gigs, books, films, events february 2020

gigs   gwenifer raymond, doctor turtle, various people at siobhan's party.

films

• loaded, 
• seven thunders, 
• the vampire lovers, 
• sea ranch interview, 
• a cat in a bag (1964 - john coltrane soundtrack as blue world), 
• hawkwind documentary, 
• ronald blythe interviews, 
• elementary... very patchy, not much on horror channel lately. 

 books 

• the accident -ismael kadare (the first one of his horsemouth hasn't enjoyed) 
•  reading folk archive: on the utopian dimension of the artist's book - dan smith 
•  the pedagogy of the oppressed - paolo friere (introduction and early chapters) 
•  notes and drafts for 'the dialectic of the enlightenment' (adorno and horkheimer) 
•  politics, metaphysics, death: essays of giorgio agamben's homo sacer (some articles) 
•  the leviathan in the state theory of thomas hobbes: meaning and failure of a political symbol -carl schmitt (introduction) 

 events sean visits, visit tate, siobhan's birthday, visit jeremy bentham in his old location for the last time, visit the grant museum, uk leaves the EU, groundhog day, fahey week 2020. .

fahey week 2020 day 7 - fahey week ends (basho day)

fahey week ends for 2020 with basho day. it is the anniversary of the birth of john fahey and the death of robbie basho on the chiropractor’s couch. basho was a big fellow plagued with back trouble. unlike fahey who lived long enough to repudiate his earlier ‘cosmic sentimentalism’ basho didn’t and he probably wouldn’t have. while also coming from takoma park basho’s vision was a lush religious, romantic one. basho sings too, often wordless and yearning, there are spoken word interludes and dedications to his guru.

to go all biblical the american primitives begat the wyndham hill new age guitar school. while fahey embraced electric guitar, noise collages and song titles such as the death and disembowelment of the new age, basho let himself be recorded by wyndham hill and arguably produced his best work visions of the country. but it wasn’t what the new age-ers were looking for.

fahey week 2020: 'the flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come...’

‘...and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land...' - song of solomon 2:12 (king james bible)

horsemouth picked up the idea of fahey week from the delta slider blogspot. (lord knows how long they’ve been running with it).

on sunday, 22 february 2015 we find the first fahey week post on horsemouth’s folk archive.

the next year we have a complete fahey week, horsemouth goes through fahey’s recorded output backwards in 7 year hops beginning with monday, 22 february 2016’s excuse me sir. do you have a minute to talk about john fahey?

in 2017 horsemouth looked at the various collaborations of john fahey.

in 2018 horsemouth begins it with his thoughts on a radio documentary - an interview about fahey’s life and work by nicholas thompson with steve lowenthal, the author of fahey biography the dance of death.

in 2019 horsemouth read and commented on an account by john jeremiah sullivan (in a collection of his journalism pulphead - dispatches from the other side of america) of phoning up fahey in pursuit of an old blues lyric.

of course there are other times in the year when fahey makes an appearance. there are probably earlier posts on horsemouth’s facebook pages or entombed under the dead weight of myspace. he’ll dig them out for you.

but there, now we’re all caught up.

horsemouth has a cough (unusual for the time of year)

part of the reason why he is coughing so much this morning is that he drank too much beer last night (once again horsemouth was king of the let’s have another one party - though to be fair myk did start it off). he went to see gwenifer raymond and doctor turtle play,

thanks to john clarkson for steering him in the direction of a free ticket courtesy of analog planet (website of the discerning hi-fi buff), he would have taken a +1 of you but it was short notice. it was good to see mike, lou, and myk there.

to repay the universe for his free ticket horsemouth bought a gwenifer raymond t-shirt. which he is now wearing  (horsemouth buying clothing?)

horsemouth arrived during doctor turtle’s set (which was nice - well played dude). gwenifer did a good long set and seems to have stopped being monosyllabic (horsemouth was a little shocked), we were treated to two new numbers played live for the first time, some great banjo pieces. if horsemouth has a criticism it is that the material veered towards the night train to valhalla end of things rather than the on the sunny side of the ocean side of things. still thanks john/ analog planet/ everybody - a good night out.

on the way back horsemouth got a bag of chips.


a friend of horsemouth was asking for recommendations in the folk music field. horsemouth recommended jacken elswyth (who he knew from the weirdshire connection - and he knew them from the wild hare club connection ans so on). and then it turns out his friend already knows jacken. (phew cor-bloody hell, small world, seven degrees of separation and less in the radical world). here's another split cassette tape and digital download from jacken. once again it is most excellent.

stellar regions (the panopticon) the blue world

recorded this day in 1967 but the tapes not found again until 1995 - stellar regions is john coltrane with alice coltrane on piano, with jimmy garrison on bass and rashied ali on drums but without pharaoah sanders. this makes it a more lyrical proposition.

some of the themes appear on the later interstellar space (the duo recording with rahied ali). the songs were titled by alice coltrane which helps to locate them.

there have been similar posthumous coltrane discoveries since (both directions at once for example, recorded 1963 with the classic quartet) and the 1964 blue world (recorded for a national film board of canada movie in three hours - the tapes spirited across the border and largely unused).

but while horsemouth loves the classic quartet he is even more enthusiastic about coltrane’s later years (he wants to see where coltrane is going).

The Cat in the Bag , Gilles Groulx, provided by the National Film Board of Canada

today is also the anniversary of the birth of the utilitarian jeremy bentham and thus of the panopticon (one of the clearest expressions of the total surveillance society but also critically of its internalisation by prisoners/ subjects/ citizens/ users of facebook). horsemouth went to visit his autoicon this week (where we can be revenged upon him for this).

while he was by no means as industrious as the parisian citizens discussed by balzac in his the girl with the golden eyes this week horsemouth worked the dayjob , he traveled to and from, he babysat, he read, watched various movies and listened to various musics, he made some attempts to learn new songs, he visited a museum. he’s not sure what he’s up to today but he’ll find something.

horsemouth multiplies his personality (‘hail to the king of ... activity, to whom time and space gives way’)

howard.... busy (also) ...etc.

‘... yes, hail to that being, composed of saltpetre and gas, who makes children for france during his laborious nights, and in the day multiplies his personality for the service, glory, and pleasure of his fellow-citizens...’ 

while the rest of the novel (the girl with the golden eyes) is a minor thing, balzac’s sustained coffee fueled rant about the hardworking, multitasking parisian citizen is a thing of beauty. balzac's parisian citizen works multiple jobs. after a full working day balzac makes him a spear carrier at the opera.

you can see why marx and engels love him (and what they’ve borrowed from him).

 

union jacks and commonwealth (the rest of you are just going to have to take your chances))

horsemouth's friends triple negative have got a new LP coming out - you can pre-order it here.

so horsemouth has survived another week. for this week. he has been gainfully employed which now means he has earned nearly enough to pay his rent (april to april) and that after this month’s paycheck it’s all gravy (i.e. he can use this money to feed and clothe himself and buy books and beer - so that would be february and march).

of course this is only nearly (but also not entirely) practicable and requires the dipping of his savings at a slow but steady rate. horsemouth’s basic plan is to coast it out to the point where his savings will allow him to survive until pension day (67) without recourse to the benefits system (this may necessitate withdrawl to a warmer country for a series of extended holidays now that moving to europe looks to have been blocked off).

horsemouth has been pondering the almost maoist optimism of paolo freire’s the pedagogy of the oppressed in tandem with the current political situation.‘trusting the people is the indispensable precondition for revolutionary change’ - paolo freire, pedagogy of the oppressed, p.42 (one pound treadwell’s table). it’s all very humanist and inspiring. ‘the correct method lies in dialogue’. easy to say (but difficult to do) in the current situation.

17 million people have chosen something horsemouth would not have chosen. everywhere horsemouth detects a profound political disaffection and a desire for autonomy (that he would recognise) but it is framed in the language of immigration controls and (paradoxically) parliamentary sovereignty.

the radical potential of the years following the credit crunch has been spunked on a dream of faded imperial grandeur. the tory party has played a good game and is now safely back in power for the next five years. and yet it is charged with delivering this insane fantasy of an escape from global capitalism into a sunny upland of union jacks and commonwealth.

the economy is about to take a kicking. horsemouth hopes that his needs are so few and his sector so far back in order of things that he will survive it largely unscathed. horsemouth will be saying I told you so at regular intervals and refusing all calls for unity. like he says all he has to do is stretch it out in the direction of the pension. should the pension evapourate or become meaningless before he gets there he’s probably still ok (he is after all a child of the middle classes).

the rest of you are just going to have to take your chances.