In other news that you may have missed, two more old friends we grew up watching on classic TV sitcoms have left us.

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Ah, crap… I just read that Floyd Red Crow Westerman, the Native American actor who played all the “wise old Indian man” roles over the past couple of decades, died earlier this week, too. He was 71.

Floyd is probably best known for playing Ten Bears, the kindly village elder in Dances With Wolves (still a great damn movie, and I won’t hear any dissenting opinions just because Costner has fallen out of favor), but he really did turn up anywhere a similar type of role appeared: notably in the films Thunderheart, The Doors, and Hidalgo, and on television in Northern Exposure, Buffalo Girls, Dharma and Greg, and even The X Files. I used to joke that he had basically taken over all the parts that used to be played by Chief Dan George back in the ’70s, but I think Westerman maybe had more of a presence than George did; he always radiated gentle wisdom and a warm, wry sense of humor, whereas George was often more taciturn and unknowable. I predict Westerman is going to be the popular image of an Indian sage for years to come.
Interestingly, the article I linked to above says he was a musician as well, and considered that his primary vocation. I didn’t know that.

I write a lot of little obituaries for celebrities whose work has affected me in some way, but many of them are not necessarily people I ever had a desire to meet. Floyd Westerman is one of the ones I wish I had known.

When I heard last night that the singer-songwriter Dan Fogelberg had died, I immediately had a powerful memory flash — not just a mere run-of-the-mill recollection that’s as two-dimensional as an old postcard, but one of those strange and rare experiences when it seems as if time and space become malleable and, for just one brief instant, you are someplace else, someplace you haven’t been in a very long time. In this case, I was 13 or 14 years old, riding in the top bunk of our old camper as the truck beneath it carved through the darkness. I don’t remember where we were going, or maybe it was where we’d been; Dad used to drive the truck-and-camper around town all the time, so it might not have been anywhere special. I can’t see anything beyond the front window except a cone of highway caught in the headlights. In my imagination, the white lines flashing past on the pavement are doppler-distorted stars seen from a starship clicking along at point-five past lightspeed. I’m reading a Clive Cussler paperback, and on my amazing little Sony Walkman — that was a type of portable music player in the pre-iPod days, kids — I’m listening to a cassette of Dan Fogelberg’s Greatest Hits.

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Here’s a sad note on which to begin the week: Lois Maxwell, the elegant lady who bantered with three iterations of James Bond over a period of 22 years and 14 films, died over the weekend. She was 80. The LA Times obit is here.

Maxwell, who played the ever-hopeful Miss Moneypenny alongside Sean Connery, George Lazenby, and Roger Moore, was replaced by a younger actress for Timothy Dalton’s first outing as 007 in The Living Daylights. Maxwell was 58 at the time, and I, for one, have always seen the change as something of an injustice. After all, Desmond Llewelyn played Q until he was quite elderly. Surely it wouldn’t have been too far-fetched for M to have an older executive secretary for a few more installments in the series? Rather than recast her with someone younger, wouldn’t it have been more interesting to change how Moneypenny relates to Bond as Maxwell aged, to make her more of a mothering presence than an object of flirtation? (Or, for that matter, why not be really daring and do both?) Sadly, the producers of the Bond series have rarely shown any true daring in the 40-plus-year history of the franchise, mostly preferring to stick to rote formula.

Nevertheless, I think it’s telling that Maxwell’s face is the one that immediately comes to mind when you hear the name “Moneypenny.” No doubt that can be attributed, in part, to the fact that she played the character for so long and in so many entries in the series. By contrast, her two successors, Caroline Bliss and Samantha Bond (ironic name, eh?), have played Penny in only two and four films, respectively. But I think you can also argue that Maxwell stands out because of a something you don’t see much anymore, an old-fashioned strain of genuine class. No disrespect to Bliss or Bond, but Maxwell simply had that civilized, grown-up, cocktails-and-jazz sort of quality that defined the movie stars of the early Cold War era. You just knew that if Moneypenny smoked (I can’t recall if she did so in any of her Bond movies, but I could be wrong), she would keep her cigarettes in an enameled wooden box and light them with a crystal desk lighter. No crumpled paper packs or disposable Bics pulled from the bottom of a cluttered purse for her. And if you could manage to seduce her, the sex would be anything but casual, even if there were no strings attached.

Maybe Maxwell’s interpretation of Moneypenny is passe now — Bond himself has been reinvented for the 21st Century, and he doesn’t bear a lot of resemblance to the character JFK was reputed to have enjoyed — but her version will always be, for me, the definitive and classic one, just as Connery remains, in my mind, the one true 007. Even if Daniel Craig was damn good…

Here’s a bummer note on which to start the weekend: SF Signal is repeating the news that author Madeleine L’Engle, best known for the classic children’s story A Wrinkle in Time and its various sequels, died last night at her home in Connecticut. She was 89, so she had a good, long life at least. And of course her books will no doubt remain in print for a long, long time to come, a form of immortality that everyone who puts words to paper dreams of achieving.

I blogged some time ago about revisiting Wrinkle when I had to write an essay on a favorite childhood book for a job interview; you can read that essay, as well, if you’ve a mind to.

You never realize how much some of those long-forgotten things from childhood really mean to you until something forcibly reminds you. A couple years ago, it was a job interview that got me thinking about Wrinkle and its sequel, A Swiftly Tilting Planet, which I also loved (I never got around to reading the other twothree books in the Time QuartetQuintet, as I understand it’s called). Today, it’s the passing of the lady who created them.

Update: There’s a detailed obit up now at The New York Times, and Scalzi has pretty much summed it up with this observation:

…what a great writer she was. Her books remain; in fact, they are on my daughter’s bookshelf right now, waiting for her. I envy her that she gets to read them for the first time.

I don’t have any children, but I understand that sentiment very well…

Update Two: Hm, it seems there are actually five books in the “time” series: A Wrinkle in Time, A Wind in the Door, A Swiftly Tilting Planet, Many Waters, and An Acceptable Time. Man, am I out of touch with my children’s and young adult literature!

Believe it or not, the primary focus of my fanboy energies throughout most of the 1990s was not the Star Wars saga. Really. I know it’s hard to accept, but it really wasn’t. It wasn’t even Star Trek, despite all the various TV spin-offs running at that time. No, for the better part of the final decade of the 20th Century, I was seriously preoccupied by a fictional universe called Highlander.

Highlander is tough to explain to the uninitiated. It has a fairly bizarre premise to begin with, and its cause isn’t helped by the fact that all the different properties that fall under the Highlander brand tend to contradict each other, or at the very least don’t share the same continuity. I’m not going to go into all that in this entry — I’ll explore that topic some other time — but what you need to know (if you don’t already) is that the entire franchise originated with a 1986 movie and was revisited in a television series by the same name that ran from 1992 through 1998.

When Highlander: The Series ceased production in ’98, The Girlfriend and I were sufficiently wrapped up in the whole scene that we flew to LA to attend a big farewell convention dedicated to the show. It was an exciting event — the entire regular cast was in attendance, as well as a lot of the more prominent guest stars, and, of course, fans from all over the country.

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“Hero” is a word that’s lost much of its meaning in recent years due to overuse and misuse. All too often, in my not-so-humble opinion, it’s a label that gets applied to people who don’t deserve it. The general public tends to confuse heroism with mere celebrity, while those who would influence the public aren’t above trying to create artificial heroes when it suits their purposes or advances a cause.

But there are still genuine heroes in the world, even if we sometimes have to look backwards to see them. One of them died this week: Wally Schirra, age 84, of natural causes. Not a very heroic death, that, but everyone dies and most people do it in rather mundane fashions. What matters is what you do while you’re alive. And he did some amazing things.

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Renowned author Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., died yesterday at the age of 84, and I find myself rather puzzled by the depth of my reaction to the news. I feel truly, deeply bummed about this, which would make sense if Vonnegut had been one of my heroes. But the truth is, the only work of his I’ve ever read is a single short story back in high school, the same short story that everyone else reads in high school, “Harrison Bergeron.” I’ve always meant to read some Vonnegut, or at least his best-known novel Slaughterhouse-Five, but I just haven’t gotten around to it.

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Bob Clark, the director of one of my favorite holiday movies, A Christmas Story, was killed today in a car accident, along with his 22-year-old son Ariel. Their sedan was struck by a sport utility vehicle being driven by an unlicensed idiot who sustained only minor injuries. The idiot is expected to be booked on suspicion of driving under the influence and gross vehicular manslaughter. I hope they throw away the key.

The LA Times has the details of the accident and a brief obit here.

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Man, I am so colossally bummed by this news: Brad Delp, the lead singer of the rock band Boston, was found dead in his home on Friday. The cause is still unknown; Delp was a far-too-young 55.

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