‘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.