Vaudeville
The Library Book of the World (as in the CD) is a theatrical concept album about trying to write a book on our current global predicament, in which I play the role of psychic medium plugged into the mainline of human history, hearing voices from present ghouls and future ghosts as well. Well that was yesterday. Today it's vaudeville on a convict ship, a tale of being held in isolation in the hold, and cut adrift in the rising seas of the Atlantic, haunted by Perception Management Inc.'s best lines, and wrestling with every sleight of language in the attempt to dislodge the mirage of our consent. Tomorrow, as the waves are crashing all around, it will be fifteen songs which form a partial soundtrack to the history/current affairs book I am actually writing, (working title Smart Lies, Secret Wars and Climate Revolt)
Atlanticana?
The album is all done and dusted, but the shifting sand gets in your shoes and it becomes hard to stand still. The music is off kilter, off balance, sliding around on deck, sea legs giving way, storm movin' in. We don't know which way the ship is headed or how many times it's been back and forth, or if we are cast adrift and forever lost in the mists of Atlanticana, somewhere fatally short of land.
Revelation
The tales therein are a microcosm of vastly bigger story, still undecided as to whether it is searching for a middle or an end, in a world still being invented. Praying that our legs will not cave in from exhaustion of endlessly treading water, we don't know if the numbness we are feeling is that of already having begun to sink below the surface. The search then for an actual Library Book of the World is undertaken not knowing if such a thing exists, what form it inhabits if it does exist, or if it will even offer any ways out of our collective hole if we actually find it? Do we indeed have any power to change the script or are we part of a sick joke like the punch-line at the end of the Book of Revelation whereby we are damned by our nature, if we do not change the script, and damned by Power if we do?
Funny ha ha
So it comedy then?
Yeh it's funny too.
Yeh right'
Yeh, but no but yeh. Or as the old comedian Frank Lee used to say, "You gotta laugh though?" But hey what do I know?'
What? … hearing voices? laughing at his own jokes? dates on both sides of the Atlantic thrown in ...