Southern Culture On The Skids - Camel Walk (Little Debbies)

I Was There

Teeth

Hot and cold black coffee consumed daily for fifty years stains my seventeen surviving teeth. Thank you all, including the ghosts of the fifteen that didn't make it, for your service boys. Much obliged. I refuse to install rich people's fake chops.

Black Eyed Susan Season 2025

The long shadow of Gumby.

Patti Smith - Gloria: In Excelsis Deo

Electioneering

Wolf Alice - How Can I Make It Ok?

Tune-Yards - hypnotized (Live) - Merrill Garbus, Queen of Musical Abstractions

Dreamt I Dropped the Hammer on Damon Hininger, CEO of CoreCivic, formerly Correction Corporation of America

The CEO of privatized, shitty, for-profit prisons. Get the fuck up out of here. His neck that supports his perfectly ridiculous bald head is perfect for the guillotine.

Dwig - Orange Evening

Sylvia Esso

Shabazz Palaces - Bop Hard (Unhappy Juneteenth)

Compliments of KEXP Seattle

When Daniel Plainview Planted Wildflowers

Daniel Plainview was consumed by seething hatred since he "slithered from his mother's filth." His words. On sage advice, and wishing to become a better man, Daniel planted wildflowers in his East Tennessee retirement haven, just out back in his field, attenuating his generalized hatred by cultivating a share of beauty. He tended the seedlings and little suckers, experiencing for the first time in his dark life the glory of god almighty in the process. "The glory of the flower." But thanks to confederate Coloniel William Johnson of Alabama, his eponymous Johnson Grass squeezed from the earth, choking and strangling Daniel's enterprise to death, leaving thick bladed Camboian jungles in the wake. And on account of that predation, Daniel returned to his default setting, which was compounded by these events. Drunken, he swore to stalk as many of Johnson's descendants as he could locate and rape them all to death. This was the nature of his condition.

Beck - Beercan

Pixies - All Over the World

Mormons on Ketamine

Special K's in the Kool Aid kids.

Fugazi - Waiting Room

Sentences from Inside - "I don't have an address for Jesus."

"I know of two pictures where I'm asleep, no shirt, camo jacket on, asleep. Alley also asleep with pink summer dress on and she is holding me while I'm laying her in the back of the Pathfinder. I'd like have these and a couple or four more. I don't have an address for Jesus. If I ever get on a phone I'm calling Daddy and then y'all. When I'm able to I am willing to go to work at Arby's, Wendy's, anything what so ever to get money an help my family. I was fortunate to speak with my daddy. Gangs control each phone except one outside. They have moved me to 24A pod where I sit waiting to be sent to Nashville-Only-Knows, but hopefully Morgan County Correctional Complex in Wartburg." WRL

DEADLY Tennessee Prison: A Look at Trousdale Turner Correctional Center

Leon Russell - Tight Rope - A Perfect Song, Seems to get everything right

The National - Bloodbuzz Ohio (Official Video)

Sharon Van Etten: NPR Music Tiny Desk Concert

Big Thief: NPR Music Tiny Desk Concert

Waxahatchee - "Right Back To It" (Recorded Live for World Cafe)

Draws tears.

Waxahatchee: Tiny Desk Concert

Sierra Ferrell: Tiny Desk Concert

Émile Bilodeau - Ça va [official audio]

Émile Bilodeau - J'en ai plein mon cass [official audio]

Fred Fortin chante Oiseau

Fred Fortin - Grippe [Official version]

Proof of Me

tUnE-yArDs - Bizness (Official Video)

tUnE-yArDs - Gangsta (Official Video)

tUnE-yArDs - My Country (Official Video)

Hole - Doll Parts (Live from Big Day Out 1999)

Tori Amos - Cornflake Girl - Oxygen Concert 2003

Zero 7 - Take My Hand Ft. Lou Stone (Live Session)

Joanna Newsom - Have One On Me

Hell is Pop Country

Musical taste perfectly sets us further apart from each other, and for good reason.

The Third Act

The narrowing of life in the third act shrinks the outer flesh of supposed reality while emboldening the bones of honesty so that all comes clear as death draws near. The narcotic assumptions about supposed realty gradually wear off, revealing the utter insanity of the human species and the wars created by the underpinnings of wars fully chambered awaiting their waging to flags flying. How the species adopt definitions through this patriotism, religion and neo-materialism (like ordering shit from Amazon), hoarding and consumption, silly tradition and assumption, which assumes so much so utterly, so errantly, and so ridicuous. How human interaction fuels egocentric lofts among even loftier regions out of reach, which intensifies the pangs of the desire that distances us from salvation's simplicity. These truths are revealed through observation, suffering, and the concommittant narrowing of act three, dying to leave the theatre.

"Be not like dumb driven cattle." H.W. Longfellow

Alone by Edgar Allan Poe, read by Tom o' Bedlam

Sufjan Stevens - Fourth Of July

Joanna Newsom the Book of Right-ON

Joanna Newsom - Peach Plum Pear

Joanna Newsom Austin City Limits 2012 (Full HD Episode)

The poetess' hands her fingers the talents of two writing spiders dancing across the networks.

Architecture Secrets of the Swiss Re Building (Gherkin) City of London

I have marveled at this structure for years and years, created by what R.G. refers to as "chimps with heads the size of planets," specifically the architectual firm of Foster and Partners.

From So Human An Animal, by Rene Dubos

"Environmental ugliness and the rape of nature can be forgiven when they result from poverty, but not when they occur in the midst of plenty and indeed are produced by wealth."

Timbuk 3 - Just Another Movie

"Now my freedom's bought and paid for,

lights up my living room."

Thom Yorke - Has Ended

My client's water broke from behind the lectern

May it please the Court: "Your honor, my client just sprang a leak." She was wearing blue jeans that would have to be thrown out. I smelled it. The filthy portent of another baby who would would slide from her mother's ninety pound body and require detox before her tiny life begins beneath the canopy of the Tennessee Department of Child Protective Services. My client's wafting filth, her fifth such enterprise. This is Appalachian American Ennui.

Lightning in the Bottleneck

Bottleneck Holler held the Bottleneck creekbed, fed by branches cascading in crevices from coldwater springs inside the Cumberland Mountains. No one dared live in the Bottleneck proper, which consisted of two tapered mountains that formed a killer squeeze, or bottleneck, which formed one of the deadliest places in the woods where we played when we was boys. Legends, (plural), held that one of the many "events" was signaled by an early purr of soon-coming floodwaters that would wash away what progress we might have made by the settler families in the deadly cove. Above the below rained down unionized waterdrops that washed the babies away as the purr rose to the sound of a thousand freight trains pulling ten thousand empty coal hoppers.

Prison Tourism

Maybe I'm too subjective on account of my chosen profession, but I've vexed at what drives subhumans into the world of prison tourism? Prison tourism has to be some kind of indicator of the decline of humanity. I mean people pay money to enter penitentiaries. Exactly who are these people? No doubt they're the gas guzzuling, brain-crippled phat set fixated on serial killers and sick mysteries. But why? Is my astonishment the result of having known too many of these ghosts and their old homes. These are the worst places in the world, for god's sake. I keep coming back to the Why of it.

Ecclesiastes 5:3 - A fool's voice is known by its multitude of words; Ecc 1:18 - For in much wisdom is much grief; and he that increases knowledge increases sorrow.

Excerpt from Conan O'Brien's Mark Twain Prize Acceptance Speech

Wiley Arms Mountain, Wartburg, Tennessee

In the Appalachian region that is defined, not by grant writers or statisticians, but by topography, the vertical becomes the rule, with horizontal the tempering exception.  The rises and falls in the Appalachian nation follow the rise and fall and rise of its denizens.
And, in my youth, Wiley Arms Mountain was a colossal sight from below.
My mommy let me dip my head into the icy mountain water when I was a baby boy and it has kept me nearby.  The smell of dying apples on the ground.  The smell of coal smoke.  My grandmother's intoxicating wafts from the frock folds of her plain and sleeveless house dresses that revealed the black hairs she did not shave beneath her arms on goddamn purpose.  Pork meat.  Creasy Greens from the Emory Riverbed.  Highway 27.  The Cord House.  Coal trucks.  Hollers.  Deep ones.  Mountain Laurel.  That odd sensation that rose when we passed the garage and junk yard just south of town.  My Daddy.  The word, "PENITENTIARY" that I learned so early on.  Shotguns and pistols and more cash money that I have ever seen.  Secrets.  There were secrets in every closet and beneath every made bed.  We mined the hollers to find that dead baby in an empty dynamite box.  These were the tickets torn in two -- I was illegally admitted to an NC-17 cinematic masterpiece that still haunts my many musings.

So now, post modern, post mumblecore, I spend the nanoseconds and half hours reflecting upon "the way things came to be this way."  I now conclude that I cannot ignore the hollers and the shotgun blasts of my youth.  The thrill of the fall.  Clouds came down and misted up the mysterious people who hung tight to the bluffsteep sides of tectonic rises.  I did not then know that I was deep inside the belly of Appalachia.

I would eventually dare to open my eyes under the icy water and look to the rounded creekstones for some meaning.  I would eventually realize that I, too, was in a state of constant change, constant flow.  From whence came the icy water.  I would learn to question the etiology of the flow.  The mountains.  Wiley Arms mountain in particular was my focus.  I remember climbing to a point near the top and being chased away by a large dog with a chain looped around its neck.  What was it guarding?

FORCE MAJEURE by Ruben Östlund (2014) – Official international trailer

Hilarious. At first.

Sufjan Stevens, "Should Have Known Better" (Official Audio)

It's May Day - International Workers' Day

Today is May Day, also known as International Workers' Day.  Celebrate labor.  Celebrate workers' rights.  Celebrate international efforts to create safe working conditions, living wages, and solidarity among the rank and file.  Reinvigorate the Occupy movement so that Americans will never, ever forget how the gamblers on Wall Street gambled with our economy and came up craps, and shrugged, like their anthropomorphic icon, Atlas.  So, celebrate the hybrid socialist programs that saved our automobile and finance industries.  Celebrate Barack Obama, a champion of labor despite the grueling adversity he faces from the right wing of Congress.  Celebrate American workers.  Celebrate those who produce and do not take.  Embrace this elegant statement:  "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs."  Karl Marx

Zero 7 - The Garden - Full Album - a Masterpiece

Zero 7 - Seeing Things (Such a thing as a perfect instrumental)

Eating the poison cows of the Sun God

"I killed my dinner with a rock, hit him in the face, taste the body, shallow work is the work that I do." Joanna Newsom. When I was faced with what I was doing I simply had to quit eating animals of any kind, and that knowlege, though attenuating harm, has made me touch upon madness.

Steven Wilson - Porcupine Tree - Sentimental

FDR's Insight in Troubled Times

"The test of our progress is not whether we add to the abundance of those who have too much. It is whether we provide enough to those who have too little." If civilation is to survive, we must cultivate the science of human relationships -- the ability of all peoples, of all kinds, to live together and work in the same world, at peace."

Elliott Smith - Waltz #2 (Strange Parallel)

Jesse Welles - The Poor

Can't You Hear Me Knocking (Live)

Spring 2025 Out Back and the Clusters of Love

Hunter S. Thompson Nailed It

"Every man is the sum total of his reaction to experience. As your experiences differ and multiply, you become a different man, and hence your perspective changes. This goes on and on. Every reaction is a learning process; every significant experience alters your persepective." Hunter S. Thompson

Nashville Bar Association Oral History | Lionel Barrett | September 19, 2023

My mentor, Lionel R. Barrett, Jr., Attorney. We tried two death penalty cases together: State v. Donald Givens, and State v. Millard Curnutt.

Noir Desir - Le vent nous portera

The Tin Drum - Die Blechtrommel (Tin Drum)

The Hair Dresser's Husband - Danse de Jean Rochefort dans Le mari de la coiffeuse

The story a woman who is terrified of time.

Alex G - Sarah

Mitsune - Roku Go (Live on KEXP)

Porcupine Tree - Anesthetize (from Anesthetize Live in Tilburg)

Elephant Revival - Petals

Calistan

Elephant Revival Performs "Birds and Stars" with The Colorado Symphony

Dinosauria We - Charles Bukowski

The Lillelid Murders and Appalachian American Ennui (Exactly 28 Years Ago - April 6, 1997)

NPR did a piece called "This I Believe" a few years back.  Listeners were invited to recite their core beliefs about anything they chose; love, life, children, work, recovery, and the like.  The encapsulations were recorded for all of posterity.   I remember posting my own account, which dealt with my recovery, as they say, from the ravages of drugs and alcohol.  I wrote that "I believe that there was hope in the passing air of a free fall."  I was wrong.  There isn't.

Anyway, selected entries were broadcast by NPR.  I had heard a range of "beliefs" during the programmings.  All were positive and full of "hope" of some kind of another.  However, Newt Gingrich was invited to recite his core feelings.  I was startled to hear his opening statement:  "I believe the world is a dangerous place."  Newt, who is dangerous in and of himself, then expounded well upon his radical thesis.  It got my attention.  It was the truth.  From the God-damnedest people of all we oftentimes hear the truth.  I've learned this the hard way.

April 6 is the anniversary of the Lillelid murders. 

The world is a very dangerous place indeed.  Apparently Vidar Lillelid either did not know this, consciously chose to ignore it, or, more likely, had fallen under the influence of a very recent indoctrination from the Jehovah's Witness Church.  Vidar and his wife, Delfina, and their two children Tabatha and Peter, were en route from a Jehovah's Witness convention in upper east Tennessee when they opted to stop at the rest area,  accessible from the southbound lane of Interstate 81, near Exit 36.

Vidar was inebriated with the dogma that had been broadcast to and absorbed by the sheepish congregants at the Jehoviah Witness convention.  So, when he saw a group of teenagers, who appeared "lost" in their Gothic appearances and sullen countenances, he foolishly opted to "witness to them," and in so doing put his family in mortal danger.  He ignored the safety of his family by approaching six strangers who appeared, as Newt Gingrich would agree, to be "dangerous."  His sense of judgment had been impaired through the dangerous amalgam created when the weak minded, sheepish congregants are drawn into the vortex of  a powerful cult, such as Jehoviah's Witness.

These possible converts ended up kidnapping Vidar Lillelid and his family in order to steal their van so they could continue on their ill-conceived exodus from Appalachia to Mexico.

 The six youths fled from eastern Kentucky, where they had been indoctrinated with fatuous Biblical chapter and verse from time immemorial.  Which was, in fact, the enabling force-field behind their flight from Appalachian Ennui.

Little blond Tabitha was shot behind the ear.  Peter was shot in the face.  Delfina was shot multiple times after witnessing the murders of her husband and daughter, and assassination attempt of her baby boy, and then run over with an automobile, pictured aft. I have the exhibits in bankers box and within my cranium. Corrupt Judge James E. Beckner and a "hand selected" group of incompetent lawyers then massacred due process of law, otherwise available to these lost souls from Eastern Kentucky, two of whom were teenagers. See, Jason Blake Bryant v. State of Tennessee, No. E2002-00907-CCA-R3-PC (Tenn. Crim. App 2002).
This may seem sexist, even misogynistic, but I hold firm to the belief that the man is primarily responsible for the safety of his family.  Vidar Lillelid failed in his duty to protect his family.  His sense of discretion had been fatally retarded by the cult of religious fanaticism at a coalition of Jehovah's Witness followers.  "The world is a dangerous place."  It is indeed.

This is Appalachian American Ennui.

Neural Flora Neural Fauna - Spring 2025

The bumble bees have been flirting with me in succession on my front porch again. The annual spring tease. I look them straight into their black faces, invisible black eyes. These reconnaisaance missions are becoming predictable. The lead bee enters my intimate space, but does offend, and probably doesn't know that the landing area on my hands has been pre-approved since five or six springs ago. They charge within a foot of me and see I do not flinch, then retreat, which signals the next in queue to do the same, but it's never the same. Ever. I saw one take a hovering shit yesterday. They have faces stained with mustardy Springtime circumstance. They make their way into the house. I quit caring long ago. Wherever they ingress is their business, not mine. Porchwise, the succssion continues with one after another observing me. They know how to look into my face like they might actually like me and then bore holes in my deck.

Andrew Bird - "A Nervous Tic Motion..." - Live at Bonnaroo

Gregory Alan Isakov - Before the Sun (Official Lyric Video)

Gregory Alan Isakov - Full Performance (Live on KEXP)

Milly Raccoon - Marijuana in the Morning

Lunch

She inveigled me as best she could to meet her for lunch, but I immediately declined, explaining, with fake apologetics, that "I don't do lunch." The word,"lunch" itself has an unplesant aftersound. Anyway, when she asked why, it elicited my objection to the global idea of macro-restaurant-lunchmeet culture, describing it in honest terms as two people sitting opposite at tables too small in a buzzing public place, facing each other, jealously muffling their already guarded banter, at my insistence, in order to scramble our pedestrian discourse from peripheral lunch-people, who probably know who I am and want to know more. Where pariticipants briefly read lunch selections from the lamenated lunch menus, filthy with fingerprints, and swallow tap water while having to uncomfortably endure the other's visage from a distance of two or so feet and engage in inane platitudes that matter to me absolutely goddamn not at all. All to the cancer of static noise, and clinking plates and saucers immersed in humish bird-like plastic speech-like noise sprinkled with mostly fake laughter, while some facebook fone woman in the corner giggles like a fucking bird as she contemplates taking a picture postcard of her spring salad, whereupon we then receive plates of lunch for review, scanning for beard hairs while the underpaid and struggling server says, "enjoy," as my forward facing lunchmate lifts the top of her hard bun to examine dead chicken that she'll soon masticate which will require me to occasionally watch her stupid face contort with each x-ray of chomping gooey lunch, while I envision the heavy ceiling collapsing, killing us all.

The Red Shoes

Embedded in this, one of the best films ever, is the Red Shoes Ballet, and should truly be appreciated when filtered through psilocybic contact lenses and tempanic membranes on a wide screen in Dolby with the lights off.

The Night of the Hunter (1955) - A Brilliant Film Classic

The screeplay was written by none-other than Knoxville's James Agee. This thing should be mandatory viewing for all divinity students, wannabe preachers, and church congregants. While this is loosely based upon the crimes of Harry Powers, "a Dutch-born serial killer," who lured women through "lonley hearts club" advertisements from the early 20th century, progenetors of sites like Match.com and eharmony. Powers would then murder them for their money. James Agee'smuted screenplay from these events, formed the basis for the film, directed by Charles Laughton. At the time I was watching this, bearing in mind that I live in Appalachia where preachers are rarely second-guessed by their ignorant congregants, I thought that this was the best film I've ever seen. I still do. The Night of the Hunter is absolutely dark, Gothic, honest, and purely wonderful.

Thelonious Monk - Underground (1968) (Full Album)

Cliff Cash - How I Found Joy Becoming Spiritually Un-f*ckwithable

Rocks

Malformed Deformed Daffodils, Spring 2025

I've seen several of these malformed daffodils, all wadded up in perversion of form this Spring in the field behind my home. There's something worrysome about this. See, I know these flowers. The subterranian bulbs squeeze up these flowers every Spring in roughly the same form and in the same spots in the field. Heretofore the daffodils have been traditional every single year, for decades. So these are alarming in some respects, yet might have a reasonable scientific etiology. A house used to sit, many decades ago, on this piece of land.

Introducing Cliff Cash, Zen Comedian

Vernal Equinox 2025 in Occupied AMERIKA.

In occupied Amerika the clocks strike Springtime to the early morning spit of Thursday's scattered showers. This is the inaugural, first official Spring in occupied Amerika. Cherry blossoms fail to hide the devils in D.C.

Hancock County, Tennessee - On my way to work

How to Know You Are In A Cult (1953)

The Lives of Others

The Lives of Others masterfully explores the intersection of form infecting art, and art infecting a single Stazi human form. Authoritarianism and the arts. Easily one of the greatest artforms ever created. The Lives of Others.

Sonic Youth - Incinerate

Porno for Pyros - Pets

Me Floating Bad Branch Kentucky and Gregory Alan Isakov - San Luis (OFFICIAL VIDEO)

An act of letting go.  Ironic that it took addiction and its evisceration of self-control for me to act like I was letting go, like a dog's dream of slipping its lead and running to the riverbed .  Today there's no need to act like I'm letting go with silly antics like this.  Today, I don't have as much to prove.  This news is almost all good. I realized that I have to take care of myself by forgiving myself and all the others.

Van Morrison - Tupelo Honey

Doobie Bros. - Another Park Another Sunday

Steely Dan - King Of The World

The abolute masterwork from a band named after a dildo.

sjowgren - seventeen

Beirut - Elephant Gun (Official Video)

Pearl Jam - Thin Air

I Am The Walrus (Remastered 2009)