Before I post this Dr No thing, I should point out that I have a strict spoiler policy. I don't do spoilers. In an age of box sets and time-shifting, there's no way to know when someone is going to catch up with season seven of The West Wing or watch the Strictly Come Dancing result show. There's no reason to blurt stuff out.
However, when it comes to James Bond films, I'm going to assume you've seen them all, but don't necessarily remember them in forensic detail. Let's face it, if somehow you've missed one, a) you almost certainly don't care and b) you're probably capable of reassembling it in your head from all the other one's you've seen.
So don't say I don't spoil you!
Sunday, 30 October 2011
Thursday, 27 October 2011
FYI Only
There may come a time when I am dead. It sounds unlikely, I know, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't make some preparations, you and I. Just in case. So, in the name of prudence, I feel I should pass on some important information that you will need.
To that end, here's everything you need to know about James Bond.
What's prompted this? Well, as you'll have gathered, I've placed my In Tray on top of the Guardian and that's where I get all my ideas. Firstly there were the answers to a set by David Mitchell where John Finnemore revealed he thinks Brosnan is the best 007 (!) and secondly there's this 'news' 'report' which mentions Bond 23. What struck me was the utter certainty with which people talk about James Bond. As if their opinions were somehow valid interpretations or something! This alarmed me. I tried to set a few things straight in the Comments section (see if you can spot me!) but that's not really the forum for such re-education and besides I have a lot of important stuff to get done today so of course I should witter on here instead.
Before we get started, many Bond titles are infernally long. I'm using my own bespoke abbreviations which are explained in the Glossary.
Some Initial Thoughts:
I'm not a fan. But I'm not not a fan either if you see. I've enjoyed the books, films, video games and so forth but there is plenty wrong with the man, his world and his cultural impact on ours. The trick to enjoying the back-catalogue today, I think, is to admire the wit, the style and the jeopardy whilst refusing to turn a blind eye to the failings.
Being constantly of-the-moment, James Bond is both a hideous post-war anachronism, forever stuck in the 1950s, and a time-shifting pop culture magnet, forever stuck in whenever a particular film was made. (See: TMWTGG, 1974's Kung Fu craze; YOLT, rocket launches in 1967; Moonraker, 1979, the space shuttle; TWINE, 1999, the Millennium Dome, Y2K Bug and many many more.) Every single film quickly becomes very dated, sometimes horrifically. The films' contemporary attitudes to sex and violence have been torpedoed by 'the ever-changing world in which we live in'.
It's telling that the films are much less racist than the books (although the baddies are still nearly always foreign, a typical meme of British adventure fiction), but hardly any less sexist. Even as recently as TWINE, the series' concession to feminism amounted to putting Denise Richards into cut-off jeans and a strappy top and calling her a nuclear physicist. There are worse examples than that of course, but we should also note the progress that has been made: Bond no longer smokes and occasionally he doesn't even coerce women into bed.
The violence is much less of a problem, but it is still a problem. In the age of water-boarding and extraordinary rendition, 007's murderous antics can not be dismissed with a raised eyebrow or a laconic quip. The first time my (then very small) son saw a Bond trailer, he cried "Who is that BAD MAN and why is he doing those BAD THINGS?". I think we might say the same if we saw our real intelligence communities in action, but tacitly we excuse them and Bond because the killing is done on our behalf. These are our bad men, after all.
This sense of ownership is crucial, because James Bond is absolutely a British figure. For more than fifty years we have cheered him on, literally letting him get away with murder, because he represented Britain to the world and showed them all we were still, actually, bloody brilliant.
So what if we're useless at sport? James Bond can win any game at all: cards, backgammon, more cards, and even preposterous video games like in Never Say Never Again. So what if we drink, eat or smoke too much? It doesn't matter - Bond can electrocute a Korean at twenty paces and that's with a bellyful of Mint Julep. So what if we're vulgar, uneducated or hideously unattractive? 007 can sniff the vintage of Sherry or pull the most gorgeous - if bizarrely monikered - women there have ever been, and that's while wearing a safari suit... So what if Roger Moore callously pushed informants off of Cairo roof tops? He had a Union Jack parachute for Q's sake! Surely that made it all all right? It might be dangerous for Prime Ministers or governments to believe that we are still a capable power in world politics, but it's a delusion that we Brits have rather come to depend on.
In short, if Bond is snobbish, old fashioned, socially backward, occasionally embarrassing and prone to unjustified acts of savage violence, well, we just don't care.
Because so is Britain.
What You Need To Know:
Well, in a nutshell this: QOS is really very good and DAD is awful, awful, awful. Lazenby's underrated. So's Moore. Connery is, for better or worse, definitive, but he has lapses. Dalton deserved another go and Brosnan is really quite annoying. Craig is excellent, but well, we'll come on to him later.
First up: Dr No.
(But you know, as and when I get around to it. There's no rush, is there. Not as if I'm going to drop dead or anything!)
To that end, here's everything you need to know about James Bond.
What's prompted this? Well, as you'll have gathered, I've placed my In Tray on top of the Guardian and that's where I get all my ideas. Firstly there were the answers to a set by David Mitchell where John Finnemore revealed he thinks Brosnan is the best 007 (!) and secondly there's this 'news' 'report' which mentions Bond 23. What struck me was the utter certainty with which people talk about James Bond. As if their opinions were somehow valid interpretations or something! This alarmed me. I tried to set a few things straight in the Comments section (see if you can spot me!) but that's not really the forum for such re-education and besides I have a lot of important stuff to get done today so of course I should witter on here instead.
Before we get started, many Bond titles are infernally long. I'm using my own bespoke abbreviations which are explained in the Glossary.
Some Initial Thoughts:
I'm not a fan. But I'm not not a fan either if you see. I've enjoyed the books, films, video games and so forth but there is plenty wrong with the man, his world and his cultural impact on ours. The trick to enjoying the back-catalogue today, I think, is to admire the wit, the style and the jeopardy whilst refusing to turn a blind eye to the failings.
Being constantly of-the-moment, James Bond is both a hideous post-war anachronism, forever stuck in the 1950s, and a time-shifting pop culture magnet, forever stuck in whenever a particular film was made. (See: TMWTGG, 1974's Kung Fu craze; YOLT, rocket launches in 1967; Moonraker, 1979, the space shuttle; TWINE, 1999, the Millennium Dome, Y2K Bug and many many more.) Every single film quickly becomes very dated, sometimes horrifically. The films' contemporary attitudes to sex and violence have been torpedoed by 'the ever-changing world in which we live in'.
It's telling that the films are much less racist than the books (although the baddies are still nearly always foreign, a typical meme of British adventure fiction), but hardly any less sexist. Even as recently as TWINE, the series' concession to feminism amounted to putting Denise Richards into cut-off jeans and a strappy top and calling her a nuclear physicist. There are worse examples than that of course, but we should also note the progress that has been made: Bond no longer smokes and occasionally he doesn't even coerce women into bed.
The violence is much less of a problem, but it is still a problem. In the age of water-boarding and extraordinary rendition, 007's murderous antics can not be dismissed with a raised eyebrow or a laconic quip. The first time my (then very small) son saw a Bond trailer, he cried "Who is that BAD MAN and why is he doing those BAD THINGS?". I think we might say the same if we saw our real intelligence communities in action, but tacitly we excuse them and Bond because the killing is done on our behalf. These are our bad men, after all.
This sense of ownership is crucial, because James Bond is absolutely a British figure. For more than fifty years we have cheered him on, literally letting him get away with murder, because he represented Britain to the world and showed them all we were still, actually, bloody brilliant.
 |
| Damian Dovarganes/AP |
In short, if Bond is snobbish, old fashioned, socially backward, occasionally embarrassing and prone to unjustified acts of savage violence, well, we just don't care.
Because so is Britain.
What You Need To Know:
Well, in a nutshell this: QOS is really very good and DAD is awful, awful, awful. Lazenby's underrated. So's Moore. Connery is, for better or worse, definitive, but he has lapses. Dalton deserved another go and Brosnan is really quite annoying. Craig is excellent, but well, we'll come on to him later.
First up: Dr No.
(But you know, as and when I get around to it. There's no rush, is there. Not as if I'm going to drop dead or anything!)
Tuesday, 18 October 2011
'Oh Yeah', Ash
 |
| 'Oh Yeah' CD single cover. |
Ash were never one of the very biggest hitters of '90s Britpop, but they did make some great records. Oh Yeah, is definitely one of them, a top-ten hit no less, but its brilliance lies in the fact that it is a song about misty-eyed nostalgia written by teenagers, for teenagers.
This is the song I was going to start with when I first thought about writing occasional music posts. When it popped up the other day I have to say it startled me - for reasons we'll get to in a moment. I bought the single back in 1996 and I liked it plenty at the time; but it is only now, fifteen years later, that the full impact can be felt.
Personally, it doesn't evoke a particular or specific memory but it revels, like a dog in Autumn leaves, in a rich sense of nostalgia. What we were thinking back then I can't remember but the track is taken from an album called 1977 and there was a sense that my generation was, even then, being encouraged to look back at our (Star Wars fuelled) childhoods as a golden age. Certainly I was introspective enough to get nostalgic about things that had happened only months or weeks earlier but, when you're twenty, that's a long time ago, of course. Thinking about it now, with all my university years compacted by hindsight, it seems at least possible that I was being sold the idea that I could be nostalgic about events and feelings that were happening even whilst the record was still playing. That might be my best guess now at what being young feels like, an instantaneous mixture of exhilaration and sadness, but this is really a back projection and an ill-formed one at that. No matter how miserable, happy or bitter-sweet you felt at the time, it is only later, physically separated by the passing of years from those feelings, that it can become nostalgia.
So when the song surfaced recently in a shuffle, it caught me by surprise even though it has been in my mind, off and on, all this time. Suddenly I was forced to listen to the song anew, to calibrate for the extra fifteen years as if they had all passed in one moment.
Listen to Oh Yeah on Spotify.
The lyrics deal with a Summer love affair remembered years afterwards and, although the word 'bitter-sweet' is often used to describe the song, really there's hardly any bitterness to it whatsoever. If there is sadness that the romance didn't last longer ("I don't know why these things ever end") then it is wholly over-shadowed by the fondness of the reminiscence. This is someone looking back with no regrets to the moment of greatest potential, of greatest excitement, the instant when anticipation peaks and beginnings begin: the moment of infinite promise when "her hair came undone in my hands".
With that, the world changes and a new endless future, full of new possibilities, is revealed:
"And, oh yeah, it was the start of the Summer.The joy of the song, the joy of looking back, is being able to see right into that moment and yet also, simultaneously, to know everything that happened next, good and bad, and even, if you like, to watch all the subsequent years unfold in a fast-forwarded montage inside your head during the guitar solo.
It felt just like it was the start of Forever..."
In short, regardless of when or if you grew up, this is not just great pop music, it's 4'45'' of perspective-shattering temporal engineering with a sing-a-long chorus and that, Kirsty, makes it rather special.
Monday, 17 October 2011
"Back off man, I'm a scientist."
Some are sooo good, they need their own page.
Holy Ghost by XKCD. Most beautifully, the original alt-text concluded: 'Okay everyone, cross yourselves, then cross the streams.'
Holy Ghost by XKCD. Most beautifully, the original alt-text concluded: 'Okay everyone, cross yourselves, then cross the streams.'
Friday, 7 October 2011
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