on coming to the end of a week in the forest

horsemouth is coming to the end of his week in the forest.


this was his last charity shop find - 50p


day six in the forest - the charity shops of leytonstone a big MEH 

yesterday horsemouth awoke in the forest and walked down past the hollow ponds to leytonstone (but there was no joy to be had in the charity shops there). later he wandered off to lou and martin’s do down at water into beer. that went well. martin played (opening with ornithologist’s arms) with his daughter singing harmony, horsemouth traded him for one of his CDs, then his son played violin (a variety of jigs and reels), two young dudes played - very singer-songwritery, nice jazzy chords and runs, kind of aztec camera etc.

then lou played, no banjo this time just guitar and voice, a gillian welch one, the one about her dad, milly, and a new song about deaths in custody (horsemouth thinks clinton mccurbin one was the last song he remembers being written about deaths in police custody, but they never go away.

horsemouth will do you a review of martin’s CD soon.

an after gig pint in a weatherspoons and then back to horsemouth’s main gaff by train and foot (pausing for a bag of chips to soak up the alcohol).

now he’s back up in the forest (he has just fed the forest cats). the bird feeder is full. he’s ‘zombied’ some illustrations of contributors to city am. a quiet day today (then off to max’s birthday) a final tidy round and clear up tomorrow (the last day in the forest).

emile zola (the flood, blood, three wars is done), horsemouth has returned his attention to mary wollstonecraft’s the wrongs of woman. in the madhouse the two communicate by notes left in books and by reading each other’s marginalia.


day five in the forest - horsemouth finds the magic money tree (turning on the taps of love) 

ladies and gentlemen, horsemouth has found the magic money tree - it was in walthamstow all the time! that dominic cummings hits the ground running, testing multiple similar ads online, the message - deliver brexit/ promising increased spending on public services. the key problem with promising increased spending on public services is that people don’t believe it - they have been told that it couldn’t be afforded for years and have internalised this belief and repeated it, there is no magic money tree.


but now horsemouth has found it (project fear advisory) the pains of brexit can be avoided. the peril of turning on the taps of debt funded spending is that it reveals austerity and deficit reduction as the ideological project it always was and all the suffering it caused as avoidable. how do you like them lemons?

horsemouth was surprised to see lemons growing on the magic money tree but there you go...

there is a complicating factor - brexit - which (project fear advisory) will fuck the economy (at least in its current form) and thus adversely affect uk plc’s ability to repay. international finance (those bastards) will of course have to charge more interest on their loans (purchases of government bonds and the like) to cover the risk that we will default (or more likely inflate away our debts). what may help or may hinder uk plc with this project is that trade war and economic slowdown is hitting china. the US and the EU - government debt begins to look like a good bet for the money slooshing round the world finance system in search of some kind of return somewhere. but will post brexit uk government debt have such a rosy glow to it?

what does a graph of economic output and brexit look like (project fear advisory)? - like a swoosh apparently (how very modern, how very reassuring). the nhs is of course the litmus test of how much uk plc’s owners love their citizens - turn on the taps of love - but not unconditional love, no, there will have to be changes... but the main problem (as with any course of treatment) is that it takes a while for the patient to actually feel better...

and in fact feel better may never come - once we are working away to pay the interest on this new debt we are the slaves of globalised finance (once again) and certain phrases will return - there is no alternative (for example). of course we will all be in this together (one nation tory) once again but of course some will suffer more than others - how about er... the working class? I mean after the sterling job they did of defending their pay and conditions during austerity who can doubt that they will fight off any attempt to make them pay for brexit as well (after all it’s not like it’s self-inflicted, and it’s not like the middle-classes won’t be queuing up to tell them this).

horsemouth is back online from the forest - he has had a day off from the world wide communion (though that’s not from want of trying). it is good to know such an existence is in theory possible. he, of course, had to make his own entertainment, to amuse his own boredom (hence his discovery of the magic money tree).

he read zola’s juvenalia the flood and three wars (after reading gustave flaubert’s juvenalia - in the same hesperus edition) - zola thinks war is inevitable, he castigates hugo for being a dreamer who wants to found a united states of europe (pfft - like that could even ever happen), for believing in international community and a new golden age.

books, gigs, films, events - july 2019

today's charity shop gold (one squid).

books

•  lady macbeth of mtsensk (nikolai leskov) 
•  the social animal (david brooks) 
•  the furies (janet hobhouse) 
•  memoirs of a madman and bibliomania (gustave flaubert) 
•  like people you see in a dream (edward l. schieffelin and robert crittenden 
•  anthropology and anthropologists: the modern british school (3rd edition - adam kuper)
• investigations of a dog (franz kafka) 
•  on reading crowds and power (a poem by geoffrey hill) 

 gigs 

• mulatu astatke, sudan archves 
•  britten sinfonia, stick in the wheel 

 films 

 the l-shaped room, werner herzog's nosferatu, two films featuring global warming as a plot device, the woman in black, montauk documentary, the scream of fear, night of the demon, casting of the runes, frightnight, frightnight 2, catch 22 (series), dad's army (film), ashram, rivals of sherlock holmes, our man flint and invasion. 

events visit parents (visit cwmbran), cat-sitting in walthamstralia commences

on entering the golden age

aashish khan and his brother pranesh khan play in the 1971 alice coltrane concert (they have also played with john mclaughlan in shakti)

aashish khan played on wonderwall music for george harrison, and as one of the musicians for satyajit ray's jalsaghar. both are sons of ali akbar khan and grandsons of alauddin khan.



wonderwall music opens with microbes, which consists of call-and-response shehnai parts and was partly based on the raga darbari kanada that opens this album ..

through his eyelids the flashes of lightning

while he slept horsemouth saw the flashes of lightning through his eyelids. he didn’t get up to look. this morning there seems to be evidence of rain (but not much of it). yesterday the house sat with the curtains drawn - horsemouth and his family skulked in the shade. here it was only 28 (sorry peeps in the seaside towns) - horsemouth is back among you to swelter soon to do some cat sitting (and possibly some recording time will tell).

howard has heard the 71 live alice coltrane session (and pronounced it the best music he has heard in a while) - at the start it alternates, alice is beating fuck out out of the wurlitzer organ, trying to make it do a john coltrane, to take off for interstellar space, the rhythm section are pouring on the petrol, then, a break, and a slightly unsettled indian music...

horsemouth has also watched some film of the sai antam ashram - gospel with hindu hymns.

horsemouth has been reading his bluffers guide to the british school of anthropology/ amthropologists (adam kuper) - malinowski, haddon, radcliffe-brown... its uneasy relationship with the british colonial project. side by side with this he has been reading like people you see in a dream the account of first contact for six papuan tribes (it usually ends badly).

the dreams of old men (the days of a year with an appreciation by horsemouth)

don't remember putting this one up - is that max ochs at the start?

the days of a year with an appreciation by henry james is a small book by m.d.ashley-dodd listing the days of the year and a short (paragraph length) description of the weather (and its emotional effects) - an emotional meteorology.

yesterday - a walk by the river (in the rain), read the torygraph, watched dad’s army.

dad’s army (toby jones, bill nighly, etc.) horsemouth strangely enjoyed (but now he’s in on the joke - the dreams of old men). as a child he never thought of it that way (wheras last of the summer wine a little later he clearly did).

and (in a related topic) then there’s brexit

- and alexander boris de pfeffel johnson's new brexit advisor - arch backstop bludger daniel moylan (‘we are really doomed’ sagely remarked a tory remainer).

meanwhile david davis as chancellor or foreign secretary?

you've got be fucking kidding me... what do they say about him?

'lazy as a toad and thick as mince'

what is interesting about the torygraph finance section (and why horsemouth reads it assiduously) is its persistent doubt about the stability of the international financial regimes from the right (which accords nicely with horsemouth’s doubts about it from the left). to the high tories of the torygraph finance is still vaguely disreputable.

'... and bathed in the ganges river...'

recent discoveries in the world of alice coltrane ('... and bathed in the ganges river...')

Alice Coltrane Live At The Berkeley Community Theatre 1972

featuring alice coltrane (mostly on wurlitzer), ben riley on drums, charlie haden on bass, aashish khan on sarod, pranesh khan on tabla and bobby w. on tamboura.





'I don’t know any more than you what you are about to read’ - gustave flaubert, memoirs of a madman (part of his juvenalia, which he referred to as opuscules historiques ), chapter 1.

and so it is with horsemouth, he gets up, gets a cup of coffee and starts typing.

he consults his diary so that he doesn’t forget to include any useful material from the day before.

sometimes he will move things around, but he doesn’t make a plan first.

memoirs of a madman comes with a short story bibliomania - in the one we have a madman writing a book, in the other, a man mad about books (a bookseller). bibliomania is set in a thinly imagined barcelona.

yesterday horsemouth went back through his blogposts trying to find the ‘poems’ he had compiled together commonplace book style - he wrote them into his notebook for the upcoming musicians of bremen album (perhaps he will make use of them there).

‘here my memoirs really begin’ - gustave flaubert, memoirs of a madman, chapter 9.

Johnny Clegg RIP

for horsemouth there's two tunes by Johnny Clegg that really reach him.



'third world child' appears in 'saturday night at the palace' a 1987 film by robert davies featuring bill flynn, john kani, and paul slabolepszy. it's apartheid south Africa, two white trash dudes show up at roadside dinner late at night as it is closing and demand to be fed, the black dude working there just wants to go home, confrontation ensues.

you know it's not going to end well.

in an earlier scene bill's character has been thrown out of his house for not paying the rent, this tune plays as he walks off up the road because it's the dilemma of afrikaans youngsters also 'learn to speak a little english'.

(thanks to luzette and richard for taking horsemouth to the movie)



the other is from the apartheid days when johnny clegg and sipho mchunu couldn't play payed gigs together only private invite parties in people's homes - and even doing this risked attacks from the state and random racists. horsemouth always found the acoustic guitar that opens a lot of zulu jive tunes amazing (insane and a little bit frightening), this one in particular blows his mind.