I was watching the teevee t'other eve--and I've been swearing on stacks of Holy Books I would quit watching the filthy piece-0f-shit transmitting device but, hell, I can't resist--I mean watching teevee and getting into it is really common as hell, and, ironically, that's why I force myself to watch it. Yes, it's like going through a garbage dump looking for something valuable, but every now and then I do stumble upon a treasure I'd never had to consider before--plus, I'm afraid that teevee is reality these days! God, I hate saying that. But, I'm afraid the common man is acted out according to the trendy ways it's supposed to be--oh, jeez, when I start thinking about actors and actresses I start growling, you know, down deep in my throat--a remembrance of bad things gone badder in my staged and very dramatic past. I mean I know actors and actresses. Bless them. Yes, I know them, I've lived with them, I've partied with them, and I've hired them.
I used to hire freelance proofreaders, which, like NYC waiters and waitresses, were mostly "not-yet-on-the-big-stage" future celebrities, both men and women--and I hired 'em by the bales--the temporary employment agencies making tons of bucks off my superman-directorship position in the big wide world of printing and design and going to press and having proof after proof come back always fucked up by printers or fucked up by higher ups or fucked up by some stupid "other" directors and always fucked up by the artists, but OH Hades unleashed, if it was fucked up by any of my staff. Therefore I hired perfect people as copyeditors and goofball out-of-work actors and actresses as proofreaders--it worked!
Actors and actresses usually are pretty smart folks. Besides being the right type in terms of looks (attractiveness) they do have to have open minds (not really "empty" as you vulgar folks think)--great concentration, good memories, quick-ears, good eyesight--most of them, too, have been to some college and most of them have taken English and literature and they're used to reading, so, yeah, they make OK proofreaders--if one of my perfect copyeditors made a mistake and the actors and actresses pretending to be proofreaders didn't catch it, bam, we blamed it on the freelancers!
I tried living with this actress-singer one time. Holy shit, the world is a stage alright, Bill, and with actresses every day's a god-damn stage on a world of stages within worlds of future and past stages--stage after stage--everything a stage appearance from their getting up in the morning and going through their morning bathroom routine: shower, douche, then wrapped up in a big towel, then sitting in front of a "vanity" horseshoed by glaring naked lightbulbs, and then they put on their "faces" for the day--their vanities are top heavy with cosmetics of every kind, 20 shades of lipstick maybe, blushes, powders, rouges, glosses--and oh forget it if it's a hair day--and then they go all made-up like they are until early in the morning after hanging in the cabarets and stage joints for further notice finally traipsing home all bedraggled to then pass out after a raw-boned day of hustling and demonstrating their acting wares!
But on the other hand, the actresses I have known could become extremely and realistically passionate in certain situations--especially in bed (or on the couch or the kitchen table or the bathroom floor or standing up against the livingroom wall) but also in arguments and fights--you talk about dramatic!
Of all of the actors and actresses I have known in my life--it must be hundreds--not one of them that I know of has ever made it BIG time.
I hired this one truly hyperdramatic actress who worked for me for a long time, not getting any roles, no call backs, but I kept using her, and then she was getting a little too long in the tooth to get the ingenue roles around NYC--she wasn't even hitting any chorus work--she could act, she could sing, she could hoof, but mostly she cried and threw her 8 x 10 glossy bios in the garbage every time she returned from a failed audition--and like I said, she worked for me for a long time--so there were many crying jags and bio-tossings I had to endure. Finally, one day I sat her down and told her what I thought she should do--it was getting bad because she'd worked there so long some of my regular males were beginning to find her alluring and I was beginning to have male problems due to her looking down her nose at them as she rejected their overtures, which led these males to come to me and start telling me what a bitch she was and how jitterbuggy her work was--Jesus X! So I sat her down and I told her, "Get your sweet ass to L.A. while it's still sweet and your breasts are still perky and your legs still look halfway decent and you do have a pretty face, so get out to LaLa--shit, you'll surely land enough bit parts and commercial shit to make a living--at least a better living than you can make here in NYC." Besides, the dude she'd sold her romantic soul to had ditched her and moved to L.A. and she told me he'd already landed a slot on a pilot for a sit-com, which is damn good long-term bucks sometimes.
So she went to L.A. and, hey, I didn't hear from here for several months and then one day she called me and she told me she'd landed a spot on the Wheel of Fortune teevee show--they were filming that week and then she'd let me know when it was going to air. In the meantime, I got a form letter in the mail from L.A. from a temp agency--she'd given my name as a reference--she was looking for editing and proofreading work! But, hey, I had faith in her and sure 'nuff, she called me at home one night a couple'a weeks later--she was hilarious. "I'm drinking champagne and I'm getting a little high...what are you doing?" "You called me to find out how I'm doing? You must be drunk." "No, dummy, I called you to tell you I won 25,000 smackers on 'the Wheel.'" "Aw-right! Way to go." And so it was--and she's the only actor or actress I ever knew who made 25,000 smackers acting--and, yes, folks, they do ringer Hollywood teevee quiz shows with Central Casting kids. It's funny, when the show asked her to put down her occupation and she put down actress they said no she shouldn't say that--like, what else had she done besides acting and she said, "I was a proofreader in New York" and they said, "Perfect, dahlink, perfect, a proofreader...oh, that's so perfect."
"So what the hell was it you had to consider on teevee that you'd never had to consider before, you ranting maniac?"
In spite of being a good friend (for 25 years now!) with one of the world's top linguists while I was watching a CBS show called Forty-Eight Hours Mystery (sic) I saw right before me eyes a gentleman who described himself as a "forensic linguist" and his work on this murder case involved a couple of death-threat notes the victim had received from the murderer and how this learned dude studied them using his forensic linguistics and discovered that the notewriter had used what our linguist called "ironic repetition" in these letters, ironic repetition involving "negative contractions" like "he isn't here" and "positive contractions" like "he had not" instead of "he hadn't." They showed the notes and I saw what this forensic linguist was driving at--he was saying based on these linguistic tricks he'd decided the notes were written by the same person, who, as is usually the case in cases where a wife is murdered, it turned out was the husband who was using the notes to try and throw the cops off of suspecting him--this sleazy bastard was implicating his own son as the murderer.
l hat (languagehat), by the bye, had a post the other day giving a couple of books that explained the art of linguistics in layman's terms.
By another bye, I could write a great episodic tome on those days when I met l hat; in fact, I hired his carefree ass and saved him from the dungeon-like punishment of working in a Doubleday Bookstore's bookwormy-smelly basement--filling orders down there for $5 an hour and a 30-minute lunch break, which l hat used to keep on reading; l hat never stops reading. He is a perpetual reader. My brother was a perpetual reader, too. l hat can read while walking around New York City--EXCEPT, he no longer lives in New York City--he's now a country squire up in contented old New England; in fact, I wonder if he's read Van Wyck Brooks's New England Indian Summer?--I loved reading that book way back when I first read it; all about Hawthorne and Longfellow--but especially Hawthorne whose books still give me the willies while I'm reading them--such a brilliant dude; such a real American writer; and old Ralph Waldo Emerson's amongst those New England Summer pages, too; and the Lowells, but not Amy! I can hear Ez crying "Imagistes! Imagistes!" now as Amy puffs a cigar and blows the smoke right in the Imagist master's face. Oh what wonderful days those must have been. White days, yes; I don't think blacks were allowed to read in those days were they? How cruel whites are; and I'm white and I can feel the cruelty in me, too, which I started supressing way back when I started doubting Jesus and Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and the Repugnicans. Remember the joke, "What's the difference between Santa Claus and God?" "Santa Claus is real." And God was once dead way back in the learning days of my generation, the "forgotten" generation. Mason Hoffenburg and I were from the same red dirt that produced that good red-dirt marijuana, and Red Dirt Marijuana is a damn fine Texasy book. And I read Hawthorne's The Marble Faun back in those red-dirt marijuana days in Texas while listening to John Kirkpatrick play Charles Ives's 2nd Piano Concerto, the Concord, and Hawthorne's got a section in Charlie's piano masterpiece, and god-damn that Marble Faun was a great book. Transcendence!
Van Wyck Brooks
Mr. Hawthorne at home.
Other Curiosities Noticed on Teevee
Mitt Romney, the Mormon fool, and Mike Huckabee, the Christian fool (anyone who believes in these ribald religions are fools to me, including the Dali Lama, Bishop Tutu, and C.S. Lewis) are now the sweethearts of the Neo-Con television pundits (also nutjobs). Rudi "Mussolini" Guiliani is losing his "Amurica's Mayor"-9/11 hero shine due to his dull-dumb pickadildoes with city funds while he was tripping the light-fantastic cheat with super-Jewish-hot (to Rudi) babe Nathan whatever her evil name is (Bernie Keric liked Jewish babes, too (Judy Regan)) on sweet old has-been CABLE-teevee ex-star Donna Hanover and his less-than-intelligent-looking son. Also, some anti-Mussolini ads from disgruntled NYC firemen ain't helping Amurica's Mayor and also survivors of 9/11 are now openly wondering what Rudi "Mussolini" Guiliani did with the millions of bucks he collected for them right after 9/11 when Rudi was championing his HERO status with pile after pile of bullshit.
The bullshit is running neck-deep in this stupid primary racing we see going on now. A corn-fed pig state like Iowa is going to determine who our presidential candidates are going to be. Pushing primaries up to January is really dumb unless you are a politician with some broadside fame and you realize that hell yeah you'll throw your hat in this ring--like Joe Biden--not a chance in hell of winning the presidency but this old politico pro is thinking proactively (a business term) in terms of the vice presidency or perhaps a cabinet position in the next Dumbocrat's administration--plus, these jokers get coffers overflowing with millions of taxpayer bucks to use in pulling their rabbits out of their changing hats--running for president means you can reach into those coffers and pull out several million just for you--hey, campaign expenses and personal salaries and shit like that. Hey the longer they politic and run for office, the more and more millions these flim-flammers are tricking us out of--Obama commands a 30-million-dollar coffer; so does Hillary "Hambone" RodHAM Clinton command a 30-million-dollar coffer--and she's already a multimillionaire thanks to her slick husband's way with the semi-ugly ladies of his tainted Billy Jeff's world--like getting blowjobs in the Oval Office, which I think is cool--office sex--everybody's had office sex. Come on, men, when's the last time you got a blowjob in your office at work? Or girls, come on, when's the last time you did it on your office desk? The best office sex I ever had was with this vice-president chick whose office was on the 45th floor of a Rockefeller Center tower and we did our screwin' on the window sill, dog style, with both of us digging the magnificent view of Manhattan Island while revelling in the junkyard-dog throes of fornication in the deepest and most salacious way. Don't get me started on office sex.
So, according to Neo-Con teevee, the current frontrunners for our next president are now, Mormon-good-guy Mitt and Mike "Praise the Lard and Pass the Possum Gravy" Huckabee--the Christian-Baptist preacher nutjob from the progressive state of hillbillies and hog-callin' contests--Slick Willie's home state, too, don't forget (NOTE: Remember: Mena, Arkansas, for years was the airbase used in the Nicaraguan-Contra shennanigans involving arms for cocaine that was instigated by old John "Death Squad" Negroponte and Pappy G.W.H. Bush during the sound-asleep/Alzheimer's presidency of Ronnie the Raygun, the Great Communicator, and I'll leave you to figure that one out after you've heard one of Ronnie's speeches--like the one where he announces we'll soon be able to fly to Tokyo from Washington, District of Corruption, in 3 hours. Yep. poor Ronnie; he'd forgotten by then about the International Date Line and its silly mucking with human-invented time).
I switched off the teevee during a discussion of Mitt Romney's Mormonism and whether Mormonism it a "cult" or a real religion. How dumb a discussion. How utterly stupid a discussion. Mormonism is a nutjob religion founded by a drunken sot-fool named Joe Smith. Yet, Mormons abound in this country, especially out in Big Sky Country, New Mexico on up the Rockies into southern Canada, a lot of them cattle ranchers, sheepherders, horse traders, wheat growers, and oil and gas well operators in Dick Cheney's phony home state of Wyoming. Texas and California are gathering places for Mormons, too. As a kid, I used to enjoy the hell out of the mighty brawls between my agnostic-Christian father and the Mormon missionaries (who dress like Hasidim Jews, by the bye)--all their young men are obligated to carry the Moronic message out to the world for two years I think it is. These young fools used to would knock on your door out in the far reaches of West Texas and invite themselves in to "discuss" Mormonism with you. My dad would eagerly invite them in and then begin tearing them a new asshole the minute they started their spieling off their plural-wives/babies born in sin philosophy based on the drunken babblings of invented angels like Moroni. As I've said over and over again, I once tried to read the Book of the Mormon while snuggled up for a couple'a days in a Pendleton, Oregon, motel (a Mormon hotspot in eastern Oregon). I couldn't get past the first page. It was idiotic writing and message texting--same as reading a Stephen King or Danielle Steele novel! Ugh!
And on this revelation of current idiocies that sparked my curiosity on this mad day I doth cease.
Suddenly, have you noticed, this "bad gal" named Amy something is the new hottest of current hot babe rock singers to come down the pike--and she's come suddenly out of nowhere onto that sordid pike--semi-ugly New York Jewish princess she looks like--and she sings like one, too--a Barbra Streisand of rock. Hell, I was just getting into Hannah Montana. Fuck it all.
thegrowlingwolf (withantennaeup)
for The Daily Growler
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