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New Hope

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14 Jun 2011

Diary of a Billsticker – Lambertville, New Jersey and New Hope, Pennsylvania, USA

By Phantom Billstickers

How to Put Up a Poster

This was a little run I did each morning starting the week after Gil Scott-Heron’s death. It was also around the time that Errol Hincksman died back in old New Zealand. The two were not related, but they may well have been – white powders drew them together.

Mr Scott-Heron was a crack cocaine addict and a very fine musician and poet. They say he invented rap music, but to me, he just embedded the words in the groove deeper than probably anyone ever has. For his part Mr Hincksman was involved in the ‘Mr Asia’ drug ring of the 1970s in New Zealand (and around the world) and was apparently, at once, a rascal and a top bloke. I never met either of them and I’m going on media portraits and the words of close friends. Plus, I’m introducing my own feelings into these topics. That’s the lay of the land.

I was having some problems with American Immigration and decided to go out and put up a few posters to clear my head. I always think it’s a good way to start the day and particularly if you don’t take it all too seriously. I was running low on poetry posters and yet had some Janet Frame, Tusiata Avia, and Roy Smith poems to put up. Thank god for that.

I always thought that when life gets complicated, the best thing to do is just to whack a poster on a lamp-post with a JT-21 heavy industrial stapler. If you start with one poster, before you know it you’ve forgotten yourself and you’ve put up two hundred, then you look back and you feel good. Then other people read the poems and they feel good too. Then, if you think about it, you’re alive and Gil Scott-Heron isn’t and nor is Errol Hincksman. But…. Aaah, I don’t know… The good get to die.

It was forty years ago on June 17th that Richard Nixon declared the US ‘War on Drugs.’ This is a war that has seen forty million arrests and no visible results except that it has ruined the lives of millions of people in too many ways to list. So, as they often say about these kinds of things: the War on Drugs actually does more damage than the situation which it purports to cure. There just aren’t enough prisons to lock everyone up and there’s a whole new type of hypocrisy crawling the streets these days. I think Mr Scott-Heron knew this hypocrisy quite well. He did at least two terms on Riker’s Island and prisons are always where you get to witness hypocrisy first hand. You see people doing life sentences for stealing a thousand bucks and you wonder where are the bankers/politicians /media barons who created the world wide debacle that everyone is suffering from these days. You wonder why these people are not in jail for all the destruction they have bought about. In fact, the next time you see a photo of one of them they are wearing a new suit. You might turn on ‘Entertainment Tonight’ and forget it all or Oprah may seduce you into thinking that things aren’t really that bad at all. But they are worse… And you know it, so you put up a poster. Just one.

Here’s what Gil Scott-Heron said about addiction:

“You keep sayin’ kick it, quit it, kick it, quit it! God, did you ever try to turn your sick soul inside out so that the world could watch you die?”

And as a good doctor might say: “Moving right along….”

Here’s how to put up a poem poster in another way: walk into a Starbucks or a Borders Books or any one of a number of places that have notice boards and whack one on said notice board. Don’t ask a staff member, in these places no one has authority to do much at all and you may be trapped into waiting for forty-five minutes whilst the store manager calls the regional manager who then calls someone in Sioux Falls who does have some sort of authority but is most probably away on holiday… Then someone else calls someone in Utah who is out at church and suggests you call in again tomorrow. Then you thank them for their input and they say “You’re welcome” and you remember that you are in America.

It’s because of those sentiments that I love Gil Scott-Heron and also Errol Hincksman. I think they were both probably real people who weren’t particularly afraid of cutting their own pathway and neither was franchised. No one called Sioux Falls, nor had to. So to me, they lead meaningful lives.

Phantom Billstickers was built, quite unashamedly, on going against the tide. That’s what I prefer to think it still stands for. For me, it is some kind of gnarled first against the forces of mediocrity and bureaucracy. It has now survived several earthquakes and so many strange occurrences that it would take me all day to write about them and possibly all year. It has survived many plagues of locusts, do-gooders, hanger-ons, and huge egos split so many ways that they made/make the Southern Cross seem small. I’m dead proud of it and I’m dead proud of the team currently working to take poetry to the world and gigs and music to the streets of New Zealand.

So I start the day by putting up a simple poster.  And I keep my feet on the ground.

RIP Errol Hincksman and Gil Scott-Heron.

 

Keep the Faith,

 

Jim Wilson

46a

08 Jul 2010

Diary of a Billsticker – Lambertville, New Jersey and New Hope, Pennsylvania USA

By Phantom Billstickers

Concerning Those Statues in The Park

It’s been so hot here for over a week now that a few days ago I saw a redneck explode in the street.

Then, yesterday when I was on 202 out near Flemington, New Jersey, I saw a dude in a bright yellow Camaro doing 120mph plus whilst being trailed by four New Jersey State Troopers wearing Smokie the Bear hats and wide grins. That is to say that all five of them were wearing the grins and the air was alive. I think they were all playing music by Prince.

On this poster run, I topped up about 120 A3s that I had placed on lamp-posts two weeks before. I added about 60 A3s and it brought the total amount placed to 180. This is a reasonably good ‘showing’ in a town of 4000 people. I placed posters by Bill Manhire, Mariana Isara, Robert Creeley and Gerald Stern. The poem posters have been noticed and I get lots of comments and emails. Posters in the street are very real.

There are many theories as to how to do a perfect poster campaign. I always thought that you started in the outskirts of the city and you kept adding to the posters and bringing pressure to the centre of the city as the play date grew closer. You want to get to the areas where there is a high volume of foot traffic and at the end, you want your point to be inescapable.

My thinking about all of this comes from the time when neither radio nor television were playing much of the Kiwi bands I was promoting and newspaper advertising was very expensive and oftentimes not very effective. In Christchurch, for a long time, the Christchurch Star was a quite effective way for bands to advertise themselves whilst the Press was a bit more conservative and didn’t really appeal. But both newspapers had excellent columns on entertainment that appeared weekly and these really helped. The Christchurch Star’s column was written by Rob White (a great writer) and the Press by Nevin Topp. Of course there was always a lot of disagreement about what worked and people tried many things to promote their bands and this was all for the good. Many good acts came out of this time and climate. Original New Zealand music was thought to be brand new and it took on aspects of being a religious event. I tell you if you’ve seen Toerag at the Gladstone then you’ve seen something and the same goes for Peter Sweeney’s Smack Riflemen. If you’ve ever met Harry Sparkle then you ain’t never gonna forget. This is a man who escaped from jail where he was doing a cooling off period for a smash and grab on a bottle store (The Star & Garter – another great pub gig), and who went to Timaru dressed as a woman. Now that’s what I call creativity. Most people would have gone to Ashburton.

So I always get these posters on the lamp-posts in Lambertville/New Hope to cover the best possible viewing opportunities. I criss-cross the city energetically enabling the posters to be seen in many different locations. Upwards of sixty locations is a good number.

As I put the posters up, I imagine people walking down the street and the direction they would be coming from and then I place the posters accordingly. Because I want to get poetry read as much as I possibly can and I’m not going to go on ‘Entertainment Tonight’ to do so, then I have to reduce this whole thing to pure and utter simplicity. I think everyone knows that these American TV shows are hyped and probably cause obesity and no one really believes in them. But, ah… A poster in the street is very, very true and if you read a Brian Turner or a Michael Palma poem in Lambertville on an old wooden lamp-post, then you have been touched my friend.

So I often think of postering as simplicity with constant repetition. You take the kick-backs and you keep going. Aaaah, my thoughts, my feelings seeping through in truth.

I always think about Kiwi music on a poster run and I am always proud of it. This week I have been thinking about people who deserve statues in the park and my first would be, in my opinion, New Zealand’s greatest ever band manager. My vote would be for Charley Gray. Charley was a very direct guy who cut through a lot of stuff and made a mark. He was way ahead of his time and very honest and devoted to music.

Then I’d give Murray Cammick a statue in the park for his work at ‘Rip It Up.’ In my view, this was New Zealand’s best ever music magazine. It’s hard to say how such a magazine could ever be duplicated or how a website or a Facebook page could come close to matching it. Rip It Up made a clear point… These days the water tends to be murky in many ways.

Aaaah, simplicity and directness of purpose.

Lastly, I’d award a statue to Eddie Chin. Eddie Chin had a few nightclubs in Dunedin when I was growing up. When people mention Dunedin music, I always think of Eddie first. In the 1960s he had a club called ’77 Sunset Strip’ and some great bands played there. These bands sometimes tended to be quite commercial and had very compelling stage acts; this was before such a thing often became something to be sneered at. Eddie nurtured many fine acts and people.

One of my favourite all-time Kiwi Bands was The Fantasy. This was Craig Scott’s band in Dunedin in the late 1960s. Craig moved on and the band went through several line-up changes (no doubt ‘musical differences’). Anyway, some of my mates were in that band and went to play for Eddie in 1971. This is what one of them (Jeff Stribling) said:

“We arrived in Dunedin at midnight one night in 1971. We had caught the 6 PM railcar from Christchurch, Bill (Kearns), Ronnie (Harris), and myself. We couldn’t get a residency in Christchurch as ‘Ticket’ (now there was a band!) had Aubrey’s and Chapta was at Mojos. So we thought we’d try Dunedin. We stayed at a motor camp that night and the next day we went to see Eddie at his restaurant, the ‘Hong Kong’, in Rattray Street. We said we were broke, starving and needed a place to live and play. He found us a flat, fed us and gave us the keys to his club across the road. The club had been closed for a long time and he said that if we painted it he’d feed us every day and we could be his resident band. We worked for three weeks and opened it as “The Groovy Room.” We called ourselves “NZ Fantasy” and we packed the venue with 600 people and it stayed that way. Eddie came into the band room one night with a massive amount of cash and gave us a bonus. He said, “I had a very good night on the horses tonight.” He was a live wire; a very kind man… My lasting memory of him is that his face was always smiling.”

Dudes, that’s how we built New Zealand Music.

I’m away to Flemington now to find that guy in the yellow Camaro. I want to smile like that.

 

Keep the Faith,

 

 

Jim Wilson

32b

14 Sep 2009

Diary of a Billsticker – Lambertville, New Jersey, USA

By Phantom Billstickers

I arrived in New Jersey about three weeks ago. I am living in a town called Lambertville which is about fifty miles from New York City. New Jersey has about nine million residents on .0015% the land size of Siberia. On the other side of the Delaware River, five minutes walk away, is Philadelphia. In this state, it is illegal to talk on a cell phone whilst driving, but motorcyclists don’t have to wear a helmet. What’s up with that?

I am still putting up posters of New Zealand poets and thoroughly enjoying it. At Phantom Billstickers, we have a system where a file is sent through to a photocopy shop in Princeton, New Jersey. That same day I can pick up posters. I cannot tell you how much photocopying has revolutionised street posters. The new digital printing of larger posters is doing the same, bringing a fresh immediacy to the media. It’s direct and it’s hard-hitting.

Soon after I arrived in Lambertville there was a poetry reading at a local cafe, River Poets Journal. I managed to get a Janet Frame poetry poster and a Geoff Cochrane poetry poster on either side of the podium.

Next, I covered the bookshops and music stores in the area. These included Labyrinth Books and Princeton Record Exchange in Princeton, Borders in Flemington, Doylestown Books and Siren Records in Doylestown, Pennsylvania and Farley Books in New Hope, Pennsylvania.

Panoply Books in Lambertville has graciously offered to do a window display of posters of NZ poets. Phoenix Books here has a couple of poetry posters in their front door. I think people are interested in what happens in New Zealand.

After this, I started on the cafes and managed to get really good coverage in the area. Even most franchised cafes and fast food outlets have proper notice boards for posters.

In America, a lot of posters are stapled to wooden lamp-posts. A week ago I did the deed and bought an industrial stapler from a really cool, old-school hardware store called Finkles. This store has real character.

The next morning I stapled up poetry posters on all the main streets around Lambertville. I managed to place the posters on good angles for easy viewing so that no matter where you walk in Lambertville you will see a poem by a New Zealand poet. For years I’ve thought a lot about that notion of NZ artists (of all types) being ‘Stranded in Paradise’ and I think that is not now necessarily so. What a crook sentence eh? I meant it, too.

In New York City there is a guy doing something really interesting. When he sees poorly designed posters on lamp-posts, he takes them down and redesigns them. Then he puts the new design (which will work a long way better as a poster) on the same lamp-post. He probably even gives the poster better distribution. This method takes a cue from ‘Guerrilla Gardening”.

This past week I took some Janet Frame poetry posters back to Princeton. I placed some on the local postering bollards and then I went to the English Dept (McCosh Hall) at Princeton University. I managed to get excellent coverage through that department. I was delighted to be helping bring our finest writer to America. I call that “Freedom”. It was all just really exciting and I got excellent coverage in the hallways (where posters were displayed) and on the notice boards. Princeton was recently voted the number one University in the USA – first equal with Harvard.

This week I am away to Cornish, New Hampshire. I’ll be taking with me poetry posters by Michele Leggott, Hilaire Campbell, and Campbell McKay.

 

 

Keep the Faith,

Jim Wilson

 

6j

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