New journalism was an interesting complement to the mainstream, but the problem was that a whole generation decided it should replace all other forms. New journalism only works when it has the mainstream to contrast against. Without that, it quickly becomes self-parody.
I'd also argue Hemingway was the original "New journalist" ...
If you read his published correspondence, he was actually a pretty thoughtful guy. I thought Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas and Curse of Lono were entertaining reads, but his later essays in the 1980s were just the angry lashing out of someone who had misread the tea leaves and had no insights into the appeal of Reagan - and so nothing to contribute to the national conversation, making him irrelevant. I doubt there was anything he hated more than being irrelevant ...
All of them were, the exceptions being Stevie Wonder and Fagen&Becker. I don't think any other of the "superstar" figures in 60s/70s pop was born after 1945. Maybe Mick Taylor, whom I wouldn't class as iconic.
I actually met Hunter Thompson on a plane. I was a flight attendant in first class and he was there. The man was such a mess that he couldn’t discern what was the flush button and what was the call button. I had to save the man from the first class lav. As we had a passenger manifest and I had also enjoyed his Rolling Stone article I knew it was him. I asked him, “Are you okay Mr Thompson” and was met with “DOCTOR Thompson”.
He drew a picture of me on a napkin and signed it. What I ever did with it is a mystery. I’m just not a collector of signatures and he just gave me the napkin cuz I rescued him from the toilet I guess.
In my life, have met many a strange or odd person, what made Hunter S. Thompson different from them was he could write. It is said, that one should write something worth reading or live a life worth writing about, Hunter S., did both, a rare and exceptional combination.
Hunter Thompson was right on target when identifying and skewering the absurdity inherent in many aspects of American life at the end of the 1950s and through much of the 1960s. By the 1970s, with the Vietnam War tearing the country apart, the stakes suddenly became far more serious. The absurdity was no longer something to laugh about. Hunter Thomson didn't change. The country did.
Fun little tidbit, recently, at the La Jolla Playhouse, I watched a musical called The Untitled Unauthorized Hunter S Thompson Musical. I went in not knowing what to expect. It was fantastic. And showed with great attention to detail his rise and fall.
"Hell's Angels established Thompson’s public persona, but if you read it (as I did) after first consuming his later work, it seems cautious by comparison. In the early pages, the author works hard to establish his credentials as a respectable journalist—offering up statistics, quotes from government reports, and paragraphs filled with names and facts. But even at this early stage, Thompson must have grasped that his readers wanted something more. So as the book progresses, it gets weirder and weirder."
It was during the research for this book that he came up with the name Raoul Duke and Thompson even inserted it into Hell's Angels. On the publicity tour, he began acting out in ways that were strange to his friends--wearing loud clothes, being obnoxious, etc. Over the next few years, he would increasingly lean into this Duke persona before becoming trapped by it in the late 70s.
Hm.. wheres our hst for today? Drowning in the bloated sea of online writing, no doubt.
Maybe somebody should write something good and *not* put it on the ol interwebs. Make everyone buy the book. Some of the kids these days might really dig that(or so some recent article i read seemed to suggest).
Thats a million dollar idea right there, if someone can pull it off. Write something really good *and* make people work to get it?(i cant believe im calling buying a book "work", but such is the world)
Ofc, i hear getting a book published is a pretty stupid business these days.. so maybe somebodies gonna need to start a new publishing house.
Idk, could be done. Somebody needs to come up with *something* different, thats for sure
Thoroughly enjoyed this, Ted. The 1960s still hold a great fascination for me, and while I don’t want to be under illusions about it, I still believe it held a promise that, had we gone down further the road with it, would’ve resulted in a different country than what we have now. There’s no question that we could have had different problems emerge, but they may have been less intractable than the ones we now have.
I can’t tell you how much I’m enjoying this. I supported Carter in 1976 based on Hunter’s Rolling Stone piece, and later had the opportunity to discuss Hunter with President Carter. You’re recapturing my youth!
New journalism, at least the best of it is a marriage of radical ideas and actions grounded in a firmly disciplined mind. Thompson embodied this, at least for a while. As far as his self-imposed demise, my humble opinion is that he unfortunately 'lost the plot'. Perhaps some of his actions, especially in the realm of drugs and alcohol, were too radical for too long of a time.
I was editing and writing in the early '70s, and was initially impressed with Thompson, although there were much better examples of the New Journalism found in the VOICE, Esquire and New York Magazine that inspired more than HT. His writing could be brilliant, but when he became too much a part of the story his work became more entertainment than journalism, more huckstering than any other writer of his generation. Thompson became too enamored of Thompson and in the process lost his way as a journalist.
New journalism was an interesting complement to the mainstream, but the problem was that a whole generation decided it should replace all other forms. New journalism only works when it has the mainstream to contrast against. Without that, it quickly becomes self-parody.
I'd also argue Hemingway was the original "New journalist" ...
Thompson would probably agree with you.
Yes. Taken in a vacuum, HST's writing actually came off as pretty juvenile. He wasn't nearly as clever as he thought he was.
His writings on Nixon number amongst the finest political coverage ever. He also lead me to rediscover Josef Conrad.
If you read his published correspondence, he was actually a pretty thoughtful guy. I thought Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas and Curse of Lono were entertaining reads, but his later essays in the 1980s were just the angry lashing out of someone who had misread the tea leaves and had no insights into the appeal of Reagan - and so nothing to contribute to the national conversation, making him irrelevant. I doubt there was anything he hated more than being irrelevant ...
Ending reminds me of how many of the iconic figures of the 1960s - early 70's were actually Silent Generation folks. Worth exploring sometime.
All of them were, the exceptions being Stevie Wonder and Fagen&Becker. I don't think any other of the "superstar" figures in 60s/70s pop was born after 1945. Maybe Mick Taylor, whom I wouldn't class as iconic.
I actually met Hunter Thompson on a plane. I was a flight attendant in first class and he was there. The man was such a mess that he couldn’t discern what was the flush button and what was the call button. I had to save the man from the first class lav. As we had a passenger manifest and I had also enjoyed his Rolling Stone article I knew it was him. I asked him, “Are you okay Mr Thompson” and was met with “DOCTOR Thompson”.
He drew a picture of me on a napkin and signed it. What I ever did with it is a mystery. I’m just not a collector of signatures and he just gave me the napkin cuz I rescued him from the toilet I guess.
You should have kept it!!! It would be worth a first class flight to anywhere!
In my life, have met many a strange or odd person, what made Hunter S. Thompson different from them was he could write. It is said, that one should write something worth reading or live a life worth writing about, Hunter S., did both, a rare and exceptional combination.
Hunter Thompson was right on target when identifying and skewering the absurdity inherent in many aspects of American life at the end of the 1950s and through much of the 1960s. By the 1970s, with the Vietnam War tearing the country apart, the stakes suddenly became far more serious. The absurdity was no longer something to laugh about. Hunter Thomson didn't change. The country did.
Fun little tidbit, recently, at the La Jolla Playhouse, I watched a musical called The Untitled Unauthorized Hunter S Thompson Musical. I went in not knowing what to expect. It was fantastic. And showed with great attention to detail his rise and fall.
Ted. You might appreciate this poem. I wrote it the morning Hunter died:
Goodbye, Hunter
Does death become you?
Do the pigs of quack still
Eat you in your long and endless deep?
Are they chomping at your kneecaps,
Twisted midgets, lost in sleep?
Goodbye, Hunter
You cranky mother.
Decapitation
Of the psyche
Not a concept
That the short
And glued of mind can understand.
But then you know that
Those steely eels
Still swam around you
Even when you were
Hard-hunkered in your bunker.
The sound of owls
As they swept along the tree line, crystal-mythed
Was not enough to fade the
Stain that left a hole
Inside your eardrums.
It’s a shame
That nothing stops them
From reacting,
Not even death.
Their sneaky tear ducts
And leaky bomb guts
But enough now said of that,
Their stars are fleeting.
Though we can’t see this.
Goodbye, Hunter
The silent enemy
Inside you
Is inside us,
This you knew.
What you didn’t know
Is that we feel it too,
You weren’t alone.
Where are your peacocks?
Did you sail them to an unfamiliar star?
Where are your dream clocks?
Did your time hit stop, no pass, retract the light, concede the war?
Where are our sleeping pills?
Did too much Xanax shoot our will between the eyes?
Where are our satirists?
In serious times
The big top clown within us cries
To be released into the ring, into the din, into the light.
Goodbye, America
Goodbye to all we said you’d be
Before we sold you for a piece
Of altared pie
To a weapon addict
Rapt dogmatic
Sleek reactive
Sly
Old bat
Whose grand design
To fix the stars
So we can
Only see
His stiffening light,
Is just another dirty eel around our spines.
Big Surprise.
Residual starlight
That’s what I call it
And the dead beliefs of brittle men
Are all that fuel its weak and bitter flight.
It’s shot its wad.
And a whole head's still
A better weapon
Than a man who flogs
The log of rigid concepts.
Goodbye, Hunter
All is not lost here.
But you know this, don’t you
Even while you sift between the stars?
Now nothing but a memory
For men
To shift in bars and oily stadiums
Or acid flashbacks
Sweet hungry tomcats
Still yearning for a time
Beyond this time
Beyond this slow and restless night.
Go now, my friend,
Find peace in everything
You knew could be
But wasn’t here in sight.
Eat whole the spleen
Of energetic waves
Eat fast the particles,
I hear they're good with Ketchup.
Residual starlight.
My friend, remember it.
It all becomes and ends
Repeating once
Straight round our bends
Kabam kapow hello, or did you say goodbye?
I think I’ve been here
This seat's familiar
I ate this hot dog
OK, alright
I think I'll linger here a while
Anyway.
This kind of systematic soft chaotic circle
Just reminds me of another time
When I hit the desert
Doing 90 in the shade.
Am I crazy or wasn't Anthony Bourdain an avid fan of Mr.Thompson???
I believe that he was. Miss that guy.
I was born two years before Bourdain so I would imagine we were both reading Hunter Thompson’s articles/books and so on at roughly the same times.
"Hell's Angels established Thompson’s public persona, but if you read it (as I did) after first consuming his later work, it seems cautious by comparison. In the early pages, the author works hard to establish his credentials as a respectable journalist—offering up statistics, quotes from government reports, and paragraphs filled with names and facts. But even at this early stage, Thompson must have grasped that his readers wanted something more. So as the book progresses, it gets weirder and weirder."
It was during the research for this book that he came up with the name Raoul Duke and Thompson even inserted it into Hell's Angels. On the publicity tour, he began acting out in ways that were strange to his friends--wearing loud clothes, being obnoxious, etc. Over the next few years, he would increasingly lean into this Duke persona before becoming trapped by it in the late 70s.
Hm.. wheres our hst for today? Drowning in the bloated sea of online writing, no doubt.
Maybe somebody should write something good and *not* put it on the ol interwebs. Make everyone buy the book. Some of the kids these days might really dig that(or so some recent article i read seemed to suggest).
Thats a million dollar idea right there, if someone can pull it off. Write something really good *and* make people work to get it?(i cant believe im calling buying a book "work", but such is the world)
Ofc, i hear getting a book published is a pretty stupid business these days.. so maybe somebodies gonna need to start a new publishing house.
Idk, could be done. Somebody needs to come up with *something* different, thats for sure
A man whose reputation more than proceeded him… and ultimately tipped him over the high-watermark!
Thoroughly enjoyed this, Ted. The 1960s still hold a great fascination for me, and while I don’t want to be under illusions about it, I still believe it held a promise that, had we gone down further the road with it, would’ve resulted in a different country than what we have now. There’s no question that we could have had different problems emerge, but they may have been less intractable than the ones we now have.
I can’t tell you how much I’m enjoying this. I supported Carter in 1976 based on Hunter’s Rolling Stone piece, and later had the opportunity to discuss Hunter with President Carter. You’re recapturing my youth!
New journalism, at least the best of it is a marriage of radical ideas and actions grounded in a firmly disciplined mind. Thompson embodied this, at least for a while. As far as his self-imposed demise, my humble opinion is that he unfortunately 'lost the plot'. Perhaps some of his actions, especially in the realm of drugs and alcohol, were too radical for too long of a time.
I was editing and writing in the early '70s, and was initially impressed with Thompson, although there were much better examples of the New Journalism found in the VOICE, Esquire and New York Magazine that inspired more than HT. His writing could be brilliant, but when he became too much a part of the story his work became more entertainment than journalism, more huckstering than any other writer of his generation. Thompson became too enamored of Thompson and in the process lost his way as a journalist.
Truly enjoyed. Just watched a YouTube doc.