Quotes from Thompson's Hell's Angels, I think printed without the expressed, written consent...etc etc`You can turn your back on a person, but never turn your back on a drug, especially when it's waving a razor sharp hunting knife in your eye.'`The music business is a cruel and shallow trench, a long plastic highway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men lie like dogs. There is also a negative side.'`I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence or insanity to anyone...but they've always worked for me.'`As you were, I was. As I am, you will be.'`For every moment of triumph, for every instance of beauty, many souls must be trampled.'`There is nothing more helpless and irresponsible than a man in the depths of an ether binge.'
Posted by: Greg / 9:38 PM
" Because, as full-on, fire-eyed, both-barrels blazing crazy as he could be, Thompson was at bottom an outraged idealist. Otherwise, why be outraged? In Richard Nixon's America particularly, Thompson saw not only the death of the American dream, but the subsequent violation and dismemberment of its corpse. Sure, he was funny, incisive and brilliantly entertaining, but he was also on a dead-serious mission: to rescue America from its worst impulses.And those impulses were crowding in from all sides. Listen to him describing the scene on the streets during the '72 Republican convention in Miami:"With the lone exception of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War, the demonstrators in Miami were a useless mob of ignorant chicken-shit ego-junkies whose only accomplishment was to embarrass the whole tradition of public protest. They were hopelessly disorganized, they had no real purpose in being there, and about half of them were so wasted on grass, wine and downers that they couldn't say for sure whether they were raising hell in Miami or San Diego."Although forged in the '50s and minted in the '60s, it took the '70s to make popular currency of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson. Vietnam was grinding on, the Silent Majority was striking back, Clint Eastwood was the world's most popular star and Nixon (Nixon!) was cruising toward a landslide re-election.It was cynicism's high tide, and Thompson surfed it with clenched, sputtering grace. You can park him with journalism if you like, but he seems to fit far more snugly in the period's satirical responses, like National Lampoon, early Saturday Night Live and Animal House.He needed Nixon to really get it up. Nixon was his dark muse, the very manifestation of all that lay darkly beneath the surface of the American swamp, "the main villain of my political consciousness." After Nixon's death, Thompson wrote he was "a swine of a man and a jabbering dupe of a president." He had an "ugly, Nazi spirit." And his body "should have been burned in a trash bin." Excerpts from The Toronto Star article, on Hunter S. Thompson.
Posted by: Greg / 9:32 PM
" Do not mourn for him. He would have none of it. His death is not sad or tragic, premature or pre-emptive. He courted it for years, and must have had days when he was as surprised as we to discover that he was still among the living. He was not a contented man, and we do not remember him now for the sunshine he spread: fear and loathing were the catchphrases by which he made himself memorable. How often he must have looked at his legendary home arsenal and thought the thought." -On Hunter S. Thompson, dead at 67, from The Toronto Star.Never have I really found a celebrity's death so hard to decipher. How should I feel, how shocked should I be. Will anybody even notice after a couple weeks. Had they lived a decent life? But with this one, I was utterly perplexed, only that the storied article in the World Herald, down at the bottom, just big enough to show a recognizable picture, punched me in the gut in the same way that some of Hunter's articles did. I haven't read everything by him, not even close, only bits and pieces of articles hear and there from The Proud Highway and Songs of the Doomed. But always there has been this deep pornographic love affair with his work. I say that because being a believer in the sancitity of the word, one who is content with the glorification of the author in the public psyche (if & when it has occasion to exist) Hunter S Thompson always seemed like cheap pulp that let the reader chew & chew just because the taste was so unmistakably bittersweet. He ranks up somewhere with Baudelaire and Bukowski on the mean & nasty scale, and yet, I've always felt like his work was "something I shouldn't be reading."I don't mean that as judgement. I think if people didn't think his voice was one worth listening to time & again, there wouldn't be so many people who were intrigued by it. And that was the lure. This guy who had done things & said things to people, that you could only dream of saying to those you detest. I remember reading a clip in Harper's from when he ripped the executive producer of the project The Rum Diary, (which has yet to be completed?) and told her what an ass she was making of herself. Explicitly he told her something like that she needed to get the ball rolling or he was going to come down there (on the set) and personally chop her hands off. I mean the balls, the utter ego of a man to carry on like that. And yet, I admit only that I wished to live vicariously through a guy like that. A guy who just bent the rules, past tense, just because there were rules he felt like mishandling. Thompson may very well have paved the way for the society being so enmeshed with a constant thread of counterculture. That there needed to be a variety of opinions, and that they not always follow with the status quo. Say what you will about the incendiary face of media, and the overzealousness of how it pulses & pounds through our television pscyhe, (God forbid we not know what the hell people are thinking about each major event going on in the world (?) America) but it is a milieu, and I'm not so sure it wasn't Thompson that created it. The Daily Show w/ John Stewart, American Idol, The Apprentice, The Osbournes for Christ sake, all because Hunter got on a bike one day, rode the Pacific Highway at ninety-one hundred miles an hour, listening to that crashing tide over the cliffs at Big Sur, and then told us all how goddamn good it felt, to push the limits, to ignore the speed limit, because it could be done. Because it was possible.I like that quote from the Star, because it's how I felt after I had had some sleep, after I had returned to feeling like just an average guy, and not a writer in reflection about the death of another writer. It is like Hemingway, is it not. Thompson seems to have taken the final action on his aesthetic, the aesthetic mattering little unless you carry it out to the last fiber of your being. Those damned existential astronauts, the Hemingway heroes, doomed by the fact of their own existence, and their blatant denial that it should matter one iota, unless it were selfishly, quickly snuffed out with an exclamation point. Checkmate. But I shouldn't mourn, because that would defeat the purpose, the very act & its outcome, saying somehow, it ain't worth it, pal, we 're all gonna go sometime, it just depends on when & how. And I haven't mourned, quite. I just thought about the death of the American Dream, what he ultimately harkened us to in his writing. How it had all just slipped away because we had somewhat lost focus on the prize, stopped caring if it was there, and what the hell can we do about it anyway.Only the spectacle that he was living the American Dream, only the one that had been realized, not the one that had been imagined, laconically, because the collective consciousness had just gone its own separate way. In a lot of ways, when I was young, I might have thought he was living the Dream, out there in the mountains, Aspen, Colorado, having sole property of his own complex, a cult following, probably getting badgered by ex-hippies, college students, idealists, and turning back to his work, calling up lawyers, Congressmen, the hacks at Rolling Stone, Harper's, the tribunes, the heralds, the times, pushing your way to the center of political movements, and having them at least let you say your piece because your that big guy that just won't shut up, and the less they allowed him to say, the more he would attack them, the more he would give him hell. A true Socratic gadfly. A big old pain in the ass, but a necessary one to get soem kind of wheel of democracy moving. Yeah, man, I guess it's all of that. "The only ones who know where the edge is are those who have gone over it." Makes sense, makes perfect sense that someone had to go off the map just so we knew what it was like out there. Just so we knew where the lines were ultimately drawn.
Posted by: Greg / 8:44 PM