pastures of plenty

there was a brief discussion last night of how karen dalton can really do it (and this is why she is unlistenable) - how in effect what she actually did was brought the anthology alive to the new york folkers - there she was, an actual hillbilly, doing it, and yet she is not so far from us that we cannot see her, this was no historic recording, and yet so strong is her duende you can hear it even on the recordings. there it is, the grain of the voice against the muzzyness of the guitar. the battle just to keep singing.

horsemouth has finished reading the fielding (a voyage to lisbon) - fielding is off to portugal for the sake of his health, but really he’s dying, he won’t last more than a few months. he spends a month becalmed in english waters before the necessary winds blow to take the boat to lisbon. he thinks about the english class system and calls for a set list of prices to stop the workers (and boatmen in particular) selling their labour for best price they can get (and scalping him mercilessly).

horsemouth has done a little research into the influence of ustad ali akbar khan's influence on robbie basho.

‘possibly the production of the most disagreeable hours which ever haunted the author’

so goes fielding’s description of his a voyage to lisbon (charity shop south london 50p together with his jonathan wild). fielding, horsemouth is pretty sure, makes it into rose macauley’s they went to portugal (but he cannot remember any details).

it’s even worse than he thought, it’s just about the voyage there - from june 26th until august 7th (42 days later).

‘there are many evils in society from which people of the highest rank are so entirely exempt that they have not the least knowledge or idea of them; nor indeed of the characters which are formed by them. such, for instance is the conveyance of goods and passengers from one place to another,’

fielding is about to find out (at length), and will share the horror of it with the reader.

fielding is going there for the sake of his health but he hasn’t even left london yet before he is fulminating against popery.



conversely for horsemouth it all goes well - last night the cats returned home, were fed and snoozed, he let the cats out this morning and they have returned and been fed (they are currently snoozing or pretending to snooze). they have accepted him as provider of food and opener of doors with alacrity.

the night before last  horsemouth watched the news and andrea oliver presented a program on uk jazz. he went to bed early. he dreamed of friends, losing them and meeting them again at the railway station. 

horsemouth arrived here having walked straight from work at camberwick green technical college (only pausing in various charity shops and at the library). this afternoon he’s off to minty’s for a jam (he thinks). tomorrow round to howard’s. it looks like next week will be the last week with a decent amount of work (i.e. enough to pay horsemouth’s rent nearly). thereafter he will be living off his savings from work (or he will have to go and find a summer job), a certain proportion of this is fair use - he can argue to himself that it is the money he (and his employer) are now paying into a pension for him in his dotage, this just leaves an amount that is actually his savings being dipped for real. 

horsemouth’s work is seasonal - he doesn’t want to take on more elsewhere because he likes the fact that he no longer gets so ill and run down over winter (though that may be down to central heating rather than anything else). horsemouth was intrigued by the bus pass at 60 (should he still be in the seaside towns) and by pension credit.

gigs, books, films, events april 2019

gigs

• martin, nick, musicians of bremen at waterintobeer 

books

•  adventures of a suburban boy, turning money into light - james boorman 
• on violence - hannah arendt
• flaubert in egypt - flaubert and maxime du camp (steegmuller) 
• leviathan (intro) - hobbes (into by c.b. macpherson) 
• whittingham vale - david 'dippie' dixon 
• the western lands - william burroughs 
• cryptozoic! - brian aldiss
• daniel hiller-roazen’s echolalias - on the forgetting of language

films - 

purge: election year - naked fury - suspiria (original) -shoot twice - i live in fear (kurosawa) - maggie - survivors (bbc 1975 first 7 episodes) - predestination - the final girls - the evil within us 

events 'help' iona move, play gig, visit parents, casting of the runes day, the devil rides out day...

horsemouth is hiding out at his parents in the green (moses moon)

horsemouth is hiding out at his parents in the green. yesterday he went for a walk with his mother over by the abbey and along up the river dore (and then home in time for tea).

in the evening horsemouth watched the first 3 episodes of survivors, a 1975 middle-classes in the apocalypse/ the good life mash-up. we are in the early episodes - society collapses, our heroes escape the city and meet up, the villains are delineated - slightly rough fellows, former trade unionists, people who are overly fond of guns, with non-u accents (very GB75, fairly secret army etc.)

faced with the historic task of rebuilding feudalism and growing potatoes the viewers got bored - replacement greg does what engineer greg should have done and gets the lights on again. it can all begin again (but with far fewer people).

extinction rebellion are doing a very interesting thing - they are refusing to go home (occupy style) - their calculation must be that they will draw more people in. the state would probably welcome a distraction (refocusing) away from brexit - the thing it can’t deliver - onto some kind of green new deal. anyway horsemouth hopes he can time it so they won’t disrupt his travel plans.

in the day horsemouth tried to find out more about robbie basho’s collaborators - is paramusic enthusiast allain ribback (in stefan basho-jungens spelling) the same as alan ribback (aka. moses moon documentary sound recorder of the civil rights movement, owner of the gate of horn chicago folk club and co-defendant of lenny bruce)? his recordings were eventually released on esp-disk. today in the seaside towns horsemouth will miss 20 degree weather, a gig by triple negative, tomorrow he will miss a presentation on the thought of brexit-guru dominic cummings.

horsemouth is reading francis steegmuller’s flaubert in egypt (attributed to flaubert)- drawn from the travel writings of flaubert and maxime du camp with judicious editorialising comments, introductions, appendices and epilogues by steegmuller. it is an enjoyable read (even if they are little more than sex tourists).

‘I pass over to bring them unto light’

horsemouth is hiding out at his parents in the green. well in the grey actually, though when the sun gets round to shining all the primroses are beautiful.

in the emerald forest (in some ways a mirror image of deliverance) john boorman has a plan to record dialogue both in english and in an indian language tupi and play them both at the same time - boorman imagines it as a connection back to the time before the tower of babel fell (but in the end it comes to nothing - the subtitles work better with the screening audience). horsemouth finished off reading it on the train.

last night he began reading daniel hiller-roazen’s echolalias - on the forgetting of language, babies babble all the phonemes of the world and then promptly lose them to focus on the sounds in the language of their parents (they retain them only for onomatopoeias).

giving a chance for alice coltrane to have a song name worthy of public enemy, today is the anniversary of the battle of medigo (or armageddon as it is more commonly known).

gig done and dusted - anxiety over

horsemouth thanks martin (for putting them on once again and for playing), nick doyne-ditmas for playing (and for playing bass of the devil which did really brought something new to it). and waterintobeer of course.

the setlist was almost entirely as predicted - satan (gospel blues), the werewolf (michael hurley), the devil, worldes blisse, when the faun met alice (musicians of bremen - you may know these from horsemouth’s solo set last time), painbirds (mark linkous - sparklehorse) he played last time also. they revived sad and lonely and dorothy.  new to the set this time a new version of blue crystal fire (robbie basho) and katie cruel (trad. karen dalton), lastly they took a crack at keith hudson’s turn your heater on.

it was a small crowd (nick’s friends, zoe, and horsemouth’s friends (darsavini, johncunningman, mira), two tourists anxious to get away up the hill to see the fireworks (but who stayed for satan and the werewolf).

after the gig horsemouth and howard and company sat and drank and chatted, _____ ankles(?) a youngsters group of slightly more ravey high energy B-52s played on the stereo. sadly darsavini and co had missed nick’s set, martin’s set had included a song about the tasmanian tiger (funnily enough fahey had renamed his track lion as the tasmanian tiger for his live in tasmania record) - having written a song about a marsupial predator horsemouth challenged martin to write a song about a monotreme. 

darsavini suggested a possible wetherspoons but horsemouth and howard threw themselves out of the door and onto the train - howard got off at shadwell, horsemouth took the easy (and more expensive) route up through zone 1. falafel wrap and home to bed.

now that the gig is over horsemouth can stop being anxious. the sun is shining. he’s had his coffee. in a minute a shower.

confiding in the evening star

such was the spare title howard had sitting around - he also had a new song - horsemouth combined the two but he is worried that he may have done to much ‘work’ to it and clouded howard’s original intention.

they have at least one more rehearsal (friday) before the gig (saturday, waterintobeer) to get everything up and running and ship-shape and bristol fashion.

 the slide guitar makes sense to horsemouth but he is still in a quandry about the standard tuning guitar (he normally takes two guitars so he can avoid doing any onstage retuning) - he’s been using howard’s old acoustic (which is a bit buzzy and sitar-like for some tastes), horsemouth wants to leave it droning on with the e-bow on it while he plays the slide but that needs it, at a minimum, to have a metal cored d-string. he may put one on one of his nylon strung guitars and give that a try.

for blue crystal fire (re-imagined by howard as a waltz) he’s abandoned (at least for now) the discordant strummed guitar (‘have you been listening to sonic youth?’ asked howard in horror) and is just concentrating on playing a theremin-like e-bow line (whilst trying not to put howard’s off).

once they’d rehearsed for a bit they went for a walk down to the thames and ate some rice and drank a bottle of beer.

horsemouth then went home and watched seraphim falls a revenger type western which (unlike the revenant) fails because it is unwilling to show its central characters in anything other than a good light. by the time angelica huston is wheeled on (literally) it’s all gone badly wrong.

the night before he’d watched kurosawa’s i live in fear broadly this is a conventional japanese family drama - except that the family patriarch wants to move the family to brazil to escape the impending nuclear war. the family don’t want to go - in the end he’s in a loony bin looking up at the sun believing it’s the earth on fire.


horsemouth has found himself singing the confiding in the evening star  chorus - so he thinks it's a runner.

horsemouth puts up links to two promising american primitive projects - one of which features e-bow on acoustic guitar (but very subtly applied).