I Believe I'll Dust My Broom

Relaxin' Doubletime With thegrowlingwolf
I'm a little queasy; I ate a huge overfat barbecue beef sandwich from an NYC street vendor called Daisy Mae, yep, after the Little Abner character who I'd be willing to bet only a handful of New Yorkers know who the hell that is, old child molester Al Capp's very popular comic strip (a "funny") during WWII on into the 1950s when old Al kicked the bucket. Al gave us Daisy Mae, Lil' Abner's barefoot hillbilly cutie who wore little if any clothes--always the same clothes, same as Lil' Abner wore the same overalls all the time in every one of Al's Conservative-Right Wing comic strip. Al also gave us a weirdly cute little humanimal called the Schmoo.

Anyway, I had a big barbecue brisket sandwich. It was advertised as "Texas Style" but being from Texas I know that that kind of statement up here in New York City means "Look out--it's about as far from Texas as a style can get." In this instance, the barbecue tasted Texas smoky alright though the sauce was too sweet--Texans put their sauce after the meat is smoked--they don't even baste their barbecue with sauce--sauce is simply a sidedish. But, I must say, it's the best barbecue I've had in this damn town since a place called Smoky's existed way back in the early 80s over on Ninth Avenue. It reminded me of barbecue that used to come in a can in Texas--Wolf Brand Barbecued Beef. They made canned chili, too. Ah, when I was a little cub of a lad; the things I ate!

I washed the barbecue down with a cold beer, all brought to me by an old girlfriend of 25 years, a truly kind woman, and a beauty, too; she's gettin' better lookin' the older she gets, and she's a bit of a Daisy Mae-type dresser, too--she shows a lot of beautiful flesh that's for sure--and it's a joy to lewdly stare at it, too.

Anyway, there's a bit of a jaunty bounce in my words tonight because the wonderful happened this afternoon for us Yankees's fans--they SWEPT the BoSox, winning this afternoon 5-zip after Wang the starting pitcher pitched a no-hitter into the 7th inning, finally giving up his first hit in the 7th, relieved by Joba Chamberlain, the latest Yankees total "wunderkind" young pitcher who came in, struck out the first batter he faced, then threw two high hard fastballs at the next batter--"at his head" the homeplate umpire claimed and tossed his ass out of the game. From then on it was a breathholder until the unlikely Eduardo Ramirez, another unknown, came on and got the side to ground out in the top of the ninth--he struck out Big Poppy--and that was it, 5-zip, and the Yankees moved into first place in the American League Wild Card race and now only 5 games behind the Red Sox for the Division Championship.

Oh how sweet it is when you're winning in baseball.

Baseball a sport of great mathematical calculation--the most analyzed sport their is--batting averages, Earned Run Averages, Runs Batted In, pitching speeds, on-base percentages, past performance statistics--I mean, baseball is a game of mathematical strategy based on the dimensions of what's called a "ballpark"--starting from the facets of a diamond and ending in the glory of a well-played and accomplished victorious game.

So Chien-Ming Wang (the best Yankee pitcher for two years in a row now) beat Curt Schilling (Curt's 40 years old now; gonna be a free agent this year; ain't gonna be with the BoSox next year, and that's a sure thing).


Here ya go! Hoist one up for the Yankees--they were the best team in baseball for the past three games where they swept the best team percentagewise in baseball.

Mets vs. Yankees in this year's World Series!!!

thebaseballhappygrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

'Round Midnight

Relaxin' With thegrowlingwolf
I'm sitting back in my easy chair, lads and lassies, smoking a La Rosa Rothchild cigar and listening to one of the overlooked classic jazz presentations from 1955, maybe Miles's first album on the Columbia label (the label that gave us the amazin' and jazz-changing Kind of Blue album in 1957, the first stereo jazz album, too), 'Round Midnight, with the most marvelous of "Ah-Leu-Cha's" ever recorded, and then the original version of what would become a Miles staple, "Bye-Bye-Blackbird" with Red Garland cookin' so cool on piano on "--this is the album young John Coltrane's on, with Mr. P.C. on bass ("Wanna hear the bass played the way it should be, you dig P.C./Hear it really played the way it really should be, you dig P.C./Talk about rhythm, he's got the rhythm, you dig P.C."), and Philly Joe Jones on drums. An ultimate time in American classical music--or Black Classical Music as Max Roach wanted it called.

Young Miles (Miles ahead of his time)

And I'm relaxin' because once again tonight my baseball-enraptured heart almost quit on me several times tonight during again one of the most exciting baseball games of a Yankees's fan's season, the second win in a row over the Boston Red Sox, the best team percentagewise in baseball, tonight especially adventurously hard on a Yankee fan's heart because the 45-year-old Rocket was pitching for the Yanks--he went into the game 5-5--but unreliable in the sense that one game he pitches brilliantly and then the next game he'll give up 8 runs in one inning--that's the precipice a Yankee fan finds himself out on when the Rocket's pitching--and tonight he was pitching against the American League's hottest current pitcher and star turnaround pitcher, Josh Beckett--a bum last year but suddenly this year the cat's meow, but then that's baseball--it all depends on these pitchers--your starting pitchers are your keys to winning--so Yankee fans aren't quite sure going into tonight's game and after last night's thriller.... One good sign for Yankee fans was that Manny Ramirez wasn't in the BoSox lineup tonight. His back spasms turned out to be more serious and Manny got the night off.

So what does the Rocket do? He pitches no-hit, no-run ball for 6 innings. The Yanks give him a 3-0 lead; they start right off banging old Josh Beckett into the ground. Sixth inning, though, here comes Big Poppy, and the Rocket fires, and BAM! WHAM! Thar she blows! just inside the right field foul pole (yes, the one Marvelous Marv Backbiter was seen sitting atop last night acting like a squirrel)--3-1 Yanks and Roger finishes the inning but that's it for him and the next inning in comes Luis Viscano and gets 'em out in the seventh and then in the bottom of the seventh A-Rod hits an A-bomb, his 43rd home run and gives the Yanks a 4-1 lead going into the eighth. Ugh, Yankee fans go, as Joe brings in Kyle Farnsworth, the favorite boo bird of the Yankee faithful--we hate this bum but Joe thinks he could be one of the greatest pitchers ever except this time Joe's full of shit and so here comes Farnsworth and, well, damn, he strikes out the first batter, but then he reverts back to his old style and walks the next batter. OK, OK, there's one out, one on, no big deal--except--Kyle's back to normal tonight and the next batter Kevin Youkills comes up and Kyle delivers and BOOM! HOLY JESUS BAM! there it goes, a two-run home run and it's suddenly 4-3 and then Farnsworth gets the next batter out but then he walks the next batter and gives up a hit, and that's all for Kyle--and he's carried off the field by a brace of strong boos--and in comes Mariano Rivera.

What does Mo do? Gets the batter to hit a little dribbler back to him; throws him out; inning over.

Bottom of the ninth. 4-3 Yankees, top of Boston batting order coming up.

What does Mo do? Gets three dribbling ground balls; one, two, three go the Sox; ballgame over, Yankees win. Seattle lost; Yankees and Seattle are now deadlocked for the American League Wild Card--and Yanks are now only 6 back of Boston and Wang's pitching tomorrow night for the Yanks against old Curt Schilling and the Yankees usually hit Schilling hard as hell so if it's a sweep, Yankee fans will go berserk with brag and pomposity, what all other baseball fans hate about Yankee fans, and start hearing Broadway show tunes in their heads, as the World Poker Tour commercial says--and then it's a 3 game series with the Devil Rays!!

Lookin' good.

thehowlinggrowlingYankeewolf
for The Daily Growler

How About Mr. and Mrs Rocket:

Fools One Night/Geniuses the Next; That's Baseball

Yankees Lost to Detroit Last Night 16-0; Beat the Boston Red Sox 5-3 Tonight
I'm still not recovered from the Yankees's game tonight; they played the Division-leading Red Sox tonight--the Sox are actually the best team in baseball right now (percentagewise)--and what a game, folks. Baseball at its best (unless you're a National League fan). The Yankees at their best. And, dammit, Boston was at their best, too. Manny Ramirez hit a ball so hard, a huge home run over the right field porch, he threw his back out and had to leave the game. But Pettite, Handy Andy, outlasted the BoSox big Japanese wunderkin--I can't think of his name and even if I could I couldn't spell it--and then Mariano came in in the ninth and that was it--there was no fire left in Boston to put out so it was one-two-three for Mo and now the Yankees--listen to this--are only 7 games back of Boston--their only hope, it looks like, is to overtake Seattle for the Wild Card. I would have sworn Boston would have folded by now, but, no, they're hanging in there tough--they had won 4 in a row until the Yankees beat them tonight.

And I have to suffer through this for two more nights--unless Thursday is a day game. The Yankees have beaten Boston this year so far--and it's the Rocket pitching tomorrow night--all Yankees fans are on their knees in some religious fervor asking that Rocket be full of fuel tomorrow night and not a fizzled-out old man like he can be sometimes--he gave up 8 runs in one inning one time this year--scary!

And let's lift a glass of ale to old El Duque with the Mets--he's actually pitching his ass off for the Amazin's, who it looks like are going to dominate their Division again this year. And the rest of the league--what a mess--6 teams are choked in a tie for the Wild Card in the National League--and even the Division leaders aren't that far ahead that they can wile away any time losing. How about Sweet Lou and the Cubbies?--they were up 2 games in their Division as tonight started.

Yankees and Mets in the World Series!!!

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

Note: We have not heard from Marvelous Marv Backbiter in a long time. God knows where he is, though someone swears they saw him sitting atop the right field foul pole at Yankee Stadium tonight. One guy said Marv looked a little squirrely sitting up there.

Johnny Damon was tonight's Yankee hero--he homered in the winning runs.
And how about Mrs. Johnny Damon--shows you what a 50 million dollar a year ballplayer can get for his money!!

Dizzy From Listening to Bird

Charles Parker, Jr's Birthday

I missed the Charles Parker, Jr., Jazz Festival this year--it's down in Tompkins Square Park this time of year because Parker at one time lived on the northside of Tompkins Square Park briefly, with Chan and his adopted family--Kim--who wasn't Parker's child though Chan claimed Parker adopted her--and he did write a tune called "Kim" and Kim Parker used to be when I met her, one time, I sung at a wedding in the Poconos of one of her best friends, a beauty of a woman who I was making out with like "The Champ" when her brat of a son....

What I didn't miss was listening to Charles Parker, Jr.; in fact, I'm listening to him and Diz now and have been for several hours. I got this bootleg CD of some great Bird & Diz, like, first, B & D in a hotel room in Chitown with Oscar Pettiford playing bass--recorded on a wire recorder by Bob Red Cross, for whom Bird wrote "Red Cross." This is the famous recording of "Sweet Georgia Brown" where Bird is playing tenor sax.

One of the most amazing sessions I listened to tonight was the '47 Carnegie Hall concert that was Dizzy's gig with Parker as his guest. Oh boy, what joy. It was a reunion of Parker and Diz after they split up in California when Parker checked into Camarillo State Hospital to "cool out" from bad heroin that sunk his ship of state and sent him into the depressive pits of the maddening realm.

Now I'm listening to one of my all-time favorite recordings, Bird & Diz on Mercury, Bird and Diz, that's the name of it and it is the cat's meow of be-bop as far as I'm concerned--no, they're not as all-star fiery as they were in the mid-forties when Bird & Diz first formed a band together--Jesus, yes, they played with abandon on those early records, but on this one, wow, it's just cool as hell, with Curley Russell's big upright bass right on and Buddy Rich playing with swinging respect, dropping some of his famous bombs at just the right time, backbeat kickin' the crew on to virtuosic Nirvanas--and on piano is the High Priest himself, one of the true inventors of the original music that led to be-bop; Monk always denied he was a be-bopper, and he wasn't--he carried stride into his own world and when Diz and Bird heard it, the be-bop came together in their heads. Monk is so unique. Don't even try to copy him, and some do, like Joel Forrester, a New York pianist who's been around for several moons, a Columbia U music major, and Joel used to like to think of himself as the white Monk, but he ain't.

One time Joel was playing down at a haunt that I and my rowdy friends frequented to the point we kind'a ran the joint and we were blues musicians well heeled in Monk. One of the rowdiest of my friends, a guitar player, said, "We've got to toss that asshole out on his F-ing ear." I laughed and said I was ready, let's go give him the heave ho. "Wait, I've got a better idea." He got up from his seat and walked over to the restaurant fire extinguisher, a big red one, you know the kind. Next I know my friend jerks that fire extinguisher off the wall and runs back to where Joel's banging away at his Monk impersonations and suddenly from out of a huge swooosh of white cold smoke from that fire extinguisher came Joel on the fly with my friend right behind him fire-extinguishing his bony ass out the door and long gone. I never saw Joel again until one Sunday afternoon years later when I went in a Cajun joint on 23rd and Madison and damn, there was Joel playing a hacked up upright in the back of the joint. Fortunately, the joint was so big and barny I couldn't hear Joel at all.

So today was my Bird day. "An Oscar for Treadwell" is blowing now. Jesus Dizzy is sharp, crackling with trumpetuous fire--Jesus, notes so high only deities can hear them, deities and hep cats who know when to bop instead of bippin'.

I'll bet not one F-ing young soul has heard as much Bird as I have nor will they ever maybe not ever hear any Bird at all. Such a shame. Such an American genius, like Charles Ives, like Diz, like Monk, like Budo, Bud Powell, and all those wonderful music innovators I grew up with and who are now playing "The Stars Spangled Banner" in Heaven--you know the joke.

And Buddy Rich! I know, an asshole, but that's OK with me; when you can play the drums like Buddy you can be an asshole.

Another great musical genius who was an asshole, James Brown, but oh what a glorious asshole James was and if he hadn't of been an asshole he'd a never gotten that sound across--"Papa's Got a Brand New Bag" and that's the James Brown tune that changed r and b and rock and roll. He put the beat on the 1 and the 3 in Papa. Whoaaaaa, Nellie.

So this was a joyous day for me. No bullshit today, just lollygagging around a fingerpopping to the best music this country has ever produced--

Today's young jazz musician probably has no knowledge of Charles Parker, Jr's, music, oh he's maybe listened to Phil Schaap's Bird Call show every morning on Columbia U radio (sorry, folks, but Phil Schaap bothers me no end--he reaches conclusions only he knows where they came from)--not note-for-note like we had to learn it, every note the MF-er played we learned it; and we had to be as swiftly perfect as he was, too; you know how hard it is to play a Charles Parker, Jr, solo on a piano? Jesus!!

How 'bout we do some Relaxin' with Lee?

thebeboppin'growlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

Albert Gonzales resigns. Whatever!!!

Passing Notes

Once I Looked at a Piano
Jimmy Swaggart was one of my very favorite Christian-flim-flammers--and, oh boy, Jimmy had it made there for a while back in the 80s--I mean the Lincoln Town cars, the big mansion down in Baton Rouge, a fairly good-lookin' wife, though she looked like she was "cold poon tang" as my old childhood friend Ray Mottweiler used to say back when he was in grade school with me in Dallas. I'd say, "Ray, check out Pearl over there. Ain't she sweet?" "Wolfie, she looks like cold poon tang to me; but the eye of the beholder rules in this case."

Ray had to be at least two years older than I was--and he had already matured to the point that even though he was 12 or 13 years old he was over 21 in terms of life--Ray Mottweiler had already figured it out back in grade school; Ray was already Freudian, believing only in quenching his thirst, getting something to eat, and then thinking about a little sex--Ray was a pure instinctual boy.

The teachers were always on Ray's ass in every class I had with him because he refused to do anything but just sit in class. He caused no trouble; he was never late; he always was dapperly attired; he was polite; he smiled all the time; but he just didn't do anything; he just sat there. Oh he listened to the teacher but when she would say take out your workbooks and do problem number 21 for today, or an instruction like that, or give a test, Ray would take out his workbook--yes, he always had his books and pencils and paper, he was well heeled in school supplies--but he would just sit there and look at the workbook but do nothing. He wouldn't even try to do the problem. Then after the time was up, the teacher would inevitably call on Ray get up off his rusty-dusty and tell the class his solution to the problem. Ray would stand up and he would say, "The answer to this problem is already inside me. I got it. Thank you." And he would sit down.

He got solid F's, though he got A's in deportment and shit like that. His parents, mountain folk who'd struck it rich in Dallas selling retread tires or something mundane like that, always signed his report cards and answered the teachers's calls to them; why they would even come to school and talk with the counselors and the principal. Ray told me one time his father told him, "Don't listen to that bullshit they teach you in them schools, son; you're as smart as me, and look what I've got. Them educated fools wish they had half'a what I got, but it's all yours, son, when I'm dead and gone."

Later one year I was bused over to another school district and I lost track of Ray Mottweiler, and I really lost track of him after we left Dallas and headed back west to the original homestead--my father missed his family, and that was that for Ray Mottweiler in my thoughts, I thought.

Years passed and then I had my first job of any significance and it was in Dallas. One day I was driving my company car fast down one of the East Dallas avenues, like Ross or McKinney, and, by golly, I saw a big tacky sign staring back at me just ahead and it read "Mottweiler USED Auto Parts." I immediately thought that has to be the Ray Mottweiler I once knew; I mean emphasizing they sold "used" auto parts was pure Ray Mottweiler--prouder that he sold USED parts than he would be selling NEW parts. Using Mottweiler logic, used parts had already proven to be well made, broken in, sturdy, and never really dysfunctional--so with a little fixin' up back in Ray's tool shop these used parts come out better than NEW parts--and putting solid greenback dollar bills in old Ray's cash register. Damned if there wasn't a big long yellow Cadillac convertible sitting outside Mottweiler's USED Auto Parts. That had to be Ray's car. I almost swerved into his parking area tempted to go in and see for myself, but I'd already whizzed by the place and soon I had my mind on other things, like the new girl I had asked out on a date that coming Friday--and soon, until as I was writing this post, Ray Mottweiler was again long forgotten.

You see, Jimmy Swaggart was one of my Christian flim-flammer heroes because he was also a piano player--he was a piano player before he got saved and became a flim-flamming Christian hypocrite preacher--Praise the Lard and pass me another one of them thar Rolex watches.

The very earliest Jimmy Swaggart teevee shows I remember were done in a small studio with just Jimmy sitting at a small upright piano, like a console, surrounded by a band: guitars, bass, drums, and Jimmy spent his whole teevee 30 minutes singing and playing the piano. Every now and then he would break loose and play some out-and-out rock and roll piano--he was Jerry Lee Lewis's cousin and some said he played even better than Jerry Lee--and he was Mickey Gilley's cousin, too, and they all said Jimmy could play better piano than Mickey. Jerry Lee and Mickey followed the Devil into show biz, but Jimmy, oh no, he was called down thar in Faraday, Lawsbanana, by God to preach the Gospel and rake in the loot that way rather than gettin' involved with the Devil's boys who promised you big bucks but then made it harder than the holiest of hells for you to get them. Jimmy through preaching was exempt from taxes, too, Praise the Lard and "Where are my ho's"; all the records he made, he got to keep everything over cost--plus they cost him nothing to record since his church built him a top-of-the-line recording studio of his very own; a teevee studio of his very own, too. Hot damn. All contributions to God through Jimmy were tax-free. Yes, folks, check out all those megachurches and that sleazy pal of the Devil's Pat Robertson or any of those goony necked, pig jowled more pious-than-thou flim-flammers--like check out Paula White. [Note to Pastor Melissa Scott: this Paula White chick is beginning to intrigue me more and more--especially now that I heard she divorced her husband on stage in her big Tampa, Florida, megachurch, The Church With No Walls--plus Paula shows off her body more than you do, sweet Melissa--plus, too, Paula's from Tupelo, Mississippi, where you-know-who was borned and bredded.]

The cousins: Mickey, Jimmy, and Jerry Lee.

Anyway, Jimmy Swaggart once told why he played the piano and that's what made me feel totally kin to old Jimmy in a music sense. Jimmy said when his parents bought their first piano he was about 7 years old. He said he took one look at that piano and he told his mother he knew he already knew how to play a piano. She said prove it and Little Jimmy sat on that stool and pounded out a boogie just like he'd studied boogie since birth and that boogie had his old pork-fat momma hip-shaking all over the house that day, praisin' duh lard for sending she and Brother Swaggart a little entertainin' genius. Yes, Lard, Little Jimmy Swaggart took one look at a piano and knew he could play it.

Me, too. I, too, remember the first piano my family bought and I, too, remember the day the movers brought it and dollied it into our livingroom and put it against the north wall under a painting of Point Lobo, California, done at the spot by my grandmother on my mother's side, the poet who was also a novelist and a painter. I, too, stood there and looked at that piano. I, too, liked its looks. With its black and white keys it looked like it was smiling at me, saying, "Come on, kid, you know you got a Jones to play me, to tickle my ivories, come on, Little Wolfie, like Sparky's Magic Piano, I'll be you're magic piano." And I right then and there sold my soul to the Devil down at the Crossroads and right then and there I, too, like Little Jimmy Swaggart, walked over to that piano and played "Mary Had a Little Lamb" eight-to-the-bar and right off the bat.

I heard my mother drop a dish in the kitchen. "Was that you playing that?" she said rushing into the livingroom. "Who'd you think it was, Ma, Pretty Kitty?" [the family cat] "What an obnoxious little bastard you are, Wolfie, but maybe you're a genius, so we're giving you piano lessons, buster, and one day when you're on stage playing alongside Oscar Levant, you can support your father and me in the style the Good Lord said we deserved to have--you owe it to us, all we do for you."

The reason for this post: I worked on two CD projects today. I got them going, moving, directed in the right direction. I'm doing solo piano pieces now--why, I'm almost actually writing them out on music paper--charting my compositions--shit, I remember my first piano lesson--I just looked at it, it was a Schaum-style lesson, and did it. My teacher fell in love with me on the spot; she saw me as her potential little Van Cliburn--and my piano teacher, I still remember her name, was the dearest friend of Van Cliburn's mother, who one day during my piano lesson came in and pinched my cheek and said, "Do your scales, sonny boy. You get your fingering down right and you can't lose." After she left, my teacher was thrilled to death and said, "You know who that is?" "No, ma'am." "That's Mrs. Cliburn; she's from Kilgore where I'm from originally; we were best friends all through school." "Wev." "No, no, she's Van Cliburn's mother." "Like I said, 'wev.'" I did my lesson for that day perfectly and perfectly from then on through 10 Schaum books and Czerny scales books until one day I thought, "Hell, I don't wanna be Van Cliburn, whoever the hell he is, I wanna be Oscar Peterson, that's who I wanna be." So I quit taking piano lessons and became a little boogie-woogie playing Devil's child, like Sugar Chile Robinson, a little kid who won the Amateur Hour playing boogie-woogie and became a little imp star after that. I was Little Sugar Chile Wolf. However, unlike Jimmy Swaggart, I never got saved and able to rake in those buckets full of tax-free greenbacks--"No Change, Please. God does not have a coin machine in Heaven. God only respects paper money." Praise the Lard and pass those hog jowls 'n gravy.

As a result of my learning how to play the 88s, as a young boogie-woogiest, I dreamed of owning an Oldsmobile Rocket 88--"You've heard of those jalopies and the noise they make/ well let me introduce you to my Rocket 88...Ridin' in style/movin' and groovin' along."

themovin'andgrovin'growlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

There Once Was a Brentano's

"pensees, anglice pansies; a handful of thoughts"
There once was a Brentano's Bookstore right across West 49th Street from my office in Rockefeller Center on the southwest corner of Fifth Avenue. Brentano's was old European-style bookstore that had everything from leather-bound signed first editions in elaborate bookcases or some ancient artifacts in another elaborate glass case and fine prints hanging on the walls on the lower floor and up the long stairway to the second floor where the throwout and bargain bins were. I went in there nearly every day and looked at several prints I desired, one a Man Ray lithograph from the 1930s, but they were pricey, hundreds of dollars, and I was working as, and I'm, like Henry Miller, not ashamed of it, a proofreader for a large accounting firm in their Printing and Design Department--and ah what a glorious name for a department run by a once-great Danish-modern designer who at that time was simply a hustling has been--once with studios in Paris and New York--now working out of his home in Greenwich, Connecticut, where he was building a Jaguar in his basement in his spare time, though he did command a director's title on my job and he was technically my boss though my boss was really the supervisor, a whacky little Christian Indian woman who had a drinking problem and decided she, too, could work from her home just like the bigshot designer, not showing up at the office once for a period of six months--"I can work just as well from my bed at home as I can in the office--afterall, most of my work is done on the phone."

So I had no money, just a lot of time on my hands, so I'd leave my proofreading desk and run over to Brentano's every time I could, which surprisingly was several times a day--especially after I was promoted and became a full-time copyeditor.

One day the inevitable happened. I went galloping over to Brentano's and, damn, the first thing I ran into was a huge sign declaring Brentano's was shutting down after many glorious years on Fifth Avenue in NYC and that very day was the beginning of their big sell off--selling everything in the store at huge discounts. Damn. There were bins full of on-sale treasures everywhere.

I immediately started going through some bins of books. Right off the bat a little paperback volume caught my eye. At the time I was heavily into D.H. Lawrence--Lorenz--as I had lived in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and had gone up to D.H.'s ranch up above Taos just past Wheeler Peak the highest mountain in New Mexico and had loved it up there--it was open to the public at the time, run by the U of New Mexico, and the several times my wife and I went up there there was nobody there. The house was open. There was furniture in it. Even an outdoor kitchen with adobe fireplaces and a big water barrel and a stack of logs--no running water in the house but right off the front porch ran a little ditch running full of crystal-clear spring water--I still remember cupping my hands and dipping them in that cold, cold water and taking a huge drink looking up at the Rocky Mountains--the Sangre de Cristos--bleeding blue and white topped across the far horizon--the view off the plateau on which D.H.'s ranch sat. My wife and I dared to spend the night up there that first time we went there and we went back several times thereafter and stayed the night there about 5 times in all--and what wonderful nights--unbelieveable--and right back up the hill behind the ranchhouse in a white mausoleum looking down on the house was D.H.'s ashes and his wife Frieda's big Brunhilde grave just outside D.H.'s mausoleum. One night my wife and I went up to the mausoleum and we lit candles and put them around on the floor and we sat there looking at D.H.'s ashes casket and read from Women in Love.

The paperback that caught my eye was a raggedy edition, Pansies, Poems by D.H. Lawrence. I picked it up. There was no publisher listed, no copyright, just the covers, the title page, the table of contents, an introduction by Lawrence, and then the poems. I got it in my head that I was holding a very rare edition of a D.H. Lawrence work. A privately printed edition maybe.

I looked at the price. Ten cents. I swear. Ten cents. I bought it.

I got it back to the office and decided it was no treasure really; Brentano's wasn't putting any rare D.H. Lawrence book in a going-out-of-business sale bin for 10 cents. Mistakes are made by stores but I couldn't see them making that kind of mistake. Besides their rare books were kept in those elaborate and locked bookcases. So, I glanced at the introduction and then put the book in one of my desk drawers and there it stayed until I got fired one bright August morning, the day before my birthday--and the damn company had sent me a birthday card that same morning telling me how glad they were I worked for them and how they hoped I had many more birthdays with the company. An hour later I was out on my ass--the cardboard boxes of my belongings sat out on the curb for me by one of the mailroom dudes--the D.H. Lawrence book down in the bottom of one of those boxes.

When I got back to my apartment I put the boxes in the closet and that was that.

A few years later I had to move and as a result of not finding a new apartment quick enough, I moved in with my girlfriend and took all my belongings out to her mansion out near Greenwich, Connecticut--ah ironies, aren't they grand! I don't know how I could endure life without all these gorgeous ironies.

So the D.H. Lawrence book by then was somewhere lost among the numerous boxes of my life's worth that were stored willy-nilly in her garage.

Of course, the ironies of romance are some of the most engaging ironies of life and sure enough this arrangement soon ran its course and next thing I know I'm sleeping on the living room couch of a couple of friends of mine who have a loft in SoHo and desperately searching for a place I can call my own.

A year or so later, my girlfriend informed me that her garage had flooded and all of my "stuff" was currently residing at the local garbage dump--it had all been ruined by the flooding and she'd had it hauled to the dump by her Italian handyman and gardener.

OK. That was that. The little D.H. Lawrence book was becoming compost now, sweltering under piles of garbage on a big New York City-area dump, dissolving, just like D.H. dissolved under the throes of tuberculosis in Italy in the summer. That was that. Wev, right?

A year or so later, my girlfriend and I made up again (oh the Ferris Wheel of ironies that made our world go around) and I was once again staying in her mansion. One night, I went into her library, a walnut-panelled room with four huge, high, shelves of books; I knew them all by heart--or thought I did. I wanted to read some Sartre and I went to the shelf she kept the Sartre on and DAMN! Did my eyes deceive me? I looked. There it sat. Right by Being and Nothingness--a great sign to me--I'm very existentialist in case you didn't know. Yes, folks, there IT sat: Pansies, Poems by D.H. Lawrence. I grabbed it quick and put it with my bag--I was only there for a weekend.

The rescued book joined me on my further ventures moving around NYC to various apartments finally settling in the one I'm still in NOW. Over the years the book got lost again. This time in amongst the wild collections of my dreams that are draped, stacked, hanging, shelved, on the floor, on the ceiling and in the closets of my apartment--I collect everything under the sun, you see, from Rockwell Kent lithographs to an extensive collection of vintage railroad annual passes to a huge collection of Vernon Kilns china and Carl Van Vechten photographs--my proudest being a shot of Billie Holiday with her dog, "Mister"--I mean, there is no space in my apartment that is not crammed with God KNOWS What--and what God, I'm asking--but anyway, I lost the little volume of D.H.'s poetry once again.

Just last night--I'm reading a biography of Paul Bowles up in my loftbed--I went looking for my copy of Bowles's Sheltering Sky (one of the best books, I think, ever written). I was digging in this crusty old cardboard box of books--oh they were dirty, dusty, disgusting--dead spiders, roach eggs, who knows, but I didn't find my Sheltering Sky--nope, instead, what I did find was a book of Rupert Brooke poems I'd had when I was in college--and then, son of a bitch, yep, there it was: Pansies, Poems by D.H. Lawrence. Golly dog, Scotty (being Star Trekian), there it was, back in my arms again. What a life this little book had had in both reality and imagination but now here it was, back in my arms again, like I said.

So here I sit with it now. There still is no publisher's imprimatur anywhere to be found--just the covers, the flyleaves, the T of C, the Introduction, and the poems--the pansies.

And quickly I came across this dazzling little poem--maybe it's not politically correct, folks, but, to hell with that, it's a quaint poem--it made me read it several times.

After dark
Can you, after dark, become a darkie?
Could one, at night, run up against the standing flesh of you
with a shock, as against the blackness of a negro,
and catch flesh like the night in one's arms.

And how about this little suggestive gem:

Bowls
Take away all this crystal and silver
and give me soft-skinned wood
that lives erect through long nights, physically
to put to my lips.

Or this wonderful one:

You
You, you don't know me.
When have your knees ever nipped me
like fire-tongs a live coal
for a minute?

I've Deduced
These were compiled right before he died. One of the poems is entitled England 1929.

I am now reading at some more of these "pansies" and I find them visibly tantalizing and then I start reading them and by dogies they're compelling creatures. Marvelous. Wonderful. I'm ecstatic. It's like spending a night up on D.H.'s ranch lo those many years ago now--and with a woman who like D.H. and Frieda is now dead and gone and buried in New Mexico.

thegrowDHLingwolf
for The D.H.aily Growler

Sealing Oneself Up in One's Self

Writhing in Writing
I went out Wednesday evening, thedailygrowlerhousepianist calls it a "monthly quorum" where he and I and a man I used to know as Manfred P. Mann--and he is a Mann, too, and not a Maus--meet at an Uptown Manhattan Irish joint and throw down Harp ales until we're talking loudly and being very flirty with the Irish lady bartender, a beauty of an Erin lass she is, too, until we excused ourselves and went to MPM's abode and polished off some of his expensive Holland gin.

I got home after midnight and I lay there and I tried to erase all my thoughts. I was missing a certain someone. Swoooosh! Erased. I was worried about being depressed when I woke up. Swoooosh! Erased. I became totally blank. And, soon, just as Paul Bowles's mother promised him when he was a kid worrying about life, that totally blankness lulled me into lullaby land where I dreamed I was a character in a blue painting hanging in a famous museum and people were constantly filing past me glaring at me, some coming up to me and getting right up their noses almost brushing my brush strokes and I was hollering madly back at them, you know, I was hollering for help; it was one of those dreams where you're pinned down and want to move, want to run, want to escape your bogged-down situation but that's the saga of the whole dream, escape is possible but impossible at the same time.

And I woke up around 9 later that morning and I was still a blank.

I didn't become aware of my self and my reality until I was drinking my coffee and I didn't even recall going out to the Islamic coffeeman's cart and getting the coffee--but when things started appearing within the blank space, filling it in again, it was due to the familiarity I had with the coffee, going and getting it the same old way every morning for the past 12 years.

I thought about doing my The Daily Growler growling but I had no way of thinking about writing--I was still sort of hung up in that blue painting--I hope it was a Picasso Blue Period, though I did seem to be rather realistic in the painting, though that might have been a figment of my impressionistic imagination--I could have been so abstract perhaps those filers by didn't even know I was a human representation, though surely even in the abstract, even in the Picassoan abstract, surely I still looked like I do now.

After the day had flown out to the middle of the sunny ocean of the afternoon, I automatically jotted down, "Our eyes are so hung up on our ignorant views we continue to refuse to recognize reality--to recognize that we are animals with the extraordinary ability to make a paradise out of this planet--but NO, we continue to deny reality and rely on fables and the false realities they lie to us about--we continue to savagely take the sweetest elements of the earth's make up--it's forests and streams, it's oceans and ice caps, it's tenderest of fish, it's precious fruits, it's lush vegetation, it's offering of curative medicines in the hearts of its rain forests and jungles--instead of nurturing these elements we are determined to destroy them--to use the earth's most miraculous offerings to openly wrecklessly destroy our only paradise! It's like we are continuously killing our mothers and fathers...."

And then I wrote, "All homo sapiens are Simians--the fathers of uncivilized ('evolution of culture') creatures are mean--hell, the father's of civilized creatures are mean, too. Why fathers in some mammalian cultures eat their young out of just plain jealousy--especially they eat their sons--the sons instinctually are a threat to the harem-coveting father's rule--the sons might grow up to whip the old man's ass and get to seed his harem--a devastating blow to a dominant patriarch. A lot of monkeys, however, live in matriarchal societies, and in those societies, the mother's are never mean--isn't that interesting."

Remember, Freud believed WAR was a way to stop EVOLUTION.

It is quite frightening to listen to these Fundamentalist Christian assholes that just flood peasant teevee with their Holier-Than-Thou flim-flamming--selling videos (VHS) for $35 a piece; selling books they print themselves for $35. All tax-free monies, too, baby. These assholes sit there in their own teevee production studios and brag about owning Learjets and having airports--I heard one of the scarier ones the other day bragging about how he was sitting in his hangar office at his airport--wow! I thought Jesus chose a jackass as his way of getting around, that or he walked.

These powder-puff-puffed-up-looking jackoffs can hypnotize Yahoos and simple folk and idiots into truly believing that they actually converse with a huge Big Daddy out in outerspace somewhere, cock and bull stories, sermons that jump all over the place from the rantings of the Apostle "I Prefer Boys" Paul all the way back to the raunchy Psalms of the raunchiest Judean king ever, King David, the boy shepherd, the harp-playing shepherd, the simple shepherd who took his slingshot and a flat stone and hit Goliath, a contemporary rassler of the day, right between the eyes and save the Chillin' of Israel from being eaten by a "GIANT." What's a giant to a small Jewish man? A guy 6 feet tall might look like a giant to a little 5 foot Jewish dude. OK, say David were 6 feet tall himself! So that Chinese dude who plays for the Houston Rockets, he's like 7 foot four--wouldn't he look like a GI'NT to even a tall Jewish guy?--of all my Jewish friends--nope, not one of them is even 6 foot tall.

What's a giant?

You see the way my life is slanting these days? Con-Ed is drilling just out my windows somewhere down in the streets. Jackhammers. Jackhammers have been noisy sons of bitches since I was a kid. They've never learned to whisper them.

Our Little Billionaire Crooked Mayor in Hot Water; Cancels His Presidential Run
Our little billionaire mayor was feeling so full of himself--he got his "congestion pricing" so he was in the city countinghouse counting all the millions he was going to rake off his charging the poor to now drive into the rich man's city--though he is not going to charge taxis and limos--aha, what the rich come to the city in. I mean it's a stupid plan--why not just ban trucks and cabs and shit on some streets, auto traffic only--hell, Norman Mailer figured it out when he ran for mayor of New York City back in the good ole days--Jimmy Breslin was his running mate. Mailer suggested, like Frank Lloyd Wright suggested in his planned city (Broadmoor (sic)), we build traffic centers, garages, at the end of the tunnels and bridges where you could park your car and then get on a monorail system that would carry you to any part of the city you wished to go.

But trouble came for the little man billionaire when a fire suddenly broke out in the Deutsche Bank Building--the Nazis...oops, I'm sorry, I still remember the Deutsche Bank from World War II, Hitler's favorite bank--also a favorite bank of George W. Bush's traitorous grandpappy, Prescott. Yeah, he helped Hitler in WWII--WEV.

Come to find out, We the People of New York City bought that piece of shit building for 90 million dollars. You think we got screwed? The building has to be demolished. The cost to demolished this piece of shit building (they still used asbestos in buildings when the Nazi...oops, there I go again, the Deutsche Bank was built) was originally 130 million bucks! But, now, due to cost overruns, it's up near 200 million. That means that WE the People of New York City have paid so far 290 million dollars for a worthless building--an eyesore even before 9/11, same as the WTC was an architectual eyesore in spite of what you're taught in New York City Propaganda 101.

Plus, turns out, the little billionaire mayor and his crony rich bastard on the city council, Peter Valone, a filthy rich developer made his claim to fame by destroying affordable housing on the East Side and putting up hi-rise luxury buildings, jobbed the demolition out to a company of rather dubious reputation and it seems a large hirer of illegal immigrants, Mexicans, Peruvians, Chileans, Ecuadorans, El Salvadorans, Guatamalans, and Hondurans, up here doing construction work all over NYC--who are those guys pointing those bricks on your building?--they all speak Spanish, that I guarantee you.

The little billionaire is currently "out of sight," dodging reporters, and just as the city assured us that there was no air contamination from the horrible fire--it killed two NYFD dudes--we know they were under the Christy Todd Whitman "the air is perfectly safe" syndrome--you know, this is a lie they all have to tell after a major contamination fuck-up like this Deutsche Bank bullshit. Who owned the Deutsche Bank in the first place? I guarantee you a lot of fat cats here and in Germany made millions off this boondoggle. That building condemned should have been demolished by the Feds--they are responsible for 9/11--yes, not me, not my fellow New York Citians, but the god-damn Federal Government whose armed forces are supposed to guard our borders and protect us from such aggravating bullshit attacks--but no, we blew it at Pearl Harbor--and we got WWII out of it--we blew it in Nam--we lost that WAR, dammit, now Bush is whining the same old song all involved in that little crooked WAR (it was for oil, too; did you know that? Check out the Michael Rockerfeller story sometimes--it might interest you to know Michael was a geologists and was in Indo-China looking for oil--later he moved over into Papau New Guinea, still looking for oil, and he was eaten by cannibals, or at least that's the martyrdom story given out by the Rockefeller Family, a family of liars, especially Michael's father, Nelson, was a lyin' dog--he's the reason we had that tacky World Trade Center in the first place--Rockefellers think big when they're building monuments to themselves).

Ah sweet revenge. See, it all comes back around on these lying fools who are leading us to CHAOS and therefore DOOM (spelled backwards it's "Mood" and the mood I'm in is dooming).

thedoominggrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

NOTE: The State of Texas successfully lynched Johnny Conner night afore last. Three more going to be lynched this week, including Kenneth Foster, the black man who sat in his car 80 feet away from where a passenger in his car killed a man and thereby under Texas law he's guilty of murder, too, and the State of Texas is going to murder him for his sins. Praise the Lard and pass me some of them pig jowls. Johnny Conner was the 400th black man (whoops, some of those were white, not many, but some of them) killed by the State of Texas. No pardons coming, that we guarantee. No clemency in the heart of any Texas governor. Hell, Georgie Porgie W. Bush killed 157. Think of the raw human power in being able to kill other human beings "legally" in capital punishment and in WAR!!!

Johnny Conner's sister who witnessed his "getting juiced with salt water" said she didn't see how the MEN who inject these poor bastards and sit there smiling justifiably as it takes sometimes 15 minutes for the poor buggers to finally give up their sorry lives and die live with themselves after they get home. Oh, don't worry, sweetheart, they're eatin' pig jowls and sippin' Jim Beam braggin' to their kids how they off'd another guiltier-than-Hell N-worder last night and how they're gonna knock off 3 more this week. Praise the Lard and Amurican justice!!

Is It Tonight, Texas?

The Texas Killing Team Prepping For a Big Night!
No, it's not Kenny Foster's turn tonight--Kenny's on a hunger strike--he's refusing to participate in his own lynching, not eating anymore, turning down the last supper, and when the time comes he will refuse to move and will force them to force him to die (remember Kenneth didn't do anything; he was simply sitting in the car 80 yards away from where, yes, a friend of his did shoot somebody rather coldbloodedly and, yes, this friend of his was a passenger in the car, and, yes, he had gotten out of the car and gone up a driveway 80 feet away from the car, and, then, yes, he did come back to the car and get in and say, "Drive like a bat out of hell, I just blew some MF-er away," though I don't know if the guy even said that. I've heard Kenneth say he heard the gunshot but had no idea it was this friend--he said he almost drove on off, but since it was a friend, he waited. Too bad. So Texas has one amongst its many goofball laws (it's still against the law in Texas to carry a pair of fence cutters in your pocket) is this crazy law they call the "parties" law that says that if you are party to a murder then you, too, are guilty of murder and that's what the tricky-ass white lawyers got together and came up with--a way to kill two N-worders with one stone. The murderer, by the bye, has already been lynched--he's dead and gone--anyway, it's not yet Kenny's time to be dragged to the layout table--Go, Kenny, Struggle, Dude, resist, make them drag you screaming and hollering, and they'll be meaner than you ever thought they could be and they'll literally like a predator killing its prey grab you by the throat and drag you to that horrid table and their Adrenalin will be flowing at full KILL and they will joke and curse as they finally get Kenny belted down to an immoveable position and then, "Hey, quick, man, needle this N-word son of a bitch; he's a strong MF-er." "Come on, Kenny boy, take it like a white man--you did the crime you gets the juice."

How cruel is that? Hell, it's American though. But no, it's not Kenny's time tonight, tonight its a fellow-death-row mate--I think he's joined Kenny in his nonparticipation stance, too, so it'll be interesting to see how they handle this dude tonight. Johnny Conner will be NUMBER 400 to executed in the Lone Star State--but here, read all about it:

TEXAS SCHEDULED TO HIT 400 EXECUTIONS

Monday, August 20, 2007

Texas has executed far more death row inmates than any other state since the resumption of the death penalty in 1976, and will soon hit the grim total of 400.

On Wednesday August 22, 2007, the state of Texas is scheduled to execute Johnny Conner for the May 1998 murder of Kathyanna Nguyen. If the execution is carried out, he will be the 400^th person executed and Texas will have outdistanced any other state in America in terms of executions carried out.

Texas regarded as the ‘capital' of capital punishment has carried out 20 executions this year the most of any state and is scheduled to executed nine other people this year besides Johnny Conner.

Four states with the death penalty have not carried out a single execution since 1976 when the U.S. Supreme Court approved newly revised death penalty statutes. Another 14 death penalty states have each executed less than 6 people in the past quarter century. This year, states as diverse as New Jersey, Montana, Maryland, and New Mexico considered doing away with the death penalty altogether.

While executions in Texas have continued at an alarming pace, new death sentences have decreased significantly both in this state and nationally in the past five years. Texas juries and prosecutors may be realizing that the pursuit of a death sentence is not worth the time, effort, financial investment, or the risk of executing the innocent, when society can be protected with the statutory provisions of either a mandatory 40-year-prison sentence or a sentence of life without parole.

Although death sentences may have declining popularity among the people in Texas, it hasn't stopped Texas from executing people and showing a total disregard for human life. It seems that when the death penalty was reinstated in Texas, it came back with a vengeance and the number of people put to death is proof of this.

It is against this backdrop that, I urge you to raise up your voices and take part in the Vigils throughout the state of Texas that have been planned to mark this somber occasion.

Help stop the execution of Johnny Conner and other death row inmates.

I'm goin' out drinking. This country is beginning to suck more and more, folks, and that's a cryin' shame.

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

"What'cha Gonna Do When the Well Runs Dry?"

Let's See...
--Carolyn Goodman died this week. It went totally unnoticed on New York City television. It may have been mentioned on PBS and CABLE, I don't know, because I only watch peasant teevee (Jack LaLanne selling his juicer; David Orick selling his suction devices), the "Networks," the channels that force you to suffer tons of minutes of boring cutsey-wootsey commercials (like Jack LaLanne's infomercial (he's 91 in that commercial and it's at least 5 years old so that old son of a bitch is 96 as I type this--wonder what he's doing? Dying?)), and commercials are all lies as I teach in my classes on "Waking Up and Smelling the Roses"--you know, REAL-ALITY--sales pitches are all lies that (yes, Jack LaLanne's a liar--so's George Foreman)--exaggerations, and even truthful exaggerations are lies. But, anyway, Carolyn Goodman died; she was 92; wow, she remained a very beautiful woman over those years but a woman probably constantly irked with a pain that wants justice, a pain caused by the Yahoo factor--the ruling factor in this country--and Carolyn Goodman because of this Yahoo factor lost her very precious son, Andrew, to the cruelty of America's white cracker/redneck/KKK "majority." Her last appearance in court on behalf of her son was in the recent trial of one of the Mississippi rednecks who killed her son--and this dude and two of his moonshine-slugging-back buddies, whoopin' it up in their pick-up truck spotted Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner, three Yankee boys the redneck good ole boys knew were down in Mississippi helping organize the blacks in order to guarantee they got to the polls and vote on order of the voting rights (100 years after they were freed from slavery by Abe "Honest in Name Only" Lincoln) they had just been given by the Civil Rights Act. "Why lookie thar, Bubba, it's them two Jew boys and that N-worder from Jew York City!" "Yew got any rope in this heah peee-cup, Homer?" "Rope, hell, hangin's too good fer them outside agitators. I got sumtin' that'll teach them thar Yankees a lessin' and that N-worder boy his proper place in our society--how 'bout I skin that sumbitch alive right in front of them Jewboys?" "Now yeer talkin' the South Shall Rise Agin', baby; let's git them N-worder lovers and that little N-wordergater bait; in fact, let's drown 'em alive down in the swamp there." "Whooooo boy! Give me a slug'athar mule, I'm gonna have me sum good ole fun tonight!"

And when they found these three young men's bodies buried in an earthen damn on a Pearl tributary, Carolyn Goodman had to go down there and identify her son. Think of what he must of looked like to his mother: the boys had been beaten so badly nearly every bone in their bodies was broken, and they had been burned, gutted, and then pitched still alive and suffering into their earthen graves like martyred saints.

Lynchin' Down in Texas Going On as Planned
Yep, folks, and most of the Yahoos, I figure, those who have no idea who Carolyn Goodman is or was, certainly figure blacks have gained equality now and dammit they should shut the F up about it and go on and get rich in the system like the Messkins and illegal Irish are. These are the same Yahoos who holler madly in favor of the death penalty. These are Yahoos who run for and get elected to political offices, like the Governor of Texas, Rick "Am I Gay or Not?" Perry--the guy who held his gubernatorial inauguration in a Right-Wing Armageddon-Mongering Christian Church in Dull-Ass (read: Dallas); a young black man's life is now in this hypocritical bird's filthy hands--this young black man's chances of not getting lynched by the State of Texas? I say nil.

I was born, raised, and educated through college in Texas and though I haven't lived in Texas in 40 years, you would think I would be ashamed of admitting I was a native Texan, but no I'm not, and I'll tell you why, politics in Texas is owned lock, stock, and barrel by the oil industry. You realize that little kids in the primary grades when I was in the Texas public school system were flooded with movies and books and comic books, all of them related to Texas history and the history of oil and its importance to Texas--and every one of these was courtesy of a Texas oil company, like Magnolia, Texaco, Conoco, Humble, Esso, Sinclair, Shell, Gulf, and Cities Service. We learned about the Spindletop oil discovery (the first oil discovered in Texas--on Spindletop Hill down in the Beaumont, Texas, area of Southeast Texas--on the Sabine River--and the air in my hometown smelled of oil and gas when the wind shifted and blew in from the north of town and the Onyx Refinery "cracking" away out there--and Onyx was a local brand but we kids knew because we'd been out to the refinery and had seen it that Humble trucks, Gulf trucks, Texaco trucks, yeah, Shell trucks filled up there, too, pulling in and out of there night and day. I had this weird algebra teacher in high school who one day broke into a tirade against General Motors, Buick in particular, and the oil industry in general--I mean his face got deathly red and he roared, "I once saw a carburator that would get 100 miles to the gallon--and the man, I knew him, sold it to Buick--and you know what Buick did?" "No, Mister Bobblehead." "Buick paid my friend one hundred thousand dollars for his invention, papers, and everything and then they took that miraculous carburator into the backshop and they smashed it to smithereens and told the inventor that as far as he was concerned he'd never heard of a carburator that would get 100 miles per gallon." Then this weird teacher suddenly went off on the oil companies and he suddenly said, "You know out there at the Onyx Refinery, you see Humble trucks out there, and you stop them and you say why is your gasoline any different than Onyx gasoline, it comes from the same source? And they answer, 'but out gasoline is called Humble, you see, so it's not really Onyx gas in there once it gets inside my truck."

Besides, too, about being a native Texan: I'm from West Texas, way out under the high sun, moving out and away from the Old South mentality that ruled East Texas and South Texas. Out in West Texas there is freedom all around you, no barriers to keep you from seeing forever back east or forever and ever out west--and the railroad split my hometown in half and those trains--I used to watch them with fun-fascination thinking "One day I'm gonna get on one of those trains and I'm gonna get the F out of this one-horse town, I guar-ron-tee"--I mean, New York City was east of my hometown--via way of Dallas--and L.A. was west of my hometown via way of the Old West. Both my families were vagabonds, my dad's family favoring California as the object of their escape; my mother's family more literary and favoring the East Coast, especially New York City--remember, I had a step-grandfather who lived his last 5 years with my family who was a native New York Citian, born and raised in Harlem, a Dutchman. That was what I loved about Texas and was proud of being a Texan, because Texas is so culturally mixed--it's dizzy with culture and most of its cultural output is genius, Texas being a source of some great original musics, the special Texas blues, the Houston r and b, the Nortena and ranchero and mariachi music of San Antonio, and Buddy Holly was just up in Lubbock, Texas, and there was a state of the art recording studio in Clovis, New Mexico, and Roy Orbison was from out in far-far-west Wink, Texas, and Willie Nelson was over in Nashville writin' all the big hillbilly hits for the biggest Nashville stars, and there was the elder Bob Wills to deal with, or even bands like Jimmy Heap and the Melody Masters, or Mance Lipscomb and Lightnin' Hopkins down in Central Texas were still alive--Texas music, and my best friend's father had a big country western hit that then crossed over and became a top ten hit and made my friend's father rich and famous (he's in the Country Western Hall of Fame) and I got to play and practice playing the piano while his son played drums out in this guy's state of the art recording studio in my hometown--you see what I'm drivin' at?--no, I'm not ashamed of being a Texan--not the kind of Texan I am--but, yes, I'm ashamed of one hell of a lot of my fellow Texans, like Governor Rick Perry--he's a cryin' shame in my book and I'll bet my eBay-bought farm (I haven't found it on the map yet) that Rick Perry will not pardon this poor dude the State of Texas wants to off come the end of August.

Remember, this guy didn't do anything but sit in a car while a friend of his was eighty feet away killing a guy. Still according to the Texas law, he's guilty--simply by his being a friend of this guy and Texas saying that this guy must have known this guy was going to murder this guy so therefore this guy's guilty of murder, too. That's how it works. Texas lawmakers believe in TOUGH LAW. The Texas Rangers were taught to shoot first and ask questions later and it's still that legendary (instinctual) law enforcement units "tough Texan" mentality that rules Texas law enforcement. They love killing in that system--and they would have loved lynching and probably a lot of them may have actually participated in lynchings--maybe even secret lynchings--lynchings of Blacks that never got out into the public--in Texas, the white polite refer to these as "necktie parties."

Carolyn Goodman's Son

In Mississippi, in the 1960s, when segregation was king, racism the status quo, and bigotry the law, it was young people who rose up and challenged the system. In racially segregated and economically depressed Neshoba County, Mississippi, it was the local black youth and northern volunteers who challenged racism and led the fight for freedom and justice. Because of the sacrifices made by many people, most of the obvious signs of racism and bigotry have been eliminated. Because of the brutal beatings suffered by demonstrators at the hands of segregationists, public facilities have been desegregated.

To achieve the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, many marched, demonstrated, and suffered brutal beatings. And some died. For three who died, Michael Schwerner, James Chaney, and Andrew Goodman, we still continue the struggle for justice.

The History

Civil rights workers Michael Schwerner, James Chaney, and Andrew Goodman disappeared at approximately 10:00 p.m., Sunday, June 21, 1964. The next day their burned-out station wagon was found in the Bogue Chitto swamp, and the bodies of the three civil rights workers were found forty-four days later, buried fifteen feet in an earthen dam. Three years after their murders, twenty-one Klansmen were arrested by the FBI, and on February 27, 1967, a federal grand jury for the Southern District of Mississippi indicted nineteen members of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan (White Knights) under Title 18, section 241, for conspiracy "on or about January 1, 1964, and continuing to, on or about December 4, 1964, to injure, oppress, threaten, and intimidate Michael Henry Schwerner, James Earl Chaney, and Andrew Goodman." A two-week federal trial in Meridian, Mississippi, resulted in seven guilty verdicts and sentences ranging from three to ten years.

The State of Mississippi has never filed criminal murder charges against any of the men involved in the murders. After careful review of the available evidence, including the 2,900 pages of the transcript from the 1967 federal trial, a list of exhibits found in the appendix to the decision of the Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, and two signed confessions, it is evident that an organization known as the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission was complicit in the murders of the three civil rights workers.

Read Ben's whole speech here:

http://www.abanet.org/irr/hr/spring00humanrights/chaney.html

And the beat of this injustice still goes on--in a state-official way in Texas with the coming lynching of this young black man.

His Name Is Kenny Foster

Kenneth Foster's time is running out.

On Tuesday, August 7, in a six-to-three decision, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals denied his final writ of habeas corpus, giving the legal green light for his execution. Foster, who is scheduled to die by lethal injection on August 30, is now at the mercy of the merciless Board of Pardons and Paroles. The odds are bad. Five out of seven board members must recommend clemency before Governor Rick Perry will consider it -- and in a state that has executed nearly 400 people in thirty years, clemency has only been granted twice. But Foster's supporters, who are spearheading a letter-writing campaign to the board and governor, are relying on one particularly salient detail to move their minds, if not their hearts: Foster didn't kill anyone.

KENNETH FOSTER JR ON TEXAS' DEATH ROW... JUST BECAUSE THEY LIKE KILLIN' PEOPLE THERE

Hey, he looks guilty to us--and so does that child; shouldn't Angelina Jolie adopt her?
OK, read Kenny's story:

http://downwithtyranny.blogspot.com/2006/10/kenneth-foster-jr-on-texas-death-row.html

Will they televise it? The Yahoos are bloodlustingly asking. Yep, sorry, Kenny, but you see justice is weird. Jesus forgives you but you see he ain't real and the Governor of Texas is real, a real piece of shit; he ain't forgiven a damn soul since he was accused of footsying around on his wife with a man--oh no! Rick is a good Christian so I'm sure he'll, under advisement from Jesus, "Fry the N word, bastard." "Governor Perry, we don't fry them anymore; we stick needles full of poison now--it's call lethal injection and it's slow, sir, so don't worry about Kenny not feeling the wrath of our almighty God, Allah, or Jehovah, or Zeus--he'll feel it alright--as our 'president' used to love watchin' 'em twist and whine for mercy before the executioner juiced 'em--that's what we say now instead of 'fry'--we say juice 'em--or 'OD his ass,' we like that one, too, though it's a little academic for the ordinary public."

Like we say, "Sorry, Kenny, but it's Amurica and your white peers have spoken--and that's like God, yeah that God you black folks seem to believe in, too, has spoken, Kenny, so, you're goose is cooked."

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

Wandering Among the Blogs

Adventures in Writing
I was reading a life of Paul Bowles, by some three-name woman writer--don't get me wrong, it's a great book--she leaves the writing to mostly quoted stuff she claims came directly from old Paul himself--and it does sound like old Paul--come one, he's made films, folks, where he says the same things he says to this three-name woman writer, though I've never heard the whole jest of his life like it's panorama-ed in this book. But Bowles mentions that the best of his writing or composing, whichever, was done unconsciously--and that he was jealous of writers, like his wife, Jane, who could write maddeningly no matter where whether bar, cafe, Lesbian dancing club, or while riding on a crowded bus. He liked to be in isolation -- sort of present-unconscious-consciousness.

Paul and Jane Bowles--"The Good Life!"

This is evolving out of me yesterday checking the blog hits for The Daily Growler--it's doubled it hits since April of this year but the recent check revealed that in the past ten or so days it'd had only 4 hits. Jesus, I whined, that's depreciating--it was really a growl but I'm getting docile recently--I mean the temperature right now in Manhattan is 62 degrees, and, hey, it's August 20th and that's summer and usually this time of year right now in Manhattan the temperature is usually in the 90s and we're all cookin' unless we're rich and have central air (think of breathing that reused air all day long--but rich people live forever--no matter, poisoned air or being shot up with poisons--look at old guilt-ridden Brook Astor, bless her old worthless-other-than-she-inherited-the-Astor-fortune self, a fortune made off the early land development of downtown Manhattan, building the first developed addition in NYC, rows of Federal-style houses up and down Spring Street, Vandam, King Street, those areas, and some of those houses are still standing--the Ear Inn on Spring Street is one of those buildings still standing--except barely--almost ruined by developers building huge ugly Plexiglas and aluminum stud and thin concrete slab eyesores on both sides of it--these heavy structures built on landfill underwhich the tide still comes in--the Ear Inn had to constantly shore up its basement--the building doing the most damage to the Ear being the glassy, steely-Dan-ish, out-of-sync audacity of a hi-rise luxury apartment building built by the luckiest rich son to come along since Harry Helmsley's weirdo son died and lost his daddy's fortune to play with to mad and a little crooked Mamma Leona--but not the Dumbass...er, I mean, the Donald...oh shit...I quit right here. Donald Trump is a ruthless, pompous, ego-maniacal fool of a boy-man who has been propped up for years by NYC rich developers simply due to the reputation of old Donnie's daddy, the Trump who made the real estate fortune that Donald got to use as his high-school graduation present--and believe me, it wasn't easy for the Donald to get out of high school. (By the bye, whatever happened to Trump University? Jesus, that would be like graduating with a Master's Degree from the University of Phoenix or how about Florida International? And whatever happened to Trump Vodka?--though the Donald assured us he was antialcohol due to a problem in his family--yeah, Donald, you hypocritical asshole...GET THEE BEHIND ME!

(Hey, did you like my impersonation of Jesus Christ? I used to love writing my impersonations of Jesus Christ down. It always amused me as a kid as to why my adult parents were so obedient and asskissing to this figment of some ancient Jewish scribe's imagination, this probably little squat and smarmy Jewish man from Nazareth, but not really Nazareth but an adjacent slum of Nazareth, who had somehow down through the years grown in height and body structure, thinning down, his head changing, his facial structure changing--why Jesus over the holy years had become an Aryan! And maybe that's true; wasn't Jesus supposed to have a brother who went to India? or was that Japan? I know the martyred Apostle Thomas ended up in India and it was there he lost his life by being run through by a spear or maybe it was a sword. The Book of Saints--is that it--I'm too lazy to look it up--by Glenway Westcott--I used to love to read about how the old saints got martyred. I like it that the Apostle Mark, for instance, who was said to be a cripple (of mind and body, I assume), ended up in Alexandria where the heathens got hold of him and dragged him to his death behind a chariot racing through the streets and pulling old Faithful Mark to dog-size-gulp pieces). Anyway, that amused me as a kid. So much so, one of the first stories I have from that period developed into a novel called The Evolution of an AntiChrist--of course I've never submitted it for publication--in fact, it's living an isolated existence on a laptop I don't use anymore and am too cheap to go buy the right cable where I can download it onto the laptop I now use--either that or I copy it by sight off the old laptop screen--and god-damn that's a lot of work.)

Which leads me to remember a great post on "editors" posted at www.languagehat.com by
l hat a couple of posts back--check it out--he's an editor now and I once was an editor, too, and oh the fun of being a too knowledgeable and absolute rule-abiding editor as opposed to an editor who says, hell, is this the way you write? then therefore and from hereafter I'll simply stick to sending you queries and it is through queries that an editor shows his or her highest catbird seat position (or glory) in the editing world. I once lost an editing job because I over edited--too many "editorial changes"--they couldn't charge the author or the printer--arggggghhh, my editorial director said, "I hate to do this, Wolf Man, you are one of my best editors, but the publisher is pissed at all those charges he had to pay to make your, and I add right here 'very correct', changes--'Fire the bastard,' he said, so I have no choice but to give you your walking papers." And there went one of the easiest and most lucrative editing jobs I ever had in New York City--and referring back to the Ear Inn, it was at my special seat at the bar in the Ear Inn that was my office--I was there at opening time--6:30 a.m. until closing at 4:00 in the next a.m.--an it was there that I edited my manuscripts and cookbooks and poetry books and nonfiction books while I drank pints of Bass ale--ate my lunch at noon, worked through the afternoons at the bar, and when I finished my editing, I bundled it up and ran it home and put it to bed and then I returned to the Ear to eat dinner and then "cool out" (a Hemingway term) by drinking and mafficking the night away--WHAT a life, folks, but I did it--and as an editor--at the same time able to finish 7 novels--later destroyed by a jealous woman--and I was told as a young Louisiana writer that the one city in the world where if I couldn't make it as a writer (or a jazz pianist, too, in my case) I could always land a free-lance proofreading or editing gig and soon be back in the money again, working on my own time, being my own boss--"As a freelancer," they said, "you can just get up and walk out if you don't like the way you're being treated"--because of that last advice, I always presented myself before potential employers as a serious PROFESSIONAL person same as a doctor or lawyer. How's that for being naively pompous? Yet, it worked; I eventually became one of the highest paid editors in NYC--wanna bet? As a writer? Shit, I managed 35 god-damn crappy books for the Catholic Church--parish histories--good bucks, don't get me wrong, seven hundred and 50 bucks advance then another thousand when the book was finished--I figured the Good Lard Press, who I was a contracted writer for, was making ten times that kind of money off the parishes--these books were sold by the parish priests to the parishioners, who were used to it since churches that lasted say 25 years always published "jubilee" histories or 50-year churches had to have their "golden" histories--I even wrote one history for a church in Michigan that was 10 years old--I made big bucks on that one and got a trip to Michigan out of it--I also travelled to San Francisco, Boston, D.C. (the District of Corruption), and Seattle; then in 1977, the publisher had me write a book on the new Polish pope and that led to me being an official press corps member when that Polish pope came to the US in 1978--I got two books out of the pope and made close to seventy-five grand off them--one becoming a "bestseller" in the Catholic world, even though the pope refused to bless it on the tarmac in Boston because he said it was too kind to the Polish Communist government at that time--and then I had a huge fight with the publisher and his swishy sidekick and I fired his ass--he had commissioned me to write a coffee-table history of Greenwich Village in NYC--a project I probably should have stuck with, but then he started pressuring me to finish it and I told him one day to take the manuscript he had and roll it up real tight and stick it up his ass--big mistake--probably, but then I'd never gotten to blog like this if I'd a made a fortune off that damn Greenwich Village book!

Which brings me back to getting hits on these stupid hundreds of millions of blogs. Every now and then I'm tempted to follow Google's orders and check out their Top Blogs of the Day--and today I fell for it and went on a blog called "Adventures in Writing." I don't know what I expected. First of all, I was a little hit by it being a well-done (formatwise) blog--it was pretty--I mean The Daily Growler is template dark and black--we like it like that, don't get me wrong--but this one had color about it and it had great things to click on and then photos and then even some streaming audio and streaming video for all I know. Then I started reading it--to see just what adventures in writing meant to this blogger. There seemed to be chances to read wannabe writers's efforts--I supposed that--one book was entitled The Red Dagger Capers (sic)--or some such nonsense by a writer who said he was an archetypal Leo. A what? Henry Miller believed in astrology, even knowing that astrology as it is today is based on a totally wrong star system--an ancient one long since proven to be bassackwards, like the star system presented on the ceiling of the giant room at Grand Central Station in NYC--the painter painted it backwards--like painting from a photograph, a photograph giving you a backwards image--like looking in the mirror, right?

Then suddenly "Adventures in Writing" turned into a magic history or something--about how card throwing got started in magic acts. Whoaaaaa. Not my kind of adventure in writing. Continuing on down the blog, I soon decided to abandon the adventures--they weren't my cup of the latest trendy tea.

I much prefer my own adventures than those of others. Yes, I'm conceited, but I am an animal that runs with packs--packs of other adventurers, most of whom offer me better adventures in writing than this dude's blog.

Boo that blog. BOO.

Using the Bowles Method

Concognizant...
if popped...
if plunked...
if spiffed...
if spiked against its will on
a Kaiser-Fraser hood ornament...
or was it a Ford?
or was it a Hickey with a feather in his avuncular cap?
How would I know?

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

"Play It Again, Sam"

Turned My Back on War
I'm sorry, I'm too evolved a human animal to care anymore if the Yahoos want to destroy this EVIL (spelled backwards is LIVE) planet.

I passed a mosque last night returning from some pub crawling down in the Alphabet City area of the Lower East Side of once-fantastic Manhattan Island, now becoming a playground for the filthy rich and common ordinary dumbass Yahoo tourists, and the top floor of the mosque was bordered with glaring signs all lit up with holy electricity, saying, "Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, Jesus X. Christ, and the Honorable Mr. Mohammed were all prophets of Allah, the one God, the Only God" "Allah is the God of All. Mohammed was simply a prophet of Allah." "Allah through Mohammed and Jesus offers Peace and Justice to the World." I thought, damn, these religious Yahoos love cheap signs, don't they. I'm so damn disrespectful. F all religions, I declare, even Atheism, the religion that left poor old Madelyn Murray O'Hare murdered out in the middle of a Mexican desert.

God, religions are the stupidest stuff human animals insist on believing in, putting their faith in, putting their money into--AMAZING--no proof whatsoever scientifically or logically that it all isn't cultural bullshit--an explanation of our instinctual fears given anthropomorphic identities. Only a troop of cowardly idiots could believe such bullshit; yet billions of people as I'm typing this heresy are on their knees babbling endlessly seeking assurances and security from a huge collection of figments of our scardest imaginations, imaginations that can't deal with the Godhood of the planet itself--this planet is our Mother and Father. We are but creatures out the sea. When we die, we turn back to dust and then we're sucked back into the slime of the sea from which we came. If any life survives it will survive in the sea, though just tonight I heard on Sixty Minutes all the underice tidbits the chinstrap penguins need to survive are nowhere to be found anymore because there is no longer any sheets of seaice for these tidbits (creel I think their called) of delight and salvation for these chinstraps to live---as a result the Antarctic chinstrap penguin population is depleted by 60% in the past decade.

Christians are rejoicing! We're destroying this EVIL world. Muslims are joining Christians in condemning earthly life--the idea is to wipe out the opposition so that only YOUR KIND remains in supernatural power (a nonexistent power). Hitler had the same idea--he called it the FINAL SOLUTION. DEATH is always the final solution, folks. YOU and I are going to DIE. You never know; another friend of mine this week discovered she has cancer.

So, go ahead, Yahoos, destroy the planet. I don't have that many more years to go--I think I'm gonna make it through life having a had damn good time--I avoided all the wars--even when I was in the army, I didn't have to work too hard, I married some truly wonderful women, made some even better love, published poetry, published books, was a lead singer with a cult band, have recorded several records, make my own homegrown CDs by the bales, and have some of the fewest but best damn friends in the world--I've glided through life in spite of the Yahoos--and they were around trying to destroy the earth when I was born and they're still active in more multitudinous proportions today--but, hell, I'm not scared of them--BRING 'EM ON!

My brother was dying and I asked him point-blank, "What's it like, bro?" and he said, "Hell, it's nothing, just something to fight like from the time you're born, just another thing to fight. Yeah, it's gonna nail my ass one day, but in the meantime, I'm still living." My brother the day before he died sent a month's worth of newspaper columns into his paper--and continued working at his computer right up to the moment he just about died with life-energy determination to continue. Completion was done; OK, let's die now.

Progress
What's it like in New Orleans? 'Bout the same as it was the day after Katrina.
Isn't that a crying shame?

What's it like in Baghdad? Worst than ever.
Ain't that a crying shame?

How about people who work at two jobs but are still poor?
Ain't that a crying shame?

I'm writing a blues here.

What's it like in the new Democracy of Afghanistan? Worst than ever. Less democracy; regression back to tribal controls of territory. Death on the increase. NATO (read: USA) wreckless with their airstrikes; killing men, women, but especially schoolchildren.
Isn't that a crying shame?

The miners died two weeks ago in that Utah mine collapse. Nothing will be done in terms of mine safety there and in other coal mines--that hasn't changed since before World War I, the war to end all wars don't you know. The mine owner will go on unabated using illegal mining methods and illegal immigrants to work in his atrociously dangerous mine--where he uses column chopping--and that's what happened, the miners were chopping down columns and sure enough, one side of the mine caved in on them as they chopped one column too many. They're dead; now three others have died trying to save them. This too shall pass in time.
Ain't that a cryin' shame?

Bush goes on getting to be "president."
Ain't that a cryin' shame?

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

"Drum Speak"

The Speaker Is Silenced
Today, The Daily Growler remembers MAX ROACH, one of the great conquerors of the original voice of music, the drums.

Listen to Max today. We are--that damn Phil Schaap is playing 153 straight hours of everything Max ever recorded up on the Columbia University radio station, WKCR--are they online?

Viva Max! He's still alive here at The Daily Growler where the saints never die--and we hope they never fade away either.

Selah, Max.

thestaff
for The Daily Growler

Dumb and Dumb and Even Dumber

How Stupid Are Human Beings?
Jesus, I've been focusing in on human beings talking these days--conversation--who was it, Stan Mack?, who used to make cartoons out of ordinary conversation he overheard around New York City--and, folks, let me tell you, and these include some conversations I tried listening to on teevee, the conversations these days are not even close to being worthy of more than a passing glance--they're not even as interesting as Gertrude Stein's big poodle Basket lapping up his water from his bowl in a rhythm far more fascinating than any conversation I focused on today.

now with his infamous "police study" that shows NYC is UP for an Al-The stock market may be crashing, but the conversation reports it as, "Whooooo, whoever they are they are selling off on Wall Street and it isn't bothering Wall Street veterans one dire bit even though the market dropped 200 points yesterday to fall for the first time in a year or more below 13,000--oh hah, hah, hah, and now on to the next freaky thing we have to learn to FEAR." [How about New York City's shanty Irish, crooked as a snake-at-night police commissioner, Ray "Customs Crook" Kelly, trying to scare the hell out of New York CitiansQueda attack!!! Yep, according to Ray and our littleman billionaire mayor in his little wimpy voice we New Yorkers are guilty of something, of what we don't know, maybe harboring Muslim-looking people, or giving the equal rights to bearded men wearing their native dress some with turbans on--they could be Sikhs--but then, yes, they could be Pakis, too--there are a lot of Pakis in my neighborhood--should I turn them all in as potential shoe bombers? Jose Padillo was convicted today--nope, not of what he was originally charged with--nope, those charges didn't even come up in this trial--I mean, STOP THE PRESSES, what our government (actually it was ordered personally by our phony president) did to this poor slob--so he went to Afghanistan to join the Mujaheddin (we created this group) and learn about what they were up to--he had become a Muslim down in South Florida--hey, that was Jeb's state during all of this wasn't it? I guess Jeb's investigative forces were too busy kicking black people off the voting rolls in helping his brother steal the election than he was about all the jihad bullshit going on in the Miami mosques--but still, baloney! bullshit! the way this poor slob was treated--think of this, Padillo spent 3 1/2-- THREE AND A HALF YEARS in solitary confinement; with no bedding--you heard me, in a 5 x 9 Navy brig pen down in Yahoo South Carolina, where else, like a jail cell, with a steel plate anchored to the wall as the bed--and Jose wasn't given any bedding--nor was he allowed pencil and paper, books, magazines, a teevee, a radio, NOTHING--he wasn't allowed anything--just a pair of skivvies--yep, folks, 3 1/2 years in a barren cell with nothing but his underwear to wear--think of this--THREE AND A HALF YEARS in isolated confinement--he was the only prisoner in the whole brig.

Now think of this: the windows of his cell were blacked out. The only light he saw was artificial light. He wasn't allowed a timepiece. He wasn't allowed a calendar. He wasn't allowed to telephone anyone. He wasn't allow to even write his mother. He wasn't even allowed to see an attorney. He wasn't allowed any visitors. Think about it: THREE AND A HALF YEARS (that's 1,277.5 days) in solitary confinement, a steel plate for a bed, a concrete-floor cell, a toilet, a washbasin, and a wire-caged lightbulb in the middle of the ceiling--he was confined to this cell in this condition for THREE AND A HALF YEARS--think about that.

Think about it-- could you endure such torture? I heard a psychiatrist talking about it and she said there was nowhere on record of any other human being ever being put in solitary confinement for this long a period of time. Plus, this guy was systematically tortured while confined--at first he was imprisoned by Bush with no chance at a trial--permanent imprisonment--and they call it external torture--day and night--like an interrogator would come and brutalize him with rhetorical questions for hours at a time and then say as a reward for his cooperation they were giving him a pillow--and they would bring a pillow into the room and put it on the steel plate that was his bed--then they would question him somemore except at the end of this questioning they would say, oops you failed this time, so we're gonna have to take back the pillow. Think of that. Then systematically every night the guards would start opening and closing the cell doors of the stockade (they are electronically controlled), their banging and clanging opening and shutting going on for hours every night in order to disrupt his sleep. Remember now he was sleeping on bare steel or on concrete wearing nothing but his skivvies. Think about it--for Three and a Half Years this dude endured this--as the psychiatrist said, guilty or not, he didn't deserve such cruel and inhumane punishment--and he wasn't even proven guilty--innocent until proven guilty--nope, folks, the NeoCons have thrown that out of our Bill of Rights (nobody knows anything about the Bill of Rights)--and perfectly legal according to George Bush who named this guy an "enemy combatant"; therefore, he's treated as a Prisoner of War (a POW)--and POW! this dude is an American citizen, folks, just like you and me, a bright guy, he taught himself Arabic, and he speaks Spanish and English, and he was linked with two other dudes, one a computer expert and the other an engineer and college professor, and these guys are said to be Jose's connections to Al-Queda and his relationship with Osama Bin Laden (Who?)--this is the same justice system we all face--hey, I saw a white man on the Montel Show today and this poor bastard got accused of being a terrorist agent due to a misindentification--he looked exactly like a person on one of Bush's kidnap-the-bastard-and-torture-him lists--and they through this guy--and like I said, he was white and white looking, too-- in the hoosegow in spite of his bellowing out that he wasn't who they thought he was--and he was in jail and lost his business and then they came and just let him go--no apology or anything--and he said, he came back to his life and found out it was ruined--because even though he had been freed by the government, he found out he still had a active criminal record--American justice, folks. When your court system becomes crooked as hell and has no ethics, then the whole country itself is subject to DOOM.

What the police here in NYC are up to is they're organizing, forming SWAT-like units, putting cameras all over, hundreds and hundreds of very expensive cameras, making laws against people filming with video cameras or shooting too long in one place with a hand-held camera--yeah, the NYPD hate protesters--they are PRO-BUSH!! So's Mayor Doodlysquat--even though he's declared himself to be "America's Mayor" now and he's planning on trying to buy the presidency with his own billions--he's got more billions in his pants pocket than Hillbilly Hillary and Back-stabbing Obama have combined in their Cayman Island Offshore Accounts (same as Mormon-nutjob Mitt Romney is a multi-multimillionaire worth more than all the Dumbocrats combined)--but New Yorkers will soon be trapped in a police state--at least on Manhattan Island--the mayor and his cronies care little or nothing about the other boroughs--they're packed with white trash, illegal immigrants from all over the world, the last of the old New York immigrant population, the huge West Indian and East Indian populations in Queens and Brooklyn--Nuyoricans in the Bronx, Blacks in Bed-Stuy--while on Manhattan Island, the rich white (mostly foreign: Saudis, Dubaians, Chinese Commies, the Brits, Israelis) developers are taking over Harlem--and believe you me, Charlie Rangel don't give a shit--he's too busy partying and getting rich-man fat--Look out, Charlie, that ole blood pressure will cut you down to size--"Don't let the pressure drop" hit you, Charlie--new breed young lost breeds are filing into old Jewish Williamsburg and old Polish Green Point now--the mayor has given all the East River riverfront away to developers--he's building a wall of hi-rise luxury apartment complexes and plush hotels all up and down the East River sealing off Manhattan Island from the rest of the boroughs. You see, Mayor I'm Richer Than Any of You Bloomingidiot wants Manhattan exclusively for the RICH and TOURISTS--look at his "congestion pricing" toll-shit (oppression) he's going to put on poor folks coming to NYC to do their daily business except now when they get to West or East 86th Streets--the beginning of the really almost pure white sections of Manhattan, where the rich live in splendor--yes, they will be able to get their limos into their apartment parking garages, thank God; limos are like taxis, see!-- and this a F the poor, F people tax--forcing people if they want to live within the rich confines of the NEW Bloomberg-Manhattan Island you must make over 50 grand a year--hell, let's make that 100 grand a year and the cheapest rent you'll be allowed is $2,000-a-month-a-room or 1.6 million if you want to buy your apartment--and that's for a tiny wormhole-loke resurfaced dump-- the mayor wants his rich developer buddies to own Manhattan--EXCEPT--I already see one new hi-rise hotel behind me has stopped construction--and I mean the building is almost up--and they've stopped and now it sits a tacky piece of unfinished tacky crap on the horizon out my window--when the real estate bust hits Manhattan, there's gonna be some jumpers--and they may be wantin' to take the little mayor along with them--EXCEPT in a time of crisis, the little mayor will leave town, don't worry.

So Jose Padillo, the dirty bomb expert--he's just a goofy dumb kid really--is now awaiting sentence--he says he's lucky--at least he'll be put in a regular jail he hopes when they give him life.

Think of that, this dude is going to get LIFE in prison--while Osama Bin Laden--hell, he's living well in our buddy country Pakistan--on his tiger shooting reserve--you know, the Dubai Royal Family knows where Bin Laden is--so do the Saudis--so does Prince Bandar Bush--oh that's right, he's Osama's brother isn't he--son of a bitch--it all leads back to Rome, as that guy wrote yesterday about the cockroaches and the new cold war, the WAR the nutjob Christians are hoping will be their precious Armageddon, where the blood will flow up to the bellies of the horses--you see, God ain't all that up-t0-date on our methods of transportation--he still thinks we ride horses--he's sending his only son down on a big white horse--coming out of the clouds, which the nutjob Christians believe aren't vaporous but are actually the gates to heaven. Oh how we love blood flowing and KILLING and MURDER and TORTURE and RAPE and blowing people's heads off--KABLEWWWWY--and those folks go free as birds, like our murderous-minded phony president--Hell, folks, he's telling us all he's out to get US, too!]

And the bottom is falling out of the stock market because the props holding up the real estate market have finally been chopped out from under it and that market's plummeting is the reason the stock market is plummeting right this minute--I say, don't worry, the Bushites will bail the market out before it crashes all the way down--the military industrial stocks should hold on, they're fixing to declare record-breaking profits--but the problem is CREDIT (is that old Ez Pound I hear laughing like a hyena from his imagistic grave?)-- everybody's overdrawn including these big global conglomerate corporations, though the independent moneybags boys, like cute little Billy and cute little Melinda Gates or good ole kindly Warren "Junk Bond" Buffett (of course it helps to have a crooked millionaire daddy to give you a jump-start fortune to work with) are doing just find--they still have money to burn. These globally profits-gouging big shot corporations, remember, are buying each other out and merging like mad, like the Exxon-Mobil merger, and these mergers costs billions and billions of dollars of loan debts and interest debts and debts to shareholders that have to be paid off--instead, they are falling into more debt because they can't show profits in any of these smaller corps they've bought out of the market--like Daimler paid billions for Chrysler (it failed once before--remember Lee Iakoka the Mustang wonderboy who drove Chrysler into such debt We the Good Old American People bailed them out of total destruction?) and now the Nazi--oops, old habits, sorry, the German boys are looking to dump Chrysler because it ain't making any profits, which is what everything is all about up and down the boards, whether big or small, making profits--profits over quality--you dig? and this all comes from Quantitative Physics originally, then with the advent of computers, Quantitative Math, which led to Quantitative Modeling and Simulating leading to Quantitative Management and finally a Quantitative Economics theory of markets and modes and the advance of Quantitative Production and product glut to fly all this QUANTITY like a dude shot out of a canon over any QUALITY hoops it used to have to jump through before meeting certain QUALITY standards, which have now nearly all disappeared under our last 50 years of being ruled by the Hollywood Conservatives.

Yes, friends, it all started with the John Birch Society out in LaLa Land after the Korean Police Action of rat's ass Hairy Ass Truman ("This ain't no war, " said Harry, "it's only a police action") and yes we ID'd ourselves as "The World's Policemen" after WWII.

Yes, Sunny California, the state that has given us in modern times S.I. Hayakawa, Ronald "Raygun" Reagan (I attended a party in Santa Clara, California, back in 1967, I was there at the invitation of Santa Clara University who wanted me as a Sociology instructor, and this party was a departmental party and everybody was cool as hell, great unbra-ed and uncosmetized natural beauty young teacher babes and pipe-smoking, beret-wearing overintellectual teacher dudes and I remember a discussion developed about whether Ronnie "Raygun" Reagan (second banana to a chimpanzee in his best movie) would be elected Governor of California in the next year's election. All these Alan-Watts-R.D.-Laing-following pundits said, "Oh no, don't worry, Southern California, yeah, they'll go for him, they're celebrity nuts down there, but Northern California, oh no, we're too sophisticated out here, and besides, there are a lot of New Yorkers in this area" and I, in my snide asshole way, said, "I don't know, most of my insane relatives ended up in California, even up here in the Redwood forests--renegade whiteys, Dust Bowlers, honkies, rednecks, crackers, clodhoppers, charcoal burners, and I guarantee you they all love Ronnie Raygun--hell, he's a real American to them, like John Wayne, that pansy, and on and on blah blah blah," I bellowed. One of the head sociologists bet me 20 bucks Raygun hadn't a chance in hell to be Governor of California--I told him, "I'm holding you to this, pal, when you nutjobs elect that nutjob and turn us all into Hollywood zombies"--bastards, I've had a meanstreak for California ever since, though I still love the state's natural beauty and the weather--but it does attract tons of pure-dee nuts, schemers, flim-flammers, phonies, pickpockets, degenerates, and American Idol contestants), and California also gave us George Murphy (the tapdancing Senator who was an avid racist and rightwinger), and now they've given us Governor Arnold "Hey, I Took Steroids, Too, But I'm Not Black, So F-You" Swartzennegger (whose father was a Nazi policeman, "Achtung, Judenschwein"), and unless we forget, the Sunny Californians gave us Richard Milhouse Nixon (the blood-thirsty Quaker, who proved himself a top-flight lyin' crooked son of a weasel bitch as a politician, calling Helen Geohagen Douglas, a decent sort of liberal representative, a "communist" and a "whore" in order to get the Orange County-type-Walt-Disney-type Yahoo rightwingers to toss his sorry old ass into office; this phony Quaker who would later as president kill millions upon millions of SE Asians following the advice of pompous, aristocratic, Harvard-trained, sons of rich families and an old sleazy thrown-out-of-Europe traitorous Jew, Henry Kissingasser (God, how white folks kind'a admired the Nazis in WWII--though I was a little kid I recall much more vehement hostility against the heathen Yellow-Peril Japs than against the Christian White Nazis and the Catholic Italian Fascists)--and all these little rich goons who had nothing to do with their worthless asses so their families put them in the diplomatic corps or got them privy Washington Beltway jobs or put them in their family foundations and such--anyway, this bunch of rich-boy aristocrats controlled our governmental movements and progresses--but these inbred assholes don't know their asses from their faces so we've ended up with these Hollywood Conservatives--yes, even like Georgie Porgie Bush the pretender, our phony, no-good, double-lyin', sommbitch "president"--and off I go again, growlin' on the fact that George W. Bush is a true coward, lyin' bastard, and he gets his penis power from knowing he's responsible now for 5,000 dead Americans in Iraq--1,000s more in Afghanistan, but, and this is most important of all, they say now he's responsible for a million civilian deaths in Iraq since he illegally invaded that "not-doing-us-any-harm" sovereign nation--"I'm gainin' on ya, Tricky Dick"--remember, Boy George was personally responsible for sending a record 157 mostly black people including one Mexican-American woman to their deaths while he was a terribly unsuccessful governor in Texas--the woman appealed to him for clemency on the grounds he claimed he was a great Christian man and since being in prison she'd become a great Christian, too, and God had told her Governor Georgie Porgie "the Man Who God Talks To" Bush would pardon her--BUT, you see, Governor Rich-Boy Bush's contact with Mexican-American women in his life had been limited to the servant girls that worked in his various Connecticut, Maine, and Texas homes (illegal Mexican immigrant girls, I'm sure (unless they were some of Pappy's Mexican girlfriends from his wildcattin' days in Tampico and Vera Cruz and the failure of his Zapata Offshore Drilling Co.) or the prostitutes Boy George visited on his boys's town visits to Via Acuna, Coahuila, Mexico, or Nueva Laredo (now a totally Mafia-controlled town--the capital of the Mexican Drug Cartel--and the Border Patrol says they know nothing about that) and Papacaya's out on the highway to Monterrey, then later with his sister in law (Mrs. Jeb Stuart Bush) or with Henry Gonzales, Prince Bandar Bush, Katty Karl Rove (who's packed his Land Rover and moved back to spend more time with his family--what do you think, a lie? but it's a timely move, I'd say), Kenny Boy Lay, and that Saudi-Arabian he went into the oil business with and failed and who later ended up having his brains blown out--I like Bush can't remember his name--and instead of pardoning this woman, Bush joked on the way to witness her execution about how he was sending her on to her Christian rewards by killing her ass. What a man! and God-damn I'm exhausted from all that running around Robin's Barn.

What a dumb history. I mean these guys are the dumbest hoof-and-mouthers I've ever seen, and I've been going pretty deep back into history lately.

We are killers and always have been--the white man started colonizing this country by massacring as many Native Americans as he righteously could--even luring them into "Thanksgiving Dinners" and then massacring them after they'd eaten and talked peace. Yep, we founded this country on massacring people, then we imposed our white principles on the people we left alive with harsh laws whose punishments included most times a little fun torture and then outright murdering in the name of justice and righteousness--usually condoned by any and all of the religious outfits involved in the running and ruining of this country. Our Civil War was bloody as holy hell--read Crane's The Red Badge of Courage--and that son of bitch was simply a reporter--he never was in combat--but he saw what a bloody horrifying mess a war was of any kind, but this one especially since it was Americans killing their own kind--and wow, it was bloody and there was a lot of both-sides patriotic bullshit--God's for Enslaving Human Beings! The enemy is evil and must be destroyed.

And then WWI came along and boy did the white man wreak havoc with his own kind in that war--I mean the whiteys blew each other to shreds, they mustard gassed each other, they set booby traps--read Fussell's The Great War--it makes a civilized ("evolution of culture") man's stomach turn--but it thrills the common ordinary human TO DEATH. As I've bleated out over these airwaves for over a year now, our white rich boy leaders are standing proud like white males against the dark-skinned heathen enemies rising up against us from all around the world--the only solution to this heathen hoards attacking us is the very White Jesus Christ bringing his army of snow white angels down out of the clouds, Jesus riding a WHITE horse, and I assume wearing a white robe and a tall white dunce cap--Yahoo, Jesus rides again. That's the white man's hope for this terrorist and illegal immigration (aren't they the same thing?) hoard that is coming against him--the world to the white man is turning brown--the color of shit.

Holy shit, I'm bushed. I've never felt like growling so deeply and hardily before--but that full moon that sails over me constantly, night and day, keeps my growling so I can "kill" (go for the throat) and bring home to my she-wolf that fresh baby elk meat she so loves--'cause I wanna howl at that moon--howlin' for my darlin'---ooooooh---ooh--ooooooo-we--howlin' preparing to make love.

The Old Beat Goes On
I got good news today from theryefarmerfromqueens, my old guitar-collecting, bass playing friend of 30 years. He's invited me to come hear his old band--reunited--and they're playing here in Manhattan Saturday night--and it's about time I treated myself to a Saturday Night Fish Fry ("Oh no, not with my daughter")--you know an out-on-the-town affair, doing the ivey-divey down in Alphabet City. He's working with another "hero" of mine, majorcontaythecanebreakrattler who's having a battle with his real heart these days but is still one of the great old-timey instrument collectors and old-timey blues performers around town--and they're gonna be joined by a dude I don't know though they assured me he was in their band originally on old guitars and a rack harmonica. We'll see.

thebushedgrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

Jose Padilla, the accused al-Qaida operative is escorted by federal marshals at his arrival in Miami in this Jan. 5, 2006 file photo. Jurors reached a verdict Thursday Aug. 16, 2007 in the trial of Jose Padilla and two co-defendants charged with supporting al-Qaida and other violent Islamic extremist groups overseas. (Alan Diaz - AP)

Wow, don't you feel safer tonight. Look at that mug. A terrorist if I ever saw one.

By the way, I think I've jinxed the damn Yankees--they lost their third in row tonight after winning 9 out of ten games in a phenomenal surge from being 14 1/2 behind Boston getting as close as 4 behind them then suddenly unexpectedly folding--their pitching staff that had been pitching fairly well just suddenly started going to pieces in Baltimore--Roger Clemens giving up 8 runs in one inning; Wang their best pitcher giving up 8 runs in 5 innings; then Pettite fell apart night before last and then Mariano Rivera, the greatest ever saver, blew two saves in a row; then last night Wunderkind Phil Hughes proved he's still just a good Double A ball pitcher by giving up 6 runs in 4 innings; and tonight the Moose (Mr. Even Steven) self-destroyed, giving up a grand slam homerun to Carlos Guillen in the first inning and Detroit was off like a house afire, tapping the old Moose for hit after hit and then stealing bases on Posada and then hitting and running successfully every time they tried it--it was off the dial--9 to 3 when I bailed on 'em--that's baseball folks; an unpredictable game. It's very hard for a team to win it all and end up World's Champeens! Even now with the Yankees losing, they're still hanging in there, only 5 behind the BoSox who are losing themselves, folding as usual, and are still pert-near tied with Seattle, who's been losing, too, in the Wild Card (I'm told I'm supposed to capitalize Wild Card).

anadditionaltidbitdisclosinggrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler (continued as is continued to be continuing in which it continues to continue--to be continued!)