The Timekeeper's Waltz: Amsterdam

The Timekeeper's Waltz: Amsterdam: "This is a sad song. I guess this is about misguided efforts. Trying to be the protector when all you do is remove choices. Music, as Berli..."

The Timekeeper's Waltz: The Reprise

The Timekeeper's Waltz: The Reprise: "Properly titled ' In the Garden of the Long Pig-Reprise' (but that didn't exactly roll off the tongue) this is the second encounter between ..."

The Timekeeper's Waltz: Penitentiary

The Timekeeper's Waltz: Penitentiary: "So I was out in Southern California a little over a year ago when I decided to take a trip out into the bay, to and old hotel that supposedl..."

The Timekeeper's Waltz: The Son of Jacob Mallet

The Timekeeper's Waltz: The Son of Jacob Mallet: "This one is the epitomy of our economic scene in the first decade of the 21st. OK, I get it, we are in transit. The calculus of change and w..."

The Timekeeper's Waltz: Criminal Cool

The Timekeeper's Waltz: Criminal Cool: "So we work through our days, save and try an make it, and the Frank Lorenzos, Bernie Madoffs, Michael Milkens come play on our weaker sides ..."

The Reprise

Properly titled " In the Garden of the Long Pig-Reprise" (but that didn't exactly roll off the tongue) this is the second encounter between the new world and the old. Our eco tourists, invite our Amazon tour guide back to our jungle for a little visit. It's tongue-in-cheek of course. Self deprecating in my own light hearted (read: dark) way. It's the only way I could describe this city. It's my home, I love it, and as far as I am concerned it represents the center of the known universe. Our historic subtext finally catches up with the present (there can only be one "now") and it's intended to be a celebration of humanity. Because that's what New York is. Nowhere on the planet do so many totally different types of people get along so well.
I'll never forget when I first moved here from London, how easy and safe the place felt, after the unpredictable violence and general angst of England. 
How totally at home I felt for the first time in my life. Different was good. Different was normal.
Because here, everybody's different. The arrowhead of humanity pointing at tomorrow.

The Reprise, from "Beautiful Accident" by The Third International
can be heard on:
http://www.jango.com/
http://www.reverbnation.com/
http://www.itunes.com/

Penitentiary

So I was out in Southern California a little over a year ago when I decided to take a trip out into the bay, to and old hotel that supposedly made the best mojitos on the planet. It was fun putting the claim to the test.
The Hotel Del Coronado is a vacuous place. A flagship of surrealism. It could only exist in California.
It's easy to see the ghosts of Tony Curtis and Marilyn Monroe drift through the cavernous halls as they act out "Some Like it Hot", or imagine Frank Baum penning "The Wizard of Oz" in one of its suites.
Yah, the mojitos were kickin' in.
I got to thinking about the effort that we put into entertaining ourselves. Escaping from reality. And we constantly reinvent it. And a key feature of entertainment is that it is fungible. It wears out. We get fed up with it, no matter how good it is. It may take 500 years...Shakespeare for instance, or 5 seconds....Katy Perry. But sooner or later we are sick of it.
I was having a conversation later that evening when my friend remarked "Yeah the gods will be watching us" and it made me wonder.....What if they are? What if they created us for their entertainment? (Back to the bit about it being fungible...) What if they get BORED with us? What happens? Do we still get to play in the sandbox or is it lights out Charlie? It made for an interesting interlude but of course presented no real worry given my lack of concern for such things. My rabid atheism prevailed. Phew!
A product of the "Free" generation. Self determination, the sanctity of individualism teamed up to put us right up there with the big guy, and if we could conceive of Him, were we not Him? Maybe it was the fact that we gained the power to nuke ourselves into oblivion that made us feel omnipotent? I'm not quite sure what it was that let the gooney bird out of the woodshed;  affluence, rock 'n roll, space travel, heart transplants, LSD, the internet?    
I don't know. But now he's out he 's not going back. This freedom thing is addictive. And it's all about me. Right?
The only problem is the more freedom we have to entertain ourselves, the more we do it.
And the more we do it, the faster we do it. And our attention span diminishes accordingly.
Of course they'll tell you that you couldn't live without the speed of this information flow........
And you'll believe 'em.

Penitentiary (from Beautiful Accident) You can hear it on:
http://www.jango.com/
http://www.reverbnation.com/
http://www.itunes.com/
and a bunch of other places too.

The Son of Jacob Mallet

This one is the epitomy of our economic scene in the first decade of the 21st. OK, I get it, we are in transit. The calculus of change and whatnot. Adapt or perish. And I buy it. I really do. The problem is, when GM lays off 25,000 guys who've done nothing but stamp out sheet metal the last twenty years, it's a little disingenuous of Obama/Bush/whoever to claim that "Education is the answer. Retraining is the key". Hey, if it was me, I'd be right down at the APEX School of Hair Blowin' getting me a new career! But not everybody is that motivated and although we can say they should be, it's not practical to expect a lifelong expectation to evaporate overnight. Here's the rub: These guys had kids who grew up WITH THAT EXPECTATION. The same thing. So what do we do? We subsidize and create another group of dependents in the form of the "perpetually unemployable". If you don't believe me, go to Scotland,or the north of England, and look at the situation there. They're experts at it.
So where's its corollary? The 30s. On the heels of the '29 crash came the Great Depression. The background  environment for the creation of welfare, the S.E.C., the Great Society and a whole mess of other social failures that didn't lift us from our financial nadir. Nope. That was world war 2 for the record.
This is a cornerstone of our social architecture and I think we need to address it. The auto industry is merely one aspect of the problem, but a quick look at the heartland and we see the dislocation to be widespread.
As the website says "Jacob Mallet never lived, yet he lived a thousand times over".

Criminal Cool

So we work through our days, save and try an make it, and the Frank Lorenzos, Bernie Madoffs, Michael Milkens come play on our weaker sides and clean us out. Those of us who don't get clipped exhibit a weird schadenfreude that results in feelgood. It's weak. It results in the glamourization of criminals. It goes back to Robin Hood. Or at least Jesse James. But it really came of age during the roaring 20s.
World War 1 had left America, as the world's arms supplier, the economic alpha bear of the planet. Middle class wealth abounded. Everybody speculated. Some bible pusher decided booze was bad and prohibition succeeded in making 80% of the population criminals. At that point, Bonnie and Clyde, Al Capone, and the rest of the lawless gunslingers didn't look so bad. That started it. It's been downhill ever since (except for a brief hiatus during the Eisenhower years when good ol' Leave it to Beaver steered our moral compass.)
Again, good intentions gone bad.
Anyone who knows me knows I believe in meritocracies. Effort should be rewarded. I never begrudge the wealth a person achieves, no matter how great. (I might not like his/her methods bu that's another thing altogether). It's become popular to beat up on the rich and that's a cheap shot. (heh?). Having said that, there is a social responsibility that comes with the accrual of wealth. Dammit the rich OUGHT to behave better the wealthier they become. So when they get sleazier, greasier, and altogether more sociopathic I just....get well pissed and write songs like this.

Criminal Cool, from the CD "Beautiful Accident" by
The Third International
Available on:
http://www.amazon.com/
http://www.itunes.com/
http://www.jango.com/
http://www.reverbnation.com/

Amsterdam

This is a sad song.
I guess this is about misguided efforts. Trying to be the protector when all you do is remove choices.
Music, as Berlioz said, "Is a noble art and a sad profession". So it's no surprise that when my daughter showed a talent for it I was scared stiff she would want to try and make a living out of it, perhaps. I had done this and they were the hardest years of my life. The most underpaid, unrecognized and under valued individuals I know are all musicians.
So I had her take piano lessons and, as I expected, she reacted with antipathy, becoming an accomplished pianist who played a mean Rachmaninoff but who had no interest in performing, creating, and devoting her life to the wicked mistress, music.
I succeeded. I won.
Clever me.
Perhaps this was at a time in my life when I was distancing myself from art, when I thought it trivial. I don't know. I only know I have come to regret the decision as my love for music, the need to express, communicate ideas, has come alive in my life again, and what I maybe deprived her of is my most beloved pursuit. Maybe it made no difference, but I can't help wondering.
The song sits in the second position on the Beautiful Accident CD, and as its subtext shows the attempt by modern society ro cure all ills with the war to end all wars. The Great War. World War 1. It was supposed to save us from ourselves, to reinvent society as a new and better thing. Of course it was misguided and represented the end of the golden age of modernism and the beginning of a dangerously poor Europe. Society distanced itself rom the great questions, the new frontiers. It became mired in the battle to save itself.
The song was written, like most of the others, during the first decade of the 21st century, against the backdrop of 9/11 and the bunker mentality that ensued.

You can hear it on:
http://www.jango.com/
http://www.reverbnation.com/
http://www.itunes.com/

Performed by The Third International

The Timekeeper's Waltz

Time.
That non renewable commodity.
The one thing we can’t get enough of.
It’s a safe bet that at the end of the day if we were offered more….another go around perhaps? We would take it. Yet so much time is spent criticizing, bitching, complaining about how hard things are. Invariably, if we have a hard time making ends meet then the complaints center around money. If we are wealthy, financially, our concerns and criticisms take on another hue. We can now afford altruism.
One thing is for sure: rich or poor, we can’t get our hands around the idea that our time here is finite.
Religious magicians have made a whole industry out of this fear. “Never mind the present, we’ve got the hereafter sorted.” And lives, whole societies and behaviour patterns revolve around this fear.
It’s true that where it all came from/where it is all going to is the great conundrum. To date nobody has satisfied me with an answer. Not the church. Not the concept of reincarnation. Not the big bang. Not parallel universes or ‘brane theory. Nothing gets to the bottom of “How it all started”.
I think Einstein was on to something when he conceived of the idea that time was not linear. But Albert stopped short. He had a few curiously provincial ideas about him for a man with a great imagination. The “steady state “ universe for one. How can someone who embraces an abstract nature of time simply refuse to believe in a dynamic cosmos? Maybe it was his belief in god that caused the contradiction.
So I have come to believe that our understanding of eternity, creation, infinity are all beyond our abilities, due in fact, to our inability to fully understand the nature of time. I also think that this understanding will not come about until our finite existence has been dealt with.. When our frame of reference changes to one closer to the truth of nature. More on that another time.
Our ability to perceive time, I believe, is a direct result of our daily perception of events. We perceive time in this fashion as a linear sequence. A.E understood that it was not perfectly linear; that it could change speed, but what he failed to comprehend was that it does not exist in a line at all. It merely appears that way due to the restricted frame of reference that we hold.
Imagine a fish that spends its life swimming against the current of the river in which it lives. Now imagine how that fish could ever comprehend an ocean.
Imagine a two dimensional being living on the surface of a sphere.
Now imagine a being constrained by the perception of linear event sequences trying to comprehend a perpetually rotating flow.
To me, the nature of time must in some dimensional way be circular. I think the reincarnationists intuitively know this, and try to express it in their somewhat childish beliefs. Certain religious ideas that, say, subscribe to a higher power that we will never really understand suggest an implicit notion of our limitations. Faith. That belief in something we cannot prove, becomes the currency. These concepts demonstrate to me man’s attempts at articulating that for which he has no words. Of conceptualizing outside his frame of reference. In this, he elicits a common need for support because true belief is beyond the individual, and we must attempt to make up for it with the voice of our neighbours. The concept of worship comes to life. Physicists, failing to understand the fundamental flaw in their ability to observe, create cosmological constants, dark matter, deep space neutrinos and a host of other flimsy, band-aid fixes for their theories. The big bang theory has so many theoretical particles, energies, types of matter that have not been discovered (but exist in the minds of the theorists, simply because they must or their theory is bankrupt) that it has become a sad joke of science.
A circular time flow removes the need to explain a beginning and an end to all things but due to our view of daily life is inconceivable to us. Perhaps that is why aesthetes and sages pondering these great questions exist in solitude. There are minimal distractions and routine.
This question; "What is the nature of time?" really came to light at the beginning of the 20^th century and formed our perspective. It, along with the great array of creative movements demonstrated by the modernists, set the tone for the first decade; when anything was possible, man learned to fly, matter was understood as energy, and philosophical thought blossomed in the Autumn salons of Paris.
The Timekeeper’s Waltz, then, opens the “Beautiful Accident” CD as this idea sits at the chronological head of things.
You can hear it on:



http://www.jango.com/
http://www.reverbnation.com/
http://www.itunes.com/

In the Garden of the Long Pig

At the risk of sounding pedantic, this world of ours is getting smaller and smaller. What concerns me is the rate at which information becomes accessible outweighs the ability of the recipients to do something with that information. Such as: The third world ogles Western niceties but for the most part finds them inaccessible. Youth sees power evinced in political judgements or big screen firepower and still has to rely on elders for money and hence freedom. We ALL get handed a stream of information about people who are richer, better looking, healthier, more popular and generally BETTER than us.
But I digress.
There is a song I wrote called "In the Garden of the Long Pig", which you can find on a CD called "Beautiful Accident" by my band, The Third International. It is a tongue-in-cheek look at New Yorker eco-tourists making their way into the depths of the Amazon only to find their tour guide more enamoured with the  manufactured trappings of middle class life than with the spectacular thousand year old trees that surround him. It's a joke, yes, but it illuminates a dangerous situation. When people are presented with things they come to desire without the ability to acquire them, they either cultivate new levels of restraint or react explosively to their impotence.
Now I am in no way Ned Ludd. Progress is the inexorable path of mankind. I do not have the answer to this dilemma. Maybe somebody does?

So that's the gist of "In the Garden of the Long  Pig". Shall we say, it's primary storyline. But it is contained in the "Beautiful Accident" CD which, as well as being a collection of songs, is an abstract walk through the 20th century...at least a series of snapshots that I think are important. Historically it correlates with World War 2, (and so sits around the middle of the album) or more precisely, it correlates with the innovations that the conflict brought us. Those which accelerated the shrinking of the planet. Long distance air transportation. Long range communications. These things, along with others, served to mark the beginning of the end for the unexplored/untouched distant mystery lands only recently discovered by Victorian explorers. They brought societies that only a generation ago threw spears at airplanes because they thought them evil spirits, to a point where they now thrive with the use of cell phones and the internet. A new class of information junkie was born.

"In The Garden of the Long Pig" can be heard on http://www.jango.com/,
http://www.reverbnation.com/ or
http://www.itunes.com/