Spy Movies and Spy-Spoof Movies

I suppose this is a somewhat misleading title.  I'm mostly thinking about the Bond franchise, as well as the Pink Panther movies.  I have owned a Bond set from the UK with all the Bond movies through the first Daniel Craig film (though not the spoof Casino Royale or Never Say Never Again) and finally was inspired to start watching them with my son after Sean Connery's passing a few months back.  I also have a Pink Panther box set, though it took me a while to track it down. As it happens The Return of the Pink Panther isn't in that box, due to rights issues as well, though the library had it, and it didn't take too long before it came in.

I don't want to spend too much time dissecting the Bond films, but a lot of them are super creaky and unbelievably sexist (with several plots hinging on Bond (particularly when played by Sean Connery) converting women over to his side just through the strength of his animal magnetism).  I basically grew up with the Roger Moore Bond and am very unsure how I will react to seeing them with my much more critical 50 year-old eyes.  Still, there is no question that for me Bond was Moore, though I also like Pierce Brosnan in the role. 

But I thought it was important to watch them in sequence.  As incredible as it seems, as far as I can recall, I only saw Connery in Goldfinger (on HBO) and in Never Say Never Again while it was in the theatres.  I would have thought the Connery films would have crept up more often in the HBO line-up, but perhaps not or somehow I just kept missing them.  I'm fairly sure I saw all the Roger Moore Bond films,* probably only the first Dalton Bond and the first two Brosnan Bonds. I've never watched any of the grittier Daniel Craig films, and I have no intention of starting now.

In general, the Pink Panther films hold up a bit better, except when playing Inspector Dreyfus's psychotic break for laughs.  I probably did watch the first one, The Pink Panther, though I certainly didn't remember it very clearly, though the bit with the two men in gorilla suits and the cars crisscrossing as they try to escape does ring a bit of a bell.  That one was pretty baggy and would have benefited from a lot more trimming.  The ones I remember better are A Shot in the Dark, The Pink Panther Strikes Again, and Revenge of the Pink Panther.  I even saw Trail of the Pink Panther (the one that was compiled from a bunch of outtakes from the other films).  That one was pretty bad, and I think we'll just stop with Revenge.  However, I'm not entirely sure whether I had seen The Return of the Pink Panther before.  There was a lot that didn't seem familiar, particularly all the bits where Christopher Plummer is off by himself being an action hero.  (Stylistically, this is much closer to the original Pink Panther movie.)

* Actually, after finally getting to it last weekend, I don't think I had seen Live and Let Die before, which is a totally strange Blaxploitation-Bond crossover with an amazing title song by Paul McCartney and Wings.  So it was an odd coincidence that Yaphet Kotto, the main villain from the film, just passed away a day ago. RIP

Midwestern Nice vs. Midwestern Mean?

One thing that has been more than a little sad is watching how both Michigan and Wisconsin have gone from basically moderate "purple" states to being dominated by fairly rabid right wing politics at least in their state legislatures (even if they manage to elect Democrats for governor).  I suppose it is the toxic impact of gerrymandering.  Minnesota seems to have largely escaped this.  Indiana and Ohio tilted pretty far right even when I was growing up, and I never thought of them as "Midwestern nice."

At any rate, I have been thinking on this a lot lately, as I have been frankly appalled at watching what the GOP has become, even in Michigan and Wisconsin.  It really was better 20 or 30 years ago (and I am glad to have gotten out).  

One of the better observers of Midwest mores, with a strong focus on lower middle class foibles, was Richard Guindon.  He started in Minnesota, moved to New York in the 60s and published in various magazines including The Nation and The Realist.  Then in the late 60s or early 70s, he returned to Minnesota and joined the Minneapolis Tribune.  He was syndicated throughout the Midwest.  In 1981, he moved to Detroit and was published in the Detroit Free Press.  He was still being syndicated in various Michigan papers throughout the 90s, which is when I encountered his work.  He retired in 2005.  

This page has some discussion of his work.  It isn't entirely clear to me why he was so obsessed with carp.  Maybe because it wasn't a particular desirable fish but it was well established in the Great Lakes (and this was before the more recent fears of Asian carp invading the Great Lakes).  It may not be a surprise that Guindon sort of plays on fears of Asian dominance but Japan is seen as the threat not China.  This is pretty much how one felt in Michigan in the 80s.

One of my favorite strips isn't particularly topical.  It most likely ran over the summer between 1987-90 (when I would have read it while back home from college).

A few months back I decided I would indulge in some nostalgia, and I ordered a couple of Guindon collections - Cartoons by Guindon and Together Again.  The dates didn't match up, and not surprisingly this cartoon wasn't included.  Then I went ahead and ordered The World According to Carp (maybe his single strongest collection) and the weirdly over-sized Michigan So Far. 

Given that the "novel" cartoon isn't in these books either, it doesn't look like it was ever collected, but fortunately I did hang onto it in a scrapbook.  That's the thing about growing up before the internet is that some things truly are lost down the memory hole (and not preserved forever in the "Wayback Machine").

The Penultimate Monty Python (Mr. Neutron)

It's been a fairly long ride, but it looks like tomorrow my son and I will wrap up Season 4 of Monty Python.  We only watch one episode an evening and lately on weekends I usually substitute a movie.  While I agree that Season 4 isn't as good as the first three seasons (not simply because Cleese had departed), the Michael Ellis and Mr. Neutron episodes aren't bad.  In an interview in the bonus features, I did see a short clip from the last episode (a sketch about the most disgusting family in England), and it looked like The Young Ones was a direct rip off!  It really is astonishing how influential this show was.

It generally holds up well, though for sure a couple of skits with blackface or Eric Idle dressed up like a Native American would have been better off on the cutting room floor when they started reissuing the series.  And some of the topical references don't make much sense anymore.  I have enough context from watching TV in late 70s and 80s to remember the BBC and network tv more generally that the Pythons were spoofing, but my son doesn't really have that background.  He still enjoys watching them though. 

About midway through our march through the episodes, I broke down and bought this on Blu-Ray through Network, which then meant shopping around for a modified Blu-Ray player that would play Regions A and B. The quality is much better, esp. for Gilliam's animations, though some of the restorations are so slight that it is hard to see much of a difference.  The single most interesting bonus feature is an industrial film that the Pythons made for Birds Eye Peas.  It's essentially a full length show (20+ minutes) all about frozen peas.  How odd.  The one area where I prefer the older DVDs is better chapter breaks, making it much, much easier to skip to specific sketches.  That's not enough reason to hold onto the DVDs, but it is a bit frustrating, as it couldn't have been that hard to add them in on the Blu-Rays.

I definitely grew up with the Pythons (watching it as a teenager either on PBS or A&E) and then during my undergrad years MTV played two episodes back to back in the evening.  I certainly had thought I had seen all the episodes, but after this drawn-out marathon, that's clearly not the case.

I don't think I had seen "Live from the Grill-O-Mat" (Season 2, Ep. 5) before, though it's possible I just forgot. I'm more confident that I had not seen "Royal Episode 13" before.  I don't think I'd seen "A Book at Bedtime" (Season 3, Ep. 12) before either, and I'm almost certain that I haven't seen "Light Entertainment War" from Season 4 previously. In  a couple of cases, these were particularly provocative episodes, which may have had something to do with it, or maybe I just kept missing them.  Hard to say.

Anyway, I'm deciding whether we go back to Get Smart (we got about halfway through Season 3 before putting that on pause) or work our way through Blackadder.  At he moment I am leaning toward Blackadder.

Edit (2/19): So we watched the last episode from Season 4 last night.  I think Mr. Neutron might have been the better closer.  Anyway, I forgot about the two German episodes.  I'm not 100% sure I have watched either of them all the way through.  I have The Life of Python at my fingertips, which includes the 2nd episode.  I probably can track down Monty Python Live, which has the first one.  So that might be something we watch next week.

It's Cold Outside

I guess we got spoiled with a fairly mild Jan.  I was expecting much more snow.  Even now with several weeks of cold temperatures we don't have all that much snow and only a few patches of black ice on roads and virtually none on the sidewalks.  I'm sure walking around was much more treacherous last winter.  Indeed, both Chicago and the East Coast (New York/Boston) have had way more snow than Toronto has gotten.

I'm not complaining exactly, but last weekend I had planned on biking downtown.  It was so incredibly cold and windy!  I made it to the library to pick up a couple of books (still running their curbside pickup) and was really suffering.  It was so clear I wouldn't make it all the way in.  So I turned around and sulked the rest of the day.  I'm pretty sure the story will be the same this weekend.  It does seem as though the weather is conspiring to keep me tied to the house at least until the 22nd when Toronto most likely will officially move back to the grey zone.  I'm hoping that March will be somewhat more like last fall, though I don't think a lot of things will be open.

At the moment the cases are definitely moving in the right direction, though the new variants are starting to move through the community.  Also, Canada's vaccine program is in shambles because of massive shortages of the vaccines produced over in Europe, which is just so depressing.

Next week the kids are back in school, which will hopefully be a good thing for them, but it is certainly a gamble.  I just don't agree with those that say we have to stay in lockdown until the cases are driven down next to zero or everyone is vaccinated.  The social costs, particularly for children, are just too high.

Another Brick Books Sale

I'm not entirely sure what this sale is about (poetry month is in April, Eliot's cruelest month).  I missed the big blowout sale last year, but now, while inventory remains or Feb 21, Brick Books is offering 21 books for $42.  I'm quite curious what will turn up.  

I have a fair number of their newest books, so I'm kind of hoping it will lean more heavily on 2019 and even earlier titles, but if I do end up with duplicates, some will go into the Little Free Library out front (which is not very well stocked these days...)

Poets & Travel

So what have I been doing with my time?  I hardly go out.  I haven't been streaming that much on-line content (many theatre channels I have basically dropped after the early days).  I have been watching a bit more TV and movies on the weekend, though not binge-watching by any means.  I haven't even been writing that much -- largely because SFYS has gone dormant over the past few months, and apparently I need some external deadlines...

One thing that I have been doing is sorting through a lot of files that I digitized over the past few months (while I could still go into the office).  Some things are quite fascinating (to me anyway), and I'll try to post a few things from time to time.  I have a small stack of acceptances from small poetry journals and a slightly larger rejection pile.  It looks like I had a poem accepted conditionally, but I simply cannot recall if I wrote back and agreed to the edits and had the piece published or not.  I wonder if this happened as I was preparing to head off to Toronto for grad school or something else came up.  Strange.  Not that a handful more published poems would have really changed my trajectory and kept me in the literary world.  

What might have changed things (possibly) is if my proposed poetry anthology had been published.  At that time it was very tightly focused on subway poems (mostly about the New York or London underground) with a handful of poems about elevated rail lines (again mostly New York and Chicago).  I found a publisher who was interested in the project but couldn't swing the royalties, and I basically let it drop and moved on with my life.  But things change.  I probably am in a position now to partially cover the royalties myself, but the nature of the project has shifted with time.  

Roughly 10 years ago I broadened the scope to include all forms of transportation and made the focus less New York-centric.  I'm now in the mood to re-evaluate and do another very broad sweep of poetry but with a bit of a slant towards lesser-known poets and Canadian poets.  I think it might take a couple of months to go through my old files and all the poetry books I've collected in the meantime (especially from Brick Books), and then I'll put an actual manuscript together and shop it around a bit more seriously this time.

Sometimes I find there are poets I would like to include, but probably won't work out for one reason or another.

As an example, I just finished reading through Robert Hayden's Collected Poems.

He has one long poem about travel by boat, "Middle Passage," but in addition to being a bit long for an anthology is a bit too heavy.  That doesn't mean I would automatically rule out a poem on the Middle Passage, but it can't overwhelm the rest of the poems in the collection.

The same heaviness applies to travel by foot in his poem about Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad -- "Runagate Runagate."

There is a short discussion of walking to campus in "A Plague of Starlings" but it is a bit too tangential in a poem that is on the long side, so I don't think that quite fits either.

The two that are the most likely candidates are both auto-oriented.  "Tour 5" has aspects of Driving While Black, though Hayden never portrays himself as being personally threatened.  "Traveling Through Fog" is more of an impressionist piece, linking the distorted view to the shadows in Plato's allegory of the cave in The Republic.  I like both.  In some ways "Tour 5" is the more obvious choice, and it is more clearly tied to auto travel.  Either might potentially make their way into the putative table of contents before this is all said and done.

Anyway, this project will likely keep me occupied and out of trouble for the next few months, when presumably I'll be able to do a bit more travelling of my own.

The Hammer Falls (Again)

I am so depressed by these emergency orders, which have just been extended through Feb. 9.  In some ways, I'm annoyed that there are so many loopholes that you end up feeling like a sap if you follow them to the letter.  We can only leave our houses for exercise and essential services, but then plenty of businesses can still be open for curbside pickup?  Really?  And to make matters worse, because the Province won't just come out and close down most of these businesses, they can't really decide whether to keep going or not, making it harder for their employees to apply for federal or the (very slim) Provincial safety net programs.

No one really knows if the high school students will get back to in-person instruction around Feb. 10 (or even the 3rd Quadmester!) and whether this will erode the minor progress we've seen to date.  I am glad that the cases are finally coming down (probably now that all the "essential" travelling to see relatives over the holidays has worked its way through the system), but I still wonder if the cost ultimately will be too high in terms of mental health, obesity in children as well as adults, bankruptcies and general fraying of the social fabric.

My mental state is not great these days, and I find I simply cannot be bothered to write much of anything.  I very much liked going in to the office, where I was basically completely alone in my side of the floor.  I find that I really need the separation from home, as well as the exercise to and from work, and the sooner I can return to that, the better.  I very grudgingly cancelled some holds at the library, but since the library is still offering curbside pickup, I put the holds back on and at least will have a purpose on some of my bike and walk trips, rather than aimlessly wandering.   

The realization that the promised vaccines are not coming at the promised rates and that most Canadians will not be vaccinated until September (so another summer with all core activities scrapped) is just too much to bear.  I do think 2021 is when a lot of small companies/restaurants/galleries/theatres decide it is time to pack it in.