SONG OF THE DAY: The Devil Gives Me Everything (kudzu'd)

I’ve had a couple of conversations recently with folks about selling your soul. I guess it seems a feasible bargain to young folks whose minds haven’t developed fully enough. Probably felt that way to me too back in the day. Usually the type who is fine with compromising their soul for material wealth or superficial fame already has a compromised soul. I’ve never been able to do it. I was blessed as a young adult by being too rough around the edges to ever have great marketable value in the soul selling business. And as I’ve gotten older and learned to hone those edges into a more at peace mosaic that doesn’t cut into everybody I pass like it used to, I know there ain’t no real value in compromising myself. The Universe loves me how I am, and in fact wants me to be more like true me than I even am now. Why would I turn from that blessing and trade it in for momentary material comfort of minor fringe fame? Anyways, it’s Friday, and where I’m at, it’s abnormally warm. The demons love to come a-tempting a full on warm feelgood Fridays. We’ve been weakened by our seasonal long dark night of the soul. Stay strong, feel the sun, and maintain your soul.

SONG OF THE DAY: Diamond in the Back (chopped and screwed)

It’s pretty simple… be thankful for what you got, and then slow it down even further. About to take a four hour ride 15 minutes away, window down, and the screwed slow jams blasting.
I considered putting the actual song title up on the heading there, but one thing I love about the chaos that has come from digitally archiving old Screw tapes is all the data ain't right. This one's been labelled the wrong thing for decades now, which might make it the right thing by now. Who am I to judge (or jury)?

34CH HVM4N OBST4CL3 1S...

each human obstacle is 
lesson to be had; learning 
to limit my reaction 

SONG OF THE DAY: Pesse Mi Buntare

I still download mp3s, because I am an old “ok boomer” man from seven years ago. There are still a number of decent music blogs I check, plus I’ve been spending more money on bandcamp this year for sure. But the problem is, my method for music, not streaming, is I have these chunks of downloaded music that get lumped into my external hard drive, then sort of battle royal their way out of the clusterfuck. Those songs that get played the most on a few month basis end up as a song of the day. That means there’s shit like this, that I have no idea why I have it, who the group is, any of that. Shit just showed up in the mix, unheralded, but I played the fuck out of it. Like a 7th round NFL draft pick, barely known, nothing expected, then all of a sudden it’s a special teams hero and you’ve got dumbasses ordering custom jerseys of it. I could probably be a legitimate faux-music journalist online and look them up and write up a 200 word description of some non-American music that’s probably once popular but unknown now somewhere else and completely obscure here. But nobody reads the internet. We look at the headlines and scroll social media timelines. In fact, this link will appear on multiple social media feeds, and like 75 people will go to the link with these words, but 60 of those will be East European or South Asian cyborgs just data trawling. The other fifteen will scope the video, and maybe a third of them will click the video to see what it’s about. Like two people will actually read the words to the very end. Which means you. Thanks. I appreciate you making it this far with me.

B3 TH4NKFVL F0R WH4T Y0V'V3 G0T...

"Be Thankful For What You've Got"

moments galore, but never

had cars that shine like mirrors

C0NS1D3R1NG H0W M4NY...

considering how many

guard rail memorials I

could've been, thankful for life

GL1MPS3S 0F WH4T W0VLD'V3 B33N...

glimpses of what would've been

if disappeared years back leaves

me thankful for what I've got

SONG OF THE DAY: Wrestling Rock'n'Roll Girl

everything is stupid, including this song
I'm too damn tired, and trying to cut down on impositions including self-imposed ones
things I don't have enough of in my life right now:

• crowbars
• down time
• 20 mile hikes on railroad tracks
• $10 supporters to my patreon
• crows
• joy
• ciphers
• alone in the woods time
• 80 mile hikes on railroad tracks
• horseshoes
• chicken flocks
• finished books
• 300 mile pilgrimages on railroad tracks
• passport
• rest
• actual rest
• actual restorative rest

and yet thankful for what I do got. it could always be worse.

SONG OF THE DAY: Thank you

Always good to give thanks to everybody actively trying to stomp you down. What a wonderful mutually supportive world we have built! [Click like to passively and performatively support this!]

DR34MS 0F BL4ST1NG B3 TH4NKFVL...

dreams of blasting "Be Thankful

For What You've Got" out of old

school car I'll never afford

SONG OF THE DAY: Chasing Love

Love is not a permanent vacation home along the shore; instead it is the ocean’s tide. That shit rolls up quite lovely, and you can lay around on the beach, and maybe the tide is high and you get yourself a vacation home to bask in the loveliness of it, but it’s an ebb and flow, and the moon gonna pull that shit back out at some point, and that home ain’t gonna be home no more. Non-traditional relationships make more sense because nothing is permanent, and no one person can really fulfill another one person’s every emotional need from now until the end. I think the old way (which is not really traditional in “way way back” sense but traditional in the common shit since western hegemony of culture) is to just grin and bear it, or work at it, or just plain suffer, as most women did in patriarchal arrangements, and to be honest, a lot of men probably did too. It’s a one-size-fits-all that don’t fit nobody.

And yet, chasing love is so much fun, whether you’re 14 or 45… getting googly eyes and tingle belly over somebody, feeling that tide roll in, warm cleansing waters of love. It might recede twenty years from now, it might recede next Tuesday… just gotta enjoy the moment.

WH4T F0R W3 C3L3BR4T1NG...

what for we celebrating,

when half of what we thankful

for still owed on forever?

JJ Krupert Jan 2018 number five "looking for a home"

I get far less hyped about EPIC NEW RELEASES that I’m not supposed to miss than I do all these various random ass collections that come out nowadays, where the crate diggers from ten years ago have become the collection makers trying to capitalize a dollar off someone else’s work by having the rights to be wrong and throwing together a sick themed collection from a defunct label/genre/regional musical tradition/nation beyond our own copyright laws/whatever the fuck. I don’t really fret the fact these people are digital era version of shitty record label producers taking advantage of the artists because haha I don’t buy shit, I just download it for free. Am I taking advantage too? Well, if you believe in capitalism, yes, but I don’t, and I doubt a batch of obscure artists (obscure due to exploitation in the first place, perhaps) if presented with the fact they could get 34 cents from me buying something that I wouldn’t buy if I had to buy thus no 34 cents, or know I’m enjoying the fuck out of a song in my shitty fucking rural Virginia hellhole life, I’d imagine all real Natural Born Artists would prefer the second. I know for me personally somebody saying, “Hey, when I was going through some real shit two years back, your writing helped me get through it,” means way more than my bank account getting hit with the $12.74 deposit from some sudden Amazon sonnet spending spree somebody went on somewhere or another. But yeah, hopefully the second leads to the first, but let’s be honest, there is no method nor meritocracy involved here, despite what algorithmic philosophies try to tell us, so I just scatter thoughtseed in a thousand directions and hope it bears as much fruit as possible.

Often times these collections will bear a heavy load of forgettable regurgitated songs, but with a couple hidden gems within that mix. And sometimes in the middle of those few hidden gems is a song that is just one of the most beautiful and amazing songs that ever fucking existed, on “Freebird” level, on “Juicy” level, on “play this shit at my funeral when y’all having a bonfire and getting drunk afterwards” level. And that’s exactly what happened with the random ass Back to the River: More Southern Soul Stories collection I absconded from digital guts at some point. “Looking for a Home” rose to the top of the collection as the most worthwhile track, and then as real life turned to shit, it became solace in the madness, and in fact an epic track that perfectly soundtracked real life experiences, as I wandered the railroad tracks along the James River, searching for any sign of future light to penetrate the crushing darkness that had become full reality. “Looking for a Home” and Little Buster’s sad wailing is now piece and part of me walking the Rivanna subdivision between mile marker 72 and 68 by the Shores yard, along the James River, mullein sprouting in creosote heavy patches alongside old tracks, fresh gravel laid down as Buckingham Branch attempts to maintain their fucking shit, me just walking along, sad as fuck, hopeless, depressed, but feeling just an atomic sliver better with each Little Buster-esque “wo-ah-o-ah-ooooo…” And that is the point of fucking art for Natural Born Artists. (And it’s not even a point probably, more likely a smudge, towards the positive, on some giant unseen metaphysical universal ledger.)

B3 TH4NKFVL F0R WH4T Y0V'V3 G0T...

"be thankful for what you've got"

sang the little mushroom mosques

as I bathed in feral woods

1LL3G1T1M4T3 4RTS 4R3...

illegitimate arts are

always unpredictable;

let whatever lead the way

Cornel West Talk About "A Profound Desire for Justice" & Being a Prisoner of Hope

(the good Dr. Cornel West speaking at UVA)

Been trying to shift back into a pro-creative zone lately, despite the buzzing negativity of the developed world around me, which has quieted down my ability to hear my heart’s natural vibrations a little too much. Last week though, I was blessed with a pair of positive influences on the heart buzz, one which really set the energies open to the second.

I’ve been listening to a lot of Brother Ali lately, having shifted away from all the strange rules I put around sound listening on my daily commute, bumping a good amount of earlier stuff but really playing his latest – All the Beauty in This Whole Life – mostly. It’s a beautiful album – nothing that will get any Pitchfork Year End listings likely, because it’s more about the message than the image. But the message is a spiritual one, yet not crappy. It seems like when music moves towards spirituality, it has to compromise quality, and the contrarian response to that is to never show any spiritual spice to your music for fear of being cast into that lot with shitty Christian rap. Brother Ali has a little more freedom from that, being Muslim instead of Christian, but his music is still thick with spirit. As someone who has been helped (and healed) immensely in recent years by Islamic philosophy, All the Beauty in This Whole Life resonates with me pretty strongly, and I find myself wishing there was an entire genre of Brother Ali music. (If you put it into the algorithm boxes, they give you suggestions which have very little actual spirituality, but seem likely to share a progressive event’s stage with Ali. It’s not quite the same, but the post-(meta?)modern algorithm – despite being developed by the noted ancient Baghdad House of Wisdom scholar Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi – lacks real world fluency in its current Yakubian applications.

All this Brother Ali music over the course of the past week primed me for attending a Dr. (Brother) Cornel West talk. This was literally two buildings over from where I work, so once the work day was done, I sat in secret pavilion gardens scribbling sonnet gibberish to kill a little time, then walked over to get near the front of the admission line. This ensured a really great seat just beyond the designated V.I.P. section (of which I have never been invited, in any form, my entire life). I expected a lot from Dr. West, but they opened it up with a piano performance by a Dana Kristina-Joi Morgan, who absolutely pummeled the grand piano into transmission of full lounge, perfectly combining classical training with intuitive ability. The piece was amazing. Then this classically trained singer Terrence Tarver (who was wearing a nice suit… I am a not a suit guy, not even close, but my man looked sharp) who did “We Shall Overcome”. He had a strong style, and I’m not attuned to classical style singing, nor appreciation for the strong style he rocked, but the traditional song was fine, and added layers to the event, and then he and Morgan combined for a duet on the theme of letting your voice be heard, and the shit was so beautiful – despite being outside my preferred modes of musical appreciations – that I couldn’t help but be moved by it. That’s real fuckin’ art, when it hits you not in a blind spot but from an angle you think you’re impervious from, but it gets you anyways.

The experience of the performances had me thinking about what Ta-Nehisi Coates described as the black elegance he saw in his My President Was Black piece from a year ago. Coates has a rambling style that goes too long at times (as if I have any right of all people to complain about that, lol), but that idea definitely bounced around my head (and heart) as I took in the evening. From a social scientific standpoint, I am white, though that label feels awkward and clunky to me a lot of times when lumped into certain concepts of whiteness as applied in this post-(meta?)modern civilization we currently occupy. I’m not really into the idea of having to categorize my upbringing or lay out my own personal history in order for outside people to deem my claims of self-identity true or not, but let me just say, despite my socially scientific whiteness, I do not feel comfortable at a very basic level in many stereotypical white environments. I felt far more comfortable at this event, with its strong element of black elegance, than I do in most. And I don’t mean I felt like it was for me, but it spoke to me in ways most academic or intellectual events don’t. (In fact, I write a daily gambleraku – three lines of seven syllables each – in a little notebook, and as I sat there I wrote “more black intellectuals / more poor intellectuals / less same intellectuals”.)

The good Dr. Brother West worked through so many themes and issues, all at once, and in a meandering story-telling way, that it would do a disservice to his style to try and explain it. If you have a chance to see the man speak, I cannot encourage it enough. But one point he drove home was that the importance of diversity comes from the fact there are more traditions than the one dominant tradition we know (or the two dominant ones – if you think of it politically, or three or seven or thirty-six most dominant traditions). This applies not only to countering the traditional white supremacist (as it has come to be known) tradition of United States imperialism, with African and Latin traditions, as well as indigenous ones, which were the traditional before European colonialism upset the continental balance and created a new “traditional”, but also to even our concepts of whiteness, as white supremacists from the lower rungs of the socio-economic ladder are essentially tools for the powerful.

But the thing I loved most about Dr. Brother West’s talk was how it was all love. It came from the heart, and that was by design and purpose. When the man entered the auditorium, he was hugging everybody he even barely knew. As he spoke, he called out a number of people he knew, many in the V.I.P. section at first, but as he went, calling out a person here or there out in the commoner crowd, who had met coming in, or talked with briefly somewhere along the way, or I don’t really know. But you could tell that Dr. West loved people, and love The People, and was down for both.

Cornel West was one of the clergy who was in town last month to counter-vigil the August 12th alt-right neo-nazi rally. He’s the most prominent voice who has spoken up since then about how antifa efforts are not morally equivalent to neo-nazis, and how antifa likely saved lives that day (and weekend) that the local police were standing down from helping. So I found it interesting that, as Dr. West expounded upon the hypocrisy of elected officials for holding onto the spirit of what originally moved them to try and help The People, that a vacant seat in the V.I.P. section was filled almost an hour late by a local politician who has been directly complicit in the events that helped create the environment conducive to having the August 12th mayhem happen. Dr. West spoke very directly, before this politician arrived, about alleged servants of The People who say all the right words, but fail in their actions, and are motivated by ego, greed, and worse. It seemed to me, as a bystander of both the night’s presentation as well as the events of August 12th weekend (and the Klan rally the month before), that this local politician probably wouldn’t have been hurt by having Dr. West’s words wash over him. But he was an hour late, and missed the build-up of energy that had already transpired, not only in Dr. West’s portion but in the musical performances directly preceding. A flow of energy had been established, and had caused a number of standing ovations at appropriate parts. How this was lost on the late-arriving attendee was obvious when, after a line by Dr. West, he stood to begin a standing ovation, but no one else stood with him. The energetic levels had been previously established, and we were not at an apex.

Dr. West spoke of people telling him he was an optimist, and he answered, “As a 64-year-old black man in America, I’m not an optimist,” and described his philosophical nature as being “a prisoner of hope.” This, too, emanates from the heart, and echoed his statements throughout his talk about us living in a time of a “spiritual blackout”. (And for me, having just been absorbing all that Brother Ali all week, that was something that vibrated strongly in me.)

After his talk was over, Dr. West opened it up to questions from the crowd, and in true man-who-is-down-for-The-People fashion, he picked from raised hands way up the common sections. A student asked about how to think about Thomas Jefferson’s history, both good and bad, and Dr. West had already talked about how important humility and piety was for everyone, because we were all fallible. He had described himself earlier as a “recovered sinner with gangster proclivities,” and in turn – in acknowledging the enigma of Thomas Jefferson having fathered children with an enslaved woman (who he took over ownership of in patriarchal way as Sally Hemings – the enslaved woman – was inherited by Jefferson’s wife) and denying that branch of family’s rights to him as a forebear, with the scene of Huey Newton having Jefferson’s words read in 1966 when the Black Panthers were making a public claim to self-determination for black communities. You can’t demonize the historical individual entirely, suggested Dr. West, but you also can’t elevate them onto a pedestal and pretend that good side absolves them of their transgressions.

The local politician had his hand raised whenever Dr. West called for another question, but West seemed intent on picking people from further out amongst the masses than down front in the V.I.P. section. He held his hand up, hard and straight, during the second part of one of West’s extemporaneous answers, and I should also mention this local politician had been messaging through his smart phone throughout the short time he was there, even during the beginning of the answer to the question he ended up having his hand raised to ask the next one after. As someone who comes from roundtable oral tradition (drunks standing around a picnic table or old truck, talking shit), there is nothing worse than the person you can see standing there loaded to shoot themselves into the free-form conversation, attached to some moment somewhere upstream of the group stream of thought, and refusing to let it go that they must be heard. It’s a telltale sign of ego.

No worries though, because Dr. West was scanning the higher reaches of the auditorium for the last question before we all had to shut down for the night, AND THE LOCAL POLITICIAN (who had already arrived nearly an hour late) STOOD UP AND FORCED HIS QUESTION INTO THE AIR. Cornel West is a lover though, and he once the local politicians introduced himself and his role locally, West acknowledged him with love. When he had initially asked for questions from the audience, I thought to myself, “Do I have a question?” and I legit couldn’t think of one that I needed answered that didn’t feel like it would’ve just been me forcing myself to be part of the talk. But this local politician’s question sounded very much like somebody attempting to hear themselves say something out loud and be answered by a famous person than someone with a legitimate philosophical inquiry. He asked about how to battle white supremacy while dealing with white fragility, and also whether elected officials can do this through policy (which was obviously a self-serving question for him, and one that had been previously addressed partially during the portion of the talk he missed by being fashionably late).

Dr. West answered the policy part very simply, that no, it cannot be done without The People helping from the outside with their sheer strength of presence. Done on the inside alone, every politician soon becomes indebted to the mechanizations of politics, and the corporate hands that drive those machines. The irony was not lost on me of this answer when considering this local politician had very recently had public meetings overtaken by The People, who were demanding the immediate resignation of himself and all this political compadres for allowing the August 12th weekend to happen the way it did.

But in answering the white supremacy/fragility part, Dr. West went back to that theme that there are more than just the dominant tradition we easily recognize in this post-(meta?)modern world, even when it comes to “white traditions”. Dr. West mentioned Myles Horton and the Highlander Folk School, as well as others taught at the Union Theological Seminary in New York, including a white guy sitting three spots to the left of this local politician, and how not everyone is fragile nor oblivious to the larger, obvious truths of an empire and its Yakubian tricks of white supremacy.

And this was where the event ended, and I was thankful for the entire performance because it helped me be okay with being a prisoner of hope and not feel like a fool. And I tried to take the spirituality of it – letting my heart do more thinking for me – to, for lack of a better term, heart, even when it came to the local politician who, so obviously from this essay, bothered the fuck out of me with his oblivious hypocrisy. To be human means to be fallible, and we’re all fucked up and problematic in probably more ways than one. That local politician is no exception, and I’m definitely no exception to that. But we can’t let that stop us from trying to cultivate a more heartfelt society that tends and cares for one another. There’s not really any sign it’s working, or we’re getting any closer to that, and in fact all data seems to suggest that the opposite is a more sensible conclusion. But just for the simple fact that I can’t give up on existence, and can’t give up on the basic pure and beautiful human potential that exists in every one of us who as a collective make up The People, I have to keep being a “prisoner of hope”. So I will, without shame.