SONG OF THE DAY: Fences

I have a pretty good ability to sense metaphysical fences. It’s both a blessing and a curse. The worst side of it is how easy to see throughout my life where I’m not welcome even though nobody outright says it. That shit weighs heavy on you, because outwardly identifying open-minded types that have hearts full of hate will be hating on you, and those metaphysical fences are up big time, but they’re not physical so they’ll deny them even if you try to point it out. So you gotta just abide what you know to be true, and accept they’ve kept plausible deniability in the physical realm. America’s full of that shit, metaphysical fences behind neighborhoods where you’re just walking along, saying what’s up to random people you pass by, when all of a sudden you realize you’re about a block and a half into territory some sort of security force is gonna show up and ask you what you’re up to. Fuck it. I cut holes through metaphysical fences with haiku spikes regularly. Just drive them in the ground right at a weakened edge, deep enough into the ground the grass covers the head and nobody realizes it’s there, and a hole gets ripped in the invisible walls, and next thing you know the neighborhood is ruined. It’s like reverse gentrification. I practice it a lot actually.
By the way, this is a Blue Globe Beats song my boy Boogie Brown put together off an EP full of songs where he had computer voice read blurbs from this very blog. So this song’s words are already on here somewhere or another. If there’s a track Brown hasn’t put up on Youtube that I’m supposed to write about, I usually whip up a video just like I do with the kudzu’d 45s. For this one, I found video of hedge laying back in the day, which is the old school method of cutting hawthorn to build natural walls. Video lines up pretty amazingly a few times. I consider this art, even if it’s just me throwing a bunch of various shit together. It’s a digital mosaic, and only like 19 people will ever see it. Thank you for being one of them.

SONG OF THE DAY: Killing Time

I will still listen to shit like this, and drive down back roads with the windows down, and it’s still a reckless life, but in different ways than it would’ve been thirty years ago. You gotta change, and challenge the universe is different ways, because if you were lucky enough to roll the dice certain ways and never crap out (die), you’d be pushing your luck too far to keep it up. So I’m still getting stupid (because I know how), but I try to keep it fresh. Just killing time until eventually I’m freed from this spiritual prison of a body.

Y0VTH FVLL 0F R3CKL3SS F1R3 WH1CH...

youth full of reckless fire which 
ain’t afraid to burn bright (but 
those moments leave telltale scars) 

T1M3 L4PS3S, 4ND S3D1M3NTS...

time lapses, and sediments 
of experience clog our 
brains with what we think is truth 

F34RS 0F TH1S W0RLD PR0DVC1NG...

fears of this world producing 
more problems than solutions 
forget it’s beyond our grasp 

SONG OF THE DAY: Shu Ba Da Dum Ma Ma Ma Ma (kudzu’d)

[A critical micro-analysis of the final chase scene from White Lightning, as submitted to The University of Universal Magnetics by Raven Mack, as part of my thesis on Southern Gothicc Futurism.]
White Lightning came out in the summer of 1973, and was part of a ‘70s genre of white lower class antihero movies. Burt Reynolds was in his initial wave of stardom after the success of Deliverance the year before, and played a former moonshine runner who was seeking vengeance in the murder of his brother, killed by local police. Placed alongside current politics, the movie stands in sharp contrast to today’s performative outlaw imagery that many white men have purchased as their identity, that somehow makes the dissonant alignment of “outlaw” with “backing the blue”, or supporting law enforcement. Reynolds’ character, Gator McKlusky, is a true outlaw, and has the prison record to show for it. Gator uses federal agents, under the guise of being a cooperative witness, to get a souped up Ford Custom 500, and eventually lures the corrupt sheriff, played by Ned Beatty, into a climactic car chase. Knowing every back road to the mile, despite his time away in prison, McKlusky is able to slowly lure the sheriff to going over an embankment and drowning in the river. In post-MAGA crime-fearing politics, the notion of killing a policeman would be never be seen in good light, much celebrated as a heroic victory, but White Lightning lays out the tale to our antihero’s benefit.
All media is propaganda of some sort, attuned to the creator’s biases, whether consciously or unconsciously. Rarely these days do we see underclass heroes who are positioned against corrupt authorities that are realistic and present day, thus easily translatable to real life corruption. It’s more often than not filtered through science fiction, against technological overreach or distant corrupt systems of power that are more globalized than localized. But the reality of the American experience is that those of us who suffer abuses at the hands of an ever-expanding police state do so at the localized level. It’s refreshing to see a folkloric antihero succeeding against the type of corrupt county sheriff that still very much exists in far more rural American counties than the average digitally news attuned brain could comprehend. And with local journalism pretty much gutted by venture capitalism and the movement to digital news sources over the past couple decades, any stories of local corruption are mostly word-of-mouth.
The end of White Lightning is a memorial parade for the dead sheriff, which Gator watches before driving off into the sunset. He didn’t actually cooperate with the feds, remaining true to his outlaw nature as a former moonshiner. The local people, unaware of the reality behind the scenes, still celebrated the sheriff, believing he stood for law and order in a decent way. These would be the MAGA people today, who somehow are the political marks standing alongside the parade route, waving flags for a corrupted leader, yet they believe in their minds, due to the propaganda they consume, that they are the Gator McKlusky, and antihero. It makes no logical sense. But in a world where the propaganda’s biases are far more pronounced, yet denied to an even greater extent, it’s hard to avoid. We’ve been culturally conditioned to think up is down, wrong is right, and openly corrupt leadership is a savior from corruption. We need more Gators, but all we seem to be served up are more flag-waving extras jockeying for digital position to watch the parade march by.

P3RS1ST3D D3SP1T3 W31GHT VP...

persisted despite weight up on shoulders (which I aim to lessen with each passing year) 

SONG OF THE DAY: Time To Throw Down (kudzu'd)

Old school electronic boom baptism sermons to send distraction signals to the more modern surveillance bloop blips to become confused by. Analog technology confounds artificial intelligence, committing cultural jailbreak, creating pockets of autonomous throw down, which is always temporary because the more truly free fun any cluster of humans just being have anywhere, the panopticon scanners shift to try and cover it with monetized joylessness. For as long as men have secretly stacked hoarded coins, raw human joy has been harvested and processed into wealth, removing all the fun, synthesizing raw serotonin into watered down dopamine chase, and turned too many of us into worshippers of new, mistaking it for fresh. Heavily processed new is no replacement for truly fresh, whether you speak of summer squash or simple rhymes. The new school attempts at funky freshness are full of polysaturated phats, and only clog the heart with an unexplainable sadness. But the real shit volunteers itself wherever life is a compost pile, and the artificial can’t ever stop it. It will always be time to throw down, somewhere where the mundane eyeballs ain’t been told to blandly scan yet.

C0NFVS10N 0F PVRP0S3 WH3N...

confusion of purpose when demands of modern living get my heart’s intent twisted 

SONG OF THE DAY: Rush Rush (kudzu'd)

This 45 of mine has a skip at the very end, but other than that it’s perfect. In fact, the skip at the end loops part of the hook, off beat, but it’s still even more than perfect because I can just fade out on the skip and the whole song played slow, and I think that’s what trips me out about the yearning for digital perfection. It’s a flawed quest. Imperfect is always going to be better, and thus more perfect than perfect. Also, I’m a big fan of slowed disco. The beat simmers down to a more manageable flow, the percussion inside disco music is insane, and frankly, when it comes to getting into records, you gotta be into shit nobody else wants. Unfortunately, they’ve rebranded disco as “boogie” music and it’s making a comeback. It’s not unfortunate that the music is coming back necessarily, because I love that. It’s just that the cheap ass records a motherfucker like me gets left to pick through is about to lose another genre. Then again, not too many people give a fuck about 45s, so you can still find plenty of record stores that just got huge bins of cheap ass ones in good shape, because it takes too much work to go through them. I been broke lately, so ain’t had the funds to go record digging in a while. I’m starting to fiend.

R3FL3CT1NG VP0N P4TT3RNS...

reflecting upon patterns of thinking which lead me to dissatisfied conclusions 

SONG OF THE DAY: Stellar Fungk (kudzu'd)

The mental spaceship been a bit stalled here lately. All the internal streams seem to be flowing normally, maybe a little bit of back-up, but whatever main line of creative drainage this body has out unto the Universe has been clogged, so it hadn’t been flowing freely, causing that back-up, where the ideas get swirled together even when they don’t mix, and can’t be expressed fast enough to air themselves out properly. And I’m actually pretty blessed with halfway freedom enough time to try. I think constantly about all the amazing creative minds that get stifled by work in our world, who just have endlessly brilliant thoughts in their own mind, but they never get the chance to be turned into some sort of art. And I also think about all the boring artists who have every opportunity to express themselves, get to work as big as their brain desires, and have access to whatever equipment promises to make their plans easier. Art (like all things) in our culture is built on inequality, and inequity, and all them uneven surfaces we’re building everything on. I try not to let it fuck with me, and keep that spaceship perspective, too high to be bothered by this Earthly bullshit. But it does get in the way sometimes. And mostly it just makes me sad, because there ain’t no merit to it, and there’s truly brilliant people out there completely unknown, left and right, while some mediocre ass folks get propped up in local scenes as signs of brilliance, just because they got the right stack of cash nudging them along from behind. I can’t change it, can’t fix it, and probably shouldn’t think about it. But I do, which is probably why the mental spaceship is stalled. It’s good to be grounded, but the surface is full of obstacles, so sometimes you gotta go back to the clouds, to avoid the mediocrity. If you get too caught up in it, you end up the same.

SONG OF THE DAY: It Really Doesn't Matter (kudzu'd)

Every time I listen to Zapp, I think, “wow, I don’t listen to enough Zapp.” And I listen to a lot of Zapp.

SONG OF THE DAY: Jeep 'n Benzos

Loud music blaring from slow moving vehicles in an urban environment, creating ambiance of joy amidst the underbelly of chaos that civilization don’t like to admit is integral part of acting civilized. I’d rather hear loud joy than quiet despair. I’ll never understand people mad about that.

SONG OF THE DAY: Mary Jane (kudzu'd)

I grew up on raggedy ass homegrown, so new age weed with its space sciences in both growing and consuming is too much for me. It plucks at the fractures in my traumatized brain, and I end up just sitting there thinking about how much longer it's gonna be. Folks who are big ass weedheads are always like, "Oh you just gotta try this blah blah blah strain, and don't smoke it, you gotta ingest vaporized pellets" or some shit, but it never works; I just sit there cuddled into the bed like a babbling fool afraid to babble because he knows he's a fool, and self-conscious fools make for the worst internal babble. But please, if you are a user, feel free to tell me in the comments how my personal experiences are entirely wrong.

SONG OF THE DAY: Cold, Cold, Cold (kudzu'd)

Riding a train to New Orleans so this track showing up as me writing about it next on my secret list that's always too far behind but nobody sees it so it doesn't matter is just about perfect. I love trains, and looking forward to walking around an alien place not doing shit for a couple days. Keep it slow, forever. The slower you live, the more timeless you are.

SONG OF THE DAY: I Need Some Money (kudzu'd)

Oh hey, I updated the shop on my website. Check it out. Support the dirtgod arts, so I don't end up having to get a second (third) job.

SONG OF THE DAY: Red Dirt Boogie Brother

It’s easy to lament the loss of regional genres and sounds in the digital era, but the negative effect of algorithms is just going to push folks back into cross-pollinating each other IRL again. Digital adds another layer to our existence, but it’s been manipulated so heavily in recent years that it’s almost useless in actually encouraging art, as it’s all so commodity driven. Algorithms got no purpose other than to sell you shit (which includes stifling you selling your own shit so that you buy in to the algorithms, which always has limited success anyways).
And at the same time, in the old new ways, this song came into my playing by an old-fashioned download of a compilation off a music blog. I still do that. I don’t stream, and I don’t fuck with spotify. I don’t judge folks for streaming, because we all do what our generation is used to, but I do judge folks who pay for spotify. They pay Joe Rogan’s fucked up ass millions, but are cutting payments to musicians who don’t stream a high enough amount. Keep in mind, they’ll still be using those artists’ music in their system, but if you don’t reach a certain threshold, you don’t get paid. But also, all these systems we have in place, which were supposed to make everything better and more universally accessible are all getting broken, by capitalist greed. Everybody making a little bit of extra money wasn’t good enough, so they had to tinker with the shit and make it so a few people made a whole lot of extra money. That’s how it always is.
That’s the beauty of human creation, whether art or civilization… no matter how much it changes, it’s all still basically the same. People are gonna be dancing on the ashes of a lot of shit we think right now is eternal. That’s just how it is, and always will be, until it ain’t, but nobody can actually predict that.
Beyond all the shit talk by Mr. Blog Haver over here, this song fuckin’ rules. The pinnacle of my sunshine chaos was my early 20s drunken years when I had a 1981 Datsun 200SX that I paid $500 for and put like 150,000 miles on it. This is exactly the type of song I would’ve blasted, driving madly between nonsenses with a mind going 120 mph. My mind don’t like going that fast no more, but it’s okay. I’m learning to slow down and try to get further down the road than wreck into a guard rail pretending I’m still an old version of me that ain’t real no more.

SONG OF THE DAY: I Won't Love You Again

I love all songs where there’s horns that sound like summer insects, especially ones about love. I feel very disconnected from mainstream American life, with weirdly secure houses that have HVAC systems where the outside is never inside and the inside is a quarantine from nature. I like rattly windows propped open with a stick, and hearing the summer chorus of forest bugs, and being part of it all, rather than hiding from it, pretending I’m better than everything else. Humans really built some fucked up shit, didn’t we? Seems like we’ve over complicated every aspect of lounge. Oh well, fuck it. I can’t fix the world. I ain’t even fixed the leak in the roof yet. But it might not ever rain that heavy ever again.

SONG OF THE DAY: What Am I To Do

Mostly listen to oldies at this point, and mostly don’t give a fuck. Thinking about forming a doo wop group if I could find four other people like myself, which can’t be easy, to be honest. I’m pretty fucked up.

SONG OF THE DAY: Sunrise (kudzu'd)

Oh look, I wrapped up the heroic crown. It ain't the greatest sonnet in the world, but it's a sonnet, and it fits the pattern and rhyme scheme and gets it done, and I did in true freestyle sonnet fashion and wrote it in about 11 minutes with my rhyming dictionary at hand.

Infinite outlook grants this grimy world more grace, 
man's vision hyperextended our reach too far 
beyond what humility should have kept in place; 
star dusted crowns got delusions of grandeur... par 

for the course when dreamers discourse with mad schemers 
who build pyramids of abstractions. These unreal 
realities start to bind, blind to redeemers 
who arrive to remind us existence is wheel 

and not a line chart. My heart yearns for sunrises 
greeted with hopeful joy, and sunsets filled with peace; 
but this compromised world the devil devises 
entraps the spirit in sadness without release. 

Nonetheless, with stealth I conceal behind this face 
planet rock mentality born from outer space. 

SONG OF THE DAY: Struggling Man (kudzu'd)

Back on that freestyle sonnet tip, so as to wrap up this heroic crown hopefully. I really need to cobble together another book of freestyle sonnet heroic crowns.

Simplifying life also amplifies the funk; 
living with spunk and zeal has popular appeal 
but is far less practiced by masses far too drunk 
off performance without basis in being real. 

Ain't no carrying the weight of world created 
by men without struggling in mind from time to time; 
this labyrinth designed to entrap those baited 
with dreams of escape is a well organized crime 

against true pursuit of happiness. All this dirt 
of metaphysical nature which stains our acts 
of building our pyramid schemes will only hurt 
ourselves when it's time to pay universal tax 

of balance restored. At war with abstract wealth chase, 
infinite outlook grants grimy world far more grace.

SONG OF THE DAY: Lookin' For A Home (kudzu'd)

This is the song I named my last book of haiku after, but slowed down. That’s a pretty great book. Feel free to buy a copy if you randomly show up here and aren’t a robot.

SONG OF THE DAY: Charlie Brown

Briefly was playing the fuck out of this song because my beloved girlfriend bought me some Charlie Brown masks made by Jimmy Valiant’s wife Angel for my birthday. This is not the cartoon character Charlie Brown, but when Jimmy Valiant had to leave town and just wrestled under a mask as Charlie Brown from outta town. The masks leave the beard area exposed, which is ideal when you have an actual beard. Unfortunately, the masks fit weird as fuck, like the eyeballs don’t line up well with my actual eyes. But I still love them very much, and we got to meet one of my childhood heroes when we picked them up at his wrestling camp. And I made him a haiku spike which he put on the wall there in the camp’s main building. The whole place is like an outsider art environment, with every available surface covered with pictures and art, and a little line of old prized vehicles out front too. In terms of rural arts compounds, it’s definitely a 5 out of 5 stars. Even had a nice little fountain, without water (probably still too close to winter).