More Random Notes From Wrinkled Scraps...

…all one need do to personally assess the war in Iraq is to go to LiveLeak.com & watch it in action, from both sides – everyone has a cell phone camera – notwithstanding the Pentagonian version, here’s what’s really going on, ask any Iraqi vet, Insurgent or Marine…

…where only a few years ago the hallways of VA hospitals were filled with aging World War II, Korean War and Vietnam-era vets yesterday when I was in the VA in White River the corridors were crawling with armless, crippled, shell shocked soldiers from Iraq and Afghanistan, none appeared to be older than 25, most younger…and the 1000 yard stare is back…

…man, years ago, like 43 of them, I pawned the gold watch my parents gave me for graduation somewhere in the Tenderloin District of San Francisco so, not to put too fine a point on it, so I could have some money to drink and buy drugs with on my way to the celebrated North Beach; husbandry has never been a specialty of mine, so off I trundled on the trolley cars and up major inclines which define the trip up Powell Street and in a few minutes there I was, the City Lights Bookstore, the Jazz Workshop, Lisa Kindred, some kid named Janis Joplin and a band called Big Brother and the Holding Company were playing at The Coffee Gallery, I tell you how so seminal a moment in my life can possibly have been 43 years ago sends me into overdrive, hold on Dude, I gotta get an opener…and the guilt of having pawned that watch grows exponentially, my Father went to his grave not knowing and my Mother, may she live to be a 110, thinks it was stolen and won’t see this unless you call her up and blow the whistle on me…

Random "...NOTES...from wrinkled scraps...

…I’m about to enter my arteriovenous malformation period in which either my DVTs get me, my breaking ticker quits or a stroke smites me down as sure as would Excalibur in the hands of King Arthur…now I ask you is that plain enough or what? All it means is that the Grim Reaper is in the 'hood...some reviewer of NOTES in a publication called Zine World, wrote thusly of NFTD, and I might add, set me off like an M-80…here is what ‘Jack’ wrote:

Notes From the Dump #415: I have no fucking idea what this guy is talking about. It makes my head hurt. References to the Grateful Dead, Jane and Rasa whom he’s not heard from in 45 years, medulla oblongatas, the sleazy dirtbags at Halliburton, and the oil embargo of 1973. Plans on writing a book. Terry Ward, PO Box 133, Westminster Station VT 05159, nftdnotes@yahoo.com [$? 6M :30] –Jack

Hi, it’s me again, you hoser, TWard, Terry - I am not used to and don’t like being criticized, so with great umbrage I fired off a note to Jack’s editor, Lynne Bailey:

Lynne, hi...

...the reason Jack's head hurts is because it takes a little cerebral work to appreciate NFTD and he isn't cut out for it...am I correct in thinking he spent a whole 6:30 seconds on it...wow...after 21 years of poring my literal and literary heart and soul out to a very widespread and global audience (NFTD has been featured in many mainstream media publications - The Boston Globe, The New York Times and People Magazine and the subject of a Public Television program, not to mention a 100 underground reviews) suddenly a neophyte having a bad day torpedoes my magnum opus in 6 mins. 30 secs?

...I don't think so...look here Jack, thinking is hard work that's why not a lot of people do it, give it a try Dude. It really doesn't matter to me what people are saying just so's they are talking about me and NFTD, ever in the vanguard, way ahead of the curve, and over your head son, over your head...Regardz, TWard

Jack apparently hasn’t heard: Even people who don't like to read like to read Notes From The Dump, am I wrong? Take a couple Pamprin Jack...

'Small's Paradise' , in Harlem...

…was (and maybe still is I haven’t been there in 35 years) the penultimate Black Blues & Jazz club, the ultimate being The Apollo, also in Harlem, but Small’s Paradise is also world-renowned, being the hip and hip-swinging joint it has been since the start where such pre-eminent musicians as Jimmy Smith, Art Blakey, Jimmy McGriff, Stanley Turrentine, Billy Holliday, B.B. King, Cannonball Adderley and so many many others either began or continued or in some cases wound up their careers at Small’s Paradise, a legend in its own time owned by a legend in his own time because sometime in the early 60s I think, a guy named Wilt Chamberlain bought up Small’s and ever after it was known as Big Wilt’s Small’s Paradise, and of course there was only one Big Wilt, to whom, morning though it may be, I heartily if sadly drink a stout in his memory: Long Live the Late, Great Wilt Chamberlain, first of the 7 footers (7’2” at his peak), first in so many basketball records – no one has ever scored a 100 points in one game except Wilt, and actually because of the rules built in since that 1962 record was set, no one ever will again…one year he averaged 50 points per game…so long Big Fellow! You were one of a kind and wonderful on and off court!

It's hard to take a schmuck...

…like Rudolph Giuliani seriously.

President Giuliani? Give me a break, the real Rudy is pre-9-11...

Rude Rudy is the consummate politician (I mean that in a derogatory sense although generally I think consummate is taken to mean the best of something but there are no bests in the political arena, they are all second choice, second-rate do-nothings living off the public weal while pretending they are guiding us through the intricacies of life – speaking of folderol and balderdash), and all this hoopla over a painting of the Virgin Mary being splattered with camel dung IS folderol. First off, who really gives a shit? I’ve got a lot of work to do, wood to cut and haul and bring in in the few remaining weeks before the snow flies, and I’ve got meaningful editorials and deathless prose to compose…motorcycles to ride, a friend or two to visit, and so on…I don’t have time for the kind of silliness which is preoccupying the mind of Mayor Giuliani, although I’m not sure he has much of a mind; indeed, I’ve heard when he is alone in a room there’s a vacuum…

Rudy is merely stumping for Senator amongst The Faithful. Look, I don’t like camel shit dropped on my paintings either Rudy, whether of Mary Christ or Canal Street in Bellows Falls, but who am I to say what is art? And who are you, Lord and Master? – to say you’ll have the museum showing the painting in question, run out of town? If you and your co-conspirator – Major Media – hadn’t made such a fuss over the stupid thing anyway, nobody would ever even have heard of it.

All you’re doing is casting about for votes from the fundamentalists, the papists, the religious right and a variety of other sectarian nut cases as you run in vain against Hillary Rodham Clinton who’s gonna make short work out of you, Mayor. I’m bettin’ not even your own wife votes for you!

You and Rue Paul can then get together and do a sidewalk act outside Penn Station, or a traveling salvation show at all the drag strips...

(I’m pretty flagrante delicto with my whipping of The (former) Mayor don’t you think? It’s because I know most likely he’ll never see this so none of his boys will come at me with badges, sap gloves and Glocks and put 41 rounds through me.)

Whoever hung the sobriquet 'Great'...

…on Peter the…

...as in Peter The Great, Tsar of Russia in the early 1700s, should have added Peter The Great Big Prick for he was a nasty bastard, going so far as to have his son the Tsarevich Alexis tortured and from which apparently he died a few days later, begging his father’s forgiveness.

...being knouted was not/is not a pleasant way to spend the afternoon…the Tsarevich skin was basically flayed like a trout while dad watched to make sure the soldier doing it didn’t wimp out…he was a monster was Peter The Great, but I suppose ‘great’ can be good great or bad great, in which case he was still Peter The Great.

...in his time he would make the horrendous atrocities of today’s Taliban seem like child’s play; by the 1,000s were they led to the scaffold, to the wheel to be broken by sledge hammers, up the bloody steps to the executioner waiting with an axe to hack off your head, gulp, here comes Peter and the great big prick is pissed…

Peter hung some particularly recalcitrant home guardsmen – the Streltsy – from street lamps and trees throughout Moscow and just left them there to dangle & rot and collapse into a heap as they disintegrated, left for all to see to show those who did not get hung or broken on the wheel or pole-axed, that Peter the Great was not to be trifled with.

And if he – Peter – was a monster, what of Ivan the Terrible!? What must his history read like?! Well, for me, no one writes Russian history better than Robert K. Massie who wrote ‘Nicholas and Alexandra’ and this book I’m spellbound by, ‘Peter The Great, His Life and World’ – if you like reading history this is for you.

Random NOTES From Wrinkled Scraps...

…once inside the borders of America everyone – citizen, alien, illegal alien, visitor, what have you – everyone, even a terrorist of any persuasion – is subject to and protected by American laws.

Even I know that so I was stunned when this clueless judge’s ruling was overturned…I can’t remember the particulars nor where I read it on the web but it was a case where a judge ruled that an alien was not protected by American laws because the alleged perp was an illegal alien but the hard, inalienable fact is that if you are in America, no matter who you are or how you got here, you are subject to and protected by all of American laws.

It is exactly that cut and dry and I am amazed a judge wouldn’t know that – what sort of trail has he left behind him…

…I’ve never heard of the band Coldplay until now and have yet to hear what they do but I can barely restrain myself from running over to Turn It Up CDs and grab a copy after reading this comment from a New York Times appraisal of the band by Jon Pareles, ‘…the most insufferable band of the decade…the lyrics can make me wish I didn’t understand English…’ Too funny…cracks me up.

Sell that (which) thou hast and give it to the poor, is, I think, a Biblical admonition and in fact may be a tenet of other beliefs – Christian, Moslem, Jew and Pagans alike may feel that way, so why then are the patriarchs of all the aforementioned beliefs running around in high-end vehicles, wearing threads of the finest cloths, bling that would shame any self-respecting Gangsta, jewelry, man, gold and silver and rubies and emeralds and, well…don’t get me going there, I mean bling Dude real bling the real thing - gold and silver and diamond and pearls, nothing Wal-Mart about it…what happened to sackcloth and sandals?

Some goofy general spouting the party line...

…I see, was quick to assure us that the helicopter which crashed and burned in Baghdad and killed 18 more members of our loving American family was not shot down but augered in because of a mechanical failure, as though that made it alright.

…the insurgency didn’t shoot it down, we are told, rather mechanical problems doomed it, just a matter of metal fatigue of the Vietnam-era aircraft, or some such balderdash when in fact one of those sleazo Defense Department contractors who’d sell out his mother, no doubt sold defective equipment to the military…something along those lines…the Pentagonian view of war is never what’s really going on, in my considered opinion, but what do I know?

…I know this, at least as I see it - those 18 dead in that chopper were killed by George Bush and Dick Cheney, two of the most dangerous men on earth…a two-man terrorist organization…well, November ’08 is getting closer but by the books it spells, at a guess, 3,000 more dead by then…those two boys have created a monster which has taken on a life of its own and is taking the lives of our own.

By now he's been trundled off to the Big House...

…and soon will be forgotten by all but his family and few friends, forgotten in the warrens of the dungeon known as Leavenworth, but Sergeant Lawrence G. Hutchins III (the Marine who killed an innocent Iraqi man and then tried to make it seem the dead man was an insurgent when he wasn’t) should have as his cellmates, George W. Bush and Richard Cheney - because if Lawrence Hutchins is guilty of murder, which he is, then so too are George Bush and Richard Cheney because had they not sent Sgt. Hutchins there on a false premise he would have stayed home and shot pool with the boys in the NCO club…

…instead, the charge is murder, the sentence, 15 years! What a bleak world lies ahead for him, he’s like only about 23 years old and he’ll do most of that time before he’ll get over those steel bars and stone walls…he shouldn’t have done what he did but he wouldn’t have if his Commander-In-Chief and his pit bull, Majordomo and General Factotum, the abrasive Dick Cheney, thugs in suits, hadn’t started World War III.

Formerly, The Palace