Foto by tgw, New York City 2009-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Say goodbye to: Chief Jay Strongbow (Joe Scarpa): I had to return in order to write a little goodbye to Chief Jay Strongbow. One of my best pals in high school's father was my hometown's wrestling (the phony type) promoter and I hung many an afternoon at the Sportatorium, where the wrestling events took place. I learned all the tricks of the trade from my friend and another kid who worked there--many an afternoon we staged wrestling matches up in the big ring, "real" ones even to the point of learning how to smash a metal folding chair over your opponent's head to where it didn't hurt one bit. My brother at the time was a sports reporter on our hometown newspaper and I often accompanied him to various sporting events around the town and was especially known by my peers for sitting with him at the reporters table (we were the only reporters who covered the matches) at ringside at the wrestling matches--my brother actually had the hammer and rang the bell at the end of the rounds, a job he later let me attend to. I saw and met many a night Chief Jay Strongbow at those matches and many a night I've had the Chief thrown over the ropes and come smashing down on the reporters table always sending my brother and me scooting off out of harm's way. It was kind'a dangerous since the Chief or his opponents weighed way over 250 pounds. The Chief's gimmick was he came into the ring wearing a full Native American chief's costume with the war bonnet and everything. He also had long black hair which he kept held up with a Native American sweat band. When his opponent would piss him off, he would go into a fairly impressive war dance before grabbing his opponent and applying his patented sleeper hold on him. My brother knew the Chief wasn't a real Native American at all but was one Joseph Scarpa from Philadelphia, PA, though in a deal with my friend's promoter father he agreed to never spill the beans in his coverage of the matches. Later the Chief acquired a Native American brother called Jules Strongbow and they fought on the West Texas Wrestling Circuit as a tag team. I remember Chief Jay Strongbow in the late fifties and early sixties representing in teevee commercials the weight-loss pill called Tafon, which is No Fat spelled backwards, a weight pill just as phony as the Chief. I was very surprised to see that the Chief had just died; I hadn't thought of him in many a moon. So I come out of my den to give the old Chief a hearty good-bye--he brought me much pleasure and fame as a high school kid--I knew the whole game was faked, but I always pretended around rasslin' fans that it was real.
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What Black Folks Face Daily in Billionaire Mike Bloomberg's New York City Police State--Mike Bloomberg Hates Blacks, Latinos, and Poor People in General
Check out this report from Mike Taibbi:
www.sott.net/articles/show/243704-Mike-Bloomberg-s-New-York-Cops-in-Your-Hallways
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On April 14, 2006, The Daily Growler Started Publishing
In honor of the beginning of our 7th year of being and nothingness and since our main character, thegrowlingwolf, has out of rage, wrath, and need of inactivity fled off into the Wild Blue Yonder (off to wolf country) telling us who remain behind as he fled to sail the Growler ship into any waters we dare sail her, we've decided to rerun some posts from the past, beginning with today's from April 19, 2006, a Growler episode about Dirt and Texas entitled "From Dust to Dust," complete with a poem from thewomantrumpetplayer, a visitor/character who has been on board since this bitch of a ship started sailing. We hope you enjoy these trips from out of our past and we give you a long list of cheers from the Growler staff: Franny & Zoey, our two-headed girl reporter; Mr. Ed., the Editing Horse; thedailygrowlerhousepianist who is still tickling the ivories in various prestigious dives in the NY-NJ area; Walter Crackpipe, our venerable old muckraking editorialist; Austin Highchew, our managing editor; Colonel Singh the Singing Sikh, our expert on nothing and everything; barabbasmunn-dayne, thedailygrowlerjots&tittlesman; Marvin Backbiter, our sports reporter; Helen Klein-LaCloos, our poetry editor; and Elmer Snowedin, our poet laureate.
From Out of Our Past Come the Thundering Hoofbeats (this is the kind of headlines you get when you have a horse for your editor)("Nay," Mr Ed. says from his stall):
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Wednesday, April 19, 2006
From Dust to Dust
TEXAS
The first thing I think of when I think of Texas is earth. Is that really the first thing I should think of when I think of Texas? Maybe I should have said dirt instead of earth. Or maybe I should say dust instead of dirt. The most important book in Texas has a character in it who says that man simply exists from dust to dust. That's a horrible statement to me, especially if I reminisce on it for any stretch of time.
Like how once upon a time I stood in the middle of a certain part of Texas, the part of the state that faces square into the face of the sun during the day and is absorbed into the face of the moon at night, in a certain early season on into summer's flames.
And I've been standing there facing into that sun's sparkling heatwaves and I have been standing there just watching...daydreaming...inwardly thinking, when all of a sudden I was cold. Yes. Cold. In the middle of a certain part of Texas, standing there in the direct stare of the sun and feeling cold.
Then the extremely dry air that was frozen in stillness by the essence of its own heat around me started moving. Slightly at first, little wisps whipping at me with cold small licks. Then those licks turned to bitings. I know it immediately. I know what those bitings mean. Those bitings that precede it...and then I look up and there IT is.
First, I see a low bluish line on the flat horizon, the shimmering of the remaining dangling glass slivers of the full-faced sun's heat still boldly dancing in gestures of defiance at what is coming.
The wind is now just flat-dab cold. And now the wind throws grains of what's coming in my face and I breathe in and taste the first of what's coming in my face and what's coming in my face tastes like earth, or should I say dirt? or should I say dust?
I turn and face that rising bluish line and look it directly in its billions of eyes. I watch it rising and becoming a dark deep blue hulk raising up before me, coming at me as if coming straight up out of that earth just in front of me a few miles, though in actuality it really had started a hundred miles out to the west, out on the flattest of the flattest prairie plains, crunchy with hot sands and scraggly with low brush, suddenly spanked by a swooping down of a huge hand of wind.
Then my eyes widened as this dark blue bald hulk with the billion eyes hooded up, rising up like a thunderheaded cobra slowly straight up before me, its hood flaring wide, its body arched, its purpose to strike right at me, to come at me, to overwhelm me, to bite me.
Up, up, up, building up, rising darker and more blue, licking out with now stiff tongues of hard dirty bites, gradually coming up, its hood flaring wider and coming higher, now roiling and rolling up. As it rolls toward me, as it dances toward me, it turns from blue to red as it flares up square into the staring face of the sun.
And THEN! just like that, the face of the sun was gone. Blotted out.
There is a pain I suffer as I stand there in the middle of that certain part of Texas, in that certain early season on into summer's flames, in the middle of what once faced into the shimmering heat caused by that sun that had disappeared into those acres and acres of dust scooped up and set aroll a hundred miles west in front of me by a swooping down huge hand of wind. The pain is in the dry bath given me by those rolling, boiling rifled grains of that borne aloft sandy desert loam hurting as they shower me.
We exist from dust to dust. How many of those who had already turned to dust, from the ancient days until a recent time, had overwhelmed me that day in the middle of that particular part of Texas, in that part of Texas that faces into the face of the sun during the day...until another huge hand of wind swoops down to stir the earth a hundred miles west of where I stood there once upon a time. Had I breathed back within me the remains of my ancestors?...or other ancestors, like the ancient Clovis people, the ancient Aztecs, or the other nomadic tribes of Native Americans who once roamed these flatter than flat prairies once lush with grass and bison, with people living on the sandstone mesas, along the rivers and the creeks, following the herds of bison, across those now barren prairies to make their beds for another night under that high, high sky in the middle of that certain part of Texas, that part of Texas that faces straight into the face of the sun during the day and is absorbed by the face of that beautiful silver crying moon during the night and to wake up the next morning to face the rising sun, to cook their buffalo meat over buffalo chip coals, to eat their prairie wheat breads and mushes, then while the women struck the camp, the men sharpened their flint arrowheads as they prepared to head out across those lush grasslands to go after another buffalo, to go after another day in the face of that sun in that time when there were no dust storms. Not in that particular part of Texas, not in those certain oh-so primitive days when man did not attempt to conquer the earth but rather to go along with its moods, living within the will of this planet that spins away day by day, swirling its face dead into the face the sun during its many days and being absorbed into the silver face of the silvery moon during its many nights.
NEW YORK, NEW YORK
I was raising up out of my bed one morning not so many years ago in New York City. I had overslept and was very late for work. It was a little after nine in the morning. I sleep in a loft bed in a room on the 11th floor of a lower midtown Manhattan apartment building, a tall window that stretches up from the floor of my room up alongside and on above my lofty bed. From that window, I could look down south down Manhattan Island, far down to where I could easily see two monumentally tall twin box-like skyscrapers.
On this morning, being late for work, I awoke already startled, a little scatterbrained, facing that window that faced south down the island of Manhattan directly at those two monumentally tall twin box-like skyscrapers, and what I then saw didn't hit me as true at first. I just looked at it and didn't know whether to believe it or whether to figure it was a colossal stunt of some kind, an illusion, maybe a remaining vision from a dream I had just survived. If it were a stunt or an illusion, it was a huge one, yes, an amazing one, yes, but no, no, no, no...and I came fully awake.
What I was seeing, yes, really was what I was seeing. What I saw was a sudden explosion of clouds of boiling, roiling smoke and flames flying out from the monumentally tall box-like skyscraper closest to me. I stared unable to do anything but stare. The smoke gathered in dimension streaming out from the building eerily oily black, an ugly puffing up black sticking out fiery red tongues as if panting for air as it shot out from the now obviously knifed through structure, oily black, grimy black, littered black to cool down gradually though billowing up majestically from a burnt dark dirty gray up, high up, into a rather angelic white spread-winged cloud making its way toward the heavens.
Later in the day, after all the buildings were down that were coming down, that place down south down the island of Manhattan that used to hold within its view those two monumentally tall twin box-like skyscrapers now simply smoked. The buildings had disappeared and were now only ghostly smoke rising high in that clear and beautifully luxuriously clean sky that framed that smoking pit the rest of that gloriously beautiful day. Even the smoke in such a sky was visually striking allowing you to forget the human horror and destruction it represented. That smoke was coming from smoldering liquid steels and other metals, the ashes of enormous trashes, the grains and bits and chips and fragmentations of human remains, the powdered bloods and guts and hearts and genitals of over three thousand human beings smoking up a horrible crackling dies irae.
And all through that first night after this had happened, I was unable to sleep because of a certain bitter smell and TASTE that was suddenly in the southern breezes blowing up from downtown Manhattan from that smoldering place of death and destruction and revenge right through my window and right straight into my nostrils, into my lungs, and into my bloodstream, where they made themselves at home.
thenycgrowler [thegrowlingwolf using a pseudonym]
for The Daily Growler
______________________________________________________________
The first thing I think of when I think of Texas is earth. Is that really the first thing I should think of when I think of Texas? Maybe I should have said dirt instead of earth. Or maybe I should say dust instead of dirt. The most important book in Texas has a character in it who says that man simply exists from dust to dust. That's a horrible statement to me, especially if I reminisce on it for any stretch of time.
Like how once upon a time I stood in the middle of a certain part of Texas, the part of the state that faces square into the face of the sun during the day and is absorbed into the face of the moon at night, in a certain early season on into summer's flames.
And I've been standing there facing into that sun's sparkling heatwaves and I have been standing there just watching...daydreaming...inwardly thinking, when all of a sudden I was cold. Yes. Cold. In the middle of a certain part of Texas, standing there in the direct stare of the sun and feeling cold.
Then the extremely dry air that was frozen in stillness by the essence of its own heat around me started moving. Slightly at first, little wisps whipping at me with cold small licks. Then those licks turned to bitings. I know it immediately. I know what those bitings mean. Those bitings that precede it...and then I look up and there IT is.
First, I see a low bluish line on the flat horizon, the shimmering of the remaining dangling glass slivers of the full-faced sun's heat still boldly dancing in gestures of defiance at what is coming.
The wind is now just flat-dab cold. And now the wind throws grains of what's coming in my face and I breathe in and taste the first of what's coming in my face and what's coming in my face tastes like earth, or should I say dirt? or should I say dust?
I turn and face that rising bluish line and look it directly in its billions of eyes. I watch it rising and becoming a dark deep blue hulk raising up before me, coming at me as if coming straight up out of that earth just in front of me a few miles, though in actuality it really had started a hundred miles out to the west, out on the flattest of the flattest prairie plains, crunchy with hot sands and scraggly with low brush, suddenly spanked by a swooping down of a huge hand of wind.
Then my eyes widened as this dark blue bald hulk with the billion eyes hooded up, rising up like a thunderheaded cobra slowly straight up before me, its hood flaring wide, its body arched, its purpose to strike right at me, to come at me, to overwhelm me, to bite me.
Up, up, up, building up, rising darker and more blue, licking out with now stiff tongues of hard dirty bites, gradually coming up, its hood flaring wider and coming higher, now roiling and rolling up. As it rolls toward me, as it dances toward me, it turns from blue to red as it flares up square into the staring face of the sun.
And THEN! just like that, the face of the sun was gone. Blotted out.
There is a pain I suffer as I stand there in the middle of that certain part of Texas, in that certain early season on into summer's flames, in the middle of what once faced into the shimmering heat caused by that sun that had disappeared into those acres and acres of dust scooped up and set aroll a hundred miles west in front of me by a swooping down huge hand of wind. The pain is in the dry bath given me by those rolling, boiling rifled grains of that borne aloft sandy desert loam hurting as they shower me.
We exist from dust to dust. How many of those who had already turned to dust, from the ancient days until a recent time, had overwhelmed me that day in the middle of that particular part of Texas, in that part of Texas that faces into the face of the sun during the day...until another huge hand of wind swoops down to stir the earth a hundred miles west of where I stood there once upon a time. Had I breathed back within me the remains of my ancestors?...or other ancestors, like the ancient Clovis people, the ancient Aztecs, or the other nomadic tribes of Native Americans who once roamed these flatter than flat prairies once lush with grass and bison, with people living on the sandstone mesas, along the rivers and the creeks, following the herds of bison, across those now barren prairies to make their beds for another night under that high, high sky in the middle of that certain part of Texas, that part of Texas that faces straight into the face of the sun during the day and is absorbed by the face of that beautiful silver crying moon during the night and to wake up the next morning to face the rising sun, to cook their buffalo meat over buffalo chip coals, to eat their prairie wheat breads and mushes, then while the women struck the camp, the men sharpened their flint arrowheads as they prepared to head out across those lush grasslands to go after another buffalo, to go after another day in the face of that sun in that time when there were no dust storms. Not in that particular part of Texas, not in those certain oh-so primitive days when man did not attempt to conquer the earth but rather to go along with its moods, living within the will of this planet that spins away day by day, swirling its face dead into the face the sun during its many days and being absorbed into the silver face of the silvery moon during its many nights.
NEW YORK, NEW YORK
I was raising up out of my bed one morning not so many years ago in New York City. I had overslept and was very late for work. It was a little after nine in the morning. I sleep in a loft bed in a room on the 11th floor of a lower midtown Manhattan apartment building, a tall window that stretches up from the floor of my room up alongside and on above my lofty bed. From that window, I could look down south down Manhattan Island, far down to where I could easily see two monumentally tall twin box-like skyscrapers.
On this morning, being late for work, I awoke already startled, a little scatterbrained, facing that window that faced south down the island of Manhattan directly at those two monumentally tall twin box-like skyscrapers, and what I then saw didn't hit me as true at first. I just looked at it and didn't know whether to believe it or whether to figure it was a colossal stunt of some kind, an illusion, maybe a remaining vision from a dream I had just survived. If it were a stunt or an illusion, it was a huge one, yes, an amazing one, yes, but no, no, no, no...and I came fully awake.
What I was seeing, yes, really was what I was seeing. What I saw was a sudden explosion of clouds of boiling, roiling smoke and flames flying out from the monumentally tall box-like skyscraper closest to me. I stared unable to do anything but stare. The smoke gathered in dimension streaming out from the building eerily oily black, an ugly puffing up black sticking out fiery red tongues as if panting for air as it shot out from the now obviously knifed through structure, oily black, grimy black, littered black to cool down gradually though billowing up majestically from a burnt dark dirty gray up, high up, into a rather angelic white spread-winged cloud making its way toward the heavens.
Later in the day, after all the buildings were down that were coming down, that place down south down the island of Manhattan that used to hold within its view those two monumentally tall twin box-like skyscrapers now simply smoked. The buildings had disappeared and were now only ghostly smoke rising high in that clear and beautifully luxuriously clean sky that framed that smoking pit the rest of that gloriously beautiful day. Even the smoke in such a sky was visually striking allowing you to forget the human horror and destruction it represented. That smoke was coming from smoldering liquid steels and other metals, the ashes of enormous trashes, the grains and bits and chips and fragmentations of human remains, the powdered bloods and guts and hearts and genitals of over three thousand human beings smoking up a horrible crackling dies irae.
And all through that first night after this had happened, I was unable to sleep because of a certain bitter smell and TASTE that was suddenly in the southern breezes blowing up from downtown Manhattan from that smoldering place of death and destruction and revenge right through my window and right straight into my nostrils, into my lungs, and into my bloodstream, where they made themselves at home.
thenycgrowler [thegrowlingwolf using a pseudonym]
for The Daily Growler
______________________________________________________________
1 comments:
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I wrote a little poem when I visited later that autumn:
Autumn In New York
Dust motes dance
In a shaft of sunlight
In lower Manhattan.
Bodies of people I love.
MbR, 2001
2 comments:
That was a great post, and it's been a great six years -- congrats, and here's to many more!
It has been a great ride on your "bitch of a ship" and I am happy to be a character/visitor in your ongoing tumble of words and thoughts and ideas, etc. Yes! Here's to many more! (I raise my virtual glass with languagehat.)
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