Hunter S Thompson commits suicide

Pitkin County Sheriff Bob Braudis, a personal friend of Thompson, confirmed the death to the News. Sheriff's officials did not return calls to The Associated Press late Sunday.

(...is it weird that I immediately think of Doonesbury?)

being honest and being earnest will kill you dead.

downright fucking depressing.

to make it that long, to put up with all the bullshit for so long, and then to give out...

but i also blame it on hst. he was always a briliant analyst and reporter, but always retreated into his own world when done observing. saw very clearly the need to fight but never did.

i'm saying that as smart a voice he was, all he was, because of his style, was a voice in the wilderness. he might have had a greater impact if he had written differently.

and he wrote traditonally alot of the time, he got qoutes, he did his research, he contructed arguements in a really explicit way--look at 72.

langauge needs to be invented for each circumstance

I have a hard time 'blaming' Dubya, the man lived through six years of Nixon, 12 years of Reagan-Bush and four more of Bush II - something else was going on.

I miss him already.

His impact was huge. And not all good, obviously, because everybody (including him, eventually) focused more on the "gonzo" than the "journalism." But jesus, if you read his evolution as a writer, from his pretty staid and conventional early pieces through to the early '70s, there's just this amazing liberation that happens there, he broke free, in a way that sort of epitomized and embodied things about that era. And then of course he was confronted with the same question that haunted everybody else: what next? He didn't know, never really figured it out. But goddamn he loved his freedom. And he loved it with a ferocious intelligence, what a fucking brain that guy had when he didn't fuck with it too much and let it do its thing.

He made things seem possible that didn't seem possible before him. His later life -- and now, this -- also mark the limits of possibilities. But just because he didn't change the world doesn't mean he didn't change the world.

HST---Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72

I blame Bush and the modern syphilitic kowtowing media.

One of the best journalists i've read and writer of the best political account I can think (Fear and loathing ... '72)

:-(

even if thompson's death has nothing to do with bush in any way, his is a voice and a spirit whose absence for the remaining bushco years will be missed.

um, i meant that his absence will be felt. or something like that.

HST killed himself because of a chemical imbalance in his brain which made him mentally unstable. Period. Lots of people hate Bush but haven't offed themselves because of it. If the blame for such a thing could be laid on Bush, then there'd be millions of people blowing their heads off every day (99% of ILX posters would be dead by now).

It's a terrible loss but let's not cheapen it by trying to spread the blame where it doesn't belong.

RIP.

president's day no less.

Oh, come now. I don't like Bush at all but that is clearly ridiculous.

http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/print?id=1992213&type=story

But I don't think there's anything weird about that.

HST #1 R.I.P. 23/12/77

Just reading that article from Rolling Stone, I don't think he could have changed his writing style without changing what he was saying. (I have not read his work.) Sometimes I think the goal is not to be heard by the most people, but to be heard by the people who will be moved by what you are saying. Raising funds, weighing chances, and making deals are proper actions for people who want to get things done.

Anthony Easton is right (haha) about me re: Thompson. I'm not super-familiar w/the canonical stuff, but his early work I've read I've always really liked. "The Kentucky Derby Is Decadant and Depraved" is still the single funniest piece of writing, fiction or nonfiction, I have ever read. I've not enjoyed his recent work as much but the anti-Bush thing he did for Rolling Stone last October was blindingly good. on the whole, his impact on me is less direct than it is for folks like Yancey, who has long been very vocal about treasuring Thompson (I thought of Y immediately when I heard the news), but it's plenty large nevertheless. R.I.P.

Hunter and Peelie within six months of each other, I'm running out of role models.

I certainly didn't think that Hunter would take his own life, but I'm not surprised at the same time. It's kind of ironic that he did it at 65, the mark of old age & start of social security benefits, etc. Could have been anything, though. It was an unpredictable act from an unpredictable man, and that's why we loved him.

What a fucking SHAME.

But I never saw him slipping quietly into old age. In retrospect, I think I always kinda knew he would take his own life, but I never could bring myself to say it out loud.

(Re: The "Vice" mention — I'm still not convinced that the editors/writers of Vice actually know how to read, so I have doubts they'd put an author on their cover.)

I'm filled with several conflicting feelings on this right now, part of me thinks "That lazy SOB!" I think he fell into a lot of self-imposed traps over the years, cornering himself, and as often as not, at least since the Clinton book, he seemed to be writing so that he wouldn't have to write anymore (cf, fulfilling of his book contract by publishing two collections of letters [The Proud Highway is awesome though, and probably as important as FL/LV] and early novels).

Of course I don't know what his mental health was like, and there are clearly signs throughout all of his writings that he would end this way, though I often dismissed them as typical juvenile death-lust and Hem-fixation.

I feel so sorry for his son Juan. They were very close, and he was the one who found the body. Juan was probably the perfect testament to Hunter's greatness--the "drug-crazed madman" created an articulate, well-mannered & conscientious son.

Probably not the best time to bring this up, but I wonder what they're going to do with Owl Farm. I'd hate to see them turn it into some lame tourist museum or something (although I'll admit that I'd probably go).

I still have to give props to Johnny Depp for the FLLV movie, though. He pretty much nailed Hunter's mannerisms & the psychotic energy of the book. I think it started to get cartoonish at points, which Hunter has a problem with (watch the "HST Correspondence" section of the special features disk from the Criterion set) but in some way the book calls for that. Depp & Hunter got pretty close during that film, and I'm sure he's taking it pretty hard today. I sure he'll release some kind of statement, if not do a eulogy.

Man, this really sucks. RIP HST.

Goodbye, Hunter. You astounded me.

I'm not surprised, though. Jann Wenner is a piece of crap. Hunter was a big part of making Rolling Stone more than a hippie music rag & he seems to have forgotten about that. You forget a lot of things when you're rolling around in a big pile of money, i guess.

Dunno quite what else to say. His writing was a huge influence on me in college, particularly Fear & Loathing On The Campaign Trail, which (along with Doonesbury) formed a large part of my education on the U.S. election process.

hunter could write about sports and make it interesting. no offense to sports fans, but...

rest in elbows to the head.
m.

you took too much, hunter.
let history shed it's tears, but the memory will survive.
truly, one the most distinctive american voices of the past century, agree with what he had to say or not, the way he said it was what set him apart.
RIP.

thirteen hits of mescaline and a salt shaker of cocaine
cigarette holder erection extending between aviator shades
unsolicited endorsements for Remington and Wild Turkey
football discussions with the Devil
career-making asswhip from the Angels
visions of the President of the United States naked (would make anybody crazy)
appeals to Jann Wenner's guilty conscience
application of whip to Chuck Young's sorry ass
when the wierd turn pro eventually the drugs stop working
he stuck to his guns (unfortunately)
RIP Hunter Thompson

speaking from a point that has little to do with his impact as a writer (though i think that cannot be overstated) (so fuck you gabbneb, get a clue, fuck your faux-polite insider hardball bullshit politix, mr. terry mcauliffe-wishing-to-be-karl-rove-lite) (don't take it personal, babe), and i hate to become a parody myself (too late!), but again, louisville (blah blah). my hometown, the place that defined me as much as i defined it, was such a place of inspiration and exasperation. i knew that even before i read hst. and he was just an inspiration for getting out, much less changing the world in his way (so he didn't crumble all the towers, but that's a pretty tall order for anyone) (unless you're gabbneb, world shaker). hst, muhammed ali, slint (ha!), anyway, yeah you get the drift. someday, some of hst's louisville contemporaries - friend and foe alike - will put together the true early portrait of the man (one of his best friends was the real estate mogul paul semonin) (one of his worst enemies was david grubbs's dad) (he was known even in high school for snaking gasoline for his motorcycle if you left your car in your driveway). i only know some bits and pieces. and i never met him. i just knew his writing, and an awful lot of it i knew before i even got to read it.

RIP.

of course. i am being critical because i think that he actually wanted to crumble at least a few and had chosen not to for fear of real celebrity, and that this may have been his concession speech as things got really bad. who commits suicide at age 65? (well, HST, maybe; and i didn't know about the health problems beyond the long-standing ones) i see parallels in Dylan's apparent depression at having gone down the celebrity road and in his need to publish a book to tell off the hagiographicers who were too busy worshipping him and fetishizing marginality to become Dylans themselves.

no, he wouldn't be HST if he didn't write the way he did. but i wasn't asking him to be an NYT reporter. i was asking him not to bury his stuff in a sports column (not that sports isn't socio-political, but it's a little context-specific). to do tv. movies. talk radio. something i can't imagine. i'm not disrespecting new media. i'm saying go where the audience is. though this makes me realize that he was a writer first, a thinker second, so maybe he felt that his medium was too much in decline. or maybe there was an intractable conflict between his chosen form and substance.

If anything, I just wish he could have stuck around a bit longer to tear Dubya apart, or possibly be there at the plane when his empire crumbles, waving peace signs nervously to the press.

as hstencil put it, the speculation is pointless but it is maddening knowing that the one person on this earth who you thought would never stop fighting, who would never give up....finally did. we thought since he bought the ticket, he'd take the ride all the way up to the end. but maybe this was just a part of the ride for him, the last hurrah.

i'm really hoping he left a note.

Rather than say "rest in peace," I'll say "haunt those motherfuckers into their own graves, Raoul."

maybe i'm totally underestimating his impact at espn and it's more canny than i thought. but how much is someone who goes there for sports scores and has never heard of him going to pay attention?

1. F&L on the Campaign Trail '72
2. Great Shark Hunt
3. Las Vegas
4. Hell's Angels
5. Everything else, if you're still interested.

haha, xpost

Actually, the parallel that sprang to my mind was the suicide of Guy Debord. For Debord it seemed like an admission that the world had turned and left him behind. There was a certain grim grace to it. Perhaps that was a spirit that would have appealed to Hunter - do not go gentle into that good night, etc...

Sad stuff, though

it's time to get weird, people

Another shout out goes for HST's deleriously awesome stilted cadence. Once you hear him speak, reading his writing gets better.

=( =( =(

I shook my head and said nothing; just stared at him for a moment, trying to look grim. "There's going to be trouble," I said. "My assignment is to take pictures of the riot."

"What riot?"

I hesitated, twirling the ice in my drink. "At the track. On Derby Day. The Black Panthers." I stared at him again. "Don't you read the newspapers?"

The grin on his face had collapsed. "What the hell are you talkin' about?"

"Well...maybe I shouldn't be telling you..." I shrugged. "But hell, everybody else seems to know. The cops and the National Guard have been getting ready for six weeks. They have 20,000 troops on alert at Fort Knox. They've warned us--all the press and photographers--to wear helmets and special vests like flak jackets. We were told to expect shooting..."

"No!" he shouted; his hands flew up and hovered momentarily between us, as if to ward off the words he was hearing. Then he whacked his fist on the bar. "Those sons of bitches! God Almighty! The Kentucky Derby!" He kept shaking his head. "No! Jesus! That's almost too bad to believe!" Now he seemed to be sagging on the stool, and when he looked up his eyes were misty. "Why? Why here? Don't they respect anything?

i thought debord had terminal cancer

From Poppy Z Brite's blog.

(meant sarcastically)

gave me confidence about how difficult it was

It'll be interesting to see what RS does for HST in print. Doubt he'll be on teh cover, but Jann is quite sentimental about the good old days (and now that Hunter's dead he's easier to edit). Of course the canny old bastard's estate probably owns his copyrights by now, otherwise we'll see a quickie "Best of HST" from Wenner Books.

Some of the best stuff Hunter wrote started from sports journalism. And when Hunter writes sports, contexts be damned. Fear & Loathing started out as coverage of a 'sporting' event. He was a great sports writer, and I would not hesitate to guess that Sports Illustrated will give him a tribute. Espn was a cool place for him to be. I think you're barking up the wrong tree, friend.

xpost: I don't expect anything of Rolling Stone anymore. I would that it weren't so.

(I have no idea what I'm saying or what it means, btw.)

I'm not saying this in defense of the man, but only to emphasize that anybody in Congress or anywhere else who plans to cross Jimmy Carter should take pains to understand the real nature of the beast they intend to cross. He's on a very different wavelength than most people in Washington. That's one of the main reasons he's president, and also one of the first things I noticed when I met him in Georgia in 1974 - a total disdain for political definition or conventional ideologies.

His concept of populist politics is such a strange mix of total pragmatism and almost religious idealism that every once in a while - to me at least, and especially when I listen to some of the tapes of conversations I had with him in 1974 and '75 - that he sounds like a borderline anarchist...which is probably why he interested me from the very beginning; and why he still does, for that matter. Jimmy Carter is a genuine original...He won't keep any enemies list on paper; but only because he doesn't have to; he has a memory like a computerized elephant.

Compared to most other politicians, I do still like Carter. Whether I agree with him on everything, that's another thing entirely. He'd put me in jail in an instant if he saw me snorting coke in front of him. He would not, however, follow me into the bathroom and try to catch me snorting it. It's little things like that." Ibid.

I was the most obvious journalist - coming off my book on the 1972 campaign - to inherit Teddy White's role as a big-selling chronicler of presidential campaigns. I would have been locked into national politics as a way of life, not to mention as a primary source of income..And there's no way you can play that kind of Washington Wizard role from a base in Woody Creek, I'd have had to move to Washington, or at least to New York...and, Jesus, life is too short for that kind of volunteer agony. I've put a lot of work into living out here where I do and still making a living, and I don't want to give it up unless I absolutely have to. I moved to Washington for a year in 1972, and it was a nightmare.

Yeah, there was a definite temptation to write another campaign book - especially for a vast amount of money in advance - but even white I was looking at all that money, I knew it would be a terminal mistake. It wasn't until I actually began covering the campaign that I had to confront the reality of what I was getting into. I hadn't been in New Hampshire two days when I knew for certain that I just couldn't make it. I was seeing my footprints everywhere I went. All the things that were of interest last time - even the s all things, the esoteric little details of a presidential campaign - seemed like jibberish the second time around. Plus, I lost what looks more and more like a tremendous advantage of anonymity. That was annoying, because in '72 I could stand against a wall somewhere - and I'd select some pretty weird walls to stand against - and nobody knew who I was. But in '76, Jesus, at press conferences, I had to sign more autographs than the candidates.

Through some strange process, I came from the '72 campaign an unknown reporter, a vagrant journalist, to a sort of media figure in the '76 campaign. It started getting so uncomfortable and made it so hard to work that even the alleged or apparent access that I had to this weird peanut farmer from Georgia became a disadvantage." - Ibid.

He gave me and a million other writers the knowledge that writing could be more than the shit poured on cereal every morning from the papers and the even sloppier crap served up in magazines of repute. In his writing came the hope that passion, honesty and pure balls on the line, as well as cynicism, absurdism and an unhealthy disregard for all forms of authority, especially the ones that came bearing banners of freedom and liberation, he gave hope that this would tranwsfer. Instead, it became material not fit to wipe a dog's ass on like Uncut or the New Yorker, and it became blogs obsessed with the self's progress wit hin other circles of self, cheap daisy chains leading all the way back up into the asshole of everlasting boredom.

well, there you go.

Any, this moved late last night, offers a little more detail:

Friend says Hunter Thompson in pain from broken leg, hip surgery before death
ASPEN, Colo. (AP) — While Hunter S. Thompson’s suicide shocked many in his out-of-the-way neighbourhood, one of his closest friends said Monday the writer had been in a lot of pain after a broken leg and hip surgery.
“I wasn’t surprised,” said George Stranahan, a former owner of the Woody Creek Tavern, one of Thompson’s favourite hangouts.
“I never expected Hunter to die in a hospital bed with tubes coming out of him.”
Thompson died in his home Sunday evening from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head, Pitkin County Coroner Dr. J. Steve Ayers said Monday.
Authorities refused to say whether a note was found. Thompson’s body was found by his adult son, Juan, later Sunday evening.
Investigators recovered the weapon, a .45-calibre handgun.
Neighbours in Thompson’s Woody Creek neighbourhood said a broken leg had kept him from going out as often as in the past, including to the tavern.
But Shep Harris, who now owns the tavern, said Thompson would sometimes slip in for a drink and a smoke if no one else was there.
Patrons normally are not allowed to light up because the tavern does not have a separate smoking area but if Thompson were the only customer, he had a waiver.
“We called it the Hunter Rule,” Harris said.
Mike Cleverly, a neighbour and longtime friend, spent Friday night watching a basketball game on TV with Thompson. He 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.
“He had a thing about guns,” said Mary Eshbaugh Hayes, an acquaintance and a former editor of the Aspen Times newspaper.
“I was always very worried he was going to shoot someone.”
He did, at least once. In 2000, he accidentally slightly wounded his assistant trying to chase a bear off his property.
Hayes said she was present when a drunken Thompson fired three shots into a copy of one of his books and gave it to a friend, saying: “This is your autographed copy.”
Despite the gunfire and the wild, drug-addled image he projected in his writing, Thompson was on good terms with the sheriff’s department and was friends with Sheriff Bob Braudis and DiSalvo, the sheriff’s director of investigations.
“I would definitely call him a friend,” DiSalvo said.
“This was not the way I expected Hunter to die.”

God I miss him...

hunter said these words to me many years ago: "I would feel real trapped in this life if I didn't know I could commit suicide at any time." I knew he meant it. It wasn't a case of if, but when. He didn't reckon he would make it beyond 30 anyway, so he lived it all in the fast lane. There was no first, second, third gear in that car - just overdrive.

-----

anyone who says that bush is to blame for hst's death; that hst wasn't the type to do something like this, etc etc with the judgments.......just fuckin realize that no matter how much you idolized the man; no matter how much you enjoyed his work; and how influencial it was for you........YOU DID NOT KNOW THE MAN! so enough already with trying to ascribe motives - you did not know him!

I listened to the F&L/LV audio play thing last night, and at the end, HST himself comes on and says (and this was like 97/98, I think) "There will be no year 2000..."
He was always sort of hoping for the end of the world, and I'm a little disappointed he couldn't stick around to chronicle it.

http://msnbc.msn.com/id/7011556/

This week I'm going to dig out F&L as well.

"Nixon once famously said Thompson represented "that dark, venal and incurably violent side of the American character". When you think about it, this doesn't sound like an insult. Nixon wasn't claiming that Thompson had defamed the American character. It sounded more like Nixon admitting that when Thompson held up his surreal, hallucinatory mirror, the president recognised an aspect of himself in there.
"http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0,6109,1419644,00.html

Which if your right, is a little embarassing...

(Haha, R&RC...)

Both of those articles (NR and WS) are mean-spirited, ill-timed, and stupid. "Incoherent babblings." Has he ever read the man? There's nothing incoherent about him.

(And he misquotes Thompson's "famous aphorism" twice.)

http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/ruse200502220743.asp

http://www.franciscan.edu/home2/Content/News/main.aspx?id=427

He's a complete tool. Another awkward, ugly, small-dicked momma's boy with no social skills who learned that if you can't join 'em, criticize 'em.

I really pity these kind of people. If you're so insecure with yourself that you have to constantly criticize the way other people live their lives in order to give yours some semblance of meaning, you truly have some issues.

surely it was better when you could buy indulgences, no?

xpost to jay: i ALMOST used the term "mama's boy" in my previous post about this "Mr. Ruse".. something happened to him in New York over the last fifteen years and it almost certainly involved a woman, and definitely involved his mom.

http://www.slate.com/id/2113865/

no, i think i do know him, regardless of the bush thing, and your quote confirms my caricature exactly - he was brilliant, but fundamentally an escapist

gabbneb has been a total fucking imbecile throughout this thread. seriously, let it go. you know him better than ralph steadman? shut the hell up.

this death has hit me very hard. expect a long blog post about hunter and (oddly) raymond carver later this week...

If you're easily offended by people with sticks up their ass, ignore this link.

Also, if you think of him primarily as a writer, don't you think what is possible for writers -- even for those who write on politics, society, and culture -- is different from what is possible for thinkers?

the upside is that hitchens genuinely admires HST and is struggling to say why, exactly: it's NOT writing style or wildness of behaviour or political achievement or political insight

what i think it might be is something else hitchens consistently admires - possibly bcz he is very far from consistent in achieving it himself - which is to say, intellectual honesty

i don't think hst had that good a bead on any of his political foes after nixon, actually: i don't think he had the measure of reagan or gwb

BUT i do think - without reserve - that he was an honest writer: even his fantasies of the insane and ugly behaviour that (for example) tex colson might be capable of have a deep ring of honesty, as do his (somewhat credulous) hymns to the utter saving decency of carter or mcgovern

the most telling thing in "fear and loathing on the campaign trail" is when he gets super-excited abt some highly complex play being made by the mcgovernites at the demo convention: it is both ruthless and cynical, pure "politics" (in the bad - or clintonian? - sense), but it is also very smart and effective, and he can't help himself, admiring pros doing what they do best

i actually kind of agree w.gabbneb, that hst never found a way to recast his role after he became well-known for being who he was: he certain contributed to the transformation of american media, by finding a platform from which to mock the bland narrowness of pre-70s punditry, but - though he detested the role he was shunted into playing - he didn't find a way out of it really (maybe there was no way out of it)

the result, for good or ill, was the swelling world of us alt.media: except that in later times (than the mid-late 70s) this has as much as a balm and a zone of psychic shelter as a force for social change (i suspect)

anyway, sleep well hunter

he wasn't afraid to put himself across as an idiot — in regard to his self-destructive behaviour AND in regard to the sincerity and dielaism of his beliefs — but the times caught up with him and (somewhat) stifled him, insofaras gonzo stopped being a byword for idiocy and became a byword for cool

he gets super-excited abt some highly complex play being made by the mcgovernites

it's this strain of him, his fascination with betters, handicappers, people who play to win, that coalesces with his football and gambling writing, i.e. areas of life where there are no rules except winning. i think he always had some measure of admiration, if not always respect, for people who understood that much more of life is a bloodsport than most people think, and that whatever you can get away with goes

1. Seven hours in the presidential limo with Nixon, talking football.
2. He was drinking in the bar at the Watergate hotel during the burglary.)

this impulse is sadly lacking almost everywhere in our "entertainment" these days, precisely the place where it ought to be, Jesus just look at what happened to Steve Martin, look at what happened to Saturday Night Live, look at what happened to rock and roll!

abbey i have never read: kerouac i never got anywhere with

as if Greil Marcus never writes anything self-regarding? Might be the funniest thing I've ever read here (trust you're not being ironic). I was actually surprised at how (relatively!) humble Hitch's HST thing was. And humility & Hitchens usually don't fit in the same sentence.

Kerouac seemed like a really nice guy. The writer equivalent of "She's got a great personality."

neither hitch nor cockburn for example know (i suspect) to quote that thing marcus found in lester bangs's posthumous notes: "... I was fun, had a wild sense of humour, a truly unique and unpredictable individual, a performing rock'n'roll rtist with a band of my own, perhaps a contender if not now then tomorrow for the title Best Writer in America (who was better? Bukowksi? Burroughs? Hunter Thompson? Gimme a break. I was the best. I wrote almost nothing but record reviews, and not many of those..." Marcus continues: "He was half kidding until the parenthesis began (he never closed it); then he was telling the truth."

but yes, it's a feeble overview of the territory (though as i said i think he gets a coupla things right)

http://www.quartzcity.net/~chris/blogpicts/zevon-hst.jpg

I wonder if the same thing happened to Hemingway (not that they are in the same literary ballpark, but you know...).

one of the reasons i think hst didn't have a v.clear bead on the rise of the post-nixon right is that the aspen "freak power" campaign seems to have been adopted as modus operandi *way* more by the right (xtian and libertarian modes) than by the left

You only have to read that 9/11 column for irrefutable proof otherwise.

The unspoken part of Marcus' patronizing formulation on Bangs -- "the best writer in America could only write record reviews" (sic) -- always seemed to be "if Lester Bangs is the best writer in America then Greil Marcus has to be the best writer in the Universe."

re the second, what marcus writes is this: "Perhaps what this book demands from a reader is a willingness to accept that the best writer in America could write almost nothing but record reviews."

ie i. he is quoting bangs himself,
ii. he is amplifying bangs's own point,
iii. he is agreeing that bangs was "the best writer in America"

so how this is a "patronising formulation" i don't entirely understand - though i know it has become routine a la meltzer to assume that marcus-the-square is merely bandwagoning whenever he signals his enthusiasm for something non-square (however i seriously think hitchens is FAR worse in this particular regard)

marcus himself has of course NOT written only record reviews, hence is surely ruling himself out via this very same sentence as candidate for "best writer in America" (hence a fortiori "best writer in the universe")? possibly in his heart of hearts he does actually think he is, but this particular paragraph, justly read (ie in its entirety: i'm not gnna quote it all) is poor evidence for same

i think the interesting (and actually relevant) part of the bangs quote is that bangs briefly entertains - if only to reject - the notion that hst was the best writer in america, bcz i don't think it's at all an unreasonable notion to entertain; in fact, i think c.1972-74 he maybe possibly was, in ref.the massive quake he — w.rolling stone as his platform — enabled w/i american political writing

(mailer was more daring and more way insightful up till the late 60s, but also lost it, i think way more completely, in regard to writing abt high politics) (mailer also bankrolled the start of the "underground press", eg the village voice)

x-post: meltzer thinks he is, anthony

Just below the cult of personality and drug-fueled rants there's a level of Mencken-like commentary on the ills of politics and society. For all his searching for the American Dream, I think he knew all along that if he were to find it, it wouldn't be for him. Although a longtime icon of the apparent counter-culture, he was never really part of any scene. A paranoid outsider to the end, down to the fortified compound where he lived. The world always scared Hunter more than he scared the world. Too weird to live, and too rare to die.

i think this is a v.astute point

all i wd say abt insight is that i think his insights into how nixon worked and what he represented were not matched by similar insights into subsequently hated pols

i suspect some of the at-last-i-can-say-it venom derives from ppl realising - as happens when someone dies - that they themselves have tumbled far from their earlier ideals, when their inspiration towards those ideals actually didn't (ie they are revealing how much they secretly know THEY THEMSELVES are sold-out suXoRs)

xxpost

I have some high ideals and want to aspire to higher things in life, but I don't delude myself into thinking that my choices are intrinsically better because they're more "responsible." Even the point of "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" is lost on anyone who glamorizes the behavior. There's no beauty in drugs when all you end up with is paranoid delusions and the fear.

What reading HST makes you realize is that these things exist whether you're sober or not and there's no escaping. Anyone who thinks he was some ego monster and was surprised when he was scared to be social hasn't really been reading.

The number of "I idolized him at eighteen, now I think he was a drugged-out phony" weblog eulogies are ridiculous. Hunter lived for himself, not for anyone who wanted to emulate his lifestyle. Look at his friends and collaborators; none of them are trying to emulate his consumption or style of output.

Exactly. What I wanted to write, but I was getting too upset to think coherently. It's not HST's fault if the aforementioned bloggers don't find him as exciting as they did when they were in high school. I get a strong whiff of "I had to settle down with my wife and kids — why didn't he?" from most of these people, as if they deserve kudos for being normal, boring and drug-free. I'm not trying to suggest that HST lived the ideal life, but denegrating him after his death isn't thoughtful or original — it's just cruel. A lot of them are also conspicuously ignoring the fact that he WAS a pretty straight-laced journalist for most of his early career (primarily in South America). Gotta know the rules to break 'em properly.

Has anyone else read The Rum Diary? I'm not going to make any claims or criticisms about its strength as a novel, but the backstory behind the plot has always made me wonder about the metamorphosis from writer to gonzo journalist. I don't have the book here, but I remember reading about how two of the main characters are really just different facets of Hunter's experiences. I really think he divided a straightlaced, slightly jaded past from a disconnected hedonism by creating two characters. It's interesting considering which path he claimed to have chosen...

ACT I::

http://www.counterpunch.org/proyect02232005.html

"If that's what he wanted, we'll see if we can pull it off," said historian Douglas Brinkley, a friend of Thompson's and now the family's spokesman.

Thompson, who shot himself to death at his Aspen-area home Sunday at 67, said several times he wanted an artillery send-off for his remains.

"There's no question, I'm sure that's what he would want," said Mike Cleverly, a longtime friend and neighbor. "Hunter truly loved that kind of thing."

Colorado fireworks impresario Marc Williams said it's doable.

"Oh, sweet. I'd love to. I would so love to," said Williams, 44, owner of Night Musick Inc. in suburban Denver and a fan of Thompson's writing.

Thompson's wife, Anita, and son, Juan, are looking into the cannon scenario, said Brinkley, who has edited some of Thompson's work.

Brinkley also said Thompson did not take his life "in a moment of haste or anger or despondency" but probably planned his suicide well in advance because of declining health. The author of books including "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" was in pain from a host of problems that included a broken leg and a hip replacement.

"I think he made a conscious decision that he had an incredible run of 67 years, lived the way he wanted to, and wasn't going to suffer the indignities of old age," Brinkley said. "He was not going to let anybody dictate how he was going to die."

Thompson had spent an intimate weekend with his son, daughter-in-law and young grandson, the spokesman said.

"He was trying to really bond and be close to the family" before his suicide, Brinkley said. "This was not just an act of irrationality. It was a very pre-planned act."

Family members had no hint that Thompson planned to take his own life, Brinkley said, and he did not leave a note. "There was no farewell salutation," he said.

Williams, the fireworks impresario, said it is not uncommon for families to have their loved one's ashes scattered across the sky in a fireworks shell, though his company has never done it.

If the Thompson job were his, Williams said, he would probably blast the ashes from a 12-inch-diameter mortar 800 feet into the sky. Then a second, window-rattling blast would scatter them amid a blossom of color 600 feet across.

"If you were going to light up a flash-bomb worthy of Hunter S. Thompson, you'd want to make it an earth-shaker," Williams said.

I'm wondering how much previously unreleased material is going to start surfacing now. I wonder tho, it seems like the good doctor probably already put into print everything he considered worth printing.

1. Seven hours in the presidential limo with Nixon, talking football.

Well, I think it was more like 40 minutes than seven hours, but I always assumed this story was true - HST wrote about this encounter more than once, and he didn't use that unmistakable tone he always had when he was making shit up.

Quote of the day (or at least of the moment):

"A lot of people want to grow up to be firemen and President. But nobody wants to grow up to be a cartoon character."
-- Hunter S. Thompson

Their current on-line poll:

What’s your take on Thompson?

And featured FAQ:

Wasn't Duke based on Hunter S. Thompson?

As the link reads:

 
Is it true that Duke represents Hunter S. Thompson? How long has he been appearing in the strip?
-- K. T., Baltimore, MD

Wasn't the character Duke based on the writer Hunter S. Thompson? If so, does Thompson's death mean Duke will kill himself too?
-- Paul, NY, NY

The late Hunter S. Thompson was indeed the initial inspiration for Doonesbury's Uncle Duke, who first appeared in the strip in this July 1974 series. Their paths diverged as Duke took on a life of his own, and over the decades his ever-evolving career has differed dramatically from that of HST.

The Town Hall respectfully raises a hefty tumbler to Hunter S. Thompson, a powerfully innovative and influential journalist and writer whose voice will be missed.

As yet I have not found any other statement by Trudeau on Thompson.

• Bush, Schroeder demand Iran halt nuke plan
• Judge extends stay in right-to-die case
• U.S. prepares to test bird flu vaccine
• Report: Health depts. unprepared for crisis
• Clear Channel, Howard Stern withdraw suits
• Soy industry searches for next innovation
• Historian: Thompson probably planned suicide
• NFL · NBA · NCAA Hoops · MLB · Soccer

I doubt there will be too many "lost writings" as he was, by his own admission, quite mercenary, and it's not like, y'know, he ever let a work of writing's utter failure to accomplish what it was supposed to do prevent its publication. I mean, that's the whole beauty of F&L in LV. It's this giant, wonderful failure of a motorcycle race article.

I'm tired of all the "oh, he was a coward for killing himself" BS. Have any of you actually ever shot a .45? It's one of the loudest handguns I've ever fired & kicked me back a good two steps the first time I tried it. It takes an incredible amount of courage to say "I've done all I can; I'm going to go out on a high note" and stick a hand cannon to your temple. And it's not like he was catching his family or fans off-guard: Juan obviously wasn't that surprised by it, and anyone with more than a passing knowledge of his work could see the foreshadowing.

I hope they can pull of the "cannon", especially if it's anything like the one in the "F&L On the Road to Hollywood" BBC doc, a giant tower with the Gonzo fist at the top. I would love to be there for that, but I'll be happy to just attend to public ceremony in the summer, bottle of Chivas in hand to toast ol' dead Doc.

The Duke of Hazard
Feb. 21, 2005

Last night, the night that Hunter S. Thompson was apparently shooting himself (an exit somehow befitting the self-styled anarchy and insouciantly godless iconoclasm of the man) my friend "Dirty Bobby," a magazine photographer, and I were in the kitchen of my house discussing a road trip he'd taken on a journalism assignment in Nevada. Suffice to say there was a lot of crystal meth involved, a rental car with a V-8 engine, a half-naked, semi-conscious female basketball player from UNLV, and a remake of an automatic Nazi "grease-gun," which was fired repeatedly out the window at 80 mph.

It was the first time in my life I have ever considered the possibility that Dr. Thompson's work might have had a questionable impact on the youth of today. This was certainly not the first of such stories I'd heard.

While there is a lot to be said for this kind of self-consuming, skid-marks-on-the-lawn-of-the-establishment behavior, most of the kids who imitated Thompson didn't really get that he wasn't simply depraved for the sake of depravity. Thompson may have seemed to be merely flailing violently among the vultures and wolverines wafting up from the spilled ether in his Buick floor mat, but he actually had a point: He was searching for the American dream. The twisted style in which he conducted this crusade was a reflection of how twisted he felt that dream had become.

If artists are the uninsulated emotional conductors for the rest of society, Thompson was a one-man power grid of paranoia, revulsion and defiance. He was a canary in our collective coal mine, an ulcer on our societal tongue, a warning. He was physically a big and strong enough man to recklessly embody the idea that we should all Beware of Where We Are Headed. A shuddering red flag.

Alienation was a big part of Thompson's voice, but not (I believe) because he wanted to be alienated. HST wrote very movingly about participating in the thrillingly inclusive group energies of the 1960s. He just didn't really fit in very well to anyone else's scene. He was a bit too charismatic, clean-cut and bizarre on his BSA, with his cigarette holder, to blend in with the Hell's Angels. He needed to be the center of attention too much to comfortably share the spotlight in rooms where other luminati of the day were having their moments -- rock stars, politicians, the various and infamous. Thompson was trapped, somewhat, in the limbo between Journalist and Personality: the neither-nor underworld of the rock-star scribe, who wields a little too much personal gravity to yield the focus to a subject other than himself.

But nobody wanted Thompson to stop talking about himself -- we loved living vicariously and seeing the world through his yellow target-range aviator lenses. He was our reluctant superhero of ultra-decadence. The contexts in which Thompson was placed (in a younger, finer world, when Rolling Stone had the balls and decency to trust the untrustworthy for the sake of Thor's whipsong, faxed to the editor on paper napkins in scrawls illegible) were really just an excuse to hear more of him, commenting on anything. It wasn't that his subjects were so terribly important, or even timely -- his deadlines came and went -- it was the verbal synapse-connections -- poison flowers that could only blossom from an overheating brain: Teeth like baseballs, eyes like jellied fire ... shoot the pasties off an 8-foot bull dyke and win a cotton-candy goat ...

Sure, the man had been dehydrated since 1971; he needed electrolytes and proteins and Thorazine and antidepressants and probably something for his ailing joints because he probably had no cartilage in his knees or hips at all, and a whole host of other difficulties that comes of applying a lifelong scorched-earth policy to your mind and body. Thompson was old, and life had finally become sufficiently uncomfortable for him to check out.

I think it is improper and disrespectful to whine about this suicide. Thompson was in the game for a very, very long time, and I think it is a safe bet that he was never comfortable. This was a profoundly tortured guy, the smoke from whose ears always made a whole lot of exciting colors that we all enjoyed. It was a great brain to watch but you wouldn't want to live in it, I'd aver. He was a butch motherfucker and I'd bet cash he stuck it out significantly longer than he really wanted to. Let's face it, HST was not one for the nursing home -- he'd have just stolen everyone else's barbiturates and hurt people trying to arm-wrestle.

May the kindly trickster gods collect you, Hunter Thompson, and drive you to where the buffalo roam, where your mind can unspool itself forever and your spirit can go on groping unsuspecting tits and trashing hotel rooms. You have earned it, Golden and Immortal Son of Classic Letters. Rest in Whatever You Would Prefer to Peace. We, the filthy and leaderless children who cherish your legacy, salute you, and will honor you with every bullet fired out of our car windows toward the unmarked desert sky.

Selah.

And this, from way upthread:

I always thought it the height of arrogance to assume that yours was the generation that would be the Last Ones.

suzy, who takes responsibility or credit for an entire generation, though... even the one they belong to?

Yet he was also part of a century-old tradition in American letters, the tradition of Mark Twain, Artemus Ward and Petroleum V. Nasby, comic writers who mined the human comedy of a new chapter in the history of the West, namely, the American story, and wrote in a form that was part journalism and part personal memoir admixed with powers of wild invention, and wilder rhetoric inspired by the bizarre exuberance of a young civilization. No one categorization covers this new form unless it is Hunter Thompson's own word, gonzo. If so, in the 19th century Mark Twain was king of all the gonzo-writers. In the 20th century it was Hunter Thompson, whom I would nominate as the century's greatest comic writer in the English language.

i still think wolfe can't write but he does mention an important thing: that hst is funny

Holy shit, when you look at it like that, he was a motherfucking genius!

Hunter Thompson’s widow says he shot himself while they were on the phone
ASPEN, Colorado (AP) — The widow of journalist Hunter S. Thompson said her husband killed himself while the two were talking on the phone.
“I was on the phone with him, he set the receiver down and he did it. I heard the clicking of the gun,” Anita Thompson told the Aspen Daily News in Friday’s editions.
She said her husband had asked her to come home from a health club so they could work on his weekly ESPN column — but instead of saying goodbye, he set the telephone down and shot himself.
Thompson said she heard a loud, muffled noise, but didn’t know what had happened. “I was waiting for him to get back on the phone,” she said.
Hunter Thompson, famous for Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and other works of New Journalism, shot himself in the head Sunday in the kitchen of his Aspen-area home. He was 67.
His son, daughter-in-law and six-year-old grandson were in the house when the shooting occurred.
Anita Thompson, 32, said her husband had discussed killing himself in recent months and had been issuing verbal and written directives about what he wanted done with his body, his unpublished works and his assets.
His suicidal talk put a strain on their relationship, she said.
“He wanted to leave on top of his game. I wish I could have been more supportive of his decision,” she said. “It was a problem for us.”

Gonzo journalist Hunter Stockton Thompson not only planned his suicide, he had been providing instructions on how he wanted his legacy preserved, his wife, Anita, said Thursday in her first public interview since his death.

Before leaving the fortified compound in Woody Creek known as Owl Farm to take a walk for the first time since her husband shot a .45-caliber bullet into his mouth Sunday night, Anita Thompson, 32, said she was finally overcoming the horror that the renowned writer she loved so deeply had purposefully ended his life.

"At first I was very angry. He was my best friend, my lover, my partner, and my teacher," she said. "But I know he is much more powerful and alive now than ever before. He is in all of our hearts. His death was a triumph of his own human spirit because this is what he wanted. He lived and died like a champion."

In recent months, Thompson, 67, had repeatedly talked of killing himself, she said, and had been issuing directives verbally and in writing of what he wanted done with his body, his unpublished work and his assets. His suicidal designs put an intense strain on their relationship, she said, but his motives were not rooted in desperation or fear -- he simply felt his time had come.

"He wanted to leave on top of his game. I wish I could have been more supportive of his decision. It was a problem for us," said Anita Thompson, who retreated to her parents' house in Fort Collins when the two would quarrel. There, she said, he would fax her love letters.

The couple, who married in April 2003, had a profound affection for each other, and even though they feuded over Thompson's death wish, friends say the couple always reconciled.

"Hunter loved Anita so much. They were a shining example of two people who couldn't keep their hands off of each other," said family friend Tim Mooney, a former manager for musician Jimmy Buffett who first met Thompson while working behind the bar at the Hotel Jerome in the 1970s. "Their affections dominated every mutual moment that they shared every day they were together. Hunter realized that Anita and Anita's level of love for him were allowing him to live 28-hour days."

Last weekend, Anita, who was working out at the Aspen Club & Spa, called Thompson, who asked her to come home so they could work on his weekly ESPN column. She said the two never said goodbye; rather, he placed the receiver beside his typewriter that sat on the kitchen counter, loaded his revolver, and pulled the trigger.

"I was on the phone with him, he set the receiver down and he did it. I heard the clicking of the gun," said the author's widow, adding that the clicking sounded as if he was striking the keys of his typewriter. She heard a loud, muffled noise in the background, but did not know what had happened. "I was waiting for him to get back on the phone." He never did.

"I'm going to miss him horribly, you can't even imagine. He was such a beautiful man."

Juan Thompson, a Denver resident and 40-year-old son of the famous author, his wife Jennifer Winkel Thompson and their 6-year-old son Will were the only ones in the house when the shooting occurred. They told investigators the shot sounded like a book crashing to the floor. Juan Thompson found his father slumped in the chair he sat in to pen many of his classic writings. The phone receiver was still resting on the kitchen counter, next to the typewriter and a glass of the author's favorite whiskey, Chivas Regal, said his widow, who took a van from the Aspen Club back to the house, where sheriff's deputies, and tragedy, greeted her.

The night before he killed himself, Thompson gave his son a medallion he once received from Oscar Zeta Acosta, a prominent Chicano lawyer, writer and speaker fictionalized as the Samoan in the 1972 classic "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas," as well as an emerald pendant Thompson had worn since 1976 -- the latter was for his wife. Anita said Thompson instructed Juan to give the pendant to her after he died.

She said none of Thompson's family members knew exactly when he planned on turning a gun on himself, a la his idol Ernest Hemingway, and that she would have intervened and "called in a SWAT team" if she would have known that the end was so near.

Now Anita Thompson plans to continue carrying on her husband's legacy as he instructed. "I have a lot of work to do, even more than before," she said, declining to reveal specific details of Thompson's last requests, except that Owl Farm is "more fortified than ever before."

But she did confirm the family plans to blast her husband's ashes out of a cannon on Owl Farm in spectacular fashion, as he had wished.

"I think we should," she said. "The more explosions, the better."

The literary champ was sitting in his command post kitchen chair, a piece of blank paper in his favorite typewriter, dead of a self-inflicted gunshot through the mouth hours earlier.

But a small circle of family and friends gathered around with stories, as he wished, with glasses full of his favored elixir — Chivas Regal on ice.

"It was very loving. It was not a panic, or ugly, or freaky," Thompson's wife, Anita Thompson, said Thursday night in her first spoken comments since the icon's death Sunday. "It was just like Hunter wanted. He was in control here."

I am so putting this into my own will.

Hunter S. Thompson found in front of typewriter; word “counselor” on page
ASPEN, Colo. (AP) — Hunter S. Thompson’s body was found in a chair in the kitchen in front of his typewriter with the word “counselor” typed in the centre of the page, according to sheriff’s reports.
The word was typed on stationery from the Fourth Amendment Foundation, which was started to defend victims of unwarranted search and seizure, according to reports released Tuesday.
It was not immediately known what, if any, significance the word had to the founder of “gonzo” journalism or to his family.
Juan Thompson found his father dead on Feb. 20 from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. After reporting the death, Juan Thompson walked outside the Woody Creek home and fired three shotgun blasts into the air.
“Juan told me he had shot a shotgun into the air to mark the passing of his father,” Pitkin County Deputy Sheriff John Armstrong said in his report.
Juan Thompson was allowed to go into the kitchen alone to drape a golden orange scarf over his father’s shoulders, according to Armstrong. Jennifer Winkel Thompson, Juan Thompson’s wife, said the family had purchased the silk scarf in Florence, Italy, and gave it to Hunter Thompson the night before.
The couple and their six-year-old son were in the house when Thompson, 67, took a handgun, put it to his mouth and fired.
A soft-sided gun case was found at Thompson’s feet along with a spent shell casing, according to reports.
The family has canceled plans for a public gathering in favour of a private service. A public event will be held at a later date. Plans also are in the works to blast Thompson’s ashes from a cannon, which was one of the author’s wishes.

The "counselor" phrase could have had many meanings (the sarcastic one is my hope), or none at all.

In 100 words or less, "Why should your cannon be used to blast Dr. Hunter S. Thompson's cremated remains into the sky?"

The Aspen Daily News will forward the essays to the family of the late gonzo journalist, who will give them "serious consideration," said Aspen Daily News Associate Editor Troy Hooper.

"We're talking 100 words, not 101," Hooper said on Saturday. "And snail mail only. No e-mails or phone calls."

The entry deadline is March 13, 2005. The address is the Aspen Daily News, 517 E. Hopkins Ave., Aspen, CO 81611.

Entrants must include an actual photograph of the cannon being entered (no conceptual drawings), how far it fires, an approximate date when it was last fired, and whether anyone was seriously injured at said firing. Cannons with historic value or from Kentucky will be awarded extra points. Any other important or impressive information should also be included. Entrants MUST actually own the cannon being entered, or obtain legal access to it.

"The winner is responsible for transporting the cannon to Aspen at his or her own expense, and on short notice," Hooper said.

Hooper said the Aspen Daily News decided to sponsor the Hunter S. Thompson Blast-Off Cannon Contest after discussing the issue with Thompson's friends and family who want to honor the canonical author's wish to have his remains blasted over Owl Farm.

In recent days, cannon owners began to step forward, volunteering their weaponry to the family through their connection of the newspaper. "But they didn't really have a direction in which to step," said a low-level Aspen Daily News editor, "so now we are giving Thompson's fans that direction."

w00t!

this is what I was saying!

At the memorial, neighbor and actor Don Johnson remembered once asking Thompson: What is the sound of one hand clapping? Thompson responded by slapping Johnson across the face.

Hahaha

Any further word on the public ceremony planned for this summer (dates, location, speakers, etc.)?

Ha, that's way better than Bart Simpson's answer.

http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/0307051thompson1.html

rosebud...rosebud...

i am afraid i might miss this while its on the newstands. news-stands.

Also, one of the better quotes from the local papers: Neighbor Something Something had this to say about the cannon deal: "Just so long as they point the thing east."

or something to that effect.

"Anita Thompson, 32, said she plans to protect and promote her husband's legacy."

In other words: forget the webcast, the cannon blast thing will be available on a DVD shortly for you to buy with dollars.

"The monument towers over a field between the home and a tree-covered red-rock canyon wall. It is shrouded in gray and blue tarpaulins that ripple in the wind and it will not be unveiled until Saturday. It is modeled after Thompson's gonzo logo: a clenched fist, made symmetrical with the addition of a second thumb, perched atop a dagger."

This does sound totally awesome, I must admit.

There's a link to the cannon-firing from there.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20071012/ap_en_ot/the_gonzo_way

AGAIN???

Fuck

http://www.corregidorisland.com/macarthur.jpg

yesterday, the ny post reports that howard stern is under investigation for "insider trading." and now, this. not a good weekend :-(
-- Eisbär (llamasfur), Monday, 21 February 2005 06:52 (2 years ago) Link

o_O

I loved the thing of his in the Harper's this month.

RIP, heaven needed a dude who influenced every shitty journalist ever.

<I>i blame this on bush...</i>

lol

RIP, heaven needed a dude who influenced every shitty journalist ever.

lol lol