a dream with singing

tomorrow - the 18th - is the anniversary of the first joint mix put up by the musicians of bremen on mixcloud (here you see horsemouth impersonating a 'down-and-out' olympic mascot - photo by max 'crow' reeves)

‘success - a form of social persecution’ - pasolini (quote modified)

and sadly one of the few social persecutions horsemouth doesn’t suffer from. he’s slightly hung over (having invited darsavini out for beers after the development committee and having drunk more beers than is sensible for a worknight). still he doesn’t have to work until two thirty.

the world continues to be a dreadful place (except where horsemouth is - where it is only annoying).

legislation intended to prevent the conversion of vast swathes of london into private landlord hell with houses in multiple occupation is now preventing the monkey-on-a-stick housing co-op from creating social housing (because it would be creating houses in multiple occupation). here horsemouth sighs. ah well - fuck it (and fuck newham) - the entire time horsemouth has been engaged in this social housing lark all it has ever done is get harder to create social housing. of course the trend towards houses in multiple occupation (rather than houses housing families) is driven by low wages - only multiple occupation makes the rent affordable - precarity (both of income and of immigration status) results in ‘churn’ (a high turn over in tenants). legislation will not prevent the proportion of dwellings let to families drop in newham (for example) or elsewhere throughout what horsemouth refers to as the seaside towns.

apparently there’s a lot of cheap(er) housing in hastings.

afterwards horsemouth and darsavini discussed teleology - the bugbear against which we are all supposed to fight - and yet horsemouth thinks there are historical and political contradictions that force things in particular directions (if not at so great a level to inevitably lead to communism), they can (indeed) point the other way.

afterwards there was a dream with singing.

'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.
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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.

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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).

quoth the heron 'nevermore' (on the eve of fluxus)

horsemouth is up (early) with a slight headache having bumped into his old friend luzette strauss (and her husband richard) on the canal towpath. the repaired to the improbable hipster pub by the side of the blackwall tunnel approach to speculate on how business people think.

horsemouth was off up three mills field the better to read the eve of fluxus the fluxmemoir of billie maciunas  wife of fluxus founder and guru george maciunas. unlike many art memoirs that are full of the joys of the artistic life, or at least redemption of the suffering through eventual success, this is a bleak tale of the art world, art dealers and even friends descending like vultures after george's death to strip the corpse of fluxus. years later billie sees george maciunas prefabricated building system exhibited in a gallery. the building system was originally designed to provide mass housing and was published as an appendix to henry flynt's book communists must give revolutionary leadership in culture, a book which george had designed. however the gallery owner denied that there was any connection between maciunas and flynt and 'macunias's political statement on the efficacy of mass-produced housing was branded as apolitical, seamless and purely aesthetic'.

in his life maciunas was anti the art world, in billie and nam june paik's reading he 'tried to seize not only the production's medium but also the distribution system of the art world' , he saw that artists lost control of their own products.

following george's death billie suffers at the hands of various beatniks, artist' colonies, dealers, before escaping to portugal, later she learns portuguese and translates poetry. richard translates from the portuguese and for a long time published translations of mozambiquan and other african authors - sadly print on demand and e-books (and all the rest of it) came to late to save his publishing business aflame books.

quoth the heron 'nevermore'

a heron is perched on the door of number 10 downing street muttering nevermore to itself, attacking policemen, hunting socks the cat, and making sorties to divebomb guardsmen. johnny morris is dead - they may have to call bear grylls.