Okay if you haven’t yet seen Jackson for the once a month Downtown Comedy Show he puts on at the Metric Bar & Grill you better get your butt in gear so you can tell your friends, lovers and grandchildren too that you know this guy before he busted out to the big, big time.
Featuring comedians from HBO, Comedy Central, Showtime and more!!! Hosted by comedian Jackson!! Its all at Metric Bar and Grill 39 Cannon St. (downtown) Bridgeport, CT Showtime 930pm!! Ten dollars at the door and worth every sheckel.
Order food while you’re there cause The Metric can cook up a storm but be warned you might laugh so hard you could spit up your chicken wings and look like the fool.
Oh yeah and Jackson’s got a brand spanking new OPEN MIKE night every Thursday at Metric. Comics, poets hip hop artists and more. Give him a holler on Facebook and keep up to date. His posts are part Martin Luther King, part Richard Pryor with a dash of lord knows what which equals 100% Jackson.
Check out New Jackson City on YouTube. We can’t post it here because, well it’s a newspaper blog and the you know what is just a bit too real.
Okay so here’s the deal. In conjunction with exhibit ART/BPT:2010 City Lights Galley will present a screening of short films and video projections all about Bridgeport. Good and bad, memories and dreams and hopes and fears.
Discussion to follow featuring Bridgeport mavens Michael Daly of the Connecticut Post, Brad Durrell of the Bridgeport News and Lenny Grimaldi of ONLY in BRIDGEPORT fame. Chili dinner for both meat lovers and vegetarians starts at 5:30 and the screening begins at 6:30. Suggestion donation of $10. RSVP REQUESTED.
Okay well maybe we’re overselling this show. After all we don’t know how badly seasonal adjustment disorder is affecting your mood, but either way turn off the Olympics and get on over to 51 Crescent Avenue in Bridgeport this Saturday for a show curated by The Gallery at Black Rock .
The opening of their INDUSTRIAL STRENGTH ART SHOW will be a bigger blast than bobsled racing on the boob tube will ever be. And in case you think we’re being snooty, we do like bobsled racing. As the title suggests the show presents a variety of work in which artists respond to the industrial landscape.
If your friends in Brooklyn think Connecticut is nothing more than Martha Stewart and The Mohegan Sun get them on Metro North and take them too.
Being an artist who works for little money and sporadic attention news of the suicide of celebrated bad boy fashion designer Alexander McQueen left me humbled at the randomness of life, the unfairness of celebrity, happiness and what it takes to create a self-made life as an artist or just an everyday Jane.
It would seem like someone who had such acclaim should be happy. Especially when that someone did it his own way, without the agreement of the establishment and who rose to great prominence in spite of them. After all don’t money and success especially when doing something you love always lead to happiness?
Of course, as proven time and time again the answer is an obvious NO.
Yet we are lucky to be surrounded by so many inspired creators who need to do their work, be it music, writing, dance, photography whatever the hell it is that turns them on, without so much attention. The need to create is what drives them.
So like our friend Bridgeport comedian Jackson noted, in of all places his Facebook page, we are both the slave and our master.
Poor people are often happy. Rich folks often miserable. Same for the famous and the unknown, too.
September 13, 2009 at 12:14 pm by Meredith DiMenna
Last night I had the pleasure of seeing Mr. Tony Bennett in concert. That’s Mr. Anthony Dominick Benedetto to you.
As an introduction to one of his songs, Mr. Bennett told the crowd how Bob Hope came up with the Americanized version of his name in a conversation after Tony’s appearance in Pearl Bailey’s show. Tony (the only white kid in the show) tried to introduce himself as “Joe Barri” but Bob caught on right away that this was a made up name and demanded to be told the real thing. Of course, once he heard it, he knew why Tony was using a fake one and quickly suggested the alternative. BUT, I digress.
The purpose of this post is to crudely generalize my ethnic heritage and point out, that regardless of how many Italian-Americans have had to pose as merely “Americans” by dropping the “etto” and the “icci”, the fact remains, that Italians (hyphenated or otherwise) are the best entertainers in the world. And the reason is: we are sentimental, romantic, nostalgic, simplistic, genuine saps, simultaneously ruled by by emotion and able to conjure emotion, just as comfortable ending a show stopper with arms spread under the spot light as winding down a ballad perched on a stool next to a grand piano letting one tear spill down a quivering cheek.
To see a pro like Tony Bennett at age 83 inspire probably 10 or 11 standing ovations in the span of one ninety minute performance, is to understand performance itself. At least the Italian interpretation of performance, which right now, is all that matters to me. It is to feel, publicly, what everyone else feels privately, and let it trickle out of you in an effortless vibrato where appropriate, to whisper it in a husky sotto voce when applicable, to sustain it in a clear bell of a tone where fitting, and most importantly to belt it out at the top of one’s lungs when necessary.
Though the Italian-American style is not in vogue in the music world at present – what’s left of rock music favors sort of a Scandinavian goulache, a Norwegian, Swedish, British deadpan, I don’t care or I am just very precious by nature, look and sound – it always manages to dominate in some sphere of public consciousness, i.e. Bravo’s Real Housewives of New Jersey, and I believe will regain its rightful place in pop music soon.
At the very least, Saint Bernadette, will be working on it . . .
It’s been a long week. I can always tell it’s been a long week when I continually forget what day it is. Something about our new “weather” makes it ever more difficult to distinguish one day from another – was it Tuesday when it rained? It rained every day, but was it in the morning or the afternoon? The rain seems to separate mornings from evenings as though they were separate entities and I feel myself believing three days have passed in the span of just one.
I bring this up not only as a pseudo-poetic introduction to some shameless self-promotion, but also as an introduction to an examination of the necessity of rock in roll in our lives. It’s something that we in Saint Bernadette think about often and something that has been in the news over the past few weeks as public radio and VH1 (things we tune into now that we are officially irrelevant people) feature profiles of Woodstock on its 40th anniversary. Is rock n roll important? Is it necessary?
In the interest of community building as well as shameless self-promotion, I would offer that it is both. As critics and pundits and commentators struggle with reconciling their admiration for the music that made up Woodstock and the fact that it was really just an overcrowded disaster full of drug and alcohol users, one thing they often forget to mention is that the music works without the drug and alcohol. 11 year olds in the 70s put on The Who in their bedroom to great effect just like I danced around to The Police when I was 8 and totally convinced that “Every Little Thing She Does is Magic” was about me.
Rock is the expression of that little voice inside that’s always demanding this: “Tell me again why we created this bizarre system of life whereby I need to go somewhere for 8 hours a day that I do not like and do something that I do not care about, all for the privilege of coming home to someone I probably can’t stand and affording to spend the weekend buying things I do not want or really need or that perhaps I pretend to really want or need so that I don’t have to face the fact that I spend most of my life doing what I don’t want to do?”
it could be then, that rock is just a part of the man’s game, a false panacea, that keeps us trapped in our cycles of false achievements and phony happiness. Or it could be that, if used correctly, it’s the motivation necessary to respond to that demand with “You don’t need to spend most of your life doing what you don’t want to do. Just some of it. Now, figure out what you really want to do. And do it. Really hard.”
I can’t promise life changing epiphanies at our show this Friday, but I can promise that we will try – really hard.
took place exactly one week ago. This was a historic event that you probably missed, but you will nonetheless feel its after-effects, as the seismic shift it caused in my consciousness alone had to be powerful enough to bring about change throughout our fair city.
As I stood in the window of my loft in downtown Bridgeport, looking out over Baldwin Plaza, the time came for me to come to terms with the true existence of my pot belly. What do I mean by “true existence”? What I mean is it’s “actual size”, not the size that I pretend it is when I am sucking it in and standing sideways in the mirror.
What I’ve discovered in recent months is that I am nearly always sucking in that stomach – when I’m driving, sitting at my desk, writing this blog. The cumulative effect of constantly sucking in my stomach is that my body and my mind have started to live as though the pot belly is not really there. Over time, different parts of my body, like my shoulders and upper back, knees and hips, have been taxed unfairly to maintain this illusion. The illusion, in turn, compounds the effect by allowing me that little bit of leeway in any changes to my diet or exercise habits that would eventually eradicate the pot belly.
This cycle of denial seems as inherent to modern human nature as the search for food was in primitive man. But, what is truly sad is its exponential and compound properties – the way the denial of the problem prevents the problem from being addressed, and the systems developed to cover up the fact that the problem is not being addressed simultaneously worsen the problem.
Does this remind you of anything?
My problem is that I consume more calories than I burn, thereby resulting in the pot belly. Until I lower my calorie intake sufficiently and consistently enough, that pot belly will remain. And the longer I keep sucking it in, the longer I will fail to make the necessary changes to my calorie intake and the more collateral damage the rest of my body will suffer.
Bridgeport’s problem is that nearly all efforts focused on the improvement and redevelopment of the city are based on reclaiming an image of the city from the past or from other cities in Connecticut with which we do not have the resources to compete. The longer we keep trying to fashion an urban environment that caters to the smallest slice of our diverse population, the longer the isolation and stagnation will continue and the more collateral damage the city as a whole will suffer.
I could go into detail about what I mean here, but I think everyone knows what I’m talking about, don’t they?
I am as guilty as anyone when it comes to this crippling pattern of denial, but I made the choice to open my eyes and address my pot belly, utilizing the most powerful force of socialization known to modern civilization, the oft-abused, but nevertheless imperative: public shame.
I opened my window at Read’s Artspace as the moon rose over Baldwin Plaza and let the belly hang over the window sill. My husband stood on a chair holding a flash light and called out “look up here!”
Now, as we Bridgeport residents know, there is no one on Baldwin Plaza at night on a Tuesday, it’s only Thursdays when we can count on the downtown artists that the city so wisely and uncharacteristically imported in four years ago to do something crazy and enjoy this beautiful city resource. But despite the lack of people to witness the public shaming of my belly, I can assure you that my belly did, in fact, feel ashamed and in the past week, I have stayed true to those changes in diet and exercise that are the only proven path to the elimination of the pot belly. In addition, my shoulders, back, knees and hips have stood up in strong support of this action. We stand, unified, and together we will succeed.
Bridgeport is an international city and at the same time, a uniquely American city. Its history is a reflection of every major American drama of the 20th Century. But if you want to know what the kids in Bridgeport think about Bridgeport’s history, you might come up with something like this recent news item.
Many of the efforts over my 4-year residence in Bridgeport are the equivalent of this monstrosity on my pot belly. But because I am just a humble local artist and community blogger, and one with a firm commitment to bringing only the good news about Bridgeport, I will refrain from using this platform to publicly shame anyone who may be responsible for the layers of misguided and futile efforts that swirl around Bridgeport’s redevelopment efforts. Instead, I offer you my own public shame as the catalyst to the end of my own cycle of denial.
If you see me riding my bike to Seaside Park, just give me a wave of encouragement!
Or better yet, be a jerk! Never mind that Sweetport is something different every summer – there’s always something, right? And only your attendance and feedback will help the various organizations, planners, promoters, and presenters figure out exactly what you like and how you like it.
This year the lovely people at City Lights Gallery were given the Herculean task of organizing cross-platorm, multi-faceted, multi-cultural events programming that will appeal to your eyes, ears, and tastebuds. I like their approach of guest curators, themed events, and mutliple locations, but I also know that it has probably been difficult for some people to comprehend the overall concept and/or to find information on individual events. But, I’m optimistic and I think the past few years have developed an awareness of free summer events in Bridgeport that we can continue to grow, working together.
The West Indian Jerk Fest, hosted by the Greater Bridgeport West Indian American Association will host a Jerk Fest comprised of steel drum and reggae music, jerk chicken and pork, and visual art throughout the gallery.
FREE MUSIC ON McLEVY GREEN, BRIDGEPORT
1 P.M. REGGAETON
2 P.M. JAZZ
3 P.M. SWING – Wayne Hiller Band
4 P.M. STEEL DRUM
6 P.M. REGGAE: ANTHEM WITH MUTTIE LEWIS
All proceeds from food sales to benefit the West Indian American Assocc. of Greater Bpt.
Scholarship Fund.
Rock your inner hippie, the one that’s been out since Vibes, and tie dye a t-shirt at City Lights too!
Enjoy some reggae, some jerk chicken, some brightly colored visual art and the after party at Two Boots. Then come back to the blog and complain about it!
