Times and stirred things up around here last year with his profile of New Jersey Bloggers has a good one on page two of the Metro section today.

I'm not linking to it because, probably as a result of his NJ Blogger piece, he's been elevated to the rarefied air behind the TimesSelect wall.

Get him.

Today he takes us on a tour of an exhibition called "Monumental: Imaginary Monuments to New Jersey", which whimsically asked for submissions for a monument to Da Garden State. It will be at the Jersey City Museum on Montgomery Street and Victory Hall a couple of blocks away, running from March 25 through April 23. It sounds like fun, though inevitably self-flagellating.

Here's Mr. Applebome's summary.
So what does this tell us about the lure of the
Jersey myth? What's the secret of Da Jersey
Code? Here's my take. New Jersey is America
at its most vulnerable, most human, least heroic,
least easily definable. It's the rest of us -- old
gangsters, old cities, old rockers, old suburbs, new
suburbs, too much traffic, too much pollution, too
many crooks. It's Abbott and Costello and Philip
Roth, Frank Sinatra and Ice-T, Allen Ginsberg
and Aaron Burr. Sometimes it seems like a rocky
romance that's seen better days, but at its best,
and in its dreams, it's still the Garden State.
Fair enough.
Posted by: Sluggo / 4:36 PM
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