SONG OF THE DAY: Tambura (kudzu'd)

Puppets are pretty cool actually. It kinda sucks not too many people learn or practice puppetry these days, and mostly our reference to “puppet” is a metaphor for an unthinking individual. The metaphor has taken prominence over the actual practice. Disgusting. That’s why when I win the lottery, I’m going to found a College of Puppetry, preferably in some dying Appalachian town. Maybe multiple ones, actually, like 8 of them, each in a different state, and we’ll have a team marionette competition instead of football and basketball, and keep it a perfect 8. Can you imagine the Dirtgod Appalachian Schooling Conference Marionette Tournament, every summer to wrap up on June 27th, international DJ Screw, because that’s the perfect in-between mini-holiday excuse to keep it chill between Juneteenth and 4th of July.

SONG OF THE DAY: Che Che Cole (kudzu'd)

I got this mostly dope book the other day called Boogie Down Predictions, but there was a chapter on DJ Screw’s whole movement, which I’d gotten excited about seeing in the table of contents, but ended up incredibly disappointed. The whole thing was written in hard academia style, which is great for academia but doesn’t really translate all that easily to normal people. Too many big ass words all for the sake of being big ass word usage. Folks struggling to still pay last month’s rent don’t have a lot of time for shit like that. Mostly, when I finished the chapter, I thought it could’ve used more Big Moe flows on it. Like just explain your whole idea, in your academic ass overwordy way, in detail to Big Moe, then let him flow for about 32 lines over an instrumental and explain it better than you. That should be how we peer review things to be honest. This is my thesis, because I am Professor Lounge (Ph.D. in Fuck That Shit).

SONG OF THE DAY: Marie (acoustic live)

I used to not like Townes Van Zandt, can't even remember why. I think maybe some early version of a hipster woman tried too hard to convince me how great he was at some point around my college years, when being a first generation student from a fucked up rural family surrounded by suburban assholes who thought they were the most progressive people on earth even though they were afraid of every black guy who wasn't from the suburbs. There wasn't no real consciousness of how being a first gen college student was a supremely fucked up thing to deal with socially, which causes all sorts of impostor syndrome and self doubt and anger and lashing out back then like there is now. I used to do a lot of edgelordy zines back then, weirdly enough more out of hatred of suburban kids than disliking anybody else in particular. I hate all that shit now, wish it never existed some of it, but also it got me to here where I am now. Most of those progressive super punk super PBR super wild and crazy people from back then own houses and even rental houses in Richmond now, and have regular jobs and own their own businesses, even though they have tattoos, but not fucked up tattoos, expensive ones that look nice, because all the fucked up ones got covered up years ago. I can't really do anything to piss them off now, nor do I really want to, because to be honest if I ever want to become a successful (meaning financially supported) artist, that's exactly the type of person who is going to have to want to buy my fucked up art - people who want weird fucked up looking shit to put on display to show how they're still weird and fucked up themselves despite having settled into the stability that was inherent to them. (If you're one of them types, I'm not talking about you - you're definitely one of the good ones. Message me for available haiku spikes too.)
Thus, I didn't like Townes Van Zandt for a long time, because I wrongly associated him with that type of vibe. But he was fucked up, drank codeine, and died early, before he could get Nashville money and turned into the 1980s version of Sturgill Simpson or some similarly fake shit like that. But it is nice having avoided Townes like the plague all that time, because even to this day, a new release will come out, and some song like this which I never heard before ever, will show up on it, and it'll be the saddest most fucked up beautiful shit ever, and I'll just keep listening to it while I look for the India ink to do a homemade tattoo, but then don't find it because it's one of those boxes I never unpacked when I moved the last time. Some boxes never get unpacked.

TR4D1T10NS 0F 3XC3LL3NC3...

traditions of excellence

built on exploitation of

those people deemed as lesser

TH3 H1GH3R 3DVC4T10N...

the higher education

industry profits off of

the meritocracy myth

G3TT1NG L0ST 1N L1BR4R13S...

getting lost in libraries

which rich folks put together,

stealing their hoarded knowledge

L4BYR1NTH 0F TH0S3 B0VG13...

labyrinth of those bougie

ass sterilized souls, feeding

themselves learned self-importance

4C4D3M1C BR1CK P4TT3RNS...

academic brick patterns

mastered by labor class, all

while supervisors idle

r v a z z

city bricks that seen stories
for centuries - nothing like
new school suburban facades

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown - April '11 #8: "James River Blues" by Old Crow Medicine Show

I could write about the James River again, being I live 5 minutes from it, but instead I thought it would be funny to share some shit I wrote in college for a Nature Writing class, that my prof. kept on her page for years. I actually had contemplated applying to MFA program for Creative Writing a couple years back and contacted her to give me a recommendation, which she was willing to do, but wanted to see some recent work. I made the mistake of sending her my Me and Brown story about slitting a dog's throat and saving a hillbilly from suicide on the side of the highway, and she backed the fuck off and broke the contact we had made. I guess older women nature writer types can't handle the reality of the lower worlds.
Anyways, here is some shit called "Why I Listen to the River" which I wrote when I was probably like 20. Most people would be embarrassed about cornier things they wrote earlier on, but whatever man, this is how I got to now, and there's actually a lot of the philosophies I still carry in this, even if my musical tastes are different.

WHY I LISTEN TO THE RIVER
By Raven McMillian
One of my earliest memories is of my parents, grandparents and assorted others digging the foundations for two homes on the family's fifty acres of wooded land in Meherrin, a small Virginia town whose only claim-to-fame is a banjo picker named Roy Clark. This land would be home eventually, once a few trees and countless rocks could be cleared away for the room needed to plant a simple two-story structure. I was just four or five at the time, so me and my aunt, also too young for useful labor, would walk with my grandmother down through the woods to a creek spot deep enough to wade in thanks to the work of beavers. The area around the wading spot was fairly clear, due to the beavers ambitious teeth, and I remember the cool water feeling pretty damn good on my tiny body caked with the red dirt found throughout the property. The summer humidity baked that woodland smell into the air, and at that point in my life, everything still made sense to me.
Eventually, one of the houses was complete and the plans for the other were abandoned due to a lack of finances, and my two parents and two younger sisters and I were living the good life of a country home with gardens, a couple of goats, and a woodshed full of winter warmth. My dad handcrafted a little cedar sign to hang at the end of our driveway. At the top he painted "The McMillians," with "Rolling Creeks" underneath in his rambling, reclining manuscript.
I spent a lot of time wandering around these rural creeks while growing up, jumping from side to side of the meandering water, to whichever would branchwhip me the least. I learned to meditate back here, sitting beside the miniature dirt cliffs cut by a tiny stream, counting my breaths and ignoring the world to that trickling sound. The fall was my favorite time, when the leaves swished around my feet and I could see through the naked trees farther than usual. This time of year was always cut short by the threat of trespassing hunters booming too close to ignore.
As I got older, like most teenagers, I preferred to get away from the parents and the home and all the stuff that seems "boring" to a teenager in the country since it's all he's seen for most of his life, and me and my friends would wander southside Virginia in late model cars with illegal inspection stickers and almost empty gas tanks looking for something to get into.
One spot we would usually meander our way around to was a place called Shelton's Rock, a little turn in the Appomattox River deep in the country at the end of a ruttedout dirt road. Here, for some amazing natural reason, a large rock declined into the slow river in a series of steps, creating easy access to the water, as well as a forty foot diving platform at the top. Thirty feet upwater, the river was only knee deep, but for some reason, at this little twist, the river curved around and went underneath this rock, gradually eating away a swimming hole that was bottomless to us since no one had ever reported touching a bottom. Rumor even had it that some folks in the past, no one knew who, had tried in moments of courage to find the bottom, only to get caught in an underwater riptide of sorts, and get wedged underneath the rock as they drowned.
At least once a week in the warm season during my last two years of high school, different assortments of us would ignore the demands for our presence in classes, and waste the day away diving and swimming and drinking and enjoying each other's company at Shelton's Rock. But the world gradually pushed its responsibilities into my young mind, and I found myself hustling off to college in the "big city" of Richmond, me being a naive country boy looking to experience as much as possible, as well as wanting to get away from the "boring" rural life I had always lived. My parents predicted I would eventually miss the country and want to return.
My first week in the city was spent skipping orientation programs with other freaks on my dormitory floor to explore what was really going on around the city. One night that first week, two of these folks introduced me to "the river." We went to a place called the dead rocks, at the edge of Belle Isle, a place my southern ancestors held Union soldiers prisoner in tents. Here, a quarter miles worth of smooth granite rock faces poke up and around still water, in a little offshoot section of the James River, kept for the most part dry most of the year by a small dam of concrete and a lot of brush piles. Occasionally, during high water, these dead rocks get covered, and Belle Isle becomes an island. We went over to the north end of Belle Isle itself, where the river rushes by in rapids, rocks populating the surface, altering the river's flow, creating wild whitenesses, as well as calm swimming spots.
Over the years, I've found myself returning again and again to the river, at Belle Isle as well, as other spots here and there, looking for moments of calm amidst the city life I chose for myself, just as I always went to Shelton's Rock as a teenager, and just as I always wandered back to the streams behind my house as a child. My spirits seemingly flowed with the waters along those streams, into the Appomattox and eventually up to the James.
Well, that sounds pretty corny, and it should because it's just not true. Those streams behind my house, in all likelihood, flow somewhere other than the Appomattox, and the Appomattox itself combines into the James downstream of Richmond at Hopewell, so my spirits would have to have fought westerly, back upstream for a number of miles. But nevertheless, during my life, I've always found positive relaxing moments alongside of running water.
But why is this so? What makes me want to hang around rivers?
I asked a friend these same questions, since he told me he had been battling a paranoid schizophrenia by going to the river a lot. He said we did it because plants and water are better than concrete and steel. That's true, but that still didn't explain why I choose the river over, say, fields or forests.
So I asked myself, "what is the river?"
Well, I answered, it's water, of course, that starts way up in the mountains, almost to West Virginia, and trickles its way down through the state some three hundred miles, basically heading east and into the Chesapeake Bay. Up in those mountains, the river is a crystal clear baby of what it will become. At that point, it is an "uncarved block," a Taoist concept describing the state of nearperfection of a newborn baby, a point where the mind is not yet made egotistic by our manly things. It would be our goal in life, if we were all Taoists, to attempt to return to that state of the uncarved block, back to that original simplicity.
An uncarved block of the James River, born at a place called Iron Gate, where mountains penetrate the open sky, goes about its inevitable flowing. It goes through the Blue Ridge mountains, where the James River and Kanawha Company years ago attempted to carve its meandering nature into a series of straight canals. But the James was a difficult child, and the company eventually had to abandon its ultimate goals and settle for what little damage it had already accomplished.
The James flows past Lynchburg, where men carved mines out of the hills and let the waste go where it may.
In its adolescent stages, it wanders through the Piedmont countryside, accumulating the bruises of eroded topsoil carved from farmland by poor thinking.
It crashes past the rapids of Richmond, oblivious to the murder rates and the state government buildings. Here, it gives me music to daydream and meditate through my own insanities.
It rolls southeasterly, through lands where tobacco farms long ago were carved out of "new" land, but not without the fear of a native hatchet being buried in one's head.
The James reaches adulthood by marrying the Appomattox at Hopewell, where vast industrial "plants" have grown towards the sun. It is here Allied Chemical dumped roach poison into the water in the late seventies, contaminating fish as far away as New York. Here is where my uncle once worked, telling me of companies dumping whatever they could get away with into the river. Here, the James enters the "real world," a New World Order.
The waters become brackish as it grows past the old plantation homes of ancient landlords carved into the landscape, high above the tide and flood lines.
It eases past Jamestown, where the London Company carved the beginnings of a new nation away from the natives already present. Here, the river took its current name, once being called the Powhatan, after an Indian chief, only to be renamed the King's River by the colonists, in honor of King James, but in such a way that the new title could be used to make the natives believe it was in honor of King Powhatan. Everyone simply called it the James after the natives' influence was eliminated by similar conniving methods. The salty tears can be tasted here.
Finally, the James releases itself into the Chesapeake, where it is a physically abused giant growth from its mountain origins. At the Chesapeake, it is far from an uncarved block.
I also was born a tiny beautiful living thing, looking for the most comfortable way to go about my path, but others manipulated me and used me for their own good and took away what I could give them for very little in return. This, I cynically believe, will continue until something bigger swallows me away, my Chesapeake being death.
But the James doesn't seem to worry about it. To borrow a line from the Allman Brothers, "it just keeps on flowing, it don't worry 'bout where it's going."
One of my best friends moved to Colorado a couple of years ago, hoping to get into the music school at the University of Colorado, but he had to establish residency first for affordable tuition rates. After a few months there, he was working a shitty job, had few friends he considered meaningful, and was diagnosed with some disease in his colon. It was curable, but depressing nonetheless. He wrote me a letter about all these problems, saying he wished he could come back and "chill on the river & listen to it laugh and float around some answers."
I had this in mind as I woke up on the morning of my twenty-second birthday with a deep ball of confusion planted deep inside my guts, right where you can sense things. I was disillusioned by the seemingly useless education I was getting, and the superficial people I was surrounded by, and the endlessly futile job I was working at, so I got on my roommate's bike and rode down to Belle Isle, that same place introduced to me four years ago. It was early in the morning, so no one else was around, and I went to the rocks alongside the river rapids. Leaving the bike on the path that circles around the isle, I skipped out onto these rocks, over the holes of still water, over to one large chunk of granite that juts out into the river farther than the rest of the accessible ones. Beside this rock, the water rushed over an underwater rock, and smoothly curled down a drop of four feet between the rock I was on and another piece of granite ten feet over, towards the middle of the river. At the bottom of this flawlessly smooth descension, the water smashed over more rocks, creating bubbling white rapids and a slight mist, along with that comforting sound. I sat myself down at this vortex, shut my eyes, and listened to the river laugh at me and the situations I get myself bogged down in. The river entered me with every breath, flushing out all the traumas I momentarily thought were insurmountable.
And looking back I realize the reason I've always gone to the running water, whether it be a small stream or a raging river, is because it knows what I go through. Just as my ancient newborn mind is polluted as I travel through this material world, its mountain beginnings are corrupted by a lot of what it wanders through. But the river never gets bogged down like I do. It keeps rolling along like always. From time to time I need to be reminded that I should do the same.
________________________________________
Bibliography
Bartlett, Richard A., ed. Rolling Rivers: An Encyclopedia of America's Rivers. New York, NY: McGrawHill Book Company, 1984.
Ryan, David D. The Falls of the James. Richmond, VA: William Byrd Press, 1975.
Seelye, John. Prophetic Waters: The River in Early American LIfe and Literature. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1977.
Woodlief, Ann. In River TIme: The Way of the James. Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books, 1985.

So yeah.
STEAL "James River Blues"
NEXT: Yet another Iron & Wine song, which I think may be the last since I've purged myself of that obsession!

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown - March '11 #4: "Eye Examination" by Del Tha Funkee Homosapien

When I was in the college, I did a 12-page paper on this very song, for a linguistics class, breaking the shit down to a nerdgasmic compound. At the time that was crazy clever, but what with the internet, that's been lost. I'm not sure how you'd be clever nowadays with everything meta times twelve all over the place. But I've always dug this song immensely - actually have the 12-inch single for I think "Dr. Bombay" but to be honest, I don't even know, because all I ever played off the single was "Eye Examination" proving that B-side not only won again but made A-side obsolete in my brain.
I went to college at VCU, which is in the news for basketball glory. Kids filled the streets at campus when they won their Final Four game last weekend, except a lot of campus is like a couple blocks over from where I remember, because they've expanded like fuck, trying to chase off the negro crimelords of Jackson Ward, and expand the big industry of higher education to revitalize the Broad Street corridor around the campus there. Used to be a place called Ivory's where people got shot every weekend. Like seriously, every weekend. Dude opened up with a machine gun one night, and abandoned his hot pink Beamer right on Broad Street. I always wondered if he just ran off or got in someone else's car or what. Seems a big waste of a pimped out Beamer. Ivory's is gone though, as is the Hardee's and the old strip club that was the most decrepit concrete building ever, that got tore down while I was still in school there. Industry is the key to revitilization.
They showed a park there where the students were encouraged to celebrate, but none of them really filled the park, which was odd to me and my wife because when we went everybody hung out there, including the homeless. But the school took over the park - Monroe Park - and put benches with center armrests to keep people from sittin' sideways on them, and put a campus cop shop in the center gazebo-like building. I guess no one goes there anymore, like it's a red zone of unlounging and the kids preferred to fill the asphalt going around it. That park is where I first met my wife. I was high on acid. That's college.
My linguistics paper on Del's B-side song that won again, I really was proud of it, more so than most things I did in college. I still have the word processor I wrote it on, but the thing is broke, and you can't use those disks from one to the other without them being reformatted, but I still have a box of those disks from that word processor. I have in that box about 80 pages on a novel I wrote about some coked out ambulance EMT guy who was stealing tattooed skins off of dead people, and there was this background uprising going on where naked people with torches - like hundreds of them - would just storm through at times like a tsunami wave of feral humanity. The novel really sucked, and I got sick of the main character, and didn't want to hang out with him anymore. I wish I could see what he's been up to, locked up in those obsolete word processor disks all these years. I wonder if he ever finished making his wall-hanging?
STEAL "Eye Examination"
NEXT: You can run but you can never hide, not even when you are concealed!

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown - February '11 #7: "Barefoot By The Cherry Tree" by Chris Robinson

The CD this comes off of is New Earth Mud or something like that, and I imagine when Chris Robinson of The Black Crowes was a sophomore in college, and liked to skip his World History class to go to the park and play his acoustic guitar, he wrote most of these songs for Kate Hudson, who was in his Southern Literature class, and they googly eyed each other when they noticed they both were really into Flannery O'Connor. Usually Chris Robinson was more into playing guitar during the day and hanging with his buds in Theta Chi at night. Robinson could get in a zone on the foozball table, especially because he was usually sipping on Sierra Nevadas while everyone else was pounding Natural Lights. And don't get it twisted... he'd drink a Natty Light too, it's just he figured if he was gonna get a drinking buzz on, he wanted it to be clean. But Kate Hudson didn't really run those same circles, at least not then. The next year, when she was a sophomore and he was a junior, that's when she started showing up at parties, and they hit it off and would do X and hang out talking until the sun came up, sitting cross-legged on the 2x4 frame bed nailed up halfway in the corner of his room. She thought it was neat he had painted the walls so dark and put those glow-in-the-dark stars and moons all over the wall, but just in that one corner, so they'd light up under a black light. She was the first girl he'd ever met that knew anything more about the Beat writers than Jack Kerouac, and they would talk about Gary Snyder and joke about playing yabyum, which was their nerdy well-read way of chewing around the sexual tension, but on the edges of it, both of them afraid to scare the other away. You know how things are.
So Chris Robinson would blow off World History class, once in a while at first, but eventually every Tuesday or Thursday afternoon when it was sunny enough, to go sit out in the park on the other side of the athletic complex, just off official campus grounds, and write songs on his guitar about Kate Hudson. Some of his Theta Chi stoner buddies would show up sometimes, playing hacky sack, talking about going to Merlefest next year, but all Chris Robinson would want to do was write songs about Kate Hudson.
Eventually, they got married, had kids, shit screwed up, got divorced. He was briefly addicted to heroin but does a lot of yoga now. She's fucking an MMA fighter from Belize. Their two children are raised by an assortment of caretakers and nannies, most lovingly by a 44-year-old black woman from Liberia. But they're not her kids. You can tell it affects the kids. They don't even know this song exists.
STEAL "Barefoot By The Cherry Tree"
NEXT: A pharmaceutical anthem!