horsemouth 'whataboutist' ('remember, remember, the fifth of november')

morning peoples. 

'starmer is boring but not corrupt' it was put to him. (er. except when him and his cronies were sabotaging the previous labour leader but we will let that go because it has indeed gone by). 

and then it was put to him that he was guilty of 'whataboutism' or 'whataboutery'. 

he replied that things happen (yes), but other things happen also, and it is permissible to go 'but what about...' because the other things may be a part of the first thing (a decay in wider political life for example). 

horsemouth has heard sten raise boris and lady nut nut's home decoration habit (paid for by anonymous donors - no danger of access or political influence being purchases there!) on the back of paterson MP's double my salary scheme, is this not 'whataboutery'? (or whatever the scope limiting measure is called). 

horsemouth is glad boris has been knocked back on his first attempt to knobble the regulator but he will soon be back at it (and probably, when the dust has settled, with labour assistance).

horsemouth's but what about? was claudia webbe MP who conducted a campaign of harassment against someone she suspected of having an affair with her partner (including threatening to thrown acid in their face). for this she received a suspended sentence and community service (which strikes horsemouth as unduly lenient). when you look at her website she is making all the right noises for someone of horsemouth's political persuasion and there she is ascending the greasy pole up from islington councillor onto the labour national executive. it only goes to show you can't tell very much about people from who they say they re

sproatley smith (and the weirdshire lot) have put up a compilation album of various artists who have played weirdshire events at the babar cafe (and very good it is too). horsemouth thinks it's a great 'scene' alula down, haress etc. and recommends you buy it , similarly he recommends the stuff from leigh on sea (the owl service etc.), the stuff stick in the wheel put out, gwenifer raymond's take on american primitive. 

meanwhile what is happening with the musicians...

'remember, remember the fifth of november...'

because it's bandcamp friday. (rather than the day on which we celebrate a conspiracy to blow up parliament rather a long time ago). 

on this day bandcamp waive their revenue share so more of the money goes to the musicians themselves (and they are hungry if not technically a famine). remember you can get the whole musicians of bremen digital discography  (and that's all the albums, EPs and digital singles you can see here) for a mere  £11.25 GBP or, if you've done that already, maybe you could purchase the weirdshire compilation or some of the music horsemouth has recommended above. 

horsemouth is very bad at this self-promotion lark and facebook and blogspot are obviously not the places to do it. 

horsemouth is coming to the end of milan kundera's immortality a book based around a (private life) sex/ (public life) fame dichotomy. if horsemouth is honest he has always been a shy boy (and now he is rapidly becoming old) and has not really had enough of either to satisfy him. he suspects he's pretty much had his lot (of either sex or fame) and from here on he will have to make music because he enjoys making it. 

his immediate task is the peter, paul and enza stuff, to negotiate a playing of some of  pete's songs (to their mutual satisfaction) and get a version of enza's loops of heaven  up and running.  

the village band of grassano

the village band of grassano was returning from nearby sant’arcangelo when the bus skidded and went off the cliff - the local shepherds still avoid the area at the base of the cliff claiming they can hear brass instruments playing. sant’arcangelo itself has the horns of the local dragon in the church - killed by a nearby feudal lord for the grazing rights to the meadows alongside the nearby river. to do this he required the assistance of the virgin mary. ‘the village is built of the bones of the dead’ says the town crier/ grave digger of gagliano - in his youth he was a wolf tamer. (this much and more we learn in carlo levi’s christ stopped at eboli, carlo levi the exile in lucania an area even more remote and fucked up than grassano - a region that  that not even christianity had properly reached. gagliano is (like akenfield) a fictionalised version of a real place).


there is a photo of late era (cleaned up) fahey on his way to a gig (from the front cover of womblife) - or is it? it looks suspiciously like he is moving, he looks suspiciously like the fahey of santa anna days. horsemouth has continued his fahey week celebrations by listening to death chants, breakdowns and military waltzes, and the dance of death and other plantation favourites (volumes 2 and 3 respectively). the downfall of the adelphi rolling grist mill was a live recording with flautist nancy mclean (she plays on lewisdale blues off voice of the turtle also) - allegedly recorded in march (so perhaps an anniversary) but horsemouth cannot yet discover the date.

april's books

read

 camembert - pierre boisard - book group - free

akenfield  - ronald blythe - one pound - probably horsemouth's book of the year so far

english traits - ralph waldo emerson - one pound (versus)

letters from england  - voltaire - at brother's while babysitting

the plague - albert camus - two pounds fifty

the unforgiving years - victor serge - two pounds fifty - amnesty hammersmith

to do list

letters of anton chekov - ed. lillian hellman - halcyonandon - one pound - introduction read

emile - rousseau - halcyonandon - one pound (some progress)

magic toyshop - angela carter - book group - free - as yet untouched.

escape into olomec time

horsmouth has been dreaming of escape - it required the carefully timed crashing of two vans so as to fake the death of one of the protagonists (before the patrol returned). for some reason a mid-period freddie mercury was there with a white switchblade (most stylish). 

the reason for this dream is probably horsemouth's reading of victor serge's unforgiving years, andy says he has read 3 other victor serge novels, horsemouth might have to as well, this one is pretty damn good. the war has ended - the narrative has taken us from stalingrad to dresden (carnage carnage carnage) now the survivors are hiding out in the mexican desert in olomec time. 

this is probably horsemouth's last 'full' week of work - there was a bank holiday monday, he doesn't have to work this morning, he has his normal wednesday off (he knows he's not going to get a lot of sympathy here). 

sean braved the transport hell that is the east of the seaside towns (and their vital infrastructural improvements that will benefit us all) to come and visit - things proceed with life offering up some resistance. in an email he said the following,

'particularly enjoyed the Akenfield/pastoral idyll post. Yes, 1914 war was a great step forward for the rural workers - Horsemouth is current front runner for the feral prole counter-intuitive revisionist theory of the year award.

Seriously! You put the finger on what irritates me about the vogue for all that hey-nonny-no nonsense; like, in that Electric Eden book theres a whole bit where Shirley Collins goes on about the tragedy of how the whole "folk tradition" ended in 1914....Yeah, there are no "folk" outside of quaint rural English villages, which weren't actually quaint at all, but were in fact so shit that even moving to the city to be a factory worker or a soldier on the western front was preferable. Fuck 'em, and their "get off my land" countryside bollocks.'

earlier horsemouth was over at howards (and then a quick pint in the murder mile) the musicians of bremen working season may be over, they need to top and tail the tracks and send a few of them off for mastering (it does make them sound better), they also need to select the strongest tracks and ask themselves if they should be spread out over a range of genres or clustered round one particular sound... and then they need to go and play live. it's been a while. 

'a town without intimations'

horsemouth is very taken by albert camus description of oran in the introduction to his the plague (red cross I think it was - no british heart foundation - lewisham - two pounds fifty, when horsemouth got it home he discovered that he already had a copy - undisclosed charity shop 25p, but by then he'd started reading it... and anyway this just gives him a duplicate copy for disbursement). the reading of it goes smoothly and quickly (like camus' early stories that horsemouth read recently), it's like a j.g.ballard or defoe's journal of the plague year, or the opening set up of the decamaron or the opening set up to artaud's theatre and it's double, or foucault on the social discipline necessary to overcome the plague. (anyway it goes quickly p.84 so far)

it even opens with a quotation from defoe's robinson crusoe,

 'it is as reasonable to represent one kind of imprisonment by another, as it is to represent anything that really exists by that which does not!' - robinson crusoe's preface to the third volume of robinson crusoe. (there are of course several games being played here).

further to this horsemouth has also finished ronald blythe's account of an east anglian village akenfield which is truly great - he ends it by interviewing a gravedigger (who wants to be cremated and his ashes thrown straight up into the air). horsemouth may have to find another copy to give to is parents.

this morning horsemouth trammed it to lewisham and wandered from there over blackheath and down through greenwich. the sun shone and then it pissed it down. by the time horsemouth was home it was sunny again. for the next 4 days horsemouth works, and then similarly for the next 3 weeks, and then what?

a necessary corrective to a pastoral idyll

last night horsemouth read lillian hellman's introduction to anton chekov's letters but then started in earnest on ronald blythe's akenfield his account of a suffolk village, this was later made into a film staring local people - kind of like moi, pierre reverte...except without the murders, horsemouth has the press release from 1975 about it he found safely tucked away in the book.

the first story properly told in akenfield is of leonard thompson, a farm labourer, despite his brother dying in the boer war he joins the army in march 1914 just to get off the land and is delighted when war breaks out in august. he puts on weight in basic training because he is being fed properly for the first time and not worked to death, 'it literally happened. it is not a figure of speech' . at harwich 'we were bursting with happiness. we were all damn glad to have got off the farms' . at the dardanelles on the beach they find a marquee tent, inside that are the rotting bodies of the dead. they take and lose and retake hill 13 to the turks, by the end of it only 3 men of the 60 in his unit at harwich have survived. after gallipoli he was sent to france, he survives the somme but is taken prisoner after arras, in clogs in winter they dig the keil railway, many prisoners die. on november 5th 1918 some mutinous german sailors arrive and free them advising them to go and pick potatoes in the fields. he eventually makes it back to the village. some things have change for the better - there are unions and a wages board, but in the summer of 21 there is a drought, the corn act has been repealled because the government doesn't want to pay the subsidy, it descends into years of poverty and persecution before the union can be re-established again in the thirties.

horsemouth thinks this is a necessary corrective to a pastoral idyll that is portrayed as preceding the first world war as if everything was ok until then.