'populism, efficiency, or both' (rainmaker's coming)

ok bad news people - McCoy Tyner has died. this album recorded by rudy van gelder in 1970 with gary bartz, wayne shorter, ron carter, elvin jones, and alice coltrane on harp on three tracks

horsemouth had the morning off on friday (because gasp, yes gasp ladies and gentlemen) he turned down work. he just had a wafer thin booking in the afternoon and then he was done for the week.  what will he do over the weekend? not very much. he has his timetable for next week (and it seems bearable and sufficient). of course he still has a cold (dripping nose, sometime cough).

horsemouth (as you know) is of an apocalyptic frame of mind. a crisis is about to intervene - a crisis antithetical to the logic of capitalism (trade, interaction, increase) but ‘thetical’ (is such a word exists) to state biopower (travel restrictions, immigration controls etc.). like any decent zombie outbreak horsemouth expects state power to be revealed as distinctly insufficient (not that they won’t try). he sees this as an irruption of reality into capital’s dreaming.


horsemouth usually thinks of politics as an exercise in rainmaking - you need rain, they promise to make it rain, you pay them, perhaps it rains, perhaps it doesn’t, perhaps it rains eventually (but they get to keep their money either way). trebles all round.

the other side of it we will all be beaten to make up for capital’s losses (like 2008 and austerity all over again) but this time the hand of the state will have been strengthened both by the powers it will have adopted and by people’s recognition of the fundamental fragility of life. alternatively the people may emerge with a better understanding of their actual real strength faced only by a state that has been exposed as a fairweather sham.

the government makes big noises about its concern for the regions but has nothing to offer ideologically but a rerun of spurious unwanted devolution, terra nullius ‘redevelopment’ or centralised ‘efficiency’. some unstable amalgam of these strategies will likely be sufficient. it is less about ideological coherence and actual results than opportunities for rainmaking.