'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.