walter benjamin's post war career

horsemouth's ears pricked up when he heard of walter benjamin's post war career - there was a slight snicker in the speakers voice so possibly it could have been a joke at the expense of his listeners, or benjamin's posthumous re-writers and anthologisers perhaps. anyway. all at once horsemouth was reminded of richard rorty's remix of heidegger's career - in which heidegger fled fascism and in general came round to rorty's way of thinking and was an all round much nicer person.

horsemouth imagined walter benjamin not halting at the spanish border but spectacularly blagging his way across it by sheer charm alone, through spain to portugal to the azores and thus by flying boat to new york where he was to remain for the rest of his life. his embrace of positivist sociology and statistical methods, his falling out with adorno and the german set in L.A. his enthusiasm for jazz records, baseball cards, the mass produced ephemera of american life, his championing of be-bop and charlie parker (and later john coltrane) after being taken out to harlem by anais nin.

of course in america he got enormously fat but remained somewhat owlish behind his spectacles to the end of his days.

varese / idiot st. crazy / cameron bain

as a child varese used to escape from his difficult family life by swimming. one night he went for a swim and swam out too far. a dolphin nudged him gently back to shore. if this doesn't entirely accord in your mind with ionisation and all those sirens and rattling sheets of metal then imagine him in his workshop downstairs in his little red brick house in sullivan street in new york. a piano takes up most of the room, there are gongs and musical instruments from around the world. upstairs is the kitchen coloured green by the sunlight in the trees in the garden. from behind the workshop's door come 'thunderous olympian sounds' according the visiting anais nin. strangely she gets only one line in louise varese's varese a looking glass diary but gives 8 references to the vareses (and that's just in volume 3 of her autobiography).

idiot st. crazy comes from dunkirk and can play. horsemouth went out to see him (and others) play last night (more on this later).

 

today is the birthday of cameron bain who died this year. freebird would be too corny (though they did play it at his wake). when he and horsemouth talked they mainly talked about heavy metal and russian and east european literature. they almost entirely met at parties and almost entirely talked at the start of the evening - for later on they would both be too drunk - he drank like a russian). horsemouth (as a child of the valleys) liked his commitment to the style of heavy rock. cameron's own guitar playing came out of the new zealand 'play...listen... play again' school. the miracle of recording means we have at least something of him - he is not gone utterly. he waves back to us from the sun from a vantage point high up in the beckton alps. we do not notice. we are too busy talking.


horsemouth will close with an epigram from sigizmund krzhizhanovsky picked (after a few tries) by bibliomancy (book divination) 'I am not alone. Logic is with me.'

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horsemouth will write up the gig he went to sunday night another time.

' a daily record of that part of one's life, which he can relate to himself without blushing.'

ambrose bierce is phlegmatic about what a diary can achieve noting its inevitable self-censorship;

hoggart is struggling with the dangers of self-censorship (and, if one should succeed in that battle, of censorship itself). hoggart notes 3 kinds of aphorism in common use - putting up with things, those concerned with tolerance, belonging and charity, ones on the value of honesty, against these he counterposes the aphorisms of the state and of management 'you're not living in the real world' and the positively bloodthirsty 'you can't make an omelette without breaking eggs' .

horsemouth is positively a fan of 'you can't make an omelette...'. this is because he is a sucker for the romance of development, he feels a positive moral need to respond to the pain and suffering of the world with some concrete action, one that is not just a repetition of eschatological revolutionary pieties (a series of token tantrums and shock slogans). or at least he used to and it is still part of his mental make-up.

strangely meszaros is concerned with the 'there's no alternative'/ 'in the real world' refusal of debate also - pointing out that if this were the case (as politicians often say) there would be no point in electing politicians as politics would have no meaning.

the hoggart book (the way we live now) is wise and sane and a little stodgy.  horsemouth was pleased to read clinical wasteman (in 2012 piece on mute) praising capitalism for its impersonalism, attempting to escape the black hole of 'community' and 'authenticity' - in capitalism (for all that it is evil) we are granted at least global rather than local opportunities. while many would welcome a retreat into community, a world reduced to a human scale, it would still be a reduction. hoggart points out that many 'community' activities are in fact often staffed by the middle-class and yet intended to make provision for the poor and so do not demonstrate community but its division.

'to all the people who have made the exodus from society and its politics' (mary celeste)

fred inglis takes hoggart to be an egalitarian authority, he enjoins would be investigators to be 'one of the people on whom nothing is lost' in the words of henry james. this seems to horsemouth something of a curse - but then he is, according to myers briggs as an introvert someone not that interested in observing and responding to the social process but more with the structure of of ideas and still more with actual outcomes.

like ranciere hoggart is resistant to theories that explain away, for instance the following quote seems perfectly reasonable to horsemouth and yet at the same time deeply wrong (hoggart takes against it too);

 'all state education is a sort of dynamo machine for polarising the popular mind; for turning and holding its lines of force in the direction supposed to be most effective for state purposes.' - the education of henry adams, 1918. 

of course education policy in this country is not education policy but an animal husbandry policy (seeing as the ruling class do not use the schools for which they decide policy - ok the millibland twins were state educated (god bless you ralph) but otherwise not). so in theory education policy should be framed by what is best for the state - but no the picture is incredibly more complex (and even more random). like housing, education is one of the ministries where nebbishes are warehoused, portfolios for oblivion, and out of which they attempt to clamber by making a lot of noise. some even survive to make it back to the back benches.

december the fourth was the anniversary of the discovery by sailors on the dei gratia of the empty mary celeste floating unmanned. the bbc news briefing calls her the marie celeste - her fictional name in the story by sir arthur conan doyle. among the crew of the mary celeste who were lost were the captain benjamin briggs, his wife sarah, and their daughter sophia. a son arthur was left with the paternal grandmother in marion massachusetts. a lineal descendent of arthur is the physicist lyman briggs, husband to katherine cook briggs and father to isabel briggs myers - the promulgators of the myers-briggs personality test. the mary celeste was eventually (1885) wrecked off the coast of haiti in a bogus insurance claim attempt.

 this blog contains at least one lie.

the illumination at canning town (roses and snow)

horsemouth is slightly headachey - no surprises really (a beer with john smith, a can of fosters with andy and paddy, a white mulled wine and a red mulled wine out in a cold canning town). horsemouth was out to witness the illumination at canning town - there was a samba band under the flyover (most excellent) and a cold looking stick in the wheel played clustered round a single microphone and with a minimum of banter. horsemouth chatted with georgina brett who does a voice into multiple guitar delays solo choir thing (or will do up at the others in stoke newington on sunday 7th december together with idiot st. crazy, hems, darkroom, darren sangita and himanish goswamy for a fiver) but not tonight - too cold. once, she said, she'd spent 6 months rehearsing for 3 hours a day to sing a piece by stockhausen as part of a large choral ensemble, annotating the score to work out what stockhausen was doing (but then she'd also played in a samba band).


check it out - robbie basho and tablas too...

horsemouth bumped into vic as well (who, busy as ever, is doing a tea dance at which ivan will be appearing at finsbury town hall). he bumped into jamie lucie also.

it was the library that finished them off and sent them all their various ways - there was a bar - but it was in a library - the books were hidden and the carpet covered with clingfilm but still it was in a library and thus sacred space.

three weeks to the solstice and thus to horsemouth's next gig - ('what are you? a druid?' remarked john smith). next week horsemouth labours in his standard pattern. today he will stock up on museli ahead of the apocalypse. yesterday he and john smith went for pizza and did some more work on noah, he played his version of satan your kingdom must come down to andy and paddy.

apart from last night it's unseasonably warm, the warming seas are producing a plague of giant lobsters soon they will begin swimming towards land and the (brief) age of the crustacean will dawn. horsemouth is with the somewhat grumpy richard hoggart (beset around with relativism and commercialism) - hoggart looks for good bad books, the kind of generic trash that stimulates thought and motivates feeling. horsemouth would cite philip k. dick's work as an example of this. hoggart quotes c.s. lewis 'the ideally bad book is one of which a good reading is impossible' - a book so braindead and of its type that nothing other can be made of anything in it.

"the moon and sun are travelers through eternity. even the years wander on...'

horsemouth has worked and walked back home and has had a little nip of pastis to celebrate (he will now have a coffee to sober back up and probably fry some potatoes). horsemouth has been listening to robbie basho's two concerts from Coe College's Sinclair Auditorium and to an unreleased rarity death song, basho uses his wordless singing the way most rock bands would use a lead guitar solo - to take him up and beyond.

beautiful golden autumn sunlight is shining into his room - horsemouth would like more beautiful autumn sunlight to shine in his room but without rearranging the building it is impossible.

horsemouth has a plan to tour around the sun - if a leeway of a week is allowed - horsemouth has already played the summer solstice 21/06 (on 28/06 as part of musicians of bremen at ayesha's secret house party), lammas (9/08) on 6/08 for tim goldie's abject bloc, the autumn equinox... musicians of bremen lamentably failed to play on but they did manage samhain (well halloween) on 31/10 at cafe bohemia. horsemouth has a cunning plan to play the winter solstice (21/12) on the 20/12 as a solo gig (more details soon). of such bodging and haggling is his life made. but it feels good to get his musical endeavours in sync (sort of) with the heavens. thereafter his next gig should be early february (imbolc/ groundhog day) midway between this and the vernal equinox is fahey week (incorporating basho day) - horsemouth will try to get blue crystal fire (by robbie basho) an airing.

today is the anniversary of the death of the poet matsuo bashō (from whom robbie basho took his name);

 "The moon and sun are travelers through eternity. Even the years wander on. Whether drifting through life on a boat or climbing toward old age leading a horse, each day is a journey, and the journey itself is home.”

'satan your kingdom must come down'

horsemouth is up early - his body now wakes him up at about a quarter to seven - later he goes to work (he will walk in to save money and to get fitter). the national guard occupies ferguson. the capitalist system countinues to bump along the bottom with low interest rates and low returns. serco have been reawarded the contract to run women's deportation centres despite currently being investigated for sexual assaults upon inmates.



 horsemouth has been working on satan your kingdom must come down (daddad 'nashville')

- he's bodging it a bit but it's sounding pretty good, he needs to get the repeat pattern smooth (and effortless) so he can sing strongly over it (it's a straightforward set of blues cadences). horsemouth is mainly thinking of the willie nelson version above - he should give a listen to the earlier gospel versions.