Rest day, and much needed. Lots of sleeping, not much doing.
The end times fascists are plotting their escape from our world. Our mission is clear.
An excerpt from Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor’s new book which is out tomorrow. I’ll be getting the audiobook.
I was pleased to see this excerpt is not just outlining all the terrible things but touches on some of what we can do about it. This has been my big thing as we face up to these forces of darkness — what can we do to resist and ultimately defeat them?
Start from love of place, then conjure a radically inclusive future where everyone can afford dignified lives, embrace common goals across difference, get outside and gather offline and in person, take on the powerful joyously, draw on history and don’t be afraid to stir the soul.
This fits with everything I’ve been reading and is, I think, why the fascist flaggers hit their first real resistance in Birmingham when they came through my home of Stirchley where we’ve been doing this sort of work for years now. It’s not going to be easy but it can be done.
A reading of the Bayeux Tapestry
Like most things that are incredibly familiar I realised I couldn’t tell you exactly what the Bayeux Tapestry depicted so this hour long account was welcome. What’s particularly striking to this comics-head is how much it obeys what we now call comic book grammar to the point where chronological flow can be reversed and still make sense.
The video uses a 19th century copy of the tapestry by Charles Stothard rather than photographs of the tapestry as it currently it, which might seem odd as high resolution images are on Wikimedia in the public domain (in two parts), but this has some real value as it shows how it was before the restoration, which I didn’t realise was quite substantial.
The story itself is actually surprisingly short on details, given the scale of the thing, and I imagine it would have accompanied an aural storytelling tradition, like slides with a presentation. You can picture someone moving around the room spending a decent amount of time beneath each scene fleshing it out with colourful facts that got stretched with each telling.
On a personal note, I’ve actually seen the tapestry in the flesh, albeit as a child when we went on holiday to France on the 1980s and stopped off at Bayeux. I remember it being hung behind glass in a room half its length so it doubled back something they’re not doing in the London display due to fragility. I don’t remember much more but we did take home a fold-out reproduction which I still have upstairs somewhere. Because it’s a comic, and I collected comics. I should dig it out really.
- Richard Littler, of Scarfolk fame, started a recreation of the tapestry using Yellow Submarine characters before “a voice in my brain intervened and screamed, ‘What in god’s name are you doing?'"