winnicott and the grey monk

horsemouth has been posting over at american primitive guitar group on facebook.
he posted a link to bandcamp’s round up of the scene.

anyone missing? asked horsemouth
- glenn jones and daniel bachman replied the massive, mark fosson also.

label wise a nod to dying for bad music and not just tompkins square and takoma park would be good.

the british guitarists - bert jansch, john renbourn, davy graham, wiz jones, etc. are excluded on principle. they don’t have the rhythm says fahey in a german tv interview. but look at what davy graham gets up to with modal guitar, look at renbourn and jansch’s goodbye pork pie hat and alike.




in horsemouth's humble opinion the best appreciation of fahey is to be found on blog the hum's blogspot here (and written by an avowed guitar hater too), and in part three of the article a guide to loads of american primitive guitarists even horsemouth has never heard of.

last weekend’s events (charles’ river holy boys tuning)

friday night (as you know) horsemouth was in the pub with howard (one pint became four - but fortunately no more).

saturday horsemouth was out toasting in the sun (reading mostly) and then staying in (watching a dvd box set of the sons of anarchy season two).

sunday he planned more of the same but andrew minty invited him out first to a community gardens and next the park. in both places he (playing fool that he is) played a little guitar and attempted to impart his hard won guitar wisdom. he then went for food with minty and lisa (thank you for inviting him).

lisa had her guitar tuned in standard eadgbe - hence some cover versions were attempted (jolene, wind beneath my wings, something by the grateful dead).

the girl in the community gardens had her guitar tuned dada(-12)be (or something like that, nearly as horsemouth is fond of remarking) but her main interest was short little repeated phrases (though she professed to be a john renbourn fan). horsemouth recommended african music (funk would have done it too) ali farka toure etc. and is usual standbys john fahey and robbie basho (he’s a bit of a basho evangelist). he could also have recommended robert fripp’s league of craft guitarists (more than one person doing small repeating riffs in a knock-off minimalist fashion).

in both cases horsemouth recommended getting ones thumb perpendicular to the neck of the guitar when holding down chords (it just gives you greater strength and better string termination - and hence a clearer sound), in lisa’s case he recommended a cheat for playing the a-chord.

the sons of anarchy is ostensibly about the problems of community (a very horsemouth issue) but in fact it is mainly concerned with problems of masculinity (or rather their erasure in a fantasy). horsemouth enjoyed it (though it is a little grim) - maybe he should watch season one sometime.

he’s been reading dazzling stranger (a biography of bert jansch) - from whence the charles’ river holy boys tuning - it’s a bit stodgy and fattening (like all music books - music is incredibly difficult to write about well) and dvd boxed sets.

monday night and one turns into four again and horsemouth staggered home drunk. this was deeply deeply foolish. at some point he got some chips (he hopes he paid for them).

by wednesday  horsemouth had recovered his equanimity - he’s away to inspect his quarters (and various allotments)  in the forest - today he was away to sunny greenwich (CD and book buying mission). he should have bought dazzling stranger a double CD compilation of the finest moments of bert jansch’s career (including the later neglected bits), instead he bought a 2 CD’s in one compilation of jack orion and nicola (and free jazz by the ornette coleman double quartet - but that’s another story).

books wise it was another visit to halcyon(and on) but the muse of book buying was not with him so he only emerged with procopius’ the secret history (one squid)- a book in which bad things happen among the late romanochristian ruling class. it’s page three and we’ve already had some murders and an outbreak of incest. (kind of like I claudius  on steroids).

‘why was the book written if it could not be published?’ wonders g.a.williamson in his introduction.

horsemouth was on point hill, an artist was there having drawn the new vista from there (for engraving later), as was his wife (horsemouth presumes) and a woman walking her dogs. the dogs made friends of everybody. apparently beneath the hill there are caves - party spaces before the war, air raid shelters during. he then descended via pigsty alley and past the house  where  alfred salter quaker mayor, doctor and member of the settlement movement was born (a quaker like many yankee whaleship captains). melville has published moby dick when a series of attacks on whaleships by an enraged whale begin, he writes, ‘I wonder if my evil art has raised a monster.’ 

'as I sit mending clothes you will never ever wear.' / 'sometimes I wonder where the poor people went'

so goes the harshest line (in horsemouth's humble opinion) in anne briggs' you go your way (my love), a classic song-at-parting, the chorus functioning to get the object out the door against the daydream of love brought back by the repetition of everyday tasks.

the usual picture you see to go with this is bert jansch and anne in their youth sitting in a pub, bert the archetypal toussle-haired romantic hero, anne the dark girl. years later (after leaving off singing for many years and becomming a market garderner) she's persuaded to sing it again for the folkbritania programme (or some such). 'there's a lot of ghosts about' mutters archie fisher (probably), 

'at that time one thought it would never change, it would never be different , but it has changed, you know we're all different and in a way it sort of... um... highlights the differences for me between what we were than and what we are now.' 

'even though the structure has changed there's a lot of ghosts about'

'yes, the fact... as I say that it opens the door on ones youth and all that... sense of hope, faith, and musical belief, and exploration'

today horsemouth goes to look at houses - it is the first grey day of autumn - is he keeping busy enough do you think? yesterday, horsemouth was up early (oops. no he was not)  - it was a beautiful day outside (he went for a walk). it was the third anniversary of bert jansch's death (he almost forgot).

'sometimes I wonder where the poor people went'

horsemouth has been listening to michael goldfarb's description of driving a taxi in new york in the 70ies (think Taxi, taxi driver, the 'drop dead'  decade). the decade of 'planned shrinkage'  - an 'unofficial policy' straight out of the RAND corporation, in some ways the inevitable consequence of  moses and his expressways, his bronx clearances - where people would move out of town then the tax base will fall then the city would cut services (fire stations, doctors surgeries, hospitals - sound familiar?) but to its poorest members first so that they would go too, leaving more of the pot for those who were left. years later he's chatting to a black guy in a bar in brooklyn, the neighbourhood had always been middle class, just black middle class the guy says, and now it's hipster hell. 'sometimes' , the guy says 'I wonder where the poor people went.'

Moses and the cross Bronx expressway makes it into Tricia Rose's book on hip-hop black noise, the thing goldfarb comments on is the grafitti bombed trains - he gets it. out in the ruins people remake what has been left behind into a new music, a new culture - it's an astonishing victory.  horsemouth went to new york first in 1990, there were public enemy posters everywhere and  it was still pleasantly grimey, conversely when horsemouth went in the early 2000s it had been scrubbed clean - early breakdancers (crazy-legs, pop-master lock) were wheeled out as if on the heritage cicuit on municipal stages, and even that was rare and had to be looked out for, his friends were being rinsed off manhatten, beginning the exodus to brooklyn.

horsemouth is reading the flaubert  (mainly). friday night he went out for a quick couple of pints with marike in the somewhat hopeful hipster pub in an old council office on the blackwall tunnel approach road (like he said it's hopeful). soon the balfron will become the ghost of social housing past the high rise icon of modernism gone bad will become aligned with the forces of regeneration, more commuter rabbit hutches will be chucked up as fast as the speed of setting concrete (abervan village or something, city island)  the city is thriving by means of accelerating the calculated exclusion of its poorest.