Hunter S. Thompson memorials

when a talent dies - one who sort of remained on the peripheral, a bit below the radar, occasionally popping up here and there - the accolades blast the frontline like rapid fire.

kind of like when John Ritter died.

the following entry is a collection of exerpts of some of the better memorials and rememberances of heir Doctor Gonzo...

Rolling Stone magazine:
In a recent piece for Rolling Stone on the 2004 presidential campaign, he called George Bush a "treacherous little freak." To Thompson -- who once threatened to run for the presidency himself and narrowly lost an election in 1970 for sheriff of the Aspen area, running on the Freak Power Party ticket -- politics was a blood sport, and American politicians, so prone to corruption, were only too deserving of contempt. Observing President Bush's poor performance in a debate with "my man" John Kerry, he wrote for the magazine, "I almost felt sorry for him, until I heard someone call him 'Mister President,' and then I felt ashamed."

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Thompson's incorrigible behavior, his mumbling incoherence, his fishing hats, aviator frames and cigarette holders all made for a larger-than-life presence. He was a hardboiled writer of the old Hemingway school, terse and piercing, enamored of guns. Yet he will be forever associated with the counterculture of the hippie era for his ruthless dogging of the Nixon administration and his gleeful experimentation with psychedelic drugs, two subjects which he often wrote about in tandem.

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The Associate Press:
Because the style of writing he invented — "gonzo journalism" — surely reached its peak with its creator and isn't likely to be duplicated in quite that way ever again.

Thompson was often linked with fellow writers Gay Talese and Tom Wolfe as part of a troika of literary titans who invented a reporting style in the 1960s that came to be known as the New Journalism. But Talese, for his part, never saw it that way, saying Monday that Thompson was an original.

While all three writers took an eye for description and detail to new heights, only Thompson immersed himself so thoroughly — and often so outrageously — into his stories, Talese told The Associated Press.

"I will miss him as a man who was amusing while he was also insightful," the author of "Honor Thy Father" said by phone from his New York City apartment. "He was amusing and also maybe wretchedly out of step with the current morality. At this time of political correctness, he was never politically correct, and that is what I'll miss the most about him."

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"We had two bags of grass, 75 pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine and a whole galaxy of multicolored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers," he wrote.

Whether he actually prepared for his assignments with that kind of indulgence, Talese said he didn't know.

"You never know what these people do," the author said. "They know what is entertaining about their material, and sometimes what is not true about their life becomes part of their persona."

What is known is that authorities who raided Thompson's rural Colorado home in 1990 found LSD, cocaine, marijuana and dynamite there. He beat the charges, however, when the search was ruled illegal.

His home was often described as a "heavily fortified compound," although Thompson, who would sometimes take high-powered firearms into his back yard for target practice, acknowledged in a 2003 interview that that was an exaggeration.

"I think the only fortification might be my reputation," he told Salon magazine. "If people believe they're going to be shot, they might stay away."

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L.A. Times interviews friends in Woody Creek, CO.:
Thompson lived in a secluded compound along a rural highway a mile or so from the tavern. Friends said he liked to pass the time firing automatic weapons, writing and drinking heavily. He typically woke at 5 p.m., wrote through the night and slept all day.

His death seems to have winded Woody Creek, a wealthy enclave eight miles northwest of Aspen. For some, Thompson was beyond eccentric — he was an enigma. He could be rude and nasty, then turn on a dime and be sweet and lovable.

"Everyone sort of adopted him and accepted him as he was," said Mary Harris, owner of the Woody Creek Tavern. "I used to live next door to him. I'd hear gunshots coming from his backyard. We used to hang out. He liked to come in when we closed. He could be a bully or your best friend."

"I knew Hunter for 25 years, and I think some of what he did was an act," said Joel Lapin, drinking a beer at the tavern. "He was an extremely intelligent man. He would walk around town with a drink in his hand, but it was his persona, like Groucho Marx with the cigar. He once showed up at the golf course with a shotgun. He was actually no more outrageous with firearms than any of the rest of us here."

Those who knew him often found his rambling style of conversation unintelligible.

"I never knew what he was talking about," said Don Collins, a 50-year-old plumber sitting at the bar. "You would hear this mumbling and then loud interjections. He could have been saying anything. Maybe he was telling me, 'Get out of my house or I'll shoot you!' "

Groupies liked to drop in or call Thompson at the bar. He didn't respond well to invasions of privacy and didn't talk much to strangers, his friends said.

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The Wall Street Journal Tom Wolfe on HST:
Hunter S. Thompson was one of those rare writers who come as advertised. The Addams-family eyebrows in Stephen King's book jacket photos combined with the heeby-jeeby horrors of his stories always made me think of Dracula. When I finally met Mr. King, he was in Miami playing, along with Amy Tan, in a jook-house band called the Remainders. He was Sunshine itself, a laugh and a half, the very picture of innocent fun, a Count Dracula who in real life was Peter Pan. Carl Hiaasen, the genius who has written such zany antic novels as "Striptease," "Sick Puppy," and "Skinny Dip" is in person as intelligent, thoughtful, sober, courteous, even courtly, a Southern gentleman as you could ask for (and I ask for them all the time and never find them). But the gonzo--Hunter's coinage--madness of Hunter Thompson's "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" (1971) and his Rolling Stone classics such as "The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved" (1970) was what you got in the flesh too. You didn't have lunch or dinner with Hunter Thompson. You attended an event at mealtime.

I had never met Hunter when the book that established him as a literary figure, "The Hell's Angels, a Strange and Terrible Saga," was published in 1967. It was brilliant investigative journalism of the hazardous sort, written in a style and a voice no one had ever seen or heard before. The book revealed that he had been present at a party for the Hell's Angels given by Ken Kesey and his hippie--at the time the term was not "hippie' but "acid-head"--commune, the Merry Pranksters. The party would be a key scene in a book I was writing, (The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test). I cold-called Hunter in California, and he generously gave me not only his recollections but also the audiotapes he had recorded at that first famous alliance of the hippies and "outlaw" motorcycle gangs, a strange and terrible saga in itself, culminating in the Rolling Stones band hiring the Angels as security guards for a concert in Altamont, Calif., and the "security guards" beating a spectator to death with pool cues.

By way of a thank you for his help, I invited Hunter to lunch the next time he was in New York. It was one bright spring day in 1969. He proved to be one of those tall, rawboned, rangy young men with alarmingly bright eyes, who more than any other sort of human, in my experience, are prone to manic explosions. Hunter didn't so much have a conversation with you as speak in explosive salvos of words on a related subject.

We were walking along West 46th Street toward a restaurant, The Brazilian Coffee House, when we passed Goldberg Marine Supply. Hunter stopped, ducked into the store and emerged holding a tiny brown paper bag. A sixth sense, probably activated by the alarming eyes and the six-inch rise and fall of his Adam's apple, told me not to ask what was inside. In the restaurant he kept it on top of the table as we ate. Finally, the fool in me became so curious, he had to go and ask, "What's in the bag, Hunter?"

"I've got something in there that would clear out this restaurant in 20 seconds," said Hunter. He began opening the bag. His eyes had rheostated up to 300 watts. "No, never mind," I said. "I believe you! Show me later!" From the bag he produced what looked like a small travel-size can of shaving foam, uncapped the top and pressed down on it. There ensued the most violently brain-piercing sound I had ever heard. It didn't clear out The Brazilian Coffee House. It froze it. The place became so quiet, you could hear an old-fashioned timer clock ticking in the kitchen. Chunks of churasco gaucho remained impaled on forks in mid-air. A bartender mixing a sidecar became a statue holding a shaker with both hands just below his chin. Hunter was slipping the little can back into the paper bag. It was a marine distress signaling device, audible for 20 miles over water.

The next time I saw Hunter was in June of 1976 at the Aspen Design Conference in Aspen, Colo. By now Hunter had bought a large farm near Aspen where he seemed to raise mainly vicious dogs and deadly weapons, such as the .357 magnum. He publicized them constantly as a warning to those, Hell's Angels presumably, who had been sending him death threats. I invited him to dinner at a swell restaurant in Aspen and a performance at the Big Tent, where the conference was held. My soon-to-be wife, Sheila, and I gave the waitress our dinner orders. Hunter ordered two banana daiquiris and two banana splits. Once he had finished them off, he summoned the waitress, looped his forefinger in the air and said, "Do it again." Without a moment's hesitation he downed his third and fourth banana daiquiris and his third and fourth banana splits, and departed with a glass of Wild Turkey bourbon in his hand.

When we reached the tent, the flap-keepers refused to let him enter with the whiskey. A loud argument broke out. I whispered to Hunter. "Just give me the glass and I'll hold under my jacket and give it back to you inside." That didn't interest him in the slightest. What I failed to realize was that it was not about getting into the tent or drinking whiskey. It was the grand finale of an event, a happening aimed at turning the conventional order of things upside down. By and by we were all ejected from the premises, and Hunter couldn't have been happier. The curtain came down for the evening.

In Hunter's scheme of things, there were curtains .. . and there were curtains. In the summer of 1988 I happened to be at the Edinburgh Festival in Scotland one afternoon when an agitated but otherwise dignified, silver-haired old Scotsman came up to me and said, "I understand you're a friend of the American writer Hunter Thompson."

I said yes.

"By God--your Mr. Thompson is supposed to deliver a lecture at the Festival this evening--and I've just received a telephone call from him saying he's in Kennedy Airport and has run into an old friend. What's wrong with this man? He's run into an old friend? There's no possible way he can get here by this evening!"

"Sir," I said, "when you book Hunter Thompson for a lecture, you have to realize it's not actually going to be a lecture. It's an event--and I'm afraid you've just had yours."

Hunter's life, like his work, was one long barbaric yawp, to use Whitman's term, of the drug-fueled freedom from and mockery of all conventional proprieties that began in the 1960s. In that enterprise Hunter was something entirely new, something unique in our literary history. When I included an excerpt from "The Hell's Angels" in a 1973 anthology called "The New Journalism," he said he wasn't part of anybody's group. He wrote "gonzo." He was sui generis. And that he was.

Yet he was also part of a century-old tradition in American letters, the tradition of Mark Twain, Artemus Ward and Petroleum V. Nasby, comic writers who mined the human comedy of a new chapter in the history of the West, namely, the American story, and wrote in a form that was part journalism and part personal memoir admixed with powers of wild invention, and wilder rhetoric inspired by the bizarre exuberance of a young civilization. No one categorization covers this new form unless it is Hunter Thompson's own word, gonzo. If so, in the 19th century Mark Twain was king of all the gonzo-writers. In the 20th century it was Hunter Thompson, whom I would nominate as the century's greatest comic writer in the English language.

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On HST's final rest:

If one of Hunter S. Thompson's last wishes comes true, the body of the late maverick journalist will be cremated this week and his ashes blasted from a cannon across his sprawling ranch in Woody Creek, CO.