urban wanderings with economical and political observations relative to matters applicable to, and illustrated by, the estates

horsemouth has started on william cobbett's rural rides - cobbett points to the corporations, to crown lands usurped by various lords, he points to taxfarming and rentiers, 'base and fraudulent paper money, that loan-jobbers, stock-jobbers and jews' etc. etc. cobbet rides out west (kensington to uphusband) past the country houses of the gentry who sit in parliament and have let this happen. likewise, though thankfully without the anti-semitism,  horsemouth finds marshall berman's all that is solid melts into air is useful here. here to horsemouth, in the east, on his urban wanderings, robert moses and his corporations and expressways, here at the edge of docklands, in an interstitial district of swamp and car yards and (at best) distribution centres triangulated by giant sweeping roads, cycle paths, trainlines, tubelines. muddy tidal rivers reveal the swamp underneath.

at goodluck hope a footbridge spans the river and a new luxury district rises where there were once factories and warehouses. everywhere the cranes rise up at their command depositing investment silos of debt serving rental income like alien eggs. deep in the earth tunneling machines enact 25 year plans. the city's population will swell by the million until the floodwaters come, or the future runs out.

and on the estates a sure but steady rinse begins where even the social housing that remains on them is sold or the tenants within displaced by bedroom taxes (the requirement of overcrowding by law), by housing benefit caps, in the long march of possession orders for rent arrears through the courts. above this and as ideology a willingness to seek market value to fund affordable housing, a romance of development in difficult times, where the old stock is either demolished or supplemented by properties at affordable rent. affordable rent itself already falsified by vast increases in housing benefit for those in work, by working tax credits.

oh the crocodile tears up at the unaffordability of it all, dressed in the costume of cobbett, in the sack cloth and ashes of prudence. soon an adjustment will have to be made, perhaps lean years for the investors, creative destruction - the dumb money harvested, their assets picked over, and then returning market confidence, returning investor confidence. the water flows down to the sea, the sea floods in, tides turn, estuary mud stinks but it is soon covered again, the money is loaned out, assets created, rents charged, the debts are repaid with interest or the assets seized, it all balances, it's all cycles, and the money.... the money seems to pervade everything and yet fly upwards into the skies, whether those skies are troubled or clear and blue.

it is a landscape that is making a killing.

and down below (as if on google earth) our camera zooms in on a solitary figure walking, circling round him, with him, close by, watching and silently judging. it is horsemouth. he walks out to bow ecology park to do a little reading, watching the construction round what was goodluck hope, waiting to see if they will open up the riverside walkway at the other end of the park - one that stretches clear down to the tip of canning town. but look at his face, you can see he is troubled, old wrongs trouble him, he watches the water flow down to the sea from this his garden. horsemouth has no horse, he only has his feet, he will take you where he can, and show you what he sees, he will tell you what can be told and leave a silence to indicate what cannot. and then he will hand you over to someone who will tell you something altogether different. he hopes that in the end you will see it his way.

confessions of the r(ev)eal

so horsemouth is back reading beneath the visiting moon by david grubb - he had it lent out until just recently in a fit of prosyletising. horsemouth doesn't do poetry much - he should do, he admires its concision, but he doesn't - he needs the stealth and seeming directness of prose. it is subtitled an english childhood but for horsemouth his time as a psychiatric nurse or indeed meeting the actor who is supposed to play him in the film of his life (horsemouth can't find any other reference to this film anywhere) or his proposal for 'memory photographs' in prose (and the blank pages he leaves for you to do this) are just as interesting.

one hundredth post

horsemouth's morning routine involves getting up, opening the curtains, turning on the computer, putting the coffee on, brushing his teeth (and perhaps getting dressed - depending on the weather)... and then he checks facebook (he may check his email or he may listen to the 5.30 news on iplayer either before or after doing this depending on his level of inspiration). it is there (or rather here) that he diarises whatever he did or thought about in the previous day or dreamed the previous night. he finds this form of digital confession very useful - similarly the ability to show people what he's been listening to, to invite them to listen to it too. but there is a sense in which it grants the control that prose gives to his actions - he can chose when and where to tell people these things, and they are not obliged to respond by social convention, they can elect to respond.

there's a problem with doing this in the morning in that this is often the sunniest part of the day (and horsemouth likes the sun).

of course in the old days one would have just gone round someone elses house for a cup of tea and chat - he does that a bit these days (friends on the block and that) - but it's a bit more like last of the summer wine than the likely lads. another outbreak of the bookgroup would be good.

horsemouth should get on with writing his gert ledig tribute - live from the social housing trenches of east london, he should do some more work on his singing and playing, and then of course (sigh) there are more books to be read. soon horsemouth is back at work - he's already taking boookings.

musicians of bremen reviewed and horsemouth out and about being sociable

thanks to iona tanguay (of gertrude) for writing a review of  musicians of bremen's album.

'he loves the public, but not as people'

so horsemouth went out to hear adam sherry (of dead forest index) sing a solo gig at an exhibition of max's photographs in the crypt of the little dorrit church (st. george the martyr - borough).  he has a good voice and layers himself up nicely with a loopstation pedal, his guitar accompaniment is  effective and unshowy with an unfashionably relaxed attitude to guitar tuning. as usual horsemouth would advise (as he would for himself) more structural variation in how the tunes are put together. 

with the loopstation horsemouth would make a comparison with david thomas broughton (who uses the loopstation to undermine/ supplant / call into question the moment of performance) and its use to provide a seamless redoubling of the performance (to allow one to harmonise with ones-self etc.).

horsemouth has been considering the following quote about robert moses, the famous carver out of the cross bronx expressway and faust as developer in chief in marshall berman's all that is solid melts into air.  the quote is from frances perkins (america's first secretary for labor under FDR),

'he loves the public but not as people. the public is ... a great amorphous mass to him; it needs to be bathed, it needs to be aired, it needs recreation, but not for personal reasons - just to make it a better public.' 

new improved sociability horsemouth has been out two nights in a row - surely this is a bit excessive. 

'association with human beings lures one into self-observation'

one of many statements in Kafka's notebooks later published posthumously in Parables and Paradoxes (1946), and The Blue Octavo Notebooks (1954) as translated by Ernst Kaiser and Eithne Wilkins - ths is now a shop billboard on redchurch street in shoreditch (but is it a clothes shop or a restaurant or a perfumiers? - horsemouth could not tell). 

sunday, though horsemouth doesn't think much of him as a painter, horsemouth went out to a william burroughs exhibit - he liked the things that had been shot at, he liked three little morrocan themed minitures by brion gysin - he liked the dreammachine (but he had seen it before at the perfume launch). strangely horsemouth bumped into jen (who he has not seen in a long time - she asked to be remembered to ross and elsie). they then went round myk's awesome flat nearby for a coffee (horsemouth repo'd his copy of david grubb's beneath the visiting moon) and then for vegan cake in the horror that is brick lane - but the cake stall wasn't there so horsemouth had a tagine instead.

they then (for they were mob handed) went off to a cafe in hackney in search of improvised music (there horsemouth met merv who horsemouth also hasn't seen in a long time). they then went to a pub near liverpool street to round out the evening (and discussed life, love and movies). for the whole time of horsemouth's existence in shoreditch (about 10 years) the pub (the crown and shuttle?) had been derelict - inside it has stripped walls and a beer garden and a selection of real ales at 4 pounds plus a pint. 

horsemouth had thought of visiting the exhibition with sean the previous evening - but sean demurred saying that the last time he'd seen the shot at things william burroughs himself had been there.

here we see burroughs and kafka reappraised in terms of their positive benificent aspect -'association with human beings' and 'self-observation' are understood postively and immediately re-incorporated into the business of hustling us to seek satisfaction for our wants in material items. the couples walked around hand in hand - the gaggles of friends stopped for frequent consultations (in spanish or italian) - it all loooked very pretty in the slightly autumnal  sunlight. monday people are back to work but for now they want to run and play (and later cake). 

horsemouth doesn't feel himself a part of it - but he sees the lure  of it - new improved horsemouth is trying to get as much socialising in as he can before the world of work begins again and he's down the rabbit hole for another year.

on our nevsky prospect everything is also, once again, made elsewhere. they will take us off to crystal palace, once again.

horsemouth invites you all to the musicians of bremen bandcamp page which even includes a free download of musicians of bremen's  cover versions.

now read on...

'I am afraid my sentences are becoming grammatically incorrect.'  - andre gide (last words).

horsemouth is proposing a little fiction (collectively authored). will people bite? he needs to go get a copy of a gert ledig book - here we have an omniscient god's eye view of everything but one that stays with one character (and even goes inside his or her head) but then when they meet another character the worldview hops into that characters head and away they go - chain letter/ pass the parcel/ video game. this works well for warzones and characters at the end of their tether or beyond it. it makes the world feel like a vast senseless and malevolent  machine, like being inside a dardennes brothers movie, and it makes it easy for people to co-operate on writing a piece (hopefully). fiction will allow us to telescope events together.

horsemouth proposes that they thinly fictionalise their own struggles, conflicts etc. - stay with what you know. 

horsemouth's brother's kid plays a lot of shoot'em up video games - once you have seen an enemy (or an ally) they become highlighted and can be seen through walls. this probably helps reproduce the effect of being able to hear them moving about or perhaps it just makes the actual experience less random, makes it seem more like it makes sense and is logically satisfying. the character even continues to see for a limited time after their own death and the death is replayed (horsemouth suspects for these reasons). and then the character is off - reborn into this world of endless conflict once again. (strangely horsemouth's brother's kid seems in no hurry to become a buddhist). 

today horsemouth will probably finish off all that is solid... he's also dipping into the oxford book of death (dj enright) which has a part of the ressurection at cookham as its cover. currently horsemouth is a little squeamish about the topic (death not resurrection)  - he hasn't played the reverend gary davis's death don't have no mercy recently because truly it doesn't (and neither does life), he liked (and will probably steal) the following stanza,

'life's too short for worrying.'

'yes, that's what worries me.'

origin unknown. 

'get'em out by friday'

'unrestricted and grandiose developments of productive forces will render political revolution superfluous' - g. lukacs, goethe and his age. 

 it's not looking too bad outside. horsemouth has woken up with a mild headache something he puts down to either;
 A) the igor like deformation of vertebrae where it joins his skull,
B) the humongous quantites of wax filling his ears causing ear infections
C) his persistent under-caffeination.

of course lukacs isn't arguing for this - or inventing that particular wired-neo-liberal panglossianism (we may not live in the best of all possible worlds just yet but we will do soon and even then it will keep on getting better and better by means of smart design and total quality management). what he is doing is identifying it as the ideology of faust, in particular the faust of book two, faust the developer, or so marshall berman argues in his all that is solid melts into air. faust unites metropolis (heart and head) in himself but this still won't stop him from doing evil in the service of his plan, philemon and baucis (that delightful old couple from ovid) still survive on some prime real estate, the winkler has failed to get them out, faust despatches the heavies but says he doesn't want to know about it.


there is always a human price to be paid for development - a necessary sacrifice - this is the real faustian bargain (or so berman argues). lukacs writes on mandeville and the fable of the bees horsemouth will have to find this. horsemouth is back from his brother's - but he's back up there soon. he's now contactable by phone. in a bit he'll go for a wander and read some more berman.

work (having been renamed and re-organised) will begin again sometime after 8th september.

'everybody has a part to play'

so horsemouth watched snowpiercer round anthony's (it was that or the remake of battle for the planet of the apes) - if modern films are theme park rides then a film set on a train after the end of the world (by ice) hurtling on a loop round the world once every year should be a perfect set up. there is indeed the old soviet-era gag about russia as a train, under lenin .... this, under stalin... this, under andropov... steadily getting worse, how much longer can this train keep rolling, if indeed it hasn't been shunted into a siding and forgotten.

at the 'head' the engine are the decadent ruling class, at the tail the surplus people. or so it at first appears, but as tilda swinton. a representative of the head, says, 'everybody has a part to play'. every so often the heavies appear to take some children. there is a religion that sanctifies the social position of everybody on the train but during the rebellion an angel winged party-goer is thrown down into the grinding cogs of the engine. beneath the art deco surfaces are revealed... it is metropolis on wheels, modernism on a loop sliding back into myth, the driver needs reminding of the factories act.

here it is not the fact that the train must get somewhere at a particular time (12.10 to tuscon or whatever) but that the train has a structure - a head and a tail, social stratification by carriage/ by ticketing, that is the unity. the plot (of course) has more holes than a thing with a lot of holes, it shows its comic book origins carriage by carriage, set up by set up, in an excess of detail, it obeys the genre conventions (but it could just as well be a spaghetti western, or a horror film or a whodunnit). it's that czech special effects with korean/ western actors slumming it co-production (old boy, tilda swinton, ed harris).

it ends with a polar bear as a symbol of life outside the train.

there is the big fantasy takeover of both children's reading and the cinema - hunger games, the terminal girl of alien becomes the 'right-of-passage' girl it's girls because girls still read as darshavini pointed out, she'd watched one recently set in an underground silo that she felt worked better spatially. there are all these mainstream dystopia - but horsemouth is not clear what they are for. the real problem is when people don't have a part to play - when they really are, or will be, surplus to the needs of capitalism. can't capitalism retreat from being a world social system, what precisely does this mean.

 -------------------
 today horsemouth is probably off to chateau bremen - then he's away to a gig (by one of grizzly bear), thursday, friday, he babysits his brother's kids (maybe monday too).

the love of the worker bees (horsemouth at 50)

this morning is grey. horsemouth has survived until 50 in line with the statistical trend for people of his colour, class, and birthplace. later he goes to the pub to be commiserated by his few remaining friends. horsemouth feels better about it than he did last year - last year he was in the pub drowning his sorrows by about 2pm - he was making some efforts to record a slide guitar part for dorothy, but it wasn't happening, for some reason horsemouth couldn't count bars. this year horsemouth is a little more organised (he has told people in advance).

so yesterday morning horsemouth went up to 3 mills green and lay about in the sunshine reading alexandra kollontai's love of worker bees (no definite articles please, she's russian) and in particular the first story vasilisa malygina - vasilisa struggles to establish a communal house, but the residents treat her like shit, defeated she retires. as horsemouth walked back he watched two pieces of litter engaged in some love play or perhaps doing the tango seemingly oblivious to the fact that one of them was an empty bag of crisps and the other a plastic bag containing the byproduct of the warm social relationship between a dog and a human. they skipped and danced and circled round each other until horsemouth drew near when they went silent and pretended to be inanimate again (at least until he had passed). if horsemouth were gogol they'd talk and have careers.

sean has been in touch;

 "Had some more thoughts about androids/replicants or whatever (hey, you asked).... Isn't all this Dick stuff about "empathy" a bit like speciesism? Animals lack what we might call empathy - red in tooth and claw and all that - but does this mean they have no right to exist on their own terms? I mean, why should intelligent machines behave like humans? Perhaps they will have other qualities - quite likely more viable ones - that we don't have....
What would be the point of creating machines that behave like humans anyway? We can already do that - under capitalism, the planet has become a huge facility for the mass production of humans....why build even more artificially? That is, of course, a rhetorical question. The ruling class want to make fake humans for the same reason they've made machines since the mechanical loom - to intensify production. Replicants would solve the difficulty of labour discipline - the final solution of the worker problem. So of course they wouldn't be designed to fully duplicate humans anyway.
I'm waiting for the internet to become self aware and start sending out terminators. Any day now...."

animals and empathy

well wild animals may exhibit some empathy (dolphins saving the odd sailor lost at sea etc. but in general they're too busy staying alive, hunting and killing (and, presumably, having fun doing it)).

but young animals definitely do exhibit empathy (and this is why we keep dogs and cats and monkeys as pets and deliberately infantilise them from their wild state). beyond that (rabbits, tortoises, goldfish) they function entirely as blank screens on which human's can project their empathy (and fondly imagine they are getting it back). the animals don't get a choice whether they are used as empathy surrogates by humans distressed at the 'red in tooth and claw' nature of capitalism and seeking succor in a trans-species domestic realm.

I think in a way PKD is parodying this by having people keeping squirrels and ostriches as pets - at least they're alive (unlike humans under capitalism). children are impelled towards animals as natural allies by sentimental adults (and then back away when they realize they have sharp teeth).

as the empathic (but not yet an ethical) circle expands less suitable animals are drawn into the 'pet' relationship - lions, bears, wolves etc. - traditionally 'wild' animals now seen as natural, balanced, and healing (of course these experiments are not always successful - look at 'bear life' dude killed and eaten by a particularly grumpy older bear ). only this morning on youtube horsemouth was watching some dude 'playing' with a pride of lions like they were big cats...

replicants and production - horsemouth will have to think about this.