The Daily Growler: After the Storm Edition

Foto by tgw, "Down Fifth Avenue," New York City 2011
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Say Goodbye to:
David "Honeyboy" Edwards, 96, American blues guitarist and singer, congestive heart failure.

My God, the Honeyboy lived 96 years. Amazing! His mother named him David, but the way he sang, they called him Honeyboy. He brought the honey out of the blues he sang. Born in 1915, he entered adulthood as many boys did in those days when he was 14. All the roots dudes were still alive and hitting their peaks down on the Delta, meaning the Mississippi Delta, which isn't really the Mississippi Delta, though it's been known as the Delta since slavery times--when Honeyboy's family's elders had surely been slaves--I mean, he was born "just south of slavery" himself--emancipated but incapacitated by Jim Crow and the Southern Redneck backlash after the Reformation, introducing the period of lynching or burnin' with impunity and Ku Klux Klan-ers--rule by the ignorant White Trash, creatures much lower on the pole of civilization than the brilliant and bright people who had to do their bidding or get hanged, burned alive, getting their skin stripped off while still alive, being disemboweled alive before being burned alive. Honeyboy had all of that in the reality into which he was born. Honeyboy was born into what Albert Murray calls the Blues Idiom. He grew up with the Chatmons and the field hollers and the guys playing the blues on git-boxes, fiddles, slide whistles, jugs, washtub basses, parlor pianos. The guys like the one W.C. Handy first heard playing and singing the blues in the train station in Greenville, Mississippi. Yes, and over in Clarksdale, Mississippi, the Honeyboy left home at 14 with his homey Big Joe Williams to be what the White man dubbed "an itinerant blues man." He grew up with Johnny Shines and counted as a friend Robert Johnson, the blues hero and the man who some say invented all the new forms of the blues all the way through to the blues's baby, rock 'n roll. Honeyboy claimed he was with Robert Johnson the night he drank the poisoned whiskey (some say he drank liquid heat--canned heat). Allan Lomax first recorded Honeyboy as Mr. Honey--and just think of the new-born musics the Honeyboy grew up on--why he heard Charley Patton and Tommy Johnson and the very young McKinley Morganfield for sure. From the Honeyboy's Wikipedia entry, he describes the life of an early bluesman:

“

On Saturday, somebody like me or Robert Johnson would go into one of these little towns, play for nickels and dimes. And sometimes, you know, you could be playin' and have such a big crowd that it would block the whole street. Then the police would come around, and then I'd go to another town and where I could play at. But most of the time, they would let you play. Then sometimes the man who owned a country store would give us something like a couple of dollars to play on a Saturday afternoon. We could hitchhike, transfer from truck to truck, or if we couldn't catch one of them, we'd go to the train yard, 'cause the railroad was all through that part of the country then...we might hop a freight, go to St. Louis or Chicago. Or we might hear about where a job was paying off - a highway crew, a railroad job, a levee camp there along the river, or some place in the country where a lot of people were workin' on a farm. You could go there and play and everybody would hand you some money. I didn't have a special place then. Anywhere was home. Where I do good, I stay. When it gets bad and dull, I'm gone.[3]

”

And from Honeyboy's Website, the word:
David Honeyboy Edwards, the “Last of the Great Mississippi Delta Bluesmen” has died. This morning Monday August 29, 2011, about 3 am while resting peacefully at home, Honeyboy moved on to blues heaven. He lived a long, full life, and he felt at peace. He loved to say, “The world don’t owe me nothing.” Just shy of his 96th birthday, Honeyboy played his last gigs at the Juke Joint Festival and Cathead Mini-Festival in Clarksdale, Mississippi April 16 and 17, 2011.

Prior to his health turning for the worse in late April, Honeyboy was scheduled to play numerous gigs in Chicago, across the USA and in Europe, including today at Millennium Park in Chicago for the noon time concert series. His manager Michael Frank had to cancel all those dates due to Honeyboy’s declining health. He maintained a strong spirit until the end, telling stories and showing off his dexterity in his hands.

Visitation will be Thursday September 1 from 6:00 pm to 9:00 pm, with an open mic for comments by his friends and fans from 7:00 to 8:00 pm at the funeral home. Services will
be private on Friday September 2.

McCullough Funeral & Cremation Services
851 E. 75th St.
Chicago, IL 60619
Phone: (773) 488-8900
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After the Storm
All your favorite Little Growlers survived what the pundits are now declaring as the costliest disaster in USA history--WOW, we're all going, shouting it out as one! We are loudly asking,
"Even costlier than the financial disaster imposed on us by Goldman Sachs and all the failing (going under) banks We the People of the USA bailed out!" Costlier than three trillion dollars! Some say 4 trillion! Some say even more when you include the secret monies in the billions the Federal Reserve is printing up and bailing them out to these failing crooked pirating financial
"institutions." The Obama Administration is now saying that if these criminal institutions pay a fine--in the low billions--then, guess what? They will be excused of their crimes. The fine, by the way, is less than the total of the bonuses these criminal entities paid out last year--bonuses paid to already high-salaried CEOs that are now making 324 times more than their highest-paid workers. This means that these sorry openly criminal assholes who almost brought our whole economy down are getting off with a slap on their money-grubbing wrists--these criminals who through fraudulent mortgage and deriviative schemes were able to foreclose on millions of homeowners, driving them out of their homes, taking over their lands, taking over their savings, their pension monies--so these bastards are going to pay a modest fine and all go FREE? Amazin', Amazin', Amazin'.

So this was the costliest Act of God in the history of US Acts of God. Billions of dollars of damages from wind and flooding--mostly flooding, flooding all the way from North Carolina up to Vermont of all places. Our brilliant Oral Roberts School of Law graduate and front-running candidate for president says that this hurricane was definitely an act of her angry God--this Christian babe who says God's laws take precedent over the nation's laws. On what God was this Christian nation founded? This White Man's stolen-land nation was founded on the British principle of law that says landholders were the only qualified citizens to rule us and make our laws--oh, sorry, we apologize for our dedication to realism, but dammit, God had nothing to do with the aristocrats who invaded and occupied this marvelous continent of natural wonders--natural wonders we human monkeys hate because they are more awesome than anything we human monkeys can conceive (a PBS Nova show on the origins of human beings calls we human monkeys the smartest beings ever evolving out of the oceanic slime--this according to we human monkeys)--though Christians are told by their God (remember, he's originally a Jewish god) they can move mountains with the faith contained in a mustard seed. And down in the hills of West Virginny, the Christian Capitalists are proving they have the materials and the know how to blow a 4,000-foot mountain down to a level playing field, leaving it stream-contaminating rubble to fill up some once Garden-of-Eden-like mountain valley--AHA, THERE, NATURE, YOU BITCH OF A MOTHER, TAKE THAT. So Nature sends a 5.8 earthquake to hit near Raleigh, North Carolina, followed by a hurricane that cost more in worthless US dollars than any other natural disaster ever--and you'll notice this cost analysis is based on LOSS OF PROPERTY and not on the loss of human life--which to date is a mere number--comparable to say the number of Iraqis who die daily--not anywhere near comparable to the number of children dying daily in the Horn of Africa.

And how about how now there is an investigation into to what happened to the billions of dollars that were collected by the various quickly formed aid funds meant to help the survivors of the 9/11 disaster--how costly was that? We here at The Daily Growler said way back when that we suspected Rudi "Mussolini" Guiliani of making some sweet bucks off his 9/11 aid fund scheme--he and Bernie Keric made big dame-impressing bucks off of it. [We wonder, did We the Citizens of New York City ever get paid back that money of ours Bernie spent fixing up his home, the one he lived in with his wife and kids and not the Battery Park apartment where he fucked Judith Reagan, the celebrity-authored-ghost-written book publisher, the best fucking she'd ever had, she admitted, on the window sill overlooking Ground Zero?]

And then, the Wolf Man slugged his way into our offices from a huge steak dinner up the street at his favorite Irish pub--yes, he seemed a bit tipsy--in the Irish tradition of being tipsy--shouting that he now knew for sure the USA was now almost officially a Fascist state. Then he led to us to a Website in which Leon Trotsky defined Fascism--here's an excerpt from that Trotsky statement:

At the moment that the "normal" police and military resources of the bourgeois dictatorship, together with their parliamentary screens, no longer suffice to hold society in a state of equilibrium -- the turn of the fascist regime arrives. Through the fascist agency, capitalism sets in motion the masses of the crazed petty bourgeoisie and the bands of declassed and demoralized lumpenproletariat -- all the countless human beings whom finance capital itself has brought to desperation and frenzy.

From fascism the bourgeoisie demands a thorough job; once it has resorted to methods of civil war, it insists on having peace for a period of years. And the fascist agency, by utilizing the petty bourgeoisie as a battering ram, by overwhelming all obstacles in its path, does a thorough job. After fascism is victorious, finance capital directly and immediately gathers into its hands, as in a vise of steel, all the organs and institutions of sovereignty, the executive administrative, and educational powers of the state: the entire state apparatus together with the army, the municipalities, the universities, the schools, the press, the trade unions, and the co-operatives. When a state turns fascist, it does not mean only that the forms and methods of government are changed in accordance the patterns set by Mussolini -- the changes in this sphere ultimately play a minor role -- but it means first of all for the most part that the workers' organizations are annihilated; that the proletariat is reduced to an amorphous state; and that a system of administration is created which penetrates deeply into the masses and which serves to frustrate the independent crystallization of the proletariat. Therein precisely is the gist of fascism...

We especially love that sentence: "After fascism is victorious, finance capital directly and immediately gathers into its hands, as in a vise of steel, all the organs and institutions of sovereignty, the executive administrative, and educational powers of the state: the entire state apparatus, together with the army, the municipalities, the universities, the schools, the press, the trade unions, and the co-operatives...--but it means first of all for the most part that the workers' organizations are annihilated...." Reference: www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/works/1944/1944-fas.htm

It's a commie site, so be prepared to be boarded by the thought police. If you remember, fascism started with Mussolini, a ex-Socialist, taking his Blackshirts into Bologna, the Red Menace hotbed of Communism in Italy (to this day, Bologna is basically a Communist environment), the only workable opposition (according to Trotsky) at the time against Fascism.

thestaff(including: austinhighchew; franny&zoey,ourtwoheadedgirlreporter; mr.ed.theeditinghorse; milesheadachyhart)
for The Daily Growler

A Little Taste of American Art:


"Ranch on the Plains" by Peter Hurd