Uhhh!! Have you seen Ozzy lately? You know his Birthday was Dec.3. He’s getting close to acting like Mohamed Ali…The guy can barely talk, and he breaks down and cries at the drop of hat.
HST … at least he can tie his shoes and walk around still.
Hunter Stockton Thompson has beeen called the greatest degenerate of the twentieth century.
Oh yeah E. Jean Carroll put a great picture in the book Hunter: The Strange and Savage Life of Hunter S. Thompson. It has HST with Oscar Zeta Acosta at 3 a.m. in a Caesars Palace bar on April 26, 1971, With a caption reading "Yes it is all True. But Worse.
It’s not a Vegas nightclub, Thompson’s having a flashback to Haight-Ashbury and the first time he did acid. He talks about the first time he did acid in the bathroom of a bar (The guy who hooks him up is played by Lyle Lovett in the movie.) and a stranger walks in and sees Thompson snorting the acid off Lyle Lovett’s sleeve. In the background of the scene, which Eats_Crayons gets right except for the location, you can see Grace Slick of Jefferson Airplane/Jefferson Starship/Starship fame singing White Rabbit.
Ahhhh… that’s right! Depp had more hair in that scene too for the flashback purpose.
Note: When I went to see that film, I developed a migraine just as I was taking my seat. Of all movies to see on the big screen when you have a migraine… < insert pukey-face icon here >
Actually ozzy is like that because of alcohol not the drugs drinking was ozzy’s biggest problem and HST was a full on tripper and it really does mess with your head when you push the limits and also you have to recognise the purity of drugs like lsd at the time when he was does them.
This is a nice zombie. I am a huge fan of the film and Hunter’s books. Depp was incredible in that movie, IMO. I think Hunter was at times very incisive…but he was also full of shit too. Fear and Loathing is a random, addled and hilarious mish-mash of half-truths, partly recollected experiences, exaggerations and embellishments in my eyes.
Well, as long as this is up and running, I’ll recommend Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr Hunter S Thompson. It’s a great documentary on Hunter and when Johnny impersonates him, you almost can’t tell the difference.
This entire passage (shortened here for brevity) has always seemed to stand out as a damned fine piece of writing…the kind of perfect wordsmithing that everyone who has ever “wanted to write” wishes they could achieve. Even HST couldn’t do it all the time - one has to wade through a lot of incomprehensible dross in his work to dig out these occasional gems. Thompson’s essay “Midnight on the Coast Highway” rises to the same level. I have not found too many other writers of his stripe that could achieve these flashes of pure brilliance. Edward Abbey came close in some of his essays, and Tim Cahill (another Rolling Stone alumnis) could sometimes manage it, although he is altogether a more subdued personality than Thompson. There are probably others working today that can produce that same feeling of clarity and vision in their writing, but none come to mind.
Thompson always said the wave passage was the best thing he ever wrote. Despite all the other insanity, he was serious about writing and he struggled with the fact that he was a caricature for most of his career. The way I see it, Thompson did plenty of drugs but in his books he uses drugged perceptions as a way of showing what it was like to be in a particular place and time and as a way to bring out the undercurrents and tensions in a scene. That’s what he’s really doing when he writes about all the drugs he and Zeta Acosta (or others) were doing, and in his best stuff, he does it very well. Some of the drug intake had to have been real, but the real and fictional drug use is in the books for literary purposes.
Thompson’s style - the whole Gonzo Journalism thing - was about putting the author and his perceptions at the center of the story. If you read a few of his stories (especially if they include The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved), you start to get a sense of where the reality probably was and what’s been enhanced.
I remember rolling stone magazine republishing this when Michael Jackson and his one glove were big. Rolling Stone pointed out that The Brown Buffalo far predated Jackson for the trend.
It’s obvious that some of the posters don’t know that Hunter S Thompson blew his brains out on 20 Feb 2005. Wiki has a decent page on Hunter: Hunter S. Thompson - Wikipedia
<ten year old nitpick> Not Lyle Lovett - the man in the bathroom was played by Flea from the Red Hot Chili Peppers. </nitpick]
I had a brief fascination with HST about a year ago, and concluded that I wouldn’t want to spend more than ten minutes with the man, but at least it would be an interesting ten minutes. It’s rare to be that big of an asshole and still be such a colorful, magnetic character.
Someone had asked WHO portrayed Hunter S. Thompson better, Bill Murray or Johnny Depp. That’s a real photo finish because in my opinion they both did an amazing job. But mind you, as are most of the others commenting on this topic, I did not know Thompson. I can only speculate from interviews I’ve seen with him and Documentaries. Murray is one hell of a funny guy and Depp is nothing short of a chameleon the way he can slip in and out of any part and sell it completely. But from what I’ve heard, both had spent a lot of time with HST preparing for their roles which turned into a deep long lasting friendship for each. If I had to pick one I’d probably toss a coin to decide because they both nailed it.
An old co-worker of mine claims to have met Thompson at a bar in Colorado. Bet on a game of pool and when Thompson lost, he wrote the guy a check, figuring that he’d rather have Thompson’s autograph than $25.
Check out Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo, by Oscar Zeta Acosta, the actual person referred to as the “Samoan attorney” in Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas.
Sad story, but very interesting.
So Thompson wakes up at the one hotel, finds the lawyer gone, a stack of room service bills and decides to beat town. He gets pulled over in the desert by Gary Busey (who for some reason asks Thompson to kiss him–I never understood that. Was it a “police are homosexuals” insult?) who tells him to sleep it off at a rest area.
Thompson goes to a pay phone and calls his lawyer who is still in an office wearing a suit, not hungover and not near dead like he was hours before. The lawyer tells Thompson that he has a suite booked at a different hotel for the narcotics conference. Thompson heads back to Vegas, goes into the suite, where the lawyer is already there (with the 13 year old girl) and already bombed out of his mind.
The timeline just doesn’t work. Was it part of the intoxicating effects of the drugs? I couldn’t follow that.
