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drinks with zeus

Jeffrey Alan Bright
Apr 18
3 min read

Money. It’s a funny thing. Not even real. Doesn’t exist in nature. Just a story we tell ourselves. And the money-story you tell yourself can be strikingly different if you have it than if you don’t. Add politics — along with religion one of the most ancient, arcane, and embellished catalogs of storytelling — and the tale becomes convoluted in excess.

Viewed from a sufficiently removed vantage, modern Western civilization and its obsession with the whims of capital more resembles a DaDaist comedy than it does anything sensical. Logic is only what the sayer says it is. Common sense becomes evasive. All information is ripe for exploitation and subjugation. For all our sophisticated messaging and campaigning, we really are simple, primary creatures, each staring intently toward the end of our respective nose, each cheering for our chosen side, for our chosen fiction. Evolution would have it no other way. We are told we need this or that amount to possess this or that thing or have this or that experience. Along we go, believing in full.

As a musical entity, Myself a Living Torch was never shy of donning the jester suit, of playing the fool to joust and parry. Surrealist satire can not only be entertaining, but it can be meaningful — hey, there’s another story we can tell ourselves! Perhaps no work in the MaLT canon more exemplifies this spirit than the three minute and fifty-one second pop farce known as “I’d Print Lots More Money.” The song pushes forward strongly, in sturdy masculine virtue and with stumping confidence, a supremely naïve face-to-the-future campaign platform — one that promises the stars, with “Ferris Wheels on Mars,” one that makes the “darkness feel like sunshine,” where “death would not be feared and there’d be no more pain.” The premise is simple. It’s all about money: Does anyone really know how much there is? Is there enough? Is there ever enough? Is that by design? What if we rewrote the story? The future of the human imagination should not be tied to something so mundane as obsessively counting the beans.

As the author and composer of this quaint and critical musicale, and as a citizen of the 20th Century and now the 21st Century, I see with a certain giddy, guilty joy that my little politics-as-pathos has not, in my estimation, lost its perverse luster over 30 years after its penning. In fact, rather than fading away as an obsolete marker of its era, its absurdity has only become more robust! We’ll all “tour the moon.” Yes, we will! We’ll “survey the Milky Way to see just where it ends.” That’s a fact! We’re gonna “travel at the speed of light in search for intelligent life!” Indeed, we should, and no doubt are. There’s no stopping us now, baby!

No, no, no. Don’t worry and don’t fret. All ye practicalos. The wheels, cogs, and levers of an ism so centered on the money story could never abide such tomfoolery, such shameless chicanery. How the quest for power would suffer! I slept through Econ 101 at university, but retained enough through osmosis, I suppose, to know value is based on the ratio of have to have not. Competition drives fairness, and exceptionalism requires winners (few) and losers (many). That’s how the story goes. Yessir, I see the paradigm in acute clarity. I know the joke is squarely on me as much as the joke is on us all, likely more so on me. The absurd pointlessness — the all-in straight-faced silliness — of "I'd Print Lots More Money" is, well, precisely the point of its absurdity.

A story, a promise, human destiny is changed forever…

I had a dream, a flying dream

We were all free, we saved the Earth

We kissed the clouds, had drinks with Zeus

He confessed there was no truth

And I fell

Previously released on MaLT's 2021 Instant Karma Cannot Get Me LP, IPLMM is now available in a fresh mix on all the streamers plus in a 7" vinyl edition b/w "The Future So Bright and Gold" — a double whammy disc aimed squarely at our modern post-modern moment.