Born on State Highway 1

I basically assume that I am under constant surveillance.

I don’t mean that any agency or entity has any particular interest in watching me – my narcissism doesn’t quite reach that degree. Almost. Not quite. I mean that I assume by default that someone could possibly be viewing me or listening to me or recording me at any given time.

If I’m walking down the street, there could be security cameras or satellite photos including me in their records. There could be a Google Streetview van cruising past. When I get money out of an ATM, there’s a little camera at the top – it could be recording. It’s entirely possible that cellphone microphones could include functionality for remote activation. So could webcams. I am aware of the possibility of hidden cameras behind mirrors in elevators, always suffixing any private vanities with a ridiculous flourish of my most silly of silly faces – just in case.

The lengths some people will go to in hiding their World of Warcraft addictions.

Plausible deniability, you see? Concerned about a grey hair springing from my eyebrow? Ahahaha, no, not me. I finished off with an impression of an orangutan – remember? I knew you were watching all along.

With the online demand for all kinds of weird shit, I’m conscious of at least the possibility that any given public toilet comes fully equipped with a hidden camera catering to the growing needs of a copraphiliac black market. A fire-extinguishing sprinkler would be such a perfect disguise for a hidden camera that a sprinkler-shaped camera is almost certainly available for purchase online these days.

I take it for granted that every website I visit, every image I view, every email I send or receive, could be recorded somewhere. When I receive SMS messages to my phone from certain people using certain keywords (buzzwords?) inviting me to certain meetings or protests, I see some colour of alert register on some server somewhere in my imagination. When I get a text from my sister about her wedding a few minutes later and I reply, I wonder idly if she is now possibly implicated in my own possible threat-potential credit rating.

These things, they’re always possibilities. In any given space, physical or virtual, there could be someone watching or listening. That is simply a fact, an aspect of the means provided by modern technology. Various things – profit, security, perversion, policing, even curiosity – provide motive for the means that are now commonplace. There is every possibility that I am being watched as I type this and you are being watched as you read it. Or not! Who knows?

My other car is a hilarious T-shirt slogan.

But the thing is, I don’t care.

Of course, I do care. When I think about it hard and think about how things could be otherwise, sure. But for the most part, I find it hard to bring myself to care. I’ve internalised the panopticon. Maybe we’re always being watched. What can you do? It’s like pesticides. They’re not good for you, but there’s no escaping them. Apparently I’m not alone in my lack of shit-giving.

Maybe this is what believing in an omniscient personal God feels like. I vaguely recall that aspect of it – muttering to God about how he must find it real hilarious that I stubbed my toe. You must get acclimatised to that feeling of being watched. For a while you’re on your best behaviour, but eventually you’re taking your pants off in a TVNZ elevator just to see if there are any repercussions.

For the record, there are not.

Dan Shapiro, author of Mom’s Marijuana (excerpt), provides a tense anecdote from the frontline of psychology.

Two years ago, I had the opportunity to interview Danny Yount. You probably don’t know who Danny Yount is. Do you. You idiot. Anyway, Danny Yount is a graphic designer who has fallen into the rather interesting niche of totally b’dass title graphics guy.

What’s he done? Oh, just the titles for Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, the closing titles for Iron Man, the excellent titles for the sadly underrated series Invasion (least known of the victims of Hurricane Katrina), a sweet promo for The Sopranos, concept work for the Deadwood intro, the end credits to Tropic Thunder, among other things. Oh, and just a little thing called the title sequence to Six Feet Under.

By the way, it’s because of the utterly awesome Iron Man 2 trailer that I thought of this. Here it is. Man oh man oh man.

Here is the interview, should you be interested. Unfortunately, the magazine for whom I did the interview didn’t end up fitting it in, but the guy’s body of work is too awesome for any interview with him to go unread.

How did you end up being a title-design specialist? Is it something you aimed at, or more something you just started to realise you had a knack for?

Both. I’ve aspired to do titles since I saw Seven by Kyle Cooper and some early work by Tomato. I love the process of design and animation so I could not think of anything better to do than this. Title design is a great canvas – there are so many things that can be done and so much to learn about film. And the duration of the project is not as a long as doing a movie, so it never gets old.

Yep. Self-taught. But I worked my ass off to make up for a lack of formal training. And I found that ambition and talent and a lack of knowledge will make you crazy enough to do the stupidest things to make it in the business. I read everything possible (many of it unnecessary), got high-interest loans for computer equipment to learn on, and spent many late nights making bad design until I learned something. I made up my mind a long time ago that I was not going to do something I hate for a living and was willing to anything to make it work. At one point I had two jobs – a day job in a print shop and a night job as an illustrator – until I got my first “real” design job which paid enough to drop the others.

How much do you know about a TV show, film or video game when you’re creating its introduction? How much direction does a client give you? For example, had you seen the pilot for Six Feet Under?

I did see the pilot, yes. And that is usually how it goes – It’s “hey, we have this thing we want to show you but we don’t have any titles for it.” In Hollywood the director and/or editor will show the film to you or you will attend a special screening. Sometimes you only have a script to read. Sometimes the director has an idea of what will be portrayed, but most times they are open to whatever works for the film. You have to set the tone for the story and you have to get into people’s emotions. That’s what good moving image design is all about – same as directing a film.

Do you usually get to pick your own music, or is that often part of the brief?

I always make music suggestions in tests that I do, but in the end they either have it scored by the composer or have something selected that is feasible or through some contractual obligation – like in the case of Iron Man where Black Sabbath was used. They almost picked the track I was playing, but the contract overrode that suggestion. For Six Feet Under, I was handed the music by Thomas Newman and when I heard the plucking of the strings in the piece, it sounded like someone working, thinking. So I based the idea on that.

Not cheap at all – definitely Tron and ’80s arcade games like Tempest and Battle Zone. I spent a lot of hours and quarters on those back in the day. Movies like War Games and Bladerunner, Escape From New York, RoboCop, T2, Close Encounters, The Matrix, etc. I’m a huge Sci-Fi fan. But I learned that taking my wife to see Starship Troopers was not a good idea for a date. Also loved old car chases – Gone in 60 Seconds, The Car, Duel, Vanishing Point, Eat My Dust. I was a latch-key kid and so my mom had HBO (which had just came out) installed at our home so my little brother and I could have something to watch while she was at work as a waitress. I didn’t think she realized though that I was watching things like the Exorcist. Back then that was pretty hard stuff. Also underground comics as a kid like Heavy Metal and R. Crumb’s work, the Freak Brothers, Fritz the Cat, etc. I was also in a lot of rock bands playing guitar. As for TV, I grew up during what I consider to be the golden years – late ’60s – early ’80s. Get Smart, Beverly Hillbillies, Brady Bunch,  Batman, Hulk, Six Million Dollar Man, Charlie’s Angel’s, Dukes of Hazzard, MTV (the first few years), etc. It was a good time for TV. I think now it’s a dead platform. YouTube is way better.

Title sequences often become an important part in viewers’ experiences of film and TV, especially if they’re, say, watching a season of Deadwood on DVD. Are there any other fields of expertise you think go perhaps under-recognised by the viewing public?

Of course – so many of them, especially in the film business. But that is just because as a society we put such a high premium on certain classes of people – celebrities, directors, athletes, performers. But that is not what motivates me personally. I really don’t care if the person in the video store who is renting Six Feet Under or Ironman before me in line knows what I did. In fact, I would rather just avoid the conversation because people treat you differently. The attention is nice but often perception is distorted. When I spoke at Semi-Permanent in Auckland the introduction was “I heard he was a design rockstar but when I met him he was just this ordinary dude – please welcome…” That was kind of a bummer for me – that there was an expectation that I could not fulfill. I would be miserable if those expectations were cast on me in everything on a daily basis. So I do not care if the public knows or not. But among my peers I think it is important. It is a career after all and you have to cultivate the perception of the reality of what you do and what your role is in the profession.

Do you work in any other artistic media? Painting or sculpting or playing music or anything like that?

I’m a musician – I play a lot of rock guitar. I also take a lot of photography and fantasize about making a book of them someday.

Because I get weird compulsions sometimes, I have gone through Ray Comfort’s “Special Introduction” to the free copies of Darwin’s “Origin of Species” that are being distributed for free by evangelical Christian groups on university campuses around the world.

The DNA Code
Page 9

Darwin’s theory of evolution is not without its difficulties. Even 150 years later, scientists have yet to supply adequate answers to what critics claim – and Darwin himself admitted – are weaknesses of the theory. Following are some areas of continued controversy.

What follows is mostly about DNA – which hadn’t been discovered in Darwin’s day, so it can’t be something that “Darwin himself admitted” is a weakness of his theory. In fact, DNA’s discovery is an example of biology having moved on and greatly increased its knowledge since Darwin’s first investigations into the theory of evolution.

The DNA that defines every aspect of our bodies is incredibly complex, but in simplest terms it can be described as a book composed of only four letters. To liken DNA to a book, however, is really a gross understatement. The amount of information in the 3 billion base pairs in the DNA in every human cell is equivalent to… [Comfort goes on for a while with some illustrations of how complex DNA is - and for some reason includes how long all of the DNA in your body would stretch to if laid out in a line.]

Comfort has a kind of obsession with referring to the patterns of chemicals in DNA as “information” or as a “code” or a “blueprint”. In taking that simple linguistic step, he presupposes an encoder or a designer. That’s not to say that you can’t look at DNA as “information” if you wish, but that approach is not necessary. The chemicals in DNA are in a pattern such that they interact with other chemicals to give rise to particular arrangements of matter we call living things.

Aside from the immense volume of information that your DNA contains, consider the likelihood of all the intricate, interrelated parts of this “book” coming together by sheer chance.

Comfort uses this term “sheer chance” several times. Evolution is not sheer chance. It is causal. Comfort also implies that the theory of evolution involves modern DNA forming spontaneously, rather than being the product of an extraordinarily long string of events. If I was inclined to write like Comfort does, I might say that if you counted all the iterations of self-replicating patterns of DNA throughout history and laid a dollar coin down for each time it happened, you’d have a pile of coins larger than the whole Milky Way galaxy. Or some shit.

Critics claim that would be comparable to believing that this publication happened by accident. Imagine that there was nothing. Then paper appeared, and ink fell from nowhere onto the flat sheets and shaped itself into perfectly formed letters of the English alphabet.

To imply that “there was nothing” and “then paper appeared and ink fell from nowhere” is analogous to the theory of evolution is either profoundly ignorant or incredibly deceitful. Comfort is actually approaching the origins of life here, which is a separate issue from the theory of evolution. But no theory of abiogenesis suggests that life appeared from nothing. There was plenty of stuff around before life arose in the universe.

It’s also obviously absurd to use “perfectly formed letters of the English alphabet” as analogies for the chemicals that are involved in processes of life.

Initially, the letters said something like this: “fgsn&k cn1clxc dumbh cckvkduh vstupidm ncncx.” As you can see, random letters rarely produce words that make sense.

Hilariously, Comfort has included the words “dumb”, “duh” and “stupid” amongst his random letters. Not sure what he means by doing so.

But in time, mindless chance formed them into the order of meaningful words with spaces between them. Periods, commas, capitals, italics, quotes, paragraphs, margins, etc., also came into being in the correct placements.

Again Comfort refers to “mindless chance”. No one is claiming that “mindless chance” or “sheer chance” formed the patterns of life. This is a lie, or an expression of Comfort’s ignorance.

The sentences then grouped themselves to relate to each other, giving them coherence. Page numbers fell into sequence at the rice places, and headers, footers, and footnotes appeared from nowhere on the pages, matching the portions of text to which they related. The paper trimmed itself and bound itself into a book.

Comfort’s parody of evolution sort of gets more unhinged as it goes on. Who knows what “the paper trimmed itself” is supposed to represent in evolutionary theory. But here’s a thought – if the jumble of letters on a page replicated themselves over and over, billions of times, and if there was occasionally variation from one iteration to the next, and if there were forces of competition or environment that killed off patterns that were increasingly different from Ray Comfort’s book, while not killing off patterns that were increasingly similar to Ray Comfort’s book, you would in fact end up with Ray Comfort’s book.

That’s the only way this absurd analogy could be brought around to relevance.

The ink for the cover fell from different directions, being careful not to incorrectly mingle with the other colours, forming itself into the graphic of Charles Darwin and title. There are multiple copies of this publication, so it then developed the ability to replicate itself thousands of times.

And here he just kind of goes completely off the rails. The picture he paints is of the complexity of modern DNA forming exactly as it is today, with no preceding causes or situation, out of nothing, “by sheer chance”. This is not even remotely analogous to the theory of evolution, and it is either deceitful or ignorant for Comfort to suggest it is. In fact, if you replace “by sheer chance” with “by God doing it”, his absurd parody probably more closely approximates his own beliefs.

Another Thought
Page 31

If you find it hard to believe that there was an Intelligent Designer, give this some thought. Man, with all his genius, can’t make a rock, a leaf, a flower, a living singing bird, a croaking frog, or even a grain of dead sand from nothing. We can recreate, but we can’t create anything material from nothing, living or dead. Not a thing.

[...]

But we can’t make even one blade of grass from nothing, let alone giving it the ability to reproduce after its own kind, as regular grass does. We have no idea where to begin when it comes to creating. If that’s true, how intellectually dishonest is it to say that this entire incredible creation in which we live, came into existence with no Intelligent Designer?

Mankind’s ability to create “something from nothing” is not a necessary condition of life arising via natural processes. It’s rather bizarre that Comfort would suggest that it is.

Darwin’s “Unsavory” Views
Page 31

Comfort writes at length about Darwin’s racist attitudes, including his assertion that “civilised men” are “more evolved” than “savages”.

An atheist wrote and said, “What do Darwin’s personal views on race have to do with our modern understanding of evolution? Nothing. Absolutely nothing, Ray. Even a fool knows this.” Indeed, Darwin’s racism has nothing to do with the credibility of the theory of evolution. It should stand or fall on its own merits. However, the theory itself teaches that all men are not created equal.

The theory of evolution does not “teach that all men are not created equal” in terms of any relevant value judgement. Nothing about the theory of evolution inherently says that one man is “better” than another, and neither does it say that man is “better” than a squid. There are no value judgements in the theory of evolution.

Darwinian evolution doesn’t say that human beings are made in the image of God and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights. It rather states that they are mere animals, some closer to apes than others, and it therefore opens wide the door to racism.

Darwinian evolution does not say that humans are “mere” animals. It says that humans are animals. There is nothing “mere” about it. That value judgement is Comfort’s own. And the theory of evolution no more inherently opens wide the door to racism than a belief in a Creator opens wide the door to believing such a Creator plays favourites with the races he has created.

His Disdain of Women
Page 34

As with racism, so with sexism – Comfort accuses Darwin of sexism, presumably seeing sexism as a natural consequence of believing the theory of evolution. And as with racism, nothing about the theory of evolution inherently places a value judgement on males and females, with one being “better” than the other.

His Famous Student
Page 35

Perhaps it was inevitable. By “Darwin’s famous student”, Comfort is of course referring to Hitler. Curiously, he hits the nail on the head when he writes:

Darwin’s observation of the survival of the fittest in nature was interpreted to mean only the fittest should survive – and Hitler was happy to take Nature’s place in ensuring that it was done.

In other words, Hitler misapplied Darwin’s theory by deriving an ought from an is – a value from a fact. Darwin observed that, in nature, “the fittest survive” – which is to say, that which is well suited to survival tends to survive well. Hitler misapplied the observation, turning it into moral imperative. But, having correctly identified this important distinction between Hitler and Darwin, Comfort goes on to identify Darwin’s theory of what is true with a bunch of ideas of what is good.

In promoting the idea that humans were merely animals and accidents of nature, the natural consequence of Darwinism was to overturn the traditional Judeo-Christian values on the sacredness of human life. The legacy of Darwin’s theory can be seen in the rise of eugenics, euthanasia, racism, infanticide and abortion.

Again, Comfort uses the value-laden term “mere” in reference to the theory of evolution’s observation that humans are animals. What is “mere” about being an animal? Presumably, Comfort believes that any attitude towards humans in which humans are not distinguished from animals by possession of a “soul” is an attitude where humans are somehow degraded. But to claim that a naturalist view of human nature says that we are “mere animals” is as meaningless as saying that Comfort’s own view of human nature is that we are “mere souls”.

As for “euthanasia, racism, infanticide and abortion” being the “legacy of Darwin’s theory”, we’re right back to Comfort seeing value judgements where the theory of evolution makes none. The theory of evolution is concerned with how life diversified, not with how life is to be lived.

Darwin and Atheism
Page 39

It’s rare to find an atheist who doesn’t embrace Darwinism with open arms. Many believe that with creation adequately explained by evolution, there is no need for a God…

Yep, fair enough.

…and no moral responsibility.

Wuuuuuuuh?

If there are no absolutes of right and wrong, anything goes as long as it’s within the bounds of civil law, and any sexual exploits are merely natural instincts to further our animal species.

Back to “merely” again.

However, Charles Darwin himself was not an atheist. In On the Origin of Species he refers to creation as the “works of God” and mentions the “Creator” an amazing seven times.

So if I was an atheist, I would see that I have an intellectual dilemma. If I deny that there is a God, I am saying nothing created everything, and that’s a scientific impossibility.

No, if you deny there is a God, you are saying there is no God. You’re not saying anything about the origins of the universe at all, except to say there was no God involved in them.

I may say that I have no beliefs in any gods, but if I say I have no belief that my Toyota had a maker, it means I think that nothing made it (it just happened), which (again) is a scientific impossibility.

It is at this point that I begin to wonder if Ray Comfort is actually genuinely stupid. These dilemmas are something like saying, “If I say I have no belief that this gust of wind is a big invisible giant blowing at me, it means I think that nothing made the gust of wind (it just happened), which is a scientific impossibility.”

So to remain credible, I have to acknowledge that something made everything, but I just don’t know what that “something” was. So I wouldn’t be an atheist if I believed in an initial cause.

“Initial cause” and “God” are two quite distinct notions. An atheist can believe in an initial cause if that makes sense to them, and they’ll still be an atheist so long as that initial cause is not a god.

[...] Keeping in mind that the most intelligent of human beings can’t create even a grain of sand from nothing, do you believe that the “something” that made everything was intelligent? It must have been, in order to make the flowers, the birds, the trees, the human eye, and the sun, the moon and the stars.

This is just weird. His reasoning seems to be that…

a. If one was intelligent enough, one could cause something from nothing. (Great intelligence is sufficient for the ability to cause something from nothing.)
b. In order to cause something from nothing, one must be very intelligent. (Great intelligence is necessary for the ability to cause something from nothing.)
c. Not even the most intelligent human beings are intelligent enough to cause something from nothing.
d. Something had to cause something from nothing.
e. That something must therefore be greatly intelligent.

There is just no reason to swallow the first two premises.

And… that’s it. The last ten pages of the Special Introduction have nothing at all to do with Darwin or his book, but is rather a very poor argument for becoming a Christian, ending with instructions on how to ask God to forgive your sins. There’s a pretty stunning piece of bait-and-switch where he tries to get you all angry about the murder of a little girl, tells you that God’s even angrier than you are, and that he’s so good that he is that angry about every little thing you do.

If you would like to read the full text of the “Special Introduction”, it’s on Scribd here.

I visited Auckland University yesterday, which is not particularly unusual. It is a little like watching an episode of Home & Away after three years of not watching. You don’t recognise most of the faces, though the plot lines and stereotypes seem to stay the same, and then you spot a familiar face like Nick Keesing Alf Stewart and you know you’re in the right place.

Anyway, I met Dave there, and he said, “Oh, check this out. I think it’s a good sign – there are people giving out 150th anniversary editions of Origin of Species.”

I had a look at the book. Nice pretty cover, at the bottom of which it read, “Special introduction by Ray Comfort”.

“Dave,” I said, a bit like a mother who’s found crystal meth in her 6-year-old son’s lunchbox after he’s come home from school. “Who gave you this?”

“Some people were just giving them out.”

Dave had been duped! Bamboozled! Hoodwinked!

For those who don’t know, Ray Comfort is an evangelical preacher in the States (actually born in New Zealand), made particularly famous by his association with ex-Growing Pains star Kirk Cameron and their winning video: “The Banana: The Atheist’s Nightmare”. The video initially would only really make you laugh if you find it funny to imagine that they’re talking about an erect penis rather than a banana (God made it to perfectly fit inside a human mouth, etc.) It became a bit more hilarious when the actual nature of wild bananas was pointed out online.

Unsurprisingly, Comfort’s “special introduction” is a 49-page essay on how awful Darwin was and how great (Ray Comfort’s brand of) Christianity is. The introduction is beautifully laid out in an easy-to-read typeface, indented quotations, footnotes, pictures and photographs, spaced paragraphs and section labels. Tacked on to the end of the introduction is the actual text of Darwin’s “Origin of Species”, mashed together in a much smaller typeface, no spaces between paragraphs and very token section labels. And missing one or two chapters.

Basically, the book and its worldwide giveaway by Comfort’s organisation are a delivery mechanism for an evangelical tract. There’s nothing inherently wrong about evangelical tracts, but when you don’t call them what they are, and when you call them something quite different on the cover, you are being intentionally deceptive. One can argue that since the book actually does contain “Origin of Species”, it’s not lying at all. I say in response: you know perfectly well what you’re doing. If Ray Comfort’s 49-page diatribe wasn’t there, you wouldn’t have anything you’d want to give away at all.

The move hasn’t gone unnoticed around the NZ blogosphere, with the Fundy Post shedding some light on some of Comfort’s organisation’s motivations and timings.

Later today, I’ll post a quick rundown of examples of Ray Comfort either lying to his readers or betraying an extraordinary ignorance of things about which he’s apparently published books.

UPDATE: Click here for that very rundown.