Here are a few more thoughts from Hunter. He was not always right....but then he was only seldom wrong:
Hunter S Thompson on work ..."Absolute truth is a very rare and dangerous commodity in the context of professional journalism." "The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There's also a negative side." "Publishers are notoriously slothful about numbers, unless they're attached to dollar signs - unlike journalists, quarterbacks, and felony criminal defendants who tend to be keenly aware of numbers at all times." "I have no taste for either poverty or honest labour, so writing is the only recourse left for me." "I've always considered writing the most hateful kind of work. I suspect it's a bit like f**king, which is only fun for amateurs. Old whores don't do much giggling." "I have a theory that the truth is never told during the nine-to-five hours.... on drugs ...You can turn your back on a person, but never turn your back on a drug, especially when its waving a razor sharp hunting knife in your eye.I have always loved marijuana. It has been a source of joy and comfort to me for many years. And I still think of it as a basic staple of life, along with beer and ice and grapefruits - and millions of Americans agree with me.There is nothing more helpless and irresponsible than a man in the depths of an ether binge." Good mescaline comes on slow. The first hour is all waiting, then about halfway through the second hour you start cursing the creep who burned you, because nothing is happening...and then ZANG! I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they've always worked for me.
America: just a nation of two hundred million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns and no qualms about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable. We cannot expect people to have respect for law and order until we teach respect to those we have entrusted to enforce those laws. We have become a Nazi monster in the eyes of the whole world - bullies and bastards who would rather kill than live peacefully. We are whores for power and oil with hate and fear in our hearts... lifestyle advice ...Going to trial with a lawyer who considers your whole lifestyle a crime-in-progress is not a happy prospect. The person who doesn't scatter the morning dew will not comb grey hairs. He that is taught only by himself has a fool for a master. Anytime there's a big sporting event, go to either the winning or losing town; there'll be riots in both of them. Riots are fun. Avoid being seized by the police. The cops are not your friends. Don't tell them anything. Have an objective to give your bender a theme. For instance, stalking and killing a wild pig with a bowie knife. Register at a hotel under a pseudonym, and then rent two convertibles - a Porsche and a green Cadillac - so you can switch cars when things start to go bad. Be sure to launch one of these cars off a steep hill. Don't have sex in the lobby - it's usually awkward. Call on God, but row away from the rocks. ... and finally ...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. For every moment of triumph, for every instance of beauty, many souls must be trampled. A word to the wise is infuriating. When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro. Some may never live, but the crazy never die.
Thursday, February 24, 2005
ADS EMBEDDED IN NEWS STORIES RAISE CONCERNS
In the never-ending pursuit of profits, online sites are generating
new revenues by selling advertisements that appear when users click on
certain keywords, but when the practice is extended to words in news
articles, critics say it could create the impression that advertisers are
influencing the reporting. Business news articles in yesterday's online New
York Post included words highlighted and underlined in green, which, when a
mouse was rolled over them, produced a box with a link to the "sponsor's"
Web site. Aly Colón, who teaches journalistic ethics at the Poynter
Institute, says the biggest risk may be alienating readers: "If we want to
be taken seriously for the work that we do as journalists, we should try to
devise a way of presenting our material so that the users, the readers,
know that we are first and foremost about the news." A Nielsen/NetRatings
analyst says news organizations' recent experimentation with embedded
advertising reflects a dearth of online advertising opportunities: "There
is definitely a shortage of supply [of online content]. That leads to this
kind of experimentation." (New York Times 24 Feb 2005)
In the never-ending pursuit of profits, online sites are generating
new revenues by selling advertisements that appear when users click on
certain keywords, but when the practice is extended to words in news
articles, critics say it could create the impression that advertisers are
influencing the reporting. Business news articles in yesterday's online New
York Post included words highlighted and underlined in green, which, when a
mouse was rolled over them, produced a box with a link to the "sponsor's"
Web site. Aly Colón, who teaches journalistic ethics at the Poynter
Institute, says the biggest risk may be alienating readers: "If we want to
be taken seriously for the work that we do as journalists, we should try to
devise a way of presenting our material so that the users, the readers,
know that we are first and foremost about the news." A Nielsen/NetRatings
analyst says news organizations' recent experimentation with embedded
advertising reflects a dearth of online advertising opportunities: "There
is definitely a shortage of supply [of online content]. That leads to this
kind of experimentation." (New York Times 24 Feb 2005)
Bill Berkowitz writes that the Center for Media and Democracy's
"sleuths of spin John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton have exposed how
corporate shills and government spokespersons manipulate the media
and undermine democracy for more than a decade," and are now
"setting about an ambitious - yet necessary - undertaking:
reinventing journalism." Berkowitz interviews Center founder Stauber
about recent media scandals involving PR, payola, and fake
journalists. They also discuss SourceWatch, "an information source
that is truly 'of, by and for the people,'" and other ways the
Center works to further media democracy.
SOURCE: Alternet, February 22, 2005
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
http://www.prwatch.org/node/3300
"sleuths of spin John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton have exposed how
corporate shills and government spokespersons manipulate the media
and undermine democracy for more than a decade," and are now
"setting about an ambitious - yet necessary - undertaking:
reinventing journalism." Berkowitz interviews Center founder Stauber
about recent media scandals involving PR, payola, and fake
journalists. They also discuss SourceWatch, "an information source
that is truly 'of, by and for the people,'" and other ways the
Center works to further media democracy.
SOURCE: Alternet, February 22, 2005
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
http://www.prwatch.org/node/3300
Tuesday, February 22, 2005
The Gonzo has died. We watched part of the film Fear and Loathing in Los Vagas last term - which is part of the story of a man who changed journalism in our times.
Here is the obituary from his home town paper:
Flamboyant Thompson was 'promise unfulfilled'
Littwin: Thompson true to caricature he created
Ripples spread far from writer's work
Thompson dissected the illness of a nation going out of control
By Duane Davis, Special to the News
February 22, 2005
I first came across Hunter Thompson's writing just before I got out of the Army in 1967.
I was just starting to get curious about beatniks and hippies and, having already read Kerouac and Ginsberg and Burroughs, was easily taken in by a book with the lurid (and alluring) title, Hell's Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs.
It was a good book, but not a great one. The main problem seemed to be that the writing didn't quite measure up to the material, that the author was not equal to his subject.
What I wanted were words as wild and dangerous as the ideas, people and events being described. I wanted sentences and paragraphs that whipped off the page and assaulted what I knew already, what I'd been taught about the way things are.
What I wanted from Thompson, it turned out, was still a few years away, but when it came, it descended like the whirlwind on Job. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream (1971), was just what I was looking for.
The '60s were dead and gone. The Age of Aquarius had started to shift into moral malaise and counterculture collapse. Hippies were poised to become businessmen: dealing drugs or enlightenment or some weird combination of the two. The Silent Majority had roused from its slumbers and was looking for payback.
It had been crazy. It was about to get crazier. And just when it seemed like it might be a good time to cash out, Hunter Thompson came into his own.
In the '70s, reading Thompson was a rite of passage. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was quickly followed by Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72. Taken together, the books were fever charts of an America gone bad in the head and sick in the heart. Thompson was onto something: power, drugs, and madness; paranoia, megalomania and an arrogance not seen since the last days of the Roman Empire. He knew the names of the beast: Amerika, Vietnam, Watts, Newark, Columbia, Watergate, the Chicago Seven, SDS, the Black Panthers.
Thompson's writing was a mirror held up to our own faces contorted in the paroxysms of what we expected to be the end of the world. Thompson wrote it all down, and no matter how weird he got, it was never weird enough: Real life always sneaked past and waited around the corner with something even crazier, sicker, more dangerous. So we read Thompson as a form of self-diagnosis. While we were taking his pulse, we were checking our own.
Thompson wasn't the first. He wasn't even particularly the best. But he was the craziest.
If you wanted Edge, real edge, you read the Good Doctor.
We survived the '70s. So did Thompson. He continued to write and eventually the shelf came to hold a number of books: Four volumes of the Gonzo Papers: The Great Shark Hunt, Generation of Swine, Songs of the Doomed, and Better Than Sex; two collections of letters: The Proud Highway and Fear and Loathing in America; and, in the last couple of years, Kingdom of Fear and Hey Rube.
For a few years, Thompson had been carefully defining himself as a writer rather than reporter. Some said this was a way for him to avoid being to taken to task for a career of sloppy journalism and made-up "news" stories.
My take is a little kinder. The Good Doctor knew that "journalism" is what goes into newspapers: read in an hour and tossed aside. What he wrote, especially the two Fear And Loathing books and the first two collections in the Gonzo Papers, attempt literature.
He was a Jeremiah for our time, a crazed, coked-up, gun-totin' prophet. He shouted, I think, in order to make us hear. And now that the Good Doctor has left the office, you better believe that, wherever he has gone, they're going to need to lay in a good supply of earplugs. He went out shouting - and there are a lot of us left behind who can still hear him, raging into that good night.
Duane Davis is co-owner of Wax Trax Records and a News book critic. He reviewed Thompson's "Kingdom of Fear" in 2002.
Hunter S. Thompson dies
Last Updated Mon, 21 Feb 2005 17:31:24 EST
CBC Arts
ASPEN, COLO. - Hunter S. Thompson, the U.S. writer who pioneered the super-subjective form of journalism known as "gonzo," has killed himself, his son said.
In a statement released to the Aspen Daily News, Juan Thompson said his father shot himself to death in his home in Aspen, Colo., on Sunday night. He was 67.
Hunter Thompson, centre, with Benicio Del Toro, left, and Johnny Depp at a New York premiere for the film adaptation of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. (AP Photo/Kathy Willens)
"Hunter prized his privacy and we ask that his friends and admirers respect that privacy as well as that of his family," his son said in the statement.
The newspaper said the Pitkin County police confirmed the suicide.
Thompson is credited with pioneering "gonzo journalism," a highly subjective and over-the-top style that makes writers – and their opinions – essential parts of the narrative.
He first vaulted to fame with his non-fiction book Hell's Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs (1966) – after riding with the bikers for a year to gather material.
But he's most famous for Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1972) – which purported to be a work of fiction, but was a thinly disguised, gonzo compilation of two road trips that Hunter made to Las Vegas with a friend.
In their trunk, according to the book: "Two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half-full of cocaine and a whole galaxy of multicolored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers. ...A quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of Budweiser, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls" – all of which they manage to consume on the short trip.
A gifted chronicler of depravity in American Life, some of Thompson's other works included Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail (1973) – about the 1972 presidential election campaign between Richard Nixon and George McGovern – and Generation of Swine: Tales of Shame and Degradation in the '80s (1989).
Thompson was born in 1937 in Louisville, Ky.
He served in the U.S. Air Force for a short time as a young man, then began working as a freelance journalist.
He seemed to have rubbed shoulders with almost every famous counterculture figure in the 1960s, from beat poet Allen Ginsberg to New Journalist Tom Wolfe to Ken Kesey (including hanging out with the Merry Pranksters and participating in Kesey's first LSD tests).
He inspired a number of films, including Where the Buffalo Roam (1980) with Bill Murray playing Thompson and British director Terry Gilliam's take on Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998), starring Johnny Depp as the Thompson character, Raoul Duke.
He was also the model for the character "Duke" in Garry Trudeau's comic strip Doonesbury.
Thompson's most recent book was Hey Rube: Blood Sport, the Bush Doctrine, and the Downward Spiral of Dumbness (2004).
Here is the obituary from his home town paper:
Flamboyant Thompson was 'promise unfulfilled'
Littwin: Thompson true to caricature he created
Ripples spread far from writer's work
Thompson dissected the illness of a nation going out of control
By Duane Davis, Special to the News
February 22, 2005
I first came across Hunter Thompson's writing just before I got out of the Army in 1967.
I was just starting to get curious about beatniks and hippies and, having already read Kerouac and Ginsberg and Burroughs, was easily taken in by a book with the lurid (and alluring) title, Hell's Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs.
It was a good book, but not a great one. The main problem seemed to be that the writing didn't quite measure up to the material, that the author was not equal to his subject.
What I wanted were words as wild and dangerous as the ideas, people and events being described. I wanted sentences and paragraphs that whipped off the page and assaulted what I knew already, what I'd been taught about the way things are.
What I wanted from Thompson, it turned out, was still a few years away, but when it came, it descended like the whirlwind on Job. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream (1971), was just what I was looking for.
The '60s were dead and gone. The Age of Aquarius had started to shift into moral malaise and counterculture collapse. Hippies were poised to become businessmen: dealing drugs or enlightenment or some weird combination of the two. The Silent Majority had roused from its slumbers and was looking for payback.
It had been crazy. It was about to get crazier. And just when it seemed like it might be a good time to cash out, Hunter Thompson came into his own.
In the '70s, reading Thompson was a rite of passage. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was quickly followed by Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72. Taken together, the books were fever charts of an America gone bad in the head and sick in the heart. Thompson was onto something: power, drugs, and madness; paranoia, megalomania and an arrogance not seen since the last days of the Roman Empire. He knew the names of the beast: Amerika, Vietnam, Watts, Newark, Columbia, Watergate, the Chicago Seven, SDS, the Black Panthers.
Thompson's writing was a mirror held up to our own faces contorted in the paroxysms of what we expected to be the end of the world. Thompson wrote it all down, and no matter how weird he got, it was never weird enough: Real life always sneaked past and waited around the corner with something even crazier, sicker, more dangerous. So we read Thompson as a form of self-diagnosis. While we were taking his pulse, we were checking our own.
Thompson wasn't the first. He wasn't even particularly the best. But he was the craziest.
If you wanted Edge, real edge, you read the Good Doctor.
We survived the '70s. So did Thompson. He continued to write and eventually the shelf came to hold a number of books: Four volumes of the Gonzo Papers: The Great Shark Hunt, Generation of Swine, Songs of the Doomed, and Better Than Sex; two collections of letters: The Proud Highway and Fear and Loathing in America; and, in the last couple of years, Kingdom of Fear and Hey Rube.
For a few years, Thompson had been carefully defining himself as a writer rather than reporter. Some said this was a way for him to avoid being to taken to task for a career of sloppy journalism and made-up "news" stories.
My take is a little kinder. The Good Doctor knew that "journalism" is what goes into newspapers: read in an hour and tossed aside. What he wrote, especially the two Fear And Loathing books and the first two collections in the Gonzo Papers, attempt literature.
He was a Jeremiah for our time, a crazed, coked-up, gun-totin' prophet. He shouted, I think, in order to make us hear. And now that the Good Doctor has left the office, you better believe that, wherever he has gone, they're going to need to lay in a good supply of earplugs. He went out shouting - and there are a lot of us left behind who can still hear him, raging into that good night.
Duane Davis is co-owner of Wax Trax Records and a News book critic. He reviewed Thompson's "Kingdom of Fear" in 2002.
Hunter S. Thompson dies
Last Updated Mon, 21 Feb 2005 17:31:24 EST
CBC Arts
ASPEN, COLO. - Hunter S. Thompson, the U.S. writer who pioneered the super-subjective form of journalism known as "gonzo," has killed himself, his son said.
In a statement released to the Aspen Daily News, Juan Thompson said his father shot himself to death in his home in Aspen, Colo., on Sunday night. He was 67.
Hunter Thompson, centre, with Benicio Del Toro, left, and Johnny Depp at a New York premiere for the film adaptation of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. (AP Photo/Kathy Willens)
"Hunter prized his privacy and we ask that his friends and admirers respect that privacy as well as that of his family," his son said in the statement.
The newspaper said the Pitkin County police confirmed the suicide.
Thompson is credited with pioneering "gonzo journalism," a highly subjective and over-the-top style that makes writers – and their opinions – essential parts of the narrative.
He first vaulted to fame with his non-fiction book Hell's Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs (1966) – after riding with the bikers for a year to gather material.
But he's most famous for Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1972) – which purported to be a work of fiction, but was a thinly disguised, gonzo compilation of two road trips that Hunter made to Las Vegas with a friend.
In their trunk, according to the book: "Two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half-full of cocaine and a whole galaxy of multicolored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers. ...A quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of Budweiser, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls" – all of which they manage to consume on the short trip.
A gifted chronicler of depravity in American Life, some of Thompson's other works included Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail (1973) – about the 1972 presidential election campaign between Richard Nixon and George McGovern – and Generation of Swine: Tales of Shame and Degradation in the '80s (1989).
Thompson was born in 1937 in Louisville, Ky.
He served in the U.S. Air Force for a short time as a young man, then began working as a freelance journalist.
He seemed to have rubbed shoulders with almost every famous counterculture figure in the 1960s, from beat poet Allen Ginsberg to New Journalist Tom Wolfe to Ken Kesey (including hanging out with the Merry Pranksters and participating in Kesey's first LSD tests).
He inspired a number of films, including Where the Buffalo Roam (1980) with Bill Murray playing Thompson and British director Terry Gilliam's take on Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998), starring Johnny Depp as the Thompson character, Raoul Duke.
He was also the model for the character "Duke" in Garry Trudeau's comic strip Doonesbury.
Thompson's most recent book was Hey Rube: Blood Sport, the Bush Doctrine, and the Downward Spiral of Dumbness (2004).
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