SONG OF THE DAY: Left With a Broken Heart (kudzu'd)

Spinning records in the town I was born in tomorrow, and I’ll probably bring some brown-eyed soul jams like this, but we’ll see if the vibes are right to play ‘em or not. Was messaging with DJ Disco Cat about this today, as we both pulled records, and the difficulty of being a physical media person who is a believer of Universal Magnetics, and how you don’t wanna bring everything possible, but you do wanna have the ability to flow with the in-person tangents that arise. Anyways, it’ll be hot as fuck, so perfect day to come sweat in a quonset building to the olden funk and new boogie funk and whatever the fuck else we end up spinning. It’s June 27th, too, so you know I’ll be honoring DJ Screw. Or maybe you don’t know that. Who the fuck even reads this? Probably mostly bots, and then my sister and my girlfriend, but they usually see it after the fact. I think that covers it. Well okay bots, I look forward to seeing you IN REAL LIFE. If you are not my sister or my girlfriend, leave a comment. *tumbleweeds*

first ever OPOSSUM Funk jam

June 27th is unofficially recognized as DJ Screw Day, due to the June 27th grey tape being his most famous one. That is the perfect day to launch a new (hopefully) series of funk jams called O.P.O.S.S.U.M. Funk, that me and my man DJ Disco Cat out of Richmond are putting together. In tandem with the folks at the Phunkadelic space in Farmville, Virginia, we shall be setting up in the quonset building, and funkifying the West End of Farmville. This is especially exciting for me because I was born a couple miles from there, so I get to return home as my fool ass self of now. We’ll be spinning records from 1 to 5 pm that day, alternating sets somehow. I’m sure I’ll play some 45s at 33 (in honor of Screw) but we’ll keep it funky enough you can shake your ass. Also, considering the ICE detention facility is just down the road, I am fairly certain I’m gonna spin a fat chunk of cumbia, to generate psychic waves of prison wall breakdown in that direction. So come on out on a warm ass Saturday afternoon, and let’s get on down!

SONG OF THE DAY: Tired of Being Alone (kudzu'd)

I’ve taken up playing Torricelli’s trumpet, an old acute truncated hyperbolic solid brass one, but so far all I’ve learned is Al Green’s “Tired of Being Alone”. It’s hard to get used to, because of the finite volume, so no matter how hard I try to blow (which is hard for me, due to my advanced age and sleep apnea half-choking in the middle of the night ass). But mostly, all my neighbors are frustrated by it, not due to the noise, but because of the infinitely long shape. It’s not so bad in the woods behind the house, but by the time you get to the end of Schuyler Road, it’s a few hundred feet high I reckon. Ultimately, I’d like to be able to make cosmic cumbia music if I can find some like-minded people, or even non-people to be honest. Not robots though. I ain’t making no new-fangled mathematically nonsensical space funk with no goddamned robots. Well, at least not Earth robots as designed by humans here. Maybe there’s more soulful robots designed by other intergalactic species in other systems, but I’ve seen nothing with a copper heart that has the fingerprint of homo sapiens upon it. I heard tell, talking to an old dude on the Greyhound riding between Dayton, OH, and Charleston, WV, one time, that there were space robots who could play the horn really well. But this dude told me that like how on Earth, fleshly humans play brass instruments, there were robotic creatures with brass veins (aka wires) who played horns made of a flesh-like material, so it wasn’t rigid, but they were. At first, I was like, “Whatever, weird old dude I’m stuck beside on the bus for a long time,” but when I gave him a look like that, he jumped right into talking about bagpipes from Scotland and how they were made from sheep intestines originally, and it all started making sense. That’s how the Greyhound used to be… it was a podcast before podcasts existed, and you couldn’t change the channel until the next stop either one of you got off on. Or sometimes, a new guest would show up and enter your podcast (Greyhound conversation). Late at night, at the back of the bus? Man, those were some of the best podcasts I ever heard in my life. Crazy shit. Anyways, what was I talking about? Oh yeah, the Torricelli’s trumpet I got at Motleys in Farmville.

S0VTHS1D3 V1RG1N14 SCRVB P1N3...

southside Virginia scrub pine, 
in human form, bound to be 
mulch around a plantation oak 

S0VTHS1D3 V1RG1N14 SCRVB P1N3...

southside Virginia scrub pine - 

pulpwood existence meant for 

mulch around plantation oaks 

Y0V C4N T4K3 TH3 B0Y 0VT 0F...

you can take the boy out of 
the country, but his simple 
ass was still born in Farmville 

N4V1G4T3D TH3 S0VTHS1D3...

navigated the southside 
Virginia mine fields; somehow, 
still in one fragmented peace 

TR4NSM1SS10NS 0F 0TH3R W0RLDS...

transmissions of other worlds 
beyond the one I was born 
in gave me hope for escape 

TH3 VN1V3RS3 1S W4TCH1NG...

 

the universe is watching 
whether you feel it or not; 
every moment's a test 

H0L1D4YS C3L3BR4T3D...

holidays celebrated

in awkward ways to maintain

false sense of stability

SONG OF THE DAY: Basquiat

Hi. Do you need an angry but positive fuck you anthem after too much extended family and unrelenting consumer capitalism beating on your fucking brain? Good. Relatedly, a couple months back I was in the outlet store and they had Basquiat socks, which I got, because I have a job where I wear fake nice clothes and act like I'm a decent and upstanding member of society instead of the mental degenerate who wants everything to crumble into a fresh progressive apocalypse that I am. So I bought these Basquiat socks for like $3, and it feels pretend resistant, but it's actually just somebody got a licensing agreement for dead Basquiat's art, and I bought some fucking socks, which apparently not enough people bought at the regular overinflated price, so I got them at the outlet store. Trickle down identity, lol, a lower class boy that's done come up in the world, WEARING A MOTHERFUCKIN' THREE DOLLAR PAIR OF SOCKS, LIKE A GODDAMN FAUNTLEROY.

B0RN 1N 4 PL4C3 C4LL3D F4RMV1LL3...

born in a place called Farmville,

which iphone autocorrect

capitalizes wrongly

SONG OF THE DAY: Going Home

Notions of home we’re often born into, without stability, to where general geographic areas become home more than specific piece of land – a neighborhood or more expansive area we bounced around while developing our human roots. Often times we’re uprooted, perhaps by economics, perhaps by traumas, maybe weather… who knows, but shit happens, regularly, that blasts stability sideways. I consider myself from southside Virginia in very general sense because my sense of home has taken a couple of body shots over the years, to where the two actual places that are buildings I slept in the most amount of nights of my life aren’t really my legitimate home any more. One I don’t ever want to go back to, to be honest, not that specific house, and I won’t unless somebody dies and familial obligation will force me back. The other, I still have access to, and my not being there is on friendly terms, but it’s also not my home any more because home requires that constant exchange of energy with a place where you see the subtle changes in it and it sees the subtle changes in you. Where I live now does not feel like home, and in fact is even outside that general feeling of home relationship I have with southside Virginia. The shape of things is different, and the culture is close but not the same, and I don’t know, it just don’t feel like home.

So many humans end up living in places that are not home. It’s a fairly common thing actually, and it’s perfectly easy to accept living in a non-home place and make the most of it, but you’re also not home. I thought on this a lot over the course of two events this weekend. First, I helped dig a grave, for a woman being buried at home, next to one of her favorite gardens, and that deep connection to home so impressed me. I’ve attended a couple home burials in the past, and in fact always joke about how, being from southside Virginia, I’ve been to two funerals in junkyards. This is a factual statement, and both were beautiful and completely appropriate events. But digging a grave for a home burial where home was still known, to such a deep level… it impressed me greatly. There is a strength in having a lifetime of connection with a place, one that transcends economics in a lot of ways, which is why when experts tell people from economically depressed places that they need to move to where there are better opportunities, and not everybody jumps at the chance, I can understand that. If you have deep cultural roots to a place, separate from economics, it is not easy to just assume getting a paycheck is enough to tear those roots out and try somewhere else, where there’s no guarantee of financial success.

I also thought about this notion of home during the Mexico/U.S. Gold Cup final, because that was held in Chicago, and essentially any U.S. men’s team match against a Latin American country that is not held in ultra-white spaces like Columbus or Salt Lake City is going to be a road match for the home team. That was the case in Chicago, where the crowd was predominately pro-Mexican team, far more than visible support for the U.S. team. And it got me to thinking of immigration and the political discourse about that, and all the Mexicans and Salvadorans and Hondurans and others who traveled so far from their notion of home, simply to find a decent life. And how you can find that community elsewhere, if there’s enough of you from back home, to build a little slightly stable slice of that back home in a completely different place. I don’t see how anybody could be mad at that. That’s really all any of us want, is to have a home, and feel complete there, and safe, and know there’s a community acting like family to help us when crisis comes up.

Most spiritual mythologies talk about helping strangers, and making them feel at home. That’s a deep concept which seems to be lost upon too many humans these days. To act with compassion, and not just let somebody into your space to sleep on the floor, but to welcome them, make them feel as if it is their home too. It won’t, because home is deeper than one day’s worth of actions – it is woven slowly through time, through many days’ worth of actions, years, even generations. But simply helping somebody to feel at home shows at heart level, not brain level, not politics level – but right-thinking heart level that you understand home cannot be manufactured out of nothing, but you want them to know they are welcome.

It’s a weird feeling not having a strong sense of specific home any more, and there’s a strange restlessness I get sometimes that I think comes from that lack of roots. Like I said, it’s not uncommon, but damn if it doesn’t feel weird, especially on those weird moments where I don’t even realize I don’t feel at home, but then I roll into the general part of the Earth that does feel like home, on a perfectly home-like day that activates all these cellular memories, and it’s just some fucked up moment riding down an old road, and my body and being is like “ahhh, home” beyond my ability to rationalize or understand in intelligent scientific way. True home.

SONG OF THE DAY: You'll Cowards Don't Even Smoke Crack

Sitting in the back of a training session at work oh fake work the backbone of Americanism, and we have “brain breaks” where we watch jaunty “fun” videos and there was one about coffee and how great coffee is and it’s all white people in here, not dirty white people but clean shineface white people who believe in Americanism still, and idk man I don’t enjoy this life I’ve stumbled into sometimes. Working with crackheads on a paint crew was a lot more exciting. I guess this is progress, but I’m not sure. Sitting at the back of a room full of bonafide white people where I feel completely uncomfortable and out of place and not myself and it’s Friday and I don’t really feel like giving a fuck, makes me wish it was my week to run this training and my brain break video would just be this Viper song.

I have a lot of funny working with crackheads stories, specifically from a period in Farmville which y'all got no idea about small town crackheads vs. city crackheads, it's like a whole different level of comedic behavior from tragic circumstances. But I don't really feel like sharing them openly on the gentrified internet because I fear y'all cowards might actually be too white. I'll be walking around most of the weekend though, catch me at the bus stop.

SONG OF THE DAY: Braggin' Writes Revisited

The wonderful aspect of a true and living sub-culture as opposed to one just manufactured by capitalist based materialism, is there's so many sediments and layers to the true and living sub-culture. I'm currently involved in helping with organizing a local community hip hop festival, and as part of it last year, they had a panel talk discussing the history of hip hop shows and groups and endeavors locally. It was amazing to watch that, and piece together the history of this one small southern city's hip hop. It's like that everywhere too - an art form (always with the dream of becoming business) where all these people, at generations level now, got to express themselves in this thing that blossomed from the South Bronx in the 1970s. Shit man, writing raps and freestyling carried me through the '80s as a rural kid, and in retrospect it's amazing to me that little ass Farmville, Virginia, had an AM radio station that played hip hop back then, which a lot of cities didn't even have. It's amazing that the club which had been Ernie's Disco, owned by my first grade teacher's husband, which we took a field trip to back in the day, just to dance and shit. Fevers has seen a ton of touring acts come through over the years, and has a pretty crazy reputation, but fuck it you know, people need places to go.

With all that in mind - the layers and sediments of hip hop culture - it's crazy to think of all the legends, absolute geniuses who exist in these tendrils of that culture, who are probably hardly known at mainstream level. J-Live is one such legend, just a beast of a lyricist and MC, and also public school teacher in Washington, DC (last I knew). I go through lyricist fetish periods, as all semi-educated white males who love hip hop tend towards (lol), and whenever that happens, J-Live usually pops up. An absolute legend, whether people know of him or not.

SONG OF THE DAY: Once Upon a Driveby

An original album from my collection, that I bought upon first release back as a teenager, at Carrington's Records & Tapes in shithole Farmville, VA. Allegedly at the time, the owner didn't like white people and charged white kids a dollar more to buy albums or tapes (no CDs yet? not locally maybe) than black kids. Is this true? I don't care. I've gone through like three phases of loving the Boo-Yaa Tribe again during the course of time since I first bought this record, and also periods of not really caring. And somehow the album has survived it all, and still sits in my collection, having lived in trailer parks and milk crates I stored at somebody else's house, now sitting on some near free Ikea shelves off Craigslist in a damp basement apartment. Materialism as identity fucking rules!

SONG OF THE DAY: Como Cumbia (Buenas Tardes Hip Hop Mix)

A slowed cumbia rebajada track by Babylon Motorhome, which is timely because I’m simultaneously reading Sunset Trailer Park essay by Allan Berube at work, and also contemplating trailer life and my own class history, and how my Clayton Homes attempt to move next door onto land failed miserably, and I was ripped off by them (and thus Warren Buffet) and I borrowed a thousand dollars to get that con moving faster, in desperation, and they only gave me $415 back, and in fact on back of check have a stamp that says basically “if you cash this thing you let go of any claims against us, or others of us, or any of us just barely involved in this sham”. I have not cashed the check yet, requesting more info, not that I can recoup any of it, because I’m the desperate and doomed and not protected by law, but I’m smart enough I’d like to at least make those devils work for their con. But I’m still doomed.”

My grandmother held down our family from a trailer, most my life, though she lived in a house somewhere when I was younger than 4. But summers and after school were always at her trailer, Eastgate Trailer Park in Farmville, which at the time was all-white, by design, the landlord wouldn’t rent to non-whites. Just across the creek was the road to the projects though, and all-black, as well as rowhouse rentals through the woods also all-black. We had snowball fights and basketball games and football games that tended to break down along color lines, and we all got along, but it was tense at times – a learned re-creation of larger indoctrinations.

Eastgate started renting to non-whites, which caused problems with some locals, but I’m sure it was a decision behind the scenes of power to do so, and this timed along same timelines as Prince Edward Academy becoming Fuqua School and finally allowing non-white (i.e. black) students. A woman I was around the same age as wrote a book about how they need to fix Prince Edward County, where Farmville is. She went to the private school. I stayed at my grandmother’s down the hill from it, in the trailer park, a lot. This woman writer has been successful in her career endeavors, and sometimes I’m resentful of how some people have access to that while others (meaning myself) do not. But also, she never hung out in a trailer park on a hill during a snowstorm where we had a barrel fire at the top and rode a car hood down the icy paved hill all day long, no fucks to be given, using old tires to plug the sewage drain system at the bottom of the hill so as to not accidentally kill ourselves, but also accidentally realizing (once snow and ice covered the tires a little) that we could build a ramp at the bottom of the hill too.

Being broke sucks in this system, because this system is constantly trying to sell you things, without relenting, so that every direction you turn, at home on screens or in public with stores and billboards, there is something using neurological triggers to make you want it. But you don’t have money, so you can’t have it. This causes great shame because we’re also taught your economic status is determined by meritocracy, and how hard you’ve worked and been rewarded. But it’s just not true.

My grandmother’s trailer still exists, no longer in Farmville but out in Meherrin. She died years ago, and my aunt lives there now, with one of her sons, and there’s been a parade of people who’ve had to take shelter there over the years. I went there a few months back because of a thing that was going on, and the floor still sags here or there, and it’s tiny beyond belief, and my aunt has updated the pictures on the wall so the old wall of history that my grandmother had slowly built over time is gone. The same fucking trailer from when I was like 5 – four decades of life squeezed out of this fabricated home probably not meant to last that long ever, by design. How many of these “motorhomes” exist in this Babylonian system, the wretched people at the bottom of the socio-economic pyramid squeezing life out of these consumer items, making broken things keep working, for as long as we are physically able? And people still mock others as “trailer trash”… FYI, fuck y’all fake motherfuckers.

SH1TH0L3 T0WN 1 GR3W VP 1N'S...

shithole town I grew up in's

left behind railroad tracks now

gentrified gravel bike path

F1FT33NTH M1L3 M4RK3R N0T F4R...

fifteenth mile marker not far

from route fifteen bizness, me

just getting lost on a walk

N0TH1NG M0R3 4M3R1C4N...

nothing more American

than small town parade where we

all pretend shit is alright