Foto by tgw, "The Sun Over Manhattan," New York City 2011-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Say Goodbye to: Hubert Sumlin, the Wolf Man's guitar player back in the good ole days of the ripe days of the Chicago blues--After Chester Burnett died in '76, Hubert went out on his own, coming to New York City in the 1980s and 90s and working around town with many of the local White blues musicians, including many Daily Growler acquaintances.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The End of the World
I've been reading an article over on the Signs of the Times (SOTT.org) about how close we are to extinction due to a series of cosmic catastrophic events that are predicted to soon descend upon us by those who devote their lives to studying such supposedly scientifically deduced probabilities. We have survived fairly safely as an animal specie for millions of years now (my apologies to devout Christians who say we aren't but about 6,000 years old, using Holy Babble mathematics and astronomy, this same mathematics and astronomy that told us the Christian-Judaic God Jehovah (Yahweh/Allah) stopped the sun from going around the earth for an hour or so back in the days of the fabled Joshua, yes, the one who "fit de battle of Jericho"). Currently, I would off-the-top-of-my-head approximate that several million of us a year die from a cataclysmic catastrophe--an earthquake; a tsunami; a volcanic eruption; wild fires; famine; drought. In China alone, I wouldn't be surprised to find millions die every year from some form of NATURAL catastrophe. And I emphasize that NATURAL.
This form of human extinction is due to begin sooner than we think, according to this study in SOTT [Mr Ed: Please note, the article under discussion was written and published on Signs of the Time in 2007]. Gary Null on his Progressive Radio Network has been shouting from his Upper West Side Manhattan rooftop for the past several months warning us about these solar plasma storms predicted to hit us as soon as fall 2012. This is the same year, December 21, 2012, the Revelationists are promoting as Doomsday (due to a planet discovered in Sumerian literature that is headed on a direct bull's-eye course toward the earth that is, again according to Sumerian astrological time, scheduled to collide with the earth in 2012--also, December 21, 2012, coincides with the ending of the Mayan calendar)--Revelationist prophets who are the religious fanatics who follow the astronomical science found in the Christian Holy Babble New Testament ramblings of a crazed Saint John the Divine, obviously an early-day schizophrenic, who was exiled to the wild-isle of Patmos by the Greeks after he was caught pandering his brand of threatening Christianity against the Paganist Greeks and their divine authority. Seems the Greeks gave in to Big John's pleas for at least some quills and ink and paper--or had the pencil been discovered by then?--anyway, Johnny got his writing tools and in isolation on this snake-infested piece of despicable land (what did he eat, I wonder?) he set down how he predicted the world would end--resulting in the Christian New Testament Book of Revelations and the coming of Apocalypse Now.
The Island of Patmos...today.
All prophecies lead eventually to doom. Even in my role as a qualified soothsayer--based on my Sociologist focusing, my Gestalt eye that measures the societal environment in which I'm casually struggling to survive--all I can prophesy for the future (that nonexistent place in our hopes) is Chaos. By adopting the principles of the Beat generation and Be-bop culture back in the early fifties when I was maturing faster than the average kids I developed and found myself emulating what was considered The Cool. And along with my cynically brilliant and angrily growling cohort-friend, my life-time best friend, the Quantitative Physics genius who I met during a beating session after school one afternoon in junior high and who became my parallel-lined twin human-animal-hybrid phenomenon brother. This lover of Dostoevsky as a high schooler--this guy I used to read Havelock Ellis with and later Freud with and George Gamov's Birth and Death of the Sun with. Together we advanced en garde well ahead of our peers--and as teenagers we lived the Beat life to the hilt, the cool life, a life based on total liberty, Beat libertarianism, from deep out of Voltaire's Enlightenment preachings, though not to the point of wearing berets and smoking pipes like Ralph J. Gleason, one of the original hippies, a San Francisco newspaper columnist who later became the chief sponsor and promoter of the famous 1964 Monterrey Jazz Festival that gave us Big Brother and the Holding Company and Janice Joplin and Jimi Hendrix jamming the "Stars Spangled Banner," and the amazing music, I think, of John Handy and Michael White [Mr. Ed: Ralph J. Gleason was also one of the founders of Rolling Stone]...but I let myself get sidetracked...hey, life's so damn fascinating, but spinning out so fast, I find myself even while writing racing with my biological clock, which is pretty much in sync with my 60-year-old Bulova Automatic wristwatch, that keeper of human-invented time based on Norwegian gods and Caesars and the Sun and the Moon--humans are so damn weird.
I claim I am a member of the Beat generation, though I'm not really...yes, I'm pretending to be, though I have a right of saying I'm a Beat since I was as I mentioned above so advanced beyond my own generation, a generation I've many times named the Lost Generation, the generation between the Beats and the Pepsi generation--the Me generation--but as a member of the Beat generation, our fear of extinction was evident in the Atomic bomb. In fact, for a short while my bunch were called Atomic Bomb babies...but soon the Hydrogen bomb came along and made the A-Bomb blase...the almighty Hydrogen bomb the Nutty Professor Edward Teller's proud invention...and I used to look at that old ragged-ass fool Teller spouting his hatred of life and projecting that hatred onto human beings by thinking of himself as a god, a god with the power formulated in his head of how to blow the human race and all its relatives and other above-ground animals off the face of the earth. Such power! And it's all about power. POWER. POW. A smack in the kisser or a Prisoner of War.
War is now salvation. And while these savior wars carry on and on, Gary Null and a bunch of progressive scientists and commentators are bullhorning their warnings, their tilting points--or turning points--their warnings of climate change affecting our worldwide water supplies, to the point on that point alone we're facing extinction. We can't live without water, or, Christians, am I wrong? [Mr. Ed: The Wolf Man forgets his Christianity. All the true believers have to do to get fresh water is strike a rock and the water flows miraculously gushing and freshly deliciously free, satisfying beyond holy belief.... I'm being signaled that if I don't quit this bracketed interruption I'll be reminded that President Obama this week OK'd the slaughtering of horses for their consumable meat.]
Warring for water is the next big World War. Invading and occupying countries with enormous aquifers under them (of which there are very few left, the world's largest aquifer under Brazil fastly drying up)--or invading and occupying ice-islands like Greenland so we can chop them up into blocks of freshwater ice and then truck it via huge plastic bags down off the East Coast where they'll sell those Greenland icebergs to cities for their temporary water supplies.
I am pretty sure somewhere in this world of scientific laboratories, some mad scientist is working on a way to strike rocks and bring forth waters. "God won't let us die of thirst." Yet when Jesus Christ asked for a little water for his thirst while giving up the ghost on a Roman execution device, he was given vinegar. "I asked her for a little drink of water and she gave me turpentine." I remember the woman a decade or so ago whose lover took her out on a sailboat into the Atlantic where he then proceeded to fall overboard leaving the woman alone on the ship, sailing wildly around the Atlantic for days--finally being rescued after an unbearably long time at sea without food or WATER. How did she survive? By drinking her own piss. Or how about the little Haitian girl who was trapped in the earthquake rubble for months who survived by drinking the blood of the people dead around her. Imagine the stench, as Somerset Maugham might have written.
And Somerset Maugham's choice as the writer who wrote the best prose ever, Voltaire, has now walked back into my life, having been out of my life for many years since the last time I read Candide. Voltaire the true Libertarian. The man who said he didn't see much difference in good and evil--and in some instances, he said, a man's evil side, like his greediness, or craving for power, might contribute some good to society.
Quoting Mr. Voltaire
"It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong."
"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities."
"To succeed in the world it is not enough to be stupid, you must also be well-mannered."
"An ideal form of government is democracy tempered with assassination."
" In general the art of government consists in taking as much money as possible from one class of citizens to give it to the other. "
Like Candide
I in forgetting my Candide, I also forgot the lesson of that great bundle of great humorous writing--forgetting the basis of my Sociological background--that in spite of downfalls and abuses and absurdities and cruelties and hard times and oppression and murder and threat and catastrophe, one MUST stay POSITIVE.
So, as our extinction arrives, STAY POSITIVE. As Fats Waller said, "One never knows, do one?"
theenlightenedgrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler
A Little Taste of American Art:
A blog entry for a Daily Growler Hall of Fame Artist, a pal, Nicholas Egon Jainschigg
Tuesday, November 29, 2011
My shirt--Up Now!
That is to say November 30th, since some of you may work for employers discontinuing email in favor of Tweets.
As some of you may know, I got asked to do a design for an art project by a Netherlandish T-shirt company and I rolled out an idea I'd been contemplating for a while: the Indulgences. The design and the Indulgence are attached, in case you're someone who's been within three or so meters of me in the last decade and I haven't explained it to you, in detail, with hand-waving and visual aids.
In any event, the day of its exposure draws nigh, and for those of you curious about the design, or for those of you with a spare $499.00 (Shipping Included) for a T-shirt of unparalleled artistry, or for those of you curious about what sort of being might actually contemplate the outlay of $499.00 for a T-shirt of any degree of artistry up to and surpassing Michelangelic if it didn't contain sufficient DNA evidence to guarantee a hefty out-of-court settlement,may I direct your browser to:
http://sequoiatees.com/
As some of you may know, I got asked to do a design for an art project by a Netherlandish T-shirt company and I rolled out an idea I'd been contemplating for a while: the Indulgences. The design and the Indulgence are attached, in case you're someone who's been within three or so meters of me in the last decade and I haven't explained it to you, in detail, with hand-waving and visual aids.
In any event, the day of its exposure draws nigh, and for those of you curious about the design, or for those of you with a spare $499.00 (Shipping Included) for a T-shirt of unparalleled artistry, or for those of you curious about what sort of being might actually contemplate the outlay of $499.00 for a T-shirt of any degree of artistry up to and surpassing Michelangelic if it didn't contain sufficient DNA evidence to guarantee a hefty out-of-court settlement,may I direct your browser to:
http://sequoiatees.com/
No comments:
Post a Comment