Song of the Sausage Creature
On my tombstone they will carve, "IT NEVER GOT FAST ENOUGH FOR ME."This hurts. He neglected the petty moralities and saw the real outrages as too appalling for ordinary writing. He may well be the canary in the coalmine.
Hunter S. Thompson Song of the Sausage Creature
A waste, may he find peace in a life well lived.
posted by Anthony at Monday, February 21, 2005
12 Comments:
canary in a coalmine??
2/22/2005 01:33:00 pm
frog in the ecosystem
rat in the ship
2/22/2005 01:46:00 pm
not mine.
2/22/2005 03:44:00 pm
coalnotyours?
2/22/2005 03:49:00 pm
"Why bother with newspapers, if this is all they offer? Agnew was right. The press is a gang of cruel faggots. Journalism is not a profession or a trade. It is a cheap catch-all for fuck-offs and misfits - a false doorway to the backside of life, a filthy piss-ridden little hole nailed off by the building inspector, but just deep enough for a wino to curl up from the sidewalk and masturbate like a chimp in a zoo-cage." From Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, by Dr Hunter S Thompson.
He made it all worthwhile. Jon Ronson has a good obit. in The Guardian:
http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0,6109,1419644,00.html
2/22/2005 10:37:00 pm
Streams of beautiful well-written bile don't come easy and are so rarely seen. There's not an ill-considered word there and look at the way the sentence build up a head full of clauses.
2/22/2005 11:30:00 pm
My friend Peter Martin handed me a beat-up, torn-up, chewed-up copy of “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.”
It was a clarion call, although to what was unclear.
For Peter and me, and many others who came of age in the pastel ghetto of the eighties, Hunter S. Thompson was a sort of pied piper— calling us to look hard at ugly truths and celebrating life at the verge of self-destruction. His prose and twisted vision was a time machine back to a decade when things seemed more real, more at risk. It took a while for that illusion to fade.
Thompson was a gateway drug—an invitation to Wolfe and Kesey and Mailer and more—onto Hemingway with an abandon beyond that somnolent tenth grade lit recitation.
There was more, of course. Colorado could call Hunter Thompson its own—especially in a time when gruesome, soulless suburbia had not yet metastasized upon the land and the body politic. Thompson’s Woody Creek milieu still had a bit of random, wanton wildness that made Colorado Colorado, not Iowa or New York or Los Angeles. And I would, time to time, run across Thompson’s son in Boulder, the way that everyone seemed to kinda know everyone, back when Boulder was fun and confused rather than trust funded and oh-so-sure of itself.
So Thompson grew to be a familiar sort of voice—particularly his political commentary. He reared back and leered at emperors’ sans clothing, even when they had them. He pierced the veil of artificiality of contrived democracy. No, scratch that. Thompson burned down the potemkin villages of our republic.
But only for those who would listen. Thompson told more truth about politicians and the process than any sane person could stomach. Too unpleasant, the undrawn conclusions. While Thompson was an unbeguiled witness, he vision did not change the world.
But it did change mine. His cratering prose about fast motorcycles—too fast motorcycles—must have burrowed deep into my adrenal recesses. He sung the praises of the Vincent Black Lightning, long the world’s fastest street bike, then years later churned out the “Song of the Sausage Creature” for Cycle World, a review of Ducati 900ss. Today, a Ducati 900ss, blood red and full of song, sits in my garage, waiting for a sunny day and another clarion call. When a cannon shot spreads his ashes across the Pitkin landscape, I’ll be out in the garage, toasting his memory.
from www.thecherrycreeknews.com
2/23/2005 12:58:00 pm
Mr. Green?
2/23/2005 02:07:00 pm
Blogging is a kind of journalism, IMHO, and we owe more than a little debt to this man. He did to objective reportage what Jacob Burckhardt did to objective history.
Sad and unfathomable day indeed.
2/25/2005 05:19:00 pm
Mark
I hadn't heard of Jacob Burckhardt and I'll have to research further, thanks for the tip.
I agree blogging is a kind of journalism or at least a kind of deprofessionalised accounting of the world where there is no one interpretation. HST showed us that there was a very personal way of reporting things that shined through all the bullshit. I think this influence is more pervasive than the guns and drugs and than his actual writing style (mother of a thousand bad imitations).
Very much agreed.
2/26/2005 04:12:00 pm
I discovered hunter s. in the rolling stone about 1973.My mate got me annual air mail subs for 50 bucks and each weekly isue would arrive with many dollars of US stamps on it-what a bargain.
He was always my hero and his best asset was his hatred of richard nixon.
Later millions of others joined his club.
3/06/2005 02:53:00 pm
Hi marklatham, agreed such well focussed uncivilly justified fury, well worth the stamps.
And must say I always enjoy seeing your feisty comments out and about.
3/12/2005 11:16:00 am
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