Wednesday, January 31, 2007

The Wars for Oil

What's Happening in Afghanistan?
I mean you hear very little except bullshit about Iraq on the poor class teevee networks and on the middle-class CABLE networks but you never hear anything about what's happening in Afghanistan anywhere. Is our War against Afghanistan a GOOD war? Most people, pundit or pauper, seem to be agreeable that the War in Afghanistan is righteous. Why? It's for oil, too; to use Afghanistan as a passage for this huge transnation oil pipeline coming down from the Caspian Sea and the Russian oilfields to bring oil to Europe and to India, too--that Russian oil that American oil companies were all over Russia for after Gorbechev brought the Soviet Union down in a one-day decision. Reminder: Afghanistan's president is an oil company executive.

Such interrelated bullshit is going on all over the world and all for ENERGY! Energy is the current unmined gold mine for this new century. The way to get filthy rich quick is in energy, and the discovery of new energy sources that gives full meaning to the term EUREKA!, an American expression meaning "I've hit the jackpot," the real American Dream, hitting the F-ing jackpot, digging into that Mountain of Gold freehand and coming up with the wealth discovery of a lifetime. Folks will risk the deaths of 3100 American soldiers, 50,000 injured American soldiers, 500,000 Iraqi civilians and innocents and their own lives to grab the wealth of nations--and that's the goal of the Bush Family Connection/Saudi Arabian Connection/Arab Emirates Connection/Bin Ladin Connection oligarchy whose intent is to unilaterally take over the wealth of all Middle-Eastern nations, except Israel, which has no wealth except that that the USA gives them.

The way you to get rich quick is to invest in get-rich-quick energy industries or do crooked deals with energy companies, read: "Oil Companies" read: Standard Oil! It's still the Standard Oil conglomerates that were put together by the Rockefellers back in the Industrial Revolution heyday of the great fat-bellied, hog-jowled robber barons like John D. Rockefeller, Jay Gould, the Harrimans (to whom the Bushes owe their base wealth--Sam Bush who made railroad parts or something like that in Ohio--and hooked up with the railroad hogs Harrimans (New York Central Railroad)) to do deals in railroading, all railroad rights backed and subsisdized by our rich-man-ruled government to the point there were no losses in early railroading, all built on stolen public lands with Congressional money giveaways.

Or invest in Afghanistan poppy crops. That's another asset (read HEROIN) you don't hear much about on poor man's teevee or middle-class CABLE teevee. The largest buyers of processed poppy seeds in the world are the big pharmaceutical companies. Oxycontin is a derivitive of opium, which is what the poppy means to the Afghanistan economy. Morphene is nothing but heroin, too, and trust me our hospital pharmacies are stocked to the gills with oxycontin and morphene and manitol and codiene and cocaine (read: novacaine)...whooo boy, big bucks, big crooked bucks, big untaxed, unaccounted for bucks! We love inflicting pain on people but we hate pain ourselves.

[A Daily Growler aside: 2 out of every 5 people in the world today are either Indian or Chinese.]

So what the hell is going on in Afghanistan? Don't worry. The same thing's going on there that's going on in Iraq and overhere in Washington, District of Corruption; the same ole lyin', cheatin', killin', gettin' killed, crookedness--billions stolen by someone in Afghanistan same as in Iraq--the same crooks stealing it, the political crooks stealing all over the place, the same old crooks getting rich over there, too: read: Halliburton, the Carlyle Group, Bechtel, British Petroleum--did you ever ask yourself who supplies all the petroleum products for our military? I think Bush has already blown our reserve of oil, hasn't he? (Remember what the Teapot Dome scandal was all about back in the Gay 20s?) And some of these get-rich-quick Afghani politicians and suppliers or whatever you call them are shipping big bales of stolen US money down to the Pakistan border and to the Taliban, once again a bold threat in southern Afghanistan--Kandahar, remember that city?

[I just heard of a book called Blood of the Earth (De La Pirro)--all about Oil and the world and the Saudis and their bailing out of Pappy Bush's oil business down in Houston and tells all about the relationship of Midland, Texas, and Texas oil in all of what's going on in our country as I type this.]

Poor Folks in New Orleans Arrested Trying to Take Back Their Homes
Down in ole Nu Orluns the developers (the Plantation Bosses) and white city planners are intending to knock down the huge Saint Bernard Project (when I worked for the Orleans Parish Juvenile Court this project was THE project, a huge populated area of New Orleans, and yes, all black and poor and troubled and with constant social problems galore) and turn it into a luxury condo area, a buffet against the glaring wrong of the demolished Ninth Ward and the unspoiled white sections of the city.

Hey, you all folks down there in Nu Orluns--it's gonna be Nu R-leens from now on; that's the white pronunciation of the city's old name.

These are poor folks who returned to New Orleans to go back to their homes (in Saint Bernard and in other projects being demolished) and found they no longer were wanted there. And some of them got arrested and thrown in Parish Prison for trying to help these people return to their project homes. Elected officials, including Ray Nagin (is his real name "Tom" Nagin?), are avoiding this issue, hiding out against it and saying their corrupt hands are tied by FEMA and Homeland Security, blah, blah, blah. The "New Vision" for New Orleans does not include black folks, folks. There are billions of dollars on the loose down there and you'd better bet white folks are gonna get most of that. "Hey, Brother Ray, get your nose out of the white man's ass and lead your people back HOME."

Molly Ivins
Sorry to hear Molly has taken a turn for the worse in her fighting for several years now her battle against the Big C. Looks like this recurrence may be the big one. Hey, thegrowlingwolf wishes Molly the best.

Molly took on Austin, Texas, for her journalistic knife honing, the capital of Texas, and all those male creeps that have made Texas so ebullient in the commanding politics of the US of A over the past decades, the power of OIL coming out of Texas, Austin, Texas, Houston, Texas, Midland, Texas, and Molly was there from the beginning of all the skullduggery started by the Repugnicans in Texas back when she was a young woman growing up amongst these kingmakers and kingpins; she knew Lyndon "Big Balls" Johnson; she knows Bill Moyers, the Baptist preacher boy who hooked onto the coattails of Lyndon "Big Balls" Johnson and rode them right on up to the top of the journalistic world--LOOK at Preacher Billy now! But Bill knows Molly. And Ronnie Dugger knows Molly. [Ronnie Dugger and Howard Zinn are connected in some way.] And everybody who is anybody in Texas journalism knew or knows Molly.

So, hey Molly, put your mind over your bodily matter and get on with your work.

My brother, a famous Texas journalist himself, knew Molly and highly respected her essay-writing ability, which is what journalists are, daily essayists, constantly writing essays, columns, whatever you want to call them, but words put together in such a way they bring a different light on the reality of the NOW! Having to write day-in and day-out essays of brilliant design and intentions and staying right jam up to date, topical, you know, and writing essays that make heads snap back in awareness, and Molly said it pretty close to what it really is like in Texas and the Texas influence currently dictating the scene in Washington. I mean, this woman knows Georgie Porgie Bush, our phony president, inside out. Oh the shit she could tell you about that spoiled rich brat.

A Daily Growler special healing is sent to Molly Ivins! [The Daily Growler is sad to tell you that Molly Ivins died this afternoon, Wednesday, January 31, 2007.]

http://wingsofjustice.com/07/01/woj07005.html

Randi Rhodes
I'm getting randier and randier for Randi Rhodes the more I hear her these days. She's getting it down real up in the field; in fact, this afternoon, she was tinkled pink by the Scooter Libby trial and then several Congressional investigations that started today--the Dumbocrats seemingly momentarily at least off their asses and trying to focus on how to get rid of this demonic goofball spoiled rich oil brat "president," who really isn't legally president--surely he could be impeached for merely tampering with elections, couldn't he? Especially thrilling Randi almost to orgasm was Patrick Leahy and Arlen Spectre getting together and sending the Attorney General (Hay! Huerta! Viva Los Constitutionalistas!) Alberto "Speedy" Gonzales, the son of the illegal Mexican immigrant to Tejas, a letter asking him to tell them what the phony little toy president's attitude is toward Congress and War--Congress controls the purse strings to the funding of War according to the Constitution. But what does the Great Decider think about this? Speedy can answer two ways; he can say "Yes, Georgie Porgie screwed up and please forgive him," or he will have to say G.W.B. has dictatorial powers over Congress. As a dictator only then can the president tell Congress to go suck its own phallic and he's the Great Decider and he's decided Congress can't say dick shit in the matter of these World Wars he is Commander in Chief over and therefore don't forget, you peones, it's his army, navy, air force, and marines and now, dickshit, Congress, what the hell are you gonna do about it? Randi says this will force Gonzales to admit Bush is a dictator and that will lead to all kinds of cans of worms being overturned and all kinds of skeletons falling out of the White House closets, which, according to Randi's thinking, will surely spell the end for Bush.

OK, Randi. I'm with you, but I don't have your faith in the Dumbocrats; just as crooked as any Repugnican snake in the grass. The promoting of Hillbilly Hilary as presidential frontrunner disturbs me, too. Not that I'm against a woman being president. I'd rather have Chelsea Clinton than Hilary; I've already said that. Or how 'bout Jimmy Carter's hippy daughter? Where's she when we need her?

The Dumbocrats are finding themselves in the same position they're always in in presidential elections--they pick the least strongest candidates to do the job, i.e., Fritz Mondale, George McGovern, Weepin' Ed Muskie, old sot Teddy Kennedy, John "Loser" Kerry, John "Loser" Edwards, Al "Loser" Gore, etc., etc. OK, so they lucked out with ladies man Slick Willie Clinton. I mean check out Slick Willie's salesmanship personality--and that's what Slick Willie is, an F-ing Bible salesman from the Ozark hills who simply kissed the right big ole white ass to get ahead politically (in Slick Willie's case that big ole white ass, and a dirty one it was, too, belonged to old William "Queenie" Fulbright's, the old racist Arkie Senator, and the Slick one kissed it passionately and got himself a Fulbright Scholarship, which sent Billy Jeff to Oxford so he could learn to be a good hillbilly Tory, which is what the Clintons may be: Tories from Arkansas.

Anyway, Randi's on the right track now; she's the only one left on Air America who's saying anything progressive (whatever than means) (I mean it in the Lafollette Progressive sense--a la current Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold) and outright provocatively thought out. The other Air America talent who was right on the money was Mike Malloy, but they got rid of his ass plenty fast when he started saying to IMPEACH BUSH NOW! and that was over a year ago.

There is a complicated end to Bush, Randi said today--it involves Cheney resigning, Bush picking a vice-presidential replacement--Randy said how 'bout he picks John McCain as his veep? Bush then resigns, McCain becomes president, pardons Cheney and Bush, and then sets himself up to run against Hillbilly Hilary and Obama (or in Repugnican speech "Osama"). Ho boy, the designs are many; mosaics which we hope turn out to be clear pictures of the truth about all this corrupt and fabricated time in our fabricated lives on the Good Ole USA Plantation, Mr. Charley still in power, still ridin' the line with that shotgun cocked and ready to shoot some slave ass should it decide it wants to be free! Freedom ain't in this country anymore, folks, it's on the March in Iraq!!!

Bush, by the way, today said he had no plans to attack Iran. Uh-oh! That means he does have plans to attack Iran. THAT MAY MEAN WE'VE ALREADY ATTACKED IRAN. [By the way, the Hillbilly (white American) way of pronouncing Iran is "Eye-Ran." Sounds like Ayn Rand the way they pronounce it."

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

http://www.therandirhodesshow.com/live/

Tuesday, January 30, 2007

Jots and Tittles on Royalty and Iraq

Prince "Duh" Phillip and the Fug-ugly Camila Parker Bowels Come to Harlem
I say, the Royals are so F-ing predictable. I posted 'bout a month ago a little blog attack on Brit Royalty and how Amuricans bow and scrape to Brits no matter their royal or common stature but especially to the royal bullshit family and how every time they come out of their castles and do their little world PR trips, they inevitably come to this country and end up in Harlem kissing black babies--old Queen Liz did it when she was in NYC and old Amurica's Princess "Which Way to the Stables" Diana used to do it a lot, 'cause she was in NYC a lot.

But, yes, to Amurican white people, the British royals still own us and are due our respects, and this is especially true amongst the Elizabethan-era hillybillies that nest and roost all along the hogback of mountains that run from West Virginny on the east on over west to Tulsa, Oklahomey, a hillbilly world capital, home of Oral "Slap 'em up side the head" Roberts and his retard family, check out his halfwit son, Richard, and also home of one of the most horrible of racial conflicts in the history of racial conflicts--what those white Tulsa hillbillies did to its black population amounts to the same reason Saddam Hussein got hanged just recently over there in good ole becomin' hillbilly Iraq (pronounced Eye-rack up in them hills, folks).

Can you imagine being a hillbilly high school drop out, say living in the hills of old Kaintuck, can't find no job, not even at Wal-Mart, folks on his bony ass, "When y'all gonna git a job, Billy Bob? Yore ole daddy and me's on our way to the pore house as it is. Why don't ya jin the army or sump'in? Mabel Mottweiler's boy, Ab, jinned the army and look at him, no arms no legs left after Eye-Rack, and I bet that's bringin' in some good steady bac'n for Mabel and Bubba John; 'course they has to take care of the boy, you know, wipe his ass and shake his pee-pee down 0-kay-zhunly," having to listen to that all day, going down to the army recruiter and being hoodwinked into joining the dog soldiers, trained for two weeks, and then shipped whole hog right into action in Iraq? Can you imagine that hillbilly finding himself in what to him is a land full of Holy Heathen, towelheads, mooselimbs, Jesus haters, A-rabbs, sand monkeys--can you imagine that? Timothy McVeighs by the thousands in our army now; Zeus help us when all these wearied and harried sons and daughters of the great patriotic Amuricans come home, patriotic Amuricans who'll offer their sons and daughters lock, stock, and barrel to the army just to get them off the hillbilly economic rolls with the chance hope of maybe bringing in at least 10 grand if they get killed in action overthere.

You take a hillbilly family with 3 big strapping blond blue-eyed toeheaded sons and one meek lizard-like goat-humping daughter, that's 4 in Eye-rack at once; if all 4 of 'em gits blown away, hell, that's 40 thousand smackers, more money than the average Amurican hillbilly family will see in a lifetime of chopping wood and doing rubboard washings and ironings for Mister Charley and Miss Anne. Oops, I forgot about the moonshiners. These white trash whites at least have given us our bourbon and rye whiskies, the best in the world, folks; ya gotta give the white man credit where credit is due.

Our British heritage; the Elizabethan holdovers that ran off into them Piedmont, Appalachian, Great Smokey, Blue Ridge, Ozark, Ouachita mountains and had huge goon-eyed sad-looking families that lived off possum, collards, and lots of greasy gravy all washed down with a number of slugs of white mule and then doin' a little pickin' and grinnin' on the front porch while the yungins use the outhouse, "Don't fergit to throw that there lime into the hole after ye've shat."

These are the Amuricans who still bow before fops like Prince "Poppycock" Phillip (check out that head!) and Camila Parker Bowles, truly one of the ugliest women in the world; yet, up side Prince Phillip she turns into a royal beauty, still ugly as the ho's that work the palace stable boys, but in royal terms, a true princess. What a wowser! I could play the Dozens on her the rest of the day--"Yo mama beat you with an ugly stick." [These are also the 30% who would still follow our little spoiled rich brat Georgie Porgie G. W. Bush right off the edge of their flat earth into human oblivion.]

So, yep, NYC just had P. Phillips and CPB here, and yep, they no sooner got off the royal bus (yeah, sure) that they headed for Harlem--"I say, where are the little pickaninnies today?"--and sure nuff, soon they were kissing black children and grinning like overfed possums (or Cheshire cats I guess I should say--do they have possums in England?). What a pathetic scene; and of course, all our dignitaries like our "richer than Prince Phillip" mayor, the little billionaire, had their noses deep in the cracks of both these slimey limeys--can you imagine the degradation of having your face up Camila's wild crack? "Shoot 'em the finger!" I was growling in my most antimonarchial way, "Arrest 'em as terrerists and wearing Nazis uniforms to parties and shit. Send 'em to Syria to be tortured."

I say.

Here's an accusation against the charming Prince Phillip by Fayed's ole filthy rich pappy:

MOHAMED al-Fayed yesterday used a BBC radio interview to launch an extraordinary attack on the Duke of Edinburgh, branding him a racist who "grew up with Nazis" and who organised the murder of his son and Princess Diana because he could not tolerate the thought of their marriage.

Read all about it:

http://www.posner.com/articles/al_fayed.htm

Little Jots About Iraq
Created after WWI, the war to end all wars, remember?, by the godly Winnie Churchill and the Brit diplomat snobs out of three principalities of the old Ottoman Empire (Turkey), Iraq was created totally due to the Kurds having beaucoup oil and the Brit geologists knowing there was oil and even more oil probably under that sand--though right now, the Kurds still control most of the producing oilfields--and that oil spilling over into the Shi'ite and Sunni regions, too, with enough oil under that sand--even though they hadn't drilled there yet--to 'cause these slimey Brits to want to hold on to it; therefore, the Brits unified these three totally different peoples, the Kurds, the Shi'ites, and the Sunni, into the nation of Iraq. All because of the oil.

Every American president, elected or not, since WWI has had a hand in some kind of involvement, clandestine or otherwise, in Iraq affairs. Eisenhower approved the CIA's overthrowing of the Iraq leader in the 50s--yes, that same now godly man who warned us of the military industrial complex, that golf-playing ex-general (with a Stooge mentality really, though like the pompous Patton, Ike loved to read war history) instigated wars on his own--how about our involvement in Viet Nam for a start? Kennedy, too, was very active in Iraq politics and the oil industry overthere, which was being threatened by nationalization by Iraq's government.

And then, wow, little Georgie Porgie's pappy, yep, the Honorable George Herbert W. Pappy Bush--oh Zeus, this is all so silly sickening; these creeps have been meddling in Middle Eastern policy since our white Anglo-Saxon creepy Brit ancestors caused it all in the first place; the god-damn French, too, were involved in dividing up the Middle East after WWI. But GHW Pappy Bush, that big fart, is the cause of this modern attack on sovereign Iraq. Pappy Bush the wimp. Who encouraged the Iraqis to rise up against Saddam and then when they did and came and asked him for weapons to overthrow Saddam old Pappy said NOPE! Saddam's army was being decimated in Kuwait. The Iraqis had done just what Pappy and his army had advised them to do; they had risen up and could have easily overthrown Saddam but, nope, Pappy flubbed it; just as he then flubbed it twice by not going into Baghdad when he had the upper hand. Ya see, this is where Unka Dick, Cousin Karl, Scooter, Rummy Rumsfeld got the idea that the Iraqi people would welcome a liberating American army with rose pedals and superSiegheils. Pappy could have gone on in to Baghdad during his winning the Gulf War and, yes, then the Iraqi insurgents would have been on our side and would have seen the US Army as a liberation force rather than what it is today in Iraq, an invasion force, a threat to their very existence and certainly leaving them with nothing now, no country at all, no Baghdad, no electricity, no fresh water, no sewer system, the presence of an occupying army that will be occupying their country now only Zarathustra knows for sure how long, and worst of all, the loss of their wealth, their oil--we've stolen their oil and given it back to those very companies that gobbled it up after Winnie "Half-Amurican" Churchill conquered it, Exxon Mobil (Standard Oil of New York & New Jersey), Chevron (Standard Oil of California), British Petroleum (they are drilling off all our oil in the Arctic region of Alaska), and British Shell. [In a Malcolm Lowry story, Malcolm is residing in a squatter's shack on Gabriola Island off Vancouver, British Columbia, and right across from the shack is a huge Shell Oil Refinery with a huge neon sign on top of it that was supposed to spell out SHELL but at night, due to the "S's" neon blown out, the sign designated the area as HELL, much to morbid Malcolm's delight.]

My Shell sign says HELL, too.

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

Monday, January 29, 2007

Turning to Things of Beauty

Sitting at a Piano
I came across this wonderful stuff in Vivian Perlis's Charles Ives Remembered, an oral history of Brother Charles Ives as told by friends, acquaintances, musicians, relatives, business partners, and the famous others. Of course it's open-book knowledge that I think Ives is the greatest classical composer this country's ever produced. It's hard to beat Ives at music; it's impossible to outwrite Ives; he wrote music like no one had written music before or has since; as one writer said, Ives could write notes impossible to play on the instruments to which he assigned them; yet, he expected those instruments's players to be proficient enough to find a way to make these impossible notes possible. All his music due to a question that sailed through his mind, it actually sails through all our minds, a question Ives called "unanswered." The Unanswered Question.

One of these Ives oral historians was the truly great pianist, John Kirkpatrick. I mean, Kirkpatrick not only let Ives's music grab hold his "heart and soul" he went on and delved deeply into the source of the music, becoming intimately acquainted with the maestro himself, learning at his feet, watching as Ives showed him how to play his music, and Ives showed him how to read his music, and then Ives showed him how to "remember" his music. Kirkpatrick would go on to not only play Ives's music in concert but to also do an absolutely awesome job of editing and compiling all of Ives's dictations taken by his secretary in the 1930s, dictations that Ives called "memos," and Kirkpatrick turned these hundreds of pages of material into a tome of masterpiece proportions, Memos, all in the words of the man himself with extensive explanatory footnotes by Kirkpatrick. This book has become us Ivesian Worshippers's Holy Book; I mean everything you always wanted to know about Ives and his music is in there in Ives's own eccentric words and Kirkpatrick's extensive and greatly cross-referenced notes. But like a happy wolf, I howl off into a mountainous continuance and must drift back down to street level and get on with what I intended here.

What I am driving toward is John Kirkpatrick's explaining how he learned to play Ives's Concord Sonata, his Piano Sonata No. 2, composed in 1911 and 1912. Kirkpatrick went on to perform on the first recording ever made of Concord.

"In order to learn Concord, I copied out the whole thing and made a kind of metrical interpretation of it, just as an aid to memory. I don't have the kind of musical intelligence that could swim around in this kind of prose rhythm with no bar lines at all. I had to explain to myself very clearly just where all the main first beats were.... Ives was very nonplussed one time when I told him about my working copy of Concord, and having to make a metrical analysis of the whole thing in order to memorize it. I told him that, in regard to that aspect of the work, I was really Rollo. He didn't say anything--he looked puzzled.

"Concord takes a limber piano. You can't do Hawthorne on a piano that has much resistance. It should sort of fly through the air with no effort whatever. When I started out playing Concord, it used to take something like forty-seven minutes, and then several years later it was down to about thirty-eight. I think it's now about thirty-six.

"You play it with all kinds of memories, all working together--the aural memory of the way you know it sounds; the tactile memory or the tactile sense of interval with the fingers sort of doing their dance into the keyboard in a kind of massage of each slur; the dramatic memory of the way it unfolds; the synthetic memory of the way it coheres or the way it makes sense; and (if you're lucky) a kind of spiritual memory of just the right approach to life in general. But that's nothing you can aim at very consciously--that's a kind of reward. But all those memories, they work together." [From Charles Ives Remembered, Vivian Perlis, De Capo, 1994, pp 215-218.]

Jesus I love that. It is how you have to approach Ives's music. Kirkpatrick goes on to say that Ives in his respect for Emerson wanted his music to be good for players's souls. To me that means a music that will make you excited in your solar plexus, which is what all art should do, especially a music that tries to continuously answer a continuously unanswered question, the question, the why?

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

Sunday, January 28, 2007

Scary Stuff

Bush the Idiot's War on Iran--It's a Comin'--Bush's Way Out of Iraq. "If at First You Don't Succeed, Try and Try Again." Failure Is Only Relative to the Future.
From Counterpoint:
"Within weeks from now, we will see the informational warfare machine start working. The public opinion is already under pressure. There will be a growing anti-Iranian militaristic hysteria, new information leaks, disinformation, etc. . . . The probability of a US aggression against Iran is extremely high. It does remain unclear, though, whether the US Congress is going to authorize the war. It may take a provocation to eliminate this obstacle (an attack on Israel or the US targets including military bases). The scale of the provocation may be comparable to the 9-11 attack in NY. Then the Congress will certainly say "Yes" to the US President."

Read the full article:

www.counterpunch.org/roberts01272007.html

Will Mush-for-Brains Actors Please Shut the F Up
There's this second-rate actor clown who get's prime-time teevee time to spout his Pablum-fed pap about the economy. His name is Ben Stern. He's a limp-wristed character actor who also is the character-type teevee commercial-creators love--a numbskull with a sarcastic voice hyping eye-drops that take the red out of your eyes, especially on those mornings you crawl home after being so drunk you were blind and ended up in bed with Rue Paul and take a look in the mirror the next morning to see your eyes looking like they're suddenly Holy and bleeding bloody Jesus tears. This actor fool gets prime-time teevee time because he's supposed to be an expert on the stock market, a student of Capitalism, which by the bye does not make him an expert on the economy, which isn't based on the stock market except in the rhetoric of the deceivers like Capitol Hill and Neo-Con statisticians. These clowns believe if the stock market is at 13,000 then hell the economy is flying high. Such bullshit.

The scary bullshit Ben Stern was allowed to present this morning on CBS was outright idiocy magnified 10-fold by his faulty reasoning. Stern's premise was that the media has now turned on poor little spoiled rich brat Georgie Porgie Bush, our fraudulently elected president, both elections, and the first president ever appointed by the Supreme Court, and is attempting to "force his bad side on the public" while ignoring the truly "great" things this "president" has done, like having given us a booming economy!! Stern's ignoring the "great" things this little spoiled rich brat jackal has enforced on us like lying to Congress and the UN to get We the People involved in 2 unending wars and now with him tooting idiotic threats of an all-out nuclear attack against Iran, a country also obviously run by an idioitic clown just as full of lies as Georgie Porgie, two big lying blowhards blowing harder and harder trying to entangle the world in the Holy War for Oil and the Almighties of their oil-rich dreams--the fables these two morbid clowns offer as proof they are holier than all the rest of us on our knees and babbling bullshit to a host of Almighties--who are, in case none of you have caught on, deaf as doorknobs because they are illusions and illusions have no ears with which to hear our stupid, selfish beggings for riches and long lives and perfect health. The economy isn't booming, it's sinking, sinking into a sea of debt, a sea whose pelagic is stormier than the Bush Babies ever foresaw--no mission can be accomplished if we have no way to rescue ourselves from the high seas on which these fools have chosen to sail. I'm predicting doom, Ben Stern, doom in the form of Chaos in the Middle East, Holy Wars galore started all over the world and doom in the form of us waking up one fine morning and Chancellor Bush announcing We the People are broke--remember, as you learned yesterday, we have our dear friends the Indians behind our dumb asses now since we gave them valuable nuclear knowledge so that they can now build more and more nuclear weapons as they battle our other dear friend over there the wonderful democratic republic of Pakistan. Oh Joy. With such allies, we'll own the whole blinking world before this is over. Chancellor Bush and his new financial advisor, Ben Stern, will hold the reins taut against the encroaching army of Dumbocrat pansies who of all the insults are planning to run a white woman and a black man against this King of the White Deciders, thereby sort of, in the words of Ben Stern, denying Georgie Porgie Bush the magnificence his despotic rule deserves. Oh yes, Ben Stern does say Bush F-ed up in Iraq, but that's no reason to turn so heartlessly against this "otherwise" great president. G.W. Bush joins Ben Franklin and Gerald R. Ford as our only unelected presidents.

Dumbass racist Amuricans started all this by electing a god-damn hollow-headed actor as president, Ronnie "the Alzheimer's President" Raygun, the great communicator--"We will one day be flying to Tokyo in 3 and 1/2 hours!" We keep idolizing these celebrities; the same California idiots who put Raygun into politics have now foisted another air-headed actor, good ole Arnie Schwartzenazi on us--"Achtung, pass me that Phillies Blunt while I tweak this young girl's titties." I mean we give these numbskull fops powers they don't know how to handle. How embarrassing it is for me to see these goony bastards spouting out their beliefs on our disillusioned heads--crap settles to the bottom and that's where all this crap is taking America, right down to the bottom. No place for a Wolf Man--only the rats, cockroaches, dung beetles, polecats, and possums enjoy such a cesspoll of excrement.

Sad News About the Death of a Truly Great Patriotic Amurican. Good Luck in Hell, E. Howard--Don't Worry, G. Gordon Liddy Will Join You Soon Enough and, Hey, Say Hello to Lee Harvey Oswald, Allan Dulles, and J. Edgar Hoover While You're Down There

Bay of Pigs and Watergate break-in organizer dead at 88

ehowardhunt.jpg
Former CIA officer and White House secret agent E. Howard Hunt died of pneumonia at North Shore Medical Center in Miami, Florida, on Tuesday, January 23. Hunt was born in Hamburg, N.Y., on Oct. 9, 1918, and graduated from Brown University. He entered the United States Naval Academy as a midshipman in February 1941. Hunt joined the CIA in 1949 and was assigned to Mexico City with another rookie, future conservative author and commentator William F. Buckley Jr. In 1954, he helped plan the successful overthrow of the elected president of Guatemala, Jacobo Arbenz. In 1961, he organizer and executed the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion. He retired from the CIA in 1970 and was enlisted by the Nixon White House the following year as a political consultant. Hunt planned the botched break-in at the offices of the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate Hotel to bug the telephone lines. The burglars were arrested on the night of June 17, 1972, and Hunt spent 33 months in prison on a conspiracy charge. His memoir, American Spy: My Secret History in the CIA, Watergate and Beyond, will be published next month with a foreward by William F. Buckley Jr. Hunt was 88.

Goodbye to a Great Amurican. Why lookie here, E. Howard has a posthumous book coming out. With a forward by that truly wonderfully great Conservative dunderhead and former OSS operative, William F (for F-ing old) Buckley Jr. Praise the Lard. Such great gentleman! Why do they have to die so young? [Sorry, William F. Buckley, Jr., is dead as far as I'm concerned.]

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

Saturday, January 27, 2007

Teevee Mama, With the 21-inch Screen

From Woggies to Bush Babies
I watched a teevee show this early Saturday morning. I had a god-damn cold--I haven't been sick in 6 years at least, not since New Year's Eve 1999, and I didn't really get sick then until I woke up in 2000 in a paradisiacal situation--I loved them both--but with a Roman Legend-type cold--and it was a bitterly cold night and I was hot and roaring sweaty from having lead the hot band at this hot, hot club that night--I remember we had two countdowns because we had a phony one first when we thought it was midnight but the clock in the club was five minutes fast so we had to do it over--timed this time by Unka Dick Clark, before the midnight stroke that wiped him off the teevee screen--remember, Mister Perpetual Young! Anyway, we followed Dick's ball as it descended--ah, what a lurid eve that was, the last time I remember having a cold.

Anyway, this teevee show I watched was hosted by an Indian gentleman of Islamic bent talking with a man who looked more like a Bulgarian than Indian and they were talking about how globalization had helped India to become one of the greatest countries in the world today--why, son of a bitch, the Indian railway system runs profitably, the Indian gentleman said--it ran at a billion-rupee profit last year. OK, I'm impressed, though Mussolini did that in Italy in WWII so that doesn't prove to me that a country is one of the greatest countries in the world. According to the US of A geniuses you cannot run a railroad profitably anymore--look at poorly managed and operated AmTrak; in fact, we don't even need railroads anymore. General Motors went about championing the trolley bus, the motor bus, the truck, and the automobile while digging up streetcar tracks all over the nation and running roadbeds over with concrete and clover leaves and throughways that aren't throughways at all but stop-and-go ways, clogged ways, clogged with poison-producing petroleum-fueled behemoth machines--ALL HAIL THE AUTOMOBILE AND THE BUS AND THE TRUCK AND THE SUV--a stationwagon on a truck chasis (the cheapest chasis there is to build in the auto industry). The SUV comes by heritage from the Jeep in WWII--the Jeep being Popeye's weird dog in the flickers.

So these two dudes on this Praise India teevee show started talking about jobs leaving the US and going to India as great for India and also great for the US. Take a guess why these two clowns were saying outplacing Amurican jobs to India was a good thing for the US of A--US outsourcers, of course, are saving about 10 dollars an hour per outsourced job, I summed up from the math they were throwing around--the average US worker making $15 an hour (I would challenge that, but....) and the average Indian making $5 an hour--thus freeing up millions of dollars for US of A companies (the outsourcers) to reinvest in the US of A, thus creating more jobs in the US. Wow. Amazin', amazin', amazin'. Like the Indian said, where $5-an-hour in the US is poverty, in India it's wealth! And that leads me to yet another astounding reason why the US benefits from outsourcing our jobs to India: BECAUSE India as a result has become one of the biggest backers of the USA in its political struggles around the world, especially, the Indian dude added, since the US gave India nuclear secrets so it can now make some more nukes so it will have the same knowledge of making nukes the USA had already given Pakistan...and the beat goes on. Yep, Indians are now Bush Babies, love the Iraq War, love Hollywood, love driving BMWs (whoops, that's not an America automobile, is it? or is it? do we really know who owns Bavarian Motor Works cars these days), love eating at McDonald's and getting huge greasy fat like huge greasy fat Amuricans-- and looking like their Indian counterparts here in NYC and living out in Flushing, Queens. "Smarmy" is the British word for an Indian's plumpness and skintone. Oh those clever Brits. So perfect in their Anglo-Saxon ignorance.

Then the Bulgarian-looking dude says, hey, India now is the leading pro-USA country in the world, along with, listen to these choice lands of great democracy: Nigeria, Japan, Britain, and Poland! Yahoooo I started crying and wolf-jumping around for joy. Hot damn. How proud I am to have the Nigerians, the Japs, the Brits, and POLAND! in back of me as I march freedom madly around the world. Oh joy, Oh boy. They didn't mention the Pakis at all during their bullshit--lame bullshit, too; uneducated bullshit; of course, the Pakis are our much-stronger allies. I wolfshit ya, of course.

Meanwhile, DOOM looms nearer and nearer as we enter the remaining years of Georgie Porgie's rule and ruin. I'm predicting, and I'm not a soothsayer, that come 2008 when Hilary wins in a landslide over Jeb that Georgie Porgie will not relinquish his crown--a crown of thorns--the sign of martyrs--and not the crown of jewels he thinks it is. Yep, G.W. Bush, the worst of the litter, will finally announce that this country is now owned lock, stock, and barrel by a combo group headed by the Bin Ladin/Bush Families, the Saudi Arabian royal family, and the CEOs of Exxon Mobil and Halliburton, one of which may be Donald "Put 'em on the Rack" Rumsfeld--anyway, I'm with India, George W. Bush forever!!!

I mean can you imagine the hatchet job the Repugs (a pack of millionaire crooks) are going to do on Hilary and Obama? They're already calling Obama Osama! I mean come on. And if Obama's mother is white, why isn't he referred to as a black-white person? I know, the Repugs call them "mixed breeds"--language straight off the ole Plantation. Hand me my banjo, mammy, we gonna cook some squeezin's up and party hearty down in the holler! Yeeee doggies! George W. Bush forever.

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler


Bye the bye, another 100 or so folks in Baghdad were blown to bits this morning while people were booing dear, sweet, pro-Amurican Leonardo (Leonard) Di Caprio. Baghdad's All-Democratic Government sent it regards to Leonardo.

Friday, January 26, 2007

Sick, Sick, Sick

How's It?
How does one become a director in Hollywood? Why is Clint Eastwood considered a great director? Robert Redford, too. All they are are "kind'a" successful actors--I mean Clint Eastwood simply played Dirty Harry in every role he played, whether he was wearing a cowboy outfit or his San Francisco detective suit and tie and always expert with a long rifle or a .357 magnum. The spaghetti westerns he did, is that where he learned to direct? I don't get it. Do you compare Bob Redford and Clint Eastwood to Billy Wilder? Frank Capra? Even Francis Ford Coppola?

I know a director like Spike Lee went to NYU film school so I suppose he learned to direct there. One must deduce that if a movie star gets rich enough, like George Clooney, he can negotiate to direct a film! I still don't get how Hollywood determines whether someone is a great director or not.

Did you ever notice how they're not many highly vaunted actress/directors. Betty Thomas who directs a lot of sleaze movies wasn't an actress, was she? Hollywood I know at its core and that core is rotten since its move from Astoria, Queens to those hills west of L.A. Rotten in the sense that a prostitute is simply an entertainment industry and in the entertainment industry women are all hookers.

Scumbags
OK, I'll just come out and say it, I'm a man of no morals, but celebrities give me a cramp in my ass how they go about getting away with just about any damn thing they please. I mean you throw your cell phone in the face of a stranger and see all the god-damn trouble you get into. But a movie star, a bigshot celebrity, can do it and all that happens is he has to pay the person he hit enough money to stop him from further suing harrassment while the law let him off Scot free. Matthew Broderick ends two people's lives in Ireland as he runs them down in his BMW--is anything at all done to him? Nope. Scot free again. You get a BMW and slam it into another car and kill two people in the other car and see how your life will change. Matthew Broderick didn't even miss a lick in his vacation time--killing two Irish persons was just a glitch in his everyday schedule of privileged partying at the max.

Celebrities also marry off and on five or six times before they mature enough to realize life is a little more serious than the scripts that are poured like liquid sugar into their hollow brains. And when actresses can't bear any more little "who's your daddy?" bastards they go to depressed countries and adopt exotic babies, the goofy Mia Farrow, for instance, collecting foreign babies as though they were trinkets on a what-not shelf. [Hey, trust me, I'm jealous as hell of Soon Yee; I mean, come on, a toy for Woody, that at-best-a-good-Jewish-comic who became a rich bastard and gained his privilege through writing and directing his own biographies. Don't you just love it? Who decided Woody Allen was a brilliant director?

9 Below Zero
It is cold as a witch's tit here in NYC--though I still swear on my Exxon-Mobil shares there's no such thing as global warming. I assume from the fable that a witch's tit is cold because pure magic and evil are cold, I assume; cold mother/cold child? If a witch's tit has milk, it must be sour ice cream by the time a witch's baby's lips creep around it and suck it stark and bare.

On the news, this is the national news now, the lead story was not that 100s died in bedraggled Baghdad today--that was never reported--no, the networks lead story was that Leonardo (Leonard) Di Caprio was booed somewhere where he was strutting his privileged life before the morons who flock to theaters and spend billions of dollars on shit that is best described as "graphic" art motion framed to be sequential, full of graphic gore, sleazy insenuating sex jokes, and of course the topless scenes. Too, it's funny how I heard also on the news tonight that some right wing freaks are bitching to high heaven over an "explicit sex scene" in a coming movie. I mean, come on, the porn industry is bigger than the Jesus industry! Given the choice of watching old dried prune Billy Graham spouting his cornball fabulous shit or watching Jena Jameson get gang-banged by 5 tattooed, earringed, nipple ringed gentlemen with hyperextended big dicks, what do you think the majority of males 18 to 35 will watch?

Fascination With Brits
This is another puzzle. Why are British actors so respected by Amurican filmgoers? Is it white Amuricans who find British accents and looks exciting? It can't be the millions of other British colonists who have escaped to this country; they must be super sick and tired of those pompous British actors and actresses with their affected accents. Ugh! I mean, here's long-time all-star -boring-talk-show host Charlie Rose (a failure everywhere else but PBS) is interviewing old drunken rascal Brit fop-actor and big-time drunk, Peter O'Toole as I type this. I have the sound down so I can't hear what the hell Peter is spouting; it's some kind of actor bullshit I imagine. Actor bullshit is like the sermons of Christian blowhard preachers, it makes absolutely no sense at all if you try and follow its many deviations, tangents, and repetitions. In summing up interviews with actors, no matter their acting ability, all that one concludes from it is that acting is sooooo difficult and sooooo demanding and that acting demands they spend such lonnnnng hours on the set, oooooh the drudgery of being an ahk-tor, when it actuality, being an actor is not work at all, it's "playing" (they work from "plays"), it's memorizing a script and pretending to be somebody you may or may not be same as we all are actors from the time we're born--playing the games children play.

Like Sly Stallone, he's one of my favorite actors along with Arnold Schwartzenazi, because he's at best a porn actor who has mumbled his way into a moronic character millions of morons can idealize and through horribly animalistic gory films this 5-foot 6-inch midget Stallone, standing on boxes in all his scenes, is frozen in film as a bigger-than-life titan of a man who can take on a whole sleazy, gook-looking army and defeat it single-handedly and come out a successful Amurican. Or how about Sly playing his Rocky role over and over and over? What a scumbag Stallone is. And so's his whole family; remember how embarrassing his mother used to be on Howard Stern's radio show back in the good ole days when Howard wasn't rich and hiding away in satellite radio. Howard used to say anybody (celebrity or otherwise) could write a bestselling book or act in a money-making movie. Stern did both; to the point he was hyped by his own PR as the King of All Media. Howard's now lost in the world of the rich and famous. His life is made; no need for anymore innovation.

I am sick, sick, sick; sicker than Lenny Bruce tonight. [Wasn't that Lenny Bruce movie a great movie? Dusty Hoffman wasn't it? Lenny Bruce was a tragically funny man. Richard Pryor is a black spitting image of Lenny Bruce. One of the funniest things I ever heard was Lenny's playing the Pope's PR man--and Jesus showing up during one of Cardinal Spellman's demented lectures at Saint Paddy's Cathedral and Cardinal Spellman immediately stopping his diatribe to have "the bum in the back of the church" thrown out on his bony ass.

The world never changes, folks. Politicians never change. Actors and actresses never change. The way we make films hasn't changed since the days of D.W. Griffith. Everything goes in circles. After this awful War in Iraq we will have a fragile peace, but then another war is coming, of that you can be assured.

Are we doomed? Yep. I think so. How 'bout us goin' up on that hill overthere and doing some howling?

Tomorrow the Peaceniks are marching on Washington. The day before the march, the Pentagon unveiled a new weapon, a lasar gun, that shoots a hot ray into a "protester's" flesh and causes him or her to jump back and try and run away from its cruel heat (pregnant women, I heard an ex-Gyrene say, are a big problem for our troops in Iraq--with this weapon, a trooper, rather than wasting bullets on her scummy ass, can now just hit her with this beam and blewy, running like the coward she is is the result and no one's hurt at all; as it is now, they have to shoot about 30 or 40 rounds into a pregnant woman's belly to eliminate her as a threat to their security--you see, these army creeps learned in Viet Nam, they claim, that you can't trust anybody, man, woman, child, truncated person, midget, Cecil the Dog-face Boy, nobody--they all could be "the enemy"--you know, pregnant Viet Namese women had hand grenades up their vaginas just waiting to blow themselves up and hopefully take along a couple of Gee Eyes ("Hey, so-jer boy! You like pussy?" "Damn right, baby, here I come." KAAAAABLEWY.) So goes war. And so will go war on and on forever. It never ends, as Sam Kinison used to say--especially the one where Sam has died and is laying on the mortician's slab, you know, and suddenly the mortician turns dead Sam over on his stomach and proceeds to bugger his cadaver. Sam starts screamin' "It never ends. Even after you're dead, it never ends." And it doesn't.

the growlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

Thursday, January 25, 2007

Left, Right; Right, Left

Question of the Day
?left to right read who people than differently things do down and up or left to right read who People

Did you get it, or do you need a mirror?

Here's an interesting statement I found searching the Internet:

...but does a particular direction of visual layout of information predispose our brains physically?
Yes, in the sense that anything you do over and over becomes "wired" that way. It's kind of like a path through tall grass. Once you've found a way through, the next time it's easiest to go by the same route. Each time you walk through you flatten more grass and it's easier and easier to take that route rather than any other possible one.

Someone just explained this to me in another thread. When one neuron fires out of several that might fire, the one that fires gets more nourishment from the surrounding glial cells. That makes it healthier and zippier than the nearby neurons and much more likely to fire than any others the next time.

Those pre-Columbian Native Americans surely had a most efficient scanning system - I sometimes find myself pouring similarly for particular words.
I was just thinking that when I wrote it out: it's not a bad idea for faster reading, except it would require us to learn to read and write "mirror" writing. Keyboards would have to have twice as many keys. Typos could get very complex.

I never thought of it as "scanning," but hell, that's what it is. I keep forgetting that computers are simply typewriters with storage cabinets attached to them and how you can view your files as pictures on a teevee screen. How do we read our files? We scan them. Wow, we are human scanners--we work just like a scanner works. Wow. Do scanners work on Japanese? Well, sure they do since the eye is a camera, right, Susan Sontag? The eye is photographing, or scanning, when it reads. If we have photographic memory, like the memory in our computers, then hell we are computers. Even if we don't have a photographic memory we still have a memory, a coded memory, yeah. Wow, I love this stuff; it's sociology, folks. But then it's art, too; the art of perception. But then it becomes philosophy, the study of files.

wolfgrowlingthe
The Daily Growler for

I just didn't have much to say today. A lazy day. I was trying to read some Persian when the question of the day came to me. Do people who read right to left react differently to everyday actions, like reading signs, reading human signals, using the brain, etc? Right brain. Left brain. Isn't that pseudoscience? Like bioclocks and shit like that? More in L. Ron Hubbard's line of warped logic, a fiction writer's vision of a scientific god. Mystery becomes the reason for the belief. God it's as deep as the brain. Scanning. I am looking at that word differently than I ever did. It no longer has the brand name Epson on it.

Just In: We see a developer has bought Astroland, the famous Coney Island amusement park and is planning to turn it into a rich boy's playyard. Yep, condos, hotels, and an all new amusement park with hopefully one day casino gambling...looks like the New Mafia, the land developers, are going to take another public amusement area away from the people of New York City. Development, in case you didn't know it, means laundering huge amounts of drug money, redirecting bank monies through the system of the developer's networks--illegal monies, like Mafia takes and bribery money and counterfeit money. I sometimes am amazed at the amount of fools who are in Atlantic City dropping their lives down the toilet of luck, of which, of course, there is no such thing. Coincidence? Yes. Luck? No. I'm thinking all the fools when they win are probably paid off in counterfeit monies, who the hell really knows. With today's modern scanners and shit, you can reproduce a pretty authentic-looking piece of money on the office copier.

Wednesday, January 24, 2007

When a Fool Speaks, I Do Not Listen

...Unless That Fool Is Me
I did not listen to our phony president last night. First of all, everything he says is a lie so case closed right there. Right? [Daisy Martinez has a cool closing theme on her cooking show--who the hell doesn't have a cooking show? How about Henry Kissenger Cooks?--and let him cook until he's well done! It's a joke, folks, but then I know you know that.]

I worked in advertising for 35 years; I know most everything we act accordingly to is based on lies--OK, call them suggestions--anyway, they're concocted suggestions--mostly fabrications, some with maybe a pinch or two of truth in them just to give them a truthful flavor, though the lie's the ruler--the passer-on of falsified information, info spun until it's cotton candy, though it's still just as lethal as it was when it was pure cane sugar. Falsified information: like everything that is labeled "All Natural." That's a joke. What determines whether something's not "All Unnatural." Are synthetic products like saccharin all unnatural? But, does saccharin have anything all natural in it? [saccharin is the oldest artificial sweetener; 1879 at Johns Hopkins--a weird word, supposedly taken from the Greek and meaning "sugary," but also is found in the Sanskrit word ['scuse my Sanskrit] sharkara, which really means "gravelly" and is used in the sugar sense metaphorically--I am wandering far from afield. Jesus, F this; how the hell did I get off into biochemistry?...oh, yeah, I know...I didn't watch Georgie Porgie tell a pack of lies last night; yet I can probably recite his speech almost exactly as he recited it; lying like a dog, i.e., Georgie Porgie Bush, our never honestly elected fraud president, the first ever president appointed by the Supreme Court, a sitting of 12 old F-ing raggidy ass-kissing partison judges--whoa, was Clarence "Trying to Climb Anita's Hill" Thomas (Tom) ever a judge? A fed judge? Under old Pappy Bush, you remember; Pappy's gift to the Supreme Court--and now we see what a freak show the Supreme Court became after William "Right Wing Bircher Demon-hearing Idiot" Remquist was guerney-ed onto the Court, and what an insult to Rooseveltian Dumbocrats putting William Remquist on the Supreme Court by Ronnie Raygun, our Alzheimer's president--a real bucket of shit right in the liberally bluffing faces of the bleeding heart Kennedy continuence of the Roosevelt New Deal (the New Frontier) (read Roosevelt as "Jewsevelt" like the Repugnicans of FDR's day did (like the Tafts of Ohio)--what ole Ezra Pound called FDR from his Rapallo, Italy, home on his infamous Old Ez Sez radio shows during WWII. Ez had a strange theory of economics based on the economics of a dude named Major Douglas and his theory of Social Credit. Ez couldn't help it if the Major's theory saw Jewish people as loansharks.

Here, by the way, is a cool link of a layman trying to understand Ezra Pound and his theory of economics--I love old Ez and used to read the Cantos just for the formation of the words and the sound made while reading them without trying to understand ol' Ez's imagist meanings:

http://d-squareddigest.blogspot.com/2003_02_23_d-squareddigest_archive.html

This guy takes ol' Ez on. I understand why Ez hated interest rates and believed in social credit. Hell, his father worked for the Philadelphia Mint, during the minting of Morgan silver dollars, you know, cartwheels? Things made out of stone should be readily available to the people; now there's nothing wrong with that. Ez was an imagist--what a head he had! I tried to read Major Douglas in college but found him dry and boring, though he did claim he predicted correctly depressions and inflation and deflation and living on borrowed money and USery...usura.

Freedom Still on the March in Baghdad
It was hard for me to believe the story a couple'a days ago about the Iraqi insurgents (Al Queda, Sodr's boys, terrorists, whatever the hell they are) managed to imitate the stupid U.S. Army so thoroughly the Army checkpoints passed them right on through the Pearly Gates to the Green Zone thinking they were American potentates on a secret visit to the war zone. Instead, they managed to take out a 100 or so innocent Iraqis by being car bombers, not really Americans after all. [Did you know there are almost 100,000 foreign workers in Iraq working for the various contractors getting rich overthere off the death and destruction that follows along behind Freedom on the March and the Mission Never Accomplished Brigade, which is almost as large a number as the number of military troops overthere? Maybe that's why Bush wants to send more human fodder for his weapons of mass destruction overthere, to give the Pentagon a majority vote when it comes to military giveaways and transferred wealth--which is what we're doing, draining the former sovereign nation of Iraq of all its wealth and giving it away to the globalization-worshipping corporate wealth-gobblers, like the Bush family. Never trust your life savings with a Bush! Never! Even ole sweetie-pie Jeb, named after a Confederate general, ran a crooked savings and loan back in the good ole days of wide-open getting rich in junk bonds, land deals, and savings & loans--yep, just like old George Bailey ran in It's a Wonderful Life--it's hard not to like a movie Jimmy Stewart stars in.]

These guys in Iraq who dressed up in US of A uniforms and went straight through three or so checkpoints were in a caravan of 7 black superSUVs all the keiko-muckity muck get as an escort when they sneak visit Iraq to make another crooked business deal or perhaps to bring the bribery payroll for the Iraqi government, which includes that great freedom patriot, Chalabi--yep, he's still around; remember when he was caught spying for Iran! Yeah, Iran! How quickly we forget. Remember how he's wanted in Jordan as a swindler and thief, which means they behead his ass, or maybe they should let the Iraqi Execution Squad hang him high! That would be a winner on YouTube.

Such idiocy in my name--your name, too. To Bush we're all stupid lower-feeding catfish-types; people who live in the alleys behind the mansions he grew up in. Bush is used to hiding behind Big Mammy Babs's solid foundation, he's a mommy's boy, that's for sure; and I bet Pickles ain't no sweetheart every minute of every day; just like it's hard to imagine having fun with Hillbilly Hillary who has the same cold serious look on her aging face as Pickles. Both have hick husbands; Hillary's is a real hillbilly Arkie hick; Pickles's husband is just a plain ole dumbass poor little spoiled brat rich boy who went to college to party in Skull and Bones with dunderhead Yaleys like John "Hands Up" Kerry--"Hey, John, pass the Heinz ketchup, please."

I didn't watch the State of the Union speech last night; but then, I don't ever remember ever watching a State of the Union speech. I am positive all of them since George Washington have been packed with lies the same as a sardine can is packed with sardines.

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

Thanks to whomever you are--we had a wonderful SURGE recently in hits on The Daily Growler. Praise the Lard!

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Tuesday, January 23, 2007

Exclusive Interview With thegrowlingwolf

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Monday, January 22, 2007

The Speaking Child

Thinking and Writing
I continue gleaning gems from Paul Goodman's writing in this 1951 edition of Gestalt Therapy: "A child forming his personality by learning to speak is making a spectacular achievement, and from antiquity philosophers have felt that education is primarily learning humane speech and letters, e.g., 'grammar, thetoric, and dialectic' or 'classics and scientific method.'" [p. 321, Delta Books edition.]

What the Speaking Children Up to in Los Angeles?

Anthony Prudhomme was slain by members of the Avenues, a Latino street gang. But he was not a rival gang member, or a police informant, or a drug dealer. The Avenues did not target him for the content of his character, or even the contents of his apartment.

They targeted him for the color of his skin.

Here's the link to the rest of this scary story:

http://www.splcenter.org/intel/intelreport/article.jsp?aid=722


Seems like Mexican immigrants are being blamed for targeting blacks on order from the Mexican Mafia. Now what the hell does that mean? Isn't the Mexican Mafia a terrorist organization? So, hell, let's "surge" on Mexico! They have oil, too.


Herman Melville on Cats
From Typee: "[On seeing a "big black spectral cat" sitting erect in his Typee doorway] I am one of those unfortunate persons to whom the sight of these animals is at any time an insufferable annoyance."

Ever Hear of Hotan?
"Hotan is recently famous for the discovery of caucasoid mummies, which are evidence of long term inhabitation of the area by the Tocharians. The desert atmosphere has preserved perishable items such as wood and fabric, attracting archaeologists. The area is rich in archaeological sites that are buried beneath the desert sand." [from Wikipedia]

I am compiling a study of the Principality of Chach. My study starts in Western Turkestan, "the Transoxiana of the ancients," or so called by ancient numismatist, Richard Frye, in his American Numismatic Society publication, Notes on the Early Coinage of Transoxiana, published by the Society in 1949, when hardly anything at all was known about the Principality of Chach except that, yes, it had existed. In the Southern Tarim Basin in what now is Turkestan, formerly Western Turkestan, Tocharian A and B languages, also known as Chinese Turkestan back then, an area Frye called a "linguistic gold mine" with Tocharian A and B, Khotanese-Saka, Sogdian, Parthian, Pahlevi (Persian), Syriac (a language Pastor Melissa Scott knows), and later Turkish and Tibetan. In Western Turkestan it was Sogdian and a separate language: Khwarazm (modern Khiva), and another tongue spoken by the Hephthalites, called the White Huns, and who came from the East in the 5th Century AD.

Sogdian was an East Iranian language used by traders, colonists, and missionaries (Buddhists, Manichaeans, Christians) especially along that portion of the Silk Road that ran from the Middle East all the way to China. Chach was home to the Chachians, who, according to Chinese writers, were expert silver miners and silversmiths, especially expert coiners. A numismatist named Davidovich wrote in 1979 about Bukharan silver coins being minted in Chach. By the 7th century AD, the Chach were minting their own coins--23 types discovered to date. The Principality of Chach was located just northwest of the present city of Tashkent, Uzbekistan, just outside of present-day Samarkand. The City of Tashkent (Tash for "Stone"/Kent for "City") started as an oasis on the Chirchik River at the foothills of the Colestan Mountains. In the 5th century AD, the Principality of Chach built a square citadel 8 km south of the Syr Darya River. Chach developed into a principality of 30 towns and controlled a network of 50 canals, also becoming a trade center on the Silk Road between Sogdians and Turkic nomads. Hsien-tsang called Chach "Che-Shih." During the Samarkand dynasty--Tashkent became Binkath, though the Arabs kept the old name "Chash," pronouncing it "Shash." Tashkent, "the City of Stone" comes from Kara-Kahnid rule in the 10th Century.

Whew, I'm glad I got all those notes collected and off my chest.


Denny Zeitlin
Denny Zeitlin was a San Francisco jazz pianist of phenomenal technical skills, a truly speedy pianist, who I believe was also a psychiatrist. I do know, Denny Zeitlin wrote the music for the new version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers--was the remake as good as the old one?

I hope I haven't bored you with my collective note taking. A raft of jots and tittles.

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

Sunday, January 21, 2007

Jots and Tittles Strewn Along a Path Back to Normalcy

JOT: Journal of Trivia? Judgment of Totalitarianism? Jungle of Transcendentalism?
I am listening to the Duo for Violin and 'Cello by an American named Edward Toner Cone. Most people leave the apostrophe off 'cello, but it really is a violincello, isn't it? I'm never sure of myself when it comes to 'cellos. Cone is just another in my searches for an advancer of American classical music--or American cultural music, what the hell, it's this dude's conception of the music coming out of his head. It's not bad, but, sorry, Ed, it doesn't make me wanna get up and dance or turn romantic either; I don't know; it simply makes me think of a thousand other classical pieces! Wow, what a condemnation. A dear friend of mine, a drummer, and a good one, too, a guy who knows jazz about as well as anybody I've ever known or read, handed me a cassette one time and told me he'd appreciate my opinion of it. When he asked me if I'd listened to it and I said yes he eagerly asked me how I liked it. I said "I'd already heard it before." He was humiliated. "What the F does that mean?" I said, "That means I've already heard this done...by its originators, like Miles Davis...." "What?" "I mean it sounds like somebody trying to copycat exactly how the old Miles Davis Quintet used to sound; or I've heard it done by Al Cohn and Zoot Sims maybe; dig? My question back at you is, where is the music within you're blood and not in your memory?" What an asshole I am.

Freedom Tower
I went to the Freedom Tower site and read some of the articles and comments posted there. One article really pissed me off--and especially the comments about it. The article refered to a battleship, the USS New York (why not "New York City"?), that was built in Louisiana out of scrap from the WTC, the 9/11 leftovers. Can you believe that? First of all, does that mean the Pentagon got all the scrap iron that came off that horrible site? One of the guys in Louisiana who worked on the ship said "They'd knock us down and now we was gonna knock them back down with this heah boat." Such assinine reasoning forced me to chisle an epistle in the stone of the Freedom Tower site's comment section. Last I looked, they were still checking my comment for "moderation." Hot damn. I was moderately assholy! That Freedom Tower is such a joke to me. A cartoon being drawn in order to pull a wool over our eyes so we can't see the truth of all of this, 9/11, Katrina, the War in Iraq, the Saudi involvement, the Israeli involvement, on and on and on and on. Idiots lead us. The rich are all egomaniacal idiots.

Another Cone
Now a piece by Mr. Toner Cone entitled New Weather, the poems of one Paul Muldoon (a top of the mornin' to ya, Paul, me lad!) of whom I had never heard, just as I had never heard of Toner Cone before I bought this CD (I collect American music):

Hedgehog

The snail moves like a
Hovercraft, held up by a
Rubber cushion of itself,
Sharing its secret

With the hedgehog. The hedgehog
Shares its secret with no one.
We say, "Hedgehog, come out
Of yourself and we will love you.

"We mean no harm. We want
Only to listen to what
You have to say. We want
Your answers to our questions."

The hedgehog gives nothing
Away, keeping itself to itself.
We wonder what a hedgehog
Has to hide, why it so distrusts.

We forget the god
Under this crown of thorns.
We forget that never again
Will a god trust in the world.

Paul Muldoon
from Selected Poems, 1968-1986

Live Long and Prosper

CHICAGO — Motorola Inc. said Friday that it would cut 3,500 jobs and take other steps to reduce costs after misjudgments on pricing and sales forecasts for its high-end phones contributed to its least profitable quarter since 2004.

The move came as the world's No. 2 cellphone maker reported a 48% decline in fourth-quarter earnings, to $624 million, on a steep drop in profitability in the handset business.

Chief Executive Ed Zander announced the cuts at an analysts' meeting in New York, saying Motorola could save about $400 million over two years by eliminating 5% of its workforce.

Facing stiffer competition from its rivals' new products, Motorola aggressively cut prices of its phones during the quarter, especially in emerging markets, to gain market share at the expense of profit margins.

The decision to shed jobs comes after Motorola's recent $3.9-billion acquisition of Symbol Technologies Inc., a maker of bar code scanners and hand-held computers, had increased the Schaumburg, Ill.-based company's workforce to 70,000 from about 67,000. The cuts are to be spread across the company globally and completed in the first half of 2007.

From the Associated Press, 1/21/07

Gore Vidal in Cuba

He told the media that he “worried about the collapse of the Republic. We have lost habeas corpus and the Constitution that we inherited from England 700 years ago. Suddenly, we were robbed of it. The current regime has done it, and the legal bases of our Republic have gone with it, and as I am one of the historians of that Republic, I am not happy.”

How did he see Cuban reality as opposed to what the US government reported? “They never told us why we should hate the Cubans. I think Kennedy and his compatriots were motivated [in their aggressive anti-Castro policies] by vanity.” He said, “My friend John F. Kennedy was running for president,” (1960) and he foolishly allowed the CIA’s Bay of Pigs invasion to take place. “Vanity has played a large role in the relationship,” he added, referring to the terrorist war aged by the brothers Kennedy against Cuba after the April 1961 Bay of Pigs fiasco.

Vidal paused and jumped backward in time. “When we invaded Cuba [in 1898] it was only a pretext to start the war against Spain and end up taking the Philippines, as we did in the end.” The Cuban reporters taped and wrote. “I hate to say it,” Vidal continued with a smile, “but you were just a step for the United States to reach Asia, although we always had our eyes on the Caribbean.”

From Counterpoint, by Saul Landau


thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler




Saturday, January 20, 2007

In Memory of a Departed Relative

THANATOPSIS

by: William Cullen Bryant (1794-1878)

      O him who in the love of Nature holds
      Communion with her visible forms, she speaks
      A various language; for his gayer hours
      She has a voice of gladness, and a smile
      And eloquence of beauty, and she glides
      Into his darker musings, with a mild
      And healing sympathy, that steals away
      Their sharpness, ere he is aware. When thoughts
      Of the last bitter hour come like a blight
      Over thy spirit, and sad images
      Of the stern agony, and shroud, and pall,
      And breathless darkness, and the narrow house,
      Make thee to shudder and grow sick at heart;--
      Go forth, under the open sky, and list
      To Nature's teachings, while from all around--
      Earth and her waters, and the depths of air--
      Comes a still voice--Yet a few days, and thee
      The all-beholding sun shall see no more
      In all his course; nor yet in the cold ground,
      Where thy pale form was laid with many tears,
      Nor in the embrace of ocean, shall exist
      Thy image. Earth, that nourish'd thee, shall claim
      Thy growth, to be resolved to earth again,
      And, lost each human trace, surrendering up
      Thine individual being, shalt thou go
      To mix for ever with the elements,
      To be a brother to the insensible rock,
      And to the sluggish clod, which the rude swain
      Turns with his share, and treads upon. The oak
      Shall send his roots abroad, and pierce thy mould.

      Yet not to thine eternal resting-place
      Shalt thou retire alone, nor couldst thou wish
      Couch more magnificent. Thou shalt lie down
      With patriarchs of the infant world--with kings,
      The powerful of the earth--the wise, the good,
      Fair forms, and hoary seers of ages past,
      All in one mighty sepulchre. The hills
      Rock-ribb'd and ancient as the sun,--the vales
      Stretching in pensive quietness between;
      The venerable woods; rivers that move
      In majesty, and the complaining brooks
      That make the meadows green; and, pour'd round all,
      Old Ocean's grey and melancholy waste,--
      Are but the solemn decorations all
      Of the great tomb of man. The golden sun,
      The planets, all the infinite host of heaven,
      Are shining on the sad abodes of death,
      Through the still lapse of ages. All that tread
      The globe are but a handful to the tribes
      That slumber in its bosom.--Take the wings
      Of morning, pierce the Barcan wilderness,
      Or lose thyself in the continuous woods
      Where rolls the Oregon and hears no sound
      Save his own dashings--yet the dead are there:
      And millions in those solitudes, since first
      The flight of years began, have laid them down
      In their last sleep--the dead reign there alone.
      So shalt thou rest: and what if thou withdraw
      In silence from the living, and no friend
      Take not of thy departure? All that breathe
      Will share thy destiny. The gay will laugh
      When thou art gone, the solemn brood of care
      Plod on, and each one as before will chase
      His favourite phantom; yet all these shall leave
      Their mirth and their employments, and shall come
      And make their bed with thee. As the long train
      Of ages glides away, the sons of men,
      The youth in life's green spring, and he who goes
      In the full strength of years, matron and maid,
      The speechless babe, and the gray-headed man--
      Shall one by one be gathered to thy side
      By those who in their turn shall follow them.

      So live, that when thy summons comes to join
      The innumerable caravan which moves
      To that mysterious realm where each shall take
      His chamber in the silent halls of death,
      Thou go not, like the quarry-slave at night,
      Scourged by his dungeon; but, sustain'd and soothed
      By an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave,
      Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch
      About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams.
"Thanatopsis" is reprinted from Yale Book of American Verse. Ed. Thomas R. Lounsbury. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1912.

Friday, January 19, 2007

Eulogy for a Relative Who Saw No Sense in Life

The Following Is Something Written a Few Years Back by My Nephew Who Just Blew His Brains Out North of Los Angeles Near Ventura in December 2006--This Piece Concerns the Folksong "Oh Shenandoah" or "Across the Wide Missouri"

The true nature of the song really shows up with what you've (he's writing to a musicologist) found. The fragment reveals yet another take on the word Shenandoah and makes plain the song's original explicitness. It helps to demonstrate the complicated background we are dealing with.

This stanza adds support to an overall evaluation of "Shenandoah". Direct and literal interpretation of the contemporary lyrics, so tempting, doesn't work. The song suggests a romance but close inspection soon washes that away. The song appears wholly metaphorical, in fact, centered on no one actual person or place after all.

Ironically, it may be that the song has little or nothing to do with obvious contemporary associations: Shenandoah as Valley, River or Indian chief. I expect that many simply will not accept that, and I certainly can be wrong, but I just cannot found the word "Shenandoah" onto the original song at this point. I feel that that exact word came into it late. While most easily peg it as a very old song (and therefor of some obscurity) it seems that the idea of the lyrics changing over the years is taboo with Shenandoah. In other postings this idea of a Shenandoah-less "Shenandoah" has been taken as fightin' words. But the well-founded association as a shanty is also dismissed by some. Go figure.

The word Shenandoah et al. is aboriginal and typically phonetic. Historical variations include Gerando, Gerundo, Shendo, Genantua, Sherando. Schin-han-dowi and a host of others may translate into River-Through-the-Woods, Silver-Water, and such. One assumes that whatever phrase Shenandoah may actually represent, it is most likely a place name and associated with water. But again, studying the etymology of the word 'Shenandoah' doesn't clue us much at all to the song by the same name.

I appreciate your example of the bawdy lyrics. No doubt shanties got quite 'robust' as the work crews of men alone sang them. The more "offensive" the better it seems, all to stir their spirit on the job. I have to smile: if only folks knew that that sweet song tinkling in the background is actually so filthy.

I think it important to dwell on just how profane shanty lyrics were as we look at "Shenandoah". Abusive, criminal and lascivious mildly describe the tone of these shanties. The "true words" to any such shanty are not likely easily revealed. The need for re-written, "tamer" versions for the historical record, as it were, must have existed all along. The naieve scholar would assume that these things can ever be nailed down patently.

I do not expect to find the song originating in America from what I've seen so far. Is or was there a Shennydore community in Ireland? Somehow I believe this was an Irish work song that went to sea.

The big mystery to me is where the word "Missouri" got in there, a far murkier quest it seems than ironing out old Shen'.

It is the song's association with Western Expansion, 'crossing the wide Missouri', that most intrigues me, as I've said. The song's transport to the West is of no question, any number of songs were sung in the West, but the current association of Shenandoah as a "western theme" is daunting. I have no background in music whatsoever, my work is in history. Help finding the above mentioned reference volumes, especially Legman's, would be appreciated.


Another Winter of My Family's Discontent
I was at the hospital the night my 2nd nephew, this nephew, was born in 1959. My first nephew was already 6 years old when this next one came along. My brother was infatuated with the poet T.S. [Thomas Stearns] Eliot, whom he later met while the poet was giving a lecture at the University of Texas. At that meeting, my brother informed Mr. Eliot that he had named his second son after him. Later T.S. sent a letter addressed to my nephew in which he told him to wear the name proudly just as he was proud to have so fine a young man named after him. My nephew kept this letter framed and over his bed up until his dying day as far as I know.

My nephew was preciously cute as a kid. All the family women adored him. He was especially cute with his little toy kitchen he'd put together, a stove, a refrigerator, an enamel worktable, pots and pans, the works just outside the backdoor of the house his family first bought after they had moved from our hometown out in far West Texas to Dallas in 1961 when my brother, his father, was hired by the large Dallas afternoon newspaper as editor of the book review section of their Sunday paper.

All my brother's boys turned out to be extremely "smart," too smart for their own good, if you know what I mean. They excelled so rapidly in elementary school that they lost a lot of comprehensive-type learning, which they replaced with the autodidactic way in which their brains forced them to go--a path of self-directed direction, an unknown but guessed-at direction, which made it even more thrilling, never knowing whether you are a genius or a fool and never knowing from one day to the next who you can rely on whether you are a genius or a fool. The problem these kids had to constantly face growing up was the overwhelming presence of their aggressively ambitious father, who had been a little smart-ass, too, as a kid, being advanced 3 grades in elementary school to the point he was 15 going 16 (in November) when he went to college. He said he felt totally out of place yet right at home at the same time in college; he knew the subject matter required to pass his courses but he had nothing in common with the older kids who were his classmates. My brother had a mean wit; he was also a raconteur of supreme presentation--once my brother started declaiming it was hard to stop him and even if you could stop him, it was hard to top him. His presence even among his wife and kids was imperial. He ruled his household through his own self-image, the "cultured" Wit from the vast prairie lands of West Texas, the open spaces under the big sky, and in his quest for his own sky-high dream he idealized himself as the greatest writer in the world out of sheer failure at being able to do anything else with as much zeal and determination, and my brother could write--at his death he had 29 books credited to him in his bibliography and hundreds and hundreds of published articles, columns, and his many NYTimes Review of Books articles, one of which, his appreciation or depreciation of Texas writers like Larry McMurtry, who my brother knew personally and who I had gone to college with, became quite a controversial article in the national literary world and led to his rating of Texas literature becoming the gold standard when it came to the best books ever written either about Texas or by Texas writers.

My brother's presence in his home was either met with outright despite or downright silly worship. His kids were suppose to view him the same way his literary audience did. And he hobnobbed with some of the most brilliant writers, newspapermen, and publishers in the world and also his friends included some of the richest men in the world in Dallas. He himself became rich in Dallas; his rise to fame and fortune was written up in Newsweek and Time in the early seventies it was such a phenomenal story. Suddenly my brother was rich and influential in Dallas. And just as suddenly his rather extraordinary kids were expected to act even more extraordinary all for the glory of their father with no glory coming to themselves or so I think they begin to think. He was especially hard on his boys. He expected his boys to rise above him, to want to write, to want to paint, to be photographers, and they tried to please him but they just couldn't. These kids grew up beat, hip, high, and headed for heaven on earth; my brother was baptized in the principles of the Protestant Ethic under which he grew up during that horrible time in this Land of Dreams, a time lost in time but which historically became known as the Great Depression [Republican economic policy the cause of it]. My brother grew up having to "fend" for himself and when he was 14 he had to get his first job, ironically delivering the newspaper on which he would eventually launch his writing career. From 14 on my brother was on his own and having to support himself on through for the rest of his life. At that time, my parents were so desperate for work, they palmed him off on my grandmother and went traipsing off across the windswept dust-bowl-heart of the nation looking for work and income and leaving him behind to come under the influence of my old tough-as-nails pioneer-woman grandmother, the librarian, the author, the poet, and the painter, and her cultured Protestant ethical teachings. My grandmother was insistent, too, that not only your morals be pure but also your language: "Use the language correctly," was one of her main tenets; she insisted on perfection in writing prose or poetry. Her next tenet was: "Read, read, read." That became her Three R's. As he once wrote, the library was his home from the time he was 14 till he went to college and books were his education. This life experience made my brother one of the strongest and daringest individuals I've ever met in terms of wit, reply, and essaying life; yet, he was a "chicken" when it came to being a good father; the poor guy had never experienced the kind of love his kids begged for from him. It wasn't that he didn't love his kids; it was that he was ignorant as to how to show them he loved them. All my brother did from sun up to sundown was work at "the paper" or out in his office working at his typewriter writing yet another book, a column, or several articles. He went to his grave questing recognition--recognition more than just his Texas recognition--he became "the dean of Texas writers" before he died-- but he wanted all the eyes of a room, hell, of the world, on him, and that included the eyes of his kids. My brother was very hard on himself when he got rejected or when he felt he had failed, especially when he realized he was a failure as a father with his boys. He didn't dig their scene at all and considered their culture (the Beatles, Herman Hesse, Zen Flesh Zen Bones, I Ching, Jimi Hendrix, LSD, pot, getting high in order to get to that next level, that level of total freedom, that level of "with it," and "cool" that was too strange and therefore "evil" in his Protestant Ethical eyes. I showed my brother one of my stories one time--it later got mentioned for a Kerouac Prize--and my brother said it was "nonlasting" writing; childish and totally unimpressive when held up to his heroes like T.S. Eliot and Somerset Maugham or his love of Gerard Manly Hopkins, who I once heard him say was his greatest teacher. He told me Jack Kerouac's work would never amount to a hill of beans. You can imagine what he thought of the Beatles books and the writings of Lester Bang or Rudolph Wurlitzer!

My brother was a celebrity. And I know firsthand how hard it is for kids of celebrities to adjust to reality especially when their powerful celebrity father is holding such a high goal of success over their pretty little heads. All his kids were brilliant in their own sweet ways, but especially this third kid, a strange little cute boy with blazing blond hair and crisp blue eyes, an Aryan posterboy and just as mentally mixed up, so scared of life, so scared of stepping off into the normal world, that the abnormal became the norm, especially since he was so utterly unprepared for that textbook "normal" world, expecting as he did to climb that stairway to heaven in the footsteps of his mighty father, with a constant "Go to Hell, Mother, but Love me, Love me, Daddy." And like I said, his daddy just couldn't do it; like I said, too, he just didn't know how to do it. As a result, this kid, hinting at it over and over, one day admitted he was gay and gay he became. Case closed! My brother, a very liberal man really--EXCEPT in the case of homosexuality. I'm perfectly sure my brother knew about homosexuality--he had been in the damn Navy and later the Marines in WWII so surely he'd known some Matachines; plus I knew the gay part of Dallas when I lived there, so I know as a newspaperman he surely knew that gay scene, too, though it was not that flamboyant a scene and was easily avoided, still it was there. But homosexuality disturbed my brother to a bitter turning against this son who suddenly was gay and pushing his gayness in his father's face and to my brother that meant he had failed; his heterosexuality was impotent when it came to this son, this failure.

Oh, how deep I could go into this, but that's enough. You get my point. I was pretty close to this kid both when he was growing up and later after he was grown--hell I practically lived with my brother and his family for a year until I finally got a job and got married--and then even after living in New York City for a year, I went back to Texas and lived on my brother's "goat ranch" down near Austin for a year until my wife came and got me and dragged me back off to our idyllic life in New Mexico. I was close to this kid though in New York City when he was going to a private school up in Connecticut and he would come down to NYC and spend weekends with my wife and me.

I can clearly remember this kid from way back, like I said from the night he was born. He took an early liking to me and I to him. We spent many an hour making fun of Mister Rogers and then getting involved in huge Crazy 8 games--and oh how he loved beating me at Crazy 8s--it's where I got my family nickname, too--he got it from some kitty cats on the backs of the Crazy 8 cards and he started calling me that name that has stuck with my family to this day.

The last time I really saw my nephew I spent a whole day with him back in the high eighties. He drove me all over Dallas to all my old haunts and to the house I grew up in way out in East Dallas and we drove and talked and he told me history and I told him history and it was a great day of bonding for both of us and we ended up late in the afternoon, the sun sailing down behind the colossal home of H.L. Hunt to corona it as we looked out far across the lake as we stood talking and drinking and smoking a jay on the shores of White Rock Lake, just talking life and art and getting high on beer and Mexican mezzrolls--after that, I never saw him again--that was 20 years ago now, but I heard from him, oh Lordy did I hear from him. He got to calling me at 2 or 3 in the morning and he would beg for attention and love from me and I gave it as best I could though the phone calls eventually began to vex me and then tax me, I cannot be a daddy and I certainly couldn't be his daddy and it got to the point that finally I gave up on him and told him to quit calling me, etc., I wasn't mean about it, but it caused him to viciously turn on me and to eventually curse me as the person who was responsible for his being Gay. No living human could be as vindictive as this guy when he was full of bile. I mean he could come up with expletives Nixon never thought of; foul accusations and put downs. This he began to do to me--same as he had done to his father, I then realized. He one night told me he believe Gays were the new Jesus Christs and were put on earth like Jesus to be persecuted until death did them part and they would arise into some Gay Heaven. This kid hated women; I decided that right off the bat; as a result of his hatred of women he turned woman himself and became a bitter, bitter bitch, still pining under his breath, "Love me, Daddy, Love me, Daddy," but there was just no daddy in the world to love him.

It's sad he, like Hunter Thompson, decided there was nothing left to live for on that December day in that California state park. I can sense my nephew out in that forest that day; I even kind'a know where that area is. I'm sure it was unseasonably warm. He was camping, so he had all his camping stuff with him--probably had his car parked back at the park headquarters--he was paranoid as hell, so I now know he had his trusty rifle (it turned out to be a shotgun) with him. The part I can't imagine is his being so down that he was able out in the deepest part of that forest to somehow get that rifle barrel into his mouth--it can be done--Hemingway got a double-barrel shotgun in his mouth, much bigger than a rifle; and then pulled the trigger! That one I can't get. I have never wanted to kill myself; in fact, I'm proud I've defied death several times in my life and continue to live at life in good health. I know and have dealt with manic depressives, but I could never understand why this kid with all in life he had couldn't bear it any longer--enough to blow his bloody good brains out. God, that must have been a such a gutter-low point in this poor man's life. I feel deeply for him right now; deeply. Ironically, I was just told he is still in the morgue--hasn't been buried yet--since December 2006. How cold is that! He is a martyr; yep, my nephew is a martyr to me.

Death and friends and relatives dying no longer affect me much at all. I act insensitive most times to hearing of people dying. But when some people die, I cry, and believe me, I was taught that men DO NOT cry, and I haven't cried much at all, but I shed a tear as I was writing about this nephew's death.

His favorite artist at one time was Cat Stevens--"Tea for the tillerman, steak for the sun," so I leave this lyric with ya:

Get your bags together, go bring your good friends too
Cause it's getting nearer, it soon will be with you

Now come and join the living, it's not so far from you
And it's getting nearer, soon it will all be true

Now I've been crying lately, thinking about the world as it is
Why must we go on hating, why can't we live in bliss

Cause out on the edge of darkness, there rides a peace train
Oh peace train take this country, come take me home again

themourninggrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler