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News Briefs 22-02-2005

By Gregon

We can’t stop here…this is bat country.

Quote of the Day:

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.

Hunter S. Thompson (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas)

Greg
Editor
Greg is the owner-editor of The Daily Grail, as well as the author of a number of books including Stop Worrying, There Probably is an Afterlife.
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6 Comments

  1. Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas
    Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas

    Never read the book, but (thanks for reminding me) what a movie! I caught most of it again recently on late-night cable tv. But since I missed the beginning, I began looking for the DVD in stores, and was puzzled to discover it’s not easy to find. A check at amazon cleared up this mystery. It seems there’s an unusually wide variation of vehement opinion on this Thompson classic: 448 customer reviews — many almost as bizarre and funny as the movie itself.

    Humm, maybe it just plays different for those who were care-free young hippies in the early 70s.

    Yours truly,
    Kat

  2. un
    geez it’s a bugger not being able to see properly.i thought the link to…u n panel votes against all sorts of human cloning…actually read…u n panel votes against all sorts of human clothing.
    i went away to ponder it awhile.
    then decided…why not.

    a while ago i was reading a sign that said…day old chickens…as dry old chickens….and asked the proprietor why he would even bother.

    there’s always a laugh in the most unexpected places.

    shadows

  3. Hunter S. Thompson: the memorial stories
    Remembering Hunter

    “I think Hunter was incapable of casualness. Everything to him had a certain intensity. Hunter was passionate about everything: sports, writing, wine — everything he did he brought to it that element of passion. And he never took the day off; he was Hunter every day.”
    – Curtis Robinson, friend

    A ‘totally unclassifiable’ life

    Of Aspen, Thompson wrote that his aim was to “create a town where people could live like human beings, instead of slaves to some bogus sense of Progress that is driving us all mad.”

    Thompson speaks: A 1997 profile

    Thompson once described himself as a “lazy, drunken hillbilly with a heart full of hate who has found a way to live out there where the real winds blow – to sleep late, have fun, get wild, drink whiskey and drive fast on empty streets with nothing in mind except falling in love and not getting arrested.”

    For his 30 years in Woody Creek, Thompson has kept to himself for the most part, except for his “savage, fire-sucking campaign” for Aspen sheriff in 1970 on the Freak Power ticket that called for, among other things, ripping up the streets and replacing them with sod, renaming Aspen Fat City, and punishing dishonest dope dealers.

    Amazingly, Thompson lost by only six votes.
    …
    Thompson has had his share of run-ins with local law enforcement in the past few years. The most widely reported was a 1990 incident in which a female pornographic film producer accused him of assaulting her, specifically grabbing her breasts. That sparked an 11-hour search of the writer’s home where police seized a tiny amount of cocaine, 39 hits of LSD, a hookah, an antique Gatling gun, seven ounces of marijuana and four sticks of dynamite. (Charges of possession of a controlled substance and misdemeanor charges of sexual assault – all stemming from allegations made by the producer – were dismissed.)

    Thompson laughed remembering the incident. …
    “It happened right here. She came at me! I was justdefending myself like this.” Thompson held out his hands, palms out. “It was a defensive sort of movement.” He chuckled and drifted off. Then, as if he had licked a light socket, he sprang back.

    …
    In a room adjacent to his kitchen – an exotic, funky den of sorts – Thompson has his work in progress laid out on a circular table, tentatively titled “The Proud Highway: Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman, The Fear and Loathing Letters, Volume I, 1955-1967.” Three binders full of letters have been carefully filed and neatly stored for last-minute editing before its June publication by Villard. Inside are letters to editors, writers, friends and family, including communiques to novelists William Kennedy, Tom Wolfe, Norman Mailer and J.P. Donleavy. And though Thompson wrote the letters as an obscure and struggling writer, he says he always received a response: “Things were different back then. Writers communicated. They don’t do that anymore.”
    …
    Some critics of Thompson question whether he has anything left to say, some viewing him as a burned-out novelty act coasting on past literary victories. However, you would be hard put to find a colleague with a harsh word to say about Thompson.

    Even the New York literary establishment, which is not necessarily gonzo-friendly, has already worked itself into a frenzy over the book of letters, tripping over each other to get an advance copy.
    …
    Near midnight, Thompson got ready to go out. “I have to serve my community,” he said with a perfectly degenerate grin before draining his tumbler of Chivas.
    …
    “You need anything?” he asked, grabbing a hat down from the wall tacked with Steadman’s jagged, splattered illustrations.
    “No, thanks.” I said, “I’m set.”
    “Don’t lie to me,” Thompson said. “I’ve been there. On the road. Reporting. I’ve said, “No, I’m fine for gas’ or whatever and then get stranded down the road in the middle of the night. It’s horrible.”
    “No, really, Hunter, that’s all right,” I said.
    “You need some money?” he said briskly. “Fifty, a hundred? You can send it back to me later. What about a coat? You need a coat? All you have is that?” Thompson nodded at my ripped Oxford. “Well, take some food with you. We’ve got plenty of food.”
    …
    I realized Thompson, avatar of the weird, a Kentucky hillbilly who stumbled into the klieg lights of literary fame, is a lot more human and kind than most might think. Behind the persona and the act, he is a generous guy, the regular guy sitting next to you in a sports bar offering to buy the next round, just like one of us.

    As details of death emerge, friends remember Thompson

    Hunter S. Thompson’s suicide shocked nearly everyone in his quirky, rural neighborhood near Aspen, but one of his closest friends said today the writer had been in a lot of pain after a broken leg and hip surgery.
    …
    Mike Cleverly, a neighbor and longtime friend who spent Friday night watching a basketball game on TV with Thompson, said Thompson was clearly hobbled by the broken leg.
    “Medically speaking, he’s had a rotten year,” he said.
    But he added, “He’s the last person in the world I would have expected to kill himself. I would have been less surprised if he had shot me.” Thompson was legendary for his love of firearms.
    …
    Despite the gunfire and the wild, drug-addled image he projected in his books and articles, Thompson was on good terms with the Pitkin County Sheriff’s Department and was friends with Sheriff Bob Braudis and with DiSalvo, the sheriff’s director of investigations.”I would definitely call him a friend,” DiSalvo said.

    Guns, gonzo and whiskey

    Pitkin County Sheriff Bob Braudis, one of Thompson’s closest friends, said, “The family is hugging, huddling and supporting each other through a different time. There’s been literally hundreds of phone calls from friends, admirers and people all over the world. … Woody Creek will never be the same.”

    Writer wanted cannon sendoff

    If one of Hunter S. Thompson’s last wishes comes true, the body of the late maverick journalist will be cremated this week and his ashes blasted from a cannon across his ranch in Woody Creek.

    1. wow
      wow kat, i don’t need the net, i’ve got you, babe.
      that’s more info than i was able to find in all the articles i read about thompson’s demise in the last couple of days.
      onya mate.

      shadows

      1. much more info
        What I hobbled together here was only a small part of those linked articles, most of which were published just in the past day or two.

        I recommend you read the articles themselves. They paint a very different picture than (what seemed to me) the predominantly negative view of Thompson and his work which was expressed in some TDG comments a few days ago.

        Some people said it was bound to be his degenerate lifestyle that did him in, many at least implying that his suicide had something to do with his recreational drug use. His friends all said it was most likely due to being in constant pain for the past year from hip replacement surgery. I’ve never seen any articles about LSD, marijuana, or Chevas Regal causing degenerative joint disease. Matter of fact, at around the same age, my uncle had to have a hip-joint replaced, and he’s never drunk alcohol, smoked any sort of cigarettes, has been madly in love with the same woman for the past 60 years or so, always ate three homecooked meals a day, blah, blah.

        I dare say most people in the (so-called) developed nations spend practically every waking hour trying to figure out how they might become so degenerate — a world-famous, highly acclaimed author, worth millions of dollars, who is happily married, has a son and a grandson, is beloved by many friends, and who’s living on his own ‘ranch’ near Aspen, CO, where the air (and everything else) is clean, the vistas are beautiful, the people wealthy and well-educated, the economy robust, etc.

        As we used to say in the 70s of up-tight judgemental straight people, some people here could use an attitude adjustment.

        Kat

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