'he was my guide and philosopher, and had also been a better friend since our fight with the knives...’ - w.h. hudson of his brother.
the date when horsemouth stopped saving is of course not fixed but moving further into the past (it now stands at january 2012 - or will do when horsemouth breaks into the actual money). there was a period where horsemouth was simultaneously dipping his savings to make up for low amounts of work but also saving into his various ponzi schemes. he can only move this so far back - that would be december 2011. to quote horsemouth’s sheffield grandmother never a lender nor a borrower be - at least horsemouth doesn’t have debt (he has not already sold at least part of his future).
horsemouth has named today’s post after another herb - he is trying to identify a thornbush with berries.
fortuitous discovery yesterday - a case (well 8 cans) of in-date chickpeas - total value probably about £2. in other fortuitous discoveries - a laura cannell interview and an article on reynardine
so horsemouth is back to earth after his gig (he still feels a little strange though and has done for about a month now). today horsemouth is grumpy once again - this is so much more him. he feels like himself again. all it took was exposure to his fellow human beings in a meeting pretending to ‘decide’ things - can anything be truly ‘decided’? really?
the day before yesterday (sunday) he went round to martin’s famous roof garden for coffee (in fact shandy) with martin and andrew minty. there are plans to have a ‘jam’ at the end of the week. howard is away camping in alfriston (you may remember their visit there the year before last).
how our memory serves and fools us
w.h.hudson (victorian nature writer, gaucho and founder of the rspb) has read segei aksakov’s childhood... he praises it, saying it is difficult to recover childhood as it was (and not to recover it as adults would wish it to be).
similarly post reformation funeral monuments - there, upon the death of one of the couple, a funeral monument would be carved of them but one of them would continue to live (and often worship in the self-same church for many years) and age.
towards the end of the book hudson begins to read in earnest - but sadly an early attempt to write a family newspaper the tin box having fallen apart in inter-brother feuding.
sunday night horsemouth watched jacques peretti’s the super-rich and us- much more an account of securitisation and the growing inequality of society. the bailout money has gone to the super-rich and we will be paying off the interest on it (to them) until we die. as one commentator points out if it were a game you would just stop playing...
the gig is done and dusted (horsemouth pronounces it the best one yet). he thanks you all for coming (those of you that made it), and for those that didn’t, he looks forward to your company next time. he thanks richard (not martin as horsemouth claimed ten minutes before the gig) and albino for putting him on (cheers dudes) and the soundman peter.
now all that remains to do is to recover from the post-gig drinking and hangover. good bless horsemouth’s liver (so frightfully loyal).
the alcohol was necessary (horsemouth argues) to recover from the adrenaline. the adrenaline however had a number of unforseen side effects (for example it utterly fucked his memory in the run up).
horsemouth started his first song - satan your kingdom must come down - at a fine tempo (unfortunately too fast). there were a number of guitar fuck ups. he thanks you all for singing along.
he started with satan... and ended with the devil song, encoring with ace of spades.
there are photos - horsemouth will endeavour to collect them.
friday 21st july, after a long absence from the stage, musican of bremen opens for filthy pedro, six foot panda and albino at the beehive , bromley-by-bow. get there early if you want to see him (get there later if you don't). stage times will be prompt - horsemouth is on 20:00 until 20:30. there may be special guests (like last time) or there may not.
your last chance to see musician of bremen/ horsemouthfolk play live before lammas.
did he mention it was FREE? you're going so you are!
104-106 Empson Street, E3 3LT Bow, Newham, United Kingdom
it's pretty close to bromley-by-bow tube. it's not that far from chrisp street market. it's a bus ride from hackney 425 gets you close, 488 closer still. it's not as far as you think.
horsemouth is up and about and has his coffee (the cat has been fed) and there’s sunshine. this means it is probably a beach day (his last day in ireland). the bbc weather seems to think it will last all day (horsemouth will take a packed lunch - when he’s bought it).
horsemouth has been living on new potatoes, bread and cheese, there’s been some courgette, zucchini, tomato, onion, red kidney beans, pasta sauce and pasta, and even a little salad. he bought some sweet potatoes but didn’t get round to cooking them. he’s had a quick tidy up (more this evening and tomorrow morning).
horsemouth has (as usual) achieved less than he would have hoped (he couldn’t -for example - get the tv working) - on the other hand he’s had a few ah-ha moments that he wouldn’t have had sat on his arse in the sweaty seaside towns. he’s read less than he hoped and made little progress musically but he’s more relaxed and realistic about the amount of work he will have to do.
on the other hand he has a gig to play when he goes back (and he’d like to play more if anybody is asking).
life for horsemouth is comparatively easy - work pays (just) enough to live and there’s enough of it to keep him engaged (but not so much of it it drives him crazy) - similarly with leisure (a much more dangerous adversary than is commonly thought). politically horsemouth is even optimistic - the state has no good moves it can make (zugswang), the bases are loaded. the times they are a-changing (with all the concomitant anxiety that entails) but as horsemouth’s namesake horsemouth remarks at some point in rockers ‘I-and-I know that all of the youth shall witness the day that Babylon shall fall.’
if he’s not been incredibly successful (or written that great song yet) at least he hasn’t had disasters that have beset other white boys with guitars (jackson c. frank and ‘skip’ spence for example).
anyway. back tomorrow evening. he’ll see you when he sees you.
‘discourse cheers us to companionable reflection... the sail
of thinking keeps trimmed hard to the wind of matter.’ - heidegger,
poetry, language, thought, p.6.
yesterday horsemouth journeyed to cork to meet with robert curgenven (recommended by mutual friend sue ferrar).
horsemouth is a big fan of robert’s work but hadn’t purchesed any until this point (for all horsemouth’s writing about music and technology he’s a bit of a luddite really and does as few online transactions as he can get away with).
they began by establishing context - mutual friends and acquaintances (er. sue, ah tim goldie, mattin...), musical or artistic practices, philosphers and politics, areas of london or the world, squatterdom/ co- opdom, gentrification and brexit, england / ireland, NHS and education funding, prospects for work. it turns out they were at the same gig at st. mary’s stoke newington (the old church) - it’s where horsemouth met sue again after a twenty-ish year gap. it was so cold she was handing out blankets to the audience.
the great (gentrification) game is on again in cork - art spaces closing down (venues, workspaces) and yet to horsemouth there still seem plenty of derelict properties (maybe these are just landbanked until the full restoration).
horsemouth mentioned drombeg robert proposed newgrange - like the turrell skyspaces but built to last, tuned to an astronomical fixed point (the winter solstice) like maeshowe.
how will the technology appear to a visitor from the future? - it will appear to have gone backwards, to have dissolved in airy generalities. instead a focus on the materiality of sound, pressure waves and resonant frequencies, resonant frequencies in organ pipes, resonant frequencies in buildings, on durations and intensities, and locations.
in reception another escapee from london. a general consensus the country was going down.
in other conversations - on the bus on the way in, a carrigaline builder who’d smashed his shin and ankle falling off his bike in wintery weather christmas eve before last - he had no complaints about the irish healthcare system - he could no longer be a plasterer though, he was learning to type and use computers.
this morning horsemouth is enjoying oar by skip spence.
there are some unlucky deaths in english folk songs. being shot by the boyfriend who has mistaken you for a swan for example (a likely story), or drowned by your jealous sister your body dragged ashore your bones made into a harp that ends up being played at your sister’s wedding reception. statistically your chances of dying in these fashions are small (at least according to the evidence in folksongs) - you are more likely to die of a broken heart (one third chance roughly) or drowning (also a one third chance). being hanged as a highwayman also scores highly.
it was drowning that horsemouth chanced by his trip to the seaside (crosshaven outport) - he walked there (along the disused cork-crosshaven railway) and he walked back. on his way back he was a little torched by the sunlight (he should have returned to the beach instead and gotten the bus back later). he paddled but he did not swim (there were lots of jellyfish) - no one dies of jellyfish in english folk songs (nor of sunstroke).
horsemouth’s trip to the seaside enabled him to escape on ongoing discussion thread with suburban bushwhacker and dr. tram (among others) - one issue was the relative underperformance of the uk green party (compared to their german cousins perhaps). suburban opined it was their anti-hunting/ anti-countryside policies that held them back, tram that they were just not that popular.
horsemouth opines that it is merely the very strange and unreliable first past the post/ representative MPs system that does it - there is a very poor correlation between how people voted and how many MPs their party receives. this is because the current electoral system is just not designed to do that. consequently the stories we tell ourselves (most political reporting and opinion in other words) about what ideas are popular, which parties are up (and which are down) based on the number of MPs are almost entirely misleading. in 2017 the greens got half a million votes (and one MP), the SNP got one million votes (and 35 MPs) - go figure.
there may not be a simple correlation between votes for a political party and seats received but there is a measure of how disporoportionate the result is the gallagher index.
but this index has its own problems ,
for example, by this index (a least squares method for the mathematically minded) the last election was a fairer one (achieving a gallagher index of 6.45 compared to usual british election results of 16 or so) - achieving parliamentary representation more reflective of votes cast than any recent poll.
this was because the percentage of people voting tory more closely resembled the percentage of seats they got than it usually does because the system produces strong parliamentary majorities for the victorious party from weak minority votes for them (almost as if it were designed to do that). most of the disproportionality in the measure is down to this.
here is the key problem with the gallagher index.
the disproportion of the voting choice of voters for the smaller parties contributes far less to the gallagher index than the over representation of the victorious party. under the gallagher index the labour party have no cause for complaint (they achieved an almost perfect match between the percentage of people voting for them and the percentage of seats they got) and the lib dems have got major cause for complaint (on this measure they continue to be by far and a way the most under-represented party), except that the gallagher index fails to pick up the under-representation of smaller parties .
the gallagher index effectively conflates under-representation and over-representation because it squares the difference between voter percentage and MP percentage (making its sign irrelevant). the SNP are in reality over-represented (as are the other regional parties DUP, sinn fein, plaid cymru), the lib dems, ukip, the greens are under-represented. it is not that being a regional party has any magical virtue here - it is that the number of voters in the constituencies are lower (horsemouth will check this out).
the internet the gift that keeps giving - four by the young bert jansch and four by norwegian(?) guitarist finn kalvik. 'running, running from home' duo with kalvik, bert returns the favour on 'elegi'
today is sunny out (horsemouth should probably go to the beach at some point).
it is with the ‘good morning’ that horsemouth parts company with news briefing.
he’s up. he’s had his coffee.
he’d just tried a quick play through of sliabh na mBan - anglicised as slievenamon - ‘the mountain of women’ this started with one of horsemouth’s fake mali-style guitar parts then he worked to incorporate a traditional irish tune he learned from a recording by his friend denise. the women race up the mountain in a competition to become fionn mac cumhaill’s wife, grainne wins (after fionn shows her a shortcut). . (or would be if his hands were not still asleep and not co-operating). listening back to other versions of the air horsemouth can't hear it in what he plays.
he was moving on to painbirds when the doorbell rang. (package delivery - clothing - horsemouth hears american in the accent round here a lot).
just up the road and down a lane from where horsemouth is staying is a holy well (st john’s well or tobar eoin Óg). the lane emerges in a housing estate on the other side of carrigaline (but then horsemouth couldn’t work out a way off the estate). there’s a pilgrimage up to it at mid-summer (24th june). yesterday horsemouth was thinking about blind blues musicians (blind blake, blind willie johnson, the reverend gary davis, there’s a lot more) - apparently the well restored the blind man’s sight who found it.
horsemouth found the holy well during an evening wander about (after a day spent sat around the house). in the afternoon the clouds had suddenly parted and it was blazing hot for a while - horsemouth, the king of wishing to be somewhere else, wished he was at the beach, but didn’t trust the weather enough to get on the bus (he was wrong).
in the evening he watched the witch - which is good. it’s unredeemed - no one arrives to save the family, they cannot save themselves, they are destroyed by malign supernatural forces, their blood enables the witches to fly (but even that isn’t a reason - nothing is explained by this).
‘O how marvelous to be able to look at what one cannot see. O sweet miracle of our blind eyes.’ - godard, histoire(s) du cinéma (1988–98).
when horsemouth arrived at the drombeg stone circle there was a ritual in progress. the celebrants sat with crossed legs in the stone circle. some kind of a wind instrument was being played,it was all most celtic. later there would be an incantation and drumming on a shamanic frame drum -the celebrants were spanish speaking (latinas mostly - horsemouth guesses). horsemouth tucked himself in behind a stone and listened in (himself and the musician’s girlfriend exchanged smiles). when the ritual transitioned into frame drum and incantation horsemouth moved away to the vantage point overlooking the site - a few (more conventional) tourists arrived and held aloof also.
with the frame drum and the incantation the celebrants were up and moving drawing energy from outside the circle and casting it into the centre (towards the assemblage of crystal and silver laid on the stone marking the spot where the body of an adolescent had been found during archeological excavations). there were flowers on the altar.
but the energy was of a different order - indifferent to the ritual two workers from the ancient monuments commission were busy strimming the site - cutting back the grass - phasing in and out, rising and falling in intensity. the hands of the incantress (a patty smith look-alike) shook with this energy at one point her arm circled thrashing the air like pete townshend. the celebrants moved,some saluting the sky welcoming in the solar energy, some hands on heart, some moving their weight from foot to foot mobilising the energy.
horsemouth quite liked this mixture of energies - a kind of folk industrialism.
and then the ritual ended - the celebrants dispersed - another took up the frame drum and kept a steady post-ritual beat for five to ten minutes whilst he looked out across the valley. there was a discussion with the tour guide about lunch. prehistorically there was a structure on the site intended for brewing beer or roasting meat, so these are not new concerns... and then hugs all round, they were off back up the lane, the tourists back to their coach parked a mile up the road (thoughtfully parked in front of the sign to the site). the musician and his mate shouldering a rucksack seemed to be off by different means.
there was a change of the guard - as you enter the site (where the site’s entrance now is) there was an information board with an speculative illustration, through the two tallest stones directly opposite the entrance the flat stone of the druid’s altar could be seen, there were offerings on the altar, a druid with raised hand indicated the cleft in the hills where the sun would rise (or was it set) on the winter solstice. that’s not right surely remarked the two women (and getting out their phones and google compass they settled it to their own satisfaction).
broadly horsemouth is neutral on this kind of prehistorical re-enactment. people are free to do what makes them happy or at least helps them make sense of the universe - even if it is an assemblage of celtic airs, amerindian ‘shamanic’ drumming, improv poetry and tai-chi warm up exercises (to be followed by chicken salad for lunch), even if it is misalignment.
drombeg is about two and half miles out of rosscarberry along the r597 (towards glandone). it is adequately signposted (but take a map to reassure yourself). in ireland they seem to have not so much the overlong country mile as the country kilometer but it was a nice walk on a mild day.
there are other possible prehistoric sites for horsemouth to visit out west (there’s little locally to carrigaline) but they might be more difficult to find and get on to (templervan by clonakilty for example is not signposted, is on private land, is to quote one antiquarian ‘only accessible from the east’ and that after climbing through an electric fence).
when horsemouth got back into rosscarberry (birthplace of thomas barry, jeremiah o’donovan-rossa and michael collins) the sun began to shine. horsemouth sat out,read, drank a pint of beamish, walked around a bit and killed time until the bus back to cork came. once again his face is a little burned the rest of him pale.
from now until the end of his visit is the anniversary of alice coltrane recording lord of lords - presumably it took longer to record than the other albums because it’s an album with orchestra. santana lifted the version of going home (dvorak to you and me) to open his live in japan triple album lotus.
it’s the tenth anniversary of horsemouth joining facebook.
ten years in the room full of mirrors listening to ‘the sirens sweetly singing’. of course before that there was myspace - now a deserted zombie infested shopping mall on the wrong side of the tracks...
before that horsemouth had to make do with print publication, the occasional ‘gig’, face-to-face meetings with his friends, email (yes once upon a time we used email to communicate), phone calls - he was an early(ish) adopter of email - a late adopter of the mobile phone (for work only he tells himself).
horsemouth is older, greyer, balder (and on more than one front) and with worrying signs of arthritis in his hands. but on the whole he doesn’t feel too bad on it. he’s engaged in his usual semi-monastic retreat of a holiday. but it is still longer than he cares to mention until his pension.
facebook affords him the chance to write everyday (with the possibility of it being read), to recommend music (remember the dj set with vinyl, the compilation cassette tape), to collect newspaper clippings (as if one day the power structure will be held to account), to get out the photo album and show the slideshow of his holiday. it enables him to show you the sunny side of (his) ocean if not the dark shadows moving in (his) woods. so does blogger.
it has however slowed down his work rate in proportion that it has made it more available to people - this he regrets.
...
meanwhile howard has been busy yet again...
and last night’s featured presentation washigh rise from a novel by j.g. ballard.
ballard takes the tropes of the genius architect and machines for living and undercuts them with the r.d. laing let it all hang out notion of therapeutic communities bringing difficult subconscious material to the surface. do you remember that one from when you were a kid where you would wake up in the night to discover your parents were having a party and find your house suddenly invaded by loads of drunk adults engaged in being very strange? a desire on the part of the adults to play at lord of the flies - all that class and sexual tension spilling out messily.
it ends with a thatcher speech but this is weak - the one that is needed is the there is no such thing as society speech (but even that is the wrong one) - really thatcher has nothing to do with this, these are early 70ies tensions we are dealing with here. it is the blank flexible doctor who thrives (rather than the history man documentary film-maker, another retro-fit
).
the front of the house gets the sunlight in the morning (where horsemouth’s bedroom is) - it takes a while to reach the backgarden - and the kitchen (horsemouth’s most used room).
yesterday horsemouth topped-up the bus card (garages) and then walked out to the ruins of carrigaline castle - sadly it’s not open to the public so he had to be content with the view from the road and peeking through the gate. he paused to eat his lunch on a small bridge - there were flowers like ox-eye daisies in the water.
in the afternoon he’s ashamed to say he snoozed, listened to music and wandered round the house. howard has done a new mix (emahoy, fleetwood mac(!), and desert sun- two escapees from the manson family).
horsemouth listened to it and then watched a number of documentaries on the manson family in the evening. manson’s followers (and former followers) are left worryingly disininhibited and the media comes and invited them into notoriety.the media does more to solve the crime than the cops.
manson had enough talent to attract attention as a songwriter (brian wilson stealing one of his songs for the beach boys, neil young praising him) but he was too much of liability to close the deal - or perhaps not, perhaps if he’d been just a bit luckier the family would have been written up as some utopian commune. thereafter he was on a death trip, moving out to the desert, to death valley even.
horsemouth always avoided this kind of material (patty hearst, jonestown) - the temple ov psychik youth, vague etc. were always interested in it. he just thinks it’s bad behaviour, a monument in skulls to the failure of love, how is that interesting?
so horsemouth has a gig (maybe) - 21st july the beehive in bow 8-8.30 (hopefully not AM). he should now embark on a description of the venue and how to get there (ok it’s near bromley by bow tube - just up the hill from the gentrifier’s arms - but horsemouth can’t find the number of the bus out of hackney for you lot right now). he should be able to give you a description of the venue because lots of his friends have played there (suke, the rantipoles etc.) er... but he didn’t go so he can’t.
it has made him get the guitar out and sing and play a bit at least - and to start thinking about a set-list. it looks like andrew minty is working and howard may be ill - hmmn it may be an actual solo gig.
this morning is a grey morning (but that doesn’t prove much round here) - yesterday was perfectly sunny in the end. horsemouth only made it out as far as the garage to refuel his stash of euros. he drank one of jon’s beers to celebrate (and very tasty it was too).
today horsemouth will have to go shopping - his eaten all the obvious food only leaving the stuff that must be cooked. he will also refuel his bus card that he has rinsed with all his visits to the seaside and to cork.
he’s (nearly) finished off ship of fools from whence the unknown knowns - the stuff everyone knows but no one will say (abuses in the church, bent financiers, corrupt poiticians etc.) - fintan gives the example of an old lady asked if she believes in the fairies - oh no sir! but they’re there...
the cockney equivalent is probably the charge of stating the bleedin’ obvious - laboriously pointing out what is better passed over in silence as it is assumed to be common knowledge.
last night he watched american sniper -it’s good to see people who are good at what they do (even if you think what they are doing doesn’t do any good). not sure what film this is from - any ideas?
