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)

horsemouth is (local) history

DOPO porto based five piece experimental ambient folk outfit. good stuff. seemingly active 2004-2009, last posting a retrospective compilation in 2019. 

mário lopes wrote the sleevenotes, he opens browser window after browser window looking for their history. 

'in the middle of the process that purpose faded from my thinking and the sound took over the operations. this sound: I found myself in the center of an orchestra born before my ears unexpectedly. the acoustic and electric guitars, the harmonics, the tambourines, the ferrinhos, the rattles, the melodies, the layers of noise processed by pedals that the DOPO manipulated so that the voices were different and the guitars and keyboards stopped being exactly keyboards and guitars...' 

it's horsemouth AM. a slow starting day. horsemouth is (local) history the fall of the house of fitzgerald has been added to tower hamlets local history archive. one day aliens will land. survey the ruins. look at all the hard drives and find horsemouth and enza playing dress up. 

horsemouth is reading james sallis's time's hammers. there's a jerry cornelius story. the west collapses, london burns, there are corpse barges everywhere on the river, jerry and michael moorcock sit out on the balcony in a modernist riverside des res and watch it all come down. 

the current torypocalypse is not a bit like this. there is cronyism and corruption. strangely people are not e-baying their way through the crisis like horsemouth assumed, online sales are not up (much) but physical sales are very down. we are in penitential lent. the economy is most excellently tanked (and we haven't even had brexit yet). 

horsemouth has sent a message to sean (long time no see - get in touch dude). yesterday 

horsemouth was getting over tired. at 2.55 he was cursing the air black and blue, slamming doors, drawers, threatening kettles and demanding vengeance. at 5pm he was done. he had a beer and was laughing at a compilation video of people getting seriously hurt doing dangerous stunts.

astral traveling versus the commute

 this is one of the 4 tracks recorded in LA on this day in  1970 by pharoah sanders. it is the famous one because it has lonnie liston smith on electric piano (apparently it was just sitting in a corner of the studio) the remaining two tracks on the album were recorded in NY and are much more straight ahead  faux african pieces. one of the four is a great cecil mcbee bass solo. 

horsemouth has just worked (travelled to and travelled back) and he works there tomorrow (bollocks). hopefully this is horsemouth moving sharply towards the exit to the year. some coughing and sneezing on the train (hopefully horsemouth won't get sick and die - this would piss him off). he's up early - so he'll save it now (the night of the 24th) so he can just pop it up first thing. 

he was just watching a great a.l. 'bert' lloyd interviews doc watson film. bot just doc watson singing am I born to die? but also him doing a version of salty dog (one that horsemouth knows from mississippi john hurt).

we are climbing up the hill of winter (and we must climb down the other side too)

recorded this day in 1971

in his dream horsemouth was up the pub with marike. they were being adults and giving an advice and guidance session to a youngster. (HINT. don't take any advice from horsemouth, he really does know  nothing). horsemouth was bragging about lots of historical events, the (in)famous people he knew etc. er. back in the day etc.  

anyway. he's up now. 

last night a zoom meeting on the state of the co-operative (horsemouth almost forgot about it). he worked in the morning. he attends a meeting this morning and then travels and works this afternoon. 

last night a documentary on the disproportionate deaths of BAME people (and BAME health workers in particular) during the pandemic. it is of course racism rather than race that leads to poverty and poor public health, it is the disproportionate presence of BAME people in lower patient-facing roles in the health service, they are poorer so they take more shifts, that leads to increased exposure (and thus increased death). 

but now everybody gets a risk assessment (woopie!) so everything is of course better. 

horsemouth is of the opinion that if white people were dying disproportionately then a motley crew of strangely BAME employees would soon be rounded up and shipped off towards the guns (but then he digresses). 

perhaps he is wrong. maybe the ruling class don't even give that much of a shit. we have had the great government fuck up in the provision of PPE now we move on through the great government fuck up in test, track and trace towards the great government fuck up in getting people vaccinated. 

this will of course be followed by a few hard rounds of austerity (e.g. no pay rises to match inflation in the public sector real-terms wage cuts) leading to increased poor public health just in time for the next novel virus. and of course there's the double tap of brexit.

horsemouth is glad to be out of it. except he's not out of it. he's leading a strange ubikstyle existence where he ghosts up once in a while and gets on a train to go to work. the rest of the time he is working from home on technology he does not understand. 

horsemouth worries about falling ill this late in the game (we are climbing up the hill of winter and we must climb down the other side too). at the weekend he babysat (too many people). this afternoon he gets on a train (too many people) and tomorrow too. and that will be his appetite for risk done. 

and then it's just next week (really).