horsemouth is a little disturbed to find that not only did he unconsciously (honestly) lift part of john fahey's the death of the clayton peacock for his extended slide guitar piece (roughly up to 0.42), he also lifted part of his revelation on the banks of the pawtuxent (roughly 0.17 to 0.20). the first he suspected it was fahey - he just couldn't remember which one, the second he was surprised and horrified when it popped out of the speaker at him.
horsemouth's magnum opus (as recorded a few years ago in mr. nick's bathroom) goes a little something like this:
first the main theme from jean renoir's film partie de campagne (kosma/ monteiro),
an interlude from deep river (trad. arr. fahey - either a showtune adopted as a spiritual or a spiritual adopted as a showtune horsemouth can't remember which),
the statement of two themes from the death of the clayton peacock,
an answering theme from (as horsemouth now discovers) revelation on the banks of the pawtuxent, the re-statement of the peacock themes with interpolated chords moving in minor thirds.
some (horsemouth hopes) original material involving ascending chords in minor thirds (bearing a similarity to something by the bartok influenced jonas hellborg's the word album),
a pause,
some material from gustav holst's mars -bringer of war played in four time, variously re-titled the martian war-machine stomp by hawkwind or 14-18 mechanised warfare blues by horsemouth.
horsemouth's guitar is tuned daddad (nashville).
of course the whole thing is too long and bloated with pretension - if it were a dead sheep it would float downstream.
horsemouth is reading gary klein's sources of power - an account of intuitive, or naturalised, decision making - rather than the rational choices model of peer soelberg (1967). soelberg taught a course in decision making at MIT's sloan school of management - when it came time for the students to choose their career he expected them to use a rational choice model (you know, identifying options, evaluating options, and then choosing between them, picking the one with the highest score), instead they went with gut feeling, there was one that just felt right. when soelberg asked them how it was going they pretended to have not made the decision yet or to be using rational means, or engaged in fiddling the evaluation weightings to achieve their predetermined goal.
this (of course) contrasts quite nicely with samuel smiles' (of self-help fame) well brought up victorians and marks the rolling back of rationality - and option evaluation (think of myers-briggs). instead people simply recognise the situation and then go for a solution similar to the ones they used before or go for the first option that looks like it will work (rather than the best optimised option), visualising what the consequences will be, if the visualisation involved too many steps they will think again. only if all else fails will they retreat to a rational choices model.
outside it is a beautiful cold , chrisp and blue day. horsemouth will probably go for a walk. it looks like work is over.
Monday, 15 December 2014
Sunday, 14 December 2014
'in recording the obscure labours of humble enthusiasts'
horsemouth is back from johnny and denise's in the suburbs having let himself be bullied by the transport infrastructure (or rather the limited representation of it available online) - he opted for the 'safe' route of returning via south woodford (last westbound tube 12.05) - as a result he had to leave the party just as they were putting on the dancehall, the alcohol had done its necessary work and he was beginning to re-connect with his sociability. ah well. I suppose there will always be next year (until there isn't). horsemouth didn't fancy a drunken stagger back (via unspecified night buses) or (still worse) a hungover stagger back at painful a.m.
horsemouth is reading two things at the moment - duncan (and linda) williamson's fireside tales of the traveller children (borrowed) which includes a variant on the musicians of bremen featuring a donkey, a sheep, a duck and cockerel. so far he's only read the story about the hedgehurst king (a kind of were-hedgehog). and the introduction to samuel smiles self-help. from whence comes the title of this piece (a description of smiles' practice).
horsemouth is reading two things at the moment - duncan (and linda) williamson's fireside tales of the traveller children (borrowed) which includes a variant on the musicians of bremen featuring a donkey, a sheep, a duck and cockerel. so far he's only read the story about the hedgehurst king (a kind of were-hedgehog). and the introduction to samuel smiles self-help. from whence comes the title of this piece (a description of smiles' practice).
Friday, 12 December 2014
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).
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).
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.
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.
Monday, 8 December 2014
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.'
----------------------------------------------
horsemouth will write up the gig he went to sunday night another time.
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.'
----------------------------------------------
horsemouth will write up the gig he went to sunday night another time.
Saturday, 6 December 2014
' 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.
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.
Friday, 5 December 2014
'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);
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.
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.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)