The scene in Star Wars that scared me most as a child was not the one where Luke Skywalker’s family are burned alive or any of the ones featuring Darth Vader but the one where Luke, Han, Leia and Chewbacca are in the garbage compactor on the Death Star and the walls start to edge towards each other, threatening to crush them alive. A reason that the weeks leading up to Christmas are my least favourite time of year is that the days feel a bit like being inside that garbage compactor, their walls gradually closing in on each side, the picture in front of you diminishing, until Solstice, when a droid in a separate part of the building shuts down the system, offering new hope. I find avoiding disease helps, but I went into town and, in trying to duck the sickly sweet odour of one of those horrible disposable e-cigarettes that children and adults buy from corporations who are looking for ways to hasten the death of the planet - “awful things, like sucking off a robot” an old-fashioned smoker told me recently - I strode directly into a man’s damp cough. “I know what I will do!” I thought, two days later, feeling like my head was full of cotton wool from a dead person’s bathroom. “I’ll walk this bastard off.” It’s worked before but as the sun dipped below the wall of hills that hides the quiet secrets of Devon’s heartland, it felt like a big orange button wired to every ache in my body, sending them up as it went down, and I cut my route short, mocked by a fidgety owl, heading back to a warm house and, like so many people, especially at this time of year, shutting the doors and seeking scraps of meaning in books and films to maintain the illusion that I’m not just a tiny part of a vast interconnected organism born of cosmological chaos.
Almost certainly the best thing I was ever told about owls was when I met an owl handler and he said that the wild owls near the sanctuary where he worked worried about the tame show owls there and sometimes stopped by to leave them shrews and mice as presents. That was just under a decade ago. I can still picture the proud and vacuous line of show owls, waiting for human visitors, their remarkable array of colours and sizes and head shapes. I still think about it quite a lot and find that my own sympathy for the predicament of the show owls grows keener with the years.
Michelle Phillips, formerly of the Mamas & Papas, went to watch Star Wars one morning directly after its release with her step-brother who’d worked on some of the animation in the film. As she remembers it, she saw Harrison Ford being Han Solo, gasped and said, “That’s my pot dealer!” By that point, Ford had long left his drug peddling days behind him, having already been acting in films for a while, getting his big break with quite a high profile role in George Lucas’ American Graffiti, in 1973, four whole years before Star Wars, but it’s a good story and I’m choosing to believe it happened just as Phillips said it did. Back when he was working as a carpenter and providing weed for West Coast rock stars, Ford slept with nine people per day, more even than Warren Beatty, who could only manage six. I found this out while reading Hollywood’s Eve, Lili Anolik’s book about the writer and album cover designer Eve Babitz, and it was one of the few moments where I came up from the narrative for air, due to a pedantic need to analyse the logistics. I’ve got no doubt that the young Harrison Ford - have you seen his face? - would find nine willing sexual partners who happened to have some free time on their hands during the same 24 hours, especially in the climate of Los Angeles in 1970, and there’s always the possibility that multitasking was involved, but the admin sounds stressful, especially for someone who comes across as an individual naturally drawn to low-stress situations. Meanwhile Sergio Mendes’ Encino recording studio, which would soon prove redoubtable enough to produce the Brazilian musician’s ‘Stillness’ and ‘Primal Roots’ masterpieces, clearly didn’t just build itself.
The first time I read Eve Babitz, my reaction was “Fantastic, it’s the Joan Didion you can go to the pub with.” 1977’s Slow Days, Fast Company, her second book - and, if we’re being honest, her only great one - is as dangerously addictive as gossip, as loaded with promise and mystery as 7pm on a summer night in a new country, as atmospheric as all the best writing about place, as randomly confiding as a good friend who’s one and half drinks in. Her fans - not least me - can’t help but be as fascinated with the free and adventurous life she once lived as they are with her perceptive, angular descriptions of lazy, ponderous West Coast days and nights. She put Steve Martin in his signature white suit, had a Doors song loosely written about her (‘LA Woman’), popped up in a courtroom scene in The Godfather II, was photographed playing chess naked with Marcel Duchamp, designed the covers for Buffalo Springfield’s ‘Again’ and ‘Retrospective’ LPs (her other masterpieces, alongside Slow Days, if you ask me), became a recluse after accidentally setting fire to her skirt with a cigar in her car and sustaining third degree burns. It might be disappointing for many to discover, via Anolik’s book, that, while Eve’s sister Mirandi - who once drove Jefferson Airplane’s tour bus, made leather trousers for Jim Morrison and, one senses, has at least a memoir’s worth of stories of her own - seems the height of accommodating loveliness, Eve herself, in the years immediately before her death (in 2021), comes across for the most part as an emotionally disengaged slob with an addiction to Right Wing talk radio. But that’s the 60s and 70s for you. A lot of people didn’t get out alive. Others did, but mostly in a strictly technical sense.
I can’t remember a time in my life when people on a broadcasting device near me who’d experienced the 60s weren’t regularly mythologising the 60s, talking about the remarkable stuff they got up to during them. It’s been going on so long now, it’s hard to believe that one day it will stop, but it will, and, as nostalgically greedy as the 60s seem, many of us will feel sad about that, mourn the gap left by the hazy first person accounts, even the ones that were probably major bullshit. Just as there is now nobody left alive who fought in the Great War, there will be nobody left who went to Woodstock or saw Pink Floyd at the UFO Club, just ever more Instagram feeds curating dead people’s photos, reminding us that our lives aren’t as exciting or cool as those lived a little earlier. But one day people might be just as curious about how we lived now. “What was the early winter of 2023 like?” a young person might well ask me, when I am very very old, in a world unrecognisable from the one we currently live in. “Well, apart from all the war and the ever snowballing technology-fed awareness of how awful everything is almost everywhere, and the looming prospect of losing our homes to various natural disasters, and the immense frustration at the corrupt stranglehold of politicians and big business on what was left of the environment, and the general sense of living in a mournful, isolated EndTimes, it was really quite wonderful,” I might reply. “Due to the same technology that was killing everything, I could, with great ease, surround myself with all the cultural elements of the recent past I loved, without having to put up with the ones I didn't. Sandwichcraft had reached its apex. I also bought a fantastic floral poncho, without even having to leave the house, which arrived earlier than anticipated and cheered me up during the year’s diminishing days.” “Is it this same poncho you’re wearing right now, with the avocado stain?” the young person might reply. “It is,” I might reply. “I have a talent for keeping clothes alive. And it’s not avocado, it’s some pistachio filling that dropped out of a cannoli I ate in the summer of 2037.
I’ve been enjoying swaddling myself in my poncho more than I could ever have anticipated. Because of the place where I grew up, I am conditioned to think I’ll instantly be felled in the thoroughfare by strangers for making certain sartorial choices, but as of the timing of writing I appear to still be vertical. Mostly people just want to run their fingers across it, very gently. Ever since I first put it on, I’ve started to look at my coats differently, the way I might look at uptight mathematicians I want to avoid. I imagine my current TV show of preference has been a factor, too, since it has me spinning within it like it’s a tidal wave, just as it does every time I watch it. A friend asks me what I’ve been up to since I last saw him and I manage to stop myself a fraction of a second before answering, “Well, I have undergone somethin’ of a fuckin’ week and could do with lettin’ the world do its own spinnin’ for a goddamn change. That fuckin’ hooplehead Steve who imbibes his poison at Tom Nuttall’s jerked off on a leg of Sheriff Bullock’s horse and the cum’s author may soon be more widely known, causing more horns to lock than you or I could rightly predict. Meanwhile Jane’s drinkin’ has finally got the better of her and there’s delegates from Yankton and the Pinkertons in camp. They’re hypocrite cocksuckers and the fuckin’ lyin’ instruments and tactics they use to fuck people in the ass can be turned against them.” Deadwood isn’t where I am but it certainly feels like it because that’s what will happen when a show bold enough to invent its own language thinks out every nuance of each of its characters to this rigorous and obsessive extent then, on top of that, every actor playing those characters gives the performance of a lifetime in the role they were born to play. Withnail And I had one Richard E Grant; Deadwood has, what, thirty, forty? Yeah, you’ve seen Brando in The Godfather, but have you seen Robin Weigert as Jane Cannery and Brad Dourif as Doc Cochran in Deadwood? Fifth time around - or is it sixth? - I am finding more in it than ever, more humour and kindness, especially, and as I do, I realise it is inside me, forever, and that I have learned as much from it about storytelling as from any great novel, because it is a great novel, sadly an unfinished one, due to its cancellation after three seasons, but one that shows maximum respect to its reader from its opening scene to its last. “But what about the casual viewer?” an interviewer once asked David Simon, the creator of The Wire. “Screw the casual viewer,” Simon replied. If anything, Deadwood experiments even further with this philosophy. It’s not just that its signposts are never painted in neon; often they’re hiding in the stew of mud and human piss and blood and horse manure that passes for its main street. The show is not worrying itself about that. It knows that, if you’re tuned in, and you get it, you’ll be coming back. If you blinked and missed them first time around, you might catch them on your eleventh viewing, and won’t that be nice?
The Deadwood movie, which came out in 2019, 13 years after the show’s cancellation - in other words, after more people had time to catch up, rewatch it numerous times, and realise it was the best TV programme of all time - is good, in the way that catching up with a slightly forlorn friend a long time after you rightly should have done can also be good. The loss of a particular gold dust is probably less due to directing or acting or script than format: Deadwood, which at its best feels as potentially lengthy and complex as life itself, is far more suited to the patient, multi-layered storytelling long-running TV shows make possible. Life’s Work, the 2022 memoir by Deadwood creator David Milch, gives further insight into the inner workings of this, detailing the loose, unplanned nature of scripts, the family atmosphere on set and the collaborative efforts between writers and actors to sculpt characters assiduously. While listening to the audiobook I became intrigued to find out the identity of the fittingly intense narrator reading Milch’s words and was tickled to discover it was Michael Harney, who played Steve, the aforementioned drunk whose semen stained the flank of the Sheriff’s horse: a rare instance of a first person non-fiction audiobook being read really aptly and sympathetically by a person who didn’t write it. I’m less fussy about author-narrators when it comes to fiction on audiobook, although I’m very aware, from the several hundred I’ve listened to and the fifty or so I’ve abandoned, that the wrong voice can kill a book. I’d have been happy for the correct someone else to read my latest novel but the job has fallen to me, as it has once previously with fiction and twice with non-fiction. Several factors have been making me postpone beginning the process: little bolshy interferences from what some people call life, the knowledge that my novel is longish and has a lot of different characters and I’m going to have to “do some voices”, a slight trepidation associated with home recording and editing. But this week I identified an additional root below my hesitation: I wrote the book, it’s full of my thoughts, and right now what I’m particularly into is focussing on other people’s thoughts, above my own, which, because I already went to the effort of writing them down, I am already all too aware of. It’s something to do with the time of year, my equivalent of recharging: that biorhythmic November-December awareness that you will sleep soon if not plugged into a power outlet. I’m at the pump, filling up, on Siri Hustvedt’s What I Loved, on William Kennedy’s Albany novels, on Stella Bowen’s Drawn From Life, on Babitz, on Deadwood, on Jhumpa Lahiri, on Harold Pinter’s script for Joseph Losey’s The Servant, on my third Penelope Lively novel in a month. The cost has increased: short days of psychological adventures mean paying the price of no physical adventures, sometimes no writing, either. It’s dark already, again. The future is out there, somewhere, beyond the glass. As the Yankton commissioner in Deadwood tells Steve the hooplehead, you don’t fuck the future, it fucks you. Every time. Even if that happens to be in a surprisingly positive way. Maybe my hibernation is my cover story, just a way to try to impose some control on that future through the selection of influences I choose to pickle myself in, but if so, it’s still hibernation, and it still feels right at this, my bad time of year, the time when I always feel quieter and older and tamer and slower. I can hear the owls again, not far from the house, unseeable. They love these nights that not so long again we complacently called afternoons. Maybe they’ll take pity on me and bring me a present.
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Loved this piece; and LOVED 'Deadwood.' I missed it terribly when it ended...then 'Justified' came along, with Timothy Olyphant acting again as a balls-to-the-wall lawman. Again, an amazing ensemble cast; basically, the lawlessness and chaos of Deadwood, but moved to West Virginia. So good... And I, too, am curious about the poncho; photo, please?
Enjoyed this series of thoughts - particularly regarding 60's nostalgia and how eventually it won't be that way ... living in San Francisco, blocks from The Fillmore, this resonates.