o baby please, don’t you rock, my boat, cause I don’t, want my boat,to be rocked

somewhere in horsemouth’s facebook feeds a self-described immigrant bemoans the insanity and racism of brexit (in frankly symbionese terms death to the fascist insect that preys on the minds of the people) elsewhere a dutch friend bemoans the if that’s what they want then that’s what they must have attitude of the labour party to brexit (and their concomitant fantasy of lexit).

of course brexit really needed two things - a disgruntled left-behind sector of the population, fearful and battered by austerity (tick) and some tory (or indeed labour) grandees offering to take care of them (tick). both are signs of political infantilism - there is no taking care of anybody where we are going - the tory grandees know this, for them it is an opportunity to finish thatcher’s work by having a brutal and protracted round of economic and social shock therapy.

now horsemouth knows (never mind how he knows) that what appealed to iain duncan smith and the likes about the brexit issue was how much it appealed to the people on the estates - people he had previously regarded as politically unreachable.

the labour grandees think (and horsemouth admires the realpolitik of this) that there is no standing in the way of the great british people’s stupidity best to just let the bus crash and pick up the pieces afterwards (when the remorse and regret has kicked in). at that point labour is the only game in town. er... except horsemouth thinks ts this won’t actually work - for in this the tories are right for when the wheels come off people will not admit they were wrong - when faced by the consequences of their folly they will double down.

so what about the filthy unprincipled middle ground- while no doubt economically comfortable for horsemouth and his ilk (so you’ve got low(ish) wages, low social reproduction, poor pubic transport but you’ve also got the opportunity to earn money in an expensive place and spend it in a cheap place - don’t knock the foreign holiday - and don’t forget the seemingly never ending supply of pretty girls from foreign lands with a good command of english).

the arguments for staying with europe (and fairplay it was heading towards a european super-state with reduced national sovereignty) are strictly on the don’t rock the boat level - after the 2008 collapse you’d think people would know that it’s a bad idea to rock the boat (o baby please, don’t you rock, my boat, cause I don’t, want my boat,to be rocked) but no - they’ve instituted a round of boat rocking.

here horsemouth (and remember he’s supposed to be some sort of filthy communist) is lining up with the euro wing of capital as opposed to a buccaneer existence on the high seas of principle with a bunch of jaded tory coffin-cheaters in fascist uniforms (blithering on about free trade, free speech, the evils of identity politics and fuck me its going to be awful). once more into the breach of reaction.

the soul of a man

yesterday was the anniversary of the death of blind willie johnson.

horsemouth has started oscar wilde’s the soul of man under socialism - now this is usually portrayed as oscar wilde’s rejection of communism but in fact horsemouth finds it an able warning against the authoritarian socialist path. now (of course) you would probably not buy your socialism from oscar the glib (so much to answer for) but from some heavy germans.

and yet there are moments when oscar’s prose does it,

 ‘there are a great many people who... are compelled to do the work of beasts of burden ... to which they are forced be the peremptory, unreasonable, degrading tyranny of want. these are the poor... from their collective force humanity gains much material prosperity... but it is only the material results that it gains.’

the problem for horsemouth, and he’s a shoulder to the wheel kind of guy, is how do you get there from here. for horsemouth if you’re going to start a revolution (or a fight for that matter) you’d better be able to win it because you don’t want to see yourself and all your friends murdered or thrown in jail. your best bet is getting organised (a party/ a gang) and before you know it your old authoritarian thoughts and habits have returned. all ways round it that horsemouth has seen involve some fantasy of ‘being’ the commune (the workers, the ‘people’).

horsemouth has (in any event) retired from the active end of this sort of nonsense. he would like to see a better world but he doesn’t expect it to come. it is a grey morning but the weather forecast says it will pick up (and the sun may even shine through).

the day before yesterday horsemouth walked up through the valley of the agapemonites to walthamstralia where he raided the bookshops (emerging with wilde’s de profundis - one squid scope) and had an ice cream. later he sunbathed in the garden, watched the news (depressing as sin), and then watched grim prairie tales. online he found a book by the grand daughter of one of the agapemonite founders.

same old man (preparations)

horsemouth is back among you (his head is full of uk kack). this morning it is rainy and grey and he needs to do some preparations for work tomorrow (having a shave and checking his costume so as to look presentable).

yesterday horsemouth did little but fart about on facebook - an evening researching the internal police investigation into failings during the rotherham child sex abuse cases (the largest case they have ever investigated excepting the hillsborough stadium disaster - and look how long that came to trial - south yorkshire police so much to answer for), a late night investigation into the possibilities of a triggering of article 7 with respect to hungary. he ended it off with a trip back through his posts for last september.



during the day he put up a link to one of howard's golden glow mixes from a few years ago featuring same old man by karen dalton. he practiced guitar playing through it and another song by karen dalton - somethings on your mind (C&W/ southern soul basically). he thinks he’s got them - he’ll write down the lyrics and chords today have a think about arrangements. he was mostly playing the almeria bm, he might dig the resonator out, really they all need restringing (especially the hummingbird that’s now a 5 string).

same old man he’s playing with a C7 (a four finger chord) - he can feel some arthritis coming in the first joint of his little finger on his left hand (he already has it quite badly in the first joint of his little finger on his right hand). horsemouth is on a clock for this to spread throughout his hands - thereafter he will have to rethink how he makes music.

in far off austria zali krishna has been experimenting with the goldberg variations - the results are here.

labour time (ten yards of linen) 5779

horsemouth is saddened by his return from porto. he’s back - thursday, friday there’s work even. the year starts (back down the rabbit hole for you horsemouth).

and yet (four of pentacles) he is relieved - because at least now he knows where his money will be coming from.

pessoa is on a tram. he looks at the dress the girl in front of him is wearing - at the cloth (it’s type, how it was made, where the flax, cotton etc. were grown), the stitching, the different types of yarns (and he thinks about how they were made), the overall construction of the garment (imagine scissors cutting) and all of a sudden he sees all the labour of the all people that went into the dress, he sees them all crowding round. it is like marx’s discussion of the labour and in particular the labour time in a coat in capital volume 1 chapter 1 (and it is unlike it).

curiously this is like the (half digested) notions of labour time (socially necessary labour time) and its extension (that negri lifts from it in time for revolution) that horsemouth was blithering on about while drunk at john’s birthday party to a lawyer and an artist . both nodded.

horseemouth took pessoa’s the book of disquiet with him - it had fitted his mood very well before he went (slightly anxious/ slightly bored). as the turkish surfer girl horsemouth chatted to said on the park bench observed, pessoa is a little sad.

‘to write is to forget’ says pessoa the contrarian, omar khayam, almost derridean discussions of what it would mean to be remembered as a writer (but to be dead, to no longer be there). he lives inside his own head (and deliberately so). he has made himself a creature of habit. horsemouth has dipped into it, not read it consistently beginning to end to tick it off his list, he cannot find the dress section now, but the pleasure if this is that the book is not yet finished, there is still more of it to read.

because ‘to write is to forget. literature is the pleasantest way of avoiding life’ horsemouth did not blog while he was away (so as not to miss anything or distort the weight of it). he did however keep a diary of excursions to help his (feeble) memory in later years.

this year horsemouth worked right up until the summer solstice and starts back a little ahead of the autumn equinox.

while horsemouth flew back there was the abbots bromley horn dance - it is also (simultaneously linked only by time that most tenuous of things) the two day sunset to sunset transition of rosh hosannah the jewish new year - when it completes at sunset tonight it will be the year 5779.

gigs, books, films august 2018

gigs - none

books

• origin of totalitarianism - hannah arendt (start) 
• the story of my heart - richard jefferies 
• felix holt - george eliot (recommenced) 
• as others see us: cork through european eyes (read) 
• time for revolution - antonio negri (started) 
• beckett - a.alvarez (read) 
• the gray monk - william blake (poem - read) 
• sirènes m'étaient contées: exposition 20 novembre 1992 - 14 février 1993, Galerie CGER catalogue (illustrations looked at) 
• tuning and temperament - j.murray barbour (started) 
• the body and society - peter brown (good chunk) 

 films ghosts of mars, the hole, terror creatures from the grave, picnic at hanging rock (series), gotham (series), the new york ripper (lucio fulci), bert lloyd documentary, rambo: first blood

star - magician - sun

‘this share goes against our community standards on nudity or sexual activity’ - facebook

well not this note no - unless they intend to remove the rider-waite tarot pack from facebook (though think about it - the cards mentioned feature a naked woman, a naked child, water, rocks, a wall, a tower, a horse, two dogs, a lobster, a bird (all naked), various sunflowers, a path leading off into the mountains). in this it resembles not at all the cover of houses of the holy by led zeppelin (which features two naked children clambering around on some rocks - at the giant’s causeway in fact while covered in silver paint).

the album was released in 1973, it's led zeppelin so it probably sold a few copies - The photo shoot featured two children, stefan and samantha gates. as an adult, in february 2010, stefan gates was featured on a BBC radio 4 documentary about the cover. He said there was something sinister about the image, though his sister disagreed, their mum just replied that it was the 70ies and people did that sort of thing. he also admitted never having heard the album. the programme ended with gates returning to giant's causeway and listening to the album on a portable player and finding it cheerful and happy and inspiring (not normally words horsemouth associates with led zep).

frankly the world is a terrible place full of wars, pestilence, famine death racism, homophobia and capitalism - there are many terrible images one would not wish to encounter before breakfast, yemeni kids killed by US made bombs for example - so a bit of nudity is not the real problem - isn't the real problem the targeted advertising and content of facebook and the like, the activities of the likes of cambridge analytica just revealing the process, revealing the opportunities for surveillance and control.

after much tooing and froing facebook decided that the cover of houses of the holy does violate their community standards - horsemouth could accept the decision or he could complain about it to improve their service at a future date but their decision still stood. he complained about their decision so as to improve their service at a future date.

of course all this does is remove the file with that particular name - the same image with a different name will not be removed.

presumably all over the world people are having their summer holiday photos of their children at the beach banned. facebook will of course be a better place when all this has been removed.

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horsemouth had a tarot reading - an all major arcana 3 spread - it went star - magician - sun. the tarot pack was not rider-waite but tarot de marseille so the sun (naked child on horseback sunflowers in the background) had been replaced by twins (the ibeji).

at first horsemouth could not recognise the magician (he thought it was the page of wands - but the meaning is similar).

there is of course something about the sun, sea and rocks - and we experience it each summer holiday when we go to the seaside - a clearing out, a simplification.

horsemouth the magician is assembling his tools preparing to do things, but he’s still thinking about the past, dredging up material from his subconscious (star), but he’s preparing to move forward once again entering solar regions (the sun).

yesterday he babysat. earlier he wandered through the maze of streets by the canal. howard has been busy - he's done a jazz compilation.

unearthing something nasty

yesterday's helpful reminder occurred in a discussion of 'hauntology' on the folk horror revival page. there was an ill-advised accusation of bert lloyd being a 'cultural marxist' (or at least an implication that his ‘researches’ were of a similar, i.e. low, level of scholarship).

true bert lloyd was a communist - but as one commentator put it 'there was nothing 'cultural' about a.l. lloyd's marxism'. he was an old school stalinist ('a tankie' in horsemouth's terms) he'd have a problem using the ideas of jacques derrida (the er. ‘father of hauntology’ if you will) in his writing because frankly he was already dead (hmmn or maybe not - but anyway, no sign of derridean thinking in bert lloyd’s writing that horsemouth can detect).

now onto this term cultural marxist and the people who use it

the term 'cultural marxist' is used by one of horsemouth's friends when horsemouth thinks what he really means is 'shitty patronising new labour councillors who won't give me a council flat', horsemouth’s friend may beg to differ and claim wider political aims, but this is how horsemouth hears it. horsemouth thinks his friend is wrong to use it in this fashion but hey, at least he has a real problem.

but more often the term  'cultural marxist'  is used by alt-right types as a means of having an anti-intellectual or anti-communist witch hunt in all but name.  at no point is any evidence offered or any serious reading done. it is simply slander and innuendo .

the sample argument here is ‘hauntology is no good (because derrida’s a marxist), bert lloyd was a marxist (so his research must be no good)’.

firstly is derrida even a marxist? he publishes a book the spectres of marx which sort of affiliates him to the marxist tradition, or at least shows that there is a deconstructive reading (derrida’s thing) of the marxist tradition possible - but then loads of other theorists (terry eagleton etc.) most of whom would almost certainly be described by alt-righters as cultural(ly) marxist, weigh in (in a a book called ghostly demarcations) arguing that derrida is not a proper marxist, or that a deconstructionist reading of marx cannot be made and it still be marxism.

secondly the problem for such people in the folk horror world (and there do seem to be some neo-folk types about, people who like to spice up their lives or flagging musical careers with a hint of fascism) is that the fifties, sixties 'folk revival' world was (largely) hewn into existence by writers, archivists, performers and promoters deeply interested in the working class and the independent culture of the working class - a pack of communists, lefties, peaceniks, civil rightsers and fellow travelers (such were your seegers, lomaxes, macolls and crucially here bert lloyd).

now horsemouth does not think propaganda always leads to the best music (he's with john fahey and harry smith on this one) its... oh look, just watch this documentary, clearly there is no mileage in arguing with bert lloyd's folk bonafides. and clearly there is also a danger of folk being  used to promote essentialist, nationalist or just plain racist myths - of it being (re-)hijacked by the right.

horsemouth could tell you a tale of cultural studies - of people wishing to study the culture of ordinary people, he could tell you a tale of a young generation of philosophy students enthused by rock and rave wishing to study it and deploying the new ideas coming from the continent following the dethroning of marxism in 1968 (deleuze and guattari in particular but derrida also). he could tell you a tale of the beautiful dawn of these ideas and their partial eclipse (as the problems with their application became obvious). he could tell you a tale of the rise of hauntology in the editorial office of the wire.

as to the term hauntology applied to music horsemouth is not particularly into it himself (there’s a nina power article somewhere where she questions its value). if it helps you write and create all well and good, if it helps you arrange your record collection and structure your taste all well and good. if you want to use it to slander people you can fuck off with that.

(horsemouth had a look in the photos of this critic of bert lloyd and derrida - and what should he find there but the logo of national vanguard/ national action - us fascist organisations).