RAVEN MACK is a mystic poet-philosopher-artist of the Greater Appalachian unorthodox tradition. He does have an amazing PATREON, but also *normal* ARTIST WEBSITE too.
It's Friday but not payday which sometimes I think
is even better than payday because when it all dissipates away so quickly as
you pay your damn bills that you can, and put off the ones you can’t, it’s depressing.
But the days that aren’t Fridays, when you know you’re already broke, but no
broker than before, and there’s nothing you can do about it, at least not for
the next couple days, so you just dig into a deep and cathartic “fuck it”
philosophy, and make the most of what you got. What’s for supper? Stone soup.
What are we gonna do? Sit right here and watch the sun go to sleep then see how
the stars decide to dance tonight. Isn’t it cold? Yeah, it is. Let’s burn some
shit. We can use my dried up dreams for kindling.
I don’t use streaming services like Spotify so I
have no Spotify wrap-up for you. I’m not acting like I’m better than you, or
worse; I just don’t stream shit. I have an innate distrust of algorithms
because their artificial intelligence is most likely programmed by the same
people who have always suggested to me how much I would love the Drive-by
Truckers, whom I hate, even though I’ve tried multiple times because even
people I respect tell me how much I’d love them. Same thing with The Mountain
Goats. Also, which should be obvious, streaming rips the fuck off artists, so
if you’re going to stream, I’d suggest Bandcamp. I’ve been making an effort
this past year to support more and more Bandcamp artists, because I know from
experience they actually get that money. One Bandcamp purchase goes a lot
further than streaming your favorite artist’s album on Spotify. If I bought an
album on Bandcamp that the artist got an $8 cut from, I’d have to stream songs
from that album over two thousand times to equal that payout for them. I know
even y’all’s number one artist on your social media-friendly image post about
Spotify wrap-up probably ain’t got two thousand streams. Even if it does, think
how much work it takes in terms of time to stream that shit two thousand times
as opposed to buying it once on Bandcamp? Nonetheless, so that I don’t sound
like an old man yelling get off my lawn full of external hard drives containing
mp3s gotten from Mega links in old blogs, I figured I’d share my song of the
year for 2020. It’s “Where'd You Come From” by Psalm One, from
2004. I love this fucking song. Simple tales of writing on trains, riding on
trains, getting high in the yard, and freestyling. It’s a dirtgod heaven
anthem, and it’s my song of 2020. I’ve played it at least three dozen times.
The best was when I bumped it right after wandering for a couple of hours in a
CSX yard on the Potomac River on the West Virginia side, with the tiniest
sliver of Maryland across the way so that if you rode the bridge across, then
through the tiny town there, you were in Pennsylvania before you ran out of
town completely. This shit sounded extra good that day, seeing all the Trump
signs and a slow death small town called Hancock after having just baptized
myself for a while in giant idling freight cars covered in the homemade tattoos
of a buffet of vagrants and vandals.
Scope the link to the right or click this, but I've been running a Patreon for a few years now, which is somehow full of just as much content as this constant ass blog has. I assume folks know, but I'm not sure they do, and I don't know that folks that support my Patreon even know this blog exists. Who knows? The daily photograph/gambleraku I post here actually compose sets of thirty that I post all together on my Patreon. Other things that go on there:
shard tanka with tanka poems written with google street view screenshots
fairly regular haiku batches
a Dollarstore Tournament Fighting tournament set in an unreal town called Dirtrock (where I actually live)
random sonnets or commentary
just started a thing called The Maradona which is a soccer-related list thing in memory of Diego Maradona
Anyways, just throwing this in here in case anybody sees this that didn't know about that, and vice versa. I create a myriad of shit all across multiple media, both digital and physical, all of it accessible in different ways but none of it entirely connected. It's more like tendrils wandering wherever rather than a well-organized English garden. It's a beautiful mess, just like me, which makes sense.
Brother Theotis Taylor is a nonagenarian (dude in
his 90s) down in south Georgia, who apparently for decades has had a piano and
an old reel-to-reel tape recorder set up, so that when the mood struck him, he’d
record some sounds. He toured as a gospel singers, even played the Apollo, and
with Sam Cooke for a while. But mostly he’s just been living his life down in
Georgia, feeling the creative spirit as it hit him, and making his art as a
conduit from wherever it comes from for whoever might hear it. Even if they don’t
hear it, it’s more about a relationship with creation than an end result of
consumption. People lose sight of that too often. I lose sight of that too
often. (My kids are always like, “why are you saying ‘people’ when you mean us?”)
Creation existed long before consumption did, and will continue to exist long
after this system of mass consumption – which has poisoned every possible
creative outlet you could think of – is dead and gone. Anyways, this song is
pretty fuckin’ great.
I wanted to look fresh when I’m walking around
through the yard and river and great American industrial wasteland barefoot, so
I got Adidas stripes tattooed on the outside of both my feet, except I couldn’t
afford an actual tattoo artist because the gentrification of tattooing the past
couple decades means those fuckers charge exorbitant Mercedes Benz prices when
I’m very much a Ford Taurus at heart (and wallet, but even when not at wallet,
still at heart, which means I ignore my wallet because I know the wallet is
generally lying anyways). So I did it myself, which is fine, but much like most
DIY projects, it’s kinda raggedy, because we’re all pretty shitty at doing
things ourselves that we’ve never done before but watched a couple youtubes so
figured, “fuck it, I can rebuild the transmission on my daughter’s car”. Plus
doing my right foot was harder than my left foot, because I’m right-handed, and
I kept switching between using my left and right hand for my right foot, with
it bent behind me sideways, which brings up a second issue in that I did the shit
with my foot at a weird angle, so it looks halfway normal Adidas striping to my
eyeballs’ vantage point, but my girlfriend looked at them and said, “What the
fuck did you do?” Nonetheless, I remain undeterred, and am working on Adidas
stripes down my left leg – got three to about my mid-thigh, and the center
stripe all the way down to beside my knee so far. It takes a lot of time
because I’m using sewing machine needles, manually, old school stick and poke
style, which I never called “stick and poke” in my life until the internet made
that the way you say it; it was always “homemade” or “jailhouse” tattoos. But
just like what I used to call a “short and long” got homogenized by popular
culture into a “mullet” haircut, “stick and poke” has become the phrase you use
for doing fucked up homemade tattoos now, even though I literally never heard
it called that the first largest chunk of my life, as I acquired a plethora of
horrible stick and pokes. Sometimes people ask me if I’d ever get any of them
covered up, but first off like I already told you, legitimate tattoo artists
are expensive as fuck; but also, no need to cover up what I had before, I mean
I might put a line through it like graffiti on a wall suggesting somebody
should die, but I don’t have any of my horrible tattoos that are that horribly
offensive to who I am now that I’d want to do that. To be honest, I expect
people to have growth as a human being, but if you had some shit that you find
horribly offensive to who you are now that you thought was good enough to get
tattooed on your body earlier in life, I don’t know if I trust that person,
because they’re likely to rewrite themselves again in the future. You can’t
rewrite yourself, just accumulate more shit that makes the entirety of who you
are now. Nonetheless, I got some fucked up stripes on my feet now and am
working on stripes on my legs. Probably won’t do my arms though, because even
if I’m creating the illusion of my naked body being Adidas brand nudity, I
still wouldn’t be wearing a shirt in the illusion.
