books, gigs, films, events may 2020

books

•  illness as metaphor/ AIDS as metaphor - susan sontag 
•  the suitcase - sergei dovlatov 
•  christ stopped at eboli - carlo levi 
•  the plague and exile and the kingdom - albert camus 
•  the island - chekhov (part) 
•  the revenant magazine (folk horror edition) 
•  balzac anniversary (various short stories) 
•  nlr (andrei platonov - man and nature, benno teschke - reply to balakrishnan, peter osborne - philosophy a deux (deleuze and guattari), fredric jameson - dresden's clocks (on time again), steve lukes - gadfly from prague (on ernest gellner), perry anderson - a mage in the mato grosso on claude levi-strauss) 
• homo sacer - giorgio agamben 

films, tv etc.

• the crazies (george romero)
•  can you see what I'm trying to say (marion brown)
•  the blood on satan's claw
• zombie flesh eaters (lucio fulci)
•  the man with the movie camera (part)
•  christ stopped at eboli (4 hour italian tv version er. in italian)
•  pasolini season (accatone, moma roma, documentary)
•  the dead pool (dirty harry)
•  snow piercer
• sons of anarchy (series 1) 

gigs (online of course) gwenifer raymond, SPeW video release, acoustic anarchy folk club

the 11th week of horsemouth's lockdown begins (things can happen now)

it’s start of the 11th week of horsemouth’s lockdown (70 days since he’s been on public transport, 70 days since he’s been in a supermarket) and it begins to fade. he’s met up with howard twice now.he met up with martin. yesterday he was supposed to meet with minty. (outside? yes, 2m social distancing? er.. maybe) and then of course there are his housemates that he has bumped into or been in close proximity to (and then the various people they’ve met up with and so on). 

other than that he’s barely been out of the house (up to the local shop once a week. the dudes up the local shop, all the people they see, their distressing habit of not wearing masks and handling the produce without gloves). horsemouth has gone all howard hughes in the crisis.

 
yesterday he wandered out onto the marshes (he picked some wildflowers they are in a jar here with him). the lockdown suits his lifestyle (sit around, read books, sunbathe, fart about on facebook). pretty much it is what he would do anyway - well, mostly. he’d like to get on with some music. he’d like to get up to visit his parents. (hell he’d like to hide out there in the countryside for the duration). 

his folks are halfway up a hill in the middle of nowhere (with minimal points of contact with the outside world, the daily run to the garage on the motorway for the paper probably) this gives them a decent chance. later this evening a phone call to them. 

ideally horsemouth will have had it already and survived (he doesn’t think so but maybe - of course if there were an antibody test widely available this would help enormously). failing that he will catch it at some point and be one of the 80% to whom its a pain in the arse but no more - he doesn’t like to think about the scenario where he’s one of the 20% who gets it and ends up in hospital (or indeed in the percentage that actually dies). he thinks he’s a bit young to actually die of it (but it’s not impossible).

he hopes he doesn’t catch it. (he hopes he hasn’t caught it). he hopes he doesn’t give it to anyone.
it has swept through the care homes, it has swept through the old people living in extended families. the government are arguing that the infection rate and the death rate among the doctors and nurses is no higher than the general population (so failing to provide them with adequate PPE can’t be killing them no?) but surely their rates of infection should be a lot lower (because they have the kit and the kit works) even though they are exposed to more people who have it.

cummings (sick with covid) and his wife (sick with covid) drive to durham to drop the kids off with his folks. were they making a run for it? was it like weekend? she’s a spectator editor - horsemouth always assumed it was a style sheet for tory morons he hadn’t realised it was actually the in house magazine of the new regime. (he’ll have to try to actually read it). 

cummings is the tories’ best hope because he wants to (re)configure them as a modern technocratic managerialist party that can continue to win elections. without an utterly radical reconfiguration of the ruing class/ the electoral system and an economic rebalancing of the country the ongoing failure of democratic legitimacy cannot but continue. it is thus fertile ground in which to plant a flag (as cummings/leave/boris proves). 

what we are heading into is a double dose of radical shock therapy (a covid brexit) that may well overstretch the ruling class’s ability to manage it (and the people’s ability to keep calm and carry on). boris has to take the conservative party into this radical change and encourage them to stick to it even when their desire to keep their noses in the trough conflicts with their sense of who they are. the genius of the thatcher construct was that she was simultaneously one nation tory (socially conservative) and radical neo-liberal freebooter and this allowed her to get away with a lot.

globalisation may be over but the neo-liberal looting is not. we are entering a phase where the state is assuming more importance.

things can happen now. 

horsemouth takes the second title for today’s epistle from a documentary on the french new wave - the jump cut, the montage, the experience of the film is not seamless, the artifice involved in making it is foregrounded, made the subject of the film, the film becomes about film.

 
yesterday horsemouth failed to go for a walk (how useless is that?). he will try and rectify this today.

'ecoutez l'histoire de bonnie and clyde' (a dream of wessex)

it is the anniversary of the deaths of bonnie parker and clyde barrow 
murdered by 'the laws' this day 1934

 'if a policeman is killed in dallas, and they have no clue or guide; if they can't find a fiend, they just wipe their slate clean and hang it on bonnie and clyde'  - from a poem written by bonnie parker two weeks before her death the first verse of which is used in serge gainsbourg's song.

horsemouth dreamed of bridport. (just back from bridport in the hills) when he woke up the summer sun and the whitewashed walls reminded him. horsemouth dreamed of bridport. (just back from bridport in the hills) ...

yesterday howard was up visiting but (as sometimes happens) they were out of tune. howard has his work head on (some of his young people are finding the lockdown - and life in general - difficult) and horsemouth... well horsemouth is losing the ability to speak because he speaks to so few people.

they sat out the front listening to music through the window. last time they actually sat out on a saturday (this might be the secret trick or it might have been the music - horsemouth was short on sitting out music (not enough brazillian music or old-school reggae - he’s not sure where it all is), howard brought some (but for some reason horsemouth was disinclined to play it). eventually carlinhos brown and capitao do asfalto did it.

it is a curious one, for much of the lockdown horsemouth was sustained by work (not enough work to actually feed him, as if these were normal earning times, but work that ate a lot of time). this is over, horsemouth is furloughed, and as usual, when work stops, he doesn’t quite know what to do with himself.

he showed howard some illustrated books: the ones that met with approval were under summer skies by vytautas bubnys (designed by vasili shulzhenko) ‘a book about the lithuanian countryside today’ (from 1974) and a book of russian fairy stories the firebird with admirably flat and colourful folk style drawings by igor yershov and ksenia yershova. horsemouth forgot that he has the miguel covarrubios illustrated blues anthology - that would have been good to show also. he lent out the pierre de clastres (with the paul auster ‘making of’ introduction).

otherwise horsemouth has just been reading and sunbathing - more balzac (at the sign of the cat and racket). everybody else is back out and being sociable (which means the virus will keep going) but horsemouth is still not up for it.

a very influential tune RIP mory kante .

‘there’s a red house over yonder’ (grita liberdade)

‘well then, tell it to us, we will not repeat it...’ - the young couple out walking, a seaside tragedy, balzac.

so to celebrate the birthday of balzac (yesterday) horsemouth read a number of his short stories that he doesn’t think he’s read before; the atheist’s mass, the conscript, the elixir of life, the red house, and a seaside tragedy. he also read the wikipedia article on him (so all that type founding stuff in lost illusions was from bitter personal experience).

he also glanced at the introduction to l’illustre gaudissart that he has - but this is in french so horsemouth struggles to make sense of it (and yet it seems very foucault to him - un certain ordre de choses);

‘le commis-voyageur, personnage inconnu dans l'antiquité, n'est-il pas une des plus curieuses figures créées par les mœurs de l'époque actuelle? n'est-il pas destiné, dans un certain ordre de choses, à marquer la grande transition qui, pour les observateurs, soude le temps des exploitations matérielles au temps des exploitations intellectuelles...’

there’s more, it’s another huge machine (it’s one of those great coffee-fueled balzacian set-up rants). all of it in one huge paragraph ending - ‘écoutez le discours d'un des grands dignitaires de l'industrie parisienne au profit desquels trottent, frappent et fonctionnent ces intelligents pistons de la machine à vapeur nommé Spéculation...’ 

of course horsemouth can read it in translation online.

in red house (written in paris may 1832) a criminal is discovered at the bourgeois dinner table, what of it? - say the young man’s advisors, lawyers and aristocrats together - all property is theft if you look back into it far enough.

ben has been contemplating the current situation based on a comment in frederic jameson’s hyperspace essay (lrb, 2015). horsemouth did little with this essay but note that he had read it and rehearse some of the arguments until he was satisfied he had understood them.

now horsemouth (as you will have noticed if you have been reading these) sometimes tries to make sense of the current moment. broadly he sees it as an intensification of the logic of brexit, the replacement of a globalised neo-liberal order with a nationalised neo-liberal order. horsemouth doesn’t think this will get anybody anywhere worth going (except for the ruling class who will continue to rule) but it is in line with what the 52% who voted for brexit wanted.

otherwise the crisis merely accelerates what was happening previously - the movement of everything online into total surveillance. the replacement of the local and the lived with a boutique facsimile.


horsemouth has added a cape verdean revolutionary anthem to his current african music selection. in vanda’s room an old man now living in portugal listens to it over and over - soon they will clear the slums and move him to a new apartment block. the song is just the lost dreams of youth.

‘the perplexity of the early days gradually gave way to panic’

now horsemouth is not doing much on this latest one (dark was the day) apart from playing a root note bass line. still he is very pleased with the way it has come together. (love the bells at the front).

other demo tracks from musicians of bremen volume four are available on soundcloud for your perusal.

horsemouth has been reading albert camus’ the plague (in a rather natty penguin modern classics edition from - well back when paperbacks were 60p anyway).

it begins with a frontspiece by defoe not from his journal of the plague year but from robinson crusoe; (horsemouth admits he had not noticed it until now)

‘it is reasonable to represent one kind of imprisonment by another, as it is to represent anything that really exists by that which exists not.’

is this to be read as a straightforward plea that metaphor be permitted? (bearing in mind susan sontag’s resistance to the employment of metaphor in medical matters) or as a sly injunction to read the text metaphorically? the tendency was to read camus fictitious account of the struggle against plague in oran in the 40ies as a metaphorical account of the struggle against fascism in france in the 40ies, a return to the foundational myth of existentialism, one of choice. that faced with their absurd position men had made a choice to struggle etc.

the book is written in a mixture of distancing circumlocutions and a harsh directness
- from ‘and, as it so happens, what has yet to be recorded before coming to the culmination...’
 to ‘one grows out of pity when it is useless’.

 soon it will be the anniversary of la semaine sanglante when the paris communards  were murdered by the new french state. later still the anniversary of the death of bonnie and clyde.

horsemouth was reading the camus, the chekhov he has set aside for the time being. here the perplexity of the early days is not becoming panic but boredom and frustration, people have not accepted the inhuman scale of events but at some point they will be faced again by this realisation. horsemouth expects the flare ups both of the disease and people.

htaed kcalb (the black death in reverse)

so horsemouth watched the latest transmission from rasta boris ‘get back to fucking work’. he’s sad to say it did make him laugh (so it’s off to the re-education camp for him). but at least the government appears to have rediscovered the trick of clear messaging.

 ‘get back to fucking work’. (sorry) but that doesn’t make the practicalities of it any better.

take this 2m rule for example (one caribou = two huskies = four ravens = 8 sourdough loaves as the people of the yukon have it) - basically it’s bollocks, it’s based on an idea about how far the virus might travel if you breathed it out with your normal level of respiration. of course if you sneeze or cough it’s going to travel much further (and coat any available surface), if you are sitting there in an air conditioned space (like an office, a modern bus, on an aircraft) then all the all the air is recirculated anyway. (and so you’re fucked so you are). and if you’re on an old tube train? well again - you’re fucked so you are.

horsemouth looks at the footage of people getting on the tube because they need to get to work and sighs. this is why he has proposed renaming the new elizabeth line (crossrail) the death line. take the death line to the death factory all aboard the death ship.

of course you should avoid public transport if you can (says rasta boris) when you ‘get back to fucking work’. of course something like 50% of the workforce was always already ‘back at work’ - the NHS, a vast employer, care workers, supermarket staff, transport workers, logistics and distribution people, farmers, key workers - like people who work in off-licences, posh wine shops etc, teachers teaching the children of key workers. the people who are bundled out of the door and into danger.

let us be frank about this ‘the low skilled’ - and how do we know they are ‘low skilled’? because they are low paid.

horsemouth is lucky he is in the joke bit of the economy (so this is what all that education was for) - the bit that can ‘work from home’. he feels a little guilty (but then on the other hand he has crap lungs and would like to make it to the other side of this alive).

now is probably the time to dust off those arguments about ‘the expanded circle of reproduction’.

there used to be attempts to distinguish between the work that needs to be done and the work that frankly doesn’t need to be done (but in this society we claim it does). to distinguish between the productive bit of the economy and the reproductive bit of the economy (the bit that enables the people in the productive bit to go to work), the inessential bits (the person selling you a latte by the tube station) and the frankly vampiric bits (finance etc.) that suck off the blood of value and feed it to the rich. this is pretty much how horsemouth sees it.

of course much of the work carried out under capitalism (building crossrail for example) makes sense (just about) within capitalism but is probably really inessential, if not actually ecologically harmful - but that’s a side point, here horsemouth is just interested in the production, reproduction and distribution of value within the system.

now in general we argue that value is generated in all of it as a whole. but you could argue that value is generated only in some of it and the rest of it merely makes ‘claims on value’ - e.g. in 2008 the financial sector crashes and we the people with our work (essential and inessential) bail it out. that the value circulated in capitalism is in fact generated by the work of the workers is one of the key marxist points. but capitalism, through ideology, can reset this point between what is held to be productive and what is held to be vampiric - the state or the unemployed for example, care work.

the virus offers capitalism a chance to reset (just as the financial crisis offered us a chance to reset in 2008 but we failed to take it) and crucially to reset at a lower level of activity but with tighter control over where the profits and thus the value goes (it helps to think of this whenever any political policy is proposed - cui bono).

as a friend joked this scenario will be like the black death in reverse - instead of there being a shortage of workers and thus the workers gained greater freedom (as at the end of the black death), work will contract and so less workers will be needed to do it. there will be a surplus population, vast unemployment, a state burdened with debt servicing its debt to international finance (aka the rich).

there is another scenario - the debt taken on by the state expands but people are relaxed about it, the wisdom of socialised health care becomes apparent, the former neo-liberals (tory and labour) have a road to damascus conversion and begin to tax the fuck out of the rich to support the economy and employment keynes style. workers share of gdp rises as the ‘gains’ of neo-liberalism are re-appropriated to the state as redistributive mechanism. frankly horsemouth would probably settle for this, this is kind of the thomas piketty ‘it always takes major social and political mobilisation to move societies in the direction of equality’ position.

both of these are ideological tendencies within capital so the actual result will be something down the middle. 

the virus will just become chronic (like season flu is). it will become endemic in the third world. biopolitical control measures - contact tracing via apps in the first world will reinforce the general level of xenophobia and paranoia. capitalism can live with the virus, its not an existential threat to it, just another opportunity, it permits the shock therapy but is not severe enough to kill the patient. of course it’s all early doors yet.

there is another scenario - the key workers become aware of their power, the danger they are being placed in as a class, blah blah blah revolution (but horsemouth doesn’t think this will happen because we did such a poor job of defending ourselves after 2008).

ok - that was cheerful wasn’t it. (further down the line - global warming - now that probably is an existential threat to capitalism)

‘I attended the sick, painted, read, and wrote, in a solitude that was pervaded by animals and spirits’

‘ of what avail was a poor madonna with a black face against the ethical state of the neapolitan followers of hegel’

horsemouth went for zoom beers with howard yesterday (well a zoom beer). the video call now feels warm and authentic (rather than alienated and pointless). which was great

they did some planning for the eventual release of musicians of bremen volume four, just getting ready to have it mastered. the current plan is to have an ‘LP’ of 10 to 12 or so tracks and then a couple of ‘EPs’ of the rest. to master the LP tracks expensively (and the EP tracks less so). the covers - turn your heater on, painbirds, blue crystal fire will probably sit on one EP. there may be some haggling and horse-trading to be done over which tracks to have on the LP but most of the choices are obvious. howard is a bit doubtful about having physical CDs. horsemouth is still keen.



horsemouth has finished re-reading christ stopped at eboli by carlo levi (one of his favourite books). carlo has fallen foul of the italian fascist authorities but unlike gramsci he is not stuck in prison but sent into internal exile in lucania in a series of small villages. eventually (december 43) he makes it back to the north, to florence, and writes this book (he had been freed upon the fall of addis ababa).

 ‘many years have gone by, years of war and what men call history. buffeted here and there at random I have not been able to return to my peasants as I promised when I left them, and I do not know when, if ever, I can keep my promise. but closed in one room, in a world apart, I am glad to travel in my memory to that other world, hedged in by custom and sorrow, cut off from history and the state, eternally patient, to that land without comfort or solace, where the peasant lives out his motionless civilisation on barren ground in remote poverty, and in the presence of death.'

carlo levi was in exile in a village thinly fictionalised as gagliano for about 1 year. later he writes an impassioned manifesto over several pages over the failure of the cities to understand the countryside and the peasants. (similar, in a way, to gramsci, he thinks about what prevented revolution, the specific conditions). re-reading it horsemouth found he had forgotten levi’s dog, barone, who had a nearly human personality, the many strange creatures of gagliano that have a dual nature, werewolves, the woman whose mother was said to be a cow, goats etc. the awe with which the peasants regarded the appearance of carlo's sister (for now he could be fitted into a familiar pattern of family relationships), the black madonna, the sudden outbreak of boal’s forum theatre as the locals protest when he is banned from practicing medicine.

‘at dusk three angels come down from the sky to every house. one stands at the door, another sits at the table, the third watches over the bed. they look over the house and protect it. neither wolves nor evil spirits can enter the whole night long.’

 ‘when rain stopped play’ - from now on we must be alert - be alert, your country needs lerts, was a joke horsemouth and his brother often cracked as children (it’s probably from the goon show) ...

sweet earth flying part 2 (eleven light city)

today is the second day of the anniversary of the recording of the album sweet earth flying by marion brown.

there is of course no sweet earth flying part 2 on the first side of the record (and no one seems to know what happened to it) . the record goes straight from paul bley’s electric piano introduction part 1 to the drums and electronics work out of sweet earth flying part 3. it ends with muhal richard abrams answering piano track sweet earth flying part 5.



and then you turn would the record over and there would be eleven light city parts 1 to 4.

as far as horsemouth can work out eleven light city is a a ‘floater’ lyric in several blues songs - as the feed in line in some versions of sweet home chicago for example, in big boy knox’s eleven light city blues, in old original kokomo blues by james 'kokomo' arnold (1934), charlie burse, furry lewis & will shade play a version on beale street mess-around, recorded summer 1962 or 1963 in memphis.

kokomo is in any event a town in indiana. some claim kokomo is ‘stop light city’ with loads of stop lights on the main drag, others that it had 11 speakeasies during prohibition. kokomo arnold later explained the song's references eleven light city referred to a chicago drugstore where a girlfriend worked and "koko" was their brand name of coffee.

in robert johnson’s version (recorded in san antonio texas) kokomo is replaced by chicago and eleven light city with land of california. the song becomes an aspirational song of emigration rather than a ‘going back’ song (even if the geography is more than a little hazy).

on eleven light city marion brown and the band stretch out some more, there may even be an ARP synth in there (if horsemouth’s feeble eyes are reading the tiny (reduced to CD size) sleevenotes correctly. muhal richard abrams is on organ loads. it’s good to sit and listen to it (horsemouth’s ears often get tired out by sweet earth flying before he gets to it and so he doesn’t pay it proper attention).

in june (4th-5th) horsemouth will do a review of geechee recollections marion brown’s 73 album from the georgia trilogy (assuming horsemouth is still alive). ed michel (who produced all three of his records on impulse) said marion brown was easy to work with because he knew what he wanted.

eleven light city ends with cymbal hits. high up on the ‘bell’ of the cymbal.

‘thunder blossoms gorgeously above our heads' [sweet earth flying part 1]

‘thunder blossoms gorgeously above our heads [...] bleeding rain / dripping rain like golden honey.’ - jean toomer

for morning, start with the paul bley piano introduction. sweet earth flying part1.

paul bley is an interesting cat - a montrealler, he’s working as a jazz musician right from the 50ies, through the 60ies, this album is from 72?/ 74? (74) and he’s in boston with a pack of free jazz dudes, he’s playing one of those new rhodes electric pianos, a stargate, listen to that sustain (that bizarre envelope).

it’s influential - harold budd does a version. marion brown later re-records it with guitarist karl rausch on november cotton flower.

may 6th and 7th 1974 'sweet earth flying' was recorded, one of three albums marion brown made about his home state of georgia (sweet earth flying, geechee recollections, afternoon of a georgia faun). he left georgia to go to university and to play on ascension with john coltrane and on fire music with archie shepp, and he played in paris, but he came back to live in atlanta and recorded those three albums.

the inspiration for the series of albums came from the poetry of jean toomer - part of the harlem renaissance but distant from it. he became a fan of gurdjeff and later a quaker.

the bassist and the drummer (james jefferson, steve mccall) do sterling work, listen to the drummer go on part 2 (sorry that should be part 3, part 2 isn’t on the album). muhal richard abrams is on the album too (organ and piano), a founder member of the association for the advancement of creative musicians (together with steve mccall), and a sometime rosicrucian, he played with the art ensemble of chicago, anthony braxton, roscoe mitchell etc. but he’s another musician who’d been playing since the 50ies.



sweet earth flying part 5 is like muhal richard abrams’ reply  to paul bley (if anything it’s even more debussy-like than the opener).

boris johnson ‘worse than the plague’

got a sudden craving for this one.




‘re-reading illness as metaphor now, I thought:... one cannot think without metaphors. But...’ 
- susan sontag, AIDS and its metaphors (1988)

sontag was inspired to write illness as metaphor (1978) when she contracted cancer. she found the whole health promoting, if you get cancer you can’t have been taking enough care of your health ideology deeply unhelpful (as it is). this made her think about the metaphors that are attached to cancer and to other illnesses (in themselves mere biochemical and physiological facts), that this disease ennobles the sufferer (tb), that this other makes them more creative (syphilis), that this disease humiliates and degrades the sufferer (cancer), and how unhelpful these all are.

she wants to strip these metaphors away, and do without. if it is not possible to entirely extract metaphor from language then in these cases (at least she argues) it would help. now horsemouth likes metaphors, it’s how he thinks, he can barely write a sentence without summoning two or three but he wants the doctors treating him and the science that backs up their decisions to be as good and clear and reproducible as possible.

humanity is always telling itself stories about magical treatments that can defeat this disease or that disease. vitaminD, vitamin C, sunlight, fresh air, less sexual repression, more sexual repression, avoiding mobile phone masts, blah, blah, blah. one of the joys of the two essays is that she cites the metaphor makers - procopius, the emperor maximilian, donne, defoe, camus (the plague gets an honourable mention), artaud, thomas mann, karel capek, dostoievsky (via his mouthpiece raskolnikov).

curiously there is no 1918 influenza pandemic, nothing on the 57 flu.

by the end of AIDS and its metaphors one metaphor she definitely wants to reduce the usage of it the medico-military metaphor, fighting disease, the disease invades, the disease has a fifth column of secret spreaders, and perhaps the one we are hearing the most about at the minute the frontline.

the families of dead doctors and nurses and bus drivers appear on tv arguing that it can’t be right to send people out to fight the disease not equipped with the right PPE. horsemouth doubts the usefulness of an idea derived from the trench warfare of world war I with its vast inhuman loss of life, for it is already to concede the idea that medics will not be properly protected and will die in large numbers. this is the case. it is the fact 

but the frontline runs down the middle of the the tube train, the middle of the assembly line, the middle of your 2m social distancing in the supermarket, it is there on the tape that stops you going up and talking to the bus driver, in the plastic shield that stops you breathing on the woman at the checkout. it there in the daily lives of the 51% of people who are still at work and are still travelling to work. and of course as the lockdown ends and the factory hooter goes for back to work it will be there for more of us.


this frontline has a rear as well, the lockdown, the place of the phony war, where horsemouth types this, where we must be loyal and observe blitz spirit.

 ‘an affliction from god for the sins of men’ said the emperor maximillian of the plague. procopius went further describing the emperor justinian and his wife theodora as worse than the plague, as demons sent to plague humanity. and boris, prime minister of the country with the highest death toll in europe, how will he look when this is over.

some friends have been making better use of the lockdown time than horsemouth.

happy mayday everyone! (no horsemouth did not start it off with a beer)

happy mayday everyone! (no horsemouth did not start it off with a beer).

horsemouth has passed through the dangerous and difficult may eve. he wonders how other people are (people he doesn’t usually see). he didn’t celebrate having worked with a beer (like he usually does) because he’s afraid of headaches (headaches, sore throats, dry little coughs all minor enough symptoms in themselves).

horsemouth is up early. the day begins. later he should get on with some work. the sun shines (with that great golden hour tinge from when it has just made it over the eastern horizon).


the sunlight you see in the photo in  the header on this blogspot page above is the afternoon sun shining into horsemouth’s westfacing 2nd floor flat when he lived down in pop(u)lar. you remember, the flat with the light. he has made the above photo the header on this blogspot page - horsemouth folk archive - where he archives his random thoughts and discoveries.

the bin men are outside (hail binmen). what task better sums up our society but that the people who haul away your trash make house-visits. it is a society predicated on the creation of trash.