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04 Jun 2011

Diary of a Billsticker – South Philadelphia, USA

By Phantom Billstickers

We drove into Philly early in the morning of Memorial Day. There were not a lot of people around and it was very peaceful and quiet. This always sets the tone for a good poster run. Later in the day, it would get to be 95 degrees (Fahrenheit), but at just after 8 AM it was around 70 degrees – so it was relatively cool work and it was unhurried. The people you run into on a poster run are usually very friendly and they well understand what you are doing. It is just normal stuff to them. In fact, it is a craven-hearted individual who does not understand another person putting up a poster.

We put up posters by the following poets: Janet Frame, Chris Knox, Sandra Bell, Sam Hunt, Tusiata Avia (all from New Zealand) and Robert Creeley (USA). About 80 or 90 A3 posters were placed in the South Philly area and this took less than an hour. You put two up on each wooden lamp-post with a kind of semi-industrial stapler, you stop and photograph them and then you move on.

South Philly is a very cool and funky area. The local clubs and gigs use posters (of course) and the best I have seen lately are for the Mexican music acts. Their posters are ultra colourful and really do the work they are intended to do: they tell the local Mexican population where the gigs are. They breathe life and vitality into the streets.

Anyway, I was asked to explain how to do a poster run. So here it is:

1. You stand in front of a lamp-post with a heavy industrial stapler and a couple of poetry posters until you decide to do something about it. You always put the posters on the poles at an angle where they will be seen by the maximum number of people. You think of the way people walk past the poles.

2. You look right and then left for signs of the proximity of Homeland Security or anyone else who might think you could be a terrorist. You make sure your hair is short and that you have no beard. You must wear no unusual clothes. You decide that you are the same religion as the person who might question you and you also decide to be subservient. You will go into any difficult encounters by agreeing with the encounterer. As Hunter S. Thompson once said, “To get along, go along.” This will be your mantra. You will apologise to anyone if you have to and then you will ‘move along.’ The key is to hold onto your stapler.

3. You hold the poster up against the lamp-post and then you whack it with the stapler with all your might. You think of this as being something like getting rid of the dirty water off your chest. You may grimace. But, if you are putting up a poem poster by any of the six poets who have been mentioned, then you will instantly feel much better. By God, there’s some satisfaction to be had by doing something enormously simple over and over. There’s power in that.

4. After about four or five poles you will begin to loosen up and really get into the rhythm of it all. At that point, you may be able to look back and see people reading the posters and then you know you have done something good. That’s important. It’s just a small step, but it is a step forward. When you really get into the swing of it, you will not want to stop and you are always disappointed when you must. But tomorrow is another day.

5. After about thirty or forty poles (or notice boards in cafes etc), you realise you have made a difference and brought something to the lives of others. That’s the key to it all. But you must keep doing it.

The next launch in the Phantom Billstickers poetry project is in Christchurch, New Zealand on June 17th. It starts at 5:30pm and is at the Addington Coffee Co-op. In this launch we are featuring poems by twenty-eight Kiwi poets (from memory) and one Canadian and one American. You are invited. There will be lots of good poets reading.

 

Keep the Faith,

 

Jim Wilson

45a

02 May 2011

Diary of a Billsticker – Trenton, New Jersey, USA

By Phantom Billstickers

This was yet another poster run in the Phantom Billstickers poetry poster series. It was a beautiful spring morning as we headed off to Trenton, the state capital of New Jersey. I buy ‘The Trentonian’ newspaper every day and I’m not sure why. I think it’s the horror, the horror. There is something appealing about horror.

The banner headlines from the day before screamed out “Killed For Pills” and told the story of a pharmacist being “gunned down” by “an eighteen or nineteen-year-old black man with dreadlocks.” So I kind of knew I had to put up some posters whilst keeping my hair short and not swaggering. The Trentonian reminds me of the dim and dark ages in New Zealand journalism. This was back when all newspapers focused on dawn raids to find Polynesian overstayers hiding under peoples’ beds. When no Polynesians were “playing up,” they’d find similar items to shock and divide and destroy. Thank God all that’s over and most thinking Kiwis appreciate the value of other cultures living in our country and bringing their magic. New Zealand is very rich on this score.

But, now we’ve all found a common enemy in Libya or Afghanistan – so far away as to be meaningless to most people. It’s like we have to find something to dislike. We know we’re right as well, as we’ve been told it and we believe it. We’re keen to buy this new line of journalistic merchandise. Yet, we all know that any war is a wasted enterprise, but it’s good that it’s all so far away and a drone takes care of most things. No need to get our hands dirty. We can stand on the sidelines and scream as the horror grows.

In Trenton, I was carrying poetry posters by Frankie McMillan, Lawrence Arabia, Sandra Bell, Jody Lloyd, Sam Hunt, Chris Knox, and Robert Creeley. The first six are Kiwis, the last an American. All are tremendously good poets who deserve to be heard. Hey, everyone deserves to be heard, but I just wish the voices were as sweet as these poets’ voices.

I enjoy a good poster run and particularly in the morning when the sun is first coming up. I have a mate who tells me that suicide rates are highest in the spring. I’d think this would be because some people are more afraid of the good things in life than of the bad. Nelson Mandela might have said something (he borrowed it I think) about more people being afraid of the light than of the dark. I think there are a lot of people in this life who like to trumpet out the bad as if this makes them better human beings. They scream and moan and try to alert us to all kinds of shit. In the end, often, their screaming and moaning is way worse than the shit they are trying to alert us to the dangers of. I’d rather shoot aspartame in the mainline than be around most of these people for too long.

On a good day and given a good poster run, I always have music in my head. On this particular day, I was moving to the rhythm of ‘Going to California’ by Led Zeppelin. This is a lovely, soft, acoustic track, and yet it really moves. I was also thinking through the bass playing from the Pretenders ‘Stop Sobbing’ and it too was altering my footsteps. It was a lucky day and this is a good way to be. Powerful music (and good expression) can be such a good force in peoples’ lives. Beauty doesn’t sell as well as horror and repulsion, but to move in that direction might be a good thing.

The sun was getting bright overhead and I was stapling posters to poles in a Spanish area of the city. I knew this because I couldn’t understand a single word people were saying and I kept (unconsciously I’m sure) thinking about the Spanish Armada.

“The patient is not cured because of free association, the patient is cured because he can free associate.” – Sigmund Freud

Well, it’s all better than thinking about newspaper headlines, and death and destruction, and political viewpoints and other things that glug up people and stops them moving. Political viewpoints kill people and they’re all about as bad (all of them) as newspaper headlines that screech and holler.  I’d rather put up posters, Jack. I’m not resigned and depressed in life either, far from it. I see good things in the very worst areas. I’ll never like Donald Trump, though. There’s no upside there. And, sometimes, I agree you’ve got to have a good band (or writer) that seems to screech and scream and yet cuts through all the crap and says things at a subconscious level that’ll add more value to society than Bill Clinton ever did or could. Sometimes such a band screams (in a good way). One such band was The Ramones. ‘Gabba Gabba Hey’ was the appropriate response to “I did not have sex with that woman.” It’s also, probably, the appropriate response to the war in Afghanistan.

So this was a good poster run full of joy and promise and sunlight.

“Hey, Gabba Gabba Hey…..”

 

Keep the Faith,

 

Jim Wilson

44a  44b

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

29 Nov 2010

Diary of a Billsticker – Washington DC and Baltimore, USA

By Phantom Billstickers

There might be lots of good reasons for going to these two cities to do a poster run of Kiwi poets. A person has to have clear intentions and I always try not to get sidetracked. My job is to try and make people feel better and not to spit and moan all day about what is going wrong. There’s lots of spitting and moaning in these places.

Poem posters I was carrying included works by Tusiata Avia, Mariana Isara, Frankie McMillan, Janet Frame, Sam Hunt, and Brian Turner. I only carried a poem of one American with me, Robert Creeley. I find Mr. Creeley pretty hard to leave behind, but I generally think I should put up the works of Kiwis. We know lots about the Americans, but they know little about the Kiwis and our dreams and desires. They’ve never really had a mutton pie to speak of.

I am writing this on the 37th anniversary of the shooting of John F. Kennedy. I think you could count the number of Americans on one hand who know who the Prime Minister of New Zealand was in 1963, or any other of our Prime Ministers for that matter. It’s strange because we’ve had a wee few disasters in Aotearoa this year and now I find more Americans know who we are. But it’s a painful way to define a country.

As you might imagine, it’s hard to put up a poster in the centre of Washington DC. In that area, I think you could most probably be arrested for farting. I’d never take Harry Sparkle with me there to poster, because we’d end up in some exotic pokey in South Carolina or somewhere, or maybe in Florence, Colorado. I prefer to Super Max my McDonalds these days.

My spirits were lifted for a moment in DC when I saw a Shepard Fairey ‘Obey’ poster on an under bridge, but in the few square miles around the White House everything has been swept scrupulously clean and the lamp-posts are steel with deep corrugations, so you can’t really put anything on them. America is very concerned and anxious about terrorists right now and so even though you may come to do them a kindness, this can be misinterpreted. It’s all in the way it’s written up and I’d hate to be shot or arrested for putting up a poster. But I swear I am the person in New Zealand who has heard more than any other “you can’t put that there.”

Nowadays I like to think I’ve settled down, but I remember a (good) time when the Phantom Billstickers business card had on it ‘we just don’t know any better.’

But this poster run looked good because just as I left for a true ‘neighbourhood’ in the North West of DC, the Otara Millionaire’s Club (OMC) came on the radio blasting ‘How Bizarre.’ It’s a great thing when you are in America and you hear Kiwi music on the radio, you always feel proud. I put up their posters.

‘How Bizarre’ is a funky little song and it’ll loosen up your poster stapling muscles and dissolve some of the armour that may separate you from true living. No longer roiling in your chains you may go forth, and so, with breathing changed, I walked the neighbourhood affixing righteously on to those cherished wooden lamp-posts. The ones I have come to know and love so well in America.

“Oooh baby…”

Yes, Kiwi music does a lot of good in the world and I think now we even have more musicians than sheep.

“Ooh Baby (ooh baby)
It’s making me crazy (it’s making me crazy)
Every time I look around…
Every time I look around…
Every time I look around…
It’s in my face…

How bizarre
How bizarre….”

So I talked to lots of people on this run and including some other guys putting up posters (they were wanting to buy junked cars for ‘up to $200’). I put some posters up right outside the local police station (and could barely stop) and had a very friendly conversation with a cop doing so. There are too many big things in North West DC for the cops to worry about other than someone adding some beauty to a lamp-post and I must say the police station is bigger than the interisland ferry. One day these police stations will be bigger than the North Island and things will be worse….

“Oooh baby…
It’s making me crazy…
Every time I look around…
It’s in my face….”

Washington DC is where the Beatles gave their first concert in the USA in February 1964. They opened with Chuck Berry’s “Roll Over Beethoven.” I think they blew the room down. These things are in my mind as I poster. Two days before they were on the Ed Sullivan show and blew America away.

Anyway, next day it’s was Baltimore’s turn. I love Charm City as it just kind of feels to me to be naturally worn in. There are a lot of reasons you could come here too. There are strong references to Baltimore in at least two Bob Dylan songs, this being where Hattie Carroll was murdered and also where ‘Miss Mary-Jane had a house in Baltimore.’ Gram Parsons wrote a fine song called ‘Streets of Baltimore’ and Tim Hardin penned ‘The Lady Came from Baltimore.’ So the city stands up lyrically. I postered in the Hampden district where the streets smell of ketchup from all the restaurants in the area. I just love the wooden lamp-posts. Once again I met plenty of people and was therefore given an opportunity to talk about Kiwi poetry and music. Oooh baby…

There’s a ‘zine from Baltimore, actually, that features some fine writing and great poetry. It’s called ‘Smile, Hon, You’re in Baltimore’ and is probably the best ‘zine I’ve seen for years. It is dead close to the street and dead invigorating to read. Google it and have a read, it’s worth it.

“Oooh Baby…
It’s making me crazy…

How bizarre…”
Keep the Faith,

 

Jim Wilson

40b 40d 40f

11 Jun 2010

Diary of a Billsticker – Lambertville, New Jersey, USA

By Phantom Billstickers

Woke Up This Morning and Got Myself a Broom

It is true that putting up posters will shift the dirty water off one’s chest. I have never come back from a poster run feeling worse (I’ve said this before), not even when my posters have been immediately covered by another posterer. This used to happen all the time in old Christchurch (and elsewhere) when sometimes twenty different people would go out pasting up for twenty different gigs on the same night. It’s a nice and interesting idea that people should ‘share’, but I always think their egos involved and sometimes egos can’t grasp even very simple concepts. Then, it’s not as if every ego in the world is working for a bank or finance company or even in politics. No, there are egos everywhere. Sometimes there are even egos in reverse.

Talking of egos, the most disturbing thing about America right now is the Oil Spill (yes, I meant to capitalise that because it is a huge disaster) in the Gulf. I hear there is another panel of ‘experts’ who are going to meet and discuss the matter later on in the week. The panel consists of Bono, Sting, Sean Penn and Elton John and their discussion will be screened on Entertainment Tonight. That’s how sad it all is. If only they would completely give away their fortunes to make it better. But they’ll never do that. The head guy from BP looks stunned and ineffectual and Mr Obama should front up and start cane-ing people. That’s the view of my ego.

So that’s why I like postering, because when you are putting up posters everything becomes perfectly clear and truthful (“The only thing that matters is the clear and simple truth” – Ernest Hemingway). It’s the activity of postering that unclogs the system and gets me moving and doing something that I enjoy a hell of a lot: putting up simple street posters for poets. That’s about the easiest thing to do and I do not like the theorising before and after the fact that one sees on television these days. Lewis Lapham once said something about television front people being the new car sales people of the media set and he’s right. So the Gulf Oil Spill is a tragedy on a number of fronts. The animals (human and otherwise) will suffer the most. I feel for them.

I did this run in Lambertville over three days and I put up posters by Jeffery McCaleb, Roy Smith, Brian Turner, Gerald Stern, Chris Knox, Robert Creeley, Michael Palma, Sam Hunt, Bill Manhire and Michele Leggott. Some of these are my favourites of course. I can stand back and look at them on a lamp-post and I feel good. I’m ‘put together’ again.

I tried to mix in the different sentiments with these posters too; some go really well in couplings with another poet. Sam is good with anyone. Robert Creeley is the man and will bring light to any lamp-post. Michael Palma goes really well with Chris Knox (he the musician and Michael the dude talking about Ray Charles). Roy Smith’s poem is just funky and smells of sand and diesel and Jeffery McCaleb just has this big heart, which I hope continues to serve him well.

And so on and so forth.

So you can see it’s not just about stapling a few posters to lampposts, it’s about ‘feeling’ and ‘being’ and it beats talking to lawyers and accountants and watching that Oil Spill. It also whips the endless and vapid smiles of television presenters. I’m sure all this is the cause of obesity.

You can quite easily see why people wake up and get themselves a broom. A broom is the best friend of a billsticker. A broom is what a billsticker usually uses to put up posters. Billsticking happens in every major city in the world. People will go out and express themselves. They’ve done this since before the beginning of recorded time. We’ve got a guy at Phantom Billstickers in Christchurch right now who is the fastest guy I have ever seen with a broom. I won’t mention his name because that may cause embarrassment.

I have learnt the noble art of billsticking from some of New Zealand’s best ever promoters. Here I am going to mention some names: Hugh Lynn, Robert Raymond, Harry M. Miller, Joe Brown, Oz Armstrong, Mark Cassin and Benny Levin.

We used to do ‘airport runs’ and this is where a billsticker would go out and poster the road in from the airport just before the date and time of the arrival of the ‘star’ or ‘stars’. Then you’d poster all around the hotel at which the promoter would tell you the act was staying. To use a sentence from “The Thin Red Line” this ‘bucks the men up’. The stars feel better and spirits are lifted. 90% of the value of a concert of any kind is that everyone arrives and leaves happy. The stars included.

Benny Levin would always ‘walk the town’ and ‘talk the act up’. I am privileged enough to be able to say that I did this with him a few times. He’d snaffle down a couple of ginseng and we’d put some posters under our wings and go from shop to shop putting up posters for the gig. This would be a few days before the play date and the important thing wasn’t so much the putting up the posters (although this was still critically important), but the talking to the shopkeepers and getting a gauge of how the concert would sell… Getting people interested.  If two hundred people told you in one day that they loved the act and were going to be at the gig, then this gave you a really good indication of how that concert would go. I don’t like to disparage anyone or anything really, but this kind of thing will still give you a better indicator of the popularity of an act than Facebook or the internet will ever be able to do. This is real people talking to real people. So, even though we may want to freshen up the simple street poster with technology, there is no doubt that it (the simple street poster) is a very powerful instrument and it feels real. I’ve said it.

Real is what the world needs of course. Getting face to face with people and making contact is the most powerful force in the world.

I was going to write about Eddie Chin on this posting. In my opinion, Eddie was one of New Zealand’s finest ever promoters and did one hellacious amount for the NZ music industry. I actually had some intake from people who played for Eddie back in the 1970s to write something, but this will have to wait.

I grew up watching how Eddie’s clubs bought Dunedin alive and I was very much influenced by what he did. I’m going to write about him on my next posting, because right now I hear a lamppost and a broom calling to me.

 

Keep the Faith,

 

Jim Wilson

31a 31b

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