Agent Palmer

Over the past decade or so, I’ve recapped most Tours due France. I’ve watched all of them, but somehow it has only recently become an annual thing.

I also watch every Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift, and sometimes I write about them. As a spectator, both Tours offer excitement, and for me, it’s the joy of experiencing two Tours per year, which I’m all for.

When you want to know more about The Beatles and James Bond, two of Britain’s largest popular culture exports, and what both meant to Britain and the rest of the world, you need to reach for John Higgs’ Love and Let Die: James Bond, The Beatles, and the British Psyche.

This book starts on Friday, 5 October 1962, when The Beatles’ first record, ‘Love Me Do,’ and the first James Bond film were both released. As Higgs states, “The Beatles were about to become the most successful and important band in history. Not to be outdone, James Bond would go on to become the single most successful movie character ever.”

Do you like art? Collecting stuff? Anime, cartoons, or animated films? You don’t have to like all of those things, because enjoying just one of them is enough for you to consider collecting animation cels.

Before I dive into why I think this is great for anyone and everyone, let me first define what exactly an animation cel is, as it isn’t exactly the technology of today, though most of us grew up on it.

Music documentaries have gotten better recently. I can’t say exactly why, but I’m excited for it. One such example is the recently released Becoming Led Zeppelin.

Including interviews with surviving members Robert Plant, Jimmy Page, and John Paul Jones, as well as a rare John Bonham audio interview, this rock documentary is all about how they got to the mountaintop as rock stars.

I can’t recall if I’ve discussed them here before, but I’m the proud owner of a few animation cels in my personal art collection. They’re pieces of a whole and reflections of the things I loved as a kid. Their existence on my walls grows even more special with each year as cels are part of a dying art.

Cel is short for celluloid, which is the transparent sheet on which the “animated” drawings were once painted or drawn on.