“We still aren’t entirely sure about Hunter S. Thompson. His personal life has certainly been exhumed, er, to death, thanks to the post-suicide cottage industry of biographies, personal reminiscences and documentaries that have sprung up like dandelions around a gravestone. We do know, for example, that Thompson was a philanderer and a mean drunk on occasion, and that he had trouble setting things down on paper as the years progressed and substance abuse clouded his beautiful mind. And yet when it comes to the work itself — that half-mad hybrid of sharp reportage and venomous rhetoric — mysteries still abound.
When discussing his own creative process, Thompson could be very cagey indeed. For years, readers have speculated about the fact-vs.-fiction conundrum that lies at the heart of 1971’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Doug Brinkley, Thompson’s friend and executor of the author’s estate, has in the past referred to the book as a novel. In his movie adaptation, Terry Gilliam literalized the book’s beastly hallucinations and turned Thompson’s terrifying thought-dreams into a kind of Tex Avery nightmare. When I interviewed Thompson in 2002, he danced around the subject of factual accuracy with digressive charm, a familiar feint whenever someone tried to dig into the marrow of his most famous works.
But for years there have been murmurings about a skeleton key: cassette tapes, thousands of them, that would unlock the mystery and allow us to tease out the truth from Thompson’s Boschian mind trips. Alex Gibney received permission from the Thompson estate to use the tapes for his documentary Gonzo, the best and most insightful Thompson documentary by a wide margin. And now we have The Gonzo Tapes, a companion box set that contains hours of the cassettes spread across five CDs. For anyone but the most fervent Thompson heads, The Gonzo Tapes is a mighty tough trawl. The fidelity of the recordings, which span the years 1965 to 1975, is truly crappy, and given that Thompson often liked to play records in the background while recording, it sometimes takes a Herculean effort to discern what the hell is going on. You have to lean in a bit to catch the nuggets.”
(via LA Weekly. h/t: Professor Hex)
“Sipping from a glass of white wine and secretly itching for a cigarette (he later admitted), Art Spiegelman glibly entertained a gaggle of British adult comic-book fans. We were all in a small theatre at London’s Institute for Contemporary Arts, where Spiegelman explained his rationale for what is perhaps one of his most shocking drawings from the 1970s: a decapitated man getting fucked in the neck.
“I did the most vile comics I could possibly think of, because I thought that’s what underground comics were all about,” he said with an unapologetic shrug. He then admitted that Robert Crumb, a comic artist renowned for testing the limits of taste in his own drawings, banned him from his house in San Francisco in the 1960s. His wife was just too disturbed by that particular image.
The drawing appears in Spiegelman’s most recent effort, a new edition of “Breakdowns: A Portrait of the Artist as Young %@&*!”, created first in 1978. This book, said Spiegelman, should lend some insight into his evolution from vile cartoonist to Pulitzer Prize-winning artist and illustrator. The Pulitzer came in 1992 for “Maus”, a personal story about the Holocaust in which Jews were depicted as mice and Nazi Germans as cats. Though canonised now as an important unconventional memoir, “Maus” was originally met in 1978 with “a stunning silence”, Spiegelman said. His goal for the project, first drawn with a fountain pen, was to make readers feel like they were reading a diary. “Breakdowns” offers a trek through Spiegelman’s early work and development as a comic artist, revealing what he grappled with before “Maus”. At the lecture, Spiegelman presented slides from the book–rough, silly, strange and sometimes simple images that exemplified his mantra: “comics should be whatever you want them to be.”
(via More Intelligent Life)
“Comedian George Carlin, a counter-culture hero famed for his routines about drugs and dirty words, died of heart failure at a Los Angeles-area hospital on Sunday, a spokesman said. He was 71.
Carlin, who had a history of heart and drug-dependency problems, died at Saint John’s Health Center in Santa Monica about 6 p.m. PDT (9 p.m. EDT) after being admitted earlier in the afternoon for chest pains, spokesman Jeff Abraham told Reuters.”
(via Reuters. One of my favorite routines: George Carlin talking about “Stuff” )
“At the time of this writing, interesting recent press coverage hearkens back to two of 1969s most notorious events.
The first story concerns the new search for possible Manson family murder victims long rumored to have been buried in the desert near Manson’s old hideout at Barker Ranch in California’s Death Valley. This theory of unknown murder victims stems from a statement attributed to Manson family member Susan Atkins, who allegedly told a fellow inmate she was incarcerated with that there were “three people out in the desert that they done in,” referring to other possible victims during the Manson family’s spree of killings during the summer of 1969. As reported by the press, a team of forensic scientists have traveled recently to Barker Ranch and used cadaver dogs, ground penetrating radar and other equipment in an attempt to locate these possible victims. According to the report, the scientists located “three large areas of interest.”
The story second concerns a BBC News report that details the revelation from the FBI’s own files that the Hell’s Angels may have actually tried to assassinate Mick Jagger at his rented home in Long Island, New York in retaliation for Jagger?s comments following the disastrous concert at Altamont in late 1969. The murder attempt supposedly failed after the boat carrying the would-be assassins foundered during a storm, almost drowning them.
That these two stories continue to resonate in modern times in not such a surprise. The article below discusses the detrimental effects that the Manson murders, the ill-fated concert at Altamont, and numerous other crimes that the press of the day dubbed “hippie murders”, had on the hippie image.”
(via Steamshovel Press)
(For another good read about the dark side of “the Age of Aquarius” check out “Turn Off Your Mind”, by Gary Lachman)
“Join me now, if you have the time, as we take a stroll down memory lane to a time nearly four-and-a-half decades ago – a time when America last had uniformed ground troops fighting a sustained and bloody battle to impose, uhmm, ?democracy’ on a sovereign nation.
It is the first week of August, 1964, and U.S. warships under the command of U.S. Navy Admiral George Stephen Morrison have allegedly come under attack while patrolling Vietnam’s Tonkin Gulf. This event, subsequently dubbed the ?Tonkin Gulf Incident,’ will result in the immediate passing by the U.S. Congress of the obviously pre-drafted Tonkin Gulf Resolution, which will, in turn, quickly lead to America’s deep immersion into the bloody Vietnam quagmire. Before it is over, well over fifty thousand American bodies – along with literally millions of Southeast Asian bodies – will litter the battlefields of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.”
[..] Meanwhile, elsewhere in the world in those early months of 1965, a new ?scene’ is just beginning to take shape in the city of Los Angeles. In a geographically and socially isolated community known as Laurel Canyon – a heavily wooded, rustic, serene, yet vaguely ominous slice of LA nestled in the hills that separate the Los Angeles basin from the San Fernando Valley – musicians, singers and songwriters suddenly begin to gather as though summoned there by some unseen Pied Piper. Within months, the ?hippie/flower child’ movement will be given birth there, along with the new style of music that will provide the soundtrack for the tumultuous second half of the 1960s.”
(via The Center for an Informed America. h/t: Conspiracy Planet)
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