Dredging the Channels of My Mixed-Animal Mind

"It's discouraging to think how many people are shocked by honesty and how few by deceit"
You like that? Noel Coward said that. Noel was a class deceiver--a dramatist, an actor, a playwright, a lover of the most exquisite way of speaking, that clipped and rocket-fast way a true British snob learns to speak (as they learn to speak at Oxford and Cambridge)! As a young man I turned my young nose up at Noel. I despise fops. Plus, I am a true Anglophobe. I despise everything British--and if you know me you know that's not true: I've owned three Jaguars when they were British made and they were the most beautiful cars I ever owned and they made me feel doubly creative as I drove them around New Orleans and then later in Santa Fe, San Francisco, Victoria, B.C., Key West, on the beach at Boca Raton, and then back in Santa Fe with my last one, a Mark II sedan with the steering wheel and post converted to the left side for export to the USA except they converted the steering wheel and post as it was in Britain with the gear shift and the turning signal still opposite each other where if you didn't know this when you went to put the car into gear, you inevitably grabbed the turning signal device--and I had to have my turning signal device replaced about five times--my Navajo mechanic in Santa Fe had studied in Munich with BMW yet he had trouble working on my Jag ("This car is totally different from a German machine, dude")--and he broke my turn signal two of those five times an "outsider" drove my car--nobody drove my car but me--except my wife when drove--my wife would not ride in a car if I were driving it--when we went out she always drove--even on our 12,000-mile trip around America and Canada in that Jag she drove most of the way while I sat in the 9-out-of-ten spot and drank cold beers and bullshitted and occasionally teased her by putting my hand between her legs and tickling her pride and joy. I told you, didn't I?, that on that 12,000-mile trip, my wife and I made love in as many great weird places as we could, like one afternoon on a lonely stretch of hard-to-get-to beach on the Pacific Coast Highway up around Santa Barbara, and once on soft minty ferns in a redwood forest just outside Eureka, California, and my wife said it was one great moment of ecstasy for her when she got her G-spot hit while she was gazing up into the majesty of those gentle giant trees--hanging around hundreds of thousands of years just so a greedy bunch of Texas fatcat pigs--posing as Georgia-Pacific Lumber Co.--could find that the Japanese were willing to pay plenty big Yen for redwood lumber--I mean, redwood's the toughest and most resistant lumber in the world--so fuck our redwood forests--they're wealth to the already wealthy--one tree's worth several thousands of dollars once it's been boarded out at a sawmill--yeah, and they have huge lumbering machines now that can actually dig a redwood right out of its sacred ground--rip 'em up--that's what we Amuricans love, rippin' things up--"Gonna rip it up...." J.B. Lenoir said, "Let's rip up the carpet up off of the floor so ladies and gents we can boogie some more."

Our best performance of all time in a daring act of sex came (ain't language great?) when we were in Mexico City in Chapultepec Castle on the edge of Carlotta's bed--but MY most exciting moment with my darling, sweet, young wife was on the 12,000-mile trip and happened atop Ernest Hemingway's grave--with my wife's tantalizing bottom hardened-cheeked right over old Hem's head--I guess they buried him with his head toward the top of the headstone--and Hemingway had a flat marble slab over his whole grave for a headstone--and after we drove up to Ketchum, Idaho, from Boise, turning up northeast at Mountain Home, stopping briefly in Hailey where Ez was born, in the Jag on a late Monday afternoon. The first thing we did on hitting Ketchum was to go to the cemetery and once there it was easy to find Papa's grave and we'd brought along a checkered tablecloth we stole from a restaurant in Boise and a picnic lunch of Chinese food (I got on a craze for sweet and sour pork on this trip) we'd bought in Boise, yes, the restaurant we stole the tablecloth from, along with a bottle of Sancerre wine--and as the mountain sun was setting in the west--actually right over the top of the Hemingway house where Mary Hemingway was staying at the time--and we were a little jicky headed and I said, "Toots, have you noticed any cars or humans, any anything on the road for a while?" "No, it's quite...it's beautiful out here--I mean, won't they kick us out of here?" "There's no gate really." "No, there was no gate...of course that damn Jag stands out like a sore thumb." [It was solid white and shown like a diamond in that late evening Idaho half-light.]

"Ain't she sweet?" A '62 Mark II Jag with its cherrywood dash and black leather seats.

"Fuck the car, let's take a chance--I dare you--on his grave, Toots!" "What!" "On his grave--all you do is lower your shorts and sit on me!" "No, I want to look up at that sky. Look at it, Wolfie, look you can already see stars popping out." I put the tablecloth doubled up over Hem's head; she pulled her shorts and panties off, and I pulled my jeans down, and son of a bitch if we didn't fuck for a good twenty minutes--I was disappointed...I came in her--and I had kind'a had a perverted desire to pull out and shoot all over Papa's marble slab, you know, mark it with my DNA--but the passion was too much--and the way my beautiful wife sang to those stars--and by the time we came back to earth, it was scary dark--even the stars seemed to have disappeared--maybe they were sexual fantasy stars--but anyway--then we saw a pickup coming slowly up the highway and then it stopped just outside the cemetery gate. We jumped up and scrambled and got into the car. "Don't start up yet," my wife said, "so far there's no sign of them checking out the cemetery." Just as those words oozed out of her mouth the pickup shot a military spot over our way and I went ahead and started up the Jag and coolly tooled up to the gate. It was a cop that got out of the truck. I got out and said, "Hi, officer, we were visiting Hemingway's grave--you know, we picnicked with Papa..." I laughed a goofy laugh. "Yeah, I noticed you were picnicking when I went by about thirty minutes ago." "It's a beautiful place...and Papa was a beautiful man, and my wife and I think it's beautiful up here--any houses available for rent around that you know of?" "You can check up in town--the real estate man owns the motel and restaurant up there." "Great, thanks, sir, have a good evening." I drove on off before he said anymore. "He saw us fucking," my wife said. "He saw me fucking and you getting fucked! But, hell, Toots, he couldn't see anything--it was pretty dark." "Yeah sure."

The next morning we woke up and went out to this Hemingway memorial they told us about at the motel--just up a road and then out along the edge of the Sun Valley Resort--and we went up there and there was a sign saying the Hemingway Memorial was "This Way" and we parked and walked down the "This Way" path and soon we came upon this sweetly crafted little human deer park and the center of its attraction was a grey marble column, about 6-feet high (Papa's height), on top of which was a bust of the man himself--at the base of the column was a quote from one of his short stories--and the place was idyllic--fucking poetic it was, with a babbling brook falling cold and rushing madly down the slope by the memorial and then splashing on down the aspen-clogged hill to disappear among those constantly whispering trees--and I went and got a six pack of Rainer beer out of the Jag and brought it back and put it in the cold stream--and then I revealed to my wife that I'd also brought the checkered tablecloth along. And soon I had my wife naked and so fucking beautiful and as she was looking out from the memorial platform way out across the rolling slopes of the Sun Valley that was fanned out in spasms of mixed colors far below us and shooting way off into the distance as they sped up the foothills of the Sawtooth Mountains all thick and creamy with toppings of slight snow, enough to make them look wintry in that cool summer time we were there--and I took all my clothes off and came up behind my wife--boy howdy--what a life that was! What a life I've had!

That beautiful woman who was my wife then and enjoyed those good times and daring fucks with me is now planted in the New Mexican earth she so loved--her people put her ashes around the base of a tree she had planted back when she was still young and had long since divorced me and had moved to Santa Fe where she built her own two-story adobe castle--built it herself; made the adobes herself; put in the log vigas herself; and built the house from top to bottom herself--then when she settled in it, she began to buy all the property for miles around her, in the process buying a whole mountain that the government later bought from her in developing a National Park site in that area, the Glorietta Pass area--the area where a Civil War battle was fought believe it or not back in 1864--and that government deal made my ex-wife rich as hell--hell, she was already rich as hell; she got rich as hell here in New York City--and she kicked my ass out of her life once she got rich, tossing me out, leaving me spinning like a discarded empty beer can just tossed out the driver's side window of a sleek little white Jag going about 85 mph down a wide open highway in Utah or somewhere like that--out in the middle of nowhere.

The stories I could write about the adventures I had with that wife. Hell, I have written a lot of stories about her on this stupid blog--why do I keep writing this shit, I keep asking myself as I look in the mirror and see like the old C&W song said, "the yellowing pages of history written across my face"?--I think I'm making that lyric up--I'm too damn lazy to walk about 2 steps over to the bookshelf where I keep my music books and sheet music and that sort of thing--all musicians have music books and fake books and sheet music and arrangements and study books, scale books, books of chords, books on styles, biographies of musicians and composers--I have a huge lot of books on Charles Ives and a very complete library of Mr. Ives's scores--some going back to 1933 when his scores were first published by Henry Cowell and his New Music magazine. I am currently trying to learn Mr. Ives's song "Ann Street." It's a very short song about a very short street, as Mr. Ives puts it in his lyrics, which he took from a poem he found in the New York Times one Sunday. thedailygrowlerhousepianist told me t'other day he'd begun attempting to play snatches of the Concord Sonata, Ives Piano Sonata #2, and said he was not doing that bad with the score--it's a very difficult score to read and follow--I can't imagine playing it--yet, there are some wonderful versions of it on records--especially John Kirkpatrick's original recording of it from 1944--and then Kirkpatrick recorded it again in 1972--both versions are pretty identical--Kirkpatrick was the supreme understander of Mr. Ives's piano music--in fact, Kirkpatrick directly worked with Mr. Ives while he was still alive in going over his compositions--and Mr. Ives heard Kirkpatrick give the first performance of the Concord at Town Hall in 1938--then in 1940 Ives went to London where he was recorded playing his own music--he plays The Concord sporadically but long spurts of each movement.

Just reminiscing. I mean the news is so sickening these days. We the People want a New World Order, an order that goes our way, and yet the politicians are so hand-in-glove with their corporate sponsors they seem to deliberately turn their backsides on We the People, no matter what their party affiliations--George Carlin did a great routine on our political system, by the bye--Obama talking like a Bush Baby--defending Bush's bullshit determination to piss a nuclear rain all over Evil Iran--Obama and Nutjob Cap'n John "POW" McCain in total loving agreement on this issue! Hell, they're even hand-in-glove on staying the course in Iraq--Obama never talks about exiting Iraq--nope, instead, like Nutjob McCain, he admits he'll keep troops in Iraq--plus, he's definitely sending more troops to the "righteous" war against the people of Afghanistan, a country that had nothing to do with 9/11--Bush invaded that country on the premise the Taliban protected the Very Evil Osama Bin Laden (half-brother to Bush's darling Prince Bandar Bush--whatever happened to the Prince? You don't hear much about him anymore. Has he been decapitated by the Saudi Royal Family--they love beheadings in Saudi-Arabia--that's had advanced that culture is!), a man the object of another Bush LIE: "I will find and destroy Osama bin Laden!" Yeah sure! A totally LYING dog as our president and still Obama, Hillbilly Hill, Cap'n John "Oops I Got Shot Out of the Sky--Mission Failed" McCain give the most impeachable president in the history of the Constitutional impeachment provision anything his little weasel brain wants--they just unitedly gave this bastard 270 billion more of We the People's fastly disappearing monies to fight his illegal war, a war that in truth is an invasion and occupation of a sovereign nation that had never done a damn thing to the USA except cooperate with us as Ronnie "Raygun" Reagan and Pappy Bush helped support Iraq's 9-year war with Iran--what a screwed up part of the world that is, thanks to our pals the Not-So-Great Brits going way back after WWI and the Balfour Agreement--it created Saudi-Arabia, Syria, Iran, and after much finagling, Iraq--it divided those Arab tribes up so that Britain could control the oil that had been discovered over there by Brit geologists--read all about it in T.E. Lawrence's great Seven Pillars of Wisdom. Lawrence of Arabia a great movie, too, by the bye, and you don't hear me praising many movies--which is what most Hollywood and British productions are, "movies," and not "films." Still called "movies" after all these years. Yep, they were original called "Flickers" when they flicked--then finally they got them smoothed out, no flickering, just smooth movement from frame to frame--look those cells are really "moving"--thus the movies. They became "films" once the PR folks got ahold of a movie and tried to spin it into a classic film.

I notice the New York City City Council is giving away another great land space to developers--this time Wills Point--on which now sits the current Mets Shea Stadium and it's new boondoggle stadium that is going to be named after a "bankrupt" bank, CitiCorp--and all around this huge stadium land mass are auto body shops and junk yards and fields full of rusting metals and strewn garbage, just across the subway tracks from the Louis Armstrong Tennis Stadium--yeah, they named a tennis stadium after Louis! Of course, then they built the Arthur Ashe Stadium and it became the center stadium replacing Louis's stadium as the main attraction. It all started at the West Side Tennis Club in Forest Hills, New York, home of the original US Open--now all of it called the Billie Jean King Tennis Center--why her on a New York court? I once played golf in Midland, Texas, in a foursome that included a black woman, Althea Gibson. This woman, originally from Harlem, New York, went on to become the first black woman tennis champion ever; later she switched over to golf where she became a champion on the Ladies PGA tour. Why wouldn't you name a New York City tennis center the Althea Gibson Tennis Center?--why name it after Billie Jean King? Billie Jean did start the United States Tennis Association, I guess. If it was called the Althea Gibson Tennis Center then all the tennis facilities out at the US Open would be named after black people. I think it was originally called Louis Armstrong Stadium--yes, Corona, Queens, is the site of Louis's long-time home--his house is a museum--though it is now situated in a neighborhood that is running down fast!--because they were going to use the stadium for concerts, too--who knows, certainly not I!

Althea Gibson--she played tennis, golf, and she also played the saxophone.

And Congress just gave Bush Baby permission to further spy like a paranoid maddog on all Amuricans, men, women, children, dogs, cats--especially if you look a little too smarmy for Bush's rich White brothers and sisters (I'm pretty sure Bush Baby and Pappy Bush consider their Saudi-Arabian branch of the family very WHITE and not really A-rabb) under the Skull and Bones pirate flag. Where's the fucking opposition? Then Congress handed this rascal over 274 billion dollars to continue his illegal occupation of Iraq! AMAZIN', AMAZIN', AMAZIN'.

Plus Georgie Porgie Bush has given away more of our National Preserved Lands to his oil-drilling buddies--he's given out thousands of drilling rights to over a million acres of our wilderness and National Park lands to his already filthy rich and getting filthier richer by the seconds Oil Buddies. Remember The Daily Growler's "Get Rich Quick" Stock Market Investing advice. Just chock up on Exxon-Mobil stock. Don't worry, they're doin' OK in this current stock market crash. And if Exxon-Mobil, Chevron, and BP take over the Iraq oil fields as Bush Baby is trying to force on the new Democratic Republic of Iraq, then it's Katie-bar-the-door to the amount of swelling profits it will report in its first quarter of stealing all that oil from the Iraqi people. Then when Bush bombs Iran back to the Stone Age and takes over Iran's oil fields, hot damn, what a wonderful world it will be. Yes, the stock market is crashing, but not Exxon-Mobil--oh yeah, remember, before they merged they were both going bankrupt! What a farcical world it is!

And now, the disgusting combustible energy goons have discovered that Sullivan County, New York, one of the most pristinely beautiful wild counties left this close to New York City, sits over a huge pocket of natural gas. They believe this is due to their finding a certain kind of black shale stratified beneath a huge portion of Sullivan County. It's loose shale and it's hard to drill down through to reach the gas pockets--they tried it once several years ago and failed--it will really take some destructive superdrilling to loose all that gas! The center of this gas pocket is located under a beautiful cold-water lake that is one of the sources of the New York City water supply! We are totally under the bootheels of oil and oilmen (yes, MEN; there are no women on any major oil company boards I know of) and we have been since oil was first discovered in Oil City, Pennsylvania, way back when John David Rockefeller was a stupid accountant in backwater Ohio--you know Pappy and Georgie Porgie Bush (the Bush family ironically also came to life in backwater Ohio) totally depend on oil and the wars for oil for their family wealth! Doesn't anybody understand this foolish desperation over this oil and gas shit? Just stop driving your fucking cars. Put 'em in the garage and ride the fucking public transportation. Or if you live out in the hinterlands, start a community bus service or taxi service. I've lived in New York City 20 years now without an automobile. Of course, if we stop driving our cars and take public transportation, they'll raise the price of public transportation to outrageous heights--the subways here in NYC, for instance, now cost $2.00 to ride. That will soon be going up to $3.00 and I figure in less than ten years it will be $5.00 a ride--the MTA (Manhattan Transit Authority--a whole passel of wealthy crooks mismanaging this massive transportation system while receiving extremely high salaries) claims day-in day-out that it is broke--mostly now they're saying due to higher fuel costs--the subways run on electricity provided by Con-Edison (Con artists deluxe) and the wildly dangerous nuclear power plant at Indian Point up on the Hudson, only 25 miles as the fallout falls from a metropolitan center of 14 million people--oh, the body counters say, only a couple of million would be wiped out should say Indian Point blew sky high one day--hey, that's not a bad kill ratio considering! And We the People are more scared shitless of a nuclear attack from some sloppy drunk Al Queda (a made-up devil enemy like all our made-up devil enemies) insurgent carrying a boxcutter and crudely made nuclear shoe bomb than we are the terrorism of nuclear power in our own backyard!

And even Obama is trumpeting nuclear energy and now he's even trumpeting out talk of new scary shit about Pakistan and the Taliban and we're losing our ass in Afghanistan, the righteous invasion of a sovereign nation by the warmongering oil goons Bush Baby and his puppet master Unka Dick "Oil Filthy" Cheney. These creeps enjoy torturing humans and then killing them. Look at how many thousands of Amurican troops, how many hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and Afghanis have been killed, how many thousands of Amurican soldiers are maimed and truncated for life, and 5 million Iraqis are displaced, driven from their home land into the safety of unsafe Syria and Lebanon. At the same time, Bush has snottily ignored the displacement of thousands of New Orleanians--his own nation's citizens--laughing his golf-playing ass off while New Orleans sinks into the miasma of total neglect--"Hey, it's just a bunch'a swoogies who are bitchin'--they're better off, like my old mammy Babs said, living in poverty in Houston than they were however they were livin' in New Orleans--thank God, it's a white city again! Oh, Bush rushed to declare Callie-forn-ee-ah (I'm mocking Governor Schwarzenegger's Nazi accent) a disaster area--he rushed out there personally--and I apologize--I forgot, GWB gave up golf until we win the War in Iraq! What a pompous little fool. Leading us lemmings right over the brink--and we're gladly following! Look at Bush's record as Governor of Texas--he killed via executive order 157 human beings (OK, most of them were black savages, granted), yep, he sent them all on a final ride on the lethal guerney--and hell, he'd even travel down to Huntsville, Texas, to see some of these executions--especially the Mexican woman he killed. There are now 345 men, mostly black men, on the Texas Death Row and old Governor Rick (Hick) Perry can't wait to start "killin'" the hell out of 'em.

What a world, eh?

Noel Coward is so right--honesty scares the hell out of us; deceit is exciting to us.

By the bye, I've started work on my Jazz Story #2, a dilly of a "cool" episode if I say so myself. I've got it plotted out, I've known the story in my head for many a moon, and I'm writing like a banshee on steroids these days--"Look at that moon it's shining so pretty, it's shining up there for you and for me...." King Pleasure singing Parker's solo on "Billie's Bounce." And I'm currently thrillin' to my 78 rpm recording of King Pleasure doing "Jumpin' With Symphony Sid" (Lester's vehicle) and "Red Top" (the Jug's vehicle), the later on which he's joined in vocal gymnastics by a young and starting out Betty Carter (I know, "Who?"). Life is good in spite of everything goin' on.

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

This is a Jaguar Mark VII. I bought my young wife one of these for her 21st birthday in New Orleans. People thought it was a Bently. She didn't like driving it so we sold it to a white professor out at Dillard University. I bought her a new MG 1600A instead and then ended up taking it away from her and using it myself until I bought myself a Jaguar XKE--giving the MG back to my wife. What a life we had, eh?

And there it is, a 1964 Jaguar XKE Series 1. Mine was yellow. I paid $7,000 cash for it. Ironically, it was money I got from my parents's estate after they were killed in an automobile accident. Later, while driving my XKE back from Beaumont, Texas, to New Orleans, on a stretch of straight-as-an-arrow highway through the bayous and swamps of Cajun Country that I tooled this car up to 115 mph--and then I goosed it up to almost 120--the speedometer went to 160--in an effort to pass a line of slow-ass-moving farmer-swamp rat-drivers--and just made it--and it was then and there that my young wife said, "Stop the car. I'm not riding with you driving anymore. Let me out, I'll hitchhike back to NOLA." I stopped the car and she took the wheel and we drove girl-safely back to NOLA--except she did hit 90 once and I brought it to her attention and she quipped, "Yeah, but my driving 90 is safer than your driving 60." She got me there. I simply popped a cold can of beer and sat back and enjoyed the rest of the ride. By the way, that top on that red XKE above--that top slid right off whole-hog and turned it into a convertible with a ragtop hidden away in a back panel in case it rained. Also, the hood of that car opened from the windshield end--it raised up to stand erect over the radiator. What a car, but what an expensive car--it was made for the open highway and not for city driving--and eventually I traded it in in Dallas for my older but classier-to-me little Mark II, that white job I pictured way up above in this post.

Joe Girardi vs. Joe Torre
First, Joe Girardi:

American League East
Team	W	L	Pct.	GB	Home	Road	East	Cent.	West	L10	Strk
Tampa Bay	50	32	.610	-	31-13	19-19	22-15	5-4	11-7	7-3	W 2
Boston	50	35	.588	1½	31-10	19-25	16-14	12-5	11-9	4-6	L 3
N.Y. Yankees	44	39	.530	6½	22-19	22-20	15-15	11-15	8-2	4-6	L 2
Baltimore	41	40	.506	8½	22-13	19-27	15-19	7-6	8-8	4-6	L 2
Toronto	41	43	.488	10	22-19	19-24	9-14	15-7	9-12	6-4	W 3

And now, Joe Torre:

National League West
Team	W	L	Pct.	GB	Home	Road	East	Cent.	West	L10	Strk
Arizona	42	41	.506	-	25-15	17-26	10-13	6-11	20-8	3-7	W 1
L.A. Dodgers	38	44	.463	3½	22-20	16-24	6-7	14-14	13-13	4-6	L 2
San Francisco	36	47	.434	6	14-25	22-22	9-7	6-15	15-13	5-5	L 1
San Diego	33	51	.393	9½	21-26	12-25	8-8	8-12	14-16	2-8	W 1
Colorado	32	51	.386	10	20-20	12-31	6-9	8-11	11-23	1-9	L 8

And how freaky is it seeing Tampa Bay leading the BoSox with a .600 winning percentage! I guess taking the Devil out of their name really did sit well with the Christian God. I assume Yahweh and Joshua ben Joseph are baseball experts.

Sick World, Sick People. Sic, Sic, Sic.

Sunday Morning Corporate View of the World
Ever-thing's fine and dandy. Yep. Hah-hah-hah. The stock market crashing ain't no problem. Hah-hah-hah. A Chinese Kid-Capitalist (he was probably educated in the US, what do you want to bet?) has bid 2.4 million dollars on a charity auction on eBay--the highest charity auction winning bid ever in the history of charity auctions--for a meeting with Crooked-as-a-Snake-at-Night Warren Bluff-ett, another rich asshole who got rich off his old pappy's influence--check out who Warren's old pappy was. Ain't that grand. Don't you wish you had 2.4 million to blow just to have a chance to stick your nose really deep in old Royal Warren's filthy, unwiped, gritty asshole? The wealthy worship each other. The only thing divine to the wealthy is the crook they see when they look in one of their many mirrors. "Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who's the wealthiest son of a bitch of us all?" "Senor Slim!" "Senor Slim! How dare you, that pissant Messkin!" "Sorry, sir, but you asked me!" "Uncle Tom, get your black-servant ass in here and break the holy shit out of this mirror!" "Yassuh, Mister Bluff-ett."

And our little-man billionaire mayor here in New York City has our City Council in his butt pocket, these clowns who are supposed to be the citizens's check on hiz (dis)honor's neighborhood raping money-grubbing tactics butt instead their noses are deep in this mayor's little narrow droopy white dirty butt crack and as a result recently they gave their political backers, the New York City real estate industry, the biggest rent increases ever in subsidized housing rents! And New York City real estate dealers hate subsidized housing. And you know why? Because subsidized housing was a protective device passed by the NY City Council back after WWII when landlords started raising rents to ridiculous heights in order to take advantage of the dumbass returning soldiers who had GI Bill money and FHA money behind them--most of WWII's servicemen were drafted into the army--they had no choice but to kill or be killed or as conscientious objectors be sent out into the battlefields unarmed to gather up body parts and to put brains back into skulls! A CO in WWII was the same as a US citizen proclaiming themselves a Commie Sympathizer during the Cold War. So now, poor people in New York City in the few remaining subsidized buildings are going to have to pay a 4.5% increase on 1-year leases and a 8.5% increase on two-year leases! Unsubsidized apartments? Well those poor souls have no protection whatsoever--only their incomes--the landlords can raise their rents as absurdly high as he (most landlords are men--men have most of the wealth) can claim as the market base--especially if a tenant moves out--then the landlord...oh shit, I'm tired of preaching to all these choirs! Real estate developers and real estate salesmen rule us. It's the old plantation back again--but this time there's white folks down in the slave quarters with the blacks and Latinos--why, shit, there's even some of those whites who thought of themselves as the Conservative Middle-Class in the slave quarters, too--complaining about the accommodations and the fact there are "lesser" (they used to be called "savages") human beings being treated cruelly equally with their hi-rise arses!

Listen to me, a man who has declared himself a writer and no longer has to work--George Bernard Shaw said that, didn't he? My work now is rounding up words that tell my many stories--in fact, on my other computer I found a folder in which I had started my memoirs--I've temporarily called it The Last Roundup.

And what about Zimbabwe! Bush is thinking about invading Zimbabwe now because Amurican and British whiteys have declared Robert Mugabe a terrorist (anybody who attacks white people) because Mugabe has refused to recognize his "opposition" in the election he just yesterday won by a landslide--his "opposition" is a stooge of the British Empire's remains, which is what Zimbabwe is all about--Mugabe has since the beginning been intent on taking his people's land back from the Great (Not So Great Really) British who stole it from them back when the sun never set on that British Empire--back when Zimbabwe was named after that great white humanitarian Cecil Rhodes--yep, where the Rhodes Scholar comes from--and all the Brit fop farmers and ranchers and slaveholders protected by the British Empire stole acres and acres of native African land and turned it into prosperous farms and cattle ranches--and when Rhodesia was given its independence by the good Queen Lizzie, it changed its name to Zimbabwe and it elected Robert Mugabe as its leader overwhelmingly in 1980--Robert Gabriel Mugabe had been leader of the Rhodesian rebels--he was a hero to Zimbabweans the same as Mandela was in South Africa--except Mandela for some reason has turned his back on Mugabe! The first thing Mugabe did when he was in power was start throwing Brits off their land and letting the native Zimbabweans take it back--"If you can kick the Brit shits off the land, the land is yours!" This is the basis for Bush and Gordie Brown despising the actions of this full-blown N-worder of the BLACKEST kind.

Hey, Great Britain, you fucked the world up, now you gotta pay for fucking it up.

And then, marvelousmarvbackbiter, called me day before yesterday from Yankee Stadium--the old one that the City refurbished with millions of taxpayer dollars back when Mike Burke and CBS owned the Yankees in the late sixties and early seventies--George Steinbrenner got the deal of his life when Burke and CBS wrecked the Yankees and made them a second-division team under Major Houk--I mean their stars in those hapless years were Hector Lopez and Roy White!--and Steinbrenner got to buy the team for chicken feed! marvelousmarv said he had box seats at Shea that evening and if I could get my ass out to Queens, I could join him for the night-end of the Yankees-Mets doubleheader. The Mets won the game at Yankee Stadium 15-3. One of the Yankees's minor-league starter pitchers fell flat on his young face! What a sloppy game. I told marvelousmarv, bullshit on baseball this year, so he said, well, in that case he'd call Franny and Zoe our two-headed girl reporter and see if he could get in her...whoaaa, I forgot, marvelousmarv likes to dress up in women's underwear and have a big black man bugger him while he submits to the orders of a Sadist domitrex wearing black leather and carrying a bullwhip! Who knows, maybe Franny and Zoe is into that shit--anyway, I did watch some of the Shea game on teevee. Of all things, Sid Ponson (a traveling hack of a pitcher) shut the Mets stone-cold down--and the Yankees went on to clobber the Mets 9-0.

Then yesterday's game at Shea was a fairly good game--Santana versus Andy Pettite. Pettite gave up a home run to David Wright and that was it for a while until the Yankees went berserk and scored 3 runs off Santana (he looks like a bum)--then the rains came--and there was a two-hour delay. I passed out. The Yankees won it 3-2; Pettite's 4th win in a row. Hah-hah-hah.

The new Mets stadium, mostly paid for by the citizens of New York City, sits looking exactly like the old stadium as it looms up over Shea's centerfield fence--a new stadium that will have only a very few thousand general admission seats while the rest will be expensive field boxes--and the rest around the top rim of the stadium and between the upper general admissions and the first tier will be the real reason for building these new stadiums: a couple'a thousand luxury boxes--luxury suites I think they're called--suites that sell for millions a year--plus there'll be a shopping mall built into the venue along with high-priced restaurants and bars and shit and this new Mets stadium is going to be named after CitiCorp--yes, the old First National City Bank of New York City, which then became CitiBank, and then became CitiCorp, and, yes, it is the same CitiBank that recently fired 5,000 workers because it's on the brink of bankruptcy from its prime-rate-mortgage-lending schemes that backfired on it--but, hey, CitiCorp still has enough big bucks left over to buy the right to have the new Mets stadium named after it--a Capitalistic jive that goes directly against everything baseball is supposed to be, the American pastime that became the sport of the people--though now, it's becoming the sport of the corporate executives. No more knothole gangs--like Willie Randolph belonged to as a kid! In fact, corporate executives don't like knothole gang kids--they like only their own little spoiled brats who get to sit in the superboxes with them and their drunkard and coke-sniffing co-executives!

I just saw where the new fabby stadium for the Pittsburgh Pirates (Pie Rats) (a ballteam that in the 90s was on the verge of bankrupcy) only holds 35,000 regular-type baseball fans! The new Yankee Stadium (will it be called "the House that George Built"?) will only hold 45,000 regular folks. The original Yankee Stadium, the House that Ruth Built, held 75,000. Of course, Steinbrenner and the new owners are right: you can't fill a 75,000-seat stadium anymore--but you can fill a 45,000-seat stadium day-in and day-out, like the Yankees did last year, one of their greatest attendance seasons ever--they averaged over 50,000-a-game (amazing). This reasoning would mean the new stadiums for the Florida Marlins and the Tampa Bay (formerly Devil) Rays should hold only 10 or 15,000 folks, the numbers they usually draw to their games (the Rabid Christians in Tampa (a big Christian fundie headquarter city) made them take the Devil out of their name even though that was the whole reason for calling them the Devil Rays--that was their symbol in those days, too, the huge manta ray that is called the Devil Ray--as opposed to the Man O'War Ray! Or Man Ray! The Tampa Bay Man Rays--I like that.


Oh, yes, yes, yes, take the Devil out of that name--Praise the Holy Hell Lard!

A Man Ray--of our own beloved H.D.

I just can't get into baseball this year. The Yankees are not the same team they were last year. Joe Girardi ain't Joe Torre--Joe has taken the Dodgers to only 2 1/2 games behind the Arizona Diamondbacks as of last night when the Dodgers got no-hit but still won the game 1-0 on an error that let the only run score.

The Yanks are currently playing over .500, something it took Joe several months to do last year but he did it, coming from like 20 games under .500 to take them to the playoffs with Cleveland! The Yankee hitters look awesome and they should--A-Rod is leading the American League in batting right now--having a great year--however, and this is the big however most teams face these days, Yankee pitching is atrocious, even with Mike Mussina being the second winningest pitcher in the Am League right now and Andy Pettite having just won 4 in a row. But we know Mike and Andy won't hold and will fade eventually--Mussina will start losing games--and Pettite, too (or arm trouble will put him on the DL), though Pettite was their best pitcher when Brian Cashman went on a tear and diss-ed Andy and let him go to Houston after Andy had been their leading pitcher that year--the year Roger Clemens retired--2005 was it? The next year, Cashman saddled Joe with one of the worst pitching staffs ever--and still Joe took 'em to the playoffs.

As for the Mets, well, it looks like Willie really wasn't the problem afterall. Jerry Manual is doing no better than Willie--Manual is 5-6 now in his tenure as "interim" manager! The Mets should probably trade managers with the Yankees--Manual is an American League manager (with the White Sox for 5 years--why'd they fire him?) and Joe Girardi is a National League manager (managed the Marlins one year--was fired for subordination by the Marlins's crackpot rich-boy owner).

The Mets are only 4 games out of first--the Phillies always fold and they just lost 5 in a row--and the Mets are substantially ahead of the Nats, the losers in this division--the Mets and Atlanta the powerhouses--except, like Jerry Manual said on an interview yesterday, the Mets hitters are obsessed with swinging at outside off-the-plate pitches--like Carlos Delgado struck out 3 times yesterday swinging at pitches that were 'way off the plate on the outside, some in the dirt they were so outside. Oh well, the world goes on.

Truck bomb in Baghdad killed the normal 20 or 30 innocent Iraqis yesterday! Good news--the Splurge is still working--John McCain praises the Iraqi PM and says things are really looking good in Iraq now that he's ready to become our POW president. Like Father Lawrence Lucas says, How does John McCain's getting his ass captured in Vietnam qualify him to be president? If that's the case, then every African-American in the United States is qualified to be president! Except, Obama, who is only half-black, as Ralph "Spoilsport" Nader brought up day before yesterday--so he was never captured!

Ah the ironies are dancing around me like street rats having a ball late at night under a street lamp!

Father Lucas also says that New York Citians better be prepared for another "staged" terrorist attack on us--as warned by one of John McCain's political advisors--"If we have another 9/11, John McCain will win the presidency."

Aren't these clowns supposed to represent the Amurican people's wishes?

Hah-hah-hah.

thesundaygrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

The Wolf Man Looks at Phenomenalistic Thinking

What the Hell?
I found the definition of "phenomenalism" among some old soiled and encrusted notes on a clipboard I'd discarded into a neglected corner probably five years ago...

I am living a blues idiom life now--and that's phenomenal--at least it is to me.

And I was arguing with a poet about his statement that poetry is the language of art and I said, no, it's the art of language--and he said shut up you're a novelist and I slugged him with an open copy of Across the River and Through the Trees right in his nose--there, you poet bastard, you insult me--I'm a novelist, which means I paint murals with language--and, he, putting a cold towel over his ruptured nose, said, just like I said--I mean, you idiot, we're in agreement--I'm a painter of language--my poems are the language of art, which, isn't it, the same as you're saying if you say your novels are murals? I was about to slug him again, I was reaching for the The Collected Letters of Aldous Huxley a huge volume--Aldous Huxley a wordy son of a bitch, a Brave New World man of letters who wrote his best stuff while tanked up on 5 ccs of lysergic acid diethylamide living in the New Brave World of Hollywood--I can see Aldous, Gore Vidal, and Paul Bowles getting high together!

Read me a few words of The Sheltering Sky and I'll tell you it's Paul Bowles. Play me only a few notes of a Mingus solo and I'll tell you it's Charles Mingus. Or I'll tell you it's Ray Brown, if it's Ray Brown. Or now I'm beginning to be able to tell you of even those who make even the slightest of phenomenal effects on me, like the guitar playing of Teddy Bunn recently--or the pumping away of Lil Hardin Armstrong on an album Bill Grauer recorded on his Riverside label in 1961, when Lil was 62, with her using a band of Chicago musicians she picked herself out of the Earl Hines Band--and I was blindfolded and I said, "Damn, that's Lil Hardin Armstrong, but I have no idea who the rest of the dudes are...Hell, that's Lil's tune 'Clip Joint.'" "That's phenomenal, man, phenomenal," said the blind-fold tester. "I dig it," said I, proudly howling toward that old Bilbao Moon! Ah-hooooooo-eeee, a hoooooo-eee, de-hooo-eeee!

Hear the train a'comin', hear those rails a'hummin'--hooooooeeeeee! Comin' 'cross the trestle...a'hooooooooo-eee!

I've known old railroad men who could tell you what locomotive it was if you played them a recording of locomotives chugging and exploding and letting off their steam whistles--"That's a 2-8-4 Berkshire." Phenomenal, right?

A 2-8-4 Berkshire wearing the Nickel Plate Road emblem crossing a steel trestle bridge.

"Can You Hume a Few Bars of Phenomenalism for Us, Wolfie?"
Sure: The doctrine, set forth by David Hume and his successors, that percepts and concepts constitute the sole objects of knowledge, with the objects of perception and the nature of the mind itself remaining unknowable.

Boy, that really must have pissed Freud off when he read that! We accept whatever perception of something our minds have without understanding how our damn minds concluded it! Like how do our brains work? I've listened to the learned trying to explain the brain and they do the best they can but there are still some mental mechanisms that are phenomenal, like how languages have evolved out of us, very complicated languages, all meaning the same thing simultaneously, like Sanskrit, wow, that's a pretty phenomenal language to me. Wouldn't the ultimate poem then, to my poet friend, be one constructed in Sanskrit then translated immediately back into whatever language out of which you constructed your Sanskrit?--like is a Russian's knowledge of Sanskrit the same as that of any other person's knowledge of it whatever the language? Or.... Yep, I'm thinking linearly--I was listening to a business freak, a twenty-something phenom, explaining vertical ascension or something strange like that in the world of NEW WORLD business! Is that anything like Pappy Bush's New World Order--that illuminated by a thousand points of light?! Pappy's greatest-ever speech--even greater than his wonderful "read my lips" speech or the speech where he tells us here in New York City to kiss his old gnarly sweaty ass. Can't you see Donald Trump naked in one of his fabulous penthouse apartments in one of his fabulous Trump Cities somewhere and making his trophy hotty swimsuit-model wife stick her sweet nose deep in his old miasmic crack in respect of his glory over her--especially since she blessed his Foul Hind-ness with a goofball, wigheaded, popeyed son! Little Prince Donald! Is Donald Trump a phenom? NO! Donald Trump inherited every thing he is from his real-estate-developer Big Daddy, the original builder of the Trump Cities out in the boroughs. Donald ain't no phenom. Billy Boy Gates? Hell no, nothing phenomenal in stealing an operating system out from under the noses of a small Seattle systems developer. Nor is his wife a phenom! She may have been when she was one of Billy Boy's "game-designing" phenoms, but after becoming his celebate wife, she lost her phenom status. Marrying a filthy rich man is not phenomenal! Any pretty and dumb babe can get a rich bastard to marry her--all she has to do is spend hours upon hours playing with his wanting-to-shrivel-old-cock--it's easy--check out Anna Nicole Smith! The good Anna, who is no longer in the news. I'll bet she makes a comeback one day--oh, God, the phenomenal thing about Anna Nicole Smith is that she grabbed headlines away from some of the most historic news stories ever--like the Taliban kicking our ass in Afghanistan and the Iraq government turning against us and people starving all over the world, horrible starving, thousands of children dying every hour of starvation, some dying sucking on their mothers's dried-up titties--and phenomenally our anguish is about "What's going to happen to Anna's illegitmate kid, the kid with two daddies, both daddies a little strange--hell, more than strange?" Those hang-along dudes sucking old Anna Nicole's bank account dry! Then finally killing her off after she had one of them's child ("them's child"--that's phenom language, isn't it?)--don't you think her lovers killed her?--look at the bucks they reaped off her death and then fighting over her kid and shit like that--parasites these dudes were! In the meantime, in Iraq human beings were being enslaved to work for the US-invading contractors (KGB (sorry, I mean, KBR), for instance)--the story of 6 Nepalese men who were lured to Jordan by the promise of big-buck jobs in swanky Jordan hotels and restaurants and shit like that. Once in Jordan, however, these lured souls had their passports taken away from them and were then force-transported into Iraq and there put into virtual slavery--taken into Iraq where they were turned over to gangs like the KGB (again, I mean KBR)--the six Nepalese were then summarily found dead on the streets of Baghdad...but that's a story Amuricans could care less about.

It was also kind'a disgusting to see Obama and Hillbilly Hill loving one another before a crowd of crowing thousands, mostly old pruny looking women! Neither of them addressing issues, like why Obama and Hillbilly Hill are for giving the telecoms immunity from prosecution when they break our laws and spy on Amurican citizens supposedly protected from such things by privacy acts and the Constitutional right of not incriminating ourselves--5th Amendment! Also, I'd like to know why Obama is for offshore drilling and drilling in the Alaskan Wilderness Reserve and also why both of them are backing the resurging passion for building nuclear power plants and keepin' on using coal? Nope, that's not what they discussed. Rather they just trumpeted out how great each of them were, how wonderful, how so wanting change they are--yet they approved a couple'a more hundred billion for Bush's Trumped-up Attack on Iraq (his illegal invasion and occupation of a foreign sovereign nation, something for which he should have been impeached years ago)! On the Iraq issue, I'm sad to say, Obama, Hillary, and John "Nutjob" McCain are all in loving agreement! Here's what's phenomenal about these politicians and this spying-on-us system they are approving wholeheartedly: now you say the wrong thing, like word it wrong, on your cell phone or in an email or over your dialup and you could be arrested and held without bail for as long as good ole Uncle Sam (archaic) wants to keep you! Yahoo, Obama, way to go with this "change" bullshit you're peddling. How phenomenal was it when Ralph "Spoilsport" Nader called Obama a Half-Black this week? Has Ralph been reading The Daily Growler?

By the Bye
I just read the 17th Chapter of my dear Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre and, yes, thewomantrumpetplayer, the dialog so disgusted me I almost flipped the book into the virtual garbage--however, I soon found Charlotte's lust, that which she's portraying between the lines of her lousy dialog, phenomenal--she was one horny woman (writer) and putting such a load on poor always-stepped-on Jane--and Jane's folding fast--her once rather stoic I thought nature and evolution has now suddenly disappeared, smoked over from the fires she's set between her hot and burning thighs that are oven-like surrounding her even hotter Vestibule of Love--Charlotte writing and thinking of her soppy love for the Belgium dude who was the spitting image of Jane's precious Mr. Rochester--does Jane even know his first name yet? I got to the part where Mr. Rochester accosts demure Janey in a dank hallway as Jane's trying to slip away from the "goings on" in Mr. Rochester's party room--his foppish guests are in there and those guests include the fabulous Miss Ingram, who according to Mrs. Fairfax is Charlotte Bronte's ideal beautiful woman, something we more than know by now doesn't fit the orphan Jane one damn bit. Yet, we know Charlotte wants to break loose and write Mr. Rochester grabbing young Jane and ripping off her clothes and baring her lithe young body as he gasps while devouring, "Ah, a body worthy of comparison with that of the Winged Victory in Rome--with all its marbly-smooth symmetry like yours, ooooh, these ripe young breasts...ah, Jane, please forgive my rampant passion." And there and then Jane is "spoiled" by Mr. Rochester's lunging and lugging plunging and the novel will then continue with Jane lying bleeding on Mr. Robinson's fine big musty four-poster, confused, with Mr. Rochester pounding his still rampant prick on one of those bedposts while his dog Pilot licks his master's wounds--"Bad boy, go lick that wench's cunt if you're so wanting to lick." And when Jane hears herself called a wench, ah, then the novel will perhaps return to its great beginning--for a while there I was thinking about luring Charlotte into my vain playground for some fantasy sex--you know, of the literary type! The Seducing of Charlotte Bronte my novel-in-progress--or should I say my mural-in-progress?


Charlotte Bronte from the Cornell U. Library Collection. Not bad. I wouldn't kick her out...if you catch me drift.

yeoldegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

Delectables From the Wolf's Human Head

My Back Is Stilled Turned Against Reality--Yet Even My Dreamworld Is So Real

Notes From Two Notebooks
I, like Louis Armstrong used to, keep volumes of notes all in neat little drugstore notebooks, notebooks piled high by my bedside and another stack under a pile of books on the floor. Most writer-types do keep notebooks...don't they? I really don't know what writer-types do anymore. I tried reading a current novel (Shakedown by Charlie Stella) given me by thedailygrowlerhousepianist--we we're cattin' around t'other eve hittin' the Irish Pub-crawl trail (why musicians were called "cats"--from "cattin' around" as opposed to "doggin' around")--and we were hell bent for glory--and he gave me this book and when I got home, OK, my brain was a little sloshy, I tried reading this book but I gave up after the first couple of pages. Stella started right off being very pompously violent on the first page (like "You think you know violence, let me tell you about the violence I know and love and cherish") and I don't mean that violence bothers me; what bothers me about it is, as used by Stella, that it's a commercial gimmick to make books gritty sounding and gutsy promising (according to the PR hype on the book) and tough-guy-written--like Raymond Chandler taught 'em how to write dick books, detective stories, which is all this novel is, a fast-paced, short-sentenced, detective romance; yet, still Raymond Chandler can outwrite these modern posers. I expect real violence in a novel about violence (like Octave Mirabeau's Torture Garden) and I see violence going on constantly around me here in Gotham, but what writers like Stella write about is Hollywood-kind-of-made-up-graphic-arts violence--and speaking of things fading away, I'll bet 3/4s of the new New York City twenty-somethings have no idea what "Gotham" means in terms of New York City--unless they're Batman freaks--but even then do they associate Batman's Gotham City with New York City? Where would the Bat Cave be say young Bruce Wayne did live as a twenty-something in a New York City hi-floor luxury apartment? Central Park maybe? The Palisades...that could be possible since stately Wayne Manor would have had to be up on the Hudson there somewhere it was so big, bulky, and woodsy. Though I'm sure Batman was created by New York Citians and drawn here in New York City and, yes, Batman's Gotham City is New York City, but then I'm thinking like "good old days" thinking, very WHITE thinking. Listening to George Carlin again yesterday and damn how he hit us white folks on the head, nailed us, nailed us too solid, that's why he was so scary to the white male controllers of everything we say or do in this Land of the (We Think) Free and Home of the Stupidly Apathetic--and speaking of dumb shit, I saw on local commercial teevee that a local soldier had been killed the day before in Iraq and the teevee woodheads were making much to do of him as a patriot, you know, gun-ho for our phony president and his trumped-up War in Iraq, but then they got to the real story of why this stupid young man had recently reupped for a second tour of volunteer duty in Iraq--he'd just gotten there when he and another New Yorker got their heads blown to bloody pulpy bits by an opposition-to-the-US-invasion sniper. The reason he reupped?--he was black by the way--I have to emphasize that--(I'm impersonating Don Imus (the leftover pile of hardened-dung shit of bankrupt radio)--"Hey, you all misunderstood me" (in his fake "cowboy" way of speaking--Imus is talkin' like a "drugstore cowboy" as my dad would have called him))...SO, the reason this young New York black man had reupped for another tour of duty in Iraq? The Man was foreclosing on his mother's house he'd grown up in and before joining the US Army he was working three jobs to try and stop The Man from taking the house. Then, thanks to the glowing US Army recruitment brochure, he found out he could make more money in the army than he could working the three shit jobs every damn day so he signed up for instant duty and was instantly sent to Iraq. He made it safely through street-fighting in Baghdad, EXCEPT when he got back home from that first tour, he found out the bankers/lenders (The Man) were still intending on kicking his mother into the street. Thinking like the brave gung-ho trooper he'd become, he reasoned that the most sensible thing for him to do would be to reup for another tour of duty with the volunteer army, you know, take the reup money, yeah, the good old army offers these young fools maybe 10 to 15 thousand dollars cash to reup, give that to his mother so she could pay some on her mortgage debt, and that's what this poor fool of a young kid did, he reupped and, sure 'nuff, he was sent right straight back to Baghdad (by now Bush, McCain, all the war-lovin' nutjob politicians were saying the Surge had worked and the streets of Baghdad were fastly returning to normal--DON'T YOU BELIEVE IT!). Once back in beautiful, safe Baghdad he once again tempted fate, soon learning that if you tempt fate long enough it'll bite you in the ass and sure 'nuff, he'd just landed back in Iraq when fate blew him unidentifiable all over a backstreet in old Baghdad (it only happened a couple'a days ago). OK, so, yes, mom will get the ten grand cash for his body from Uncle Sam but I'll bet you The Man will still kick her ass into the street--and while I'm on this subject: you don't hear much about Uncle Sam anymore do you?--ever notice that? I like noticing things for maybe one last time as they fade away--most probably fading away until they're gone forever from thoughts or view--a lot of 'em will hang around for another decade maybe if they get notorious enough, but most of them, Whoosh!, gone! Like the first 20 years of my life was sent to its fate on a Westchester County, New York, dumpsite--like hundreds of my mom and dad's photos from way back into the late 1800s were suddenly gone, especially one photo I loved of my Wild Uncle Billy, he was my great-grandmother's cousin, wearing his chaps, sportin' two ivory-handled six shooters, one holstered, one drawn and held across his chest, with his western shirt and a ten-gallon hat and the big clunky-chunky Western boots, posed rather cutely by the trail photographer at a hitching post covered with a huge sheepskin (ironic since Billy was a cattle-drivin' cowboy and not a sheepherder)--oh and WUB had a fancy silk scarf tied swashbuckler-style around his neck, too--but he wasn't looking mean, he was instead looking starry eyed--and beneath the photo was the trail photographer's name and the city he worked out of, Colorado City, Texas, in this case, Wild Uncle Billy obviously working on far-West Texas ranches in the area, rounding up cattle and drivin' them over to the railroad loading pens at Colorado City, which later during the oil boom in the 1920s became a big refinery town--home of Cosden and Cities Services (now CitG0 and owned by Venezuela) refineries--and Wild Uncle Billy's old trail photo was burned alive on that Westchester County dump--the revenge of a woman I had wronged, and Wild Uncle Billy had probably done any number of women wrong--"It's in me blood!" me and Wild Uncle Billy are shoutin' to high heaven! Gone, too, were seven complete novel mss of mine--one an evil Bergmanian love story of woman worship--the sacred Rosalind, a woman's name that fascinated me while writing this novel while living in Mexico City with my wife, the mixed-breed (the beautiful rose of my life)--she'd cut my throat if she heard me calling her a mixed breed--and she could cuss me out in Spanish, English, and Italian--brilliant girl--and the nostalgic one in me tells me all the time, "You should'a stayed with that woman, you idiot--I mean, come on, she was young, beautiful, with a body men were willing to kill you over, but mainly she had brains, and it was her brains that made her so beautiful really, the brains behind that gorgeous..." "Ah, shut the fuck up, you weren't married to her!" "Got me there, pal. How 'bout that Jewish girl in Santa Fe--why'd you fuck that one up?" And Rosalind was burned alive along with six other novel mss on that Westchester County dump--one ms a detective tale--the main character, Andrew Tripellian, was a clone who'd figured out he was a clone and had studied up on the real A. Tripellian, you know, finds his real family...shit, what great works of art were burned alive on that Westchester County dump...but then, like I said, I am an observer of things as they fade away. I sit sometimes like the foolish thinker that I am and convince myself I could still, a la D.H. Lawrence, rewrite Rosalind from memory and get it pretty close to the original--and it was a long one, too--written when long novels were in. During some of those faded-away good-old-days.

Let's see, what can I glean from these notebooks:

1) "The El Salvadoreno (tilde over the N) Restaurant in Elizabeth, New Jersey, looks like a good place to eat."

2) "By 'unconscious' he [Jung] means that the body of human instinct is situated below the threshold of identification: that it operates unbeknownst to man"--Phillip Wylie in An Essay on Morals.

3) Gunther Schuller (in his book The Swing Era) says the "riff tune"--a whole tune based on short riffs following changing chord patterns--was invented by Charlie Christian, the Oklahoma City-native guitarist discovered by John Henry Hammond, Jr., and his son-in-law Benny Goodman, and who died of tuberculosis here in New York City almost as soon as he got famous--back in 1941--[a year so full of things happening--all of which are slowly fading away--like that "Day of Infamy that will live forever...." for instance, or like Franklin Delano Roosevelt for instance].

4) Charlotte Bronte uses the word "hebdomadal" in Jane Eyre. Here's what Charlotte Bronte thinks is a beautiful woman (a Miss Ingram who the boss of the Thornfield Hall seems fascinated with), speaking through her character Mrs. Fairfax, the head of the servants at the Hall where Jane, a governess, teaches the bastard girl child the result of the boss's Paris adventures with a French dancer: a beautiful woman is: "Tall, fine bust, sloping shoulders; long, graceful neck; olive complexion, dark and clear; noble features; eyes rather like Mr. Rochester's [Mr. Ed: the Hall's master who young Jane suddenly has the hots for--remember thewomantrumpetplayer's commenting sarcastically about young virgin Jane desiring to fuck her absolutely assholey Mr. Rochester so why didn't she?--and Rochester's desire to violate young virginal Jane is there, too], large and black, and as brilliant as her jewels. And then she had such a fine head of hair; raven-black, and so becomingly arranged: a crown of thick plaits behind, and in front the longest, the glossiest curls I ever saw. She was dressed in pure white; an amber-coloured scarf was passed over her shoulder and across her breast, tied at the side, and descending in long, fringed ends below her knee. She wore an amber-colored flower, too, in her hair: it contrasted well with the jetty mass of her curls." [from Jane Eyre, Chap. 16.]

5) Buddy Bolden's original New Orleans band was: Buddy and Willie "Bunk" Johnson on cornets; Cornelius Tilman on drums; Willie Cornish on trombone; Willie Warner clarinet; Mumford on guitar; Jimmie Johnson (Bunk's brother) on bass; later Frank Duson replaced Willie Cornish on trombone. Bunk said every time he blew a clam Buddy Bolden would knock his cornet out of his hands. Finally poor ole Buddy had to be sent to the insane asylum and three dudes, Lyon, Brock, and Frankie Duson, the "Boys in Brown," took the band over and called it the Eagle Band: Sidney Bechet on clarinet; Sidney's brother Leonard on trombone; Bunk and Sidney Desvigne on cornets; and Joe Bechet on guitar.

6) The first New Orleans bordello to hire a house pianist was Countess Willie Piazza's on Bourbon Street. His name was John the Baptist. Then Jelly Roll came to town and played at Tom Anderson's Annex also on Bourbon.

7) Donna Summers on Tavis Smiley said, "It's all about the moment." Donna is currently on a comeback--I believe her first one, isn't it? She must be broke--I thought she married into the Geffen money--maybe not.

8) New word, "stay-cation," heard used on commercial teevee, meaning a "stay-at-home vacation."

9) Big Eye Lewis Nelson, the early New Orleans clarinet master was probably the first bandleader to ever hire a piano player, a man named Black Pete.

10) In 1914, Sugar Johnny, a cornetist, was the first NOLA-ite to take a jazz band north to Chicago.

11) Jack Papa Laine's White Reliance Band had two blacks playing in it, Achille Baquet (famous for his "Well in a Bucket") and Dave Perkins--both were so lightskinned they easily passed for whites. It almost drove Dave Perkins crazy--he got used to being white and it bothered his musical soul.

12) "Let us think back on the long history of occidental music and observe the invading sweetness that comes sooner or later over each new form of music. It is a sort of decadence which creeps over all art." Roger Payne Dodge, from an article on jazz critics in Ramsey & Smith's Jazzmen --a great little insightful book that takes you back into the jazz realities of the 1920s and '30s when jazz music was born for 16 years, was maturing, and was also facing that invading sweetness that Dodge says eventually creeps over all art.

13) Josh Groban--what an insipidly boring musician and singer! I accidentally stumbled over a Josh Groban PBS-special concert tonight. Josh was singing in his droopy-drawers quavering asshole voice in perfect harmony with some super-style black "perfect" chick singer who pompous-but-tenderly-sweet Josh brought out to show his white audience what a hip dude he was--"Look at me, a pampered little white asshole of a White Mom's delight, working with a swoogie gal!" My question is who were the what-looked-like 5,000 people at this concert? Screaming white girls holding signs saying they wanted Josh to come into the audience so they could hug and kiss him. Arghhhh! I already hated this upstart from years ago--I used to have a Website devoted to jazz and one day I put him and John Tesh on my most-electrified hotseat and tried to reduce them to "faded glory." John Tesh has since disappeared back into his fabulous "Christian" hotshot life with his movie-star wife! Like I hate Yanni, too. These are what the old jazz critics would call "makers of sweet corny music"--Popular music that is milled and not invented--milled for such an old-timey way of singing--I mean Joshie's voice quivers like the old Rudy Vallee white types of those long ago and almost faded away 19-teens, twenties, and thirties. No syncopation at all. Everything up-and-down rather pogo-style--total droopy-drawers music. And when Joshie sits down at the piano he plays just like Alicia Keyes, as though he just finished a John Schaum book on playing via chordal progressions. Bland piano playing and Joshie singing a song he wrote just for his admirers--and shit, folks, my last gig I drew 12 people--Joshie feels like it's over when only 5,000 show up for one of his extravaganzas. And oh yes, like all white pretender singers, Joshie has a band full of black musicians, especially one of those black wonder-dude guitar players (he reminded me of the too-much-peddle-effect playing of Kevin Eubanks)--and a definite all white stars who wish they were black (like the awful Michael McDonald, remember him and his screechin' trying to sing like a black woman?) need in their bands, a black drummer. I'm jealous. Hell yes. I'm jealous, too, that nowadays our pop stars are being picked by a bunch of unknown fops--like why are there so many English judges on all our pantie-waist teevee instant starmaker shows? Like a show called "So You Think You Can Dance." One of the judges is a Brit fop, an old dude who carries on, I say, Brit style for minute-upon-minute on just why or why not a dancer is great, mediocre, or worthless. My question is, when did Brits become dance experts? Let's see you dance like James Brown, you fop. Let's see you dance like Sammy Davis, Jr., you fop. Let's see you dance like Michael Jackson. Let's see you dance like our best American modern dance groups today! But the main point of this note is that I hate Josh Groban--even I could blow his smarmy ass away could I get in a cutting contest with him.

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

The Wolf Man Turns His Back on Reality

A Wolf in a Jazz Sanctuary
Woman at the bank told me I couldn't use money in my account until after 5 today. I ask her why and her reply was the standard one, "It's stated clearly in the bank's rules and regulations...." I stopped her with a growl. Chingamadre! Banks. They've been around since man let his crooked nature rule him--and it is a male thing to be glad-handedly deceiving all the time, constantly working on varieties of trick bags, schemes. "Hey, I got this here mercantile store--I do so much cash business I have to have that monster safe--there's plenty'a room in that safe...well, let's see now, there's space in there I could keep other folks's money on hand for them...yep, I could offer to let them 'deposit'--ooooh, I like that word, it's so syrupy and nice--yes, deposit their cash in my safe--let them deposit their money with me...in turn, I give them a deposit slip in exchange, and then anytime they need some dough, they just trot in to my store, write out a...what'll I call it...a 'take-out' slip...no, no, that's too effeminate--I'll probably only get men customers--though, hell, I'm not one to deny takin' a lady's money, too..." Schemin' all the time. Finally coming up with 'withdrawal slip.' My dad used to boast that he knew every banker in my hometown, he'd gone to high school with them, enough that he'd could walk in any of the three banks and get a quick loan if he needed it or a cup of coffee with all the bank prez's back in their plush offices, "How 'bout I put a dollop of sour mash in that coffee, Big Bad Wolf, and then we'll talk about what you need financially...anything for an old pal...." And my dad really believed that until one day his old pals were gone the way of rich bastards and he was left dealing with an impersonal bank employee who didn't know my dad from the proverbial Adam--and my dad ended up near his end totally antagonistic toward banks..."Like old Hetty Green used to say...they called her the Witch of Wall Street you know, and old Hettie said there wasn't a banker anywhere in New York City who wasn't a crook so she kept her money elsewhere--in the stock market, the bond market, in buying whole railroads--screw their stock--once her only child, Edward, she called him Ned, told her he wanted a train for X-mas so she bought him the Texas Midland Railroad, a thirty-mile freight hauler, in central Texas, just east of Dallas." And I really don't know if Hetty Green said that about bankers, how would my dad know, though he was born in the very town in which Neddy's railroad was headquartered and at about the time Neddy would have been there, living there--Ned Green had the first car ever driven in the unpaved streets of Dallas, Texas...way back in the early 1900s--before cars--and just think about how much horseshit was in those dear olden-day streets. A visitor to New York City back in the mid-1800s said the stench in the Manhattan streets was unbearable it was so thick and smoky and gravy like as it was swallowed up by your nose.

Banks. They raise the hackles down me spine! It's my money, but it isn't my money! It's their money they tell me 'till I withdraw it--free if I withdraw it from their bank at their approved time, but $4.25, if I withdraw it through an ATM at another bank. Bastards! I start cursing them! I need languagehat's book of curses, dammit! "I put a curse on you!" [You had to see Jay Hawkins to appreciate him--and also you have to listen to his infamous "Constipation Blues."] And if I believed in the powers of the wicked I'd certainly put a good curse on banks! I see where CitiBank here in NYC is laying off 5,000 boneheads--wow, just dumping them--"Sorry, we overhired when we were stealing the big bucks from the minorities with our cheap-loan schemes...ah, those golden days! Well, anyway, then we got caught sucking each other's dicks in our VIP men's room and shit now we have to pay out billions in reparations...I mean, folks, we're broke, and rather than firing me and the 52 vice presidents under me, all of whose salaries combined are more than we'll save firing 5,000 bonehead-loyal employees--of course, we'll steal a lot of pension money from you, too...so ya see folks,; why we gotta fire you?" Peasants (read: pissants)--that's what we all are to bankers. Can you imagine a guy making a couple'a million-a-month firing a bunch of people making if tops $75,000 a year? Like the Bear Stearns vice presidents that got busted by the Wall Street police--blaming Bear Stearns going belly up on these poor suckers. Of course, like Scooter Libby and Charles Colson, they'll go to one of the comfortable Fed prisons, the one in Alabama maybe where old crazy-ass John Mitchell served his time playing tennis all day on the prison tennis courts. John Mitchell? You don't remember John Mitchell? How about Martha Mitchell? Nutjobs! They got to rule us for a while.

But, goddammit, my intention was to turn my back on reality. I was listenin' to some George Carlin routines late last night--especially the one about WAR--how we "war" on everything, like our War on Poverty, or the War on Drugs--WAR, WAR, WAR...that's a great routine. And also I found out that that Saturday Night Live I'd seen down in Philadelphia in 1975, in a motel room on the Mainline, was in fact the premier Saturday Night Live and George Carlin was the first guest host! And the "God" routine highly bothered the Sat. Night Live goons--what was that Pepsi-Gen nut that started Sat. Night Live? Anyway, that was the George Carlin I heard that night--Wow! What a quick mind--he was a druggie of course--he was my generation, the forgotten generation--George Carlin perfectly represented the humor of my generation, the quick, cognizant humor--Carlin was a Master of Using Language in its so many variations to drive home his points--his pack of ironies--like his run in the "Seven Words You Can't Say on Television" routine with the word "shit"--like how we all use the word shit, shithead, shit for Shinola, "the shit, you say," "I can't take your shit anymore," stupid shit, how the shit did that happen? Same thing in the WAR routine--twisting the word war into so many vernacular usages. Wow. Such genius. Such turmoil though going on in old George, a trooper to the end, a painful end, and yes he was a druggie and he abused alcohol--and I've buried my ears in a Chet Baker "album" made back in 1959--which seems to be a B.C. date it has been so long ago now, WOW, 49 fucking years, shit, that's a shitload of years, and yet this music is as fresh as a daisy--so romantically pure music, man; yet with that good syncopation present--Chet's velvet trumpet--so full'a blues, an Oklahoma kid who played trumpet in his high school band and then his mother up and moved to Los Angeles--and young, pretty Chet hit the big time big in L.A. when he was just 20, self-taught jazz trumpet, with a mellow, velvet tone, a kind'a pure tone, that became associated with "the Cool" movement that started actually in New York City at the recording of Miles Davis's famous Birth of the Cool album, which had originally been a Gerry Mulligan project, and Chet Baker was an original member of the taking-jazz-right-to-the-top Gerry Mulligan Quartet and then the Quintet, on Pacific Jazz those quartet/quintet albums--"Utter Chaos" Mulligan's theme. That was Cool Jazz--and the Lighthouse All-Star gang, Shorty Rogers (his "Martian" albums were the coolest, man, can you dig? On one Martian cut, it ends with Shelly Manne spinning a 50-cent piece on his snare and the engineer mic-ing it as it spins all the way down to a plop stop. End of tune), Bob Cooper, Bud Shank--and damn I loved Bud Shank's playing--and then he made an album with Laurindo Almeida, the Brazilian jazz guitarist, that was the cat's meow for me--I listened to that album at least a hundred times--especially "Blue Baiao," which was written by Luis Gonzaga and Humberto Teixiera; Teixiera died in '79, but Gonzaga lived on until 1990. I used to work in Rockefeller Center here in NYC and one day my old pal and work partner, Senor B, came back from lunch a little looped--nothing new really--and he immediately started trumpeting the fare he'd just had at a place on West 45th, a Brazilian restaurant called Brasilia. The next day, it was hot as Holy Hades, and since I was a daily visitor to a coin shop on 44th, this day while I was in the neighborhood I decided to walk back down 45th from the coin shop and check out this Brasilia. From that hot day on, I was in Brasilia at least once every day and most times twice every day, so much so it became my home away from home, my headquarters--you wanted to find me, you went to Brasilia. One day while talking to Nealton, the son of the owner, his father Nealson, I mentioned Laurindo Almeida and Neal knew him very well, Nealton was from Rio where Laurindo was from and he was big there, called "The Boss of the Bossa Nova" there, though Laurindo moved to L.A. and became a part of the Cool Jazz movement, and his album with Bud Shank was the coolest damn pre-Stan-Getz-Bringing-the-Bossa-Nova to popularity album there ever was--Stan, that jazz musician, stole Astrud Gilberto away from Gil Gilberto--stole his woman and his music--though the Getz-Gilbertos "Ipanema" was a huge hit and moneymaker for all three of 'em--so in talking to Nealton about Laurindo Almeida I scatted a long bit of "Blue Baiao" and his eyes lit up and he started telling me all about the "baiao" and blah, blah, blah. About a couple'a full moons later, I'm in Brasilia at the bar sipping on a Cachaca (Brazilian gasoline), and Nealton comes up to me with this old geezer, really old, bent over, but still chisled face handsome, skin brown and taut, and Nealton said, "Wolfie, I'd like for you to meet Luiz Gonzaga." "Howdy-do, glad'a meet ya." And just as Nealton said it I realized it, "Luiz wrote 'Blue Baiao'...." "Holy Shit," said I, and I leaned over and kissed the old dude on the cheek--and then I was invited to his table--with his wife and Nealton's chef and his wife and we downed a whole bottle of Cardinal Mendoza brandy--and I started scatting "Blue Baiao" and Luiz and his wife started singing the real lyrics--co-composed way back when Luiz was paired with his friend for life, Humberto Teixeira--from Humberto's Wikipedia entry:

...and he [Humberto Teixeira] met his great co-author of countless hits Luiz Gonzaga. From this co-authorship came the baião a uniform beat made to dance to. They swapped the original instruments the viola, tambourine, steel drum and Brazilian fiddle for the accordion, triangle and bass drum. The new rhythm revolutionized Brazilian music which then swung between the samba songs and imported rhythms.

And what Cool times those were, and what a cool song "Blue Baiao" is--and the host of other tunes on that first Laurindo Almeida/Bud Shank album--there were eventually two it was so popular.

And I was listening to Chet Baker back yonder in '59, with the best, Bill Evans on the old piano, Paul "Mr. P.C." Chambers on bass, Herbie Mann on flute, Pepper Adams on barrie, and Connie Kay on drums. They're all dead now. Ain't that somethin'. At one time in my life these guys were so alive and in my life every damn day and I read about them faithfully in Down Beat and Metronome and I bought their albums, yes, I even liked Herbie Mann, though not so much Pepper Adams, though Bill Evans, shit, "Waltz for Debbie" almost changed my life--and I tried to play modal shit--but I was too fused into my style of boogie-bop--lame left-hand shit--though not any more, folks: I've got my left-hand in overdrive these days--still working on it; like Eubie Blake, I plan on playing the piano until I'm 100!

And Chet's blues takes me back--and I hate being romantic anymore--nostalgia being romantic. And I keep thinking of Tina Turner singing "What's Love Got to Do With It?" What a touching song.

The Cast of Characters

Hetty Green and her dog, Dewey. Hetty's son, Col. E.H. Green in his car. He became a Colonel in Texas, but he was never in the Army.

Laurindo Almeida & Bud Shank.

Chet Baker back in those Cool L.A. Days

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

Shit, Piss, Fuck, Cunt, Cocksucker, Motherfucker, Tits

A Christian Fundamentalist Raised From the Dead
It's early, early Monday morning in New York City. I'm up and getting ready to go out and get my morning coffee from my Muslim coffee peddler over on the near corner of Broadway and the street I live on. The teevee was running all night and I woke up to its white noise and on waking I hit the remote one time and on came this Praise the Lard and pass the biscuits and gravy Christian evangelical-bullshit paid-for (Jesus infomercials) show and as I shook the fuzz from in front of my still-half-sleeping eyes I heard this pig-jowled white guy, an older dude, lookin' good with his diamond rings and his Jesus-approved Rolex gaudily glowing on his wrist, saying that he was peddlin' his new book, 90 Minutes in Heaven. I focused on this dude--you know, awakening my full eyes--and then I came fully awake when I heard him say he'd been in a horrific 4-car pile up outside of a big Jesus-Yahoo conference area he'd just pulled out of some where out in the sticks of the USA--he said 200 pastors were behind him in a holy convoy of Christian automobiles following him in his Chrisitan automobile down the road--soon there followed a huge car crash. The dude talking, the dude who was leading that convoy of preachers, says the last he remembers is looking up and seeing he was plowing into another car. The story continues as this dude says that one of his lamebrain pastor buddies in a car just back of the 4-car pile up came waddling up to the scene to ask the policemen there if there were any people in need of prayer--Whaaaa! How cornball is that?--oh the gall of a dedicated, flim-flammer Christian--but anyway, the police told the guy that only one person was hurt in the wreck and that was the guy in the red car except, the cop added, it's too late to pray with him, he's dead--the cops supposedly wrote him off the minute they peeked in his car and got a gander at him--but this preacher said, it didn't matter, because God was telling him to go pray over the guy in the red car--God talks to these hillbilly Christians on a pretty regular basis--you would think they'd write down all God's words and make a new Christian holy book--the words of a modern God--with a Q&A session maybe: "God, does the sun still go around the earth?" "Well, that's a tough one, my son. I know the Devil has pretty much convinced everyone that the earth goes around the sun, but I say that's heresy, my son, bald-ass heresy--I mean, come on, I made the god-damn sun and earth, I should know what goes around what." "You'd think so."

I impersonate Jesus better than God maybe--but anyway, back to our tale: So this preacher who God is telling to go pray over the dead man in the red car, goes over, and the dead man is covered with a tarp, and the preacher pulls the tarp back and starts praying like a banshee over this supposedly dead body (so saith the police at least). And listen to this, this gumshoe preacher prayed over this dead guy for 5 hours, count 'em--I'm quoting the fundie dude who wrote the book--already it's a little hard for me to believe the police would leave a dead body in a car for five hours--come on! But anyway, I guess it's heresy to doubt a Christian fundie's word, so I'll accept what this dude was saying as true, which was, that after this dude had prayed over him for 5 hours, the dude came back to life. Praise the Mighty Bucket of the Best Lard! A blessed miracle. Again, my heretical nature is asking, why didn't God just let the guy live through the car wreck like he did the other participants in this holy pile up? Of course the answer to that is that God works in mysterious ways--especially he tests Christians out all the time, throwing snares and temptations and car wrecks at 'em--anyway, the long story made short is that the dude talking and selling his book was the dead guy in the red car. His book 90 Minutes in Heaven concerns this dead dude's absolutely clear memory of while he was dead going to Heaven--yep, that Hebbin' from stories of old, that other-universe metropolis that should now have a population of billions of white Christian zombies--is there a black section of Heaven? A Latino section? Anyway, this guy started talking about going to Heaven, yep, he saw the Pearly Gates, you bet he did, and who met him at the Pearly Gates, nope, not Saint Peter the First Pope, nope, but instead a woman named Mrs. Norton (Ed Norton's mother maybe), a woman who had been his neighbor when he was a kid and since his parents didn't go to church, she took him to church, Praise the Lard Piled High, and by golly, she took this dude into Holy Heaven for a quickie tour! Wow, I was so impressed I flipped off the channel and surfed a couple notches up on the remote and then, BOOM, there it was on an early morning teevee newscast: George Carlin had died earlier in L.A. of a heart attack after checking into the hospital due to chest pains--he had a history of a heart problem--and I got to thinking, this yokel dumbass lyin' preacher got to continue to live but NOT George Carlin, perhaps the most intellectual funny man ever--I mean, George Carlin was a god-damn genius when it came to showing just how laughingly hyprocritical we human beings are--George was the master of the sardonic--the first time I ever saw George was on the very first Saturday Night Live I ever watched, I was in Philadelphia, in a motel room out on the Mainline, and George Carlin came on and starting talking about God and my friend and I were struck dead in our tracks listening to this unbelievably complicated yet macabrely funny routine about God.

I was also there when the NYC Pacifica Station, WBAI-FM, played the "Filthy Words" routine and got both George and WBAI into all that FCC trouble.


In memory of George Carlin, like I said, I think the greatest humorist maybe of my time, here's the "Seven Words You Can't Say on Television" routine:

The following is a verbatim transcript of "Filthy Words" (the George Carlin monologue at issue in the Supreme Court case of FCC v. Pacifica Foundation) prepared by the Federal Communications Commission:

Aruba-du, ruba-tu, ruba-tu. I was thinking about the curse words and the swear words, the cuss words and the words that you can't say, that you're not supposed to say all the time, ['cause] words or people into words want to hear your words. Some guys like to record your words and sell them back to you if they can, (laughter) listen in on the telephone, write down what words you say. A guy who used to be in Washington knew that his phone was tapped, used to answer, Fuck Hoover, yes, go ahead. (laughter) Okay, I was thinking one night about the words you couldn't say on the public, ah, airwaves, um, the ones you definitely wouldn't say, ever, [']cause I heard a lady say bitch one night on television, and it was cool like she was talking about, you know, ah, well, the bitch is the first one to notice that in the litter Johnie right (murmur) Right. And, uh, bastard you can say, and hell and damn so I have to figure out which ones you couldn't and ever and it came down to seven but the list is open to amendment, and in fact, has been changed, uh, by now, ha, a lot of people pointed things out to me, and I noticed some myself. The original seven words were, shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker, and tits. Those are the ones that will curve your spine, grow hair on your hands and (laughter) maybe, even bring us, God help us, peace without honor (laughter) um, and a bourbon. (laughter) And now the first thing that we noticed was that word fuck was really repeated in there because the word motherfucker is a compound word and it's another form of the word fuck. (laughter) You want to be a purist it doesn't really -- it can't be on the list of basic words. Also, cocksucker is a compound word and neither half of that is really dirty. The word -- the half sucker that's merely suggestive (laughter) and the word cock is a half-way dirty word, 50% dirty -- dirty half the time, depending on what you mean by it. (laughter) Uh, remember when you first heard it, like in 6th grade, you used to giggle. And the cock crowed three times, heh (laughter) the cock -- three times. It's in the Bible, cock in the Bible. (laughter) And the first time you heard about a cock-fight, remember -- What? Huh? naw. It ain't that, are you stupid? man. (laughter, clapping) It's chickens, you know, (laughter) Then you have the four letter words from the old Anglo-Saxon fame. Uh, shit and fuck. The word shit, uh, is an interesting kind of word in that the middle class has never really accepted it and approved it. They use it like, crazy but it's not really okay. It's still a rude, dirty, old kind of gushy word. (laughter) They don't like that, but they say it, like, they say it like, a lady now in a middle-class home, you'll hear most of the time she says it as an expletive, you know, it's out of her mouth before she knows. She says, Oh shit oh shit, (laughter) oh shit. If she drops something, Oh, the shit hurt the broccoli. Shit. Thank you. (footsteps fading away) (papers ruffling)

Read it! (from audience)

Shit! (laughter) I won the Grammy, man, for the comedy album. Isn't that groovy? (clapping, whistling) (murmur) That's true. Thank you. Thank you man. Yeah. (murmur) (continuous clapping) Thank you man. Thank you. Thank you very much, man. Thank, no, (end of continuous clapping) for that and for the Grammy, man, [']cause (laughter) that's based on people liking it man, yeh, that's ah, that's okay man. (laughter) Let's let that go, man. I got my Grammy. I can let my hair hang down now, shit. (laughter) Ha! So! Now the word shit is okay for the man. At work you can say it like crazy. Mostly figuratively, Get that shit out of here, will ya? I don't want to see that shit anymore. I can't cut that shit, buddy. I've had that shit up to here. I think you're full of shit myself. (laughter) He don't know shit from Shinola. (laughter) you know that? (laughter) Always wondered how the Shinola people feel about that (laughter) Hi, I'm the new man from Shinola. (laughter) Hi, how are ya? Nice to see ya. (laughter) How are ya? (laughter) Boy, I don't know whether to shit or wind my watch. (laughter) Guess, I'll shit on my watch. (laughter) Oh, the shit is going to hit de fan. (laughter) Built like a brick shit-house. (laughter) Up, he's up shit's creek. (laughter) He's had it. (laughter) He hit me, I'm sorry. (laughter) Hot shit, holy shit, tough shit, eat shit, (laughter) shit-eating grin. Uh, whoever thought of that was ill. (murmur laughter) He had a shit-eating grin! He had a what? (laughter) Shit on a stick. (laughter) Shit in a handbag. I always like that. He ain't worth shit in a handbag. (laughter) Shitty. He acted real shitty. (laughter) You know what I mean? (laughter) I got the money back, but a real shitty attitude. Heh, he had a shit-fit. (laughter) Wow! Shit-fit. Whew! Glad I wasn't there. (murmur, laughter) All the animals -- Bull shit, horse shit, cow shit, rat shit, bat shit. (laughter) First time I heard bat shit, I really came apart. A guy in Oklahoma, Boggs, said it, man. Aw! Bat shit. (laughter) Vera reminded me of that last night, ah (murmur). Snake shit, slicker than owl shit. (laughter) Get your shit together. Shit or get off the pot. (laughter) I got a shit-load full of them. (laughter) I got a shit-pot full, all right. Shit-head, shit-heel, shit in your heart, shit for brains, (laughter) shit-face, heh (laughter) I always try to think how that could have originated; the first guy that said that. Somebody got drunk and fell in some shit, you know. (laughter) Hey, I'm shit-face. (laughter) Shitface, today. (laughter) Anyway, enough of that shit. (laughter) The big one, the word fuck that's the one that hangs them up the most. [']Cause in a lot of cases that's the very act that hangs them up the most. So, it's natural that the word would, uh, have the same effect. It's a great word, fuck, nice word, easy word, cute word, kind of. Easy word to say. One syllable, short u. (laughter) Fuck. (Murmur) You know, it's easy. Starts with a nice soft sound fuh ends with a kuh. Right? (laughter) A little something for everyone. Fuck (laughter) Good word. Kind of a proud word, too. Who are you? I am FUCK. (laughter) FUCK OF THE MOUNTAIN. (laughter) Tune in again next week to FUCK OF THE MOUNTAIN. (laughter) It's an interesting word too, [']cause it's got a double kind of a life -- personality -- dual, you know, whatever the right phrase is. It leads a double life, the word fuck. First of all, it means, sometimes, most of the time, fuck. What does it mean? It means to make love. Right? We're going to make love, yeh, we're going to fuck, yeh, we're going to fuck, yeh, we're going to make love. (laughter) we're really going to fuck, yeah, we're going to make love. Right? And it also means the beginning of life, it's the act that begins life, so there's the word hanging around with words like love, and life, and yet on the other hand, it's also a word that we really use to hurt each other with, man. It's a heavy. It's one that you have toward the end of the argument. (laughter) Right? (laughter) You finally can't make out. Oh, fuck you man. I said, fuck you. (laughter, murmur) Stupid fuck. (laughter) Fuck you and everybody that looks like you. (laughter) man. It would be nice to change the movies that we already have and substitute the word fuck for the word kill, wherever we could, and some of those movie cliches would change a little bit. Madfuckers still on the loose. Stop me before I fuck again. Fuck the ump, fuck the ump, fuck the ump, fuck the ump, fuck the ump. Easy on the clutch Bill, you'll fuck that engine again. (laughter) The other shit one was, I don't give a shit. Like it's worth something, you know? (laughter) I don't give a shit. Hey, well, I don't take no shit, (laughter) you know what I mean? You know why I don't take no shit? (laughter) [']Cause I don't give a shit. (laughter) If I give a shit, I would have to pack shit. (laughter) But I don't pack no shit cause I don't give a shit. (laughter) You wouldn't shit me, would you? (laughter) That's a joke when you're a kid with a worm looking out the bird's ass. You wouldn't shit me, would you? (laughter) It's an eight-year-old joke but a good one. (laughter) The additions to the list. I found three more words that had to be put on the list of words you could never say on television, and they were fart, turd and twat, those three. (laughter) Fart, we talked about, it's harmless It's like tits, it's a cutie word, no problem. Turd, you can't say but who wants to, you know? (laughter) The subject never comes up on the panel so I'm not worried about that one. Now the word twat is an interesting word. Twat! Yeh, right in the twat. (laughter) Twat is an interesting word because it's the only one I know of, the only slang word applying to the, a part of the sexual anatomy that doesn't have another meaning to it. Like, ah, snatch, box and pussy all have other meanings, man. Even in a Walt Disney movie, you can say, We're going to snatch that pussy and put him in a box and bring him on the airplane. (murmur, laughter) Everybody loves it. The twat stands alone, man, as it should. And two-way words. Ah, ass is okay providing you're riding into town on a religious feast day. (laughter) You can't say, up your ass. (laughter) You can say, stuff it! (murmur) There are certain things you can say its weird but you can just come so close. Before I cut, I, uh, want to, ah, thank you for listening to my words, man, fellow, uh space travelers. Thank you man for tonight and thank you also. (clapping whistling)

From Pacifica Archives

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler