A Poem about Sand-Hill Cranes

Thanks to the teacher from Ontario CA who had his 4th graders read this at a talk on poetry for English learner schoolchildren at CATESOL in about 1998. They really put the zap on my head with this poem and others, like the Lion's speech from "The Wizard of Oz." Who _did_ put the ape in apricot?

The Sand-Hill Crane

By Mary Austin

Whenever the days are cool and clear,

The sand-hill crane goes walking,

Across the field by the flashing weir,

Slowly, solemnly stalking.

The little frogs in the tules hear,

And jump for their lives if he comes near;

The fishes scuttle away in fear

When the sand-hill crane goes walking.

The field folk know if he comes that way,

Slowly, solemnly stalking,

There is danger and death in the least delay,

When the sand-hill crane goes walking.

The chipmunks stop in the midst of play;

The gophers hide in their holes away;

And “Hush, oh, hush!”

the field-mice say,

When the sand-hill

crane goes walking.

Still Got That Look

Heard this on KPIG and laughed. Couldn't find the singalong lyrics anywhere online, so transcribed them myself. Enjoyez vous!

Still Got That Look

By Jim Ringer

From the Album “The Best of Jim Ringer: The Band of Jesse James”

Lyrics transcribed by Piet

His life was a shambles, every day was a gamble,

Orange Sunshine burned his mind up long ago.

Have a listen, he learned, and any way he turned,

He found out was the wrong way to go.

Now he wears shiny shoes, he swears he’s found truth,

And all he’s learned up to now has been lies,

He used to take acid, and now he loves god,

But he’s still got that look in his eyes.

Every day he spends hours tryin’ to pin flowers,

On folks who ain’t got time to smell.

And he tries to explain, if you miss your plane,

Well, that’s better than your burnin’ in hell.

That old preacher believes it’s the workin’s of Jesus,

That old preacher just don’t realize,

He used to take acid, and now he loves god,

But he’s still got that look in his eyes.

His mama back home kinda wishes he’d phone,

But his dad hopes he don’t call today.

The last time he called was sometime last fall,

For money and to beg them to pray,

Well the church had his money, and his clothes are still funny,

And them new shoes ain’t even his size,

He used to take acid, and now he loves god,

But he’s still got that look in his eyes.

Yeah,

He used to take acid, and now he loves god,

But he’s still got that look in his eyes.

German Radio

Making Love in a Canoe

"How is American beer like making love in a canoe?", the Australian joke of the 1980's asks. Because it's fucking close to water. It used to be that we really had something to be ashamed of over here: our beer truly sucked. Now, as long as one has the sense not to buy the swill advertised during the World Cup, we have nothing to hide. American "micro" brew ales kick the Germans' any-flavour-you-like-so-long-as-it's-Pilsener ass.

But even then, back in the bad old days, we always had an easy comeback. In many areas in the United States, there has long been quite decent radio available. NPR is available in some villes that don't even appear on a map, and any town with a college has a shot at getting avant-garde music, unless, as in San José CA, the college station decides to act as a training ground for the disingenuous pap of commercial radio. German radio on the other hand, made even US commercial stations look really good.

I just got back from Germany, and I am pleased to announce that I found a station that is not only worthwhile to listen to, but positively indicative of what Europe can become.

I stumbled across a Spanish language talk show near Bremen in 2004. I stuck with the station, though it changed languages after that one show. The station announced itself as "Radio Multi-Kulti", an interesting slang for "multicultural"[see Gerhard Seyfried comic, attached]. The daytime playlist included a lot of Latin-American stuff, stuff from all over, and Michael Franti, from Northern California, a favourite in my Berkeley household, whom I first saw at my student co-op fronting the band Beat Nigs.

2 years later on my next Germany spree I immediately got to work locating the station on the dial. I had not noted the frequencies but located them quickly enough. 96.7 in Bremen, 103.3 in Koeln; now I know. I made every effort to listen to Radio Multi-Kulti/ Funkhaus Europa in the car, at home [ to the distress of my elderly mother in law's ears] and on an Ipod sized "transistor" radio. Musical fare included, besides predictable amounts of Brazilian music, Indian pop, African styles, and, most exquisitely, male French rap interspersed with female Arabic soul-style singing. This is the style critiqued in US/monolingual form by Consolidated in "This is Fascism". There was also mind-bending music with opaque Alpine German dialect lyrics, and lots and lots of Turkish pop. Only now did I twig to the fact that there are no ads on the station!

The chrystalising moment for me was when I left the Bremen train station on a bike [multi-modal transpo!] headed for the university library. The general environment of culture shock with the heightened situation of attempting to figure out Germany's Byzantine traffic culture on a physically vulnerable bicycle is bad enough. Wearing headphones dampens the audio channel of awareness, and the eyes and neck crane to compensate. This all created a Nervenkostuem, a psychic state, which I would liken to pouring vodka on the rocks over the brainstem.

Turkish pop was the perfect accompaniment to this! It supplied just the right almost-there quality, Germany being almost-there to Turkey. The texts supplied a finger-grasping almost-there understanding to my semi-Turkish-speaking brain. I understood all the grammar of the songs, but none of the vocabulary. This was much preferable, for my craven purposes, to the Klartext, the open understandableness of German. Also, it was finger-snappin' good.

The station's format is on the German model. It is neither a news station nor a music station, but both. Perhaps the best parallel is Pacifica in the US. Mid mornings are most fruitful for music, and the evening hours are taken up with news shows in about ten different languages, starting at about 4 p.m. with news from the Beeb [BBC], cycling through French, and Italian, and ending up about 4 hours later with Russian, which, oddly comes some time after Serbo-Croatian. The daytime music shows have some information interspersed—I actually learned something about Bangladesh's war of independence after a George Harrison track. At night the station plays world beat shows from all over including our very own Afropop Worldwide from PRI, and Polish, Turkish and Francophone shows. I thought the station was Nederlands free, but it turns out that, to paraphrase the Whodini song of the early 80's*, the Dutch come out at night.

Now comes my plug for flag-wavin' Europhlia. If you, like me, have just read Jeremy Rifkin's "European Dream" or the somewhat more poppy "United States of Europe" by T.R Reid, then this station fits right into the hope of a Pan-European paradigm. Much of the informational content, the evening new shows, is tuned toward other European languages, intra-European immigrant languages. The musical content invites native and immigrant alike freely to cross borders and to enjoy what can be found there, regardless of the linguistic content of the songs. Best of all are the overnight shows, where the listener is not really expected to be able to speak the language of the DJ, but to let it just wash over him until the next song. Klartext is not a priority. Radio Multi-Kulti is pretty much Europe in a box.

After I returned from Europe I found the stations on the web. It turns out Funkhaus Europa is in the one in Koeln, and Radio Multi Kulti is in Berlin. The station[s] can be heard in those 2 cities, and in Bremen, perhaps the Berkeley of Germany. That's a simple map for you of where it might be bearable to live in Germany, if you are hip or of colour, though smaller Heidelberg is pretty OK too. Anywhere else, you can hear the stations online.

Google "Funkhaus Europa" and it comes right up at the top of the list. This one is a bit fiddly to listen to, as it plays in a browser window, and, irksomely, turns off after a while until you refresh it. "Radio Multi-Kulti" needs an additional browser term like "RBB", the parent station. Multi-Kulti only plays in Real Player, which I regard as evil, but if you quit Real Player while listening to Multi-Kulti, then it stays tuned for next time. This makes Real Player my player for listening only to this one station. [Reject all attempts by Real Player to register you, whatever that means!]

Something else about the Funkhaus Europa that ties in with the internet is that they feature particular artists pretty intensively, announcing concerts, playing their interviews in rotation, and writing up their albums. The freaky Alpine quasi-Germanophone, Hubert von Goisern [Austrian, it turns out] is featured. Balkan Beatbox was on while I was there. I would like to see who is on next.

It's not WFMU New Jersey or KFJC Los Altos Hills, but it's interesting, you can learn something, and it provides a hopeful window on all that is not German in Germany.

*"So if you wanna live a nice quiet life, do yourself a favor, don't come out at night, 'cause the freaks come out at night!" -Whodini

The McMullins

The storm and its fury rage today,
Crushing hope that we cherished so dear,
Storm and clouds will in time pass away,
The sun again will shine bright and clear.

-from "Keep on the Sunny Side" as recorded by Hank Williams.

The hopes of the McMullin family of California's northern coast in the late 1880's were indeed crushed, one by one. I have visited their graves repeatedly over the past 20 years passing through the area. The stones show how their toddlers were born and buried one after the other until, eventually, sooner rather than later, the parents go to join them leaving, apparently, no issue.
The family lies in Evergreen Cemetery [a few steps away from 38.9505N, 123.6904W on GPS or Google Earth] at the intersection of Highway One and Mountain View Road just south of Manchester, California. South lie the Garcia River and Point Arena, a larger village. Graves here appear to bear only Anglo names, many of them appearing on local landmarks, ranches, or street names. Two cemeteries close by Point Arena, one with the same name as the Catholic church in town, the other with the Odd Fellows sign above its large concrete gateway, show more diversity, including graves of the Stornettas, whose name is carried by North Coast icon Clover Stornetta Dairies. The Stornettas' land is visible from Evergreen Cemetery.
No concrete gateway or white picket fence borders Evergreen. A cedar windbreak forms the entry. The fence is split cedar stake, typical to the area. The turf is short, but not mown. The McMullins lie in the open area near the entrance where one of several shorter conifers passes its shadow over the stones as the day's sun moves by. Further back in the cemetery, the trees that grow thick over the bordering streambed encroach on neglected graves at the back. One exception is a 10' x 10' concrete area where several members of the Bishop family were interred in the century before last. The name pops up all over the cemetery and on [at least historically] the ranch just up Mountain View Road.
Under the shade of a tree blown hard by coastal winds, the parents' somewhat monumental gravestone is the final punctuation of a short sentence of much simpler gravestones. The small stones are regularly spaced and mostly straight, like a first-grader's new teeth. Here we see the fruit of Jennie McMullin's womb, beginning when she is 25 years old. Her partner, presumably husband, was 20 years her senior.
The first of the stone incisors is for Carl, "Son of S.W. & Jennie McMullin". The stone notes that he died 25 days after his 1^st birthday in 1874. In the next year, his brother, a little over a month old, dies. 2 years later they are followed into life, and then into death, by Irene, "Dau. of" the same parents, nearly a year old. This mother, who can least bear an extra burden, then conceives twins. Less than a year after the death of Irene, one, Ellie, dies on the day she is born. The other, Paullie, survives. For a week. The twins bear names befitting infants. They will not need adult names. Nearly three years elapse before the McMullins' final attempt at reproduction arrives at Evergreen Cemetery. In November 1880, their unnamed "Dau" is interred. No date of birth is listed. "Infant" reads the headstone. Jennie's reproductive potential is exhausted. She is just 31. Perhaps they have learned not to name their dying children. Perhaps this was a miscarried pre-term foetus.
The side of the adult McMullins' large, substantial gravestone lists all of these children, and no more. Jennie McMullins survived until 1893. She was 44. Her husband did not see two more summers after her death.

…Each man's death diminishes me,
For I am involved in mankind.
Therefore, send not to know
For whom the bell tolls,
I t tolls for thee.

– John Donne http://www.global-language.com/devotion.html

Nunc lento sonitu dicunt, Morieris

Now, this Bell tolling softly for another, saies to me, Thou must die.

Covelo

It takes quite a while to go all the way up the 101 from the Bay Area to Willits, but it's OK, it's the cool part of the 101 with curves, really close to the Russian River where it bashes against big rocky faces at curves. Especially cool during floods which last Thursday was not. It was lovely and mellow, and I let all the buttheads pass me if they want. 70 is fast enough!!
In Willits there are the usual chains, and there is also something called the Phoenix Bakery, where I had my [thankfully!] only meal of the day after a 10 a.m. departure. They serve a slice of fougasse baked around BBQ for 10 bucks. Please don't eat the whole thing like I did!
I managed the next 10 or 20 miles before, like a snake with a rat inside, I needed to sleep a bit. At the turnoff to Covelo there is a river near the highway and one of those well-tracked, beer-canned sandbars somehow publicly accessible though not a park. I dozed while I read British history. Locals parked their Novas, let their kids splash, drove their ATV's through the water. ATV's are basically sports-rider-mowers. How tuff is it to drive them through a creek like in the SUV commercials?
The road to Covelo is about 30 miles from the 101 in nice sweeping curves that would have had me really going balls out a few years ago. Today, I sought out the scenery. The rocky creekbed is reminiscent of the Feather River in the Gold Country. The road would be pretty much bicyclable, but only just. Just because it's possible doesn't mean it's doable, to paraphrase Bruce Sterling.