W.B. as couch potato: Marvel's Daredevil

Over the closing credits of the television program Marvel’s Daredevil is a “thank you” to Brian Michael Bendis, Gene Colan, Klaus Janson, Alex Maleez, David Mazzucchelli, Roger McKenzie, Frank Miller, John Romita Jr., John Romita Sr., and Joe Orlando.

And appropriately so: The series oozes with the imagery those creators pressed into the classic comic book stories that pushed the envelope of what comic books stories could be.

I needed to pause after watching three episodes of the 13-episode first season (available since April via Netflix) because of the over-the-top violence of these TV stories, which were faithful to the original. When I moved on, I had to watch alone because my dear companion does not have the tolerance to watch such scenes of simulated butchery and inhumanity, no matter how compelling the overriding story is.

After watching that third episode, “Rabbit in a Snowstorm,” I wrote:

A story that begins with a man’s head being crushed with a bowling ball concludes with the murderer killing himself by jamming his eye into a sharp spike. The fist fights are graphic and prolonged and quiet save for the grunts, shouts and screams of pain and the sound of bones cracking and snapping. This is entertainment?

The mystery and intrigue are extremely well done, but the violence is over-the-top graphic. Perhaps this is good – too often comic book violence is sanitized to the point where it looks like inconsequential fun – but one has to ask whether the well-told story is worth enduring the extreme realism of the violence.

When what passes for entertainment crushes the soul, is it entertainment anymore or some variation of pornography? I need to decide whether the story is worth enduring the ugly parts.

This is certainly not the kind of story I want to create – I need to consider whether it’s the kind of story I want to finish watching.

The awful violence of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (*the Swedish version) served the story of that outstanding film. To this point the awful violence of Daredevil seems gratuitous to me.

On the other hand, the show’s creators dare to be out on the edge – they know this won’t appeal to everyone but choose to tell this story this way.

And so I soldiered on through episodes 4-13, slowly because I had to find times both when my beloved wasn’t around and when I was in the mood for watching a violent TV program. In the end, I’m glad I stuck around to watch.

The cast must be applauded. Charlie Cox makes Matt Murdock/DD the role of a lifetime, conveying incredible emotion with his eyes hidden almost all of the time. Deborah Ann Woll as Karen Page and Elden Henson as Foggy Nelson bring to life characters who are astonishingly faithful to those we followed on four-color pages all those years ago.

(Wally Conger says this may be the most faithful interpretation of a comic book series onto the screen ever. I don’t disagree.)

When I first saw the words “And Vincent D’Onofrio as Wilson Fisk,” I knew the show had the potential for magic. Few actors portray disturbing characters with the depth and humanity that D’Onofrio brings to the screen, and my highest expectations were met. D’Onofrio’s Kingpin (Wilson Fisk) is true to the vision that those 10 comic book creators crafted through the years.

Although his name is on the opening credits from the start, D’Onofrio does not actually appear until that third episode, in a stroke of creative genius. And even then he only appears in the final sequence, a scene that only hints at what is ahead. My desire to watch Fisk unfold may be the reason I decided to proceed to the fourth episode and beyond.

Daredevil – especially as reinterpreted starting with the Frank Miller issues and most especially starting around issue #170, when Miller reinvented the Spider-Man villain as Daredevil’s nemesis – inhabits the darkest corners of the Marvel Comics universe, and so this is a dark, dark show. No one gets through this fight unaltered or unhurt. It’s often painful to watch, but ultimately it is a spectacular triumph, one of the best seasons of television I’ve ever seen.

'War's never a winning thing, Charlie'

In Ray Bradbury's immortal tribute to the Summer of 1928, Dandelion Wine, the boys encounter Col. Freeleigh, a veteran of the Civil War who, when asked which side he fought for, the winning or losing side, claims he doesn't remember.

"No," said the old man, deep under. "I don't remember anyone winning anywhere any time. War's never a winning thing, Charlie. You just lose all the time, and the one who loses last asks for terms. All I remember is a lot of losing and sadness and nothing good but the end of it. The end of it, Charles, that was a winning all to itself, having nothing to do with guns. But I don't suppose that's the kind of victory you boys mean for me to talk on."

Who is this guy anyway?

The completion of a project gives a guy a chance to stop and take a deep breath. As the world awaits Tuesday's release of the Myke Phoenix compilation Year of the Dinosaur, I find myself taking a deep breath and contemplating what the bibliography so far means.

Since I was 10 years old and found a copy of Amazing Spider-Man #4 at the old IGA in Milton, Vermont, I have enjoyed superhero stories. Well, even before that - I do remember enjoying a Legion of Super-Heroes story or two before the summer of 1963 - but Spider-Man and Marvel Comics made me a fan. A few years later I heard about a series of 1930s pulp hero reprints of a superhero named Doc Savage, and Cold Death started me on the path that would lead me to Myke Phoenix.

My Myke stories are designed to take you about an hour to read, approximating the comic book experience or perhaps a TV show. Year of the Dinosaur collects the 12 stories I've written in the past year or so, with a bonus short called "A Myke Phoenix Christmas."

I first conceived of Myke when I was a late-30s radio news reporter. I finished four stories and started several others, but the lack of a practical outlet to share them with the world led me to set the project aside. The indie publishing movement provided that outlet, and those earlier stories have been available since 2008 as The Adventures of Myke Phoenix.

But of course, my world view goes beyond the confines of the superhero adventure. (That is not to say we couldn't have a lengthy conversation about the superiority of Marvel's The Avengers to any Superman or Batman movie ever made.)

I've always thought war was stupid, and I've come to think of states as counterproductive to individual human endeavor. That led me to write The Imaginary Revolution, the memoirs of the man who led the planet Sirius IV to independence from Earth and beyond to a commonwealth that had no state government apparatus. As discussion raged over what form of government to establish for the newly free world, protagonist, Ray Kaliber, asked the simple question, "Why do we need a government at all?"

The story is a sequel of sorts, or at least set in the same universe, as The Imaginary Bomb, a space opera perhaps best known as a series of podcasts I voiced in 2006. The universe is based sometime in the future from now, when humanity has discovered how to tap the power of the imagination as an energy source. As too often happens with new technology, someone has considered the implications of weaponized imaginary power, and my interplanetary truck drivers get tangled up in stopping the imaginary bomb before it hurts someone.

I also have a collection of short stories, Wildflower Man, anchored by the story that has gained quite a following in its podcast form, if I may say so. I haven't transferred that book to digital form because, to be honest, I wish it was a little longer. I keep meaning to write a few more short stories to pad it out. One of these days.

I've also collected some of my essays on a couple of themes. Refuse to be Afraid is about empowering yourself to battle through the fears and impulses that keep us from the greatness we could accomplish: Refuse to be afraid. Free yourself. Dream.

And A Scream of Consciousness discusses ways to fight past the distractions of everyday life and concentrate on the needs of this moment, right now. These two books, and the "What I Believe" section of The Imaginary Revolution, probably sum up what I might pretentiously describe as my life philosophy.

So there are seven books, five fiction and two non-fiction, that hopefully will entertain you, perhaps could change your life, and at least will tell you a bit about who this guy is anyway.

If you're reading this on Friday, Nov. 14, 2014, the day I wrote this, you have until tonight to get a free download of Firespiders Unleashed, the pivotal Myke Phoenix story that opens the trilogy that also includes March of the Alien Dead, Claws of Death and Talons of Justice. Yes, it's a four-part trilogy. I blame Hollywood. Or perhaps Douglas Adams.

Starting Saturday I'll be devoting most of my shameless self-promotion to the collection that climaxes with those four stories, Year of the Dinosaur. But I really do like the way the saga ends, so if you want to cut to the chase and save a couple of bucks, buying the individual stories is a pretty good investment.

In any case, those are the motivations that drove the bookshelf of my stuff to date. So now you know.

I always thought war was stupid

Happenings around the world always remind me of the opening lines of my little  anti-war anarchist novel The Imaginary Revolution, which I was merrily writing along a couple of summers ago about now.

This was the first fragment I wrote on the ImagRev blog, and it never got dislodged as the book's introduction:

I always thought war was stupid.

I mean, think about it. You and your adversary disagree about something, and the solution is to send your citizens to fight each other to the death?

You’re never going to succeed in killing each and every one of your adversary’s citizens, so even if you win, there are thousands of people who still believe in whatever it was you were trying to obliterate.

You can’t kill an idea.

The book was told in the first person by the main character, Ray Kaliber, but on this point (among a few others) the author and his character are in complete agreement.

Every day we choose to create or to destroy

It’s the morning after an audience of more than 150 people came to the great mansion now called Ellison Bay Manor to enjoy a concert of chamber music, savor hors d’oerves and wine, and tour the building and grounds. I played a very small role in that event, handing out programs and pouring wine.

And this morning, I consider all of the human effort that must come together to form a single event such as this.

First a huge contingent of artisans and craftsmen must come together to build a house large enough to hold several hundred people – no, before that they must cut the trees, mine the iron, quarry the stone, carve a space out of the wilderness to set the home, then assemble the home.

Three talented men need to compose patterns of music that are pleasing to the ear. Five musicians must study and practice, each of them for years, to gain the ability to interpret a fragment of those patterns and blend their efforts to recreate the sounds that the composers heard. Food must be grown – plants and animals – shipped from miles away, processed and prepared in a way that is pleasing to the palate.

Transportation must be arranged to bring people to the door, because this was built as a home and the driveway has limited parking space – wait! A team must build each of the machines that transport us all, each machine itself comprised of many parts, each of which had to be crafted.

Thousands of people working in consort, and each contributing the talent and effort of their years of experience, to do their bit to bring a bit of beauty to the world, a bit of happiness to other people’s lives.

You might say it’s a miracle to bring that many people together to accomplish all this, or you might say it’s simply (simply! This great complicated organism cannot be described simply) the nature of humanity to work together on tasks that a single one of us could not achieve on their own, but to which each of us can contribute a unique, essential piece.

I consider the years and years that each and every one of the hundreds of people in that house brought to their contribution – and how that scene is repeated daily in thousands of place, thousands of events, individuals and teams creating beauty and utility and service for thousands of others, building something special with every breath –

And then I emerge from that place and hear the talk of poison gases and measured conversations about how many bombs are appropriate to be dropped in retaliation for the retaliation against the retaliation that began with the retaliation, and I am shocked and confused that this near-miraculous everyday creation of beauty and service is interrupted so often by similar forces marshalled to tear it all back to pieces.

Why? What leads men and women capable of building great works to tear down instead? Minds and hands work together to create unspeakable beauty. Similar minds and hands work together to wreak unspeakable horror.

We choose each day to work to create or to destroy, to encourage or to disparage. We must find a way to promote and protect the creators and to keep the destroyers in check.

Cross posted to Door County Advocate

Worth repeating over and over again

Let the first act of every morning be to make the following resolve for the day:

* I shall not fear anyone on Earth.

* I shall fear only God.

* I shall not bear ill will toward anyone.

* I shall not submit to injustice from anyone.

* I shall conquer untruth by truth.

* And in resisting untruth, I shall put up with all suffering.

Mahatma Gandhi

‘We’ can’t solve this, but we can

When something horrible happens, a clamor arises that "we" should do something to prevent something like it from ever happening again. And so it is with the unspeakable events in Newtown, Conn., where a disturbed individual killed 27 people including 20 young children and then himself.

The horror has been compounded by the decision by too many people to attempt making political points at a time like this. A great many have argued that “we” need new laws restricting non-police access to the kind of weapon used in this crime; a great many others have argued that “we” need new laws to allow schools and teachers to carry weapons to defend themselves.

This is what people have come to mean by “we should do something”: By “we,” they mean the government. By “something,” they mean new laws.

I would like to make the perhaps controversial suggestion that now – with emotions running high – is not the time to be passing new laws. The government has more than enough power, thank you, and “we” have more than enough laws to prevent the law-abiding citizen from committing an atrocity.

Besides, we don’t need new laws. And notice I took the quotations marks off, because now I’m talking about what we can do, as opposed to asking the government to do it for us.

What we need to do is pay attention to some old laws. I mean laws like “Love your neighbor as yourself.” The person whose birth we celebrate at this time of year proclaimed that the most important law of all, and yet we tend to disobey that law on a daily basis.

I mean laws like “Treat other people the way you would like to be treated.” This so-called Golden Rule exists in just about every world religion, I’m told, and yet each day we do unpleasant and even unspeakable things to others that would hurt badly if someone did them to us. Certainly, none of us wishes violence to be done to ourselves or our families, so a decision not to commit aggression against others would be a good first step.

Evil exists among us; it reared its ugly head again Friday in Connecticut. I’m not so naive as to believe that if we simply loved one another, evil would go away.

But we each carry the power to love and to hate within us, the power to reason and the power of violence. I dare say a new law or regulation passed by government will not defeat evil, but an old law observed by each of us could – if we make the decision to interact with love.

The Imaginary Revolution is here.

On Dec. 15, 1791, the folks who were in the process of establishing a new government ratified a list of prohibitions intended to prevent that government from violating the innate rights of free individuals. It was a bold experiment.

Today, Dec. 15, 2012, in honor of that bold experiment, I formally introduce The Imaginary Revolution, a novel about individuals and governments and violence and nonviolence.

I’m not so vain as to think this little novel about an Earth colony that throws off its shackles is as important a contribution as that list of 10 statements. No, this is just my contribution to the idea that power flows from the individual to the state, not the reverse.

It is my contention that a loving individual committed to nonviolence wields more power to change a world for the good than any state, any use of force, any expression of hatred or revenge.

All 10 tenets of the Bill of Rights are under attack in 2012. All 10 are routinely ignored by the state, and in fact most efforts by the state to restrain the individual are met with cheers and applause. Freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, the right to be secure in one’s person, houses, papers and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures – read the list and you will be able to think of circumstances where the state violates these prohibitions every day.

I got words

People are angry. And violence is sweeping the globe.

They couch it in noble language: Arab Spring. Defending the middle class. Protecting our rights. Even defending liberty.

But it’s still plain old senseless violence: Beating someone about the head, or killing them, in the belief that will convince others your cause is right and just.

All too often all that is accomplished is continuing the ancient cycle of violence – an eye for an eye, or replacing one violent tyrannical regime with a new violent tyrannical regime. The success of such revolutions is imaginary and temporary.

Through the years some have tried to show a better way – men like Henry David Thoreau, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., Jesus of Nazareth – changing the world through civil disobedience, nonviolence, noncooperation. A way that does not meet violence with hatred and more violence.

The novel The Imaginary Revolution, which officially debuts tomorrow, is set on a planet light years away. But I mean to say something about the here and now.

We're all gonna die

I repeat myself – but these thoughts are still relevant, still part of my book Refuse to be Afraid, and relevant to the new book, The Imaginary Revolution. And so I repeat myself:

My eye was caught at the antique store by a thick, well-worn book titled "Modern Medical Counselor." By its condition it was clear the book was anything but modern, and the price ($2) was right, so, figuring it would be an interesting excursion into the past, I brought it home.

What actually caught my attention was the section that I casually opened to, even before I brought the book home: "Survival in Atomic Bombing." The copyright date of the book is 1951, so browsing through this book will be a traipse through an era where communism and nuclear death were our greatest fears.

With the knowledge of what was to happen in the next 60 years, we know the fears were largely unfounded. Hiroshima and Nagasaki are still the only cities ever destroyed by atomic bombs. Although the great communist bogeyman reared his ugly head many times over the years, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics fell apart under the weight of its totalitarian follies and China has decided to try burying us the good old American way, by establishing government-subsidized monopolies.

In other words, the fear that was used as an excuse to impose on our liberties never came true. Communism and nuclear catastrophe did not destroy us.

Today, the fear is of small groups of terrorists (and "rogue nations") with nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction. The fear is that an influenza virus that kills birds will find a way to migrate into humans and cause a pandemic. The fear is that standing too close to a person smoking a cigarette will give you cancer. We can let those fears control us, we can let others use those fears to justify locking us into cages, or we can refuse to be afraid and live our lives as free men and women.

Here is the fear that lurks behind all of these fears: We are afraid to die. We are especially afraid to die before we experience a ripe old age.

Here is the truth: We all will die, some of us "before our time." The real choice we all have: We can live and die as slaves, or we can live and die as free men and women.

Most of our lives we exist in the gray area between freedom and slavery, convincing ourselves that we are making our choices freely: When we hand the chains to our government and our bosses and our creditors, we rationalize that we are making a free decision to enslave ourselves. And it usually is a freely made choice — in the beginning.

Like Jacob Marley's ghost, we accumulate shackles as we progress through life, usually out of fear — fear of poverty, fear of going hungry, fear of not having a reliable car. And the biggest fear of them all is the fear of death.

Accepting that you will die is the beginning of freedom. The title of the song "Live Like You're Dying"  is its message.

These thoughts, especially as I relate them in a political context, could be misconstrued as advocating violent resistance against the slave masters. Nothing could be further from the truth. The revolution I advocate is an internal one:

Refuse to be afraid. Resist the impulse to yield to the fear and let someone strip your liberty in the name of security and protection. Live like you were dying — because you are dying, someday, so better to live free than in chains.