Now some of us have decided to breathe life into a new project. This one is called Burrow Magazine. This is not be confused with “burro,” which is a sort of South-of-the-Border ass, or “borough,” which describes the boundaries in which we are confined to live, or “burrito,” which is a lard specialty at Yummy Taco, a Korean-owned ersatz Mexican restaurant on Flatbush Avenue, or “burgher,” a law-abiding German, not the popular American health-food snack. Nor should you mistake Burrow for the word “barrow” as in the following Allan Sherman version of Dublin’s unofficial anthem ”Cockles & Mussels,” the original of which wasn’t written by an Irish person at all, but by a Scotsman:
“She wheels her wheel barrow
Through streets that are narrow
Her barrow is narrow, her hips are too wide.
So wherever she wheels it
The neighborhood hears it
Her girdle keeps scraping the holes on each side.
In Dublin’s fair city
where girls are so pretty
My Molly stands out cos she weighs twenty stone.
I don’t mind her fat, but
It’s not only that, but
She’s cock-eyed and muscle-bound Molly Malone.”
The self-definition of Burrow Magazine is this: “A Brooklyn-based magazine publishing a borderless community of writers, artists and non-elitist shit stirrers.” That’s us, and we invite anybody interested in submitting written material, short stories, essays, poems, reviews and art work to consider this as a possible source for being published. We intend to regularly update this site, but will also produce two hard copies of Burrow per year.
This is a humble beginning, but we know that we will only receive feedback when we put some food on the table. So we’ll be brutally honest with you and relate the saga of our name choice. We wanted “Plan B” but some bastards had already nabbed that one. Then we considered “The Rolling Stones” but totally unknown to us, there is some kind of aging and supposedly popular English rock band by that name. Then we toyed around with “Sabenza Gakula”, a Zulu phrase about hard work, but to our surprise nobody here knew what that meant. We even entertained an amalgam of all of these under the title “The Rolling Plan Gakula Stones Sabenza B Magazine,” but we bickered about whether anybody would understand the “B” reference. From this rather pointless exercise, we learnt two important facts, namely that there is an emerging popular music scene happening in the United Kingdom of all places, and that not too many people speak Zulu in Brooklyn. We are much the wiser.
The first incarnation of this site deals with a few commentaries and some not-so-tall tales. Russell Shorto, author of the "The Island at the Center of the World," an absolute page-turner about the original Dutch colonialization of Manhattan, had the chance to rub shoulders with Hirsi Ali, the Somalian writer who made a big stink in Holland, and he shares his take on this experience here. The Reverend Billy, lead-howler of the Church of Stop Shopping, a man with a pompadour and white tux that would make Jerry Lee Lewis salivate, pontificates against consumerism and dispenses with a Beatitude or two. You can read about the fruitless pursuit of one of our editors to bring the Pogues’ front man Shane MacGowan to Brooklyn on St. Patrick’s day to spin some records in a local club. There's another writer’s take on the wonders of the steam age as they relate to the technology of how to listen to music, and various rants, reviews and fiction, some of which deal with what is happening in our immediate neighborhood. And then there's the art work! It’s a little bit of this and a little bit of that, but as the old song goes, “From small things baby, big things sometimes come.” Read on. Furrow your brows with the Burrow.
