‘tradition cannot be inherited and if you want it it must be obtained by great labour.’)

horsemouth (the sluggish) was slugging in bed in a slug-like fashion. if slugs could snore then horsemouth would have snored too, snored and snorted and then turned over and gone back to sleep.

horsemouth has been enjoying a ‘lie-in’ (kind of like a press conference but with better beds) but now he has to rise and get on with the day. he works. later he babysits. he’s not musically endeavoured for a while. thursday should be a short and compassionate day (then he has to see what else they’ve got for him next week).

horsemouth had a fahey evening last night - he retired to bed and read (architect adam caruso’s the feeling of things - architect puff pieces in a satisfyingly luxurious binding - as usual architect’s books are initially promising but ultimately disappointing as they become a list of complaints of excessive commerciality and lack of rigour against various competitors) ... and meanwhile fahey’s red cross disciple of christ today, summertime and various other of his late excursions filtered in.


 ‘tradition cannot be inherited and if you want it it must be obtained by great labour.’ - t.s.eliot

caruso shows us cedric price’s ducklands plan to heal the docks of hamburg by leaving the soil to nature and the ducks to aerate and reclaim, he shows us joseph beuys 7000 oak trees (for documenta 7) but then he shows us their own work in walsall in mdf and ducts, a pedestrianised square swept clean of history in stortorget. the book is beset by the idea that the well designed will be better for people and that it will have some mitigating or counter effect to the evils of capitalism - perhaps it does not.

caruso talks of ‘the last decade of economic growth: the vindication or the last hurrah of the market economy’ but then this is the decade up to 2008 - since then capitalism has fallen over once more, got back up and continued on its way (and is probably about to fall over again). its crises are signs of a vigorous endo-cannibalistic health, a shark-like feeding frenzy of undervalued and talked-down assets... and then it all begins again exactly the same.

safety last (the gig economy)

since the crisis the growth in productivity has not returned to its previous levels - it is not that they are beating less value out of us, it is that they aren’t successfully beating more and more value out of us each year (woe is them) . this has been a major problem for british capitalism - unlike the germans disinclined to spend their money on machinery - but quite what it means now (in the time of task monkey and the gig economy) horsemouth is unsure.

as a musician horsemouth apologises to you all for ‘the gig economy’ - truth be told most musicians in recent years never made a living out of playing gigs (they just did them to promote their copyright-able, reproducible wears - their recordings). it is like we have landed in bad-attali land, a world where not only can everyone be an artist or make music, they can also hang your door or clean your flat.

to escape the crisis constantly nipping at capitalism’s heels there is always one more floor to climb - at one point they even had you dangling from a clock face (like a character in metropolis). at the end of filming a dummy was thrown off onto the safety platform (a mere two stories below) it bounced off and continued on its inevitable way, they then announced that some of the film stock had been ruined and up you went again. climbing around on the face of a building with the thumb and forefinger of one hand already missing as the result of a previous accident during filming. the state intervened and you were dangling at the end of a rope called working tax credit...

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later horsemouth works - later he finds out what he’s doing next week - still later (in about 6 months time) he loses his flat because of the housing bill (see it doesn’t even have to be passed by parliament - nor even the gubbins by which it will work be examined - for it to deprive a creature so low as horsemouth of his habitation). roughly concurrently how his work is funded changes. the norflab tower is emptying out (once the setting for j.g. ballard’s 70ies novel of social aspiration rise high just released as a movie) and is experiencing a return to form in its final hours, kids in the stairwell trying to sell you weed for example...

cassandra (wall street and metaphor)

photo by john clarkson mix assembled by howard grange tune selection horsemouth helliwell featuring the singers and players as themselves

it seems to horsemouth that cassandra is popular at the minute (for she is in both penny dreadful and homeland). (both would support feminist and post-colonial readings - indeed they are both written from the position where these ideas have become banal and the stuff of tea time drama).

horsemouth has often played cassandra in various am-dram productions - this is the essential tension in horsemouth’s character (such as it is) betweeen his mr. apollo routine (science, rationality, do right) - he diagnoses a lack of this as the world’s problem to which the adorno flavoured problem of stopping rationality from overtaking all that makes us human takes second place. and then there is cassandra warning of judgement to come - who is not believed (and this is what gives the drama its tension).

of course until it all falls you are objectively wrong - and then suddenly (and briefly) you were right - but then you are wrong again as the new normal forms its inverted pyramid and stabilises the cracks and contradictions one more time. the neo-liberals didn’t die of embarassment with massive state intervention to stabilise capitalism because they were never really about preventing it - austerity has taken eight years to march through the institutions to where horsemouth both lives and works once inside the walls it will make short work of the defenders.

what is needed in many ways is a new new culture of capitalism - the teams, the innovation, the diversity are the flip-side of the coin of casualisation, zero-hours, the zombie-drone of disenfranchised service workers - its higher form which can be spoken to legitimise its lesser deeds.

interestingly in homeland (series 1 at least) saul is the apollo figure - if not a tormentor then a facilitator - the one who believes - cassandra prophesies and is (at least for a while) believed - there is (his) work of rationality to excavate the hidden rationality, to bring the timeline into visibility, to reveal the break. cassandra is now a valued employee. time is pressing - there is a problem of lack of sleep, at waking and in the moments before sleep the doors to the subconscious are open.

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horsemouth’s illness is ending - he’s getting bored - today he will go for a walk.

the compensations of aesthetic autonomy (b-boys got to document)

this morning bright and sunny (but cold). last night horsemouth watched dogtown and the z-boys a film on skateboarding (and surfing). the discarded youth of a blighted seaside town take up surfing in the most insalubrious and dangerous wrecked ex-amusement park they can find, they hang around the local surf shop, and in the afternoon, when the wind makes surfing impossible, they skate - taking moves they learnt from surfing films and applying them to dry land. it’s the technological breakthrough of polyurethane wheels that permits this. during a drought they begin skating in dried up swimming pools.

the film has a great 70ies rock soundtrack (that’s how horsemouth was persuaded to watch it) - lots of great later hendrix (dolly dagger, freedom, ezy rider, and is that bold as love in a quiet bit?), early sabbath (paranoid), blue oyster cult (godzilla), thin lizzy (bad reputation), ted nugent (cat scratch fever, er... wham bam sweet poon-tang), sorry this list is going to get very unfashionable very quickly.

style - they all remark - was very important to what they did - and a number of photographers and writers recognised this early on. it becomes art - like graffiti, like breakdancing, like rapping, like DJing - horsemouth goes for parallels with the world of early NY hip-hop described by david toop in rap attack (not that horsemouth is a first hand informant for such things you understand). commerce is not far behind (or perhaps it was there already in the surf shop they hung around in, in the surf competitions they entered not even requiring that first photo, that first article in skateboard magazine).

(ok horsemouth can't find it on youtube - here's another sant monica skater)


of course not all the kids do well out of it. nonetheless there are compensations to aesthetic autonomy - in its knowledge, its power, its experience of autonomy as structure rather than a flood of atomised consumer choices. faced with these kind of achievements the games of modern art look paltry to horsemouth.

horsemouth is often stuck for things to do on the weekend and a little bored (oops the weather has gone crap out there) - he has a plan to learn baby please don’t go it has a great john lee hooker relentless beat to it (if we’re still in the land of 70ies rock budgie do a particularly stomping version). there’s his songwriting (and playing) and there’s his writing (this).

horsemouth also watched homeland (series one episodes 4-9 (phew), the first disc of the set wouldn’t play). he likes the paranoia. but it can’t give you pavement to penthouse because it doesn’t come from the streets - the budget on even the most modest movies is simply too big. yesterday some actors were hanging out near the foot of the balfron (tower blocks - urban deprivation - natch) horsemouth doesn’t know why.

‘I was a member of cultish commune but I’m a guardian reader now’

yesterday horsemouth worked and then staggered the length of the city in the rain to deliver his paperwork.

on the way back (to work) he took refuge from the storm in the utopia projects pavilion hidden away in the basement of the courtauld gallery (url - http://utopia2016.com/). there were posters on the walls, books to read (of the I was a member of cultish commune but I’m a guardian reader now variety - two or three recent examples (e.g.Dylan Evans, Tobias Jones)  - and the utopia: a sober survey of a ridiculous belief variety).

in one horsemouth found not only an essay by matthew hyland (broadly predicated on the adorno/ bloch face off) but also a photo by max reeves (youth rave it up during the student riots).

of utopia matthew says the following;

‘we understand ‘utopia’ as an always incomplete alternative, the invocation within the given world of something incompatible with, and hostile to, given conditions. it is a negation of the given and a recognition of something ‘missing’ but also a necessarily imperfect assertion of that which is not -yet.’ - matthew hyland, quoted in utopian pulse, ines dovjak and oliver ressler (eds.), 2015.

frankly horsemouth himself has more and better books on utopia (here at the horsemouth folk archive/ memorial library) and worse ones naturally (utopia is not always so ‘incomplete’ - often it is drearily itemised down to the chicken). the exhibition is light on the french (cabet, saint-simon, the icarians, ranciere etc.), having raised bloch it should make him available.


from horsemouth’s point of view what was more interesting (and welcoming) was a free juke box- horsemouth began (somewhat obviously) with gil-scott heron’s the revolution will not be televised, then something by boris vian, then the isley brothers’ disco-stomping fight the power (parts 1 and 2) (lyrically this and the bassline from the revolution.. are the main ingreedients in public enemy’s fight the power) and hawkwind’s shouldn’t do that (the live version from off roadhawks), really he should have thrown some thomas mapfumo in there as well (er. and some reggae). only a spanish dude was tempted out into playing something latin american.

thomas more writes utopia but in it his proxy cautions the returned explorer not to go meddling in the business of kings with his tales of a well administered society - telling kings not to go to war would be like hitting them with a pigs-bladder he advises. but soon thomas more is dead, executed (you can see he was going to get into trouble with that attitude), and elevated to the sainthood. machiavelli (having been tortured by the new regime) instead writes a little primer, a how-to manual on state craft ostensibly aimed at would be princes, for which honesty he is vilified as the devil to this day and which is still read, but soon he is dead anyway.

today horsemouth works for an hour or two - he has to work friday as well this week. soon it is the easter break and horsemouth will be able to have his coughing fits in peace.