Mistah Thompson, he dead
9:05am: Goodbye Hunter, you saved my life. You were a giant, a fucking GIANT! More to come on this.
LATER @11-ish:
The wires around the world are humming - people are taking a moment to reflect on the the life and death of Hunter S. Thompson.
In my life there have been a few folks that have trod across the boards that I can say I owe a huge debt of gratitude to - some of these people are/were my friends, some of them are dead and gone, some I've lost touch with, and some I've fallen out with. All of them (and they know who they are) are still important to me.
Then there were some who came to me via their work and Hunter S. Thompson was one of these people.
My old pal John Johnson turned me on to Hunter back in the mid-eighties when I was a fresh faced punk running the gutters, looking for the keys to life and one night he handed me his dog-eared copy of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and said "Read this."
I did and I was never to think about my world the same way again.
It is that kind of a book.
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was a watershed book for me, like Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer/Tropic of Capricorn, Charles Bukowski's Notes of a Dirty Old Man, William Burrough's Naked Lunch, J.P. Donleavy's The Ginger Man, Hemingway's The Sun also Rises and of course Jack Kerouac's On The Road - there are others of course, but these are the major league tomes that struck with major league force.
All of these books and their iconoclastic authors were pivotal in setting me loose on my crazy life course, for better or for worse, though I think primarily for the best. I have used these books as magnetic guideposts, even though some of them I haven't read in years and some I go back to again and again, to remind myself of a silent vow that I made to myself years ago, the one about actually living life, instead of only existing in it - tasting the meat as it were.
Hunter Stockton Thompson checked out the building yesterday, for his own very personal reasons, and it doesn't really matter why. I have felt for years that his best work was long behind him, and he knew that and it probably fucked with him. His work was important, his legacy to literature was important, he took it very seriously and that is obvious from the way he approached it, presented it and allowed it to breathe. Did he become a caricature? In some ways yes, but in some ways don't we all? His caricature was as original as they come.
America lost a part of its conscience yesterday - the part with the sense of humor and the gleam in its eye, the part that gave a damn abou the little guy and knew that absolute power corrupts absolutely.
I am glad that I got to meet him once, at a bookstore in San Francisco in the Haight-Ashbury (appropriate locale) and I got to shake his hand, look him in the roving eye and talk to him about the South for a moment (where we are both from - In fact, I presented him with a Stone Lion Tavern bottle opener - he seemed to appreciate this token gift and he thanked me and said, "Chattanooga, fucking weird town." I agreed. I am sure he promptly lost the opener) He also endorsed my candidate for Congress I was managing, Caine Cortellino, last summer, on the basis of a letter that I wrote to him. So, I got that going for me.
Hunter, I'm glad you lived and I am sad you are dead but you were a smart boy and I'm sure you had your reasons. You came, you saw and you left a hell of a mark on the world of letters and culture. If only we could all be so blessed.
Selah!
This is the last paragraph in Hunter's book The Curse of Lono and it felt like the perfect epitaph to me:
"Over the side. Into the deep, blowing air like a porpoise as he slid away from the rocks and out to the open sea, disappearing into the ocean with the atavistic grace of some mammal finally remembering where it really wanted to be."
LATER @11-ish:
The wires around the world are humming - people are taking a moment to reflect on the the life and death of Hunter S. Thompson.
In my life there have been a few folks that have trod across the boards that I can say I owe a huge debt of gratitude to - some of these people are/were my friends, some of them are dead and gone, some I've lost touch with, and some I've fallen out with. All of them (and they know who they are) are still important to me.
Then there were some who came to me via their work and Hunter S. Thompson was one of these people.
My old pal John Johnson turned me on to Hunter back in the mid-eighties when I was a fresh faced punk running the gutters, looking for the keys to life and one night he handed me his dog-eared copy of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and said "Read this."
I did and I was never to think about my world the same way again.
It is that kind of a book.
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was a watershed book for me, like Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer/Tropic of Capricorn, Charles Bukowski's Notes of a Dirty Old Man, William Burrough's Naked Lunch, J.P. Donleavy's The Ginger Man, Hemingway's The Sun also Rises and of course Jack Kerouac's On The Road - there are others of course, but these are the major league tomes that struck with major league force.
All of these books and their iconoclastic authors were pivotal in setting me loose on my crazy life course, for better or for worse, though I think primarily for the best. I have used these books as magnetic guideposts, even though some of them I haven't read in years and some I go back to again and again, to remind myself of a silent vow that I made to myself years ago, the one about actually living life, instead of only existing in it - tasting the meat as it were.
Hunter Stockton Thompson checked out the building yesterday, for his own very personal reasons, and it doesn't really matter why. I have felt for years that his best work was long behind him, and he knew that and it probably fucked with him. His work was important, his legacy to literature was important, he took it very seriously and that is obvious from the way he approached it, presented it and allowed it to breathe. Did he become a caricature? In some ways yes, but in some ways don't we all? His caricature was as original as they come.
America lost a part of its conscience yesterday - the part with the sense of humor and the gleam in its eye, the part that gave a damn abou the little guy and knew that absolute power corrupts absolutely.
I am glad that I got to meet him once, at a bookstore in San Francisco in the Haight-Ashbury (appropriate locale) and I got to shake his hand, look him in the roving eye and talk to him about the South for a moment (where we are both from - In fact, I presented him with a Stone Lion Tavern bottle opener - he seemed to appreciate this token gift and he thanked me and said, "Chattanooga, fucking weird town." I agreed. I am sure he promptly lost the opener) He also endorsed my candidate for Congress I was managing, Caine Cortellino, last summer, on the basis of a letter that I wrote to him. So, I got that going for me.
Hunter, I'm glad you lived and I am sad you are dead but you were a smart boy and I'm sure you had your reasons. You came, you saw and you left a hell of a mark on the world of letters and culture. If only we could all be so blessed.
Selah!
This is the last paragraph in Hunter's book The Curse of Lono and it felt like the perfect epitaph to me:
posted by Unknown at 2/21/2005 09:05:00 AM
1 Comments:
I'm thinking that my friend Jeff Peterson is running for a city council seat in district 7 here in Chattanooga, and someone should be made aware of his Hitlerian Plan for taking over the Southland and turning it into a huge disco-themed aumusment park designed to attract large groups of drunken Shriners and Catholic pedophiles who will pour millions of dollars into the local economy and ship all blacks and lesbians to a concentration camp in British Honduras. But if you're looking for cocaine, and you're ready up front with some bills and the proper code words, you want to stay on the Strip and get next to a well-connected hooker, which will take at least one bill for starters. What's that? Who's dead?
Brian King (Colonel Depp)
Post a Comment
<< Home