Existing in New York City: Our Special Iraq Report

Say Goodbye to: Les Blank, maker of those wonderful films on the Cajuns and the blues and all kinds of Americana stuff. Les Blank, 77, American documentary filmmaker (Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe, Burden of Dreams), bladder cancer.
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Say Goodbye to: Roger Ebert, I didn't really dig him as a film critic but, hey, he did co-write the screenplay to Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. Roger Ebert, 70, American film critic (Chicago Sun-Times, Siskel & Ebert), thyroid cancer.
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Say Goodbye to: Daniel Hoffman (see end of post)
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Democracy in Iraq
a Special Report from The Daily Growler Special Correspondent, Walter Crackpipe

Ten years in Iraq and we showed those bastards (remember, they tried to murder old Pappy Bush) who's boss.  OK, so 4,800 of our young got sent off to military glory-land; so what?  No big miss in terms of anybody in this country really giving a damn (hey, those boys and girls knew what they were getting into when they joined our glorious armed forces).  Even though we lost more of our own lives in Iraq than died in the World Trade Center military invasion, we still managed to kill 660,000 of those towel-head heathen (this number calculated by an independent source and not our glorious government or the number crunchers in our brave military--some ingrates claim over a million Iraqis died) and drive a couple’a million of ‘em out of the country and into refugee camps.  Our God, the real God, blessed Little Privileged Prick, G.W. Bush, with his vision of a democratic Iraq and his determination to revenge those assholes trying to murder his old sacred Pappy.  OK, so the conniving little asshole lied us into that war.  That’s OK.  He asked God for direction and our God, the real God, gave him that direction.  “Go thy into Iraq and show those heathen sand-n-worders the power of a God-Blessed America who you don’t threaten with weapons of mass destruction whether you have them or not.”  Mission Accomplished!!  You see as a low-life liar Christian all you got’a do is confess to Big Daddy and his Only Son, like, “God, forgive me for lying like the most unholy of dogs,” and, by golly, you’re forgiven and made righteous.

Democracy Brought the Iraqis Fresh Drinking Water

Ten years bringing Iraq democracy.  So what we ravaged that country.  So what we blew up their sewage systems; so what we destroyed their water supplies; so what we dumped dead bodies in their rivers; so what we blew the heathen bastards away with bullets and shells made with depleted uranium (highly radioactive); so what we killed a bunch of innocent women and children?  We brought these unholy creatures democracy and via that democracy we brought them our God, the real God; if they wanna still believe in that silly-ass Allah, so be it, but let ‘em know, if they reject our democracy and our God, the real God, then we’re keeping enough of our brave hero soldiers and Blackwater goons around to send another 660,000 of them to Hell, if our Nobel-Peace-Prize-winning commander-in-chief decides it’s necessary.

 Baghdad Gets Its Own Disneyland Courtesy the Kind Folks of the USA

I certainly feel safer now, don’t you?  I feel safer because I no longer have to worry about one of that USA-supported Sad-damn Hussein’s unmanned aircrafts loaded with weapons of mass destruction sailing into the side of the Empire State Building.  Praise our God’s holy name.

We are perfectly justified by our God, the real God, to go into all the world and convey our message of “do like us or we’ll do it to you.”  As our great privileged aristocrat president, Teddy Roosevelt, said, “Speak softly but carry a big stick,” which is what we do.  We now have our drones that fly in softly but oh what big sticks they carry.  Our God, the real God, gives us the technology to build such wonderful weapons.  Just think, a group of towel-head heathen terrorists gather to plan to kill Americans and feel they’re perfectly safe, until WHAM, we hit ‘em with a drone strike and KABLEWY, we wipe out those god-damned terrorists no matter if most of ‘em might be innocent women and children and grandpas and grandmas.  If you hate the USA, by God, you deserve to die.

Prediction by Crackpipe 
1) I predict there'll be no gun laws of any kind any time soon.  After all, the USA is the largest weapons producer and seller in the whole damn world.
2) I predict we'll one day learn that the CIA (working out of Turkey) started the Syrian conflict...perhaps even using Al-Queda recruits.
3) I predict another financial debacle that will render us all Third World creatures...remember, a part of the NeoCon Manifesto was to drive the dollar down to worthless paper and to wipe out all classes except the lowest class...Paul Wolfowitz is still a free man enjoying a rich and prosperous life.
4) I just read where G.W. Bush is still costing the American dumbasses several hundred million dollars a year, $400,000 alone to run his Dallas office!  A true American jerk hero, eh?  Remember, the dumbass Americans elected this idiot to two NeoCon terms as president.

Hope you're comfy in your soon-to-be foreclosed on homes...has your wife or husband talked about divorce yet?  Have your kids started their assault rifle collections yet?  Like Detroit, your hometown is soon to probably be turned over to an Old Massuh as we revert back to the Old Plantation days in this country.  Get ready to live in a tent and go begging for work of any kind..."Yaasuh, boss, I'll work for company store chits and weevil-riddled flour."

waltercrackpipe(frommyyachtontheSaintLawrenceRiver) 
for The Daily Growler 

Say Goodbye to:  Daniel Hoffman

Identities

One searches roads receding, endlessly receding, receding.
The other opens all doors with the same key.Simple.

One's quick to wrath, the wronged, the righteous, the wroth
kettledrum.
The other loafs by the river, idles and jiggles his line.

One conspired against statues on stilts, in his pocket
The plot that dooms the city. The other's a good son.

One proclaims he aims to put the first aardvark in space.
The other patiently toils, making saddles for horseless headmen.

One exults as he flexes the glees of his body, up-down, up-down.
The other's hawk-kite would sail, would soar--who has tied
it to carrion and bones?

One's a Tom Fool about money--those pockets are his, with the holes.
At his touch, gold reverts to the base living substance.

The other's a genius, his holdings increase by binary fission--
Ownings beget their own earnings, dividend without end.

One clasps in a bundle and keens for the broken ten laws.
The other scratches in Ogham the covenant of a moral pagan.

One with alacrity answers to '121-45-3628?'--'Yes, Sir!'The other
bends his knee, doffs cap, to no man living or dead.One

Does all his doings predetermined by diskette or disc.
The other draws his dreams through the eye of the moon.

Existing in New York City: My Early Days as a Poet

Foto by tgw, New York City, 2013
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President Obama Shucks and Jives Us Again With Bush-Like Deviousness
From AntiFascist Calling:

Wall Street's Choice

As one of the filthiest dens of corruption in Washington, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is in a league of its own.

In late January, when the president announced he was nominating former federal prosecutor Mary Jo White to lead the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), The New York Times, as they are wont to do, proclaimed that the "White House delivered a strong message to Wall Street." [Mr. Ed: Bullshit!]

A rather ironic assertion considering the tens of millions of dollars "earned" defending Wall Street criminals by Debevoise & Plimpton partner Mary Jo and her millionaire lawyer husband John, a partner at the white shoe corporate litigation shop Cravath, Swaine & Moore, as Above the Law disclosed.

Keep in mind that White will soon lead an agency that for years covered-up financial crimes by routinely shredding tens of thousands of case files on everything from insider trading, securities fraud, market manipulation and the Madoff and Stanford Ponzi schemes, as a 2011 Rolling Stone investigation disclosed.
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Say Goodbye to: Virgil "Fire" Trucks, a big favorite of mine when I was a little kid and a Detroit Tigers fan.  They brought Virgil in "to put out the fire."  Old baseball players seem to live forever. Virgil Trucks, 95, American baseball player (Detroit Tigers).
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Say Goodbye to: Herbert Streicher (better known under his stage name, Harry Reems), the New York City actor who became famous as one of the pioneer porn actors, acting that some of our sleazier intellectuals might consider poetry: Harry Reems, 65, American porn actor (Deep Throat), pancreatic cancer.
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Thanks to: The Existentialist Cowboy for adding The Daily Growler to his blog list.  The Cowboy is a "brother" from the individualist wilds of West Texas from whence came I.
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Here's an Absolutely Cold-Ass Blast of Well-Written Accusations in Celebration of Our Glorious Victory in Iraq ("Hey, come on, man, they had weapons of mass destruction they meant to use to kill Amuricans...'Bring 'em on,' as our great president taunted the unholy Muslim bastards!"): http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/03/22/americas-willing-executioners/
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What's So Alluring to Women About a Poet?
Outside of jazz and blues, the next music that interests me is the music of Charles Edward Ives, a fascinating man born in Danbury, Connecticut, in 1874, who started writing music at age 11 and who by the time he was 14 was an accomplished organist.  He went to Yale and there studied under Horatio Parker (whose father's name, coincidentally, was Charles Edward).  While at Yale he started writing his first symphony (he ended up writing 4) and many other pieces, including marches, ragtimes, theater music, string quartets, songs, violin/piano sonatas, organ music, orchestral sets.  After he graduated from Yale, he moved to New York City where he made his living as a church organist, while staying up all night writing more music.  By 1914, when he was 30 years old, he had written the bulk of his output, including his most famous work, his Second Piano Sonata, subtitled, The Concord Sonata.  By the time, Charlie quit writing music, he was becoming a successful and innovative businessman, forming in those early 1900s the Merrick and Ives Insurance Co., a company that eventually evolved into one of the most successful insurance companies in the USA.  Due to bad health, Ives retired from the insurance business a millionaire in 1929.

After Charlie's retirement from both the insurance business and writing music, he became a patron of new music in the US, especially contributing funds to such composers as Henry Cowell, Edgar Varese, Elliott Carter, and helping the career of a pianist and songwriter, Katherine Ruth Heyman.

The latter Ives funds recipient, Katherine Heyman, was a pianist who specialized in the piano music of Alexander Scriabin whose preludes Ives admired. [Scriabin, by the way, is worthy of much attention.  There is so much entertaining weirdness in his biography (as a kid, he built pianos that he gave away to people; he became a mystic and begin to see his compositions in terms of the colors of the notes; he wrote a piece to be performed by all forms of artists in the Himalaya mountains; Asteroid 6549, Skryabin, is named after him).]

Katherine Ruth Heyman was born in Sacramento, California, in 1877 (when Charlie Ives was 3 years old).  She studied piano with her father, Arnold, who was a concert violinist, and made her recital debut at age 6.  Intrigued, I Googled-down her life story and was delighted to find in her biography put out by the New York Public Library in relation to their having an archive of the songs she wrote that she was a friend of Ezra Pound's and had put two of Ezra's poems to song.

The Young Ezra Pound

Always attracted to any woman who became a friend of Ezra's, on further investigation, I found out that friendship was more than just a friendship. Ez was 19 (living in London) when he met 34-year-old Katherine Heyman.  The amazin' Ez, poet, woman charmer, and lover got engaged to Miss Heyman who in return gave Ez an heirloom diamond ring.  Ez being the gentleman that he was went on to charm the pants off Hilda Doolittle and got engaged to her using Miss Heyman's diamond ring to seal the deal.  Hilda, a highly romantic Moravian girl from Pennsylvania, wrote that Ez's kisses were "fiery" and "electric" and "magnetic."  All was fine until Hilda caught Ez in a romantic clutch with her gal pal Frances Gregg.  Believe it or not, after breaking up with Hilda and Frances, Ez went on to charm Mary Moore out her pants, getting engaged to her using, you guessed it, Miss Heyman's diamond ring as the engagement ring.

Young Hilda Doolittle

Ez's later love life is well known.  In 1914, while acting as Katherine Ruth Heyman's manager, he met the beautiful Dorothy Shakespear (as Ez described her, "not only beautiful but also well off") and married her.  Then 8 years later, in 1922, Ez happened across the dark American expatriate beauty and violinist, Olga Rudge, who he took as his mistress, dividing his love time between Dorothy in the winter months and Olga in the other months, a relationship which ended with both of these women living with and caring for Old Ez on into his final years.  It was said that Ez in his final years sat speechless with his head resting on his chest while these two faithful women waited on him hand and foot though they hated each other.

Dorothy Shakespear

Olga Rudge

As those who know me know, I grew up with a grandmother who was a poet and her influence on me caused me as a young Ez-type in college to begin writing poems, many of which I wrote to the "girls" in my life, especially a young 16-year-old rock-and-roll columnist on my hometown's newspaper whose pants I eventually managed to slip off her young body using poems and champagne, a poetic romance that lasted for 4 years, a romance that in a poetic way ended in her getting knocked up by a man I hated while I was off doing time in the U.S. Army.  I got a poetic revenge on her (a la Ez) by after she was married re-seducing her by confessing to her via a long highly erotic poem my continuing lust for her while openly wilding around town with her best friend, a girl with her head in the clouds whose ambition was to write verses for children.

After college, while living in Dallas, Texas, I pranced around that town posing as a Poundish-Byronic poet-rue charming the pants off both idyllic single girls and unsatisfied married women alike by being able to create poems to these women on the spot, so to speak.  A sonnetizing Casanova with the morals of most of the great poets in my past.

My old pal, Languagehat (at www.languagehat.com), recently sent me a well-written and researched article from The Awl, by Carrie Frye, entitled, "How to Be a Monster: Life Lessons From Lord Byron," that concerns itself with the London doctor,  John Polidori, who Byron hired on to travel with him on his golden tour of Europe, a doctor who Byron called Dr. Polly Dolly, an article that revealed the many immoral seductions over women and young men instigated by the poet monster, seductions that included his own half-sister (with whom he had a child), all sorts of actresses, and young loose adoring ladies both single and married, to a woman of London high society old enough to be his grandmother.  The article also sketches the life of Lord Byron in a Swiss chalet in the company of Percy Bysshe Shelley and his underage mistress (she was 16) soon to be his wife, Mary Godwin, and her 18-year-old sister, Claire.  At one party in Switzerland, when Lord Byron entered the room, many a damsel fainted at the sight of his glorious presence.  One of his lovers, Lady Caroline Lamb, called his hold over women "Byronmania."    

The Monster Himself, Lord Byron (contemplating his next seduction?)

Lady Caroline Lamb (Laying in waiting for the Monster?)

 

Mary Godwin Shelley (Percy's babe; Dr. Polly Dolly broke his ankle by jumping down off a wall to offer young Mary his arm in escort after Lord Byron coaxed him into the act knowing the bland doctor had the hots for her)

Never Coagulating 

The bad blood

flowing in the poet's veins

when opened with a jealous knife

never stops flowing

its bleating

bleating out songs of seduction

even as it flees the panting heart

theoncepoeticgrowlingwolf  

for The Daily (Yeah Sure!) Growler

The Art of My Old Friend Will Shuster 

 "Santa Fe" (an etching)

Existing in New York City Among the Capitalist Pigs, Part II

Foto by tgw, New York City, 2013
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Watching the Rich Playing Golf on the Rich Man's Golf Course 
I've been feeling lousy.  In the true sense of the word.  Lethargic.  Trapped in the web of tedium vitae.  Ennui is a good word for my situation, too.  Last Friday (March 1), I passed out in the lobby of Bellevue Hospital while waiting on line for almost 2 hours to get a refill for my heart meds.  Where the hell did all these down and outters come from? I asked my subconscious companion as I stood there and stood there and waited and waited.  A couple of times I almost got the moxie up to split the scene but, hey, I thought, shit, I've waited this long, a little longer won't hurt me.  WRONG!  Suddenly my head started spinning.  Suddenly my stomach got queasy.  And the next thing I know, I was down for the count on Bellevue's marvelous marble lobby floor.

I tried to get up off the floor but a couple of big tough Black security guys forbade me to complete that action and they radio-ed for a stretcher that soon arrived.  Four of these big urban cowboys lifted me onto that stretcher and wheeled me post haste down a long corridor and straight into the Bellevue Emergency Room where I was soon being pushed passed a whole lot of down and outters on stretchers, some with NYPD cops as their escorts.

Next I know I'm told they're keeping me overnight to check my vital signs giving me no say in the matter.  Then I was wheeled by a nice Black lady wearing a white uniform up to 17 North and deposited in a room by a window overlooking the East River running north, a window from which I could see far up the river, up the FDR Drive, past the 59th Street Bridge (I refuse to call it the Ed Koch Bridge), past Roosevelt Island, and up to where the East River meets the Harlem River.

I stayed in Bellevue for 5 days this time.  Monday now over a week ago I was wheeled into an OR and during a two-hour surgery, I became the proud possessor of an ICD, an Implantable Cardioverter Defibrillator.  Then I had one more night in the hospital and Tuesday around 11 am, I was sent packing by my cardiologist.

Once back home, I thought, whoop-tee-do, I'm back in the saddle again.  This time, if I take a nose dive for the grave, my ICD will shock me back alive (a la a resurrection) and I'll be once again living in the highest of cottons.

But oh how wrong I was. I soon found the two-inch incision, though healing as predicted, during its healing process was draining me of my energy.  The healing wound plus the immune-system drainers of the heart meds I'm on (beta-blockers, aspirin, and statins (all of which I hate with a pharmaceutical dissident's passion)) have combined to leave me with restless leg syndrome, sleepless nights, and a lethargy that makes me sometimes feel the only sleep I'm ever again going to get will be when I'm R.I.P. six-feet under some Queens or Brooklyn turf (except I've requested I be cremated and my ashes thrown to the New York City winds).

By this past Saturday, I was so googly eyed and drained of energy, I decided to bury my head in the boring sands of television.  Not even the craziness of Christian television brought me out of my lethargic slump.  I didn't regain a bit of my upsetting-the-cart vigor until 3 o'clock Saturday afternoon when on NBC I found the Cadillac World Golf Championship event being broadcast live from Miami, Florida, and the old Doral Resort's Blue Monster Golf Course.  And who was leading this big-buck tournament?  Why to me the greatest golfer of all time, the recently much-abused billionaire golfer, Tiger Woods (though records claim he's only worth 500 million).

Of all the sports, baseball and golf are my favorites.  Mainly because, as a kid, I excelled first in baseball and then later during my senior year in high school after my bad-ass attitude had lost me a chance at a professional baseball career, I took up golf.  One of my cousins on my father's side of the family had turned me on to the game.  This cousin became a Texas amateur champion and every time he came to my hometown to play in a tournament and twice while playing in two Paris, Texas, tournaments, he used me as his caddy.

So I got intrigued watching Tiger Woods this past Saturday and Sunday playing almost perfect golf...to go on to sweep win the tournament and garner himself a cool million or two bucks.

As I watched this golf tournament, I became focused on how even the commercials (high-end automobiles; stock investment companies; golf equipment manufacturers; big banks) during the broadcast were aimed at people with money.  Golf itself is a very expensive sport to learn and play.  To play on Miami's Doral courses (there are five) costs over $250 a round.  Membership in golf clubs varies with most public and private clubs (which used to mean no Negroes and no Jews allowed...and still, in spite of Tiger Woods' popularity, there are no Black players on the pro tour that I know about...and very few if any Jewish players).  Initiation dues run from $2,000 up to over $200,000 ($650,000 at a new country club in the Long Island Hamptons) with annual dues running from $3,000 a year to up over $100,000 a year.

Most professional golfers must have sponsors in order to maintain their pro tour statuses.  The winningest pros of course have the most in terms of sponsorship bucks, with golfers like Tiger Woods, Phil Mickelson, and the current hot-shot Rory McElroy easily worth millions in sponsorships, Tiger, as I stated, is the first pro golfer billionaire, money he scooped in off sponsorships and not tournament prize wins.  Most of the consistent top-ten finishers in pro tournaments make millions of bucks a year, drive top-end automobiles, live in mansions, and travel from tournament to tournament in their own private jets.

Capitalist pigs love golf and owning golf courses and owning pro golfers.  How disgusting was it to me to see the announcement during this Miami Doral tournament that this old course and spa had just been bought by Donald Trump (you know a piece of property is spiraling downward in value when Trump buys it).  How further disgusting was it to see this big inflated-egoed pompous ass arrive at this tournament in a helicopter and then plump his big fat butt in a golf cart that whizzed him from his helicopter up to his privileged clubhouse parlor overlooking the last hole.  How further disgusting was it to see that the Donald has now blown up into a big-time fat slob.  What a phony Donald Trump is.  He's never really worked a day in his privileged life, his father making the family fortune before passing it on to his worthless son.  Trump is the bankrupt champion of the world's real-estate wheelers and dealers.  He's constantly declaring bankruptcy with his projects, i.e., his constantly bankrupted Atlantic City gambling casinos.  This pompous ass has admitted under a deposition he has exaggerated his worth.  According to the Capitalist Pig List put out by the Forbes Money Worshipers, Donald is worth about 3 billion, which lobs him down around 400 on the billionaire list.  Donald by the way, being a boy from Queens, New York, hates blacks.  Remember, Donald the Blowhard believes our President isn't an American citizen.

Seeing Tiger Woods win on Donald Trump's latest acquisition gave me great relief from boredom.  Tiger easily trounced all the White boys in Miami for his 2nd tour win of this year.  Tiger, by the way, has overcome his shenanigans with the high-priced whores that wrecked his marriage and put him in a bad light a few years ago and is back smelling like a rose again.

Obama Continues to Kiss Republican Ass
This phony progressive president continues talking out both sides of his White/Black mouth.  He's pretending to hold back a decision on this disgusting TransCanada Keystone Pipeline bullshit as he awaits a special study on the matter he's commissioned.  Who's heading up this study?  Why a TransCanada executive.  What do you think the results of that study will be?

And gun control.  Pres. Obama sloughed that touchy subject off on Joe "DuPont Asskisser" Biden.  Months now after Newtown we still have no bans on any kind of weapons.  By the way, who makes gunpowder?  Could it be DuPont?  I predict there'll be no new gun laws on the Federal books as time erases our memories of the horrors guns of all sorts wreak on our dumbasses.

Is Pres. Obama going to cave in to his Republican buddies on cutting Medicare and Social Security (two citizen-paid-into successful Fed programs)?  Well, yes, it looks like he is.  Fuck old people.  Old people are supposed to drop dead the minute they turn 65; how dare they keep living on past that day of insurance-company calculated lifespan.

LOOK OUT!  Jeb Bush Looms on the Republican Horizon
There's all kind of Beltway rumoring going on about Jeb Bush reving up the Bush Family Empire jets readying to toss his crooked hat into the 2016 presidential bruhaha.  This little privileged Bush prick certainly knows how to steal elections.  I laughed my ass off hearing Jeb say his little Georgie Porgie AWOL brother would be exonerated in a good light by passing time.  Jesus X. Christ, how do we stop these idiots from taking us down these paths of war economy doom?

The New (Nude) Pope
The Italians took the papacy back over with this Argentinian Italian.  I wonder what his background is in terms of exiled Fascists from the Axis?  Or how about his connection to the Mafia?  Anybody who sucks up and worships these throwback Popes...and, yes, I meant that suck up part as a pun...are in my books too fucking nuts to have any say in anything...check out superCatholic Paul Ryan, a true little privileged nutjob who's out to wreck our economy.

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily (Weekly) Growler 

The Art of My Old Pal Will Shuster

The 40th Wedding Anniversary