He spoke to us because this month his latest book, Flight of the Eagle: A Strategic History of the United States, is being published by Random House. As its title suggests, it’s a review of American History, highlighting how that country became what it is. It’s understandably an epic. And who better to undertake such an unapologetic undertaking than someone like Black who, despite being British and Canadian, somehow represents so much of what makes America what it is: all power, mistakes, intelligence and pride.

“We were camping, by a river, and my old man pulled out his gun. I’d seen him shoot it before, a few times. He waved me over, then he sat down and I sat in his lap.”

Mike is a bear of a man, a veteran actor, and a master storyteller. I can see the weight of the rifle in his hands, his eyes turning into his father’s.“He kind of held my arm inside his and told me to put my finger on the trigger. Then he put his hand over mine.” Mike’s finger curls carefully around the memory of his own as a child.“I can still feel it exactly. It was safe and scary at the same time. He held the rifle against my shoulder and pulled my shoulder into his, so he’d absorb the kick. He told me to aim…”And now Mike leans forward, hands still raised, his fingers curled, he squints one eye.“And squeeze. Then, boom.”

“What did you shoot at?”

Mike shrugs, and just like that the gun disappears.“I don’t know,” he says.“A bush? A tree? We shot across the river.” For a moment he glances off, like he’s looking for where the bullet went.
Mike has been my best friend as long as I can remember, but I’ve never heard this story about his dad before. I know a hundred other ones—even watched a few of them unfold. They usually end with some sort of a bang: an explosion, a gunshot, a burst of laughter, a badass moral, an echoing lesson.

The son of a depression-era bank robber, Mike’s dad Bob sailed through life like a buccaneer. He was a gambler and a biker, but also an excellent dad and a helluva hard worker. For decades he was a high-wire crew-boss for the phone company. He’d go to work sometimes with a sabre hanging from his belt: as he hung from the wires, he’d belt out orders like a pirate on the main sail. He brought phone books home from work and stuffed them into the wood-burning hearth for target practice.“That was always fun…”says Mike, “shooting up the fireplace.”

For Mike and his brother, guns were like the rest of life in Bob’s domain — to be taken lightly and deadly serious at the same time—to be learned, mastered and thoroughly enjoyed. Bob was smart enough to keep firearms away from the rest of us little punks, but he knew his boys—he’d moulded them with his bare hands into brave and trustworthy young men.

A heavyweight boozer and Viking philosopher, Bob was the kind of man who no one could beat, so he had to do it to himself. He was a living legend until he finally died, from living so legendarily hard.

It was a rainy day in May, 2003. After years of death-defying illness he stood up out of bed and collapsed. When the paramedics arrived, they saw the butt of a Ruger P85 in the drawer of the bedside table, knocked open by his fall, and called the cops. Like all his other guns, it was well-registered, but the police seized it, and Bob was taken to the hospital, where he quickly departed for whatever Valhalla might be up there.

Here in Canada, it took Mike some hoop-jumping to get the gun back. Eventually he did, and re-registered all 30 of his dad’s firearms in his own name. Now it’s 10 years later and we’re driving my mum’s 30-year-old van to a shooting range outside Vancouver. We’ve got the Ruger in a lock box, along with a Colt 45 that Mike’s dad gave him when we graduated from high school.

“I don’t honestly know why my old man was so into guns,”says Mike.“Or why I am. Except that my old man was. No, that’s not really it…”

Mike is a big-hearted, liberal-minded man, and his eloquence can falter when it comes to his relationship with guns. Especially now. Mike’s first child is due in less than a month. Despite the earnest protests of his lovely wife, Mike wants to name him Buck. My son’s name is Zev. We figure they’ll be a crime-fighting duo. Defending gun-ownership is not foremost on my best friend’s mind.

Mike is not only a marksman, but a scholar of warfare. His maternal grandfather and great grandfather were soldiers in wars that he has studied obsessively. He believes that killing is the most unnatural human behaviour and that to do so requires an instinctual deprogramming. Police, even soldiers, he says, used to train by shooting at targets without faces.

“They were still full of their humanity going onto the battlefield, where maybe it was ripped from them, but they were human going in. Now, kids go through shooting simulations on computers before they even know how to read. We’re desensitizing a whole generation to gun violence. And here, kid, you have the right to own an assault rifle. Those things shouldn’t even exist. They serve no purpose but to kill as many people as quickly as possible.”

“Didn’t your dad have assault rifles?”

“Yes,” says Mike. Which means, of course, now Mike owns them. I can see him wrestling with everything as we cross a bridge over the sparkling Fraser River.

“You going to teach Buck to shoot?”

“If he wants to learn,”says Mike.“I don’t know why I always have to defend this stuff to people. It just seems like a no-brainer.”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t want to live in a world where everyone carries a gun. That would be a horribly stressful place to be. But as it is, the world is full of guns, and I think it’s good and smart to know what that means, how to use them, what they can do. It’s not the marksmen who shoot innocent kids in the street. It’s the little gangster morons who are handed guns and don’t know how to use them.”

“And then there’s always the zombie apocalypse…”

“That’s right,”says Mike, as we pull up to the firing range.“Got to make sure Buck and Zev are ready for that.”

* * *
There are dozens of kitschy pop-culture targets to choose from—everything from a Hello Kitty with a machine-gun to a sexy Mrs. Claus. But Mike, of course, chooses the classic, faceless silhouette.

Before we start to shoot, he takes me carefully through the safety lessons; how to load and hold and aim. I pay close attention. Not only do I want to learn to shoot well, but at this point, I still think it’s what this column will be about. We fire his father’s gun, and then his own— shooting patterns in paper in a bright, deafening warehouse. Then we get in my mum’s van for the drive back to our childhood neighbourhood, his pregnant wife, and my little boy who is napping.

“That was fun,”says Mike. I agree, but I can see he’s deep in thought, so I watch the road and wait until he gives me something else.“You know what it is?”

“What?”

“All those things we loved as kids—the pirates and cowboys, and cops and robbers, even the war… all those stories and adventures—my dad made them real. We’d be watching a movie or whatever and then he’d go and bring out the exact same musket that soldier was holding—or a crossbow or a rifle and he’d put it in our hands, and he’d show us how it worked, try to teach us what it really did—let us feel the weight of it, you know?”

I look over and Mike’s hands are curled around that invisible first rifle—the Lee Enfield .303 Jungle Carbine—and he’s staring across the river. He looks just like his dad.

And I can see now that it’s not about what you hit, or even what you aim at. It’s about holding on to something.

For more of Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall’s fatherhood chronicles, visit here.

Go back in time for a moment to the summer of 2007. As fun as it is to think about it with the irony afforded by hindsight, Iron Man was a gamble. And not just because he was a semi-unknown superhero in a market bogged down with superhero films, but because its star had never carried a blockbuster before. Not really. Robert Downey Jr. had been an actor—an energetic, anarchic, incredibly talented actor—for more than 20 years, but he’d never carried a movie that got made into Big Gulp merchandise. It wasn’t clear if he could do it.

There was no doubt about his talent. The gamble was whether he would do it or whether his old demons would take hold of him at the height of his success and sabotage him (as they did once before), and take Tony Stark down with him.

It all seems a little laughable now. Like it’s silly to talk about Robert Downey Jr.’s bad old days. He’s so completely reborn. He has all the talent everyone always knew he had, without the terror. He’s just pure, unfiltered cinematic energy.

And, sure, we could talk about how he still has some hurdles to clear: the second Iron Man wasn’t as good as the first, and so who knows if the third installment will continue that trend, especially since it’s helmed by a new director. And, sure, success can breed pride, and pride isn’t typically conducive to excellence. But, all those things seem irrelevant when it comes to Robert Downey Jr. The man forged Iron Man out of sheer will and charisma, and appears poised to pick up where he left off.

Unplug on a cliff top hideaway overlooking the turquoise Aegean on an under-the-radar Greek isle or soak up rays from a modernist perch in Croatia above the glittering Adriatic. For a more tropical idyll, try sun-kissed pavilions in Thailand, palm-fringed beach houses on Barbados or an eco-chic estate tucked away in the Dominican Republic jungle. You’ll save a little something extra for souvenirs, and have a tantalizing tan to show-off for all your smart planning too.

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Photography: George Pimentel

Back then Britain was stuck in the midst of a serious wave of ’60s nostalgia. It is a mania that has never fully left us, creating the context for tonight’s exclusive launch of People, Hell & Angels, an album of previously unheard recordings from Hendrix’s ever-emptying vaults. The party is happening at the recently reopened Bag O’ Nails Club on the edge of Soho, the folkloric site of an early Jimi Hendrix Experience UK gig in early 1967. Then, so the legend goes, Messrs.’ Clapton, Townshend and Beck were crammed in. Tonight veteran rock writers, record executives and young Hendrix-heads glug beer and wine, while waiting patiently for what is likely the guitarist’s last unheard studio work.

People, Hell & Angels has been in the works for a long time, with producers Eddie Kramer, John McDermott and Jimi’s sister Janie Hendrix picking out the recordings good enough to be released. The Hendrix estate’s standards are high. There are plenty of recordings that won’t see the light of day. Here, they’ve selected a series of stripped-down yet powerful studio takes that position Hendrix as purveyor of a full-blooded, jazz-and-blues-inflected garage rock. The opener “Earth Blues” is punk soul. The single “Somewhere” features Stephen Stills on bass and is imbued with Hendrix’s looping and quivering solos and fuzzy coagulated spurts of noise that still have the power to make you stop and think, “How?” — which is some feat in a world where his loose, sprawling psychedelic blues template has become a staple sound of the pub band, from Toronto to Tallinn.

Hendrix wanted to play with Miles Davis—who many regard as Hendrix’s equal and dream collaborator—but the trumpeter’s management would not take less than $50,000 for the privilege. The album track “Let Me Move You”—the biggest draw for aficionados, as no version of it has seen the light of day until now—points to what might have been, with Hendrix riffing like a jazz guitarist, accompanying the saxophonist Lonnie Youngblood. “He understood how a jazz musician thinks,” says Kramer, who engineered Hendrix’s studio albums. “He sublimated his ego into this role of rhythm guitarist. He was like a session guy, playing rhythm, but when the solo comes—whoosh! Off we go.”

Most of the recordings were made between Hendrix’s most fertile period and his star-spangled performance at Woodstock in 1969. The guitarist had just made Are You Experienced, Axis: Bold As Love and the double album Electric Ladyland in the space of 18 months and was “searching for stuff to change the direction,” says Kramer. “He was a restless soul.”

Of all the songs tonight, his cover of bluesman Elmore James’s “Bleeding Heart” feels the most intimate. When Hendrix breathes out a fleeting “Yeah!” it’s as if he is in the room. I think back to my teenage years of video-taping classic album documentaries. Tonight, though, Hendrix isn’t a frozen icon from a nostalgic documentary. He’s alive.

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