The Daily Growler

Existing in the Police State of Billionaire Heaven: New York City: Biding My Time

2012-01-26T22:43:00.001-08:00

Foto by tgw, "Through a Glass Darkly," New York City, Jan. 2012
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Time Waits for No Man
My dad used to say, "Don't let time pass you by." After he'd say that I would wonder in my child-curious way how time could pass one by. I had never felt it passing me by. I'd look at my wind-up alarm clock by my bed, my first timepiece ever, and I would imagine the hands flying freely around the dial, hours and hours and hours passing me by. Swooshing by me.

Time is a movable feast, I suppose. Since it's man-invented, of course it can't pass me by. Time is imprisoned within our chronological devices, which are the concepts of our brains. Time is a controlling agent. Time is an incarcerator. Time is a method of measurement. Time is a measurement of just how long we have...to live...to die...to be imprisoned...to wile away time...to take a lot of time outs--and the time out is one of the means one has to keep time in tow. You get frustrated, you just take a time out. Time outs stop the clocks; yet the shadow of time keeps on keepin' on.

Your heart is a timepiece. It tick-tocks.

Before there were quartz time or digital time, before our Naval Observatory time was computerized and nanoseconded down to minutia of time, clocks tick-tocked either from side to side or up and down.

Back in my good ole days, I used to hang on my three-hour lunch breaks at a Midtown Manhattan restaurant called Ho-Hos. It was in the ground-floor back of the old Time & Life Building in Rockefeller Center. I first heard about Ho-Hos on the long-ago-and-now-forgotten Long John Nebel's all-night radio talk show that aired back from the 50s, 60s, up until 1978 when Nebel died of prostate cancer. Ho-Hos was one of his sponsors. Two of the bartenders in Ho-Hos were Jimmy Chin and Mister Yick. One day I was sitting at the bar when this musician friend, he'd been big during the bubble-gum rock phase, came in needing money. He was peddling this pocket watch he'd gotten as a wedding present from his wife who he had now divorced. He said he definitely hated her and he also hated this watch because she had given it to him so he said I could have the watch for $20.
That's it...the Majestime Pocket Watch I Bought for $20 From the B-Gum Rocker
Twenty bucks was chicken feed to me then since I was working in a high-cotton field knocking down big bucks-per-month, so out of feeling sorry for the dude, I'd just gone through a divorce of my own, I bought the watch. After the dude had split, Mr. Yick asked me to see the watch. He took it and held it up to his ear. "Yes, velly good watch," he said handing it back to me. Curious, I asked him what he was listening for when he held it up to his ear. He said cheap watch tick-tocks up and down but good watch tick-tocks back and forth sideways.

I at one time invested a whole ton of spondulex in antique wristwatches. My oldest and most treasured one was a 1907 Elgin porcelain dial solid silver wristwatch with solid gold works inside the silver filigree case. I still have it--one day the stem broke and it has sat dormant for several years now. The time contained in that old precision-made chronometer has been frozen in time. I tried to sell it on eBay as is for an opening bid of $100 but nobody was interested. I paid $375 for it ten years ago. At one time my watch collection contained 50 timepieces, of which I've now sold off 20, leaving me still with right at 30 watches in various states of running, some having their own time-works frozen and in need of repair. If you ever see me in the street or at dinner or playing a gig, I'll be wearing my favorite of all my watches, a 1950s Bulova automatic with a black dial. Bulova may not have invented the self-winding wristwatch, but its were the best and this little watch has been running faithfully for me for over 10 years now. The longest I had a wind-up wristwatch run was 18 years, a Gruen watch my dad bought me for high school graduation, claiming he paid $80 for it, an exorbitant price for a wristwatch in those days. That watch ran until one day it simply just stopped winding and working, so I put a nail in my apartment wall and hung that watch up on it as a work of art.

The most amazing wristwatch I've ever owned is what we called the Casio Rubber Watch. It is a battery-operated watch--it has all kinds of bells and whistles on it, too, like an alarm, a stop watch, military time, etc. It also lights up in the dark. A friend in the watch business sold me this watch for $30 back in the 80s--the insert that came with the watch said it had a 7-year battery in it. That watch, my friends, is still running today, 20 years later--keeping fairly accurate time--sitting in a never-used coffee mug up in my loft bed right now as I type on this post. The last time I wore it, about a year ago to an Ives program at Town Hall, it started falling apart, a little metal strip falling off the watch face, the band, rubber, tearing slightly near the clasp--so I returned it to the coffee mug and there it sits today still telling time. Just look at the time this old rubber watch still is recording--the time of my life up there in my loft bed for the past 20 years.

Sitting here looking around my apartment, I count four wall clocks--and there's one in my bathroom (my Charles Parker, Jr., clock), too, so that's five. I love clocks but I hate time. One of my clocks, it's celebrating the 10th Anniversary (1994-2004) of the Hudson Valley Renegades minor league baseball team, stopped one day about a year ago at 15 minutes of 12--and I have just left it set that way. Another one of my clocks is an hour off because I never change it come Daylight Savings Time beginnings and endings--in the spring it will be two hours off--and in the fall, it will return to being one hour off.

Daylight Savings Time was a Rooseveltian move to give folks longer days so they could work their asses off in the WWII defense plants. Why we kept Daylight Savings Time after the war I'll never know; the politicos on the left say it's so the little kiddies won't have to trudge down to their schools in the dark; the rightwingers say it blasphemes God's time. All that Daylight Savings Time proves is that man is the clockmaker and he can start and restart time at will. I mean why couldn't Congress pass an amendment saying 12 midnight was no longer 12 midnight but was now 12 night noon or some such bullshit as that? Man could even add an extra hour to a day if he so chose.

A good quote about time? Here's one from Somerset Maugham (in The Moon and Sixpence):
"I don't think of the past. The only thing that matters is the everlasting present."
Living in the present tense continuously. I learned living in the present tense continuously from Gertrude Stein who said she wrote in the continuing present tense. Writing in the present tense. Solving all your problems in the present tense. Because the present tense is where we all are at the same time. It is in the present that I sit now presenting you with this little presentation on time. My time. I know my time, but I don't know your time.

Some Antique Watches, the Collecting of Which Was One of My Pastimes
A Famous Hilton Triangle Watch From the 1930s.
This Is a Nelson Celluloid Watch, Also From the 1930s.
A Lord Elgin Gold Watch With Black Dial and Wire Lugs From 1940s--I still own this watch; unfortunately its works are currently frozen.
This Is the White-faced Version of the Lord Elgin Gold Watch With Wire Lugs From 1948. All but the Black-Dial Gold Elgin (3rd from top), I no longer own.

There aren't many old watchmakers still around who really know their business. The guys who knew how to work on the above watches are all gone now and today's watch repair people here in New York City have no knowledge of these American watches--most of the watch repairmen in my neighborhood are Russians. There is still a world-renown Elgin watch restorer out in California but he's quite expensive. However, those Elgin Gold jobs above when completely restored sell upwards in the 300-to-400 dollar range.

So remember, time will tell, but what it will tell, we'll not know until the time comes for us to know. A lot of people are looking forward to a coming time; while some are dreading any kind of waking time.

thetimefulgrowlingwolf
for The Timely Daily Growler

A Little Taste of American Art:

"Big Red Flower?" by California artist, Geoff Greene--Acrylic on 2 canvas panels - 48" x 38" (August, 2007) The question mark is explained: he didn't remember what kind of flower it was.

Existing in Wall Street, USA: Here It Comes Around Again

2012-01-23T04:08:00.001-08:00

Foto by tgw, "Through a Glass Darkly," New York City, Jan. 2012
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Ready for More of the Same
Notice the same stays the same seemingly forever. The stage was set with the evolution that brought us to the human-monkey state, this human monkey who refers to himself as MAN, or in his intellectual sense, Homo sapien--very few Homo sapiens have ever heard this name, however--it's a name preserved for use in our ivory towers. Man is the same today as he was yesterday and the day before yesterday. Man is the same all over the world. Even though a man is speaking in a rare language only understood by a very few people, he is still speaking everyday language: "Hi, Hugh, how you doin'?" "Just fine, Lugh, how the hell are you doin'? And how's that cute wife of yours...I intended to knock her out and drag her off to my cave but you, you son of a bitch, you beat me to her."

I regularly read www.languagehat.com, a site filled with linguistic discussion by some of the sharpest minds in the business. A recent post on L Hat's site dealt with the subject, "Have Americans Ruined English?" The linguistic responses to this post were all primarily concerned with yes Americans have butchered the real English language, blah, blah, blah. Mostly answers only a linguist (there are sociolinguists, you know--me trumpeting about how all of these thinkers are in fact Sociologists, my favorite human-monkey invention, a biased opinion, of course, since I tout myself as a Sociologist, though non-practicing in the active and up-to-date sense). THOUGH, the whole premise of this post is that all, including Sociology and Linguistics, are still the same, the same goals, the same intentions, the same research methods, the same taught elementals--producing the same ole-same ole--yes, perhaps a modified same ole-same ole, perhaps a same ole-same ole moved on to a higher plane, but still it's the same ole-same ole.

All animals have language. My neighbor has two cats that he sometimes allows to kick the kinks out of their apartment-confined activities by letting them tumble about out in our small but spacious hallway. One of the cats knows me from when he was a big kitten and always comes directly to me corresponding with me in terms of rubbing his head against me, in terms of purring heavily in friendship; the damn cat knows me as a friend. The other cat, however, who I've never touched or talked to, avoids me, is standoffish, though I try and get her to come to me, she relinquishes her getting petted to the cat who knows me--and who when the other cat seems to be coming to me, blocks her path and tells her in an easily understood way that I am his friend and not hers. We have developed a language consisting of words, of sounds, of touch, of even me turning the key in my door lock and this cat knows that sound and runs to my door to wait until I come out--and then he's ready for a little conversation with me.

Did you ever notice that most animals know the meaning of the word "No"--in English, French, Spanish, etc., but then no seems to be a common sound that means what it means to all animals including Homo sapiens. Like when chimpanzees (our next of kin) have a conflict, there's always one big mama who puts a stop to it with firm looks and shrieks that mean NO to the offenders.

Another thing this cat knows are my hand signals. Like most cats and dogs understand the sign language that means "Come here"--or they know the whistle that means the same thing--or in some animals, the hand signal combined with the words "Come here" are easily understood by most animals I have a friend who has a parrot--and even parrots understand "No" and hand signals signaling them to fly down and perch on a finger, or hand signals and sounds telling them it's time to eat. All animals know what "It's time to eat" means, too, no matter how it's phrased: in sound, or whistle, or words.

I looked up "animal linguistics" in Wikipedia (you may love or hate Jimmy Wales, but he pulled off a cool move by shutting down Wikipedia sites for 12 hours--and the SOPA and PIPA bills were thrown off the table as a result--for the moment, the Internet is still left wide open--it's like a huge world-wide bulletin board)--and here's what I found:

"With linguists, the interest of animal communication systems lies in their similarities to and differences from human language:

Human languages are characterized for having a double articulation (in the characterization of French linguist André Martinet). It means that complex linguistic expressions can be broken down in meaningful elements (such as morphemes and words), which in turn are composed of smallest phonetic elements that affect meaning, called phonemes. Animal signals, however, do not exhibit this dual structure.
In general, animal utterances are responses to external stimuli, and do not refer to matters removed in time and space. Matters of relevance at a distance, such as distant food sources, tend to be indicated to other individuals by body language instead, for example wolf activity before a hunt, or the information conveyed in honeybee dance language. It is therefore unclear to what extent utterances are automatic responses and to what extent deliberate intent plays a part.
Human language is largely learned culturally, while animal communication systems are known largely by instinct.^{[citation needed]}
In contrast to human language, animal communication systems are usually not able to express conceptual generalizations. (Cetaceans and some primates may be notable exceptions).
Human languages combine elements to produce new messages (a property known as creativity). One factor in this is that much human language growth is based upon conceptual ideas and hypothetical structures, both being far greater capabilities in humans than animals. This appears far less common in animal communication systems, although current research into animal culture is still an ongoing process with many new discoveries."

How fascinating, eh? [What am I, Canadian? The last time I was in Canada--Newfoundland and Nova Scotia--I was very bored]. But these things are fascinating to me in a Sociological sense, though I don't agree with a lot of those above points--like animal communication is instinctual, meaning to me it never changes; yet I think animal communications depend on their location and relation to human beings and in that sense they pick up new ways of communicating with each other.

As a writer--hell, I can easily communicate with other animals--even put words in their mouths if I want to--like writing a children's book narrated by an English-speaking bear perhaps. Writers can use language any damn way they please, as long as it's, shall I dare say, entertaining. It's all about being entertaining. Getting parrots to speak human words is done because it's entertaining when these birds do seem to be understanding and speaking OUR language. Writers must be entertaining--the language they use or abuse in being entertaining in terms of correct usage is irrelevant in a work of fiction. Conversation--the first definition--the second definition having to do with sexual intercourse--which, by the way, has its own form of language--in all animals not just humans. All animals growl and groan with pleasure as they have sex. Humans have a knack of using scurrilous words from their language to add more spice to the action.

And action it is, too. Action is entertaining. Action. Acting. The Act. Act One. A play in 4 Acts. Act yourself. Act like a lady. Act your age. Your actions speak louder than words. Actors. And actors are entertainers.

I'm back to reading Somerset Maugham's wonderful little book, The Summing Up, and I'm in the part where Brother Maugham is talking about his time as a produced playwright and his relationship with the actors and actresses who recreated his written plays onto the stage in a reality setting. In writing about actors and how hard it is to pin them down as to who they are in terms of who they really are--you know, like Maugham says, actors seem to be a conglomeration of all the parts they've ever studied for or succeeded in performing. And, then, in a typical Maugham way, he boils actors and actresses down to the nitty-gritty by writing: "Make-believe is their reality, and the public, which is at once their material and their judge, is also their dupe. Because make-believe is their reality they can look upon reality as make-believe" (Somerset Maugham, The Summing Up, chapter 31, last paragraph).

I've never had any trouble writing dialog--though I never tried to write a play. I was tempted way back when Tennessee Williams wrote Camino Real (1953) and later In a Bar in a Tokyo Hotel, where one critic wrote that Tennessee was "fracturing language" to fit his characters's actions, or where the play is leading its characters--up to the final scene--and then BOOM, the audience is shocked and left stunned. That's what I began to like about Tennessee's play writing.

And as to the language of Camino Real, here's a reply from the main woman character in the play, Marguerite (Camile like)--(thanks to www.sheilaomalley.com/)--and I think this is great writing:

"MARGUERITE. Oh Jacques, we’re used to each other, we’re a pair of captive hawks caught in the same cage, and so we’ve grown used to each other. That’s what passes for love at this dim, shadowy end of the Camino Real … What are we sure of? Not even of our existence, dear comforting friend! And whom can we ask the questions that torment us? “What is this place?” “Where are we?” — a fat old man who gives sly hints that only bewilder us more, a fake of a Gypsy squinting at cards and tea leaves. What else are we offered? The never-broken procession of little events that assure us that we and strangers about us are still going on! Where? Why? and the perch that we hold is unstable! We’re threatend with eviction, for this is a port of entry and departure, there are no permanent guests! And where else have we to go when we leave here? Bide-a-While? “Ritz Men Only”? Or under that ominous arch into Terra Incognita? We’re lonely. We’re frightened. We hear the Streetcleaners’ piping not far away. So now and then, although we’ve wounded each other time and again — we stretch out hands to each other in the dark that we can’t escape from — we huddle together for some dim-communal comfort — and that’s what passes for love on this terminal stretch of the road that used to be royal. What is it, this feeling between us? When you feel my exhausted weight against your shoulder — when I clasp your anxious old hawk’s head to my breast, what is it we feel in whatever is left of our hearts? Something, yes, something — delicate, unreal, bloodless! The sort of violets that could grow on the moon, or in the crevices of those far away mountains, fertilized by the droppings of carrion birds. Those birds are familiar to us. Their shadows inhabit the plaza. I’ve heard them flapping their wings like old charwomen beating worn-out carpets with grey brooms … But tenderness, the violets in the mountains — can’t break the rocks!"

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

A Little Taste of American Art:

Leonore Knight, Pen and Ink Illustration of GOP Elephant, circa pre-1900 (that's William McKinley and Teddy Roosevelt in the handbasket). Little is known about Knight other than she was an illustration artist for the Los Angeles Herald in the 1920's - 1940's. I first heard of her when I bought an autograph item of Betty Roche's, Duke Ellington's vocalist from the mid-forties up into the fifties, very famous for her versions of Ellington's and Billy Strayhorn's Take the A Train--on her own with the Savoy Sultans and later on the famous version by the Ellington Ork released in the early fifties. Betty's autograph was with regards to Leonore Knight whose address at the time, 1944, was in Hollywood. I have learned from dealer descriptions that Leonore Knight sent out autograph requests via return mail to many Hollywood celebrities (a photograph of Hattie McDaniels signed to Leonore recently sold at auction for $1600) and entertainers. Recently on eBay, a lot of several of Leonore Knight's pen and ink drawings was offered for $699. The above illustration is from that eBay auction.
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Are 50% of Americans Dumbasses?

2012-01-22T02:46:00.001-08:00

Foto by tgw, "Nightshot Through Glass," New York City, Jan. 2012
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"Political economy came into being as a natural result of the expansion of trade, and with its appearance elementary, unscientific huckstering was replaced by a developed system of licensed fraud, an entire science of enrichment"--Frederick Engels.
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I'm listening to Duke Ellington's filmscore to Otto Preminger's Anatomy of a Murder. I then look up and watch a newscast with the sound off. It's showing and hoopla-ing about how Newtie Gingrich won the South Carolina Repugnican primary. They show a photo of pig-jowled Newtie. They are now showing a photo of the The Mitt Mann. He looks so dull. A dullard. Though, hey, I can easily poke fun as these two backwards-thinking jerks--come on, we have language that puts these snake-oil salesmen in their place. Call Mitt "the Mormon" Romney an asshole. Don't worry, he'll not sue you for libel because he is an asshole. Call Newtie Gingrich a big fat fool and that's too mild. Newtie is lower than a big fat fool. He's more like a man with his fat head up his fat ass. How's that?

Remember, I'm listening to Duke Ellington's music. Watching a soundless television screen. The music is overwhelming my spewing rebuke at those soundless images on that television screen. The reporters look so serious as they report that Newtie won in spite of all the revelations of his pornographically inclined male-dominance principle of using women as masturbational devices, because Newtie, I'll guarantee you, is a big-time masturbator.

I spin my thoughts upward into this portion of Duke's score he titled "Grace Valse," a place so high above a low-life like Newtie Gingrich will never reach it. He can't even reach underneath so high an accomplishment.

In Newtie's favor, however, I must sleazily admit that all men dream of threesomes. Newtie's in a Beltway privileged place where he can fulfill his lowest pornographic dreams--and winning in South Carolina is pornographic in itself, according to me--and racist, for without a doubt South Carolina is now our most racist state--even more racist than Gawjah, Alabanana, or Mississippi? Well, that's a tough one; Mississippi is still an open pit of racism even though the majority of the state's population is surely not White. All of these states from Gawjah over to Lawsbanana are old plantation states; South Carolina has been the epitome of a White-controlled state that still wants to belong to the Confederacy (remember, they wanted to fly the Confederate flag over their capitol building). South Carolina is a big Military Industrial Complex state also and Newtie represents that bunch of crooked arms dealers in Congress. It is also a big nuke-wasted state. A polluted state. The home of the late great hypocrite, J. Strom Thurmond.
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"Our mutual value is for us the value of our mutual objects. Hence for us man himself is mutually of no value." Karl Marx
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Just by quoting Engels and Marx I'm subjecting myself to surveillance. When dumbass people hear the name Karl Marx they immediately cringe in fear--they are totally dumb to his writings and his Sociological findings in Das Kapital. And Marx was a Sociologist. The above quote to me is magic thinking--a wit that can throw thoughts directly in your face--you get them when you think--if you're a dumbass you don't get them. We are what we own.

Do Mitt Romney and Newtie Gingrich represent We the People? Yes, because they own more than the average man does and to own more is our overall mutual ambition no matter where we are or what god we believe in--even our gods want MORE. Plato said man was searching for what was good for him. What is good for us in our minds, as an old song lyric sings, is "to be as rich as Rockefeller." [And, folks, believe it or not, the Rockefellers are still our ruling royal family--their power is still way above the power of even Little Billy "More" Gates [a little weasel of a man] and Warren "I Ain't Bluffing" Buffett [a weasel of a man].]

Yes, we all want to be rich. Money, not Jesus, Buddha, or Allah, is salvation. Dumbass Repugnican's, those at the voting level, have no hope of ever being as rich as Mitt "the Mormon" Romney (inherited wealth)--none of the money Mitt has made was earned--even he admitted that when he tried to backwards think his way out of having to disclose his tax returns--his father, ole George Romney (he gave us the Gremlin), disclosed his tax returns for six years back when he ran for president many moons ago. Yet, and here's the irony, getting as rich and powerful as Newtie Gingrich does seem possible to them. Ron Paul? Well he's a rich son of a bitch, too, but he's too wacky for a backwards-thinking Repugnican to comprehend. These boobs know nothing about Austrian Economics and Ron Paul is steeped in it as a Calvinist Libertarian, which is what American Libertarianism is, Calvinism: "Work for the night is coming when you'll work no more."
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“There is no work, however vile or sordid, that does not glisten before God.” John Calvin
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So now the backwards-thinking Repugnicans have three wonderful choices: Mitt "the Mormon" Romney (the winner in the low-attended New Hampshire Repug primary); Rick "Man on Dog" Santorum (squeak-by winner of the dumbass Iowa caucus); and now Newtie "Hey, Honey, How 'bout a Threesome" Gingrich (winner of the Racist State primary--also not very well attended).

Is President Obama shaking in his boots as he watches these foolish clowns compete for a chance at knocking the African off his perch and drown him in the deep waters of backwards-thinking Neo-Conism? Not that President Obama isn't a backward thinker himself, this Nobel Peace Prize winner who is under the bootheel of the Military Industrial Complex and the criminal bankers and the financial institutions they are still running in fraudulent and criminal manners. Obama seems to continue to favor old Clinton assholes and top CEO criminals as his closest advisors. His latest bullshit move is to make Larry "Failed Economist/Failed Harvard President" Summers head of the US-controlled World Bank, a position G.W. Bush gave to Paul Wolfowitz. Surrounded by backwards-thinking and corrupt men of wealth and privilege, there is no hope to me of this man ever returning to his "Yes, We Can" bullshit--all lies it turns out--LIES, LIES, LIES.

You tell enough lies, some truth begins to leak out.

Our future looks bleak--I can see why it's more sedating to look behind us at the Good Ole Days, that weren't Good Ole Days for all of us--always for White folks, but not so hot a look back for our nonWhites.

Did you read where the Chinese artist who conceived and rendered the Martin Luther King memorial on the Washington, District of Corruption, Mall fucked up one of King's quotes?--edited it down so it would fit on this rather bland King memorial that mocks the Vietnam Memorial (ironically, also done by a Chinese artist). Now the government's trumpeting goons are trying to figure out how to rectify the fuck up without having to do the whole thing over. Why does our government love Chinese artists so much? Maybe our government is behooven to the Chinese Communists because this is the gang that owns us lock, stock, and barrel. Our government is letting the Chinese Commies use hundreds of thousands of acres of our Western wilderness lands. Most of our clothing and television and computer production is happening in Communist China. Why, they are going to be the main tenants in what was once called the Freedom Tower, a hypocritical building that has now been named No. 1 World Trade Center--Freedom having nothing to do with that sordid development, a gift of We the People to one of the crookedest real estate developers in the country and the Power Elite-run, always needing more money, New York-New Jersey Port Authority--an authority We the People of New York and New Jersey really don't need. Did you know that a lot of the splurging of high-rise luxury buildings in New York City is due to their being financially backed by China's state investment bureau?

So, hey, folks, you better learn a little Mandarin. Remember when our nation's corporations sold all of OUR productive assets to Japan (our television, our movies, our recording industry (this Duke Ellington Anatomy of a Murder CD I'm listening to was original recorded on Columbia Records, but we sold Columbia Records to the Japanese and now all those old Columbia albums are being reissued by Sony), our camera production, our automobile industry--Datsun (now Nissan), Toyota, Mitsubishi, big arms producers during WWII--and Japan was buying up our property, too--Japan bought Rockefeller Center once--a move that almost brought down the Japanese economy--so bad a move, they had to give it back to the Rockefellers thereby losing millions of dollars in reneging penalties. And all of our corporate goons started advising us we'd better start learning Japanese--the future was in Japan! Now Japan is on the brink of disaster--their economy sinking daily--their air now polluted by radioactivity from their buying our nuclear technology (General Electric's technology)(General Electric is also a member of the Military Industrial Complex).

So goes the world of high finance. Voodoo economics continues to strangle us--Voodoo Capitalism is bringing us down--BUT, we are so dumb we still believe we're the best and brightest people in the world.

thegrowlingwolf
for The Sunday Daily Growler

A Little Taste of Chinese Art:

Notice, "Democracy" is represented by rather Western-faced people, while the oppressed look very Chinese. So why do we accept Mao's kind of Communism but rain down bullshit on Karl Marx's Communism?

Existing in the Police and Corporate Welfare State of New York City: Waiting for the Nazis to Reveal Themselves

2012-01-20T11:26:00.000-08:00

Foto by tgw, New York City, January 2012
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Say Goodbye to: Johnny Otis, 90, American R&B singer-songwriter. Johnny Otis, a Greek cat who chose to be Black--Johnny was an amazing man. First time I ever noticed Johnny he's playing drums with Prez's septet on some early Aladdin records (Norman Granz's first record label). Johnny introduced to the world: Esther Phillips, the Ravens (who became the Coasters), Etta James, Jackie Wilson, Hank Ballard and the Midnighters, Little Willie John; he produced and his band backed up Big Mama Thornton on Lieber and Stoller's "Hound Dog." His band also backed Charles Brown on his famous "Driftin' Blues." Plus Johnny brought us his biggest hit, "Willie and the Hand Jive," a tune eventually stolen and used by phony blues man, Eric Clapton, going about his business of stealing his sounds from American original musicians like Johnny Otis. I happen to know all the lyrics to Johnny's infamous "Signifyin' Monkey." Johnny also played vibes, was a preacher, a club owner (the famous Barrelhouse Club), was a disc jockey, and ran for Congress in California--his brother was our ambassador to Jordan at one time--Johnny Otis who grew up in a mixed Valejo, California, neighborhood decided he wanted to be Black and he almost pulled it off. Johnny always made me think of Mezz Mezzrow, a Chicago Jewish lad who also decided he wanted to be Black--White guys who find they are more attuned to a Black way of life than they are a White way. I know how that feels, trust me.
Say Goodbye to: Etta James. How ironic that Etta James dies a day or so after the man who discovered her and gave her her first gigs, Johnny Otis, died; she at one time being a member of the Johnny Otis Show. Etta James, 73, American singer ("At Last"), leukemia.
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Obama Idiocy: President Obama is fixing to appoint Larry Summers as head of the World Bank. What the hell does this little creep have on Obama? Why not Suzanne Somers?
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What Is Wrong With Me?
This silly presidential-campaign politics is so beneath me; yet, these idiots, these Yahoos, have the privilege and power to literally drive me into homelessness--to ruin what life I have left--and now with filthy powers given to one man, our president, the resident president, this first Black president taking the power to have his army target me, pick me up off the streets, whisk me over to Guantanamo where without trial or hearing or anything, I can be left to rot there and disappear into an unknown space. Our president is our armed forces Commander in Chief don't forget--plus he inherited G.W. Bush's Executive privileges, privileges passed on to President Obama by this little sorry specimen of a man who is obviously his mentor (Obama said after meeting Georgie Porgie for the first time that he liked the guy a lot), that little spoiled brat bastard whose family, headed by the old Reagan-Raggedy-Ass Pappy Bush and his New World Order, has run this country into the god-damn ground--a ground being stolen out from under We the Common People of the USA by our divine Power Elite.

I disagree with the 99-to-1 ratio the Occupy Wall Streeters keep depending on--at least 45% of that 99% are living in some form of rightwing racist dream state--that's the 45% who, I'm sorry to say but I'm thinking this way, would vote for Adolf Hitler and throw Jesus Christ in Guantanamo as a leftwing radical. Like I can see Mitt "the Mormon' Romney sporting one of those little Hitler moustaches and wearing an SS uniform (remember, Prince Harry has a cool SS uniform he could loan the Mitt Mann)--"Sieg Heil, it is none of your fucking business the taxes I pay--I'm rich--so I'm divine, you petty heathen bastards, you poor slobs who've had to work your asses off so my family could become filthy rich--Praise Macaroni and Baloney, those Mormon gods." But now I read that the Mitt Mann's offshore bank accounts and the financial shenanigans he pulled with his Bain holdings have gotten his old sagging ass in trouble with his own party of backbiting goons--Bain holdings crookedly obtained millions of crooked dollars, shenanigans all done through backroom insider finagling and a shifting of paper funds all night long by teams of number-crunching MIT and Harvard fops who work all night long in front of those latest computers all hooked together all over the world--a world of united pirates fleecing the common man (Every Man) of all his wealth and natural resources.

In my last Growler post, I tried to open almost-asleep eyes to history--a history of banks and bankers and financial shenanigans and how Imperialist Royal Families, like those who ran the British Empire, allowed holding companies and private equity investors and hedge-fund conglomerates to form their own armies and navies with fleets of ships cruising the wild seas of the world looking for the planet's wealth, captained by half-madmen and manned by men of adventurous, criminal, egoistic natures--going about the world sniffing out the common wealth with their new navigational tools and instruments and their new cartographical printings coming out daily to guide their ironclad ships with their multiple braces of heavy-duty cannons in their quests to invade, occupy, and steal that wealth when found, their ships's hulls reserved for tons of gold, silver, spices, coffees, teas, medicinal plants, whale oil, timbers, and slaves. Whatever they could conquer by force and steal by force! The White Man ever Capitalistically evolving--always seeking New Frontiers--and taking them by force, of course.

I am compelled to bark forth--from out of low growls comes harsh barking--rebelling against a coming ideal that I was warned against all my young rebellious life--the idea that this nation was skidding on a greased-lightning sleigh ride headed for the very depths of another economic hell--a hell only made worse by the instigators of these depressions who are using the mass fear of them to start more of their profitable wars, wars in which while our youth die needlessly our so-called enemies are decimated, killed by the hundreds of thousands, by the millions in some cases, and millions are driven out of their homes, off their lands, to flee to safe haven countries, like the 2 million Iraqis we displaced and who are now living in utter chaos in camps in Lebanon and Palestine. I hold post-World War I Germany up as an example of the way we are headed. A Corporate State leads to National Socialism, which is, folks, in case you've forgotten, Nazism when wearing German uniforms..Fascism, when wearing Italian uniforms--economic systems devised by Sociologists/Economists--echoes of it still prevalent in the politics of the Ayn Randers, the Ron and Rand Pauls, the Von Hayek and Von Mises Libertarians (and throw that big phony rightwinger Ayn-Rand-loving fool Allen Greenspan into that sordid nutjob mix).

We are ripe right now for a military takeover. You don't think so? We are ripe for a dictator. What do you think? We the People have no power whatsoever anymore. We are being duped by sorry bastards. I know them as what C. Wright Mills called the Power Elite--if you know me you should also know C. Wright Mills (a Texan, by the way)--and what the great American Economist/Sociologist Thorstein Veblen called The Leisure Class--and what Karl Marx called the Bourgeoisie. Allen Ginsberg said we were being governed by the working-together CIA, FBI, Mafia, and Corporations--Listen to Rage Against the Machine doing Allen's poem "It Hadda Be Playin' on the Juke Box":

www.youtube.com/watch?v=QxrUlTYhu4M

It's just a crying shame how this all has evolved, undercover, behind closed doors, gradually but surely going out of control and there's nothing We the Measly People of the USA can do about it except via radical means, like not paying taxes; like taking your money and savings out of the big criminal banks; like not voting for these fools. Occupy Wall Streeters tried to stir us up, but they have been driven off by a police-state-Homeland-Security-coordinated government plot against them, to simultaneously attack them, beat them, pepper spray them, give one of them a severe head wound that has left this Iraqi War vet half-goofy and out of balance and having to go through expensive rehab--and they threw an old paraplegic grandma out of her wheelchair, pepper spraying her as they did, and they deliberately pepper-sprayed a group of peaceful OWS protesters at UCal-Davis--pepper spraying them in a cruel and mean fashion--like "Here you god-damn al-Queda-ass-kissing dipsticks. You're all traitors! President Obama, declare these cheesy bastards enemy combatants and let's ship 'em off to Guantanamo Concentration Camp--and while they're there, why don't we 'round 'em up, pack 'em in a shower room, and then gas their worthless asses! Praise God, and may God Bless America! Rick Santorum for President!"

My generation warned you of a coming Fascism. There were huge numbers of Brits and Americans during World War II who remained loyal to Germany--who stood behind Hitler--people like Charles Lindbergh and the Duke and Dutchess of Windsor found Hitler charming, intelligent, worthy of being listened to.

I know the Ku Klux Klan were willing to lynch Jews along with Blacks in the real fine Yee-Haw Old South of the Jim Crow era on into the 1940s. "Wake up, White people! The niggers, the Spicks, the Kikes, the Gays, the Lezzies, the Moozlimbs, the Woggies, the Gooks, the Chinks..." is the Ku Klux Klan's shout out, spouting out their blasphemous tags, Ku Kluxer types believing what spews from their mouths is a divine defense of heathen White people, the Euro-blends that Pat Buchanan says are being allowed to be swallowed up by these savage brown, black, and yellow peoples. God help us, Pat cries. And God-damn, I wish Pat's drunken Irish God would stop helping us.

What I'm trying to say is that we are in the same economic situation that led Germany to accept a psychopath like Adolf Hitler as their fearless leader, their Fuhrer--the Germans, the Barbarians, the Visogoths, the Lutherans, the Teutonic Crusaders.

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

Saving John Coltrane's Last Home

www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-16643652

Existing in the Corporate State of New York City: Oh No, thegrowlingwolf Dons His Master's Robes

2012-01-17T05:32:00.000-08:00

Foto by tgw, "String Theory Photography," New York City 2012
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How's This for an F-U at We the Poor People of the USA From the Dumbocratic Party and President Barack Obama: First of all, by holding its convention in Charlotte, North Carolina (a huge banking headquarters city), the Dumbocratic Party insulted all Progressives, Commies, Workingslobs, the Unemployed, the returning War Vets, the Uninsured, the Blacks who voted overwhelmingly for the President in his fraudulent campaign of 2008 (remember, too, the Repugs came back strong in the 2012 election)--plus they shoot the bird at all those names on the Statue of Liberty that are said to be welcome to these shores--and now the US says FUCK the meaning of that Statue of Liberty sitting out there in the middle of my hometown's harbor and my hometown's billionaire mayor has chiseled off that statue's original meaning and replaced it with the exorbitant fee they now charge these hayseed tourists, these hick hinterlanders who flock to this city to gawk at our sights, to clutter our streets with garbage, and then paying big bucks to ride on these fleets of diesel-spewing double-decker tour buses up and down Fifth Avenue--these Euro trash and Middle American hicks who frequent the cheaper hotels that are mostly owned by Indians and Israelis and Chinese Commies and Arab Royal Families--the money these bastards make not staying in this country but going back to the motherland, except in the case of the low wages they pay their mostly immigrant staffs.

But to top the insult of the Dumbos holding their convention in Deep South Charlotte--it was announced yesterday by President Obama's campaign headquarters that President Obama's acceptance of the Democratic Party nomination speech is going to be made OUTDOORS! YAHOO! And WHERE!!! Why if you said BANK OF AMERICA STADIUM, you are correct, sir or madam. What a fucking fist in the face of those of us silly enough to still have any hopes that this totally phony two-faced dude would confess his sins and correct the many errors he has made and renew the many promises he has wimped out on--this winner of the Nobel Peace Prize--this President who has gotten us more deeply involved in world warfare and has gotten us closer to a nuclear war (with Iran) than even that little crooked weasel of a spoiled brat G.W. Bush did, a bastard who I still resent getting to live the Life of Riley down in Dallas, Dumbass, Texas (and I'm from Dallas), in a mansion he got through a foreclosure deal, living the leisure life, the pampered privileged life, and living it high on the hog on We the People's slowly depleting earnings and pension monies.

Can you imagine what possessed President Obama and his sidekicks, first of all to hold their convention in Charlotte, Yassuh Boss, North Carolina, but then to hold his acceptance speech in a stadium named after the CRIMINAL BANK OF AMERICA, a bank that if the truth be revealed is currently on the brink of bankruptcy! I mean this dude is a god-damn confused two-faced man--same as Slick Willie--same as Mitt "the Mormon" Romney--that corporate pimp paying 15% taxes while We the People are paying 25-to-30%, the poorer we are, the higher taxes per capita we have to pay. Plus, don't forget, it was just reported, the IRS is 300 million or so in the hole. Let's sell our IRS to Communist China!
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The Old Wolf in Sociologist Clothes Growls Again
Let me tell you what's goin' on. It's simple. Our government, in cahoots with We the People who are Corporations, has evolved to the point of sacrificing its own people (especially its own young people) for a chance to rule the world--a Corporate takeover of the world led by Goldman-Sachs-World and embraced by the White superpowers of the world, the US (though we are fastly becoming Paper Tigers), London, and Germany--and I say London because Great Britain as an economic whole is stone broke and in debt to the International Banking Cartel (Oligarchy) led by Goldman-Sachs-Deutsche Bank, et. al., and the US through its control of the IMF and the World Bank, and in this instance, I use US in the sense of that part of the government We the People of the USA have no access to, that secret US that is currently in the driver's seat in a seemingly impregnable way overhere, while at the same time Germany is financially regaining control of Europe (the European Union)!

And Germany is who We the People, the Common People, should be concerned about in terms of their redomination of Europe. Remember, the Deutsche Bank was among the cluster of buildings around the World Trade Center that was ruined on 9/11, a building this bunch of German pirates allowed to just sit there in ruin until finally they were forced to start bringing the unsafe mother down.

Check 'em out--from Wikipedia (which is blacking out some time tonight (Jan. 17th) to protest the SOPA and PIPA censorship of the Internet bills now being considered by our corrupt Congress, which also has something to do with Corporate control of the Internet):

"Deutsche Bank is the largest foreign exchange dealer in the world with a market share of 21 percent.^[2] Deutsche Bank has offices in major financial centers including New York, London, Frankfurt, Paris, Moscow, Amsterdam, Dublin, Toronto, São Paulo, Singapore, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Sydney, Dubai, Riyadh and Mumbai"

Do you have any idea what being the world's largest foreign exchange (wheeler)dealer means?

Check this out about 'em:

"Fears that Deutsche Bank could neglect its German roots and expand risk-taking activities prompted key members of the supervisory board to opt for the dual CEO model. Deutsche Bank is listed on both the Frankfurt (FWB) and New York stock exchanges (NYSE)."

Neglecting its German roots. Guess where Goldman-Sachs's roots were originally rooted? However, during World War II, Deutsche Bank was very loyal to its German Aryan roots. Check 'em out--again from Wikipedia:

"After Adolf Hitler came to power, instituting the Third Reich, Deutsche Bank dismissed its three Jewish board members in 1933. In subsequent years Deutsche Bank took part in the aryanization of Jewish-owned businesses: according to its own historians, the bank was involved in 363 such confiscations by November 1938.^[19] During the war, Deutsche Bank incorporated other banks that fell into German hands during the occupation of Eastern Europe. Deutsche provided banking facilities for the Gestapo and loaned the funds used to build the Auschwitz camp and the nearby IG Farben facilities. Deutsche Bank revealed its involvement in Auschwitz in February 1999.^[20] In December 1999 Deutsche, along with other major German companies, contributed to a $5.2 billion compensation fund following lawsuits brought by Holocaust survivors.^[21]^[22] The history of Deutsche Bank during the Second World War has been documented by independent historians commissioned by the Bank.^[19]

"During World War II, Deutsche Bank became responsible for managing the Bohemian Union Bank in Prague, with branches in the Protectorate and in Slovakia, the Bankverein in Yugoslavia (which has now been divided into two financial corporations, one in Serbia and one in Croatia), the Albert de Barry Bank in Amsterdam, the National Bank of Greece in Athens, the Creditanstalt-Bankverein in Austria and Hungary, the Deutsch-Bulgarische Kreditbank in Bulgaria, and Banca Commercial Romana in Bucharest. It also maintained a branch in Istanbul, Turkey."

They were of the "Good Germans."

Here's a site that is openly anti-Israel and Zionist that defends Hitler's handling of the banking cartel after, as this site says, the Treaty of Versailles laid the burden of unfair war reparations payments on the backs of the World-War-I-whipped Germans (Germany had to pay the war costs of all the countries opposing them in WWI--costs that were 12 times more than the worth of all the property in Germany) and that is what wrecked the German economy and brought the International Banking Cartel in to try and keep the Germans from printing their own money rather than, as these bankers wanted, the Germans continuing to go deeper into debt to this International Banking Cartel (this site, by the way, emphasizes that the International Banking Cartel after World War I was headed by the Rothschilds Bank agents who were Jewish but also Germans). Yes, I am certain this site is condemned as anti-Semitic, that I don't doubt--but then a lot of White Christians in this country are very anti-Semitic though pro-Israel --pro-Israel for their own selfish reasons and not because they're not anti-Semitic. Most White Christians still subconsciously blame the Jews for crucifying their fabulous savior, their made-up Messiah (a dude Ancient Jewish history ignores). At rightwing fundie Christian megachurches you don't see many Jewish converts, if any, trotted out before the mixed-bag audience of hayseed and hillbilly Whites (a lot of 'em ex-snake handlers) and freedom-seeking (in the sense they can become White before the White God) poor Blacks. (The White Massuh God, you see, wipes Blacks clean of their Black sins (those put on them by the Christian God because Noah's Black son, Ham, gazed upon old drunken Noah after he had passed out naked as a jay bird. This cleansing in the Blood of Christ according to the Fundie gospel means these Blacks who were Black with that ancient sin have been washed clean and are now before this Christian God White as the driven snow, Praise the Holy Lard Bucket.) I mean, Jews have too much intelligence to believe that Christian crap--but, of course, Israelis cater to these Christian deceivers because of their political sway in this country.

So check out this site anyway--it's very interesting to me--not so scary to me in terms of it being anti-Israel and anti-Zionist but more scary in terms of its pro-German stance in terms of excusing the Nazis killing 6 million Jews, Gays, Gypsies, Commies, and the physically impaired in exchange for respecting their so-called "brilliance" in how they so quickly in a matter of 4 years brought fallen and totally bankrupt Germany back up to the height of a world superpower.

wakeupfromyourslumber.com/node/6720

Again from Wikipedia:

"Goldman Sachs was founded in New York in 1869 by the German-born Marcus Goldman.^[4]^[5] In 1882, Goldman's son-in-law Samuel Sachs joined the firm.^[6] In 1885, Goldman took his son Henry and his son-in-law Ludwig Dreyfuss into the business and the firm adopted its present name, Goldman Sachs & Co.^[7] The company made a name for itself pioneering the use of commercial paper for entrepreneurs and was invited to join the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) in 1896."

First of all reading the above history of how Goldman-Sachs came to be it's easy to notice that these German-born men were Jews. In the German historical mind, it was the Jewish bankers and financial dealers (the Rothschilds in particular) who brought down the German Empire, actually starting back in the 1850s at the time of Karl Marx and his coming out of Germany warning us about this economic system called Capitalism--a system coming out of London, at that time the city on which the sun never quit shining, the financial center of the British Empire--of Imperial design--a system designed to keep Kings and Queens and other world leaders in the splendor necessary for these stupid, common, ordinary human-monkeys to declare themselves divine. Capitalism became the system of the divine. To the divine go all the profits (the spoils)! And the Imperial Courts of the world embraced this Capitalism whole hog and they sent these pirates around the world conquering the valuables of the Continents around the Seven Seas, their future colonies invaded, occupied, and founded by Trading Corporations (the well-armed and manned ships of the East India Company or the South Seas Company), hedge-fund and private-equity corporations--all of these Imperialist nations had these large Capitalist investment and development corporations to go out and do the dirty work of warring and pirating necessary to keep THEIR ROYALS more splendid and powerful with gold and silver and slaves than all the other ROYALS.

The United States of America was founded by the Dutch East Indies Company, making New Amsterdam a Dutch Colony.

What Am I Saying?
What I've started harping on of late: IT'S THE SYSTEM, CAPITALISM, THAT'S THE PROBLEM. Capitalism depends on first the ability to own private property including common lands. Second, the ability to Capitalistically improve one's Capitalist holdings, thus raising the value of the property. Capital investments are the improvements you make to the property you own. Capital means the value of what you produce on your private property. Money is not Capital. Money is simply a means of exchange. Its original value depended on bartering--"I've got 5 fat sheep ready for slaughter--I need a team of horses for my spring plowing, so, how 'bout it, my 5 sheep for your team of horses?" "How 'bout you throw in another sheep and I'll thrown in a new plow?" So what happened then when say one lambing season when for some reason all the lambs are born dead? Well, you go to the men you've traded your sheep to in the past and you say, "Brothers, look, all this year's lambs have died on me, so I've got nothing to barter with but I need several barrels of flour and meal and tea and coffee and several bolts of cloth and some tools, so how 'bout you all give me what I need on credit and I'll promise on the Holy Bible to pay you when my corn and bean crops come in this coming spring, what'a you say?" And thus began credit. And the holders of these credit slips began to charge interest.... Do you see where I'm leading you?

The Difference Between Ricardo's Capitalism and Marx's Capitalism:
"Because Marx was critical of capitalism, he examined it with a view to finding faults or contradictions in the system; Ricardo basically accepted it and saw it as a harmonious working-out of the economic process. The chief actor in the Marxian model, as in the Ricardian model, is the capitalist. The capitalist's search for profits and reaction to changing rates of profits explain, in large part, the dynamics of the capitalist system. But whereas capitalists in the Marxian system rationally and calculatingly pursue their economic advantage and sow the seeds of their own destruction, in the Ricardian system these same rational and calculating capitalists, in following their own self-interest, promote the social good. Although the classical economists' long-run prediction of a stationary state is certainly pessimistic, such a state is not the fault of the capitalistic system; rather, in their view, it follows from Malthusian population doctrine and historically diminishing returns in agriculture. For Marx, however, the capitalistic system produces undesirable social consequences; as the contradictions in capitalism become more manifest over time he said, capitalism as a phase of history will pass away."

It is Ricardian Economics that our Capitalism is based on. Ricardo saw Capitalists (Wealth of Nations Capitalists) as "rational and calculating" and that by their following "their own self-interest" they "promote social good." Marx simply took the opposite view of the Capitalists of his time. He saw them as dependent on the poor workingclass for their production, CHEAP LABOR, a workingclass they had to keep POOR in order to manipulate it for their own lordly benefits and their own conspicuous consumption. The number of workingclass laborers you employ and the wages you pay them and the amount of product their labor produces determines your wealth. When you don't pay fair wages and you force your workers to overproduce (work 16-hour days, 6 days a week), you begin wearing them thin and you piss them off and they eventually revolt and bring you down. Marx believed Capitalism and Capitalists would destroy themselves. Marx's periods-periods-of-downturn predictions, whether you dig Marx or not, have been dead on the bull's eye so far since he made them--in London, by the way--back in the 1860s.

Check out our current economic situation; the enormous debt the stupid-ass Neo-Cons drove us into trying to drive down our standard of living and the worth of the dollar, those goons with their arms up G.W. Bush's tight ass manipulating him to do like his father and the Republican godfather, Ronald "McDonald" Reagan, did before him and drive the US into the largest debts in this nation's history; larger debts than FDR had gotten us into during World War II--I mean these Repugnicans, the Milton Friedman-follower idiots, so hate Keynesian Economics--in a depression (or a war economy), the way out is through government spending--and they blame Keynes and FDR for all our current problems (why do you think they so want to wreck the Social Security System?)--such BULLSHIT--it's the very system CAPITALISM that's the problem. (And always keep in mind that President Barack Obama in his book said he admired Ronald "McDonald" Reagan especially for his economics policies--meaning in particular his Free Trade policies, which Obama has continued to promote and commit to agreements, just recently his signing a Free Trade Agreement with South Korea that will send 150,000 US jobs over there.)

This kind of growling peters me out fast...

Let's pause for a station identification,

thepausinggrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

Please note, like Don Rickles always excused his most bigoted statements by saying it was all in fun, our above attempt at laying wide open the wounds of this ravaged world right now may seem to some leaning toward bigotry--well, like some might protest that we are promoting Adolf Hitler as an Economics genius--and that by guiding you, dear readers, toward a site that is revealing but, yes, certainly anti-Semitic in being anti-Israel and anti-Zionist, which doesn't necessarily mean this site is promoting the hatred of all Jews--besides, for all we know, the blogmeisters of this site may be Jewish. The point is, their analysis of the reason Germany rose from being a totally worthless nation after World War I back up to, in just a few short years, back up to being a world superpower--this all happening under Hitler, though most decidedly this refinancing was not of his suggestion even--I'm pretty sure Hitler was an idiot when it came to most anything except trying to prove to Germans his grandfather wasn't Jewish and that he was a pure Aryan when look at this Frankensteinian-looking little prick, his shortness, his Austrian peasant background, his warped sense of art--anyway, whatever, we found the article entertaining in the sense it was revealing another side of the Banking Cartel--this in dispute of statements after World War II that the Jewish Bankers had supported Hitler up until he decided Jews were not human really...but then notice how the Deutsche Bank fired its Jewish board members and became the Gestapo's bankers and helped finance the building of Auschwitz, etc. Bankers, whether Jewish or Aryan, are still pirates and greed merchants who'll sell their grandmothers, wives, daughters, dogs, and favorite stud horses for more piles of gold (money having to be founded on a gold base to be worth more than the rag paper it's printed on)--profits!

thedailygrowlerprophets

Existing in the Biggest Apple on Earth: Pissing in the Wind

2012-01-15T18:50:00.000-08:00

Foto by tgw, "Oscar & Elvis Together on a Wall," New York City 2012
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I See Nothing Wrong With Celebrating a War Kill By Pissing On It
Like a lot of people, I, too, was puzzled over Leon "Pancho" Panetta's and Hillbilly Hillary's fervent moral uppityness over the LEAKED video that shows several of our bravest and most heroic dumbass volunteer soldiers pissing on the already-dead bodies of a towel-head fresh kill they had just made in our War of Terror on the heathen people of Afghanistan. Come on, these brave lads were simply celebrating this successful fresh kill. They had blown these evil bastards away according to the "kill or be killed" military attitude they were taught in basic training as the principle under which American paid servicemen are taught to fight. I mean what do We the People of the USA expect when we put lethal weapons in the hands of eighteen-or-nineteen-year-olds and then teach them that where they are going (being deployed to) the principle idea is to kill first and ask questions later--a principle based on a military logic that says the enemy can be any of the opposing people no matter how innocent they look. As we learned in Vietnam, old gook grannies or young naked gook girls can be carrying weapons--you can't trust them--so, hey, it's the same in Afghanistan as it was in Vietnam when the brave Captain Medina ordered his brave, democracy-bringing, righteous Charlie Company men under Lieutenant Calley to "Shoot to kill every stinking one of those gook bastards at My Lai no matter what they look like. You can't trust a young man...nor can you trust his old granny...nor can you trust even his newborn baby girl. Blast the bastards off the planet, for they are the enemy and you are the righteous, on a godly mission...."

So you see why I was puzzled over Panetta (this old bastard is 73 years old) and Hillbilly Hill getting up on their moral hindlegs over this video. So the boys are celebrating their victory by pissing on their fresh kill of towel heads--the enemy--the enemy that to our kill-or-be-killed-trained American troopers all look the same. "I can't tell one towel head from another so I shoot them all." The puzzle: it doesn't seem to matter to the upperclassy Leon and lowerclassy Hillary that those Marines have just riddled with bullets several rather innocent-looking Afghanistan citizens. That these soldiers have just blasted away the lives of these people isn't as shocking to Brainwashed Leon and Coldhearted Hillary as these poor young boys-will-be-boys pissing on the dead enemy. Pissing on the dead is a perfectly legitimate way for a soldier to celebrate a great victory.

Here's a scene from the video that shocked Leon and Hillbilly Hillary.
Now, you see, as an ex-serviceman (U.S. 4th Army out of Fort Sam Houston), the above scene doesn't bother me in the least. I mean, come on, boys will be boys--all male animals mark their conquests by pissing on them--like they mark their territory by pissing around it. The news media can't say "pissing" so they put it as our boys are "urinating" on these poor slobs--hey, I just noticed, none of the dead are wearing towels on their heads.

By the way, in case you're into pissing games, here's a good one for you:

www.gameace.net/game/2158/Golden_Shower/

Talk About Your Pissers
Mitt Romney is a fucked up human being. You see, old Mitt was born with a silver-Mormon-spoon in his mouth. He's never had to work a fucking day in his god-damn privileged life. Newtie Gingrich is pig-jowled fop whose mentality is based on his own pompous evaluation of his own worth, a worth based on his warm and serious ass-kissing ability on the big fat-cat asses of the moneygrubbers in our Military Industrial Complex--Newtie's Gawjah district is home to Lockheed-Martin-Marietta (for the town in Gawjah where it's located)--and those lethal-weapon pirates (they once only made airplanes) have paved old Newtie's way with the finest of fool's gold--he thinks he's worth a million when in fact, he ain't worth a plug nickel. Rick Perry--hey, old Rick said hell yes if he'd a been one of those brave American volunteer-paid-salaried soldiers who had just killed three or four of those scumbag towel heads, you damn tootin' he'd'a dropped his fatigues and pissed away merrily singing, "God Bless America," as he did. John Huntsman--oh no, a Mormon bites the dust. [Why are We the People so enamored with Utah politicians? Think about it.] Yep, old John, though in New Hampshire (where about 30 diehard Repugnants voted in that stupid primary) you'd a thought he was a serious challenger to Mitt the Mormon. Now John's simply a Mormon has-been.

Idiots. Glowing idiots. Dumb-as-holy-hell idiots. White racists all of them, that I'll guarantee you. The only Black people Mitt associates with are those who are cleaning the shit cans in his several magnificent overbuilt mansions; or the Blacks he uses as his security force--as a Presidential candidate, doesn't the Mitt Man get Secret Service protection--costing We the People millions of bucks to provide?

But always remember this: 50% of Americans who vote vote for these freaks. George W. Bush didn't have to steal but about 50,000 votes to win over those two Democratic fops, Al "the Bore" Gore (a phony environmentalist, by the way; under Bill Clinton and Al's vice-presidency, environmental regulations were thrown to the wind along with regulations on banks and financial institutions--along with our habeas corpus rights--plus they gave us the first Patriot Act) and John "I Married the Ketchup Queen" Kerry (a former District Attorney), a phony anti-War protester.

Right now it looks like Mitt the Mormon is going to be the papier-mache candidate for the tiresome Repugnicans--the party of the Capitalist right--

AND ALL OUR PROBLEMS STEM FROM THE SYSTEM: CAPITALISM! AND CAPITALISM DEPENDS ON CHEAP LABOR--SLAVERY BEING THE CHEAPEST FORM OF LABOR AND THE LABOR THAT MADE THIS COUNTRY GREAT--for White people, that is.

thenonpartisangrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

Existing in New York City: In the Thickets of Time

2012-01-10T05:22:00.000-08:00

Foto by tgw, New York City 2012
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Time
Artie Shaw said it is all about time. Time is measurement. We love to measure. We love to measure ourselves. We reward height over littleness. Gargantuans over Tom Thumbs. Breadth over narrowness.

I have a natural sense of time. I hate clocks. BUT, ironically, I have in my apartment 6 regular-type clocks; 6 computers each with its own clock; 25 wristwatches, all 50 years old or older, all still running in their unique ways. Out of all of those timepieces--37 of them--each one gives forth its own version of "what time it is"--and in the older watches, the stemwinders, I'm in total control of the time within them. Look at the intricate work of the old clockmakers and watchmakers and wonder at how dedicated we are to the shackles of clocked time.

A bioclock? I don't know if there is such a thing; yet, my body does run on a clocked time of its own: its clock its heart. Heartbeats, 72 thumps a minute, are the counting off of one's own time--the heart is nothing more than a timepiece (a metronome in music)--measuring the consistency of our daily existence. A drop in your heartbeat and you're dragging ass. And you can drag ass so consistently that soon you'll need to be shipped to a local emergency room to try and have your timepiece put back into the correct sync, those 72-beats-per-minute required for E-Z living.

Which brings me to beats. The beats. The beats determine the swing, the bop, the rock, the roll, the sway--the take-it-easy way--controlling even how we stride...how we should walk...even controlling how fast we can run or controlling the precise steps of our trickiest dance moves. Watch how timed our greatest musicians and athletes are when they perform. They're on the clock. They are timed and measured within time frames. Their performances are clocked. Precision and endurance are the pieces of time that count the most in both heartbeat, measured time, height, length, breath, taping on out into continuums of precision...of running scales...of reading. Yes, there is a precise and measured way to read. Think of a great pianist reading a musical score for the first time.
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Since my time is my time now--in the now...in the now uncriticized...in the NOW, W-O-N spelt backwards...in the now, the wow, the rhythm-ing, the rhyming, the rendering, the now, the now unfolding as a rose in spring unfolds, a tragic unfolding since the further it opens and shows its alluring beauty, its attraction, the further projected it is towards its own demise. Does time end at death? Who the hell knows. Who the hell cares. If there's no tomorrow, I won't know it. Tomorrow is an unpredictable state since it's not in the now. My time is NOW my own time. But then, to be beat and honest about it, my time has always been my time, especially this time in the now. Do these words stay in the NOW as long as they can be read? I'm drifting now. Drifting is an old-fashioned way of clocking time. Drifting is cool if you can afford it. "Drifting and drifting, like a ship out on the sea." As I unravel this piece, I'm beat again, I'm measuring myself by my own experiences in time, in time past and in time present, there is no time future--oh what a time I've had.

Suddenly I feel, improvisational as I am, like reading Allen Ginsberg's greatest work of art...his masterpiece Howl...hide the kids as you read along with me--as you read, remember this is dedicated to Carl Solomon--even if you have no idea who Carl Solomon is, still remember it is dedicated to him as you read it:

HOWL

I

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,

dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,

angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,

who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz,

who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated,

who passed through universities with radiant eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war,

who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull,

who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burning their money in wastebaskets and listening to the Terror through the wall,

who got busted in their pubic beards returning through Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York,

who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their torsos night after night

with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, alcohol and cock and endless balls,

incomparable blind streets of shuddering cloud and lightning in the mind leaping towards poles of Canada & Paterson, illuminating all the motionless world of Time between,

Peyote solidities of halls, backyard green tree cemetery dawns, wine drunkenness over the rooftops, storefront boroughs of teahead joyride neon blinking traffic light, sun and moon and tree vibrations in the roaring winter dusks of Brooklyn, ashcan rantings and kind king light of mind,

who chained themselves to subways for the endless ride from Battery to holy Bronx on benzedrine until the noise of wheels and children brought them down shuddering mouth-wracked and battered bleak of brain all drained of brilliance in the drear light of Zoo,

who sank all night in submarine light of Bickford's floated out and sat through the stale beer afternoon in desolate Fugazzi's, listening to the crack of doom on the hydrogen jukebox,

who talked continuously seventy hours from park to pad to bar to Bellevue to museum to the Brooklyn Bridge,

a lost batallion of platonic conversationalists jumping down the stoops off fire escapes off windowsills off Empire State out of the moon

yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts and memories and anecdotes and eyeball kicks and shocks of hospitals and jails and wars,

whole intellects disgorged in total recall for seven days and nights with brilliant eyes, meat for the Synagogue cast on the pavement,

who vanished into nowhere Zen New Jersey leaving a trail of ambiguous picture postcards of Atlantic City Hall,

suffering Eastern sweats and Tangerian bone-grindings and migraines of China under junk-withdrawal in Newark's bleak furnished room,

who wandered around and around at midnight in the railway yard wondering where to go, and went, leaving no broken hearts,

who lit cigarettes in boxcars boxcars boxcars racketing through snow toward lonesome farms in grandfather night,

who studied Plotinus Poe St John of the Cross telepathy and bop kabbalah because the universe instinctively vibrated at their feet in Kansas,

who loned it through the streets of Idaho seeking visionary indian angels who were visionary indian angels,

who thought they were only mad when Baltimore gleamed in supernatural ecstasy,

who jumped in limousines with the Chinaman of Oklahoma on the impulse of winter midnight streetlight smalltown rain,

who lounged hungry and lonesome through Houston seeking jazz or sex or soup, and followed the brilliant Spaniard to converse about America and Eternity, a hopeless task, and so took ship to Africa,

who disappeared into the volcanoes of Mexico leaving nothing behind but the shadow of dungarees and the larva and ash of poetry scattered in fireplace Chicago,

who reappeared on the West Coast investigating the FBI in beards and shorts with big pacifist eyes sexy in their dark skin passing out incomprehensible leaflets,

who burned cigarette holes in their arms protesting the narcotic tobacco haze of Capitalism, who distributed Supercommunist pamphlets in Union Square weeping and undressing while the sirens of Los Alamos wailed them down, and wailed down Wall, and the Staten Island ferry also wailed,

who broke down crying in white gymnasiums naked and trembling before the machinery of other skeletons,

who bit detectives in the neck and shrieked with delight in policecars for committing no crime but their own wild cooking pederasty and intoxication,

who howled on their knees in the subway and were dragged off the roof waving genitals and manuscripts,

who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists, and screamed with joy,

who blew and were blown by those human seraphim, the sailors, caresses of Atlantic and Caribbean love,

who balled in the morning in the evenings in rosegardens and the grass of public parks and cemeteries scattering their semen freely to whomever come who may,

who hiccuped endlessly trying to giggle but wound up with a sob behind a partition in a Turkish Bath when the blond & naked angel came to pierce them with a sword,

who lost their loveboys to the three old shrews of fate the one eyed shrew of the heterosexual dollar the one eyed shrew that winks out of the womb and the one eyed shrew that does nothing but sit on her ass and snip the intellectual golden threads of the craftsman's loom,

who copulated ecstatic and insatiate and fell off the bed, and continued along the floor and down the hall and ended fainting on the wall with a vision of ultimate cunt and come eluding the last gyzym of consciousness,

who sweetened the snatches of a million girls trembling in the sunset, and were red eyed in the morning but were prepared to sweeten the snatch of the sunrise, flashing buttocks under barns and naked in the lake,

who went out whoring through Colorado in myriad stolen night-cars, N.C., secret hero of these poems, cocksman and Adonis of Denver—joy to the memory of his innumerable lays of girls in empty lots & diner backyards, moviehouses' rickety rows, on mountaintops in caves or with gaunt waitresses in familiar roadside lonely petticoat upliftings & especially secret gas-station solipsisms of johns, & hometown alleys too,

who faded out in vast sordid movies, were shifted in dreams, woke on a sudden Manhattan, and picked themselves up out of basements hungover with heartless Tokay and horrors of Third Avenue iron dreams & stumbled to unemployment offices,

who walked all night with their shoes full of blood on the snowbank docks waiting for a door in the East River to open full of steamheat and opium,

who created great suicidal dramas on the appartment cliff-banks of the Hudson under the wartime blue floodlight of the moon & their heads shall be crowned with laurel in oblivion,

who ate the lamb stew of the imagination or digested the crab at the muddy bottom of the rivers of the Bowery,

who wept at the romance of the streets with their pushcarts full of onions and bad music,

who sat in boxes breathing in the darkness under the bridge, and rose up to build harpsichords in their lofts, who coughed on the sixth floor of Harlem crowned with flame under the tubercular sky surrounded by orange crates of theology,

who scribbled all night rocking and rolling over lofty incantations which in the yellow morning were stanzas of gibberish,

who cooked rotten animals lung heart feet tail borsht & tortillas dreaming of the pure vegetable kingdom,

who plunged themselves under meat trucks looking for an egg,

who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot for an Eternity outside of Time, & alarm clocks fell on their heads every day for the next decade,

who cut their wrists three times successively unsuccessfully, gave up and were forced to open antique stores where they thought they were growing old and cried,

who were burned alive in their innocent flannel suits on Madison Avenue amid blasts of leaden verse & the tanked-up clatter of the iron regiments of fashion & the nitroglycerine shrieks of the fairies of advertising & the mustard gas of sinister intelligent editors, or were run down by the drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality,

who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge this actually happened and walked away unknown and forgotten into the ghostly daze of Chinatown soup alleyways & firetrucks, not even one free beer,

who sang out of their windows in despair, fell out of the subway window, jumped in the filthy Passaic, leaped on negroes, cried all over the street, danced on broken wineglasses barefoot smashed phonograph records of nostalgic European 1930s German jazz finished the whiskey and threw up groaning into the bloody toilet, moans in their ears and the blast of colossal steamwhistles,

who barreled down the highways of the past journeying to each other's hotrod-Golgotha jail-solitude watch Birmingham jazz incarnation,

who drove crosscountry seventytwo hours to find out if I had a vision or you had a vision or he had a vision to find out Eternity,

who journeyed to Denver, who died in Denver, who came back to Denver & waited in vain, who watched over Denver & brooded & loned in Denver and finally went away to find out the Time, & now Denver is lonesome for her heroes,

who fell on their knees in hopeless cathedrals praying for each other's salvation and light and breasts, until the soul illuminated its hair for a second,

who crashed through their minds in jail waiting for impossible criminals with golden heads and the charm of reality in their hearts who sang sweet blues to Alcatraz,

who retired to Mexico to cultivate a habit, or Rocky Mount to tender Buddha or Tangiers to boys or Southern Pacific to the black locomotive or Harvard to Narcissus to Woodlawn to the daisychain or grave,

who demanded sanity trials accusing the radio of hypnotism & were left with their insanity & their hands & a hung jury,

who threw potato salad at CCNY lecturerson Dadaism and subsequently presented themselves on the granite steps of the madhouse with the shaven heads and harlequin speech of suicide, demanding instantaneous lobotomy,

and who were given instead the concrete void of insulin Metrazol electricity hydrotherapy psychotherapy occupational therapy pingpong & amnesia,

who in humorless protest overturned only one symbolic pingpong table, resting briefly in catatonia,

returning years later truly bald except for a wig of blood, and tears and fingers, to the visible madman doom of the wards of the madtowns of the East,

Pilgrim State's Rockland's and Greystone's foetid halls, bickering with the echoes of the soul, rocking and rolling in the midnight solitude-bench dolmen-realms of love, dream of life a nightmare, bodies turned to stone as heavy as the moon,

with mother finally *****, and the last fantastic book flung out of the tenement window, and the last door closed at 4 A.M. and the last telephone slammed at the wall in reply and the last furnished room emptied down to the last piece of mental furniture, a yellow paper rose twisted on a wire hanger on the closet, and even that imaginary, nothing but a hopeful little bit of hallucination—

ah, Carl, while you are not safe I am not safe, and now you're really in the total animal soup of time—

and who therefore ran through the icy streets obsessed with a sudden flash of the alchemy of the use of the ellipse the catalog the meter & the vibrating plane,

who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space through images juxtaposed, and trapped the archangel of the soulbetween 2 visual images and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun and dash of consciousness together jumping with sensation of Pater Omnipotens Aeterna Deus

to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human prose and stand before you speechless and intelligent and shaking with shame, rejected yet confessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm of thought in his naked and endless head,

the madman bum and angel beat in Time, unknown, yet putting down here what might be left to say in time come after death,

and rose incarnate in the ghostly clothes of jazz in the goldhorn shadow of the band and blew the suffering of America's naked mind for love into an eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani saxophone cry that shivered the cities down to the last radio

with the absolute heart of the poem butchered out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand years.

II

What sphinx of cement and aluminium bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?

Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks!

Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy judger of men!

Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgement! Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stunned governments!

Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb!

Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows! Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long streets like endless Jehovas! Moloch whose factories dream and choke in the fog! Moloch whose smokestacks and antennae crown the cities!

Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks! Moloch whose poverty is the specter of genius! Moloch whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen! Moloch whose name is the Mind!

Moloch in whom I sit lonely! Moloch in whom I dream angels! Crazy in Moloch! Cocksucker in Moloch! Lacklove and manless in Moloch!

Moloch who entered my soul early! Moloch in whom I am a consciousness without a body! Moloch who frightened me out of my natural ecstasy! Moloch whom I abandon! Wake up in Moloch! Light streaming out of the sky!

Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisable suburbs! skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic industries! spectral nations! invincible madhouses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs!

They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven! Pavements, trees, radios, tons! lifting the city to Heaven which exists and is everywhere about us!

Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstacies! gone down the American river!

Dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions! the whole boatload of sensitive bullshit!

Breakthroughs! over the river! flips and crucifixions! gone down the flood! Highs! Epiphanies! Despairs! Ten years' animal screams and suicides! Minds! New loves! Mad generation! down on the rocks of Time!

Real holy laughter in the river! They saw it all! the wild eyes! the holy yells! They bade farewell! They jumped off the roof! to solitude! waving! carrying flowers! Down to the river! into the street!

III

Carl Solomon! I'm with you in Rockland

where you're madder than I am

I'm with you in Rockland

where you must feel strange

I'm with you in Rockland

where you imitate the shade of my mother

I'm with you in Rockland

where you've murdered your twelve secretaries

I'm with you in Rockland

where you laugh at this invisible humour

I'm with you in Rockland

where we are great writers on the same dreadful typewriter

I'm with you in Rockland

where your condition has become serious and is reported on the radio

I'm with you in Rockland

where the faculties of the skull no longer admit the worms of the senses

I'm with you in Rockland

where you drink the tea of the breasts of the spinsters of Utica

I'm with you in Rockland

where you pun on the bodies of your nurses the harpies of the Bronx

I'm with you in Rockland

where you scream in a straightjacket that you're losing the game of actual pingpong of the abyss

I'm with you in Rockland

where you bang on the catatonic piano the soul is innocent and immortal it should never die ungodly in an armed madhouse

I'm with you in Rockland

where fifty more shocks will never return your soul to its body again from its pilgrimage to a cross in the void

I'm with you in Rockland

where you accuse your doctors of insanity and plot the Hebrew socialist revolution against the fascist national Golgotha

I'm with you in Rockland

where you will split the heavens of Long Island and resurrect your living human Jesus from the superhuman tomb

I'm with you in Rockland

where there are twentyfive thousand mad comrades all together singing the final stanzas of the Internationale

I'm with you in Rockland

where we hug and kiss the United States under our bedsheets the United States that coughs all night and won't let us sleep

I'm with you in Rockland

where we wake up electrified out of the coma by our own souls' airplanes roaring over the roof they've come to drop angelic bombs the hospital illuminates itself imaginary walls collapse O skinny legions run outside O starry-spangled shock of mercy the eternal war is here O victory forget your underwear we're free

I'm with you in Rockland

in my dreams you walk dripping from a sea-journey on the highway across America in tears to the door of my cottage in the Western night

Thanks to Weed's site for my source for this HOWL:

www.wussu.com/poems/agh.htm

thegrowlingwolfintheNOW
for The Daily Growler

A Little Taste of American Art:

From "Albums That Never Were," by American album cover designer, Gary Burden.

Existing in the Police State of New York City: All Whites Are Racists

2012-01-09T20:15:00.000-08:00

Foto by tgw, New York City 2012
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Pat Buchanan Fired By MSNBC For Telling the Truth

Like Felix the Cat, I gotta trick bag. You know about trick bags, don't you? My trick bag is filled with ironies. Like Felix's tricks in his trick bag saved him from rather humilating situations--even when Felix was in serious trouble there was a jolly whimsy about his reactions thus making the tricks that Felix turned that trick bag into rather whimsical themselves.

Let's see what's in my trick bag today. [The Wolf Man has opened a large black valise into which he is now delving.] What's this? It's pig-jowled, a little sloppy looking, graying rudely, red eyed...ugh, ugh, WOW, look, it's Pat Buchanan. A real idiot. Look at the idiot. First of all he's Irish Catholic from Missouri.

And I heard this morning (Monday, Jan. 9) from Amy Goodman (sometimes Amy is so boring in her monaural same-ole-same-ole radio-delivery style), that MSNBC had fired the "controversial" Buchanan due to listener complaints about Good Ole Pat's recently favoring White Nationalist publications and radio shows. Then the truth came out when Pat's latest book came out, a book in which Good Ole Pat finally let the polecat out of his trick bag. This nation is going to Holy Hell in a heathen handbasket (Pat's Irish Catholic Hell (God, I hope they have 18-year-old Jameson's down there)), because We the White People of the United States (the USA's Chosen People) are losing our foothold on the necks of nonWhites--and Pat's list of "nonWhites" includes the traditional American Indian (the Red Man)(ironically, the American Indian gave White people one of their favorite addictions: tobacco); all Latinos but especially Messkins (Pat's way of pronouncing Mexicans); most dark-skinned Europeans--especially Eye-talian Catholics--Guineas, as Good Ole Pat would call them); Greeks (Pat hates Greeks, I guarantee you); Arabs (Pat pronounces it A-rabbs); Asians (all Asians, no exceptions)(Pat called them "Gooks" at one time); Indians (Pat calls them Woggies); Pakistanis (yes, Pat calls them Packies); Black Americans and Africans (Pat hates all Black people, even Clarence Thomas, Pappy Bush's token Kneegrow clown). I think I've covered enough of Pat's ethnic hatreds to show you that hell yes, Pat Buchanan is a White racist fool who believes our two greatest presidents EVER were Ronald "McDonald" Reagan and Slick Willie Clinton. This man is a pig-jowed idiot with Irish Catholic ideals--why do you think Good Ole Pat loves Rick Santorum, the man-on-dog candidate, so much? Remember, Rick's the fool who put his wife's aborted fetus in a jar and kept it as a reminder to his kids to never wear rubbers when screwing--rubbers are a defiance to God's Holy Social Darwinism and as a result, Big Daddy in the Sky will strike the fetus DEAD on ARRIVAL.

Our political ship of fools is being captained by reversed Ahabs who are trying to save the Great White Way of Life (a whale of a life if your White).

I've written for the past 6 years that most White people in this country are racists. Very few White people in this country have any social contact with Blacks except in a work situation--the higher up you go in the White Culture the more-than-likely relationship Whites have with Blacks is in a boss (Massuh) and servant (Step-in-Fetchit) situation--or boss and security guard situation--or boss and shit job situation. The higher up you go in most corporations the less Blacks you see, except, like I said, in servant positions. Warren Buffett? Yes, he's a racist. Little Billy Gates? Yes, he's a racist. Pat Buchanan? Mitt Romney? Rick Santorum? Even Ron Paul? Yes, these men are all White racists. I guarantee you they are.

From Jillian Rayfield's post at tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/:
Quotes from Good Ole Pat's new book, Suicide of a Superpower:

When the faith dies, the culture dies, the civilization dies, the people die. That is the progression. And as the faith that gave birth to the West is dying in the West, peoples of European descent from the steppes of Russia to the coast of California have begun to die out, as the Third World treks north to claim the estate. The last decade provided corroborating if not conclusive proof that we are in the Indian summer of our civilization.

The "Third World" to Pat? You figure it out.

Obama’s White House thus enlisted in the long and successful campaign to expel Christianity from the public square, diminish its presence in our public life, and reduce its role to that of just another religion.

This is White Christian (Irish Catholic) racism. Remember, to the likes of Pat Buchanan, President Obama is not an American citizen and he favors the Muslim religion over Christianity. In other words, President Obama is a heretic and should be burned at the stake...or at least lynched.

From a chapter called "The End of White America," Good Ole Pat let's it all hang out:

The white population will begin to shrink and, should present birth rates persist, slowly disappear. Hispanics already comprise 42 percent of New Mexico’s population, 37 percent of California’s, 38 percent of Texas’s, and over half the population of Arizona under the age of twenty. ……. Mexico is moving north. Ethnically, linguistically, and culturally, the verdict of 1848 is being overturned. Will this Mexican nation within a nation advance the goals of the Constitution—to “insure domestic tranquility” and “make us a more perfect union”? Or has our passivity in the face of this invasion imperiled our union?

Leo Carillo as "Pancho" (from "Cisco Kid" television show)

So there you go, folks, it's those damn Messkins we White folks really have to worry about. You see, the Mexicans are Catholic, but they are way-out further out than Irish Catholics. Why those stupid mestizos believe the Virgin Mary IS a Guadalupean Indian woman when Pat Buchanan knows the Virgin Mary IS Irish. "How 'bout a wee nip of the Holy Water, Mary, me gal?"

So much for Pat Buchanan--except that I now see MSNBC is saying White Brother Pat is not fired but suspended. The White chiefs at MSNBC are racists, too, but, hey, who cares?

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

A Little Taste of American Art:

Speedy Gonzales (1953), Warner Bros. creation.

Frito Bandito (1967), Tex Avery, artist.

Existing in New York City: Trying to Learn How to Be a Good Robot

2012-01-06T04:45:00.000-08:00

Foto by tgw, New York City 2012
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As We Are Existing
Did you ever stop and consider the millions and millions of scientists around the world who are working on the mad side of science every hour of every day somewhere? Like this nanotechnology. We may as well face it: millions of scientists truly believe in this nanotechnology. www.foresight.org is an amazing site for me, though, OK, I'll admit it, I don't understand a hell of a whole lot of what I read on it, but it's still fascinating for me to try and read it and understand it because it's stuff some of my brainier fellow human-monkey beings are full-fledged and hell-or-high-water-like into and believing in in a "foresight" manner. Check out their Nanodot Weblog: www.foresight.org/nanodot/.

Like here's a fascinating kind of scary little item I found at the Nanodot Weblog, dig this:

Humanoid robot for military showcases advances in robotics

Posted by Jim Lewis on November 7th, 2011

Among the emerging technologies expected to transform society over the coming decades [my emphasis], robotics at all scales is interesting because it provides graphic evidence that technology is getting better at mimicking increasingly complex movement and behavior [again, my emphasis]. Last month we noted the impressive progress achieved by Boston Dynamics’ AlphaDog project to develop a robot “pack animal” for the US military [My comment (interjection): Can you see the principles of a drone/robotic army and air force evolving here? Turn war into a continuous scientific sport?] Apparently there has been equally impressive progress in developing a humanoid robot capable of faithfully mimicking human movements to test protective suits for use by the military, and ultimately, to replace humans in a variety of arduous and dangerous tasks [my emphasis]. This month IEEE Spectrum gave us this update: “Stunning Video of PETMAN Humanoid Robot From Boston Dynamics“, by Erico Guizzo:

… The humanoid, which will certainly be compared to the Terminator Series 800 model, can perform various movements and maintain its balance much like a real person.

Boston Dynamics is building PETMAN, short for Protection Ensemble Test Mannequin, for the U.S. Army, which plans to use the robot to test chemical suits and other protective gear used by troops. It has to be capable of moving just like a soldier — walking, running, bending, reaching, army crawling — to test the suit’s durability in a full range of motion. …

I also asked Raibert if they could eventually use PETMAN or PETMAN-related technologies in other projects. In other words, are we going to see PETMAN used in applications other than the chemical suit tests?

“You bet,” he says. “There are all sorts of things robots like PETMAN could be used for. Any place that has been designed for human access, mobility, or manipulation skills. Places like the Fukushima reactors could be accessed by PETMAN-like robots (or AlphaDogs), without requiring any human exposure to hazardous materials. Perhaps firefighting inside of buildings or facilities designed for human access, like on board ships designed for human crews.” …

After watching the video, Guizzo’s comparison to the Terminator Series 800 model doesn’t strike me as all that far-fetched. When they announce something that reminds us of the T-1000, I’ll know that advanced nanotechnology is imminent.

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The Wolf-Man Robot
After noticing that some state has authorized the poisoning of tens of thousands of blackbirds--because they are doing what comes natural to them, finding a food and water source along their natural migration paths through our Midwest farming regions--and then after reading the above horn-tooting post on the Nanodot Weblog about our humanitarian military investing millions and millions in researching robotic warfare toys, I reflected on how we human-monkeys hate anything natural. One of our mistriggered notions we've had in our rather stupid minds considering the death-defying nature of human-monkey progress is that we must ELIMINATE Nature from this planet. These nanotech scientists--and like I said, there are millions of them out there--in nanoengineering, nanomedicine, nanodesign, nanoimaging, nanomanagement, etc.--seem to recognize this trait and are trying to compensate for it by creating these robots to mimick us, to become the future slaves for us, to do all our shit work for us, to take chances for us, to even take bullets for us. The new soldier's first issue will not be an AKA but will be a remote-control device that operates his robotic replacement on the battlefield.

This all stemming from us stupid creatures considering ourselves above nature in some big-pie-in-the-sky wonderland of eternal-life fantasy. I think of Heaven as a world full of crazies; Hell being where all the sane that walked among us go. Remember, the fictitional Jesus taught that scumbags of all kinds from child abusers on up to mob wackers and politicians who diddle young girls in their offices with illegal Cuban cigars can come to Heaven if they just "confess their sins" and then righteously follow old Jesus on up the tribulation trail [remember, Hitler was a Christian].

I'm just thinking how these millions of bright-ass scientists, mad or otherwise, are devising new principles (mechanical principles) of matter, of being, or corporeal existence, of spirit, of mind, of the future of our evolving into a totally mechanistic society--because, in case you didn't know it, scientists through mathematics and computer robotics have their own universal language and communications capabilities--life reduced down to a binary mathematical way of existence--Being and Nothingness--pure Existential existence.

Looking forward to Doomsday this year! ARE YOU READY?

thegrowlingroboticwolf
robotically for The Daily NanoGrowler

A Little Taste of New York City Art:

James Rizzi's New York City Heart--his native Brooklyn pulsating on the right; his downtown Manhattan world pumping it up on the left. R.I.P. Ratso.

Existing in the New York City Police State: They Are Dropping Dead All Around Me

2012-01-05T04:40:00.000-08:00

Foto by tgw, New York City 2012
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Death, the Inevitable Savior
I read the Wikipedia Death List every day. Usually I don't know most of those who are listed as dying on it--a lot of soccer players, football players, motocross motorcyclists, Latin American and Croatian actors, and old rock stars listed, but recently I've been seeing people die who were very contemporary in terms of my growing up, education, and learning process.

Like Helen Frankenthaler died a couple of days after X-mas (I can never refer to it as Christmas--I hate Christians--there, I've said it). Around 1970, I went over to Rutgers University in New Jersey and attended a Robert Motherwell show where I purchased a limited-edition print of his. My authentication cert said Robert himself was going to pull it and sign it while it was still damp. I paid $80 for the print. When they finally sent it to me, it had a fold drop-dead across its middle. I sold it a couple of years ago for $300. What's this got to do with Helen Frankenthaler? She was at that show at Rutgers. I met her. Plus, I'm not sure, but I reviewed an art exhibit held way back when at the U of Illinois in Champagne-Urbana and I'm almost sure she was exhibiting at that show.

When I met her at this Rutgers show, I knew her as Clement Greenberg's former mistress; I had no idea she was Robert Motherwell's wife. Both she and Robert were privileged little rich kids and were known in New York City cultural and social circuits as "the Golden Couple," a title which they constantly gave legend to by giving extravagant parties and such, though this best-and-brightest couple eventually corrupted itself into decadence and the marriage ended. Helen, used to Manhattan Upper East Side glamor and plenty of money, then married a stock broker who she lived with until his death a few years ago. She was a devotee of Hans Hoffmann and Jackson Pollock. Now she's R.I.P. at 83. Helen Frankenthaler, 83, American painter.

Helen Frankenthaler

And this week Ratso Rizzi died. I knew Ratso through a guy who had grown up with him in Brooklyn, my friend and next-door neighbor for 5 years, Matty Quick, the rock 'n roll drummer. Matty had a large collection of Ratso's 3D creations around his apartment, gifts from Ratso or things Matty grabbed off Ratso's studio floor. All of us at that time called him Ratso; his real name was James. 3D cutouts were his metier. I've been around Ratso a lot as a sideline participant especially during the 1970s days I wrote about in my on-line 33-chapter tome called One Spring Morning Off Spring Street, a piece of writing mainly devoted to my remembrance of rock journalist and would-be rock star, Lester Bangs, whose band, Birdland, was actually Matty Quick's band, the Rattlers--but I never really knew Ratso.

How parallel-line coincidental is it that our own thedailygrowlerwomantrumpetplayer's first big love affair was with Ratso! She could tell us things about him that might curl our toes--certainly, he must have curled the WTP's toes. Here's Ratso's Website for those of you who'd like to delight in his presence and art once more before he's lost to his own archives: jamesrizzi.com/.

Also among the recent dying is Don Mueller. I remember hearing on the radio as a very young kid that famous game between the New York Giants and the Brooklyn Dodgers. It happened October 3, 1951. This game happened after the Dodgers went into the end of August 13 games up on the Giants only to be caught and tied by the Giants by the end of September resulting in this play-off game, the winner going on to the World Series. Mueller was in that game and he was vital in it, too, except the game turned out to be tragic for Big Don.

From Don's bio: "With New York trailing the Brooklyn Dodgers, 4–1, in the ninth inning, Mueller singled Alvin Dark to third base. With one out, Whitey Lockman doubled to score Dark, but Mueller broke his ankle sliding into third. He was carried from the field, and missed both Bobby Thomson's game-winning home run that followed Lockman's hit and the 1951 World Series."

Don Mueller was what was called a heavy hitter. He consistently hit in the .300s; during the 1952 season, Mueller came in second to teammate Willie Mays for the National League batting title.

Others who died that I recall, though they weren't that important in my life were Ralph McDonald, the percussionist--he used to live around the corner from me in Mount Vernon, New York; and jazz drummer Clem deRosa.

Death Quotes:
From The Daily Growler Hall of Fame Actor Errol Flynn:
"Any man who has $10,000 left when he dies is a failure."

Somerset Maugham: "Death is a very dull, dreary affair, and my advice to you is to have nothing whatsoever to do with it." From one of Maugham's books, I learned how if you are drowning to go ahead and get it over with--just lay back and open your mouth--you'll be drowned, according to Maugham, in less that 3 minutes.

Edward Munch: "From my rotting body, flowers shall grow and I am in them and that is eternity." My ex-wife, the Choctaw-Mexican-Welsh beauty, had her ashes put in a hole and a tree planted in them. I would love having a huge tree growing out of my ashes. (Yes, I'm a cremationist.)

J. Robert Oppenheimer [one of the creators of the Atom Bomb]: "I am become death, the destroyer of worlds."

Willa Cather [the best quote, I think]: "I shall not die of a cold. I shall die of having lived."

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

The Art of Ronald Searle

Once Again Existing in New York City: I'm Back on Broadway

2012-01-03T23:31:00.000-08:00

Foto by tgw, New York City 2012
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Say Goodbye to: Ratso Rizzi: I knew Ratso and his work from the time I lived on Greenwich and Spring streets and hung out at the Ear Inn: James Rizzi, 61, American pop artist.

Say Goodbye to: Sam Rivers, an innovative saxophonist from the New York City Rivbee movement (Sam Rivers and bassist Cecil McBee).
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The Clouds Have Briefly Opened Up For Me
The scenario continues to be controlled by outside direction. That's why the attempt to get the drama staged is a bumpy road. A rude road. A crude road.

I fell into a ditch--a ditch of Verizon's digging. They said they came Friday at 7 pm. I was home pissed off--I thought I heard a strange sound sometimes during Saturday morning as I was preparing to train up to the Bronx where I ended up having a true whale of a time New Year's Eve, New Year's Day, and the Day After New Year's Day.

New Year's Eve we ate black-eyed peas (it was called "Hoppin' John" by the cook) and drank a lot of good cheer--champagne, yes, a good one, too. Then we all spoiled ourselves and watched Dick Clark's Rockin' New Year's Eve from Times Square and, lawsy, there was the man himself--hey, so what he had a stroke and almost kicked the bucket back a few years--hey, so what, now ABC trots him out all gussied up in a suit...and, Wow, old Dick's almost able to almost talk again. [Note: Pre-stroke Dick once gave out some good investment advice: saying we should all buy into Mexican telephone stock. Think now: Senor Slim, the Mexican telephone king who is now the world's richest man.]

New Year's Day my entourage and I drove over to Marble Hill for a big Cuban dinner feast thrown by our own thedailygrowlerhousepianist's beautiful Cuban wife and cooked by her 86-year-old mother. A splendid affair. Tons of good beer and a bottle of Jameson's, a bottle of Ron Rico, white wine. Pre-dinner cheeses and humus dishes and Greek olives and crackers and wafers and such. The dinner courses opened with a pepper salad followed by the main course: beef hearts stuffed with ham and cooked in the oven with new potatoes, onions, and garlic--it has a Cuban name but I can't recall it. Along with the beef came the black beans and rice, and, Jesus, those beans were like mucho perfecto--arriba! I scarfed down what seemed like buckets of black beans they were so good. Desert was flan-Cuban-style, vanilla pudding (it reminded me of banana pudding without the banana slices and the vanilla wafers) with sticks of cinnamon in it. Packing beans away two nights in a row left me a bit fouled up gastrointestinal-wise, but I survived the food in good shape and in good spirits and without much deviating from my norm.

Sunday evening we watched the New York Giants kick the Dallas Cowboys's asses back to Big D--better luck next year, boys--and the Giants won the NFL East Conference moving on to play Atlanta this Sunday. I'm am not a Giants fan--in fact, I'm not really a football fan, but I do like playoffs and following the New York teams if they're good enough to make it like the Giants did but the Jets didn't.

How 'bout Rick Sanatorium for President?
Are people in Iowa WHITE! I know Omaha used to have a lot of Black folks. But obviously only Whites vote for Republican candidates in our White-majority hog and corn state. Rick Sanatorium as President? You talk about total disaster. These corn-fed Iowans (genetically engineered corn, I might add) must really like shooting themselves in the foot. Jesus, Rick Sanatorium? The dog-fucker! He once compared Gays making love to a man humping a dog dog style. I assume old Rick has never fucked his wife doggy style. I wonder if he's ever experimented with putting his Sword of God into that other hole back there?

I mean come on, folks, the idiot Mormon only won the idiot Iowa Caucus by 8 votes over the idiot from Pennsylvania. Both of 'em blitzed ole Libertarian idiot Ron Paul...dropped him down to third. And they blitzed poor old sweet-as-pie idiot Michelle Bachmann, the Oral Roberts School of Law grad. And Oral Roberts Law School is now owned and campused by that great American Pat Robertson, that pig-jowled deceiver, about as evil a man as you can find if you believe in good and evil. I don't myself. Unless you view it as the ancient Chinese did--there being two sides to everything their philosophy--even in their cooking--sweet and sour cooking. All of us have sweet and sour natures. Rick Sanatorium is probably a highly regarded moral man; yet, like I said, I'll bet you in bed with his wife or mistress or even if it's with the family dog, he's as evil as he comes.

Don't be surprised, folks, if the Teabaggers teabag Obama. Obama just simply refuses to counter these true idiots. I mean, Rick Sanatorium said the reason the factories left small Iowa towns--like Hamburg, he mentioned--was because of the industries being unable to compete with the Chinese, for example, because of how the American worker demands higher and higher wages that he then expects the government to subsidize--intimating as the Republicans have been doing since J.D. Rockefeller's time that the American worker is basically lazy as hell. Of course, all Ruddy Rick is following is the Neo-Con principle of driving the dollar down, thereby driving wages down, principles that do what all of this driving down results in: CHEAP LABOR. And that's been it from the git go when it comes to the Neo-Con Economics, which is Milton Friedman Economics, an Economics that theoretically works or doesn't work, though always the final results say it does work, whether it does or not, as old Milton put it. Idiots all rule us. Men who like Reagan are of very limited true education and are extremely dull of wit.

The dumbest statement Rick Sanatorium made this past week was that he defied a crowd of Iowa idiots to show him anyone in the USA who had died because they didn't have health care. Brilliant Rick, you power hungry asshole--you jerk--you hater of people who aren't of your warped sense of right and wrong. You hate Blacks, Latinos, Muslims, Atheists, Anarchists, Intellectuals, Poor People (including your own White Trash brothers and sisters who are hillbilly slovenly and glassy-eyed over expecting the government to bail them out--yeah, like the government bails out the West Virginia coal miners, the lazy bastards!).

I got cussed out good by a person over the weekend when I mentioned I saw no sense in voting since I didn't think it mattered who was president--whatever they say they're going to do they renege on and go on doing what Washington, District of Corruption, politicians do best, cover their own and their family's asses and the asses of their mistresses--savoring the good life and fuck the rest of the world! That's a true American Ayn Rand Ron Paul Fountainhead Libertarian way of thinking. G.W. Bush preached it as pulling yourself up by your bootstraps. (Let me remind you that that creepy bastard, G.W. Bush, is the one who wrecked our current economy and sent us spiraling into debt; yet no one blames anything on this little spoiled brat creep. Obama still refuses to go back and correct the mistakes of our past by arresting this little prick, his Unka Dick, a true dick, and his old Pappy, G.W.H. Bush, who I've always said is behind all this shit--starting back when he gave his 1000 Points of Light speech in which he introduced his New World Order). So Obama still has his corporate-law head in the nonexistent future. I was told I was totally and precariously wrong and that whether I liked Obama or not, we all had better vote for him or we'll get the likes of Rick Sanatorium. Jesus, it's such a Loony Tune situation, like Porky Pig, I'm signing off with a Be-ah-be-ah-be-ah, that's all, folks. The farce rolls on.

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler (back online for only the gods know how long).

Existing in the Bronx

2012-01-02T05:10:00.000-08:00

Today I'm up in the Bronx. Great New Year's weekend topped off by a splendid Cuban dinner hosted by the wife of our own thedailygrowlerhousepianist, the meal prepared by her Cubana mother, 86 years old. Now it is early morn on the 2nd of the new year and I'm up using this Gateway laptop a friend has loaned me. Cruising back down to my Manhattan digs today and then who knows when we'll be on-line again--except we can go down to our favorite Irish pub and use their WiFi or like we said yesterday work out of the public library-though working out of the library puts us exposed to CIA and FBI profiling searches.

Tomorrow our second round battle with Verizon begins.

It is so quite up here I'm going a bit batty. This month-long Verizon crap is driving me a bit more batty and my nonconforming nature is being forced to conform by this global bullshit and this corporations-can-do-no-wrong only their customers can do wrong bullshit,

I love the Internet. What a wonderful tool it is at bringing the world so right into your lap so to speak. Yet, these big global corporations are surely going to ruin the Internet and turn it into a Wal-Mart-like on-line shopping mall.

The rich continue to prosper. I wonder if a phony asshole like Donald Trump ever has any trouble getting online? Or Billionaire Mayor Mikey Bloomberg picks up his cell and there's no dial tone; you think he doesn't get immediate results?

In the meantime, truly, folks, the presidential candidates, including President Obama, are lower intellectually than the characters in a Loony Tunes cartoon. Newtie Gingrich and his sloppy pig jowls dropping off his prissy face show that he's a well pampered asshole with his millions and millions of payoff bucks from the Military Industrial Complex and now his Virginia connections since he's moved from Gawjah to Virginia. Gingrich is an idiot. Case closed. Mitt Romney is a stupid Mormon. Case closed. Dr. Paul Ryan is a mean-asshole Libertarian; yet at least he is positively against further war involvements--like the soon coming nuking of Iran--yes, we will go to war with Iran--using our unmanned drone air force as our vicious intruders--as we go about invading and occupying this country that has a huge oil reserve, the whole thing behind all our invasion-and-occupation schemes--even our invasion and attempted occupation of Afghanistan is truly about oil domination--and that pipeline we need to pump our Central Asian oil buys down to oilless Europe. Karzai, as you should know, was an oil-company executive before we made him our hand-puppet back during the Bush-Condo-Leasing Rice era. Karsai and Condo-Leasing being old oil buddies from way back.

Libya? Oil. Iran? Oil. Not because they hate the Jews. All Arab countries hate the Jews and Israel so it has nothing to do with Iran's threat to Israel. Hell, we own Israel don't forget. We also own their military and they'll do about anything we tell them to do. Remember, Israel could not survive with out our economic and military help.

The world is a chaotic place at the present. That's wonderful for guys like me who thrive on contrarian principles--an Internet sociopath.

Life will go on in 2012. The rich, I guarantee will get richer. You and me? Yes, we will get poorer. Economics will be proven to be a pseudoscience mastered by dipsticks like Larry Summers, that asshole. Robert Rubin will get around 20 million in bonus bucks from his current financial-schemer connections. Another asshole who got us into this Clinton-approved mess we are currently in. These birds will go on living the good life. Mitt Romney win or lose will go on being rich and well taken care of by the financial industry crooks. Dr. Paul Ryan? Don't worry about this bastard ever having to worry over being foreclosed upon or losing his job or having his phone and Internet service disrupted. Barack Obama? Win or lose, he's now set for life--life as a new millionaire. If he doesn't remain in politics, his old buddies will get him a high seat in some corporate law firm or major financial institution or bank. His buddy Timmy Geithner will take care of his old buddy.

It's all so beneath me. Fuck politics. I'm holing up in my cave with Occam's Razor.

Okay, so I may cut my throat with that razor.

thegrowlingwolf
for the sometimes and sometimes not The Daily Growler

The Daily Growler Shut Down by Verizon

2011-12-19T02:18:00.000-08:00

Foto by tgw, New York City 2011
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DUE TO THE TOTAL UNRELIABILITY OF VERIZON HIGH-SPEED INTERNET SERVICE, A LOUSY SERVICE, THE DAILY GROWLER WILL BE DOWN UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE. WE LOST OUR INTERNET CONNECTION 15 DAYS AGO AND VERIZON HAS YET TO RESTORE THE SERVICE. WARNING: WHATEVER YOU DO, DO NOT USE VERIZON FOR YOUR INTERNET CONNECTING. I'M TOLD IT'S ALL RUN OUT OF INDIA.
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To just start writing. As I start writing I think of William Saroyan writing. Sitting in a chair in the window of his house watching the people in the neighborhood. Spotting on one. Focusing. Then beginning to write about that person. Characterizing what he thought that person was like alive. Thinking of William Saroyan saying in the introduction to that book of short stories that a writer had to write at the appointed time they'd set to write. Sit down in front of the typewriter, put a sheet of paper in it, and, BOOM, write. Even, Saroyan said, if all you wrote was gibberish. You know like: "I flew into a charming rage this morning as I gulp the winds from the primary bulb that firmed in terra firma for a foreign number of calliope strains...." or even, "Brrrrr. Guzimond peedo impdkline=de90 dillicuss t8i marge eetlk...." At least you are writing. Writing being the demon that keeps you living. Living being our most valuable source of pleasure. Pleasure the only reason we're living. Pleasure that will take our minds off the fact that being alive means we're on death row. The planet's death row. That's why we human beings are so angry at Mother Nature--the jungle from which we sprang--though, just think, since the originals of us sprang from the sea, there's a little saltiness in all of our instincts.

And all writers are writing about and of themselves. All writers, especially those of great success, are egomaniacal to the point if they peter out they'd rather be dead than living.

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

ONLY THE GODS KNOW WHEN WE WILL BE BACK ON LINE AGAIN.
Back in late November, we signed up for Verizon DSL high-speed Internet service. From Day 1 the service started falling apart. The first thing that happened was our phone was shut off and we were told there was a cable break in our neighborhood and that the break would be fixed on December 5, almost two weeks away. Turned out we didn't have phone service for 8 days--and then it came back on. Everything was fine then and we were high-flying in high gear for a week or so when one fine morning, ZAP, the phone line went dead and the Internet connection service went dead, too. Since then, for two weeks now, we have had neither phone or Internet connection. This time Verizon says the problem is the line into our building, which they said a service person would be coming to our building on December 30th. This person never showed so as we enter this new year, the only way we'll be able to get on line is to go to our favorite Irish Pub and use their WiFi or to the public library. In the meantime, we are referring this matter to the NY Public Utilities Commission--and also we are currently searching for a replacement connection service. Rumor has it that this DSL service is run out of India. Enough said.

thestaff
for The Daily Growler--until further notice.

HAPPY NEW YEAR anyway!

The Daily Growler Visits the Monkey House

2011-12-16T04:37:00.001-08:00

Foto by tgw, New York City 2011
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Say Goodbye to: Bob Brookmeyer. I first heard of Bob Brookmeyer through his work with Jimmy Guiffre, a Dallas cat and North Texas graduate who was one of my early-times jazz mentors. Jimmy hired Bobby I believe after Ralph Pena his bass player quit his working band ("The Train and the River")--I first HEARD Bob on a Storyville LP called Morning Fun I bought directly from Storyville's offices in Boston (George Wein started Storyville Records) featuring Bob Brookmeyer and Zoot Sims, with Hank Jones on piano, Bill Crow (he's enjoyed the Growler at least once) on bass, and Papa Jo Jones on drums. Bob after awhile was consistently high up on the Down Beat Miscellaneous Instrument division of their popularity polls because he didn't play a trombone, he played a valve trombone--that put him in the company of the great Don Elliott and his Mellophone and a newcomer out of Indianapolis named Roland Kirk whose miscellaneous instruments were the Manzello and Stritch. Bobby Brookmeyer has left the coil at 81. I'm right now listening to he and Zoot playing Basie's "The King" from that Storyville LP (reissued in the 90s on a Black Lion CD out of Germany). Bob Brookmeyer, 81, American jazz valve trombonist.
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Making Monkeys Out of Monkeys
I was thinking, what if nobody showed up to vote in a presidential election? Wouldn't that be great! President Obama gets 0 votes. Newtie Gingrich gets 0 votes. Or what if say only 30 people in the whole USA showed up to vote and they wrote in Adolph Hitler's name, would Hitler be declared president? By the Supreme(ly dumb) Court? How would that work?

I mean, you talk about monkeys acting like monkeys. I'm sorry, folks, but I can't vote for any of these fools that are being trotted out as wholesome honest men with holier-than-thou visions, including the better-at-being-G.W. Bush-than-G.W. Bush-was President Obama. This man's a two-faced dog (my apologies to Cecil the Dog-faced Boy III of Lake Flaccid fame). They talk about a Mormon-idiot like Mitt Romney and a pig-jowled idiot like Newtie Gingrich flip-flopping like scared-shitless just-hooked fishes (calm down, boys, maybe Jesus Christ'll serve you up at the next Sermon-on-the-Mount get-together), but what about President Obama's flip-flopping? Check out his promises in 2008. Check out his recent flip-flopping on vetoing this insulting 600-billion-dollar 2012 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA)... Come on, the guy is a lying dog, same as all the rest of them.

Hey, the War in Iraq is over! (Yes, F. Scott, I am laughing at my own joke.) Osama bin Laudin is dead. The jobless rate is down! (Yes, F. Scott, I am laughing at my own joke.) The economy is recovering! The banks have been successfully bailed out and back to their old pirating tactics of ruining world economies again, Praise this God who keeps blessing this country. And Goldman-Sachs, the true rulers of the world, will be doling out some of the biggest bonuses in Goldman-Sachs crooked history that dates back all the way to the Civil War. Goldman-Sachs criminals, like Robert Rubin, will be garnering multimillions in bonuses in just a few weeks. Goldman-Sachs pretty much rules the USA right now, too, with its dick-boy Timmy Guethner as head of the Treasury and another of their dick-boys as head of the Federal Reservs, which in secret has doled out upwards of 26 trillion--did you get that figure?--26 TRILLION dollars in secret funds to both US crooked banks and foreign crooked banks.

Goldman-Sachs rules the world. The current phony heads of Greece and Italy--bankrupt countries--are Goldman-Sachs Europe executives. There is currently, ironically in terms of from whence came Goldman-Sachs, a Nazi-fication of Europe going on in terms of Germany now powerful again and holding a new reign over the current falling apart of the European Union--Great Britain--totally bankrupt if truth be known--is threatening to pull out of the Union. Why all this trouble? It all started when these countries fell into line with both of G.W. Bush's phony invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq. And I still say our invasion and attempted occupation of Afghanistan was just as phony as the invasion and occupation of Iraq, which our current Commander in Chief is now going about the country tooting his tin horn in declaring that war as being over (yeah sure)--he is in full campaign mode now--praising our BRAVE TROOPS--those bold brave volunteers--those hearty American boys who it has been shown through secret documents found in an Iraq garbage can this week went about murdering Iraqi men, women, and children as a kind of sport--military records showing one bunch of wild-spreeing brave troopers stopping cars at check points and if the cars had children in them these jerks shot the children in the heads and then let the cars go on through. Wow, come on, Commander in Chief Bush...er-ah, sorry, I mean Commander in Chief Obama, give those brave troops medals of honor! (Yes, F. Scott, I am laughing at my own joke!)

Like Gary Null, I can't watch any of these idiot debates or speeches they are so beneath me in terms of several phases, one being in terms of culture and nobility, that if I do watch such bullshit I tend to watch it the same way we kids used to go out to the Fair Park Zoo Monkey House and mock our monkey relatives to the point some of the more sensible ones had learned how to shoot the bird at us and others to turn their rear ends toward us and then whip around and throw a handful of monkey feces at us. Newtie "the Family Man" Gingrich, Mitt "the Mormon" Romney, Ron "the Super Libertarian" Paul, Rick "Dog Fucker" Sanitorium, Michelle "Chimpy" BachMANN, and yes even Barack Hussein Obama, to me are nothing but political monkeys putting on a monkey house show for the stupidest monkeys in all the zoos, We the People Monkeys of the USA.

The 99% vs. the 1%--that's bullshit. It's more like the 50% vs. the 50%. Remember, G.W. Bush, the worst president ever up until Obama came into the White Man's Monkey House, got almost 50% of the vote in his two fraudulent runs for president. Remember, Rick Perry wasn't chosen by God to be one of the worst governors ever of Texas (the state with a history of horrible and crooked governors) but was elected overwhelmingly by the good citizens of Texas. Michelle Bachmann didn't fuck her way into Congress, her Minnesota constituents evidently love her and her idiotic reasoning enough to trust her as their representative. The Repugnicans didn't take over the House of Representatives by not getting the majority of votes in their bailiwicks. Anthony Weiner, the Brooklyn Democratic jack-off meister, a very "Liberal" dude, was replaced by his constituents with a rightwing Repubnican. Scott Walker, the Governor of Wisconsin, didn't just fly into office on angel wings. Hell no, a majority of Wisconsin cheese-heads put him in office. In most of the United States states, Liberals, Commies, al-Queda, Hippies, Atheists, Anarchists, Progressives are all seen negatively. Why do you think Dumbocrats try so hard not to be seen as Liberals? Why do you think the Democratic Party advised Obama to steer clear of Roosevelt New Deal tactics? Even here in New York City where we are now absolutely living in a Corporate-Police state, a majority of voters keep electing this billionaire bastard originally from Boston mayor creep who is literally rezoning this city to please his billionaire hedge-fund and private equity buddies--this little Napoleonic-complex "girly" man who, I swear, is going to declare himself Mayor of New York City for Life next time it comes time for him to step aside and give us a chance to try a new mayor for awhile, though, more than likely, we'll elect one of the same old kind we've always elected, and I give you: Jimmy Walker, William O'Dwyer, John Lindsay, Abe Beame, Ed Crotch (I can't call him Koch), David Dinkins, Rudolph "Mussolini" Giuliani, and now Mayor Mikey Bloomberg. What a stupid bunch of men. New York State since I moved here in 1969 as a wide-eyed true believer in New York City as being the culture center of the USA (boy was I surprised) has been constantly broke--and the City has been broke--and taxes and rents and everything have gone up to where New York State is the most expensive state in the Union.

So, what if nobody voted in the upcoming Presidential election? What would these little phony elitists do?

And currently our Congress is voting overwhelmingly (a unified Congress) to take away several more of our Constitutional rights through this new 600-billion-dollar the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) bill that is giving our Commander in Chief the right to declare the USA a combat zone (in the Holy War on Terror) and thereby use for the first time in our history the US military as his enforcement organization (he's already using unmanned drones in this country) to go about arresting and shipping off to Guantanamo (didn't President Obama promise to shut down Guantanamo?) where they can be locked up and the key thrown away any US citizen our President (and his SS goons) decides is a terrorist sympathizer (al-Queda and the Taliban are the underlined devils in terms of key terrorist organizations), enemy combatant, or anti-administration protester.

So why vote to reelect so two-faced a man as Barack Obama? And certainly nobody in his or her RIGHT mind would vote for Newtie Gingrich (check out his pig jowls). Let me do a little soothsaying and say, I'll bet you, Barack Obama is a puppet--I'll bet you a hill of fresh doughnuts, he does whatever these corporate puppetmeisters who have their hands up his ass tell him to do. Obama is just another George W. Bush. Who's really running this country? Why, Goldman-Sachs, that's who.

So there. I'm not voting for these fools. Shit, I'd rather go underground--like the best of the anarchical hippies and Yippies did. Hey, Angela Davis, you're still around, how come you're not very active anymore? Tom Hayden, where are you, dude?

Orwell.

thegrowlingwolf
for The Anarchy Issue of The Daily Growler

The Daily Growler Jots & Tittles Man Returns

2011-12-12T06:44:00.000-08:00

From the Algae-Crammed Waters of Lake Flaccid, New York, Comes The Daily Growler Jots & Tittles Man: barabbas munn-dayne
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And a hearty Winter Solstice to you one and all. This is the time of year you live off the profits you made from your abundant fall harvest. Fearing invasion and occupation of my cabin, I went into town yesterday to Aunt Milly's Tea Room and Backroom Gun Dealership and looked at pistols. I've got my shotgun still, but I don't know, I feel like I ought to have a pistol. I know...I know, I've been watching too much teevee here lately--and in the shows I've been watching everybody has a damn pistol or firearm of some sort, men and women, cops and criminals and terrorists, no matter. Also, I'm being affected by what's predicted coming our way. Like, according to some folks [and recent Growler posts], OK, so they're atheistic mad scientists and gurus and such, but anyway they're saying that as soon as next year we humans are gonna get hit by a herd-like galloping of solar flares (plasma) as the Sun, our true God, is at its maximum belly full in terms of its heat being turned up to maximum high, expanding its belly until it lets out a mighty burp--which propels out these flying tongues of flaming plasma and this time the storms created by this plasma blowing out into the universe are aimed directly at the good ole USA. Afterwards, these predictors say, there will be a Holy Disorderly Order of Chaos where we'll all be fighting over survival issues like food, water, safety, or vulnerability. I'd feel better in such a circumstance if I had an equalizer.

I know, conspiracy folks, fanatics, doomsday clowns...the end of human life as we know it coming--if not via solar-flare-plasma storms then by the Sumerian-predicted ancient planet's remains hitting us dead center--bull's-eye head on--and thus, as those Sumerian astronomers predicted, the human race will be exterminated.

I remember back when President and Alzheimer's Poster Boy Raygun Reagan, our grade B actor president, the Great Communicator, had his shaky finger on that red telephone in the oval office. The red telephone with the red button on it--isn't that the way it worked?--Ronnie hits that red button and Armageddon begins--and back then I imagined old Ronnie Reagan waking up in the middle of the night in a bit of an Alzheimer fog and imagining the Soviets had fired a missile at the White House--"Mommy, wake up, help me down to the Ovaltine office so I can get on that red phone and warn the Air Force, like I did in...Mommy, what was that movie where I was an Air Force hero?...er-ah...." "Oh, Ronnie, relax, take a shot of that Aricept, you've had another nightmare...what was it this time, that I was bangin' Frank Sinatra behind your back?" And in those days I was thinking, "Yes, Mr. President, you fool, go ahead, push the red button, end human life for ever"--and I wanted to be wide-eyed and bushy tailed when that big red glow appeared in the night sky marking the nuclear end to mankind. I want to witness the end of my kind. A world left to cockroaches.

Aunt Milly showed me the couple of handguns she had left. "They been hittin' me hard in the handgun department. I got some choice assault rifles over here if you'd rather." "No, Aunt Milly, I was thinking more like a Glock." "Tell you what I can do. I gotta contact in the New York City Military Police Department who obtains, that's the word he uses for it, me Glocks at way under wholesale." "What, are they hot?" "Naw, nothin' illegal. They're confiscated off Black guys, raids on Black hip-hop clubs, you know, those boys in blue have ways of gettin' 'em." "What do you get for a Glock?" "Tell ya, what, Barabbas, my boy, since I knew your mom and pop, tell ya what I can do, give me four-hundred smackers on this barrelhead here and I'll have you a Glock by next week. You'll want one around this time of year. Lotta truckers come through here lookin' for folks to kill as a hobby."

There was no arguing with Aunt Milly. That's why I didn't tell her there's no way she could have known my mother and father since not only have they never been up here but they've been dead 30 years now.

The passage of time is amazing to me. How slow time passes when we're young. How ironic is it that time passes faster the older we get--the closer we get to the end of our time.

My father and mother would not have approved of my getting a weapon. My dad always requoted over and over the cliche "if you own a pistol, one day you're gonna have to use it." Of course it's when you don't own one that you need one the most.

As I left Aunt Milly's through the tea room, she hollered after me, "If you need some trainin' on handlin' a Glock, I'm startin' a new firearms class next Wednesday night out at the Big Chief's Shootin' Range. Your Glock ought to be in by then so come on out. We have a ball shootin' our firearms out there, plus there's cold beer and a stick of salami and some brewer's bread from Uncle Don Shines's bakery over by Mount Vanhoevenberg."

As I was leaving the tea room, I noticed a sign on Aunt Milly's bulletin board. It said, "Remember, Dr. Donald Smedley's Pansies Are the Finest Pansies in These Parts for You Pansy Lovers."

I putted on back out to the lake and my cabin. Got cold as Hades over night up here. Temperature was 22 on my back porch early this morning. Winter up here is not bad. The lake doesn't smell as bad as it does in the summer--oh, it still smells, but the cold air keeps the smell low-level, like swamp gas stays hovering just above its watery surface. Getting lonely up here; I miss a woman. There, I've confessed on line. I haven't had a woman in my arms since Cecil the Dog Faced Boy III's sister visited up here from Florida...Jeez, speaking of time flying by...2 years ago now--and still, no one's heard a word from Cecil. His house is still boarded up--though some pranksters did paint swastikas all over the boards--why swastikas, nobody up here knows. Unless it's the Native Americans doin' it. Cecil wasn't Jewish, though, hell, maybe he was. I never even considered that.
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Jots & Tittles

--It's hard to believe that Newtie Gingrich has suddenly rearisen back to the top of the GOP presidential ladder. Newt "the Family Man" Gingrich, a total phony wholly devoted to representing the Military Industrial Complex, Newtie's home district back in Gawjah being home to Martin-Marietta and Lockheed...or have they merged yet?...anyway, Newtie gets his millions of back-room payoffs every year from those big parasitical defense contractors who couldn't exist without We the People of the USA (the true 99%) surrendering one-quarter of our earnings (without ever seeing it) every year to the US government via the IRS out of which Congress just recently voted 600 billion to the Department of Defense. I mean can you imagine what 600 billion dollars looks like? And what it would buy in terms of getting us out of debt or putting those of us out of work back into some kind of wage-earning position, even if it's digging ditches or shoveling shit. Six hundred billion is ten times more billions than Little Billy Gates is worth or Old Good Ole Boy Warren Buffett is worth; why that's 5 times more than Gates and Buffett's combined billions. And you talk about a draft-dodging coward of a John McCain type; and, yes, like McCain, Newtie's a philanderer, a crook, a purveyor of fabulous reasoning (Palestinians are an invented people); yet, he is now being seriously discussed as a serious candidate on the commercial-pap teevee politico shows--and I'm sure Newtie was the center of conversation on all the Sunday morning politico (right-wing) shows.

--Obama showed up at the Army-Navy football game Saturday--those two second-rate college football teams playing 60 minutes of high-school football while the President did his photo op at midfield with Good Ole Joe, Joe Biden, just back from a junket to Iraq, tagging along, smiling, waving, everything hunkie-dory in their "we hit a gold-mine" lives. And then our compassionate president and second-term presidential candidate praised our fighting men and women for their brave victories against world terrorism--and I'm thinking, but wait a minute, Mister President, you mean you consider the invasions and occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan successes? How are our troops heroes? They were totally and feebly unsuccessful at stopping 20-plus drunk-the-night-before Saudi-Arabians wielding box-cutters as weapons from attacking us within our borders on September 11, 2001 and blowing down both World Trade Center architectural-tacky towers. Where were these American heroes that day? Obama may as well give the Medal of Honor to Commander in Chief George W. Bush who has to be a hero if our troopers are heroes.

--Did you ever wonder how many people die in automobile accidents every year in the USA? Here's the figures for 2007, from the Census Bureau:

Table 1067. Motor Vehicle Accidents—Number and Deaths: 2007
Motor vehicle accidents 10.6 Million
Deaths within 30 days:
Passenger cars . . . . . . . . . . . . 16,500
Light trucks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12,400
Motorcycle riders . . . . . . . . . . . 5,200
Pedestrians. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4,700

Notice: That's "Deaths within 30 days," which means those figures are how many folks died in car accidents per month in 2007. Which means around 430,000 people in the USA died in automobile accidents in 2007. Do you know how many people die from drug overdoses in this country per year? I recall years ago in Harper's Magazine's list of ironies they used to run, they showed a statistic that showed only 5 people had died from a cocaine overdose one year; yet that same year we spent like 60 billion dollars on the War on Drugs--always headed up, by the way, by an ex-military high-ranking goon. Ex-generals, by the way, make out a bit of alright when it comes to military retirement pay, pensions, quarters pay, health care, plus more than likely they'll get a multi-million-a-year job with a big Military Industrial Complex contractor or they'll land a job with a lobbying firm representing the Military Industrial Complex.

---US cops are being trained in Israel. Why are We the People of the USA so in awe of Israel? OK, I know it's not politically correct to say anything negative about the Jews in general which includes Israel, Zionism, Israel's having a nuclear weapon arsenal, Israel's now being the longest foreign occupier of a sovereign nation in history--Palestine, which they've occupied now for 63 years. And, yes, I read where New York City Police Chief Ray Kelly has been to Israel more than 20 times to study their police and military methods of continuing to occupy Palestine and laying siege to the Gaza Strip--especially inviting one of the most brutal Israel policemen ever, a dude named Dichter, to New York City to give Mayor Mike Bloomberg's 56,000-man ARMY terrorist training--a dude whose spies in Gaza told him that a Palestinian rebel was sleeping in an apartment building--what should they do? Dichter said, blow the place to smithereens. They replied, but, sir, it's a big apartment building, hundreds of families live there, children.... Dichter said, blow it away, so we kill a few Palestinian dogs along with this terrorist bastard...blow that motherfucker down. So the Israeli Army blew the building down--yes, Praise Yahweh (Allah), they killed the Palestinian rebel (how dare he mean terror toward the kindly Jewish people), but they also killed 8 Palestinian children, 30 some-odd adults, and left 150 people injured and homeless and desperate. Israel's cops and military are more Naht--zee...BUT, oh no, you can't say that can you?

--Sergei Khrushchev... yes, that's right, that old Soviet Khrushchev relation, his son, Sergei. Bet you didn't know that Sergei was or still is a Professor at Brown University on the Providence Plantation.

--On a recent PBS "Secrets of the Dead" episode on the Battle for Stalingrad during World War II--deeply impressive in terms of the horror of WAR. I mean these people had graphic film footage of that battle from both the Nazi side and the Soviet side. Hitler wanted to make a big impression on Uncle Joe Stalin by demolishing the city named after him. But the Soviet forces proved more valiant and defiant than Hitler ever figured. I mean, folks, you watch the footage of this rather large city being bombed off the face of the earth by the German Luftwaffe--the Germans had a camera trained on Stalingrad from across the Volga and you can visually see its once gleaning white buildings being one by one bombed back to the Stone Age. Then the cameras inside the city show bodies every where, pieces of bodies, burnt bodies, smoldering bodies--of the thousands of people living in Stalingrad at the time, only a handful survived. Millions of troops and civilians died in this brutal winter fighting, in the snow and ice and storms--yet these human beings went on destroying and killing and maiming and the Germans captured so many Soviet soldiers they couldn't care for them and kept them in outdoor pens without water or food--and as the German soldiers starved and froze to death, so did those Soviet prisoners. I mean, I can't imagine such slaughter happening in this country; yet, I know damn good and well it surely could one day happen here. Watch that god-damn docudrama--in the PBS show "Secrets of the Dead" archives.

Stalingrad during the Battle of Stalingrad thanks to 3.bp.blogspot.com/

--Progress should spell an end to wars, but it doesn't. No, it ironically makes wars more deadly than before.

--Progesterone--is an anti-brain-aging supplement.

--Women farmers: Of the 3.5 million farmers still left in this country, a million of them are women. Women own 14% of some 2 million farms. Women farmers, per male prerogatives, are discriminated against when it comes to getting loans from the U.S. government.

--Ortega y Gasset wrote: "For life is at the start a chaos in which one is lost. The indivdual suspects this, but he is frightened at finding himself face to face with this terrible reality, and tries to cover it over with a curtain of fantasy, where everything is clear. It does not worry him that his 'ideas' are not true, he uses them as trenches for the defense of his existence, as scarecrows to frighten away reality."

--Why stop quoting him?: Ortega y Gasset wrote: "Blood, language, and common past are static principles, fatal, rigid, inert; they are prisons."

--Merrill-Lynch (and yes they did lynch a hell of a lot of us) is being allowed to transfer its derivatives debt onto the failing Bank of America--thereby pushing the debt onto We the People of the USA.

--Albert Pujols--shit yes he left the World Champion Cardinals for the worthless Los Angeles Angels (once the California Angels and Anaheim Angels) and a 5-year deal giving him $254 million bucks. Can you imagine, a baseball player being worth 254 million bucks--$77 million bucks a year? Good for Albert though. He is a great one--though how much you bet he'll DH in the American League--quit playing first base. Maybe I'm wrong. And, hell yes, I would have bailed on the Cardinals, too, though I can't imagine why if he's worth $254 million to the LA Angels, why wasn't he worth maybe $260 million to the Cardinals? Tony LaRussa's retiring, so maybe Albert knows something we don't know about the Cardinals's future. The administration of baseball is run by corporate-crook speculators who invest in these teams as a hobby. Most of them aren't aware of the beauty of the sport.

--In a Sestra commercial: a smiling mid-30-ish actress looks at the camera and says, "In a matter of minutes...(heavy breathing)...I WAS THERE." Where was Sestra when I was a Casanova? I remember being romantically involved with a young woman years ago on our first night to be so involved and as we got undressed and climbed into her bed, she said, "There's a tube of Prolong in the nightstand there if you're the kind of man who needs it." And thus my Heights went a Withering.

--A Verse from Elmer Snowedin (thedailygrowlerpoetlaureate):

Those Who Believe

Those who believe
will believe anything
and anything they'll believe
others follow and believe
and believers all believe
and what is believed
is unbelievable.

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A short but pleasurable return from me,

barabbusmunn-dayne,thethedailygrowlerjots&tittlesman
for The Blue Monday Edition of The Daily Growler

The End of Mankind Is Inevitable...SO WHAT?

2011-12-05T20:53:00.001-08:00

Foto by tgw, "The Sun Over Manhattan," New York City 2011
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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.

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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/

Existentially Existing in the Police State of New York City

2011-12-04T06:24:00.001-08:00

Foto by tgw, "Moon Over Manhattan," New York City 2011
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Say Goodbye to: Christa Wolf...a wolf person...a writer I have never read but investigated after a friend told me about her being one of her favorite writers and that she had just died in Berlin December 1st. In checking Christa's Wikipedia bio, I find her interesting enough to now read--she was from a German family living in Poland when after WWII her family was forced to move back to Germany, back into the Democratic Republic of Germany--East Germany, where she became a good Socialist though critical of the DRG leadership. It sounds like a fascinating life--and her book that sounds interesting to me is what's referred to simply as Christa "I". After German reunification, she continued as a Socialist until the 1990s, and she was highly criticized by (West) German critics for some of the roles she played while an East German. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christa_Wolf
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Losing Myself in My Books
Those who write books also read books. God, I hope so. Can you imagine a writer who's never read a book? The one "writer" who comes directly to mind is George W. Bush, our two-term faux never-honestly-elected president. This same faux president who followed the script of the Neo-Con Manifesto to a mindless tee, the mandate that not only called for a downgrading of the US dollar and a drive-to-the-bottom of the U.S. economy but also for a series of invasions and occupations that has led us into this "endless" War on Terror. George W. Bush wrote a book but I'll bet you a pile of organic horse manure he never even read his own book [Mr. Ed.: The Wolf Man forgot about Georgie Porgie reading My Pet Goat].

I am keeping an eye out on politics though I hate politics now and am doing my damnedest to ignore it (or them), though such ignorance could spell my future demise due to the latest anti-American action from Congress, a 600-billion-dollar Department of Defense spending bill that includes a tacked-on addendum that gives our president and future presidents the power to decide whether even U.S.A. citizens can be deemed enemy combatant terrorists--those especially who support al-Queda, a group I thought had been pretty much assassinated and drone-flight murdered out of existence, though our Congress is still quivering in its boots over this little bunch of spoiled-brat Islamic fanatics who if they ever did exist as a terrorist organization they did so under the constant eye of our CIA (G.W.H. "Pappy"Bush was once head of the CIA) and the Israeli Mossad and certainly whose organization and power and whereabouts were known among the Bush Family Circle since Osama's step-brother Prince Bandar bin Ladin (you don't hear much about Bandar anymore) was so close to this family circle they dubbed him Prince Bandar Bush. This new executive-order privilege given our presidents means that the CIA or the FBI or now the U.S. Army (for the first time in US history a "national" unit of the US Army is assigned combat duty in the USA) can go to the president and get a secret back-room meeting with him where they can give him a list of "untrustworthy" U.S. citizens who these spying institutions believe are heading internal "terrorist" organizations or believe they are aiding and abetting other-world terrorist organizations--especially the evilest of them all, our own made-up (by the CIA) al-Queda. Our president can then personally decide which of these so-called U.S.-citizen terrorists are enemy combatants (loyal to al-Queda (the overall catch-all terrorist group)) and by executive order can then order these U.S. citizens busted, shackled, taken into custody, and shipped immediately to Guantanamo prison (didn't Obama say he was going to close Guantanamo?) where they'll be held without charges, without documented evidence, without any hope at a trial, to certainly be waterboarded a couple'a hundred times, and then locked away for good, the key thrown away and the USA saved from an eventual terrorist attack (didn't Obama say upon closing Guantanamo all those poor bastards would get U.S. civilian trials in this country?). Tonto was right, "Paleface speak with forked tongue."

I mean the more I write about politics, the more ridiculous and vehement I get--these overrich White male and Michelle "I Went to Oral Roberts Holy Law School" Bachmann scumbags whose agendas are out to ruin our lives and, by golly, they're doing a damn good job of it, while they live and play the billionaire way, traveling at their leisure around the world, attending all kinds of secret conferences and meetings and forming foundations, like Slick Willie Clinton, that worthless piece of crap (I stole that defining phrase from Grandpa Al Lewis), now the wealthiest ever ex-President, said to now be worth over 200 million dollars. Slick Willie who along with G.W.H. "Pappy" Bush (Bill once announced that Pappy was his new best friend) got their greedy little backwards-thinking hands on several billions of dollars to aid the tsunami victims (remember that tsunami that wiped 200,000 human beings off the face of the planet?), aid that never really got to those people--aid that ended up in both of these ex-President's foundations or libraries or World Affairs Councils. And then Slick Willie teamed up under Obama's orders with G.W. "Spoiled Brat" Bush as U.S. overseers at rebuilding Haiti, this little pair of crooks given billions in aid money for Haiti, aid money that so far hasn't reached the Haitians, 300,000 of whom were wiped off the planet by that earthquake we no longer read or hear a damn thing about and another 100,000 or so killed by a cholera epidemic brought about by foreign soldiers (UN troops) patrolling their streets and byways and raping their young girls, etc. Hey, so these ex-President assholes rake off the tops of these "rescue" funds a few million bucks, justifying it as personal expenses, you know, for air travel, for office expenses, for assistants and cohorts and secretaries and mail-room boys. What a racket!

I look about my cluttered apartment. I'm looking at a large pile of books stacked under the table on which I keep my LAN-line phone (oh how the big communications companies want to dump LAN lines in favor of wireless and cell phones). I am suddenly (I know, I'm breaking one of Elmore Leonard's 10 Rules of Writing) thinking of W. Somerset Maugham. Just like that I'm recalling a book of his. What the hell one was it? I'm querying myself--The Writer's Notebook? No. And I am mentally drawn to this stack of books, which I start sorting through, blowing the surface dust and grime off them--and there SUDDENLY near the bottom of that stack is the book I was imagining was in that stack, Maugham's The Summing Up. (You see, subconsciously I knew I had that book and I knew it had in it what I was needing to read at this moment in my ever-changing life.)

I pulled the book out of the stack and cleaned it off as best I could. It's a 1956 seventh printing of the Mentor Book paperback edition. It was falling apart. Completely unbound but still intact though wobbly and delicately so. I got out my U.S. Postal Service-approved mailing tape and taped the book back together as best I could and immediately (SUDDENLY), even as I was finishing taping it together, began reading it. Aha! I cried after only one paragraph! This is exactly the book I was imagining--a book in which I can avoid politics... BUT NO! Suddenly in those early pages I read:

"The English are a political nation and I was often asked to houses where politics were the ruling interests. I could not discover in the eminent statesmen I met there any marked capacity. I concluded, perhaps rashly, that no great degree of intelligence was needed to rule a nation. Since then I have known in various countries a good many politicians who have gained high office. I have continued to be puzzled by what seemed to me the mediocrity of their minds. I have found them ill-informed upon the ordinary affairs of life and I have not often discovered in them either subtlety of intellect or liveliness of imagination. At one time I was inclined to think that they owed their illustrious position only to their gift of speech, for it must be next door to impossible to rise to power in a democratic community unless you can catch the ears of the public; and the gift of speech, as we know, is not often accompanied by the power of thought" [pp. 6-7, The Summing Up, Mentor Books, 7th printing, 1956].

The pen (or in my case, the computer keyboard) is mightier than the sword. Maugham was quite a writer. He's quite a story in himself. His father was a lawyer assigned to the British Embassy in Paris, where Somerset was born and raised and went to school and learned to read and write and do math and stuff in French and yet English was his natural language, the one he learned not in school but just in everyday communications among his English-speaking parents, their friends, and his siblings. Both his parents died when Somerset was very young, his mother dying in childbirth when he was ten and his father dying when he was 14.

Maugham was a natural-born writer. He was compelled to write even though he knew nothing about Elmore Leonard's 10 Rules of Writing or Robert Graves's Reader Over My Shoulder. He set about teaching himself how to write.

"When I began to write I did so as though it were the most natural thing in the world. I took to it as a duck takes to water. I have never quite got over my astonishment at being a writer: there seems no reason for my having become one except an irresistible inclination, and I do not see why such an inclination should have arisen in me" [p. 12, ibid].

I, too, began to write as though it were the most natural thing in the world. I, too, took to it as a duck takes to water [breaking another of Elmore Leonard's 10 Rules of Writing]. I, however, was luckier than Maugham in that I did have a grandmother who not only was a librarian but a published writer, too, one novel and two books of poetry. Though I came to writing on my own--my first inclination was to be a musician--I did have the inclination for writing passed on to me by my grandmother who I grew up with as she spent her final years with my family, and as such, I heard her typing every morning on her latest attempts at poetry or novels.

Maugham's best book in my opinion? The Razor's Edge.

In the avoidance of politics and politicians...though how can you? I mean the idiocy of Herman "The House Boy Stud" Cain; the inane babblings of a dipstick like Newtie Gingrich; the inane babblings of Michelle "the Fucked Virgin" Bachmann; the lying-dog spoutings of derivatives-trading billionaire Mitt "The Mormon" Romney--I mean, what a Ship of Fools--though, listen to this bit of cynicism, that Ship may be sailing right into that Potomac yacht club's docks in November of next year. Remember, We the People of the USA haven't been too bright when it comes to picking which of the rich White men we elect as our presidents. From Truman through Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Gerald "Who Can't Chew Gum and Walk at the Same Time" Ford (unelected President), Jimmy "Peanut Farmer-Rocket Scientist" Carter, Ronald "Star Wars" Reagan, G.W.H. "Pappy" Bush, Slick Willie "I Did Not Have Sex With That Woman" Clinton, G.W. "Duh" Bush, and now Barack Obama (he turned out to favor his White side more than his Black--and don't forget, he's half White).

Even with another chance to step up and take control of the world and switch it off the path to Chaos and put it on a track toward world unity, Obama will still wilt when he gets around tough White rich assholes, like the men he hires to be his consultants--like the CEO of General Electric--and that wasteful truly uncreative and stupid Supercommittee. As Somerset Maugham so distinctly put it: "Since then I have known in various countries a good many politicians who have gained high office. I have continued to be puzzled by what seemed to me the mediocrity of their minds. I have found them ill-informed upon the ordinary affairs of life and I have not often discovered in them either subtlety of intellect or liveliness of imagination."

Nothing changes...history repeats itself...Americans keep proving over and over how god-damn dumbass and stupid and riddled by fables and fairy tales we truly are.

thegrowlingwolf
for The Sunday Edition of The Daily Growler

Existing in the Police State of New York City as a Compulsive Writer

2011-11-28T23:21:00.000-08:00

Foto by tgw, "A Tabletop in NYC," New York City 2011
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The Burden of a Compulsive Writer

"Conformism, imitativeness, submission to rules and to teachings is the writer's capital crime. The work of a writer must be not only the reflection, but the larger reflection of his personality. The only excuse that a man has for his writing is to write about himself, to reveal to others the sort of world that is mirrored in his own glass; his only excuse is to be original; he must speak of things not yet spoken of in a form not yet formulated. He must create his own aesthetics - and we must admit as many aesthetics as there are original spirits and judge them for what they are, not for what they aren't." (Gourmont in his introduction to the first Book of Masks, 1896-98)

Remy de Gourmont is right. If you are a natural-born writer (I am), then his statement is what you are bound to--the only thing anybody really and truly knows is himself--you know who you are just like I know who I am. This knowledge coming from down deep. Like you are lying on Freud's couch [never lie on Freud's couch, by the way] and Herr Doktor is taking you back, back through the veils of your ego and superego and libido and right into the Holy of Holies that is your Id. Your being. And my being arrived on this earth at a place referred to as the "Lone Prairie." A flatter-than-flat space on this round earth. A place so flat you can't see any curve to it. You have to use your imagination to curve the horizon--to even curve the vertical. That's why focusing is so hard for us--like focusing on what we're doing or what we're going to do--we're focusing on a flat screen when we need to focus through the convexed eye onto a curved screen. [You don't think we live in an upside-down world--study how the convex lens works--the lens in your eye same as the lens in your camera. Upside-down reflections.]

I seriously know myself through a character I designed through years of experience, a character called thegrowlingwolf --a play on words reflecting the original me's hang up on the music of Chester Burnett whose stage name was The Howling Wolf. And we all first of all have to have a stage name. All writers are playwrights. We are writing "novel" plays is all we are doing.

As thegrowlingwolf, however, I am not really a real person. Explanation: see if you can think of The Daily Growler as a Work in Progress. A novel being written on a daily basis. A novel like Joyce's Ulysses. One day in the life of.... And there are many novels that are one day in the life of.... A newspaper is a journal. Bon jour. Diurnal reporting.

The Daily Growler was originally conceived by a schizophrenic whose two personalities really like each other--why, they are the best of friends: one the Perry White of The Growler (he sometimes appears as Austin Highchew under the guise of Managing Editor) and the other the main character, a man conceived when George W. Bush announced he was against stem-cell research because he could foresee mad scientists using this unGodly research method to create what Georgie Porgie called "human-animal hybrids." Now, come on, folks, since we are all a part of what we call the Animal Kingdom (I call us all Jungle Aborigines--Children of Nature), we are all animals, then the phrase "human-animal hybrids" is kind of charmingly nonsensical, though to a natural-born writer it's a chance to write under a perfect pseudonym or stage name: thegrowlingwolf, the human-animal-hybrid son of Karl and Maria Wolfe of a place in West Texas called "Who Knows Where" out on that Lone Prairie.

The only excuse that a man has for his writing is to write about himself, to reveal to others the sort of world that is mirrored in his own glass; his only excuse is to be original; he must speak of things not yet spoken of in a form not yet formulated.

I suppose all people compelled to write feel the same way about it as I do though I'll bet you they're not as purely improvisational as I and my alter-ego are.

Writing like music is based on time and measures and sequences and beats. When I write on this blog it's the same way I write when I write a song lyric. Something just pops in my head and I film it through my convex lens and focus on how I as a character in a novel experience will handle it--let it pan out, evolve and grow, or peter out, wobble, and eventually drop dead in the middle of a paragraph (a road).

Handle it real. You must write what is real. The woman who writes the Harry Potter books is a fairy talest and not a novelist. Children's books are pathetically badly written. Whether the Harry Potter woman is a sincere writer is not my argument--no, her sincerity I'm not putting down, what I'm putting down is when you write fabulous stuff you must in your own make up be lost in fantasy. Like devout Christians who totally believe in the fabulous tale of this Jewish reformer who history doesn't know at all but who Dark Ages writers personified in their unspooled tales in the form of this Jesus, a man of childish parables and Yahoo adventure stories.

I can't write fantasy. I haven't lived, no matter which side of the schizophrenic fence I'm on, a fantastic life. I've lived a full REAL life. I have survived as my genetic make up has let me survive. A part of my survival depends on my writing. Cathartic writing. Yes. But then all writing no matter who's compelled to write it is cathartic writing. That's why when the well runs dry, as Hemingway always suggested and then ended up doing himself, there's only one thing to do: shoot yourself. Dr. Hunter Thompson came to that conclusion, too. As a writer he found himself that one day sitting frozen over an empty page--not even able to write nonsense--and then he began to contemplate shooting his own failing brains--blowing them out of his head--the same as Hemingway did. And I suppose it's why Faulkner drank himself to death. I know it's why Dylan Thomas drank himself to death. Maybe it's why Ambrose Bierce disappeared in the Mexican desert--he was down covering the Mexican Revolution looking for a story, looking for a book to write. Jack Kerouac hit the skids when that one day in Florida he woke up to the realization that as a writer he was burnt out--I mean his last stories and books are embarrassments--that's why he ended like Elvis, with his head buried in a toilet bowl.

I'm blessed in that I have music to fall back on should I find one day I can no longer fill a blank space with words strung together in such a novel way they tell a real story of human-animal-hybrid evolution and development.

An improvisationalist writer has a tendency to ramble. To find it hard to control the brain as it writes on ahead in the direction his or her intuitions are showing it the way to go.

Elmore Leonard's 10 Rules of Writing
Back in the spring, our old pal, L Hat (www.languagehat.com) , sent us this Guardian article on Elmore Leonard's 2010 book entitled The 10 Rules of Writing.

www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/feb/24/elmore-leonard-rules-for-writers

Good advice from a fellow writer, though I've found most fellow writers don't often take fellow writers's advice seriously. Why do I need Elmore Leonard's rules; hell, I already know them, otherwise I'm not a writer...huh? And I admit, I am one of those writers that sometimes uses "suddenly" like an exclamation point! Scott Fitzgerald settled the case of exclamation points back in the 1930s when he said a writer using exclamation points was like a comedian laughing at his own jokes.

Writers are among us. I used to work for a vanity publisher. One year I edited over 300 manuscripts for this company. These were all, without exception, badly written; yet, you could tell from the writing that these people really thought what they were writing was literature. These people really believed they were writers and that their stories were so unique--as a real writer, I edited them lightly--left their worst in--I mean their worst writing was ironically their best writing.

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

A Little Taste of American Art

Approaching Juneau, by Eddie Applegate.
There is no reason for you to recognize Eddie's name--he's now a Southern California artist--but his fame came as an actor--especially as Patty Duke's boyfriend on "The Patty Duke Show"--back in the early 1960s--as television was evolving into the world of color.

Existing in the Police State of New York City: Billionaires's Heaven on Earth!

2011-11-26T05:17:00.001-08:00

Foto by tgw, "Shot Thru a Dirty Window," New York City 2011
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From Irish Turkey to the Mexican Barrio
I did eat turkey. At my fav Irish pub, just down the street from me. Hansy the chef loaded my plate with mashed potatoes and mushroom gravy; a pile of sweet potatoes to boot; a big heapin' of cranberry sauce; big slabs of turkey white meat piled over a sausage/sage stuffing covered in turkey gravy--I gobbled it down, washed it down with a trio of Redbridges!

I returned home as stuffed as the deadest Holy Day turkey and was rewarded by a two-hour-long Paquita la del Barrio (Franny from the Neighborhood) concert on Mexican television. I'm highly attracted to this woman's music. She sings rancheros--but she sings them with a dominant feminist attitude. In her songs she compares men to rats, to scumbags, and she liberally salts her performances with many salty put downs of men, though she admits in those same lyrics that women can't do without them--the thing being, women need men but they must learn to "capture" their men, "cage" them--a feminist-ruled zooful of would-be male lovers! Especially "whipping" men into shape so that they bring their women flowers and plenty of bling. What amazes me about her performances are her musical arrangements of the many tunes she sings during a performance. Rancheros (and Nortena and Bando, too) tunes are stuck to a simple structure based on the single-line rhythm of an electric bass and the broader but tightly strict modulations of an electric guitar, kept in bailando time by drums accented by bongo intrusions, all under a constantly Mexicanic squeeze-box accordion played with a swirling of quickly played keys and buttons via dazzling arpeggio runs--quixotic little responses to Paquita la del Barrio's perfectly executed verses--each line sent forcefully home by her precise pronunciation of the words. I mean, what's not to like about this true performer, this pure musical talent who has taken rancheros to controversial but definitely progressive heights in terms of making her style and performances so uniquely special.

Paquita del la Barrio ( Francisca Viveros Barradas from Veracruz)

And after two hours of Franny from the Neighborhood (her name is Francisca)--I admit that a part of my growing up in West Texas was influenced by the Mexican culture that surrounded me--and Texas was always part Mexican to me--and certainly La Musica influenced me--I grew up hearing it on the radio every day and every night--and though after I became a member of the jazz life I put it down, it is still with me in my memories and in my own musical make up. One of my own most famous (and that fame is fading daily) compositions is entitled "Rockin' on the Border," about a time I was in Nuevo Laredo during Labor Day--I was actually on a honeymoon with my Choctaw-Mexican-Welsh wife who looked so Mexican when we lived in Mexico City, men used to hit on her in Spanish--like, "Hey, senorita, ditch the gringo and come with me." And for a while in my life I was fascinated by Mexican women--my first crush on one coming in high school and her name was Trina and when I looked upon her the delight shone in my eyes.

thegrowlingwolf
for The "Saturday Evening" Daily Growler

Give a listen and watch to Paquita del la Barrio singing "Tres veces te engane" with a full mariachi orchestra:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=ru8Q60JXn54

Existing in the Police State of New York City: What the Hell Is There to Be Thankful For?

2011-11-24T04:16:00.000-08:00

Foto by tgw, New York City 2011
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Say Goodbye to:
Paul Motian (pronounced "Mo-tion")--I knew Paul from his years with Bill Evans (1957-64), and he's on the greatest of Bill's 50s and 60s albums with the great Scotty LaFaro on bass. First time I remember Paul was with the Jerry Wald Orchestra (Bill Evans is the pianist). He's also on a lot of the great experimental albums of the 50s, with George Russell, with the Don Elliott albums (with Bill on piano, and my friend Tadd Kotick's father, Teddy Kotick on bass). I lost track of Paul after Bill replaced him with Larry Bunker during Bill's time in California. He reappeared in my life in the Charlie Haden Liberation Orchestra. After the 60s, I'm sorry to say, my jazz appreciation had been boiled down to what I call "my taste" in jazz, losing track of Paul as he went on to perform right up until the time of his death. Paul, unfortunately, I remember, made an album on the music of Elton John--that was enough to turn me off of Paul (and I sadly admit that). Paul Motian, 80, American jazz drummer, myelodysplastic syndrome.

Russ Garcia. If you're asking, "Who?," just check this guy out. At 12 years of age he was arranging scores professional enough to have one of his scores performed by a symphony orchestra. He went on to work in Hollywood, wrote scores for movies like The Time Machine, etc. But also to be an important figure on the West Coast jazz scene. Russ worked with Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald--their Porgie & Bess album on Verve. His orchestra, too, made several jazz albums. Plus, Russ lived to be 95 years old. Russell Garcia, 95, American-born New Zealand composer. Russ was born in Oakland...why he's considered a New Zealand composer...ya got me.
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Thanks for What?
It is so funny to hear White people planning for Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving is a Christian holiday, one that justifies the European Whites who "landed" at Plymouth Rock--is the Plymouth Rock monumentalized in Plymouth, Mass., authentic? Probably not since everything about this White Man's USA is phony, from the get go. White invaders and occupiers only believe in equality among themselves--Whites have equal rights...others? Like, why would a Black family participate in Thanksgiving? I live in a building with Asians throughout--Chinese, Koreans, Vietnamese--I asked a Korean woman on the elevator the other day if she celebrated Thanksgiving and she replied that "they" had a similar holiday. I asked, but you guys take our Thanksgiving day off as a Holy Day, right? She replied that damn right they did. Funny how Christian Holy Days become just regular ole holidays to us--like Christmas--I've been using X-mas since I was a kid. The celebration of the birth of the fictional Jesus Christ (Joshua ben Joseph from a Nazareth slum) has become our biggest commercial (Atheistic) holiday of the year--how ironic is that? Muslims, Buddhists, Zoroastrians, et al., all take Christmas off; yet, are they given paid time off to celebrate their similar Holy Days?

Every year at Thanksgiving, the The Daily Growler joins with our own concentration-encamped aborigines in celebrating this time of year as a Day of Mourning! Aha! I like that, a national day of mourning, which White folks should get behind, too.

And look where these White men have taken us. What the hell do any of us in the USA have to be thankful for except for the fact we may still be alive and we may not be branded terrorist combatants and sent from this "Land of the Free" off to do some "pure" time in Guantanamo, a former US Naval training base now turned into a horror prison, ironically on the Island of Cuba in the Communist nation of Cuba under the dictatorial rule of the Castro brothers, with whom We the People of the USA have a 99-year lease deal with the Castro Brothers on Guantanamo--most of the civilian staff there are Cubans--it's income for the Cuban government--and back in the early days of Castro we castigated him for running his infamous prison on the Isle of Pines--why how dare this little Latin prick treat prisoners so meanly. The White man was pissed off at Castro for winning his revolution (his war of independence) and then "stealing" all of our large sugar refiners (Imperial, Domino) properties (nationalizing them) and "stealing" all that property in Habana from the US Mafia! Why, we even had a President assassinated over his handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis and the insane Bay of Pigs invasion. John F. Kennedy was his name. The national hero JFK of whom no one can speak evil even though he was a man who cheated on his wife with the mistress of the head of the Chicago mob, Gilorma (Sam) Giancana (remember how we made Sam's daughter a celeb?) while he was our darling president. A dude who had Mafia connections in Hollywood and Vegas through his father, Bootlegger Joe Kennedy, the good father who would bring his mistress, Gloria Swanson, home to the Boston mansion from Hollywood, bring her in through the front door, take her past his large family sitting at dinner in the mansion dining room, up the winding stairs to his private bedroom where he then began to bang Gloria like a Zeusian bull while down below his big family--under the eye of the sainted Mama Rose sitting there so nunly pristine--the passionate screams of Gloria getting fucked hard wafting down into that dining room. "Pay attention to your food, children, your father is simply doing business as usual," explained Mama Rose in her sweet soothing Catholic girl-school-proper voice.

Here's a cool scathing article on Thanksgiving in Native American history by Gilbert Mercier at News Junkie Post:

newsjunkiepost.com/2010/11/25/thanksgiving-celebrating-the-genocide-of-native-americans/

By the way, that butterball turkey you're chowing down on today--it's full of antibiotics and god-knows what kind of growth hormones--these ain't wild turkeys--and drinking a quart of Wild Turkey whiskey would probably be a healthier substitute.

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

A Little Taste of American Art:

Origins of the Killer Whale, a drum head, acryllics on deer hide, by Alaska aboriginal artist, Michael Dangeli [See more drum art at www.alaskanativeartists.com/drums.htm

From Space Weather.com: Here's what a solar plasma explosion into space looks like--this one not a threat to us--BUT! One never knows, do one?

The eruption hurled a cloud of plasma (a "CME") into space but not toward Earth. Because of the blast site's high-northern location on the sun, the cloud flew up and out of the plane of the solar system; no planets will be affected.

Existing in the Police City-State of New York City: Reading Balzac

2011-11-21T05:32:00.001-08:00

Foto by tgw, New York City, 2011
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Reading the Amazing Balzac

I have heard praise of Balzac all my life but, for some reason or another, I never got around to reading any of his books. Last year, however, thedailygrowlerhousepianist returned from a gig in Switzerland, and at the next meeting of our quorum at an uptown Irish pub, he handed me a copy of Balzac's Lost Illusions--he'd bought it to read on the flight back to the US and he said he knew I'd like it if I ever found the time to read it. Almost immediately on getting home with the book, I soon found it calling to me to read it. You know how a book sits among other books but stands out, as if animatedly appealing to you to read it? Thus I soon picked up the hefty Lost Illusions and began reading it. I read almost 200 pages in one sitting. I found the book not only very up-to-date in terms of its description of the Parisian leisure class but also in the many schemes and delicate scams those entering into the entertainment of that class (books, theater, opera, etc.) had to adjust to in order to find success as writers, philosophers, playwrights, lyricists, publishers, agents, etc. Soon I was lost in Lost Illusions and totally under Balzac's spell.

Honore de Balzac (he really didn't have the right to use the participle de with his name. de being the same as von in a German name, meaning your family has a connection to royalty or wealth) was born in 1800 and died 51 years later of what we assume was a heart attack. He had physical problems all his life, but his biggest problem was with his heart. Though his family didn't have the right to place a de in front of its name, Balzac's father had risen from poverty to a high societal position. A high enough social position that when he died, he left his wife (there was no love in their marriage) fairly well off and totally well off when you considered her own personal wealth she inherited from her family. Balzac was a master of starting failing businesses, from printing, typography, to going to Sicily and trying to recapture value from the slag of ancient Roman mines, and from traveling to the Ukraine in order to buy acreages of forests in order to cut them down and take the timbers back to Paris and sell them there. These business adventures, like I said, failed utterly. At one time before Balzac had a best seller (Eugénie Grandet), he was 50,000 francs in debt to his mother.

Lost Illusions (Illusions perdues) was published in 3 volumes from 1837 to 1843. It, to me, is amazingly well written and does constitute what the literary crowd calls a realist novel. It is so real, I find it quite easy to exist in its time even though I am sitting here 168 years later in a contemporary world that really hasn't changed that much in basic terms of politics and doing business and making a living. I can easily inhabit the time of this novel and find it amazing how up-to-date the book's concerns are. I read in the introduction how Balzac had direct influence on the writing of Marcel Proust, Edgar Allan Poe, Dostoyevski, William Faulkner, and of all people, Jack Kerouac--ironically, the above list consists of my fav authors, especially Poe, Dostoyevski, Faulkner, and Kerouac. Unfortunately, though I have read Proust, I am not so thoroughly familiar with his work as I am that of the other four men.

What I find fascinating in reading Lost Illusions is not only the story itself and the thorough descriptions of life in Paris in the 1820s (and it really is hard to believe that this novel was written that long ago) but also in the way he writes--long thorough descriptions of the novel's many actions--but also in the many deductions he comes to--aphorisms galore--wonderful ways of wording things--and his use of words I've never before in my life heard of (and of course I must give most of this credit to the translator, Kathleen Raine [en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kathleen_Raine]. As one of www.languagehat.com/ commenters answered one of my comments about translators, linguist scholars consider translators as co-authors of the books they translate).

Here are some quotes from Lost Illusions [from Modern Library Edition, Random House 2001] that impressed me enough to jot them down in my notebooks as I continue reading this tome--I'm up to 400 pages already:

p. 51: "...for young people always begin by loving exaggeration, that infirmity of noble minds."

p. 52: "...they treated him with the overwhelming politeness that well-bred people use towards their inferiors."

p. 56: "Great minds always tend to see virtue in misfortune" [and Balzac knew all about misfortune].

p. 60: "Genius is answerable only to itself; it is the sole judge of the means, since it alone knows the end; thus genius must consider itself as above the law, for it is the task of genius to remake the law; moreover the man who frees himself from his time and place may take everything, hazard everything, for everything is his by right." [I find that an extremely deep consideration.]

p. 61: "He wrote one of those wild letters in which the young point a pistol at a refusal, a letter full of childish casuistry and of highminded irrational reasoning, enchanting verbiage, embroidered with those naive declarations, spoken unawares from the heart, that women love so much." [How can you not like such writing? And women do love such letters.]

p. 62: "Nobility of mind does not always go with elegance of manners. Racine may have had the manners of a courtier, but Corneille behaved more like a cattle dealer."

p. 72: "Like most young people, these two attributed to the world their own intelligence and virtues. Youth who knows no failure has no mercy on the faults of other people; but it has also a sublime faith in them."

p. 87-88: "If poetry is to be spoken aloud in such a way as to be understood, absolute concentration is necessary. There must be complete sympathy between the reader and the audience, in the absence of which no electrical communication of emotion can take place. If this sympathetic atmosphere is lacking, the poet finds himself rather in the position of an angel attempting to sing heavenly music against a background of the mocking laughter of hell." [Powerful stuff; I myself know of singing heavenly music against that background of the mocking laughter of hell.]

p. 103: "...but before the world recognizes superiority of any kind it demands brilliant achievement." [This could be the reason We the People of the US so admire the members of the Power Elite--we consider being rich as "brilliant achievement."]

p. 103: "Now literary success can only be won in solitude by persevering labor." [Balzac stuck to the guns of this statement by practicing what he preached. He was a constant rewriter--actually rewriting whole chapters after his books were already published.]

p. 103: "...idleness--the bane of poetic souls."

p. 130: "Some women have a horror of contracts that does honour to their delicacy; they would rather submit to a living impulse than to a dead convention."

p. 150: "A man must be very sure of a woman before he allows her to see his emotions and his thoughts as they arise....Some women carry their devotion to such lengths that they must always see their idol as a god and only those who love a man for his own sake, rather than for their own, love his weaknesses no less than what is great in him."

p. 170: "'Intellect is the lever with which a man can move the world.' But another voice replied that money is the fulcrum of intellect."

p. 198: [enthusiastic success, according to Balzac] "...an enthusiasm, if it is to succeed, must be reinforced by the fierce energy of real talent or the grim determination of ambition."

p. 215: "'A great writer is nothing less than a martyr who does not die.'"

p. 217: "But woman brings disorder into society through passion."

p. 217: [Balzac's advice to writers via his character Daniel d'Arthez]:
1) "Woman brings disorder into society through passion" therefore a writer must "portray the passions" with a) "Great originality," b) "Avoiding single ideas in favor of contrasting ideas."

p. 220: "...but love has been his undoing, for it not only makes inroads into his heart--it shoots its arrows into his brain, and upsets his life, precipitating him into the most erratic courses."

p. 223: "True talent is always straight-forward, simple, and open, and never formal; epigrams in that circle, stimulated the mind, but was never aimed at self-respect."
------------------------------
Words and Phrases From Balzac I've Never Heard of or Used Before:

1) Superfoetation (p. 56)
2) "the Phocion's axe" (p. 61)
3) "flatfooted as a Welshman" (p. 63)
4) Nankeen as in "nankeen trousers" (p. 78)
5) Cockchafer--"M. de Bargeton buzzed about the house like a cockchafer...." (p. 128)
6) Toques (togs?) (p. 160)
--------------------------------
Around the Town
Wow, our billionaire mayor today was all over television, on every channel, especially his own channel, announcing how his military police under Ray Kelly had undercovered a plot by a discontented Dominican Republican (under al-Queda influence, as our billionaire mayor put it) to blow up libraries (Huh?), police buildings (though originally the report said "police vehicles" and didn't mention buildings--why, Ray Kelly even had a simulation filmed that showed how this poor bastard planned on blowing up police cars--though the latest newscasts have turned their focus on his intending to blow up buildings). They showed a video this dude put on the Internet explaining how to make these bombs he was going to use to blow up these police cars. Then, as is the case in most of these Bloomberg/Kelly terrorist busts, they said they had been tracking this guy for over a year! So why arrest him all of a sudden today? Ironically, the FBI said they weren't interested in this guy. How strange is that?

All afternoon today (the 21st) there have been sirens in the streets and helicopters in the air. As I went down Fifth to get my beef terriyaki (I love it), there was a cop helicopter hovering over Madison Park. I haven't heard yet what new terrorist plot the NYC Military Police were uncovering.

News From Europe
Guess what the new head of Greece and the new head of Italy have in common? First of all, they both were not elected to office by the people, and second of all, both men formerly worked for Goldman-Sachs Europe!

We now live in a corporate world. The militaries and police of the world are to protect this corporate world from TERRORIST attacks. Such an insane world; such a cruel world-domination concept; making profits off bank scams, wars, and inner fightings in Africa, and threats aimed at one of the world's largest oil producers, IRAN.

Expansion of US Military Presence
President and Commander in Chief Obama proudly announcing we will now have a military presence in AUSTRALIA!!! Why? Let me tell you why: because Indonesia, where Obama recently traveled doing some arms selling, just a few miles away from Australia, is the world's largest Islamic nation! We now have nearly 200 military bases around the world. Only Ron Paul is saying if you elect him president he will shut those bases down and bring the troops home where Constitutionally they are supposed to be protecting our perimeters (borders) from invasion, something they failed to do back on September 11, 2001.

Do you see signs of fear of We the People building up in our Power Elite and government lackeys and government executives?

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

A Little Taste of American Art:

Volcano, Georgia O'Keefe

No explanation needed.

Existing in the Police State of New York City: Expecting a Winter of Discontent

2011-11-18T06:10:00.000-08:00

Foto by tgw, "The Atlantic Ocean," Coney Island, New York 2010
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Commander Mikey "El Billionario" Bloomberg and Ray "Shanty Irish" Kelly Rescue Wall Street From a Flooding in of "Terrorists" Occupiers
All over New York City commercial-pap television for the past two days, the scroll-reading pretty heads are reporting a triumphant victory of our billionaire mayor and his military-police force under his little man police commissioner, the mighty Ray "I Spy" Kelly, a pair of little men (short people), in their rescue of Wall Street from these "out of control" punks who have the nerve to believe that We the People of the USA have the power to disrupt and overthrow a system that HATES We the COMMON People of the USA--a system that is WHITE CONTROLLED, a WHITE REVENGE MOVEMENT, the wealthiest WHITE MEN in the world live here in New York City (including the Koch Brothers). And these wealthy WHITE MEN have no mercy on those they screw in order to cover their bankrupt ideals. How dare the common herd think this country, this city, this or that neighborhood, or this or that home and land belongs to them!

And early yesterday morning (Thursday), I got up with intentions of moseying down around Wall Street to check and see if the Occupy Wall Street effort to shut down Wall Street had any validity--their intention being to encircle the area and keep the stock market from opening on time and hopefully not at all. This turned out to be a great idea! It pissed off our divinely inspired mayor (if you are as rich as Mikey "Shorty" Bloomberg, you feel absolutely divine, surely blessed by the higher beings)--I mean, this little prick originally from Boston, a small town compared to New York City, owes his divinity to his Wall Street gods and benefactors--especially those gods at Merrill Lynch and Goldman-Sachs and J.P. Morgan-Chase (these Rockefeller-Morgan pirates contributed millions to the New York City Military Police Department)--I mean, come on, all these divine bastards know each other. They all belong to the same clubs and breakfast groups and luncheon groups and real-estate combines and hedge-fund and private equity pools (as do their siblings (the mayor's daughter is NYC's ambassador to the UN) and wives and brothers and brothers-in-law)--they all can call each other up on their personal private phone numbers and arrange back-room dealings, all of which are aimed at fucking the common man, the millions and millions of New Yorkers who these idiots divinely believe have NO FUCKING POWER at all. Especially these upstart occupiers with the gall to intentionally disrupt WALL STREET (invasion and occupation being the good old American way).

The NYC commercial-pap teevee puppets were especially proud of showing over and over this one Wall Street junior exec-type who was inconvenienced getting to his hi-floor corner office t'other morning who was shouting at the Occupiers, "You're the terrorists...you are terrorists!" Shouting this at people getting their faces bashed in and being shoved to the concrete and then having their faces rubbed into that concrete or having their throats being choked by a hard hickory wood or solid hard-rubber (probably lead filled) baton--yes, New York City's Finest (big fat Irish-red-faced bulls) were doing their best to please the FBI and Homeland Security and Billionaire Mayor Bloomberg by cleansing our most sacred of Capitalist streets, that street too big to fall, of these heathen, these anti-American punks, these little spoiled brats, these ingrates, these TERRORISTS.

And yep, folks, the New York City Military Police did a good job and they should be proud--especially those cops who were beating a bunch of school children trying to get to school--or those brave blood brothers who were wailing away and knocking to the concrete old grannies and stomping on 'em a bit to make their vengeful point.

Cops hate citizens because they themselves aren't citizens of New York City, most of them living outside the city proper.

Besides, it was a dundrearied lousy day here in NYC. Rainy and getting colder by the hour. A chilling kind of weather, a fooling kind of weather--it lures you into wearing thinner clothes since it was in the high 60s for the past few days and then once you're out in it, it chills you to the bone.

As For Me: All at once this past Tuesday, I was on-line most of the day but then in the afternoon, I suddenly kept getting "Authentication Failed" in the pop up that tells you why you can't connect to the Internet--over and over I kept getting this bloody pop up, to the point I called my ISP--and son of a bitch, I was told by this ISP I have been with for 10 years now my account had been canceled and they were no longer providing me with Internet service. I was the last of the dial-up accounts, I was told--me and one other poor obsolete jerk were the only dial-uppers left in the New Jersey, New York, Connecticut area, so being cost-efficient finance majors, they dumped our accounts and left us evicted from the 'Net.

When you've been living on the Internet for 20 years as I have (my first computer was an IBM PC running DOS) and suddenly you are DEAD to the Internet--can't get on it--and trust me, I'm too arrogant to go to an Internet cafe--you suddenly realize how absolutely embedded your life is in virtual reality rather than real-time reality. Without the Internet to "play" around on for hours, I found myself sitting here totally bored. Television was totally boring. I tried playing Free Cell on one of my laptops--Free Cell and Hearts--but that got boring, too. I kept coming down to my big computer and pulling down the Internet Connect icon and trying to dial up only to get the "No Dial Tone" pop up. So I did something I'm ashamed of, which I capitulated to--I called Verizon and signed up for their special offer of high-speed Internet service for $19.99-a-month (trust me, by the time they add on the taxes and surcharges and connection fees and extemporaneous fees, the bill's gonna be up over $30.00-a-month). Finally, after three days of being off-line, I got my $35 router and hooked everything up and the Verizon people called me and told me I was ready to connect and I clicked on my Ethernet connect and BOOM, just like that, I am back on line. Able once again to start spewing out my diatribe--glad to be back embedded on this marvelous piece of virtual reality called the Internet.

My reality space. The Daily Growler. Possibly with only a handful of readers--one never knows, do one? I know of 12 regular readers; I know of 2 consistent readers; and according to this blog's statistics, we get over a thousand hits a day--most of them, we assume, being the 25 or 30 spammers who try and infiltrate us through the comments section but which Blogspot (Google) has so far effectively filtered out--mostly Russian and Chinese sex sites--sex being the most popular subject all around this virtual reality world.

SEX. That verboten subject that our ignorance and repressing of are causing frustrations galore--if you can't fuck anymore, what do you do? Go to war maybe? Become a serial killer maybe? Become a common whore maybe? Become a cold housewife/mother maybe? Become a cheating husband/father maybe? On the other hand, say you are a superstud or object of great sexual attraction--think of how frustrating that must be--like our Hollywood fops and darlings are represented to us--my point being, these Hollywood affairs (marriages, couplings, studio-designed hook ups) aren't based on supersex--these couples hate each other and are most of the time impotent--they marry and divorce or just simply fuck around with impunity, every little admiring fool believing these men and women represent our highest form of sexual glory. Can you imagine a drunken drug addict like Charlie Sheen being good in bed! He plays superstuds in his grade B roles; yet, it's obvious this pretender isn't that at all--he's a frustrated impotent. Wanna bet me?

Idolatry is so stupd.

thegrowlingwolf
occupying The Daily Growler

A Little Taste of American Art:

Frank Stella’s “Severinda” (1995), mixed media on Fiberglas, is part of “Frank Stella: Painting Into Architecture,” at the Met.

thegrowlingwolf Too Sane to Go Insane

2011-11-11T08:02:00.001-08:00

Foto by tgw, "Prez Off the Wall," New York City 2011
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Say Goodbye to:
Easy Ed Macauley--as a kid I got into basketball when my brother became sports editor of my hometown newspaper. One of my favorite players--I first heard of him when he played college ball for the U of Saint Louis Bilikens (in the Missouri Valley League), from college going on to the NBA and the Saint Louis Bombers--then the Boston Celtics, where he was a star until he was traded to the Saint Louis Hawks and was replaced by the great Bill Russell. Ed Macauley, 83, American basketball player (St. Louis Hawks, Boston Celtics, Saint Louis Billikens)

Joe Frazier--How could I have missed Joe Frazier's dying? I didn't catch mention of it on any news--certainly nothing on teevee about it. I mean Joe Frazier--second greatest boxer of the 20th Century--dying before Mohamed Ali did--who'd a thought it? Joe Frazier, 67, American boxer, World Heavyweight Champion (1970–1973), liver cancer.

Jimmy Norman--Jimmy had an r and b hit back in the early 60s, "I Don't Love You No More"--then he hit gold in 1964 when Irma Thomas wanted to use Kai Winding's "Time Is on My Side" as a B side but thought it needed some extra lyrics and her recording company hired Jimmy Norman to do the job. Later, "Time Is on My Side," was on the single that was the Rolling Stones first single to hit the Top Ten...read Jimmy's sad story--it ends up Jimmy was saved for a while from a tragic ending by of all institutions, the Jazz Foundation. Jimmy Norman, 74, American rhythm and blues and jazz musician and songwriter.

Being Too Sane in an Insane World
I'm sitting here a self-abusing animal. Banging my head against the wall. Recalling Henry Miller writing that he was too sane to go insane, I, too, sense that I'm in that same boat. And Henry was put to the test more times than I have been and he lived very sanely for 89 years.

That's probably why I'm banging my head against the wall. I'm pissed off that I can't go insane. Insanity is salvation in my family. Sanity means you must face life's facts in full awareness. Too aware. Total sanity is total awareness. Total awareness is too damn scary for the average human-elevated-monkey being--all of us really just a notch below the jungle treetops. Tree houses. Did you ever stop and consider what we live in as tree houses? In our collective primate instincts there is a safety-in-height factor. Like if a wild boar or a pissed-off bear is chasing you what do you do? You look for a tree to scamper up. In order to survive, we understand naturally that we have to get as far up away from Nature as we can get (escape to). And then we realize halfway into building our towers of Babel that Nature's rule--Nature's domination, as Alfred North Whitehead called it--extends far beyond our means to escape it.

Yes, we do have the capability (and its many potentials) of building rocketed vehicles that can whisk us out beyond the reaches of earth's Nature. But so what once we're out there? Ironically then we run into another form of Nature, a very alien Nature, a Nature in which we cannot survive. A Nature in which order is just now advancing out of Chaos. I know, I'm writing philosophically and some might say I'm grasping for philosophical straws, but I'm not grasping at straws; I already have a bale of straws tightly possessed in my mental hands.

You see, sanity reveals evolution has "survived" us to a point where we realize our only HOPE at ETERNAL EXISTENCE (the direct cause of what we call "civilization")--our instincts (most untamed) still driving us in that hopeful direction--is somewhere in the future--if not in the immediate future, at least in the long-run future (like we've been waiting for all these religious salvations to arrive for thousands and thousands of years now).

There is no guarantee in natural law of any kind of substantial future. In fact, most of our natural laws lead us into Chaos. Like the Second Law of Thermodynamics leads us into entropy.

The Chinese yin and yang attitude is to me the logical key to Nature's domination over us. It really is a binary situation, a two-sided-coin conflict: where there's one thing and then there's that thing's opposite. Where there's a healthy naturally easy-born child happening there's a super-difficult birth happening at the same time or a death in birth happening at the same time. Both sides of this kind of reasoning lead us into the same future--a future of mystery. A future of surprise--except, that surprise is always going to be dressed in black and carrying a scythe and hooded and masked like our traditional executioners and speaking all languages clearly, by the way. Death is a progressive concept in Cosmic terms.

I mean everything is so clear to me. Yet, when I spew out my reasonings--all dialectically crunched--even my closest friends "pooh-pooh" them--and I use so dainty an onomatopoeia--perhaps it is better put using "blow me off"--even my closest friends blow me off--which also has a dainty ring to it. You see how our use of language can throw us off--innuendos ruling us toward insane deductions?

The sanest of you who read this blog know exactly what I mean. As well, the sanest of my friends know what I mean--and all of my friends are sane though one or two of them seem to desire to be insane; however, they are realizing like Henry Miller and myself that they are just too damn sane to go insane. Which is my point.

I've admitted over and over in this blog that I consider myself a soothsayer--a seasoned predicter. Not a fortuneteller. Of course, I don't believe anybody knows what's gonna happen tomorrow, much less a 1000 years from now. But as predicters I can see brainy characters among us with the chess-master kind of reasoning that lets them strategically see moves ahead and who can throw up huge piles of suppositions a ton or two of which might prove in the future to be on the money, BUT...and that's the big BUT of life--that opposing BUT. You think you're on the right road...BUT are you? Otherwise, why do we need maps? Why do we need GPSs? Why do we need Google satellite cameras that supposedly can infrared now clean through into our most sacred areas of our private lives, our Corporate Big Brother at his cleverly meanest.

All of this diatribe because I didn't watch the goofball Republican goofball insane debate last night (Wednesday, Nov. 9th). I did, however, see a lot of quick clips from it and I heard several excerpts from it--those mainly covering Herman Cain's continuing to deny-deny-deny his macho need to impress young women with his sexual prowess and that great Texas bullshit idiot Rick Perry's sticking all three of his left feet in his BIG DUMB TEXAS WHITE TRASH MOUTH!

Mitt Romney, the billionaire Mormon fool, came out, according to the commercial-pap teevee pundits, the big winner! Though the right-wing-nutjob audience seemed to beam with much affection still for the Koch Brothers in Black disguise, Herman Cain. Herman was obviously being his most Kingfish self as he babbled out his bullshit, avoiding any kind of logical response to any serious questions in terms of what kind of a President he would make. So he becomes President and diddles a young government babe worker with an illegal Cuban cigar in the Oval office--who cares?--what kind of a President would he be?--more hat-in-hand than Barack Obama? Herman did manage to reveal how he'd like to prick-tease Nancy Pelosi--calling her Princess Nancy--and Princess Nancy is a pretty hot White woman for a mid-life-crisis billionaire Catholic-girls-school political-daddy political parasite! I keep screaming, these bastards and bitches all know each other--they are all certainly politically akin--they are all from the same clubs from the same fraternities from the same law firms from the same colleges from the same stock from the same backgrounds from the same philosophies from the same in families.

And I'm listening to these lower-than-dog idiots blowing us sane folk off with so much hot-air--hot-air stenched with the methane deposit eruptions from their rectum-babbling bullshit assmouths--that gas that's been hydrofracted out of their minds that have been shoved up and jammed into the rock-like formations in their lassiez-faire (property rights over human rights) gas-filled asses! Can I get any plainer? Or daintier?

And these same kind of rich-ass fools are currently bringing down Europe and the European Union. Italy has been led down to the bottom of the financial garbage dump by its billionaire divinities, like this crooked-as-a-pit-viper-at-night Berlusconi, called by Forbes magazine (the Malcolm Forbes publication of Capitalist Pig worship) the 21st most powerful man in the human-monkey universe. Italy's richest criminal. And look where his bankers's ass-kissing and derivative-buying-and-selling scheming has taken the Italian people. And, of course, the stupid Italians put him back into power over and over--he's now the longest-serving prime minister in Italy's grand political history that includes their once future hope Benito Mussolini--"Hey'a, com-onna', he keep'ah duh trains runnin' on time." Pardon my attempt at imitating a stupid Italian. And, people, I swear, I love the country of Italy and have always wanted to end life there, especially along the Amalfi Coast...though as Gore Vidal said, eventually you get too old for a continuous adventure in living in Italy and have to move back to the USA and buy a home directly across the street from the best hospital in Los Angeles, as Gore had to do when he developed leg and hip problems while living in Italy.

Gary Null when asked to comment on the Republican debate said he had no drive within him to listen to these Republican idiot debates they were so far beneath him. And Gary's right, the only reason for a progressive thinker to listen to these fools is for comedic fodder to use against them. Like what a laughable fool Newtie Gingrich is, this big Gawjah fool who is totally in bed with the Military Industrial Complex--this immoral wretch who divorced his wife as she lay in bed dying of cancer so he could marry a young open-legged-to-his-love-me-daddy-charm piece of ass--Newtie a constantly re-elected Gawjah flip-flopper who always flops toward the money side of matters. And then there's scary Rick Perry, a cartoon-character type of fool. And for a feminine fool, the Repugs are offering us Michelle Bachmann, a woman perhaps going through "the change" and an Oral Roberts Law School (now the Pat Robertson Law School) graduate married to a Christian true-believing fool who has super-Christian powers that enable him to convert Gay men to straight and counsel young boys against the sins of Man--those background points alone enough to categorize Michelle as an idiot.

In the meantime, I'm becoming more and more inclined to go along with these Occupy Wall Street movements that are popping up like poison mushrooms all over the contaminated political scene these days. Methinks they are scaring the hell out of the heavily protected Power Elite--especially the bankers and the Goldman-Sachs pirates and the Bank of America thieves. Bank America thieves who are now running teevee commercials trumpeting their helping Americans regain their homes and their humanitarian ways saving just plain people from foreclosures and helping small entrepreneurs develop their start-up businesses, this bank the biggest foreclosing bunch of pirates in the US, these banks foreclosing on 10-more million homes this year, meaning they have foreclosed and thrown out of their homes now over the past several years 80 million Americans, if you consider each home foreclosure affecting an average of 4 family members--thus 20 million homes foreclosed upon kicks 80 million Americans into the streets--into tent cities--sending them into instant poverty. And the Republican candidates and our own current President are saying "Let these lazy people eat cake," our richest assholes are too wealthy to tax. That's laissez-faire Economics: protect property and not humans.

And President Obama is still trying to tell us we are so desperate for oil and gas (remember, the biggest user of fossil fuels in the world is the US military!)--for that reason behind closed doors our President is once again giving out drill-drill-drill rights to British Petroleum and Royal Dutch Shell (the Hell oil company)--BP back drilling deep wells in the Gulf of Mexico--the U.S.'s largest ever oil spill miraculously, soaked up by the Christian God, one assumes, just suddenly all gone--no more oil contamination to our Gulf Coast region--WHY, hell, folks, British Petroleum is sponsoring ads showing Black and White people from Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana saying, "Hey, you all, come on back down heah to the Gulf Coast. Why, we are back to cookin' up our famous seafood--our famous shrimp dishes, our famous oyster dishes, our famous ocean fish dishes--maybe they have a little oily twist to them, but, hey now, they're perfectly safe to eat now thanks to the wonderful people at British Petroleum...and while we're braggin', check out our wonderful white sand beaches--they're open again for fun in the Gulf Coast sun--from Florida all the way around to Louisiana, the Gulf Coast is clean and safe and proud once again--again thanks to the wonderful benevolent folks at British Petroleum." And British Petroleum is now forgiven enough by President Obama that he's giving them permission to start drill-drill-drilling like wildcat hell back in the same area of the Gulf in which they fucked up that deep-water well. And they are even forgiven enough to be allowed to drill-drill-drill on the Northern Slope of Alaska. So we have another huge oil spill! It looks now like British Petroleum has enough miracles left in their miraculous way of cleaning up their major spills that they'll be allowed another couple of disasters--and still We the People of the USA will trust them to drill-drill-drill anywhere in our pristine wilderness they want to as long as we continue to have enough oil and gas and petroleum products to keep our multiple wars going on, an invasion and occupation of Iran certainly looking definitely eminent--using our US-created Israeli military to attack them first, with our great NATO troops right behind them. Why, hey, folks, Iran is once again "proven" to have the potential for making Weapons of Mass Destruction--all they need are some aluminum tubes of yellow cake from Nigeria--where's Valerie Palme when you need her? Where's Colon's Pal--he's good at convincing just plain folk that countries DO DEFINITELY HAVE WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION that they are aiming toward the good people of the good old USA.

I saw a film on Anarctica t'other day and how different nations are staking out claims to land down there--Chile and Great Britain in some cases claiming the same land--Russia a big land claimer down there, too, as well as the USA, who along with Great Britain claim rights over the whole continent. Why this rush for staking out claims? Why when all that ice melts, just foresee all the oil under all that ice--all the diamonds and minerals and wealth under both polar ice caps. Fuck that ice. Let it melt. Corporations are prepared to tow icebergs to areas that need fresh water. Why some corporations are already melting icebergs and collecting their water in huge plastic balloon bags that they then tow over to say Japan where after Fukushima, no one over there can trust their fresh water supply.

A lot of futurists say the next World War will be a War for Fresh Water.

I predict, too, that one day we'll all have to wear oxygen tanks full of clean air that we'll need prescriptions for in order to breathe the one-day overcontaminated air. That is if we survive the coming Solar Plasma Storms. Today, November 11, 2011, two blasts of Sun-ejected plasma will glance off the earth and affect our electro-magnetic system to the point the experts are saying on the night of 11-11-11 the Aurora Borealis (the Northern Lights) should be spectacular, especially across the northern skies as some of this exploded out plasma will shoot in through the huge hole in our skies over the North Pole. Our Achilles Heel when it comes to getting hit and injured by Solar Plasma Storms.

So I leave you all with SANE HOPE, though I don't believe in hope, only faith in oneself and one's sanity.

thesoothsayinggrowlingwolf
for The 11-11-11 Daily Growler

thegrowlingwolf in an Apologetic Mood

2011-11-09T05:32:00.000-08:00

Foto by tgw, New York City 2011
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An Apologetic Wolf Man
I was not so much surprised as stunned when on awaking this morning I learned that the people of Mississippi, who I sort of referred to in Sunday's post as imbeciles all, had arisen in a new dress of progressive glory and had defeated overwhelmingly the "embryo's a human being" (with a right to life) anti-abortion legislation White racists with deep-rooted Old South White habits of thought tried to ram down their throats.

And there can be ironies galore in a Chaotic society--like as I tooled on down the information dial lo and behold it was revealed unto me that the mentally healthiest people of Ohio had arisen en masse to land a solid right jab on the glass jaw of their newly elected Teabagger governor, ex-Fox News commentator, John Kasich. After gathering over 1 million signatures on a petition to veto a governor's imposed wacky law through a referendum vote (the people's right to veto via referendum), in this case Kasich's Teabagger legislation to do away with state employees's right to collective bargaining, progressive Ohioans got their referendum and yesterday they threw out old Tea-Party Turkey Kasich's law and restored collective bargaining rights to state workers.

And as I said, there can be ironies galore in a Chaotic society--out in Arizona where the White Power Elite is openly racist--especially against Messkins (using White pronunciation of "Mexicans")--the White dude, Russell Pearce (president of the Arizona Senate) who wrote the state law that forces Arizona police to stop anybody on the street they suspect as being an illegal immigrant (a Messkin) and making them prove they're not or arresting them on the spot was thrown out of office on his ear via a recall election in which he was defeated by a fellow Republican named Jerry Lewis.

And there were other political and Sociological ironies, too, last night--in Maine and in Kentucky...but still, they shocked me--can I have faith in them, though, that is now my cynical question.

And that Big Black Numbskull, Herman Cain, is playing the deny-deny-deny game with his best male superiority attitude regarding the several women who have recently popped out of old Herman's political woodwork to accuse him of practicing that male superiority by trying to tease them out of their panties and into his big King-size magic miracle bed. Herman's pleading loss of memory as his first superiority move--using the Bill Clinton method of "I did not have sex with that woman" categorical lying, Herman puts it "I did not sexual abuse these women"...why, Herman, says, to do that he would have broken precious American values he stands for as a serious presidential candidate. What a fucking joke.

I just found out from reading EXile (Yasha Levine's article) yesterday (Tuesday) that the Koch Brothers, those billionaires who have their arms up Herman's big Black ass thereby moving his brain and mouth like Paul Winchell used to give life to the wooden dummy Jerry Mahoney, were born in Quanah, Texas [named for Chief Quanah Parker who had a White wife named Cynthia], to Herman Koch, a Dutch immigrant, who owned and operated Quannah's first newspaper. The Koch Brothers are Texans. From Quanah, a railroad-founded town. Founded by the Fort Worth & Denver City Railroad, a Colonel Dodge railroad that I found out in this same article was heavily financed by Dutch investors. Old Herman Koch was a pro-corporate-state man who was laissez faire to the bone--the whole idea of America to this immigrant Dutchman was to grab as much wealth as you could grab while the grabbing was good--in the case of his newspaper editorials, old Herman Koch, by promoting the Ft. Worth & Denver City's corporate desires and grabbing up as much land as he could afford along that railroad right of way, soon amassed a fortune in real estate and railroad stocks and bonds. Greed was good and an honorable way to accumulate wealth in this New World White nation that became the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow to these desperate Europeans who flocked to this country to provide a work force for the advancing British-Empire-designed Industrial Revolution that was tumbling into existence in this once agriculture-based economy.
Matchbook from Quanah, Acme & Pacific Railroad (courtesy The Daily Growler Historical Society Collection)
So think about it this way--the Koch Brothers are backing Herman Cain not only in order to mock Barack Obama's campaign but also to promote their father's politics, which is all their politics is, a continuance of what they learned growing up under their father's politics and philosophy. Remember, Holland gave us Calvinism (anti-Catholic/anti-Lutheranism), which is what all this Libertarian bullshit is rooted in--"Work your ass off now for the night is coming when you'll work no more." Hard work brings success; accumulation of wealth brings fame; fame brings fortune; and fortune brings heavenly gain. All divinely procured. Calvinists are very charitable, as are the Koch Brothers--here in New York City, one of their homes, you go to a New York Philharmonic Concert and you see their names as leading donators--and in terms of the whole Lincoln Center project, you see them as board members and heavy contributors. At several of our hospitals, you see the Koch name on boards and on buildings.

It's Milton Friedman Economics--Phenomenonological thinking--like even if an Economic system isn't working but you say it is, then therefore it is working. One of the problems in Sociological study has to do with a school of Phenomenologists--they let their own ideals determine their Sociological results paying no attention to the actuality of the society in which they are imposing their fantastic intuitions.

The Occupy Wall Street people are buying heavy-duty tents preparing for a winter vigil in Mayor Bloomberg's girlfriend's realty-company owned park on Wall Street in downtown Manhattan. Kindly old billionaire little man lady's man (he's had his share of women accusing him of sexual harassment in the office place) Mayor Mikey Boy Bloomberg has allowed them their generators back. They are also putting together a two-week long march on Washington, District of Corruption, via stop offs in Newark, Philadelphia, and Baltimore before arriving en masse in Washington for a protest rally--though occupiers will be left behind to continue the Occupy Wall Street efforts now all over the country and in foreign cities, too. The Bank Transfer Day move must have been phenomenal, though it's not reported much on Wall Street Week in Review or other corporate-sponsored infomercials on commercial-pap television.

And in Italy, guess who ain't gonna come to dinner anymore? Why old Silvio Berlusconi, that Power Elite criminal, has resigned and has retreated to one of his many hillside villas to sweat out his being arrested by the Italian people who at the moment are facing a bigger financial bust than anything the Greeks are coming up with. Ah sweet Capitalism! Thy death has such a sting!

MARX WAS RIGHT AFTER ALL! It is all about workers's wages.

thehumblethegrowlingwolf
for The "Humble" Daily Growler

Existing in New York City on a Beautiful Sun's Day

2011-11-06T19:05:00.001-08:00

Foto by tgw, New York City (Looking East) 2011
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Who Are These People?
The dumbass backward crowd in Mississippi, our 51st state in terms of progress and humanitarianism, a position it has held for decades now, has just passed a state law [Mr. Ed: Actually it's a referendum to be voted on--AND IT IS WORSE THAN WE IMPLY because what it does is declare an embryo a human being with a Constitutional right to life. OH HOW UTTERLY HUMANLY STUPID! All the Mississippi Republican candidates (all Southern Republicans are racists) are promoting this legislation. Praise the Lord, you dumbass Christian fantasizers] that says if a woman, white or black, is raped and gets knocked up, SHE HAS TO HAVE THE BABY...if she gets an abortion, then she's breaking the law and she'll be subject to prison time, while, in most cases (and I'm thinking via habit of thought now), the rapist will beat the rap on lack of evidence--I mean, a rapist now can always refer back to New York City's recently allowing the big-shot French rapist, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, to go Scott Free while turning the tables on the victim and making her the rapist in the case.

And I'm dumbfounded and sit and puzzle over who the hell these vicious human-hating Power Elitists are in Mississippi first of all who propose such brutal Dark Ages punishments...and I stop in mid-thinking and start remembering my Southern upbringing and how these even modern-day Mississippians are still following the White Christian rules on sexuality. A White interpretation of which can be satirized as follows: White Mississippi lawmaker (a protege of Trent Lott perhaps) stating the facts of this new law: "Hey, if the women folks allows themselves to get themselves raped, then, hey now, it's God's will she bear that little bastard. And I must emphatically add, this law applies even to a sweet virginal White gal--and I pray to God Almighty that a pure Christian White woman never has to face this heah reality, who lets herself git knocked up by the ugliest, meanest Kneegrow, yep, mah friends, she's gonna have to bear that little N-worder bastard--that thar's the sacred law of God first and the great backward State of Mississippi second."

So you gals down thar in Mississippi, you all be careful when you're out there at some honky tonk playing the Devil's game and shakin' your booty all up in the faces of them thar horny men, boys will be boys, you all know, you don't git some man so hot he has no choice but to rape you. How 'bout if you stow a diaphragm in thar 'fore you venture out for a night of Satanic fun? Would that constitute an abortion in the sight of Backward Mississippi law?

And then I accidentally Sunday morning flipped on some blah-blah-blah-bullshit commercial pap teevee politics show and there were all these high-paid talking-head pundits spewing out tons and tons of hot air over this Neanderthal Black pizza king bozo from Kansas City, this Herman Cain. Their heyday discussion was totally centered around the gaggles of babes coming out of the woodwork to testify that Herman Cain has trouble controlling his Johnson's taking over his brain when it gets erect--but then Herman's also the victim of the White Man's stereotyping--remember, to White males (especially in Mississippi) all Black men have trouble keeping those big black snakes inside their dens (pants) where they belong when they're around hot chicks--especially hot White chicks, who all White males know are the victims of all Black males's lusts. Like Clarence Thomas (he has a White wife), Pappy Bush's token Black gift to our Supreme(ly dumb) Court, was excused his teasing hot, shy, little vulnerable Anita Hill, who ended up being the castigated one in that "electronic lynch" attempt. And after listening to these White pundits, a couple of bimbo women, one from this Politico on-line site that is so respected these days, go over and over this idiot's "charges of sexual harassment," I'm thinking, all this bullshit and not one intelligent question or intelligent report on why is this baloney-packing Black man being given all of this evaluating? Of course, this fool would make a horrible president. He's got the Koch Brothers hands up his ass working his brain and mouth. They're using him to mock Black Obama--remember, these rich White men hate Blacks and Latinos. They are White racists--and that I guarantee you. I do know my people. Like even Herman Cain, who got rich off selling fat-globbed pizzas to his own high blood-pressured people and overweight White folks--naming his company after his favorite film, I assume--even Blacks admire Mafia characters, can't come in the front door of one of the Koch mansions--"Herman, this is David Koch. Come on, Herman, we see you at the front gate--you know your place is back there at the alley gate--you know, Step-in Fetchit has to let your Black ass in this White man's castle--and then I'll see you hat-in-hand in my master bedroom, and I emphasize that Massuh part, Herman, while Beulah my maid serves me my breakfast in bed--and, by the way, Herman, don't get any ideas when you're checkin' out Beulah's big fine booty. She's my property, Herman."

Idiots. Mitt Romney's an idiot; yet he gets so much god-damn attention. Mitt Romney's George Romney's son. They are Mormons. I'm sorry, folks, but I gotta be front and center on this since I've actually tried to read the Book of the Mormon once, but, folks, Mormons are oddities. Oddities are eccentrics. Eccentrics are fantasizers. The Mormon theology is pure fantasy. The fantasy of a stone alcoholic--they said Joe Smith was drunk most of his life--and Mitt Romney is a true believer in the Mormon fantasy of a drunken self-proclaimed prophet.

And Rick Perry...he's so idiotic even the Tea Party freaks find him alarming.

So another Sunday's over. We start yet another week. Blue Monday, how we all hate Blue Monday--except, one bit of cheer, people all over the US of A on Bank Transfer Saturday transfered millions out of the too big to fail banks and into credit unions in amounts never before seen in credit union banking! I'm safe, I bank at the Apple Bank, a New York City bank at which NYC's working class banks.

thegrowlingwolf
for The Sunday Daily Growler

A Little Taste of American Art:

Winslow Homer Civil War Drawing: Thanksgiving-Day In The Army. After Dinner : The Wishbone

Winslow Homer (1836-1910). The above was an illustration that appeared in Harper's Magazine during the Civil War, which, as my grandmother said, wasn't civil at all.

Existing in New York City: "When's the Next Bookburning?"

2011-11-05T06:42:00.000-07:00

Foto by tgw, Atlantic City, New Jersey, 2011
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The Burden of Having to Write
I have been a very lucky man from Day 1. That I admit. First of all, I was lucky in birth. The members of the immediate family from which I'm from were oddities in the midst of a community of same-thinking-and-acting folks. Oddities? Yes. And the oddest of them? The ones who were writers--even the ones who were would-be writers.

First of all, I was lucky to have a grandmother, my mother's mother, who was a writer--a poet and a novelist--and, yes, she was published, so I guess I could call her an author.

As a writer, she loved to read. As a reader, she loved books. In her room was a book case. A tall wooden book case stuffed with books of all kinds. It was a small library but it had the right kind of books in it. Art books, fiction and nonfiction books, but especially a set of "big" books: two large compendiums of English literature from Chaucer to Joseph Conrad and one of poetry from Spenser to Stephen Spender.

My grandmother loved books so much, when her millinery shop failed in the 1920s, she went and got a job at my hometown's Carnegie Library. She became so popular a part of that very active library she soon rose to head librarian--my hometown was on Highway 80 and the Texas & Pacific Railroad, both avenues leading directly from the East Coast straight across America to the West Coast, Highway 80 known as the Bankhead Highway (after Tallulah Bankhead's daddy) and running straight across country from New York City to Los Angeles.

And my hometown was a highway stopover point and a railroad and bus stopover point, as well...and it was a place full of "motor hotels," later shortened to motels--motor inns they were called, too, and two big hotels, the big clumsy Hilton Hotel (it became the Windsor later) and the taller and more stately Hotel Wooten (a seventeen-story landmark whose big red neon sign could be seen for miles and miles all around my hometown's location on that flat prairie known in song as the Lone Prairie).

The other writer in my immediate family was my brother; an older brother, 15 years difference in our ages. After graduation from college and a stint in the U.S. Marines (in the South Pacific and China during WWII (the last war we supposedly won)), my brother, a history major, had no idea what he wanted to do for a living. He assumed all he was qualified to do was teach history, so he started looking for teaching jobs though in all his looks, he had no luck.

He, too, had grown up under the influence of my grandmother. He had been more intimately involved with her than I would ever be since while he was a freshman in college (he started college when he was 16), my parents moved up to Northern Oklahoma and left him behind to live with my grandmother.

He grew up in her library, too. While my mother and father both worked during the Great Depression, they would leave him with my grandmother at the library. He later would write a book about growing up in a library.

Both my brother and I knew library stuff and book stuff long before we went to even grade school. As a pre-schooler, I loved to be dropped off at the library and then allowed by my grandmother to go up to the children's reading room on the second floor and sit--I don't remember ever any children being there when I was there--and look at the wonderful old slides from all around the world through the library's stereopticon [Mr. Ed: This word stereopticon was red-lined by our ABC spell checker and when we clicked on the yellow highlighted word for the alternative it gave us "stripteaser"] and to look at all the wonderful picture books.

When I went to college and had to take Library Science, I whizzed right through it. I'd known how the Dewey Decimal System worked since I was a child. I'd even watched my grandmother's bookbinder, an old Scottish gentleman from Edinburgh, binding and re-covering books--I also knew about papers--like fly leaves and end papers and title pages and quarto and verso and copyrights and who the most famous authors were from several periods of literary time.

When I was 11 years old, living in Dallas and going to junior high, my grandmother, she had retired from the library, had remarried, thus my stepgrandfather from New York City, and had moved to Dallas, to a quaint little house on East Grand just across from Tennyson Park, that was enclosed by huge overtowering elm trees, had a goldfish pond in the back yard, and in the far corner of her back yard was a Model T Ford motor that sat there like a sculpture piece in that jungle-like back yard. Though I lived several miles southeast of my grandmother's house, where I went to junior high school was only a few blocks north of it. I was bused to the school in the mornings (yes, we had busing way before the Civil Rights Movement made it a controversial political matter) but in the afternoons I got to purposely missing the bus home so I could go by my grandmother's and then walk home from there.

Being a writer, my grandmother owned a typewriter, something very special in those days. Most families didn't have anyone with a typewriter in them. The typewriter, same as the piano, fascinated me (keys that you played with your fingers). My grandmother was very protective of her typewriter. She kept it on its special stool-table, a table with real tree limbs for legs. She kept it covered with both its original typewriter cover but also with an Italian-made cloth wall hanging depicting the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor.

Every time I was around her on those afternoons after school, I would beg her to let me "play" with her typewriter. I got so persistent that one afternoon she caved in, though in caving in she told me, "No, you can't play with my typewriter, but you can learn about it, how to treat it special, because it is special. It's what I write on; it's like my assistant, like a member of my family." And that day, she began teaching me how to type. It took me about two weeks of lessons to finally get her permission to type something up by myself. I still had that sheet of schoolboy notebook paper throughout my life until my last wife sent all my possessions, including 7 completed novels, to the Westchester County dump. On this sheet of ruled paper, I had typed my name and address, my age (11), and then a list of what I wanted to be and accomplish in my life (one being a professional hockey player, due to the fact my dad had just taken me to my first-ever hockey game (a Dallas team vs. a Tulsa, Oklahoma, team)). One of the very first things I wanted to be was a writer, "like my grandmother," as I put it.

And thus began my writing career. And thus also began my true deep appreciation of books.

In the meantime, back to my brother. After failing to get a teaching position, running out of his Marines GI Bill pay and mustering out pay, in desperation one day he walked into the offices of our hometown newspaper, got an interview with the managing editor, and told this man he wanted to be a newspaper reporter. Experience?, he was asked. My brother had worked on his college's literary magazine in which he had published several essays and one short story. The managing editor wasn't impressed much with the writing but he was impressed with my brother's gall--or "balls" as we would say today. Due to this "nerve," this managing editor gave my brother a chance. He assigned him to do a story. He was to take a ride on a new branch of the Abilene & Southern Railroad that was extended just after WWII to reach Ballenger, Texas, some 30 miles south of my hometown and then write a report of the trip (I still have a copy of this article in my collection of my brother's writings and books (my brother published 30 books during his long writing career and literally thousands of newspaper articles and magazine pieces)). The managing editor was so taken with this reportage, he hired my brother. Though not first as a feature writer but as a sports reporter. My brother's first column in my hometown newspaper was on sports and was called "Seein' Red," because my brother had red hair and was very out-front in his promoting the local athletic teams, of which we had many with a high school that had a state-championship football team and three colleges all with full athletic programs, two of those colleges sporting nationally acclaimed athletic teams--one Hardin-Simmons University with a nationally ranked football team during World War II and in the early 1950s led by their great quarterback John "Model T" Ford; and one Abilene Christian College that had one of the world's finest track and field teams, especially their world-record-holding relay teams--culminating in world renown during the Melbourne Olympics in 1953 when ACC's amazing Bobby Morrow won three gold medals and anchored the relay teams to two gold medals and two World's Records.

From being a reporter on our hometown newspaper, my brother was launched on his writing career, a career that carried him to a national fame that I could never duplicate--in the 1980s he hit his greatest fame as a commentator on the McNeil-Lehrer News Hour, Jim Lehrer once being my brother's protege.

My grandmother, my brother, and I weren't "educated" writers. In other words, we weren't "taught" how to write. Writing just simply came natural to us. My grandmother's son, my Uncle Uncle, was a good writer, too, though nobody knew he was until after he died and his wife sent my grandmother a portfolio of short stories he had written, the best one one about being a barnstorming pilot in an open-cockpit bi-winged Curtis Jenny--the best part of that story about his trying to fly over a 14,000-foot Rocky Mountain peak when his plane's altimeter only show the plane capable of going 11,000 feet.

Being around a library that was run by your grandmother inscribed you with literary ambitions; growing up hearing that grandmother and watching her typing day-in and day-out, usually writing poetry, but also I remember her at an advanced age tackling another novel (her first novel was published in 1944) also definitely influenced me toward writing. And she would talk writing with me when I'd ask her hundreds of questions about how she wrote.

And then one day in the 1950s, my brother sold two articles to The Atlantic Monthly, moved from my hometown paper over to Dallas, where he got a job as Book Editor of Dallas's largest newspaper, the Times Herald. As a book reviewer he received in the mail daily advanced copies of all kinds of books, nonfiction and fiction, to a point where at one time, right before the Kennedy Assassination (his editorials on the Kennedy Assassination gleaned him national attention and won him a several national awards), he was receiving hundreds of review copies a week. At that time, he claimed he was reading a book a day--7 books a week. Many a time I went to his house and he would let me go through his piles of books and pick out the ones I wanted--his only specification was that I read what I took. From those piles of books I found my writing heroes at the time, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, and my special writing hero, Thomas Wolfe (the original from North Carolina and not the white-suit-wearing fop from Richmond, Virginia). The Sun Also Rises for Hemingway; Gertrude Stein's Making of Americans, and my first Thomas Wolfe, The Web and the Rock, a posthumously published novel that arrived in Maxwell Perkins's office at Scribner's in a huge wooden crate, the original manuscript thousands upon thousands of pages long, Max Perkins himself editing the book down to a readable length. That book inflamed me--and along with my appreciation of Hemingway's and Gertrude Stein's simple let-flow way of writing--and after reading it, I set out to seriously become a serious writer.

And all of this review of books and their importance in my life was instigated after my pal, L Hat (www.languagehat.com) sent me an article on what libraries do with the overwhelming amount of books they sometimes have to cull off their limited shelves. Here's that article Bro. Hat sent me: http://www.cracked.com/article_19453_6-reasons-were-in-another-book-burning-period-in-history.html

Such an article makes me want to puke. How insane is burning books, especially rare Shakespeare editions, just because of rules and regulations? Every institution has its rules and regulations.
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New York City's Little Prick Billionaire Mayor Defends His Wall Street Brothers and Sisters
Occupation Wall Street here in New York City is driving our fair city's Plutocratic Mayor Mikey Bloomberg absolutely insane. This little-man prick--Wall Street's buying his stupid stock-analyzing software made him rich (Merrill-Lynch the first to buy into it), so hell yes he has to defend Wall Street, which makes him an accessory to piracy and thievery. This little rich prick recently warned us stupid-ass New Yorkers--he's divinely anointed you know, otherwise, how did he get so rich?--that HE will not tolerate the "wildness" of the Occupation Oakland--the pissed off Oaklanders had started a bonfire near the Port of Oakland, which they shut down earlier in the week, which led to some cars being set on fire and some bank windows broken and that reminded me of the "agent provocateurs" during the anti-Vietnam War protests. "That sort of violence will not be tolerate here," the meanly serious mayor said, that serious more-pious-than-thou look on his dumbass face, "I won't allow that to happen here."

I'm listening to this little privileged jerk lecturing We the People of New York City on what we should or should not do, a divinely inspired attitude of his that correlates with the idea that since he's so fucking wealthy, he must be directly connected to the Divine One. Mayor Mikey is Jewish, so we assume he does consider himself one of the highest of the Chosen Ones. Occupy Wall Street is a force against this little prick, who is supposed to surely be in his last year of office as mayor after he forced HIS City Council (whose female head is head-over-heels in love with this little prick) to authorize him to run for an illegal third term--an election he only won by 50,000 votes over an unknown Black man (Bill Thompson)--an election Little Mikey spent $100 million dollars out of his own pocket to buy.

Mayors! How did these pretenders get to be so fucking powerful? This little billionaire prick has been the same-ole-same-ole New York City mayor We the Citizens of New York always elect, i.e., Ed "How'm I Doin'" Crotch (Koch), Jimmie "Phony" Walker, Abe "Crybaby" Beame, Rudolph "Mussolini" Giuliani, William "Pampered Bill" O'Dwyer, John "Playboy" Lindsay, David "the Black Mayor" Dinkins. I mean why would a man worth billions of dollars (recent statements say Mikey's only worth 12 billion (I've seen estimates he's worth many more billions than that given he's still raking in millions a year from Bloomberg Ltd.) be interested in a job that pays at best a couple-a-hundred thousand a year, chicken feed in terms of our billionaire mayor's worth? The reason: POWER. This mayor has increased his wealth since he was first elected as a replacement for Rudi "Mussolini" Giuliani, who himself tried to rig it where he was our perpetual mayor--though the City Council denied Rudi the opportunity to run for an illegal third term.

Mayors. Who the hell needs them keiko-muckity-mucks? A city as large as New York City should be run by the citizens of NYC--like Mayor Bloomberg's rezoning this city in favor of his real estate developer pals--like Mayor Bloomberg's wrecking our public school system in favor of his charter-school-chartering pals. Truth is, Bloomberg hates Blacks and Latinos just as he also hates poor Whites--and he's rezoning Manhattan so that he can drive Blacks and Latinos and poor whites off the island but especially out of Harlem proper and East Harlem where the Latinos live--Harlem being a well of wealth for real estate developers, EXCEPT, first they've got to drive those god-damn N-worders and Spicks out of that real-estate-developing goldmine. Bloomberg has also rezoned the shorelines of the East River so his developer pals can build 40 hi-rise luxury apartment buildings and executive hotels and luxury condos all up and down that river's shorelines.

Pardon me while I rinse my mouth out with soap to get my profane dislike of this Plutocrat mayor off my immoral mind.

In the meantime, the presidential election bullshit is being flung far and wide, Obama now appealing to his grass-roots base for funds again---Hey, Obama, I thought you favored those thirty-five-thousand-a-plate dinners over the stupid grass-roots idiots who you say you understand their frustrations over these Wall Street crooks and their continuing to be criminals without any fear of being punished but things ain't gonna change so We the People might as well get used to Wall Street crimes to continue full blast and with guaranteed funds for them should they get too big to fail again.

Sorry, folks, but I can't get US politics out of my hair these day! I mean politicians like Mayor Bloomberg feel because they can raise billions of dollars from us to run for a job that pays at most $400,000-a-year they are our dearest Big Daddy figures--we the stupid, the poor, the unsuccessful, the unambitious, the lazy, the ex-slaves, the illegal immigrants--the unpatriotic, the would-be terrorists, the friends of Palestine, the promoters of an Islamic takeover! Of course, they run for these positions because with multi-million-dollar campaign coffers whether they win or not they are elevated, these rather common-ordinary-already-rich men (and women)(the collected worth of Congress, I read last week, is now 4 billion dollars) to the entrance hall to the headquarters of the World's Power Elite.

Ah, Chaos! And when those solar flare storms hit us (starting they say for real in 2012) and all that projected plasma shoots down through this huge hole in our protective ozone layer now expanding widely over our North Pole and shuts down all electrical power it will leave We the People of the USA in the dark, in the cold or extreme heat, without any water, without any fresh food, without a chance in hell when all the nuclear power plants begin blowing up, unable to get any money out of our electric-dependent banks, unable to flee the Chaos since when our cars run out of gas and can't be refilled and the streets and bridges and highways will be jammed with escapees anyway--WHY, what writer isn't hopefully rejoicing over this coming disaster! Something to write about!

Claude Levi-Strauss said: " The world began without man, and it will end without him."

Henry Miller wrote: "The world dies over and over again, but the skeleton always gets up and walks."

Heinrich Heine wrote: "Wild, dark times are rumbling toward us, and the prophet who wishes to write a new apocalypse will have to invent entirely new beasts, and beasts so terrible that the ancient animal symbols of St. John will seem like cooing doves and cupids in comparison."

Kurt Vonnegut wrote: "What's going to happen is, very soon, we're going to run out of petroleum, and everything depends on petroleum. And there go the school buses. There go the fire engines. The food trucks will come to a halt. This is the end of the world."

thedoomsdaygrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

Existing in New York City on a Lot of EDGES and LEDGES

2011-11-02T19:18:00.000-07:00

Foto by tgw, New York City 2011
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Edges and Ledges
Awoke to a lot of cheering this morning. Cheering over Occupation Oakland and the Longshoremen shutting down the Port of Oakland--A STRIKE! These general assemblies of these Occupation efforts are getting smart. If workers don't show up for work, then what's the only alternative of the Power Elite (the owners of our corporations--their stockholders for whom their overpaid and overbonused CEOs are stooges--stooges to the Power Elite that is the true 1%--the 99% including some lower-class millionaires) is to use the force of the New York "Corporate Protecting" Police Department to quell these "childish" revolts, as our billionaire mayor considers these intruders into his dust? The working class and the unions waking up to see that Occupy Wall Street and Occupy Oakland and Occupy Chicago and Occupy Louisville, wherever that these modern-day hippies are everywhere and throwing new monkey wrenches into the traditional Capitalist works and the lowering of wages as the cause for all our woes--inspired further now by the marvelous Greek people who have forced their banker-ass-kissing politicians to have a referendum on the issue [now the pompous Greek prime minister is back-peddling on that deal], which is whether or not the Greeks sacrifice their salaries being lowered, their pensions being robbed, their taxes being raised while the wealthiest Greeks (including Greek bankers) pay no taxes at all, their being forced to buy military equipment--like submarines--they don't need, their being forced to sell their public lands, which includes being forced to privatize those beautiful and sacred Greek Islands and sacrifice them to a plethora of same-looking deluxe hi-rising same-old-same-old hotel chains that mock the Greek culture and plasterize and plasticize Greek history--like say how about a Trump City on Corfu? The Greek people are telling the Euro banks and the US banks (Goldman-Sachs is once again the pirating culprit in bringing down the Greek economy--they go about the world destroying economies with impunity) to go fuck themselves.

And how exciting it was this morning to hear that Jim Corzine, the former head of GOLDMAN-SACHS, the former New Jersey Senator, the former New Jersey Governor, has gone belly up in his new financial pirating enterprise! BANKRUPT! These big shot assholes privileged to pull off Bernie Madow schemes "legitimately," with We the People of the USA's blessing through our Congress and Executive branch, supported by the Supreme(ly dumb) Court, always excusing these "too big to fail" corruptions and giving them impunity from any kind of serious punishment, like a whole lot of prison time for a whole list of pirates like Jimmy Corzine. I'll bet you a mountain to a mole hill old rich-boy Jimmy didn't lose his private island retreats or his many mansions and condo apartments around the world; and I damn sure guarantee you Jimmy didn't lose any of his offshore bank accounts or his Swiss bank accounts; nor all those stocks and bonds in his wife's name and in the name of the Corzine Foundation.

I listened to some Occupy Wall Streeters ( a lot of whom are women--young women) rallying around themselves and I shivered with delight--these people realize we are now in a state of Chaos--Chaos which breeds anarchy--Chaos which has no respect for order of any kind--Chaos perhaps leading to a true Libertarian society--an anarchic society--the world in transition and out of immediate control.

It's not easy to live on a constant edge these days here in the largest city in the USA. I'm fortunate to being able to hang on to my sanity here and to so far being able to support myself, though I'm really living right on the poverty line--right in the middle of the thinnest of ices. Living in this metropolis that as Norman Mailer said isn't really a US city but rather a true international city, a city state, an Empire State unto itself.

I live in a building that has a mixed-bag population trying to survive in it: Chinese, Koreans, Vietnamese, Indians, Pakis, Afghanis, Africans (especially Nigerians and Guineans), Uruguayans (my new next-door neighbor is a beautiful young Uruguayan lady), Ukrainians, Moscovites, Georgians (the nation not the state), Australians (I met a new tenant on my floor the other morning who is from Australia--married to a Chinese woman, or so he let me know uninvitedly), French, and Spanish (including Puerto Ricans, Caribbean Islanders (West Indians they were once tagged), and South Americans)--I'm sure I could go on through another dozen nations given the time. Even my landlord is a Persian (Iranian) Jew with a thick Middle-Eastern accent. White people like me are a minority in this united nations building, though there are more and more of US piling into the joint on a daily basis.

Momentarily stable, any change in any of the many winds blowing through this city could change all our situations on the spur of a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, to be biblically poetic.

Individually, at my age, I'm becoming aware of possible attacks on my body I used to never worry about. Like a sore that doesn't heal. Like a sudden pain in my neck when I bend it a certain way. Like a chest pain hitting me from out of nowhere--a gas attack like I have never had in my life happening while I am simply walking up the street like I have done a thousand times before with no problem. Or in the just every-day necessity of hustling about the town, you just never know what will happen. I've been hit twice crossing New York streets, once downtown by a guy in a Cadillac and once recently in the neighborhood by a Korean gentleman in a pick-up truck. I've also almost been hit several other times. Or there's also the possibility of a police stop-and-search action--700,000 citizens, mostly Black and Spanish, were stopped and searched by the New York City-State Police Department this past year none of which led to any significant arrests. Or I could perhaps look at a crazy too long on a subway and the crazy see me as a demon and come at me with a butcher knife. I was riding the subway one time when a crazy sitting there in his pee-soaked clothes letting his eyes roll all over place, drooling, smelling, suddenly opened a paper sack and pulled out a brand new meat-clever-looking knife, all shiny and stainless steely bright, and this crazy began admiring the sharpness of the blade by running his fingers delicately over it. Or, you never know--like say you went down to give support to the Occupy Wall Streeters and some cop doesn't like your looks and next thing you know you've been tassered and arrested and due processed. Your life ruined with conjured up accusations and court appearances and your mug shot put on a police file along with a record of your misbehavior and you're fingerprinted and there go your fingerprints into the Universal Cop File. You see how on the edge We the People of the USA are all over the USA?

I was once walking in Midtown Manhattan and in front of me I heard a sudden quaking sound and then screams of all kinds, and dust roiling up in a little whirly kind of cloud. And when I got close enough to ask what was going on, I found out a young man, an actor on his way to a rehearsal, had been beaned by a beam--a small steel beam that had fallen off a skyscraper construction site--this before these sites were required to use netting under the floors they are working on. During that same period I read of an old lady who got beaned and knocked off the mortal coil by a hammer dropping from one of those skyscraper construction sites. And that reminds me of the scene in Only the Dead Know Brooklyn where Thomas Wolfe (the original Thomas Wolfe from North Carolina and not the white-suit-wearing fop from Richmond) is walking down Fifth Avenue and a jumper nearly falls on him--splats before him on that Fifth Avenue sidewalk. And workers in New York City skyscraper office buildings see jumpers all the time. My ex-wife who worked in a Park Avenue office building once while looking out her 24th-floor office window was shocked to suddenly see a jumper fly by, so close and alluring, she followed the rest of his flight on down until he crashed and splatted naked, his clothes blown clean off him, on a projecting out second-floor roof. I myself while working in Rockefeller Center was called to the front windows of the office one day by the company secretary to be shown where a jumper had jumped out a 30th-floor window of the old Time-Life Building (on Rockefeller Plaza, a privately owned street) and had landed on the roof of a parked car--and we could see the poor bastard (turned out he was a stock broker) laying there splatted to death in the cradle of the indented roof of that car.

Several of my friends watched horrified during the evolution of 9/11 as people were jumping out of those burning straight-down-falling towers--some from the highest floors--the 100s--above the flames, going to their deaths being consumed by the very flames they were trying to sail over and somehow suddenly take to flight in order to miraculously save themselves.

I live on the eleventh floor. When I first started taking photographs out one of my windows, I found that by a certain manipulation of my body, I could hang off that window's ledge safely braced by hooking my shoe on to an iron bar device jutting out from the brick surrounding this window and locking my free hand into a large hook-like hardware that the old window washers used to hook their safety belts onto. By this precarious hanging, I got some of my perfect cloudy sky shots--like the photograph that is at the head of this post. Just the other day, I contemplated trying that act once again when I just happened to notice that iron bar I used to depend on for my life is really just hanging on itself by the bare threads of its rusting bolts in that decaying brick. I reached out and touched it and it was loose as hell. No more window-ledge aerial photos from me. Eleven floors down is a scary sight when you contemplate it seriously and not defy it just for a good photograph.

And this afternoon as I sat here doing some work on my Lester Young stage play, I heard a loud buzzing, and then an explosion, and I turned around just in time to see sparks flying out of one of wall electrical outlets. FIRE! The always unholiest of threats against tenants in NYC apartments. I rushed down and reported it to the office and they said they'd sent someone up. But no one showed up and now the day is passing into tomorrow so I'm apprehensive about going to bed--FIRE! Fire scares me more than anything. I've had members of my family burn to death--two especially whose fiery deaths have haunted my imagination since I was a child and heard the stories of their burning to death.

I try to watch commercial television to take my mind off my fears but television is so corrupt, so predictable, so inane, so lower than I, which is an elitist attitude, but then I accept the role as the Elitist--though I'm not a Power Elitist.

According to the Marxists, the problem is wages--wages being lowered--too large a work force for the fewer and fewer jobs--jobs that once existed in abundance in this great land of the free and home of the brave. Today's wages don't go anywhere--whatever wages we can earn are soon eaten up by taxes and cell-phone bills and credit card bills and medical bills and insurance costs and mortgage payments and automobile upkeep bills and higher and higher fuel prices--with the banks and financial institutions sucking our money out of us while fixing it so our industries can be shipped off locks, stocks, and barrels to countries like China or Indonesia or South Vietnam where people are happy to have a 14-hour-a-day job paying 50-cents an hour--and they can live high on their style of hog on $7.00-a-day--or in China men, women, and children are supposedly eager to work for like $3.00-a-day.

"It's'a hard...it's'a hard...it's'a hard rain's gonna fall." And the rain is already falling pretty damn hard. A Chaotic hail storm. The cosmos predicting a storm of an even more disastrous threat coming possibly any day now, a solar flare storm, a solar plasma storm, a storm that can come bowling down one of the universal alleys and knock down all ten pens of the world's energy sources--shutting down electrical grids--shutting down satellite transmissions and mirrorings--shutting down the nuclear power plants--shutting off the water to them that cools them down and keeps them from blowing sky high. And here in New York City, we are privileged to live only 25 miles down river from one of the most dangerous nuclear plants in the world, the Indian Point Nuclear Power Plant built by Con-Edison back in the 70s, the same kind of plant like the plant in Fukashima, Japan, that is still blowing sky high as I type this though you'd never know a damn thing about it if you depended on our Power Elite-owned news and information services and certainly no help from our government in terms of recognizing the possible consequences of such a solar display of power! Afterall, the Sun is our true God and Savior all rolled into one ball of star fire.

From the Wisdom of Thorstein Veblen
"The life of man in society, just like the life of other species, is a struggle for existence, and therefore it is a process of selective adaptation [written at the height of the debate going on over Darwin's recently published theories of natural selection, those misinterpreted as meaning life goes mostly to the "survival of the fittest"]. The evolution of social structure has been a process of natural selection of institutions. The progress which has been and is being made in human institutions and in human character may be set down, broadly, to a natural selection of the fittest habits of thought and to a process of enforced adaptation of individuals to an environment which has progressively changed with the growth of the community and with the changing institutions under which men have lived."

These institutions becoming humans themselves--built out of the "fittest habits of thought"--traditions or "noble experiments," as Ortega y Gasset might put it. Veblen writing at the same time the Supreme(ly dumb) Court was making corporations citizens of the USA--this at the time of John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil was evolving into an oligarchy--making the Rockefellers the most Plutocratic family America has so far produced, a family that is still at the core of this bad apple this country has rotted into thanks to this one family's greed and self-important continuance--the original Plutocrat's stolen monies still supporting the survival of this otherwise totally unfit family whose weakling great grand-sons-and-daughters--like JFK and tacky Jackie's worthless daughter still having power enough to be active in political thought and direction and in the controlling of our largest corporations thanks to their stockholding presence in the Chase Manhattan Bank empire put together by that sad old worthless Rockefeller named David, an empire whose dabbling in this crooked derivatives market bankrupted it as We the Stupid People of the USA came to its rescue with trillions of taxpayer monies (of debt to the Communist Chinese actually) and allowed it to merge with that other family of ruthless pirates, that of J.P. Morgan (and whatever happened to Morgan Stanley?)--but still on the edge of bankruptcy.

Back to Veblen: "It is to be noted then, although it may be a tedious truism that the institutions of today--the present accepted scheme of life--do not entirely fit the situation of today. At the same time, man's present habits of thought tend to persist indefinitely, except as circumstances enforce a change. These institutions which have thus been handed down, these habits of thought, points of view, mental attitudes and aptitudes, or what not, are therefore themselves a conservative factor. This is the factor of social inertia, psychological inertia, conservatism.

"Social structure changes, develops, adapts itself to an altered situation, only through a change in the habits of thought of the several classes of the community; or in the last analysis, through a change in the habits of thought of the individuals which make up the community. The evolution of society is substantially a process of mental adaptation on the part of individuals under the stress of circumstances which will no longer tolerate habits of thought formed under and conforming to a different set of circumstances in the past."

From chapter 8 of Thorstein Veblen's great AMERICAN classic: The Theory of the Leisure Class. Leisure class another term for unproductive human beings.

theamericanclassicgrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

Existing in New York City: Fulfilling My Destiny

2011-10-31T06:38:00.000-07:00

Foto by tgw, New York City 2011
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The Psyche; the Soul: Fiction or Fact
James Hillman just died. Who the heck is James Hillman? Well, James was a remarkable human being, a Four-Square Jungian whose tome of important recognition almost won him a Pulitzer Prize. James was the founder and high-priest of Archetypal Psychology.

James was born in 1926. After serving in the Navy in WWII, he went to the Sorbonne first, then Trinity College in Dublin, ending up getting his PhD from the University of Zurich where he studied with Carl Jung and that way got involved with the Carl Jung Institute from which he earned his analyst's diploma and then became the first Director of Studies, a position he held until 1980 when he came back to the USA and settled in Texas.

What is Archetypal Psychology? It's a wee bit beyond Jungian psychology--far out in the world of the soul, or as Hillman used it, the psyche.

From Hillman's Wikipedia entry:

"Archetypal psychology is a polytheistic psychology, in that it attempts to recognize the myriad fantasies and myths (gods, goddesses, demigods, mortals and animals) that shape and are shaped by our psychological lives [pure Jungian thinking]. The ego is but one psychological fantasy within an assemblage of fantasies. It is part of the Jungian psychology tradition and related to Jung's original Analytical psychology but is also a radical departure from it in some respects.

"Whereas Jung’s psychology focused on the Self, its dynamics and its constellations (ego, anima, animus, shadow), Hillman’s Archetypal psychology relativizes and deliteralizes the ego and focuses on psyche, or soul, and the archai, the deepest patterns of psychic functioning, "the fundamental fantasies that animate all life" (Moore, in Hillman, 1991)."

I love that: "the archai, the deepest patterns of psychic functioning, 'the fundamental fantasies that animate all life.'" Human beings searching for this thing they call the soul. And Hillman comes to the soul the right way, through Western philosophy, of course going back to Plato. Plato insisted the "good" in man was what led him toward a god (perfection), what led him toward higher planes, what led him toward heaven--a simple ancient way of explaining the superior nature of some MEN--Plato's world was a male world--and the inferior nature of others. Plato owned slaves. Slaves were necessary in those days in order for the capturers of slaves to progress, build their cities, etc.--just like slaves built early New Amsterdam and eventually early New York City.

Some things Hillman taught were brilliant in terms of Jungian progressive thinking. From an interview with Scott London (see www.scottlondon.com/interviews/hillman.html), Hillman brilliantly deduces the current situation in psychotherapy:

"Hillman: I'm not critical of the people who do psychotherapy. The therapists in the trenches have to face an awful lot of the social, political, and economic failures of capitalism. They have to take care of all the rejects and failures. They are sincere and work hard with very little credit, and the HMOs and the pharmaceutical companies and insurance companies are trying to wipe them out. So certainly I am not attacking them. I am attacking the theories of psychotherapy. You don't attack the grunts of Vietnam; you blame the theory behind the war. Nobody who fought in that war was at fault. It was the war itself that was at fault. It's the same thing with psychotherapy. It makes every problem a subjective, inner problem. And that's not where the problems come from. They come from the environment, the cities, the economy, the racism. They come from architecture, school systems, capitalism, exploitation. They come from many places that psychotherapy does not address. Psychotherapy theory turns it all on you: you are the one who is wrong. What I'm trying to say is that, if a kid is having trouble or is discouraged, the problem is not just inside the kid; it's also in the system, the society."

Yes, Hillman is right, the problem is not YOU--the problem is SOCIETY.

Before I got into Sociology (the "science" of common sense), I dabbled in Psychology--especially a course in Experimental Psychology. Due to the teacher I had, I found the course boring as hell. First of all, the environment was a factor: the class room was hot, stuffy--this in the days before every building and home had to have air-conditioning--plus the decor of the classroom was what in those days was called "eye-ease" green, which in my way of thinking meant the color "eased the eyes" into sleepiness. Plus the professor spoke so softly it was truly hard to endure one of his lectures without at some point in it, finding yourself wandering off into dreamland (it could well have been a dream analysis class). I used to have to take 2 caffeine tablets (No Doze tablets they were branded) before each class and even then, it was hard to stay awake. What I did learn in Experimental Psychology was one experiment where what you see is not what somebody else sees. In regards to this statement, one experiment involved colors and their influence on our desires. You know, for instance, that red is a very influential color in many aspects of our lives: Satan, for instance, is red--from the fires of his environment, one assumes. The current drink: Red Bull, emphasizes the fact that if you down one of these little cans of reconstituted Gator Ade, you'll have the energy of not just a bull, but of a red bull, a charging bull, a bull snorting fire. How I wish I had been under the tutelage of a thinker like James Hillman.

Here's some more brilliant thinking from Hillman via the Scott London interview:

"Hillman: I've found that contemporary psychology enrages me with its simplistic ideas of human life, and also its emptiness. In the cosmology that's behind psychology, there is no reason for anyone to be here or do anything. We are driven by the results of the Big Bang, billions of years ago, which eventually produced life, which eventually produced human beings, and so on. But me? I'm an accident — a result — and therefore a victim."

From whence comes trauma?

Now dig this from Hillman:

"Hillman: Yes, we worship the idea of the "self-made man" — otherwise we'd go on strike against Bill Gates having all that money! We worship that idea. We vote for Perot. We think he's a great, marvelous, honest man. We send money to his campaign, even though he is one of the richest capitalists in our culture. Imagine, sending money to Perot! It's unbelievable, yet it's part of that worship of individuality.

"But the culture is going into a psychological depression. We are concerned about our place in the world, about being competitive: Will my children have as much as I have? Will I ever own my own home? How can I pay for a new car? Are immigrants taking away my white world? All of this anxiety and depression casts doubt on whether I can make it as a heroic John Wayne-style individual."

Hillman's gift to American Psychology he called "the acorn theory." From the tiny acorn comes the mighty oak. This he conceived as a myth, based on Plato's saying all men are born with a destiny--or what Plato called a paradigm. The soul to Hillman like Plato is the prime mover in that destiny--which in some instances is called "the calling." A calling within your character that supposedly leads you to your destiny and from which the beauty within you is revealed.

One final gem from Scott London's interview with Hillman:

"Hillman: I think we're miserable partly because we have only one god, and that's economics. Economics is a slave-driver. No one has free time; no one has any leisure. The whole culture is under terrible pressure and fraught with worry. It's hard to get out of that box. That's the dominant situation all over the world.

"Also, I see happiness as a by-product, not something you pursue directly. I don't think you can pursue happiness. I think that phrase is one of the very few mistakes the Founding Fathers made. Maybe they meant something a little different from what we mean today — happiness as one's well-being on earth."

Yes, Amen, and all of that, Mr. Hillman. Economics and Economists are fucking up all our destinies no matter where we find ourselves existing. Even in the pits of the worst society in the world there is still that calling, that acorn within us that wants to grow into a mighty oak, that which is our destiny.

I studied Economics on the college level and later over at the Henry George School. As a Sociologist, I found Economics so deceiving. Economics (and Sociology for that matter) is based on statistics and oh how statistics can be made to lie. And I refer you back to my post on the deceitfulness of clinical trials in the establishment of new medicines--and all clinical trials are are statistics--measuring values. That the end result is "sort of true" means the whole concept is false from the very beginning.

I have always known my calling. I've known I wanted to be a writer from childhood. Did I want to be a successful writer? Not necessarily. I just wanted to write. I'm driven to write. The New Age is against me, of course, since today's young writers are totally off my page with these electronic books and these graphic novels and multilingual poetry. If I've failed as a published and self-sustaining writer, I succeeded in fulfilling my destiny. From my acorn has evolved the mighty oak that I am in my own imagination--like this blog--a novel blog whose main character is me,

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

A Little Taste of American Art:

Just Swing, 2001, by Lauren Camp (1966- ).
"Why do I make art about jazz? Because I love the way the music makes me feel.

"I am intrigued by the complete sound that comes from several instruments collaborating. I love the education I've gotten from listening and reading and looking with a critical ear and eye. When I listen, I hear colors and shapes. The sounds I hear are the designs I make with my threadwork. The colors I hear sometimes take my breath away. I like the friction of the colors and the way they sparkle like the music. My art form gives me a way to "play" what I hear – a chance to doodle and delight.

"When you think about it, jazz is just like me – creative, improvisational, sometimes moody, sometimes whimsical, curious, demanding, constantly in motion, roots in the blues but head in the clouds, fearless, fanciful, free."

Lauren Camp

Existing in New York City: Bare Minimum Existence

2011-10-28T04:35:00.000-07:00

Foto by tgw, the Sky Above New York City, Anytime; at Any Moment
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Bulletin: As we have said: Obama is withdrawing the troops from Iraq but that doesn't mean that insane war is over. Nope, not by a long shot. The Iraqi people want us out of Iraq--we don't want to leave, but their parliament is kicking us out--except there'll still be 100,000 contractors there and the world's largest embassy will be guarded by Hillary Clinton's private State Department army of 12,000 troops--but as Obama said in his political campaign speech the other night, he's bringing the Iraqi troops home. WELL, not quite. The Pentagon is now planning to keep troops in Kuwait. AHA! Plus, the Pentagon is proposing sending Navy ships and Air Force reconnaissance planes and drones and shit to the Persian Gulf. Leon Panetta, a Clintonista, says we must not only keep troops close to Iraq in case the Iraqis decide to become belligerent and anti-American again, but MAINLY, we are in the throes of planning for the big war with Iran, our new nation of anti-American devils. Now say the USA was surrounded by Iran's troops--say Iran had 200,000 troops in Canada--you catch our drift? Wouldn't we be paranoid and crazy as hell, same as the Iranians are now? Plus, Obama's administration is finally grooving its military way into Africa with a series of secret CIA drone bases within Kenya (where corruption is so blatant it is causing a food shortage and Kenyans are beginning to starve to death) and Ethiopia (now seemingly our dickboys in that area) and probably in the Sudan. Get ready for another WAR, We the People of the USA. Another expensive venture that will end up killing more and more just plain folks--and the bullshit keeps piling up.
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Say goodbye to: Roy Smalley, Jr.--I remember Roy as the Cubs's shortstop prior to Ernie Banks arrival on the MLB scene when Roy was traded to the Milwaukee Braves. Last I remember Roy, he was with the Phillies. His son, Roy, was a shortstop later with the Minnesota Twins. Roy Smalley, Jr., 85, American baseball player (Chicago Cubs, Milwaukee Braves, Philadelphia Phillies)
Say goodbye to: Emery Gulash, one of the great and early railroad filmmakers--shooting railroad videos from the age of Steam on into the diesel era:
DEARBORN, Mich. — Emery J. Gulash, 88, a prolific railroad photographer whose work lives on in dozens of books and video programs, died Friday, February 24. A Lansing, Mich., native who went on to a career with in drafting and management in the Detroit area with General Motors’ Fisher Body Division, Gulash was an early 35mm color-slide photographer, dating from his Army training days in Texas; he served in the Army Air Corps 1944-1946.

From the 1950s through the 1980s, Gulash traveled widely, shooting slides as well as 16mm color movies. Several years ago, as his health began to fail, he summoned publisher Bob Yanosey of Morning Sun Books to Michigan to turn over his slide collection, “so it has a good home,” and Gulash’s photos grace dozens of Morning Sun publications. Earlier, Gulash’s movies formed the basis for numerous video programs issued by John Koch’s Green Frog Productions.

"There is no secret in fortune making. All you have to do is buy cheap and sell dear, act with thrift and shrewdness and be persistent," Hetty Green (she inherited her father's fortune when she was 31. She became the richest woman in the USA from the 1860s until her death in 1916, worth in today's values at over 1 billion bucks).

Being a Descendant of "The Witch of Wall Street"
My father, an honest man, often told tales of what he declared to be our distant-past relative, Hetty Green, known around New York City and the Financial District as "The Witch of Wall Street." My father, this honest man, always ended his tales of this 19th-Century multimillionaire woman by emphasizing that Aunt Hetty's greatest piece of advice to the world was "NEVER trust bankers!" [This not quite true; Hetty kept her money in the Chemical Bank of New York--she had her own vault there, which the Chemical folks let her use as an office.] And, yes, my father, that honest man, had a coffee-can stash of cash. As a kid, I was just sure as hell he had hidden large sums of money somewhere because every time the bank statements came and my mother tried to balance the family books, inevitably I'd hear her asking him, "Karl, what is this, you only put three hundred dollars in the bank again this month? What the hell happened to that check Mr. Murphy gave you the other day?" And my dad inevitably had a sudden memory loss, like "What check?...Walter Murphy gave me a check? He didn't give me a check, that was only an order for some more work." Then my mother would accuse my dad of lyin' like a dog. Surely she was wrong, my father, the honest man, a lyin' man?...but then surely he was when it came to his finances. Remember, it wasn't Honest Abe who said "I can never tell a lie." And honesty to We the People of the USA is to turn found fortunes in to the local police precinct rather than hiding them in your attic until the coast is clear to spend them. In that Honest Abe sense of honesty, my father, the honest man, fit the bill to a tee. He once found on the sidewalk in front of his store a leather pouch with around fifty-thousand dollars in small bills along with a bank deposit slip. And rather than letting the evil Wolfe inside him rule, his sense of Honest Abe honesty prevailed and he took the leather pouch to its intended bank and turned it in. What did his honesty get for him? Zero. That's what. His honest way of thinking suspecting he was in line for a big reward. All he got was a systematic "Thanks a lot, see ya later"--that his only reward. I swore right then and there that if such an occasion happened in my life, I'd be damned if I'd turn it in. Fifty-thousand bucks in cash! Whooo-boy. That was a dream find for a poor boy like me--to hell with honesty.

My father and mother had a lot of banker friends. One couple in particular. A rancher couple on whose ranch oil was discovered. So much oil and a return of so much money, this couple decided to open their own bank. Which they did, The First State Bank of my hometown. This was a close friendship, especially between my mother and the woman, "Miss Addie," who I remember as fat, jolly, and very satisfied with life.

Also one of my dad's closest high school friends became president of my hometown's largest bank, the Farmers & Merchants Bank, where my father, the honest man, evidently allowed old Aunt Hetty's warning to go unheeded. It's where he banked all of his life. My mother, on the other hand, whose own mother and her mother never trusted anybody much less bankers, couldn't stand my father's bank-president friend, and kept her money in the other of the largest banks in my hometown, the Citizen's National Bank.

Another tale my father would tell at times had to do with checks. He swore up and down he'd written checks on everything from paper sacks, pieces of wallpaper, flour sacks, the back of one of his dress shirts, on a sheet of schoolboy writing paper...you name it, he'd written a check on it. "The bank has to respect it as long as your signature matches your signature they have on file."

I was taught that banks originated in the business of the businessman in a town who had the largest safe. That these guys began to allow customers to store their savings in their safes for a fee. The idea grew so rapidly, that soon these businessmen had to set aside a whole other building for this "banking" business; thus the origin of banks. I know now this much later in life that the origin of banks came along with the dawning of time--the idea evolving out of the Mesopotamian Ziggerats (the first pyramidal skyscrapers) and the ancient priest accountants and keepers of the city-state's wealth and assets (that given unto the heaven-dwelling gods). Math must have originated in the accounting world of those days.

So where did banks get their original monies? From depositors. Especially from the concept of the savings account where depositors could stash any excess monies they might make where it could be held safely in the bank's vault for them any time they needed it. Thus bankers became crooks when they realized they had all this cash in their vaults--they were paying interest on it--banks did pay interest on even checking accounts in those early days--so why couldn't they take that money and turn it into IOUs--the banker figuring out how to use the money in his vaults as investment capital. Also, the concept of using depositors's money to loan out to other depositors--MY POINT--I know, I'm over explanatory--what!--but anyway, my point is, banks would go broke over night if depositors withdrew their money, shut down their savings accounts--then quit paying on their loans, etc. Wow, the power of the people! Remember the Civil Rights and Anti-Vietnam War cry of "Power to the People!"--and the People's Parks that were started...my generation...and what happened to those revolutionaries? I remember hearing J. Edgar Hoover, that cross-dressing pervert of a cowardly man, say that even though it might take 20 years, the FBI would eventually get every one of those revolutionary punks--and, by God, that old perverted cross-dressing queen was telling it like it is--and sure enough, 20 or so years later, the FBI had gotten and put out of business, Eldridge Cleaver, H. Rapp Brown, Huey Newton, Stokely Carmichael, Timothy Leary, Abbie Hoffman, Fred Hampton, Martin Luther King, Robert Kennedy...think about it.

Of course governments don't want their people to have any power. Of course the 1% who own us lock, stock, and barrel don't want us occupying any space near their space! Of course the CEO of General Electric (an Obama pal) doesn't want the Occupy Wall Streeters occupying any space near him, even the space across the street from the GE Building, which is the old RCA Building, John D. Rockefeller's proudest tower in his private empire in the very heart of Manhattan. The RCA Building once the home castle of a man they called General Sarnoff, the Russian immigrant who not only stole radio from Marconi but also stole television from Philo Farnsworth, the Utah inventor.

When we think of the Rockefellers, we think of oil, but oil wasn't where the Rockefellers did their crookedest best. Here's a 1976 article from educate-yourself.org entitled "The Family That Preys Together Stays Together." An article on at that time just how the Rockefellers stole most of their wealth and their Power-Elite control over most of the major corporations of this country (think about it--the Rockefellers held 5% stock still in Exxon (originally Esso (Eastern States Standard Oil)) in 1975 before this Standard Oil company combined with another Standard Oil company, Mobil (Socony (Standard Oil Company of New York)-Mobil (originally Magnolia Oil Company of Texas)--remember that scam when Exxon and Mobil were threatening to go out of business if they couldn't merge! So We the People of the USA amazingly put up no argument when our cowardly lion Congress and Justice Department said sure, go ahead, merge--so today what's the biggest Capitalist-pig company in the world? Anyway, read all about this family of money hoarders, worshipers of Mammon--those who know that MONEY IS THE ROOT OF ALL POWER! A fictional root according to true Economics laws since money is simply a means of exchange. From "The Family That Preys Together Stays Together" (1976):

And yet, incredibly, oil is not even the Rockefellers' biggest business. That honor is reserved for international banking. The Rockefeller family banks are the First National City Bank and the Chase Manhattan Bank. The Chase Manhattan is the third largest banking establishment in the world; and while only number three', it is by far the most influential.

The largest bank in the world is Bank of America in California, inventor of the bank credit card, Bank Americard, which now has 39 million cardholders worldwide. Bank of America became a giant through branch banking in California, where it has over 1,000 offices. Until recently, however, when it linked is overseas operations with the Rothschilds of Europe, the Bank of America lacked international horsepower. Now it too has joined the internationalists' crusade for World Government.

Chase Manhattan was created by the union of the Rockefeller-owned Chase Bank with the Kuhn, Loeb controlled Manhattan Bank. The marriage has been a huge success for both families; in 1971 Chase Manhattan claimed $36 billion in assets. This is impressive enough, but the New York Times has pointed out that it is not the whole story:

". . a major portion of their [Chase Manhattan's business carried on through affiliated banks overseas is not consolidated on the balance sheet."

Time also emphasizes the immense power of the Chase Manhattan, noting that "The Chase has 28 foreign branches of its own, but more important, it has a globe encircling string of 50,000 correspondent banking offices."Fifty thousand correspondent banks around the world! if each correspondent bank were worth only a paltry $10 million, it would give Chase potential world wide clout of five hundred billion dollars ! Such a figure is simply incomprehensible. Unfortunately, it is probably a conservative estimate of Chase's power and influence.

Such financial clout would give the Rockefellers the ability to create an international monetary crisis over, night. Could it be that it is they who have been yo-yoing the price of gold, dollars and foreign currencies during the past few years-creating panics for most investors, but profits for themselves?

Every time an international monetary storm blows up hundreds of millions of dollars flow into European banks. When the storm subsides, those who were 'in the know' at the beginning have made enormous sums of money, That the Rockefellers have been very profitably involved through the Chase Manhattan Bank and its overseas facilities, seems more than reasonable.

By almost any standard, Chase Manhattan has become virtually a sovereign state. Except it has more money, than most. lt even employs a full-time envoy to the United Nations.

As just one illuminating statistic, during 1973 Chase board chairman David Rockefeller met with 27 heads of state, including the rulers of Russia and Red China, plus scores of lesser dignitaries. Not even Henry Kissinger, he of the - shuttle diplomacy - and much- publicized state dinners, can match Rockefeller's influence with the men at the top.

Chase Manhattan's annual reports contain much information detailing the worldwide expansion of the bank. lt has gone international on the grand scale. And it shows no signs of slowing down. In fact, Chase Manhattan is the undisputed world heavyweight champion when it comes to international banking.

The damn Power Elite know where the money flows like wine: in the financial world, the world of money trading and money exchanging and basing our whole economy on how the fucking New York Stock Exchange's daily auctioning off of millions upon millions of shares of every company rich enough to buy a seat on this Power Elitist-controlled bourse--trading floor--gambling casino--where millions and millions of shares are traded daily tax-free--yep, no stock transfer tax on any of these trades.

We the People of the USA can't buy groceries without paying a tax on them. We're even taxed on the food we eat when we eat out in restaurants. And the booze we drink. We are taxed on the property we own--a tax that is supposed to support our public school systems but doesn't. A nickel-a-trade stock transfer tax on stock trades would pay off the fucking national debt in a matter of a year or so.

We the Citizens of New York City pay taxes out our tired asses--in terms of payroll (earnings) tax, we're hit with a three-way slice out of our earnings right off the bat--the Federal government, the State of New York, and the City of New York slicing up our little pies. Plus, we pay a sales tax--now up around 9% now; plus if we have automobiles we pay outrageous bridge and tunnel tolls and highway tolls, which are taxes--here in New York City, the George Washington Bridge alone collects millions upon millions of dollars a day--money that is transferred by helicopter to the Port Authority counting room--this crooked as a snake at night New York-New Jersey Port Authority the Power-Elitist-controlled outfit that is wasting 20 billion of New Yorkers and New Jersyans tax dollars on this architectural embarrassment, #1 World Trade Center pink elephant, that so far has only two occupants, Conde Nast--given what amounts to free rent just to get them to commit to the building and the People's Republic of China (that's the old Red China...that's Communist China to you Baby Boomers). Plus we are insulted by the Bank of America and AIG Insurance building brand new skyscrapers up right in our tax-ripped-off faces--these crooked companies who pay no taxes; in fact, they get huge tax refunds every year; plus their well-heeled CEOs have their taxes so creatively accounted for, they pay only about 5% of their incomes in taxes while people working under them are paying 25% of their incomes on taxes. Working stiffs are still working the first 4 months of the year for the various governments into which they pay taxes.

The next revolution is the one begun already--a revolution against these world-ruling Power-Elite-owned (check out their foundations) financial institutions and banks.

By the way, last night's World Series game, #6, was one of the damndest, wildest, best baseball games I've ever seen. What a great sport baseball is, though it so pisses me off to see all the Bank of America advertisements all over both the Rangers and the Cardinals's stadiums--bankofamerica.com stenciled on all the railings around the dugouts--same thing stenciled along the back walls of the dugouts--then huge outfield signs declaring Bank of America as a sponsor of Major League Baseball.

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

A Little Taste of American Art:

Spring Landscape, 1910, by Chauncey Foster Ryder

From www.askart.com/
American Tonalist landscape painter, Chauncey Foster Ryder, was born in Danbury, Connecticut in 1868. In 1891, he moved to Chicago and began his artistic training at the Art Institute and at Smith's Art Academy.

After moving to Paris in 1901, Ryder enrolled at the Académie Julian, where he studied under Jean-Paul Laurens and Raphael Collin. He showed at the Paris Salon for the first time in 1903. During the four years that followed, he exhibited annually at the Salon. Although Ryder maintained a studio in Paris until 1910, he returned to America in 1907 and settled in New York, where he began to show at Macbeth Galleries.

Like many of his contemporaries, Ryder traveled during the summer months. Among his favorite haunts was the artists’ colony of Old Lyme, Connecticut, where he often stayed at the home of Miss Florence Griswold, a gathering place for artists working in the area. Ryder exhibited with the Lyme artists in 1910 and 1911 and was given the honor of painting one of the panels in the Griswold house dining room. During a stay in Old Lyme, he sold a painting to Mrs. Woodrow Wilson. In 1910, he established a home and studio in Wilton, New Hampshire, where he spent summers for the rest of his life. Wilton was also a base for Ryder to travel to sites in Massachusetts, Maine, and New Hampshire in search of painting subjects.

Existing in New York City: the World Series Going On While the World's in Serious Trouble

2011-10-24T20:36:00.000-07:00

Foto by tgw, New York City 2011
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Watching Baseball
For a private reason I'm watching the World Series this year. So far, in terms of baseball, I've enjoyed it. Two good managers, Ron Washington and Tony LaRusso. Ron Washington is a New Orleans native who was a shortstop with the Minnesota Twins back in the 80s--Ron admitted to using cocaine last year--so I'm new to him, though he's now taken the Rangers to the World Series two seasons in a row (they lost to the SF Giants last year). I've been aware of Tony LaRusso for many years now. When he was at Oakland, I couldn't stand him; he played Billy Ball out there--and then when he went to the Cardinals, I said good riddance and thought I'd never have to worry about him again--me being a dyed-in-the-wool American League aficianado since my youth. I didn't start as a Yankee fan. First I was a Philadelphia Athletics fan. I loved Connie Mack. But the Athletics during my youth were losers, Connie Mack being notorious for building up a championship team and then selling it off the next season to make money. I grew up with an older friend, his father called him Chinky, his name was Charles, who was an absolute Cardinals adorer. When we played kid baseball in his backyard (with a Spall-Ding and a miniature souvenir bat Chinky had gotten at a Fort Worth Cats game), he was always the Cardinals and I was always the Athletics--though Chinky tried to teach me that if I insisted on being an American League fan, I should drop the worthless Athletics and become a Yankees fan. Because of Chinky, that's exactly what I did: I dropped the Athletics and became a Yankees fan--and was a true Yankees fan up until George "Alzheimer's Poster Boy" Steinbrenner and his lucky general manager (really one of the worst in baseball) and his worthless son, Hank, trick-bagged Joe Torre, insulted him, told him if he stayed on he'd have to take a big cut in salary--Joe one of the greatest, if not the greatest, manager in baseball at the time. But, you see, George couldn't stand losers dammit and for the first time in many years, Joe and the Yankees lost to Cleveland in the seventh game of the AL Playoff game--Manny Rivera blowing the save--and the Yankees didn't make it to the World Series. Poor Joe. That year had been a tough one for him--especially after he was saddled with a bunch of old has-beens--like over-the-hill Johnny Damon and long-in-the-tooth Randy Johnson and finally steroid-loaded Roger Clemens--plus, Joe was also saddled with a bunch of Double-A ball pitchers, like Jabo Chamberlain (what happened to him?) and Phil Hughes--but don't get me started on that--besides, Joe's retired now and is living comfortably over in the New Jersey woods.

But, like I said, for private reasons, involving a woman I truly dig, I have watched every game of this year's World Series--and, believe it or not, though I like Ron Washington as a manager, I'm rooting for the Cardinals.

All us true baseball fans know it's all about pitching--steady pitching. Scoring is up to the hitters and so far, as is usual, these games have had both excellent and not-so-excellent-at-all pitching. Pitchers adjust after terrible outings and one way they adjust is by watching films of their games and seeing exactly where they made mistakes pitching to the opposing batters. Saturday night, the Cardinals totally clobbered the Rangers. Alfred Pujols, who there's no doubt is the best all-round hitter in baseball, hit three home runs in that game that ended 16-7 Cardinals trouncing of the Rangers. In the next two games (including tonight's), the Ranger pitchers figured Pujols out and he's gone 0-8, striking out tonight in the 9th inning with the tying run on base. The Cardinals were badly managed tonight--I mean, they left 13 or 14 dudes on base, their big hitters unable to come through--the Rangers turning awesome on them and taking a 3-2 lead in the Series as they go back to Saint Louis and have the sixth game--do or die for the Cards--Wednesday night (which is actually now, tomorrow night).

And oh how time doth fly.

What I've noticed watching the Series that has struck me as odd is the fact that neither of these teams has a Black star on it--they are both Latino-White teams--of course, I know, a lot of those Latinos, especially the Dominican Republicans, are really Blacks, but in the White man's baseball categorizing, they are considered Latins. The only Blacks on the Texans, for instance, are ancient bullpen ace, Don Oliver, and another ancient bullpenner, Arthur Rhodes. On the Cardinals? I swear, I didn't see one Black--that is, unless you consider all those Latinos Blacks.

I hate the Texas Rangers with a passion because of their total respect for that little asshole, G.W. Bush. I mean that killer creep threw out the first ball in Sunday night's game and he and Pickles have been there right behind home plate in the good seats with Nelson Ryan, who is now the Rangers's CEO.

Another curious thing I'm finding in baseball today is how when the seventh-inning stretch rolls around and they used to sing or play "Take Me Out to the Ball Game," they now play or have a soloist sing "God Bless America," all done up with military geeks standing at attention and American flags proudly waving about--and I'm wondering, what the hell does the military and some geeky man in a military uniform singing "God Bless America" have to do with baseball? Could it be millionaire baseball owners and their millionaire wives and sons and daughters and all the millionaire players (and they all are millionaires, even the second-raters) feel guilty about not having to worry about their fucking asses having to be put on the firing line in all the stupid wars we are currently involved in? And what has yowling up to this White Man's God asking him to bless America done for We the People of the USA? Is this failing and rapidly falling economy this God's way of blessing us? Is the ruthless running over us by our ruling Power Elite this God blessing us? Is our getting our asses clobbered in 5 or 6 warring fronts this God blessing us? Plus, as I always ask whoever these people are who come up with this patriotic shit, what God is this God that is supposed to be blessing America? And does this America include Latin Americans? Mexicans? Dominican Republicans? Venezuelans? The Japanese ballplayers?--is this their God blessing us? How utterly moronic this aspect of baseball is. This was started I think by that god-damn George Steinbrenner who after 9/11 in a grand show of his personal patriotism started playing that god-damn awful Kate Smith singing that God-awful song during the seventh inning stretch.

I pray, "Please, God, whichever one you are, please quit blessing America."

Also, in terms of commercials during the game: first off, I was surprised that one of the big sponsers of this year's series is something called Jenny O--a turkey meat company--though it's hard to figure out just what Jenny is--she seems to be promoting turkey burgers, but what she is and where she comes from is beyond me. Also, I'm insulted by the Bank of America proudly touted as a World Series sponsor--using the money they stole from We the People to blow it advertising during the World Series--they advertise and still they are bankrupt--with President Obama recently guaranteeing these thieving bastards a 75 billion-dollar backing of these bastards still doing this fucking derivatives scheme shit--foreclosing like madmen on poor people's homes and car loans and going after their kids when these kids and these families can't keep up with the ever-increasing interest on those ungodly student loans.

I thought it kind of cute today to find out that Wal-Mart was cutting back on their workers's health-care benefits (I didn't know Wal-Mart (and Wal-Mart of China) gave health-care benefits). I also heard, and I don't know if it's true, that Wal-Mart pays such low wages they give their new employees food stamp applications as part of the coming-on-board package. Come on, folks, STOP BUYING ALL THAT CRAPPY COMMUNIST-CHINESE-PRODUCED CRAP THAT WAL-MART SELLS! Do you know how many American businesses Wal-Mart has put out of business through their Chinese branch? Rubbermaid is one I know of. Remember Rubbermaid products? Wal-Mart went after them and drove them under. Now all those products are made in Commie China.

Another curious thing about the commercials during the World Series--the number of foreign-made products galore--especially the automobile ads. I'm especially pissed at Jennifer Lopez (what a waste of talent) doing these Fiat commercials. We the People of the USA lost 2 billion dollars bailing out Chrysler Motors, which had been driven into the ground by being owned by the Nazi car company Daimler-Benz, only to find out after our President announced Chrysler had paid back its bail-out money--all but 2 billion dollars--he further announced that Chrysler Motors was now owned lock, stock, and barrel by Fiat, the Italian car company. Fiat and, of all things, the Canadian government had been involved in this bail-out. (Shouldn't that puzzle We the People?) That should really piss off We the People. And there's Jennifer Lopez boogie-ing around her old Bronx neighborhood in this little piece of Fiat shit car--the worst cars made--a car you know damn good and well Jennifer Lopez wouldn't be caught dead in in real life!

I love the new Volkswagen (Herr Hitler's own design) commercials--"Das Auto," they now call their little tin-fiberglass cars.

I also find car commercials that are bragging now how they get 35 mpg on the road interesting. Especially since I had a 1962 Renault back in the late sixties that got 35 mpg in town and 40 mpg on the road. They've had a carburator for a hundred years that could get up to 100 mpg--some motorcycles used to get 100 mpg easily.

Another commercial that pisses me off is the Viagra commercial that uses Chester Burnett (the Howling Wolf)'s "Smokestack Lightnin'" as its background music. This handsome actor stud, who obviously can't get it up, is seen commandeering this very fancy sail boat--now you're thinking if you're a man, any dude that handsome and with that big a sail boat surely gets more than his share of seafaring cuckoos's nests, so, poor bastard if he suffers from erectile dysfunction! So, yes, it is worth his chancing blindness by taking Viagra--as long as he doesn't suffer from one of those 4-hour-long erections the Viagra folks warn us men about at the end of that stupid commercial. I don't think the Howlin' Wolf had any trouble getting it up.

Anyway, I have a night off from the World Series tonight--so I'll just let baseball drift off out of my head today and lay back and dig some Pee Wee Russell, a musician long dead now, who I am finding more and more fascinating day by day.

Pee Wee Russell (from Bill Crow's Website--see it in The Daily Growler blog list)

Here's what Gunther Schuller wrote about Russell: "Clarinetist Pee Wee Russell...was one of the most original figures in jazz history; he never did quite fit into any of the established stylistic molds, and he maintained his unique identity throughout a long career, covering at least three major periods in jazz." Later, in reviewing Russell's playing on a certain record, Schuller wrote: "At first hearing one of these Russell solos tended to give the impression of a somewhat inept musician, awkward and shy, stumbling and muttering along in a rather directionless fashion. It turns out, however, upon closer inspection that such peculiarities--the unorthodox tone, the halting continuity, the odd note choices--are manifestations of a unique, wondrously self-contained musical personality, which operated almost entirely on its own artistic laws. ... To which one needs to add, for those uninitiated into the special world of Pee Wee Russel's music, that he was not just some intriguing, freak, oddball eccentric: he was also one of the most touching and human players jazz has ever known."

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

A Little Taste of American Art:

Oil on Canvas, by Charles Ellsworth "Pee Wee" Russell (1906-1969)

Existing in New York City: Listening to LIES

2011-10-23T07:24:00.000-07:00

Foto by tgw, New York City 2011
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Advertising Is All Lies
One of the things I learned working in the pharmaceutical advertising game--my office was on Madison Avenue, too--was when you are writing any kind of ad copy, you are exaggerating the importance, utility, and value of the product you are actually SELLING. I worked for many decades in back-office advertising situations, back where all the crunching work is done. Back where the concepts are thought up. Back where the product is given a brand--yes, it comes from branding cattle. Marking your possessions. Putting your brand on your possessions. Possessions you intend one day on SELLING. From the brand comes the product itself--giving the brand a physical body. In terms of pharmaceutical advertising, the brand's physical body is the drug. This is a drug that has been formulated in a biochemical laboratory. It comes to light as a chemical formula. That chemical formula has a name depending on the chemicals biochemically blended into what these biochemists intended it to do in terms of its mechanism of action influence on what has been diagnosed as a disease of a particular type whether organic or systemic, blah, blah, blah. The pharmaceutical ad writer is given this chemical formula along with all of the clinical trials (pharmaceutical companies keep active a team of doctors they pay big bucks to conduct these clinical trials, blind studies, where a group of people suffering from a certain disease are given either this experimental drug or a sugar pill, a placebo). From all of this biochemical and clinical trial information, the pharmaceutical ad writer and his team go about giving this drug a reason for being, an efficacy, a brand name and in parentheses its biochemical (generic) name--i.e.:

ZOLOFT® (sertraline hydrochloride) is a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) for oral administration. It has a molecular weight of 342.7. Sertraline hydrochloride has the following chemical name: (1 S-cis)-4-(3,4-dichlorophenyl)-l,2,3,4-tetrahydro-N-methyl-l-naphthalenamine hydrochloride. The empirical formula C₁₇H₁₇NCl₂•HCl is represented by the following structural formula:

The hydrochloride [HCl] in the formula, by the way, is the salt that weighs the sertraline down to where it stays in the system long enough to attack what it's chemically formulated to attack, in the case of Zoloft its mechanism of action works on the brain's manufacturing of serotonin, Zoloft supposedly giving an energetic shot to that manufacturing.

Following the above formula comes a fine-printed information sheet that gives a total description of Zoloft: how it works, or is supposed to work; how it came out in terms of its clinical trials (the drug versus the sugar pill (placebo)); its efficacy in terms of how it came out in the clinical trails; how to dose the drug; then the WARNINGS section, followed by a CONTRAINDICATIONS section (meaning other drugs it might clash with causing great harm to the partaker). This massive little fine-print tome is what comes with your meds when you pick them up at the drug store--is called the P.I., short for Prescribing Information.

Sertraline hydrochloride is the generic name of Zoloft, an antidepressant that has recently been shown when taken by pregnant women to be responsible for babies born with cleft palates and heart problems, etc. You see, clinical trials don't involve children and pregnant women (for ethical reasons), so a doctor who prescribes Zoloft to a pregnant woman suffering from depression is doing so against the advice of the prescribing information which warns the doctors that Zoloft has not been clinically trialed (tested) on children or pregnant women so this excuses the drug company, in the case of Zoloft, Pfizer, from any responsibility for any problems evolving from doctors prescribing Zoloft to children or pregnant women, which also includes nursing (or breast-feeding) mothers, too.

So from the above complicated scheme of things, you can imagine the difficulty a pharmaceutical ad writer has when trying to promote Zoloft.

First of all, in spite of many clinical trials, there is no real proof that antidepressants work at all compared to placebos. Every clinical trial has its failures. It's deaths. Though these deaths may not show up in the final test results. Deaths or other ill-effects of antidepressants fall outside the random sampled middle of the trials--in the business we call these "ouliers." In a clinical trial of say 1100 depressed patients, say 6 die during the clinical trial--out of those 1100 patients, these 6 deaths will show up far outside the average--therefore as outliers they won't affect the results of the clinical trial.

I worked on a drug similar to Zoloft when I was in the business. I was a medical editor on this product. My job was to make sure the copywriters used good grammar (made sense), but that they also were staying within the Federal Drug Administration's so-called regulations in terms of medical advertising--like nowhere in a drug ad are you allowed to use the term "Cure." These drugs are not curatives; they are inhibitors. Most of their mechanisms of actions are the same as you'd find in the caution statements that come along with any TOXIC (POISON) substance, and that's all these drugs all are, toxics. They can be easily compared to rat poison or insect spray and their effects on the biological systems of these pests are the same effects that work in the human body as well. These drugs for humans effectiveness is in the control of the dosage. You put just enough poison into a human's body to do the trick--in the case of the antidepressant I worked on, the trick was to toxically knock out the culprit responsible for the slowing down of the reuptake of the brain of seratonin.

In order to sell a product like Zoloft to depressed people, you have to LIE. You have to exaggerate Zoloft's power. You have to warn subtly that once you start taking Zoloft, you have to keep taking it--it's actually you have to keep taking it forever--but the copy will say as your health-care provider has prescribed--the warning gets boldest when the copy says if you do go off your antidepressant meds, there is a strong possibility whatever good the drug did you is now reversed and you'll be subject to a depression like you never knew could exist--one so powerful, it might drive you to suicide. Those voices in your schizophrenic head telling you the easy way out--and while you're taking your own life, why not take your family or your friends with you.

All of this to say that at a quorum meeting at an uptown Manhattan Irish pub--ruled over by the glorious Paula--while watching a newsclip of President Obama saying he was bringing the troops home from Iraq by the end of the year, a realization popped into my head. And, yes, I did listen to this speech with my backwards thinking theory in mind--that theory that tells me what Obama says he's going to do is exactly what he's not going to do. Which led me to recall that this is ELECTION CAMPAIGNING TIME--and President Obama, I just read, has already gotten most of the billion bucks he's gonna need to rerun--remember Rerun on teevee?--from WHO? If you guessed Wall Street, the hedge funders, the bailed-out failed banks, Goldman-Sachs, AIG, the Bank of America you are correct, sir or madame--the crookedest bastards in the old Capitalist ballgame--and they're backing their BOY Obama with all the bucks he needs. And I said outloud, "Every speech President Obama makes now is a fucking advertisement--he's running for president--he's advertising how he is an action president--why, lookie-lookie, I'm bringing home the troops from Iraq [the reason we're bringing the Iraq troops home? Because the Iraqi Parliament voted to not give US troopers impunity for their criminal actions! Besides, we're leaving 100,000 contractors there and at the world's largest embassy, Hillbilly Hillary will house her private army of 7,000 troops. Plus, too, we'll just move our troops into Kuwait, somewhere like that. NOW, via the idiot babbling of John "Failed Mission" McCain, We the People are promoting sending US troops into Syria--remember, the CIA is behind the rebellion in Syria! They were also behind the rebellion in Libya!]--wait a minute, I thought we'd already withdrawn troops from Iraq--didn't he take a bunch of troops out of Iraq when he took General Betrayus out of Iraq and sent him over to that horrible mistake of a war in Afghanistan? That horrible dastardly war still going on after TEN fucking years. Can you imagine if this country were under constant military rule, constant threats of daily bombings, of daily gunfire in the streets, of military forces and vehicles and military police and CIA agents and UN and NATO troops and big shots all up and down every one of your streets, taking over your tourist spots, taking over you governing bodies, taking over your police, your rights--death everyday--death from rocket attacks--death from firing squads, death drone aircraft, death from US Army helicoptors--death to men, women, children, daily, dead bodies in the streets of Afghanistan's cities for ten long fucking years?--can you imagine the whining and whimpering and police brutality and military takeover that would cause in this country?--and look at the death and destruction we've imposed on those poor Afghan people--the Afghan-Americans I know are great witty people full of laughter and peace--for ten long fucking years! And all the while that little wormy bastard, G.W. Bush, is living it up like the spoiled brat he is, living off the dole--lecturing recently in British Columbia--I can't imagine who the fuck in their right mind would pay that little spoiled brat prick $500,000 to make a speech--about what for god's sake? And watching the Texas-Detroit American League Championship series, how pissed I got seeing that like prick and Pickles being treated with such privilege and respect--front row seats, alongside Nolan Ryan and his wife, G.W. vaunted as the ex-owner of the Texas Rangers; vaunted as the little prick who tricked the citizens of Arlington, Texas, into building that, and I'll admit, very impressive little MLB ballyard. Chills of total spite ran up and down my spine as I watched that little murdering phony Texan (he was born in Connecticut) and Potsmoking Pickles sitting there dumbass with both teams's managers going over and fawning over this little killer, this ex-faux-president who through the wiles of his father's and his Unka Dick's and his brother Jeb's cronies and goons stole two elections right out from under a couple of wimpy Democrats (Gore the Bore and Kerry the Poor Little Rich Boy Phony AntiVietnam War Hero), who rather than fight back, cowardly tucked the quivering tales and went to bed losers.

All advertisements are LIES. That's all I'm saying.

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

A Little Taste of American Art:

Madame Butterfly, by Helen Frankenthaler (December 12, 1928)

Oh That There Were a Real God of Wrath

2011-10-19T10:23:00.000-07:00

Foto by tgw, New York City, November 2010
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Say goodbye to: Norman Corwin, one of the great radio script writers of all radio time: Norman Corwin, 101, American radio writer, director and producer

Bulletin: Keeping Up With the Kurds: yahoo.com/turkey-launches-incursion-iraq-111917235.html

Bulletin 2: 42 Campaign Promises President Obama Lied About:
obamawatch.wikidot.com/promises-broken

A The Daily Growler Repeat Performance from November 2010:
Behold Ourselves...the George W. Bush Interview With Prince Charmin' Matt Lauer

America must not ignore the threat gathering against us. Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof, the smoking gun that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.
George W. Bush
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Ex-Faux-President George W. Bush has to be one of the strangest dumbest idiots in the Universe. How dumb can dumb get? I dared to watch a bit of plastic newsman (sic) Matt Lauer's interview with Georgie Porgie. Twice I turned it off after the Most-Idiot-Bush among the Idiot Family of Bushes started explaining why he authorized waterboarding, as he so proudly dumbly is admitting to as he goes about book touring, peddling his worthless, waste-of-trees, sweet-fucking-though-moneymaking memoirs, How I Stole Two Elections...er-ah, we jest, of course--Decision Points. Can you imagine the PR firm dude who came up with that title for the ghostwriter to work off of? There must have been a ghostwriter because there's no way in hell George W. Bush, that crap-for-brain, could write a book, no matter how juvenile it was written. So there has to be a ghostwriter. Maybe Pickles?

It was both maddening--oh the growling I did--and gratifying--in an "I told you so" sense--watching and listening to this American embarrassment of a human monkey--though even monkeys don't want me claiming that miscreant's kin to them. "He didn't come from no monkeys I know," one jibed at me when I mentioned I might write a blog post about our ex-Faux-President in which I would compare him to maybe a chimpanzee. Another monkey howled at me, "Come on, Wolf Man, Cheeta's ten times smarter than that poor excuse of a misfire. Too bad it wasn't his fetus in that jar his mother showed him."

Monkeys can be cruel. But then so can such dumb men like G.W. Bush. Yet, I looked at him perhaps from a different angle than others--from my angle, I could see the many arms going up this poor little spoiled rich brat's ass, assuming as I did those arms were working the many different working parts of this dummy--like making his mouth move in sync with the dumb shit coming out of it. Jerry Mahoney had more wit than this little wooden man.

I mean he authorized waterboarding 'cause a lawyer told him it was not torture. "I'm not a lawyer, so...." G.W. tried to explain to equally confused Matinee Matt Lauer, who actually seemed to try and pin old Georgie Porgie down, but then Georgie got a pout on and said he wasn't going to say anymore about it and then went into his explaining how his mother had showed him a fetus in a jar...WHOAAAAAAA. Right then and there I slapped my forehead. The word "dunderhead" kept cruising through my growl-fevered brain. What is the fascination with this fool? Later today (it has already happened), I'm told, Okra, er-ah, sorry, I mean, Oprah, I call her Okra 'cause she ain't that bright a woman though she is very rich so to hell with what I think of her--and I say more Power to her 'cause she's getting so fat she's not gonna be around with us much longer after she retires and gets the gout and then puffs up until her blood pressure blows her fuses.... So later today (it happened already), Okra, there I go again, Oprah's going to interview Georgie Porgie Puddin' Head along with old Pappy himself...and damn, Mammy Babs, too. I wonder if Mammy will bring along that jar with that fetus in it? Wouldn't that be cool?--oh what ratings that would get Okra! "Oh, now word up here," Mammy will up and say suddenly. "You know, Okra honey, I've always admired your people, let me say that from the very bottom of my cold, cold heartless heart. That's why I thought I'd do you a favor, in terms of ratings, babe." "Oh, Mammy Babs, what you got in yo' purse, girl?" I'm not good at doing Oprah, I'll admit it, but, hey, I've started this, now I've got to finish it. So anyway, Oprah will carry on about how proud and privileged she is to have two ex-Presidents, both idiots, but also to have the first mother..."Oh, Mammy, what the hell you pullin' on my show?" "Okra, I'm pullin' this...." With that she pulls out this fruit jar. "Oh, my Lawdy-Lawd, Mammy, is that what I think it is?" Little Georgie joins in, "Oh, mommy, not that damn fetus...is that dang thang still floatin' around in that thar jar?"

Oh what a show. I will miss it. I'm too brilliant a mind to waste it on taking verbal pokes at this waddling threesome who combined have brought such crass overseering pain to this whole country. This little dumbass man sitting there in front of the cameras saying the stupidest bullshit you've ever heard and instead of being here and challenging this idiot and what he says and giving us a review of this idiot's memoirs, our President is off hustling arms to Indonesia today--the world's largest Muslim nation. One rightwing commercial press headline said, "Obama at Home, Holds Hand Out to Muslims." There ya go, the Indonesian-Muslim is finally showing his true allegiance--he is a Muslim and he is now an Indonesian. Poor old Obama. He's too damn dumb to get off his "Forget the past, I'm looking toward the future," a future we've been denied by this little evil bastard and his evil-bastard family--parasites they are--sucking We the People's national blood dry. I say throw the book at the whole Bush Family.

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

Existing in New York City: We're All Gonna Die Anyway

2011-10-13T05:40:00.000-07:00

Foto by tgw, New York City 2011
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Bulletin: HOT DAMN! We're pulling our troops out of Iraq! But guess where the poor bastards are heading--not home, but how about the WAR WITH IRAN, the NEW EVIL threat against We the People of the USA. This will be a nuclear war--that is: IF WE BLOOD-THIRSTY ASSHOLE COLONIZERS ARE READY TO WIPE OUT THESE EVIL ANTI-CHRISTIAN/ANTI-JUDAIC/ANTI-AMERICAN BASTARDS ONCE AND FOR ALL!! [THE OCCUPY WALL STREETERS CAME TO TIMES SQUARE TODAY--they are getting attention--though that attention always tries to find ways to discredit this merry band of pissed off young Americans, though today they were joined by a lot of old bastards and famous folks, too--IT'S GROWING! IT'S MOVING! IT'S THE ONLY THING WE THE PEOPLE HAVE GOING FOR US]--read on...
Bulletin: HOT DAMN, a trumped up reason to go to WAR WITH IRAN--wait a minute, didn't Reagan rig his first win by dealing with Iran? Obama thinks he's Reagan, so...WOW! HOT DAMN! ANOTHER WAR! You think we're broke now! Wait'll this WAR gets going good. Wait'll the Department of Defense asks for 300 billion bucks. Will the Red Chinese financially back us in this war? Will Commander in Chief Obama USE NUKES on these Sand N-word Devils?--these proud ancient people who can't help it their politics and their religion is so intwined and they are ruled by so stupid and so worldly ignorant MEN--WOE IS THE WORLD! All of this because Abraham knocked up his Arab (a Palestinian, we assume) hand-job maid (servant? slave?) and together this odd couple bore that little bastard Ismael and another fairy-tale of competing cultures came into this totally imaginary world of competing man-made deities who still today are wreaking through the militant natures of their true believers such inhumane and cruel havoc on the real world, this heavenly orbit, we human beings's true mother land, mother earth, from whence we sprang--and we did not spring from the semen of one of our man-made ghostly gods--this heavenly beautiful planet that is the only real heaven and should be treated as a paradise before it's too late for us to realize as mother earth's children, we're responsible for taking care of her in her old age--for our mother is dying because our father, the Sun, is dying--and death is simply the price humans have to pay for getting to be men and women and have sex and procreate, as Philip Wylie so analytically put it in his little in-praise-of-Jung book, An Essay on Morals.
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[Please excuse this hastily and mostly unedited posted new edition of The Daily Growler]
Globalization Wins Out Once More to the Detriment of We the People of the US
Those devastating free-trade deals with South Korea, Colombia, and Panama passed through Congress with flying colors and a lot of gleeful smiles on the faces of the richest of the rich and the CEOs of the global corporations--"world" corporations that have no allegiance to any NATION--their global extremities outbound national boundaries--they have their own laws and rules and police forces--they are global corporations and no longer consider themselves bound by any national laws or regulations or taxations. President Obama is simply continuing on what started seriously with Reagan, and continued on through the Bushes, though really blossoming out into Venus flytrap proportions under Clinton, and continued faithfully on now by Reagan-loving Obama. The globalization of the world continues. And it was Slick Willie Clinton who really went hog wild with these free-trade giveaways that President Obama, though they are disastrous programs in terms of our current economy problems, assures us are working on our behalf, even though the free-trade deal with South Korea alone is going to cost We the People of the US hundreds of thousands of jobs and a loss of millions in tax revenues--but oh what a boon to South Korea's automobile industry, its green-energy industry, its television-set-making industry, and its computer-assembling industry.

And adding insult to injury, I read this morning that President Obama has just added 70 million dollars to his campaign kitty, a campaign kitty that eventually will need over 1 billion dollars in contributions to be there during the continuing of this year-long presidential race to the finish line (Obama's presidential campaign kitties have now collected way over a billion and a half dollars). These enormous amounts of money these already millionaires cash in on in order to be seated in the private boxes of our Power Elite (what becoming president assures them) are to me is an insult to the intelligence of We the People, who, from my vantage point, since they don't seem to object to these sums of monies these mediocre men are spending in order to get a job that pays a measly $400,000-a-year--chicken feed to multimillionaire criminals like Mitt Romney (and you don't think he's a crook?--then check out what his business was in Boston that made him even richer than he already was with his inherited money)--are the dumbest most easily seduced and suckered in people in the world. This statement in spite of the Occupy Wall Street effort of those brave mostly young dumb middle-class kids valiantly protesting against our corrupt and totally controlling corporate citizens (and corporations are US citizens and have been since back in the late 19th Century) who are robbing We the People blind through their twisting the nuts of our cowardly Congress while their dickboy, their houseboy, the guy that shines their shoes and kisses their smelly White asses, our President, defends their crookedness and continues to staunchly defend their "too big to fail" rights to rob us blind--telling the Occupy Wall Street bunch that though he understands their frustrations (no he doesn't), we still must keep our financial institutions afloat and respect them--he said We the People must sacrifice our own lives so that these global giants can continue to roam the world wrecking economies while raking in billions upon billions of criminally obtained monies--wrecking the economies of Greece, Ireland, Italy, Spain, Portugal, the USA, with the UK and Germany not far behind--with the glowing approval of Slick Willie Clinton, that Arkie bum, that philanderer, and his two-bit lawyer wife and that gaggle of Clintonistas that have invaded and occupied President Obama's Oval Office--like the ex-CEO of General Electric who Obama chose as his jobs-creation expert--yeah, this jerk creates jobs alright, in Singapore, in Malaysia, in Red China (oh we don't call it that anymore do we, we hypocritical fools), in Vietnam, in India, and now in South Korea.

It would be nice if We the People could unify and throw all these bastards out on their ears--but, no, that won't happen. If we're sort of lucky, Ron Paul will be our next president; if we're our normal unlucky stupid selves, we'll get Herb Kain as our new worthless mediocre-at-best president.

It seems to us, like it always has, that President Obama was forced (through deals with Slick Willie and Hillbilly Hillary when he was shellacking them with his campaign run) to bring into his administration as advisers and campaign managers and members of his supercommittee, the worthless likes of Timmy Geithner (Obama's mother worked for Timmy's father in Indonesia (I keep harping on that) whose job with the Ford Foundation was gotten him by one of his wife's family who was a big shot at Ford--these bastards are all related in more than one or two ways), David Axelrod, the sleazy and stupid Larry Summers, the pig-headed asshole Emanuel Rahm, who now we see used Obama as a stepping stone on his way from a stooge of the nuclear industry right into being mayor of Chicago (really in ways more powerful than the President of the US), and as many corporate CEOs as his advisers advised him to bring on board. Obama, the "Yes, We Can" president of great and hopeful promise (remember, too, he won the Nobel Peace Prize), has lowered himself to being Whitey's dickboy and the White Man's House's houseboy president--so why not replace Obama with an even dumber of the dumbest of Black men?

Surviving, That's All We're Doing
My next door neighbor is a sad sort of man. He's retired though he's still very young looking. He's either Puerto Rican, he has a Spanish last name, or he's Black--or he's both. You see it's hard to tell in New York City just what the hell people are. If they reside in New York City they are New Yorkers, but is that the only thing that makes them New Yorkers? If you are born and raised in New York City, aren't you more a New Yorker than someone who moved here when they were in their mid-twenties and who never left? There are some who claim blood rights to being New Yorkers not just residential rights.

My next door neighbor is overweight. He walks with a cane. A couple of years ago he was on the verge of demise after what appears to be a problem with his taking street-marketed Viagra. You see, like I say, this guy is very young looking. Women, especially Black women, find him very attractive. But it's not just his looks. He must also pack a packed wallet and he must have a very broad-spanning bank account--he is a retired building superintendent--he also is supposedly an electrical engineer. Though I don't think he drinks, he acts like he's drunk all the time.

He comes out of his apartment at odd hours of the day and night. In the hallways, no matter the hour, he talks loudly to himself, language always punctuated with fiercely vile expletives, his favorite being, of course, the world's favorite, "Fuck," and its many variations--a sample of his hallway self-conversing, "God-damn, motherfucker, oooh--ummm, son of a bitch, er-ah, ummm, what the fuck? Well, I'll be god-damn...."

I don't think of my neighbor as being much of a philosopher. In thirty years of living by this human being, I've only been in his apartment one time, and I've never had more than an "Hey, man, how's it going?" conversation with him. He's hard to talk to. He rambles when he does enjoin you in conversation. He mumbles. "How ya doin'?" "Ah, urrr, don'know, same, you know, things come in boxes...god-damn boxes...." He's double-jointed when it comes to conversation. Though I've had hundreds of perfunctory conversations with him over the years, not once have I fully understood his responses. "How's the weather out there?" "Ohh, like--mumble-mumble--crossing the motherfuckin'--mumble-mumble--I don't see that far...." I swear, interpreting his replies is beyond my ability at comprehending.

When I found myself on the elevator with him just a few days ago, I said, "Damn, S. S., looks like you and I are going to die in this building." To which he clearly replied, I mean, I've never heard him speak so clearly, "Hell, next year, we're all going to die no matter where we live."

He was of course referring to Doomsday, December 12, 2012.

Racing Through Life: Racing Toward a Future
Yes, life is a race. It's further defined as "a rat race." Racing rats. Have you ever raced rats? They are unpredictable. Their instinct is to directionalize themselves via smell and not via their "eye on the prize." One could say their "nose is on the prize." You put the cheese (seduction) in the trap, the rat smells it, it triggers off a natural hunger in his belly, and soon you hear the trap snap shut and next you check it out and sure enough, there is a garroted rat freshly dead caught under the steel wire garroting device. (And trust me, I'm an expert at this, nothing in the way of rat traps or mouse traps can beat the original old wooden-based ones with the steel-spring trap device--you put the cheese in the tin tongue gizmo, you cock the trap by pulling the garroting wire back to hook it with care into the tin tongue with the cheese in it, that cheese that is letting off that special stink that drives a rat or mouse batty with hungering desires, and then you go on about your business, confident at sometime in the near future you'll whack the hell out of a rat or mouse. I've recently tried the Tom Cat traps that come with a little bottle of liquid that supposedly gives off that special odor that revs up a male rat's or mouse's testosteronic impulses or sets loose a female rat's or mouse's instinctual desire to get laid. Good idea? Nope. I've got two Tom Cats sitting dormant now for over a year, both chocked full of this sex-enticement liquid, both having never trapped and thus never killed either a rat or a mouse. A live tom cat, a mouser, would be a better buy.)

The Race of Life
All summer long I've watched the Diamond League Track and Field competitions and other track and field events (like the U.S. National Championship) culminating in the World Track and Field Championships held this year in South Korea. With each competition, I noticed, there are runners always showing up for these events who never win a damn thing. There are an average of 10 participants per event--sometimes as many as 15 in the distance events. In fact, in every one of these competitive events, there are always 3 winners, but dozens upon dozens of losers, some racers and field competitors who are never able to get better than LAST place ever!

In every competition, it's usually the same top-3 event specialists who always win. The competition is limited to a top 3 or 4 persons in every event (including the qualifying heats), one of whom is usually the world record holder in the event--or at least, holding the fastest time in the event for the year. Like the 100-meter dash. Without a doubt, the greatest 100-meter-dash man is Usain Bolt of Jamaica (he holds the World's Record at 9.58 seconds). This guy, unless he's stoned or four sheets to the wind or sick as a junkyard dog stuffed full of tainted rat meat, doesn't lose. The only man to beat him this year (and, remember, Bolt doesn't compete in every event) was a Jamaican rival who trains with him down home (the young man who won the World Championship when Bolt bolted too early (jumped the gun) and was disqualified). Yet in every 100-meter event during the whole of the Diamond League season, there are the perpetual losers, those who if they're lucky come in fourth, though there are steady competitors in these races who inevitably come in dead last. And this is true of the field events also.

I marvel at these losers. In the hurdling events especially they are so noticeable, not for their "almost" winning, but for the way they lose. I mean you know the last-place hurdlers almost the minute they're off the blocks--as they approach that first hurdle, which either they barely clear, or they knock down, or, in the worse-case scenario, they trip over and fall to the cinders and are disqualified. And in the distance races, too, there are your "sure" winners (distance races, mens and womens, these days are dominated by Ethiopians and Kenyans), but, and you can usually pick them out before the race starts, there are those in every race (and they show up in every Diamond League event) who you know are going to end up dead last or only a few notches above being dead last. Like there's this US woman distance runner, our greatest Olympic hopeful, who before every race shows confidence that this time she's gonna go it all out and beat the Ethiopians and Kenyans and as the race takes off, she's right up there with the best of them--galloping along just behind the "rabbits," the runners hired by the race events whose job it is to pace the event runners, set the tempo for the races on world's record pace (they don't use the rabbits in world championship or Olympic events))--and this US hopeful runs elbow to elbow with the Ethiopians and Kenyans--looking sharp--staying within a few steps of the favorites--UNTIL..the rabbits drop off the course and the Ethiopians and Kenyans put their pedals to the metal and then back sails this US woman--and back further she sails--the strain on her face and body increasing as the Ethiopians and the Kenyans sprint off up the track toward GLORY, while our US hopeful falls further and further back UNTIL...race is over, same old Ethiopian or Kenyan wins the race, and the same old second-place and third-place Ethiopians or Kenyans come in 2nd or 3rd, and our US hopeful--well, she ends up either last, almost last, or at best middle-of-the-pack, like 8th or 9th.

There can't be much money being made at these events by these losers; yet, they show up at every race--somebody sponsoring them--usually their countries, I suppose--some of these losers are their country's (or nation's) champions. The conclusion: You can't have winners without losers. Another conclusion: There are always more losers than winners in any competition.

I was both a runner and field event competitor in high school. I was fast. I ran the fastest qualifying 220-yard (in the days before meters) dash my final year in track and field; yet when the coach put me in my first full-fledged competition, I got a lousy jump off the blocks, and soon was flying, but flying behind, over-trying, ruining my rhythm, my breathing pattern, suffering anxiety pangs, and coming in a disgraceful 5th out of 8 runners, one of my teammates winning the race, a teammate I had beaten easily during team qualifying trials. As a broad jumper (now called "the long jump"), I jumped consistently around 19-feet 5-inches--a good distance for a high schooler, but a consistently losing distance when it came to competitors who were jumping 20-feet and 21-feet, one little guy from Dallas who could jump 23-feet. As hard as I tried, I could never jump 20-feet; I couldn't improve on my 19-foot-5-inch best; therefore, I was a loser broad jumper. The next year, I dropped track and field and joined the high school golf team, where I also was a loser, but a good loser, a fun loser. My best golf talent? As a teacher. I became a good golf instructor. I got to go to all the tournaments in that capacity--I could see immediately what my better teammates were doing wrong--I was better at this than the coach--and he used me as an assistant coach all my senior year in high school. Later I played awhile on the Texas Pro-Am tour but to no winning avail. In a pro-am match where I was paired with Charles Coody (from my hometown)--Charles would later go on to win the 1971

Masters. After playing a few holes with me, he said to me, "You know, you'd be a damn great golfer except you have no concentration whatsoever. You're looking all over the fucking place instead of concentrating on your game...you're especially hung up on that cute girl that's following us around. You'll find one day that concentration is the key to any kind of competitive success." And oh how true that proved to be--and how Charles Coody hit my problem dead on the head. Concentration is the key to success. Concentration, a state where you blot out everything except the task at hand, whether to hit a golf ball steadily accurately tournament after tournament or whether running at a winning speed race after race or whether winning 20 games pitching baseball or hitting .330 batting a baseball. Individual concentration is difficult no matter the competition you are in. Even that competition we all face in the workplace--in whatever rat race we're entered. Holding one's concentration is the meanest part of being a consistent winner--otherwise with all the worries of the world on your shoulders you're sure to fail. Look how expensive whores ruined the great Tiger Woods's golf career--fucked his concentration up so badly he went from the world's greatest golfer to a common old everyday hacker in a matter of weeks (Golf has been a globalized sport for many years now).

Baseball, though trying like hell to go global--some team owners want to bring Japanese teams into our Major Leagues, hasn't managed, too, yet. The minor league International League once was about as global as you can get with teams in Canada--the Montreal Royals--and teams in Havana, Cuba, the Havana Sugar Kings.

Remember when football tried to go global with the World Football League?--teams in Europe--though that has since fizzled out--our football can't compete with the true global sport of soccer, called football in most world cultures. Other global sports include Track & Field, cycling, swimming, skiing, rowing, cricket, field hockey, weightlifting, gymnastics, hockey, water polo, horseback riding, basketball, etc.

A true American sport: La Crosse.

So We May As Well Get Used to Globalization
Can the world be unified? Probably not, but it looks like our rulers and lawmakers and corporate power brokers and our Power Elite are determined to make us global whether we want to be or not. Get used to shoddy products--like all the clothes that come from China--like even all the computers that come from China--the Apple Mac G5 desktops running Leopard (OS 10.5) for instance (thousands of them were recalled by Apple)--a total failure as a computer since its capacitors were no good and blew up and ruined all your graphics cards and video cards and screen resolution and then caused them to refuse to boot up or when you did get them booted up, they fell asleep immediately not to be awakened. Shoddy products made with the cheapest of plastics and refurbished parts--like hard drives from China are totally refurbished from the millions of junked computers and junked parts We the People of the US send illegally to China every year.

Yes, we're in a mess, but we were warned years ago that this was happening. It's called offshoring now; back then it was called globalization via free trade--the Neo-Con Manifesto (by Paul Wolfowitz--what happened to old Paul, anybody know?) declaring the Neo-Con's goal to drive the dollar down as well as our too high standard of living--declaring products have to be made as cheaply as possible for corporate profits to continue to grow--somebody has to lose in the process and that somebody IS We the People of the USA. We got, as my old folks used to say, "too big for a britches." From the get go, this economics has always been about CHEAP LABOR. And from cheap labor you get cheap goods! But if labor continues to get cheaper and cheaper--one day we'll wake up and our president will announce that the owning of slaves is once again legal...because our new plantations via globalization are just too god-damn big to fail, so we all, men, women, and children, must sacrifice our free lives so that our corporate citizens can continue to enjoy the lives they as Power Elitists feel have been divinely bestowed upon them. Otherwise, why are they so much richer than the wide majority of us?

theburntoutgrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

A Little Taste of American Art:

Sarah in the Summertime, 1940, by Tom Lea (1907-2001)
Tom Lea was born and raised in El Paso, Texas. Sarah Lea, the subject of Sarah in Summertime, was a young woman from Illinois who, on a visit to a friend of hers who had married and moved to El Paso, spotted Tom Lea painting a mural in the El Paso post office. It was love at first sight, she told her mom. The mother asked, "How are you going to live on the meager income of an artist?" to which Sarah replied, "You just watch me." Tom Lea climbed to fame in the art world as a World War II army illustrator. After World War II, he became very famous as a painter of murals--murals of his stampeding bulls were especially intriguing--as were his many books that he illustrated himself.