With an introduction by Jim Wilson.
Short stories, poems and editorial by:
Tusiata Avia, David Eggleton, Graham Brazier, Anton Jenner, Gerald Stern, Hinemoana Baker, Jim Wilson, John Dix, Bill Direen, Janet Frame, Chris Mooar, Frankie McMillan, Jay Clarkson and Simon Sweetman.
Available for digital download on Kindle and iPad for a small fee on Amazon.com here.
Cover by Phil Judd.
Yesterday in New Jersey I was racing that pissant Toyota Prius down I-95 about as fast as it could go when an incredible thunderstorm broke and lightning went zig-zagging across the sky. The rain began to beat down so bad that I had to take refuge in a truck stop and wait until the whole thing had blown over. It had become really difficult to see the road ahead and the atmosphere was turning black and the sky seemed to be closing in. Thunder was booming like it was Black Sabbath. I turned the stereo up and this is the one thing Toyota do very well: they allow you to escape. The weather kind of reminded me of growing up on Russell Street, Dunedin, where the sky also got pretty black. Back then there was nothing I liked to do better than go and play up in the bush when it was pelting down. I like those kinds of memories. I hold on to them and they guide me.
I had woken up in a feverish state of mind and I was off to put up some poem posters in Trenton, the state capital of New Jersey. I wished I was driving a V8, even a clapped out V8 like I have done so many times before. William Burroughs used to say “an old Ford will never let you down” and I know this to be true. Trenton is only about twenty miles from Princeton and the two are as different as chalk and cheese.
Trenton is an interesting city and if the local newspapers are to be believed it is in almost total disarray and I happen to like cities like this. The mayor has been indicted for something or other and is due to go to trial, every second real estate developer is in jail, the police chief is fighting with everyone and Governor Chris Christie won’t give anyone more cops. He can’t afford to as there is no dosh left for relief. In other words, it is a city abandoned by everyone except the fast food chains and I’d hate to be working the night shift.
In Trenton, there are reports of children wearing bullet-proof vests to play in the streets and a local social welfare reform group is saying that the reason people are becoming obese is that they are too afraid to go outside and exercise. Heroin is priced at an all-time low of $5 a bag and it is being sold on the steps of the local state government with brand names like “Permanent Vacation”. Two bags and you’re gonna blow like Ornette Coleman whether you want to or not. I say there are bad lieutenants in about one of every four cop cars. Hypocrisy rains down like thunder.
I don’t particularly like seeing the excitement of destruction in front of my very eyes, but I do prefer a little more of a Bohemian landscape as opposed to the corporate scenery around Princeton and where nothing particularly real is ever said or done. People in Princeton don’t seem to know how very wealthy they are and it is extremely common to see women climbing into huge Mercedes SUVs the size of Knox church with four or five designer store bags. Sometimes their husbands trail behind with the other three. The store below my small apartment sells cheese and they proudly state that the average American eats 40 lbs of cheese a year. I know.
I find Americans are often so self-absorbed that though they are incredibly well-mannered, they practically never listen to what you say. They haven’t been able to hear the Arab/Muslim world and they won’t hear you either. This creates incredible dissonance if you let it. And I don’t think they have got all this alone in the developing world either. I think the further you go up the scale of wealth and particularly in white, middle-class areas, the more you will see that people are doing very well thank you, that they have completely closed ears, and they may not even fling you a piece of cake. Auckland, New Zealand is very much like this as it becomes more and more of a millionaires’ playground.
I have found the only way to have a decent conversation with a lot of these self-absorbed types is to start jabbering on about Dan Carter right from the get-go and only then you may have a slight chance of coming away feeling refreshed. If you bring Merhts into the conversation it is also uplifting and sometimes even Jonny Wilkinson works. The biggest mistake you can ever make is to think that anyone is ever listening to you and so you must pleasure yourself. I often think of Zinzan’s drop goal and it passes the time of day in a less lonely way. You have to work yourself up to getting manic and then you have to start to jabber. Facebook is a happy hunting ground for this kind of shit.
When the weather cleared a bit and the sky brightened up, I got into Trenton and scattered a few poem posters by Kiwis on lamp posts and I truly whistled while I worked. I didn’t have any trouble and you just never know if the way the media is reporting things is the way it truly is. So what I try and do about most things in life is just keep my mind on rugby, poetry, coffee, dogs, and literature. For a while in Princeton I was streaming the New Zealand news shows on my computer each night, but I noticed that I began to feel a bit touchy and a tad disgusted after a few days. Then I switched off the television and now I feel much better. I don’t watch all those crime watch or crime shows either because they are mostly full of shit. I find shows like ‘Border Patrol’ to be beneath contempt. Sometimes I used to admire the suits of the news presenters but I never wanted them.
I was in another working class city last week, too. I had to go to Flemington, New Jersey to get a toothache fixed. I’m sensible enough to know now that if you travel to a poor part of town or to a poor city then you may get dental care at a much lower price. But in the case of Flemington and at this dental surgery, I was completely wrong. Over these past couple of decades, dentists have become very hungry and they want to sell all these new products and just as quickly as possible. This one dentist was working patients in about six different booths all at once and with about three or four assistants. He may as well have been on roller skates like he was Speedy Gonzales and he was out to drain everyone’s pockets to the maximum. I don’t know what kept him to the feverish pitch he was in, but I didn’t find it attractive. He took a cursory look in my gob and told me that if I didn’t get two teeth capped immediately, then I would need total hip and knee replacement surgery. In the end, I insisted on just the one filling. These people have a power over vulnerable people and they can get them to buy. So I never think the problem is just the corporates, the politicians or the banks, I think the problem is all of us. It’s very destructive.
I walked out and put up some poetry posters.
Thank you for sticking with me, Kemo Sabe.
With an introduction by Jim Wilson.
Short stories, poems and editorial by:
Bill Direen, Hi Newman, Ben Brown, Kelly Ann Morey, Rick Bryant, Jim Wilson, Brett Lupton, Dave McArtney, Simon Sweetman, George Henderson and Chris Mooar.
Available for digital download on Kindle and iPad for a small fee on Amazon.com here.
Cover by Lisa Morales.
This was to be my final poster run before leaving the USA on my way back to New Zealand. I’m writing this some months afterwards and so I can’t even remember which poem posters I was carrying, but there would have been about ten different Kiwi poets involved and two or three Americans.
Perhaps the attached photos will show the poets. Maybe I was carrying some Patrick Connors (a Canadian poet) posters as well. Anyway, I’d like to think I was and it always makes for a perfect day to be putting up posters. Besides I do like the Canadians because they were with us at Passchendaele and they do possess a reasonably sensible health care system and government (from the looks of things). They’re generally not too imperialistic either and that always makes for good neighbours. Canada can’t be bad, because Lindsay Lohan wasn’t born there.
I stayed pretty close to downtown and San Francisco is quite easy to get around. It’s a great place to walk and loaf about and there’s always a lot going on, you could be fully occupied all day by just watching what people are up to. Everyone knows this city is, and always has been, a tremendously energetic place in terms of the great music, literature, theatre, poetry and everything else that it has produced. It is a very expressive centre and has often adopted a lot new ideas before other places. I don’t know, one is always in a ‘holiday mood’ when visiting other places anyway, but San Francisco just seems to me to be a city with a bounce in its step. The people seem colourful and outgoing and opportunity is in the air. I wonder if the prescription rate for anti-depressants is down here compared to other cities?
It is a city for extroverts and there’s plenty of opportunity to get things ‘off your chest’. It’s probably harder to be self-obsessed in a place like San Francisco where the culture seems to largely about pulling people out of themselves and getting them involved in their surroundings.
The world owes this city a huge debt, as most of us have at one point or another felt a lot better after hearing some of the music that has been recorded or written here. Strangely enough, it is also a centre for many international financial institutions as well and then Silicon Valley is nearby. There are a lot of immigrants and this also makes for colour, expression, and new ideas. The whole area flows with creativity.
I walked the area known as ‘The Tenderloin’ to put up the posters. This is a kind of well worn in and ‘informal’ neighbourhood that is famous for Miles Davis once having recorded a live album at a local club. Now, if that album were recorded in Gore, I’m here to tell you it would have sounded completely different. I think The Tenderloin is also the area where Lenny Bruce was arrested at another nightclub because he used the right word at the wrong time. Bill Graham, the promoter who changed for all time the concert industry in America, was from San Francisco too and the music he promoted changed the culture in a substantial way. Then you have the best bookstore in the world on Columbus Avenue: City Lights Books. Lawrence Ferlenghetti, the owner, published many of the ‘Beat Generation’ writers and went to court several times for obscenity because he dared to print what was on everyone’s minds.
In the harbour is Alcatraz, once the world’s grooviest prison and home to Al Capone and many others. Steve McQueen drove a Ford Mustang in an irreverent fashion around the steep streets of San Francisco in the movie ‘Bullitt’ and Levi Strauss jeans were ‘born’ here. This is where Janis Joplin got her big break and Owsley Stanley started ‘cooking’ LSD in commercial amounts and turned the world on. The Grateful Dead played in the parks for free and Carlos Santana saw B.B. King playing a live gig and was himself set on a course. The Beatles started and ended North American tours in 1964 and 1965 at the Cow Palace, a local venue. Their set was twelve songs long and I bet their entire gig was shorter than some Carlos Santana lead breaks. San Francisco is where ‘Rolling Stone’ magazine was founded…. And the list can go on and on.
So, I was happy to be putting up poetry posters and the people in The Tenderloin will stop and talk to you and it just made for a couple of very nice days for me. I’ve thought a lot in my life about the difference an environment can make to a person’s creativity and how that creativity can be bought to the fore and nurtured. Obviously one of the problems in creating say, live music in New Zealand, is that the potential audience isn’t really that large and for everything that people say about the internet (and they say plenty), it is usually harder going to make a living out of the Arts in Aotearoa than it is in lots of other places.
When you get to a place as exciting as San Francisco it really makes you ponder these things. I’ve seen world class talent go awry and askew in New Zealand because of the real lack of rewards and then I’ve seen people make some really bland music (and writing) and reap relatively large rewards because they appeal to ‘middle New Zealand’ by being bland and barely moving an inch. They continually say what the person before them has said. There’s not much room in New Zealand for many ‘niches’ and I don’t reckon that’s good for us and sheep and cattle get boring after a while.
So I guess you could really, really say I enjoyed my time in San Francisco and it’s always a privilege to be putting up poetry posters.
Thank You!
Keep the Faith,
Jim Wilson
I think Baltimore is the favourite city of a lot of people these days and this has a lot to do with a certain television show. I think that the show in question probably depicts ‘true’ things in a very real and earthy manner. It brings forward a lot of matters we all knew were going on, but which no one had stated quite so clearly before. Of course, when someone manages to do this simple thing (bring forth the undercurrents) then people are endlessly refreshed and fascinated. It’s that sense of the ‘naked lunch,’ where we can clearly see what is on the end of every knife, fork, and spoon. Sometimes it’s just not pretty and it’s easier to live with it all by ignoring it. Wittgenstein did say something like the best way to deal with a problem in life is to live like it doesn’t exist, but the ‘problems’ in cities like Baltimore have cried so loudly and for so long now that they will be addressed no matter what. It’s a big train that’s coming and there is a payload. However, some people would try and take the word ‘problem’ and soften it back to a ‘situation’….. But whichever word you choose, it’s a big one. That train is hundreds of carriages long and it is pure poetry in motion. Bob Dylan (who also wrote about Baltimore in a fine song) has been saying this stuff, sometimes indirectly, for many years.
Then, Omar Little himself chimed in with that it was all a game anyway and it was either play or be played. I think Omar’s way will win every time because Wittgenstein never slung dope on a street corner and so what did he really know about life? Slinging dope on a street corner is what hundreds of thousands of people do these days, whether they do it from behind a computer screen, from out of a doctor’s office, or whilst working for a major pharmaceutical company in some polite business park. They’re all corners when you think about it and I imagine the language is much the same when all the veneer comes off. So, somehow, doing it on down on an actual street corner with deep and intimate connections to Colombia seems a long way more honest. The whole idea is to keep the public satisfied and people do need more of everything, that has become obvious. There are also a lot of ‘folk’ who have to be paid.
I had printed off fresh supplies of posters before this run. I was carrying poems by Tusiata Avia, Marty Smith, Pat Connors, Elizabeth Smither, Brett Lupton, Dylan Kemp, Roger Hickin, Frankie McMillan, Jeffery McCaleb, Gary Langford, Chris Price, James K. Baxter, Hone Tuwhare, Janet Frame, Jody lloyd, Sandra Bell and Keri Hulme.
Some of our poets have actual real connections to Baltimore, Janet Frame being one, and some have merely watched ‘The Wire’ and enjoyed it and been fascinated by it to the utmost. I also think that many other people have what feels like ‘real connections’ to Baltimore these days. These ‘ties’ are often being built via Facebook and through cellphones and on the world wide web and in all kinds of ways that no-one can interrupt. If the government can’t keep Heroin and Cocaine (I deliberately capitalised both to annoy the creative writers) out of the Projects (and they can’t), then what hope do they have in trying to stop the population talking to each other like they do these days? It’s all very random, but the truth will be out. I guess it must, but we do seem to be waiting a very long time, and, you know, Congress will vote to lift the debt ceiling…. I always have the feeling we are pouring more coal into a runaway train. Not that I am a Republican sympathiser either (heavens no)…. It’s just that I don’t think the problem anymore is either the Democrats or the Republicans, the problem is that people obstruct each other and cut each other down for strange reasons. It’s easier to dig the garden (or put up poetry posters) than to have ‘viewpoints’ because you end up getting feedback from someone who has a different viewpoint and cherishes being louder.
I believe Janet Frame lived in Baltimore for a while and possibly at the home of Dr John Money. I can google this subject if I want and no doubt come up with the answer, but instead I shall dredge through memories of what I’ve read some way back down the track. When I think about Janet Frame for long enough, I begin to think of her working at the Occidental Hotel in Christchurch which is now long gone, but which did have some good gigs in days gone by. There’s a line someplace where she writes about the area I grew up in… I think she either mentions Serpentine Avenue or McLaggan Street in old Dunedin and let me tell you this area would drop very nicely into Baltimore and everyone would get on really fine. When I was a kid, there were ‘corners’ of one kind or another all the way up Serpentine Avenue and McLaggan Street and I was fascinated by those corners.
You can see why it was a absolute pleasure to be bringing Janet Frame back to Baltimore, a city that she really ‘liked’ and not just in a Facebook way. It is her birthday on August 28th and probably a day of which all Kiwis should take note. If she were still alive, I guess she would have been around ninety years of age. She has always moved me and has been one of those writers who helped set the ‘Kiwi Character’ down on the page. That setting the Kiwi character and not just waffling around the exterior has been pure gold for New Zealand. Very few have done that and some have sold tons of books in the not doing of it.
Anyway, lots of famous people came from Baltimore or lived here for a while. H.L. Mencken did most of his work here and I like to think that David Simon (originator of ‘The Wire’) is just carrying on that sort of work for the television age. Old H.L. said some very pointed things, whilst David Simon shows them in a way that everyone can understand. I think one of the basic premises of what they both say or have said is that many things ‘suck.’ And not to put too fine a point on it, they do. It was never going to be fair and I leant that way back in Dunedin or perhaps somewhere out near Seacliff on the Otago Coastline.
Frank Zappa came from Baltimore and gave the world some of its finest music. When I think about New Zealand, I remember people in little towns who too were inspired by Frank. Frank was one to cut right through to the truth, musically and otherwise. He famously (well to me anyway) said “if you want to get laid, go to college, if you want to get an education, go to the library.” Now that’s the truth and the writer Colin Wilson (‘The Outsider’) knew that full well. I think everyone knows that at some level. You will learn more by being down on your luck in a prison cell somewhere for three months, than you ever could possibly learn in a some hallowed halls for fifteen years. But to each his own and there are many ideas on which I have no wisdom.
I’ve always relished being a billsticker, it really has a touch of the old Charles Dickens about it. It is always about the dark and pasting up a wall by car headlights and then the timely hit and run and the don’t look back credo. In recent days it too has become ‘modernised’ and I’ve not always liked that…. I just enjoy helping people to get their voice out there and so this has compensated to some extent for the way that it has all become (and everything has become). But I remember one time back in Christchurch, when I was pasting up a ‘strip’ down by the Farmers’ Department Store on Colombo Street. A band was playing a gig the next day and they needed something high profile and I had to do this run when a lot of people were about and I had to act like I wasn’t embarrassed. It was about 1982 and it was at about 6pm, I was with Harry Sparkle and he’s not afraid of this sort of thing… I mean everyone kicks you so you have to be ‘armoured’…. Someone walking by and said to me ‘why don’t you do that in the daylight?’ (it was winter and it was cold…) and I replied, very quickly I might add, that if I did it in the daylight then it’s possible someone from social welfare might see me and cut my dole.
Anyway, long story short… I did a truly gratifying poster run in Baltimore and got the real word out there for a lot of people. It can be done and it’s very satisfying.
Keep the Faith,
Jim Wilson
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