I was awakened Friday morning by the illegal immigrant workers that have been pointing the brickwork on the wall just outside my windows for 4 summers now and it looks like they are going to be back at it again this summer.
Disturbances. I hate disturbances. They wrack my nerves. They cause me upset stomachs, though my stomach being like steel resists being upset by fooling with my mentality. I was suffering not as a sociopath, like the Virginia Tech shooter, Cho, but as a mental patient stuck within the extreme limits of my mental coolness to handle constant and everyday nerve-wracking hammering and using a motorized router (to dig the old mortar out from between the cracked or broken out bricks) just outside my windows. I look out my windows and I see dirty ropes and steel cables hanging down, and I look up, I see the bottom of the several-feet-wide platform dangling just above my window tops.
There has been scaffolding covering up the front of my building for, I swear, 20 years of the 25 years I have now lived here. It's the oldest building still standing on Broadway in NYC; the building was built before the Civil War. It has landmark designation so any repairs and upgrading done to it has to follow the original designs of the building--my landlord has old postcards that show what this once grand showcase building looked like at the turn of the 20th century when everything west of us was the Pennsylvania Railroad Station and the gobs of interacting tracks that surrounded the station in those days. It was considered a railroad hotel and across the street from it was the grand Imperial Hotel (replaced by one of the tackiest towers in Manhattan, the Stevens Tower). Sixth Avenue, a block away, was dominated in those days by the Sixth Avenue El, just a few blocks up from 23rd and the most deadly elevated curve on the NYC transit system--Dead Man's Curve it was called, and it turned those els from off 23rd to shoot them uptown, up Sixth north, to eventually rattle through Times Square (named after the New York Times and not like most people think who think it was named after time on the clock--you know, when the ball drops at the stroke of midnight (speaking of strokes, whatever happened to old stroked out Dick Clark? Is he a vegetable now?) and it becomes Time's Square--Old Father Time, I assume. The old New York Times building still sits at the head of Times Square, though it's gone through many conversions and face-lifts since it was the Times Building--once becoming the Allied Chemical Building in the sixties when it was totally refaced with Plexiglas and Fiberglas--60s tacky architecture led by Philip Johnson and the minimalist architects who gave us the now seedy looking Lever House on Park Avenue. A version of Philip Johnson's original minimal glass house he built for himself up in Connecticut has been made into a high-rise luxury apartment building down on Spring Street, the building of which almost destroyed another landmark building, one of the first Federalist houses built in the early 1800s by land developer John Jacob Astor who along with Trinity Church once owned all the land from Houston Street south to Wall Street. This old Federalist house now houses the Ear Inn, a once-freaky restaurant and bar (it's called the Ear Inn because the original bar, the Green Door, had a black neon sign above its door that said BAR, but the B had lost the neon that made it say BAR and instead it read EAR, thus the Ear Inn) started by a bunch of Columbia University music school graduates and music rebels--RIP Heyman and Charlie Morrow in particular.
I spent many a good day and night in the Ear Inn back when it opened in the late seventies. I had just moved into a loft just around the corner from the Ear on Greenwich Street. I went in it when it was the Green Door (an early-to-open Union bar catering to seamen and dock workers) and they wouldn't serve me because I was a stranger and I had long hair and looked like a hippy and these people considered hippies the sames as commies and homos. One day I was walking by there and I saw a tall red-haired dude with a water hose cleaning off the front of the building. With him was a much older woman, pure grey hair, really old but active looking. Turned out she was a famous artist--she made her art from things she found in the street. The red-headed guy told me that they were opening the bar back up and would I please come to their grand opening, which I did. I used the Ear Inn as my headquarters from 1977 until I had to move out of the neighborhood in 1981. One of my best friends became the first Ear Inn bartender and I would be there when he opened at six a.m. and I very seldom left until he and I left after closing hours and he'd locked up the bar--around 4:30 in the morning. Then we'd all boogie up to Bleeker and the Pink Tea Cup for some grits, sausage, eggs, and sorghum syrup. Those were the days, my friend. What a great time I had in the Ear Inn, and then one day it was leased out to three dudes who turned it into a very trendy and well-attended restaurant that made them rich and RIP Heyman rich--and I haven't seen any of my old Ear Inn pals in over 20 years now. I haven't been back to the Ear Inn in about 10 years.
Lofts were the big thing down there in those days. This area was once a manufacturing area when NYC produced a hell of a lot of the nation's goods, these downtown lofts ex-factories, so these lofts were big and spacey with huge high windows and great broad wood floors and tin ceilings and brick walls--my loft was in an old butter and egg wholesaler's building. The guy I rented from had bought the butter and egg building for $27,000. He refurbished it and when I moved in I paid a fixtures fee of $900 bucks and a monthly rent of $350. My loft was brand new, though amateurishly constructed by the landlord who considered himself a plumber and his pal who considered himself a contractor. Both were very slipshod in the work they did, but then, that's the tone of NYC construction these days--it's all slipshod--cheap ass aluminum studs holding up sheetrock walls that you can easily hear your neighbors fighting or F-ing through, and thin concrete slab floors, and I mean thin, too, probably less than a foot thick most of them, all surrounded by Plexiglas and Fiberglas outer shells--plastics invented by the Nazis in WWII, I think, thus the German spellings--I may be wrong on this--l hat, help me out. I joke, of course.
Capitalism is such a crude system. If favors cheapness over class. Thus quantitative management, where production becomes the most important thing in a manufacturing process to the exclusion of quality. What is quality now-a-days? Quality used to mean that an American-made automobile was made to last the buyer 10 years. After WWII when the automotive industry started making cars again--they didn't make new cars from 1944 to 1946--people were desperate for cars and bought them by the 1000s; so, automobile production increased and the quality of the cars decreased. Those car folks, though they had maintained getting rich off manufacturing war vehicles like tanks, trucks, Jeeps (named after Popeye's amazing dog, in case you didn't know--Popeye called his dog "The Jeep" and his dog could do amazing things, just like the old Army jeeps could--they were four-wheel drive, you dig? Hummers today are nothing but glorified Jeeps. Jeeps have become Nazi-made (I'm sorry, German-made) cars now from Daimler-Chrysler--Daimler is already ready to get rid of their Chrysler association. [I just noticed our economy is ranked sixth behind Sweden, Germany, Japan, Switzerland!!, and Holland--all countries the US Army saved from Nazi occupation in WWII--except Switzerland, of course, who even the Nazis let be neutral; that's why the first United Nations was organized in Geneva (aha! the Geneva Convention, which today we totally ignore). That's the kind of irony I love.]
We continue to think we are the greatest economy in the world. We continue to believe our military is the greatest military force on earth. NOT TRUE. The Chinese Commie Armed Forces are a hell of a lot larger than our forces. The Chinese Commies have an army of 2 million; they are able to put a couple'a more million troops in the field at any given moment. They whipped our ass in VietNam and drove us out of Nam. And by the bye, they let VietNam develop in its own way, too, after that wretched bloodbath was over--the US going to the aid of the feeble French who had been decimated by Ho Chi Minh's armies at Dien bien Phu.
The Battle of Dien Bien Phu (French: Bataille de Điện Biên Phủ; Vietnamese: Chiến dịch Điện Biên Phủ) was the climactic battle of the First Indochina War between the military forces of France and Vietnamese revolutionary forces called the Viet Minh. The battle occurred between March and May 1954, and culminated in a massive French defeat that effectively ended the war. Dien Bien Phu was "the first time that a non-European colonial independence movement had evolved through all the stages from guerrilla bands to a conventionally organized and equipped army able to defeat a modern Western occupier in pitched battle."[4]
[from Wikipedia]
By the bye, the dominoes didn't fall in that area like old John Foster Dullass, our aristocratic Sec'y of State under dumbass Dwight David Eisenhower's reign kept bleating--Ike the golf-playingest president we've ever had. Gerald Ford played a lot of golf, too (Congress has its own country club and golf course, the Congressional Country Club--they used to play the National there on the pro tour every year), but he was never elected president, like Georgie Porgie Puddin' and Pie Bush Baby, the lowest of the lowlife Bush family. I see where old Pappy Bush is speaking before the Moonies. Pappy was a big backer of Reverend Sun Yung Moon--the Korean Jesus in the cheap business suit--and still probably is. Moon made his fortune off ginseng--whose powers are supposed to be hot and invigorating to real men who can't get it up, like old Bob Dole. The first Korean restaurant I ever went to served what they called a Seoul martini--it was vodka and ginseng--and I must admit, I was as powerful as Zeus himself later that night with my true love (one of the many who have passed through my life). Since then, I've drank a few shots of straight ginseng to no avail. I no longer see it promoted in my neighborhood, that used to be one of the largest Korean communities in NYC though it's now being destroyed by these new venture 55-story luxury apartment buildings jutting up all over this area now. Where they build, they tear down Korean businesses and restaurants and things. There used to be a great Korean restaurant called Seoul House over here by me, but now it's long gone and a trendy little hotel has taken its place. Since NYC's biggest industry is now the tourist industry, these little trendy hotels, with names like the Gershwin or Giraffe are popping up all over the place, at lot of them owned by Indians, who learned to be good servants and how to run hotels under the F-ing snob Brits when they were a Colony. These are old transient hotels, like I said before, clustered around Penn Station and Greeley Square, that foreign investors are buying and having feeble architects come in and make them into trendy hotels whose rooms go for about $175 a night--watch out for the rats and cockroaches! as opposed to $275 up to $575 a night in a Sheraton or Hilton monster. I can't imagine why a bunch of bug-eyed Iowan farmers or prairie chicken hicks would want to come to NYC and pay those kind of prices--for less than a hundred a night you used to could rent a room on the rim of the Grand Canyon with awe-inspiring views--the views from your hotel window here in NYC will either look out on another building's walls or your views will be blocked by neon signs and advertising geegaws; the suites at the top of the hotels, where they make their big bucks, even the little trendy hotels have expensive suites on their top floors, sometimes have views of the city.
Speaking of the Moonies, I live just over from the Moonie headquarters in the massive old New Yorker Hotel on Eighth and 34th--the first time I ever saw Bob Marley was in the Manhattan Room of that hotel. Moonie girls, cute ones, used to sell roses on street corners or they would come in the bars and hustle them--you bought a rose from them and then they would stay around and talk to you, eventually leaving you to believe you could maybe score with them--they were quite sexy young Korean girls--and then these babes would cap off the sex deal by inviting you to come with them back to the New Yorker. Once back at the New Yorker you didn't get your booty but you got locked in a room and then a Moonie bullshitter would come in and try to get you hooked on being a Moonie--then, you were told, you could have as many young Korean girls as you wanted--you could even massively marry one of them if you wanted. I never fell for it but I do remember being in the Ear Inn one night when a Moonie girl came in with her roses and this guy at the bar fell head over heels for her, went off to the New Yorker with her and we never saw him again--I swear.
L. Ron Hubbard said, you can't get rich writing pap-like mystery books, but you can get filthy rich by starting your own religion. Let's hear it for L. Ron Hubbard, a great capitalist pig.
Hey, Look, Our Solution to Our Losing in Iraq (Remember While You're Watching This the Great Communicator's Famous Ich bin Berliner Speech: "Mister Gore-bah-shelf, tear down this wall.")
Related Video
A wall U.S. troops are building around a Sunni enclave in Baghdad has come under increasing criticism, with residents calling it 'collective punishment' and a local leader saying construction began without the neighborhood's approval. (April 21)
Play video | » More AP video
Don't you love the AP's use of the lower case "i" in the above headline!!! (Sorry, Scottie, but I do laugh at my own jokes; re: Scott Fitzgerald who said using exclamation marks was like laughing at your own jokes.)
Have a beautiful Saturday eve.
I'm not so happy. The Yankees pitching is giving me woes. The best hitting team in baseball--most runs scored to--has the worst pitching staff, so bad, they pitched a rank amateur (Double A ball) against the Boston Red Sox--Big Poppy had a field day with the stupid Yankee pitchers--and tomorrow they're pitching a dude who only pitched two games at Double A Trenton before becoming a Yankee starter--that's how lousy their pitching staff is this year.
thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler
Here Is an Interesting Article From the Editor of Exile/Moscow; We Here at The Daily Growler have already posted that you don't ask psychologists or psychiatrists about these kind of shooters because they are SOCIOPATHS and not psychopaths. If you study Social Psychiatry, there you will find the keys to these rebellers against authority. Same thing just happened at NASA--a worker shot another worker--not because he was a psychotic but because he was getting fired and blamed the guy he shot for it--that's a typical sociopathic response to a workplace conflict--check out the postal employees who blow other postal employees away. These guys hate life not because they are individually demented but because they do not know how to socialize. They are afraid of condemnation; of being ridiculed; of failure. Here read this:
Don't you love the AP's use of the lower case "i" in the above headline!!! (Sorry, Scottie, but I do laugh at my own jokes; re: Scott Fitzgerald who said using exclamation marks was like laughing at your own jokes.)
Have a beautiful Saturday eve.
I'm not so happy. The Yankees pitching is giving me woes. The best hitting team in baseball--most runs scored to--has the worst pitching staff, so bad, they pitched a rank amateur (Double A ball) against the Boston Red Sox--Big Poppy had a field day with the stupid Yankee pitchers--and tomorrow they're pitching a dude who only pitched two games at Double A Trenton before becoming a Yankee starter--that's how lousy their pitching staff is this year.
thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler
Here Is an Interesting Article From the Editor of Exile/Moscow; We Here at The Daily Growler have already posted that you don't ask psychologists or psychiatrists about these kind of shooters because they are SOCIOPATHS and not psychopaths. If you study Social Psychiatry, there you will find the keys to these rebellers against authority. Same thing just happened at NASA--a worker shot another worker--not because he was a psychotic but because he was getting fired and blamed the guy he shot for it--that's a typical sociopathic response to a workplace conflict--check out the postal employees who blow other postal employees away. These guys hate life not because they are individually demented but because they do not know how to socialize. They are afraid of condemnation; of being ridiculed; of failure. Here read this:
And now that the media has started digging up the early life of Cho Seung-Hui, the same pattern emerges. Former classmates of Seung-Hui say he "was pushed around and laughed at as a schoolboy" because of his "shyness and the strange, mumbly way he talked":
Chris Davids, a Virginia Tech senior who graduated from Westfield High School in Chantilly, Va. [with Seung-Hui] ... recalled that the South Korean immigrant almost never opened his mouth and would ignore attempts to strike up a conversation. Once, in English class, the teacher had the students read aloud, and when it was Cho's turn, he just looked down in silence, Davids recalled. Finally, after the teacher threatened him with an F for participation, Cho started to read in a strange, deep voice that sounded "like he had something in his mouth," Davids said. "As soon as he started reading, the whole class started laughing and pointing and saying, 'Go back to China.'"
Luke Woodham, the high school killer in Pearl, Miss., whose murder spree preceded Carneal's by two months, was even more explicit in his rebellion. Minutes before starting his schoolyard rampage, Woodham handed his manifesto to a friend, along with a will. "I am not insane," he wrote. "I am angry. I killed because people like me are mistreated every day. I did this to show society, push us and we will push back. ... All throughout my life, I was ridiculed, always beaten, always hated. Can you, society, truly blame me for what I do? Yes, you will. ... It was not a cry for attention, it was not a cry for help. It was a scream in sheer agony saying that if you can't pry your eyes open, if I can't do it through pacifism, if I can't show you through the displaying of intelligence, then I will do it with a bullet."
Read the whole article here--it's pretty good-- http://www.alternet.org/story/50758/
