books, films, gigs, events february 2024

books 

- elizabeth costello, j.m. coetzee

- the spoilers, desmond bagley

- gary stevenson article, daily telegraph

- on autofiction, adam thirwell (artreview) and  anna backman rogers  'still life: notes on barbara loden's wanda' (1970)- part. 

- burnt norton from the four quartets,  t.s.eliot.

- the temptation of peter breugel the elder

- housing crisis underplayed, financial times

- christopher priest obituary, guardian

- art of marisol, art forum

- alive, alive oh! diana athill

- LRB smartphone article

- $hutdown: how covid shook the world's economy, adam tooze.  

film 

- R4 piece on anne briggs, adam hall 

- protest: what is it good for, james butler, LRB

- making sense of social housing. podcast, 3 episodes, tortoise media 

- vinyl requiem, philip jeck

- christopher priest obituary, outlaw bookseller

- hazard profile, soft machine (RAI 1974)

-  two 'poor in america' documentaries 

-  the martin sheen thing

- katie cruel in the subway

- wave debb mix/ howard non golden glow mixcloud mix

- outlaw bookseller, bookpilled, novara media, spain speaks etc.

- predator 2

gigs none

events 

groundhog day (punxsatawny phil prognosticates an early spring), heathwall wander, beers with howard, year of the dragon begins, anniversary of satchidananda integral yoga gala (1971), interstellar space day, fahey week 2020(4), valencia tower block fire, snow moon, leap day, london overground lines renamed, tories lose two by-elections, mardi gras/ ash wednesday, 12 years ago the end of horsemouth's involvement in 'volunteer led renovation'.

the leap day (the three of rabbits, the six of hens, the two of crows...)

the three of rabbits.

the six of hens.

the two of crows (often).

it's true. we are coming up on the 2000th blogpost of this incarnation of the blog on blogspot. (we are on 1952 so we will cross that border sometime towards the end of april horsemouth thinks). we are rolling up towards 11 years of blogging here. three years plus of blogging everyday. 

there was of course a previous incarnation of this blog on myspace (currently stored in a zip file) that transitioned onto blogger through a more regular blog on facebook using the facebook 'notes' tool (when that existed). 

it is the leap day so we will be using this somewhat anomalous day for reflection on just what exact kind of craziness fuels this whole enterprise. 

it is the leap day. the last time it was a leap day was in 2020. the pandemic was about to arrive. horsemouth was comparing it to godzilla. because there are fewer leap year days than normal days there are fewer entries in his memory. 

currently the plan is to do a phonecall with his brother in the evening, then a zoom meeting friday 12-1 and then get a train down out of newport mid afternoon (then in the evening horsemouth goes to see a gig). 

saturday there's a plan to wander round charlton (british home of italo svevo). 

horsemouth has been researching the water industry. 

'since margaret thatcher’s government privatised england’s water companies in 1989, debts have been piling up almost every year, going from no debt in 1989 to a combined £60.3bn between them in 2023... 28% of thames’ customer bills were spent servicing debt...'

'thames water has been lobbying the government and regulators to let it increase bills by 40%, pay lower fines for breaches and keep paying out dividends as part of efforts to avert a taxpayer bailout...' 

a somewhat kafkaesque bordertown

'we are all imagining the same thing in the end, but we have different ideas of how to get there'               - yoko ono

it's the last day of fahey week (it is basho day - the anniversary of the death of robbie basho). 

what does youtube recommend for basho? (we tried this trick with fahey yesterday if you remember)

well blue crystal fire and then the album that it is from visions of the country and then night way (also from visions of the country). horsemouth has gone the night way. (listen to that singing -  is he counting it off like qawali? or is he singing in spanish? or is it just the wordless music of the soul?). 

basho dies. fahey is born. 

------------------------------------------

'james cleverly joins calls for lee anderson to apologise...' you literally could not make it up (ask the people of shithole, sorry horsemouth meant to say stockton).

horsemouth has completed his books, films, gigs, events list for february 2020(4). he will put it up soon (probably on leap day the 29th of february). . 

he's not reading as much as he should (he should be reading now). horsemouth is planning on being back in the wen for friday. he plans to go to a stick in the wheel/ laura cannel gig. (this will take us out into march so it cannot count as a gig towards his february total). the elizabeth costello is nearly done - she is waiting admittance to the afterlife in a somewhat kafkaesque  bordertown. 

juanita (I live in a car)

fahey week this year has passed its mid-point. 

we are easing down towards robbie basho day. 

horsemouth doesn't know what track to pick to best indicate it. youtube recommends film of fahey playing live, poor boys long way from home from hamburg 1978 followed by red pony from a tv special in 1969. judging by this footage the 70ies were clearly a hard decade for fahey, he's ageing fast, going bald by the minute. he seems to be wearing the same shirt (but it has been washed grey). we get on to whole albums (the dance of death and other plantation favourites, america, fare forward voyagers).  

horsemouth has picked womblife one of the later albums (1997). horsemouth has it somewhere courtesy of denise. it just shows fahey could have been doing that ry cooder soundtrack thing all along. 

the cover photo is fahey in his car (with all his possessions). 

it may be from when he was moving up to salem oregon or it may be from later (when he was homeless and living in his car). horsemouth used to imagine he was on his way to a gig (but no that car is just too full). 

the photo is by bettina herzner - her other photos of fahey seem to be from the welfare hotel phase (so perhaps he was just storing stuff in his car by this point). 

living in a car seems very fashionable at the moment (because people can no longer afford to live in flats or houses anymore not because there are no jobs but because wages are so low). people are now in work homeless, they suffer from in-work poverty. horsemouth has watched two poor in america documentaries recently - disney workers living in the motels close to disneyland and a wife and kids living in a car in california while the husband is off in kentucky earning the money labouring (but then  he gets attacked, kills the other guy in self-defence and ends up in jail). 

things are much worse for people these days than when horsemouth was a kid (if he did but know it it was a period of peak prosperity and cultural authority for the working class).  

horsemouth is up. he has his coffee. it's a cold and frosty morning. last night the martin sheen thing - they have escaped port talbot, they have escaped wales via hay-on-wye, they have escape the welsh catcher general in cheltenham, they are on their way to an undisclosed location. he wonders what the critics are making of it. there's an element of post-lockdown  conspiracy theory in it. this horsemouth enjoys as a reconfiguration of it all. 

'fahey establishes rapport with the tasmanians'

it's the morning. horsemouth has not done his homework for fahey week and so will have to bodge something together in a hurry. 

yesterday evening he did a little reading on live in tasmania  by john fahey. it is an object lesson in how fahey can present himself and his work to best effect and the lengths he is prepared to go to to achieve this. at least one track is not actually played live but is a studio recording with audience noise dubbed onto it. the tracks are renamed for the occasion to make them appear like new work and one of the main pleasures is identifying the songs for what they are. 

and here is fahey doing the heavy lifting for him, first 'fahey establishes rapport with the tasmanians' and then discoursing further upon 'obscurity'. 

fahey is a thorough-going huckster (in this he is not a bit like kafka). 

sadly for horsemouth (and his 'it happened today' tendencies) this album was not recorded any time round today but was instead recorded in october. 

===================================

'the cladding - the material used on the façade - is suspected of being a major factor, with reports that it was banned in 2019 because of its flammability, but that it was not subsequently removed from buildings that had used it...'

horsemouth has been keeping an eye on the fire in valencia at a campanar residential development. it looks like that cassette style cladding from the outside with (allegedly) a polyurethane core.

'esther punchades, from insurance inspection agency APCAS, told state broadcaster TVE a lack of firewalls and the use of the plastic material polyurethane on the façade of the building that caught fire would have contributed to the rapid spread of the blaze.'

ten people are dead. the alarms didn't go off. probably more people would have died had it happened at night. once again looking at photos of the burnt out building it is amazing that more people didn't die. 

of course these fires will continue to happen because cladding became fashionable, and because many of the firms that built the buildings are no longer in existence. 

the situation is, of course, not any better in the UK, many buildings with flammable cladding languish unremediated because the money has not been made available to remediate them. 

today better weather. 

kafka/ fahey (kafkaesque/ faheyesque)

 'if I were another person observing myself and the course of my life, I should be compelled to say that it must all end unavailingly, be consumed in incessant doubt, creative only in its self-torment...'  - franz kafka, diaries, 25th february 1915. 

'bluegrass music destroyed my life' - john fahey

kafka/ fahey 

could they be more different? 

kafka dies before he gets old.

fahey doesn't. he gets old bloated and fat (and only then does he die). 

kafka is ennobled by TB (even as it kills him - check susan sontag on this). 

fahey is dragged down by alcoholism, prescription drug abuse, obesity, diabetes, epstein-barr syndrome and eventually a monstrous heart attack. it's just not a fashionable way to go and he doesn't leave a good looking corpse. 

both are clearly mad as biscuits. maladjusted. 

kafka has a reputation for the short stories published during his life time. but when he dies more of his material is posthumously released and translated. his reputation gets bigger until he is some kind of a secular saint and we have the adjective kafkaesque, a word so overused it may have lost all meaning. 

fahey has a reputation as a guitar player. but then he lunches it.  he goes into internal exile in salem oregon. when he is rescued even as he doesn't want to make the old music anymore. but does this term apply to his music or his character. if the music he no longer wanted to make was faheyesque, is the music he made at the end of his career faheyesque also? or are they closer than he claimed?

yesterday zoom beers with howard (he did not go off to yoko ono after all). two beers. feeling slightly muzzy this morning. yesterday some sunshine - horsemouth almost managed to sit out and read. so far nothing he has 'planted' has come up (but it is early days yet). the bbc weather claims rain today but then decentish for the new week. 

let us think fahey in terms of his animals, in terms of his presentations (ape fahey)

'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.

'I remember turtles, tons of them, around his office, his home. we built a turtle sanctuary in his backyard in LA-- on palms boulevard, a breezy name for a concrete noise....' - from leo kottke’s tribute to john fahey.

fahey week day three

of course the turtles mentioned in the song of solomon are turtle doves, and the turtles mentioned by leo kottke are tortoises. 

'look! you are the moon among the stars

look! you are a light in the darkness

my turtle dove...'  - baaba maal, mariama. 

apparently one in five migratory species are under threat of extinction. horsemouth recently read a post which suggested that pigeons and doves have been domesticated and taken by humanity to every corner of the earth, that they are there where we are because they love us. (horsemouth thinks that is stretching it a bit).  

horsemouth is reading j.m.coetzee's elizabeth costello. in this coetzee's central character has become an older woman with an interest in animal rights (but an author still - if we take his central characters to be ciphers for the author). as an author she is required to give author talks and she returns often to kakfa's  a report to an academy - in which an ape gives a presentation to a learned academy. for costello (and many philosophers)  what makes humans human is reason (and this allows them to do what they will to animals because animals do not have reason) but, for costello, this is not a satisfactory argument. 

it is the one kafka tests by having a reasoning ape. 

let us think fahey in terms of his animals, in terms of his presentations. 

fahey's totem animal was the tortoise/ the turtle. a strange beast. leathery skinned, an armoured shell, not noticeably loquacious, not often suspected of reason. later, when life had brought him low, fahey was to attribute this in a cod-freudian fashion to childhood sexual abuse by his father. whether this was his actual opinion or whether it was elicited from him by the fundamentalist christians running the welfare hotel where he lived and attempting to treat him for homelessness, alcoholism and prescription drug abuse is a moot point.  

fahey's spirit animal is not a high-flying bird who can give us access to the overview but the tortoise, a creature made leaden and slow by its defences, by its shell. 

fahey wrote copious sleeve notes mocking academia, in particular philosophy and anthropology, and also mocking the picaresque tales of wandering singer-songwriters. the ape fahey meets academia most successfully in his thesis on charley patton but in almost every interview he burlesques the role of great musician with something profound to say. 

 fahey makes it into next month's 'uncut' magazine,

'65 years on from his trail-blazing debut album 'blind joe death', the guitarist’s influence looms larger than ever. here, friends and acolytes help us uncover the truth behind this contrary artist’s life and career...'

horsemouth has been vegetarian now for something approaching (or perhaps even surpassing) 40 years. it doesn't bother him, it is easy, he does not notice it. nor does he notice the vast empire of animal death that the animal rights people see, he notices the vast empire of human death and suffering instead, but he can't see what to do about that so he retreats from it. 

today zoom beers with howard (maybe - if he isn't distracted by the yoko ono exhibition). yesterday a visit from a friend of his mother's.