For those of us who belong to the Deadwood faithful, it was a bad day when David Milch announced the show would not run for a fourth season. For those of us who love it (and there are worthy, intelligent humans who don't. I've met them, and come away puzzled and a little hurt by what, from my love-addled perspective, looks like willfully intransigent blindness), it was not just the color and variety of the characters or the violent fairground charms of the town itself that drew us back like a siren's song, but the poetry of the language, largely unequalled in its moments of sudden delight. You have to settle into town a piece before you can appreciate the hilarity of the lines: "Well, you are one entangled inebriate," or "Those who doubt me suck cock by choice," or (my favorite) "He's been picklin' his prick in the cunt-brine of another." You have to relax into Milch's callused palm before you can recognize as an act of unexpected kindness the moment when the brothel-keeper, at the culmination of a blowjob, says to the whore, "Spit it out. You don't have to swallow it."
Yeah, it all sounds sick and wrong, but that's only when it's out of context. IN context, it's sublime, which brings us back around to the day upon which David Milch announced to the world that he would be leaving the wooden sidewalks and mud streets of Deadwood for the swells and barrels off Huntington Beach. And I may be the only Milchhead in the world who heaved a sigh of relief and thought, "At last! A surfing show that will shred."
OK... I didn't think it... not in those words. But there aren't enough vicarious enjoyments for armchair surfers. Some great books and some good ones, a lot of documentaries, a few surf-dramas. For all its mediocrity, I love Point Break because it indulges in surf-exploration you don't get most places, from the zen of it to the nazi-punk of it. It's shameless. Anthony Keidis is a methed-up surf nazi! Keanu Reeves is a surfing FBI agent! Patrick Swayze is a bank-robbing Big Kahuna! "Look, Bodhi, people are dead. The ride is over." Awesome.
To make John From Cincinnati, Milch teamed up with Kem Nunn, who may be the god-template to which surf novelists will aspire for decades to come. With these fellows on board, I thought, it cannot help but please mightily.
And, to an extent, it does. I'm three discs into the four-disc season. So far there's not a lot of surfing, which is not great, but surfing footage I can get from docs. Most of the characters are compelling, most of the acting is well done, most of the dialogue is strange and engaging. It's got just the right touch of supernatural about it. The one problem I've got is with Mr. Eponymous there, this John from Cincannati fellow. He's an angel. Or maybe not. It could be argued. My own impression is that he's some kind of recording angel, as he spends most of his time repeating the thoughts and words of others. I can see how he seemed like a good idea for a central plot device initially, but it doesn't ultimately play. Maybe it's miscasting. Maybe the device never became human enough. Maybe I'm just tired of people talking to God (Wonderfalls, Joan of Arcadia) and getting angelic visits (Saving Grace, and that cloying daytime television thing with Della Reese in it). In any case, the climax of the last episode I saw was a communal dream sequence in which old John spews off a string of Finnegan's-Wakeianities while everyone eats barbecue. Included in the extras was David Milch onset, interpreting the speech line by line to the gathered cast. I watched about half a minute and turned it off. First, if the speech needs a bedside companion to guide us through it, it damn well better be as brilliant as Joyce (this is not). Secondly, the translation itself was, in a word, lame.
There is one interesting thing that Angel John does: he allows the characters a glimpse of God. It manifests as a moment of omniscience, pain, and terrible heat, and that seems to me a pretty decent stab at approximating a theophany.
The long and the short of it is that I'm headed right back for more. My sympathies are all wound up in the mutual destiny of the Yost family, three generations of brilliant surfers. One of the questions at the heart of the show is whether or not it is enough to do what you love in solitude, or must it be shared with others to be fully realized? That's one of my own favorite questions, and I'm hoping for a little redemption for Mitch (Bruce Greenwood) and Butchie (Brian Van Holt) and Cissy (Rebecca De Mornay).
In any case, the best way to prepare for the show is by falling in love with surfing. If you don't have actual access to the ocean, do it vicariously. Start off with Dan Duane's Caught Inside: a Surfer's Year on the California Coast, then try a Kem Nunn novel. Tapping the Source may be his best. Steven Kotler's West of Jesus is another good one on the surf memoir shelf, and Joy Nicholson's the Tribes of Palos Verdes melds fiction and memoir to good effect. There are a thousand documentaries; Riding Giants is one of the best, I think. Then dip into some of the great collections of surf literature: I recommend the Big Drop, edited by John Long, and Zero Break, edited by Matt Warshaw. At first it'll seem like a foreign language, but at some point, I guarantee it, you'll fall in love. And then you'll be ready.
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