Start with the heroine’s name: “Maya” in Sanskrit is the illusion of reality that we all experience, which creates a false division between our selves and the wider universe, and ultimately becomes the source of all suffering. (“Maya” also ranks among the top 2,000 most popular names for girls in America. We like our illusions.) Practically all the information Maya gathers through the course of the film is obtained through intermediaries, or through filters. Never once does she punch or strip or waterboard a detainee, but she’s there when it happens, and occasionally gives the orders that make it happen. What she does not take away from in-person interrogations, she gathers by the medium of the video screen.

A great portion of Zero Dark Thirty deals with Maya’s gradual inurement to seeing. She starts off visibly sickened by the acts she’s party to. Agents around her, like the brutal field op Dan (Jason Clarke), try to shield her from direct involvement. “There’s no shame in watching on the monitor,” says Dan, who keeps pet monkeys at Bagram Airbase in a cage more spacious than the box into which he shuts captured al-Quaeda informant Ammar (Reda Kateb).

But Maya hardens, as one must, at least on the surface. Soon she’s leading interrogations on her own, and perusing the videorecordings of other torture victims for clues to bin Laden’s refuge. She rubs her eyes at footage of humiliated men hanging by their wrists and grilled for intel, but that could just be the fatigue of a long night’s cram session. Soon enough, she’s chatting by satphone with her colleague Jessica (Jennifer Ehle) while watching a drone strike that appears to have no more consequence for her than a Pringles ad.

These screens through which Maya views horror tend to pixellate, their images breaking down into the component bits that make up the whole. This is an effect we experience, even in the age of high-definition displays and phenomenal video bitrates, when we lean too close to our monitors. A bit or pixel by itself is the most basic unit of information, but it’s useless without context. Try to build a house out of one brick and see how far you get. Maya is gathering bricks, and soon they’re all she can see.

As Maya works, the American flag intrudes on her periphery. For the most part, it hangs limp as she interacts with fellow agents in bunkered, insulated CIA stations. It’s presented as a mundane office object, always to one side of the frame, never intruding or signaling sharp meaning.

At Camp Chapman, the pivot point for the entire film, the flag snaps awake in the wind and forcefully imprints on our awareness. It is doubled in one shot — a shot that if held for a few more languorous frames would smack of Terrence Malick — by the billowing camouflage netting that shelters Jessica while she awaits a crucial rendezvous.

The flag is pristine; the netting that mirrors it, of course, is ragged and full of holes. The symbol is transmuting before our eyes.

Jessica’s death in the field radicalizes Maya with a new sense of exceptionalism: “I believe I was spared so I can finish the job,” she says. This is a very American sentiment. When Maya presents her evidence that bin Laden resides in an Abbottabad compound, when she’s undercut by her male colleagues, when she identifies herself to the chief of the CIA as “the motherfucker that found this place,” the American flag is perched on her shoulder. Upon entering the room, in fact, she’s directed to sit next to it.

Maya goes on to observe the Abbottabad raid — again, from a distance — and confirm the assassination of bin Laden. Her job completed with a simple nod of the head, she then boards a C-17 for home, takes her place, and begins to weep.

Maya sits against sagging red cargo netting strung across white acoustic quilting — the ragged flag again. The dusk light is on her ivory skin. The woman who portrayed a Universal Mother in Malick’s The Tree of Life is here the symbolic mother of a nation, wounded and wilting, frayed by the bloody work done in delivering it.

Wilco — Ashes of American Flags

After calling on CNN reporter John King, Bush says, “This is a scripted—” and then breaks into laughter. King, like his colleagues, continues as if nothing untoward is happening. Author and media commentator Eric Boehlert will later say: “[Bush] sort of giggled and laughed. And, the reporters sort of laughed. And, I don’t know if it was out of embarrassment for him or embarrassment for them because they still continued to play along after his question was done. They all shot up their hands and pretended they had a chance of being called on.” Several questions later, Bush pretends to choose from the available reporters, saying: “Let’s see here… Elizabeth… Gregory… April.… Did you have a question or did I call upon you cold?”

Q. I have a question. [Laughter]

The President. Okay. I’m sure you do have a question.

Q. [April D. Ryan, American Urban Radio Networks] Mr. President, as the Nation is at odds over war, with many organizations like the Congressional Black Caucus pushing for continued diplomacy through the U.N., how is your faith guiding you? And what should you tell America—well, what should America do, collectively, as you instructed before 9/11? Should it be “pray,” because you’re saying, let’s continue the war on terror.

… a God-given cue for Mr. Bush to once more cloak his moral arrogance in the verbal vestments of humble religiosity. … Far be it from Ms. Ryan to ask a follow-up question about why virtually every religious denomination in the country, including Mr. Bush’s own, opposes the war. She might as well have been Mary Sunshine (Christine Baranski), the sob sister reporter in ”Chicago,” who tosses Roxie an image-burnishing softball at her press conference by asking, ”Do you have any advice for young girls seeking to avoid a life of jazz and drink?”

The President. “… My faith sustains me because I pray daily. I pray for guidance and wisdom and strength. If we were to commit our troops—if we were to commit our troops— I would pray for their safety, and I would pray for the safety of innocent Iraqi lives as well. One thing that’s really great about our country, April, is there are thousands of people who pray for me who I’ll never see and be able to thank. But it’s a humbling experience to think that people I will never have met have lifted me and my family up in prayer. And for that I’m grateful. That’s—it’s been—it’s been a comforting feeling to know that it’s true. I pray for peace, April. I pray for peace.”

April Ryan’s authorship of the least relevant question in the cascade of irrelevant questions asked on March 6, 2003 didn’t vault her far. She remains the host of AURN’s “White House Report,” broadcasting weekdays from Washington, D.C.

The war on Iraq began thirteen days after that press conference, on March 19, 2003.

Minutemen — Toadies

Eldridge Rodriguez, also known by his proper name Cameron Keiber, launched his own record label rather than wait around for some outlet to scoop up his bimetropolitan group, and the Beatings served as its flagship. 2002′s Italiano hurled a whallop and drew critical attention. Comparisons to the Pixies were probably inevitable, given the Boston point of origin and the presence of a female bassist, Erin Dalbec, but perhaps fitting: There’s a distinct loud-quiet-loud aesthetic at play in the Beatings’ music too.

The Beatings, “Twins,” from Italiano (2002)

The Beatings’ three vocalists — Rodriguez, Dalbec, and Rodriguez’s fellow guitarist Tony Skalicky — all proved themselves capable of the barbaric vocal yawp that punk and melodicore demand. The wailings complement each other. The language of the band’s manifesto is probably tongue in cheek, but it acknowledges their lyric obsession with decay and change: “Once society is broken down and rebuilt, the prophets of yesteryear will be discussed in whispers …“

If there was a flaw in 2006′s Holding On To Hand Grenades, the band’s cerebral bile-storm of a sophomore studio album, it was structural. The record built on certain themes — industrial decline (“Gas stations where no one is employed/Inventions replace by Tinker Toys …” from “Upstate Flashbacks”), the abandonment of empathy in favor of entropy (“Dead man on the side of the street wrapped up in cellophane …” from “A Responsible Person”), and societal collapse. Those threads go back at least to Italiano‘s “New Destroyer.” Hand Grenades is a Katrina album, if that makes sense.

This is all admirable, but the record is frontloaded with hard grinders, rather than interspersing its softer numbers like Dalbec’s showpiece “Pennsyltuckey” throughout. When a rocker with a title like “Feel Good Ending” is the fifth track out of thirteen, the blocks are stacked a little sideways. This song is a closer. Probably not an issue in the age of the malleable MP3 mix, but a CD is a static medium.

The band takes its time between releases, pursuing side projects and day jobs, to the point that aficionados like me sometimes get panic attacks over the idea that they’ve broken up. Dalbec, for instance, is a school librarian who I’m willing to bet doesn’t sing “Stockholm Syndrome Relapse” for her students. When not pulling from their own catalog in concert, they’re known to touch on another of my favorite bands from time to time:

The Beatings, “Smothered in Hugs,” Guided By Voices cover

Late Season Kids took its bow in 2011, and it seemed to mark a more hopeful, less aggro approach. The roar was still there, but it was more … optimistic, maybe? “Bury You,” for instance, is basically a love song that looks at obstacles in the way of a mature relationship and tries to see around them. “All The Things You’ve Been Missing” is regretful, but not raging. Maybe it’s a function of aging, or of seeking a wider audience, but the new direction is still worth following. When I’m unhappy, I’ve always got the earlier stuff.

Rodriguez promised new things for the band in an interview early this year, and the band’s Facebook page promises a new album is in mixdown. This is hopeful stuff. For the record, I have no idea if these are the same Beatings who nudged the UK Beatings into changing their name to the Beat Up before they disbanded in 2006 — but I do know whose music I’d rather listen to, and feed my anger with.

Poster Children — Freedom Rock

Alvin, who started the Blasters with brother Dave and other players in their hometown of Downey, California, fell badly ill on tour in Spain in 2012, leading to benefit concerts to raise money for his medical bills. Now 60, he’s on the mend and playing again, including an appearance at his own fundraiser. My only regret about this interview is I forgot to mention to Phil the first time I saw or heard the blasters: in that cracked-out ’80s action-musical Streets of Fire. The text was first published here.

The thing that always struck me about the Blasters music is it often doesn’t sound like what I think of as rock ‘n’ roll or rockabilly. It’s got sort of a postwar, pre-Elvis kind of feel at times.

Hopefully, that is because maybe we have pointed that way. All of these names that people had for different fashions that have lived on top of music don’t really have a lot to do with the core, the current of music that’s being passed through time, through your culture — if I’m not getting too abstract, which I tend to do. For example, Elvis Presley was a white guy that sang black music. Now, how many possible things could be more incorrect? Although it will be said in this sense. And was Elvis the first? They’ll say that Elvis was the first, but Elvis wasn’t the first that tag was given to. That tag was given to Bing Crosby, in the ’20s, as a jazz singer. That tag was given to people who put blackface on for years. Elvis Presley played what kind of music? Rockabilly, rock ‘n’ roll — they have all these names, and these names are usually telling you what color the singer is, what color shirt the singer is wearing. But most of these core ideas that are being handed down, whether you sing a song that’s been sung before, or write a song to update anachronisms and things from other settings, you contribute to this cultural flow. When fashion gets too involved in it, you get these things like, “Well, this is a rockabilly band.” Well, certainly the word rockabilly existed, and it was sort of a derogatory term in the sense that “hillbilly” was a derogatory term, and the “rock” just meant they played music perhaps like what they called “black music” — which has got a lot to do with African music, but it’s not devoid of European influence or participation during its entire history.

Elvis Presley wasn’t something special. He was good, but he wasn’t something that hadn’t happened before. It’s simply a political divide between the blacks and whites that made it reasonable to have words like that to apply at those times. They didn’t really apply. There was some overt efforts to separate those musics, because of records. … Once you were able to have music with records, a couple of things happened. First, music has to start competing through time. Before you could record something, you could write it down, you could say, “OK, here’s Mozart’s thing, I’m gonna be a traditionalist and play it and interpret it this way” — but it wasn’t Mozart playing it. Once you could record somebody, I didn’t have to hear somebody tell me about what they sounded like. I could actually hear it, and I could pick up a needle and put the needle back down and learn the lick real fast. Music, because it was such a business in his century, was treated differently in the way we talk about it — because of the money generated by publishing and the distribution of the information. But because of that, you had people like us who grew up able to listen to the whole spectrum.

When I sang Elvis Presley songs, most of the time I already knew the song that he got it from and the song that that guy got it from. It’s part of music, to hand the collective knowledge on the culture that came before you, to hand it forward. That’s part of your job. Your job may also be to make some furniture company inheritee rich when they sell record players and distribute heavy records, or maybe to get fellated someplace, but primarily the job of music is to embody your culture and your history. Before we wrote it down, we sang it, and when we sing it, it brings a context with it. Yes, some people write songs, and some people steal songs, and iceboxes turn into refrigerators, but things that have important information, important perspectives, continue to be handed down. From that perspective, the Blasters tried not to lay too much fashion inside of the music, albeit David and Bill did wear bandannas. I saw them. But less musical fashion, play more to the core of the flow. We got famous for singing “I’m Shakin’” — a rhythm and blues song. If I wouldn’t have been pink, then nobody would ever have said we were a rockabilly band. But we were pink, so we were a rockabilly band. That meant both my complexion and my shirt.

Did you take that mission very seriously when you got started? Did you think of yourselves as being carriers of the music?

Well, the entity “The Blasters” started in the late ’60s, with John Bazz, who plays bass now — played drums at that time. I know that this happened to other people at my same age, and I know that it’s happened historically all the time — when I grew up, every now and then you’d got to a thrift store and buy a 78, and some of the music was a lot cooler than what I could buy someplace else, and it was a lot cheaper. And people were still around playing it. We started learning who they were. You can’t really kill that core part of music, and it’s always enticing to a young musician to understand, when context is deep. There were so many great musicians — when I was 12, I walked up to Sonny Terry, the harmonica player, and he gave me harmonica lessons.

By the late ’60s, when we were like 15 or 16, we were backing up T-Bone Walker and Joe Turner. Lee Allen was playing saxophone with us. Music is handed down. See, before records, it was even a more personal thing — you sort of had to be there to hand it down to somebody. Somebody had to see you many times to be able to learn your licks on a guitar or even to remember you phrasing on a song, whereas with records you could play them over and over again, and now the pulse became faster. … Before I could drive, these guys were friend of ours. I remember two weeks after I met Joe Turner and Lee Allen at the York Club in LA. We were 15, we had a gig opening for Black Oak Arkansas at the Golden West Ballroom in Norwalk, California. We’re getting ready to go onstage, we’re really nervous, the place is packed, they don’t know who the hell we are. And Joe Turner and T-Bone Walker just came to the gig! We didn’t even tell them we were playing there. These big shots came down there.

People handed you music. And I’m in a position now that I try to disseminate it as well. That’s part of the job of the musicians, and that’s part of the way that you feel yourself connected as an element in that cultural wave to the future. That’s your real job. The body sanctions you for that. Evolution doesn’t play around, it’s here for a reason. If I’m left alone, I’ll sing, and if people are around, I’ll probably sing in a different way, for different reasons, for my ego, but to pass information on. And so yeah, I always figured that it was getting passed to me, and I always felt that you were supposed to pass it down, with whatever individuality and variation that your personality and character reasonably adds.

When you started playing as the Blasters, you were playing to audiences that had come to see X or had come to see the Germs, as the case may be …

Yes and no. The thing called the Blasters has been a band that existed, and even used the name the Blasters, since about 1967, when we were 14 or 15. I played at disco places, but when punk came around, it was such a refreshing as well as familiar cultural setting and musical mode that it made it easier to find some roots — whatever the core thing was. … But yeah, we started playing at punk places. We’re friends with all of those guys still. In fact, we rehearsed at the Bazz Houston factory, Johnny Bazz’s father’s factory, since we were very young. And when we started practicing at the late ’70s down there, his partner’s son, a guy named Stevie Houston, who had the Joneses, another early punk band, and TSOL used to practice there at the same time.

So we were all friends. They learned a lot. Todd (Barnes), the drummer from TSOL, used to sit and watch Bill Bateman, just sit and watch him all practice. If you’ve seen the Blasters show — that’s another thing, I have no delusions about what my face looks like when I’m singing. It’s not a rockabilly face. It’s more like a Caesarean birth. The energy level is hopefully as high as I can keep it. … And that’s another thing that has to be passed down. Whether you start as a punk or a hot rod player or whatever, it seems that as time goes by they all settle into this groovy kind of mode, and I’m trying not to let that happen. I say that with a certain amount of sarcasm

Did your audience members come to believe that some of the covers you were doing were originals?

I have no idea. There certainly many times when originals they thought were someone else’s. Even the notion of somebody’s song — “I’m Shakin’” is probably first recorded by the same guys that recorded “Fever,” Rudy Toombs and Little Willie John. And “Shakin’” is in my estimation, other than “Fever,” the best of that class of songs. … A song is a song. If one of the important jobs of music is to bring forward the collective cultural knowledge of those that came before you, and deliver it in a medium that has context — I can’t sing “Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny Yellow Polka Dot Bikini” to “Old Alberta,” the field holler. It’s sarcastic, because the words don’t match the music. The music has meaning that underlies, that overtakes, that makes sarcastic or creates friction between words and music. Music delivers context. Context is what carries most meaning in language — words are sort of pointers inside of context.

So if the job of music is to hand this knowledge down, then how important is a new song? There are new songs, but there’s only so many melodies that are 16 bars long, and when somebody writes a song, they get paid money for that, and they have a name for that payment, and it’s called a royalty. It comes from the time of kings. It’s from 700-year-old French and English jurisprudence— “Hey, Mozart, you won’t be playing that song in town at the opera house. I, King Rudolph,” or whoever, “paid for your chateau that summer, you will pay me my royalty.” And through social democratization, this notion of the ownership of a song arose. It became important to learn how to write down the songs in written music if you were gonna do a song. The way that musicians would get sanctioned would be by being and playing where we are at that time. Whether we wrote a song, didn’t write a song, were the first to record it, we’d play the song. Now, if somebody hears that song that you write, what’s the point of that song? The point of that song is to pass some piece of information, isn’t it, to get people to hum the song in your head? It’s gotta be something close to that, so it helps them remember this message and take this context. …

One of the ways that people got paid, like Homer, who wrote the The Iliad and the The Odyssey — he actually sang it, but he just wrote it down. He was a singer; how did he get paid? Well, in order for other people to have the history, there was no recording, they had to come hang around you. People became students of these people in order to learn these songs. They did not care who wrote this song. Homer didn’t write The Iliad and The Odyssey, Homer wrote it down. Homer may have taken out some anachronisms, added some flowery words, once he wrote that thing down, If I say, “The scarlet-fingered dawn,” they say, “Ah ah ah, Homer said ‘rosy!’” But before Homer wrote it down, the song had evolved from great to poet to great troubadour to great singer to great orator, back to orator to singer to poet. It got handled to where parts of the story and ways of saying that story were a collective, social thing. Anybody who writes songs has always found their inspiration — frequently, I don’t want to say always — but you find your inspiration in the society around you. … It only became important who wrote a song when the king started getting paid royalties. And that part of music, because it came down through social democratization — all of a sudden we could get publishing money.

Of course, the publishing then was for a piece of written sheet music. Then it became a record. Now of course it’s a for a string of zeros and ones that may be interpreted to be a song. They might also be interpreted to be a picture of Bing Crosby. Such things are going to occur. Willie Dixon was a good friend of mine. Willie Dixon would get paid money for the song “Spoonful.” Willie Dixon, I know, did a great version of “Spoonful,” but Willie Dixon knew he didn’t write “Spoonful.” He would tell you, “I didn’t write it, I was just the first one to publish it.” … Nobody wrote “Baby Please Don’t Go.” There are songs that weave in and out. You could put a multiplicity of songs together out of “Minnie the Moocher” and “Buffalo Gals.” They all intertwine with each other. But we pay the king, certainly we want to pay Willie Dixon, we want to pay me whatever publishing I can get.

We talk about writing music. A great deal of the reason for music is because, look, we’ve only been writing for about 6,000 or 7,000 years. We have been bringing our culture forward in music and sound and language for at least 200,000 years as modern human beings. The tendency for us to think of words in time as things that are one piece paper, the written language, is foreign to music itself. It is an intrusion on it. Music’s job was to make you remember sounds and word with the meanings attached to them, and sometimes to take things that have absolutely no meaning, like ABDCDEFGHIJKL… I’m saying it now, but I still, someplace in the back of my mind, I’m singing that song. There isn’t any reason that A should come before B. What puts any sense to that is you learn to sing a song. There’s 26 letters, there’s eight notes, and you follow the absolutely random, chaotic order of sounds. That’s the power of music, to connect with its context.

Not that there isn’t power in writing, not that writing and music can’t match each other — but if a guy was a songwriter, he could’ve never ever touched a pen in his life. There are songs that some people start singing and they’ve never written them down. They write them down later. They call it songwriter, they could also call it songsinger. … And the difficulty in making those distinctions is reflected in modern publishing laws. First of all, yes, you can take somebody’s song that’s owned by them, even though they may or may not have written it, that doesn’t matter, but if you significantly change that song, you can apply for what’s called arrangement royalties. Your unique arrangement gives you some points off of that. That’s a way they’ve tried to make a friction between those two things (performance and publishing) that don’t really have friction in music. They have friction in music as a business in the society in which it came up.

So the musician or the songwriter is a conduit in this model.

Correct, correct. And some songwriters are musicians, some songwriters are singers. Irving Berlin didn’t sing his songs, he wrote songs. There are all of those different variations. A dancer — tap dancing interfaces with music, and in fact had a great deal to do with the rhythms that came through the ’20s and ’30s, bringing 2/4 and 4/4 jazz and backbeats. Dancing is as old a part of the context of handing culture down as music is. … A culture is handed down through all of those things. Music, it’s not a visual thing, so it doesn’t hinder you from any visual communication, and it sets a context in one of the oldest senses — the sense of vibrations in my close environment: sounds. There is a palette of archetypical meanings. The sound of babies crying is understood between mammals pretty easily. … Music is a sentence — not a written sentence, it’s a spoken, sound-controlled sentence that supports the words. Or there’s plenty of music that doesn’t have any words, it’s just music, and it sets up its own context, and doesn’t point anything out to you in words. … I presume that people could take these court cases, but nobody wants to shake any boats. And now, with the stuff that’s going on on the Web — which is good, I think, and healthy — the redefinition of even what it means to be a royalty is coming about.

Isn’t there a risk that the people who win that kind of conflict are the ones who have the deepest pockets to begin with? I mean, Disney made sure that its characters didn’t go into the public domain …

Brother, you are on the ball and preachin’ to the choir! Hell, yes. You know about that Disney thing, good for you, because I might have said it in five more minutes. What was Disney’s first cartoon hit?

Steamboat Willie, right?

Steamboat Willie. And what does “Steamboat Willie” mean? A very famous, very important cultural song is “Steamboat Bill,” and that’s what he’s whistling in this little cartoon. “Steamboat Bill” probably was adapted in the middle of the 19th century. It’s about a steamboat guy who gets in a race with the Robert E. Lee, which is the fastest steamboat to go from Natchez to New Orleans. It was famous for that. You would maybe recognize the melody, if you’re old enough. … One of the reasons he used it is it was public domain, it was so damn old. So he takes a public domain song, makes his first cartoon, there’s even good reason to question whether he didn’t steal his little cartoon drawing from some New York doll manufacturer, and if not, from Ignatz from “Krazy Kat.”

Really, Mickey Mouse was just a blackface comedian, singing a minstrel song. And all of the public domain stuff, from the very first one to the present day, that Disney has made their fortunes on — now it comes down they have to get rid of their stuff, and they go to Congress and pass a fuckin’ law. … When record companies first came out, there was nothing in the books, no laws that said guys who sang songs on records had to pay anybody any royalties. So in 1928, two of the publishing companies got together and took a suit against Victor, Columbia, a bunch of the record companies, saying you have to pay us money like you were selling sheet music. The court said, “There’s nothing in the law that says you have to do this.” So they denied their claim. They appealed it, and again, they were told, “There’s no law that says you have to do this.” They stopped there, they went to Congress, and they got a law passed. That’s why we have mechanical royalties, started in 1928. Then in ’29 and ’30, ASCAP formed in order to collect those things, and then that was so corrupt that BMI formed. Now they’re all corrupt. … No matter how many times they hear you sing it, you don’t get a dime for that, it just depends on who wrote it. Which of course is unfair — that doesn’t mean that who writes it shouldn’t get paid, it just means that people who perform it should too, and we’re now upon that with the Internet.

Isn’t it a case of the bitter with the sweet, though? You got the chance to meet Sonny Terry and these guys, but most 15-year-olds, if they wanted to hear the music, would have to experience it through records.

Well, I experienced most of the stuff that I experienced through records, but I did meet some people. There’s always some people still alive. That’s part of the reason why you hand it down. You could come meet me! Not that that’s as good as meeting Sonny Terry, but I’ll tell you what he said. I’ll show you what he taught me. There’s always a lot of greats around. …. I know 15 guys who are great musicians, who play out in the street and pass this stuff around.

Does the Internet make it easier to pass musical traditions around?

Absolutely, it makes it easier to pass it around. It also inundates you so that it’s very difficult to find a path through all of the possibilities. For example, I knew Bear from the Canned Heat — his real name was Bob Hite. Bob Hite had one of the most phenomenal 78 collections, one of the great ones of the world. I first knew about that because he was on “Ninth Street West,” a dance show — I was like 13 or something — and they had that hit song, “Going Up the Country,” which was Alan Wilson’s arrangement of a song that was recorded by Charley Patton and Henry “Son” Sims on fiddle. And Bob Hite played that 78 on that show. That was the first time I ever heard that stuff. I went, “Oh, Jesus Christ!” I made it my commitment right then … one day I was gonna find that Bob Hite guy and play that stuff for him. I just had to hear a few seconds of it — the straightforwardness of the music, the perspective of the singer, the aggressiveness of the guitar — immediately I just said, “Oh my God!”

When I saw James Brown on television singin’ “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag,” it was like BOOM! Jeez! You know when it’s there. Even if they try to hide it with fashion, eventually some guy at a local bar, they still ask you to play “Johnny B. Goode.” There’s shit that’s good! There’s no reason for it to leave. There may be reasons to update it. There may be reasons to cycle it through as its texture fits the texture of a culture at a time. We don’t have any new names for music, and most of the ones we had were artificial anyway. It’s all mixed up, there’s no reason to talk about jazz, funk, fusion, pop, rhythm and blues, country … Country! Where’d they get that one? What country are you talking about?

You’ve studied math and artificial intelligence. These are big fields.

I’m a set theorist. I study semantics and dynamic systems. That’s what I was doing all night.

Semantics in a mathematical sense? Is that meant as a mathematical term?

In the linguistic sense, which is a mathematical area. But yes, intimately related to meaning is the theory of sets. … People who work in semantics are mathematical linguists. I have a pretty good perspective on what’s going on in semantics, because of my longtime pursuit of that, since at least the middle ’70s, and the set theory techniques that I use that did not used to be accepted. Then they became really accepted in 1988, and then everybody had to say, “Oh, I guess you were right.” … You think it’s hard to get in the music business? I thought it was gonna be easy to get into the mathematics business, because you PROVE the stuff that you do, right? But just like in the music business, if what you’ve proved diminishes the scope of what someone else has proved, they don’t really have any interest in supporting that. That’s OK too, but then they actually have an interest in squelching it, marginalizing it. … I wrote a thesis for my master’s degree. I had to write it at Long Beach State, even though I was accepted at UCLA, because they didn’t accept these set theory techniques. I did that in the middle ’80s — I slowed the Blasters down then — but in ’79, when I went to UCLA, I went to get an adviser, and I had these three-page synopses of stuff that I’d already done. Most people wouldn’t read it when I just gave them the light explanation, because mathematical semantics, certainly at that time, was in its fairly early stages. When I got some people to read it, the set theory that I used was what’s called a non-well-founded set theory. … At any rate, I got vindicated. I went back to UCLA in ’93, but I had fought so long I wanted to just play music, and that’s really why for the last 12 years I have played more music and done less math. But I’m now also doing math again, because I want to give them the next part of the story. I hope that it shows to be true. So far, so good.

That is to say, you have proofs that you’re working on which are related to your earlier work, and you want to expand upon it.

Well, the earlier work, the thing I wrote my thesis on, is the tools of my set theory. I showed the relative consistency of my set theory to the famous set theory that they love, Zermelo-Fraenkel theory. That means mine’s not screwed up if theirs isn’t screwed up. And then it has all these advantages. I developed these things so that I could use it to frame semantics in, so you could get all of these results, keep the algebra of the sets. But they didn’t accept the set theory that I used, so I had to go and write a thesis to prove that the tools were good. Now I’m gonna take the tools and do the theory that I had done before, now that everybody knows the tools are good. That’s big stuff.

Well, where do you teach?

I don’t teach anywhere now. I only taught when I had to keep myself off the road. I taught at Long Beach State, I’ve taught at a few private places, and I’ve been a teaching assistant at UCLA. And I’m a good teacher, I like to teach, but I like to play music and then do math at night, after I’m finished blowing myself off with music. It’s just right with me. If I teach math all day, then I play music at night, and I don’t wanna to do math. So it’s better to play music all day and then do the math you want to do at night. I’m sort of the opposite of many mathematicians I know who play music, but do mathematics to make money. I play music to get the money I need to do my mathematics.

When you have been teaching, what have your students thought when they learned you were also a musician?

Well, the first few semesters I taught, they would’ve had to be pretty hep to know I was a musician, even though I was playing around town, mostly solo at the time. But the second time I taught, ’84 or ’85, people actually knew who the Blasters were — it was actually good for them, because the classes learned a lot better, whether it was because they were trying to impress me or what. But I’m a pretty good teacher. The problem is I have ethics. I won’t have sex with my students, and boy, do teachers get opportunities to do that. I just wouldn’t do it, and boy, there was a lot of beautiful girls that second time around, jeez. Maybe that’s why I don’t teach — I’d just get in trouble.

Well, I hear there’s groupies in rock ‘n roll too.

Oh, there are. There’s groupies for crackheads. Everybody’s got some groupies.

What’s your brother Dave’s relationship to the Blasters now?

Whenever David needs the Blasters, he tries to get one of those so-called “Original Blasters” gigs together. Other than that, David and my relationship is good. I talk to David a couple of times a month, and we love each other as we always have. We’re just brothers, y’know? How would you like to be my little brother? I don’t think so. … Nonetheless, it is good fun to play with my brother, as it was since we were small kids. But you gotta watch him.

Arthur Collins — Steamboat Bill (Victor 78rpm 1911)
via The Internet Archive

(What else is going on: Links to all my recent Emerald City Comicon coverage
for Comic Book Resources can be found here.)

(Which reminds me that I am now feebly, fumblingly Tumblring here.)

This was probably my favorite view of Seattle’s Emerald City Comicon 2013: Gerry Conway, who made the comics of my youth, in a concise and on-point interview with comics writer and journalist Blair Butler. The savvy interviewer and a series of esteemed creators carried on one-on-one talks (many archived for webstream) that got to the heart of their work and their business. Conway told his fair share of stories out of school, and critiqued the industry from his current outsider’s perspective. (“He’s got that Law & Order money,” one comics journalist told me in the hall, “so he can let fly.”)

I took in Conway’s panel, plus an earlier one in which Chris Claremont would not shut up, alongside friend Andrew Wahl, who has a natural zeal for the period as chief of Comics Bronze Age. The model at Marvel in the early 1970s was less concerned with damaging the brand — not everyone involved was convinced there would be a brand within a decade — than with creative storytelling, Conway says: “When you get these layers and layers of oversight, you get exactly what that will produce, which is stuff that’s kind of massaged to death and screened of all potential impurities.”

If comics are jazz, comicons these days are NASCAR. Bigger! Louder! More colorful! The ECCC main media hall, where the Star Trek captains and True Blood vampirettes and Walking Dead zombie-hunters receive the adoration of a coagulated crowd, is populist theater. The Walking Dead itself, the latest in a rich heritage of shows to rule television despite not being any good, was the subject of three panels featuring two co-stars spread across the three-day con. I don’t begrudge performers their moment with the fans, but nobody who went to Michael Rooker’s panel on Friday learned anything other than, yeah, Michael Rooker sure can do a good impression of Merle Dixon — a character idolized strictly for his ass-backward badassness.

On the other fringe, actor-playwright Danai Gurira has clearly thought more deeply about the implications of a societal collapse than the show itself ever will. Her presence on a Saturday joint panel with Rooker (of whom she’s obviously quite fond) helped tug her fellow castmember down from the swaggering, incommunicative heights of his solo panel the day prior. These events are empty calories: the actors know very little about the overall maps of their own projects, they’re sworn to secrecy about what they do know, and all that remains is to reinforce their shows’ cults, which sometimes means catching the spittle of the braying lunatics in the fanbase.

(One thing I need never see again is a fan bellowing at Wil Wheaton and Felicia Day in character as Sheldon from The Big Bang Theory.)

(Other things I probably don’t need to see again include Wil Wheaton and Felicia Day.)

Hey, white cosplayers blacking up to be Michonne and her pets from The Walking Dead! I didn’t see you Sunday at Danai Gurira’s thoughtful, intimate panel. Why not? The talk was well-attended but not SRO, so you certainly had a chance to walk up to the mike to present yourselves. You obviously admire the character tremendously, so wouldn’t you want to show off your costuming to the accomplished, intellectual African woman who plays that character? … If you can’t say yes to that, if you apply the categorical imperative to your performance and find the outcome undesirable, then your costume choice was probably a poor one, not to be repeated next year.

(Speaking of next year, this was the second year in a row for Blackface Geordi LaForge. I don’t think it was the same guy both years, but I definitely saw a dude doing this at ECCC 2012. Same question to those fellows, but I’m damn sure not gonna ask it of Bleeding Cool commenters.)

Brian Stelfreeze, artist: “A fan came up to me on Friday, with some copies of Shadow of the Bat for me to sign. And he said, ‘This is the first comic book convention I’ve ever been to. I was into comics in the early to mid-’90s. … I want to get back into it.’ And he’s just like, ‘I tried Batman, but I had no idea what’s going on, so I can’t read it.’ I was like, wow. So this guy wants to be a fan, but the project says ‘Nooooo.’

“And the guy says to me, ‘So I like Batman — what can I read?’ And I was like, ‘Uhhh … I don’t know.’”

Stelfreeze is also noteworthy for his lithe, muscular female figures, in an industry where bolt-on jugs are de rigeur. I give you now Stelfreeze’s Catwoman Defiant from 1992 vs. Guillem March’s Catwoman from the 2011 New 52 reboot. Which one of these renderings, viewed from some future vantage, will be considered off-model?

Garth Ennis, writer: “Don’t look back. Don’t repeat what’s already been done — which is a big problem that comics have.”

(Garth Ennis’ Crossed, by the way, eats The Walking Dead for lunch and then buggers it.)

Ennis expressed a corollary sentiment in the professional tales he shared with Butler during their interview, saying his own fanhood — very much a form of “looking back” — impeded his storytelling when he managed Judge Dredd for 2000 A.D. That twin burden of fannishness and nostalgia was touched on by a boatload of other creators on panels and talks throughout the con — including Marvel scripter Jeff Parker, who was efficiently tag-team interviewed Friday night by comics blogger David Brothers and a bottle of mid-shelf Irish whiskey.

Walking out of that panel, I flagged down the Comics Reporter himself, Tom Spurgeon, to thank him for his work. More, I wanted to praise his confessional interview at Gil Roth’s Virtual Memories podcast, where he talks at length about his near-fatal illness of 2011 and the dramatic weight loss that followed. Along the way, he explores the instincts that can make one a massive consumer of both comics and calories: “You’re a pleasure junkie, I think — a lot of geeks are — and I think that you kind of want to stay in that state of existence where you’re super-happy and content. And there’s a nostalgic pull in that …” Look back to the past, to the pleasures that you had, and try to recreate them at your peril.

(What do you mean you haven’t heard Tom Spurgeon’s interview? Jesus, man, click and correct that now, it’s heartfelt and outstanding.)

Brothers and a host of young industry bloggers surfaced Sunday on another panel, moderated by Rachel Ededin, called “Looking Past the Target Audience.” It was a valuable and pretty well-attended exploration of how comics, games and other entertainments can marginalize whole segments of fans (a/k/a potential consumers) by the way they involve — or decline to involve — women, ethnic minorities and LGBT characters. Given the vastness of the topic, the panel referred questions to Ededin’s Twitter address, and promised to assemble a Tumblr to respond and cultivate the conversation. A lot of ground got covered here without once mentioning that prick Orson Scott Card.

I learned at this same panel that Geoff Johns, whom I don’t read (and who doesn’t update his site much), last year did his bit to advance diversity by creating a Muslim Green Lantern. But Johns and Ryan Reynolds are the reasons my kindergartener now turns up his nose at his John Stewart action figure, and I wonder how many characters of color Johns needs to invent to atone for all the ones he’s sidelined, buried, or stripped of their powers.

(Looking backward, again. Being too much of a fan, again. Superman and Batman are magical because they can be used to tell any story you want, and the stories their handlers want to tell, apparently, are about having sex with Wonder Woman and Catwoman.)

I wound down the convention Sunday on the news (from Warren Ellis’ Twitter stream) that artist Jerry Ordway, a fixture of comics from the late Bronze Age onward, basically can’t get hired. Comics are Charlie Adlard’s post-apocalyptic world, apparently; we just live in them.

Blugh, that makes the whole con sound depressing, when it was really quite a good time — subtracting out the weird nerd privilege that makes people think racial drag is okay or they can jump a 3k queue just because their friends are inside holding a seat for the Misha Collins Slashfic Hour.

Here’s a positive note on which to end: My dear friend Amie Simon, whom I did not get to see AT ALL because she was busy squiring Jerry Dandridge/Prince Humperdinck all over the Washington Convention and Trade Center, scored the Tweet O’ the Con, it appears, with a true gem. She deserves all the Faves.

Tom Waits — I Don’t Wanna Grow Up

There’s a moment in Terence Fisher’s The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) that seizes the eye. The film holds many small wonders of composition, but this one hides just beyond the shoulder of the actor holding the frame, and it suggests deep implications about the path Baron Victor Frankenstein (Peter Cushing) pursues in his creation of life out of death.

This essay is a section of a book-length work in progress concerning the film, in which Frankenstein crafts his Creature with the reluctant help of his longtime tutor and friend Paul Krempe (Robert Urquhart), out of sight of his devoted but neglected fiancée Elizabeth (Hazel Court). “We’ve only just started — just opened the door,” Victor tells Paul at one point, urging their work on. “Now’s the time to go through that door, and find what lies beyond it.”

The scene in question begins about 34 minutes into the film, after Victor has horrified Paul by hinting at his plans to acquire a wise, experienced brain for his creation.

Victor and Elizabeth in formal clothes entertain the only character in this Swiss-set horror to boast a Germanic accent. Professor Bernstein (Paul Hardtmuth) reclines in Frankenstein’s parlor and chuckles along with his hosts as Victor decants brandy into a set of snifters. The central-casting little old man is delighted to be in such good company; he has no family of his own, although he holds the respect of natural philosophers throughout Europe.

For her part, Elizabeth is grateful to have Bernstein on hand, since it means Victor must join in the household gathering as well. It’s a push-pull between them as they each address the professor, spelling out their own discontents through the medium of polite conversation. Elizabeth curses Victor’s long and reclusive working hours; Victor resents any obligations that keep him from his work. “I, for one, think the world would be a far, far better place without research,” Elizabeth declares. “At least … my world would be.”

Bernstein, sucking wisely on a cigar, isn’t inclined to disagree. Pure science can erode a man’s joy, he says, “until one is too old to enjoy life.”

Elizabeth is delighted. She pictures herself telling Victor in future disputes, “On the authority of the greatest brain in Europe, you must leave your stuffy old laboratory, and come out into the sunshine with me.” Elizabeth’s costumes have gradually crept down off her shoulders with each subsequent scene. Tonight’s dress is a black gown highlighted with white, with a red flower pinned at the bosom to transfix the eye. Blood and darkness against ivory.

Victor uses the opportunity to take a sexist jab, but Bernstein wonders if true science is worth the trouble either for the scientists or the world at large. “There’s a great difference between knowing that a thing is so, and knowing how to use that knowledge for the good of mankind,” he says.

(Victor appears not to be listening, instead calculating the approximate dimensions of Bernstein’s skull.)

“We quickly tire of our discoveries,” Bernstein rattles on, setting down his brandy to gesture Freudianly with his cigar. “We hand them over to people who are not ready for them, while we go off again into the darkness of ignorance, searching for other discoveries — which will be mishandled in just the same way when the time comes.”

It’s a trope argument of Atom Age science-amok horror movies — that one can know too much, and unravel God’s creation in the process — but it’s more directly expressed here than in, say, a thriller like Them!. In Bernstein’s statement as constructed, the problem isn’t necessarily the scientist, but other people. If the scientist wants to accept the crushing burden of brilliance, that’s his decision. Bernstein implies that what’s lacking is stewardship — the willingness of the scientist to see his concept through to its proper ends. Certainly, Victor Frankenstein views himself as the very man for such a task.

Paul arrives, a wet blanket on Victor’s larger plans for the evening. “We didn’t expect you back until the morning, Paul,” Victor says. But Paul says he felt compelled to return (from wherever he went; we weren’t even told he was away), and he’s thrilled to meet the great thinker Bernstein. The Professor announces himself equally delighted, but it’s late, and he sets aside his cigar to be shown to his room. He kisses Elizabeth’s hand, nods cordially to Paul, and lets Victor escort him to the entry-hall stairwell.

Climbing the stairs slowly, he praises Victor’s hospitality and his manor. The Baron is pleased, and at the head of the stairs pauses to show Bernstein a Dutch masterpiece.“It was purchased by my father,” Victor explains, “and illustrates one of the early operations.” This is The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp, a Rembrandt oil.

Bernstein dons his pince-nez for a better look. Victor glances at the balcony rail behind them, which is obviously breakaway balsa wood. “If you step back a little … you’ll see it better.”

Bernstein complies, and Victor slips sideways to stand in front of him. “Look out, Professor, look out!” he cries, and hurls the old man through the splintering rail.

The stunt that follows boggles my mind. We are on the upper stair with Frankenstein, and we watch the Professor hurtle headfirst to the eminently solid-seeming floor of the hall below. The stuntman lands on the top of his head, jarringly, and bounces onto his back, Bernstein-wig flopping. Setting aside a nearly undetectable ripple in the padded surface that catches him, it’s startling in its realism.

Bernstein’s body lies still on the marble. On the upper landing, Victor steps toward the ruined banister, gazing down. In a subtle but phenomenal act of composition, the assembled physicians and observers of The Anatomy Lesson seem to stare at him in horror from the left side of the screen. Of all the steps he’s taken through that door he mentioned to Paul, way back when their experiments commenced, this is the only one that’s irrevocable.

Some extratextual notes:

•  The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp was painted in 1632, commissioned as a group portrait of the Amsterdam Guild of Surgeons. The onlooking physicians gawp as Tulp displays the tendons of a cadaver’s forearm, comparing his findings against a book of anatomical illustrations propped open at the feet of the corpse.
• Said corpse, like the one stolen by Paul and Victor to build the Creature, belongs to a condemned thief — Aris Kindt, also known as Andrian Adriannsz, a repeat offender finally sentenced to death in his mid-twenties for stealing a man’s cloak. Kindt on the table appears to have a barrel chest and foreshortened arms and legs, as though he lived with a form of dwarfism. When Victor steps forward to look down on the slain Bernstein, he becomes the focal point of the painting, occluding both the lecturing physician Tulp (a man of pure science) and the anatomy subject Kindt (a deformed criminal, a “monster” by the measure of his society). He has transformed into both things simultaneously.
• If Victor’s father, the late Baron Frankenstein, thought he was buying an original when he won the painting that mutely witnesses Victor’s highest crime, he got taken. The original work is seven feet wide, far larger than the portrait Bernstein contemplates in his last moments before dying, and remained in the possession of the Guild of Surgeons until its dissolution in 1798. It has never left Holland, although it passed into the hands of a charitable fund which tried to sell it in 1828 before a royal degree thwarted that. Let’s assume that in the alternate universe of The Curse of Frankenstein, where Rembrandt sized his oils for dormitory poster frames, Victor’s father was the successful buyer.

Roky Erickson and the Aliens — Creature With The Atom Brain

Somebody’s gotta keep these projects classy. DC Universe, the animated arm of the DC Comics empire, has carved out a niche by mining and exploiting classic comics storylines for direct-to-video product. How they manage that material is up for debate, but unquestionably, one of the biggest talents in their stable is composer Christopher Drake.

Take 2011′s All-Star Superman, an adaptation of the standalone 2005 story cycle from writer Grant Morrison and artist Frank Quitely. Justly acclaimed as a defining Superman story, the work was adapted into a watery paint-by-numbers Filmation cartoon. But this cartoon did boast the most compelling original score I’ve heard on a DCU disc, getting the pomp and tragedy of Superman just right. It evolves from Coplandish pastorals to symphonic skyward thrusts, not unlike the character. (It also cleverly quotes Maurice Ravel’s Bolero in segments where rival superdudes come on to Lois Lane.)

Green Lantern: Emerald Knights, released the same year, pushes the action out into space, and Drake follows suit. Digital percussion drives the horns and choruses, and while it’s less imaginative than some of his other, I like to think that’s because he was spending his energy on All-Star Superman.

In 2012, Drake scored the two-part DTV version of The Dark Knight Returns, the ultimate fanboy Valentine. While the resulting film made no improvements on the source material and in fact wound up looking significantly less cool than Frank Miller, Klaus Janson and Lynn Varley’s comic, Drake certainly made it sound better, harking back to ’80s dystopian science fiction films for his source material. It doesn’t necessarily top the mortal gloom he unearthed in Batman: Under the Red Hood (2010), which mirrored the source tale of Batman’s failure to protect the one person closest to him.

But I’m particularly enraptured by the churn und drang of Drake’s main title composition for Justice League: Crisis on Two Earths, with its tale of Earth’s heroes pitted against their own negative images. I’m not sure whether the title sequence or Drake’s music came first, but it gave him a chance to really speak to the themes posed by the film in the way the film itself, at times, did not. It also let Drake invent a Justice League motif that he was able to revisit two years later for Justice League: Doom.

It’s rare that I key in on music in movies, at least on first viewing, but Drake’s scores always draw me in — maybe because DCU product so often disappoints me in the visual sphere. I think he deserves a treat on the next Blu-ray: a music-only track. It would be a reasonable reward for an animation franchise’s MVP, the guy who provides the real energy.

After it was first sighted last month by a fishing boat floating along the Western Washington State coast, eventually washing up on the Olympic National Park, it was confirmed that the 19-meter long dock was one of four that used to be lodged in the fishing port of Misawa in Aomori Prefecture that were ripped off by the March 11, 2011 tsunami. … It will be remembered that in June 2012, a first dock already turned up on one of the beaches on the Oregon coast. This one was even larger at 21 meters long, and was identified to have come from Misawa via a metal plaque plastered to it. — The Japan Daily Press

In order to minimize damage to the coastline and marine habitat, federal agencies are moving forward with plans to remove the dock. In addition to being located within a designated wilderness portion of Olympic National Park, the dock is also within NOAA’s Olympic Coast National Marine Sanctuary and adjacent to the Washington Islands National Wildlife Refuge Complex. NOAA has announced a Request for Proposal (RFP) to solicit proposals from professional marine salvage contractors. …The deadline for submitting proposals is 2 p.m./Pacific on Jan. 22, 2013. — Washington Department of Ecology

My proposal: Leave it there. The 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami killed nearly 16,000 people and led to the explosions at Fukushima Daichi that endangered hundreds of thousands more. It was an international cry of anguish. How do we remember such things? We build memorials. In this case, the tsunami has provided the memorial for us.

A crew has already scraped off 400 pounds of marine plants and animals in an attempt to prevent any invasive species from taking hold,” the Associated Press reports. Why? These organisms too are memorials. What could be more natural than species uprooted and cast across the sea, to seek purchase in new waters? A riven portion of Japan has been shared with us; more, the state of Washington has historic ties to Aomori and Misawa.

Leave this dock. Shore it up. Let Washingtonians look on it, or better, walk onto it, and look east across the ocean, and remember.

Too bad Mallory’s actually a backstabbing architect of murder in the name of democracy.

M is hunted by the cyberterrorist/former MI6 agent Silva (Javier Bardem), who first shreds her reputation by exposing her deep-cover operatives, then blows up her office by a highly unlikely combination of infrastructural hacks, then attacks her frontally in the very chambers of British power. In a bid to protect her, Bond goes off-grid and shepherds M to his ancestral home, the Scottish country manor Skyfall, while instructing MI6 tech guru Q (Ben Whishaw) to lay an electronic “trail of breadcrumbs” that will usher Silva there to finish the job.

Mallory, the new head of “the intelligence committee,” has been spearheading the effort to remove M from the job. He is presumably a high-ranking civil servant answerable to the Prime Minister, and M resists his project as a foolish measure of “civilian oversight” on her division. But she’s tainted by major security lapses — one of them Bond’s own failure to retrieve a sensitive hard drive — and besides, she’s too old-fashioned, if not simply too old, to satisfy the new government. They want her resignation; she refuses. She’s a political trouble spot.

Mallory becomes aware of Bond’s last-ditch ploy, surprising Q in the middle of his preparations. He knows Bond is the only thing protecting M, and he knows Bond is all alone in the effort. He approves.

And then the man with access to the highest levels of government power does nothing, while Silva’s twelve footsoldiers march on Skyfall by land, and Silva himself, with yet more heavily-armed lackeys, approaches in a helicopter gunship by sea.

There’s only one conclusion: Mallory expects Bond to fail yet again. He’s probably aware of Bond’s poor performance on agency psychological and physical evaluation. To paraphrase Silva, he knows Bond is not ready, and knows that he will likely die. If he fails, Mallory is rid of both a stubborn bureaucratic headache and a Double-0 asset who’s past his prime; even if he succeeds, M by this point is such complete poison (she got a lot of people killed in Westminster Abbey just by sitting down) that her career is over, and Mallory wins.

But if Bond lives? Then Mallory, the new blood who’s nonetheless Old Guard, who keeps a field-trained markswoman for a secretary, still maintains this deadly tool in his kit. Bond is seemingly never disciplined for, in point of fact, getting his boss killed, so long as he participates in a conspiracy of silence with his new superior. His tricked-out Aston Martin is gone, first ridiculed and then blown up, but his subterranean Q Branch and upper-crust male boss in a leather-padded suite are again in place.

Ian Fleming once described the character of Bond as “a blunt instrument wielded by a government department,” a phrase M adapted in Casino Royale, the first and still best of the Craig-starring films. Mallory, he of the convenient initial, has the fatherly qualifications to aim Bond — who just immolated the last vestiges of his own father — like a missile. Wherever he lands, he wreaks havoc. If 007 someday detonates in midair en route to his target, well, that’s one more witness put to rest. Democracy prevails, as it often does in real life, by turning a blind eye to slaughter.

Ann-Margret — Mr. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang

(Find the above mp3, plus 18 more Bond-related tracks,
downloadable at Probe Is Turning-on The People!)