SONG OF THE DAY: El Cuerno de Chivo

Ah yes, the joys of country and urban mixed together, in the tale of the clip of an assault rifle resembling a goat’s horn. There’s a Chalino Sanchez multi-part documentary you can see on Vix, should you be like me and get it to watch Liga MX, and it’s pretty great. This genre of music is such a strange and beautiful one that only could have come from Mexico.

SONG OF THE DAY: Poetica Pedagogica

Whenever I'm around too many LOVE IT OR LEAVE IT types, I wanna leave it. It doesn't feel like home, and even what felt like home ain't home any more, so I get to make my own home the rest of my life. So leaving it is always an option. But then when I get away from all those LOVE IT OR LEAVE IT people, and am around a bunch of other people, who ain't all up in arms about loving it or leaving it, I tend to love it. I guess the lesson is your life ain't the flag in front of the cop building so much as the people you're surrounded by. If you need some real life help, you're gonna run into a lot more people before a single flag comes along. And don't call the cops. They'll just fuck everything up.

SONG OF THE DAY: Yo Soy Norteño

Every day of my life I think about how I need to get better at Spanish. Couple years back I rode the bus from L.A. to New Orleans, and until we hit El Paso, I was the only gringo on the bus as it crawled along the highway close to the border. I hadn’t had a shower since Chicago (having gone to Seattle by bus, then down to L.A. by train since Chicago), and baby wipes in the bathroom wasn’t cutting it. Sat next to this nice bilingual woman though, who said nothing about how I stank, and even shared her George Lopez special on her ipad with me. It was chill.

Where I used to live out in the country, there was people across the road with confederate flags still up, and they was on that immigrant hate shit, I’m sure. I never got that, because if somebody’s taking your job, is that the worker’s fault, or the bossman’s fault? If your boss is hiring somebody for lower wage and pushing you out the door, why are you mad at the other worker? That’s a dude in the same situation you are, out here struggling to survive on this goddamned greedy ass Earth. I’d rather have immigrants next door than confederate flags anyways.

Nonetheless, I gotta get better with mi español. I look forward to be an old ass gringo somewhere where it’s not white as fuck, reading Galeano at a café that makes an ojo negro with cayenne.

JJ Krupert Feb 2018 number seven "payaso"

[y'all fuck with Tego? 

you should.] 

Returning to the mud, getting lost in the weeds; 
soy un payaso estupido por creer 
en la meritocracia; forced english feeds 
perpetuate clown thought - necesito leer 
mas Galeano, mas Vasconcelos, plantar 
pensamientos de raza cosmica en 
mi cabeza (y mi corazon), levantar 
filosofias de Sumak Kawsay; and then 
once payaso del diablo blanco conquest 
of false progress utopian thinking's been hacked 
with metaphysical machete, achieve blessed 
state of less stress, less mess, plus more natural fact
simplicity as universal good life touch, 
getting real freedom means letting go what you clutch. 

JJ Krupert Jan 2018 number ten "el regreso del chapo"

Chapo about to go to trial & I can’t say I glamorize him like some folks do

bc post-modern Robin Hoods built off drug sales

carry a lot of collateral damage

(which ain’t even collateral tbh)

but I do appreciate

narco-inspired t-shirts from the flea market

a sign of not gentrified just yet is the flea market

if it’s a real live flea market

with cayenne mango & a machete man stand

& bootleg futbol jerseys

(a thousand shades of Barcelona)

plz don’t have a pretend flea market

in the gentrified art part & pretend

it is like ppl surviving the struggle

together

commercially

just admit your pretend flea market

is struggle cosplay

the affluent acting as if money is a concern

& that their enabled art is some sort of hustle

I am offended by the glamorization

of tinkersmith makerspacing legitimized

(& generally funded or at least safety netted) artz

more than Robin Hood drug lord myths

I am offended by inequality

so I guess ppl who come from the wrong end of the pyramid

and gold-plated el cuerno de chivo gun their way to the top

do make me happy inside (just a little)

but I’d rather the whole fuckin’ thing

fall apart

JJ Krupert Dec 2017 numero once "traficantes michoacanos"

my love of narcocorridos remains shameful 

soy un gringo stupido 

forever

lo siento

3L R10 P3R3Z0S0...

el rio perezoso

no entiende por que

la serpiente corre

L1T3R4L 34STB0VND 4ND D0WN...

literal eastbound and down,

contemplating "hola, me

llamo Ruben" beginnings

JJ Krupert Nov 2017 number thirteen "el cholo"

No puedo hablar espanol bien, pero hago mi major esfuerzo. Yo uso el traductor de google y libros Eduardo Galeano (en espanol e ingles, lado a lado). Comprendo lentamente, y escribo en espanol aun mas lento. A la chingada, el dio de la suciedad sobrevivira. Escucho demasiada musica nortena a veces, porque prefiero estar caminando por America Central o Colombia o Uruguay o cualquier otro lugar que no sea aqui. Aqui tiene demasiados problemas. A la chingada. Manana es otro dia. (Necesito un teclado espanol.)

V1V13ND0 3N 3ST4...

viviendo en esta

tierra como una

bestia poetica

C0NF3R3NC14 C0N L4S...

conferencia con las

cabras bajo la luna

nueva, mente clara

3L GR4N J3F3 T13N3...

el gran jefe tiene

una polla pequeña;

"chinga tu madre, cabron"

S1TT1NG 0VTS1D3 T13ND4...

sitting outside tienda,

waiting for pupusas in

styrofoam tray to come out

October O.C.D. #2: Hot Peppers & Early Mornings

My wife learns the herbalism witchcraft and knows the Ayurvedic thangs of our inner Constitutions, and lately I’ve found that if I eat hot peppers all the time and get up early when the rooster calls (literally at my compound), I have a much more productive day. I used to think I was a night owl, which might have been true in my younger days, but now it seems if I get rolling early on, I hit the dumpster and get the good wilted cantaloupes for the chickens, and get a good long day at work, breathing in the fine sanded dust of progress deep down into my lungs. At that point, I come home, shower up, and so long as I don’t sit down on the deep ass couch we got from our friends last winter, I am awake and rearing to go for a few more hours to do word things inside the guts of cybertronic machines. It is a great life when these days happen, because I feel like I’m maximizing my potential. My wife told me this is my kafa (of kaffa or kapha of kafka or something... I don’t pretend to know) and I shouldn’t overindulge in either the hot peppers or the super-early mornings.
I have found my favorite peppers are the anaheims. I don’t really eat jalapenos so much... oh wait, I forgot, if there’s serrano peppers that aren’t just green but have red and orange color to them as well, that’s the ones I want most. I like slow sautéing up a little frying pan of hot peppers and sweet onions and mixing them in with whatever we eat normal that night. It does me good. And I have learned to chop the peppers on our second cutting board (one only used for hot peppers) with the plastic bag I bring them home in used as a glove, so I don’t do that thing where you rub your eye with your fingers afterwards and have burning eyeballs for half an hour. Also, there’s nothing worse than cutting hot peppers and then taking a piss and then your penis is burning for twenty minutes like you were wearing jeans with a zipper standing too close to a bonfire with no underwear on, but only right around the spot you were holding it at. Often times I fear I have a yeast infection, and then I remember I was cutting hot peppers earlier, and plus, I don’t cheat on my wife, unless we’re playing Parcheesi for sexual favors.

Sol Cerveza

AFFORDABILITY: Sol tends to be the cheapest of the Mexicanola beers in my local gringo grocery spots. I have often thought of Corona as Mexican Budweiser in that it's not really any different than anything else but it has lots of commercials and it sponsors Nascar (well, Corona sponsors lucha libre, which I like to assume is Mexican Nascar to help me perpetuate this myth in my head that Mexico is a magical, wonderful creature). Mexican beer, it has seemed to me, does not have the natural alcoholic content to get you drunk in all environments, but when it's hot as fuck the skunky nature of the Mexican beer, when properly tinged with some fresh lime (none of that pre-limed bullshit they sell nowadays), is some most proper shit. Which of course, as I thought that, begs the question why the fuck am I drinking it in the middle of September when it feels like the middle of October in central Virginia? Probably because it was stacked up in a center display and was one of the cheapest 12-packs that fit my retarded constantly shifting parameters of what's acceptable and not acceptable. A solid quatro out of cinco. (That’s 4 out of 5, para los gringos.)
DESTROYABILITY: Again, the delivery of drunkenness by Mexicanola cervezerias is questioned by me, but just as I thought that, some cumbia rebajada came up on my shuffle machine, and I realized that fuck it man. If you are already destroyed, beer doesn’t need to overdo it on top of that. Perspective, bro. I am naturally comfortable sitting on a milk crate or driving a vehicle with broken tie rods and mismatched fenders 200 miles with a empty gallon bottle of wine full of nickels and dimes for gas money, so I don’t need the supersonic alcohol content. My brain is probably firing up at around a 0.05 naturally. 4 out of 5.
LABEL AESTHETIC: It is a simple and beautiful bottle, clear to see the piss-cohol contained inside, with a nice white sunbeam dooda thing going on, and that bright red SOL kicking it as well. As a teenager, I did a bit of acid catfishing at night drinking Sols like crazy, so I've studied this bottle with an abundance of hazy attention, by firelight underneath a full moon with the stars above charting my future just I've never learned to read them correctly. Plus they were blurring around under the influence of the blue unicorn four-panel blotter, so I couldn't have deciphered their meaning even if I could have focused and read it like the ancient mariner. So staring into a Sol's clear glass, I not only see the simple Mexican label on a sturdy bottle, I see those memories, of my carefree and reckless youth, which some of those forks left instead of forking right at certain crossroads, they may not have been the best choices. But they got me here, with a mind full of strange thangs, a quiet house with three beautiful daughters of assorted ages sleeping upstairs in the cool fall air from the open windows that need reglazing anyways, and a yard full of country - chickens and horseshoes and tall grass and some broken things and stacked things and packratted things. Thus, whether good or bad, it is what it is, and that's as close to perfect as I can get. 7 out of 5.
CORPORATE MASTER: Sol is Mexican, and brought to America by probable Mafiosos. One thing I dig - and this should’ve been mentioned above under label aesthetic, but I don’t go back bro, straight ahead, always and forever - is the list of countries with it written in that language. That means it’s a worldly company. I hope that with the rise of the Mexican drug cartels, them dudes can at least launder themselves into the corporate world, although I guess you don’t really need to launder money in a semi-lawless land. But judging by the great choices on the La Tienda store shelves, I would assume the Mexican corporation is far superior to the American corporation I am used to dealing with. Hell, it might be making wires hooked up to lead paint with a battery to light up a Rudolph nose as a Christmas ornament. Or it might be making Coke use real sugar because corn syrup is for zombies. 5 out of 5.
OVERALL AMBIANCE: Sol makes me feel good. I am not completely ignorant; I understand that “sol” is Spicanese for the sunshine. But it is no coincidence in my mind that “sol” be sounding like “soul”. From remembering night time acidhead catfishing escapades to meandering down the Rapidan River with my old boss in his inflatable fishing boats after good rains put it all to flood stage, Sol beer is a good-timed beer, pumping up the heart of a good-timed man. 9 out of 5.
TOTAL RATING: 5 & 4/5 STARS!