Living in New York City in End-Time Reality

Foto by tgw, New York City, April 2010
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"Make It Short but Sweet"
I'm sitting here watching a computer screen disintegrate out of the corner of one eye. thedailygrowlerhousepianist just emailed me the sad news that his father had died two days ago of cancer back in Michigan.

I'm surrounded by my friends who have either beaten cancer or who are currently going through treatment. My friend the museum director went to his doctor a month or so ago wondering about why he had had a sore throat for so long. He left his doctor's office with neck cancer, a huge tumor under his tongue, and a scare like an arrow through the heart of his nervous system.

My friends and I have what we call quorums. We meet at an Uptown Irish pub to down some pints and Gibsons and shots of Tequila and catch up on our various affairs as many monthly Friday evenings out of a year as we can manage. We had a quorum two weekends ago. Four of us showed up. Four of the male members of this gathering--myself, thedailygrowlerhousepianist, the museum director, and a sculptor I call the Iron Man--he works in heavy duty iron--like recently several huge flywheels (off of a large ship), so huge, he had to crane them in to his Gowanus studio. In fact, he reported to us at this quorum that the flywheels had already been turned into art.

I'm sitting there sipping at a pint of Harp and enjoying such enhanced interpersonal conversation when it hits me: of the four of us good friends, 3 of us have had cancer. I being the so-called lucky one.

The museum director was already undergoing chemo. He looked thinner--not bad--he's a very striking person in terms of looks anyway. We commented on this notice. Yes, he said, he had lost several pounds. Why? He couldn't eat, he said. The chemo had burnt his taste buds out of his mouth so that he had no taste. When my brother was told he was going both blind and deaf, I imagined what the horror of such a reality would be like by coming up with a pretty close proximity to being that way by shutting my eyes tight and plugging up my ears with earplugs. But trying to imagine having no taste! That's hard to imagine, especially when all the time you're trying to imagine not having any taste you can taste!

So as a result of his chemo, the museum director has no taste for solid food. He says he might as well be putting cardboard in his mouth when he tries to eat, chew, and swallow some solid food. A spoonful of garlicky potatoes makes him gag in a wretching way. So he lives on high-protein chocolate shakes, liquids the only source of food he can tolerate since liquids can slide on past the mouth, the tongue, to zoom on down his saliva-dry throat before taste really has anything to do with the process.

Further, he was forbidden to drink alcohol so he was sipping on ice water. It was also very noticeable that he was having trouble swallowing. He kept having to clear his throat.

He was excited in a "get it over with" way that he had one more chemo session to go--so by the time of this post, he's finished his chemo and is resting up getting ready for the surgery that will hopefully remove the tumor and the cancer that is living in it waiting to metastasize.

The House Pianist had a thyroid cancer back around December. They successfully got it by removing his thyroid.

The Iron Man had the meanest of cancers, pancreatic cancer. He has now been in remission over a year.

I mean I sat there amazed the rest of the evening. I'd just never thought about how many of my closest friends have had cancer--some of them beating it--some of them not. Within the past decade I've lost my dearest pal ever since junior high days to brain cancer; my ex-wife, the Tex-Mex-Choctaw-Welsh raven-haired, dark-eyed, haunting beauty, to breast cancer 5 years ago now. She smoked a pack or two of Salems from the day I met her--she was 16--telling me one time that she'd rather risk getting cancer than giving up her Salems, a statement that bit her in the ass at age 58; my brother to the last and worst of the 3 cancers to attack him, the final a brain cancer; an old New York City good-times girlfriend who had moved to Carolina to get away from the bad air of NYC to lung cancer--she, too, a showy woman who always had a Queen-sized, pink-filter-tipped Nate Sherman cigarette in her slender fingers; and only recently did I find out my very favorite first cousin, the guy who led me into the art of piano playing, had died of brain cancer just before Christmas of last year.

And then today I check into the Independent News NaturalNews page to check up on the latest in natural (holistic) health news and suddenly I faced this shocking headline:

As radioactive fallout skyrockets, NaturalNews advises readers to consider precautionary doses of iodine, bentonite clay and zeolites

Come on, folks, isn't that a SHOCKING headline? Iodine pills by the way do protect you from low levels of isotopic radiation; bentonite clay and zeolites I've never before heard of.

I do not want cancer. When I was a kid, I watched my mother's brother dying of cancer in a VA hospital in McKinney, Texas. He was like my hero uncle--he was an early aviator--he was also an early filmmaker--he was owner of a chain of movie houses--it was like this handsome man--I mean, he was my hero uncle--the dandy in the high-class clothes and the custom-blocked Miller hats and the Packard automobiles and the 3 wives, the second of which died of cancer at 29 years of age--there was this hero of mine laying on a World War II surplus army cot in a tiny little stuffy ground-floor back-alley-like room (this was 1950--there was no air-conditioning much then--certainly no refrigerated air)--my hero uncle now a withered stick-figure thin barely recognizable the cancer having eaten away his high-cheekboned handsomeness and his lustrous deep brown eyes--he was a "brown-eyed handsome man"--now laying a raw wreck of a man on this army cot wearing only a pair of boxer shorts and a Guinea tee-shirt--the room was hot as hell--stuffy--and there lay my handsome Hollywood deboniare airplane-piloting hero uncle a shriveled up man--his bald head now totally hairless--and his face--ARGGGGGGGGGHHH! His face was totally barren of hope...faith...totally barren of even the ability to laugh or smile or even frown...his face hardened into a painful stone face.

The minute Uncle saw us, my mother and dad and my grandmother, his mother, and me, it wasn't that he knew who we were...no, it was more like he knew who we were and he hated us for being where he wished the hell he still was--healthy as horses with tons of life left in us--and the four of us were healthy as horses--and when he saw us he started into cursing us out--the foulest language I had heard until then--though this hero uncle was infamous for his constantly overboiling temper and his use of expletives that would make the most seabound sailor quiver in his Navy-issue shoes and I had heard him say "Damn" a lot--"God-damn" more than once--but never like he was spewing this time, "Oh, God-fuckin'-damn, sonofagoddamnbitch...." My grandmother: "Brother, it's your mother, sweetheart...." "God-damn, you, mother, for having me--and get the hell out of here unless you are here to kill me...please, mother, kill me, kill me...god-damn...." Then the stupid question--ah mothers!--"Brother, does it hurt that bad?"

As a kid cancer was a rare thing. I remember this man from my hometown named Cager--yep, that was his name--Cager--the father of sons: Otho and Elton Dale. And when we lived in Dallas, Cager came to stay with us while he underwent treatment at the Hoxie Clinic, the clinic of Doctor Hoxie who claimed he could cure all kinds of diseases, even cancer, using his special treatments. Dr. Hoxie was considered Dr. Hoaxy by the AMA, but for people with cancer he convinced them that perhaps they were a coffee enema away from eliminating the cancer from their system. It was worth a shot to an otherwise hopeless person and cancer was pretty much a terminal disease in those days.

I remember Cager, who was a notorious chain smoker, had lung cancer. I remember him coughing...lugging coughing...deep coughs that roared up volcanically from his phlegm-packed lungs a rush of green-slime, which Cager hurled into a coffee can he carried around with him. I remember my mother set aside a set of dishes and utensils and a cup and a glass for Cager. In those days the medical info warned that cancer might be contagious and my mother to make sure assigned those several pieces of her everyday chipped and cracked china that she didn't mind losing since as she was informed cancer might be contagious she intended all along to throw Cager's dishes, utensils, cup, and glass in the garbage the minute he left, which she did when Cager finished his treatments at the Hoxie Clinic and headed on back out to far West Texas to end up in his final resting place. She also threw out all the sheets and pillow cases he had used while visiting with us.

I'm thinking of going out and buying me a pistol just in case.

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

WHITE PEOPLE...the NEW CHOSEN PEOPLE?

Foto by tgw, New York City, April 2011
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Say Goodbye to:
Madame Nhu...yep, Premier Nhu's wife--glitter gal and Neiman-Marcus shopper. How many millions did she rip off We the People of the USA? Plus over 2 million of her people were killed in that stupid war--yet the Madame got to live a good long life--ironic isn't it? Madame Ngo Dinh Nhu, 87, South Vietnamese First Lady (1955–1963), after an illness.

Jumpin' Joe "the Jet" Perry...when I was a kid, the old All-American Football League San Francisco 49ers was a thrilling team to watch--lefthanded quarterback Frankie Albert--and Joe Perry was his yard-gaining champion fullback--one of the first Black stars in pro football. [3]Joe Perry, 84, American football player (San Francisco 49ers).

Huey P. Meaux. I had no idea Meaux was still alive until just yesterday (April 23). From Lake Charles, Louisiana, and recording in Houston, Texas, Huey P. Meaux was a prime mover in recording Southern Louisiana blues, Cajun music, Zydeco (of Clifton Chenier), Katie Webster, plus several Texas bands like the Sir Douglas Quintet (Doug Sahm) and Freddie Fender. Huey unfortunately was in kiddie porn and got caught with tons of kiddie porn photos and stuff and as a result Huey served a little time--just getting out of prison in 2007. Huey P. Meaux, 82, American record producer.
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NOTE: Van Jones, Obama's former green energy advisor who quit in protest over Obama's leaning toward clean (which means dirty) coal, natural gas, oil, and nuclear energy, is a very powerful speaker with a powerful platform. He drew an audience of 10,000 aroused young people in Washington this past weekend (don't worry, our Ayn Rand media didn't cover this event--PROTEST is no longer allowed in this country, didn't you know?).
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Hail (or Sieg Heil) the White Man! For He Is Chosen of the True God
I'm listening to one of the best Art Blakey Messengers units doing a tune called "Are You Real?"--off Blakey's Blue Note release titled Moanin' (the title tune off this album was a big jazz hit)--with the unusual pianist Bobby Timmons, who wrote "Moanin'"; with Jymie Merritt, the kid bass player; with another kid, the teenage trumpeter, Lee Morgan; topped off by the cream of eclectic tenor players and future Hollywood music director, Benny Golson. This LP became a jazz masterpiece for us true (and soon to become a part of second-hand history like World War II veterans) jazz aficionados. It was recorded back in the fall of 1958...

... all of that jive-loaded intro-paragraph to lead you to the fact that it was the tune on that LP, "Are You Real?," that set me to thinking this morning...triggered my thoughts onto a path that has direction and goal--the direction toward thinking about my race--I'm White (ah, really? no one can tell by your writing and the admissions therein that you're whiter than the driven snow!)--and what the dominant males of my race are up to...

...you see, usually, rather than taking such a challenging path, I'm prone to stand relaxed at a crossroads in a state of mellow procrastination--standing still in a nonperplexing way, putting off rather than facing treading down that path that has direction and goal, a path of much thinking and the resulting dialectic reasoning that accrues to result in an eventual written
accomplishment...

...the tune's title, "Are You Real?," the question asked of a woman by a man who is trying to seduce her, got me to thinking as low down and realistic as I can get. Dammit, I've been real since I was born. I grew up using my realist intuitiveness trying to escape from myths. Myths plied upon me by a variety of forces from parental through schooling through military training through trying to apply and realize success in a system seemingly opposed to my evolving ambitions...

...my generation of White kids, Norman Mailer, one of our elders, coined the word "Wiggers" to describe us, I call the Forgotten Generation. We at one time were called "Atomic Bomb Babies" because we were born on the advent of weapons of mass destruction like the world of human monkeys had never before known--from sticks and stones to Atomic bombs. Our child eyes were blasted wide-awake before our time by the United States Army Air Force dropping those two Fat Boy A-bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki--and my dad was a civilian worker for the Army Air Force--already I was subjected to mixed loyalties...

...and our little eyes were opened to the fact that with the dropping of those two A-bombs, our little future asses were perhaps doomed. AND THEN, I mean right in the middle of what we hoped was a long period of peace, quite, and loving words while we tried to figure out this American Dream shit, the US government up and announced that since we had single-handedly won World War II and were now the most powerful nation in the world and since Hitler blew himself and his girl and his dog up in that Berlin bunker we needed a NEW WHITE DEVIL. And, by the Great White God, they then announced they had found the NEW WHITE DEVIL: UNCLE JOE STALIN!

Russia was then calling themselves the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (the USSR (it looked like CCCP on their Olympic uniforms)). One myth I grew up under was that the Soviet Union and Uncle Joe Stalin were our valiant allies in the years and battles and horrible deaths of millions that led to OUR victory over the White Devil, Adolph Hitler (not his real name)--why, Jeez, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had met with jolly old pipe-smoking Uncle Joe Stalin (they still celebrate Joe as a hero in his Georgian hometown) at a couple of what the government called "Summit" meetings during WWII...

...BUT, now, we wide-awake children of the atomic future, the future fathers and mothers of a future generation of highly radiated and electro-magnetized bunch of Zip-coded kids, were spun around on our thin dimes and were then being told Uncle Joe and the USSR were no longer our allies but were now the NEW WHITE DEVILS. Uncle Joe was the NEW HITLER! And Uncle Joe was even persecuting Jews, too, by the Great White God. A new myth--like changing horses in midstream. The new myth stated in big booming letters that looming NOW on one of OUR future horizons was World War III, the NUCLEAR WAR...

...a WAR that was already manifesting itself through our patriotic and avaricious Military Industrial Complex coming up with a massive sudden production of these nuclear-headed creepy rocket things officially designated as InterContinental Ballistic Missiles--or since Americans are pretty stupid, the MIC and Pentagon intellectuals broke it down into an acronym, ICBM, which is all we illiterates needed to know to understand what our sick-eagle-proud military fat cats were talking about when they told of Russia's nuclear capabilities (atomic secrets given the Reds by a New York City Jewish couple--the evil and corrupt Ethel and Julius Rosenberg who DIED for their sins against this God-righteous nation--NO, the Rosenbergs were not considered messianic so they were humanely executed--not in an oven gassed by Zyclone B, but on top the stove in an electric chair--"Serves 'em right!" the truly patriotic White Gentile male leaders declared). Soon we little rebelling goose eggs of influence were being told that these horrible NEW WHITE DEVILS had just as many of these deadly ICBMs as we had--in fact, the heart of this new myth hinted that more than likely the Soviet Union had more of these weapons of mass destruction than we had...and here I simply spit out, BLAH, BLAH, BLAH...the beat goes on...

...nothing changes. Case closed. We are skidding toward human annihilation. Self-annihilation...

...except, before this potential nuclear world war could be established as a World War, we had to prepare for it through what the government deemed a COLD WAR. I'd never heard of a HOT WAR--and I'd certainly never heard of a COLD WAR. The COLD WAR got pretty hot at times--like in Korea where we fought both Communist White Devils, the Soviets and the Red Chinese (the People's Republic of China--now the world's leading Capitalist country)--or like in the Cuban Missile Crisis when the White Devil Khrushchev tried to sneak ICBMs into White Devil Fidel Castro's Communist Cuba, which was brought on by the CIA-bungled Bay of Pigs fiasco when a handful of wacko CIA agents posing as Cuban antirevolutionaries tried to retake Cuba from the White Devil Fidel Castro who was only 90 miles from our precious drug port-of-entry paradise, Florida (P.S.: also one of the reasons JFK was assassinated)...

...now, do you see what a clatter of confusing brandings developing children of my generation had to deal with?

...and we dealt with this clatter through the unhomogenized cultures available to us. We rebelled against first our parents and their outmoded dull way of dreaming the American way (Perry Como put us to sleep--in so deep a sleep only a rockin' rollin' Chuck Berry duck walkin' into our brains could wake us up and show us a new highway--a tangling of superhighways that ran all over North America that were all ours...

...and we hit those highways in our sexiest Detroit iron with Chuck and Ike and Brother Ray and Muddy and Jimmy and Big Joe and Big Mama and Big Maybelle and Bird and Diz and Monk...even that hip-twitchin' Wigger Elvis--blasting out over our radios--the faster the car the faster the music...

...drivin' off toward New York City or L.A., or New Orleans or Chicago, sailing off into our own conceived myths, leaving our parents far behind, back up the road, rockingchaired to sleep on their sagging porches by Como and Boone and Red Foley and Pee Wee Hunt and the Top 40 Tony Bennett and even some of Old Blue Eyes post-WWII comeback hits, like "Give Me Five Minutes More")...

...and I'm talkin' White now, please understand. Blacks were still under the bootheel of Jim Crow during this epoch in White American Dominant History. And it was due to what we called segregation--the reverse of which was desegregation--and the separation of cultures that went along with good ole separate-but-"equal" Jim Crow "laws of the land"--that caused us rebelling White children to seek and find our ways out from under such a nightmarish dream within the many unhomogenized cultures we White children had access to. White privilege it was...

...for instance, my best friend in high school and I fell head over heels for the Blues. As a result, we wanted contact with some Blacks--can you imagine, two White kids in their teens only having a marginal acquaintance with Blacks? We used to drive over into the Black part of our White Man's-controlled segregated town and park in front of a Black club called the Main Event Club--a dance club, though we knew they served beer in the joint, too, and that it really was a combo dance hall and bootlegger beer and liquor outlet. But why we dug the Main Event Club was because of its jukebox and the fact they had an outdoor speaker over the main entrance of the joint--and it was on that jukebox that my White friend and I first heard the Blues and saw how they affected people first hand...and then we heard JAZZ coming from in there, some cool shit, man--and we got to hitting on Black cats as they came out of the club, "Hey, man, c'mere'a minute...naw, man, we're cool, we just wanna know who's that on the jukebox playin' now...Miles? Yeah, with who, with Bird?...thanks, cat, thanks."

Yeah, Norman was right, we weren't yet but we were edging toward becoming Wiggers--in the sense Norman created the word, meaning Whites who were into Black culture so deep they began imitating that culture by hipping up our White speech with Black inflections or by changing our clothing styles--copycatting Blacks. And what I meant above by White privilege? There is no way in the holiest of Hells that two Black teens could have parked in front of one of the White hillbilly beer joints in a White neighborhood in a segregated White male-dominated town to dig the music coming out of the joint...and even if they got away with parking there, they'd be lynched if they dared to holler at a White cat coming out of that beer joint to ask him who's that on the jukebox...I mean, first off, no Black kids would have dared do such a thing in those days--not yet anyway--though their time was dawning--my generation got so infected by Black culture--through the music especially, that we began to ask in a pestering manner certain questions of the White establishment: "Hey, parental cats and school-teacher cats and administrator and executive cats, if We the People of the USA are all created equal under our White God ("...red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in his sight") and our White Man's Constitution [of course we didn't think in those specific terms in those days], then why can't Blacks go to school with us?; why can't we socialize with Blacks?; why can't we date Blacks?"

...and then along came Rosa Parks and Dr. King and the Freedom Riders! Along came those Greyhound and Trailways bus rides--when Greyhound and Trailways were forced to abolished their Jim Crow rules--that "Blacks to the back of the bus" bullshit--and then along came the sit-ins--then the marches. And it was my generation who got to see a chance at maybe this nation becoming a real free society, an amalgamated society--an interacting people who could bring the world together into a stable unified way...

...does anybody remember the Unisex movement?

Trouble is domination is natural to all human monkeys (we are chimpanzees); both territorial and individual domination. Males are naturally the kings; the rulers; the hunters and warriors--the meat and spoils and slave providers; Nature's Power Elites. MEN. And it is a Man's world still. Check out the Forbes 500--it's overwhelmingly men who control the world's wealth, and the great majority of those are White Men.

There is nothing more worthless, in the piece of crap sense, than a White man with a bad attitude who is suddenly given power beyond his wildest dreams. And that's the God-given dominant power that this piece of crap Teabagger Michigan governor and that embarrassingly dumb-ass Wisconsin governor are showing off with their insane programs of on-purpose disruption ("disruptive advertising" a French concept from the 1990s)...and now the Wisconsin Swiss-cheesehead (in terms of the holes in his head) piece of crap governor is copycatting the Michigan piece of crap governor with this same failing-city-takeover coup shit and handing city governing over to private management firms--tons of which are spreading like wildfire now around the country as these teabagger Yahoos work to turn this country into a Corporate State more ruthless than any government we've ever had on earth. Under these little weasel potentates, we will all be privatized--AND you know what they call privatized individuals? They call them SLAVES...CHEAP LABOR!

So here I am: a White guy trying to make sense out of my fellow White guys and what the hell they are up to. Revenge? Oh yes, a lot of revenge. Conservative revenge. Neo-Con revenge. Revenge that goes way back to the days when John D. Rockefeller, Goldman-Sachs, J.P. Morgan, Commodore (who wasn't a Commodore at all except on his yacht) Vanderbilt, the Harrimans, etc., had their monopolistic ways with We the People of the USA--Plutocrats to the core. Avariciously greedy bastards with no morals whatsoever except the backwards thinking morals of feudal lords.

And, yes, today's teabaggers and wacko Conservatives trace their heritage back to when the Industrial Revolution landed in this country and we took up an adulterous union with British Capitalism, which was based on British Imperialism.
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The Chosen People
From good ole reliable Wikipedia:

Deuteronomy 14:2, "For you are a holy people to YHWH your God, and God has chosen you to be his treasured people from all the nations that are on the face of the earth."

I got curious as to how White people, Gentiles, got it into their collective head that they are really the Chosen People by proxy--by proxy since the Jews never accepted Joshua ben Josef of Nazareth as their Messiah--the Gentiles getting their political power through the pompous and callous Charlemagne and his wacko self-important mother who for political reasons made Christianity (Gentilism) the state religion--otherwise Christianity would have soon died out--since outside the original Jewish converts, no Jews ever accepted Christianity in any form, except in Israel's case where they must kiss the ass of the Gentile-Male-Dominated USA in order to survive as a Holy Land. I'm speaking as an A remember--an A is an ATheist without the Theist--as Baudelaire said: "I'm a mystic at heart and I believe in NOTHING." And certainly I believe in nothing that can't be proven--like how does anybody prove the truth of history?

I leave ye Gentiles and Jews to ask yourselves the question: "Are You Real?"

In spite of the myths that claim you are not real but supernatural, I still say the current reality is so real and normal and monkey-like and territorialistic and hubristic and chauvinistic--the only solution to untying all the knots the human monkey race is in is a self-inflicted nuclear holocaust. Only then can we prove we are not animals but White Gods...the True Jews...White People are the NEW Chosen People (in the New World Order, which all of this bullshit is adhering to).

WARNING: President Obama (a Nobel Peace Prize winner) has approved using his precious predator drones (I love that word "predator." As half-wolf I totally understand what the word implies--predator drones are out hunting for human monkey meat!) in Libya...on the side of the Rebels, about who we know nothing, except through them the CIA, they are thick in Libya, has informed them is the easiest way to the taking over Libya's OIL! All of this is about OIL. Ask yourself, why is the price of gasoline going sky high at the moment? Why? Who decides to raise the price of gasoline? Ah, avarice! How lovely its poetic way of painting so bright a picture on so corrupt a canvas. World War Three, the Nuclear War...is it just around the corner?

And by the bye, the Japanese nuke meltdown is now so serious, the site has been deemed too dangerous for human presence.

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

thegrowlingwolf Sitting at the Feet of Klee

Foto by tgw, New York City, March 2011
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Say Goodbye to: Eddie Joost: As a kid I knew Eddie as a Philadelphia Athletic shortstop under Manager/Owner Connie Mack, ironically playing for the Athletics when they shared Shibe Park with the Phillies back when there were only 8 teams in the American League. Eddie was famous for wearing glasses--a fine infielder and clutch hitter--Eddie also played for the Cincinnati Reds 1940 World Series team in the 8-team National League. He holds the "honor" of being the last manager of the Philadelphia Athletics before they were moved to Kansas City. Eddie's Athletics finished in the cellar and lost over 100 games: Eddie Joost, 94, American baseball player and manager (Philadelphia Athletics).
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The Smell of Painters Painting
As a kid, I remember how my grandmother always smelled of her paintings. I remember her easel. And I remember her canvases. And I remember her wooden paint box and her palette. And I remember her sitting in front of that easel; she had it turned toward her north-side window that she kept uncurtained when she painted. And I remember watching her as she squeezed the paints out of those big lead tubes, squeezing them out onto her palette in big gobs, squeezing several colors out at once in separate gobs around that palette. And I remember her brushes that she kept in a big tin juice can (Hi-C Orange Juice can maybe). And I remember her explaining the different brushes to curious me. And I remember being fascinated that some of her brush bristles were camel hair--and some of them pig bristles--and several of her prized ones made of sable hair. I would want to use her brushes but she would look at me very fiercely if I went to grab one explaining in stopping me how valuable (expensive but worth it in terms of her art) those brushes were to her and how she had used each one and had it shaped or worn down to the right shape she needed to use it for what she needed it for in the shaping of her paintings from sketch (her box of pencils, charcoal sticks, and pastels) to canvas. And I remember her sketch book, a big one in which she was drawing seems like every time you saw her and she wasn't painting. I remember seeing her sitting up in her bed with her sketch book on her knees. Then, I remember in the summers she would leave us to go to Santa Fe, New Mexico, with a painter friend of hers to sketch in the mountains and to sketch the local Navajos who laid out their crafts every day in those days under the porticoes of the Governor's Palace, one of the oldest buildings in the USA, in the Santa Fe Plaza, which when my grandmother visited there was still raw and earthy, like the Navajo earthenware she loved to buy and then paint as still lifes. I remember how thrilled she was one time when she and her painter friend went down into Old Mexico to paint--to Saltillo. And I remember the several paintings she painted as a result of that trip and the sketches she had made while down there. And I remember those smells that were always in the air of her houses and later in the apartment my parents built for her on the back of our house. Smells of turpentine--she used it to clean her brushes and to also erase things she didn't like during her paintings. I remember the smell of linseed oil. She used linseed oil in mixing some paints and I believe to keep her brushes from drying out. And I remember the smell of the oil paints--Grumbacher oils she used--and I remember going over the names on the tubes as they sat in the slots in her paint box--cadmium red; mauve; yellow ochre; verdant green; cadmium yellow; red ochre; cobalt blue; matte black--and the smell of those paintings--and she painted every day on her canvases and when she finished them she filed them in a neat row in a little side closet in her room.

Though she knew a lot about flowers already, she'd once owned a florist shop in my hometown's largest hotel, only in her later years did she begin to grow flowers in her yards, specializing in peonies. Her peonies were champions; she had white ones and yellow ones that blossomed into giant heads of white or yellow petals, heads so heavy they bent their stems over to bow to the mighty West Texas sun, Ra in all his righteous life-giving glory. And soon all she painted were peonies--from a distance--as though peonies growing on the moon--or up close--as though peonies blooming up out of a deep perspective--or sitting still in Navajo earthenware itself sitting around on imaginary patios--or peonies marching in various files in vases on tables--peonies--she through her flowers (and the birds and insects those flowers attracted) and the way they dominated the yard space and the way they sat in the morning dew or later bowing in respect to the moving-away sun--or how they reflected off the casement windows of my parents's sun porch--and through these flowers she became one with nature--in them was her cosmos, her God--letting the paint flow naturally out onto her canvases, subtle greens headed up into gobs of white-petaled white strokes--the green and white or the green and yellow of her cosmic peonies.

And I found in a pile of books holding up one end of a board on which I was cherrypicking some old Chinese postage stamps a copy of Paul Klee's Pedagogical Sketchbook (a book he created for the course he taught at the Bauhaus Art School). Right off I sat down and started reading Sibyl Moholy-Nagy's introduction to the book, which starts off with this quote of Klee's:

"For the artist communication with nature remains the most essential condition. The artist is human; himself nature; part of nature within natural space" [p. 7, "Introduction," Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, Paul Klee, Pedagogical Sketchbook, Frederick A. Praeger, New York, second printing, 1962].

I like Paul Klee. I read this Pedagogical Sketchbook (I bought it while I was in college) before I ever saw one of his paintings. Even now, though I'm familiar with his most famous paintings, I've never seen one in the flesh. [I refer you here to Nick Jainschigg's blog over in our blog list; Nick recently returned from a trip to Moscow specifically to see an exhibition of the Russian landscape painter Isaac Ilyich Levitan's works in the flesh. A fascinating artist's adventure to see in the flesh one of his major inspirations.]

As a young man, I steeped myself in Elie Faure's History of Art, a most fascinating book written by a most fascinating man--a man deserving of a book; yet his Wikipedia entry is very lacking in simple details like the fact that Faure was a doctor--or even the simple fact of when he died--1930.
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The best years of my time (5 years) in Santa Fe, New Mexico (1965-1970), were spent living in the studio of one of Santa Fe's most famous artists, Will Shuster. Will was a member of Santa Fe's Los Cinco Pintores: Will Shuster; Josef Bakos; Walter Mruk; Willard Nash; and Fremont Ellis. These painters all came to the Santa Fe right after World War I (1920, 1921). They built houses all in a row on the then unpaved country road, El Camino del Monte Sol, a dirt trail that led from Canyon Road, a Santa Fe main drag now, off up toward Sun Mountain and the at-one-time Catholic monastery that in later years became St. John's College. Will's adobe studio sat down the hill behind his big rambling adobe hacienda whose front abutted the Camino. You entered the long driveway through a ironwork gate and then wound down a steep slope to the back of the studio--all hanging on the side of the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains overlooking the sparkling little low-level city of Santa Fe several thousand-down-the-mountain-feet below the studio.

My wife and I got to live in Will's studio because at the time he had emphysema so bad it had forced him to retire from painting. He had been a World War I (the war to end all wars) dog soldier in the trenches in France--he was flat-dab in the naked middle of the Battle of Verdun. His first trip over the top and he ran right smack-dab into an exploding German mustard gas shell. He said it was like breathing hell fire; he said he was gasping for air but the air he was gasping in was almost pure mustard gas; even when he talked about that time his eyes watered up in what looked like painful tears.

Will had studied art with Robert Henri at the Pennsylvania Academy of Art in Philadelphia. Through Henri, Will met and became lifelong friends with John Marin, the New York City Ashcan artist whose studio was in the famous old Chelsea Hotel--still extant here in NYC though it has now been turned into a chic boutique apartment hotel--where all kinds of celebs used to stay, though now I think all the celebs have transferred down to the eyesore Soho Grand Hotel or whatever it's called, SoHo's first luxury hotel--a symbol of the invasion of the conformers that has led to SoHo's ruin--driving the real artists out of the lofts they had created, built themselves, with A.I.R. (Artists-in-Residence) status--and oh what a time that was--the glory days of downtown Manhattan--but I digress.

Will Shuster at work on his fresco in the patio of the New Mexico Museum of Art in Santa Fe, entitled "Voice of the Earth"...1930s.

Will was the epitome of the early 20th-Century painter. He wore the smocks. He wore the string ties. He wore the correct hats. He was at the boiling center of that area's great artistic movement that changed Santa Fe from a sleepy little Santa Fe trail's-end village into a nationally known art colony.

Will's studio was a perfect artist's studio. It was on two levels. You entered its front door at ground level. You entered first the living room--an open-ceiling room--framed in bookshelves--with a fireplace--a wide-board floor covered in Navajo rugs--with two big arm chairs facing that fireplace. Off the living room was the kitchen; a small kitchen, but a well-heeled one with a wonderful range and a set of copper pans marked "Savoy Hotel, London," and they hung on big steel hooks over a wide-angle butcher block table that sat in the middle of that kitchen.

The living room's ceiling was two-story and open all the way up to the high and wide slanted north-facing skylight. A small winding staircase led off the back of the living room up to the second-floor balcony where once Will did his painting. His huge wooden easel was still in its place--a paint-splattered floor surrounding it. On the easel was a small painting of a native American woman's head. I put my writing table up there and my stereo and that's where I worked on a novel about a Catholic priest and his involvement in the Kennedy assassination; complete with a character of justice and mercy I called Maximillian--yes, that's the way I spelled it; I think the name had more to do with McMillan the publishers than it did the Austrian-born French emperor of Mexico. [By the way, I came up with my character's name long before Jim Lehrer started writing on his novel Viva Max whose main character is a Maximilian. Later in New York City, my Maximillian manuscript was the source of my future hatred of the publishing industry and the editors who make their reputations and livings off the creations of more talented people and thinkers.]

My first year living in Will's studio, Will and his second wife were still living in the rambling hacienda. Will's second wife was a Brooklyn-born woman who obviously had once been a dark beauty. When she was young and pretty, she was the girlfriend of the poet Robert Graves. I was up at the big house one day visiting with Mrs. Shuster when she got a letter from Graves who was then living on Majorca (where he lived for 40 years--dying there in 1985). "He still loves me," she said after opening the letter and reading it to herself, her eyes getting misty as she read it. "He still sends me poems." She read a line or two from the poem he'd sent along in this letter and then she said, dreamily, "Poets should stop writing poems while they are young." And, yes, I was unimpressed with the couple of lines she read me from that poem. I've never forgotten what Mrs. Shuster said about poets, intentionally meaning Robert Graves.

Will at the time had just turned 70. He suffered terribly from his emphysema, the reason he'd left the East Coast and had come to the dry desert air of New Mexico. He had coughing fits now that lasted for hours--that kept him up most nights. Will had another problem, too. That was vodka. He loved vodka. He drank charcoal-filtered vodka; he said he believed that the charcoal filtering took all the impurities out of what otherwise was the rank fermented juice of the potato.

Will several nights out of the weeks he lived in the big house--before he and his wife bought a house down in Albuquerque and moved down there, leaving the big house empty and in my wife's and my care--he loved bringing his vodka bottle down to his studio and sitting with me in front of the fireplace gradually getting drunker and drunker while spinning out yarn after yarn about his fabulous life as an artist from his time in Philadelphia and New York City to his time in Santa Fe at the center of its art world. Will was the creator of the Santa Fe monster icon, Zozobra, "Old Man Gloom," a 20-foot-tall character Will thought up that is burned every year to end Santa Fe's Fiesta Days, a celebration that has been going on since the 1920s.

Will Shuster's "Zozobra" in 1933. In those days Zozobra was built up from the ground with a wood superstructure around a tall pole spine; now, I think, they hang him from a crane. This is quite an imposing structure when it is sitting on its hill and is rising high above Santa Fe during the Fiesta Days (in September)--and then it's even more impressive when they set it on fire. Now you know where the Burning Man came from.
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And Will Shuster would sit with me--me drinking my Heinekens and he drinking from his fifth of vodka--cheap vodka, too, like Alexi--the kind made from grains and not potatoes in Clifton, New Jersey, and not Russia--brand or country of origin didn't matter to Will as long as the label said "Charcoal Filtered"--and Will would start drinking and talking...I'd mention a name, like "Stuart Davis...." And Will would start reeling out his Stuart Davis stories. "Oliver LaFarge...." "Witter Bynner...." "Winfield Townley Scott...." "We were all poets in those days. Bynner and Scott were real poets, but we all wrote poetry, bad or good, it didn't matter. One of our amusements during our constant partying...life was a party then...I mean, my first wife and I lived out near Camel Rock in a tent at first...yet, we had some swell parties out there...on a bluff looking out over the Rio Grande Gorge...the sunsets out there would blind you they were so multiphasical...but one of our games was to write poetry--spontaneously, you know, from person to person...." Ironically, later when my wife and I tried to settle in the San Francisco area, we camped out with my old New Orleans friend and co-Sociologist in San Jose. He had moved to California due to my showing him the difference in the salaries of social workers in Louisiana and those in California after an old girlfriend of mine when I lived in Dallas had moved to San Francisco and gone to work for the State of California as a social worker and she had sent me a copy of what they paid urging me to come to San Francisco--her letter arriving just as I was getting married and moving to New Orleans.

Through this friend in San Jose, I met a social psychologist/psychologist (a Sociologist deluxe!) who became one of my back-of-my-conscience heroes...Milton R_____. I met Milton one night only in a small wooden house that sat back off the street in among some huge trees in Los Gatos, sitting just under the rise on which sat the Paul Masson Winery (cheap wines made elegant by Orson Welles being their spokesman for years). And Milton was an amazing man--my friend had met him while they worked together at the state mental facility in San Jose where they were both working with alcoholics. Milton had been an early enthusiast for the drug LSD--invented by a Dr. Hoffman who worked for the Swiss pharmaceutical firm Sandoz who produced it as a legal prescription drug. Milton was having brilliant success treating his alcoholic patients with LSD when the overexposure of the power of this drug was dramatically unleashed on Conservative-Majority America by Timothy Leary, a Harvard psychologist, whose wild-eyed tantric-like antics and sexually explicit bragging about the effects of the drug led to its being outlawed--made illegal by the Feds--and the FBI came after Milton with a vengeance. Now that I've led you all around Robin's barn, the night I met Milton, he was working on writing poetry by just throwing words in a hat and pulling them out--like writing poetry I Ching style--and that night Milton, my wife, my friend, and I played a game Milton had invented--we went around clockwise giving out words which Milton then wrote down on a pad and when we'd finished, we made a poem out of the word list. Like say Milton started it off with the word "deconstruction"--my wife immediately added "demolition," my friend say said "mind bend," and I came up with "Beagle matter." The result:

Deconstruction...
sits demolishing minds
bending them
as they struggle to survive that what mattered
with Darwin on the HMS Beagle.

And the next day sitting on the patio of a coffee house in Carmel overlooking a glittering Pacific Ocean, I suddenly recalled Will Shuster telling me about he and Winfield Townley Scott and Fremont Ellis and Alice Corbin Henderson and her husband William Penhallow Henderson and Oliver LaFarge and Spud Johnson and Witter Bynner and whoever else was at one of their parties starting clockwise giving out phrases and words and writing poems that way, the same way Milton R_______ was experimenting with writing poetry 30 years after Will's poetry-writing-game parties took place.

And one day I'm sitting on the small couch in the north corner of Will's studio living room going through a shelf of books I hadn't yet explored, all of them art books, and I came across a small blue-bound book and when I opened it I opened up an art treasure, letters from John Marin to Will. John Marin who I knew from several of his watercolor prints that used to hang in my dad's frame and mirror shop--my dad sold prints from Donald Art in his shop--and it was among my dad's prints that I discovered Matisse, Derain, and the amazing Vlaminck, a painter I really fell for--and this reading John Marin's letters to Will got me started into that time in Parisian art history that Roger Shattuck called The Banquet Years, which is, by the bye, a wonderfully written, exciting, and informative book on the subject of the arrival of modern art to Paris from 1885 to 1918.

And I sat on that couch all one afternoon reading those letters--all several pages, handwritten, all with drawings in the margins or else sketches of ideas he was working on. One letter especially interested me. It was a several-page letter in which Marin was explaining to Will how he had recently become fascinated by drawing women's breasts. One page contained a drawing of a pair of perfectly realistically perfectly drawn breasts. In a note under this drawing, Marin said, "You know, Will, a woman's breasts don't point straight out at you like her eyes do. No, Will, you know this, one breast hangs out to one side and is bigger in size than the opposite breast that is smaller slightly and is pointing more straight at you than the other. A matter of the nipples being naturally separated enough making it easier for a newborn child to suck them." Wonderful letters. All about Marin and his wife's life living in the Chelsea. About walking around Greenwich Village in the snow--about walking by the Jefferson Terminal Tower on 6th Avenue--about stopping by the Lafayette on 5th Avenue.

I actually took a water color lesson from one of my brother's best friends back home who at the time was head of the art department at one of my hometown's three colleges. The lesson produced an original work of my art I called "Shovel Leaning Against Chair," which is exactly what it was, an old-fashioned ladder-back dining table chair sitting in the middle of a room--a room with no windows, just brown walls, a barren wood plank floor, and lit by a hanging down wire with a socket in which shone a single naked bug-gut-stained light bulb--that like unto which Tom Edison called a Mazda, the God of Light in Zoroastrianism and Ohrmazd Bay in the evil Manichaeism. Leaning against the chair was a long-handle shovel, a spade actually. By the chair on the floor was a flower in a flower pot. That was it. Browns mostly, though the flower in the brown pot was red, like a red sunflower. I entered it matted in an art show held in Midland, Texas. It was sent back with a note attached to it saying that it had been appreciated for an honor but rejected at the last minute. I was thrilled to death--I was in my teens--and for many years after that kind rejection, I tooted around the various towns I lived in to the various friends I tried to impress, especially the many cultured women I desired tooting pompously as I did that I was a successful watercolorist--my work recently having shone at a Midland, Texas, art gallery (Midland at the time had more millionaires per capita than all other places in the world except Kuwait).

I loved Ivy League Fine Arts majors in those days, as another "bye the bye,"--especially one Yale beauty who not only had a Fine Arts degree from Yale but also a degree from the Yale Divinity School. Her ambition was to be a Unitarian minister, which was all right with me since I had dated a Unitarian flautist in college and I had attended "church" with her one Sunday morning when the minister "preached" from Evelyn Waugh's The Loved One--another very good book, by the way--and afterwards after we had had wonderful wild sex out among the brush outside of town how she told me one of her intentions was to one day to not only become a great flautist (and she did) but also a Unitarian minister.

And after several hours of sitting with Will Shuster in his adobe studio, with a mountain-high darkness now covering the huge open skylight hanging high above us as we sat in front of that fireplace, he'd start nodding out. The heat from the pinon (pine) logs and the soothing burning of that vodka going down--the bottle was empty by then--was zooming him out of this world and back on the battlefields of life. Then I'd call up Mrs. Shuster and tell her to get ready I was bringing Will home. Then I would wake Will up--he couldn't quite come wide awake--then struggle to get him upright on his feet--he was a very strong old man. Once up on his feet, I would literally get behind him and push him out the door and then up the hill to the adobe hacienda's back porch--the real struggle starting at the short flight of stone steps that led from the studio yard up past the fountain/fish pond Will had built and which was headed by a silver-plated sculpture of a Native American woman--nude a la an Ingres nude--looking out west--what I thought was Will's best piece--to eventually push him up onto the big rambling porch to where I then helped Mrs. Shuster get him on into the house and to bed.

Wow, I get into remembering things and my remembrances become almost allegorical--though they are all true stories--I swear--stories based on the many ironies that have popped up in my life--the parallel-line relationships I have attracted over the years--likes that have led me to have a lot of painters as friends even now, though it all started in my remembering the smells of my grandmother painting.

Which reminds me, when I first moved into Will Shuster's studio, I unpacked one of my grandmother's paintings. The painting was very special to me, so I wanted it prominently displayed and the best place I found was on the wall just to the left of the fireplace. In order to hang it where I deemed it best shown, I had to remove one of Will's paintings. The first time he came down and introduced us to what would become weekly visits with him and his vodka bottle, he right off noticed I had moved his painting and put my grandmother's in its place. I noticed he noticed what I'd done so I explained, "That's a painting my grandmother painted for me right after I was born--she signed it on the back to me back then." The painting was of a scene taking place in the back of the library at which she was the head librarian for many years, under a small grove of mesquite trees the action of which was of a "hobo" with several mutt dogs laying around him panting (it was a summer dog day--I was born in August) as he was going through the library garbage barrel--a huge oil drum that sat out back of that library. I thought the little painting interesting in the sense she had used the shadow of the library building interacting with the ground-level scene with the mesquite trees standing as though in the spotlight of the overhead sun. Though I don't remember what I expected of Will in terms of its worth as art. Will studied it seriously a minute or two, then raised his vodka bottle to it and declared, "She's a fine primitive...yes, a fine primitive." It was a put down--Will was an academically trained artist--yes, Robert Henri was avant-garde in some ways, but mainly Will was modern but not as modern as some of his contemporaries, like Stuart Davis...not even as modern in the abstract or impressionistic sense as John Marin. But still he was telling me he could tell my grandmother was an amateur painter--looking down his nose at her work--like I look down my nose at certain musicians and poets and writers I consider amateurs.
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At the Feet of Klee
Paul Klee's Pedagogical Sketchbook was designed for the students in his design course at Walter Gropius's Bauhaus School of Art in the wonderfully creative days in Germany's pre-Hitler Insane-Horror Days.

Klee through this little Sketchbook starts with the simple . (dot), as it sits as a full stop, going nowhere. First he gives this . (dot) movement. Through movement the dot stretches into a line...then the line takes on a basic horizontal movement, though soon Klee has taken that line and has curved it, lifted it off the horizontal, and sent it hurtling toward space--the unknown--though as the line progresses--or loops back into itself--or as the line runs into new dots, it becomes what Klee describes as an active line limited in movement by fixed points. Now this starting point in nothing . (dot) has gained movement through delineation--gaining a freedom to move wildly if uncontrolled--but then controlled by fixed points and through imagination it can advance to planes that are formed by these lines controlled by fixed points to the point dimensions are suddenly seen, width, height, breadth, depth. I mean it is fascinating stuff, with Klee giving as his intentions in this book a new way of looking at the signs of nature--based on his original statement that an artist must communicate with Nature since the artist is human and as such is a part of Nature. Klee's explained that "By contemplating the optical-physical experience, the ego arrives at intuitive conclusions about the inner substance" (what Moholy-Nagy calls "the Spiritual"). The art student is more than "a refined camera" simply "recording the surface of an object." Klee says a student who is serious about art "must realize that he (or she)" is "[a] child of this earth; yet also [a] child of the Universe; [the] issue of a star among stars." Heavy stuff for a design starting with a . (dot).

After Sybil Moholy-Nagy's intellectually crystal clear Introduction to Klee's Sketchbook builds the scaffolding on which we can study the deepest aspects of Klee's pedagogical theories (it involves getting a student to think above and below the horizon) of proportionate lines, dimension and balance, gravitational curve, and kinetic and chromatic energy (the actions of a painter painting) lead to what Moholy-Nagy calls "an axiom that shows Klee's deepest wisdom": TO STAND DESPITE ALL POSSIBILITIES TO FALL! Deep, eh? Not really. For after you have digested these concepts set out in plain translated-from-German English by Moholy-Nagy and after you get into Klee's Sketchbook's innards, like a spinning top turning into a feathered arrow, you suddenly realize where Klee is going--he's attempting--he says its instinctual with humans to want to fly--to jump off the macrocosmic and into the microcosmic to work back out from there into a new space, a new Universe, a "spirtually" devised Universe and Nature--like approaching Nature from within, from the beginning of something out of nothing toward a reproductive example of one aspect of this New World.

Klee called the summation of his pedagogical theories Resonanzverhaltnis, experiencing a dual reality through seeing and feeling the essence of Nature to the point you, the artist, begin to realize "a free creation of abstracted forms which supersede didactic principles with a new naturalness, the naturalness of the work. He produces or participates in the production of works which are indications of the work of God" [Plato's Eitos].

Holy Christ, Klee through his art is defining God! It's clear to me. I could write a whole book on this--the discovery of perspective--just think, at one time artists hadn't discovered perspective yet--they were trapped on a flat earth. Klee teaches the evolving artist--and this includes us writers and Sociologists, too--to fly off the flat earth and into the circular-circulating Universe--from the microcosmic to the absolute cosmic. Freedom as represented by a shooting star.

thegrowlingwolf
for (a very artsy-fartsy) The Daily Growler

Living in New York City Paranoid Under Blue Skies

Foto by tgw, New York City, March 2011
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Say Goodbye to William Walker, or Billy Bang...jazz violinist extraordinaire...started off with Sun Ra and the Arkestra...then played around New York City with his own trio during the 80s-90s. Billy died of lung cancer getting ready to perform at the Rochester Jazz Festival:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billy_Bang
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OH NO! I'M TRAPPED AMONG THE LEMMINGS!
I'm not depressed. I don't get depressed. Repressed, yes, maybe...repression. Isn't that what Freud said was our worst enemy? "Let it all hang out." I thought that's where we were headed. And that's what I liked about American Blacks, they were the most patient and tolerant of people, especially of their enemies.

I'm listening to Ezra Sims's String Quartet No. 2 (1962). It is how I'm feeling right now--how I'm not supposed to feel. This the second movement, called "Calmly Moving," and it is lulling me into a midstream of sensibility--a movement that is soon ending in my anticipating ears--I'm a musician; we sense endings...and beginnings, too...and middle passages, too--musicians, even bad ones, usually have more sense than the average bears around town. And I say even the bad ones and I include in the bad ones even those poor little spoiled brats who line up by the millions to try and get on American Idol (a pop music mill--and I see where that little British deejay dick that sold Uncle Rupert on American Idol has another same-kind-of show soon coming on one of the competing same-old-same-old commercial networks--probably the amateur Disney Network) are so fucking confident of their best amateur efforts--amazing how this inane pop teevee show and Walt Disney Inc. now determine who our juvenile and teen-age pop stars will be. But then that's all teevee is (and this includes all the Walt Disney-created teevee amateur shows (Mickey Mouse Club)): the remaking over and over of its historically most-successful shows, of which numerous amateur-hour shows (at least they used to call them "amateur" shows) have been extremely successful over the years (The Lipton Amateur Hour; Arthur Godfrey's Amateur Hour; Ed McMahon's Star Search; etc.). All people...and monkeys...think they can sing. Therefore, all people are jealous of those of us who can sing naturally--just right-off-the-bat, like all people think they can sing--especially when they are in a recording-booth-like shower or any place with a lot of reverb. Playing an instrument naturally...that's another matter. Most instruments aren't easy to just start playing--and it's certainly not like you can just start singing. Only idiot savants and men who talk directly to God like Jimmy Swaggert can claim they saw a piano and right off they knew, by God, they could play it--and they did play it like right off the bat--they just walked up to a piano and BOOM started playing it like a pro right off the bat. In Jimmy's case, it was the piano in his holy rolling church as a boy in Faraday, Louisiana, along with cousins Mickey Gilley and Jerry Lee Lewis--both of whom played the exact same style of piano Jimmy did--all of them playing by ear (which I assume is by God).

I'm making fun of these amateurs--any self-taught singer is an amateur--and I call them still amateurs even after these amateur idols turn professional (they get an agent and a recording contract). Yes, they start out as amateurs and they end up as amateurs--professional recording engineers and sound experts and Pro Tools giving them whatever professional abilities they are forced to learn--yet, their music and singing is still amateur--and here I am a hypocrite.

I remember the afternoon in Dallas, Texas, when the piano van delivered my mother's prize buy of her lifetime, an 1888 Beethoven Pump Organ, made in Paterson, New Jersey, in that year of our (or your) Lord (mine's Lord Buckley)--information one found in gold stenciled text across the back panel just above the line of stops on that old organ. This beast of an instrument was about the size of a spinet piano, except it wore like a Chiquita Banana-type hat atop its top, an elaborately carved topper (headboard, same as a bed's headboard), this one carved up with fruits and vines in dark mahogany, with insets backed by mirrors, all rising up to a rather steeple-like top that was just a ball of mahogany wood on a tower of mahogany vines.

I was seven years old when that organ entered my home that afternoon in Dallas, Texas. A plain English tudor-style two-story brick and stucco home that to me, a near-to-the-ground kid, looked like a castle--and it really was a castle in terms of where it sat in the middle of what was intended to be a pre-World War II housing development--halted by the war, to leave MY house, the model home in the development, a castle atop the hill that had a street, Hilltop Road, named after it. My castle-house with its Trojan Horse-looking cedar tree growing up to a gigantic height on the east side of the tall brick chimney that was the house's broad nose. And what castle didn't have an organ in it? I know in all the schlock Vincent Price "horror" movies of those years, Vincent's castles always had a huge pipe organ in them for Vincent to evilly sit and evilly play--usually a minor-key Bach-like rush of crescendos and diminuendos.

I once met Vincent Price in New Orleans; he was going around with "The Vincent Price Art Collection"--selling it off during appearances at the local Sears-Roebuck store--he sold off his art in cahoots with Sears-Roebuck, for whom he was a paid consultant or some-such PR bullshit title like that. I bought a Renoir drawing from Vincent that day for $600--he personally signed the COA. When my wife-at-the-time later kicked my worthless ass out of our Sutton Place-New York City high-class digs, the Renoir disappeared into her future and not mine. Though I would not own it today had I have gotten it in the divorce settlement--I would have sold it immediately after the divorce because at the time I was working for Time Inc. making at my highest $7,000 a year. My expenses were about twice my income.

It's hard for me to believe I've survived two times in my life when I was stone broke--literally almost put out on a New York City curb with my mangled possessions--without a sou in my jeans--and yet I've managed to come back up both times--to rise back up like the proverbial Phoenix. Hell, in my day, I've gone from flat broke and in debt (credit cards) to a skyrocketed ride up over the hundred-grand-a-year mark in the advertising racket. And what a great word racket is for what our careers really are. Corporate rackets rule us now. In fact, the USA is one big racket--a nation of schemers--a nation of speculators--pure speculations--even speculative ideas--and that's what these teabagger dicks and janes are telling We the Dumbass Conforming People of this country of lemmings--like this effort to destroy Medicare and Medicaid, two programs that are run much cheaper that any private health insurance company could ever run them. We are being pushed back against the wall of either surviving or perishing on our ability to make lucky speculations--meaning investments--investments that to these New Wheeler-Dealers mean "playing them as they're dealt to you"--the greater the odds, the better the speculation. Some will really strike it rich; others will lose their asses. That's the Law of the Jungle--and our civilization--our artificial life--is being repressed back into a Chaotic jungle.
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Time has passed. Time has changed. The music has changed. Now it's Sviatoslav Richter playing Bartok's 2nd Piano Concerto with the USSR State Symphony. I had a rare chance to see Sviatoslav in person--in Austin, Texas--I had my ticket--I was totally excited--I listened to him playing Debussy's L'isle joyeux live in concert--where in that ferocious ending of joyous expiration Sviatoslav stomps the stage with his foot--what an ecstatic moment for a worshiper of the piano and the many saints who've learned to play it with automatic perfection--or near-perfection. As Glenn Gould came to realize, only in the recording studio could he do his performance more-close to perfection. He couldn't correct mistakes in live performances--and that's hell for a perfectionist like Glenn. Horowitz, on the other hand, worked his mistakes into his performances as a natural part of his genius--at least Horowitz never feared veering from the script. At the last minute, to my almost-depression-state disappointment, Sviatoslav canceled the concert--his management said he had a bad cold. I quit listening to Sviatoslav for a while after that in reprisal against his letting a headcold deprive me of a chance to see him play in the flesh. Though in a few months all was forgiven and I had to have my Sviatoslav Richter whether it was in person or not--and then I heard him play the Beethoven Eroica Variations...and then Stravinsky's piano version of Petrouchka. Performances that will never be topped.

Men like me and Sviatoslav Richter love the piano from stem to stern--I mean even its design, its architecture, its symmetry, its acoustically boxed projecting abilities, the layout of its two-tone keys--the minor keys, the black keys, the accidentals. And to be able to wail on the best of them is an exquisite delight--like Sviatoslav and Glenn Gould played on the finest instruments--and like I myself have had occasion to play on--once in a recording studio on a 1927 Steinway Grand--and Steinways are still the best to me, though I've never played a Bosendorfer--anyway, all I can say is there is nothing like being able to play a piano! And to play it in a way no one else does or CAN. Oscar Peterson--the greatest piano player from my lifetime, once said he held himself up against any of the best classical pianists--he said he had opportunity to play like them--he could read sheet music--but he said none of them could ever play like him--besides, what he did was totally improvised and was never the same...that which Glenn Gould said about playing live! You can't be perfect live. But then define perfection.

As a writer, am I freer than I am as a musician? This is the kind of mental fodder I'm unable to seriously try and answer in these days and times of making hay while the sun shines.

Nuclear disaster is raring up its hydra-head in Japan. Threatening to come against me. The scared shitless Japanese spin doctors talking in terms of isotope levels, those radiation levels with a half-life of a matter of days; deemphasizing, playing down, the plutonium levels, those superradiation levels with a half-life of 24,000 years! (Samuel Beckett wrote a whole story on his return to using exclamation points--which to an old baseball player-editor like me is a ball and a bat.)

We are facing our own nuclear disaster. Yet, our president with stentorian coolness assures us we're totally safe from a nuclear catastrophe in this country--I sit here in doubt, knowing what I know about backwards thinkers--and just 25 miles down wind from the Indian Point Nuclear Facility, proclaimed for any number of years now as the most unsafe nuclear plant in the USA--built directly over a fault line--a sagging-with-age reactor whose meltdown and eventual hydrogen explosion could wipe out 200,000 people immediately. (I remember the night a drunk managed to drive his car through the front gate of this facility and through fences right up with the nose of his car abutting the reactor core containment building.) But I'm not to worry.

Am I paranoid yet? No. I know better than to be paranoid. Neurotic at times? I deny I'm neurotic, too. I'm, like Henry Miller who is definitely one of my heroes: I'm too sane to be insane. Unlike the great Dr. Hunter Thompson or the great Ernest Hemingway, I can't see myself at a mental breakdown point where my mental agitations were so demeaning as to cause me to turn a high-powered weapon on my head and blow my brains out all over my desk--or in Hemingway's case, his home's vestibule mirror. Both mens's brain pieces should have been preserved--from those blown apart brains came such brilliant thinking; yet, they still turned on their bearers with a repressive vengeance.

Nonconformists being forced to conform. That's what drives great thinkers to self-destruction.

thenonconforminggrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler Sunday Edition--now in our 5th year of growling

thegrowlingwolf: Realizations

Foto by tgw, "Penn Terminal Building," New York City, March 2011
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A Beer Guzzler Gets Me to Realizing
Early in the dawning of the day, I commented on a commenter's comment on Chris Hedges's Monday column on Truthdig.com that was encouraging those of us with a revolting spirit in our bones to truck down to Union Square here in New York City on the 15th of April (tax day) to protest in front of the Bank of America down there. That's funny in itself that the Bank of America, a California bank originally, has a bank on Union Square. Ironically, that's also where the Union bank, the Amalgamated Bank, is located. Union Square, with its statue of Abe Lincoln in its belly--Abe Lincoln a Republican.

The commenter was criticizing Hedges for, I think, writing down his nose to who he refers to as progressives by saying "We" have no chance against outfits like the Bank of America by going through our state and Federal representatives because they are totally in the hip pocket of these banks--who did steal trillions of dollars from us--oh, they didn't steal it, We the People gave it to them. The commenter, who ID'd himself with Homer Simpson chugging down a can of Duff beer, resented writers like Chris Hedges telling him what he has to do. His comment got me to thinking. OH NO...not thinking, for God's sake. Thinking only leads you to conclusions. OH NO...not conclusions for Zeus's sake. But, yes, I got to thinking and by thinking realizing, "Hey, folks, We the People are bringing this bullshit down on ourselves."

Think about this: the people of Wisconsin voted in these rightwing fools who are now disrupting our current form of democracy, at least the social aspects of it, those that effect the bottom half of us--the poor Whites, whatever Middle Class Whites are left in this country--maybe petty millionaires are now our Middle Class--all Blacks, no matter their affluence, certainly all Latinos, legals and illegals, and most certainly all unions and union members, in particular government worker unions.

In Ohio, it was the people of Ohio who elected this absolutely dumbass rightwinger governor who is now going to penalize all union workers--I mean, come on, corporations hate unions and these new Teabagger assholes are Capitalist asslickers, most of them millionaires already, like the Paul boys, the Koch(sucking) Brothers, Eric Prince's father (in Michigan)--on and on the list goes--this governor in Ohio who is also destroying government workers collective bargaining rights--and who has figured out a new way to impose a Poll Tax on his citizens (remember Poll Taxes? I do; the first time I voted in Texas, I had to pay a Poll Tax) by requiring people coming to vote to produce three or four photo IDs, like a passport, or a driver's license, or whatever or else you can't vote. The idea here is to keep Blacks, Latinos, senior citizens (all mostly Democrats) from being able to vote. Again, I say, the people of Ohio evidently wanted this; they elected this asshole as their governor.

In Michigan, again, it was the people of Michigan who voted in their now totally repressive Teabagger regime--the one that just passed a bill that gives the state the power to go to a failing city, take it over, fire all the elected officials, and bring in private city-management companies--Detroit is a failing city--and so is Flint--Detroit lost 25% of its population over the past 10 years. That's OK with these dudes. Remember, they are racists and Detroit was Motown--mostly Black at one time--with Detroit Whites moving out to the suburbs to get away from Detroit's Blacks.

I reiterate, all of these kooks were elected to office by the people of these states--and yes the majority of voters in these states are White!

I keep telling people, this Teabagger bullshit movement is simply the White Man taking back control of this country that is turning Brown right before his tired old Bible-thumping eyes--and these states are in the Bible Belt--the Bible Belt--where the Silent Majority came from--where the dumbest Americans live.

I had to agree with beer-guzzling Homer that demonstrating in the street doesn't work. Like Chris Hedges's demonstrating in front of the Bank of America won't rectify anything, won't bring regulations and oversight committees--hell no, these people totally ignore demonstrations--or if the demonstrations start working, they'll bring in their security goons and of course the local police will back up the bank's security goons--I mean, come on, what beer-guzzling Homer was saying was that these demonstrations simply leave the demonstrators vulnerable to being filmed and photographed by the hundreds of security cameras surrounding a place like New York City's Union Square--also the home of the old Tammany Hall building, now a film school--plus it was once home to the US Communist Party under Gus Hall; plus it was home to Paul Sweezy's Monthly Review (Paul was a Marxist economist--he once had a famous debate with pro-Capitalist Joseph Schumpeter). But, I'll tell you what, folks, I'm going to be down on Union Square come the 15th, though even if a million people show up for it, it will never make the local news and certainly not the national news.

Of course, people could take their money out of the Bank of America--it used to be banks depended on depositors for their capital--of course, there's no need for depositors anymore after Brother Big Dog Clinton, under the advice of nutjob economist-failure Larry Summers took all the regulations and restrictions off the banks. Remember, it was Larry Summers whose solution to the nuclear waste problem was to dump it all in African countries--and they did dump it off the Somalia coast and ruined the Somalian fishing industry and turned those out-of-a-job fishermen into pirates.
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Today is a helluva beautiful day here in New York City, though mine is disturbed by hammering--they are putting a new roof on the oldest section of my apartment building, the landmark building--the oldest building on Broadway. For some ungodly reason they after tearing up the old roof have taken big sheets of plywood (oh the wood we waste in this country) and are now hammering them down--with nails, yes--over the old beams. I am watching them wondering why wood? Why would you use wood as the subflooring on a roof on an ancient wood structure anyway? Maybe my landlord hopes the damn building will catch fire and burn to the ground thus freeing him from having to maintain it as a landmark building.

To an old-time New Yorker like myself, fire, not an al-Queda attack, is my biggest fear. Several years ago now, my building had a fire on the 4th floor. The smell of burning wood woke me up in the middle of the night. I went to one of my windows and leaned out to see where the wood-burning smell was coming from and immediately the flames from the fire licked my face and I'm on the eleventh floor so those flames were shooting up 7 floors above the 4th floor where the fire was. The hippy tenant living there had put a lit candle in his window to ward off evil spirits and the candle set his drapes on fire.

For a brief moment I stood motionless trying to figure out what the hell to do--I mean my apartment is full of keyboards, guitars, recording equipment, and collectibles worth thousands of dollars. Finally, I realized I had to bust a move, so I donned my jeans and a wool shirt and a jacket--it was winter--and dashed into my hallway--fuck my possessions.

The hallway was packed with smoke. I ran up the stairway right outside my door to try to get on the roof and the door was blocked. Breathing in fire smoke isn't healthy at all--and I got a lung full of the damn stuff that almost knocked me out--I mean it was burning my lungs--but I managed to get back down those steps and back down to the hallway that led over to the other end of the building and the other door to the roof. The smoke was so bad, I had to get down on the floor and like a snake wiggle my way the 60 feet over to the other to-the-roof stairwell. As I crawled by another apartment a woman started screaming--she was holding a baby--instinctually I took the baby and made a wild dash for the stairwell to the roof with the mother screaming along behind me holding onto my jacket tail for dear life. We made it up to the roof at the front of the building and out of danger of the fire, which was on the back of the building.

Turns out if I'd a stayed in my apartment I'd a been OK. When the firemen came up and told us the fire was out and we could return to our apartments, I rushed back down to mine. Just as I got in sight of my door, there was a fireman raising an axe to it. "You got here just in time," he said, "I was fixing to chop your door down--I have to check your rooms...."

All of this happened in a swiftly confused matter of minutes.

I still remember the feeling when I realized the building was possibly on fire and the horror of having to decide to bust a move immediately--fuck your possessions; it's your life that really matters in one of these instances.

My family history is full of fires. My parents first apartment, they were just married, burned to the ground. Then the first house they bought, I wasn't born yet but my brother was there, burned to the ground. Later in Dallas just after I had moved out of my brother's first house there, I got word that it had burned to the ground--a Christmas tree fire--and that my sister-in-law had suffered bad burns when she had rushed back into the fire and rescued one of my nephews.

Fires and car wrecks in my family history. I've wrecked two cars totally in my life. This same sister-in-law who jumped back into the house fire to save her son later while driving down a Dallas freeway in her 300SL Mercedes ran into the back of another car and almost killed herself--and ironically, the son she had rescued from the fire--who went through the windshield head first.

Then later, during the July 4th weekend of 1964, my parents along with my mother's sister, came down to New Orleans to visit with me and my new wife. My parents had never been to Florida. My wife and I at the time kept a room in the San Carlos Hotel in Pensacola, Florida, so we decided to take my folks to Florida. I drove my parents brand new Mercury from New Orleans across Mississippi and Alabama into Florida. Outside of Mobile, Alabama, while cruising along at a merry clip, I somehow got distracted from watching where I was going when my aunt screamed from the backseat and I looked up and we were hurling toward a car that was creeping up onto the highway from a side road. I hit the brakes and since it was a brand new car, those brakes grabbed, squealed, laid down smoking rubber, but stopped us just before we would have plowed right into the side of that car. My mother hollered, "What are you trying to do, kill us!"

We made it back to New Orleans safely after what turned out to be a splendid 2 days on the then beautiful white sand beaches of that Florida West Coast.

It was a Monday morning after that July 4th weekend when out in front of our New Orleans apartment on Dumaine my wife and I told my parents goodbye. We took some pictures and off my parents and my aunt drove heading back home to Texas, first to Beaumont to drop my aunt off, then on back to West Texas.

Late Monday afternoon, I had just come in from drinking Dixie beers and eating raw oysters at my favorite Vieux Carre restaurant, Ruggerios, when my wife said my brother had called. I should call him back immediately. She looked awful. She had been crying. "What the hell did he say to you?" I asked, thinking maybe my brother had insulted her. "No, dumbass, he called to tell you your parents were killed...." I called my brother. Yes, he said gravely, "Mother and Dad were killed just outside of Rusk (in East Texas near where my mother was born). An 18-wheel asphalt hauler hit them broadside...the truck was doing 80 mph...."

My reaction was a macho one. I made out like I wasn't bothered by losing my parents. "It was dad I'm sure who was to blame...." I was such an asshole about it. My wife and I immediately went back to Ruggerios and got plastered, plus we ate a big platter of king crab legs and linguine with green sauce all cooked and served up by Mama Ruggerio. There was nothing sad about that feast except what was going on deep inside me. This was the kind of death that I didn't know how to handle.

My parents's funeral was quite a show. The two coffins were set up at the funeral home and during the funeral women kept coming up and throwing themselves on my dad's coffin. I sat amazed. I was wearing sunglasses and I was pompous and wanting to get the hell out of there.

My brother had seen my parents mangled bodies down in Rusk at the city morgue down there and he told me they were practically unrecognizable. My mom was thrown 20 feet up in the air witnesses said to plop down just off the edge of the highway, her clothes blown completely off of her as she landed with a bang.

My dad's body was blown out the right side door of the car by the action of the truck hitting the driver's side door. My dad's body sailed out sideways to land 30 feet down the highway, his clothes blown off him, too, including his shoes and sox.

My brother came to me during the funeral and said the people at the funeral had requested an open-casket viewing. I cursed out loud...I mean, I hollered at those fools, "Fuck you, people. Why would you want to see my parents in the condition they're in?...hell no you won't open those caskets, not while I'm here."

I left that funeral that day and I swore before my wife and a rack of gods I'd never again attend another funeral in my life.

That was 1964 and since then I have attended only two funerals--in 1969 I attended Coleman Hawkins's funeral that was held here in New York City at St. Peter's Church, the Jazz Church. And then in 2008, I attended the funeral of my soul brother Robert Francis Guida. However, those are the only two funerals I've gone to since my parents died. In the meantime I've missed the funerals of my very best friend ever in life, my best friend ever here in New York City, my two nephews's funerals out in California, my brother's funeral out on the far western plains of Texas, and my ex-wife's funeral out in New Mexico.

The next funeral I am planning to surely attend will be my own.

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

Another Visit to Lake Flaccid, New York & The Daily Growler Jots & Tittles Man

From the Languid Shores of Lake Flaccid, New York, Comes the The Daily Growler Jots & Tittles Man, Barabbas Munn-Dayne
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And a teetering good whatever to you and yours from the salty shores of leaky Lake Flaccid, New York, in the asshole of the Adirondacks. Life up here goes on as usual. It is good for those who are upwind from our poisoned lake--those downwind in the town of Lake Flaccid are all sitting around Mel's Cracker Store as though still in a hibernation mode after a long dull filmy winter around here.

Cecil the Dog-faced Boy III? We've still not heard hide nor hair (not a kind pun) from him. We assume he's dead. That's right. Even his chauffeur hasn't been seen for months and his log mansion is boarded up with huge panels of plywood over the windows and his driveway is blocked by a big campaign sign for Mayor Jerry Purim who is running unopposed for his 10th 2-year term as Mayor of Lake Flaccid. The mayor's job has no salary. It's simply an honorary title. Jerry was our first mayor so why not as long as he can stand living at the farty end of the lake, we keep electing him mayor--all you have to do is write his name on a piece of paper and sign it and drop it off at Jerry's office in the post-office-jail combination. Yes, Jerry is also the town sheriff and postmaster--though I get my mail delivered by Chief Lawrence "Mule Deer Caught in Headlights" Schmello who works out of the Saranac Lake post office. In fact, for as long as I've lived here, I've never been in the post office part of the jail--Cecil told me he went in there one time to buy a stamp and Jerry had none--he said the post office boxes were fruit crates stacked just under the gun rack, though there was no mail in them that he could see--just as there were no guns in the gun rack.
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Jots & Tittles
---Florida cracker preacher burns Koran: The idiocy of this Florida goon-cracker-Neanderthal preacher, Terry Jones (his mother spent weeks thinking up his last name), burned a Koran (at least that's what he said it was--isn't even buying a Koran to burn a mortal sin under his revengeful God?). In retaliation, in Afghanistan, Afghanistan Islams stormed a UN camp and randomly shot a bunch of people--foreigners, occupiers. What a bunch of total wackos Christians are--White Christians that is--White Amerikan Christians that is. Dumbasses all of them. Praying to a big pie in the sky. What an inane thing to do. I still don't understand why the White Gentiles see so easily that Jesus Christ is their messiah when the Jews don't even remember who the hell Jesus Christ was--he's not in their history! There's no record in Jewish records or Roman records of Jesus Christ ever existing--yes, there were Jewish reformers in those days everywhere--especially the Essene branch of Judaism, of which, supposedly, though again there's no proof, Jesus was a practitioner. The fictional Jesus of the New Testament (a totally Christian-invented series of pamphlets--you could hardly call them "books," most written hundreds of years after Jesus supposedly lived and taught) never rejected his Judaism--he remained faithful to the Sabbath, the Jewish festivals and ceremonies, and Yom Kippur, and those holier-than-thou days.

Ignorance is BLISS!

---How are the Haitians doing? You'll have one hell of a time trying to find out from our vaunted press. Not one mention ever on NY's various teevee news shows (and that's what they are, simply television shows) of how the Haitians are doing, or how their rebuilding is coming along, and nothing of Aristide's return to Haiti. I mean, Jesus Christ, 300,000 Haitians died in that earthquake (more than have so far died in the Japan disasters (one still waiting to happen--breached core of one now leaking radiated water into the Pacific Ocean). They've not rebuilt much housing down there yet. There is no revitalization program going on in terms of growing food, restoring the forests (Haitians cut down 95% of all the trees that once blanketed Haiti for firewood and to make into charcoal to cook with)--and President Obama what's his spin on our leaving Haiti blown apart; has he even been to Haiti? He certainly hasn't mentioned Aristide returning. And where the hell are Slick Willie and G.W. "Baby" Bush, Obama's appointed US-advisers to Haiti? Slick Willie's out continuing to amass a huge fortune--this Arkansas hillbilly boy who as Governor of Arkansas earned $30,000-a-year is now estimated to be worth 200 million dollars! Can you imagine! And does he pay full taxes on that amount? Hell no. He don't pay no taxes (like "We don' need no badges"). Loophole-loving bastards! And We the People can't tax our wealthy or they'll leave the country and we'll lose whatever taxes they do pay. Big deal. Let them move. Let them move to Monaco. Let them move to Dubai (Dubai is currently bankrupt by the way). Let them move to Hong Kong. Yeah sure. I can just see Donald Trump living in the Arab Emirates. Donald Trump, now pretending to run for president, bad mouthing President Obama by saying he has no US birth certificate! Donald Trump, if he becomes president, will turn the White Man's House into a hi-rise luxury condo building--you know, put a Trump City tower over the slave-built house--rename Washington, Trump, District of Corruption. Why not? Donald Trump and his current wife--let her be Vice-president. I'm sure she's seen a lot of vice in her lucky fucking life. I crow in the face of so low-life-a-commoner as Donald Trump (the "rump" part of his name being the significant part of it--T Rump).

--Teabaggers (our style demands we call Tea Party members Teabaggers--they are squatting over We the People's faces demanding we suck on their balls--even their women have balls don't forget) are on the rampage as they spout out bullshit about the mandate they were given in the 2010 elections that will enable them to put our Unions and our working class in jeopardy with the hopes of eventually outlawing Unions and forcing the working class to take wage cuts, deny them any benefits, deny them workplace safety, deny them vacation time, subject them to uncontrolled and unpaid overtime--FUCK the American Working class they are bellowing, a class none of these pampered spoiled brats and old fart codgers know anything about--most of these crap-master bastards are out of the same whore's womb. Obama's response to these political clowns is to bend over backwards to them in an effort to compromise his way into another run for this job that has now made him and his wife and daughters set for life. The campaign for 2012 is beginning already and Obama is attempting to raise 1 Billion dollars for his part in this dumbass election in which the dumbasses will elect our next dumbass president. Already this coming presidential campaign is being sold as the most expensive political campaign in World history. The American Dream has actually come true for Brother Obama, like it came true for Bill and Hillary and Chelsea (though poor Chelsea must be a bitch with a tendency to gain weight especially in the wide-load hips since her worthless husband is already getting tired of her bitching and her evidently lame-lax style in making love--"Hey, hon, let's get a divorce," he's hollering as he's masturbating in the bathroom to a photo of maybe his mother. God I can be so fucking cruel, can't I? And these are supposed to be "Jots & Tittles"--vignettes rather than long, going off the edge of the world, expletive examinations of our most worthless, richest, and most parasitical of Americans).

---Did you know: Gisele Bundchen, a fucking (maybe not actually fucking--models can't afford to get knocked up--though she did diddle around with Leonardo deCaprio and eventually she married Tom Brady the NE Patriots quarterback (they got beat by the New York (New Jersey) Jets in the AFL playoffs this year--how embarrassing for poor model-burdened Tom) long-limbed blonde Brazilian model (that umlaut over the U in Bundchen may mean she's the relative of a Nazi murderer who escaped to Brazil (with Dr. Mengele maybe?) after WWII) gave 1.5 million dollars to Haitian aid? Gisele was discovered when she was 14! Wow, how horny those god-damn advertising impresarios were to get a hot 14-year-old Brazilian moppet into their racket--and oh my god those Hollywood and AFL creepy types like Leonardo deCaprio who hang around the runways during fashion season (Japan's fashion season had to be canceled this season--ooohh the shame of it--but then even supermodels aren't immune from radiation poisons) looking for babes to be seen with as they make their constant "appearances" in the superchic places around the world. From 14 years old, Gisele went on to become a Victoria's Secret underwear model, eventually ending up worth 150 million bucks!--and that ain't Brazilian money either, folks--the highest paid model in the business. The American Dream came true for Giselle--and she's not even a norteamericano--una Gringa.

---Baseball season is open. And from old Growler pal, L Hat (www.languagehat.com), the best Mets song ever--mbtn.net/we-want-hit. The Mets are under new management, in the office and on the field, though the team is basically still the second-division team that Jerry Manuel couldn't make winners out of--so Jerry got the boot and now the Mets manager is...damned if I can remember his name. The Yankees? Hank Steinbrenner, the worthless son of worthless son George Steinbrenner (he wrecked his father's Great Lakes shipping business), is already fucking with players on the team, especially Derek Jeter. He has dreams of dumping Jeter as being over the hill (like his father ruined the successful baseball careers of Bucky Dent and Bernie Williams--and also drove Butch Winegar to a state of mental depression). The Yankees may not be as invincible as they think they are this year--Detroit, Boston, and the Oakland A's look good this year--and there's always the troublesome Tampa Bay ex-Devil Rays, now the Christian Rays--all covered with good BP oil, we assume. Question: where the hell is the Growler sports expert marvelousmarvbackbiter?

--I'm sitting on my screened porch listening to Jimmy Reed's At Carnegie Hall Veejay CD--such wonderful music, though the album is a famous fake. Jimmy never played Carnegie Hall--and this Carnegie Hall he's playing at on this album is the Veejay studios in Chicago. Another famous phony album was Oscar Peterson's famous At the Concertebouw Verve LP (now out on CD) that was recorded at Los Angeles's Olympia Auditorium and not the Amsterdam concert hall. I often have wondered how many of those "live" albums were really "live" where they said they were--or were they simply studio recordings with audience applause edited into them? Deceit is so sweet when it works.

---WAR...It seems to me that our worthless politicians are determined to get us involved in World War III, advertised as our first nuclear war! President Obama seemed determined to get us involved in this Libyan mess--but, believe it or not, G.W. Bush's worthless military goon, Robert Gates, has advised against getting involved in this one. He knows our military is stressed out, overused, abused, crippled, and we're running out of fossil fuels that keep the USA military juggernaut flying and motoring around to every conflict in the world--we're broke, running our military on borrowed money--money borrowed from the Chinese Communists. Our economy is now a war economy. Keynes said it was alright to deficit spend in hard times; yet, Keynes, yes he was Gay, is now considered a perverted economist in favor of Milton Friedman, an Austrian-type (Calvinistic) economist who loved Pinochet...oh well, what's the use of undressing these perverted thinkers when the people who love and adore them see them wearing clothes no matter how nakedly pathetic they are revealed. Hey, let's sit back and enjoy the wars--while listening to some Jimmy Reed "back home" (Mississippi & Chicago) music, some truly wonderful American music--music from our deepest souls, from the souls of a people who were brought here against their wills and who have managed to survive in the Social Darwinian way better than their oppressing White brothers and sisters. And by the bye, for you Sociology fans (our Wolf Man is a Sociologist), Darwin didn't mention the survival of the fittest--that was the Brit Sociologist Herbert Spencer who came up with that. He's the so-called inventor of Social Darwinism. (Read Richard Hoffstater's famous book on the subject, Social Darwinism in American Thought, 1860–1915 . Also his Age of Reform is a revealing book.)

---Here's an excerpt from Richard Hoffstater's "The Paranoid Style of American Politics," published in Harper's Magazine [before Rupert Murdoch bought it] in November 1964:
American politics has often been an arena for angry minds. In recent years we have seen angry minds at work mainly among extreme right-wingers, who have now demonstrated in the Goldwater movement how much political leverage can be got out of the animosities and passions of a small minority. But behind this I believe there is a style of mind that is far from new and that is not necessarily right-wing. I call it the paranoid style simply because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind. In using the expression “paranoid style” I am not speaking in a clinical sense, but borrowing a clinical term for other purposes. I have neither the competence nor the desire to classify any figures of the past or present as certifiable lunatics. In fact, the idea of the paranoid style as a force in politics would have little contemporary relevance or historical value if it were applied only to men with profoundly disturbed minds. It is the use of paranoid modes of expression by more or less normal people that makes the phenomenon significant.

---Did you see where NASDAQ is trying to buy the New York Stock Exchange? And whatever happened to the American Stock Exchange? AMEX?

---As I leave you, Jimmy Reed is singing, "I'm all dressed up and I got no place to go." That's sort of how I feel right now.

barabbasmunn-dayne,thedailygrowlerjots&tittlesman
for The Daily Growler Saturday Evening Post (posted on an afternoon)

A The Daily Growler WARNING: Check out this Teabagger asshole--another idiot from the cheesehead state of Wisconsin:

He's Paul Ryan the Teabagger head of the House Budget Committee
Born in 1970, Paul's daddy was in the construction business in Janesville in the State of Cheesehead. Pretty Paul attended the playboy-playgirl University of South Beach (known as the University of Miami) where he graduated with a law degree. He rose to political fame as a speech writer for drug czar and total asshole Bill Bennett--remember him? Paul Krugman says this fool's budget will put us 1 trillion bucks in the hole due to the enormous tax cuts it gives to the richest of us--which must include Paul's parents, don't you think, and probably Paul, too; I'm sure he's managed to network himself into the millionaire's club at least--remember, taxing the rich means taxing every worthless son of a bitch in Congress and our own President--and our ex-Presidents, too, Slick Willie "Big Dog" Clinton now said to be worth 200 million dollars. "How sweet it is," Jackie Gleason used to wink at us and declare, meaning you peasants watching my fucking dumbass teevee shows are making me fucking rich beyond my dreams--and subtexting: "...and you people will never really know HOW SWEET IT IS!" Jackie Gleason, a hard-drinking chain smoker, died of cancer.

Paul Ryan, by the way, is NOT cutting Congress's salaries or the President's salary--oh no! Paul, by the way, also, has never had to work a fucking day in his life, unless you consider politicians and rich people's children working class.
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