All Along the Watchtower With thegrowlingwolf

Foto by tgw, "Photographer Under Glass," New York City 2010
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ON APRIL 6, The Daily Growler WAS FOUR YEARS OLD!!
"Happy Birthday, Daily Crower, (signed: Dolly Parton); "Happy Birthday, Daley's Prowler!" (signed: Hanson, er-ah, remember us?); "Happy Birthday, The Growling Bowler!" (signed (it's a facsimile): Jesus Christ; and co-signed: Gotcha! Joe LIEberman). Just a few of the massive spam-cans of email birthday greetings we've just gotten lo this afternoon. Praise the Lawdy Lawd and pass that pile of biscuits and that 2 pounds of creamery butter and that cake knife over here to me, please...Aha! Groat clusters, that's even better!
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"Is That a Mask You're Wearing?"
I was watching Sec'y of State Hillary Clinton, I believe she was actually in the District of Corruption, though she was probably between flights, off to somewhere to visit our colonies (our allies) around the world, standing seriously firm in, as she said, "our" (her word) commitment to take civilization down with us in order to defend Israel's "right to exist" (says who?) "at any cost" (again, Hillary's words)--and We the People, though we're 4 trillion dollars in the hole managed to come up with "our" commitment of another 30 billion to help bail out Israel--and, yes, We the People agree with Hillary, without the U.S.'s monetary and military help, Israel would soon perish.

Which leads me to my first deviation from my original idea--after all, I am up on the Watchtower today--the one Bob Dylan and Jimi Hendrix used to walk along watching life down below and watching heavenwardly for coming "religious" disasters.

Just yesterday, I had the privilege of reading an on-line criticism of a past post I "penned." In this posted tirade, I aimed my sarcasm at the pomposity of New York City's autocratic billionaire combo-mayor-and-Superman, self-adoring Mike Bloomburg in his allowing his developer buddies to rape Manhattan communities, wiping out traditional neighborhoods and replacing them with these new artificial neighborhoods that are catering more to corporate visions and the tourist industry than to the citizens of New York City. This mayor's pomposity then led me to continue my railing in that post on across the Brooklyn Bridge and over into downtown Brooklyn to growl about how Caesar Mikey Bloomberg and his ass-kissing city council had given their divine blessings to one of the mayor's superdeveloper pals to go on and continue the raping of downtown Brooklyn with this so-called "Atlantic Yard" project, a colossally overproduced (overproduction would be the death of Capitalism, said that German Sociologist Karl Marx) new-Brooklyn complex of luxury hi-rise condos and hotels and hi-rise office buildings. Giving divine blessings to go ahead with this disruptive project in spite of community protest and the fact that this is an, as I said, overblown (out-of-proper-planning control) project that will displace thousands of people and small businesses and replace them with luxury living space (Oh those views!) that only today's upwardly mobile rich (i.e.: financial industry executives and middle management goons) can afford, luxury hi-rise hotels that only the superrich can afford to stay in, and luxury office space that will be gobbled up by all these new sideline derivative and loan-sharking companies and private equity foundations and Power Elite family foundations (one of these divine little accumulations of tax-free money (I guess in a remembering way they're the Skillman (sic) Family Foundation) is currently buying up buildings and land all over Detroit--a city Capitalism ruined through abandonment. Then White people left the city in droves so that Detroit is now 85% Black, so, of course, it is also dirt poor now, abandoned to go back to a jungle existence--a large city ripe for the pickings of the huge developers and financial scumbag groups and of course the big bailed-out banks, these scavengers; and finally we assume a lot of the rapacious foreign real-estate investment corporations (especially those from Commie China) that are daily roaring into NYC to take advantage of the current low status of the US paper dollar (it's really quite worthless).

What's this I hear? "Hey, Wolf Man," why look, it's Magic Johnson and the Russian billionaire (how does a 30-something-year-old Russian become a billionaire overnight these days?) who just bought the superlosing New Jersey Nets basketball team that is being moved to Brooklyn yelling at me. "Yeah, guys, what's up?" "Wolf Man, this is gonna be so good for Brooklyn. We mean, come on, Wolfie, look, man, momentary big rapper-singing star, clothing designer, author, politically correct Black leader, the billionaire Jay Z is a big investor in this boondoggle for the filthy rich developers and bankers and insurance brokers and private equity funds and rich boy and girl foundations..., er-ah, rather than vulgarly condemn it, get on the bus, Wolfie. Sink some of your family's fortune into this. I mean, Wolferino, we gonna get richer than sin off this boondoggle, baby."

So when these shifty weasels get through literally razing the living hell out of downtown Brooklyn and bringing New Jersey attitudes across the North River to that once so "unknown" City of Brooklyn, New York (Thomas Wolfe, the real writer, said only the dead really knew Brooklyn (the largest cemeteries in NYC are in Brooklyn)), once the fourth largest city in the USA. Of course, one must sadly note that J.P. Morgan/Morgan Stanley/Chase had already disrupted that area by building a plain-Jane sorethumb office tower in the Court Street area of downtown Brooklyn years ago--getting their big fat pirate-booted foot in the door during the reign of one of our other worthless mayors (Guiliani or Koch? Aha: here's one of my unfactual facts) who gave out huge tax breaks to the Morgan Clan in exchange for their promising to spruce up the subway stations directly under their new plain-Jane disruptive building--sprucing ups which most of these tax-cheating moveable feasts never fulfill leaving it up to the always-broke MTA to fix them on their own--escalators sitting unfinished in some Midtown Manhattan stations because the developed building over them reneged on their promises to refurbish them--of course they lost nothing in terms of fines, punishments, or imposed taxes.

I guess I was my usual vulgar self in this other post that got me so splendidly criticized. The criticism of it went something like this: "Though a lot of his facts are doubtful and he uses bad grammar, still this thegrowlingwolf's rantings made the best sense we've seen on what's really going on in the Brooklyn Atlantic Yard situation." I took pride in reading that. Man, this dude hit my nail right on my head--EXCEPT, I disagree with him in saying my facts are doubtful. All my facts are facts, they're just facts made out of my own personal guesstimations, actually the same "facts" as the better grammarians who also feel drawn to write use as facts. (I recently congratulated the Existentialist Cowboy for bringing up the "fact" that al-Queda is a made-up-by-the-CIA in cahoots with Chevron Oil (Karzai and Condo-leasing Rice were on the Chevron board at one time--alas at the same time Unka Dickless Cheney was head of Halliburton of Dubai) phony organization (it simply means "camp" in Arabic, a "fact" we've been saying on the Growler since we started broadcasting in 2006--and knowing since the early 1990s. The Cowboy doesn't like to be topped--he claims he's a legitimate big-time journalist and I won't deny he's not more cultured and worldly than I am--but, hey, I wasn't trying to use oneupmanship on him--though maybe I was). My "essays" or assays, yes, are hard to understand unless you are a fictional-real character in life, acting out a chosen persona, a persona who is prying into the backroom-secret-deal corners of individual and societal life looking for ironies.

Our pompous little-man mayor has been on a piss trip since New Yorkers vetoed his stupid 'congestion-pricing' traffic plans to charge motorists big bucks to come into Midtown Manhattan below 92nd--Hiz Honor's zone of his wealthiest tax payers (Trump City starts at 92nd Street--now ain't that interesting?)--keeping the ordinary traffic out of Midtown so the rich and famous and their limos can whiz around freely and unimpeded doing 50 mph down city streets while rushing to leisurely garner another billion-dollar boondoggle coming their way from the triple-taxed good ole easily fleeced citizens of New York City.

OK, I'll admit and agree with my critic, the above is full of bad grammar, except, doesn't a person speaking perfect proper affected English in perfectly proper affected tones strike you as a smart ass? When you're discussing things around the old dinner table, isn't bad grammar acceptable?--or when you're cursing out your television? When you're watching television and suddenly you realize how full of bullshit most of its channels are and you further realize those channels are throwing a gushing of that bullshit right into your face--"Here, you easily duped bastards," your teevee's talking heads are yelling at you, "swallow this load of bullshit or...."/"Hi, this is Chuck Norris with another load of bullshit to throw at you!"--or "Hi, it's Montell Williams, and today on the show we're welcoming back for the first time in over a year--please welcome to this bullshit show our big fat cow lummox bullshitting psychic Miss Bullshit Brown."

So I relished the good criticism I got in that online critical piece because in the end the critic had to say, "Yes, this wolf rants, but in his rantings are so many insights as to what the hell is being pulled over our eyes!" Yeah verily I say unto you: that's the kind of criticism that keeps me growling, that drives me to further rant, to call these rascals and their machinating friends the rat bastards and hoodwinkers that they are. They are ten-times worse than those Somalian pirates President Obama recently declared war on. It was his own highly prized adviser, Mad Larry Summers, who was the originator of the idea of dumping toxic waste in 3rd-World countries, namely Africa, and actually carrying out such a dumping off the coast of Somalia. Why hell all that did was take away the way thousands of Somalians made their livings since it destroyed their fertile fishing waters--killed all the fish--so how enterprising was it of these Somalian fishermen to become pirates?--they already had these ocean-going high-speed boats at their disposal so why not turn them into attack boats and become real authentic pirates--why this enterprise has already garnered them millions of bucks from Saudi-Arabia alone, many more bucks than they could have garnered fishing (I'm attracted by that word garnered in this post). But Obama, in praising the rescue of that one pirated captain who was being held hostage by the Somalians in a life boat by the Navy Seals, has declared he's putting all his resources into fighting these pirates. Oh hot damn, our boy president is playing good guys and pirates now with his little toy soldiers of whom he's commander and chief. When this rescued captain was asked why he took that particular route knowing there were pirates in that area, he replied, "Well, that's the route we take." Case closed. By the way, we captured one of these pirates and he was brought to this country to be tried. I was wondering, shouldn't that be a case for a world court?--a high seas crime? Why do we have jurisdiction over a high seas crime? Does our Navy have bases all over the world in order to protect a private shipping firm's ships in international waters? Like how much did that rescue effort cost US taxpayers? You mean shipping firms aren't responsible for the lives of their captains and crews--but WE ARE?

So there stood Hillary Clinton, her face sternly serious, shoveling the bullshit of our dedication to the preservation of Israel into our faces. She assured Israel, speaking to the country as a human entity I assume, that even though Net'nYahoo had insulted old workin' man Joe "I Work for the DuPonts" Biden on his "surprise" visit to Israel to foment peace between Israel and those Arab Dog NonHuman Palestinians by giving the go-ahead for some more Israeli taking over of lands from those Palestinian dogs in East Jerusalem, razing their homes and farms in order to build housing for the many new Israelis that are tumbling into that holy country daily. Joe Biden left Israel downfallen. Obama had to call Net'nYahoo and get tough with him--so what did the Net'nYahoo do? He announced even more Jewish houses were being foisted onto lower-than-dogs Palestinians in East Jerusalem. A big fuck you to the hand that feeds him.

Jews and even some Arabs really do consider Palestinians human garbage and flotsam, dogs to be put up against walls and shot, men, women, and children, all the worthless same (not an open "fact," no, but, I'll bet you it's a fact just the same). Arabs are fodder for the inhumane decisions of Israeli politicians and military bozos out to enforce Judaic legends and YHWH-chosen-people promises even though these brother-sister humans come from the same human monkey species. They both claim this superman Abraham as their Great White Father--was Abraham a Jew? Was he also an Arab? Sure he was, he was a Semite, right? He was from East of Eden, a sheep and goat herder--a grabber of grazing land. A mean possessor of water wells.

Here's another "perhaps to become a fact" I heard this week: Osama bin Laden has been dead for 10 years. I heard a couple of my favorite radio ranters (Ralph Schoenman and Mya Shone--check out their Website: takingaim.info/), say that the other afternoon when talking about how al-Queda and Bin Laden were both boogiemen invented by the CIA in its backing of the Mujaheddin in their fight to try and drive the Soviet Union out of their country. The Soviet Union had tried to invade and occupy Afghanistan same as us and had failed, warning us we would fail too if we got involved in the mess that is Afghanistan. Did you know 73% of Afghanistans live in rural areas? Kabul and Kandahar being the largest cities; Kandahar being in Helmond Province where the juicy poppies are grown. Did you know that Karsai's brother, the drug dealer, controls Kandahar? Did you know that most Afghanistans live on a few hundred dollars a year; yet we've pumped billions of dollars into that country, all of it then passed out among the Karsais and Pushtoon tribal chiefs and Uzbekistan generals--the rich and famous of Afghanistan--and we've also pumped billions into Pakistan, India, Georgia, Central Asia, Iraq, Saudi-Arabia, Yemen, Jordan, all the minor European countries--where haven't we pumped billions of dollars? That's the question we should ask ourselves.

For a good belly laugh, check out the role of a high-class swindler named Peter Galbraith, son of old John Kenneth Galbraith, and an old Bill Clinton buddy and Joe Biden, John Kerry, Obama adviser on foreign policy--also the cause of all this recent bullshit being thrown back in our faces by Karsai in Afghanistan--Karsai threatening to join the Taliban if the US doesn't leave him along--all because of Peter Galbraith who was nosing around for his Power Elite masters in Afghanistan during the phony elections in which Karsai's opposition pulled out of the race and took his voters with him leaving Karsai the unopposed victor--a victory Peter Boy Galbraith declared corrupt because Karsai was so corrupt and his administration were so corrupt--and they weren't playing ball with Chevron Oil--you know the real reason we're in Afghanistan: that oil transmission pipeline we've already got the plans for building that will bring Central Asian oil down through Afghanistan to the Caspian Sea. Read this from the NYTimes:

When drillers struck oil in a rich new field called Tawke in December 2005, no one but a handful of government and business officials and members of Mr. Galbraith’s inner circle knew that the constitutional provisions he had pushed through only months earlier could enrich him so handsomely.

As the scope of Mr. Galbraith’s financial interests in Kurdistan become clear, they have the potential to inflame some of Iraqis’ deepest fears, including conspiracy theories that the true reason for the American invasion of their country was to take its oil. It may not help that outside Kurdistan, Mr. Galbraith’s influential view that Iraq should be broken up along ethnic lines is considered offensive to many Iraqis’ nationalism. Mr. Biden and Mr. Kerry, who have been influenced by Mr. Galbraith’s thinking but do not advocate such a partitioning of the country, were not aware of Mr. Galbraith’s oil dealings in Iraq, aides to both politicians say.

Source: www.nytimes.com/2009/11/12/world/middleeast/12galbraith.html

Why, yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. He's called the United States of America. But, Virginia, he isn't a good Santa Claus. This one comes down your chimney, murders you and your family, then steals all the fuel oil out of your basement. And all of this is about OIL and our trying to invade and occupy oilfields throughout the Middle East and Central Asia--our greedy oil-worshiping eyes envisioning our controlling all that Middle East oil from Kyrgyzstan all the way over to Saudi-Arabia (we need Israel to take Iran for us--and they will).

Well, there you go, folks. Yes, my facts are doubtful; and, yes, I use bad grammar with liberal ease; and, yes, I'm vulgar in a civilized sense (I love things of the jungle); but, my rantings make the best sense around these days--according to one critic!
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Get Ready for Another Stupid Move by Corporate Lawyer President Obama
For years the nutjob rightwing has been trying to jack-off our tax system. The Power Elite hates the IRS and have been working to eliminate it for years. The idiot Steve Forbes has been pushing a VAT since he first started running for president--that's a Value-Added Tax (remember Steve's father? Malcolm? Who though gay supposedly made it with Liz Taylor before her body crashed around her and left her a blubbery vegetable of a woman--Malcolm, the Capitalist Tool, up and having a massive heart attack one day after riding his motorcycle around the Forbes Estate when he was in his 70s but still believing because he was so filthy rich he would live forever). Now I'm sensing Obama is about to pull this VAT shit out of his bag of right-of-center tricks. Value-added Taxes would mean the price of every fucking thing we have to have to survive will go up from 17% up to 27% more under this system of taxation (it's wrecked the Irish economy). We already have a very progressive tax system if it were enforced according to how it's supposed to work. The more money you make the more you pay in taxes. Makes sense doesn't it? However, due to the many loopholes that have been sewn into our fragile tax laws that favor the filthy rich over the poor, our progressive tax system has become out-of-balance with the heavy burden of taxation falling on the heads of those who can least bear it. G.W. Bush reduced taxes on the rich, which automatically raised them on the poor. Obama who swore he was going to retax the rich as per usual has reneged on that and is instead proposing lowering taxes even more on the rich, believing the Milton Friedman-David Stockman-Allan Greenspan-Ayn Rand hoax that the richer the rich get the more money will trickle back down to the fucking peasant class. You believe that, and the majority of Americans do, and you're fixing to end up on your way to those new poor houses the debt industry is building all over the country.

Oh how sadly and depressingly two-faced Obama has become. He's never in the District of Corruption much at all anymore either--have you noticed? He stops by the White Man's House occasionally perhaps to make a hidden-meaning speech or to do one of his now famous photo-ops where perhaps he's playing basketball on the White House basketball court--oh, yes, old Ike Eisenhower built a golf hole on the White House lawn--Obama's built a basketball court. Obama, like his predecessor, is seemingly always aboard Air Force One headed for another long-distant meeting with our allies somewhere--like he popped up in the darkness of night to spend 7 hours dressing down Karsai in Kabul a few weeks back--remember when Georgie Porgie used to drop in unexpectedly on the troops?--then Obama was off to the Czech Republic to sign an arms deal with those poor trapped slobs--and then on to Moscow to sign a nuclear arms treaty with one-half of the Russian ruling class--Putin, the ex-KBG murdering fool, was against the worthless and wimpy nuclear arms treaty but the other "president" grabbed a photo-0p opportunity to pose with Obama and signed it. Soon Obama's going to fulfill his promised trip to tour Asia that he put off when Haiti was wiped off the map by a big boy earthquake. He'll perhaps be passing through China to give them a warning or two ending up in Indonesia where he's going to sign another big arms deal. Spreading military power all around the globe, this man of peace, this Nobel Peace Prize winner, making arms deals with all the countries of the world--handing out billions of Daddy Warbucks to the lackey countries of the world, those ruled over ruthlessly by their Power Elites. The Rich versus the Poor. Guess who wins that contest?

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

Another Batch of Fine Folks Who've Up and Left Us Recently:
Wilma Mankiller, 64, American activist, first female Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation (1985–1995), pancreatic cancer.

Mike Cuellar, 72, Cuban Major League Baseball player, stomach cancer.

Mike Zwerin, 79, American jazz musician and jazz critic, after long illness

New York City Living: Getting Rich Quick While Rewriting History

NOTE: languagehat.com is BACK ONLINE!
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Get Rich Quick: President Obama's Healthcare Reform, his recent decision to go against the wishes of the American people and drill the hell out of Eastern seacoast and around Florida and in the Gulf of Mexico and up in the Alaskan wilderness, and his ordering our rolling back a 30-year ban on new nuclear power plants in favor of a wild-spree of plant constructions* starting with an 8 billion-dollar boondoggle to an Atlanta construction company with no nuclear power plant-building experience, that 8 billion bucks actually covering the predicted cost (which we know will develop into another 8 billion of cost overruns) of this new nuclear facility for the Atlanta, Georgia, area, which is also the home of Newtie Gingrich who is starting up his Neo-Con Ten Commandments Family-Values bullshit again--joining with the racist, murderous, truly terrorists teabagging Tea Party reactionaries--also luring back into the contaminated Neo-Con spotlite the likes of Vietnam-tortured nutjob John "Jawin' Jawn" McCain and Sarah "First Woman President" Palin. By the way, don't worry about the rumors: Nutjob John won't divorce his billionaire wife to fuck Sarah Palin--he ain't that big a'nut. This old battered Vietnam-mission-failure John knows who buttered his fucking two-timing bread (Mrs. McCain's alcohol-peddling daddy)--besides, I'll tell you, Sarah Palin's a terrible fuck--she's into bondage, I'll guarantee you--I can see her wearing leather tied to a big gaudy Roma-of-Italy bed bearing red satin sheets and being bullwhipped into ecstasy by a man wearing a Lone Ranger mask and nothing else--maybe I'm wrong--I would suppose also there is a loaded gun present somewhere around the bed when you're bangin' "Drill, drill, drill" Palin (it's the drilling she's after).

So here's your The Daily Growler investment tip of the day: These Obama boondoggles and giveaways are going to prop up the profits of the healthcare insurance industry and the big pharmaceuticals (just today it is being announced that our government secretly bailed out Pfizer Pharmaceuticals from going belly up--our big pharmas are "too big to fail, too"--but We the People are too small to save--you get it?)--their stocks already are advancing faster than the average bulls. Next, the offshore drilling boondoggle is not really going to help our dependence on OIL (the Power Elite's desperation for OIL and more OIL the reason for these stupid wars and all our ills--even the healthcare issue)--drilling offshore is very expensive, plus the amount of oil or gas you finally extract is minimal to say the least. In the meantime, the damage you've done to our East coast ecosystem will be eternally devastating. Remember, Obama's ordering drilling in our most violent hurricane zones. Some say that Katrina had such devastating affects on New Orleans due to the deep channel the oil companies and our Corps of 2nd-rate Engineers dug so that huge oil supertankers could make it up the Mississippi to the refineries in Baton Rouge--that deep channel fucking up the Mississippi Delta (the mouth of the Mississippi as it widely floods into the Gulf of Mexico) thus destroying the natural flood protections of the many marshland channels, grasses, sandbars, out there--that deep-wide channel allowed Katrina an open path right into the 9th Ward and the whole north end of dear old New Orleans. My latest report on today's New Orleans comes from a friend of mine who like me was once a New Orleanian deluxe, both resident and frequent visitor, before his recent trip down there to check on things. Now he says New Orleans sucks. "Wolfie, I'm never going back. It's ruined beyond recovery, man, totally ruined."

BUT, what this offshore oil drilling boondoggle will do, it will make the already filthy rich oil companies even richer--especially Shell (a Dutch oil company), who Obama is already guaranteeing drilling rights to, big time--especially in the Alaskan Wilderness area--that area We the People denied George W. Bush the privilege of allowing his old pappy's oil-stealing criminal friends the right to destroy it ecologically--all for the mere "drops" of oil that will be the result of such carnage. So sell the house, the car, the dog, whatever else of immediate value you have left after the recession rip-offs and invest in Exxon-Mobil, Shell, BP, Texaco-Chevron--you bet. Also remember, Halliburton and KBR (both old Texas oil firms) are still going strong living off government contracts--KBR recently was given a new billion-dollar-guaranteed war contract--plus, Halliburton and KBR will soon be involved in the reconstruction of Haiti--a Bill Clinton-G.W. Bush enterprise so you know it's gonna fuck up Haiti for good--why, I'll predict right here and now that the US declares itself the occupier and interim governing body in Haiti not too long from now--wouldn't that be funny if G.W. Bush was elected the first interim occupying president of New Haiti?--We the People of the US will rebuild Haiti in our image--Port au Prince will become Clinton-Bush City--or maybe Barack Obama City--though I don't think Bill and G.W. are going to let Obama take the spotlite away from them in this Haiti gold-mining situation. So consider putting some of your money in Halliburton of Dubai and KBR (formerly Kellogg, Brown, & Root). To me it is a win/win situation. Hell, you may as well get some filthy lucre, too, out of these corporate gold mines same as all your representatives and presidential advisors and Supreme Court justices and Appellate Court justices and Hillary and Bill and Warren Buffett and his pals Billy Boy Gates and the lovely Melinda Gates--hell, check out Tiger Woods's portfolios--Tiger's on a comeback so you know he needs winners right now. Congrats, by the way, to Tiger. He's coming back out into the unreal world at The Master's this week. He looks good--has a beard now--the new Tiger--hell, this son of a btich looks better than ever now--I'll predict he will clean clocks at the Master's--he knows that once-segregated course like the back of his old daddy's departed hand.

And in nuclear energy? I'd suggest you check out General Electric stock--they just got that giving India nuclear secrets for mangoes deal that Obama allowed to go on through--as though Obama really was impressed with G.W. Bush when he met him for the first time--remember--he met with G.W. right before his big expensive inauguration? He came out of that saying old Georgie Porgie wasn't such a bad feller after all; in fact, he was a very likable dude. Hot damn! But then Obama thinks Larry Summers and Timmy Geithner are likable criminal dudes, too. And Ben Bernanke--why, it's all of old G.W.'s sidekicks--and all of Slick Willie's sidekicks--yeah, that's how you bring about change--by giving us the same old shit over and over again, though all of these schemes eventually lead to failures--like we're failing in both Iraq and Afghanistan now--we are losing those wars! (Word out of Pakistan today, a suicide bomber at the US Embassy in Peshawar (isn't Osama bin Laden a resident of Peshawar's finest neighborhood?) killed four US Marine guards there though no one else of importance was killed; also, that great humanitarian freedom-bringer General McCrystal-Meth said today he was sorry but yes American forces a day or so ago did assassinate two pregnant mothers and a small girl child in a night raid on Pakistan by our courageous freedom-delivering drones--one mother was the mother of ten; the other mother was the mother of 6, so by killing these two women, they took the mothers away from 16 Paki children (little savage urchins to We the People's armed occupiers over there). McCrystal-Meth said he was sorry but that was war and by God we got war whether we want it or not. Find out what company makes those drones and invest heavily in it.

I wish Obama would handle these idiot teabaggers tough--like a good boxer--go after them dancing like a butterfly but stinging like a bee. You go right up to their sorry asses and you say, "Look, you stupid assholes, it was your way of thinking that got us into all this crazy shit and it was the majority of the American people who elected me because I impressed them as a presidential candidate who was going to CHANGE this country in spite of your terrorist-like oppositions. They thought I was going to put this country back on its feet, bring our manufacturing base home, get us out of those two stupid and illegal (universally) wars, blah, blah, blah." But NO. Obama it turns out is a right-of-center centrist--following in the footsteps of his idol Ronnie Raygun Reagan. It's just hard to believe this man who had so much potential has sided with the get-rich-quick schemers--and this Black man (that's what he put on his census return they say) is content to let his Corporate Law degree guide him even over his Blackness--he's posing as a Black man when in actuality he's half White--selling his own people into Corporate slavery--by bailing out the crooks, by kissing the big White asses of the Corporate Oligarchies--and phony government statistics are telling us everything's hunky-dory--why there were 100,000 new jobs created this past whenever (they never give you exact dates and exact figures--only guesstimations)--yet, President Obama, dear Ivy-League-trained man, the unemployment figures didn't shrink--they stayed steady at 9.7 (your figures)--while your own Black people were suffering 15% (some say 17%) unemployment--plus your own Black people are suffering most for lack of health insurance (an poor Whites, too); Blacks are suffering most from the foreclosure booming market and the derivatives schemes that stole their property and life right out from under them. I'm not a teabagger--and I hate bashing Obama because that means I am a teabagger to those who still have faith in Obama--43% of us--but god-dammit, I can't sit still and watch this guy continue G.W. Bush's disastrous course--continuing the executive privileges he arbitrarily gave himself. It's as though if you checked Obama's ass you'd find old Unka Dick's gnarly old bony hand up in there working Obama's way of thinking and the direction he's taking us in.

So there you go, folks, the The Daily Growler way of getting rich quick--the only way most of us are ever going to get rich--unless you hit one of the plethora of gaming devices our state's now sponsor, like Lottoes and Mega-Bucks--gambling being the biggest industry in Capitalism--it's called "speculating" among the rich and famous. Of course, they've got the excess dollars with which to speculate--but, it don't matter, like I say, get as much capital assets together--sell the gold out of your teeth--and bank it in OIL, Healthcare Industry, Insurance Industry, Pharmaceutical, and Nuclear Energy stocks--fuck green investing--the big OIL companies are going to take that over soon--so stick with Exxon-Mobil--as a corporation, they have more money than most of the countries of the world combined.

Another good stock area to check out is the Military Industrial Complex--which also includes General Electric--but also Raytheon, Gruman-Northrup, Lockheed-Martin (in Newtie's bailiwick), and Boeing as potential gold mines. Obama is discussing using drones to patrol La Frontera--our border with our good neighbors Mexico (White Americans hate Mexicans remember)--so, like I hinted at above, whoever builds drones should provide you with a nice little nestegg--if you follow the money and get in and get out based on a percentage basis at the right moments--same as you play when you play blackjack at a casino.

[*There's good news (for the moment) for New Yorkers; a court has recently thrown a monkey wrench into the corporate works at the disaster-waiting-to-happen Indian Point nuclear facility that has for years been a cause for concern due to its age and frequent leaks and now the discovery that the plant has been leaking radio-active waters into the ground that then drains off into the Hudson--thereby breaking environmental protection laws. The court has refused to allow the plant to fire back up to full capacity due to this water-pollution problem. This on the heels of the Vermont legislature shutting down the Yankee nuclear facility on the Connecticut River for the same reasons--the plant was old and leaked and was leaking radio-active water into the ground polluting waters for miles around that plant.]


Foto by tgw, "Moon Over Manhattan #4," New York City, 2010.
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"The Hipster Is Dead"
I was reading a Salon piece by a hip young thirtyish writer, a journalist pretending to be a Sociologist and Economist, but a journalist, you can tell by the way they automatically write. You know what I mean? Here's a for instance from a Salon.com article by Thomas Rogers:

Mention the word "hipster" these days, and a few things come to mind: Young, white 20-somethings dressed in skinny jeans and lumberjack shirts, and wearing thick-rimmed glasses; neighborhoods like Williamsburg, in Brooklyn, and Silver Lake in Los Angeles; trust-fund kids; Chloë Sevigny; cocaine; ironic mustaches; and likely some mixture of contempt and hatred.

Of course, this is just the latest iteration of the term "hipster." Norman Mailer famously used the word to describe the middle-class whites who fetishized jazz culture in the 1920s, 30s and 40s, and in 1958 Jack Kerouac applied it to the members of the Beat Generation. For most of the twentieth century, it was used as a vague and usually pejorative term for a person with trendy countercultural interests.

First of all, neither Norman Mailer nor Jack Kerouac used "hipster" for any of the reasons Rogers states in his piece of fluff writing's introduction. The hipster appeared back when Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, the backbone of the Beats (Jack Kerouac said he hated the word "Beat Generation") were still in high school--the Beat did not mean the beat of the music or the beat of a drum or the beat in a line of poetry but rather came from Jack Kerouac's French-Canuke Catholic upbringing in Lowell, Massachusetts, and his poetically falling in philosophical love with "the Beatitudes"--as he tried to express in his Dharma Bums. Then drunken, drug-addict, bum, true first hippy, Herbert Huncke came along and said it meant "Beat Down" generation, Herbert making it analogous to "The Beat" in his world, the beat of the cop through the crime streets--his billy club the symbol of the Beatin' Down you got when the Fuzz hauled you in on a drug charge or a robbery charge--and Herbert had been in the slammer and Herbert could write fairly well and Herbert was the perfect hippy character who found a home with Burroughs and Kerouac and Ginsberg. John Clelon Holmes wrote Go, a novel of the Beat Generation. The Beats in actuality were of the Swing Generation, kids who were in high school at the start of World War II--the "Beat Me Daddy Eight to the Bar" generation.

This was the generation of kids who would either survive WWII whole or they would suffer great losses of life and a chance to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. These were rebellious kids who were tired of war and the hot air of politics and the commericialization of art, especially of music and literature. The fiction of the Holy Bible outsold all our best writers--in fact, our best writers didn't get rich off their books but off their self-promoted characters, characters of their own posings --like Hemingway using his own fabulous life as the source of subjects for his novels and short stories--Faulkner got his fame from Sanctuary, a very great book to me, but scandalously vulgar to the critics at the time it was published. Faulkner admitted he needed a "potboiler" to really get readers's attention. Faulkner didn't have a successful book until the late forties, the great Intruder in the Dust, what a great book; then the Snopes novels came out and Little Bill was set.

Ginsberg, Kerouac, Burroughs, the Beatniks, hit fame and what fortune they made right off the bat. Kerouac's On the Road and then his Subterraneans became the influential novels to the young hipsters who devoured those books like the Lost Generation had devoured Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises or Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. And the Beats became an extension of Hemingway and Faulkner and an extension of Robinson Jeffers and Kenneth Patchen and were promoted by Larry Ferlinghetti and the City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco, where the Subterraneans took place--and guess what that led to--Bill Graham may have been at that famous reading of Howl where Kerouac was drunk out of his mind and Howl rolled out of Ginsberg like thunder rolling in over the West New Jersey hills to eventually cause rain to flood Paterson--Howl by the way was dedicated to Carl Solomon one of the characters who roams through all the Beat writings--himself a poet of great magnitude but also a self-abuser in the sense he desired to be insane and kept checking himself into mental institutions, saying he got his greatest inspirations from being in the loony bin.

"I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,/dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,/angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,/who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking/in supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating/across the tops of cities contemplating jazz...." That's the opening of Howl (from Howl, City Lights Books, 16th printing, 1966, p. 9). The angelheaded hipsters--that's what the Beats really were, Angelheaded Hipsters, trying like Jack Kerouac, to invent a new religion, a secular religion based on the Beatitudes.

And here they are, from Jesus's "Sermon on the Mount," from the Gospel of Saint Matthew (the tax collector):
THE EIGHT BEATITUDES OF JESUS

"Blessed are the poor in spirit,
for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Blessed are they who mourn,
for they shall be comforted.

Blessed are the meek,
for they shall inherit the earth.

Blessed are they who hunger and thirst for righteousness,
for they shall be satisfied.

Blessed are the merciful,
for they shall obtain mercy.

Blessed are the pure of heart,
for they shall see God.

Blessed are the peacemakers,
for they shall be called children of God.

Blessed are they who are persecuted for the sake of righteousness,
for theirs is the kingdom of heaven."
Kerouac grew up under those Beatitudes.

"Are we fallen angels who didn't want to believe that nothing is nothing and so were born to lose our loved ones and dear friends one by one and finally our own life, to see it proved?"
— Jack Kerouac (The Dharma Bums)

This was the time when Jean Paul Sartre published Being and Nothingness, the book that explained true Existentialism, that there is only NOW, otherwise there is nothing. Existence is NOW, right this minute--Existence is there one minute and gone the next. As Hemingway rewrote the "Lord's Prayer," "Our Nada which art in Nada, hallowed would be Thy Nada/Thy Nada come/Thy Nada be done/on Nada as it is in Nada." I'm paraphrasing it but you can hear Hemingway say it on the old Caedmon LP of Hemingway Live put out in the 1960s.

To a jazz musician, "I'm beat, man," meant, "this gig has worn me to a frazzle, I'm goin' back to the hotel and catch some Zs." Jazz slang. But not what the Beats represented. Herb Cahn, the San Francisco columnist (a journalist), started calling them Beatniks. It was a sarcastic reference. The Beatniks shook up the post-WWII world by taking reality into US outer spaces previously considered taboo by the Neo-Conservatives of the day--White people--especially White parents--even supposedly hip parents like Ginsberg had, though his mother was totally insane and his father was a wimp. These were boring times--the Eisenhower Years--Ike played golf all day while the Congress tried to reinvent some war fears by trumping up the Cold War that finally led to the VietNam War, the war that brought the Beatniks's philosophy (the Beatitudes) to the forefront and created the Hippies and Yippies, etc.

Like I said, hipsters had been around a long time before the Beats. Back in the late forties they became known as Hep-Cats. "I'm Hep," was the cry of the jazz babies. Hep, in case you are wondering, comes from the US Army, WWI/WWII. "Hep" was the "One" in march-time cadence counting: "Hep, 2, 3, 4." Some interpret it as "Hup" but it was Hep--from drills, from march steps--and march steps were 4/4, and the first jazz bands in New Orleans were marching bands; even the Buddy Bolden Band appeared in marches, marches to funerals, marches to seasonal events, and marches in the Zulu portion of the Mardi-Gras parades every year. Old time jazz guys like Henry "Red" Allen used to call off their tunes with a "Hep" that came out like a low-throat growl. Red was a native of Algiers, Louisiana, whose father had a family marching band--Allen's father knew Billy Young, Lester Young's father, who also had a family band--Lester admitting that he was influenced to become a musician by following the parades and tailgaters around the streets of New Orleans when he was around 10. Later at 12, Lester became the drummer in his father's band.

Hep cats started getting associated with jazz men--the jazz women were simply known as Kittens or Kitties. Hep cats were men. They were "hip" to life, to life's sounds, to life's beats, to life's wisdoms--Hep cats became Hip Cats, then just Hip--"I'm hip," meaning I understand jazz and the jazz lifestyle. Soon Hip Cats was shortened to "Cats." The jazzmen became cats. There was a comic book hero-type in the early forties, too, known as Cat-Man--his symbol was a black cat head--similar to Batman's bat symbol.

The hepsters-hipsters followers became known as hipsters. Hipsters were mostly Whites. It was only natural that their offspring would become Hippies and certainly the Hippies were mostly White. These were cats Norman Mailer tagged "Wiggers" or White Niggers--and, yes, I was there, and Norman was right, we were White kids intrigued by the new and upcoming Black culture that was feeding us our own beats, our own music, and offering us a new spoken language to attempt to learn. Blacks inventing the true American music--starting with the Blues men of the 20s--and Blues men were never referred to as Cats--that was for the jazzmen that came after them: Robert Johnson, Charlie Patton, Tommy Johnson, Cow-Cow Davenport, Big Maceo, Roosevelt Sykes, John Lee Williamson, and then McKinley Morganfield (Muddy Waters) in the early 40s when Muddy was discovered by John Lomax on a plantation down in Mississippi and at first he was known as Mississippi Muddy Waters.

The be-boppers (Dizzy Gillespie and Charles Parker, Jr., et al.) brought in a whole new lingo--and Dizzy was a cat alright, but Parker--I never thought of him as a Cat--hell no, he was the BIRD--what the cat pursued--what the cat tried to catch.

So with the coming of the be-boppers--and they were a direct influence on the Beats--Blacks invented a whole new jazz language for the Hip Cats to trend toward--and soon White Rock 'n Roll had taken over the Whites and White rockers became the Hipsters, and their followers were called Hippies--and like I said afore, Bill Graham must have been at that famous reading of Howl in San Francisco because soon after that hippies took over the Haight-Ashbury section of San Francisco and soon the Filmore had opened and soon hippy bands were everywhere--Big Brother and the Holding Company with Bessie Smith imitator Janis Joplin (a Texan) singing the White blues about wanting Mercedes-Benzes and expensive bottles of single-malt Scotch and new styles of free-flowing clothes and makeup-less countenances--like angels never wore make-up.

The Earth's Angels became the White hippies. Jazz went on evolving in spite of the hippies and the folk music revival and then the coming of Cool Jazz--a White movement started on the West Coast by baritone saxist Gerry Mulligan who saw the value in a be-bopper like Miles Davis who was in L.A. at the time and who had taken his jazz from Dizzy and had cooled it down--so Dizzy blew HOT while Miles blew COOL. And thus the Whites became the Cool Cats of jazz while the HOTs became the funksters, like Horace Silver who started Funk bands in the fifties with his big hits "Sister Sadie," "Filthy McNasty," "Senor Blue," "Doodlin'"--then came along the White Third-Streamers, the Gunther Schuller crowd, the George Russell crowd--White classically trained musicians who were bowled over by how jazz was even more inventive than Bach--why jazz was even more improvisational than Bach.

The 3 Bs became Boogie/Blues/and Bop--all based on the beating of the human heart. So now, even the Liberals are rewriting history. What is history but NADA! Only vague memories; only circumstantial evidence; most history is fiction.

So is this true?

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

An Ezra Pound Poem:

The Rest

O helpless few in my country,
O remnant enslaved!

Artists broken against her,
A-stray, lost in the villages,
Mistrusted, spoken-against,

Lovers of beauty, starved,
Thwarted with systems,
Helpless against the control;

You who can not wear yourselves out
By persisting to successes,
You who can only speak,
Who can not steel yourselves into reiteration;

You of the finer sense,
Broken against false knowledge,
You who can know at first hand,
Hated, shut in, mistrusted;

Take thought:
I have weathered the storm,
I have beaten out my exile.
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From Selected Poems of Ezra Pound, New Directions, 1957, 25th Printing!, p. 29.

Ezra Pound, and yes we know his many sins, has always represented to me the honest American. I know, that's hard to swallow, but Ezra was too advanced and creative to become a hill of beans in this country at the time he was blossoming as a serious genius (as opposed to a comic genius, though I think Ez was a comic genius, too). England at the time was fascinated with "Colony" things and especially fascinated by American Colony things, like our writers and poets and musicians--and from London Ez went to Paris and from Paris to Rappolo and from Rappolo to being imprisoned in an open-air chicken-wire cage by the US Army on the grounds Ez was a traitor and had broadcast traitorous and salacious and antiSemitic remarks over Italian radio at the height of the war--referring to Roosevelt as Jewsevelt--that sort of shit. Yeah, the US threw that shit back in Ez's face, but like I said right off, Ez was too advanced and creative to be understood by especially his own people. The poem above, The Rest, shows that like a lot of creative Americans, both White and Black, find only hostility against their creativeness in their own country, so, too, did Ez and he carried that resentment with him for the rest of his life--and this same idea can apply to Hemingway, T.S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, Hilda Doolittle, George Anthiel, Man Ray, Henry Miller, Sidney Bechet, Bill Coleman, Brick Feagle, Josephine Baker, and Ez--the list goes on and on. Our expatriates. And most of these found once they escaped the "doldrums" of US creativeness for the fertile fields begging for new seeds of new art--new entertainments for Europeans--before WWII, it was very difficult to return. In Europe, these artists found acceptance and praise and legendary status, though all the while they wanted to be accepted in their native country more than anything. They all tried to come back home but once back home they found out why they had escaped the US in the first place. Ez never came back (yes, he did return to enter the Saint Elizabeth's Loony Bin (the government-run loony bin) down in the District of Corruption. He realized he wasn't really the kind of American the Power Elite that ruled the US even back then cared anything about--and that included the publishing and filmmaking Power Elites, too--the rich--who artists have depended on for their sustenance since the cave painters of the early days when the best and brightest chimpanzees began to walk upright so they could get down out of the treetops and discover the treasures on the jungle floor--only then to reason the only hope for this new kind of chimpanzee was to find his and her way out of the jungle, this new species of chimp whose various utterances were developing into semi-language and whose inner feelings were being expressed through stick drawings--drawings in the dust to explain a direction of a fellow traveler--"Ugh, grrr. yaaayyaaa...uh-huh...n0rrr, nooo, grrrr"--meaning, "Here, dude, let me draw you a map--this is North--dig, the direction of the North Star, dig? That's north, see that way--toward that mesa off over there, you see? You, clout, look, see in the dirt here, this line is going North--to the right--this is right over here, this side, see? That's East...but you don't wanna go East, you imbecile...." This is the chimp who later identified himself as a Child of God to distinguish himself from his backward ancestors--his jungle-tree-top-trapped ancestors--early men who resembled Cheetah more than they did Tarzan--and to realize now that he was walking upright and beginning to draw examples of what his grunts, groans, moans, yowls, barks, ululations, mopes, growls, grimaces, excitements were insisting upon or resisting on the other appendage. Can you imagine being a best and brightest in those early dawn days of human monkeydom? Being the artist, the linguist, the musician, the teacher, the doctor--all of your art leading you to ways of communicating--the best and brightest being the most complex of communicators who seemed to understand each other and who combined to become our first tribal presidents and heads of state, our elites. Wow, how optimistic I am to believe the human chimpanzee rode from the jungle--the Natural state of existence--and into the Civilized world under the leadership of artists! Civilization is manmade--the first man-made thorn in the earth's tender flesh.

Gertrude Stein tried to come back the USA she loved so dearly and though she was welcomed with open arms, she never felt "at home" here--why Gertie was a Lesbian to boot--a Lesbian Harvard-trained pragmatist who invented a way of writing nobody since has been able to really understand though many, including Hemingway and Ez, have tried to emulate. Ez, by the way, according to Hemingway, got the boot from Gertie the first time he visited her salon when he sat in one of her precious moderne chairs and it collapsed under his bohemian weight. "Out, damn Spot," hollered Gertie and she and Ez never again were friendly, though Hemingway remained loyal to Gertrude right up to the day he blew his brains out all over the entrance-way mirror at his home in Ketchum, Idaho, just 13 miles up the road north of Hailey where Ez was born.

Hemingway was never happy in the US. He said the best places he'd found to write were first in a hotel room in Madrid during the Spanish Civil War when the Fascists were shelling that Republican-held city day and night using Nazi-supplied and -flown bombers and later on his finca in Santiago, Cuba. The worst place to write in the world he said?: New York City. I love For Whom the Bell Tolls. It's a revolutionary novel to me. I see Ez's ideas all through it; and Hemingway remained loyal to Ez right up until that day he blew his brains out, too--though he did write a poem about Ez (there's a City Lights paperback of the Poems of Ernest Hemingway) that implied Ez was full of shit, but Hemingway thought that same thing while he was seeing Ez every day in Paris, fascinated by him, his poetry, and his intelligence, but at the same time questioning some of his eccentric ways--like his experimenting with opium for a while--and his following the economic theories that were anti-American banking and leaned toward Mussolini Fascism (the Fascism of Italian economists and Sociologists, Mosca and Pareto)--the big American banking sin was in Ez's terms "usury." This started with a problem Ez had with US Customs that considered a certain rare diamond as "art" but not Ez's books and the magazine Blast that Ez's pal Wyndham Lewis had started. Ez denounced the US's system of taxation and interest charging, which he believed were unnecessary in the great society Ez envisioned. As a result of Ez's being pissed off at the US, he turned to a U.S.'s enemy's economic system, the one backed by Mussolini--who Ez met one time (and Hemingway, too). Ez's backers say he wasn't pro-Nazi or truly anti-Russian Communism but that because of these banking/usury theories of Ez's he of course related it to the Jews, who, of course, were in the banking business, the mercantile business, and who were diamond dealers and loan sharks and lawyers--which led Ez to his antiSemitic statements over Italian radio (whose shortwave signal was so limited no one in the US ever heard one of Ez's broadcasts (US intelligence service transcribed those broadcasts that are now in the stacks of the Smithsonian Institute (boy there's a lot of American genius locked up down there in that Smithsonian Institute)), statements that got so vitrolic, Ez in one broadcast praised the extermination of Eastern European Jews and warned American Jews that their time was coming. Ez later admitted, in his own way, that that was a big mistake on his part--though the way Ez worded his regret wasn't that he didn't feel the same way about Jewish usury and the Jews role in "ruining" Europe and the United States but that he was regretful that he had made them public during WWII.

It's interesting to note to me how Ez was quite a ladies' man. The ladies loved him but the men were all jealous of him. Ez after graduating Penn with a degree in Philology (linguistics, folks; a branch of Sociology), he got a job teaching at Wabash College in Indiana. One night Ez "befriended" a "stranded" actress and let her stay in his room all night. This defiance of Wabash College's social mores got Ez fired, which is one reason he ended up first in Venice--always partial to Italy from the very beginning--and then in London. Ez had a marvelous sex life--first having an in-and-out sexual relationship with H.D. (his Pennsylvania girlfriend)--he turned her into a bisexual--then later after he'd shacked up with Dorothy Shakespear he seduced a young violinist, Olga Rudge, and Ez stayed "true" to this menage-a-trois right up until he died (in 1972 at 88 (?). One reason, Ez stayed in Italy after WWII started is that he had a daughter with Olga who was 13 years old and had never known anything but living in Italy--plus, another reason, Ez's ancient parents had retired to Italy and lived with Ez and were too old and feeble to be moved--besides they'd sold everything they possessed in the US and had moved to Italy to die there.

In 1949, Ez won the Yale U. Bollinger Prize for Poetry. The election committee for the prize considered Ez's treasonous and antiSemitic ways but found in favor of ART over politics and said Ez's poems were too important on their own to not be rewarded with prize-given praise and adoration. They were on another plane from Ez's politics and economics, though Ez died believing all wars were started over economic matters.

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

New York City Living as a White Male

Foto by tgw, New York City, 2009
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April 2: The Good John Bunch Has Left Us:
John Bunch, 88, American jazz pianist, melanoma.
Herbie Ellis

I just read on the Wikipedia Death List that Herb Ellis one of the great jazzmen this country gave us had died. Herbie's dead. Eighty-eight. He had Alzheimer's, which makes his death even sadder.

The first time I heard Herbie Ellis? I know exactly. I was at my friend's apartment. Though he was still a senior in high school, his parents gave him permission to get an apartment of his own. It was a small but neat little apartment with a private entrance off the street. My friend's father was a famous C&W songwriter and entertainer who had made millions off his songs, especially one that had reached #1 on both the C&W and Pop charts--that song alone made the dude a multimillionaire--so my friend had a lot of material goods that most kids his age wouldn't have for years yet. Like he had his own cool car. Hell, he had his own apartment away from his parents. He had his own hi-fi (stereo would come only a few years later) and a fabulous record collection (his father also owned a couple of radio stations and all the record companies sent him tons of demo records and albums of all genres and my friend had permission to go through these tons of records and pick out the ones he wanted--his father had no intentions of listening to any of them since the recording companies sent these same records to his radio stations). Having his own apartment, too, meant he had his own refrigerator, which meant he had a place to keep BEERS cold! And BEER was as important to us then as learning the ways of seducing women (we read Havelock Ellis together)--and what better way to listen to music than with a cold beer and a good friend.

I had finished my freshman year in college that first summer my friend had his own apartment. As soon as I hit town from college and had unpacked and checked in with my folks, I was out the door and over to my friend's, which was just up the street from my family home. The minute I came through the door he had a cold can of beer in my hand and was holding an LP in his hands, which I knew meant he had a new LP he just had to have me listen to. He put this LP on his hi-fi and sat down on the floor beside me directly in front of his player's speaker. The LP was a Verve LP featuring The Oscar Peterson Trio playing live at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam. The album became a great joke among jazz musicians when it was revealed that not only weren't the Oscar Peterson Trio playing live at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, they weren't even playing live. The LP was actually recorded in the Mercury Studios in L.A. and the audience noises were dubbed in. [Mr. Ed: I must hoof in here and say according to a CD of this concert here in the office, it was recorded in 1956 live at the Opera House in Chicago during a JATP tour. The Trio recorded in the Concertgebouw in 1959 but that concert was not recorded.] Norman Granz explained it that the album had originally been planned to actually be recorded at the Concertgebouw during Oscar's European tour but then plans changed at the last minute but by then the album sleeves had been made and printed as "The Oscar Peterson Trio at the Concertgebouw." The cover art was a photograph of a windmill one assumed was in Holland, though it had absolutely nothing to do with the music on the album. On the back was a photograph of the trio that made them look like they were on the stage of a concert hall.

The first tune on the album was "The Lady Is a Tramp." A blazing version. I was mesmerized. My friend and I were absolutely silent. We didn't even take a drink of beer. We didn't move. We were straining our ears to hear every sound coming out of these three wizards of jazz.

Oscar Peterson I already knew: first from his first album, a 10-inch RCA Victor LP recorded in Montreal, Canada, with a couple of radio station studio musicians backing him. That was 19-year-old Oscar playing absolutely amazing boogie-woogie. Though Oscar was lightnin' fast by 19, he wasn't yet as smooth-as-ice fast as Art Tatum nor yet did he have his time down as firmly as nor did he show the virtuosity of Nat "King" Cole. Soon, however, he was recording for Norman Granz's Clef and Norgran labels, later merged into the Verve label, with his own trio composed of Ray Brown on bass and Barney Kessell on guitar. Both Ray and Barney Oscar met when Norman Granz brought him down from Montreal to New York City--Carnegie Hall it was--and made him the Jazz at the Philharmonic house pianist. Ray and Barney were already a part of the JATP tours. Barney Kessell was a great guitar player--a great jazz guitarist--totally influenced by Charlie Christian, the young Black phenom guitarist from Oklahoma City who blossomed briefly playing the jazz guitar like it had never been played before--solo lines--with the Benny Goodman Ork from 1939 until Charlie died of TB here in New York City in February of 1941. Barney was learning the guitar in Muskogee, Oklahoma, while Charlie was gigging around the Southwest out of Oklahoma City (Ralph Ellison was growing up in Oklahoma City at the same time--and Walter Page's Blue Devils worked out of Oklahoma City in those pre-Kansas City days--in fact, Lester Young joined Page's Blue Devils in Oklahoma City before going with "Big" Page to Kansas City where they joined Count Basie in taking over the Bennie Moten Band). And Barney could play the blues and that's what Oscar was looking for, a guitar player who could play the blues like Oscar Moore played the blues with the Nat "King" Cole Trio on which Oscar wanted to base his trio. In no time flat, the Oscar Peterson Trio got big time and needed to go out on a tour and Barney Kessell got involved in A&R work in Hollywood and couldn't go so Oscar needed a new guitar player and he chose this guy Herb Ellis.

And this was the Oscar Peterson Trio my friend and I first heard that day at his small apartment on the floor with our attentions nailed to that speaker and the absolutely smooth-sailing overwhelming cookin' trio jazz coming out of that hi-fi. Oscar was reaching his peak years--his virtuosity had grown in its own way and O.P. had joined with Art Tatum and Nat Cole to form a triumvirate of swinging jazz pianists--pianists with speed-of-light fingers and ideas to go along with those fingers--flicking them over the keys with greased-pig speed yet hitting the notes solidly on the head--Tatum the champ at that, then Cole, then Oscar--because Oscar sometimes played so fast he hit double-keys--like a B and C--as one key--or in a bumble-bee flight up the keyboard he might trip over a couple of accidentals. These three pianists needed very special guitarists to make their trios become vehicles of their fame and fortune. Art Tatum had the amazing Tiny Grimes as his guitarist; Nat Cole had Oscar Moore; and soon Oscar Peterson had Herb Ellis.

I soon found out Herb Ellis was from McKinney, Texas. Then I learned he'd gone to college in Denton, Texas, to North Texas State Teachers College, along with Jimmy Guiffre, a sax and clarinet player from Dallas, the college I had just finished my freshman year at--and hanging in the jazz department, too--and that was the first time I'd ever heard Herbie went to North Texas State University, which it was when I went there--they had dropped the "Teachers College" and become a State University. By the next fall when I returned to NT, I knew all about Herbie Ellis. Back in the jazz department, I soon brought up Herbie's name and the head of the lab jazz band told me, "Hell, this jazz department owes its existence to Jimmy Guiffre and Herb Ellis. In fact, both Herb and Jimmy will be here this year to give labs."

I recently got my hands on a DVD put out by Oscar Peterson's daughter called "Life in the Key of Oscar." It's a great little docu on O.P.--his life, his moving on up--enveloping a reunion gig in a Toronto jazz club of the Oscar Peterson Trio comprising Ray Brown and Herb Ellis--with the addition of a young Canadian drummer (Oscar sometimes used drums instead of guitars in his trios--Ed Thigpen, who died just this year, was one of Oscar's first drummers after Herb quit the trio). The year was 1988--and though the men were older (Ray Brown kept his boyish handsomeness until the end) and in the case of Oscar heavier than ever--and Herbie was total grey where he wasn't bald and was somewhat paunchy--they still played with the same laid-back ferocity they had back when they were so hot in the late fifties.

Herbie talked about being the only White guy in a Black group and touring the South how he wouldn't stay in the White hotels but stayed in the Black parts of town with O.P. and Ray. Then he talked about battling alcohol and having to give up touring to kick the booze and do studio work back in L.A. Oscar then talked about how he'd just sensed that this White boy from Texas who he knew could play the blues was the guitarist he wanted to blend with he and Ray Brown in some of the most fascinating and popular at the time trio work in any musical venue--"We thought as one," Oscar said in his praise of Herb Ellis.

When that reunion video was shot up in Toronto (Oscar lived his last years in Toronto) all the men had almost 20 years to live. Oscar and Ray died in the 2000s--Oscar two or so years ago; Ray before then a bit; but Herbie. I knew Herbie wasn't dead. Though I hadn't really considered anything about him in years--hadn't seen any new CDs out from him; hadn't checked up on him at all. Jimmy Guiffre died last year but he was nearly 90 and terribly sick and his death didn't disturb me. Still I never even thought of Herbie. Then this morning I decided to check the Wikipedia Death List and there it was

Herb Ellis, 88, American jazz guitarist, Alzheimer's disease.

And there goes another of my heroes--mentors--fellow Texan, fellow Texas White boy who fell in love with Black culture and Black music and especially the blues and jazz, and fellow North Texan. Herbie's death shook me up. And I was already shook up just having finished a CD project commemorating the 1st anniversary of the death of my old music colleague and dear friend theryefarmerfromqueens.
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White Male Rage (oh no, political comment)
This morning on our Pacific station here in NYC, WBAI-FM, the subject was "White Male Rage," as explained by two young men, a White man and a Black man, who have just written a book explaining White Male Rage (of the kind symbolized by Timothy McVeigh and the gun-toting men of the Teabaggers ("teabagging" is a sexual-prank term meaning that a man teabags another male by dangling his balls over another's man's mouth, his teacup, like one dangles a teabag over a cup of hot water in making tea--and these teabaggers are sexual deviates). These boys sound like graduate students from a prominent eastern university who got together and wrote a dissertation that some college don decided was worthy of publication.

Their premise was that due to the changing economy and racial relations in this country, White males are fearing they are losing power--they are becoming impotent in terms of position and superiority. Where before White men had no trouble making it the American Way, i.e., it was no problem for a White male to find a job; it was a White good-ole-boy network anyway, so being White guaranteed you certain first rights to all life experiences, jobs, society, institutions, government--this Nation the White man's birthright--and the White males were guaranteed a smooth-sailing path to the top of things if that was their ambition. Over the past 40 years, these boys say, things in this country have changed drastically including the population of nonwhites. This country is progressing in favor of a new majority against the old white network--and now with the election of a Black president, suddenly new ways of doing things have been forced on White men by the economy, by new laws and regulations, by jobs not being there exclusively for them anymore, by the outsourcing of jobs, by the closing of factories, and by having to be submissive to a bunch of Black male authorities, too, yes, like the president and his attorney-general.

The central idea posed by these two college boys with a new book out, I say is wrong. Yes, it is racism; yes, it is White males feeling they are losing the privileges they feel they have because they are White. And, yes, they believe White people founded this country and that Blacks and Mexicans and yellow people and smarmy Indians from India and greasy Pakis and God knows the messes of colored people pouring into this country by the hungry droves should be shouting glory that the White man formed this Nation. However, to today's White males it seems these "fur'ners" (and, yes, Blacks are foreigners to your basic White Teabagger mentality) come here and rather than adapting to a White Western European culture and nationalism they instead disrespect and rebel against this being basically a White Christian nation. "My god," the average white male thinks who's just lost his job, his home, his car, his wife, his dog, "these woolly booger bastards are taking us over, these god-damn Messkins allowed to take jobs away from us by these humanitarian sons of bitches who care more about common ordinary people than they do the White Power Elite, the White people who are respectful of the White philosophy that teaches us that the most CIVILIZED members of our society, are those rich White Males who provide us with jobs and health insurance and a chance to succeed"--the White Power Elite, the best educated (not true at all), the richest, the ones who control our wealth and therefore our lives.

The White Male Power Elite is still in control of this country.

Look at our justice system. It's corrupted by White male judges. I was looking at the 2nd Federal Court of Appeals here in New York State, a very powerful Federal Appeals Court. Most of its judges were appointed by G.W. Bush, one of them one of Georgie Junior's first cousins, John Walker, a rabid Bushite, a rabid hater of ordinary people, especially those people who to the Bushes should be servants and gardeners and cottonpickers rather than president of the USA! This John Walker asshole actually ran over a highway patrolman and killed him in Connecticut--the Bushes home state--and wasn't even tested for drugs and was released on the spot without being charged with any violation. Can you imagine if you should happen to run over and kill a highway patrolman? Why do we need judges anyway? Do away with judges. Design an impartial computer program to run our courts. Fuck judges. Why do we need a President for that matter? Why? Because a Capitalist-system-based government demands an Executive, a CEO, a Chairman of the Board!

These two college grad students who've written their NYTimes bestseller on White Male Rage have hit on a serious subject but they've neglected to figure out the real reason for it. Yes, of course it's due to racism--an inherent White racism, especially vitriolic against Mexicans, Muslims, Hindus, illegal immigrants (unless they're White ones--like all the illegal Irish women and men working in US Irish bars and restaurants).

Yes, of course White Male Rage is pro-Christian principles, which means it's pro War; it's antiGay; it's anti-Atheist; and it truly believes the White way of life is the righteous and God-approved way of life. White dominance is a gift to the White Man from his God. And, yes, the White Male (and the White female) is scared of anybody who isn't White! Scared because he has no way of understanding these people--Blacks just aren't White, that's all there is to it. Indians aren't White. Mexicans aren't White, though Spanish are! Mexicans are Native Americans so they are still considered savages by the CIVILIZED White man. The Spanish on the other hand are Europeans--they are conquerors; they are Imperial Grand Wizards. They are White. All the people the White Man at one time Imperially ruled over were considered uncivilized.

Where did these college boys missed the boat? Why in going all around Robin's barn without looking inside the barn where the seat of the problem is. IN CAPITALISM!

Who brought Capitalism to this country? Not the Native Americans. Not the slaves. How about the Colonizers? The first White Men (and women) to come to this country were brought here by Capitalist Companies and colonizers. The first White Men brought over here (either into Massachusetts or Virginia) were representatives of Companies, trading companies headed by rich and powerful Brits, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Germans--all the European CIVILIZED corporations sending out their privateers, sending out their pirate captains, their fleets, their militias--their objective: TO CIVILIZE THE SAVAGES! To CAPITALIZE on the untapped wealth of the earth's money-making resources.

Capitalism. Brought to this country by the White Man. Capitalism that needs CHEAP LABOR to make it work--so that individual White Men can get richer and richer off the backs of indentured servants (the poor Whites) and African slaves, who were, don't forget, rounded up and sold to the White Slavers by African chiefs and tribal leaders--slavery being a part of the history of man since man discovered himself as a divine being back around the dawning of what has become known as CIVILIZATION (so far all civilizations have been built on the backs of slaves). This is why the White Man hates Nature so much. Nature is Natural. Nature provides all animals and living things (including plants, bacteria, etc.) a chance to make it, to survive. Civilization is the unnatural way and provides only certain individuals the chance to make it comfortably, to survive leisurely, not just to survive but to survive in style, in rich dress, draped in symbolic golds and jewels, the signs of Power! This is how it's always been. African tribal chiefs--check 'em out--check how they live--stylewise--the best of clothes, the best of cars, the best of mistresses, the best of booze and food.

The White Male Rage in this country, yes, is triggered by progressiveness or "movin' too fast" away from the White foundations on which these people believe this country was built--"it takes time to change," as the Old South holdin'-out rebels used to yell. Their rage is against any apparatus that threatens to ALTER (change) the laissez-faire policies that have traditionally worked wonders for White males in terms of privileged White exclusiveness.

The missed opportunity in all this White Male Rage argument--and as an armchair Sociologist I see it clearly--is that the White Male Rage expressed openly in this country is by a minority of White males. However, I see them as a small majority (the McCain-Pallin Repugnicans got 57% of the White vote in this last election)--listen to this!--they are magnified as problems in this country as it is progressing left by the FBI, the CIA, Homeland Security, the NIS, the military in general (in generals--all White males), Congress, and, of course, the commercial news media (mostly dependent on government licenses and deregulations and government time-buying for their big profits). These are the defenders of Capitalism.

The opposite of Capitalism is not necessarily Communism. It is not necessarily Socialism. It is Humanitarianism--the rights of all humanity to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."

Capitalism is the biggest cause of crime in this country. You think Bernie Madoff wasn't a great Capitalist? He bilked the Capitalist privileged that's why he got caught and sentenced to such a tough sentence. Kenny Boy (Bush) Lay was also a great Capitalist (an economist by training)--I mean look at the Capitalist scam this friend of the Bushes pulled on We the People--especially the State of Cal-y-forn-y-ah--Kenny Boy wrecked the California economy--and it hasn't recovered yet.

Capitalism (the coal industry) has ruined the State of West Virginia, too. Lowest of everything in the US--lowest education levels, lowest incomes for the hardest kind of work, worst environment in the nation--COAL the KING of West Virginia. Made its politicians rich, too. One of its Senators is John D. Rockefeller! Superrich ruling over a superpoor state. That's what's causing all this RAGE, not just White Male Rage. White Male Rage gets covered by the news--mostly White Male reporters and anchors. There are News Babes out there, too, but they have no power really--most News networks are controlled by White Males.

Capitalism has left the State of Michigan in ruin. Our automobile industry didn't just collapse on its own accord. The Capitalist running it ruined it. Capitalism breeds greed. A good Capitalist makes billions off failures. Why Capitalists make billions off wars. They make billions off disasters. That's the reason we kids, and I speak for White male kids, were placed in competitive situations from the time we were born--the hopes of our White families was placed on the heads of their male offspring. Farmers had as many boys as they could because under Capitalism it's natural for the family wealth to be passed on to the sons, not the daughters. The Rockefeller daughters were never as powerful as the sons. The Kennedy daughters weren't anywhere near as powerful as the sons.

White Males brought Capitalism to this country. Rich White Males. Land-owning White males. Plantation-owning White Males. White Males rich and powerful thanks to Cheap Labor and stolen natural resources! Capitalism NEEDS SLAVES for it to really be rewarding.

All of the current economic problems in this country stem from our thinking WE the People of the USA single-handedly won World War II. We crowned ourselves Rulers of the FREE World during the phony (advertising agency-created) Cold War with Russia (another White Male-controlled nation). Ike Eisenhower put "In God We Trust" on our dollars and it has been "in God" we've trusted ever since and trust me, God is the perfect Capitalist, he definitely will through his henchmen steal a society blind (and God's wealth is all tax free!). It's very White of God to bestow so many blessings on this his country. "This is God's country...." "God bless America!"

to be continued as is continued when continuing continues continuing the continuing present...

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

A Texan in New York City Having Old West Memories in the Rain

"STOP THIS CAR RIGHT NOW! STOP IT, I SAY!"
The photo above is of what's called in philately a se-tenant block of 4. Se-tenant is the present participle of the French verb se tenir, which means "to hold each other." A se-tenant block of four shows 4 stamps of different designs being held together; they are from a sheet of 100 stamps that divides up into 20 of these se-tenant blocks of four. I am assuming most of my readers are not stamp collectors. Certainly not avid enough stamp collectors to have memorized a philately glossary or to have actually specialized in niches of stamp collecting represented by the above se-tenant block of 4. It is known as the "Texas Centennial Se-tenant Block of Four"--that's how you list it when you're trying to sell it on eBay. It was issued in 1936 by the Texas Centennial Commission who were in charge of the year-long celebration of the 100th Anniversary of the existence of Texas as a republic--becoming the Republic of Texas after it successfully defeated the Mexican forces under General Santa Anna at the Battle of San Jacinto (Houston area) in 1836. This year-long celebration culminated in October of 1936 at the State Fair of Texas held on the State Fairgrounds in Dallas, Texas.

The State Fairgrounds was once a huge part of Dallas, Texas, life. It sprawled all over East Dallas from the outskirts of downtown on out to the eastern city limits. Several Dallas main streets ended at the Fairground gates. It was also a terminus for several streetcar lines (yes, Dallas once had a fabulous street railway system). Though the State Fair happened in October, the Fairgrounds was opened year-round. WRR, the city-owned-at-one-time radio station, had their studios on the Fairgrounds. The grand old Cotton Bowl stadium was on the Fairgrounds (sadly, this year's "Cotton Bowl" for the first time was played in Arlington, Texas, at the Dallas Cowboy's new wonder-type football stadium of the billion-dollar-cost type--so the Cotton Bowl surely is headed for demolition). But the big attraction open year-round was the Midway and especially its famous wooden sit-down roller coaster called the Comet. My dad, by the way, was at the Fair in 1947 the day the Comet opened. He was in the first wave of riders who rode it because of a challenge from my mother. She loved challenging his manhood. The ride made him deathly sick and the next day he awoke with a serious back condition that he complained about the rest of his life. My first time at the State Fair I was 10. When I wanted to ride the Comet, my dad told me his Comet story and went on and on about what it had done to him and because of that he deemed me not old enough to ride it and that was that. I didn't ride the Comet until I was in college and went one year with a pack of my beer-drinking collegian cohorts to the State Fair and I rode the Comet drunk as a lord and sure enough, on exiting the ride, and I must admit it was very thrilling ride, I got deathly sick...so sick, I ended up in back of the Hollywood Strip Club tent throwing up like a drunken college kid who's just ridden a very thrilling roller coaster drunk as a lord and with a belly full of corn dogs and hot link sausage sandwiches and tacos and several gallons of Falstaff draft beer. I was upchucking so hard and loudly, one of the strippers stuck her head and one naked breast out a hole in the tent and told me to go fuck myself. That floored me and I suddenly started laughing--like a hyena--upchucking as I laughed--her telling me to go fuck myself striking me as cleverly funny--I laughed so hard I quit vomiting. That cured me and I immediately suggested we all trot around front and go into the Hollywood Strip Club and catch the show, which we did. Unlike my father, however, riding the Comet never affected my back in any way.

The Comet at the Texas State Fairgrounds from 1947 until it was demolished in 1989 after no insurance company would insure it.
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There once was a photograph that hung in my grandmother's writing room in her home. It showed her mother, my greatgrandmother, along with two other OLD women, on a platform at the Texas Centennial at the State Fairgrounds of Texas in October of 1936. This old hawk of a pioneer White woman is looking very strict; she's wearing all black including a very stylish black fedora that she probably got in the early 1930s from a hat shop my grandmother owned and operated in my hometown's finest hotel. The Governor of Texas, James V. Allred, is presenting one of the other women with a medal on a ribbon and a presentation case and an envelope. These three women were the last surviving widows of men who had fought under old General Sam Houston in Texas's "War of Independence" from Mexico in 1836. My greatgrandmother had married a 75-year-old Texas Republican army captain when she was 14. It was a horrible marriage--a marriage the 75-year-old dude's family denied ever existed--and to this day on the family's Web site my greatgrandmother is mentioned as a footnote--though throughout her life she kept his name--and in those envelopes those three widows received from the governor that day was a $12-a-month pension, which my greatgrandmother, pioneer and naturally frugal, lived mighty easy on the rest of her life--at least another 10 years.

These were wiry, serious-faced, tuckered browed, tough-as-nails women. My greatgrandmother had a scary young life--she was a mother of 7 before she was 20 years old. Only one of those 7 children lived, my grandmother, the poet and librarian and former hat-shop owner. One of my greatgrandmother's seven kids, her daughter Leeta, was self-delivered in a roadside ditch after contractions had started while she was running from where she was working in a field of corn her husband had planted trying to get back to the safety of her house after a "pow'rful" rainstorm full of lightning and hail had come up suddenly. She was running toward a road that was the quickest way to the house and when she tried to jump the ditch that lay between the field and the road, she didn't make it. She landed flat on her back in that ditch that by then was beginning to fill with water and becoming a very dangerous place to be. As she lay there flat on her back--she was afraid to move because of the way she had landed on her back--the contractions started, rapidly becoming closer and closer together and soon she realized she was giving birth--and very prematurely, too. At this point in the story, my greatgrandmother's eyes would be flushed with tears.

And then the baby came. It was so tiny, she said. So tiny, she kept repeating. "Hardly bigger than a newborn puppy. As blue-black as the sky above us." She bit the umbilical cord in two and tried to wash the baby as best she could and then she pushed the blue-black and by now freezing little withered and wizened body inside her blouse against her full breast trying to keep the baby alive and safe and dry until she could manage to get to her feet--or her husband would come looking for her, calling her name--and then she said the skies opened up and the rain poured what seemed like directly down on her and little Leeta--yes, she said she named the baby Leeta right then and there. When my greatgrandfather finally found his young wife and got her and his newborn daughter, Little Leeta (and that was how she was known in the family) back to the house they found Little Leeta was dead. She had drowned while in her mother's arms, tucked inside her mother's blouse against her breast. However, during the final downpour, the water that drenched my greatgrandmother had cascaded down her neck and rivered down into her blouse to drown the already half-dead premature child puppy--my grandaunt Little Leeta. That experience, the trauma of it, haunted my greatgrandmother the rest of her days--haunted her--in her sleep she dreamed the incident over and over again.

Just one of the many tragedies these tough women faced nearly every day of their young lives. Tragedies that forced them to live day-to-day lives. They already knew the sight and smell and taste of death--my grandmother was a survivor of the 1900 Galveston Flood in which thousands people perished in the sea as it tried to swallow Galveston Island, my grandmother and her husband and small son lucky enough to be at the highest point on the island when it hit full force, a point only a mean little number of feet above sea level.

Galveston, Texas, after the 1900 Flood. That could be my grandfather and grandmother out there on that beach--my grandfather did help gather up the dead and throw them in wagons that then carried the bodies down to the beach where they were put on barges and boats and taken out into the Gulf and dumped out there. My grandmother, who would have been in one of those buildings you see standing in the background--she was in a school and that white building straight ahead there on the right looks like a school, said the next morning after the men had gathered up the bodies and dumped 'em out in the Gulf the beach was covered in bodies--they had all washed back ashore when the tide came in. Then the men had to regather them, put them on pyres on the beach and set them on fire.
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Most of their hardest parts of life were endured when they were single women, single mothers--my greatgrandmother married twice; my grandmother married twice--men didn't last long at all in those days--my dad's father, a big bulky man who ate like a horse they said, died of a heart attack when he was in his 50s; my mother's father died of what was called catarrh but was probably lung cancer when he was in his 40s--he was a sign painter and worked with lead paints and cadmiums and he also smoked a pipe.

The Texas War veteran (my first greatgrandfather) was 77 when my greatgrandmother ran away from him saying his older sons were out to murder her because she refused to have sex with the old gnarly bastard. At 15, she jumped out her bedroom window and escaped into a swamp in which she wandered for almost 2 weeks before making it up river to a close relative's house in Central Texas. Her second husband (my second greatgrandfather) was a schoolteacher, poet, violinist (fiddler they called him), and possessor of a fine tenor voice. But this charming handsome man had one problem: he drank. He played his violin and sang at local social events, weddings, etc., and someone always brought the jug out at these affairs and, yes, my greatgrandfather stayed long into those celebratory nights getting sloppy drunk--depending on his horse to get him back home when one of the celebrants who was still sober enough would throw his drunk ass up over his saddle and then spank the horse on the ass and tell him to go home. One night when my greatgrandmother had had a fright from a bunch of Night Riders (ex-Confederate soldiers who formed a white terrorist group called the Night Riders; the Ku Klux Klan was later based on these groups) who were looking for a runaway slave girl so when my greatgrandfather's horse trotted his drunk ass up to the dugout door (yeah, they lived in a dugout--a home built into the side of a hill (a dugout hole in the hill--dirt floors, walls, ceilings, with a regular wooden home front--like building a house-like facade over a cave entrance) my grandmother had her Colt revolver loaded and cocked, ready to fire, and fire she did when she heard that horse trottin' up to her door--another Night Rider she assumed and she emptied that revolver through that front door, hitting the horse once in the front leg and my greatgrandfather once in his left leg.

That greatgrandfather died a young death and after he died, my greatgrandmother settled down with her only living child, my grandmother, also a tough old bird.

My grandmother had grown up in that dugout. When she was about 10, she was playing in the front yard of the dugout while her mother was hanging out the wash. My greatgrandmother kept one of her hawk eyes cocked over checking on her daughter. Alertly that afternoon that cocked hawk eye caught a movement, a movement that woke up the mother protectorate in her and she turned full eye on the object and what it was was a full-grown black panther (yes, Texas had panthers in those days) slithering catlike up on my 10-year-old grandmother, a very tasty morsel in that cat's eyes. The old lady quickly grabbed an ax and went after that big cat--she hacked it to death only a few feet from her daughter.

My grandmother was home schooled until she was of high-school age when she attended a one-room schoolhouse in the nearest town to the dugout. She didn't graduate high school so she didn't have enough credits to get in a local college so what she did was every day during the school year when the weather permitted, she'd go up to that college and sneak inside the building and try and slip into a classroom--she tried it so often, one of the professors at the school took a liking to her and began loaning her textbooks to take home and study and then when she brought them back, he'd give her a test. From this college education, she developed a great fascination with the poetry and adventures of Lord Byron, a fascination that evolved into her writing her own poetry, an involvement that culminated in two published books of poetry in the 1930s and then her crowning glory in 1941 when her Texas novel was accepted for publication by a Los Angeles publishing house.

She was a brilliant woman. Lightbulbs were always going off over her head. BUT, she had one problem. She worried. She couldn't help it. All she had been through from birth to present made her naturally cautious. Instinctually wary. "Woe is me" was her motto. Always present in her words even if she were rejoicing--like when she stood among her flowers and talked to the birds, two of which, sparrows, Petey and Sally, would light on the electrical wires that ran just above her garden from the house out to the lightpole in the alley, and when she would take some flower seeds and put them in the palm of her hand, Petey and Sally would fly down, perch on her hand, and eat those seed. She could call those birds's names and they'd come flying in from wherever they nested. Sometimes only Petey would show up. Sally might not show up for days, then, zip, there she'd be with Petey. Even when communicating with her precious nature friends, her flowers, her birds, her dog, the earth, she kept that worried look somewhere within the make up of her face. Always in her eyes.

Her growing up a single child hanging with a single mother (her father died when she was 16) on the lone prairie made her cautious, suspicious, and, yes, sometimes dangerously afraid, the worrying factor developing out of all the horrible experiences either she suffered or were passed down to her by her family. Worrying became a part of her growing up.

I knew she worried. I'd heard her sigh many a time and say "Woe is me" after it, but I didn't consider how inborn it was, how sensitive she was to its alerts, until the first family automobile trip I remember taking with her along. It was a trip in my dad's 1938 Oldsmobile--a big green iron box of a car considered a semi-luxury car at the time, a poor man's Cadillac. We were heading out from my hometown in West Texas intending to drive nearly 400 miles down the center of Texas and then over to Beaumont in southeast Texas on the Neches River where my mother was born and where her sister still lived.

It was raining that early spring morning we set out on this trip. It rains in spasms in West Texas. Mean-looking thunderstorms building up into glorious thunderheads that appear first as baby heads on the horizon though soon those heads would expand, build up, billow up, roil up into what the Native Americans called thunderheads. The sky would darkened, turn almost to night, and then CRRRRRRRRRRRRACK, a bolt of lightning would slap down out of that thunderhead like a lizard's tongue to splinter into the ground and then be followed by an engulfing explosion of thunder that would then echo off across the prairie. Then the rain would begin. Just big hard drops at first but quickly turning into a deluge. Gully washers was the name the natives gave them. They moved through fast. And after they passed the sun would come out from under its umbrella, shake itself out, and then render the whole landscape a sparkling field of watery diamonds--the air refreshed--the wind refreshing. BUT, given my grandmother's past experience with water, killing water, flooding waters, such gully washers brought out the worrisome witchy woman from this otherwise calmly brilliant woman. Gully washers to her tough-bird, Pioneer-woman mind meant floods. It meant drowning. Washed out roads. Washed out bridges. They caused detours, where the road was under construction or worse was maybe washed out and you had to drive off the main highway and ramble off over these backroads until you were directed back onto the main highway by the highway patrolmen who were directing traffic through the detour.

Some of these detours led to creeks and rivers that had no high bridges over them but instead had concrete ramps called low-water bridges traversing them. Cars in those days were built high off the ground--so it was possible to drive cars through pretty deep water--but when it was too deep, you had to back up and somehow turn around and go back the way you came until you could find another road or way over that creek or river to get back on a main road somehow. You never went on a trip in those days without a good road map (and a good spare tire). All filling stations had racks of road maps--good ones, too. My dad liked the Texaco maps the best simply because my dad was a loyal Texaco customer. That old Oldsmobile even had a map light on the dashboard. While my dad drove, my mother would search out byways and farm routes and out-of-the-way ways back to paved civilization.

So the first time I took a trip with my grandmother the worrier, we headed out in this rain off down Highway 80, motoring over toward Fort Worth where according my map-reading mother we were going to take a cut off at Weatherford and follow the Leon River down state to somewhere around Bryan when we'd then cross the Leon and go over on the East Texas side and then on off down to Beaumont and my aunt and uncle's.

The first big river we had to cross was the Brazos. The Brazos is a major Texas river. It's a long river--over 500 miles long and flows from just northwest of my hometown all the way down to the Gulf of Mexico around Houston. Most of the time the Brazos is a mild stream winding through a sandy bed that is prone to sandbars and rumored to be full of quicksand...EXCEPT when you have more than one gully washer in a day, then suddenly a river like the Brazos goes from a lamb to a roaring lion--it becomes flooded--and flooded deep--a rushing flood, a muddy flood, a crushing formation of waving water bulldozing its way to its lover the ocean.

I was enjoying the scenery when I heard my grandmother asked my dad, "Isn't the Brazos coming up?" "Yes, you know it's coming up...after Ranger." "Didn't we just go through Ranger?" "Yes, why you asking me these silly questions?" "I'm concerned about the Brazos." "Don't worry...that's a rickety bridge over it but sturdy enough."

We drove on. I knew when the Brazos River was coming up because I knew the hill you went up steeply and then wound down off of to cross the old iron bridge with the wood runway that rattled and shimmied loudly when you crossed it in a car. We came over the hill and then started down grade, you couldn't see the bridge yet though you could see the bluffs that were the banks of the Brazos from there. We made a sharp curve and there it was, the Brazos River Bridge. We were headed for it, doing about 55 miles an hour, when out of nowhere my grandmother bellowed out, "STOP THIS CAR RIGHT NOW. STOP IT I SAY!" My dad hit the brakes. The car skidded a bit, but my dad brought the car safely to a stop on a siding just a matter of 30 feet from the bridge.

The remains of an old Brazos River bridge from back in the era of my tale--that is the Brazos below the bridge but it's not the bridge my grandmother deemed too evil to try and cross though it certainly looks like it.

Without a word, my grandmother got out of the car...my dad was saying she was nuts...and she walked up to the edge of the bridge...she stood there a moment, then she stepped out onto the bridge and turned toward the river and raised her arms. Now I was beginning to think my dad was right, she was nuts.

She came back to the car. "I'll not ride with you over that bridge. It's got evil all over it and the river is evil, too." "You're crazy," my dad said and acted like he was going on across the bridge, to hell with her. She jumped out of the car. "Wolf, you're going to have to appease her," my mother said. "You know she was in the Galveston Flood, daddy...." "Oh, god almighty, mama, the Brazos River ain't the Galveston Flood." "Here, Wolf, there's a road here that runs down to Waco where you know there's a high bridge there."

And that's what we did. We drove all the way along the Brazos down to Waco. As we were coming up on the city limits of Waco, my grandmother said, "Waco's where they had that horrible tornado a year or so ago--don't those look like tornado clouds over that way?"

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler