The Horse is dead

Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid is on now. Impossible to estimate how much I love a Western. I was raised on them by dint of the timeline: there was nothing else on. Five Card Stud was the first movie I ever left feeling depressed, and I wasn't even that old when I saw it. Since then that bad, sad-in-the-belly feeling has been my benchmark for all manner of art. If it's the Five Card Stud feeling then what I saw may not have been bad or good, but it moved me.

Westerns, like jazz and sci-fi, have become absorbed into the mainstream. I never enjoyed western novels, with the begrudging exception of Pete Dexter's Deadwood -- which is no relation to the TV series. But I refer to Westerns again and again, in Electric, in several short stories ('Running Hot & Cold' and 'Oilskin').

I grew up in the age of the counter western: El Topo, the Sergio Leone westerns (which we watched as the real thing and never considered ironic), John Wayne as the old guard -- gunfights as martial arts epic, a genre which my generation also understood. Prose was the stuff in between: the moody contemplation. I'm less certain now. But I still love the pics: the stretch of vistas, the changing climate, the rules.