Baying at My Full Moon Again...and full mooning America

It Doesn't Seem to Matter to Anyone That One Million People Marched Yesterday in New York City Against the God-damn Stupid War in Iraq, Started by a Lying, Creepy, Language Fumbling, Stumblebumming, Little Prick, Side-of-the-Mouth Executive Who Loves the EXECUTE Part of His Stolen Title...by thegrowlingwolf
I was out there marching yesterday; and I was shooting the peace sign at all the gawking sidewalk revolters and defiers, like the big fat bellied cops who in their one moment of power were fathering us around--one of them hollered at me as I simply stepped off the curb waiting for side-street traffic to poke its way across the march, held up by a fat-belly cop out in the middle of the street. So this Mafia-reject yelled at me, "Get back up on that curb right now!" "You talkin' to me, Pilgrim?" "Yes, you, get back on the curb." "Yeah, or what?" He turned back and faced his portly pal. Cops playing cops. What a ridiculous looking bunch of thugs. Their uniforms didn't fit--they were sloppily dressed to put it nicely, plus all their cop toys, big overgrown radios, nightsticks, handcuffs were prominently displayed hanging all off the sides and backs of their belts, things on each side of their overblown backsides, just like the gay dudes used to wear their keys on their backside belts to signal if they were pitchers or catchers. What a bunch of silly bastards these "servants" of the citizens were. One saucy cop, a patrolman who got to stand on the sidewalk and grade the pot-bellied traffic cops playing out in the traffic was talking to his pardner as I passed, "What a bunch of losers," he spoke disgustingly. I said, "Yeah, but their not losing their lives over there in that cesspool your precious buddy-buddy the 'president' has got us entangled in. How about you, boys? You look about the right age for cannon fodder, how 'bout I sign you boys up now...er-ah, I'm a looey JG recruiter, so I can sign yore asses up right here in the street and have you blowin' away towelheads 'fore the night's over." They didn't want any trouble so they used what they'd learned in their tolerance classes and ignored me. They profiled me as a longhaired hairy crazy. And they were right. I was crazy as a rabid wolfhound all day. I'm crazy as hell because I was born in the good ole US of A and as such I was told a peck of bullshit lies, like about how if I were a good boy, Santa Claus would bring me nice presents at Xmas--that was bullshit; or how if I made good grades in school, I could worm my way on up to the very top...why, I could even be president of these here United Snakes one day, which is total bullshit and comes with no wiping; also, I was told that if I said my prayers to whatever almighty every night 'fore I went to bed, my prayers would be answered at any minute the next day. More bullshit. I prayed like a praying mantis for this fine young thing in my English class to fall head-over-heels for me and all she did was write in my annual in neat penmanship, "To a really really nice boy. I hope you get a lucky break one day, otherwise, I pity the fool." F you, too, you buffoonette, you clowness, you gorgeous dreamgirl. Bullshit. Bullshit. More and more and more bullshit until the earth turns shitty shitty brown brown, and smells shitty to the high heavens, which soon will also be full of bullshit, floating bullshit, orbiting bullshit. BULLSHIT IS REPLACING THE OZONE. We'll all turn brown, but not in a brotherly or sisterly sense, but rather in a bullshit sense.

"He tried to kill my daddy!" That was one excuse our ole buddy-buddy "president" gave for killing now 2400 troops and 100,000 Iraqi men, women, and children. The "president" quipped, "My olde wimpy pappy. Why, who would wanna kill my old daddy, 'cept maybe my mom, Babs? I've heard her say a few bullet-to-the-brain things about...ohhh, I better keep my god-damn foot out'a my mouth. You piss Babs off and you're pissed on, and believe me, she has a stream like a full-grown cow. You even seen a cow piss?"

Wasn't it logical and exciting how the "president" blamed higher gasoline prices on the Democrats. It takes genius to do that, to say that because the Democrats were blocking drilling in one of our fabulous wilderness lands in the Arctic, the poor olde unprofitable oil conglomerates simply were forced to raise gasoline prices. They didn't want to. My god, it pained their souls to have to raise prices another couple'a bucks. Hot damn! So, hey, citizen numbskulls, you gotta let your government ravage the Arctic, you know, melt it down, melting, too, all that f-ing no good ice up there--"Hey, could we sell that ice to Mexico? I know when I was a drinker--I did some other shit, too, but anyway, I use'ta go down to Messico and whooo boy, they never had any ice for your drinks down there; the need ice like India needs nuclear secrets." Of course, the big crude oil boys want to drill the bejesus out of the tundra looking for the piddling of oil there may be up there, though every sillyass geologist in the world agrees we better find an alternative to OIL since OIL is almost extinct, that's earl brother. Such idiots we have ruining this country. How can someone with a logical mind believe men who think they are "deciders" or "commanders in chief" or "executioners" or "being driven and instructed by 'that thar Gawd in Hebbin.'"

I was doing a little monkey dancing to Joe Smith and His Mormonics while trying to understand how anyone in their right minds could believe the babbling Mormonic lyrics they were drunkenly warbling, unless you are a male sexual maniac so you can marry a whole bunch of babes, have girl babies with them, and then be f-ing the girl babies, too, knockin' them up, having little Mormonic bastards. My favorite Mormon spot on earth is outside Juarez, Mexico, where they can marry animals and shit if they want to, F anything that walks and shakes its behind, even the damn Gila monsters..."Hey, Brother Josiah, hold that mean asshole up here so I kin poke him--watch out he don't bite ya, you silly bastard, I don't think he's gonna suck that olde gnarly thing'a yours!" Hey, we have Mormons in Congress: the idiot of all idiots, Oren Hatch, is a Mormon. The idiot, true idiot, too, governor of Massachusetts is a Mormon.

Curious about Mormonics? Here ya go, this blog pretty much answers all your curiosity about a religion made up by a fool and a drunkard, Joe Smith, when he fell in a ditch dead drunk and woke up with these golden plates which he translated because he knew old Egyptian hieroglyphics that a creature name Thumm taught him. Poor old Joe, he got so drunk that he buried the golden plates and then forgot where the hell he buried them when he was having his first drink the next morning. Holy Hypocrites! Why not believe that? Might as well believe that as to believe little Mary of Nazareth got knocked up without having sex. Yeah, sure, Mary. Here's your official Daily Growler Mormonics site http://nowscape.com/mormons1.htm

So, 1 million marched in NYC yesterday, led by Reverends Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, Cindy "poor old dead Casey's mom" Sheehan, and they said Susan Saranwrap was there but she was in disguise I guess, because I didn't recognize her, or else she's an ole bird now and I remember her as a young flighty chickadee with big cans, like in that numbskull Mailol's movie about a New Orleans whorehouse where Little Brookie Shields is stripped down and ogled and we supposed F-ed off camera. OK, I'll admit, Jesse said there were only 300,000 folks in the march, but he couldn't see, not like I could. He was trapped up at the front, looking good, by the way, looking full of food, good health, nice grooming, and great Johnny Cash-like black garb. Jesus, man, all you have to do in this country is get your name in the forefront by being in the forefront just at one good time in history and you got it made for life. So Jesse couldn't see as well as I could; 30-plus blocks packed with marchers, still marching at 4 pm when I backpeddled and escaped the throngs ending up the Broome Street Bar where a guitar player I used to work with works as a bartender. We ended up talking about why his band can't get any gigs anymore and he was sliding me free pints'a Bass all during that time and I was drinking them and talking my ass off, my right foot killing me and my arms blistered by that wonderful old pleasing sun that was out all day yesterday blessing the whole event.

The news media covered all the fathers murdering their children--Jesus, that happens every day around here; or a spectacular car wreck on the Deagan or on Queens Boulevard, or some such jam-packed with SUVs thoroughfare, or a fire destroying houses or buildings, flattening them to ashes, yet the NYFD getting credit for a heroic job as always. And, of course they covered the asshole-smiling billionaire mayor as he goes about giving tax breaks to and helping his sports developing asshole buddies weedle new baseball stadiums for both the Yankees and the Mets at the city's citizens's expense--I thought the city owned Yankee Stadium--shows you how dumb I am. The billionaire mayor with no wife is also allowing another one of his suckbuddies to build an unwanted basketball arena right smackdab in the busiest middle of Brooklyn--moving out small businesses and housing for middle income or lower income folks--tearing down their homes and businesses so that some asshole owner of the f-ing New Jersey Nets can bring them over to Brooklyn for his gain and so his rich asshole friends can sit in total luxury and drunkenly or coked up watch the game from their luxury boxes.

I suppose they want to put domes on the new baseball stadiums. Probably the most expensive and therefore the most profitable way to build a new stadium in terms of the city picking up the greatest costs. That's no way to watch baseball. Baseball's best when you're sitting out in the open air, or under a refreshingly cool big open-air grandstand. That's the way to watch baseball. My favorite seat when I watch baseball is right behind first base. Boy what a great spot to see a baseball game, plus, you get a lot of line-drive smashed foul balls shot at your ass for 9 wonderful innings, and you get to encourage the home team almost face-to-face over there.

When Willie Randolph was playing his last year with the Yankees, before that big, fat, untalented asshole George Steinbrenner sold him off, that bastard, to Minnesota (where he hit over .300 and had a great year), in a game against California in a September game back in the 80s at the Stadium, a crazed, rather always sottish enviromental engineer from Cornell and I sat right behind first base. Willie was on first and we were pumped up, our lungs filled with encouraging passion, and Willie was itchy and we noticed it--he wanted to steal, so we started hollering, "Go on, Willie, go for it! You can do it, Willie, steal...Steal, Willie, come on you wimp, give it a go, Steal Willie Steal, Steal Willie Steal." Finally, it was too much for Willie and he ripped his ass off the base and took off flying for second. He got about half way and wham. He dropped. He had pulled his hamstring. He didn't play anymore that year I don't think and then that asshole Steinbrenner traded our Willie to the Twins.

Willie's back now with a vengeance, taking the Mets to a big first place lead over Atlanta, the always seemingly eventual winners of the Mets's division. I think the Mets can do it this year. They have the hitters, fielders, and some pretty good pitching, though Willie knows from his Yankee experience you can't trust even the biggest named pitchers.

See, talking about baseball calmed me down, took my mind off the Yahoo assholes who are running this country and the rest of the world, like Henry Miller warned in 1934, down into a bottomless pit.

Besides tackling the Mormonics today, I also intended on getting into a little Process Philosophy, a la Alfred North Whitehead, you know, I was going to explain the "human soul" using process philosophy, but my yowling, growling, howling, turning wolf forced me to bay at that bigger-than-a-big'a-pizz'a-pie, 'at's amore MOON.

Jesus, I'm beat. Better beat than dumb.

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler
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The Daily Growler Quote of the Day:
From W.E.B. DuBois, from a recording he made in 1953, "Strange paradox that the poverty of a worker must be maintained so that he is forced to work for the rich" [from a speech he gave in Los Angeles]. Here's Capitalist Industry's class structure, according to DuBois:
1) The Rich Class
2) The White Serfs
3) The Colored Slaves.
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Freedom on the March

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It's Time to Bust a Move

The Daily Growler Goes a'Marchin'
A bunch of Growlers are heading toward New York City to join the peace march going on there tomorrow morning at Madison Square Park (yep, the original old Madison Square Garden faced this park; that's the Garden that Sanford White built and on whose roof he was shot over a hot little trollop by Harry Frick (Doctorow did a book on it)). So, yep, we're gathering there tomorrow (Saturday, April 29th, at 24th and Fifth Avenue) to get pumped up by Cindy Sheehan, Jesse Jackson, Reverend Al, Susan Saranwrap, Randy Randi Rhodes, and then march around the huge mulberry bush that is midtown Manhattan. It's futile, you say. It may be, but it's awfully fun to find yourself among a million or so people who agree with you. It gives you hope, at least for a day. Plus, it's gonna be a beautiful morning and oh, what a beautiful day, and we've got a wonderful feelin', everything's going our way. Fists in the air, and thegrowlingwolf will be there doing his disruptive growling--"Gimme an F...gimme a U...gimme a C..." Mimicking Country Joe--where are you now, Joe? Doing has-been shows out in Minneapolis or somewhere midwest like that? thegrowlingwolf is a good mimick and he has a voice that you can hear for at least 20 square blocks. "Gimme me a K."

No sleep tonight for The Growlers. We'll have video cameras and point-and-shoot digitals with us, so we hope to party hearty all tomorrow night in revelry over a successful peace march--and we'll watch the videos we make and look at the digital shots all while the men smoke La Rosa cigars (the official Daily Growler cigar), while the women smoke their medical Mexicans, and we all pontificate over several cases of Tecate (the unofficial Daily Growler beer). We are packing up, so we're packing out of the blogosphere until we meet again. I'm sure we'll have a laptop there and we'll get The Daily Growler out to post manana. Viva Mexicanos! (and that's another march coming up this Monday all over the Americas). The Mexican illegals are already Americans, if you think about it, just as much Americans as us (the US of A).
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Poeta nascitur non fit
From The Daily Growler poet laureate--
How 'bout I give you a little diddy by Blake:

Song

How sweet I roam'd from field to field
And tasted all the summer's pride,
'Til I the prince of love beheld
Who in the sunny beams did glide!

He shew'd me lilies for my hair,
And blushing roses for my brow;
He led me through his gardens fair,
Where all his golden pleasures grow.

With sweet May dews my wings were wet,
And Poebus fir'd my vocal rage;
He caught me in his silken net,
And shut me in his golden cage.

He loves to sit and hear me sing,
Then laughing, sports and plays with me;
Then stretches out my golden wing,
And mocks my loss of liberty.


--Bill Blake, from The Portable Romantic Poets: Blake to Poe, put together by W.H. Auden and Norman Holmes Pearson (a very poetic man's name) for the Viking Press in 1950, and reprinted by Peguin Books in 1977, an edition that was reprinted thrice more times, in 1978 (twice) and 1980.
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My Encantadas

Must be heaven; not a soul in sight;
Only the lumbering and lascivious steps of Nature
leaving its tail-dragged tracks in its heat-breathing soil.
The iguanas and their secret nights;
The Galapagos, at their slowest age,
Its deadly determination made dumb by living.

And in their second coming will arrive
rats, cats, dogs, pigs,
All signs that soon its holiness will be fouled,
And on will tumble a hellwagon full of souls.


--Anonymous; found wadded up in The Daily Growler waste basket, April 28, 2006.
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A List of Tracks to Listen to, If You Are Into Jazz, America's Own Truly Classical Music, Though It Can't Be Learned in Schools--Did You Know That?
These are old tracks picked out by The Daily Growler's Ancient Bopper, a 60-year veteran of the many jazz pleasurable wars that occurred from 1941 to NOW--a student of his 3 Bs: Blues, Boogie, and Be-Bop.
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If you can find these, they are essential to elementary jazz studies--these cuts are the basis for an evolution that may have been given a mutating blow by the f-ing Brit "little boys" called The Beatles, Brit "little boys" so taken by this classical American music, their first album covered all their favorite American swinging tunes. Like Larry Williams's "Slow Down." Wow, the way the Beatles recorded it, it slowed down so much my drawers drooped and I fell totally dead asleep. When I woke up I went back and played Larry's (a Houston, Texas, bandleader and pianist) version and got my energy back again. Larry's "Slow Down" is the most driving blues/r&b/rock tune written until Larry Graham gave us "Release Yourself"--Hell that whole Release Yourself album struck me blind and shouting Brother Graham's praises to the highest of heavens, up there where Larry Williams conducts the Big Daddy Fab Band.

Jazz Classics per the Ancient Bopper:
1) "Hollywood Shuffle" by Chu Berry, from the RCA Victor album Hot Mallets released by Victor in the early fifties. On this same album is the tune "Hot Mallets," which features Dizzy Gillespie's first solo ever recorded.

2) "Wheatleigh Hall" --this may be on a Giants of Jazz volume (thanks to www.languagehat.com it's The Giant from 1963); I first heard it when I lived in Mexico City in the sixties. Features Dizzy, Sonny Rollins, Ray Bryant, et al.

3) "Jacky-ing" on a Monk Riverside album from the late fifties featuring Thad Jones, and Monk's regular back-up dudes--Orr and Dunlop, I think, though I'm not sure of any f-ing thing anymore. I am ancient, you dig?

4) Any of those tracks that Hawk cut in Paris in 1937 with Benny Carter and Django Rhinehart, especially "Sweet Georgia Brown." They swing so hard on these tracks, Django at one point hollers "Yeah" just to release the tension that has soared these geniuses to atmospheric swinging heights. One of the swingingest jazz jams ever recorded.

5) "Django" from the Modern Jazz Quartet album on the Atlantic label of the same name. This is one hell of a classic piece of jazz composition; written by John Lewis from Albuquerque, New Mexico, with Percy Heath, Milt Jackson, John Lewis, and Connie Kay.

6) "Land's End" a Stan Getz album on Verve put together by Norman Granz and first issued on an album sold through Playboy Magazine. It features Stan with the greatest HUGE trio ever to mount a jazz stage: Oscar Peterson, Herb Ellis, and Ray Brown, the Oscar Peterson Trio.

7) Krupa-Rich on Verve. Holy shit! What an album. Old, almost dragass Gene Krupa and fiery pre-heart attacks Traps the Wonder Boy, Buddy Rich, in a drum-battle album put out by Norman Granz (this drum battle started on Norman's Jazz at the Philharmonic (JATP) concerts) in the late fifties. Features Buddy/Gene, Flip Phillips, Illinois Jacquet, Little Jazz, Dizzy, with the Oscar "by God" Peterson Trio, yep, Herb Ellis and Ray Brown. What a m-f-ing wonderful totally massive jazz album.

8) Tangents in Jazz. Stan Kenton got the A&R job at Capitol Records--they had plenty of bucks due to Frank Sinatra signing with them. Kenton had held jazz workshops at North Texas State College/University thanks in part to Jimmy Guiffre's being a graduate of NT. As a reward, Jimmy got to do this album. Features Jimmy playing the hell out of that low-register breathy clarinet with one of my heroes, Jack Sheldon on trumpet. Sweet tangential jazz; brilliant composing, which all North Texas graduates had to thoroughly know thinks to guys like Ed Summerlin, who taught composition there.

9) "Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue" from the Duke Ellington at Newport, 1956, on Columbia, which got into jazz in the late fifties, the beginning of stereo, thanks to Mitch Miller, who loved jazz but couldn't play it worth a shit. Mitch is also responsible for the Charles Parker Jr. with strings albums on Emarcy (which stands for Mercury Recording Company). If you don't know this album and "Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue," then, shit, you ain't no jazz aficianado. This is ultimate jazz; jazz in its purest form. Paul Gonsalves, a stone alcoholic, plays for what seems like way over 100 choruses on this titan of musical accomplishments. Duke forced Paul to take long solos on purpose, to punish him for coming to the gigs drunk out of his skull. By the end of this solo, Paul is sober as the most sober judge to ever judge.

10) Duke gets two on my first TEN here; this one is Suite Africaine. On Columbia. Whewwww. What a hell of a magnificent piece of music. Dig the use of those drums--Sam Woodyard! Wow, right back to the heart of the jungle and Madame Zzaj's recording studio.

For Jazz lovers only,
the Ancient Bopper
for The Daily Growler
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See ya at the Peace March in New York City tomorrow. Or with the Mexican Laborers Monday, also in New York. And don't forget, don't spend any money Monday. F 'em all.

"Gimme an F...gimme a U...gimme a C...gimme a K!" You know what that spells, right Georgie Porgie (our "president")? What's that, Georgie? A saying they have in Tennessee...er-ah, well, you know they have it in Texas..."You can fool me once, you can fool me twice, and you can but you can't or you can't F me twice...huh?"

PEACE!

Varia

The Daily Growler Discovers the Use of a New Word
I'm sometimes the laziest SOB on earth, a title I proudly guard. But writing a blog is tough sledding, gutsy like running a marathon. You get driven to the point that you start writing instinctually. If you are a real writer and not a stupid dilettante, you HAVE to write just like you have to sleep and have to eat and have to do the double-backed beast as often as possible. But writing will drive you either to drink or babbling insanity, depending on your drive. Being the laziest man on earth and also a driven writer, I work so hard I exhaust myself so that I can be lazy naturally with the writing bug captured in the burning bright silvery ash of my La Rosa cigar or in the six-pack of Tecate beer I have cooling in the fridge. When I finish those cooling out tools, the laziness is superseded by a flare to write again; to write again until exhaustion again, until the next time I can be the laziest SOB on earth.

I popped into languagehat last week ( www.languagehat.com ) and l. hat entitled that day's entry as "Varia." The word struck me first as a woman's name. Varia. Sure, Maria. But Varia? I couldn't think of any woman named Varia; I liked it; I played the game like, "if I had a daughter, I'd name her Varia." But I knew it wasn't a woman's name. l. hat started off by saying he needed a little time off so he was gonna just give us a little moment of Varia. Aha! I lorded about the manor. "Varia" had something to do with "variety." The spice of life, right? On my first day in a freshman World History class in college, the prof entered the classroom, stood at his podium, twirled his moustache, looked up and said, "About the best thing I will teach you in this whole course that we are about to begin is 'Variety is the spice of life.' Class dismissed." Oh how history became so easy after I seasoned it with a little spice of life. Varia...variety...and finally, I thought to look it up in my Merriam Webster's Collegiate dictionary and I just loved what I found: "varia npl (1926) : MISCELLANY : esp : a literary miscellany." The perfect word for me to ponder lazily over, maybe while sipping on a scotch, the way Hemingway drank his scotch: you put a Manhattan glass of good scotch in the freezer of your fridge. You let it freeze; the water in the scotch will turn to ice and then you simply tilt the glass up to your thristy lips and you let the lovely pure cold mountain spring-like flowing of that smokey alcohol come sippingly slow and cold and straight over a slight oval rim of ice straight into your gullet ice cold and soothing as a lazy hell. Hay caramba, the varia! We should have a feria varia.

Have you noticed how lazy I'm being? Have you noticed I'm not writing? I'm so damn lazy and this word varia's got me so relaxed--see, this is literary miscellany. It's easy as hell to write; it's as though I'm writing floating flat on my back in a jacaranda-spiked swimming pool at old Las Brisas Hotel high above Acapulco Bay. Wow, I hear steel guitars hula-ing in a bathing beauty way down on a lazy, crazy, hazy day of summer beach in spring while the varia have driven me to the dictionary. I'm 'laxing in the pool of words called Merriam Webster's Collegiate dictionary. My eyes wander up two entries, skipping over the prefixes vari- and vario- (as in variometer) to the delightful word, vara n [AmerSp. fr Span., pole, fr L., forked pole, fr fem of varas bent, bow-legged (1831) : a Texas unit of length equal to 33.33 inches (84.66 centimeters).

I once existed in Texas and I was reared by pioneer single-parent leather-hide Texian ladies and I never remember hearing the word "vara" used or defined. Looks like a lady's name to me. "If I had a daughter, I'd name her Vara."

I'm now mucho borocho on laziness; I'm stumbling up a word and damn, my scotch has suddenly turned to pulque and I'm throwing it back with a vaquero npl -ros [Sp -------more at BUCKEROO] (1826) : HERDSMAN, COWBOY, and I certainly have known my share of buckeroos (Roy Rogers, Howdy Doody), herdsmen ("The Swinging Shepherd Blues" by Moe Kaufman), cowboys (Roy Rogers, Howdy Doody, Casey Tibbs, Gene Autry, Will Rogers, Texas Jim Robertson, Tex Ritter--I got cowboys comin' out mah ass.

I tried to travel up a few more words but most of them were vaporous, vapory, vaporish, vaporing, vaporetto, vapor----------on up to vapidity. Which is where I am right now, in a vapidity--lazed out. Passing out.

Dean Martin was approached just after he'd finished his third show of the night at the Sands out in Vegas way back when. He was sitting backstage drinking straight scotch, his eyes hooded, his head drooped. A reporter approached and asked, "Mr. Martin, do you ever sleep?" Martin looked up over his glass and crooned, "Fortunately, I pass out a lot." That's the next step in having lazed around in the dictionary for a breve momento...

I have passed out.

Varia.

theliterarymiscellany
for The Daily Growler
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The Daily Growler Quote of the Day
Herman Melville on cats: "[on seeing a 'big black spectral cat sitting erect in his Typee doorway'] I am one of those unfortunate persons to whom the sight of these animals is at any time an insufferable annoyance." from Typee
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Watch a television show called, "The 6th Extinction" I saw it on PBS. It's scary. It's all about how China's need for meat and soybeans is burning off and destroying the Brazilian rain forests. Brazil's ruined land from soybean growing--the rain forest floor is only thinly fertile; after several crops of soybeans, the land is ruined for growing soybeans, is then used to run scrawny beeves onto the going barren land, half-dead animals they send to Europe and the good ole USA where there's a heavy demand for steaks. China then goes to the oldest grasslands in the world, a top-of-the-world ancient valley in the highlands of Central Africa, a totally unspoiled wildflower orgy of speckling and sparkling myriads of colors wavering in the gentle ancient breezes. What now? China is paying big bucks for beef and soybeans and the ancient Africa cattle herders, like the Watusi, are running their cattle onto this fat and anciently healthy grassland. Now, China has no food production, their lands are already dried out from their overgrowing soybeans to meet the huge, billion-folk demand for pork, beef, and birdmeat. The Chinese are craving meat at such a demand, the China meat producers can't meet the need, thus the contaminating of Brazil and the Central African grasslands. Hey, it is leading to the 6th Extinction--which will include the extinction of homo sapiens.
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The Daily Growler apologizes for the "We got linked!" screw up; we tried to link to the blog that linked us, but the URL just doesn't "translate" right, so to hell with it. The blog is called wood's lot--and you can Google that and it will come up. Go look at this blog. It's amazing. Today they lead with a cool quote from Wittgenstein. Lot's of art and photos of artists and writers--a long quote from Henry Miller's Air-Conditioned Nightmare, a book that surely should be in The Daily Growler a la Oprah Book Club--returning soon.
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Educating BartCop

The Daily Growler Quote of the Day: Henry Miller, The Tropic of Cancer, 1934. There is trouble in India; Ghandi's returned and is laying ground for a breaking with Imperial England and a forming of an independent state of India. Miller wrote, "India's enemy is not England, but America. India's enemy is the time Spirit, the hand which cannot be turned back. Nothing will avail to offset this virus which is poisoning the whole world. America is the very incarnation of doom. She will drag the whole world down to the bottomless pit." Henry was warning us 72 years ago; sounds like he's right here in the room with The Daily Growler.

An Open Answer to a Question Raised by Bartcop www.bartcop.com
Yesterday, Bartcop was writing about how he couldn't understand with all the exposed shennanigans, secrets, baldface lies, stealing, ineptnesses, idiocies why the Democrats weren't dancing already on born-dumb Georgie Porgie's political grave.

Bart lives and works out in what I call Tallshit, Oklahoma (that's Tulsa to us Okies--I'll qualify my expertise by saying I spent some growing up years in Enid, Oklahoma, right in the heart of the Cherokee Strip). First of all, I am not meaning to trash Bartcop because he works out of Tulsa; he's done a phenomenal job with early Website management and success and now up to the level of having a radio show, which though not making him rich, is at least keeping him afloat so he can continue his harrangue, and harrangue is just what the Yahoos in this numbskull country need. But Bart's question and the passionate confusion he expressed in it, led me to start considering just where Bart is broadcasting from. It's just that out in Tulsa, Bart's a few miles outside the city limits of Amurikan reality. He's never breathed in the fumes of people and buildings burning and collapsing and the ashes smoldering for days afterward and his city turned into a police state and a bull's-eye target for future "terrorist" to aim at, with an asshole billionaire mayor who wants to defiantly build in the place of the old WTC a skyscraper that not only will be an architectural hunk of junk but also a taller than any building in the world "bird" pointing up defying the Saudi boxcutter-carrying flyboys to try another attempt at blowing NYC away.

So before I answer his question about what he calls the "pink tutu wearing" Democrats and their cowardly ways, let me take some potshots at Tallshit (Tulsa).

Tulsa, Oklahoma, is an old oil boomtown founded by good, good white people who were imprinted with such good Christian values--oh yeah, they love their precious Jesus in Tulsa--they solved a racial problem they had back in those oil-rich good ole days (1921) by burning down the whole black community of Greenwood, 35 blocks of black businesses and homes totally destroyed, and, too, of course, with great white compassion, lynching, burning, and just flat shooting men, women, and children at will, 36 was the official white number of dead but everyone knew many more than that died, and, of course, due to the extreme compassion of the white system of extreme justice (remember, Justice is symbolized by a BLINDFOLDED WOMAN) the good, good, Jesus-loving white citizens went jacking-off crazy with IMPUNITY.

Tulsa dumps its shit on a stepping up of foothills that lead up past Miami (a Native American name), Oklahoma, and trail on up into the holy home of Amurika's Elizabethan yodelling hoedown hillbillies, up in the Ozarks in southern Missouri and northern Arkansas (the holy headquarters of Wal-Mart--yee haw! Actual Hillbilly Heaven right up the trail at Branson, Missouri--double yee-haw! Missouri, the first state to pass an unConstitutional state law making abortions illegal--triple yeeeee-hawww!).

Originally, Tulsa was settled in 1836 by the Creek, Cherokee, and Choctaw Native Americans who survived the Trail of Tears and reached this place on the Arkansas River in what was then called Indian Territory and set up a camp they called Tallahassie, yep, same as the town in Florida, these tribes's native lands being in northern Florida, Georgia, the Carolinas, and Alabama. The first white man to set up shop in this bend of the Arkansas was Lewis Perryman, in 1846. Soon covered wagons full of white families and gold-seeking out-of-work eastern and southern white men, soldiers of fortune, hunters, trappers, and weirdo religious kooks started coming down the Trail of Tears out of St. Louie and Joplin, on down across the sagebrush to tumble into Lew Perryman's trading post. Some of them stopped and tried to set up businesses and homes around Lew's bend in the river and they named it Tulsey Town, surely an Anglosized version of a Native American word. (For your info, "Oklahoma" is a Choctaw word meaning, "Okla"--"people" and "Homa" "red"--so Oklahoma means "home of the red people.")

Tulsa remained a pissant village until a day in 1898 when across the Arkansas River from Tulsey Town at Red Fork what was called the Glen Pool Strike came in big time, oil gushing up, natural gas flaming off. By 1905, Tulsey Town had become Tulsa, Oklahoma Indian Territory, and was given the handle, "Oil Capital of the World."

The Glen Pool Strike was just one part of an oil boom that echoed across all of Oklahoma south to across the Red River into northern Texas, crabbing horizontally to cross the Red River once again and going over into central Arkansas--around El Dorado, Arkansas, one time home of that self-learn-ed, pig-jowled, rapin', gamblin', incestuous, masturbating right-wing fool, slant-drilling-rich wildcat oilman, H.L. Hunt.

Before 1907, Oklahoma was designated an Indian Territory. You addressed your mail to Oklahoma, "Oklahoma Indian Territory." That means Oklahoma belonged to the Native Americans. As I've already shown you, Tulsa was in this Indian Territory--a sagebrush prairie that spreads out west past Enid and over by Perry, that area out there being the infamous Cherokee Strip, named because this strip of 226 miles across the top of northern Oklahoma and about 50 miles vertically on the map from the Kansas border to down below Enid around Guthrie was land stolen from the Cherokee Nation, among others, like the Pawnees, Osage, Kaw, Tonkawa, Nez Perce, Otoe, and Missouria Native Americans. Then came the Homestead Act of 1886 under President Grover "Where's your boy?" Cleveland (Grover supposedly had an illegitimate son by a mistress of his) and the oh-so good, kind, good-hearted great white father Amurikan government decided, hell, we're gonna let white folks have that land. We gonna have a little sport and let all the white trash rascals run out of the east and south 'cause they were most lazy, poor, worthless--former white indentured servants from over in the Piedmont, drifters, fortuneseekers, and they were so wild-crazed for this free land, they lined their wagons, buggies, ponies, some on foot, at one end of this Cherokee Strip and when the gun went off and the flag was dropped, these white scalliwags rode hellbent on settling on some free land.

Oklahoma belonged lock, stock, and barrel to the Native Americans because they got it as a gift from the good, sweet, and gracious white Amurikan government, with good ole kind and considerate friend of the Native Americans, Old Leatherhided Bastard Hickory, weird and scary, dirty, hairy, and full of fleas (I steal from that great old diddy, "The Bastard King of England") Andy Jackson, yep, the same dude the Democrats named their most-famous once-a-year fundraising affair after, the Jefferson-Jackson Dinner. Yep, the kind Amurikan government gave the good Native Americans their own land. Oh, and I forgot, the good ole kind and considerate great white father Amurikan government also provided hundreds of thousands of Native Americans transportion from their native lands and over the Ozarks and down past Miami, Oklahoma, over the sage brush into old Tallahassee, Indian Territory, that sweet, kindly path the Native Americans, in jest I'm sure, called "The Trail of Tears." So, wonder of wonders, when that oil boom hit Oklahoma, all the oil was on Native American land, and soon all the Oklahoma Native Americans were rich they thought for life. And they were until the oil lease and mineral right swindlers hit town, all sharp-tongued white oil agents sent out by old Big Daddy John D. Rockefeller and his Standard Oil goon-types to cheat, gyp, swindle, rook, hook and crook and steal all that oil wealth literally right from under the Native Americans. The Native Americans in Oklahoma were left soaked, poor as Job's turkey, on short-sheeted "reservations" around the new oil-made white cities like Lawton, Ardmore, Altus, Oklahoma City (used to have an active oil well pumping on the capitol lawn), Edmond, Norman, Guymon. Penning up the Choctaw, the Anadarkos, the Cherokee, all of the former owners of Oklahoma. The Okla turned from Homa to lily white. Oklawhitey. And the Okies were born.

Tulsa today ain't no Oil Capital of the World anymore. Nope, now it's an aviation center with over 300 aviation companies in the area. It's still standing on stolen land, but who cares now?

Wow, I got that off my hairy chest, a fairly good series of growls, some that reached the higher pitches of a howl several times. Wow, the hair is receding from my face, arms, legs, but that f-ing full big-faced moon is still sailing over my reality, in spite of it being in the middle of a bright and sunny afternoon.

Finally Answering Bartcop's Question
The reason with all the felonous and traitorous evidence the Democrats have available to them the don't get off their pink tutued asses and revolt, Bart, is that, first of all, they've all been bought and sold and bought again and sold again and they are only in their offices or wanting to run for offices because of the power it gains them and the MONEY that they will accrue by being in the Washington, D.C. (District of Corruption) loop. As a New Yorker, it's hard for me to call Hillary Clinton "Senator" since she doesn't represent my poor tired ass in any way I can think of. Hell, she's a carpetbagging revenge-seeking numbskull Yaley lawyer, is in debt to the Democratic Party leader-hacks who choose who they will let buy their way in by proving they can successfully fundraise to own a nomination and party backing. Everything is based on how much money you can bring into the tax-free party coffers.

So, Bart, here's a Daily Growler set-in-stone rule: all Congresspeople, Demoncrats or Repugnicans, are bought by the highest bidders, which, by the bye is never the people they are supposed to represent. They represent themselves and their own desires, fuck the people of the US., and they remain loyal to where the bucks and power come from, no matter the "evilness" involved.

Remember, Bart, your hero, Bill "White Trash Deluxe" Clinton made $30,000 as governor of Arkansas (a Native American name, though it's never had a Native American governor), one of the poorest f-ing states in the union--yee haw. Clinton's Hope, Arkansas, boyhood home was certainly on wheels at one time I'm willing to bet. Let's say Hillary at best was offshoring a hundred thousand bucks a year at her crooked Little Rock federal money chasing law firm. So, this couple unable to make more than $130,000-a-year (an amount that couldn't get you a one-bedroom apartment in New York City these rich-taking-over days) back in good ole hoedown hillbilly Arkansas, left the White House , holy Jesus, worth 7 or 8 million bucks, and that's before they got their big baloney-book book deals from good ole gal genius Judith Regan, the hotshot celebrity book booker, last heard of when she made the headlines after it was revealed she had been wallowing in the dusts of the smoldering ashes of the World Trade Center in throes of mad passionate pig love with the great pig lover Bernie Kerrick, who Bush was ready to name Homeland Scare Tactic chief (god, another Native American reference). Judith said Bernie was the best pig lover she'd ever wallowed with in her whole unmarried life. Bernie being married and under Federal indictment didn't say anything about Judy-Judy-Judy's piggie abilities.

Besides that, Bart, these Loop insiders have had close eye-to-eye looks at Georgie Porgie, the "president"; Unka DickCheney; bitch puppy Karl Rove, and they've seen the insanity in those fool eyes. One zap from any of those 6 eyes is enough to scare the hell out of you, keep you from flying in small planes or watching out for the Swift Boat boys and their fabulous dossiers. They know from association that these guys are psychotic killers and that they have the ultimate power on their side; they have the f-ing poor battered military at their beck and call (the poor fools), the FBI (Federal Bureau of Idiots), the CIA (Pappy Bush once ran it), a majority of dolts in Congress, and the whole raggedy ass insults to justice Supreme Court judges, and the lying "chief" wiretapping everybody and their dogs's asses. These freaks are Machiavellian as hell. They'd kill their grandmothers to get ahead. And, besides, Karl Rove might happen across a few hotel security tapes showing them or those they love in precarious situations. "Damn, is that Slick Willie not having sex with that little baby-fat Jewish intern?--I took her home myself and got some after meeting her at a party at Uncle Teddy's Georgetown digs. In fact, Uncle Teddy had some hot eyes on her himself, saying she, er-ah, reminded him of an intern in his, er-ah, sordid past."

Ask your soldier boy hero who dropped out of the Democrat senatorial race in Ohio about it? He has your answer, Bart. That's why you're right to keep them all in your pink tutus. Classy Freddie Blase would tell you these politicians are all cowardly lions with no hearts like a straw man and no brains like a tinman--he would tell you they are Pencil-Necked Geeks and pencil-necked geeks are total pathetic losers, easily pinned to the point they cry "Uncle," except the pathetic Democratic candidates will cry "Unka Dick, Unka Dick," or hell, Unka Dick might just let go an accidental shotgun blast right in their asskissing faces.

Impeachment is the answer. The Bill of Rights, written by old Democratic Daddy Tom Jefferson, says We the People of this United States of America have the right to overthrow any government that rebukes the people's will, which is according that same document, "the Pursuit of Life, Liberty, and Happiness," protection from foreign invasion, why we have an army, and if they don't get that right, they have a right to bear arms, form a militia, and drive the rascals out of the White House. It will be up to the people of the US of A to join hands and put these assholes in jail where they belong--owing all the American people (especially including black people, Mexican Amurikans, and NATIVE AMERICANS), the Afghani people, the Iraqi people reparations--I mean fine 'em all enough to break the Carlyle Group and gain back the rights to the commonwealth our natural resources represent and not PROFITS for the Plutocrats these people really are.

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler
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Wow! The Daily Growler got linked by a great site www.ncf.ca/~ek867/wood_s_lot.html

Also, don't forget our old friends at www.languagehat.com
And give a little respect to one of the greatest musicians of all time at www.oscarpeterson.com
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A Little Hurting Truth

The Economics of America
I have to take out my trusty 10th Ed. Merriam Webster's Collegiate and give you some definitions:

capitalism n (1877): an economic system characterized by private and corporate ownership of capital goods, by investments that are determined by private decision, and by prices, production, and the distribution of goods that are determined mainly by competition in a free market.

capitalist n (1792): 1: a person who has capital esp. invested in business: broadly : PLUTOCRAT 2: a person who favors capitalism

plutocracy n (1652): 1: government by the wealthy 2: a controlling class of the wealthy

I use the dictionary to explain things because people, even those who can barely read, trust the dictionary. The 3 definitions above explain what Amurika is at this moment. We are governed by a government that is Capitalist! All the members of Congress and all the henchmen who work for these birds are Capitalists, too. Our government is now owned by a wealthy private sector who definitely intend to run it as a corporation. Instead of selling stocks, our government sells bonds and allows foreign investors almost tax-free opportunities to buy into our markets, make excessive profits, which they don't declare, most of them claiming they are losing money by investing in Amurikan real estate, factories, etc, which is total bullshit they spew in order to avoid having to pay taxes. Our government corporation also makes trade deals and distribution decisions based on the principles of this global marketplace economy.

I would refer you to Das Capital, but Karl Marx is considered a bastard commie devil, and we still fear commies, unless they are Capitalists posing as commies, as in the case of The People's Republic of China and its two large, large, very large Capitalist cities, Shanghai and Hong Kong. The reason our corporate government and our capitalist politicians are dangling a carrot on a stick in front of these formerly commie bastards is because of the enormity of their marketplace potential. They've got to get those Chinese bastards off those bicycles and into gas guzzling automobiles--in the world economy, whether the US makes the cars or Japan makes the cars doesn't matter one damn bit since they're all in cahoots--the Nazi car company Daimler has joint ventured with Chrysler; GM has since WWII worked arm-in-arm with the Japanese car industry--in fact, their car industry is modelled after the old GM model when they were headquartered in Detroit and Flint, now ghost cities almost since GM abandoned them and moved their corporate headquarters to Fifth Avenue in NYC.

You see, Amuricans are no longer cheap labor; they are also in debt, which means their buying power is becoming more and more limited every year, except at the extreme top of the social ladder where a small number of people (Pappy Bush wanted it to be 1% of the WORLD's population) control so much wealth, they sit around all day figuring out "What the hell can I buy today? I already own 99% of the wealth in this country? I've got two yachts, three private jets, sixteen mansions all over the place, 25 luxury apartment buildings working for me, twenty-five classic automobiles in my garage--along with my 5 Hummers and my fleet of limos, I own 16 Picassos, I own 7 ski resorts, 4 spas, plus what I don't own, I have in my 5th wife's name, the rest in my kids's names--hell, my daughter is richer than I am I think, the way she's spending money over in Europe right now; in fact, she asked me the other day, 'Daddy, can I have that castle you own in Ireland. Hell, you're not using it.' 'Sure, honey,' I said, 'I didn't even know I owned a castle in Ireland, holy cripes, how many more castles do I own, I've lost track?'"

It doesn't matter to plutocrats if you're white, black, latino, Asian, Mongolian, Turk,`Kurd, Jewish, Christian, Islamic, if you've got the capital wealth to play in their league, then, come on in, the water's just fine. When you become a plutocrat, your color is green and that's the color other tycoons see when they're lookin' at you. They are focused on your bank records more than your skin color. Yes, there is a lot of racism in the higher eschelons of the Plutocratic World--that world on the top floors of the higher and higher buildings they are building all over the world.

Donald Trump, a joke to me, said he bought a building in Chicago for 35 million bucks. He turned it into a luxury apartment building. He said he sold the three top floor apartments for 35 million bucks each, and thereby off those floors alone made his investment back and 200% profit on it. Donald Trump is a stupid ass jerk from Queens, New York, whose old pappy, a whack job landlord and real estate developer from the old days, one day handed the lad a million bucks and told him to make it or be broke--"This is all your gettin' of my money, toehead. You better get a hell of a hairpiece to cover that toehead, boy." And Trump did. You would think, as rich as DT claims he is he could afford a better hairpiece or if its real, have his private barber shot. It doesn't matter if you make it into the Plutocratic realm if you go broke occasionally or not; you're Plutocratic buddies will bail you out. Donald Trump's latest tactic to bail his ass out of missing huge payments he owed on his gaudy casinos he built in double-gaudy Atlantic City--except the parts of town where the majority blacks live, which is still as rundown and shabby as it was before casino gambling came there in the 70s--is bankrupcy. Yep, the Plutocrats go bankrupt when they get in a bind; besides, most of these clowns's wealth is paper wealth. I married a woman one time who was so brilliant in terms of practical solutions to big problems wealthy businessmen began hiring her to "intuitively" act as a checkpoint in all their affairs--she was their very private secretary, and they paid her really high salaries ($42,000 a year in the 70s) for a 28-year-old woman who really hated all of their asses with a passion. At one time when working in NYC for a dude who had just been given a billion dollars credit by the Saudi Arabian government to build oil tankers and jet fuel refineries under a British oil company's banner, she told me, "These bastards don't have any real money; they can't even pay their American Express bills when they come...hell, they're paper cowboys." That's what she called them and that's what they are, paper f-ing cowboys. All of their wealth is tied up in loans, stock issues, bond issues, and lobbying. Oh what a wonderful life.

So then, why are we suckers, we lower class boobs, so upset when taxes keep rising for us and going down for the rich--corporations hate taxes; most of your Big Eight accounting firms (now it's down to the Big 3 or some such lower number after a bunch of them merged in the 90s) no longer deal in 2nd story tax filing services--they've given that over to Sears Roebuck or H&R Block types (crooks still), because they now deal in what they call "executive management" and "corporate tax structures" all of which are schemes to keep the corporate assholes from being fairly taxed either in this country or in any other country in the world. In the 80s the corporate buzz phrase was "bridging the gap," which meant the first step to creating what they eventually created, the global marketplace. The global conglomerates consider themselves nonnationalistic, which means, they do not respect nations and their governments or the regulations of those nations and governments. Most of them used quantitative management schemes (like downsizing or reengineering) and breaking anti-trust laws by merging and laying off their older more highly paid workkers, and merging, and laying off more workers, and merging and laying off more workers, and continuously merging and laying off workers to where most of the biggest corporations in the world are now worth more than most of the governments in the world, including the good ole USA, whose government, by the bye, in case you haven't noticed, is in debt to the tune of several trillions of your hard-earned dollars.

Most goofy ass Amerikans have no sense of how much a trillion of anything is. A million bucks can be eaten up in a matter of a year; a billion maybe 10 years, but a trillion, shit, you're talking more like a 1000 years.

The capitalist pigs live very well, though they may not be happy people. Most of them are on their 2nd or 3rd marriages, have toehead, numbskull kids (like our "president"), and most of them have totally pissed on their past and the lower classes most of them were born into.

The best dude I've ever heard talk on this is Michael Parenti, a West Coast college professor. His insight into capitalism and the global marketplace is phenomenal; yet, I haven't heard a peep out of the dude of late. Here's a Michael Parenti quote, "There's only one thing throughout history that the ruling classes have wanted, and that's everything."

So, the next time you pull your gas-guzzling SUV (men love 'em because they think they're driving trucks, which they are, car bodies on truck chasses (the cheapest chasses to make)) into your Exxon-Mobil station and 20 gallons cost you $80, don't bitch, don't get mad at Exxon-Mobil, hell they made more profits than any company in the history of profits, which means they're a great corporation. That's the whole idea behind a Capitalist corporation: more and more and more and more profits. Reread what Michael Parenti said above. These bastards want it ALL.

Does this truth hurt? I'm afraid it doesn't hurt enough to get the boobs out of their SUVs, except soon, the Chinese will have the SUVs and Amurikans will be lucky to own a bicycle to ride.

thebrokeeconomist
for The Daily Growler
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Quote of the Day
"We are prisoners of concepts." former California governor, now mayor of Oakland, Jerry Brown
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Mister Mu Sic

Nikki Giovanni
I had gotten mad about jazz when I was a very young man and taking piano lessons in Dallas from Van Cliburn's mother's best friend, a Mrs. Kirby. She was teaching me to play Bach, von Webern, Chopin (I played one of his etudes at my first recital), and Czerny scales, which I couldn't stand--playing the classics that is. Listening to it was fun, but playing it was no fun. I wanted to play like Nat "King" Cole, one of the best damn piano players I had ever heard, and still alive at the time, though he had become a successful singer by then and only played the piano on certain occasions, like sometimes on his teevee show. Oscar Peterson would agree with me to this day about Nat Cole being a damn great pianist, I guarantee you. So, I started playing jazz piano, trying to play with a blazing right hand and an inventive bass line in my left hand.

When I came to New York, that was what I thought I would do. Play the piano. I had led a jazz trio in college in Texas, then later on a motel tour from Texas to California, and then a full-time gig with my trio in a bowling alley in Santa Fe, New Mexico. I had played with an old Brew Moore, one of the early unknown great saxophonists, and once with Paul Gonsalves and Joe Mondragon, who were both from Santa Fe.

I had always intended to come to New York, not as a piano player but rather as a writer since while I lived in Mexico City I had done some stringer work for Time Magazine so I had a connection in New York with an editor at Time. I didn't know any musicians in New York.

I moved to New York City in March of 1969, at the height of the Civil Rights Movement, the Black Panthers still active, the Black Liberation Army still active, the Weather Underground putting bombs by banks and blowing out their windows late at night when no one was around, and then one day blowing themselves up at a townhouse down in the Village. All of that action was going on, H. Rap Brown was still raising his fist and shouting "Black Power" and advising the only way to fight the white man was with fire, the fire of gunfire; Huey Newton was still with us; Angela Davis (what happened to Angela?) was still active, along with the Jacksons, and Joan Baez and her boyfriend were refusing to pay a part of their taxes because it was going to the Viet Nam War effort, though that didn't work; the IRS scared the hell out of Joan and she shut up about that, though I think Joan's boyfriend did some prison time for that action. What happened to all those revolutionary spirits? They're still around; I saw Joan Baez trying to make a comeback on the Mountain Home teevee music show out of Wheeling, West Virginia, but she wasn't political at all. Money makes a conservative out of the most outspoken revolutionary. That's what starts revolts, being poor as Job's turkey and being hungry for fame. You don't expect the fortune but when you get it, you cool your heels. You're a Capitalist pig then, just like the critters you revolted against. Where's Hanoi Jane? Where's Tom Hayden? Where's the young John Kerry who threw his Nam medals away? I know what happened to the real revolutionaries, Stokely, Huey Newton, Eldridge Cleaver, Timothy Leary, yep, I know where they are, in the ground dead--except Tim Leary who's in outer space.

So I came to New York City in the middle of the revolution that even then wasn't being televised and I started hanging out at jazz clubs. Jazz was my passion. A more intellectual music has never been conceived; I mean you need facile brains to play jazz the correct way--you don't have to read music, you have to KNOW jazz, which really was the essential music, the essential self-expressive music, the music that comes solely from your solar plexus through your cranium and out through you body and into your instrument.

After I went and heard Jaki Byard, the pianist, one night at Art DeLugoff's Top of the Gate down in the Village, I went down to Time the next day, checked in, and got a job writing ad copy for Time-Life Films. My wanting to be a jazz pianist was over, but not my love of jazz.

One of the first dudes I met at Time Inc. was my boss's closest friend, Frank Conroy. Frank had a novel just out called Stop Time, a jazz novel, plus, he played the piano himself and down in the Village. I hung around Frank a lot and then I started going around every night to all the jazz clubs, the Top of the Gate, the Gate, the Cedar Tavern, Michael's Pub, Slug's, Knickerbocker's, Eddie Condon's, the Half Note, Jimmy Ryan's, the Metropole, the Vanguard--yes, there were that many jazz clubs in New York then. At those clubs I heard Dizzy, Mingus, Jimmy Rushing, Roy Eldridge, the Modern Jazz Quartet, Junior Mance, Art Blakey, Jaki Byard, Mose Allison, Zoot Sims, Max Roach, Sam Jones, Pharoah Sanders, Archie Shepp, Ornette Coleman...Cripes, and I thought I was coming to New York to make it as a jazz pianist.

Then in 1969, my brother got rich and sent me some bucks and I used them to enter New York University in the spring of 1970 taking a publishing course they offered led by Sam Johnson, who at that time was publisher of Doubleday, and a writer named Anatole Broyard. I also signed up for one of Sam Eagle's film classes, but I couldn't cut that, so I cut it. But I never cut my publishing classes and after class, I got to going over to a bar on Thompson Street called Googies.

It was in Googies one night that I met a bass player named Junie Booth. Junie dropped word that night that he had landed a gig with Art Blakey and the Messengers coming up at the NYU Jazz Festival held every year in the spring those long ago days at the Loeb Student Center, the NYU union building, or student lounge. I went.

It was just after 1 pm when I went into the Center. Wow, I was amazed. I walked in. The room was large and full of couches and armchairs, no folding chairs, and you just found an empty seat, I found one on a couch with a bunch of women; yes, of course, that's what attracted me to it. Toshiko, the Japanese woman pianist, and her husband, Lew Tabackian, and their big band were playing. Actually it was their last tune, which didn't bother me since I wasn't into white jazz players in those days, though, hell, Toshiko was a good piano player and Lew Tabackian, he was OK, a little too many harsh notes for me, but he was OK.

As soon as they finished, they stayed and mingled with the crowd. I went up and met Toshiko. She was much older looking than I figured her to be because when I first read about her in Downbeat when I was in high school, she was very young and very pretty. Now she was seasoned, and that's as polite as I can put it. She was a cigarette smoker and I think the cigs were drying her out.

I stayed on the couch and watched as the faces of the crowd changed. The women on the couch left me there by myself. Then I saw Junie Booth come in with his bass. I went up to him and he acted like he didn't remember me, but he was friendly and introduced me to the pianist George Cables, at that time very young, and then trumpeter Freddie Hubbard. Wow. Meeting Freddie Hubbard was the big thrill. They all got set up. I can't remember who the sax was with Art that day, though I think it was Carlos Garnett, though Frank Morgan sticks in my mind.

Then, in walked Art. Holy cripes, he was decked out in the very latest hip stuff, a wild, wild shirt, a hugely complicated African necklace that rumbled, tinkled, and jammed all around his shirtfront. He was also surrounded by a bevy of very beautiful young black women, one of whom I was immediately attracted to, a sweet face, short reddish bleached hair, and dressed so hip, half Cherokee to me and half hippy, with a bright, beautiful smile. Oh my God, I couldn't take my eyes off her. She was going about being introduced to people, especially the group of black women that had come in with Buwana.

The band set up, tuned up and got ready to play. The festival dude took a mic and announced the Messengers. Immediately, the young ladies broke loose and started heading for seats. The woman I had had my eyes and dreams on, son of a bitch, she walked right over, smiled down at me and asked, "May I sit here?" Hell, yeah, you can sit here. And she did. She sat down right by me.

Blakey played a couple of tunes. I was amazed by Cables. Being a pianist, you remember, I was knocked out of my socks by his crafty manipulations, reminding me of a young pianist, Kenny Barron, who I had met in New Orleans in the 60s when he was 18 and with Dizzy Gillespie's Quintet, with James Moody and Chris White and Les Spann. What a group!

There was a large lull in the proceedings. I introduced myself to this beautiful woman right to my right, close enough all I had to do was reach out and touch her. She told me her name was Nikki. What do you do? I asked her. I'm a poet, she replied. Cool. I am too; I published some poems a few years back, 21 to be exact, and I went on about myself, being as charmin' as I knew how. She told me her first book was being published as we spoke. Great, I said, when's it coming out? I hope this fall; I'm working on the galleys now; it's so good to see your work in print. It sure is. I went on and told her about the first time one of my poems hit, in the Piggott, Arkansas, newspaper; Piggott is where Hemingway's second wife was from. I can't read Hemingway, she said. He's too damn white for me. I dig, I said, trying to be as cool as possible with my favorite author being slammed by this young poet who was so pretty, so alive, so lovely of smile. I was turned on high. I got bold. I ask her if she would give me her phone number and could I call her? She said, instead, why didn't I come hear her read from her new book at the Roundtable on Broadway, where Birdland once was, where she would be reading with a whole bunch of revolutionary women poets. She gave me a brochure and a ticket to the event, which was that Sunday evening. Damn right, I said, I'll be there. I'll look forward to seeing you.

Art Blakey started up again and Nikki and I got deeply into the music, snapping our fingers, saying "Yeah" a lot, and me dropping an "I hear ya" once or twice. Then Blakey announced the last piece of their set and then it was over. Nikki said, well, I have to go meet my friend over there--it was a woman--but it was fun, really fun, and really, come see me Sunday. I will, I will.

She left. I got home and read the brochure. She was Nikki Giovanni, from Cincinatti, had just graduated from Fisk, and her first book that was coming out was called Gemini.

I didn't go to the Roundtable that Sunday night. I wanted to go, but I was married at the time; yeah, I forgot to say I was married, didn't I, and I hadn't cheated on her yet and wasn't going to that Sunday evening either, so I stayed home like a good husband and never saw Nikki Giovanni again, though when her book came out, I bought it and read it twice, it was that interesting. She was a really interesting writer; she had a strong voice and her essays and poems had the beat, the jazz beat, the 4/4 rhyme in a forceful style that, to me, precedented what would develop out of the rap studios that were in NYC at that time, places where you went and joined a room of other people and you just started "rapping." That's how it started, in the rap clubs. From there it surfaced in music with Gil Scott Herron and the Last Poets--Gil Scott was a master pianist and poet whose "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised" really shook up my roots and made my tree grow a little wilder and more improvisational.

Just this week, I saw a PBS rerun of program honoring Nikki, telling of her life, with her talking about growing old, her grandmother, and her sister, Gary, and saying, no, she didn't understand hip hop, that she still listened to jazz, but that the kids didn't listen to jazz--they didn't listen to Hawk, or Coltrane, or Dizzy...she didn't mention Charles Parker, but, I caught her drift. She said the difference between the jazz generation and the hip-hop generation was that the jazz dudes were fighting for civil rights while the hip hop generation were business people, making themselves successful off their music then taking the style into clothing lines, restaurants, movies, and management teams--then she mentioned Puffy (now Diddy), Russell Simmons, and Tupac Shakur--and then she read her poem to Tupac Shakur--she didn't however show her "Thug Life" tattoo.

Just today I read where Nikki just survived lung cancer, having one of her lungs removed, but surviving it. "Hell yeah it was scary," she says. Chemo ain't no fun; I know that from having my best friend in NYC dying a few years ago of esophagus cancer--I sat by his bed in Sloane-Kettering (show up you'r dead) Hospital while he took his chemo. His once beautiful black body turned dark blue. He said it felt like an electric current going wild throughout his bloodstream. Then I read on and found out Nikki's sister, Gary, the one who first called Yolande Nikki, had the same cancer that Nikki beat and that she was going through chemo therapy at the time of the piece I was reading, about Nikki's appearance at the University of Missouri on Martin Luther King's birthday--she told that crowd that she'd like to hear a rapper rap Martin's "I Have a Dream" speech. Yeah. Me, too.

Nikki Giovanni now has published too many books for me to list them all. Just start with the autobiographical Gemini like I did; you will not be able not to keep on reading as many of her books as you can.

I became a writer after all and never did ever become a jazz pianist in NYC. I did become a fairly good singer and was lead singer for a clap-trap cult band that had a brief moment of fame down in Tribeca before the movie stars, lawyers, Cristo, and stock brokers discovered it and turned it into another place artists and musicians made charming and artsy fartsy and now is being commercialized, trendified, and, as far as I'm concerned, ruined.

Mister Mu Sic
for The Daily Growler
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Praise Ye, the Lard

Holy, Holy, Holy
Believe, ye fools; believe, believe, believe.

The word "lie" is the center of the word "believe."

All of what all of us BELIEVE are lies. Did you KNOW that, brothers and sisters?

That preacher, priest, rabbi, rector, prelate, whatever title of reverence you wanna give the dude (they are mostly men and have been since religions were invented) is basing his teachings, sermons, bulls, whatever, on LIES.

The dah Vinci Code -- total unadultrated bullshit. There is not enough evidence that Jesus or Mary Magdeline ever existed, if any, so who the hell KNOWs--and certainly what you don't KNOW you can't BELIEVE.

The poor Christians have only one reference to Jesus ever and that is in the works of Flavius Josephus, an aristocrat Sadducee (son of Zadok) who wrote a history of his exploits that was published in Rome in 90 AD.

Here is Flavius Josephus "writing" (I will qualify the quotations marks after the quote) about ho Cristos:

About this time there lived Jesus, a wise man, if indeed one ought to call him a man. For he was one who performed surprising deeds and was a teacher of such people as accept the truth gladly. He won over many Jews and many of the Greeks. He was the Messiah. And when, upon the accusation of the principal men among us, Pilate had condemned him to a cross, those who had first come to love him did not cease. He appeared to them spending a third day restored to life, for the prophets of God had foretold these things and a thousand other marvels about him. And the tribe of the Christians, so called after him, has still to this day not disappeared.

from the Jewish Antiquities

(Based on the translation of Louis H. Feldman, The Loeb Classical Library.)

I put quotes around "writing" because there are certain parts of this account (see the passages in italics) that are said to have been added by Christian copiers years later. We assume Josephus wrote in Latin. Since the Greeks dug Jesus's tale better than anybody, can't we assume it was Christian copiers who copied it from Latin to Greek? (koine Greek)

The vouted and vaunted Apostle Paul was a Greek from Antioch. He worked for the Romans as a special prosecutor and persecuter of criminals, the insane (unless they were Roman dignitaries, Judean royalty, or Jewish Caliphs), troublemakers in general, but especially the political troublemakers, revolters, outlaws, and false prophets. I beLIEve I heard mention that the Good Paul actually may have tossed some stones at Jesus since his main job at the time, the reason he was in Judea, was persecuting the followers of this Nazarene dude. "Stoning" was a good way of punishing a lawbreaker, especially a whore, an adulterer or adulteress, or a rabblerousing anti-orthodox bearded Jewish hippy dude who wore sandals and sheets, lived an Essene style of life-- with a lot of living and praying in the desert, an Essene essential; in fact, an essential for a lot of Judean beLIEvers. Stoning is universal in human history. Especially in areas where there are a hell of a lot of rocks, like New England, say around Salem, Massachusetts, where they have big stones, too ("Hey, Pilgrim, instead of rocking this bitch, let's lay one of them thar big stones on her chest; if she can survive that, hell, I'll worship her." "Good idea, Thou of great faith," saith the accuser, preacher, prosecutor, preacher, and executioner, preacher).

Now, I refer you back to the italicized portions of the above Flavius Josephus passage. These are purported to be the additions the Christians (especially the Byzantine monks) made when copying it. The big question is why would an aristrocratic Sadducee turned Pharisee beLIEve Jesus was the Messiah? Scholars say his mention of Jesus was in a discussion of Pontius Pilate's dilemma of whether this guy was just an innocent crazy or whether he was "King of the Jews" as he claimed, or at least according to the board the Roman assholes nailed up on his cross in jest. Josephus doesn't mention this King of the Jews shit, he merely mentions the trial and that maybe Jesus was simply an innocent kook. Josephus then passes back into the revelation of his own glory--Hell, he convinced the Roman General Vespasian he was the Messiah.

Where the Messiah bullshit comes from: "...a star shall come out of Jacob, and a scepter shall rise out of Israel; it shall crush the forehead of Moab and break down all the sons of Sheth...." Old Testament Book of Fables, Numbers 24:17-19

The Moabites were a people who lived in the highlands east of the Dead Sea in what is now Jordan. The Moab language as spoken and written, as shown in the Moab Stone, is almost identical to Hebrew.

Sheth, according to the biblical legends, was the third son of Adam and Eve, the son Jehovah gave this first couple to screw (like the animals all around them in the Garden of Eden--in the Tigres-Euphrates Valley, by the bye) because of their loss of their precious son Abel who was murdered by his brother Cain ("raisin' Cain). Sheth is the same as Seth. Seth was also an Egyptian god, said to be the uncle of Horus.

A Little Additional Info on Flavius Josephus
He was born Joseph ben Mattias in Jerusalem in 37 AD. Like I said, he was born an aristocratic Sadducee (a Judaic sect along with the Essenes and the Pharisees), though later he changed his beLIEfs so he'd be viewed as a Pharisee, the Sadducees not being well liked by the other Judaic sects.

In 64AD, Joe Mattias went to Rome to approach the Emperor Nero to beg the release of some priests who had been arrested in Judea and sent to Rome for imprisonment. Joe was successful and sailed back to Jerusalem a year or so later only to find the Jewish Revolt against the Romans had begun.

Joe then became General Joe Mattias and was sent to Galilee to join forces with the raggedy, hippy-like John of Gischala and his peasant forces to stand against an attack by the Roman armies under Vespasian.

General Joe and John of Gischala were surrounded by the Romans at Jotapata, put under siege and, BAM, Joe and John found themselves in a lose/lose situation. The tale is that the Jewish forces hid in a cave and decided one of them should kill all the others and then kill himself [what a stupid story]. General Joe won the lottery, but instead of killing everybody and himself, he surrendered to Vespasian. When he was brought in before Vespasian and his son Titus expecting to be horsewhipped and certainly crucified, he wisely began spouting the Messiah statement from Numbers. Not in declaring himself for Jesus, but rather convincing Vespasian, who had aspirations for the laurel crown back in Rome, HE WAS THAT MESSIAH (ho Cristos) mentioned in the Jewish holy book. It worked. Hot damn. Vespasian was pleased that Joe had declared him the Messiah of the Jews.

In the meantime, back in Rome, Nero committed suicide, the next guy was lynched, and then a couple of general dudes, one named Otho, began bickering and clawing for the crown when Vespasian came to town, routed 'em all, and made his son, Titus, the emperor.

While Vespasian had General Joe in prison, Joe became best friends with Titus; they were the same age. So when Vespasian took over Rome, he made Joe Mattias, Flavius Josephus, and made him a citizen of Rome. Praise the Lard! Flavius Josephus was Vespasian's translator when he later took over Jerusalem and destroyed the Temple. [Christians now are all yelling, "Praise the Lard," to the high heavens.] Anyway, because of this, old Flav was considered a traitor to the Jewish Revolt and therefore a traitor to all Jewish people.

Back in Rome, Flav lived a splendid life of comfort backed by a rich Roman. In his leisure, he began writing his big tome, his history of the Jews--though mainly a book trumpeting his own exploits, feats, and adventures. After his patron died, we lose track of Flavius Josephus and must presume he died right after his big book was published in 90AD. It is reported by the bestseller lists of the times that Flav's book didn't sell at all and probably wasn't read at all, except when discovered in the archives by the Christian researchers.
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Have a happy Sunday...and remember...Keep BeLIEving.
from The Daily Growler

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Reintroducing the Growling Wolf, or thegrowlingwolf, as He Likes to Be Introduced

THEE WAXETH TOO MUCH
I hate to complain about that for which I growl, The Daily Growler, but it seems to me of late the Growler eds. have been allowing a little too much "poetic waxing" to be going on at the expense of some serious growling. Yes, the vignette combining the Texas dust storm experience with the New York City reality of 9-11 was a well-done piece, but how many of the true dopey Yahoo Amurikans would ever get its drift and the analogy that drift leads you to. Sure bleeding heart liberals will understand its drift--an eerie drift, one that if you read it again and get into the swim of its drift, you see how scary breathing even actually is. Yes, natural terrorism has the same effect on your senses as a politically or religiously induced terrorism, the stench of both the same, that earthy natural stench that arises from the already dusty flames boiling out of a Texas dust storm or that that arises from the burning flesh of human beings when the bonfire's as big as 9-11. Dig where I'm comin' from?

Yeah, I got the piece, but only the choir got it like I did. The Yahoos didn't get it. Here's a couple'a Yahoos right here, let's say on a Goose Creek, Texas, street corner, oh, and listen, one of 'em's talkin' about that vignette: "That shure were a perty story that thar boy living up thar in that Jew...excuse me, New York City, but, I ask'ya, what the hell was he writin' about? A duster? Tornado? Cyclone? or one of them thar storms old Pa used to tell about back in them dust bowl days. Now your'ah talkin' 'bout somethin' I understand. Whew, boy. But, I jest didn't git the conneckshun this boy was makin' 'tween a Texas dust storm and that thar Jew...thar I go agin, damn, I mean New York City 9-11 thing when we know Sad-damn Hoosain did that and we know God makes'a Texas dust storm, for why, well, that's only for God to know. I say to that thar feller, sorry, but it's like they say in Tennessee...or at least I know they say it in Texas...you fool me once you fool me twice...er-ahh, but you know you cain't fool me always. Ye catch my drift?" See what I mean.

Too much literature kills a Yahoo. Can you imagine Georgie Porgie's (the "president's") library? Although Pickles was a librarian, she looks like a librarian, so she may have salted G.W.'s private library with some Moroccan-bound classics (some first edition Zane Greys maybe--the illustrated versions).

Besides, hey a la Macy Gray, I have to be kinder to Pickles because Pickles once gave great respect and tribute and honest idolization to someone close to me. This close one told me he thought Pickles admired him to the point of love. He said she always was so breathless and grandly glad to see him everytime she saw him; friendly to the point of being erotic. When they'd meet at an affair, she would run up and hug him and kiss him and then take his arm and lead him around the room introducing him as her favorite author to all her cozy friends and vested-interest guests. And then at the banquet dinner table, he mentioned triumphantly, she always sat by him and loved him entertaining her with his millions of off-the-cuff tales.

And then she honored him with a dinner at the White House and she gave him the full royal treatment--so with his ego pampered so whole-hoggedly, he tumbled head-over-heels for the dull but charmin' Pickles.

The close one met G.W., too, a lot when he was "governor" of Texas especially, but the close one had grown up to not trust dudes like G.W. and he knew how barrel-rolling mean they were in terms of cashing in on the Capitalist wheel of fortune at the expense of everybody else's commonwealth, meaning the close one knew how badly Georgie Porgie had run Texas into the ground economically, and how many poor wretched souls he had needled on the table of death back in the dankest part of the old State Prison at Huntsville, right up the road from old Mister Sam's sacred old home [Texas hero Sam Houston--actually not a bad man when you consider him in a certain light, a light and a point Texas-Mexicans and Mexicans would disagree with me on]. So the close one had nothing to do with G.W., just tolerated an occasional handshake from him or a pat on the back from him, but then, too, once a pretty fantastic tribute (a decree), which left the close one kind'a floored it was so nice, but it was G.W. giving it, so the close one threw it in the trashcan of his mind and went on admiring Pickles as a love interest that pepped up his withering aging mind to the point he felt he was romantic again.

A Short Growl
The world is still twirling and spinning and tilting its way around the sun again and again and again and it still carries along with it the dumb as well as the smart, though it's hard to tell the two apart these days. The "president" is still lying and getting away with it. The "president" still has around 40% of polled-folks on his side. The Chinese commie leader, Dr. Who-- I swear that's his name--was trotted out by the "president." I think Hu spells it H-u, but anyway, ain't that cute, the leader of the Chinese commies is Dr. Who? I jest, please, I jest.

I ask myself why is G.W. Bush trotting the Chinese commie leader around like he's offering him a chance to buy this country? I suppose Dr. Who sits there half asleep like Unka Dick and thinks, "Hell, I own all of this country anyway, you dumb Texas hick. What the hell's this lying son of a bitch talking about, offering me a chance to buy this country." "Well, you see, Hoo, it's like this, either you buy this country, or we nuke ya, what'd'ya think'a that, Mr. Hooey, or whatever your name is?" "Hu." "Naw, Who's on first." "What?" "Naw, What's on second." "You crazy." "Naw, You Crazy's on third. [heh-heh-heh]"

Then Dr. Who flew over to Saudi Arabia. What better place to go to relax after looking over your possessions in Washington, D.C. (the District of Corruption), than Riyadh for a little sun, oil, and relaxation? I think Dr. Who owns Saudi Arabia, too, since commie China is now the largest non-Capitalist Capitalist, most oil-burning Capitalist country in the world, its Capitalism growing by leaps and bounds, cell phones and Beamers, luxury high rises and McDonald's, an exorbitant number of skyscrapers and an exorbitant number of poor. Oh what a beautiful life. Look what power does for men who don't deserve it. They abuse it, of course, due to them being so dumb as to react with their raw animal naturalness; it's only natural these little-men big-fools are barrel-rolling mean and that their ultimate goal is to drive down the Amurikan economy to that 1% ownership of the world old Pappy Bush promoted when he was king for a term. The rest of us 99% either gag to death on cat food or just up and starve to death, or we pull ourselves up by our bootstraps like Pappy Bush and his illustrious grandpappys did way back in those glorious days of open monopoly and Captitalist greed out of control. [Remember Pappy Bush's sensitive and caring reply when asked about poverty right here in the squalid US of A? About how he didn't see any poverty and how everybody he knew had a job and, hell, he had two houses so what the hell were people bitching about. Plus, too, remember Babs's passionate and caring response as she passed among the displaced residents of New Orleans packed like sardines into the run-down, unkept, once-great invention (of the great forgotten Buckminster Fuller) Astrodome, "Why, Georgie Porgie, aren't these persons from New Orleans so much better off here in our lovely Astrodome. Why, my little still-sucking baby boy, they're better off here even than they were before Hurricane Corina." [Heh-heh-heh] 40% of the polled Amurikans don't find that offensive at all. "After all, the king's mamma was right. Them folks is better off in the Astrodome with our taxes payin' thar way, givin' 'em good food, I saw big boxes of Cream'a Wheat down thar when I swaggered through there right behind a guy dressed up like George Washington...er-ah, wha? [a stupid look comes over his stupid face] ...that's Miz Babs Bush? Oh my God, 'scuse me, I gotta go kiss her ass."

I love Amurika. But I don't think the "president" does; nor do I think Dr. Who the commie Capitalist loves Amurika either. He looks like he's out to get us--and Bush looks so dumb he doesn't even know the guy is jiving him. All of them are cocksuckers, by the way.

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler
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It's coming upon Sunday. We are taking the Lard's Day off. We'll sit around smoking La Rosa cigars for the dudes and medical Mexicans for the ladies of the Growler world. We'll have Mingus and Ives on the Growler sound system and soon some cat will bring out the 25-year-old Ambassador Scotch and we'll have communion--we'll break up Jesus's body into big nice pieces and we'll wash it down with slugs of Jesus's precious Scotch blood, at 100 bucks a bottle. Holy, holy, holy. How 'bout a holey?

PAX on you all from
The Daily Growler.
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The Quote of the Day: "peace- 1: a state of tranquillity or quiet: as a: freedom from civil disturbance b: a state of security or order within a community provided for by law or custom 2: freedom from disquieting or oppressive thoughts or emotions 3: harmony in personal relations 4: a: a state or period of mutual concord between governments b: a pact or agreement to end hostilities between those who have been at war or in a state of enmity. 5: -- used interjectionally to ask for silence or calm or as a greeting or farewell -- at peace: in a state of tranquility or quiet." Merriam Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, 10th edition.
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