Pursuit and Tomorrow
I walk to twelve branches of the public library and read seventeen books in one day. I read an art book and a memoir. I watch four pictures.
Read and Stride
This time, with the benefit of some better planning, I was able to hit twelve branches of the library system (and five Little Free Libraries) in one day of walking. It came out to over sixteen miles, much of it in crazy ricocheting around the southeastern quadrant of San Francisco and on up around the northern rim through several of my favorite areas.
Started at the LFL near Silver and Cambridge, where I dropped off the paperback copy of Moby-Dick and grabbed a children’s book called The Blue Parakeet by Margaret Gould and illustrated by Lorraine L. Arthur. I read it and left it in another LFL by Silver and Ledyard, where I found a board book called Doggies: a counting and barking book by Sandra Boynton. I left Doggies in an LFL by Neptune and Thornton, which had no books worth taking.
At the Bayview branch I read a seasonally-appropriate board book called Easter with text by Carine Laforest and illustrations culled from Shutterstock and Colorlife (not clear what this quite means in terms of who actually made the images). I also read Clifford's Happy Easter by Norman Bridwell. According to the complete reading list, I last read a Bridwell (non-Clifford) book in 2020, though I have no recollection thereof.
From there I walked to the Bernal Heights branch (past a warehouse where I briefly worked a long time ago, and near the location of my friends’ house that they lost in a fire). At Bernal I read Fancy Nancy, illustrated by Robin Preiss Glasser and written by Jane O'Connor, before hitting the pavement once more and hiking over toward the Glen Park branch.
On the way there I came across an LFL at the corner of Arlington and Roanoke and made a good find: The Berenstain Bears' New Baby by Stan & Jan Berenstain, which upon reading I instantly recalled loving as a child because I really dug the idea of living in a house inside of a hollowed-out tree with a big set of wooden steps, and liked the cutaway illustrations of the interior layout. When I was a kid we had a small collection of Berenstain books around and I’m really glad I came across this one specifically.
At the Glen Park branch I read Let's Be Bees by the distinguished children’s book author Shawn Harris, creator of one of the best children’s books I’ve ever read.
I started on an impooooooosing movement up over Diamond Heights, stopping on the way to drop off the Berenstain book in an LFL on Diamond Street. On the other side of the Heights I walked down towards the Noe Valley branch, which used to be my regular branch when I lived in that neighborhood some years back. I settled on Tiptoe Tiger by Jane Clarke, illustrated by Britta Teckentrup, and after reading it I headed towards the Mission, stopping for a coffee and croissant on the way.
The old Mission library building is undergoing renovation; the Mission branch is currently housed in a different building around the corner. Inside of it I read the best book of the day, the marvelously-illustrated Skeletown: Más. ¡Menos! by Rhode Montijo. His confident, high-contrast, old-meets-new Dio de los Muertos illustration style merits further exploration.
On to the Potrero library. Dirty Harry grew up in this neighborhood. I read San Francisco ABC: A Larry Gets Lost book, written and illustrated by John Skewes. The complete reading list shows that I read this once before, in 2020 while living not in San Francisco. At the Mission Bay branch I read Cat on the Bus by Aram Kim.
At the Main Library branch, where I did my weeks-long training back in the previous decade to start doing volunteer work as an adult literacy tutor, I read Good Golden Sun by Brendan Wenzel. At the Chinatown branch I read Hello Day by Charlie Mylie.
At the North Beach branch, where I obtained the Beat books I was reading last November, I wanted to read at least one grownup book on this day of walking and reading. I ended up going with a book of mostly-not-terrible Beat poetry by someone named Jack Micheline called Outlaw of the Lowest Planet. I also came across a short book of koans by Jack Kerouac called The Scripture of the Golden Eternity that I decided to take with me and read later, which I started doing at the bar that evening while soothing my creaky joints from the day’s walking.
From North Branch and Micheline I walked to the Marina branch where I read John Lennon, written by Maria Isabel Sánchez Vegara and illustrated by Octavia Bromell for the “Little People, Big Dreams” series of children’s books I frequent. Apparently this Lennon fellow was quite a famous, talented and successful musician.
The twelfth and last library branch I visited on foot that day was the Golden Gate Valley branch, where I read two books: When We Are Kind by Monique Gray Smith and illustrated by Nicole Neidhardt, and Great Day for UP by Dr. Seuss with pictures by Quentin Blake, the guy who used to do all those quirky illustrations for Roald Dahl books. According to the biographical indicia at the back of the book, this was the first book Dr. Seuss asked someone else to draw for him!
So that’s eight branches on the first walk and twelve on this one. I have eight more to hit in the last walk. In the days after this second walk I also made two further additions to the complete reading list. I read a book of art called Gerhard Richter: Engadin. The artwork is by Richter, whose stuff I wanted to study and consider as inspiration for one of my experimental sketchbooks, and an accompanying essay is by one Dieter Schwarz, with a foreword by three other people with long names and titles and affiliations.
I also read The Hilliker Curse: My Pursuit of Women: A Memoir by James Ellroy. It was much better and more readable than I was dreading, quite entertaining and easy to imbibe, more so than his other book-length memoir. But it is an odd text, and it ends with him professing his love and commitment to the woman he was seeing at that time in 2010, whereas I follow his press enough to know that he’s back with his ex-wife Helen Knode. Knode is a significant figure in this book and I wonder how she or Ellroy feel about it today, since at book’s end he seems to come to a thoroughly misguided certainty about who of the several important women he’s loved and written about is the one that’s best for him to be with long-term. This memoir is well-written and entertaining, but the premise seems undermined by the conclusion.
In any case, as far as I know, I have now read every available published word of Ellroy’s work to date.
Film Selections: All Brosnan Bond
This is where I came in. Pierce Brosnan was “my” Bond, taking over the role when I was a kid and performing in the 1995 film that got me interested in the character. Which film of course also was adapted into a legendary multiplayer Nintendo game that for American men of my vintage remains a foundational part of our personality-formation — proximity mines in the Facility bathroom, “slappers only” in the Temple, no self-respecting competitor plays as Oddjob, all that. If you were there you know what I’m talking about.
GoldenEye, directed by Martin Campbell, 1995. A number of sweeping updates outfit the franchise for a post-Cold War environment and stick the landing with aplomb, producing one of the best films of the entire series.
M is now a woman (does that make her a Bond girl?), brilliantly recast and played wonderfully by a crisp and cool Judi Dench. She tells Bond that he’s a Cold War relic while Moneypenny, now played by Samantha Bond, correctly tells Bond that he is sexist. Brosnan steps into Bond’s bespoke suits with suavity and self-assurance; he’s unbelievably handsome and dashing, a great fit for the role.
Campbell’s slick and confident direction gives the franchise a fresher look for the Nineties, and a solid script by Jeffrey Caine and Bruce Feirstein finds an interesting solution to the conundrum of what to do with Bond in the wake of the Cold War. It turns out that the greatest threat comes from within MI6, with the villain in this piece being none other than Bond’s friend and peer agent 006, played by the great popcorn movie thespian Sean Bean.
GoldenEye has hands down two of the all-time best Bond girls (three if lady-M counts):
Xenia Onatopp, henchwoman to Bean’s villain character, played by the impossibly gorgeous Famke Janssen, who is phenomenally batshit in the part of a lethal BDSM-type villainess who gets sexually overheated by violence. Janssen as Xenia is my current favorite Bond girl ever.
Izabella Scorupco as the “good Bond girl,” the resourceful, pretty, intelligent, sassy, sexy Russian computer programmer Natalya, who helps Bond foil his ex-friend 006’s plot to use a Russian satellite-weapon to hold the Bank of England for ransom.
Since this isn’t strictly speaking a reboot, they are running with the continuity that Felix Leiter is dead, so Joe Don Baker comes back from his villain role in The Living Daylights to play Bond’s new CIA contact Jack Wade. A prodigious young Alan Cumming chomps scenery as Natalya’s programming rival who is helping 006. Desmond Llewelyn maintains as Q in the movie’s goofiest scene, showcasing how GoldenEye bottles its Bond silliness effectively, keeping it contained to certain scenes and settings and giving prestigious actors like Brosnan, Bean and Dench fairly serious material with which to make something great. A solid story takes Bond to Monte Carlo (where he encounters Xenia across a baccarat table), Russia and Cuba and sets up a dispute between M’s modern number-crunching intelligence methods and Bond’s preference for intimate and violent means of espionage. The decay of the USSR is adeptly written into a story of the West threatening to turn on itself amidst the cautious optimism of the mid-Nineties.
This is a great entry in the series, one of the best Bond films. It’s much better than I thought it was at twenty or thirty, and precisely as good as I thought it was as an adolescent kid when it became the first Bond movie I ever saw in a theater. Highly recommended.
Tomorrow Never Dies, directed by Roger Spottiswoode, 1997. The rest of Brosnan’s run declines steadily in quality and curiously mimics much of the Moore era (for better and worse). The movies once more grow broader, quippier, shallower and sillier, though these middle two Brosnans are relatively good overall. They’re very unoriginal, but they’re competently made and the time goes by fast when you’re watching because of decent action, okay writing and strong acting support.
Tomorrow Never Dies involves Bond going after a nefarious media magnate played by a fun-having Jonathan Pryce who is using a proprietary stealth submarine to manipulate hostilities between China and Britain so he can control newspaper headlines before they happen. It’s a good premise and reflects the anxieties of its time, with Pryce’s character seemingly being modeled on Rupert Murdoch. The story takes Bond to Hamburg, where he seduces Pryce’s character’s wife, played by then-sought-after television actor Teri Hatcher, and on to Vietnam where he partners up with a high-kicking and badass Chinese intelligence operative played capably by Michelle Yeoh. She and Brosnan have a great scene together where they have to flee from bad guys on a motorcycle while handcuffed together, necessitating Yeoh’s character to straddle Bond’s lap and shoot behind him while he drives.
This felt like a microwaved update of ideas from past Bonds, but for some reason it all kinda works and is reasonably good fun. It’s missing most of the qualities of greatness from the film before, but it’s not bad at all. Brosnan and company keepin’ it at a simmer.
The World Is Not Enough, directed by Michael Apted, 1999. This one was helmed by a great director who worked on some of my favorite films, the Loretta Lynn biopic Coal Miner’s Daughter and the documentary Up series. His Bond film is an enjoyable if shaky and unoriginal entry that has some good qualities and some increasingly dumb ones.
Sophie Marceau registers a good performance as a Bondgenue businesswoman who eventually turns out to be the film’s chief villain, a nice writing choice. Robert Carlyle performs suitably as her terrorist abettor who is set up as the main bad guy before the twist. Denise Richards is awful as a pointy-breasted nuclear scientist in a wet undershirt who is named Christmas just so that Bond can make Christmas-themed seduction quips at her. Desmond Llewelyn must have either been intentionally retiring or getting let go, because they write in a Q-helper played by John Cleese who fully takes over as the new Q in the next film.
This is a by-the-numbers Bond film that gets kinda dumb but is buoyed by competent direction, some entertaining action and very good acting from the principals (with the exception of the out-of-her-depth Richards).
Die Another Day, directed by Lee Tamahori, 2002. They hired another reputable prestige director for this one but it couldn’t save Brosnan’s last film from being a pile of dogshit, one of the worst in the whole series.
This is the first Bond film after 9/11, before the Batman and Bond films of the rest of the Aughts became dystopian meditations on terrorism and endless war and warrantless surveillance and stuff like that. It finds the series at a cultural moment where the producers evidently had little idea what Bond was meant to represent, so aside from one allusion by M to the world having “changed,” they just ignore it and retreat into an overcooked Bond-cliche screenplay and some unbelievably bad special effects. Over-reliance on cheap-looking, clumsy CGI is this film’s chief offense, but it is not helped by sloppy dialogue and some surprisingly bad acting by Halle Berry. Toby Stephens, an actor I liked when he played Kim Philby in Cambridge Spies, is one of the few good things about Die Another Day, playing a bizarre, deliciously snide and fun if nonsensically implausible villain. Rosamund Pike provides a constrained and inoffensive performance as a lethal double-agent Bond girl. Judi Dench is in fine form as M.
Die Another Day starts out with an interesting premise in which Bond gets imprisoned and tortured in North Korea, leading to his disgrace in the eyes of M and MI6. I don’t want to get into the rest of the premise because it’s too stupid, but it involves surfing, and some bullshit about using experimental DNA technology to change facial features, and a palace made entirely of ice, and an INVISIBLE CAR with which Q outfits Bond, and Michael Madsen thoroughly half-assing his role as a rude CIA boss, perhaps because he could plainly see how bad the script was.
The theme songs are generally decent in the Brosnan era: Tina Turner, Sheryl Crowe and Garbage doing good performances of just-fine songs for the first three films respectively. The Madonna-performed song for Die Another Die, a soulless electro-dance assemblage characteristic of the over-technologized mass media culture of the era, might be my least-favorite Bond song so far. Madonna has the distinction of being the first Bond song-singer (unless I’m forgetting someone?) to also appear as an actor in the same movie, delivering a few lines of dialogue with Brosnan for the duration of one scene.
Connery, Craig, and one-timer Lazenby had mixed records like all Bond actors but got the dignity of registering okay-to-good movies as their final Bond outings. Brosnan’s exquisitely beautiful face and charismatic coolness are ideal for the role, but he sits alongside Moore and Dalton as Bond actors whose final Bond films were creatively unsuccessful. Really, really bad in Brosnan’s case. (Unless he’s not done, unless he comes back as an aging Bond or a villain, about which there have been some press rumors circulating since Amazon acquired the rights to the film series and are gearing up for the next cache of films.)
Anyway, since I have seen all of the Daniels, I am now a fellow who has seen every single extant James Bond film at least once. But I’m still going to rewatch all the Daniels just so I can say I’ve seen the whole franchise in order of release date. And I should probably read at least one of Ian Fleming’s original 007 novels…