A Positively Final Appearance, Alec Guinness

A refurbished Star Wars is on somewhere or everywhere. I have no intention of revisiting any galaxy. I shrivel inside each time it is mentioned. Twenty years ago, when the film was first shown, it had a freshness, also a sense of moral good and fun. Then I began to be uneasy at the influence it might be having. The bad penny first dropped in San Francisco when a sweet-faced boy of twelve told me proudly that he had seen Star Wars over a hundred times. His elegant mother nodded with approval. Looking into the boy's eyes I thought I detected little star-shells of madness beginning to form and I guessed that one day they would explode.

“I would love you to do something for me,” I said.

“Anything! Anything!” the boy said rapturously.

“You won't like what I'm going to ask you to do,” I said.

“Anything, sir, anything!”

“Well,” I said, “do you think you could promise never to see Star Wars again?”

He burst into tears. His mother drew herself up to an immense height. “What a dreadful thing to say to a child!” she barked, and dragged the poor kid away. Maybe she was right but I just hope the lad, now in his thirties, is not living in a fantasy world of secondhand, childish banalities.

A couple of weeks ago, in a Chinese restaurant, the dapper little Chinese maître D bowed low as I left and, full of Chinese smiles, said, “Sir Guin, now that Star Wars is being shown again you will be famous once more.” Oh, to be Ernest Thesiger.

The mornings, during the past few weeks, have started quite sharply and yet gently blurred in hazy sunshine. There is a very rounded cherry tree in the middle of the paddock, now in flower, but the haze softly obliterates the trunk of the tree, leaving the blossom looking as if it might be a small pinkish-white cloud that has settled with us. It spreads a feeling of calm like a blessing. I stand out of doors in my dressing-gown, gazing at it with gratitude, but know that all too soon there will be a thud of letters falling through the letter-box, including glossy photographs which no ordinary pen can sign. As often as not they have already been signed in a sprawling gilded signature by “Darth Vader” from Star Wars —“so-and-so IS Darth Vader.” Maybe — but it wasn't so-and-so's voice or face (when it was finally revealed) to the best of my remembrance. The “IS”, I suppose, is for reassurance, like clutching at something when waking from a bad dream.

Last Sunday, as Mass was finishing, a young man leaned over my shoulder and said, “My pop is a great fan of Star Wars. Will you say hello to him as you leave the church?”

I asked where his father was.

“At the back in a wheelchair,” he said.

The priest gave his blessing and the ritual words, “The Mass is over, go in peace.”

“Thanks be to God,” we chorused back, the young man adding, “And can I have your autograph?”

“Not here,” I replied rather crossly.

At the back of the church, sitting in a wheelchair, was a large, middle-aged, genial-looking man. I went up to him all smiles, like a baby-kissing politician, and exuding the sweet benevolence of a hospital-visiting princess. I took him warmly by the hand and made one or two fatuous inquiries. He suddenly said the dreaded words — “Star Wars!”

“Ugh —hugh –uh –ha –hm,” I said, but I kept up my smile.

“Obi-Wan Kenobi,” he nodded at me and, for good measure, “May the Force be with you.”

“And also with you,” I replied, to ecclesiastical merriment.

“The Man In The White Suit; that was you, wasn't it?”

“Yes, about forty-five years ago,” I replied, with a sense of relief that we might have reached saner ground; anyway terra firma. Then his face became grave and he said, “Darth Vader.” 

I backed away as quickly as possible, sketched him a valedictory wave of the hand and stumbled down the church steps into fresh air and morning sunlight. The young man pursued me. “The autograph,” he said, quite politely. But that was suddenly too much for me. “Not in front of the parishioners,” I said. Then I disappeared.

A second later I was deeply ashamed but the damage had been done. No excuse. Just sudden bloody-mindedness and panic. It's no good saying to myself, “Watch out in these declining years, things could turn nasty.” Donkey's years ago I remember seeing an elderly man in Harrods screaming and screaming at a shop assistant because she was buffing her nails. I felt sad contempt for him and it never occurred to me to mutter, “There, but for the Grace of God, go I some day in the future.”

The evening news announced that dust bowls have formed on the dry farmlands of Cornwall. Cornwall, of all places, where there used to be so many hedges.

We all need hedges, I thought. They don't have to be prickly though, like mine.

“I was world-weary, and I always complained a lot.”

Do you miss Walter when you’re writing lyrics on your own?

Yeah, for sure.

Do you two exchange ideas, and can we assume that there will be more Steely Dan?

We’ve been talking about it for a couple of years. But he’s been spending a lot of time with his family and that’s what he’s into now.

When people say they’re spending a lot of time with their family, I always think there’s some other covert reason they’re not saying.

Walter always tells me that what he likes best to do is nothing. He likes to hang.

And what do you like best?

Work.

Donald Fagen interview, 2012

Unassigned Territory, Kem Nunn

Harlan stood for several minutes at [the room's] center, in the darkness. He was trying to figure it but found he hadn't enough to go on. An affair of the heart, perhaps. Harlan had given in to an affair of the heart once. He had been eighteen years old at the time. He had run away with a neighbor's wife and they had gone to Kansas City. His father and the woman's husband had come looking for them. It was an absurd story. At least it seemed absurd to Harlan. The woman's husband wound up pulling a gun on him in their apartment. He wasn't very good with it and Harlan had taken it away from him. Then his father, who had been looking in another room downstairs, had come up and Harlan had fought his father. He could have taken his father but he hadn't.

In the end -- not the night of the fight, but in the end -- Harlan had done what his father wanted -- he had gone home. What he had found at the time was that living with the woman was doing something to him. When he had left with her he understood he was breaking a rule. But he thought it was only one rule; he had thought that he could violate one principle and yet still live by the others, and what he found was that it didn't work that way. Later he believed he had learned the truth of Paul's words when he said that God's Word was like a mirror in which a man might see not only the man he was but the man he might be, and he came to understand that the proper business of life was trying to do something about the difference. It was the revelation which had pointed him down the road he still followed. It was about keeping honest and as near as Harlan could tell, obedience to the Word was the only thing that worked.

Harlan went to an open window. The night air was cool against his face. He could see a bit of the road and above that the ridge which led to the interstate. Above the ridge the sky was filled with stars. He tried for a moment to imagine what the girl the Wheeler boy had run off with might be like. Neil Davis had described her as a common whore. The curious thing about that was, it was more or less the way Harlan's father had once described the woman Harlan had run away with. There were times when it suited him to imagine he no longer remembered the woman's name, but he did. He continued to stand at the window, to examine the huge black shape the ridge had cut from the starlit sky. The woman's name was Virginia. At one point during the summer of his eighteenth birthday she had given him a record as a present -- the Paul Whiteman recording of "I'm Coming, Virginia." It was supposed to be a joke, something she had picked up in a secondhand store. The thing turned out to be something of a collector's item, however, as it contained a cornet solo by Bix Beiderbecke and there were times now, when Harlan thought of her, when he imagined he could still hear the pure tone of Bix's horn as it filled a cheap two-room flat complete with bamboo shades and colored lights, windows open upon hot summer nights.

The woman had died some ten years later, or so Harlan had been told, in a Memphis hospital of cirrhosis of the liver -- an ugly death and what he supposed was the point of the story, what one ought to remember about the pursuit of empty pleasures. That he remembered more, that the cheap trappings of a romantic sentimentality still clung to the episode like the scent of a dime store perfume, was a nagging source of irritation. That the trappings were capable, on occasion, of generating actual tears, was worse than irritating. But then he supposed there was a point in all of that too. It had something to do with the stuff choices were made of. Though not a subject he ordinarily talked about, it was, he thought, under the circumstances, something he might take up with a certain Obadiah Wheeler, should the opportunity present itself.

True Believers, Kurt Andersen

Back in 1963 people thought they were seeing the future when Gordon Cooper spent a day in outer space circling the earth. But when I look back now at the long weekend after John Kennedy's assassination, I realize that was the big time-warped glimpse into the twenty-first century. In 1963 it was unprecedented and bizarre to have nothing but news and discussions of news events airing on all three TV channels around the clock for days on end, and to have that clip of Ruby shooting Oswald played again and again. I sit with a plastic pint of sugar-free green-tea gelato and a purring Clarence Darrow on my lap, flipping between MSNBC and CNN and FOX, driven from one to the other and back by ads for pharmaceuticals and gold. On every channel, people are talking about the latest breakdown of talks with Iran. In the last forty-five minutes, I've listened to a dozen different anchors and experts and commentators and have learned absolutely nothing I didn't know from reading the story in the newspaper this morning. For a few months last year, when I stopped watching cable news altogether, I think I felt slightly mellower and happier, like when I gave up cigarettes and Diet Coke, or when mosquito season ends. And as with cigarettes, I've come to believe cable news is slowly killing us, giving us intellectual emphysema, cancer of the mind. After all, people smoked for the better part of a century before they really knew it could be fatal.

True Believers, Kurt Andersen

Power Chord: One Man's Ear-Splitting Quest To Find His Guitar Heroes, by Thomas Scott McKenzie

"She's my shovel," Brad Gillis said when I asked about the battered Stratocaster his guitar tech had shown me on the side of the stage. It's a 1962 model that he obtained in 1979 when a friend abandoned a project to paint the guitar. It wasn't a huge acquisition at the time because the guitar player had a black Les Paul Custom that he adored. But he started customizing the Strat on a bit of a lark.

"I had a Datsun 240Z that was custom painted with red-orange paint," he said. "I had an extra can left over for touch up. I sold the car, but still had the paint. I thought, 'Shit, I'll paint this guitar in car red.' I took it to a body shop."

He then had the neck and headstock painted black, which was an unusual treatment back then. He added a Floyd Rose tremolo, changed the pickups, and made numerous other alterations.

"Whatever the hell I wanted," he said. "An extra fret, locking nuts, tuners, I changed everything. Then I started playing and I thought, 'This is a fucking great guitar.'" The instrument has never been far from his side for the last thirty years.

The interesting thing about workhorse guitars is how they are treated with both reverence and abandon by their owners. These instruments contain decades of memories, successes, and failures. They carry the scars of tens of thousands of miles on the road. They often have the dried blood of musicians caked in cracks and crevices. On his website, Steve Vai writes movingly about one of his instruments that he calls Evo:

Although Evo is just made out of wire and wood, I'm afraid of how much emotional investment I have in her. I think when you play an instrument long enough it becomes an extension of yourself in ways that run deeper than anyone may understand but you . . . For me, Evo has been the voice of my heart and seen the depth of my most depressed emotional frames of mind to my most euphoric moments of joy and divine love, and she usually gets the brunt of it all. I have cried, screamed, prayed, and bled through that instrument, and like I said, although she is only wire and wood, there is an emotional investment in her. I'm afraid at how much I love her

Musicians aren't the only ones to cherish their guitars. As fans, we invest tremendous sentimental value (and therefore, a cold hard cash value) in the instruments that produced our favorite songs -- enough value that celebrity-owned guitars fetch huge amounts at auction. Eric Clapton's Fender Stratocaster, nicknamed Blackie, brought an astounding $959,500 at a Christie's auction in 2004. Slowhand sold the instrument, along with many others from his collection, to raise money for his drug rehab program in the Caribbean. The idea of parting ways with the guitar didn't seem to bother him, at least not when compared with the good work the money would make possible. But I went out and purchased a lottery ticket, hoping to win enough to buy the guitar. My plan was to win the auction and then loan the guitar back to Clapton. It just didn't seem right -- in my mind -- that he should be without the guitar. After his passing, maybe it would come back to me or to a museum.

But in spite of the fervor with which the instruments are honored, the musicians still manage to thrash them around every night. I've seen Vai play his cherished Evo with such abandon and fury that I thought he would rip it apart onstage. It felt like watching a cheetah tear into a gazelle on Wild Kingdom.

Brad Gillis was no different with his beloved '62 Strat.

"I still beat the shit out of that guitar," he said. "I'm still playing it hard."

Mr. Gillis, with shovel.

Billy Bathgate by E.L. Doctorow: Sex Scene 2

The thing about Drew was she was not genitally direct, she wanted to kiss my ribs and my white boyish chest, she held my legs and ran her hands up and down the backs of my thighs, she caressed my ass and sucked my earlobes and my mouth, and she did all these things as if they were all that she wanted, she made small editorial sounds of approval or delectation, as a commentator to the action, little single high notes, whispers without words like remarks to herself, it was as if she was consuming me as an act of eating and drinking, and it wasn't designed to arouse me, what boy in that situation needed arousal? from the moment she stopped the car I was tumescent, and I waited for some acknowledgment from her that this was in fact part of me too but it didn't come and it didn't come and I flared through my need into an exquisite pain, I thought I would go mad, I became agitated and discovered only then her availability, that in all of this she was only waiting for me to find her absolute willingness to be still and listen to me for a change. This was so girlish of her, so surprisingly restrained and submissive, I was not artful but simply myself and this brought forth from her a conspiratorial laughter, it gave her the pleasure of generosity to have me in her, it was not an excitement but more like a happiness of having this boy in her, she wrapped her legs around my back and I rocked us up and down in the back seat of the car with my feet sticking out of the open door, and when I came she held her arms around me tight enough to stop my breath and she sobbed and kissed my face as if something terrible had happened to me, as if I had been wounded and she was, in an act of desperate compassion, trying to make it as if it had not happened.

Then I was following her stark naked through the brush into this noplace of such great green presence she had chosen arbitrarily or by happenstance, with her gift for centering the world around herself, so that it was all very beautifully central in my mind, the place to be, following her flashing white form around trees, under tangles, avoiding the whip of branches, with a brilliant chatter of communities of unseen birds telling me how late I was to have found it. And then we were going generally downward, and the ground became swampy and the air close and I found myself slapping at stings in my skin, I had wanted to catch her, tackle her and fuck her again, and she was doing this to me, taking me into furies of mosquitoes. But I came upon her squatting and ladling handfuls of mud over herself and we applied this cold mud to each other and then we walked like children into the sinking darkness of forest, hand in hand like fairy-tale children in deep and terrible trouble, as indeed we were, and then we found ourselves at this still pond as black as I had ever seen water to be and of course she waded in and bid me to follow and my God it was fetid, it was warm and scummy, my feet were in wet mats of pond weed, I treaded water to keep my feet from sinking and couldn't crawl back out fast enough but she swam on her back a few yards and then came crawling out on all fours, and she was covered with this invisible slime, her body was slimed as mine was and we lay in this mud and I punched into her and held her blond head back in the mud and pumped slime up her and we lay there rutting in this foul fen and I came and held her down and wouldn't let her move, but lay in her with her breath loud in my ear, and when I lifted my head and looked into her alarmed green eyes in their panic of loss, I grew hard again right in her and she began to move, and this time we had the time, by the third time it takes its time, and I found the primeval voice in her, like a death rattle, a shrill sexless bark, over and over again as I jammed into her, and it became tremulous a terrible crying despair, and then she screamed so shriekingly I thought something was wrong and reared to look at her, her lips were pulled back over her teeth and her green eyes dimmed as I looked in them, they had lost sight, gone flat, as if her mind had collapsed, as if time had turned in her and she had passed back into infancy and reverted through birth into nothingness, and for an instant they were no longer eyes, for an instant they were about to be eyes, the eyes of soullessness.

Yet a few moments later she was smiling and kissing me and hugging me as if I had done something dear, brought her a flower or something.

Posted here for discussion purposes, in this essay.

Billy Bathgate, by E.L. Doctorow: Sex Scene 1

Much later Rebecca and I were sitting on one of the couches and she had her legs crossed at the knees and one dirty foot swinging and her night-gown showing below the hem of her black lace dress. She was the last kid there. She raised her arms and she pulled her black hair back behind her head and did something deft back there the way girls do with their hair so that it stays the way they fix it without any visible reason to and despite the law of gravity. Maybe I was a little drunk by then, maybe we both were. Also the dancing had been warm and close. I was smoking a cigarette and she took it out of my fingers and drew on it, one puff, and blew out the smoke without inhaling and put the cigarette back in my fingers. I saw now she was wearing mascara on her eyelashes and eyelids and had on that communal red lipstick, paled somewhat since its application, and was glancing at me sideways with her foot swinging, and those eyes dark as black grapes, and her white neck draped in that torn shawl of dusty pink -- I had no warning or preparation from one moment to the next, I was swimming in a realm of intimacy, as if I had just met her, or as if I had just lost her, but surely as if I had never roof-fucked her. My mouth went dry she was so incredibly childishly beautiful. Until this moment I had been the party giver and big boss of the evening, dispensing his largesse and granting his favors. All those dances--oh I knew everyone knew I favored her on my randy forays up the fire escape, but it was athletics, I paid her, for chrissake, I must have been staring at her because she turned away and lowered her eyes, her foot going madly--all those dances I had danced with her and only her were the exacting ceremonies of possession. And this ancient witch child understood before I did that everything was now up in the heart, as if my rise in the world had lifted us to an immensity of consequence, which we were now allowed to see, like a distance ahead of us, like a horizon. They must all have understood, every fucking kid there, while I thought what I had been feeling was only a sweetly mellow good time.

So when everyone else had gone we lay for the first time together without any clothes on that same couch, everyone else asleep, even Garbage in some inner bin of his privacy. We lay in the dark cellar of dust and ash, and I was passive and on my back and Rebecca lay on top of me and cleaved herself on me letting herself down with a long intake of her breath which I felt as a cool flute of air on my neck, and slowly awkwardly she learned her rhythm upon me as I was patient to allow her to do. My hands were on her back for a while and then on her buttocks, I followed the soft down with my fingers, I knew it was as black as her hair, it went from the bottom of her spine down into the crack between her ass, and then I put my finger on her small ring of an asshole and as she raised her hips I lost it in the clamp of her hard buttocks. Her hair fell forward as she raised herself and it brushed my face, and when she lowered herself it fell around my ears, and I kissed her cheeks as she rested and I felt her lips on my neck and her hard little nipples against my chest and her wet thighs on my thighs, and then I didn't remember when it started she was making little discoveries which she voiced in private almost soundless whimperings in my ear and then she moved into some arrhythmic panic and went stiff and I felt around my cock the grasp of her inner musculature and when I reached down with my finger and touched the asshole it clamped around my fingertip and released and contracted and released in the same rhythm as her interior self was squeezing and unsqueezing my cock and I couldn't stand it anymore I arched myself into her and pulled back, raising myself and lowering myself with her dead bodyweight as vehemently as if I were on top, pretty soon going so fast she was being bounced on my chest and thighs with little grunts until she found my rhythm and went stuttering and imperfectly and finally workingly, smoothly against it, meeting me when I was to be met, leaving me when I was leaving to be left, and that was so unendurably exquisite I shot into her and held her down against me with my hands while I came pulsing up into her milkingly lovely little being as far as I could go. And she held her arms around me to get me through that, and then there was peace between us, and we lay as we were with such great trust as to require no words or kisses, but only the gentlest, slowest and most coordinate drift into sleep.

Posted here for discussion purposes, in this essay.