Heaven Just Got A Haircut

Tom Haircut, 1922-2020

 Dick Van Dyke, Rose Marie, Mel Brooks... it really did seem as if that gang of pioneers would live for ever, but it turns out writer, perfomer and director Carl Reiner would only make it to ninety-eight. Well, hallelujah for him. It can't have been easy to build movies around a conceptual stand-up like Steve Martin, but you wouldn't know it looking at Reiner's CV. He absolutely understood "stupid", and I don't think there's any more spirit-lifting proof of this than the clip below. This is Your Story is the Sid Caesar's Show Of Shows sketch my family would look out most often, when wanting to get delerious, but this is my own personal favourite. It might actually be the most influential bit of comedy I've ever watched, which might explain why I didn't really go into comedy: even making fun of how little work you're doing looks really hard. That's Carl Reiner on the left. This went out live. God, it's good. Hallelujah. Enjoy.

A Surer Evil Timeline Check Than Goatees

 I finally watched the Mirror Universe episode of Star Trek, the one where Kirk and Bones accidentally beam into an evil universe and Spock has a goatee – the first instance, I think, of facial hair being used to denote an evil switch. (In 1960's The Two Faces of Dr. Jeckyll, Jeckyll actually loses a beard to become Hyde, but I'll always associate the evil beard, first and foremost, with the twin of Michal Knight.)

 As a simple statement of the values of the Federation, Mirror, Mirror works incredibly well – a bit like, now I think of it, how Pottersville in It's a Wonderful Life realises the malevolent effect upon characters we've already met of living in a world similarly gone to shit (although in that darkest timeline, spectacles on a love interest take the place of the goatee). My favourite moment comes about twenty minutes in, when we finally cut back to our universe – assuming optimistically that Star Trek is set in our universe – to find out what havoc the evil Kirk and Co. have been committing on the original Enterprise while their counterparts have been attempting to steer the evil universe away from planetary looting and domestic tooth and claw, because it turns out they've committed no havoc whatasoever, but have instead been dragged, almost immediately, kicking and screaming to the brig. Because of course they have. Because what's a utopia without checks and balances? That's how you really tell which timeline you're in: not by looking for goatees, but by seeing who's in prison, and who's walking around still allowed to be in charge.

 (A few more telly thoughts - I'm finding it hard to get into The Next Generation. I can't shake the sense that the ideals of the Federation have lapsed into snobbery. You shouldn't be able to ask of a Star Trek "Which character's the curious one?" They should all be curious. Unlike in The Original Series, the aliens of TNG aren't mysteries to be learnt from, but sleazy, third-world-coded fops, there to be taught a lesson. I did finally get into Community though, hard. But, like Rick and Morty not immediately, having to wait nearly a series for it to bloom from a hate-friendly Scrubs-without-stakes into a hate-friendly Muppet Babies-for-grownups, which is much more my thing.)

Sung Blog Sunday (of Sorts): Self-Portrait as Saturn

This isn't it.

 

 Under instruction from my friend Lucy to sing a scale and then improvise fifty seconds or so of opera dressed as a planet, I was assigned Saturn having a breakdown, and so here I am in a very thrown together costume (Saturn was sometimes portrayed carrying a scythe. I did not have a scythe), eating my children (in accordance with Myth) and threatening to issue brochures explaining why. My hope is you'll find it every bit as catchy as yesterday's Shepard Tone. I don't know who the painting above is by I'm afraid, but I found it here. Also, while we find ourselves in a macarbre vein, as followers on Instagram might have seen, I found on this morning's walk along Regent's Canal not one but two dismembered sets of pigeon wings still attached to each other. All explanations welcome.

Sound Thinking (My First Encounter With An Auditory Illusion)

 I'm sure I wasn't alone as a child in trying to work out if a clock actually went "tik tok" or just "tik" by seeing if I could alternate in my head on what beat the "tik" fell, but for me the results never proved conclusive, perhaps because this test specifically depends on skewing the results. Anyway I knew the mind can play tricks, but I don't think I'd ever encountered a purposefully engineered auditory illusion until today, so huge thanks to Gavin Brockis for the following. It got me very excited.

 According to the youtube blurb the Shepard Tone "seems to continuously get higher but never really does", like the aural equivalent of an Escher staircase. The mechanics of hearing are far more of a mystery to me though, so I'm far less clear what's going on - Oh wait, it's here, of course Vsauce made a video about it. Further thanks though to Gavin for this neat introduction to the reading of sound waves, and to James Bachman for trying to explain it all to me in terms of a slinky, almost as if the slinky was specifically designed to explain waves. Oo. Slinky physics. That's got to be a thing, no?

Round Four

 We did another quiz and zoom and chat about whether or not Jaws is a horror movie and if it is does that mean Jurassic Park's a horror movie, and here's my round. I've posted the answers in the comments.

1. Which article of clothing takes its name from this French trapeze artist?

2. What do Scarlett Johansson, Vin Diesel, Linda Hamilton and Will Young all have in common from at least the moment they were born?
 
3. Which German band had a gigantic hit in 1990 singing...

4. Not counting Battlecat who's more of an accessory anyway, which Masters of the Universe action figure was the first not to have four poseable limbs?

5. Two part question: Black Phillip is the what from The what?

6. This, I think...

... is the floorplan of the Palace of Knossos in Crete, thought to be the inspiration for the myth of the Labyrinth. According to that myth, what monster was it originally built to house?

7. Which cartoon spy works for the fictional "International Secret Intelligence Service", or ISIS? (And if you can only give me his surname, that's fine.)

8. According to the brochures of the Old Bailey, their statue of Lady Justice is not blindfolded because her "maidenly form" already guarantees impartiality, rendering any blindfold redundant. But what does she hold in her left hand?

9. It has been sung about by Donna Summer, Cilla Black, and the cast of The 40-Year-old Virgin, and it lasts approximately two thousand, one hundred and sixty years. What is it?

10. What links all the answers?

How to Be Indoors According to "Play School"

 I doubt Play School could have afforded an outdoor set like Sesame Street's even if it had wanted one, but rewatching the episode below it's interesting to note how different the focus of the UK's pre-school telly flagship was to that of America's. While Sesame Street excelled at showing you how to exist with others, Play School showed you how to be by yourself. I think these two were my two Play School presenters as well. My generation has so much to thank Derek Griffiths for: his music for Bod was a conscious introduction to the joys of jazz and his physical comedy was similarly freeing, teaching us all to embrace wobbliness like noone was watching. It's only rewatching this though that I remembered Chloe Ashcroft was also my favourite. She taught stillness, and listening. There's no trace of self consciousness to her banging on some tins, so when she breaks off to ask "But how did the music of the world begin?" it's a surprising segue, sure, but we're braced for surprises. So before I ever went to school I think I'd already learnt from these two how to play both comedy and drama respectively. I know Bagpuss gets all the praise, but you really can't beat paying attention to actual people, and Derek and Chloe reward that attention so well. What a great piece of theatre this is.

"Sticks of different lengths!"

Sometimes This Blog Will Just Be Juvenile Catfish Trying To Get Into An 18

Source.

This does feel very like a sequel to Two Trenchcoats In A Kid.

A History of Rome For People Who Like Wobbly Things

  I have watched this film four times now and I still

have no idea what this graphic represents.

 Having self-isolated for over twelve weeks it was weird to wake up on Friday with an insect bite. It felt very, you know, "We got company". I think I found the mosquito responsible when I went to take a shower, hovering by the curtain like a tiny Norman Bates. A surprising amount of blood enused, so now I'm alone in the flat again and what I miss most about company might be best embodied in the following, a nineteen minute history of Rome sent out to classrooms in the eighties and preserved here on Reelblack's youtube channel in an ever so slightly warped print. The distortion's only noticeable when there's music, but there's quite a bit of that, which I find amusing enough when watching on my own, but I know would have me on the floor if I was watching in company. That's what I miss. It's hard to corpse on your own. And I guess this means there's still a part of me that associates friends with classrooms. Anyway, could someone get the lights?

A Chair Is a Movable Raised L-Shape For Supporting Your Bum and Back. What?

From Larry Gonick's Cartoon History of the Universe. This and youtube and Carl Sagan and Natalie Haynes are how I know history. And books.

 Hot on the heels of Carl Sagan's take-down of Plato, Natalie Haynes Stands Up For The Classics has a wonderful episode on Western Philosphy's first poet, inventor of Atlantis, founder of an Academy that lasted nine-hundred years, and preserver of the Socratic dialogues, here just for balance. Being less familiar with the Socratic dialogues than the show's contributors I have maybe a happier and certainly a more ignorant take on the old guy's hair-splitting. "That's just like your opinion, man" can be a valid contribution I think. Socrates doesn't seem like a nihilist to me, more like Lebowski. And I was never attracted to "Fatso"'s idea of abstract perfection, but listening to this I realise how priviliged that makes me: When the talk turned to advertising I immediately thought, no that's not right, there's no Platonic subtext in advertising, ads aren't selling an idea of perfection, if anything - like politics - they're selling us an identity. But then I suddenly remembered the perfect Mitchell and Webb sketch below (I think written by Joel Morris and Jason Hazeley) and recalled that advertising treats men very differently to women.

 Men are spared the Platonic ideal. There's toxic masulinity and machismo, sure, but there are so many other options too. We still get to be the default. The fact a priviliged layabout like me can find Platonism - the idea that reality's just an imperfect imitation  - so alien a concept perhaps gives ammunition to Sagan's argument that it was always an inherently oppression-friendly philosophy. And I adore Edith Hall's theory it all came from Plato just being very short-sighted.

Suppressing the Square Root of Two

(Everyone had Lockdown hair in 1980.)

 The video I wanted to post on Saturday for the Solstice would also have made a good Father's Day post, but I still can't upload it so here instead is more classical revisionism. The tone of Carl Sagan's "Cosmos" is so placid and harmonious throughout that when our host suddenly goes on the attack, you listen, especially when the subject of that attack are two of the most revered minds in history.

 "In the recognition by Pythagoras and Plato that the Cosmos is knowable, that there is a mathematical underpinning to nature, they greatly advanced the cause of science. But in the suppression of disqueting facts, the sense that science should be kept for a small elite, the distaste for experiment, the embrace of mysticism and the easy acceptance of slave societies, their influence has significantly set back the human endeavour."

 The "but" Sagan sounds here rings like a bell. He also suggests Plato tried to burn the works of Democritus and even Homer, which shows how little I know. But then again all of this was two and a half thousand years ago, so how much can we know? Here for example is a drawing of the Pythagorean philosopher Hippasus, made two thousand years after his death by drowning. Who knows if he looked like this?

 Some write that Hippasus was drowned as a punishment, either for propogating the knowledge that the square root of two could not be expressed as a ratio of two whole numbers (the original meaning of "irrational") or else for teaching the existence of the dodecahedron, and Sagan explains in the clip above why both might have been considered heretical. Documentary-maker Errol Morris investigates the circumstances surrounding Hippasus' death further here, as far as it's possible to investigate such a thing, and it seems likely he actually just fell in the sea and was martyred after the event, and that his "forbidden" knowledge wasn't suppressed so much as simply extinguished by its own unpopularity. After all the Platonists could never have kept the dodecahedron a secret for ever.
 Sometimes iron pyrite just gets lucky.

Source.

My Solstice Video Won't Load So Here Instead Is The Invention of The West

 And next time someone tells you not to judge Classical Greek civilization by modern standards, if that's a thing that ever happens to you, you can just say you were judging it by Classical Persian mores instead. Here's what really went down between Xerxes and the 300 (plus 900 slaves). Man, I love becoming an expert in things after twenty minutes of youtube cartoons. Join me.

Ian Holm And Lewis Carroll A Sitting On A Gate.

 I'm surprised I haven't posted this clip on here before seeing as I always seem to be introducing people to it, but here's Ian Holm's stratospheric turn as the White Knight in a 1998 adaptation of Alice Through the Looking Glass not short on intelligent readings - Penelope Wilton's also in it, and Geoffrey Palmer in dundreary whiskers, and Steve Coogan as a gnat, all giving precisely judged comic readings rather than just putting on a costume and being loopy because it's Lewis Carroll. I also really like how Kate Beckinsale's adult Alice listens, a credible mixture of attention and distraction. The Buster Keaton make-up is a bit distracting maybe - although its heart is in the right place - and Holm had already played Lewis Carroll so this might just be stunt casting, but it still takes my breath away twenty-two years later. This is how you do it. Thanks, Ian Holm. I'm sorry you've gone.

First Draft

 I went out today in a mask for the first time. Today I went out for the first time in a mask. I went out in a mask today for the first time. Today I went out in a mask for the first time. This is what writing this blog's actually like. I'd hoped that if I wrote something a day for haf a year stuff like this would have become easier by now, second nature, word placement, things like that. But no. Maybe I'm not paying enough attention. I'm not used to practicing. Anway, today I went out in a mask, for the first time, and it felt good. Now I'll have a bash at that second bit again. This is what writing's like, nothing like talking, and it should be like talking but when you talk I suppose it doesn't matter so much if you don't know how a sentence is going to end. I tried drawing today. I thought I hadn't done it for a while. I drew some round cartoon eyes and then a j-shaped nose and immediately saw I'd not left enough room for the body and just drew a triangle and realised I'd no idea what it was I was going to draw, and that that was the work, and without that I wasn't really drawing. What's the important bit then? That I wore a mask? That I went out today? That today was the first time I wore a mask? Is any of it important? Was I just hoping while writing that something important might turn up?  Was I even putting in the work of hoping? I don't think I was doing even that. But that's something. What I wrote just then. Hope is work. Yeah. That seems important. I'll write that.

Can You Tell Me How To Get

 SPOILER WARNING: By the time Big Bird arrives, Stevie and the gang have already packed up their things and headed off in the "jazzmobile", leaving him to chase hopelessly after them on a unicycle. I'd never noticed before how Beckett Sesame Street was. And I've just remembered Big Bird isn't actually a bird of course, he's muppeteer Carroll Spinney with one arm in the air and his head bent down over a small-for-1973 television monitor surrounded by taped-up script pages... on a unicycle.

Ruslan Pelykh's Day's Work, June 5th

 Okay, class, since we're running a bit behind I'm just going to stick a video on. Ruslan Pelykh is a video artist from Ukraine. He does a lot of work for Vogue, and it says here "his videos focus on the sexuality and individuality of each model" so you'd definitely want him on your team... I know I always say this, but I should check out vimeo more often.

.

"RELLICK"

 "Up in a bit..." I posted last night, and then went for a walk until one in the morning. I'll keep you in suspense no longer though, this is all yesterday's post was going to be. A couple of photos from a walk I did on Sunday.

 Is that a bicycle frame? I've no idea, and credit the unplaceable sameiness of decaying organic matter. I'm walking in the daylight hours now as well. It's busier than this looks, as you probably know. I'd decided to walk to Grenfell Tower and back on the third anniversary of the death of its occupants.

 The reason this post is so procrastinated though, the reason it's actually going up at five to midnight on Tuesday, is that over the past weekend I was tempted to do with this blog what I'd done in 2011, i.e. nothing (see right), and for similar reasons, the country was getting obliviated and producing a blog duting that felt like decorating the edge of a smoking crater with a gold pen, and I didn't want to distract from the ugliness, but I also didn't want to add to it. And I didn't want to go to jail. Some friends of mine went to jail. But not prison.

 If you just leave the internet and go out for a walk though, and you show what you saw, at least that's real. It's not a distraction, and it's not piling onto anything, it's not a declaration of war. So here is yesterday's contribution to the sum of human knowledge: some things I saw the day before. This isn't Grenfell Tower. It was lit up green and the "T" was missing. 

Sometimes this blog will just be Khadija Saye going to Venice

and this.

The View From Space: Catching Up With Lembit Öpik

From Dinosaurs And All That Rubbish by Michael Foreman. 
(I found out today my friend Saskia knows him.)

 Firstly, apologies for missing out the umlaut in "Öpik" in my previous post about the Chair of Parliament for outer space's first ever pyramid scheme zero-gravity sex-farm micronation "Asgardia", but I didn't know how to do them in January. You just have to keep the vowel key pressed, it turns out. Moving on: I'm not sure what those images are behind Öpik, something space-based no doubt, and it doesn't look like wherever he's quarantining himself allows the hanging of pictures, but that print of an aeroplane window looks pretty levelly propped up on the back of his sofa so I've no further notes. Take it away, Lembit!

Clearly.

 (The Cosmic Shambles Network, by the way, has also been doing some actual zero-gravity research, here.)

My Round: Six Degrees of Kenny Baker

 Okay, my twitter notifications appear to have quietened down a bit now that today's bussed-in statue-protectors have started throwing nazi salutes, so now that's settled, here's yesterday's quiz. Again we all had to come up with a round, and again the others found mine much harder than I was expecting, giving me a huge tactical advantage when it came to the final tally of course. I gave them the role Kenny Baker played in a film, short or television programme according to the Internet Movie Data Base, one other member of the cast, along with their role, and the year that the thing came out, and they had to give me the credit. You know, the name of the thing. I've posted answers in the comments.

1. Kenny Baker was a Plumed Dwarf and Michael Elphick was the Night Porter in 1980.

2. Kenny Baker was Fidgit and John Cleese was Robin Hood in 1981.

3. Kenny Baker was the Parody Commendatore and Vincent Schiavelli was Salieri's Valet in 1984.

4. Also in 1984, Kenny Baker was HRH The Rangdo of Arg and Sandra Dickinson was herself (and who can blame her?)

5. Kenny Baker was a Brighton Busker and Cathy Tyson was Simone in 1986.

6. Kenny Baker was R2-D2 (uncredited), and Paul Reubens was Pilot Droid RX-24 in 1987.

7. Kenny Baker was Dufflepud and Warwick Davis was Reepicheep in 1989.

8. Kenny Baker was Bruce the Convict and Jim Davidson was the Sheriff of Notthingham in 1999.

9. Kenny Baker was the Zookeeper (uncredited), and Sean Harris was Ian Curtis in 2002.

10. And finally, Kenny Baker was Charles Isaac and Simon MacCorkindale was Harry Harper in 2007.

When I Was Allowed to Be in "The Atticus McLaren Mysteries"

 
 Despite my tasty showreel of shorts, for a forty-something actor who really likes film and telly I've done next to no film and telly acting, so I felt very lucky at the beginning of last year to be asked by Spring Horton (top row, second from the right) to come up to York for a week and appear in their passion project filming with an actual crew, playing a likeable supporting character with an actual arc, for actual money. I felt other things as well of course... trepidatious, is it? Can we not just say "trepid", the opposite of intrepid?... but that was in the lead up to the shoot. During and after, I simply felt lucky.

Spring: "Is the clock in shot?"  Amanda, DOP: "Big time." 

 That's Thomas Jennings on the left as the autistic and aromantic asexual hero Atticus, and me as his estranged brother Scout, (which I didn't twig was a Harper Lee reference until three days into the shoot). An autism-friendly adaptation of Spring's own book, The Atticus McLaren Mysteries: Murder at the Museum was the perfect job for a first timer like me. I think Spring was a first timer as well, producing and directing, but they betrayed no particle of the anxiety that they write about here for example, and the simple story of these two brothers reconnecting was so soundly plotted I felt that, for all my inexperience, there was no mistake I could make dumb enough to derail it.

 And I did make mistakes, that's clear when I watch the finished show, available to view on youtube HERE, which is one of the reasons I didn't share this until now (another reason being that Spring hinted they may want to re-edit). Don't get me wrong. I don't bring any lights down or anything, and all my clothes stay on, but my idea of naturalism tests the limits of how much one can pointlessly fidget in front of a camera, which turns out to be not at all ideally.

  That might be why I've got my hands in my pockets here, although looking at it, let's face it, this does seem a little disrespectful. 

 It's fine though. I was learning. And when the shoot was done I was no longer a first timer. I'd finally played a person on a show, and without any shadow of "impostor syndrome" hanging over the enterprise because there didn't seem a done way to do this; I was another of Spring's decisions, like putting the credits in comic sans. I'd been invited to work on something someone wanted to say, a dream they'd taken seriously enough to see realised with confidence and kindess. And I love doing that more than anything.

Spring talks more here.

Sometimes this blog will just be a big bait ball.

 As promised.

 And in motion.

Sea Change

 This is methane ice, which is a thing, There's estimated to be more than one thousand trillion cubic metres it at the bottom of the ocean. Not all of it stays there. The warmer the ocean gets, the more of it is released up into the atmosphere, warming the air, which warms the ocean, which releases more methane, and so on. And by "and so on" I mean of course "until this planet is as uninhabitable as Venus" but currently however, fortunately, ninety percent of the methane's absorbed by little flitting microbes as it rises to the surface. I picture them flitting anyway, but not vividly enough to see upon what. Good for them. All this and more I learnt on Monday which was "World Ocean Day", from the frankly exciting Dr. Helen Czerski in World Ocean Autopsy: The Secret Of Our Seas - featuring an actual porpoise autopsy, be warned - which screened that evening, and is now viewable here.

 Michael Pinsky's Pollution Pods

 Earlier in the day Helen joined the Royal Museums Greenwich again to host an Ocean Day Special, packed with experts, no expert more immediately invested in the fate of the oceans perhaps than Lisa Koperqualuk of the Inuit Circumpolar Council, co-managing the new world as the ice melts. The show is typically inspiring and surprising and just plain kind, and I'm so pleased to have been involved with these (obviously the grumpiest guest is the artist.)

 In an article for the Washington Post, climate expert Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Robinson quotes Toni Morrison: "The very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work" and that article's now behind a paywall so I'm also sharing this that she wrote for Scientific American: "To Save the Climate, Look to the Oceans". According to Helen Czerski, they're engine of the world, and that's a hell of an image. To end with here's a great little tour of the engine's highways, cities and volcanoes, accompanying a tuna in May's epic Sea Shambles. And that on the wall behind Helen is apparently a "bait ball". I'll post a real one tomorrow, because they're amazing.

"It Was Good While It Lasted"

 Ah! Here's where I got "statue lovers" from: this great post-Charlottesville piece from John Oliver back in 2017. Following the tearing down of the (very nicely sculpted) statue of human trafficker Edward Colston, it's funny to see these "pro-history" arguments rolled out again, but not funny ha ha.

 Bristol Police's own response to the toppling, however, had me absolutely beaming, and feeling even, I don't know, pride?

Good man. https://t.co/VmYvlsGRoW

— Peter Davis (@TweeterDavis) June 7, 2020

... Probably, if I'm honest, more pride than I felt hearing the response of my local MP. I mean, I get it, softly softly and everything, but either the statue should have been taken down, or it shouldn't. Show a little gratitude, hon. And that's all from White Guys Talk About Statues for tonight. Hope you're all doing tremendously.

"Who Gave A Mermaid Her Voice"

 Above is this week's Ships, Sea and the Stars which I think will be the last for a spell. It's about mermaids, presumably organised to coincide with the beginning of Pride month, but given a little extra pang of relevance yesterday by J.K. Rowling. I don't sing on this one but I get to do a little reading of Oscar Wilde, and the guests are as superb as ever. Watching it, I kept being reminded of the brilliant video essay below about Howard Ashman's work on The Little Mermaid. I'd no idea how big a part his vision played in it, nor that Ashman and Menken's first ever musical was an adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut, which I obviously found exciting. (I also never knew until today that when the cartoon was first dubbed into German, Ariel was voiced by Ute Lemper.)

Plaza, Poll, Petition

two days old

source

 "Performative distraction" acknowledged, I still find the reality of the Mayor of DC commissioning this outside the White House incredibly powerful, not just the idea of it. What else is changing? According to a poll in the New York Times "76 percent of Americans — including 71 percent of white people — called racism and discrimination 'a big problem' in the United States. That’s a 26-percentage-point spike since 2015" and that tastes like spring water, even if people always do play nice when it comes to polls. Something else that's changed - I've started bothering to tick the "Yes! Tell me if this pettion wins" and here's one you might like: "Teach British children about the realities of British Imperialism and Colonialism"... I was walking along Regents Canal again this evening, conscious that as a Londoner - even under lockdown -  I'm incredibly lucky to benefit from centuries of infrastructure built for the receipt and distribution of resources taken from countries suffering infrastructures built solely to extract them, and I thought that that was probably as worth knowing about as, say, the Spanish Armada. That "resource extraction" overview by the way is a total theft from John Green. I get everything from youtube.

I Don't Want To Sleep Before Wishing Breonna Taylor Happy Birthday

Thanks to my sis Aunjanue Ellis for sharing this gorgeous video with me. The Black People’s “Happy Birthday” for #BreonnaTaylor. Sounds beautiful. I know she hears it. May we not have to sing in absence of our sisters and brothers. But in their presence. Living fully + joyfully. pic.twitter.com/cDniDb4Ibc

— Ava DuVernay (@ava) June 6, 2020

 

VIEW FROM ABOVE: Easily the largest group of #BlackLivesMatter demonstrators yet in Portland, Maine tonight. #NEWSCENTERmaine pic.twitter.com/YvrwOYQoJj

— Zach Blanchard (@ZachBlanchard) June 6, 2020

 

It’s nearly 10 p.m. in Louisville and the birthday party for #BreonnaTaylor continues. pic.twitter.com/PkYyT3zRD4

— Mandy McLaren (@mandy_mclaren) June 6, 2020

 I could go on.

 It's 4:10 in Britain on the night of what would have been Breonna Taylor's twenty-seventh birthday, and it looks like a hell of a party. And sure, I haven't wanted this blog to be the news because as I said wayyyyyyy back, when Cameron became Prime Minister and I made a gif of Brian Haw that no longer loads, "who wants to be the news?" but maybe that's changing. Again. As long as there's new hope I'll post hope, but I have little to report because I'm still staying in, apart from the night walks, but tonight as I walked to Portabello Road and back, what life I saw on the streets bore both an absence of fear and an absence of tutting. I stopped missing South London, although that said this is a new walk for me, so maybe it was always like this before the isolation. I also want to share this by James McMaster before I sleep: "You’ll want to know what happened last night around the capitol building of the country’s most segregated state..." and he's right, because it was exactly what I wanted to read...

 "I saw so much pent up joy released. I saw young people meet new people, entering into new friendships and flirtations founded in the possibility of a better world... It was the world as it could be, a rehearsal for the world we’re all fighting for. It was an autonomous zone, a racial rapprochement on black terms... All of this was unthinkable just a week ago..." but I really recommend reading it all.
 And I'm glad I took a break from the Shakespeare in time for this.
 Shakespeare's a great critic of systems, but absolutely no believer in change, even if he secretly desired it. Both his tragedies and comedies depend upon that hopelessness but I don't blame him for keeping those desires a secret, even from himself, there were on heads on spikes a stone's throw from his theatre. I might give it another week though.
 And I'm less worried about civil war than I was. But I might still post about it. Oh and the Lindsey Graham thing is fun too! This has been the news.
 I hope you're all doing tremendously. Stay safe.

Surviving "Surviving Edged Weapons"

 Possibly the greatest insight I've received into American Policing in general, as opposed to what's happening just now, was - well actually, it was probably when I was on a student exchange to Milton Academy Massachusetts when I was seventeen and we were reading Going To Meet The Man by James Badwin and I asked the English teacher who "the man" was, and he answered "You're rooming with Lamont, aren't you? Ask Lamont," and so I asked Lamont, who slept in the bunk below me and was really into Kenny G and played waves to fall asleep, and he told me what had happened to him two weeks ago while I'd popped into the ninety-nine cents store and he had waited for me outside... but my second greatest insight into American Policing - well actually, that was probably from my gap year when I was nineteen - I know, amn't I lucky! -

Rube, 1994

 And I was sharing a ride from Atlanta to Chicago because I had the deposit money but no American driving licence, and Jamal had a license but no deposit, and Doug joined us because he'd just fled New York with chicken-wired wrists because he didn't want to cook for the Mafia any more having received a message from the actual Devil while trapped in a crack den, and because he was good for morale, so we were all delivering a car and we'd stopped to get gas in Kentucky and a policeman turned up and asked us for ID because he'd received reports of "three strange-looking guys" and he said "put your hands where I can see 'em" and I'd heard it as "put your hands on the ceiling" and reached up and Doug gripped my hands and pulled them down and when I chuckled an English chuckle at the officer because he couldn't read Jamal's licence because he wasn't wearing his glasses Doug nearly drew blood from digging his fingers into my arm and vigorously shaking his head in silence and I could see that the silly man was fearing for his life... but my third greatest insight into American policing in general, as opposed to necessarily what's happening just now, definitely comes from the excellent circle of score-knowing slobs at RedLetterMedia whose great work randomly viewing old VHS tapes for Wheel of the Worst led them to the police training video from 1988, Surviving Edged Weapons. To quote this trutorial: "Adding to the threat are a host of improvised weapons - sunglasses that can be flicked to poke out your eyes..."

 "Fish-hooks hidden in earrings are stuck through pant legs to rip your fingers on a pat down..."

 "Boots with protruding spikes..."

 "A baseball cap with razor blades sewn to the back..." 

 And to quote Mike Stoklasa and Rich Evans: "It's not a wonder that cops are paranoid motherfucks that shoot you to death! Because they show them videos like this!" A mouthful was said there. Doug saved my life. Here:

Today I'd Like to Remoan About Hostile Environments

 Hi. Twitter Simon here, beginning to wonder if the fall in (aways mild) abuse I receive when sticking my nose in might have anything to do with the new profile picture. I'd love it if people thought I was actually a lawyer from this. Who wouldn't love being mistaken for a lawyer?

 NO FURTHER QUESTIONS etc. But why was this headlining my twitter side-bar last night? What even is "Nine News"? Ever since I read a couple of months ago that a Trump mega-donor had bought a "sizable stake" in the site, I've become very threat-level-hey-now about what it promotes, and so when I returned from last night's quiet walk to see #londonriots trending, I checked the hashtag and indeed most tweets accompanying it were wondering why it was trending as there hadn't been any riots. I did also see footage of the anger in Whitehall. Sure. But I'd witnessed that before, any weekend over the last two years in which I'd been down to do a bus tour and the Brexiters had had one of their "marches" - not marches so much as a crowding into the Wetherspoons as early as possible to drink and drink and wander around with a flag and hurl abuse at buskers, looking for fun or a fight or a fun fight - and I would stand there hoping that London might be a cure for this, and that the racists - I saw their banners and I saw their caps, these were racists - would see how alone they were. But anyway, yes, I saw last night on twitter yesterday's outnumbering of the police outside Downing Street, and I saw some commentators express "boggled minds" that this "brutality" was in response to a shooting on another continent, and I tappity-tapped in my little lawyer's wig a reminder to those commentators just what Downing Street had been up to for the past four years plus: the Windrush scandal, the "Go Home" vans, "pickaninny smiles", "letterboxes", and the much discussed "hostile environment", and hoped - again, hoped - that these protests might illuminate what that blithely bandied-about phrase "hostile environment" actually meant, and how instantly intolerable everyone should find it. Here's another hostility:

 "Ending freedom of movement". And a Union Jack. As I wrote on Monday (okay, Tuesday morning) us pinky grey men never really have to think about "freedom of movement" anyway. I suspect this tweet knew exacty what it was doing though. Division aways benefits the Right, which might be why so much government messaging seems purposefully designed to ruffle liberal feathers. But while I still believe Fascism Thrives On Division, and while I still suspect the PM, and definitely POTUS, would rather see a civil war than their own resignation (for the same reason Hans Gruber blew up the Nakaomi Tower) I'm also very happy to see pressure applied, proper pressure, because no police officer was charged with anything until people marched. Also I'm not sure what we're seeing here is Division. I hope. After the December election I decided to turn this blog into a Politics/Anxiety tag-free zone, because the increasing shittiess of all things seemed such a given I wanted to spare anyone who came here any more (also I still had plans for a series of Time Spanner in which an avatar of the demiurge, President Guff Goofy, declared a zombie apocalypse saying "you know who the zombies are", and I was saving up my politial anxiety for that), but that was six months ago, and now there feels something like a tugging at the monolith, slow work, but potentially effective, an awakening of care, which I find invigorating, and it needs to be kept up. So I remain a remoaner. I looked up what I'd been doing during the last #BlackLivesMatter protests in 2015. I'd voted for Corbyn. Again, I'd been hoping for an awakening of care, but we know how that turned out - care became discredited, and those who'd spent their entire political lives attempting to orchestrate a more just environment became synonymous with bullying and intolerance. So this probably does have to be led from the bottom. And while I have Santa's knee I'd also quite like a government intent on kerbing the manipulation of democracy through online misinformation rather than one led by gamers seeking to become a world leaders in it. That seems another fair demand. And finally, here is my favourite twitter interaction for a while. Elizabeth Jackson's not cowed by a wig. It's important to remember this is also an option.

A Pertinent Point About Behaving Suspiciously For Money

 My late night walks are getting later and later, so it's still Monday for me. But before I go to bed, there's a bunch of half-thought-out drafts I keep in reserve and the one accompanying this picture seems the most apt to post before #BlackOutTuesday. The picture wasn't taken today, it's me heading into the City to do a Ripper Walk earlier in the year. I love the job. It's nice pay and you're very exposed but you get to be scary, and I love being scary. Maybe because I'm not very active. There's no Point Break-type activity that I practice to feel more alive or in touch with the sea or the air or the earth or whatever, but being allowed to be scary is proper taste of the bigger freedom. I turn up to these walks in "costume" - a long black cheap mac, black shirt, tie, trousers and shoes, clutching a lumpy clanking plastic bag that secretly holds my hurricane lamp, and here's the point about when I did this: every time I took to public transport in this clobber or hovered round the railings of the Square Mile, waiting for my group to turn up and working on my skulk, dressed like a middle-aged high school shooter, I knew that I would never be stopped and asked what I was doing, or where I was going, or what I was carrying, or why, no matter how egregious or inexplicable I looked. And I will pay myself the compliment of saying that I also knew this was what white privilege looked like, that these were the freedoms I enjoyed, freedoms everyone should be able to enjoy: the freedom to raise questions without being questioned, and the freedom to be scary and still listened to.

#blacklivesmatter and #blackhistorymatters and #statuesofrealpeoplearemainlydumbandscary

 Here's nothing. I'm keeping vampire hours again. Lacking both heat-reisistant gloves and goggles as recommended by the excellent Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and unkeen on combing through fourteen years of my social media to wipe it of "personal details and anything that could be perceived as inciting violence" as recommended by the excellent Varaidzo, oh and also, you know, just being a hoverer, I didn't get to Trafalgar Square on Sunday to mourn George Floyd until two in the morning. 

 But General Napier was still there, and Major General Sir Henry Havelock, and the fat prince. The fourth plinth was empty though, I noticed, fleeced of its Ninevite Lamassu... "Statue lovers" someone said knowingly of the torch-wielding protestors at Charlottesville, and I've thought about that quite a bit since, and decided yeah, I don't like statues of real people I realise, not really, not any more. Any of them. Even the lovely ones just look creepy and wrong, even Eric Morecambe. Unmistakably unalive. Borne of a tradition intended to literally deify tyrants. And I suppose I'm just retreading my moan from the last post, aren't I, but, like Mark Gatiss, statues fetishise the past without a shred of interest in history. Don't get me wrong, I like creepy things as much as the next fantasist. And I warm to the decor of a haunted house. But I wouldn't say I'm a statue lover. I also saw a fox. He looked shiny and unafraid. I think foxes are having a good lockdown.