And so, another great name from British pop culture slips into the great federal correction complex in the sky. Farewell, Howard Marks. You were the subject of Jeremy from Peep Show's favorite book of all time. You were the patron saint of British blazing. A nation turned its reddened eyes to you at festival side-tent after festival side-tent. And like Tricky, you always managed to strike up a spliff on stage and no one told you to knock it off. How does that even work?
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For a guy so complicit in his own myth-making, it's hard to separate the man from all the anecdotes about hanging out on Filipino drug islands with exiled aristocrats, or losing wads of hundred dollar bills down airplane toilets—and it would be foolish to try. The myths are his contribution to our culture. Living large, and then telling it larger, is what Marks did. He was a kind of proxy for male fantasy, an unrivaled Boy's Own tale for the late teens, James Bond if his shaken-not-stirred had been a Camberwell Carrot.Here, then, is a little bit of humanizing fact about Howard Marks, combined with the larger-than-life stuff and some unusual or off-radar facts about him, to create a portrait of the man known as Mr. Nice.He was, basically, a decent bloke, by all accounts. "He was one of the cleverest, nicest, and most charming old rogues I have ever had the pleasure of spending time with," said actor Keith Allen."Whenever he saw you, he'd always asked after your family," one acquaintance noted.At Oxford, Marks fell in with a set called "The Establishment" that included a future Financial Times editor, Rick Lambert, and the last governor of Hong Kong, Tory grandee and BBC chair Chris Patten. Even among the very best, he excelled. His only lecture, on the differences in space-time perceptions between Newton and Leibniz, apparently went down very well, and he toyed with the idea of dipping further into academia.Of course, marijuana had to take some of the credit. "A common difficulty encountered by those beginning to study philosophy is that whatever is read appears totally convincing at the time of reading," he later pondered. "Smoking marijuana forced me to stop, examine, scrutinize, and criticize each step before proceeding. It assisted me not only in pinpointing weaknesses of certain philosophical theories, but also in articulating alternative philosophical viewpoints."
HE ACTUALLY *WAS* NICE
CONTRARY TO MOST PEOPLE'S EXPERIENCE, HE ALWAYS MAINTAINED THAT MARIJUANA WAS A GREAT STUDY AID
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HE NEVER TOUCHED HARDER TACK
HE MADE YOU NOSTALGIC FOR THE GLORY DAYS OF MONEY LAUNDERING
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