Spirits In The Material World:Ghosts S3.

The Ghosts are back. Or at least they were, on BBC1, during August and September of 2021 (with a Xmas special in, you guessed it, December of that year). I caught up with the third of, so far, four series on the iPlayer over the last few days. It was, as with series one and two, a delight.

If anything this was the funniest series so far. Not much has changed. Nick Collett has replaced Tom Kingsley in the director's chair but, on screen, it's pretty much business as normal with Button House's owners Alison (Charlotte Ritchie) and Mike (Kiell Smith-Bynoe) being helped, harassed, and hoaxed by the motley crew of spooks and ghouls they share their home with.

Robin (Laurence Rickard) has developed a knowledge of Loose Women that rivals his knowledge of chess, Kitty (Lolly Adefope) gets excited about watching Grease but ends up getting it mixed up with Nightmare On Elm Street and watching that instead, Fanny (Martha Howe-Douglas) briefly falls in love with a most unlikely suitor, and even Sir Humphrey-Bone (Rickard again) gets to share his back story. 

Not that the other ghosts are the most appreciative audience. I suppose they're in no rush. They've got nothing but time. Time that Thomas Thorne (Mathew Baynton) spends mooning after Alison, time that the Captain (Ben Willbond) likes to organise efficiently, time that Pat (Jim Howick) wants to devote to doing a seemingly never ending quiz, and time that Julian Fawcett MP (Simon Farnaby) would rather spend watching pornography and reminiscing about the good old days of sexual harassing female colleagues.

He is, after all, a former Tory. Mary (Katy Wix) is put to better use in this series and, for some reason, her constant obsession with fennel became very amusing. As did the Captain's mistaken belief that pillow talk means talking to one's pillow, the scene where the ghosts gather round a campfire to tell ghost stories (!), and, not sure why but it cracked me up, Robin's memory of a hunt:- "first time hunt mammoth, me be bricking it".

There was a bit too much Whigfield for my liking and Thomas doing keepy-uppies with Humphrey's head wasn't as funny as the makers seemed to think but they were minor gripes. I smiled, rather than laughed, at the more puerile jokes such as mixing up "aural" with "oral", a Button House onesie that from a certain angle appears to read Butt Ho, and a lord whose "balls are the most magnificent in the country".

Of course, there's the usual Fanny jokes. The gift that keeps giving. The best of them, this time, being the line "lucky Fanny, to be touched up by such a hand". In relation to some restorative work on her portrait, of course. The part that made me laugh the most though was when Julian decided to interfere with Mike's work e-mail correspondence by adding an unwanted x to it. Leading to a lengthy debate about the appropriateness of adding kisses to work emails.

Elsewhere, it's all go at Button House. A documentary team descend on the property to make a film about an anti-Elizabethan coup, the house is treated for woodworm - which means everyone has to camp in the grounds, and it even becomes a location for AA meetings. There's even a fear that irritating neighbour Barclay Beg-Chetwynde (Geoffrey McGivern) may die in the house and be stuck there forever.

That's something nobody wants. The story that runs through the whole series is the arrival of Alison's long lost sister Lucy (Jessica Knappett). Kitty becomes very jealous of Alison's burgeoning friendship with Lucy but that may soon prove to be the least of either of their problems.

While Ghosts doesn't always grip me completely (I look at my phone, or my "field phone" as the Captain would call it, far too often) it always feels warm and comfortable. From Julian doing, and saying, a "chinny reckon" to the strangely familiar guest star Richard Durden and on to the scenes where the ghosts gather round the telly to watch football (though Fanny would prefer to watch Murder She Wrote) you always feel engaged in the presence of these characters.

Almost like a family. Perhaps that's why it feels okay to do other things when spending time with them. Obviously, as with many families, the Christmas edition has its heartwarming moments and there are a couple of genuinely moving moments. It's sad when Alison realises that someone she thought she was close to is revealed to have dishonest intentions but it's emotional, in a very nice way, when the ghosts, who can neither eat nor drink, mime a feast and a toast. Just to feel alive again. Which is, oddly enough, one thing this show makes you feel. Alive.

Kakistocracy XLII:Bonfire Of The Sanities.

It's three years today since we unshackled ourselves from the EU and became 'free'. By now we should be enjoying those oft promised sunlit uplands and the NHS should be thriving on the extra £350,000,000 a week that the Brexit brigade promised on the side of their battle bus. How's that working out in reality? 

It rather seems that Project Fear turned out to be Project Reality. For all the Tory party's attempts to blame everything on either Covid or Putin's war in Ukraine, the harsh reality is that the UK is the only G7 country whose economy has not recovered to its pre-pandemic size, food and heating prices have seen such drastic rises people are worried about starving and freezing to death, and essential workers like nurses and firefighters are striking as never before.

The Brexit purists, of course, say this is simply because we haven't gone far enough. But nothing ever will be far enough for the likes of Jacob Rees-Mogg, Daniel Hannan, and Nigel Farage. Men who have long ago proved themselves to be charlatans, chancers, and liars and men we should no longer take seriously. They are men we should never have taken seriously. Then we might not be in this mess.

Rees-Mogg has announced a plan to rip up all EU laws that have passed into British law regardless or not as to whether they are good or bad laws. He says it'll take a year to get rid of over 4,000 laws. This can only be a disaster, a bonfire of the sanities, and the only reason he's doing it is to prove Brexit purity to the headbangers on the extreme right of his own party.

Which, to be fair, following the Johnsonian purges of any decent and honest Tory (yes, such a thing did once exist though I still fundamentally disagreed with them) is nearly the entire party now. Let's take Suella Braverman, remarkably still the Home Secretary, as an example. Braverman has recently been confronted by 83 year old holocaust survivor Joan Salter who told her that the language she has used to demean and dehumanise refugees reminded her of the language the Nazis used to justify murdering Jews like Salter herself.

Braverman, you won't be surprised, refused to apologise. She couldn't see anything wrong with talking like a Nazi. Her only defence was "we have a problem with people exploiting our generosity, breaking our laws and undermining our system". On that point, she's not entirely incorrect. Let's have a look at some of the people who have broken the law, exploited our generosity, and undermined our system lately. We can start with Nadhim Zahawi.

Until earlier this week, Zahawi was the Chairman of the Conservative Party and was happily threatening to sue people who claimed he'd been guilty of tax evasion. Those threats to sue went quiet when it was revealed that he had, very much,  been guilty of tax evasion. Zahawi, of course, claimed it was a mistake and nothing criminal or suspicious.

He claimed to not be very good at money so it's easy to understand how a piffling little sum of £5,000,000 (admittedly a smallish percentage of his fortune) could slip under the radar. But claiming to be no good at money is an odd thing for someone who was Chancellor just last year to say and threatening to sue people who bring this up despite having already been investigated by HMRC is a downright deceitful thing to do.

In that he fits in very well with a Conservative Party that is as dishonest as it is criminal. He may have been removed as Chairman of the Tories but the electorate of Stratford-upon-Avon still have him as their MP. At least they'll be pleased to know his horses are nice and warm.

When Rishi Sunak took over from the disaster formerly known as Liz Truss last year he promised a return to integrity, professionalism, and accountability. With the behaviour of Zahawi, Braverman, and Rees-Mogg - and ongoing shitstorms concering Dominic Raab and Boris Johnson coming down the line - we can now see he has failed, miserably on all three accounts.

Yes, sacking Zahawi was the right thing but, as ever with the Tories, cleaning up their own house is not a serious concern. The important thing is to constantly create new enemies so we have someone else to blame for the mess the country is in. Instead of blaming the party that has been in power for nearly thirteen years now and has served up five truly dreadful PMs.

Protestors are always good scapegoats. They inconvenience people. They have to. That's the nature of protest. Try signing a petition and see where that gets you. So the government have come up with a plan to make almost every form of protest, including making noise and walking slowly, illegal. I had a bad flare up of gout last week. I was walking very very slowly. I wonder if, in the future, I could be arrested for that?

The Tories are bold though and they're not just taking on Extinction Rebellion, Insulate Britain, and Greenpeace. No, they're even gunning for the nurses that they had us all standing on our doorsteps applauding during the first lockdown. A plan has been mooted to sack striking nurses which is, of course, complete and utter insanity.

We need more, not less, nurses and the way to get them is to pay them better and treat them with respect. At least pay them enough that they don't have to use food banks. There are 177 billionaires living in the UK at the moment (Rishi Sunak is just under that mark but he's fucking minted). Between them they own four times as much as money as the NHS is given each year.

Tax them more. At least make them pay the taxes they already should be paying. There's lots of talk about a 'cost of living' crisis but I don't think that tells the whole story. There's no cost of living crisis for Rishi Sunak, Nadhim Zahawi, or Jacob Rees-Mogg. The cost of living crisis is for the little people. The ones that abide by the law, pay their taxes, and try to do right by their fellow man.

What underpins the cost of living crisis is a far more serious crisis. It's a distribution of wealth crisis which means that old Etonians, Bullingdon bully boys, and tech bros like Sunak siphon huge percentages of the country's wealth into their own, often offshore, bank accounts and the rest of us squabble around for small change. It's the very definition of a drip down economy. Except there's not much dripping down.

In the long term, the whole system needs changing but in the short term the most urgent goal is to rid the country of this cruel, corrupted, and criminal Tory administration. One now so saturated in sleaze that even once proud Tory voter Rod Stewart can see it. Pausing only for a quick singalong of Maggie May, Rod the Mod rang Sky News to give his opinions of how the Tories are handling the NHS. It went something like this:-

"There are people dying because they cannot get scans. I personally have been a Tory for a long time but I think this government should stand now down and give the Labour party a go at it. In all my time living in this country, I’ve never seen it so bad. This is a bad time for us in Great Britain. Change the bloody government".

On The Last Leg, last Friday Adam Hills invited viewers to send in modified Rod Stewart songs that could reflect the current state of the Conservative government. There was a suggestion of The NHS Cuts Are The Deepest but nearly everyone else who replied simply changed the lyrics from "we are sailing" to "we are failing". The sad thing is that this terrible failure of a government is taking us all down with them. Kick them out. Kick them out as soon as you can. 

 

 

Camera Obscura? Known and Strange @ the V&A.

I almost got lost in the maze of upstairs galleries in the V&A trying to find the Sir Elton John and David Furnish gallery, or gallery 101 as it's more prosaically known. When I finally did find it I got a bit lost trying to understand the exhibition. Or at least what the theme was. There were some good photographs in it for sure. But I couldn't really work out what linked them all together.

Rinko Kawauchi - Illuminance (2009-11)

Known and Strange:Photographs from the Collection is a vague enough title to not really tell you anything and even the board on the wall as you enter the room doesn't offer much more. It tells us that photographs have the "power to transform the familiar into the unfamiliar, and to make the ordinary extraordinary" and that photography can "capture many different perspectives" while allowing us to see things that, in our relatively short lives, we won't have time to witness with our own eyes.

But that could be true of any group of photographs. In truth, I think the V&A were just sat on a lot of interesting photos, had a gap in their scheduling, and decided to show some of them off. Nothing wrong with that. Not least because the exhibition was completely free.

Many of the photos on show focused on small moments, things you may easily pass by without stopping for a second look. Rinko Kawauchi's Illuminance series looked at spiderwebs, dew, and light reflected in mirrors. Her work was pleasant to look at and seemed to emphasise how beneficial it is for us to sometimes slow down and take in the wonders of the natural world that surround us wherever we are.

That's why I haven't dusted the cobwebs in the corner of my spare room for a while! Zanele Muholi's work comes from a completely different angle. Their work intends to make us look at the violence and discrimination faced by the Black South African LGBTQIA+ community. Muholi's not gone about it in an overtly political way and, instead, has simply photographed members of that community, like Sosi Molotsane (below), and presented them with accompanying testimonies. The idea, I think, is to give visibility to a community many would prefer to pretend don't exist. Almost as if a historical document.

Zanele Muholi - Sosi Molotsane, Yeoville, Johannesburg (2007)

Susan Meiselas - The Managers, Essex Junction, Vermont (1974)

Susan Meiselas - New Girl, Tunbridge, Vermont (1975)

Susan Meiselas is also in the business of giving marginal people a voice. Or at least a presence. In the seventies she travelled around New England, Pennsylvania, and South Carolina photographing and interviewing women who performed striptease acts at local carnivals. For good measure, she took a few snaps of the men who ran these events and, of course, they tend to be fully clothed.

But, essentially, Meiselas was trying to give these women, who would perhaps only be seen by their audiences as bodies to ogle, identities. The fact one of the images is simply titled 'New Girl', though, suggests it wasn't an entirely successful project. 

Paul Graham was another who journeyed around the US to take his photos. He seems to have been less interested in people and portraits and more concerned with how the natural environment affects us. How we can marvel at its beauty, be in awe of its power, and yet remain at mercy to its seemingly capricious whims.

Paul Graham - Washington and South Broad, New Orleans from the series A Shimmer of Possibility (2004-06)

Teresa Zelenkova - Stairs, Cesky Raj (2015)

I really liked Teresa Zelenkova's image of an old stone staircase in Cesky Raj in Czechia but all I could gather from the information boards was that she is interested in mysticism, philosophy, and folklore while also valuing intuition and coincidence. I decided that it was just a cool photo of a rather spooky looking staircase. I took much the same approach to Gauri Gill's Balika Mela which didn't have anything to read about it - and was probably better served by that situation.

Visually impressive though Mitch Epstein's American Elm photograph was I thought the reasons for taking it were not entirely true. The idea is that Epstein wandered the streets of New York looking for rare trees in an urban environment. But I've been to New York, I've been to Central Park. There are trees everywhere.

Gauri Gill - Balika Mela (2012)

Mitch Epstein - American Elm, Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn from the series New York Arbor (2012)

Let's give Mitch the benefit of the doubt. Let's say he wasn't including parks and city forests and he was specifically looking for trees in fully urban environments. In which case, especially with its concrete encasement, he's done well to find this one.

Andy Sewell, whose series Known and Strange Things Pass has given this odd little show its name, had a clearer concept behind his work. He's taken photos from either side of the Atlantic which explore not just that vast ocean itself but the cables that, mostly unseen beneath the water, carry the Internet from continent to continent. As Sewell has said:- " the boundaries we put between things are more permeable than we might like to think".

 

Andy Sewell - Known and Strange Things Pass (2020)

 

Klea McKenna - Life Hours (4) from the series Generation (2019)

I'm not quite so sure about the claims made for either Klea McKenna or Dafna Talmor. McKenna seeks to move photography away from a purely visual medium and to explore the sense of touch. Her photos look good but to touch them they feel like photographs and nothing else surely? Any feeling of touch comes from our previous knowledge of what the items depicted feel like and in that case that's no difference to a holiday snap of one of your kids making a sandcastle.

Which, to be honest, would carry a greater emotional weight. Talmor takes decent landscape photos and then ruins, sorry - alters, them by cutting them up and recombining them into hybrid compositions. I can't really see the point.

 

Dafna Talmor - Untitled (JE-12121212) from the series Constructed Landscapes (2015)

 

Donna Ruff - Migrant (2011-16)

Donna Ruff's work was a little better. I liked the use of Moorish titles to create a form of abstraction but if I hadn't read that the photo in the background was originally printed in The Independent 'newspaper' and depicts the Brussels bomb attacks of March 2016 I'd never have got it from just looking at the photo. Interesting aesthetically but if intended as a political piece then somewhat weak.

Maurizio Anzeri is another who can't leave a perfectly good photo alone. He makes what he, rather pretentiously, calls "photo-sculptures". Starting with vintage photos found in flea markets, he uses traditional embroidery techniques to mask the sitter's faces. It's not clear why but it's not entirely terrible. Lucy actually looks quite funny.

 

Maurizio Anzeri - Lucy (2018)

 

Not sure if that was Anzeri's intention. Last up is James Welling's Julia Mamaea series, one he's been working on for a full lustrum now and one that's ongoing. On a visit to New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, Welling came across a sculpture from a Syrian woman called Julia Mamaea who lived from 180 to 235AD. He took a photo and then made a series of carbon dye prints in various different colours, very much in the style of Andy Warhol, with the idea that we, the viewers, would question notions of repetition and difference.

Not sure that's exactly what happened but it was, along with the works of Andy Sewell, Teresa Zelenkova, and Paul Graham one of the best things in this curious, mildly engaging, yet utterly inconsequential show. I left the V&A and walked to Camberwell. On Vauxhall Bridge, I saw one of the most beautiful red skies over Battersea Power Station and near the Oval cricket ground an unhinged lunatic threatened to kill me. I dare say both those events will live on in my memory a lot longer than a show that was far more strange than it was known.

 

James Welling - Julia Mamaea (2018-ongoing)

 

Fleapit revisited:The Fabelmans.

""Everyone sees me as a success story. But no one really knows us until we're courageous enough to tell everyone who we are" - Steven Spielberg 

I like going to the cinema. But it's not like it used to be. When I saw The Fabelmans yesterday evening at Catford Mews cinema (a place which still charges a very reasonable £6.50 for all films at all times every day of the week) there were about fifteen to twenty people in there. Often there are even more empty seats.

That's not how it used to be. I remember packed houses for films like Fatal Attraction and Ferris Bueller's Day Off back in the mid-late eighties. A decade before that, Basingstoke town centre would see queues of hundreds waiting for hours to see blockbusters like Star Wars, Jaws, and Grease.

That's how it had been for decades and that's how it was for young Sammy Fabelman (Mateo Zoryan Francis-DeFord) when his parents took him to see Cecil B. DeMille's The Greatest Show On Earth at a theatre in 1952. Sammy was scared, transfixed, enraptured, and had his head rearranged by the experience. Not least by the train crash scene. One which, on returning home and receiving a toy train set for Hanukkah, he became intent on repeating and replicating.

His dad, Burt (Paul Dano), couldn't understand why young Sammy wasn't treating his shiny new toys with respect but his mum, Mitzi (Michelle Williams, as brilliant as ever), knew. Mitzi was a free spirit and a troubled soul. She could identify in Sammy something she had in herself. Her potential career as a pianist cut short as she bought her up four kids and supported Burt, a kindly man who seemed to be something of a pioneer in the early days of computers.

As Sammy grows up (and Gabriel LeBelle takes over the lead role) we see Burt's job take him and the family from New Jersey to Arizona and on to California. Mitzi doesn't always find the upheaval easy and neither do Sammy and his sisters:- Regina (Julia Butters), Natalie (Keeley Karsten), and Lisa (Sophia Kopera). For various reasons, Burt's best friend and work colleague Bennie (Seth Rogen) seems to spend an awful lot of time with the family, he's there at almost every pivotal event, and though everyone seems to like that to begin with, it soon brings its own set of problems.

Sammy, or Sam as he gets older, throws himself ever further into the world of creating moving images. Casting his friends, and fellow scouts, as actors he makes short war films, he manipulates sound for maximum affect and he punches holes in the celluloid to create the illusion of gunfire. At college, he's tasked with making a film of the student's Ditch Day (a seemingly school sanctioned day of larking about on the beach instead of studying). Borrowing his girlfriend Monica's (Chloe East) father's Arriflex camera to do so, the results are hugely popular and cement Sammy's ambition to work in Hollywood. We all know how that panned out.

The Fabelmans is an ambitious film that tries, perhaps, to be too many things at the same time. Director Steven Spielberg (who co-wrote and produced the film with Tony Kushner) has not been shy in announcing that it is, in many ways, an autobiographical account of his formative years and of his family's life but we're never sure just how accurate these reminiscences are and how many of them make use of artistic license.

As well as acting as a Spielbergian Bildungsroman (it's all there from school bullying to the first awkward snog), the film also acts as a love letter to film making and the silver screen as well as a more straightforward rites of passage feature. Also, because Spielberg is Jewish and this is his lived experience, there is plenty for students of antisemitism to ponder. Not least in the form of the two school bullies, Logan (Sam Rechner) and Chad (Oakes Fegley).

It's moving without ever becoming schmaltzy and though it never had me welling up as such I did feel the odd lump in my throat. There are moments to sadden you (Mitzi's inconsolable grief after the death of her mother, Sammy's realisation that his parents are fallible humans like everyone else) and to anger you (the bullying) but there are also moments that will make you laugh. The appearances of Jeannie Berlin as Burt's crotchety mother Hadassah and Judd Hirsch as Sammy's eccentric granduncle, and former lion tamer, Boris are both great but are possibly eclipsed by Mitzi deciding the answer to her problems is a pet monkey.

More than any of that though, it's a film to make you feel warm inside. As I chomped my way through a bag of mint crumbles, I saw the young Fabelman/Spielberg becoming transfixed by the art of movie making and its infinite possibilities. I saw how in art, the art of cinema but also the art of music or indeed the art of art, a person can escape the constraints that life and family put on them and fly closer to a world of dreams. I saw how, eventually, we merge our realities with our creative notions and we, hopefully, create something both bigger than ourselves and something that also reflects our reality back to the world. The Fabelmans showed how art can give meaning to life. I liked that. You probably will too - and if you're a fan of David Lynch stay to the end, there's a treat in store for you.

Where We Go One, We Go All:How To Talk To Conspiracy Believers?

Have you ever described people who hold different opinions to you as 'sheeple'? If so, you're probably a moron. Whether or not you believe in conspiracy theories. Whether or not you believe the moon landings were faked, whether or not you believe 9/11 was an inside job. whether or not you think Covid was a hoax (or somehow caused by 5G), and whether or not you believe Donald Trump really won the US election of 2020.

If you believe all, or any of, those things as well you're not just a moron, you're a dangerously deluded moron. But if I was to meet someone who believed all, or any, of those things and I told them I thought they were a moron it seems that would not only not change their mind, it would more than likely make them double down on their beliefs. Most likely, they would think I was moron and a pompous one to boot.

So how do you speak to people who believe in obviously, and easily, discredited conspiracy theories? Do you, as was once suggested when dealing with people suffering from religion, put them on the metaphorical 'children's table' and talk to them as if they're small infants who still believe in fairies and Father Christmas?

That doesn't seem like it'd work either. The frustrating thing is almost every strategy you might care to try seems completely futile. That's the thing with conspiracy theories. Any attempt to disprove, or discredit, them simply becomes more proof of the conspiracy itself and we become the 'sheeple' in the eyes of those that belief the theories.

Ulrike Schiesser was with Skeptics in the Pub - Online last night to deliver a talk, Building Bridges:How To Talk To Conspiracy Believers, about just this subject and if it was slightly dry and, at times, rambling (Schiesser was, it should be noted, speaking in her second language) it was nonetheless still interesting.

Ulrike works in Austria for The Federal Office for Cult Affairs. An institution I'd not heard of before but one that was set up back in 1998 to give impartial information about cults, alternative religious movements, and various esoteric groups that may (or may not) be peddling misinformation. It seems admirable that the Austrian government should have such a body.

People often ask why do people believe obviously irrational things and how can that be stopped. You'd like to think that facts and logic would win the argument but that has been proved, time and time again, not to be the case. In reality, "believers" are not impressed with facts and logic. Often they come with 'alternative facts' (for which read - lies). Usually they're unimpressed with any attempt at debunking and it is not uncommon for them to aggressively assert that they are right and you are wrong.

With an absolute certainty they cannot reasonably have. That's because people are not logical in the way we build our belief systems and, instead, we are hugely influenced by emotion and regularly make decisions based on the social group we're in. 

Conspiracy theorists often see traditional family values and norms threatened by modernity and start to see themselves as saviours of the world. Online especially, it's easy for them to connect with others who share their misguided beliefs and groups are formed. As their beliefs move them away from their real family and friends, they become part of a new community. It's no coincidence that the QAnon motto is "where we go one, we go all".

Feel the power of positive reinforcement after a few retweets and likes. One of the best ways to play on people's heartstrings is, of course, the use of children - and conspiracy theorists have not been slow to get in on this. If the children are in danger (be that from evil vaccinations or from shady paedophile rings consisting of politicians you don't like which only Donald Trump has the power to stop) all the better.

It gets people's attention, it rouses emotion, and, often, it can end up in violence. It's so much easier to justify violence when you've been tricked into thinking you're carrying out violent acts to save the children.

Another popular trick used to coax people into conspiracy theory belief is to make people who may be of average, or low, intelligence feel they are clever. Make them they feel they know something others don't. Patterns are good for these (the human brain loves patterns) and it doesn't matter how ludicrous and convoluted they are. Many of them don't make sense. Ulrike showed us images of words relating to Covid that people had assigned numbers to and then added, subtracted, multiplied, and divided them until they finally got a result that included a 666 in the answer.

Thereby proving what? That Satan is responsible for Covid. Which you've already said is a hoax anyway. So the belief here is that someone who genuinely doesn't exist (Satan ) is the creator of a plague that does exist but you say doesn't exist. Conspiracy theories don't need to make sense. Often it's best if they don't because the believer can spend more time arguing about it which is one of the main points. To waste people's time and leave them feeling demotivated to even debate it any further.

Over the years, conspiracy theorists have been able to prove the existence (and malign influence) of the Illuminati because this shady, and all powerful, organisation chose, for some unstated reason, to hide clues in Goofy cartoons and episodes of Spongebob Squarepants. Some have even posited the existence of triangular foodstuffs like Toblerone and Dairylea cheese triangles is a sign from the Illuminati. Let's not even start on The Matrix.

So back to the question posed in the title of the talk. How do you change someone's mind? The short answer - not easily! A good start, suggested Ulrike - and I am inclined to agree, is to ask yourself when was the last time you changed your mind as regards a deep fundamental attitude? For example, on matters of religion or politics.

For me, it's been a while. But for those of you who have, what convinced you to change? Which people and which experiences inspired you and how long did it take? We often talk about changing other's minds but less so our own. If we find it so hard to change our own minds why do we expect others to change their minds so readily?

Studies show that people change their minds on these big issues for a relatively small number of reasons. There could have been an important, and sobering, personal event that has caused them to make significant changes, they may have reached a tolerance limit or lost faith in a peer group (an example would be being an anti-vaxxer but deciding that assaulting doctors or nurses is a step too far), or they may have a new focus in life. A new job, a new partner, a new child or even new, and positive, role models to look up to.

But, often, these changes are glacially slow. People are sometimes ashamed to admit they've been so wrong and that's why, Ulrike proposed, it's best to make a few basic considerations when we getting into debate with conspiracy theorists:-

Be an explorer and not a preacher, be friendly, try to discuss and not to argue, search for common ground, and aim to create small cracks in world views. Also to accept that you won't see results immediately.

But while giving respect, demand it for yourself too. In cases of aggression you're fully entitled to withdraw from the debate. Show solidarity with victims of hate messages and certainly don't join pile ons when people are already being abused. Intervene when boundaries are violated and never ever feed the trolls.

These, of course, are aspirations and we'll all fall short of them on occasions. In most things in the world, none of us are experts so, in direct contravention of Michael Gove, we have to trust experts. When discussing people's beliefs don't just ask about content, ask about sources and ask people if they don't trust experts then who DO they trust? 

If they don't trust a fully qualified medical expert then why do they trust a complete stranger on the Internet? If they don't trust anybody then doesn't that make their life intolerably miserable? We obvioulsy can't trust some people, we certainly can't trust the current government - even Rod Stewart's finally realised that, but we must have more faith and trust in each other. As ever, that was the overriding message that came through in this talk.

Thanks to Ulrike Schiesser for delivering it, thanks to Gerard Sorko for compering, and thanks to Skeptics in the Pub - Online for another diverting Thursday evening. 

Fleapit revisited:Goodfellas.

"I'm funny how? I mean funny like I'm a clown? I amuse you? I make you laugh? I'm here to fucking amuse you? What do you mean funny? Funny how? How am I funny?" - Tommy DeVito

Back in autumn 1990, me and my mate Bugsy went to the Warner Brothers cinema in Basingstoke to see Martin Scorsese's then new film, based on the book Wiseguys by Nicholas Pileggi, Goodfellas. We didn't really know what to expect. We were more or less at a loose end. We came out raving about it and, for years after, we'd be doing impressions of the infamous unhinged rant by Tommy DeVito that starts this piece and impersonations of Anthony Powers' minor character Jimmy Two Times. 

We'd even name one of our band's, Cloth, songs after a minor character in the film:- Security Guard With Lobsters. But that was over thirty years ago and I'd not revisited the film once in those three long decades. When I saw it was up on the iPlayer I decided it was time to dive back in and see if the film really was as good as it had seemed a long time ago when were young.

Spoiler alert! It is that good. The snappy wiseguy dialogue and the relatively short scenes means it never gets boring. The music (take a deep breath:- Aretha Franklin, Bobby Darin, The Who, The Rolling Stones, Harry Nilsson, Cream, Muddy Waters, Tony Bennett, The Shangri-Las, The Ronettes, Al Jolson, Johnny Mathis, Sid Vicious (!), and, of course Layla by Derek And The Dominoes) that links the action helps the over two hour film zip along surprisingly quickly and the way the brutal and realistic feeling violence explodes so rapidly, often from seemingly innocent interactions, means you're never far from a visceral shock or two.

It's a world of Pontiacs, Cadillacs, sharp suits, card games, cigars, diners, recipes for pasta sauce (they are Italians), infidelity, casual racism, guns, knives, and people being threatened with having their heads put in pizza ovens. Balls are, regularly, busted, people get 'whacked', and bodies are found disposed of in the back of garbage trucks or frozen stiff in the back of meat trucks.

"As far back as I can remember I've always wanted to be a gangster" we're told, very early on, by Henry Hill (Ray Liotta), the film's chief protagonist and, indeed, we start with Henry, as a teenage boy, in the mid-fifties growing up in Brooklyn, working at a cab stand run by the mob, and taking regular beatings off his dad (Beau Starr).

His boss, Paulie (Paul Sorvino - who, like Liotta, passed last year), had hundreds of guys working for him. His primary business was 'protection' - but it came at a high price. Henry, though, was doing well working for Paulie. He found his job opened doors for him. At thirteen he had more money than he could spend and and was so 'respected' that other boys would carry his mum's (Elaine Kagan) groceries all the way home for him.  

Henry's introduced to Jimmy Conway (Robert De Niro). Jimmy's flash, he tips doormen and bartenders $100 a time, but he's tough too. He'd been locked up at the age of eleven and by the time he was sixteen he was carrying out hits. Understandably, people were scared of him.

But he took to Henry and Henry to him. Jimmy introduces Henry to Tommy DeVito (Joe Pesci) and together they start to make money by stealing cargo from Idlewild airport and burning buildings down for insurance. Tommy may be 'funny', he IS funny, but he's also a psychotic bully with a hair trigger. A dirty bomb likely to go off at any moment.

It didn't particularly concern Henry. The lifestyle more than made up for the risks which Henry felt were minimal anyway. Not least because he was so good at his job. He couldn't understand people who lived normal lives and worried about their bills. "Suckers" he called them.

When he meets his future wife Karen (Lorraine Bracco) she's initially circumspect but soon Henry's extravagant wealth and borderline celebrity status seduce her and she falls into his world, increasingly moving away from her own Jewish family and friends. Henry and Karen's wedding is predictably fancy and almost every one of Paulie's relations she meets that day are either called Peter or Paul. All their wives are called Maria.

But, in 1970, when Billy Batts (Frank Vincent) insults Tommy in a bar (reminding him he used to be a shoe shine boy, Tommy and Jimmy beat him, stab him, and shoot him to death. A risky course of action because Billy Batts was a "made man" and it's not a good idea to kill a made man.

Tommy continues to become ever more psychotic and unpredictable and as things begin to escalate the gangster lifestyle stops looking like glamorous fun and begins to look like what it really is. Dangerous. Potentially fatally so.

As further murders are committed, prison sentences are served, affairs are had, heists are carried out, and drug addiction and paranoia afflicts members of the organisation we're left wondering if Tommy, Jimmy, and, most of all, Henry will manage to get out of it alive and if so .... how?

It's a brilliant film and everyone's brilliant in it (including brief cameos from Samuel L.Jackson and Vincent Gallo who I'd not really have been aware of back in 1990) though Pesci, of course, gets the juiciest role of all and absolutely relishes in it. As well as excelling at it. 

The one thing I never noticed all those years ago, though, was the fact that I didn't really care about what happened to any of the characters in the film. Even if they lived or died. I just enjoyed the ride. Perhaps that's because there's barely a sympathetic character in the whole film or perhaps that's because Scorsese had placed me in their world with such exquisite precision that I too started to feel the thrill more than I probably should have. Goodfellas is a fascinating world to visit, on television or at the cinema. It'd be a horrible one to live in. What Scorsese did so well is show us that for those that choose to live that lifestyle that realisation often comes much too late.