Way back when in a way back post of The Daily Growler in that way-back time of 2006 I, thegrowlingwolf, gave a detailed explanation of what made Britney Spears a self-destructive timebomb. Hell, even old Doctor of Educational Psychology (Unlicensed) Phil knows Britney's self-destructing but he can't explain why--not in psyche terms. The Britney Spears he's "counseling" as "Britney Spears" isn't really the Britney Spears; nope, he's dealing with the prefabricated Britney Spears, that's the Britney Spears acting up and gaining more and more and more everyday headlines--gobbling them like she's gobbling uppers to keep up, to try and stay on top, what she's programmed to do--did'ja hear me?--this programmed maintenance of fame is what's crackin' the real "cracker gal" swamp-girl Britney up. Her grapple to stay in the public eye no matter how "ooooooh scandalous" is an addiction to which her programmed self is hooked and she's successful enough at grabbin' headlines she blows away all the political-religio bally-hooing and insider swordfighting going on--Edwards quitting; Rudi Mussolini throwing in the towel (and what a filthy towel it is too--so let it lie; let the toxic-waste squad clean it up)--why "precious" little Britney even beat out Jimm-eh Cah-ter's declaring for Obama moment (you know Jimm-eh was pissed when Unka Teddy "Chappaquiddick" Kennedy came out for Obama), Jimm-eh Cah-ter the ex-still-living president who's really not spotlessly clean, by the bye, folks--check out his record in the Sukarto history of Indonesia and its massacre-ing hundreds of thousands of East Timorans working hand in hand with Armand Hess and Chevron and Dutch Shell to wipe out the Timorans to get them out of that oil-rich area of Indonesia--yeah, check out who gave military equipment and training to build up the Indonesian Army--yes suh, boss, Mister Jimm-eh was president and his man in Indonesia was there at the time of this massacre and blah, blah, blah--all these creeps are so crooked, even Divine Jimm-eh, though he's tried to make up for his sins in this incident and in his foul up in his attempt to rescue the hostages in the Iran incident during his administration--his screw up actually leading to the election of Ronnie Raygun "Alzheimer's" Reagan, the man, "the Great Communicator," the man of great traveling magic who was going to get us from NYC to Tokyo in three and half hours, Cap'n Whacko John McCain claims was his patriotic inspiration--but, wait a minute, John, you'd already been hogtied and rambunctiously tortured before that? I don't get it? How did Reagan inspire John patriotically? I'm confused. Back to Britney Spears; she's less confusing to me than John McCain's out-of-nowhere return to frontrunning status--remember when the bleeding-heart Liberals (how about the Kansas governor representing the Dumbocrats rebuttal to Bush Baby's bullshit Intestate State of the Disunion speech; her rebuttal was weak, effeminate, boldly going nowhere, and who the fuck is she anyway?) were puffing out their predictive chests saying John McCain's campaign was so fizzled out because he was out of big bucks and moral support and his staff was deserting his ass like rats diving off a sinking ship? Wha happened? How'd he get big bucks rollin' in again? How'd he get his staff back? Amazin'. In watching a documentary on the building of the Parthenon (remember Sarah Vaughn struggling trying to say "Parthenon" correctly during one of her live recordings of "You Belong to Me"--with trumpeter Wendell Culley blowing riffs off her lines behind her--obligato, I think it's called?), I was curious to see that the Athenians posted on stone tablets outside the Parthenon construction area that gave a detailed accounting of the actual cost of building this temple to the Athenian taxpayers. How neat! Open bookkeeping!
But Britney Spears, I mean, all this poor little "created" bitch has to do is throw a temper tantrum, divorce again, marry again, have another couple of little privileged bastards that society will have to bear hearing about for the rest of their fucked up Hollywood kid lives, go off on a pill-freak freak out, check herself in and out of rehabs, driving her flashy foreign automobiles without a license, drunk, but, amazingly, no jail time for the Britney yet; hell, throw her ass in the clink like they did Paris. It kind'a cooled nutjob Paris out for a while; at least she hasn't been in the NEWS lately.
I started writing this early this morning. Now it is the next day actually, after midnight in New York City, and, man, is it still. It's so quiet it hurts. When you don't hear any noise in the streets or in the skies of New York City it causes you to go look out the window and look for doomsday or something like that. In a way this quiet is wonderful, especially for a guy with words up his ass, under his arms, like thick and wormy all throughout his brain and its waves and all across its pan, words as mush and then as nourishment--eating words out of my own brain, which I am now regurgitating out onto this seemingly endless window of a sheet of writing paper that I must fill with these crazy words, words that become so loud when it is this quiet in New York City they echo across my plain of brains. That's when a writer writes his or her best; in the still of the night. And god-damn it is so still tonight. Tomorrow must be gonna be one hell of a noisy day! Hell, it's February already.
So already this rambling "Britney" prattle is going nowhere; my words are wanting to form around another angle and write on that for a while, like thinking about parents and how they harm us with words when we're idiot kids, this after reading Jane Bowles's wonderful note written back in the early fifties about how her father berated her by saying she was a procrastinator and that that procrastination would be her death. My mother told me that same thing all the time I was growing up supposedly to her wiling away my time. "You're a procrastinator," she would predict, "and it's gonna be the death of you." Wow, thanks, Mom, I needed that! That's what Jane said, "Thanks, Dad; wow, really thanks, you creepy bastard." No, Jane did not write like that but I'll bet that's what she was thinking.
"My father predicted everything when he said I would procrastinate until I died. I knew then it was true. In America, it is very painful to know this as a child. Now that I am forty and in North Africa, it is still painful" [from "Curls and a Quiet Country Face" in The Portable Paul and Jane Bowles, published by Penguin in 1994 (from the old Viking Portable Library)].
I knew then it was true when I was young and my mother told me the same thing. I am now way past 40 and living in New York City and I still can't get my mother's condemnation out of my head. Yeah, Janey, it's painful alright; EXCEPT, fortunate for me, maybe, my mother wasn't right about a lot of things.
So Walt "Ducky" Disney Studios turn out these little tinhorn stars by the droves: J Lo, Aguilara, Ricky Martin, Justin Timberlake, Britney, all manufactured in the Disney Mickey Mouse Club Remake Salons all around the US; remember, Disney sent Britney to their "entertainment" school here in NYC where they taught her stage presence, hoofing, warbling, how to get settled in a recording studio or on a film set, how to sing, how to shake her butt, how to enhance her ass and her tits--"Use 'em, baby; those tits and ass boys out there are your meat and potatoes, Brit, so shake that booty and make that looty--of course, Unka Walt and the Mickster ask that you skip reading that fine print down there where you sell your soul to Unka Walt's frozen corpse and the Mickster--hey, Minnie Mouse made the contract up..." Squeak, squeak, squeak. Britney is babblingly promoted by the many many celebrity suck-up shows, a lot of which are shown on Disney's ABC network and their many CABLE venues. Unka Walt and the Mickster's latest teeny phenom is this phony Hannah Montana and Billy Ray Cyrus's daughter, Missy or Muffy or Moppet, whatever, and Hannah and Missy shake their little tiny undeveloped asses and budding titties into the pimply faces of their still-in-diapers fans to the tune of phenom hustling--hustling that fools us all, especially we double-foolish and easily fooled Americans. Unka Walt and the Mickster pretty much control the Broadway theater scene here in NYC now--the Mickster's white interpretation of African legend, The Lion King, is becoming a perpetual runner, being promoted to the Mickey Mouse hilt and selling out like hotcakes every night to the Iowa and Nebraskan cornshuckers and pig farmers in Disney's own Broadway Theater now--why I was reading where Disney has a whole "Broadway" department that is constantly coming up with theater production ideas. [Billy Ray Cyrus, by the bye, was a one-hit hillbilly wonder ("Achy Breaky Heart" in case you've forgotten) who then proved himself a low-grade, below-B-grade actor in Larry Pax's stupid Doc teevee series--a rip-off of old Dennis Weaver's series where he was a New Mexican cowboy cop working as a special consultant to the NYPD (yeah sure), riding horseback around the streets of New York City--remember that farce of a series? It's nice to regain your stardom through your kids.]
Any way, it was fun for a while getting rid of those nitpicking, flip-flopping, egotistical politicians whose perpetual running for president is getting so fucking boring. The candidates are all FOOLS, folks; so as fools, we Americans traipse on; Jeez, we hope our totally crooked leaders aren't leading us over the brink into the abyss! But if they are, who the hell are we to complain.
Chaos is a comin', its sails are in sight!
languagehat yesterday took a hard right that hit square-jawed into the glass-jaw mug of the New York Times--a newspaper I used to read on line when I worked for a living but now which I haven't even glanced at in 4 years since I've been unemployed as a writer and blogger and musician and cynical asshole.
Here's L Hat's complete post for your edification--I love the way this dude thinks--I've known that thinking for 25 years, folks, and I love the way he writes, too--
January 31, 2008
THE LYING TIMES.
Every time I think I'm inured to the idiocies of the press, even what are allegedly its finest representatives, something comes along to get me frothing in rage again. The latest comes via Bill Poser at Language Log, who writes:
The New York times contains a brief article entitled One Pot describing the Spanish dish known variously as cocido or olla podrida literally "rotten pot" According to the dictionary of the Real Academia Española, podrida may have an admiring connotation, similar to the use of "filthy rich" in English. Curiously, instead of the correct olla podrida, the article gives the name of the dish as olla poderida, which it explains as a derivative of poder "strength", because it gives you strength."Curiously"? "Taken aback"? I guess I admire Bill's sangfroid and charity, but I'm not going to mince words: I think this is a complete dereliction of the first duty of a newspaper, which is to tell the truth. What's next, not reporting on vote fraud or covering up a slaughter in the Congo because "some readers might be put off"? Furthermore, they're not just making it up themselves, they're putting their lie in someone else's mouth:Reader Jim Gordon wondered about this and emailed the author of the article. Her response: she and her consultants and editors were aware of the correct name and etymology but thought that some readers might be put off by the notion of rotten food, so they changed the name a little and made up a fake etymology. It seems clear that they were not trying to deceive anyone with evil intent, but I am still taken aback that a respectable newspaper would make up a fake name and etymology.
“Olla means pot, and the original name was olla poderida, which comes from poder, which means strength,” said Alexandra Raij, an owner of Tía Pol, the tiny Spanish restaurant on 10th Avenue in Chelsea.I presume Ms. Raij (a Spanish equivalent of Reich, apparently) said no such thing; if I were her, I'd put the fear of a lawsuit into the paper for knowingly making her look like an ignoramus.
How on earth do you justify making things up and putting them in "the newspaper of record" with such a ridiculous excuse? I think the reporter and every editor who approved this should be fired and a memo sent out to all employees of the Times that conscious deception of the readership will not be tolerated.
And don't tell me "it's only language." Language is how we communicate and how we understand the world. If you're capable of lying to me about words and etymology to spare my supposed feelings, you're capable of lying about anything, because you don't understand the value of truth. Our world is made of words, and the Times is degrading it. Shame on them.
...and yes, last but not least, yesterday morning (Thurs.) on Amy Goodman's Democracy Now, old Ralph "Spoilsport" Nader said he was'a thinkin' of giving the old presidency another run--hey, Ralph says now that Johnny Boy Edwards is out of the race no one's spouting the "progressive" line (according to Ralph) so he may need to run again this year to get us back on the right track. Is John McCain going to win the presidency in November? Maybe. Amazing, but, hey, it's America. We're fools don't forget; even those of us who have prestigious writing jobs on The New York Times.Selah.
thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler
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