don’t tell the d-o-g but horsemouth is breaking up the b-a-n-d.
the cockerel (howard grange) is safely back in england (probably down in pop(u)lar at this very moment), horsemouth (as you know) is the mule, or donkey, or donkeymule or whatever, the d-o-g and the c-a-t are who they say they are.
but the d-o-g and the c-a-t do not get on (in fact they are barely talking). this is why horsemouth has decided to break up the b-a-n-d.
horsemouth will probably reform the b-a-n-d in england as just himself and howard (though he may musically collaborate with the c-a-t in future), the d-o-g is, in any event, off to the k-e-n-n-e-l-s later on today (probably), that was always the plan anyway. the d-o-g is only a young feller (and a hothead), the local dogs seem mostly to sing I’m the king of the castle, but the d-0-g’s song seems to be you’re not the boss of me.
horsemouth hoped that if he could just get everyone in a room talking then the reformation would naturally follow but it was not to be.
horsemouth knows that in other cultures the musicians of bremen are composed differently - a badger rather than a dog say - and indeed in many tellings of the story they are not even on their way to bremen.
actually the d-o-g is probably not gone until monday.
horsemouth was bored so he got out the time machine...
one year ago horsemouth and howard got john clarkson's harmonium out of storage (and so hence the current musicians of bremen album). two years ago horsemouth was moving his worldly possessions after several happy years down in langdon park (thanks to everyone who helped). three years ago he was buying the biography of karl krauss: apocalyptic satirist in oxfam in walthamstow. four years ago he was going to a meeting to be persuasive (he can't remember what about to be honest or if he succeeded or failed). five years ago horsemouth was hiding out in the countryside at his folks and reading balzac's a murky business. six years ago he was with kevin davy watching people going off to the london olympics down the greenway. seven years ago he needed a bass amp and a means of getting it to the gig for a snatch foster band gig - iona obliged with the amp (and an awesome beast it was too), john clarkson drove (cheers dude).
hmmm - reincorporation has been achieved - that seems to be a good place to stop.
the siege is over - the defeated army trundle away - horsemouth will have to do some research. at one point, in ismail kadare's book, to find the aqueduct bringing water into the castle, the besiegers release a thirsty horse who begins to dig where the aqueduct is. in this he truly is ‘a horse ... able to do things that a scholar can’t’ because the aqueduct has been designed to baffle human understanding and ‘make no sense’ but a thirsty horse just digs where it can smell water...
this could have been a morrissey tune - if you listen very carefully you can hear him. swooningly romantic, wracked with self-doubt, all wrapped up in a double entendre... no idea who this lot are (young person's music).
horsemouth is uncomfortable with the animal side of him (notice that he has chosen a much put upon beast of burden to be his spirit animal). however it is sometimes necessary to connect with this side of himself (when dealing with animals, children, lovers and insufficiently socialised adults - all creatures who will not accept a fascimile of the correct response but demand actual emotional connection).
but horsemouth finds this difficult and will often just get angry instead at having been made to do it. horsemouth’s anger is not a least said soonest mended kind of thing, it’s a mean passively-aggressive consequences playing beast, it’s a bit of a tantrum thrower, it’s not a pleasant sight.
but it is funny - a real comedy piece.
as horsemouth gets older he strives to do it less - let them have it, he says, if that’s what they want.
yesterday horsemouth got the bus out to fountainstown - and then after a read on the beach and a paddle he got the bus back. last night it rained (which made the dogwalking brief).
interesting there’s just been a power outage. the dog seems unbothered. horsemouth will blog on until the dog gets restless and then go for a walk. it’s a rainy grey day so he’s uncertain what he will do for the rest of it. for a brief moment he had a vision of no shops open, the fridges defrosting, the full ATMs not working apocalypse.
'come as you are...'
a few nights ago horsemouth was dreaming of village life. of the firemen making a symbol similar to the takoma park records logo. his dreaming of villages may be inspired less by carrigaline and more by the village in ismail kadare’s the ghost rider - the daughter marries out far away, the son promises the mother that if she wishes it he will bring her back, but then he dies fighting, the mother curses him in his grave for not bringing the daughter back, but then one night the daughter is at her door saying her brother has just brought her back.
‘come as you are...’ he said to her. his armour all covered in earth.
when he wrote it kadare was in disgrace in internal exile in albania. it’s translation history is interesting it was translated into french by a friend of his joseph vuroni in paris and then from that into english with additional bits added. the book ends by giving a preview of the siege.
it’s another book (like broken april -horsemouth would argue his best) about the kanun (albanian blood feud laws) - which the police chief sees as a self-managed means of imprisonment and execution (this may be a portion added after in the new translation). there is of course a political metaphor and message here but for kadare to have survived albanianian communism there can’t have been one - hence the rewrite, hence the original choice of a well-known ghost story (but one that was known in the rest of europe), folkloric material officially approved of.
horsemouth is sitting out in the sunset in the back garden minding a fire while J+D ferry one of the offspring and her friend to the cinema. he really needs the fire not to go out (so he can look like a trustworthy person and build trust).
‘with ishmael’s white reverie, with the patience of bartleby...’ - georges perec, W.
last night (when he arrived) horsemouth was straight on the guitar and him and denise blasted through their classics and through some prospective new tunes. she’ll have plenty of time to practice them while on holiday with dave and caudia (and graham and fiona).
meanwhile horsemouth will be dog-sitting, cat-sitting, watering the tomatoes (and possibly playing a little guitar himself, certainly doing some reading and some farting about on the internet, perhaps going for a few long walks).
before he flew he was reading felix holt again - it’s great - he will be quoting some of it tomorrow (when he finds a quiet minute to blog).
horsemouth is a little bored (but soon he is off to ireland). saturday sean was supposed to visit but there was also creation rebel up at walthamstow garden party (in the end sean will come monday or tuesday). later still on saturday horsemouth was off babysitting.
sunday afternoon there’s a good solid african music line up there (seun kuti and egypt 80, fatoumata diawara).
on the glorious 12th he failed to get out the door to look at the old school house (a very churchy looking building just off lea bridge road) - he always wondered what it was (and now he knows). soon it is up for sale (as a grade II listed building there’s limited opportunity to chop it about).
he shopped in the morning and read/ farted about on the internet in the afternoon.
he began the day listening to nirvana’s in utero (satisfyingly crunchy, strangely melodic and very well made) and ended it with metallica’s 1983 kill ‘em all - there’s a band photo, they all look very young and very serious, the riffing is there (but the vocals and the production aren’t).
horsemouth has ‘discovered’ veronique chailot a normandy french singer of early music who since 2005 has played with veziana, an ensemble dedicated to early music from both sides of the pyrenees.
horsemouth is reading the mystic mind: the psychology of medieval mystics and ascetics - a collaboration between a medieval historian and a psychologist has a precedent in his studies of the desert fathers but also on the position of women in the early church - in peter brown’s the body and society and in joyce e. salisbury’s church fathers, independent virgins - this also feeds in to his interest in utopian communes, monastic communities and secular solitaries (in both fiction and real life).
last night (on the news) horsemouth heard danny dyer proclaimed ‘the shakespeare of our times’ - and it is true - with a little work (and a few connectives, a refusal to parenthesize, the excision of a few agreement seeking right’s and yeah’s, the twat’s can probably stay) there it is.
he is channeling not just pub geezer (hearts of english oak and all that bollocks) but also a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing - this is at the heart of it, confusion. that the facts cannot be established, watching the words move around on the page and refuse to settle down.
and an endless confusion, an endless quibbling.
what dyer is doing is channeling and dramatising this confusion - he wants it sorted, but it’s not his job to sort it or even to propose how it could be sorted. where is the geezer? where is the geezer who called all this on?
the world is (to quote the temptations’ hit) a ball of confusion. but this confusion is not born of the desire to poets and songwriters and playwrights to entertain, or indeed a metaphysical desire to point out how very temporary and conditional our understandings are, but is objective, it is not just in our minds but out there.
‘... all that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind....’
so says marx, also channeling shakespeare in a way, but he wants to give us a way out.
‘.... the bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. to the great chagrin of reactionists, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. all old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. they are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilised nations...’
in brexit and trump and bannon we are witnessing a strange revival of the reactionists, of ideas to which the bourgeoisie usually only pays lip service, or recommends for others, or does on the quiet, are now a political programme - perhaps because the progressive part of capitalism has an inconsistent character, seemingly roaring ahead into the future on one hand (AI, china, biotechnology), seemingly stagnating and decadent on the other (its backing away from production into rent seeking, and endless foam of south-sea bubbles, dirty hospitals and late trains).
there is a way in which what is progressive in capitalism has become an ideology of capitalism, one of free-trade and globalisation (neo-liberalism) despite the fact that the world is still divided up into trading blocks managed by alliances between nation states. against this the economic nationalists aka. the reactionists propose a strategy of realpolitik and trade war.
this is not the end of history (in a globalised neo-liberal utopia) that the neo-liberals were expecting but it is the consequence of their victory.
it is strange to see marxists arguing for (or against) different arrangements of trading blocks, but that’s what the debate over brexit is.
for, of course, in the end, it is capitalism either way.
a post-brexit britain will not escape from the world economic system into a permanent england football victory (and its people into beer-warmed togetherness and homogeneity) but (more likely) into a dangerously isolated hinterland, the people troubled by the unfinished business of brexit.
the current dust-ups in the conservative party are not set to come to a crisis and then all blow over - they will run on and on because there can never be a brexit sufficient enough to satisfy its most utopian fans. brexit cannot lead to albion (and beyond that horsemouth makes no predictions).
so where are we headed? perhaps to some economically damaging brino, or an incredibly economically damaging no-deal, or an extension... all of them capitalism will deal with in the same way as the 2008 crisis, by beating more value out of the workers, by more austerity, by more crisis.
and meanwhile the center cannot hold europe may fall torn apart by its own reactionists but not in such a timely fashion that they can abandon their (strangely neo-liberal and globalist) european principles such as freedom of movement (such as currently enjoyed by refugees crossing the mediterranean in inflatables?) - but perhaps they can, perhaps that can be portrayed as a necessary compromise with the mad unprincipled english.
for the most likely end to the business (as vaudeville actors refer to productions) is for it to remain unfinished.
horsemouth is up late (he must have slept soundly).
last night he went off to see two ‘american primitive’ guitarists with howard in islington (they drank at islington prices - six quid a pint! jaysus where will it end!)
John McGrath
irish (from where horsemouth couldn’t tell you - he has a cloth ear for accents) less john fahey more michael hedges - some nice neck taping and right hand harmonics. he did do a fahey inspired piece in skip james tuning (open Dminor) - nice, decently fahey-esque, and sang one. he recommended steve lowenthal’s book as a ‘warts and all’ portrait of fahey. horsemouth liked the pedals but ultimately the set was not his thing, it was a little too mannered for him. he has written on samuel beckett, music and repetition - which makes him all the more interesting.
Gwenifer Raymond
horsemouth missed the start of her set (but probably only the first few minutes he hopes). very minimal stage chatter, which is shows confidence in the material - welsh - but from where horsemouth couldn’t tell you (he has a cloth ear for accents). it makes sense that she plays banjo also (and employs fingerpicks), guitar mic’ed up (rather than DI’ed), good frailing and fingerpicking style, the material taken at a ferocious charge, more blues meets dies irae. a strong sense she could play whatever she wanted, and decently dark too. john fahey is reborn and this time she’s a woman.
earlier in the day
horsemouth was up the dalston curve garden with iona (of gertrude and the rantipoles). she is back for a vacation from rumania (and a rantipoles festival gig) and currently reading her way through mihail sebastian’s diaries, an account of the rise of fascism in rumania in the second world war and the succumbing of the intellectuals to it (including mircea eliade and e.m. cioran people horsemouth has heard of and even read).
this seems to be the book of our times - trump, the EU, everybody playing the immigration card and the liberals rolling over to permit the infringement of human rights.
plus, the gide, the saramago, the pessoa, you know horsemouth is a complete sucker for author’s diaries.
iona hasn’t been musically inactive in rumania, she started an ensemble to play balkans music, she mentioned a style of gypsy rap that horsemouth will have to investigate (manele).
somewhat annoyingly children can now research their teachers online - leading to classes full of rumanian children doing gertrude’s the perfect ‘O’ dance like something out of a musical.
she also blogs over at https://misstangybucharest.wordpress.com/
2nd june - field day - oumou sangare, princess nokia, tzusing, kurupt FM’s set - cod MC’ing over uk apache and shy fx’s jungle classic original nuttah, charlotte gainsbourg.
3rd june - patti smith from over the fence
10th june - barking folk festival - unthanks, stick in the wheel, nancy kerr, gracie petrie, lucy ward, two stilt walking ladies being suffragettes
17th june - vinyl deptford closing party - gardyloo spew and dj sets
18th june - rose petal jam and the scordatura ensemble perform harry partch’s early chamber music
21st june improvising vocalist guillermo horta - met up the park
24th june - leigh folk festival, men diamler, bob collum and the welfare mothers, alisdair roberts, neil mcDermott and tartine de clous, hoy shanty crew, masal.
books
george eliot - felix holt, (begun)
claudio magris- microcosms (finished),
terry eagleton - criticism and ideology (up to p..40 or so),
jose saramago - the notebook (nearly finished),
fernando pessoa - the book of disquiet (started),
chronicles of the house of borgia - baron corvo (started)
dog moon run - callan wink (finished)
folklore of cornwall - two folk singers
films
bay of blood, danger: diabolik - mario bava,
a fleetwood mac documentary,
big trouble in little china, they live, vampires (john carpenter),
in the shadow of the shard,
the third part of arabian nights,
urban legends 3,
silent hill.
from hell
a little of 'oncle yanco' by agnes varda
