Friday, April 21, 2006

TRANSLATION - Rainer Maria Rilke - page a month

R. M. Rilke wrote this as a young man (age 25) in one night, 1899. Though it tells the story of a man fighting in Hungery in 1663 it gained immediate success during its 1912 publication selling 8,000 copies in three weeks. I love this work for its simplicity; Rilke was capable of fitting a lot into basic physical gestures and landscapes.

Die Weise von Lieben und Tod
des Cornets Christoph Rilke


(The Lay of the Love and Death
of Cornet Christoph Rilke)

“…the 24th of November, 1663. Otto of Rilke / of Langenau / Granitz and Zierga / travelled to Linda to collect reperations for his fallen brother Christoph who fell in the campaign in Hungary. He demanded compensation / but the Lehensreichung would give nothing / Otto of Rilke walked into the same trap his brother Christoph had (a man in a beige uniform brought him the death certificate: Cornet in the Campaign of Baron von Pirovano the Imperial etc.. All the men on horseback of the Heyershen regiments…were deceased) and returned home…”

Friday, April 14, 2006

ZINE Review - WT Chronicles

Written by men and women on or below the poverty line, WT Chronicles gives a voice to people usually voiceless by exploring issues of class, gender, self-esteem, and life.

WT “White Trash” Chronicles was established by Jen and Sonia; both single mothers who balance work and community action. Jen works full time at a homeless shelter and Sonia volunteered to help rebuild Katrina-Country last spring. Jen is currently enrolled in the Stonecoast MFA program at the University of Southern and Sonia is a recent college graduate. Their mission statement describes WT Chronicles as “a publication celebrating working class writing and art” in an attempt to “fully explore the conditions of poverty that many Americans live under”.

I first met Jen and Sonia at a poetry reading held at Acoustic Coffee every Tuesday (located at 32 Danforth St.), and quickly noticed the effectiveness of the zine, then going into its 11th issue and 11th month. Inside of issue 11 the prose ranged from mamaspitfire’s essay on Class, Masculinity, and the Capitalist Blues, which used real life stories to show how the social construct of male-as-breadwinner has been used to exploit working class men, to The Boss, a work of fiction written by WonderBred about… you guessed it. WT Chronicles also crams in poetry, cartoons, revolutionary lyrics, black and white illustrations, and samples of essays written by recognized writers responding to the politics of class. Not an inch of space is wasted because of the number submissions that Jen and Sonya receive each month.

Besides revealing the local talent, Jen and Sonya have used WT Chronicles as the focus of an educational lecture at the University of Southern Maine and held a benefit with the Portland Victory Gardens Project to benefit Maine Books for Prisoners. This latter feat was achieved by presenting a night of poetry, much of which was previously published in the zine. The turnout filled every seat in the room and left many standing. Since my initial encounter, WT Chronicles has reached its 14th issue and put up a website. If you aren’t in Portland the same week that Kinko’s gets ripped off and miss the printed version, visit wtchronicles.org to find selections from past and present issues’. Another way to get your hands on future WT Chronicles is to write Jen and Sonia at wtchronicles@hotmail.com. WT Chronicles will release a new issue next month (5/1/06).

Wednesday, April 12, 2006

Statue of a Human Head. . .


Made of Missing Shoes and
Coffee Cups or Dog Bowls


a dog lifts its leg

to the train

as it goes
whistling by

its owner.
how many times

sheltered
rhythms

one’s own heart beat
catches on

the sleeve
of a cabman driving

with a drunken fare
to Vegas marriage.

I bore him
for a moment

and it took all
my strength.

1/17/06

Review - Hank Williams III - Straight To Hell

The best approach to Hank III’s new double disc album Straight To Hell (released Feb. 28 ‘06 on BRUC Records) is to sit down just before dark with a bottle of whiskey and a joint the size of Grandma’s turkey baster; within seconds you will realize that the HELL raised tonight comes from a whole new dimension. Cause Hank’s music is a lifestyle, it’s a hell raisin’, honky-tonkin’, pot smoking’, girly lovin’, train hoppin’, belt buckle wearin’, tattoed manifesto of a lil’ something called country. Hank and the Damn Band represent an American anti-culture that originated before Johny Appleseed even planted a tree and long before Garth Brooks showed up, as Hank’s family history attests. With his new album comes the next heel stompin’ jambory, and damn it’s been a while.

Straight To Hell’s sound, at first, is that of traditional country album. Steel guitar twang, boppin’ bass, fiddle-sqeal, and banjo strummin’ announce the first song. It sounds like an ancient record found at some garage sale that you happened to take home and haven’t stop listening to since. A rare find, a glimpse at old time reality--to help induce this skunky nostalgia Hank and the Damn Band did all the recording themselves in a “good wooden room” in Nashville, on a Korg D1600, as the album jacket boasts; a simple recording device with built-in CD burner. The ambiance is as low down and dirty as the lyric’s subject matter. But don’t be fooled, as steeped in tradition as this album appears, its full of surprises, like the sample of low rolling Satan-laughter 34 seconds into track 1.

The story-telling lyrics tell about living hard, the drinkin’ and druggin’ and how it’s all going down hill. But the morel is always the same: we’ll get by somehow, and there ain’t no other kind of livin’! Hank has a rare talent for putting the listener in the condition he describes. So maybe you haven’t woken up surrounded by empty bottles, broken glass, the sound of someone crying, and bullets in the walls, but gad-damn if he doesn’t put you there. And if you have been there, he’ll comisserate with you about it. Hank’s other favorite subject is heartbreak, a subject everyone can relate with, though this album is not as saturated with love songs as his last release, Lovesick, Broke & Driftin’. The lonesome cowboy isn’t gone completely, Hank’s yodel still rings true on many songs, imbibing them with sorrow, but the hard partying cowboy wrote most of this album.

Besides the 13 tracks on Disc 1, Hank III gives a 42 minute long track on Disc 2. It is a solo perfomance full of psycodelic samples, tweaked production, and good ol’ country songs. Disc 2 reveals Hank’s desire and ability to take country in truly original directions. Songs proudly mock polite society as well as “pop country” by combining country crooning with punk and metal screams lowly mixed into the background. The overall effect is a violence that many will find distasteful, exemplified in Not Everyone Likes Us: “I think I’d rather eat the barrel/ of a double farrel loaded shotgun/ than hear that shit/ they call pop country music/ on 98.1”. But the bottom line - straight up - distorted screams have never been mixed with traditional country before this album. And only Hank III could make it work. Straight To Hell is written for anyone who loves good ol’ country music and likes raisin‘ a little hell. Don’t expect Straight to Hell to let you go to bed early, but if you play it at Grandma’s she probably won’t listen carefully enough to catch all the Satan stuff.

Blueberries By The Bay

Maine is one of the largest producer of blueberries in the world and consequently has a fondness for the small colorful fruit. And not simply for its taste. With recent studies showing that eating blueberries is good for your health, the rest of the world has begun to take notice of blueberries, and this means more business. But behind the world-wide trade of blueberries and the big companies like Wyman’s or Cherryfield Foods Inc., lie the small Maine communities who make it all possible.

I grew up in Cherryfield Maine, a five and half hour drive to Boston, an hour drive to New Brunswick Canada, a five minute drive to the Atlantic ocean. Ever heard of it? Few people have, though it is the “blueberry capitol of the world”. There, blueberries are a way of life. At age 12 every August began to take on a new meaning: three to four weeks of waking up before the sunrise and to spend a grueling day bent over on the blueberry barrens raking beneath a hot sun, treelines in the distance, the only source of shade.

Arriving on the barrens, the bushes are still covered with the night’s dew. I wear several layers of clothes to keep warm though all but shorts and a t-shirt will be left when the day is through. I grab my rake and a stack of boxes and move toward the first available row. After a few jabs with my rake, my hands and feet are soaked and my back aches from the days before. I can smell the sweet fermented scent of crushed blueberries underfoot. How am I going to manage another 10 to 12 hours of this?
The days are filled with hard work but something invaluable comes with this yearly harvest: co-workers. Maine’s blueberry harvest employs around 8,000 annually, many of whom come from out-of-state, bringing with them a brief period of cultural diversity in my usually quiet town. To judge how close the season is to beginning, I need merely observe the number of new faces at the local “corner store”. The majority of blueberry harvesters are Mexican or Native American, however people from all walks of life are present.

The relationships that develop on the barrens rarely last longer than the blueberry season, though some lead to one or two letters. As people travel from all-over to come rake they have stories from all over. A Mic-Mac Indian from New Brunswick was at one time the Golden Gloves Champion of the world (though he was not a very good raker). Another man I met had worked with my favorite actor a couple months before in Texas. Felix, a Mexican who spoke strong English, would tell me about his family back home and how they depended upon the blueberry harvest. He also taught me how to eat a Mango. Later in the year, perhaps on a winter day, I might receive a letter from a fellow raker now far from Maine, in a place I could only dream about at 12.

Now the cultural diversity is here to stay. The migrant influx has resulted in making my hometown one of Maine’s most culturally diverse, quite a feat for a downeast town of just over 1000 inhabitants. And it was the blueberries that brought the diversity. At the end of the sweaty day, drinking by the water truck, I learned that the world is a much larger place than the street I grew up on and the town whose limits might also have been mine. Every August the lesson is taught again.