'I wish I could have helped him'

'... I am writing this in the third person to gain much needed objectivity.'  - philip k. dick, valis, p11. 

yesterday horsemouth finished reading the man in the high castle. 

there is in it a great gernsback continuum moment that horsemouth had forgotten or never read correctly or unconsciously supressed (he has a shocking tendency to read things too quickly and without attention and thus miss things). now the gernsback continuum is a william gibson/ bruce sterling(?) short story where, as a result of prolonged exposure 50ies pulp american sci-fi art, a photographer (if memory serves) starts to see it everywhere in real life. he is haunted (the text jokes) by semiotic ghosts. 

in the man in the high castle japan and germany win the second world war and partition america - sitting in the park in san francisco the old japanese bureaucrat contemplates a new american made  piece of jewellery, he gets up from the park bench and into the nightmare world where germany and japan did not win the war. 

this nightmare haunts several of the characters - especially as, when consulted by characters in the book,  the I ching appears to suggest that this is in fact the case and that the characters are living in a weird counterfactual world (thus doubling their bitterness).

it has been a long time since horsemouth consulted the I ching. like the tarot he admires the aesthetics of it. 

the world of valis is similarly divided but having divided himself philip k. dick can play the mental dissolution of his own character for laughs (look at the pay-off line to chapter 1; 'I wish I could have helped him.')

yesterday horsemouth sat out in the back garden and read. sometimes he would go and sit on the front steps of the house and listen to the radio (er. on his work laptop if you see what he means). the broadband signal does not stretch out back (or at least it  didn't used to, maybe it does now with the new laptop).

at some point there will be some painting work to do in the front room.

last night he watched the fall of yugoslavia. sick power crazed individuals march an entire people into the killing fields. the croats are just as guilty as the serbs, they just played it better (the geography favoured them, they were further to the west). the UN, NATO, the EU, the west sits on its hands, arms its favourites and, eventually, bombs. 

next up the fall of kosovo - more insane nationalist carnage.   

today. another beautiful day. horsemouth will go for that long promised walk with enza (more than a quarter of the year has gone since they first hatched the plan).  there is the fall of the house of fitzgerald  to celebrate, there is some politicking they could think about (if they can be bothered), there is catching up to do. 

he has a couple of hours to kill in the morning before he goes - he will dick about online (pardon the pun), get a shower etc. 

horsemouth loves to vote

as an old person (and despite the fact that he disdained it for years) horsemouth loves to vote. 

and what dropped through his letterbox today but a voting card. 

he won't get the chance to actually do it until may 6th but horsemouth loves planning ahead. 

 - mayor of london (two votes. first choice and second choice. khan looking like a cert. from the polls). 

the lib dems have had a bit of a problem with their candidates already.   this  election was postponed a year (because of covid) so their original candidate (siobhan benita) dropped out (saying she couldn't afford to wait), there was then a shortlist of two candidates. now you can check this against the wikipedia page. and horsemouth has seen the footage that forced the second candidate geeta sidhu-robb to crash out.

why can't we all just get along? mutters horsemouth to himself. (he's also a little gobsmacked that the lib dems are so stuck for candidates that this one looked like a runner). 

anyway her replacement luisa porritt is not jonathon porritt's (friends of the earth) daughter seems perfectly sane. 

also up for a vote this time round; london assembly member for north-east constituency and london members of london assembly (it's a mixture of first past the post and proportional representation). 

meanwhile things move towards the AGM of the collective endeavour and the election of  a management committee. if horsemouth is honest with you he thinks his vote is pretty much wasted in larger elections (he just likes doing it) - where the democracy is the levers of power aren't - whereas in the collective endeavour he actually thinks people's votes matter and influence what subsequently happens. 

yesterday horsemouth sat out in the garden and read. he began and finished off agota kristof's the notebook (in a way the story of how she came to write it is more interesting, the novel itself is a tin drum kind of thing overpraised by slavoj zizek). 

then he started on philip k. dick's the man in the high castle (he pauses here to tell you how much he likes penguin classic's new cover for it, the world map in braille - or at least in those kind of raised bobbles beloved by modern architects for their cassette panels). it remains genuinely shocking as, by implication, it reveals the world round us and our opinions as a mere historical accident. 

after that he watched the fall of yugoslavia. as officials within the communist party and army generals ferment and pander to ethnic nationalism for the sake of their own careers (leading to carnage). 

it's a beautiful bright sunshine-y morning. horsemouth plans to listen to the radio on the front steps in the morning and then finish off man in the high castle in the back garden this afternoon. he's decided to try some light, easy to read, stuff, to get his reading back up to speed. 

tomorrow a walk with enza. friday is bandcamp friday. may 6th the chance to vote. 

they promised horsemouth sun (silver lining silver lining)

they promised horsemouth sun, ladies and gentlemen. but he ain't feeling it. (wait, let him check the bbc weather page). 

ah the sun has been postponed and downgraded until this afternoon but in exchange (silver lining silver lining) it's going to be even warmer tuesday (21C! - woo hoo!). it may be possible for horsemouth to be wheeled out into the back garden and sit and read (and get off the laptop and the internets). that would be good. 

for his sunday morning music horsemouth listened to an alice coltrane compilation. the cover lifts nicely from the fibre work of lenore tawney (friend and lover of agnes martin). he found a photo of alice coltrane he'd never seen before (from the inside cover of reflections on creation and space) and a photo from a luaka bop celebration of her spiritual music from the Knockdown Center, 52-19 Flushing Ave. in Maspeth, NY, US on 21 May 2017.

in recent days horsemouth watched satan's slave (not as much fun as it should have been) and eye of the devil in which french aristo david niven does the right thing by his peasants (to give the game away in a wickerman stylee).

a friend has bought the download of another friend (horsemouth was going to say CD this is how his brain thinks). horsemouth has enabled musical exchanges. 

sten is back (from where horsemouth does not know) and he's back off out again. no work for horsemouth (as far as he knows). 

last night was the worm moon. so called because it is supposed to be getting warm enough for the worms to come out of winter hibernation and recommence their task of turning dead matter into soil. they are the ultimate victors. 

28th march 1871: the paris commune is proclaimed

 'the commune was formed of municipal councillors, chosen by universal suffrage  in the various wards of the town, responsible and revocable at short terms... the commune was to be a working, not a parliamentary, body, executive and legislative at the same time...' 

on the 26th of march the elections were held. 

on march 28th the commune was proclaimed. 

the diarist and noble edmond de goncourt had his own views  which way the wind was blowing (as he wrote on this day in 1971). 

'government was passing from the hands of the have's to the have-nots, from those who have a material , interest in the preservation of society to those who have no interest whatever in order, stability or preservation. perhaps, in the great law of change that governs all earthly things, the workers are for modern society what the barbarians were for ancient society, the convulsive agents of dissolution and destruction.' 

given that the commune only lasted 60 days few of the commune's decisions were implemented.  but they were exemplary of the interests of the workers,

- separation of church and state;

- remission of rents owed for the entire period of the siege (during which payment had been suspended);

- abolition of child labour and night work in bakeries;

- granting of pensions to the unmarried companions and children of national guardsmen killed in active service;

- free return by pawnshops of all workmen's tools and household items, valued up to 20 francs, pledged during the siege;

- postponement of commercial debt obligations, and the abolition of interest on the debts;

- right of employees to take over and run an enterprise if it were deserted by its owner; the commune, nonetheless, recognised the previous owner's right to compensation;

- prohibition of fines imposed by employers on their workmen.

the republican calendar was restored (you now horsemouth is interested in such things). beginning on the autumn equinox, the year was divided into twelve 30 day months with 5 sansculottides (or complimentary days that did not belong to any month) to make up the year. 

the months that cover our events were; 

- germinal (from french germination), starting 20 or 21 march

- floréal (from french fleur, derived from latin flos, "flower"), starting 20 or 21 april

- prairial (from french prairie, "meadow"), starting 20 or 21 may

rob lawson has an album out (the village under the moon) and has posted it to your humble narrator (it has survived its postage despite the envelope being slit open and very good it is too). horsemouth particularly likes track  3 which seems to combine buffalo girls with several special species of small furry animals... 

horsemouth has no idea what he is up to next week. 

next week SUN! (well, monday, tuesday, wednesday and temperatures up nearly to 20! woo-hoo!)

well ok he's off for a walk with enza at some point and then friday is bandcamp friday. now sales of musicians of bremen  recordings seem to have stalled at the enthusiastic early adopters (thank you people, you now who you are). horsemouth has been avoiding post offices and home deliveries since the start of the pandemic but now, newly jabbed, is perhaps the time to get back to it.  as far as new work goes howard has posted over various demo tracks, horsemouth looks forward to getting on with it (a series of guitar duos perhaps).  

an infinite me (reflected to eternity)

horsemouth has stolen today's title from the post of a friend (he hopes she doesn't mind). it's a proposed caption to a photo of herself with her mobile showing the screen of the mobile on which is the photo of her with the mobile... it's mainly about earrings. 

in january 2018 (so six months after the grenfell fire) kingspan held a private dinner at the houses of parliament (as part of their PR campaign). according to their managing director  'two or three' MPs attended. 

now horsemouth finds this suspicious already. 

surely if you were lobbying MPs how many attended and who they were would be an important fact.  we now know who two of the MPs were, one was the conservative's kevin hollinrake and the other the  DUP's jim shannon (the chair of the all party parliamentary group for healthy homes and buildings). 

so who was the third? answers on a postcard. 

this horsemouth learned from his new favourite blogspot - the grenfell inquiry podcast. yes whenever your blood pressure is low and your levels of hate subsiding simply listen to the grenfell podcast (and all will be well again). 

kevin hollinrake replied to this reveal with a pithy 'bollocks' on twitter. which might initially look like a denial but a while later he was back with the story that kingspan are a major local employer (which is true because kevin has previously used their premises for various presentations on local issues.  jim shannon (being in the DUP) is presumably not an easy man to embarrass. 

he has another quote here the intervention of the imagination in social reality but he can't remember where he lifted it from.

another friend has posted to bandcamp an alan's psychedelic breakfast style track made in her kitchen. apparently it won't be up long so grab it now. 

today. lounging around. 

tomorrow. significant events in the paris commune/ the oldest known live recording of john fahey.  

next week. who knows. maybe nothing. bandcamp friday friday if that's any help. 

meanwhile (over on mixcloud) someone has done a tribute mix to weirdshire with similar (but non-weirdshire music) and very good it is too. 

'on march 26th the paris commune was elected...'

 

'... on march 28th it was proclaimed.'

grey morning. today horsemouth works (twice). thereafter who knows we are into the great poverty. (well maybe not. maybe they'll furlough him again. maybe they'll find him more work). 

we have the two months of the commune and then the bloody week of its fall and the fate of the prisoners. horsemouth read a little of engels' scene setting and marx's two addresses to the general council of the international workingmen's association. 

here we see king crimson playing a small gig in bath. this kind of playing was very influential on the young horsemouth. he bought the record in a boots or a wollies near oxford circus sometime in late 1981/ early 82. probably together with some stanley clarke cassettes. 

in a recent podcast david runciman and helen thompson talk to chris bickerton about how technocracy and populism have come together (new labour to macron’s en marche, from dominic cummings to five star). they discuss the fusion that is technopopulism. at the level of technology the voter targeting profoundly changes the ability of political elites to roll and skew elections and this is new but it must work with the material that the population gives it. the plaint of MAGA is about jobs and work as much as it is about gun ownership and Qanon. 

horsemouth has been jabbed (flaubert's war)

flaubert has a bad franco-prussian war. the prussians occupied his house and sent him off to run errands. he has to send his niece abroad to england. sadly horsemouth does not have the diaries from this period - otherwise he could tell you more.

but he is, edmond de goncourt finds, not distracted by events, when they meet up after the war (saturday 10th june 1971) and the commune.

'dined this evening with flaubert, whom I had not seen since the death of my brother. he has come to paris to find some information on his ' tentation de saint antoine' . he is still the same, a writer above all else. the cataclysm seems to have passed over him without distracting him for one moment from the impassive making of books.'

the next significant date is the 28th.

horsemouth has been jabbed. the top of his arm is sore. he retired to bed early and watched lone wolf and cub. he had the shivers at one point (this is probably evidence the vaccine is doing something that and the sore throat and headache). it is a beautiful bright morning. he walked up into walthamstow using the route through the industrial estate. he has today off (and then works friday). 

'of course, whether governments will be able to devise and apply the more demanding targeted measures needed to keep the virus in check and live with it in a complex urban society remains to be seen; right now, under the spell of brussels, they can’t even organize a vaccination campaign.

otherwise the news is bad...'

wolfgang streeck continues to beat the EU with the stick of covid. it's not a pretty sight

'we seemingly cannot learn the art of doing nothing. to sit and wait. to stay in. to focus on the small things. '

this was horsemouth one year ago. giving voice to the obvious received opinion (as he lamentably does).

one year ago howard had posted over a demo of a track amharic (later to become amarach). horsemouth had already recorded his guitar for it (one of the last things he recorded for the album and maybe one of the best things he has recorded ever).  

today horsemouth goes to get jabbed (9.55 up in walthamstow). he is grateful to live in a world of science and development of the productive forces where such things can happen. 

yesterday (which horsemouth now hears as sung by karen dalton) having finished hannah arendt's on violence horsemouth had a look at zola's la debacle and the goncourt brothers' pages from the goncourt journal for discussion of the 1871 paris commune. both were eye witnesses. the surviving goncourt brother writes his journal entries at the time, zola writes his fictionalised account 20 years later. neither are in sympathy with the revolutionaries but edmond de goncourt (being a noble who dabbles in novel writing) perhaps has a clearer view of it. 

'the newspapers see nothing in what is going on but a question of decentralisation: as if it had anything to do with decentralisation! what is happening is nothing less than the conquest of france by the worker and the reduction to slavery under his rule of the noble, the bourgeois and the peasant.'

horsemouth will attempt to publish edmond goncourt's comments on the day on which they happened. 

with the zola it is really an addendum to the novel's account of the franco-prussian war (the final nail in the coffin of the second empire), it is not until p.468 that the commune happens and the book is done by p.509. the idealist dies the stoic peasant survives (heartbroken) to march off into the future. in doctor pascal  (the last novel in the series) zola retreats from the scientism that scaffolded his creation satisfied that he has done enough good work.

there was a whole circle of writers round zola and the goncourts, flaubert, maupassant etc.(victor hugo is bumping round as the grand old man of the scene) horsemouth will dig around his collection and see what they have to say about the matter 

strange movements in the heavens of the collaborative endeavour

BIG NEWS! martin (the chair of the co-operative endeavour for the last 7 years) is retiring. 

who will be the new chair?

well that depends on who is elected to the management committee (because they elect the chair from among themselves). forward to the annual general meeting. 

what happens at the AGM? (end of april) handbacks, rent rises, all the good things. (the AGM will be conducted by zoom this time).  horsemouth doesn't expect it to be too bad because to be heard and to discuss requires a even more co-operation on zoom than it does in real life. and if someone gets out of order you can just mute them out - something that is considerably more difficult in real life.  

at some point as soon as possible  there will have to be a face to face general meeting. 

horsemouth must say he's annoyed by the fetishisation of the balfron tower (in contemporary leftist discourse) that said it does look great. why not be as concerned about robin hood gardens (which was just as concrete brut)?  or indeed the destruction of social housing on the next door aberfeldy (replaced by rent farming investment blocks)? all of this strikes horsemouth as just as egregious (but it doesn't raise the same level of comment). 

and then there's the soon to be redeveloped chrisp street market (festival of britain model estate)?

there's an outside chance this scheme will die because events have pushed back the start date and undermined the rationale (posher tenants and sales equals more money for housing associations battered by government rent limiting measures). but I don't think this is enough to actually stop it

the pandemic slows everything down to a snail's pace. but the dinosaur of redevelopment just keeps walking forward (even as its economic rationale vanishes). sheer momentum keeps it going through the 'dip' and  into the promised land of investor confidence. (and if not? fuck it, it's been built already). 

the new ball game for the city is coming but it won't be here for a couple of years yet. 

horsemouth discovered (from a belated guardian obituary) that milford graves (the jazz drummer) ran a herbal garden, taught a martial art and redecorated his house in the style of gaudi. 

what a don! 

respect! 

Milford Graves Full Mantis from Full Mantis on Vimeo.

in which horsemouth and howard are interviewed separately

From an interview by Emma Stroud.

- Tell me a little bit about the music you make? Any major musical influences? 

Howard - I majored in sound on my arts degree. I was really into the New York minimalists. Very influenced by them. Over time I managed to cobble together a studio in Brixton with a friend. We made very experimental electronica which can be heard on Bandcamp. This is a long time ago. My current musical projects involve working with horsemouth... We bonded over Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. How we have managed to do anything over the last few years with my crazy work schedule has been a minor miracle. It’s pretty much acoustic based, we sing, we play, we write together, I record, I mix. We then release it and virtually no one listens. But that’s fine. As a band, we share a love of Alice Coltrane, Pharaoh Sanders, Ali Farka Toure, Drum and Bass, John Fahey, and dub reggae.

Emma - ...What is your story as a musician?

horsemouth -Well I really wanted to get a band together since I was about 15 but I didn’t manage it until 1990. Basically we were trying to invent Brooklyn afrobeat 10 years too early (and in the wrong place) - so that went nowhere. The singer went off to become the actor Noma Dumezweni. I played guitar on Lush 3.1 by Orbital (if people remember them)… and then (defeated) I gave up for a few years. When I came back I decided it was just for fun. In the co-op I met Howard, we collaborated on two CDs of music by co-op members (there were always lots of singers and players in the co-op), and then we started making music as musicians of bremen which is ongoing. Peter Holmgren played bass on one of our songs, and later on I played a gig  with him at the Phoenix Social and a few years later we played a gig there, Peter and Myself,  with Enza (of 'the Fall of the house of Fitzgerald') on vocals.

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

yesterday howard was round. they sat in the sunshine on the front steps and drank beer (3 bottles between them). horsemouth cooked (butter beans, quorn, onions, chillis, pasta and peas). howard pronounced it tasty. they listened to (thelonious) monk's greatest hits and LTJ bukem's fantazia 2  set from 1994. horsemouth is trying to live quietly until he has been jabbed. 

thereafter he suspects his life will have the same unsatisfactory texture as before. 

the q-tip pause tape beat for nas's 'one love'? 

yes...

it's lifted from this song by philadelphia funk crew the heath brothers. 

equinox plusone (into the bright half of the year)

RIP paul jackson bass on you got it you get it, and lots of herbie hancock/ headhunters funk stuff, santana's festival and shawn philips' spaced...

horsemouth must admit to robbing that berimbau part. 

it is into the bright half of the year (for that part of humanity that lives in the northern hemisphere - you've got to remember that even india and sri lanka in the northern hemisphere).  

over half the (adult) population has been jabbed (but not horsemouth). this only goes to show how many sick and aged people there are (not that horsemouth is not sick and aged). 

he lazed around in the day not getting any reading done. in the afternoon/ evening he took to watching zatoichi. whilst horsemouth was being bored suke and enza were creating (he admits to being a little envious). 

he had a brief discussion online about the post brexit/ covid world 

(probably the lack of a pay rise for nurses/  the cuts to the railways  the first sign of it). 

brexit was self-inflicted and divisive but post-COVID there will be calls for unity (er. and sacrifice). really if they can get away with giving the nurses a real world pay cut what chance for the rest of us. horsemouth's parents, his brother are staunch brexiteers. the whole thing is probably best viewed as the UK equivalent of MAGA. and now it will get even more weird as britain really does become 'little britain'. horsemouth thinks the ruling class would have gone for it after brexit but now (post-covid) they have a licence to go even bigger. 

gawdelpus. in this respect horsemouth is glad to be old and thus out of it relatively soonish. 

yesterday horsemouth checked his finances. he was a late starter regarding the world of work (courtesy of squatting and volunteering and government make-work schemes). when he thought he was going to canada (and when he was still in shock that people would pay him money to do things) he worked hard as he could and  saved money. but he would frequently get sick and exhausted in winter. in the last decade that has gone into reverse and he has started living off of those savings. working first through his savings account and then starting in on his ISA (so far he has rinsed half the interest on it without digging into the capital). the credit crunch and now covid have dented it 

horsemouth lives cheap (this is the secret he learned from his yorkshire scottish granny) and can probably roll the rock a few years closer to his retirement and then coast it out until his pension. this is his plan (such as it is).  at one point his plan was to coast out a few of those years at least in the south of europe. brexit has buggered that bit but it may still be possible (assuming horsemouth survives). 

ok. roll on he jab. howard may be up around lunchtime. after that maybe some painting in the front room. 

equinox (horsemouth makes it to the weekend)

equinox 09.37 

horsemouth is just days off his first jab (hopefully - it would be a shame if they ran out of jabs before they'd vaccinated your humble correspondent). it is one of two remember horsemouth and the full benefit of it takes about 10 days to kick in - and then there are the inevitable new variants it is less good against.

work monday and friday (nothing tuesday allegedly). meeeting of the communal endeavour monday evening. next week a walk with tim goldie. week after a walk of some description with enza. 

arguably the commune has made its fatal mistake (on this day in 1871), it has not pursued the regular army to versailles to disarm them and disrupt the plans the generals and politicians are hatching against paris. marx and engels experience the commune as the glorious confirmation of their theories

horsemouth listened to david runciman's podcasts (in history of ideas) one on rosa luxemburg and the other on carl schmitt. this is horsemouth's problem he likes the luxemburgist line (internationalism, democracy, halt the wars, let the revolution and the people teach you) but he suspects that lenin is right (if you don't want to die and have everyone you know die seize power and be inflexibly opportunist). 

the schmitt (fucking nazi) he doesn't like at all. but he is right to call the contradiction at the heart of liberal democracy, its unstable character. 

hannah arendt repeats an interesting point in on violence that franz borkenau made following the spanish civil war. that with the new weapons of war the revolution stands little chance against the overwhelming violence its opponents can bring to bear. and at this point horsemouth says yes - look at syria, yemen etc. he thinks the time of revolutions is over and the time of communes (of which paris was the first) may be over also.

on the other hand capitalism is driven here and there by its contradictions, the world is delivered up to it with such a thoroughness so that no part may escape its collective fate. the argument for the necessity of the better world grows ever stronger. change (for the better) is still possible. 

today enza goes to catastro/fille's to film a video for one of her songs (most excellent).

horsemouth will continue to shuffle around and do a bit of reading. at some point he will have to replenish his stocks of food (he's getting thoroughly sick of pasta, fakemeat, beans and onions). the virus doesn't take away the option or desire to go entertainment shopping (horsemouth is bored so he goes to buy food/ books) but it does help dis-incentivise it. 

focus are at the castle rehearsing, cheese, tank tops, chess and knitting (what more could you want?).

 

tomorrow the equinox (paris commune II)

Meshes of the Afternoon (Maya Deren, 1943) from SeriousFeather on Vimeo.

horsemouth doesn't have a copy of the civil war in france to hand instead he has 40 or so pages in a wishart marx/engels selected works (volume one) and 30 pages in the viking library  portable karl marx. 

to be honest he may have a copy of it (he remembers having a copy of it)  but it may be lost in the stacks somewhere in his room or hidden at his parents (where he was) to be read at a later date. it could even be upstairs in the living room hidden on the shelves there.

'the direct antithesis of the empire was the commune'  

the main lesson horsemouth wishes to impart is that the paris commune came out of a moment in history one that combined not only a large and militant working class in the city of paris (and a few of the larger cities lyon, marseille) but a ruling class in the nation as a whole that had embarked upon a disastrous war with the germans, lost that war,  and now needed to get the working class to pay the reparations for it and the costs of rebuilding. 

'yes gentlemen, the commune intended to abolish that class-property which makes the labour of the many the wealth of the few'  

and now we are at another moment in history when the ruling class needs to get the working class to pay the cost of another  crisis. before they would only have had to get the cost of brexit paid, now they have to get the greater costs of covid paid and eventually they will have to get the costs of the climate crisis paid if they are going to be able to keep on taking their cut. 

horsemouth doesn't forsee canons, militias and la semaine sanglante, but he does forsee trouble. 

sun is shining (weather is sweet). sten is off to get jabbed. the other two are done already. horsemouth is getting done wednesday. 

horsemouth works this afternoon. thereafter it is the weekend. tomorrow (9.37 am) the equinox. if in fact it was not yesterday this far north. he should check on howard. 

he did some reading also about maya deren and watched meshes in the afternoon which positions her work close to jean cocteau. 'new relations between the perceiving eye and the power of light' are proposed. he watched more zatoichi. he checked for his pay (remembering that it sometimes appears the day before payday (official)). 

yay they've paid him! his rent only (effectively) but nonetheless it enables horsemouth to maintain his library and himself in a comfortable state. 

possibly the last week of work next week (after that summer boredom). 

it will be difficult to get away this year. 

150 years of the paris commune (the sphinx)

'what is the commune, that sphinx so tantalizing to the bourgeois mind?' 

account lifted and condensed from the wikipedia entry.

towards the end of the franco-prussian war in 1970 as the germans surrounded paris, radical groups saw that the government of national defence had few soldiers to defend itself, and launched the first demonstrations against it. on 19 september, national guard units from the main working-class neighbourhoods—Belleville, Menilmontant, La Villette, Montrouge, the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, and the Faubourg du Temple—marched to the centre of the city and demanded that a new government, a commune, be elected.

at the end of the franco-prussian war in 1971, 400 obsolete muzzle-loading bronze cannons, paid for by the paris public via a subscription, remained in the city. the new central committee of the national guard, now dominated by radicals, decided to put the cannons in parks in the working-class neighbourhoods of belleville, buttes-chaumont and montmartre, to keep them away from the regular army and to defend the city against any attack by the national government. 

on 17 march 1871, there was a meeting of thiers (chief executive of the french government) and his cabinet, the paris mayor national guard commander and the commander of the regular army units in paris. thiers announced a plan to send the army the next day to take charge of the cannons... if the seizure of the cannon was not successful, the government would withdraw from the centre of paris, build up its forces, and then attack with overwhelming force, as they had done during the uprising of june 1848.

the attempt to seize the canons at montmartre failed. the soldiers refused to open fire on the crowd that rapidly gathered to defend the canons. the army generals were seized. 

late on 18 March, when they learned that the regular army was leaving paris, units of the national guard moved quickly to take control of the city.  

the next day the red flag was raised over the hotel de ville. 

and so began the paris commune

'what is the commune, that sphinx so tantalizing to the bourgeois mind?

the proletarians of paris,” said the central committee in its manifesto of march 18, “amidst the failures and treasons of the ruling classes, have understood that the hour has struck for them to save the situation by taking into their own hands the direction of public affairs.... they have understood that it is their imperious duty, and their absolute right, to render themselves masters of their own destinies, by seizing upon the governmental power.'  - karl marx, the civil war in france (1871).

horsemouth will follow the commune for the two months of its existence on its 150th anniversary.  he will rely on zola's account in la débâcle (1892) and karl marx's the civil war in france. 

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

apparently the the nas track above is a push button mixtape made by q-tip. horsemouth still has one of these somewhere (in his collection of cassettes).  it was a radically democratic moment in the technology.  the song itself one love is a depressing tale of poverty, villainy, incarceration, the backing track a beautiful collage, the cover image the child who is the man (destiny is location) at the crossroads (the corner) in the projects. victor hugo wrote of child communards going to their deaths. the sphinx asks a riddle that cannot be answered until it is answered. 

in which work has several related meanings

 

horsemouth's friend ben is sitting in a room re-conducting alvin lucier's experiment with the resonant frequencies of rooms and repeated speech. what the repeated sound elucidates is the material properties (the resonant frequencies) of the physical space in which the speaker is. of course the recording is portable and so is (usually) listened to elsewhere (in another room).  this is lucier's text that ben 'riffs' off. 

'I am sitting in a room different from the one you are in now. I am recording the sound of my speaking voice and I am going to play it back into the room again and again until the resonant frequencies of the room reinforce themselves so that any semblance of my speech, with perhaps the exception of rhythm, is destroyed. What you will hear, then, are the natural resonant frequencies of the room articulated by speech. I regard this activity not so much as a demonstration of a physical fact, but more as a way to smooth out any irregularities my speech might have.'

but by smoothing out the irregularities of speech lucier/ ben renders it incomprehensible (it is the irregularities of pitch and rhythm that enable sound to carry language). in this it might be taken to be an example of destructive repetition but productive also, in that it reveals the resonant frequencies of the room. 

in part, in ben's use of it, there is a complaint about the alienated conditions in which we now find ourselves working but conditions that reveal the material conditions in which we are working (but also the ideological conditions in which we are working). for the zoom/room/ the different room are the rooms in which we work. in the cartoon sisyphus works from home we see sisyphus on the sofa with his laptop and the rock. 

the transition of work to zoom (from work(place) to room) reveals somethings about the educative process (for ben's work is teaching) and the process of work that we are seeing afresh. 

it being ben there is more. 

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

 'the progressing explosion of the atom of 'obedience' (whose stability was allegedly eternal)'

such was the quote from heinrich boll that hannah arendt wove into her on violence. it has (of course) been doctored in the usual horsemouth fashion (with what was subversive placed in brackets).

horsemouth has to warn you up front that in on violence it is fair to say that hannah does not 'get' black power and, like adorno, she finds herself out of sympathy with the 60ies radicals. she despises their fetishisation of violence as a tactic, pointing out that it is at best for marx and engels a symptom, and at least a  distraction in the marxist scheme. that it is an under theorised heresy of sartre, sorel and fanon. 

'it is the function... of all action... to interrupt what otherwise would have proceeded automatically and therefore predictably' 

labour here is the kind of work that keeps you fed, the kind of work you do in consumption, the reproductive work, a repetitive, cyclical reproduction; work here is the kind of production you do of objects that may outlast you; action arendt sees as politics (but to horsemouth is seems it could just as well be art). and these are in a kind of ascending order (would be horsemouth's limited reading).

arendt has a major bugbear with things proceeding automatically and predictably, she doesn't want human society to be a calculable machine, she resists its reduction to this. 

just as she did with labour/ work / action in the human condition, she separates out power/ force / authority / violence and (as with labour/ work/ action)  it is important that they are kept separate and do not collapse into each other. if power is just violence if it does just grow out of the barrel of a gun then what is the use of any politics,, but if politics is a separate realm then action in that realm can have an effect.  

horsemouth is relying on runciman's reading here and may well have to get his own copy. 

yesterday faced by the sheer house-brick bulk of the origins of totalitarianism (and not possessing a copy of the human condition) horsemouth took advantage of his down time from the internet to depart into the fields with hannah arendt's on violence (a slim volume). he's about half way through he will attempt to finish it off and make some notes on it (and then return to origins as it were). 

today no work and tomorrow no work. 

today the beginnings of the paris commune (to be declared tomorrow). 

horsemouth the 'strangely soothing' (who will save the world?)

or so a friend has said. it may have been the mention of the equinox (saturday 20th 9.37 am) or it may have been hannah arendt's history-wide schema.

friends have been out samba drumming and protesting ahead of priti patel's 10 for 2 anti-protest law ten years inside 2 teach you not to protest. now horsemouth thinks protest is pretty essential to the smooth functioning of the state (because the alternative is insurrection, terrorism and sabotage). this is why it is a good idea to let the people protest. you know what's going to happen priti. some blameless do-gooders will protest they'll be charged with protesting under your 10 for 2 law, a judge will free them driving a coach and horses through your carefully drafted bill and holing it below the waterline. 

after this equivocal reading the cops and CPS will leave it rot on the statute book unused. 

to work these kind of neo-fascist power grabs need an event (a 9/11 say) and then you can get away with anything you don't even need to pass any laws. whether the great british public will approve of your legislation to deal with the likes of son of swampy horsemouth doubts. doubtless the daily torygraph  will commend you for your enthusiasm. 

you're not the boss of them priti, they're the boss of you. 

actually, thinking about it, with the kind of impoverishment likely to result from covid a few years down the line, a law banning protests might be a useful thing to have. horsemouth tends to think we are entering a re-run of the 80ies (which was itself haunted by the 70ies) by thatcher's children who want to stage a re-enactment. sorry that's not very soothing

horsemouth was once (in the 80ies) denounced for being on an ego-trip of being a revolutionary. he regrets he has to admit that his critic was entirely correct (as subsequent events proved). horsemouth blundered about like an idiot and it really was a miracle he didn't end up in jail or with a criminal record (for this he has to thank various lefty lawyers). maybe he did some good or maybe he was totally ineffectual if not actually harmful (he really can't tell). horsemouth retired and hardly ever wanders out on marches and pickets and such things.

he thinks they are important because working, paying your taxes and voting once every five years is not enough.  

nonetheless there's nothing like a bit of heavy handed policing for turning a drama into a crisis.

because of his hannah arendt musings he has discovered sandburg 'perhaps the first american urban folk singer' and poet, author of I Am the People, the Mob.

this afternoon work. 

 

we are nearly at the equinox (the people, the mob and the mass)

yesterday horsemouth filled out his pages of the census.  they all did. for once the entire house was gathered in the kitchen and there were nibbles. 

they asked questions about his health and employment, gender and passport ownership. 

horsemouth has at last been making progress with his reading of hannah arendt's the origins of totalitarianism (note that there is more than one origin). he has made this progress by focusing on the problematic of the mob - what is it? and where does it come from? pursuing this through the index. he finds counterpoised to it the people, somewhat thinly theorised. 

'the people is not god' remarks a disillusioned clemenceau (or perhaps it is hannah arendt who says this). for the people (who 'always fight for true representation' - hannah again) can become split into two contesting mobs.

the mob is 'the caricature of the people', it 'hates society from which it is excluded', it is 'a group in which the residue of all classes are represented', 'excluded from society and political representation the mob turns of necessity to extra parliamentary actions', fond of plebiscites, produced in a series of great public frauds. for them the ruling class fells parental recognition, admiration and fear. 

'the rise of the mob out of the capitalist organisation' is noted by the philosophers of the decline school (spengler et al.) but they are wrong, this is not the working class (for it is the residue of all classes). the alliance between capital and the mob is the root of imperialism and racism , the imperialist project the solution to the problem of the mobs tearing society apart. 

but this is not enough to form totalitarian societies further shock therapy must be conducted on society to atomise the people still further, to produce people who are only themselves, whose only way forward lies with the party. this produces the masses. 

so where are we in all this with our MAGAs and our brexits and our 5 stars?

are the people storming the capitol a mob or a mass? has anyone really been individuated into such isolation?  but are these 18th/19th century mobs? curiously still walking around in the 21st century. or modern 20th century masses?  

will we stay divided by brexit? or will we be reunited by coronavirus? 

arendt (a philosopher of order) sees no virtue in these mobs and masses, but only in the originary undivided people. (or so it seems to horsemouth on the basis of his limited reading).  there's a david runciman podcast about her - horsemouth will give it a go. 

yesterday howard came round to visit. he doesn't have flu after all (and he doesn't have covid). they sat drinking tea on the front steps (and even played a little guitar). 

in which horsemouth asserts control over that which he controls

one of the things horsemouth did when he returned was play musicians of bremen volume 4 which he hasn't listened to now for a number of months.  amárach stands out as particularly strong, it may be the best thing they've ever done. 

howard is ill (he has the flu) so no zoom beers to round out the week.

lots of walking yesterday. the sun was shining (the weather was sweet). 

he went out on a walk up to the chemist where his jab will be and then back down through the marshes. (he should have timed it really). he is still not full of the joys (but anyway). a friend recommended taking his shoes and socks off and standing on some real earth and grass. grounding she said. he might just do it. 

later he went out walking and there was a hail storm. 

he recognises he is disappointed with the grittiness of his existence in the seaside towns.  it is a sad place at the moment. it is, as his mum would say, a bit basic. he could, it turns out, have returned a week later to no ill effect (he would thus have escaped needing to have even an opinion of recent events by not being around for them. or maybe they would only have commenced once he returned in any event). 

because he was up early the day seemed interminable. in the end he put on a jumper, got a glass of ricard and went to bed early. he did do some reading on the dreyfus affair, the chapter of hannah arendt's the origins of totalitarianism; - antisemitism IV: the people and the mob a present from his brother and his wife (thank you). 

now horsemouth knows that, in addition to various art students, various institute of ideas types have been reading this of late. this is a bit interesting seeing as they were noted brexit supporters and the book has  harsh things to say about the mob and plebiscites and is thus  a difficult book to take as your guide to these dark times if you have supported people in their plebiscite decision. and yet this is how this penguin classics edition (the attack of the killer seagulls edition) encourages people to read it.  

to horsemouth we have witnessed a number of popular (and populist) rebellions against the neo-liberal globalised society by the excluded (or more patronisingly 'the left behind'), MAGA, brexit, various national movements that dissent from the EU consensus. horsemouth does not think any of these movements will take people where they really want to go (or indeed anywhere progressive) but it cannot be argued that they aren't real. 

still now he has his morning coffee and the sun is coming in the window (mildly).  this evening filling in the census (and a phonecall from his mother). in the week 6 hours of online work (broadband permitting) and 3 hours of face to face work (visor) with 4 hours of travel on public transport (facemask on). at the weekend the equinox and the week after a meeting of the communal endeavour, horsemouth gets jabbed (for the first time YAY) and he changes electricity and gas suppliers. 

the changing leccy and gas suppliers is really just a means of redeploying excess energy and of signalling an investment in the house. (horsemouth asserts control over that which he controls). it may necessitate a one off payment to the previous supplier to pay for the excess winter usage. 

horsemouth triumphant (in inevitable defeat)

horsemouth is triumphant (in inevitable defeat). again. 

his tactical position was not strong. he is the boss of the wrong commodity.  

ah well. horsemouth often goes down to defeat.  he is used to it. he can see its advantages. 

horsemouth is feeling much better (thanks for asking). rage has left him. defeat has lifted the burden of struggle off his shoulders. everything is for a time. everything is a voluntary association. everything (it turns out) was ok all along. 

there may be a negotiation (perhaps not a full negotiation, horsemouth is in defeat remember). horsemouth has registered his displeasure. it may be futile, it may be efficacious, time will tell. 

frankly horsemouth is sick of struggle (it all takes so much effort). and he is sick of defeat (it is too frequent). this is the nature of arguments over rights and wrongs conducted with limited resources.  

horsemouth likes to give the impression that he is a calm, industrious, helpful mule but nothing could be further from the truth, he is a difficult beast full of angers and slights. he is trying to get wiser as he gets older (but he suspects he is just getting less interested). 

yesterday (while stomping along in a furious rage on his daily walk) horsemouth slipped over and fell in the mud (he banged his head also). he really does begin to wonder if he does not (in fact) have lockjaw such are the unreasonable nature of his rages. but then they are structured by reason. 

another friend has left london. horsemouth is sad.  the world moves on, the changes brought about by the pandemic begin to be felt. 

horsemouth should really undertake a 'digital detox', he likes the entertainment and he likes the 'likes' (he likes the applause when he can get it)  but it really doesn't go deep enough for him. in any event there is an opportunity next week when a flatmate has lots of online work to do, horsemouth will try to take it and try and do some reading instead (he has been lamentable in his reading of late). 

there's a lot of sitting around looking at the box going 'entertain me then'. 

he enjoys the writing. he loves the opportunity to make sense. but soon enough it is over, the 'writing for the desk drawer'  that people used to do no longer makes the sense it did. not only does everyone have a novel inside them, everyone is their own novelist, everyone is a novel

he should play more guitar (after all he has rather a lot of guitars and they take up rather a lot of room). and he should sing more (he is lamentably out of practice).

next week about 6 hours of online work (broadband permitting) and 3 hours of face to face work (well with visors and such like). this 3 hours will require something like 4 hours of travel (and an early start similar to today's). soon enough it is all over and horsemouth will collapse into boredom (without the option of travel). 

hopefully there will be furlough. horsemouth is doing well out of the apocalypse (but it is starting to drag). 

 

horsemouth and the war over space

look what just popped up! karen dalton from a 1971 tour with santana. horsemouth never knew this existed. the acoustic guitarist is too quiet but they do good tight versions of something's on your mind, blues on the ceiling, are you leaving for the country, and one night of love. 

well horsemouth is back in the great wen after very nearly a quarter of the year away. did you miss him? probably not (you weren't going out very much horsemouth understands). the bin men are just visiting (cheers dudes).

he returns to the books he was reading before he went away scattered about the place (the flux wedding - 28th feb is gone). he returns to three CDs of zither music (and their associated packaging, two postcards and, in one case a booklet) from robert lawson in far off rio gordo (reflexivity, cashmere doesn't follow you to malaysia, the nameless wave). it's all great stuff - horsemouth recommends it to you. he's made a start on reflexivity. 

horsemouth returns to the war over space (he's just been skirmishing with sten over it). he returns to an uncompleted redecoration of the upstairs living room (in fact he returns to the living room floor having been made unuseable by sten dumping his tools from a jobsite there). sten's plan is to now sort the tools out on the kitchen floor, which is, as he points out without irony, the only free space left in the house.

once again it is the game of the 8 squares and the 9 spaces.  

now everybody in the house has a hoarding issue but daryll, ian and horsemouth are assiduous about keeping it in their own rooms. 

similarly the front garden. (now this was not as bad as horsemouth expected it to be). 

when he returned home horsemouth had a minor radge. he did the undone washing up. he mopped the kitchen floor. most importantly he took out the recycling and the bag of rotting organic waste left on the countertop, he reduced the number of bins out front from 4 to 2 (apparently there is a shortage of bins), he's just contemplating taking it down to one. 

horsemouth is adopting the strategy of being needlessly obstructive (this creates tactical space so he can appear generous and helpful  should he actually agree to something). in a way preventing the living room from being used suits him fine (it means there aren't people clumping about above his head) nonetheless he retains the moral belief that it should be returned to being available for the use of all the people in the house. 

'what I didn't reckon on was that I would bring some of that past self back into the present'

rose simpson (now an old lady) invites us to remember her time in the incredible string band  and gives herself permission to remember it too. who would have guessed it, the 60ies wasn't reliably wonderful (rows with the other girl in the band, girlfriends in tears etc.) and yet it was some kind of wonderful, 'we wanted to change the world'. 

there are the props too. recovered from other family members. a moroccan drum that was a bathroom ornament, the recorder that was played at woodstock, the violin, the gibson guitar.

she attributes it all to being in the rio cinema in hackney in 2018 and all the people wanting to hear about it. it was all repressed. she left as the band moved solidly and methodically into scientology, she didn't fancy it much. 

it all starts with mountaineering. later we are in the recording studio. perhaps a book on joe boyd's production company witchseason. 

horsemouth plots his return to the great wen. he could (in theory) stretch it out here for another week  (but he's getting angsty). it will avail him naught to be back (well at least for the first few weeks). while his life is there it is difficult to do much about that life (or with that life) at the moment. 

it is the longest he has been away (continuously) in years. 

horsemouth has been remembering triple negative. he wonders when it will be possible (or indeed desirable) to see bands again. 

Penultimate Press · Triple Negative - Bad Grace

the second wave of the giant horsemouth

 it will happen. never fear.

yesterday the sun shone. horsemouth walked on the common and then sat outside and read (the newspaper).  he brought the book down but it didn't happen. he couldn't settle. he was quite restless. his feet kept walking him about the place. 

he worked (briefly) in the afternoon. then went for a walk on the common. and then had a beer and settled down to watch zatoichi. (his feet keep walking him about the place). later he watched some crime drama with his parents and the dog. (he thought he should include that heart warming detail for people separated from their parents and their parents' dogs).

today is rainy and grey. later a journey to get chickens. and then?

well he has to get back to the wen at some point to enable him to work face to face on the 18th. and sooner is better really. there's also his first jab on the 24th. 

he's been hiding out at his parents for the best part of a quarter of the year (nearly) 

through as much of the second wave as he could manage. what is the future of the city? who knows. it's an interesting moment of change. all is mutability and flux. 'nought may endure but mutability' but mutability has periods (and then it's all stasis for so long you think change can never come). the face of the old politics is beginning to peak through events (god isn't it ugly). the best the state can do for you? a one percent payrise. think about that. what does it mean for the rest of us. 

anyway horsemouth is old so it's not really his problem. (or so he tells himself). 

horsemouth is feeling a bit flat-ish and anxious. the time has come to resume his life (such as it is). but what if it continues to be as blocked and disconnected as previously. neither here nor there has the thing (that's its problem). 

 

two stories in synopsis

on this day a year ago horsemouth was waking up to the fact that a quarter of italy had just gone into lockdown. up to this point he had been dimly aware of the coronavirus, but that bit of news entirely succeeded in focusing his thoughts. to his credit historical horsemouth seems to have caught on pretty fast. he thought we were 'a couple of weeks' behind italy (and so it turned out to be). 

an artist (ben eastham) is stuck in a flat in an athens in lockdown (says his article in art review). there are demonstrations. riot police try to storm the university nearby. he cannot understand what is going on because he does not speak the language. he focuses his attention on the picture on the wall of the spare bedroom he is living in. (it is a remake (of sorts) of hockney's a bigger splash). 

he has only his summer clothes.

down from the picture (in the photo of the spare bedroom), a book. j.g. ballard's myths of the near future (possible first edition bill botten cover). 

horsemouth blew up the photo in the browser, thought he could read j.g. ballard and then googled j.g. ballard book covers until he found it. then he looked it up on wikipedia. he likes snooping around other people's bookshelves.

 

two stories (in synopsis) stand out. (horsemouth quotes)

'1. "Having a Wonderful Time" - Written in the form of postcards, the story chronicles a young couple who vacation on the Canary Islands, but their flight home is repeatedly cancelled until it becomes apparent that they—along with thousands of other families vacationing—will never return home, and have been forever exiled.

2. "The Intensive Care Unit" - The story takes place within a society in which everyone is isolated, living alone and communicating (much like webcams) through their TVs. A young family tries to kill each other after they decide to meet in person.'

good old j.g. taking the contrary position on human sociability. 

ben eastham's position - well that's very ballardian. (see story 1) presumably at some point the greek authorities will deport him. story 2 - well this is our condition. we are all promised that we are going to meet up and we are told it will be wonderful. 

allegedly we are moving towards the out door of the crisis, a sunny upland of spending and leisure awaits. but wait, haven't we been here before, ah yes but it will be  all different this time now that we have the vaccine. 

ah the vaccine that is proof against all new variants as they appear? 

er. well. no. 

that track and trace that will definitely work to catch outbreaks early on?

er. well. no.

horsemouth hopes to get vaccinated. he will then return to being pretty fucking careful. he doesn't think much of an escape over the summer is possible (but then he's already had a quarter of the year off at his folks). 

meghan and harry 

here, once again, horsemouth  is ducking his responsibilities when the conversation comes up. history (the psychodrama) is repeating. really horsemouth does not care about the rich or the royals. he views it as the possibility of change. 

today some work. (but first a morning off). 

the death and disembowelment of the new age (by zatoichi the blind swordsman)

new age is certainly a contested term (if not always a term of abuse and a slur). 

however if you include windham hill as descendants of fahey, then you have to admit that he helped kick off the new age. after all ackerman tried to study with robbie basho. fahey's feeling about this can probably best be deduced from the title of a later track of his  the death and disembowelment of the new age.

certainly later (self-released) basho falls into this category (but strangely).

the 'respectable' end of the genre is ambient but anything designed for meditation with dolphin and whale noises on it is probably out. (though when horsemouth was working supporting a massage therapist about 10 years ago they still had cassettes of it). 

birdsong is the modern equivalent of this marked by recent events. shocked by the collapse of the categories of work and social life many people took a walk, at some point they would return from shock to consciousness and hear the singing of birds. 

music often moves the spirit (but often it moves the spirit in a lustful desiring way). horsemouth notes that he has less interest in  this and more interested in numinously spiritual effects. 

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it is 150 years since the paris commune. we are moving into its time. on the 17th and 18th the new french government (installed after the defeat of the french  forces and the siege of paris in the franco-prussian war - ably described by zola in le debacle) will attempt to seize the cannons of the working class militias of paris from the parks where they were stored thus triggering the commune. 

meanwhile zatoichi defends the peasants from the exploitative and corrupt ruling class (despite his position in feudal society as yakuza or gangster). but it doesn't do him any good, he ends up walking down the road alone at the end. 

today work. tomorrow work. wednesday probably chickens. soon back to the wen. 

today is back to work day for the education sector. back to normal day. university courses with a practical content may re-open also. horsemouth isn't a fan. he thinks we should all be staying home (as much as possible). 

horsemouth hears the waterfall

yesterday five years ago. a compilation of horsemouth's interests and influences on mixcloud (photo taken by john clarkson, mix assembled by howard).

the usual suspects: judee sill, alice coltrane, GZA, schubert, art ensemble of chicago, willie nelson, gene clarke,  milton nascimento, stella chiweshe, santana, nico.

saturday: in the morning horsemouth went for a walk on the common. in the afternoon he was bored and boring so he started watching some more zatoichi movies, he's on number 5 he thinks. we are just out of the black and white years and into the colour years (but not into the arterial spray and lots of blood years). 

saturday is a difficult day (there is no one o clock news or work to break up the boredom).

in a normal year horsemouth is sunk beneath taxation. he is fortunate that he can live on so little that he doesn't have to work very much at all. the keeping the tax thresholds at their current low level (£12.5k) has little effect on him because he doesn't earn as much as that in an average year. he guesses this will be true on 5 years time as well. however in general what this means is that in future more poor people will have money taken out of their pockets to fund the state's debt (and will thus go to the bankers and the rich)  and  that this money they then won't have to buy the things they need and want from the businesses round them (causing a drag on the economic recovery, employment etc.)

this year (for horsemouth) furlough will help (like it helped last year) hopefully. horsemouth seems to be getting some already due to the off-on nature of the pay cycle and the paucity of hours he works (and hopefully this will run out over into the summer holidays).

then what? horsemouth does not know. really he is just rolling the rock in the direction of retirement/pension  

of course they get 20% of whatever he buys by VAT but that's not much more than food (and in a normal year second hand books). 

a change is coming. the patterns of consumption and housing and earning have been stable for a long time and  things are currently held in suspended animation but soon enough a cold wind will blow (a doubly cold wind brexit and covid) and then who knows. 

the political situation must not be allowed to return to normal (if it returns to normal we lose). 

horsemouth hopes he has enough saved to keep out of it. 

stop press: horsemouth has got his jabs booked (back in the wen). the first is after he returns to face to face work  but booking  the jab slightly further away physically bumped it a week closer. this only means he has to travel back and travel to and from teh work booking without catching anything and dying. ok wish him luck he would like to get out of this unscathed. 

 

'RoyalMail: Your parcel has a £1.99 unpaid shipping fee, to pay this now visit: *www.royal-maildeliver.com* or your parcel will be returned to sender.'

 so, your starter for ten audience. is this a 'genuine' demand for two quid or a scam? please vote below. 

horsemouth would have expected some kind of code number which ended up identifying you, your house etc. . not a fill in the form, name, address, date of birth, (hell why not ask for my NI number while you are at it). 

it could be genuine. if it is a scam they've copied the entire of the royal mail website (including the welsh bits). 

horsemouth has instructed his housemates to pay if anyone appears with a parcel (after all it could be a CD of robert lawson's excellent zither music). 

here we go. the return to the frankly archaic 'suspicious parcel from abroad for a 'mr. foreigner-lover' of unpatriotic street, traitor land' . sign this, and this, and the sex offender's register and...

if someone shows up at his door with a CD then he'll pay. (OK he's asked his housemates to pay). 

horsemouth assumes this is what it is like getting food into northern ireland. 

the irony (of course) is that, if it is a CD, the CD is a freebie (a gift from a fellow musician) but horsemouth has no idea how you would go about proving this or even arguing it or even if it makes any difference to the state's strategy of discouraging contact. 

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horsemouth supposes that in future he will have to fly to the EU and post off his CDs from there (or vice versa) and wow the wonders of modern technology. what it is to live in a global economy eh? you didn't realise there was something worse than globalisation? Or he'll have to arrange some kind of digital download thing for people. (should be possible).

of course at some point some kind of lend lease might be established where and underground network of musician/enthusiasts within and without the EU agrees to hold stocks of the others musical productions and post them off to locations within their own block. 

last night a busy social whirl - first zoom beers with howard (after which horsemouth had a headache) and then mike from sunny texas messaged him. horsemouth proposed lady snowblood (which howard said he'd watch - late night text review 'this is a heavy movie'). horsemouth himself watched  zatoichi monogatari (which he thinks is the second in the series - in black and white (and before arterial spray came to be a fixture). horsemouth genuinely can't remember how the topic got onto samurai movies. (ok now he remembers - howard had been talking about kurosawa after they'd discussed rondo hatton). 

it looks like horsemouth is coming back to the wen because he has work - he has a face to face booking on the 18th. he will have to check the possible travel arrangements. 

he will have been away for about a quarter of the year.  

this is ok. it's nice to spend time with his parents and the dog and to wander round the countryside. there are (of course) reasons why horsemouth would wish to be back in the great wen, his life is there, it is just that at the minute there is not much more he can do in the seaside towns that out here (that is one of the discoveries of the pandemic).

BANDCAMP FRIDAY - now open your wallet and repeat after me 'help yourself'

today is bandcamp friday when in exchange for advertising bandcamp (and to a lesser extent musicians of bremen's musical product hosted on it) horsemouth and howard receive marginally more money from each sale. 

so please put a penny in the old man's hat. (this would be the equivalent of watching the old man's youtube video a hundred times). 

the actual headline rate is pretty good and (like most musicians horsemouth has ever discussed this with) musicians are actually pretty impressed with the bandcamp set up and offer. it just needs tyou the consumer to actually buy their music (apologies if you have already). they like soundcloud too, and mixcloud and horsemouth makes great use of video sharing platforms such as youtube and daily motion. but here we are heading in to rates of remuneration so bad it doesn't bear thinking about. 

howard argues they need to be on tiktok (is that the correct spelling?).

of course if they wanted to make money they should go busking. but making money isn't their goal really. they just want to be sure t hat people are hearing their music. 

mixmaster mike posted a picture. 

'this is the prestigious gold DMC world DJ championships world championship mixer trophy..'

mixmaster mike (of the invisibl skratch piklz) wins this competition, receives their golden trophy mixer and then has to use it for years because he can't afford another mixer. 

'I used it and beat it to shreds because I was broke and couldn’t afford a mixer. I was a broke world DJ champion. (I) had to turn that situation around.'

mixer/ DJ technology has changed out of all recognition and made it possible to do impossible things. DJ rob swift said the following; 

'it’s not lost on me that the X-Ecutioners performance accompanying this caption took place just before the turn of the 21st century. before smartphones and social media. in advance of the technology that affords us all the DJ apps, turntables without tone arms and tricked out mixers that make the impossible possible. the 4 of us put a big fat period at the end of turntablism's golden era on this stage, on that night. fuck, you might as well file this post under shit you will never see again at a DJ battle.'

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last night horsemouth watched two episodes of early 70ies french supernatural detective series la brigade des maléfices. technology played a strange part. in the first episode the fairies of a lake in a park are abducting men - they cannot be seen or heard (normally) but they can be recorded on film, in movies, or on magnetic tape. 

similarly in the second episode a devil type character is selling TVs to the newly wed, the TVs are fitted with a camera (like gogglebox) so that the audience can be observed and in the studios a drama is specifically performed to make the young husbands jealous (resulting in murder). (of course this parallels the audience research work that later went on to become gogglebox). 

he watched a little of les rois maudits. arguably the books were a precursor to game of thrones (remember that?). 

now they tell him (he should have known that really)

so apparently it's gweniver rather than gwenifer. now they tell him. he should have known that really. (the single 'f' in welsh)

gwenifer raymond on an internet radio show.

the jackson c.frank days end. here's something from later on with his 'older' voice. 

last night horsemouth watched terror  the latest bbc classic serial. it's about the franklin expedition. this horsemouth first heard about in the version of lord franklin played by pentangle. (spoiler alert) it was the expedition to find a north west passage over canada to alaska and the northern pacific from the atlantic. it  went badly wrong and everybody died. of course soon (with global warming and modern icebreaker technology) such a route will be possible.

there's something of a realignment going on within the musical commodity as streaming sites alter the rates they pay and capitalists buy up the songbooks of famous songwriters.  

friday is bandcamp friday again. horsemouth urges you all to buy something (the better to feed the starving artists). if you could see your way to throwing a few sheckels horsemouth and howard's way that would be grand. 

today a grey day and a walk on the common. tomorrow bandcamp friday and (actual paid) work. saturday the anniversary of one of horsemouth's mixes for howard's golden glow show - well horsemouth selected the tunes and howard did the mixing - it was pleasant to listen to it again (horsemouth had forgotten  about it). 

'when the light left them' (dark matter)

some interesting footage has emerged of vashti bunyan recording from the 60ies. you can see her singing but you can't hear her. it's kind of like that art project from a few years ago where the guy produced a film of all the motion by the players of the french football team off the ball (a football match where you only very seldom get to see the ball, one that resembles your actual experience of the game). normally the work that goes into making a recording is hidden (because it is in fact fatally dull and antithetical to the kind of seamless pleasure you would wish the listener to have).  

horsemouth had the title to this blogpost first. it was from an interview with an astrophysicist. she was saying we can only see these galaxies as they were  'when the light left them' we can't see them as they are now. and there is a second reason for this. between us and them is dark matter (better named transparent matter) that like a pane of glass or a glass of water refracts the light. what we see out in space is seen through gravitational lenses.

we see vashti as she was when she was recording back in the 60ies. we see the spaces and the cups of tea.

for the universe to behave as it does (given the laws we think it obeys) there must be a certain amount of dark matter in it. the astrophysicist had been estimating the amount of visible matter in the universe and thus the amount of invisible 'dark' matter using statistical analysis methods.  there is also the 'dark energy' that is causing the universe to fly apart (but that's a story for another day). 

at the end of the large great project (and with her daughter going off to school) the physicist decided to change direction getting into estimating the effects of climate change mitigation strategies (again by means of statistical analysis). she estimated that (after fossil fuels) the next biggest contributor to global carbon (dioxide) is the food industry and that it's emission could be reduced by a half (or was it a quarter) if we went vegan (the further advantage was that humanity would be able to produce enough food to feed itself on a quarter of the land it currently uses, thus allowing for significant re-wilding).

now horsemouth is a lazy vegetarian. as you know he will gladly eat cheese and eggs if they are offered) but he's been moving back in the direction of less dairy for a while. he suspects that stinky (and suspiciously soft) foreign cheeses are going to get more expensive after brexit. eggs he never buys. yoghurt he could probably eat less of, he's been experimenting with museli in water for a while. 

he hasn't eaten meat (baring a mistake in portugal in the 90ies) since 1984 (or thereabouts) and similarly for fish (baring a few minor lapses),

here it is a misty morning and horsemouth doesn't have to work. 

 

'the arcade's penny claw hanging empty'

horsemouth is suffering from memory loss. he can't remember the thing he needs to remember in order to get started. 

no wait a second he's remembered where he wrote it down.

today and tomorrow are the jackson c. frank days 

born 2nd march, dead 3rd march. sort of like solomon grundy (the man whose life covers the days of the week) but quicker. he managed to pack a lot of misery into this time. the songs are consistently amazing. paul simon produces his first album (and goes back to america with jackson's tune blues run the game in his repertoire). 

following on from solomon grundy down the track of songs about the days of the week led horsemouth to dashing away with the smoothing iron (as covered by edward the II and the red hot polkas) and thence to flanders and swann's the gasman cometh (an ongoing tale of construction mishaps involving all the trades and set over the course of a week). 

'well it all makes work for the working man to do' 

it's the days of the week that is the unifying factor here. horsemouth works today and he works friday. the weather has been warming up this will permit him to sit outside and read. he needs to make progress with his reading, he's read very little (in the way of books) for months. 

up until yesterday over 400 views on the fall of the house of fitzgerald,  thanks to all the people who have watched it and thanks to all the musicians involved. two stills from the filming of it taken by catastro/fille have been entered in the women's history month photo competition, an exhibition by women photographers celebrating women’s lives with portraits.

after some initial teething troubles horesemouth's working from home gig is all going very smoothly. he's making pretty much what he was before and  even saving money (though the pubs and second hand bookshops being closed may have something to do with that). he's not missing the commute, the tesco sandwiches and the coffees out. but a) it's only a third of the workforce (not that you'd know that from the newspapers) b) some people don't have it as easy and their work takes a lot longer from home c) while he generally agrees with the point about this forces premises costs out from the employer to the employee it also royally fucks lots of commercial property companies (so there is an upside). 

last night (having worked and walked) horsemouth watched some of les compagnons de baal a 1968 french tv series featuring a satanic conspiracy. it features jacques champreux (later to crop up in georges franju's things). horsemouth particularly enjoyed episode 5 with scenes set at the church of cosmochronos near the dog's cemetery in asniers. horsemouth remembered that the dog's cemetery featured in a performance by charlemaigne palestine that he once witnessed. 

the decameron of morel

it was july1929 at the height of the coronavirus epidemic that had decimated humanity following the wars, the revolutions and the spanish flu of the first quarter of the 20th century. the inventor morel decided to retreat with a group of his friends to a remote island, and to a museum he had had built there, to sit out the conflagration. his initial plan had been to retire there with his love faustine but she had been unwilling to come without her friends. there they would dance, talk, and tell each other tales until the crisis was over. 

but secretly morel had a plan to record everyone's actions over the first week of the retreat (using  technology he had recently perfected) and then (in a further extension of that technology) repeat that week as if on a loop forever. 

it was 50 years later when a solitary survivor stumbled upon the recordings still repeating themselves over and over...

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horsemouth has made a conflation of  adolfo bioy casares the invention of morel  with boccaccio's il decameron (he thinks it suits the times). there's a comparison to be made with last year at marienbad  (or so the critics think - horsemouth will have to watch for himself) but mostly horsemouth would compare it to groundhog day. 

there are many time recycled movies (as horsemouth's friend ben would point out). 

how did horsemouth find it? 

well someone (OubaelPhoumet) on youtube had posted up a clip from the movie soundtracked by  robbie basho playing bardo blues but hadn't identified it. he had also posted up mountain man's farewell by basho over a clip from il grande silenzio. (all excellent choices dude) 

suddenly, while watching it, noticing in particular the heroine's indifference when the hero speaks to her, horsemouth realised what he was watching. the vain attempts of the living to speak to the recorded - the result is indifference. 

horsemouth had read the book many years ago and was aware that a film had been made of it. he researched some more and came across a french tv version of the same tale (set in january).

horsemouth will leave you with basho playing piano and singing mehera.

today horsemouth works (and then he will go for a walk).