SONG OF THE DAY: Genius of Love (kudzu'd)

There is a local festival of establishment The Arts (capital letters of doom) types called The Tom Tom Fest, making a playful friendly name from Thomas Jefferson, who metaphysically hovers over everything locally, as a spiritual god of sorts. His home was built on a mountain overlooking the city as well, and the stupid university here was made by him, and has very self-important vibes to itself, like all Thomas Jefferson worshippers. It always bugs me though, because the most actual famous Tom Tom thing of the past half century is “Genius of Love”, which despite the Tom Tom Club being a couple of new wave white folks from the ‘80s, it happened during that cross-pollination with early hip hop in New York City, so “Genius of Love” has deep roots tied throughout hip hop’s history, as a classic breakbeat, and was one that DJ Screw spun often on his grey tapes. But another more recent landmark in Charlottesville, no pun intended, is a giant hotel that’s never been finished on the Downtown Mall, where the concrete and steel innards have been so long exposed to the elements that I’m sure it’ll have to be torn down and restarted should anybody ever have the money to waste on it. The well-to-do types who would willingly go to a Tom Tom Festival hate it, and decry it as a blight on the small city landscape. I see it as a wonderful testament to the avarice of capitalism, and a symbol of decay as warning for those who would trust the competence of white men with strong abstract numbers beneath their name (both the abstract numbers and surname inherited from their great grandfathers). I have secretly been filling this hotel with cheaply acquired PA systems and old stage speakers, and me and a couple co-conspirators have been wiring them all, to eventually run into a single generator, which… when the time is right and all the proper “we’re the good ones” type faux progressive wealthy white people are gathered in one of their big capitalized The Arts shindigs nearby, likely for that godforsaken Tom Tom Festival, we’re gonna hook up the generator and blast a slowed down “Genius of Love” at as close to infinite decibels as our ragged rig can get, hopefully blowing out all the storefront windows within a quarter mile. I’m sure all of this is illegal in a multitude of ways, but when wonderful whimsy like that is outlawed by a society that falsely assume it is civilized, then only outlaws will have wonder and whimsy (which is kinda where we are already, to be honest).

SONG OF THE DAY: When I Hear Music

One of the main reasons I don’t get all caught up on “Oh, gotta listen to this new music right away!” is there’s always a false sense of immediacy attached to capitalism, that we all gives ourselves because we act like we’re supposed to be curators of culture when actually we’re mostly just getting tricked into consuming a bunch of shit. There is no must-watch TV or must-see movies or brand new albums we have to hear, and if any of that shit is actually as good as it’s being hyped, it’ll still be around when we get around to it.
I say all this because I had no idea this song existed six months ago. I never even heard of Debbie Deb that I can remember. And if I had heard of it back in 1983 when it came out, I was a little aspiring delinquent metalhead, so I probably would’ve been too cool to give a fuck. But this song did come across my experiential radar this year, and it immediately became a favorite. The 45 also went to the top of the list to acquire, because I could tell that beat slowed down was gonna bump like crazy. And it does. I can’t imagine not spinning this record already whenever I have a slowed down 45 gig. That doesn’t happen often because most people don’t want things they don’t recognize. They want nostalgia or basic, and usually a combination of those two. Shit, even when I was at the stupid local community radio station, when I was getting run off for daring to think I could play records in the daytime, the rock programming manager lady was like “We just prefer to keep weird stuff late at night.” To a basic ass fucker, a slowed down beat is weird, especially if they don’t already recognize the song.
We live in such basic times. We need more Debbie Debs.

SONG OF THE DAY: Wondering

Fences are assholes, and one of my favorite asshole fences, for all it represents, is the fake ass wrought iron fence along the train yard in Belmont, Charlottesville, which separates an old part of the yard with a coal tower where delinquents used to fuck around until a teenage girl got killed there years ago, from the actual still operational yard. The coal tower stretch has been a road for a while and now all these expensive ass townhouses and an "urban living" apartment building have gone up, and the fence keeps everybody jogging along the bike path safe from whatever vagrancy or minimal industry might still be going on in the barely functional yard. And Belmont is starting to creep in closer on the other side as well, from the southern end, with the old office building there being renovated into apartments, and the houses in that part rising in value at a crazy rate. Won't be long until another fence goes up most likely. I find it hilarious to an extent, because all the folks living good comfortable lives for the most part, at least financially, in those new townhouses and all, don't want the industrial blight, perpetuating this myth that all the hard work to have a society is just magically done by unseen elves (the poor) that keep everything functioning smoothly in the exceptional way America was god blessed. A few blocks over, there's a giant mural of the train yard done by a Richmond artist, hearkening back to an older era when people actually had jobs in train yards. There's other murals like that nearby (and anywhere that's being gentrified from old industrial abandonment zone to new thriving renamed neighborhood in any city around America), probably a little brewery that's popped up too, with either the brewery or some of their beers named after defunct industries or local landmarks, pretending to honor the memory while actually just exploiting the ghosts they refuse to acknowledge. I pray that the trickster gods of working folks rise up from the creosote dust left behind from their existence, and haunt these assholes by blowing through that asshole fence. We no longer have wrong side of the tracks, because everything's been settled so long, but we most definitely still got wrong side of the fence, everywhere. One side, you're good, but on the other, you're a threat. And your politics don't matter at all, to be honest. It's just what you're born into.

TH3Y ST1LL BV1LD PR0GR3SS, BVT 1T...

they still build progress, but it 
ain’t for all of us - just the 
high-born who can afford it 

SONG OF THE DAY: #KingButch

I miss doing haiku slams, and being around actual people. I wonder if we’ll ever have that shit again. Used to do them at Balliceaux in Richmond years back, which was a decent environment, before it went down in metaphysical online flames. Often we were the early show, and there was at least once that I think Butcher Brown was the late show. They put out an album last year that’s absolutely wonderful, which is what this track is off of. It’s weird funk/hip hop/all over music art, which is something I miss about Richmond so much – how there’s all these different flavors that are rubbing up against each other in a very weird way, creating new flavors in the process. It’s like cultural seasoning I guess. Charlottesville, which is where I’ve lived for a while now, has never impressed me artistically. A lot of overinflated senses of self, often propped up by unacknowledged privilege. Any art I’ve seen or experienced or been part of was done completely outside the arts scenes, and usually goes somewhere else as soon as it can. Anything within the arts scene tends to be unseasoned, so to speak, and thus sort of bland, even when intelligent or competent or skilled. That’s a hard thing to admit to be honest, because for better or worse, I’m going to be in this area the rest of my life. But I don’t find that much inspiration here, and usually have to go looking elsewhere. I guess that’s why I miss the haiku slams right now – I’m getting older, and don’t want to be completely insular, inspiring myself all the time. I need outside inspirations, other people doing wild shit that challenges and pushes. And I’m not getting it, which means I do stupider shit in the process too, because now I’m working off the diminishing returns of past inspiration.

SONG OF THE DAY: Dead Confederate

There was a dude from Charlottesville, Virginia, who got rich as fuck working with the stock exchange in the early 1900s, named Paul Goodloe McIntire. Towards the latter part of his life, like most people who got obscenely rich, who started being a “philanthropist” to throw everybody off the fact he shouldn’t have ever gotten that rich off stock market speculation. Large chunks of his money were given to University of Virginia, which he attended for a single year before leaving to go to New York and get paid. He also gave a good bit to the city of Charlottesville, most notably in parks and statues, including the giant park that still bears his name right on 250, with a relatively new skate park in there. But the place where his statues and parks came together was what was once known as Lee Park, and now has some other name that I can’t remember but is either Justice or Progress or Biden 2024 or something like that.
The statues he commissioned bear mentioning as a whole, since the entire lot of them have not stood the test of time. The one most folks probably see easiest is the Lewis and Clark monument, where Main and Ridge Streets intersect, which famously (for local activists and concerned folk) has Sacagawea cowered down behind them in a less than honorific fashion, which the recontextualizing of history has taught us them dudes might’ve been fucked out there in the western “wilderness” indigenous nations without her guidance. Similarly, a half dozen blocks to the west, there’s one just to George Rogers Clark, which similarly is kinda fucked, depicting dude standing over top a lot of other folks, including some cowering beneath his great white greatness and whiteness. This one is near where my office used to be so I used to walk up there and sit sometime, but to be honest, this was not an early pick for lunchtime fuck-off bench within walking distance of the office back then. Lots of gardens tucked away on a major full of itself university like UVA. I wouldn’t put the Clark statue park on my draft board, it’s a walk-on that might play special teams, at best. But it’s a problematic statue in retrospect.
The other two statues commissioned by McIntire are far more obviously fucked – a Stonewall Jackson one put right outside the courthouse in 1921, with a giant dedication where folks were flying the Confederate battle flag (as popularized by stubborn idiots to this day). A couple dudes allegedly smashed the angels at the foot of this sculpture, but I don’t believe the charges at all. I bet it was Q Anon folks who did it, but tried to make it look like anti-fascist activists did.
And of course that last statue is the most well-known – the Robert E. Lee monument erected in a park right by the downtown library, where McIntire bought up that block back in the day, demolished everything on it, and turned it into a public park, with a lost cause statue, nearly four decades after the Civil War was over. A local teen activist named Zyahna Bryant led the call to have the monument removed, and other activists began rallying around that. Eventually, self-serving politicians got involved to make a cause of it as well, and the whole thing became a culture wars flashpoint to cause the park to be chosen as the site for a Unite the Right rally in August of 2017. (A month before this, a Ku Klux Klan rally was held at the Stonewall Jackson monument, with strong police protection for the Klan, and anti-racist protesters getting tear gassed and arrested. I’ve got a thing I wrote about that day here.) Unite the Right became known to most of the world as “Charlottesville” because of the bullshit we got to experience here firsthand, which was namely a bunch of nazi racists and fascists openly meeting hoping to at the least intimidate people, but more likely kill a lot of people. They were armed for assault. Luckily, with no help from the government or police – both of which chose to use the “ignore them” tactic, which included police standing down the day of the event – local and regional antifascists organized a resistance to their presence, which likely saved a lot of lives. The day will be known though for Heather Heyer being murdered by a racist in a Dodge Charger, but anyone who was there that day knows many people who were affected by that vehicular rampage, jumped out the way, got hit, or were involved. (Shout out to Tim Sauce, local rapper, who was on the streets that day, and in July, and when he got locked up on separate charges briefly after all this, got to hold a little one-on-one session with the driver of that Dodge Charger on the inside. Tim Sauce is a hero.)
Anyways, the actual removal of the Lee monument seemed more important after all that, but has never happened. It got covered for a while with giant tarp, but rednecks kept coming to tear it open. It’s surrounded by orange fencing and signs saying you’ll be prosecuted, and has been the site of multiple incidents since 2017, that I can’t even begin getting into. Shit, I even had a giant fucking Nazi fuming at the mouth as he was being detained by police on the one year anniversary, yelling at me that he had the duty to dispatch of anyone who went against the Constitution, with a confederate flag dangling out his pocket. An activist poet I know had confronted him in that park, very bravely, up in this giant racist’s face, putting herself at risk. She got a stiffer sentence than he did, by the way. He also was walking free a couple hours later after his arrest, a few blocks from my apartment at the time, after telling me aggressively how he had a duty to kill people who thought like me. Probably relevant is that apartment was one block from where the local shithead who invited Unite the Right to Charlottesville in the first place once lived, and did a lot of the organizing for it. So the shit is all around us, and has been ever since August 2017. That’s just the sediments of history since 2017. The monument itself, not erected until 1924. Lost cause statues were erected in abundance around that time, throughout the south, not in remembrance of southern history so much as to work in tandem with Jim Crow laws and the legalized repression of black people as opposed to outright slavery. The monuments were ominous warnings that ain’t shit changed. So even before 2017’s events locally, those monuments are not meant as a symbol of pride, but as one of foreboding.
Of course, pro-southern “heritage not hate” people have laundered the immorality of slavery in the south’s plantation system through all sorts of means, so that the Civil War was somehow about the freedom to go bass fishing without a license, or some shit completely unrelated shit that pretends slavery had nothing to do with it.
Many places have rightfully, since 2017, tore these statues down. Some were taken down by the people themselves. But the Lee monument in downtown Charlottesville, Virginia, remains – a giant middle finger of stubborn resistance to accepting all people as equally worthy of the basic human rights of life, liberty, and a pursuit of happiness.
After the dumb shit that happened in Washington, DC, the other week, a lot of pundit types have written “the lessons from Charlottesville” and how what we experienced should have been a warning to everybody else. The idiot mayor of Charlottesville at the time, Mike Signer, has even used it to ramp up his media appearances to sell self-serving books and try to further his political career, even though he was entirely useless in fighting Unite the Right, despite activists telling him exactly what was likely to happen. Basically, the political establishment doesn’t hear the people, much less serve them, but also the ragtag pack of clueless nitwits who raided the Capitol building, allegedly as self-described patriots, also don’t serve the people, as a whole, but instead their propagandized core of those who have mutated white supremacy from its foundation into some strange more diverse white supremacy based on the benefits of western civilization, which basically means capitalism, along with believing all the American exceptionalism mythologies. Of course, just like the Lee monument and its claims of being there to honor a great historical figure, these belief systems can give the surface appearance of being honest, but their built on a far more flawed and fucked up foundation.
I say all this as a man who grew up in the rural south, wore shirts with confederate flags on them as a kid, even did a zine for a number of years called The Confederate Mack during my younger edgelord days, in an attempt at that time to “own the libs” or shock the hypocritical suburban kids I found myself surrounded by as a first gen college student. “Own the libs” didn’t exist then, as it was a decade before the internet got poppin’, thank god, because my digital footprint would be a fucking train wreck. (I mean, it already is, but this is after great personal growth and maturity and breaking of cycles.) But I can also say, as a 47-year-old white male who still lives in the rural south, fuck those statues, and fuck that flag. They serve no purpose of good whatsoever, and all these motherfuckers saying “We have to remember our history” the loudest tended to not be the best students of any sort back in school.
The dimwit kid across the road from where I lived for two decades, where my family still lives, he grew from a dumb kid who loved horses to a grown man-child who has a confederate flag in the front yard with a spotlight on it. And when I’ve talked to him, he has that blank look in his eyes of those who have digested far too much nutritionless information, the online equivalent of McDonalds drive-through intelligence, where you think you’re learning new and truthful facts, but actually just getting fed a bunch of shit that’s not healthy for you in any way and doesn’t contain the building blocks for actual truth, just simulations to give the taste and appearance. There’s a growing army of these types, as was evidenced by what happened, and I’m not really sure how you fix it. You can’t just simply “educate” people who already feel like they’ve been educated in a bold and more correct way than you offer. They’ve been brainwashed, for lack of a better term, and unfortunately America’s rugged individualism means folks automatically look at deprogramming themselves of the brainwashing as a type of brainwashing itself. You know, like how actual news is now fake news, and how anti-fascists are known by most old people, including your grandparents and parents and aunts and uncles, as the fascists. Erecting monuments to confederate heroes happened a century ago. They’ve got far more complex tools building their armies of blank-gazed supporters now. And we’re not going to be able to reach a lot of these people, because it’s a century later, AND WE STILL HAVEN’T EVEN TAKEN DOWN THESE STUPID FUCKING RACIST MONUMENTS.

TH3 SH4P3D 3DG3S 0F C0MF0RT...

the shaped edges of comfort 
still cut into the skyline - 
unattainable contours  

SONG OF THE DAY: Te Queria

The advertising dude who allegedly came up with the “yo quiero taco bell” campaign using a chihuahua has parlayed the wealth he “earned” as a brilliant advertising type into a role as local arts gatekeeper, who allows shit he knows about to thrive while shit he has no clue about continues to exist in the margins. The Columbus discovery metaphor of these types, who have to be exposed to good shit, in order for good shit to have access to all the spaces they hold the keys to, remains too true and annoying as fuck. Anyways, he recently posted a nude selfie of himself meditating or some shit, on social media, to show you just how easy it is, at least for an economically comfortable 50-something white man, to remain calm in these trying and terrible times. Also, he is an artist, the authentic kind that has access to shows (because of the aforementioned holding of keys), so if you’re a young physically attractive femme-appearing local artist, look out. I bet he’s got a photography project you’d be perfect for – artistic sexy pictorials taken in his studio. One time, I did a reading or some shit at a lady’s teaching building thing, to “expose” myself to new people. This dude’s ex was one of the attendees, and I was supposed to be excited to meet her, because of the opportunities such meetings opened up. That whole method of people becoming considered valid and supported artists is bullshit, and full of ways for those with the power (like ol’ yo quiero taco bell dude) to exploit that power to their own benefit. So as we burn everything down, I ask you to not just think globally, or nationally, but also burn down bullshit locally as well. Because it’s a lot of shit local that needs some fire.

4 W0RLD G0T BV1LT 4CC0RD1NG...

a world got built according

to specs that may not have been

beneficial to us all

0TH3RS 4CC3PT B31NG B0X3D...

others accept being boxed

into bourgeoisie coffins

with pride - a learned behavior

TR1CKST3R 4CRYL1CS 1N TH3...

trickster acrylics in the

shades of natural blossoms

attempt to recreate wild

CVTT1NG THR0VGH 0LD C04L Y4RD FR0M...

cutting through old coal yard from

Belmont to downtown, watching

gentrification's tendrils

TH3 G3NTR1FY1NG MVR4L...

the gentrifying mural

passed one block from apartments

where people got evicted

R1S1NG C0ST 0F 3X1ST1NG...

rising cost of existing

in an otherwise normal

space occupied by skewed wealth

3V1CT10NS T0 M4K3 R3P41RS...

evictions to make repairs -

gentrifying neighborhood

laundering morality

SONG OF THE DAY: Set Tripping

Fuck it, I'll listen to more Boo Yaa Tribe, sitting in the back yard with the bluetooth speaker dangling out the window, reading about the history of ghazals. Violets and dandelions everywhere, here in this strange part of Belmont, Charlottesville that's not quite Hogwaller (that's once you pass the BP) but also not really the gentrified part of Belmont just yet, though there is a big ass house they're finishing building up two doors down, and the old lady who legally owns this house I'm renting the basement apartment of had a stroke and is in her 90s, so once she passes, who knows what her kids do with these properties. Sometimes the process of old ways dying literally requires old people dying and the next generation not wanting to fuck with all the work of farming or owning places or working on washing machines or cars, and everything has slowly gotten outsourced to corporations for the past 40 years, and we are fucked.

I often think about weird things that academia doesn't give enough attention to, like how L.A. gangs, which were always geographically based, have been altered by gentrification. Are there hybrid gangs now in certain communities, or new truces and disagreements because of how certain neighborhoods were relocated to certain certain aging devalued subdivisions? American culture is weird, because it's sort of like having all these weird little actual cultures underneath the superficial level of no real culture at all other than absorbing the undergrounds ones into the sunlight until you've bleached them of all their microflora.

W34LTHY M3N G3T T0 R34L1Z3...

wealthy men get to realize

their cocaine visions, land scaped

to give them what they desire

SONG OF THE DAY: My Uncle

On the bus this morning, the chill driver stopped next stop after mine and picked up this chill dude I always see on the bus and around town, he explicated to me in great detail how he makes good jerk chicken one time. Anyways, those two dudes sat up front talking about house prices in Charlottesville, how everything was like $300K, and three-storey, and how couldn’t nobody working a regular job actually find a house to buy. This kinda tripped me out because since my separation I’ve operated under the assumption I’ll never buy another house, that because of my income and lack of savings and no family to borrow any money from to make shit happen on a down payment or whatever, that I’ll just rent the rest of my life. It had never even occurred to me that it’s normal American dream thinking to assume that if you’re employed regularly, with no plans of not being employed, that you buy a house probably. Like this was not even in my brain as a reality.

That tripped me further out because I’ve always thought of gentrification and rising housing prices as affecting renters, not home owners. Usually low-income renters are in cheaper apartment complexes, and higher-end renters are doing so from private owners, who own more than one place generally. Rising home costs mean people who are ownership class having rising mortgage costs for the extra shit they buy, which means they jack up rents, which also means being able to rent a place goes beyond what working people can afford and then relies on the market of wealthy students or adults who are partially supported by inherited wealth. The idea of a bus driver or the other guy who makes the best jerk chicken allegedly or lmao me actually being able to buy a house, in the city, that was like imagining a trip to Uruguay next weekend – an impossible fantasy which you think briefly then move on with real life.

Anyways, this song is called “Uncle” so my weak tie-in is that if you have familial wealth, and consider yourself “broke” because you don’t have cash wealth at hand but still have a healthy network of familial wealth, including uncles and aunts you can ask for help, or non-cash resources you can easily access should a financial emergency come up, you’re not broke. I mean shit, I’m not even broke to be honest, even though I only have six cents for the next two days. I’ll still get paid on Friday, guaranteed, and got food enough in my basement apartment, and all my regular bills are current, and I’ll be able to juggle and shift the medical debt collections as well, for at least another month (which is all we do each time). So I don’t consider myself broke even, because I’ve known for-real broke before. I’m living fucking good to be honest. But I hadn’t even considered I’d ever own a house again until I heard them dudes talking about it like that was some shit people still aspired to. Normally I would’ve blown it off as elite nonsense gibberish, but being this was two black dudes on the bus, that wasn’t appropriate. It made me want to have dreams again, but also made me mad at the dream crushers out there who have built this incredible inequality in our lives. Fuck y’all. If you’re one of those people reading this, you’re not broke, so stop acting like it. And support my patreon.

W4LK1NG THR0VGH TH1S SM4LL C1TY...

walking through this small city,

where Jefferson's dreams sprouted

wires where used to be just trees

SM4LL PS3VD0-S0VTH3RN C1TY...

small pseudo-southern city

where America revealed

how it doesn't give a fuck