so goes the harshest line (in horsemouth's humble opinion) in anne briggs' you go your way (my love), a classic song-at-parting, the chorus functioning to get the object out the door against the daydream of love brought back by the repetition of everyday tasks.
the usual picture you see to go with this is bert jansch and anne in their youth sitting in a pub, bert the archetypal toussle-haired romantic hero, anne the dark girl. years later (after leaving off singing for many years and becomming a market garderner) she's persuaded to sing it again for the folkbritania programme (or some such). 'there's a lot of ghosts about' mutters archie fisher (probably),
'at that time one thought it would never change, it would never be different , but it has changed, you know we're all different and in a way it sort of... um... highlights the differences for me between what we were than and what we are now.'
'even though the structure has changed there's a lot of ghosts about'
'yes, the fact... as I say that it opens the door on ones youth and all that... sense of hope, faith, and musical belief, and exploration'
today horsemouth goes to look at houses - it is the first grey day of autumn - is he keeping busy enough do you think? yesterday, horsemouth was up early (oops. no he was not) - it was a beautiful day outside (he went for a walk). it was the third anniversary of bert jansch's death (he almost forgot).
'sometimes I wonder where the poor people went'
horsemouth has been listening to michael goldfarb's description of driving a taxi in new york in the 70ies (think Taxi, taxi driver, the 'drop dead' decade). the decade of 'planned shrinkage' - an 'unofficial policy' straight out of the RAND corporation, in some ways the inevitable consequence of moses and his expressways, his bronx clearances - where people would move out of town then the tax base will fall then the city would cut services (fire stations, doctors surgeries, hospitals - sound familiar?) but to its poorest members first so that they would go too, leaving more of the pot for those who were left. years later he's chatting to a black guy in a bar in brooklyn, the neighbourhood had always been middle class, just black middle class the guy says, and now it's hipster hell. 'sometimes' , the guy says 'I wonder where the poor people went.'
Moses and the cross Bronx expressway makes it into Tricia Rose's book on hip-hop black noise, the thing goldfarb comments on is the grafitti bombed trains - he gets it. out in the ruins people remake what has been left behind into a new music, a new culture - it's an astonishing victory. horsemouth went to new york first in 1990, there were public enemy posters everywhere and it was still pleasantly grimey, conversely when horsemouth went in the early 2000s it had been scrubbed clean - early breakdancers (crazy-legs, pop-master lock) were wheeled out as if on the heritage cicuit on municipal stages, and even that was rare and had to be looked out for, his friends were being rinsed off manhatten, beginning the exodus to brooklyn.
horsemouth is reading the flaubert (mainly). friday night he went out for a quick couple of pints with marike in the somewhat hopeful hipster pub in an old council office on the blackwall tunnel approach road (like he said it's hopeful). soon the balfron will become the ghost of social housing past the high rise icon of modernism gone bad will become aligned with the forces of regeneration, more commuter rabbit hutches will be chucked up as fast as the speed of setting concrete (abervan village or something, city island) the city is thriving by means of accelerating the calculated exclusion of its poorest.
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