The Bastards! They're Doing Away With FREE TV

A The Daily Growler Bulletin: Barack Obama who swore in his campaign that he would not tolerate lobbyists or take money from lobbyists, has just axhandled a good one to the heads of the just plain fed-up-with-things-as-they-are folks who elected him. So what does this dude do? He just announced that William Lynn will be deputy Sec'y of Defense under Bush's own Robert Gates who will be Obama's Sec'y of Defense, too. Keeping Robert Gates made no sense to us here at The Daily Growler--nor does Obama's picking this former Dept. of Defense deputy under, who else, Slick Willie Clinton, this William Lynn, who is currently a vice president at the very crooked, war-profiting Raytheon Corp. These birds have huge contracts with the Dept. of Defense--like they make Tomahawk missiles (great name; I'm sure the Native Americans love the Defense Dept. naming a missile after their tomahawks) for the Navy; plus they supply contractors to Iraq--why, we've recently had a Growler friend who was going to work for Raytheon in the Antarctic! Obama an Uncle Tom! Afraid of his own shadow? To make things worse, Obama has announced he's going to honor John McCain during his inauguration! Holy Jesus Blooddrinkers! Obama, please, man, you're looking so fucking foolish! And you had a chance to rule the fucking world--you had a chance to deny everything Bush set up, including his Sec'y of Defense--and why does John Brenner, a war criminal, so amuse you? And why are you trying to be a mediator like Jesus or Abe Lincoln--you ain't emancipating anybody by following the principles of unification--that's like trying to mix oil and water--why are you leaning over backward (a good term for it, too) at being extremely welcoming to the stupid-ass backwards-thinking Repugnicans to come across the aisle and join you in your changes (bullshit)?--these fools who just released "Barack the Magic Negro" consider you way beneath their hick asses. They think you should be shining their shoes and not president of the US of Racist A. You don't climb into bed with such whores, Barack. If you do, then you're caught on the hidden camera and you're ass is total grass. You've caved in to Old Massuh! Get used to saying, "Yassuh, boss, yassuh," and please oh please don't have an affair with a white woman--oh golly gee! And we thought Michelle Obama would have an influence on this guy but obviously not--she's too enamoured right now with all this Power Elite attention she and her cute saucy daughters are getting--and they are model little girls--and these people are smart but they are also system dumb, too. Sorry to report such depressing news--but that's what we are--reporters of depressing news. Can it get worse?
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The Old Wolf Man Just Figured It Out
Actually I found it out through a progressive blogger's site. This digital tv signal bullshit! I've questioned it from the first time several (government paid-for, by the way) PSAs started appearing on television by saying if we don't buy a new teevee or if we don't buy a special converter box and a high-priced digital-receiving antenna (they are still rabbit ears, just super-spaceage-looking, but still rabbit ears) by February 19th, we will no longer be able to receive any teevee signal, analog, digital, nanoseconded, via pigeon, whatever. No more teevee! Of course, our crooked government said they would give each family in the USA two $40 vouchers to apply to buying a whatever-priced (I've seen them advertised for as little as $80 on up to $150) converter box so you can simply hook it up to your analog set and there ya go, digital teevee. "Wow, look at that picture. Why, look, you can see the nosehairs in the nose of that pimply-faced weather girl we used to think was so pure and hot." Now we hear this teevee-voucher bullshit government agency is broke and they can't back up even the vouchers they've already sent out--what bullshit! This is the kind of bullshit I keep growling about. These bastards are Power Elite manipulators and nobody ordinary seems to understand what I'm preaching, bitching, growling, going for the throat after.

Why do Americans remain so smart yet so dumbass? I watch a lot of music on teevee, on vids, on DVDs, and I have to say, some young artists impress me with their sounds, their ears, their admiration for instruments that aren't usually related to popular music--of course, jazz did that years ago--Oscar Pettiford started plucking a cello rather than a bass in the 1940s--especially on Mercer Ellington's (Duke's son) Mercer record label in or around 1947. Of course, Stuff Smith had already brought the fiddle into jazz--also Joe Venuti, a white violinist, who was with Paul "The White King of Jazz" White Man--hah-hah-hah--but old Paul Whiteman was a weird strange dude who really appreciated black music though he couldn't perform it as jazz only as pop-swing-fox-trot white folks music--but very talented by-ear-playing musicians like Bix Beiderbecke. Or how about Art Van Dam? He played jazz on the accordion. Or how about Meade Lux Lewis playing the Celeste on a boogie track? Or how about Rahsaan Roland Kirk--my god, this genius son of a bitch could play up to eight instruments at the same time--the stritch (how many stritch players have you ever heard?), the manzello (how many manzello players have you ever heard?), the tenor sax, the flute, and the nose flute (how many nose flute players have you ever heard?)--he also played the castanets, the gong, and a siren--plus Rahsaan's music built into such a tumultuous ride and pitch and roll and stretching forth that by the time he'd decided to bring it to a conclusion, he was beating the living hell out of a fold-up chair and hollering outrageous blindman advice to those who see, like in his brilliant "Bright Moments" where he advises sight folks to see the bright moments in life instead of the dark moments--that even a blind man can tell when something's brightly brilliant and whether like a bird whose cage has been covered with a blackout hood--he still knows when it's dawn and the brightness of another day is upon us. Or how about "We Free Kings"?

Musicians today seem to know the music they play. They've learned how to use guitars as percussive instruments. Drummers today are pretty lousy--just tub bangers mostly--keyboard people are little bright guys who can play classical piano but who in popular bands are mostly responsible for weird loops and shit, background choral polyphony, or barely heard comping. Bass players are simply guitar players--strumming away--no solos, no virtuosity, just a respect for ensemble playing and singing harmonies, which the youngsters do quite well. However, most of these bands, and that includes what young jazz groups I've heard, too, are playing linked phrases--first they start off with cute little lines one of the guitar players has learned, like a daring Bach cadenza, except this ain't Bach it's r 'n r, and then the lead singer rips his shirt off, plays a smear on his guitar, and then it's volume wide open, strumming loudly coordinated, the drummer going wild as if playing trash cans, and the keyboard player sitting demurely in the background doing the loops and running the computerized portions--I'm sure all bands have Pro Tools and use it heavily--anyway, there doesn't seem to be any innovations in these musicians. Early rock 'n rollers, the best of them like Ike Turner and Chuck Berry, seemed able to use what instruments they could afford at their virtuosic best, like Chuck Berry's guitar playing, like his compositions, like his clever and witty lyrics. How can you not like "Havana Moon" or "Back in the USA" or even "Mabelene." The ultimate rock 'n roll song to me is Chuck's "Reelin' and a Rockin'"--and that to me is the rock 'n roll anthem.

With the young musicians--what do I find wrong with them? Wrong's a bad word. They aren't wrong. It's their world not mine. They interpret music through a new channel of information leaving me out in the cold standing naked with just a pencil and some music paper, my half-beat-up keyboard, with a 4-track tape deck for recording...you see what I mean?--musicians like me are now being left to choke to death in the dust of today's super-fast rising stars who seem more interested in their own look than they are with the kind of music they're committing to our memories. I know just about any song you play back at me up until the time the Beatles came to New York City in 1964--after that, well, to be quite honest, the tunes I remember best are the tunes that seem to remain faithful to the American way of making music from our earth on up toward the stars. I never wanted to be a star. I just wanted my music to be respected by other musicians, and so far the musicians I'm quite friendly with, and my very best friends are musicians, do respect my talents. I was sitting playing this guitar I found in the garbage last year the other day and a drummer friend was over. He watched me several minutes and then he said, "Are you playing by ear?" I said, "Yes." "That's amazing," he said. I said, "That's the way we used to learn things, by listening to records and memorizing the lines by playing along with them as we heard them on these recordings." Lester Young said all instrumentalists should know the complete tunes before they try and play them, even the lyrics, and Lester emphasized that. Like how do you know how a tune's supposed to really go if you can't fit the words to the melody line, which you never play note-for-note, according to the Prez--jazz is the improvisational approach to that melody line--like how many different variations of that melody line can you add onto in a matter or 3 or 4 minutes?

Concentration, I think, makes a person smart or dumb. The person who can block out all the rest of the world and concentrate on the infinitesimal lot that is what they have to work with and become so concentrated in their effort they soon develop into geniuses, those are the people who become the most observed in life, the most idolized, and it is about idols--idols inspire others to follow. Most thinkers, preachers, musicians, entertainers, etc., I see today, can concentrate, but only on their own image and how that image has been put together by a manufacturing team--it's a false concentration--it's more like Svengali than it is individual concentrated virtuosity.

Dumb and dumber rule, therefore. As long as they do it with decorum, as Thorstein Veblen would say.

So this digital teevee mess turns out to be an effort by the CABLE and satellite companies (and that includes satellite radio) to do away with FREE teevee (and, yes, free radio, too). Turns out, this is a G.W. Bush idea. Remember, the worst-ever commissioner of the FCC was Michael Powell (yep, the stupid son of our own great Colon's Pal (I still hear pundits saying Obama should have Colon's Pal in his cabinet--one guy said Colon's Pal should be head of the CIA! I say why not Mickey Mouse for head of the Mickey Mouse, stumble-bumble, viciously mean CIA?). It was Michael Powell who decided we needed digital teevee rather than the inexpensively produced analog system that has been working pretty god-damn well since teevee advancements were made by Sony with their Trinitron sets in the 60s. And now you know what's happening? It turns out nobody will be ready to convert to digital by Feb. 19th or whatever Feb. date it is. Plus, too, a digital signal doesn't travel as far as an analog signal. Therefore, for those of you who live in the sticks, like 30 to 50 miles from a digital broadcaster, a converter box won't do you much good--why, hell, owning an HD-ready teevee won't help either--neither one of them can receive a digital signal from that distance. Even in the city, the digital signal may not always be reliable. We've been scammed. We must pay for television now or be thrown out with the bathwater. I say, I'm going to try and live without teevee. There is no even-near actuality on teevee. Even the teevee reality shows are totally unreal. Teevee even controls the football games--have you noticed that? Football game time is controlled by the teevee broadcasters. The Fox Network even controls what time a sporting event they televise starts--and since sports teams make most of their big bucks off television monies, they go right along with letting Fox determine when a baseball game starts--and Fox does that with great frequency during baseball season.

Television sit-coms and dick shows are simply a repetition of what they say are ten basic plots teevee uses over and over again (I see Jackie Gleason "Honeymooner" plots rehashed all the time on teevee). Like these crime-lab shows that are as thick as hops on teevee right now. They are getting more and more unbelievable--like I saw a "CSI-Miami" show the other night where in one explosion about 10 people were blown to bits and a CSI gal was kidnapped and taken and tortured and threatened with rape and then, out of nowhere, comes the CSI Calvary--and in perfect television-scripted out-of-nowhere solution and all who deserve to be saved are saved and left to live another day--and thus another episode. And like I've said before, this plethora of actors and actresses are making millions of dollars a show--from acting school or drama class to the Power Elite--by looks and luck--all the babes on teevee shows are hot mommas--especially the big female CSI stars--especially I dig Emily Proctor--a fucking beautiful woman--except, in High Definition you notice Emily has skin problems. Poppy Montgomery is another actress I think is a god-damn good-looking babe, though here again, up close, her skin is pretty pimpled and pitted. You'll see a lot of actors and actresses suddenly leaving shows because their looks will be ruined in high-definition. James Woods, for instance, will have hell getting another teevee show his face is so pitted.

So it's a big plot to do away with Free teevee--what we call commercial teevee, which, of course, is not free at all--even PBS's shows's contents have to be approved by their donors and commercial sponsors. Teevee sponsors, by the bye, add on their advertising costs to their products's final price.

So, hey, I'm kind of excited. I've lived before without teevee; once for several years. So I may just live that kind of life again. I have my own digital-vid camera; I can film my own teevee shows and show them on my analog teevee set. I just today looked at the rushes I shot for my favorite Irish pub at Halloween and I was quite impressed--I'm editing it into about a 15-minute film and then I'll give it to the owner's son--he's featured in it a lot--good filming if I say so myself [languagehat recently had an interesting post about US taverns becoming Pubs all over, even in Ohio, now--L Hat doesn't watch teevee perhaps as much as I and therefore doesn't understand the influence of Brits and Irish on us these days--especially in terms of cooking shows and chefs and such--like that one Brit chef who has that show where he trashes restaurants and then goes in and makes them total successes--of course, teevee is all staged and propped and produced and managed and cut and edited--but anyway, that Brit fop recently mentioned that he was turning a Long Island restaurant into the first of this kind of new PUB on Long Island--I can't remember the name he used but he said there were already 12 of these new kind of PUBs in Manhattan alone]. I've got a good friend who threw all his teevees out the window when his daughter and only child came along and he didn't won't her spoiled dumb by allowing her to get her learning off teevee. His daughter, 5, is a little genius now--a self-designing artist already.

So I say FUCK TEEVEE! Let them have their fucking digital teevee--I don't think the Power Elite watch teevee and they seem to do fine--only us stupid people (the Power Elite calls us subservient laborers) who have to work for a living or we perish watch teevee.

A Working-on-Wall-Street 1929 Tale
This is from Vivian Perlis's great little book, Charles Ives Remembered, an Oral History (published in 1994 by the Da Capo Press), on people who knew Charles E. Ives, the great and innovative American classical composer and leading insurance man of the early 20th century--he was a partner in the Myrick & Ives insurance firm that was located in the New York Life building when it was on Wall Street. This excerpt is from p. 65, the Charles J. Buesing entry. Buesing was a young protege insurance salesman of Ives's at Myrick & Ives. Here's an interesting passage from young Mr. Buesing:

"During the Depression [the 1929 one and not today's] in the downtown Wall Street area we cast our eyes to the sidewalk, hoping to pick up a dime or a nickel, but we also cast our eyes skyward to avoid falling bodies. It was that desperate. I went home twice with the blood of suicides on my suit. Right on Cedar Street, while I was walking in the center of the street about two o'clock in the afternoon, a body came hurtling down from the top of 120 Broadway building and killed a very close friend of mine who was just seven feet away from me. Another time, one of our associates was restrained by me from going out the window into the courtyard from an office right next to Charlie Ives's. Charlie was not in his office at that time. We were on the sixth floor, and I kept yelling until the cashier heard me and we pulled the man back. The times were desperate. We had sixteen million unemployed and everybody was afraid of losing his job."

There was a footnote to this tale. The footnote sort of played down Charlie Buesing's looking skyward for jumpers on Wall Street during the time he's talking about. The footnote's justification for such downplay is based on dates and times Mr. Ives was in the office and Charlie seems to be talking about a time just before the Depression in terms of Myrick & Ives happenings. I, however, believe the good Charlie Buesing and I'm sure what he reports is the unexpurgated truth. Our current tabloids are telling us about two suicides over our Great Depression--which, by the way, using my prophetic skills, is going to be a Greater Depression than the Great one. It's so thrilling to think of some form of total Chaos taking us over. Chaos is heaven. Really it is. It's the next dimension--and virtual dimension. I sense that one day we will be able to create virtual clones of ourselves and then write a program that when activated will let us live all our life past over, you know, create situations where like for instance in my life: what if I hadn't have had my first marriage annulled and had tried to go on with the marriage? What would it have been like to be married to that woman, a woman who I totally admired for both her brains and her body?--she was a truly beautiful woman. I mean would we have partied ourselves into an early grave? We both loved fun. We both loved cocktails and conversation over cocktails. We both loved going to concerts. We both loved going to parties and making fun of all the guests. We both loved like ordering ham sandwiches at Phil's New York Deli in Dallas and then being served what Phil called his "Jewish ham," which was his finest pastrami with spicy brown kosher mustard on New York rye. We both liked going to different churches on Sundays...and to the synagogues on the Sabbath...and being cynical about the sermons and the guys delivering the sermons...though we did find women preachers in a couple of black churches we attended. We both loved riding all over Dallas in a Sunbeam Talbot sports car saying we were Dick and Liz--Richard Burton and Liz Taylor who were currently parading their vulgar asses around going in and out of fights, being drunk and stoned together--falling sloppy together on the floors of their fabulous mansions or the carpeted deck of some swanky hotel--both promoting their movie careers--poor souls. Liz lived through it but it killed poor old Richard Burton, the drunken Welshman, who'd a been a coal miner if he hadn't'a lucked out and gone to London and learned to fake Shakespeare--I used to love doing my fake Shakespeare act. It fooled a lot of people. I mean I could spout reams of Shakespeare and people would start asking themselves, dammit, that sounds like Shakespeare to me--most people in the USA know Shakespeare from high school--Julius Caesar, Hamlet, maybe McBeth, but I on the other hand had only scanned Shakespeare--yes, I learned some of the famous lines, like the ones everybody in the fucking world knows, "I come to bury Caesar not to praise him!" "To be or not to be, that is the question," "Oh, Romeo, oh, Romeo, whereforth art thou," or "Tis thee who must endure my pain; for tis thee who desired it in thy mind that it thus happened to me." There ya go. Did you pass over it or catch it? Yep, that last line is obviously my fake Shakespeare. I think I could write at least one act of a fake Shakespeare play if I had the time.

Anyway, I do truly believe we will one day be able to create our own virtual worlds--worlds where we can enter them for days at a time, for years perhaps at a time--where perhaps through the right interpretation of Chaos we can find the gate that will open with the secret password that will lead us to a virtual eternity, virtual eternal life.

Hot damn, couldn't I make a religion out of that idea? Like L. Ron Hubbard made out of his stupid Scientology. And this week we saw nutjob playactor Scientology preacher John Travolta being revered all week as a loving and caring father after his (was he autistic?) (what was wrong with his son?), anyway, the kid fell in the bathroom of John's fabby Bahamian vacation digs and cracked his skull open and then died--the Power Elite compound with its own landing strip for John's private jet right out back of the house--John's a hotty pilot, you know, a very respectful thing among the entertainment Power Elite. Ray Charles claimed he used to pilot his own jet. This was confirmed by Ray's pro pilot especially after Ray decided he could land the plane and he came in on a wing and a prayer and almost crashed the plane trying to land it by instinct and memory. I mean, I understand Ray's logic. Any dude who's blind but who can play the piano like that cat did is seeing something--he's seeing that keyboard just as plain as day. He's seeing the individual keys and knows just where to put his fingers on those keys to get the song he's got in his head out of his head and into that piano's insides--any dude who's blind and can do that can surely fly his own jet plane. Or remember John-John Kennedy--he thought he was a hot-shit pilot, too, and look what happened when he was playboy piloting his load of babes over to party time at the Kennedy Compound in Hyannis Port--the Kennedy's fort and castle facing the North Atlantic Ocean. I went by it once getting the hell off Cape Cod to get back to New York City to save my marriage. It looked like an extra-large Holiday Inn to me, but then I'm very disrespectful of the Kennedys both as individuals and as a family. You talk about a pure-dee Leisure Class (Power Elite) Family who have all the time in the world to do whatever they want to, whether it be to become jet pilots or perpetual politicians--they've got the leisure time to study whatever is their latest whim. Like Caroline Horseface suddenly desiring to be a state senator. They've got the leisure time and the family money to run for political office. Hillbilly Hillary is still out on the road begging up monies enough to pay off her failed run for president. Hillbilly's Power Elite status is that of a welcome-aboard member. She's in the Power Elite, yes, but at a lower-class level--like she's safe enough now with power to be forgiven her loss and going in debt in her campaign against Barack the Magic Negro. During Hill's leisure time she has to work, you see--whether it's pretending to be an author and lecturer, or whether it's pretending to be one of the Senator's from New York State, or whether it's pretending to be interested in bringing about change in this country--when we all know what Hillbilly Hillary meant by change was she wants everything changed back to when her dear, sweet, and faithful husband was president. That seems to be the same change Barack Obama meant in his campaign, too.

The Daily Howler is still intellectually defending the Clintons. He's also a strong defender of Al Gore and John Kerry. I like Bob the Comedian's way of thinking about the press and about our school system--Bob's an ex-teacher in the Beltway area--he's from Baltimore, I think, but sometimes he irritates me with his putting down of writers who put down the Clintons or Gore the Bore or John the Vietnam Vet Nutjob-Heinz Catchup inheritor Kerry. Any liberal, too, who doesn't think like The Howler (which can be a monkey, though Bob uses a sitting wolf as his gadget) is a "wrong" liberal--a phony liberal--and nearly everybody who doesn't think the Clintons represent the correct liberalism to Bob is a phony. Also, Bro (and I'm talking directly to this dude, you see), why do you keep watching these stupid teevee show clowns and expecting serious thinking out of them? They, too, are comedians, Bob; when they piss you off with their insane and inane twistings of the actual news, you surely know they are trying to entertain us and not inform us--they are trying to get a controversy that really isn't a controversy at all started at every break in their shows and reentries to the next segment of their shows--and all the while, the show's producer is looking at the running on-line Arbitrons and watching the show's various segments's ratings--but then, surely, Bob, you already know this.

I know, readers, Bob doesn't read The Daily Growler; in fact, I'll bet he looks down his nose at us if he has ever read the Growler--and you know with a name like The Daily Growler, somebody's clued him in to this blog--whether he's actually read any of our posts or not--you know what, I don't give a shit. I read The Daily Howler nearly everyday and some days I find him funny as hell and as right as rain in his criticisms and his showing where the facts don't meet the road--but then, on the other hand, my hand, why waste your time watching these stupid shows?--like Keith Olbermann--he's not so bright--I find a lot of his shit very stupid--and Rachel Maddow, too, while I'm on this--why is Rachel Maddow now so glorified since she's joined the enemy on CNN? Rachel Maddow when she was on Air America wasn't all that radical. Randy Rhodes was much more provoking in terms of her approach to the news and her guests and their views on the news. The most radical of all was Mike Malloy--and Air America quickly kicked his too-liberal ass off the air early in their several failed attempts to succeed. If Air America is still on the air, I wouldn't know, nor do I care.

thegrowlingwolf
for The "Good Ole" Daily Growler
The Voice of Contented Anarchy

Here's a YouTube where you can watch Rahsaan Roland Kirk play "Volunteer Slavery"--"stop bringin' me down"

www.youtube.com/watch?v=jqXYAcVPDD4