'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).

rosamund plays piano

sean has been in touch;

'We imagine that as an occasional participant in bourgeois politics (without illusions, naturally), horsemouth welcomes the jezbollah victory in the labour leadership contest. Of course its entertaining - one day in and the claims of a risk to national security are already piling up, and blairbrownistas are resigning en masse from jobs they haven't even been offered yet (twats) But give it a couple of years and corbynomics - the use of state institutions to bypass a dysfunctional banking system in order to invest in production directly - will start to appeal to members of the ruling class as a solution to deepening crisis and survival in the face of a more combative proletariat. Ok, that bit about a more combative proletariat might be a slight exaggeration - just a bit! - but you know what I'm getting at....' 

last night horsemouth went out to see laura cannell play at cafe oto. he was a little early getting there (what it is to live in a city with efficient mass transit) so he wandered down ridley road market and heard the last tune by solution sound system - they kept promising another but it hadn't materialised by the time horsemouth wandered off. he bumped into one of laura's old friends who lies down near the nags head. he saw scottish johnny (johnny reggae) through the crowd.

he then wandered round the corner and hid in the (re-located) arcola theatre bar until john clarkson arrived. angharad davies was up first overbowed violin, delicate harmonics, oliver coates (cello) was up next - a short piece and then a long repetitive piece (about 25 minutes in length), then laura cannell playing tracks from her first album and her new album (alternating under bowed violin and recorders)and then a short piece by a quartet of the musicians (sorry third violinist dude horsemouth did not catch your name) - this last line up made a fine old racket.

horsemouth last saw laura cannell play in the fishermen's chapel in leigh (which he thought was a slightly better gig to be honest). on the way back the overground through hackney central was out (due to planned track maintenance) though there was a replacement bus service - horsemouth took the branch down through shadwell and back on the seaside towns light tramway instead. he hasn't mentioned that to get to the grandmaster flash gig he made use of the interchange between hackney central and hackney downs (there it only took them 30 years to build a corridor).

in middlemarch rosamund has just played the piano and sung - she plays the piano well, she sings adequately, george eliot seems to distrust sound describing its emotional effects as echoes - as something not really there. horsemouth watched footage of a friend jumping off a bridge into a river for fun - its what he remembers about her, her adventurous spirit. it made him tidy up his flat and do the washing up.

on viewing the new rent silos (and the empty boarded up estates of social housing awaiting demolition)

'come friendly bombs...
fall on the homes of conservative MPs,
on their first homes
and their second homes, on the ones they let out to their grannies and on their duck islands

come friendly bombs and smart bombs
fall and fly down the chimneys
of developers
delivering napalm like a bad santa -
'have you been good children?'
'well, have you?
eh?'

come friendly bombs
wait until the workers have gone home
and then
blast each rent farming silo back into nilotic mud
so that when ISIS come
they will not even be sure
that anything used to be there ...

come friendly bombs
'get it ready for the plough,
the cabbages are coming now'

so horsemouth went wandering about aimlessly with max. the bbc weather predicted sun and was is indeed sunny and a decent 20 degrees or so. (it will be the same today). later (after an email clarifying the political situation of the monkey-on-a-stick housing co-operative) horsemouth succumbed to anger and wrote a poem largely based on that 'extremist' john betjman's anti-suburb screed 'come friendly bombs (fall on slough)' . horsemouth is not against the suburbs or the country or the town - he is only against them as they currently exist.

earlier max had got on the 25. horsemouth went to up meet him at bow church station and then they wandered down through stroudly walk past the building where gandhi stayed during his time in london (and site of r.d.laing's therapeutic community - kingsley hall) . in the park alongside it there were new community facilities - max and horsemouth stopped for a game of ping-pong (well a knockabout really - neither play well enough for it to be worth scoring).

thence across the blackwall tunnel approach and down the canal from three mills then back up to the road again and across the bridge into the retail park on the site of the former gasworks. of course this whole area of retail park/ distribution warehouses/ small grade factories and (down towards the bow flyover) scrapyards sandwiched between the river lea and the dlr railwayline has got to look threatened by the encroaching blocks of commuter hutches and the rent farming silos on either side. the dust here from diggers labouring away ontop of mounds of shit hurts horsemouth's eyes and throat. there are a few pubs that never seem to open. the fear must be that it will go the way of 'city island' another ex-industrial site now sprouting tower-blocks later on horsemouth and max's itinerary just opposite bow ecology park (just south of the bow flyover).

 there horsemouth and max paused a bit to plan further wanderings and elected to try the trinity street estate in heavily rebuilt canning town - when they got there it was as horsemouth saw it last (on his similar wandering with paul clark) empty, tinned up and, in the words of a batman comic 'derelicts have been using it as a toilet' . there it sat in the sun still (as it has done for the last 3 years) waiting for the wrecking ball and the concrete nibbler - for social housing to end and for its replacement with more rent silos and 'affordable housing'.
feeling peckish our intrepid adventurers journeyed back across the flyover to chrisp street market, down backstreets past gentrification poodles painted on buildings by bow arts trust - but the curry hut was shut - after a brief and unsatisfactory lunch horsemouth set off to put max on the right road (and the quickest route) through the estates of east london to the royal london hospital - they parted company at stepney green and horsemouth returned via st. dunstan's, brickfields and the limehouse cut.

when the sun shines london becomes a kind of paradise.

 when he got home he ran his feet under the cold tap and had a lie down. this evening he goes to a gig (orchestre baobab) and a catch-up with some friends.

what will you find in the horsemouth folk archive since 21st march?

beautiful natural death, ramakrishna in pittsburg, visiting times at the horsemouth guitar museum, the hound of hounslow, the london whale, quoth the heron 'nevermore', the three deaths of harry smith,'such flowers as the hares will not eat', the north pond hermit, birthing behemoth, and the private opinions of yoked creatures.

'is there any yoked creature without it's private opinions?' (god save the queen)

certainly not horsemouth - he's a mine of opinions, many of them dusty and slightly historical.

once upon a time horsemouth met dave wakeling (the singer of the beat) a long time after his pop career, of which his american friends were unaware. dave modestly noted that the beat (or the english beat as they were known in america) had at that time recorded a song stand down margaret calling on the then new british prime minister to resign, years later (in about 1990 when the conversation took place, in fact days before the great british public were rioting over the poll tax) she had just been declared the longest serving british prime minister ever, thus demonstrating the power of political pop.



similarly horsemouth offers up god save the queen by the sex pistols as the queen becomes the longest serving british monarch ever. that we have failed to see the revolutionary eschatological moment, that we have failed to live in those times, would be a source of regret to the younger horsemouth (the older horsemouth is slightly relieved). and yet he cannot subscribe to gradualisms,
'the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts'

remarks an editorialising george eliot (and translator of feuerbach) in middlemarch.

if the 'potential h-bomb' of youth, frustration and boredom has been defused, if thatcher evaded the bullet intended for the queen, if the mpla and the ira have gone into government, if even the council tenancy has bitten the dust, then still something evades the curse of no future and history continues to happen.

horsemouth has started reading middlemarch (53p charity bucket horsemouth's local supermarket) as part of his project to familiarise himself with english literature after years of avoiding reading it on the basis that everybody else did.

yesterday horsemouth enjoyed the brief hours of afternoon sunshine and wandered off down to the distribution depots to stockpile against armageddon, he listenend to in the middle of nowhere by orbital (past their best but still some good moments) and night spirit masters a richard horowitz compilation of marrakesh based gnawa musicians (with an introduction by paul bowles). now that he listens to these shorn of his enthusiasms he hears them much better.

'the adventures of grandmaster flash on the wheels of steel' (so much music so little time)

thanks to his friend denise (and a free tickets for locals sweetener) horsemouth has marked the end of summer with grandmaster flash. of course when grandmaster flash DJs a set of hip hop ('when I play you sing the songs to me...') what we really get is the crowd-pleasing karaoke nostalgia machine - but hip-hop always worked with the best part of the record - that's the bit you want to play. horsemouth got very excited (and regretably a little drunk - still no harm done).

today he wakes up purged and cheerful (and mercifully hangover free) - of the festival (er. grillstock - a retail opportunity featuring acres of grilling meat, horsemouth should really send a photo back through a timemachine to his formerly vegan self to fully destroy his faith in the future, of course horsemouth is still a vegetarian but that's an easy option these days) and the other bands (the cuban brothers - a sub-ali g routine, fun loving criminals - a little dull) the less said soonest mended, horsemouth is prepared to conceed to levi roots (quality reggae band essentially the advertising wing of his herbs and spices project) - they at least arranged a shout out to rico rodriguez.

of course it is no good abstractly opposing capitalism - people still have to earn their daily bread - if grandmaster flash is still touring he still needs the work. the fact that its track after track of genius helps a lot - that this all comes from the bronx, brooklyn, the five boroughs, a city even further down the gentrification road than london, that it has become its sonic memory that is something.

pinch punch first of the month (rain rain go away)

howard has been busy and added a musicians of bremen  facebook page - see the links list on the right (or click here - in an old school stylee)

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later this month horsemouth goes back to work (ok he has an orientation thing friday). the sun is turning on and making it through the cloud. really horsemouth should be away in brighton (or somewhere where there will be sun today).

yesterday it rained - at best horsemouth made it up to the supermarket. he jammed with andy (it went well) and read the newspapers.

 'a sort of musical comedy without music.. (or) going right deep down into real life and not caring a damn' 

so p.g. wodehouse delineates the two basic approaches to writing - horsemouth (though not a fan of musical comedy - well other than the wizard of oz) is more in the musical comedy line. horsemouth sometimes gets angry about the terrible state of the world but he will always search for an amusing way of slinging mud at the people he holds responsible rather than a mere cursing. this reflects his general temperament - he is uncomfortable with rage (voice) preferring exit.

horsemouth is going to try to get out for a wander before the heavens open and autumn descends - he's seen a few fallen leaves but not enough yet. his tomato plant has grown long and lanky and still has some flowers on it - maybe there will be cherry tomatoes for christmas.