juanita (I live in a car)

fahey week this year has passed its mid-point. 

we are easing down towards robbie basho day. 

horsemouth doesn't know what track to pick to best indicate it. youtube recommends film of fahey playing live, poor boys long way from home from hamburg 1978 followed by red pony from a tv special in 1969. judging by this footage the 70ies were clearly a hard decade for fahey, he's ageing fast, going bald by the minute. he seems to be wearing the same shirt (but it has been washed grey). we get on to whole albums (the dance of death and other plantation favourites, america, fare forward voyagers).  

horsemouth has picked womblife one of the later albums (1997). horsemouth has it somewhere courtesy of denise. it just shows fahey could have been doing that ry cooder soundtrack thing all along. 

the cover photo is fahey in his car (with all his possessions). 

it may be from when he was moving up to salem oregon or it may be from later (when he was homeless and living in his car). horsemouth used to imagine he was on his way to a gig (but no that car is just too full). 

the photo is by bettina herzner - her other photos of fahey seem to be from the welfare hotel phase (so perhaps he was just storing stuff in his car by this point). 

living in a car seems very fashionable at the moment (because people can no longer afford to live in flats or houses anymore not because there are no jobs but because wages are so low). people are now in work homeless, they suffer from in-work poverty. horsemouth has watched two poor in america documentaries recently - disney workers living in the motels close to disneyland and a wife and kids living in a car in california while the husband is off in kentucky earning the money labouring (but then  he gets attacked, kills the other guy in self-defence and ends up in jail). 

things are much worse for people these days than when horsemouth was a kid (if he did but know it it was a period of peak prosperity and cultural authority for the working class).  

horsemouth is up. he has his coffee. it's a cold and frosty morning. last night the martin sheen thing - they have escaped port talbot, they have escaped wales via hay-on-wye, they have escape the welsh catcher general in cheltenham, they are on their way to an undisclosed location. he wonders what the critics are making of it. there's an element of post-lockdown  conspiracy theory in it. this horsemouth enjoys as a reconfiguration of it all.