all is friendship, mutual aid and kindness

 cold grey morning outside. nice and toasty inside. 

valerie and her week of wonders.

it is of course an anti-clerical fairy story. the church and the bourgeoisie are rotten with vampires. your family are vampires. but sex is the driving force of the universe, the servant girls are at it, the farm labourers are at it. the birds and the bees are at it . the metonymic animals, the bees and the chickens, these represent the people, the bees fly in and out of a hive  in the wooden statues of a man and a woman through a slot where the generative organs are, the chickens are in the dovecote, chicken blood may be substituted for human blood, but the vampire is represented also as the polecat. 

our 13 year old heroine must fend off the inappropriate attentions of the vampires (even those in her own family)  if she is to recreate the family scene, if she is to enable the return of her mother and the recovery of her aunt and father (the bishop) from vampirism, if she is to escape the inquisition, if she is to grow and mature. and because this is a bright optimistic film, one filmed in the sunshine, she does it. 

it is the sexualisation of minors that is difficult for modern viewers not to worry about. like sweetback's badass song or jodie foster in taxi driver or whoever gets to play lolita or carrie  or christiane F.  people go to the cinema because they want to see (how much footage of a semi-naked 13 year old do we really need to see). 

if it were to be remade today it would probably be remade like the hunger games or twilight (or indeed buffy the vampire slayer). a fully clothed film of teenage daring-do. but it is not a night journey. most of it takes place in broad beneficent sunlight. valerie's motives are not sexual - with her  it is all friendship, mutual aid and kindness, this is what provides the cure against vampirism. her diet is not chicken and red wine, it is all honey and apples.

because this is a bright optimistic film, one filmed in the sunshine, she does it. everybody is at the picnic in the woods, her parents and aunt are returned to her (seemingly in pre-vampiric form), only the lustful priest is punished (imprisoned in a bird's cage sunken into the ground as if half-forgotten already). 

it made horsemouth feel nostalgic for the beauty of the czech republic (and poland also). for the old town squares when the sun shines and there is beer. 

horsemouth's friends would probably suggest that he should be watching more vera chytilova (sedmikrasky has a similar rabelaisian optimism, something different less so). there's a thing in milan kundera where sex becomes the thing that is possible instead of freedom (and therefore becomes tainted).  

horsemouth is not sure what he is up to today. 

it is the 180th anniversary of the birth of the reverend kilvert. he lived rural idyll in clyro near hay-on-wye. he liked them young and pretty and frequently confides this to his diary. how much notice you take of this depends on how you read it. there was a particular victorian habit of sentimentalising young girls (alice by kilvert's friend lewis carroll is a particular example of it). 

horsemouth realises he is in the wrong place at the wrong time (again)

yesterday a ghost booking. one where horsemouth realises he is in the wrong place at the wrong time (once again). 

he hates these because he hates letting people down. in this sense his prayers (to get rid of both face-to-face bookings) were answered (but not in the way he would have chosen). he could do without the journeys over there.  if he'd been less trusting and less lazy and driven more defensively he would have escaped it.

'ah well! these things happen!' was not what he said at the time. 

he won't know until friday if that's him for the year (he does hope so).

on this day in 1851 (ok maybe tomorrow)  the goncourt brothers began to keep their journal. they wrote it jointly (one dictating the other writing). they would often make notes on their cufflinks as the evening progressed people got more and more drunk and more and more indiscrete (and things generally went from bad to worse). they write as 'we'. 

they begin by witnessing the coup d'etat of napoleon III. 

the goncourts were nobles, frustrated novelists, in a position to fund their own literary magazine (unlike their rival zola who arguably took their techniques and had the greatest success with them). in revenge they begin their journal. 

there is great consolation in writing. look at this. even better - blogspot's title?

'horsemouth realises he is in wrong'  (are you my superego? mutters horsemouth). 

what was mere rage and despair (and all over something of no great significance) becomes something that can be looked at dispassionately. its poison drawn. horsemouth over-reacts to these things because of his imposter syndrome (something he has tried to escape by becoming pseudonymous, or a cartoon mule). 

at work a problem continues to be intractable. but at least there is some real effort to resolve it (this marks a change from earlier years).   

pinch, punch, first thing that came to mind

pinch, punch, first of the month. that was the first thing that came to his mind.

horsemouth is on the correct page of the calendar for the end of the year. (woo-hoo)

over on musicians of bremen  a like from map recordings (home of the diamond family archive) who seem to be based down in totnes.  horsemouth has missed seeing them play a number of times (he'll make a point of seeing them next time).

last night horsemouth finishes off the passion of anna. curiously she reminds him of an ex (that's some long repressed material surfacing right there). and curiously max von sydow in it reminds him of duncan (long, lanky, prone to drunkenness, at war with the universe). it's much more like strindberg and hamsun and munch and... (that's all horsemouth's scandiwegian miserabilists used up). 

later he listened to some lena platonos (witches is the famous track). he had fun trying to convince himself that he could understand the odd word here and there in a documentary about her (it was all in greek with a few loan words, horsemouth knew they were loan words from other languages because he understood them). he had fun trying to work out how the cyrillic letters could spell out her name. 

arcadia is on the point of collapse. it has been sucked dry by sir phillip green (an old school asset stripper). the idea of rural perfection has been destroyed. and yet it cannot be, it is being reborn in the government's new (post brexit) strategy for the countryside. 

today horsemouth goes and works. this means travel (there and back again  on the death train). horsemouth hopes he hasn't caught covid already (and he hopes he doesn't catch it today). wednesday has allegedly cancelled (that's good) so perhaps he can get some work in from home instead. 

on the last day of november

phew horsemouth has made it to the last day of november (and as a bonus wednesday's face-to-face booking has popped). on the downside he still has a sore throat. 

last night he watched about half of the passion of anna  a late bergman, a movie essentially made to keep the house from shame from being demolished by the local authorities on faro island. max von sydow is back at the house but his wife has left him, two neighbours circle. this morning sten mentioned the manic pixie dreamgirl stereotype. despite the age of the age of the characters and the excellence of the actors there is still an element of wish fulfilment to them.  

horsemouth 'researched' it further (via wikipedia or 'the general intelligence') to the japanese  magical girlfriend  and yellow cab stereotypes. 

he still has half of it to watch. (horsemouth will have to see if bergman mentions it in either of the two books he's got). 

horsemouth also posted (over on facebook) some photos of himself playing a gig at max 'crow' reeves publishing event and exhibition for the launch of his book 'mirkwood' held  st. leonard's church in shoreditch on friday 13th october 2017. you can buy it here. 

there are photos by darsavini and by max. it is nice to remember a time when such things were possible. maybe, one day, they will be possible again. it was the anniversary of a number of other gigs recently that made him think of it.

earlier in the evening he had watched an acoustic routes documentary about bert jansch, 

horsemouth tends to say this bert yansch and then corrects himself (still). presented by billy connolly with a box of records and a truly terrible dansette record player. as billy notes, if people had a record player (in their bare boards apartment) it would be one of those dansettes and then they'd have a stack of records next to it (with the bert jansch blue first album on top). 

bert sold his first album for £100 to transatlantic records, they recorded it in the owner's kitchen. today is brownie mcgee's birthday. there's a clip of him (and sonny terry) playing key to the highway (one of the key songs on bert jansch's first album). in the jansch documentary they get to meet each other. jansch goes to sit by the ocean a little shell shocked. 

horsemouth's week is considerably improved by a cancellation.  (were horsemouth's prayers answered? well at least in part). now ideally next week would be travel free also...

today an IT irritation but otherwise it seems to be working (except nothing seems to be happening yet, ah he was in the wrong room together with a dozen students).  eventually he gets to where he needs to be. that's the day. daylight is falling and he's tempted by a beer. tomorrow a journey by train. 

memoirs of a good-for-nothing (and the dead dreams of the cold war kid)

last night horsemouth watched  the quiller memorandum. alec guiness as a bureaucrat, max von sydow  as a nazi, british spies rattling around 60s berlin (in pursuit of neo-nazis). curiously slow paced and uninvolving. what the harry palmer tales of len deighton has, the first mod brtish spy, a cynicism about the ruling class, this doesn't really have, what john le carre's  the spy who came in  from the cold has, the sour taste of betrayal and moral exhaustion, this doesn't have. 

horsemouth is finally getting around to reading peter burger's theory of the avant-garde, a book that, horsemouth now discovers, puts forward a theory of art but is mainly about writing (in terms of manifesto and collage). he has owned it for years and should have read it when he as writing about this kind of stuff. a quick look at the references reveals he has already swum in the seas of horkheimer and adorno, in jochen schulte-sasse's introduction. 

burger's book generated a book almost twice as long of response. 

when he wrote his initial pieces horsemouth failed to make the correct distinctions between the different varieties of european modernism, the avant-garde is a response to the the exhaustion of the schonberg neu music (usually translated as modern) and strategies relying on the autonomy of art, a change to different strategy of trying to break down the autonomy of art seeing it as restrictive.   

it is good to be reading it now because it focuses on the dada, futurism, surrealism moments (that horsemouth has just dipped his toes into from the performance angle). 

released 50 years ago the day before yesterday. horsemouth usually passes on from this song to jack orion which as a prog-folk epic is growing on him. 

the good, the bad and the ugly

horsemouth has finished for the week. (phew and thank fuck for that). he got a bottle of beer and started making dinner. later he watched some of the good the bad and the ugly. and had the pleasure of watching it almost as if it were a new movie because it is so long since he'd last seen it that he had forgotten most of it. a few soundbites lifted by big audio dynamite stuck out.

earlier (to celebrate his liberation from unremitting toil) horsemouth had listened to musiciians of bremen volume three on shuffle (to get the same kind of defamiliarisation effect).

let all mortal flesh (keep silence), serpent(S), when the faun met alice, on the banks of the susquehanna, worldes blisse, all flowed together like a new album, sliabh na mban, satan, then the one horsemouth had been expecting next her hair like some glittering gold. horsemouth was then surprised to hear funeral song (which he heard as if it was a bonus track) and surprised again to hear the devil.

this would usually be a busy time for horsemouth, the christmas gig season.

in this week (in past years) last year he played the farewell to johnny gig (with peter, paul and enza) - wow was that a year ago it feels much further away. many years back the snatch foster band (with nick, rusty and clive) down in the basement of the hope and anchor and a few weeks later they played with iona, ayesha, zoe and dawn as the santa belles down in dalston. this they did as a trio (clive was unavailable) nick said never again but horsemouth enjoyed himself. they sang a version of in the bleak midwinter.  

tonight (a few years ago) a gig round minty's house with minty, morven, siobhan, lisa etc. etc.

horsemouth has enjoyed the second wave (post 2001) of his music making. it is (excepting all this blogguery) the thing he has done that he can point to and be proud of. the work may have been more socially useful, or the co-op stuff, or the odd rounds of babysitting but it is the music he is proud of.

no gigs this year. but he released an album (musicians of bremen volume four with howard) and a film (the fall of the house of fitzgerald with enza and suke). he didn't go to many gigs himself this year (for obvious reasons - possibly only the gwenifer raymond perhaps, lankum were cancelled) he watched a few things online (but it doesn't do it for him). 

similarly we have just passed the 14th anniversary of horsemouth starting blogging (on the now mothballed space station myspace). these blogs (and this last year's from facebook) sit on his old netbook in a corner of his room (and as attachments on an email).  in theory he could download his back catalogue of posts from facebook (now that they have become practically inaccessible there) but he's in no hurry. 

fuck the christmas decorations it is not even december and horsemouth is already constructing his end of year lists. 

light is pretty fast (halfway between samhain and the winter solstice) the desert fathers

sadly the signal is only radiating out at the speed of light (unless we can open a trans-dimensional gateway (again)). snail mail. what we really  need an einstein podolsky rosen bridge or a paired tachyon communicator (utilising bell's theorem). once again the limits of space travel become apparent to horsemouth (he feels so held back).  

horsemouth begins his day with the great tuli kupferberg (the fugs) morning morning harmonized here by sisters joan baez and mimi farina. then it went on to a radio set by richard and mimi farina's radiated out into the cosmos. 

but this is not true horsemouth actually began his day with a car or van honking away in the street at about 6am. he got up. got out of bed. opened the downstairs door and climbed up into the morning to ascertain if it was sten's hire van. it was. but fortunately sten was already up and out a little further up the road yelling into his mobile phone (so horsemouth didn't have to go wake him). 

horsemouth has a slight sore throat (he thinks it's just a cold or something - but then he would wouldn't he). sean has been in touch (so he's alive then). horsemouth has been reading james sallis, which is very m.john harrison avant la lettre. 

last night he watched more uriah heep (everybody can play and sing and there's no lack of talent on stage). it's a very disciplined band. 

yesterday an unexpected work failure. hopefully it will all go ok today and horsemouth can end the week feeling productive. we are halfway between samhain  and the winter solstice. 

horsemouth watched a clip and read a piece about a guy who lives without money (daniel suelo). sleeping in a cave and dumpster diving for food (with a little light foraging thrown in - well he does live in the desert). he describes the liberation he felt leaving his life savings in a phone booth and just walking away. the internet came along, he could go to the library and blog, he was someone with a story to tell. a desert father. 

later (about 2016) he had to move back to his parents to take care of them (and to take up stewardship of their money). - he seems to be adjusting ok to this (building bike trailers and alike).

horsemouth is less interested in his god and natural selection and pay-it-forward stuff than in his critique of the alienation  money makes possible (the very thing horsemouth likes about it).

horsemouth's plans very much involve his life savings - they are the thing that (will) make him not dependent upon working. this means they cannot threaten him with unemployment. he could live in porto (or somewhere in the sunny south) on about half the rent that he pays to stay in the seaside towns (and probably the same again for food). he could stretch this out (off and on) until pension day (when he becomes state aidable again - living costs anywhere in the world (currently) plus housing costs in the uk).   

he at least has a plan b. (and - truth be told - he has a plan b to that)

horsemouth is kind of on a clock with work and living in the seaside towns. 

except he's not - he's on a negative clock, when the decision is made then he will know that the clock has been ticking. 

at the end of next week he will have been paid his rent for the year april to april (in a large part down to furlough). he will even make the rent for that week. it now looks like work for the year will finish up on the 11th (and nothing of the 'travel-in' variety from the 9th.) 

horsemouth has struggled with the year and work (but then he always struggles). instead of having a meltdown trying to get to the booking on-time/ find the student / get registers signed, he's having a meltdown with Teams links and laptop stability. really it's the same thing. he doesn't like to work. he has a problem with authority. 

what he does need to do is start downsizing to permit himself to move (when the charity shops re-open)