MX-du Renga #2

funky stinkin' goat
makes the break for the pokeberry
purple mouth and fur

some folks cook pokeweed in pots
vinegar calming the taste

where the kitchen soothes
to understand its meaning
an apron's worn space

curving the waist of love dirt
filling emptying the sink

dishes stack three high
sunday morning quick clean-up
for scrambled egg pan

bloody mary celery
eases sunday to monday

greeting the morning
seven directions calling
days fill in my void

monday means work time mindframe
friday kicks in recklessness

waking and living
picking the food from chaos
can't cut what we use

the wholeness is the whole thing
and orbits are a constant

shot pool at orbitz
kids who were high school stars felt
uncomfortable

with the eight ball that gleaned
the felted path to pocket

snortin' rails and lines
my pockets turn inside out
sharing and it's gone

selfish minds sharing lines last
as long as money's easy

giving way to stars
what you are seeing right now
passed to past long gone

lightning zip zap flash anse
stand right now scream like lupo

superheroes dance
bright colors flash like spent bulbs
old worn underoos

pictures steal souls say old drunks
whose heritage is diseased

[Suzy, Paola, Dave, Raven... in no particular order of participation...poetry is stupid]

LOUNGE PLAYER: Tejas

ZZ Top is most widely known for their MTV-era synthesized mega-hit shit like "Legs" and "Sharp Dressed Man", but that shit got played out unless you wanna strut around like Jimmy Garvin in some sequined pants on a Saturday night. But that was my first exposure to ZZ Top, being I was a young buck back then. Holy fuck is the older shit better. Even their newer shit, like the last few years, is better than you'd expect from some old dudes. I guess Billy Gibbons does drugs again, and not hyper goofy dance drugs but introspective heady drugs, which is the basis of all great rock-n-roll.
Tejas is their classic for me tonight, good simple wine-drinking (screwtop wine, not corked bottles) music for a drizzly night, hating on bills and hating on bossmen and hating on it being Monday when finances and obligations force you to at least pretend to be nothing more than a weekend warrior, but you know come tomorrow, you'll blow off work early and go sit by the river, going elbow-deep into a 12-pack, hoping to not get arrested for driving while blind because of stupid mothers against drunk drivers lobbying power.

MX-du Renga #1

cool october sky
cut by a comet slicing
across the treetops

handed down by starlight streek
the wiz dreamed music beats

beer circles clover
jukebox awaits its moment
likewise rocking horse

kids grow faster than wild hops
hipness waits for teen ego

hoops spread from vintage
skirts the past in circular
rim shots reel the edge

slam-dunk love affairs began
in courting parlors - old school

chain link hoops chink loops
lyrical asphalt clatter
basketball matters

lone kid lacking athletic
prowess sits still silently

praying mantis casing
resting in your palm open-handed
stillness that centered

god and experience make
conflict in non-animals

resolve to listen
steady breathing with your mind
taking thoughts and time

truthful worry and a grin
a watchword in the darkness

dwelling in shadows
are parts of yourself you don't
always recognize

smearing paint pressed in your hands
streaking down your arms tired

rest comes with old age
at least that's what's promised by
people who hold reins

old in the way of greying
assisted living buildings

[suzy, paola, dave, raven... in no particular order of participation...poetry is stupid]

Wrestling Tanka - Set Two

[Bump on Rhodes]
If Dusty's red splotch
could talk, it might say: I have
dreams too, Amer'ca.

He conceals them behind a
crimson babyface - focused.
~~~~~~~
[Four Horsemen]
J.J. Dillon lets
his resentment of Ole
into his promos.

Ole lets his hatred of
ev'rything stifle his life.
~~~~~~~
[The Great Kabuki]
Staring at sailboat
paintings, Kabuki waits in
the small hotel room.

Gary Hart will return with beer -
probably Lone Star bottles.
~~~~~~~
[The Von Erichs]
Fritz Von Erich drives
around his ranch, always in
the Texas sunset.

Four young gravemarkers needing
not much math - his legacy.
~~~~~~~
[CLAWHOLD!]
The Iron Claw is
a perfect finisher - cruel
submission or pin.

A single fingerless black
glove adds to the move's aura.
~~~~~~~
[Dewey Robertson's Lament]
Missing Link pauses
by the black curtains; should he
carpool with the ref?

It would be fast, but Race and
Murdoch will have beer to share.
~~~~~~~
[Classy Freddie Blassie]
Freddie Blassie looks
down at us mortals and laughs;
we ARE pencilnecks.

Cigar ash burns in night skies
while geeks seek internet shoots.

MX-du Renga - Explanation

Haiku, which is what I mostly throw up on this blog-foolishness, is actually a derivative of a the beginning of a longer form of Japanese poetry - renga. There all sorts of things you can google up to get a better peabody poindexter understanding of it, but basically, the concept behind renga is a three-line verse of 5-7-5 syllable structure (haiku), followed by a two-line verse of 7-7 syllable structure (tanka), back to the three-line 5-7-5, back to two-line 7-7, and so on. Folks would get together in groups and write these things, with each person only seeing the previous verse to base their verse off of, eventually creating an overall piece of structured chaos. Renga can be considered by some to only be true with 100 verses, but I've read of 40, 54, anything really being renga.
What we started doing was getting together the weekend before a new moon to get drunk and sit around and bullshit, listening to music, and writing this shit, passing around notebooks. There are those who were very serious about this in history, bringing large notebooks of haiku and tanka verses to put in the best positions during renga parties. We are of the looser crowd, freestyling it, and not being all rigid. Thus, our renga's only requirement is that we do it around the kitchen table, and it end with a 7-7 verse. I'll be putting these up along the way as we do them. I won't even be trying to have any sensible punctuation though, as not everyone thinks about that when passing a little shitty notebook around the kitchen table while getting drunk. Like you even care.

Wrestling Tanka - Set One

[Chain in trunks gimmick]
Old ladies fretting
at the blood of their hero
while the slick heel smirks.

Crowd, face, villain, ref - all locked
in the square dance of kayfabe.
~~~~~~~
[Ox Baker]
Stop men's hearts twice in
life, and sport wild bush brows to
be Big Ox Baker.

At night, the Spirit of The
Bus'ness fights two ghosts; he snores.
~~~~~~~
[Tully & Gino]
Gold-trimmed sunglasses,
some technical prowess, and
a cokehead's swagger.

In the blink of His eye, their
God would claim them as His own.
~~~~~~~
[Jimmy Snuka]
Flashes devil horns,
soaks in crowd's awe, and transforms
into Superfly.

"I love you," in Hawaiian;
aerial splash onto flesh.
~~~~~~~
[Macho Man]
Gone insane with style,
launching longhaired elbowdrops
in Louisville's lore.

Flying, lethal axehandle
making Southern tempers flare.
~~~~~~~
[Harley Race's kneedrop]
Perpendicular
angling of the legend's leg
added leverage.

Aerodynamic afro
and sideburns made more hurting.
~~~~~~~
[Ernie Ladd]
Well-spoken black man
bending The Man's rules for his
gain threatens the marks.

H. Rapp Brown's favorite pro
wrestler wears the crown with sass.

Death Valley Driver Video Review #151 Hype!

DVDVR #151
I've been slacking on keeping track of this thing, mostly because blogs are evil traps to ensnare me into the mind-weakening folds of the internet, but I figured I'd mention to the three of you who look at this about the DVDVR from a week or two back. I did a couple of long-winded funny reviews about IWA East Coast wrestling and Chikara wrestling, plus some other shit too.

IMMORTAL: Curtis Turner

I listened to the entire Nascar race today on the radio, working in the backyard on your average weekend family handyman projects. But the more I follow today's Nascar, the more I hate it - a bunch of whiny-voiced pussies racing cars that they can't even ding up for fear of sponsorship complaints. They have to drink whatever crappy drink is laid out for them in victory circle. Today, they were complaining because of trash getting on the grills, as if the point was to take this million-dollar machines and have them in a vaccuum to make the racing sport pure. Fuck that. They should race on dirt with Wal-Mart bags blowing in tornado circles in the turns and then we'll see who can drive and who can't. It sucks. When a little faggot like Tony Stewart is the resident tough guy (don't get me wrong, I like Tony Stewart), then you've got a bunch of punk asses driving cars.
So I figured I hadn't done an IMMORTAL in some time, and Curtis Turner fits the bill more than anybody. He was from Nascar's early days when they still raced on the beach at Daytona, and he would get drunk most of the night before, sleep a few hours on the hood of his car, and then go win races. He got blacklisted late in his career for trying to unionize the drivers, but he also was a legend. Most notably was his weird penchant for flying his private plane while drunk. One Sunday morning, he landed it in a church parking lot because they had run out of drink onboard. And supposedly, when he finally died in a plane crash, everybody figured he did his famous trick, where he told his guests to fly the plane while he took a nap, regardless of the guests' ability to fly an airplane.
Thinking back on looney-tunes like Curtis Turner, as well as Junior Johnson and the other oddballs from back then (CooCoo Marlin as well, who just recently died), Nascar needs some retuning. I know it's on an upswing for the middle class Dodge with Hemi dads to act like they're suburban rednecks while pumping the latest sterile Brad Paisley or Toby Keith offerings while refilling at the convenience store on their way to go pick up the new Larry the Cable Guy DVD at the Wal-Mart Supercenter. But that'll fall off, and Nascar better remember its roots - all those dirtbags filling up the dirt tracks and half-mile asphalts every Friday and Saturday night. Those guys are all still wearing #3 t-shirts, and #8 by association, but there's no real superstars they believe in to carry the torch anymore. It used to be a family-business and you'd stick with driving families. Who the fuck was Jeff Gordon, or Jimmie Johnson's dad? Probably insurance salesmen. Fuckin' Nascar.

Wrestling Tanka - Explanation

The Japanese poetry style of haiku is really only the first 5-7-5 syllable set of a larger group-composed poem. Traditionally, one person would write that stanza, then a second person would write a two-line 7-7 syllable stanze behind it. This two-part poem is called tanka, whereas the first part is haiku. Ideally, you'd continue this by sending the second part to a third person, who would write a 5-7-5 third-part, without seeing the first one, and then that third piece would get sent to a fourth person who would write a 7-7 piece to attach to that, and eventually you'd have 100 people taking part and the entire collection would be something or another, for better or worse.
Being me and Rev. Axl Future have written wrestling haiku back and forth to each other over the years, we decided to give it a shot at doing some tankas, where one of us writes the first 5-7-5 piece, and the other follows up with the 7-7 part. They'll be posted here, as we get them done, through regular people's mail, on postcards, because regular mail and postcards are wonderful blessings on shitty rainy days. There's nothing special about electronic mails. It may take us a while between putting sets up, but we are out there, doing this, somewhere or another.

Death Valley Driver Video Review #149 Hype

DVDVR #149
Dean always makes the cover images too goddamned big for my ancient computer with the hamsters on wheels chip inside, so no cover. A week late on the hype, but ain't nobody here anyways. I watched a great wrasslin' tape out of Kansas, featuring a bunch of guys I'd not only never seen before, but actually hadn't even heard of at all. And there's the culmination of the IWA King of the Death Match 2000 comic book.

Last 5 Vinyls On My Turntable

(most recent first, meaning now; all 7-inch delights tonight)
Pink Floyd - Money/Any Colour You Like
The M-80s - Seeing Things/Split/Bad Women
Waylon & Willie - Mammas Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Cowboys/I Can Get Off On You
Al Green - Her I Am (Come And Take Me)/I'm Glad You're Mine
Fats Domino - Whiskey Heaven/The Texas Opera Company - Beers To You
I heard Pink Floyd did a one-time reunion show for poor African kids. I wonder if they tried to find Syd Barrett? I wonder if Syd still thinks he's a glass of tomato juice and only his mom cares enough to not spill him?
I wonder if Eddie Pearce is dead yet?
Man, that "I Can Get Off On You" song is fuckin' awesome. Makes the other more popular side look like a Keith Urban/Garth Brooks duet. Which it probably will be soon enough.
Al Green allowing himself (especially his loins) be controlled by the Fallen Angel equals good shit. Fats Domino being influenced by hillbilly music equals good shit. Snuff Garrett thinking he could do country opera equals some of the worst shit ever.
The one I'm most likely to listen to again fastest would be the Waylon & Willie single, B-side. Easily. If my wife wasn't on her moon cycle, maybe the Al Green. I don't know if I've ever actually had sex while Al Green played. I remember one time I slept at this girl's house and we didn't do anything more than hug and kiss and she showed me the shotgun she kept under her bed, and I woke up on a Sunday morning and she was downstairs playing Al Green and cooking potatoes and eggs with her hot-ass crewcut grown punk intellectual self. I loved her as much as a man could love a woman, for a couple of days at least.

Death Valley Driver Video Review #148 Hype

DVDVR #148
Hey, we actually kept it going bi-weekly so far. There's some shit about Shinya Hashimoto, and some shit about Ox Baker - perhaps the biggest cuddliest bear you'll ever see. Plus a bunch of other wrestling nerd stuff.

Last 5 Vinyls On My Turntable

(most recent first, meaning now)
Zodiac Mindwarp & The Love Reaction - Tattooed Beat Messiah
Iron Maiden - The Number of the Beast
S.O.D.: Stormtroopers of Death - Speak English or Die
Kreator - Extreme Aggression
W.A.S.P. - W.A.S.P.
Obviously, I'm in a semi-metal mood. I had a "more things change..." moment with the Maiden, as "Children of the Damned" came on and I cut the volume up a touch, because I figured I wouldn't wake my two kids upstairs with a little more loudness. It gave me deja vu of being 13, doing the same exact thing with a shitty boombox and cassette copy, at 1 in the morning, thinking I wouldn't wake up my folks across the hallway. The one I'm most likely to listen to again the fastest would probably be W.A.S.P.

LOUNGE PLAYER: If An Angel Came To See You, Would You Make Her Feel At Home?

This is easily, without a doubt, my most played LP of the last couple years. It has all the pure southern longhaired country boy rock-n-roll of Lynyrd Skynyrd, but with a slight toss-in of weird redneck hippie nonsense, plus Jim Dandy is about the most rock star motherfucker to ever have lived that most people don't even remember. He was David Lee Roth before David Lee Roth was. "Gravel Roads" would be my theme song were I a wrestler, and "Fertile Woman" may be just about the greatest weirdo dirtbag jobless rural stoner ode to having sex with a woman that ever existed. "Water is the blood of God, fire is his brain," so sayeth Jim Dandy in "Our Mind's Eye". Motherfuck yeah. I wish Dandy took over the Manson Family cult when Charlie got put in jail, then Ouish would be drawing album covers to this day, and maybe we'd have more of Bobby Beausoleil's jailhouse music for public consumption.

Carbon 14 #26 Hype

Carbon 14 website
I just got the newest issue of Carbon 14 in the PO Box today, and it's probably my favorite issue I've seen since I've been a contributor. There's a little bit less of the creepy "I like to masturbate to old crime fiction magazines" type art, and more good goofy shit that doesn't freak me out. There's interviews with both Blowfly and Terry Funk, as well as Sky Saxon (quite a trio there), plus I read more columns in this issue that I've enjoyed than in most. Rev. Axl Future's got a nice thing on the overall experience of a wrestling card, which is nice to read as I've been missing getting his Wrestling Eats Its Young mailings in my PO Box (Rev. - if you're out here somewhere in the evil, get back to me on that thing I sent you, one way or the other), and it's always nice to see someone think the same perfect thoughts I do, but say it with a far more expanded vocabulary and sense of magical scientifics. And actually, I don't mind the column I contributed to this issue either, even though I slapped together after going to a funeral back home.
Apparently, Carbon 14 has some new distributors, so you might even be able to find this shit in fancy bookstores with coffee baristas and escalators and crap like that. I think, given the choice of this issue of Carbon 14, and a soy milk cafe latte mocha with a blueberry muffin, your six dollars would be better spent on Carbon 14. Hopefully the CD won't be stolen out the middle.

Death Valley Driver Video Review #147 Hype

DVDVR #147
It has been promised that we will start doing DVDVR online thingies every other week from now until we don't deliver every other week. Right now it has motivated me to start digging back into the wrestling. It's a decent enough issue, with my man Ryan Muldoon joining the crew, which makes me not the newest guy anymore. All I contributed was some wack-ass haikus about developmental territories in the month of May 2001, and mailed in a piece late night one evening about some SMW I found behind a stack of records. It's sort of full circle with Ryan, because he used to be a contributing writer for Punchline weekly magazine in Richmond when they were my arch-nemesis in the middle issues of The Confederate Mack. Now, he's my partner in being a fuckin' nerd watching wrestling and acting like somebody gives a shit what we think.

Confederate Mack Issue 48 Hype

This is my stupid zine, which is better, by far, than my stupid haikus. It's available for $3.50 per copy thru paypal (raven mack @ earth link . net sans the spaces) or $3 in cleverly concealed cash per copy thru my mailbox (PO Box 569, Scottsville, VA 24590) or if you have to, I'll take a money order made out to S. Stone. Here's the content listings for this issue...

Mindstate Nitty Gritty - an introduction to this issue of sorts, where I explain why I hate you most likely.
Building The Perfect Jukebox: Part A - Highly tangentized accounts of how I'm filling my jukebox up, slowly but surely, with seven inches.
Stolen Zine Content (New Footnoted Style) - a long-ass article on DJ Screw I got off the evil internet, that I added footnotes which end up being slightly longer than the original piece, thus making it a completely new piece of sorts, that's highly difficult to sort through being I don't use page numbers, because page numbers are Yacub's way of limiting your reading insight.
Building The Perfect Jukebox: Part B - same as the above, with Dukes of Hazzard related tangents.
Building The Perfect Jukebox: Part C - continuing with the theme.
Exit Ramp #48 - an outro, only a paragraph, but contains my favorite line of maybe the last five issues.

IMMORTAL: Han Shan

So this "blog" is basically full of all these haiku I've written, and that project is a much larger and bizarre project than just writing haiku, which was completely inspired by Han Shan.
First off, Han Shan aka Cold Mountain, was this Chinese hermit in the Tang Dynasty who only came down to beg food and get drunk. He carved his "poems" on cliffs and rocks and trees, and it wasn't until his legend spread and some prefecture or something tried to find him, only to see Han Shan and his sidekick Shih Te disappear into a cave, that the prefecture decided to send people out to collect up whatever poems they could find. So what we have is probably nothing.
Anyways, from this I told myself last year I would write a 1000 haiku. Somewhere along the way, I started saving old 12-pack boxes from beer I bought and drank as well. I have also for years cut pictures from magazines that were the perfect size for this little sketchbook I had, just to fill with random blasts of image which I was originally gonna then have one rap lyric per page typed into it from famous songs (or at least ones I knew of), then leave the book somewhere. Of course, I never finished that, but it left me with hundreds of these same size pictures cut out from magazines. Well what I did was pick four haiku per 12-pack box, and five magazine pictures, I arrange the bullshit, lay it out glue it and then polyurethane that shit. I just started accumulating them (I'm actually up to like fifty-some), then came across a big stack of hearty plank scraps at a couple of jobsites, which is perfect for cutting to a certain length to give the boxes a spine, which I can then put a screw and some scrap speaker wire on and it'll hang - pure bizarre folk art.
Now motherfuckers are telling me I should do an art show with this shit, because they look so fucked up, but I expect art people wouldn't understand, and I wonder if that doesn't compromise my integrity as well. Although I wouldn't mind taking some people's money off their hands.
Han Shan would never do that, but at 32 with two kids and a wife who only works part-time to be home with the kids, I lose more and more moral high ground every week. Stupid world.

LOUNGE PLAYER: Red Headed Stranger

This album is perfect for easy Sunday mornings, getting drunk while the kids dance around the kitchen with you. The door is open and the grass needs cutting, but you can get to that later in the day. "Hands on the Wheel" comes on, and you think to yourself, "I think after this side of the album, I'm gonna set the kids down in the living room with a Care Bears cartoon or something, and me and the ol' lady are gonna go upstairs for a few minutes." The windows upstairs are open and there's a breeze blowing over your naked asses, and the kids don't get upset over anything and come yelling up the stairs about this or that. And then if your wife tries to steal your horse, you can shoot her, because you can't blame a man for shooting a woman who's trying to steal his horse.

IMMORTAL: Clarence 13X

Positive black nationalist hip hop of the early '90s, as well as conspiratorial white horse beholding black nationalist hip hop of the late '90s both are heavily filled with people claiming 5% Nation of Islam. Most people don't know shit about it, and you'll hear people being all like, "How's he a Muslim when he's drinking 40s and shit?" But they don't know. I worked with a dude called Biship the Bigheaded Scientist a few months ago, and he laid a lot of this shit on me, and I think that wack-ass (I'm guessing it is) RZA book for the whiteboy hip hop marks out there has some mathematics stuff in it as well. But the dude who founded the 5% Nation of Gods and Earths, an offshoot of the Nation of Islam, was born in run-down shithole Danville, Virginia, long before it was just a drug-filled town and back when black people were lesser humans. Clarence wandered into NYC, got hooked up with the Nation of Islam, but found their bullshit rules to pretentious, and came correct with the knowledge that every man is God. We are. I'm currently working on some texts for Quarter Percent Nation, which is 5% of 5% - those who are pre-ordained righteous but stuck in this unrighteous world where false gods call each other god and dunn. You don't need dark skin to be True God, you need dirty-faced dark soul, yet one that's unstained by the sterility of our modern manly bullshit. Clarence 13X, when he founded 5%, changed his name to Allah, and his mathematics (which is about analyzing words, not actual numerical bullshit) reasoning for all men being God is that A was for arm, L for leg, and H for head, so God, or Allah, was arm, leg, leg, arm, head - in other words man. It's logic like that that makes so much sense to a guy like me it's ridiculous.

IMMORTAL: Jimmy Valiant

Wrestling has always been in my life, for better or worse, but no one has ever spoke to me within its bizarre confines more than Jimmy Valiant. He was the most like people I grew up around looking up to. The whole point of the stupid wrestling is to trick you into thinking it's real, even if for a quick second of suspended logic. Valiant's promos and behavior and even the clothes he wore and the way he shucked his legs made me think he was more real than anything else I've ever seen in wrestling. He lived just like the crazies sitting around the kitchen playing Spades on a Friday night with my folks lived.
And the cycle perpetuates itself. Partly from the way I was raised, and I'm sure partly from the influence of things like Jimmy Valiant, now I'm a 32-year-old freak with long beard and dreadlocks who regularly goes around wearing t-shirts with iron-on letters. I try not to put stupid shit that's too hipster or ironic or anything, and instead vague nonsense like "BIRD DOG". Too much more and it becomes a message, and messages require reading, and reading makes you self-pretentious.
Jimmy Valiant is retired from wrestling mostly and has a goat farm outside of Christiansburg, plus a wrestling school. People who have goats tend to be professional loungers, mostly because you've made the decision to have animals but you're too broke to have anything expensive. And you probably can't have chickens because you're dog would kill them. So you get goats. If you ever can find The Best of Handsome Jimmy Valiant Volume 1 or 2, you should check it out. Don't buy bootlegs, because if you order it from Boogie himself, you're putting food right inside his belly, direct. And it'll be worth it. Or he might rip you off, because he's a wrestler and they tend to do that. Either way, he's still the human embodiment of Boogie Woogie.

LOUNGE PLAYER: Fire on the Mountain

You can't really find LPs as much anymore for cheap because of stupid ebay. If ever there was an argument I could wrap my head around against globalization, it would be buying used records and ebay. It used to be shitty college towns had shitty record stores that were independent and you could find your crappy Pavement and Moby CDs there, plus they would have all these great records for sale that heroin junkies would sell for cheap, and you could accumulate entire genres of great music for relatively cheap. But now with ebay, these motherfuckers go online and see what the actual going rate for something is, and they try to charge astronomical prices for a goddamned record. Fuck those people. And then you look for it on ebay, find it for $7, which is too high as it is, then it's like another $15 to ship and handle it. Fuck those people too.
There are still loungers out there, the straggler stores that no one remembers where it only stays open because the guy teaches guitar lessons to high school kids in the back room, and when you go in, there's a wall of vinyl and some 16-year-olds jamming out a rough version of "Sweet Home Alabama" in the back room. In was in a place just like that I found my latest copy of Fire on the Mountain.
I grew up with this record, in an area where rednecks and hippies sort of morphed into this super-sub-species of dirtbag white people who were working class and all got high all the time. "Longhaired Country Boy" off this record is the anthem for these people, far more so than "Freebird". But it's also got "Trudy" which is a great love song about being in jail and knowing your goddamned girlfriend is gonna run around on you. And "Feelin' Free" is a better Allman Brothers song than anything Greg and Duane could come up with - pure biker rock sunshine head full of things that alter it happiness.
Ol' Charlie Daniels is most known for "The Devil Went Down to Georgia", but saying that's his best song is like saying Metallica's greatest jam is "Enter Sandman". I'm sure if I do more than one of these Lounge Player listings, a few more CDB records will get in the mix as well, but this is the one I've been playing the most today. I have no beer and no money and haven't paid mortgage, so I found a bottle of wine somebody gave us a few months ago, and put it in the fridge to cool down. In the gatefolds of CDB records, ol' Charlie would write little things on each record - redneck poetry of sorts, and the one in Fire on the Mountain says, "Hungover, Red Eyed, Dog Tired, Satisfied - It's a long road and a little wheel and it takes a lot of turns to get there. Thank You, Damn It." [Note the bizarre applications of capital letters.]
No, thank you Charlie Daniels, because I too like to get stoned in the morning and drunk in the afternoon. And in about twenty minutes, when I'm sucking on a free bottle of chardonnay or cabernet sauvignon or whatever the fuck it was I put in the refrigerator and pumping Fire on the Mountain, you will help enable me to not hate everything so much. I will wake up tomorrow, hungover, and happily go scrape at lead paint on some rich dude's porch, with lounge in my heart.
If you do not have this record, and don't have a record player even, don't get it on CD. You can't digitize lounge; it's just not possible. It won't be the same. So save your money and buy a turntable.

IMMORTAL: Oscar Zeta Acosta

Happened to be at the farmer's market in town when there was a protest about some stupid pipeline for water bullshit, which was a great thing to protest, but the protest itself seemed so sterile to me. A bunch of white people standing around blah-blah-blah-ing, wearing cheap t-shirts, and feeling all good about themselves for standing up against something, then jumping into their Audis and Volvo and Benz stationwagons or Jeep Grand Cherokees, and rushing home to their comfortable world. Very masturbatory, which is what most protest seems to be, whether it be against local water pipelines or international corporate globalization.
Dr. Raoul Duke HST was suicided recently, and everybody ooh and ahhed about his style of writing, which was more extension of his living than a separate entity, which was stupid because people love to gush about the dead when they don't give half a shit about them when alive. All this'll mean is a second crappy movie starring Johnny Depp. But a co-conspirator in that whole Gonzo journalism was Oscar Zeta Acosta, or the attorney in Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas (or Benecio del Toro if you're a young buck and that's your only reference). Acosta's The Revolt of the Cockroach People is one of my few Bibles, and I've given away probably ten copies of it in my lifetime already. I find it a much more proper primer on protest. One of my favorite images, which may actually be an HST memory rather than in the book, is Acosta standing in front of some judge's house after having set the guy's yard on fire, laughing maniacally while holding a jug of wine as the judge opens the door to see his well-manicured yard burning. Motherfuckin' awesome. Now that's a protest.

The Confederate Mack - Issue 47 Hype

The Confederate Mack is a zine I've done for longer than I've been a responsible adult. Content listings for this issue are below. Available for $3.50 thru per copy thru paypal (raven mack @ earth link . net, minus the spaces) or $3.00 thru mail (PO Box 569 Scottsville, VA 24590, preferably cleverly concealed cash, but money orders are cool, made to S. Stone).

Dear Friend - a letter to you, my friend, about me and talking with this dude called Wirehead while walking the railroad tracks.
Cookin' At The Compound - an updated pickled beet egg recipe for you to throw in a big pickle jar in the back of your refrigerator.
Redneck Ninja: Sicodelico Mask Lesson - Redneck ninjas are the kids I train in the art of eluding whatever we need to elude to keep our freedom. This particular lesson involves acid and a broken mirror.
Working Man 12/Yankeefied Bossman 13 List - an tangently-explained list of things I find good and bad in my current life, whether pop culture or tangibly in my face.
El Seis-Pack Del Primero Diezes - top ten lists about: longest ruling heads of state still living, things I wish I could say I wrote, albums that were #1 earliest in my life that I own manufactured copies of, albums that were #1 most recently that I own manufactured copies of, ways to make country music better, and ways to make my compound better.
Lounge Fatwa #44 (the first) - further explanations on the philosophy of lounge.
Preacherman Talkin' On The TV - going to a dude named Pug's funeral, and the thoughts on how full of shit we are about death when we get our version of "god" too much in our head.
Domestic Bonus Leftover Top Tens - top ten lists about: musically-inclined people I'd throw in a dungeon, customized NFL jerseys I'd get based on playing Madden football, and conspiratorial storylines bugging my paranoid mind.

Each issue is 40 pages, has more word content than any magazine you waste your time with, and will probably make you laugh, but may just make you angry, potentially with me.