The Muddled Growlings of thegrowlingwolf

Full Moon Voices
This god-damn Liz Hardwick has first pushed my ass in among the weird love-starved Bronte Sisters; so OK, I fell for Charlotte, though I had a mad urge to go for Emily--but I had no problem literarily writing my way out of the Bronte-sisters mad-for-men circle to hide for a while in the insane too-sane world of Paul Bowles, another crossdressing-type of writer who seems to just automatically accept two ways of doing anything, including making love--just like I've gotten myself literarily stuck in my being philosophically intrigued by Debbie Harry's "Parallel Lines" poem and her concluding that her relations with men, women, whatever were like parallel lines and Newton saying these parallel lines could NEVER meet only virtually meet--get close enough to kiss and fuck--has thrown me into a tizzy.

Then I dared to venture back into Liz's fine little book, Seduction & Betrayal, so "woman" a title, too, isn't it? I'll tell you'se guys one thing, Liz has awakened me to the parallel universes of men and women--dig? Like how on a different line women are compared to historically dominant-thinking men--men the powerful; men the machos; men the royal bones--the stronger the bone the more mad-swimming semen it produces, the longer the divine line--men the possessors of women--and this male ownership of women is still the accepted law in most cultures, including the culture of the US of A--males are still the possessors of women. And with this crazy unreal real subject matter being mixmastered into my brain's sauces, I tackled Liz Hardwick again--I decided since I couldn't seduce the Bronte gals--and I really almost got Charlotte, I tell you all, I'd use my powerful Gary-Cooper (I know, 'Who?')-Sweet-Talkin'-Texas-Macho-Maverick-Unbranded-"Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn"-best on her, but, hell, her womanly cry for wanting to be impregnated--to eventually see her own male side in a son or her own female demise in a daughter left me spinning then getting up and running like mad down the middle of a going-nowhere road (the only way for a man to treat a Bronte gal)--and then comes the daughter, and I turned to the next essay in Liz's little book and son of a bitch, NO NOT THIS, Liz, dammit, there she was, the bitch-woman I was gonna have to deal with, holy shit, Sylvia Plath--grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr--all I suddenly was growling was, "OH SHIT, another 'Love Me, Daddy' daughter, forsaken by her daddy, her sweet original and sugar daddy, Her Real MAN"--oh no, I wimped, and limped, and floated like a bad-poem's blimp trying to avoid another bout with trying to fuck Sylvia Plath--even, like Liz later said, knowing that intellectual women are bad in bed--I mean, shit, like all of the Olympian gods had to do to get a piece of ass--same with intellectual women as with mythological goddesses--I mean isn't it all about men and women getting together, coming together, mixing, blending, compromising?---WHOA! That last one, compromising, got my head slammed into the oven by mad Sylvia and her strict demand for males to be refocused from their desires to fuck her to a desire to really get to know her and respect her and end up fucking worshipping her and listening to her needs and there you are "safe" in Sylvia's slender arms--is Sylvia Plath a damn Jewish princess or what? Liz said due to Sylvia's daddy being a German born in Poland and her mother being Austrian left her stranded in the air between Europe, the Old World, and Winthrop, Massachusetts. Holy moly--

And speaking of the Holy Modal Rounders--and I'm taking an aside as a breather here--I mean, I'm so full of thoughts my brain is trying to strangle me--am I sounding Plathian yet?--anyway, a good old musician friend of mine is now working with Peter Stamfil (I could never really remember how to spell his name) and his new band--Jesus, whew, let me do a few jumping jacks here--I wish I were as simple as Jack LaLanne--I used to wish as a kid I wasn't so antsy-pantsy in my curiosities--like I thought it would be nice to get a job say with the highway department, working like a fucking dog all day in the heat or cold, then coming home dog-tired, plopping down in front of the teevee and watching I Love Lucy (in junior high we called it I Love Loosely), and then hollering toward the kitchen, "Honey, I'm home," and then my babe comin' out of the kitchen with a cold can of Bud--"Baby, yore dinnah's gonna be ready 'fore Little Ricky sucks his first titty...." "Baby, you're the greatest." What a life--not a worry in the world--you come home tired as hell, you get that cold beer, you watch a little teevee, then you eat--chicken-fried steaks with white gravy and a pile o'grits, a little tin log cabin of maple syrup, all washed down with three fruitjars of ice tea, then you goes and takes a shower, then you shits, then you shaves, then you changes your underwear, you brush your teeth, then jump into the bedroom, play around with the old lady's tits a while then start snoring away by eleven o'clock, passin' out, leavin' the old lady watchin' David Letterman--a little agitated, she's playing with her own tits now, hoping that her old man will wake up early enough in the morning to bang her 'fore he flies into the kitchen to start makin' his breakfast and she has to get up and get the kids ready.... That's the life without complicated thinking I thought about before I hit life head-on. But I learned quite early that I didn't fit that persona. First of all, I had no interest whatsoever in hard work. When during college I one summer actually did work on a highway construction crew in the flat middle of the West Texas sun's anvil in 100-degree-plus weather and no thank you--fuck that kind of work--and also I couldn't stand I Love Lucy--right-wing bitch--and then I read Plato who said some of us, especially poets and philosophers, shouldn't work at all but rather sit under trees all day and think. I went with Plato. Knowledge comes from trees in all our holy books--ever notice that? Shouldn't that instinctually tell us that trees are somehow important in the "knowledge" we've gained since we've become advanced monkeys--the divinest form of the simian branch of the animal tree and its many many branches and roots--don't forget the ROOTS.

OK, OK, I plunged right into Liz's essay on Sylvia Plath.

First of all, I can see falling for Sylvia's smile when she was at Smith--"I hope you're not a virgin, sweetheart." "Would you strangle me to death if I told you I was a virgin while you were fucking me?" "Wow, are you a poet?" What a deceiving smile. Hell, Sylvia was a cute little minky, and of course she was smart as a whip--never made below an A--I mean, come on, born a perfectionist--champion horseback rider! Of course: "Sylvia, er-ah, can I ask you a question? Are you Jewish?" "Why, if I tell you I'm Jewish are you going to push my fucking head in an oven and then cry 'Die, Jew, Die!' and then like an Aztec priest will you dagger out my still-beating Jew heart and eat it raw before the godly Sun?" "Holy shit, Sylvia, let's fuck."

And right off the bat I see Liz is in love with Sylvia same as I am--I must have this bitch--and Liz says as much as she wants to womanly hate Sylvia she has to say she can't hate her, can only love her through her almost perfect way of expressing herself poetically--Liz says The Bell Jar fails as a novel though it is a good novel.

I mean, it was easy to tear through Liz's evaluation of Zelda Fitzgerald and her battle with Scott Fitzgerald being the better writer yet Zelda may be being the better story maker--I mean, even Scott admitted they wrote things together and he stole many of his novel ideas from reading her diaries and her notes criticizing his writing. That was easy to get through because Scott and Ernie and Ez (check out how closely related Sylvia is to H.D.), Thomas Wolfe (he had a mad Jewish woman madly in love with him) and those dudes had been my nonconforming generation's inspiration, so I sided with Scott in his struggle with Zelda--Scott wrote, "I left my capacity for hoping on the little roads that led to Zelda's sanitariums"--and that's how I treated Zelda in my imagination--yes, I found her sexually hot, but also I knew her as one of the girl teaser types who had preyed on me as a young male, teasing me viciously with their girly charms, like lifting their skirts and letting me see their panties--I learned, screw the breasts, go right for the pleasure--so early in life I learned to beware of a woman's initial offerings--her temptations--why, hell, woman is the only parallel line we males can actually come together with--when we insert our penises into the woman's welcoming vagina, though not really one in a growing-together sense, we are at least momentarily docked together, tradin' juices, participating in the creation of life--or even if it's not welcoming in the case of male superiority--though in the animal world, if a male is rejected by a female--this is especially true in the world of wolves--the male doesn't rape her but concedes to her commands and withdraws--I mean even if he gets to the point of rarin' up and mounting her, you know, gettin' the hold and gettin' it ready to strike (his "burning spear")--if she turns around and snarls at his ass, he's outta there. Whether this is true of monkeys or not I'm not Diane-Fossey aware of--no, I think not, since most monkeys are male dominated in terms of kings and divinity and shit--though even in the pre-Man monkey world, the male still seduces the female and begs her to let him have some--that's all life's about--or am I getting Freudian again?--which is why I love Freud, he legendized all these mixed psyches we advanced monkeys have produced--Sir James Fraser mythologized them; Carl Jung put them into human culture as being the legendizing of our instincts, what we numbskull humans call our "consciences."

Oliver the Monkey Man

For the latest in monkey news, try: http://monkeydaynews.blogspot.com/

So, as I dug into Liz Hardwick's talented autopsy of Sylvia Plath's remains, I was determined Sylvia wasn't going to make a monkey out of this wolf man. I had already been with Sylvia, via A. Alvarez's charming The Savage God but I read that while I was still Sylvia's age, and I was a bright-eyed poet in those days who didn't understand women at all, except to be wary of their promises and taunts and teases and the many "May I kiss yous" and "May I touch your breasts?"

I remember clearly the first time a girl opened her legs to my prowling hand, going up her little girl leg, up under her skirt, up her thigh, scared shitless, nervous, sweating hot, heatin' up more, and boldly then touching her panties--I'm boiling by now! But I remember how totally cool this girl was--she actually urged me to pull the panties back off her prize--wow, and how wonderfully curiously strange that felt the first time I inserted a finger in her preteeny vagina--I was 11 and she was 10.

How childish I feel around women like Sylvia Plath.

Once I worked in a county juvenile home during the early part of my having-to-work state of being. Going through the initiation class, this caseworker who was a karate expert taught us neophytes how to defend ourselves if we were attacked by one of the little juvey criminals we were given as temporary wards. Then our Dr. Phil-type psychologist started jawing with us about suicidal threats--how we'd be facing threats of suicide all the time--mostly from the GIRLS brought in--the girls were always threatening suicide--then our Dr. Phil gave us his solution to this girl-threatening-suicide problem. "These girls aren't serious about killing themselves. Remember that. They're looking for attention, for love actually, why most of them are here anyway--because they are incorrigible or runaways or lost girls--girls without love. I don't recommend it, but we once had a director, a behavioral psychologist, who would go to the girl threatening suicide and take a razor blade with him and then he'd say to the girl, 'OK, you want to commit suicide, I understand, so I thought I'd let you do it--I brought this double-edged razor blade along with me--I'll leave it with you--but first, let me explain the best way to kill yourself with this razor blade--which is, I believe, what you wish. So here, let me show you how to cut the arteries in your wrists so they bleed the most'...." The doc then said, in all the cases handled by this behavioral dude, all the girls broke down and admitted they didn't really want to die as much as they wanted the attention they thought they deserved.

Aha, so suicide-attemptors are really looking for attention. And damn, Liz says definitely that's what Sylvia Plath's suicide attempts were about, attention, even the eventual suicide attempt that would work on sweet Sylvia Liz says was staged (timed out by Sylvia) in order that she'd be saved at the last minute. Alvarez explains this in his book, too. Sylvia didn't want to die, but she wanted to scare the fucking bejesus out of those she demanded love from and never got love only rejection--only her artistic self got acceptance--rejection even from her slimy limy husband, that asshole Ted Hughes, who hell yeah fell for Sylvia's intellectual-sexual seduction--and hell, yes, he banged her enough to give her children, daughter Frieda and son Nicholas--she was a mother--the mother of the desperate--leaving Ted finally--by then he was advertising to her how many times he was fucking around on her--and she and the kids moved to London to live in an unheated flat desperate, looking for work, trying to support herself, boring except for writing and her perfectionist housecleaning and motherly duties, and it was during one of the coldest winters ever in London history--a perfectly lovely Sylvia Plath winter--the winter of her pleadingest discontent--and Sylvia was writing down her pleadings in the form of the poems with Ariel and Winter Trees and what bitchy sweet calls for help those collections are.

But Sylvia was a fakir. Beneath her admitted love of death and the thrill of participating in her own death was a cold bitterness she blamed on her father--he died when she was 9--Liz Hardwick says was due to her 1) being born a woman, 2) being a genius, 3) being madly ambitious, and 4) being of a grave mental instability.

Complications--all planned out in this brilliant young woman's too-easily absorbing mind, absorbing everything it set out to perfectly do--and what a strain such a mind is; I know, I deal with that kind of mind and yes it is hard to keep that kind of mind from wandering off into the shadows (and Sylvia wrote herself into stale, moldy, corners of cellars--shadowy places--once hiding down in a cold, smelly basement, in a deep dark all shadow corner behind a pile of logs--hard to find in this her brutal hide-and-seek game--once in her shadowing evil cell, Sylvia downed a whole bottle of sleeping pills. But tricky mean Sylvia had timed this one out, too, and finally she was found and rushed to the hospital in time to save her life. Great show, Sylvia--what do you want this time? A little daddy love?)--and in the shadows minds like ours start imagining deeply into the many shadowy areas of LIFE--and soon this kind of mind is contemplating the final act we will all have to face--as Philip Wylie said, we gave up eternal life for sexual intercourse--I've tried to relate that to the Christian "Garden of Eden" tale--the Temptation of Eve and the eventual fall of Man after the pristine Eve was seduced and we assumed fucked by the Devil in the disguise of an upright walking snake (when God found out, he punished the stupid snake and not the Devil, Heavens prettiest Angel remember, cut the legs off the snake and made him slither like waxed shit along the ground)--and all this woman/man thing is so parallel and as such is so theoretically complicated--I mean, how does one write their way out of so full and active a mind except by killing oneself? Liz compares Sylvia to Hart Crane, Scott Fitzgerald, and Edgar A. Poe--as Liz states, these poets rather than Emily Dickinson, Marianne Moore, and Elizabeth Bishop--and Hart Crane committed suicide; and Scott and E.A. committed suicide by drinking themselves into the grave.

So now I've taken on Sylvia Plath--god-damn, I wanna read The Bell Jar again now, and The Colossus and Ariel--poems like:

There's a stake in your fat black heart
And the villagers never liked you
They are dancing and stamping on you
They always knew it was you
Daddy, Daddy, you bastard, I'm through

From her poem, "Daddy," a lovely little ditty in honor of her father, a biology teacher whose speciality was beekeeping.

Liz Hardwich, I made it through your thoughts on long-lost Sylvia Plath. So far so good. I'm still fascinated by women like Plath; same as Paul Bowles was fascinated by his self-destructive wife, Jane Bowles--and Jane Bowles is so much like Sylvia Plath--even to the Jewish daughter thing and the hatred of fathers and mothers--Paul Bowles hated both his parents--he grew up in Jamaica, Queens, New York--Jane, too, was from New York City--and Jane lived the same kind of life as Sylvia Plath except Jane did want to live though life for her was so damn black and disappointing in the end--Jane was paralyzed by a stroke and lived on for another dozen years in this state, a sleepless, dark, damp, and shadowy existence in a sanitarium in Spain--not only paralyzed, but blind, too, and unable to speak--though she still wrote--and kept on writing--and these are the kind of writers I associate with--writers who take risks--the same as Sylvia loved taking risks--by constantly committing suicide--though down deep, Sylvia wanted to be rescued--to get accepted--and don't all we who think we're writers--rejection is tough--being critically rejected is tough, too, but in a way, Sylvia's acceptance as a poet was her downfall--instead of taking her poems as pleadings for somebody to save her from her suicidal games the critics praised her poems as dark but beautifully and brilliantly created and produced--so beautifully written perhaps her fans didn't take Sylvia the human being seriously enough--though, Jesus, what a difficult bitch she must have been when she was in one of her playful moods.

Hold on, Liz and I are moving on again. Let me peek at the next essay--Virginia Woolf! Oh boy oh boy oh boy--I know already something about Virginia Woolf--again, like Zelda, Virginia's suicide is not going to bother me--though I once thought Virginia Woolf was my grandmother in a dream I had as a kid--I mean she looked like my grandmother who was a novelist and poet but who would have never ever contemplated suicide--in fact, in one of my grandmother's best poems she tells Death to forget coming for her in the spring, a time of birth and bloom and new life--she'd just refuse to die if Death came then--on the other hand, I can see Sylvia Plath as my grandmother--oh holy cow! I think I would commit suicide. "Oh, daddy, let's do it together!"

I had a good friend back in my younger days who one day with his wife committed suicide like Sylvia--he and his wife bound themselves together with ropes and tape and then they together put their heads in the oven--and my friend was strong, so if she'd wanted to back out at the last minute, she was bound to him, and that way bound to die with him, which she did.

I wrote a poem about my friend and his wife once but after rereading it all night one night I finally set it on fire and watched it disintegrate in an ashtray.

I quickly jot out a quickie poem to Sylvia Plath:

For Miss Plath

I live and
I do live;
I die and
I don't live;
or do I?

Ah, what
A sweet
Yet bitter
Question
That will
Never
Be answered.

The Cinderella Story According to Sylvia Plath

Cinderella
The prince leans to the girl in scarlet heels,
Her green eyes slant, hair flaring in a fan
Of silver as the rondo slows; now reels
Begin on tilted violins to span

The whole revolving tall glass palace hall
Where guests slide gliding into light like wine;
Rose candles flicker on the lilac wall
Reflecting in a million flagons' shine,

And glided couples all in whirling trance
Follow holiday revel begun long since,
Until near twelve the strange girl all at once
Guilt-stricken halts, pales, clings to the prince

As amid the hectic music and cocktail talk
She hears the caustic ticking of the clock.

Sylvia Plath


thegrowlingwolfnotvirginiawoolf
for The Daily Self-Destructive Growler

Elizabeth Hardwick d. 2007


Sylvia's final resting place--though we know she ain't resting--she's busy in hell fucking up the Devil. I like the way the Hughes is added to her name; that must really please her--that bastard got the last word, too, with that epitath--"Even amidst fierce flames the golden lotus can be planted." "Fuck the golden lotus and that fucking phoenix shit attitude," me impersonating Sylvia.

The Sistahs Bronte!

Romantic Elements & Didactic Realism
I got a thin paperback in the mail today. I'd never read Elizabeth Hardwick. I didn't think I'd ever heard of her and then L Hat reminded me she was one of the founders of The New York Review of Books. That doesn't mean she's all bad. Of course I crudely joke. Even if I had of remembered who Liz Hardwick was I would have forgotten totally about her until a former member of my family told me she was handling the sale of Liz's fabby CPW (that's "Central Park West" in New York City lingua acronym) apartment, where she'd spent many "questionable" years as the wife of old Bob Lowell, the Boston Brahman poet whose family kept jamming down around his already nutty mind--and he and Liz Hardwick, or so I hear, honey, had a very quarrelsome and "sexless" (did I say that?) life together--so anyway, besides the point, but anyway just the same, that's how I came to be curious enough about Elizabeth Hardwick (she lived to be 91 years old in spite of Robert Lowell) to the point that I decided I wanted to peruse some of her writing. So I ordered this thin paperback on the Internet, Seduction & Betrayal, and like I do with any book I get in the mail, I immediately started reading it to see if it would hold any attention whatsoever from me and soon I found I was intrigued more with Miss Hardwick's ("Please, Robert, she doesn't want to be known as Mrs. Lowell") first subject than I was with her writing--she has a loose journalistic style--flavored with enough intellectual posturing to give a nice crust to an otherwise normal good ole Amurican apple pie. Her first essay in this book subtitled Women and Literature being about the Bronte sisters, Anne, Emily, and Charlotte and right off the bat Liz had me crazy for a chance to ponder these strange girls up close! Imagine, three sisters brought up under the rule and eye of a sotted father, a failed writer, who had to survive on a parson's salary while having to raise several children, only 3 girls, the Bronte sisters, and 1 boy, surviving, the boy the worthless son, Branwell, who was notorious enough around Haworth, where they all lived, that Matthew Arnold included a few lines about him in his poem "Haworth Churchyard," a poem they say Arnold wrote in the year of Charlotte's death:

O boy, if here thou sleep'st, sleep well:
On thee too did the Muse
Bright in thy cradle smile;
But some dark shadow came
(I know not what) and interposed.

Old Man Bronte gave up and drank like a fish; however, he lived to the ripe old age of 81--outlived all his kids. The son killed himself with drink and opium, especially after being rebuked in love by another man's wife. The bad poet in him, and Liz Hardwick says he was a total artistic failure as a painter and a poet, is what killed him--an overromantic view of women and their true affections (or affectations). Charlotte Bronte had a very similar kind of romantic involvement in Belgium, where she went with Emily to study French (so they could become teachers back in Yorkshire) with M. Heger and his wife. Charlotte wrote tons of love letters to M. Heger though M. Heger never replied to any of them, tore them to shreds and threw them in the wastebasket, and then totally rejected the young hot Charlotte when she expressed her love for him face-to-face--Emily left Belgium after a year, but Charlotte went back and stayed another year at the Hegers as an English teacher.

Maria Bronte, the mother, died when the girls were in their juvenile years; Maria and Elizabeth, two other Bronte sisters, died of tuberculosis after being sent to the rather deadly campus--bad food, bad sanitation, bad living conditions, no heat in the rooms, and uncleanliness galore--of something called Clergy Daughters's School.

Life was rough around the Bronte's Haworth parsonage for the girls, having a drunken worthless father as their sole support and a drunken, dopehead brother that Emily became strangely protective of and attached to taking care of him until he died in a stupor one night--and Emily then herself gave up to death and died a few weeks after the brother.

The girls being of three different emotions had one thing in common: all three of them had an unceasing urge to write, first to write poems, then to write novels, and by golly all three girls wrote novels and got them published against all odds in those days. Anne wrote Agnes Grey; Charlotte wrote Jane Ayre; and the withdrawn and not so pretty Emily wrote what Elizabeth Hardwick calls one of the great novels of all time, Wuthering Heights, but which the critics of the day panned as a "disagreeable story" and as being too "dismal and gloomy."

I'm sad to say I've never read any of the Bronte gals's books--I've seen Wuthering Heights as a movie and do remember it as haunting, but now, thanks to Elizabeth Hardwick, I quickly have to know more about these English sisters--especially Charlotte who seems to have been the only one who had sex with a man (she got pregnant right before she died of tuberculosis at 39)--she married one of her father's curates.

The girls--Emily, Charlotte, & Anne (I'm guessing)

Paul Bowles Again
I just finished one of the best damn little novels I've ever read, Paul Bowles's short but sourly sweet tale of hidden shadows and ulterior motives and torture, Up Above the World. Ah how gay and free Dr. and Mrs. Slade are as they head off on a second honeymoon by taking a cruise to a fictional Mexicanish country--but soon fate will introduce them to a bothersome biddy of a ballsy bitch, Mrs. Rainmantle, and thus their totally awesome little story begins! And Paul Bowles? Well he's the master of the short story done his way. He reminds me terribly of Somerset Maugham who like Bowles writes books that are simply so well written and told you can't put them down until you finish them. Bowles is writing one of the splendid little mysteries of all time--I exaggerate perhaps, but that's what reading Bowles makes you do.

Paul Bowles in his beloved Tangier.

Enough bookishness.

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

It's Nina Simone's Revolution

NO, It Isn't John Lennon's Revolution--
John Lennon was a bright Brit, but to American musicians who were developing American music at the time (mid-1960s), he, and the other three fabs, too, was a traumatic diversion to our original stream of American improvised musical evolution. At the time of the Beatles, American musicians (I'm talking black & white here (there were one or two Brit jazz dudes who migrated over here during that time I could tolerate, like Victor Feldman, really cool pianist/vibraphonist)) were evolving out of blues into the early foundations of real gutsy rock 'n roll, that invented by American black musicians down south mainly, especially invented early on by Ike Turner down in Greenville, Mississippi, where Ike started taking "swing," "jump," "r and b," and using emphasis on the weak beats per his African heritage, emphasizing a rockin' and rollin' beat, yes, grounded on the shuffle, but, loosenin' up the feet and bringin' on the early black dances--those that evolved out of the much wilder (step- and movementwise) dances of the Swing Era--to explain true rock 'n roll in a descriptive way, think of it this way, if you men or if you women are screwing correctly, your motions are both rockin' and rollin' as you "jazz" your baby--and what a better solution to the man/woman situational conflicts than through some correct lovemaking?--dancing leads to lovemaking, so why not put the correct way to make love in the music itself?--and in the lyrics, too, but mostly in the rhythms, those E-Z rockin' rhythms that gave rise to The Glide, a modified Eagle Rock, or down south the Hulley Gulley, the Boogie Down, evolving on into the sexually ripe dances of the mid-to-late fifties, The Watusi, The Swim, The Push, the very erotic slow dancing--and on and on until James Brown put the beat on the one and changed rock 'n roll into a much more swinging-tight ensemble-banked experience, a bringing the Devil's and God's music into such an assstomping puredee mixture of the modern Euro-harmonies-melodies with the from-way-back African polyrhythms--James's horizontal melody lines backed by all those off-the-one riffs from the band, then the chordal progressions, taking everything higher, including the self--a music that when it was over you missed it--not that you were humming it and remembering it word for word necessarily but you were still FEELING it and feeling it still moving in you. Oh what a glorious thing could have come from this except suddenly American musicians had to pay attention to four rather droopy-drawer boyz from Liverpool--OK, they were poor--so what? They were boyz who loved American music--yes, the black aspect of it (the Beatles's first album covered all American blues hits--what a wreck they made of Texan Larry Williams's amazing "Slow Down" on that album), yes, but again, so what? And as far as I was concerned, at the time I was working my own jazz trio trying to do Mingus things and Monk copies though soon I was getting requests for Fab Four tunes--and dammit, though, like Ray Charles, I wasn't impressed with the Beatles's tunes, I suddenly had to learn some of them, which I did--"Yesterdays," "Eleanor Rigby," "Hey, Jude"--and I played them as instrumentals--I jazzed them up as best I could. My conclusion: what the Beatles did for rock 'n roll was turn it OLD-FASHIONED WHITE.

I despise the Beatles because the American recording companies and their lawyers went to England and found all these young Brits who were mad about American music, blues especially, and because of their mimicking aspects they signed 'em up and brought them over here where they could pay them chicken feed and then make millions off their records by promoting them as the "White-Christian" alternative to the Devil's seductive black rock 'n roll that different-hungry white kids were integratin' into by buying black artists's recordings (Chuck Berry, Little Richard (he discovered the Beatles remember), Jimmy Reed, Booker T. & the MGs, Otis Redding (oh how great a rock star was he!--he shook 'em up in London, too--the mighty "Shake" was recorded live in London))--and these horny-for-black-music and association-with-blacks white kids's parents and their teachers and their government and their churches declared black music and black musicians EVIL (add the "D" for DEVIL), declaring black music was the Devil's music--an immoral music that led to fornication, which then led to a drifting away from God and Jesus X. Christ. Black rock 'n roll stood for what to white parents and elders were the loose sexual attitudes blacks were "born and bred" with--jungle sex--why cracker whites called 'em jungle bunnies--and that rock and roll beat that Ike and Chuck and Little Richard had invented led to Devil dancing, voodoo dancing! And my God, look how that rock 'n roll made those girls's asses shake and those men's hips pushin' in and out! But, "Hey," the American white record producers said, "what if we offered these kids going heathen a clean-cut little bunch of cute Brit boyz, say with bangs haircuts, and cute little continental suits fittin' 'em snuggy--what if we gave white kids this alternative? Wouldn't white parents gladly say 'Hell yes, now you guys are talking and go ahead, yeah, and YES our kids are okayed to listen to and buy the records of these polite little white boys and the cute music they play--why that's almost white church music the way they play it!'" (the Brits stole all their culture from their wonderfully overripe-culturally rich colonies).
Ikey Renrut, inventor of rock 'n roll.

Brits got into the blues, too, and became kind of pompous with their blues playing since they believed they were better understanders of black music than were American white kids. They felt they could mimic (or mock) American black musicians and get away with it, which guys like John Mayal did--you know, alter their words so they seem to be speaking like they think a black man sounds (the Brit women were more taken by Joan Baez and that ilk and not by any black women blues or rock stars (think of the Beatles one day out selling the inimitable Aretha Franklin!), kind of easy for a little Brit boy to do since southern whites (poor whites) spoke a near-perfect Elizabethan English and that's the English the slaves heard, that's the English the slaves learned, speaking it with their different African dialects thus adding beautiful strange ways of speaking this English that really came alive in the early blues recordings--and those old white Elizabethan hillbillies sang those Brit laments and Irish ballads they remembered from their own past--they didn't have lutes but thanks to the African slaves they did have gourd guitars, gourd banjos, then they developed banjos and mandolins, and deer-gut upright basses, then came cat-gut-strung fiddles--and the string bands of Kentucky, West Virginia, the Carolinas, down the Piedmont to Georgia, and over into the Smokies and up into the Appalachians, and on the front porches of those hillbilly homes throughout those southern hills--and the blacks brought their African music forms and adjusted them to these hillbilly laments and Irish ballads and then the shitkicking dance music--gulley jumpin'--the squares all dancing--doing their rounds, their jigs, their step dances, their fiddlin' jams--all improvised--and this music already here was easily absorbed and extended in terms of rhythms and harmonies by the blacks (they were integrating in spite of old massuh's prohibitions and punishments against it--"mixing" it would later be called). African music had no harmonies like Euro music had--what harmony there was in African music was horizontal--found in the melodic line of the singers (the women of the tribes usually) that sat horizontally on top of the polyphonal and polyrhythmic layers of the drums and clappers and bell ringers, all built around the conducting of the master drummer, a very remarkable musician--Madame Zzaj's lover was The Drum in Duke Ellington's history of jazz suite. Remember, slaves couldn't practice their religions, which involved drums and so old massuh banned drums and drumming--also the slaves were either Christians or they were whipped on a regular basis until they either became Christians or were beaten to death, though slaves were valuable property to the old massuhs so they wouldn't usually beat a strong slave to death--maybe an old one they really were losing money on anyway (old people can't work as hard and as long as young people)--they were not allowed to speak their original languages--so they learned English the way I said above--you can easily still tell whether a black person is from the north or is from the deep south even today--I can distinguish differences in the speech of black people I know from Philadelphia and those I know from Chicago or California or even New York City. You can also tell what part of the south blacks are from by the way they speak. Like the Texas blacks I grew up with--segregated until I went to an integrated college--they had their own way of speaking English and their own way of making white musics swing and begin turning white music strongly black--though in terms of music I was already integrated having heard and so admired from inside out to grab it and bring it back inside my conciousness since I was 5 years old and got hold of my older brother's 78 rpm record collection a collection that was full of swing records (both black and white bands), and a part of his collection was devoted to Count Basie, and those early Count Basie Decca recordings, one which really grabbed my little ass was just Count and his All-American Rhythm Section (Walter Page ("Pagin' the Devil"), Freddie Greene (who Billie Holiday said was the best man in bed she'd ever had but he was impossible to live with he was so pretty), and Papa Jo Jones (who was zoot as hell back in those days)), and this album was all blues, from Leroy Carr's "How Long, How Long Blues" to Count's famous "Boogie Woogie," the best record of which ever made was when John Hammond took Count, the rhythm section, Tattie Smith, Prez, and Little Jimmy Rushing from Kansas City up to Chicago in 1936--"Boogie Woogie" so striking--along with a brilliant "Lady Be Good," a vehicle Count called "Shoe Shine Boy" (it was later politically corrected to "Shoe Shine Swing"), and "Boogie Woogie"--and Lester Young is simply at his sterling best on these recordings--made in as Smith-Jones Inc. on Columbia's (as in "Gem of the Ocean" and as in CBS, too) Vocalion label.

Here they are, the All-American Rhythm Section with the Count at the piano--this is the photo that was on the inside cover of the Decca recording of just Count playin' the blues I was mentioning above. From left to right is Freddie Greene, Jo Jones (wearing truly zoot clothes), Walter Page (who would get sick and die during the filming of the 1957 CBS Sound of Jazz television special), and the Count at the piano. I always dug Count's shirt he's wearing in this photo.

All of this to say, no, Nina Simone's "Revolution" is not John Lennon's in spite of them being similar, yes, and maybe it was Nina's song first, afterall, several of the Beatles were accused of song stealing--George Harrison having to pay a black group millions for stealing almost word-for-word and note-for-note their song "My Sweet Love." Besides, John's "Revolution," I'm sorry to say, wouldn't inspire me to revolt against much of anything except the Beatles being credited with ultimate peace and good White meanings and shit like that.

Listen to John's "Revolution" and then listen to Nina's--which one has you up and marching and dancing while you march quicker? If it's John's, then cool. If it's Nina's, then RIGHT ON!

There should be Revolution in the air here in New York City after yesterday's white judge's miscarriage of fair justice in the case of the NYPD (2 black cops/1 white cop) shooting and killing a young black man 50 times--16 bullets in the friend in the front seat with him--6 bullets in the guy in the back seat--one bullet going across the street into a motel room--but no, I don't feel any revolution in the air today. There's just not that many WHITE people in NYC who give a shit if the NYPD blows away an occasional innocent black man (is there such a thing?)--the cops's attorney in this case saying Sean Bell and his friends were a bunch of thugs and drunks and they were out looking for trouble! Yep, that's the way it is here in NYC today. Sure am glad I'm a white wolf--oh shit, but the white hunters are slaughtering the white wolves of Yellowstone as I type this...but, that's the story, folks.

I'm still listening to Nina's "Revolution"--it's revolving around the room now.

Praise the Lard and pass the ammunition and we'll all be free.

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

Some Extraneous Notes From Out of The Daily Growler Garbage

--verse from a song being sung on Christian teevee, "Butterfly kisses after bedtime prayer...." Yee-O-da-Lady-Hoo! Doesn't that sound sort of pedophilic?

--in certain parts of Pakistan, a woman can be stoned to death for being seen talking to a white man.

--"I live a quiet contemplative life"--Walter Brennan's Doctor character in Bad Day at Black Rock.

--from an ad on teevee for a penis enlargement placebo: "It extends that special area of the male's body"--could it be his nose for lying?

--14,000 barrels of oil a day are pumped from under the Medina area of Los Angeles.

--Jesse Ventura was on the Tim McCarver Show on CBS this morning. Very interesting character this Jesse Ventura--ex-rassler--ex-wrestling fraud--ex-Vietnam vet, both his parents were WWII vets, and yet he now says his dad said the Vietnam War was a sham and he went over there and found out his dad was right and though right-wing Republican as hell, Jesse is against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan--plus he's against corporate welfare--mentioning how the people of Minnesota are willing to pay higher taxes so the Minnesota Twins can have a new ball park; yet are unwilling to pay higher taxes to keep schools open around the state. Ah, the ironies. How we love the ironies of life. Strike while the ironies are hot, we say.

Nina Simone

"Revolution"
thegrowlingwolf has been nonstop playing this YouTube vid of Nina Simone singing her 1969 tune "Revolution," which she wrote with Weldon Irvine --

The Wolf Man says it was the band bed that woke him up to this--he heard it on one of those "progressive" radio programs he listens to, then went Googling for it, and found it on YouTube. We here at The Daily Growler hereby pass it on to you (four or five) who are our faithful visitors--it is a pretty kicky tune and a fine message, too:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqfWM6npGG0

thetotallyhungoverstaff (staff party last night at the Dub House)
for The Daily Growler

Nina Simone

Fascism Comes to New York City

Sean Bell GUILTY!
A judge has said the 3 cops who blew away Sean Bell and put one of his buddies in a wheel chair for the rest of his life are NOT GUILTY of any wrongdoing whatsoever. Sean Bell was the Black man who with his two buddies attended a bachelor party at a BLACK dance joint called the Kahlua Club, DJs, girls, stripper girls, lap-dance girls, where 1000s of men go every week to get their hard-life rocks off, in the case of Bell just a night out with the boyz before his wedding the next day. The judge heard 30 witnesses to the basic facts in this case. The cops's story was that an undercover cop inside the club, who they admitted had had several slugs of likker, called out to them, they were doing an undercover sting on this club that according to their undercover informants and the undercovers working inside the club--drunk, high, or not--was a den of thieves, drug dealers, and guys with guns. This drunk or not dude signalled the outsider cops that they overheard one of Bell's groups say he had a gun and that they were fixing to get into something and then they were leaving the club, blah, blah, blah--police excuses. To the cops here in NYC, no matter if the cops are black, white, Latino, the three cops actually charged in this killing were black, white, and Latino, all black men are criminals whether they prove beyond a doubt or not they are innocent. It's been that way since I moved to NYC in the early seventies, the days of the Black Liberation Army, the Black Panthers, and the Young Lords--they were still actively involved daily with the Feds and the NYPD--one of the Young Lords's brothers was murdered by the cops right in front of him--Felipe Luciano or one of those dudes--not Geraldo Rivera, though he was a Young Lord. Every year since I've lived in this town the cops have shot an innocent black man or an innocent black kid or child time after time; they've choked a Latino dude to death for letting a football hit a police car; they've plugged an African kid with 60 slugs when he was reaching for his wallet to show them some ID--the police said he fit the description of a drug dealer they'd been following--wrong N-worder--and they don't say they're sorry or nothin'--"Just doing our duty." Same thing the Nazi police said in WWII Nurenburg Trials--"We were following orders"--and that's what "doing our duty" means to urban cops, especially cops here in NYC since Rudi "Mussolini" Guiliana has been mayor and undercover mayor Billionaire Bozo has followed in Mussolini's footsteps. Pompous ass little billionaire asshole mayor, a little-man prick who is intent on driving the poor and especially blacks and Latinos off the island of Manhattan--but, yes, out of certain areas of Queens, too--Brooklyn, too--he's changing the face of downtown Brooklyn, filling it up with rich whites and majority white corporate offices and leaving the Brooklyn ethnic populations to lay in squalor in a concentric circle out from the new downtown Brooklyn one of the mayor's best pals, the owner of the New Jersey Nets, is developing with the help of our rezoning-like-mad mayor and the absurd city council (housing several developers and superlandlords) who's using the city's power of eminent domain to classify huge blocks of the current downtown Brooklyn blighted areas so this developer can bulldoze that whole area down and then rebuild his dream city there surrounding his billion-dollar sports arena and complex he's using as the new center city Brooklyn--mostly hotels and hi-rise-luxury apartments will take the place of the many small businesses and affordable living spaces that once were abundant over there--these new hi -places for all the illegal immigrants workers piling into the boroughs to work, cleaning out the shithouses and keeping the rich comfy and protected--best jobs in Manhattan now being limo driver and hi-rise luxury doormen--also the Polish peasant maid service big shot Russians or the Haitian peasant maid service--all hirers of illegal immigrants--the Irish pubs all across NYC will still have their illegal immigrant Irish kids working as waitresses and bartenders, though now even in the Irish pubs the tendency is to go with Mexican men waiters and cooks now.

This fucking judge has now ruled that a New York City cop or gaggle of cops can blow your ass away, man, woman, child, mostly still black and Latinos who have to worry, except these bastards will shoot to kill a hippie white type or what they consider a "terrerist" with total impunity--the FACT is: you cannot bring charges against a NYC policeman if he kills all your family or just 1 of your family, same as you can't bring charges against a Blackwater operative who blows away the innocent in Iraq.

Now I have to say yes watch out mostly black families and then Latino families--I'll bet the cops haven't killed a white guy in years--I can't think of one--I can however think of many other black men they've put an end to, like the poor bastard the cops shot after trying to bust him as a drug dealer--he's the one that Mussolini Guiliani said after releasing this dude's juvenile record that he wasn't a choir boy and then it was learned the dude had been a choir boy at one time. I remember the BLACK man the NYPD put a broom handle up his ass. Nothing happened to those cops. Then there was the little black boy holding the candy wrapper the cops blew away--they thought the candy wrapper was a gun. Aren't the NYPD always shooting kids with toy guns, too. Remember the crazy black man with the hammer the cops shot dead. Remember the poor frightened overweight black woman the cop blew her door down and blew her head off with a shotgun because he said she was threatening him with a butcher knife?

Our shanty Irish police commissioner is the former head of US Customs who quit rather than face an indictment claiming he misused Customs funds for his own gain--nothing really unusual in the higher ups of our crooked government. He knows crime; I mean, come on, there's an Irish mafia still working in this town; there's a Russian mafia; and there's the same old Mafia, the Sicilian brand they used to call the Cosa Nostra--hell, the Mafia has run aspects of New York City for years--and I've heard they used to maybe run certain aspects of the NYPD. Hush, now, remember, the cops are always found innocent of wrongdoing when they shoot your ass. They rescue a dog from a sewer and they're called heroes. One of them gets shot and killed--oh my god, you'd think a fucking saint had been killed in the line of duty! The kill or be killed attitude is alive and well in our New York City Police Department.

Me, I'm tunin' in, turnin' on, and droppin' out, baby. I'm puttin' my earphones on and listenin' to Frank Motley and the Crew doin' "Bow-Wow-Wow"--that's TNT Tribble singin' it--and then comes Frank playin' his dual trumpets.

And you know we love trumpet players, especially women trumpet players (and there have been some good ones).
Here's Kiku Collins, a Jersey girl; Beyonce's trumpet player.
Ingrid Jensen, former Diva trumpet player; now in NYC playin' jazz.
Jane Sager--early famous woman trumpeter--with Ria Rito's All Girl Band--also replaced Buddy Hackett in Katherine Dunham's accompanying orchestra--Charlie Barnett's band, too.
Clora Bryant" border="0" height="230" width="150"> Clora Bryant. Dizzy Gillespie was her mentor--called the "sexiest trumpeter in the land"--when she played "Cherokee" the men stood up and listened.

I must admit I have a strong attraction to women musicians--most male musicians do, I think, though we seldom have much success when we marry them.

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

New York City Scenes

The Camera's Eye/The Poet's Eye

Manhattan

Sunlight bounces off the windows
of oncoming cars. I want to scream
driving to work, with a scratch of lipstick,
clutching my cold cash heart.
Behind me the total sum of existence;
a half-fed baby, yesterday’s dishes,
a nanny glued to daytime soaps.
This heat wave. Time is unrelenting;
time is broken by the folding of prams
in shopping malls, where I dream
of flying to Barbados. I’ve learnt
to add, subtract and multiply ingredients
they never taught in home economics.
Later, a slip of Prozac, and the chaos of dusk.
I face Manhattan with that sinking feeling,
another fall approaching.
My flabby rear cushioned,
my navel winking.

Michelle Cahill

I am alone here in New York, no longer a we.
Elizabeth Hardwick

Jazzonia
Oh, silver tree!
Oh, shining rivers of the soul!

In a Harlem cabaret
Six long-headed jazzers play.
A dancing girl whose eyes are bold
Lifts high a dress of silken gold.

Oh, singing tree!
Oh, shining rivers of the soul!

Were Eve's eyes
In the first garden
Just a bit too bold?
Was Cleopatra gorgeous
In a gown of gold?

Oh, shining tree!
Oh, silver rivers of the soul!

In a whirling cabaret
Six long-headed jazzers play.

Langston Hughes

Prez
That ain't tip-toe-ing
Naw
Jawin' before
Your gig guts have to be attuned
Oiled, if you will,
Gin, bourbon, scotch,
an Up and Down--
Prez?
Ding Dong?
Hangin'
in a past long gone
in a world long gone
in your ears, yeah,
but still long gone,
the echoing of that long gone
in your ears
Aligning with your memories
Bringin' up the testimonies,
and you hear them--
"Lady Be Good"--
and you start to
Swing
You swing
Can you swing?
Lady, you can swing,
and, girl, you can swing,
and, girl, you can
Put your swing
in my backyard
Any day,
Lady Day,
and that stream's
Still running
Under everything:
Remembering
Crescendo
Rhythm-ings
Blues upon blues
Upon waves
and pomps
and processes
and brushing off the suits
and splashin' on the floo-floo
and the sun's gone for
Another night and day
and the sun's
Gone for another knight
and the sun's always gonna go
Anyway, so
Ding Dong?

Little Selmer Blower

1
MANHATTAN’S streets I saunter’d, pondering,
On time, space, reality—on such as these, and abreast with them, prudence.

2
After all, the last explanation remains to be made about prudence;
Little and large alike drop quietly aside from the prudence that suits immortality.

The Soul is of itself;
All verges to it—all has reference to what ensues;
All that a person does, says, thinks, is of consequence;
Not a move can a man or woman make, that affects him or her in a day, month,
any part of the direct life-time, or the hour of death, but the same affects
him or her onward afterward through the
 indirect life-time.

3
The indirect is just as much as the direct,
The spirit receives from the body just as much as it gives to the body, if not more.

Not one word or deed—not venereal sore, discoloration, privacy of the onanist,
putridity of gluttons or rum-drinkers, peculation, cunning, betrayal, murder,
seduction, prostitution, but has
 results beyond death, as really as before death.

WALT WHITMAN

All photographs on this post, with the exception of the vintage photo of Prez standing up on a Harlem sidewalk, were by thegrowlingwolf

The Daily Growler

Guns and God

You Talk About Bitter Folks
I was just reading in Yahoo news that there'd been 36 shootings and 9 homicides in Chicago over this past weekend. Hey, Obama's from Chicago. You think these are maybe some of those "bitter" folks he was referring to in his famous insult remark to Hillbilly Hillary's constituents? I'm beginning to think of Hillary now as the white Oprah--hey, I like that--"The White Oprah," our next president, Hillary RodHAM Clinton (it's funny to hear him called "Bill" and her referred to as "Mrs. Clinton")--yahoo, and let's get back to things as usual. I'm almost wimping out and saying any Dumbocrat will be better than John "Nutjob" McCain, though I really frankly couldn't give a damn. I've lived through the presidencies of so many of these birds--the first one being Harry S. Truman: --it didn't phase Hairy Ass...er-ah, I'm so disrespectful, Harry S. one damn bit--like GENERAL Sherman said, "War is Hell"--and Harry didn't bat an eye when he bombed (literally cooked them to death--radiated them ("Take that you anti-Christ demons")) the people of Nagasaki and Hiroshima--and you know why? Though most people don't think of Harry as one, he in fact was a military man, his greatest success in life before kissing the Pendergast Machine's ass in Kansas City when he first decided to run for office and the Pendergast Gang gave Harry a mostly black district to run in and though Harry was a solid racist, Harry relented and went among the blacks and got their votes and that's how Harry finally got elected to Washington, District of Corruption. During WWI, the war to end all wars (remember what I say about advertising--and propaganda is advertising--as one of Freud's relatives, Mr. Bernays, would tell you were he still alive) Harry Truman rose to the rank of Captain in the Mizzou Horse Brigade and actually saw a little combat I think--so Harry didn't apologize for dropping those genocidal bombs--Harry, true to his military indoctrination, said it saved 2 million of the USA's THIS MAN's Army, Navy, and Air Force troops: therefore, it was worth taking out 300,000 innocent civilian Japanese devils to save those 2 million US military angels of mercy. Remember, Christianity, and our military is very Christian, very prejudicial toward Jews and you can damn well believe toward Muslims, is a desert religion--it believes salvation comes from the sky, yes, but along with that, the desert religions believe destruction and annihilation come from the sky, too--chastisement from God comes from the sky--why some white fundie Christians truly believe Katrina's wiping out old New Orleans was punishment from God (God loves using floods to make his point) because of that wonderful old city being predominantly a black-American city and growing more and more black year after year-- but also for many years, New Orleans, full of Old-World Catholic whites, was very tolerant of a large gay (very gay) community--plus, New Orleans was the birthplace of many sins, including Storyville and its beautiful whores, and also the sin of being the birthplace of the Devil's Own music, a music coming through the Devil's black children. White, of course, stands for Purity in the Christian religion--all the Arab shieks and potentates wear white, too, if you notice--and Black to true Christians represents "SIN"--and the blackest of sins is not believing that Joshua the Essene of Nazareth is the honest-to-God DNA-proven only child of the Big Christian Daddy who lives in the bright white and shining place called Heaven--where everybody's walking around in white robes--even Creflo and Taffy Dollar (I couldn't'a made those names up...come on, here come the clowns!) will be wearing white gowns--Jesus X himself will be sporting Armani-sanctified white robes--hey, remember now, Jesus X is coming back through a big hole of awesomeness that will open up one bad-day for sinners in those boiling heavens in that salvation sky riding on a BIG white horse! So God destroyed New Orleans--or let's say, he "cleansed" New Orleans, you know, made it WHITE again--not spotless white yet, but, hey, Donald Trump's down there doing his best to get the rest of the spots out of New Orleans's new white fabric. Hey, isn't that easy to believe? Come on, millions of white Americans believe that down deep; why can't you believe it?

Hairy S. Truman also took his military forces over to Greece and tried to start a war over there--Harry felt Greece was going Commie, so he had to put a stop to it--and when he couldn't get a war going there, Harry discovered Korea--"Hot damn," said Cap'n Harry Horse Brigade Truman, "fuck Congress, let's call this one 'a po-leese action'--Hell, that ain't war; I'm the top cop, so I say, let my little police action begin on those god-damn going-commie slopes over there--those piefaces, isn't that how our boys describe those Korean women? Japs made 'em whores, you know, back before WWII." So Harry was a warmongering ex-war-participant and ex-Captain of the Horse Brigade president who dropped the first-ever nuclear bombs on 300,000 human beings--microwaving them to doom; he tried to start a little police action in Greece; and then Harry successfully got us into the Korean War, though it was a never-declared war. Harry Truman thought regimental thoughts and lived a very regimented life.

The next president I lived under was 4-star General of the US Army (first ever), Dwight David Eisenhower, the ex-general of all ex-generals since at that time he was considered a great military leader therefore our fellow Amuricans deduced he must be a just plain ole great leader military or not, because of his Allied leadership that may or may not have been the winning strategy in WWII (the righteous war). Ike was a docile man who didn't know how to laugh at all, though he did grin one of those little weak sneer-sort-of smiles when he was playing golf, which was nearly every day of his presidency. Presidents in those days very seldom traveled outside the US--JFK is the first president I can think of who started traveling around with his jet-set wife in their own big nice jet plane, Air Force One--we had developed a huge fascination for airplanes in those years, jet airliners--in fact, by the sixties it had finally set in that the USA was king of the hill, we'd saved Europe from Hitler and we'd saved Asia from communism, and so we started travelin', flyin', especially to Europe and the Caribbean and to Mexico and Hawaii--why even to Australia on cute little Quantas "Koala Bear" Airlines. But Ike traveled mostly by Lincoln limo or train--the first president to not use a Packard limo--I don't even know if Ike had a presidential plane by then. Ike took the presidential train to Denver a lot. Rumor was Ike had built himself a bunker inside a mountain in the Denver area. He was out at Cherry Hills Country Club (no N-worders or Jews allowed) just south of Denver most every day when he was in Denver. Then when he had his big famous heart attack, he was operated on in Denver and recouped there. Remember, Ike so loved golf, he built an actual pitch and putt hole on the White House back lawn. Ike was purdee military. He was West Point to the core (or should I say "corps" (looks like "corporation" doesn't it? Hmmmm, I wonder why?)). Did Ike start a war. Well, one might say by sending advisors (or is it advisers, copyeditors!_into Nam...oh, hell yeah, Ike had a lot to do with the VietNam War, another dirty little war lying got us into.

Our next president was JFK, an ex-Navy PT boat commander, and JFK, of course, was tough-talking during the Cuban Missile Crisis, which could have ignited a nuclear war between us and the Soviet Union, the big Atheistic Commie Devil country in those days. And, of course, too, it was silly Jack Kennedy who allowed the stupid Bay of Pigs fiasco to take place--while he was banging the Chicago Mafia boss's girlfriend--he had no choice since the Mafia was backing the US Cuban refugees who made up the pathetic bunch that landed ashore at the Bay of Pigs and were at once contained and run off. Had JFK lived, hell yes the VietNam War would have gone on...and it did go on big time after our next president, Lyndon "Big Balls" Johnson put together a big lie he called "The Gulf of Tonkin Incident"--yes, there was no Gulf of Tonkin incident, it was all made up by Army PR and the CIA, who really is a military unit that was evolved out of old General Wild Bill Davidson's OSS, our spy unit during WWII, the righteous war. Lyndon Johnson, of course, was a draft dodger in WWII.

The next president I lived through was Tricky Dick Nixon, and a tricky 2nd-story operator he was, too. A Pacifist by birth (a Quaker believe it or not), Little Tricky Dick soon found out being a Quaker made you a sissy so he did a 360 in terms of pacifism and became one of our great "bomb 'em back to the Stone Age" presidents. Nixon loved bombing Hanoi...hell, he loved bombing Laos...hell, he loved bombing Cambodia...and occasionally he bombed Thailand accidentally--nobody cared--Nixon gave us Henry Kissingassinger, a truly "evil" man with an "evil" accent, a lyin' son of a bitch; "I am not a crook." And then the Tricky One had one of his tricks backfire on him and thus the Watergate Hearings happened and old Tricky was almost impeached--his old buddy Gerald "Chewing Gum and Falling Down" Ford, another never-elected president like G.W. Bush, pardoned his old crooked ass at the last minute, and there went Tricky Dick Nixon. During his presidency, his keeping our troops in VietNam and bombing the bejesus out of the VietNamese and then his handling with Kissingassinger of the Paris Peace Talks, arguing over where people sat at the bargaining table while 1000s upon 1000s of VietNamese were being Agent-Oranged to death, blown away by constant bombings--and it all could have been avoided had a president had enough guts to just say, "Naw, we ain't going into VietNam; instead, we'll let them win and then take control of them with economic aid and reconstruction aid...but no, no president has ever had that kind of guts.

After Tricky Dick? Well, that was Old South peanut farmer, Jim-meh Cah-ter. People don't think of Jimmy as military, but he was. Naval Academy grad--supposedly a nuclear expert--am I right in my memory--but anyway, yes, Jimmy was a military man--a Naval Academy man, same as old John "Nutjob" McCain. Jimmy tried his military expertise by sneak attacking Iran to rescue the hostages the evil old Devil-looking Ruhollah Khomeini had taken as he stood up waving the Islam jihad flag after returning to Iran from a good life in Paris and saying Muslims had to revert back to backwards and obsolete Islamic laws and ways of doing things, which meant men were the only important humans on earth and women were just a notch above sheep in terms of importance. Jimmy's military venture failed miserably. His attack units were left a pile of rubble on the outskirts of Tehran.

Then came Commander 'n Chief Ronnie Raygun Reagan. But Ronnie was so Alzheimered up he thought we were still fighting WWII and he was playing his greatest role--though in actuality he got his Bedtime For Bonzo thrilling performance mixed up with his famous War movie role--actually I think Bonzo got the Academy Award not Reagan in that great classic American film--Bedtime For Bonzo, I mean. Reagan craved war, but hell, the Soviet Union was economically collapsing--had nothing to do with Raygun stuttering, "Mister Gor-bah-chef, tear down that wall." (He was heard asking Nancy after he'd made that statement, "What wall am I talking about, Mommy?") Our first actor president and holy shit, they're the worst kind of people to make president--they have no idea of their true identities. Why not Martin Sheen for president? Didn't he do a fine job during his presidency on West Wing? Raygun did manage to cause a little hell on the Island of Grenada--his troops managed to kill their duly elected president--we don't call that "murder" do we?

Next came George W. Herbert Bush--ex-flyboy himself; when a captain in combat his plane crashed, GWH Bush bailed out of his plane before all of his men were out, a mistake that was punishable by immediately shooting his ass--though Cap'n George came out Scot free and with flying colors, though his war record is pretty pathetic really--old GWH was a Yaley, too, remember. And GWH gave us our first war WIN since WWII, his famous Persian Gulf War, Desert Storm, Stormin' Norman, oh what a lovely little war GWH's invasion of Iraq was--why those salty Iraqis thought GWH gave them permission to invade Kuwait and take back land that traditionally had belonged to them--that's right, GWH Bush gave Sad-dam Hoosane (the Bush pronunciation) the go-ahead through Rumsfeld and Unka Dick to attack Kuwait--hell, yeah, go ahead and empty those babies out of those incubators--what, that never happened? You mean GWH Bush lied to the American people about that Kuwait invasion? You mean because Saudi-Arabia allowed Bush the use of their land to mount an attack against a Muslim nation Osama Bin Ladin got pissed and threatened retaliation?--Saudi-Arabia kicked his ass out of the Bin Ladin homeland--and that made Osama ten times more pissed off--and thus started all of this bullshit we're suffering through now--yes, GWH was called a "Wimp," and a more wimpier man I must admit I've never seen--talk about a menacing milquetoast! As corrupt'a man as ever held the presidency and now he's handpuppeting his son to churn up his balls and prove how tough and tyrannical a pissed off Bush can be.

4 Gyrenes died today in Baghdad--but we're still winning over there.

Then came Slick Willie, the Rhodes scholar draft-dodger dude who tried to become a certified hippy but he just couldn't tolerate having to be liberal. Whoever said Willie was a liberal sure did miss the boat. Though Willie was a draft dodger, he did try his best to start a little slew of wars--Willie shot missiles into Afghanistan; he shot missiles into Baghdad and bombed Iraq morning, noon, and night, and kept the boycott on those poor slobs who'd just gotten out of a 10-year war with Iran. Plus, the Slick One took our troops into Bosnia and Serbia and he gave us the great General Wesley Clark, the man who said, "Fuck yeah we're bombing civilians, fuck 'em, they're the enemy whether they're wearing a military uniform or not." I've often wondered why militaries insist on wearing the same kind of uniforms! Why not an army of guys wearing Armani suits?

Then Slick Willie sent the gyrenes into Somalia. That proved to be a farcical mistake. Remember the reporters wading ashore with the Gyrenes going into Somalia? Slick Willie got to loving being Commander in Chief--and yep, Hillary was right there by her draft-dodgin' phony hippy husband's side backin' his warrin' ways 100%--until Willie got caught with his speckled pecker out and Monica Lewinsky's plump lips around it.

I mean, that's not a history of many PEACEFUL presidents. The only man in this country who hollered the loudest for PEACE got his brains blown out in Memphis, Tennessee, on the balcony of the Loraine Motel...yeah, come on, don't we vaguely remember Martin Luther King?

Cap'n John McCain Likes Calling Women "Cunts"
And that's a military thing, too. John was in this man's Navy when there were no women in it--"Company B's a bunch of WACs/They carry Kotek in their packs"--that was one of our "Count Off" call and response things we chanted as we marched when I was in THIS MAN's army. We even wore little caps, like opening up a letter-size envelope and putting it on your head and wearing it like a cap--and, yes, they did, I guess, look like vaginas--and we called them "cunt caps." John's concept of the military was as the ultimate experience of male bonding--nerve building--and no man wants to be called a "pussy" just like a woman doesn't want to be called a "cunt"--except in John McCain's military women are cunts--black guys are "jungle bunnies," to Cap'n John, too, I guarantee ya. Latinos to Big Bad John? Try "spicks"--yep, or "pachucos," oh, and "pepper bellies"--"wetbacks"--and for John's stand on the illegal Messkin immigrant situation, Governor Arnold (the Pig) Schwartzensteroids (he blows cigar smoke in the faces of girly men) is backing Big Bad "Nutjob" John--I've seen a picture of them hugging. John's a little short fart. And, too, have you noticed how John's bloating up the longer this campaign goes on? He's puffin' up like old Jerry "Pillsbury Doughboy" Falwell puffed up right 'fore he fell over dead in his Sunday platter of fried possum and okra and grits swimmin' in that ohhhhh good possum head gravy. McCain may be blowing another mission again--remember when he crash-landed on that aircraft carrier and killed what 42 men? He may be crash landing again...I don't know, but you do know I have had some medical training in my past--pale people with hoggy fat-dripping-type jowls look like pigs getting near the slaughterhouse to me, and they do look piggy as hell, too, even in color, and McCain's definitely looking porky. Hey, maybe he's the reincarnation of the Yippee Pig who ran for president back at the 1968 Dumbocrat Party Convention in Chicago--remember that one?--I'm sure it's on YouTube--"The whole world is watching"--all those Peaceniks stormin' ChiTown, pissing off the racist Chicago cops, and pissin' off shanty Irish asshole mayor Richard Daley (ironically, this old asshole's son is now mayor of Chicago--they never learn)--I don't know if I've ever said, but I like Chicago people, but I wouldn't want to live there.
The pissed off Chicago pigs clubbing the shit out of those dirty hippies in 1968.

The Hippies and Yippies take over Grant Park, Chicago, '68--We the People had guts in those days--we weren't afraid to face the pigs's billy clubs and rifle butts and pistol butts--and some of us took it and got the shit beat out of us--and we went to jail--and we spit on them--and we blasphemed them, and we sang holy little diddies of American equality, and we put flowers in the gunbarrels of the National Guardsmen's rifles, and they in return hated our bloody commie and anarchist guts--enough to shoot to kill us if ordered to--as proven by the Kent State tragedy--and we hated National Guardsmen's guts, too, and fuck 'em, and by God we ran Lyndon "Big Balls" Johnson out of office and when Hubert Pipsqueak Humphrey, a Sociologist from the U of Minnesota and at one time a fightin' Liberal Dumbocrat, caved in at the 68 convention and lauded Mayor Daley and lauded the War in Vietnam and lauded God and Jesus and Tom Jefferson and Hairy Ass Truman, We the People turned against his old withered up and dying ass and he lost the election by a cunt hair to Richard "I am not a crook" Nixon--the "Nix on Nixon" didn't work and here came that crooked little weasel into power and look what a bloody mess he made of things--this after he'd told us we weren't gonna have him to kick around anymore after he lost an effort to be governor of California after Lover Boy JFK narrowly whipped his old revengeful ass in 1960--and then "Big Balls" Johnson had trounced Barry "the White Jewish Redskin" Goldwasser ("In your heart you know he's RIGHT") in '64--and Johnson used the little girl out in the field with an atom bomb going off in her future! Brilliant ad. Johnson called Barry a pigfucker and got away with it. Johnson won by the biggest landslide ever until Tricky Dick waxed old Wimpy George "Means Well" McGovern's ass in '72--when all the hippies got "Clean for Gene."

Only twice since Johnson ran like a rat off the sinking ship of state have the Dumbocrats managed to retake the presidency--with Jim-eh Cah-ter--and then Billy Jeff Clinton. That's it. Wouldn't that mean odds are that the Repugs will win again this time?--leaving the Dumbocrats once again sucking their thumbs and submitting to the total rightwing concept of RUIN....

It doesn't bother me. I've been fascinated by Chaos for a long time--since I first read about Chaos in Henry Miller's books and then studied the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics in a Physics textbook--the wonderful world of Entropy--the capital of Chaos--where at last, Debbie Harry, parallel lines shall surely meet.

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

We Repeat thedailygrowlerhousepianist's Comments on Yesterday's thegrowlingwolf's Posting That He Thought Hillbilly Hillary Was Gonna Win the Dumbocratic Nomination

The analysts all say that unless there's a miracle,
there's no way Obama can lose.

With the prevailing proportional allocation, her
delegate gains, even with a 10 point victories, will
not be anywhere near enough to catch Obama. By every
measure, popular vote, pledged delegates, and
superdelegates, he has an insurmountable lead.

If they catch him screwing a donkey or something,
Hillary will have a chance. Otherwise no.

The press wants McCain, so they want the Dem primary
to be as much a slugfest as possible. It saves McCain
money and he gets to look all presidential. Ergo,
they've been dumping on Obama lately, because if he
won big in PA, the writing on the wall would be
readable by everybody.

My 2 cents...

thedailygrowlerhousepianist

The news just reported that Hillary has won the Pennsy primary--of course, that could be
false. Of course, too, that doesn't mean she advanced very much in her delegate count.

A Close Up of Harry Truman's Wrath Upon the Hiroshima Japs

Harry Truman said this Japanese "cunt" had to be
barbecued in order to save a 100 thousand brave
American troopers's lives--Hey Harry, it was worth
it, baby!

A Wolf Man on the Watch Again

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