"We're All Bozos on This Bus"

Among the Bozos
Yes. Bozo died over the 4th-of-July weekend. Larry Harmon. He was buried in his patented Bozo outfit. In honor of the Death of the First Bozo, our own thegrowlingwolf seems to have flipped his wig...while we're at it, how about honking our beezers! how about we all let the air out of our shoes!

www.firesigntheatre.com/albums/bozos1.mp3


Larry Harmon looking slightly perverted as he squeezes a Little Bozo named Bryan.

Georgie Porgie "Bozo" Bush, our faux president.

Bozo, a village in Mali.

Check out the "real" Bozos:

www.galenfrysinger.com/bozo_village_2.htm


How about a Bozo guitar?

Bozo Bear? Nobody remembers Bozo Bear, do you?

A Bozos mullet fishing lure.

A Bozo Bop Bag--you get to slug the shit out of the irritating Bozo.

Surely there once was or was thought about a Bozo Cola.
A Bozo 8 automobile? Bozo did have a bus on his kiddie show.
A Bozo cut--haircut.
Bozology 101--at clown college.
A dance called "The Bozo Bop"--dance like the Bozo Bop Bag when it's slugged.

Bo and zo
not zo and bo
bowed to zowie
and became
Bozooogie
a funny boogie-woogie
a character named Oogie
all because
of Larry Harmon
the darling of the carny
with his red-honker beezer
his shoes full of air
his red flaring hair
"That's Bozo there"
Except,
"We're all Bozos on this bus."

a poem by a fifth grader named Bennie Bozokovsky

We don't understand the reference to Uncle Floyd's Oogie!

thegrowlingwolf's Daily Journeys
Since our own resident Bozo has flipped his wig and wobbled off down the road like Junco Partner, we, in digging around in old files here at the gorgeous offices of The Daily Growler--deep inside the Unka Dick Cheney Private Bunker--under a mountain somewhere in Virginia--have come across a Daily Journeys folder on the laptop The Wolf-Man left behind--the inconsiderate bastard! We got a passel of phone calls--I know Dick Gramblerian called Franny and Zoe and bitched about thegrowlingwolf bailing out on Growler fans simply because he was suffering from chronic empathy for Dr. Hunter Thompson. "Preposterous," Dick spewed. And Esteemed Professor Butler "Butane" Gobblett called Mr. Ed, our editing horse, wildly accusing us of false advertising--if you type in a certain key word into Google Search you get a whole big, gay, banner-flowing, Hail Mary blurb about how fascinating thegrowlingwolf is. OK, already. Here is the first entry in thegrowlingwolf's Daily Journeys:

Daily Journeys #1

Because of Bukowski

Charles Bukowski impressing me.

I’m trying to write poetry again.

Writing poetry to me is like improvising music…

the same thing…

has nothing to do with spirit, soul, anything like that.

As Gestalt Psychology tries to teach, we live in a concentric whole,

a place that is one and the same no matter where within that whole

you are as whatever you are. Gestalt Psychology tries to bring that broken whole back together again… Gestalt Psychology is a Humpty-Dumpty experiment with

putting fragments of the whole—the world, the environment, the self, the society, the community, the neighborhood, the district, the part of town, the farms, the dells, the rivers, the streams, the Gestalt back together again…

I’m exhausted from how the whole doesn’t to me seem to have ever been whole, unless it was at the precise moment a certain slime began evolving toward what would eventually walk out of the sea as the beginnings of man—maybe that beast walked out onto that land and then had the problem of acclimating to it, realizing himself or herself, looking and seeing others of the same type, going to them, communicating with them, figuring out first of all they were thirsty—you couldn’t drink the sea water in those days either, could you?—second of all, they were hungry—and surely it stopped there for a moment. Perhaps the easiest way to stop the immediate hunger was to eat each other; but no, these were probably plankton eaters while they were evolving in the sea—so there would probably be edibles in the prehistoric sands onto which they had walked—like shellfish, washed ashore regular fish—there must have been billions and billions of fish or fish-like things in those old primordial seas—and billions and billions of land crabs and things like that living on the primordial beaches--plenty to eat when you consider it a while. So, there you go: thirst is taken care of by pools of fresh water (clean rainwater), I assume, or the fresh water from the crustaceans they ate—or maybe like crocs and alligators they didn’t have to drink that much to survive—anyway, finally it came to successfully satisfying those two essential instinctual survival urges and then there was that time—satisfaction from good drink and plenty of food, that time of leisure, with bellies full, relaxing, wanted to be entertained, and the females must have started dancing enticingly—or were they asexual like giraffes? Jesus, this is too deep for me.

Journeys Continue as Is Continued

Waiting for my Godot, a man named Jimmy, from outside Philly.

Waiting for a man named Jimmy from right outside Philly.

Waiting for my Godot, except my Godot will finally come.

We all will finally come.

The final cum.

The second coming.

Rejuvenated instincts.

And a new blossoming of gods.

thegrowlingwolf 2007

The Sunday The Daily Growler

A Confidential Note to the Daily Growler Staff:
"Good fiends,
I have took me off alone...I should ask a horse if that's good grammar--like I'd ask the Big Bad Wolf if that was good grandma! "Whooooooo, mama, what delicious bazooms you have, Granny dear!" "Wolfie, you pervert, you can eat me, you bastard!" And then I saw this guy on teevee selling a documentary he's done on Dr. Hunter Thompson and I got to thinking about Hunter's last days, finished, in a wheel chair you know, going blind, finished, unable to write, his body wracked with pain and his mind mad at himself and his father and his life and coming to the conclusion that why hang around in such misery, unable to even speak, dying by the hour, and so he did what all authors who are finished should do--he like Papa Hemingway--like Ross Lockridge, Jr.--blew his brains out--what good were they, they were shutting down--he couldn't write anymore--you know what that's like? he couldn't drink or do drugs anymore, except morphine which leaves you off in dreamland which is supposed to take your mind off your pain except, as my good friend told me after the Big C had invaded his lovely brain and was shriveling him up into a fetal ball he was in such pain, he said he turned down the morphine--he said it reminded him too clearly that he was dying and in pain if he thought of dying he welcomed it--after he was dead, all those bottles of liquid morphine were found in his closet at his house--and jars of Percodan caps--and my old friend from high school and college days finally couldn't take the pain from his brain cancer and he gathered together all his friends and family one Sunday afternoon in January of 2002 and they watched a pro football game together and then my friend pulled his own plug and slipped on off into the next unknown, my dear old brilliant friend with one of those phenomenal minds, the smartest dude I've ever known--and I've known a lot of geniuses--brilliant men seem to find me curious--I make a good friend unless you need me to save your life someway, then hell, I'm no good above the conversation and daydream level--that's why I have to write--remember I'm a poet by genes! My great-grandfather wrote poetry, played the violin, had a beautiful tenor voice, but also loved likker--came home one night all likkered up fumbling at the dugout door--he and my greatgrandmother lived in a dugout, a house made by digging out the side of a hill, putting a front wall with the front door--only slits for windows--a tin stovepipe to carry the heat away from the wood stove--and my greatgrandfather came home drunk, very late at night--his young wife scared to death inside that insufferably hot cave--and she didn't know it was him and took her pistol and shot once through that log-wood door--shot my greatgrandfather in his upper thigh, she didn't kill him, but when she got him inside he was in such pain she took the whiskey out of his saddlebags and poured a dollop and a half of that strong almost gasoline rotgut whiskey straight into the bullet hole and then while he drank himself into further oblivion, my greatgrandmother took her Bowie knife and cut that shot out of her husband's leg--he recovered--and he walked with a limp after that--but he didn't stop drinking--he was a poet remember! Poets commit a lot of suicide, too. You have to be careful calling yourself a poet--unless you have a good income, like Wallace Stevens, James Merrill, and James Dickey, then hell, write tons of poems--but what if you're like Hart Crane--you just have to go on and jump overboard somewhere--like jump off the stern of the Orizaba--and once flying back to the US from Haiti over Cuba off to our distant left--I looked down into that Caribbean as we came past Cuba and I thought, somewhere out in that vast water is old Hart Crane--his troubles over--his greatest poem enough to keep him immortal--just think how much mental pain old Hart had to be in, too--and he had that young babe trying to convert him to heterosexuality--Peggy was her name--but still old Hart left her bed and went to the rail of that big liner and he thought his last poem and then overboard he went. Some people who survived "jumping" suicides say they get half way down from their jump and wish they hadn't'a done it. Like a guy who survived goin' off the Golden Gate Bridge--he said it knocked sense into his head and then thinking about what he'd done scared the hell out of him. John Berryman was a jumping poet! Off the Mississippi River Bridge in Minneapolis--I don't think it was the bridge that fell apart that afternoon back now so many forgotten years--and John, with a poem and the smell of a bit of alcohol on his lips, leaped into the ice cold waters of the Mighty Mississippi! I have a jumper poet in my family--well, my grandmother the librarian claimed he was a distant cousin--his mother was Sam Houston's daughter, old Mr. Sam the hero of the Battle of San Jacinto--and this guy was named after Mister Sam--his mother had married a man from my hometown and for many years she was the postmaster at the big post office in the heart of my hometown's downtown--and my grandmother helped him with his poems--lengthy romantic intellectual things--like the Agrarians wrote--and she sent them off to East Coast magazines and Ezra's girlfriend in Chicago's Poetry Magazine--and he got them all back with rejection slips--and one brilliant hot-as-hell afternoon, this relative of mine went up on the roof of the tallest building in my hometown, a 16-floor art-deco hotel, and tried to fly off into the poetic cerulean and instead, after a flight of only a few feet outward and never upward descended to land smack-dab face-first flat as a pancake, his good clothes exploded off of him with the splat, as he hit the North 3rd Street macadam--plus when they scraped his 19-year-old body off North 3rd Street, under him they found a sheath of his poems, all ripped, bloodied, soppy with guts and god-knows-what-fluids--the funeral home people later pitched the filthy poems into the garbage and long gone from this world were this poor ruined man's creations--on his legend as a jumper lived on in the legends of my hometown--my grandmother said she was sorry she hadn't memorized any of this man's poems, but, no she hadn't ever made copies of his poems for herself--ironically, my grandmother was a published poet, some of them OK for their day and time, but she lived to be 84 and in perfect health up until about a month before she just up and died--one day, she was tied-down in her hospital bed--by then she was totally out of her gourd and usually didn't recognize anybody nor did she say anything to anybody, except this one day. I was standing by her bed when she looked over at me and said, "Wolfie, somebody's ringing the front doorbell/Look's like it's your friend, Ted Snell"--that was it. About then the front doorbell rang--and, of course, you can figure this one out--it was the milkman--fuck my adlepated grandmother! Of course it was my friend Ted Snell--and from then on I noticed whenever she said anything, she said it in rhyme--a true poet that beautiful relative from a way back in the coming forth of my genes into the Wolf-Man I've turned into.

No, I'm not going to go off and shoot myself--Hunter Thompson's sad ending simply gave me inspiration--inspiration to not be a blockhead--old Samuel Johnson's statement made an impression on me, you see--and then I always admired Thorstein Veblen the economist/sociologist (his "conspicuous consumption" theory is still applicable in today's class situation in this country)--who in the middle of his successful teaching career at Wisconsin just up and disappeared--they later found out he'd exiled himself to a cabin far off in the Wisconsin wilderness--exiled himself with tons of books, which he preceded to start reading--seven years later, he came out of hiding and back on the scene--he had read hundreds of books on every subject--I've always wanted to go off somewhere and disappear--I tried Newfoundland but it was too god-damn lonely--more men than women, too--but I can pull it off hidden away right here in New York City...

Besides, this blog is boring me--I hear no readers--oh, I know, we have tons of readers, they're just such lazy assholes, like thedailygrowlerhousepianist who says it's too complicated to comment on this blog--he has to identify himself all the time--it's a long story--he's a stubborn man--but I know he reads the blog--and I know others who read it, too. I've a couple a dear lady friends who read it but who have nothing to comment about they say--"How the hell can we comment on what you write?--except I do like your innuendos about that one character you keep writing about who resembles me a lot." "NO," I scream, "It's all fiction, like everything is fiction! It's my accumulated observations, and I'm unpiling them out of my attic--I may even read this Richard Ford guy--he must be good he won a Pulitzer Prize"--and right up Fifth Avenue is a beautiful narrow gold-domed building and it was once the offices of Joe Pulitzer the Saint Louis newspaper emperor--it's a treasure of a building, though I'm sure some Chinese real estate developer would love to tear it down and build an executive hotel on the site--it has a great room up under that gold dome with high-glossy window panes--I've always wanted to go to the tops of all the buildings in New York City I admire--I've been of course atop the Empire State Building--up as high as they'll let visitors (read "tourists") go--I once was going to write a book about Empire State Building jumpers--there's been quite a few, five or six since I've lived in NYC--then remember the wild-ass Arab dude who went on a shooting spree up there not that many years ago now?--and I know my pal L Hat has been to the top of the Woolworth Building--and he's been privileged to sneak his way out a panel and onto the roof of the CitiBank Building as well--I guess it's called the CitiCorp Building now, but not when it was first built--built the way it is with its slanted-for-solar-power-roof because it was trumpeted as a technically perfect office building providing it's own energy through it's enormous solar-panelled roof--it never happened! Maybe Con-Ed told CitiCorp to go fly a kite--they weren't buying their F-ing power from them! Anyway, the CitiCorp didn't put in solar power and went with good-old bad coal-produced Con-Ed electricity! Now the building's rather plain and tacky--though it's so shoddily constructed it'll be easy as the World Trade Center to implode out of existence one day!

So, you see, I'm tired of writing the Growler every god-damn day--I've written thousands of pages of stream of consciousness writing--some blather, yes, a lot of rambling and babbling and a lot of freak-speak--but some of it was total fun writing--easy writing for me--but now I feel like--Fuck it--I'll finish this Jazz Story #2--but then I gotta read a ton of books that are piling up all around me--I gotta listen to all these tons of CDs I have piling up around me, a Columbia CD coming today, 20 remastered original masters of the music of Bix Beiderbecke--including Lester Young's favorite record--he carried it around with him in his famous trunk--"Singin' the Blues" with Bix and Tram--Frankie Trambauer, Prez's favorite saxophone player--he claimed--Ivey divey!

Keep the Growler going, I hope. Like can't you get up off your duffs and write something intelligent yet brutally sarcastic every day! Like Walter Crackpipe--I like his attitude--or what happened to that three-named woman poet who was gonna present new poetry on the Growler! Helen what's her name?--Kloos-DNA or whatever--or what happened to that Texan in New York?--that was a good idea, like Dennis Weaver playing a New Mexican policeman on loan to the New York City Police Dept. and getting to use his horse in New York City rather than riding in a squad car--yeah sure--hey, millions of blockheads thought that a great show--hell, they even thought Dennis Weaver was a great actor--he was a great pothead like Gilligan, wasn't he? Franny and Zoe, come'yon, gal, write some woman stuff! Am I the only person able to keep this blog going? Hell, BuzzFlash is claiming they need at least $50,000 bucks a month donated so they can keep their blog going! I was looking at the most viewed blogs the other day on this blog rating site and Adriana Huffington's blog is the most hit-on blog--her Huffington Report or whatever it's called. Wasn't she married to a rabid right-wing nutjob billionaire?--when did she become the broken-English voice of American journalism! And some blogs, like one that dresses cats up in human outfits and publishes their photos--that site gets 100s of thousand hits a day! Amazin', Amazin', Amazin'.

Anyway, keep the Growler going--reprint shit if you have to--I don't care--I'm gonna go talk to Bix maybe--except I don't like the smell of a flooded land--or a river runnin' at scary high levels--I remember in New Orleans how the Mississippi smelled so raw and grave-like earthy when it was packing tight and widely brown against that flimsy levees that hung just above the rooflines overwhich my New Orleans abode looked--except the levees over the Vieux Carre held firm--funny how the levee to break was the one supposedly protecting the most people--why can't those homeless people of New Orleans sue god-damn FEMA and the Corps of Engineers for ruining their lives?--for putting a whole city into ruin! And while California is on FIRE, where's Commander and Chief Bush? Why he's in Japan! Japan! you say, what the hell's he doing in Japan? He's attending one of those weird G8 Conferences or whatever they're called--so while California is burning away and the Midwest is still stomping around in the Mississippi mud and New Orleans still sits in ruins--this little warmongering pampered little rich son extravagantly spending ALL our monies and wealth on his foolish effort to impress his wimpy father with his illegal invasions and occupations and his taking away of all our privacies--he's spying on all our asses and the big telecoms are going right along with him--and they're doing so with Congress-approved-Obama-NutjobMcCain-HillbillyHill-approved impunity--and with all of this going on, Georgie Porgie is being wined and dined and treated like a king in Japan--attending a conference of rich fools and rich dictators and Saudi Royal Family goons and Commie Commisars of Wealth and heads of all BIG DADDY corporations as these men of great humanitarian intent gather together to study on how to squeeze more money out of those of us who have to WORK for a living--I saw no women at this big conference, except the Geishas sucking these rich fools dicks under the huge ring of tables at this world-private-conflab that WE-the-People aren't allowed to know anything about what the hell goes on at these things!

"Singin' the Blues" is playing once again in my head. Bix is right, pass that bottle to me! Nobody listens to my blues and jazz anymore--

I'm a blockhead...

In the meantime...good luck with the Growler--may it wave forever in the battlefield breezes of an appreciation of excellent wit and sarcasm--the pissed-off growlings of this wolf are gonna be silenced for a while...though like Fats Waller said, one never knows, do one?

thegrowlingwolf-frompartsunknown
for The Daily Growler--Sunday Edition"


Berenice Abbott: atop the Chrysler Building

Berenice Abbott by Man Ray

Berenice Abbott's "Night View of New York City"

New York City When It's Beautiful

I Feel Like: "It's Mine All Mine Today!"
I sailed out early this morning, hit the sidewalk singing, "Look at that moon/It's shinin' so pretty/It's shinin' up there/For you and for me...," and, yes, there it was, that moon standing still over Jersey, and I whistled up the opposite direction, up that street down there in that photo up that street the other way toward Fifth Avenue, which is in back of that photo up there--and when I got up to Fifth Avenue I turned south (downtown)--even that song "Downtown" was written about "going downtown to downtown Manhattan"--even though it was sung by a Brit chick--anyway, I headed downtown on the sidewalk walking along by the west side of Fifth Avenue--wide Fifth Avenue--and it is really wide until it gets down to 23rd where Broadway bulls its way in a slash across it and it narrows and then slinks off headed downtown not as wide as it was--right there at the Flatiron Building, the first skyscraper--and there's a great old-time grainy film of 23rd there in front of the Flatiron Building--and there's a ferocious wind blowing in this old film--and the filmmaker you soon realize is focusing on this ferocious wind blowing up the sidewalk running in front of the back-then Flatiron building and blowing up the sidewalk-dragging bottoms of women of that day's 19th-century full-in-bloom dresses as they were fighting against this ferocious wind--and then the randy filmmaker's camera spots three rather young women coming along, up to the corner of 23rd and Broadway, and they're hatless and their dresses are more 20th century than the kind'a flamboyant dresses of the other women, and these "girls" are fightin' that wind on that sidewalk in front of the Flatiron Building, too, as they come up to the corner--you know, how women even today grab their skirts and hold them down when a gust of wind comes up under them and tries to balloon their full skirts out--I mean, these are obviously by the time they get to the corner of 23rd and Broadway three younger-than-the-other-women babes--and as they step off the kerb to cross Broadway there at 23rd, this ferocious wind suddenly pinpoints these babes's dresses and suddenly their more youthful and loose skirts are blown sky-high upward, a la Marilyn M standing over the subway grate as the wind made by a passing subway below gushes up to blow Marilyn's full pleated skirt way up above her waist--showing her panties--and what a great promotional stunt that was back when a woman just didn't go ahead and let her legs show and even let her panties show--what the hey, women show it all in bathing suits--promotion for that great little 50's whitey-life-in-NYC movie--The Seven Year Itch--a film I still find fun, with good acting from Tom Ewell and good acting from even Marilyn, though she's simply acting out her Marilyn Monroe persona--lush acting from Marilyn and comedic-half-slapstick acting from Tom Ewell acting out what used to be call a "Mister Peeper's" character, a Don Quixote character--and Ewell's playing an EDITOR in this movie--he's an editor for a cheap-ass paperback publisher except he imagines he's actually working for one of the top publishing houses in New York City--it's a good Whitey New York City 50s film--filmed in the city--with an especially good view of old Penn Station--a magnificent edifice that PROGRESS destroyed and replaced with the current 1 Penn Plaza and the new-now-old Madison Square Garden, both structures now in need of repair, both shoddy looking--that tacky-tacky architecture of the 60s--and one side of 1 Penn Plaza has been dormant, neglected, and blighted--shops boarded up and a Cox fence put up around the entrances and steps and approaches on that 31st Street side for years now--

...so...and, like I was saying, this ferocious wind comes along in this old film and hits the dresses of these three young babes just as they are stepping off the curb into Broadway and it catches the girls off-guard and blows their skirts up ferociously high, one girl's up high enough that you see that her legs above her high-tops and half sox are NAKED, and all three up-blown skirts naked ankles--and you can also see if you look quickly enough that all the girls's legs above their ankles are NAKED--the filmmaker guessed right and kept his lascivious camera on these sweet girls, cranking away on that camera waiting for that right moment--he was obviously filming from the southwest corner of Madison Park there--and he was expecting at least some NAKED ANKLE--and don't those two words go together nicely?--also, as language, they speak interestingly--I say, "Ne-kid-ank-el"--and it comes out neckidankel sometimes--which is an interesting word, neckidankel--and he got more that he imagined--he got some NAKED LEG! Neckidlayg.

And I turn down Fifth to go down to the deli on 30th and Fifth and get my pomegranate-cherry juice, a chocolate croissant, and a large cup of French roast coffee--black--my breakfast every morning for the past century it seems like--and I wish I'd'a brought my camera because I see the Flatiron Building up in front of me so clearly, a huge American flag is hanging off the building next to the deli and it's flapping and when it flaps back toward me the Flatiron Building stands shining in all its morning-sun glory and then the flag flaps away from me and blots out the Flatiron Building. I was photographically visualizing that scene when it struck me, I was all alone on the sidewalk, and looking up the sidewalk in front of me up toward the Collegiate Marble Church, I saw no people--I looked across the street--there were no people on that sidewalk over there either--I looked out into Fifth Avenue, and it was empty, no cars, no buses, no TOUR buses, which I hate but which are essential now that New York City's only industry is the tourist industry--remember when our finest fashions were designed and made right here in Manhattan?--now we must kiss the asses of tourists--especially the Euro Trash and their mighty Euro dollars--the Germans love the many hotels that now are ruining my once cool Korean-Chinese-Vietnamese neighborhood--and an 18-story hotel for god-damn salesmen and that ilk is going up right over east of my apartment, right up against my building--so far the noise hasn't bothered me--they have already demolished one 6-story brick building and except for the swirlings of lethal dust as they front-loader shovel all those crumbled bricks and the brick dust they shed while they're being dumped into a huge demolition garbage truck--or a huge dumpster--gagging, killer brick dust swirling all out and all over the sidewalk and part of the street, though the actual noise of the destruction has been surprisingly minimal.

By the time I got to the deli, I realized it was Saturday, July 5, the morning after the commercial hoopla--I was amused that this Scottish fop-phony-dead-at-night talk show clown--he gained his acting fame on the old Drew Carey Show--and I dig Drew Carey--I've known a lot of Drew Careys in my life--but anyway, this Scottish fop--his comedy is atrocious, trust me--I can't stand him and I always flip him off--both ways--when he comes on and I'm not near the teevee--but anyway, I thought it ironic that he was hosting the "Independence Day" affairs for CBS last night--I didn't watch it on teevee, though I did on early teevee this morning see them interviewing a blonde early-thirties-something tourist over at the fireworks on the East River and she said something very disturbingly stupid to me, she said, "I want to thank our troops--and I'm praying for them daily--but I want to thank them for making it possible for us to enjoy this magnificent fireworks display in peace"--whooooo, how scary dumb is that statement?--and being made sacrosanct over our hired soldiers for our all volunteer armed forces who were used as cannon father in a preemptive invasion and attempted occupation of a sovereign nation that was absolutely no threat to us but that unfortunately did not possess nuclear weapons but did possess lots of oil--our 21st Century Lord and Master. I did once have the privilege of attending a Fouth of July party at a dude's apartment in the Waterside Apartments whose livingroom window looked right straight out on the length of the East River from the 59th Street Bridge all the way down to the lit-up Brooklyn Bridge--and I must admit that it was some kind of experience sitting in this dude's window and seeing and hearing the whole schmear of this Gucci-family's ultra-expensive fireworks display--supposedly paid for by Macy's Department Store(s)--who the hell knows?--and it I'm sure was like being in a city being bombed--like London in WWII, or Tokyo in WWII, or Hamburg in WWII, or Panama City, Panama, when Pappy Bush bombed it, or like used to happen every day during the Clinton Administration in Baghdad--and these Waterside Apartments on that East River with these spectacular views of this extravagant fireworks display were originally Mitchell-Lama (a New York term) affordable apartments though now they've become market-based and they are now privately managed and that's driven out most of the school-teacher-types and city-worker-types who gobbled up those apartments when they were Mitchell-Lama--but this dude invited me and my woman at that time up there to watch the show--and my women then was a beauty from Illinois who when she bent over every man's eye in the room was on her absolutely perfect bunny wagon--besides, I love Illini women--especially Chicago women--they're tough women--like Detroit women, too--and one of my current female sidekicks is a Detroit woman--from the heart of old Detroit, down behind Briggs Stadium--or Tiger Stadium--still standing, by the way, away from the tackiness of Comerica Park or whatever corporate name the new Detroit ballpark has.

Meanwhile...back walking toward the Flatiron Building:

Photo by tgw "The Flatiron Building in Early Morning Light"

And long holiday weekends are the best time to live in New York City--especially if you are drawn to this city like I am and love it as your own like I do--and I've been drawn back to it a lot of times--yes, I've tried to escape it--I've tried to leave it seriously--the first time when I decided I wanted to finish my PhD and moved to Austin, Texas, to go to UT--then saying "Fuck You" to UT, my young wife and I moved back to Santa Fe, New Mexico, from where we had left to come originally to New York City, and back in Santa Fe, I went down to UNM in Albuquerque to study with old Frank Hibbard, at that time one of the great preColumbian archeologists in this country--expert on Mexican digs and southwestern US digs--but, nope, it didn't work--I missed New York City and so did my wife so back we came--back to New York City--and I stayed tight here then until this woman decided to and actually did divorce me, and after getting "our" divorce finalized in Haiti, I tried to stay and live in Haiti--lived there long enough at this one hotel to have two Haitian mistresses--and I lived there three months--and one day I got homesick for New York City and so I came back and got myself a tiny apartment on East 57th Street, an elementary school playground right outside my "picture" window--though also a Rear Window-reminding view of a huge apartment building behind my building--there was even a garden between the buildings again like in Rear Window. And I like Jimmy Stewart in Rear Window used to sit sometimes on a night when I didn't have a girl friend over and watch the various shows going on in the windows of that apartment building--the girl who did her exercising naked--and then every morning this same girl put her makeup on and did her hair in her open window topless--and then there were the gay guys who bugger each other every god-damn night it seemed like--on their room floor every night--and then there was the sophisticated gay guy who had men over for coffee a lot--the coffee klatch--I had five women I was seeing at that time so I wasn't lonely that much at night--though I never missed the topless chick putting her makeup on and doing her hair every morning--come on, I'd just been freed from a marriage that lasted 11 years, and I was still young, with a lot of wild oats to sow, and I went out every night with my best friend, a handsome man, a photographer by profession, a photographer of beautiful women by profession--yeah, he'd been a horse race photographer, too--and he attracted babes by the barrelsful--I mean beautiful women flocked around him all the time--or he'd have one of his latest model girlfriends in tow--one I especially liked who was so damn beautiful and smart--she ended up getting a PhD from Harvard Biz School--but before then she partied with my friend and me--he went with her for at least 6 months--and she partied hearty with us--and I necked with her sometimes when we were both drunk--like in the kitchen getting fresh drinks, you know, she'd let me kiss her and smell her up--she wore a great perfume and I usually don't like perfumes--

And it was in that East 57th Street tiny apartment--the building was owned by Argentinians and the top two floors was a whorehouse--beautiful Sud Americanas and they were always on my elevator--the elevator air thick with their scents--musky scents--and while living at this apartment, I met the next chapter in my "married" life, a 105 lb, 5 ft 2", beauty of a Philly woman, so damn pretty that the minute I spotted her I wanted to possess her and I spotted her when she and her girlfriend came into this bar/restaurant/disco my friend and I hung out at kind'a always except this night he wasn't with me and I was lonely and on my own and I looked up and this totally perfect-for-me dreamgirl walked into the bar--went to the bar--ordered drinks--and as quick as a rabbit, I was over asking them if I could reach over them and get my fresh Heineken--they said yes and the next thing I knew we were jiving--and then we moved over to a table--and this dreamwoman knew what I was after, she was out on the town offering what I was after--a night out from her husband who was babysittin' at home while she was out getting hit on by guys like me--and I hit on her heavy that night and that was the night that changed my life for better or worse up until about a month ago--and we ended up in bed until 4 am the next morning and she left me to rush home to her husband and child and then called me that evening and told me she thought she loved me and she missed me and she was crying and I then knew I had a dilemma. I was seeing this smooth-luciously-smooth-skinned Jamaican woman, too, at the time--and there's a story here but I'm gonna side-step it--and I'm tempted to tell it while it's on my mind--this Jamaican woman I called "Sleppy" 'cause she looked sleepy all the time--and I was also involved with a truly sweet and extra-loving warm girl from the Old South, too--and oh the stories that are popping up like mad in my mind--there's a story connected to this North Carolina woman, too--holy cow, the stories, the stories, they're piling up in my cranium--I feel compelled to suddenly write a whole god-damn colossal tome, an epic, a Homerian epic...

As Samuel Johnson said, "Only a blockhead would write for anything but money." Damn, Sam, you mean writing because I have to write--fuck trying to sell what I write--I've done that--and even when I was selling my writing it wasn't enough to live on--so damn, Sam, I'm a god-damn blockhead...

And I am a blockhead...

Walking in this empty city this morning made me feel so good I've decided to modernize my life; step out of the past--out mafficking with thedailygrowlerhousepianist last night--and he, a little soused, said I was a little too old-fashioned! Wow, he's right...

Thus to hell with my stories--my affairs--my god-damn past--today I'm alone in my favorite city in all the world--I'm sitting here enjoying an absolutely beautiful and very quiet day--me, myself, I, and my city--this whole god-damn big wonderful city all to myself--Fuck MY PAST. Fuck my rambling stories. Fuck my leaving New York City--end of those stories, I have lived in this one room for the past 26 years and haven't left New York City for longer than a couple of days...

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

Joe Girardi (Yankees) vs. Joe Torre (Dodgers)
First off, Joe Girardi's not doing so good--even though the Yanks are still playing above .500, they are nine games behind Tampa Bay and the Red Sox...and Hank Steinbrenner is already getting juiced up against Girardi--now probably realizing they got rid of the best manager in baseball for a guy who's too baseball dumb to be a manager--Joe Torre wasn't a back-up catcher--he was a real catcher. Also Hank's forcing Joe Girardi to move Jabo Chamberlain to the starting rotation has been disastrous--Jabo is no starter--Joe Torre knew Jabo combined with Mariano Rivera (he blew a game the other night) was the best closing combination in baseball--but, oh no, Hank and George Steinbrenner and Brian Cashman--I'll bet none of them ever played baseball (hardball) in their lives--know more about baseball than the best manager in baseball and even his protege, who they said was gonna revitalize the Yankees--add youth to the mix--and then stupid Joe Girardi, who like I said if it had not have been for Joe Torre would be selling Budweiser door-to-door in Northern New Jersey instead of managing what is the greatest offensive team in the MLB right now, stated he was going to take the Yankees to the World Series or else. Their pitching will be the team's and Joe Girardi's downfall!

American League East
Team	W	L	Pct.	GB	Home	Road	East	Cent.	West	L10	Strk
Tampa Bay	53	32	.624	-	34-13	19-19	24-15	6-4	11-7	9-1	W 5
Boston	52	37	.584	3	31-10	21-27	18-16	12-5	11-9	5-5	W 2
Baltimore	44	41	.518	9	25-14	19-27	15-19	9-7	9-8	5-5	W 1
N.Y. Yankees	45	42	.517	9	23-22	22-20	15-17	11-15	9-3	4-6	L 2
Toronto	41	46	.471	13	22-19	19-27	9-14	15-7	9-15	5-5	L 3

On the other side of the MLB fence, Joe Torre and the Dodgers have just won 4 in a row and are now only a 1/2 game out of first place--with the Diamondbacks on the skids lately--and Joe's Dodgers are only 2 percentage points off playing .500 ball! Amazing! Oh how good it must feel for Joe when he checks the standings every night--especially when he sees how stupidly bad the Joe Girardi Yankees are doing--and I don't blame Joe Girardi for taking the best-paying managerial position in baseball--to get to manage the Yankees! Hey, there's been a ton of Yankee managers since George "Sportsdumb" Steinbrenner bought the team for a wooden nickel. Go Joe! And I hate the Dodgers, folks!

National League West
Team	W	L	Pct.	GB	Home	Road	East	Cent.	West	L10	Strk
Arizona	43	44	.494	-	26-18	17-26	10-13	7-13	20-9	3-7	L 1
L.A. Dodgers	42	44	.488	½	22-20	20-24	6-7	17-14	14-13	7-3	W 4
San Francisco	38	49	.437	5	16-27	22-22	9-7	8-16	15-14	5-5	L 1
Colorado	36	51	.414	7	24-20	12-31	8-9	8-11	13-23	4-6	W 4
San Diego	34	53	.391	9	21-26	13-27	8-8	8-12	15-18	2-8	W 1

The Willie-Randolphless Mets? Well, they're not playing very well but neither is any of the other teams in their division--so the Mets are only 4 1/2 out of first and are just a bit off playing .500 ball--I mean, Willie could have done just as well had he stayed on--dumbass baseball owners (subsidized rich assholes--yeah, our Congress subsidizes MLB owners!). Hey, Jerry Manual ain't so bad, but neither was Willie Randolph.

thegrowlingsportswolf
for The Daily Growler Sports Extra

What! The Fourth of July a Pure-dee Whitey Holiday!

Frederick Douglas's Fourth of July Speech
Within the now-famous address is what historian Philip S. Foner has called "probably the most moving passage in all of Douglass' speeches."

What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sound of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants brass fronted impudence; your shout of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanks-givings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy -- a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States, at this very hour.

You can read the full speech here:

www.historyplace.com/speeches/index.html

So while you're slobbering over all that barbecued pig meat--"Man, I can't eat all'a this, but I can damn sure try"--while you're gnawing on that overpriced ear of gasoline-producing corn, all sloppy with pure creamery butter (ever wonder where that creamery is now?)--"Pass the salt, please!"--while you're wasting food like mad--while you're slugging down several cases of now overpriced and now overtaxed beer, the world is melting and Chaos is approaching fast (a bottle of Heineken here in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, now costs in a deli $4.50 a 12 oz (or maybe they have trimmed 'em down to 11.5 oz, I haven't checked lately) bottle--then when you get to the register, the foreign dude or chick says, "Four-eighty and be quick about it." "Four-eighty!" you scream in protest. "I thought it was four-fifty." "Thirty-cent tax! You pay now." You pay tax on a bottle of beer at a deli now. How crooked are our politicians--they are thieves and we condone their thievery! Look how our little-man billionaire mayor has sold Manhattan right out from under the established citizens of New York City--selling it to whatever best-friend-real-estate-developer wants it--all these baseball stadiums our mayors gave huge tax breaks to are now begging for more money--cost overruns in the millions upon millions, and these bastards want New York City to foot the bill for the extra-costs. Seems like the contractor on the new stadium We the People of New York City are building for the New York Yankees and that subsidized owner asshole George Steinbrenner is someone's close relative--I recall hearing or seeing some such statement. Construction has stopped on the new Mets stadium right now--the Mets are claiming they need some millions of dollars, too, in cost overruns! Building these new stadiums--only people with high incomes can even afford general admission tickets to these new super-slick-luxury-boxful-mall-like ballparks--$45 at the new Yankee Stadium--and $35 at the new Mets stadium. Both teams, by the bye, are playing lousy sloppy worthless baseball--seems our own marvelousmarvbackbiter was right all along--didn't matter who managed these teams, what mattered was who owned them and who these owners put in as general managers, two goofball dudes who know absolutely nothing--NADA y NADA--about baseball--they only know "trading"--trading their slaves back and forth year-in, year-out--their slaves getting so fucking rich it takes away their reasoned playing of the game and puts in its place their hot-shot-all-star-type of playing, where every hit has to be a spectacular home run and every defensive play has to be one of those slip-sliding-away-type catches or one of those snagging an infield ground ball and then doing a 360 wheelie in the air--like Derek Jeter in yesterday's Yankee farcical loss to the Boston Red Sox (who had just been swept by the new Devil-free Tampa Rays (I think they should be named the Tampa Reds--for the great guitar player and not the Cincinnati Reds)), doing one of his trademark leaps in the air and firing--spectacular looking but this one ended up in the Yankee dugout--so goodbye Yankees--Red Sox ate 'em alive, 7-0--Andy Pandy Pettite took the loss. You can't win with bad pitchers! This is what the Yankees and the Mets general management just can't get in their heads. Take the current Tampa Bay Devil-free Rays--a rookie hitter is leading this team, but that's not the reason they're winning--it's their pitchers; their pitchers are pitching their asses off! Joe Torre knew this--he begged for good pitchers and Brian Cashman and Steinbrenner gave him a worn-out and worthless bunch of has-beens (like Carl "Gold Brick" Pavano) including the Big Unit, Randy Johnson (still Randy managed to win 19 games one year with the Yanks), and then dumped a whole busload of Single A minor-league pitchers on Joe's ass--in spite of how bad these dudes were, Joe managed to limp the Yankees into the playoffs--at one time sweeping five-in-a-row from the BoSox to actually take over first place for a brief moment before they went to Tampa Bay and lost 3 in a row and then went to Baltimore and lost 3 more in a row; yet, they still made the playoffs. Now Joe's having a ball in Los Angeles and they run a great commercial here in NYC where Joe is surfing--then cruising around L.A. in a convertible! In the meantime, A-Rod, the most overpaid baseball player in baseball history--who may be the greatest player playing right now--is trapped between Madonna's legs--what a life, huh? How would you like to just play a kid's game for 3 or so hours a day--a kid's game mind you--and get paid more money than you could ever possibly need whatever your lifestyle?--and as a bonus, you get to fuck Madonna--which has to be expensive--Madonna's the material girl remember, you don't fuck her for free! They say Madonna gets horny and just calls superstars up and says "Get your ass and your dick over here fast, you're fucking me tonight." Married and a mother, too, right! You know if a low-class American peasant woman acted like Madonna, she'd not only lose her kids for damn sure but she'd probably have to serve a little time for drug possession or prostitution or something! Our celebrities do as they please. Robert Downey, Jr., a dude who has defied the law several times, overblowing coke, carrying guns openly, getting into bar brawals, waving his guns at people, busted, even did a little jail time--and I just saw him on some infomercial-for-celebrities talk show, Jay Leno maybe, and oh hey, he's so talented, he's so into his acting, he's so great, he's so Academy Award material--fuck him, I say--there are dudes sitting in prison doing 25-to-life for lesser things than that prick did! Naomi Campbell finally didn't get her way and look at the tantrum she started and got busted for? You think she'll do any time? OJ murdered his wife and her young boyfriend--It's OK, OJ! Robert Blake murdered a woman he fucked and knocked up and had an unwanted baby with, so Robert, being Baretta for one last comeback show, blows her head off--NOT GUILTY--cried a jury of Bob's peers! Phil Spector--he just nonchanlantly shoots a bitch who maybe refused to suck his dick--who knows--Phil don't remember--is Phil doing any time yet? It amazes me. If, during my career, I had come to work stoned on coke and toting a piece and waving it all over the office, what'a you think would happen? Would I get promoted? Or say I threw my cellphone at and hit in the face a hotel desk clerk? What do you think would have happened to me? Madonna--how many men has she fucked? Madonna has no talent beyond being a fairly good girl softrock singer a couple'a moon's back now. These girls are highly sexed; their whole acts are enticing men to get the hots for them so they'll buy their videos or download their hits--like if Beyonce don't show no titty and some big ass, who's gonna buy her same-old girl-singer shit music?--however people dig music these days, which I don't know, not having come into the iPod age yet. Madonna is a terrible actress. Her movies all suck, especially her fantasy movies like Truth or Dare. Come on, folks, Madonna is a poor little dumbass Catholic girl from the Bronx who connived her way to the top--she interned at rock radio stations here in NYC and slept on the floors at those stations and then fucked all the staffs so they'd push her records! I liked "Material Girl," but I thought Cindy Lauper was a more talented same-type performer!

Who the hell knows if Madonna's a great fuck? We are led by the press to believe she must be, all these hot men who tumble over themselves to get in her bed--and it's been a pretty active bed, too, like Marilyn Monroe's bed used to be filled to capacity all the time, too--and with a couple'a Kennedy brothers, let's see Madonna top that--unless she gave some to Bill Clinton--no that was Barbra Streisand he had the hots for--and still at the end of Marilyn Monroe's life she told her best friend, after the best friend found Marilyn in bed with a plumber she'd called to fix her pipes (The Mighty Sparrow used to sing about that in his "Big Bamboo"--"I'm a plumber, not an entertainer...."), that she'd never had an orgasm in her life. I'd be willing to bet one day Madonna admits that, too. A man can't satisfy a privileged young hot chick making millions of bucks every day like these girls--no matter how handsomely masculine Hollywood makes these otherwise "pretty boys"--and we know the young white boys have little dicks probably--"young chickens," as Tennessee Williams called 'em when he was in Hollywood--I mean do you know how many celebrities have clothing lines! Justin Timberlake has a clothing line. I saw Cindy Crawford the other day advertising her furniture designs being sold at Wal-Mart or K-Mart somewhere like that (Cindy is a furniture designer!). Cindy's highest claim to fame was as a Sports Illustrated swimsuit model (jack-off material for teenage sex maniacs--especially those first issues where they let their nipples show and some of 'em did a turnaround and showed their asses spilling out of their thongs). All those girls got rich--most of them got fucked by rock stars, too--Rachel Hunter actually landed and married old pathetic Rod Stewart--who still fucked around on her after he knocked her up a couple of times and she won a couple of Mother of the Year awards, then Rod dumped her for a younger model and poor Rachel had to settle for 20 million or so support--that's pocket change to Rod. Or how 'bout the celebrity making the headlines right now, several-times married and abused Christy Brinkley--what's her claim to fame? Why, Christy was a Sports Illustrated swimsuit model--holy shit--poor little Christy--she's worth millions now--hey, she made a bucket of bucks off poor old drunken and used up has-been rocker Billy Joel (hey, I'll admit it, Billy wrote some cool stuff--but the women, the booze, the money, the big cars, have given old Billy holy hell--'cept even old Billy manages to keep himself in new models every year). What great lives! Free love; free anything; do whatever you please if you're rich. Something sick I saw yesterday on the corny Okra Show (that's Oprah to you folks)? How about Maya Angelou's 80th birthday party at Donald Trump's playboy Miramar Mansion down in old-line-legal-rich-ass-crooked-bastards-reserve Palm Beach, Florida? Oh what a sick affair. What does Donald Trump have to do with Maya Angelou? you think he's read even a paragraph out of any of her books?--except I can't stand Maya Angelou though I respect where she comes from, Arkansas, and I respect her achievements, but I can't stand her in person--plus, I don't blame her for letting Oprah make her rich and famous--why not? And then when Donald Trump showed up unexpectedly (yeah sure) on Okra's show, the stupid, dumb-cluck, thirties-forties somethings (mostly white) in her audience went absolutely Holy Roller wild--I mean, some of these women had grimacing faces, eyes full of tears, sending out such love to this big phony ignorant pompous asshole Donald Trump whose idea of intelligence is diddling some Miss Universe and not getting caught! What a sham!

Frederick Douglas is right! Besides, I have always admired John Brown as the kind'a white man I hope I am. I heard Howard Zinn say John Brown was actually successful in his efforts though his attack on Harper's Ferry spelled his doom--but the repercussions from that attack and the controversy over Brown's eventual hanging led to the start of the Civil War and the end to slavery (yeah sure) in this country.

Have a Happy Fourth--I'm going to--fuck those Iraqis and Afghanis who are gonna get blown to smithereens today--fuck the fact that Obama (oops, I'm like John "Nutjob" McCain, I can't get that name right)--Osama bin Laden--is supposed to be dying of kidney failure--we know Bin Laden's already dead--he was a fictional character anyway--and fuck the fact that people in Africa are starving to death--Darfur's women are being raped and beaten and shit--and Darfur's men are being butchered--even fuck our flooded Midwest--don't live so close to the Mississippi River, you idiots! Fuck 'em all! I'm shooting off some fireworks tonight here in the Land of the Spied-on Free and the Home of the Dumbass Brave. Like, what kind of human volunteers for an army that is losing in two wars?--come on, you young dunces, you know your chances of not coming back alive are 1 in a 100 or so missions--and your chances of coming back alive but wounded beyond belief are even higher, like 50 in 100 missions. In the meantime, the Blackwater Private Army are having a ball--they get to kill and torture with impunity--and those ex-Peruvian and ex-Colombian troopers are making more bucks than the stupid US volunteer soldiers!

Let the HOOPLA begin!

thefireworksshootin'growlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

GOOD NEWS: Old race-baitin', black-hatin', white-trash, hillbilly-hick Jesse "Lynch All Niggers" Helms has up and died today! And on the Fourth of July, too; the great Whitey Holiday! Celebration time! Come on!

From thedailygrowlerhotnewswireservices (Mr. Ed at the switch)

Wavin' Old Glory to Beat 60!

photo by tgw--
Recommended Fireworks for the 4th
I always wondered where "to beat 60" came from; I assumed it meant going faster than 60 mph on or in a conveyance vehicle. I once got a brochure from the Schwin bicycle company and it had a drawing of a dude, an old-timey dude wearing old-timey tights, and he was on a racing Schwin, no fenders and thin tires, hunched over it, peddling like a demon under a wooden canopy built out from the top of a railroad passenger coach--they had built a special wooden roadway for him to ride on between the railroad tracks--under the picture it said--I don't recall the dude's name, seems like it was Charles Something--let's call him Charles Something--that Charles Something was shown going 60 mph--60 mph on a bicycle--now that's something else.

Wouldn't you know IT would be on the
Internet! There he is on the right here:
Charlie "Mile-a-Minute" Murphy. He's
riding on a special board roadbed laid
down by the Long Island Railroad--that's
the special coach the LIRR built for
Charlies--it took him 57 seconds to go
60 mph. The year was 1899. Here, read all about Charlie Murphy at this Website:
www.bikereader.com/contributors/woodland/murphy.html

I love getting so distracted. There's one thing I didn't find on the Internet: where "to beat sixty" comes from. Maybe I was putting in the wrong key words.

July 4th Music
You gotta put on Charles Ives's "The Fourth of July" section of his Holidays Symphony--it is dedicated to his business partner, Julian Myrick--they founded what became the New York Life Insurance Co.--Mr. Myrick, though he made Mr. Ives a filthy rich man, was above board in all his dealings--Mr. Ives didn't care as long as his money gave him time and the means to compose and publish his music. Around 1914, Mr. Ives had a heart attack and it changed his way of doing things--Mrs. Ives wouldn't allow Charles to get too excited--he had a tendency to get wild and wildly furious when he was tense and excited--sometimes he would get so excited Mrs. Ives would tell him to immediately go lie down and cool off or it might be over in a matter of minutes--Mr. Ives's heart! Ives went on to live to be 80, born in 1874, the same year Arnold Schoenberg was born--and Arnold Schoenberg made the following comment in 1945: "There is a great man living in this country--a composer. He has solved the problem of how to preserve one's self and to learn. He responds to neglect by contempt [ed: how great is that!]. He is not forced to accept praise or blame. His name is Ives." You see, Ives was atonal before Schoenberg.

"The Fourth of July" section of Ives's Holidays Symphony was composed in 1913. Of it, Ives wrote: "It's a boy's 4th--no historical orations--no patriotic grandiloquence from 'grown-ups'--no program in his yard! But he knows he's celebrating--better than some of the county politicians. And he goes at it in his own way, with a patriotism nearer kind to nature than jingoism..." Mr. Ives was very defiant when he was defiant. He despised "formalized" things--he defied European standards--he was a true American and he practically one-handed revealed how American composer should really write music--based not on "the German form," which Mr. Ives despised, but a whole new way of composing--the ultimate American way of composing--a way ignored until Mr. Ives was 70 years old when he won the Pulitzer Prize for Music and was finally discovered by young Americans like Lennie Bernstein who championed Mr. Ives symphonic and orchestral works beginning in 1950. Mr. Ives's popularity rode high during the 50s and 60s culminating in 1974 with tons of Ives 100th anniversary recordings--like the complete recordings of Mr. Ives doing his own works--singing his own songs--playing the piano with that pounding and progressing sense of immediate need to explain, to fly, to float above the common norm, to polytonally and polychordally and quartertonally move himself up into the highest catbird seat of American musical composition--a position, as far as I'm concerned, he still holds--and I have accumulated on purpose as many American composers recordings as I can afford and as many sets of American composers's sheet music as I can afford--I now have over 175 pieces of American compositions in my sheet music library--containing about 30 rare scores of Mr. Ives's work--plus, I'm so Ivesian, I have an 8 x 10 glossy promotional photo of Mr. Ives hanging on a wall opposite this computer on which I tooling out this blog-blabbing; Mr. Ives is looking down straight into my eyes--I just noticed yesterday while contemplating on "my musical hero" that in the photo Mr. Ives's fists are clenched as though he's challenging you to a boxing match! Ives was always in that clinched fist mood--that's what caused his heart problems--his heart raced when he got excited! Like I say, taking it easy from 1914 on, allowed him to live to be 80.

Mr. Ives as he hangs on my wall looking down at me. See those clinched fists!

thedailygrowlerhousepianist and I are spending the 4th together this year. thedailygrowlerhousepianist's wife has left him on his own to go on her merry way and my "woman problems" have been solved for the moment and I'm left in peace--my current "flame" is in Warsaw doing something fantastically fun while I'm sitting here broiling--a bit--in a little New York City humidity. So us two bachelors-for-the-day are going to gather together at my favorite Irish pub for first some chowing down and then some guzzling down of some Jameson's Gold afore we head back to my joint for some serious music listening--and, yes, we'll start off with my copy of Donald Johanos (born in Cedar Rapids, Iowa) conducting the Dallas Symphony's 1967 recording of the Holidays Symphony. Then I'll get out my new 1972 Columbia LP of the great Ives interpreter John Kirkpatrick's rerecording of Mr. Ives Piano Sonata #2, the Concord Sonata, which he first recorded (for Columbia) in 1944--78 rpm records that are very rare and very expensive to own--I have the LP of the '44 recording put out by Columbia in 1947--so we'll be comparing the two versions--I've got two sets of sheet music for The Concord so we'll have fun following John Kirkpatrick with our scores as he plays so smoothly and transcendentally (Mr. Ives would like that) this very difficult piece.

Then we'll listen to my new LP of Leopold Stokowki conducting the American Symphony Orch. in Ives's Symphony No. 4--a symphony so fucking American it gives guys like me and thedailygrowlerhousepianist goose bumps!

We'll end the evening with some fireworks--a whole bunch of Lester Young 78s out of my collection, especially a Signature recording I just bought, from 1944, Dickie Wells and his Orchestra, which includes Lester Young blowing one of the hottest solos of his recorded life on "Linger Awhile."

Hey, I'm currently bidding on a 1948 Herman Leonard photograph of Lester Young's pork-pie hat hanging off the edge of a music stand, with a cigarette perched on a Coke bottle (not usually the bottle found around Lester) while Lester takes a break somewhere in the dark background, somewhere close to the cigarette smoke coming off the cigarette--it's a great photo--it really is--and Katrina almost wiped out a lot of Herman's old plates--though a great effort was made to save as many as possible--hey, lookie here what I found on the Internet:

We'll see if I may own a copy of this photo in a few days--probably not; it's probably worth several hundred bucks--it's at $100 bucks right now but the reserve hasn't been met--so we'll see. I'm getting into jazz photos now--it may be a great collectible market soon--some jazz photos are nearly 100 years old now--like if I could find that photo of Buddy Bolden with his band!

Have a Happy Holiday--a happy Fourth of July. It used to mean speedboat racing out on Lytle Lake to me as a kid--my uncle worked for Coca Cola who sponsored the races every 4th and I got to ride out to the lake on a big Coca Cola truck and sneak-drink hot Cokes off that truck the rest of the day. When I was a kid, I drank hot Cokes--my uncle had one closet in his house stacked to the ceiling with cases of Cokes--hot Cokes!

Just remember while your chowing down and wasting food all day, at least 20 or so people will be blown to bits in Iraq and Afghanistan at any given moment during the day--talk about fireworks! Life is sweet, depending on where your ass is at the moment.

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

Our DUMB Leaders

I Was Sittin' Here Thinkin'
Watching commercial television is like going through a huge pile of garbage. It's all garbage though if you're lucky you might find something of value somewhere within it. It's a huge pile of garbage--comparable to the Manila garbage dump where thousands of people live and make their living searching for valuables among that Manila trash mountain.

This morning while going through the garbage of commercial television I decided, "HOLY CRAP, the people who are 'leading' us (leading us like the lemmings we are) are pretty damn dumb when it comes to their intellects, their cultural contributions, their thinking, their educations, their improving what knowledge they have (if any in the case of GW Bush), their reading (or "their blogging" I guess I should say now)--and, important to me, what kind of music turns them on, you know, what music sets them to dancing! One lone hope you have with Obama is that he picked up that solid polyrhythmical movement-encouraging musical gene from his African father and not the monotonal up-and-down-movement-encouraging musical gene from his white mother--in other words, you hope Obama can dance! I'm sure his wife can dance and hopefully maybe she taught him some steps--he acts like Bill Clinton around women, I've noticed that--he knows women like him--even that planted white woman, the ex-Hillary lover who's going around saying now that Hillary didn't get the nomination she's voting for John "Nutjob" McCain, even she has sexual fantasies about Obama! GW Bush, I guarantee you, can't dance for shit--nor can Pickles dance for shit--though I'm sure Georgie Porgie and Pickles both spent plenty of long-times slugging down long-neck Lone Stars in a hell of a lot of yeehaw white's only dance halls in their partying days--especially Pickles who went to Southern Methodist in Dallas where I'm sure she spent plenty of college-day nights out on Greenville Avenue at one of those rip-roaring big dance halls that has lined that avenue since time began in Dallas, grindin' and pushin' in loose-body, drunken-sloppy, Yahoo dancing with those big-old-bowlegged-macho Texian whitey drugstore cowboys (like the man she eventually married) or those groping, lusting, humping SMU frat rats--drunkenly and cokeheadedly whoopin' it up hell bent for getting laid later.

OK, so Obama and Hillbilly Hill have Ivy League degrees and as we all know, that means they're privileged according to their diplomas! Then how come they are both so dumb acting when it comes to common sense, Thomas Paine's measuring device for a true free people in a true democracy (I know, I know, there's no such thing as "common sense" or a "true democracy" and I'm toying with these concepts like a cat plays with a mouse before it devours it and puts a Cheshire cat smile of satisfaction on its face--but since this is all fantasy--it doesn't matter).

Like why is Obama so wanting to please the white, wild, fundamentalist Christian right-wing? Does he really believe he has to prove his "whiteness" to these fools? These people who let a big Jewish fairy tale rule their lives--I say, Fuck 'em, and I yell a hearty "hurry up and leave us behind!" out to them. Why can't Obama see it that way? By the bye, this fairy tale the nutjob Christians put all their faith in is the same fairy tale that's found in many cultures, especially in the desert cultures, Judaism, Islam, and Christianity, really all the same religion with the same Big Daddy (Yahweh/Allah), the same racial poppy, Abraham to the Jews and Gentiles, Ibrahim to the Muslims--and Gentiles is what Christians really are--even their precious Joshua ben Joseph of the Nazareth slums who they call Jesus Christ spoke in terms of his being a Jew and following Jewish laws except he was an Essene (a Judaic sect); Jesus never called himself a Christian, NO, he stayed Jewish, but a reformer type who was really rejecting the OLD TESTAMENT (the Torah) and its archaic laws based on the Ten Commandments, basing his reformist views on what he'd learned reading the Torah and the rabbinical interpretations of the many rabbinical scribblings in the margins of the original Torah, the rabbinical interpretations of the many rabbis who came before and after this reformer Jew Joshua ben Joseph whose message was one of simplicity: rather than being subject to harsh laws--like the laws imposed on the Jews by their old wrathful God or their Jesus-time's Roman captors--the best way to repel these harsh captors was not through "vengeance is mine" but through loving them as you wanted to be loved--dig it? And this means loving old Yahweh/Allah the same way--do unto Yahweh/Allah as you would have him do unto you. It's the same thing Gandhi preached. It's the same thing Martin Luther King preached. React to violence against you by showing your peaceful side--"turning the other cheek," as Joshua ben Joseph put it--Jesus is simply teaching the Golden Rule, the ancient template of cooperation: "Do unto others as YOU would have THEM do unto YOU." It's as simple as that. That's what the Hippies preached, too, with their peace, love, and tie dye mantras! PEACE is the answer to all our problems; yet, like Noel Coward said, we'd rather be deceived than to know the truth about things--reality is too real and that's what scares most DUMB asses to the point of believing anything that "guarantees" them they can avoid death simply by putting their faith (their survival mode) in a fairy tale--in a cruel way, and here's the deceit of these fairy tale salvations, death is the only hope for most Christians--death is their release the same as it's anybody's release--the same as it's a jihad Muslim's release--the same release a Buddhist monk gets from setting himself on fire--like they did when the USA invaded and tried to occupy VietNam--that's why suicide is so scary to most Christians--it's so dramatically real time--in other religions, suicide is rewarded by great favors when they eventually all tumble into their heavens! Christians don't commit suicide--supposedly. Christians sacrifice their lives in place of the lambs the Jewish priests used to demand be brought for sacrifice during feasts of atonement, like the Passover season--the "blood of the lamb" goes over the doorjam--this was before some trinket maker invented the mezuzah as a substitute for writing shema in lamb's blood. I think it's easy to catch my drift.

Like this piece of garbage I found amongst the morning commercial garbage deliveries: Obama this morning puts his two-toned foot in his mouth again by saying he will continue Bush's faith-based initiative program--letting the churches in a community take care of the social services (to Conservatives, social services means: "Free handouts to lazy blacks, illegal Mexican immigrants (most Messkins are considered lazy by legend-making Whiteys--you know, the Mexican wearing the big sombrero sound asleep against an adobe wall right in the middle of the day when the smelly, sweaty Whiteys are being frustrated bosses--"Si, si, El Patron, es tiempo siesta--no trabajar!"), Puerto Ricans living interchangeably between the USA (like Newyoricans) and Puerto Rico, South Americans looking for free handouts through nanny jobs for the lazy women and dirty-work construction jobs for the lazy men, and of course those lazy, drunken Native Americans ("Injuns" to whiteys) getting to live free on whitey's land and driving around in free pickups, and, oh yes, for fairness's sake, white trash whiteys are included in this Conservative view of welfare--those who used to be tenant farmers in the time when the old plantation was Whitey's gift to US industry)--you know, what "welfare" means to Conservatives: blacks driving big fancy cars ("Yo, whitey, where's my Lexus? I don't drive no Fords, sombitch, I want my Lexus!") and wide-screen television sets being given to them by the government social services programs. The right-wing Christian nutjobs call this "secular humanism."

Obama for some strange reason thinks he has to appeal to Conservatives! Why, for God's sake? He represents an opposition, not a compromiser! Yet, when he revealed his admiration for Ronnie Raygun Reagan's economic theories a few months back, I wondered, just how dumb is this Harvard Law graduate?! He sure does talk damn dumb occasionally and certainly in this morning's morning-news garbage he's talking real dumb saying he will continue Bush's faith-based intiative program, with the news pundits suggesting he's really not appealing to Whitey Christian votes but to his fellow black voters because black communities are so dependent on their churches for social services, drug counseling, etc. Come on, you stupid dicks, blacks are gonna vote for Obama because they know already that faith-based initiatives or not, Bush is a racist, his policies are antianything that ain't WHITE and RICH and already PRIVILEGED (like Condo-Leasing Rice, for instance, and ex-military Uncle Tom, Colon's Pal, or that great supreme legal mind, Clarence "Yassuh, Boss, I'se'a Dancin'" Thomas who was foisted on us by Georgie Porgie's own racist pappy, Old Pappy Bush himself--remember Clarence's "electronic lynching" accusation?). The reason this is such dumb talk? Because god-dammit we're supposed to have a government separate from our fairy tale religious beliefs--religion has no place in government! Come on, Obama, you're supposed to be a law genius--a debater--where's you intelligence? Keep your religious beliefs out of politics. Politicians keep us divided along superstitious lines--united we'd throw their greedy asses out and put a true government by the people for the people in their place--like why isn't any candidate talking about the Bill of Rights! You notice none of these goons ever mentions We the People's rights under the Bill of Rights!

And why is Obama so scared of White Christian evangelicals anyway?--all nutjobs; all more left-wing than any progressive Dumbocrat because Christianity is a form of Communism! Think about that! Faith-based initiatives? Isn't that a form of socialism! That's like huge tax breaks for huge profit-guzzling corporations--it's called "corporate welfare."

I'm curious suddenly as to why the price of crude oil is suddenly constantly high-flying-ALWAYS-going-up! Since when has oil production been so hard hit all of a sudden!? Could it be GW Bush's illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq (and Afghanistan, too) has depleted all our oil and gasoline reserves?--did you know the military has its own oil and gas reserves?--remember the Teapot Dome scandal? The armed services supply their own fuels--nowadays the military is depending on private contractors to provide those fuels--and at market prices--whatever the OPEC Royal Families want--the Sheik of Oman needs another couple'a hundred yachts with bowling alleys in them, dammit!--the Sheik wants bowling alleys in his yachts, to hell with the slaves he's using to pump that oil and to service his yachts! I mean Hugo Chavez says he has plenty of oil in Venezuela--oil's no problem for him! Saudi-Arabia has no problem with oil. Russia has oil. The Caucasians have oil. Iran has oil. Even Iraq has plenty of oil. Who doesn't have oil? You guessed it, the US and China--the two countries who now hold the future of humankindness in their hands.

Remember when the Washington pundits were praising Georgie Porgie Bush when he was first elected as being the first president who got a "live and play with a BBA" degree instead of a law degree? Finally, a businessman in the White House. Plus, Georgie Porgies privileged-boy college degree was an Ivy League degree, too. Why, hell, folks, like his old Pappy, GW has a Yale degree! Why, so does Hillbilly Hill! And we all know what a great job GW did with all the businesses he started and managed over his long successful life as a businessman. He has a 100% record in his handling of his businesses--a 100% record of failure: his oil company with his Saudi-brother-buddy (a guy who was later found shot dead) was a failure! During his time of owning the Texas Rangers (set up by old Pappy Bush's oil-rich compadres) he put that team in financial ruin! His managing of the State of Texas when he was governor! Check it out! The only thing GW was good at as governor was ridding the state of 157 mostly black men (one Messkin woman was in the mix) via executive execution thereby keeping these worthless bastards (most of whom were really never really proven guilty beyond any doubts) off the Texas nonexistent welfare roles. The last book GW ever read: you guessed it if you said My Pet Goat. GW, by the bye, rigorously maintained a low-C-average at Yale. You or I couldn't even get into Yale with a low-C-average. In my college career--I have a Masters of Arts degree in "Sociological Theory"--to get it I had to have at least a B average--and I didn't go to Yale, though I had mostly Ivy League-educated teachers in the colleges I attended--an exception was most of my Sociology professors were from the University of Chicago.

Changing the Subject
I just heard a dude on Amy Goodman's Democracy Now this morning saying the countries in the world that have nuclear weapons have no fear of the US attacking them--an Indian dude said Indians and Pakis have nuclear weapons as a defense against being attacked by the US. Countries that already have nuclear weapons: Israel, Great Britain, China, North Korea, Pakistan, India, Russia--know that the US will not attack them! If you don't have nuclear weapons, you are subject to an attack by the US on your country--for your wealth--stealing the wealth of nations--that's why Adam Smith entitled his book that--wasn't it originally titled, Stealing the Wealth of Nations? This dude on Amy's show says US government thinking says that the new frontier for battlefield (military) technology including nuclear weaponry is now outerspace! The US sees space as theirs to rule like they rule the seas! like they rule the air! At the same time, this dude says, the Defense Department has lost interest in nuclear weapons and is letting our nuclear weapon supply go straight to Hell in a leaky canoe.

Anna Deveare Smith
Then Amy (whose lookin' damn good these days for a 50-something-year-old Harvard grad) had this babe, Anna Deveare Smith, on. I've heard of her before; she's always here in New York City doing her "performances"--she, like Whoopi Goldberg before her, does multicharacter voices--put together from innumerable interviews she does with different types of Amuricans--it's a thing with talented black women who by desire are actresses! Let me explain--I lived with a black actress once--black women, even beautiful light-skin, whitey-preferred black actresses have hell getting their pretty legs in the doors of the whitey-controlled acting industry--I know, you're thinking, wait a minute, Halle Berry gets plenty of roles! Whitney Houston went from singer to Oscar-winner-type actress (though she couldn't act for shit)! But, with one million or so black women thinking of themselves as actresses--you see, there are tons of weekly auditions listed in Back Stage for the whitey-preferred blonde skinny bitch actresses--tons of roles--but for a black actress, there aren't many calls to go to and once they get to these auditions there are 600 look-alike black actresses competing for say one role--where a white actress may be auditioning for a play with all white women parts--dig?--except soap operas now have a lot of black actress roles these days--a lot of black television actresses who shot their wads on teevee (like this really and truly beautiful and totally sexual actress Victoria Rowls (she made her name as a pathologist/detective on Dick Van Dyke's last-hurrah teevee show--his comeback show from his recovery from alcoholism--Diagnosis Murder) who now has a big starring role on one of the soaps) are now finding roles in the soaps--getting to be the mistresses and lovers of white actors, too--that's a big afternoon thrill for the sordid gaggles of bored women who get their thrills from these shoddily written, filmed, and produced bags of teevee garbage--there's no better thrill to a white woman as seeing a truly handsome (though probably gay) white male actor heating up a hot little black minky--stripping her down to her bra and panties after she's ripped his shirt off and left him topless (it's OK for men to go topless on teevee--ain't that ironic? Do men's breasts turn gay dudes on?) and just as he's throwing her back onto the bed with the intentions of pounding her good there's a fade to commercial! That's why Whoopi Goldberg revolutionized Broadway for black women--one-woman shows where these very talented black actresses can play many roles in one show--and that's what this Anna Deveare Smith does. She calls herself a performing artist--and that's what she is--she has one show where she impersonates Studs Terkel doing a radio interview (her high-squeaky-voiced Studs sounds like Studs on helium)--she has Studs talking about Mark Twain and Huck Finn and Jim on the raft when the white slavers holler up at Huck and ask him if there's someone on the raft with him and he says yes and they ask "Black or white?" and he says "White" because you see Huck's confused about why Jim is considered a slave and not a human being like him--and also Anna does a Korean (male or female I can't tell which) from South Central L.A. who lost everything during the L.A. riots when blacks destroyed his business and his home and then bragged about how they'd rid South Central of its real problem, Korean business owners!

I'm gonna be honest--I find Anna's impersonation of the Korean victim of the L.A. riots hypocritical. What say a white woman actress used a black accent like Anna's Korean accent?--and I live in a building full of Koreans--and especially Korean women, like Anna Deveare impersonates in her act (or is it a Korean man? it's hard to tell)--her Korean accent does capture that distinctively certain childish way of speaking English Koreans have but then it slips to me off into a blackish sort of irreverence when she's making this Korean character get pissed off at blacks--and I'm sayin', like I guess to Anna all "yah-yah, if I did that" white critics of her performances are hypocrites, that her Korean accent becomes mockery to a Korean the same as a whitey actress speaking like she thinks a black woman speaks, "Yeah, girl, you go now!" is mockery to a black woman or man. Like the Spice Girls--only one black in the group--but they all wanted so to be identified as a "soul" group, which we know here in racist America means "black" group--and a lot of white girl singers mockingly try so hard to be accepted as black in their styles--and Mariah Carey who's half-black sounds white-as-hell to me! How did Mariah Carey get to be a superstar? Does anyone remember? Maybe by marrying the president of her recording company?

I'm ramblin'--but my point really is this: Anna Deavere Smith is making herself a definer of the arts (and when she uses the word "artists," she basically means performing artists--actors--stage actors and film actors--Anna had a part on West Wing, though, hey, come on, man, Anna's also an AUTHOR--yep, she's got several books out--books just like Studs Terkel's books where he went around interviewing Americans all over America--nothing original about Anna! is that what I'm saying?). She made one statement that really grabbed me by my white balls. She says she met with Wynton Marsalis--and somehow Wynton has set himself up as about the only expert on jazz music left in America--jazz musicians get kind of sick of Wynton, he flip-flops a lot--like he once had a big argument with Herbie Hancock over where jazz should be going--saying jazz had to stay according to New Orleans standards and not let itself be corrupted by taking it into other genres (meaning rock or heavy metal--sweet popular music--but not classical music, oh no, Wynton can play Mozart and make a recording with an opera singer trying to sing jazz--it never works!) like Miles did at the end of his career (like playing Michael Jackson and Stevie Wonder covers) (though Miles did come back and play a remaking of the "Birth of the Cool" idea when he was dying by playing straight-ahead once more--and straight ahead to Miles was like he titled one of his albums, "Miles Ahead"). Trouble is, Miles stayed cool to the end--but Anna Deavere Smith has decided we've had the Birth of the Cool and it didn't work so now, according to her, it's time for the Death of the Cool. Artists, she says, have to stop being cool and start being aggressive! In her big summit meeting with America's only jazz expert, she says she got Wynton to agree with her in her "Death of the Cool" ambition even though Wynton is named after one of the coolest piano players who ever played cool piano, Wynton "Winetone" Kelly--and Winetone was a child of Miles, too--like all of the musicians Miles picked to "lead"--like teenage pianist Herbie Hancock! And teenage drummer Anthony Williams. Anna says, fuck the cool, it's time once again for HOT art! You see, I'm way ahead of Anna--I'm going back and relistening to the oldest jazz recordings I can find, back when jazz was critically broken down into the HOT and the SWEET--you see, "the COOL" developed out of the HOT! The HOT got shuffled off into White Dixieland music--and finally died a cold death in the mid-forties--killed a bit by WWII. You see Anna has no real history of jazz in her--a lot of black people look upon jazz as staid and too white-dominated (like Norman Granz and Irving Mills and types like that)--plus, it's still the Devil's music to a lot of blacks--the music of being oppressed, the music of singing the blues because of that oppression--that slavery mentality--though historically, blues was the music that told blacks how to shake off their troubles, shake out of those irons, shake loose and depart out of the South--to take that Illinois Central train straight up to "Sweet Home Chicago"--"Come onnnnnn, baby, don't you want'a go?...come onnnnnn, baby, don't you want'a go?...back to that sweet state like California, Sweet Home Chicago!" I love that song. My first acquaintance with it was Herman "Junior" Parker's very successful recording of it in the late 50s--though, of course, Robert Johnson did the definitive version of it, though Roosevelt Sykes would later claim he wrote it.

Oh, would you like to check out what Anna Deveare looks like? Here ya go:

It's hard to deny a black woman like this anything she wants! I know, I've fallen prey to several of these extremely beautiful and talented creatures! We're all the same beneath the skin!

So Anna Deveare Smith is successfully setting herself up as the spokeswoman for all American Art now--music, acting, painting! Her latest project is a book telling artists how to succeed in this world! She tells young artists, you gotta respect The Man's (Whitey's) power and react to it not with cool disregard but with aggressive power that artists have but don't know how to use--Anna's gonna tell ya how to use that power, artists! Look for Anna maybe one day to take Whoopi's place on "The View," that pile of lady-glittered-up television waste. [Barbara Walters is such a twisted piece of crap, a totally untalented daughter of a New York City playboy and nightclub impressario--boy, did old Lew (the Jewish way of spelling Lou?) Walters kiss a lot of Mafia ass in his day.]

Whew! I'm as exhausted as a garbage man at the end of his day's run! Plus I feel as dirty and smelly as a garbage man fresh off the truck!

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler