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James Bond

JAMES BOND
 
 
Royal Navy Commander James Bond, CMG, RNVR, is a fictional character created by British journalist and novelist Ian Fleming in 1953.  He is the protagonist of the James Bond series of novels, films, comics and video games.  Fleming wrote twelve Bond novels and two short story collections before his death, although the last two books were published posthumously.  The Bond character is a Secret Service agent, code number 007, residing in London but active internationally.  Bond was a composite character who was based on a number of commandos whom Fleming knew during his service in the Naval Intelligence Division during World War II, to whom Fleming added his own style and a number of his own tastes.  Bond has a number of character traits which run throughout the books, including an enjoyment of cars, a love of food and drink, and an average intake of sixty custom-made cigarettes a day.  (More from Wikipedia)
 
 

On the following album, The Times They Are A-Changin’, the targets are even more diffuse.  The structure of “When the Ship Comes In” was inspired – by way of the cultural tastes of Dylan’s former girlfriend Suze Rotolo – by a Bertolt Brecht/Kurt Weill song “Pirate Jenny”; the song comes from their play, The Threepenny Opera.  The song is closely associated with Weill’s wife, the Austrian singer Lotte Lenya, and her breakout role was in a 1928 production of The Threepenny Opera.  The most famous song from that play is “Mack the Knife”, which was an unexpectedly huge hit for Bobby Darin in 1959.  The lyrics in his version of the song even reference “Miss Lotte Lenya”.  Lenya is best known to Americans for her role as the villainous Rosa Klebb in the 1963 James Bond movie, From Russia with Love. 

 

(May 2013)

 

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We have been bombarded with important anniversaries this year.  In music, they all seem to go back to 1962.  In the larger world, 1962 was the year of the Cuban missile crisis.  Also, James Meredith became the first black student to enroll at Ole Miss that year; and a handful of students decided to mark the occasion by staging unseemly protests against the recent reelection of President Barack Obama.  The first James Bond film, Dr. No also came out in 1962; and the tag line for the seminal film American Graffiti was, “Where Were You in ’62?”. And then there is the unexpected death of the icon to end all Hollywood icons, Marilyn Monroe, which also happened in 1962. 
 
(Year 3 Review)