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.

One Use of Sanitary Pads in a Revolution

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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"

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!"

 

. برای زن، زندگی، آزادی

  My friend Faren is almost finished packing. Moving tomorrow. As I mentioned before she's had a testing  fortnight, and I offered to help with her boxes, but she asked me to go to Trafalgar Square instead. So I went and I took these videos and photographs and far more.

 

 A demonstration was being held to honour Mahsa Amini, the woman murdered by Iranian police for her inappropriate headwear. People were calling for revolution, and saying her name, and angry and smiling. It was glorious. It had the quality of glory. The Square was in full bloom.

 

 I saw a new statue on the fourth plinth, which I thought had been reserved for the Queen. But this was of Malawian preacher and freedom fighter John Chilembwe. It had gone up three days ago.

 

 The work of sculptor Samson Kambalu, it recreates a photograph taken in 1914 of Chilembwe refusing to take his hat off in front of the white colonialist over whom he now towers. Now he was looking on. Chilembwe would later stage his own uprising in Malawi.

  I remember when Boris Johnson was mayor, he tried to turn this plinth into a war memorial. Without meaning a shred of disrespect to the late Air Chief Marshall Sir Keith Park, I'm happy that didn't happen. Particularly today. As I say, full bloom.

Strands

 

"For Mahsa Amini" by Faren Taghizadeh

 

  It's been a busy week for me, but busier for my friend Faren. She's moving flats, which is always quite emotionally draining, and also working 12 hour shifts as social media correspondent for BBC Persian – a job which condemns her to immediate arrest as a western spy if she tries to revisit her home country of Iran. Last night, while I was continually reloading iplayer to see if I was on EastEnders, she was covering a possible revolution.

 

 

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A post shared by BBC NEWS TÜRKÇE (@bbcturkce)

 

 Here's Faren explaining for the Turkish Service some shows of solidarity for Mahsa Amani, the Iranian woman who died last week after being dragged into a van and beaten by "morality police" for incorrectly covering her hair, a death which coincides with the failing health (and rumoured passing) of Iranian Supreme Leader Khamenie, as well as a meeting of the United Nations. The UN is now calling for an investigation into Amani's death. Iranians are calling for more. If "calling for" is the right phrase. 

 Content warning: vast outnumbering...

 

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A post shared by bamdad esmaili (@bamdad_esmaili)

 

 Hence the 12 hour shifts. These scenes are extraordinary. Faren's very busy. I asked her to translate the chants. In hindsight that probably wasn't the smartest thing to ask someone with parents in Iran over a messaging app. 

 I'm going to offer to help with her boxes.

 

Come On Pilgrim

(source)   

 

 "It's basically a pilgrimage," said Gemma, "There were a couple behind me from York. They asked me what else I was going to see while in London." They'd been down for Diana as well apparently. Gemma Brockis of course lives in London, like me. Having decided it would be crazy to miss probably the biggest act of local political theatre since the beheading of Charles the First, she had joined the queue on Saturday at 4am and was out of Westminster Hall fourteen hours later to come over and help me with a self tape, buzzing. It was great to hear her.

  Because in spite of my decades working in tourist attractions, I tend to forget when I talk about London's "community" or public spaces how much of destination this city is, how much of a venue it is. And the night I walked from Victoria to Hyde Park Corner a week earlier seeing nothing but an occupying army of fences and police, I had known nothing about The Queue to come. It hadn't occured to me that my back yard might have to present itself as the centre of the world for a spell, again.

 

  I also forgot – or it never occured to me – watching and rewatching King Prince Charles lose his temper over a pen in Nothern Ireland, that not only had his mother just died, he was there to reaffirm the legitimacy of – and shake hands once again with – the killers of his favourite uncle. If the biggest story from that visit was a leaky pen I guess he was doing his job, poor sod. It's easy to associate the idea of kings and queens with fantasy, and conclude that their inclusion in a political system is a sign of immaturity, but a far more crucial ingredient of fantasy is heroism and, like Yoda in the good films, the Queen was never heroic. It wasn't her job to make history, just to exist in it, and her speeches weren't meant to rouse. "It is at times such as these..." was her catchphrase.

 

 "She was a little old lady," Gemma said. "Immortal crown. Mortal wearer. The Queen is dead. Long live the King. That's the power of it." 

 That it might be safer for a nation – particularly a nation as historically in love with the idea of empire as ours – to concentrate its hero worship upon someone whose job is simply to receive that worship without seeking it, was an idea that the Queen exemplified for seventy years. "Seventy years. She met Eisenhower. In the fifties. A female head of state!" And this was something else Gemma said that really chimed, particularly in a week which has seen Lindsey Graham attempt a nationwide abortion ban in the US and the murder of Mahsa Amini by morality police in Iran. Without – perhaps uniquely – ever having to be sexualised, masculinised or martyred – from the moment she was on the throne – "here," said Gemma, "was a woman people listened to."