The Right Kind of Eyes: Hunter Thompson Has Left the Convertible (Having Nothing and Everything To Do With This Site)

We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like “I feel lightheaded; maybe you should drive . . . “
--Hunter S Thompson
--Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas

This morning I find myself careening across the American landscape, a passenger in a driverless candy-red convertible called the Great Red Shark. Me and an embarrassing number of other writers. The grim news washing in with the East Coast dawn is that Hunter S Thompson is dead. Evidently, he finally decided to let others take the wheel.

If you want a NoteTaker blogging tip, you’ll want to check back another time. Because this post has nothing to do with the topic of this site, but--curiously--it points to the essence of the site itself. Without HST this site wouldn’t exist or, indeed, my decades-long, ongoing and dubious arrangement whereby people actually compensate me to screw around with words.

I want to talk about HST, but I’m loath (fine word, that ) to do The Profile Piece. For that, look no farther than this serviceable overview in The New York Times. Or simply Google the Thompson of your choice, God knows they’re all there: Sporting Editor HST, Rolling Stone HST, Drug-Addled HST, Scotch-Abusing HST, Counter-Culture HST, Iconic HST, Failed Sheriff HST, Woody Creek Denizen HST, Doonesbury Cartoon HST, Violent HST, Fearful HST, Arts-and-Letters Class Clown HST. All these and dozens more.

In his purposely smudgy 65/67 years, HST made Citizen Kane look simplistic. His Rubik-Cube personality makes the neat distillation of four or five facets impossible. Except that the Media will try to do precisely that--and, adding insult to injury, will couch the whole biased picture as Objective Reporting.

But, like HST, I don’t believe in objectivity--never have and never will. After all, even quantum mechanics holds that simply observing an event changes it. The genuine, albeit grim, fun will be to watch the Media profile Thompson in a way that proves they still don’t get it. HST once wrote, “No point mentioning the bats . . . the poor bastard will see them soon enough.” Except that the Bastardly Media won’t. And so, as Hunter also wrote: Fuck these people . . .

No, the only way to do this thing properly is to do it Gonzo--not out of homage, not because I can’t help myself, not out of some obscure performance-art attempt at form-is-function, but because I can only say with authority what I think about HST. I suspect your Thompson may not be mine--but that’s not the point; it’s the upfront admission of the bias--my bias. You know where I stand, and with that knowledge, you can deal (or not) with my observations. To do this Gonzo also means just that--Gonzo and not Gonzo-esque. This is an improvisation--one draft, no notes, as it occurs to me, somewhat spell-checked, and posted. Gonzo-esque is a far more crafted writing with a mannered or retrofitted informality--a special effect, if you will, the Sky Captain of writing: blue-screen Gonzo . . .

One
Despite my overwrought italics and Mock-Heroic Capitalization, my HST was a philosophical inspiration, not merely the founder of a stylistic school. To say he elevated subjectivity is utterly wrong. Instead, he released it--in the same way Michelangelo described sculpting as releasing statues out of stone. Thompson’s brilliance was in revealing what was always there, hidden beneath layers of professional self-justification, second agendas (both personal and corporate) and the drive to gentrify journalism by making it a pseudo-science.

Of course, journalism reviled him for highlighting the obvious--that X was what this reporter saw and how this reporter made sense of it. Even the supporting deep background was unavoidably pushed through the subjective filters of a reporter’s subjectivity. Christopher Isherwood understood and so did HST--I am a camera: When I look here, I am not looking there. And while the Media has made a kind of uneasy peace with HST’s legacy, one has only to look at film, book or restaurant reviews to see the still-rising tide of Faux Objectivity. When was the last time you read a review that confidently said “I didn’t like the film” or “I personally loved the book”or “The food there is not to my taste?” Even punditry has become empiric.

At the time of Watergate, HST said he wanted to tie one of the conspirators to his car bumper, drag him around the the White House a couple of times and then cut him loose at the gate. Shocking and over-the-top, it was (and remains) a hell of a lot more honest than Fox News and Bret Hume pimping for the sitting Administration or planted fake reporters in the White House press room or journalists on the take to promote governmental agendas. All of this thoroughly evil behavior--wrapped in the cool, measured tones of Objective Journalism is shocking and skin-crawling in ways HST could only hint at.

There’s a reason that increasing numbers of people are getting their news from Jon Stewart and Keith Olbermann--it’s the odd assurance of their obvious personal agendas which genuinely smart viewers use to contextualize the information and news. In their journalistic spit-takes at news stories, Stewart and Olbermann are inheritors of HST, as opposed to the deeply furtive look in Peter Jenning’s eyes that he tries to hide as his impassive Media Face says something cognitively dissonant.

Which brings us around to this site and its direct connection to HST. You know what’s more anxiously wanna-be empiric than journalism? It’s journalism about science and technology. This site is all about having technophiles understand the subjectivity of the tips and the methodology leading to their discovery. I like the idea that this site almost incidentally helps people enhance their use of NoteTaker (though I suspect that the undoubtedly horrified AquaMinds would like it another way). In the same way that you don’t work for a company as much as work with people at the organization, this site is dedicated to giving you idiosyncratically skewed tips--just as other sources of tech help do--except that the PeachPit style book slathers on Objectivity.

Annoying as the fact is, this site is not about NoteTaker; it’s about me using NoteTaker and reporting back on my adventures. And for this trope I once again thank HST . . .

Two
My Hunter Thompson is about being quintessentially American--in the manner of Fitzgerald or Pollock or Miles Davis or Lou Reed. He embodied the passion, idealism, violence, and despair of his culture. He’s why America is loved and also why it’s hated. And similarly, people either loved or disliked him. He, like America, leaves little room for neutrality. HST cared too much and that led him into edgy places. Someone once said that cynicism is broken romanticism and I think this is true. Underneath all of the arm-waving, the Bad Behavior and the bile was someone who, like Gatsby, “believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us.” And like Gatsby, his approach to America was often obsessive and flawed. But in an age increasingly drained of passionate idealism, it was revitalizing and touching--even as cynical reverberation bounced off frustration.

My father had John Wayne ordering “lock and load;” me, I’ve got HST:

“Strange memories on this nervous night in Las Vegas. Five years later? Six? It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era--the kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special timeand place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run . . .

There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda . . . You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning . . .

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--that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.”

Indeed.

Three
Which neatly brings us to the final way HST is responsible for my career: I’d still give my left testicle to have written the previous passage from Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas. As a writer, Hunter Thompson was a consummate craftsman, although his Gonzo genre often obscures this important fact.

Just as Jackson Pollock gave rise to some thoroughly bad art; just as Lou Reed was perversely responsible for Jackson Browne and just as late-period Miles Davis made Kenny G possible, HST gave rise to Joe Esterhaus and a whole school of Gonzo wannabes; people who assumed that Gonzo was the prose equivalent of putting a car into an uncontrolled skid.

Gonzo, however, is all about control. When you’re can’t hide behind editing, when you’re doing the equivalent of Cartier Bresson full-frame prints, you better believe it’s about control, Baby. It the opposite of a car in in an uncontrolled skid--it a car driven by a deeply experienced, meticulously trained stunt driver.

In this, I see HST as analogous to John Coltrane and his sheets of sound--those dense, overlapping sonic variations. Trane’s improvisational complexity was born of of endlessly practicing scales--craftsmanship and the fretting of detail. So too, HST: At his best and seemingly most manic, there’s the thunderous poetry of the Book of Revelation; the precision of a prize-fighter in top form. It may not a style you chose to read, it may not be a topic you like or point view you subscribe to, but goddamit it was writing that rivaled top-form Fitzgerald.

You need to read the following passage from Hell’s Angels because this is what American writing should be like. You need to read this and then pick up whatever novel you’re currently making your way through and do an A/B comparison. You need to read this and then think about the professional model-cum-news reader that Fox News might prop-up in front of the Golden Gate bridge in an attempt to even suggest this story . . .

“Months later, when I rarely saw the Angels, I still had the legacy of the big machine--four hundred pounds of chrome and deep red noise to take out on the Coast Highway and cut loose at three in the morning, when all the cops were lurking over on 101. My first crash had wrecked the bike completely and it took several months to have it rebuilt. After that I decided to ride it differently: I would stop pushing my luck on curves, always wear a helmet and try to keep within range of the nearest speed limit . . . my insurance had already been canceled and my driver’s license was hanging by a thread.

So it was always at night, like a werewolf, that I would take the thing out for an honest run down down the coast. I would start in the Golden Gate Park, thinking only to run a few long curves to clear my head . . . but in a matter of minutes I’d be out at the beach with the sound of the engine in my ears, the surf booming up on the sea wall and fine empty road stretching all the way down to Santa Cruz . . .not even a gas station in the whole seventy miles; the only public light along the way is an all-night diner down around Rockaway Beach.

There was no helmet on those nights, no speed limits, and no cooling it down on the curves. the momentary freedom of the park was like the one unlucky drink that shoves a wavering alcoholic off the wagon. I would come out of the park near the soccer field and pause for a moment at the stop sign, wondering if if I knew anyone parked out there on the midnight humping strip.

Then into first gear, forgetting the cars and letting the beast wind out . . . thirty-five, forty-five . . . then into second and wailing through the light at Lincoln Way, not worried about green or red signals, but only some other werewolf loony who might be pulling out, too slowly, to start his own run. Not many of these . . . ans with three lanes on a wide curve, a bike coming hard has plenty of room to get around almost anything . . . then into third, the boomer gear, pushing seventy-five and the beginning of a windscream in the ears, a pressure on the eyeballs like diving into water off a high board.

Bent forward, far back on the seat, and a rigid grip on the handlebars as the bike starts jumping and wavering in the wind. Taillights far up ahead coming closer, faster, and suddenly--zaaapppp--going past and leaning down for a curve near the zoo, where the road swings out to sea.

The dunes are flatter here, and on windy days sand blows across the highway, piling up in the thick drifts as deadly as any oil slick . . . instant loss of control, a crashing, cartwheeling slide and maybe one of those two-inch notices in the paper the next day: ‘An unidentified motorcyclist was killed last night when he fail to negotiate a turn on Highway I.’

Indeed . . . but no sand this time, so the lever goes up into fourth, and now there’s no sound except wind. Screw it all the way over, reach through the handlebars to raise the headlight beam, the needle leans down on a hundred, and wind-burned eyeballs strain to see down the centerline, trying to provide a margin for the reflexes.

But with the throttle screwed on there is only the barest margin, and no room at all for mistakes. It has to be done right . . . and that’s when the strange music starts, when you stretch your luck so far that fear becomes exhilaration and vibrates along your arms. You can barely see at a hundred; the tears blow back so fast that they vaporize before they reach your ears. The only sounds are the wind and a dull roar floating back from the mufflers. You watch the white line and try to lean with it . . . howling down the long hill to Pacifica . . . letting off now, watching for cops, but only until the next dark stretch and another few seconds on the edge . . . The Edge . . .There is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over. The others--the living--are those who pushed their control as far as they felt they could handle it, and then pulled back, or slowed down, or did whatever they had to when it came time to choose between Now and Later.

But the edge is still Out there. Or maybe it’s In. The association of motorcycles with LSD is no accident of publicity. They are both a means to an end, to the place of definitions.”

This is fine, pure stuff; a razor-sharp excellence that’s difficult to remain standing on, because it eventually cuts deeply and makes you bleed . . .

Four
This is my HST--and as previously noted, it may not be yours. No one can continue to write at that white-hot level; it’s simply not possible. In recent years, my HST slowed down, going dormant like a volcano that occasionally erupts. My HST began to worry about his Place In Literature and started assembling his letters and essays. The news and views from Woody Creek became less and less frequent and saying that HST was basically Past It is neither unfair or cruel. But like that kid at the conclusion of My Favorite Year, I won’t remember the later HST; it’ll be the swashbuckling version that I’ll keep close by for inspiration.

I’m certain I’d be someone very different today had I not read and felt HST. Maybe better, maybe worse--but different. Because of this, it seemed fitting to grind this little techno-endeavor to a halt--to create a different kind of memorial marking an important passing. And I needed to balance the Zen with thanks that was a long time coming.

Epitaph. In memoriams always require an epitaph. The truest way is to look to HST himself. The Media will be filled soon enough with 20-second sound-bites and short, punchy summations that reduce his life to a Classics Illustrated comic book--or a Doonesbury cartoon. What I thought of before the news of his death had faded from the tube was HST’s own appreciation of his friend, radical lawyer Oscar Acosta. It seems, well, right:

"There goes one of God's prototypes; a mutant, never intended for mass production."

Okay, we’re done here: No edits, no changes.

Thanks, Hunter.

Comments

[Bradley Laboe]

I will miss him ... BIG HUG for Juan, Jen, Willam and Anita… who will never be able to fill the hole left in there lives by the man in spite of the myth and legend attached to his life..

I am a long time friend of Juan we went to the Aspen Community School together I have been using the blogs to try to send a message of love to him and the family but I know he is totally swamped because of the media attention at Owl farm and I need to let him know that we care for Him, Anita and the whole family in this time of tragedy while respecting his privacy

Let's see if we can get the word out ...
He was first THE MAN….
He became the myth and legend
To me he was several people.
He was my best friend’s dad although he always called his dad Hunter
(At Juan’s wedding he said to a friend about me “Look there’s another little bastard I raised that turned out OK”)
He was Hunter S. Thompson retiring shy southerner who loved guns and his freedom
And
He was the Dr. Gonzo who we all know who would be in your face and try to kill you if you attempted to try to take away his guns, drugs, freedom, privacy and the god given right to go into an explosive tirade about it.

To be such a person required him to have a unique emotional support structure. These people now need our support, love and understanding in this time of grief.

Bradley Laboe

[Fraser Macdonald]

Thanks Kevin, well said. It's been years since I first read that piece about The Edge, but it's never left me. Hunter's work gets in your DNA like that -- thanks for expressing it so eloquently.

[zo]

you did it. good job, kev. the man is here.

[Penny]

That's perfect, an absolutely perfect montage of Hunter Thompson, poet and madman, realist and dreamer, a man who was a sign post for a generation. And I so agree with you re Jon Stewart, look at what his honest plea did to Crossfire. (That puppet show was to televised journalism as Howard Stern was to radio journalism: so glad both have gone up in flames.