On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1969)

My favourite Bond film is On Her Majesty's Secret Service. I saw the film first as a seven-year-old, one of the half dozen or so films my father took me to because he wanted to see them.

I recognized the Countessa (Diana Rigg) from television's The Avengers (1961-1969), and I think that was the moment I learned that people in movies are not their characters, only the jobs they take, like the job that took my father from our house at 5:30am weekday mornings because the New York and Toronto stock exchanges opened at 6am Pacific time.

Since that first screening (at the Dunbar Theatre, where I recently saw the latest Bond film, No Time to Die) I have seen OHMSS a half dozen times, and this time what struck me most was how badly it was dubbed, Bond's parts in particular. A leading reason why might relate to how badly one-time-only Bond George Lazenby was alleged to have behaved on set. Bond's post-production voice carries equal parts condescension, diffidence, frustration and disdain.

Bond franchise holder Albert R. Broccoli once said that Lazenby, at his best, was the ideal Bond, and I thought so too as a seven-year-old. But what did I know? I had never seen a Bond film before. Nor did I have any desire to see the next one (Diamonds Are Forever, 1971) after learning that Diana Rigg would not be in it. "Her character was killed," said my father, to which I replied, "Yes, but not the person who played her!"

Made/Unmade

A couple weeks ago Monte Clark Gallery opened an eight picture exhibition by the lens-based artist Stephen Waddell, entitled Made/Unmade.

Given the design of the gallery's main display room, viewers are encouraged to move counter-clockwise, and so it is that we experience on the east and north walls a pair of delaminated circular tables, the hollow insides of figurative statuary (front and back?) and a forgotten graveyard featuring a more solid form of (granite) statuary -- in this instance, a kneeling, grieving figure, head bowed. 

Moving to the west wall, a picture of an art school hallway, where against its high walls lean paintings, presumably made over the course of an academic year. On the same west wall, a young worker untangling a piece of rope at what looks like Vancouver's Jericho Sailing Club. On the south wall is a single picture, this one of a dead-faced figure, mid-40s, alone on a chain carousel as it swings clockwise towards us.

Both the exhibition title and its counter-clockwise orientation suggest an undoing. The tables were made, and functioned as such (socially circular) until something (a flood?) brought about their decay. As for the two hollow statues, are they halves of a single statue (halved for what reason?), or were they designed to stand "proud" from a wall, their hollowness or incompletion hidden? As for the monumental grave marker, it is categorically less the subject of its picture than its signifier: a graveyard, yes, but a landscape first and foremost.  

That the first two walls carry the petit genre troika of still-life (tables), portraiture (hollow statues) and landscape (graveyard) has bearing on how I process Waddell's art school hallway. If not of the petit genres, does this art school scene, then, belong to something grand -- like a history painting? And if so, the history of what? The past school year? The past year of COVID? Or because the work is double dated (2012-2021), the past nine years, a decade that has seen a shift not only in political economy, but in technology, ethics and aesthetics? Is this decade the knot our young worker is trying disentangle, unmake, make sense of, or is it something this worker has unconsciously succumbed to? Is this decade what haunts the eyes of the figure on the chain carousel, someone insanely conscious of what has transpired, to the point where this figure can no longer go on in any direction, but in circles?

Made/Unmade closes November 13th. Please see it.

Finding Nothing

Gregory Betts's Finding Nothing: the Vangardes, 1959-1975 (Toronto: U of T, 2021) arrived last month. I have just finished the 110 page "Introduction" (roughly 34.5% of the book) and am stimulated enough to review it. Not here, but for Ormsby. 

Michael Morris's The Problem of Nothing (1966, in gouache; 1967, in acrylic) makes a nice cover, no? I thought so when I chose it for the cover of my SFU Gallery exhibition pamphlet in 2010. Ray Johnson thought enough of it (reproduced in a 1968 issue of Artforum) that he cut it up, collaged it and sent it back to Morris, with an invitation to participate in his correspondence art project. I expect someone will see fit to use it again at some point. A problem that keeps on giving.

The Fellowship of the Ring (2001)

"The world is changing," intones Saruman before his crystal ball. The scene is from The Fellowship of the Ring, the first of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, released on December 19, 2001, soon to be twenty years ago, though it feels like it has been around forever.

The change Saruman announces is not an observation but a desire, a product of his own unrelenting will. For those unfamiliar with Tolkien's books, we don't know why Saruman wants the world to change, only that change is not good but evil -- an evil designed to wipe out Dwarves, Elves, Hobbits and Men. Only Orks are welcome in this changed world, and one wonders why?

I have never read the Tolkien trilogy (I read The Hobbit when I was eleven), so I wonder how much attention Tolkien gives to Orks and Ork culture in his books. Presumably a lot, given his interest in history. But what are these Orks if not workers and soldiers, mostly male-like (the one instance where a female-like Ork appears is on the battlefield, and is of a higher rank). As for Ork ambitions, they seem limited to following orders -- mining metals, making mega-Orks, going to battle. In the two or three scenes where Orks are amongst themselves, they sip gruel, bicker, fight each other -- over stuff.

The first Lord of the Rings book was published in the summer of 1954, a year-and-a-half after the death of Joseph Stalin. Did Tolkien have Stalin and his alleged dictatorship of the proletariat in my mind when he thought up Saruman and his Orks? As for his Dwarves, Elves, Hobbits and Men, all belong to a feudal mode of production. Somewhere between the two, in the evolutionary middle, is a liberal democracy that had yet to be invented, implemented.

Among the changes in my lifetime is a liberal democracy that has lost the ability to present itself as the antithesis of evil while at the same time doing evil things under the guise of freedom and liberty (neoliberalism), usually in the service of that one-percent who control most of the world's wealth. People are wise to call bullshit on it, but what is the alternative? Trumpism? Putinism? Chinese state capitalism? In the Black Panther franchise, subjects are happy under a king. Same too of Tolkien's subjects. Is there a middle anymore? In anything? A Middle Earth, as it were?

Fall Titles

I don't know where to begin (and wonder if I should begin at all) with this Publisher's Weekly ad. Curious, I went to the Simon & Schuster website, and found this: 

Poop is a normal kid, with normal problems— you know, parents, homework, bullies. He used to have a normal name, too. But then he moved to a new school, and everything went down the toilet. That’s the bad news. The good news: Turns out some names are special. Some names come with powers. Turns out those bullies really stepped in it.

SOMETIMES BEING A KID CAN REALLY STINK.

Will Poupé becomes the new target of bullies at his middle school. All day long, they call him Poop. However, when Icky the Janitor reveals himself to be a wizard in disguise, Will learns that there are Names of Power – if you are given one of these names, you gain certain abilities. Poop is one of those names. He now has powers that he could use to get back at the bullies! But power – even poop power – is exactly what can turn someone into a bully. With some help from his friends, Will must find a way to use his fantastic farting magic for good.

An original graphic novel.

Okay, I get it. Turning what's imposed on you into a super power. But as with any power comes negative consequences, potentially turning the avenger into an oppressor -- or in this case, a well-intentioned book into a loaded weapon. 

Poop is an allegory, but unlike the word it alludes to, its word is in general use and is accepted when describing a certain bodily function, whereas the allusive word has a hateful history and can only be used by those it is hurled at.

Would I give this book to a child, as a tool of antiracism? No. Would I give it to a child in an effort to help them understand why it might have the opposite effect? God no! (Talk about digging an even deeper hole!) Does Poop come with a teaching guide? I would hope so. And if so, that's the book I'd like to read. 

Semiotic Weapons: the "Nerf or Nothing" Ultimatum

The Toys R Us catalogue arrived yesterday. As usual, it is filled with models -- kids playing with toys in an effort to excite interest in them. Only this time it is exclusively BIPOC kids pointing the guns ("blasters"), and never at each other. Who or what is their out-of-frame target? And why are these kids always smiling. It's all so -- hopeful? 

Check out the ad copy:

The satisfying "ka-chunk" of re-loading. The "pop" of foam darts. And the belly-deep shouts and laughs that come from ducking, dodging, and chasing after opponents. You don't have to be a kid to enjoy blowing off some steam with this fast-paced indoor or outdoor blaster battle -- you just have to join in the fray.

What is the significance of this ad? What does it signify? Inclusion? Or is it as "simple" as a target market -- getting BIPOC parents of BIPOC kids to buy more "blasters"? 

Today's Weather

The coast is windy, says the news. At first it was a local story: record low barometric pressure, a "bomb cyclone" made up of hurricane force winds and rain. A couple hours later it led off the national news. Now it is an international story with reports of an "atmospheric river" so powerful that it has turned San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge from a work of transportation infrastructure into the world's largest wind chime.

How many MFA students will be out there today capturing its sounds for future projects -- from those eager to catalogue its tones (the minimalist) to those (expressionists) who need only a three-to-five second clip to abstract into something even further removed from its source?