Existing in New York City: Oh, Come All Ye White Hypocrites

Foto by tgw, New York City, April 2013
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Say Goodbye to: Deanna Durbin, a great singer and movie star.  In the late 1940s, Deanna Durbin was the highest salaried woman in the USA.  She started appearing in movies as a teenager; one of her first movies was with Judy Garland.  Deanna Durbin, 91, Canadian singer and actress.^[3] (death announced on this date).  Check her singing out: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=inV3RlOTOXM
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Say Goodbye to: Janos Starker, one of the great cellists I had the privilege of digging a lot of as a young man when Janos was the principle cellist with the Dallas Symphony Orchestra under Antal Dorati.  One season as a kid, I attended the children's music appreciation concerts under Mr. Dorati and during one of those concerts Janos Starker played a Bach and a Kodaly cello sonata. I was totally impressed and for several weeks after that decided I wanted to be a cellist.  János Starker, 88, Hungarian-born American cellist.
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Say Goodbye to: Maria Tall Chief (she changed it to Tallchief later): I just found out that Betty Marie Tall Chief died back on April 11 from complications of a broken hip suffered in 2012.  Maria Tallchief, born in Fairfax, Oklahoma, on the Osage Reservation, was the first Native American to become a diva in the ballet world becoming first a star with the Ballet Russe and later with the New York City Ballet.  in 1946 she married old George Ballachine, but the marriage was annulled when George threw Maria over for another dancer.  Maria was a beautiful woman and became one of the world's greatest-ever classical ballet dancers.  Watch Maria dance with Rudi Nureyev:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q-qy2Z_j58A
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Say Goodbye to: George Jones, the good ole boy from right near Beaumont, Texas, whose first hit was "Why, Baby, Why?" and who at times in his life was better known for his extreme alcoholism and missing gigs than he was for his recordings.  I found George Jones a fine songwriter and sang a couple of his songs in my heyday as a New York City cult-band singer.  I can't imagine anyone ever imagined George would live to be 81 years old.  George Jones, 81, American country music singer ("He Stopped Loving Her Today", "The Race Is On").
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Oh, Come All Ye White Hypocrites
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I’ve already had my say about the Boston Marathon bombers, The Tsarnaev brothers, and their pressure-cooker bombs that killed 3 and wounded (maimed) 170.  The younger brother ironically had become an American citizen on September 11, 2012.  And the older brother, again ironically to me, was married to a Christian woman and was the father of a 3-year-old kid.  I wonder, will one of Obama’s death drones kill that kid for the sins of her father the way one killed Awlaki’s 16-year-old American son, Abdulrahman, in Yemen?  That’s how Obama’s spokesperson, Robert Gibbs, at the time justified that kid’s murder.  This American kid who at the time was living with his grandparents in Yemen, grandparents who disagreed with the politics of their son.  Gibbs said glibly that Abdulrahman should have picked a better father, the father another American citizen murdered by one of those wonderful drones.  [I’m just reading in Counterpunch that there is now a drone base in Philadelphia.  Look out Philadelphians who aren’t Christians but look like Muslims…but wait a damn minute, did those American-Chechen brothers look like Muslims?]

Can you see why I see White Americans as hypocrites?  Hey, I’m White; I know my people.  I grew up in the Southwest among all-White neighborhoods, going to all-White school systems, finally getting a form of relief from Southern White hypocrisy when I attended the first college in the Southern Collegiate Association to integrate in 1956.  Integration meant Blacks could now attend my college.  Ironically, Middle-Eastern Muslim students, I had an Iranian friend in college, were considered Whites in those days.  You see what I mean about White Americans being hypocrites?

Later I lived in New Orleans, Louisiana, where prominent White people (politicians, newspapermen, lawyers, judges, etc.) pronounced Blacks not humans but rather “coons” and “gator bait” and “jungle bunnies” and the worst pronunciation of all, “niggers.”

And when finally, I left the South for good and moved to New York City, due to my accent, a New York City White cab driver said, my first day riding in a New York City cab, “I can tell from your accent you’re from the South so I know you understand me when I tell you what’s wrong with New York City…it’s the niggers and the Por-toe Reekin’s who are our [meaning New York City’s White people] biggest problem.”  You see what I mean about White Americans being hypocrites?

While three people died in the Boston bombings (and, yes, 170 people were injured badly), that same day 50 people died in Baghdad from a car bomb.  Nearly every day in Iraq innocent people die from being blown to bits by bombers.  Check out the followingt:

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Documented civilian deaths from violence in Iraq

112,114 – 122,644

Further analysis of the WikiLeaks' Iraq War Logs
may add 12,000 civilian deaths.

This data is based on 31,804 database entries from the beginning of the war to 17 Mar 2013. The most recent weeks are always in the process of compilation and will rise further. The current range contains 10,302–10,666 deaths (9.2%–8.7%, a portion which may rise or fall over time) based on single-sourced reports. Graphs are based on the higher number in our totals. Gaps in recording and reporting suggest that even our highest totals to date may be missing many civilian deaths from violence. See Recent Events for as yet unpublished incidents, and read About IBC for a better description of the project's scope and limitations. 
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Now do you see why White Americans  are hypocrites? (I could say “the majority” of all Americans are hypocrites, though I don't see Blacks, Muslim-Americans, and Native Americans as participating in the hypocrisy of which I'm writing.)  Think about if the United States suffered 10,000 deaths a year from “terrorist” bombs.

Look at the devastation and destruction and death the White Political and Military Leaders of America brought to the people of Afghanistan…the innocent people of Afghanistan who had nothing to do with 9/11…who had nothing to do with Osama bin Laden (a Saudi-Arabian) being in their country…he was invited to Afghanistan by our CIA who took over reigning militarily over Afghanistan from the then Soviet Union who warned us not to get involved in Afghanistan because it was impossible to win a war there.

And look at the innocent victims of our drone strikes in Pakistan.

As irony would have it, today (April 25^th) in Dallas, Texas, the weasels and rats and corrupted ones dedicated the George W. Bush Presidential Library.  I was shocked to see Jimmy Carter there and speaking highly warmly about Georgie Porgie’s benevolence toward Africa.  I never thought much of Jimmy Carter, the peanut farmer/rocket scientist who fucked up tragically in trying to rescue the Iran Embassy hostages, a foolish endeavor that left the gate open for Ronnie “Raygun” Reagan's invasion into the White House during the next election.  All of our White Presidents have been hypocrites.  And now our first Black (half White) President is a hypocrite, too.  Maybe it’s just natural for White (or half-White) Americans to be hypocrites. 

And speaking of hypocrites, wouldn’t you know New York City’s billionaire mayor who can’t stand being out of the spotlite for one minute, came on NYC television today (April 25th) with his shanty Irish police commish to take the spotlite away from Boston (ironically his hometown) by declaring that the Tsarnaev brothers next stop was Times Square where they intended on doing some serious bombing having one pressure cooker bomb left and some smaller hand-grenade bombs left in their arsenal…no one has explained yet how the brothers were carrying this sack of bombs around Boston as they tried to escape the long arm of what seemed like every Boston policeman and Sheriff’s department goon and FBI agent in the whole damn town.  It seems the young Tsarnaev, handcuffed to his bed in a Boston hospital, is taking advantage of the attention he’s finally getting to trumpet himself and his brother as master planners of bombing away the USA with their three pressure cooker bombs.  [Please, I’m not making light of the death and injury these two nutjobs brought to the couple of hundred watchers of the final yards of the Boston Marathon.  I’m merely showing how hypocritical we Americans are when it comes to someone hurting us while we’re hurting so many more around the world with our war economy and stupid War on Terrorism and our stupid drone strikes and our stupid selling and giving away weapons of mass destruction to whichever ally we deem needing them or, in the case of Saudi-Arabia, those able to purchase them.]

We the American people, especially those of us who elected that little criminal privileged prick, G.W. Bush, to two terms as president (whether he stole the elections or not, We the People of the US allowed him to do so without any challenges) and then reelected President “Two Face” Obama again after he had reneged on every “Yes We Can” promise he made in 2008 (he was the lesser of two evils, you argue…so what, he was still evil…and look at the messes he’s continuing to get us into while at home he seems intent to force Republican austerity on our asses) (in today’s (April 25^th) hearing on the murderous effect of drone strikes, President Obama refused to send a representative from his administration to explain his drone-strike policies to the shindig).

I’m sorry, but I just can’t believe how We the People of the USA, no matter how fucking neurotic, frightened, bamboozled we are, are continuing to be led down the path to Chaos by our damn noses by our corrupted politicians and global corporations without so much as a weak call for help, a call for stopping this vulgar shit, a call for the arrest of George W. Bush, a call for the recall of these fucking backwards low-populated state representatives and senators who ignore the needs of their people in favor of the pockets full of cash offered them by our true rulers, the global corporations who have no allegiance to our national needs anymore and whose main vision (as used by corporations) is to go about confiscating the wealth of the world for their own powerful positionings and rankings on the Forbes 500 and their own hoarding of trillions upon trillions of dollars and stashing it away in offshore banks and financial ventures and not paying any taxes on the enormous profits they are making off this war economy.  We are such hypocrites...and by now I'm saying all of us Americans are hypocrites.

thegrowlingwolf

for The Daily Growler

 

Existing in New York City: Celebrating Our Seventh Year of Blogging

How to Spot a Chechen (from The EXiled)
 http://exiledonline.com/spot-the-chechen/
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Say Goodbye to: Richie Havens. I once lived next door to Richie up in Greene County, New York...the man loved to party. Richie Havens, 72, American folk singer and guitarist, heart attack
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Say Goodbye to: Artie White, blues singer...who I knew from his recordings on the Jewel label.
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The Boston Massacre
Do you think the three who died and the nearly two hundred who were injured (losing limbs, some with brain damage) in the Boston bombing would have suffered this foolish bit of trauma had we not been killing Muslims wildly around the world and placed in such a fear society, fear of Muslims attacking us, fear of losing our means of income, fear of intruders, fear of the police?  What if Obama when he took office in 2008 had brought peace to the world...brought our troops home and disbanded Homeland Security (what terror has Homeland Security stopped?) and the CIA goon squads and grounded all the drones and sent out tons of diplomatic corps with open arms of peace, love, and tie dye? In the meantime, look at the next item in this post about the George W. Bush Library being built at the expense of millions of dollars of our tax money (and probably our Social Security pool money) and think about how that little lying prick is living the good life down in Dallas, Texas, both he and his pothead wife getting the best of free health care and being protected to the hilt by Secret Service goons.  That low-life weasel of a spoiled brat boy who never grew up...a weasel of a man who went AWOL and cried behind his mammy's dress when his time to SERVE his country came up; yet, this same little prick sent thousands of military personnel to their deaths and millions of Iraqis and Afghanistans to their deaths.  Too bad this year's Boston Marathon wasn't held down that nice Dallas street on which this criminal bastard lives.

In the meantime, what did I tell ya, Congress didn't pass one god-damn new gun law.  Obama continues to show his Republican side is his true side.
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Look What Your Tax Dollars Are Building: The George W. Bush Presidential Library: This building will not contain any books but will be filled with shit.



Solar Flare (CME) to Hit Helpless Mercury
"Earth was not in the line of fire. Instead, the CME is heading for Mercury: ETA April 20th. NASA's MESSENGER probe in orbit around Mercury will be monitoring the effects of the impact. If the CME overwhelms Mercury's relatively weak magnetic field, it could scour material off the planet's surface creating a temporary atmosphere and adding material to Mercury's comet-like tail." (From spaceweather.com)
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Irony
Ironically this West, Texas, fertilizer plant explosion happened close to the anniversary of Timothy McVeigh (our homegrown terrorist and ex-US Army-trained killer) blowing up the federal building in Okie City using this same kind of fertilizer.  Ironically, also, West, Texas, is only a few miles from David Koresh's compound that Janet Reno ordered burnt to the ground, fuck the people inside.  Ironically also, the ATF is involved in this investigation, too.  This chemical plant (that's what this ammonia-based fertilizer is, a chemical) hadn't been inspected in 5 years (it is also a non-union plant); chemical plants blow: Bopol in India; one in France a few years back; and down in Texas City, Texas, when I was a kid, a boat loaded with sulphur-fertilizer blew sky high killing over 1,000.  But we are hooked on chemicals...we love them and we love our fertilizers and we love our chemical weapons...but the plant executives and officials who allowed this to happen, they're not terrorists...oh no, they'll get bonuses and be excused for their carelessness and mediocrity in concern for their workers and neighbors...hey, it's all about profits, folks!  It's Capitalism at its best and most dangerous.

By the way: President Obama's oil-executive-packed Keystone Pipeline investigative thugs released their report on the Keystone Pipeline (one of the members of this committee was a Trans-Canada executive) and guess what?  Why, of course, they said it was perfectly safe and blah, blah, blah...and now Trans-Canada is flooding the press and internet sites with ads telling how many jobs and how much money this "safe" pipeline is going to mean for our economy (and Canada's).  Plus, check out who owns the Texas refineries where this dirty crude is going to be refined and sold to European markets.  Would you believe the Koch Brothers?  Let's give those two sorry bastards a big round of tax breaks for their giving not one shit about anybody's lives but their own.
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Interesting Statement About Social Security (from tompaine.com):
"...when it comes to Social Security, there is no division between 'old' and 'young.' There’s only 'old' and 'not yet old.'"
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 OH BOY, Here We Go Again: Remember How Vietnam War Started?  WE LOVE WAR!

US to deploy 200 troops to Jordan over Syria war: minister

(AFP) – 1 hour ago 

AMMAN — The United States plans to deploy 200 troops in Jordan because of "the deteriorating situation" in war-torn Syria, Information Minister Mohammad Momani said on Wednesday.
"The deployment of the troops is part of US-Jordanian military cooperation to boost the Jordanian armed forces in light of the deteriorating situation in Syria," Momani told AFP.
He did not say when the troops were scheduled to arrive in Jordan.
"US and Jordanian officials have been in touch for the past two days. It is still unclear if military equipment and weapons will arrive with the group, who will come to the kingdom in the coming stage."
Jordan, a key US ally in the region, says it is hosting around 500,000 Syrian refugees.
Prime Minister Abdullah Nsur told parliament on Sunday that the impact of Syria's war posed a threat to the kingdom's security and Jordan would seek the UN Security Council's help to tackle the fallout.
Copyright © 2013 AFP. All rights reserved 
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Say Goodbye to: Frank Bank: Lumpy on "Leave It to Beaver." Frank Bank, 71, American actor (Leave It to Beaver).
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In Celebrating Our Seventh Year of Posting The Daily Growler, Here's a Post From Nov. 2006

Thursday, November 30, 2006

An I for an I

Me, Myself, and I
Since my transcendental elevation from cynical bottoms to the existential plane of universal mazda—the light bulb, symbol of the Idea, I am seeing clearly NOW almost to forever. Only NOW, because about the past I am confused and about the future I know as much NOTHING as the most vaunted soothsayer or scientist. With NOTHING visible in front of me and NOTHING truly remembered in back of me, I am left with the NOW.

In the NOW, what matters?

For many years I was a professional editor in New York City working in several areas of editing, first as a copyeditor, then as an editor, then a senior editor, then an editorial director, and finally as a pharmaceutical ad editor. I started in editing as a freelancer peddling my wares in whatever back-office temp job I could land—and I temped at some of the hottest publishing houses, magazines, ad agencies in NYC—and I worked so hard and was so easily accessible night or day I impressed directors and senior editors and soon I began to get more work than I could handle. I was on my own. I loved freelancing. And during the seventies, one could freelance one’s way into steady enough workloads, most of which you worked on at home (I had a brand-new downtown loft I worked out of, though most of the time my official office was a special table in a window they had set up for me around the corner at a local watering hole). I edited everything from cookbooks to horribly bad poetry manuscripts to the pompous asinine trumpetings of an old upstate New York rich man and ex-U.S. senator and WWII general rambling out his memoirs before the approaching Alzheimer’s took him under and left him more goony bird than important homo sapien. In my best freelancing years, I made easily $500 a week, always getting a check every Friday, taking it right to the check cashing place where I had an account, cashing it, and heading straight back to my watering hole office for a little successful celebration that lasted until Sunday afternoon when I once again had to come to my senses and start editing on the pile of another week’s worth of work, buckling down until the eagle flew on the next Friday. I swore I would never again work for anybody except ME, MYSELF, and I. Do I hear a drumroll and a salute?

It was all me. My being the important being; my individuality my freedom. And I believed in NOTHING then. I had learned in college as a student of sociology that all was darkness and that only in light did we progress—nights were given over to shivering in fear and alarm and days were given over to being creative, to thinking, to getting ideas, light bulbs over heads symbolizing a light for the coming darkness. Bringing light to darkness is God’s first creation in all the holy books of the world. The more light bulbs you have, the more light you have. Eventually, the light bulb eliminates DARKNESS—and or NOTHINGNESS. Our individual space is our place in the sun. We protect ourselves from the darkness; in the light we are so aggressively idealistic we have to be controlled. “Stiffled,” as Archie Bunker used to put it.

When I was finally tossed out of my profession on my ear, a part of my dismissal had to do with me being out of the modern mode, the new work world that insists we're all members of TEAMS, which, of course, is bullshit, except TEAMS keep workers in line--TEAMS following the B.S. adage that two heads are better than one. What, though, if there's only one light bulb over just one of those heads? That's usually the case when it comes to TEAMS in the corporate structure. They are there to take the individuality out of the worker. I don't like that. I'm an individual; I work better left alone. My line of work demands separation. TEAMS handicap a guy like me.

The irony here is that as a man I love being alone but as a wolf I need my fellow wolves for certain advantages in hunting, which is the main occupation of a wolf.

This is becoming a nice writer's puzzle for me. I've got a lone-wolf-contrarian versus a member of a tribe or wolfpack; one the shepherd the other the lamb. Besides, I haven't really gotten deep in this existential atheism yet; I love the sound of that. It means a believer in NOTHING doesn't believe in any SUPERNOTHING either, only the darkness of pure NOTHING. So when I turn on all my light bulbs what I see is me and all my shadows, the "I's" that behold me through my self--the Id, the Ego, the Superego; those that are NOW.

I said I am writing poetry again.

Coming: the Great I AM.

To be continued as everything is continued until it is discontinued.

the growlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

The Word From Baghdad--The Idiots Were Meeting in Jordan While in Iraq
From the Washington Post:

But Iraqis on both sides of their nation's sectarian divide report worrisome signs that the conflict will soon evolve into pitched battles between large armed groups.
One secular Shi'ite speaking on the telephone from Baghdad said Shi'ite militias were massing in preparation for a large offensive against Sunnis in the capital.
"They had a big militarylike ceremony today for the Mahdi militia, to show their force. They are making themselves ready for something big -- protests, fighting, killing," said the Shi'ite.
A secular Sunni in close contact with one insurgent faction, said rebel Sunnis were also trying to form alliances among militias for a big push in the city against the Shi'ites, including more raids on government buildings.

Our truly dumbass, phony "president" says we're staying the course in Iraq until "the mission is accomplished," his words in Jordan where today the phony "president" of Iraq got pissed at his master and tried to bite him back. In the meantime, Unka Dick was summoned to Saudi Arabia where the Bin Ladens are getting pissed off at Bush Baby is letting the filthy dog Shi'ites take over the country and the only Shi'ites close by are the Iranians--the Saudis are Sunnis--oh boy, what fun we have created overthere. Unka Dick's nose is deep up the asshole of the ruling Saud. We are owned by Saudi Arabia, if perhaps you didn't already know that.

Pappy Bush is now stepping in to solve the Iraq situation with his own study group paid for by, guess who? We the People. Pappy's picking up a staff and a few million bucks to help on his retirement--how old that old F anyway?

Be Glad You Don't Live in Baghdad, Unless You Do...
thestaff
for The Daily Growler

Existing in New York City: We Are a Nation of Killers

Foto by tgw, "Radiating Cell Phone Panels Aimed at New Yorkers," New York City, 2013
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GIVE THREE CHEERS TO THE DAILY GROWLER--as we celebrate our 7th year of blogging...we started back in April of 2006.  Go to the end of this post for a 2006 post!!!
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Say Goodbye to: Grady Hatton, another great old baseball player from the 8-team days of Major League Baseball, an infielder with the Cincinnati Reds back in my early days when I followed MLB and collected baseball cards; passed on at 90; like I say, old baseball players (some of 'em) seem to live forever. Grady Hatton, 90, American baseball player (Cincinnati Reds) and manager (Houston Astros), natural causes.
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Say Goodbye to: Annette Funicello, at one time every young boy's fantasy sex symbol when she was a well-developed member of the Mickey Mouse Club.  Walt Disney later insisted that Annette not show her marvelous cleavage in all those stupid beach blanket bingo movies, though he did allow her to wear one-piece bathing suits.  Annette Funicello, 70, American actress (The Mickey Mouse Club, Beach party films) and singer ("Tall Paul"), complications from multiple sclerosis.
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We Are All Killers

War, war, war.  Hot damn!  Don’t you just love war?  Now we’re beating the war drums for a possible nuclear war with North Korea!  Double hot damn!  Finally a nuclear war.  You know our military goons have been praying to the God of War for it seems like forever for a nuclear war with some heathen society; so why not North Korea?  Those lousy dirty commie assholes; we need to teach those sorry bastards a lesson.  Only problem is, these heathen, commie, bastards do have nuclear weapons.  Of course, don’t dig too deeply into where they got their nuclear capabilities.  They supposedly got their nuclear missile capabilities from Pakistan and Egypt, though I seem to recall a connection between a Swedish nuclear power company and either Dick Cheney or Donald Rumsfeld having something to do with selling North Korea nuclear power capabilities.

God, we love war.  We love killing heathen.  We love defending our allies to the death.  Even to the possible end to all mankind.  You see, these lousy commie North Koreans have missiles with nuclear war heads capable of perhaps reaching the California coast.  Remember last year sometime when North Korea tested a missile and we pooh-poohed it as going up a few feet in the air and then slamming back down to earth a dud?  Why do I remember all these incidents and nobody else seems to?  Is it because I’m an armchair objectivist sociologist? (I like the fact that the objectivist poets (Wm. Carlos Wms, Oppen, Zukofsky) considered poems machines built out of words.)

And President Obama.  What is with this guy?  He continues to compromise with these nutjob Republicans.  Why?  He doesn’t have to.  He’s got the people behind him, though, yes, the American people are fools.  Why fools?  For one reason they keep electing these arrogant, hayseed, backwards-thinking boobs who don’t give one flying shit about the people they’re supposed to represent.  I mean can you imagine these beanheads allowed this bullshit sequester crap to prevail, a bullshit political move that in cutting Medicare has put in jeopardy cancer patients, Medicare once paying for cancer patients to get their chemo therapies at local clinics but with this sequester bullshit now forcing these poor boobs to go to HMO for-profit hospitals where Medicare only covers partial chemo expenses leaving these poor folk to have to come up with upwards of $650-a-month out of pocket.  These Washington, District of Corruption, jerks living the good life with the world’s best paid-for health care gouging poor folks to pay for the economic mess these lying-dog jerks shoved us into with their ass-kissing of non-tax-paying corporations who are hoarding billions of dollars in offshore banks (mostly British banks) so they don’t have to pay taxes on these hoards of money, these corporations who aren’t paying taxes anyway given all the loopholes these Washington, District of Corruption, creeps keep voting their way.  These same creeps who after 21 little kids were gunned down by a antipsychotic drug-taking nutjob kid in Newtown, Connecticut, still can’t come up with any gun-control legislation that might perhaps save some future lives.  Fuck no.  Instead, they hem-haw about as they kiss deep into the ass cracks of the nutjob National Rifle Association and the weapons manufacturing lobbyists who want to arm the fucking world so we can go back to having shoot outs and multiple drive bys and cops mowing down innocent people and antipsychotic drug-taking psychopaths to continue blowing us away on a whim with assault rifles that can fire 100 rounds in a matter of seconds.  But of course the USA is the weapons capital of the world.  We are the world’s largest makers and sellers of weapons of mass destruction.  We are the world’s cruelest people.  We love murder.  We love serial killers.  We love mobs and the Mafia.  We love outlaws.  We love fear.  We love the thought of being given a license to kill.  And we love killing.  Life means nothing to us, not even our own lives.  Look at all the fat slobs waddling around boogie-ing into McDonald’s to carb up on green-slime-beef hamburgers or butt-shaking into Burger King for some abscessed cow meat or maybe glue-factory slaughtered horse meat for all we know.

I just watched a whole slew of George Carlin live on YouTube and oh what a right-on man of wit and wisdom he was.  And speaking of old bitch Maggie Thatcher's death, in one of his bits called "Things You'll Never See," he said one thing you'll never see is Maggie Thatcher strapping on a dildo.  This pinhead of a Brit corruption who thought Nelson Mandella a terrorist and who was palsy-walsy with some of the corruptest assholes in the world, including Pinochet and Saddam Hussein.  This warmongering bitch who was hand-in-hand with old Pappy Bush in starting the Persian Gulf War and who bombed the bejesus out of the poor Falkland Islanders because Argentina wanted to take back what was their sovereign territory.  In Merry Ole England as I write on this they are having parties celebrating Maggie's death.  From our friend Nick Jainschigg comes this link

http://metro.co.uk/2013/04/09/margaret-thatcher-dead-10-songs-about-her-3589285/

And we sing "Ding Dong the Witch Is Dead" along with the Brits.  But then we must remember, Maggie didn't rise to power without the full support of a majority of Limeys, did she?

The Syrian Conflict
I just watched a very awesome PBS "Frontline" program this evening (April 9th) of some brave filmmakers in Syria with both the regime forces and the rebels and Jesus X. Christ what a telling program.  It shows the futility of war; how stupid it is; how dividing it is.  People who once were neighbors are now enemies.  The rebels blame the regime and the regime blames the rebels.  The official word in Damascus is that the rebels are foreigners, terrorists from England, France, Turkey, Libya, while the rebels seem ragtag at best, with weapons they managed to grab from overtaking regime outposts, weapons most of the rebels shown in this program don't even know how to fire.  One weapon they knew how to fire it but they didn't know how to aim it.  Trying to aim it, they were using Google Earth coordinates they were downloading off cell phones.  They had rocket launchers, for instance, but they didn't even know how to fire them.  At one point the rebel commander says they only have 80 bullets left in their arsenal.  There is a sad moral to this bullshit conflict, at the end of this program, one of the defeated rebel soldiers says he is going over and join al-Queda.  Most of the civilians I saw were women and children.
 
Just as I heard on an interview with an Iraqi civilian who said he wished they could go back to the days of Hussein, a Syrian woman on this program was saying Syria used to be so peaceful under Assad.  "We used to could walk around at night without any fear."  "WAR...what's it good for?  ABSOUTELY NOTHIN'"

In the meantime, President Obama is being advised by the same ole dumbass military goons who advised Little Georgie Porgie Puddin' Pie Bush, that little prick who got us into this whole war economy mess we're in, spending trillions of dollars on these stupid conflicts around the world, in war-ravaged and now absolutely divided Iraq; in war-ravaged and innocent-of-having-anything-to-do-9/11 Afghanistan, while We the Dumbass American People suffer, while we lose our homes, our jobs, our manufacturing, our pensions, our public lands, our minerals, our water supplies to President Obama's Reagan/Thatcher-like austerity measures and the privatization of our lives as he allows corporate criminals to do as they please, to go about robbing us blind, to go about making billions off these useless wars, to go about making billions off polluting our air, to go about making billions off chemically and genetically ruining our food supplies [we are letting Monsanto and DuPont destroy our honey bee populations through the use of their pesticides that are 1000-times more powerful than DDT...without bees to pollinate most of our food supply, we'll produce no crops in a few generations.  Yet, President Obama continues to promote Monsanto goons to high-level decision-making jobs in our FDA.  And he continues to promote fossil-fuel fools to high positions in our energy and interior departments.  And he continues to let his White side rule over his Black side brain in order to kiss the criminal asses of the Wall Street gangsters, gangsters who get free rides though their policies (of gambling with our money) that are bringing ruination and more war to this collapsing (heading toward Chaos) world.  Are we doomed?

thebittergrowlingwolf  
for The Daily Growler

Happy Birthday The Daily Growler...Here's a post from 2006

Sunday, December 31, 2006

Old Father Time Is Hanged By His Neck

Here Goes Yet Another Year
I am all alone this New Year's Eve, a situation I have purposely placed myself into. I have no gig again this year. It's now been 6 years since I fronted a New Year's Eve band at a NYC club, a band I fronted for 7 years before one of the star bartender's galfriends, a violin player who had been around NYC for a long sagging bunch of years, a star follower...but I'm growling about a personal disappointment and I'm sure the violinist is no longer the NY's Eve band down there--but that was a wonderful time for me--I was a star then, and, boy, I gotta admit, I love the power of being a lead band singer and the miniscule stardom but still stardom that that brings--and, yes, the babes, ah the sweet women who love musicians, the best women in the world, that I guarantee, to put up with the emotions of a musicians, the depressions, the drinking, the associating, the drugs, the "always" disappointing hopes--it's a hell of an emotional trip for a musician's babe and god help 'em if they marry their musician--I don't give a shit if the musician is a successful musician--they're the worst husbands.

I have the draft of a novel I wrote on another laptop that's still up here above my head on a shelf gathering age, which is told by the layers of dust that have like tree rings collected on it. I fire it up occasionally just to keep it alive to me, but, anyway, in that novel I discussed what it was like being a musician and the problems a musician had with his woman--a horror story, a real horror story, too, a story that only a musician could tell, though most musicians aren't good writers. I must have written 500 songs about my particular horror story with women. [In that novel I talk about a young Viet Namese immigrant who lives directly across the hall from me and who still lives directly across the hall from me and who is into what I call "house" music, meaning it's a kind of mixing--which is stealing the riffs, beats, and actual recordings of real musicians to make a synthetic music that is called house music because it's the kind of shit you hear when you go in a Mafia-run or an Israeli-run dance club or "house" out in the distant boroughs of New York City. Young people dance straight up and down now and that's what this crappy music sounds like, just straight up and down boring, boring rhythms--their tempos never changing--boring, GOD-DAMN BORING. But anyway, he's just fired up--he's really a good neighbor, kept up by a really nice Viet Namese woman who's a strong, hard-working babe, the kind a real musician really needs and not this poor little amateur kid who truly thinks he's Amurican hip by playing his mixes--he told me one time he had over 2000 albums stored over in Brooklyn he made his mixes from--he tried to take advantage of me when he first moved in over there, hearing me practicing and shit he told me, "Hey, man, could you teach me to play a keyboard, I just bought this Yamaha...." Musicians are funny. We don't like to pass out tricks on to kids, especially kids who...oh hell, there I go again, growling due to my own frustrations with being a musician who used to work every New Year's Eve not having a gig this New Year's Eve.]

And that's why I'm purposely alone this New Year's Eve.

And what has been the worth of 2006 to me? I don't know. It was just another year to me. Let's see if I can recap what this past year was...

1) the 2006 baseball season was one of the best I've ever lived through, though as a New York City baseball fan I was terribly disappointed that the two best teams in baseball were eliminated by two rather second-rate teams who went on to perform in a truly boring and who-gave-a-shit World Series won by the Saint Louis Cardinals, the least worst of these two undeserving teams. That was bad; but the season itself was a winner, both for the asshole owners--they made billions, trust me--and the fans. The fans got their money's worth and the owners got much more than their money's worth.

Hey, here's another irony, it was the best year in the Yankees's long history in terms of attendance and earnings, and, yet, the greedy son of a bitch who owns the Yankees had the nerve as punishment for his all-star millionaire Yankees letting him down to announce he was raising Yankees ticket prices by up to 25%. Baseball ain't a kids's game anymore. What kid has $30 in his jeans to afford even a bleacher seat at Yankee Stadium? That means only people with good paying jobs are keeping baseball alive and well--it's no longer a poor people's sport and that's a shame. The only hope for poor people is that they still broadcast all Yankee games over the free radio--I mean, you have to subject yourself to what seem like eternal commercials, everything, even a ground ball to shortstop is sponsored by some sponsor--"Wow, here's hot ground ball to Jeter at short, brought to you by Toyota, the throw to first, brought to you by ConEdison, is, in time, brought to you by Budweiser, for the out, brought to you by the good people at Kay Jewelers." But, hell, it's free and you can be at every damn game, road or home. Of course, if you can afford a $100-a-month and can get ESPN, you can watch the games on television--but for Yankees games that means it's Bobby Mercer as the announcer. [Poor Bobby just underwent brain surgery down in Texas to remove a tumor from up there. Hey, Bobby is an old Okie hillbilly just like the Mick--in fact, Bobby was supposed to become the next Mick but he never could cut that mustard. As an announcer, he's kind'a boring, though the boy does know baseball in a hillbilly sort of way.]

2) In music. I discovered that Charles Edward Ives is the greatest classical composer ever produced in America, and to me, in the world; the most original composer ever. I raise a glass of Moet to Charles Ives--especially his Concord Sonata and his great 4th Symphony and all the stuff, man, all the Ives you can eat in one meal. Damn right, he's worth gorging on.

And then, I came back to pianist Jaki Byard, his playing and his leading and composing, and thanks to thedailygrowlerhousepianist I got my hands back on what I think is one of the greatest live recordings ever recorded, in jazz or whatever, improvised perfection, Jaki Byard's album from the 1960s, Live From Lennie's on the Turnpike, a dump of a club that used to sit outside of Brookline, Massachusetts, on the Mass Turnpike. It contains a Jaki tune called "Twelve"--it's written in 12/4 time, that's 3 triplets of eighth notes played 4 times in one measure, like a Delta blues, like Lightnin' Hopkins and Mance Lipscombe played, and it is massive, wide-open, free-as-a-bird, soul-stealing, giving wings to those same feelings that give us energy to rise from a nothingness into a 12-minute-long period of ecstasy, the highest pleasure man can enjoy, the pleasure of being entranced by a music as it arises and explodes--or ejaculates, though I'm reading it from a male point of view.

And as always, I've found Charles Mingus continuing to be fascinating, unbelievably fascinating right up to the time when his body told him he was through and he refused and kept on writing from his wheelchair--humming it out into a tape recorder. I got a DVD of Mingus at the Montreux Jazz Festival in 1975 doing a rendition of "Goodbye, Pork Pie Hat" that just knocks your F-ing sox off, with Benny Bailey and Gerry Mulligan and Mingus taking over your totally aural intake and bringing it straight into your solar plexus where it turns to feelings, man, deep expressive feelings, feelings that soar you and cause you to memorialize Lester Young, man, that is if you know Lester Young like we jazz afficianados have to know Lester Young and we know it takes two to tango, two to rango.

Which brings me to another fun musical thing that happened to me in '06--re-getting-into Lester Young, the one master I tended to overlook coming alive when I did in the middle of the happening careers of Charles Parker, Jr., Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, Sonny Rollins, Bud Powell, Oscar Peterson, Clifford Brown, Max Roach, Thelonious Monk, the innovators--my teachers, the masters, but then, thanks to John Coltrane whose life I followed step-for-step till he died, I began listening tighter to Lester Young, especially a Columbia LP issued back in the earliest 1950s, called Lester Leaps In, and featuring the earliest Lester Young recordings mostly with Count Basie and the Kansas City gang from back in the late 1930s, Jo Jones, Freddie Green, Walter Page, and that band, that old Benny Moten band kicking Lester on and on note velvety perfect note after velvety perfect note, playing the tenor sax as though it were an extention of his body, which it was. Hail, Lester Young!

3) Politics in 2006. Politics broke my F-ing heart in 2006. Scary politics. Fascism blooming faster than crab grass on a southern front lawn right before our eyes and our leaders seem dumbstruck in their efforts to stop it in its tracks, its huge tracks, its overwhelming tracks, its big feet slamming down on us as it goosesteps over our necks with its bootheel-enforced philosophy of demand. Politics may be beneath me in 2007. I'll do it dog-style if it is--up the rump, if you don't mind my crassness. Bush. Hooey on that gone-astray monkey. He's a crushed wimp. Killing is getting boring to him. Killing Hussein should have been one of his thousand points of light, but it seems old George had rather be down in Crawford, Texas, on his faux ranch entertaining his advisors--"Here, boys, have a couple'a swigs of this Ezra Brooks here. My old pappy, that old sagging wimp, sent it to me congratulatin' me on stretching old Sad-dam's neck till it snapped. Gawd, there was a day when I'd like to have been there, like when I used to enjoy those executions I ordered down there in my adopted State of Texas. Yeee-haw those were good times. I don't know, boys, maybe I'm gettin' tired'a killing folks--though hell, I expected a lot more of our doughboys to have been killed by now--I used to think the more of my boys killed overthere the more peppy the populus would get behind me--you know, get behind in a good sense and not the sense they all seem to be expressing--they're gettin' behind me all right but I think they're fixin' to dog F me, boys--I don't think there's any luv in their motives. I may have to bail on you boys. I'm rich as hell; I don't have to take this; Prince Bandar Bush sez he has a room at his Pakistani Tiger Camp I could come live in with my old half-brother, Osama."

4) I started reading books voraciously this year. I love reading books like that. 14 at once presently--and looking to start reading another one as soon as possible. I've never read Finnegan's Wake. I think I'd like to give it a try. Here's a link that will lead you into that Joycean World, a fascinating man, Joyce; a man who wrote in many languages at once, Finnegan's Wake having that great long sentence--it has a name, but I've forgotten it--like there's one word mentioned over and over in it. Hell, go with me to this link:

www.fweet.org/

You can even find out what "fweet" means.

Ulysses is the funniest book I've ever read; second is Lolita; and wouldn't you know Nabokov got to sit at Joyce's feet in Paris and idolized the guy; and James was an interesting sweet singing drunkard of a man, becoming eccentrically blind as a bat in his latter years, yet able to see amazingly through walls of words.

Happy New Year from

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler 

Existing in New York City: Our Special Iraq Report

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

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

Democracy Brought the Iraqis Fresh Drinking Water

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

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

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

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

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

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

waltercrackpipe(frommyyachtontheSaintLawrenceRiver) 
for The Daily Growler 

Say Goodbye to:  Daniel Hoffman

Identities

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wall Street's Choice

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Young Ezra Pound

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

Young Hilda Doolittle

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

Dorothy Shakespear

Olga Rudge

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

Never Coagulating 

The bad blood

flowing in the poet's veins

when opened with a jealous knife

never stops flowing

its bleating

bleating out songs of seduction

even as it flees the panting heart

theoncepoeticgrowlingwolf  

for The Daily (Yeah Sure!) Growler

The Art of My Old Friend Will Shuster 

 "Santa Fe" (an etching)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily (Weekly) Growler 

The Art of My Old Pal Will Shuster

The 40th Wedding Anniversary