Party tricks

You know those questions that pose hypothetical situations to which the answer seems obvious but the question has been constructed in a deceptive form, so that the obvious answer reveals some subtle aspect of perception? Some of those questions seem painfully contrived, like: A man driving on a twisty country road, hits a deer and his headlights are smashed. Ten minutes later he's phoning his wife, after diving to a town (obviously he doesn't have a mobile). How did he drive to the town with no headlights?

I answered with, 'He just drove there,' I think I was supposed to infer a night time incident from the context but it didn't work. The person asking got a bit mift at this point, she was never the brightest light on the Xmas tree,  not dim exactly, she just put too much faith in rote, one of those folk with predicable thought processes who accepted answers depending on the status of their source. Anyway I tried out the question myself, for curiosity's sake, guess what, it didn't work then either. She must've been asked the question herself at one point, for her to be as impressed by its implications as she seemed. So I started to wonder, was the question posed to her with a more effective wording or did she fail it deliberately? By deliberately I mean, appear to make the assumption of a night time context in the question, for the sake of social acquiescence, then use self deception to convince herself that her assumption was genuine. That might seem a little tenuous but the nature of her reaction, when I failed to make the elicited assumption, was something akin to that which follows from a break in social etiquette, it was if I was being rude.

A much better question of this ilk is: if a tree falls in the forest and no one is there, does it make a sound? Yeah that question, this one went so far over my head that I always dismissed it as some zen type thought mangling, that needed sufficient drug induced cerebral hindrance to be effective. It wasn't until it was pointed out, that the word sound, a bit like the word colour, can be, and is often interpreted as reference to a sensory phenomena, that the penny dropped for me.

So here's another question, that falls somewhere between the forest question and the equivocal wording of the car hits deer question. Here it goes: there are three people travelling together, each of them has just applied for a job as a bus driver. The first person is a good driver and got the job. The second person is a fair driver and didn't get the job, the third person can't drive. Who wins?

Some Raven fun

Richard Corben is quite a special comic artist, he's one of very few, who moved the medium into a transcendent form, a form that wouldn't be out of place dangling on the walls of Mayfair. As far as I know that actually hasn't happened, the people running those establishments being the possessors of rather numbed aesthetic sensibilities. Corben is able to achieve this elevated state of accomplishment through a rare collection of wide ranging skills. He's an artist who can convincingly model rounded figures, with a vivid colour range and convey drama in scenes through lighting, without obscuring detail. Let me tell you, that's a neat trick, no matter what insight into his techniques you may have accrued.

For me, his best work was accomplished while he was being published in the Warren, magazine format, horror genre comics. He's still worth a gander at as a contributor to Heavy Metal magazine but that publication was a bit esoteric for me and it's self consciously arty purpose eroded some of the sharpness of it's contributors. Anyway that's enough waffle, lets have a look at another one of those excellent Youtube meldings of art and music, as we appreciate the man's talent set to the warblings of the Alan Parsons Project, through a tune inspired by Poe's, The Raven.

Daredevil (series)

Have you seen it yet? Lets assume you haven't, so we'll keep this as free from spoilers as feasible.

Look a picture, happy now?

There's a lot of positive feedback for this series, from some judiciously selected luminaries and quite possibly that positive reception is justified. Speaking personally though, while I did enjoy the series, it's some distance from how I envision the Daredevil mythos. Dark, that's how it is, yes lets get a flow of adjectives going; gritty, sombre, earthy, morally ambiguous, does that give an indication of the territory we're in?

Daredevil's fictional world is populated by corrupt officials and perfidious authority, just like the real one, and dealing with such issues places demands that test the inviolable morality of the heroic stereotype. So we can expect some of the post code era, angst driven bouts of self doubt and questioning can't we? Er no not really, here Matt Murdoch/Daredevil takes his cues from a different iteration of popular literature, that of the pulp detective/vigilante genre, as practised my Hammett and Spillane. That is, if literature is the source of such influence, it could be it comes from television dramas like, The Sopranos and True Detective.

The comparison between Mike Hammer and Murdoch/Daredevil is compelling, he uses the same indicators to delineate his morality. Everyone is metered with same brutal treatment, unless they happen to be a female or child and this aspect is alluded to quite self consciously at a few points in the script. So we're not subjected to some naive fictional construct where the boundaries of good and evil are coincident with our hero's prejudice. The moral ambiguity goes further though, Murdoch isn't just a diamond in the rough, he's pretty much a complete, fully rounded psychopath, only just outdone in the atrocities he commits, by his nemesis Wilson Fisk.

The Fisk/Murdoch dichotomy is the meat of the drama that Daredevil concerns itself with. It's where it both excels and where its weaknesses lie. I quite like Wilson, in fact it's hard not get behind him and cheer him on, in a few places. There is one particular instance, close to the end of the series where there is an encounter with one the sympathetic characters, that leaves him with a certain justification, albeit contrasted with his overreaction and its consequences. This is where the drama fails to an extent, Murdoch gets away pretty much unscathed from any examination of the consequences of his behaviour, whereas Fisk is continually put under the glare of exposition.

There are occasions where the pace of the drama gets a bit slow in the series and there are a couple of episodes where it seems nothing much gets done except for a few plot points. The fight scenes have come in for some praise and while they're quite good and it starts off well, it gets to a point where it seems a bit predicable and there were a few moments where it seemed it was a case of: cut to punch up. I want to conclude on positive note because it was a pretty good watch but if you haven't seen it yet and you decide to give it a spin, you might want to go through a few episodes back to back, where a particular episode drags a bit.

Oh wow!

Just found this web resource here, Robert E Howard's Conan, it's spendirificous. Howard's prose is just out there, refreshingly untutored, dense and viceral. Flippin' 'eck get yourself a marvellous freebie now.

Thought for the day.

The language of the totalist environment is characterized by the thought-terminating cliché. The most far-reaching and complex of human problems are compressed into brief, highly reductive, definitive-sounding phrases, easily memorized and easily expressed. These become the start and finish of any ideological analysis.

Robert Jay Lifton 

Liberty

An important milestone was passed today, one I that think is worth noting, routine exit checks been have introduced at UK borders. Fine -- that would be the kind of thing we used hold up as an example of autocracy and routine affront to liberty in the erstwhile USSR and its satellites, cue a Robbie Coltrane jokey Russian accent '...and what is your reason for wanting to leave the glorious motherland, when will you be returning?'. The advent of exit checks implies a power to deny the privilege to cross the border, If that were a general rule it would be a severe infringement of civil liberties and a breach of treaty commitments. Of course there's always a way round these technicalities, probably a suspicion that a person refused passage was liable to commit illegal acts abroad would be cited as justification. We have had a few people travelling abroad recently whose journey has made an impact on the media, I suspect those instances will be cited as justification for this move. So we can expect these measures to be temporary, only extant until the current crisis has abated, can't we? yeah like that's gonna happen. No, I think those checks are here to stay, meanwhile if you wanna wallow in nostalgia for a while, why not look up an old seventies speculative TV drama, 1990 with Edward Woodward. 1990 portrays a near future Britain (near future in 1970 something) where people are smuggled out of the country. One of the reasons for those people wanting to leave is to get treatment for health problems untreatable by a health system in distress, ring any bells?

Politics

You know, I find politics hard to reconcile, you have a bunch of folk that, lets face it, we all know are dishonest and self serving, slagging each other off in an effort to prove there's a meaningful distinction between them. It's a kind of pantomime, except that half the audience are shouting, he's behind you! the other half are yelling, get him! All politicians are dishonest, although not all of 'em are completely without any integrity but that dubious honour is ubiquitous amongst the ascendancy of their number. What makes politics and politicians so intrinsically perfidious? That's a tricky one but I think I have a clue, it's because of their collective identity and the need to distinguish that identity from competing ones. You can witness this in action, when politicians and those members of the public who express a partisan preference, take sides on issues. They always tow the party line, well almost always, there's a degree of fluctuation but their adherence is related to the fervency with they align themselves. Witnessing what seems for some, to be the magic that can turn black into white, night into day, failure into success, can be quite spectacular but raises disturbing questions about the nature of the human condition. I'm just wondering, if there is any way out of this insanity, because as the divisions between the political factions have become less and less profound, the intransigence with which the faithful deny reality has become more and more rigorous.

I'm pondering this subject, not just because of the election looming here but I read a post on a blog recently, where the author saw fit to offer up an apologia for living in a particular location with a prevalent political affiliation. What? I mean what? yeah I suppose that might be understandable if you were living in a town where they shoot grandma for fun but it seems a mite queer, not to say presumptuous, to do that over the largely inconsequential standard political divisions. It kinda implies that he holds the notion, that anyone who votes a certain way is evil. Yeah I'm sure that's true for some of 'em but the rest, they're just ordinary people, like you, me even him. So how do people get like that, is that what he really thinks or does the apologetic tone suggest he said it just to cosset his readers' prejudices? Now just imagine what might happen if I called him out, pointed out the not inconspicuous fact, that this attitude was completely barmy, do you suppose he would make the assumption I was acting through political impetus?  I think there's a good chance there would be, do you see how that works to instil division where previously none existed? What I think that demonstrates is the exponential nature, of the expansion of needless divisiveness, it just needs one teeny particle of contention for affiliations to coalesce around, then it grows like a snowball, pretty soon you've got an avalanche thundering down the mountain.

I said all politicians are dishonest, that may not be true because I have spied the occasional member (very occasional) of that fraternity make a stand in the face of the broader consensus. The broader consensus isn't always the product of cabalistic intercession into democratic process, it's just that we're in a place in history where that has become a dominant factor. No that doesn't mean there's a conspiracy, it just that means policy is generally not formulated in the democratic forums that were intended for that purpose. Instead it's agreed through Institutions like the G7/8, The EU, Nato even the UN and other supernational institutions, then implemented through treaty or a lesser commitment. The point is, that these arrangements circumvent democratic process, or at least they do when such decisions are expedited by democratic institutions with no meaningful discussion. That case would the prevalent condition in this country although it's not always true for every nation, the more powerful ones get to form or modify the agendas imposed though these supernational processes and generally ignore any decisions they find inconvenient. What's interesting about the supernational processes is that the tribalism of domestic political division has become reflected in analogous divisions throughout the supernational forum. This, unfortunately, is where things start to get dangerous, indeed in one particular instance, fostering needless division has become very, very dangerous. Not only has this placed us in very real peril, it has destroyed a valuable accord between two erstwhile foes, rewinding the clock a couple of decades.

If that particular snowball were to become an avalanche, we would all be in very serious trouble, heading for the new stone age I would imagine. This would be one of the reasons, I'm not at all keen on people stoking trivial and meaningless division with inflammatory or pejorative rhetoric, like the guy going on about those terrible people in the place he lived, who voted a certain way. In certain contexts the awareness has arisen that divisiveness has a negative impact, it's even become antisocial to express divisive ideas pertaining to those contexts. Good, but does the concept that meaningless division is wrong have to remain discreet to these contexts? Very few people seem to be able to make the leap of generalising that principle. That's nothing new, most of us can't grasp the universality of concepts like mutual respect, rights/liberties and equitable treatment either, so what's the surprise? Quite a while ago, I wrote a not particularly good short story that tackled this subject, so this issue must've been playing on my mind for some while, I wonder how many other people ponder the issue?