the revelation of the sources of power to be found on the back of the clayton peacock

horsemouth is a little disturbed to find that not only did he unconsciously (honestly) lift part of john fahey's the death of the clayton peacock for his extended slide guitar piece (roughly up to 0.42), he also lifted part of his revelation on the banks of the pawtuxent (roughly 0.17 to 0.20). the first he suspected it was fahey - he just couldn't remember which one, the second he was surprised and horrified when it popped out of the speaker at him.



horsemouth's magnum opus (as recorded a few years ago in mr. nick's bathroom) goes a little something like this:
first the main theme from jean renoir's film partie de campagne (kosma/ monteiro),
an interlude from deep river (trad. arr. fahey - either a showtune adopted as a spiritual or a spiritual adopted as a showtune horsemouth can't remember which),
the statement of two themes from the death of the clayton peacock,
 an answering theme from (as horsemouth now discovers) revelation on the banks of the pawtuxent, the re-statement of the peacock themes with interpolated chords moving in minor thirds.
some (horsemouth hopes) original material involving ascending chords in minor thirds (bearing a similarity to something by the bartok influenced jonas hellborg's the word album),
a pause,
some material from gustav holst's mars -bringer of war played in four time, variously re-titled the martian war-machine stomp by hawkwind or 14-18 mechanised warfare blues by horsemouth.



horsemouth's guitar is tuned daddad (nashville).

of course the whole thing is too long and bloated with pretension - if it were a dead sheep it would float downstream.

horsemouth is reading gary klein's sources of power - an account of intuitive, or naturalised, decision making - rather than the rational choices model of peer soelberg (1967). soelberg taught a course in decision making at MIT's sloan school of management - when it came time for the students to choose their career he expected them to use a rational choice model (you know, identifying options, evaluating options, and then choosing between them, picking the one with the highest score), instead they went with gut feeling, there was one that just felt right. when soelberg asked them how it was going they pretended to have not made the decision yet or to be using rational means, or engaged in fiddling the evaluation weightings to achieve their predetermined goal.

this (of course) contrasts quite nicely with samuel smiles' (of self-help  fame) well brought up victorians and marks the rolling back of rationality - and option evaluation (think of myers-briggs). instead people simply recognise the situation and then go for a solution similar to the ones they used before or go for the first option that looks like it will work (rather than the best optimised option), visualising what the consequences will be, if the visualisation involved too many steps they will think again. only if all else fails will they retreat to a rational choices model.

outside it is a beautiful cold , chrisp and blue day. horsemouth will probably go for a walk. it looks like work is over.