Bond

Sean Connery-the original Bond

   This week, we have been inundated with Bond--James Bond. This as a result of all the hype over the impending release of the latest Bond film, "Skyfall". It has received nothing but rave reviews and even I am looking forward to seeing it.
   I have yet to see any of the Daniel Craig "Bond" movies. This has been more of an oversight than anything as I have been quite intrigued and will likely be checking them out soon, one way or the other.
   In the meantime, it is quite interesting to surrender to the hype and investigate it, at least a little. The Free Press here in London spent the last week publishing surveys such as who was the best Bond ever, who was the best villain, the best title song, etc.
   I have been watching James Bond movies since they first came out, back in the sixties, and I have seen all (or at least large chunks of all) of them. As importantly, I have read all the Bond books written by Ian Fleming. I read them with the same kind of passion as I'd had for the Hardy Boys books. It's almost as if they were the next step up in the puberty process and they were pretty heady stuff for a young lad such as myself!
   Because of this long association with Bond, it is interesting to watch the recent goings-on, the surveys and opinion polls. It is particularly interesting to listen to people try to rate the all-time best Bond portrayal. This is not the first time this has happened, there have been enough different actors playing James Bond that it kind of lends itself to this sort of thing.

Daniel Craig, the "new" guy

   In the past, whenever the question has been asked, the general consensus was that Sean Connery was the quintessential Bond. What I find fascinating now is that this seems to have changed. According to the surveys, now Daniel Craig has taken on the mantle of being the best Bond ever and "Skyfall" has been described as the best of the Bond movies. Now, I haven't seen "Skyfall", nor have I seen any of the Craig performances so I'm not really in a position to offer an opinion. My feeling is that Craig is more than acceptable as James Bond and I am interested in seeing him in the role.
   Acceptable as Craig might be, for me, there will always be a soft spot for Connery. They say that your favourite Bond is your first Bond. Sean Connery was the actor who laid out the Bond template and he is who I visualized as I was reading Fleming's books. In the interim, I have appreciated Pierce Brosnan and Timothy Dalton and, to a lesser extent, Roger Moore--all of whom have played Bond more than once. I hesitate to even mention George Lazenby.
   What they are currently saying about "Skyfall" is that it has not only the wild action you've come to expect from a Bond film but also extremely strong, three-dimensional performances by the principal actors. This has not always been true of Bond films. It also takes the theatrical Bond back closer to the Bond depicted by Ian Fleming.

Ian Fleming, James Bond's originator

   If you have read the books, you know James Bond as a very conflicted individual. He is not superhuman, he falls in love sometimes when he shouldn't, and he can be brainwashed. He is an assassin who occasionally develops soft spots for his targets. He makes copious mistakes. The James Bond of the movies has not always been the James Bond of the books. It appears as though Sam Mendes, "Skyfall's" director, has gone above and beyond in humanizing the main characters and this is why the film works.
   It's hard to imagine the Bond series of films ending. It may not end any time soon. If this is true, then, at some point, they will be looking for a replacement for Daniel Craig. Already this week, there was an article in the paper as to who Craig's successor might be. Sometime in the future, there may be a major controversy as to who was the best Bond--Craig or the new guy? Until I learn otherwise, though, I'm sticking with Connery... 
     

Carsongs

   There are songs I sing that I only sing in the car. I spend a lot of time in my car and, for much of that time, am alone. This gives me the perfect opportunity to break into song.
   I have been singing essentially the same songs for years now. They are songs that, for a lack of a better term, have always struck a chord with me. Many are songs from old albums my parents used to play. A couple of them are folk songs from a live Harry Belafonte album, "Hene ma tov" and "La Bamba". Ironically, one is an Israeli song and the other has whole sections in Spanish, the translations of which I have never actually known but they are both melodic and beautiful and I am happy to sing them anyway.

   Harry Chapin plays a prominent part in my car songbook. "Cats in the Cradle" and "Taxi" (yes, the whole thing--minus the high part) get a lot of play. I also do a specialty version of "Taxi" in high speed, it takes only about a minute and 45 seconds and is good for a giggle, although only one other human has ever heard it and he is with the angels as we speak.
   Various songs from the original album version of "Jesus Christ, Superstar" get frequent airplay, my favourite is "Hosanna" (I sound like Jesus and I sound like Caiphas...)
   There are several songs I like to think of as perfect songs. Their perfection has something to do with their message, their poetry and their symmetry. Included in this particular list of car songs is Leonard Cohen's "Sisters of Mercy", Traffic's "John Barleycorn", Paul Simon's "Duncan" and Paul Stookey's "The Wedding Song (There is Love)".
   Lastly, there are my songs, songs I've made up, some serious, some pretty light-hearted and some downright silly. Some I wrote when I was a teenager and then on into my early twenties, mostly about girls and work and many of them, to coin a phrase, angst-driven. After I discovered that my Mum's remains were interred in common ground at Mt. Pleasant cemetery, I ended up writing a song called "The Buried-In-Common-Ground Blues". I wrote this simply while driving around, without having to put a lot of deep thought into it. Generally, this is when the best songs happen. At the other end of the spectrum, I wrote a song about a guy whose girlfriend won't have sex with him because, as it turns out, she's in love with a tennis player. To make matters even worse for the young man, the tennis player turns out to be Martina Navratilova. Probably the crowning achievement of my car songwriting career has been a take-off on Puccini's great aria from "Turandot"--Nessun Dorma. In my version, the title becomes "I Knew Norma".

   Unfortunately, no one has heard or will likely ever hear any of these self-written car songs. The glory of singing in the car is the anonymity and relative privacy. I do tend to turn down the volume a touch at stoplights and in slow-moving traffic. Once I'm back up to speed, though, all bets are off.
   So if you see me in traffic someday and it looks like I'm talking to a passenger in a very exaggerated and demonstrative sort of way and you look and you notice that there is no passenger...well, that's just me and my car songs!
  
  

Fear of heights

   I believe my first misadventure with heights occurred back when I was about four years old, or thereabouts. There was a swing in a tree out behind the duplex we lived in, in Youngstown, Ohio. My dad was pushing me in it and I was going higher and higher and suddenly was terrified.
   I don't know what terrified me. I know that at the apex of the swing there was really nothing between me and the ground. I'm just not sure how I knew that was a bad thing.

don't look down

   Perhaps I fell one day, from someplace high. Perhaps I fell that day, it was long enough ago that my memory is perhaps cloudy enough to not remember the possibly almost tragic result of my ride on that swing. For whatever reason, the fear of being in a high place has been with me for a long time.
   Fortunately, I have been able to avoid situations where I might actually have to deal with this fear. Any time I have had to deal with it, it has been something which crept up on me that I was unable to plan ahead for.


   Back in 1973, my Dad and my brother Bob and I made a trip back to Gibsons, B.C. for a visit. My mum had passed away in the spring and we just wanted to connect with the family we had there. One day, my Dad, my Uncle Keith and my brother and I decided to climb Soames Hill. Soames Hill towers over the main harbour at Gibsons and provides a wonderful view of the town and surrounding islands. We set out for its base one afternoon and began climbing. At the beginning, it was a fairly gradual ascent. Little by little, though, things got steeper and the landscape more difficult to traverse. At some point, I found myself inching my way up a sheer rock face. It had been a path which simply narrowed, got steeper and then petered out into merely footholds. I had been looking up for the most part, trying to find the easiest way. There stopped being easy ways and I made the mistake of looking down. I was about a hundred feet up in the air and knew, from where I was and what was below me, that I would not survive a fall from there. I was paralyzed, almost sick to my stomach, and seemingly unable to go up or back down. Eventually, my Dad and Uncle talked me through taking very small steps forward and I finally found myself at the top of the rock face. From there, things were easy and we ended up at the peak of Soames Hill, looking out over Gibsons. We took pictures up there but none of them contain any of the real terror I'd undergone getting there.

The view I survived to see.

   I think little bits of that day have followed me around--a watermark of fear had been created which has been etched indelibly on my psyche. Part of the dynamic going on was the feeling I had that falling off that rock face would have ended the almost unbearable fear I had been experiencing. I now wonder how many other people who might have been in similar but perhaps even more dire and inescapable situations simply decided to jump and end the fear.
   I now approach high rise balcony railings very gingerly and test them before I actually lean up against them. I then am able to lean out and look over or simply take in the view. Often, however, I almost forget what I am doing and suddenly what feels like tiny electrical shocks pass up the backs of my legs as I realize once again just how high up I am. I almost imagine there is no railing and I am suspended in space, then falling.
   In what seems to me an unthinkable and almost evil  incongruity, it is much easier to climb to a high place than it is to get back down. I found myself needing to get on to our roof last weekend to check things out before the remnants of Hurricane Sandy blew through. Getting up on the roof was not an issue. My unreasonable fear kicked in, however, when it was time to get back down. I had had a dream earlier that week that I found myself suddenly on a rickety and narrow footbridge suspended over a several hundred foot drop into a river.  I was terrified and wanted to jump, to end the fear. Little bits of this dream came back to me while looking down from the edge of the roof. Jumping off the roof, in a twisted way, seemed almost preferable to the fear involved in being suspended up high for the three or four seconds it would take to orient myself on the top of the ladder. I approached the ladder more than once and had to back off. I have been on the roof several times before and had to keep reminding myself of this as I finally negotiated my way back down.

   I even found it difficult to to Google fear of heights, in order to get a pic or two for this post. It is way too easy to superimpose myself into many of the pictures you find when you do this particular search. Each and every time I got that same electrical pulse up the backs of my legs and an almost metallic taste in my mouth, in my fear.
   This loathing of heights generally does not impede my ability to function normally on a daily basis (apart from making it a bit of an adventure to clean my eaves troughs) and I have never had any particular need to address it in any corrective way. The technical term for a fear of heights is acrophobia. There is apparently some debate as to its cause and treatment. Some believe it occurs as the result of an early childhood trauma, others believe it is an innate part of a person that they are born with. Some believe it has something to do with how we process the visual cues we need in order to perform motor activities. As a brief example, the visual cues available to me at the top of the ladder (grey sky, other rooftops) are vastly different than the ones at the bottom of the ladder (solid earth being one of them).

   Fear of heights is not something I am particularly ashamed of. It is certainly common enough. And it almost makes sense, to have some level of fear of potentially dangerous situations. At least up to the point where it paralyzes you.
   So you will never see me working on a skyscraper and you will never see me piloting a hot air balloon and you will never see me rock climbing in the Grand Canyon. My friends will all be in low places and, hopefully, the only lofty things I will need to deal with will be my aspirations!