The Bond Project

For some reason I cannot realign this first paragraph and I am too lazy to figure it out, and also too lazy to send this review back to Jay with my edits built in, to publish which ones he approves.  I have primarily corrected typos and one or two stylistic choices in favor of proper grammar--but I do not think Jay will find this disconcerting.  He writes the way he talks, and I try to do the same thing, and if you can't appreciate that, then you might as well give up on Flying Houses.  I love writing the way I talk.  It's like a continual process of discovery is happening before your eyes, and there's no feeling that everything has been so intricately refined and calculated to speak "the truth."  I say the truth is in the present.

Jay Maronde and I have been friends since August of 2001.  I met him at the same time as another friend, with a friend I made on the second or third day, neither of which I still talk to--and not by my choice.  We simply drifted apart and I miss them.  But Jay and I stuck.  

The night we met, he asked if we could be drinking buddies and I said yes (we were 18).  We would sneak into a package store and I would trust him to buy the whiskey because he looked older than me.  But eventually we wouldn't have much trouble finding places to sell us some kind of alcohol in Greenwich Village, and we found ourselves going to Smalls Jazz Club, sitting in the back by the bar on the floor, drinking from a bottle of 99 Bananas, staying until 5 AM and watching the sun rise over the skyline of the World Trade Center, as a hundred bikers crossed our path, and we waved.

Later on, I became Editor of the Film Section of Washington Square News (formerly, Culture Shock) and asked Jay to be my co-editor.  We had gone to screenings and written reviews during our freshman year, and we loved the feeling of importance we got from it.  I remember forcing him to go to see L.I.E. with me (and the other two friends that formed our Fab Four) on September 10, and I remember noting in my first ever review, praising the film, that Jay had called it, "The worst fucking movie I have ever seen."  And I remember spending the second half of the next day with him, and drinking in his dorm room.

In the first meeting I held as Editor, I introduced Jay as my co-editor and put my feet up on the table to a dozen or so dazed onlookers and said, "I don't consider myself very professional, but this is the way we are going to do things."   I remember him liking that moment very much.

Recently, he called me (we have only seen each other twice in 2012--but that is much more often than in 2011, or 2010, or 2009, or 2008, or 2007---but 2007 is another story...) and proposed that he write reviews of all 23 James Bond films in anticipation of the newest one--Skyfall.

I told him I was always looking for writers at Flying Houses, looking to expand my operation to Huffington Post-type levels and get bought by AOL Time Warner for millions of dollars, and thought the project was a fantastic idea.  Flying Houses only has a few film reviews (The Brave One, The Dark Knight, The Girlfriend Experience, Antichrist, The Visitor, Le Scaphandre et le Pappilon (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly), A Lawyer Walks Into a Bar..., and perhaps a few more) but I have never viewed it as purely a book review blog--though they do comprise the majority of the posts.  I have viewed it as a blog to review books, movies, music, live experiences (The Pitchfork Festival and Ray Bradbury, for example), my Negligent Infliction of Emotional Distress Columns, short stories, and whatever else anybody would like to write.  

So, without further ado, I present to you, the first in a series of 23, The Bond Project.