Vinting a Spleen

Woke Up Pissed
Progress in New York City now means more 55-story luxury apartment buildings and more giant 2000-room hotels. I woke up pissed because at one time in my existence I lived in one of the quietest apartments in NYC--in the back of a midtown ancient structure built with marble floors and thick walls with air pockets in them--yes, those pockets are full of rats and mice and cockroaches--that's just NYC where there are definitely more rats and mice than people, which is true all over the world, isn't it? Why are rats seen as evil and mice seen as cute? Mice are just as smelly and disease-carrying as rats. Mice bite, too. Plus old mouse piss that has dried and turned to powder can kill you if you breathe it in. Remember Bob Dylan almost died when he breathed in some powdered mouse piss out at one of his many, I'm sure, Long Island mansions. You notice that, all these sudden stars, these sudden millionaires, buy fine houses. That must tell the rest of us somethin'--like, hey, land is the only thing worth investing in--like buying a house for 50,000 in the 70s and then selling it in the 2000s for 700 grand, fortune enough for most people entering their sixties when you need tons of bucks to survive, what with our health system been made a Capitalist venture--can you imagine, assholes will close a hospital down now if it isn't making a profit?--F the people in the community who depended on it--F the people seeming to be the motto of the American corporate world, which is the world's corporate world, too. F all Americans--I hear that every day from the various governments we're under--aren't we the most governed people in the world? You know how many laws are on both city, county, state, and federal books currently? There must be millions. Think about it, the minute you leave your apartment you start facing laws--in the hallway--"No Smoking"--you ask why? but you aren't supposed to ask why; somebody's made a law that says stupid human beings can't smoke in the hallways of apartment buildings in NYC. OK, wait'll you get to the street! Aha, we have a little-man, billionaire mayor who wants to ban smoking in the street! I'm not a smoker and I'm not into cigarettes--I do enjoy an occasional well-rolled top-graded-tobacco cigar--like Slick Willie used on Monica Lewinsky in the Oval Office those days he didn't have sex with that woman.

Aren't our politicians such jokes? Yet they rule our lives. A lot of these millions of laws come from that Congressional den of thieves every year--I mean, the bastards call themselves "lawmakers," but is that really what their supposed to be doing in Washington, District of Corruption; why not make the original laws work? Why does everything we do constantly need amending? Everything has to be brand new in this country to have meaning, which means in any given NOW you have to be "with it" or you are pitched into the garbage of life just like those BMWs and Mercedes will eventually end up in the scrap yard (both great Nazi automotive giants back in WWII--the Bavarian Motor Works was Hitler's favorite car company though he loved Daimler's big Mercedes tractor-like armored cars to ride through the streets of Berlin in then--Siegheiling all the way, man--Daimler by the way now owns Chrysler Motors, ironically who made tank motors in WWII used to totally level Berlin and the surrounding countryside; Chrysler also made aircraft engines used in the bombers that leveled Hamburg. Life is so full of ironies. That's Mitsubishi advertising, "Hey, Yankees, we kill your grandfathers and fathers in WWII with our fine Mitsubishi bombers; now we kill you on your highways with our fine pieces of shit Mitsubishi automobiles," a company, for all I know, that could still be being financed by the US government from leftover WWII treaties and shit).

It's too big for us. It's too F-ing complicated. Think of it. I used to think hundreds of millions of shares traded everyday down on New York City's Vegas Strip, Wall Street, where the real high rollers hang out, but how surprised was I to learn that when the HALs down on Wall Street went on strike and the market had what they are now calling a "machine-made" drop of 400-plus points, that day over 1 billion shares were traded. Think of that? One billion shares a day for 5 days a week--that's 5 billion shares a week being traded on Wall Street. Who's doing it? Who is buying and selling that many shares a day. For every share bought there has to be a share for sale, you know. That amazes me. At the height of my Wall Street venture, I owned 5000 shares of stock. Today my stock would be worth several millions of dollars had I held onto it. But in this Age of the Salesmen and continuous profits the trend is to buy and sell every second the market is open, just sit and stare at a computer and buy and sell all day--and I guess there are millions of suckers in this world doing just that--like these Texas Hold 'Em dudes I watch on teevee--one of whom, a several-time world poker champion, is from my hometown and though we didn't know each other, we went to high school together--playing cards for hours and hours--why? Why? I don't have to ask why. The answer to that is the amount of money needed for a good lifestyle in this country is either you got it or you don't and hopefully there is some mysterious Big Daddy to help you if you ain't got a dime or a pot to piss in.

Get rich quick. And that leads me back to progress in New York City and why I woke up pissed this morning in a once-totally peaceful apartment whose peace is now shattered on a daily morning basis when at 8 a.m., construction begins on a 2000-room hotel over a couple of long blocks from me; I woke pissed and feeling like writing under the pseudonym of Vint Spleen. [I actually did once write an article in a New Mexico newspaper under that name and I got this nice letter in response to the article; it was addressed to Mr. Vint Spleen in care of the newspapaer--"Dear Mr. Spleen, I have a son named Vint, too. Enjoyed your article. Yours truly, Irene Spleen." Ironies! I love 'em.

Back behind me, two long city blocks over on Sixth Avenue they are just starting construction of a mighty, 2000-room hotel that will totally block out my view west out over the Hudson and across a piece of the Jersey wetlands (For the 1964 NYC World's Fair, Robert Moses tried to change Sixth Avenue to the Avenue of the Americas but it never caught on--you see Sixth Avenue is lined with the flags of all the North and South American countries, plus statues of their heroes, like old Simon Bolivar (wasn't that Jean Paul Sartre's girlfriend? I can't resist that joke. Please don't laugh at me) and some others I never heard of, except good old Benito Juarez is on the Avenue and I always like Benito, a real revolutionary.

This splurge of new huge hotels in NYC are being built in order to offer rich world tourists expensive high-floor rooms and suites with awesome views for their pleasure while they're here doing whatever rich tourists do in NYC. The average hotel room in NYC right now is $575 a night, I kid you not. These new high-floor suites will go for thousands a night and that way keep the hotels viable, filling up the lower junk floors with no views at $575 a night, plus these stupid tourists pay a 14% city tax surcharge on their hotel bills, too--SURPRISE, on a 575-buck-a-night room that comes to 80 bucks extra a night. Holy Cow! Of course, the hicks from Iowa can get tiny rooms in the many India-owned old reconverted hotels that are on nearly every street in this town for $110 a night--WATCH OUT FOR THE RATS! This is all due to our little-man, billionaire, boy from Boston mayor who is determined to turn tourism into New York City's main industry--hell, he's already declared it such--in other words the only jobs being created by these tourist trap hotels and giant luxury apartment buildings are servant (slave) jobs. One of the highest-paid jobs in NYC today, I was reading this the other day, is limo driving.

Tourism has brought such disgrace to elegant old New York, like sightseeing buses--tacky big double deckers with their bottom windows blackened out with gaudy broadside ads and their roofs full of goofy ogling hicks from the bottomlands--I don't know where they come from--retired teachers and cops and shit listening to some actor or actress describing like the Empire State Building to these yokels. And outside the Empire State Building now are lines of tourists, a lot of Asians with their cameras--the Asians and the Canadians travel in huge big tour buses--these buses line the streets where the cheap India-owned hotels are and they leave their motors running--it's against the law, but big bus companies don't have to honor laws--give 'em a ticket, they don't give a shit. I mean we New Yorkers breathe a lot of foul air made fouler by tourism. Another abomination are these phony trolley things--they look like those trolleys at DisneyLand or DisneyWorld, and god are they tacky, especially to someone who feels one of the most dastardly acts of aggression against the American people of the 20th Century was when General Motors decided streetcars in this country had to go and buses had to take their places. GM successfully destroyed super-transit systems in L.A., Dallas, Texas, New Orleans, El Paso, Texas, Detroit, Minneapolis, Portland, Oregon, Washington, D.C., Baltimore, Maryland (I think it was the oldest streetcar system in the US), Boston, Mass (I think Boston kept some of their streetcars), etc. I sat in my dentist's office on Canal Street down in New Orleans in 1965 and watched while crews dug up the old Canal St. streetcar tracks--ripped 'em up, and they once ran so beautifully up and down Canal, trolleys out in the center of Canal, which was a boulevard with marble sidewalks, man--and the streetcars ran all the way up the center of Canal out to the Fairgrounds, Audabon Park--to the Sugar Bowl, when it really was held in a football stadium, Tulane Stadium, which was a huge bowl that held 80,000 people. What a mistake to rip up New Orleans's trolleys; and New Orleans had to quickly put a lot of the lines back in because New Orleans became dependent on tourism, too, when all its old industries were bought up by conglomerates and moved out of New Orleans. When I visited New Orleans as a kid, I was amazed by the industry just in the French Quarter--two coffee companies, Luzanne and French Market, were right there on Decatur--the smell of coffee roasting wafting all about lower Canal. Then there were two breweries on Decatur, too, Jax (for Andy Jackson whose statue is right up Decatur in Jackson Square, Andy's on his rearing up horse and under him are the words "United We Stand"--ain't that ironic now that Katrina and our negligent US government (they should go to jail for their handling of the New Orleans devastation)) and Regal (Lager spelled backwards). Now you go to the French Quarter and it's all tourists, drunken Texans and Mississippians; Georgie Porgie once admitted he did a lot of drinkin' in New Orleans--I wrote a song once with a lyric, "Over in a two-by-four/over by The Famous Door/ Bourbon sounding like a whore/everybody wanting more and more around here/this town of my dreams...."

And now that I'm awake and thinking of New Orleans I get more pissed. I loved New Orleans. It was Old South, yes, at one time the largest slave-trading city in the world, yes, yes, all of that, but it was a different town, not American really, enough of the Old World flavor left in it to make it inspirational to progressive musicians and writers and shit--I mean, New Orleans was the source of so many real American stories both of the bad and good kind, but yes it was the South, and, yes, the whites in New Orleans are racist bastards, though some of them weren't, some of them were progressive musicians and writers and shit, but, what happened? In my case, one day, I just woke up and decided it was time to leave New Orleans.

I was sitting one morning having breakfast with the then mayor of New Orleans, Vic Schiro--I've told you, Vic liked to have me and my friend Bonafons around him at breakfast because he liked our sense of humor, so every morning we had great big old Louisana sausages with grits and sorghum and fried Creole tomatoes with the mayor--and on this particular morning, I heard Vic and some of his planning board stooges seriously discussing building a freeway over the French Quarter. Can you imagine? It would have meant tearing down a portion of the French Market--it was needed the mayor argued to get the keiko muckity muck bankers, lawyers, politicians into town from their St. Bernard homes, or their Lakefront homes, or their homes across the Lake in Slidell or Covington--plus there were plans drawn up already to build the World Trade Center (whose head was at one time the infamous Clay Shaw--remember that name?), yep, that's what it was called, down at the foot of Canal where it is today. I went home and told my wife, "Baby, pack your things; it's time to hit the road. They're out to ruin New Orleans." She agreed after I told her the story, and old Vic had given us a huge smoked ham that Christmas, too, and we were still cuttin' sandwiches off it in January when we decided we were moving. And move we did--to Mexico City.

So here I sit hearing that racket over on Sixth Avenue--they are having to wreck a four-story, thick-concrete-floored, steel-beamed construction by using these little Caterpillar things with jackhammers on their fronts while huge big shovel machines dig the rubble up and put it into huge dump trucks who take it and sell it as fill out in the Jersey swamplands or maybe as land fill on the washing-away beaches of Long Island. The steel they sell, too, as scrap. Remember the USS Freedom, or some such silly shit battleship name, the battleship made in New Orleans supposedly out of the steel scraps from the World Trade Center here in NYC?

I get more pissed thinking of the eyesore Freedom Tower these billionaire developers have planned for that cemetery they now call Ground Zero, a tourist attraction, by the way, now. I see hayseeds down there paying to walk up on this special built lookout where they stand in awe looking at Ground Zero--or now, its the basement floors of that middle-finger-looking, bird-shooting tower of plastic and aluminum they are joyously bragging about among the billionaires all over NYC. "Too bad old Harry Helmsley's dead; he'd love to have a shot at managing this pink elephant--remember when he bought the Empire State Building?" What a joke life in NYC is becoming.

Is it time for me to move again?

And here's a post I never posted--I thought it had to be a joke, but it wasn't. Read this and learn about hypocrisy:

Bush Perhaps Seeing Al Queda As Our New Messiah

http://thinkprogress.org/2007/02/25/hersh-qaeda/

Beautiful isn't it? Lies leading to more lies and all lies coming around in a circle to lie themselves into truths. Edwin Starr told you about War, but nobody listened; oh they danced to the tune, but they didn't listen to the words.

Academy Awards
Helen Mirin, a Brit actress who is notorious mostly for her large rack than she is for her acting ability, won best actress. That she won an Academy Award in Hollywood, USA, for portraying a queen, in this case old, long-living Queen "Who Stole My Scotch?" Elizabeth (a direct descendent of Nazi sympathizers). I mean, come on, what is our great fascination with these Brit actors and actresses? I just read that in the remake of Gone With the Wind , Hugh Jackman is going to play Rhett Butler. A Brit. Well, hell, afterall, when they made the original Gone With the Wind, the director's latest lay, Vivian Lee, got the role, and she was a Brit. Brits, I suppose we love 'em because they backed our slaveholding Confederacy during our Civil War (we love Civil Wars in this country). Why not an all British cast in The American Revolution, the spectacular? They could film it in Vancouver, British Columbia. Hey, that'd be a blockbuster. How about Mick Jaegger as Muddy Waters in The Muddy Waters Story?

I have always been amazed at how faithful to their forefathers white folks are; everything British is fine, white, and wonderful to them; yet, Britain was our enemy in the Revolution; then in 1812 Britain attacked this country again, burning down the White House in the process. God Save Our Queen.

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler