My latest godson recently visited me. One morning while making home versions of McMuffins—little turkey sausages between oat-floured English muffins, with smoked Gouda slices added to one, alfalfa sprouts to another, little 4-year old Henry looked over to me from his chair-chair and asked, “Uncle George, where are the strawberries?” “I have some nice ones,” I replied and my housekeeper having overheard brought a bowl of California types, probably ‘Driscoll’ over to the table. I made thick slices under his direction and he replaced the cheese and sprouts with them. The strawberry turkey McMuffins tasted delicious, with an unusual contrast of savory-sweet texture, perfect for the low-key amusement of breakfast.

Later for lunch, Henry asked that we make tiny, mini hamburgers consisting of little pieces of bun, meat, and thick slices of strawberry. This was even tastier and one of those simple children’s ideas that make adults feel a bit stupid. He went on to making normal-sized hamburgers with large fresh cut pear and peach slices, and they were ok. Pears weren’t the match for burgers that the strawberries were. The peach burgers were better.

I was reminded of a story of a friend who left his small liberal arts college in the early 70s to get a job in “the real world” (a trend at the time). Pizza Hut was still new enough to be a big deal for neighborhood birthday parties. He was managing one in the Pittsburgh area, a city of close-knit blue-collar neighborhoods. A family of a dozen or so came in and settled at their table. Soon, a young kid—the birthday boy, so little he couldn’t see over the counter—came up and asked my friend Steve, “Sir, do you have peanut-butter pizza?” Steve noticed his nose was running. At that time, a birthday child could have “whatever pizza combination they want—extra toppings free!” by which they meant store toppings. Steve said, “Why sure, young man”, ordered a bunch of appetizers for the family and darted to a nearby supermarket for the peanut butter. He said it wasn’t nearly as bad as he’d expected, and some of the adults tried it. But the kid was transported to heaven. Steve is now a business executive, and active in local politics in Austin, Texas. He often wonders about that kid—what he turned out like. I promised him I’d watch my godson’s progress and see if he ends up “Iron Chef” material—minus the tattoos or I’m not his godfather.

Claude Hope was my professional mentor. He was pressed into this service while in his 50s by my father with whom he had worked for many years. Claude was one of the founders of the PanAmerican Seed Company, after working in Costa Rica for already nearly two decades. B. Y. Morrison had sent him down there in WWII to grow quinine for anti-malaria medicine and he remained, becoming a Costa Rican citizen in the early 60s. I worked periodically for him in the 60s, 70s and 80s and finally as a colleague in the early 90s until he officially retired, by which time he had created Linda Vista, the greatest flower seed breeding and production farm in the world, consisting of 75 acres of fiberglass and plastic roof structures, or “techos”, to keep the rain off the hundreds of thousands of seed-bearing plants. The writer, Allen Lacy, described it poetically in the cover essay of his 1988 book, Farther Afield.

One of my last visits with Claude was in spring of 1995, while he was still active in his late 80s. He’d come to Fordhook a couple of times after I’d relocated from Illinois, so I was anxious to return my respect to him. I spent a week reviewing crops and touring the cloud forested countryside. Growing up on a dairy farm in Sweetwater, Texas, and graduating in the first class at Texas Tech, Claude was a living legend, representing a golden era of early 20th century horticulture. Reminiscing with him meant long evenings over Johnny Walker Black, witnessing a chapter of history. He could recall his classes with L. H. Bailey at length and with great clarity. He was as extraordinary a conversationalist as plant breeder. Plus, he introduced me to David Burpee 40 years ago.

At the end of my visit he beckoned me over to his wall of books in the living room of the tiny cottage he shared with his guests. He pulled down a pair of old paperback books and presented them to me saying I’d enjoy them very much. I was taken aback; Claude’s frugality was legendary. I started them immediately. John L. Stephens describes a two-year odyssey in the late 1830s through Central America and the Yucatan Peninsula where, with his companion Francis Catherwood, he discovered most of the Mayan ruins. Catherwood illustrated and Stephens detailed the monuments of Copán, Palenque and Uxmal. However, he chronicled also a wide range of encounters with Spanish colonial society, the same rural world Claude had encountered in the 40s and I had in the 60s. Stephens had been sent to Guatemala by the government, not unlike Claude. In addition, the two-volume set was from the early paperback vintage of Dover Press, a publisher of durable, high quality soft cover classics. They hadn’t aged at all, even in the tropics. Besides being of sentimental value, it is one of the best books I’ve ever read, an early modern American version of the journals of Cabeza de Vaca, another astonishing read.

Within a couple weeks of my spring ’95 visit to Calude, I was invited to Bard College, which I’d attended for several years. I was fortunate to have the poet Robert Kelly as my English professor and faculty advisor. He scribbled across a term paper I’d labored over for weeks, “Do you talk like this?” It changed my life. I had returned to have an interview with him that Bard’s president, Leon Botstein, generously arranged. We drove around the rustic and charming campus and up to Tivoli for a sit-down at the home of the artist Stephen Shore, who had kindly agreed to photograph us for the college’s alumni magazine. It was a rare and memorable afternoon talking for several hours with my second mentor. Kelly writes dense, energetic, allusive, Einstein-like poetry that channels past as well as present worlds. He was fascinated by David Burpee’s search for the white marigold, as one might expect a poet to be.

On the drive back we passed along the Hudson River near Barrytown. Talking leisurely, he mentioned how he met his first wife while she was working at the Brooklyn Museum, near where he’d grown up. She’d been assigned to help catalogue a large collection of pre-Columbian artifacts. “What kind?” “Mayan relics, and you won’t believe this, George, but they’d been housed right here near the college, on a small island right down there”, motioning to the riverbank. “Isn’t that remarkable, that I’d get a job teaching right where my wife’s artifacts had been stored?”

Apparently a gentleman collector had bought them a long time ago. “Where did they come from?” “Well, they were a collection of Mayan objects from an expedition in the 1830s by a man named Stephens. You ever hear of him?”

I happily told him of the visit I’d just made to my old mentor, his gift, and that I was in the middle of reading Incidents of Travel. He was as amazed as I was.

I’ll never forget the colleague, a lady plant breeder, who, while inspecting row after row of late season petunia trials for signs of botrytis resistance, looked up from her stud records and sighed, “I just love being pregnant – if I could, I’d be pregnant all the time”.
She revealed on another occasion – I honestly cannot recall the contexts of our subsequent conversations – the reason men have breasts. “RNA, George. Cytoplasmic inheritance, you know, you guys are all more female than you are male.” She continued beating out golden plates of wisdom for the many years we worked together.

Another breeder, a famous university professor, labored over a large group of several dozen inbred lines of potato plants that he continuously reproduced in his greenhouse for many years. He was trying to transfer the genetic resistance to a rare disease from the wild plants into a domesticated variety. He used to talk to the plants, like to an imaginary friend, sharing professional and personal problems, and listening to baseball games on the radio as he worked. This went on for almost two decades. Still, he was unable to achieve a fertile cross between them. He was preparing to abandon the project when he had a mild emotional breakdown. Occasionally, he’d visit the greenhouse, sobbing miserably. After he recovered, he decided to give the plants another try before shutting them down. He announced to his students and fellow faculty that the plants were going to be destroyed unless the next test crosses “took”, as they say, or reproduced. Sure enough, a few of the plants suddenly, and for no apparent reason, became fertile and produced offspring possessing the exact traits he sought. For many years he insisted – and most of us believed – that the plants “heard” him, not in any audible way, but as a result of the years of gentle but specific force he had exerted on them. Geneticists call this “selection pressure”. In the wild, biological evolution takes millions of years. Several of his students told me, after he retired, that he confessed that it was the strangest and most wonderful experience he’d ever had as a scientist – a miracle, in fact.

I have no talent for plant breeding. The three projects I undertook over the years – coffee, sweet peppers and petunias – went bust. However, I discovered I had a bit of a knack for research management, which is something like hospital administration. For example, surgeons need a relatively unfettered environment, what the Harvard Business School calls “loose-tight” controls. Over the years I’ve learned that the best salesperson usually makes a mediocre sales manager. So it is with doctors – although there are exceptions – and plant breeders as well. While aptitudes vary widely, clusters of them point to particular areas of success, and “square pegs don’t fit into round holes”. So it is also with plant adaptation – gentleness is essential.

Mediterranean societies view trees as rare and prized possessions. As a result they are seldom found in towns and cities except as monuments or landmarks. Orchards and forests are cultivated away from cities and vice versa. Cemeteries are cleared, as are most sacred places. By contrast, trees thrive in Northern Europe even in the densest urban centers and rival the architecture that often imitates them. Only when their roots jeopardize public works are gigantic trees removed.

The British Isles offered a perfect stage for neoclassicism—its groves reiterated the ancient religious places of the West and absorbed the influences of the Near East, especially Persia. In the early 19th century the collapse of social institutions and norms challenged the view that public and courtly places were to be oriented toward the eternal and divine. In the arts, new ground was laid for the senses, and the human figure became as fashionable as it had been in the ancient world. This awakening had a profound impact on garden design.

Most fascinating is the “British-Italian Connection”. Artists, aristocrats and the newly rich traveled around the world, especially throughout Italy, the center of Renaissance humanism. Subsequently, radical new ideas about pictorial space, the “inhabited mind” and the manipulations of mass and void were imported to the forested island nation. The romantic movement in landscape design inspired visions of a new Arcadia, and resulted in the finest parks and gardens in the world.

By comparison, the US is a cemetery: cleared, squared and settled. Our towns became ugly, primarily through neglect. Naturally clear of trees, the fertile plains and river valleys offered the European colonists super-abundant riches—an enormous plantation state filled with slaves. Here and there, the public was permitted to be amused by imported theme gardens in small settings.

Over the last 50 years the refreshing “wilderness” movement has taken root, appropriately beginning in the treeless and garden-poor Midwest, through the legacy of Jens Jensen and others. The “open plan” of interiors without walls translated well, particularly to large gardens. The “naturalized garden” is available to the average property owner. Only in the US can so many own so much land. We should welcome all styles of garden design. The yard, rather than the house, should be the new focus of our attention.

Named after ‘Impression Rising Sun’, a painting by Monet, impressionism revolutionized painting to an extent he neither anticipated nor welcomed. “I am in it (the movement) but I seldom see my colleagues . . . the little chapel has become a school that opens its doors to any hack.” A truly inspired and extremely rare genius, Claude Monet was also an extraordinary landscape architect and gardener.

The countryside and climate of northern France blesses the many who till its excellent soil. Monet was as unstoppable a gardener as painter, and a force of nature—literally. When he painted the frozen Seine River covered with snow, he remained in the spot from sun up to sun down, a hot water bottle warming his fingers, icicles on his beard and several inches of snow on his hat.

Gardening is as natural as sleeping to the rural French. After his early success in the painting market, Monet moved with his wife and five children into a “peasant” house (simpler than a farmhouse) surrounded by a small orchard in Giverny, a village on his beloved Seine north of Paris. With a large family, Monet soon planted a vegetable garden. After several years exhausting the local scenery with his imagination, he decided to recreate nature in an ideal form on his property. He constructed a network of several acres of jewel-like flower gardens and spent the rest of his life painting them. The most famous spot is the waterlily pond, but there are many others. He especially liked poppies, clematis, dahlias, roses, agapanthus and zinnias.

Monet created the artificial pond from scratch with a crew of helpers from the village. The Epte River branches off the Seine and passes by the house. He channeled the unusually clear water into a clay bedded marsh. At the pond’s short end he built a Japanese-style footbridge. It was this scene that stimulated a change in his pictorial vision. He wrote to a friend, “It took me a long time to understand my waterlilies. I planted them for the pleasure of it; I cultivated them without thinking of ever painting them . . . and suddenly had the revelation of the magic of the pond. I took my palette . . . and since that day I’ve scarcely had another model.” He continued painting for several decades until his death in 1926.

While Monet produced ecstatic paintings that transformed the art world, he was also a product of the changes in his era. These include the “fast painting” techniques of artists who followed Second Empire military campaigns; the impact of the photograph; and the invention of tube paints, which made outdoor painting easy and inexpensive compared to the previous practice of mixing paints in the studio. However, thousands of artists encountered these pressures and opportunities. Only Monet responded so uniquely. Rather than breaking molds, he made new ones.

Toward the end of his life, after a long trip abroad painting foreign landscapes, he wrote the same friend, “I’ve gone back again to things that are simply impossible: water, with its weeds on the bottom waving under it, marvelous to see, but to want to paint it is enough to drive one mad. Still, this is the sort of thing I’m always tackling”.

Monet’s life is worthy of emulation. He had dedication, focus, strength and stoicism in the face of hardship and depression. And it wasn’t just “impressionism” he founded. A youthful Kandinsky was wandering through an exhibition of French painting in Moscow and encountered his first Monet. At that moment the founder of abstract painting realized “what a painting could be”.

I visited Giverny in 1989 and was astonished by its radiance. With eventual prosperity, Monet was able to add a studio and a couple of rooms to the house. He was a big fan of Japanese prints. They cover the walls of his sitting room and study. It was as if he used their stillness and simplicity as points of departure for his volcanic creativity. He once told a visitor who asked for artistic advice, “Paint what you really see, not what you think you ought to see . . . merely think, here is a square of blue . . . here a streak of yellow and paint it just as it looks to you, the exact color and shape, until it gives you your own impression of the scene”.

I visit “Monets” the way others do baseball parks, mountain trails, or—er, well—botanical gardens. Besides the “busman’s holiday” effect which results in my feeling like I’m at work, touring gardens does not compare to admiring art at museums. I simply prefer painting. The near-impossibility of capturing flower colors on canvas is a testament to Monet’s devotion to the task. It’s magic.

A gifted writer, Derek Fell, recently wrote and photographed a fine book about Monet’s garden. (He was, appropriately, a horticulturist at Burpee for many years.) Also, the renowned artist Stephen Shore created poignant photographs of the gardens almost thirty years ago. However, a visit to Giverny is also highly recommended.

Once I visited a military museum at Saumur in France, housed in a castle there. Its main collection was of saddles—every example of whatever man has fashioned to seat himself on a horse was on display, from almost all the armies in the world, old and new, north and south, east and west. I was bored within minutes, surprisingly, because I spent several years of my youth on a cattle ranch. I love saddles! So the strong sense of ennui was very odd at first. After some time I realized that the tedium resulted from the academically finished quality of the exhibit. It was too comprehensive. Perhaps it was because I liked saddles so much that I felt trapped by the museum’s sense of formality and convention. There was no exit, so to speak. When I was done, there was nothing left for me to learn about saddles.

A similar experience can take place in gardens. If the collection is too vast and perfectly organized, it can turn enthusiasts off with its emphasis on logic. Gardeners tend toward the personal signature and distinctive style. Or if the repetition of contrasts continues too long, it can destroy the intended effect of the picturesque. Occasionally I have seen visitors of a botanical garden wandering with their eyes glazed over. Great gardens—large or small—have unresolved and unfinished qualities that pervade the design rather than announce themselves. One is thereby released and transported from the garden, not held to its thrall or enclosed in its constructed totality. Having everything, or the perfect fit, or the ultimate statement, is no blessing. A terminal effect resulting from either content or style leaves the garden visitor bloated and unwilling to return. D. H. Lawrence loosely captured this spirit of openness in his credo, “Living, I want to depart to where I am”.

Inducing boredom in a garden is a common—and entirely innocent—mistake, ironically due to the desire to please, impress, educate or persuade. Careful planning is required to avoid the good for the sake of the great. However, ultimately the saving grace of a garden design is time. It provides not only the relief of change, but the guarantee that folks will return for new evaluations.

Speaking of time, fall is up to bat. The gardens in both Pennsylvania and western Washington will begin to rest. All of the plants will pause at some point during the winter. We have one more two-day Open, a glorious celebration of Viburnums and Hydrangea with Dr. Michael Dirr premiering his new book, in Pennsylvania on September 21 and 22.

Perhaps Saumur castle should build a victory garden in keeping with their military theme and offer pony rides to put the innumerable saddles to use.

At Duke’s Nicholas School of Environmental Science, researchers blow CO2 through stands of trees to determine the positive effect—if any—of global warming. Thus far, it isn’t conclusive that there is a benefit from any increase in carbon dioxide—a theoretical boon for trees. Some experts speculated that tree health would be the only silver lining of the greenhouse gas cloud. However, the effects of health derive from systemic change—holistic, to be more exact. Changes in soil fertility, water and temperature must interact with the spike in CO2 that Gore predicts will occur over the next century.

If we start now to plant a lot of 3-5 year old oak and beech trees, and later the new, disease-resistant elms and chestnuts, we shall provide future generations with one of the best reliefs from the blazing heat and choking humidity of an “earth out of balance”. Back in Illinois, I lived in a 3,000 square foot, tarpaper covered ranch house. Midwestern summers are brutally hot. Yet, because the architect placed the main end of the L shape under a large elm and butted the corner against a maple, I needed no AC. Visitors were always surprised by how cool and quiet my house was.

Everything about trees is good, as their role in folklore and religion attests. More than any other form of life, they bless mankind. Where they grow, our species flourishes. As Bill LeFevre of Bartram Gardens pointed out to me, planting majestically tall and splendidly branched shade trees will result in not only a reduction of electricity required to pump cold air through homes, but also a paradise of backyards and parks. If our nation plants a billion oaks now, they will be ready by about 2040, and will provide several hundred years of deep shade.

The eminently gifted tree biologist Nina Bassuk discussed this at length in her speeches back in the early 1990s. The enlightened nations of France, Germany, the Netherlands and Scandinavia have practiced fine tree care and preservation for centuries, resulting in heavenly forests. However, Dr. Bassuk tipped me to Budapest, Hungary, with its Illinois summers, as the greatest model for the United States. Indeed, she inspired me to visit there. I’ve never seen such healthy chestnuts and oaks. In the park on Margaret Island in the Danube, there was a chestnut so enormous that it cast several acres of shade. I thought I was in a grove of trees until I saw the huge trunk. Someone three hundred years ago was thinking about that impressive, otherworldly effect.

Recently, there have been several “urban forest” initiatives, as well as many started in developing countries to redress the deforestations that occurred during industrialization. These efforts merit our attention and vigorous support.

The floating Savior heard the pleas. Cool weather arrived Friday afternoon like a soothing daydream—a bit of Lompoc right here in the heart of Pennsylvania’s Delaware Valley.After the shipping lanes from Great Britain and France were blockaded by the Germans in WWI, the US horticultural seed industry (vegetable, flower and herb seed) struggled to find new sources for these traditional crops from Northern Europe, the former home of most 19th century immigrants. In 1915, agriculture still overwhelmingly dominated American trade and labor. A collapse of food related industries would rival the horrific disaster of ships lost at sea. My grandfather, George J. Ball, was part of this movement, as was W. Atlee Burpee, the founder of our present company.

With its unique transverse coastal mountain ranges, the Lompoc valley gets breezes of cool, moist air directly off the ocean with no interference by north-south mountain formations. Reaching almost 20 miles inland, the region enjoys the same weather as the deck of a cruise ship. This weird combination of steady wind, morning fog, no rain, low temperatures and California sun by noon, earned Lompoc the status of sacred, uninhabited space from the Chumash. They would periodically hike across the mountains from their outlying settlements to this magical place to worship their gods.

The Lompoc Valley is a black hole of southern California weather: no heat, no dry air, no stillness, no bustling crowds, and—with no windward mountains—little rain at any time of year. A “perfect storm” for seed production and, in fact, vastly superior to Europe due to this unusual weather combined with ample farmland. In fact, there is no place like it in the world. Imagine a cool England that is also both sunny and dry.

Early settlers from the east and midwest included many members of temperance unions who farmed or grazed livestock. Later settlers shunned the area’s cool climate and aloof townsfolk. Not so the Bodgers and Burpees, seed breeders and producers who said, “Eureka!” Their colorful annual flower fields gave the area its longstanding nickname, “The Valley of the Flowers”. Seedsmen have flocked to Lompoc from around the world for almost a hundred years. To this day, local farmers fashion all sorts of large threshers, “clippers” and enormous vacuum machines to gently extract dry flower heads of zinnias, marigolds, lobelia, alyssum, column stock and hundreds of other annuals, biennials and perennials. They mount them on tractors and slowly drive them through the fields. They have built dozens of barns to mill, clean, sort, grade and bag the seed. Lately, a valley in Peru entered the game, with an ability to supply a few classes of seed during our winter months—good for backup and insurance against disease or extreme weather.

Thus, the US and Canada avoided the embargo and general instability of war-torn Northern Europe, hitherto the horticultural capital of the world. Interestingly, Japanese breeders also took advantage of the WWI blockade, supplying highly specialized vegetable and flower seeds to the US market. However, they were stopped in WWII, and recovered only by further specializations. From the 1980s onward, Europe, Japan, Korea and Taiwan recovered much of their trade, especially as worldwide markets opened. Nevertheless, seed from Lompoc’s “mother plants” are so superior, European and Japanese seed companies still produce crops there.

Little more than fifty years ago, Basque immigrants herded sheep on the hills outside town. Diatomaceous earth mines were built in the mountains. The infamous Federal Penitentiary remains—now minimum-security—and nearby Vandenberg AFB still employs hundreds from the town. There is a ring of subdivisions owned by commuters working in “no growth” Santa Barbara, 45 miles to the south. Laotian immigrants started moving to Lompoc in the 90s.

In late autumn, the farmers harvest the best broccoli in the world; the freshly cut stalks and heads have an unsurpassed succulence and sweetness. Locals enjoy heavenly lunchtime feasts of it, steamed and drizzled with melted butter and freshly squeezed lemon juice. When I used to go out on business, I would join these happy repasts. We would take the phone off the hook.

Most books have some measure of relevance, but the “greats” – the resonant ones – reflect a lifetime. One has to read heavily and strenuously in both classics and contemporaries in order to find the gold.

Like Madame Bovary haunted by the crippled idiot, and Anna Karenina spooked by the vision of the railroad worker’s death, I remember under duress my totem-like deep images. Most carry the Hydra’s head of past and present family, and are meaningless to others. However, the rest comprise the rich tissue of my imagination. Writers – and patient readers – live for such moments and take long narrative trips to reach them. As Homer said, the journey’s the thing.

Here are some recent tidbits:

“God Against The Gods” by Jonathan Kirsch – One of the more recent blockbusters of religious history by the masterful Kirsch and his best so far. It has astonishing sections illuminating the history of monotheism.

“Beyond Belief” by Elaine Pagels – Similarly, the great ‘Gnostic Gospels’ scholar delves deeply into early Christian mythology and faith. Her discussion of Satan is especially striking.

“Incidents of Travels in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatan” by John L. Stephens – The two volume set is required reading for anyone interested in tropical America and the early 19th century explorers. Engagingly written, “Travels” has many magical passages and extraordinary adventures. Stephens discovered Mayan ruins in the late 1830s. Avoid abridged version.

“Native Realm” by Czeslaw Milosz – One of the most poignant works of literature in the 20th century. Milosz comes close to perfection in all his books, but this has a uniquely delicate tone. His collection of early essays, ‘Legends of Modernity’ is also excellent, as is his poetry which earned him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1980.

“The Night Manager” by John Le Carre – His best novel, with a thrilling plot and vivid portraits of people and places, especially Switzerland and – most unusual – French Quebec.

“The Europeans” by Luigi Barzini, Jr. – His range is extraordinary and his quality of prose is Old World without feeling dated. They don’t make reporters like him anymore. If you want to know what makes Europeans tick, this is a starting point. Also contains a chapter on “The Baffling Americans”, that remains timely.

“Crisis In Bethlehem” by John Strohmeyer – The greatest dissection of the fate of heavy industry in the US in the late 20th century. Sounds boring, perhaps, but it’s quite the opposite in Strohmeyer’s hands. A born writer, he edited the local daily newspaper, while society collapsed around him. As a child, he saw his millworker father hang himself in the front yard, so his descriptions of our epic struggle with ourselves – writ large in steel – are moving as well as pitch perfect. Hard to find.

After a few beers, I decided to write a self-indulgent blog entry. I like escape movies, so long as they’re mindless. But I’m afraid James Bond has become a serious “art film” subject. Thank God for Jaguar Paw.

First, the “new” Bond flick. Although Daniel Craig is a welcome replacement for Pierce Brosnan, who was almost as bad as Roger Moore and George Lazenby, he has a bland, dull voice, neither weak nor strong. However, his body language and broad smile are reminiscent of Sean Connery. After Connery, Dalton was the best Bond. Critics considered him dull—but he was fantastic and should have been “kept on”, as the Brits say.

Craig recalls Moore’s blue eyes, while eclipsing Connery’s sculpted face. His similarity to Richard Burton is distracting. (Too bad Burton never had a 007 role.) James Bond has to have great non-verbal skills to contrast with his emotional vacuousness. Craig has them in spades, for better or worse. Not since Connery has Bond been so physically tough. Yet, oddly, he has never been so emotionally fragile, a disturbing contrast and, especially in James Bond, a big turnoff. Indeed, I was startled by how much Craig reminded me of Chris Cooper’s performance of Robert Hanssen in the recent ‘Breach’.

Chris Cornell’s powerful voice is perfect for the title track, ‘You Know My Name’, one of the best of the recent Bond songs, although not as memorable as Sheryl Crow’s ‘Tomorrow Never Dies’.

Things go wrong from the start. The pre-title sequence is drab and sterile. Then, surprisingly, Bond is presented as the focus of the title sequence, which hitherto featured exclusively women.

Next, the first long action sequence plays out without a shred of evidence why Bond is laboriously pursuing the astonishingly agile bad guy. As a result, in addition to controlling the chase, the “Crouching Tiger”-like baddie acquires our instinct for fair play. Within minutes, I was cheering for him—not a great start. But James either shoots or blows up everyone in sight for no apparent reason, which makes for anxious viewing in 2007. This is the first of many signs that Bond is deeply flawed. Nothing “secret” about this agent. He is now self-absorbed and even verbose—jarring in the Nietzschean “man of action”.

We’re constantly reminded of his imperfect nature, especially by his mumbling. He’s blonde and fair skinned, which makes him look out of place at the beach. His love interests are both contrasting brunettes. As in the title sequence, one can sense the tide of gender stereotypes reversing. Although hairless below the jaw, he’s become less superhuman, which is thought provoking, but ultimately a drag. Obviously, the producers conducted market research and focus groups. Bond is very contemporary now; heroine as much as hero. This is a shame, since 007 was originally an iconoclast, especially as played by Connery. Now he is apt to sob and quote Lorca. This is the Harlequin Romance version of Bond, more for the career girl than the teenaged boy. Imagining Connery in this role is impossible.

Played by the overrated Judi Dench (a previous nod to political correctness), “M” is a fatuous buffoon, resembling more a foul-mouthed Henry Greenstreet than the great Bernard Lee. And her London flat features a gas log fireplace, Holiday Inn lobby style. Is this a joke?

Off to Huntington Hartford’s Paradise Island—often duplicated, never imitated—that looks here like a cross between Las Vegas and Long Beach. Bond arrives in a Ford (?!), and we’re treated to an obnoxious Goldfinger reference in order to laugh, one more time, at fat German tourists. (It’s a British thing.)

We also have to be reminded throughout this rather long flick that we live in a “wired world”. Early reviews said there were no more exotic gadgets, but there certainly are boring ones: cell phones, computers and cameras that reek of product placement deals.

The gender weirdness in the beach scene—man as Venus, woman as Centaur—would’ve been preposterous in previous Bond movies. One of the few reliefs in the first half is Demetrius, played by the talented Simon Abkarian, whose few minutes on screen are memorable.

In contrast, as the love interest, Eva Green expresses no heat or passion. Her overdone eyes distract from her allure, while her forced smile makes her dreary and boring. The first brunette, Caterina Murino, who plays second fiddle, is refreshing by comparison and a superior actress. (However, the female surprise is the extraordinary Ivana Milicevic.) From the moment Green and Craig engage in their first tedious exchange, the movie begins to crash. One of the biggest howlers is that Bond reveals himself to be an orphan who is attracted only to married women. So much for reticence and British reserve. They should have turned Milicevic loose on him. She has a feline quality, outlandishly beautiful with a large, bowed mouth and flaming brown eyes. She ultimately disappears in a dungeon—alas.

Except for the pleasure of seeing the wonderful Giancarlo Giannini—who shines in roles that stink—the second half of ‘Casino Royale’ is a pain. For example, the villain is thinly sketched for being on camera so long. His use of an inhaler, while interesting, serves only to conjure up memories of Jules Danskin, played by the great Richard Masur in ‘Who’ll Stop the Rain’, one of cinema’s most colorful bad guys.

The plot is thick and dull, which is unusual in a Bond flick. The “ideas” of terror, the arms trade and—of course—gambling, slowly push events along. The actors pose in molasses. If you like poker, you’ll find the casino scenes exciting. Most of the action sequences are shot at night or indoors (easier and cheaper to film), hard to see, and thus not very exciting. The heart attack scene is truly disconcerting. Who would expect a youthful, fit special forces soldier to have a personal defibrillator? Bond isn’t a hero—he’s a basket case.

Additionally, the sound quality is poor. Craig swallows most of his words, which works in spy novels but not in movies. The music is spooky and understated, like a second-rate Hitchcock film. But it is very effective in the main casino scenes. In fact, the terrific fight with the Ugandans in the stairwell is the action highlight of the film.

In conclusion, ‘Casino Royale’ is too heavy-handed. One of the telling features of genuine art is its own concealment. This tries to be art and fails, and few things are as unwatchable. Also, the romantic entanglement isn’t tangled. It seems sterile and lifeless, as if the characters were department store mannequins. The “new” Bond is cerebral, hung up and even frightened at times. He preens in front of the mirror. He’s complex and “willing to commit”. He’s not the Bond of the past. He comes across as the reincarnation of Richard Burton—a nice trip down memory lane, but nothing new.

I thought Clive Owen was a shoo-in, but apparently he’s not sufficiently sullen and bitter. Apparently, today’s audience wants a screwed up hero—the “James Dean effect” finally trickling down to the level of escapist entertainment. Owen would’ve been perfect 25 years ago, which is where my image of JB lives.

Apocalypto

That ‘Apocalypto’ was made at all is a miracle: a glimpse of ancient Mayan life, using mainly non-actors and entirely in sub-titles. Mel Gibson has created riveting action, spectacular costumes, dream-like settings and a beautifully simple drama Compared to Bond, Jaguar Paw is a demi-god.

The stunning flick moves up and down a mythical pathway (literally) through the Yucatan. Three major tests face our hero and the tale is capped with a breathtaking conclusion. I’ve never seen such an amazing set as the Mayan city, nor costumes as splendid in any film. The editing is fast paced and the photography uses all the technology available to deliver an exciting experience. It is as if Gibson had been given the Mayan priest’s mojo.

Plus, it’s refreshing to see children and old people as normal parts of a movie, odd as that sounds. Gibson is an old-fashioned humanist. At times the music—always mysterious—sweeps through the film like a tropical storm. The success of the use of mostly non-actors and subtitles is astonishing. Jaguar Paw, Flint Sky, Zero Wolf or any of those other characters make Bond look silly.

In short, ‘Apocalypto’ is a great flick due to Gibson’s quirky genius. He wouldn’t run a focus group if his life depended on it. From a marketing standpoint, this movie should have been DOA. Yet it sold remarkably well, because Gibson studied Kurosawa, one of the masters of ensemble action. ‘Apocalypto’ is a bit like ‘Seven Samurai’. An ancient, divinely inspired slave culture, versus a rural village in Japan under oppression by warlords. The dreamy action is similar, as is the humility of the main characters. ‘Apocalypto’ reminds me also of ‘Cleopatra’ or ‘Ben Hur’ when they came out—the same groundbreaking use of costume, sets and camera technology.