Unposted on Election Night: Spoilers for Vengeance

 Okay, a little more about what's happening in US... 

 B.J. Novak's superb comedy "Vengeance" – released in 2022, but only caught by me on the plane back from Vancouver last August – charts an aspiring true-crime podcaster's attempts to document "the new American reality". And I mean charts. The film is a text. So this post isn't an in-depth review, just a recommendation. I'd originally meant to put it out as an immediate response to Trump's election victory back in November, because I thought: what rational reader wouldn't be thinking "Wait, what the hell's going on?" and I'd enjoyed the film as a search for some answers. Then I didn't post it, and now I've learnt the film's leaving Netflix on February 8th, so quick, HERE IT IS*

 I'll return to "Vengeance" in a bit, and maybe it's too late now for post mortems, maybe no-one's in the mood for "What happened was...", but it's only going to get later, so here's another search for answers I meant to share – answers other than just "Everyone's Abandoned Democracy", which seems hopeless if true – and by the way, I'm so glad Jon Stewart's back...

 

 "What happened was, the country felt like Government wasn't working for them, and – the Democrats, in particular – were taking their hard-earned money, and giving it to people who didn't deserve it as much as them. And so the Democrats got shellacked."

 Or, as Jennifer Pahlka puts it even more succinctly in this article:

"the reality is that Republicans let their voters choose the candidate, and Democrats didn't - twice." 

 Maybe what resounded most, then, rewatching "Vengeance" after Trump's terrifying majority, were its final words, so here are SPOILERS... Our hero's initial understanding of events, before he even arrives in Texas, has proved completely correct: the girl he hooked up with in New York was just a hookup, and despite the conspiracy narratives spun by her family, she did die of an opiate overdose. But his understanding of everything else now – how to act, how to choose, how to love, how to remember... the big stuff – is scorched earth, and when he concludes to her mother, as we're all taught to conclude, "No regrets", the Texan muses back:

"I never understood that... No regrets... In my life, everything starts with a regret... Ends with a regret... In between, regrets... It's all regrets... You run as fast as you can from the last regret... And of course you're just running straight into the next one... That's life... It's all regrets... That's what you should say... No other way to be alive... It's all regrets... Make 'em count."

 

"So Six Flags, the theme park..."

 

"Exactly."

 

* UPDATE: For those who can, it's now up on All4 HERE.

Sometimes this blog will just be Daniel Hodges.

 

 It's important to me to keep this blog from becoming just another reaction to the big thing, a somewhere else from stuff. But I acknowledged Trump when he won back in 2016, so I'll allow him another mention here. Daniel Hodges' reaction to the presidential pardons of insurrectionists who tried to gouge out his eyes is the kind of cold, heartfelt reality check his country needs as many of and as soon as it can get, and unlike the Right Reverend Mariann Edgar Budde's sermon to Trump upon his inauguration (reaction shit posted below) – which I'm guessing most readers will have already seen – it's an address explicitly directed to "everyone watching", so I'm happy to boost those numbers. 

 

 Another great reminder of how much power we do and don't have right now is a fleeting story I saw on instagram, which said – perhaps in reaction to the breadth of the brim on Melania's hat – "If you've kissed a loved one on the cheek today, remember, you're more powerful than the president." 

 We have more resources for reaching out to and checking upon each other than have ever existed before. Let's use them. I hope you're all doing tremendously.

Spinach or Silence as Sources of Power

 "So, Art is something which is made when you use a material to change something... but it helps people to consider the Art which is in front of them if it is grouped with another set of Art, and it's very difficult to consider Art in isolation from other Art..."

 Born Yesterday has a great format: two twenty-four-hour-old clones of the hosts ask two guests to explain the world in terms of the only three things they've yet had time to learn about. Alexander Bennet and Andy Barr are its perfect hosts, digging down in just the right spots, and presenting perfectly packaged summaries, so no matter how a guest chooses to play it – as hilarious disruptor or dweebish stickler – it's almost impossible not to be entertaining. (Like Taskmaster.) As evidence, I'd like to submit this episode, in which I'm dropped in alongside Andrea Hubert (I'll let you decide which is which) to explain such topics as Cumbria and the concept of "The Ends Justifying the Means" with only Popeye, a Hog-roast, and Birmingham New Street Station as points of reference. Other topics also emerge during the episode, such as animal cruelty in early cinema, Insults, Joy, and whether or not – according to the mathematics of decapitation – Bradley Cooper's nose in Maestro makes him more alive. 

 I've been a fan of this podcast since it began, and obviously I'm always up for explaining the world to babies, so thanks to Andy and Alexander – an old Crystal Maze colleague – for inviting me, and thanks to Andrea for being such a great teammate/opponent and for showing me all her blades. (We appear nineteen minutes in. If you fancy a drinking game, down a shot every time you notice me avoiding saying her name because I get self-consciously stuck on whether "Andrea" has a long or short A, despite it being said numerous times during the record, and the way the name's always pronounced. I'll join you.)

 "So, in building our understanding of what a Mime is, we have been led to believe that, if a dog were to withhold from you its name, it would be able to pick you up..."

 

Wowee! An Official Film!

Staying In My Lane

 Those old explanations of ghosts – echoes of a trauma baked into place – is it only human trauma that has that power? Might parks be crawling with the ghosts of worms? Is this river haunted by fish, fish ghosts targeted by heron, more than a millenia-worth? I'm trying to get into the Hallowe'en spirit now that the weather is proper October.

 

 Unfinished business – that was another explanation. Do only humans get to have that then? Wait, is that all a soul is? Business? Is it? I haven't been busy this year. Maybe. Have I felt like a ghost? A bit. And it hasn't all been unenjoyable, but I watched a youtube essay last week about the films of the Beatles which reminded me that being A CREATIVE FORCE is, you know, an option, and initially may require nothing more than just thinking to yourself "I'm going to be A CREATIVE FORCE" and then seeing what happens, and it's really picked me up. (Here's that video essay.) 

 

 In this case a bit of what happened appears to be me going for a walk and then posting shit phone pictures of it here. Well, good. You'll have to take my word for it that there were joggers. It's odd to me, by the way, that that that's what it's called: "jogging". That's definitely what it looks like, but it's not the aspect you'd think they'd want to advertise. Jogging's normally something you want to avoid, in case you scratch the record or spill your drink. How can I make running forward feel more like running into something? Jog!

 

 Are these pavement demarcations a hangover from the pandemic, or permanent now? And has anyone studied their effect on a pedestrian's mental health? I think I hate them. They just seem like another thing to get on the wrong side of. It's nice to have somewhere to record that though. It's nice to be A CREATIVE FORCE. The next paragraph contains swearing.

 

 I also hate seeing so many people right now take the side of a side, rather than siding with people – to see so many call for an end to Netanyahu's response to the largest mass murder of Jews since the Holoocaust while not also calling - seeing as we're calling for things - for the safe return of Israeli hostages, as though we've finally run out of internet and there was just was no room for the Landaus. Well fuck that and fuck the war and fuck taking sides unless that side is Peace. Fuck Bibi. And fuck Hamas; buoyed by their actions, the Iranian Government announced last week it would be targeting Persian journalists working in Britain like my friend Faren. And, parenthetically (do go on, Simon) coming up to a year after the murder of Mahsa Ahmini by Iranian police for having loose hair I decided to search Xitter for any more news of protests, and found myself enaged in the following fun coversation about... let me check... yes, apartheid. Stick with it.

 

 

 

 I know, "mroe"...

 By the way, you can now find me on blue sky at @slepkane.bsky.social. 

 I really hope you're all okay.

I Demand To Know Who Built This Pig.

 

 

 You may have seen this substantially meme-ified pig before, in its original untouched-up form. Online reactions to the film have been understandably strong but, beyond the fact that it's a 1907 Pathé recording of an old vaudeville act, I can't find much information about what it is I'm actually seeing. Who was the act? How was it being done? What would a cross section of Le Cochon Danseur look like, for example? How many people would we find? Just the one costumed actor, moving his arms in and out of the trotters to swivel the eyeballs? A little child sitting on the main player's shoulders to operate the head bits separately? How does it all look so coordinated?

 

 The dancing pig is shamed.

  

 And how successful was the act? Because, if it was successful, why have I never seen any contemporary imitations? Why would we not see this level of articulation in a puppet again until "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles"? If Vaudeville could come up with something this impressive in 1907, why would a Master of Cinema like Fritz Lang, the creator of Metropolis, have such difficulty building a convincing dragon nearly twenty years later? If I was Lang I'd have gone "Get me the dancing pig people, STAT!" Or maybe he did. Maybe they built this dragon too, but it wasn't as good. Who built this pig!

 

 

(Okay, now I've looked it out, it's better than I remember, but it's still no dancing pig.)

 I have a question too about the technology used to clean this clip up – less about the wherewithal, and more about its effect. I assume it's some kind of rougher, off-the-peg version of whatever Ai Peter Jackson used to clean up the Beatles footage in "Get Back". A few other youtube clips suggested by my algorithm use the same tech. Here's the first I saw...

 

 My old workplace, the Trocadero, and the next time I was there I took a photograph, to compare the two...

 

 Because, when I watch these clips I feel – as I felt watching "Get Back" – that I'm somehow being transported in time, and then I have to check why, because documentaries aren't new, and film has been around for long enough for me not to be surprised by it. That's my question.

 

 So I've decided, it's not that the retouching makes footage look more realistic, but that it makes it less immeditaely familiar as "footage", and so the brain reads it more literally. One can – rightly – condemn the artificiality of this, if what's intended is the creation of a more accurate record. But what this technology reminds me is that, from its inception, film has never been just a record, it is also a genuine marvel. 

 

February in the Black

 For the past couple of years, every time I've finished a book I've taken a photograph of it, maybe hoping that this will make me read more. I took six photographs of books in January I see, and one in February. And none in March. Here's Holland Park. I'd get wheeled around here when I was one, so I've been told. I don't remember. Now it's just up the road.

 

 Photographing Kensington was one thing I managed to keep up in February. Was I doing it hoping to feel more like a resident, or like a tourist? Did I want to feel more at home or the opposite? I still stayed sociable, although I stopped going to the BFI as much, another fad of January. But I still had spending money from my first two commercials shot at the end of 2021. I still met friends, and if I was twenty years younger maybe there'd be photogaphs of that too. Here's a concert I was invited to in February. I couldn't remember why I'd photographed it, until I looked closer and saw everyone's masks. Click to enlarge.

 

 I met Gemma Brockis a lot. I could afford to go out for coffee. We'd knock ideas about, her teaching and seeking meetings, me working a couple of days a week at the Crystal Maze and meandering. She told me how as an immersive theatre veteran she'd also occasionally get approached by Virtual Reality Engines to participate in Research and Development. Intimacy was what they were after now. "Virtual Intimacy" was VR's philopospher's stone.

 

 What does "intimacy" actually literally mean though, I asked? We talked about that a bit – Chris Goode used to ask it back when he still did the blog, and was alive – then I decided to just look it up on my phone. We all have an idea. What do you think it means? As far as I could work out, "intimacy" just means the opposite of loneliness. That doesn't seem to have much to do with Virtual Reality. I didn't think they were going to find it, and I made a note of that on my phone. That phone broke, but I remembered.

 

Peas Before Memes. Yes Always.

 

 

"Here, under protest, is beefburgers."

 

 First there was the tape, endlessly copied and passed around. Dad owned one he'd play for friends who came over: waiting for the good bits, they'd sit and listen to a seemingly drunk and spiralling Orson Welles record with a telling mixtue of misplaced care and angry disdain voice-overs for Findus in 1970. The internet had yet to be invented but this recording had already become a meme...

 

 

 

 John Candy quotes the tape here: "Yes. Always." (originally a response to a director's "I'm sorry.") This was what you impersonated if you wanted to impersonate Orson Welles in 1982, and it would come to define the final act of his life. A deeply unfair definition, but Welles sort of only has himself to blame for this because it's too good a scene to cut from any biography. The wikipedia entry for "Frozen Peas" – yes, it has a wikipedia entry – suggests Welles tried to wrest control over the Findus narrative with an anecdote about a wild goose chase he claims to have led the "fellas" on around Euope. He had also once claimed on the "Dean Martin Show" that even Shakespeare had done commercials...

 

 

  But these outtakes weren't recorded in a hotel in Venice or Vienna. You can tell he's watching a screen, so if the anecdote was true, he clearly came back for more. I think Dr Moon Rat's reconstruction is probably more accurate. Or Pinky and the Brain's, a children's cartoon made twenty-five years after the original session, and ten years after Welles' death. But again, before the internet. Maurice LaMarche had clearly also heard the tape...

 

One Use of Sanitary Pads in a Revolution

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Sareh Ghomi (@sarehghomi)

 

                  "I am sitting here now with a bag of boiling water on my heart"

 

 So the twenty-one-year-old Orson Welles cut Ophelia almost entirely from his hour-long Hamlet it turns out, only introducing her ten minutes from the end to drown her so that he could do the grave-digger scene. That's quite a cut. Let's put a pin in that then, and rejoin the Womens' Revolution in Iran. Among the death sentences and other horrors of state retaliation following the death in custody of Mahsa Ahmini after her arrest for inappropriate headwear, there are also sanitary pads being put up to blind security cameras now. Instagram's translation of Sareh Ghomi's brilliant post above provides both illumination and a poetry of its own, but take any gendered pronouns with a pinch of salt because I think Farsi only has the one. Thanks to my friend Faren for sharing this:

 

 "This is the women's revolution, I mean this picture, I am sitting right now with a bag of boiling water on my heart and rolling in pain to myself and thinking why I shouldn't have seen this one piece all these years, special black bags that when you said: a pack of purple blinks, please! The local superintendent wouldn’t hand you in that thick, smelly black bag. I mean, during her pregnancy, the path of the drawer from the room to the bathroom had to be put like a bartender in your pocket or pull your pants and shirt over it so that the male elements of the family and friends would not see it and get upset! I mean my friend who never threw his used tape in the trash bin at his workplace and took it with him to an urban trash bin because he thought the environment was too masculine! That day when your boyfriend, after a big party, wants to clean the toilet, but his laziness in putting the bag in the bucket and sticking one of the same used ones to the bottom of the bucket, makes him face a scene he had never seen before and sound Don't forget to throw it up! They don't know what winged means! They don't know what to buy when you're in trouble and slamming the door and wall! Or even ashamed to buy and load a super so that the important package is not visible, sometimes out of kindness buy diapers like because you're in so much pain. Sanitary tape is a white fragrant piece that prevents the bleeding from spreading, and right here in this picture, it's glued itself to the wagon camera to stop the bleeding so it doesn't get lost! So the female body and all that's connected with it is changing user, it's taking over, it's breaking all taboos, see this white piece stuck to the camera and remember to be safe you are safe too. #women_life_freedom"

Is Orson Welles the Perfect Hamlet or the Absolute Opposite? There's Only One Way to Find Out.

   Love Goddess, the musical in which I play – among other husbands of Rita Hayworth – Orson Welles, opens this Friday, and you can get tickets here. We're deep into tech week, so I don't have much time to blog, and I haven't even listened yet to what I'm posting today, but I'm looking forward to it.

 

Archie, Jane, me, Imogen, and Joey. I believe it's called proof of sweat.

 

 You'd have thought that, of all the big Shakespearean roles which the erudite, intellectual, procrastinatingly impatient, fatally disappointed, theatre-obsessed Welles had tackled, Hamlet would among them, and it turns out you'd be right. The only reason I didn't know this until I looked it up today, is that it was back in 1936 when Welles was still twenty-one, in a self-directed radio adaptation. Of course, he'd already staged Macbeth by then. My parents sent me the first volume of Simon Callow's massive biography "The Road To Xanadu" for my birthday, so I'll see what that has to say about it...

 

 Oh. Okay. So much for my interpretation then – of either Welles or Hamlet, take your pick. But no! Both feared they might be phonies, both feared their own monstrousness while also wishing they were more like the monsters, and there's not a single speech of Hamlet's I can't imagine in Welles' voice, so maybe it's Callow who's wrong. But he did write a massive biography. But he says it was a thirty-minute adaptation, and it's actually two thirty-minute adaptions. But they didn't have the internet back in 1995. But we do.

 

 

UPDATE: Okay, I've listened to it. I think it's fair to say there is one quite heavy omission. Can you guess what got cut?

Not Safe For Work

  On Tuesday I held a place for the Webcamming Chronicles (a very different show from Spike) which Maud Madlyn and Andrès Montes Zuluaga will be performing again tonight at the Cockpit Theatre as part of Trojana – either the name of their company, or of the very specific sex-work-based project this show is a part of, I'm not quite sure which – and as this is a recommendation I'm going to try to get it written and posted while there's still time to get a ticket. There's a Q and A after tonight's show as well. I guarantee you will have questions, but I can't guarantee you'll necessarily want the answers. 

 To quote Trojana's f*c*b**k page:

"For this particular piece, performer Maud Madlyn took on her most demanding personal and professional challenge to date: work as an adult webcam model and trainer. She infiltrated the industry from a clandestine studio in Cali, Colombia, second world-leading power in this business. Why? To see what sexual desire looked and sounded like when decency and political correctness were stripped away."

 Along with many mutual friends from the London Dungeon I'd known Maude from when she ran the Etcetera Theatre above the Oxford Arms in Camden, and after she left the country – (side note: I love that she describes herself as "French-born" rather than French; I might start describing myself as British-born, it immediately seems a little freeing) – I knew from her instagram posts she was doing something involving not wearing clothes, but it wasn't until I saw this show on Tuesday that I realised her specific level of commitment, and that Trojana may have taken its name from the horse.

Image taken from this review of Webcamming Chronicles' Covid times, online premiere

 

 Not knowing much about the show beforehand however probably made it more unforgettable, and so I don't want to say too much more about Andrès' and Maude's investigations (I also want to get this posted pretty quickly, as I said) but – with the proviso that every audience will make every show different, and so what it felt like when I saw it might not be what it feels like any other night – I will say that the two things I probably loved most about the show were: 1) That I really wasn't prepared for it, and that it didn't seem to care – content warnings are incredilbly important but I hadn't realised until I watched this how much they also really make me feel like a consumer, like I'm in the shops – but I only loved this because 2) While a piece of staged journalism, it never stopped being art, by which I mean liminal, by which I'm trying to find a word that sounds less pretentious but still describes the necessary protective shared understanding that you don't have to immediately engage with the work as fact, that you can interrogate it without feeling you're interrogating the artist. That's what I mean. That thing that Nanette didn't have. Interrogating a work means you can create a conversation within yourself. And I don't know if I ever heard these specific words said, but the phrase "unsafely human" was something powerful I was left with,

 Of course, Trojana might also take its name from the first ever webcamming star: the coffee pot outside the Trojan Room of Cambridge University. If you're going tonight, maybe you could ask.

 

Sure, I'm still on twitter.

 When I first returned to this blog* after Boris Johnson's 2019 election victory I thought I'd just remain on twitter to post links and provide a little daily – but potentially always topical – keening over our exit from the EU inspired by Megan Anram's daily "Today was the day Donald trump finally became president" posts. Initially, I thought spending less time on everyone's favourite hellsite was simply for my own good, but when I watched Lindsay Ellis' video about her own cancelling last April I realised maybe the problem wasn't just me, but twitter's own business model, which now required the active promotion of upsetting content in order to keep our attention. Capitalism depended on growth, and twitter had grown as big as it was going to get. So I pinned this to my profile:

 

 Yes, stay cool. Because Fascism Thrives On Division. 

 Then, just over a week ago, Elon Musk finally bought the site or app or whatever it is for forty-four billion dollars.

 

 

 And immediately sacked its content moderators – one week before the American midterm elections, and exactly one day before a terrorist attack on a migrant processing centre in Dover followed by our reappointed Home Secetary's warning of an "invasion" of the south coast by refugees – and I was initially nonplussed by commentators passing the popcorn and using phrases like "it's going to be a wild ride." I mean, I get it. I write, and sentences must be finished, and lot of this blog is just me sharing stuff I find ineresting and then realising I should probably provide some kind of commentary, and "it's going to be a wild ride" is a handy sign off. But it still seemed a weird way to describe the rise of Fascism.  

 

 My sister's a meme!

 

 But maybe that wasn't what was being described. Maybe those commentators anticipating twitter's downfall were looking forward to the fall of the rise of Fascism, certainly something I'd like to live long enough to see... That's maybe not entirely true. What I mean is, given that I have to keep on living, I would very much like the fall of the rise of Fascism to happen at some point during that. 

 Has the word Fascism gone a bit weird on me now? Maybe.

 Anyway, here's some chat.
 

 And I was talking to my uncle Gordie last week, and learning how well his children's generation have been rallying around each other, and how much help is now provided – ar at least seen to be needed – which wasn't when I was their age, and I have to remember that I'm living to see other, far better things also on the rise. 

 

 

* Here's how this post originally began: 

 

 When I first started

 Okay actually, before I continue I'm going to let you a little into how tediously I go about writing these posts: I've just started writing this, about four minutes ago, three of which have been spent arriving at the word "tediously" which I might still change, and it would normally now be about an hour before I looked back over all this and finally noticed how... again, I'm going to spend a while now trying to find a synonym for "bad"... let's just stick with "bad" then... how bad those opening four words are, only as it happens this time I noticed almost immediately. "When I first started"? Surely that's a... I'll look this up... tautology? Doesn't starting mean doing something for the first time anyway? And yet it sounds okay to my ear when I say it out loud. Maybe I just like the sound of my voice too much. "When I first started..."

 Okay.

 When I first started returning to this blog to post daily

 Oh bloody hell....

 "First started returning"? That sounds terrible. What can that mean? But no, back in December of 2019 I returned to the blog after a bit of an absence and I started posting daily, which I hadn't done before, and then there was a break in early 2021, and now I'm blogging daily again. Hence "first", hence "returning"... Yeah that"started" is redundant.

 When I first returned to this blog to post daily... I've honestly forgotten now what I was going to say.

Bojangles Break

 

 Unfamiliar with the name, I wikipedia'd Bill Robinson – as namechecked in the often brilliant Fred Astaire muscial The Band Wagon – and my belated dance education continued (it beat working on my abs):

"According to dance critic Marshall Stearns, 'Robinson's contribution to tap dance is exact and specific. He brought it up on its toes, dancing upright and swinging,' adding a 'hitherto-unknown lightness and presence.'... He is also credited with having popularized the word copacetic through his repeated use of it in vaudeville and radio appearances."

 So when I wrote that the trick to dancing seemed to be to get my top half to hold up my bottom half, apparently he invented that. And more. Watching the battered, echoing remnant of his work above I realised – later than I would like – that I'd grown up loving Bill Robinson's dancing without ever seeing the man himself do it:

"His signature routine was the stair dance, in which he would tap up and down a set of stairs in a rhythmically complex sequence of steps, a routine that he unsuccessfully attempted to patent."

And who can blame him? 

Heigh ho. 

That's entertainment.

Zan Zendegi Azadi continued...

 Yesterday I met Faren (not pictured) and her friends and colleagues in Trafalgar Square to join a human chain across Wesminster Bridge in support of the protests in Iran. October the 29th was also Cyrus the Great day, so I thought about researching him before writing this, then realised it probably wasn't that necessary, but I'll still research him after I've written this. I've got Larry Gonick's Cartoon History of the Universe open next to me right now.

 

 

  

 Whitehall had been busy. The March of the Mums had made front pages earlier that day, and there was also a Ukrainian protest outside Downing Street, with which we ocassionally intermingled. "Down with tyrants." A lot of the chants were in English, but we were also taught "Azadi! Azadi! A-zad-i!" the Farsi word for freedom. And I finally learnt how to say Zan, Zendegi, Azadi, meaning Women, Life, Freedom – as taught to the people of Hastings by Omid Djalili here, and written across the Jason hockey masks of some protestors. Others hid their face behind David Lloyd's Guy Fawkes mask, now associated with Anonymous, possibly unaware of the seasonal appropriateness. Others still were dressed as zombie nuns, but I'm pretty sure they were just cutting through.

 Our numbers grew as we walked down Whitehall, sometimes side by side and filling the road, sometimes holding hands in single file to form the human chain, (which I couldn't photograph without breaking of course). There hadn't seemed to be as many in Trafalgar Square as a month ago, but now we were on the move we were closing roads. This was my first march. Faren said she hadn't felt as safe as she'd have liked at the last one, because people had started shouting "Down with the BBC", believing the corporation hadn't been doing enough to support the protestors, or that reporting the deaths of students was bad for morale – meanwhile the very fact of Faren's employment by BBC Persian has seen her upgraded by the Iranian Government from spy to terrorist – but on this demonstration however, I only saw the one sign with the letters "BBC" dripping in blood, and Faren had her friends around her now. She seemed happy. She was loud. "I'm letting out a lot of anger." I realised I'd only been throwing my voice. Pretend shouting. Shy.

 

  Posting some photographs of the protest on Instagram that evening, I wondered for the first time what my phone is actually up to when it says it's "finishing up" after the loading bar's filled, and I had flashbacks to Arthur Pewtey at the Marriage Guidance Counsellor. I don't really know how well I've fulfilled protestors' requests to "Be the Voice of Iran". But I know what I can do if it's okay with you, and that is to sign, and ask you to sign, THIS PETITION to whoever's Home Secretary when you read this: to drop an already twice rejected Public Order Bill that would make criminal offences of everything that happened yesterday – "interfering with key national infrastructure" for example – in other words, closing roads – and "locking on" – in other words, holding hands. If not for me, do it for Cyrus the Great.

 

Breaking

  No wonder that podium's always doing a double take. 

 I reached the end of yesterday wondering how I'd managed to get so little done given how little I currently have to do, and only realised with Liz Truss' resignation today how much time I've spent simply checking who's in charge.

 

 

 To be fair to the Daily Mail, she lasted longer than an hour. She also lasted longer than Andrew Neil when he tried to launch a similarly naked culture war over on that GB News then left after two weeks. And how long will the Tories last? Sorry, I mean the Conservatives! I'm trying to stop using the T word, as I have a theory the way they've managed to stay in office for so long is by having two names: the "Tories", who soak up the bad news and the hate, and the "Conservatives" who actually appear on the ballot paper, name unsullied. We'll see if this works again. I've no idea when. Anyway hats off to the Daily Star's "Will Liz Truss last longer than this lettuce" live feed, a properly salient piece of journalism – Yes I know we all know about it, but this is an archive too. To whoever's reading this in years to come: Shush, I know political chaos is never a prelude to good news, but let me enjoy this. Right, the rain's just stopped, laptop closing, I'm off for a walk. 

More Strands

 

 Sweet flipped birds of freedom. Here.

 And yesterday footage went online of riot police joining an anti-Khamenei march. I must remember it's the absence of fear here that's so uplifiting, not the absence of danger. A week ago, a day earlier in the same day that the first student protestors were beaten and fired upon in the Sharif Univeristy in Tehran, my BBC Persian friend Faren shared an Iranian video of a white-haired badass turning heads on the tube by slapping the crap out of two men complaining about her uncovered head. Stills don't do the video justice. You can see it here. I asked Faren what the onlookers were saying at the end and learnt some colloquial Farsi: "Pashmam" very loosely translates as, "Well, blow me!" But its literal translation into English is: "My hair!"

 

Villains From a Simpler Time: Martin Shkreli

 

 

 "Yeah, I'll be evil, I'll be the Bond villain." I had totally forgotten about Martin Shkreli! Do you remember Martin Shkreli? Something like... he bought the rights to an AIDS drug and immediately made it five hundred times more expensive? I know next to nothing about American Healthcare, but Allie Conti's interview with him for Vice back in January 2016 is a beautiful character study regardless of topic.

 

 The useless hover board, the mismatched wine glasses, the "Sicilian Defense", the globe on the floor. That Wu Tang Clan album. This is what performative villainy looked like before Putin invaded the Ukraine. Before Covid. Before Brexit. Before Trump. Almost before Elon Musk.

 

 I was only reminded of it when watching RedLetterMedia discuss Ben & Arthur as part of their "Best of the Worst" series: an awkward cri de coeur shot in a cheaply furnished flat. Something about that film's combination of bareness and clutter suddenly reminded me of Shkreli, so I looked him up, and it turns out he'd just got out of prison.

 

 I've no idea if the rob-the-rich-to-give-to-Research-and-Development defense he gives in this interview holds any water at all. I just know he's pawned his "prison watch" and is now threatening on instagram to go and bed all our "thot mums". I miss wondering what someone like him will do next, rather than fearing it. I hope he never catches up.

 Here's some Ben & Arthur.