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: Go Steady (kudzu'd)

Futurism always seems to be set in space, and in positions of authority, or at least controlling the destiny. I’ve been thinking about true funk Southern Gothicc Futurism is gonna be right here where I already am, not in space, not escaping the mess already created, but living with what’s left of the messes that got left behind. There’s never any science fiction about the kitchen workers on a spaceship, always the officers. Give me a thousand page novel of the random stormtrooper on the Death Star, fourth generation stormtrooper, don’t even like them fuckers but didn’t have no choices in life so just ended up being a stormtrooper, but before the Death Star got blow up, he could tell the vibes were off, and went awol with a few co-conspirators, and they’re living on one of them junk planets, just vibing, banging on old gas tanks to make a beat, building synthesizers out of spare parts, pitch shifted theremins the size of radio transmission towers with old cranes dangling a wrecking ball to adjust the sounds. That’s what I envision my Southern Gothicc Futurism to be, right here, down in the woods, or over there, too. My mother just passed, so I finally get to go back to the woods I fucked around in as a kid, and the old Chevelle carcass is there that I wrote all these myths about it being a time machine that goes to the Food City in Pikeville, Kentucky, so I can get with that environment again, too. The time machine is broke right now, but I can fix it. It’s gonna take a decade or so though, but I got time, even if I don’t.

TR4D1T10NS W3 SH0VLD R3SP3CT...

traditions we should respect 
covered up by promises 
of endless prosperity 

SONG OF THE DAY: Cheeba Cheeba

 

video 

Randomly decided to look up famous graffiti artist Stay High 149, and turns out he was born in Southside Virginia, down in Emporia, before moving to the New York City at age 6 in the mid-1950s, and ending up in the Bronx around ‘66. Apparently he never knew his dad, but early on in graffiti’s late ‘60s/early ‘70s days, Stay High 149 became well-known, turning a haloed stickman figure from a popular TV show into a smoking character that was thrown up with his every time he did it, stylizing it in a way not everybody did at the time. By the time hip hop and graffiti was blowing up towards the mid-70s, Stay High 149 was a legend. He apparently had a job as a messenger downtown, so rode the train all day long, saw other tags, so started carrying markers with him and tagging all over. He got featured in a New York magazine article in 1973, including a picture, and the cops busted him afterwards once they knew what he looked like. He switched to other tags after that, then he sort of disappeared, still tagging but also battling drug problems, while raising and supporting a family. (He apparently tagged the stairwells of the World Trade Center extensively, because that’s where his job was based, before he lost it due to drug issues.) Around 2000, as internet culture and information sharing was developing, he ran into another graffiti writer, and found out his name still carried legend. He resurfaced, getting mobbed at a couple art shows he showed up to at the time, and got back into graffiti for a while. Norman Mailer’s “Faith of Graffiti” long essay had been released as a book with photographs of prominent graffiti back in ’74, and featured Stay High 149. It got reissued in 2009, and had a picture of a Stay High 149 tag on the cover of it. At the same time, the actual Stay High 149 could be found haggling prices for graffiti canvases on the streets of NYC. Once again, the archivist from within the system of respectability and authority got more wealth out of the deal than the originator and source of the material. Stay High 149 died in 2012, from liver disease, after a life spent battling those addiction demons. He’s got a government name that his obituaries go by, but his real name is Stay High 149, and to think otherwise is fucking stupid and disrespectful to how he lived his life.
Emporia used to have both an east-west and north-south train line, but the east-west has been shut down, like a lot of shit in Southside Virginia. Folks try to gentrify them into rails to trails, but weekend bikers will never bring the economy that actual functioning textile mills and factories gave folks. It’s a dead end town for the most part now if you don’t already have wealth to live off of. The north-south line still runs, operated by CSX, and the Amtrak still comes through, carrying folks up north to better opportunities or family or an escape to this day. There’s no yard there, so probably not any old freights sitting around, but I wanna go down there and tag up some Stay High 149s, as homage to an illegitimate arts legend, and where he was born, because ain’t nobody there gonna bother trying to remember shit like that.

S0W1NG MY S0VTH3RN G0TH1C...

 

sowing my southern gothic 
futurist new moon prayers, 
for simple shit to return 

UPCOMING HAIKU SLAMS

The 411 on upcoming Sovthern Gothic Fvtvrist Haiku Slams.

• SATURDAY NOVEMBER 23 - CHARLOTTESVILLE VA - TWISTED BRANCH TEA BAZAAR

OUR YEAR END EVENT! Featuring a Tournament of Haiku Death Matches, plus two open battle royals between tournament rounds. The 8 competitors for the final tournament championship of 2019 will be announced on social media.

I do also have an official (lol) website now, with a page on haiku slams there as well - check it out - and book me to come do one of these things in your neck of the woods.

SONG OF THE DAY: The Trill is Gone

Mash-ups can be hit or miss, but Amerigo Gazaway has established himself as perhaps the best at this shit, going at it like a music ethnographiti artist, taking not only the original works being mashed up, but archival interview materials, as well as re-interpreting samples used in the hip hop half of his mash-up. Some of his project thump harder than others... the Fela Kuti/De La Soul one stays strong rotation, while I'm not sure I've ever revisited the Common/Stevie Wonder one, but each and every project has at least a couple tracks that slap if you dig the metaphysics behind the combined artist.

The Trill is Gone is exactly that type of song, and this is probably one of my more favorite Gazaway projects, which speaks to how deeply the south has humidified my soul. It's also perfectly sensible that mashing shit up is musical ethnography because because southern hip hop is different in the ways it's different for the same metaphysical reasons that the blues blossomed there. The shit all makes perfect sense if you take specific pinpoint stainless steel sterilized science out of it, and unfocus your eyeballs enough to see the bigger truths.

SONG OF THE DAY: Here Again

Finished the first issue of a new zine the other night, taking it to get printed today (though I can’t pay for that until Friday). Calling it Southern Gothic Futurist, naturally, and I write most of it extremely offline, on a word processor I affectionately call “the clacker”. It’s kinda weird to be writing a zine on the clacker, twenty five years after I used to prominently do zines on an earlier clacker. My first word processor did some problematic zines, mostly because I was figuring out my place in this world, and as a first generation college student, definitely didn’t not feel like some of the people I was around. Haha, some of them still harbor grudges against me to this day, hating with their hater asses. At that time there was no real class acknowledgement, so the feelings of fraud and not being the same were ignored back then. Had roommates once, one of whom became a fairly well-known punk singer briefly, who held that class shit over my head on a couple of occasions. But the differences are obvious to this day, what having access to wealth and not having access to it means.

But also I ain’t complaining. As a young adult male I wrote some really horrible shit at times, things I’d be ashamed for my children to read and think was actually who I am now. And despite shock and awe tactics of artistic output, I’ve always been an authentically honest person at heart, who wants good for as many people as possible. Not sure the digital realm fits with that any more. It feels like a poisoned well that once was full of very sweet water, connecting with like-minded fringe fuckers you couldn’t easily do in real life. That’s likely the source of my regression to zines, because zines were that before there was an internet. I remember going through the old Factsheet Fives, seeking out fucked up people to exchange fucked up mail with. And I can’t really say I miss that, because you can’t go back to what’s already been trampled into dust by time, and zines in 2019 are a completely different beast than zines in 1995, but hey, what can you do? I was actually looking at my first zine’s rough layout (literally cut and pasted, never no pdf) and already thinking how it’s nothing but words for the most part, and how the last time I shared a booth at a zinefest with my daughter, some dude came up and saw how my zines were nothing but words and literally gasped, and not in a good way. So I’m not really saying anything here except I do what I have to do to survive being who I am.

My first word processor was bought by my grandmother from part of the life insurance payout when my uncle Ricky committed suicide. My uncle Ricky was problematic as fuck, in fact my whole family is. But so is everybody else’s. The symbolic realism of typing not only college papers as first generation college student but also fucked up poetry and zines on a word processor bought with life insurance money from my uncle’s suicide was never lost on me. A lot of people die without ever getting their words out, and if they get ‘em out, nobody ever hears them. The spirit of Southern Gothic Futurism is very much the words of the voiceless getting heard, the assorted beautiful marginalized underclasses we find throughout the south, perfectly steeped in the cultural humidity, coming together, and making some goddamned noise. Sometimes I wonder, “what is my work? what is the work of the dirtgod raven mack?” and that’s the best I can come up with. I love to express what I need to express but just as much I love to amplify others who need that space too, and help those who lack the confidence in saying what the fuck needs to be said to untangle their own lives (which often are unnecessarily entangled up in systemic bullshit and other people’s trifles) get more confidence in doing it. To me, that’s what Southern Gothic Futurism means. But of course, if you’re practicing it too, it’s as much your’s as mine, so make it what you need it to be too.

SONG OF THE DAY: Liberation

Was reading the words of Rammellzee again the other day, as I often do, and got to thinking about intellectual property, philosophical consciousness, and “gothic futurism”. I’ve been babbling for a while now (maybe a year? I’m not good with calendars when it comes to art, as I shall always remain) about “southern gothic futurism” and in fact renamed the haiku slams I hold space for under that phrase. This was born from being deeply fascinated by Rammellzee’s gothic futurism philosophies, about how American racism goes back to medieval cultural forces, how language is used to hold us back and has been weaponized. I honestly can’t stop thinking about it, because (all this is a “it seems to me” scenario) America, as in United States (not original twin continents), seems to be Earthly realization of western European cultural progress, English colonialism (here, but Spanish colonialism just as strong a force through the Americas historically) coming to full culmination, or at least trying to. Thinking about the way Roman letters are broken up from natural continuation makes it hard to accept concepts like “linguistic revolutions” because they’re mostly done in English still. We (all of us) are of course forced to do this though, because most people with any connection to an earlier cultural tribe have likely lost that connection, and the language associated with that culture, many white people included. (This is not a bullshit “Irish people weren’t white” post lolol, but the English subjugated and assimilated a lot of people who never would’ve considered themselves English, who now proudly – and sadly – consider themselves white brethren. This is key part of how racism works, tricking peasants into thinking their kingly because they are the same X as their rulers. But that’s a whole ‘nother essay...)

My recent trip by train around the county reminded me with very clear examples of why I love the American South so much, where black and white have been forced to co-exist by historical atrocity, and in the socio-economic margins of American life, the ones who have co-existed have to a certain extent realized how the same they are along many roads of the American Empire’s intersectional experience. Of course, not all, because poor whites are still white, and males are still male. And an added plus to the southern experience has been the influx of Latinx culture (lol “latinx” is perfect example of a linguistic revolution which doesn’t necessarily make sense to me because it’s still anglo in foundation). Last weekend went to a high school dudes reunion hangout, and was talking about how in tiny ass Keysville, VA, there’s a tienda now, and I can stop and get a coconut boi water if I want to. No pupusa stand in the back, as of yet, but one can only hope that’s an eventuality. Tobacco farms which used to employ slave labor moved to cheaper undocumented labor, which is not the fault of the workers at all, because it’s the employers who are breaking the law imo. They are the ones with power; punishing the workers is wrong-headed (as the United States tends to be though). But for me, the concept of “southern gothic futurism” is that mix of cultures, which creates a beautiful survival mode environment, but also harkens back to all those “tri-racial isolates” cultures which existed in the margins, swamps, and deep mountains of history – where runaway/freed slaves and disillusioned/escapist whites and indigenous peoples lived and bred together into smatterings of mixed culture that confuse the racial philosophies that make the United States be the way it is. People recognizing their shared and similar humanity by living among each other instead of putting up walls and barbed wire differences which aren’t based in natural reality, only in enculturated indoctrination.

Anyways, with all that in mind, and this explanation of what southern gothic futurism means to me at philosophical core, this Outkast song is most definitely the southern gothic futurist (un)national anthem. And a cold ass Sunday where the sun still shines like a thousand poetries in one blast is the perfect day to bump the southern gothic futurism (un)national anthem, imo. Much love to you all.