Monday 21 June 2021

-- - SUMMER SOLSTICE 2021 - --

in today's good news triple negative have released more material on soundcloud. 

so the sun has risen. outside it is a grey and cold morning (like autumn remarks sten as they shuffle round the coffee pot). it is the summer solstice and the sun has risen and will set in its most northerly positions on the skyline. soon it will sink back down southwards and ascend lower in the skies, it will hide behind the houses, the days will become shorter and cold winter will come upon us.

last night horsemouth watched the sun set over stonehenge courtesy of english heritage's web cam feed. when horsemouth was a filthy hippie they were the villains of the piece.  the sun set behind the clouds and rose behind the clouds. 

but winter will not come for a while yet. we are still in the bright quarter of the year.

horsemouth's father (horsemouth's mother remarks) loves the sun and she remarks that horsemouth is similar. 

horsemouth is preparing to go play a gig (enza has wished him luck). he should check the spare guitar strings situation/ decide if he can get away with only taking one guitar. 

horsemouth's normal strategy is to take two guitars - one tuned standard (EADGBE) and one tuned nashville (DADDAD), this enables him to swap easily (and without onstage retuning) between the different sides of his repertoire. 

he will be relying heavily on volume three with just a handful of fragments from volume four. today is the third anniversary of the release of volume three the most horsemouthish of the albums, a response to volume two the most howardish of the albums. 

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‘it feels as if those days here in capri and positano were yesterday... and in the meantime one has grown old without knowing how this happened.’

late on in his life adorno sends a postcard to kracauer. people are saying when adorno was young they were lovers. (it had never occurred to horsemouth that adorno had a sexuality, later he had a wife, certainly, but she mainly seems to have been there to transcribe his debates with horkheimer). there was (of course) a falling out and a cooling off. 

the charge is that adorno destructively edited kracauer's work and that in order to get out of nazi'fying europe kracauer had to suck it up and like it . but unlike benjamin kracauer does escape and lives a long life in america, he writes on film, he gets to open up some clear water and independence from the frankfurt school. kracauer's charge against adorno is that he can get the dialectic to do whatever he wants - the horror of the world is controlled, tamed, a position of authority established. 

elsewhere (in the NLR rather than the LRB) fernando pessoa has his politics examined. it is a much murkier journey than horsemouth would have expected. it's like there is a particular malaise in poetry given its position in culture that leads it, as high culture, into an accommodation with  the rising authoritarian governments (look at ezra pound). 

horsemouth is grey-haired, balding for certain (if not technically bald) and now he's getting twinges of arthritis in his fingers (this will probably necessitate him changing how he plays guitar). 

it's been a funny old year (to put it mildly). 

this week, well the gig yes, but also, this evening, a meeting of the communal endeavour online. tomorrow the anniversary of the great myspace blog dieback, friday films in hereford with richard wild hare/ one of the last ever paydays. 


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