Is Asbury Park Dead?

Last night we watched a pretty depressing movie called City by the Sea. It could have been a very powerful movie, but seemed to lose it's way somewhere along the line. That's not why I sit here scribbling.

A big part of the dark side of the film is the setting for a decaying beach town, which is purported to be to be Long Beach, New York. Shortly after I saw something that looked like the Ocean Grove pier, Sarah started asking if this was partly filmed in Park? I sort of thought so at first, and then backtracked saying that all these old and decaying shore towns look about the same.

Near the end of the film, there is a scene with what looked to be the old amusement house at the south of end of . It was a street I'd walked a hundred times as a kid. I was struck by just how much it looked like somewhere I knew in Park and mentioned it out loud to everyone (we're a noisy movie watching family at home). When the movie ended I halted the DVD at the start of the credits to shoo the kids to bed and then watched a few minutes that I had missed. Afterward, Sarah wanted to go to the credits and I wanted to go check IMDB. I went to filming locations and Sarah watched the credits.

When I came out she announced that there was a disclaimer that none of the film was shot in Long Beach and that the movie specifically mentioned thanks to , the Stone Pony (a local bar, also known locally as the home of Bruce Springsteen) and several New Jersey organizations. The IMDB locations information showed Park and New York, New York.

In one of the commentary pieces (which I suddenly decided to watch), they mentioned that the footage at the beginning of the film was home movies (I'd figured that part out) which they had requested in the Park Press while filming was being done. The DVD has some truly great stuff to see if you are from the area (or even just interested). They show the Convention Center back before it was a relic (which it was long before the last time I was there during the summer of 1980). There are clips with the boardwalk and (even more amazing) the beaches teeming with people. There are a couple terrific shots of the Ocean Grove pier. And then the scene shifts to a view of the current day Convention Center from the north, showing a bit of the ocean front with the pier at the south end of Ocean Grove still visible. The city truly looks dead, which is about where the movies depression begins.

I will say this, the boardwalk is in really good condition, which wasn't possible to say in the late sixties and through the seventies. From what I known about Bradley Beach, located just over a mile south, this is quite amazing. Bradley has had to nearly completely rebuild its boardwalk twice since the last major reconstruction I watched after Hurricane Bell in 1976. I guess they're doing the boardwalks to make themselves look good for the cameras, they've become the Jersey Shore for the Sopranos series on HBO. The film has good (sometimes depressing) shots of throughout.

was dying by the early seventies and didn't seem able to help itself. The city had been all about the circuit for young adults (the first block from the ocean contained a large number of clubs, bars, pool halls and the like, so people cruised around it) and the ocean front attractions for the families. When the first seeds of decay began, local teenagers kept the ocean front attractions going (once your parents won't go, it must be good right?) and the young adults didn't even notice. Over time, as it slid downhill, people began ignoring it. It was alone among its shore neighbors.

All the shore towns are somewhat desolate in the winter. The people who choose to live there do, and everyone else bails for the winter. The more middle class towns (such as Long Branch to the north and Belmar to the south) tend to stay more than half filled. The summer towns more or less empty out (the people who come there expect to find the boardwalk and beach about the same every year). was more the kind of place that should have stayed pretty filled, but suddenly the whole town was decaying and that place was as desolate as the summer towns. Unlike Atlantic City, they didn't have the clout to ask for a gambling bailout (I bet that they did ask).

Deal to the north is very wealthy and all about property, they could care less what happens in (unless it's for sale).

Long Branch, just a bit further north was a grown up, middle class town. Its beach was a profitable sideline business.

Ocean Grove at the time was getting to be a little seedy, and there was a bit of property owner animosity towards the Methodist Church which owned the town and made all the rules. That changed in the late seventies (or thereabouts), and the town looked terrific the last time I was there (August 2001). Remove all the stupid church rules and the town is reborn. What do you know?

Some nice arsonist helped Bradley Beach by burning down the entire block between Ocean and Beach, and LaReine and Brinley back in about 1973 (it still had the long dead carcass of what I think was called the Brinley Hotel until the fire removed that problem). A few lawsuits later, there were condos on Ocean Avenue and more modern (aka smaller) apartments and homes to fill the rest of the block. Several years later they rebuilt the area across the street, tearing down the deteriorating public pool, bathhouses and arcade. Bradley is a summer town and the people who live there work pretty hard to keep it the same year around.

Avon was and still is a lively summer town that is also well maintained all year long. It has more old fashioned hotels on Ocean Avenue, and much bigger homes throughout the town. Avon is also home to the Shark River Inlet Coast Guard Station, which can't hurt.

Belmar is another middle class town that has seemingly rebuilt its beach front area continuously. Every time I see it, there's another bunch of remodeling and different arcades and shops in the young and trendy part of the ocean front. Everywhere else it looks about the same. The basin area where the charter and party boats run from is hurting, but they've offset that by developing what used to be marshy wetlands into an island with a whole bunch of condos and town homes. Otherwise, it is as it was.

I wish for the best, but it's sad.

School Trip

On Wednesday and Thursday of this past week Adam, Sarah and I took a trip up to San Francisco to see Academy of the Art College where Adam is thinking of going after high school and is slated to attend a Summer Art Experience this summer. The school is open enrollment, founded in 1929, with twenty buildings throughout city, ten for housing and ten for academic studies. Most of the buildings are within a few blocks of Market Street, but they have shuttles running around to all of the buildings on a more or less continuous basis. For summer and scholarship consideration, Adam will need to submit a portfolio (and we had the opportunity to see a few examples).

What an interesting trip it was...

We got to see 'purple' mountains for the first time Wednesday on the trip up to San Francisco. The hills at the top of the grapevine (along I-5 just outside of Gorman coming from Southern California) are all kinds of interesting colors; green, orange, purple included. We all drove a little bit on the way up here, and everyone had a pretty good time as we laughed, joked and generally acted silly.

We stayed at Hotel Rex which isn't a bad place (it was very inexpensive for San Francisco), but it has the smallest and perhaps slowest elevator I've ever used. We had dinner at the Oaks inside the St. Francis. It was awful. I'd enjoyed the food in room service so much that I figured dinner would be great. Not even close and I'm not going to go into it. We ended up buying a full gallon of water Wednesday night after dinner, which was about a half gallon more than seemed appropriate. Oh well.

The Academy of the Arts buildings were everywhere, including one about a block from the hotel (this turned out to be one of the galleries). With all the times I've been to San Francisco in the last 16 years, I've never noticed one before. Wednesday I was noticing them everywhere. The main building is just a couple blocks from Moscone Center.

The first tour was for Fine Arts and Illustration. We got to see the four galleries operated by the school in San Francisco, and also had a chance to see several of the labs used by the illustration and painting students. Most classes used a sort of black bench instead of easels, which was odd (not seeing anyone use one, I'm not sure how it's done). Lot's of cool 3-D models were around, most of which are used as guides for future 2-D and 3-D illustration. So I guess illustrators need to learn clay modeling as well. Finally, we saw the building where the modern media classes are taught which is also the location of the schools software and email lab.

At lunch time we wandered over to see the Metreon, a SONY 'shopping experience' a couple blocks from the main school building (just around the corner from the north side of the Moscone Center). It was quite interesting. We spent a few minutes in the PlayStation store (Stephen gets a t-shirt), another few minutes in the Discovery Channel store and then wandered off to eat. After food, we checked out the SONY store. Lot's of cool gear to salivate over, but the thing that got Adam going the most was a picture of a Shelby Cobra 427. On the way back from lunch we hit the California Historical Society, where Sarah found a book for Jonathan and I found some cool old maps. They have one from 1858 that I really like.

While waiting for the Interior Architecture and Design tour to begin, we had a chance to watch a number of commercials done by students. I hate commercials but a couple stood out as being really well done (which says something if you know me). The tour crowd was decidedly female, as I think they were as confused about what 'Interior Architecture' means as I am. Adam, another father and I were the only males in the tour group. After the tour, I'm still pretty confused. There was a lot of traditional interior design stuff, but it went deeper than that. I'll have to do a lot more research to understand what it is that they are trying to teach kids to do. I was very impressed with one sophomore project, an excellent interior/exterior view of a home done from the artists view. It was stunning and I kept wandering back to look at it.

The ride home on Thursday evening was a bit odd. Adam wanted to see the Golden Gate bridge again (it's been about four years), so we went over it in sunlight, and came back over in a rainstorm with Adam taking pictures from the back of the van. I haven't looked at the pictures yet, but they ought to be interesting. We got caught in a bit of traffic getting out of town at 4PM. Worse, we got caught in a real mess on the other side of the bay (around Pleasanton on I-580) at about 5 PM.

Overall, it was well worth the trip and we all learned a few things. I'll put up the pictures when I get around to it.

Old Albums

I've been wrestling with what I should do with the many old albums that we have. Today I tried to see if I could digitize them and my initial research indicates that I can.

I was able to play our old Technics turn table through the iMic, but I had to crank the gain in Amadeus II all the way to maximum and I had the volume on my external speakers just about maxed out. I never bothered with a RIAA preamp a few years ago when we bought the tuner without a built-in preamp stage. And I really need one, so I poked around a little bit. An inexpensive amplifier seemed reasonable.

Whoa! These critters are expensive, and people still seem to favor tubes for the high end equipment. I don't think I'm going to worry about it that much.

I've found one that has an RIAA compliant amplifier, a ground connector, RCA in/out and mini-plug out for about $50 with shipping (and that's the only one I found in that price range) so I'm going to try it.

Speaking of Amadeus, I have been pretty happy with it. I used SoundEdit 16 for years, occasionally for recording, but much more often for converting sound files from one format to another. Since starting to use Amadeus, I've been doing more playing with it's recording capabilities for things like Jon's songs. It's a fun break from the other reasons I end up in front of the computer.

FireWire 'Issues'

Jonathan Rentzsch has posted a link to a very interesting white paper by James Wiebe of WiebeTech regarding FireWire meltdowns.

James Wiebe of WiebeTech has written an excellent, if somewhat academic, description of FireWire port destruction and its root causes.

About five months ago I privately implored James to publicly document the over-voltage protection they had quietly rolled into their Super Drive Dock, a feature which soon spread through their product line ...

I'm one of those unfortunate souls who has killed off a FireWire port and it was darned inconvenient.

After researching the problem a bit, I learned that WiebeTech had added power switches to their enclosures. I took advantage of buying a switched enclosure (a MicroGB+) about a month ago while purchasing a new FireWire PCI card for the G4 with the now dead port. It's unfortunate that this has become such a problem, but WiebeTech is doing a good job at delivering a functional workaround.

Front page emptiness!

I re-rendered my site after changing the URL and there isn't anything on the front page. This is going to have to change. I don't want the MT behavior here, I rather like the Radio way of doing things..

That is, the last X number of articles on the front page, and all articles for a given date are rendered on a distinct page. The nice effect of MT's way of doing things is that every article is itself a distinct page.

Lot's to think about here.