'the present is dressed in the clothes of the irrevocable past'

huzzah! horsemouth has made it to friday. the sun is shining. and the binmen seem to have taken away all the rubbish.

horsemouth is up at a reasonable hour.   

a wowing, fluttering video of george winston from forty years ago has emerged. he's playing at a benefit for robbie basho. the nascent scene is up in palo alto. it will coalesce around william ackerman's recording studio and his label wyndham hill. 

and there's some interpretive dancing by natasha marks/ marx(?)  it might need ears better than horsemouth's to work her name out. anyway seems george has had several of his pieces used as the basis for dance pieces, notably “arboles” 1983 choreography: karen peterson,  costumes: delma iles and  “when once I sang” 1987 choreography: paul mockovak, , costumes jeff phipps.

in the basho fan forum there's a lot of anger against ackerman over his treatment of his former guitar teacher basho (mainly for deleting basho's albums on ackerman's wyndham hill label when basho could really have used the exposure and the money). you can really hear basho's influence on him in the opening passage of this improv with george winston. 

ultimately ackerman didn't like basho singing - it didn't fit in with the cool aesthetic of modern instrumental guitar music that he was building for his label. basho's music was exiled to a side label and then dropped.

and ultimately the whole wyndham hill thing is too tasteful for horsemouth. things are too nicely recorded and there's too much natural wood. (it's nice to see it looking and sounding just a little rough as here). there's no grit in it (and it is the grit that makes the pearl). 

horsemouth feels the same way about the jazz of ECM. 

when they came to rerelease basho's masterwork album for wyndham hill visions of the country the master tapes were long gone and it had to be transferred from vinyl. 

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

horsemouth is finally reading paolo virno (in a very battered and muddy copy he found in a book box). he has cleaned it up with tissue and hand sanitiser.

'the present is dressed in the clothes of the irrevocable past' 

paolo virno is discussing  déjà vu but this is preparation for discussing the end of history (in his book déjà vu and the end of history). virno sees it as 'the untramelled extension of memory's jurisdiction'  to the present, as we live we make memory also but the active doing part is what we experience, except when déjà vu  strikes, then we are trapped with an uncanny feeling that we are experiencing a memory (but not a memory from any specific point in the past but from a generalised past). 

we feel trapped in an 'irrevocable past'. 

horsemouth guesses (for he has not finished reading it yet) that this will be found analogous to the political moment of fukuyama's the end of history - when all the great battles have been fought and only an endless neo-liberal social democracy beckons us. this was a very popular idea immediately after the end of the cold war and it is a measure of the self-absorption of the west that nothing has yet killed it off. 

it is nice to find the key to such things in the workings of memory. in things that are close to hand. horsemouth continues to look at these things through an earlier refutation/ acceptance of fukuyama's proposal, derrida's spectres of marx (but then again he should go and read it). his eyes travel to the irrevocable (that can never be changed or 'called back'), to the uncanny. 

today maybe a walk. it is certainly looking beautiful outside.