good morning! good morning! today more sun and heat (horsemouth will mostly be hiding indoors).
yesterday evening horsemouth went for a wander as the day cooled off. he enjoyed the cool of the evening. humanity were wandering around being beauteous, some were even up the pub by the canalside.
hail the gods of finding things in the recycling (ganesha probably) the FT Weekend back on (woo hoo). two july weekend's worth. in a bit he will start digging in and reading them.
instead yesterday he managed a little light reading of isaiah berlin's three critics of the enlightenment - first a biographical section on hamman, then a biographical section on vico (of naples). both are added to the book and help enormously with reading it
horsemouth has been tempted out to eulogise the 12 dreams of doctor sardonicus one of the best ever records intended to be listened to all the way through. it just sounds better to him than forever changes and sgt. pepper (now that's a heresy for you).
over on thrift a life our reseller has hit the wall (no drama it's a video from a year ago), he attempts to talk people through it, work sucks he freely admits, the arguments in favour of work (as some kind of moral obligation) suck also, nonetheless we need to do it to keep ourselves fed, he proposes various ways to trick ourselves into going back to work.
there horsemouth has finished the coffee. he's up slightly later than usual it is important to get out for a wander round before the day heats up and it becomes hard work. thereafter horsemouth will be closing the windows, closing the curtains and attempting to keep the house cool. from tomorrow it changes. for a bit. sten is saying he is going to clear the front and back gardens.
soon horsemouth plans to be away to his folks.
further horsemouth is trying to get more mobile by purging some of his book and guitar habit. the economic model of living in poverty seems to be viable (now to see what it can do).
horsemouth thinks he will half-write this post, go up to the book-bank (and make a deposit) and then return to finish off writing this. so above tangerine dream and later horsemouth will share shade gate by hawkwind (from a later album - probably the last hawkwind album horsemouth bought) which he broadly views as a lift from it (naughty harvey horsemouth guesses).
in the land of book pilled/ thrift a life there is a slow down in the re-selling. our man insists on the work he refuses speculation about what is causing it (he views this as essentially unknowable). if it is still this way in 6 months time (we may have to think again) he says but (as he also says) can you ever envisage a time when americans don't want to buy things off the internet?
here we see the apocalypse of the resellers, the sky coming down on them - our man is refusing to chicken little. he's taking more of a punt on vintage (not his area), he's targetting the bins more - clothing by weight so lower cost of goods, he's doing a little mining (ok ok - working through the tails of actual mining on a pay to dig and keep what you find basis).
it's like a balzac or a zola novel - you are right there with him as he shoves things into remailer envelopes 'I buy in bulk.'
the problem for the economy is that if consumers are spending their money paying their energy bills they don't have spare money (discretionary income) to go and buy anything else with, so the economy (for this is all it is these days) tanks.
last night horsemouth watched a documentary on tangerine dream - 7pm sky arts (freeview 11) revolution in sound: tangerine dream. this was followed by a documentary on modular synthesis but horsemouth wasn't watching it, he was back off downstairs in the world of thrift a life.
horsemouth has announced is planning to potlatch much of his book collection and some of his guitars (the paesold classical guitar and the avon (rose-morris) les paul copy he guesses). horsemouth works by making lists (otherwise he forgets)
anybody want some of them? if you have a topic area you are particularly interested in tell horsemouth and he will let you know what he has in that area.
horsemouth is very grateful for his shady nook. (p.s. the binmen have been, or are be-ing right now, but quietly - they may even have gone earlier because it's summer).
horsemouth was just getting irate (shit in the front garden, shit in the living room). he was getting irate yesterday as well. and maybe the day before. he will sit sten down and have a chat and see if there's a negotiation to be had (but he will be delaying this until the weather is cooler). he has, however, flagged up that there will be talks about talks.
horsemouth has been battling sten to defend the usability of the living room (but only himself and sten use it to any meaningful extent so why bother). he is now thinking the easiest thing to do is to abandon it to entropy and kipple - let it become its own critique.
in winter the chair by the window that gets the sun is useful to horsemouth, maybe that can be preserved. he sometimes watches tv (the news, the odd horror movie).
the battle over the deposition of kipple would then move on to other surfaces - the front garden, the back garden, the corridors, the kitchen, the refrigerator.
everybody in the house is a hoarder but everybody else keeps their stuff to the agreed areas (their room mostly, their space in the junk room). sten will not because a) it is a diabolical infringement of his liberty b) he needs storage/ waste dump space to operate his business
horsemouth's view is that hoarding is mourning, an over attachment to things, an unwillingness to let time (and things) pass.
people like their possessions, they are emotionally attached to them as repositories of memory and as fulfilments of the promise of capitalism, they have no real desire to live in an ikea blueprint of functionalism (ok no they do based on the horrors horsemouth has enunciated above). such is the material wealth of this society that some excretion is necessary to permit continued consumption (hence the binmen). indeed discipline in the domestic space is necessary to permit its continued enjoyment (tidying). think things by georges perec here.
thrift a life/ bookpilled is attempting to avoid employment (aka. having a boss) by reselling, on e-bay and such like, second hand clothes that he buys from thrift shops. to do this he encourages people to detach from whether they like the item of clothing (and its sensuous properties) and only think about it in terms of how long it will take to sell (the apps provide statistics on this). he attempts to cycle his capital multiple times, pricing low to get a quicker sale.
horsemouth is interested that this is the opposite of why people buy things.
and yet he recognises that on the auction platforms his engagement with the book or item of clothing does result in a better sale price (it is coming to resemble more normal selling, a relationship between seller and buyer). he recognises that he does have knowledge of menswear/ vintage/ books and that this is valuable (it helps him do what he does) even as he struggles against it and argues for the metrics of the market.
formerly horsemouth rewarded himself for working with quantities of snack food (espressos, sandwiches etc.), second hand books (sometimes clothing) and things found in the street. since he has 'retired' he does these things much less - yesterday he acquired a miniature vodka bottle (for use as a guitar slide) and a tiny cardboard cloud on a cocktail stick (just because). but in general he is moving to a 'don't buy shit (or bring shit back)' position. he has attempted to balance his book acquisitions with some distribution of books out to the book boxes. he will attempt to accelerate this.
he realises this is a tedious topic he will therefore detach and move on to topics of more general interest.
horsemouth is planning to potlatch much of his book collection and some of his guitars. anybody want some of them?
horsemouth was complimented on his brown-ness. he likes to get out and get the sun in early in the season before it gets too hot. horsemouth can only see the point in hot temperatures if you are at the seaside (or at the lakes).
the sun now rises at the end of the street. or so horsemouth guesses from where it was when he was out emptying out the kitchen waste into the compost bin. it sets behind the block of flats visible from the back garden (or maybe even further north west than that - when horsemouth goes up the park the sun appears to be setting in upper clapton).
the axis of horsemouth's house is thus not angled perfectly south (as he fondly likes to imagine) but south east. his house also has a butterfly roof - the roof is highest at the walls and then descends in a V to it's lowest point along the midline of the house (with the axis pointing south east).
the result is that horsemouth's house has almost the worst roof possible for fitting solar panels. (ideally for solar panels you want a south facing roof, flat or pitched - either will do). many roofs in the co-op are like this (butterfly roofs pointing south east) and the houses are narrow, meaning the size of the array (and thus the power generated) will be small. (horsemouth hates to break this to people).
that at least is horsemouth's opinion - what the co-op really needs to do is find someone who knows.
the whole current ecological drive (to net zero) seems very strange to horsemouth - the silicon wafer for the solar panels will need to be produced (it is produced in china smelted in giant vats heated by burning chinese coal (releasing lots of CO2 )). the towers for offshore windfarms are steel manufactured in vietnam (releasing lots of CO2 ). these items are then shipped to the UK (er...releasing lots of CO2 ) to help with our de-carbonisation.
everything has to be manufactured and shipped and the workers to assemble or install it have to travel to your location. the fantasy is that the technology will miraculously arrive to enable us all to live our lives without having to make changes.
actual decarbonisation (affirms horsemouth) is more likely to be driven by increase in costs of power thus leading to people consuming less because they can no longer afford it. decarbonisation has real costs which will (probably) be born by the working class because they lack the means to defend themselves.
horsemouth was watching some videos by thecottagefairy(now this has a slightly different meaning in english - a fairy was an abusive term for a gay man, a cottage was a place where gay men would gather for anonymous(ish) sex).
in comparison thecottagefairy in american seems to be a good looking girl (ok ok woman) who has rejected city life and retired to the countryside to do a little gardening, forage wild plants, bake biscuits with flowers in them, write in commonplace books and all while dressed in long skirts and such like (there doesn't seem to be any mud in this version of the countryside which is somewhat shocking to horsemouth. there seems to be no need for wellington boots). a piano plays and she discourses in soft, relaxing, reasonable voice about her lifestyle choices. she works as a bookseller - it's all nicely photographed.
and this is when it strikes horsemouth that there must be a very nice digital camera on a tripod somewhere filming this.
and of course horsemouth types this on his laptop sitting up in bed (cross-legged) wearing a slightly stained short-sleeved shirt (in a pale purple and white gingham he guesses) and a pair of blue fila shorts (with white and red piping). in a bit he will go for a patrol - this he does because a) he is bored b) to get in his exercise before it gets too hot, and c) because people do not always take their donations to the commonweal to the book-boxes but frequently just leave them out on their garden walls. (he's still hoping the dude on chatsworth will cough up the copy of the FT weekend into the recycling from whence horsemouth can snaffle it).
in the city (where horsemouth lives) the rental news continues to be bad (quite how bad horsemouth had not in fact realised). the long awaited day of retribution has half arrived (and yet it looks like it may be delayed out). timing of course is everything.
it is certainly true of horsemouth who took the opportunity granted by the redundancy cheque and the activation of his work's pension (in particular the proportion of his work's pension taken in advance) to jump ship.
bye bye good ship capitalism (actually the filthiest of down-on-its-luck luggers), you will not miss me.
- why do people work?
- because they need money to live (mostly). (there are other reasons. people like the status. the role. the sociability. they may even like the task itself).
- if you had enough money to live on would you work?
- maybe...
horsemouth thinks of himself as retired but he worries that he does not have enough money to coast it out until pension day - when the state pension kicks in.
the big problem (as horsemouth sees it) is the decline in the real value of pay (and indeed money in general) and the concomitant increase in profits and just pure wealth of the ruling class. now if there's a shortage of workers then the workers should be able to challenge the bosses for better wages. horsemouth hopes that in struggle things move forward and contradictions are worked through.
well ok let's see you says horsemouth.
from the long hot summer to the winter of discontent.
good morning! good morning!
horsemouth has the window open (and to be fair he's wearing a jumper). we enter another heatwave. though not quite as quality as the one before. it's early (well not as early as it was when horsemouth woke up and started writing this).
yesterday horsemouth mostly hid indoors but he also patrolled the neighbourhood a few times. he went up to teh powerscroft road book box but it was being visited the first two times he passed by (this is good news).
on his mission (in nearby colenso road) he found a copy of three critics of the enlightenment: vico, hamman, herder by isaiah berlin (pimlico edition 2013 good condition).
and yet three critics is a book of the type composed after the event - it may have been berlin's intention to write a book on this topic he never did and thus this is not it, it is a combination of various essays together as if they were a book, as if they all had the same object.
the 'these essays originate...' of berlin's author's preface repurposed in this book does not refer to all the essays included in the book, it is in fact the preface to his book vico and herder: two studies in the history of ideas. to make the two studies into three essays requires more than the inclusion of a further essay on hamann the magus of the north (an author horsemouth has never even heard the name of before) which itself includes passages not used in the original.
and then there are also the essays not included in the book (his josephde maistreand the origins of fascism for instance).
on wikipedia there are quibbles about the referencing too - that the secondary sources referenced by berlin in his original essays may have been swapped for the primary sources (that berlin may or may not have read).
of course any book can be objected to on these grounds (this is pretty much that is the lesson of derrida if not the lesson of althusser).
but what of berlin's (reconstructed) intent, to quote wikipedia;
'three critics was one of berlin's many publications on the enlightenment and its enemies that did much to popularise the concept of a counter-enlightenment movement that he characterised as relativist, anti-rationalist, vitalist and organic and which he associated most closely with german romanticism.'
now there's a lot of this counter-enlightenment thinking about (perhaps as a necessary corrective to the instrumentalist reason of the enlightenment). the various currents embrace various parts of the history authorised by the enlightenment (this is vico) but also by counter-enlightenment thinkers. these are dangerous times. anyway horsemouth has made it through the introductions and as far as p.22.
today? more reading. a few quick patrols before it gets too hot. maybe a walk with TG at some stage.
it is the anniversary of the recording of the first of marion brown's georgia trilogy afternoon of a georgia faun (curiously enough recorded in new york). horsemouth is letting it pootle away.
so the photos are coming in from the camping trip horsemouth did not go on (dammit).
yesterday a walk up to walthamstow st. james street - there and back again 5 miles or so. horsemouth pretends he was going there to look for books but in his heart of hearts he knew the oxfam was shut and that the other two charity shops he visits on the bottom of the market have very limited selections. really he went for the walk and he went early - not quite the first customer in the doors but nearly.
he types this wearing a jumper (it is a grey morning only just clearing). this he thought would never be possible again yesterday afternoon. a week of plus 30 beckons.
for the early part of yesterday afternoon horsemouth hid in doors - a friend described mabley green as being like death valley. he listened to the hawkbinge podcast episode about PXR 5. they take as their guide the order in which the albums were released and only take the studio albums. horsemouth suggested that really you should listen to hawklords next (which was released before PXR 5 but actually recorded after) so the order would be astounding sounds - quark - PXR 5 - hawklords. this would be a good guide to the calvert years.
possibly sonic assassins too. chipped in a friend.
yes. this is their defect (replied horsemouth). they won't allow themselves access to the live albums. the singles. the bootlegs. they are forced to pretend that the good stuff wasn't usually recorded live and then overdubbed (in the case of PXR 5 this would be robot and uncle sam's on mars). though frankly it does mean clunkers like back on the streets can be avoided. matt (the youngster) does at least lead one to the important questions such as - why on earth you would follow up high rise with a clunker like PXR 5? why on earth you would ever commit flying doctor to tape?
once you let yourself listen to sonic assassins you can hear that harvey bainbridge and martin griffin (of devon band ARK) had heard stratus by billy cobham. this horsemouth had never suspected because he didn't hear stratus until much later (as a result of massive attack robbing it for safe from harm), you can hear calvert attempting to busk or freestyle the lyrics (and why the through composed version on hawklords is so much better).
later the C4 news. the ex-PM is having a nice rest and refusing to do anything (to be fair this was the condition of being allowed to keep the keys to no.10). meanwhile the future PM is engaged in hand to hand combat for the delectation of the tory party faithful. the plan seems to be to sacrifice the people to greater profits for mammon in october (and have some tax cuts for the rich). horsemouth suggests they sort that one out in a hurry.
after the C4 news horsemouth could find nothing he fancied watching. he fiddled about on the computer and then he went to sleep early.
it is 7 years since the release of musicians of bremen volume two an album with which horsemouth had surprisingly little to do. it is essentially a solo album for the other musician of bremen - horsemouth contributes a lyric and some guitars to blackwall tunnel and he sings and plays vast quantities of guitars on noah (a song he co-wrote), other than that it is all yer man.
and very good it is too. yer man is mostly playing the hohner 6 string guitar (but also the ukulele for sure on noah and blackwall tunnel), all keyboards, and he recruited a singer (ruth chiat) for two tracks who does a great job. horsemouth thinks it is the neglected jewel in the collection.
based on yer man having recorded a solo album (in all but name) horsemouth was able to argue that he should have his own solo album in all but name (and that would be volume three with horsemouth singing the main vocals and yer man singing the back ups).
they then re-united (to a certain extent) for volume four, covers, the humming, and all of that. if horsemouth has a criticism of volume four it would be that he's not convinced they reformed the band nor that they picked the right tracks for the album - amarach he is convinced by, am I born to die he is not, wonky he is convinced by (but it's entirely yer man's), blindspot so nearly makes it, he could go on.
a friend has purchased the collection - horsemouth should wander the CDs down to him.
remarks the disturbed young man in h.p. lovecraft'sthe tomb.
here horsemouth is stuck for relatable events. (he may have to revert to analysing causes).
yesterday a failure to launch kind of day. horsemouth went out and snoozed in the shade in the park. he patrolled the neighbourhood several times, checking first the book bins and later the dustbins for discarded quality newspapers. (there were some people on the high road in the habit of chucking out the FT weekend section). some progress was made with the reading of the master and margarita.
horsemouth's room is very cool and quiet, it makes it difficult to want to get out onto the sun-fried streets.
in the islamic calendar (a lunar one and thus roughly 10 days shorter than the solar calendar that we may be more familiar with) the new year has begun and we are just exiting the first 10 days of the year (these have especial significance).
the depopulation of the east continues;
'most of the five million people who emigrated during the first two decades of putin’s rule were under forty; almost all had university degrees (92 per cent) and a significant proportion had PhDs (14 per cent). since february, hundreds of thousands more have bolted.'
the greatest lack a country can have is a lack of people to do the work. it means the work will have to be done elsewhere, other countries will get the benefit of it, and some other government will get the taxes on it.
horsemouth was due a wander round with TG but he is late back. horsemouth will try and get out for a wander round early.
