'when omac is born the truth shall be known'

sean has been in touch;

'Couldn't resist attaching a double page spread from 70ies jack kirby comic  omac - a space satellite that downloads information directly into a human brain on earth via laser beam (a fucking pink laser beam at that!). Can't believe I hadn't noticed before that brother eye is jack kirby's version of valis ( jack must have been contacted  too - after all, it doesn't make sense valis would only contact one human. That would explain the change in his work when he "went cosmic"; the sheer volume of pages, and the increased abstraction that matches pkd's description of the patterned geometric hallucinations, obsessively reworked over and over....it all fits. And of course, omac was produced in 1974).

And Is it my imagination, or does professor forest - the inventor of brother eye in omac - look like josef stalin (see attached pic in page header)?
Didn't philip k. dick suspect that valis may actually have been a soviet mind control experiment? We wonder if this means that kirby theorized in a similar direction....
(Although we might note forest is a benign figure.... kirby always comes across as an anticapitalist)'

this idea is supported by the writer  Christopher Knowles “something very, very powerful hit [Kirby] around ’65 or ’66, and transformed him from an already imaginative man into a psychedelic shaman disguised as a freelance pencil pusher”  as quoted in Jeffrey J. Kripal’s 'Mutants and Mystics: Science Fiction, Superhero Comics, and the Paranormal', University of Chicago Press, p.154. (http://www.tcj.com/jack-kirby-hand-of-fire-roundtable-part-2/)

Must have missed that bit in Divine Invasions (I skimmed a fair bit of it)
You're right about pkd's female characters... in fact, I'd go a bit further and say its more than the resentment of the needy; he really doesn't like wimmin. Donna in scanner darkly or alys in flow my tears are particularly unpleasant examples of this.'

horsemouth is typing this in the corridor a) to avoid mind control rays and b) because the internet connection is better (if that is indeed a different thing).

sunday horsemouth went out for a wander round the eastend of history with max and myk (and sundry italians, americans, britishers) this was after wandering back the long way round through the eastend. at the  quadrivium where john williams (the wapping vampire) was allegedly buried - one literary reaction to his crimes was thomas de quincey's on murder considered as one of the fine arts. horsemouth hastily chose a passage and recited the following. 

'soon after the secret was explained: in more than a figurative sense "the murder was out." For in came the London morning papers, by which it appeared that, but three days before, a murder the most superb of the century by many degrees had occurred in the heart of London. I need hardly say that this was the great exterminating chef-d'oeuvre of Williams at Mr. Marr's, No. 29 Ratcliffe Highway. That was the début of the artist; at least for anything the public knew. What occurred at Mr. Williamson's twelve nights afterwards — the second work turned out from the same chisel — some people pronounced even superior.'   

'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.

poptones / turn the heater on (revisions of you / the blue house)

horsemouth is back from the west. he's feeling a bit run down and de-serotonin-ed (toxic chelsea lager/ busy week probably) - having been to see jah wobble (and various invaders of the heart ) play. after he goes to howard's (and then maybe another gig).

jah wobble is a big man these days - when horsemouth and paul arrived the club resounded to koto playing, then there was some taiko drumming with some japanese singing ... then a break and then jah wobble and some film and t.v. theme tunes(midnight cowboy, get carter, the sweeney, take five)  just when the audiences patience was getting used up he switched to old reggae tunes (java augustus pablo - again with the koto player), there was a percussion  interlude with jah wobble playing timbales and rototoms and the taiko drummer. at the mid point of the set visions of you, becoming more like god, (played to click, sinead o'connor's vocals on a sample - did horsemouth mention the drummer was a bit good - as drummers are these days) ending out with johnny rotter (johnny rotten impersonator) poptones, public image, and then everyone back onstage for the grand finale. the players horsemouth didn't realy know - veteran improv'er clive bell was only added on the day, the guitarists were a little busy for horsemouth's taste (but ____ aziz the second one can really play) and the keyboards a little cheesy (always one of jah wobbles failings).

it was most strange to see the public image material re- created note perfect (that was the quality of the players), the audience kind of didn't know what to do with it, but applauded loudly enough at the end. they were kind of pretending they'd moved on and didn't do nostalgia.

later, in the pub, horsemouth pointed out that the garage track playing was (basically) a dub bassline against diso drums - so very pil.

turn the heater on (the blue house) and this is where the story really starts. 

horsemouth headed up to howard's in hackney to make some music. they appear to be writing a song about noah using the technique of book divination, horsemouth's ear picked out a pentatonic melody (probably a hangover from the japanese music at the jah wobble gig), the chords aren't (perhaps they can try the classic motown trick of posh chords/ pentatonic melody). they then tried a 6/8 one named (by object divination) as the comet (a song of the type unwelcome visitor). they then tried blue crystal fire  and then kieth hudson turn the heater on (probably because new order covered it) - howard had recorded a great harmony version of it - but harmonies are precisely what throw horsemouth when he's singing. all this was on lucy's guitar, the slide tuned bad taste country and western guitar stayed in its case, perhaps (horsemouth thinks now) it's the right thing for noah . 

then he was off to a cunning folk gig in sutton house (or the blue house as it was in squatter days) -when he was being filmed for the hackney documentary horsemouth took django there as one of the first squat venues he'd been to in london god told me to do it, antisect(?), and as john reminded him another green world.  this time he was there to see stick in the wheel  and john constable (aka john crow) and to look over the building - he'd heard there was a room they'd left as the squatters had left it -  but they couldn't find it. horsemouth has to admitstick in the wheel  are great (hey they even have a song about looting) - they do a version ofraggle taggle gypsy-O  (the one with 7 gypsies who sang so neat and so complete) and a version of two sisters (a song of the type murder and the supernatural revenge). the woman who opened (at 8 sharp!) was from the norfolk folk clubs (good voice) - horsemouth liked the guitar playing on the first one (song of type - lover wants access to the house)  but (sadly) has forgotten her name. and at the end john constable ('the live poet not the dead painter'). 

all thing very london - which is strange seeing as its ending - even the high net worth individuals (what are we to say of this) are being driven out by the ultra-high net worth individuals.  

horsemouth may go for a walk today (or he may bottle it). sociability has cured his gringe - maybe he should try more of it. 

'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.

either toss the piano or fcuk off!

horsemouth is not against hoiking a piano out of a window of the norflab tower - he thinks it would sound great - what he is against is the reduction in the amount of housing available at social rent that the privatisation of norflab tower (and indeed the housing of wob star trust members there) means. of course if doing this led to the creation of more housing (at social rent) in the seaside towns (or even further out) horsemouth would have to modify his objection and admit that at least the best possible thing was being done given the difficult circumstances. 

horsemouth doesn't really care about local connection or consultation - he believes these are myths (but fairplay if you can make them work for you) - what he cares about is having a roof over his head at a price he (and other working or be-benefitted stiffs) can afford - ideally somewhere funky, if not somewhere boring will be fine. he cares about keeping the poor (like himself) in the seaside towns. not because he thinks it is important to have a 'vibrant mix' of rich and poor (fcuk the rich) - but because the poor need to be close to their means of earning a living, they need to be close to the opportunity that the money sloshing around this city provides. it is merely that he will end up even poorer and more knackered if he has to commute in.

it is no surprise that the established tenants of the estates bordering on norflab are unenthusiastic about piano throwing games - it just looks like a waste of money to them - and that they are unenthusiastic about the wonderful community generating claims for modern art (because frankly these  claims are rubbish). the money spent by harca on revamping the neighbourhood (so the rich in norflab don't feel they are moving into a slum) benefits them far more than the presence of 'creatives' and their poodle murals. but the current tenants aren't the people disadvantaged by gentrification (or redevelopment as it is known) - the people disadvantaged are their sons and daughters who cannot get anywhere to live and the people displaced so that the gentrifiers and the bow artists can move in - they are people who (almost entirely) are not local  and have never been local . the people who lose out are not here and will now never come.

but the artists have forgotten something as well - they, in a rush to embrace communitarian rhetoric, have forgotten the contempt the da-daists and futurists felt for the established world and the denizens of it rich and poor - it is not enough to ironize both the world of your parents and the world of the estate trash you must show that you know better than both.

now either toss the piano or fcuk off!