6 months of confiding

true to his words to you horsemouth did not get up to much yesterday. 

he started watching five men of edo (1951) a samurai drama but gave up. 

the yakuza dramas are essentially picaresque action films, they are comedies - zatoichi  arrives in town, outsmarts the villainous locals, takes up with the virtuous locals and defends them from the evil local boss (much carnage). at the end he wanders off into the sunset (and they play his song again).

the samurai dramas are different. we are enmeshed in a world of obligation of feudal society. people's lives are destroyed by these obligations. they are tragedies. take 47 ronin as an example. the ronin will get their revenge for the fall of their master (but then everyone will have to commit suicide). 

horsemouth gave up on five men of edo and took up with the modern day kaza-hana (2000). drunken ruined salary man and suicidal sex worker go up north into hokkaido to die in the snow. by the end of it death has been averted and a stable nuclear family has been constructed. 

the couple are at a hostel in the north in the snow in the kitchen. a guitar is produced and a very bad entertainer starts to play (he's been coming there for 10 years and always does the same show). one part of the show is an impersonation of zatoichi (ending in an as if zatoichi style swordfight with the audience). 

he has a copy of david rattray's how I became one of the invisible (1992 semiotext(e)) round here somewhere. it is a clever admixture of carlos castaneda style shamanism with the desert fathers with beatnik travellers. apparently there is a new edition out with more of david's writing in it.  

it's six months since the release of confiding. horsemouth wishes he'd done a bit more work on it. it should probably have been on the album rather than out on its own. the slide guitars don't really work. they'd tried to record it several times and thrown the previous takes away and sadly those were the better takes in terms of horsemouth's playing. frustratingly several sections of it work really well. horsemouth should have been satisfied with his work on these. 

a courageous horsemouth would have just deleted the slide parts where there's singing. they aren't really doing anything, or doing it well enough to be worth keeping, they just dilute the listener's attention. that said he doesn't like the keyboard sounds either. 

today. more lounging around and reading and probably a walk. there's sunshine coming in the window (that gives him some hope).  for the last six months (since the death of the facebook blogging tool) he has been posting every day - his need to diarise has gotten the better of his need to publish.