Existing in New York City: Nothing New in Combing E-mails, Phone Calls, Internet Activity

Foto by tgw, "Looking Down on West 31st and 7th Ave," New York City, 2013
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Say Goodbye to: Johnny Smith, one of the great "Cool Jazz" guitarists.  He hit his high in the early 50s when his Quartet featured a young Stan Getz. Johnny Smith, 90, American jazz guitarist and songwriter ("Walk, Don't Run"), natural causes.
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Spying on Americans
All this current bullshit about the NSA forcing Verizon, Sprint, Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Facebook, Twitter, et al., to let this the biggest of the multitude of government spy agencies and their contracted asshole companies like Booze, Allen, Hamilton secretly record our emails, telephone/cell phone calls, internet activities is really nothing new.  Plus, they are doing this with OUR money!  And trust me it is billions upon billions of dollars.  BUT, the U.S. government's secret spy agencies and their goons have been doing this for decades.  I was writing about our Fascist government back before Chris Hedges quit the NYTimes or Glenn Greenwald figured it all out.  Back before the days of our phony Napoleon: G.W. Bush, Slick Willie Clinton, back during the days of old Pappy Bush (formerly head of the CIA), now an old toddling bastard who's still alive showing you that lying-sorry-worthless politicians can almost live forever on diets of martinis, wine, women, steaks, and bribes.  Of course, they get the best healthcare in the world.

Do I give a damn if the NSA, the FBI, the CIA, the DEA, Homeland Security are chewing over the The Daily Growler's tiptoeing through the phony tulips?  Hell no.  Feast on my ramblings, boys.  Look in the mirror and see who I'm condemning to the "evil and immoral" side of U.S. life.

When I worked hand-in-hand with law enforcement in Dallas and New Orleans, I could almost always tell who was an FBI agent or which one of the cops I dealt with would eventually go to the FBI.  They were usually little guys with big chips on their shoulders.  Sociopaths for sure; but then aren't all politicians, cops, FBI, CIA, Pentagon, et al., sociopaths?

I loved it when our Nobel Peace Prize-winning President stood up and told yet another bald-faced lie when he said his paranoid-schizophrenic spy freaks weren't listening to our phone calls.  Naw, Prez, they ain't listening to them, they're just recording them and running them through one of those "spot the terrorist" software programs.

The head of the NSA, by the bye, General Keith Alexander, is an old Bush administration West Point chump, a child of the crooked Donald Rumsfeld who boosted him from a one-star general up to a three-star general in record time.  Now, due to Obama's worship of the Bush administration's worthless goons, Keith is a 4-star general.  Keith, according to all the pundits I've read lately, is probably the most powerful goon in Washington, District of Corruption.  Keith, being a gung-ho military man is a lying son of a bitch and two-faced to boot.  His intentions are to start more wars.  We, in case you didn't know it, are living in a war economy.  We are still the world's policemen and, folks, that started back with the Eisenhower administration after the racist Southern Dumbocrats turned Republican and floated old Ike into power over the dumb-ass Dumbocrats picking the egghead Adlai Stevenson, the former crooked but slick-talking governor of the Mafia-run State of Illinois.

Have you noticed how gun control is no longer an issue with these sociopathic pricks even though the senseless local terrorists keep blowing away innocent Americans on what seems like an every day basis?  In a war economy, arms makers rule.

I've had personal experience with being spied upon.  Back in the roaring sixties, my wife and I belonged to CORE (the Congress of Racial Equality) and we subscribed to the Louisiana Weekly, Dissent, and Paul Sweezy's openly Marxist Monthly Review.  Old J. Edgar "Crossdressing" Hoover spied on us daily.  Later, my wife and I subscribed to the Peking Review out of Mao's RED China and we had to get permission from the USPS to receive our issues, even to receive calendars and cookbooks from RED China.  Later when under the Freedom of Information Act, we found out the government had dossiers on us...my wife, who had majored in Chinese language and Chinese history in college, had an especially large file.

Spying is a big business.  It's a big business not only in this country but in every country.  Spies are constantly spying on themselves.

I and several of my close friends say let 'em have info on us; pile it up; we don't give a damn.  Of course, the dumbass American people, the dumbest people in the world, lemmings who are letting themselves being led over the bluffs to their eventual demise, keep electing these scary bastards.

As Ralph Nadir told us back decades ago when he ran for president, there is no difference between the idiot Republicans and the idiot Dumbocrats.  They're both equally corrupt.  And this is a truism that one can trace, as I have recently, way back as far as you can go in the history of this White Man's country that was stolen via invasion and massacre from the Native Americans.  We human monkeys are territorial beasts and just like predatory animals, we are constantly due to economic necessity expanding our territories.

Come the next election, the dumbass American people will re-elect most of the clowns ripping us off in Congress, 90% of these fools get re-elected no matter whether we think they are fucking us or not, and trust me, they are all fucking us royally.  So bend over, folks, and prepare to get fucked royally even worse than you got fucked the last time you voted Obama back into office.  He keeps pulling the Bush Empire wool over our eyes and we seem to love it.

Ironically, with all this expansive spying, these goons still couldn't stop the Boston Marathon fools from doing their terrorist deed just as the fool military allowed those Saudia-Arabians carrying nothing but box-cutters as weapons to pull off one of the greatest invasions in military history back on 9/11 when that little coward G.W. Bush started this stupid War on Terror.

Soon these goons will be getting us involved in this Syrian civil war (that was started, I say, by the CIA), which will lead to a major Middle-East war that could eventually pit Russia, Iran, Syria, Iraq against us and our nuclear-war-craving ally, Israel.  This will be the nuclear war our dumbass brutal military goons have been praying to Mars for since Hairy Ass Truman blew away 300,000 Japanese to end World War II, which has really never really ended.

thegrowlingwolf 
for The Evil Daily Growler

 

Existing in New York City: Reading a Path to Glory

Foto by tgw, New York City, April 2013
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Say Goodbye to: Stumpy Cromer, the Stumpy half of Stump and Stumpy. Stumpy Cromer, 92, American comedian and dancer (Stump and Stumpy, DuBarry Was a Lady).
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Reading and Its Aftermath
I just finished reading Jacob Wassermann's 646-page tome, Doctor Kerkhoven, a draining yet thrilling experience.  A depressing yet inspiring feat.  Reading it was like running a race that in a quaint way I never wanted to end yet by the finish line I was totally void of strength to go any further had it so decided to go so.  I'm not wanting to give a book review of this mighty novel; I do however hope the spirit of Wassermann's marvelous way of relating a tale has invested itself in my own humble efforts at churning out a novel (I've currently completed 100,000 words on a novel).  I've got another novel of Wassermann's to read but I'm afraid to read it, Doctor Kerkhoven was such a dramatically powerful book.  I don't dare find Wassermann losing lustre, which is silly of me, I know.

I've read books all my life since I grew up in a home with my hometown's head librarian who was also a published novelist and poet and a brother who eventually became the writer of 30 published books and who was also a successful newspaperman, historian, and at one time a bookstore owner.  As a high-schooler, I worked in my brother's bookstore and as a result sometimes sneaked certain books I desired to read in the back rest room where I'd read at them until I heard either my brother or one of his helpers hollering for me to return to the store and get back to work.  I remember one time while reading a book in the restroom and being caught doing so by the bookstore clerk in haste to heed her calling, I marked my place in the book by folding down a page corner.  I returned the book to the shelves and before I had a chance to return to reading it, it sold.  A day or so later, the person who bought the book brought it back, complaining to my brother that he wanted his money back because he'd found the page that I had turned down the corner and since he had bought the book as a brand new book,  the turned down page made it obvious that the book was actually a used book.  My brother was so irate, he made me pay for the book out of my scant wages.  The book was Mezz Mezzrow's  wonderful book (written with Bernard Wolfe), Really the Blues, the first book I bought in life, accidentally, but certainly not the last book I ever bought.  At the height of my book collecting years, my library contained 2,000 volumes. [Mezz Mezzrow was a saxophonist and clarinetist of what was then called the Chicago school of Dixieland persuasion.  He was born Milton Mezzrow in Chicago in 1899 (the same year Ernest Hemingway was born in the Chicago suburb of Oak Park).  The first line of Really the Blues reads:  "Music school?  Are you kidding?  I learned to play the sax in Pontiac Reformatory."]

Bankers Have Always Ruled This (Stolen) Nation
From my reading of Van Wyck Brooks' New England: Indian Summer (published in 1940):

"He [Henry Adams] had a taste of politics, the politics of the new age, that somewhat disillusioned him in London, for the British statesmen seemed to him highly disingenuous and very unlike the Adamses in this respect; but he never supposed that America would dispense with its best-trained statesmen and cast its lot for politicians who took their orders from bankers." 

"They [America's statesmen] had really believed in the cause of advancing mankind, and for three generations they had sacrified personal interests and local interests to the welfare of the country as a whole.  They had really believed in the cause of advancing mankind, and for three generations the family [Adamses] had fought for the country against the British and against the bankers,--Downing Street, Wall Street, State Street--and Charles Francis Adams, as Minister to England, had foiled the British again and kept them out of war.  He had raised to its highest pitch the prestige of American policy; but the bankers had prevailed in his absence.  They had won the war [Civil War] for the North and demanded their pound of flesh, if they had to kill the country to obtain it."

"John Quincy Adams, who had formed the faith of his sons and grandsons, had had a noble vision of the country's future.  He had hoped to develop the national wealth on a collective, not a competitive, basis.  He thought there was a volume of energy stored within the Union, enough for the prosperity of all: if this could be brought into use in accordance with the laws of science, it would lead the population to perfection.  For this reason, John Quincy Adams had promoted the study of science, while he fought with all his might against the bankers, who stood for competition and disruption.  And now it appeared that science itself, applied in machinery and railroads, had stimulated nothing but ambition and greed."

"Thomas G. Appleton suggested in Windfall that 'a gallows conveniently placed at either end of Wall Street might be useful.'"

And Finally...
From Henry Adams' A Cycle of Adams Letters:

"I firmly believe that before many centuries more, science will be the master of man....Someday science may have the existence of mankind in its power, and the human race commit suicide by blowing up the world." 

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

Existing in New York City: Ruled by Mediocrity

Foto by tgw, New York City, May 2013
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Say Goodbye to: Ben Tucker, bass player; I first was aware of Ben on the Herbie Mann live album that featured Ben's best-selling jazz tune, "Comin' Home, Baby."  Ben with Bob Dorough wrote lyrics to the tune that became a big hit for Mel Torme.  Ben, living in Savannah, Georgia, became a successful businessman and owned his own radio station and club (Hard-Hearted Hannah's) in that city.  Ben was killed when the golf cart he was riding in was hit by a car...Ben was 82.
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The Following Link Is to an Excellently Researched and Written Piece From antifascist-calling.com That Should Piss You Off Enough You'd Quit Doing Business With These Sorry Assholes.  Here's an Excerpt:
Nearly six years since massive financial fraud and speculative market manipulation drove the global capitalist economy off the rails, congressional grifters in both benighted political parties have turned over the legislative process to bankster lobbyists.

Talk about technocratic efficiency!

Last week, The New York Times revealed that "Bank lobbyists are not leaving it to lawmakers to draft legislation that softens financial regulations. Instead, the lobbyists are helping to write it themselves."

According to emails leaked to the Times, a bill that "sailed through the House Financial Services Committee this month--over the objections of the Treasury Department--was essentially Citigroup's."

antifascist-calling.blogspot.com
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Say Goodbye to: Mulgrew Miller, pianist extraordinaire.  Mulgrew Miller, 57, American jazz pianist, stroke. [Go below the Destroying of Detroit to watch Mulgrew with Ron Carter, Louis Hayes and Steve Nelson.]
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Wasting Time With Mediocrity
I watched a bunch of young musicians.  They were all very talented.  The were all abundant in understanding the technology of their instruments and equipment.  A lot of them were multiinstrumental.  BUT...and I'm fascinated by "buts" in the middle of things...it's like butting in to a train of thought...BUT here's my BUT, the music these talented well-learned kids created was mediocre, technical skill without what we used to call "soul."  They hadn't been through the fires of hell yet.  This is referring to a statement I came across while reading Paul Gauguin's criticism of the International Exhibition held in Paris in 1888, the exhibition that gave Paris the Eiffel Tower.  Gauguin in writing about what makes great pottery stated, "So the substance that emerges from the fire takes on the character of the kiln and thus becames graver, more serious the longer it stays in Hell."

I know how the commercial (Capitalist) world loves youth.  Young and extremely good looking kids go far in its world of ideal success.  I watched a profile of Taylor Swift, the current every-album-she-releases-is-a-multimillion-dollar-seller hottest babe in the woods these days.  I watched as she packed huge arenas with bright-faced, itchy, seriously adoring fans, at tops averaging maybe 11-years-old.  As an old musician, I marvel at how audiences for all American music changed when the racist record promoters and agents decided to block the advent of Afro-Americans (musicians who certainly had gone through several layers of hell in their lives) taking over the music of the USA.  And they surely were in the late 50s and early 60s.  The biggest names in the recording industry were Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Ike and Tina Turner, Aretha Franklin, Otis Redding, Sam and Dave, Frankie Lymon, Ray Charles, and on and on the list can go.  And these racist record promoters and agents went to Merry Ole England and found a whole host of white-boy copycats and their bands...and they found, like Sam Phillips said about Elvis, these were white boys who got that American black sound down no matter how phony it was...to these racist birds, it was hard to tell whether these Brit copycats were white or not...or whether they maybe were Negroes.  And thus the mediocre Beatles, Rolling Stones, Elton John, David Bowie, John Mayall, Eric Clapton, etc., were forced marched onto our music scene.  The British Invasion worked.  It brought the 11- and 12-year-old white kids out to scream and foolishly worship these young British foppish white boys with impunity.  Idolic worshiping that their white cultural mores (their parents) wouldn't allow them to show with the same insane (adorational) respect for Black entertainers.

Jacob Wassermann wrote, "Premature fame is often a disease of childhood."  Children as multimillionaires; they've spent no time in the fiery hells of life's kiln.

My Contemplations Lately
Though I still get vehemently mad over the Ayn-Rand antics of President Obama as he goes about promoting anti-humanitarian ways and means (war, nuclear energy, the Keystone "Dirty Oil" Pipeline, putting billionaires in prominent cabinet positions, caving in to the nutjob Republicans (especially those from low-populated pissant states), pushing the poor under the bus, making destructive free-trade agreements, selling our air and fresh water off to the fossil fuel industry (promoting fracking and selling off our public lands to the frackers and drill, baby, drillers--the worst polluters in the world),  I have risen above politics.  Fuck it.  Let these near-sighted Yahoos own the world; I no longer give a shit.  My fellow Americans are true dumb-asses and I hold them responsible for the mediocrity that now rules and ruins this White man's (stolen) nation,

I'm soaking my brain in the wondrous writing of Jacob Wassermann (in particular his great novel Doctor Kerkhoven) and the paintings and writing of Paul Gauguin.  I'm proud to be an artist in the vein of such revolutionaries as Wassermann and Gauguin.  My head is filled with revolutionary thinking and reasoning that I can only realize through my imagination, via going back to the roots of my existence (before I was civilized) and letting them grow into experiences and angles and tangents and expansions that I create characters to relate their meanings and directions.

Some Well-Written Words From My Higher Contemplations
From Joseph Wassermann's Doctor Kerkhoven:

"When people are facing accomplished facts, as we say, the things that happen to them have generally already happened.  Just a wave which has reached them and carried them on.  The movement goes on day by day; destiny matures imperceptibly.  One of its fruits is love, another is death."

"...unless a man can be worshiped he must be trampled underfoot."

"Superior ability creates time, and facility is the result of an orderly mind."

"Is there anything funnier than a person who takes himself seriously?"

"The depths of man's mind are hard to search, the hardest thing on earth."

"Born as we are and living as we have to live, the highest human quality is demonstrated only in sorrow and suffering."

"There are some experiences that remain in our memories like visions, for a true vision is superior in strength and duration  to reality.  They represent not only a restricted time and a specific occurrence, but a universal condition.  The misleading effect of proximity disappears, a comprehensive feeling of destiny remains."

"Every malady of the mind is a form of anarchy."

"Without the certainty of repetition, there can be no growth or progress, no accumulation or unfolding."

"When the cold of heart begin to burn, the woe to those they love."

"Woe to those who inflame the cold-hearted, they will be burned to death in their arms."

Writing not only should entertain the reader, but also give him or her food for thought like the above quotes I've extracted Joseph Wassermann's novel, Doctor Kerkhoven.  This novel, I now must admit, is one of the most difficult yet mind-blowing novels I've ever read.

President Obama and Our Capitalist Pig Rulers
Fuck them all.  Let 'em steal all our money, our homes, our land, our jobs, our savings, our Social Security.  These trickle-down theory assholes who have almost wrecked this country.  Last night (May 28th) I watched a documentary called Detropia about the rise and fall of our once fastest-growing city in the WORLD that has now fallen into ruin.  Over 100,000 abandoned homes and vacant lots.  Factories that once produced automobiles and auto parts and auto accessories now in ruin, abandoned, gutted, moved to Mexico or China.  It'll make you sick to see a city of one time 1,800,000 people now down to 800,000 people.  After watching this film, again I said Fuck these bastards...let em go...let 'em ruin us.  Let 'em follow the Neo-Con idea of driving the dollar down and thus driving our standard of living down to make us a Third World nation, which we are fastly becoming.

I hang my head in shame.  My generation stood up against these assholes.  My generation was anti-war.  We were humanitarians who cared for people rights given under the Bill of Rights, rights now that are totally taken away from us.  What's that buzzing sound above our heads?  Oh, shit, it's a drone coming to assassinate us.

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

The Destroying of Detroit

 
 Mulgrew Miller on YouTube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IitYiuf7nrc

Existing in New York City: Being Literary

Foto by tgw, "In Madison Square Park," New York City, 2013
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Say Goodbye to: Ed Shaughnessy, a versatile jazz drummer who could play a variety of styles especially in the big band sense. Ed Shaughnessy, 84, American drummer (The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson).
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NOTE: There have been no new posts of The Growler here lately due to thegrowlingwolf's withdrawing into his own world of creativity.  He's probably, for all we the staff know, off slunk up in his Davenport, Iowa, waterfront retreat, chugging down swigs of Keokuk corn likker, and writing on the many books he's currently writing on in order to speak his peace before his leaving the mortal coil.  We are merely guessing.  One cannot predict the whereas and whereforths of personalities like our leader's.  In the meantime (or meanwhile) be patient and keep tuning in since one never knows when this master of pseudonymic disquise will again show his masked face on this blog.

thedailygrowlerstaff (most of whom are lost souls themselves)
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Say Goodbye to: Billie Sol Estes, the baby-faced wheeler and dealer back in the 60s who was born in Abilene, Texas, in 1924.  I grew up knowing a lot of Billie Sol's Estes relatives.  He was a member of Abilene, Texas's own homegrown Christian denomination, the Church of Christ, of which, after Billie Sol served a prison sentence for selling a bunch of rube farmers shares in his fertilizer spraying tanks that didn't exist (I have actually seen some of these tanks that he did have constructed as prototypes), he became a certified Church of Christ minister.  The Wikipedia info on Billie Sol is very sparse and deals only with his sins.  Once while my wife and I were journeying over into Mexico from El Paso, I noted there was a huge billboard with Billie Sol's picture on it advertising his loan company (I believe he started one of the big loan companies of the 1950s.  I'm vague because I was a mere kid when Billie was doing his best conning. Billie Sol Estes, 88, American businessman and convicted con man.  Here is a much better bio of Billie Sol: http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKestes.htm

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I had composed a blistering tirade on President Barack Obama as a worst president than his predecessor, the little prick at whose library dedication, Obama said G.W. was "a good man."  Instead, I bring you the following:

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Not Long to Live

It is not death itself that is hard, but the way that leads to death.

Jacob Wassermann in Doctor Kerkhoven

What do you do when you know for sure you don’t have long to live?  No set date but one arriving soon for sure.  At any moment actually.  Signs?  Minimum at the most.  Maybe a sudden swooning feeling.  Maybe a sudden tugging at your chest.  Negligible signs if any. 

Death coming like a thief in the night.  Death metaphors (a thief in the night; a Grim Reaper-like stranger suddenly knocking at your heart’s door) marching with glee through your mind.  You can’t worry about it.  You can’t dwell on it.  Or if you want to you can because you know if you dwell on it constantly you may go nuts and then you’ll lose the fatalistic feeling in your out-of-this-world mind.  That’s one way to challenge your situation head on.  Like driving your speeding car off a cliff not really knowing what you are doing or why you are doing it (like a character in a Walker Percy novel).

You can do that if that’s the way you want it.  Or you can try and wipe it off your mind without going crazy.  That’s hard to do when you know it’s coming.  Wipe it completely off your mind.  Take your mind totally off of it.

Or play constant games with a “bring it on” attitude maybe.  Like play constant rounds of golf (again as in a Walker Percy novel).  Or bowl 24/7.  Or go to a house of ill repute and indulge in sexual marathons.  If you survive the stressful energies needed to perform such games you are liable to a rewarding deep sleep, a sleep so deep and rewarding you never awaken from it.

And sleep is a problem.  If you go into a deep sleep you’re also prone to have horrible dreams.  Dreams of running from death and not being able to get away from it, its hot breath singeing the prickled hairs on the back of your straining neck.  Dreams in which you face monsters out to kill you.  Dreams in which you dream you are living forever only to run into death in the middle of your invincibility.  Dreams that become so mean they bolt you awake in a pool of sweat.  They bolt you awake in a pool of sweat with the realization “your time” is still coming soon.

Of course, you can take the easy way out.  A do-it-yourself solution.  You can buy a pistol and blow your brains out (like Hemingway and Dr. Hunter Thompson).  Or you can take a whole bottle of sleeping pills.  Or you can slit your wrists or slit your throat.  Killing yourself is hard to do unless you are nuts and like I said earlier if you’re nuts you may not even be aware of “your time” coming anymore.  Maybe the mere waiting for it to happen is nuts enough that you would be compelled to go ahead and get it over with.

You can go to doctors looking for salvation.  Or you can go to shamans.  Or witch doctors.  You can join voodoo ceremonies.  You can go to the foot of a Christian cross and plead with the dead Jesus hanging on that cross for a miracle.  “Let me live, please, let me live.”  Though why would that dead Jesus let you live?  He teaches that death is salvation, doesn’t he?  Or you can practice transcendental meditation or yoga.  Neither of which practices have ever saved anyone from death, especially not the TM gurus or the yoga yogis. 

Or you can write poetry.  Stay up all night writing poetry.  Poetry about life.  Or even poetry about death.  About passing.  About transcending mortality.  Through poetry drifting off into a state of nirvana.  Or a state of limbo.  A purgatorial place where you can think sublimely.  Where you can lose yourself in ethereal thoughts.

What the hell do you do when you know you haven’t got long to live?

When those who know tell you, “It may be tomorrow or it may be six months from now….”  “Can’t you be more precise?”  “No.  Sorry.  The only encouragement I can give you is I’ve known of cases with your problems who lived for years….” 

If you only could get a specific date.  I’m going to die in 31 days.  Or I’m going to die precisely this coming May 31^st at 6:30 in the evening.

You don’t want to waste time.  You must occupy what little life you have left doing something creative.  Doing something valuable.  Perhaps volunteering among the terminally ill.  God no.  That’s too morbid an idea.  To walk among the soon-to-be dead being soon-to-be dead yourself.  You think you’d rather shoot yourself than endure that.  So how about working among the vibrantly living?  Work with kids?  Or would you be jealous of their chances at full lifetimes?

You could become evil and wish to take those with much life ahead of them with you when you finally feel your end time is about due.  You could arm yourself to the teeth and go to a populated place and start mowing the living down.  That’s a possibility.  A revenge-type possibility.  I’m dying anyway so why not go out in a moment of glory?  Surprising the living with death.  But then what if by some miraculous moment you lived and were told you had been misdiagnosed and instead of dying you were going to live on for your full number of years?  Then you would be sentenced to die in a gas chamber…or to die on a gurney with a State executioner injecting you with death.

This is the situation I found myself in after surviving a heart attack.  This is the situation I found myself in the day after I left my cardiologist’s office after he had told me he thought I should get a defibrillator implant.  “Why?” I asked him.  “Well,” he told me, “I’m concerned about your heart…you know, only sixty percent of your heart is viable, forty percent is dead.”  “So, what does that mean?”  “It means without this defibrillator device, your heart could just suddenly stop beating.  Should this happen, you would have at the most about three minutes to get to an emergency room….”  “Or what, Doc?”  “Or they’d not be able to get your heart to beating again….”  “And I’d be dead?”  “Yes, you’d be dead.”  “So, doctor, without the defibrillator, how long have I got to live?”  “I can’t say, it depends, you’re not a young man.”  “I know how old I am, I just want to know what are my survival chances given my age without this defibrillator.”  “Two years at the most.”  “And with the defibrillator?”  “Three, four, maybe five years.”

At most five years to live!  To be able to remember easily back twenty-five or thirty years and to realize how fast those years passed makes five years seem like a blinking of life’s eyes.  Five years.  And in five years I wouldn’t be that old.  I still felt like I had lots of life left in me.  I am constantly taking my pulse and my heart beats merrily on beneath the pressure of my fingertips clasped fast against the large vein on the underside of my left arm’s wrist.  My heart due to certain meds I am taking is forced to beat at a low rate, 53 to 60 beats per minute.  The reason I was told was because a rapid heartbeat signals a problem somewhere in my cardiovascular system.  For me a sudden rapid heartbeat could mean another heart attack sticking its ugly monkey wrench into the works in terms of my time left on earth.

My time left.  E.E. Cummings wrote, and I’ve never forgotten it since I read it in Paella Mea now so many decades ago when I was a young and death-defying man: “Time the eater of all things lovely.”  And T.S. Eliot wrote something like that, too, in the Waste Land.  And when I was a singer I sang “December Song,” “Oh it’s a long road from May to November…but come December….”  Yeah come December.

My grandmother, a poet, wrote a poem in which she told the Grim Reaper she would refuse to die in the spring when life was springing forth from the living earth, when seeds were coming alive, when flowers were waking up and spreading their wings, when like coming out of the graves of winter life was reborn.  She didn’t want to die then.  Please.  But when she died, ironically, it was spring.

Fats Waller said, “One never knows do one?”  The Bible says death will come in the twinkling of an eye.  And that’s the problem I live with everyday now. 

I’m sure it’s the same as like being on Death Row.  And I sometimes picture myself as being on a Death Row.  I know I am definitely going to die.  But when?  But if I really did know…like if my doctor told me with a sardonic smile on his or her face, “You are going to die at 6:30 pm on Friday the 13^th of this next month,” what would I do?

To know is perhaps suicide.  To not know is perhaps best.  What you don’t know won’t hurt you.  That old saying just may be the truest answer to the question that will stay on your lips until your time finally comes.

thegrowlingwolf  
for The Daily Growler

For a blistering look at how "following in the Neo-Con footsteps of that 'good man'" President Obama is, check out this site: http://stpeteforpeace.org/obama.html

I don't think any tirade of mine can make it more clear than this site how corrupt President Obama's presidency has been and will continue to be.

Existing in New York City: Oh, Come All Ye White Hypocrites

Foto by tgw, New York City, April 2013
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Say Goodbye to: Deanna Durbin, a great singer and movie star.  In the late 1940s, Deanna Durbin was the highest salaried woman in the USA.  She started appearing in movies as a teenager; one of her first movies was with Judy Garland.  Deanna Durbin, 91, Canadian singer and actress.^[3] (death announced on this date).  Check her singing out: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=inV3RlOTOXM
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Say Goodbye to: Janos Starker, one of the great cellists I had the privilege of digging a lot of as a young man when Janos was the principle cellist with the Dallas Symphony Orchestra under Antal Dorati.  One season as a kid, I attended the children's music appreciation concerts under Mr. Dorati and during one of those concerts Janos Starker played a Bach and a Kodaly cello sonata. I was totally impressed and for several weeks after that decided I wanted to be a cellist.  János Starker, 88, Hungarian-born American cellist.
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Say Goodbye to: Maria Tall Chief (she changed it to Tallchief later): I just found out that Betty Marie Tall Chief died back on April 11 from complications of a broken hip suffered in 2012.  Maria Tallchief, born in Fairfax, Oklahoma, on the Osage Reservation, was the first Native American to become a diva in the ballet world becoming first a star with the Ballet Russe and later with the New York City Ballet.  in 1946 she married old George Ballachine, but the marriage was annulled when George threw Maria over for another dancer.  Maria was a beautiful woman and became one of the world's greatest-ever classical ballet dancers.  Watch Maria dance with Rudi Nureyev:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q-qy2Z_j58A
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Say Goodbye to: George Jones, the good ole boy from right near Beaumont, Texas, whose first hit was "Why, Baby, Why?" and who at times in his life was better known for his extreme alcoholism and missing gigs than he was for his recordings.  I found George Jones a fine songwriter and sang a couple of his songs in my heyday as a New York City cult-band singer.  I can't imagine anyone ever imagined George would live to be 81 years old.  George Jones, 81, American country music singer ("He Stopped Loving Her Today", "The Race Is On").
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Oh, Come All Ye White Hypocrites
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I’ve already had my say about the Boston Marathon bombers, The Tsarnaev brothers, and their pressure-cooker bombs that killed 3 and wounded (maimed) 170.  The younger brother ironically had become an American citizen on September 11, 2012.  And the older brother, again ironically to me, was married to a Christian woman and was the father of a 3-year-old kid.  I wonder, will one of Obama’s death drones kill that kid for the sins of her father the way one killed Awlaki’s 16-year-old American son, Abdulrahman, in Yemen?  That’s how Obama’s spokesperson, Robert Gibbs, at the time justified that kid’s murder.  This American kid who at the time was living with his grandparents in Yemen, grandparents who disagreed with the politics of their son.  Gibbs said glibly that Abdulrahman should have picked a better father, the father another American citizen murdered by one of those wonderful drones.  [I’m just reading in Counterpunch that there is now a drone base in Philadelphia.  Look out Philadelphians who aren’t Christians but look like Muslims…but wait a damn minute, did those American-Chechen brothers look like Muslims?]

Can you see why I see White Americans as hypocrites?  Hey, I’m White; I know my people.  I grew up in the Southwest among all-White neighborhoods, going to all-White school systems, finally getting a form of relief from Southern White hypocrisy when I attended the first college in the Southern Collegiate Association to integrate in 1956.  Integration meant Blacks could now attend my college.  Ironically, Middle-Eastern Muslim students, I had an Iranian friend in college, were considered Whites in those days.  You see what I mean about White Americans being hypocrites?

Later I lived in New Orleans, Louisiana, where prominent White people (politicians, newspapermen, lawyers, judges, etc.) pronounced Blacks not humans but rather “coons” and “gator bait” and “jungle bunnies” and the worst pronunciation of all, “niggers.”

And when finally, I left the South for good and moved to New York City, due to my accent, a New York City White cab driver said, my first day riding in a New York City cab, “I can tell from your accent you’re from the South so I know you understand me when I tell you what’s wrong with New York City…it’s the niggers and the Por-toe Reekin’s who are our [meaning New York City’s White people] biggest problem.”  You see what I mean about White Americans being hypocrites?

While three people died in the Boston bombings (and, yes, 170 people were injured badly), that same day 50 people died in Baghdad from a car bomb.  Nearly every day in Iraq innocent people die from being blown to bits by bombers.  Check out the followingt:

-->

Documented civilian deaths from violence in Iraq

112,114 – 122,644

Further analysis of the WikiLeaks' Iraq War Logs
may add 12,000 civilian deaths.

This data is based on 31,804 database entries from the beginning of the war to 17 Mar 2013. The most recent weeks are always in the process of compilation and will rise further. The current range contains 10,302–10,666 deaths (9.2%–8.7%, a portion which may rise or fall over time) based on single-sourced reports. Graphs are based on the higher number in our totals. Gaps in recording and reporting suggest that even our highest totals to date may be missing many civilian deaths from violence. See Recent Events for as yet unpublished incidents, and read About IBC for a better description of the project's scope and limitations. 
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Now do you see why White Americans  are hypocrites? (I could say “the majority” of all Americans are hypocrites, though I don't see Blacks, Muslim-Americans, and Native Americans as participating in the hypocrisy of which I'm writing.)  Think about if the United States suffered 10,000 deaths a year from “terrorist” bombs.

Look at the devastation and destruction and death the White Political and Military Leaders of America brought to the people of Afghanistan…the innocent people of Afghanistan who had nothing to do with 9/11…who had nothing to do with Osama bin Laden (a Saudi-Arabian) being in their country…he was invited to Afghanistan by our CIA who took over reigning militarily over Afghanistan from the then Soviet Union who warned us not to get involved in Afghanistan because it was impossible to win a war there.

And look at the innocent victims of our drone strikes in Pakistan.

As irony would have it, today (April 25^th) in Dallas, Texas, the weasels and rats and corrupted ones dedicated the George W. Bush Presidential Library.  I was shocked to see Jimmy Carter there and speaking highly warmly about Georgie Porgie’s benevolence toward Africa.  I never thought much of Jimmy Carter, the peanut farmer/rocket scientist who fucked up tragically in trying to rescue the Iran Embassy hostages, a foolish endeavor that left the gate open for Ronnie “Raygun” Reagan's invasion into the White House during the next election.  All of our White Presidents have been hypocrites.  And now our first Black (half White) President is a hypocrite, too.  Maybe it’s just natural for White (or half-White) Americans to be hypocrites. 

And speaking of hypocrites, wouldn’t you know New York City’s billionaire mayor who can’t stand being out of the spotlite for one minute, came on NYC television today (April 25th) with his shanty Irish police commish to take the spotlite away from Boston (ironically his hometown) by declaring that the Tsarnaev brothers next stop was Times Square where they intended on doing some serious bombing having one pressure cooker bomb left and some smaller hand-grenade bombs left in their arsenal…no one has explained yet how the brothers were carrying this sack of bombs around Boston as they tried to escape the long arm of what seemed like every Boston policeman and Sheriff’s department goon and FBI agent in the whole damn town.  It seems the young Tsarnaev, handcuffed to his bed in a Boston hospital, is taking advantage of the attention he’s finally getting to trumpet himself and his brother as master planners of bombing away the USA with their three pressure cooker bombs.  [Please, I’m not making light of the death and injury these two nutjobs brought to the couple of hundred watchers of the final yards of the Boston Marathon.  I’m merely showing how hypocritical we Americans are when it comes to someone hurting us while we’re hurting so many more around the world with our war economy and stupid War on Terrorism and our stupid drone strikes and our stupid selling and giving away weapons of mass destruction to whichever ally we deem needing them or, in the case of Saudi-Arabia, those able to purchase them.]

We the American people, especially those of us who elected that little criminal privileged prick, G.W. Bush, to two terms as president (whether he stole the elections or not, We the People of the US allowed him to do so without any challenges) and then reelected President “Two Face” Obama again after he had reneged on every “Yes We Can” promise he made in 2008 (he was the lesser of two evils, you argue…so what, he was still evil…and look at the messes he’s continuing to get us into while at home he seems intent to force Republican austerity on our asses) (in today’s (April 25^th) hearing on the murderous effect of drone strikes, President Obama refused to send a representative from his administration to explain his drone-strike policies to the shindig).

I’m sorry, but I just can’t believe how We the People of the USA, no matter how fucking neurotic, frightened, bamboozled we are, are continuing to be led down the path to Chaos by our damn noses by our corrupted politicians and global corporations without so much as a weak call for help, a call for stopping this vulgar shit, a call for the arrest of George W. Bush, a call for the recall of these fucking backwards low-populated state representatives and senators who ignore the needs of their people in favor of the pockets full of cash offered them by our true rulers, the global corporations who have no allegiance to our national needs anymore and whose main vision (as used by corporations) is to go about confiscating the wealth of the world for their own powerful positionings and rankings on the Forbes 500 and their own hoarding of trillions upon trillions of dollars and stashing it away in offshore banks and financial ventures and not paying any taxes on the enormous profits they are making off this war economy.  We are such hypocrites...and by now I'm saying all of us Americans are hypocrites.

thegrowlingwolf

for The Daily Growler

 

Existing in New York City: Celebrating Our Seventh Year of Blogging

How to Spot a Chechen (from The EXiled)
 http://exiledonline.com/spot-the-chechen/
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Say Goodbye to: Richie Havens. I once lived next door to Richie up in Greene County, New York...the man loved to party. Richie Havens, 72, American folk singer and guitarist, heart attack
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Say Goodbye to: Artie White, blues singer...who I knew from his recordings on the Jewel label.
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The Boston Massacre
Do you think the three who died and the nearly two hundred who were injured (losing limbs, some with brain damage) in the Boston bombing would have suffered this foolish bit of trauma had we not been killing Muslims wildly around the world and placed in such a fear society, fear of Muslims attacking us, fear of losing our means of income, fear of intruders, fear of the police?  What if Obama when he took office in 2008 had brought peace to the world...brought our troops home and disbanded Homeland Security (what terror has Homeland Security stopped?) and the CIA goon squads and grounded all the drones and sent out tons of diplomatic corps with open arms of peace, love, and tie dye? In the meantime, look at the next item in this post about the George W. Bush Library being built at the expense of millions of dollars of our tax money (and probably our Social Security pool money) and think about how that little lying prick is living the good life down in Dallas, Texas, both he and his pothead wife getting the best of free health care and being protected to the hilt by Secret Service goons.  That low-life weasel of a spoiled brat boy who never grew up...a weasel of a man who went AWOL and cried behind his mammy's dress when his time to SERVE his country came up; yet, this same little prick sent thousands of military personnel to their deaths and millions of Iraqis and Afghanistans to their deaths.  Too bad this year's Boston Marathon wasn't held down that nice Dallas street on which this criminal bastard lives.

In the meantime, what did I tell ya, Congress didn't pass one god-damn new gun law.  Obama continues to show his Republican side is his true side.
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Look What Your Tax Dollars Are Building: The George W. Bush Presidential Library: This building will not contain any books but will be filled with shit.



Solar Flare (CME) to Hit Helpless Mercury
"Earth was not in the line of fire. Instead, the CME is heading for Mercury: ETA April 20th. NASA's MESSENGER probe in orbit around Mercury will be monitoring the effects of the impact. If the CME overwhelms Mercury's relatively weak magnetic field, it could scour material off the planet's surface creating a temporary atmosphere and adding material to Mercury's comet-like tail." (From spaceweather.com)
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Irony
Ironically this West, Texas, fertilizer plant explosion happened close to the anniversary of Timothy McVeigh (our homegrown terrorist and ex-US Army-trained killer) blowing up the federal building in Okie City using this same kind of fertilizer.  Ironically, also, West, Texas, is only a few miles from David Koresh's compound that Janet Reno ordered burnt to the ground, fuck the people inside.  Ironically also, the ATF is involved in this investigation, too.  This chemical plant (that's what this ammonia-based fertilizer is, a chemical) hadn't been inspected in 5 years (it is also a non-union plant); chemical plants blow: Bopol in India; one in France a few years back; and down in Texas City, Texas, when I was a kid, a boat loaded with sulphur-fertilizer blew sky high killing over 1,000.  But we are hooked on chemicals...we love them and we love our fertilizers and we love our chemical weapons...but the plant executives and officials who allowed this to happen, they're not terrorists...oh no, they'll get bonuses and be excused for their carelessness and mediocrity in concern for their workers and neighbors...hey, it's all about profits, folks!  It's Capitalism at its best and most dangerous.

By the way: President Obama's oil-executive-packed Keystone Pipeline investigative thugs released their report on the Keystone Pipeline (one of the members of this committee was a Trans-Canada executive) and guess what?  Why, of course, they said it was perfectly safe and blah, blah, blah...and now Trans-Canada is flooding the press and internet sites with ads telling how many jobs and how much money this "safe" pipeline is going to mean for our economy (and Canada's).  Plus, check out who owns the Texas refineries where this dirty crude is going to be refined and sold to European markets.  Would you believe the Koch Brothers?  Let's give those two sorry bastards a big round of tax breaks for their giving not one shit about anybody's lives but their own.
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Interesting Statement About Social Security (from tompaine.com):
"...when it comes to Social Security, there is no division between 'old' and 'young.' There’s only 'old' and 'not yet old.'"
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 OH BOY, Here We Go Again: Remember How Vietnam War Started?  WE LOVE WAR!

US to deploy 200 troops to Jordan over Syria war: minister

(AFP) – 1 hour ago 

AMMAN — The United States plans to deploy 200 troops in Jordan because of "the deteriorating situation" in war-torn Syria, Information Minister Mohammad Momani said on Wednesday.
"The deployment of the troops is part of US-Jordanian military cooperation to boost the Jordanian armed forces in light of the deteriorating situation in Syria," Momani told AFP.
He did not say when the troops were scheduled to arrive in Jordan.
"US and Jordanian officials have been in touch for the past two days. It is still unclear if military equipment and weapons will arrive with the group, who will come to the kingdom in the coming stage."
Jordan, a key US ally in the region, says it is hosting around 500,000 Syrian refugees.
Prime Minister Abdullah Nsur told parliament on Sunday that the impact of Syria's war posed a threat to the kingdom's security and Jordan would seek the UN Security Council's help to tackle the fallout.
Copyright © 2013 AFP. All rights reserved 
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Say Goodbye to: Frank Bank: Lumpy on "Leave It to Beaver." Frank Bank, 71, American actor (Leave It to Beaver).
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In Celebrating Our Seventh Year of Posting The Daily Growler, Here's a Post From Nov. 2006

Thursday, November 30, 2006

An I for an I

Me, Myself, and I
Since my transcendental elevation from cynical bottoms to the existential plane of universal mazda—the light bulb, symbol of the Idea, I am seeing clearly NOW almost to forever. Only NOW, because about the past I am confused and about the future I know as much NOTHING as the most vaunted soothsayer or scientist. With NOTHING visible in front of me and NOTHING truly remembered in back of me, I am left with the NOW.

In the NOW, what matters?

For many years I was a professional editor in New York City working in several areas of editing, first as a copyeditor, then as an editor, then a senior editor, then an editorial director, and finally as a pharmaceutical ad editor. I started in editing as a freelancer peddling my wares in whatever back-office temp job I could land—and I temped at some of the hottest publishing houses, magazines, ad agencies in NYC—and I worked so hard and was so easily accessible night or day I impressed directors and senior editors and soon I began to get more work than I could handle. I was on my own. I loved freelancing. And during the seventies, one could freelance one’s way into steady enough workloads, most of which you worked on at home (I had a brand-new downtown loft I worked out of, though most of the time my official office was a special table in a window they had set up for me around the corner at a local watering hole). I edited everything from cookbooks to horribly bad poetry manuscripts to the pompous asinine trumpetings of an old upstate New York rich man and ex-U.S. senator and WWII general rambling out his memoirs before the approaching Alzheimer’s took him under and left him more goony bird than important homo sapien. In my best freelancing years, I made easily $500 a week, always getting a check every Friday, taking it right to the check cashing place where I had an account, cashing it, and heading straight back to my watering hole office for a little successful celebration that lasted until Sunday afternoon when I once again had to come to my senses and start editing on the pile of another week’s worth of work, buckling down until the eagle flew on the next Friday. I swore I would never again work for anybody except ME, MYSELF, and I. Do I hear a drumroll and a salute?

It was all me. My being the important being; my individuality my freedom. And I believed in NOTHING then. I had learned in college as a student of sociology that all was darkness and that only in light did we progress—nights were given over to shivering in fear and alarm and days were given over to being creative, to thinking, to getting ideas, light bulbs over heads symbolizing a light for the coming darkness. Bringing light to darkness is God’s first creation in all the holy books of the world. The more light bulbs you have, the more light you have. Eventually, the light bulb eliminates DARKNESS—and or NOTHINGNESS. Our individual space is our place in the sun. We protect ourselves from the darkness; in the light we are so aggressively idealistic we have to be controlled. “Stiffled,” as Archie Bunker used to put it.

When I was finally tossed out of my profession on my ear, a part of my dismissal had to do with me being out of the modern mode, the new work world that insists we're all members of TEAMS, which, of course, is bullshit, except TEAMS keep workers in line--TEAMS following the B.S. adage that two heads are better than one. What, though, if there's only one light bulb over just one of those heads? That's usually the case when it comes to TEAMS in the corporate structure. They are there to take the individuality out of the worker. I don't like that. I'm an individual; I work better left alone. My line of work demands separation. TEAMS handicap a guy like me.

The irony here is that as a man I love being alone but as a wolf I need my fellow wolves for certain advantages in hunting, which is the main occupation of a wolf.

This is becoming a nice writer's puzzle for me. I've got a lone-wolf-contrarian versus a member of a tribe or wolfpack; one the shepherd the other the lamb. Besides, I haven't really gotten deep in this existential atheism yet; I love the sound of that. It means a believer in NOTHING doesn't believe in any SUPERNOTHING either, only the darkness of pure NOTHING. So when I turn on all my light bulbs what I see is me and all my shadows, the "I's" that behold me through my self--the Id, the Ego, the Superego; those that are NOW.

I said I am writing poetry again.

Coming: the Great I AM.

To be continued as everything is continued until it is discontinued.

the growlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

The Word From Baghdad--The Idiots Were Meeting in Jordan While in Iraq
From the Washington Post:

But Iraqis on both sides of their nation's sectarian divide report worrisome signs that the conflict will soon evolve into pitched battles between large armed groups.
One secular Shi'ite speaking on the telephone from Baghdad said Shi'ite militias were massing in preparation for a large offensive against Sunnis in the capital.
"They had a big militarylike ceremony today for the Mahdi militia, to show their force. They are making themselves ready for something big -- protests, fighting, killing," said the Shi'ite.
A secular Sunni in close contact with one insurgent faction, said rebel Sunnis were also trying to form alliances among militias for a big push in the city against the Shi'ites, including more raids on government buildings.

Our truly dumbass, phony "president" says we're staying the course in Iraq until "the mission is accomplished," his words in Jordan where today the phony "president" of Iraq got pissed at his master and tried to bite him back. In the meantime, Unka Dick was summoned to Saudi Arabia where the Bin Ladens are getting pissed off at Bush Baby is letting the filthy dog Shi'ites take over the country and the only Shi'ites close by are the Iranians--the Saudis are Sunnis--oh boy, what fun we have created overthere. Unka Dick's nose is deep up the asshole of the ruling Saud. We are owned by Saudi Arabia, if perhaps you didn't already know that.

Pappy Bush is now stepping in to solve the Iraq situation with his own study group paid for by, guess who? We the People. Pappy's picking up a staff and a few million bucks to help on his retirement--how old that old F anyway?

Be Glad You Don't Live in Baghdad, Unless You Do...
thestaff
for The Daily Growler

Existing in New York City: We Are a Nation of Killers

Foto by tgw, "Radiating Cell Phone Panels Aimed at New Yorkers," New York City, 2013
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GIVE THREE CHEERS TO THE DAILY GROWLER--as we celebrate our 7th year of blogging...we started back in April of 2006.  Go to the end of this post for a 2006 post!!!
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Say Goodbye to: Grady Hatton, another great old baseball player from the 8-team days of Major League Baseball, an infielder with the Cincinnati Reds back in my early days when I followed MLB and collected baseball cards; passed on at 90; like I say, old baseball players (some of 'em) seem to live forever. Grady Hatton, 90, American baseball player (Cincinnati Reds) and manager (Houston Astros), natural causes.
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Say Goodbye to: Annette Funicello, at one time every young boy's fantasy sex symbol when she was a well-developed member of the Mickey Mouse Club.  Walt Disney later insisted that Annette not show her marvelous cleavage in all those stupid beach blanket bingo movies, though he did allow her to wear one-piece bathing suits.  Annette Funicello, 70, American actress (The Mickey Mouse Club, Beach party films) and singer ("Tall Paul"), complications from multiple sclerosis.
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We Are All Killers

War, war, war.  Hot damn!  Don’t you just love war?  Now we’re beating the war drums for a possible nuclear war with North Korea!  Double hot damn!  Finally a nuclear war.  You know our military goons have been praying to the God of War for it seems like forever for a nuclear war with some heathen society; so why not North Korea?  Those lousy dirty commie assholes; we need to teach those sorry bastards a lesson.  Only problem is, these heathen, commie, bastards do have nuclear weapons.  Of course, don’t dig too deeply into where they got their nuclear capabilities.  They supposedly got their nuclear missile capabilities from Pakistan and Egypt, though I seem to recall a connection between a Swedish nuclear power company and either Dick Cheney or Donald Rumsfeld having something to do with selling North Korea nuclear power capabilities.

God, we love war.  We love killing heathen.  We love defending our allies to the death.  Even to the possible end to all mankind.  You see, these lousy commie North Koreans have missiles with nuclear war heads capable of perhaps reaching the California coast.  Remember last year sometime when North Korea tested a missile and we pooh-poohed it as going up a few feet in the air and then slamming back down to earth a dud?  Why do I remember all these incidents and nobody else seems to?  Is it because I’m an armchair objectivist sociologist? (I like the fact that the objectivist poets (Wm. Carlos Wms, Oppen, Zukofsky) considered poems machines built out of words.)

And President Obama.  What is with this guy?  He continues to compromise with these nutjob Republicans.  Why?  He doesn’t have to.  He’s got the people behind him, though, yes, the American people are fools.  Why fools?  For one reason they keep electing these arrogant, hayseed, backwards-thinking boobs who don’t give one flying shit about the people they’re supposed to represent.  I mean can you imagine these beanheads allowed this bullshit sequester crap to prevail, a bullshit political move that in cutting Medicare has put in jeopardy cancer patients, Medicare once paying for cancer patients to get their chemo therapies at local clinics but with this sequester bullshit now forcing these poor boobs to go to HMO for-profit hospitals where Medicare only covers partial chemo expenses leaving these poor folk to have to come up with upwards of $650-a-month out of pocket.  These Washington, District of Corruption, jerks living the good life with the world’s best paid-for health care gouging poor folks to pay for the economic mess these lying-dog jerks shoved us into with their ass-kissing of non-tax-paying corporations who are hoarding billions of dollars in offshore banks (mostly British banks) so they don’t have to pay taxes on these hoards of money, these corporations who aren’t paying taxes anyway given all the loopholes these Washington, District of Corruption, creeps keep voting their way.  These same creeps who after 21 little kids were gunned down by a antipsychotic drug-taking nutjob kid in Newtown, Connecticut, still can’t come up with any gun-control legislation that might perhaps save some future lives.  Fuck no.  Instead, they hem-haw about as they kiss deep into the ass cracks of the nutjob National Rifle Association and the weapons manufacturing lobbyists who want to arm the fucking world so we can go back to having shoot outs and multiple drive bys and cops mowing down innocent people and antipsychotic drug-taking psychopaths to continue blowing us away on a whim with assault rifles that can fire 100 rounds in a matter of seconds.  But of course the USA is the weapons capital of the world.  We are the world’s largest makers and sellers of weapons of mass destruction.  We are the world’s cruelest people.  We love murder.  We love serial killers.  We love mobs and the Mafia.  We love outlaws.  We love fear.  We love the thought of being given a license to kill.  And we love killing.  Life means nothing to us, not even our own lives.  Look at all the fat slobs waddling around boogie-ing into McDonald’s to carb up on green-slime-beef hamburgers or butt-shaking into Burger King for some abscessed cow meat or maybe glue-factory slaughtered horse meat for all we know.

I just watched a whole slew of George Carlin live on YouTube and oh what a right-on man of wit and wisdom he was.  And speaking of old bitch Maggie Thatcher's death, in one of his bits called "Things You'll Never See," he said one thing you'll never see is Maggie Thatcher strapping on a dildo.  This pinhead of a Brit corruption who thought Nelson Mandella a terrorist and who was palsy-walsy with some of the corruptest assholes in the world, including Pinochet and Saddam Hussein.  This warmongering bitch who was hand-in-hand with old Pappy Bush in starting the Persian Gulf War and who bombed the bejesus out of the poor Falkland Islanders because Argentina wanted to take back what was their sovereign territory.  In Merry Ole England as I write on this they are having parties celebrating Maggie's death.  From our friend Nick Jainschigg comes this link

http://metro.co.uk/2013/04/09/margaret-thatcher-dead-10-songs-about-her-3589285/

And we sing "Ding Dong the Witch Is Dead" along with the Brits.  But then we must remember, Maggie didn't rise to power without the full support of a majority of Limeys, did she?

The Syrian Conflict
I just watched a very awesome PBS "Frontline" program this evening (April 9th) of some brave filmmakers in Syria with both the regime forces and the rebels and Jesus X. Christ what a telling program.  It shows the futility of war; how stupid it is; how dividing it is.  People who once were neighbors are now enemies.  The rebels blame the regime and the regime blames the rebels.  The official word in Damascus is that the rebels are foreigners, terrorists from England, France, Turkey, Libya, while the rebels seem ragtag at best, with weapons they managed to grab from overtaking regime outposts, weapons most of the rebels shown in this program don't even know how to fire.  One weapon they knew how to fire it but they didn't know how to aim it.  Trying to aim it, they were using Google Earth coordinates they were downloading off cell phones.  They had rocket launchers, for instance, but they didn't even know how to fire them.  At one point the rebel commander says they only have 80 bullets left in their arsenal.  There is a sad moral to this bullshit conflict, at the end of this program, one of the defeated rebel soldiers says he is going over and join al-Queda.  Most of the civilians I saw were women and children.
 
Just as I heard on an interview with an Iraqi civilian who said he wished they could go back to the days of Hussein, a Syrian woman on this program was saying Syria used to be so peaceful under Assad.  "We used to could walk around at night without any fear."  "WAR...what's it good for?  ABSOUTELY NOTHIN'"

In the meantime, President Obama is being advised by the same ole dumbass military goons who advised Little Georgie Porgie Puddin' Pie Bush, that little prick who got us into this whole war economy mess we're in, spending trillions of dollars on these stupid conflicts around the world, in war-ravaged and now absolutely divided Iraq; in war-ravaged and innocent-of-having-anything-to-do-9/11 Afghanistan, while We the Dumbass American People suffer, while we lose our homes, our jobs, our manufacturing, our pensions, our public lands, our minerals, our water supplies to President Obama's Reagan/Thatcher-like austerity measures and the privatization of our lives as he allows corporate criminals to do as they please, to go about robbing us blind, to go about making billions off these useless wars, to go about making billions off polluting our air, to go about making billions off chemically and genetically ruining our food supplies [we are letting Monsanto and DuPont destroy our honey bee populations through the use of their pesticides that are 1000-times more powerful than DDT...without bees to pollinate most of our food supply, we'll produce no crops in a few generations.  Yet, President Obama continues to promote Monsanto goons to high-level decision-making jobs in our FDA.  And he continues to promote fossil-fuel fools to high positions in our energy and interior departments.  And he continues to let his White side rule over his Black side brain in order to kiss the criminal asses of the Wall Street gangsters, gangsters who get free rides though their policies (of gambling with our money) that are bringing ruination and more war to this collapsing (heading toward Chaos) world.  Are we doomed?

thebittergrowlingwolf  
for The Daily Growler

Happy Birthday The Daily Growler...Here's a post from 2006

Sunday, December 31, 2006

Old Father Time Is Hanged By His Neck

Here Goes Yet Another Year
I am all alone this New Year's Eve, a situation I have purposely placed myself into. I have no gig again this year. It's now been 6 years since I fronted a New Year's Eve band at a NYC club, a band I fronted for 7 years before one of the star bartender's galfriends, a violin player who had been around NYC for a long sagging bunch of years, a star follower...but I'm growling about a personal disappointment and I'm sure the violinist is no longer the NY's Eve band down there--but that was a wonderful time for me--I was a star then, and, boy, I gotta admit, I love the power of being a lead band singer and the miniscule stardom but still stardom that that brings--and, yes, the babes, ah the sweet women who love musicians, the best women in the world, that I guarantee, to put up with the emotions of a musicians, the depressions, the drinking, the associating, the drugs, the "always" disappointing hopes--it's a hell of an emotional trip for a musician's babe and god help 'em if they marry their musician--I don't give a shit if the musician is a successful musician--they're the worst husbands.

I have the draft of a novel I wrote on another laptop that's still up here above my head on a shelf gathering age, which is told by the layers of dust that have like tree rings collected on it. I fire it up occasionally just to keep it alive to me, but, anyway, in that novel I discussed what it was like being a musician and the problems a musician had with his woman--a horror story, a real horror story, too, a story that only a musician could tell, though most musicians aren't good writers. I must have written 500 songs about my particular horror story with women. [In that novel I talk about a young Viet Namese immigrant who lives directly across the hall from me and who still lives directly across the hall from me and who is into what I call "house" music, meaning it's a kind of mixing--which is stealing the riffs, beats, and actual recordings of real musicians to make a synthetic music that is called house music because it's the kind of shit you hear when you go in a Mafia-run or an Israeli-run dance club or "house" out in the distant boroughs of New York City. Young people dance straight up and down now and that's what this crappy music sounds like, just straight up and down boring, boring rhythms--their tempos never changing--boring, GOD-DAMN BORING. But anyway, he's just fired up--he's really a good neighbor, kept up by a really nice Viet Namese woman who's a strong, hard-working babe, the kind a real musician really needs and not this poor little amateur kid who truly thinks he's Amurican hip by playing his mixes--he told me one time he had over 2000 albums stored over in Brooklyn he made his mixes from--he tried to take advantage of me when he first moved in over there, hearing me practicing and shit he told me, "Hey, man, could you teach me to play a keyboard, I just bought this Yamaha...." Musicians are funny. We don't like to pass out tricks on to kids, especially kids who...oh hell, there I go again, growling due to my own frustrations with being a musician who used to work every New Year's Eve not having a gig this New Year's Eve.]

And that's why I'm purposely alone this New Year's Eve.

And what has been the worth of 2006 to me? I don't know. It was just another year to me. Let's see if I can recap what this past year was...

1) the 2006 baseball season was one of the best I've ever lived through, though as a New York City baseball fan I was terribly disappointed that the two best teams in baseball were eliminated by two rather second-rate teams who went on to perform in a truly boring and who-gave-a-shit World Series won by the Saint Louis Cardinals, the least worst of these two undeserving teams. That was bad; but the season itself was a winner, both for the asshole owners--they made billions, trust me--and the fans. The fans got their money's worth and the owners got much more than their money's worth.

Hey, here's another irony, it was the best year in the Yankees's long history in terms of attendance and earnings, and, yet, the greedy son of a bitch who owns the Yankees had the nerve as punishment for his all-star millionaire Yankees letting him down to announce he was raising Yankees ticket prices by up to 25%. Baseball ain't a kids's game anymore. What kid has $30 in his jeans to afford even a bleacher seat at Yankee Stadium? That means only people with good paying jobs are keeping baseball alive and well--it's no longer a poor people's sport and that's a shame. The only hope for poor people is that they still broadcast all Yankee games over the free radio--I mean, you have to subject yourself to what seem like eternal commercials, everything, even a ground ball to shortstop is sponsored by some sponsor--"Wow, here's hot ground ball to Jeter at short, brought to you by Toyota, the throw to first, brought to you by ConEdison, is, in time, brought to you by Budweiser, for the out, brought to you by the good people at Kay Jewelers." But, hell, it's free and you can be at every damn game, road or home. Of course, if you can afford a $100-a-month and can get ESPN, you can watch the games on television--but for Yankees games that means it's Bobby Mercer as the announcer. [Poor Bobby just underwent brain surgery down in Texas to remove a tumor from up there. Hey, Bobby is an old Okie hillbilly just like the Mick--in fact, Bobby was supposed to become the next Mick but he never could cut that mustard. As an announcer, he's kind'a boring, though the boy does know baseball in a hillbilly sort of way.]

2) In music. I discovered that Charles Edward Ives is the greatest classical composer ever produced in America, and to me, in the world; the most original composer ever. I raise a glass of Moet to Charles Ives--especially his Concord Sonata and his great 4th Symphony and all the stuff, man, all the Ives you can eat in one meal. Damn right, he's worth gorging on.

And then, I came back to pianist Jaki Byard, his playing and his leading and composing, and thanks to thedailygrowlerhousepianist I got my hands back on what I think is one of the greatest live recordings ever recorded, in jazz or whatever, improvised perfection, Jaki Byard's album from the 1960s, Live From Lennie's on the Turnpike, a dump of a club that used to sit outside of Brookline, Massachusetts, on the Mass Turnpike. It contains a Jaki tune called "Twelve"--it's written in 12/4 time, that's 3 triplets of eighth notes played 4 times in one measure, like a Delta blues, like Lightnin' Hopkins and Mance Lipscombe played, and it is massive, wide-open, free-as-a-bird, soul-stealing, giving wings to those same feelings that give us energy to rise from a nothingness into a 12-minute-long period of ecstasy, the highest pleasure man can enjoy, the pleasure of being entranced by a music as it arises and explodes--or ejaculates, though I'm reading it from a male point of view.

And as always, I've found Charles Mingus continuing to be fascinating, unbelievably fascinating right up to the time when his body told him he was through and he refused and kept on writing from his wheelchair--humming it out into a tape recorder. I got a DVD of Mingus at the Montreux Jazz Festival in 1975 doing a rendition of "Goodbye, Pork Pie Hat" that just knocks your F-ing sox off, with Benny Bailey and Gerry Mulligan and Mingus taking over your totally aural intake and bringing it straight into your solar plexus where it turns to feelings, man, deep expressive feelings, feelings that soar you and cause you to memorialize Lester Young, man, that is if you know Lester Young like we jazz afficianados have to know Lester Young and we know it takes two to tango, two to rango.

Which brings me to another fun musical thing that happened to me in '06--re-getting-into Lester Young, the one master I tended to overlook coming alive when I did in the middle of the happening careers of Charles Parker, Jr., Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, Sonny Rollins, Bud Powell, Oscar Peterson, Clifford Brown, Max Roach, Thelonious Monk, the innovators--my teachers, the masters, but then, thanks to John Coltrane whose life I followed step-for-step till he died, I began listening tighter to Lester Young, especially a Columbia LP issued back in the earliest 1950s, called Lester Leaps In, and featuring the earliest Lester Young recordings mostly with Count Basie and the Kansas City gang from back in the late 1930s, Jo Jones, Freddie Green, Walter Page, and that band, that old Benny Moten band kicking Lester on and on note velvety perfect note after velvety perfect note, playing the tenor sax as though it were an extention of his body, which it was. Hail, Lester Young!

3) Politics in 2006. Politics broke my F-ing heart in 2006. Scary politics. Fascism blooming faster than crab grass on a southern front lawn right before our eyes and our leaders seem dumbstruck in their efforts to stop it in its tracks, its huge tracks, its overwhelming tracks, its big feet slamming down on us as it goosesteps over our necks with its bootheel-enforced philosophy of demand. Politics may be beneath me in 2007. I'll do it dog-style if it is--up the rump, if you don't mind my crassness. Bush. Hooey on that gone-astray monkey. He's a crushed wimp. Killing is getting boring to him. Killing Hussein should have been one of his thousand points of light, but it seems old George had rather be down in Crawford, Texas, on his faux ranch entertaining his advisors--"Here, boys, have a couple'a swigs of this Ezra Brooks here. My old pappy, that old sagging wimp, sent it to me congratulatin' me on stretching old Sad-dam's neck till it snapped. Gawd, there was a day when I'd like to have been there, like when I used to enjoy those executions I ordered down there in my adopted State of Texas. Yeee-haw those were good times. I don't know, boys, maybe I'm gettin' tired'a killing folks--though hell, I expected a lot more of our doughboys to have been killed by now--I used to think the more of my boys killed overthere the more peppy the populus would get behind me--you know, get behind in a good sense and not the sense they all seem to be expressing--they're gettin' behind me all right but I think they're fixin' to dog F me, boys--I don't think there's any luv in their motives. I may have to bail on you boys. I'm rich as hell; I don't have to take this; Prince Bandar Bush sez he has a room at his Pakistani Tiger Camp I could come live in with my old half-brother, Osama."

4) I started reading books voraciously this year. I love reading books like that. 14 at once presently--and looking to start reading another one as soon as possible. I've never read Finnegan's Wake. I think I'd like to give it a try. Here's a link that will lead you into that Joycean World, a fascinating man, Joyce; a man who wrote in many languages at once, Finnegan's Wake having that great long sentence--it has a name, but I've forgotten it--like there's one word mentioned over and over in it. Hell, go with me to this link:

www.fweet.org/

You can even find out what "fweet" means.

Ulysses is the funniest book I've ever read; second is Lolita; and wouldn't you know Nabokov got to sit at Joyce's feet in Paris and idolized the guy; and James was an interesting sweet singing drunkard of a man, becoming eccentrically blind as a bat in his latter years, yet able to see amazingly through walls of words.

Happy New Year from

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler