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.
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