RIP Hunter S. Thompson

[Sunnydaydreams]

sadly, hunter s. thompson killed himself last night :( he wrote the book fear & loathing in las vegas. he will be missed by one and all.

peace & love

[theREALsun]

i did hear that this morning on npr
RIP, indeed.

[delta9]

It was yesterday, actually, but yes, he will be missed, however...

I haven't read much of his work, nor seen him speak... But I did get the feeling that he wouldn't want us to mourn, but rather celebrate his death. He was certainly a great man, and touched many lives... A great, noble, and powerful thing indeed. If he felt it was his time to go, well, he certainly was not one who missed the show. On the contrary, he shaped, directed, and played a part in it. His accomplishments will be left with us.

He created a form a journalism and touched thousands of lives. If he decided it was his time to go, it was, to him, time to go, and he did not live an unfull life. We should (and shall) continue to celebrate the things he left behind for us all to enjoy!

:hippie:

[Sunnydaydreams]

youre right delta, he died last night. that was the first thing i heard this morning when i woke up. its sad to lose someone that bright, a light among the darkness. i often wondered what thompson would thought about this dark era our country is entering into w/ bush at the reigns, military occupation in Iraq & a possible war w/ iran... now i ask myself ''what would hunter do?"

heres an article about him: http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/0221-29.htm

any comments are welcome

peace & love

[goldendharmabum]

a truly beautiful spirit.. following a cosmic current more intense than most of us will ever be able to comprehend. everytime the colors start crawling down the walls.. i remember those who came before.. those who BOLDLY came before. long live the dreamers. the body containing that energy of universal intensity has at least found the point of returning to the earth.. but that energy. mm. it's still kicking around, for sure. here's to hunter~
cheers.

[Herbmama]

Raise a Glass to Dr. Gonzo!
He will be missed

[tooter_mcgee]

this really is sad.. i read the book, and they made a pretty decent movie out of it... it seems there's tragedy around every corner the past few days.

:hippie:
Diana

[Pedata]

I read his book Hell's Angels in high school. He traveled with them for while. Anyone else read it?


Peace,
Cassandra

[delta9]

Haha! Some happy news, sort of.

Hunter S. Thompson's ashes to be shot out of a cannon (http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/afp/20050222/ts_alt_afp/usthompsoncannon_050222232905)
LOS ANGELES (AFP) - US author Hunter S. Thompson, who committed suicide last weekend, wanted to exit this world in a style befitting his extraordinary life: being fired from a cannon, a friend revealed.

http://us.news2.yimg.com/us.yimg.com/p/afp/20050222/capt.sge.myk50.220205232549.photo00.photo.default-288x384.jpg

The larger-than-life writer of "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" stated in his will that he wanted his ashes to be fired out of a cannon following his funeral, plans for which have yet to be announced.

"I believe he wanted to be shot out of a cannon," friend Troy Hooper told AFP.

"I understand it's in his will," said Hooper, associate editor of the Aspen Daily News, based near the Colorado home where Thompson, 67, apparently shot himself on Sunday.

"That's Hunter's style. That's how he would want it. He was a big fan of bonfires and explosions and anything that went bang and I'm sure he'd like to go bang as well," he said.

Hooper, who became friends with father of "gonzo" journalism about five years before his death, cited reports that Thompson told his son, Juan, that his after-life ambition was to become cannon fodder -- literally.

"That's exactly the kind of stuff he would say all the time," he said of one of the most important American literary figures of the 20th Century.

It was Juan Thompson who found his father's body in his rural home in Woody Creek, near the ski resort of Aspen, after he apparently shot himself in the head on Sunday night.

Hooper, who saw Thompson last week, said Thompson had been in pain following recent back surgery, following a hip replacement and after he broke his leg recently.

But Thompson, famed for his LSD- and alcohol-fuelled literary exploits, did not seem "more distraught than usual" in the days before he died, Hooper said, adding that Thompson was "often either up or down."

Sheriff's department investigators in Woody Creek, where Thompson lived for more than 40 years, said he appeared to have died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

Thompson became a sharp-witted icon of 1960s counter-culture after the publications of "Fear and Loathing" in 1972 in which he pioneered "gonzo" journalism, in which the writer inserts himself and his personal views into the story.

His work, written in the first person, hit a chord with America's youth at the height of the unpopular Vietnam and the social rebellion of the 1960s and 70s.

Thompson described the birth of gonzo journalism in a 1974 interview with Playboy, saying he was covering the Kentucky Derby on deadline, but "I'd blown my mind, couldn't work."

"So finally I just started jerking pages out of my notebook and numbering them and sending them to the printer. I was sure it was the last article I was ever going to do for anybody."

Thompson rose to fame in 1966 with the publication of his book "Hell's Angels," the story of his infiltration of the then-feared Hell's Angels motorcycle gang, an adventure that got him savagely beaten.

"Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" is the apocryphal tale of a wild, drug-fuelled weekend spent in the desert gambling hub of Las Vegas by protagonist Raoul Duke, a thinly-disguised version of Thompson.

The adventure was recreated in a 1998 Hollywood film starring Johnny Depp.

The stories of Thompson's heady experiences earned him a popular reputation as a wild-living, hard-drinking, LSD-crazed writer bent on self-destruction.

His other works include "Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72," a collection of articles he wrote for Rolling Stone magazine while covering the election campaigns of then-president Richard Nixon and his opponent, Senator George McGovern.

[treehugger]

heh...very cool!!!

[delta9]

Suicide was preplanned, not act of sudden anger or depression (http://www.cnn.com/2005/SHOWBIZ/books/02/23/thompson.death.ap/index.html)
DENVER, Colorado (AP) -- Journalist Hunter S. Thompson did not take his life "in a moment of haste or anger or despondency" and probably planned his suicide well in advance because of his declining health, the family's spokesman said Wednesday.

Douglas Brinkley, a historian and author who has edited some of Thompson's work, said the founder of "gonzo" journalism shot himself Sunday night after weeks of pain from a host of physical problems that included a broken leg and a hip replacement.

"I think he made a conscious decision that he had an incredible run of 67 years, lived the way he wanted to, and wasn't going to suffer the indignities of old age," Brinkley said in a telephone interview from Aspen. "He was not going to let anybody dictate how he was going to die."

Thompson, famous for "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" and other works of New Journalism, spent an intimate weekend with his son, Juan, daughter-in-law, Jennifer, and young grandson, William, the spokesman said.

"He was trying to really bond and be close to the family" before his suicide, Brinkley said. "This was not just an act of irrationality. It was a very pre-planned act."

The family is looking into whether Thompson's cremated remains can be blasted out of a cannon, a wish the gun-loving writer often expressed, Brinkley said.

"The optimal, best-case scenario is the ashes will be shot out of a cannon," he said.

Other arrangements were pending.

[Pedata]

Quote-Douglas Brinkley, a historian and author who has edited some of Thompson's work, said the founder of "gonzo" journalism shot himself Sunday night after weeks of pain from a host of physical problems that included a broken leg and a hip replacement.

Omg. I just thought, as many drugs as he did he may have built up such a tolerance that his pain meds weren't doing anything. I have a friend who had a hip replacement and she had some serious pain. It was almost a year before she felt like her old self.

Peace,
Cassandra

[wyldflower]

I loved Fear and Loathing

:bandit:

RIP Hunter S

[kermit]

Kermit cries! :bawl:

[NeverNeverLand:)]

I haven´t read any of his writings but I´ve seen fear an lothing in las vegas a film that caught the vibes of taking to much drugs for a long time real well,with alot of humor.

[mamasharones]

:( RIP he will be missed

[delta9]

Econmist Magazine's Obituary (http://www.economist.com/people/displayStory.cfm?story_id=3690414)
http://www.economist.com/images/20050226/0905OB.jpg
Hunter S. Thompson, doctor of gonzo journalism, died on February 20th, aged 67

THERE were always way too many guns around at Hunter S. Thompson's farm in Woody Creek: .44 Magnums, 12-gauge shotguns, black snubnosed Colt Pythons with bevelled cylinders, .22 calibre mounted machineguns. He also kept explosives, to blow the legs off pool tables or to pack in a barrel for target practice. His quiet bourgeois neighbours near Aspen, Colorado, complained that he rocked the foundations of their houses.

Explosions were his speciality. Indeed, writing and shooting were much the same. His very first newspaper story, written when he was ten for a neighbourhood newsletter in Louisville, Kentucky, was headlined “WAR!” (“The Voits declared war on Hunter's gang on Oct. 1, 1947. At 3.00 Hunter's gang attacked the Voits”). Later, as a working journalist, he fired off reckless fusillades of words that were meant to shock and entertain and wreak collateral damage.

He had always been a problem, kicked early out of high school (drinking, vandalism) and rapidly out of the air force, but his casual smashing of the rules of American journalism happened more or less by accident. Assigned to cover the Kentucky Derby in 1970, his mind was too blown with drugs, as usual, to write the story. One by one, with his trembling hands, he ripped the pages of whiskey-fuelled ramblings out of his notebook and sent them to the printer. The piece that resulted, “The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved”, was a runaway success, though he had neither described the race nor mentioned the winner. And he was astonished: it was like “falling down an elevator shaft and landing in a pool of mermaids.”

A friend called his style “totally gonzo”. The name stuck, though, as he confessed, nobody knew what the hell it meant. For the literary, he could explain that it followed William Faulkner's dictum that “the best fiction is more true than any kind of journalism.” Mr Thompson stalked, rifle in hand, cigarette (in holder) dangling, on the wild borderlands between fact and fiction, leaving readers to decide what was true and what was not.

Editors tried to control him, but failed. Journalistic objectivity was a nonsense to him; he threw it away, and turned his gaze on himself. He and his excursions into depravity became the central and only theme of every story he wrote. Sent to Puerto Rico for the New York Herald Tribune, in 1959, he shot rats at the San Juan city dump until he was arrested. Assigned in 1971 to write a 300-word caption on the Mint 400 motor-cycle race for Sports Illustrated, he wrote the 50,000 words of mayhem that became “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas”. It began: “We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold.” Posted to Zaire in 1974 to cover the fight between George Foreman and Muhammad Ali, he never watched the boxing. Instead he floated naked in the hotel pool, into which he had thrown a pound and a half of marijuana, and let the green slick gather round him.

“Fear and Loathing” made him famous: so famous that the Republicans came courting him, although he was a Democrat. It was not just the guns, but the fact that he wore a twisted sort of patriotism on his sleeve. That journey through the Californian desert to find fame and fortune, stocked up with “two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half-full of cocaine, and a whole galaxy of multi-coloured uppers”, was also, Mr Thompson claimed, “a classic confirmation of everything right and true and decent in the national character.” (“Jesus! Did I say that?”)

Nixon's men wondered if this madman could be their bridge to the alienated, war-hating young. But they were playing with fire. Mr Thompson thought Nixon a liar and a bastard. He covered the 1972 election in typically take-no-prisoners style, producing what one campaign aide called “the least accurate and most factual” book about it; and when he toyed with politics it was on the Freak Power ticket, running for sheriff of Pitkin County, Colorado, where he could blow things away in the woods.

At Hemingway's grave

He did not give “a flying fuck” what he smoked, or ingested, or did, but there was a thoughtful side. Early in his career, in an obituary of a friend, he wrote of “the dead-end loneliness of a man who makes his own rules.” He was often melancholy, and wild conviviality and celebrity made no difference to that. The epigram to “Fear and Loathing” quoted Dr Johnson: “He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.” It was not thought surprising that his death was a suicide.

In 1964 he had made a long journey to Ketchum, Idaho, to the grave of Ernest Hemingway, one of his models and heroes. He wanted to understand why Hemingway had killed himself in his cabin in the woods, and concluded that he had lost his sense of control in a changing world:

It is not just a writer's crisis, but they are the most obvious victims because the function of art is supposedly to bring order out of chaos, a tall order even when the chaos is static, and a superhuman task when chaos is multiplying...So finally, and for what he must have thought the best of reasons, he ended it with a shotgun.

[RockyJay]

Rest in peace, man. :hippie:

:cheers:

[Sagaro]

I loved that guys style of writing and the movie was so awsome. Rest in Peace Love and Drugs.