SONG OF THE DAY: Phukeng Special

My stomach was fucked up all night last night, I think from too much old ass turmeric in the peanut noodles I made, so I called in sick to work this morning, and went back to sleep. Woke up at like 9:30, and thought, "The heater sounds funny." It wasn't the heater, it was the toilet, which didn't latch shut after an overnight flush. This happened to time perfectly with a slow drain for the whole house due to likely root in the sewer line out in the yard. Anyways, the whole downstairs bathroom and hallway was flooded, and water was dripping into the basement. Luckily this is an old house, so the basement has a dirt/gravel floor and everything is off the ground down there, and none of it was directly beneath the drips through the floorboard. I mopped up the hallway, first time in a while, so it was a reverse blessing I guess, and will figure out the rest of it outside the house. Anyways, that's how my Monday started this week, which would seemingly be a bad sign. But what can you do? A lot of things are breaking right now culturally, some by design, others from neglect. Those who can afford to fix everything want to hoard those resources only for themselves, and are getting stingier and stingier with that wealth, whether conservative or progressive. Nobody at the top of the pyramid scam, no matter how rainbow flaggy their front yard is, wants to give up their spot up high. That ain't on the ballot this year (or any year). It never will be. So the rest of us are left to fend for ourselves, more and more. It is what it is. Life is still a blessing, even if the manmade systems we have to navigate are devilish as fuck.

Haiku Spike Sale

It has come to the point that I either need to sell more art or get a second W2 job. So I've cut the price of haiku spikes (for now) to $50 each, including for custom ones. How a custom one works is generally you tell me what you're looking for, and often times I carve more than one and let you pick. Sometimes I carve more than one but one in particular feels most like it needs to go to you.

I'm offering the same sale price of $50 apiece, or 3 for $125, on all the ones I currently have as well. At one point, I was getting $125 apiece of these, but they are a hard to explain piece of three-dimensional art, and the market for weird art shit seems to have shrunk pretty badly. I don't doubt the value of these magical art objects, and know they have great metaphysical value, and will likely have a much higher material value one day, likely after I'm dead. But I'm trying to survive capitalism while I'm still alive, unfortunately. Here is the dedicated Instagram page, as well as my website page for them.

I've been making these things for many years, having written thousands and thousands of haiku as a regular meditative practice to unwind the tangles in my life. I started carving them on found railroad spikes over a decade ago, and have improved on the process over the years. Some of them are painted, some are left natural railroad spike color, all our clear coated to help preserve the finish. But they are industrial detritus, so rust and decomposition happens. Nothing is eternal.

Railroad spikes have been used in Southern magic practices for a long time, usually as a protective device for the home. I have made a number of these with intentional messages that I've driven into the ground in various places where those haiku messages are important, with the point of the railroad spike pointing in the direction I'd hope the energy of the words would flow.

Thus, you can make a request for a custom spike with this in mind. My father used to talk about "The Power" that ran through our family, which I've come to know better and better the older I get. My art has always unconsciously accessed this realm, but as I've gotten older, I've practiced consciously doing this work when necessary. So this haiku spike could be far more than a piece of art, depending on what you're requesting.

I honestly have no idea how many haiku spikes I've made. I know it's well over a couple hundred, and probably nowhere near a thousand. But I don't know for certain. I don't believe in archiving the art that comes from me. Dandelions don't count their blossoms; they just keep blossoming for as long as possible.

It's also hard to explain the haiku spikes, because they're three-dimensional art meant to be held and read all the way around, and we've mostly been trained to look for flat art to hang on walls, because we've boxed ourselves in with how we live, so that seems most obvious. These aren't flat, but brings energetic life to your space in a far different way than flat art would.

You can go to my website's haiku spike page, and most of those should be available. You can message me (ravenmack at gmail dotcom) if you are interested in one, or more.

SONG OF THE DAY: Ozali

Space synthwaves are a good example of how you can’t always be entirely grounded. I mean, you need some grounding so you don’t float away completely (although, who’s to say that’s bad?), but many of the ties we apply to our lives are tethers more than grounding ourselves. My freestyle mind hasn’t been as strong in recent years, repetitive vocabulary, redundant experiences. Saw a dude freestyling in New Orleans who blew my mind on his immediate recall factor, so I’ve been trying to freestyle a little more each day. Almost made this a “space synthwaves” sonnet off the head, but didn’t because I’m waiting on a ride and was afraid I wouldn’t finish it before they got here. Since I didn’t do it, of course I would’ve had enough time. The Universe is a trickster, always and forever, which is why you gotta balance the grounding yourself in Earth thiccness to letting yourself float off into space, chasing the stars that humans could never be, though we are their children.

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.