(no subject)
Feb. 21st, 2005 02:09 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dexfarkinHunter S Thompson killed himself today.
The only thing I have to say is that I never knew it would actually bother me.
See, Hunter's been a mad old bastard for years, coasting on a reputation and enjoying the occasionally whiparound after waving his gun at the local sheriff. Most of what he was involves bullshit, self-promotion and nonsense.
But this was a man that skewered American politics at it's most fucking reprehensible and destructive in FEAR AND LOATHING ON THE CAMPAIGN TRAIL '72. The same man who glorified and villified the drug culture in FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS. The same man who tore open his guts and laid bare what happens to eighteen year old idealists in THE RUM DIARIES.
This was man that I read less than five weeks before accepting that I was never going to be an artist, and that journalism was not solely about sucking Josh Harnett's cock waiting for the spelunge in the eye. That maybe what journalism was about involved more than rewriting AP releases and corporate memos.
Gallager and Guckett get White House press passes, and HST shoots himself in the head.
Maybe he was right...
The only thing I have to say is that I never knew it would actually bother me.
See, Hunter's been a mad old bastard for years, coasting on a reputation and enjoying the occasionally whiparound after waving his gun at the local sheriff. Most of what he was involves bullshit, self-promotion and nonsense.
But this was a man that skewered American politics at it's most fucking reprehensible and destructive in FEAR AND LOATHING ON THE CAMPAIGN TRAIL '72. The same man who glorified and villified the drug culture in FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS. The same man who tore open his guts and laid bare what happens to eighteen year old idealists in THE RUM DIARIES.
This was man that I read less than five weeks before accepting that I was never going to be an artist, and that journalism was not solely about sucking Josh Harnett's cock waiting for the spelunge in the eye. That maybe what journalism was about involved more than rewriting AP releases and corporate memos.
Gallager and Guckett get White House press passes, and HST shoots himself in the head.
Maybe he was right...
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2005-02-21 01:06 pm (UTC)Maybe he was right...
Well, that's about the stupidest thing you've said in like, ever.
no subject
Date: 2005-02-21 01:43 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-02-21 05:59 pm (UTC)The fact that the man hadn't really done anything that reverberated with the power of his earlier works in 15 years or so in no way lessens the impact of the body of his work. I find it a damn pity that he didn't continue to use that piercing, warped insight, or was so burned out that he couldn't (or didn't) express it.
The best part of him was that although his stuff reeked of the death of idealism, it was still written from the heart of an idealist. How he must have suffered for it.