He did manage to get his remains shot out of a rocket.
He was the original article, too weird for mass production.
Everything he said was true.
Even when it wasn’t, the truth was often stranger, if he was present.
Quite likely, not many people, would have been able to believe the truth, when he was on a bender.
Which, seems to be, pretty much the whole fucking time, until he blew his own head off, like Socrates.
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I like to think of him as a tribal shaman telling stories around the fire to keep the good superstitious people around him from going feral. He used the credulity of others to give them a sense that life was too interesting to waste on overly serious living.
Sounds like ayahuasca. Never tried it but I think I’m due once I get my walking papers.
Are you sure that what he wrote was not the truth of his subjective point of view?
I have never taken a bunch of acid, qualudes, and whatever else was in his sock drawer then tried to record an accurate history of an event.
The whole point of Gonzo journalism what to tell the story on event from the subjective point of view of the author, to do away with any pretence of objectivity as I understand it.
I’m fucking positive. He made a bunch of shit up all the time.
His drug of choice appears to have been duper’s delight.
He made up a story about a Presidential candidate being hooked on surgical heart anesthesia and it actually made it into the news cycle in the 70s.
Not a single word of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is true except that Zeta Acosta playing the part of Dr Gonzo supplied lines while character acting on tape and Hunter used the made up dialogue in his book. Hunter insisted and deeply intoned that it was true to sell copies.
Drugs don’t work like you apparently think they work.
It wasn’t a subjective point of view. It was fiction presented as truth for entertainment.
He did shit like that all the time. It’s how he got his first score writing about the Hell’s Angels. He knew he could write anything he wanted because none of it could be verified. He took immense pleasure making folk hero legends out of weird characters. he took weird things and made them larger than life and even weirder. He was exaggerating to tell tall tales for fun and profit and he knew that they’d be just strange enough in person for people to believe anything he said.
It was farce presented as fact. You’re so gullible. I just did a bunch of peyote with the bigfoot and he has a bridge in Manhattan that he swears is an investment gold mine. He’d keep it for himself but he got clap from gangbanging Mrs Santa Claus with Paul Rueben and needs money for penicillin. Just send Bitcoin to my email address or whatever and we’ll work out the property rights. I swear.
I heard he embellished but not just made it all up out of thin air.
Did you know Hunter? What sources did you use to come to this conclusion?
The interview I posted was informative if you watched the whole thing. He directly says that Gonzo Journalism isn’t really journalism. He makes repeated references to it as non-factual. The situations it’s based on mostly didn’t happen in the same way that the trip to Narnia didn’t happen despite some kids playing hide and seek in an old wardrobe.
The Gonzo tapes performances from where Fear and Loathing sprang can be purchased now on CD. They are purely for the purpose of performance. They were acting out these scenarios as part of a collaborative creative work. I’m sure they went to Vegas at one point, took a lot of drugs and made giant asses out of themselves on the strip.
However the order of events, people, events themselves, encounters, crimes and things like romantic interludes with desert dwelling CHP officers and tripped out Barbara Streisand fans are almost certainly the product of creative writing rather than fact. The inspiration for those things are probably lost with both Acosta and Hunter’s demise.
Acosta notably alleged that a lot of the lines in the book were lifted straight from unpublished performances he gave on the tapes and that he didn’t get his name in the book or the billing on the dust jacket that he was originally promised by Hunter. He didn’t debate if anything happened but that was the nature of their gig. They were in on the joke and the audience was there to “buy the ticket” and “take the ride”.
Hunter S Thompson was like a literary Andy Kaufmann. There’s no sense in taking him factually unless they were there but because he has a proven and admitted track record of entertaining deception and points out himself that he has a problem with people believing the things he writes then I think it’s safer to assume the admitted storyteller is just telling a story.
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Yeah. I was a “Santa Claus” isn’t real kind of kid. Not very popular with parents, teachers or other children.
#MeToo, age 5, disbelieved in Santa Claus, by middle school, an atheist.
Still upsets my my mother, about the atheism thing.
That being said, the purse tournament promotions scene does benefit from some razzle dazzle.
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I wish I were that funny!
So do we!
…
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AT least I’m not here to just flex?
I’m not that flexible.
Jim Henson was a damn fine American.
Plenty of us are awful, me included but guys like Henson and Mr Rogers deserve statues did a lot of good with some cheap props and a few gags.
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You/we cannot save them they are already lost.
We can only warn our young through stories and songs of old, warning them of the danger to be encountered when locking oneself and comrades in a room and throwing shit at each other whilst swearing it is chocolate to protect a fragile ego from admitting to be a room dwelling thrower of shit.
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This is a problem of political bias, but political bias is part of a larger cultural bias, a particular social orientation. Rolling Stone has always been left-leaning, but it also was for many years the home of great writing from conservatives, notably P. J. O’Rourke and Tom Wolfe. But we have closed ranks, socially, in recent years, for a variety of reasons, many of them just blisteringly stupid. This has coincided with certain social and economic changes that have undermined the quality of American journalism. It is not that we do not know how to get it right, or even that we do not have the resources to get it right — it is that our petty hatreds and cultural tribalism have led us to believe that it does not matter if we get it right, that lies and misrepresentations about cultural enemies are virtuous in that they serve a “greater truth.” And this is not an exclusively left-wing phenomenon: Donald Trump’s lies, and the distortions and misrepresentations of right-wing talk radio and cable news, are excused and even celebrated on the same grounds.
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