Day 220: Wires

‘Ello. I’ve been writing and reading and watching and thinking a lot today, about Steven Crowder and Ben Shapiro and Dave Rubin, about their lord and saviour Dr Professor Sir Daddy Jordan Peterson… about the alt-right, about the difficulties in holding together a worthwhile yet highly complex system (our fairly liberal democracy) versus the ease in which said highly complex system can be undermined by those seeking simply to destroy (harder to keep many spinning plates in the air and keep the plate spinners focused and fed and happy than to run around tickling under armpits). I’ve been thinking about the kinds of attention we bring to things, and how they, the kinds of attention, actually manifest different realities - or rather manifest inherently different aspects of perhaps the same reality. I’ve been thinking about logic, and the limits of logic, and how often we use logic to justify gut feelings - on abortion, trans rights, hot button topics - that we often come to initially from a level far below logic. How logic can at times be a perspicacious tool to cut through our prejudices, and at others simply a way of reinforcing prejudice, depending how we wield the tool, whether we turn it on ourselves, or use it only to dismantle our adversaries, and keep a strange blind spot for our own assumptions, à la Steven Crowder.

So I’ve been thinking about a lot, but it’s all rough and nebulous at the moment, so I won’t talk about it anymore today.

I’ve also been introducing Mike to The Wire, which show is, quelle surprise, one of my favourites of all time. Watching early episodes back I’m again thrilled by the complex clockwork world David Simon et al have created, a world of hierarchies and structures, of police departments and judicial systems and newspapers and political networks, and of the parallel and often times more brutal, often more direct, equally as valid organisations of the streets.

But also how this is not a cold, mechanical world Simon has constructed. Talking of types of attention and ways of manifesting reality - there’s an essential humanity to The Wire, an inherent compassion, used to populate these opposing structures with real people, with characters who, from the most minor to the most major, from the lowliest corner boy “sucking on a 40, yelling ‘5-0’” to the highest police commissioner, are all imbued with genuine life. Simon sees people. He has a keen eye for order and arrangement and framework, and it is often this that gives the show its dizzying verisimilitude, but underpinning this ordering of discrete information is a deep and profound well of empathy, of understanding, of love. The Wire, as Simon has often stated, is a Greek tragedy of the modern American city - and it can only be such because he cares so much.

If you have not yet watched it I would urge you to do so. Easy-going? No. But over the course of its five seasons I unquestionably became a deeper, wiser, better person. Get to it.

……

OK. Music. Let’s go with… Love, by Lana Del Ray. I’ve never sought Lana Del Ray out. This came on on Spotify playlist, and I found myself digging it. Her voice is really sensuous, no? Voluptuous, even. It’s like drowning in a tempestuous ocean of 80% cocoa fairtrade dark chocolate. Silken and sunless and purring with an edge of danger. I likes.