gigs, books, films, events february 2020

gigs   gwenifer raymond, doctor turtle, various people at siobhan's party.

films

• loaded, 
• seven thunders, 
• the vampire lovers, 
• sea ranch interview, 
• a cat in a bag (1964 - john coltrane soundtrack as blue world), 
• hawkwind documentary, 
• ronald blythe interviews, 
• elementary... very patchy, not much on horror channel lately. 

 books 

• the accident -ismael kadare (the first one of his horsemouth hasn't enjoyed) 
•  reading folk archive: on the utopian dimension of the artist's book - dan smith 
•  the pedagogy of the oppressed - paolo friere (introduction and early chapters) 
•  notes and drafts for 'the dialectic of the enlightenment' (adorno and horkheimer) 
•  politics, metaphysics, death: essays of giorgio agamben's homo sacer (some articles) 
•  the leviathan in the state theory of thomas hobbes: meaning and failure of a political symbol -carl schmitt (introduction) 

 events sean visits, visit tate, siobhan's birthday, visit jeremy bentham in his old location for the last time, visit the grant museum, uk leaves the EU, groundhog day, fahey week 2020. .

fahey week 2020 day 7 - fahey week ends (basho day)

fahey week ends for 2020 with basho day. it is the anniversary of the birth of john fahey and the death of robbie basho on the chiropractor’s couch. basho was a big fellow plagued with back trouble. unlike fahey who lived long enough to repudiate his earlier ‘cosmic sentimentalism’ basho didn’t and he probably wouldn’t have. while also coming from takoma park basho’s vision was a lush religious, romantic one. basho sings too, often wordless and yearning, there are spoken word interludes and dedications to his guru.

to go all biblical the american primitives begat the wyndham hill new age guitar school. while fahey embraced electric guitar, noise collages and song titles such as the death and disembowelment of the new age, basho let himself be recorded by wyndham hill and arguably produced his best work visions of the country. but it wasn’t what the new age-ers were looking for.

fahey week 2020: 'the flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come...’

‘...and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land...' - song of solomon 2:12 (king james bible)

horsemouth picked up the idea of fahey week from the delta slider blogspot. (lord knows how long they’ve been running with it).

on sunday, 22 february 2015 we find the first fahey week post on horsemouth’s folk archive.

the next year we have a complete fahey week, horsemouth goes through fahey’s recorded output backwards in 7 year hops beginning with monday, 22 february 2016’s excuse me sir. do you have a minute to talk about john fahey?

in 2017 horsemouth looked at the various collaborations of john fahey.

in 2018 horsemouth begins it with his thoughts on a radio documentary - an interview about fahey’s life and work by nicholas thompson with steve lowenthal, the author of fahey biography the dance of death.

in 2019 horsemouth read and commented on an account by john jeremiah sullivan (in a collection of his journalism pulphead - dispatches from the other side of america) of phoning up fahey in pursuit of an old blues lyric.

of course there are other times in the year when fahey makes an appearance. there are probably earlier posts on horsemouth’s facebook pages or entombed under the dead weight of myspace. he’ll dig them out for you.

but there, now we’re all caught up.

horsemouth has a cough (unusual for the time of year)

part of the reason why he is coughing so much this morning is that he drank too much beer last night (once again horsemouth was king of the let’s have another one party - though to be fair myk did start it off). he went to see gwenifer raymond and doctor turtle play,

thanks to john clarkson for steering him in the direction of a free ticket courtesy of analog planet (website of the discerning hi-fi buff), he would have taken a +1 of you but it was short notice. it was good to see mike, lou, and myk there.

to repay the universe for his free ticket horsemouth bought a gwenifer raymond t-shirt. which he is now wearing  (horsemouth buying clothing?)

horsemouth arrived during doctor turtle’s set (which was nice - well played dude). gwenifer did a good long set and seems to have stopped being monosyllabic (horsemouth was a little shocked), we were treated to two new numbers played live for the first time, some great banjo pieces. if horsemouth has a criticism it is that the material veered towards the night train to valhalla end of things rather than the on the sunny side of the ocean side of things. still thanks john/ analog planet/ everybody - a good night out.

on the way back horsemouth got a bag of chips.


a friend of horsemouth was asking for recommendations in the folk music field. horsemouth recommended jacken elswyth (who he knew from the weirdshire connection - and he knew them from the wild hare club connection ans so on). and then it turns out his friend already knows jacken. (phew cor-bloody hell, small world, seven degrees of separation and less in the radical world). here's another split cassette tape and digital download from jacken. once again it is most excellent.

stellar regions (the panopticon) the blue world

recorded this day in 1967 but the tapes not found again until 1995 - stellar regions is john coltrane with alice coltrane on piano, with jimmy garrison on bass and rashied ali on drums but without pharaoah sanders. this makes it a more lyrical proposition.

some of the themes appear on the later interstellar space (the duo recording with rahied ali). the songs were titled by alice coltrane which helps to locate them.

there have been similar posthumous coltrane discoveries since (both directions at once for example, recorded 1963 with the classic quartet) and the 1964 blue world (recorded for a national film board of canada movie in three hours - the tapes spirited across the border and largely unused).

but while horsemouth loves the classic quartet he is even more enthusiastic about coltrane’s later years (he wants to see where coltrane is going).

The Cat in the Bag , Gilles Groulx, provided by the National Film Board of Canada

today is also the anniversary of the birth of the utilitarian jeremy bentham and thus of the panopticon (one of the clearest expressions of the total surveillance society but also critically of its internalisation by prisoners/ subjects/ citizens/ users of facebook). horsemouth went to visit his autoicon this week (where we can be revenged upon him for this).

while he was by no means as industrious as the parisian citizens discussed by balzac in his the girl with the golden eyes this week horsemouth worked the dayjob , he traveled to and from, he babysat, he read, watched various movies and listened to various musics, he made some attempts to learn new songs, he visited a museum. he’s not sure what he’s up to today but he’ll find something.

horsemouth multiplies his personality (‘hail to the king of ... activity, to whom time and space gives way’)

howard.... busy (also) ...etc.

‘... yes, hail to that being, composed of saltpetre and gas, who makes children for france during his laborious nights, and in the day multiplies his personality for the service, glory, and pleasure of his fellow-citizens...’ 

while the rest of the novel (the girl with the golden eyes) is a minor thing, balzac’s sustained coffee fueled rant about the hardworking, multitasking parisian citizen is a thing of beauty. balzac's parisian citizen works multiple jobs. after a full working day balzac makes him a spear carrier at the opera.

you can see why marx and engels love him (and what they’ve borrowed from him).

 

union jacks and commonwealth (the rest of you are just going to have to take your chances))

horsemouth's friends triple negative have got a new LP coming out - you can pre-order it here.

so horsemouth has survived another week. for this week. he has been gainfully employed which now means he has earned nearly enough to pay his rent (april to april) and that after this month’s paycheck it’s all gravy (i.e. he can use this money to feed and clothe himself and buy books and beer - so that would be february and march).

of course this is only nearly (but also not entirely) practicable and requires the dipping of his savings at a slow but steady rate. horsemouth’s basic plan is to coast it out to the point where his savings will allow him to survive until pension day (67) without recourse to the benefits system (this may necessitate withdrawl to a warmer country for a series of extended holidays now that moving to europe looks to have been blocked off).

horsemouth has been pondering the almost maoist optimism of paolo freire’s the pedagogy of the oppressed in tandem with the current political situation.‘trusting the people is the indispensable precondition for revolutionary change’ - paolo freire, pedagogy of the oppressed, p.42 (one pound treadwell’s table). it’s all very humanist and inspiring. ‘the correct method lies in dialogue’. easy to say (but difficult to do) in the current situation.

17 million people have chosen something horsemouth would not have chosen. everywhere horsemouth detects a profound political disaffection and a desire for autonomy (that he would recognise) but it is framed in the language of immigration controls and (paradoxically) parliamentary sovereignty.

the radical potential of the years following the credit crunch has been spunked on a dream of faded imperial grandeur. the tory party has played a good game and is now safely back in power for the next five years. and yet it is charged with delivering this insane fantasy of an escape from global capitalism into a sunny upland of union jacks and commonwealth.

the economy is about to take a kicking. horsemouth hopes that his needs are so few and his sector so far back in order of things that he will survive it largely unscathed. horsemouth will be saying I told you so at regular intervals and refusing all calls for unity. like he says all he has to do is stretch it out in the direction of the pension. should the pension evapourate or become meaningless before he gets there he’s probably still ok (he is after all a child of the middle classes).

the rest of you are just going to have to take your chances.

by queensbridge road (my bus laid down and died)

horsemouth had time to kill yesterday (so he walked across the seaside towns and went to the tate). 

after an extortionate coffee horsemouth found in the basement archives an exhibit on austiran emigree expressionist painter and photographer marie-louise von motesiczky. as an old lady she used to drive into hampstead to do her shopping in a little 3 wheeled car with her dog. an irish nurse would go ahead to clear the way and stop traffic.

her father was born (scandalously) in the natural history museum.

another ancestor was psychoanalysed by freud.

she was the friend/ patron/ unacknowledged second wife (effectively) of elias canetti. but when veza, canetti’s wife from the autobiographies dies, he marries another (and takes up with a young iris murdoch). she was a link back to the austria of beckmann and kokoshka,

horsemouth went to the blake room (but of course all the blake was still in the blake exhibit), what was there focused on samuel palmer and the ancients of shoreham. horsemouth particularly liked john craxton’s print of llanthony abbey (up near his parents). it was there he discovered that the incredible string band song lavengro is named after george borrows’ heavily fictionalised autobiography including much of gypsy life (horsemouth cannot find a version on you tube so this will have to do instead).

on his way there he spotted nigel henderson’s screen.



 later there was a free bowl of soup and a bread roll (thank you artistic youth) at a nearby art institution and some quite enjoyable advice on writing art reviews (that horsemouth has failed to make use of).

‘no more horses, horses...’ (leviathan unchained)

horsemouth is working up a version of blue oyster cult standard the revenge of vera gemini (dew there’s a lot of words, looks like patti smith was getting paid by the yard). albert bouchard sings it high (no way horsemouth is getting up there).

‘if you invoke a myth, you invoke all of it’

the great fish leviathan (the monster of the deep) is choosing to swim away from the EU into uncharted waters ('arr hoist the jolly roger and chuck the health and safety legislation overboard me lads!'). it is swimming away from behemoth (the monster of the land).

for years leviathan hauled its bulk onto the the land (shuttling between brussels and strassbourg) wearing a kind of behemoth costume and sat in giant conference centres debating important matters with behemoth (a kind and gracious host). unlike in japanese movie the monsters will not fight until one is vanquished, the modern world is not like that, they will sometimes meet at davos, nod to each other, perhaps exchange a few words.

in the half a century since leviathan was last in the water the world has marvelous changed (arguably it had in fact changed long before this). is there still a place in the world, between the sealanes and the container ships, for a giant seagoing monster? probably not. at 11pm january 31st leviathan set sail. god bless her. you don’t see many of them these days.

sadly she will be confined to coastal waters for the first few years.

coming up on horsemouth folk archive

•  fahey week (feb 22nd to the 28th) 
• basho day (the 28th),
•  jackson c. frank day (march 2nd to march 3rd)

 

gigs, books, films, events january 2020

once again slightly late

gigs - lou crisfield, martin howard, cunning folk (80ies set) at waterintobeer

books

• apollinaire - francis steegmuller, 
• american overdose - chris macgreal, 
• introduction to 'from honey to ashes' - claude levi-strauss, 
• adorno-benjamin correspondance (first and last letters), 
• andrew norris - politics, metaphysics and death: essays on giorgio agamben's homo sacer - intro, dips,
• artforum, the economist (december 2019), 
• october 170 (hal foster piece, charisma and catastrophe), 
• raymond williams - people of the black mountains (started), 
• 92 acharnon street - john lucas. 

 films, tv etc.

• true detective series 3, 
• the essay (radio3) on bladerunner and weimar germany, 
• the great ecstasy of woodcarver steiner (werner herzog), 
• get out, 
• elementary, 
• the reptile, 
• simon king of the witches, 
• necromancy (first half), 
• evilspeak (first five minutes), 
• november, 
• la jetee, nostalgia, the fisher king
• juventude em marcha 

 events mixing round howard's, bahauas exhibit at teh william morris gallery, lou at wib, see red ladies of the apocalypse, see the mari lwyd, shocking hangover, next weekend pub with howard. the UK leaves the EU (to be followed by groundhog day).