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

So despite all this Johnny Cash died on Friday... the best I can say is that I will miss him and his utterly human stature in his later years. To me, Johnny was bigger than Elvis, bigger than Sinatra, Dylan, he was tantamount. Maybe John Wayne himself might have been the only person who was his equal. But there was such a dignity in the last years of his life, each album, each song, each verse showing a man exposed... a man who wanted to portray himself as the toughest guy on the planet, and with the set of his eyes, his postures, you might have believed him... Like a bird on a wire, like a drunk ina midnight choir, I have tried in my way to be free. These were Leonard Cohen's words of course, but a deep sincerity looms around them when Johnny sings them. So much apology, so much amendment, that I can't help but believe these last ten years were devoted to repentance, much in the same way the Jews flog themselves and beat their breast at the death of a loved one... like that baggage just had to be dropped... I realize how much life I have left to live through that man, that I haven't even begun to live, as if everything up until now was the dress rehearsal... that somehow to live you tend have to make mistakes and that somewhere there are heartaches innumerable, unfathomable. Not out of necessity, but part of the human condition. But Johnny wore it well, he turned it into something like integrity, admirable despite anything anyone could ever drudge up against him... God rest his soul, God grant him the entrance to the pearly gates of heaven... long live his spirit, here & ever after...
Posted by: Greg / 10:38 PM

Basically, if you think about it, music would seem like worth so much more if I didn't know a bunch of other people weren't getting the same canned preformatted item, frames and all. Basically, when I buy a work of art (if I buy a work of art) I would know that I am carrying the original, which could not be reproduced. Therefore, for the privilege of having seen the piece, having been attracted to it, and then knowing that the artist prodiuced only one like it, I would be willing to pay above $100 for that item. But knowing that 100 other people will pay 16 or 17 bucks for a CD, doesn't the artist already get his money back for the production of it. That's a liberal sum too. No, wait, the record company needs their cut too, huh? Man, those guys seem to be leaving something out aren't they? Man msuicians consider themsleves lucky that they don't really have to work striaght jobs that they make a living doing what they love to do. I'm still scraping for $9.37 an hour to make ends meet and I have reams of poems just dying on the vine and I have that sneaky feeling I'll never really be doing what I love to do. May not ever. Makes me want to quit writing all together actually. I mean hey, I freaking idolize these people you know, I truly do. But I decided that it was enough to pay $40 once to see Bob Dylan ... $20 an hour per person when you have about three or four thousand on one given night. Sorry, Bob but the times they are a-changin', keep trying to get heaven before they close the door. You can probably buy your way if you ask nicely. Actually, I bet true musicians think it's cool if their stuff is getting heard by people who can't afford to buy every one of their albums. Even the dead ones, you know. I mean if you're so shallow that you're in it for the money, and that's it, you're shit is probably not worth hearing anyway, and it'll be only so long before you could only hope people are still dowloading your shit illegally.
Posted by: Greg / 12:41 AM
Lastly, for now, I am incredibly disturbed by the lawsuits for the file-sharers. I am waiting for the hammer to drop here. I mean yeah, I download music but that's it. I listen to it while I'm doing stuff on the computer. I personally have just bought this Bruce album and one by the White Stripes as a direct result of being able to listen to songs on the albums before hand. The file share allows me to listen to hear music that blows me away, and actually, I'm more apt to buy albums because of it. As far as the Record Industry deciding to slap the suits on personally individuals, I have sympthy for people. Maybe they are just shocked that this things actually going down. And I don't blame them. I wonder if I've shared files in the capacity they are scrutinizing. But my major problem with the record industry's stance is that they could begin using the kind of discs that everybody buys in 5-packs for 3.99 at Walmart. Insead, they've used a medium which is pretty cost-efficient for them. They sell one million of them, in some places at mark-ups of $17 or $18; when I used to buy tapes for $10 or $11. No -- places like Border's and even the independent record stores said about cassettes,CD is the wave of the future, everything well be on cd before you know it. And they were right. BUT what about the couple hundreds of dollars I've spent trying to upgrade to better systems, so I can listen to my cd's. Currently, I have about two hundred cd's which I own...so take that and multiply it by 16 or 17 and you have a good three thousand dollars of my money. And I rarely ever batted an eye at it. Sure, I try to get albums on sale, but I ahve spent that money for the pleasure of hearing the music I want. Now let's forget the number of cds and tapes originals that I've sold over the years at only 25% of their initial worth. Because they're lost to me now,, either because I didn't listen to them enough to warrant lugging them wherever I may move. Or maybe I was hard up for cash and thought I could eek out 30 or 40 bucks from some shylock record seller. I have strongly supported the record industry over the years because I had to have the new album... BUT what do I care about a record industry that really doesn't care about musicians, talent, originality, individuality, creativity or the music that comes through it. Right now, I am listening to Wilco Yankee Hotel Foxtrot or whatever and don't think I don't know how they made a killing on this album. Cool story about screwing the record industry over and getting to make an individual record. I still paid $15 for the album. Soooo, question, is it the music that seems worth the money or the package it comes in.... I know it is. David Fricke said once that the packaging is just an artifact, a siginifer of the signified which is what is what is contained on the 6 inches of platinum waves" so how do we get past the frivolity of the package and get that treasure we're really after...download!!! Totally. So sue me. I'll pay you in platinum and plastic... I'll give you back all the damn stuff you charged me for... and by the way, I'll make sure I download it all onto my computer first... and I expect to be reimbursed for the price of additional memory it take to do that...
Posted by: Greg / 12:26 AM
So the other night I'm sitting at a neighbor hood bistro and I see a group of four (beautiful) women of Eastern European descent. I was befuddled. They were gorgeous, with dark hair and slim bodies, curvacious(?) but I couldn't quite place the origin...either Ukranian or perhaps Albanian. That had an enticing ring to it. But I couldn't stop watching them, the way they talked, their accents a mystifying beauty, hidden but enchanting. I must sound a bitr ignorant at this. They could have been from Louisiana or Saskatoon and maybe that's just it, it wouldn't have mattered. But I'd seen two of them promoting an art show for a New York artist in the Old Market sector and spoke with one of them about art. Unfortunately, the talented artists in this community are limited, as are their resources. We have galleries, sure, but it's like getting a law or medical degree in this town... you're not going to bat many eyes out east, may have some luck in the west. But it's kind of limited anyway. Anyway, I gained the impression that they were Balkan, or Slavic. I myself have primarily Slavic roots, and yet I never had seen brunettes of this stature, extremely (clearly) independent, bound by a loyalty to "family" instead of some strict sense of husbandry. I have been acquainted with Lithuanians, Sudanese, Kenyan, Cameroon, Saudis, Ukranian, Greek, and Romanian just that I can pinpoint. Apparently, the education here is cheap, as I don't understand why so many stuydents would come to Nebraska for schooling, not when you have so many prestigious universities which would get you a job just about anywhere (Columbia, Dartmouth, Stanford, Syracuse, Georgetown, Temple) But I did see an Asian woman who was speaking in her native language who dropped the needle on the whole scene. Wowee. Too bad, she looked like a freak version of a Christina Aguilera (what with the cell phone propped on her ear) I don't know hard to explain. Maybe it was the African drum circle in the parking lot of the Little King, the punk in a Scottish kilt, and the tibetan monks with traditonal red garb appearing at the same time on a Satuday night down in the Market. Wild shit.
Posted by: Greg / 12:06 AM

Omaha is still Omaha. I am listening to Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska and it is absolutely beautiful... maybe more contemplative of what's west of here... miles and miles of highway, some interste and others just good old country roads. Unfortunately, I can't seem to get it all out on paper. Susan Tedeschi at the Nebraska State Fair etc. The stretches of cornfield interlaced into the Platte River. See, I live in the city of Omaha, I'm not in anyway on the outskirts. I go to coffee shops, sometimes the bars in town, and there's little cultures in each of them. tTonight we met a guy from Columbus Ohio and he was wearing a cowboy hat. The friend I was with asked what was up with the hat, and he said "well, I just thought people out here would probably be a little bitlike the kind you normally find wearing hats." Which of course made us laugh. It's of course not like that at all. Hicks don't use meth in the reams that they seem to come out somewhere in the city limits. Where the stockyards used to be (how we got be called the Beef State long ago) they figure they can cook it up without a problem because the smell from the pens where the killing floor used to be pretty much wipes all that out. That's in South Omaha, about five miles south of where I live, and it's filled with Mexicans, Hispanics, Puerto Ricans. Apparently, that's where we got the drugs, just up from the Latin Americas. Of course, white folk have a sweet taste for what is being sold on the streets. So it all comes around. One quick note: Omaha is more global than you might guess, we have just about every nationality you could think of...
Posted by: Greg / 11:50 PM