in which ‘there is an equitable distribution of prizes in accordance with poetic justice’

horsemouth has been caught wishing it were may already (freudian slip - oops) - this is largely because he fails to make proper use of his time - last night he failed to invite someone up the pub (and failed to suggest that someone should put their comments in an email). over the weekend he failed to go out and meet people (wandering round pop(u)lar instead) or engage in any music. neither was he in hereford for the weirdshire weekend, nor at stick in the wheel’s do at cafe OTO (for which someone had some spare tickets), nor at the nominees in paper dress vintage.

on the plus side he may have sorted out a gig invite...

he did however read violette leduc’s in the prison of her skin (small town french childhood misery memoir by a lover of sartre - and serious threat simone de beauvoir thought) and he has started on another life by yuri trifonov (soviet era novelist in touch with the 19th century style of deep and satisfying characterisation). sadly though he has become immediately distracted by dave van ronk’s the mayor of mcdougal street -(NY chancer makes it big on folk scene and becomes the inspiration for llewellyn davis). dave was big and clumsy (and left-handed) as a child - so much so his irish grandmother said he’d been swapped for a swede up at the hospital.

bernie wrightson has died (one of the few comic book artists horsemouth could tell you the name of) (ok er... frank miller, dave gibbons, stan lee (?), matt boyce, sean o’connor, dan barker). horsemouth only really knows his work from swamp thing (which dan lent him way back when) and there’s a classic book’s frankenstein - wrightson’s work is dark and big and busy and epic.

the king is gone but he’s not forgotten...

in which everything is confronted by its opposite and revealed as something else

later horsemouth goes to a meeting. a committee he is on was asked to buy something. they bought something. doubtless there will be trouble.

horsemouth is under the protection of the equinox - tomorrow, thursday, friday he works, wednesday he has off.

at the weekend there is the anniversary of igor stravinsky’s visitation to alice coltrane (the one after his death) that lead to her recording excerpts from the firebird on her album lord of lords. may 28th is the anniversary of an expanded john coltrane quartet playing nature boy at the village gate. may 29th is the anniversary of the birthday of harry smith. shortly thereafter it will be the end of the month and horsemouth will be publishing his read, listened to, visited list. april 6th is the anniversary of alice coltrane recording sita ram and oh allah with tamboura player tulsi (both from universal consciousness).


yesterday (as you know) he went for a wander round pop(u)lar - today he is in the centre of town.

horsemouth has been wandering around his old hood taking a look at the new build toss (speckled brickwork - check, julliet balconies -check, gym - check etc.). he has been largely recreating various journeys that he made with paul clark and max ‘crow’ reeves back in the day. he walked across the red bridge from canning town to hope (the northern bit of the isthmus on which trinity buoy wharf rests between the nilotic mud of the thames and the nilotic mud of the lower lea). once upon a time this was a prime industrial site with bessemer mills, before that the vicar instituted swimming lessons for the local schoolkids.

there is, said a friend hiding out in devon, nothing to do in chrisp street market on a sunday - so horsemouth was in the library fiddling about on the computers.

he’s been a little bored and to be honest he’s been a little boring. he needs to get on with things. he made some efforts to dazed and confused by led zeppelin in the morning (a well constructed misogynist pile of toss utilising ‘found’ lyrics and some truly excellent riffs) - perhaps he can get a woman to sing it (and thus escape the well-founded charge of playing misogynist toss).

do you like it here now? are you settling in?

today is the anniversary of the recording of tracks 1,3 and 5 on expressions by john coltrane (one for the john coltrane festival calender).

horsemouth must confess he’s enjoying his time in the new bode. it’s kind of like being on holiday. he bumped into kell on sunday (what are the odds? well they’ve improved haven’t they).

of course being a pessimist horsemouth assumes something terrible will happen to make up for the fact that he’s enjoying himself (there’s footage of him watching the skies/ checking the water for submarines).

horsemouth has finally cracked and bought something by giorgio agamben homo sacer (successor to foucault and officially pronounced ‘over’ a while ago now) - it must only be about 20 years since he first heard of him.

yesterday was a busy day - horsemouth buzzing off a late coffee (bad boy), drama in the neighbourhood etc. etc. tomorrow (today now) more work - more flats to see - wednesday morning off anyway to recover. we’re up to week 6 of the pre-easter accumulator.



yesterday was the anniversary of the first horsemouth as selector howard as operator mix and of the recording of vilia (from birdland by john coltrane) in the john coltrane festival calender.


horsemouth is not implying that these events are of the same scale. he was going to give you a parallel review of cosmopolis, sedmikrasky and conversation piece but he’s a little too fried.

the grauniad has finally got round to reporting the death of guitarist deke leonard (of welsh proggers man) from back 31st jan. horsemouth remembers this being played on the friday night rock show as a kid and their photo being up in the room where we learnt welsh (for one year) as a 'welsh' rock band (er. together with budgie and that's all I can remember). great band inventive as fuck and with that deeply dry south wales sense of humour - album title 'do you like it here now? are you settling in?'

fight the youth (‘if they suffer it’s no fault but their own’)

urghh horsemouth is disgusted of tunbridge wells- a parliamentary committee (featuring margaret hodge) takes 13 minutes to double the money the royals will receive and meanwhile the youth have their right to housing benefit when they are unemployed withdrawn. this is done while parliament is away so that jumped up pack of property owning rural solicitors won’t even get a chance to wave a beak at it.

online you can see a drawing of horsemouth ranting away about this up at speakers corner.

horsemouth is a little surprised at the passivity of the youth when faced by the war against them and has decided to side with the establishment instead.

dirty fucking thieving bastards. the youth that is. ignorant that’s what they are (and probably racist).

there - horsemouth’s is now a respectable opinion and he may even be invited to appear on the news again. 

horsemouth has been to look at flats out in sunny walthamstow for his co-operative. top floor in wood street, crumbly small block, 3rd floor of a tower block. in the towerblock the living room had been partitioned to give a third bedroom. in the crumbly one there were clear marks of flooding from upstairs - the baby sat in the papoose while the russian mother watched tv, while, in the cupboard small second bedroom, bed on the floor, another tenant waited. of course none of these are houses in multiple occupation because they are all notionally only two bedspaces. ‘you could have more than one bed in here’ sagely remarked the wise beyond his years estate agent.

the monkey in the mirror

When and why did you first write music? 

 It would be when I got my first guitar when I was 15. I thought it would attract the girls if I could sing some songs but I couldn’t sing anyone else’s (so I set out to write my own). Later I was told that I couldn’t sing - so I just concentrated on playing the guitar (even though I was terrible at that also - at first).

What’s your composing method? (a) sitting at a piano (b) computer (c) pencil on manuscript paper (d) improvisation with musicians (e) other. 

Mostly (e) Other - guitar, pen, various bits of paper, my voice. Normally I’ll have a few guitar parts sitting around for ages and then some ideas for a topic will come and then I’ll sit down and work at it until I have all the lyrical bits and all the instrumental bits stuck together in kind of the right place. Then once I can play it through I stop work on it. Jarvis was right - lyrics are kind of like the homework that has to be done so you can play the song - this is why I favour songs with repeated choruses, wordless lyrics..., working with other people to write either the music or the lyrics, or both. I spend a lot of time arranging, working on other people’s stuff, trying to find the useful thing for the guitar to do in the tune, or for any other instruments. I’m quite quick at writing lyrics - normally songs come very quickly but take a long time to be finished.

Usually I don’t write enough lyrics to tell a story - but perhaps enough to suggest that something is going on. Really I think you only need a few really good lines - and the rest just have to be good enough so that they don’t let the song down.

When I was in a band (bush house) playing electric guitar the bassist was incredibly inventive - whatever I played (or thought could be played behind it) he’d come up with something better, sometimes (though less often) other members of the band would come up with smart things and I’d respond to them. I’ve never really done improvised music and I don’t much like doing it really. I’ve written on computer (but I was always thinking about what the guitar, the bass or the lyrics would be doing) - it’s fun (it gets rid of a lot of that haggling with other musicians to get your ideas played that you get in male bands).

Music is an irrational activity so song-writing partnerships don’t tend to last long - the ease of recording that technology affords means the song can be quickly completed (and then it’s on to the next project). Now that you no longer need to be in a band to play some tunes they tend to stay together for less time.

Where do your ideas come from? 

 Life, books, newspapers, other people’s songs. I keep lists of good lines, good titles, ideas for playing things, ideas for songs, lyrics.

“Noah’ (which I co-wrote with Howard Grange) came because we were opening a book at random at picking out lines - once it was about Noah - once we had the chorus, the rest of the lyrics wrote themselves - for me it’s about loss, the world has been swept clean and can begin again but somebody is missing. The chords came (both verse and chorus) because they fitted with the ukulele part. Howard wanted a longer version of the song with more lyrics and a bigger overall production on it - so we did a version like that that’s on volume one - but there’s also a shorter version arranged much more how I would like it online (we’ll probably put it on my EP when i get round to recording it). The second guitar I wrote in the studio and started improvising out over the end of it - I’ve always been interested in layering guitar parts, it’s something I picked up from african music and my brief studies with Folo Graff at Jenako Arts in Hackney in about 1988.

Do you find inspiration from other composers? Which? 

Since about 2002 I’ve started learning other people’s songs from sheet music, chord guides etc. and listening to more classical music and learning some of it (or at least trying). In particular french classical music written for the piano- debussy, satie, faure, messiaen. Conversely I’ve worked on learning country and folk songs because they are straightforward - the guitar is just there to support the singing and singing has become more important to me than fiddly guitar parts. In general I’ve been inspired to simplify.

Which non-musical influences are important to your music?

Life, books, newspapers, politics, sex, death. Death is big (I’m a bit of a goth really).

What do you say when asked to describe your music?

 ‘Post-apocalyptic folk’, ‘I play in a guitar and ukulele duo’, ‘Slide guitar versions of french parlor piano.’ 

Do you think about the listener when you’re composing?

Not really. Sometimes I imagine me playing it and people really liking it.

When did you feel ready to call yourself a composer? 

 Well I don’t. I don’t really call my self a song-writer either (I just don’t write enough songs). Musician for hire - Guitar, Bass, one finger keyboard, backing vocals, arrangements.

What’s your musical guilty pleasure? 

Metal. Big cock-rocking guitar solos. Gangster Rap. R n’ B. Led Zeppelin, Genesis, Yes, Mike Oldfield, ECM airbrushed jazz ... I’ve always been told I had ‘bad’ taste in music. I can’t say I care very much. 

What’s your ideal night out?

Old school Drum and Bass - I like to dance. Failing that a decent pub dancefloor. Failing that beer and friends. These days staying in and not having the hangover the next day.

One last question: What are you doing musically at the moment? 

Working on singing a version of world turned upside down for the phoenix 35th anniversary party (and learning the lyrics), working on a slowed down version of bad moon rising by creedence (strangely apocalyptic), failing to finish writing a song that’s a cross between ghost town/ mac the knife and erik satie’s gnossienne no.1.

Failing to get on and record an EP with me singing and playing new versions of songs I’ve written, co-written or arranged, country, folk and early music. Plenty of Death and a little sex maybe. And slide guitar versions of french parlor piano songs.

landgrab

photo by max crow reeves

in the above photo you see horsemouth planning to urinate on a derelict estate in newham - an estate kept empty for years so as to be available for redevelopment at a higher density.






horsemouth has been spending a little time learning to play world turned upside down which as howard noted is strangely appropriate at the time of the government’s landgrab on housing associations and councils. the National Housing Federation has cooked up some backdoor deal where they give the government what they want voluntarily allowing the government to get the policy in without it being taken to a vote in the houses of commons. the councils may feel they have been ratted out (they would be obliged to sell off their more valuable property as it came empty to fund the ‘replacement’ of housing association property sold off under ‘right to buy’ legislation for housing association tenants) and will thus become uncooperative. 

horsemouth thinks right to buy (with up 100k reductions for longstanding tenants) should be extended. it should be extended to private tenants. similarly the requirement to lower rents by 1% every year (required of housing associations) that should be extended to private landlords too...etc. etc.

there are curious results from the blitzkrieg of proposed housing legislation - where once there was a set aside of a proportion of flats on most new build estates that had to be let out at affordable rent (80% of market rent) now this no longer has to be done - but housing associations will still be required to produce their new housing at affordable rent, it’s all a bit random and poorly thought out - but that doesn’t matter it just increases the shock and awe.

housing policy doesn’t have to work (in the sense of housing people) - all it has to do is drive people into the arms of private landlords and enable those landlords to charge the highest rent possible. that works for the landlords.

the sin of property we do disdain - but of course we don’t, we feel aggrieved that what is properly (if collectively) ours is being taken from us by government diktat - but really we are just being given an object lesson in the fact that all property rights ultimately derive from the state and can be revoked at any time.

you poor take courage you rich take care.

'gentrification is... Nothing to do with privatisation - right to buy, LDDC etc. It's the liberals and outsiders.'

such would appear to be horsemouth's unreasonable position. if this is in fact the case why does horsemouth think this?

in horsemouth's view it is not enough to just add artists to a declining city to gentrify it - though the mayor of braddock (collapsed population rust belt town outside pittsburgh where george romero filmed martin) pinned his hopes on this (that and turning main street into allotments), and it has become part of artists raison d'etre (look at bow arts trust).

it is not the great art produced by (de-)slumming it creatives nor their slowly supped flat whites that drives gentrification but simpler geographical factors like the proximity of the terra nulius to somewhere with money and economic factors like large sums of savings looking for returns. post war the automobile, the suburb and the garden city depopulated the cities creating the 'inner cities' so called sinkholes of crime, depravity, welfare dependency and shoddy building - but as successive waves of people trying to live cheaply noted they were actually not so bad - indeed they were fun. and so came the waves of outsiders, like the outsiders before them and the outsiders to come. there is no originary community of pure-bred cockneys - they were here only for a time, we are all here only for a time.

but the measures listed (and the olympics and cross-rail and any infrastructure projects) are minor parts of the gentrification process - they just show that the government/ mayor/ local authority are supportive that it is prepared to put tax-dollars (ahem) at the service of the process. without the above measures gentrification would still have happened but it would have stopped at the gates to the estates, it would have taken the streets and the houses, the genius of privatisations and 'right-to-buy' and 'affordable housing' is that it will enable the taking of the estates.

this is a more hegemonic variety of social cleansing than the ones previously witnessed and not fully complete in chelsea and kensington and islington and docklands, it is a cleansing in depth. the docklands working class communities (for example) are still there for now (if disrupted and changed) but they will soon be gone.

it used to be said that buying land was a good bet (because the good lord wasn't making any more of it) now the same can be said of housing - the destruction of social housing (housing the workers and non-workers can afford) is proceeding apace and it is not being replaced - why would they when gnp incorporates house sales - why intervene to lower the price of a commodity?

much can be achieved (in the new sharing economy) by overcrowding - and indeed we are witnessing an increase in people sharing rented accommodation as under-occupying owning or renting families are rinsed out - as it all becomes barracks housing for the barristas, this city is a giant rent farm. and yet this is not a victory for the right of single people to be housed - we are only here for a time but it is now on a clock - we must earn before we are spun off to the hinterlands. ok I'll write some more in a minute but that's enough for now.
 --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

the difference between earlier waves of gentrification (the outsiders, the liberals, the squatters, the artists-before-their-gentrifying-potential-was-noted) and the current one, is that earlier waves still left space for the previous communities, it still left them shops and services and housing - this next wave does not. of course the art and the happenings cannot transform crisp street market as is but when it is rebuilt it will change. robin hood gardens will go the way of the aberfeldy (replaced by new higher density rent-farming estates) concrete brut or no - and if it doesn't it will just be architecturally preserved like balfron but gutted of its original purpose of social housing. what can be done to resist this? probably just the usual campaigns. or perhaps a sudden improvement in the state of productive capitalism leading to a loss of interest in safe and secure rent seeking behaviour.

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

horsemouth went down to east india dock and watched the tall ships sail by (including the chilean esmerelda where pinochet's torturers worked). later he watched amicus horror's the house that dripped blood - and noted an artfully placed copy of lotte eisner's the haunted screen, and then whatever happened to jack and jill? a seventies amicus exploitation movie - a 70ies couple plan to terrorise the gran to death and so get hold of her house by telling her about youth power, the oldies out and euthensasia campaigns, how there is a dreadful shortage of housing for the youth because of under occupation by the old who persist in living on. 'where were you when hitler needed you?' asks the boy of the girl (they do make a cute couple).

upper and lower clapton (the guardian of the nunnery and his epileptic pekingese)

so following a walk up to norton folgate on sunday (then down to crossbones cemetery) - horsemouth decided to wander further afield. first up the canals (limehouse cut, three mills, river lea past hackney wick almost up as far as the anchor and hope - near where amelia and helen once lived thought horsemouth nostalgically) to howard's in stoke newington borders (er. upper clapton). and thence back down towards wapping to pick up some chillies from an anonymous friend. (from stoke newington borders (!), where horsemouth one lived, down queensbridge road (where brenna once lived), through haggerston park where horsemouth would read and sunbathe, past the nags head where he once lived (and further down just off vallance road too) and thence back home down cable street/ various cycle paths and the limehouse cut again. (see there's something circular to this journey - about 8 miles all told maybe a little more).



the canalside was practically solid boat all the way up - but the boat people were friendly - the cyclists less so (fucking cyclists). new blocks (with speckled brickwork and julliet balconies) sprouted out of the nilotic mud and the sites of old pubs. horsemouth stopped off at the filter beds - ruins when horsemouth first discovered them in 85 by climbing through a fallen down bit of the wall. now artful victorian ruins - if not quite well-loved enough to have a coffee shop.

the destruction of hackney continues but on his walk horsemouth observed more of the continuities than the transformations - the sunbathers in haggerston park looked the same (though where was the guardian of the nunnery and his epilleptic pekingese and his friends in 'the regiment'). the street-drinkers had their resident spot on the bench just by the pond. the epileptic pekingese had died many years ago - leaving him with just the wolf hound - when horsemouth met him again a few years ago (up by st.clement's) he had been forgotten - so many new people in the neighbourhood.

true horsemouth had picked a route that avoided the masses and the main shopping streets. he mistimed crossing the road and had to back up - the driver gave him the finger (ah that reassuring 'up-for-a-fight' hackney rudeness). back down to wapping - still the new estates but also reassuring poverty. horsemouth waited in a park. the youth played football in the sun. people rented out boris bikes . horsemouth could have been in barcelona.

the gentle author / the gentle developer / the liberty of norton folgate

horsemouth: orange t-shirt, white shorts, near the 'save norton folgate ' banner

so horsemouth is back from saving norton folgate from rapacious development - he has the badge and the book to prove it. there may even be photographs. unlike the early days of 'demonstrations' (where one was merely arrested, roughed up a little for attempting such things) horsemouth and his cohort received a book from the hands of the gentle author (though you did have to queue for it - what is it with the british and queueing?). basically horsemouth was there saving a village of the architecturally minded posh from being evicted to make way for productive (empty) office blocks. of course if the proposal was to knock it all down to create entirely social housing horsemouth would have to support that instead.

horsemouth was there with merv (being mutinous, he announced he was there to 'stick it to the man'), max, samanta, niall. at one point merv pronounced that what was needed was a queue disruptor, when questioned as to what this might be he suggested a capacitor. there was then some discussion of the strange afterlife of old television sets and the fact that they can still give you a belt long after they've been switched off thanks to the large capacitors they contain. 'from hell's heart I stab at thee'.

the book is a good pleasurable book of photographs and commentary on the history of the seaside towns and its people. on the way up he bumped into andy coram at his antiques shop (fuck it people go buy some antiques people) but did not make it back as he'd promised.

cross bones cemetery with john crow - photo by max reeves

instead horsemouth wandered down to the crossbones cemetery with max through the sun-fried (and tourist infested) streets. there horsemouth met john crow and others dedicated to keeping this outcast graveyard open but to do so meant to do a deal with 'the man' (ok the Bankside Open Spaces Trust). horsemouth was most impressed with the pyramid of broken masonry dug up on the site and decorated with clam shells (once the food of the poor). the clam shells shone white in the afternoon sunshine. they have something on wednesday and thursday there.

thereafter horsemouth and max adjourned to the pub (the george). strangely two and a half beers merely succeeded in anaesthatising horsemouth. he had two beers the day before remember. eventually horsemouth and max staggered up to rejoin their lives.

spem in alium (40 part motet)

so tonight horsemouth observed a vote to buy 3 bedspaces of social housing - on the way there he passed a concrete nibbler working into the evening under spotlights in the rain to tear down an estate of social housing. you can see his point can't you...

horsemouth is back having circumnavigated the south east of the city in good company. there are photos - sadly horsemouth, in the process of mis-explaining parallax has been caught making the universal 'it was this big gesture' , he's also seen holding forth outside italo svevo's house in charlton. horsemouth has since read more to improve the tour guide experience.

they then went to re-enact blow up in maryon park before taking the silvertown ferry back (one of the last great clanking electro-mechanical experiences to be had in this city). it was there that horsemouth and ant-knee split off from the main party (who were carrying on to east ham in search of a dosa) and returned by the docklands light tramway.


at the start in st.alfege greenwich (the first time horsemouth has ever been inside) there was a conversation with a royalist old lady in front of an organ once believed to have been played by thomas tallis(but no longer). the leader of the tallis scholars (james burton?) rehearsed the choir. greenwich had fallen on hard times once the royal palace had moved she said - hence the large number of well preserved houses.

horsemouth is continuing to enjoy the goncourt journals but by now there is only one of them jules having died in a distressing fashion of syphillis - first he loses his sense of tact, then his pronunciation returns to that of a child,

'over that beloved face, once so full of intelligence and irony, that shrewd and wonderfully malicious countenance of the mind, I can see the haggard mask of imbecility slipping minute by minute,'

in a restaurant he cannot use a bowl properly and people begin to look, edmond reprimands him and he begins to cry 'his tense, trembling hand sought mine on the tablecloth'. they both break down in tears. on 20th june 1870 jules de goncourt dies in convulsions.

edmond, the older brother lives on , and after a few months begins to write again - witnessing the prussian invasion and the commune and its supression. he lives (and writes) on to 1896.
 -----------------

 it is only just slightly over two weeks since horsemouth's gig (as the musician of bremen) but already he has forgotten it. he has discovered he has misunderstood tallis's spem in alium - it is not that the writer of the text puts his faith in others (as horsemouth would be wont to assume) but that he doesn't put his faith in others but only in god.

bah humbug!

"how difficult it is to tell even a millionth part of the truth and how harshly one is punished for doing so." - edmond de goncourt.

so merry christmas one and all. god bless us each and every one. bah humbug. at this point horsemouth would usually be going  'having survived yet another year...' 
 ----------------------------------------------------------

having survived yet another year horsemouth is pleased to have played and recorded an album of songs with john smith as musicians of bremen, he's pleased to have released it (both online on bandcamp and as a physical cd), he's pleased to have played three gigs in this line up and a fourth as musician of bremen - combining the best of musicians of bremen with the best of his horsemouthfolk days and all in 30 minutes - and all these gigs in some kind of alignment with the heavens. he is pleased with the progress of various songs he's involved with writing and arranging (worldes blisse dirge and noah), though he really should hurry up a bit with all this. he plans to continue with it all in the new year.
horsemouth thanks the people who put them on (gertrude, tim goldie, albino).

horsemouth has blogged daily (or nearly) and continued with the promulgation of yam zombies but he has not, so far, managed to get his theoretical endeavours going again.

horsemouth has been pleased to go out and see more music this year (thanks to john clarkson mostly) in no particular order idiot saint crazy, georgina brett, the owl service, stick in the wheel, a reformed les ambassadeurs internationaux, richard skelton, the bohemianauts, pelt, richard youngs, rick tomlinson, united bible studies, aine o'dwyer, gertrude, daniel rosen, david thomas broughton, adam sherry, com(in)us, arthur brown, jonny halifax & the howling truth, tim goldie, jah wobble, various improv'ers and jazz improv'ers. (kevin davy, dreamtime etc.).

on youtube/ spotify/ i-player he made some good discoveries - judee sill, more karen dalton and robbie basho, gene clark etc. mc5, sonic'.s rendezvous band and some working musicians robert curgenven, sproatly smith.

tv wise. (not that he has a tv you understand) treme, true detective.

books? akenfield, michael jeffries - wild england, cobbett rural rides, kilvert and anais nin, diaries, john hillaby,  anna kavan - ice, albert camus  the plague, imogen holst gustav holst,  lillian hellman the unfinished woman, and a threefold cord - alex la guma, memories, dreams, recollections - marianne faithfull, the prisoner - thomas m. disch, magic hour - jack cardiff, hadrian VII - fr. rolfe. denis johnson train dreams, anton chekov letters, dubravka ugresic the ministry of pain, george lois damn good advice (for people with talent). re-reading pkd -do androids dream of electric sheep?, rousseau - reveries of the solitary walker, the lover - marguerite duras, blues people - leroi jones, beneath the visiting moon - david grubb,   ...

healthwise.  horsemouth (a vegetarian already let us remember) has reduced the amount of cheese and pastry he consumes and walked more - moving towards a term time 20 miles a week.(if only he could face the tedium of jogging).  his frozen shoulders have unfrozen and he has not been coughing his lungs up, the only downsides are that he is balding rapidly and his teeth continue to be a bit rubbish. ( but hey never look a gift horse in the mouth).

at work. he has been revisiting material that gave him trouble in his youth and (at last) being able to see the wood for the trees. he is generally pleased with the work-life balance, while his unemployed friends are being mercilessly fucked with by job club etc. at least horsemouth doesn't have this. sadly the ideology of capitalist austerity finally arrived in beachside donkeymule land (friends have lost their jobs already, pay and conditions have been cut and there may be further trouble ahead).

gentrification. housing wise the seaside towns continue to gentrify at an astounding rate ('how much?') but at least there have been some signs of effective resistance (e15 mums, new era, ASS), horsemouth's housing co-op has continued to lose housing and to lose people - the longer this particular can can be kicked down the road the better. he doesn't want the street food but (secretly) he quite likes the craft beer (motherfuckers - 'how much?' ).

horsemouth made 50 this year (he outranks you all) some people have left the party, some have arrived, some have got ill, people's kids continue to grow. he's off for a walk with his parents soon. merry christmas.

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

'in my journal I have tried to collect all the interesting things that are lost in conversation.' - say the two goncourts (edmond and jules) united as one writer (as one I) in the process of 'dual dictation' . they would go out to the parties and make notes on the comments and on the bad behaviour - frankly their friends (the daudets mostly, theophile gautier, balzac, sand, zola, flaubert...) were glad when they stopped doing it (not that they ever did stop it really).

early on they give us the typical end of an evening - 6am, a friend drunk and in tears over a showgirl who doesn't love him, another showgirl semi-naked, drunk and vomiting, cursing loudly, the goncourts (drunk) taking notes (well jules taking notes on the cuff of his shirt).

they begin their journal with the coup d'etat of louis napoleon. in 1856 the read poe and recognise his genius. in 1857 theophile gautier tells them how he writes (he's under considerably less economic pressure than balzac clearly). their novel germinie lacerteux (a thinly fictionalised account of their housekeepers bad behaviour) paves the way for zola (but they themselves do not follow it up).

'low income londoners won't be priced out for a while'

says a headline in the grauniad (that's good to know).

horsemouth rose at 3pm (having been up earlier between 10 and 12 to see sean out of the door and off to the bus). having played the gig horsemouth proceeded to get terribly drunk and stay up late and so was hungover and vomitous in the morning. he hopes he was chatty and made sense enough at the gig because he was paying for it the next morning.

by 3pm the hangover had abated and horsemouth began to shuffle round the flat and to check out reports.

horsemouth thanks everyone who came out and commiserates with those who couldn't make it or arrived late. he particularly thanks john smith and andrew minty for singing a song each with him. horsemouth was once again cursed by feedback and microphone placement issues - he opened with the werewolf (by michael hurley) with john smith on backing vocals and then into gentleman john (lyrics by horsemouth, music by rust groat) which went tolerably well excepting that his fingers were being mutinous and he was assailed by feedback issues. really horsemouth lost the audience for a while here and took a while to recover - the mercifully short guitar instrumental went ok as did the golden one taken solo (largely written by john smith but with some input from horsemouth) , as did I still miss someone (johnny cash) wth andrew minty of the duvals singing. but recover horsemouth did with the devil song (entirely written by horsemouth) and worldes blisse dirge (a trad.arr. - a traditional 12th century song arranged by horsemouth - in fact he'd only finished working it out the morning of the gig) and with a first airing of noah (written by john smith and his good self with the aid of book divination). horsemouth fucked up the second line and so had to comp about for a bit until he could repeat the verse again (he hopes no one noticed - john smith noticed but said it sounded good). finally horsemouth indicated the approaching solstice and got the audience to sing in the bleak midwinter (they were really good) with him singing the bass and when he forgot the words again he simply got them to repeat the first verse. by reincorporation we reach the end.

horsemouth wishes he could give you a great helpful blow by blow description of the other bands but he was off getting drunk and talking shite to people - fake teak were good in a heaven 17ish, early Depeche Mode kind of way, monteagle had a good trancey americana thing going on. in between that horsemouth was mostly out in the carpark - he thanks albino for putting him on again.

he starts referring to himself in the third person (right to buy)

the day of the gig dawns bright and clear - horsemouth has just avoided prayer for the day (always worth doing). in the courtyard a magpie is running off the pigeons.

today is the anniversary of the bringing in of the right to buy policy. not the right to build policy or the right to have enough money to buy policy or the complete supression of the value form policy etc., but a policy that decimated social housing stock by forcing councils to sell off their housing and one that enabled the government to raid the proceeds of those sales while denying councils the right to use them to create social housing to replace (or at least ameliorate) the loss of stock.

horsemouth is conflicted on how best to faff out the day (they can't expect anything productive of him surely, he's an artist and a musician) - he could go and faff it out up in hackney or he could shuffle round the foreshore of the seaside towns.

john hillaby's journey through love has reached the point where his wife dies. his watch keeps stopping. hillaby takes to drink (he always liked drink, it gets him through rainy days when hiking). all of a sudden he starts referring to himself in the third person - horsemouth knows this one, 'who's there?' asks the cyclops, 'no-one' replies odysseus. his wife was a psycho-analyst (like lampedusa's wife), he realises he knew lots of people he could ask for help but had not. he finds a cutting in his files to distress himself with, a terrible flies trapped in a web resorting to cannibalism kafka-esque nightmare (the spider by frans vans pauen). he begins the journey down the chain of books and songs and associations and to question his walking and writing.

he travels to the US to walk the appalachian trail (5000 miles of backwoods - maine to georgia) and gets lost in his memories almost immediately. the wildlife is different it makes little sense to him. the forests are already logged out. after a brush with hypothermia and lost again he makes straight for the nearest road, bus and airport out.

augustine of hippo says 'when a thing is everywhere the way to find it is not to travel but to love.' 

apparently noah (like the vikings) first released a raven to guide him to land but it did not return - then he released a dove, the loon (or great northern diver as it is known here) was apparently one of the few birds to survive the flood independently (4004 bc according to bishop usher).

get out of denver baby

horsemouth is reading lynsey hanley's estates: an intimate history - she moans on at them for their soldification of the english class system. but to horsemouth they represent the kind of housing he can afford and if he is very very lucky (and boxes very very clever) he can get - otherwise it's a grand a fucken' month to live in fucken' leytonstone (believe). (ok ok leytonstone's not so bad but a grand a month and the work to pay that would seriously tax horsemouth's will to live).

horsemouth is grateful to the estates - and when they have a fearsome reputation doubly grateful (it keeps the ponces off). not that horsemouth is some hardcase urban survivalist nutter you understand (he just talks that way after he's worked). lynsey shows us a photo of her grans house in the rhondda valley and expects us to tut tut at its poverty - to horsemouth it looks pretty good - it looks like the kind of terraced house most of his friends lived in.

horsemouth is a child of the suburbs - both sets of grandparents were farmers and lived in the countryside (and there were holidays with them) but horsemouth grew up on the edges of towns - just outside llansamlet near swansea then near bedwas just outside of caerphilly - the estate horsemouth's parents lived on was row after row of new build bungalows on hill overlooking what was soon to be the motorway. horsemouth (and his friends) played in fields that backed onto newer estates and on river banks blackened with coal dust.

later horsemouth's parents moved (in their minds moved back) to the deepest countryside they could find - it didn't suit him - he got the bus to the local town and to the sixth form college at 7.30 in the morning and got the last bus back out at 6.30 at night (herefordshire was an early adopter of bus privatisation) - it hardened his solitude and he read a lot of books. he hung around two years and some months and then came to the seaside towns - first to go to university and then to stay first in hackney and then tower hamlets (with stints in brixton, ladbroke grove, hoxton) ... and then back to hackney again and then away (before the full horror of gentrification hit). he likes it here - poplar - it's still fucked up, poor and boring - and despite horsemouth's gangster neighbours and a murder within 50 yards it feels fairly safe.

now horsemouth's parent's place feels like where horsemouth is from - somewhere not quite wales but nearly - horsemouth is proud of knowing about ten words of welsh - the walls of the classroom at school were covered with pictures of welsh rock bands - man, budgie, horsemouth forgets the others...

horsemouth never learnt to drive, this makes 'returning' to live in the countryside problematic.

horsemouth's parents generation was the generation that left to go to work, that tasted social mobility, as did horsemouth's father's parents who after the second world war moved down from yorkshire to devon emboldened by the nhs and the new welfare state (a plan to go help found an agricultural commune in new zealand had fallen through).

all the william morrises, all the ruskins, all the rosettis in hackney these days - all that facial hair and still no decent wallpaper.

all the william morrises, all the ruskins, all the rosettis in hackney these days -  all that facial hair and still no decent wallpaper. perhaps a fetish for fay and fair folk music, perhaps a willingness to play the journeyman artisan. perhaps a fear of pubic hair (who knows). thank fuck the fashion for hanky over the head (the poor woman's wimple) has died out.

forgive horsemouth - he's grumpy - they've been making him work. he's been stitching sow's ears into silk purses - or at least things that look like they might be silk purses until they have been sold - but the next morning  you wake up and it's a sow's ear you've got in your pocket. this is the nature of all alienated labour- the nature of every impulse purchase.

william and jane morris, all those pre-raphaelite crazies (and their folksongs) still they had more political sense than all these sweepy sweepy broom broom peope - horsemouth swears when he saw boris being danced up the street (broom in hand) there was somebody waltzing with him saying in his ear remember thou art mortal! remember thou art mortal! eyes fixed on the glorious all swept out future, when london would be free of its rioting mobs and a hundred village greens would bloom. he swears that person looked familiar.

the cuckoo and the turtle dove will get even rarer (as their african wintering grounds are eroded away). whereas in greece even the dogs are rioting.

horsemouth has been watching zombie biker movie psychomania - it begins with formation motorcycle ballet through the standing stones in the mist.

saturday british summer time ends, the friday after is halloween, the wednesday after bonfire night - the world frays a little at the edges, the gates are opened up, things begin to appear strangely transformed and yet still within the old world.

on hearing a modern singer (we work against)

great voice.
bjorkish.
cute accent
.... and not that interesting.
no the one for horsemouth - does she do any trad?

she does trad - it works better.

horsemouth is not in love with lovely voices - what horsemouth wants is something about the voice that is revealed as it does the work of opening up the song - words and music working against each other (barthes much misused and always worth a read essay "the grain of the voice'). he feels the same about most classical singing. horsemouth would be more interested in hearing an amateur singer sing and seeing where they breathed or put the emphasis - voices with flaws, voices with imperfections, average voices working with dramatic material having to recruit other resources to cope. too many people are in love with the sounds that come out of their mouths (and recording gives you access to these seconds again and again) to worry about what the song is saying.

the music too has this problem. it is too sparse and willfully 'adventurous' (in a boring tasteful way - hello wire). a lot of this stuff shares this problem -  it is just too mannered and too overproduced for its own good - all texture loving recorded with expensive microphones but with no musical content for it to work against. horsemouth is not interested in acoustic textures themselves but in the portability of the instruments and  in the restriction of options that not having an electric guitar, a rack of effects pedals and an amplifier brings.

they cover a song horsemouth knows 

so they found that one did they - ouch - well the lyrics always were rubbish - 10 seconds and off- ok if you could sing like bjork, cerys mathews and liz fraser the I guess you would... could she not sing a song where it sounds like she thinks it's important? or could she not sing one where it sounds like she just thinks it's cheap throwaway commercial trash.

even when he sounds bored bob dylan at least sounds like he thinks the song should be sung (or if he doesn't that's interesting - often he sounds like he wants to kill everybody for making him sing the song) - even when he's singing god-bothering trash on a nationally syndicated tv show mid-evening johnny cash sounds like he means it.

'lies, damned lies and quotations'

"figures often beguile me, particularly when I have the arranging of them myself; in which case the remark attributed to disraeli would often apply with justice and force: 'There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.' - mark twain 

(ps. there is howeverno evidence disraeli ever uttered this line http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lies,_damned_lies,_and_statistics).

horsemouth recently got into a debate with john smith about child poverty statistics (in john's new role of fully paid up contrarian) wondering if  there ever a time in England when there wasn't child poverty? and when there were times of less, and why was this?

horsemouth held it was  post war - welfare state, more equitable distribution of the profits, running out of steam through the 80ies , 90 ies but admitted  that would be quite a bit a research - last year the child poverty stats weren't as bad (and before). he was not sure people bothered collecting statistic on the poor until victorian times - it's one of the things cobbett does in his rural rides is try and assess how well fed people are, but he's not collecting figures. this probably doesn't happen until the time of  engels, cole and postgate's the common people mentions a survey of london wages in 1747. being a contrarian John Smith suggested that maybe there were no poor to collect statistics on.

cobbett has a view of prosperous rural self-sufficiency (before the arrival of paper money and stock-jobbing) but songs such as four loom weaver (where during a cotton shortage the whole family shuts itself up in the cottage and starves to death) suggest that things weren't always so rosy.

horsemouth thinks that clearly if there are no statistics then the problem can't exist (this is the governments attitude - it is very careful which statistics it gathers and which could only e provided at 'disproportionate cost') - but wondered (on a practical level like cobbett) how many kids at john smith's school get free school meals. apparently lots of them, they've just started a breakfast club, because most don't get breakfast. Some were only getting one meal a day before this at lunchtime.

if there were only 20% of kids in a borough in child poverty would that be more acceptable? or 10%? or the 15% current national average?

horsemouth should probably read the report more carefully before rushing into 'print'.

'life is a pure flame. and we live by an invisible sun within us' (hard times dub)

today is the birthday (in 1605) of the accidentally knighted sir thomas browne. a writer celebrated by coleridge and johnson and connolly (and if horsemouth remembers correctly malcolm lowry - yes google supports this interpretation). horsemouth has found a copy of his the major works (edited by c.a. patrides) and will be making several expeditions into it today in celebration. horsemouth had forgotten the lowry- melville connection, furthermore he had not realised that lewis mumford had written on melville (pierre still languishes unread).

cobbett entertains - he sits on the hillside at old sarum (capitalised thus THE ACCURSED HILL) cursing malthus and cursing the political establishment and their plans to emigrate(soon to be transport) the poor. 'hard times' says a passing peasant. he curses birkeck and his enthusiasm for the backwoods, he remembers advising birkbeck's daughters not to let their father take them more than 20 miles from boston,  even though birkbeck died in the attempt.

howard (or john smith as horsemouth should now be calling him) is continuing to work on noah (now titled noah again) - he has a fine exhausted ending / middle 8 for it. noah is tenth in descent from adam, he is the father of shem, ham and japeth. the rainbow as a symbol of hope becomes important. 

yesterday horsemouth travelled to the supermarket to stock up on coffee and museli ahead of the collapse of civilisation, he also made soup and harvested some of his beans (he will store them for replanting next year). there are some tomatoes on the plant (but they have not gone red yet and it's a bit of a race to see if they will). horsemouth is pinning his hopes on the visible sun for this one. the catepillers have polished off his nasturtiums to the barest stem and vanished - apparently gardeners often plant nasturtiums to distract the catepillers (according to john clarkson). he has some nasturtium 'seeds' for next year. the peppers are doing well - especially the italian frigatelli , the fennel is still thriving.   

'what causes horse-hair to become living things?' (unfeeling oligarchs and their toad-eaters)

sadly today was not leadership wednesday (as previously advertised) where we learn to be leaders (horsemouth will have no problem applying these lessons due to his formidable personal charisma) but group and team wednesday (forming storming underperforming flatlining mourning). pity. horsemouth was looking forward to hearing about foxes and lions and machiavelli and pareto.

william cobbett (rural rides) describes MPs as either ravens or jackdaws, one cackles and one caws, but there's no real difference he says, they are only in opposition to each other to the extent that they sit opposite  each other.

cobbett also (anticipating ivan illich by a century and some decades) takes against the fashion for education as a cure for the ills of the poor (though he does so on the basis of the differing talents of different breeds of dogs, arguing that their differing abilitities cannot be put down to education.   he takes  against 'the monster malthus' who has furnished the unfeeling oligarchs and their toad-eaters with the pretence, that man has a natural propensity to breed faster than food can be raised for the increase...'  there is talk of  surplus population, cobbett's response is to go and verify if this is the case on the ground.  he finds it not so.

horsemouth's father often speaks of both malthus and cobbett approvingly - horsemouth wonders if he has noticed that they are in disagreement. 

a modest proposal on child poverty/ the shortest way with poor children

and today statistics (http://www.endchildpoverty.org.uk/why-end-child-poverty/poverty-in-your-area) - horsemouth's father's pet hate 'there are lies, damned lies and statistics' -   have been published on child poverty.

these give the breakdown of child poverty (after housing costs have been paid) to parliamentary seat and local authority borough. huzzah boroughs in  the seaside towns (bow, poplar, bethnal green etc.) have come top in all the land again with 49% of children living in poverty (horsemouth's former borough hackney make quite a credible showing too). but the point is this is just gives the concentration of poverty rather than the actuallevel of poverty (something quite difficult to assess given the different costs different families face).

however shocking these figures are  it important to realise that a solution is at hand - as the poor are rinsed out from the seaside towns and distributed all over the country (as far away as manchester if one of the offers made to an E15 mum had been accepted) one would expect these percentages to go down and the regional percentages not to rise by so much (just due to the effects of dilution). child poverty is experienced by individual families and individual children and lifting people out of poverty is a difficult business (when one does not want to pay living wages, charge social rents or fund affordable childcare), and yet for these figures to improve not one child will have to be lifted out of poverty - they will merely have had to have been driven out to elsewhere. how can the rich and prosperous city live cheek-by-jowl with such grinding poverty ? ask the bleeding hearts.only due to underdevelopment  reply the rich.

'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. 

even more rural rides and urban explorations

the cobbett (rural rides) goes well - having been jailed to newgate as a radical cobbett is pursued everywhere not just by rain in the form of st. swithin the classic predictor of an inclement english summer but also 'judge's'wig shaped clouds' (this may be code or accurate meteorological information). it is the years after the napoleonic wars - the coasts are littered with huge martello forts, the pensions list stuffed with ex-army officers, the state has taken an interest in agricultural production and mutters on about 'overproduction', speculation has taken hold. agricultural workers are being starved off the land.

'it is the destructive, the murderous paper-system, that has transferred the fruit of the labour, and the people along with it, from the different parts of the country to the neighbourhood of the all-devouring Wen...'

'this vile paper-money and funding system; this system of dutch descent, begotten by bishop burnet and born in hell; this system has turned everything into a gamble. there are many hundreds of men who live by being the agents to carry on the gambling. they reside here in the Wen; monay of the gamblers live in the country; they write up to their gambling agent, whom they call their stockbroker...'in such a state of things how are you to expect young men to enter on a course of patient industry? how are you to expect tat they will seek to acquire fortune and fame by study or by application of any kind?'

cobbett is old church - he has it in for the jews, the quakers and the methodists (despising their preaching most of all - though he is partial to methodist hymns sung by pretty girls). 

thursday horsemouth bumped into his old friend andy james (now there was a surprise), friday he went for a womble round the hood with his old friend paul clark. there was something cruel and didactic about the itinerary (broadly the concrete footing of every new build for miles). this is response to paul's comment on a previous walk that at least there was no sign of riverside development here at the bohemian edge of the seaside towns. sadly this is not the case, as horsemouth endeavoured to prove, indeed concrete was being poured so hastily that it dribbled out of the cracks in the fencing.  whole new islands rising out of the estuary mud - actually no (but never mind, nearly).

and then over to canning town and the 80ies style dereliction on the estates behing the current wall of concrete. trinity street and the tinned up flats are still there - the stairwells have been blocked off (but then the fencing cut through)  and, sadly, to quote the joker in the killing joke,  'derelicts seem to have been using it as a toilet'. nonetheless dozens of empty flats all within 100 yards of each other while homeless families are cleansed out of the borough - doesn't look good horsemouth must say. paul noticed a sign up by the door of one of the flats'discourage unwanted callers' .

footsore they returned to horsemouth's lair and had a beer.

'sheep devour men.... and trees devour sheep'

now would probably be a good time to be reading the cobbett (a nation hamstrung by debt, pensions, and tithes (ecclesiastical taxes)) forcing the poor farm labourer down into debt and local poor law welfare provision and make-work schemes but horsemouth has put it to one side to concentrate on poe's gordon arthur pym -  essentially a treasure island knock-off. horsemouth has survived his first week back at work - there should be celebrations.

yesterday he was out at the v&a (surely one of the most beautiful museums) in the indian summer having wandered there through a misty hyde park - he hung around little france for a while pretending to read but in fact doing a lot of people watching/ letching the young. horsemouth is never out west. neither of the exhibitions he saw particularly did it for him but sitting by the central pond in the sun was definitely fun. there was an old copy of class war in the disobedient objects exhibition on protest and art, and the wapping news  from about the same time, video footage of greenham women rocking the fence. 

today it is rainy and grey - horsemouth hopes there's still some more sun to come from the year.

horsemouth is still thinking about the outcome of the scottish indepedence vote - he is still astonished that the ruling class allowed something so potentially destabilising (it kind of snuck up on him before he realised the full horror of it).

it is as if they have believed their own democratic and managerialist propoganda and think empire and union can be restructured as if it were some management buy-out, as if the only political strata of the state were the modern democratic/ administrative one, as if international finance markets didn't have something to say about the kind of stability they expect the 'democratic' regimes where value is warehoused and operations conducted.  of course even devo-max is now well and truly kicked into touch, the only chance of keeping it alive lying with idiot backbench tories (jumped up pack of rural solicitors that they are) demanding a proper settlement of the issue when cameron would prefer a quick pacifying bodge. salmond retires from the field of combat - it will be intersting to see if he writes anything (but it will also be utterly irrelevant).

in marx's parable of non-reproduction 'The Duchess of Sutherland and Slavery' the scottish lairds (integrated into the economy) go from larids to landowners and turf their subjects off the land to make way for sheep (in the medieval fashion - ' 'sheep devour men'  later still the sheep are replaced by trees 'and trees devour sheep' ) -  the whole region is depopulated (as  remains so as john hillaby notes in his walking diary journey through britain) and is returned to an anomalous state of 'nature'. instread of being developed it is literally devolved and that this 'looting' continues to lie at the heart of development is rosa luxemburgh's line (horsemouth gathers) . it may be that the existing set up with economic conditions set in the interest of london rather than scotland provides optimum stable long-term looting  of value, or it may be that a democratically run scotland could develop and produce more value (to be looted locally or to permit a marginally more equitable setup). but the motor for scottish independence was a political one, economic only at second remove, it is the irrelevance of how scottish people vote to how their economic future is decided in westminster. here we see the true 'triumph' of democracy and its continuation - we see the spread of the powerless local assemblies with tax raising powers that dare not raise taxes - a return of hollowed out historical forms and costumes or their invention. 

yet had salmond succeeded he would have royally fucked the westminster political elite - that they let it get even this close is tribute to their political ineptitude - that they have survived is largely down to luck.