Foto by tgw, "Full Moon Over Manhattan," New York City, 2010
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[A The Daily Growler Red Alert: Our dear sweet humanitarian Congress just gave Obama 33 more billions of our borrowed money for his precious WAR against Afghanistan--his evil war against Afghanistan--his continuing of George W. Bush's WAR policies and Surge-military-tactics that so far have not worked--WE ARE LOSING THIS WAR, you Fools--but it's a WAR Obama cannot help continuing--his balls are being tightly squeezed by our Corporate-backed WARmongering Power Elites to continue with the Iraq War, the Afghanistan War, the murderous over-the-border attacks into Pakistan, the threatening War with Iran, and the really big-time threatening NUCLEAR WAR with North Korea (those dirty sorry commie rediculous bastards). Obama will give a glowing speech of great backwards-thinking Harvard-debate-team platitudes when he announces we are going to NUCLEAR WAR with North Korea on a presidential order and not officially through Congress. And you threw away those gas masks.]
[Do you find, like we do, that the Clintons spending 3 million dollars on Chelsea's wedding a bit insulting given the state of the economy and people losing their jobs and their homes...HOW DO WE THE PEOPLE TOLERATE THESE INSULTS TO OUR HARD WORK, OUR TAXED LIVES--THESE PEOPLE ARE LIVING OFF OUR EARNINGS! Remember this when you're watching Chelsea blow 3 million bucks on her wedding (the wedding of the New Century), her father as President took more civil rights away from We the People than any president before him. President Slick Willie did do away with habeas corpus and did give us the original Patriot Act.]
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The Wolf in Me vs. The Man in Me
Comprehending the incomprehensible. That hit me this morning during my morning reading--and God that sounds so old-fashioned...dammit, and "old-fashioned" is so old-fashioned now. And NOW. And I live in the damn NOW but the society I live in lives in the past or the future, both of which do not exist. Only the NOW. Living in two worlds at the same time gives two definitions to everything. I try to comprehend this two-sided world in the sense of the fictionalized (comfortable) world (my own world) I have set up for myself to live in from which I can comfortably empirically view the real world (the world I exist in) as it amoebically spreads alive beneath me (my view that is). My own world, as I've constantly harped on in my past, is one of a continual present (or presence) (Gertrude Stein writing in her continual present tense). Thoughts come to me on the fly in this world, dig? And old-fashioned way we (my generation) used to say "dig" after we'd posed a solution to a problem and you either said "I can dig it,'" in return or you could retort with, "I can't dig that, man." But dig is NOW so moldy-oldy, another old-fashioned term from, Jesus Christ, as far back as Louis Armstrong's time in the spotlight on this revolving stage (when an entertainer is on stage entertaining that's his or her continual present). We would say something and ask a question: "I'm pretty sure I can lift that car, dig?" "What? Dig you liftin' that car? Come on, man, you jivin' me. If you can lift that car I'll kiss your ass from here to Milwaukee, dig?" Now, there's no question only, "Oooh, that's awesome, dude." Or is awesome old-fashioned by NOW? [I make mention here of the generation following mine--the Hippy Generation, a mostly all-White generation--used to end every sentence with "you know?" "I think love is beyond my dimensions, man, you know?" From whence came a lot of "er-ahs" (dumb pauses within what you're trying to say), also followed by "you knows." "Hey, dude, er-ah, you know, like, why are carrots silver when I'm high, man, you know?"]
And living in the NOW is living fast. In the NOW, manmade artificial time sails along as fast as that grand full moon, that big laughing orange spaceship that sailed into my field of vision around 5:30 this morning and had sailed on and gone by 5:45. What a moon, you dig?" Fat and full it was. Clearly full of vexing symbolism, long oolooloo poems, and clocking the consistent tide manipulations as it swept the heavens clean of moonbeams.
And all speed is getting faster. We are now deeply into nanosecond thinking. The real world is a world of instant information. Boom, and like a pop-up toaster sending up your nicely toasted bread, up pops information all nicely toasted and buttered and served to you on a silver screen or a print-out sheet. Everyone's a renaissance person now!
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Walmart (or Wal-Mart, or the Sam Walton Shopping Mart of Yahoo (Bentonville), Arkansas), I read, is now going to radio tag all their pairs of underwear. Wallmart is NOW in the information gathering business. Walmart's explanation is that it's only an inventory thing--when you by a pair of shorts or a pair of panties, Walmart's snoop doggies can route this signal into the inventory reorder bin and those shorts you're wearing can be automatically reordered--plus, Walmart's spy network can know when you throw those shorts away and send you an alert e-mail: "We noticed you just threw away your faux-cotton 'Made in Communist China by 5-year-olds' genuine inflammable Moxey Joxey crotch-adjustable shorts/panties. Bring your used shorts/panties into your local Walmart for a coupon allowing you 50 yen off our regular low price on another pair of shorts or panties--besides, whewwww, it's about time you got a new pair of underwear. Your Friendly Walmart Underwear-Tracking Manager, Ted Brownstain, Jr."
I'm such a rediculous man. I think rediculouse would have been a more clever put down of me and my full-moon thoughts. I refer to a commenter's comment on our last post (remember, I suffer from multiple identities). I had pissed this commenter off when I referred to the three Triple Canopy hired guns (two Ugandans and one Peruvian--none a US citizen) who were killed several days ago in Baghdad in a rocket attack on the Green Zone (home of the world's largest embassy) as "soldiers." It's kind'a like he's saying, "How dare I call these Triple Canopy hired guns soldiers. Triple Canopy, you see, is simply a for-profit PRIVATE "security" firm paid a billion or 2 bucks a year to GUARD the freedoms that GREEN ZONE represents to true patriots, of which, of course, I'm not included; therefore, I'm "rediculous." Yes, I am ridiculous (I like drunken John Wayne's way of putting it, "I'm ree-god-damn-dickulus"). I'm meaning to be ridiculous. One must be ridiculous to get one's point across in this vast sea of television-cell-phone-iphone-droid-electro-magnetic-info numbskulls who believe the incomprehensible principle of "my country right or wrong"--and if you don't go along with that--you see, these idiots see the opposite of Capitalism as Communism (or Socialism, or Humanitarianism--"Godless" political and economic systems)--and they don't know one fucking thing about Communism or Capitalism. They don't know why Adam Smith called his book The Wealth of Nations. That's what Capitalism is, going about stealing or acquiring the wealth of nations, thus bringing all that RAW (unrefined) wealth back to your superiorly armed but natural-resource-poor nation where it is refined (produced into a good (the opposite of a bad)). This is one of the inherent reasons why We White People of the USA respect the British as being so much more refined than us--so mannerly and so civilized--so much more civilized than We the People of the USA--yet, We the Rainbowed-Colored People of the USA have the most intelligent and wildly experimental of young people coming up--curious--genius in certain learned ways, like knowledge of computers and how to manage them and use them for promoting your talents and wares--yet, our Power Elite (our rulers) are eager to sacrifice our best and brightest young kids (now both boys and girls) on the altar of the God of WAR, our current economic and political system, a WAR economy/politics governed by contributions of cash, WARS our current distraction from the real world we actually NOW live in. All this distraction while the world's corporations are secretly setting up their NEW WORLD ORDER--a Global Nation broken up into corporate states--broken up into corporate police states. Maybe one day we'll see on teevee: "The U.S. Army today announced they'd made a deal with British Petroleum and from now on the U.S. Army will be referred to as 'The British Petroleum U.S. Army,' with a cosponsorship from Nike and Walmart." But then, oh how REDiculous I sound.
Now, here, let me really be REDICULOUSEY: you should know I believe with Jung and Philip Wylie (an American-born writer whose niece's murder became one of the most famous murder cases in the long history of murder in New York City) that man is simply an animal. An animal under the illusional belief that he or she has a divine beginning. A supernatural beginning. An animal who has justified his being by historically tracing it back to what he has projected onto his mind's screen as his "Heavenly Father," a big huge White man who once lived in a Green Zone where the Tigris and Euphrates rivers come together (why that's Baghdad) he called Eden--and God resided in the Garden of Eden (L.A. once had an apartment complex called the Garden of Allah) and created the first human, a man, of course, who this big huge White man called Adam. This is the animal we know today in our heads as Homo sapien, in our own particular language (the language of our heads)--or in one of our ancient languages--at least one of our ancient Western languages, the language we call Latin--Homo sapien. It means "wise man" in this language we call Latin. Now that's rediculousey, ain't it? Man the illusional animal lives in the past and the future. Living in the NOW stuns him and leaves him helpless. Leaves him looking ridiculous.
What Do Writers Have to Do With It?
Back in my loft bed this morning, the full moon having sailed on past to sail in gloom over New Jersey--I felt growly and not in the mood to howl. To calm down, I tried a little early-morning radio--this guy I know for his radio show of a couple of decades now was interviewing a famous Sci-Fi writer (the only ones I truly know are Samuel R. Delaney and Robert Heinlein)--and I mean my radio friend was really trumpeting heartily this guy's style of writing--"it's marvelously complicated," he said. I laughed my Wolf Man ass off during this interview. The writer, I have no idea who he was, had a gruff gravelly voice and was doing his best to answer stupid-dick questions like "I know this is a bothersome question to a writer of your regard, but I'm puzzled as to just...well, er-ah, I'll come right out and ask you, how do you come up with such marvelous...how do you begin to write such marvelously complicated stuff?" How does a real writer respond to such a full-moon question? Oh sweet amateurs.
As a band singer I've faced audiences out of which I know at least a third of them figured they could sing as well as I could--and that's balderdash because I'm a damn good singer and I've actually studied breathing technique and finally learned to sing with the 1 (the time) in my automatically measuring mind and singing from the solar plexus (diaphragm)--plus I had a damn good band full of damn good musicians behind me too--no Pro Tools pitching my voice to perfection over a computerized PA system. I hear all these modern-day Janice Ian-Fiona Apple-type lady singers and all these Bobby Brown-Jay Z imitators and I know their voices are Pro Tooled (they also love vocal coders) and their harmonies with themselves perfectly pitched and blended and looped and shit--wasn't that called "quantizing" in the old days? I feel the same way when I'm writing--readers thinking, "Jesus, I can write better than this rediculouse bastard." (Bet you can't write as much as I can though--just thought I throw a barb of my own into this rediculousey mix.)
And writers talking about writing are boring as hell, too. Most good writers aren't good at holding seminars or teaching writing classes. I mean really, how do you teach somebody how to write? Yet, I know from experience, most of our "great" writers today are academically trained or met in a writing class--or if they aren't academically trained, they are natural-born writers of local experiences, like that phenom woman from North Carolina who writes her Smokey Mountain hillbilly stories attractive enough they attracted the New York City bigwig agents who are constantly looking for local color writers.
Little Truman Capote wrote a wonderful little book called Local Color (about traveling in Europe a la Mark Twain's Innocents Abroad) after the wonderful Other Voices, Other Rooms (also a local color book about growing up in Alabama) both early stories before Truman hit the big time with Breakfast at Tiffany's--and how forgotten is he now?--and once Truman was the talk of this town after In Cold Blood allowed him to go all-out gay and hold a self-glorifying party at Madison Square Garden--and, oh yes, he got to have Liz Taylor, that celebrated celebrity whore, as one of his dearest friends--and oh how Liz loved gay men (Truman, Michael Jackson, Malcolm Forbes)(did I just call Michael Jackson gay?).
Writing is easy. That's what most people think. I once worked for a trick-bag crooked-as-a-snake-at-night vanity publishing firm. I read over 300 manuscripts a year for this bunch and of those 300 manuscripts, I wouldn't have published a one of them, not even if the author had supplied me with his or her used toilet paper to print it on. Therefore, most people on average are horrible writers. Even some highly trumpeted writers to me are horrible writers. Stephen King, for instance. I tried reading Pet Semenary--whoops, I think I've punned this title--anyway, I tried reading it and got only two paragraphs down the first page when the urge hit me to throw this piece-of-shit book in the garbage where it belonged. Which I did--and really, I'm a guy who doesn't throw books in the garbage. Also, Danielle Steele. I couldn't read her--horrible writer. Sentences like a fifth grader at their toiled-and-troubled best. But, you see, I'm a male so I don't understand women writers anyway. I remember it was a Norman Mailer review of one of Mary McCarthy's novels that turned me on to this woman who became as a result one of my favorite women writers--in one of her books she describes how Bunny Wilson showed her the best way to suck his dick--relating it to bowing a string on a violin--wonderful writing; yet, Norman Mailer found her very undeveloped.
For the present, a decision: Mary McCarthy is judged Guilty of Meretriciousness and equally: Guilty of conspiring not to give the goose away, which means thus, Guilty of refusing to reveal that the genteel lords and ladies who manage America are the psychic descendants of Conrad’s Kurtz. “Ah, the horror, the horror,” and she will not take a burning look.
Norman Mailer.
From that other side of Norman's world come some quotes from Mary McCarthy's world:
The labor of keeping house is labor in its most naked state, for labor is toil that never finishes, toil that has to be begun again the moment it is completed, toil that is destroyed and consumed by the life process. [Same as toiling with writing a novel.]
Mary McCarthy
Every age has a keyhole to which its eye is pasted.
Mary McCarthy
Every word she writes is a lie, including and and the.
Mary McCarthy
The suspense of a novel is not only in the reader, but in the novelist, who is intensely curious about what will happen to the hero. [If you are a "real" writer, you know exactly what this means.]
Mary McCarthy
We all live in suspense from day to day; in other words, you are the hero of your own story.
Mary McCarthy
You musn't force sex to do the work of love or love to do the work of sex.
Mary McCarthy
Mary McCarthy young and Mary McCarthy old
A Writer Writes Because He or She Has to Write (They Are Not Good At Much Else)
A writer, like Mary says, writes about himself or herself--as the main character within all his or her characters. I struggle with women characters, for instance. Just like Mary struggled with men characters. I think I've got female dialog down pretty good, but in terms of feelings, shit, I feel sometimes like I'm a universe away from what a woman really feels. And yes like any horny male, I write about men as though they were me, sexual adventurers in a jungle of wildly available lusting females--it's my male conscious that cooks up whatever tales lie within my life experiences. I've nowhere near lived the variable life Mary McCarthy experienced; yet, there are so many sides of even my life left about which to write, sides of the darkness as well as sides revealed by sunlight--or a spotlight. Though under the spotlight things are so phony, so decided in terms of make up, position on the stage in terms of marks, places where the spotlights can highlight you--devised by a lighting team--it is all so phony.
We have a local newswoman talking head--her father was a famous (to me) jazz bassist. This woman, she's been around for nearly 30 years now, at one time, way back when she was freshly young (and still a flower in bloom) out of Toledo or somewhere Middle America like that, appeared to be charmingly beautiful and sexy cute and was lusted after by those male voyeurs who get off on teevee babes.
I worked at Time-Life at the time of the big world premier of John Huston's "Annie" at the Radio City Music Hall directly across Sixth Avenue from Radio City. Several of my Time-Life cohorts and I stood on the curb there and watched all the spotlighted Hollywoodites arriving in their stretch limos--"Hey, look, there's that drunken old underage-girl hound John Huston." And there he was, getting out of his stretch limo (that's stretching a point to its fullest, isn't it? Important elites riding around in cars that have been "stretched" via adding extra metal links into their chassis and bodies so they stretch out longer than the average car to denote, "Hey, get out of the fucking way, peasants, you pissants, this royal carriage is carrying a VIP motherfucker who's in a hurry to get to his appointment--perhaps it's with his masseuse...or his mistress." Yep, it's the continuance of the necessity of the ancient royal highasses going all the way back to ancient royal Africa possessing excessively bulky and extra-roomy and designed-to-be-big-and-awesome carriages. Carriages big-enough they had the privilege of running your walking ass down should you trundle inappropriately into their right of ways).
One of my pals watching this Hollywood-comes-to-New-York-City show with us turned our attentions to an NBC remote truck parked just to our right. On the roof of that truck the crew had set up a camera and standing by the camera with a mic in her hand was this talking head cute-babe newswoman. And, yeah, man, she looked good up there, too. She looked cute, nice body, pretty face. Quick as a mouse aware of a nearby cat, this pal o'mine took off toward that NBC truck. And quick as a cat after a mouse, he was up the ladder at the back of that truck and soon he was on the roof and heading toward this newsbabe with a big goofy smile on his face and his arms opened ready for a love hug. He was immediately stopped by the cameraman and then the newswoman turned on him and he got wise and shimmied his ass back down that ladder and ran back breathless over to where we were standing. "Bitch," he was yelling as he approached. His face was fiery red. "That bitch! You know sumthin', boyz?" "What?" "She's fucking ugly as hell up close. That bitch has so much make-up on she looks waxy, man, like she's a fuckin' wax woman. Shit, she gave me the creeps."
Ah deceit. Ah illusion. Ah the stage!
thegrowlingwolfunderafullmoon
for The Daily Growler Full Moon Edition
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