#355

"Now listen/look here you son of a bitch/BITCH--"

That's always the sign that a threshold crossed, here in America. A trespass flagged. In response, we go straight for the mother/bloodline/patriarchal brainwashing, but first, we draw the attention of the trespasser and we choose a hook sense--a little modifier that can mean a lot about the situation and the speaker. Our local preoccupation with the word "bitch", a love affair that stretches back several decades and doesn't look to be losing any heat, is a whole other can of bitches.

Jokes aside, patriarchal brainwashing can parenthetize the whole preceding, it seems to me.

Cool! That's all I have to say about that today. Next item of business:

FACTUALLY MUSICAL 2023 

VOLUME FOUR

[unchain the sex machine]

*

Would it have been funny to say "unchain the sex machine, bitch?" Perhaps [unchain the sex machine (bitch)], that's what I originally thought of. Well, no way in fuck is it funny like this! I also thought about doing "...patriarchal brainwashing[mother/bloodline]" because it is more precise, but it reads better as is. 

*

So there had been a pile of nailed-together rotted shit that'd called itself a deck for ten years, and we as a familial household had agreed as a courtesy. My dad had decided this was the summer something got done about it. He's gotten a book about building your own deck from the orange-themed home improvement superstore--overkill, since we'e just refurbishing, but more is better, after all. He's got lumber and tools. He's got a son that has proven degenerate, a drug-addled, sex-crazed, aberrant and out-of-control college-ditching pile of feral reactions. In his masculine wisdom, he knows to aim for several birds with each stone cast. The labor will fall to me, under his expert direction. Even if it doesn't get my head straight, which it might (dudes are weird), he'll have done his part, won't have strained his ass, and by hook or crook, the deck will get done.

Summer 2009 was real hot and sunny, which was good. I wanted it blazing down on me without pause the whole time I was out there. I wanted it to lay me low if it could, knock me on my ass, kill me on the spot. Failing that, as I knew it would and made even more spiteful by the knowledge, I wanted to sweat. I wanted to sweat till I couldn't wear a shirt, till it rolled off my nose in fat drops and I was acclimated to the stinging in my eyes.

Clawing nails out of rotten lumber so I could tear it down board by board, getting underneath the fucker to shore it up and replace the rotten supports with fresh new ones, scraping the old paint off the entire thing, hammering in the new lumber, building benches that formed a barrier around the platform instead of the former railing the weather had already mostly destroyed, taking out a worm-and-ant-eaten decorative pillar attached to where the corner of part of the condo overhung the deck, and finally repainting the entire mess with primer and two coats. The whole time, my old silver 160GB iPod that had been my eighteenth birthday present played through my old silver Bose wraparounds that had been my first purchase with my own money from working a job after I'd turned eighteen played me my music, the music I needed at that time. I was going to be twenty that autumn. 

Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, Tampa Red, Ma Rainey, Blind Willie McTell, Charley Patton, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Lightning Hopkins. Some others that escape me at the moment and which I haven't yet put on my iMusic, although my mom did recently find my old music files--gigs of the stuff--which should have it all and who knows what else I've forgotten. Out of that, I depended mostly Johnson, Muddy, and Red. Woulda listened to John Lee Hooker, but I didn't have any of his stuff in my posession then. I listened to The Mountain Goats, too, but that was about it. Tried listening to other stuff like Red Hot Chili Peppers and Beethoven and whatever else, tried, but couldn't. All pretty much hateful to me. Empty. False coin. 

All I wanted was them Blues. 

*

It was a hard summer. I felt so fucked up. I had crashed and I didn't know what I wanted to do next or if I wanted anything at all. Being in my parent's house was chafing, but egress seemed impossible. When I wasn't working on the deck I'd go to the library at the community college under my mom's orders to keep my mind alive and see if I could think about preparing to take classes there. Read a cool book of all kinds of essays about The Iliad. Read a textbook on electrical engineering. Read Thomas Wolfe's You Can't Go Home Again, since it seemed relevant at that particular moment (it kind of wasn't, but it was a pretty good book).Wrote some poems. Stared out the skylights and listened to the Blues.

Finished learning to drive that summer. That fucking sucked, but at least the test was easy and I didn't have to take classes as a teenager. I hadn't learned to drive yet because not only did I bail on my parents teaching me because I couldn't handle it emotionally (because of their mishandled emotions), but I concluded also that if motherfuckers tried to make me sit in any more classes I was going to lose touch with reality completely and start gnawing on things--objects, other people, my own limbs--and screaming incessantly at the highest possible pitch if anyone dared disoccupy my mouth. 

Let me say this, to clarify unnecessarily: I had a very hard time being a teenager. I know most of us do. I know some of us die from it. I understand; in this life I have all but kissed death on the mouth.

In this life, I have been a stranger in a strange land, always, more stranger in more lands, even the land of time, border crossing after border crossing, visa passport greencard hullaballoo, bilingual alien both ways, stranger can't go home again, stranger sees what others can't, can be hurt by what others can't perceive, homebody has no home. Never did I feel it all more completely up to that point than working on that deck under the pulsing sunlight, with a life that I had purposefully crumpled up and tossed at my own feet.

It wouldn't be the last time, and it would be a lot worse some of the subsequent times, but I was just a boy. How was I to know? That one felt like the big one, and one of the only things I could hang onto was the Blues.

*

Guess that's one of the ways I know and feel myself to be American in the U.S.A. brand of it in a sense that is inviolable and legitimate. Legitimacy concerns immigrants greatly, perhaps overpoweringly. It follows that authenticity and identity are also huge concerns. This is 101 stuff, very entry level, but I want to afford as many entry points as possible that are straightforward because I'm gonna say some very complicated stuff today, sometimes plainly and sometimes obliquely, and I'm hoping to maximize my chances of being understood. 

*

The Mountain Goats led me to Robert Johnson when I was sixteen, closing in on seventeen. On Nothing For Juice, they cover "Hellhound on My Trail", one of my favorite covers of all time. The Johnson version is one of my favorite songs of all time. Many times I have salted the miles I walked with both versions, keeping moving, needing to keep moving.

It's the kind of writing and composition that I like. A variation strong enough to stand out and still be rooted in the core concept. And it haunts. It worries the footsteps. It is what it says. It tells a strained and off-center truth, and there's no escaping once you've heard it. Maybe it just tells you something you've always known.

Once I'd found Robert Johnson, the local library had me covered with a bunch of CD's, as they could so reliably be counted on to do; bluegrass, metal, or seventies funk. More from the Delta, Texas, Chicago, New Orleans, Florida--all these places had their old blues down in the dirt, and I went for it. Around this time I read that Chuck Klosterman essay where he talks about how the old acoustic scratchy recordings put him and a friend to sleep, but not being a sleepy person at all and less so when listening to any music unless I'm exhausted to the point of surrender, I could not relate. There was something there. I didn't get it yet, didn't fully understand why I liked what I was hearing so much, in the strum and thump of it, in the way the words came, the cadence, the tricks on the strings so subtle but changing everything one song to the next. Deeper, though, there was something pure and inviolable but also, again, down in the dirt there. It was a beauty that came from damage, from pain. It was a wholeness that came from being broken. I know what it is now and can name it easy, and if you don't know, look it up: that shit had duende. Duende up the ass. A deep and singular vein of the stuff. 

*

While I was still actually attending college my buddy (all the way back from the very first post! That buddy! Hahaha) and I discovered a shared love of the Delta, of Robert Johnson. His big Johnson song was "Terraplane Blues"; I suppose this preference must say something about both our similarities and differences. Through time and cultural investigations of the kind that make social engagements bearable to me, I came to gauge that he got a lot of his music shit from his older sisters, who were part of a cohort that were predominantly nonblack teenagers in the late nineties and whose cultural influence blanketed my town in the aughts. They got to the blues and reggae music through Bradley Nowell's lyrics, he of Sublime fame and the rock star that died at 26 instead of 27. The man was worshipped where I came up, far as we are from California. Take what you will from all that, I have my own feelings based on a whole lifetime dealing with the strange petri dish where I grew up.

At any rate, we discussed the Blues, the genre and concept and its history and philosophy at length, its strength and bewitchment, its power and beauty. Being musicians and at that "DEFINITELY make a project and be in a music thing" age, we even tried to play our own, me on my acoustic bass guitar and he on slide guitar and vocals. We tried to write originals, one of which was some good,  and had a cover of "House of the Rising Sun" that had some merit. Other than that we were kids on the playground fucking around with shit we didn't fully understand or respect quite enough, but that's the unskippable folly of youth. He also showed me Nina Simone and Billie Holiday, which was dope of him. 

So indeed, the Blues had figured largely in things closing in on that summer, but it was working on that deck under the sun that brought it home to me, that made it a part of me that runs as deep as any of the rest. A part of my dirt. Soil where I grow.

* 

The cultural consumption of Blackness, of Black folks and the continuum of what they make to share and stay alive with, is some complicated fucking shit. Some people may have noticed that last post, in discussing pop music, I did not mention a single group or artist composed predominantly of people who are, was fronted by a person who is, or who simply is--nonwhite. Even though I mentioned groups from a few places around the world, from a lot of discrete origins and nationalities, even though being White is a made-up thing just as fake as being Black, and there is great diversity in the sample if you want it, the fact remains the fact--none of them are Black. Weird how that happens. 

How that plays out economically for people, I don't know for sure and that's not the purpose of this inquiry. The comparison between the label Pop and the label R&B is an old one with a lot of words gone under the talking bridge; money and race always seem to be a lot more the question than questions of composition or categorical qualifications, which makes a lot of sense because money and race and music are all real and emotionally loaded for practically every living person and composition, categorization, and classification are real and emotionally loaded for fewer people; I dare not guess the proportion, but it likely favors the former qualifier. To speak as reservedly as possible on the matter.

My point? My position? Well, I dunno about all that, but I explained all that about the Blues because I wanted to offer some snapshots that illustrate the question as something complex, subjective, and importantly, playing out over time. There's lots more to the story! Before and after. 

Guess my point, to strain the term, is that culture is a geography, on which we are all placed at birth. Just like existence itself, we did not make it, ask for it, or consent to be thrown into the middle of it, to be subjected to its inevitable and unavoidable forces. We did not consent to or ask for any of the things that serve to categorize or subdivide us in this culture and the cultures that comprise it. Things just are what they are.

Culturally speaking in this geographical sense, we all have to work hard and break a lot of rules just to see each other. Just for a chance at a glance. Therefore, it is much easier to make shit up to make our own lives easier, to steal and lie and cheat and build walls and mark borders and have wars about it all. It should be clear that a lot of what we grow up hearing about other people is propaganda. Even what we experience about "other" (all) people through the membranes and apertures of culture is propaganda. When I say propaganda, I mean the dissemination of sets of facts distorted in a calculated manner presented as social knowledge intended to homogenize opinion. Homogenized opinion is only homogenous because it has been manipulted to be so.

Throughout history, all peoples everywhere have received and been presented with lies and distorions about strangers when communicating about other places and the people who live there, lies and distortions that hurt all of us. That was just how the world had to be. It hasn't had to be that way for some time. Now it is like that because time has enthroned tiny and diverse ingroups dotted around the globe who profit immensely out of it, and whose influence is exerted to protect, refresh, reinvent, and reestablish those lies as completely as possible. They help each other knowingly and unknowingly. All the while, like soldiers, we die in the trenches while they sip their wine and look fondly on their children, who will send our children out to hate each other for no god damn reason. This also plays out literally with actual soldiers for actual territory. Indeed, we're at about the point where the metaphor and the literal things we are talking about become the same, but they always were: that's the power of a metaphor. 

No way around it: if we want a better idea about what's going on elsewhere, we have to actually go. 

To to traverse unpaved ground and cross borders in culture is a thing not easily done by all. To call yourself an explorer and possess the means to live up to the name even a little isa huge, crazy privilege, even these massively interconnected days. Terrain can be inaccessible, impossible to navigate, impossible to reach, impossible even sometimes to imagine. There are gates, there are unmarked dangers, there are monsters, traps, paper oceans of outdated maps. Most importantly, there are forces arrayed to keep like with like and all feet on preapproved toll roads. And to arrive and be somehwere is not the same as having been born there and cannot be, even if you are not a tourist or a seeker of capital/clout, even if you were brought, even against your will, even if you came with every intention of being the same or even more than born there, however that's supposed to work: we'll find out how and make it work. But it's not how things work. More's the pity.

However, we were all born on the same planet. We might act like that counts for something. Geographically and all.

At any rate, whether we succeed in getting somewhere is entirely dependent on our will to do so, and what we get out of it is entirely dependent on our ability to be receptive and open to information that may destroy our worlds and even our sense of self. You may have to stretch your mind in a way that you would never dream of stretching your body, for you would break every bone in it and turn inside out. 

That discomfort is how we gain ground. That discomfort is how we dissolve barriers and actually get a shot in at the bastards who keep us down with their boots on our throats. Please help each other see this. Not just the people you think need to see it; you too, your friends, your family, again, over and over, because it's not going to be over, not while we draw breath, not while the story's still happening. Because that little precious bit of ground is hard to keep and easy to lose.

Ok. I'll be done. It's simple: if you listen to music influenced by Black folks, and you do, because human music was very probably heard for the first time on this planet in Africa, because American music has influenced music all over the planet and modern American music is uniformly influenced by the Blues, by Jazz, by Disco and Funk and Hip-Hop, and that is facts--then you should understand that a choice lies before you: stay where you are and drink water stolen from another person's mouth, or uproot painfully and go thirsty as long as they go thirsty because you understand that you are kin, that you are in this thing together no matter what tries to keep you apart. Understand that your skin is in the game. So you will feel pain where there was no pain before. So you will lose a lot of comfort that you had before. So you will understand better the kind of world we live in, the kind of people we can be if we try and the kind of people we could be, if we're not careful. 

Is that too personal? Squeamish? I'll share some undeserved pity: literally the absolute least that you can do is put your own mess to the side for sixty seconds out of one day, act like a human being, and see things from where other people are standing.

There is a payoff, too. Just as you will feel pain and frustration and just as you will find that once-welcoming places and comfortable atmospheres become hostile and inimical, just as you will no longer be able to relax the same way you once did, there will be joy where once joy was impossible, was inaccessible. There will be love and peace within you that you did not know was possible. There will be a new world for you to explore, and that world will be bigger and more beautiful than the one you left behind. That is my promise to you, a fucking promise, and I never promise for shit. But I promise that because that shit is a guarantee.

Ok. For real. The consumption of cultural production whose means and products are tethered to racist ideations and inequitable economic and social structures bears with it a call to responsibility. This call may go unheard, it may be ignored. If heard, the hearer can only respond to it with the tools they have, at the pace that is possible, under conditions that they are subject to as an individual. This is a process which may be long and have setbacks. We are all in it together.

One day, maybe, our shared culture can be a reflection of God, a fractal of the infinite universe which is the seed and realization of infinite possibilities in one: an allness which is one and a oneness which is all. Until then, we do what we can, what we must, as we are able, each of us a single scale reflecting the light of an infinite universe on the body of an infinite serpent flying through infinite time. And we are all the serpent, the infinite, and time.

*

Initially I thought this post was going to be a relatively simple tale followed by the proceeding discussion of this playlist I made last winter, but it turns out I had to get all that out of the way plus some stuff written below. You're probably reading this before that, of course, but you, dear reader, might be a maverick son of a bitch/bitch and I don't control you. You might have read the seventh paragraph first, then this one, and now you might skip to the end before reading the eleventh paragraph, and so forth. Anything is possible.

Presenting a brief on that simple genesis:

After living in the same town, more or less, for all my adult life, an accomplishment whose significance is keenly known by children who moved around a lot as kids and were sensitive to the drawbacks (there are, of course, good points to everything, but nothing is perfect, and pretending anything can be causes a huge amount of global suffering, to be frank), I had moved to the twin town. I'll just say it plain: it's much Blacker here. It's WAY more Poor White here. These are not reasons I tried to stay on the other side of town; as outlined in the opening sentence, I fought and moved and worked and struggled because I needed to keep to what I knew for once in my life, I needed to not deal with new geography, I needed to get good at what I'd been at for a while. Leaving for college was a fiasco, followed by a string of fiascos, and through them all I fought hardest for a single thing: one-dimensional geographical stability. Pathetic, but necessary.

Ironic, too, because I like it way better out here, am much more comfortable here. But there was a period after the exhaustion wore off and when the sun was shining down in the summer that was an emotional transition, and while I was listening to all kinds of music at work with my coworker as we washed school buses inside and out (a harrowing task, but one we got down to a science), while I was driving in my own car, I needed something else. 

So I made a driving playlist, which I shall roughly sketch out:

Quite a bit of Ray Charles, one from Dexter Gordon, a couple by The Meters, a few from Bukka White and Little Richard, a little more sizable a sample from Howlin' Wolf, most of two by Hound Dog Taylor & The Houserockers, some Bo Diddley, some Funkadelic, some Fats Domino, most of what Elmore James and Elmore James and the Broom Dusters made, couple songs from Cameo, Eddie Hazel's "California Dreamin'", a whole bunch of John Lee Hooker from his whole career, Louis Armstrong's "Tin Roof Blues", and some of a record that Bo Diddley, Howlin' Wolf, and Muddy Waters are all together on. This brings me of course back to the bunch of Robert Johnson, Blind Willie McTell, Ma Rainey (rather less Ma Rainey streams than was recorded, I note), Tampa Red, Lightning Hopkins, and a substantial accounting of everything by Muddy Waters and by Nina Simone. 

All I have to point out any further, besides resisting the temptation to just list every damn track, is that more than half of these artists were masters in three distinct genres and about a quarter of them could do anything on the planet, including stuff that hadn't been invented yet. I dunno. Maybe I'm underselling it. It just feels like, compared to my other playlists, which I would describe as delicate little wire scupltures or specially curated trash piles or magpie nests or lazy rivers, this one's a brick. It would go through a plate-glass window. Perhaps too much genius, perhaps a dangerous amount of fire. 

*

Couple weeks ago I listened to the whole Alicia Keys discography. I had an exceptionally great time all the way through, and talk about a person that can do anything on the planet including stuff that hadn't been invented yet. I guess that's all I have to say, because this post is too fucking long.  

Damn, what if after all that I was all like "Yo, that Keys bitch can plays the piano like a White man! Bet."

Maybe I shouldn't tell as many jokes as I do. 

*

A last thought in this volume: true intsersectionality, total abolition of all forms of slavery--freedom, the first true freedom our species has known since the advent of land as economic property tied to inheritance schemes--means looking out for and ensuring the safety and the future of people that hate you, people that are ignorant, people that will not change. It means you will have to love your enemy as you love your friend, even as you love yourself. We have had no shortage of prophets, dead and living among us, who have understood this. If you fail to understand this, if you cannot let go of your attachments--as the prophets have proclaimed--you lose ground. You stay slave. You give it up to the empire, to the ruler, to the person who owns the chains, which will stay tight on you and yours and everybody else, including the person who owns them.

Maybe this is a crude and overprescriptive way to describe it, maybe this feels like a lot of responsibility or that I have actually minimized the problem and it is possible even that I am merely stupid and naive. This is the truth as I understand it. If I am stupid and naive, well, I would rather be an idiot than a slave. All I know is I got to die. Also that if I can manage to free my mind, my ass may just follow. 

*

It's officially ended, that's the post, in which I did rather more capitalizing than usual. Felt appropriate I guess, but those fluid rules are among the most bullshit on the planet, we should e e cummings it or stop using terms altogether. I guess that was one more thing. Anyhow but here is the following, which has nothing to do with anything, unless you think maybe it does. Nothing to do with me. 

Being able to see and not hear has made one of my cats crazy in one way, and being able to hear and not see has driven my other cat crazy in a different way. Both my cats make perfect sense to themselves in a world that makes sense as they understand it, but they have a pretty hard time understanding each other. One is a tabby and one is dark gray, and each one thinks the other smells bad in a deep-down way. They do smell different. They both smell fine to me. The both make sense to me. I love so much to share my life with them, to live with them and love them.

Maybe I love them too much and piggyback inferences and connections onto them excessively, but maybe that's just part of having cats.

*

Woo! That's gotta be one of the longer posts. It'll serve for yesterday, and probably tomorrow, though I might see if I can squeeze off a quick one. 

You know what cartoon I watched recently and thought was very very good? Apple & Onion. Wish they made more of that. Loved every little episode, each so good, so taut and creamy. Little cream buns. So much good music, so many good songs, and no soundtrack anywhere! Damn.

Next I'm going to listen to The Coup's whole discography. Yes, I have strapped in. Pressing play on 1993's Kill My Landlord--yes, relatable--ohhhhhhh shiiiiiiiiiiiiiii

--JL