I know it will be very, very silly but the effects alone are guaranteed to rock you from the big screen.
WHEN in the course of human Events, it becomes necessary….
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Intellectual disgrace
Stares from every human face,
And the seas of pity lie
Locked and frozen in each eye.
Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice.
With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress.
In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountains start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.
– – WH Auden
Sometimes it seems I had a dream, and, as a dreamer woke immersed in mineral baths closed within a cool, dark chamber fed by streams flowing in from the center of nowhere.
Hanging from the granite ceiling a kerosene lantern cast shards of light through the pale steam rising from the surface of the pools.
Ripples radiated outwards from the edges of my body and tapping faintly on the rock revealed the edges of the chamber.
Outside I could hear the wind slide across the spine of the mountains, speaking in a language that I remembered but could no longer understand.
Steam filled my nostrils and heat penetrated my bones until, after a time, I had no body, only a sense of silence and distance and calm.
As if I had just woken from all water into dream.
— Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, 1973
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The steel mill sky is alive.
The fire breaks white and zigzag
shot on a gun-metal gloaming.
Man is a long time coming.
Man will yet win.
Brother may yet line up with brother:
This old anvil laughs at many broken hammers.
There are men who can’t be bought.
The fireborn are at home in fire.
The stars make no noise,
You can’t hinder the wind from blowing.
Time is a great teacher.
Who can live without hope?
In the darkness with a great bundle of grief
the people march.
In the night, and overhead a shovel of stars for keeps, the people
march:
“Where to? what next?”
— Carl Sandberg
Down valley a smoke haze
Three days heat, after five days rain
Pitch glows on the fir-cones
Across rocks and meadows
Swarms of new flies.
I cannot remember things I once read
A few friends, but they are in cities.
Drinking cold snow-water from a tin cup
Looking down for miles
Through high still air.
BY GARY SNYDER
Starry-eyed an’ laughing as I recall when we were caught
Trapped by no track of hours for they hanged suspended
As we listened one last time an’ we watched with one last look
Spellbound an’ swallowed ’til the tolling ended
Tolling for the aching ones whose wounds cannot be nursed
For the countless confused, accused, misused, strung-out ones an’ worse
An’ for every hung-up person in the whole wide universe
An’ we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing
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That is no country for old men. The young
In one another’s arms, birds in the trees
—Those dying generations—at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.
An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.
O sages standing in God’s holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.
Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.
– – W. B. Yeats, 1865 – 1939
Stone-cutters fighting time with marble, you foredefeated
Challengers of oblivion
Eat cynical earnings, knowing rock splits, records fall down,
The square-limbed Roman letters
Scale in the thaws, wear in the rain. The poet as well
Builds his monument mockingly;
For man will be blotted out, the blithe earth die, the brave sun
Die blind and blacken to the heart:
Yet stones have stood for a thousand years, and pained
thoughts found
The honey of peace in old poems.
— Robinson Jeffers
Sometimes it seems I had a dream, and, as a dreamer woke immersed in mineral baths closed within a cool, dark chamber fed by streams flowing in from the center of nowhere.
Hanging from the granite ceiling a kerosene lantern cast shards of light through the pale steam rising from the surface of the pools.
Ripples radiated outwards from the edges of my body and tapping faintly on the rock revealed the edges of the chamber.
Outside I could hear the wind slide across the spine of the mountains, speaking in a language that I remembered but could no longer understand.
Steam filled my nostrils and heat penetrated my bones until, after a time, I had no body, only a sense of silence and distance and calm.
As if I had just woken from all water into dream.
— Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, 1973
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I’ll watch it in the best theater in the world.
Damn it! They moved the opening out to October.
I binged the Craig movies twice, and the Sean Connerys once, but it’s been a long fake pandemic. It’s good to keep up on your espionage and spy fiction; it informs you of the cloak and dagger shit bring pulled in real life.
Like: a sequel to 1/6 but nobody came to it. Because: fool me once (is enough). DC is a bad Bond film, complete with central casting bufoons such as the ones one post up from this.
On your reminder, I just went and bought Goldfinger and Thunderball.
My collection slowly expands.
Bought From Russia With Love and Dr No earlier this year and watched both.
I was but a child when the James Bond adventure started, and now as an old dood it continues.
The first 12 or so I watched in theaters (drive in and sit down) and the rest were enjoyed in the greatest theater in the world.
When a James Bond flik came out my dad announced, “Get in the car (stationwagon), we’re going to the movies.” My mother would load up the big Coleman container with rootbeer and a bunch of them little plastic cups with duckies all over them for us kids and her and my dad drank it out of full size glasses. She also filled a basket with sandwiches, chips, Brach’s candy, napkins, etc. Then we’d head to the Silver Springs drive in down by Mechanicsburg, the home of Bobby Rahal.
My 20 year old son (neither he nor my 18 Y.O. daughter care for James Bond) asked me what movie to watch with Bond – which one was the best. I had to say: Thunderball. It was a tough call.
The remasters are great, huh? Even YOLT got all of a sudden really cool.
That pistol my dad brought back from the war is essentially the James Bond pistol, 7.65. Although I’ve never fired it.
Ghost-
If you have a Roku TV, the Pluto Channel is currently running all the Bond movies (except the Dan Craig ones) for FREE and “on demand.” I record them and edit out the gazillion commercials.
Great stuff.
Bond films have usually—with the exception of those with campy Roger Moore—been worth a look. It has been hard to watch Daniel Craig in the roll as Bond since Craig is in real life (does such a thing exist for an actor?) an anti-gun weakling who grows faint at his own blood.
This latest iteration of Craig as Bond is riddled with feminist agit-prop. And Lashana (quick…guess her race!) Lynch is a negress to boot. A twofer!
We have gone from Sean Connery slapping the butt of a “Bond girl” to Daniel Craig being shamed and humbled by a black ‘OO’. In the next Bond film no doubt a black, lesbian and ultra-feminist ‘OO’ will slap Craig’s butt. And he’ll like it.
Conservative reviewers have said that the new movie is nowhere near as woke as the previews threatened. They had an extra year. Perhaps the hostile reaction to the preview and suggestions that the next Bond would be a girl were noticed and heeded
I think Craig is the best Bond. When they rebooted starting with Casino Royale, I was thrilled as finally a Bond that was portrayed as Fleming intended, an assassin. Never could get past the light hearted quipping of Connery. I began reading the books in 5th grade and I took them seriously.
Brosnan also was good and I pretty much skipped all of Moores’
This one looks good. I’ll be there.
Go ahead Boomer, promote your own demise! You welcome your death.
Are you trying to be a Vox Day clone?
Evidently a VoxDayite… and after I’ve dumped all Vox’s links and platforms from my daily rounds.
Poor Alex-
He’s having another bad day after wetting the bed again.
Stop exaggerating. Alex did not “wet the bed”. He wet his diapers. There is a difference you see. Be specific please.
Enjoyed Bond from a very young age. Tower Theatre, Roseville Calif with my parents, dad with his white shirt and tie, mom with her hair high, enough Aqua Net,,,,,,,,to slow a raging 40 mph storm in her hair, zero movement,,,,, well maybe a 1/2 percent shift to windward.
VI
I don’t want to watch this movie, so I won’t.
The second movie was the best. The first was off Broadway, then they found their legs. It was also the last small movie, which had a lot to do with it being the apogee of the franchise. Special effects are a substitute for quality.
Craig was a plus for the franchise, the first since Connery. As an actor. Connery is a man who is an actor, one of the few.
And Connery was a “man’s man”:
“While in Edinburgh, Connery was targeted by the Valdor gang, one of the most violent in the city. He was first approached by them in a billiard hall where he prevented them from stealing his jacket and was later followed by six gang members to a 15-foot-high balcony at the Palais de Danse. There, Connery singlehandedly launched an attack against the gang members, grabbing one by the throat and another by a biceps and cracked their heads together.”
And recall Connery’s handling of mob boss Mickey Cohen’s underling Johnny Stompanato:
“Stompanato stormed onto the film set and pointed a gun at Connery, only to have Connery disarm him and knock him flat on his back.”
The argument was over a woman. Naturally. Those were the days.
Daniel Craig was in his role as James Bond when he accompanied the Queen to the formal opening of the London Olympics in 2012:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1AS-dCdYZbo&ab_channel=Olympics
Another Bond update: “Actor Daniel Craig has been made an honorary Commander in the Royal Navy – matching the on-screen rank of James Bond. Commander Craig’s appointment as an honorary officer reflects his personal support for UK Armed Forces and links it with the legacy created through the guise of the fictional British secret agent. . . . The Royal Navy actually has a few real-life Bonds within its ranks. Lieutenant Commander Frances Bond, who serves at the Royal Navy’s headquarters in Portsmouth, was invited to meet Daniel Craig ahead of the launch of the new film. Lt Cdr Bond said: ‘I’ve had my fair share of light-hearted banter from colleagues over being a real-life Bond but I never imagined I would actually one day get to meet the actor who played him.”
Photos of Craig in his Commander’s uniform at the link:
https://www.royalnavy.mod.uk/news-and-latest-activity/news/2021/september/23/210923-daniel-craig-honorary-commander