Pay Your Fucking Taxes, Stupid Billionaires

Absconded Capital in the 21st Century 

When I was a kid I asked my economist father if they put all the money in the world in one place and divided it up with everybody on the planet (I must have been a nascent communist), whether would all be reasonably well off or not. My father replied there wasn't such wealth in the world to make everybody well off, let alone wealthy. We would all get about a month's pay and then the money would be spent. 

Of course, that's a long time ago and  since then we've learned through such things as the Panama Papers that global wealth locked up and hidden away from the prying eyes of tax offices of various governments is such that it would make us all rather well off, if not wealthy, if redistributed globally. Thomas Piketty's big book essentially underlined how this terrible state came to be.  

The drain of wealth out of nations via Tax Haven has got to be one of the worst injustices going around. The fact that that capital largely does not work - i.e. put to good use in building factories and towards production and instead sits around on government bonds and debt structures around the world exacerbates the various injustices threefold: once for the tax not paid, once for the misapplication of capital, and once again for the lack of debt forgiveness that condemns the third world to its third world existence. You know, those world vision starving kids and all that, is a side effect of this money sitting on all those bonds.  You gotta laugh when the charities come knocking on your door, that they expect piling up your $5 will somehow counteract the mountain of bonds.  

While I don't believe in a radical redistribution wealth like I did when I was 5, I do sort of think the least the billionaire classes can do is pay their fucking fair share of taxes. 

...and so, to this song! 

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No More Time

We Ran Out Of Time To Fix This World

It's been awhile. Apologies. 

The updated interface fro Blogger has proven to be a deterrent. It's actually quite annoying endless user-friendly than the old one. I'll try and get on top of it and come back more often but ... you know how things can get. Your out of time to do things. 

I've got this new song out. You should check it out. 

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'Liberosis of the Moon'

And Why Would The Moon Care?

It's only been staring down at us mere mortals for along as anything's been crawling or swimming or walking or flying on the face of this earth.

Liberosis 

n. the desire to care less about things—to loosen your grip on your life, to stop glancing behind you every few steps, afraid that someone will snatch it from you before you reach the end zone—rather to hold your life loosely and playfully, like a volleyball, keeping it in the air, with only quick fleeting interventions, bouncing freely in the hands of trusted friends, always in play.

The moon, is barren. Its emotions austere. It is not surprising it has the desire to care less about things. It may even be that it has already reached the absolute zero of caring as it orbits this planet.



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'Onism and Wolves'

You Are Where You Are

Our consciousness is not that different to that of animals. We think our ability to articulate words and therefore convey meaning makes us so different from animals but this is a misconception of what our conscious mind consists. The 'I' we place as the 0 - 0 coordinate is a construct that enables to decide on fairly simple things like what one might want to eat or when one might want to go to the toilet. Most offer biological functions come through this filter and manifest themselves in our minds. And to that extent we are no different to the cat that miaows demanding to be let out of the house or the dog that barks at passing cars in annoyance and boredom.

With that said, it's wort considering this word today:

Onism 

n. the frustration of being stuck in just one body, that inhabits only one place at a time, which is like standing in front of the departures screen at an airport, flickering over with strange place names like other people’s passwords, each representing one more thing you’ll never get to see before you die—and all because, as the arrow on the map helpfully points out, you are here.

We need to drill down deeper into what we think we are and where we think we exist. The space time we perceive is a lot more motile and defiant towards any meaning we place on it. You may be better off to strip away the abstractions and feel your way into the wind like wolves.




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'Exulansis'

Is It Me, For A Moment?

The totality of your life is impossible to communicate. I always laugh when I watch some TV show or movie where the conflict revolves around a character withholding information about themselves. The other party berates the character as being dishonest, and make the charge that such dishonesty leads to communication breakdown or worse still, a termination of trust.

What never seems to be discussed in such instances is the impossibility of conveying one's entire truth in pith dialogue that even a middle-American yokel can understand with bite-size chunks of wisdom sprinkled in. So for that purpose we have to explore this word here:

Exulansis 

n. the tendency to give up trying to talk about an experience because people are unable to relate to it—whether through envy or pity or simple foreignness—which allows it to drift away from the rest of your life story, until the memory itself feels out of place, almost mythical, wandering restlessly in the fog, no longer even looking for a place to land.

That's some problematic stuff right there for any character on screen that has to convey their way-out-there truth. Like "I'm Batman", or "I love you" or "I eat snails for breakfast".
Sometimes, you just ca't put it into words. That's just the truth of the matter.




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'Ellipsism'

How Does It End?

If you read history, you know you experience this feeling.

Ellipsism

n. sadness that you’ll never be able to know how history will turn out, that you’ll dutifully pass on the joke of being alive without ever learning the punchline—the name of the beneficiary of all human struggle, the sum of the final payout of every investment ever made in the future—which may not suit your sense of humor anyway and will probably involve how many people it takes to change a lightbulb.

Clive James who knew he was dying of cancer let out his own ellipsis around the time of the end of season 2 of 'Game of Thrones'. His lament was that he would not live to see how it would all end on that TV series. He expressed some embarrassment that man of his age would be so caught up in the kind fiction that had dragons in it, but he needn't have worried - it's not as if his own poetry was terribly profound or deeply meaningful. Lucky for him, he outlasted the last season and saw it all end.  I don't know what he thought of the end, whether he was with all the people that complained about it, to whether maybe he was exhausted by the narrative, he accepted for what it was.

When Francis Fukuyama wrote the book 'The End of History', it seemed eminently premature to declare not just because I was still young but because there were clearly lots of people still about from whence history would be made. The end of history necessarily comes when there is a last man standing, watching the devastated horror of the extinction of all living things, with nobody to read how it all happened.

Yet if the likes of Tacitus or Suetonius or Thucydides felt ellipsism it is not surprising nor is it something to be pitied. Have great empathy for their ellipsism. There is a desire to see out how things turn out. It is what keeps us tuned in and turned on to all the events that unfold around us. Perhaps it i the first human condition that takes place when one balances one's own mortality with the absolute of time.



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'Jolly Jouska'

Talking To Yourself Is A Sign Of Madness

It's hard to get things right the first time. If you sit down to do a recording, Take 1 is never right. Take 2 sometimes is just right, but Take 1 being the golden Take is very rare. And so in conversations, where there are no opportunities to perfect the discourse, you don't quite get things out the way you want to, and this leads to this weird process of dissecting one's own thoughts in endless internal dialogue afterwards.

Jouska 

n. a hypothetical conversation that you compulsively play out in your head—a crisp analysis, a cathartic dialogue, a devastating comeback—which serves as a kind of psychological batting cage where you can connect more deeply with people than in the small ball of everyday life, which is a frustratingly cautious game of change-up pitches, sacrifice bunts, and intentional walks.

Which all makes it sound rather jolly. Life also has a way of eluding the jolly.

Imagine a life. A person gets out at the beginning and gets run over by a freak bus. They leave the front door one morning, and this random crazy bus rides up on to the sidewalk and takes them out.
He survives, but he is messed up - he will never be who he was going to be for the rest of his life.

Then he eventually gets up form his hospital bed and wonders what the hell is going on and what the hell just happened - but there is no answer. So they are doomed to question what the hell happened to them as they left the door to their house. Was that the wrong decision? Yet everybody else leaves home at the start of the day. Was it that the wasn't looking carefully enough? Perhaps he reacted too slowly and the bus ran him over. Or perhaps it was the driver's fault and not his own, but he feels like he needs to shoulder some of the responsibility.

And so he talks to himself endlessly, in a sad bid to unravel the mystery of how his life was altered irrevocably. That, is his jouska.

It sucks, yeah?



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'Regal Vellichor'

Mostly Musty

This COVID-19 pandemic situation has nudged me back towards reading books. So it seems appropriate that the word we're hijacking for song titles is vellichor.

vellichor 

n. the strange wistfulness of used bookstores, which are somehow infused with the passage of time—filled with thousands of old books you’ll never have time to read, each of which is itself locked in its own era, bound and dated and papered over like an old room the author abandoned years ago, a hidden annex littered with thoughts left just as they were on the day they were captured.

The most recent book I read is about the many diasporas of humanity out of Africa. It seems long ago - probably about 60,000 years ago that we left Africa as Homo Sapiens. Judging by how lacking in wisdom humanity is, clearly that time has not gone towards accumulating a whole wisdom.

I realise as I write this entry that my habit of reading books gave way to a habit of producing music.It is ironic somewhat that one goes from a phase of life where there is nothing one can do to produce what they want to produce and so one must spend time devouring texts to enrich one's mind; and then to a phase of life where one has the means of production so it is incumbent upon one to keep producing as much as one can using all the available time at hand.

All the same I would like to go back to reading in equal measure. It's not that I have stopped liking the producing part, it is just that I do miss spending time with books. Reading is great - even the reading of somewhat-crappy-books.



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'Blue Sonder'

You Are Not Alone

The definition of Sonder goes like this:

Sonder 

n. the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own—populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness—an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that you’ll never know existed, in which you might appear only once, as an extra sipping coffee in the background, as a blur of traffic passing on the highway, as a lighted window at dusk.

I am guessing that, with all this social distancing due to the COVID-19 pandemic, "other people" is starting to seem like an abstract idea. It's kind of getting that way with me. My friends are becoming voices down a phone line or messages on social media. It's a little daunting to think I won't be grabbing a bite to eat with my old buddies at our favourite haunts for at last 6 months, and god only knows if our favourite haunts would even be in business 6 months down the track.

The wider picture of course is that our ancestors survives the bubonic plague and other epidemics and pandemics. Even our grandparents and great grandparents survived the Spanish Flu of 1918-1919; although in writing that, it seems important that it did go on longer than a year with that particular pandemic. You take a moment to contemplate those lives and their losses, and their suffering and well, that's even more cause for sonder.

When I as working on this one, it didn't really occur to method I would be putting it out during a global pandemic. That is the nature of time. You only get to live the history that comes to you.
We were warned about a pandemic. We just didn't seem to factor it into our thinking, even with all the fiction that warned us of what it might be like in the 21st Century. This is not quite Bocaccio's Decameron or Albert Camus' plague, or even Love in the time of Cholera. It's more a prosaic confrontation with ethereality that toilet paper is valued more highly than most other things in the supermarket when it comes to our consumerist society.



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'Tea in the Sahara'

"One Wish Before We Die"

For a start, it's April Fools. It's going to be a few days before Nodus Tollens is going to come out. I figure it might be an opportune moment to talk about this instrumental cover I did.

The original is of course the snobby, The Police on their Synchronicity album. It used to be the last track on the LP released in Australia, but later iterations and the CD version features 'Murder by Numbers' as an extra bonus track that comes after 'Tea in The Sahara'. I like 'Murder by Numbers' but one thing it is not, is a closing track for me. It creates more confusion than anything. If the Police didn't think it was worth putting on the original release, I kind wondered if it really belongs at the end of a very unified album without it.

Rick Beato has a nice video about how wonderful 'Murder by Numbers' is but really, one must ask, does it really belong on Synchronicity? And if so, does it belong as the last track?

What's interesting about this song is how the intro section is a C#minor vamp kind of thing which then slides into the verse which is built around F#minor and A, and the Chorus is a disarming I-IV-V sequence in E which resolves back at the C#minor. There's an almost mathematical beauty in how the bits fit together while disguising the E major feel of the chorus right through the intro and verse. Sting works very hard to hide the dirty secret that the song has a happy I-IV-V chorus until it lands on your lap like a delightful surprise. Who writes exquisite songs like this any more?

Rick Beato was also talking about Paul McCartney and Sting as seemingly the only two people who write modal songs, and nobody else seems to do it. It's getting to be a lost art.

With all that said... This is a bit of fun cover. I never feel up to singing Police songs, but I always like playing them on guitar and bass, so it seems inevitable I'd play a cover of something by them at some point. This version features my Telecaster, and my PJ bass. It's a very Fender kind of recording.

Nodus Tollens

Don't Know When Exactly But..

I've got an album of instrumentals coming out. It's more stuff in the vein of 'Neurotronic' where I let the synths and modulators go spastic and then figured out how to play guitars and bass and drums against it. It's not like there is any high falutin' concept beyond trying to make the seemingly atonal fold back into something that resembles guitar rock.

'Nodus Tollens' is the name the album. The term Nodus Tollens apparently means "the realisation that the plot of your life doesn't make any sense to you any more." I figure a lot of things could be said about such a statement. Maybe I'll wait until I get into it track by track once the damn thing gets its release.

Yes. When is it coming it out anyway?
This album was supposed to come out on the 29th March 2020 but there was a mix up with the Distributor and so here we are in limbo. It might take a week for it to getup.With the COVID-19 situation going, it might take even longer but you wonder how hard it could be to mount a digital release. It's not like I'm pressing these albums.

After 2 years of doing these digital releases, something wonderful happened. Somebody actually downloaded one of my tracks paying real money for it - all US$0.99 of it. Hey I'd like to encourage that here so whoever it was, kudos to you! Everybody should learn from this person's good behaviour.  If you're reading this blog, come on, you know you like this stuff well enough.


UPDATE:
 ....and here it is. Let it rip.

'Closing Time Blues'

Love in the Time Before Corona

It's certainly disorienting to be talking about hanging at bars until closing time in an era when pubs and bars are all closed by state order in a bid to stifle the Coronavirus spreading. I mean who'd a thunk it, whereby all the drinking holes in all the world are closed thanks to this damn virus. What will happen to that famous line in Casablanca wherein Rick Blaine (played by Humphrey Bogart of course) intones in a demeanour best described as glum:

"Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine."

Yup. That line doesn't feel the same in this exact day and age where you can't hang out until they throw you out.

I'm not much a drinker to begin with. My policy is one-and-done on any given night. I'm not a teetotaller because I found out Adolf Hitler was one, but I can be pretty close to being one for very long stretches. I as once pulled over for random breath testing in the mid-90s and was asked when my last drink was by the police officer. My reply was "I think 1987..."

Which is to say the periods that I did hang out 'til I was thrown out were fairly brief. And truth be told by the time I was being thrown out at closing time, I was pretty sober because I was a one-and-done guy. I was genuinely there for the drunk-and-sorry company. The best and worst of all that is to say I'm probably not cut out to be an alcoholic; but as the other songs in this series might indicate I could very well be addicted to other bad behaviours.

In closing out this series of songs, I have to say the album didn't work out the way I thought it would. I wanted to do a more reflective, slow-moving, lyric-driven, thoughtful kind of blues album. Instead I've written about stupid sex secrets of travellers and swingers and teenage nymphos. Nothing ever goes to plan and with this song, I have the feeling I've just fallen back on my natural thing where I zip along at 145bpm or so. There's a bigger gulf between the way one envisages one's music and actually how it plays out when it comes out of you. If I had a reason to be blue about closing out this album, I guess it would be just that: I wish that I'd gotten further away from my own natural inclinations than I did.




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'Zombies of Lust'

What's There To Complain About?

If a guy could magically become a Lothario, a Casanova, a Don Juan or Don Draper, would a red blooded male turn it down? I think it would take a lot of shunted libido and strange refractions in the persona before a guy could confidently say 'no'. We're all suckers for a bit of a good time.  In turn, when you get into the limerence of a new relationship and all you do is fuck, you enter a brain space where you may as well be a zombie. You become fuck-headed.

In my own moments of being fuckheaded, I've made drastically bad decisions in my life which I can only attribute to the absence of proper perspective and judgment that comes from being fuckheaded. You're like a zombie, devoid of a brain and so you make stupid decisions - but you tell yourself afterwards the fucking was great, so the losses accrued from the bad decision are worth it.

It's like your whole reality is warped by the experience of too much sex. You don't know where the line is because you cross over it ever so quietly and when you do, you're crossing it by concentrating on something else entirely. Judgments about one's own life are impaired severely at such junctures. You ask yourself afterwards why in the hell you didn't see the problems coming. You don't because pussy has a way of distorting reality. So you have to understand this: if you have a friend who is going through the limerence that comes with love and is getting laid really well, it is best not to ask them very important questions with consequences. A Lothario, a Casanova, a Don Juan or Don Draper is not a good arbiter of sane life decisions by dint of being on the wrong side of the line.

They're just Zombies of Lust.


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'One More Time Before I Die'

True Stories, Tall, and Short

The thing about life and lyrics is that you run out of things to write about your own life. I ran out of things to write about my life and love life at that, a very longtime ago. I don't mean to boast but, I've written a lot of songs my time and written a bunch of short stories in my time, and lord only knows I've written a shit tonne of blog posts over here too. It's natural that you pick the low hanging fruit of your life pretty damn clean, somewhere along in your creative life. It's just something that happens in a creative life.

You don't have to be Picasso or Paul Klee to want to re-invent the way you approach things from first principles, and unless you are Titian who never bored of painting similar kinds of portraits, you do go looking for different subjects and topics to address. You can't keep going over the same terrain repeating yourself - unless you're a bluesman. Then it's de rigeur.

One of the reasons I ran out love songs to write is because at some point I settled down and stopped lusting after the next pretty face that came along. That too is life. You can't keep riding on the testosterone, getting into romantic scraps in search of ever more love songs. Or just any old relationship-related songs for that matter. It's often better to go all Paul McCartney and pick song titles and stories out of newspapers. Not to mention the fact that love, as portrayed in pop songs is more akin to mental illness than actual love, but that is sort of another topic for another day.

All that said, you do luck out sometimes.

My musical acquaintance Paul regaled me with the story of two old blokes on a bus wherein the conversation revolved around wanting to have one last fuck before they shuffled off their portal coil. I was in a bus and this woman loudly proclaimed in a phone conversation - which she forced everybody to listen to on the bus - that she would like to get laid just one more time with the guy she slept with the night before. And then there was this teenage girl who is always talking way too loud on the bus wondering out loud if she will ever have sex again, after she dumped her boyfriend.

Sometimes life gifts you three verses, jus like that. You'd be a mug not to write it down into a song.



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'Lonesome Swingers' Party Blues'

Where Are the Swingers Parties of Yesteryear?

This one's a weird one. Just bear with me.

Years ago a guy with a heavy-duty surname went missing. Turned out he went to a swingers party without a partner and it got him killed. Turns out you need to bring a partner to a Swingers' party because if you don't you probably just end up with blokes, and that's not exactly the desired outcome. You're meant to be fucking each others wives/girlfriends/spouses, so you have to bring a partner or you can't participate.

The rule sounds fair but I wonder if not bringing a partner really is punishable by death. It seems rather extreme for a club exercising its membership rules.

That happened way back in January 2010, just over a decade ago. The actual killing happened over the Australia Day long weekend and I remember this because a guy called Benjamin Fulford predicted that a Rockefeller would be killed in late 2009, and well, this guy's surname was Rockefeller.

Does one put much provenance into things like that? One probably shouldn't.

Still, Benjamin Fulford also predicted that Pope Benedict XVI would resign, probably about 18 months before it happened, and that was freaky too because no Pope had resigned in nearly 600 years. So how did he know? He probably has good sources. Therefore, one could be led to wonder if the murder of one swinging dude was or wasn't part of some conspiracy theory fantasy - one does not know. I certainly don't but you have to take note when symbols line up.

Anyway, I decided I would take the news story at face value rather than indulge the conspiracy theory bit, and wrote a song about a guy who wants to go to a swingers' party but his spouse won't agree to go. I figured that was enough weirdness for one song without the ramification of a world conspiracy where Rockefeller's and Rothschilds are plotting to reduce the world population through bio-engineered pandemics. I mean it might be what's going on with SARS, MERS, and COVID-19, but on an album called Blues Balls, the swingers party is enough, no?




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