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Red Eye Special
I've been listening to cassette tapes--then transferring them to a CD format and then squeezing them out into iTunes where I put them through an equalizer board and then burn them back onto a final CD. I've found these great blank CDs at a Staples in my neighborhood, French leftovers; yeah, French all over the packaging; but they're good, high-quality...
...and speaking of my neighborhood, here in New York City we have the wonderful opportunity to have a mayor who's worth more money than all the gods put together and he's suddenly decided he's so rich he must be a superman in terms of running the wicked city of New York so he's issued a Mayoral Bull that says he's free to run for an illegal third term as mayor whether anybody wants him to or not. He had his announcement party yesterday in Queens--in Queens because the head of the City Council, this Queens gal, has her nose big time up his gnarly old smelly ass--buried so deep in there she can't see the truth for all his bullshit. Plus, Bloomie represents the real estate industry and they own the City Council and the Mayor's office and this bunch of political parasites are sucking the people of the City of New York dry--the Metropolitan Transit Authority is broke again and they're raising fares and commuter tickets--this pool of political rich-boy flim-flammers have been claiming they're broke every year I've lived in New York City--and every year since I've lived here the public transportation fares have gone up. A subway token was 15 cents when I came to NYC and soon zoomed from 15 to 35 cents, then higher, then higher, up to $1, then higher, eventually getting the fares up to today's $2.oo, soon to be $2.50, and, of course, then soon to be $3.00. The Staten Island Ferry, a great NYC asset, what a great trip, was 5 cents when I came to NYC. Believe it or not, I've ridden the Staten Island Ferry when there were only a handful of people on the decks--it's great to ride the ferry hanging over a rail as she plows past the Statue of Liberty and noses towards the Staten Island terminal--then coming back you can sit and watch the goofy passengers until you're aimed right at the Manhattan skyline, then you head up front again as the ferry aims its sights toward the South Ferry terminal--a moment when you are out in the middle of the most beautiful harbor in the world looking toward the most magnificent skyline in the world--a marvelous occasion for a New York City person.
I've never stayed long on Staten Island, but my old friend the photographer used to go out to the southeastern end of Staten Island, out past the Verazano Narrows, looking out across the Atlantic or back onto the NY Harbor, and he would sometimes sit out there all night contemplating the universe of land, sea, and sky that lay before him. He and I loved contemplating scenes like that in those younger days, those poetic days, those highly romantic days. We used to stand on the walkway high up on the 59th Street Bridge and contemplate the world looking down the East River--that walkway's no longer open I think though I haven't been over around that bridge--I used to live under it--in at least 15 years--just like I haven't ridden the Staten Island Ferry in maybe 20 years--and I've never been out to the Statue of Liberty. I've always felt the Statue of Liberty has nothing to do with me--besides it's sotten with tourists and I can't stand tourists. But this little prick mayor we have loves tourists. He says that's the major industry now in NYC! Can you imagine! Tourism is the largest industry in NYC. All your fashions used to be thought up, designed, created, and then retailed out of NYC; all the big textile mills used to have their headquarters here in NYC--and the publishing industry was here--where is it now?--Berlin? And everything you bought anywhere carried a New York City headquarters address--I don't even think New York cheesecakes are made in New York anymore. I mean, the most powerful chefs in New York City now are British chefs--can you imagine! When I was in England, we joked long and hard about how bland and dull and just like the snobby Brits the food was! I was watching the latest Brit chef wunderkin on the Food Network the other day, and I was wondering, where the hell did this guy learn how to cook, and he was talking that stupid nonsense chefs talk about these days, like "carmelizing"--that's a big key word among these popping-up-like-mushrooms Brit chefs these days--and they put that awful raspberry sauce scrawled around their small portion main courses--a thumb-size piece of meat covered in a pesto of some kind, prissied up with mint leaves or sprigs of parsley--ah the presentation! What a presentation!..."But this tastes like shit." There's no where anymore for a home boy like me to get some stick-to-my-ribs American food cooked by somebody who grew up learning from his or her best family cooks how to cook food the American way--like how about bringing me out some ham hocks and red beans cooked with onions, tomatoes, and several big helpings of fat back, salt, pepper, garlic--hell yes, now that's cookin' to me. I don't like Brit music and I damn sure don't like Brit cooking! I want banana pudding and peach cobbler and chocolate meringue pies and sugar-cured hams and bacons--but now that's considered deadly food--though my elders were raised on that cooking and even the heavy drinkers and smokers in my old family lived into their seventies with no problems--most of the women living into their 80s and 90s; they lived on beans and fat back, hardtack, biscuits, hush puppies, tea cakes, cornmeal mush, farina, fresh garden vegetables, dandelion and wild onion salads, fresh ears of corn, busted-open-in-the-fields watermelons and cantaloupes--real red ripe tomatoes--now some Brit's lecturing me on what great cooking is! Julia Child, that snob, she brought that European cooking to the US. The French food I used to eat in New Orleans before Julia existed was ten times better than anything I ever ate cooked using Julia's "old" French cooking methods--she was a privileged housewife with a bureaucratic (spy) husband--and while hubby was doing his spying, Julia went to French cooking school.
And this asshole mayor of ours is adamantly opposite whatever the people of New York City need--everything under him is being gentrified, rezoned (he's turned traditionally low-rise NYC neighborhoods into hi-rise neighborhoods), and he's made it easy-as-pie for his real estate developer pals to steal land out from under us and he's giving them big tax breaks to develop mostly hotels and expensive places for rich people to own! Except there are a lot of new hi-rise luxury condo buildings with big "Now Renting" signs out in front of them these stock-market-diving days; one of them right up the street from me with "Now Renting" signs all over its front sidewalk area. There are six huge hi-riser condos (averaging 32 floors) behind me. All six show mostly empty apartments. You learn how to spot empty apartments in hi-rises when you've lived in the heart of NYC as long as I have. Think of living on say the 50th floor of one of these hi-rises and you're the only tenant living on the floor and there are no tenants on the floors above you and several floors below you. Empty apartments. And you never know when the building management is going to rent out its empty apartments as hotel rooms--to transitory tenants--they do it; my landlord does it; it's illegal, but they all do it. Running for a third term for Mayor of NYC is illegal, too, but our billionaire mayor is going ahead and doing it anyway. Here's how that's unfair. Bloomberg is willing to spend 3o million dollars out of his own pocket to run for mayor--plus he'll get real estate money and City Council approval and he'll be running ads 24/7 on teevee about all the great things his pompous little ass has done for NYC. I myself can't name one good thing he's done for this city. Before the Wall Street stealings began, this prick of a mayor was bragging about how big a surplus NYC had in its budget! A couple'a years later he's now saying we're 8 billion bucks in the hole. How we got that way, oh, we're too dumb and poor to understand such "big figures." These criminal assholes! You can't get rid of them. They are like weeds. Even if you shoot them up with Monsanto's Roundup (a toxic poison more dangerous to humans than weeds), they pop right back up the next election year.
How refreshing it would have been had Obama been a sincere voice and action figure for change; for a whole new way of doing business for We the People--an END to THOSE STUPID, BREAKING-OUR-ASSES WARS! US troops out of Iraq!--just get them the fuck out of there--leave that billion-dollar embassy to the Iraqi people--maybe they can make a mosque or a royal palace out of it! And get the fuck out of Afghanistan, too--and not like Obama's doing, putting more US troops in there!--first he said 25,000; now he's adding 12,000 more after adding 17,000 more--who the hell knows what's going on in that wretched and unecessary war over there? Russia warned us about how you couldn't win in Afghanistan. We the People through our crooked and drug-dealing assassinating CIA created Osama bin Laden--he was a fucking nobody until we brought him to Afghanistan to help us and the Mujaheddin kick the Taliban's Islamic asses out of there--while our poster boy Osama bin Laden was fabricating his Al-Queda terrorist organization--with US weapons and CIA approval. And how about this Karsai, We the People's puppet president of Afghanistan. I mean he's an oil thief and his brother is the leading heroin producer in the country. Keep it in the family, I say. What a life! The truth being: Afghanistan is necessary for us to control as we try and control all oil in that region--Afghanistan important not only because it borders Iran, but it's also a major oil transport state--moving the oil down from Central Asia to oil-poor Europe where it sells like hot cakes.
Yet, Obama, now that he's Commanader in Chief is letting that POWER go to his head. You don't know how powerful the legend of being President of the United States makes you feel. Remember, we live under the legend still that we are the richest and most powerful (militarywise) country in the world no matter our current state of bankruptcy and worn-out military. Hey, Obama gets saluted now! You know how powerful that makes you feel? Have you ever had the power to make underlings have to salute you? I was a second lieutenant in the horribly corrupt US Army and poor jerky kids had to salute my ass or I could order them to drop and give me "20"--push ups that is. I never did it. I treated my troops like brothers and as a result I got warnings all the time from The Old Man (the Company Commander) to not fraternize with the troops--the underlings--'cause you're gonna have to lead them into battles in which they might all be decimated. There were no women soldiers (what a misnomer) in my army days--when we saw a woman on base, we went howling wolf mad! Even an old general's old lady looked masturbationally hot to us horny base-bound soldiers. Remember, in the military, there are no Constitutional rights; there's only the Military Code of Conduct; otherwise, unless you're an officer you're a SLAVE!...though, guess what, even the officers are slaves to the US Military ideal--a legend as fictional as Jesus X. Christ.
I have splattered my brains all over this post--I'm angry--but I'm happy, too. I'm listening to cassette tapes I made starting back in 1984. Tapes I made at rehearsals and jam sessions a little clump of NYC blues & jazz musicians attended back in those days--all of them featuring myself and theryefarmerfromqueens--I already have 7 hour-long CDs and I'm still in September of '84. I'm making these CDs for theryefarmerfromqueens wife especially--I've left a lot of her husband jawin' away on various topics on these CDs--a lot of conversation--I want her to feel like her man is still alive--and he is on these tapes. I have five more hour-and-a-half cassette tapes to go in '84 and next there's a pile of 12 hour-and-a-half cassettes for 1985, forget 1986 and 1987. I'm estimating I'll get about ten hour-long CDs out of this mess of tapes now scattered all around my floor in front of my cassette deck, CD recorder, and sound board I'm pumping the cassette sounds through before they record on the CD before this is over--10, hell, I see at least 20 down there on that messy floor.
A work of love; and musicians love doing this kind of stuff. We love recording ourselves; most of us hate studio recording under the rulership of a stupid recording engineer who knows not one damn snittin' shit about music. Like when you record a vocal in a recording studio--oh how faked up it becomes--totally Pro-Tooled into something magnificent, though as opposite the passion of a live performance as one can get; that's why commercialized music sounds so boiled beef, as in British cooking.
Red Eye Special in my head refers to Rusty "Fire-eater" Bryant's great 60's tune of the same name.
Rusty "The Fire-Eater" Bryant--Rusty left the mortal coil in 1991.
thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler
From The Anti-Fascist Calling: an article on this Afghanistan mess!! Good read; necessary Daily Growler reading
Sunday, March 29, 2009
As Washington Escalates Military Operations, American Officials "Discover" ISI-Taliban Nexus
Long considered the realm of "conspiracy buffs" The New York Times, citing anonymous "American government officials," have belatedly "discovered" that Pakistan's Inter Services Intelligence agency (ISI) is aiding the Taliban and al-Qaeda.That ISI operatives were reportedly involved in planning the 9/11 attacks, the ostensible reason for the 2001 U.S. invasion and occupation of Afghanistan remains as they say, "off the table." Yet, as The History Commons reports, Operation Diamondback uncovered a 2001 plot jointly-run by ISI operatives and organized crime figures to illegally purchase weapons, including Stinger missiles and nuclear components, for the Taliban and al-Qaeda.
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Read the rest here:
antifascist-calling.blogspot.com/2009/03/as-washington-escalates-military.html
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