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

Two Great Americans Dead: Jerry Ford & Saddam Hussein

Gerald Rudolph Ford
Wanna hear something funny as hell? Currently on every channel on network teevee, and this includes the chump channels like Fox, My TV (formerly Universal TV), and C TV (formerly Michigan Frog's Warner Bros. TV--the WB, remember?), they are covering the funeral parade of Gerald Ford, his old gone body being hauled around rainy Washington, District of Corruption, as though they'd found out he was god or something. This character who Lyndon "Big Balls" Johnson said couldn't walk and chew gum at the same time, this Congressman who checked in on the golf course more often than he checked into the Senate, this dude who was never elected president and when he did run for president got his ass crushed by Jimmy "Peanut Balls" Carter is being idolized by the Amurican media. Amazing! This boring jerk was only "president" for 3 years, one year without a vice president and then two years with old Mr. Goody Two Shoes, Nelson "Burn Attica to the Ground" Rockefeller, one of the most obnoxious human beings to ever live, even more obnoxious than his predator grandfather, John D. Rockefeller. The only major skullduggery Jerry "How 'Bout a 'Round'a Golf With Me and Bob Hope?" Ford commited was pardoning our major crook of those years, an elected president, Richard Milhouse (where do you think The Simpsons got the name?) "Tricky Dick" "Mr. Checkers" Nixon, an abomination to humankind much less his poor ole alcoholic wife, Pat. Damn, a lot of presidents have had alcoholic wives, haven't they? Including old Jerry Ford, right?

Jerry Ford was a lucky son of a bitch. Thanks to Spiro Agnew being just a dumbass crook and getting his prolixy ass fired and after he was on his way to prison, Jerry got to be vice president, picked by his old pal, Tricky Dick Nixon (I don't remember Tricky Dick getting this kind of hero treatment when he died--I don't even remember the Repugnicans even mentioning the Tricky One's name at their last laughable convention--in fact, in their last 4 laughable conventions--Raygun's their vaunted hero now--Ronnie Raygun, our only president to have Alzheimer's disease, though even with Alzheimer's folks thought Ronnie was still the Great Communicator.

Jerry Ford, however, was not thought of as a great anything, not even by the Repugnicans. Wasn't Ford totally forgotten, too, by the Repugs over the next few elections?

Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. He's the American people; yes, We the People; you and me. We are Santa Claus when we give a bum like Gerald Ford for serving 3 pitiful unelected years still the same privileges a president like FDR or, more up to date, Tricky Dick Nixon, Slick Willie Clinton, and old Flappy-Pappy Bush get: keeping his 250,000-a-year salary for the rest of his life, along with office space paid for, and Secret Service protection, franking privileges, and improvements to his mansion in Palm Springs, where Jerry Ford in retirement got to play F-ing golf day-in and day-out from 1977 until his death at 92, almost 30 years of leisurely privilege--plus, yes, Jerry did get his Gerald Ford Library and Museum in Grand Rapids built with taxpayers's money (there weren't any books in the Gerald Ford Library last time I looked--and there was only a set of golf clubs and a wad of chewing gum in the museum). Plus, Jerry's nutjob wife, Betty-- OK, OK, so she beat cancer, so what; OK so she was hooked on drugs for years, so what--still, We the People put Betty in the Hollywood help business with her famous Betty Ford Clinic, where she put celebrity drug heads to work cleaning toilets and humiliating them and thus saving them the old Grand Rapids Calvinist way making them "work for the night is coming when they'll work no more"--"Oh, thank you, Betty, for making me clean those toilets and finding Jesus and shit like that. Now, can I go back to my F-ing free-as-a-bird Hollywood life?--can I get back to screwing around and spreading illegitimate children all over the LA area, doing dope, carrying firearms, and smashing my latest overpriced sports car into light poles and other drivers with impunity? Hail Betty Ford. " Oh, wait a minute. See, talking about Betty Ford and I totally lost track of her husband, what was his name? Oh, yeah, Jerry "Calvinist" Ford. How quickly we forget. But teevee is covering his funeral procession as though he were the Repugnican JFK. Oh, I forgot, Squeaky Frome tried to eliminate Jerry by shooting him in the gut with a peashooter. Why the hell would anybody, even a total nutjob like Squeaky, try to kill Jerry Ford? I guess God wanted to...and he succeeded.

So here's to that great Amurican unelected president of 3 years--smeared in his only attempt to be elected President by Jimmy "Mr. Peanut" Carter, currently being childishly berated for blaming the Middle East problems on Israel (you can't blame Israel for anything--Gawd protects them--they are Chosen, remember?) in one of his latest books--another ex-president living a damn good retirement life on We the People's hard-earned monies. I raise a glass of Stroh's beer to old Jerry "Fore" Ford. Amuricans mourn his passing--Hey, holy crap, wait a minute, the old bastard was 92 years old. It's time he was being taken off the dole.

Another Great Amurican Is Dead
Well, I was certainly gratified to hear that finally they'd hanged old Saddam ("Saa-Dam Hoosane," as Pappy "the Wimp" Bush used to call him) Hussein by his Bathist neck. Like a good Amurican, Saddam kept his mouth shut to the very end, never revealing how he was a product of the CIA, put into power by the US, supported by the US, Rummy Rumsfeld one of his creators--yeah, and it was Rummy who probably hung those lurid photos of the twins in Saddam's sons's palaces. You do remember we killed Saddam's sons early in our Freedom on the March campaign, just before the "Mission Was Accomplished"? Yep. But, today, Little Georgie Porgie, our "president," was all cheery and bright and ready for another "Mission Accomplished" photo-op with the dead body of old neck-broken Saddam. "That's for my daddy," Little Georgie Porgie was heard to be trumpeting about the halls of the All-White House. "Now, my daddy's gotta like me better than Jeb, dammit. I've taken the wimp out of my daddy's name and have killed the man who tried to kill my old pappy. Now, pappy, I'm the man of the family, you old fart. Did I say that? Whoooo, I'm a tough cowboy, ain't I? Hey, Pickles, save me a hit on that mezzroll I smell you smoking back thar in the Lincoln Log Room."

So, America, don't you feel a hell of a lot safer tonight? A guy who we put into power and who had no weapons of mass destruction and nothing to do with 9/11. Praise the Lard. Boy, howdy, I ain't afraid no more. Thank you, Appointed President and Never Honestly Elected "President" Georgie Porgie Puddin' 'N Pie W. Bush, and, by God, that "W" doesn't stand for Wimp, it stands for "Warrior." Hot damn! I feel a Nobel Peace Prize going Georgie Porgie's way next time. Thank you, "President" Bush and the good People of Iraq for ridding the world of this horrible man of terror and destruction. For supposedly killing 30,000 Kurds with poison gases [No, it wasn't for that he was hanged--see end of post] and biological warfare weapons we had given him under Ronnie Raygun, Unka Dick, and Rummy Rumsfeld's other lives, he has paid the price. In the meantime, Georgie Porgie's role in all this Iraq mess is that he's only killed 3,000 Amurican troops, almost ruined the U.S. Army, has stolen more than a trillion dollars from the Amurican treasury and the Iraq oilfields, plus, he has killed over 65,000 innocent Iraqis in order to imposed his will (his George Will--get it?) on the People of Iraq, now in a mess of a Civil War, though that's been America's policy of war since Washington went out after the bloody nuisance Native Americans in West Virginia and Pennsylvania oh those many white history years ago now, invading countries and then weaseling out after these countries are split in half north vs. south, the same thing that is happening in Iraq today as the people of Iraq have Saddam's funeral procession--what--they're watching the Gerald Ford funeral procession, too! Iraq is being divided into a North Iraq and a South Iraq. The oilfields are in the North this time--and we rarely are able to ever conquer a part of the division we set up that is designated North--America still feels bad about our South losing the Civil War--after all, those hillbilly southern murderers were good ole Whites, pure as the driven snow. White still stands for purity in this nation. Black stands for oil not people.

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

Here Are the Charges Against Saddam--Why He Was Hanged

From CNN: Hussein was convicted on November 5 of crimes against humanity in connection with the killings of 148 people in the town of Dujail after an attempt on his life.

The dictator was found guilty of murder, torture and forced deportation.

The Dujail episode falls within 12 of the worst cases out of 500 documented "baskets of crimes" during the Hussein regime.

The U.S. State Department says torture and extrajudicial killings followed the Dujail killings and that 550 men, women and children were arrested without warrants.

My God, what a demon. Look at Georgie Porgie's killing record. How about 157 persons on the Texas Death Row?

Declaration of Independence

The New Self-Governing Man/Wolf
"Not subject to control by others." Definition, baby; it's all about definition. "Not affiliated with a larger controlling unit." Damn right. My favorite definition of "independent": "c (2): being enough to free one from the necessity of working for a living...."

Yes, I am going indie, man. You know, I just learned this from James Brown, hearing an interview done with James and Al Sharpton 25 years ago where James says he can't get played on radio stations, even black radio stations, because of the record distributors being controlled by the Mafia and the mob had decided James either went along with their demands or he didn't get played. James said he went independent and started taking his records around to radio stations himself and getting them played. Then, later, I got to discussing this with a small gaggle of dinner companions at my favorite neighborhood Irish hangout and we all concurred, drunk though several of us were--not the Wolf Man, however;I'm teetotaling this week--that the only way to complete mental and economic success was through staying independent, by being men of the world not defined by nationality or religion, men totally free to dabble in their own independent pleasures, one a worldwide perfume dealer, another a boxing writer, another a restaurant owner, and the last, me, a guy who has a confused mind in terms of whether he's a man or a wolf and who is currently investigating going independent himself, to become an independent thinker, decider, writer, composer, songwriter, piano player, harmonica blower, owner of a courderoy jacket once worn by that great independent, Artie Shaw. Me, a caster of his bread upon the waters of rapid-flowing time. And then I tried to write a poem on a napkin and got as far as:

I knew a man
who slept in blue light
and wished the sun were blue

His son who was yellow
a sickly fellow
wondered if blue could help him, too

So the son went blue
turned green and mellow...

And that's as far as I got.

Independence is a tough row to hoe. The odds are against anybody or even a tribe or a nation going independent. The trend is to unify and create a union; first of independent rationalizers, then as independent citizens, unionized, and soon, suddenly no longer independent but dependent on a "larger controlling unit" and thus the cycle in the search for independence begins again.

My independence started when I became a rebellious child. It continued in college, there manifesting itself in me as the antagonist, raising my hand in all my classes and challenging the professor's definition of whatever it was he was trying to teach me. "Show me, dammit," I screamed after my raised hand was noticed and acknowledged, "don't bore me with your lecturing. Give me empirical evidence and not your boring words." Oh shit, you don't declare your independence while a college student. You don't have degree enough yet to do that, see? You aren't a master yet. You aren't a DOCTOR yet. Why DOCTORS are considered the ultimate source of life.

Am I saying colleges are training grounds for the plantation management system? I think maybe I am. College to me was my chance at independence from my parents and my past. College then to me became my grounds for my own individual beginning and not one ordained or disdained by my ancient parents and the heritage they brought to me through their unionizing their bloodlines in me, though DNA has totally replaced bloodline genesis now, hasn't it--it's even replaced the former total ID independence of fingerprinting--you know, your fingerprints are the only fingerprints like them in the whole animal world.

We are all going digital whether we like it or not. I want to go digital independently. Off on my own; a new adventure, an adventure in a new wonderland. A wonderland of speed and of, of course, great deception. There is much magic is digital existence.

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

Waitin' for Melissa...and up pops Spade Cooley

Waiting for Melissa
I’m waiting for Melissa, watching a video of me playing organ with some of the best bluesmen in the New York City area—why, look, it’s thedailygrowlerhousepianist playing the piano, at a studio in Times Square, filmed over a year and a half ago now. I’m amazed by myself. In the corner of my eye is a very cute little-person woman—a midget woman, but I know they hate being called that. I can’t imagine what you could call me that would insult me. A motherfucker? Nope. I never had any sexual feelings for my mother. I assume she was sexual; if she wasn’t, OK, how the hell did I get here? Out of a test tube? God, it seems like only yesterday when the scary people were casting allegations of demonic foreboding against “test-tube babies.”

Seems like only yesterday, too, when we were all discussing, myself in cynical whimsy, cloning. Was it possible? I remember a book about a man who claimed he was a clone. We conjectured about what it would be like to clone yourself every 55 years or so, you know, a continuous being yourself in a totally cloned existence.

“Hi, who are you?”

“Hi, I’m you, that’s who.”

“Well, you do look like me.”

“And you look like me, too.”

“So, how does this work? Since I’m the real one….”

“Who says you’re the real one? I’m the real one, my friend.”

“What’a you mean you’re the real one? By God, I’ve been the real one since that early morning in that hospital in that prairie town that had a song written about it.”

“A song about a lone rider riding out across this prairie, the wind blowing hard, whipping a dusty whip in lashes ‘round his head, then in chilling slices down his body, his body bent against that strong wind, a west wind coming east, a shoveling wind, a shoveling and pitching wind, shoveling and pitching the dust of the ancestors all back in the face of his history.”

“Riding away from absolute fate; the fate of being blown in the wind.”

“Dylan once lived in Gallop, New Mexico, you know.”

“Of course, I know. My wife introduced me to Bob Dylan and I introduced her to Dylan Thomas—and my wife and I never went to the White Horse…I didn’t go to the White Horse until after my divorce, after I’d met another woman and had fallen in love once again after once again after once again and again, always falling in love, even when I was married.”

”Absolutely.”

It’s only a couple of clones talking; clones who are themselves again, one the real one, but unable to be the real one with another real one there thinking he’s the real one, too, and he is and the other one is, too, and that’s the way with families of clones of themselves who are clones, too. A clone is writing this. Can’t there be evolutionary cloning going on all the time?

I remember when my brother got his heart transplant people discussing whether if my brother got a Hindu heart would that make him a Hindu. Or, did the new heart turn him from a rather cynically witty verbalist into a soft-hearted altruist? Does a heart have anything at all to do with the psyche?—and, of course, the answer is yes; your solar plexus affects the beat of the heart; the beat of life being lived. So I'm waiting for Melissa. I wonder if she's a clone?

Spade Cooley
At one time in the past world that name, Spade Cooley, was known worldwide. There were three gentlemen (some might argue that point) from Oklahoma who are given credit for the invention of the music that became known as Western Swing: Bob Wills was one; Milton Brown was one; and the other is that name that was once known worldwide but now echoes in the memories of old folks getting’ ready to die and even then it echoes so dimly it's not much ever heard anymore. Funny how Bob Wills of those three dudes came out the most immortal so far.

This third guy was born in the hard-times Oklahoma Panhandle but left early during the Great Depression (and Dust Bowl) and headed with his family West, ending up in the State of Oregon at a place called Paddle Creek (sic). Only after he got to California did his star begin to rise, first around Modesto as a fiddler, then being heard and invited to Los Angeles where he was befriended by Roy Rogers who hired him for his back up group the Sons of the Pioneers.

Spade Cooley the fiddler became Roy Rogers’s best friend; they pal-ed around all over together. And soon Spade broke off from Roy and formed his own band and then got booked in a big space in Santa Monica and soon Spade Cooley was just as popular as his coevals, Bob Wills and Milton Brown; in fact, more popular than either of those guys; why Spade Cooley became a movie star even. Milton "Brownie" Brown died early but Bob Wills was soon in Los Angeles, too, and Western Swing had become by then a hugely popular venue and a chance for talented Okies to get rich.

Spade put together a small unit at first, with an accordion and a harp—Spade named his band members as though they were Oklahomans even though one of them was from Brooklyn—like Pedro De Paul on accordion. Soon, the small group developed into a full size orchestra and soon Spade had a big hit, “Shame, Shame on You,” and soon, too, Spade had bought a mansion on Ventura Boulevard in L.A. and a ranch out on the edge of the Mojave Desert. He also had a yacht and a several cars, over 100 Western-style suits and over 150 pairs of boots in his huge closet, eventually building everything up into a fortune of 15 million dollars. Spade Cooley. Have you ever heard of him?

Spade’s lead singer was Carolina Cotton, and she got so popular, she quit him and went out on her own and Spade, a ladies man in the true sense of the word, a man of constant affairs of the genitals, and soon a heavy drinker, and soon an alcoholic, found a replacement for Miss Cotton in a girl named Ella Mae, a cute built blonde, who though solid of body and curve was a loser as a singer, though Spade kept her in his band until he married her, knocked her up, kicked her out of the band and told her to stay home and raise their kids and leave the music biz to him. They had two kids, a girl and a boy. The girl’s name was Melody. Soon Spade’s life took a turn downward. The alcohol gripped him tighter and tighter every day and with each tightening grip a boiling jealousy was released from old Spade’s soul like a volcano going off. It got so bad, Spade made Ella Mae confess she’d had an affair with his old pal Roy Rogers—yep, she’d run off to Palm Springs with Roy and screwed him there—10 years before, she confessed. Then Spade got it in his whiskey-soaked mind that Ella Mae was joining a sex cult where homosexuals and heterosexuals mafficked with greased ease in and out of all the holy of holies in the Satanically satin-lined porn room.

By 1960, rock and roll had put an end to the Western Swing craze and old Spade was out of the business, though he still had his worth, 15 million bucks, and he still had his mansion on Ventura and his ranch on the edge of the Mojave. He took up real estate development and also began making plans to build an amusement park called Water Wonderland out near his ranch in the desert area of L.A., a huge waterpark for which the old Okie fiddler actually got interested backers and had designs drawn up.

In the meantime, Spade was I.V.-ing whiskey, putting heebie-jeebies in his bloodstream, jacking off over the sexual promiscuity he imagined his wife indulging in, and with the King of the Cowboys, too--the King of Western Swing's hot wife and the King of the Cowboys--and why not throw Trigger in there, too...oh, it's a good story. Spade forced his daughter Melody to watch him as he flipped on out finally, spinning into an outerspace only the hidden map in his brain knew the whereabouts of, a spinning into that was kicked off by Spade, in front of his daughter, while Ella Mae lay bleeding on the floor from where Spade had bludgeoned her down on her back, when he leaped up in the air suddenly and came boots-down-first smack-dab in the belly-button middle of Ella Mae's stomach. She went unconscious. Spade held a pistol to his daughter's forehead as he declared he was calling an ambulance and the police...it's a hell of a story and I've found it on the Internet in a small book form (see link at bottom of post). Check it out. It's one of the great L.A. crime stories of the sixties.

By the way, they laid the Great James Brown out at the Apollo Theater all day today here in NYC. James Brown, a real god, man; no fable; a legend, yes, but a legend witnessed from birth to death by a whole generation that is still kicking against the pricks in my stratospheric world, that world of the constant full moon floating above me morning, noon, and night.

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

The Spade Cooley Story:

http://www.crimelibrary.com/notorious_murders/celebrity/spade_cooley/index.html

God Is a Woman

That Hoodoo That You Do So Well
Dr. Gene Scott’s widow, Pastor Melissa Scott, has like a cobra hoodooing a bird in order to strike it dead and swallow it down while it’s still warm, bloody, and squirming with gutsy gravy hoodooed my weak ass, and has me struck down and excitingly every night I wait for her to come on at midnight on the channel that used to belong to the citizens of New York City except dumbass, self-serving Rudi “Goombah” Guiliani sold it to Larry Paxton, an old pal, for 92 million bucks, which disappeared from the books the very next day after the sale. Paxton turned this city channel into a hypocritical network of Ron-Popeil-type teevee junk hustlers during the high infomercial sales hours--afternoons when the frazzled, daydreaming, left-at-home wives or worn-dry mothers are sitting like suckers at a medicine show in front of their idiot boxes or in prime time at nights, where they don't have a chance in heaven or hell, they give you homemade sitcoms like the horrible Doc (I think it's bit the dust by now) or—old geezer David Orick hustling his crap during the high-rate hours then going over to Jesus around midnight for an hour of good holy drenching.

So, ‘round midnight, on Channel 31 here in NYC every night, here comes Melissa Scott, oops, I’m sorry, where’s my respect, PASTOR Melissa Scott in all her smart-ass splendor. Melissa starts growling immediately and she growls non-stop for one whole hour, teaching, as she calls it, from the cue cards she inherited from Dr. Gene Scott, the ex-Holy Roller man of holy hijinks, show horses, drinkin' beer, and smokin' illegal Cuban cigars who espoused a Gospel of hillbilly intellectual hoodoo he claims he gained access to via obtaining a PhD from Stanford U in the 70s, a degree he was so proud of he trumpeted the fact on his "teevee shows" constantly, as though to him Stanford U represented the seat of all true education on this planet. If Jesus had'a had to gone to college, he'd'a gone to Stanford. Anyway, besides raising show horses and collecting rare bible stuff, he also went for high-ass, starlet-like ladies hot off the sinful streets of Show Biz City, USA--going through two other babes before he discovered Little Melissa, who I supposed was dropped at his Pasadena mansion doorstep by some Good Fairy, lucky bastard. He married Little Melissa back in the 90s when she was but a young virgin looking for an old god to screw to death (Dr. Gene died in 2002 from prostate cancer) and then inherit his hillbilly, Hollywood kingdom (Christians all worship monarchies, as high as a Christian can go in that fabulous realm of thought)--hey, come on, it was Hollywood and it was Dr. Gene Scott, a Pasadena huckster of the old-school kind I grew up watching spin the sillies into a bunch of hypocondriac jelly girls and osteo-humping hags, common angels sent by the Holy Roller god down to earth so that the Yahoos and the snake-worshipping hillbillies could keep their procreational-hunting eyes on something sexually appetizing as well as talking so widely far off-their-walls they can only judge her Almighty truths by the hardness of their cocks if they're men and the beating of their hearts and the hardening of their nipples if they're psycho-twisted nymphos with glory floatin' around in their superego dreams.

Little Melissa. Every man’s dream. Paleface white. With a charming strange Star Trek-like accent—she was born in Italy—and she delves into her convoluted Dr.-Gene-type hortatory meandering as she mimmicks like a starlet bound for not an Old Ship of Zion but a sleek new yacht of Zion—and she does it in such wonderful movement and aggitating flow. Tonight, Sweet-Sour Melissa was translating her King James Christian holy book into Hebrew, Greek, and Latin. She claims she’s fluent in 17 languages; that’s one more than l hat, I think, though I feign from denying the Hat Man his proper respects and wouldn’t be surprised at all to find he knows 18 languages, one more than Pastor Melissa. Dammit, you see, there’s only one problem with my using l hat as a spiritual guide, I don't want to see him naked and in a seductive pose, language be damned.

I mean, come on, all men watching this woman think the same thing as I do watching her--even a eunuch could get a hard on watching Sweet-Sour Melissa; I mean, come on, ladies, she’s a piece of a__! A brick house! Petite. Total slenderness under her holy garb. On stage she dresses like Hans Conreid, the old teevee character actor—he was Danny Thomas’s (Marlo’s daddy) Uncle Toonoose on Make Room for Daddy or is that too long ago for you all?—he always wore like "professor" clothes, and that's what Melissa wears, a black long frock coat--Ortho-Jews wear them, too, and so does Professor Irwin Corey, all topped off with slick black pants, sporting a white backward collar—she is a pastor remember—otherwise she's in all-black. And she wears sleek black pumps and a nice woven-gold bracelet. It’s her face and hair, however, that captivate the male man or wolf in me and turns my passion for Jesus into a passion for her as I'm penis-brained following her billowing long hair as she in Jezebel tosses sways it alluringly about her Pre-Raphael face and I'm sure shoulders—Hell, she can be Jesus if she wants to as far as this Wolf Man is concerned. Hell, man, I'm honest, "Hey, F me, Jesus! I believe ya, Melissa, baby! Hey, how 'bout a dance in the Spirit, some Holy Rockin' and Rollin! Some Holy Rollin' in God's big water bed. Praise the Lard and pass Doctor Gene's will over here.

By the way, who the hell cares that Melissa Scott is Melissa Pastore but better known as Barbi Bridges and is president of Barbi Bridges Enterprises. Who the hell cares if she's a porn star on the side. I'm sure the gods don't give a shit--Hey, pass me that DVD, brother, and Praise the Lard; you get the tissues for this one.

Chewing Gum and Walking at the Same Time
Oh BOO HOO HOO, 92-year-old Gerald Ford died last night. Oh boy oh boy, and these political nitwits on teevee are blowing their snouts over this old easy-living dumbass from Grand Rapids, Michigan, home of the Libertarian Calvinists, once the home of Kelvinator refrigerators and famous Grand Rapids furniture, true American copycat furniture, affordable prairie furniture, but now only a shadow of its old industrial self. Militia territory. And along came old Soapy Williams-Repugnican Jerry Ford and his babe Betty Ford, already a clinical case. And Jerry got elected to Congress and he kissed ass like a good boy and finally got his big break when the Tricky One, Tricky Dick Nixon, Noxious Nixon, picked the old standing-still and gum-chewing Jerry Ford for his running mate after his main squeeze Spiro Agnew went and got his old ass in some kind of illegal shennanigans in Maryland. Jerry was there during the Watergate bullshit. But he was so dumb, so busy trying to walk and chew gum at the same time, he didn't see anything wrong going on. Why, hell, after old Jerry got to be president himself, not by election but by default, old crooked-as-a-snake-at-night Tricky Dick having bailed out after Congress was surely impeaching his crooked ass, bailed out back to San Clemente, the big California seaside mansion We the People of the USA bought for that son of a bitch--but nope, folks, old generous Jerry Ford pardoned that weasel. Set him free. Locked up all the Watergate investigation materials forever so nobody will ever know the truth; so you might find old goofball Jerry Ford was flat-dab in the middle of the action, too, though John Dean says Ford was so always on the golf course and had no idea that any kind of wool was being pulled over his dumb mug.

Never elected president, yet got all the benefits of being president, a salary for life, office space, SS protection for the remainder of his life, and a chance to rob the Treasury for a Gerald Ford Library, and there has to be one in Grand Rapids, right, though Jerry and Betty lived longer in celebrity foolish Palm Springs than they ever lived in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Old Jerry Ford for the last 35 years of his life got to live like a duke, on the golf course every day, with Bob Hope, with Der Bingel; why even old Pappy Bush used to visit Jerry and Betty and play multirounds of golf with the moguls and goddaddies out in Palm Springs, where Sonny Bono was his Congressman. Jesus, what a waste of taxpayers's monies.

So long, Jerry Ford. You can just chew your gum now; you don't have to worry about walking anymore.

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

War As an Aspect of Nature

The Poetry of Stephen Crane
In the opening to chapter 5 in his book, The Poetry of Stephen Crane, Daniel Hoffman writes, "For Crane the natural state of man is conflict, against a cruel God, an indifferent nature, an ironic fate. Love is the loyalty of two doomed souls to one another. In a world devoid of moral purpose, life without human loyalties is a senseless protraction of suffering. Confronting huge amoral forces, the individual hews the solitary path of his own unimportant life. His life may be a futile one, but if it has been loyal, kind, or, supremely, sacrificial, he may take comfort from it when all striving is done" [p 146, Daniel Hoffman, The Poetry of Stephen Crane, Columbia University Press, 1957].

A gloomy outlook on life; written before electricity? In the case of Crane, he may have had gaslight in his NYC slum apartment. Alcohol. Boogieman blazing through his brain and blood. Another Crane later would mimmick this same perspective of life and it would cause him to find relief from his futilities by leaping off the Orizaba and into the drink of the Gulf of Mexico, just off Cuba, leaving behind a crazy babe in his stateroom. For Stephen it was drink; another Stephen, Stephen Foster, same sort'a outlook on life, same sort of in-the-gutter, his Gulf of Mexico, ending--Edgar Allan Poe, too; in New York City, too. Damn, isn't it ironic how these souls mingle in the streets of this city? I feel them all the time; right around the corner from me Mark Twain once lived; and I'm only a few blocks from the Herman Melville house; and right up the street in an old 100-year-old hotel Doc Pomus wrote "Burning Love" and "Mess of Blues" for Elvis. John Berryman, the poet who jumped off the Mississippi River Bridge in Minneapolis and drown himself when alcohol no longer worked, was an understander of Stephen Crane.

Hoffman went on to state, "In such a world the natural condition of society is war. From the first, for Crane, war was not a willed human action but a given condition, an aspect of nature."

It's as though that simply from writing The Red Badge of Courage so well, so realistically, Crane developed shell shock, and Crane never was in war. But war hung in his mind and caused him to gargle in alcohol, bury himself in alcohol. "The sun so hot I froze to death."

And here's a poem Crane wrote, but it was never published:

There was crimson clash of war.
Lands turn black and bare;
Women wept;
Babes ran, wondering.
There came one who understood not these things
He said, "Why is this?"
Whereupon a million strove to answer him.
There was such intricate clamour of tongues
That still the reason was not.

[p 151, The Poetry of Stephen Crane.]

In the meantime, war goes on. Crane could have just as well written this poem about Baghdad.
Baghdad is now Holy Hell. "Freedom on the march" has left Baghdad barren, left in a "clamour of tongues" as the "Lands turn black and bare"--and the war goes on and another war starts, Ethiopia attacking Somalia--yep, it's a religious war, Ethiopian Christians versus Somalian Islamics. F-ing religious assholes. Merry F-ing Bloody Jesus X. Christ Birthday to you bloodthirsty lying preying mantises who just keep on lying and lying and lying and don't worry, these slow-ass bastards didn't kill any Taliban big shot. They always come up with that lie every few months. Success, don't you see; shit, success; why, hell, we only need to kill 3 or 4 more thousand of stupid Amurican volunteer soldiers--except conscription is already being bandied about by some of Bush's newly hired goons.

Meanwhile, Bush is on vacation at his faux ranch in Crawford. He's always meeting with his advisors on the War in Iraq, where he's also order the stupid Iraqis to kill Saddam damn fast before Bush falls on his own sword in disgrace. As soon as they cut Saddam's head off, I suppose they'll have another "Mission Accomplished" photo-op. How 'bout a naked Army babe bringing Saddam's head to Georgie Porgie on a silver platter.

We the People of the US of A are being pushed into the gutter by the drunkards who lead us.

And I'm writing poetry again.

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

Papa's Got a Brand New Bag

"Take It to the Bridge"
JAMES BROWN, one of the truly true originals to come out of American Music died last night in Georgia--and I'll bet it was a rainy night in Georgia, too.

I first saw James on the Ed Sullivan Show back when "Please, Please, Please, Please" was on its way to the top. He put the beat on the 1. He didn't allow mistakes in his band. In one concert, you actually hear James, while he's singing, say, "I heard that." His manager said when he heard that he knew somebody in the band had screwed up and James was letting him know he heard his screwup--and, the manager said, the dude definitely heard about it after the show and was lucky if he wasn't fired.

James Brown. A man who went about looking for his reward, looking to be known, getting known, but then getting in trouble with his own people back in those Noxious Nixon years--and then he went to the Apollo Theater and got back on top again. Yeah, James made mistakes in his personal life but never in his music. In the music, James was renown, unique, a genius, a true American music star and IDOL in the realm of Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, Ike Turner, Chuck Berry, the true inventors of a new form of the blues that when black was called "Rhythm & Blues" (when white, "Rock & Roll"), which is what it was, too, though Robert Johnson had been singing about "Rockin' and Rollin'" for a long time and so had John Lee Hooker and J.B. Lenoir, and Big Joe Turner ("Roll 'Em Pete") and that's what this music really was, the earliest form of American Rock and Roll, the blues taken to another height, ridin' on elements of blues, boogie, jazz, ragtime, with the syncopation that matches the human heart beat when it's rocking or when its rolling.

James Brown one of the last of the Great Originators: Scott Joplin, Buddy Bolden, Louis Armstrong, Big Joe Turner, Wynonie Harris, Louis Jordan, Joe Liggins, Roy Milton, Lucky Millender, Nat "King" Cole (and James sounds like Nat to me)...and there are more--Chuck Berry, Aretha, and Ike are still with us...these are our TRUE AMERICAN IDOLS.

One of my favorite James Brown songs's lyrics pretty much sums up how I think James saw the world, his world; beautiful lyrics, much more brilliant than anything the Beatles ever wrote or could write. Read 'em and think of James.

This is a man's world, this is a man's world
But it wouldn't be nothing, nothing without a woman or a girl

You see, man made the cars to take us over the road
Man made the trains to carry heavy loads
Man made electric light to take us out of the dark
Man made the boat for the water, like Noah made the ark

This is a man's, a man's, a man's world
But it wouldn't be nothing, nothing without a woman or a girl

Man thinks about a little baby girls and a baby boys
Man makes then happy 'cause man makes them toys
And after man has made everything, everything he can
You know that man makes money to buy from other man

This is a man's world
But it wouldn't be nothing, nothing without a woman or a girl

He's lost in the wilderness
He's lost in bitterness

GOODBYE, GODFATHER JAMES--It ain't gonna be the same in this old world anymore.

Your pal,

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

PEACE ON EARTH AND GOOD WILL TOWARD JAMES BROWN! "Take it to the bridge! Take it to the bridge!"

Year-End Yahoo Shenanigans

And You Thought Dick Was Tricky!
First off, before I start my normal growling, I was surprised to find in my Webster's Collegiate that the word shenanigan's origins (1855 first usage) are unknown. I always racially thought of it as an Irish word. [As a mean aside, I just heard an interview with Gore Vidal by Connie Martinson in which Gore said that his mother was of Anglo-Irish descent adding after Connie interjected that Gore hated his mother and didn't speak to her for 20 years that he believed the Anglo-Irish people were the meanest and cruelest people on earth.]

Oh well, so let me start growling about what's making me belly laugh here at the end of yet another year--and they roll by with such ferocity.

First of all, how maniacally laughable is the fact that after the Dumbocrats had swept back into power on the basis of the American people wanting us out of this war, an American people of which 71% want G.W. Bush, our phony "president," tossed out of the White House on his ass and with Pickles bouncing on her ass right along behind him, Birdbrain (and I apologize to birds) Bush, the Great Decider, has come rushing right smack-dab back into our bleeding-heart liberal faces with the decision that We the People of the US of A are all terrerists and, by God, not only are we not pulling out of Iraq or Afghanistan, but, by God, we're sending more young Amurican stupidos over to both places, and we're sending the U.S. Navy into shelling range of Iran--FOOLS-- to die for this spoiled-brat rich boy's God-damn lies, for his crimes, for his oil stealing, for his robbing of the US Treasury, for his rigging of the Supreme Court with right-wing legal terrerists, for his terrorizing the Middle-East with his constant threats of US invasion, first off Iran, but, hey, don't forget Syria, and last but not least don't forget Palestine and Lebanon. Remember what the old Wolf Man has always said, there would be no Israeli army without the US of A's support of the whole nation. I've already said how the US military industrial complex uses the Israeli Army to test its weapons of mass destruction, like missiles, arms, cluster bombs, land mines, tanks, Hummers, jet planes (we forget Israel has a pretty good Air Force thanks to the US of A--and ironically, so does Saudi Arabia have an Air Force thanks to the US of A).

Ironies amaze me.

Iran wouldn't have nuclear knowledge had the US of A not given it to them. Wow, how simple all this shit is to deciminate, that is unless you are an Amurican Yahoo who has no thoughts that last longer than the longest television program--unless you catch males on Saturday stupidly watching events like NASCAR racing that run on and on for hours--or golf tournaments, of which there seem to be more and more and more every year to the point golf pros now get to earn millions every single week of every year--like Tiger Woods will easily wipe out Jack Nicklaus's most-tourney wins record because, hell, Tiger has 52 tournaments a year he can compete in (marvelously, I might add) whereas Jack maybe had 32 a year he could compete in. Teevee wishes all sports were played year-round and they've tried it with football and basketball and it doesn't work, but it seems to work with golf, car racing, and skateboarding events (kiddy sports--I consider tennis and iceskating kiddy sports, too). Baseball is the greatest sport ever invented by humans and we thank our buckets of lard that baseball doesn't last 12 months a year--they play baseball every day, 152 games a year--and probably more as the leagues expand--and baseball, like golf, is going worldwide soon, unlike football, which when they try to take it worldwide they fail--you know why, because baseball is an American sport and golf has been much more an American sport since the 1910s than a British or European sport, though it did originate with them, the Dutch I think, right?

So, let's see, even though the November elections proved the American people are sick of the Iraq War, even the generals in Iraq are sick of it, and we're getting sick of war in general--WHY? BECAUSE WARS NEVER SOLVE ANYTHING; ESPECIALLY RELIGIOUS WARS OR WARS FOR OIL--so even though that's the true state of the union, it's not to Georgie Porgie's and the Neo-Con war and money-stealing mongrels's state of the union, nope, hell no; they, instead, are increasing our involvement in Iraq, more money and more cannon fodder. Ho boy. Doesn't Bush sound like Noxious Nixon talking about bombing the hell out of Hanoi, our hands being tied because we couldn't, Westmoreland (through our own Colon's Pal) saying he needed 100,000 more troops or he couldn't win in 'Nam, and then Noxious Nixon, "I surely am a god-damn crook," started bombing Cambodia and backing Pol Pot--oh how familiar all this war trickery is to me--but then, I've been around too long. It happened during the Korean War, same thing, General Self-Important MacArthur kept crying like a baby because he couldn't invade the People's Republic of China, with the largest manpower army in the world, and bomb the hell out of them--with old General LeMay, the creator of the Strategic Air Command, hollering that his SAC bombers could "Bomb 'em [the chinks and the gooks to the good General of the Air Force] back to the Stone Age," and oh how those generals wanted to do that, to bomb these people out of existence, bombing being our big tool, our national cock--and this is a male nation and don't you forget it; no pussies in our White House--unless they're invited into the Oval Office for a quickie after a hard day on the phone with your political cronies trying to keep the campaign coffers filled to overflowing--or hell, maybe you could sneak Marilyn Monroe into the White House if you were president (a necrophiliac president, wouldn't that be cool?)--that'd be alright with me. I don't give a damn who a president is shagging just as I don't give a damn about celebrities boffing each other and giving us an abundance illegitimate children, untalented goofballs people who go ape over every movie released by violent Hollywood are gonna have to support in the gaudy style their parents (or at least the one that admits they're their parents) spoiled them with before they went has-been and went broke. I give you the example of John Lenon's two untalented sons; Ringo Starr's untalented son, Zack; how about Johnny Carson's sons, remember them, totally untalented--just like their father as far as I'm concerned--Amazing how we make glaring celebrities out of game-show hosts--bad game shows at that. Or how about Liza Minelli? How scary is she when she's mimicking her scary mother, though Judy Garland was a real kid wonder ruined by Warner Brothers who got her hooked on uppers--hooking her in her teens, the dirty bastards. Liza has gumption [a Wolf joke], I'll give her that. I remember how she used to brag about doing heroin with Halston and Little Truman Capote. God. I'm draped in sackcloth and ashes.

And speaking along these strange ironic lines, some Jungian has dug up some old Swiss hotel records that now prove beyond a voyeur's doubt that the good Herr Doktor Freud was boffing his wife's sister, the titilatingly beautiful-at-one-time Minna. Hell, Minna lived with the Freuds for 42 years--from the time she was 19 or so, after her fiance was killed--so why wouldn't you think a sex freak like Freud wouldn't probably have been doing her along with his wife all along-- the Bernays sisters; don't sisters know what sisters are up to? There are no secrets between sisters, are there? There certainly are between brothers. Oh the things I could tell my brother now that he's dead.

So anyway, so what? Freud banged his sister-in-law. Psychiatrists expect their good-looking men or women patients to fall in love with them don't they? Plus, some of the greatest Freudian psychiatrists have been women, Anna Freud one of them, also a woman named Karen Horney in this country--and I would have certainly fallen in love with Anna Freud had I been relaxed on her analysand couch--"Hey, Anna, I have this sexual problem, I keep getting a hard-on looking at you." Whoaaa. But, hell, it had to be. Anais Nin in her special little prickteasing way fell in love with a couple of psychiatrists and I'm sure she offered them a piece of that famous Nin pie--I mean, come on.

A year of total nonsense of which sense can be made but even that sense looks like nonsense to some of us sensible people and wolves.

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

NOTE: We don't know if The Daily Growler will sport a post tomorrow--it is a holiday, no matter its pagan origins, though we at The Daily Growler don't believe in Nada, much less X-mas. Go Santa Claus!

Check in under the tree anyway.

Tempus Fugit

Time Flees
It’s hard for me to believe we are seven years into another century. I have two kindred now born since 2000, new centurians, leaving my century behind in the dust of its ancientness, leaving behind my century’s thinkers and inventors, writers, musicians, all that wonderful American culture that developed in the 20^th Century, the rise of unionism, the rise of right thinking in terms of finally getting away from old-fashioned parental controls (19^th Centry controls; though both my parents were born in the 20^th Century, they were dripping from being baptized in 19^th Century values, morals, and desires. As far as that goes, my new grandniece and grandnephew are going to be baptized in 20^th Century values, morals, and desires, both their parents being mid-20^th Century types; at least types with new ideals, ideals built upon peace in the world, a mixing of races and cultures in this country, the rising up of fairness doctrines against the still oppressive nature of the end-of-the-19^th-Century way of thinking, a thinking that gave citizenship to a corporation thus giving it the same status under our Constitution as an individual citizen. That’s the bullshit 19^th-Century corporate America gave us. Georgie Porgie, our phony, two-bit, criminal “president,” represents that 19^th-Century was of thinking, that Industrial Revolution (started in Britain, where else?), that imperialist way of thinking, the beginning of the Fascist takeover of this country, the Repugnicans the most oppressive of the 19^th-Century political parties, the Dumbocrats becoming “the party of the people” even though it was the Dumbocrats who backed slavery and States Rights. F.D.R. took advantage of that “party of the people” B.S. and he’s the guy who under his aristocratic scheming figured out that the workingclass, middle-class, public-servants of all colors were the largest voting block in this country and that if you could unite them you’d have a clear majority in an election against the elitist Repugnicans, who were by the 20^th Century totally in the back pockets of the corporate zillionaires like the steel, coal, railroads, banking, oil, lumber, automotive barons and especially the back pockets of the Rockefellers, the Vanderbilts—so far all of Dutch descent, old original New Amsterdam families who stole Manhattan from the friendly Manhattan Indians—and the Astors, the Carnegies, the Mellons, the Fricks (some called them the Pricks), the Harrimans, the Goulds—on and on I could go with these familiar family names whose worthless offspring we’re still supporting, like our phony “president,” Georgie Porgie, certainly the spoiled brat dopey offspring of a long line of criminal-behaving Bushes, starting with swindler Sam Bush out of the same old 19^th-Century sticks of Ohio from whence came, too, old rotten John D. (Damn the people full steal ahead) Rockefeller.

I look at an X-mas card from my niece and her family and I look at them, all perfect, her husband the handsome public administrator and triathelon star, her daughter becoming more perfectly white beautiful every day—looking Hollywood bound every day, I tell you de truff—and her never looking better, all of ‘em superbly blonde and blue-eyed—the perfect family, man. It makes me kind’a sad. Why? I asked myself and it begins to reveal it’s because I’ve ended up such a failure.

My mother and father have long been dead—dying before their time, sacrificed on the highways of Texas so that an empty asphalt-hauling 18-wheeler could break the speed limit in order to get back for his next load, the faster he drives the more pick ups and hauls he can make, the boss on his ass to break the speed limit in order to get the loads to the construction sites in time—dig, it’s a part of progess. So my old man pulled out of a roadside park after taking a lunch break and BOOM, my parents were gone—just like that; in a matter of seconds, going from vibrantly alive, eating the fried chicken and drinking their Dr. Peppers in the shade of a lovely roadside park sitting at a picnic table, I can see them now—both of them loved picnicking, especially when they traveled, and they loved traveling and had in their lives driven thousands and thousands of miles around the USA every summer vacation since they were married in the 1920s and never with any problems, tickets, wrecks, etc. But that one fine summer day, in July it was, right after they’d been to New Orleans to visit with me and my new bride, their number was up…BOOM!—and a wreck like that makes a hell of an explosive noise—BOOM! and they were gone.

My only brother is gone now. He died 4 years ago of brain cancer after his life was saved by having a heart transplant and then setting the record for a heart-transplant survivor, 18 years. His first wife died right after his heart transplant of liver cancer; one of his sons just recently died in Los Angeles, a very talented painter, of a botched operation. He has two sons and a daughter still living and they are my only family left. I have no aunts or uncles and only very distant cousins still alive.

My two best friends in life are long gone. My friend the photographer died of throat cancer in 1993; and my friend from childhood, the one person who knew me intimately intellectually, died of brain cancer in 2002. Another friend who I used to hang with on a daily basis died suddenly while entering his apartment after work one day—BAM, a heart attack.

I was born as WWII started. When I was five years old, I started attending military funerals as the young men of my hometown were flown back dead from the Italian Campaign in Europe and then from the Philippine Campaign in the Pacific. I’d estimate for awhile there, I attending a military funeral at least twice a month as my brother’s high school buddies and my family’s close friend’s sons came back in those infamous body bags—and I remember one story that went around that when one mother opened up her son’s body bag, it wasn’t her son!

Then I started school as WWII ended and the Cold War with the Soviet Union began, and then there was trouble in Greece with Truman threatening to send in the Marines, and then there was the Korean War, and then the War in Viet Nam, and then Ronnie Raygun's War on Grenada, and Pappy Bush's War on Panama (500 innocent people killed in that war), and then Pappy's Gulf War (250,000 sick soldiers returned from that fiasco), and then Slick Willie's attacks on Afghanistan, rocket attack on Baghdad, and our sending the Marines into Somalia, and then here comes another Bush, this time a real pussy-whipped poor little rich boy, a phony "president," Georgie Porgie, and sure enough here comes another war, this one another war to end all wars...well, wars on terrerism, that is, except Georgie Boy says this war is nonending.

So, hot damn, here we are at another one of those "peace on earth and good will toward men" times when the smell of death is thick in the air of the world and looks like these imbeciles who lead us keep on leading us deeper into the ruinous cost and mounting death tolls as the nonsense of this War on Terrerism goes on, keeps going on, and seems as though it's meant to keep going on out of my time on into your time--and oh what little time we all have left.

Gore Vidal Still Fighting

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Famous US writer Gore Vidal.Photo:Miguel Guzmán Ruiz Gore Vidal: Bush Could End Like Nixon Havana, Dec 12 (Prensa Latina) Famous US writer Gore Vidal warned Tuesday that President George W. Bush could end as did Richard Nixon, with an obligatory resignation. Vidal, 81, is visiting Cuba at the head of a large delegation of US intellectuals, historians and politicians. "We hope he will end up like Nixon, resigning the presidency," the author said in an exchange with professors and students at the University of Havana, adding "it s not impossible." Comparing the present US leader with Richard Nixon (1969-1974), who was forced to leave the White House due to the Watergate scandal, Vidal said, "When a building begins to fall to pieces it is very difficult to stop its collapse." thegrowlingmerryX-maswolf for The Daily Growler

Mexican Immigrants in New York City

Hell Day in New York City
I am suffering a hell day today. I partied heartily last night, feasting with Bacchanalian guffaw, but, unfortunately, overindulging in 12-year-old Irish whiskey at my favorite restaurant with a couple of young women and thedailygrowlerhousepianist. thehousepianist and I had gone over the scores of Stravinsky’s Pulcinella and the Ives 4^th Symphony and then a couple of my best women friends dropped in with gifts and cookies and sweets and looking beautiful as are all the women who hang around me, and then we took ourselves down to my neighborhood pub and there we did our thang!

I woke up this morning not in that good a mood. I mean, I get mind-dementing hangovers when I party where Irish whiskey is being poured by the tumblerful and this morning was no exception. Plus my stomach was having a Rocky Raccoon reunion. But I struggled with it, did a muggles, and about 8 o’clock, I’m beginning to pull out of it, you know, the nose of my mind's airplane slowly leveling off and readying to ascend again, when all of a sudden there came such a clatter on the roof above me that I jumped up and looked out the window to see what was the matter. I knew it wasn’t Santa Claus, though I do believe in Santa Claus—Santa Claus has played a big role in my family’s life because of a man once dressing up in a Santa Claus suit and trying to rob a bank—but this clatter on my roof wasn’t Santa Claus but was a crew of illegal Mexican immigrants who are doing brick work on the roof, and Viva Zapata! at 8 this morning, all Mexican and regular old hell broke loose—the Mexicans were back directly above my apartment on the roof with their router and their hammers, the router making a horrific noise doing what it’s doing, drilling all the mortar out from between the loose or broken bricks they are pointing up, and this horror of a tool shakes the walls of my room, rattles things sitting about on my what-not shelves, and UGH! I hold my churning head in my hands and try and conjure up peace but it's impossible. [My dad once did a sterling business making what-not shelves—do you know what a what-not is and why a what not needs a what not shelf? Sounds like a line from a poem: Do you know what a what not is and why it is a what not and not a what yes, though I ask why not a why yes instead of a what not?]

Prestidigitation with words; that’s what a writer does.

So thus began what we in New York City call a Hell day. Not a Holy Hell day yet, though it could become one before the day is over.

These illegal Mexicans have been doing this brick work on my building for two straight years now, spring, summer, fall, winter, it doesn’t matter; snow stops them, but that’s all. Freezing temperatures don’t stop them. Sometimes they work on Saturdays. Horrid heat doesn’t stop them, though some days, sunny or rainy, they don’t show up for three days maybe, but then they’re back and louder and more obtrusive into your privacy than ever afore you know it. And they are going full blast as I type this; I’d rather be suffering from that other form of Montezuma’s Revenge between you and me.

The frustration is, they do this work in the same spot over and over and over. It’s an unrelinquishing punishment to human nerves and willpower. It has to be one of the premier tortures in the very pits of the holiest of Hells. How would you like it if two illegal Mexican immigrants were hammering and drilling on the walls of your home every day except Sunday from 8 in the morning until 4 and 5 in the afternoon for two years?

They both are now hammering right above me—there is another apartment above me, but even being a floor down from them they still sound like they are right here in the room with me. The hammering is over and now the router is rattling the windows and trembling the walls. You sit trying to grasp the fact that you are just going to have to endure it. Now one is hammering—he’s been hammering in the very same spot since 8 o’clock—3 hours now, while the router operator moves back and forth, over far right for a while, then back over me again for a while, back and forth, with the hammering staying consistently over me. They didn’t even take a lunch break yesterday. All I can do is put a whamma-jamma on them, but my supernatural powers are impotent against the mechanical power these sons of bitches control.

Our little-man billionaire mayor has openly bragged about wanting only rich people to live in New York City—you know, builds up the tax base, this darling little-man billionaire asshole mayor tells us condescendingly, like a trainer talking to a dumbass monkey he’s trying to train to steal all the change out of people’s pockets while the trainer does a song and dance to divert the attention from the cute little F-ing monkey's criminal feats. They are voting today on a huge development project that will change the face of downtown Brooklyn plus saddle New York Citians with a worthless sports arena (to house the New Jersey Nets pro basketball team, the owner of which is a big pal of our little-man billionaire mayor, who’s a Repugnican to boot). All mayors build monuments to themselves, but this little jerk is rebuilding New York City in honor of himself, changing the skyline, allowing Con Edison to build huge substations in the heart of neighborhoods right next to schools or apartment buildings, it doesn’t matter to these creeps who run this city, to handle the enormous amounts of energy all these new 50-story luxury hi-rise buildings that are going up like a huge wall around my neighborhood, the tallest of which is called Skyhouse, are going to expend. Wow.

I notice a lot of these buildings are built in the airspace over our dear old precious churches. These nontax-paying sons of bitches are selling out to these developers, which means these churches no longer need a congregation’s support—they are making millions off the leasing of their airspaces to these foreign-mostly developers. And these buildings will sit empty for years; the developers don’t give a shit as long as the development backing holds out—I mean, some of these are being financed by the Commie Chinese; you think they are going to run out of development money? Hell no.

Sorry, my hell day is a day of suffering for me, so, like an analysand, I’m spilling my wrathful beans in this post.

Hell day continues. It will be over around 4 o’clock and by then, I’ll be growling in my normal cone of silence again.

And by the bye, NYC department stores for the first time in their histories are staying open all night long this X-mas, including R.H. Macy’s right up the street from me. First time ever they’ll be open 24 hours a day. These sons of bitches are desperate for customers in these taxing days of approaching poverty for most of us; besides, rich people don’t shop at Macy’s.

On a good note: I bought a corduroy jacket from the Artie Shaw Estate Sale held in 2005 from one of Artie’s next-door neighbors in the Hollywood Hills. It came in the mail yesterday while thehousepianist was popping some cold Heinekens for us. Damn, what a beautiful coat—and it fits me fine, a little tight under the arms, but damn it feels good—it’s a hell of a high class jacket; I wore it last night out on our eating and drinking spree. Artie Shaw was a great influence on my early appreciation of jazz due to my brother going off to WWII and leaving behind his 78 rpm record collection, hundreds of shellacks, all of them swing classics, Tommy Dorsey, Glen Miller, Eddie Heywood, the Milt Hurt Trio, and Artie Shaw’s band, especially the tune “Traffic Jam” that featured a young Buddy Rich on drums. I got to meet Artie in the 1960s through my brother, who went on over the years to become one of Artie’s best friends and Artie became my brother’s very best friend—and they corresponded and called each other for 40 years, and when my brother was in Los Angeles, he always went up to visit Artie, a close friendship that lasted until my brother died in 2002. Artie then died 2 years later at 92 years of age. Boy, there’s a lot of emotional feeling passed down to me through this great jacket. The neighbor told me he guaranteed it came right out of Artie’s closet and had not been cleaned so that Artie’s DNA stays alive in the jacket. Don’t clean it, the dude told me seriously. I won’t.

I’m over my hangover; the Mexicans have gone back to Queens, it’s X-mas weekend coming up, three days of peace for me; I promise, no growling…oh, hell no; that’s a promise I couldn’t keep for the life of me.

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

Eat, drink, and be merry, for: who the hell knows what waits on the morrow?

Emptying My Head of Passing Thoughts

Passing Mental Gas
I was rejoicing in the spirit night afore last when I caught Pastor Melissa Scott on our Jesus channel here and then suddenly there was her husband, his third wife, Dr. Gene Scott PhD, absolutely my favorite Christian crackpot of all time--the great master of intellectual deception who I had not seen on teeve in 20 years at least, since one of my staffers used to tape things off CABLE for me back in those ancient days of VHS, and one of the things he always kept me up on was Dr. Gene Scott's teevee show where, as he put it, "I wear all the hats" [and he would always be wearing a different hat every show, from a Daniel Boone coonskin to a Stetson cowboy hat, sometimes wearing three or four hats at once] "I do all the thinking for you" [talking to his congregation] "You sit there, keep your traps shut, listen, and most of all learn from my teachings otherwise why am I wasting my time--I have plenty of things I could be doing"--anyway, he was quite a character who was at least a challenge to your agnosticism, a sensible, though totally off-the-wall proof of the reality of Jesus X. Christ being the Son of God and not the Son of Man through the on-site verification of Jesus's disciples, all of whom, Dr. Gene says, suffered horrible deaths defending Jesus's teachings so then why would these men who are historically proven to have lived died such horrible deaths for a LIE, if Jesus wasn't who he said he was, and he said he was the Son of God, the perfect son, who literally believed what he taught, blah, blah, blah.

At the end of Doctor Gene's almost-an-hour rambling through his intellectual proof of the resurrection of Jesus, one of the Doc's greatest teachings--in which he uses huge plexiglass panels on which he scribbles in magic marker all these steps of proof that Jesus was killed, buried, and then rose from the grave and then ascending, like a Star Treker being beamed, straight up from a hill outside Jerusalem to Big Daddy's castle in the air--that unknown universe the Holy Rollers talk about. But then ah hell, Doctor Gene is nothing but a Holy Roller who lost his faith and went to evil Stanford and got a PhD in Educational Psychology or some such weirdo teacher's college doctorate--the son of a Holy Roller preacher and his preachin' wife--Holy Rollers allow women to preach going against Paul's advice that women should be seen and not heard--but then, I think they have to admit that Paul was probably a Sadist, if sexual at all, homosexual, some say and cripple, struck by polio, that being the bright light that blinded his old ass when he was working for the Romans killing Jewish dissidents--the main reason Jesus was hanged by the Romans because he refused to recognize Caesar as the Divine ruler of the world and not Jesus's dad, the Jewish god Jehovah. All the Holy Roller preachers today, trot there hillbilly or Hollywood wives out--they shape 'em up, like Creflo Dollar has turned his Gawja country girl wife into a high society dame now, made a preacher out of her like Doctor Gene Scott made a preacher out of his last wife, Melissa, an Italian-born babe who's weird as hell but also enticingly Eve-like in her long crimped hair, her cool glasses, topped off by her slightly off-key angelic way of country singing, which she does, she sings and she preachers and she literally keeps the exact same expression on her face not matter what the hell she's doing. Why, dammit, that old bastard Doctor Gene has Swengali-ed her into his female image. I love the way she moves. I'm sure, like Aimee Simple McPherson, the mother of all these kooks, she's a sexual giantess, an Amazon firecracker in bed--domitrix, yes, but firecracker just the same. Sorry, when it comes to women, I'm a deviate.

At the end of Doctor Gene's teaching on the resurrection of Joshua Ben Joseph, the Essene Jewish Reformer, they gave his Website. Yesterday afternoon, I Googled the Website and DAMN, Doctor Gene is DEAD. Prostate cancer took him down. He refused medical treatment saying Jesus would heal him--then it was too late when he finally gave up and tried chemo and shit like that. When he died he had suffered a stroke, a heart attack, and finally a fatal heart attack that slip him into a coma (not a comma as a student of mine once said) and then it was Adios, Doctor Gene Scott. Eugene Scott from Buhl, Idaho, to an empire in Pasadena, California, a home of religious nutjobs, like the late weirdo Herbert W. Armstrong and his British-Israelite movement. Anyway. Doctor Gene died in February of 2005. Pastor Melissa Scott inherited it all. Praise the Lard! She got the restored Warner Bros. theater in downtown L.A. that the Doctor called his Cathedral and all of Doctor Gene's rare bible collection, the largest private bible collection in the world. Plus she got Doctor Gene's teevee network, the University Network, and Melissa now streams old Doctor Gene footage 24 hours a day all over CABLE and the Internet. Praise the Lard for Melissa. She's one serious bitch. Check her out; she wouldn't be a bad misstress if some of you Hollywood hunk types are looking for source of income while you await your audition that's gonna send you higher in the heavens than Melissa--except good luck on that, Melissa right next to God now, you know.

I totally passed out after writing this brief post.

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

FEAR

The Ministry of Fear

I’m listening to this British dude, Robert Fisk, telling it like it is about Iraq. He relates it all back to 1920 and the siege of Baghdad by the Brits; all of this the fault of the Brits, but actually the fault of our inbred imperialist attitudes—historically constructed attitudes, all based on FEARS, fears invented by think tanks [read: like the Brookings Institute, etc.] and passed on to the Ministry of Fear. Yep, even Georgie Porgie, our phony “president,” has his Ministry of Fear. Rummy Rumsfeld was the Minister of Fear and now it’s a man named DICK, Dick Gates, same as Rummy, just in a different color suit, but, I guarantee you, just as white MEAN and viciously caught up in his own white power, the power to torture and the power to eventually kill and even the power to perhaps find himself high up in the hierarchy of the eventual Fascist dictatorship that this country becomes if We the People don’t put a stop to it—Oh hell yes it’s coming. I am a bit of soothsayer, you know, so hold onto your hats, it’s a coming, though since I’m also a hidebound cynic, and as such, I, beneath the surface of my predictions, believe it’s already here, we are now FASCISTS, and we really have been all along, even since before the Constitution and the first Congresses and shit. Aristocrats formed this White Nation and aristocrats still rule this White Nation.

Let’s look at the word “aristocrat.” Aristos means “best” in Greek and Latin [sorry, I am not a linguist, so take my definitional statements as coming from the italicized portions of my Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary. I do have a copy of the OED in my hard drive, thanks to l hat’s efforts of getting it to me, but I am awfully lazy computerwise and the “little dic” is right here by my side, so, hey, I improvise.

Trouble with an improviser? Let me name the ways! But my improvising on the breaking down of the English word “aristocrat” is purely according to what I’m reading in the dictionary. Why do we trust dictionary definitions so much? We don’t know the people who decide such things, do we? I remember the name Clifton Fadiman. Anybody else remember him? My dictionary’s Editor in Chief is Frederick C. Mish. The word “mishmash” comes to mind. The “Director of Defining”—Jesus X., what a title! I would rather be the Director of Defining than the Editor in Chief—Yahoooo! But the Director of Defining is E. Ward Gilman (a three-named person—we young college-boy writers used to make fun of three-named women poets). [By the bye, is anyone of you aware of the Explanation Chart in dictionaries?—I find it quite fascinating—it comes of pages 8a and 9a in my Tenth Edition Webster’s Collegiate (1993).]

So aristos means “best.” Numero uno. Ichi ban. The suffix -kratia just being the –cracy, like “demo-cracy.” So an “aristocracy” is “government (-cracy) by the BEST (aristos-) INDIVIDUALS or by a SMALL PRIVILEGED CLASS.” There’s nothing in aristocracy that has to do with any majority. Is this form of government beginning to look more familiar NOW?

RUGGED INDIVIDUALISM. When slaveholding counted when it came to power in this country, who the hell do you think became the leaders of this country? Aristocrats with the most slaves, read: George “Pot Grower” Washington, Tom “Whar’s My Cullard Gal” Jefferson, John “Kiss My Ass” Adams, a Boston Brahmin—or even Ben “the Philanderer” Franklin (“Methinks I’ll take meself down to the Hashfire Inn….”) or Alexander Hamilton (his mother was a Caribbean black wasn’t she? though Alex would have challenged you to a duel had you said he had even a drop of black in him) and Aaron Burr, an aristocrat who when shunned by his aristocratic friends went down to Texas and formed an army and declared he was forming his own empire; both Burr and Hamilton were snobs. Oh, I forgot, a part of the definition of “aristocrat” is being “snobbish.” Aristocrats live in “socially exclusive” neighborhoods—closed communities, like where most mansions are, outside the commonwealth usually. Did you ever hang around a really rich dude’s mansion? I have. My brother used to live across the alley from Ross Perrot in Dallas, for one brief moment in his crooked life the world’s wealthiest man, and by God was that Perrot mansion guarded! With high steel barbed wired fences sporting barred entrance gates with big RP monograms on them—symbols that bring awesome fear and respect from the low-life workingclass—from which all these assholes come, by the way; even Washington and Jefferson were from dirt-farmer stock—with tons of armed guards at those mighty pearly gates. And then Ross had his on “security force” inside the gates. Oh yes, quite an exclusive way to live; certainly isolated on purpose from the real-world community in which the workingclasses try to cope with existence. These dumbasses believe the witch doctors who tell them, “Work for the night is coming when you’ll work no more.” Very Calvinistic, don’t you think? Which is leading us right back to the Libertarians.

When you are powerful enough to have gates to close against your fellow man and have your own protective army to make sure those gates stay closed to your fellow man, by God, then you are an aristocrat, subject only to your own improvised laws; your property becoming your own heaven on earth, fuck working for any coming night when you’ll work no more—in fact, F work; that’s for somebody else to do, all under protection of the fascist government that is engineered by your own class to benefit and secure your own class. This is why Bush is determined to free the richest Amuricans from taxes and plebian laws. Aristos, don’t you see, are above the law—they make LAW, they don’t obey it.

Yep, aristocrats rule us all and have since the beginning of time back there on the Serengeti Plain in Africa. So the first aristocrat may have been a tribal witch doctor, maybe one of the reasons we are instinctly impressed by witchcraft, one of the ways the aristocrats keep their power: by keeping knowledge from the commonman—Jefferson believed this to the point he built the University of Virginia as a place where aristocrat children could come learn how to be aristocrats, southern competition with Havard and Yale, the Big East aristocrat colleges. Aristocrats think they’re smarter than you. Are they? Well, hell, they’ve been to Harvard, Yale, and the cavalier University of Virginia, so, according to aristocratic law, yep, they’re smarter than you, even after they were forced to allow Jews and blacks to become aristocrats. Saudi Arabians, for instance, are considered aristocrats to the aristocratic Bushes. Iraqis? Oh hell no; Saddam Hussien was an F-ing peasant; the Shah of Iran, however, now he was a true aristocrat and was treated as such by the U.S. government. And, yep, you guessed it, the Bin Ladens are accepted aristocrats, and that includes little brother Osama—yep, he’s an aristocrat, too; one of THEM.

In my continuing to read and reread Eugene O’Neill’s Days Without End, I came across the following--and regarding reading books over and over, Malcolm Lowry said he wrote books to be read more than once. He asked how could you get the true flavor of a complicated novel without reading it multiple times, each time taking on a new perspective of the story as it has unfolded out of a writer’s mind for a decade maybe, or in the case of Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano 12 years? It takes a writer 12 years to develop his characters and a reader is going to wipe them out of existence after one reading? Those characters keep on living and changing in our best literature. On the other hand, who the hell gives a shit about a piece of Stephen King pap after one reading? “I can’t wait until they make a movie out of this.” “Would you read it again?” “Oh hell no. The movie, on the other hand, hell yeah, I might watch the movie two or three times, or when it came out again on teevee or CABLE or somethin’ or I might buy a DVD of the movie. But the book? Hell no; I threw mine away right after I read it—or did I give it my wife to take to her job where they have a lending library?”

Anyway, what I’m trying to tell you is that while reading Days Without End I came across these lines. They are spoken by John Loving, the play’s main character—remember, he shares the stage with a mirror image of himself who’s audible but invisible to the other characters and who is actually just his alter ego. But here’s a cool little speech that tells a good bit of what I’m trying to get across in a very passionate way—and remember, this was written in the 1930s, ancient times to some of us:

Act Three, Scene Three:

JOHN: “I listen to people talking about this universal breakdown we are in and I marvel at their stupid cowardice. It is so obvious that they deliberately cheat themselves because their fear of change won’t let them face the truth. They don’t want to understand what has happened to them. All they want is to start the merry-go-round of blind greed all over again. They no longer know what they want this country to be, what they want it to become, where they want it to go. It has lost all meaning for them except as a pig wallow. And so their lives as citizens have no beginnings, no ends. They have lost the ideal of the Land of the Free. Freedom demands initiative, courage, the need to decide what life must mean to oneself. To them, that is terror. They explain away their spiritual cowardice by whining that the thime for individualism is past, when it is their courage to possess their own souls which is dead—and stinking! No, they don’t want to be free. Slavery means security—of a kind, the only kind they have courage for. It means they need not think. They have only to obey orders from owners who are, in turn, their slaves!”

His alter ego replies to this:

LOVING (Breaks in—with bored scorn): “But I’m denouncing from my old soap box again. It’s all silly twaddle, of course. Freedom was merely our romantic delusion. We know better now. We know we are all the slaves of meaningless chance—electricity or something, which whirls us—on to Hercules! [Act Three, scene II, pp. 109-110, Eugene O’Neill, Days Without End, 1^st Edition, 1934.]

Damn, to me that’s fine writing and thinking while writing. But it makes you stop and think. It’s O’Neill’s yin and yang thinking; I love especially the statement that the righteous John makes about slavery to the stupid being security. I know that’s true even though one isn’t really supposed to admit slavery is still as alive and well today as it was back in 1933 when O’Neill was writing this play. “Freedom” in the eyes of numbskulls like Georgie Porgie, our phony “president,” and the numbskull coevals in the Pure White House is slavery. That’s why little spoiled brat GWBush--who now looks bushed to me lately—like when he trotted poor Pickles out yesterday to have her show her scrape scar where We the People’s paid-for special doctor scraped a skin cancer off her leg. Your doctor’s gonna charge you $4,000 a pop to scrape off your skin cancers one day—Pickles, however, got the royal queen’s discount and didn’t have to pay a damn dime for her skin cancer scrape. Praise the Lard how We the People pamper these already spoiled brat bastards as though they really were noble people (what the aristocrats were called in Medieval England, noblemen), these aristocratic assholes like the Bushes who have stolen their fortunes through politics and asslicking since back in the late 1800s—a family aristocratically proud that it helped Hitler’s regime with its banking problems at the height of the Third Reich, even to the point of helping Adolf finance the building of the concentration camps! Oh yeah! Go Bushes Go! You gotta love these sorry bastards. They are products of our American way, the way of aristocrats, plutocrats, theocrats, autocrats, whether Dumbocrats or Repugnicans—hell, even Ralph Nader’s a damn aristocrat!

God, I lose it everytime I think of how this “president” is getting away with all this lying and cheating and stealing and lying some more and just arbitrarily declaring us in a War on Terrerists and then just as arbitrarily taking away all our rights to privacy, all our rights to the pursuit of our happiness, all the rights to our guaranteed freedom of speech, all the rights to habeas corpus when we’re being falsely accused of let’s say murder, all the rights to worship or believe in whatever the hell we want to believe in even if it’s the right to not believe any of it if we so go that way—Atheists should have the same rights as faithful fools who believe in Almighties!, all the rights to travel unobscured by passports and ID-examinations and being fingerprinted, etc., etc., etc. (as the King of Siam liked to say).

Cowards become slaves. Now that’s a scary thought. That means if you rebuke slavery you could be subject to the state killing your ass. See what I mean? Say you follow all the orders given you by the aristocrats without question, without argument, with the obedience of a beaten-down hound without a home who hasn’t eaten in 7 days—like one of those dogs in the teevee dog food commercials, then you become a patriot, another Neo-Con word for "slave." [What Amuricans spend on pet food in a year could end starvation in the world forever.

Like John Loving’s alter ego, I am seeing it all as silly twaddle—and, certainly yes freedom is simply a romantic delusion.

Robert Fisk says these aristocrats hold us in slavery through FEAR. Red, green, yellow, orange alerts that really have no meaning whatsoever than to scare hell out of us. Or, hell, there’s tons of scary movies being made constantly, or there are murder mysteries constantly pumped on us, cop shows, America’s Most Wanted, detailed investigations into workings of serial killers—television CSI shows that turn serial killers into heroes! They do. They respect both scientifically and professionally serial killers. Plus, watch some of these shows sometimes and look at the various ways they show to kill people. Recently they’ve been into serial killers who bury their victims, always young girls, alive, leaving trails as to when their oxygen is going to run out unless they’re rescued, which this serial killer wanted because he didn’t really want to do what he was doing, you see; something was driving him to… Such bullshit.

Murder. Death. Well, OK, DEATH is our biggest FEAR. Only the truly stoned of us aren’t afraid of DEATH [Doctor Hunter Thompson wasn’t afraid of death; he beckoned it to take him and it answered his beckoning by blowing the top of his whole head off—leaving nothing of the brilliant Hunter S. Thompson but a stump of a wrecked body, the rest of him splattered all over a window overlooking his little Aspen empire. Before he died, he wrote that he was killing himself because he’d done all he could do, had tried to warn us but we didn’t listen, so, hell, he’d lived 68 years and that was long enough so—BOOM—Adios, suckers].

We are all along with our phony “president” and all the crooks in Washington, District of Corruption” are COWARDS who have “lost the ideal of the Land of the Free.” We want to be LED by the nose; we want to be RULED, we want to be enslaved because only then will we feel safe and secure. Only then can we really believe doctors and other medicine men, like Jesus X. Christ, the Great Physician, and all his healing force of gooney bird hucksters and hustlers and flim-flammers that we are never going to die if we only eliminate the Islamic faith from the world—and maybe the only solution to that elimination problem is the Final Solution. Right, Adolf?

The Ministry of Fear. What did that old bleeding heart crippled liberal say, that old rascal aristocrat, Franklin Delano Roosevelt (a three-named man), “We having nothing to fear but fear itself”?

thegrowlingwolf declares that he is not afraid. I live in the middle of New York City, just a few blocks north of Ground Zero, where these aristocrats are hoopla-ing it up with spoiled brat NY governor Potato Head Patake over the fact they are going on with the building of the world’s tallest building anyway whether anybody likes it or not. This development not only includes turning that site into a real estate goldmine but also turning that area into a New Manhattan with an overabundance of new office space and of course tons of new 50-story luxury hi-rise apartment buildings with million-dollar views of Ground Zero—you know, they’re leaving the concreted-over hole open as a museum or Disneyland show or something crude like that. Totally a commercial monument to the aristocrat’s true god, Mammon. The Devil already owns their souls; so they can’t help themselves, just like Flip Wilson’s drag queen used to say, “The Devil made me do it.”

Candides. All of us are Candides.

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler