Some Nearly Wordless Pics of Languedoc Until the Keyboard's Fixed

  

 

 

 

 Click to embiggen. And spot the dog.

EXCITING SPACE ADVENTURE 32: Where Pounds Won't Go!

"Pound as in the pounding of these zammoths' feet?"

"What zammoths? The ones to our right?"

"The ones I'm pointing at. Well, yeah, those ones, okay. God. So I wasn't exactly pointing at them. But yeah. God."

"No. Pounds as in insert-national-currency-here. The future has no regulated currency."

"Oh, and air?"

"No. And no zammoths. They're hallucinations. This planet's atmosphere is too thin. We're dying of radiation sickness."

"Speak for yourself. My body's packing in because it doesn't know how to function on a planet that has only a third of Earth's gravity. Hey, where are those guys going?" 

"I can't see what you're pointing at."

"Forget it... Where are we again?"

"Fucking everywhere, apparently."

 

 Illustration by nobody.

I call this piece "The Person Who Has To Explain The Art"

 No sorry, my point was that when I initially saw those road signs turned upside-down by French farmers over Christmas my first thought had been simply, oh I guess some stuff's upside-down now. I had clocked the symptoms a few weeks earlier while tearing through Norwich Castle on a twilight ticket and noticing that one of the paintings had definitely been hung the wrong way up. Screwed, in fact. Screwed to the wall – see above. In the next gallery I noticed another, by a different artist, again definitely upside-down (I don't mean to boast, an artist like me just has an eye for these things).

 

  Every room in fact had one painting inexplicably set upside down, and my first thought here was, oh I guess this is some kind of protest – exactly the feeling I didn't get when I saw the protests in Languedoc. (Mum tells me farmers are now blocking every road into every city with tractors, so that's less ambiguous.) I couldn't think what might be being protesting however. So I went up to the information desk and said "Hello" firstly, and then "Can I ask why some of the paintings are upside-down?" and the smiling woman at the desk handed me a leaflet sporting the name Mark Wilsher, explaining "Yes, it's an artist. Five works have been turned upside down. It's all about your reaction to it." And I'm trying to work out how best to explain the way she said it, because I think that's the point of this post.

 

A sidenote: I come from a generation who have been taught, upon reading the words "the smiling woman at the desk", to imagine immediately something counterfeit and sinister – the polite, public face of an industrial carnivore – but after the trip to the castle I went back to punch imaginary tickets on a train pretending to go to the North Pole, or pour and serve real hot chocolate, because most of the jobs I've taken have been pretty public facing – not just the out-of-work actor stuff, but the actor stuff too. Other credits on my CV include: Announcer; Host; Voice; Receptionist; Narrator; Waiter; Lift Operator; and Conductor, bus. But even the murderers on that list were narratively never threats to the public. I like the public, and I like being the public. 

 

 

 Anyway, I don't want you to picture me leaving that exchange with the smiling woman at the desk in any way huffy or aloof. And I don't want to give the impression she didn't seem very much on the side of the exercise. But she did say "It's all about your reaction to it" it in a way that made me wonder how previous enquiries might have gone. I said "Aw thanks" and took the leaflet to let her know she wasn't going to get any trouble from my end at least. I don't know. Perhaps I'm projecting. Perhaps she wasn't deescalating anything, just happy to help. Perhaps I was also projecting when I thought it might have been a protest, or when I thought those upside-down road-signs in France might not. Walking away, I thought: "Well, I guess my reaction to seeing some paintings turned upside-down is to find out why they've been turned upside down. Sorry if you were expecting more, Mark." 

 But now I think maybe the work was actually having her to explain the work to me because – as you might be able to tell – I've had a far more complicated reaction to that. 

 (Sorry I didn't post much here about The Polar Express, but there was Instagram. And that's me with the outstanding Miles Mlambo above. And below, that's me getting over two million likes on TikTok. Boasts of equal stature.)

@bethmae0 💫✨️Just be you✨️💫 #polarexpress #fy #fyp #fypシ #fypシ゚viral #fypviral #foryou #foryoupage #foryoupageofficiall #trend #trending #quoteoftheday #mumsoftiktok ♬ original sound - bethmae🤍

The German Choir of London go "Oh God"

 Here's matter ghoul adjacent. Back in March I took an iPad out to where Spitalfields borders The City, to see if I could get anything useful for a little promo Big Ben said we needed to make now that the Americans were favouring Harry Potter Tours – which we don't do – over the more nuanced, site-specific contextualising of the tragic murder and mutilation of unaccommodated Victorian women provided by Fred Strangebone's Ripper Walks. "Well, this will look terrible" I thought as it started to rain because I knew nothing about what makes a street look good. 

 The iPad was a gift from the Musical Director of the Deutscher Chor London, Barbara Hoefling. When I came to cut the Strangebone footage together I found a whole file of recordings she had made on it in preparation for a lockdown Hallowe'en Concert. Barbara's developed her own method of directing amateur choirs: instead of training each singer up to the standard of a soloist, she concentrates on perfecting the coherence of their untrained voices into a single instrument, to produce a sound I've heard no other human choir make. I tried playing one of the recordings I'd found over the footage of our route, and was instantly thrilled by how devastating I found the result – far too upsetting to attract even the Canadians however. So I knocked together a new soundtrack from some library numbers, Ben provided text and sound effects – car horns, golf swings, that kind of thing – and you can see the final trailer here, if you like. But Barbara Hoefling's brilliant work is below.

 

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.

 

A Bad Idea I Had, and How It's Going

  I'm not going to soul search here. I'm just going to report the facts. I bought Mondo and Sky Blue when I lived at Clapham Junction, to serve as a surrogate couple we could take with us on holiday and photograph in case we didn't work out as a couple ourselves. Mondo had one eye, and a goofy grin across his belly. Sky Blue's face was clear apart from the sun. These two vinyl figures came with us everywhere for six and a half years, and they stayed with me in the flat in Forest Hill when the time came for me to live there on my own. That's them, above. The night before my first night alone, I wrote the following in the notes app on my phone at 3am:

Those go there.

Mondo and Sky Blue.

Except they don't go there any more

Because there are more gaps now.

But you can't just move stuff, because then it's just things in a room and it's cold outside and that's all you have when this was going to be a home.

And you've made nothing that can be hung on a wall in fifteen years.

 I wrote more than that too. 

 They came with me when I moved to Mornington Crescent a year later, and they came with me to Notting Hill. I didn't know what to do with them, all my ideas seemed stupid, but here's the one I finally went with: near where we used to live in Loughborough Junction, there's a small, unexplained indentation in the wall where a brick has been slightly knocked in.

 

 On the 29th of August I took Mondo, Sky Blue, and a small bottle of Loctite, and I set them there. Sky Blue was glued a little more firmly as I couldn't find as flat a base for Mondo, but both stuck, and I took a photo and then left them, feeling I'd done something actually quite self-indulgent and pointless:

 

 A week later, on the 5th of September, I returned to Brixton and decided to check up on them. They were still there, but I noticed that Mondo had come unstuck. Someone must have moved them to see if they were glued down, snapped Mondo off, but then left him there unacquired. I was touched by this. I wondered if anything like this would happen in Notting Hill, if anyone would just leave something standing. I took a photograph, and decided to check up on them whenever I was south. As I may have said before, I have no memory of ever experiencing closure on anything:

 

 I revisited them again, a week later, on the 12th of September. They were still there. Sky Blue glued in place. Mondo left loose: 

 I revisited again on the16th of September:

 

 And the 2nd of October:

 

 And the 20th of October:

 

 And the 29th of November:

Logging The Local Iconoclasm

 Simple. Effective. And I notice this last picture suggests there were never any faces to deface in the first place. So everyone's happy, gold star.

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.