Thursday, June 30, 2011

Living in New York City As an Elitist and a Spoiled Brat


Foto by tgw, New York City (retrospect #2), 2008
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I Am Becoming an Elitist

And why not become an elitist? The word has a very bad reputation, though one of its definitions is "egalitarian," a belief that all people come into this world with equal opportunities--and this can even in a sort of way include humans born with defects: either the idiot, the paraplegic, or the superdeducer (in terms of easy deduction)--i.e.: idiot savants (like this little girl idiot savant singer that is being currently foisted on the public--same with that plump rather dull English babe, that Boyle woman (her star is fading, if it hasn't already crashed)); Stephen Jay Hawking; or Sherlock Holmes (and, yes, why not include fictional characters as real-world models?).

According to Jose Ortega y Gasset, the spoiled-brat child, the child of aristocracy, for instance, the heir, can never be a real person. Why? Because they never have really EARNED their wealth (like worked for it), instead they have inherited it from the ones (like their grandfathers) who EARNED it (or stole it; stealing is earning (crooks work for their booties)), thereby never having anything of their own to use in identifying who THEY really are. The American right-thinking Sociologist/Economist, Thorstein Veblen, would surely agree with Ortega y Gasset on this matter.

The negative aspects in the definition of elitist are based on cultural put down of oversmart (in terms of correct thinking) humans. Like the American Fundie Christian attitude toward education--"You can go to college, you can go to school, but without Jesus, you're an educated fool." That designates anyone with an education who doesn't believe in Jesus Christ as "Lord and Master" a fool. The American Elitist writer, Harper's magazine's Russell Lynes, used Highbrow and Lowbrow as his way of measuring the ordinary and the extraordinary in terms of the furrows in one's brow relating to the position of one's status within the nation's culture. One thing Lynes said I like is: "In my estimation, the only thing that is more to be guarded against than bad taste is good taste." Lynes put down in snobbish terms according to his critics the spoiled child! Same as Ortega y Gasset. Same as Thorstein Veblen. Same as C. Wright Mills. Commentary (think Norman Podwhoreitz and rightwing Judaism (Zionism)) magazine noted: "WE ADORE self-appointed scolds who tell us what shallow characters we are. Here is Mr. Lynes casting us as History's Spoiled Children. We have it too good, he says."

I have over and over written on this crusty blog how we are ruled by the spoiled brats of the original stolen-wealth families of the USA: the Morgans, the Harrimans, the Rockefellers, the Chases, the Salomons, the Goldmans, the Sachs, the Monsantos, the Lehmans, the Hiltons, the Koch Brothers, the Carnegies, the Melons, the Guggenheims, the Whitneys, the Pratts, the Tafts, the Kennedys, the Shrivers, the Tischmans, the Trumps, the Bushes, the Schwabs, etc. Any name you see on a US foundation: spoiled brats. Any name you see on a medical pavillion: spoiled brats. Any name you see on a cultural center: spoiled brats. Mitt Romney is a spoiled brat. John Kerry is a spoiled brat. Bill Clinton is certainly a spoiled brat. Barack Obama? Well, check out his past. Is he a spoiled brat or isn't he? I say he is.

Here's what Ortega y Gasset says about these spoiled-brats of human history: In The Revolt of the Masses in a chapter titled, "The Self-Satisfied Age," we find a paragraph: "This type (the self-satisfied type) which at present is to be found everywhere and everywhere imposes his own spiritual barbarism, is, in fact, the spoiled brat of human history. The spoiled child is the heir who behaves exclusively as a mere heir. In this case the inheritance is civilization--with its conveniences, its security, in a word, with all its advantages.... The aristocrat inherits, that is to say, he finds attributed to his person, conditions of life which he has not created, and which, therefore, are not produced in organic union with his personal, individual existence. At birth he finds himself installed, suddenly and without knowing how, in the midst of his riches and his prerogatives. In his own self, he has nothing to do with them, because they do not come from him. They are the giant armour of some other person, some other human being, his ancestor. And he has to live as a heir, that is to say, he has to wear the trappings of another existence" [p. 71, The Revolt of the Masses, Signet Mentor Books ed., 1950].

I grew up with privileged heirs. Some of my best friends in high school were the children of oil men. I had friends in high school who drove Corvettes and Thunderbirds; or who rode expensive Harleys; I had high school friends who had tennis courts in their backyards; I played on the high school golf team with boys whose fathers were oil men or doctors and who had full bags of brand-new clubs, who drove to the golf course in their own cars. One of my friends in high school while still in high school when his father died inherited his own cattle spread, the largest cattle ranch in my hometown's area. One of my high school friends whose daddy was an oil man had lived all over the Middle East, in Iran, Iraq, and Saudi-Arabia. Later, when his father died, he inherited beaucoup shares of all the major oil companies--his largest chunk of stocks being in Aramco (the Arab-American Oil Company). These kids seemed perfectly normal to me. I was never jealous of them. In the world of oil, one never knows when geologists from Standard Oil or SOHIO or Socony-Mobil or Sinclair or Cosden are going to find an oil deposit under your going-under ranch or worthless piece of land on which nothing will grow...or on those 40 acres your Uncle Cypert left you in his will...and then Halliburton or Schlumberger are going to come sink a well on your property and the next thing you know you are a member of the nouveau riche. To this day I still depend on a lucky strike for most of my successes in terms of money.

The most money I've ever had in my life was when my parents were killed together in a car wreck and my God how the money rolled in off the various insurance policies and land sales and the selling of their house, my home during those high school years, and the big pool of money in a savings account my mother had started back during World War II and which was bulging at the seams by the time my brother and I inherited it. Inheritance. I lived 7 carefree years on that inheritance--with a wife, too--7 years of living in a Vieux Carre apartment in New Orleans, a hotel's penthouse suite in Mexico City, a mountainside villa in Santa Fe, an upper-floor luxury apartment in San Francisco, and finally to end up living in a two-bedroom apartment on West 56th and Sutton Place in New York City, where soon that inheritance ran out--I remember selling off the last of my once win/win stock portfolio, 200 shares of Sperry-Rand I sold for $30-something-bucks-a-share. My wife by then had to get a job, which she did as a 20-year-old executive secretary and legal aid to a Lebanese New Yorker millionaire oil man whose biggest partner was at that time the world's richest man, Adnan Koshogi, who had intimate connections to the Saudi-Arabian royal family through his daddy who had been the Saudi king's personal physician. Soon my wife networking at a jet-like pace, after the Lebanese millionaire (she quit him while we were cruising with him on the QEII, which he had chartered to personally take all of his crew and political cronies to the opening of his new jet fuel refinery in Newfoundland) she shot her way up quickly in the New York City business world to eventually end up being elected to the Board of one of New York City's largest executive recruiting firms (when she quit this firm her severance pay was $200,000 (this was the early 1970s)). By then my inheritance had run out and I was void of personal income, living like a duke on my wife's income, a gracious situation for me though it soon led to our divorcing. And that was bad news for spoiled brat me--and, yes, I've always admitted I was a spoiled child--an accusation constantly hurled at me by my very much older brother who was born during the Great Depression and was always chiding me for having had it so good as a kid--"I had a full-time job by the time I was 14," he was always bragging to me--and my brother was right. I was a spoiled child. And I can vouch that it isn't easy for a spoiled child to succeed above and beyond his inheritance. Later, my brother got lucky and became a millionaire (from an inheritance--the owner of a large Dallas newspaper left her controlling shares of stock to my brother in honor of his award-winning editorials he wrote about Dallas after the Kennedy assassination). After my brother's death, I inherited another little nest egg, which I immediately scrambled--adding some bacon and onions and tomatoes to it--and gobbled it up before finally being forced to get a job of my own, which I finally did in 1981 when I took a job in the Printing & Design department of a Big 8 accounting firm.

While working at Time-Life as a copyeditor, I appealed to a senior writer at Sports Illustrated for a junior writing position with SI. I told him I wanted to be a writer, to which he replied, "You want to make money in this field, get into the advertising end of it--become an adwriter; that's where the big bucks are." And that's what I did--at age 40, after living like a spoiled brat and a junior playboy for 40 years, I became a professional writer/editor. I worked my way up the ladder from Time-Life to CBS Production to Viacom International (the spin off of the CBS production department ordered by the Justice Department in the 1970s) to Chapman Direct Marketing to the Big 8 accounting firm and from there into medical editing and my best paying job ever on a Big Pharma advertising agency on Madison Avenue in the old Look Building (Look magazine), my desk overlooking the roof and steeples of St. Patrick's Cathedral, a job at which two years in a row I made over 100,000 bucks. No brag, just facts. I made so much money--it worked on me the same as inheriting wealth--so soon I left that racket and decided to base my next success on my own writing and music talents.
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You know this threat of a Greater Depression than the Great Depression if We the People do not pay the interest on our loans from The People's Capitalist Republic of China by August--when the new budget and deficit-spending caps are supposed to be passed by Congress.

This austerity bullshit is such absolutely genuine bullshit. The Greek people are NOW facing the same problem as we're going to be facing in August--they were going to not be able to pay off the interest on their debts--those caused by the Greek parliament getting involved with Goldman-Sachs and their surefire/win/win toxic derivatives scams--so Greece appealed to the IMF and the Euro Bank for a bailout, which these crooked institutions then nailed up on the barn door the "austerity" measures they expected the Greek people to accept, or else fuck bailing them out. With these austerity measures, the IMF goons warned the Greeks that if they failed to accept them, the whole European economy might collapse! Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit. Iceland told the IMF and the Euro Bank to stick austerity up their wahzoos and reneged on their debt payments and nothing has happened to them; in fact, Iceland on their own are solving their problems--FUCK the Euro Bank and the USA-controlled IMF. I mean, the USA is totally behind these IMF austerity measures they are imposing on these failing countries like Ireland, Spain, Portugal (Portugal has already caved in to these pirates), and if truth were known England. The headquarters for the IMF are here in New York City. The US so far has chosen Euro Trash financial crooks to act as head of the IMF; this time for the first time they have chosen a woman as its head, a woman who is currently the Financial Minister of France. In her first speech as head of the IMF she immediately started warning Greece that if it didn't sell its soul to the IMF and the Euro Bank, dire straits were ahead for not just Greece but the whole European Union. Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit. Fact is, the IMF is broke. It gets its money from the US Treasury. [By the way, that big fat slob ex-head of the IMF, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, will soon get out of jail free to return to his sweet charming life of living in $3,000-a-night hotel rooms with expectations of being able to rape the maid at such prices. Already the Power Elitists are trumping up all kind of charges against the Black woman from Guinea (it once was French Guinea) who charged this big fat French sugar daddy with rape. First off they are spreading the rumor that her charges were unreliable since she was a liar and had claimed she'd been raped once before--you see, US White men can't believe a woman, whether Black or White, if she claims she's been raped more than once in a lifetime. This is especially true of Black hotel maids. Now, the Power Elite White boys have come up with not only saying she's a lying Black bitch but now they are rumoring that this single mother is involved in criminal activities like DRUG DEALING! So soon this fat cat Power Elitist banker will be cleared of all charges and the Black maid will be hauled off to Rikers Island facing 25 to Life. Next time, bitch, lay back and enjoy it, as one old New York City weatherman advised women at the end of his last NYC televised weather report--"If you all are getting raped, ladies, rather than fightin', just lay back and enjoy it." His name was Tex, and, yes, he was a Texan, and that advice cost Tex his half-a-million-a-year salary and he disappeared from the NYC teevee scene never to be seen again.][NOTE: Dominique Strauss-Kahn WAS SET TOTALLY FREE FRIDAY, JULY 1. Yes, the rape-hollering Black woman (foreigner!! oh, but then Strauss-Kahn is a foreigner, too) is a liar (I knew it all along), the prosecution blurted out during old Dom's New York State hearing. Not only is she a liar, but this Black bitch is also a drug dealer and connected to criminal elements through money laundering as well (as if old Dom isn't connected to anything crooked). This is the same prosecution that threw old Sleazebag Strauss-Kahn in the multimillion-dollar-SOHO-apartment slammer in the first place. I mean are we to believe the prosecution never checked the reliability of the victim before they slammed down so hard on that old evil banker. So there ya go, folks. You got the money, you've got the freedom. To the rich go the spoils--and now, a Black hotel maid is facing prison time while Big Daddy Dominique will go totally free and soon be back to assaulting maids in $3,000-a-night hotel rooms. You see, our legal system really works! Also note the name Cyrus Vance, Jr., one of the NY State prosecuting attorneys--here's a typical spoiled-brat little well-connected rich boy, son of old Cyrus Vance, Sr., both political parasites living off the government dole.]

Reagan started wrecking our economy when that dumbass Alzheimer's poster boy Grade B-minus actor allowed David Stockton and his wide-eyed Neo-Con faith in the absurd economics of Milton Friedman to take over as his economics guru--a guru of trickle-down economics, that which G.W.H. "Pappy" Bush called voodoo economics. Reagan started it off by running up the largest budget deficit ever in the history of this country at the time. Then G.W.H. "Pappy" Bush came up with his 1,000 Points of Light bullshit and his New World Order, at the same time shoving our asses deeper into the bottomless well of debt by breaking Reagan's budget deficit records wildly (later, Pappy's worthless spoiled brat son, G.W., would shatter all existing budget deficits--that wrecked economy this little spoiled-brat rich boy passed on to Barack Obama, probably saying like Jerry Lee Lewis said as he finished his set just before Chuck Berry was due to come on stage by setting the piano on fire, saying, "Let's see the Nigger top that!." Chuck topped it by blowing old Jerry Lee's Old Lawsbanana ass out the back window). Then Billy Jeff "Big Dog" Clinton comes along with Democratic Neo-Con Neo-Liberal bullshit, takes all the regulations off the banking and financial and insurance companies, and using the economy as a stepping stone to two terms as president, he left office claiming a budget surplus (I've seen arguments that Clinton's surplus was rigged to be a surplus when it really wasn't). The office he left was the Oval office, that office in which Old Big Dog had his little "Hey, this is fun!" pornographic incidents with Monica Lewd-winsky. Can you picture President Obama diddling a young woman government employee with an illegal Cuban cigar in the Oval Office? "I did not have sex with that woman." Dammit, I agree, diddling a girl with a Cuban cigar isn't having sex with her. The cigar is having sex with her, so let's bomb Cuba. Getting a blowjob from a girl is not having sex with her either. This is the same president who had to pay $850,000 to shut up Paula Jones, a woman who Big Dog had called up to his hotel room when he was Governor of the hick and very backward state of Arkansas to show her his Big Willie Pop fully erected--that speckled pecker he was so proud of. And Paula Jones was a woman of the semi-ugly kind the Big Dog seemed to like. I mean writing about this makes it so hard to believe--I mean it is so absurd.

These are the ethically bankrupt MEN We the People keep electing and reelecting to lead us and manage us and rule over us, which is all Congress is, a law-making body of spoiled brats and 2nd-story lawyers and parasitic millionaires who make their livings and nest eggs off We the People.

Our Congress is a Ship of Fools. I just saw that total Mormon idiot Oren Hatch braying like the mule he is about how Obama is sliding this country off into the ditch of Socialism, that place that positions this nation just above the snapping jaws of political/economic Hell. OOOOOH, I am shuddering with the insane fear that Obama is a Socialist! Get out of here! He's a god-damn corporate lawyer for God's sake. A National Socialist, yeah, if that's what you mean by Socialist!

And then a couple'a days ago, up pops that Connecticut idiot with shit for brains, Joe LIEberman--he's back with his solution to all our problems. Why can't We the People ever get rid of little prick politicians like Oren Hatch (he's been in Congress since I was a kid) and Joe LIEberman and this new female piece of crap who's replacing Sarah "Pale Face" Palin as the Repugnican HOT BABE candidate, Michelle Bachmann. Especially since Sister Sarah's bus tour flopped and backfired on her; in fact, it cost Sarah her role as the Repugnican HOT BABE. I mean the Koch Brothers are now jacking off over images of Michelle Bachmann.

I actually heard Michelle called "extremely smart" on commercial pap teevee last Sunday. All day long she was the center of attention on all those wild-full-of-crap Sunday newsmaker interview shows. I check out where she went to college. Guess where? If you guessed ORAL ROBERTS UNIVERSITY, you are correct madam or sir. An Oral Roberts graduate is "extremely smart"? Here's how smart this dumb Wonder Woman is: she has made the statement that if she were president she would rule the nation using the Holy Babble of Protestant Christianity as her source book. For, you see, old Pentecostal-Iowan-White-Trash Michelle truly believes the Holy Babble (Bible) of Protestant Christianity holds the answers to all our problems, all of them: political; economic; social; moral; etc. That is it holds the answers to all our problems unless you happen to be a Buddhist, a Hindu, a Muslim, a JEW! Now why in several layers of Holy Hell would any American in his or her right mind...and I stop myself right there--perhaps there is no American in his or her right mind right now! I itchily (in the sense I've got ants in my pants) see a great possibility that our first woman president will be a Christian-Oral-Roberts-U-trained Jesus-Lover-of-Her-Soul rubber-room candidate. And why not?, I shout across the rooftops. And I stand up proudly on those rooftops and stentoriously declare, "I, thegrowlingwolf , do hereby swear myself to backing hail-heartedly the candidacy of our first woman president, Michelle Backwardsmann! The new and improved Sarah Palin.

Ugh. It gives me the willies to write about these creeps even if it is in a sarcastic manner.

The compromising has not worked, you dumbass Dumbocrats! President Obama, the White Racists Repubnicans are gonna haul out the racial slurs and jungle-bunny insinuations as they shiver in fear at the oncoming onslaught of Brown people taking this country over--BROWN people who for the most part are Catholics! OH HOLY NIGHT IN HELL...CATHOLICS! The POPE finally in the White Man's House.

According to Michelle Bach(Backwards)mann, during her inauguration she will personally ask us all to get on our knees and accept Jesus H. Christ as our personal savior--then she'll have an altar call, "Come all ye who labor...Come all ye who wish ye were having sex with me...Come, come, come...let's bring Jesus H. Christ into our Constitution as our nation's government's savior, Lord and Master, yassuh, yassuh, Boss Mister Jesus, make slaves of all the poor, the broken and maimed, those who were so stupid they allowed their houses to go into foreclosure...OH YE OF LITTLE FAITH!" Oh, I can see it now, PRAYER back into our privatized schools. I can see a huge block of granite with the Ten Commandments on it placed in front of every government building. "Thou shalt not kill...unless you are Commander in Chief of the whole friggin' USA Jesus-Christ military complex"--Praise the Lardy Lard and pass me one of those groat clusters--steamy hot, dripping with soul sauce and real cow butter...ah the illusions of grandeur I suffer through.

theillusionalspoiledbratgrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler
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Speaking of OUR Spoiled Brats, Here's Michael Parenti on the Subject:

"The free marketeers have a deep all-abiding faith in laissez-faire for it is a faith that serves them well. It means no government oversight, no being held accountable for the environmental disasters they perpetrate. Like greedy spoiled brats, they repeatedly get bailed out by the government (some free market!) so that they can continue to take irresponsible risks, plunder the land, poison the seas, sicken whole communities, lay waste to entire regions, and pocket obscene profits"
[From: www.michaelparenti.org/DisposablePlanet.html].

Nikola Tesla's Death Ray Machine

Nikola Tesla (1856–1943) was a noted inventor, scientist and electrical engineer. He invented Tesla coils, transformers, alternating current electrical generators and was the first early pioneer of radio technology. Tesla worked on plans for a directed-energy weapon from the early 1900s until his death. In 1937, Tesla composed a treatise entitled The Art of Projecting Concentrated Non-dispersive Energy through the Natural Media concerning charged particle beams.[17]

Tesla was noted for claiming that he had developed what he called a "teleforce" weapon, or death ray. This death ray could "send concentrated beams of particles through the free air, of such tremendous energy that they will bring down a fleet of 10,000 enemy airplanes at a distance of 250 miles (400 km) from a defending nation's border and will cause armies of millions to drop dead in their tracks", as said in an article. He offered this invention to the U.S. War Department and to several European countries without success. Various conspiracy theories persist regarding the nature of this device and the whereabouts of Tesla's model or schematics[18] for it [from Wikipedia].

Check Out Dr. Judy Wood for Info on How DEWs Brought Down the WTC Towers
www.drjudywood.com/

Saturday, June 25, 2011

Enlightened Man/Woman vs. the Masses


Foto by tgw, New York City (in retrospect), 2008
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The Masses Are Basically Dumb As Hell

I listen to and watch President Obama straight-facedly babble out his brand of lawyer-emit-trained politico-speak at me and I don't gain anything relevant from what he's saying EXCEPT--and it's at that word except that I stop, because except is a jumping-off word. In the preceding sentence, for instance, because acts as a stop sign: "Because...." and one expects after the stop a reason will pop up that will clear the path ahead like a stop sign holds up one flow of traffic so another flow can flow through. Keeping the flow going is the basis of most of our science. Keeping the blood flow going is the science of life. It gets complicated when you start relating all of our different levels of reasoning, which is all our sciences, to keep the flow of thought going--to keep things progressing--some of us using pure science (mathematics, physics) and some of us using pseudo-science (sociology, economics, philosophy, poetry, literature), and some of us using supernatural science (alchemy, astrology, fortune-telling, theology, extrasensory perception)--all of these sciences trying to keep the flow of life going.

Just yesterday I came to a nice big break in my reading of one of Balzac's exciting and enlightening tomes, Lost Illusions, a 600 + page tome (I used to like using roman a fleuve in place of tome back in my younger and dumber and more romantic literary times (the 1960s--the Patty Duke years)). And oh how I needed a break from that book. Balzac has to be, at least he is to me, one of the greatest writers in whose-ever history. To me there's no comparison that I know of and I'm including Will Shakespeare in my conclusion. And, yes, Will was a masterful output-er of meaningfully combined words, most of which he wrote on the fly backstage as his productions were evolving out on the stage--his historical dramas being just the pap (propaganda) to keep the dumbass Brits entertained while the royal buffoons were playing soldier in the constant wars going on between the royal families of that century's Europe--that era of war-whoring royals that gave Will Shakespeare so much to write about, so much to parody and satirize, and, yes, when I get into reading Will, I find him hilariously funny--in the vein of Jimmy Joyce...certainly in the vein of Mark Twain...Nabokov, et. al. But Balzac. Balzac wrote over 200 tomes in his lifetime. Balzac wrote almost 24/7--he only slept 30 minutes at a time (all the sleep geniuses need--Thomas Edison only slept 30 minutes at a time)--to stay awake and alert using high-octane Mexican coffee beans that he ground himself and brewed in his coffeemaker to his dark-brewed delight--Balzac's coffee pot in a perpetual state of brewing--and, yes, Balzac crushed his coffee beans with a mortar and pestal--Balzac it was estimated consumed on an average of 40 cups of coffee during one writing session--now, yes, these may have been demi-tasses, expresso-sized portions--and I, too, being a consumer of dark-roasted coffees drink Turkish and Greek coffees in demi-tasses--those coffees that leave that nice chocolatey thick spoonful of remains at the bottom of that dainty cup.

Taking a little break (this can be skipped over--though it shouldn't be because of its relevancy to the dance, if you catch the flow of what I'm writing and saying at the same time--writing being simply a conversation a writer is having with himself)--I'll bet you readers (both of you--I jest of course) a dollar to a donut (did you realize this is the accepted spelling of doughnut in this blog's SpellChek's opinion?) that I'm the only Internet pundit (Pun-jabbing pundit) in this particular end of the blogosphere (a part of the bigger Googlesphere) who writes while listening to America's true CLASSICAL music, Jazz (Madame Zzaj)--and I'm writing now while listening to, under my stereophonic EARphones (headphones), one of the greatest-ever recorded live jazz performances that turned out to be one of the greatest ever spontaneous set of jazz inventions ever recorded--thanks to Norman Granz, Creed Taylor, Rudy Van Gelder (if you know Jazz you know these names) and the Verve production teams in 1965 (the year after the Beatles had invaded us (and I don't blame the Fab Four for this) with White Brit-fop (bubblegum on the bedpost) "rock" to the more musically advanced USA--in order to please the masses (the White mass market in this case))--this great jazz accomplishment was entitled: Smokin' at the Half Note and featured the genius of the jazzmeisters, Wynton "Winetone" Kelly and Wes Montgomery, both being ass-kicked by the kick-ass sectionists: Paul Chambers and Jimmy Cobb--whew, this shit inspires the holy behemoth hell out of me, stirs me up (a la Bob Marley), and builds sweet hot fires under my already inspired rattling off a mile-a-minute's worth of punditry--I mean, under the influence of this U.S.A.-born-and-bred genius music by now I'm raving like a crazed evangelical Christian fakir, walking the boards hollering the merits and beauties and nuances of this salvation music and...Jesus, I'm babbling like the brook Virginia Woolf drown herself in.

By the bye, Paul Chambers's bass had a head carved at its top in whose mouth Paul used to place his lit cigarettes while he played. Miles later fired Paul because he suspected Paul of stashing his mezzrolls in that bass's head's mouth, too.
http://www.kalamu.com/bol/wp-content/content/images/miles%20davis%2035.jpg
Paul Chambers Playing Bass With Miles: You see that little head up on top of Paul's bass? Photo thanx to kalamu.com.
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And, yes, cats smoked while they played in them thar past-age days--and check out how many musicians died from either cigarettes or cigarette-smoke contact. It's a hell of a lot of 'em who left us early due to cancers and massive organ failures (the autopsy report on Charles Parker, Jr., who died at age 33, stated that nearly every organ in his body was diseased)--and even I have musician friends who've never smoked a day in their lives who have spots on their lungs now--from working those old smoky clubs and bars--myself included--I was never a cigarette smoker--at least not any cigarettes I didn't roll myself out of my choice of smoking tobakies--like Balzac got his coffee beans from Mexico, so, too, do I get my tobaky from that great land. Should one admit one's sins on the Internet? Yes, and especially you can when you are a protagonist character in an on-going reality novel called The Daily Growler--think about it--The Growler is written by a Man-Wolf (hybrid) and edited by an editing horse and collated by a two-headed "girl" reporter--and managed by a man named after a Texas city and a kid's highchair. That's the The Daily Growler reality, folks. Though it is a civilized reality--really it is.

And now back to our logic: So, we're back to my taking my break from Honore Balzac and to continuing from the word EXCEPT. A word I called a jumping-off word as opposed to a stop-sign word like "because"--in the sense at EXCEPT you are first stunned to find the flow being detoured. You expected the flow to go on down the traditional direction. Instead, EXCEPT leaves you hanging--briefly, yes--EXCEPT in the case of the way I write--in that case you may be held suspended for several long paragraphs, as you just were left hanging--er-ah, come on, I try and reason, this is the fun of reading The Daily Growler. It gets kind of like a crossword puzzle at times.

So I listened to President Obama spieling out his withdrawal of troop plans for poor old bombed-back-to-the-Stone-Age Afghanistan (the Afghanistan War the perpetual war (you wanna bet?)) and I found the President's spiel babble...not comforting babble, because it was military-speak babble, and when you analyze it using my "backward thinking" logic, you find that what this President is saying is that though he is bringing home 10,000 troops right off the bat and then 20,000 more by the end of some other soon-to-be-forgotten-and-overlooked future date, he is leaving 60,000 troops there, plus whatever NATO (a joke army) troops are still there, plus 100,000 "contracted" troops (soldiers of fortune) still there, plus the CIA operatives and Blackwater goons still all over the place there, plus the bungling Afghanistan raggedy forces, plus the inept Taliban-infiltrated Afghan police force--all to be still overseered by the Good Ole USA, the invader and occupier, the Neo-Imperialistic Corporate forces of the USA under their Nobel Peace Prize-winning Commander in Chief, Barack Obama.

And this campaign-speeching bullshit of Obama's got me breaking from Balzac and picking back up after a long delay, Ortega y Gasset's Revolt of the Masses to start reading it again. And soon I was back in that great book's reality--the reality that when its brilliant light is shined on my fellow We's the Peeps of the USA, I see how mortally (I think) dumb WE are. Dumb, dumb, dumb. Obama: DUMB. John Bonehead the House Majority Leader: DUMBER than DUMB. Nancy Pelosi: poor little rich girl: Catholic girl school DUMB. Hillary Clinton: just plain Clinton DUMB. Big Dog Bill Clinton: Arkansas hick DUMB. Mitt Romney: DUMBER than the DUMBEST of the DUMB. And Mitt's a dumbass Mormon, which rhymes with Moron--in fact, one of the Mormon White Angels is a Moron(i)--and please, folks, I tried to read The Book of the Mormon one time in a Pendleton, Oregon, motel room, after eating a very badly cooked sirloin steak at a steak restaurant I had seen touted along the highway all the way from Washington state into Eastern Oregon--and the first chapter of the Book of the Morons was so moronic, I caught myself bursting into mad laughter and calling my wife into the room to read her passages of it, especially the ones I found full of total idiocy--both of us laughing like Cheshire cats at the insipid stupidity of what surely is drunken writing. Like if I were to down half a quart of say Ron Rico rum and be writing like a maniac, "And in the beginning was a large goose-like man who rose above the desert to flower into a pansy of a angelic mortal whose first words were, 'When I see seagulls I see the semen of seminarians in whose golden-goose light I hear the honking of Jesus Frig'em Young Christ and the Tribe of Benjamin following faithfully along behind him as he leads his multiwifed army against the monogamous Devil in the Great Salt Lake desert--praise ye Moroni, ye Morons of the Latter Days.'" By golly, I'm inspired...to rewrite the Book of the Mormons as the True Book of the Morons. I'm on fire.

And Ortega y Gasset blames this dumbness on the masses, who he says took over in terms of majority rules in the middle of the 19th Century after the French Revolution.

A Very Relevant Passage From The Revolt of the Masses:
"The theme I am pursuing in these pages is politically neutral, because it breathes an air much ampler than that of politics and its dissensions. Conservative and Radical are none the less mass, and the difference between them--which at every period has been very superficial--does not in the least prevent them both being one and the same man--the common man in rebellion.

"There is no hope for Europe [published first in 1930, revised in 40s for publication in 1950] unless its destiny is placed in the hands of men really 'contemporaneous,' men who feel palpitating beneath the whole subsoil of history, who realize the present level of existence, and abhor every archaic and primitive attitude. We have need of history in its entirety, not to fall back into it, but to see if we can escape from it" [pp 69-70, First printing Signet Mentor edition, 1950][It is interesting to note that on the copyright page its says the translation was approved by Senor Ortega y Gasset and the translator has chosen to remain anonymous.]

I can't top the above statement by Brother Ortega y Gasset. How right this man is in saying we have to learn history to escape its distortions.

Trying to escape history, I remain,

thegrowlingwolf
for The Saturday Evening Posted The Daily Growler
http://www.kalamu.com/bol/wp-content/content/images/eric%20dolphy%2007.jpgPhoto courtesy (again) kalamu.com.
PS: I ended today's punditry listening under my headphones (earphones) to an Eric Dolphy album called Vintage Dolphy featuring the evolving jazz of the innovating Eric Dolphy. The great Dolphy--1928-1964 (he died from complications from diabetes)--goes toward a classical dawn on this album that came out in 1986 as a CD. It's a compilation of the spontaneous combustions from 3 different live concerts from 1962 and 1963, just months before one day Eric was GONE. In his introduction to this CD, Gunther Schuller writes: "Eric used to 'shed' [jazz musicians call practicing "woodshedding"--"I gotta get back out to the woodshed, man, I'm getting so slouchy"] untold hours every day, often at the expense of eating, sleeping and any leisure time. Frequently I stayed with him at his place in Brooklyn, a single room apartment with virtually no furniture; just a mattress, a chair and a small table. One day, after playing/practicing all morning and well into the late afternoon, I mentioned (having myself grown quite hungry) that he hadn't eaten anything, and I saw hardly any food in the apartment. He took me to one end of the room, opened a closet door, and pointed to two huge sacks sitting inside. 'They're full of white beans; that's almost all I eat. And you know, that's how black folks in the south survived for years in the old days. You almost don't need anything else.'

"Like I say, he was much more into playing his horns than he was into eating well."

Gunther Schuller, Intro to Vintage Dolphy, GM Recording GM3005CD.

Wednesday, June 22, 2011

Living in New York City: In a World of Perpetual Royal Wars

Foto by tgw, New York City, 2008
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My Youth and Nonconformity

I'm obsolete. I've already been a "youth." I've already led adults around by the nose getting my way. I've already set trends and been hip and been snide and put down old fogies and moldy fig ways of thinking. Now, I am admittedly way past being able to pose or characterize myself as being even spiritually close to anything "youthful." As a result, my "new" ideas--meaning I'm still thinking "youthfully"--come out born in storage. And I grappled many minutes before I came up with that metaphor. And I am a natural-born lover of tangibles. And, don't forget, of ironies, too.

I'm stuck in the ruts of the older highways of life, life's Route 66s, because, check this out, I autodidactically created my life's direction when I was a road-engineering youth--and I followed that direction and the road that direction led me down has led me now through several decades of "take it easy" life--smooth sailing on what to most folks would be a bumpy road. As a road builder I was a nonconformist. That's why I like the many twists and turns of this my own road. I find the way the crow flies not my method of traveling. I like the rubber-to-the-road way of traveling. The fastest way--the shortest way--never minded to me.

A part of that has to do with the fact I am slothful, a procrastinator. A procrastinator who was condemned to failure by my mother when I was a carefree high-school bon vivant (Casanova), or so she supposed me to be--my nonconformity misinterpreted by my accounting-minded mother as procrastination. Truth out, at that time, I had no idea what the word procrastination meant. I had to look it up in the dictionary to found out--and since then it's a word I've never forgotten. My mother's word for me.

I don't remember why she condemned me as a procrastinator but that condemnation having stuck with me all these years sometimes pops up into my mind especially when, yes, it does seem like I'm putting most things off. Moving forward slowly. And, yes, I do move slow. It's not that I'm slow in the "he's slow" mental categorization--oh no, I'm quick when it comes to wit and repartee and punditry and sloganeering and correcting others. I would have made a great debater or lawyer--except for my shyness. I suffer from a great timidity. And that is the explanation behind my slowness. I would have been a great teacher--except for this timidity--which I now discern as caused by my having no confidence in myself until I can prove myself perfect. The renaissance-man syndrome was a propellant I used to cruise (a form of procrastination?) through LEARNing as much KNOWLEDGE as I could gather and utilize. As a result, I became a little cocky wiseass whizkid--though, here my timidity gave me my cool.

It's all so complicated due to our childhoods being so complicated. Many a writer has attempted a volume imagining what a society formed and ruled over by children would be like--Lord of the Flies is the ultimate effort in this genre, although I'd throw the Harry Potter books in this genre, too, though I shouldn't comment on Harry since I've never even read one word of a Harry Potter book. They are too British for me. Kiddy book writers, too, try and give kids mature powers through their respect of the rules of kings and queens, princes and princesses, and even in their anthropomorphic tales, it's the royalty followers are told to follow if they want to succeed in a kingdom situation--which is the situation in most fairy tales. Trouble with kids and rule--their form of rule is the cruel form--the natural form--the instinctual form of rule. I was not a kid ruler. I never read kiddy books. Hell, I couldn't be a ruler because I was a natural-born disrespecter of RULE (but not rules).

The Golden Rule--hogwash. The ruler and yardstick to me were tools of punishment. "Grab the yardstick, Wolf, Wolfie's pissing me off in here with his obstinence," thus spaketh my mother. Roberts' Rules of Order. I never knew them. Emily Post's book of etiquette?--fuck it, I was crude, interfering, annoying...timid out in public but a wrathful little wretched anarachist within the confines of my home ground. And I blamed the reason for rules and rulers (teachings of obedience) on my parents.
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Presidential Campaign Time: "Come Let Us Be Totally Unreasonable Together"

Oh my gosh, they're off and running again. The multimillionaire's every-four-year Olympic-style political game is underway--the sport of running for political office (from the pits to the power).

President Obama, a new multimillionaire, is having to round up at least a billion bucks to compete for this all-powerful world chief of police job. His billion against the multimillions of let's see, 1) a wild-wall-eyed-pike of a babe-woman from drifting-backwards Minnesota; 2) a privileged spoiled rich-boy son of Pappy George Romney, ex-Michigan governor, guaranteed loser candidate for President, and ex-President of American Motors--and pampered-rich-boy is an afflicted candidate in that he's a Mormon--but then, and here comes another set of ironies, we like wacko religions here in the US of A--and the fact that Mormonism is a truly off-the-wall wacko religion (like Christianity), though that fact didn't bother the voters of the Old Line Brit Colony Massachusetts, who loved old Mitt so much they made him their governor. Mitt made his own money, thank you, in Boston in the crooked banking business.

Now up pops this guy, Jon Huntsman, who in New Jersey in front of the Statue of Liberty--the very spot Ronald "Henna-haired" Reagan launched his presidential campaign--wahoo, originality is a Repugnican trait. But Jon is from the pitiful state of Utah--and, god-damn, another Mormon. And what a Moron he is--he's a former governor of Utah (a low-populated state though it has somehow managed to shove its way intrusively into national politics (think Oren Hatch)). Jon's presidential pitch is based on this country going Black and Brown--you see there aren't many Blacks or Browns in Utah--it's a White state--Mormons see Blacks through the drunken eyes of old Joe Smith who was simply a fundamentalist Christian when it came to Blacks being the cursed children of the cursed Ham. God cursed Ham. Why? Why, hell, because he saw his old drunken pappy, Noah, nekkid--saw his dad's old gnarly pecker all unfurled and exposed. I mean that's bad enough but he further blasphemed God through looking at his nekkid father and making mocking comments about the sorry scene--"Hey, my brothers, dudes, come check out the old man--he's drunk again, but look, this time he's buck nekkid--and, Jesus Christ, what a pecker the old man's sprouting in his winemare...and, shit, he's not circumsized...." Oh my God, what an abomination! An abomination that got Ham cursed by turning his skin Black and shipping his ass off to Darkest Africa--he got (Gott in Himmel) returned to the jungle from which we all sprang. Plus, we assume this God cursed this the first Black man by giving him a big pecker--a Black snake. I mean, I can't write seriously about such inane bullshit.

And this Huntsman nutjob was Obama's choice to be our ambassador to Capitalist/Communist China, which is now the home t0 more millionaires and billionaires than the US of A--I think (therefore I am) I read somewhere. Check that fact out. China and India are now creating more NEW billionaires per capita than the rest of the world combined. Amazing, amazing, amazing. Still both countries ironically also have the highest poverty per capita in the world. Plus, China is currently going through a long drought--they lose a couple of million peasants a year to famines and nobody gives a shit; India is currently suffering a drought--all the while Monsanto is driving all Indian farmers out of business--an Indian farmer commits suicide every hour on the hour, I heard recently. The Power Elite in China does not give one shit about the millions of Chinese who are wiped out every year by the planet's worst famines, or major earthquakes, and extreme poverty. Nor does the ruling class in India give a shit about the Untouchables--so a 100 million of the raggedy-headed woggies die--who gives a shit? Certainly not the rich.

The division of RICH and POOR...and the evidence of this keeps rearing its big greedy head in this country NOW--in fact, NOW, in nearly every country and society in the World!

And what a roster of pitiful candidates the Repuglicans are running against Corporate-Commander in Chief and Wall Street big fan, President Barack Obama. Surely the American people don't want a Mormon in the White House. Like how many first ladies will our first Mormon president show up with? Or do old Mitt and Jon Huntsman not go that far with their Mormon doctrinism? What a ship of fools. But then, Obama is a fool, too, so there you go.

And last evening (June 22) President Obama, looking rich and famous, spouted out some grandstanding palaver with his rather hollow-sounding (backwards thought out) announcement that We the People of the USA are pulling our troops out of Afghanistan...well, er-ah, we're sort of pulling our troops out of Afghanistan...though we still have this WORLD commitment being the world's policeman and moral overseer--and making Afghanistan safe for rule by US Imperialist-Capitalist colonizers (invasion and occupation of countries we don't like). Oh boy, oh boy! Except, don't hold your breath, folks, waiting for World Peace--even though our President is a Nobel Peace Prize winner! Ironies! Ironies!

Here's Obama's troop-withdrawal plans for Afghanistan--the longest WAR in US history: 5,000 troops coming home whenever--he says immediately, but that doesn't really mean immediately in the sense you think of something happening on the dime. No, no, this withdrawal will be in the "slow immediately" category--like Obama's spinning out withdrawal figures using statements like "by the Year 2018"--but to me, that ain't immediately. But, glorioski Zero, even if he brings 5,000 troops home tomorrow and another 5,000 a year from now, there will still be 65,000 US troops who are staying--plus the 100,000 soldiers of fortune that will be staying on there, these privateers who are making fortunes over there, stealing billions of dollars from We the People.

Yep, our Peace-Prize-winning president is closing down our operations in Afghanistan like he did our operations in Iraq, where we still have a 100 or so thousand troopers and soldiers of fortune plus Hillary's 7,000-man State Department private army. Plus, now, our Commander in Chief says he's not obligated to the War Powers Act or Congress in his little private war on Libya (a continuation of another Ronald Reagan intrigue), so we'll now turn our drone-and-splurge tactics (Obama says the Splurge worked both in Iraq and Afghanistan) on the Libyans. You see, according to our Peace-Prize-winning president, this, like the Korean War, is simply a police action, not a war--even though our Air Force planes made 60 bombing raids on poor old Ghad-dam-daffy's Tripoli compound and surrounding neighborhood yesterday (June 22). The intention is still the same as Reagan's in terms of Libya: assassinate Khadafy. Remember, OUR hatred of Khadafy goes all the way back to when Reagan tried to kill him.

That fucking Reagan--what a nutjob, but he got elected president by We the People--by a big margin, too. We the People of the USA elect these clowns to office so there: we must love them over any kind of supposedly peace-loving, red-leaning, Injun/Messkin-loving human rights activists, enemy-coddlers, Islam-tolerant wimps like that god-damn Dennis Kocinich. I mean, Dennis's Congressional ass is now in so much trouble in far-rightwing Cleveland--I mean Ohioans are pretty god-damn backwards--check out their governor--he's thinking of pulling up roots and moving out to Washington state to have any chance of keeping his lucrative Congressional job--since it looks like Cleveland may fire his contrarian ass in favor of a Teabagger (Party) wacko.

We the People of the USA love WAR. We love KILLING. We easily with no compunctions show people getting disemboweled or while they're still alive having pieces of their flesh cut off and eaten by a Hannibal Lechter type character; yet we rail against seeing two human beings fucking--even though all of us FUCK; even the most fundamental Christians among us FUCK. Mormon men love fucking so much they need more than one wife and all the daughters those wives can produce to quell those procreational juices. But, hell, killing is in our nature--why else do you think pistols are shaped like penises, with their balls hanging down via the grip--and it's in the grip where you store up the semen-like bullets. Even our tanks look like swollen-balled penises. Even our Air Force jets are penises with wings. Even our unmanned drones look like flying penises. WAR is a royal male sport--the penis rules the world.

It's a man's world; and men love killing; raw bloody killing, mangling, tearing people limb-for-limb. I was watching Michael Wood's great series on Shakespeare running for a twentieth or thirtieth time on PBS (our Public British Broadcasting System) and marveling over the fact that Shakespeare's mother's relatives were arrested and thrown into the Tower of London on suspicion of trying to overthrow the Protestant regimes, and though the powers who were couldn't prove any of the charges against Will's mother's family--they were rebels against the New Religion--Protestantism--Harry's new religion--they were of the Old Religion, the Catholic religion, which was outlawed in post-Harry the Eighth England--and Shakespeare's mother's relatives were executed in front of the London meat market--tortured before they died--being disembowled and watching in pain as their entrails were burned. And that, folks, is the barbaric blood that flows through us White Anglo-Saxons (remember, Obama is White through his mother). Also, I found it so interesting to note that while Will Shakespeare was travelling around with the Queen's Men (the Queen's own acting troop whose plays were propaganda plays getting the Brit subjects ready for another royal war) they ended up in Plymouth at the time of the invasion of the Spanish Armada. Will may have actually watched that battle from the shoreline. I only had one problem with Woods's presentation: he called Shakespeare the greatest writer in history. I guess that's true to a Brit.

The world goes tumbling on toward Entropy (CHAOS)!

theeasilyirritablegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

Thursday, June 16, 2011

Living in New York City--the White Man's Paradise

"Los dioses de la noche" Osvaldo Romero
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NOTICE:
In our "My Blog List" on the right-hand side of this post, we have added the correct-thinking site of Webster Tarpley (think J. Orlin Grabbe)--a man of wise thoughts that so far as we can tell are totally consistent with The Daily Growler contentions--with an especially in-depth look at the life and crooked and dumb goose times of one of our favorite characters, G.W.H. "Pappy" Bush--Tarpley's Unofficial Biography of George Bush. It shows up old Pappy for who he really is--a spoiled brat son of crooks from way back--as Tarpley says, he was born in a bank.
Check it out: The Pappy Bush Story
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The White Man's Paradise
The rich White man, of course. The poor White man is in the same boat with...well, hell, Mel, let's get serious...it's the same boat, yes, but like boats since time began, there are two sections to it--those decks above the water line and those decks below the water line.

The true rich ride above the water lines.

The rich White men live on the tops of the highest hills. The capitalist ventures that make these White men rich are down in the valleys, along the riverbanks or the coastline safe harbors--OR down deep under the mountains...OR under the largest cities (in the sewers, the subways, etc.). The hills in Manhattan are now topped by the highest man-made structures possible--extensions of foundations--where the total support strength of a man-made structure always is--why the pyramids are pointed--strength of man and nature being in its roots--its foundation--its mooring to the spaceship earth. Man, no matter his color (color is a cultural thing), as a descendant of tree-dwelling primates, feels safest high up--at the top; in the heights; in the castle-forts atop the highest points in the land; like back in medieval Italy when the height of the tower on your property was your symbol of wealth and power.

The higher up homo sapiens can get above the vicious jungle (the street) floor (the ground) where it's dog eat dog the safer they feel--and trust me, EVIL, "live" spelled backwards, does lurk underneath us--Evil lurks in all that we tree-dwelling monkeys can't see--even though our monkey eyes have almost swollen shut the more of us who were eventually forced down to the jungle floor due to our size. You see, evolution's cruel side is that it is being forced to expand (to be expansionist in its progress--and, please, this is macro-Sociology I'm chewing on here--or cosmic common sense through this reasoning factor we human monkeys are so proud of) by its connection to the expanding universe.

Deep shit, right? Too deep for even a superprimate like "reasoning" human beings. We are forced by this evolutionary process to seek a way off this space ship that one day will crash just as all the planets behind us have crashed and burnt thus forcing the life that humans have evolved from to be blown outwardly (expandingly)--as space-blown seed that landed in earth's primal oozing seas and gave birth to what we human monkeys now call life.

But do you see my point (direction)? My compass has worked pretty damn well for decades now. Why? Because I have expanded my knowledge as is necessary--for instance, expanded my brain's RAM and ROM capacities to where I can clearly see and clearly understand that my brain is comparable to a computer--that D.H. Lawrence of all people was correct in saying our emotions originate in our instinctual foundation, our solar plexus--the area of your gut where your diaphragm is located. Everything (in a physical sense) extends from that area up to your brain's vast space, the brain representing a map of the universe embedded in us back in a past cosmic history (how's this for mystical writing? I'm the Nostradamus of my time! Bold statement, you say. It's the wolf in me, I answer with a growl).

Think about it. Come let us reason together. I've always loved that statement. Lyndon Baines Johnson's scriptwriters came up with that slogan back at the height of the Great American Dream State those same scriptwriters called The Great Society. The highest culturally this country ever got--in my opinion; I was there; I was a progressive, a true libertarian lefty, a natural-born skeptic, i.e., cynic. A natural-born mystic, in the Baudelaire sense. And I always admired old Baudelaire. Why? Because I've always admired Edgar Alan Poe (at one time I claimed direct kin to him beings I have Poes in my Old Virginny-rooted forebears, though I later learned from my honest Poe-blooded grandmother that little Edgar was not a true Poe--that he was, due to the extreme kindness of the Poes to genius--taken in as a son by our Virginny Poes, so therefore...but, therefore to the dogs, I still respect E.A. as a relative--I mean, I so enjoy his mystery, his misery, his struggling as a writer in New York City, same as me--for the same reason I feel kin to Stephen Foster when it comes to songwriting and struggling as an artist in New York City--plus living close to the gutter same as those guys. And you think a POOR son of a bitch in New York City isn't living close to the gutter...or how about a POOR son of a bitch living in Midtown Manhattan in the dead middle of the most expensive real estate certainly in the USA and certainly in more than 99% of the world. You talk about feeling POOR, too, when every person you pass on the sidewalk you're pretty sure is wealthier than you--like that Chinese guy getting in that brand new Cadillac SUV. And all of this tirade started with a reference to Lyndon Baines (I call him el cojones grande) and his "Come let us reason together" slogan at the height of the Great Society, the highest this nation has come to a democracy yet--much to the chagrin of the Republican Racist Conservative John Birch Barry Goldwater Asshole White motherfuckers who set out to get revenge when Lyndon Johnson creamed old "In Your Heart You Know He's Right" Barry--forced him to put on his American Injun costume and do a war dance out in his secret basement room in Phoenix where he mockingly showed his respect for the Red Man, which to some White folks is a brand of chewing tobacco from our White tobacco plantation owners who at least gave credit back in those days to the Native American for letting them steal the idea of smoking tobacco as a addictive trip from them--Native Americans have always smoked and doped for the spiritual effect--tobacco being a gift from the earth that when used humanely is good for healing wounds--you chew it up into a paste and apply it say to an arrow wound, for instance. So, yes, soon the utilitarian use of tobacco becomes a pleasurable one--the nicotine in it that heals the wound also being an addiction on the soul due to its soothing powers. When we are high is when we see our spirits!

[For a good mystery, check out how Lyndon "Big Balls" Johnson died--check out that last helicopter ride that poor old dude took. Note, too, that Lady Byrd, Lyndon's loving wife, got to live the perfect life until she was 90 years old. And she never said one damn word about how her husband died--living the privileged life of a country squire's widow, tending to her garden, and her Lady Byrd Foundation of hidden wealth--and trust me, Lyndon and Lady Byrd before they got into politics--I mean Lyndon was a schoolteacher--yet, at Lyndon's death, he and Byrd were worth multimillions of dollars plus owning radio stations and real estate in D.C. and Texas--and Lyndon's brother Sam was well taken care of--he was once governor of Guam or one of those South Pacific territories we still claim as ours (Guam, Truk, American Samoa)--and I knew Lady Byrd's brother Tony in Santa Fe--thanks to his connection with Mexico, he ran a very successful trading company selling Mexican products and art and crafts. I give you as a good place to start in understanding Lyndon Baines Johnson: J. Evetts Haley's Will the Real Lyndon Johnson Please Stand Up. Haley was a history professor--and, yes, a nutjob, a Texas rightwinger--but he was a vaunted historian and tried to stay true to his professional renown, though like any good Texan in those days, including Lyndon Johnson, he overblew it a little bit. Still it's fun reading. Another fun Texas book is H. L. Hunt's Utopian guidebook based on his imaginary society of the same name, Alpaca. [A little Texian aside there for you.]]

A former Texan,
thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler
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From Out of the The Daily Growler Office Attic, Nostalgia:
We would guess you'd have to be pretty damn old to know what the above "thing" is. What it is, it's a cardboard board that has "push out" buttons (those red circles that say "Push")--these were also called punch boards. This one is a football push-out-for-prize game in which the contestant is trying to win free candy bars. Each push out cost a nickel and guaranteed you at least one candy bar. However, if you pushed out a chit that said "Touchdown," you won 5, count 'em, 5 candy bars--the board was fixed to where no matter how many candy bars the candy store man had to give away, he always knew the board was loaded to where the regular sale of one candy bar at a nickel out grossed the number of bars given away on the prize spots.

Dig the football players and their uniforms and equipment--leather helmets and baggy uniforms--not much padding--big old cleated shoes--late 193os, early 1940s. This collectible comes from Philadelphia, P. A.
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WARNING: We are at war in Libya now; according to President Obama, he has a Constitutional right under the War Powers Act to take us into war anywhere in the world he feels American citizens and privileges are under attack (with an intent to kill Americans). Look out Sudan. President Obama and his War Powers Act has its eyes on you. The question that should be on our minds is where is this president getting all this money these various wars are costing us? We are soon to get involved with the struggle for democracy now going on in Bahrain. We are already involved in the struggle for democracy going on in Yemen, where our Nobel Peace Prize-winning President has already under the War Powers Act approved of drone attacks driven by the CIA in our righteous attempt to clean out the unrighteous Islamic jihadists from that area of THEIR world--though according to our brilliant military advisors, we're mainly in Yemen to scrub out our greatly adaptive enemy, the mysterious al-Queda--who we say now has elected a new leader to replace the Devil himself--whose body we assume once dumped in the sea was floated straight down the world's drain into Christian hell by our new Crusader armed forces--and the Air Force does use Crusader missiles, doesn't it?

Bye the bye,
don't worry about the current drop of the Dow-Jones. It doesn't mean anything. You see it's near the end of the fiscal year (July usually) for the our businesses, corporations, our government, so they are going to account for all their sins during this time--you know, like Yom Kippur for US corporations, nonprofits, foundations, governments, banks, etc.

And a Chaotic Shout From The Daily Growler to the Following:
The Greek Unions--
they are striking en masse in Greece today--protesting the European Central Bank--the printer of Euros--the European banking establishment (based on US banking after World War II)--taking away Greek democracy should the surly Greeks reject these same banks forcing the Greek workingclass to pay for the robbing of the Greek treasury by Goldman Sachs thereby through fraud wrecking the Greek economy to the point the Greek Power Elite that has ruled Greece since World War II has sat idly by while the Greek economy went to the pirating dogs, a Power Elite that has consistently refused to tax the wealthiest Greeks, those who run around the world with free hands--like the Onassis clan, or like our own John Negroponte and his original Greek family--both families in the shipping business--the Greek Power Elite allowing these bastards to live like dukes and earls and barons and sheiks around the world, any port in a storm, watch out for your hot babe, that slimy Greek billionaire shipping magnate is eying your prize babe. And guess who the Greek workingclass is blaming for their current situation? Why President Obama who started all of this (well, actually Baby Boy Bush and Hank "Goldman-Sachs Pirate" Paulsen started it) by bailing out the banks and putting them back in the derivatives business--Jesus Christ, these are CROOKS we're supporting--and we here at the Growler call Bill Gates and Warren Buffett crooks, too--and Warren Buffett is proving himself a lying son of a bitch in this recent investigation of HIS Moody stock rating service--he's denying, denying, denying, like that little weasel Anthony Weiner was denying, denying, denying, until his pregnant wife got home and laid the fucking Hillary Clinton law down to his little weaselly ass. She'll be divorcing him--well, no she won't, because Jewish women don't divorce the fathers of their children--they make them pay out the nose for the rest of their lives. Like Hillary made old Slick "Big Dog" Willie pay for his good time with the young impressionable girls. Now a Porn Queen is revealing how she and Weiner, the little pervert, had "conversations," though she emphasized there wasn't any actual sex, a point she may be holding back on on the advice of her attorney--don't you think all these women are going to have to be paid off? So there goes Tony Weiner down that path of humiliation, a kid caught jacking off by his mommy, being pulled by his ear by his pregnant wife--mean women those pregnant women--a generalization we deny should any pregnant woman take offense from that statement.
----------------------------------Get your credit cards out, prices are going UP............................
P.S.: there are also demonstrations in Spain today and Portugal is watching Greece and the Irish are fleeing Ireland...and Iceland, who rebuked these same crooks, is backing the Greek workingclass against the bankers--and though Iceland is a dangerous land on which to survive, it certainly looks like a wonder place to live as long as you can survive--we mean, the whole earth is blowing up eventually--so where is it entirely safe anywhere on earth at the moment?

thestaff (thanx to franny & zoey)
for The Daily Growler "It's Getting Kind of Daily Again."

Tuesday, June 14, 2011

Living in New York City: Doing the New Age Tango

Abilene & Southern Railroad's #20 Baldwin 2-8-2 Steam Locomotive: sitting on a turntable--both railroad, loco, and turntable true "things of the NOW very distant past"--though in my memory I can still hear one of these old locomotives chugging up a slight grade on the old Texas & Pacific Railroad (long gone) tracks that ran behind our house when I was a kid in Dallas, Texas, after WWII.
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Gone Are the Days
My ex-New Orleans sidekick and friend for many moons now, a master of the Big Board who now lives a double-whipped smoothie life out in California, passed on to me this E-mail of this rather sad list of "passing fancies." It's from one of my friend's Internet friends. We don't think of these things as "obsolete," but they are, because it's now a Future Shock world where technology is rapidly advancing faster than we mortal human monkeys can control it or even keep up with it. With the advent and takeover of nanotechnology and now this new "Cloud" concept of computing, we will have to upgrade every 6 months or be left behind in a "Cloud of dust" or with a tombstone (surely soon to be a thing of the past along with cemeteries) over our heads.

Check It Out:
9 THINGS THAT MAY DISAPPEAR IN OUR LIFETIME

Whether these changes are good or bad depends in part on
how we adapt to them. But, ready or not, here they come

1.
The Post Office. Get ready to imagine a world without the post office. They are so deeply in financial trouble that there is probably no way to sustain it long term. Email, Fed Ex, and UPS have just about wiped out the minimum revenue needed to keep the post office alive. Most of your mail every day is junk mail and bills.

2.
The Check. Britain is already laying the groundwork to do away with checks by 2018. It costs the financial system billions of dollars a year to process checks. Plastic cards and online transactions will lead to the eventual demise of the check. This plays right into the death of the post office. If you never paid your bills by mail and never received them by mail, the post office would absolutely go out of business.

3. The Newspaper. The younger generation simply doesn't read the newspaper. They certainly don't subscribe to a daily delivered print edition. That may go the way of the milkman and the laundry man. As for reading the paper online, get ready to pay for it. The rise in mobile Internet devices and e-readers has caused all the newspaper and magazine publishers to form an alliance. They have met with
Apple, Amazon and the major cell phone companies to develop a model for paid subscription services.

4.
The Book. You say you will never give up the physical book that you hold in your hand and turn the literal pages. I said the same thing about downloading music from iTunes. I wanted my hard copy CD. But I quickly changed my mind when I discovered that I could get albums for half the price without ever leaving home to get the latest music. The same thing will happen with books. You can browse a bookstore online and even read a preview chapter before you buy. And the price is less than half that of a real book. And think of the convenience! Once you start flicking your fingers on the screen instead of the book, you find that you are lost in the story, can't wait to see what happens next, and you forget that you're holding a gadget instead of a book.

5.
The Land Line Telephone. Unless you have a large family and make a lot of local calls, you don't need it anymore. Most people keep it simply because they've always had it. But you are paying double charges for that extra service. All the cell phone companies will let you call customers using the same cell provider for no charge against your minutes

6.
Music. This is one of the saddest parts of the change story. The music industry is
dying a slow death. Not just because of illegal downloading. It's the lack of innovative new music being given a chance to get to the people who would like to hear it. Greed and corruption is the problem. The record labels and the radio conglomerates are simply self-destructing. Over 40% of the music purchased today is "catalog items," meaning traditional music that the public is familiar with. Older established artists. This is also true on the live concert circuit. To explore this fascinating and disturbing topic further, check out the book, "Appetite for Self-Destruction" by Steve Knopper, and the video documentary, "
Before the Music Dies."

7.
Television. Revenues to the networks are down dramatically. Not just because of the economy. People are watching TV and movies streamed from their computers. And they're playing games and doing lots of other things that take up the time that used to be spent watching TV. Prime time shows have degenerated down to lower than the lowest common denominator. Cable rates are skyrocketing and commercials run about every 4 minutes and 30 seconds. I say good riddance to most of it. It's time for the cable companies to be put out of our misery. Let the people choose what they want to watch online and through Netflix.

8.
The "Things" That You Own. Many of the very possessions that we used to own are still in our lives, but we may not actually own them in the future. They may simply reside in "the cloud." Today your computer has a hard drive and you store your pictures, music, movies, and documents. Your software is on a CD or DVD, and you can always re-install it if need be. But all of that is changing. Apple, Microsoft, and Google are all finishing up their latest "cloud services." That means that when you turn on a computer, the Internet will be built into the operating system. So, Windows, Google, and the Mac OS will be tied straight into the Internet. If you click an icon, it will open something in the Internet cloud. If you save something, it will be saved to the cloud. And you may pay a monthly subscription fee to the cloud provider. In this virtual world, you can access your music or your books, or your whatever from any laptop or handheld device. That's the good news. But, will you actually own any of this "stuff" or will it all be able to disappear at any moment in a big "Poof?" Will most of the things in our lives be disposable and whimsical? It makes you want to run to the closet and pull out that photo album, grab a book from the shelf, or open up a CD case and pull out the insert.

9.
Privacy. If there ever was a concept that we can look back on nostalgically, it would be privacy. That's gone. It's been gone fora long time anyway. There are cameras on the street, in most of the buildings, and even built into your computer and cell phone. But you can be sure that 24/7, "They" know who you are and where you are, right down to the GPS coordinates, and the Google Street View. If you buy something, your habit is put into a zillion profiles, and your ads will change to reflect those habits. And "They" will try to get you to buy something else. Again and again.
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Generational Leap Frog
In Economics 101, students learn the Law of Diminishing Returns. The example given in teaching this concept is that of the milk shake and one's hunger or thirst for one. It's like you go into the ice cream store craving a chocolate milk shake (my preference). Sure enough, the first shake is absolutely gratifying. But then you order a second shake. But this time this second shake goes down fast at first but by the end of it, you are beginning to be first of all feeling FULL and second of all you're getting a little tired of chocolate milk shakes. Then a third one is brought to you and you begin attacking it. This time it's close to impossible to drink this milk shake with much speed, finishing it perhaps with a great struggle and maybe a wee bit of being sick at your stomach. And THEN you are brought a FOURTH chocolate milk shake, which you reject--even the sight of it makes you sick. You see the principle of this Law of Diminishing Returns? And this principle can be applied to anything you do--even like the owning of a new car. At first we are proud of it--keep it cleaned up--keep the interior sparkling. But say a year later--the car's newness has worn off--there is less pride in it; you don't keep it so clean anymore; etc. This principle can even be applied to thinking--favorite concepts, designs, art, etc.

Human beings themselves become obsolete. Each new generation of young people set the trends, the fashions, the entertainment levels, the avant garde. In my lifetime I've seen radio as the most powerful media give way to at first black and white television. While in the movies, color film had finally become the norm while the industry technical folks experimented with wide-screen concepts like CinemaScope and Todd-A-O and futuristic concepts like 3-D (by the way, the next trend in television will be 3-D--and I'm sure there are some Techies, now called Geeks, who are working on 4-dimensional viewing concepts (like the holodecks on imaginary spaceships like the Star Trek Enterprise)...or integrated 4-D viewing with surround sound tracked onto it--or virtual movies in which the viewer can actually become one of the actors).

I am so obsolete. I lay out big bucks for some electronic toy (I'm into computers and recording equipment) only to see after enjoying it for say 6 months the announcement of an upgrade to it, a better and faster edition. Since 1985, look how computer operating systems have changed. Look how many new versions of Windows have come down the electronic pike (from Windows 85 to Vista). Apple is up to the Snow Leopard in terms of their OSX progressions--leaving behind their sometimes, I think, better extinct operating systems: Leopard, Tiger, Panther, Jaguar, and a long string of Classic OSs--and I loved 9.1 and still use it in the Classic mode with my obsolete Power Mac G4 running obsolete Panther 10.3. With my current obsolete set up, when I go on the Internet, Firefox warns me that my obsolete Firefox can no longer protect me from attacks. I am quite sure that Snow Leopard (OS 10.6) is soon to be obsolete and need to be upgraded (to Cloud computing).

My Youth and Nonconformity (a Page Out of MY Hi Story)
I'm so obsolete. I've already been a "youth" several times over. I've already led adults around by their noses getting my way. I've already set trends and been hip and put down old fogies and moldy fig ways of thinking. Now, I am admittedly, way past being able to pose as being even spiritually close to anything "youth." As a result, my "new" ideas--meaning I'm still thinking "youthfully"--come out under false pretenses as young in intentions but old in approach. Though I can cover my ancient ass by relating myself to root beer. The best root beer is "old-fashioned" root beer--but now I squandering analogies.

I'm stuck in the ruts of the road of life I so immaturely and adolescently created when I was a road-building youth--that road that has led me now through several decades of, I'll admit it, smooth-sailing life. As a road builder, I am a nonconformist. I like twists and turns though I like making them at modern angles. I find the way the crow flies not my method of aviation. The fastest way--the shortest way--never impressed me.

I remember the first time I traversed the Salt River Canyon in Arizona. I was in my beat-up rather Beat Chevrolet that had once been owned by a rich girl who when she outgrew it, her daddy sold it to me for $300. And I was so impressed with that Salt River Canyon and the highway that scaled it and descended on it, that magnificent canyon, and then at that time that highway was narrow, stretches of it unpaved, full of runaway offshoots in case your brakes went out coming down.
http://images.travelpod.com/users/matthewd/1.1253978579.salt-river-canyon-az.jpg
Salt River Canyon, Arizona. From Travelog.com.
And I lived my life by jumping from coincidence to coincidence--because coincidentally, my mother's brother, the Filmmaker, had rigged up a movie camera mounted on a tripod mounted on a wood platform in the back seat of his 1921 Maxwell touring car and had taken his mother, my grandmother, and his new movie-star wife, my aunt Celebrity, off out west filming--and one of the places he filmed was in the Salt River Canyon--with my grandmother driving the Maxwell while my aunt that I never knew (she died of cancer shortly after this trip) rode shotgun recording the event in terms of directing and scripting the scenes. I'll never forget seeing those films one time when I was a mere tad in swaddling clothes--how scary those black and white canyon shots were to me--those shots off the rims of that snaking-river-cut-deep canyon and in those days the scary narrow winding looping unpaved road that led travelers headed out toward the Golden State from one side of that deep pit in the earth to the other side and escape up onto the flatlands that then lead through the desert over to Phoenix. And from there it was easy to slingshot oneself out across the borax-white Mojave desert to eventually tumble down into Los Angeles off the San Bernadinos.

My uncle's intention on that trip was to film his entrance into that new beckoning wonderland for those dabbling in this new art form called the cinema--his adventure from the flat prairies of his home in West Texas out into the wild lands of the west to open up new highways in New Mexico--the Red River Canyon highway (that I would later visit many times myself when I lived in New Mexico)--and then in Arizona--and finally going out across the wide desert to come glorifiedly rolling into Hollywood in that big Maxwell touring car with that big hand-cranked movie camera mounted on the back seat--mounted where it could be busted down and encased in case of a rain storm or snow storm or earthquake--my uncle was an early filmmaker, except he called himself a movie maker--EXCEPT on this trip, he failed to get further than just east of Phoenix when his money and film ran out and his wife and mother were by then driving him to cursing them to the point where in a pouting state, he turned that Maxwell around in Phoenix and drove it straight back to West Texas without saying a word and without filming a lick and without doing anything but driving as fast as he could back so he could dump the two haranguing uncomfortable women he'd brought along with him on his advent upon the Hollywood movie scene.

I am slothful. OK, I admit it. I move slow, though ironically I can move fast, too. It's not that I'm slow in the "he's slow" mental categorization--oh no, I'm quick when it comes to wit and punditry and sloganeering and correcting others. I would have made a great debater--except for my shyness. I suffer from a great timidity. And that is the explanation behind my slowness. I would have been a great teacher--except for this timidity--which I now discern as caused by my having no confidence in myself until I could prove myself perfect. The renaissance-man syndrome was a propellant I used to cruise through LEARNing as much KNOWLEDGE as I could gather and utilize. As a result, I became a little wiseass whizkid--though, here my timidity gave me my cool.

It's all so complicated due to our childhoods being so complicated. Many a writer has attempted a volume imagining what a society formed and ruled over by children would be like--Lord of the Flies is the ultimate effort in this genre, although I'd throw the Harry Potter books into this grave genre, too, though I shouldn't comment on Harry since I've never even read one word of a Harry Potter book. They are too British (Gothic) for me. Kiddy book writers, too, try and give kids mature powers through their respect of the rules of kings and queens, princes and princesses, and even in their anthropomorphic tales, it's the ruler types followers who are taught to follow European traditions if they want to succeed. Trouble with kids and rule--their form of rule is the cruel form--the natural form--the instinctual form of rule. I was not a kid ruler. I never read kiddy books as a kid. Nor have I ever read a kiddy book to a kid. Hell, I couldn't be a ruler because I was a natural-born disrespecter of RULE and rules.

The Golden Rule--hogwash. The ruler and yardstick to me were tools of punishment. "Grab the yardstick, Big Wolf, Wolfie's pissing me off in here with his obstinacy," thus spaketh my mother. Roberts' Rules of Order? I never knew them. Emily Post's book of etiquette?--fuck it, I was crude, interfering, annoying...timid out in public but a wrathful little wretched anarchist within the confines of my home ground. And I blamed the reason for rules and rulers on my parents.
The Pacific Electric Car to Watts (Los Angeles), 1944, foto by H. I. Kelso

theobsoletegrowlingwolf

for The Daily Growler

P.S.:
Our latest "penis enlargement" spam is from "Governor Arnie."