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.