saturday (run and play)

 

horsemouth has made it to another saturday. huzzah. it's a grey day out. 

last night a very enjoyable (and slightly drunken) zoom call with howard. horsemouth and howard played around with backgrounds inserting themselves into historical memories (like a rerun of the invention of morel or something from a christmas carol). horsemouth did a tour of the upper gallery (the photographs of the ancestors). he guesses that in the cold light of day the photos don't make it (but he hopes maybe some will appear at some point). 

then down to dinner. (horsemouth thanks his family for feeding him). 

they live is a terrible movie (and horsemouth can't honestly say it's john carpenter's worst) but 'it's a documentary'. and an almost perfect MAGA movie, reaganomics crossed with bound for glory woodie guthrie-isms, resentment against slick yuppie capitalists and their media machine. they're not just globalists, they're interstellarists. horsemouth loves it. 

'this one can see!' 

but has a number of defects that carpenter's earlier exploitation output didn't have - for a start the soundtrack is terrible (when you think of all the genius electronic music he made for the halloweens, the fog, escape from new york, assault on precinct 13... imagine how great it would have been with one of those. 

more, there's a weakness with his straight ahead action heroes (that only snake plissken escapes - and even he can't carry escape from LA). a double bill with repoman maybe? a friend suggests the people under the stairs. 

even when he's not using his own electronic music carpenter can make good music choices, listen to the sheer swagger of  george thorogood's bad to the bone in christine for example. 

later. breakfast. a walk on the common in the rain. 

horsemouth has work clear out until the end of march. (he reckons).

at howard's recommendation he watched an LRB documentary on the grenfell fire and what led to it. kind of a close but potted social history of ladbroke grove, the westway like the cross-bronx expressway. but horsemouth finds it slightly disingenuous. the contracting out of social provision (and social housing) has deep roots in kensington and chelsea and it's popularity with recent tory governments is held to be down to david cameron living in the borough.  

but it's not that is it? that's not the whole story. it's down to the (curiously unmentioned) new labour government of tony blair, it was them who really took the ball of service commissioning and ran with it, cameron and osborn were following them. 

it wasn't just kensinsgton and chelsea tenant management organisation who were receiving glowing reviews from its own board members for their own service delivery it was everywhere all over the country. it is far from, as the LRB would tend to suggest, a local problem. if it were a local problem of an entrenched tory regime then the kind of service privatisations and contracting out that happened in kensington and chelsea would only have happened there but instead it happened in councils all over britain (and indeed all over the western world). grenfell cannot help you think through people's dissatisfaction with labour if it is so narrowly framed. 

and of course this is the defect in the LRBs position. it was, in the corbyn years, a kind of house journal of new labour in exile,  runciman et al. use hobbes as an apologia for state power, rather than in the way arendt uses him (as an exemplar of the social pessimism of bourgeois subjectivity). nonetheless horsemouth enjoys their blogs and podcasts attempting to think through where we are going. 

ok the sun may actually be shining outside and the birds singing. horsemouth may have to go for a walk.