horsemouth back to work (leisure starts to make sense again)

ok soaked through and grumpy (not as grumpy as he was at a quarter to nine though when he was getting soaked through - fuck you kingston, your rain and your absence of signage).


hmmm hmmmm hmmm yeah! an hour off to piss around (suddenly leisure makes sense to horsemouth). the mighty toots and the maytals - horsemouth once saw him wandering up the road near the barbican (horsemouth was with mark pugh and luzette at the time - they had tickets to his show) if memory serves.


 ‘this is a show tune. but the show hasn’t been written for it yet.’ (nina simone)

once again horsemouth loves that thing with reggae that it’s tough and joyful at the same time.

yes horsemouth really is that grumpy. time tough. ok no it looks like lots of work, lots of work means more money. soon horsemouth will have a plot for the year (through til june anyway).

yesterday he did all the things he said he’d do and even had time for pint (thanks enza). on the walk home he found a ficelle outside a bakery near ayesha's (he snacked on it).


 

‘this remorse, I should start my preface from here’

as it turns out produced by Ric Ocasek RIP (and one of the best records ever)


a few nights ago horsemouth failed to go out (bad boy) but he did watch perry henzell’s the harder they come - one of the the three seminal reggae movies (the others being babylon and rockers -in horsemouth’s humble opinion).

in italy post war italo calvino finds the people changed, emboldened by his (brief) time as a partisan he writes ‘a book born anonymously of the general atmosphere of the period’. he notes that people had ‘a mania for narrating their experiences’, a re-birth in story-telling, even shading into folklore, even the uncommitted he finds changed. .

years later he writes a preface for it - one full of remorse for its distortions (‘this remorse, I should start my preface from here’). in the preface the partisan tales of another writer (beppe fenoglio’s a private question) is substituted in to stand for his story. 

but this neo-realism that is really a neo-expressionism is not where calvino’s genius lies - pavese speaks of the fairy-tale quality in his writing and calvino becomes the author we know.

horsemouth is often afflicted with remorse (his sins are small but numerous) - it creeps up on him when he is insufficiently active. in the harder they come ivan the gunman is seemingly not affected by remorse - at every stage he wants to be paid the full value of his work and that is what all the interlocking rackets (religion, law, property, the music industry, the ganja trade) are designed to prevent.

in the day horsemouth went for a walk round the marshes at one point - he saw a tree that had been cut down and then been lifted up by new grown branches from its roots (like some kind of art installation). he read a little (italian writing today, penguin 1967) in the back garden in the sun and (of course) farted about on line.

back to the wen (again)

horsemouth is back with you. back to the pyramids and the transmitters.
weather better friday, saturday, sunday, thereafter sunny in the morning 21-22.

by better horsemouth means warmer and sunnier (even though he has fled the hottest days of the year in the seaside towns for several years now).

he returns from the summer holidays with a decentish tan, having recorded some music and having read some books and watched some movies (he has also taken the time to keep this blog (and horsemouth archive) going though he has done no other writing that he can recall). the music he is proud of - the best yet he modestly opines (next key date - howard’s half term in about 6 weeks time). 

he’s been conducting a survey of how his friends listen to their music in this the modern digital age (and having read how the music got free on the rise of mp3). he suspects CD again (a physical thing that people can hold onto) and various other digital means (to be decided). it’s a way away though - a 2020 release.

while he has been at his parents he has listened to the new tracks through only once or twice (it is good to get one’s ears out of the project once in a while), instead he has listened to whatever came along. he’s already missed the opportunity to work by being out of town (this is a good sign - he could do with making more money this year than last year).

horsemouth’s wages have effectively been stagnant (and insufficient) for a number of years now - they are however paying into a pension for him (which is jolly nice of them, or will be, should he ever get there, should ‘there’ not move ever further away like a dangling carrot).

in his time at his parents - many wanders on the common, more reading of the torygraph, tv in the evening bbc4 - archeology, hill-walking etc.

while he was away gavin barwell (the butcher of grenfell) was made the right honourable gavin barwell, the governments suspension of parliament was ruled unlawful (in a a scottish court). the clock ticked down on brexit - the clock ticked towards a brexit election - the clock ticked down on global warming.

let a thousand flowers bloom (and the smile on the face of the tiger)

chairman mao (apocryphal) and a limerick of unknown provenance.

‘infamy, infamy, they’ve all got it infamy’ - kenneth williams carry on cleo

poor boris (not a phrase horsemouth ever thought he’d write) - it’s a bad day when not even the police want to be photographed with you (and are demanding an apology). the royal road of comedy has deserted him and he wanders parched in the wilderness. ok ok he’s got the weekend off to pull his bruised ego back together and contemplate the humiliations about to be heaped on his broad (if hunchbacked) shoulders (god his posture’s terrible).

when gove and boris hitched their wagon to brexit there was a brief flurry of the 'let a thousand flowers bloom' rhetoric - horsemouth assumes they are taking the western (non althusser) view of the cultural revolution (actually the hundred flowers campaign was earlier) as a move by mao to involve the people in the ideological battles of the chinese communist party. with brexit they find the people already assembled (as a result of years of propaganda by the red tops, the torygraph etc. - instead of the centralised authority of the tory party they have found another source of power. they defect to the leave campaign.

here's a little vignette, IDS attends a meeting on an estate in chingford about brexit - he is shocked to discover that 'the people on the estates' are really interested (having previously viewed these people as unreachable).

of course (to mix fake colonial metaphors) this is a bad case of tiger riding and not guaranteed to end well at all. what led people to vote for brexit (all those years ago) is an inchoate mixture of grievances many of which will in fact be made worse by brexit itself (of whatever stripe). is it the job of a progressive to warn against it or to shoo it on its way (so that it can all be worked out dialectically).

it is (perhaps) the low point in the story for boris the hero - shackled and humiliated by his party and parliament, the knives glittering the darkness around him. it’s boris versus the establishment - but at some point he will get to make his appeal to the people, he will twinkle, he will buffoon like a pound shop Churchill, and if he looks like he can deliver they will vote for him.

but they can’t vote for him they can only vote for their local conservative MP (as many as are left) whose behaviour may (or may not) have pleased them - then there’s always the brexit party.

and let us salute those glorious principled heroes of the people leaving the tory party - nicholas soames, amber rudd (fucksake)...

last night horsemouth watched a documentary on the rise of hitler (focusing on the german aristocracy’s welcome of him and perfect for these democracy anxious times), then dad’s army (probably the cause of brexit if we are honest) and then a 50 years of monty python special.

hence we witness the power of political satire.

a bright sunny morning (memphis)

once, as a child, at his grandparents in herefordshire he thinks it was, horsemouth saw a tom sawyer annual (he can’t remember if it was a cartoon strip or if they were illustrations to a story) but the conflation of it is that while tom and huck were on the raft in the mississippi the and on either side turned into ancient egypt (complete with pyramids and ancient egyptians and pharoahs and tombs closed for all eternity by draining sand like egg timers(lifted from the hollywood ten commandments).

maybe it was just a dream. beyond this memory there is nothing more so horsemouth cannot say more.

horsemouth is off to his folks in the countryside. last night he watched charlie parr play - charlie has recently had an accident and lost the use of all except his thumb and his forefinger on his picking hand - still that’s the treble and the bass covered, the occasional chord for punctuation, slide on the little finger of his fretting hand sometimes, a choice of not one but two glorious resonator guitars. a good solid foot stomp and a decent singing voice. horsemouth liked charlie’s minutemen t-shirt. he manages real depth sometimes, he manages to take you right back, was that a lift from last kind favour?...

his warm up man and harmonica player jd wilkes plays great banjo (swapping between the styles within one song) and does an excellent distorted harmonica sonny boy williamson routine (hey, what about little walter?). then there are songs where he plays banjo with one hand and harmonica with the other (which is a neat trick) - perhaps this trick was overdeployed ( three songs JD - really?).

horsemouth liked his songwriting - dark moralistic tales of feral hillbilly youth and he does the classic murder ballads also (pretty polly). he’s a hardworker clearly, aiming for huckster rather than wise old man, plus he has a rockabilly band the shack shakers.

books, gigs, films, events august 2019 (a little late)

books -

• the wrongs of women (mary wollstonecraft) 
• appalachian dulcimer traditions (mike lee smith)
•  harringey's hidden streams revealed (albert pinching and david dell) 
• sicily (guy de maupassant) 
• flood, blood, 3 wars (emile zola)
• various (old) editions of the new left review and the london review of books
•  investigations of a dog (franz kafka) 
• native stones: a book about climbing (david craig) 

 gigs - acoustic anarchy (lou and martin)

 films everybody in the place (jeremy deller), the dlatlov incident, the trouble with the tories (michael portillo), kill bill 1, eddie the eagle, the angel with the trumpet, seance on a rainy afternoon, solace, george clark on council housing, easy rider, no country for old men, creep, hard times (walter hill, charles bronson).

 events sojourn in the forest, much recording, becoming symmetric, bother's eldest's a-level results, visiting eugenie in the suburbs

how music got free and how housing got expensive

‘the secret of life is honesty and fair dealing (if you can fake that you’ve got it made)’
- old record industry saw.

horsemouth is up. outside it is a grey morning (boo) but that is ok because horsemouth is slightly torched from yesterday. yesterday he had a mission to run (it got him out of the house and away down the road at a fair old trot). otherwise he went off in search of cheap coffee at the supermarket in the fields (failure - there is obviously a ritual that needs to be done to ensure success in the coffee hunt and horsemouth is not doing it.)

nonetheless the overground into town and some brisk walking at either end and on either journey. this is good preparation for when he is back at work (whenever this will be).

horsemouth is reading how music got free (stephen witt) - the record industry mogul, the german inventors of mp3 (an interesting section of psychoacoustics - the sound we actually perceive), the dudes from shelby north carolina sneaking pre-release CDs out of the pressing plants and uploading them to the internet (to no great economic benefit).

the book is from 2015 and is a much better account of where the push towards the dematerialisation of music comes from than horsemouth’s account. but is it still true? - have we not in fact reverted to the digital jukebox where you pay for your music as part of a subscriber service - spotify etc. (in fact you pay for it to be ad free).


of course a rival book could be called how housing got expensive.

john mcdonald has proposed a right to buy for tenants of private landlords and there is some social justice to this position, but horsemouth basically views this as a distraction from the real task of getting social housing at social rent built. the small buy-to-let landlords have interestingly received several kickings from the tories already and the market is consolidating into larger companies that can write off the expenses imposed on the sector by government. similarly the housing associations have received several kickings from the government (like the proposal of right to buy for HA tenants) - all these did was convince the HAs that they should get out of providing social housing and get into providing housing for sale.

result? less housing for rent so higher rents all round because the housing that poor people need is simply not getting built.

all over the world in every nook and cranny the money is looking for a return - as long as it continues to be in short supply renting out housing is a one-way bet, and this is true even if the economy tanks or the government taxes it more heavily because people will always need somewhere to live (somewhere near work that is).

and of course buying doesn’t get you out of this - you simply move from renting your home to owing debt on your home - the housing ladder is a debt ladder that you must work to service (this is how the money finds its return).

the mcdonald plan is populist tinkering (it may be that he proposed more social housing at the same time and the press did not report it - it’s just not their interest). anyway this is how the housing got expensive but it is ok because horsemouth can be here telling you about it (until google or facebook or whoever decide to charge for it).