god is still dead
Apr. 9th, 2005 01:23 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ununoriginali jus recently discovered that my uni's student guild publishes a pretty spiffy mag. really cool, having everything on survival tips a student needs to the real essentials - books, culture, music, movies :p plus a really cool feature/theme for this issue. reminds me that i used to, and still have, a passion for writing and the way words connect that make them so utterly lyrical.
the article that inspired my previous entry:
God Is Still Dead: Fear and Loathing in 2005
Grok
Gemma Watson
"We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark -- the place where the wave finally broke and rolled back."
What were you doing when you heard that Hunter S Thompson was dead? I was catatonic, listening to the radio and watching Oprah with the sound turned down. It was an appropriate freakshow, and it gave me the fear.
I got the fear, because Hunter S Thompson, who was the author of many great and angry books including Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Generation of Swine, Songs of the Doomed and lately The Downward Spiral of Dumbness (an ode to the present) and father of Gonzo journalism put a gun to his head on Sunday, February 20, 2005, at the ripe old age of 67. He who cursed and spat his way through Watergate, the Cuban missile crisis and the Cold War, who single-handedly took on Richard Nixon, who lived his life fuelled by bloodlust and narcotics, who called important people "crazier than six loons" and got away with it, chose to bite it in the era of George Bush's son, leaving us with the bleeding heart marshmallow soft hey-don't-shit-on-me-I'm-alright polish of Michael Moore to deal with the swine.
"Who does vote for these dishonest shitheads? They are the racists and hatemongers among us -- they are the Ku Klux Klan. I piss down the throats of these Nazis."
I mean, at first I was angry, but then it seemed logical. He said that he'd "feel claustrophobic in this life if he didn't know he could commit suicide at any time". Ralph reckons it was a matter of when rather than if and who am I to argue? After all, imagine what would have happened if Kurt hadn't put a gun in his mouth, ended up all geriatric and lame and preserved and leathery from all the smack, playing RSL clubs and benefit gigs as a shadow of his former self. Perhaps it really is better to burn out than to fade away.
This overwhelming surge of acceptance occurred whilst whittling away the minutes in the Bankwest queue, watching "It's the End of the World as We Know It" on Music Max among a rash of disinterested faces and thinking, shit, this isn't pastiche and it ain't post-modern -- it's fucking boring, and it'll CRUSH YOU, if you don't stay alert.
Lately I've been carrying Thompson's books around like talismans against mediocrity. It encroaches from all sides like deadly poison. Maybe he's got the right idea, becoming dust and being shot into the ether. His editors always claimed that his predictions were remarkably accurate.
"The American century was the 20th, so sayeth Henry Luce. And when it ends, Christ, you can't avoid thinking: "Ye Gods!"
So say goodbye to Hunter Stockton Thompson, spokesman for democracy, drugs and dynamite, self confessed dope fiend and gun nut, who wrote about politics like it was porno and pornography like it was power and damnit it was scary but exciting as well. He did it first and he did it best and we'll spend our whole lives -- a generation who've been taught (in Hunter's own words) that "rain kills fish and sex is death" -- we'll spend our whole lives chasing that kind of momentum, that kind of vitriol, believing that there's nobility in being wasted and waiting for our time to come, our golden age fo freedom and progress and it won't -- no one will ever allow it to happen again because it may be a paradox but there's a critical mass of apathy here at the "end of the American century", festering away in our spoilt rotten hearts.
The last of the great icons is gone and I got the fear. I hope you got the fear too.
left me with an irrepressible urge to go sweep thru hunter s thompson literature :p
the article that inspired my previous entry:
God Is Still Dead: Fear and Loathing in 2005
Grok
Gemma Watson
"We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark -- the place where the wave finally broke and rolled back."
What were you doing when you heard that Hunter S Thompson was dead? I was catatonic, listening to the radio and watching Oprah with the sound turned down. It was an appropriate freakshow, and it gave me the fear.
I got the fear, because Hunter S Thompson, who was the author of many great and angry books including Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Generation of Swine, Songs of the Doomed and lately The Downward Spiral of Dumbness (an ode to the present) and father of Gonzo journalism put a gun to his head on Sunday, February 20, 2005, at the ripe old age of 67. He who cursed and spat his way through Watergate, the Cuban missile crisis and the Cold War, who single-handedly took on Richard Nixon, who lived his life fuelled by bloodlust and narcotics, who called important people "crazier than six loons" and got away with it, chose to bite it in the era of George Bush's son, leaving us with the bleeding heart marshmallow soft hey-don't-shit-on-me-I'm-alright polish of Michael Moore to deal with the swine.
"Who does vote for these dishonest shitheads? They are the racists and hatemongers among us -- they are the Ku Klux Klan. I piss down the throats of these Nazis."
I mean, at first I was angry, but then it seemed logical. He said that he'd "feel claustrophobic in this life if he didn't know he could commit suicide at any time". Ralph reckons it was a matter of when rather than if and who am I to argue? After all, imagine what would have happened if Kurt hadn't put a gun in his mouth, ended up all geriatric and lame and preserved and leathery from all the smack, playing RSL clubs and benefit gigs as a shadow of his former self. Perhaps it really is better to burn out than to fade away.
This overwhelming surge of acceptance occurred whilst whittling away the minutes in the Bankwest queue, watching "It's the End of the World as We Know It" on Music Max among a rash of disinterested faces and thinking, shit, this isn't pastiche and it ain't post-modern -- it's fucking boring, and it'll CRUSH YOU, if you don't stay alert.
Lately I've been carrying Thompson's books around like talismans against mediocrity. It encroaches from all sides like deadly poison. Maybe he's got the right idea, becoming dust and being shot into the ether. His editors always claimed that his predictions were remarkably accurate.
"The American century was the 20th, so sayeth Henry Luce. And when it ends, Christ, you can't avoid thinking: "Ye Gods!"
So say goodbye to Hunter Stockton Thompson, spokesman for democracy, drugs and dynamite, self confessed dope fiend and gun nut, who wrote about politics like it was porno and pornography like it was power and damnit it was scary but exciting as well. He did it first and he did it best and we'll spend our whole lives -- a generation who've been taught (in Hunter's own words) that "rain kills fish and sex is death" -- we'll spend our whole lives chasing that kind of momentum, that kind of vitriol, believing that there's nobility in being wasted and waiting for our time to come, our golden age fo freedom and progress and it won't -- no one will ever allow it to happen again because it may be a paradox but there's a critical mass of apathy here at the "end of the American century", festering away in our spoilt rotten hearts.
The last of the great icons is gone and I got the fear. I hope you got the fear too.
left me with an irrepressible urge to go sweep thru hunter s thompson literature :p
