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.

Hat Hat Bang Bang

 

In which I belatedly honour THE film of 2023...

 

 (A placeholder's good for more than one day, right?)

 The summer evening I saw "Oppenheimer" I remember I raced hime to get to work on a version of this, inspired perhaps by Nolan's ruthless deployment of the formula: Man plus Hat times Cinema equals Importance. But I couldn't find an untreated soundtrack to the trailer I wanted to mix into it, and it wasn't really synching, and so I moved on. For the rest of the year however I continued to ponder just what that script had meant when targets other than Hiroshima were being dismissed by those men sat round the table as "too small". It was just a throwaway line, but how can a civilan target be "too small"? Noone ever explained that. This was well before thousands more non-combatants would be bombed to death with America's blessing in the Autumn. Anyway, cut to the end of year and I had another look at the edit, and decided it didn't really matter that it was shit; no less effort had gone into it than the idea deserved.

 

 

 

Also for your consideration: "There are some things you can't film" Yoshishige Yoshida

 

 And working on the mash-up further wouldn't stop anyone actually thinking that one film was a cinematic milestone and the other a risible vanity project, but I was still bugged I couldn't get an untreated soundtrack. Then, tonight, someone on F*c*b**k – already having gone into some length about how much they loathed the charmless Great Man narrative of "Maestro" – started watching "Oppenheimer" for the first time, so I decided to dust this off and join in, and here it is. Tone is tone, isn't it? Where did Michael Flatley go so wrong? Nowhere.

 

And: "When the horizon is at the top, it's interesting" David Lynch (as John Ford)

March doesn't get back to Normal

 Let the record show this post is actually going up on Thursday the 22nd, the day after President Volodymyr Zelensky visited the US Senate. I've been meaning to post something about March for a while, to catch up on the run-down of the year, and Zelensky's address has proved a good incentive, so here are more old photos.

 

 Again, a lot of scenery, including a reminder that a giant mound had been dismantled outside Marble Arch, serving as the reminder it had ever gone up. It looked better stripped of turf.

 March appears to have seen no real change to my routine. I'd use my time walking, and photograph where I walked. Local parks. Local galleries.

 

 I put off buying stuff for the room. We still wore masks at the Crystal Maze. The weather was changing though, behaving itself to begin with, showing no signs for example that in April this would all be snow...

 

 And in August this would be dust...

 Then, just as it seemed it had been decided the pandemic was over now, and "things" should be getting back to "normal", we suddenly remembered the possibility of nuclear annihilation.

 Down the hill from me, outside Holland Park, flowers and signs of support started appearing at the feet of the statue of the Ukrainian Saint Volodymyr. Russia had invaded the Ukraine on February the 24th. I looked it up.

 

 Just up the hill from me, outside Kensington Gardens, fences were erected to protect the walls erected to protect the Russian Embassy from graffiti, and across the road from them, more fences, often peopled by protestors, but I'm normally too shy to take photos of people. 

 

 The fences are still there today.

 

 And the signs.

 

A search for "Zelensky" conducted at the beginning of this invasion reminded me he'd been a popular television comedian before coming to office, and the extraordinary speech he gave in Russian on the day of the invasion reminded me how powerfully a comedian can communicate.

 

Remarkable speech. Addressed to the Russian people, it should also be heard everywhere. pic.twitter.com/RkrDGSYUYq

— Piotr Zalewski (@p_zalewski) February 25, 2022

 

 On one walk, I then bumped into the friend who'd invited me to that concert where the orchestra were all masked. She'd grown up in Yugoslavia, and outlived it, still holidaying as a teenager in what was becoming Croatia while living the rest of the time in what was becoming Serbia (Is that right? Have I got that right? I should look it up.) Anyway, she lived in a war. 

 "Vladimir Putin is an absolute fucking genocidal dictator," she explained over a pint in the Windsor Castle. "But –"

 "America doesn't give a fuck about Europe either. The Cold War's been over for thirty years, why is there still NATO? Putin didn't do this without reason. I cannot believe this propaganda. News should be History. Nothing is being explained. We're not enemies. These are people! They're going to have to discuss! It's exactly like Yugoslavia... I'm sorry." 

 And now I'm thinking of that "Stalin Attacks Churchill" headline from 1946, in the copy of the Daily Mail we use as a prop in Love Goddess. It's a good prop. You can see the beginnings of the Cold War in the story beneath, as "Generalissimo Stalin" warns of an English-Speaking assumption of World Domination. The power of that narrative's still there today too.

 

Nightwalk in Xanadu

 Having skirted its making in my "research" for Love Goddess, today I decided to actually rewatch Orson Welles' Citizen Kane, which happily appears to be available on iplayer forever. The film seems timely now in a way it probably hadn't since it first came out. I initally wrote "frighteningly timely" but, if I'm honest, also quite pleasingly timely...

 

a reference to this

 

 Timely not just in its depiction of one of the richest men in the world maniacally throwing money away in an attempt to buy the love of "The People" and call it Democracy, but also in its depiction of the attempt to use money, and the media that money buys, to remake reality itself, and of the suicide-attempt-inducing nightmare of having to live inside that lie – the fate of Kane's second wife.

 

 Susan Alexander's story probably stands up best as a metaphor; in reality, billionaires' wives seem to be managing okay. Still, as the opening of the film makes clear, Citizen Kane doesn't take place in reality. I was wildly wrong before when I said it began with a news reel. Of course, it begins with this:

 

 In the ruins of the fairy tale that Kane retreated into, to the sound of the same sleepily growling horns composer Bernard Herrmann would later use to accompany Jason and the Argonauts disturbing Talos' gigantic jewellery box: lost monkeys, abandoned gondolas, an absurdly convex golf course, and the suggestion – confirmed in the film's closing shots – that this is just a taste of Xanadu... that you'll never be able to see the whole thing. Immediately, I was reminded of scrolling through my photos after a night walk, deciding what images to use, and how many, and what order to put them in on this blog. So actually, this opening does remind me of the real world. Or whatever you want to call what we're living in until the lights go out. That's what makes it the greatest.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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"

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.

 

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!"

 

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.

 

Not A Good Look

 Another big scary face. Gemma Brockis sent me this: it's Mussolini's Italian Fascist Party headquarters in 1934. There's a lot going on, isn't there – the face may be saying "No", but the walls... It's got my name written all over it! Anyway, it's a lot more ghost-trainy an aesthetic than I normally associate with fascism. When I think of fascist architecture, I think of Albert Speer's slave-built "cathedrals of light" at the Nuremberg Ralleys, and those huge, bare rectangles and domes reminiscent of and maybe even inspired by John Martin's extraordinary designs for the Hellish city of Pandaemonium in his illustrations for "Paradise Lost" made a hundred years earlier...

 

All of which I guess means there never really was a "fascist aesthetic", beyond Big and Dumb. It's just a numbers game. Changing the subject completely, walking home last night I noticed – it was hard not to – more police on the route from Victoria to Hyde Park Corner than there were non-police. I asked one of them what was going on, and she explained that the Qeeen had died – thanks – and that they were here for the funeral. "Isn't that a week away?" I asked. "It's just, this is quite intimidating." "Don't worry," her partner replied, "We're here to keep people safe." I didn't ask from what. 

 Hey, remember when that Russian guy got arrested for holding up a blank piece of paper? Can you imagine if that happened here LOLZ!

Gracious

 Who says a circle has no end? Phil Davis' twitter account put it well: "She did what she was supposed to do." I always thought it would be David Attenborough who went first, but no, Churchill's boss has finally left us. Not all the bus shelters in Notting Hill bear the news yet. "Postpone" is probably the wrong word to use here in retrospect, and "rest":

 

 And maybe noboby was looking at their phone more than normal as I walked home through Soho, maybe I was just noticing it more. I learnt of the news myself from the definitive "1926 - 2022" instagram post on my phone at about seven in the evening just outside Forbidden Planet, but people had been spending all day reminiscing about her already online, so I felt more of an "Oh, right." than an "Oh no!" And the drinks I walked past felt like drinks-after-a-show kind of drinks. Friday kind of drinks. Life definitely goes on. Today's proven that, at least.

 I didn't hear anyone say "God Save the King" outside the Crown. The mood outside all the pubs, and in the pub above which I write this – have I mentioned, I live above a pub now? – seems more one of "Fair play, who can blame her?" But it's been raining a lot, of course, after the drought, of course, and she'd just appointed a new Worst Prime Minister, of course, so maybe everyone's had their fill of the unthinkable and just wants to kick a ball around. Or maybe that's just me.

 Susy and I went to visit our Aunty June yesterday, in her new care home in Henley. Susy visits her a lot. I love Susy. June's dealing with her sudden dementia incredibly well I think, without distress, finding her way around it like a new phone that doesn't do what the old one did. There's nothing doddery about her condition. Some very specific information simply doesn't take. Every ten minutes or so I just had to reintroduce myself, and explain I wasn't married to my sister. Not "remind" June. That information had gone. Meet her, I suppose. And I like meeting people. "And what do you do?" She can get through a book perfectly well too, she told me, whoever I was. June's not bored. 

 So there's that. The giant illuminated strawberries on the Coronet fly at half mast. And Mum and Dad arrive from France tonight, to celebrate their fiftieth wedding anniversary back here in the United Kingdom. I hope they're okay. "Kingdom". I've never had a king before. I wonder if that will take. I wonder what money will look like. Oh! I was going to send her a link to my youtube Shakespeares, I think she might have enjoyed them. The Queen, I mean. What made me think of that? I wonder what she listened to. I wonder if she ever heard me. 

 

A brilliantly unfortunate front page from the Mirror.

The "Mitchell Beazley Joy of Knowledge Library's Book Of Man and Society" Round

What are those pixels hiding? A lady nipple? Is it, somewhere, cock o'clock? (Source.)

 

 Anyway, back to the quiz!

 If any of these images are slightly familiar, it's because I've been to the Mitchell Beazley well once before, here. I don't have the book with me now, alas, to show you, but it's made up of heavily illustrated, two-page chapters, so each of the following illustrations comes from a different chapter, and I've jumbled up the titles. That's right. Jumbled. Can you unjumble them? Have you the time and inclination to scroll endlessly up and down this page and do that? Can't you just leave things as they are? I'll post the correct answers in the comments, for all the good it will do you.

 

1. How the brain works

 

 

 

2. Moral development

 

 

3. Adolescence

 

  

4.  "Keeping fit"

 

 

5. Thinking and understanding 

 

6. Adulthood from 20 to 30

 

 

7. Behaviour therapy

 

8. The meaning of ritual

 

 

 

9. Body image and biofeedback

 

 

 

10. Potential of the mind

 

 

11. Prejudice and group intolerance

 

12. Birth control

 

13. Alcoholism and drug abuse

 

14. Work: curse and pleasure

15. Family of man: how peoples differ

16. Origins of human society

 

17. Religion and the plight of modern man

 

18. Development of surgery

 

 

 

19. Diseases of the nervous system

 

20. What is philosophy