all the colours of the dark

the painter pietro perugino crops up in torso (1973) an italian giallo film directed by sergio martino (all the colours of the dark). there you go an artist, so you aren't just watching a sleazy slasher film with loads of naked bodies. not exactly a recommendation for the university of perugia, the student body loo good but the faculty has issues. (as usual a great soundtrack). 

yesterday the 50th anniversary of the recording of three of the tracks from universal consciousness by alice coltrane - of the three horsemouth chose sita ram. the sleeve notes list three recording dates. tulsi on tanpura (following on from the great journey in satchidananda), clifford jarvis on drums, jimmy garrison on bass. harp and organ on this one. probably the last album recorded in new york before the move to the west coast but after alice's visit to india and ceylon (as was). 

horsemouth shared a call for urgent action in response to the new variants of covid from members of the Lancet Covid-19 Commission Taskforce on Public Health. the vaccine will not be enough (because we cannot currently vaccinate the world fast enough to stop new vaccine resistant variants popping out. we are living in the moment of delusion that this is possible and in the rush of gratitude to the vaccine). society will open up again (and then it will all kick off again). third wave in summer (or third wave in winter). the government are promising no more lockdowns horsemouth thinks this is foolish. he thinks the vaccinations program will stall in any event because of dust ups with the EU over the limited supply. 

he is a cheerful monkey isn't he.  

yesterday a trip across the fields and up the road to aldi (cheap piazza, fakemeat, 2 bottles of beer, onions, pesto). he would have bought more but he didn't realise he'd brought a spare bag with him. he abandoned sten at toolstation and returned to sit in the garden and read. 

it's another bright sunshine-y morning. today the first anniversary of the death of john prine. next week the anniversary of the 1000 incarnations of the rose american primitive guitar festival in takoma park in 2018 (the height of human civilisation), the week after the mancom (of the communal endeavour), the week after the pink supermoon and the AGM for the same. 

he will continue with his reports from edmond de goncourt our correspondent at the paris commune 1871. 

'everything lingers on a moment (and hastens on to death)'

horsemouth is slightly scandalised that mixmaster mike is scratching with the robert johnson album - aren't they rare by now?

over on metamute an interesting article.

the first part is 'a view from the trenches' of opposition to the restructuring (cost cutting)  universities are attempting (based on a model of 'never let a crisis go to waste' in response to the pandemic).

the second part marks the financialisation of education but also how this changes the understanding of the value of education leading to changes in what education is supposed to achieve (think of the mantra of employability).  peter thiel, dominic cummings the nay-sayers among the speculators on the return on investment of education, the proposers of a different type of education.

the article is interesting, because it accepts the model of the disruption of education, of the need to respond taylorisation of education and of its disciplines with an education that trains students to work across disciplines (so that their work will not be taylorisable and thus have some value). 

yesterday the weather was colder (but the sun still shone). horsemouth walked over to the supermarket in the fields and bought a coffee grinder (himself and sten have a stash of coffee beans), some pre-ground coffee (3 doublepacks of lavazza red label at £5.80 each - which is what passes for a bargain these days), 5l of cooking oil, enough cheese to kill a pig and two bottles of beer. later he read in the garden. 

he's moved on from valis and do androids dream of electric sheep? to philip k. dick's a scanner darkly. instead of rhipidon society (a collection of good and true friends) we have our hero surrounded by his frenemies and sunk deep in paranoia.

and he is justified in this because he is in fact an undercover cop (a fact he cannot always remember). 

don't get horsemouth onto the subject of spycops.

horsemouth has been making some efforts to learn to play the boy in the bubble by paul simon. he can't do it yet - he can't sing the verse lyrics while playing  the guitar part (the chorus is fine). however while he was round howard's he persuaded howard to sing the verses (and that worked well). 

so maybe that's a way forward with it. 

the sun is shining (but it is cold out). that's better weather than was predicted already.  horsemouth has had his first (full) cup of coffee and is about to go round for a second half. whence he will wrap up warm and sit around in the sun. 

it is difficult to imagine all this was possible (and may be possible again)

free gigging. free festivals. anarchy man!

like the minutemen (a band on every block, and every few blocks a venue they could play) here and now offered a different economy of music to the paid gig and the record. 

surprises here? daevid allen's 'no drugs onstage' policy. 

it's tendentious to say they were the first placed band of the hippie underground. horsemouth would argue they were distinctly the second rank (beneath  hawkwind and gong). while people may have their issues with dave brock and his politics (the kind of issues they don't have with saint lemmy) it has to be admitted that he took the band into another era of free gigs on that west country circuit (hence adrian shaw and harvey bainbridge - successive bass players from the south west hippie scene). 

it seems strange that the whole economy of the festival circuit once existed. and then that rave was successfully grafted onto it. 

it is difficult to imagine all this was possible (and may be possible again). 

horsemouth had an unusual talent for missing history. sometimes this served him well (the poll tax riot? he was out of the country), at other times (hawkwind play treworgy) he kind of wishes he'd been more bold. 

musically (frankly) it's all a bit poor. there is a pull to the mainstream in here and now (but that said it was good music to dance to). horsemouth has a cassette somewhere coaxed out from oxford . 

yesterday horsemouth sat in the sun and read. he finished off valis and moved on to do androids dream of electric sheep. once again it is the thing round empathy and pulling together that strikes him, the humans have the advantage because of empathy. the replicants lack of empathy is seen as a grave defect (lack of solidarity makes it difficult for them to have a slave revolt for example). 

this lack of empathy is not, as in contemporary views of autism, seen as a superpower. partly this is the rise of the nerds and the relative cultural importance of brain work. 

what is great with  philip k. dick is his use of his own personal shit being played out and worked through once again. 

afterwards horsemouth watched a large chunk of the good, the bad and the ugly an unrelenting vision of sadism, greed and the disasters of war against which can only be posited a rugged individualism. the lack of empathy the characters display for each other is a function of the society they are in (they literally can't afford it if they are going to survive). as such it actually functions as a critique of the state (war), the  modern world, and our alienated condition under capitalism.

the hippie idyll, the free festival scene, is marked by a spaghetti western like reality overlaid by hippie idealism that cannot overcome its circumstances.  

still it was instructive to try. 

today a walk horsemouth thinks (if only to the supermarket).  

6 months of confiding

true to his words to you horsemouth did not get up to much yesterday. 

he started watching five men of edo (1951) a samurai drama but gave up. 

the yakuza dramas are essentially picaresque action films, they are comedies - zatoichi  arrives in town, outsmarts the villainous locals, takes up with the virtuous locals and defends them from the evil local boss (much carnage). at the end he wanders off into the sunset (and they play his song again).

the samurai dramas are different. we are enmeshed in a world of obligation of feudal society. people's lives are destroyed by these obligations. they are tragedies. take 47 ronin as an example. the ronin will get their revenge for the fall of their master (but then everyone will have to commit suicide). 

horsemouth gave up on five men of edo and took up with the modern day kaza-hana (2000). drunken ruined salary man and suicidal sex worker go up north into hokkaido to die in the snow. by the end of it death has been averted and a stable nuclear family has been constructed. 

the couple are at a hostel in the north in the snow in the kitchen. a guitar is produced and a very bad entertainer starts to play (he's been coming there for 10 years and always does the same show). one part of the show is an impersonation of zatoichi (ending in an as if zatoichi style swordfight with the audience). 

he has a copy of david rattray's how I became one of the invisible (1992 semiotext(e)) round here somewhere. it is a clever admixture of carlos castaneda style shamanism with the desert fathers with beatnik travellers. apparently there is a new edition out with more of david's writing in it.  

it's six months since the release of confiding. horsemouth wishes he'd done a bit more work on it. it should probably have been on the album rather than out on its own. the slide guitars don't really work. they'd tried to record it several times and thrown the previous takes away and sadly those were the better takes in terms of horsemouth's playing. frustratingly several sections of it work really well. horsemouth should have been satisfied with his work on these. 

a courageous horsemouth would have just deleted the slide parts where there's singing. they aren't really doing anything, or doing it well enough to be worth keeping, they just dilute the listener's attention. that said he doesn't like the keyboard sounds either. 

today. more lounging around and reading and probably a walk. there's sunshine coming in the window (that gives him some hope).  for the last six months (since the death of the facebook blogging tool) he has been posting every day - his need to diarise has gotten the better of his need to publish.

a wander round (thank god, civil war has broken out!)

horsemouth is back from a wander round with howard. sad to relate they drank beer (small tins of modern IPA) and ate snacks. 

they started midway between their respective 'gaffs' (in the corner of victoria park), thence to the boats with the coffee (though they did not partake) and then on down the canal to the bow tescos (where they loaded up on the beer and snacks). they adjourned to the millfields to drink, eat and chat and then over the new bridge and round the island to the channelsea inlet and abbey creek. there are photos. thence up the green way to stratford and back to howard's via the dlr. 

there pizza and more beer. they listened to howard's collection of yemeni music and the new floating points/ pharoah sanders album (which they both think is impressive, rising up into alice coltrane like orchestral textures). horsemouth tried out howard's new guitars (a nylon strung and steel strung one) and pronounced them good. there was some discussion of how to cheat B and Gm chords. 

it will be horsemouth's last visit to the flat (howard is on the move)

at roughly 6ish horsemouth departed for the dlr at stratford he made the unfortunate discovery that the north london line (the overground) was out and there was a replacement bus. however after a goodly while it seemed to horsemouth that the replacement bus was heading further east rather than back west so he got off and fortunately found a 425 (as eulogised by official burnt toast) which delivered him to homerton hospital. 

now this has probably been horsemouth's most active (and most exposed) day in a long time. he now plans to go back to staying in and driving defensively for a bit (by way of mitigation). that said it was fun. it would probably have been better to walk but horsemouth brought the bass guitar back with him and so went for the dlr. 

yesterday there were events in horsemouth's paris commune diary. 

the reactionary edmond de goncourt writes;

'the sound of gunfire, about ten o'clock, in the direction of  courbevoie. thank god, civil war has broken out! when things have reached this pass, civil war is preferable to hypocritical skullduggery. the firing dies down. has versailles been beaten? alas, if versailles suffers the slightest reverse, versailles is lost!...

finally a newspaper tells me that the belleville troops have been beaten! I am filled with a  jubilation which I savour at length. let tomorrow bring what it will.' 

in other good news. 

horsemouth may have made a sale (thank you dude) on bandcamp friday. work have furloughed him (and seeing as the furlough may run up to september) he may even make enough money to pay tax this year. the apocalypse is enabling him to save money, if he survives, this may be useful. 

at the opening of utopia (and bandcamp friday)

 'and if you look back,

try to forget all the bad times,

lonely blue and sad times

and just a little bit of rain...'

horsemouth hadn't realised quite how good fred neil's voice is (he thought he was a better writer than a singer), but this tune really shows it off well (almost tim buckley levels of beauty). dolphins as well, largely because it has a great turn at the end. 

horsemouth is reading valis by philip k. dick. at some point he writes a giant exegesis on his experience (the one where god or the soviets fire pink laser beams full of information at his head). in the novel PKD is not above playing his own mental illness for laughs but the exegesis is real.  

similarly in alberto toscano's article on the documentaries of adam curtis horsemouth finds the tale of abu zubaydah who has been detained without charge and tortured by US authorities for almost two decades. he tries to recover from a shrapnel wound to the brain by writing a diary, a ‘vast collage of memories and feelings’ (amounting to some 10,000 pages). 

finally there is ubuweb a vast collection of dada and surrealism where we can run and play. 

indeed a friend has just opened such a utopia  - haretopia - all rendered in cartoons. horsemouth is gingerly exploring. 

meanwhile (back in the meat world) it is bandcamp friday when the few remaining citizens of planet earth who have not yet done so can purchase a copy of musicians of bremen's fine albums. (or howard's solo electronica or rob lawson's zither music).  

today vast purchasing of musicians of bremen's entire oeuvre/ horsemouth and howard will probably go for a walk. thereafter horsemouth will probably go back to being careful again (until the boredom drives him out of doors). 

the photos are back from the developer (things in life)

the photos are back from the developer for the new lifestyle horsemouth ordered. they did a few mock ups and a run through to see what the composition looks like (it looks pretty good says the old mule). 

yesterday horsemouth and enza went for their long delayed walk (we are talking about a quarter of the year here). if it was not the gloriously sunny day promised by the forecasters it was at least warm and dry. they met half way (enza was a little early and horsemouth was a little late). 

they adjourned via the canal system to a leisure area with various boats, open coffee stalls and outdoor bars preparing for re-opening. there they planned for the succession of the chairmanship of the collective endeavour (later enza would phone horsemouth to reveal that martin was in fact not retiring and his succession would in fact not be taking place). 

later they would wander up through hackney marshes to horsemouth's front doorstep bar for a bottle of beer and to avail themselves of  the facilities.  it was there that the photograph was taken. 

then they wandered back down to the park before parting company on the bridge marking the border between their two realms. he lent her the fictions of bruno shulz and the invention of morel. 

what they didn't discuss was making more art of the fall of the house of fitzgerald variety (though enza does have another project on the go with suke but then suke also has another project on the go, so god knows when the first project will come out). 

today is the start of chungking express month. the policeman's girlfriend (may)leaves him on april 1st. he resolves to keep collecting tins of pineapple (is it?) until may 1st (when he'll admit it is over). dennis brown's song features. it's two stories of the three originally planned. 

meanwhile the government has written a report on structural racism in the uk (written by some structural racism deniers);

“the well-meaning idealism of many young people who claim the country is still institutionally racist is not borne out by the evidence”.

oh do fuck off (sighs horsemouth). 

to horsemouth this is a sad reversion to type. the necessity to make social expenditure (furlough etc.) caused by cornoavirus gives the tory party the opportunity to tack left into a one-nation toryism (land of hope and glory etc. etc.) , but they can't take it unless it is on their ideological terms. horsemouth is glad this is the case because it means at some point they will fall (however the wait will be fucking tedious).

he's not sure what to do with today.  there appears to be some sad reversion in the weather.