Isegoria

Eric Felten gives a surprisingly thorough run-down of James Bond’s drink selections in Martinis Only? Not James Bond:

Bond’s first drink on record occurs some 30 pages into Fleming’s debut novel, ‘Casino Royale.’ He strolls into a bar at a French resort hotel and orders … an Americano.

A what? An Americano is made of Campari, sweet vermouth, and soda water over ice in a highball glass. One of my favorite cocktails, with its perfect balance of bitter and sweet, the Americano is admittedly an acquired taste. Yet it was so popular among Americans visiting Italy at the turn of the last century that it was named after them. Nowadays it is obscure enough to be a fair test of your favorite bartender’s skills.

Bond’s taste for Americanos is explained in the short story ‘From a View to a Kill,’ which starts with Bond licensed to kill time in Paris. ‘One cannot drink seriously in French cafes,’ Fleming writes. ‘Out of doors on a pavement in the sun is no place for vodka or whisky or gin.’ Instead, one makes the best of the ‘musical comedy drinks’ appropriate to the venue, in which case ‘Bond always had the same thing — an Americano.’

Fleming knew that in drink no less than food, it pays to play to an establishment’s strength. When Bond grabs a roadhouse lunch with Felix Leiter in ‘Diamonds Are Forever,’ he doesn’t waste time elucidating the comparative virtues of shaking vs. stirring; he just orders a beer (a Miller High Life, at that).

When in Jamaica, 007 favors gin-and-tonics extra heavy on juice from the island’s fresh limes. When Bond trails Auric Goldfinger to Geneva, he relaxes with a tot of Enzian, “the firewater distilled from gentian,” the root of an Alpine wildflower. In the Athens airport he knocks back Ouzo; in Turkey it’s Raki. At Saratoga racetrack, he drinks Old-Fashioneds and “Bourbon and branch” (i.e., water). And when Bond goes out to lunch in London, he orders one of the most distinctively British of drinks, a Black Velvet. Equal parts champagne and Guinness stout, a Black Velvet might sound awful, but proves to be startlingly good in the drinking — I find it tastes curiously and deliciously like hard cider.

But 007 doesn’t always bow to local custom. In “Casino Royale” Bond for the first and only time invents a drink, a “special martini.” He specifies to the barman, “Three measures of Gordon’s, one of vodka, half a measure of Kina Lillet. Shake it very well until it’s ice-cold, then add a large thin slice of lemon peel. Got it?” Later, he names it a “Vesper,” for his doomed love-interest, fellow British agent Vesper Lynd. When he learns she’d been working for the Russkies, the cocktail is as dead to him as the girl.

It would appear that I’ve read few of Time magazine’s top 100 Novels from 1923 to the present — and many of those I read were either high school reading assignments or genre fiction.

That said, Catch-22 and The Catcher in the Rye were never assigned to me in school — and I’m glad, because I hated them both.

Incidentally, if you look at the Readers’ Choice list, I’ve read most of the top 20:

1. 1984
2. The Lord of the Rings
3. The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe
4. Watchmen
5. To Kill a Mockingbird
6. Things Fall Apart
7. The Great Gatsby
8. The Catcher in the Rye
9. Snow Crash
10. Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret
11. Lolita
12. Catch-22
13. Ubik
14. A Clockwork Orange
15. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
16. Animal Farm
17. Lord of the Flies
18. Slaughterhouse-Five
19. Beloved
20. The Grapes of Wrath
21. Atonement

Years ago, fantasy writer Michael Moorcock attacked the popular works of Tolkien (Lord of the Rings), C.S. Lewis (Chronicles of Narnia), and Richard Adams (Watership Down) as Epic Pooh — comforting, unchallenging, and conservative:

I sometimes think that as Britain declines, dreaming of a sweeter past, entertaining few hopes for a finer future, her middle-classes turn increasingly to the fantasy of rural life and talking animals, the safety of the woods that are the pattern of the paper on the nursery room wall. Old hippies, housewives, civil servants, share in this wistful trance; eating nothing as dangerous or exotic as the lotus, but chewing instead on a form of mildly anaesthetic British cabbage. If the bulk of American sf could be said to be written by robots, about robots, for robots, then the bulk of English fantasy seems to be written by rabbits, about rabbits and for rabbits.

In Into the Woods, James Parker takes a different point of view:

But writing off “Watership Down” as a manifesto of middle-class conservatism misses the point; the book’s unique effect resides not solely in the comforting, cabbage-muffled discourse of the well-behaved rabbits, but in the irruption — into their quiet, grey world — of violence and domination.

For this was the other sphere of Adams’s experience: Prior to his career in government, he’d had an action-packed war, serving in the Middle East and then participating, as an officer in the 1st Airborne Division, in Operation Market Garden, the calamitous and bloody Allied attempt to clear the main bridges in German-occupied Holland. The Second World War shaped him as irresistibly as the first had shaped those other primary English fantasists, Tolkien and Lewis: “I must confess,” wrote Adams, “that it was the high point of my life, and the rest has been little more than an aftermath.”

Active duty is no guarantee against whimsy — A.A. Milne, creator of Winnie the Pooh, was a signals officer at the Battle of the Somme — but the marks of Adams’s war on “Watership Down” are plain. The lines of power in the book are drawn with brutal clarity, from the Owslafa — the Gestapo-like enforcers of General Woundwort’s warren — to the more improvised and benign, but no less efficient, command structure used by Hazel and his band of runaway bucks. And the novel’s violence, ever-threatening, occurs with a terrible, scuffling abruptness, leaving half-severed ears, torn haunches, nostrils filled with blood. The frozen state of “tharn” — defined in the book’s “Lapine Glossary” as “stupefied, distraught, hypnotized with fear” — is a facet of rabbit-hood, certainly, but its human version is shell shock: locked terror, the draining away of courage.

NPR reports on Triumph and Tragedy for Wallace and Gromit:

A fire in Bristol, England, on Monday may have destroyed much of the original work by the creators of the animated movie characters Wallace and Gromit. The fire broke out at a warehouse owned by Aardman Animations. It came on the same weekend that their latest movie opened, and won the weekend box office race, in the United States.

Great non-fiction gets slimmed down looks at Penguin Books’ latest venture:

With its snazzy new ‘Great Ideas’ series released this month, Penguin Books hopes to provide an economical remedy for time-pressed readers in search of intellectual sustenance.

Each of the paperbacks costs $8.95 and offers readers a sampling of the world’s great non-fiction. For example, the Gibbon book is a slim 92-page selection called The Christians and the Fall of Rome. It presents Gibbon as sort of an intellectual tapas to be savored in one sitting.

Oddly, I was just thinking — sincerely — that I really should read Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

(Hat tip to Tyler Cowen.)

Update: Amazon already has a list of the whole line.

Another update: I picked up a not-quite-so-abridged (704-page) copy of Gibbon’s Decline.

I never got around to seeing Sin City, but I meant to. Andrew Klavan’s The Sin of Sin City offers an interesting assessment:

The movie, an almost uncannily accurate reproduction of the Frank Miller cult-classic comic-book series of the same name, is certainly as brilliant as it is bad. It’s brilliant because its black-and-white palette with pulsing intrusions of red, yellow, and blue looks beautiful; because its acute and vertiginous camera angles are thrilling; because its imitation of the comic’s atmosphere is remarkably complete; and because the cast is excellent. It’s bad because all that aesthetic power is put into the service of a masturbatory barbarity.

The film’s interlocking stories are all, essentially, the same story. Boy hurts girl; other boy avenges girl. Along the way, the severed heads of women are mounted on walls, the testicles of rapists are ripped off by hand, women are eaten by men, men are eaten by dogs, throats are cut, brains spattered…. In other words, all those gorgeous visuals ultimately represent nothing more interesting than the internal world of a crawly 12-year-old boy, his alternating fantasies of torturing naked women and of being the strongman who comes to their rescue.

Now, 12-year-old boys are what they are and fantasies are what they are, and I condemn neither. If boys’ consciences didn’t wrestle with their violent desires, there would be no adventure stories. Nor, as my own novels attest, do I object to sex and violence as pure entertainment. Sex and violence are central to entertainment because they are central to the language of our dreams.

But the translation of daydreams into art — even violent, sexy pop art—requires at least some minimal interaction between the raw material and a compassionate conception of the terror and dignity of being human.

Boss-Zilla! describes what it’s like to work for Hollywood producer Scott Rudin, who has gone through 250 assistants in five years:

The producer — who once forced an underling to tape a sign defining the word ‘anticipate’ in huge letters above his desk — says that when he asks follow-up questions about work, assistants often look back at him ‘like I’m speaking Urdu.’ He tells them, ‘When I ask you these questions, have an answer ready. Then I would think you’re intelligent.’

He is also known for a wicked sense of humor: When one assistant routinely sported ink-stained shirt pockets, Mr. Rudin bought him a half-dozen expensive dress shirts at Bergdorf Goodman, which he then had an intern spot with ink blotches.

The atmosphere drives assistants to perform remarkable tasks. In May 2004, for instance, director Stephen Daldry was climbing in the Himalayas when Mr. Rudin became desperate to show him a new screenplay. After an assistant got the pages into the director’s hands in Nepal, Mr. Daldry says he later asked Mr. Rudin in amazement, ‘How did you find me?’ (An assistant got Mr. Daldry’s office to say where he was vacationing, then hired a specialty courier service to take the script to Kathmandu.)

In 1992, L.A.-based assistant Adam Schroeder was asked to deliver an offer to author Terry McMillan, whose best-seller ‘Waiting to Exhale’ was the subject of a bidding war. Mr. Schroeder says he flew to San Francisco on the Fourth of July, then drove to her suburban home, where she answered the door in a bathrobe. Even after Mr. Schroeder helped the writer’s little boy search for a lost rabbit, Mr. Rudin didn’t get the film rights. The loss didn’t get Mr. Schroeder fired. He now operates his own production outfit in Hollywood. Ms. McMillan declined to comment.

Other times when things go wrong, Mr. Rudin lets loose. Former assistants say he sometimes vents his anger by throwing phones and office supplies, prompting assistants to take precautions. Some feared Mr. Rudin might hurl an easily accessible framed picture on his desk, so they surreptitiously moved it out of his reach. Others measured Mr. Rudin’s phone cord so they could keep the appropriate distance. ‘The rookies often stood too close,’ remembers Mr. Evans.

Return of the King notes that Peter Jackson has been publishing video “Production Diaries” of his work on King Kong at Kongisking.net.

It also notes that Peter Jackson has lost his hobbit-belly; he’s lost 70 pounds in the last year.

In addition to working on the movie directly, Jackson is building his movie-making empire:

He is also the sole overseer of a rapidly expanding movie empire. Wellywood, as it’s known to Jackson groupies, encompasses some 1,300 crew members, 7,500 cast members and extras, and hundreds of thousands of square feet of facilities, including soundstages, a motion-capture studio, a props and costume shop, and an antique airplane factory — all scattered across block after block of the Wellington suburbs. When you hire Jackson to direct a movie, Kamins says, “you’re making a deal with a biosphere. With a community.”

The centerpiece of Jackson’s empire is the Weta Workshop, the 65,000-square-foot facility on the site of a former water park outside Wellington. Named after a prehistoric cockroachlike insect indigenous to New Zealand, Weta is an umbrella company encompassing the workshop proper, the f/x shop, and a merchandise company. Lord of the Rings veteran Elijah Wood has called Weta Workshop “Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory, but without the candy.”

I was wondering what “Weta” meant…

I don’t know who jwz is, but Boing Boing pointed to his High Concept:

You may have noticed that there are a whole bunch of ‘celebrity poker’ shows on television these days, where a group of famous people sit around playing cards and being snarky at each other, and they film the whole thing. I can’t imagine too many things more boring than watching someone else play cards, but I guess fishing has a rich TV history too… Anyway, I have an idea, and hopefully one of my many readers in the entertainment industry will make it a reality: Celebrity Dungeons and Dragons.

I want to see a TV show where the flying camera crane zips around the table where Wil Wheaton, Puff Daddy, Michael Madsen, and Lindsay Lohan play D&D. I would totally watch that.

‘Yo, I’m-a gonna get all up in that orc’s face with my Magic Missile. Jack you up, orc!’ Then then announcers banter, ‘oh, Magic Missle! A bold choice, he might need that later. Here comes the roll…’

It would be GLORIOUS.

It turns out that Wil Wheaton actually helped pitch the idea to Comedy Central a while ago.

Incidentally, I enjoyed this Photoshopped pic that somebody posted on jwz’s blog.

There are two stop-motion animation films coming out soon. New Movies Bring the Inanimate to Life looks at the technique’s history:

Stop-motion animation dates back at least to 1907, when J. Stuart Blackton used the technique to show a dinner being prepared by invisible hands in his short film ‘The Haunted Hotel.’

The technique has a venerable history in live-action films, used to create dinosaurs in the silent classic ‘The Lost World,’ the giant ape in the original ‘King Kong,’ the beasts in films by special-effects master Ray Harryhausen and the giant robots in ‘RoboCop.’

Stop-motion has had a varied life on television with such shows as ‘Gumby,’ ‘Davey and Goliath,’ Rankin-Bass productions like ‘Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer’ and the California Raisins commercials.

Aardman gave stop-motion a modern makeover in the mid-1980s with its ultra-cool animation for Peter Gabriel’s music video ‘Sledgehammer.’

Advances in realistic computer effects in the last decade have largely choked off stop-motion animation in live-action films. And despite the timing of ‘Corpse Bride’ and ‘Wallace & Gromit’ along with Aardman’s ‘Creature Comforts’ TV series, stop-motion’s future looks spotty.

‘I think we’re either going to die on the vine, become a buggy-whip factory, or we’re going to be discovered as a folk-art craft,’ said ‘Corpse Bride’ cinematographer Pete Kozachik, who worked on ‘The Nightmare Before Christmas’ and ‘James and the Giant Peach.’

Marvel to Finance Up to 10 Films:

Comic book publisher Marvel Enterprises Inc. on Tuesday said it completed a new $525 million debt facility to independently finance a slate of films based on its characters.

In the past, the company licensed its comic book characters and story lines to other studios such as Sony Pictures and 20th Century Fox. The new arrangement — under which Marvel is also changing its name to Marvel Entertainment Inc. — gives the company creative control, the right to build a film library and ‘greater profit potential.’

Marvel said it will use the seven-year, $525 million nonrecourse debt facility to finance up to 10 films based on characters such as Captain America, Nick Fury and the Avengers. The credit line, which was arranged by Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith Inc., includes $465 million in revolving senior bank debt and $60 million in mezzanine debt.

As producer, Marvel said it will receive all film-related merchandising revenue, and all profits. Paramount, a unit of Viacom Inc., will distribute the films, with the first release slated for summer 2008.

Sounds interesting. Which characters?

Marvel said the 10 characters in the arrangement are Captain America, The Avengers, Nick Fury, Black Panther, Ant-Man, Cloak & Dagger, Dr. Strange, Hawkeye, Power Pack, and Shang-Chi. Each film is expected to have a budget of up to $165 million dollars and a rating no more restrictive than PG-13. Although the financing allows for the production of animated films, Marvel currently intends to use the funds to make only live-action films.

Ant-man? Shang-chi? I have my concerns.

Howard Pyle’s Book of Pirates is now in the public domain, and all the illustrations are up on Flickr.

(Hat tip to Drawn!, which got the tip from Boing Boing.)

Jackson Publick, co-creator of Venture Bros., describes the move of their Noodlesoup animation studio in Spinning Plates:

Noodlesoup moved their studio a couple of weeks ago. And though I am loathe to let go of the raw/industrial, open space stylings of their previous world headquarters in favor of the smaller, more quasi-corporate setting of their new offices, I welcome the change of neighborhood with open arms. Barely a hop, skip and/or jump away from its former setting, the new Noodlesoup finds itself in much more austere surroundings — namely, across from the fabled, stone-lion-bedecked New York Publick [sic] Library and Bryant Park. Perched atop the 26th floor of this architectural wonder, I will sit in my cramped office and allow the stunning southern views of the Empire State Building and some building with gargoyles all over it whisk me away to a sci-fi/family/action-adventure/adult comedy inspirational wonderland. I will miss the palsied, oversized-hip-hop-gear-wearing, scabby, babbling masses that teemed along our former stretch between the Port Authority and Penn Station… I will miss their belligerent requests for cigarettes and change… I will miss the pigeons on the overhead ledge that thrice crapped upon me… I will miss the occasional knifings and vehicular manslaughters on what I like to call ‘our corner,’ and the palpable sense of dread that accompanied the setting sun there. Rest in Peace, Old Noodlesoup Headquarters… Hell-OOOOOO Fifth Avenue!