Gonzo's topics - tribe.net

AS MODERATOR, MY FIRST LINE OF BUSINESS...

2008-05-01T02:18:54Z

... is apparently to make an all-caps subject of a posting!

Now that I've had a coup of the Gonzo Tribe, I am changing its direction a little.

Heretofor, this tribe will be dedicated to Gonzo writing, photography, and life in general. All people who get right in there and DO EET are hereby invited to post their stories, photos, and experiences.

Because, as far as I know, Thompson would have appreciated this a lot more than a spam and fan collection.

Discuss: What is the most Gonzo thing you have done in the past two weeks? In separate topics, please.

posted in Gonzo - 1 reply

Gonzo at the Drag Strip

2008-04-28T05:25:54Z

.....within the last couple weeks, I've been ostracized by commercial promoters and midwestern fudpuckers for standing up for street racers on a statrat dragstrip board--while being praised by the site owner for being "drag racing's own gonzo journalist". He's been running my
http://racersforcoffee.blogspot.com
contributions off and on as leads for a couple years. I ran with the crew which begat the first online drag racing magazine; we kick started coverage of old school drag racing in the mid-'90's---our publisher wrote for Hot Rod for years before he got sick of the republicratic bent and gathered a clan...Nitronic Research. Cole still ambles around the LA Citybeat digs when not doing sound for Jeopardy. Go to

http://web.archive.org/web/20010417100142/www.nitronic.com/research3/ikkky.html

...for a taste. I still don't take graft from the sport--and being respected for "telling truth to power" is all the compensation I need.

I continue around here with http://racersforcoffee.wordpress.com .....and the Racers For Coffee tribe.

posted in Gonzo - 1 reply

No moderator?

2008-04-28T05:22:22Z

Hey, there's no moderator on this tribe. How are we going to blindly follow a bunch of arbitrary rules that are set down by some unreasonable prick no one knows or likes?!?

I immediately nominate myself.

Any opposition?

- Normal
Normal for Moderator 2007
"We left 2006 crying in the shower with mascara running down his face."

posted in Gonzo - 8 replies

There Goes the Neighborhood

2007-03-27T17:05:41Z

Okay I'll go. My neighborhood in Calgary, Alberta, Canada is undergoing massive gentrification on account of our oil boom. Now the mainstream media is all smiles and glowy reports and yay isn't this wonderful. Frankly I disagree. I've seen scores of old character filled houses consumed by the wrecking ball and replaced with glassy carbon copy condos. This used to be an artsy bohemian part of town, now its just trendy.

Recently I decided to start going out on the street with my video camera capturing the transformation. A couple of days ago an old video store put up a sign; "Closeout sale! We're being forcefully evicted. Everything must go!" so I went down with my video camera and interviewed the owner, Chengis Javeri aka: C.J.

The store was opened twenty years ago by C.J.'s father because his mother wanted something to do. After a year she became bored of running the store so C.J. and his father took it over and ran it until 2003 when his father passed away. One week ago C.J. found a notice of eviction addressed to his deceased father on his door. It gave him until the end of January to vacate the premises.

He's in the process of liquidating as much of his inventory as possible and trying to figure out his next career move. He grew up in the video store so it'll be quite the change whatever he ends up doing.

The Blue Turtle gallery/art shop next door opened two years ago and is also run by C.J. He only accepts work from first time artists as a means to help them get their careers off the ground and bolster their confidence. That too will be closing come the end of the month.

My intention is to combine all this footage with some personal editorial ranting to make a kind of gonzo documentary on the gentrification of the neighborhood. I hope to have it online by the end of the month.

posted in Gonzo - 2 replies

Quotes

2007-03-10T07:41:01Z

Can anybody tell me the source of this quote:

"I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they've always worked for me."

Also does anyone know of a site that lists HST quotes with sources?

Thanks,
Shane

posted in Gonzo - 0 replies

The Lucas Mannhunt

2007-02-01T21:20:52Z

This is the pitch I submitted to This American Life

It's the story of a found laptop and two womens' three year adventure trying to get the laptop back to the previous owner. In the process, the two women learn about the Mann (Lucas Mann) and develop a kind of remote bond with him through the data on his laptop. Ultimately, after years of near-psychotic stalking, Lucas Mann was unearthed through the miracle of the retelling of the story and the revival of a Google search.

This is our story: The Lucas Mannhunt

In late December of 2003, I was bringing chicken noodle soup to my best friend, Vanessa. She had come down with a flu I had so helpfully given her. I felt guilty and like doing a good deed.

In the road was a black case. It hovered and dropped as I drove up. It called to me.

I wasn't sure what to do, so I called Vanessa and asked if I should leave it or take it.

She confirmed: it would also call to the myriad homeless people in the area and, being an honest person, I knew I could trust myself to find the owner and get it back to him. Surely there was a business card in the case. I could find the owner quickly and return his case. But there was no business card. There was no immediate identification. I opened the case and it was a Smithsonian-ready laptop. The thing was old, but loved.

I shoved the laptop in my car for amateur forensic hour later.

At home, I opened the laptop with all the excitement of a child discovering a time capsule. There was no password protection so I immediately dove into his email in search of an address.

I mailed. It bounced.

I found a resume on the desktop and called all the contact numbers. They were disconnected.

On the phone with Vanessa, she walked me through looking through the history (I have to talk with Lucas about whether he wants to talk about the contents on the air, so this will have to remain a mystery). There was nothing to identify him. I did a Google search and couldn't find the Lucas we were looking for.

It looked like we had just accidentally stolen a laptop.

And then, on the desktop, I noticed a folder titled "Lucas and Alanis." Thinking it must be some Photoshopped fantasy of the owner and Alanis Morrissette, I opened it and started opening the photos. It was the ACTUAL Alanis Morrissette and Lucas, looking fun-loving and charming. They were horsing around. I started liking him. He looked fun. She was painting his toenails in one photo. In another, she was playfully punching him in the jaw. In yet another, she was giving him a wedgie, a look of staged surprise on his face.

I was hooked.

I started reading the essays saved on the computer. I started reading his emails.

I invited Vanessa over. Before we opened the laptop together, we watched the French film, Amelie. We knew we were going to embark on a journey to find Lucas and this journey could turn ugly. We could take the data in the computer brain and use it for good or for evil.

This wasn't going to be an evil journey as long as we were on watch. Not on our watch. Not for Lucas.

But these things can quickly veer off the track of what we want and into the track of psychotic stalker stumbling.

Vanessa and I are part of a huge community of friends in Los Angeles and we put the word out: Look for Lucas Mann. Look for Lou Mann (Lucas's father). Look for any connection possible.

We got back Lou's cell phone number almost immediately. He had worked at House of Blues headquarters and my friend's roommate had the number. I called and left the shadiest, most cryptic message ever: "I have something of your son's. He needs it back. Please call me or have him call me as soon as possible." I left my number and waited.

Our little radio station, Theory Radio (http://www.theoryradio.org), seemed like a good venue to publicize our desperate search. We shared the Lucas story, including personal information and some emails, with the radio listeners (only about 12 listeners, but hey). Through technical difficulties, much of our broadcast was lost, but our listeners were equally dedicated to the search.

Other information started coming in slowly (I won't break down the semi-legal methods of acquisition): someone had an address and a phone number.

We started planning a poster campaign and a parade. We wanted to make this really special for Lucas. He was our friend. I kind of wanted to date Lucas. This had to be REALLY special. We arranged for the "mayor" of our community to give the laptop to Lucas.

Unfortunately, he had recently moved and his phone number was, again, disconnected.

We had to shelve the project. It was becoming an obsession. Unhealthy.

Vanessa put away the laptop and we stopped the mad hunt. I was really sad to see Lucas go, but we had real lives to deal with. Things happen. Hobbies fade.

A week ago, I was recounting the story to a guy I'm dating. He's weird and I thought he might appreciate the story. He said there was absolutely no way that I couldn't find Lucas. There must be some Google trail.

So I searched the next morning and HEY! There was the Mann! I found him!

I emailed the support address of his website and told him the story. He was touched. This is the part where Lucas has to tell the rest of the story.

Separately.

posted in Gonzo - 4 replies

post it!!!

2007-01-31T19:11:17Z

i wanna know what happened to lucas mann?

posted in Gonzo - 1 reply

Suicide Note to be Published by R.S.

2006-08-12T19:11:37Z

News breaking today that the note left by HST four days before his death will be published in the next R.S. The note is purported to read as follows:

HUNTER THOMSPON SUICIDE NOTE: 'No More Games. No More Bombs. No More Walking. No More Fun. No More Swimming. 67. That is 17 years past 50. 17 more than I needed or wanted. Boring. I am always bitchy. No Fun -- for anybody. 67. You are getting Greedy. Act your old age. Relax -- This won't hurt'....

posted in Gonzo - 5 replies

Blasphemy in Bat Country

2006-08-12T19:10:17Z

I was watching a nameless Music T.V. cahnnel and saw this horrible song. It's some kind of Fear and Loathing in Vegas rip
off. Would Hunter be proud of this?

http://www.avengedsevenfold.com/batcountry/

posted in Gonzo - 11 replies

2002 HST Interview

2006-06-29T03:33:57Z

Hunter S. Thompson, talked to Mick O'Regan
from Radio National's Media Report.
Australian Broadcasting Corporation
6:15am - Thursday 29 August 2002

Listen to the interview here (approx 35min):
http://www.indybay.org/uploads/huntersthompsonon911_nr.mp3

Thompson discusses journalism, censorship, false patriotism, Bush, 9/11, etc.

http://tribes.tribe.net/infobunker

posted in Gonzo - 2 replies

Gonzo Store

2006-05-23T08:06:59Z

The official Gonzo store is now open, operating out of Owl Farm. Visit www.gonzostore.com for official Hunter S. Thompson merchandise, enter promotional code GONZP3X4 and get 2$ off your order.

posted in Gonzo - 1 reply

Harper's April 2006 - William Kennedy re: HST

2006-03-22T08:29:53Z

The April 2006 issue of Harper's has a three page recollection by William Kennedy of correspondence between himself and HST regarding coconut cups, a pipe stand and some other stuff HST left in Puerto Rico. W.K. was the managing editor of the San Juan Star at the time... Fills in a bit of the back story and it's pretty amusing.

The issues has some other good reading, but the piece regarding HST can be read fairly quickly at your local magazine stand if necessary... Or public library?....

posted in Gonzo - 0 replies

Brown Buffalo

2006-01-25T16:24:43Z

Has anyone read The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo by Oscar Zeta Acosta? Thoughts/reviews? Worth reading?

posted in Gonzo - 1 reply

I'm leaving Tribe

2006-01-23T04:16:10Z

I'm going to hit the road. I can't operate under the new censorship around here. The TOU geek removed a photo that I had posted in the "Political Junkies" album (and maybe a few other albums). It was one that said "Dumbfuck Mountain," a spoof on Brokeback Mountain, and showed Bush and Cheney in the starring roles.

Folks, that was political speech. It was satire. There wasn't anything obscene about it. And they have censored it. Either the TOU geeks didn't like the use of the "F" word, or they didn't like the disrespect shown for Our Dear Leaders. Apparently, only the insipid and the bland meet with their approval. What's next? Are they going to screen your posts for the "F" word? Are they going to turn over evidence of such bad behavior to the FBI, the CIA, the Pentagon, and the NSA?

I'm not going to argue with the TOU people. That would be a waste of my time. I'm just going to vote with my feet and get out of here before it gets worse. I won't be the first to have done so. And I probably won't be the last.

It's been nice chatting with you, though.

posted in Gonzo - 2 replies

Thompson on political protest.

2006-01-20T05:43:33Z

After a few slugs of Wild Turkey, and a few puffs of herb, I transcribed an excerpt from Kindom of Fear- Hunter S. Thompson's last real book before he blew his head off. This excerpt explains how an impulsive trip to Chicago in 1968 led to his political awakening. I have also added paragraphs, since these blog tools don't seem to recognize them.

---------------------------------------------------

The story began in 1968, when Random House gave me $5,000 and my editor there said "Go out and write about "The Death of the American Dream"". I had agreed without thinking, because all I really cared about, back then, was the money. And along with the $5k in front money came a $7,500 "expenses budget"- against royalties, which meant I'd be paying my own expenses, but I didn't give a fuck about that either. It was a nice gig to get into: Random House had agreed, more or less, to finance my education. I could go just about anywhere I wanted to just as long as I could somehow tie it in with the Death of the American Dream.

It looked easy, a straight-out boondoggle, and for a long time I treated it that way... I went a few places for reasons I can't even recall now, and then I went to Chicago in August 1968, on my Random House tab with a packet of the finest, blue-chip press credentials- issued by the Democratic National Committee- for the purpose of covering the Convention.

I had no real reason for going- not even a magazine assignment; I just wanted to BE THERE and get the feel of things. The town was so full of journalists that I felt like a tourist... and the fact that I had heavier credentials than most of the working writers & reporters I met left me feeling vaguely embarrassed. But it never occured to me to seek an assignment- although if anybody had asked me, I'd have done the whole story for nothing.

Now, years later, I still have trouble when I think about Chicago. That week at the Convention changed everything I'd ever taken for granted about this country and my place in it. I went from a state of Cold Shock on Monday, to Fear on Tuesday, then Rage, and finally Hysteria- which lasted for nearly a month. Every time I tried to tell somebody what happened in Chicago I began crying, and it took me years to understand why.

I wasn't beaten; I spent no time in jail. But neither of these things would have had much effect on me anyway. I takes a real expert (or experts) to beat a person badly without putting them in a state of shock that makes the beating meaningless until later... and getting dragged into jail with a bunch of friends is more a strange high than trauma; indeed, there is something vaguely dishonorable in having lived through the sixties without having spent time in jail.

Chicago was the end of the Sixties for me. I remember going back to my room at the Blackstone, across the street from the Hilton, and sitting cross-legged on my bed for hours at a time. Trembling, unable to make any notes, staring at the TV set while my head kept whirling out of focus from the things I'd seen happen all around me... and I could watch it all happening again, on TV; see myself running in stark terror across Michigan Drive, on camera, always two steps ahead of the nearest club-swinging cop, and knowing that at any instant my lungs would be shredded by some bullet that would hit me before I could even hear the shot fired.

I was standing at the corner of Michigan and Balboa on Wednesday night when the cops attacked... and I remember thinking: No. This can't be happening. I flattened myself back against a wall of the Blackstone and fished a motorcycle helmet out of my friendly blue L.L. Bean kit bag. and also the yellow ski goggles, thinking there would probably be Mace, or at least gas... but that was the only time they didn't use any.

On Wednesday evening they used clubs, and it was a king-hell bitch of a show. I stood against the wall, trying to put my helmet on while people ran past me like a cattle stampede. The ones who weren't screaming were bleeding, and some were being dragged. I have never been caught in an earthquake, but I'm sure the feeling would be just about the same. Total panic and desbelief- with no escape. The first wave of cops came down Balboa at a trot and hit the crowd in the form of a flying wedge, scattering people in all directions like fire on an anthill.... but no matter which way they ran, there were more cops. The second wave came across Grant Park like a big threshing machine, a wave of long, black truncheons meeting people fleeing hysterically from the big bash at the intersection.

Others tried to flee down Balboa, toward State Street, but there was no escape in that direction, either- just another wave of cops closing off the whole street in a nicely planned pincher movement and beating the mortal shit out of anybody they could reach. The protesters tried to hold their lines, calling back and forth to one another as they ran away: "Stay together!"

I found myself in the middle of the pincers, with no place to run except back into the Blackstone. But the two cops at the door refused to let me in. They were holding their clubs out in front of them with both hands, keeping everybody away from the door.

By this time I could see people getting brutalized within six feet of me on both sides, It was only a matter of seconds before I went under, so I finally just ran between the truncheons, screaming "I live here, goddamnit! I'm paying fifty dollars a day!" By the time they whacked me against the doorI was out of range of what was happening on the sidewalk... and by some kind of wild, accidental luck I had my room key with me. Normally, I would have left it at the desk before going out, but on this tense night I forgot, and that key was salvation- that, and the mad righteousness that must have vibrated out of me like screeching Jesus in everything I said. Because I DID live there. I was a goddamn PAYING GUEST! And there was never any doubt in my mind that the stinking blue-uniformed punks had no RIGHT to keep me out.

I believed that, and I was big enough to neutralize one of the truncheons long enough to lunge into the lobby... and it was not until several days or even weeks later that I understood that those cops had actually PLANNED to have me beaten. Not Me, personally, but Me as a member of "The Enemy", that crowd of "outside agitators" made up of people who had come to Chicago on some mission that the cops couldn't grasp except in fear and hatred.

This is what caused me to tremble when I finally sat down behind the locked & chanied door on my hotel room. It was not a fear of being beaten or jailed, but the slow-rising shock of suddenly realizing that it was no longer a matter of Explaining My Position. These bastards knew my position, and they wanted to beat me anyway. They didn't give a fuck if the Democratic National Committee have issued me special press credentials; it made no difference to them that I'd come to Chicago as a paying guest- at viciously inflated rates- with no intention of causing the slightest bit of trouble for anybody.

That was the point. My very innocence made me guilty- or at least a potential troublemaker in the eyes of the rotten sold-out scumbags who were running that Convention: Mayor Richard J. Daley of Chicago, Lyndon Baines Johnson, then President of the United States. These pigs didn't care what was Right. All they knew was what they wanted, and they were powerful enough to break anybody who even thought about getting in their way.

Right here, before I forget, I want to make what I think is a critical point about the whole protest action of the 1960s. It seems to me that the underlying assumption of any public protest- any public disagreement with the government, "the system", or "the Establishment," by any name- is that the men in charge of whatever you're protesting against are actually listening, whether they later admit it or not, and that if you run your protest Right, it will likely make a difference. Norman Mailer made this point a long time ago when he said that the election of JFK gave him a sense, for the first time in his life, that he could actually communicate with the White House. Even with people like Johnson and McBundy- or even Bull Connor- the unspoken rationale behind all those heavy public protests was that our noise was getting through and that somebody in power was listening and hearing and at least weighing our protest against their own political realities... even if these people refused to talk to us. So in the end the very act of public protest, even violent protest, was essentially optomistic and actually a demonstration of faith (mainly sub-conscious, I think) in the father figures who had the power to change things- once they could be made to see the light of reason, or even political reality.

This is what the bastards never understood- that the "Movement" was essentially an expression of deep faith in the American Dream: that the people they were "fighting" were not the cruel and cynical beasts they seemed to be, and that in fact they were just a bunch of men like everybody's crusty middle-class fathers who only needed to be shaken a bit, jolted out of their bad habits and away from their lazy, short-term, profit-oriented life stances... and that once they understood, they would surely do the right thing.

A Willingness to argue, however violently, implies a fatih of some basic kind in the antagonist, an assumption that he is still open to argument and reason and, if all else fails, then finely orchestrated persuasion in the form of political embarrasment. The 1960s were full of examples of good, powerful men changing their minds on heavy issues: John Kennedy on Cuba and the Bay of Pigs, Martin Luther King, Jr. on Veitnam, Gene McCarthy on "working behind the scenes and within the Senate Club," Robert F. Kennedy on grass and long hair and what eventually came to be Freak Power, Ted Kennedy on Francis X. Morrisey, and Senator Sam Ervin on wiretaps and preventive detention.
Anyway, the general political drift of the 1960s was one of the Good Guys winning, slowly but surely (and even clumsily sometimes), over the Bad Guys... and the highest example of this was Johnson's incredible abdication on April Fools Day of 1968. So nobody was ready for what began to happen that summer: first in Chicago, when Johnson ran his Convention like a reply of the Reichstag fire... and then with Agnew and Nixon and Mitchell coming into power so full of congenital hostility and so completely deaf to everything we'd been talking about for ten years that it took a while to realize that there was no point at yelling at the fuckers. They were born deaf and stupid.

This was the lesson of Chicago- or at least that's what I learned from Chicago, and two years later, running for the office of sheriff, that lesson seemed every bit as clear as it did to me when I got rammed in the stomach with a riot club in Grant Park for showing a cop my press pass. What I learned, in Chicago, was that the police arm of the United States government was capable of hiring vengeful thugs to break the very rules we all thought we were operating under. On Thursday night in the Amphiteatre it was not enough for me to have a press pass from the Democratic National Committee; I was kicked out of my press seat by hired rent-a-cops, and when I protested to the Secret Service men at the door, I was smacked against the wall and searched for weapons. And I realized at that point that, even though I was absolutely right, if I persisted in my righteous complaint, I would probably end up in jail.

There was no point appealing to any higher authority, because they were the people who were paying those swine to fuck me around. It was LBJ's party and I was an unwelcome guest, barely tolerated... and if I couldn't keep my mouth shut, I would get the same treament as those poor bastards out on Michegan Avenue, or Wells Street, or Lincoln Park... who were gassed, and beaten by an amry of cops run amok with carte blanche from the Daily-Johnson combine- while Hubert Humphrey cried from tear gas fumes in his twenty-fifth-floor suite at the Hilton.

A lot of people felt that way after Chicago. And in my case it was more a sense of shock at the sudden understanding that I was on the ground. I went there as a journalist; my candidate had been murdered in Los Angeles two months earlier- but I left Chicago in a state of hysterical angst, convinced by all I'd seen that we were in very bad trouble... and in fact that the whole country was doomed unless somebody, somewhere, could mount a challenge to the rotten, high-powered machinery of men like Daley and Johnson. Sitting in a westound TWA jet on the ramp at O'Hare, waiting for a takeoff slot, it occured to me that I was suddenly right in the middle of the story I'd been sent out to look for. What had begun as a dilettante's dream was now a very real subject.
That was the way it began...

posted in Gonzo - 0 replies

Breakfast with hunter

2006-01-16T11:43:30Z

I have this brilliant DVD on my hard drive
Its a fuckin cracker man
DAVE

organise limewire share

posted in Gonzo - 0 replies

Just another perspective on the Huck Finn of our time:

2005-10-23T10:04:45Z

http://www.rakemag.com/stories/section_detail.aspx?itemID=10627&catID=282&SelectCatID=282

The Sixties—Dead By Self-Inflicted Gunshot
<p>When Ken Kesey and Hunter Thompson played poker—for the future of humanity.
by Jeff Forester, Art by Jason Greenberg - September 2005
Email This Article To A Friend | Printable Page

The moment flickered past while I realized that the last of them was gone, the last of the sixties counterculture iconoclasts, those world shakers and rainbow revolutionaries: Lenny Bruce, Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, John Lennon, Abbie Hoffman, Edward Abbey, Timothy Leary, Ken Kesey, Hunter Thompson—all gone, the last by his own hand.

I met Thompson once, but I barely remember it. Part of it is time. Part of it is that in those days—the early nineties—the aging revolutionaries of the sixties were my mentors, my heroes, and I emulated them. The key to their genius, I thought, was their excesses, without understanding that their excesses were mostly countermeasure to the pain of genius.

My memories from those years are washed with a psychoactive rose-colored tinge—fleeting, gossamer—like cheesy wedding photos.

Hunter Thompson, like his heroes Ernest Hemingway and Mark Twain, was an American journalist turned fiction stylist, another who fearlessly made himself a character in his own myth-making, carefully fictionalizing his own persona. When Hemingway killed himself, Thompson was twenty-three, still a young, ambitious, and undiscovered writer. He traveled to Ketchum, Idaho, to see the place where his hero stood in the foyer of his home, lifted a custom-made, silver-inlaid shotgun from the rack, put the muzzle to his head and tripped the trigger. Thompson saw a rack of elk’s horns hanging outside above the doorway. He took them, a figurative torch-passing, a talisman.

Thompson’s journey to Idaho was not unlike my own to Eugene, Oregon. In 1990, I went to the town of my hero, Ken Kesey, to find a torch. In a classic illustration of why we must be careful what we wish for, Kesey passed one to me.

I enrolled in a novel-writing course Kesey taught at the University of Oregon. True to form, he taught by doing. His approach was to co-author an actual novel with thirteen creative-writing students. (Our experimental, collectively written book was published as Caverns, by O.U. Levon—U.O. Novel, spelled backward.) Kesey’s nature, like Thompson’s, was to up the ante, to increase the stakes, to imbue the mundane with the mythical, to inflate, magnify, and intensify.

The motives of both writers were pure, almost childlike and naive; they were simple seekers of truth, like modern-day Huck Finns. Mix this with thirty years of fame, pursuits by police, pundits, and groupies, some jail time, and harsh literary critique. Boisterous in public, Kesey and Thompson were professional introspectives, molding myths with id and ego. As a consequence, they had to live up to their creations, which became golems that lumbered behind, pursuing and ultimately consuming them.

I didn’t understand this when I met Kesey. I wanted fame. But Kesey certainly knew the monster pursued him. He intimately recognized my desire, “those burning eyes,” as he called them, and so he allowed me to tag along a on number of celebrity-sprinkled adventures so I could write about them. My tape deck, notebook, and camera in tow, I rode with Kesey and the Merry Pranksters down to the Bay Area for a 1991 sequel to The Original Acid Tests. Among other things, we pranked the Smithsonian Institution, who wanted Further, Kesey’s famous multicolored schoolbus, for an exhibit. We campaigned for Wavy Gravy when he ran for mayor of Berkeley. I tried to write about it all, but the articles didn’t sell. Kesey gave me a job as a farm hand at his spread in Pleasant Hill, Oregon. Generous.

One day he called and told me that Hunter Thompson was coming for a University of Oregon Cultural Forum gig. “Bring your tape deck; get what you can get.” The fantasy was to pick up Hunter Thompson in Further, its interior tricked out like a Las Vegas casino. There would be Tiffany lamps, topless waitresses, chips, ice, Chivas Regal to complement other neurological ordnance, and a green felted eight-seat poker table—in short, everything needed to welcome the good Doctor of Gonzo and to hold an incredible high-level summit between two of the sixties’ highest minds. That was the fantasy. The reality never jibed.

Kesey published a calendar a year later, in 1992, with Thompson’s face on a monitor at the center of the poker table with the Thompson quote: “They dragged me aboard that bus . . . forced me to drink alcohol and gamble . . . then after I won, the twisted swine stole all the money . . . ,” which is pretty much what happened.

My role as observer put me outside the action, an uncomfortable place. I was not adding to Kesey’s story, but taking from it, energizing the monster that pursued him. Even writers that bestow immortality on their subjects—think of Jack Kerouac, who immortalized Neal Cassady in On the Road—are fashioning little golems that shadow their subjects the rest of their lives.

Thompson’s official appearance was like a political stump speech without a campaign. Fans called out questions and comments and Thompson rambled. The Pranksters called the night after a few hours, loading Thompson onto a gurney and whisking him from the hall. Swirling behind us was a vortex of local journalists and politicians, wide-eyed groupies and students, drunks and freaks, bikers, and Mad Dog-crazed trolls out from under their bridges to toast their knight and champion, many of whom climbed onto the bus and rode out to Kesey’s farm.

The trolls took bottles from the kitchen and faded out into the swamp in the first hour. The other reporters and students folded about 2 a.m., the groupies lying prone on the DayGlo bean-bag chairs scattered around the living room. The politicians, more familiar with madness and depravity, left shortly after 3 a.m.

It wasn’t until after 4 a.m.—after a brief incident with an old eight-gauge shotgun with side-by-side barrels like three-foot Coke cans, a goose killer that, happily, Kesey had no shells for; after the vodka, Wild Turkey, and Chivas bottles were empty and a bottle of cheap cabernet was still hopefully half full; after Thompson had requisitioned Kesey’s old Mercury for an early morning roundup of the cows, who lowed and bawled over the roar of the over-revved engine, loud and abusive in the early-morning quiet, which also stirred the iridescent, aggressive, and ill-mannered peacocks that Thompson had once given Kesey to serve as watchdogs, which in turn riled the neighbor’s roosters, and then their neighbor’s neighbors, creating a circle of unrest spreading like pond ripples in still black waters—it was after all this that Kesey and Thompson turned to their diplomatic and cultural negotiations. I switched on my tape deck and took out my notepad.

We sat at the Kesey’s kitchen table, which was decorated with sixties relics, baby pictures, and lurid DayGlo swirls, all preserved under layers of yellowing shellac.

It was February 28, 1991, the day after President George H.W. Bush ordered a cease-fire pending Saddam Hussein’s acceptance of terms. The heady, triumphant end of Desert Storm. Bush rode high in the polls. The other team.

Kesey: We really have suffered a bad blow these last few years, you know it. A lot of people fought a real battle and we thought we could beat them.

Thompson: We were fools.

Kesey: We were fools. We’re in for five bad years. Maybe a whole lot more, maybe fifty, maybe a hundred.

Thompson: It feels like a long time. Sure, a hundred years.

Then the talk turned local. The week before, the Grateful Dead had been banned from playing Autzen Stadium at the University of Oregon. A stunning thing. An insult personal and targeted, as close as you could get to banning the local team from their home field. The psychedelic mayhem that trailed the band was no longer welcome at one of the most liberal, hippie-dominated enclaves in the United States—as sure a sign as any that the sixties were finally and completely over. That President Bush’s New World Order reigned.

Kesey: It’s all about religion. It’s not drugs, it’s religion. These people don’t want heads getting together and feeling a way that is outside the boundaries of any kind of recognized religion. That is the threat. The Grateful Dead have amassed a real bunch of followers that are following them, really, for religious reasons. They really work hard at it.

Thompson: Jerry Garcia is the one that gets it.

Kesey: Yeah, he is just a very, very

enlightened guy.

Thompson: Jerry is a hard warrior.

Kesey: Plus, he is a very, very intelligent, hardworking man, working with the best tools he can find at this period in history. And we are privileged to run around in this same time.

Kesey, who was standing, looked at Thompson and laid a hand on his shoulder. Thompson had just published two books in the last year, and had been getting into his usual trouble with the authorities; earlier that year, his home had been raided and he was charged with five felonies and three misdemeanors, mostly related to illegal substances and explosives.

Kesey: And the same with you, old timer. Goddamn. You’re a real warrior, and each time I read this stuff of yours, I read it and read it, and read over it and go back to it and look at it and I’m just amazed at it. And I’m the only one who really knows how good it is, I think.

A crowd from the barn swirled into the kitchen at this point, friends of Kesey’s. They were arguing about the poker winnings.

Thompson: There was about forty dollars in there.

Kesey: I had to pay that last guy eight dollars to leave.

(Laughter.)

Thompson: So that’s thirty-eight dollars to me.

Kesey began to do sleight-of-hand tricks with a coin, the quarter flashing across his knuckles, disappearing from one hand and reappearing in the other. He kept talking as he performed the magic, and the group at the table fell silent watching him.

Kesey: Someone told me, “You have to support your leaders.” And I said, “No! I ought not to support my leaders. That’s not my job. My job is to always go against my leaders.”

Thompson: No, your job will be to go down in history as a card cheat.

(Kesey’s concentration was broken. He dropped the coin.)

Kesey: I would be good at that.

Thompson: Yeah, but is that the way you want yourself known, he cheated at cards?

Kesey: I cheated well at cards.

(Kesey flashed the coin, making it jump from one hand and appear in the other.)

Kesey: But I always have maintained that this is what literature and art, what everything is about. It’s about that moment when your mind goes boink. That little tiny moment of magic.

Thompson: Magic is when you get people to think you’re doing something else than what you’re doing with your hands . . . which is just cheating.

Kesey: Of course! Of course. But cheating is magic.

Their bravado, this many years later, can be mistaken for vanity, or the bloviations of faded superstars. But what these men had written, and their actions, had made them targets. And they had paid the price, again, and again. In Kesey’s finest novel, Sometimes a Great Notion, the main character grows up with a sign his father nailed above his bed, “Never Give an Inch.” And Kesey never did. Thompson either. Neither of them were political; they were radical, lived radically, wrote radically, and died young. I once asked Kesey what had happened to the sixties. Why the movement lost its steam. His eyes went wide at my naivete. “They threw us all in jail. Every one of us.” I pressed on— maybe their lifestyle had brought the thing down. He took on a harder tone—teacher to student. “If you stand in the spotlight for too long, someone will draw a bead on you. What didn’t you get about John Lennon?”

That night, Kesey continued the lesson, as the writers talked about spending time in jail, and the cost of being a critic of powerful institutions—the feeling of being watched, even when you’re free.

Kesey: The job of the writer is to stand out there alone and hammer these things home because nobody else will do it. And most of us writers have stopped. Thompson, you haven’t stopped. Burroughs has not given a goddamn inch. But that all draws heat. They just tried to bust you for it.

Thompson: These last ten years have seemed like a hundred.

Kesey: More and more I feel like that is our job. We must not become partisan.

Thompson: Who “we”? You we, me we or what? Who are we?

Kesey: You know it’s gotten down to this. Forget what’s just, forget what’s righteous, forget all that stuff, forget everything except the survival of a certain limited small bunch of people that carry the light. So—I made a sign.

Kesey digs through some of the posters and artwork that lines the wall. He pulls out a sign.

Kesey: When the war came down, a bunch of people went to the Federal Building in our hometown. Usually you see them out in front of 7-Eleven. They don’t have anything else to do. They beg money and try to pick up dope. They are the peace side. Then over here on the other side are the goddamn redneck, big old bearded sons of bitches and they’re all yelling and waving the flag. So I drove by with this sign.

(Kesey held up a STOP sign.)

Kesey: I sat out in the middle of the street, between the two with my sign, and I made enemies of them all.

(Thompson stabbed his long cigarette in its holder at Kesey.)

Thompson: He’s the same bastard that tried to persuade me, on the telephone, to call up the Hells Angels. That I could make peace between the Berkeley peace freaks and the Hells Angels.

Kesey: We came close.

Thompson: Ahh, no. No, we got to get them together.

(Laughter.)

Kesey: Creativity is the only thing that will see us through. Nobody is going to see us through. The fault always has to lie with the poets. When a poet presents a really great vision, the people will follow. You cannot expect the politicians or people in the media to supply the vision. It has to be the poet’s domain.

The writers talk more about heroes and villains, dying hopes.

Kesey: But we’re not going to move things like I thought we were back in 1968. I thought we were going to grab the tail of the dinosaur and flip him over on his back, and cut him open, and eat his entrails.

Thompson: We did pretty good, though. Flipped him hard and he’s still trying to get us for it.

Kesey: Yeah, we got him on his back, but we couldn’t put the knife in and we didn’t really want to eat his entrails anyway. We just wanted to flip him over, play.

Thompson: Just flipping him over was fun. And surprisingly easy then. But battle made the monster hard.

Kesey: There’s two ways you make the world work, with a whip or a carrot. We carry carrots.

And that is where my tape and notes ended early in the morning of March 1, 1991. The carrot has become an even less effective weapon than it was fourteen years ago, and the duo’s ugly, addled prophesies have played out. Jerry Garcia died in 1995; Timothy Leary in 1996; Allan Ginsberg and William Burroughs in 1997. Kesey died in 2001. And Hunter S. Thompson, sitting in his writing chair, full glass of Chivas at his elbow, his son and grandson in the house, his wife on the phone, put a gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger on February 20, 2005. He, like his hero Hemingway, ended his life as if it were a fiction, and he the author. Last week, in a private ceremony, he had his ashes shot from a cannon at Willow Creek.

Before I left his farm for good, in search of my own path, Kesey gave me an I Ching and some coins. I decided to throw the Ching as a meditation on this passing:

There is no water in the lake;

The image of EXHAUSTION

Thus the superior man stakes his life

On following his will.

posted in Gonzo - 3 replies

NPR: A Final Farewell to Hunter S. Thompson

2005-08-22T16:41:26Z

A Final Farewell to Hunter S. Thompson
by Andrea Lee
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4807572
All Things Considered, August 19, 2005 · Hunter S. Thompson will be memorialized in an extravagant festival in his hometown of Woody Creek, Col., on Saturday. Family and friends plan a spectacular sendoff for the gonzo journalist, who committed suicide in February.

Andrea Lee of member station KAJX in Aspen reports on preparations for the event.

posted in Gonzo - 3 replies

The Gonzo Papers

2005-08-22T01:41:50Z

I'm currently reading 'The Great Shark Hunt.' "Fear and Loathing at the Super Bowl" is the article that is slaying me at the moment. I wish all sportswriting was like this...

t.h.e.o.

posted in Gonzo - 1 reply

new article

2005-08-16T23:38:35Z

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2005/08/16/national/a140708D29.DTL

posted in Gonzo - 0 replies

remember

2005-06-27T21:02:44Z

http://www.summitdaily.com/article/20050525/NEWS/50525001

posted in Gonzo - 0 replies

I can't just let it go, can you?

2005-05-15T04:57:07Z

Patrick Mesmer

Another article worth the read

Keeping Hunter Thompson's death alive

By Jerry Mazza
Online Journal Contributing Writer

Download a .pdf file for printing.
Adobe Acrobat Reader required.
Click here to download a free copy.

May 13, 2005—Given how stories and journalists are disappeared these days, here are some follow-up questions on Hunter Thompson's death. Let's hope they help keep the spirit of inquiry alive . . .

First, isn't it strange that Thompson wrote on page 3 of "The New Dumb," the first article in his last book, Hey Rube, 2004, "The autumn months are never a calm time in America. . . . There is always a rash of kidnapping and abductions of schoolchildren in the football months. Preteens of both sexes are traditionally seized and grabbed off the streets by gangs of organized perverts who traditionally give them as Christmas gifts to each other to be personal sex slaves and playthings."

This bears an uncanny resemblance to the Johnny Gosch story. The 12-year old Gosch was delivering Sunday morning papers in Des Moines Iowa on September 5, 1982, when two men approached and abducted him for the purposes of enslavement in a military-based pedophilia ring, according to testimony reported by another abused pre-teen, Paul Bonacci, in John DeCamp's 1992 book, The Franklin Cover-Up—Child Abuse, Satananism and Murder in Nebraska, pages 230–34.

Ironically, Gosch's identity has been linked to James Guckert which has been linked to Jeff Gannon, male prostitute and procurer of full-service military escorts. In fact, the former editor of the Des Moines Register for whom Gosch worked tried to discredit the identity link. Ironically, his name was James Gannon, conceivably a clue from the disappeared Gosch linking the three identities. Gosch's mother, Noreen, asked then editor James Gannon of the Des Moines Register to get community leaders to pressure the police to cooperate with her private detectives in order to solve her missing son's case. Instead, Mrs. Gosch's private letter was printed on the front page of the paper, and the police were encouraged to publicly reject and ridicule her claims. Perhaps James Gannon was involved himself.

Even if we look at just the Guckert/Gannon link, James/Jeff turned up in the White House Press Corp two years ago. Maureen Dowd notes in her 2/17/05 New York Times column, Bush's Barberini Faun, "I'm still mystified by this story (Gannon/Guckert). I was rejected for a White House press pass at the start of the Bush administration, but someone with an alias, a tax evasion problem, and Internet pictures where he posed like the 'Barberini Faun' is credentialed to cover a White House that won a second term by mining homophobia and preaching family values?

"At first when I tried to complain about not getting my pass renewed, even though I'd been covering presidents and first ladies since 1986, no one called me back. Finally, when Mr. McClellan replaced Ari Fleischer he said he'd renew the pass—after a new Secret Service background check that would last several months. In an era when security concerns are paramount, what kind of Secret Service background check did James Guckert get so he could saunter into the West Wing every day under an assumed name while he was doing full-frontal advertising for stud services for $1,200 a weekend?"

In addition, Carol Towarnicky, in her 5/2/05 article "The press takes a pass on 'Jeff Gannon,'" in the Philadelphia Daily News, said, "Just last week, a Freedom of Information Act search requested by two members of Congress revealed that Gannon/Guckert visited the White House 196 times—39 of them days when there were no press briefings."

Returning to Thompson, he says in "The New Dumb," "Most of these things [the abductions] are obviously Wrong and Evil and Ugly—but at least they are Traditional. They will happen. . . . But what the hell? That's why we have Insurance, eh? And the Inevitability of these nightmares is what makes them so reassuring. Life will go on, for good or for ill. But some things are forever, right? The structure may be a little crooked, but the foundations are still strong and unshakable."

Is this a rationalization of something he had witnessed or in which he'd taken part? Or a story he simply read about in the Washington Times when it broke in 1989? In spite of its dark overtones, is it a strange attempt at affirmation of life and America?

The Owl Rises

Why did Hunter name his gated compound in Woody Creek, Colorado, the "Owl Farm?" The name echoed the 40-foot stone owl, which stands before an altar at Bohemian Grove, in the redwood forest of northern California, not far from Sacramento. Bohemian Grove became the stage and meeting place for all-male rituals of purported Satanist pedophiles similar to those performed in the Cult of Canaan. This ancient cult would worship Moloch and perform sex orgies around hollow effigies of owls.

The owl served as a representation of the ancient god, Moloch, whose sacrificial rite called for human beings as its victims. According to the Catholic Encyclopedia, the chief feature of Moloch's worship among the ancients seems to have been the sacrifice of children. The usual expression for describing that sacrifice was "to pass through the fire," a rite carried out after the victims had been put to death.

The Cremation of Care Ritual

As the Sonoma Country Free Press online reports, this ritual "is over one hundred years old and is always the first order of business when men of industry, government, and military gather each July at Bohemian Grove. At sundown on the first Saturday of their encampment they enact a bizarre short scripted play (always the same) in which they burn an effigy of 'Dull Care' at the bottom of a forty-foot stone owl. Their rationale is that they carry the cares of the world around on their shoulders and they need a symbolic ritual in order to put it down and enjoy their holiday. Since 1980, activists in Sonoma County have brought this to the attention of anyone who will listen, all while a new tradition began with a Resurrection of Care event on the same day."

This rather benign-sounding Grove description conflicts radically with John DeCamp's reporting of events in The Franklin Cover-up. He writes on pages 326–328 that one of many young victims, Paul Bonacci, while at the Grove, claims that he and another boy were forced to perform sex acts with and to consume parts of a child whom they had watched being murdered by men in hooded robes. The body was to be disposed of by "the men with the hoods."

DeCamp reported that Bonacci also claimed that a "snuff" film was made of these events. The shocker is that the man the party had purportedly picked up in Las Vegas and who purportedly filmed the events was identified by Bonacci as "Hunter Thompson." Was it set-up or was it real?

Bonacci also told investigators that he was tortured and groomed into becoming a sex slave at Offut Air Force base near Omaha, Nebraska. He claims that he was abducted and taken there by a babysisitter's boy friend at 3 years of age. As a young adult, he was subsequently awarded one million dollars in damages by the same Nebraska court that sentenced him earlier to five years in jail for perjury. In the second round of trials, he passed all his polygraph exams. Mr. DeCamp, a lawyer, 16-year Nebraska State Senator and decorated Vietnam vet, provided Bonacci with legal assistance the second time around.

Cover-Up also reports that over the years, Bohemian Grove participants included George Herbert Walker Bush, George Walker Bush, Henry Kissinger, George Schultz and the crème de la merde of the Republican power structure.

So, was Hunter Thompson being ironic with the name "Owl Farm," nostalgic for the good old bad times? Or did Thompson think of himself as the avenging owl, swooping out of the night, seeing through the dark a truth that haunted his own memory?

Anita Thompson's Stories

Why did Anita Thompson, Hunter's wife, originally tell the AP, on Sunday 2/20/05, "I was on the phone with him, he set the receiver down and he did it [shot himself]. I heard the clicking of the gun," and then 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. In the second version, she thinks the clicking noise was her husband loading and cocking the handgun. This time, she said she didn't hear a gunshot before she hung up. In fact, she said she heard of the shooting by a phone call enroute home.

Also, in a 3/8/2005 online Rocky Mountain News article by Jeff Kass, 'Kitchen crew convenes for final toast,' Hunter Thompson claimed he always spoke to family and many celebrity friends on his speaker phone in the kitchen/office area. This time, with his wife Anita, why did he use the receiver, then put it down? If he were going to shoot himself, wouldn't it have been easier to keep both his hands free and talk to her on the speaker phone? Was someone there who didn't want to be detected on the speaker?

The Sheriff's Report

In the Pitkin County Sheriff's Report that I saw, Deputy Sheriff John Armstrong arrived first, not the sheriff. He drove up the Thompson driveway, responding to a call from Thompson's son Juan. At approximately 1750 hours on 2/20/05, he responded to a "Combined Communications radio . . ." He was told the victim was Hunter Thompson, well-known writer and journalist, who "had fatally shot himself," and that an ambulance and Sheriff Braudis were driving to the residence.

Yet when Deputy Armstrong arrived at "about 1800 hours," he heard "three shots ring out." He found out subsequently that they were fired from a shotgun by Juan "to mark the passing of his father." Does anyone find Juan's reaction an unusual expression of grief? Was he trying to scare someone off? Hit an assassin?

Deputy Armstrong also encountered Deputy Gibson, who had arrived previously and blocked the entrance to the Thompson home with his vehicle to avoid the entry of curious friends and neighbors.

Before encountering Juan, Deputy Armstrong parked his cruiser by the caretaker's cabin and a man exited, introducing himself as "Ben" and said he lived in the residence. Ben asked what was going on. The deputy told Ben to return to his house and wait there. Was there any further questioning of Ben concerning what he saw, who he was, what his period of employ was, where he came from?

Two guns, no silencer mentioned

When Deputy Armstrong questioned Juan as to what occurred, Juan said he had been "in the living room next to the kitchen where his father was. . . . He said he had heard a dull sound not a sharp crack typical of a gunshot . . . about 20 minutes prior to my [Armstrong's] arrival." Doesn't that dull sound, sound like the work of a silencer on the powerful .45 caliber gun? According to the authorities, the gun was a Smith & Wesson semiautomatic 645, first produced in 1985. A silencer was not found, and is not easy to attain by non-professionals. It effectively muffles loud gun shots. So this shot could sound like what Juan described as "a book falling from a shelf."

What's more, Juan had originally said the gun was a 357 Magnum. Magnum does make a 2000 9mm Springfield Armory XD HS .40cal. 357 handgun that "looks" something like a .45. The classic Magnum 357 is a very different looking and sounding gun than the S&W or Colt 645 .45 semiautomatic. Do we want to give the authorities the benefit of the doubt on the gun being the latter? If so, was it dusted for prints? It wasn't found in Thompson's hand, and was subsequently handled by at least one person, Investigator Ryan.

The Gray Substance . . . the Case on Top of the Gun

Deputy Armstrong reports, "I saw Dr. Thompson sitting in a chair at his desk by the kitchen stove. . . . sitting upright in the chair but his head was faced down on his chest. There was a lot of blood emanating from and formed around his mouth. Dr. Thompson was still and lifeless and I detected no visible move to evidence breathing. His color was pale. There was blood splatter behind Thompson on the counter and stove. I lifted Dr. Thompson's left hand to check for pulse and noticed that his hand had a gray substance on it the color of pencil lead." Was that substance lead from inserting the bullets in the magazine and then inserting the mag into the handle? Was it analyzed?

Deputy Armstrong also reports, "I saw a handgun at the right foot of Dr. Thompson. I also saw handgun case with a lot of blood on it which was partially covering the gun." How did the handgun end up neatly placed at the right foot? Wouldn't it have either remained in Thompson's hand, fallen on the desk, or on the floor? The bloody case in fact was found on top of the gun. Was Hunter Thompson left or right-handed? Did the gun and case fall in tandem on each other in the same spot by coincidence?

Deputy Armstrong then says, "There was a grayish color substance around the mouth of Thompson as well as a lot of blood." Was this the same "grayish color substance" found on Thompson's left hand? Has anyone verified what this substance was: gunpowder or a poison?

Bullet and Casing

Shortly after Armstrong's arrival, paramedic Hagan Kuhl entered and after checking for vital signs determined that Thompson was dead. At 1807 the heart monitor flatlined. Kuhl then cleared the scene. Deputy Armstrong determined that the trajectory leading from Thompson's mouth through the wound on the rear of his head led into and through the front face of the hood of the stove. He observed scrape marks in the metal under the hood of the stove. At the time, Armstrong couldn't find a bullet or bullet hole in the wall behind the scene without disturbing it.

Armstrong and Gibson noticed there was a spent shell casing under the chair.

Sheriff Bob Braudis and Investigator DeSalvo arrived later—it's not clear exactly when, according to the report. Also a Deputy Lumsden arrived, not clear when, and summoned a counselor from Aspen Counseling Center and Coroner Dr. Steven Ayers. Another Investigator, Ron Ryan, arrived at about 1900 hours. Rick Ballantine of the Aspen Valley Fire Department came as well.

Ryan discovered that Thompson had typed just one word, "counselor," in the center of a page of stationery from Thompson's Fourth Amendment Foundation, an organization he founded, ironically to defend victims of unwarranted search and seizure. Could that word have been a reference to lawyer [counselor] John DeCamp, author of the Franklin Cover-Up?

At some point, DeSalvo allowed Juan, his wife and child, to be alone with Thompson's body. Juan placed a gold colored scarf on his father's shoulders, a gift they'd given him the night before.

The Interesting Dr. Ayers

According to the Sheriff's Office report, Dr. Ayers, who arrived at about 1930 hours, decided to have a partial autopsy done by an outside agency. Was that done? What were the results? Also, according to Armstrong, Dr. Ayers, after hearing Armstrong's story of the trajectory, went over to the stove hood, reached under the hood and found the slug resting above the stove. He notes the evidence, the gun, one handgun magazine, one spent shell casing, one slug and fabric case.

Ayers, as reported by the Portland Independent Media Center in a 3/2/05 article, "Some Hunter S. Thompson QUESTIONS," was an emergency room doctor as well as Pitkin Country coroner and, "estimated at least half of the trauma cases—murders, suicides, injuries from car wrecks and other similar events—are drug or alcohol related. 'That number has always been significant, but more patients are being admitted via the emergency room for problems created by drug or alcohol use,' he said. . . . Yet, he did not order a toxicology report on HST because he figured 'substance abuse did NOT factor in and is NOT relevant.'" Given Thompson's addictions, or the grey powder around his mouth and left hand, why is that not relevant?

Was the Aspen Valley Medical Foundation launching a smear campaign, in the absence of evidence that Hunter was depressed, as the Portland Independent Media Center reports in the same article?

The Perceptive Investigator Ryan

At the scene of Thompson's death, it was Investigator Ryan who noticed that there was no cartridge in the chamber of the pistol. He also mentioned that a semiautomatic, which the pistol was, could be put on manual fire to shoot the one bullet, without replenishing the chamber. Yet did anyone check and see if the manual override was on? If not, someone would have had to fire that gun first then put in a new clip. In either case, could this have been an assisted suicide if not a murder? Could that be why Juan fired three shots in the air afterwards? Also, before Ryan handled the gun, were prints first taken?

In the supplemental narrative to the Sheriff's Report done by Brad Gibson, who arrived a few minutes after Deputy John Armstrong, Gibson says he took "a quick look in the kitchen" to see Hunter Thompson sitting "on a stool." It was originally said to be a chair. Gibson also reports Thompson's head was resting on his chest. But "both hands were in his lap. There was a fair amount of blood at the base of the stool." Did somebody move Thompson's hands into his lap? And why does he call the desk chair a stool again? Was it in fact an elevated stool with arms that was used at the countertop/desk in the kitchen?

Also, given what an important, controversial figure Thompson was, why did the sheriff and his crew decide on the spot to note that the case status was a "closed/non-criminal" suicide? Why rush to judgment?

The Famous Neighbor

Do you know that Prince Bandar, brother of the king of Saudi Arabia and Saudi Ambassador to the U.S., was a nearby neighbor of Hunter Thompson? This is the same Prince Bandar who was recently photographed literally holding hands with George Bush and later kissing him bye-bye at an oil pricing-and-production meeting?

Thompson also described a Bandar incident in a 1992 letter to James Carville (Bill Clinton's campaign manager) in his 1994 book, Better Than Sex—Confessions of A Political Junky, page 132. This letter was written shortly before the Clinton/Bush 1 election in 1992.

"There is another small point of information . . . James, which has to do with my new neighbor, Prince Bandar of Saudi Arabia, brother of the king and Saudi Ambassador to the U.S.

"Last Saturday (9/19/[92]), about 9 or 10 o'clock at night, the black sky over my home was rent by the thunderous noise of a low-flying U.S. military helicopter, en route to Bandar's house about a mile up the valley from mine (which is in Woody Creek, James, not in Aspen. There is a big difference, and Bandar is only on the cusp of it).

"Bandar does not normally arrive in this fashion—and if he departed that way (other witnesses swear they saw/heard three military choppers), it was a blatant display of urgency. Bush [Senior] would not move [in the Gulf War) without Him 'on board.'

"Ah . . . but so what, eh? There are many rooms in the mansion, James, and we will never be privy to all of them.

"As for fleet movements—they're not essential in that every other ordnance (weapons, bombs, boats, etc.) except hospital ships is already in place over there and they won't really need hospital ships, anyway.

"Not to take Saddam's head . . . Shit, even a phony head would look good for a South Lawn photo op on October 15. Who's going to call the president a liar when he's parading around in public with a rotting human head that he says is Saddam Hussein's?"

First, the chopper delivery of Bandar gives you a sense of the prince's closeness to the Bush family, then and now. It also reveals Hunter's insider knowledge of what was going on. You also get a sense of Hunter's distaste for Bush 1 and political lies in general. What's more, Thompson reports in Better Than Sex that he had gotten tipped by a merchant marine friend that the U.S. was moving several black-painted hospital ships (which he above mentions) into the Gulf region as part of a larger attack.

Prince Bandar and the Aspen Medical Foundation

Returning to present day and the Portland Independent Media Center's previously mentioned article, we are told that Bandar "had a cozy relationship with the Aspen Medical Foundation . . . In 1998, Level III Trauma Center at Aspen Valley Hospital is renovated thanks to a generous gift from HRH Prince Bandar.

"His $325,000 donation to Aspen Valley Medical Foundation helped fund construction of a new trauma center at Aspen Valley Hospital," said Kris Marsh, foundation president. "He also gave $500,000 to the foundation for a CAT scanner several years ago, she said." Remember, the Media Center's article had also accused the foundation of trying to smear Thompson as being depressed.

Thompson and "W"

On still another front, is there any coincidence with Thompson's "suicide," coming one day after the release of "secret Bush tapes," in which George W. Bush was concerned about his mention of prior drug use? Thompson had previously written in Hey Rube about having been in a room where "W", who apparently couldn't handle his cocaine, was puking all over the place.

Thompson also had this to say about Bush 2 and his administration in Better Than Sex, "Presidential politics is a vicious business, even for rich white men, and anybody who gets into it should be prepared to grapple with the meanest of the mean. The White House has never been seized by timid warriors. There are no rules, and the roadside is littered with wreckage. That is why they call it the passing lane. Just ask any candidate who ever ran against George Bush—Al Gore, Ann Richards, John McCain—all of them ambushed and vanquished by lies and dirty tricks. And all of them still whining about it.

"That is why George W. Bush is President of the United States, and Al Gore is not. Bush simply wanted it more, and he was willing to demolish anything that got in his way, including the U.S. Supreme Court. It is not by accident that the Bush White House (read: Dick Cheney & Halliburton Inc.) control all three branches of our federal government today. They are powerful thugs who would far rather die than lose the election in November." That said, was Hunter's death payback for anti-Bush writings?

Food for thought. For now it's amen HST and RIP. I couldn't have said it better or nearly as well. We'll just keep watching, including what surfaces from the release of the Secret Service information that Jeff Gannon made some 196 visits to the White House. On some visits, he wasn't even officially checked in or out. Hmmmm, I wonder what he could have been doing all those times, especially when the Secret Service didn't even know he was there?

Jerry Mazza is freelance writer in New York City. Reach him at gvmaz@verizon.net. Thanks to Bryan Monroe, Atlanta, Ga., criminal defense attorney and veteran investigator of 15 years, who provided a copy of the Pitkin Country Sheriff's Report and a reminder, "Something doesn't wash here."

posted in Gonzo - 0 replies

NEWS - Thompson Ashes to Be Shot From Cannon

2005-05-08T02:25:02Z

Thompson Ashes to Be Shot From Cannon

April 05, 2005 5:14 PM EDT
DENVER - Hunter S. Thompson's ashes will be blasted from a cannon mounted inside a 53-foot-high sculpture of the journalist's "gonzo fist" emblem, his wife said Tuesday.

The cannon shot, planned sometime in August on the grounds of his Aspen-area home, will fulfill the writer's long-cherished wish.

"It's expensive, but worth every penny," Anita Thompson said. "I'd like to have several explosions. He loved explosions."

Thompson, 67, shot himself in the head on Feb. 20 after a long and flamboyant career that produced such new journalism classics as "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" and cast his image as a hard-charging, drug-crazed daredevil.

The cannon shot will be part of a larger public celebration of Thompson's life. Some details remain to be worked out, including the exact date, what kind of cannon will be used and the specifics of the gonzo fist, Anita Thompson said.

She said the gonzo fist will be mounted on a 100-foot pillar, making the monument 153 feet high. It will resemble Thompson's personal symbol, a fist on an upthrust forearm, sometimes with "Gonzo" emblazoned across it.

Anita Thompson has said the monument will be a permanent fixture on the writer's 100-acre property.

She said planning for the fist has been guided by a video of Thompson and longtime illustrator-collaborator Ralph Steadman, recorded in the late 1970s when they visited a Hollywood funeral home and began mapping out the cannon scheme.

Meanwhile, Playboy magazine this week is publishing an interview with Thompson based on a series of conversations he had with magazine staffer Tim Mohr in December.

In the interview, Thompson discusses a range of topics from political freedom to the best kind of snow tires to buy but offers no obvious hints of his impending suicide.

"He was really enthusiastic and full of energy," Mohr told The Associated Press on Monday. Thompson even talked about embarking on a long-term project to expand the Playboy piece into a book, "a guide to life, sort of a handbook," Mohr said.

The interview appears in the magazine's May issue, which its newsstands Friday.

Copyright 2005 Associated Press.

posted in Gonzo - 6 replies

HST in Rolling Stone

2005-04-22T01:22:05Z

So i just got through the first two articles about HST in the newest Rolling Stone magazine. I am saddened all over again about the loss of this man, a spark of genius and insanity in a world full of dullards and sods.

All that aside, excellent writing and interesting perspective from those who knew him best. (and i'm only thru the first part.) I highly recommend picking up a copy if you haven't done so already.

posted in Gonzo - 5 replies

just the facts

2005-03-25T03:05:00Z

All right, no name calling in this thread. If we're going to talk conspiracies, let's at least get some facts to back us up.

conspiracy claim #1: There was no bullet in the chamber of the gun.

From the police report: http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/0307051thompson6.html
"I pulled the slide to the rear and observed there was not a round in the chamber, which is consistent when a semi-automatic handgun is restricted from its normal motion when fired."

It makes sense to me that a man with guns all over the house would have his gun set so that a bullet isn't automatically loaded into the chamber. Sounds like a good way to prevent accidents.

Conspiracy claim #2: Thompson was in good spirits.

http://www.denverpost.com/Stories/0,1413,36~53~2756664,00.html
Close friend Douglas Brinkley writes in Rolling Stone that Thompson was in a "deep funk."

Conspiracy claim #3: HST friend, Paul Williams Robert says HST was working on WTC and Jeff Gannon stories: http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/march2005/020305thompsonwarned.htm
http://www.total411.info/2005/03/hunter-thompson-friend-confirms-was-on.html

I can't find any proof of this guy's connection to Hunter, or any proof that HST was working on these stories. Can anyone confirm or deny?

Conspiracy claim #4: The "note" in Hunter's typewriter.

From the police report: "centered near the top was typed "Feb 22'05", and the page contained only one word, "counselor".

This does seem weird to me. Here's a rambling attempt to connect it to Prince Bandar: http://trunews.blogspot.com/2005/03/some-hunter-s-thompson-questions.html
I'm not buying that, but the "counselor" thing does seem mysterious.

One more bit from the police report:
http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/0307051thompson6.html
The cop says the autopsy concluded that the "injuries were consistent with the reported self-inflicted gunshot wound." It doesn't mention if there was residue found on his hand. Has anyone seen any more details on the autopsy?

I'm keeping an open mind, and I don't ever want to under estimate the forces of evil in our world, but until I see some more proof, I'm not buying the murder angle.

posted in Gonzo - 15 replies

Doonesbury tribute

2005-03-18T04:59:04Z

Looks like Doonesbury is running a tribute series for HST with Uncle Duke. I've put up through today in the tribe photos. Series starts here on the Doonesbury website:

http://www.doonesbury.com/strip/dailydose/index.html?uc_full_date=20050307

posted in Gonzo - 5 replies

LA Bunny Hop

2005-03-18T01:04:44Z

In honor of Hunter:

I'd like to invite you all to join us on April 2nd. Dress up like Bunny's and ride the Metro along with us on this crazy Bar Hop!

Join http://bunnyhop.tribe.net

-Joe

posted in Gonzo - 0 replies

IS THERE AN "OFFICIAL" WAKE IN LOS ANGELES AREA...

2005-03-17T23:37:05Z

I live in LA and would like to attend his wake.....L

"Who does vote for these dishonest shitheads? Who among us can be happy and proud of having all this innocent blood on our hands? Who are these swine? These flag-sucking half-wits who get fleeced and fooled by stupid little rich kids like George Bush?

“They are the same ones who wanted to have Muhammad Ali locked up for refusing to kill gooks. They speak for all that is cruel and stupid and vicious in the American character. They are the racists and hate mongers among us -- they are the Ku Klux Klan. I piss down the throats of these Nazis.

“And I am too old to worry about whether they like it or not. Fuck them. ”

—Hunter S. Thompson (Adbusters)

posted in Gonzo - 2 replies

"There going to make it look like a suicide" HST

2005-03-12T00:23:56Z

Hunter S. Thompson had been working on a story about 911...

Alexander Pope in a prose convertible
By PAUL WILLIAM ROBERTS
Saturday, February 26, 2005, Page F9

Hunter telephoned me on Feb. 19, the night before his death. He sounded scared. It wasn't always easy to understand what he said, particularly over the phone, he mumbled, yet when there was something he really wanted you to understand, you did.

He'd been working on a story about the World Trade Center attacks and had stumbled across what he felt was hard evidence showing the towers had been brought down not by the airplanes that flew into them but by explosive charges set off in their foundations.

Now he thought someone was out to stop him publishing it: "They're gonna make it look like suicide," he said. "I know how these bastards think . . ."

From: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/Page/document/v4/sub/MarketingPage?user_URL=http://www.theglobeandmail.com%2Fservlet%2FArticleNews%2FTPStory%2FLAC%2F20050226%2FHUNTER26%2FTPComment%2FTopStories&ord=1109739429511&brand=theglobeandmail&force_login=true

posted in Gonzo - 11 replies

wake in SF on Thursday

2005-03-12T00:18:44Z

In non-conspiracy related news, the Edinburgh Castle is hosting a wake for Hunter tomorrow night. Bring your game faces.

http://www.castlenews.com/

THURSDAY MARCH 10
9pm, free

Vicious Bullshit: A Hallucinatory Wake in Honor of the late Dr. Hunter S. Thompson
with Susie Bright, Phil Bronstein, Stephen Elliott, Ianthe Brautigan, John Marr, Bucky Sinister, Michelle Tea and hosted by Jack Boulware, with other very special guests

posted in Gonzo - 2 replies

murder threads

2005-03-11T23:52:12Z

This talk about HST being murdered is 1) moronic, 2) tactless, and 3) really, really unpleasent.

HST meant a great deal to me, and I was hit hard by his death. Appropirating this terrible tragedy into an iditiotic conspiracy theory before the funeral has even occurred is simply rotten. It's not funny, it's not interesting, and the idea is not remotely plausible.

If I were to entertain this asinine theory on intellectual grounds, I would say that the heavy burden of proof lies on the theorist to establish HST was murdered. In the absence of any proof whatsoever, everything you say is haphazard, unwarranted speculation. Speculation of this kind following immediately after his death is simply rotten taste. And if there is one thing worse in a story than being completely wrong, it is having bad taste.

I hate seeing it on the Tribe. I think it's plainly disrespectful. You have the right to say whatever you want, of course, but I also have the right to say what you are saying is stupid and fucked up.

posted in Gonzo - 22 replies

It's Friday, and I'm gonna Drink

2005-03-11T23:30:39Z

till the voices in my head make sense. time to unwind and dispel the rumors of my Insanity.....
hope all you Devotee's have a wickedly insane and hedonistic weekend, gonna watch the News, or shall i say sanitized for Your Protection Information hour....

it's Lent don't eat meat now good little Christians, or you shall Burn in Hell.
Me , I'm a Recovering Catholic.....

posted in Gonzo - 0 replies

Some unanswered questions - another reporter suicide?

2005-03-09T20:07:03Z

At the time when Thompson (was) commited 'suicide' – he was inmidst of a telephone-conversation with his wife!

If you read...
"Thompson shot self while talking with wife" (CNN-headline)
http://edition.cnn.com/2005/SHOWBIZ/books/02/25/thompsondeath.wife.ap/index.html

...it might give you lots of good clues about the actual happenings:

"Gonzo-Journalist" Hunter S. Thompson was talking to his wife Anita on phone about his work on his weekly ESPN column and that she should come home from her health club, but instead of proceeding the phone conversation she heard a "muffled noise" and "didn't know what had happened". She reported further: "I was waiting for him to get back on the phone,"...

Her account to Rocky Mountain News reporter Jeff Kass is slightly different: "I did not hear any bang," she told Kass. She added that Thompson's son, who was in the house at the time, believed that a book had fallen when he heard the shot, according to Kass' report. Now that's interesting: WHY "slightly different"? Because CNN spinned some different CONCLUSION into it????? Stay with the facts!!! Learn from 'Bloggers'!!

Really weird, if you commit suicide during a phone-conversation with your wife, moreover talking at the same time about your mutual plans...

Funny also that CNN writes in the sub: 'He set the receiver down and he did it' while at the same time stating in the same article in the lead just below: ASPEN, Colorado (AP) -- The widow of journalist Hunter S. Thompson said her husband killed himself while the two were talking on the phone.

Now what's correct: "After" or "while"? Dear CNN, that's what I would call real 'GONZO-Juornalism'...

As you wrote in this articles more "WHILES" I would believe that version more likely.

And which weapon makes a "muffled noise"? How thoughtful of the author to commit 'suicide' with a silencer, while your 6-years old grandson is in the same house upstairs...

Hear Thompson about 9/11 on this sound file from Aug.2002:
http://www.indybay.org/uploads/hunter_thompson_aug29_2002.mp3

posted in Gonzo - 14 replies

HST timeline

2005-03-08T03:31:47Z

Hunter S. Thompson timeline
February 22, 2005

1937 or 1939 — Born in Louisville, Kentucky (subject to debate)

1956 — Spends time in jail for robbery. Enlists in Air Force where he becomes base sportswriter. Honorably discharged despite his "rebellious disregard for military dress and authority."

1959 — writes first novel Rum Diary which won't be published until almost 40 years later.

1966 — Publishes acclaimed Hell's Angels: a Strange and Terrible Saga based on his time spent with the notorious motorcycle gang. His relationship with the Angels ends when he is assaulted by gang members who felt he was taking advantage of them.

1968 — Beaten by police during a clash between cops and protestors while covering the Democratic Convention in Chicago. The experience inflames Thompson's political interests culminating in his nearly successful run for sheriff of Pitkin County.

1970 — Writes The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved for Scanlan's magazine, a significant addition to the "new journalism" school (later dubbed Gonzo) in which author plays a central role in story. Meets illustrator Ralph Steadman who's demented caricatures would become forever associated with Thompson's equally demented prose. The anti-development piece The Battle of Aspen: Freak Power in the Rockies begins fruitful relationship with Rolling Stone magazine.

1971 — Publishes Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas considered by many to be his finest work.

1972 — Covers presidential race for Rolling Stone magazine. Articles expanded into critically acclaimed and commercially successful Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72. A McGovern aide called it the "least accurate yet most truthful" account of the campaign.

1974 — First appearance of Doonesbury's Uncle Duke, a popular character based on Thompson.

1976 — Quits Rolling Stone in a dispute over the magazine's coverage of Jimmy Carter

1980s — Continues publishing essays and books, writes for San Francisco Examiner and makes rounds on college lecture circuit.

1995 — Charged with drunk driving in Aspen, one of his frequent, and often bizarre, run-ins with the Colorado law. Blames the arrest as part of a political conspiracy.

1998 — Film adaptation of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas starring Johnny Depp released to greater commercial success than 1980's Where the Buffalo Roam starring Bill Murray as Thompson.

2000 — "Hey Rube" column for espn.com first appears.

2002 — To promote his new book, Kingdom of Fear, Thompson says he will hold a "Queen of Fear" beauty pageant in Aspen in response to a "wave of fear" he claims is inspired by the White House in the wake of Sept. 11.

2004 — Takes up the cause of Lisl Auman who was convicted of killing a Denver police officer. Publishes controversial article for Vanity Fair bringing national attention to the case.

2005 — Commits suicide in his Woody Creek home in Colorado

posted in Gonzo - 0 replies

HST parade costume

2005-03-04T20:50:37Z

Hey all,

Us folks in Colorado have a bus dedicated to HST in the St. Patrick’s day parade. We are all getting freaky with our costumes in tribute to the man and his characters and uh, hallucinations.

So, I pose the question:

Anyone have any suggestions? Or, if you were in the parade, what or who would you represent?

meow~

posted in Gonzo - 5 replies

Do you have a cannon?

2005-02-28T19:41:48Z

The Thompson estate is seeking a cannon with which to send HST's remains to his final reward. "And the rocket's red glare...."

If you have a cannon (and I know some of you do), consider submitting a 100-word essay to the Thompsons on why your cannon is the right cannon.

http://www.9news.com/acm_news.aspx?OSGNAME=KUSA&IKOBJECTID=54e539c0-0abe-421a-01df-64cbbddb4bb0&TEMPLATEID=0c76dce6-ac1f-02d8-0047-c589c01ca7bf

posted in Gonzo - 0 replies

AUDIO - On The Media - February 25, 2005

2005-02-28T19:32:26Z

On The Media - February 25, 2005
Hunter Gatherer: Talese on Thompson
A week ago, Hunter S. Thompson committed suicide at the age of 67. In the intervening days, we've seen dozens of tributes to the original gonzo journalist from people who knew him and admired him. Brooke sits down with one of them - Thompson's fellow New Journalist Gay Talese - to reflect on the journalistic legacy of Hunter S. Thompson.

http://www.onthemedia.org/otm022505.html

posted in Gonzo - 0 replies

Mark Morford on HST

2005-02-26T18:31:02Z

Mark writes a weekly column for the SF Chronicle:

by ark Morford

I am not nearly stoned enough.

I should at this moment have, at the very least, roughly four Vicodin and three Valium and two giant nuggets of phenobarbital and a few whippets and a canister of ether and a tab of blotter acid and half an ounce of premium hash and a nice snifter of gin playing naked volleyball in my addled brain right now to properly pay homage to the late great Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, which is why I ain't touching this HST legacy thing with a 10-foot line of premium Colombian blow.

I ain't touching it because it's sad and fraught and would probably fail to do the man and his masterfully debauched writing any sort of true and appropriately inappropriate justice, and given how the fine San Francisco Chronicle, like all respectable newspapers, generally disallows stream-of-consciousness fire hoses of frenetic Thompson-like curse words in its publications, I am, shall we say, a bit hamstrung.

And to be perfectly honest, I'm tragically underversed in the Thompson worldview, not really a disciple and not all that devoted to the hard-boiled writer's life and times and the guns and his hellish relationship with law enforcement, the drugs (always, always the drugs) and Aspen lair and the feverish, obsessive devotion to politics and the Wild Turkey and the larger-than-life persona, and beyond the utter genius of "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" and bits of "Generation of Swine" and "The Rum Diary," I have spent insufficient time with the Legacy to perform the beautifully raunchy verbal epitaph HST so f--ing well deserves.

But one thing must be said, and said again, and repeated ad infinitum, screamed and lamented and slapped across the face of modern journalism in the wake of Thompson's brutal and sudden but somehow morbidly appropriate exit from this bittersweet existence and upon his ceremonial entrance into the next, a place where, we just know, the hedonism runs hot and hotter and the guns are plentiful and the drugs are insanely potent and all the hookers wear Lycra and look like Jenna Jameson and can quote Nixon's resignation speech while casually sucking the rust off a tailpipe.

Forget the legacy thing. Forget the "this man single-handedly changed modern journalism" thing. It's only partially true, anyway, given how the period when Thompson nailed the political world to the wall and held a rusty Bowie knife to its throat was nearly 30 years ago, long before the Internet and way before Nipplegate and far before most cutely agitated bloggers were even born and back when Dubya was just knee-high to a collegiate cocaine habit.

Here's what needs to be said, what's worth lamenting most: there are no new Thompsons. There are no new snarling fierce-eyed one-of-a-kind journalists covering politics and the national agenda with such radical and nasty and brilliant aplomb and with such an explicit and enthusiastic disregard for standard journalistic rules and tropes, all via anything resembling a national media outlet.

In other words, while it's true what all the staid J-school chairs and Thompson's fellow journalists are right now saying about how HST did indeed blow the door open for a whole new breed of blast-furnace writers who merely disguised themselves as journalists to get a goddamn press pass, tragically few have dared follow HST through that door.

There are no new journalistic radicals willing to take such a risky, careening road to fame and glory. There is a tragic lack of HST-style fearlessness in modern journalism. No, we don't need another Thompson per se; after all, the man broke the mold. But we could definitely use a few more heavyweight writers willing to take up arms, tattoo iconoclast on their tongues and scream their defiance of all things decorous and punctual and grammatically decent.

It is 2005. Fear and paranoia and snide FCC crackdowns and what I shall henceforth call the New Trepidation rule the journalism schools and newspapers today. Few if any young writers are willing the rip the breastplate off the political helldog and yank out its dung-blackened heart and hold it aloft for all to see, and then tick off a list of brilliant, drunken and completely accurate descriptive profanities and then laugh a hacking, cackling laugh and slam a shot of bourbon and stomp away to find some good cigars.

You might rightly ask, But is this what journalism really needs? Expletives and guns and drugs? Don't we already have enough of that with the military and Lynne Cheney and the Catholic Church?

Shouldn't journalism, in the wake of so much bland me-too political coverage and obvious liberal/conservative bias and corporate media consolidation and your inability to click on any major media Web site right now and read anything dramatically different than what any other major media Web site is offering right now, strive for accuracy and respect and something akin to that most elusive of slippery hammerheaded snakes, objective truth?

To which I can only reply, you wish. Objective truth is, of course, the great white myth of our time. It simply does not exist. The New York Times and Le Monde and all those CNN/MSNBC/Fox ticker-tape newsfeeds scrolling across the bottom of the TV like some sort of never-ending dribble of drool flowing forth from the mouth of Dick Cheney's proctologist, we know this does not speak of true reality. This is not How It Really Is. Or, rather, these media represent only a fragment, a sliver, a whisper of darker and more complex and insidious truths, far underneath.

The vast majority of modern journalism is, after all, about as dangerous and daring and funky and raw and humanly accessible as Paris Hilton stuck headfirst in a giant pool of blood oranges and Veuve Clicquot. We simply cannot relate.

The stuffed-penguin suits and the prepared speeches and the bad toupees, the bulls-- White House press conferences and the lies about war and the utter lack of accountability in anything BushCo says and does, this is only the surface. This is the gloss and the sheen and the highly reflective coating designed to blind you to the more bitter, debauched, wondrous, cretinous realities.

And Thompson, maybe more than any journalist in the past 50 years, did more to write those realities, grip them by the throat and pin them down with a high-powered rifle and threaten them with Asian genital torture and vicious armpit tickling, all while smacking them upside the head with his personal thesaurus wrought from the secret love den of H.L. Mencken and Ambrose Bierce and Jim Beam.

Thompson may have died lonely, in pain, miserable. He may have lived a bitterly restless life, lost and unhappy and ever seeking some sort of solace, a reprieve from a world full of cretins and snakes and river rats and Richard Nixon and all of Nixon's evil flying-monkey spawn, many of which now inhabit the White House. We don't really know, and maybe never will.

What we do know is, the door Thompson helped blow open is now nearly completely sealed up again, spackled over with the fresh concrete of fear and reinforced with iron bars and snide FCC regulations and heavily guarded by the least accountable and most secretive and violent and warmongering government in American history. The radical free speech HST embodied, the biting and ferocious (and ultimately insightful and telling) interrogation of the various thugs of government, this approach is no longer tolerated.

Only the tiniest openings remain. Only the slimmest slivers of light eke through. The era of raw open-mouthed bitingly hilarious New Journalism in major media is giving way to one of fearful reportage and shrugging sameness and prim adjective clauses sans wit or kick or rigid middle fingers, all undercut by the uptight quasi-religious hypocrisy of the Right, worse than Nixon, worse than Vietnam, worse than you want to imagine.

So then. Do yourself a favor, reread "Fear and Loathing," flip through "Generation of Swine," realize how relevant, hilarious, debauched, glorious, sodden with crazed half-truths and drunken epiphanies and wicked observations HST's observations still are. Wave high the flag of indignation. Scream the need for more iconoclastic voices. And laugh your ass off. This much you can do.

Oh yes, and make sure you do it all very, very stoned. Surely, the good doctor would've wanted it that way.

posted in Gonzo - 2 replies

more info about suicide

2005-02-25T23:17:18Z

Apparently HST's wife was on the phone with him at the time. He 'wanted to leave while he was still at the top of his game', and she wishes she 'could have been more supportive'.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/arts/4298095.stm

posted in Gonzo - 5 replies

Hunter stuff

2005-02-25T19:20:09Z

Just thought I'd start a thread to post links to HST articles, interviews, tributes, and what not. Here's an article about what Hunter's wife, Anita had to say about Hunter's suicide:
http://www.rockymountainnews.com/drmn/state/article/0,1299,DRMN_21_3575306,00.html

This is probably my favorite tribute I've read so far:
http://salon.com/books/feature/2005/02/21/hunter/

I've been writing about a bunch of other articles and interviews and what not on my stumble blog thingy:
http://diggaslidwell.stumbleupon.com/

posted in Gonzo - 0 replies

Juan Speaks

2005-02-25T00:34:28Z

Hunter S. Thompson Said Spoke of Suicide

February 24, 2005 6:43 AM EST

ASPEN, Colo. - Journalist Hunter S. Thompson discussed committing suicide at least 10 years before he took his life, his family said.

Thompson's son and daughter-in-law, Juan Thompson and Jennifer Winkel Thompson, said that the 67-year-old "gonzo journalist" had outlived his own expectations.

"I've known for many, many years that this is how Hunter would go," Juan Thompson told the Rocky Mountain News in Thursday's editions. "It was just a question of when. This was a big surprise and I didn't expect it to be now, but the means was exactly as we expected."

Thompson shot himself in his Aspen-area home Sunday. His son, daughter-in-law and 6-year-old grandson were visiting from Denver and in the house. His wife of two years, Anita, was at a health club.

When Thompson fired his .45-caliber handgun, Juan Thompson thought a book had fallen.

"When I found him, he was in his chair, his head was slumped forward," Juan Thompson said. "It looked like he had fallen asleep."

Juan Thompson said his father had suffered weeks of pain from a host of physical problems that included a broken leg and a hip replacement.

"I think maybe he wanted to go out before it stopped being fun," Juan Thompson said.

Hunter Thompson was cremated Tuesday in Glenwood Springs. A private memorial service will be held March 5 in Aspen, with a public commemoration planned for spring or summer.

Thompson's family is looking into firing his ashes from a cannon, as he had wanted. Juan Thompson said the idea was fitting.

posted in Gonzo - 6 replies

R.I.P. Hunter

2005-02-24T03:42:54Z

He will be missed.

From AP news:

Author Hunter S. Thompson Kills Himself

3 minutes ago U.S. National - AP

ASPEN, Colo. - Hunter S. Thompson, the acerbic counterculture writer who popularized a new form of fictional journalism in books like "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas," fatally shot himself Sunday night at his home, his son said. He was 67.

AP Photo

"Hunter prized his privacy and we ask that his friends and admirers respect that privacy as well as that of his family," Juan Thompson said in a statement released to the Aspen Daily News.

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.

Juan Thompson found his father's body. Thompson's wife, Anita, was not home at the time.

Besides the 1972 drug-hazed classic about Thompson's time in Las Vegas, he is credited with pioneering New Journalism — or "gonzo journalism" — in which the writer made himself an essential component of the story.

An acute observer of the decadence and depravity in American life, Thompson wrote such books as "Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail" in 1973 and the collections "Generation of Swine" and "Songs of the Doomed." His first ever novel, "The Rum Diary," written in 1959, was first published in 1998.

Other books include "Hell's Angels" and "The Proud Highway." His most recent effort was "Hey Rube: Blood Sport, the Bush Doctrine, and The Downward Spiral of Dumbness."

posted in Gonzo - 39 replies

tribute in Oaktown

2005-02-23T07:35:05Z

in salute of Hunter S, that glorious bastard who left the building this week, LaunchPad is showing Fear and Loathing (Directors cut) tomorrow night (wednesday th 22) at 7:30 pm(free). Theres definitely no question that we'll have the projector up and running in time, don't listen to what anybody else says. Definitely no later than 8. theres definitely no possibility that we might end up in a huge pile inside watching it on a big TV, because its definitely not going to rain and the projectors definitely going to be there. bring your suitcase.

posted in Gonzo - 0 replies

HST memorial quotes

2005-02-22T08:55:11Z

I read my first book by the Good Doctor when I was 18, and since then, I've read them all, several times over. I've met friends, started conversations, made deep philosophical connections, laughed like a maniac, cried, and seen the world in new ways because of his work. Here's just a few of the many, many amazing bits of his writing that have influenced me.

So we shall let the reader answer this question for himself: Who is the happier man, he who has braved the storm of life and lived, or he who has stayed securely on shore and merely existed?
-HST, 50 years ago (age 17)

At times I think that any one of a hundred simple things could have brought that day to a different end. If we had lingered ten minutes longer over dinner, for instance, we'd have joined that awful dancing parade at a different point. Or if we'd turned right, instead of left, when we came down the stairs from the restaurant. Or even if I had run out of cigarettes, and we had stopped for two minutes to buy another pack. If any of those things had happened, we would not have found ourselves in that procession next to the same people we found ourselves next to when we grabbed the first waists we saw and started that maddening shuffle.

Yet at other times I think the events of that night were so inevitably predictable that nothing we might have done would have taken us in any other direction. I think of the day before, and the week before, and the month before that; I can even go back in the years and see the chain of apparently haphazard circumstances that brought me into that yelling, drunken parade at that certain spot at that certain time, next to those people I would never have met if I'd been a minute early or late. I remember decisions made in Europe and New York, at times when I never dreamed of going to any carnival on St. Thomas, at times when I felt I could go anywhere and do anything, holding myriad life patterns in my hands like cards, and feeling free to choose--yet if I look at all that from a certain angle, I see that I never had a choice at all but was only submitting to a fate that had long since been chosen for me.

I have thought this way several times in my life but only when circumstances have led me to a bad pass. No man who has chosen well and wisely will ever credit it to fate; the only real fatalist is a man on his way down the pipe. There is no solace in fatalism. A believer is robbed even of the pleasure of shouting, "Fuck you, I quit," because he knows that he was born a quitter and it would only be only a matter of time before he threw in the towel, surprising no one, not even himself.
-The Rum Diary

Things on my "worry list":

1) money
2) money
3) money
after the first three they tend to level out....
4) Worry that I may not be as strong as I think I am and thereby compromise with dull reality and convince myself that my weakness is a sign of "maturity."
5) Worry that I may never run across anyone whom I think is "right" enough to fall in love with, or perhaps I should say "be happy with."
6) Worry that I live in a land of semi-educated flagellants (look that one up, it will do you good) who have created and insist on maintaining a "free, equal, standardized, complacent and decaying society" which frustrates and denies the idea that I should live as I want to live and maintain my self-respect at the same time.
7) The rest of my worries are small and come and go from day to day. What are your "worries"?
-Proud Highway

posted in Gonzo - 1 reply

"George Bush should be stomped to death" - HST

2005-02-21T18:53:29Z

From an interview of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson by PJ O'Rourke (ganked from a friend on LJ):

Q. Recently you told a college audience at Marquette University, "George Bush should be killed. He should be stomped to death, and I'll join in." .... How did the students react?

A. Hey, they cheered! Then I called for a voice vote. It was two-thirds to stomp him. Meanwhile some fucking maniac recorded it and took it to the Milwaukee Journal. And the U.S. attorney in Milwaukee was about to indict me on two felony charges: five years for threating the vice-president and another five for inciting others to do it. ... I started getting calls from the Secret Service.

Q. Did you answer any of those calls?

A. Not at first, because I thought they were cranks. If it was important, they'd leave a message. And then the Secret Service showed up at the Examiner and at my lecture agency. I realized they were serious. So I called the Secret Service guy in Denver, Larry Hoppe. And he was very nice. And I said, "What's going on here, man?" And Hoppe said, "Dr. Thompson, let me tell you one thing: I would advise you not to go to Washington without talking to me first." So I said, "Come on over. What the hell."

Well, we talked for a while, and by that time Hoppe knew it was a joke. I said, "Have times changed? I've threatened to drage people around Washington by their nuts behind Oldsmobiles at a hundred miles an hour. I've advocated the slaughter of all politicians. What are the guidelines now?"

He had a pretty good sense of humor. He said, "Well, you can't say that he should be strung up. If you say that to people, WHAP! Ten years. You can say he should be tarred and feathered." And I said, "Wait a minute. I don't grasp it. What's the difference?" And Hoppe says, "I don't know. That's the way it is. Don't go out anymore and threaten to string George Bush up or stomp him to death."

Q. Now, to what level of public figure does this extend? Take somebody I really hate, like Meese. Meese is not an elected official. Can I say that somebody should slice Meese open and wrap his intestines around a phone booth?

A. No, you probably can't. He should be flogged -- just not to death.

Q. What if we said Messe should be fucked by an elk?

A. That's apparently harmless as hell. I believe that Ed Meese -- being a person without any honor, a fat bastard, really a congenital cheap pig in the style of and on the level of Richard Nixon -- should be locked in a large concrete basement with an elk. And the elk should be ram-fed full of acid before he's put in there.

Q. An angry, horny, acid-crazed elk.

A. Meese is naked, and the elk is huge, maybe 800 plus.

Q. Elk can be ugly customers.

A. And once they're full of acid, and they're really horny -- oh yeah, all night long!

posted in Gonzo - 1 reply

Origins/meaning of the Gonzo logo

2005-01-15T20:31:26Z

Hi all. Though I've known of Hunter for some time from the movie Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and being a big fan of Warren Zevon, I'm just starting to really get into his books, and I think he's great. I was just wondering if anybody could point me in the direction of the meaning of the Gonzo fist logo. has Hunter, or anyone else written about the origins and meaning of this?

posted in Gonzo - 2 replies

Hunter quotes

2005-01-12T00:29:12Z

The t-shirt posting made me start reflecting on some of my favorite HST quotes. Two of them are:

"Holy Jesus! What are these goddamned animals?"

and

"San Francisco in the middle '60s was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run ...but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that comer of time and the world. Whatever it meant....

"And that, I think, was the handle--that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn't need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting--on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. So now, less than five years later you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark--the place where the wave finally broke and rolled back."

posted in Gonzo - 17 replies

Has anybody read "Hey Rube?"

2004-12-23T06:32:28Z

I picked this up at a borders the other day and started reading it... but it just didn't seem to have the kind of Thompson political edge or even really edginess that I am used to in his work... I didn't end up buying it... but that was based on my first impression. Anybody read it and loved it?

posted in Gonzo - 4 replies

Fear and Loathing '04

2004-10-21T22:21:44Z

A brand-new piece on the presidential election from Rolling Stone:

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/_/id/6562575?&rnd=1098394261180&has-player=true

posted in Gonzo - 0 replies

Rum Diary movie in the works

2004-08-16T21:55:34Z

Johnny Depp and Benicio del Toro are planning to reprise their roles as the proxy Hunter and Oscar in a forthcoming film version of Rum Diary, directed by del Toro.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0376136/

I for one will look forward to it greatly. I thought Giliam's Fear and Loathing was amazing, and both of them turned in first-rate performances.

posted in Gonzo - 2 replies

Looking for something...

2004-07-14T06:02:19Z

Several years ago I saw a poster, only slightly larger than a sheet of regular typing paper, that was Ralph Steadman's picture from the cover of F&LiLV, complete with bats, the red shark, and two twisted caricatures in the front seat, with the following text rendered in Steadman-style drippy mess: "For all those who thing I'm not going anywhere in life, I'M NOT LISTENING!" (or words directly to that effect) I have been looking for this picture everywhere, as I really really want that poster, but I have been unable to find it. Has anyone else seen something similar?

posted in Gonzo - 0 replies

And you are . . .

2004-07-03T08:11:24Z

who exactly?

I've decided to make an attempt at being a decent moderator for all mah tribes. So let's do one of those lame getting to know you bullshit here. Let's see . . .

Name: Cheryl
Age: 21 going on 22
How'd ya find the tribe or why you joined (I guess that's obvious, but piss off and answer the damn question): I forgot my actual motivation in creating this tribe, but HST is god with a pen.
Reason why you are unique and special (just like everyone else): Because I made the greatest tribe EVER.

posted in Gonzo - 11 replies

new mod?

2004-06-15T22:54:45Z

Just wondering if anyone is interested in moderating this tribe. I'm likely leeaving tribe soon enough, so i wanna take care of the loose ends.

Just reply here and we'll have Walter switch it over.

posted in Gonzo - 1 reply

T-shirts

2004-06-08T22:50:53Z

http://www.mootrealm.com/thompson.htm

posted in Gonzo - 3 replies

american dream

2004-04-07T04:06:18Z

Like the Zen master Ikkyu said:

why is it all so beautiful this craziness
this fake dream why?

What is the goddamned point of it all? I mean, you wander around with a head full of acid and whatever else you may be on, and what is it all about? Where does it get you at the end of the day? There's still confusion, still disappointment, still the breathless pursuit of desire.

HST's genius, as I see it, is in investing this mad circus with significance by looking for something. In my case, I have the uttermost conviction that LSD will help me to find God. I'm sure s/he's around here somewhere....

I'll be sure to let you know when I find him or her or whatever.

posted in Gonzo - 0 replies

Your Favorite Hunter

2004-02-03T23:06:21Z

hey ya'll, i got the honor of the very first post, how exciting. i just wanted to see what everyone's favorite top 3 hunter books are. right now, im stalled due to other readings, but i've read quite a few. my top 3 are
1. Rum Diary - yowza... yeah.
2. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas - what'd you expect really annnnd
3. Hell's Angels - violence and loathing

i guess my picks aren't very surprising, or maybe im completely flipped out on mescaline and you all have the correct opinions?

posted in Gonzo - 4 replies