Foto by tgw, New York City, 2010-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
New York City Landlords Once Again Claiming Poverty
I am "up 'n Adam" (speaking "Prezian" (the language of Lester Young)) with the dawn. Listening to Shostakovich's very intellectual 1st and 2nd string quartets. I just bought a Decca box set (England) of all 16 (6 CDs) of Shosty's string quartets for 99 cents on eBay (even with $3.oo shipping that's cheap). Nicely packaged with notes by some classical music smart-ass writing as though he's more capable of understanding Shostakovich's music than Shostakovich was himself. We expect this from classical reviewers. They must show their astute musical intelligence in ordinary words. Boring, but I read them anyway. I like reading intellectual boring stuff. Stiffs, we used to call classical geeks. Longhairs was what they were called when I was a little "keed" (speaking "Babe Ruthian") taking piano lessons.
I'm drinking coffee. Black. I did away with milk and cream and shit like that in my coffee years ago. This bean's relaxin' me. I'm "tippin' in" (speaking "Errol Garnerian") to the day on "little cat feet" (speaking "Carl Sandbergian"). S'pose to go up to 90 today and be humid and there's no humor in humidity of that I will be guaranteed today. Ninety in New York City means the temperature in my unair-conditioned apartment will go up over 100--I've seen it at 120 one summer when I went through that summer without even any fans. I was recording one afternoon and looked over my piano out into the room and I saw water floating in the air of the room. How fiercely I loved that afternoon--and I still possess a tape on which I left the mic open and I'm talking about what I'm seeing floating in the air before me, that I am sitting at a piano literally underwater--sucking the oxygen out of the oily vaporous waters into which my lungs they're flowing. (Damn, I like writing sentences like that last one. My editorial-critical nature leads me to rewrite it but my sitting-on-my-shoulder muse--she's female--tells me to fuck the speed limit and full speed ahead.)
Besides, these are the jotted-down-fast words of a solo-flying lone-wolf of a man. I've no more wives--no children that I let call me daddy--I am standing alone looking down this final hill, down the narrow trail that ends at my burial place--or the cigar box my ashes will be preserved in--unless a future relative's child or Alzheimer'd parent mistakes my remains for Nestle's Chocolate Drink Mix and makes a milk shake out of me--and I base my chocolate milk shake analogy on the basis of my nephew's cigar box of ashes that sits handily on a shelf in the dining area of his sister's kitchen--very reachable by a young child curious as to what's in the cigar box--oops--and I forgot about that potential end of me! Spilled on the floor; vacuumed up and sent to hell by maybe a "housekeeper" (new proper word for maid). A man flying solo solo flying in New York City (whoooo, what a beginning to a sentence)--I'm "flyin' home" (speaking "Charlie Christianian") hot, adapted to the beats of all temperatures--from Hellish hot to Hellish cold. I've always been an admirer of statements like, "Jesus, I'm cold as Hell." I used to perform a John Lee Williamson blues I learned from Aleck "Rice" Miller in 1960 called "9 Below Zero." For some reason I remembered the last verse of it as "I'd rather be tied out in the desert/Right out in the falling rain"--to which Bob Guida (theryefarmerfromqueens) playing bass behind me would holler out, "It don't rain in the desert, Wolfie!" Yet, still to this day when I'm asked to repeat my version of the song once again, I sing that last verse whether wrong-or-not that way--though now I wait for Bob's response and it doesn't come.
The heat of loneliness? There's no such thing as loneliness in my New York City life. Yes, there are lonely people wandering all over this town, but one of them is not me. I've never been lonely not even when left alone. Not even when left alone and lost. Not even when lost and left alone.
The sea air of Rhode Island was sweet to breathe. It cleared up my polluted lungs--ridded them temporarily of the highly polluted New York City air remains that were oilily clinging to my easy-going lungs--New York City air that is now being polluted more and more by high-rise luxury apartment and hotel building sites--building 52-t0-62-storey buildings all around me--polluting the air with construction dusts of all kinds and chemical fumes and gasoline and diesel fumes and noise--constructing these buildings that will one day be using enormous amounts of energy and adding another layer of pollution to the already offal-laden NYC air. The air-conditioning systems in these buildings are small buildings themselves sitting atop these architectural monstrosities--gigantic dynamic units needed to pump hot and frigid air through the miles of ducts these behemoth buildings contain--water too coming down from the wooden tanks on their roofs--hidden on some of them, left tank-obvious on others. These maintaining the pressure needed to move that water from the city system up to the tanks on the roofs--and in their basements they need bigger-than-life boilers to heat the water and the building--and these boilers burn enormous amounts of fuel OIL--and their exhaust pipes up on the roofs spew out the fumes from this burnt OIL all up into our air--and it comes back down and into our apartments as oily grit that accumulates in ugly layers on our window sills whether insulated and sealed or not...falling sooty onto our flat surfaces! The emissions from these buildings will add 100% more pollution to the already over 100%-polluted air over this great city. An air full of dioxins, mercury poisons, cadmium leads, the excrement of buildings--their fecal matter. Yet, construction continues though it has slowed tremendously down--some sites shut totally down, others running on lean staffs of nonunion and illegal immigrant construction workers.
I just saw a report yesterday on how with the falling of the Euro dollar, Euro-Trash apartment gobblers-uppers and developer types are turning away from NYC real estate, where just a few months ago, our Billionaire Mayor, Mall-Mad Mike Bloomberg, was jacking us off with how New York City real estate was still prime and how these Euro-Trashers coming over here with their probably ill-gotten Euro bucks were keeping the NYC real estate market in the uppercrust areas (sky high) of affordability. Now, statistics show NYC real estate is taking a tumble, not at the bottom yet--though parts of it are dragging the bottom already. The Mayor's "higher" tax base may be collapsing around us, while ironically, NYC landlords are making big bucks on high rents and added-on charges like $100-a-month added onto your rent if you install an air-conditioner. My nextdoor neighbor with a wife and a kid is paying $2500-a-month for two tiny rooms, a living room-kitchen-bathroom and a bedroom that at one time was the apartment's kitchen. So you bet my landlord is making a profit off that apartment. Yes, these greedy bastards are mortgaged to the hilt, but that doesn't matter to rich people who can afford to buy New York City buildings. Like Donald Trump going bankrupt at a certain time every year in order to bail himself out of failing casinos and unrented or unsold hi-floor apartments he depends on for at least footing the costs of building his tacky buildings. Did you know Donald Trump (a dumbass kid from Queens, New York, whose old pappy was a successful real estate man) probably makes his most "profits" off his tanking teevee show and his real-estate-get-rich scheme than he does creating these very tacky Trump Cities all over the world. Hey, if you had big stolen bucks say from illegal arms dealing or maybe illegal diamond trading or being involved with a drug cartel, or perhaps with a huge offshore bank deposit, why wouldn't you invest (launder) that tainted money through Trump and one of his many building projects going on all over the world? Think about that. Think about how Trump's image is totally accepted as the Amurican Dream "Self-Made Man" by we US fools. So think about how easy it would be for The Donald to launder billions of off-the-books money around the world--mostly out of reach of our overtaxed IRS auditors.
Rich people support their asshole buddies, failures or not (read Thorstein Veblen's Theory of the Leisure Class; C. Wright Mills's The Power Elite)--like G.W. Bush and his many failed ventures (ditto the ventures of Neal Bush, Marvin Bush, the backgrounded daughter, Jeb (named after a Confederate general) Bush). G.W. came out of all of those failures richer and more powerful thanks to his old Pappy's worldwide criminal connections--with cocaine trafficking in South America, for instance. Remember, Pappy Bush knew the Panamanian coke dealer General Noriega--there are photos of them being buddy-buddy together--and then the General decided he was gonna fuck Pappy and handle their joint cocaine traffic himself. That's when Pappy went after his ass--remember? Pappy dropped a bomb on the poor of Panama; killed scores of these filthy savage devils (over 1000(?))--eventually getting his man and setting him up in a Miami-mansion-prison where Noriega has sat for some years now being supported in his comfortable jail life by We the People of the USA.
It's easy for these assholes to launder drug money in their many under-the-table ways. Whereas had you been Noriega but not Pappy's pal, you'd be scratching lines on the wall of some prison for 25-to-life. Under the Rockefeller Drug Laws of New York State you'd get life without parole for even a minor drug charge--and ain't it ironic that the Rockefeller Drug Laws were put into effect by an egomaniacal son of the biggest industrial crook of our time, John D. Rockefeller, an oil man who knew nothing about oil--was a drugstore bookkeeper from Ohio. Nelson Rockefeller, the man for whom the Rockefeller Drug Laws are named, died with a smile on his face while getting a blow job from two young women, one of whom is now on the board of PBS--oh, that's right, it was rumored she was there, but that she was not the girl (Megan Marshak) who supposedly was sucking on old Rocky's gnarly knob when he died. [Check out whipitoutcomedy.com/ They've got a list of famous people who've died having sex--my favorite is the Pope who is said to have had a heart attack while sodomizing a page boy. Amazing the antics of our early Roman Catholic (Christian) clerics--I mean, I don't think of priests without thinking of young boys; though there have been you're highly jacked-up hetero priests, one of whom in Whipitout's list either had a heart attack while in the saddle with another man's wife or else he was caught in the act by the husband who then beat the poor Holy Father to a pulp. All referring me back to The Decameron.]
So due to the dying NYC real estate boom--"It's over, Johnny!"--NYC landlords are now crying poverty and asking for rent increases up to 15%. Does it make sense if your building is losing money to raise the rents? Why not lower the rents and rent all your apartments rather than letting them sit empty because you can't get the abominable high rents Mayor Bloomberg has justified as "normal," due to his kissing tourists's and foreign developers's asses. Can you believe that the only industry left in New York City is tourism?
One thing that was kind of sickening on my trip to and from Rhode Island was passing the huge number of abandoned factory buildings from New York City all the way on up to Rhode Island--some huge, like the abandoned Samsonite factory building in Warren, Rhode Island. A huge old red-brick factory building that is now being turned into luxury condos or artist lofts. These properties simply abandoned by these companies as they fly their machinery off to China, where I assume Samsonite luggage is now made.
You look at these old factories and you think about how once nearly everything we buy was made in this country. New York City was the fashion center of the world, not Paris. It was the millinery capital of the world. Men's ties were made here. Rochester, New York, used to be the men's suit-making capital of the US--Hart, Schafter & Marx suits were considered some of the finest made in the world--now gone! Van Heusen made shirts here. Hathaway shirts considered the most stylish pure Egyptian cotton shirts in the world were made here. Remember the Hathaway man with his eyepatch and "sophisticated" look in his Classic Hathaway shirt? Now when I buy clothes I check the labels to see where they're made. Singapore. Malaysia. Indonesia. China. Ecuador. Honduras. It's hard to find any clothes made in the USA. One funny one I saw on a K-Mart shirt the other day was "Made in Mexico Out of Materials Made in USA."
That's the global marketplace, folks. And you know we live in a corporate state now...or did you not know that? We are now consumers only and when we run out of money to consume with, some cell of crooks will issue us more credit cards and offer us time-payment plans galore. I love these "No Interest Until 2014!" sucker ads--especially popular on furniture store ads in NYC. And I'm thinking, the same fools who support the American Idol teevee show (or who idolize Oprah or Ellen) fall for these advertisements. No interest until 4 years from now means that the item you bought for $5000 at 5% per month interest is gonna blow your ass away when you get the final payment total and all that interest piled up over 4 years is coming due.
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How embarrassing are our "public servants" over the British Petroleum bullshit that's being bandied about in Washington at our expense? Especially the southern-drawling racist Congress-Corporate Asslicker, Rep. Joe Barton of, I'm ashamed to say, Texas, a Repugnican, who called what Obama was doing forcing BP to put a 20-billion-dollar escrow account to draw claims from a "shakedown." Turns out Joe reaped a million or so off Anadarko OIL, a subsidiary of BP--why son of a bitch--and it turns out old Joe is on the energy committee. Why son of a bitch! I say if you check all the stock portfolios of these overpaid public servants you'll find 'em chocked full of OIL stocks. Our public servants are servants of the Corporation Massuhs who they really represent--those Plantation-creating Corporations who our Supremely Dumb Court insists are individual citizens, with the same Constitutional rights as you and I. Check out their stock portfolios and you'll find 'em all shucking their BP stock--and I guarantee you all of 'em have stock portfolios chocked full of OIL stocks. [The CEO of BP was seen having a fucking royal old time of it at the yacht races in England today.]
I say, old chap, what the fuck good are these Congressional investigations by these overpaid asshole fat-cat Congresspeople? (No caps on their salaries, you notice.) An American citizen (OK, she was a Code Pinker) stood up during yesterday's sham investigation and screamed that these little lyin' pipsqueak Brit-twit asshole BP execs are criminals and should pay for their crimes by being handcuffed and hauled off to the Capitol jail for pretrail waterboarding--they'd be held as murderers in the animal world court (perhaps with dolphins and pelicans as judges). But the Congressional lackey cops quickly hustled this creepy American citizen out of the chambers--oh so solemn these solons are as they go about their asinine sham investigations. Oh no they snidely defend their actions, these great OILMEN are not criminals, simply brilliant men sidetracked by this big accidental leak--not bad at all, according to BP's precious commercials--respected not as criminals but as pals gone haywire in the tough world of unfair pressures.
British Petroleum should be confiscated by We the People. Come on, Obama, you're kowtowing to the fucking rightwingers again with this OIL catastrophe--you're spouting the same bullshit G.W. Bush spouted when he first flew over and then was humiliated to fly back over and actually land in Mississippi (remember, he said he was there to check to see if his old pal Trent "Strom Thurmond for President" Lott's front porch was repaired yet) after the Gulf Coast disaster caused by hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Remember Bush setting up his own lighting equipment along with his podium with the presidential seal on it in Jackson Square and making that holier-than-thou speech where he pledged he was gonna bring New Orleans back bigger and better than before and with less blacks, too, by golly? Remember that speech?
All this BP trouble Obama's facing now was caused by Unka Dick Cheney and his OIL gang, the misfits who allowed BP to drill-drill-drill, deep-deep-deep rights in our Gulf Coast waters in the first place. By the way, these are the same assholes promoting natural gas as a clean energy source, too--promoted especially by T. Boone Pickens (a poker player turned OILman) and Unka Dick (a Texan turned Wyomingite) both from gas-producing states, T. Boone from the Panhandle of Texas and Unka Dick from Wyoming--eastern Wyoming being drill-drill-drilled dry of its natural gas via thousands of gas wells and blown to bits and dug into to extract heavy sulphur coal out of Wyoming's beautiful rolling plains where the buffalo once roamed and the real Americans worshipped the beauty and providence of this magnificent land--and Wyoming is one of the most scenic Lower 48 states in terms of rugged mountains extending out into rolling grassland plains--from mountain blue rolling out into grassy gold.
Unka Dick Cheney. Oh how lucky this little criminal prick is. We tend to forget this weasel-like old bastard with the evil-bad ticker was head of Halliburton and continued to reap profits from Halliburton even after he was VICE-president under G.W. Bush's two stolen-presidential terms. And trust me, folks, you don't have to guess at it, Unka Dick Cheney (his evil mentor Pappy GWH Bush) is heavily involved in this offshore drilling catastrophe. Halliburton of Dubai, United Arab Emirates--formerly of Ardmore, OkieHoma (becoming a major player in OIL after stealing oil lands from Native American Oklahomans)--now an ARAB company--how fucking ironic is all of this? Nationalize these OIL crooks! We the People own our OIL just like the Saudi-Arabians own their OIL and Iraq is trying to hold on to its OIL and Iran is simply defending itself against those wanting to steal its OIL--like British Petroleum--and like the British Empire, cause of everything WRONG going on in the world today.
All who know me know I am a natural-born Anglo-basher. I'm especially peeved by the Brit accent--and also the Aussie accent--though I now have an Aussie in my closeknit relationships who's a peach of a dude (speaking "Deep South American"). All day long now all over NYC commercial television are Brit fops involved in every-other ad (the Geico geiko speaks with an Australian accent); around NYC are these Outback Steak Houses whose ads emphasize that perhaps Australians invented the "barby," when I know, being a Texan, that barbecuing is simply a way of cooking normal to the way of life of guachos, vaqueros, cowboys--the chuck wagon cooks throwing the big steaks onto grills heated by buffalo chip fires or mesquite-wood fires--though in reality, barbecuing was probably invented by our earliest human neanderthals those who lived in caves and discovered a perpetual flame--the flame of the perpetual fire becoming a symbol of God (the Sun) to ancient civilizations (the artificiality of mankind). Most of our teevee amateur dance and entertainer shows are judged by Brit fops, one Ozzie Osbourne's boring wife (Howie Mandell, a Canadian, also a judge on that show); insults to our American musical and dance history, actually much uniquer than anything the Brits ever came up with--and in dance I respect guys like Michael Fokine, though, hey, these people left London and came to the US because the dance over here, you see, had discovered JAZZ and jazz intertwined with the modern dance forms of de Mille and Dunham and Graham--Black-American-African-Rooted dance blending in to form a way of dancing that was loose as a goose yet so based on American beats and rhythms and times and fantasy.
I watched the teevee show 60 Minutes the other eve and by God they've added a Brit chick to their staff of reporters. Several of the announcers of our US Open Golf Tournament going on out at Pebble Beach Golf Course (owned by a Japanese developer) are Brits and the majority of the players are Brit Empire whites from South Africa, England, Australia, Ireland. The "Vikings" or whatever the hell they are in the Capital One (where did this company come from?) commercials all speak with Brit accents. Cockney is becoming the appropriate way to speak English now! The Brits stole my American roots music right out from under me--a majority of my fellow White American musicians went right along with this notion that is now widespread that the Brits invented modern rock 'n roll. The Brits took the blues out of American music and turned our rock into bubble-gum rock--"Don't put your chewing gum on the bedpost at night"--but then most of us don't remember Lonnie Donegan, do we?
So now British Petroleum has claimed our Gulf of Mexico shoreline as their own. And how insulting are these new BP commercials (why are they running on NYC teevee?) showing this friendly serious Black male who says he's a local boy--he's dressed supercasual--and he's been put in charge of handing out the 20-billion bucks in claims checks from the forced-on BP 20-billion escrow account--the Black guy (actor), you notice, never gives his name during the whole of these insulting commercials. However, don't worry, about BP, they'll make up for their losses with bankruptcies and spinning off smaller entities and getting new tax breaks and future drilling leases and future offshore drilling--maybe they'll change their name and move to Dubai, United Arab Emirates--though isn't Dubai currently bankrupt?
The British Empire lives on--sending the World to hell in a fucking Indian-made Jaguar handbasket--those Woggies, so Brit clever they are. [In an interesting aside, it's rumored that that great patriotic American terrorist, Eric Prince, is moving his private army, Blackwater, to Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Why don't We the People of the USA simply annex all these states--even Israel--let's make them states of our DISUNION!]
theanglophobicgrowlingwolf
for The Anglophobic Daily Growler
THE FINAL WORD...from our Guest Reporter...MR MET!!!
"Hey, you smug mugs. Go Mets! Huzzahs all 'round por mis amigos. How 'bout our kicking some Yankee ass yesterday! Yee haw! Go Mets. Go Hashimoto, or whatever his name is. I ain't learnt no Japanese yet. I'm still workin' on my Spanish. Go Mets! Who's the hottest team in beisbol NOW, you Yankee assholes! Go Mets! Steinbrenner has Alzheimer's! ARod swung like a pansy last night. And thank you, Jorge Posada--you can't knock one by the great David Wright! Go Mets! KISS MY LITTLE CHINA-MADE ASS! F___! the Phillies. F___! the Braves. GO METS!
"Thank you,
[signed] Mr. Met"
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