‘prostitutes and bandits are our fans. with them, we are pals'

so wrote yesenin in 1922.

horsemouth first heard the song in italian. ok so there’s an original version of the song chanson d’un malandrin in french, the lyrics lifted from a translation of a russian poem by yesenin, wikipedia gives the english translation of the russian as 'confession of a hooligan'.

malandrin, nom masculin . sens 1 . voleur, rôdeur, brigand, vagabond douteux, qui semble dangereux. personne qui s'approprie, qui prend le bien d'une autre personne. sens 2 . histoire. membre d'une bande de pillards, de criminels. ces groupes ont effrayé la France au XIVe siècle.

er. so badman really.

at first horsemouth thought it was a ghost, an artefact of translation. the original poem (in french) is called chanson d’un voyou - but badman/ hooligan it is. it's a great  title and fits with yesenin’s fan base, and it is the title of the anthology from which the poem is taken.

horsemouth is often on the lookout for songs to sing in other languages. he’s found the lyrics in french. (and yes it is sufficiently gangster), he finds angelo branduardi's version a bit mannered (as a friend notes angelo doesn't sing like a maladrin, a brel or gainsbourg version would be better). horsemouth prefers it where umberto grillo sings it.


meanwhile most strange.

horsemouth (under his human name paul helliwell) gets a one line mention in this - imaginal machines: autonomy & self-organization in the revolutions of everyday life by stevphen shukaitis. this is from when he wrote things (like way back in 2007). horsemouth thinks the quip that shukaitis likes was actually josie's (from an editorial email).

horsemouth should probably get a friend to blag him onto academia.edu so he can separate his career from the paul helliwell who helped found the OSS and was paymaster for the bay of pigs (and various other helliwells involved in risk modelling). at the very least it would be nice to see where his thoughts have landed. 

horsemouth was never really convinced he had much to say - he begins as an orthodox adronoian (his entry point was music via attali) and is gradually dragged out onto the terrain of art and the internet (which was wreaking great changes on the musical commodity in the late 90ies early 2000s).

as to his style, essentially horsemouth would attempt to write to the word limit, constantly re-writing the sentences in an attempt to get the argument clearer and more concise - eventually this pressure would either produce the diamonds of aphorisms or at very least the sentence would start emitting neutrons and kill off the weaker sentences round it. he has a defect in that he’s overly partial to the joke.

horsemouth enjoyed the reading and the writing (and the manic states these produced where he was convinced he could see the argument). eventually he spreads himself too thinly, the crash comes, the conjuncture having writ moves on. he still reads theory (from time to time) and writes it up (here) to remind himself that he has read it but it lacks the necessary focus and pressure of publication to get it cooking. 

horsemouth has finished watching les compagnons de baal written by (and staring) jacques champreux and available in a mixture of french and italian versions (so he didn’t understand very much of the dialogue). curiously the physical comedy of it was better suited to italian.

champreux, good looking girl and trusty sidekick fight an evil luciferian conspiracy in a dr.who in back and white style. perhaps back to belphigor now (a ghost haunts the louvre) but it was a bit dull (despite featuring juliette greco) and even less comprehensible. (once again horsemouth wishes he’d put more effort into his french).