It must be gettin' close to a full moon--as a wolf I'm instinctually bound to the full moon though as a human the Sun is my true god (sociologically speaking)--and this morning I woke up a writer again, my sociological opinions having been pushed back into the very back of my hard-road-travelin' bus--and on the bus CD player I'm listening to Coleman Hawkins--from way back in times that are now even for me the amazin' memorist fading away--erased by time, of course, but then who the hell controls time if we human beings don't?--we are the inventors of mechanisms that measure time--we are constant measurers--we have to be since all our perimeter thinking is measured by surveyed and established constructed boundaries, not natural boundaries, just like our clocks don't keep natural time. The rest of the earth's animals don't use clocks though chimps can get trained to punch time clocks to get bananas and dogs can be conditioned to get food only when they hear a Russian bell and one of my fav Rachmaninoff's (I know, a "Who?" goes here--but screw it) is "The Bells," a truly eclectic Russian interpretation of a poem by the eclectic American Edgar A. Poe, a distant relative of mine, I brag, since there are Poes in my mother's gene pool, and, yes, Virginia Poes, too, via way of Tennessee--the trouble is, was Poe really a Poe?--I won't Google the answer to that in fear of causing a disruptive response in my solar plexus (my soul, remember--my sociological soul)--anyhow I still claim kinship with old E.A.--I used to drink like he did--and I had a tendency toward alcoholism and after I moved to New York City there were times late at night when I was out in the streets drunk as old E.A. when I was stumbling drunk in the same streets, like down by his house in Greenwich Village, behind NYU, the building NYU has been drooling at the mouth to tear down--and as far as I know they've probably torn it down by now--and I used to get sloshing drunk at Googie's Bar on Thompson after my classes at NYU let out around 10:30, and I'm sure I've staggered along by old Poe's Village house probably loudly caterwauling out "The Raven"--"Once (hiccough)...up...on...a...midnightdrrrrearrry...." and I've probably had shoes thrown at me I was so drunkenly ostentatious...hell, I may have even fallen into some of the same gutters E.A. slipped into for a little snooze occasionally--I know I've been smashed and almost on the floor of the White Horse Tavern where Dylan Thomas drank his last drink--later dying in Saint Vincent's Hospital--and I've been sloppy drunk and wasted in the Cedar Tavern--and in the streets of Greenwich Village where drunken Eugene O'Neill used to stumble home late at night from the Hell Hole, and, yes, I was drunk one night walking by the Provincetown Theater and yes I banged on the locked door hollering, "Eugene, I know you're in there, you bastard! Get your ass out here so I can knock your playwritin' block off"--and yes like Maxwell Bodenheim, I've slipped and fallen dead drunk against a Village building wall and woke up the next morning still there--and my mouth was desert dry and my mind though hazy was thinking, "Hell, maybe I'll just start living here"--and, yes, I wrote some of my best stuff while drunk--always as I wrote drunk I was thinking 'bout Little Bill Faulkner and his always-handy bottle of sour mash bourbon while he wrote--and two short stories I wrote while drunk on Cruz Blanca beer (I always had a case in the fridge) in Santa Fe, and I mean intellectually sloppy drunk--some of my best tricks come while I'm writing drunk, and both of those stories sold and then were resold and published in Europe (Denmark) and then later resold when included in an anthology. That year was such a hot year for me as a writer the Scott Meredith Agency agreed to handle me--they resold my stories in Europe and made the anthology deal. Shit, for a while, folks, I told people a little arrogantly perhaps that I was a god-damn writer for sure, and I told people that for a short while, yes, but while enough to make me truly believe I was a god-damn writer, not just a writer, but a salable writer--"Honey," I told my wife, "pack the Jaguar we're moving to Key West...or British Tortola...the tropics...somewhere I can write--I need heat; Santa Fe's too mild and we've been to Mexico." "What? The hell we're moving to Key West. How are we gonna live down there?...and what about Skookie and Skigor [our dogs], they don't wanna move to Key West." "Well, hell, we couldn't take Skookie and Skigor to New York City either but you'd move there, wouldn't you?" "Fuckin' A I would and screw Skookie and Skigor--we'll put 'em a plane and ship 'em back to Fairbanks." I make my wife sound so common-ass jiver like me but she really wasn't--she was a scholar--and as I watch the Peoples Republic of China Olympics--remember when the Soviets boycotted the Los Angeles Olympics holding a renegade Olympics of their own that year--the year Coca Cola bought the Olympics--1984?--I can remember when the Olympics were for amateurs and the participants had to pay their ways to the games--and that's what they are just games--except this year the US Olympians are being paid for their medals--I heard $20,000 for a gold medal--this swimming phenom, Michael Phelps, has a sponsor who is paying him a million bucks if he wins the 8 medals he's asked his god to let him win (he did get the million)--Mark Spitz, another swimmer, holds the record with 7 medals--I can remember when the USA used to put up big bitches about the Soviets all being professional athletes and now all our athletes are professional--look at the US women's and men's basketball teams, all millionaire professionals, and they're routing their amateur opponents, except a lot of guys on the China National basketball team are NBA players--and remember when we accused all the East German women of being men?--and I noticed already this year the US is accusing China of foisting 12-year-olds on us on their gymnastic teams when the Olympic rules say you have to be 16 to participate in the Olympics and, yes, some Chinese girls are very small, petite, and they do look like children--that's why Asian women were so popular with US soldiers in our wars in Asia beginning with WWII--war brides they were called after WWII and a lot of Yanks brought home their "China Dolls" and "Japanese Toys" and "Filipino Babies"--yep, folks, they were popular because they still looked underage and illegal way into their 20s--there are some Chinese twins in my building who are these doll-type women of which the Yanks had such a child-porn fondness for and these women are in their 40s now and still look like they're in their twenties and they are the prettiest women in the building--I saw one of them just this morning out on the stoop and I couldn't take my eyes off her she looked so good to early-rising male eyes--except these war-bride marriages didn't last long at all because these Chinese dolls and these Japanese toys and Filipino babies wanted to come to USA for one reason and one reason only, to get their share of "the mountain of gold," which is how sneak-in and illegal-immigrant Chinese even today see the USA--and I was watching the People's Republic of China Olympics--and, I interrupt myself again to note that Chairman Mao's great-big portrait was still hanging omnipresently high on the wall of Tienanmen Square that holds his mausoleum--the Chairman smiling out over that which he created using his interpretations of Karl Marx's Communism while swimming in the Yangtze River, and Mao honored Karl Marx all the time--on stamps, on banners, on walls--and seeing Mao's portrait and seeing Beijing (we called it Peking up into the '60s) got me to sentimentally thinking of my scholar wife and her love of China and of Maoist China especially and I was looking at Beijing and at how what NBC was showing was a faked up Beijing--NBC didn't go deep into Beijing--and from the areas they were allowed to film in it was so smoggy their long-range lenses couldn't penetrate it so all you could see were the brand-new Olympic venues, all fancied up Tienanmen Square, the huge second-most-luxurious hotel in the world (second only to one in Dubai), and the architecturally exotic Olympic Stadium and the 40-million-dollar-an-office communications tower the Commies built just for their Olympics--and I got to wondering if my wife after she became a Capitalist ever went to China?--I know she traveled a lot, plus I would be curious as to her viewpoint about the status of the present Chinese Communist State. My ex-wife died very wealthy thanks to her Capitalistic saavy--I could imagine China being long-gone into her past--perhaps partially wiped out by her saying one time, not in my presence but in the presence of a good musician friend, that I had ruined her life--but though she at the time of our marriage was still a scholar, she was not scholar enough to quit smoking Salem cigarettes, which she told me once she thought the North Carolina-Slave-Created tobacco company that made Salems was putting an addictive drug in them--I said, "They are, Toots, it's called tobacco"--and in a snide retort to my kidding her about her smoking (unfortunately--and I'll confess it here--one reason I lost my desire for this lucious young beautifully built woman creature was because she stank--of that sickly decomposing odor that accompanies all heavy cig smokers--and remember she was a gorgeous mixture of Welsh, Choctaw, and Mexican--"Whewwwweee, mamacita, muy bonita, chica-chica!" I've heard her say many times, "I'd 'rather risk cancer one day than give up my Salems," using that personal pronoun to make Salems a member of her family--and guess what got her, after first they had to cut off her so full, round, firm, and perfect tender-buttons (referring to Gertrude Stein) breasts that she had proudly had since she was eleven, those breasts that I once journeyed over with lust and love so many many hours of so many nights and days to eventually be anxiously and rudely passionately kissing and sucking on their high points, my enjoyment of them eventually raring me up to the stallion position--to the wonderful point of having sex with them--and the doctors cut those breasts off and threw them in the medical waste container and now I assume they have been devoured by some rapacious, belly-crawling, deep-sea creature--and she lost her beautiful long raven Mexican/Choctaw hair, too, and she lost her sweetly plumply rounded body--her earth-woman body--it was eaten away--and one day she was gone at age 58? So guess what got her? I don't have to tell you, do I?
So, yes, we did go to Key West, Florida, and, yes, we did try to live there, and on the beach in Boca Raton, but we knew we weren't there for good--did I tell you my wife and I were offered the Hemingway House for about $80,000 while we were there?--and we lived in the Santa Maria Motel because I had read that Hemingway stayed there when they were remodeling his house and that all his pals who came to Key West to see him stayed there--and then my wife found a little house owned by an old sea cap'n and we lived there until the road got to calling us and we traipsed on up to Boca and soon even Boca got boring and we were off to California--though ironically, after 12,000 miles and almost a full year of moving around, we ended up back in Santa Fe with me continuing to write drunken stories--getting drunk at least--having a mail affair with a woman in Chicago who owned one of the most famous-ever Chicago bookstores and who called herself the female Hemingway and who would send me love letters that smelled as if the female Hemingway had soaked them in perfume--I couldn't imagine old Papa soaking his letters in perfume--gin maybe, but not perfume--and then she sent me three Hemingway first editions and I was wanting to run up to Chicago to consummate my "mail affair" with this woman--first a first-edition Death in the Afternoon and then the Life magazine containing the real first edition of The Old Man and the Sea (Papa's Moby Dick--and while I'm at it, how great a book is Moby Dick? Those old white Americans could write their asses off--Hawthorne and Melville the best as far as I'm concerned--I love reading Hawthorne--I'm transcendental that way) and then she sent me the published first edition of The Old Man--autographed by the Italian girl who Hemingway had the hots for in Venice who did the illustration on the cover of that book--Ariana, I think her name was--and I still claim to be a memorist (I long ago sold the book)! Some answers just walk right out of my memory without even saying goodbye--some of them I don't even miss until I suddenly need them--like the name of that girl--and a beauty she was, too; I don't blame Papa if he fucked her--is it illegal to screw an underage girl in Italy? Wasn't Sofia Loren getting banged when she was 16 and breaking into Italian movies? You know Greta Garbo and Heddy Lamar were underage chicks when their lecherous old directors brought 'em to Hollywood--remember, too, Heddy had already done a nude scene in a movie called Ecstasy in Hungary, where I think she was from, then later after Heddy had married a filthy rich man, he tried to buy all existing copies of that movie up--and, of course, the movie was readily available underground for thousands of dollars, though stills of Heddy nude got released and good ole masturbating-boys-best-friend Hugh Hefner ran them in Playboy way back when Hugh's prostate was still healthy and pumpin' out that good ol' testosterone-rich semen--"Vitamin E, girls," I can hear Hugh coaxing--the bastard.
I must say, that it was a wonderful year I spent as a WRITER, getting checks for my work--and I made a little over a thousand dollars that year--but that was enough to almost live a god-damn year on in those days, especially if your wife was working for one of the richest bastards in the State of New Mexico and making one of the best women's salaries in that same state--her boss making her secretary of the Racing Association--but then I've told all my horse betting stories haven't I?--like this one: I and this pianist friend from my hometown and his wife and my wife went from Santa Fe down to Ruidosa Downs in Ruidosa, New Mexico, a Rocky Mountain resort town in southern New Mexico--and this piano-playing friend kept winning every god-damn race--coming up to me the loser of every race grinning like the proverbial shit-eating 'possum and flaunting his winnings in my face--later, another friend, Tilting Tom the pinball wizard, came up and said, "Pianist, you sorry son of a bitch." "Hey, T Tom, what the hell?" I asked him, defending my homey. "You know what this dude is doing?" Tilting Tom responded. "He's betting on every horse in every race to win--hell yes he's winning every race, 'cept he's losing every race big-time, too." "Hey, that's winning to him; he's a musician--all musicians think they're lucky with women, drugs, and gambling," I laughingly calmed him down.
While writing on this, I've listened to nearly two hours of the music of Coleman Hawkins, the Hawk, a college graduate back in a time when most blacks were lucky if they were allowed to get out of high school or even had a high school to go to--and Coleman was a trained musician and started his career out on the road with the old babe blues singers, like Ma Rainey and Mamie Smith--that bunch that preceded Bessie Smith--and young Coleman played with these blues bands until he broke loose and ended up in the forefront of jazz--guiding swing and jump into be-bop, using Theolonious Monk as his pianist in the mid-1940s...and Jesus X that sounds like so long ago--and even further back than the forties when the Hawk lived in London and Europe for several years, Hawk made one of the swingiest sessions ever--in Paree with Django Rinehart and a French sax player who wasn't half-bad, Alex Combelle (sic)--with a "Sweet Georgia Brown" that literally powers up Django until he can't hold back and hollers "Yeahhhh!"--and this was when sound had the hiss of a needle ploughing through a record groove on a shellac platter playing over it--when records were "cut"--"Let's cut a record today," the old guys used to say. And the early things were simply "sound" recordings--then in the twenties Gennett and record companies like that discovered electronic recording where amplification was used--mics were invented--and the sound started to get clearer, each instrument more distinct--though still you had the sound of that needle ploughing through those grooves--you used diamond needles to playback if you were smart--and those needles let off that hiss as they grooved through those cuts--the grooves--where "the groove" comes from, i.e., Dizzy's "Groovin' High"--and one of Coleman Hawkins's best swingers is "Bean Stalkin'," and later a brilliant abstract-like thing he called "Picasso," and another thing called "Phantomesque"--ah sweet memories! I attended the Bean's funeral (the Bean was the Hawk) in 1969 at the Jazz Church, St. Peter's, over on Lexington Avenue here in old Gotham; it was the Rev. John Gensil's (I called him Father Gunsell--I didn't like him) church, a great old dark red-brick structure that was torn-down with God's Holy blessing by City Bank in order for it to build its bigger-than-God bank headquarters, though the building is now getting dirty-looking-and-tacky-looking on the NYC skyline--and CityBank incorporated a new, modern Saint Peter's Church within its secular confines--an old college mate of mine used to be the music director there--Ed Summerlin--Ed tried to make jazz religious music--he wrote jazz masses and jazz cantatas and jazz doxologies. I sat at Bean's funeral with my heroes--right next to me on my right was Charlie Shavers--he was a heavy drinker and soon into the funeral Charlie passed out and started snoring. Someone tapped me on my shoulder and I turned around and it was Dizzy Gillespie and he was telling me to wake Charlie up--he was sitting right behind Charlie and I wondered why he didn't wake him up, but anyway, I obediently gently nudged dear ol' Charlie--he popped awake and let out a head shakin' awakening, "Yeah," very loud and then I heard Dizzy laughing his ass off--and sitting just in front of me was Gerry Mulligan, and sitting a little behind me was Horace Silver--and Russell Procope was down by Charlie Shavers and then Ray Nance was down by Russell and then Ray got up and walked to the front of the church, up just to the side of Bean's coffin--and it was Ray Nance who brought the house down when he started playing "Body and Soul" solo--just his violin ramblin' through the ceiling of that old church--putting us all up teary eyed and sayin' "Yeah, Man, blow for the Bean"--and later when we all filed by the open casket, I was right behind Bean's wife, and when she got in front of Bean, after she bent down and kissed him, she put a rose on his emaciated chest--Bean had lost a lot of weight near the end of his life; in fact, he'd become skin and bones and he had grown a huge beard and it all really made him look like a voodoo prophet or somethin'--and the last time I saw the Bean play he was with his end-game buddy, Little Jazz, Roy Eldridge, and the Bean was weak as hell and sat down in a chair and played until they got into "Bean Stalkin'" and then the Bean got up and came to the microphone and blew his ass off, going from that to "Disorder on the Border" and ending with a hell of a rompin' "The Walker." And after the gig the buzz was that Bean had been playing well but while extremely sick--and then only a few weeks later he died and then there I was at this great man's funeral. And when I went up for my turn with the Bean, Mrs. Bean turned and handed me a rose, and instead of putting the rose on Bean's emaciated chest, I put it in the bell of his sax that was sitting by the coffin on its stand, and Mrs. Bean said, "That was very nice of you, young man," and I said, "Thank you," and then walked on out of the church and into a sunshiny streets of NYC and back into the rest of my life.
And everyone knows I always dug Lester Young and followed Lester's life to the bone--but when asked what the difference is between Hawk and Prez, I say, "There are more likenesses than differences, so how 'bout, ding dong, we talk about those."
I know one thing about Hawk and Prez, I'm sorry to say their day seems to have come and gone--as has jazz music as they knew it--though what they represented and the jazz they gave birth to is still echoing through all American music and even in the music of the world, both men famous all over the world, the world still remembering Prez and Bean--and jazz was always more highly appreciated in Europe (even in the Soviet Union!) than it ever was here in the USA-- 'cause, you see, the white man has always resented blacks creative talents because remember Whitey's basing his resentments on the religious (metaphysical) fact that the white man used to, according to the will of his God, own the bodies and souls (except as mostly "animal" they really didn't have "full" souls, did they? Christianity is such a foolish religion!) of all black people--the British turned 'em into slaves--look what the Colonists, not just the British, did to the majority of blacks in Africa--like in South Africa where the Boers (the low-land, backward-thinking-Calvinist-numbskull Dutch eccentrics (eccentreks) whose name means "farmers" in Dutch--and some Boers and Boertrekkers had Malay slaves and some Orange State and Transvaal Boertrekkers intermarried with their slaves)--and look what those imperialist white men did to the Africans, along with, and don't forget 'em, the other enslavers: the Belgiums, the French, the Germans, the Portuguese, the Spanish, the Muslems, the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company (to this day, I read recently, the Bridgestone Tire and Rubber Company (Firestone was bought by a Japanese tiremaker and that's how Firestone became Bridgestone) still controls almost 100% of Africa's rubber production)--we've gotta throw all of these imperialists in the same slave boat--all of these countries dealt in the slavery of Africans, the lowering of them to the lowest thing a white man knows, "a savage" (a heathen), a man so uncivilized (meaning he hasn't accepted Jesus Christ as his personal savior) the pundits and wits and philosophizers and curious British academics and the poets considered Africans "jungle creatures"--but, wait a minute, the Sociologists early on saw that slavery was an abomination--you can't study Sociology without dealing with racial divisions in any society and trust me since the beginning of man's forming himself into societies there's been divisions within those societies based on what tribe you were from, the differences in hair styles, the differences in skin color--oh yes, we know that even among blacks skin color matters a lot and if you're a Sociologist you're curious as to why and Sociologists set up their Race and Race Relations studies and in the USA one of our greatest Sociologists was E. Franklin Frazier--and, yes, Frazier, born in Baltimore, got a Sociology degree from Howard, taught Sociology at Morehouse in Atlanta, but eventually, guess what? he ended up at the University of Chicago.
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 | E. FRANKLIN FRAZIER 1894-1962 Sociologist, Educator, Author, Scholar A Bio-Bibliography Table of Contents Introduction |
Edward Franklin Frazier was born September 24, 1894 in Baltimore, Maryland. Upon his graduation from Colored High School, Baltimore (June 1912), he was awarded, the School's annual scholarship to Howard University. He was an excellent scholar, pursuing Latin, Greek, German and mathematics, who found time to participate in extracurricular activities involving drama, political science, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the Intercollegiate Socialist Society. His leadership skills were evidenced in his class presidencies of 1915 and 1916.
On graduation from Howard in 1916, Frazier began a teaching career, experiencing high schools in Alabama, Georgia, Virginia and Maryland. During this time he published an anti-war pamphlet entitled God and War. In 1919 he accepted a fellowship to Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts to pursue graduate study, and on completion of his thesis "New Currents of Thought among the Colored People of America" graduated with a Master's degree in sociology in 1920.
In 1920 Frazier became a research fellow at the New York School of Social Work. From 1921 to 1922, he traveled to Denmark on an American Scandinavian Foundation Fellowship, and on his return, he accepted a position at Morehouse College, Atlanta, Georgia. The Morehouse position allowed him to combine the teaching of sociology with the direction of the Atlanta School of Social Work. It was during his Morehouse tenure that Frazier began his writings on the Negro family. His controversial publication "The Pathology of Race Prejudice" in Forum (June 1927) forced him to leave Morehouse.
To read more about Frazier, here ya go:www.howard.edu/library/Social_Work_Library/Franklin_Frazier.htm
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And son of a bitch if I didn't wander around in this post like a lone wolf out lookin' for love! It's gotta be a full moon out there somewhere--I'm too mixy-maniac-whoozie-wacko for some reason. thedailygrowlerhousepianist is wanting to get together to drink and listen to old man Ives, our musical godfather, and by golly that sounds like something I may need--'cause I know tdghp wants to hear John Kirkpatrick play The Concord again while we follow John along with scores from my huge Charles Ives sheet music collection. I can't play scores but I can read them--I had that much musical training as a kid--I was a whiz at sight reading when I was a little boogie-playing-Sugar-Chile-Robinson-type--a little cocky-cute smartass piano player--playing my junior-whomping boogie with a smile gleeming on my mug, a twinkle in me eye, and as unto today, that twinkling eye out for the ladies gathered around me ooohhh-ing and ahhhhh-ing as I buckboarded my way back and forth across that laughing piano keyboard, "the ivories," and most of the pianos I played on as a little whiz kid had plastic keys by then, because of WWII when plastics took over--WWII was the war that gave us synthetics--synthetic rubber, synthetic oil, synthetic cloth, synthetic everything--synthetic politics!
You want a confession: I have no idea what's back up there at the top of this page. I did hear a teevee talking-head woman say this morning, "That's eclectic but it's still inspiring." That's all I can ask of you dear readers (noncommenters--except for 2 of youse! You know who you are) in terms of reading this blog--except let's say maybe a better word than eclectic for The Daily Growler is eccentric--and certainly though the Growler be eccentric (we hope), we certainly do hope that it is inspiring!
thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler
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For Your Reading Pleasure, The Daily Howler Comes Through With a Masterful Piece on Teevee's Cokie Roberts--Real Name: Mary Martha Boggs, Daughter of Louisiana Congressman Hale Boggs Who Was Lost From Life When the Light Plane He Was Flying In Disappeared Over Some South American Jungle--Coincidentally the Same Thing Happened to Popular New Orleans Mayor Chet Morrison, to Whom I Think Cokie Is Related, and Morrison Disappeared in a Light Plane Over a South American Jungle Just a Few Years Before Hale Disappeared. Lindy Boggs, Cokie's Mom, Ran New Orleans Politics for Years From Her Throne in the Vieux Carre--So Here's a Little of Cokie's Dumbass White-Girl Bullshit From Bob at The Daily Howler.
www.dailyhowler.com/index.shtml
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A The Daily Growler Sports Extra With marvelousmarvbackbiter
Well, like Joe Girardi, the Yankees's "I guarantee you I'm takin' the Yankees to the Series this year" manager, I haven't been fired yet--but for Joe Girardi it ain't looking that good; he's managed the Yankees to being nine games behind the league-leading Tampa Bay "Devil Deleted" Rays, and even with Alzheimer's creeping up on old Boss George, he's still got to be foul-mouthing Girardi to his dumb son Hank--the sons always ruin the businesses of their fathers--who, in fact, is partially to blame for the Yankee's dilemma, which is still pitching--the Yankees have a Major League offense but a Minor League or has-been pitching staff--and Brian Cashman's been no help--he and Hank let Santana get away from them--hell, I'd'a given up Mussina and Pettite for Santana--they even let C.C. Sabathia get away from them--idiots--plus remember when Hank flew off the handle a la spoiled rich brat and demanded Girardi make Jawbone Chamberlain a starting pitcher? And what happened, the young fool kid pitched so hard, tried so hard, he was a total failure as a starter, and he kept on trying though and soon, yep, he threw out his pitching arm--rotater cuff problem--a serious problem for a pitcher, and this kid needed care not exploitation. Joe Girardi was at least manager enough to know that was a mistake--Joe Torre had said last year that was a mistake--Jawbone was too young a kid and threw too hard and it was best to use him as the middle man between the starter and Mariano Rivera--hyped up to be the best closer in baseball--though we here at The Daily Growler sports desk know Mariano has lost a lot of his exactness over the last two years--that's why Joe always never like to use Mariano until the bottom of the ninth (Girardi brought Mariano in last night's game in the 8th and Mariano blew the save--though the Yankees went on to win in the 12th inning)--and this year with Jabo pitching before Mariano, the Yanks looked invincible--then Hank flew off the Steinbrenner handle and history is history--and I'm wondering, is Hank as stupid as his father? Let's see, how 'bout I bet he's stupider than his father! I've always said Steinbrenner loves making people and then when they get to where they are secure Yankees and used to being at home in their pinstripes, ol' George has one of his jealous rages and breaks 'em. Remember, George turned on Yankee idol Yogi Berra and Yogi wouldn't even go to Yankee Stadium for a decade or more. And George ruined Bucky Dent's career after Bucky had miraculously won a World Series for him--also, he never gave Bucky a chance at managing the Yankees, keeping him on the payroll as a minor league manager, and Bucky was a damn fine minor league manager, too. George of course ruined Billy Martin--as a manager and finally as a man, reducing Billy to owning Western stores and driving his pickup drunk as a Lord and then ending up one night with that pick up smashed dead into a huge tree--and there Billy's spirit departed the ballpark. And Bob Lemon, a great manager, and George turned on him. And recently what George did to Joe Torre--the best manager in baseball--the manager who this time last year wasn't nine games behind the Boston Red Sox and who did get into the playoffs--and Joe Girardi is currently five games behind somebody (Boston I would guess) in the Wild Card race. Mark my word, Joe Girardi will be fired the day he can't at least win the Wild Card spot. Going like they are as I type this, the Yankees don't have a chance in hell at anything "playoff" this year--but I could be wrong as hell and hope I am because I'm still a Yankee fan--AND they do have a chance at the Wild Card if they can suddenly get their pitching at least half-ass back on track so their offense can be set free to go wild! They need another streak--they had a nine-game streak just a week or so ago--they need another one--that's their only chance--Toronto isn't that far behind them either--just 3 games.
The Mets. Sorry, Jerry Manuel hasn't done any better than Willie Randolph did. The Mets are still iffy every game--getting ahead and then the bullpen blowing it, Eric Heilman last night blowing a 4-run lead and then the Mets lost and the Phillies won and now the Mets are 2 games out.
Joe Torre? Don't worry about Joe. He's happy as hell out in LaLa Land. Plus he's got Manny Ramirez now! Joe wanted Manny Ramirez when Manny openly said he wanted to be traded to the Yankees and George Steinbrenner and Brian Cashman decided, oh no, we can get showboating Johnny Damon instead--so here came Johnny Damon, and though he's still a good hitter, his body's fucked up and his arm is shot and he's not a good outfielder anymore--and Matsui--what the hell happened to him? And Joe's just a game and a half behind Arizona, where's he's been off and on since the beginning of the season, being in first a couple of times, something Joe Girardi hasn't been all year.
Hey, I've grown to like and feel sorry for Joe Girardi. Sometimes I don't like his profile and then I realize he's copying Willie Randolph's profile, looking cool and stern and serious behind a serious pair of shades! I predict: Joe Girardi will be selling Budweiser (oops, Bud's now a Brazilian beer) in Northern New Jersey before next season--don't cry for him, though, he's made a lot of money for a guy who as a player was a second-banana catcher who at best hit .200. Joe Torre on the other hand was a near-.300 hitter, was a great catcher and then first baseman, and was MLB MVP one year, too, we might add.
Baseball just hasn't been much fun this year, except I do find fun in this New York baseball mess created when Joe Torre and Willie Randolph were disrespected as geniune New York baseball caregivers and thrown to the wind by a big pompous ass who lives in Tampa and not New York.
marvelousmarvbackbiter
for The Daily Growler Sports Extra
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