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Say Goodbye to: Ben Tucker, bass player; I first was aware of Ben on the Herbie Mann live album that featured Ben's best-selling jazz tune, "Comin' Home, Baby." Ben with Bob Dorough wrote lyrics to the tune that became a big hit for Mel Torme. Ben, living in Savannah, Georgia, became a successful businessman and owned his own radio station and club (Hard-Hearted Hannah's) in that city. Ben was killed when the golf cart he was riding in was hit by a car...Ben was 82.
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The Following Link Is to an Excellently Researched and Written Piece From antifascist-calling.com That Should Piss You Off Enough You'd Quit Doing Business With These Sorry Assholes. Here's an Excerpt:
Nearly six years since massive financial fraud and speculative market manipulation drove the global capitalist economy off the rails, congressional grifters in both benighted political parties have turned over the legislative process to bankster lobbyists.
Talk about technocratic efficiency!
Last week, The New York Times revealed that "Bank lobbyists are not leaving it to lawmakers to draft legislation that softens financial regulations. Instead, the lobbyists are helping to write it themselves."
According to emails leaked to the Times, a bill that "sailed through the House Financial Services Committee this month--over the objections of the Treasury Department--was essentially Citigroup's."
antifascist-calling.blogspot.com
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Say Goodbye to: Mulgrew Miller, pianist extraordinaire. Mulgrew Miller, 57, American jazz pianist, stroke. [Go below the Destroying of Detroit to watch Mulgrew with Ron Carter, Louis Hayes and Steve Nelson.]
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Wasting Time With Mediocrity
I watched a bunch of young musicians. They were all very talented. The were all abundant in understanding the technology of their instruments and equipment. A lot of them were multiinstrumental. BUT...and I'm fascinated by "buts" in the middle of things...it's like butting in to a train of thought...BUT here's my BUT, the music these talented well-learned kids created was mediocre, technical skill without what we used to call "soul." They hadn't been through the fires of hell yet. This is referring to a statement I came across while reading Paul Gauguin's criticism of the International Exhibition held in Paris in 1888, the exhibition that gave Paris the Eiffel Tower. Gauguin in writing about what makes great pottery stated, "So the substance that emerges from the fire takes on the character of the kiln and thus becames graver, more serious the longer it stays in Hell."
I know how the commercial (Capitalist) world loves youth. Young and extremely good looking kids go far in its world of ideal success. I watched a profile of Taylor Swift, the current every-album-she-releases-is-a-multimillion-dollar-seller hottest babe in the woods these days. I watched as she packed huge arenas with bright-faced, itchy, seriously adoring fans, at tops averaging maybe 11-years-old. As an old musician, I marvel at how audiences for all American music changed when the racist record promoters and agents decided to block the advent of Afro-Americans (musicians who certainly had gone through several layers of hell in their lives) taking over the music of the USA. And they surely were in the late 50s and early 60s. The biggest names in the recording industry were Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Ike and Tina Turner, Aretha Franklin, Otis Redding, Sam and Dave, Frankie Lymon, Ray Charles, and on and on the list can go. And these racist record promoters and agents went to Merry Ole England and found a whole host of white-boy copycats and their bands...and they found, like Sam Phillips said about Elvis, these were white boys who got that American black sound down no matter how phony it was...to these racist birds, it was hard to tell whether these Brit copycats were white or not...or whether they maybe were Negroes. And thus the mediocre Beatles, Rolling Stones, Elton John, David Bowie, John Mayall, Eric Clapton, etc., were forced marched onto our music scene. The British Invasion worked. It brought the 11- and 12-year-old white kids out to scream and foolishly worship these young British foppish white boys with impunity. Idolic worshiping that their white cultural mores (their parents) wouldn't allow them to show with the same insane (adorational) respect for Black entertainers.
Jacob Wassermann wrote, "Premature fame is often a disease of childhood." Children as multimillionaires; they've spent no time in the fiery hells of life's kiln.
My Contemplations Lately
Though I still get vehemently mad over the Ayn-Rand antics of President Obama as he goes about promoting anti-humanitarian ways and means (war, nuclear energy, the Keystone "Dirty Oil" Pipeline, putting billionaires in prominent cabinet positions, caving in to the nutjob Republicans (especially those from low-populated pissant states), pushing the poor under the bus, making destructive free-trade agreements, selling our air and fresh water off to the fossil fuel industry (promoting fracking and selling off our public lands to the frackers and drill, baby, drillers--the worst polluters in the world), I have risen above politics. Fuck it. Let these near-sighted Yahoos own the world; I no longer give a shit. My fellow Americans are true dumb-asses and I hold them responsible for the mediocrity that now rules and ruins this White man's (stolen) nation,
I'm soaking my brain in the wondrous writing of Jacob Wassermann (in particular his great novel Doctor Kerkhoven) and the paintings and writing of Paul Gauguin. I'm proud to be an artist in the vein of such revolutionaries as Wassermann and Gauguin. My head is filled with revolutionary thinking and reasoning that I can only realize through my imagination, via going back to the roots of my existence (before I was civilized) and letting them grow into experiences and angles and tangents and expansions that I create characters to relate their meanings and directions.
Some Well-Written Words From My Higher Contemplations
From Joseph Wassermann's Doctor Kerkhoven:
"When people are facing accomplished facts, as we say, the things that happen to them have generally already happened. Just a wave which has reached them and carried them on. The movement goes on day by day; destiny matures imperceptibly. One of its fruits is love, another is death."
"...unless a man can be worshiped he must be trampled underfoot."
"Superior ability creates time, and facility is the result of an orderly mind."
"Is there anything funnier than a person who takes himself seriously?"
"The depths of man's mind are hard to search, the hardest thing on earth."
"Born as we are and living as we have to live, the highest human quality is demonstrated only in sorrow and suffering."
"There are some experiences that remain in our memories like visions, for a true vision is superior in strength and duration to reality. They represent not only a restricted time and a specific occurrence, but a universal condition. The misleading effect of proximity disappears, a comprehensive feeling of destiny remains."
"Every malady of the mind is a form of anarchy."
"Without the certainty of repetition, there can be no growth or progress, no accumulation or unfolding."
"When the cold of heart begin to burn, the woe to those they love."
"Woe to those who inflame the cold-hearted, they will be burned to death in their arms."
Writing not only should entertain the reader, but also give him or her food for thought like the above quotes I've extracted Joseph Wassermann's novel, Doctor Kerkhoven. This novel, I now must admit, is one of the most difficult yet mind-blowing novels I've ever read.
President Obama and Our Capitalist Pig Rulers
Fuck them all. Let 'em steal all our money, our homes, our land, our jobs, our savings, our Social Security. These trickle-down theory assholes who have almost wrecked this country. Last night (May 28th) I watched a documentary called Detropia about the rise and fall of our once fastest-growing city in the WORLD that has now fallen into ruin. Over 100,000 abandoned homes and vacant lots. Factories that once produced automobiles and auto parts and auto accessories now in ruin, abandoned, gutted, moved to Mexico or China. It'll make you sick to see a city of one time 1,800,000 people now down to 800,000 people. After watching this film, again I said Fuck these bastards...let em go...let 'em ruin us. Let 'em follow the Neo-Con idea of driving the dollar down and thus driving our standard of living down to make us a Third World nation, which we are fastly becoming.
I hang my head in shame. My generation stood up against these assholes. My generation was anti-war. We were humanitarians who cared for people rights given under the Bill of Rights, rights now that are totally taken away from us. What's that buzzing sound above our heads? Oh, shit, it's a drone coming to assassinate us.
thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler
The Destroying of Detroit
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