journey in satchidananda day (the animals)

Journey in Satchidananda - Alice Coltrane from Sadhu on Vimeo.

good morning. good morning. and it's a monday morning too (start of the week). 

today is journey in satchidananda day (when the vast majority of journey in satchidananda was recorded up in the coltrane family home in the dix hills). we are talking about the cecil mcbee, tulsi, pharoah sanders, rashied ali and majid shabazz tracks on the album (everything except isis and osiris). 

now horsemouth spends a lot of time singing the praises of huntington ashram monastery (ron carter bass lines) but really satchidananda is the perfect alice coltrane jazz album. there is also the ashram religious music by her (which is also amazing and may indeed be even more amazing). 

last night a telephone call with his mum (and then a horror movie). 

horsemouth has nearly finished j.m.coetzee's elizabeth costello - which is once again a novel about the animals as horsemouth would once have put it, a novel that is concerned with animal rights. think of coetzee's disgrace - disgraced lecturer moves back into the countryside of the new south africa but this is almost too big an issue for the central character. what he ends up doing is volunteering helping at an animal centre euthanising and burying stray dogs. coetzee has written non-fiction about the animals and in  elizabeth costello he has his ageing female author beset by the concerns of famous authors (jet lag, representation, the role of the novel, conference speeches etc.) but also by animal rights. 

to be honest never thinks about the animals these days - he's a vegetarian (and has been for 30+  years), he's even had spates of veganism, the animals is no longer the overarching moral necessity that it was for him when he was  younger. (of course if you can do it, not eat animals horsemouth means, then do it) the whole thing seems to have been absorbed without remainder into consumer capitalism. 

last week the past came close: first some random plainclothes cop identifying him as a squatter, then a friend from long ago posting a photo of horsemouth from back in those days. this makes horsemouth paranoid and nervous - he has no desire to return to those bad old days. the whole thing was heavily infiltrated by police spies, people were getting arrested and jailed left right and centre. to horsemouth this seemed like vast overkill, he presumes the police spies were getting promotions out of talking up the threat that these vegetarian children (mostly young girls in their late teens, early twenties) posed. the result of the jailings was a self-fulfilling prophecy to make the whole scene darker. 

eventually, several years after horsemouth had left, barry horne died on hunger strike in a UK jail (it was just the anniversary). 

horsemouth was warned off. but he didn't take the advice and it nearly cost him dearly. like he said he's glad to grow older. he hopes it is all far enough in the past to be dead and buried. he was never anything big, he was frankly just a loudmouth and an idiot. 

most of elizabeth costello's concerns can be reflected in milan kundera's immortality (er. writing, posthumous fame, what is the novel for? etc.) everything except the animal rights. you'll pardon horsemouth is he stops with these topics (and a little non-specific workerism). 

and in other (safer) nostalgia it's the hawkbinge podcast covering the album hawklords 25 years on. this is peak hawkwind of their silver age, the bob calvert/ new wave years - bob is singing well and writing good lyrics (psi power, freefall, the only ones, only the dead dreams of the cold war kid) the new band (harvey bainbridge, martin griffin, steve swindells) are young and fresh and playing well. there is, of course, some egregious padding with remakes of earlier tracks (flying doctor, 25 years, even this is the age of the micro-man which is a lift from fable of a failed race on the previous album). 

the youngster calls it right on the podcast, singling out bob's lyrics for praise. next month PXR5 an album that was recorded previous to 25 years  and with the old line up of the band, a contractual obligations album. again it is a dog's dinner of good songs and lazy bullshit, and cutting across that  songs well recorded in the studio and songs recorded live. (but we will just have to wait a whole month for that). 

the hawkbinge podcast has moved horsemouth's thinking -  he now see's astounding sounds  as the first of the calvert era albums (it's position is distorted by the 'proper' musicians - paul rudolph, alan powell, simon house - on it who make of it a more musicianly album, he used to see it as an outlier), but it is also the last of the honking saxophone nik turner era albums. 

ok horsemouth must get on with the day.