Thursday, August 31, 2006

Profiling at Airports

Red Alert: as this post stands, it is unedited due to staff time limitations.
Going Backwards a Minute

The Daily Growler of a good many posts back now--we are too bound by time to even search back amongst our archives to find the actual post--made some satirical fun poking at how we didn't see why Americans at airports had to suffer intensive searches--no liquids, including life-saving medicines and baby formulas--mother's milk included, we assume--because of a threat that materialized in London and that included British citizens, Muslim or not, we didn't say, though the intent of Scotland Yard's tooting its own horn on the matter was that certainly they were all Muslims, including a white guy, the son of a Brit political dude and a high-class model sister. We admit we were rather sinister and pun-like in our attempt at trying to qualify our feelings about this threat as just yet another wild-eyed "terrorist-threat scare" coming on the approach to a very important election in this country--and also one in England, are we correct? Another red alert time for us here in this country; another photo op for our "president" to pedal his same old lyin' bullshit about "the terr-er-ists" and how "we're at war, people" and then that foppish looking Michael Chertoff (more of a Jack-type -off really) mucking up the media with his "whoooooo, scary, scary, liquid bombs, easy to make with mother's milk and peroxide, scary, ooooh, we're gonna impose hidebound toughass rules on all Amuricans beginning immediately because of this red alert, Al Queda coming for us, whoooooo, scary, scary, now they're coming at us en masse with liquid bombs, blowing up our airliners, killing innocent Amuricans, with these, ooooh, scary liquid bombs; and it's Al Queda attacking Amurica, so RED ALERT, and no more liquids allowed on board airlines--oooh, scary." We are making fun of this. We are getting used to the boy crying wolf and that's what's so scary to us. What if one of these kooky copycat jihadists bunch of Brit citizens or in the Canadian plot-busting case that cell included a Bangladesh connection, I think...and they all seem to originate now in Pakistan actually does succeed in performing another 9/11 attack? Will it be truth or bullshit? This is what we're making fun of, serious fun, a fun that's trying to wake Amuricans up, not international travelers--why these people are so interested in airlines and blowing them up or using them in suicide missions is because evidently it's pretty easy to get on an airliner no matter your nationality look, headdress, hairstyle, skin color--papers.... We said something about Saudi Arabians with only boxcutters and absolutely no flying time piloting a jumbo jet airliner managed to get aboard fully loaded with jet fuel and people jumbo airliners capable of speeds over 600 mphs, take control of them with boxcutters--and these planes held what over 150 passengers each, with crews of how many per flight, 10 or 15? and grab the controls and fly them with miraculous bull's eye precision into their intended targets, the WTC towers and The Pentagon. And, by the way, we asked, why don't airlines have their own security forces checking passengers and making them list everything in their luggage before they check it in, etc. That really was the jest of our comments. In our reading of the report of this plot bust in the Guardian we read where British authorities were saying they did not profile Muslims or Muslim-looking people...and we said, beligerently, defiantly, WHY NOT? Knowing all about profiling in this land of the "free nothing," knowing profiling goes on all the time in police departments all over this great democracy--even the whites among us had profiles on them, too--like long pony tails on white men meant trouble--peaceniks, hippies, Yippies, dopers, Atheists; or even white guys with whitesidewall haircuts, like Timothy McVeight, you know, a military haircut--the Aryans out in the Idaho hills, white supremists and the militia nuts--we are used to profiling in this country. We at the Growler merely said, "Well, hell, why don't you profile Muslims if you insist on saying all Al Queda members are Islamic, Muslim, and all of the ones you suspect so far come from mostly Saudi Arabia--so why not in particular pull them out and doublecheck them?--and still check the others, too. I mean a Muslim can be an Indonesian, right? Or even a Chinese. Hell, anybody can be a Muslim, or am I wrong? A lot of British fops during the Great Empire days got heavily into Islamic teachings and practices; they got into Hinduism, too. I mean, the Brits are stealers of cultures...uh-oh, we're profiling.

A recent comment on that post came from a Muslim person who was from India/Bangladesh and if we thought it was OK to profile all Muslims then why not Amuricans, too, and that it was the policies of the Amurican government that were to blame for all of this profiling and blaming and pitting against each other bullshit. We are in total agreement with this comment. Yes, it is the lyin' son of a bitch who STOLE TWO ELECTIONS FROM WE THE PEOPLE OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA and his toadying and masterminding henchmen who is the cause of all of this, and this little miscreant stole both those elections through racist and crooked-partisan tactics--profiling at the poles--certainly racist tactics in stealing the Florida vote in 2000--and Jeb Bush, our "president's" brother--did ya hear us?--just openly stole that vote with his stupid last-minute election rules and declarations--all against black voters; and then the Ohio vote in 2004 was a mess of racism mixed with just good ole crooked election tactics by the party in power, the Repugnicans. The election in Florida in 2004 was probably tampered with, too, don't forget.

Our attitude here at The Daily Growler is based on our being citizens of the US of A; we are all kinds of people, but we were born and raised in this culture and its many diversified looks and peoples and pleasures. This country has the potential to become a leader in world peace instead of a weapon of mass destruction--an intent we feel is meant to eventually wipe out the human race using religious believes as a means of keeping us divided, which when divided we fall and when united we stand (is that total bullshit?)--and we don't feel that statement is an exaggeration at all. One of the reasons we can be so freely beligerent and mocking in our comments is that we are high above the reasonings that have led humans into all these world human vs. human conflicts. We are not religious first of all. We respect no gods or manmade voodoo dolls or boogiemen. We are encyclopedists. We like to know something about every idea that has ever been proposed. We look for sensible ideas and we can find plenty of them, but they seem to have no power of attention over FABLES and ghost stories and religio-science-fictions and stupid unreal movies and BIBLES and KORANS and all the hexes and curses these master classes of pious self-proclaimed rulers pour on us daily from their pulpits. They base their rights to rule us on some right a god has given them, thus rendering it a divine right to rule us and own all our wealth. They all claim the voices of these gods who are talking to them in their own languages we assume and telling them to lead us with great holiness into mass destruction of ourselves and this paradise of a world we have all been evolved into--all of us coming as we did from Atheistic chimpanzees and mountain gorillas--we are the products of some eccentric chimpanzee tribe that woke up one beautiful Darwinian morning and found themselves talking to themselves and thinking to themselves and identifying what the hell a certain window of opportunity had been opened unto them...then they started signing each other to find who amongst them had the same cognizances and those folks got together and began signing and then getting excited and yapping and geegawing and yowling and growling and howling and dancing and gesturing and chattering and swooning and crooning and soon a society was developed and we were able to identify and define a system within this universal structure.

We at The Daily Growler want to be back at the dawning of reasoning and understanding. Human beings thinking got off track somewhere back in that dawn. The solution to ending wars is in our reasoning. We'd love to one day be able to change the name of The Growler to The Daily Grower.

GREED is an overwhelming impulse.

We welcome Muslims to our core. We however do not understand the Koran. Nor do we understand how a mass of people can fall subject to MEN (MALES) who claim these divine rights to impose their ways on us, claiming to have supernatural connections with some figment of ancient imaginations called ALLAH in some societies, Jehovah in some, Elohim in some, Baal in some, or the Pantheons of Gods of Hinduism, or the divine rulers of China's many dynasties, or even the divine rulers under the Caliphate when it went out on its imperialist adventures in order to conquer the world for the ideas of a man who was a salesman by profession and who eventually lived in a cave with his sister and was an epileptic and of course had a lot of visions and hallucinations--have any of you ever had an epileptic seisure? Same as we have no understanding of masses of people who believe an underage Judean girl of the Jewish faith got pregnant without having sex and gave birth to the ONLY SON (read SUN) of a god they called Jehovah (the dude who had given the covenant of Abraham, the old bastard who started all of this bullshit going on in the Middle East right now--the same dude who as Allah has Abraham's covenant going to his disowned son, Ishmael. Is that the reason Israel bases whether you're Jewish or not on your mother being Jewish? I mean according to the big fable--it arose out of the early Mesopotamian List of Kings--Abraham is both the poppy of the Jews and the Muslims--they are both racially Semites (from Mesopotamia)--so it's their mothers who really carry the rights to the religion in them. Jacob's mother was Sarah, we assume as Jewish as Abraham (was he a Jew? But he was a Semite. So, how was Sarah a Jew then if Abe was poppy of the Jews. Whoa. See. This is all unreasonable to us.

Humankind's salvation is in their solar plexuses and not in their minds and in all that imaginary bullshit our minds accept as hidebound truth ("hidebound" meaning some damn silly manmade book that supposedly contains OUR/THEIR god's HOLY WRIT). It's all about US or THEM in the current world quagmire--it should just be about PEACEFUL COEXISTENCE...and when's the last time you heard that promising phrase?

thedailygrowlerstaff
for...you guessed it, The Daily Growler

Wednesday, August 30, 2006

Among the Simple PART 2

Wires Crossed
Thanks to l hat, I had to go back into yesterday's post and make a couple of corrections. The most important was changing "diatronic" in my ind(n)ept glance into the idea of Structuralism and how it became linguistic anthropology...the DIACHRONIC being the evolution of a language and the synchronic being systemic theory of language. So I changed "diatronic" to "diachronic" and I corrected my incorrect spelling of SHAEFFER pens, to the correct spelling which is SHEAFFER pens.

The word "diatronic" got to bothering me, it was beckoning unto me to make it a legit word as it sat there sad-eyed looking back at me. It was an obvious typing error on my part; my notes have it "diachronic" but I have "-tronics" on my mind a lot daily dealing with electronic devices I need in the continuence of my sane but eccentric existence; or I deal with the audiotronics surrounding me as I bump and grind with all the cell phone and cell phone-camera users flitting in and out of my life on an again daily basis [at dinner last night at my favorite Irish pub, at a table of 10 Euro turistas, 5 of them were on cell phones during most of the meal. One guy continuously on the cell phone, even while he was eating. The cell phone saved Finland's and Norway's economies. Like Bluetooth is big on the Danish economy.

So I looked up "diatronic" and boy howdy, look what I found--to me this is a wonderful find since my main day gig for many moons was in publishing and advertising and you do have a need to study a little about typesetting processes when you're so involved with them day-in and day-out. So searching "diatronic" gave me this site:

http://www.factbites.com/topics/Phototypesetting


I love sites like that. God, some folks amaze me with their dedication to finishing a task. Time is grueling in its force on you--or as really feels, its force AGAINST you. Like swimming upstream against a rapids or taking on a riptide in a feat of strenght. Time has been my greatest enemy even in my earliest memories. Remember sitting in schoolrooms waiting for the big clock they always had up high on the wall over the blackboards to hit 3:30 so you could fly with unabandoned joy as fast as you could home. With me it was always flying to get home before my parents came trudging in around 5:15 (my mother was the first to pull in the driveway) so I could have at least an hour home alone. Oh how I loved being home alone. My world. My world was a hell of a lot more fun than the world my parents wanted me to live in.

Time has run the world since time was invented by man, though, yes, I've observed animals enough to know they have a sense of primitive time, too. Why do wolves how at the moon? Well, I know the answer to that since I'm a wolf, but the sun and the moon are our true timepieces; too bad we don't follow universal time. Sidereal time. A time you can reverse or advance at will; perhaps that time exists in cyberspace somewhere. A human just hasn't figured out the right language to present it in yet.

It's all about time and the definitions we create of time.

I am scarfing down a pint of Haagan Dazs chocolate ice cream [whose brand name I think I once heard has an interesting story behind it] as I type this. I'm eating totally terrible horrible killing foods today. Earlier I gobbled down a gyro platter from a Muslim street vendor, washing it down with a Snapple fruit punch--so full of corn syrup and citric acids; now I went out and came back with this Haagan Dazs and also a damn Dr. Pepper, which I may in a Texas minute pour over this chocolate ice cream. Dr. Pepper was invented by a druggest in Texas way back in the early days of soda pop adventures--all mostly coming from drugstores where they had soda fountains. These druggists mixed up syrups into which they shot spritzes of seltzer water and turned them into soda pops; syrup made with coca-nuts (source of cocaine) in the case of Coca-Cola and Moxie Cola; syrups of pepsin n the case of Pepsi; and, as they say in Texas, a syrup made of peppers (black, red, cayenne) that got the druggist who invented it to being called Doctor Pepper. Dr. Pepper at one time, next to beer, was the official Texas soda pop. My mother swore she was addicted to Dr. Peppers, and she was serious about it. So, hell yeah, I'm pourin' this Doc-ter Pepper over my chocolate ice cream...yeehaw, that's a sickening mix.

Only a wolf's stomach can endure this crap food. But, boy, is it good.

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

A Daily Growler Sports Update With Marvelous Marv Backbiter
I have just returned to earth from a doubleheader between the Yankees and the Tigers out in Yankee Stadium--the House that Ruth Built that is going to be demolished soon so we can have the House that George Steinbrenner and We the People of New York City are building. I mean poor George, the Yankees are only going to sell over 4 million tickets this year. I feel so sorry for these billionaire ballclub owners--like our own "president"--heh-heh, yep, he ruined the Texas Rangers baseball team but, hell, he tricked the city of Arlington, Texas, into building a new baseball stadium for the bankrupt Rangers--after the "president" was involved in buying A-Rod from the Seattle Mariners--and then the team still was lousy, A-Rod or no A-Rod.

The Yankees won the first game of today's doubleheader, 2-0, behind some good pitching from Wang (turning out to be the Yankee's most reliable pitcher) and then a fantastic save by Mariano Rivera--getting out the side with only 4 pitches.

Then in the second game the talented bum, Jared Wright, took the hill for the Yanks and, by god, even though he gave up 2 runs right off the bat, he then settled down and pitched good baseball, the Yankees giving him a one-run lead in the sixth when they score 3 runs to lead 3-2. The Yanks hung on till the top of the ninth.

One thing that pisses me off about Joe Torre is how he sticks to the god-damn computer printout he depends on to manage. I'm sorry. I truly think that Joe Torre is the best damn manager in baseball right now, but, when it comes to using his pitchers, he's damn scary.

Going into the ninth inning tonight with a 1-run lead, it was the perfect spot for Mariano Rivera. But, no. Joe stuck to his announcement before the second game that he was determined to rest Rivera in the second game. Bad call, Joe. So Joe trots out Scott Proctor for the ninth. Now Scott Proctor on his best day is a minor major league pitcher; on his worst day he couldn't make the grade with the Staten Island Yankees. Tonight, he thought he was pitching for Staten Island. He walks the lead off batter. Then he gets an out. Then he gets another out but the runner advances to second. Then he intentionally walks the next batter to get to a weaker hitter. BOOM. Bad move, Joe. Detroit's weak hitter hits a three bagger and the Tigers go up 5-3 over the Yanks.

Jesus, I'm pulling out my hair.

What the hell am I worried about. The Yankees are still 8 games ahead of Boston and still only 3 games behind Detroit as being the winningest team in baseball.

marvelousmarvbackbiter
for The Daily Growler

Tuesday, August 29, 2006

Among the Simple

The Idea Collective
I went to college with not much knowledge at all. Public school had taught me grammar, a general form accepted at the time, and then it taught me how to string all those adjectives, adverbs, pronouns, verbs, prepositions, etc., into statements (or sentences) in a "proper" order so that when I wrote down my thoughts in sentences like "I like birds," for instance, I wasn't really meaning "Birds I like" or "Like birds I," though I was given to think from a "birds I like" point of view and my poet grandmother would have used "Like birds I," and I thought poets were crazy even at the tender age of 5. So, putting sentences together, where am I, third grade? I mean, I could already "speak" by the time I entered public school; I was taught not to use contractions, especially "ain't," a forbidden word in my house. "Is not, young man, and if I catch you saying that word again, I'll wash your mouth out with Lava soap [an exceptionally harsh soap said to have been made from volcanic pumice ash] and I was afraid of my folks when it came to proper language; they really would have washed my mouth out with Lava had I tried to get away with using it again.

Also I could write fairly well with pen and ink before I went to 1st grade thanks to my dad's obsession with fine pens and with the fine penmanship you could become capable of developing using one of those fine "writing instruments," as my dad called them. He would take one of his beautiful fountain pens, he had a gold-tipped Sheaffer that was a pen among pens to him and cost him an arm and a leg that he taught me to write with. [$25, which is about what a Sheaffer gold-tipped pen and pencil set cost back in those Great Depression days. During that Great Depression, both my mother's and my father's families were dirt poor (my father did have a couple of brothers and a sister who had good jobs at that time and they supported his side of the family; my mother's side of the family all lived within blocks of each other and all of them were struggling--my mother wrapped butter at a local dairy for a penny a stick--my dad drove trucks for "chicken feed," as he described it. So in order to keep eating, the families would gather together in each other's houses every night and go out into the backyard in the summertime to cook out since not all of them could afford electricity or gas for spells or else in the winter time they cooked in their fireplaces or they cooked on cans of Sterno--nor could they afford much food--so all of them gathered what food they could find during the day and then bring it with them to whoever was "cookin' dinner" that evening. My florist grandmother could make salads out of dandelions, rose petals, wild chards and mustards, wild onions, wild asparagus, wild peppermint, wild berries during the spring and summer and the ladies all canned foods to make it through the winter. My grandmother, my mother's mother, knew all of the wild plants that were good to eat and she knew where to find them, along certain creek banks, or even by the side of the highways sometimes--nuts, too, she always found, especially hickory nuts--she was a tough Pioneer Woman (there is a statue to the Pioneer Woman in Ponca City, Oklahoma--she's a symbol of those single-mother white women of great strength who survived the struggles of living on those plains and prairies on that huge wild Western Frontier, single mothers because their husbands were killed by wars, Native Americans, or their own kind or they died of consumption (TB) or some other terminally attacking disease or they became insane or were old men to begin with who liked young girls in their nasty old age (my great-grandmother married a 72-year-old Texas "War of Independence" veteran when she was 14). I had an uncle who made wine out of wild grapes, "mustang" grapes we called them, and they used this wine to make salad dressings and to cook with and this uncle was also good at telling wild attention-holding stories--he was an early aviator--about flying, he had been a sailor so he could talk about sailing on ships and being in strange foreign places, and he had been an early cinematographer and he'd been to Los Angeles and met with King Vidor, a Texas man from where my mother's family was from--and my grandmother sometimes used that uncle's wild grape leaves in her salads, too, or she would make one of her specialities: spicy mashed potatoes (with with wild onions and wild herbs) wrapped in a grape leaf and then sauted in a skillet of pork lard until the leaves were crackling crisp. I had a one-eyed uncle who was a master at preparing wild meats, especially rabbits and squirrels that he'd catch himself out in the fields and along the creeks and he dressed 'em out and then used the meat in stews he called "burgoos," a term I was told came from my Oklahoma, Tennessee, and Kaintuck past generations, folks from those states thick as hops in Great Depression Texas. The following is an interesting little essay by Jerry Parsons on varmints written in a wonderful Texas style of writing--check it out:

http://www.plantanswers.com/garden_column/june02/june4.htm

_________________________________________________
But my dad would take his fine Sheaffer pen and he would show me how to write, like starting with the alphabet, you know, holding my hand and then moving it to form each letter--teaching me to use a square-topped A--my dad's style--his first name beginning with an A; and then a fancy B, I later think he got from seeing a letter B in German, each letter having to be printed or scripted in his certain ways, on and on, etc. Then he taught me how to sign my name--he could sign his name backwards and upsidedown; sometimes, if you caught him in a show-off mood, he would sign his name forwards and backwards at the same time. Then, using the Good Book of the Christian World of Fables, he taught me grammar and, by golly, I was growling pretty correct sentences when I entered first grade. Besides, all that prepping had caused me to develop into a little smartass know-it-all. I was amazed at how advanced I was with knowledge-seeking tools over those other just-plain kiddie dumbos who competed with me in first grade. I was a little man; they were pencil necked geeks. I knew how to spell words correctly too, another discipline taught to me by my dad who loved to read the dictionary and loved the idea of spelling bees. My dad loved learning to spell, pronounce, and use-in-sentences big words, and of course I knew how to spell "antidisestablishmentarianism" before I was 5. The other little brats in that class considered me a little masturbating-mouthed prick; even the old schoolmarm teacher hated my guts, though she tolerated me because she had taught both my dad and my brother--she was ancient, in her 80s when she was my teacher. She found me a problem student because I already knew what she was administratively programmed to teach me. I became an outcast because of this; I became a disciplinary problem; I became a prime subject for a good dose of methylphenidate.

Being a smartass kid put me in a position to where throughout most of my public school education I had to discover my own brand of learning or gaining knowledge. Yes, I learned rudiments in PS, the rudiments of reading, writing, and arithmetic, but I had to gain the knowledge of those systems on my own. I became an autodidactic.

Here's a list of autodidactics from history: I'm in good company; I notice William Faulkner and Bobby Fischer are in there in alphabetical order--two of my human heroes:

http://www.realityspoken.com/autodidactic

"The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education." -Albert Einstein

Why Me, Lard?
This all came up when I went on what I think is a fascinating site run by the University of Virginia--yep, old Tom Jefferson own personally designed university--the first American-style college in this country. The site is called The Dictionary of the History of Ideas and I go on it occasionally when I get curious about an idea I suddenly remember reading about, like Theosophy...or today, I decided to read about Structuralism. Holy shit, what was wrong with me? But I used to read Michel Foucault with fascination, not understanding a lot of him--I think you have to learn French to really understand him, or maybe Esperanto would be better--anyway, this site had a whole huge long piece on Structuralism written by Peter Caws.

Good god almighty it was interesting; it's a very deep subject; I need a guide to make it through most of its vastlands of linguistic thinking. Structuralism arises from the work of a man named Ferdinand de Saussure, who taught at the university level in France around the turn of the 20th Century, that one that just past--it seems like at a breaking-the-speed-limit celerity--as fast as one of those armadillos old Jerry Parsons likes to go hunting for at two in those starry Texas mornings--when armadillo chili is on his craving mind. Three of de Saussure's students took extensive notes in his classes and after he died, they collected them and published them as Cours de linguistique generale. de Saussure envisioned the science of semiotics.

I was already connected to these guys through a lot of postgraduate work I had done in Sociological Theory; I wrote my Master's thesis on Georg Simmel and his theories of triads, with very similar theories to Gestalt Psychology and now I see Structural Anthropology. The humanties, these areas of learning are called because they deal with what makes human beings human beings--as opposed to staying stupid chimps and having an easy life of it in the sweet and easy jungles of Tarzan's distant-relative world--the Shangra-La for chimps and apes--F other monkeys--chimps eat other monkeys to get rid of their wild instinctual desires for wild, fresh, hot, bloody sweet little monkey meat occasionally then they get it out of their system and go back to eating nuts, berries, and tree leaves.

So I started getting into this definition of Structuralism by Peter Caws and it got more and more involved and especially fascinating for an autodidactic like me. I understand structures and structures of systems and system functioning--I learned some of it in Urban Sociology, in Cultural Anthropology, in Race and Race Relations, and in reading the works of French Sociologist Emile Durkheim, who was very interested in the role of languages in society. Sociology you know was invented by a Frenchman, Auguste Comte, who based his thinking on two universal laws, one "The Law of 3 Phases": 1) the Theological 2) the Metaphysical, and 3) the Scientific (the Positive Phase). [Comte declared himself a Positivist and Positivism a religion and himself "the Pope of Positivism."] His other universal law was the Encylopedic Law, or his word for it, physique sociale (social physics). After a Belgian thinker started calling his work physique sociale, too, Comte changed his science to sociologie. Comte loved inventing words (neologism) and by taking the Latin for "friend" (socius) and the Greek for "word" (logos) and he came up with Sociology.

Comte also invented the word "altruism," now a branch of Sociology started by Pitrim Sorokin at Harvard.

And what Sociology is is a systematic and hierarchical classification of all science; thus, Sociology, according to the Pope of Positivism, is the greatest of all sciences because through combining all sciences it leads to social evolution and social progress which leads to THE POSITIVE STATE, what Sociologist Karl Mannheim later wrote about in his great book, Ideology and Utopia (1936) while Mannheim was on the run with Hitler bearing down on him, moving to London where another phase of his thinking evolved.

One road I see coming out of the Utopia of Sociology is the road leading to Structuralism. Wow, systems and system functionings are all important to encyclopedists, which is what these "doctors" are--observers, writing down every aspect of a structure, starting with its whole and deevolving back through its structures within structures and the functioning systems within those structures--or that big structure [Comte used Sociology to explain society in France before and after the Revolution--its theological structure; its metaphysical or humanitarian structure, and its scientific structure--the structural ironworks of that which should have led to great positive feelings in France after the Napoleonic era. And another all-important character in this story is Jean Jacques Rousseau who wrote an essay called Essay of the Origin of Languages --Structuralism began with this essay and that led to the science of Linguistics that started with the Western rediscovery of Sanskrit in the 19th Century, using it to trace the origins of their language, the Indo-European language. Through what they called the "diachronic" they studied the evolution of a language; and through what they called the "synchronic" they observed the systemic theory of language. And then here comes Semiotics. Symbols. Hand gestures. Margaret Mead being fed a bunch of bullshit by some Samoans. The Golden Bough becoming a very important book in all these folks's repertoire--especially us Jungian Sociologists who see everything humans do as based on myth and superstitions and codes--protections from the evils of the unknown, including those people speaking languages that are unknown, that have to be interpreted through hand signs, or combining hand signs and sounds--I've noticed people hem and haw and giggle at things the same whatever the language they are speaking.

Fascinating isn't it? [I recall Jerry Colona when I write that--"Fascinating, isn't it." One of the most unusual and brilliant crazy men of the stage of induced laughter--he had a quaint way of cracking your ass up.] But learning is so much fun. I mean Structuralism is too big a subject for me to be becoming an expert in this late in my autodidactic existence, but, hell, it's fun to try and grasp their concepts, concretely or otherwise.

Besides, I know one of the world's great linguists personally; one of the most brilliant guys I've ever known; but I am one who likes hanging around people who are more brilliant than I think I am. It's like when I played golf, an old pro, Billy Maxwell, whose father started my hometown municipal golf course, and he went to my alma mater, told me, "Hey, kid, get out there and play with your friend, C.C.; he's the best damn golfer I've seen out here; you play with him all the time, you have a tendency to strive and beat him and that makes you play above your skills because you're having to learn to shoot better than him as you play him; the more you play him, the better you'll get, unless you're a natural phenom--which you're not, by the way." I took his advice and entered a semi-pro tournament over in the bald-ass plains town of Sweetwater, Texas, and I was paired with Charles Coody, who went on to become a major player on the PGA tour; and in order to play with this guy and not look like a fool, I used a two iron off my tees that day and for the first time in my golf playing adventure, I hit every fairway with my drives, and though I was 30 or 40 yards behind Coody, I still managed to get to every green in regulation, though there's where I fell apart; on the greens; I couldn't putt for shit. At the end of the match, Coody shot a 69, set the course record, and went on to win the tournament. I shot an 84, the best score I had ever posted in match play--in fact, it was the best golf I had played to then. Coody even congratulated me by popping me a cold can of beer out of his golf bag as we walked back to the clubhouse to check and sign our scorecards. I missed the cut by 2 strokes and was eliminated from the tournament, but hell, it was a day I shot like a pro because I was playing with a real pro.

Ferdinand de Saussure compares "structuralism" to a game of chess. Really exciting thinking.

I still really do not understand Structuralism, but at least I'm very acutely aware of it now; let's see if I delve into it deeper.

My Own Reality Show Idea
How about a "Battle of the Gods"? You know, have the most powerful witch doctors from all the voodoo religions (and that's all of them) go mano y mano against each other. Like American Idol but with shaman and Holy Rollers competing to bring down their gods to do battle on stage. You know, have a Santa Ria ritual--kill some chickens and spray the blood and feathers in curse against the demons present in the teevee studio. Wow. I'd love to see Baal and Jehovah go at it again in a reconstruction of Elijah and the High Priest of Baal battle of the gods in the Christian's Old Testament (or Ye Olde Testament to be more King James about it)--with the pillars of fire zooming down, and the burning wheels coming out of the sky--"Sweet low, sweet chariot, coming for to carry me home...." Dizzy ended one of his versions of "Sweet Low, Sweet Chariot," with the shave-and-a-haircut tag of "Tender-leaf tea...." A brand of real tea, but what we old potheads called marijuana--Tea and good Tea was Tenderleaf Tea.

Roll me a mezzroll, Mezz. [Mezz Mezzrow wrote Really the Blues, a book of total bullshit but one of the most important linguistics studies ever written. "How's 'bout a muggles, Mezz?" I love that book.]

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

HOW EMBARRASSING WAS BUSH'S THIRD TRIP TO NEW ORLEANS AND THE GULF COAST AND HIS ABSOLUTELY STUPID STATEMENTS TO THOSE SUFFERING SOULS DOWN THERE? ONE OF HIS STUPID "YERE DOIN' A HECK OF A JOB, NEW ORLEENS" STATEMENTS. SOME ONE SHOULD BE IN PRISON FOR THE CATASTROPHE OF NEW ORLEANS, NOT CAUSED BY KATRINA THE HURRICANE BUT BY THE INCOMPETENCE OF THE ARMY CORPS OF ENGINEERS AND THEN FEMA AND THEN THE "PRESIDENT" HIMSELF--TROT THEM OFF TO PRISON--OR MAKE THEM REBUILD THOSE LEVEES THEMSELVES--YEAH, PUT 'EM ALL OUT THERE WORKING ON THOSE LEVEES--UNKA DICK, KRIMINAL KARL ROVE, CONDO-LEASING RICE, RUMMY, THAT JUDGE UNKA DICK SHOT IN THE FACE, LYNDIE ENGLAND, SADDAM HUSSEIN, PUT 'EM ALL TO WORK ON THOSE LEVEES--THOSE BASTARDS--THEY KILLED KENNY!!


Monday, August 28, 2006

Indulgences

What Happened to Hell?
I am sitting here on a deep August night, in NYC, and the temperature is 72 and like being in paradise really, whereas only two weeks ago, it was hotter than the holiest of all the Hells. Jesus, I'm I gonna join the Christians against the greenhouse effect and say, yep, it really was old Yahweh punishing us with a little prep Hell because we were letting Gays marry each other; and because we have no prayer in school; and because we still kill embryos--THOU SHALT NOT KILL EMBRYOS!, though it's OK to execute the mentally retarded, kill off our young people in wars--Jesus, forgive us, we are the only country to drop nuclear bombs on other human beings--though as a guy told me the other day, "Hell, not as many Japs died overthere as were killed in the fire-bombing of German cities." So God was pissed at us and he scorched us for a couple'a weeks...why now paradise?

I was sorry to see Mayor Ray Nagin of NOLA apologize for talking about "that hole in the ground" up here in NYC because I got his drift, and I think the true people of New York City got it, too, and weren't offended by it. Who got offended by the statement were the developing, scheming, money grubbing, same-ole-same-ole scroundrels who are bloviating their credentials for honoring those 3000 Americans (though not all 3000 of those "Americans" were Americans) and who are totally know-it-alls when it comes to what's best for Ground Zero, which is literally just a hole in the ground, though these always arguing factions involved in the filling in of that hole want us all to believe it's sacred ground--it's holy ground and that we should respect these high priests, most of whom were scared shitless by this unexpected attack--Rudi scared shitless when he was walking through what he thought was safe ground during a photo-op with his sweaty-armpits henchman Bernard Kerick (I just read this twisted bastard two-timed his mistress--Judith "Celebrity Publisher" Regan--who used to bang his old hairy ass in the 9/11 dust on everything in their little Ground Zero lovenest--Bernie's private apartment down their paid for with 9/11 contribution monies--millions and millions of dollars--remember, Rudi Goombaiani started his own 9/11 contribution memorial fund, which I believe I read one time had as much as 80 million in it; then remember the 9/11 victims complaining about Guiliani not really coming through with any money...how easily we forget. But that's who's complaining about Ray Nagin merely saying you're wasting five year's arguing over that hole in the ground when the City of New Orleans is totally forgotten now--a much greater disaster than 9/11--and you know I actually heard a NYC television commentator, one of those communications major egoheads, saying "Nanner, nanner on Ray Nagin...there were only 3000 people killed in and after Katrina--and the 3000 that lost their lives at that hole in the ground were more important--they had to be honored, dammit, and New Orleans should just dry the F up and blow away, either that are let the New York City developers in down there and they'll build New Orleans back as though it were a DisneyWorld mock city. How criminal is the treatment the dear old imperfect, yes, City of New Orleans has gotten since it happened now a year ago? And Georgie Porgie, the little lying Unka Dick hand puppet "president" of ours, has the gall to go back to New Orleans now--and he's going to declare "Hey, New Orleens is lookin' damn fine now; wow much better than it was when I had to put up my own lights when I did that photo op in front of Saint Louis Cathedral--that's a Cathlick church, ain't it? Anyway, I think FEMA has done a heck of a job down here. Hell, my hotel room is brand new, baby--and I ain't got Pickles with me either--and the twins gave me an address here in New Orleens where I can score some...whoa, is that me talkin' to myself? Anyway, I gotta go, folks; I'm headin' over to Mississippi to do some bullshittin' overthere--but anyway, damn, this makes me proud to be my own self, me the decider, me, who am the government...is that the way you say that? I know that's how they say it in Tennessee or at least I know they say it that way in Texas, I think, but anyway, you all are all doin' a heck of a job, especially you white folks, you good Christian folks...you know Unka Dic...I mean, you know Gawd talked to me the other night--and I hadn't been hittin' the sauce either...heh-heh-heh...and he told me to tell all y'all you're doin' a heck of a job, New Orleens, and now I'm on my way to shootin' a little golf with my new pal Uncle Joel...I have trouble pronouncin' those Jew last names, but, I'm on my way to campaign in my really home state, Connecticut, where Joel Liverstein is doin' a heck of a job." And off to the side you could hear the "president" saying, "There that ought'a hold the little bastards, let's get the F outta this smelly place."

It's a shame we are so split in this country. It would make a marvelous community if we all shared the wealth of this nation equally, in commonwealth.

Charles Ives, America's greatest composer, and at one time one of America's greatest businessmen, having turned a small start-up insurance business, Merrick and Ives, into one of the largest insurance companies in America, believed in a maximum allowable annual income, with the government giving everyone 900 dollars in start up money on your way to making your maximum allowable income, which was in his time, 1910, $7500. Ives wrote, "A system under which each man had a minimum Natural Property Right recognized as his share in majority possessions, with the possiblility of working to increase this as his initiative and the needs of his family suggest to him, up to an agreed maximum which would be high enough to encourage individual action but low enough so as to rob nobody of his minimum share, has the good points of both the 'isms': capitalism and communism" from Charles Ives and His Music by Henry and Sidney Cowell, Oxford Press, 1955, p 94.

Ives practiced what he preached and after his company started making bales of bucks during the early 1900s, Ives gave himself very little salary, just enough to live comfortably on, as he said, putting all monies due him over his set maximum allowable salary back into the company. Charley Ives was worth millions of dollars but he didn't live that way, always seen wearing a same-old-same-old old dirty hat with a favorite courderoy jacket they said he literally wore from adolescence to the grave, an exaggeration, I hope, though I've seen a photo of him in that outfit--the perfect outfit for a Connecticut Yankee.

These clowns are fighting over this hole in the ground because of the future monies to be made off developing down there, from the hole on up. First of all, these gaudy, wasteful bastards intend on, against all advice by the way, building the world's tallest building down there. First they got this Berliner architect--his buildings look like some of the homes in the Ninth Ward in New Orleans after Katrina hit them and piled them up like so much trash--his buildings I call "constructed dilapidations." He gave up on it. Then some guy came up with this Freedom Tower scheme--this mighty cylindrical silver hypodermic-needle-looking heap leaping into the sky--you know, the architectural drawings all have this spaceshot needle with a halo around its pinhead and a showering of lights, like a thousand points of lights, smashing all around the ground with worshipping beams bouncing off the ground and then shooting up the sides of this heavenly hypodermic needle. It's like these greedy bastards are shooting the finger back at those hoards of terrorists that are suddenly coming against us from all sides--like kind of a big "bring 'em on" shout out. Max tacky, of course. Wouldn't a peaceful park full of grateful large trees and fountains and maybe fresh air booths and sculpture gardens be better than so expensive and wasteful a building--a place full of peace, the peace that passeth all understanding--a cooling, invigorating oasis of peace down amongst those angrily competing corporate headquarters and sleaze-bag banks and the wild-eyed stock exchange (the cathedral of the religion of shareholding and its heaven of constant profits) to those innocent ones and the guilty ones who were killed that day now 5 years ago. 5 years and they are still arguing over the billions of dollars needed to fulfill all these architectual-capitalist development schemes these clowns need to prove who really owns NYC, because a part of this development down there is going to include hotels, high-rise luxury apartments overlooking that hole in the ground, new banks, etc.--hey, son of a bitch, they were going to emplode the WTC anyway, don't you think--don't we need new skyscrapers every 25 years the same as we need new baseball stadiums every 25 years. And that's all Ray Nagin was saying. New Orleans can't depend on its own nation and that nation's people for not one damn thing except the fact they are going to take advantage of you while you're weak and especially while you're weak and black...or weak and poor. On and on it goes. The same old story told the same old way.

We need another world war now to get our economy back in shape. WAR. WAR. WAR is our salvation and always has been; that's why our wealthy class and our presidents and our Congress are constantly getting us involved in wars and have been since old "I Cannot Tell a Lie" George Washington refused to be our king and became our first great white father instead. [Washington grew marijuana at Mount Vernon, so what'd'ya think; would old George be serving 25 to life in an Upstate New York (Governor Cuomo-built) prison for that today? Well, no, of course not; bad example, rich white man caught with a couple of fields of marijuana. Nothin' wrong with that. Case closed. I'm sure George's slaves would have happily served his time for him in case he'd a gotten an unbribeable judge (yeah, where?).]

And I am about to roll over and rest in peace for a tad. I just finished smoking a wonderfully tight-rolled Habana seed filler, maduro-extra wrappered La Rosa cigar--it's the first cigar I've smoked since Castro quit smoking the foul things a few years ago. Women hate cigars. I also quit smoking cigars because of a woman. But, dammit, I had to have one the other day when I was strolling down 6th Avenue and saw the doorway to the stairs you climb to get up to the La Rosa rolling room and sales office. By the way, no New Yorker I know ever called 6th Avenue "The Avenue of the Americas" named that because of the World's Fair in 1964--and nobody probably even now notices the statues honoring North and South American heroes along the street, or the flags of all the American nations on the light standards that line this wide thoroughfare that used to have one of the most deadly curves in elevated railroad history over one of its corners...unless Rudi took those flags down and replaced them with his famous NYC advertisement banners--max tacky things that advertise NYC events like the marathon or the US Open tennis tournament that just started today out at what used to be called Forest Hills--and I missed Agaziz's farewell. He's a silly little ass who I don't remember winning that many tournaments before he married Brooke Shields who really crunched his game only to eventually dump him for the guy I think she's still with--she ruined Andre's game; it took Steffi Graf to get him back in the groove. I don't really give a shit about tennis. When I was a kid, tennis was a country club sport for fops.

There is a very disgusting government-sponsored silly stupid uneffective "war on drugs" commercial running in primetime teevee these days where a middle-aged woman is driving her homey daughter to school and the mother suddenly replies to something the daughter says with a "Right on." The ad then says flat out, "'Right on' was a popular saying among the drug culture back when your mother was a kid like you. Do you think that means your mother did drugs?" This is a commercial aimed at kids. First of all, "Right on" was first used by blacks during the black power days of Stokely and Hughie and had to do with keepin' on keepin' on against oppression and human rights abuses. Sure I've said "Right on" while doin' shrooms...while smokin' some Panama red, too...even while drinking cognac out of a bottle maybe; yep, but I've said "Right on," too sober as a judge and facing evil faces of bitter white men doped up on kilos of hatred. I think I'd rather be high on pot than high on hatred and patriotism or Gawd. Hell, I'd rather be high on black beauties or the worst speed than be gung ho on patriotism and religious fanaticism. By Gawd, Bush does hate black people, doesn't he?

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

As an addendum, me, thegrowlingwolf, came across an interesting site--it lists all the films directed by women so far in 2000-2006. I think you'll be surprised at the list. It never dawned on me there were so many films directed by women every year in this country; it's amazing. I actually recognized one of these ladies; she once freelanced for me at that crooked "accounting" firm I once ruled a roost at. I was told by one of my regular staff at that time (I had the best regular staff in town--several of whom have remained this old wolf's friends over a decade and a half now) that he took a little credit for helping this particular director get her first film financed by allowing her to spend most of her time in the office not working but on the phone hustling backers for it, a documentary, which this same person told me was a fine film--that she was a good director. Take a look here; you might see some friends of yours on the list.

http://www.moviesbywomen.com/moviesbywomenfilms.htm



thegrowlingwolf EXTRA
for The Daily Growler

Sunday, August 27, 2006

Reality Check

Peace cannot be achieved through violence, it can only be attained through understanding. --Ralph Waldo Emerson
Due to all the reading I'm doing on Charles Ives, a student of Emerson and Transcendentalism (an American religion), I'm going to try and read all of Emerson's works. It's been several decades since I last read Emerson; I was leaning toward socialism when I was a college kid and Emerson seemed very "protestantly" socialistic--I quit reading Emerson when I got involved with the Libertarians in Holland, Michigan, reading Ludwig Von Mises and Freddie Hayak, Austrian economists, and liking it because of the liberty it offered but not liking it because it was too much Calvinism for me. I grew up in a Calvinist-leaning home (a branch of the Church of Christ (another American invention) led by an old German Lutheran rebel named R.H. Boll) and I don't believe in "working for the day is coming when we'll work no more," which is what the Calvinists believe: the world is a place of hard toil and constant troubles. Working hard, you see, takes your mind off the wonderful pleasures the earth offers and which these Christian slavemasters attribute to evil and this imaginary boogieman they call Satan (or The Devil). Devils are in all religions.

I just read that 91% of Iraqis want the US out of their country so they can handle their currently split society in their own way (one of which might be to gas 30 or 40 thousand Kurds--Iraqis hate the Kurds--remember, everybody hates the Kurds--or, hell, they might just put Saddam Hussein back in office--wouldn't that be a hoot?). Bushie Boy, our childlike "president," says we can't leave because of our valuable position in the phony war on terrorism (and there'll be red alerts all around election time, you wanna bet?) there in Middle East affairs. Plus, don't forget, he was gonna use that oil to pay for all his wars, the ones he's currently losing (Iraq and Afghanistan) and the future ones, which he'll lose, too (Iran and Syria). With eyes shut tight, this fool leads us on down toward another layer of Hell, way past that horrible 7th level.

The Dumbocrats are putting all their eggs in the election basket. No one, not one damn soul, is standing up to this little monster like a true hero we so badly need. Like Obama; hell, he's over there in his father's native land, Kenya, being hailed a hero; why isn't he overhere being a hero? Like fighting for his people in New Orleans; like fighting to impeach Bush and bring all our soldiers home, a lot of whom are black men and women, along with a lot of Spanish kids, and also all those poor-soul white trash kids, like Lyndie England from the hills of West Virginny, old Bob Byrd's homebase?

I don't understand high-profile "liberals." If they are such heroes, why aren't they defying death and arresting Bush and putting him in a Federal dump of a prison (Gitmo's too sweet for him) or have the fart-joking bastard on the run and being pursued by John Walsh and the America's Most Wanted crowd? I don't get it.

Peace is in understanding. Emerson's right on that account. But understanding is pretty difficult for most over-evolved chimp-human hybrids, no matter the language.

I'm watching Tiger Woods playing golf today; he's leading this tournament by one stroke [he went on to win it in a playoff--he's now won 4 tournaments in a row, including two majors], playing at beautiful old Firestone Country Club in Akron, Ohio, home of the old Firestone Tire and Rubber Company, a planatation-style company that was built off the slavery of the rubber collectors on all the rubber plantations Firestone owned, especially in Liberia, where Firestone still uses slavery to gather their rubber, though Firestone is now called Bridgestone after they were taken over by a Japanese tire conglomerate. You know where Japan got its rubber in WWII? They don't have rubber trees in Japan. How about the Firestone Tire & Rubber Company of Akron, Ohio? Just like Henry Ford contributed scrap iron to the Japanese imperial cause. But, whatever, all that rubber built a truly great American-style golf course up there in Akron, also home of the Akron Dragons baseball team. And watching Tiger Woods, who's at least part-black, worth millions of bucks play the best golf any human has ever played, Jack Nicklaus included, I still can't help but think, "Hey, Tiger, you're playing on a golf course built off the skins of your ancertors's asses, perhaps even your Asian ancestors's asses, too."

All these ironies go through my head all day as I sometimes have to face reality--and when I do, Jesus, like the turtle, I want to withdraw back into my own shell; it's the only place that makes sense to me right now--and it's so peaceful inside that shell...I guess, about as peaceful as it is playing golf for a guy like Tiger Woods.

I saw Michael Jordan on teevee the other night and he said he spent most of his time now playing golf; not professionally, but as a 4 handicapper at the fashionable L.A. country clubs--where these guys couldn't have played only a few short years back, playing constantly, morning, noon, and night--and you better believe he's gambling while playing golf, too. I've been in country club money matches where the money put down on each hole got bigger and bigger until the last hole when the skins pot could be up to a thousand bucks and that was back in the 50s and 60s where today a thousand bucks would be more like 10 thousand or even 20 thousand. Jordan supposedly was 35 million in the hole at one time with his gambling; of course he denies it's gambling; he calls it "competition" and where he used to burn up his competive nature on the basketball court, now he does it on the golf course. I just wonder why these guys don't see a better future helping humanity rather than wasting their fortunes on self-indulgency--powder-puffing their enormous egos. Egos bloated by wealth. These rich people have so much money they just simply don't know what to do with it all. Michael Jackson goes on million-dollar shopping sprees; Michael Jordan loses millions of dollars on the golf course.

The world is so depressing a place and here I am listening to a bunch of millionaire baseball players playing plantation-style baseball (aren't ballplayers owned by the owners of the baseball teams--the old Massuhs?) on the radio and watching a bunch of millionaire golfers. Golf is an easy sport, folks. I once set the course record for nine holes at a golf course in Texas and I'm a second-rate golfer because I never used to practice, just hit the ball naturally hard and long and putted with an eagle eye absolutely naturally. The ways of hitting a golf ball are the same as hitting a baseball; you must keep your eye on the ball. In baseball, it's the same thing with fielding; you have to keep your eye on the ball even then.

It also bothers me seeing Martha Stewart fully accepted back into teevee and I'll guarantee you there are ex-teevee jocks or deejays whose careers were ruined because of a felonious offence and here's Martha just purring along doing her silly shit as though everything is this damn world is just peachy keen. Seems like she should be out shouting about how awful our prison system is--or against the harsh drug laws in this country, which is probably why most of the women Martha was in the hoosegow with were there; I'm sure they weren't there for stock swindling--they were mostly there for drug abuse or crimes related to drug abuse--while Martha can do drugs with impunity. I'm not saying Martha does drugs, maybe she doesn't, but I'll bet she's been to plenty of Westport and the Hamptons parties where there was any kind of drug you cared to indulge in--I might even just jump on out there and say, I'd bet the farm she's smoked pot and done some coke in her many past heydays.

I'm trying to be transcendental--I'm acting as though I am a god, which is very transcendental, though I'd rather be understanding than shouting at the top of my growling lungs--ululating madly at the stupidities of humans--like continuing to fly on airlines who are more concerned about the time they have to sit on an airport tarmac than they are about the safety of their passengers, which they refuse to do themselves saying that's the responsibility of the US government, because airports are usually owned by the cities they are in and controlled by the government airport regulators. How about the stupid pilot who yesterday took off from the wrong runway and killed all but one of the 50 passengers? I'll bet he was a little tipsy.

It's just hard for me to understand, I'm sorry, Ralph Waldo. Understanding takes a lot of understanding to get to its upper reaches, which is ultimate comprehension. Comprehension may be more important than just understanding. It must be graspable by even the weakest of minds; by even the unintelligent mind. Just like you train a dog not to be vicious or like you break a wild horse, that's the way you have to go about teaching understanding to angry human beings, human beings on constant killing missions; human beings entangled in webs woven by imaginary deadly spiders; one needs comprehension to get out of such an entanglement; one needs an understanding of how that web got woven around us and then how to deconstruct that web and set us all free.

True freedom would be so much more fun that hating everybody and everything that you don't understand or who doesn't understand you. Off-the-wall folks have gotten ahold of this world's power and these are not PEACEFUL folks; no, they are fanatically belligerent and always threatening DEATH and destruction. What if instead we threatened LIFE and reconstruction? Halliburton and Exxon Mobil have made enough profits off of this illegal and unholy mess to totally rebuild the whole of Iraq and still come out with billions of dollars in profits--except what old Unka Dick's gonna take out of the till for his own peace that passeth all understanding.

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

From Herr Doktor Sigmund Freud:

"...I should like to linger for a moment over our destructive instinct, whose popularity is by no means equal to its importance. As a result of a little speculation, we have come to suppose that this instinct is at work in every living being and is striving to bring it to ruin and to reduce life to its original condition of inantimate matter. Thus it quite seriously deserves to be called a death instinct, while the erotic instincts represent the effort to LIVE. The death instinct turns into the destructive instinct if, with the help of special organs, it is directed outwards, on to objects. The living creature preserves its on life, so to say, by destroying an extraneous one" Sigmund Freud, Character and Culture, "Why War?" 1963, Collier Books/Macmillan.

That's pretty scary when you really understand it. It's like the Aztec's having to tear all the hearts out of their enemies while they were still beating--it's like projecting your death wish onto your extraneous subjects. Our "president's" death wish instinct is working full force; he's projecting all of his faults on nearly every country in the Middle East, either through directly killing off thousands of them or by threatening to kill off more thousands of them and their neighbors. This son of a bitch has to kill in order to stay alive. That sounds like so much science fiction, but, hell, it makes sense if you understand it. All for what? Getting the fear of death out of their crazed heads. Look at Unka Dick? He's had five heart attacks and yet not one of them humanely finished him off; so now, he projects his own death on the rest of us. When he finally keels over; he'll have a "Fuck all of you" smirk on his face, plus he will have witnessed hundreds of thousands of people die in his safe and secure We the People protected otherwise worthless life. Guys like Unka Dick, however, seem to live forever unless we are lucky enough that some of them commit suicide; Strom Thurmond is a recent example of a man with an evil heart whose hatred and death wish projecting--especially on black people--kept the old bastard alive for over 90-plus years. Evil is Live spelled backwards. Think backwards like the Bush Babies and their faithful followers and though their actions to us sane folks are extremely evil, to them, their evil is "to live" since they see everything backwards and evil backwards is (to) live (a verb).

Happy projecting.

Saturday, August 26, 2006

A Musical Conversation

The Following Conversation Took Place Between thegrowlingwolf & thedailygrowlerhousepianist (used without thedailygrowlerhousepianist's permission)

The following is a conversation that took place a couple of days ago. It has to do with jazz, American music, but especially feelings about Charles Ives.

thegrowlingwolf: Like Randy [Weston] trying to bring African
>rhythms and shit into jazz--yeah it's fun for a while,
>but when they went back to the blues during that one
>tune, couldn't you feel the fire come back into their
>playing, whereas all that primitive drumming wasn't as
>exciting as the release the blues gave them--dammit,
>without the blues, American music can suck just as bad
>as German jazz guys, or the Beatles. You take the
>blues out of Jazz, you take the motherland out of it,
>because blues is what the American blacks heard in
>their dreams
>

thedailygrowlerhousepianist: Sounds like you're saying that
African American music is more African than African music.
This guy was just that: one guy with one drum and
it's no wonder he couldn't match that band. And if any African ensemble
could match them, and they could, they could only match them
rhythmically - and that would be the only way I'd expect them to match.
Never forget the American side of African American music which is
Harmony and Changes or if you prefer the white part of black music.

>thegrowlingwolf:it started as a march music--and that's
>Ives's contention too about true American music--based
>on the doubled duple--and why Ives insisted on keeping
>European restrictions out of his compositions. [I just
>read Ives calling Beethoven necessary in understanding
>his music, though he says Thoreau was a better
>musician than Beethoven--and that's what I love about
>Ives; he demeans the European dudes who he admits are
>musically important to learn and understand and that
>Beethoven's music is great music, but then he cuts 'em
>totally down by saying Thoreau was a better musician
>(he played the flute)--Ives says his Thoreau movement
>to the Concord is based on Ives hearing with his ears
>Thoreau playing his flute out across the waters of
>Walden Pond.]
>
>
thedailygrowlerhousepianist:Yeah well I bet Ives thought
Ives was a better musician than Thoreau. And if Ives was,
then I'd wager Beethoven was too.
Ives is very unforgiving towards musicians like Beethoven and
I for one think he's
unfair. Not because I think Beethoven's music is better than Ives said,
though of course I do, but because Ives seems to have so little
sympathy for their positions. Why is it so bad to want to
have others play your
music or to write with the performer in mind? I think that modern
people, and a middle class prig like Ives is a prime example, don't
appreciate how people in more primitive times had to work to feel like
they were humans and not animals. In this day and age, no one is so
backwards as to think an educated human is anything but a human no
matter how bestial their behaviour, but I'm not so sure older
generations were as scrupulous. And it wasn't only that they didn't
want to be animals, they feared it. Remember that they all lived among
animals, it's not like they had to stretch their imaginations to
understand animalistic behavior. No, they were into control and
structure and it's not hard to see why. Why should they be condemned
for not seeing the beauty in badly played music? I think that Ives was
standing on the shoulders of giants, to paraphrase Newton, and it
bothers me when he derides those who are holding him up. I appreciate
his points, but he's a bit too thorough and malicious for my taste. I
understand his bitterness, but wish to be excused from sharing it.

thegrowlingwolf:I think you're a little hard on Charley.

thedailygrowlerhousepianist: We're talking in a narrow sense here.
Ives is my favorite American composer and my favorite modern composer.
Not only was he a genius, technically and artistically but he had the
courage to stick to his guns. Maybe they warped him, but they never
crushed him. All indications are that he was a warm and generous person
pretty much liked by everyone that knew him.
Another of the ways he reminds me of Bach.

I love Stravinsky, but Stravinsky was a shit of a person in many ways.
In France he kept his family in poverty out in the provinces while he
was running around Paris screwing showgirls, dressed like a dandy and
eating in the best restaurants, boorishly snapping his
fingers(embarassing Robert Craft) at the staff. His children hated him,
it appears.

Many of my favorite musicans had serious flaws as people. Ives compares
very favorably to most of them, except in the memos. I think it's sad
more than anything. I mean if he's as great as he says he is, is it any
wonder that most people don't "get" him? Think about it, he was saying
that the worst musicians make the best music, is it any wonder that he
had a rough time getting his message across? Bach wasn't great in his
day, most of the great composers were either unknown or controversial.
They weren't all Haydns or Handels. They were not appreciated to their
full worth in their day, just like Ives.

One thing about the "rulebook". Bach was the one who really
crystallized the "rules". But they didn't look at it quite the same way.
In order to sound good, you had to do certain things, just like we do.
In order for the voices to sound full, you avoid parallel perfect intervals.
Avoid intervals that are hard to sing, etc. All of those rules had good
musical justifications behind them, however anachronistic they were by
Ives' time. Now, for us to sound good, we have to swing. We have to
express, we have to be unique, "ourselves" etc. If someone says this is
a blues and the chord in the 5th measure is V instead of IV, our
reaction is to think "it's not a blues". We may think sure it could be
a blues no matter what, but our initial reaction will be to compare the
so called blues to what we know as blues - IOW a rule. Swinging and
improvisation are our tradition. Bach et al had another tradition.
Beethoven wasn't as strict as Bach, and he knew it and didn't care. The
problem for Ives came when imposing this tradition on America where
there was no time to develop an academy, people needed music and they
needed it now goddammit put down your music book start playng a tune
1234. As far as I'm know, Debussy, a generation older than Ives, was
the first one who said Never Mind the Germans.

So I don't think I'm being hard on him. My reservations are in a small
part of a great appreciation. But that's how I am - I deconstruct
because of my insecurities.

thegrowlingwolf:I find in a Freudian sense he's so very defensive that he can't
>marvel over Bach and Beethoven for fear his own works aren't really very good
--his big fear was that the people who called his work nonsense or full of
horrible sounds or unplayable were right. His New England defense mechanisms
are to praise and then demean at the same time, which, in Ives's mind, keeps
>him innovative whereas Beethoven and Bach and Brahms
>were innovators but within the German rulebook,
>whereas, Ives is treading on a new ground, a ground he
>is pretty much defining as he goes along. He's a
>brilliant thinker really--Mark Twain was his favorite
>writer he later says--and there is a lot of Mark
>Twain's wry cynical wit in Ives. Henry Cowell said
>Ives was very well read.

thedailygrowlerhousepianist: Yeah I recognize the Twain in Ives too.


That's pretty good conversation, don't you think?

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler



Friday, August 25, 2006

Empirical Study #1(WITH PORTIONS LOST FOREVER)

Jazz (Jass) Today
I bought this video of an 1984 Switzerland concert featuring some of the children of Miles Davis, Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter, and Billy Cobham--piano, bass, and drums for those of you who have no idea what I'm talking about. I'm watching this video with a critical eye while wondering what the hell ever happened to the many progressions of jazz that these guys I'm watching now certainly experienced and had to develop in order to be chosen by a god like Miles Davis--Miles took jazz up another river, a very successful one for Miles, though his old jazz habits eventually caught up with him--and that's a story for another time. I'm wondering why is the jazz I hear today on the college and PBS radio stations I tune into on the computer sometimes, why is it so ho-hum? Why do I feel like I've heard it before and played and understood better--though I try and view my critical feelings out from behind my biased eyes and look at it from an observer's point of view. I am a college-trained sociologist so I depend a lot on keeping alert empirically, which is kind of like being able to see around corners, you know, the extra-sense you get from being a trained observer (or a statistician, too, if you want to be cruel to a sociologist--though it's true, sociologists are data collectors, numbers crunchers, all of their philosophies based on statistics of all kinds from all sources. Karl Marx was a sociologist really; he certainly used sociological methods in putting all of his statistical findings into the final philosophy of Das Capital and its being made into a religion by the Communist Manifesto and the brilliant Frederick Engels. Das Capital, a good book made evil by the corporate gods who have convinced billions of us that capitalism is the only ism when it comes to their getting rich and keeping YOU and ME in a form of slavery whether we know it is or not. (Credit is a form of slavery invented by the corporate-controlled banks--IF YOU WANT REAL POWER, START YOUR OWN BANK. I have a very rich and powerful past (long-gone) relative who became convinced that banks and bankers were not to be trusted and that they were in a conspiracy to steal money--plus this person brought up a good point--What right does a bank have making huge profits off my money when it's supposed to be under their vaulted protection by loaning it out, by investing with it 24 hours a day, etc. I had a friend who was a banker and his job was to take deposited monies and play the money exchange game with them 24-7--you know, buying francs at a low then selling them real quick with the first upturn in their price; or they may buy tons of bales of Euros at the a current price in order to hope it'll drive Euros even higher. This guy said banks were making millions of dollars off simple half-a-cent rises in the money markets.

Evidence. That's what is lacking. Convincing evidence. If there were convincing evidence that a god existed, I mean, no problem, I'd be on my knees babbling allegiance in a matter thunderstruck seconds. Convincing evidence is unavailable. However, there is plenty of convincing evidence that our current government is lousy, crooked, pocket-lining, anti-average-Amurican Joe, even Amurican GI Joe, with its nose so far up and tight in the crack of corporate assholes, they are letting their shitty opinion of most world people, most world POOR people go to their brains and they become aggressive...HELL, it all has to do with parenting, something most parents in the good ole US of A know nothing about. My mother depended on a book written by a Doctor Spock, the first advocate of formula feeding of babies rather than giving them nurture from their mothers's breasts--we as children were giving another animal's mother's milk--we are part cows, all of us poor ole Dr. Spock babies, the Atom Bomb babies. Baby Boomer's are especially mostly cow in both the physical and the mental. Think like cows; eat like cows; are destined to the same slaughter as cows. Unless you become a prize bull.

And after that great swing around a beltway diversion, the video of the Herbie Hancock Trio has ended--I did hear through a brilliant version of "Willow Weep for Me," one of the coolest songs ever written, and written by a woman, Ann Ronell. Check Ann out here--I mean, she wrote "Whose Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf." I say bullshit to the suggestion at the end of this bio that while she was banging George Gershwin he wrote "Willow" for her--it doesn't even sound like Gershwin to me and could be a vicious rumor spread by Kay Swift, who also was mad for George--hell, he could have written some of her songs for her, that's for sure.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ann_Ronell


The video ended with Herbie's interpretation of Richard Carpenter's be-bop classic "Walkin'" and old Herbie did it great justice. Of course, this video was filmed 22 years ago. Holy Cow, many waters under all those bridges over those years. So jazz has surely changed in those 22 years, hasn't it?

I always said the Beatles changed the mode of American black music; they put it into the acceptable church mode--here's a great lesson in church modes:

http://www.vanderbilt.edu/~cyrus/ORB/orbmode.htm

The Beatles didn't understand the true meaning of the blues they were hearing out of the US. We overhere grew up with the blues and we heard it in everything we did, even the church music that turned us on the most wasn't those dried up old fig mixolydian and lydian modes from the white church--snoring songs, I call them, but rather the powerful swinging blues-developed gospel hymns of the swinging black choirs and the lead vocalists those choirs carried with them. The white southern gospel quartet successes of the late forties and early fifties, the Blackwood Brothers, the Stamps Quarter, the Jordanaires even, got their blues from the black gospel groups, like the Golden Gate Quartet (the Golden Gate Quartet actually toured with some of the white groups back in the early fifties, though I don't ever remember seeing them perform together; I don't think that was allowed yet in the south. I've seen the Golden Gate Quarter, on its last legs, yes, in person with the Blackwood Brothers, but I don't remember them ever combining on stage)--or the Pilgrim Traveler's, the Soul Stirrers, the Five Blind Boys From Alabama, and the always wonderfully great Dixie Hummingbirds, most of whom had guitar accompanyments and not pianos, which all the white groups were based around.

WE ARE SORRY TO SAY THAT THE REST OF THIS POST WAS LOST IN THE ETHER--IT WENT ON SEVERAL MORE PAGES...DISCUSSING THE EMPORER MAXIMILIAN--INCLUDING A PIECE OF SCANDALOUS INFO ABOUT thegrowlingwolf AND HIS LOVELY EX-WIFE DOING A NASTY DEED IN CARLOTTA'S BED IN CHAPULTEPEC CASTLE.

AGAIN, THIS HAPPENED WHILE GOING OUT OF THE BLOG AND USING FIREFOX. ONE SLIP ON THE KEYBOARD AND WHAM THE POST WAS LOST.

THE WHOLE POINT OF THIS POST WAS LOST AMONG THE STARS...OF WHICH THE PLANET PLUTO IS NO LONGER GIVEN PLANET STATUS. IT'S JUST A BIG SNOWBALL IN OUTERSPACE. THEN WHAT MAKES A PLANET A PLANET?

theverylousyDailyGrowlerstaff

for The Daily Growler

THREE CHEERS FOR MAYOR RAY NAGIN. TO US, THE NEW ORLEANS TRAGEDY WAS MUCH MORE DISASTROUS THAN 9/11...I MEAN MAYBE THREE TIMES AS MANY AMERICANS WERE KILLED IN NEW ORLEANS AS IN 9/11. IN THE CASE OF NEW ORLEANS, THE TERRORISTS WERE AMERICANS WITH THEIR HEADS UP THEIR SHITFILLED ASSES.

Thursday, August 24, 2006

Flows

I've Known Rivers
I lived by a brook and the flowing of that brook stayed jollily in my heartbeat.
I lived by a canal once and that flow was barely perceptible though it was there and you thought you could feel it really really late at night.
I lived by the Mississippi River and it was a massive flow, an overwhelming flow, and when you would walk out on the leeve really really late at night, its flow looked like the body of a huge dead leathered beast floating by you, spinning the earth under you, like you supposed the River Styx would look one day as you boarded Charon's little pirogue* down on his blackened bayou.
I have stalled out my MG 1600A on a bridge high over Bayou Nezpique and in the midnight-black dark, a darkness filled with lives, buzzings, wispings, whiffings, far down below the bridge you could smell that blacked out bayou's flow, an ancient odor of prehistoric life that lived within the flow of that bayou, that bayou on that night with the invisible face--its face seen in its smell.
I have lived by a creek, high on a bluff over it a wide creek, a creek whose romantic flow used to shine glittery silvery in the full-mooned high sky nights and crackle like a sparkler in the nights when there were only a billion stars to shine on it.
I have lived by the Atlantic Ocean, in a little house, with the sand of the beach coming right up to its backdoor and the flowing in and out of that massive bowl of water sloshing all night, rocking you to sleep following the flowing of the emotions of the moon.
I have lived high on the pinnacle of a peak above the Pacific Ocean, and the deep flowing mother humming of that massive rocking blue beast roared in the depths of those shivery nights, bold crashings gradually being soothed into watery chorale accompanying the maddening solos of the many feasting gulls as they whirled high against the updrafts of that mighty ocean's flow.
I have lived on a creek that tumbled through a rock dam to slosh its wet dance through a swimming pool contraption the eccentric builder of the little stone house through which the creek splashed and dashed designed himself and which was like a manmade whirlpool and when you sat in that stream's cold waters their flow went all through your body, all up and down your blood stream.
I have lived in a garret apartment and just outside one of those windows a window at which I sat trying to write novels was a gutter spout, and always in the afternoon it rained, every afternoon at 4 pm, like clockwork, rain, and that rain would flush with gusto out that gutter spout, to gush out and then to fall straight-down Niagara-like singing onto the stones of the courtyard five floors below; and every afternoon at 4, I would rush to start writing according to the metronomic beats of that rainwater's flow as I turned that flow of water into a flowing of words, on a certain novel that would eventually be drowned in a long flow of time.

Aging is like living by a river, a river that once flowed with satisfied contentment, like a slow sand dancer as it flowed along gradually over time; however, after storms and then into calms, it picked up tempo and resembled more the spinning dancing that ends Le sacre du printemps. A spinning dancing that is seeming to dervishly spin one's self to death on the dancefloor of time. Today, that spinning, that dancing, that flowing crescendo is flowing through my rhythm-ings (see Thelonious Monk's "Rhythm-ing" for an example), another kind of dance, a dance of hours spinning into years, years with ears, years who hear how many more years I will continue flowing like the many waters by which I've lived--is a life contented by the flowing of those waters? Otherwise, why I'm I so contented at this age in life?

By coincidence, I found this set of lyrics on

MIND IS A RIVER
(Dean Bowman/Daniel Sadownick)

When I sought truth
Religion seemed too choreographed
Though still in my youth
I questioned my own existence
No moral guidance cleansed
My yearning to know about the outside
Chased my tomorrows away
I couldn’t be too long for sure

Because sometimes you can know
Too much for your own bit of good
And following the wrong path
To your dreams and down on your knees

My mind is a river, let flow
Let it flow

Truth captured my soul and
Never back did I have to look
You came into my life and soon
Became like my favorite book
And I read it, oh, always needed
To be made in the person of you
So true and now the joy in my life
Is your love

Because sometimes you can know
Too much for your own bit of good
And following the wrong path
To your dreams and down on your knees

My mind is a river, let flow

© 2005 Blak Berry Jams (SESAC); Nasdan Music (SESAC)

These lyrics come from this interesting site:

http://screamingheadlesstorsos.com/Website/lyrics.html


My all of you respect your age, rejoice in it, and realize there are still some dreams within it that may still become reality if you just keep on livin' naturally in chorus with "the eater of all things lovely--time."

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

*In case you need a pirogue, here ya go:

http://www.unclejohns.com/boat/


On August 24th, 79 AD, the city of Pompeii was destroyed by a massive eruption of Mount Vesuvius.

http://www.victorianweb.org/art/crisis/crisis1d.html

The Daily Growler trumpets a Happy Birthday to a certain person. From the ashes of Pompeii's fatal date came millions of lives.

Wednesday, August 23, 2006

Randy Weston, 1926...80th Birthday

SORRY NO POST TODAY--The Daily Growler staff, including thegrowlingwolf and marvelousmarvbackbiter and Frannie and Zoey, our two-headed hot reporter--they'll be wearing a very trendy blue business suit from Johnnie's of Muleshoe (oh how trendy), will be there, too, is going to


jazz pianist RANDY WESTON'S 80th Birthday Bash.

In the meantime, here's some fun places of friends of The Daily Growler, check 'em out. We'll be back tomorrow.

http://www.nickjainschigg.org/

http://www.geoffreygreene.com/

http://www.pbs.org/wnet/ihas/poet/lindsay.html

We don't necessarily agree with this site's statement about Vachel Lindsay being our first jazz and blues poet--along with Langston Hughes...OK, we'll take Langston. The name Thomas Hampson sounds so familiar--isn't he a choir director? Anyway...it's interesting.

http://www.poetryoutloud.org/poems/poet.html?id=80796

This looks like some fun--chance to become famous maybe? A recitator?

A Growler is raised high to all of y'all!
thestaff

for The Daily Growler

Tuesday, August 22, 2006

NOISE!!!!!

Life Lived Under Headphones
In a way it's wonderful--you are alone in your head with beautiful music in stereophonic glory--or you can listen to every breath William Faulkner makes as he reads from A Light in August [my favorite Faulkner was his "potboiler," as he called it, Sanctuary; and the novel of his that first charmed me was Mosquitos. Plus, Bill was the king of neologists, a man of his own language]; yes, that's a wonderland for me, but then how long can a human being endure under headphones? [They hurt my ears after awhile, though I'm sure for a few thousand dollars could find a pair contoured to my skull, maybe even sewn to my temples; mine are recording studio headphones--they cost a few hundred, but they're made where you are still in contact with the world outside because these have vents on the sides that let's outside high-pitched sounds in, like a phone ringing.] Headphones, in spite of their digging into your temples all day, are still a wonderful place of privacy, especially when listening to something as brilliant and full of chess moves as the Charles Ives Symphony #3, which I'm listening to as I type this-- though it's conducted by Michael Tilson Thomas, who I appreciate for his bold approach to new music, but think his conducting is choppy sometimes. He doesn't seem to have the patience Ives's music demands in terms of flow and ebbing of tempos and rhythms, its chordal manisfestations and interplaying of old white spirtuals and campground shennanigans woven with a smooth, cool needle. In other words, my ear tells me he's rushing it--which may be due to the recording space he has on a CD. Recordings are governed by recording engineers; actually in editing they can speed the tempos up and down as they please even at the bitching of the performer. Ives himself makes these same complaints about the time he was recorded, both in New York City and in London, England, in CBS's Abbey Road studios, too. As hot tempered as Ives was, he was cool, especially in his compositions. That's just my opinion. [Though I must confess, Charlie Ives played a real choppy piano--and he sung his songs choppy, too, though come on, he was an old man by then, an old man who had suffered a heart attack rather early in life, so it wasn't easy breathing right when singing his songs by that time, thus some of the choppiness in his singing--he had a very gruff laughingly sarcastic voice--hell, he was a sarcastic man, in that quaint white New England manner. I don't know if black folks born and raised in New England have that attitude or not; it comes from the transcendentalists of whom Ives was religious about, especially Emerson, Thoreau, and Hawthorne (who by the way is an amazing writer; his novel the Marble Faun is full of psychology of the Freudian bent and full of early American symbolism in terms of the actions of the characters. Most artists in those old days were very impressed with Italy, especially Tuscany. I've never been to Tuscany, but those of my friends who have been there tell me it's a wonderful true earthy place of good wine, good food, and charming countryside. Even D.H. Lawrence loved Tuscany. Their message was: There is only one God, and that's the God that is within each one of us, that God that is our "I am." That was Ives's attitude about his music; you don't understand my music, you can't comprehend it and perform it because it is the music of the God and the spirituality that is ME the hearer of the celestial musics coming to me from the universe that is within me. You bet, that's great thinking; it's true thinking; it's American thinking, white yes, but it applies to every damn human ever born, even to the slaves that built the foundations of this country from Boston on down to New Orleans, the farms, the roads, the dams, the leevees, all the shit work, done by slaves--some who were freedmen, though even as freedmen they were forced to work like slaves--if you couldn't hire 'em to do the shitwork, you could arrest them and through the prisons put them into forced labor on the sugar plantations or in building the road system in this country. There were indentured servant whites, too. It was always rumored that my family came from England and Scotland to this country on the Mayflower--only problem was, they were in coming as indenture servants due to debts so they were put in mid-deck and made to row the damn boat overhere; why members of my family became good drummers and why I have a natural-born sense of heartbeat time in a drumming way. Bass players find it hell playing with me when I'm playing the piano; it's because I learned the piano as a percussion instrument as a young boogie aficianado where you have to be your own rhythm section and my mother was a slamming stride pianist who played the piano hard, like Ives, and like Jelly Roll Morton, so I'm overheavy in my left hand, which I want to integrate with my right hand though it insists on keeping so many different times, like I say, bass players go nuts trying to accompany me. My singing is on a different beat than most accompaniests can stand, too, and it takes me forever to drop down on the right notes, you know, those that follow the measures correctly with the right tempos and note hitting--I eventually can do it. Hell, I can sing like Old Blue Eyes if I want to, though I hate crooning. I was told one time by a guitar player, a mighty fine one, too, who idolized Chuck Berry's guitar playing--a unique style that this guy had extended into his own style, which gave him a double sound, Chuck's and his blended, and he told me, "Hey, man, you're a natural crooner...you should croon the blues...that's different, man; it might sell." I argued, hell, weren't B.B. and Bobby Bland crooners enough? Or Johnny Acea? Or even Frankie Lyman and Barry White, weren't they crooners enough? Naw, I wanna sing like I hear it in my head, no matter the dissonant slips and missed notes.

I'm looking at an Ives score and I'm thinking, damn, he didn't mean for you to maybe hit it note for note as long as you covered the notes correctly--does that make sense or is it no-sense nonsense? I love a world I call the world of NADA. I got it from Ernest Hemingway's reading of the "Lord's Prayer" (the Christian mantra that protects them from darkness and evil, the boogiemen of their nightmares--Jesus, you see, being the LIGHT. Like the Pharos in Alexandria, which is now preserved atop the Empire State Building--and it used to have a revolving light up there, too, way back until the FAA made 'em cut it off. That Pharos was supposed to the a dirigible docking port, but, hell, it didn't work, they never figured out how to get the passengers out of the gondolas and into the terminal, unless they learned to walk on several yards of air). Hemingway's "Lord's Prayer" went; "Our Nada who art in heaven, hallowed would be thy name/yeah, though I walk through the shadows of the valley of death, I shall fear no Nada...." Jesus, I write like I'm an Ives symphony.

This all started out being a tribute to NOISE. My apartment is situated in the back of a 12-story building in the very heart and soul of Manhattan Island. Behind most buildings from old New York City, and my building was built in 1875, is an airspace, in the case of this building it's like an alleyway, several feet between the back of my building and the backs of the buildings across from me, of which I mostly above except for one building that is exactly the same height as my building. But in that airspace....

Note: The continuation of this post, another 10 pages of sterling thegrowlingwolf narration, one of his best posts, was lost when trying to save it. It disappeared into the ether of cyberspace. We apologize for this. It was a very long and involved post about Noise and an irritating noise that had suddenly developed in the airspace behind thegrowlingwolf's apartment. He'd signed off on it when we accidentally deleted it into cyberspace while trying to save it as a draft. We regret this; it's the first time it's ever happened.

WE CONTINUE with regrets:

From the Wolfman

Nothing pains a writer more than someone losing a huge chunk of what he calls "brilliant writing," which is what I call the post I wrote early this morning for today's posting. Hemingway's first wife once lost a briefcase full of works in progress including a novel--you think someone has that briefcase in their Paris attic and don't know what it is?

I write spontaneously--like a jazz solo; I'm purely improvisational, conversational, and continuously in the present, the here and now. Once it's done it's done with me and then Ethel the Editor goes over it with her fine-toothed comb and then she posts it. Blame it on a woman, I'm chided, but, no, I don't blame it on her; in this instance I blame Firefox, and don't get me wrong, I love Firefox--especially when using my Toshiba laptop--it does work in blocking out the crap, but occasionally it F's up and that's what happened with this post. Firefox blew the connection to Blogspot and in the process wiped out the save--sent it off to god knows where in cyberspace. Oh well, nothing bothers me when it comes to accidents--I gulp down my anger and begin thinking on the next project, whether it's writing music down in my studio or writing on this blog up here in my loftbed.

Trust me, it was a great blog--I delved into to everything, you know how I'm good at taking sideroads to get to my central location--you know, like diving off into several pages on an aside, from how noise affects the psyche to how a man should sexually treat a woman--you know, explaining the difference between lust and love--a penetrating study if I say so myself.

But those things happen. We couldn't have progress without accident; I think Darwin said that didn't he; accident being the cause of evolution. No preordination in this man's mind, sorry.

I don't believe in psychics either; what a bunch of F-ing phonies, like the Caribbean babe that made millions before foolish folks were told she was a stone phony; or remember the white babe who made down-and-out former star Dionne Warwick a couple of million bucks before she was slammed down on charges of fraud. Dionne Warwick came out of it smelling like a rose.

An accident today; a completeness tomorrow...PERHAPS!

In the meantime, I discovered the source of my irritating new noise--it was a sawing going on continuously for 12 hours a day. It was the Vietnamese dude in the apartment under me, he's also the building super, tearing out and rebuilding a whole big huge bay window in his apartment--just like the huge bay window in my apartment--I mean ripping the whole massive piece--it's mahogany wood, too--out and putting in a totally brand new window, a job that has now taken the dude two weeks. That's what the sawing was and the hammering. The hammer is the most used tool in America; maybe even the world. In this day of power tools, including power hammers, the old human-wielded claw hammer is still the ruling noisemaking king, especially here in Midtown Manhattan--you can hear hammering going on somewhere every day in my neighborhood.

So sayeth thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

The News:

How embarrassing was Georgie Porgie's, our "president," press conference yesterday, especially his explanation of why we had to stay in Iraq--and then his explanation on why we were there in the first place. Some maccaca reporter had the nerve to ask baldface-lyin' Georgie why we had to stay in Iraq now that it's been proven Saddam had nothing to do with 9/11 and Saddam did not have weapons of mass destruction, so why were we there and why couldn't we pull out immediately. Bush hem-hawed around thinking up another dumb answer--and, by God, he found one--we have to stay in Iraq just because we have to stay in Iraq..."We are at war," Georgie sputtered out--NO WE'RE NOT, GEORGIE, YOU LITTLE FOOL--NO WAR WAS EVER DECLARED ON IRAQ--CONGRESS APPROVED THE MONEY FOR THE WAR BUT THEY DIDN'T DECLARE WAR ON IRAQ! NOR AFGHANISTAN EITHER--AND WE ARE ONCE AGAIN FIGHTING A HUGE ON-RUSH OF TALIBAN FORCES COMING AT US OUT OF OUR ASSHOLE BUDDY OF A NATION, PAKISTAN, THE CURRENT HOME OF OSAMA, WHO BUSH TOLD US WAS THE REAL INSTIGATOR BEHIND 9/11--EVEN THOUGH OSAMA DENIED IT AT FIRST.

Bush sputtered on and then he brought up the 3000 Amuricans who died in 9/11. HEY, GEORGIE, YOU LITTLE DUMBASS PRICK, A LOT OF THOSE 3000 WERE NOT AMERICANS; A LOT OF THEM WERE IRISH or BRITISH; AND A LOT OF THEM WERE SAUDIS OR ARABS. THE WORLD TRADE CENTER ALSO HOUSED ONE OF THE LARGEST CIA DATABASES IN THE SPY WORLD. IT ALSO HOUSED A LOT OF FBI OFFICES. IT ALSO HELD A HUGE BIG VOLUME OF GOLD--rumored to belong to the CIA. Hey, it's a fishy event, that's all we can say. IS THE KILLING OF GOING-ON THREE THOUSAND OF OUR TROOPS OVERTHERE REVENGE ENOUGH?--WHICH MEANS THAT 9/11 HAS NOW ACTUALLY KILLED 6000 AMERICANS WHEN YOU ADD IN THE DEAD SOLDIERS TO THE PEOPLE BLOWN TO SMITHEREENS IN THE WTC. THEN YOU MUST SAY 30,000 IRAQIS HAVE BEEN HACKED TO BITS OR BLOWN ASS-UNDER IN REVENGE FOR 9/11! I'M CONFUSED--AT FIRST BUSH SAID HE WAS PAYING BACK SADDAM FOR TRYING TO KILL HIS OLD PAPPY. NOW IT SEEMS BUSH IS SAYING HE'S WARRING AGAINST THE IRAQI PEOPLE BECAUSE SADDAM USED GAS (GAS GIVEN HIM BY THE REAGAN ADMINISTRATION, OF WHICH GOOD OLE RUMMY WAS THE CHIEF GO-BETWEEN) ON THE KURDS. HELL, EVERYBODY HATES THE KURDS, GP. ARE YOU GOING TO INVADE TURKEY? THEY ARE AMASSING TROOPS ON THE IRAQ BORDER TO JOIN WITH IRAN TO MAYBE HAVE AT BUTCHERING SOME KURDS--THEY'RE GETTING OUT OF HAND SINCE BUSH LET THEM CAPTURE KIRKUK AND MOSUL WHEN WE FIRST "INVADED" IRAQ--HEY, LET'S KILL SOME KURDS TODAY--I THINK THAT'S A COMMON RALLYING CRY IN THAT AREA.

thestaff

for The Daily Growler