Book 47

"Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas" by Hunter S. Thompson

Sometimes my life seems to be one of coming at things from strange directions. When listening to a friends CD collection in the lat 90s I heard a couple of songs that I half-recognised. When the penny dropped I realised that I had heard them before as part of one of Weird "Al" Yankovic's polka medleys. With a couple of decades' worth of Flying High and Hot Shots-style movies under my pop-culture engorged belt I finally saw some of the classics, like Casablanca, The Magnificent Seven and Yojimbo. My point is that I usually read/watch/listen to the source material of a reference after I have seen/read/heard the reference itself. All of this rambling brings me not so smoothly to the works of Hunter S. Thompson.

It will, I'm sure, come as absolutely no shock to anyone who has read my blog that I am a huge fan of the graphic novel series "Transmetropolitan". I love it. It's clever, harsh, in places touching and very, very funny. I've started buying the trades, I will copy Nick and get "that" Spider Jerusalem T-shirt and I even managed to work it into my Masters. And for those of you who don't know (all three of you) the main character in "Transmetropolitan", a young bastard by the name of Spider Jerusalem, seems quite closely based on Hunter S. Thompson.

I won't go into a potted bio of the guy here, but suffice it to say that Hunter was kinda like Jared in his most GBU-ish with the dials turned up until they break off and a massive amount of drugs under his skin. And "Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas" was one of is first major works. It's brash, crass, drug-fuelled and amazing. The prose style is smooth and jarring at the same time and nobody comes off sounding particularly nice, especially not the young master Thompson. It came about when Hunter agreed to cover a big desert race in Las Vegas and did so with a car full of drugs and his huge, Samoan Lawyer in tow.

"Fear and Loathing" is the initial prototype of what Hunter called Gonzo journalism, and while there are millions of people (A couple of whom read this blog) who probably have a much better idea as to what Gonzo is than I do, from what I gather (and in my words) it is journalism that accepts that objectivity is impossible in covering events (be it an election, a war or a desert race) because a human being can never be completely objective. Gonzo doesn't try to distance the writer from the reader, but rather grounds the events being covered in the context of the writer.

As an important work in the evolution of journalism in particular, and writing in general, the value of "Fear and Loathing" cannot be overlooked and it's also a damn fine read.

four and stoned reporters out of five.