Blues Balls

New Album is Out

I've been working on a blues album of sorts this year.
Partly inspired by a bunch of blues numbers from disparate artists, I wondered what the hell I'd sound like trying to do just the blues, and of course as it turns out, I can't just do the blues. This is the result of a year's dicking around with the blues instead of working on rock music.

For whatever it's worth, it's all new material - no old songs from some deep dark part of the 20th Century. Just letting loose with the vibe, so to speak.

Check it out:

'Zebras'

And You Just Keep Running 

We always wanted to write something deeply romantic without it being just about love. A song that could convey the kind of universal, unquestioning love for all living things. Grand visions, grand aspirations, and in the most abstract way. At the same time, perhaps make it sound as grand as the ambitions, like a Bond movie theme song. And while I'm not about to get up there and be Shirley Bassey or Tom Jones, the aspiration was to be grand in posture. A bit hard when you're just this ill-equipped teen in the 'burbs in a 3-piece band.

Most of the time when we played, we had big finishes. Like an eternal yearning for the most sublime climax, the finishes would be a reach towards an orgasmic crescendo of sound, probably modelled on the last few bars of 'Wont Get Fooled Again'. So just for once we had this song that didn't end on a mounting sequence of ever bigger thumps on the open strings of the cranked guitars.

Of course, when you do things that are not to your natural inclinations, it tends to work against you putting it out to the world well. The song slowly faded from our early repertoire and ended up in the bottom drawer... until now.

I kind of like the soft denouement. I don't know if anybody really writes songs like this anymore.




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'Crane Song'

A Song Not About Cranes At All

As I keep writing here, it's hard enough writing any song, let alone about love. Writing about the first kiss is an impossibly delicate task. You have to temper it with a sense of distance and yet capture the overwhelming rush of hormones without being prosaic, nor overly poetic. Naturalism and hyperbole are both extremes you want to eschew as you sneak up on the topic. Sometimes the hunt takes years. Fortunately songs can afford to wait. It is utterly unlike the challenges of capturing that moment in front of the lens with actors standing in and having to direct them to the perfect moment on film.

If your song writing fraternity consists of Arts faculty graduates, the task gets even more self-conscious in an attempt to stamp out lines that betray your base instincts to the Freudian critic, while presenting the right kind of archetypes for the Jungian to find. Then you have to go and find the objective correlative - or so I've been told - that fits the mood and nuance perfectly and portray that as a kind of transference of meaning.
Yeah right.

At least, those were the kinds of obstacles we had to negotiate in order to write the somewhat abstract kinds of songs we used to write where by nobody understood what the hell it was about in the first listen. And maybe that was good way back when.

This is not that song.



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'Apocalypse in 4/4'

Supper's Not Ready

There are days you wonder if we're actually seeing the end of civilisation. Maybe it already has ended. There's certainly not much civilised about the Trump Administration and the on-going LNP Coalition Government in Australia is totally of the end times. I never thought things would get this bad. Some things are beyond the imagination.

Unlike Genesis who thought the Apocalypse might play out in 9/8, we had the theory it would play out in a dumb 4/4. I think we were right to that extent if EDM and Hip Hop and Top 40 is anything to go by. Music doesn't get more sophisticated, it gets less sophisticated in order to appeal to ever more people and chances are that ever-more population is less literate than the previous generation because that's essentially how dumbing down of society goes, and really, how else do you explain the Trump Administration or the LNP Coalition Government in Australia without the concept of an extended period of dumbing down? Let's face it, were not waltzing to our dooms, we're marching.

We live in terrible times, really. May as well enjoy what you can while you can.




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'The End of Our Love'

And In The End, The Grief You Give, Is Equal To The Grief You Get

This one closes out the trilogy of love-gone-wrong songs.
We finally get to acceptance in the stages of grieving.

I was going to write a bit about grief and trauma and the need to heal and all that but you can probably get that elsewhere on the internet from people who are much better qualified. All I've got for you is a lousy song. You know how it is - it's hard to continually live up to our best intentions and that's why relationships fail.

Look, I'm sorry I couldn't really give you something meaningful to do with this song, apart from the fact that it's fiction. The dude in the song isn't me and these aren't my experiences, so there's that.

I tell you what gives me grief these days is not some old relationship breaking down or my friends having bust ups and divorces. It's actually how fucked our politicians have been at addressing climate change a.k.a Global Warming. I keep flip-flopping between disbelief that our leaders are so inept and lacking in spine and vision, and anger where I think they should all be lined up against a wall and  shot, for all their crimes against humanity. We can't seem to negotiate anything with these politicians while our country burns with historically bad bush fires.
The land is burning.
Just how the hell are we to accept our politicians and their so-called 'leadership'?




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'Meet Me Midway'

Meet Me Anywhere, Really

This is the second song in the trilogy of bad breakups. Of course, after the anger and denial comes the negotiation. God, where does one start? I used to think my breakup was terrible but really, it had nothing on the drama that befell some of my friends.

Quite coincidentally, I have three friends by the name of Darren, and all three have had divorces. One of the divorces was protracted and was a result of years of arguing and bickering. Another happened after years of trying to have a child and having failed, it destroyed the meaning of the two being together. The hurt was too much and so was the backbiting and belittling that followed - truest expressions of sincere resentments were exchanged, like gunfire. The third Darren broke up recently and as far as I can tell they split because they stopped even talking to one another in ay meaningful way.

And with each one there was this cloud of unhappy recrimination that hung over them and their ex like a personal rain cloud. I helped one of them move out of his house and vividly recall the rigmarole of getting the van and loading it up and driving it to the storage place for safekeeping while he looked for a place to move in. And the ex came around to make sure he didn't run off with the furniture she wanted to keep and the conversation was civil but devoid of compassion or empathy. They're the things you remember and think "yeah maybe I'll write a song about that."

Life can be underwhelming at best of times times but the mistakes we make on the back of our relationships can truly suck. Like I said, I can write about those bits such better than about love.



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'Take Responsibility'

Take Responsibility? For What Exactly?

This is part 1 in a trilogy of love-gone-wrong songs. As noted previously, I'm not great on love songs.  It takes a special talent to write love songs and sing them with a straight face and mean it. You have to be like Paul McCartney or something but try as I might, I don't really have the earnest-ness nor the un-ironic belief in love. They make a stage show out the Beatles' music and it's titled 'LOVE'. The Beatles wrote exhaustively about the condition of love and even told us that the love we take is equal to the love we make, and by golly I'm not even sure what that bit of rhetoric means in real life.

It's very strange when something moves you deeply and yet you don't relate to it. I've been listening to the 50th anniversary re-mix of 'Abbey Road' and I tell you, it's a very different world we live in today, and it's a different kind of cultural landscape we inhabit. A lot has happened since then to re-contextualise all those fab songs. It actually is really hard to "get back home" as Paul sings in 'Golden Slumbers'. And yet one basks in the glory of the testament to love that is 'Abbey Road'. It's great, even though I'm now convinced Paul McCartney might be insane based on the psychotic emotional detachment of  'Maxwell's Silver Hammer'.

I tend towards Frank Zappa who wrote broken hearts are for assholes ("yes yes!"), and  I feel far more equipped to exhaustively survey that emotional terrain than others simply because I am wired the way I am. I am also sensitive to the manner in which people talk about love but go in hard for self-serving platitudes or downright selfish acts. There's nothing like a break up to demonstrate how awful human beings can be, and for some reason I have an eye for it. The various divorces and breakups that happened to the people around me have fed plenty of grist in to this mill. We are all capable of being such assholes when things go south - and in the end the grief you get is equal to the grief you give.

In the five stages of grief there's Denial and Anger as the early stages of responding to bad news.
This is the song that covers those bits. The overriding thesis will of course forever be "broken hearts are for assholes"

Are you an asshole too?



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'Surfin' Dog'

Surfin' Dogs Rule the Waves

I know Jimi Hendrix said may you never hear surf music again but if you play guitar long enough, you poke your head into the rich world of surf guitar. That's just the way it goes. You run out of things to do in rock, and you go to the blues, go to jazz, go to Latin, or go flamenco, or even go all African. Some, go to the mystical lands of surf guitar.

There are ins and outs to the surf tone and when you do get into it, there is a treasure trove of very cool guitar moves to be found in the surf lexicon. Of course, you kind of have to put away your Distortion pedals and learn to play clean and listen to the decay in the reverb. It's a very rewarding area if you're a guitar player.

So way back when we were kids, we went into doing a surf-tinged number without really understanding the rich history or the various schools of thought or the tonal considerations. We just wrote what we thought was a pastiche. This song isn't really a surf guitar track, it's just a collage of surf-y ideas and a shark movie thrown in. Maybe we had too much Jimi Hendrix running through our minds to do it properly and respectfully, and we were into irony because that's what a liberal arts education gives you. A taste for more irony than is proper in polite, conservative, company.

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'Cadillacs and Cowboy Songs'

Cadillacs Are The Car Of Choice For Songs


Just another song about longing. We wrote a lot of these back then. We longed for the whole world, in a way.

I'd like to pretend this is a personal kind of song but it's not. It's more of an in-joke about things that go on in a band and you accuse other members of the band for wanting to stray from the tried and true rock music you're working towards. It's a sham, really. My bandmate wasn't wanting to go play country music. He just really liked it, and I was the tone police saying "no."

So the longing is probably more about wanting to express yourself in the way you see fit. Sometimes being in a band is tough.




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'Call Me Up'

"Call Any Vegetable, Call It By Name," Sang Frank

I wish I could write a straight up love song, but it's never really been my forte. I don't know why that is, given how many bloody love songs I've listened to along the way. I really can't do a straight love song, I can only do a love-gone-wrong kind of song. It's probably because I just don't believe in the big, all consuming love any more and haven't done so for many years. I hold to Frank Zappa's adage, broken hearts are for assholes, and I can easily admit I'm as big an asshole as any that way.

Still, from time to time you permit yourself into thinking you have love licked - and really, you don't -   but you think you do, and you write something that captures a feeling. You try to catch that butterfly and stick it in the jar of self analysis, and really end up killing the feeling like you do most things you catch and stick in jars.

I once liked this girl. I was ripe for that moment. As these things go, she wanted something else in life that was not me. So all I was left with was the fleeting moment of hope. And for once I managed to write parts of it down. I had it in my drawer for years and then accidentally threw it out when I did a big clean. I knuckled down and tried to remember the words and I couldn't. All I had was the faint recollection of a vague feeling I had years and years ago.

Hence the song here isn't really the song I wrote. It's more like a delicate facsimile of that song. You fall in love with people but it doesn't work out. That's one of the most common things in the world. And yet it feels very different each and every time.




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'Freewheeling'

The Freewheelin' Art Neuro In Honkers

Way back when, in the olden days of the 1980s when they struck the deal to return Hong Kong to China, my friends and I got interested in the historic weird problem of Hong Kong. So we started to write a song about Hong Kong without really understanding it. It's weird because so much of the city rests on the historic injustice of the Opium Wars and if you've ever read the history books about that, you're left wondering about the naked aggression of capitalism and colonialism as practised in the 19th century. The song itself sort of went nowhere because for one thing it was hard to play live and for another thing Hong Kong seemed a world away form the suburbs of Sydney.

Years went by and I got to have a first hand look at Hong Kong in 1996. I was there on contract for 5 weeks at the end of which I was made job offer to go permanent, but because the handover was looming, they didn't want to give me the kind of juicy ex-pat deals. So I declined to stay on.

Though, the other thing that worried me was the presence of the PRC (read, mainland communist China) police officers and the utter gap in perception to do with what Hong Kong had become. The were there to reclaim the place as if all of its glory and wealth naturally belonged to China. It's not true - it was a sad little fishing village until the British came along. What Hong Kong had turned into was the magic fruit of capitalism and colonialism as practised since the 19th Century into the late 20th. Rightly or wrongly, the British who were 'leaving' could lay claim to Hong Kong as an achievement. None of it would have happened without the British. Which, of course was not a popular view in Hong Kong 1996.

Thus in 1996, I was meeting a lot of local people and telling them there was going to be a terrible upheaval and their way of life would lead to conflict with the expectations of their new PRC overlords. It might not happen that year or the next, but it will happen. The answer I got was, "as long as we're all making money, nothing will change. It will be business as usual."

And so it remained for many years after the handover. It was as if they really were Freewheeling down History.

As I watch the news today about the ongoing riots in Hong Kong, I have to say I'm feeling pretty vindicated. Leave things long enough, the reductio ad absurdum reveals itself; the contradictions inherent in the compromises will erupt as a force. The Hong Kong people of 1996 were way too optimistic about what it meant for Hong Kong to "go back to China". Frankly I thought it was deluded sentimentalism. You don't really get to go home in History. There's something historically necessary about the youth of Hong Kong rebelling against the prevailing rule of the PRC proxies.  I get it - it's real as it gets. It's like something straight out of the lyrics of 'Won't get Fooled Again' or 'Street Fighting Man'. It's no accident it's going on and maybe there are inevitable things in history.
Not that it helps them any for me to point this out.

As for the song itself, it harkens back to that moment in 1996 when amazing things seemed a lot more possible than they turned out to be.


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'Peaches'

Peaches'n'Cream

This song came out of the ashes of my time at University of Sydney. It felt like my life was burning down at any rate.

I'd had a bad breakup - true misery like you see in the movies. I really had to leave town and head down to Canberra to meet up with some mates from high school. They were having some kind of festival at this residential college and somehow I landed there with a guitar and a handful of songs. It was quite the refreshing experience in trying to reset my headspace in the hope of continuing with my studies. At the end of the weekend, I felt quite alright.

Then when I got back and walked into the faculty I was greeted with the sight of my ex making out with a student we used to laugh at. And it hit me that I couldn't really continue being there, hating the course, AND hating on the ex's new life choices. Something had to give and what broke was me.

All said and done, I managed to get this song out of that experience. That was something good that you could take away.



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Monstrous Gaussian Regression

Reverting To Type, Goes To Character

Here's the new album, released on 11 July 2019.

The songs on this album are straight out of the playlist for Satellite City way back when we were active. I found myself working in Chatswood of all places, and it seemed strange appropriate to revisit this material. Everything has changed in Chatswood, from the station to the general look of the place as well as demographic. For better or worse, the place is overrun with Chinese expats who bought up heavily in the real estate bubble.

Anyway, the changes prompted a bit of soul-searching as well as a look back and out of that process came these versions of these songs. I'm not trying to do all of my old catalog of songs, by the way. It just worked out that the project following on from Vega V Planet of the Empaths happened to be this retro number.

It's available through a whole host of digital outlets, but maybe it's best if you just went to Apple or Amazon or Spotify.

Quick Shots - 28 Feb 2019

Ex-Cardinal George Fucking Pell, Pederast

I've not blogged anything serious in a long while and the main reason for that is I got burnt out by the stupidity of politics. There's only so much Tony Abbott and climate change denialism and rank class warfare one can take, beyond which came the presidency of Donald Trump. After all of that was the spectacle of various Royal Commissions that laid bare how morally bankrupt our society had become, when it came to making money and getting away with illicit crimes.

Yet, today of all days kind of moved me to blog this date in history. For today is the day Ex-Cardinal George Fucking Pell finds himself in prison for having molested choirboys in the 1990s, while he negotiated away the issue of the Catholic Church's culpability in protecting pederast priests. The irony is simply too much. And if that weren't enough, the Ex-Cardinal got himself excellent character references from two former Prime Minsters of this land.

I am not a wowser. If anything I hate wowsers, so I find myself pleasantly delighted that a man who was the arch-wowser of our times was found out to be exactly the sort of sinner he excoriated from his bully pulpit. The irony is simply too beautiful not to go without being remarked upon. As obvious it is - like the sun in broad day light, really, - this was one man who ought not to have - pardon the phrase - pontificated on the ills of homosexuality when he himself was sticking his penis into the mouths of boys. And I don't for even a single moment mean to suggest it would have somehow been better had he had stuck his dick into the mouths of girls, no, no, no!

And Pell (which is a contraction for Pederast in hell) still insists he is innocent and that he intends to appeal. His lawyer sought a lighter sentence on the grounds that it was a 'vanilla' kind of transgression. Clearly the good counsel has not heard the joke about fucking one goat. It doesn't matter that it only lasted six minutes long, you get judged on the act itself for a reason.

A Father Brennan sought to cast doubt on the judgment itself by suggesting it was impossible to get a penis out to stick it into the mouth of a choirboy from under a Cardinal's robes. It's quite funny because the defence amounts to the same as the idiotic joke wherein it is claimed rapes are impossible because men with trousers around their ankles cannot run after women with the skirts up. It is as if the Catholic Church fraternity have learnt absolutely nothing from the Royal Commission, or the trial and verdict of George Fucking Pell. Creating plausible deniability is hardly the way into the Kingdom of God, Father Brennan.

Two Arseholes in Search of (De-)Meaning

That brings me to the two idiots, the Dishonourable John Howard and Despicable Tony Abbott.

As for the two former Prime Minsters who provided character references, it suggests more about them than it endorses the character of George Fucking Pell. After all, how can they claim their opinions of the man are unchanged in spite of the verdict? Are they thumbing their noses at the court? Are they casting doubt on the system of justice that leans upon jurors? Are they oblivious to the cries of the victims of sexual abuse? Or are they simply dirty old white men circling the wagons around their fellow white man with a conservative weasel mind and a willingness to forgive the errant penis?
In short, have they no embarrassment that they are endorsing a man who shoved his penis down the maws of thirteen year old boys entrusted in his care?

And the answer is clearly not; not, one, bit.

Here's the thing about these men Abbott and Howard. They created the Australia that needed these Royal Commissions. The Royal Commission into banking and insurance had to be done because both of their governments underfunded ASIC and APRA, and came up with terms by which they couldn't go after the most egregious offenders. The Royal Commission in to child abuse by institutions came up because both men presided over governments that privatised out foster care to religious organs, and never looked too hard into the problems when they were Prime Minster. Even the current Royal Commission into Aged Care emerges from the cutting health care budgets and privatising out care for profiteers. The Royal Commission to come on Disability Patients will show the same issue - that successive governments have privatised care out to private profiteers without accountability, and this has resulted in terrible abuse of the most vulnerable.

In fact, these two men contributed greatly to the environment where the Royal Commission were needed because of their polarising politics. The continued cultural wars waged by these two men made it impossible to govern the country in any sensible way. This meant government oversight was limited, understanding dim, knowledge scanty, and mostly blind to abuses in all these areas. All of this was done in the name of fiscal responsibility and tight budgets with a surplus, damn the consequences. Well, the consequences have come home to roost, and none of these Royal Commissions have painted a positive picture of the Federal Government as run by the Coalition.

Really, these men ought to have their platforms taken away in the same way Kevin Spacey had his taken away. They have nothing positive to contribute in public life if what they want to do with their platform is to endorse George Fucking Pell's character.  In most parts of our society, you don't get to claim to have character once you've been convicted of pedophilia.

Even Ray Hadlee thought it was a bit much. And I think Ray Hadlee is a bit much - but that's another rant entirely.

The 121st Day In Sodom

The other ironic thing is that all these people wanted Pier Pasolini's 'Salo' banned. Howard, Abbott, Pell, and Hadlee. Fuck freedom of speech, let's just censor a film based on the Marquis de Sade's big opus, they said. Isn't power to control what other people se or watch corrosive? Probably more than the things they seek to ban.

If you've read '120 Days of Sodom', you would know that a Mayor, a banker, a judged and a bishop get together and create their own little sadistic sex slave haven, and a lot of times spent sexually abusing minors. It's a terrible book, really, except for one thing: it shows us the relationship between the ability of power to corrupt and the libido itself. De Sade wrote this stuff a good half century before Freud, and Co. really nailed his targets. So much so they had his book banned and had De Sade locked up in the Bastille.

It's especially funny to think upon this because if anybody was the highest priest of the land, it was George Fucking Pell, and he turned out to be exactly the kind of monster De Sade said he would be. John Howard is singularly without insight so he is too stupid to understand how it might have happened that his good friend George Fucking Pell turned out to be a monster. Tony Abbott, I suspect knows better, for I suspect Tony Abbott himself is psychosexually perverted by power, and that is why he has remained in Parliament. Being in Parliament being Tony Abbott the wrecker, fuels his libido. It helps him bang Peta Credlin better.

In any case, we now understand better who these men are, thanks to the Marquis de Sade. Don't ever tell me banning his works is a good idea.

How Can Catholics Stay Catholics In This Country After This?

Look, I always bag out religion because I think they're all suspect. That being said, I don't know how Catholics in this country can stay Catholics after a Cardinal has been found to have not only protected pedophile priests, minimised financial pay outs to victims of pedophile priests, and removed the church itself from being sued for damages by those it abused, but also personally abused choir boys in his care?

How can you be okay going back to this church and confessing in the booth to a bunch of people you can no longer trust? Logically, one would look for a personal connection to God that doesn't involve going through priests, and of course that's exactly how the Reformation began. That's just logic, though.

If I were in the Vatican looking at all this, I'd be more than little worried about where Catholicism can go in Australia after this. I guess bullshit is eternal, and I need not worry about the emotional well-being of Catholics, but it has to be said, going back to Church on Sunday would be misconstrued by the rest of society as tacitly supporting these arsehole priests who would protect pedophiles in their ranks.

I mean, are you really going to be okay with that? If so, how fucking low are you willing to go as a society? I'll tell you how low I'm willing to go. From now on, I'm not going to hesitate to ask any Catholic priest how many pedophiles they personally know about and whom they're protecting.

The World Is Stupider Than You Hope

I just want to note Donald Trump is in Hanoi talking to Kim Jong-Un in hopes of reaching a nuclear detente. It won't happen because they're too far apart. All the while Trump's former lawyer who flipped on him was bagging him out in Congress. If you thought that whole scenario wasn't crazy enough, India and Pakistan have started a shooting war without actually calling it a war. Imran Khan was on TV asking to meet the Indian Prime Minister. Who knows if that would work. It would be ironic if World War III started over Kashmir between India and Pakistan exactly while the more likely culprits in Donald Trump and Kim Jong-Un were busy trying to defuse the bomb they made.

That's how deeply in the clutches of stupidity we have ended. Way to go world!
Hey don't look at me. I didn't make it like this.

Vega V - Planet of the Empaths

Got A New Bunch of Songs Out

Yes, it's that time again where I've released some more material.
This album is a collection of songs that used to be in the repertoire of my old old old band Vega V. These songs fell by the wayside as the band evolved and got different members and roles changed. These songs were always kind of fun to play, except they stopped fitting the concept of the band, and so they went into the bottom drawer where such songs go to sleep.
I guess I never gave up on these songs.

I think I read somewhere where Pete Townshend was talking about how he is attached to the songs from the earliest part of his oeuvre. It makes sense - the earliest songs are the songs where the most natural inclinations of the artist come out in the most natural way. It's the songs after no.100 that get very difficult for all parties, including the artist. The artist has to stretch harder contort harder, reach harder, in order to find new material that is satisfying that also has some kind of continuity - no matter how tenuous - to the material that came before. not to compare myself to titans like Pete Townshend or a God like J.S. Bach, but after a thousand and eighty odd bits of composed music, it's no wonder 'Art of the Fugue' is the most convoluted, baroque piece by Bach. Everybody else gets weirded out way before they get to 1080 bits of music.

Speaking for myself, after a mere measly three hundred or so, I decided to go back and re-explore my earliest bits of music. This is the stuff I was doing before I completely weirded myself out. These are the songs from long before I stopped making sense to myself; a time back when where I could spell out each chord and they would mesh, euphonious, into the next chord.

So, there they are, recorded and mixed with the help of 21st Century tech and knowhow, brought back to life like some dinosaur in Jurassic Park. You can squiz through the discography on the sidebar for track names, but better still, just head on over to Spotify or iTunes or Google Play where all digital releases go nowadays.

After all, every play counts.

'Poltergeist'

Hanging Around As An Unhappy Ghost

Once you die... we have these kinds of fantasies about what happens to us after we die. Or dumber still, what we would do with supernatural powers after our demise. It's the kind of train of thought that leaves the platform without a train driver or even logical tracks upon which to drive such trains. Such thoughts are the basis of many a religion and mental unwell-ness.

That said, you can understand the fantasy. You die; but your will transcends the demise of the corporeal, in the most Nietzsche-an way; and you exact vengeance by flinging stuff around the room.
Yeah. That'd be really intense... not.

All the same I wrote song about being a poltergeist who leaves home one day and drifts off wandering like on a cloud, aimless and without the object of one's revenge. I also obtained an Electro-Harmonix Mel-9 pedal which allowed me to trigger a bunch of Mellotron sounds using my guitar, so there are touches of that wonderful device in this one.



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'This Is Your Afterlife Now'

Edited to Add...

Hey, this is the 2500th post of this blog. How amazing is that? Not really? Okay then.
Just thought I'd mention it while I had it in my mind.
if you're one that's read a whole bunch of those entries, many, many many thanks to you for your support!

Humourless At Gaza

When your friends are dying, you're in no mood to write jolly songs of jest and jokes. Not even to cheer them up. You see them put a brave face on it and it lulls you into a false sense of security about being-ness and existence. It's a crock. Death comes as surely as Benjamin Franklin's adage about taxes. If you think I was in a heavy funk about things and writing a bunch of downer songs here, you'd be right. Except on some level, I was trying to get out of writing about my problems with life and death, I was just simply coming up with fictions about fictional characters and their deaths. In some ways, that's how sublimation works.

The character in this song has committed suicide and is freshly dead, but experiences their consciousness drifting off as they hang. It's like the definition of morbid, but there you go.
I did enjoy banging on the keyboard like it was a piano. It's the small things in life that keep you hooked in to the good bits.



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'The Patient'

The Sick Body Politic

I don''t know when it started, but our body politic stopped being normal this decade. If anything, it became unhinged, the more the evidence mounted in favour of Global Warming and Climate Change. The claims of those in denial got to be more strident, more crazy, and largely in denial of things like facts.

I'm sure the people who vote for these idiots, who do not believe in anthropogenic climate change are doing it out of a desperate sense of denial. Tony Abbott becoming the Prime Minster of Australia pretty much destroyed my faith in politics. The United States electing Donald Trump essentially stopped me blogging here because... come on, what would be the point? You're talking about clinically insane people with strongly held stupid beliefs in the highest office of government.

The only conclusion I can draw from it is that the mental illness that makes people deny things and work up a passion is rather widespread. There's a lot of mentally ill people in positions of power, pulling the levers of government, that represents a lot of mentally ill people in the electorate. There is no reason to the absence of reason, by its very definition. You can't talk to the crazy about their being crazy.

When you're sick, you don't really have a normal sense of your self. When you are running a fever, you have thoughts about your illness that are genuinely wild. You think about death and dying and other crazy, bleak things as you suffer. None of it makes any sense when you finally regain yourself and recover from the fever. It would be much worse if you were beset by mental illness and couldn't face scientific facts.

This song is basically about one of those kinds of irrational trains of thought.



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'Funeral and Birth'

You're Born, You Live, You Die

Sorry to be a downer this early in the year. It starts funny sometimes, but that's not the plan.

Here's a song about the cycle of life. The weekend my friend's father passed away also saw the birth of my nephew. It had me thinking about the coincidence and the possible meaning that could be drawn from it. No, I'm not talking reincarnation -  besides which, I think my nephew was born before my friend's father passed away. All the same, people come and go and life really is like some kind of revolving door. Maybe it is like one giant Hotel California.

Last year was bit tougher than the cycle of life and birth, I lost a couple of friends to cancer, and there's really not much you can do about it when it happens, but to mourn. I feel I spent pretty much most of the year last year putting it together in my head as to how to go forward in life without these people. You make do emotionally and you make changes practically, and you learn to live with it pragmatically.





Oh, by the way, I can embed a Spotify playlist apparently, so here it is:

'Just As You Like It'

It's A New Year!

It always comes around, so after a while you wonder if it's worth the celebrations, but I was buried neck deep in it this year. One thing that does happen as you get older is you get a better sense of humour about it.

Anyway, I hope you all had a good one. I've been dragged away again in a way I never expected, but I'm back again, posting up these links.

There will be a new Art Neuro album coming out on 30th January 2019. Yes, that kept me very busy as well. It's all the old songs from the dark ages. I won't divulge just how old, but ... they're old. The recordings themselves are new, and the songs themselves have had a polish, and yet, they are the original songs from a long time ago.

Stay tuned!

In the mean time, here's a song about the ambivalence some people feel about love. The truth is, every moment is precious so if you feel love, you should just go express it. The rest of it is social niceties and manners and customs - and really, those things are not as as important as the love you feel.



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