on the last day of november

phew horsemouth has made it to the last day of november (and as a bonus wednesday's face-to-face booking has popped). on the downside he still has a sore throat. 

last night he watched about half of the passion of anna  a late bergman, a movie essentially made to keep the house from shame from being demolished by the local authorities on faro island. max von sydow is back at the house but his wife has left him, two neighbours circle. this morning sten mentioned the manic pixie dreamgirl stereotype. despite the age of the age of the characters and the excellence of the actors there is still an element of wish fulfilment to them.  

horsemouth 'researched' it further (via wikipedia or 'the general intelligence') to the japanese  magical girlfriend  and yellow cab stereotypes. 

he still has half of it to watch. (horsemouth will have to see if bergman mentions it in either of the two books he's got). 

horsemouth also posted (over on facebook) some photos of himself playing a gig at max 'crow' reeves publishing event and exhibition for the launch of his book 'mirkwood' held  st. leonard's church in shoreditch on friday 13th october 2017. you can buy it here. 

there are photos by darsavini and by max. it is nice to remember a time when such things were possible. maybe, one day, they will be possible again. it was the anniversary of a number of other gigs recently that made him think of it.

earlier in the evening he had watched an acoustic routes documentary about bert jansch, 

horsemouth tends to say this bert yansch and then corrects himself (still). presented by billy connolly with a box of records and a truly terrible dansette record player. as billy notes, if people had a record player (in their bare boards apartment) it would be one of those dansettes and then they'd have a stack of records next to it (with the bert jansch blue first album on top). 

bert sold his first album for £100 to transatlantic records, they recorded it in the owner's kitchen. today is brownie mcgee's birthday. there's a clip of him (and sonny terry) playing key to the highway (one of the key songs on bert jansch's first album). in the jansch documentary they get to meet each other. jansch goes to sit by the ocean a little shell shocked. 

horsemouth's week is considerably improved by a cancellation.  (were horsemouth's prayers answered? well at least in part). now ideally next week would be travel free also...

today an IT irritation but otherwise it seems to be working (except nothing seems to be happening yet, ah he was in the wrong room together with a dozen students).  eventually he gets to where he needs to be. that's the day. daylight is falling and he's tempted by a beer. tomorrow a journey by train. 

memoirs of a good-for-nothing (and the dead dreams of the cold war kid)

last night horsemouth watched  the quiller memorandum. alec guiness as a bureaucrat, max von sydow  as a nazi, british spies rattling around 60s berlin (in pursuit of neo-nazis). curiously slow paced and uninvolving. what the harry palmer tales of len deighton has, the first mod brtish spy, a cynicism about the ruling class, this doesn't really have, what john le carre's  the spy who came in  from the cold has, the sour taste of betrayal and moral exhaustion, this doesn't have. 

horsemouth is finally getting around to reading peter burger's theory of the avant-garde, a book that, horsemouth now discovers, puts forward a theory of art but is mainly about writing (in terms of manifesto and collage). he has owned it for years and should have read it when he as writing about this kind of stuff. a quick look at the references reveals he has already swum in the seas of horkheimer and adorno, in jochen schulte-sasse's introduction. 

burger's book generated a book almost twice as long of response. 

when he wrote his initial pieces horsemouth failed to make the correct distinctions between the different varieties of european modernism, the avant-garde is a response to the the exhaustion of the schonberg neu music (usually translated as modern) and strategies relying on the autonomy of art, a change to different strategy of trying to break down the autonomy of art seeing it as restrictive.   

it is good to be reading it now because it focuses on the dada, futurism, surrealism moments (that horsemouth has just dipped his toes into from the performance angle). 

released 50 years ago the day before yesterday. horsemouth usually passes on from this song to jack orion which as a prog-folk epic is growing on him. 

the good, the bad and the ugly

horsemouth has finished for the week. (phew and thank fuck for that). he got a bottle of beer and started making dinner. later he watched some of the good the bad and the ugly. and had the pleasure of watching it almost as if it were a new movie because it is so long since he'd last seen it that he had forgotten most of it. a few soundbites lifted by big audio dynamite stuck out.

earlier (to celebrate his liberation from unremitting toil) horsemouth had listened to musiciians of bremen volume three on shuffle (to get the same kind of defamiliarisation effect).

let all mortal flesh (keep silence), serpent(S), when the faun met alice, on the banks of the susquehanna, worldes blisse, all flowed together like a new album, sliabh na mban, satan, then the one horsemouth had been expecting next her hair like some glittering gold. horsemouth was then surprised to hear funeral song (which he heard as if it was a bonus track) and surprised again to hear the devil.

this would usually be a busy time for horsemouth, the christmas gig season.

in this week (in past years) last year he played the farewell to johnny gig (with peter, paul and enza) - wow was that a year ago it feels much further away. many years back the snatch foster band (with nick, rusty and clive) down in the basement of the hope and anchor and a few weeks later they played with iona, ayesha, zoe and dawn as the santa belles down in dalston. this they did as a trio (clive was unavailable) nick said never again but horsemouth enjoyed himself. they sang a version of in the bleak midwinter.  

tonight (a few years ago) a gig round minty's house with minty, morven, siobhan, lisa etc. etc.

horsemouth has enjoyed the second wave (post 2001) of his music making. it is (excepting all this blogguery) the thing he has done that he can point to and be proud of. the work may have been more socially useful, or the co-op stuff, or the odd rounds of babysitting but it is the music he is proud of.

no gigs this year. but he released an album (musicians of bremen volume four with howard) and a film (the fall of the house of fitzgerald with enza and suke). he didn't go to many gigs himself this year (for obvious reasons - possibly only the gwenifer raymond perhaps, lankum were cancelled) he watched a few things online (but it doesn't do it for him). 

similarly we have just passed the 14th anniversary of horsemouth starting blogging (on the now mothballed space station myspace). these blogs (and this last year's from facebook) sit on his old netbook in a corner of his room (and as attachments on an email).  in theory he could download his back catalogue of posts from facebook (now that they have become practically inaccessible there) but he's in no hurry. 

fuck the christmas decorations it is not even december and horsemouth is already constructing his end of year lists. 

light is pretty fast (halfway between samhain and the winter solstice) the desert fathers

sadly the signal is only radiating out at the speed of light (unless we can open a trans-dimensional gateway (again)). snail mail. what we really  need an einstein podolsky rosen bridge or a paired tachyon communicator (utilising bell's theorem). once again the limits of space travel become apparent to horsemouth (he feels so held back).  

horsemouth begins his day with the great tuli kupferberg (the fugs) morning morning harmonized here by sisters joan baez and mimi farina. then it went on to a radio set by richard and mimi farina's radiated out into the cosmos. 

but this is not true horsemouth actually began his day with a car or van honking away in the street at about 6am. he got up. got out of bed. opened the downstairs door and climbed up into the morning to ascertain if it was sten's hire van. it was. but fortunately sten was already up and out a little further up the road yelling into his mobile phone (so horsemouth didn't have to go wake him). 

horsemouth has a slight sore throat (he thinks it's just a cold or something - but then he would wouldn't he). sean has been in touch (so he's alive then). horsemouth has been reading james sallis, which is very m.john harrison avant la lettre. 

last night he watched more uriah heep (everybody can play and sing and there's no lack of talent on stage). it's a very disciplined band. 

yesterday an unexpected work failure. hopefully it will all go ok today and horsemouth can end the week feeling productive. we are halfway between samhain  and the winter solstice. 

horsemouth watched a clip and read a piece about a guy who lives without money (daniel suelo). sleeping in a cave and dumpster diving for food (with a little light foraging thrown in - well he does live in the desert). he describes the liberation he felt leaving his life savings in a phone booth and just walking away. the internet came along, he could go to the library and blog, he was someone with a story to tell. a desert father. 

later (about 2016) he had to move back to his parents to take care of them (and to take up stewardship of their money). - he seems to be adjusting ok to this (building bike trailers and alike).

horsemouth is less interested in his god and natural selection and pay-it-forward stuff than in his critique of the alienation  money makes possible (the very thing horsemouth likes about it).

horsemouth's plans very much involve his life savings - they are the thing that (will) make him not dependent upon working. this means they cannot threaten him with unemployment. he could live in porto (or somewhere in the sunny south) on about half the rent that he pays to stay in the seaside towns (and probably the same again for food). he could stretch this out (off and on) until pension day (when he becomes state aidable again - living costs anywhere in the world (currently) plus housing costs in the uk).   

he at least has a plan b. (and - truth be told - he has a plan b to that)

horsemouth is kind of on a clock with work and living in the seaside towns. 

except he's not - he's on a negative clock, when the decision is made then he will know that the clock has been ticking. 

at the end of next week he will have been paid his rent for the year april to april (in a large part down to furlough). he will even make the rent for that week. it now looks like work for the year will finish up on the 11th (and nothing of the 'travel-in' variety from the 9th.) 

horsemouth has struggled with the year and work (but then he always struggles). instead of having a meltdown trying to get to the booking on-time/ find the student / get registers signed, he's having a meltdown with Teams links and laptop stability. really it's the same thing. he doesn't like to work. he has a problem with authority. 

what he does need to do is start downsizing to permit himself to move (when the charity shops re-open)

horsemouth is (local) history

DOPO porto based five piece experimental ambient folk outfit. good stuff. seemingly active 2004-2009, last posting a retrospective compilation in 2019. 

mário lopes wrote the sleevenotes, he opens browser window after browser window looking for their history. 

'in the middle of the process that purpose faded from my thinking and the sound took over the operations. this sound: I found myself in the center of an orchestra born before my ears unexpectedly. the acoustic and electric guitars, the harmonics, the tambourines, the ferrinhos, the rattles, the melodies, the layers of noise processed by pedals that the DOPO manipulated so that the voices were different and the guitars and keyboards stopped being exactly keyboards and guitars...' 

it's horsemouth AM. a slow starting day. horsemouth is (local) history the fall of the house of fitzgerald has been added to tower hamlets local history archive. one day aliens will land. survey the ruins. look at all the hard drives and find horsemouth and enza playing dress up. 

horsemouth is reading james sallis's time's hammers. there's a jerry cornelius story. the west collapses, london burns, there are corpse barges everywhere on the river, jerry and michael moorcock sit out on the balcony in a modernist riverside des res and watch it all come down. 

the current torypocalypse is not a bit like this. there is cronyism and corruption. strangely people are not e-baying their way through the crisis like horsemouth assumed, online sales are not up (much) but physical sales are very down. we are in penitential lent. the economy is most excellently tanked (and we haven't even had brexit yet). 

horsemouth has sent a message to sean (long time no see - get in touch dude). yesterday 

horsemouth was getting over tired. at 2.55 he was cursing the air black and blue, slamming doors, drawers, threatening kettles and demanding vengeance. at 5pm he was done. he had a beer and was laughing at a compilation video of people getting seriously hurt doing dangerous stunts.

astral traveling versus the commute

 this is one of the 4 tracks recorded in LA on this day in  1970 by pharoah sanders. it is the famous one because it has lonnie liston smith on electric piano (apparently it was just sitting in a corner of the studio) the remaining two tracks on the album were recorded in NY and are much more straight ahead  faux african pieces. one of the four is a great cecil mcbee bass solo. 

horsemouth has just worked (travelled to and travelled back) and he works there tomorrow (bollocks). hopefully this is horsemouth moving sharply towards the exit to the year. some coughing and sneezing on the train (hopefully horsemouth won't get sick and die - this would piss him off). he's up early - so he'll save it now (the night of the 24th) so he can just pop it up first thing. 

he was just watching a great a.l. 'bert' lloyd interviews doc watson film. bot just doc watson singing am I born to die? but also him doing a version of salty dog (one that horsemouth knows from mississippi john hurt).

we are climbing up the hill of winter (and we must climb down the other side too)

recorded this day in 1971

in his dream horsemouth was up the pub with marike. they were being adults and giving an advice and guidance session to a youngster. (HINT. don't take any advice from horsemouth, he really does know  nothing). horsemouth was bragging about lots of historical events, the (in)famous people he knew etc. er. back in the day etc.  

anyway. he's up now. 

last night a zoom meeting on the state of the co-operative (horsemouth almost forgot about it). he worked in the morning. he attends a meeting this morning and then travels and works this afternoon. 

last night a documentary on the disproportionate deaths of BAME people (and BAME health workers in particular) during the pandemic. it is of course racism rather than race that leads to poverty and poor public health, it is the disproportionate presence of BAME people in lower patient-facing roles in the health service, they are poorer so they take more shifts, that leads to increased exposure (and thus increased death). 

but now everybody gets a risk assessment (woopie!) so everything is of course better. 

horsemouth is of the opinion that if white people were dying disproportionately then a motley crew of strangely BAME employees would soon be rounded up and shipped off towards the guns (but then he digresses). 

perhaps he is wrong. maybe the ruling class don't even give that much of a shit. we have had the great government fuck up in the provision of PPE now we move on through the great government fuck up in test, track and trace towards the great government fuck up in getting people vaccinated. 

this will of course be followed by a few hard rounds of austerity (e.g. no pay rises to match inflation in the public sector real-terms wage cuts) leading to increased poor public health just in time for the next novel virus. and of course there's the double tap of brexit.

horsemouth is glad to be out of it. except he's not out of it. he's leading a strange ubikstyle existence where he ghosts up once in a while and gets on a train to go to work. the rest of the time he is working from home on technology he does not understand. 

horsemouth worries about falling ill this late in the game (we are climbing up the hill of winter and we must climb down the other side too). at the weekend he babysat (too many people). this afternoon he gets on a train (too many people) and tomorrow too. and that will be his appetite for risk done. 

and then it's just next week (really).

requiem for w.c.fields (who died from acute alcoholism)

'the script was written after the performance by chance methods for possible repeats' - rose lee goldberg writing on cage's variations V in performance art.

this morning horsemouth dreamed about the co-op having a radio station. a girl from the english language class many years ago came up but wouldn't speak to him (it was then that he woke up, reasoning that there was no point in staying asleep to be ignored)

yesterday horsemouth was out babysitting (at the park of the mini-me). (people if this is what we call staying at home  and being on lockdown then we are fucked). meanwhile work are posting horsemouth off to sunny kingston twice this week (wtaf work?).

horsemouth listened to two classic rock bands he doesn't normally listen to - he listened to  uriah heep's demons and wizards (most excellent) and doctor doctor a track by UFO (this one he had as a kid on k-tel's axe attack compilation). uriah heep were widely mocked as a poor man's deep purple,  both are heavily in debt to vanilla fudge and that big organ sound but the balance of forces was different in each band and so were the results. uriah heep were lead from the keyboards by a singer-songwriter (er. who was also a good slide guitarist and also played acoustic guitars detuned to c) plus everybody in the band could sing (in the style of sweet or queen). late on he watched an albums ranked show about them - he's as far as the live album. 

he also watched werner herzog's bells from the deep (as part of his werner herzog series) - russian babies are baptised with drama and full immersion, once each time for the father, the son and the holy ghost, people crawl out along the thin ice to try and hear the bells of the lost city of kitezh (sunk beneath the waves to escape the mongol hordes).  

horsemouth has just worked and is now grumpy. tomorrow the anniversary of the recording of black unity by pharoah sanders, wednesday the recording of thembi  and astral travelling  at the record plant in LA,

today is the anniversary of the death of judee sill. (right now horsemouth is particularly taken with linda perhacs in particular this demo for chimacum rain). 

'my heart has outgrown, like magic, the clamour of painful things...'

horsemouth has transferred his reading affections from performance art (increasingly a book of lists) to the eve of fluxus - billie moves into george maciunas's commune slightly unaware that he is titular head of international art organisation fluxus. they become lovers. there is a fluxwedding (25th february 1978) where they swap the clothes of bride and groom - hollis melton documents it in an accordeon photobook black and white. three months later maciunas dies of cancer.

when maciunas dies (he's a much older man) she is unceremoniously ejected from the movement and the house (horsemouth had forgotten this).she moves penniless to lisbon to write poetry. it is 1979  she struggles with the language (and teaches english (badly) and gets fired), she 'pounds' away at the heavy old school electric typewriter she brought with her, writing a journal. she reads hannah arendt,  she likes patti smith and punk over ginsberg, the beats and the hippies.

'she's a poet' remark her few portuguese friends. she thinks that learning portuguese will rewire her brain.

at first she stays only two years. hollis and the lawyers sort out maciunas's will and billie gets some money. she moves back to the states to go to university and study portuguese. in 1988 she moves back able to speak and read properly, she translates symbolist poet florbela espanca'a desert in flower.

'my heart has outgrown, like magic, the clamour of painful things...'

it's a necessary corrective to the account of fluxus in performance art - the lists of fluxus members and expulsions (beuys, henry flynt, yoko ono).  

a friend is stuck doing some copyediting to survive. there is a question about the wisdom of georg lukacs. horsemouth cannot find his favourite lukacs quote (something hippie-ish about the days when your ways are strewn with stars etc.) but he takes the point that wisdom is ahistorical, a bit mythical.  

there's little doubt that lukacs sees marxism from within the cauldron of its philosophical making (not just hegel but also kierkegaard, fichte) but also of the early debates within it rosa luxemburg etc. he has that overview, and then he does not die he survives to tread carefully despite having authored the hegelo-marxist 'western' heresy. it's tempting to take him for a wise old man. 

lichtheim has little patience with the tap dancing lukacs had to do to stay alive - accusing him of writing as if he'd had a lobotomy. (darn it, it's in lichtheim's bluffer's guide to lukacs but it's not in horsemouth's reduced size book shelves with the other bluffer's guides). 

last night horsemouth was early to bed. today some walking around. maybe some babysitting. 

then back to the grind. a double booked wednesday that horsemouth will have to find a way around. possibly a bit to much face to face and there and back again  for his taste. 

horsemouth (selfportrait) launch of the UFO completed

werner herzog likes walking. he walks the borders of germany. as a kid he wants to be a ski-jumper but he gives it up when a friend nearly dies, he becomes a film maker instead.  he walks from munich to paris to interview lotte eisner and re-establish a link with the fritz lang generation of filmmakers. later he remakes nosferatu (a great klaus kinsky, delft, isabel adjani, popul vuh version). 

horsemouth has launched the UFO. really this was just a fake event so that he could email round all his friends. horsemouth was late to the start of it because he was watching the country music  documentary. horsemouth posted some additional material - Catastro/fille's demo kandinsky animation, martin of confyde's song (with enza's spoken word). 

people seemed to like it, 'Fab - mad and beautiful' was his favourite review (thanks lise), there was a 'loved it!' from christophe (thanks dude).  

224 views so far (only some of which, as horsemouth is fond of remarking, will be him). 

it looks a greyish morning. last night horsemouth managed to read a little more of performance art. we are with the americans at black mountain college. he will try and read some more this morning. 

if you've seen it already please share it on to your friends

phew. horsemouth has made it to the end of the week. he does this with one hand while with the other he is conducting an evening in celebration of the release of the fall of the house of fitzgerald. 

this is already (18:30 up to 207 views (and not all of them are horsemouth).

if you've seen it already please share it on to your friends. 

today (while traveling) horsemouth read. he read rosie lee goldberg's  performance art in the thames and hudson world of art series. there have been 3 editions of it so far (that horsemouth knows of from the days when he used to frequent second hand book shops and bargain racks). 

you can get the pdf here.

this starts with alfred jarry's ubu roi and moves on through the use made of it by the futurists, dada, the constructivists and the bauhaus. kandinsky's trajectory was from the constructivists to the bauhaus but all of them used performance to refresh their artistic juices and get the ideas flowing again. though of course, as the text notes early on, da vinci, caravaggio, bernini, people famous to us as painters, had all used performance and put on renaissance spectaculars. there is a prehistory of performance to be written.

horsemouth is up to p114 and the performance of RuR- Russom's Universal Robots in berlin in 1922. he's still got all the new stuff to come.

from the film side of it horsemouth would probably cite kenneth anger, sun ra, paradjanov, pasolini, jonas mekas. anything with nice static shots. (it's a paradox that what really works though are the shots where himself and enza are in motion. 

it was, horsemouth has to admit, great fun to do. horsemouth's version of darktown strutter's ball even getting compared to the great bonzo dog doo-dah band. he feels a bit bad about not being able to extend out teh party some more. 

the fall of the house of fitzgerald (the launch of the UFO)

 

the fall of the house of fitzgerald has finally been released (so horsemouth can show it to you without getting an earful from his co-directors). north of 60 likes so far (of which about 12 are from horsemouth's side of the church). he did a kind of fake facebook event for friday evening so that he can chat to anyone who's interested in it and to enable him to spam his friends with the link. he also stuck it up on the musicians of bremen facebook page. .

he had great fun doing it (but he suspects catasto/fille aka suke had less fun and more work editing it. thank you).

it features music from  sounds of furore, horsemouth(folk) himself, martin jackson of confyde (who does a great electric fahey type thing), Вадим Померанцев (horsemouth has no idea how that's even said - he'll have to ask - ok vadim pomerantsev (no no the actor)) and musicians of bremen. he hopes you like it. 

today. a day off (officially) but horsemouth may still have to take a Teams meeting at some stage. last night to follow on from the ingmar bergman and paradjanov series, horsemouth has discovered a whole raft of herzog movies on youtube. he watched wings of hope. a plane crashes in the amazon, a young girl survives, her parents are ecologists so she understands the jungle and its real dangers, she follows the water until she finds a river and then she floats downstream until she finds people.

it looks like horsemouth's little netbook has finally bitten the dust (the mouse/ trackpad feature has stopped working) maybe horsemouth could plug in  an exterior mouse. it means carting the full sized work computer about (tomorrow for example when horsemouth goes to work - face to face). 

'I had been murdered to further the purposes of psychical research'

gwenifer raymond on the radio. see she's positively chatty now (but not as chatty as the host). 

horsemouth is getting in a quick post before not having to work (he suspects). he should go and check the work email. (it's ok he has his coffee it's not too much of an imposition).  

last night through a glass darkly by ingmar bergman which despite a great central performance, by harriet anderson, fails (it's the first one horsemouth has watched, and he's been having a bergman season,  that he thinks has failed). it fails because bergman tries to offer us a metaphysical reconciliation rather than staying with the events. 

horsemouth will listen to it later horsemouth apologises. we have missed the anniversary of this recording by pharoah sanders. recorded 1975 on the 17th november at the grand auditorium / studio 104 - maison de la radio. mastered from the original master tapes.. 

shopping (scenes from a marriage)

horsemouth is back from the supermarket (aldi). on the way in he noticed there was a homeless girl with her dog sitting on the floor outside in the sun (such as it was). when horsemouth came out she was gone.  horsemouth had passed some homeless dudes in the park.on his way back two of them were moving on (a rucksack and granny stroller each) and the third (an old feller) was sat up on the bench and being checked on by an ambulance crew. the park is on the junction opposite the brand new apartment blocks and commuter station. 

such are the giant strides being made in the care for the elderly and the homeless. 

horsemouth continues to hoard/ stockpile/ prepare for the apocalypse. e.g. he has 5.5l of banks' bitter, about 3kg of spaghetti and other pasta, a similar amount of rice, 2.6kgs of museli, 2kgs of yoghurt, 27 cans of red kidney/ butter/ canellini beans or chick peas and about a kilo each of carrots and potatoes.. on his next shopping expedition he will get a bag of onions (they keep). 

remind him to eat the carrots. he's not as fond of them as he should be. 

last night he watched ingmar bergan's scenes from a marriage - complacent bourge couple destroy their marriage in search of  love, there's an excellent montage scene showing the wife being socialised to be agreeable as a child (which could have come from any feminist book of the time) and then later there's some spousal abuse (which may shock younger viewers). eventually it all ends well. with a perfect cake and eating it scene. some of the scenes are from bergman's own marriage(s). 

yesterday work went well (as far as horsemouth can tell). today no work. tomorrow probably no work either (horsemouth should make sure people realize this is the case). thursday no work (hopefully). friday work and the release of something that horsemouth is forbidden from mentioning until it has been released. the plan is to ship the students home after december 9th so any labs and face-to-face stuff has to be got out of the way before then (or postponed until semester 2). consequently horsemouth has only a few more weeks when they can send him anywhere. then horsemouth will hunker down to see if he can assure himself he's ok to return to his parents for christmas. 

it's lockdown again for odysseus ( the latest news from the field of cybernetics)

horsemouth is up. he is dressed (jumper, t-shirt, underwear, jeans,socks). the heating has been on.

it is lockdown again for odysseus. he's self-isolating (tied to the mast). it's earwax for the crew as they labour on (essential workers). the virus sweetly singing. such is the latest news from the field of cybernetics.  

this week things at work should resolve themselves. then 3 weeks (maybe 4 weeks actual run up to christmas).. and then, for horsemouth, 2020 cannot end too soon. 

friday he has to travel to work (he'd really rather not). 

last night he did the weekly phonecall to his mother that he's been keeping up since the start of the pandemic. he then failed to watch a movie and watched a series of music videos instead - there's a 'plan' to do another horsemouth curated golden glow over on mixcloud at some point and horsemouth should gather together enough material to make himself sound interesting. . 

things enter a crucial juncture with you now what and now it cannot be mentioned until friday. as soon as horsemouth can mention it again he will. he will probably organise a facebook event so that he can tell you all about it and spam all his friends with it (including the dead ones, people he met once, people he hasn't seen in years, people he added by mistake, people he hasn't spoken to in years, and that select (and much smaller) group - true fans of horsemouth's artistic productions).  

'what if we awake one day, all of us, and find ourselves utterly unable to read?'

so proposes nabokov (thinking about it horsemouth is surprised there isn't a jose saramago novel  where this happens, or maybe there is but he hasn't read it yet). 

horsemouth supposes that if he were unable to read he would watch more films but, being unable to read the titles/ subtitles, he would have to rely upon our visual memory of the covers to know which film he was going to to be watching and his learning of foreign languages would be accelerated.

either that or the days would certainly be longer util such time as humanity re-perfected architecture and the visual and sonic arts. 

horsemouth has spent a lot of time accumulating books - he would presumably keep them around as a way of reminding himself of their contents (at least until the next move). 

having recommended it (but not having watched it in a long time) horsemouth watched persona again - one actress gets to speak, the other can can only act and react. as usual with bergman it is about his personal guilts, his life is in his work but made to stand in different places,  but also the work of actors and directors, about getting people to do your emotional work for you.

fortunately there's much less of this going on in the fall of the house of fitzgerald (as soon as he can horsemouth will share it with you). or at least if there is it is in a less-self-conscious way. horsemouth is pleased with it, bits of it succeed, it does the work of mourning and it does the work of creation and collaboration (and it looks good doing it which is the main thing). 

lessons to learn from it? a little more insistence on getting things filmed ('cover' he believes filmmakers call it) rather than photographed. as suke noted the live action sequences are much stronger than the photographs. there are a number of distressing thunks and thuds on horsemouth's rendition of high-rise strutter's ball (really early jazz tune  darktown strutter's ball) that had horsemouth taken his own guitar to the session when he recorded it wouldn't have been there. 

the pandemic limited the amount of time we can be together to make our art, so we must make it count (the same could be said for musicians of bremen volume four and the other recordings round that). . 

the wrecking ball will come and convert people's homes into rubble. against this the fall of the house of fitzgerald proposes art, dance, music and film. film and recording that turn moments of time into stone. the gaze of the medusa (the medenza) converts flesh into stone. you see that's interesting. the medusa was in the film because enza had a medusa head dress and it looked good, but horsemouth had never thought about what it might mean, it becomes available to mean something (it turns to stone) when it is filmed. 

and now it is connected with UFOs and pyramids. 

here we see a dialectic of solidity (stone, film, painting, photography, recording, the work) and mobility (dance, light, happening, music, work) and the movement between the two. 

what no press conference in the rose garden? (the curse of friday the 13th)

he had so much more still to give (in terms of creative destruction). a nation mourns. on the plus side he'll be able to do the things he couldn't do in office like get an eye test and spend more time with his wife's family (no wait he's done those already)).

dominic cummings has fallen. horsemouth rejoices (in a way). dominic is the only one of the tories horsemouth would trust to get his nose out of the trough for long enough to have a political idea - and that idea was to trade of the dissatisfaction of the politically unrepresented. he took them from out of the grasp of labour and the brexit party and ukip and gave them to the conservatives. 

from now on horsemouth will celebrate every  friday 13th as dominic cummings day. caution. there can be more than one a year. 

for the tories covid arrived and blew them off course and after that everything they needed to do was contrary to their natures. 

and in a way horsemouth doesn't rejoice. there was little to cummings beyond quack pareto style management nostrums but at least he wanted government that could deliver (and wouldn't that have been useful in the pandemic children but similarly where are the results for the money handed over?). he leaves behind a downing street thoroughly seeded with the dragon's teeth children of the leave campaign (will they dig in for the short walk through the cabinet office?). 

ultimately his ship comes to grief on the hidden rocks of the deep state on its inability to do anything except line its own pockets (and spy on militant vegetarians and grieving parents).

dialectically it gives the red wall some power when they either defect back from the tories or seal the deal, but there are no guarantees it won't sabotage itself. it pushes scotland towards the fools errand of independence. and then there's the legacy project - brexit. 

my but january will be harsh wake up (you will hear horsemouth saying 'horsemouth told you so'.)

horsemouth is back from sunny mile end and filmshow 13th. he thanks suke (and enza) for an excellent evening. he has the final cut of the fall of the house of fitzgerald on his laptop. in a minute he will watch it again but he pronounces himself pleased with it. soon it will be shared online and horsemouth will invite you all to see it. there will be no launch party (with actual people) until things have calmed down.

horsemouth adopts the howard hughes method of disease control. but then how can you go to an evening in mile end with food, drink and dancing horsemouth? because horsemouth hasn't done that in months horsemouth replies (er. since the last time him, enza and suke were together). horsemouth is a utilitarian not an absolutist. to be honest he's more worried about the railway journey across town and the lab booking on friday (sanctioned under lockdown under the double heading of 'work' and 'education').  this strikes him as objectively a greater risk. 

filmshow the 13th

in the immediate future (this evening in fact) there is filmshow the 13th (when horsemouth gets to see the final cut of 'the fall of the house of fitzgerald'). he's looking forward to this.  

work (for good and ill) has turned something of a corner. one problem solved (a little software training several months in). but then a landmine of an email, ok he will be a little out of pocket on several bookings he suspects. but fuck it (can't win them all). 

however the situation is... it can always get better. 

horsemouth is by nature grumpy. a 'decisionist', he thinks the way to things is through grit and determination (but often life isn't like that). often what the situation needs is a cool head. 

it is important to keep things in perspective. his only mission this year is not to die and he is already 3k up on this year courtesy of the furlough (huzzah). next year his only mission will be not to die (until and after such time as he can actually get vaccinated after that he'll just have to take his chances). at some point we will all be through this into the other side. (remind him to get his flu jab in).

'woke up. got out of bed...' (private press)

horsemouth woke up with a headache (actually he can remember having it while asleep). last night 'the silence' (bergman) - two sisters at war (one is bergman), the little boy lost in the hotel (he is bergman also), a troop of dwarves, a strange country with an incomprehensible language. 

horsemouth has found some private press acoustic music from the states - roger sherman, guitar, voice, drum machine, ruling planet (1978).  there are wordless falsetto vocal swoops. he drove four hours to be photographed at the beach (and it suits the music). guillaume apollinaire died of the spanish flu monday 1918, yesterday  he was buried his friends carrying his coffin through crowds celebrating the armistice chanting 'mort au guilaume!' (death to kaiser william). 

  

what passes for a success these days (the first and second great leaps forward)

phew. what passes for a success these days. 

horsemouth took the time to get set up. applied low brute cunning to the problem and eventually ended up in the meeting courtesy of his old laptop (gwann mi beauty!) because his brand swanky new work laptop was declined entry at the very gates. er...um. 

this software (you know the one he's talking about) is not designed to facilitate communication (as it is advertised) but to control access. for in truth education (like any other business)  is as much about controlling access to knowledge as it is about educating people to produce knowledge (or indeed anything else these days).

 and therein lies the first part of the problem. 

the next part of the problem is that we are living in the days of the second 'great leap forward'. 

in the first great leap forward chinese peasants were encouraged to give up trying to grow food and instead set to work out how to smelt iron. this they tried heroically. sadly all that they produced was deeply contaminated slag (because they lacked the necessary skills, equipment and training) and the nation fell into famine (some estimates put the number of the dead as high as 30 million). 

things are not so drastic in the second great leap forward. the pandemic has forced 'everyone' (except for the everyone it hasn't) to work from home. it thus relies on people's own infrastructure (and IT support capabilities) and people's own ability to learn the new softwares without being trained in them. with skills honed in the world of leisure the workers face their new distributed workplace.

no one said it would be pretty. no said it would be efficient. and yet it... stays the same. 

the real benefits of the second great leap forward lie in the destruction of value in the old office rental/ commercial property sector of the market, the destruction of value in city houses and flats (what is their worth when the commute is over). the shops, the cafes, the boutiques, the lunchtime sandwich, that whole rewards-in-the-working-day economy is gone online. the high street finally dead  in a massive centralisation. 

the night-clubs, the pubs, the whole night time economy parlous with debt, their workforce cast to the for winds.

'when this bloody 'demic's over (oh how happy we shall be)'

it will of course roll back (a little) but not all the way back. 

of course these empty offices and shops are not as valueless as we will soon be told (they will be sold at a relative premium to provide the new slum housing for the poor in jenrickvilles).  that public transport crippled with debt and charging more, the day of the bicycle has come.

a massive and pliant reserve army of labour will be created (fed out of foodbanks, struggling to dig themselves out of gig economy jobs into warehouse work, housed (temporarily) in jenrickvilles). 

horsemouth is nearly done. he's nearly out the door. he may survive the pandemic only to fall to the economic scythings of post-pandemic austerity/ the moments of the consolidation of the great leap forward. he's been holding out for a while.

horsemouth struggles. sometimes he is victorious. but nobody ever suggests crowning him king any more (which is a pity). not that he's up to it any more really.  

notes towards the longer form (downstream from utopia)

ok people. it looks like the facebook 'notes' blogging tool has finally popped. forward to the longer form. 

horsemouth does some preparatory listening to robert lawson's downstream from utopia. horsemouth writes and edits this while it plays.

dulcimers, zithers, hammered dulcimers? cimbaloms? khims? santurs? yang quins. all strings are struck if they are not plucked or bowed or driven by the wind. but not all strings are struck with hammers, sticks. a struck chordophone in the  Hornbostel–Sachs system of musical instrument classification (first published in the zeitschrift für ethnologie in 1914).  

cat among the strings isn't that like cat among the pigeons? meaning to cause trouble.  a short koto-like introduction. (perhaps koto like because of sound of the initial hit) then as diamond harvest revisited and downstream from utopia. a dog barks. a tap runs. 

ottakar dance no.2 there was a prince ottakar who founded ceske budjovice. a beer dance? a spirited waltz tarrying with forward propulsion (like mbira music). but dulcimers take us up into a kind of frictionless perfection where mbiras attach our feet firmly to the earth (even as we lift them up to dance). blossom supper/evening chimes 

mistaken flower ah the joys of delay and yankie doodle went to town variations. outside the dog is barking like it was earlier (but this is a fanfare maybe a jota) but then the change, the rattle, bent notes.

western rivers  

for the ghost of michael o'shea and his mo chara (nearly burnt in a beach bonfire).  

the album is over. horsemouth will return to it again. 

the ghoul like the reptile and plague of zombies another post colonial hammer (ok ok it's tyburn not hammer) horror (bad things brought back from abroad like vegetarian curry and a knowledge of foreign languages) plus an appearance of toccata and fugue in D minor, a young john hurt, and isn't that greg from survivors?

‘it is safe to say that it is no longer a comedy’

so ingmar bergman remarks in his workbook as he writes the hour of the wolf. (one that initially resisted being found). 

max von sydow and liv ullman (a couple) move to a remote island but the island has ghosts (or he has brought the ghosts with him), evil biting children, persecuting ghosts, ghosts of petty officialdom, ghosts of past loves and madness. 

it doesn’t help that max von sydow cannot sleep. he waits for the dawn but before that is the hour of the wolf. it is the darkest hour and one that is strangely silent. horsemouth sleeps like a log (by and large). his dreams are not untroubled (but they don’t keep him up at night). if he is bored he will watch a movie and go to bed early. if his dreams trouble him at all they trouble him just before he wakes. 

this morning is a grey morning (darn horsemouth had planned to go for a walk). but it is the morning. there is coffee and he gets to write, he gets to make sense and to perform. it is the rest of the day that poses a problem (yesterday horsemouth was even forced to clean the kitchen to assuage his boredom). 

yesterday was a bright day of winter sunshine, couples out exercising, or mobilising their children in pushchairs or walking the dog. he sat in the sunshine and read gregor von rezzori’s memoirs of an anti-semite, it is set deep back in the rumanian countryside, bearing the marks of german colonisation but post the collapse of the austro-hungarian empire. our hero is an idiot and soon he will be an anti-semite. he will survive the second world war and end up not in argentina but in the italian film industry. 

despite the pandemic (and perhaps because of it) 70 odd million americans voted for trump. the ‘left wing’ of the establishment has been deployed again and won. it is tempting to party and enjoy the sense of relief but nothing has been fixed. populism is not dead it has just been relocated out of office. it will sit in the hills and suburbs and stoke its resentments. in any event the christian right/ republican paleoconservative nexus is not defeated by this. 

and now a shower. the other joy of horsemouth’s mornings. 

friday was bandcamp friday. horsemouth was reminded too late to do any effective publicity for it. (he advertised musicians of bremen and howard’s release of his electronica (howard and yuri grange). 

but then he did something unprecedented ladies and gentlemen. he bought some music online. that’s right he parted with his (digital admittedly) hard gotten. he did this for robert lawson’s downstream from utopia which follows in the handprints of michael o’shea in that it is a recording of dulcimer-like instruments (so that’s his listening for the morning). 

review to follow shortly.

UBIK! ‘the world is now gripped by the most widespread and severe capitalist recession to be witnessed since the thirties...’

on his way home horsemouth found a 1992 september/october copy of new left review. and once again,

 ‘the world is now gripped by the most widespread and severe capitalist recession to be witnessed since the thirties...’ 

now horsemouth was thinking about this era just a week or so ago when looking at one of his old physical diaries. 

he remembers this time as the great prosperity - the carnage of the thatcher years is over, rave has happened, a psychological corner has been turned. while horsemouth hasn’t (properly) re-entered the labour market yet (if indeed he ever does) he does have enough money to get on a plane and go to a foreign country once a year for a couple of weeks. it is possible that horsemouth remembers it this way because he was sufficiently far from the economy and his needs are so meager that he was not to be bothered by what it did (much). in any event it is all part of an upward trajectory in the conditions of people’s lives beginning (again) in 1945 probably ending some time in the 1970ies but that ending disguised by cheap credit and consumer goods. 

prosperity eventually came to horsemouth, he began to engage with the economy more, rent property, take foreign holidays and such. indeed with the collapse of the soviet union we entered that era of capitalist triumphalism called the end of history that will last (off and on and despite evidences to the contrary) all the way to 2008. 

what is the nlr’s solution to the 1992 capitalist recession? 

‘the world needs international coordination and planning as never before’ 

but this is blocked by danish refusal of the maastricht treaty, a treaty which also ‘not only prescribes austerity measures but also seeks to impose a secretive and unaccountable intergovernmental structure and european central bank in place of the democratic institutions of a federal europe.’ 

and here we are 30 years later, much of which horsemouth has worked (after his fashion). horsemouth gladly contemplates (if not actually plans) his exit from the economy. the european project trundles on (by stealth) despite being relentlessly torpedoed by various european electorates. the bubbles of credit and financialisation collapse and then reform again and again. time will tell if the airline/ holiday industry has collapsed (or is merely taking a holiday). 

and of course the scale of the crisis to come is very much greater than 1992 or 2008 (or any of the other crises of accumulation or political crises that have happened in horsemouth’s lifetime). horsemouth has less faith in these crises to drive positive change than he had before.

yesterday horsemouth traveled and worked and traveled back. which was knackering (so afterwards he slept). he enjoyed it, the sun was shining. it is however not safe (horsemouth will continue to keep his head down until such point as he has been vaccinated). over on facebook (boo & hiss) the ‘Write a note’ button is still there (under its new name ‘UBIK’). 

books, films, gigs october 2020

books 

•  invisible empire (greil marcus) 
•  journey in the alcarria 
•  edvard munch (hodin)
•  the second walk from jean-jacques rousseau's 'the reveries of a solitary walker' 
•  reread marco d’eramo, the philosopher’s epidemic, nlr, 122, march/april2020, a few articles from new left review (sept/oct 2020) and a few lrb blogs. 
•  the magic lantern and images: my life in film by ingmar bergman

 films

• jacques tourneur mini-season: night of the demon, nightfall, I walked with a zombie. 
•  ingmar bergman mini-season: the seventh seal, shame, persona (part), strindberg's dream story (part)
•  lift to the scaffold, les diaboliques (part) (abortive french noir season) 
•  documentaries on the making of halloweens 3,4 and 5. 
•  scanners (following on from last month's david cronenberg season) 
•  james lee byars world question forum
•  ‘this mad riddle that no-one knows what it is’ danny dyer's strange moment of access to shakespearean genius 

gigs (online) tripe negative 

events night of the demon night (28th october 10pm), fall of the house of fitzgerald completed (seems horsemouth spoke too soon), the end of the facebook notes tool, pharoah sanders birthday and jewels of thought day, samhain.

the last post), the last last post and beyond (hardcore will never die)

‘and now... the end is near... and so we reach... the final curtain...’ 

it is november 1 st the end of the facebook ‘notes’ tool (and horsemouth’s misuse of it to provide you with a running commentary on his life). this (the 31st of october) was therefore be ‘the last post’. except it wasn't. horsemouth got in a sneaky last last post late at night and then a last last last post early in the morning of the 1st 

horsemouth can (probably) recover his historic notes with a data download (he does hope so). they will do with his downloaded myspace posts from the death of myspace. 

before the days of web 2.0 (ahem) horsemouth often kept a physical diary as a kind of appointments book (he didn’t often write anything extended in it). the earliest one he can find is a houseman’s peace diary from 1992. he’s working/ volunteering at the anti-nuclear group. his band (bush house) are playing (support slots for the rhythmites, senser, 25th of may, dub the earth, easter and the totem, back to the planet, fat dinosaur, aroma of rage, peakadelic, disco assassins. they are doing about 18 gigs a year. they are recording. he’s trying to get his mate dave social in. but broadly he’s feeling frustrated and wants to leave. the band are about to go all ravey-davey-gravey and horsemouth is pushing for that (and it’s a mistake). 

it looks like he’s still doing squatter/ anarcho-political things (er. yes. he’s having meetings with lawyers so presumably he’s under the cosh for some malfeasance or other). he goes to some huge illegal rave (castlemorton) after playing a gig supporting test department (who had a ravey davey gravey type set - those were the ravey davey gravey times). horsemouth (on the other hand) goes to see youssou n’dour, olodum and the drummers of burundi. 

ah the sirens of memory. how sweetly you sing. 

it’s samhain (when the ghosts come close). horsemouth will have to be careful. 

last night howard visited. horsemouth showed him the movie (the fall of the house of fitzgerald). howard said he liked it (overall). various bits met with his approval. they drank beer (2 bottles/ 3 bottles respectively) and ate half a cheap pizza each. they then listened to the 24th oct 2016 golden glow (tracks selected by horsemouth). howard, who is always ending things, has a plan to record the last golden glow. horsemouth might make a final guest appearance to round out the numbers (he should run up a track list).