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.
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 inATWOOD
- 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.
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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.
________________________
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.
_________________________
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.