'I saw america changed through music'

it's a grey morning (later in the week sounds better). yesterday horsemouth was bored - he thought it might be a day of events but instead it was same old same old. he failed to go to something he should have gone to. he went down to bow eco park, a tour group paused by the bridge over the railway line to regard london island (recently raised up out of the salt marshes by volcanic activity and already colonised with rent farming tower blocks) and then trooped off across the post modern bridge to... who knows where.

having missed harry smith's birthday horsemouth has been re-reading think of the self speaking (a collection of curmudgeonly interviews). he talks about collecting rare early records that later he compiled to form the anthology of american folk music (arguably one of the most influential collections of recordings ever).

 'I'm glad to say that my dreams came true. I saw America changed through music.' 

he thought the music of blacks and hillbillies and mexicans and cajuns had something to teach us (and he was right).

but smith can't resist putting the interviewer on and laying a false trail, he includes in this list such records as those of jilson setters (as mentioned in jean tilson's book the lost fiddler) secure in the knowledge that those interviewing him will not know that these two were fraudsters mocking up fake appalachian versions of old elizabethan ballads the better to get paid by anglophiles and credulous english people. (indeed setters played the royal albert hall).

but not only was smith an egregious trickster he also wasn't averse to 'earning' his living this way - by hustling.

 j. cohen - 'I've heard people accuse you of living off others - trying to disregard the whole concept of doing things that would earn your living. you've bothered me, my friends, and others in the sense that you don't accept the fact that you have to earn money to be a fruitful part of society. now that's a hard thing for me to say.' 

harry smith - 'certainly, I said it just before you did...' and indeed he had;

 'the purpose of making books on folk songs is to make money. everybody has to eat. we're all trapped in a social system where you have to do something to provide food and shelter. I thought for a while that drinking got me out of food and shelter, but it's a way of living that is pushed underground. thousands and thousands of derelicts...'

 and he continues;

 '... there are certain ways you can evade that responsibility, but it's like, the wages of sin is death. I try not to do that. I've reformed.'

jonas meekas buys smith's film heaven and earth magic and hails him as a genius (here we have the connection with maciunas and fluxus), he lets him have an 'office' in the building for a few years. but pesky interviewers keep showing up wanting to know about folkways records, the anthology, and moses asch. folkways was a cheapskate operation - the compilers of records having to type up their own sleeve notes - smith took this as an opportunity for collage, the kind of collage he applied when sequencing the tracks on the record, to collage magical elements with this music, a mixing on equal terms of high and low cultures, of analysed and analysing. bob dylan got this (perhaps) - but many of the other folk scenesters didn't.

someone has made a recreation of the tarot pack with haitian artists - cards that work (as horsemouth's friend martin has noted) by condensation and displacement but also by collage. it is said that smith once made a tarot pack that was popular with the crowleyites. the haitian artists photographed do great things. it's interesting that many of the poses are in fact mirror images of the cards (as if they wanted to leave some things a bit alone).

quoth the heron 'nevermore' (on the eve of fluxus)

horsemouth is up (early) with a slight headache having bumped into his old friend luzette strauss (and her husband richard) on the canal towpath. the repaired to the improbable hipster pub by the side of the blackwall tunnel approach to speculate on how business people think.

horsemouth was off up three mills field the better to read the eve of fluxus the fluxmemoir of billie maciunas  wife of fluxus founder and guru george maciunas. unlike many art memoirs that are full of the joys of the artistic life, or at least redemption of the suffering through eventual success, this is a bleak tale of the art world, art dealers and even friends descending like vultures after george's death to strip the corpse of fluxus. years later billie sees george maciunas prefabricated building system exhibited in a gallery. the building system was originally designed to provide mass housing and was published as an appendix to henry flynt's book communists must give revolutionary leadership in culture, a book which george had designed. however the gallery owner denied that there was any connection between maciunas and flynt and 'macunias's political statement on the efficacy of mass-produced housing was branded as apolitical, seamless and purely aesthetic'.

in his life maciunas was anti the art world, in billie and nam june paik's reading he 'tried to seize not only the production's medium but also the distribution system of the art world' , he saw that artists lost control of their own products.

following george's death billie suffers at the hands of various beatniks, artist' colonies, dealers, before escaping to portugal, later she learns portuguese and translates poetry. richard translates from the portuguese and for a long time published translations of mozambiquan and other african authors - sadly print on demand and e-books (and all the rest of it) came to late to save his publishing business aflame books.

quoth the heron 'nevermore'

a heron is perched on the door of number 10 downing street muttering nevermore to itself, attacking policemen, hunting socks the cat, and making sorties to divebomb guardsmen. johnny morris is dead - they may have to call bear grylls.

'let everything come out' (the eclipse and re-emergence of the animal and vegetable kingdoms)

so horsemouth will miss the vegetable sermon for the year - an annually preached (27th may) sermon on the benefits of horticulture. hunter gatherers and their anthropologists may object to it but on the whole horsemouth views horticulture as an excellent thing. (on the other hand horsemouth is not a fan of keeping animals - he believes in the separation of humans and animals even if it means the end of cheese rolling).

the flood waters receded the new world became visible. the vegetable kingdom put forth new shoots and takes back the mere earth with magical speed. horsemouth walked across a round field (presumably the site of an old waterworks) and found a field of buttercups. this is the image horsemouth found interesting in noah - it is an attempt once again to re-enter the garden of eden. please give the song a listen and let horsemouth know what you think. he's proud of it, he's proud of the big kosmiche delayed guitar swirl of it (musicians of bremen the stadium rock years)

horsemouth has been reading elizabeth west's hovel in the hills (from howard - which he compares favourably to deep country). he supposes rather than a desire for the solitary off-grid existence hovel is motivated by a desire to get away from alienated labour (if only as far as is possible). horsemouth likes the failure of the locals to mention that the cottage floods, he likes their willful refusal to discuss their problems with condensation and the mold that all the local cottages suffer from, he likes the cycle of bodged repairs (bed springs in the hedges) typical of agricultural areas before they are gentrified.

he's within a page of finishing it. it ends with lists of wild food eaten, birds spotted, and gives you their garden plan, 'the simple life on a pittance' . faced by the interminable political defeat it is tempting to go off to the hills and grow potatoes and eat more wild salad. this was broadly horsemouth's grandparent's plan after the second world war - except they moved to devon (which is considerably warmer and drier) and horsemouth's grandfather had been working as an agricultural labourer for a while.

conversely today is the anniversary of the founding of st. petersberg which (like venice) just goes to prove anything can be done. saturday is the anniversary of the birth of harry smith.

horsemouth and noah (and horsemouth's self-inflicted beer injuries)

horsemouth's head hurts. last night (to celebrate horsemouth's getting a guitar part in time and a general freedom from work) horsemouth and howard went out for a beer at the murder mile. they drank and they drank and they drank. at about 9pm the music seemed to get better and horsemouth and howard went from being their dads (sitting in a pub with glasses of bitter bemoaning humanity) to becoming the sad old dudes you see dancing in pubs while pissed. howard thought it might be better if the people danced (it wasn't).

horsemouth is slightly barbecue flavoured as the result of a small fire they had in the back garden after - they listened to music on the laptop dream baby dream by suicide, the kiss by judee sill, superstition stevie wonder.

horsemouth was there to put a guitar part on noah but they couldn't get it to sit in and stay in time - the tempo seemed a touch too fast, the initial ukulele part a little too roughly timed - they decided to scrap what they had and re-record it to drums rather than to click track using cubase to loop the verses and choruses and using the best takes for each. horsemouth layed down two simplified rhythm guitar parts (using howard's acoustic and his own resonator) and then a track of solo. he also double tracked the main vocal. there will be two versions of the song - one for horsemouth's upcoming solo plus guests recording (with a horsemouth lead vocal) and another extended version with drums more in the line of howard's recent recordings. both howard and horsemouth will be going out separately as the musician of bremen (there that should confuse them) and perhaps sometimes combining forces to become musicians of bremen.

horsemouth's blog post today was going to be about boredom - but he's feeling a little too rough to discuss such weighty topics.

may's books (so far) (and gigs)

• continuing with western marxism - j.g. merquior, for which horsemouth needs to read 
• history and class consciousness - g. lukacs (started) 
• the law of white spaces - giorgio pressburger 
• war with the newts - karel capek
•  making the world legible - ed. julian evans (dubravka ugresic etc.) 
•  english eccentrics - edith sitwell 
• managing in turbulent times - drucker 
• memoirs of remarkable misers (online) 
• william blake's holy thursday from the songs of experience

 gigs

• electric wizard, the cosmic dead
• magma  

on the benefits of posthumous fame

once again it was sunny before horsemouth woke up and has gone cloudy-ish after. later he goes to a meeting (how much good it will do he doesn't know). edith sitwell's english eccentrics ends with the treatment meeted out to milton in his coffin at st. giles cripplegate, his jaw smashed, his arm taken, his hair ripped out by souvenir hunters - all this in a chapter entited on the benefits of posthumous fame.

horsemouth will never be famous (posthumously or unposthumously). he will never have groupies by the score, a stately pile and/or musical differences (horsemouth, venal creature that he is, is mainly interested in the unposthumous benefits of fame). in this, as in so many other things, life is deeply deeply unfair. he will however continue to live (what's the alternative).

next week (half term for breeders and educationalists) horsemouth goes to make some music with howard, to finish off noah most probably. it looks like howard will be away somewhere sunny over the summer - then horsemouth will probably put some work into recording his solo album (with the odd guest spot) and his existing collaborations. he wants to do some more work with john clarkson on a harmonium/ omnichord and guitar duo (they haven't for a while) and the guitar and vocal duo with andrew minty continues well. he will hunt out some more collaborations. it's all part of his plan to move from having guest spots to appearing as a collective the next time he is booked as the musician of bremen.

he'd just like to make a further plea for the genius of alice coltrane here...


horsemouth has been playing la fille au cheveux de lin a lot - slide, guitar tuned open-G. there's more to be done like this - debussy's pagodes for example (which horsemouth planned out in november 2008 but never completed leaving the guitar tuned ready to play it in the cupboard for a number of years), l'arlesienne the main theme from bizet's opera later adapted as the hymn agnus dei (this horsemouth would have to relearn how to play).

we are into the bright quarter of the year

ok (as promised) back to business as usual (or its opposite) with a quote from benjamin that could be by platonov (here goes);

 'this immense wooing of the cosmos was enacted for the first time on a planetary scale, that is, in the spirit of technology.'  - walter benjamin from the last paragraph of one way street. 

we are into the bright quarter of the year - the 13 weeks of the longest days and strongest sun. outside it doesn't look too bad (horsemouth will probably go for a walk). faced by the continued blockage of historical time horsemouth returns to cyclical time to be re-energised. to cheer himself up friday night he went out to see magma with sean - a world in which a band that is essentially a cross between the carmina burana and return to forever can prosper for decades is a world that can afford hope (hell, behind horsemouth someone was loudly singing along). in a way it reminds horsemouth of ravel's chansons madécasses based on lyrics in a fake ethnic language by evariste-désiré de parny (1753–1814).

 some have responded with anger and frustration to the election result (moving nicely down kübler-ross straße) but to horsemouth this is not necessary - we are exactly where we were before the election (except that people have realised the scale of the task). we cannot, in brecht's phrase, elect another people, but another people has been created by decades of tory and blairite rule. whenever horsemouth engaged in reformist means he was firmly told that they could not work and yet people seem to be taking the election to heart - but it cannot work as any kind of an assessment of what people want - they answered the question put to them - they were not asked do you want a better world? how do we get there? they were asked how do you want your capitalism/ austerity/ racism/ militarism? etc.

the road out of hell is a long one - the road to the bearable first circle of the virtuous pagans is long enough.

On defeat (a range of responses)

it has all happened before and will happen again

horsemouth supposes that we are back with the days of looking to the house of lords and the general synod to defend us from the government. back with decades of uninterrupted tory rule. back, in fact, to the eighties. (gawdelpus)

 had it been different it would still be the same

of course if things had been different they would still be the same - this is the beauty of the stability of the british political system (a million people will vote green - they will get one seat). instead of five years of horrific destruction of the welfare state under the conservatives we would have had five years of mealy mouthed failure to defend it under labour (the originators of the marketisation of the nhs lest we forget).

when horsemouth's friends voted labour they were voting for the bevanite dream of the nhs and the welfare state but they would have received a blairite reality check from ed balls and (at best) a less steep deficit reduction curve.

bring forth the scapegoat

let us be frank - 'immigrant' and 'scrounger' kicking plays well not just in the provinces but nearly everywhere. it is much easier to blame people of low social status who are near to you for problems than to blame people of high social status who are far away, or indeed global economic systems. indeed the labour party succumbed to 'the politics of fear' themselves in issuing anti-immigration mugs, failing to embrace the SNP, and to cap it off will probably now be playing a brisk round of 'blame ed milliband he does look a bit funny doesn't he'. prognosis: rightwards lurching, embracing of marketisation etc.

the country and the city

friends have been reading raymond williams' the country and the city, there may be something in this. horsemouth always used to think this whenever he left hackney and got the train back to his parents in the wilds of herefordshire - as the green rolled by horsemouth's sense that revolution was imminent (the way it looked in hackney in the eighties) would evapourate like mist on a summer day.

it's all the fault of the proles (who are stupid and smelly and racist not like the cosmopolitan elites who are intelligent, well-groomed and er... cosmopolitan)

 (st. george of orwell says it so it must be true).

one of horsemouth's problems was that the first thing he did was check social media and horsemouth's friends are pretty much of the same opinion (broadly) as horsemouth (this is why gchq and the nsa like it so much), it was only later that he checked the mainstream media and realised the full extent of the defeat. from horsemouth's own experience anti-east european racism simmers away among builders we are just not confronting the arguments like we should.

tories for scottish independence if you combine the labour and SNP vote it's still a defeat (but a narrow one). but if scotland gets independence it's a permanent defeat that cannot be overcome. think on that you conservative and unionists.

if you didn't vote you can't complain. if you did vote you voted for it in a democratic system so you can't complain.

complain as you like but do as you're told.



if it happens again I'm leaving (UB40)

horsemouth has no problems with being in exile (as long as there's sun). cambodia is the new thailand. horsemouth's friends sing the praises of burma.

 any other good responses horsemouth hasn't considered yet?

------------------------

 ok next time (business as usual) - a beautiful quote from benjamin that's just like platonov.

horsemouth (you know the name)

outside the wind blows, the clouds move and the sunshine comes and goes. later horsemouth thinks he will wander off in search of cheap coffee (they were doing two for a fiver on lavazza at the megamart in docklands). horsemouth has nothing to do today but shuffle about, read books, and possibly buy bread so he can polish off the sneaky camembert he has lurking (is it stinky? yes it is.)

lukacs writes a new introduction (to history and class consciousness) specifically to argue that he is irrelevant and that the marxism of lenin is utterly correct and has been completely vindicated by history - he is batting on a slightly sticky wickett because he has to make use of the work of rosa luxemburg (horsemouth has the paul frolich book on her round here somewhere) who is more than slightly heretical having had the temerity to 'improve' things.

 'every quotation is also an interpretation' - lukacs 

last night horsemouth watched large chunks of charlie aherne's wildstyle (in italian) - the trains roll round the city like large mobile works of art delivering the art to the populace (whether it wants it or not), style wars is similar. if all goes well horsemouth will work a two-and-a-half day week next week and that will be it he will be free (nay oblidged) to frolic in verdant pastures all summer long. (to such extent have the conditions of the working class improved).


following a suggestion by denise horsemouth has been playing through susan reed's version of I'm sad and I'm lonely (to a foursquare C, F,G,C) rather than the (E, Am, C, Am) version he's been playing with howard in musicians of bremen. 

how to become a successful nashville songwriter

this is what comes in - they have stabbed horsemouth three times in the heart with their swords, three of the wine goblets have fallen over on the ground spilling out their wine (but behind him two remain), a river runs through the landscape past the castle, this is where it leads - horsemouth is punting a boat on a lake towards distant buildings, there seems to be a family in the boat but his face is turned away from us intent on his task, more swords, this is what leaves - swords hang on the wall above his bed, horsemouth is in despair, exhausted (the haitians made cards like these). the tarot card horsemouth is least interested in is the one in the centre - horsemouth the fabricator sitting down making pentacles (coins). this is what links it all together - work, creative action (it's a bright happy card).

horsemouth is a little sick of work and creative action as the cure for his distance - to be honest it doesn't feel like it's working.


horsemouth has been reading how to become a successful nashville songwriter by michael kosser - horsemouth admires the sheer niche nature of the work - sit in a room, write songs, teach them to studio musicians who make a demo, wait for other artists to record them, wait to see if they become a hit, wait for the royalties and performing rights cheques to come. it's good on the frustrations of the life at the mercy of ones own creativity and life at the mercy of 'success'.

hosemouth thinks he should get on with writing more songs (not that any cheques or success will come as a result of this activity).

previously he always found it difficult to link together the music and the words - he has no problem coming up with music, he has no problem sticking words (and something like a melody) on other peoples music. the clash (horsemouth notes) are fond of the bo diddley (so were big audio dynamite after them) - horsemouth has resolved to write a song using this - as usual (and following bob calvert) he will half-inch most of the words from someone else, or if not the actual words at least the speaker's position. then there's his second true story song (the one he's been meaning to write for years) perhaps it will come now. horsemouth is singing more strongly - he's been exposed to more material than before, he has years of creative work behind him that he can draw on.

april's books

20th century russian reader - mandelstams, platonov, pasternak, akhmatova and others new to horsemouth,
mary deare - hammond innes,
beyond good and evil - nietzsche (part),
sun and steel - yukio mishima (part),
yellow back radio broke down - ishmael read,
western marxism - j.q.merquior (still reading),
the marvellous adventure of cabeza de vaca - haniel long.

mayday (going back to bed)

'philosophy is not just the owl of minerva, which takes flight only at sunset, it is also the cock's crow, which announces the dawn of a new day.' - ludwig michelet, 1843. 

from the utopians marx borrowed, from fourier 'the abolition of the division of labour' from saint-simon the replacement of 'the government of men by the administration of things'.

we have passed through the dangerous night of may eve (celtic fire festivals for those who wish to resist, witches sabbats for those who wish to succumb) and are into mayday - the festival of rebirth and big party with cake. having been driven between two fires to purify them the cattle are driven out to their summer pasture, food is offered to the wolves and foxes and crows to ensure good health for the cattle. all is growth and life.


horsemouth has forgotten his dreams from last night (this morning) - unable to find a celtic fire festival or a witches sabbat he was early to bed. ok he remembers the red tops were strangely interested in architecture. how to preserve ones thoughts until one can get them written down - pen and pad at all times obviously (inspiration strikes when horsemouth is on trains, asleep, doing the washing up, walking), oppositions and relationships, diagrams horsemouth finds useful good | evil etc. re-encoding as aphorisms, songs, pictures...

once upon a creative writing course a writer explained that having sent the children off to school she would go back to bed and doodle and dawdle and scrible down a few aimless notes - the main thing was to retain that feeling of unimportant aimless activity that was not work. how it would all fit together later could be left until later.


to celebrate may eve horsemouth watched the devil rides out - which features a witches sabbat on may eve - the music is great - especially for the 'party' scene. christopher lee hams it up mercilessly. ok to celebrate international workers day horsemouth went to work. there's something wrong / right there.

(the next day horsemouth will discover that one of his friends was out raving it up until the early morning of the 2nd in soho)