john fahey week 2021 - day 7 - final day - robbie basho day

today is the anniversary of the birth of john fahey and the death of robbie basho. fahey week 2021 comes to an end. 

while fahey repudiated cosmic sentimentalism basho did not. his work represents a sustained attempt to reach spiritual take-off from the homeland of california. 

'another guy called reuben lacey... he played with a medicine bottle'

so says son house at a gig in oberlin college April 15, 1965 (at about 4.00 minutes in). son house began as a preacher and become a blues singer, reuben lacey went at it the other way. in the 30ies he recorded sides for paramount in the 60ies he was conducting a church in ridgecrest california. 

 

 

here a blues fan the fake luthier goes in search of him. 

like son house reuben was rediscovered in the  60ies by fahey, david evans and al 'blind owl' wilson. there was an album of his church music (sounding like blind willie johnson) put out on takoma. 

today fahey week 2021 ends. soon jackson c. frank is born (and dies the very next day). then it is bandcamp friday and then (soon enough) the equinox. 

reuben may have sung this hymn (by brother claude ely).

'there ain't no grave can hold my body down

there ain't no grave can hold my body down

when I hear that trumpet sound

I'm gonna rise right out of the ground

ain't no grave can hold my body down...'

'misty blue and lilac too. never to grow old'

horsemouth is getting old and clunky. after developing arthritis in the little finger of his right hand (a finger he fortunately never uses for picking), he is now developing arthritis in the little finger of his left hand (one he unfortunately does use for fretting).

he has arthritis in the other joints of both hands of course (but he isn't feeling them yet). 

there are (of course) plenty of older guitarists in the world who have faced these problems before. being less able to play with the little finger is a major loss in the classical repertoire in other repertoires it can be routed around by moving the hand. django reinhardt developed a whole technique around only having two fingers on the left hand (and guess what? it involved moving the hand).

come to it horsemouth can play a decent impersonation of most of his fingerpicking stuff just with thumb and forefinger.

there's always slide horsemouth observes (or cheating as the reverend gary davis would call it). 

music (horsemouth opines) is mainly in the ears and the brain. 

when fahey grew old he took up electric guitar (he clearly still had strong fingers because he's bending strings all over the shop). with fahey it's not so much speed and accuracy as patience and digging deep (you want speed and accuracy check out leo kottke). it's listening and framing that makes what fahey does great.

‘if the thought really yielded to the object, if its attention were on the object, not on its category, the very objects would start talking under the lingering eye’. 

remarks adorno at some point in negative dialectics.

outside it is misty. horsemouth will be out for a wander after breakfast. 

john fahey week 2021 day 5 - morning moods

so fahey lifted this for one of his songs.

horsemouth is hiding from the virus with a tinfoil hat on (day)/ paper bag over his head (night). he will be back when he can get back or to get his jab or when he needs to for work. tbh there's not anything more he can do in london under lockdown than he can do here (work online, fart about on the internet, watch telly). it's good to keep his folks company and they are in the middle of the countryside so it's fairly easy social distancing.

he chatted to sten on the phone. he did a co-op meeting. he got ian to take a meter reading. it's been a cold winter, gas consumption is up, with a bit of luck the rest of it will be mild and it will all balance out. 

that said he has met and talked to two people up on the common. (this is not ideal horsemouth should be living in splendid isolation he doesn't want to risk bringing the virus back to his parents   (even though they've had the first jab). 

horsemouth has a cold. (blocked nostril sometime sore throat). 

today is a beautiful spring morning - the celandine is up (ficaria verna). there was a frost  and there's mist. it looks like some olafur eliasson exhibit. horsemouth awaits breakfast (see how they are spoiling him) and then he will go for a walk. 

in the afternoon he will work (and then that's him for the week). next week he expects to be much the same. there's a chance the students will start having face to face labs after march the 8th (but horsemouth thinks it is already too late in the academic year and they have only a few weeks left of teaching to go anyway). 

if so horsemouth will have an excuse to return to the seaside towns (otherwise he's going to have to wing it). 

last night he watched lady snowblood to go with il grande silenzio another snow set revenger (he wonders if he can find mccabe and miss miller anywhere). 

fahey week 2021 day 4 - on doing an evil deed blues

horsemouth is up. he has his coffee. he works later. 

the primroses are coming through on the banking. the snowdrops are up. the daffodils are on their way up. the bluebells too (apparently). 

last night he 'went' to a meeting of the communal endeavour. horsemouth mainly goes to prevent anything stupid from being done or wreckers from rolling sisyphus's rock back down the hill when he isn't looking. it went well. (well as well as can be expected).

once again somebody wants to stop development because the future of capitalism (and thus the london rental market) is unclear (post covid). they worry that the value of the property will go down (it may well do) but this doesn't matter because the purpose of the co-op is to house its members (not to own a valuable portfolio of desirable properties). 

times remain far from ideal. horsemouth opines that 'to live well is the best revenge'. it really is a very pretty morning out. horsemouth should get out and enjoy it.

it's fahey week 2021 day 4. horsemouth is showing you a recording of john fahey made at dick spottswood's home in the westmoreland hills, maryland, early 1959. from the time before fahey had an 'act' (as andrew minty would term it). 

fahey week 2021 day 3 - the teachings of blind joe death

 it is in the sonoran desert that our tale begins, where the dasein and the tonal howl at night, where the locals smoke mushrooms  and the mountain lions attack. there anthropology student  john fahey travelled in search of legendary bluesman blind joe death (though the precise dates of his fieldwork are not clear and even contradictory). 

fahey found death.

he found blind joe death using the seven degrees of separation. by sending a letter addressed ' Joe Death. a black man of about 60, a blind man, blues musician and shaman, somewhere near the sonoran desert.' 

fahey, basho and the filmcrew found him working as a gravedigger in a three casa village. 'what kept ya?'  said the sage. in the local cantina, over the many glasses of rotgut whiskey necessary to build rapport with the source, senjor joe explained that what one needed to be was not a guitarist and an entertainer (or a cited anthropologist) but a man of power who did not care what others thought of him, who could retire to the desert and live in poverty and anonymity without a second thought. 

'I have seen amazing things.' said the sage. 

'silver ravens on fire on the belt of orion'

'moonbeams glittering on sacred mushrooms'

'the light of a flashlight reflected on the back of a deer's eyeballs at night.'

'harry everett smith sitting in the jail of a hick town...' 

'let's not talk about harry.' said the young anthropology student quickly, 'tell me about the blues. is it similar to the tonal. or the dasein.' 

'all of these are just words. like the words of a field report or a best selling novel. what you need young man is actual phenomenological experience that can be related to the categories of structuralist theory preferably by naive uneducated native informants...'

the young anthropologist threw down his pen. for he had been making notes in his notebook (even though it made his informant nervous). 

'goddammit I told you not to mention the structuralists, they're out of fashion'

'sorry. sorry.' the old man looked genuinely upset behind his dark glasses.

' how about an ethnomethodological breaching of the accepted definition of reality. a break in theory rather and a break in practice...' 

robbie basho was clearly unused to the drinking he sat slumped in a corner singing to himself. when they came to clean up in the morning they would find him wide eyed with terror, clutching  a crucifix and muttering about the old gods.

'let's go.' said fahey. jumping up and grabbing his guitar case. 

'where'

'the crossroads'

'not that old shit again. I told you before. all of that is bullshit lifted from english romantic poets. " mad, bad and dangerous to know". you'd think white people would recognise it...'

'cummon... get up... there's another bottle of whiskey in it for you.'

at the crossroads the wind howled like the hound of the baskervilles.

fahey got out his guitar tuned it to a gaped myxolydian and started to sing.

'jesus. that was fucking terrible. don't do that ever again.' admonished the sage. 

fahey week 2021 day 2 - the great american primitive swindle

‘an occasion of pure waste: waste of time, ingenuity, skill, and often of money’

 - les jeux et les hommes, roger caillois

such is play (according to roger caillois) and indeed such is much of playing music. comparatively little of it is work (paid employment) and comparatively little of it is economically viable in terms of reproducing the labour value of the player (certainly over the extended periods of time we refer to as a 'career'). 

except for busking (which perhaps explains its lowly status).  

of course with gambling play can become positively harmful. people wish to demonstrate that they are not controlled by money, to demonstrate their autonomy, by betting the farm (so clifford geertz argues in deep play: notes on the balinese cockfight). there can be no rational theory of economic gain to support their decision, just a desire to feel alive. 

the young fahey records his first album (blind joe death) himself and gets 100 copies pressed up (he is supported in this by his earnings from a job as a petrol pump attendant in takoma park and some money from the local episcopalian priest). some of these he sells but mostly he gives them away or hides them in thrift stores. 

already it resembles an art project more than a slick commercial operation.

but already this history hides his juvenalia - the recordings he'd made for joe bussard (as blind thomas for example).  

the second album is different. the second album benefits from playing live in folk clubs over on the west coast and from his studies leading to his  MA in folklore from UCLA. another graduate of the anthropology department there was notorious faker carlos castaneda. 

there is something to be written in the parallels between their lives. 

he has ED denson taking care of business. it's the one where he gets some sense of his worth both as a musician and as a writer with the sleevenotes.  the site of the game is now takoma records. 

'he lived like a vagrant' (fahey week 2021 begins)

ladies and gentlemen it is fahey week once again.

fahey week 2021 commences. 

february 22nd the anniversary of his death  to february 28 the anniversary of his birth

horsemouth begins by comparing john fahey and that other curmudgeon harry everett smith. 

harry everett smith was a collector. people have heard the anthology of american folk music but have not seen his other collections, listened to his other recordings or watched his movies. 

One of his obsessions was paper aeroplanes, which he mostly found on New York’s streets between 1961 and 1983.

'in retrospect, it's clear that he was a major figure, but in his lifetime he lived like a vagrant.' 

so says andrew lampert, one of the compilers of the book. 

and this is the problem. people cannot understand that both fahey and harry smith did not have successful careers that would lead to a nice house in the suburbs and tenure and yet at the same time they were significant. it makes them nervous, it's as if the object of their attentions wasn't worthy.

fahey's fans have this, playing fingerstyle guitar (being a real musician who can actually play) seems so virtuous and blameless that it is difficult to believe it led him to alcoholism, prescription medicine abuse, life in welfare hotels and obesity (and yet it is so). 

both fahey and harry smith were anthropologists turned tricksters. survival and the continued production of art required some fairly nefarious and reprehensible ducking and diving. 

both had a vexed relationship with the folk establishment. with the 'political' model of how folk music was said to cause change, both looked back (via the lens of record collecting) to a kind of american music that was gone and sought not merely to replay it but to create something new with it.

on 20th february 1991 (30 years ago the day before yesterday) harry smith received the chairman's merit award from the national academy of recording arts and sciences (the final award and completely misrepresented his work by the way).  'he saw america changed through music.' 

dylan is another one (who takes the material and makes something new with it). probably henry flynt also. 

over the week horsemouth will endeavour to lay out more material by fahey. 

'blood' said the raven

once again the guardian award for mis-naming things and thus revealing your unconscious bias goes to... (drumroll), the guardian! (boom-tsshh). for naming this article about the evils of gentrification in nine elms  'Penthouses and poor doors: how Europe's 'biggest regeneration project' fell flat' . it 'falling flat' isn't really the issue - that sort of implies you wish it to be a success with big sales of millionaire's apartments, that the poor doors leading to the social housing (out the back, by the bins) are allowed to have a table in the corridor (instead of it being viewed as a fire hazard) and if only this were done then the whole scheme could be pronounced a success.

yesterday horsemouth had a long chat with mikey gee about the pitfalls of growing older. 

how's the rathbone sherlock holmes season going? 

still to go The Hound of the Baskervilles, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon, Sherlock Holmes in Washington, The Scarlet Claw, The House of Fear. 

a pet raven in the pub spots the body. 'blood' said the raven. there's a poem that must be recited in the library. the gangster's moll and good time girl gives a patriotic speech to the ne'er do wells of a limehouse divebar, the criminal class of london is mobilised against the nazis, the nazi invasion plot is halted because of her work, when she dies it is barely commented on (as if she is not good enough to live in a de-nazified world). hail evelyn ankers (queen of the 'b's). there's a dwarf in the suitcase and murder by spider. 

saturday no wandering about (rain stopped play). sunday a wandering about at some point. 

monday, tuesday, friday - a little work. 

harry everett smith was a collector. people have heard the anthology of american folk music but have not seen his other collections. two books of his collections have recently been published. 

One of his obsessions was paper aeroplanes, which he mostly found on New York’s streets between 1961 and 1983.

'in retrospect, it's clear that he was a major figure, but in his lifetime he lived like a vagrant.' - andrew lampert. as usual there's a failure to understand people who did not live conventional lives. 

vaksine! (vaccinate! vaccinate the world!)

horsemouth dunworkin' for the week. next week booked. this time next month last timetabled bit of work. will there still be furlough do you think? (asks horsemouth in search of free money). 

yes rishi sunak will stretch it out to the summer. perhas this will even boost out horsemouth's earnings to the point where he pays tax. 

here john in far off porto has posted up to youtube the track that horsemouth couldn't find vaksine! by haitian musician sanba yo, a hymn to getting everyone vaccinated. the tune for our times.  a few friends have been jabbed already (and his parents have been jabbed).  horsemouth would like to get it done and out of the way. 

he spent some time this morning reading helen harper's always a song, helen grows up in the folk scene (and so later on does her son ben).

NASA has landed a probe on mars.   humanity. you crafty little monkeys. up to no good in the neighbourhood again. bit tense in the control room for this. you've either done it and you're heroes or it has already crashed and burned and, in the essence of good comedy, you just don't know it yet because the signal takes so long to come from mars.

so far so good and for a fraction of the cost of the UK test, track and trace program.

he watched steve coogan's stan and ollie which was excellent. old men out of time going through their paces. the double act worked particularly well. the holmes and watson of rathbone and bruce is a double act too - 'by jove holmes'  thus is the seriousness diluted. with stan and ollie the straight man (ollie) is already a comic creation - he does not know that he is the fool and the comedian, he thinks he's sensible. he is a fool beset by an even greater fool. 

they overcome their conflicts and make their last dance.

curiously this left horsemouth in an anxious state. the problem with his parents is that, while it is very comfortable, there is no chance to move his life forward here, to do new things. but then much of the world is stuck in this moment of enforced reflection (doubtless the majority of it has to continue on as usual and risk death so horsemouth shouldn't moan). 

did someone yell fire? (so must perish all troubling ugliness)

'the president of the firm's french arm, claude schmidt, told the grenfell tower inquiry his company did not warn about the use of polyethene (PE) panels, despite being alerted to a fire in bucharest, romania.' 

in 2009.

bucharest, romania  at 11:00 PM on june 26, 2009, the 18-storey high millennium business center, was engulfed in flames after a large billboard near the building exploded, most likely because it was struck by lightning. two hours later, at 01:10 AM on june 27, around 150 firefighters from sector 2 (bucharest) were still trying to stop the fire, although the main source of the fire had already been taken care of. there were around EUR 20 million in losses. 

10 years later, the building is in the same state. it seems that the owner wasn’t compensated by insurers because the investigation did not reveal the exact cause of the fire. 

but we do know the cause of the spread of the fire. composite cladding. 

2009. let's just let that date sink in a little. 

on 14 june 2017, a fire broke out in the 24-storey grenfell tower block of flats in north kensington, west london, at 00:54 BST; it caused 72 deaths, including those of two victims who later died in hospital.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

horsemouth has been watching loads of basil rathbone sherlock holmes  films. they are enjoyable confections, there's basil rathbone as the most serious  sherlock, and there's nigel bruce as a bumbling genial idiot of a watson. and yet it is watson's bumblings that often solve the puzzle ahead of holmes - though it takes holmes to realise it (in this way the british allow themselves to have a drama whose titular hero is an intellectual).  they are distinctly variable in quality, the lady in green (hypnotism), the pearl of death (rondo hatton) are high quality adventures (with functioning plots that don't rely on dr.watson's sudden quotation of dr. samuel johnson to save the day - as in dressed to kill). 

there are also the villains and their sidekicks. 

the most significant of these is rondo hatton or the creeper who ended up with his own series of horror films (the house of horrors, the brute man). 

in house of horrors, the creeper -  a giant of a man with giant features, strangles a number of women for being horrified by his appearance. he also strangles a number of art critics who have given poor reviews to his only friend the sculptor (who is french). in the end commercialised american art wins out over decadent european art, several art critics are murdered (no real loss there)  but sadly also some random street walking women and artists' models. the woman art critic gives up her job for marriage. 

oh. ps. the creeper is shot dead. so must perish all troubling ugliness. thoughtfully he even destroys the bust the sculptor has made of him. 

happy ending. 

the creeper's deployment in the pearl of death is considerably more accomplished making use of the full resources afforded by black and white as we watch his gigantic shadow ascend the steps as he steps into the light.  there is a distinct loss to cinema of the transition to colour, in the loss of the clarity of the vision and execution in black and white.

the brute man horsemouth has not yet found a decent copy online. one exists from a late night tv show where the presenter (and his idiot puppet chums) snicker at some b-movie. so perishes the work of rondo hatton. 

howard was a big fan of rondo hatton. horsemouth will have to ask him why. 

of the sherlock holmes films pursuit to algiers and terror by night  are the weaker ones (ship and train board dramas). the diamond from terror by night (like the pearl from pearl of death) are said to be cursed, there is a kind of colonial guilt here (voiced in the outdated vocabulary of the time). 

horsemouth has a few more to go. 

if you can dream then anything is possible

(artwork on a bridge in hackney, loosely based on the cover of charles mingus's changes one it seems).

phew just worked. early start (9am). and more of it tomorrow...

horsemouth has just worked.  it was a fairly intense bit of work. he cursed loudly and often (but fortunately the microphone was off - he hopes).  even so this is how zoom working is a considerable improvement on real life. 

now he must attempt to detox. soon he will go out and enjoy the day (wander on the common that sort of thing). 

he has been watching some basil rathbone sherlock holmes's - pursuit to algiers, the woman in green.  the last of these features hypnotism, a bowl with flowers floating in it. pursuit to algiers is badly made, the woman in green on the other hand is decently dark. 

in addition last night he watched the beginning of a tv series elizabeth R glenda jackson doing queen elizabeth the 1st. it was very good on the problems with being at the mercy of others and the resistances possible. horsemouth watched it with his mother, it is good to find something they can both bear to watch. 

today the inside politics podcast. (horsemouth will probably tell you about it later). 

tomorrow lots of work and then the end of another week. 

next week. monday - 6 months since the release of covers by musicians of  bremen and wednesday a meeting of the communal endeavour. 

 

ecstatic truth (the city is over)

'looking at cities can give a special pleasure, however

commonplace the sight may be. like a piece of architecture, the

city is a construction in space, but one of vast scale, a thing

perceived only in the course of long spans of time. city design

is therefore a temporal art, but it can rarely use the controlled

and limited sequences of other temporal arts like music. on

different occasions and for different people, the sequences are

reversed, interrupted, abandoned, cut across. it is seen in all

lights and all weathers.

at every instant, there is more than the eye can see, more

than the ear can hear...' 

- kevin lynch, the image of the city.

in the morning horsemouth went for a walk upon the common, in the afternoon he worked. 

later he watched a variety of things on youtube. a basil rathbone era sherlock holmes, a documentary that purported to explain the work of werner herzog, and strangely enough following on from that a long review of a video game (see how archaic the terminology is) that was already into part 2 the painful art of empathy - deconstructing 'the last of us'. 

this featured lots of rendered environments of nature invading the ruined city (in this case seattle). one of the great pleasures of the post-apocalypse is seeing this happen, from whence the reference to kevin lynch's the image of the city (the city as paths, as barriers, as sightlines, as play). 

of course the current ruin/ reformation of the city is nothing like this (and what's worse horsemouth is not there to see it). the city that has so many workers travelling to work in the morning it is literally choking, it is literally a miracle every day that it does not grind to a halt, the city that breaths in and out a million people every day, this city is not just temporarily suspended, it is over. 

of course cities have fallow periods. londoners will tell you how it quietens down at christmas or the middle of the summer holidays, people from porto how the town is sad over winter. 

it is the haunted city: we can no longer go there. the ghosts have thrown us out. 

arguably for horsemouth's generation they wanted to be in the city. what did they want? more life (fucker!) but how do you deal with an equation of the virus where life = death.

is it just a big over-reaction? or a deliberate plan by capitalism? horsemouth thinks not. but certainly a moment has come, a change in the patterns of work. horsemouth will try and avoid its implications for a while longer.

he thinks london the unsanitary will rise again, the city of big dirty nocturnal fun. that people (the young) will want to be there. 

the sherlock holmes takes us to dr. samuel johnson's house (horsemouth has been there, up that alley off fleet street), there on the third shelf behind the books the stolen printing plates for five pound notes (strangely not subsequently changed by the bank of england as it would be too much trouble), the thief locked up in dartmoor prison making musical boxes each with a variation of the theme where the notes of the piano are letters. his accomplices miss their sale at auction and then have to recover them from the buyers. 

we are indebted to the bumbling idiot dr. watson for these breakthroughs (dr.s..., the notes on the piano) as he tells us whatever is on his mind, the little he knows that might relate to the matter just for something to say.  

  

what on earth are you going on about horsemouth?

... and in a way (and horsemouth has recourse to the  phrase in a way a lot) it simplifies matters. it makes it clearer how many people we will be able to rehouse out of __________. 

and that number seems to be 8 ladies and gentlemen. 8 into shared and co-op owned, and an unspecified (as yet) number back into short-life and into single. 

what on earth are you going on about horsemouth?

horsemouth lives in a housing co-operative. the housing co-op houses members at (hopefuly) lower than market rents in a city that has for years been engaged in driving people out to the margins (generally he thinks resisting this a is a good thing to do).  the co-op has co-op owned property (predominantly shared) and it has short-life property (predominantly single)  that it gets from larger housing organisations. the hazard of this kind of stock is that the larger housing organisations will at some point want it back (and when they want it back they tend to want all of it back).

that day has come at the block of ________. and the co-op is looking to rehouse 20 plus people. ok that's not quite true the 'eviction ban' and backlogs in the courts mean we're probably talking about something may/june ish. 

except in only has the 8 places in shared plus whatever single it gets from the larger housing provider (when it gets round to it). horsemouth is grateful - it actually houses people - as opposed to various housing campaigns that don't. 

at this point it is what it is. 

there was a plan to increase the amount of co-op owned by selling a house and using the equity tied up in it purchase an increased amount of housing for the members.  this has just died the death for a variety of reasons that horsemouth is not yet clear about. 

and in a way this just makes the situation clearer. 

horsemouth can't pretend he's not disappointed. but to be frank the additional members who would be housed by such means are in single figures. phew. it seems a very unrewarding thing into which to put so much effort.

however not only does it increase the number of people housed securely by the co-op it also increases the security of the co-op to be housing more people and makes it more financially viable (which is a good thing horsemouth thinks).

horsemouth expects that at some point more people in the large shared houses will decide they actually want to live in smaller shared flats (and the whole process will go off again).  he also expects that the combination of brexit and covid will increase the amount of short life that will eventually come on tap.  but it won't do so immediately, it will take a year or two to happen. 

lots of people will be reassessing their commitment to the city. so be it. 

the paying less rent gives people more time to live their lives and to live their better lives, to be more creative, to make music, to make films etc. horsemouth thinks it is worthwhile but dew as they say in south wales the odds are stacked against us.

horsemouth moving rapidly down kubler-ross strasse past bargaining strasse and towards acceptance platz. phew. suddenly he yells, 'fucking bollocks' and then to himself 'no shhh come on'. pfft. 

. 

in horsemouth's humble opinion

 ''before the ban is lifted, the government must give renters a real way out of debt. that means a lifeline of emergency grants to help pay off ‘covid-arrears’ so people can avoid the terrifying risk of eviction altogether.'

but. as a friend commented. they won't. 

'a 2020 study by health economist katharina janke of lancaster university and colleagues that found the increase in unemployment that followed the 2008 financial crisis led to 900,000 extra people with chronic illness in the UK over two years.'

and this is what feeds in to calls by the tories and others to lift lockdown. fears of economic effects, fears of health effects, fears of educational effects, fears of psychological effects. 

but of course it doesn't have to be this way. 

what followed 2008 was austerity which was a political decision around the management of capitalist debt accepted as state debt (and arguably even in capitalist terms a harmful decision). it was a decision that charged the costs of the crisis to ethnic minority, working class and the poor people. 

and of course covid has killed and harmed ethnic minority, working class and the poor people disproportionately during the pandemic and so will austerity and capitalist restructuring in pursuit of higher profits and new opportunities afterwards.  

in part it is the failure to invest in healthcare, in decent housing, etc. that prepared the poor for covid by weakening their health. 

it is the constant attempts to unlock in the interest of profits that have prevented a strategy  of virus elimination. 

but of course it doesn't have to be this way. 

has covid changed the price of human life? covid should challenge  the very notion of human life having a price,  rather than accustoming us to it. 

but of course it doesn't have to be this way. 

let's see if horsemouth can find an upside to the current situation. 

a friend remarked that clipping the wings of the city is one of the upsides of brexit. 

horsemouth replied that indeed it may be the only upside. 

there are lots of arguments as to why it's a good thing. that the money the city brings in distorts the economy of london making things (housing in particular) more expensive for us mere mortals, that it distorts the uk economy by sucking in capital and talent that could otherwise be used more productively, that it distorts the global economy by providing a complaisant place to launder your dirty money. this will probably now just go on elsewhere (amsterdam most probably). but there will also be trickle down (such as it is) and tax-take/ business rate take reductions that will make london as a whole and the country as a whole poorer (ihho - in horsemouth's humble opinion). 

the US is full of dying cities, covid and brexit together could easily be the beginning of the end for london. the flats for speculators bubble is a big one and like the dinosaurs it will take a long time to die. 

horsemouth's argument would be that there may be something worse than neo-liberalism and globalisation and that would be a neo-liberalism and anti-globalisation that channels populist and xenophobic sentiments, where our rulers get to be 'big fish in a little pond', and that was exactly where we were headed until the covid hit. and now we will be going there with tons of state debt which (in a rerun of 2008 - 2018) they will get us to pay off via lost decades of austerity.

horsemouth doesn't think brexit and covid will free us from capitalist looting instead he thinks they will intensify capitalist looting, the state (us) buying up disused office blocks for the next generation of slum housing for example (he's proposing the name jenrickvilles).

with those who are powerless

horsemouth is up late this morning. he's missing the possibilities of london (not that he'd do anything about them you understand). maybe things will change. the world has had a taste of horsemouth's lifestyle. he doesn't think they can take it. it is (by a strange 1 in 365  coincidence) the birthday of a friend. 

he's had two days of playing the early genesis - the ones his brother has, stored away in a record box downstairs (together with the kraftwerk). there's and then there were three as well (but we don't mention that one as much).

‘cinema... stays in the street, with those who are powerless.’ - charlie chaplin.

horsemouth clicked through to (and read) an article on the films of pedro da costa. he's only seen the one juventude em marcha (aka. colossal youth) - destroyed old men shuffle round their slum flats until they are rehoused away by the city to cold, glittering white walled developments at the edge of town. endlessly they repeat the love letters of their youth, or replay the old revolutionary marches. 

as a film it has its pleasures but it's not exactly cheerful. 

there are more films in this series done with a largely amateur cape verdean cast (largely from the now cleared slums of fontinhas).  horse money begins with a silent montage of early photographs of fin-de-siècle new york tenement life by the journalist and social campaigner jacob riis. (last heard of here, tendentiously, as the inspiration for the cover of spectres by the blue oyster cult). 

then on to an economist podcast about US education. tens of thousands of school pupil's were missing from the rolls even before covid and school funding is dependent on the number of students attending. (remember the fourth series of the wire? the one devoted to schools?).

in texas the schools stayed open throughout the pandemic.  

in chicago unions fought the mayor to a standstill and negotiated local control over school opening and closing.

'the ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something we make. And could just as easily make differently.' – david graeber 1961-2020.

today horsemouth doesn't know. a walk (maybe two). he guesses. keep playing astronomy. (he just played katie cruel). yesterday a walk in the snow. the ground was frozen hard. horsemouth took the muddy walk up onto the common. today the snow is gone (so horsemouth guesses there'll be more mud). 

breakfast's ready

one. two. buckle my shoe.

though he awakes into a world where rhyme does less work than it used to. he once met a croatian woman who had learned a lot of her english from genesis records. (it's probably quite a good way to do it). 

last night a documentary on how the blue stones at stonehenge came from west wales (and may indeed have been an existing stone circle there). there were techniques for locating where people and animals had grown up due to the strontium in their bones and techniques for working out when buried quartz had last seen the sun (for where the soil was too acidic to permit organic material to survive and thus allow radiocarbon dating). the quartz had to be harvested in darkness and then the measurement of the energy contained in the crystal lattice took several months. 

breakfast's ready.

 there was a recap of the stonehenge aligned with the summer solstice theory (the one horsemouth subscribes to). but why is stonehenge there and not somewhere else?  beneath the fields there are limestone lines that travel from the horizon where the sun sets at the summer solstice (its most northerly point) to the henge itself. nature had itself thoughtfully provided a connection that the mind of man could see and make use of. 

horsemouth has heard that the recent archaeological discoveries at stonehenge  mean that the road tunnel under stonehenge  scheme will not go ahead. he does hope this is true. 

an interesting adjunct. the blue stones were probably dragged to stonehenge from west wales using the route of the current motorway system (it is not thought that the boats available in the neolithic would have been able to transport the stones).  this is the route that avoids most of the mountains - they would probably have passed by close where horsemouth lived as a child in llansamlet just outside swansea. 

horsemouth remembers them building the ring road as a child.  

 

hail the year of the metal ox! (big fish in a little pond).

morning horsemouth! morning paul! hail the year of the metal ox!

yes hail the year of the non-timorous, non-cowering beastie. 

bull. china shop. china shop bull. 

horsemouth works this morning almost immediately (he almost doesn't have time to eat breakfast). 

and then he's done for the week.  (he has his next week bookings). 

yesterday it was thursday (thus LRB podcast day). 

the actual david (aka. viscount) runciman podcast (on how well the government has dealt with covid) was dull - people will be grateful to the government that got them vaccinated, recency effects mean they will forget that it was the same government that got them slaughtered by not  following the scientific advice and locking down when needed. (similarly covid hides the sins of brexit). 

or at least this is what the polling tends to indicate. 

the david runciman versus jeremy paxman podcast (as if down the pub) was a more interesting. 

jeremy thinks the political class are fecking useless and the voters are stupid (fair points), david wants to reform democracy and become more experimental with it because the system is stuck. traditionally such stuck moments would be dealt with by expanding the circle of political representation (but other than kids there are no obvious candidates). 

david forsees more referendums (horsemouth forsees that they will never be allowed to happen again). maybe david is right, there certainly seem to be at least two on the horizon  (scottish independence, northern irish reunification with the south) and after that constitutional arrangements for the former great britain (the english rump). 

maybe enthusiasm for referendums will increase as the political and economic advantages to wrecking the economy (and , for once, being able to blame it on the people) become more obvious. horsemouth remembers his friend johnny's diagnosis of brexit (that the british ruling class had decided to become big fish in a little pond). 

jeremy can't stop himself from barracking. david can't stop himself from being reasonable. jeremy wants to curmudgeon, he doesn't want to have to commit to a position. 

soon enough the metaphorical 'beer' is gone and they are on their way. 

the thing with the eyes

horsemouth does not have a title for this piece yet (maybe one will come to him as he writes/ types). 

he had planned to listen to don campau's jazz show on kows (weds 9pm GMT) but in the end he got distracted. he's been looking for a free copy of the masque of the red death (roger corman/ vincent price) when he came across of copy of the tome of ligeia (roger corman/ vincent price). 

this reads as if it were written with a pen in one hand and a copy of  mourning and melancholia by freud in the other. and what it shows are the consequences of failing to do that work - of becoming stuck (of living in a ruined abbey, of having the wife buried at the bottom of the garden). there is hypnotism too (the thing with the eyes) . a discussion of the works of mesmer.

there are other 'works' to be done of course - the work of attachment, the work of enjoyment. but merely to label things 'work' is enough to ensure that horsemouth will try to get out of doing them. 

today it is very cold out (according to horsemouth's father who has been outside). horsemouth has his coffee and sits here hugging a radiator. he's going to go for a second round on the coffee please wait here for him. 

ah he's back. (actually he wrote that before he went away). 

he's gone through and reconstructed a list of what he has been reading and watching january to february and it is decently creditable. 

he read some of eula biss's having and being had (having read an article about it) - an anatomisation of the capitalist everyday, which like horsemouth takes you into the pounds and pence (dollars and cents) of existence. of needing furniture, of shopping at IKEA etc. all written in relatable prose (unlike horsemouth's maunderings) but by someone who is doing too well to be likeable. 

'an attentive listener,' (a scrupulous recorder), and a somewhat lazy reader

luis bunuel's ghostwriter has died. 

jean-claude carrière leaves us a great many films, a few novels and an engaging book of conversation with umberto eco called this is not the end of the book.  not that horsemouth himself is doing too much reading right now. horsemouth's mum is still reading omnivorously sitting at the table in the dinning room in the sunshine (when there is any).

bunuel's autobiography (my last breeath) notes their writing technique. bunuel would go to a fancy restaurant  and sit there with a martini reminiscing, maybe making a few notes, after an hour or so carrière would arrive and, if the mood was right, sit down and they would begin to discuss and reminisce (over another martini). 

the movies they leave us are anarchic attacks upon the bourgeoisie in the name of art and justice. in the one horsemouth has watched most recently (la femme aux bottes rouges, 1974) poet catherine deneuve accepts an artists residency from evil bourgois fernando rey - he offers artists residencies and then systematically destroys the work created by them  leaving only the relationship of bourgeois (owner of capital) and artist (worker) intact.

catherine (who possessed of the super-power of being able to alter reality) wins out in the end and walks off into a painting. 

of course if someone else were to watch it they might derive some wholly other 'message'.

in this is not the end of the book, with umberto eco, he discusses what will happen to their libraries after they die (like most collectors they do not want their books ending up in a skip). eco has the stefan zweig addiction to manuscripts - the actual handwritten and first-draft of the work. both are confident that some university will want to take their libraries for the archive (and they're probably right). 

horsemouth's copy is back in london with his other books. he has not found here (so far) a book that compels him to read. instead he has been watching films - lucio fulci's distinctly anti-clerical  non si sevizia un paperino (1972). filmed at monte sant' angelo sicily.  

in fulci there is a distrust of the village also.  someone is killing the village's children, the police are useless, the village attacks  its outsiders, the village idiot is accused and jailed, the local madwoman is murdered by vigilantes.  but, in the end, it is the outsiders from the modern world who solve the crime and halt the killings. 

similarly the villagers in the black cat are portrayed as a superstitious rabble (and again it is modern outsiders who solve the crime).

today. no work. outside it was attempting to snow. so probably a walk. 

last night a conversation with enza.  

on playing the continuo for 'masque of the red death'

'I’m being asked to talk about it a great deal at the moment...

 I’m told ratings on streaming platforms are sky-high.' - roger corman.

horsemouth is interested to hear of people taking roger corman's masque of the red death as a style manual  for their lockdown. see the peasants grovel CHECK humiliate rivals CHECK  PPE contract through mates CHECK pact with the devil CHECK order in food CHECK retire to country mansion and behave badly CHECK. 

horsemouth will have to watch it again. instead he continued watching present day america set made for tv vampire movies (desire the vampire). having read about luigi cozzi's edgar allen poe's the black cat - which is in fact a making of the sequel to suspiria  told as a splatter horror story - he watched most of  lucio fulci's the black cat.

now fulci is mainly famous for splatter but this one is a little more subtle and features mimsy farmer as an american abroad (also to be seen in argento's lesser known four flies on grey velvet). the black cat wanders round the picturesque english village bringing death, destruction and cruelty, a psychic records the dead from inside their graves on reel-to-reel tape, mimsy farmer takes photographs, drunken rural ne'er-do-wells are slaughtered, a detective from scotland yard tries to unravel the plot. it has little to do with edgar allen poe's the black cat (but not as little as luigi cozzi's  edgar allen poe's the black cat judging from the clips horsemouth has watched). 

now horsemouth has watched a lot of horror over the last year so much so that he has forgotten most of it. he really should try keeping a list (particularly of the better directors). 

horsemouth has joan didion's why I write (courtesy of the guardian) and george orwell's why I write (courtesy of random pdf donwload) to compare and contrast. 

both are good. 

orwell takes you right back into his childhood, of feeling underappreciated, in this his understanding of the creative motivation is like otto rank's, but politics comes to save him, it is politics that puts the verve and depth into his sentences. 

with didion it is the concrete observation and the mechanics of sentences themselves that gets her through to the good work, she is too patrician to subscribe to a cause. she can admit the egotism of the work (one of the why i writes that orwell gives us in his list). 

there is more to be had here. horsemouth will go back through.

yesterday horsemouth worked (afternoon). in the morning he went for a walk on the common (very muddy). today a day off (bright sunshine, a sprinkling of snow still).  

a rather more refined text

sounding very texas. very SRV, horsemouth guesses it's the sunflower

yesterday... phew it is typing in compose view. horsemouth hates fussy html code. he just likes nice paragraph dividers rather than span commands with lots of instructions. yesterday he'd typed it all in before he'd realised it was in span. hopefully today we can have rather more refined text.

yesterday a chat with john in far off porto. he's kept a culture diary (unlike horsemouth) - horsemouth particularly noticed pool of london (basil dearden), and a film by agnes varda. pool of london  (and max messaging him about the destruction of the old truman brewery on brick lane) made horsemouth nostalgic for the city. 

so it's john in porto, denise and jonny  in caragline, iona in bucharest, zali in graz, brynley in holland (somewhere), another friend has portuguese residency (should she need it) - is there anybody else who has escaped that horsemouth has forgotten? 

of course in time of worldwide crisis there is no escape. but you may be somewhere where things are less bad.

horsemouth has mostly been watching vampire movies. other than that he went for a walk up on the common with his mum usually not possible because of the mud (which was good because the view is better from up there). they looked over the dulas valley to ewyas harold castle (where kilvert once went for a picnic),

outside the window occasional flashes of sunlight (no snow).  later today horsemouth works (he thinks) then that's it for the week. soon (22nd-28th) fahey week featuring robbie basho day (horsemouth should start collecting fahey material). 

'I went to eton (but my kids talk like yardies)'

RIP anne feeney 

 “a fearless and formidable force for justice and workers’ rights onstage, in the studio, and on the picket line” - tom morello (rage against the machine)

 the two myths of social mobility (ladder as pyramid)

horsemouth attended an online birthday party/ quiznight for his old friend denise (who sings on volume three and named the track amarach or volume four).

jonnie and denise were there, dave and claudia were there, graham and fiona were there and of course your humble narrator was there. as soon as horsemouth had managed to win a quiz he retired for the evening. (but this was already quite late on).

'I went to eton (but my kids talk like yardies)'

this was essentially the complaint of david goodhart. he was in the difficult position of being the only etonian on a panel discussion about social mobility (together with timandra harkness, sadie ryan, selina todd. the panel host was matthew sweet (who for once horsemouth found annoying).

selina was there as the author of snakes and ladders: the great british social mobility myth.

now social mobility is the compensation for the great british class system, you may be destined for the factory floor and a life of penury and precarity because of the accident of your birth but by pure talent and hard work you can rise up to become a valued member of the middle class and who knows (if you are talented enough) you may even be allowed to marry into the upper class.

it is generally held to be a beautiful thing when the social mobility escalator is working and a terrible thing when it is not. there is at least an individual or family solution to to the treatment of 90% or 50% of the population as mere beasts of burden (huzzah). we are shown the ladder we are not shown the pyramid against the side of which it rests.

any notions involving a radical democratic equality simply do not occur to the british. instead (in their spare time) they wander slack jawed in wonder round the whole stinking edifice gawking like tourists.

it being britain these social changes are reflected in the way we speak. there is an official hierarchy of accents where the braying of the posh is considered to be more correct than regional accents, accents that mark you out as being a member of the middle class, a member of the working class and the language of the street and the gutter. broadcasting has led to bbc english an exaggeratedly correct version of the spoken language from which, in their informal moments, the middle class may safely depart.

horsemouth should, of course, have a south wales accent (it's where he grew up), instead he has a standard middle class accent buffed down with a little cockney (where he lives now). when he was growing up the south wales accent was not considered fashionable (if he'd known it was going to be fashionable he would have kept a mild version of it).

now language we may all deploy equally (it does not require capital or factories) so it is now perfectly possible to play a good game of regional accent (as long as the grammar is correct) or even a good game of bad grammar and the language of the street (if you are posh enough to recover from it later).

but these are not matters of political power and social justice - these are just observations of one's position within the social machine. the way up and out, in the valleys of south wales in the 70ies horsemouth and his class mates were told was through education.

but peak equality has been and gone.

david goodhart (author of head hand heart and equalities advisor to the government) worries that we don't value the manual and caring skills enough (but not enough to do them himself you understand, his concern is for society). (thus do the philosophers ensure that a chair is bought for them and food is put on their table). he takes particular ire with the over education of the poor, in particular the blairite social engineering where fully 50% of children were to go to university. surely that is too many (opines the philosopher from his table).

this attempt to raise up 50% of the population is (of course) doomed to failure (the working class will have degrees but not the middle class security that the possession of the piece of paper should entitle them to) but also was rapidly sabotaged by the government introducing a system of fees and loans for higher education. thus ensuring that the aspirants are hobbled with debt (as they ascended the ladder) and thus remain precarious.

a generation of politicians that had benefited from a free university education has pulled the ladder up after themselves but even this is only a partial critique of the system's evil.

selina todd is there to show us the pyramid to encourage us to think about collective risings rather than individual escapes and...

well there she is as part of a wonderfully moderated panel, we chuckle at the unfairness of the system, we inspect the cornices of regional accents and the children of etonians speaking like yardies, in terms of missing the point it is almost as if a guardian reporter had been sent to cover it (won't someone think about house prices for the young families struggling to get on the property ladder! ah-ha look! there's another ladder).

horsemouth is sorry to sound so chippy about the matter but there it is.

horsemouth - the humanisation of the misanthrope

'what are you doing for the weekend?' question by howard in a recent (drunken) conversation. 

'the underground is the future' - a statement by rob lawson in a recent interview.

so last night horsemouth and howard chatted (by the magic of zoom). horsemouth showed howard various aerial photographs of his parent's home (and narrowly avoided bumping into his dad 'fresh from the bath' on the balcony). 

horsemouth opined that he would be reading, going for walks and er. farting about on the internet. saturday lacks a world at one on radio 4 (so already there is a sizeable hole in horsemouth's day). 

horsemouth could easily adjust to being a work from home person. he didn't mind his commutes (but he's fucked if he's going to be making them in a pandemic) and (before the pandemic) he would have argued he needed to be there to provide a good service. now that nobody is 'there' he thinks he can actually deliver a better service from home - the question is when will people start being 'there' again?  

the problem for horsemouth is that while he is fundamentally anti-social there is a limit to how long he can do this before recognition of his essential condition dawns on him. his project is the humanisation of the misanthrope - it is the delays with this he finds difficult.

despite horsemouth's disparagement of work both horsemouth and howard  have the thing with the necessity of work to stabilise their psychic economies. of course to retire horsemouth needs to free himself of this. 

howard is not a work from home person. he likes the commute (the cycle ride, the train). he likes the structure. 

horsemouth struggled with the working from home lark at the start (mostly with the technical side of it). as a social moment he does not think it is all positive. the worker must now pay for the phonelines and the services bill and the rent/ mortgage repayment on the premises, the 'firm' will soon be free of these expenses. the firm initially loses but it recoups as it reduces expenditure on premises, the worker loses the sanctuary of their home but also the third space between them, the commute, not always a source of joy but not always a source of misery either. 

horsemouth has spent something like 52 days away already. roughly the period from the winter solstice to imbolc. imbolc lies roughly halfway between the winter solstice and the spring equinox.  

at some point horsemouth has to sneak back to the city so that he can get on with his life again but there has to be some life there to be getting on with. howard says the cops are out checking people's reasons for travel (it becomes like a scene from the great escape or a  french resistance movie). 

next week a little smidgeon of work. 

meanwhile music (that organ of prophecy) having  indicated the future of the  world of work with techno DJs collaborating over the internet is now forced to subsist without physical crowds. horsemouth finds it all a bit strange. it is only the counter of the number of people watching that reassures you. we return from the manufactory to the cottage industry. 

'... ah my little friend. you are a bird...'

so horsemouth observed to the blackbird hopping around in the bushes. later there was a small vole or mouse like creature scampering about in the same spot (but horsemouth did not hail a fellow mammal). 

today a power out(r)age for necessary maintenance mostly involving chainsaws. this meant horsemouth could not work from home nor join you on the world wide communion (and his parents could not watch tv). result they are both busying themselves outside while horsemouth skulks about indoors having discovered that the power is back on early. 

his dad scored highly in horsemouth's estimations by finding a primus stove enabling horsemouth to have a cup of coffee in the morning. 

'well I am  not writing more in my diary now that I have one. today a power cut forces me to read the newspaper and to scrawl in said diary.

and I even desultorily open hannah arendt's the origins of totalitarianism where I discovered the story of benjamin disraeli (at last an engaging character).'  

so wrote horsemouth.

to be fair horsemouth also went for a walk up on the common (which he normally does if he has enough time in the day i.e. if he is not bogged down in that imposition of vampires work) and to be honest he often gets in a walk later on (just before it goes dark) with his mum round the local roads. this helps break up the day. 

a friend/ an acquaintance(?) is going in for a detox/ rehab etc. soon and (ambitiously) planning to do a digital detox, to not take in anything web enabled.  instead they plan to read loads of books, and keep a diary and do loads of art stuff. horsemouth thinks that this can be quite productive. for instance today horsemouth sang katie cruel  something he hasn't done for a while and attempted a pass through killing floor blues  which he also hasn't done in a while. plus he read an actual book and looked at an actual newspaper. 

there are people horsemouth knows who use social media but do not, as horsemouth does, put on a show. this seems strange to horsemouth.

later? zoom beers with howard. back at the old bull and gusset 6pm. 

tomorrow? a birthday quiz with denise 

because life is just one big long victory parade

 this was horsemouth's answer to why british people liked applauding so much. 

of course there's a lot to clap about. (no slow hand clapping at the back there). 

while the death rate proves recalcitrant things return to their previous condition (except for the new varieties available - isn't constant improvement a wonderful thing especially when applied to biological systems).

today a day when horsemouth doesn't have to work. you will not notice him being any more cheerful. 

the government has failed to hit its 'ambitious' target for building brand new homes (again). covid has nothing to do with it. the 'ambitious' house building targets, that are never enough, and never of the right type, never in the right place, have never been fulfilled, the government are continuing to move society in the direction of private renting because that's their ideology. 

and if labour come? same-same. horsemouth doesn't hold out hope for a giant wave of council house building (the thing that is actually needed).  instead he would expect to see a wave of support for first time home-buyers, the kind of voters they'd like to have, the ones they are in competition with the tories for. 

still clap-clap-clap (jolly good show). 

horsemouth regrets to say that he thinks the british people are (collectively) insane (and not in a good way).  he thinks fintan O'toole has diagnosed it correctly, a failure to separate from empire, an unwillingness to admit it is over, a failure to recognise any of the history that has taken place since (except for two world wars and one world cup to be sung to the tune of camptown races). 

the portuguese have it, a mellower form of it. but lots of european nations should have this as well (the french, the dutch, the belgians, have an appreciable imperial histories. even the germans and italians to some extent (about the danes, swedes, norwegians and finns horsemouth does not know). the scramble for africa, congo, indonesia, the maghreb, south west africa, german somaliland. 

horsemouth rolls in the direction of his bus pass (not that he'd want to use it much at the minute), retirement and pension. brexit has probably fucked retiring to the south of europe and the sunshine. quite what the medium and long term results of all this covid lark will be are difficult to see at the minute. 

horsemouth has just worked. how do people stand it?

fortunately horsemouth does not have to work much. (this is just as well as it makes him ferociously grumpy.) 

still. work done (for now). 

horsemouth is tucking into a beer.

it even got in the way of his blogging ladies and gentlemen. 

here's some footage (from 2014 horsemouth believes) of michael hurley doing the proper version of the werewolf (complete with musical saw and a little tuba). as far as horsemouth knows he's still alive (which is a bit of a miracle 79 last count).  there are some great looks on the faces of the children (like w-t-a-f! adults are into some weird shit!)

yes. horsemouth just checked - he's still alive.

this is horsemouth's friday night (because he doesn't have to work tomorrow) and he doesn't think he can work friday (power outage for maintenance purposes). 

still at least he has his health.

the pandemic seems to have hit peak and to be slowly declining from there. horsemouth would probably be looking for a no worse than when he first came here (december 15th) as a guide level. but on the other hand there are also several pesky new more infectious variants and possibly more lethal varieties. 

meanwhile there's a dust up over vaccine supplies and this has enabled the DUP to open up a second front against the northern ireland protocol. (thanks ursula classy move). here we go arlene foster, michael gove, boris johnson now all looking like staunch defenders of the good friday agreement and good common sense and strangely acting in lockstep wth whoever it is who is threatening customs officials in the north of ireland (who strangely can't be named as loyalist paramilitaries). (fuck)

time is getting on. horsemouth read very little in january (but he watched a lot of movies). he should do his january round up. 

ground hog day (horsemouth communing with the sacred bears)

horsemouth is awake. he was dreaming about being a spy. outside it is not too bad a morning (it's not raining there is some sun). he has his coffee. he works in the afternoon. 

today is groundhog day (a day that is supposed to be spent communing with the sacred bears). the news will come through around 1pm. 

last night horsemouth celebrated six months since the release of musicians of bremen volume four = really just an excuse to spam his friends with the good news. it looks like one new person has heard it (so it was all worth it). 

horsemouth still hasn't got it together to do a live gig under the current circumstances. this has been a mistake he thinks. howard has played quite a bit (but no one has seen it because he plays as and when he likes). their social media efforts are divided across different platforms and do not make an integrated whole - but that's probably ok. 

howard has been recording a new tune with his new guitars (he has two - a nylon strung and a metal strung one) adding keyboards and he has a clarinet he is attempting to learn. 

gwenifer raymond was saying how much she appreciated the ability to do gigs from home that the new situation affords. horsemouth has so far not put his hand in his pocket for the new service (but he's a tightwad and thoroughly stingy so this just replicates his previous unwillingness to pay for digital product). 

of course the scrabble is on over who gets paid ('won't somebody think of the songwriters!') there was a whole PRS structure over who got paid when a band played a gig, or a tune got played on the radio that hasn't come into existence yet for the live streaming 'industry'.  

horsemouth is suspicious over the music industry's claim to be an industry - at one level reasonable amounts of money are actually generated but 2/3rds, 9/10ths of musical activity is effectively unremunerated (or in fact paid for by the musician). 

people just want to have their shamanic moment they do this dressed in the costume of paid entertainers. the amount of money he has made  as a musician would not have kept him in guitar strings, never mind guitars, recordings or tube fare to the practices.

the crisis is burning off the physical infrastructure of the creative industries. the venues are shuttered and dark and may not be coming back for a long while. but it is imbolc and we have groundhogs telling us of spring, the new days are coming a thousand flowers will bloom.  

imbolc and six months since the release of musicians of bremen volume four

'it was like travelling on a soundwave that started with forest swords had, intermittently, flashes of john fahey and ended with an early floyd mashup. love it.'  - martin (of martin and angela)

today is imbolc. lambing begins (and other agricultural things), tomorrow sacred bears are consulted (now reduced to the condition of groundhogs). the wheel of the year rolls on. 

and it's also six months since the release of musicians of bremen volume four.

what a strange six months it has been. and what a long time ago it seems.

what a strange relationship with time we now have. 

horsemouth has scheduled an event to celebrate these things for this evening but he is unsure what he will actually do for it. probably do what he has done before and post whatever live clips, videos and suchlike are available to him.  

volume four continues to hold up when horsemouth listens to it. a few people have bought it. a few people have received demo copies. at the top his favourite review so far.  

'vandals' have painted a  covid ma,sk on 235ft long man of wilmington ‘this criminal damage is an affront to those who maintain this heritage asset,’ say police. but horsemouth thinks it is appropriate, the long man is a representative of us all, it is proper he should go about masked. 

sproatly smith has posted his monthly mix for febraury again complete with st.brigid's crosses.