RARWRITER PUBLISHING GROUP PRESENTS

CREATIVE CULTURE JOURNAL

at www.RARWRITER.com      

--------------------"The best source on the web for what's real in arts and entertainment" ---------------------------

Volume 1-2016

MUSIC    BOOKS    FINE ARTS   FILM   THE WORLD

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ABOUT RAR: For those of you new to this site, "RAR" is Rick Alan Rice, the publisher of the RARWRITER Publishing Group websites. Use this link to visit the RAR music page, which features original music compositions and other.

Use this link to visit Rick Alan Rice's publications page, which features excerpts from novels and other.

RARADIO

(Click here)

Currently on RARadio:

"On to the Next One" by Jacqueline Van Bierk

"I See You Tiger" by Via Tania

"Lost the Plot" by Amoureux"

Bright Eyes, Black Soul" by The Lovers Key

"Cool Thing" by Sassparilla

"These Halls I Dwell" by Michael Butler

"St. Francis"by Tom Russell & Gretchen Peters, performance by Gretchen Peters and Barry Walsh; 

"Who Do You Love?"by Elizabeth Kay; 

"Rebirth"by Caterpillars; 

"Monica's Frock" by Signel-Z; 

"Natural Disasters" by Corey Landis; 

"1,000 Leather Tassels" by The Blank Tapes; 

"We Are All Stone" and "Those Machines" by Outer Minds; 

"Another Dream" by MMOSS; "Susannah" by Woolen Kits; 

Jim Morrison, Elvis Presley, Michael Jackson and other dead celebrities / news by A SECRET PARTY;

"I Miss the Day" by My Secret Island,  

"Carriers of Light" by Brendan James;

"The Last Time" by Model Stranger;

"Last Call" by Jay;

"Darkness" by Leonard Cohen; 

"Sweetbread" by Simian Mobile Disco and "Keep You" fromActress off the Chronicle movie soundtrack; 

"Goodbye to Love" from October Dawn; 

Trouble in Mind 2011 label sampler; 

Black Box Revelation Live on Minnesota Public Radio;

Apteka "Striking Violet"; 

Mikal Cronin's "Apathy" and "Get Along";

Dana deChaby's progressive rock

 

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Rick Alan Rice (RAR) Literature Page

ATWOOD - "A Toiler's Weird Odyssey of Deliverance" -AVAILABLE NOW FOR KINDLE (INCLUDING KINDLE COMPUTER APPS) FROM AMAZON.COM. Use this link.

CCJ Publisher Rick Alan Rice dissects the building of America in a trilogy of novels collectively calledATWOOD. Book One explores the development of the American West through the lens of public policy, land planning, municipal development, and governance as it played out in one of the new counties of Kansas in the latter half of the 19th Century. The novel focuses on the religious and cultural traditions that imbued the American Midwest with a special character that continues to have a profound effect on American politics to this day. Book One creates an understanding about America's cultural foundations that is further explored in books two and three that further trace the historical-cultural-spiritual development of one isolated county on the Great Plains that stands as an icon in the development of a certain brand of American character. That's the serious stuff viewed from high altitude. The story itself gets down and dirty with the supernatural, which in ATWOOD - A Toiler's Weird Odyssey of Deliveranceis the outfall of misfires in human interactions, from the monumental to the sublime. The book features the epic poem "The Toiler" as well as artwork by New Mexico artist Richard Padilla.

Elmore Leonard Meets Larry McMurtry

Western Crime Novel

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I am offering another novel through Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing service. Cooksin is the story of a criminal syndicate that sets its sights on a ranching/farming community in Weld County, Colorado, 1950. The perpetrators of the criminal enterprise steal farm equipment, slaughter cattle, and rob the personal property of individuals whose assets have been inventoried in advance and distributed through a vast system of illegal commerce.

It is a ripping good yarn, filled with suspense and intrigue. This was designed intentionally to pay homage to the type of creative works being produced in 1950, when the story is set. Richard Padilla has done his usually brilliant work in capturing the look and feel of a certain type of crime fiction being produced in that era. The whole thing has the feel of those black & white films you see on Turner Movie Classics, and the writing will remind you a little of Elmore Leonard, whose earliest works were westerns. Use this link.

 

EXPLORE THE KINDLE BOOK LIBRARY

If you have not explored the books available from Amazon.com's Kindle Publishing division you would do yourself a favor to do so. You will find classic literature there, as well as tons of privately published books of every kind. A lot of it is awful, like a lot of traditionally published books are awful, but some are truly classics. You can get the entire collection of Shakespeare's works for two bucks.

You do not need to buy a Kindle to take advantage of this low-cost library. Use this link to go to an Amazon.com page from which you can download for free a Kindle App for your computer, tablet, or phone.

Amazon is the largest, but far from the only digital publisher. You can find similar treasure troves atNOOK Press (the Barnes & Noble site), Lulu, and others.


 

 

       

 

Hunter S. Thompson: Weird is Not Enough
PREFACE: As perhaps this article on the late writer Hunter S. Thompson shows, I have probably lived in the San Francisco area for way too long. Just the use of the first person pronoun would indicate as much. All of "the City's" media outlets present everything that happens in the world as somehow being indexed to San Francisco, the center of the universe, and so my sense for who Hunter S. Thompson became is really all about here. I have become infected. Louisville, Kentucky-native Hunter S. Thompson was not a San Francisco guy by any stretch of the imagination, but it was here that he came to public prominence. After living in Puerto Rico and writing pieces as a stringer for the New York Herald Tribune, Thompson came to Big Sur in 1961, where he worked as a security guard and wrote pieces about that area's Bohemian culture for Rogue magazine. Big Sur is a four-hour drive to San Francisco - half-way to Los Angeles - but in its collective imagination, and in its pop-culture identity, San Francisco is one with Big Sur and Monterey. His emersion into a drug culture that had been around forever in some form, but in that period was being changed by the distribution of new highs, most notably LSD, did much to shape him. LSD was legal to produce in the U.S. until 1970. In Berkeley, there was a guy named Owsley Stanley who was doing electronics work for The Grateful Dead, and recording their live shows, and after being introduced to LSD proponent Ken Kesey, Stanley became the world's largest single private producer of the hallucinogenic drug. Between 1965 and 1967, Stanley produced a million doses of Acid, and everybody who grew up in the Bay Area has Owsley Acid stories. Anyway, I slipped away from the subject of this story for a moment there and started writing about San Francisco... See how it works? Returning to Thompson, who isn't half as interesting as San Francisco, he moved to South America for a time and wrote articles for the National Observer, lived briefly in Aspen, Colorado, to which he would return, and then moved his family to San Francisco in 1964. Nation Magazine hired Thompson, in 1965, to write an article ("The Motorcycle Gangs: Losers and Outsiders") on the California outlaw-biker gang Hell's Angels. Thompson began getting book offers to write about the group, which was not an assignment that many writers were willing to take. Thompson rode with Hells Angels for more than a year before publishing Hell's Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs in 1966. The book made Thompson a celebrity, providing the platforms that he needed to exploit the character that he had created of himself. It was one that wore pretty thin over time, and must have been a huge burden to bear. He committed suicide in Woody Creek, Colorado in 1965, shooting himself in the head with a revolver while talking on the telephone with his wife.

By RAR

I recall going into the trendy garden lifestyle mail order operation Smith & Hawken, in Mill Valley, California back around 1988 and seeing a sign posted there, in one of the cubicles of the managers of that operation, that stated something I found to be extraordinarily profound. It read "Weird is not enough".

Weird had huge cache in the San Francisco Bay area for quite some time, and to some extent still does even today. The City, particularly in the 1960s, almost personified the power of "weird". It was a key factor to the various agents of societal change that found their root in "Babylon By the Bay", as the late San Francisco newspaper columnist Herb Caen dubbed it. The Beat writers of the 1950s found strength here, as did the LSD gurus (Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters), the Hippies of the 1967 Summer of Love, the Gays of the Castro District, and the political activists of the Free Speech movement. Some of what blossomed was as substantive and authentic as Lawrence Ferlinghetti's City Lights Bookstore and its publishing outlet, but growing up alongside whatever legitimate expressions of cultural creativity and change the Bay Area fostered were layers of superficiality that likely could not have flourished anywhere else in the U.S. Some of it, like Smith & Hawken, which ceased operation in 2009, could not survive the Gamma Ray realities of real life. The Hippie movement died almost as quickly as it had begun, leaving a carnage of wasted youth and ill-conceived values. By the 1970s, "the City", as locals used to like to call San Francisco - who would become enraged should the name of the city be shortened to "Frisco" - was about as legitimate as Finocchios and Beach Blanket Babylon, mere tourist attractions along an Embarcadero that no longer functioned as a port of cultural maritime exchange so much as it did a Disneyland version of alternative lifestyles. San Francisco became a place unaffordable to those artists and creative types who were reduced to ghosts of times past. It became a center of Young Urban Professionals, or Yuppies - the cynical counterpart to the progressive edge of the Yippie movement which seemed to inspire the acronym they adopted.

In fact, by the time Rolling Stone Magazine was established in San Francisco (1967), the City by the Bay was cranking out a pretty thin veneer of what it meant to be "hip". You had the torn remnants of the Merry Pranksters, chronicled by Tom Wolfe, dapper in his white suits; holdovers from the Beat Generation, notably Allen Ginsberg; and you had Hunter S. Thompson. And, of course, you had Rolling Stone's founder Jann Wenner, who helped turn rock music journalism into a "legitimate" calling, and helped to create a form of political reportage that over time changed the nature of his music journal into a leftist polemic. Literary vitality, however, was dead in San Francisco by the end of the Viet Nam War (1974). The City became a place that mostly celebrated itself from within its own bubble of shallow self regard, as epitomized by Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City. The Barbary Coast, as San Francisco's red light district had been known in the 19th and early 20th centuries, became an artifact of history, replaced by the tourist magnet of Fisherman's Wharf, with its Ghirardelli chocolates, its seafood restaurants, and its odd museums, including Ripley's Believe it or Not, the Musée Mécanique, and its Wax Museum. Pier 39 blossomed as a confection of tourist memorabilia and sweets shops. San Francisco, the once-vital center of progressive, sophisticated intellectualism, became as superficial and phony as the "creatives" it attracted and spawned. That arc very much mirrors the professional journey of Hunter S. Thompson.

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Creatives - American economist and social scientist Richard Florida, a professor and head of the Martin Prosperity Institute at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, came up with the idea of a "Creative Class". In his construction, "creatives" are a key driving force for economic development of post-industrial cities in the United States. Florida argued that for a city to attract the Creative Class, it must possess "the three 'T's": Talent (a highly talented/educated/skilled population), Tolerance (a diverse community, which has a 'live and let live' ethos), and Technology (the technological infrastructure necessary to fuel an entrepreneurial culture). In Rise of the Creative Class, Florida argued that members of the Creative Class value meritocracy, diversity and individuality, and look for these characteristics when they relocate.

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One of the stories you hear about Hunter S. Thompson was that he learned to write by re-typing the works of Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald. He wanted to experience what it felt like to write great works. That is akin to playing in a Beatles cover band to gain insight into what it might be like to have been John Lennon. It may work, on some superficial level, but it cannot transform a mere player into a creative artist. While Thompson's approach to literary education probably improved his typing skills, it certainly did not turn Hunter S. Thompson into a literary genius. His focus was not so much that of an artist as it was on vomited insights that were obvious to everybody who saw the things that were going on it the worlds on which he reported. Thompson, who had one novel to his credit (The Rum Diary) was not a literary phenomenon, but rather was a journalism phenomenon, and his journalistic writings were ungoverned responses to what he saw as evil in the world. His stock-in-trade was to blurt out the words that most people would be too cautious to use. In his fear and loathing books and in his reporting on subjects ranging from the Kentucky Derby to Richard Nixon, Thompson gushed language from his fevered dream of drug-fueled outrage. His was a surrealist's view of a nightmare realm in which people behaved with unenlightened self-interests, committing cruelties against every aspect of mankind. His stories were not so much about his subjects as they were about his own reaction to dealing with them.   

To his devoted fans, and those whose sense of personal identity was somehow tied up with their association with Hunter Thompson - Johnny Depp, Gary Busey, Sean Penn, John Cusack, Bill Murray, the people of Aspen, Colorado - Hunter S. Thompson was a touchstone of authenticity and honesty. Outside of that bubble, Thompson was a caricature, a superficial joke. David Letterman, who had Thompson on his show occasionally, was way too smart for his bullshit, and he had no inclination to pretend otherwise. One suspects that Letterman was not afraid of the Gonzo journalist, where most of those who associated themselves with him probably were. Thompson, an exhibitionist, was predictably outrageous. One could get hurt being in his company. It makes one wonder if his celebrity hangers-on didn't function as victims of Stockholm Syndrome. Bill Clinton once upbraided Thompson for his pro-drug ethos, after which Thompson became a Clinton hater, convinced that the left-of-center Democrat would leave a permanent stain on the office of the President of the United States. Now there's a bit of cultural-political irony, with the purposeful tarnisher pointing disdainfully at the soiled spot.

Thompson represented a touchstone of the liberated 1960s, and so some people felt that if they were to share that patina they would do well to associate themselves with him. Others, like 1972 presidential candidate George McGovern, who had found a rare journalistic ally in Thompson, embraced him as someone they could talk to, even if their conversations didn't make much sense. (George McGovern was the first person I ever voted for, but he lost in a landslide to the corrupt Richard Nixon after striking out with his first choice for Vice President, Sen. Thomas Eagleton, who had to be dumped from the ticket when his hospitalizations for depression were revealed in the press.)

Thompson participated, in print, in personal-political badinage. He said this about Richard Nixon, who to Thompson was the personification of evil: "Richard Nixon represents the dark side of the 'American Dream'. Richard Nixon stands, for me, as everything that I would not want to have happen to myself, or to be, or to be around. He is everything that I not only have contempt for, but that I think should be stomped out." He could have been talking about himself, as in the "Fear and Loathing of Hunter S. Thompson" by Hunter S. Thompson, because he went through life thinking about his eventual suicide, planning and anticipating it. His idol Ernest Hemingway had taken his own life when he reached aged 60 - a cultural-historical touchstone that Thompson had written about in the National Observer. Thompson had flamed out as a writer after 1974. He was sent by Rolling Stone to Zaire to cover the Muhammad Ali-George Foreman heavyweight championship fight - "the Rumble in the Jungle" - but never made it to the event, spending his time intoxicated in his hotel room instead. He failed to deliver an article and was never really effective as a writer after that, though he covered the final days of the War in Viet Nam and in 1992 did stories on the Clarence Thomas nomination to the Supreme Court and on presidential candidate Bill Clinton.

Thompson felt that journalism was not that credible next to being a novelist, and he tried his hand at it one last time in an unfinished work called Polo Is My Life, an excerpt from which was published in Rolling Stone in 1994. It was about a guy who runs a porn theater in San Francisco.

Hunter S. Thompson: No Angel

Hunter S. Thompson's marketing of his Hells Angel book became the launching pad for his career, providing a template for his "Gonzo" celebrity nature, while also precursing his eventual failures as a solid professional. His profits from the book were torpedoed by his tendency to show up intoxicated for publication events. It didn't help that his reportage of the rape culture of the Hells Angels was in direct contradiction with a burgeoning women's movement that viewed his reportage of the Angels violent activities with contempt. The Angels themselves weren't too thrilled by Thompson's reporting on the wife-beating proclivities of one of its members. Sick of what they came to see as Thompson's exploitation of them for his own gain, they beat him up after the book was published, more or less ending their relationship with him. Before that happened, there were some strange marketing exploitations, including a confrontation staged between a Hells Angel member and Thompson for Canadian television.

 

 

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Copyright © November, 2018 Rick Alan Rice (RARWRITER)