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21 Jan 2011

Diary of a Billsticker – New Orleans, USA

By Phantom Billstickers

Who Dat?

We took off for New Orleans on Boxing Day. Americans don’t have Boxing Day really. They tend to want to gravitate to the malls so that the whole shebang can start up again.  Straight after Christmas, they are selling Valentine’s Day products.

Anyway, there was a huge snow storm and news was that many flights were cancelled, but that some were still getting away from Philly. Airports are dismal places and it’s just kind of a given that if your flight is to be ‘postponed,’ then you won’t get notice of that until a few minutes before the scheduled time. Obviously, this is to bring about the maximum possible heartbreak. Kurt Vonnegut understood these things well.

In management (in airlines and elsewhere) these days, it’s just an order of the day that one mustn’t be too vital as someone may benefit from that somewhere down the track. Airlines are just turgid and swampy affairs and one hopes that some day someone will catch on and things will be dynamic again. But watching how Barrack Obama is getting along, that won’t be anytime soon.

So we managed to catch another flight and arrived in New Orleans fifteen hours later having gone via Salt Lake City, Utah. That’s kind of like going to the shop and wanting to buy a mutton pie and ending up getting beef jerky.

New Orleans is a wild and free town and everyone knows that it has risen above many tragedies and has stormed on through to express itself again. And it does that well. But, on the night we arrived, the weather was unusually cold (near freezing point) and eight kids died in a warehouse fire. Many young kids (‘railroad punks’) jump trains and head for the Crescent City because they’ve given up on the dream and the hypocrisy and they want to live out the notion of ‘Hope’ in their own way.

In New Zealand we’d say “good on you” or just simply “on ya”, and this means that we approve of the basic principle of people following their own dreams in exactly their own way. Music expresses this all best and most of these kids play music and damn good it is too. A person who plays music best has no barriers between her and the audience. So I saw kids in New Orleans (playing on street corners) who should be on major labels, but that would end up ruining their lives entirely. Next thing they’d want to save Africa.

So, the very best thing about New Orleans is the number of people playing music in the streets and there ain’t a force on earth (like a City Council) that can stop them. There are posters everywhere and, of course, I like this. I like to see evidence that people can express themselves in a clear and coherent way. That’s why I detest political correctness. I reckon that the notion (political correctness) has done in more peoples’ heads than aspartame.

So New Orleans is a city where people (well a lot of them anyway) shake off the surly bonds of earth and just enjoy themselves. Ain’t a government on earth likes that. And we must feel real sorrow for those kids who died in that fire. They wanted what all of us want, they wanted to be free. And we all know the feeling of ‘fuck it, I’ll go somewhere else….’ And that feeling is often (but not always) right.

So we postered (in sadness for the kids) with at least half a dozen New Zealand poetry posters. Poets included Sam Hunt, Frankie McMillan, Janet Frame, Tusiata Avia, Mariana Isara and Brian Turner. I see putting up each poster as a kind of individual hit for freedom. We postered around the French Quarter (of course) and there’s another particularly funky area close to there, it’s called Faubourg Marigny but no one who’s not a native can pronounce it, and then we postered the Treme and also around Congo Square. Congo Square is where a couple of hundred years ago they used to let the slaves dance for a couple of hours on Sunday (mighty big and white of them eh?) and from that little bloom of freedom we eventually got Wilson Pickett.

I loved New Orleans because there is a feeling of hope springing eternal and I’ve needed that feeling in my life. I could spend all day telling you about the very clever people who lived there or who were born there. The city, with all its feelings of ungovernability or freedom, has nurtured these people. Hell, the airport is called “Louis Armstrong International”. No matter where you are in the city a tour will go past and someone will be saying over a megaphone to the tourists: “On that corner, over there, that’s where Truman Capote and Lee Harvey Oswald went to school and that’s where they played hopscotch at lunchtime.”

I could say all of this (and plenty more) but I just reckon we should think about those kids and listen to the Pine Leaf Boys.

Let freedom ring.

 

Keep the Faith,

 

Jim Wilson

42a 42c

01 Dec 2010

Underdogs and a (Very) Brief History of NZ Music

By Phantom Billstickers

What Phantom Billstickers is trying to do with our Facebook page and our website is take a bit of Kiwi culture to the world, whether it be our very fine music industry, our artists, poets, film-makers, comedians, clothing designers, or (as they say), whatever. We have several hundred followers on our Facebook page now from places further afield than Aotearoa. We can’t mail you a good old Kiwi meat pie, but we can tell you what our creative people are doing. Onward and on ya!

We’ll feature a little bit of Kiwi music each week and try to explain how we all got here as Kiwis. Firstly, we are a nuclear free country and that’s what we are really proud of.

Secondly, a bloke called Kupe discovered New Zealand some centuries ago. In his waka, there were probably musical instruments. Captain James Cook then ‘discovered’ (again?) Aotearoa in 1769. On any ship, there is always music. We all know this. Music is how people make their lives better. There is a ton of good music in New Zealand and it may be the last place to be truly discovered as a musical Nirvana.

My history will probably fail me, but I believe there were whalers around the shores in the early 1800s.

A lot of settlers came to New Zealand from England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales. They bought mandolins, bagpipes, various stringed instruments, and probably some oboes.  This was all well before the eight track recorder. Maybe even a Lute or two. There were no publicists on board from what we know.

I’ll cut through now to a great period in NZ music probably from the 1940s and 1950s onwards. Great Maori show bands, rock ‘n’ roll (Johnny Devlin was our own star) and many other types of music including some great country music. There was a promoter from Mosgiel in Otago called Joe Brown, and he made a difference to the whole country. Gore is now the country music capital of New Zealand.

Music, a few decades ago in New Zealand, was a mixture of what we heard (being so isolated from the world) and what we made up. Good fun it was too. All radio was government until some dudes put a boat out in the Hauraki Gulf and called it ‘Radio Hauraki’. That stirred us all up immensely. Anything the government does is pretty staid after all. But no one can fight rhythm.

By 1967, and I’m really editing a lot out here, The Underdogs have arrived. Even by then, we’d already sent several bands and solo acts around the world. Long way to go, Snow.

Lots of people will have a different view, but I think the Underdogs were probably our prime blues band of that era or any other. The Blues Army Salvation (from Christchurch) were also pretty good. Oh hell, there were many. The tradition of good blues bands in New Zealand carries on to this day.

The Underdogs had many fine moments, and Sitting in the Rain was one of them.

 

Keep the Faith,

 

Jim Wilson

 

03 Nov 2010

Diary of a Billsticker – Perth Amboy, New Jersey, USA

By Phantom Billstickers

Perth Amboy is a city about the size of Timaru back in old Aotearoa New Zealand. The city sits on a bay on the Raritan River and is about forty miles from the mystical Jersey Shore. Across the bay is Staten Island. John Bon Jovi was born here.

Perth Amboy is kind of a broken down, rust-belt place with about four cops to each city block. As you get closer to the city council offices, you’ll come across five or six cops to each block. The local mayor was recently found guilty of corruption and is to be sentenced in January. It is obvious that someone or some force is trying to scrub these streets clean and that notion just becomes very difficult when there’s a high level of unemployment and manufacturing is now happening someplace else. This ‘someplace else’ where people use their hands to make something apart from fast food, is somewhere far over the rainbow. One of the nicknames of Perth Amboy is ‘Ambush City’ and in a lot of these places, the most alive thing in town is the interplay between the Police and the population. Of course there’s a lot of crime, there has to be.

The town is like a digital tombstone from back in the Old West. The city centre looks like the OK Corral to me. But I’m never afraid of these things. That’s not what frightens me.

In Perth Amboy, I was carrying poetry posters by about six New Zealand poets and a couple of Americans. It is obvious that there once was some heavy-duty industry in Perth Amboy, but a lot of these areas collapsed decades ago and this city is now attempting to claw its way back. Yet there are numerous beauty salons because in life people have to paint something up and to put a face on. People try and make good of bad situations and the vast majority are not criminals. They live in hope and they wait.

The population of Perth Amboy is more than 50% Hispanic, the majority coming from either Puerto Rico or the Dominican Republic. No Hispanic (legal or illegal) has ever insulted me in this country. They are not by nature an obnoxious people. So I felt perfectly safe in Perth Amboy, what frightens me most about America is what happens in the ‘better’ cities and suburbs. That’s where the deals are made.

I just work one lamp-post at a time with my industrial stapler and I place my poetry posters for the best possible impact. I remember as I go what Renoir said about the purpose of art being to enliven the walls. Yes, and in a way, you can even look at all the rust and decay in Perth Amboy and think it to be a beautiful thing. I’m sure Nick Drake would have thought this way. The surrounding sadness is kind of exquisite and as you gaze about you still see people doing a pretty good job of holding their heads up high and living yet another day. So these are people you can easily like and I do. This city is just one more place where the notion of ‘hope’ never arrived in town on a freight train because there are none anymore. There’s very little heavy industry now and I’m sure there’s never enough food stamps. So what are you going to do? You can’t really bail a place like this out beyond a certain point because it has to find the bottom and then start again. These people are starting over each day and they kind of look proud to me. They will find a way out. That’s what people do. I have little faith in endless government programmes and I’m sorry about that. I’d rather people made something again.

But, I put up posters. And I always sing as I go and I think about words and poetry. I see people smiling when they read the posters. That makes it for me. On this day, before I finished and went to Ray’s Hell Burgers, I was thinking about the Tom Waits song ‘Jersey Girl’ as sung by Bruce Springsteen. Because as you’re looking at all this stuff in America and at all the rust and decay, you need to have poetry and a firm rhythm in your head. You could get really angry, but everyone seems to do that and I’m not sure what difference it makes. I’m not sure anger really builds anything anymore; it just seems to be more of a fad to me.

In America (or New Zealand) you can’t afford to have your thoughts and emotions thrown off track by either the news media or politicians. One woman, standing for Governor of California, is spending 140 million US dollars on her campaign. She obviously wants it real bad. That’s where heavy industry and all the action is these days, in politics. You just have to have a good profile picture and a few keywords. I remember they once asked Willie Sutton (famous bank robber) why he robbed banks, and his answer, which was priceless, was “that’s where the money is.” Politics is the new heavy industry and if the politicians were any good, then they’d actually be poets instead. So I’m sure, at the most basic level, it is words and music that get people by, whether in Timaru New Zealand or down by the Jersey Shore. Because people are subject to so much rubbish in spite of how clean the streets are kept.

I think the lyrics to the Tom Wait’s song ‘Jersey Girl’ are a testament to hope in difficult times. The elections (for Congress and Senate) are to be held in America this week. I really don’t think much will change other than a different group of politicians will be doing all the talking. And in a couple of years, some other group of people will be calling for ‘change.’ It will go on because that’s where the money is. It’s heavy industry. At some stage, a bulldozer became an election sign.

“I got no time for the corner boys
Down in the street making all that noise
Or the girls out on the avenue
’cause tonight I wanna be with you
Tonight I’m going to take that ride
Across the river to the jersey side
Take my baby to the carnival
And I’ll take her on all the rides.

‘Cause down by the shore everything’s all right
You and your baby on a Saturday night
You know all my dreams come true
When I’m walking down the street with you.

Sha la la la la la la….”

“Jersey Girl” by Tom Waits

 

Keep the Faith,

Jim Wilson

38b

24 Aug 2010

Diary of a Billsticker – Tennessee/Kentucky, USA Poster Run

By Phantom Billstickers

A Hillbilly Fight Club

 

Delta Airlines mistakenly sent my luggage all the way to Tallahassee, Florida, whereas I was flying into Music City, USA (Nashville, Tennessee). So, my guitar case with broom and paste was no longer available and I felt lost without my heavy-duty industrial lamp-post poster stapler. In fact, I only had about fifteen Mariana Isara poetry posters on me so I set about trying to introduce these to as many people as possible.

One makes what one can of difficult situations and one always looks up to and desires what might and could be. That’s what they’d say in the Blessed South of the USA. In other words, I was as happy as a bird with a French fry; my glass was half full, and in fact, overflowing in a very Anthony Robbins way. Dude (a motivationalist) thinks he can fly and probably also thinks that all banks should be deregulated because that’s freedom! Little does he know how many rats work in banks.

The opposite of this view is that August 20th (last Friday) was the anniversary of the day in 1968 when 500,000 Warsaw Pact Troops (we used to call them “Com Block”) flooded into the Czech Republic when they got wind of the fact that someone was trying to get ahead. Then, you might notice that right now (it’s in the New York Times today), a number of writers in South Africa are jumping up and down as the government (the writers say) is censoring the news. You think?

So, whom to believe?

Don’t tell me: one meets the new boss and he’s exactly the same as the old boss?

In Tennessee, what I did about all of this is I went about the area talking to people about New Zealand poetry and art. This is what I’ve decided to do in life. I try to no longer debate the point (any point) and I just try to commit to some form of action.

There’s just too much loose talk in this old world and Facebook is like the main street of Deadwood. We all know this. As someone once said to Al Swearenge, “First you have the emotion, Al, and then you look around for a reason to be having it.” Well, your emotions are in your blood, Al! They are in John Key’s blood as well. Though hell. I do feel sad for old Aotearoa. God’s own Country, I swear. Today I miss the West Coast of the South Island.

But a month back I was lucky enough to be travelling around Tennessee and Kentucky for a few days, mainly off the beaten track, in the hills. You have to really respect this area because it gave the world so much good music. There’s nothing clearer than that.

It has been my experience that most politicians want to be rock stars. I’ve met a few. Then most rock stars want to be politicians. I’ve listened to them too. But it wouldn’t have been just anybody who could do what Hank Williams did, nor Dwight Yoakam, nor Miss Patsy Cline.  These were people who were not (and are not in Dwight’s case) mediocre.

I have a friend in Tennessee, let’s call him ‘J.P.’ I like J.P. Damn I do. I’ve been lucky enough to know him since he was three or four years old.  I had the best year of my life in Tennessee in 1990 when I worked hauling rocks out of a mountain and J.P. did this with me. Small as he was then. He was tough. They are tough in the South (they’ve had some shit and, as you know, they’ve given it too) and they’re vulnerable too (think Hank Williams). But mostly they are just upfront and they are people of action. They’ve had some stuff in their own behaviour to come to terms with.

In the South, the beauty is that people often think in very simple ways and few of them are “yoga experts”. The whole place is not given over to academics, politicians, and “spin”.  Down there, people more often just say and do what they think. They keep it simple. There’s a lot less discussion, and people are quite up-front, though with incredibly good manners (there are exceptions to every rule). I’d paste up posters with these guys any day. Political Correctness is kept in the outhouse. That’s where it should be as it is the most stifling element of life today. Let’s see action. That’s an old Who song and the lyrics are outstanding and have you ever seen a joker play drums like Keith Moon?

I haven’t.

Mariana’s poem (‘Self-portrait as Anything from the Album: Your Body Above Me’) is excellent by the way. I’m very proud to have her onboard for the Phantom Billstickers Poetry Project. We just try and win over one person at a time with poetry and it’s all one brick on top of the other. Next year we have bigger plans providing the glass is still overflowing. We’d like it to be.

J.P. is a good fighter. He’s a man of action, see. Sometime last year he was at home hoovering and cleaning his house one night. He got a call. J.P.’s a sweet kid. Still is. There was a dude down at a local hillbilly night club (they have these in Tennessee) who slapped $500 on the table and said he’d fight anyone.  J.P.’s mate told him to come down, J.P. said he would. I think he finished his hoovering first. I like J.P. because he puts first things first. He’s not the biggest guy in the world (but he’s not small either), and he said afterwards that if he knew what the guy at the night club looked like, then he wouldn’t have gone down. But he didn’t know and so he went, awfully primal this. J.P. is fast. This is all beginning to remind me of the Clash album “Cut the Crap.” Man, there’s heaps around, crap that is. I put up posters. Other people express these things in different ways, some are pacifists. There’s no point to war, we all know this, but man there’s plenty of wars. Sad that is.

Poetry is uplifting.

You know the end of the story: J.P. went down and blitzed the dude and got the $500. J.P. and the other bloke are friends now and there’s some respect there. They both know where each other is “coming from.” William Burroughs famously talked about the Naked Lunch being where everyone could see what was on the end of the fork. Wouldn’t you like to see it all clearly if you could? But you turn on TV and you see Charlie Sheen and then you see Lindsay Lohan and then it’s followed by some politician ripping off the world and getting away with it.

So I managed to introduce a few people to New Zealand poetry and I really enjoyed it. That’s the kicks and my kicks and hopefully your kicks too, and that’s what makes a difference to me. Hope it does for you too.

 

Keep the Faith,

 

Jim Wilson

35a   35c 35d 35e 35f

30 Jul 2010

A New Jersey Hillbilly/Jim Ledbetter/Nashville Cats

By Phantom Billstickers

I am writing some commentary to James Floyd’s poem ‘Wasted Flowers’ which is the Phantom Billstickers poem of this week. I was in Nashville, Tennessee this last week and if any place can be spiritual to me it is this part of the dear and blessed South. In terms of that pleasant and grounded feeling, Nashville comes close to Dunedin in old Aotearoa and which I miss. I miss the town belt of Dunedin and all those trees (Queen’s Drive) which seem to be of a completely unique colour in terms of this world. This good world will never let you down (or will it?) and Nashville never does. I even found a new country singing star, Chris Knight. Boy, is he good. In a world where 90% of music is mediocre, I am always happy to hear a good one.

That old Ford Crown Victoria has never disappointed me yet and the door wouldn’t unlock before I left. I took it into my local gas station here in New Jersey. I mean a man might have to evacuate his vehicle pretty quickly at times, who can tell? The gas station owner (Mike) of Cifelli’s Sunoco unlocked it and threw the locking mechanism on the back seat like it was disgusting and shameful to have to lock a car. At the same time, Mike was telling me about a house that was for sale here recently and how he overheard two women discussing it whilst getting their cars filled with that precious petroleum. The stuff we are ruining the earth with. One of the women said she wouldn’t want to own the house in question because there were only five bathrooms and her family was six. Mike said, “What, does everybody take a shit at the same time?”

Mike also said that the Afghanistan war couldn’t be won because “what’s to win?” I couldn’t agree more. It’s just another case of men gone wild and having to stomp other men.

Now all that’s New Jersey hillbilly wisdom. Hillbillies (simple people) are everywhere if you look.

That car ran on eight cylinders all the way and it is one sweet ride.

 

On to Jim Ledbetter:

Jim Ledbetter came off a methadone habit by locking himself in his car in Centennial Park in Nashville, Tennessee. He had nowhere else to go. He no longer had a house and probably few friends and this whole business (getting clean) was now merely between him and God. Of course if you were to count on anyone when the chips are down like that, then God would be the one. James Floyd’s excellent poem is for people like Jim Ledbetter and I feel I knew Jim well. As far as James Floyd goes, you can find him on Youtube under The Jefferson Street Poet.

I’m bound to say that it would have been cold there in Centennial Park and I know that every part of Ledbetter’s body would have shook from one door of that old car (it was a Chevrolet) to the other door as he got clean and got himself right with God, because that’s where he got. God cleaned the slate for Jim to start over again. Then, God didn’t let him down for the four years he was clean.

I love that country music in Nashville. One time I was walking down the street in my ‘Charlie One Horse’ Cowboy hat (the ‘Mama Tried’ model) and a car pulled up and the driver asked me if I was there to record a country record?

Jim Ledbetter, having proved himself to be a qualitative and deeply decent human being, died recently of a heart attack and that’s why I’m writing this.

Guys like Jim who make a comeback have a lot to offer the world and Jim did his fair share and more of good work. I salute him. Anyone who has gotten himself involved in the drug war (it’s bigger than Afghanistan and twice as unpopular) and has gotten clean. Well, there’s a life’s work and then some. There should be a congressional medal for it.

I won’t say much more about the drug war except that it is universal these days. No doubt the Afghanistan poppy crop was up again this year (and that’s with 100,000 troops in the country) and the Mexican city of Juarez has 250 drug-related murders a month now. It’s not the Somme yet but it will be. People will do incredibly craven-hearted things for money and drugs is where the money is. One time federal officers asked famous bank robber Willie Sutton why he robbed banks and his reply was “that’s where the money is.”

There’s a remake/remodel of the Parthenon in Centennial Park, Nashville. Those Nashville Cats been playing since they were babies (I say this as an aside). Now I’m not really up on my Greek History (the original Parthenon was in Athens in Ancient Greece) but I think Socrates drove everyone mad by asking questions that pointed out the answer’s hypocrisy. People in power don’t usually like this sort of thing, they’ll even legislate against you and call in an endless supply of bureaucrats. I think they poisoned Socrates in Ancient Greece because they couldn’t stand the truth. Maybe I’ve got this all wrong and possibly I’m actually thinking of Martin Luther King who was shot because he told the truth. Boy, the truth is best for people in the long run but it’s hard getting there. You might even get your ass shot off. Still, it’s not all as hard as hanging out in an old Chev in Centennial Park. That’s true grit. That’ll make a man out of you and it’s remarkably honest. You’d stand tall after that and Jim Ledbetter did.

He was a true friend to everyone who knew him and a beacon of hope.

 

Keep the Faith,

 

Jim Wilson

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