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August 30, 2005
Buy the Ticket, Take the Ride (Pt. 1)
So I took a couple of days off to reread Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and I lost all my momentum. It’s like Dr. Thompson said to Charles Perry:
I just don’t know what happened, I lost the momentum, it was just like a train on greased rails, I’ve been taking speed to get the momentum back, I haven’t slept in three days, I haven’t changed my clothes, I think my feet are rotting.
Well, it’s sort of like that, except without the speed. I never got into that stuff, thank Jeebus. But I did try to emulate Dr. Thompson in other ways, which was a mistake a lot of us made after reading Fear and Loathing. If ever there were a book that should be emblazoned with the words “Don’t try this at home,” this is it. (Or maybe The 120 Days of Sodom; but you take my point.)
I don’t blame the Doctor for making us want to take drugs, abuse rental cars, and skip out on hotel bills. He never encouraged us to try this stuff, although he did make it seem like so much goddamn fun that it was hard to resist. Every Thompson fan, I’m sure, has a story about some crazy thing they never would have done if they weren’t under the influence of Fear and Loathing.
On the one hand, if he encouraged us to Question Authority a little, so much the better. On the other hand, it was hard to know where to stop. This was true for the Doctor himself as well; when Fear and Loathing became a huge hit, he became a celebrity, but his public image was that of Raoul Duke, his character in the book. And Duke of course was Thompson, but a grotesque and exaggerated version created for literary purposes. People loved this character, this “monster reincarnation of Horatio Alger” who did whatever he wanted and got away with it. And so Dr. Thompson seemed to feel compelled to play this character, at least in public, for the rest of his life.
His friends say that in private he was very different, a gentle and thoughtful man, and I believe it—just like all the wildest comedians turn out to be quiet depressives in real life. You can see a little of this split in the recently released documentary Breakfast with Hunter, for instance in a scene where Thompson is on his way to visit Jann Wenner, the publisher of Rolling Stone. Off-camera, Thompson has secured a bouquet of flowers for Wenner, of whom he was apparently quite fond. But once the camera is rolling, he exchanges the flowers for a fire extinguisher and blasts Wenner, who tries to be a good sport but is clearly annoyed.
Over time the public Hunter Thompson became a caricature of himself, drunk and mumbling rather than wired and fierce. In Breakfast with Hunter you’d hardly ever know what he’s saying if the filmmaker hadn’t courteously provided subtitles, and he is never seen without a glass of whiskey in his hand. It makes for an interesting comparison with some footage taken over 30 years ago that appears on the bonus disc of the Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas movie. In the older film, the Doctor drawls but is comprehensible and articulate—though the whiskey again is omnipresent.
This kind of thing, combined with the Doctor’s suicide, provide ample fodder for those who wish to see his life as a tragedy—The Genius Who Pissed Away His Talent on Booze and Dope. And you can certainly make a case for this viewpoint; for a very well-reasoned and well-written treatment, read this story on popmatters.com. But the truth, I think, is more complicated.
For one thing, however you want to look at it, Hunter Thompson produced more and better work in his life than the rest of us ever will. Sure, his early stuff was better, but isn’t that true of just about every artist—and especially every rock star, which is what Hunter really was? He certainly had enough fun for ten lifetimes. And we have no proof that he killed himself in a moment of alcoholic despair; you can just as well argue that he carefully reasoned out that it was time to go. 67 years is a long time for a guy who never expected to make it to 30.
In Breakfast with Hunter there’s a scene where he pulls out a polaroid of himself sitting alone in a hotel room, and he looks like the saddest and loneliest man on Earth. On the other hand, we also see him working with a couple of editors on a rewrite of The Rum Diary, and he is completely alert and focused, despite taking frequent breaks to pull on his hash pipe.
So I think it’s misguided to view Dr. Thompson as either tragic or heroic. He was a complex human being with a light and a dark side, just like everybody.
But at the same time, there’s no doubt he would have been more productive—and probably happier—had he gotten off the stuff. Apparently he thought about it; in Rolling Stone’s HST memorial issue, Timothy Ferris says,
Hunter occasionally talked to me about stopping drinking. He said that he had thought about joining AA but that you had to admit that you had done something wrong to join AA and he didn’t feel that he had ever done anything wrong.
Loose talk for someone who claimed to understand karma; but it was his life, his karma, his problem. The ones who really suffered were those who tried to imitate the Doctor’s lifestyle and were not blessed with “the constitution of a hammerhead shark.” They were the ones who risked damaging themselves beyond repair.
Again, I don’t feel that Hunter deserves censure for what people did in imitation of him, any more than Al Pacino is responsible for all the idiots who run around thinking they’re Tony Montana, or it’s Lou Reed’s fault if somebody heard “Heroin” and decided to try it. Caveat emptor, for sure. But he himself seemed to feel a sense of responsibility toward his fans. There’s another scene in Breakfast with Hunter where he frets openly about the effect the Fear and Loathing movie is going to have on the public:
Laila Nabulsi: It’s just a movie.
HST: Tell that to the mother of some kid who’s stabbed in the back by some dope fiend out of Vegas, and blames it on this book.
And there’s an especially telling moment earlier in the film, where an earnest young man comes up to him at a bookstore signing, gushing about what a big fan he is and how much he loves Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Hunter’s response is uncharacteristically sober: “Be careful about trying this stuff.”
That’s probably what they should put on the Doctor’s tombstone, if there’s going to be one: “Be careful about trying this stuff.” If Nancy Reagan had half a brain, that would have been her slogan, instead of “Just Say No.” For the curious, the adventurous, and the easily bored, “Just Say No” never cut it; better advice would be “Be careful,” “Call if you need help,” and it never hurts to throw in “I love you.” But that’s another discussion for another time.
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August 22, 2005
Yesterday's Weirdness Is Tomorrow's Reason Why (Part 3)
I was compelled today by Dr. Thompson’s ghost to type in this entire chapter from The Curse of Lono. The Doctor has more and more taken over this blog in the last week because honestly, whose words would I rather type, his or mine? No contest.
No commentary I could add is going to do justice to this passage, which forms the true conclusion of the book (there’s another chapter after it, which could just as well have been left out). Presented in the form of a letter to Ralph Steadman, it wraps up the threads of the Lono business, the City of Refuge, the war club, and all the rest of it with a savage elegance that only Hunter Thompson was capable of.
July 1, 1981
City of Refuge
(24 hours later)…I must be getting old, Ralph, eight pages is about all I can do in one night; so I took a break and got some sleep. I also felt I should back off and have a long look at this I am Lono business, because I am wary of being fooled by another false dawn.
That was the problem, Ralph. We were blind. The story we wanted was right in front of our eyes from the very start — although we can be excused, I think, for our failure to instantly understand a truth beyond reality. It was not an easy thing for me to accept the fact that I was born 1,700 years ago in an ocean-going canoe somewhere off the Kona Coast of Hawaii, a prince of royal Polynesian blood, and lived my first life as King Lono, ruler of all the islands.
According to our missionary/journalist, William Ellis, I “governed Hawaii during what may in its chronology be called the Fabulous Age”…until “(I) became offended with my wife, and murdered her; but afterwards lamented the act so much, as to induce a state of mental derangement. In this state (I) traveled through all the islands, boxing and wrestling with everyone (I) met…(I) subsequently set sail in a singularly shaped ‘magic’ canoe for Tahiti, or a foreign country. After (my) departure (I) was deified by (my) countrymen, and annual games of boxing and wrestling were instituted in (my) honor.”
How’s that for roots?
What?
Don’t argue with me, Ralph. You come from a race of eccentric degenerates; I was promoting my own fights all over Hawaii fifteen hundred years before your people even learned to take a bath.
And besides, this is the story. I don’t know music, but I have a good ear for the high white sound…and when this Lono gig flashed in front of my eyes about 33 hours ago, I knew it for what it was.
Suddenly the whole thing made sense. It was like seeing The Green Light for the first time. I immediately shed all religious and rational constraints, and embraced a New Truth.
It has made my life strange and I was forced to flee the hotel after the realtors hired thugs to finish me off. But they killed a local haole fisherman instead, by mistake. This is true. On the day before I left, thugs beat a local fisherman to death and left him either floating facedown in the harbor, or strangled to death with a brake-cable and left in a jeep on the street in front of the Hotel Manago. News accounts were varied….
That’s when I got scared and took off for The City. I came down the hill at ninety miles an hour and drove the car as far as I could out on the rocks, then I ran like a bastard for the Kaleokeawe — over the fence like a big kangaroo, kick down the door, then crawl inside and start screaming “I am Lono” at my pursuers, a gang of hired thugs and realtors, turned back by native Park Rangers.
They can’t touch me now, Ralph. I am here with a battery-powered typewriter, two blankets from the King Kam, my miner’s headlamp, a kitbag full of speed and other vitals, and my fine Samoan war club. Laila brings me food and whiskey twice a day, and the natives send me women. But they won’t come into the hut — for the same reason nobody else will — so I have to sneak out at night and fuck them out there on the black rocks.
I like it here. It’s not a bad life. I can’t leave, because they’re waiting for me out there by the parking lot, but the natives won’t let them come any closer. They killed me once, and they’re not about to do it again.
Because I am Lono, and as long as I stay in The City those lying swine can’t touch me. I want a telephone installed, but Steve won’t pay the deposit until Laila gives him $600 more for bad drugs.
Which is no problem, Ralph; no problem at all. I’ve already had several offers for my life story, and every night around sundown I crawl out and collect all the joints, coins and other offerings thrown over the stakefence by natives and others of my own kind.
So don’t worry about me, Ralph. I’ve got mine. But I would naturally appreciate a visit, and perhaps a bit of money for the odd expense here and there.
It’s a queer life, for sure, but right now it’s all I have. Last night, around midnight, I heard somebody scratching on the thatch and then a female voice whispered, “You knew it would be like this.”
“That’s right!” I shouted. “I love you!”
There was no reply. Only the sound of this vast and bottomless sea, which talks to me every night and makes me smile in my sleep.
OK
HST
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August 21, 2005
Yesterday's Weirdness Is Tomorrow's Reason Why (Part 2)
Dr. Thompson’s image—his well-deserved and long-cultivated image—as the drug-crazed wildman of American letters tended to obscure what a canny writer he was, at least when he was on top of his game.
Case in point: The Curse of Lono at first seems to be very loosely organized, filled with odd tangents and sidebars on Hawaiian history that at best could be called background, and at worst filler.
So we get the following data on the Hawaiian god Lono, for instance:
King Lono, ruler of all the islands in a time long before the Hawaiians had a written language, was not made in the same mold as Jesus, although he seems to have had the same basically decent instincts. He was a wise ruler and his reign is remembered in legend as a time of peace, happiness and great abundance in the kingdom — the Good Old Days, as it were, before the white man came — which may have something to do with his elevation to the status of a god in the wake of his disappearance.
Lono was also a chronic brawler with an ungovernable temper, a keen eye for the naked side of life and a taste for strong drink at all times.
And a hysterically funny, but not apparently significant incident where the Doctor acquires an ancient Samoan war club:
“What do you have?” I asked him. “I need something to pulverize an aloe plant.”
There was a pause, then he was back on the line.
“I have a fine cutlery set — seventy-seven pieces, with a beautiful butcher knife.”
“I can get that from room service,” I said. “What else do you have?”
There was another long pause. In the background I could hear a woman yelling something about “crazy…” and “chopping our heads off.”
“You’re fired!” he screamed. “I’m tired of your stupid whining. It’s none of your business what they buy. Get out of here! I should have fired you a long time ago.”
There were more sounds of brief scuffling and a babble of angry voices, then he was back.
“I think I have what you need,” he said smoothly. “It’s a carved Samoan war club. Solid ebony, with eight power points. You could pulverize a palm tree with it.”
“How much does it weigh?” I asked….
“It’s very heavy, sir. My scale won’t handle it.” He chuckled. “Yes sir, this thing is heavy. I’d guess about ten pounds. It swings like a sledgehammer. There’s nothing in the world you couldn’t kill with it.”
“What’s the price?” I asked.
“One-fifty.”
“One-fifty?” I said. “For a stick?”
There was no reply for a moment. “No sir,” he said finally. “This thing I have in my hands is not a stick. It’s a Samoan war club, perhaps three hundred years old. It’s also an extremely brutal weapon,” he added. “I could break down your door with it.”
“Never mind that,” I said. “Send it up to the suite immediately.”
This is followed by a section on the Honolulu Marathon (see Part 1) and a lengthy description of a vacation on Kona gone horribly wrong, where Thompson’s “sunny seaside compound” turns out to be a group of shacks lashed day and night by vicious surf. After that the narrative wanders a bit—OK, a lot—dealing with marijuana smuggling, a flea-ridden dog, and high-speed driving on a mountain road before finally getting to the big finish.
Along the way Thompson has befriended a local charter captain, who takes him out to fish for marlin. And they find one…
A terrible blood-lust came on me when I saw him leaping right beside the boat, so close that he almost leaped right into it, and when the captain up on the bridge started screaming “Get the bat! Get the bat! He’s gone wild!” I sprang out of the goddamn fighting chair and, instead of grabbing that silly little aluminum baseball bat they normally use to finish off these bastards with ten or fifteen whacks….
That’s when I reached into my kitbag and brought out the war club and kicked Steve out of the way and then, with a terrible shriek, I hit the beast with a running shot that dropped it back into the water like a stone and caused about sixty seconds of absolute silence in the cockpit.
They weren’t ready for it. The last time anybody killed a big marlin in Hawaii with a short-handled Samoan war club was about three hundred years ago.
And this is where it all starts to coalesce…the business with the war club leads the Doctor to a revelation:
I am Lono.
Yeah, that’s me, Ralph. I am the one they’ve been waiting for all these years. Captain Cook was just another drunken sailor who got lucky in the South Seas….
The trouble began on the day I caught the fish — or, more specifically, it began when I came into the harbor on the flying bridge of the Humdinger and started bellowing at the crowd on the dock about “filthy drunken sons of missionaries” and “lying scum” and “doomed pig-fuckers” and all those other things I mentioned in my last update letter.
What I didn’t tell you, old sport, is that I was also screaming, “I am Lono!” in a thundering voice that could be heard by every Kanaka on the whole waterfront, from the Hilton to the King Kam — and that many of these people were deeply disturbed by the spectacle.
I don’t know what got into me, Ralph — I didn’t mean to say it — at least not that loud, with all those natives listening. Because they are superstitious people, as you know, and they take their legends seriously….
The word traveled swiftly up and down the coast, and by nightfall the downtown streets were crowded with people who had come from as far away as South Point and the Waipio Valley to see for themselves if the rumor really was true — that Lono had, in fact, returned in the form of a huge drunken maniac who dragged fish out of the sea with his bare hands and beat them to death on the dock with a short-handled Samoan war club.
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August 20, 2005
God's Mercy on You Swine
The spirit of Dr. Thompson seems very close at hand tonight, as I sit hunched over this beautiful white machine pushing the buttons and watching letters pop up on the screen. “Sister Morphine” just came on the stereo and the sun has dipped below the trees; a pile of Thompson books, tapes, and clippings sits to my right, topped off by a bottle of Chivas Regal, the Doctor’s whiskey of choice.
By now the Gonzo Cannon has spoken, and the Doctor’s ashes are floating around the air over Woody Creek, but the event seems to have received surprisingly little coverage, at least in this country. The best stories I could find online were from the U.K. paper The Independent and, for some reason, Al-Jazeera.
In poking around I discovered that, contrary to what I’d previously believed, HST did actually leave a suicide note, of sorts: In the kitchen where he shot himself was a typewriter, and in that typewriter a sheet of paper where the Doctor had typed, in the middle of the page, the word “Counselor.”
I read a number of theories as to what this possibly could have meant, but the most provocative was from D.A. Blyler of The Raw Story, who postulates that it is a reference to this passage from the Gospel of John:
And I will pray the Father, and he will give you another Counselor, to be with you for ever, even the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him; you know him, for he dwells with you, and will be in you.
The biblical connection is especially interesting in light of another key Thompson fact that I belatedly learned this week. I had always assumed that he called himself “Doctor” because he was a self-appointed Doctor of Journalism; turns out that he was the proud owner of a mail-order Doctorate of Divinity, not unlike my own from the Universal Life Church. It figures in the following passage, which is the conclusion of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
I was asleep when our plane hit the runway, but the jolt brought me instantly awake. I looked out the window and saw the Rocky Mountains. What the fuck was I doing here? I wondered. It made no sense at all. I decided to call my attorney as soon as possible. Have him wire me some money to buy a huge albino Doberman. Denver is a national clearing house for stolen Dobermans; they come from all parts of the country.
Since I was already here, I thought I might as well pick up a vicious dog. But first, something for my nerves. Immediately after the plane landed I rushed up the corridor to the airport drugstore and asked the clerk for a box of amyls.
She began to fidget and shake her head. “Oh, no,” she said finally. “I can’t sell those things except by prescription.”
“I know,” I said. “But you see, I’m a doctor. I don’t need a prescription.”
She was still fidgeting. “Well…you’ll have to show me some I.D.,” she moaned.
“Of course,” I jerked out my wallet and let her see the police badge while I flipped through the deck until I located my Ecclesiastical Discount Card - which identifies me as a Doctor of Divinity, a certified Minister of the Church of the New Truth.
She inspected it carefully, then handed it back. I sensed a new respect in her manner. Her eyes grew warm. She seemed to want to touch me. “I hope you’ll forgive me, Doctor,” she said with a fine smile. “But I had to ask. We get some real freaks in this place. All kinds of dangerous addicts. You’d never believe it.”
“Don’t worry,” I said. “I understand perfectly. But I have a bad heart and I hope -“
“Certainly!” she exclaimed - and within seconds she was back with a dozen amyls. I paid without quibbling about the ecclesiastical discount. Then I opened the box and cracked one under my nose immediately, while she watched.
“Just be thankful your heart is young and strong,” I said. “If I were you I would never…ah…holy shit!…what? Yes, you’ll have to excuse me now; I feel it coming on.” I turned away and reeled off in the general direction of the bar.
“God’s mercy on you swine!” I shouted at two marines coming out of the men’s room.
They looked at me, but said nothing. By this time I was laughing crazily. But it made no difference. I was just another fucked-up cleric with a bad heart. Shit, they’ll love me down at the Brown Palace. I took another big hit off the amyl, and by the time I got to the bar my heart was full of joy. I felt like a monster reincarnation of Horatio Alger…a Man on the Move, and just sick enough to be totally confident.
Yes, Hunter Thompson was definitely a holy man of some sort…or maybe an incarnation of a minor deity, the god of mind-bending and Bad Craziness. More on that later…in the meantime, Saturday night beckons. God’s mercy on you swine.
Posted by bill at 6:35 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
August 19, 2005
Yesterday's Weirdness Is Tomorrow's Reason Why (Part 1)
One of Ralph Steadman’s illustrations for The Curse of Lono.
Dr. Thompson’s most criminally underappreciated book is The Curse of Lono, which was published in 1983 (not, as I said yesterday, in 1980—though it was almost entirely written in 1980, so I’m not docking myself any points for the error). For my money, this was the Doctor’s last substantial work of genius—although, having bypassed some of the later books, I could end up having to revise that opinion at some point in the future.
Like Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, The Curse of Lono begins with Thompson accepting a magazine assignment to cover a sporting event, in this case the 1980 Honolulu Marathon. The Marathon ends up as one chapter in the book, albeit a quite interesting and thoughtful one, with the Doctor offering his unique insights into the sport of running:
Marathon running, like golf, is a game for players, not winners. That is why Wilson sells golf clubs, and Nike sells running shoes. The Eighties will not be a healthy decade for games designed only for winners — except at the very pinnacle of professional sport; like the Super Bowl, or the Heavyweight Championship of the World. The rest of us will have to adjust to this notion, or go mad from losing. Some people will argue, but not many. The concept of victory through defeat has already taken root, and a lot of people say it makes sense. The Honolulu Marathon was a showcase example of the New Ethic. The main prize in this race was a gray T-shirt for every one of the four thousand “Finishers.” That was the test, and the only ones who failed were those who dropped out.
There was no special shirt for the winner, who finished so far ahead of the others that only a handful of them ever saw him until the race was long over…and not one of them was ever close enough to [Duncan] McDonald, in those last two miles before the finish, to see how a real winner runs.
The other five or six or seven or eight thousand entrants were running for their own reasons…and this is the angle we need, the raison d’etre as it were….Why do these buggers run? Why do they punish themselves so brutally, for no prize at all? What kind of sick instinct would cause eight thousand supposedly smart people to get up at four in the morning and stagger at high speed through the streets of Waikiki for 26 ball-busting miles in a race that less than a dozen of them have the slightest chance of winning?
These’s no sane reason at all for these runners. Only a fool would try to explain why four thousand Japanese ran at top speed past the USS Arizona, sunken memorial in the middle of Pearl Harbor, along with another four or five thousand certified American liberals cranked up on beer and spaghetti and all taking the whole thing so seriously that only one in two thousand could even smile at the idea of a 26-mile race featuring four thousand Japanese that begins and ends within a stone’s throw of Pearl Harbor on the morning of December 7, 1980….
Thirty-nine years later. What are these people celebrating? And why on this bloodstained anniversary?
It was a weird gig in Honolulu, and it is ever weirder now. We are talking, here, about a thing with more weight than we know. What looked like a paid vacation in Hawaii has turned into a nightmare - and at least one person has suggested that we may be looking at the Last Refuge of the Liberal Mind, or at least the last thing that Works.
Run for your life, sport, because that’s all you have left. The same people who burned their draft cards in the Sixties and got lost in the Seventies are now into running. When politics failed and personal relationships proved unmanageable; after McGovern went down and Nixon exploded right in front of our eyes…after Ted Kennedy got Stassenized and Jimmy Carter put the fork to everybody who ever believed anything he said about anything at all, and after the nation turned en masse to the atavistic wisdom of Ronald Reagan.
Well, these are, after all, the Eighties and the time has finally come to see who has teeth, and who doesn’t…. Which may or may not account for the odd spectacle of two generations of political activists and social anarchists finally turning - twenty years later - into runners.
Posted by bill at 2:06 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
August 18, 2005
Generation of Swine
The 80s were not a good decade for the Doctor. In 1980 he saw his personally anointed president, Jimmy Carter, soundly thrashed by the hated Ronald Reagan. And not just beaten but roundly denounced as a failure, a weakling, and worst of all, a bummer.
America, it seemed, was tired of hearing the bad news, however truthful. People preferred Reagan’s fantasy world, where you can cut taxes and increase spending without repercussions. Even so, Carter might well have been reelected had he been able to get the hostages out of Iran; that was what really sealed his fate. Of course we know now that Reagan’s campaign made a secret deal with the government of Iran to keep the hostages until after the election, which is technically treason, but that is a topic for another time.
The point is, after The Curse of Lono was published in 1980, we didn’t hear much from Hunter Thompson for a few years, and he never seemed quite the same afterward. Like most confirmed cynics, Thompson was a romantic at heart, and I think he really allowed himself to believe in Jimmy Carter, or rather what he thought Carter represented for America: honesty, integrity, and willingness to do things the right way, even if it’s more difficult.
It would be easy to get into a long argument about Carter’s effectiveness as president, but there’s no question that the country gave up on his way of doing things pretty quickly, and jumped on Reagan’s bandwagon with a vengeance. This was hard for a lot of people to swallow, and harder for Hunter Thompson than most.
When Thompson reappeared as the author of a weekly San Francisco Examiner column in the late 80s, the sense of hope that had counterbalanced his cynicism was gone, and he became a straight-up prophet of doom and malice who ranted about a “generation of swine.” Which was what the times called for, no doubt; but it can’t be healthy for you, and neither can staying continuously loaded for 20 years, which is what he was working on at the time.
Maybe it was the booze and the drugs; maybe it was because he’d given up hope; or maybe they’re two sides of the same coin — for whatever reason, the Doctor’s productivity had declined over the years. He went from being a guy who produced a 500-page book on the 1972 election to one who struggled to produce a thousand words once a week (many tales are told of his deadline battles with editors at the Examiner, whom the Doctor put through hell on a weekly basis).
But again, the talent was always there, and every so often it would make itself heard, as in this 1988 column (which is collected in the book Generation of Swine). Here the Doctor wields sarcasm like a knife aimed squarely at the heart of George Bush the Elder — though it’s every bit as funny, and more relevant, if you picture George W. instead.
The Other George Bush
By Hunter S. Thompson
Skinner called from Washington last week and warned me that I was dangerously wrong and ignorant about George Bush. “I know you won’t want to hear this,” he said, “but George is an utterly different person from the one he appears to be — from the one you’ve been whipping on, for that matter. I thought you should know….”
I put him on hold and said I would call him back after the Kentucky-Maryland game. I had given 5 points, and Kentucky was ahead by 7 with 18 seconds to go…. George Bush meant nothing to me, at that moment. The whole campaign was like the sound of some radio far up the street.
But Skinner persisted, for some reason…. He was trying to tell me something. He was saying that Bush was not what he seemed to be — that somewhere inside him were the seeds of a genuine philosopher king.
“He is smarter than Thomas Jefferson,” Skinner said. “He has the potential to stand taller in history than both of the Roosevelts put together.”
I was shocked. “You lying swine,” I said. “Who paid you to say these things? Why are you calling me?”
“It’s for your own good,” he said. “I’m just trying to help you.”…He took a call on one of his other lines, then came back to me in a blaze of disconnected gibberish.
“Listen to me,” he was saying. “I was with him last night, all alone. We sat in front of his fireplace and burned big logs and listened to music and drank whiskey and he got a little weepy, but I told him not to worry about it, and he said he was the only living voice of Bobby Kennedy in American politics today.”
“No,” I said. “Don’t tell me that swill. It’s too horrible. I depend on you for more than that.”
I laughed. It was crazy. Here was Gene Skinner — one of the meanest and most cynical hit men in politics — telling me that he’d spent the last two nights arguing with George Bush about the true meaning of Plato’s Republic and the Parable of the Caves, smoking Djarum cigarettes and weeping distractedly while they kept playing and replaying old Leonard Cohen tunes on his old Nakamichi tape machine.
“Yeah,” Skinner said, “he still carries that 350 with the Halliburton case, the one he’s carried for years…He loves music, realy high rock’n’roll. He has tapes of Alice Stuart that he made himself on the Nak.”
Ye Gods, I thought. They’ve finally turned him; he’s gone belly-up. How did he get my phone number?
“You hideous punk! Don’t call me any more!” I yelled at him. “I’m moving to Hawaii next week. I know where you’ve been for the last two years. Stay away from me!”
“You fool!” he shouted. “Where were you when we were looking for you in New Orleans last week? We hung around for three days. George wanted to hook up with the Neville Brothers. We were traveling incognito.” …and now he was telling me that Bush — half mad on cheap gin and hubris, with 16 states already locked up on Super Tuesday — showed up at the New Orleans airport on Sunday night with only one bodyguard and a black 928 Porsche with smoked windows and Argentine license plates.
It was hard to accept. Skinner was a professional, I knew — and Bush was a former director of the CIA. It was a strange mix; and especially strange, given Skinner’s bizarre fix on Bush, which made me very uneasy.
“You know why he likes me?” he said. “He likes me because I know poems. He loves poetry. He can do ‘Annabel Lee’ from top to bottom.” At that point his voice got blurry:
“It was many and many a year ago, in a kingdom by the sea….” He paused for a minute, then went on in a dreamy voice, which disturbed me. “And this maiden she lived with no other thought than to love and be loved by me…. I was a child and she was a child in this kingdom by the sea. But we loved with a love that was more than love—”
“That’s enough,” I said. “I can’t stand it. The idea of George Bush cruising around New Orleans and quoting the works of Edgar Allan Poe is more than I can handle.”
“That’s nothing,” Skinner replied. “He can sing every song that Bob Dylan ever wrote. He plays the Dobro. He has the second Dobro ever made — in its original case. Incredible, incredible.”
I laughed harshly, but he seemed not to notice.
“And he loves animals,” Skinner said. “Animals are the only thing he loves more than music.”
“I saw him rescue a dead cat and try to bring it back to life,” he said, “right out in the middle of Pennsylvania Avenue. He put his head right down on that animal’s lips and blew his own breath down its throat…. People hooted and cheered at him and a big crowd gathered, but he kept right on.”
I felt sick and said nothing. Skinner rambled on, drifted from one demented story to another, like he was talking about the Maharishi. It made no sense at all.
None of it did, for that matter. George Bush was a mean crook from Texas. He had no friends and nobody in Washington wanted to be seen with him on the streets at night. There was something queasy about him, they said - a sense of something grown back into itself, like a dead animal…. It was impossible that he could be roaming around Washington or New Orleans at night, jabbering about Dylan Thomas and picking up dead cats.
There was something very wrong about it, deeply wrong, even queer…. Yet Skinner seemed to believe these things, and he wanted me to believe them.
Why? It was like hearing that Ivan Boesky had written “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” or that Ed Meese wakes up every morning and hurls a $100 bill across the Potomac.
I hung up the phone and felt crazy. Then I walked back to the hotel in the rain.
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August 17, 2005
Electricity Wants to Go Home
I can’t say too much about Dr. Thompson’s work over the last 15 years, because I stopped buying his books after shelling out $21.95 for Songs of the Doomed — which was awfully pricy for a book back in 1990, especially when you’re fresh out of college. I was not too happy to get home and discover that it consisted mostly of retreads from Hell’s Angels and The Great Shark Hunt, Examiner columns that hadn’t made it into Generation of Swine, and unpublished fiction that would have been better left unpublished. It seemed likely that the Doctor was going through one of his drunker phases, and his editors had thrown the book together from whatever they had at hand.
But even there, the real thing, the genius, would pop up once in a while. As in the short piece called “Electricity,” which you can hear here in the Doctor’s own voice:
Although given how much the Doctor mumbles, you’re probably going to want a transcript.
Electricity
By Hunter S. Thompson
They laughed at Thomas Edison.
It has been raining a lot recently. Quick thunderstorms and flash floods…lightning at night and fear in the afternoon. People are worried about electricity.
Nobody feels safe. Fires burst out on dry hillsides, raging out of control, while dope fiends dance in the rancid smoke and animals gnaw each other. Foreigners are everywhere, carrying pistols and bags of money. There are rumors about murder and treachery and women with no pulse. Crime is rampant and even children are losing their will to live.
The phones go dead and power lines collapse, whole families plunged into darkness with no warning at all. People who used to be in charge walk around wall-eyed, with their hair standing straight up on end looking like they work for Don King, and babbling distractedly about their hearts humming like stun guns and trying to leap out of their bodies like animals trapped in bags.
People get very conscious of electricity when it goes sideways and starts to act erratic…eerie blackouts, hissing, and strange shocks from the toilet bowl, terrifying power surges that make light bulbs explode and fry computer circuits that are not even plugged in…The air crackles around your head and you take a jolt every time you touch yourself. Your lawyer burns all the hair off his body when he picks up the cordless phone to dial 911.
Nobody can handle electricity run amok. It is too powerful…Ben Franklin was never able to lock a door again after the day lightning came down his kite string and fused that key to his thumb. They called it a great discovery and they called him a great scientist; but, in fact, he bawled like a baby for the rest of his life every time he smelled rain in the air.
I find myself jerking instinctively into the classic self-defense stance of a professional wire wizard every time I hear rain on the roof. That is an atavistic tic that I picked up many years ago in my all-night advanced intelligence electronics class at Scott AFB, on the outskirts of east St. Louis — where I also learned about pawnshops, oscillators, and full-bore lying as a natural way of life.
The stance was the first thing we learned, and we learned it again every day for a long, crazy year. It is as basic to working with serious electricity as holding your breath is to working underwater….
Lock one hand behind your back before you touch anything full of dissatisfied voltage — even a failed light bulb — because you will almost certainly die soon if you don’t.
Electricity is neutral. It doesn’t want to kill you, but it will if you give it a chance. Electricity wants to go home, and to find a quick way to get there — and it will.
Electricity is always homesick. It is lonely. But it is also lazy. It is like a hillbilly with a shotgun and a jug of whiskey gone mad for revenge on some enemy — a fatal attraction, for sure - but he won’t go much out of his way to chase the bugger down if ambush looks a lot easier.
Why prowl around and make a spectacle of yourself when you can lay in wait under some darkened bridge and swill whiskey like a troll full of hate until your victim appears — drunk and careless and right on schedule — so close that you almost feel embarrassed about pulling the trigger.
That is how electricity likes to work. It has no feelings except loneliness, laziness, and a hatred of anything that acts like resistance…like a wharf rat with its back to the wall — it won’t fight unless it has to, but then it will fight to the death.
Electricity is the same way: it will kill anything that gets in its way once it thinks it sees a way to get home quick….
Zaaappp!
Right straight up your finger and through your heart and your chest cavity and down the other side.
Anything that gives it an escape route. Anything — iron, wire, water, flesh, ganglia — that will take it where it must go, with the efficiency of gravity or the imperative of salmon swimming upriver…. And it wants the shortest route — which is not around a corner and through a muscle mass in the middle of your back, but it will go that way if it has to.
Some people had to have their loose hand strapped behind them in a hammerlock with rubber cords, just to keep their hearts from exploding and their neck nerves from being fried like long blond hairs in a meat fire when the voltage went through. But sooner or later they learned. We all did, one way or another.
One night — perhaps out of boredom or some restless angst about the fate of Caryl Chessman or maybe Christine Keeler — I connected a 50,000-volt RF transformer to one end of the thin aluminum strap on the Formica workbench that ran around three sides of the big classroom; and then I grounded the strap to a deep-set screw in a wall socket.
Severe shocks resulted when the generator jumped its limiter and began cranking out massive jolts and surges of RF voltage. A 50,000-volt shock ran through my stomach, just below my navel, burning a long, thin hole that I can still pull a string of dental floss through on wet nights.
It was horrible, and still is, but it was also a massive breakthrough; and I will never forget the warped joy I felt when the first surge of electricity went through them. They squawked at each other and flapped their arms like chickens….
My own pain was nothing compared to the elation of knowing that I had just made an unspeakably powerful new friend — an invisble weapon that could turn warriors and wizards into newts, and cause them to weep.
Washington, DC, 1989
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August 16, 2005
Shotgun Golf
So far as I’m aware, this last edition of the Doctor’s ESPN.com column, “Hey Rube,” was his only published writing of 2005. I was just going to post a link here, but since it took me the better part of the day to get the goddamn thing to load successfully, and it was on a horrific yellow background when it finally did, I decided to just rip it off in its entirety and not feel bad about it.
Shotgun Golf with Bill Murray
By Hunter S. Thompson
The death of professional hockey in America is a nasty omen for people with heavy investments in NHL teams. But to me, it meant little or nothing — and that’s why I called Bill Murray with an idea that would change both our lives forever.
It was 3:30 on a dark Tuesday morning when I heard the phone ring on his personal line in New Jersey. “Good thinking,” I said to myself as I fired up a thin Cohiba. “He’s bound to be wide awake and crackling at this time of day, or at least I can leave a very excited message.”
My eerie hunch was right. The crazy bugger picked up on the fourth ring, and I felt my heart racing. “Hot damn!” I thought. “This is how empires are built.” Late? I know not late.
Genius round the world stands hand in hand, and one shock of recognition runs the whole circle round.
Herman Melville said that in the winter of 1914, and Murray is keenly aware of it. Only a madman would call a legend of Bill Murray’s stature at 3:33 a.m. for no good reason at all. It would be a career-ending move, and also profoundly rude.
But my reason was better than good…
BILL: “Hello?”
HST: “Hi, Bill, it’s Hunter.”
BILL: “Hi, Hunter.”
HST: “Are you ready for a powerful idea? I want to ask you about golf in Japan. I understand they’re building vertical driving ranges on top of each other.”
BILL (sounding strangely alert): “Yes, they have them outdoors, under roofs …”
HST: “I’ve seen pictures. I thought they looked like bowling alleys stacked on top of each other.”
BILL: (Laughs.)
HST: “I’m working on a profoundly goofy story here. It’s wonderful. I’ve invented a new sport. It’s called Shotgun Golf. We will rule the world with this thing.”
BILL: “Mmhmm.”
HST: “I’ve called you for some consulting advice on how to launch it. We’ve actually already launched it. Last spring, the Sheriff and I played a game outside in the yard here. He had my Ping Beryllium 9-iron, and I had his shotgun, and about 100 yards away, we had a linoleum green and a flag set up. He was pitching toward the green. And I was standing about 10 feet away from him, with the alley-sweeper. And my objective was to blow his ball off course, like a clay pigeon.”
BILL: (Laughs.)
HST: “It didn’t work at first. The birdshot I was using was too small. But double-aught buck finally worked for sure. And it was fun.”
BILL: (Chuckles.)
HST: “OK, I didn’t want to wake you up, but I knew you’d want to be in on the ground floor of this thing.”
BILL: (Silence.)
HST: “Do you want to discuss this tomorrow?”
BILL: “Sure.”
HST: “Excellent.”
BILL: “I think I might have a queer dream about it now, but …” (Laughs.)
HST: “This sport has a HUGE future. Golf in America will soon come to this.”
BILL: “It will bring a whole new meaning to the words ‘Driving Range’.”
HST: “Especially when you stack them on top of each other. I’ve seen it in Japan.”
BILL: “They definitely have multi-level driving ranges. Yes.”
HST: (Laughs.) “How does that work? Do they have extremely high ceilings?”
BILL: “No. The roof above your tee only projects out about 10 feet, and they have another range right above you. It’s like they took the facade off a building. People would be hanging out of their offices.”
HST: “I see. It’s like one of those original Hyatt Regency Hotels. Like an atrium. In the middle of the building you could jump straight down into the lobby?”
BILL: “Exactly like that!”
HST: “It’s like people driving balls from one balcony to the next.”
BILL: (Laughs.) “Yes, they could.”
HST: “I could be on the eighth floor and you on the sixth? Or on the fifteenth. And we’d be driving across a lake.”
BILL: “They have flags out every 150 yards, every 200 yards, every 250 yards. It’s just whether you are hitting it at ground level, or from five stories up.”
HST: “I want to find out more about this. This definitely has a future to it.”
BILL: “They have one here in the city — down at Chelsea Pier.”
HST: “You must have played a lot of golf in Japan.”
BILL: “Not much; I just had one really great day of golf. I worked most of the time. But I did play one beautiful golf course. They have seasonal greens, two different types of grass. It’s really beautiful.”
HST: “Well, I’m writing a column for ESPN.com and I want to know if you like my new golf idea. A two-man team.”
BILL: “Well, with all safety in mind, yes. Two-man team? Yeah! That sounds great. I think it would create a whole new look. It would create a whole new clothing line.”
HST: “Absolutely. You’ll need a whole new wardrobe for this game.”
BILL: “Shooting glasses and everything.”
HST: “We’ll obviously have to make a movie. This will mushroom or mutate — either way — into a real craze. And given the mood of this country, being that a lot of people in the mood to play golf are also in the mood to shoot something, I think it would take off like a gigantic fad.”
BILL: “I think the two-man team idea would be wonderful competition and is something the Ryder Cup would pick up on.”
HST: “I was talking with the Sheriff about it earlier. But in one-man competition, I’d have to compete against you, say, in both of the arts — the shooting AND the golfing. But if you do the Ryder Cup, you’d have to have the clothing line first. I’m going to write about this for ESPN tonight. I’m naming you and the Sheriff as the founding consultants.”
BILL: “Sounds good.”
HST: “OK, I’ll call you tomorrow. And by the way, I’ll see if I can twist some arms and get you an Oscar. But I want a Nobel Prize in return.”
BILL: “Well, we can work together on this. This is definitely a team challenge.” (Laughing.)
HST: “OK. We’ll talk tomorrow.”
BILL: “Good night.”
So there it is. Shotgun Golf will soon take America by storm. I see it as the first truly violent leisure sport. Millions will crave it.
Shotgun Golf was invented in the ominous summer of 2004 AD, right here at the Owl Farm in Woody Creek, Colo. The first game was played between me and Sheriff Bob Braudis, on the ancient Bomb & Shooting Range of the Woody Creek Rod & Gun Club. It was witnessed by many members and other invited guests, and filmed for historical purposes by Dr. Thompson on Super-Beta videotape.
The game consists of one golfer, one shooter and a field judge. The purpose of the game is to shoot your opponent’s high-flying golf ball out of the air with a finely-tuned 12-gauge shotgun, thus preventing him (your opponent) from lofting a 9-iron approach shot onto a distant “green” and making a “hole in one.” Points are scored by blasting your opponent’s shiny new Titleist out of the air and causing his shot to fail miserably. That earns you two points.
But if you miss and your enemy holes out, he (or she) wins two points when his ball hits and stays on the green.
And after that, you trade places and equipment, and move on to round 2.
My patent is pending, and the train is leaving the station, and Murray is a Founding Consultant, along with the Sheriff, and Keith Richards, etc., etc. Invest now or forever hold your peace.
As for Bill’s triumphant finish at Pebble Beach, I am almost insanely proud of him. He is an elegant athlete in the finest Murray tradition. Bill is a dangerous brute with the fastest reflexes in Hollywood, but he is suave, and that is why I trust him even more than I trust all his brothers. Yes, I say Hallelujah, praise Jesus. Where is Brian? I will need him for this golf project, if only to offset Bill’s bitchiness. We will march on a road of bones.
OK. Back to business. It was Bill Murray who taught me how to mortify your opponents in any sporting contest, honest or otherwise. He taught me my humiliating PGA fadeaway shot, which has earned me a lot of money … after that, I taught him how to swim, and then I introduced him to the shooting arts, and now he wins everything he touches. Welcome to the future of America. Welcome to Shotgun Golf.
So long and Mahalo.
Hunter.
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The Last Interview
Here are a few excerpts from the Doctor’s last published interview, in the May 2005 Playboy.
The usual disclaimers apply: the viewpoints expressed herein are not endorsed by etc. etc.
On Freedom: Freedom is a challenge. You decide who you are by what you do. It’s like a question, like a fork in the road. An ongoing question you have to keep answering correctly.
On Photography: I took all the Hell’s Angels photographs. Those were all mine. But I learned after trying for years that I could not keep the same focus as a photojournalist. The myth of “take your own pictures, write your own story” didn’t work for me. As a photographer I had to keep getting longer and longer lenses. I didn’t like to get up close. I didn’t want to get in people’s faces because you couldn’t talk to them much after that.
On Gambling: Ed Bradley came out here one day and beat me for about $4000 on a basketball game. I think it started as a hundred-dollar bet. But we kept doubling up. I paid him, of course. After all, I would have looked askance—and mentioned it in public—if he hadn’t paid me. That’s what makes it fun: the reality of it, having to pay up. It’s good for it to hurt.
On Karma: It’s extremely bad karma to brag about things you’ve gotten away with. I’m a great believer in karma in a profound sense: You will get what’s coming to you.
On Rejection: I had the fiction editor of Esquire, Rust Hills, as a creative-writing professor at Columbia. I still have a note from him saying, “Never submit anything to Esquire ever again. You’re a hateful, stupid bastard. Esquire hates you.” It was kind of a shock at that age.
On Free Will: In Orwell’s 1984, rigidity is imposed by the will of the state. Whereas with soma, in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, it’s the will of the people. I’ve always operated on that second theory. Nobody is stealing our freedoms. We’re dealing them off.
On Drugs: Most drugs have been very good to me. I use drugs, and if I abuse them, well, show me where. What do you mean abuse them, you jackass? What’s abuse? Like most anything else, it’s about paying attention. It’s simple. It’s not some exotic school of thought I picked up somewhere; it’s paying attention. Concentrating. It’s something you have to do your whole life.
I watch it and make sure people can handle things. You have to be super aware of who is fucked up, who is angry. Not at you necessarily, but who is dangerous. Who is not the same friendly guy you were talking to yesterday.
I don’t advocate drugs and whiskey and violence and rock and roll, but they’ve always been good to me. I’ve never advised people who can’t handle drugs to take them, just as people who can’t drive well shouldn’t drive 80 miles an hour.
On Being Outnumbered: I was ahead of the game when I realized that if I tried to kill one person the rest would back off.
You want to take on a large one. Take on a symbolic leader, the spokesman, the bully. A swift and violent kick to the nuts after a glass of water to the face is always good — and I mean a crotch twister, boy. There’s a big difference between a sort of snap-kick to the nuts and one with a follow-through, where you go all the way through the crotch with force. Use the leg—hit with a higher part of the foot so there’s a narrow point of impact.
On Potential: That old thing about “this kid has a lot of talent” will take you a long way. But eventually it has to pay off. Potential will run out — and it can run out suddenly.
On Survival: Choosing the right friends is a life-or-death matter. But you really see it only in retrospect. I’ve always considered that possibly my highest talent — recognizing and keeping good friends. And you better pay attention to it, because any failure in that regard can be fatal. You should always be looking around for good friends because they can really dress up your life later on.
In the end, it’s not so much how to succeed in life as it is how to survive the life you have chosen.
On Perspective: I’m too old to adopt conceits or airs. I have nothing left to prove. It’s kind of fun to look at — instead of a personal challenge to the enemy out there, I can finally look at it objectively. Not “Who is this freak over here?” but “Who am I?” I’ve gotten to that point where it’s take it or leave it. Whatever way I’ve developed seems okay to me on the evidence.
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August 15, 2005
R.I.P., HST (#1)
The “Gonzo Cannon” awaits its moment of truth (thanks, Aspen Times).
In fulfillment of his last wishes, Hunter S. Thompson’s ashes will be shot out of a cannon in Woody Creek, Colorado this weekend. Originally this was to be a public event, but it has been changed to a private affair, so I will be honoring the Good Doctor here at home instead of hanging out with Bill Murray, Ralph Steadman, Jack Nicholson, Johnny Depp, and God knows who else.
Which is just as well—it would have been a circus out there, with every dubious character ever attracted by Thompson’s outlaw reputation crawling out of the woodwork, most likely out of their minds on dope and speed. On the whole, I’d much rather be holed up here in the laboratory with HST’s works, which represent the man much more than his earthly remains do.
While the method and the timing of the Doctor’s death—self-inflicted, with a pistol, in the kitchen, back in February—may have been unexpected, the fact of it came as no surprise to those of us who followed his life and times. What was surprising was that a) he had lived so long in the first place, and that b) this man whose whole life was words left no suicide note, no explanation.
Although he did write a perfectly good one back in 1977:
Author’s Note from The Great Shark Hunt
by Hunter S. Thompson
“Art is long and life is short,
and success is very far off.”
-J. Conrad
Well…yes, and here we go again.
But before we get to The Work, as it were, I want to make sure I know how to cope with this elegant typewriter—(and yes, it appears I do)—so why not make this quick list of my life’s work and then get the hell out of town on the 11:05 to Denver? Indeed. Why not?
But just for a moment I’d like to say, for the permanent record, that it is a very strange feeling to be a 40-year-old American writer in this century and sitting alone in this huge building on Fifth Avenue in New York at one o’clock in the morning on the night before Christmas Eve, 2000 miles from home, and compiling a table of contents for a book of my own Collected Works in an office with a tall glass door that leads out to a big terrace looking down on The Plaza Fountain.
Very strange.
I feel like I might as well be sitting up here carving the words for my own tombstone…and when I finish, the only fitting exit will be right straight off this fucking terrace and into The Fountain, 28 stories below and at least 200 yards out in the air and across Fifth Avenue.
Nobody could follow that act.
Not even me…and in fact the only way I can deal with this eerie situation at all is to make a conscious decision that I have already lived and finished the life I planned to live—(13 years longer, in fact)—and everything from now on will be A New Life, a different thing, a gig that ends tonight and starts tomorrow morning.
So if I decide to leap for The Fountain when I finish this memo, I want to make one thing perfectly clear—I would genuinely love to make that leap, and if I don’t I will always consider it a mistake and a failed opportunity, one of the very few serious mistakes of my First Life that is now ending.
But what the hell? I probably won’t do it (for all the wrong reasons) and I’ll probably finish this table of contents and go home for Christmas and then have to live for 100 more years with all this goddamn gibberish I’m lashing together.
But, Jesus, it would be a wonderful way to go out…and if I do it you bastards are going to owe me a king-hell salutr (that word is “salute,” goddamnit—and I guess I can’t work this elegant typewriter as well as I thought I could)…
But you know I could, if I had just a little more time.
Right?
Yes.
H.S.T. #1, R.I.P. 12/23/77
Every time I read this I ask myself, well, what if he had done it? It would have been “a wonderful way to go out,” for sure, and would have cemented the Thompson legend for all time. Artistically we wouldn’t have missed much; although HST had sporadic moments of brilliance in the later part of his career, if you put together an honest anthology of his best work, 90 percent of it would be from 1977 and earlier. And we would have been spared the spectacle of a drunken, infirm King of Gonzo throwing up outside a book signing, or weeping as he’s being helped up the steps.
Then again, we’re talking about 28 years of a man’s life, and who is qualified to say they weren’t worth living? Not me, Bub. The Doc made his choice to stay around in 77, and in 2005, when he thought it was time to go, he made that choice too.
I have a lot of thoughts about the Doctor and his place in my life, but they are complicated and need some time to coagulate. Meanwhile, The Work. Over the next few days I plan to post some choice Thompson bits, working in reverse chronological order since that seemed to work well for the Steve Martin stuff.
But first, I’m going to have to find the right music.
“Music has always been a matter of Energy to me, a question of Fuel. Sentimental people call it Inspiration, but what they mean is Fuel.” -HST, 1999
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August 14, 2005
Ode to Steve, Part 5
THE STEVE MARTIN GENERATION
Steve Martin was born on this day in 1945. I was born in 1967, which means that I was about 10 when A Wild and Crazy Guy came out in 1977, placing me squarely in the middle of the Steve Martin Generation.
Yes, there is such a thing—you know who you are. Those of us who listened to Steve’s records (and those are 33 1/3 revolution per minute long-playing vinyl records I’m talking about) until we committed them to memory, we tend to recognize each other right away. And not just because we often have that portrait of Steve signed “Best Fishes” in our cubicles. No, it’s because we’ve had our minds permanently bent by being exposed to existentialist meta-comedy in our formative years.
So how does a kid from Waco grow up to warp a whole generation? Well, let’s begin at the beginning.
Steve has never talked much about his childhood. In a 1980 Playboy interview, he said:
Nobody gives a shit about where I grew up and all that. That’s boring. Even I don’t give a shit. When I read an interview and it gets to the part where the person grew up, I turn the page.
About all I’ve been able to glean from my research is that Steve was born in Waco, Texas in 1945; grew up in Garden Grove, California; and had a real-estate-agent father who really had wanted to be an actor.
Starting at the age of 10, he worked at Disneyland for eight years, and then studied philosophy at Long Beach State for three years. Those two facts alone pretty much explain everything, and I feel like I could stop here; on the other hand, I’ve done all this research, so let’s keep going a little bit.
At 21 he got a job writing for “The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour.” This is an interesting move for a guy who has always claimed to be apolitical:
Why am I not political? One reason is purely aesthetic. There were too many political thinkers in the Sixties. The world didn’t need another political comedian. The world still doesn’t need another serious person.
Certainly “The Smothers Brothers” served as an object lesson on the dangers of being overtly political: After a long battle with CBS about political content, the show was cancelled on a flimsy pretext, and Steve was out of a job. After that he wrote for other, less edgy TV shows. Shows starring people like John Denver, Glen Campbell, Sonny, and Cher. But in the meantime he was a developing a master plan that was subversive in its own way:
We were in the midst of the Sixties when I was starting to formulate this idea. I’d say, “Someday this consciousness will grow tiresome….” I knew that someday we’d have to change, just out of boredom, and that’s what I was formulating.
As if he had been waiting for the 70s, Steve quit TV writing in 1970 to focus on performing. Since at the age of 25 he’d already been in showbiz for 15 years (if you count Disneyland as showbiz, which I do), he had a pretty good idea of what his act would be.
There were several premises. First, that I played a character onstage who assumed that everything he said was brilliant. He had total confidence, with nothing to back it up. Comedy was jokes and I thought, What if there were no jokes?
There’s a very primitive but accurate theory about comedy as a building up of tension and then a release of it…. I thought, What if you cut out the punch lines completely, and had a comedian who just announced that he was a comedian? The tension would have to break of its own accord - the audience would eventually have to break it for themselves. And that was him, me, the guy in the white suit. A professional comedian with no act and supreme confidence.
Now, I think that Steve’s being a bit disingenuous here, much as Bob Dylan is when he says he was just trying to make it rhyme. Steve was a master manipulator of audiences, and he knew where the laughs were going to come; it’s just that they would come at unusual times. Often there were delayed reactions as the audience took a moment to process what Steve had just said. Like when he used to have crowds recite the “Non-Conformist’s Oath”:
Steve: I promise to be different!
Crowd: I promise to be different!
Steve: I promise to be unique!
Crowd: I promise to be unique!
Steve: I promise not to repeat things other people say!
Crowd: I pr… (trailing off into laughter)
And he did write punch lines, but they always had some kind of reverse twist on them:
Listen to “One Way to Leave Your Lover”
But the point remains valid: What Steve was doing was not comedy but meta-comedy, and everything he did was a comment on the idea of being a comedian.
It’s not that the arrow through the head is funny, it’s that someone thinks the arrow through the head is funny. It so happens that the nose glasses are funny, but my point was, it’s gone beyond the glasses; it’s the putting on of the nose glasses that is funny.
I’m not sure that Steve invented meta-comedy—other comedians of the era, most notably Martin Mull, were working in similar areas—but he certainly crystallized it. He put it this way to Playboy:
I see myself as a success of timing, having the right act at the right time, when everybody was sort of starting to think that way. That’s why I was a phenomenon rather than just another comedian.
He was a phenomenon, alright—the first rock star comedian, complete with platinum albums, sold-out stadiums with million-dollar grosses, and a genuine hit single (see photo at top). This is what gave him the power and influence to twist young minds the way he did, and we are all the better for it.
Well, that about wraps things up for Steve Martin week. Before I go, though, I’d like to address a few words to Steve personally, just in case he ever Googles himself and stumbles across this page:
Steve:
Well, first off, thanks for the laughs. And the rest of it, too. The whole thing. The last 30 years would have been a lot less interesting without you.
I know that you’ve said you’ll never do standup comedy again. But remember on A Wild and Crazy Guy, when you were doing the financial disclosure bit and, as a joke, calculated that if you filled a 3000-seat hall at $800 a ticket, you’d make $2,400,000? Well, you could actually do that now. I would find a way to get ahold of 800 dollars to see you, and I have no doubt there are at least 2,999 others out there like me. You wouldn’t even have to put on the bunny ears or do any of the old bits—well, maybe “Cat Handcuffs.” Anyway, think about it: One show, goodbye.
Finally, I’d like to remind you that you said this in your 1980 Playboy interview: “I’d like to take LSD when I’m 60.” So if you’re looking for someone to, like, get weird with, I can be there in a few hours.
Your fan,
Bill
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August 12, 2005
Ode to Steve, Part 4
COMEDY IS NOT PRETTY
It’s a cliche that you hear over and over in various forms:
• Comedy is serious business
• There’s nothing funny about comedy
• Dying is easy; comedy is hard
But the cliche exists because it conveys an accurate point: The best comedy requires from the performer total commitment, strict self-discipline, and a willingness to go beyond the usual bounds of tact and good taste.
Consider the following, which was rejected as the Richard Brautigan Poem of the Day, and justifiably so:
Ode to My Woman (excerpt)
by Steve Martin
Every man needs a woman, and I need you
To lift me when I am sad
To comfort me when I am down
To clean me when I am drunk
To walk beside me when I want to look like I’m not gay
To walk in front of me when I need someone to act as a human windbreak
To kiss me when I’m horny
To massage me when I am tense and/or horny
To make me horny when I’m not horny,
and then to watch me fall asleep.
Now, that’s rude and disrespectful, but it’s also goddamn funny. Wait, no; it’s funny because it’s rude and disrespectful; that is the whole point of the joke. To make this kind of joke you have to turn off the part of yourself that worries about what people will think.
Which is difficult for us sensitive types. I think this is one reason that Steve eventually quit standup comedy: His onstage persona - a ridiculously overconfident, go-for-the-jugular wildman - was just too different from his real personality.
Actually, it wasn’t just onstage; Steve was basically playing the same guy in everything he did until 1984, from “Saturday Night Live” to Cruel Shoes to The Jerk to The Man with Two Brains. I think it just burned him out eventually, which was why he found it such a relief to play less edgy characters starting with All of Me.
Good for him. But man, we loved that Wild and Crazy Guy. The guy who wasn’t afraid to tell a joke that had as a punchline, “So I shot her.” They guy who told Iron Balls McGinty, “Sir, you are talking to a n**r!” The guy who wrote this:
You feel a little sorry for the guy who has to compete with him. The aging, mellowed novelist, playwright, and art collector. The guy who said this: “All I want now is small and perfect and beautiful pictures…. The ideal thing to own would be one of those Winslow Homer watercolors.”
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August 10, 2005
Ode to Steve, Part 3
MID-PERIOD STEVE
We, the fans, tend to fixate on Steve Martin’s early work - the albums, “Saturday Night Live,” The Jerk, Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid, and so on - and why shouldn’t we? That stuff was stupendously great.
But if you asked Steve himself, I bet he’d tell you that his golden age was his middle period, from All of Me in 1984 up through L.A. Story in 1991. This was when he finally became a movie star.
It’s hard to remember now, but for a while there it looked like Steve might not make it in the movies. The Jerk was a big hit, but his next three films - Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid, The Man with Two Brains, and The Lonely Guy - were all commercial failures, each one a bigger flop than the last.
You only get so many strikes in Hollywood, especially when you’re a relatively unproven commodity. Everybody in town apparently knew that if Steve’s next movie wasn’t a hit, he was finished. In a 1984 Rolling Stone article, Carl Reiner recounts the following story:
I was grocery shopping at Ralphs the other day, and a box boy came over to me and said, “I just saw All of Me, and hey, that was one good picture. And that Steve Martin, he was really terrific. He sure could use a hit, couldn’t he?” As I said to Steve, when it filters down to the box boys at Ralphs, it’s serious.
So why did All of Me become a hit when Dead Men and Two Brains - at least as good and arguably better movies with the same star and same director - had done so poorly?
The answer, I think, has to do with persona. Steve’s persona in his first three movies was an extension of his onstage persona: an intimidatingly smart guy doing aggressively dumb things for laughs, often practicing the Comedy of Cruelty(tm). The younger, hipper audiences who bought his albums, went to his shows, and watched SNL liked that character; the general audience you need to sustain a commercially viable movie career didn’t.
All of Me introduced a new Steve, one who seemed like an actual human being, albeit one caught up in bizarre circumstances. In the Rolling Stone article, Steve said this about Roger Cobb, his character in All of Me:
I never played a real guy before, a guy who could walk down the street and have someone say, “Hey, Roger, let’s have a drink.” For the first time in my life, I was playing a character who could kiss a girl, who wasn’t driven by odd madnesses.
This meant that the comedy was no longer originating with Steve; he was now the still center reacting to the insane things happening to him and around him. (This is a fundamental reversal from being a standup comic, who has no choice but to generate the comedy himself.)
Audiences loved this new persona, and he used it again in his most successful movies of the second half of the 80s: Roxanne; Planes, Trains & Automobiles; and Parenthood. In between, he mixed things up by playing a mobster (My Blue Heaven); a con man (Dirty Rotten Scoundrels); an idiot in a sombrero (Three Amigos!); and an Elvis-like, sadistic dentist (a brief, movie-stealing role in Little Shop of Horrors).
I would venture to speculate that these were the happiest years of Steve’s life. Although he was rock-star successful as a standup comic, he’s always claimed that he didn’t enjoy it, as in this quote from Rolling Stone:
When I was touring, I was bothered a lot; I really tended to withdraw. When you’re anywhere but New York or Los Angeles, you can’t go outside your room or you’re followed; you can’t have a meal without feeling self-conscious that everyone is watching. I remember photo sessions where you walk into the room, and all these people are looking at you, waiting for you to do something funny, and you get so tense you can’t do anything, you don’t feel like doing anything. People must have hated me then.
Now, with success in the movies, he was beloved by all of America, able to pick and choose his projects, raking in gazillions of dollars, and married to the fetching Victoria Tennant, whom he’d met while making All of Me (in fact, this could just as well be called the Victoria Tennant Era, because it starts when she arrives and ends when she departs). If you look back at his performances in movies made during these years, you can see that they radiate relaxed self-satisfaction.
This halcyon era culminated with 1991’s L.A. Story, where I think Steve is pretty much playing himself: a smart, funny, gentle, insecure, hopeless romantic. He also wrote the screenplay, which is a love letter both to Tennant (who co-stars) and to Los Angeles itself, which endures some mild mockery but comes out looking like a magical land of dreams. I never laughed as much at L.A. Story as I did at, say, The Jerk, but I always walked away from it feeling better about life - and that is no small accomplishment.
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August 9, 2005
Ode to Steve, Part 2
THE LATE PERIOD
In trying to break up Steve’s career into distinct phases, I realized that it was going to be much more difficult than I thought to cram it into a single week. For instance, today’s topic will be Steve’s Late Period, which in the schematic that I’ve devised includes everything after 1991’s L.A. Story. That means covering 14 quite productive years in one fell swoop, which is downright disrespectful, but I’m afraid I’m left with no alternative.
I am unabashedly stealing the concept of the Late Period from a 1993 New Yorker article by Adam Gopnik. This piece offers a lot of insight into why Steve de-emphasized his movie career in favor of other pursuits.
“Making a movie means five thousand people with opinions, two years of work, twenty-five million dollars of somebody else’s money, and then I have to go on ‘Entertainment Tonight,’” Steve told Gopnik. “I want to do something else. I want to do something that I can have more immediate control over.”
When this article was written, Steve was in the process of mounting the first production of his play Picasso at the Lapin Agile. Interestingly enough, in the two days since I started writing this, an entry for a movie version of Picasso has popped up at the top of Steve’s Internet Movie Database page. The cast includes Ryan Phillippe, Kevin Kline, and Steve himself, and I’ve been sitting here pondering who’s going to play what part. The three main characters are Picasso, Albert Einstein, and the Elvis character, who’s called “The Singer.” So is that Phillippe as Elvis, Steve as Einstein, and Kline in flamboyant mode as Picasso? Wait, Einstein is 25 years old in the play; it has to be Phillppe as Einstein…but then one of the other two has to play the young Elvis…this tangent is now officially out of control and is going to have to be terminated.
Another insight I gleaned from the Gopnik article is that the beginning of the Late Period coincides with Steve’s divorce from Victoria Tennant. This makes sense; I’ve always thought that L.A. Story is most likely the apex of Steve’s movie career in his own mind. While not as screamingly funny as some of his earlier stuff, L.A. Story is suffused with a peculiar blend of satire and sweetness that is quintessentially Steve. It is also a love letter to L.A. - his lifelong home - as well as to Tennant. You can imagine that, coming off this incredible creative high and then losing the woman he loved, he would become disillusioned with the movies.
His filmography since then includes only one performance that I would call truly noteworthy, and that is a non-comedy - if not exactly “straight” - role in David Mamet’s The Spanish Prisoner. Although he in onscreen far less than Campbell Scott, he plays the con man who is at the center of the events, and the movie depends entirely on his performance. Which is a strange and disorienting one; understated, dignified, vaguely (then openly) sinister, and always threatening to bust out of the frame and become something else altogether. In playing the con man he also plays the character the con man is playing, while at the same time suggesting Steve Martin, movie star, and somewhere buried deep underneath, Steve Martin, human being. I have seen The Spanish Prisoner five or six times now, and it still befuddles me. I hope that someday before I die I will get it.
Aside from that, Steve’s starring roles in the Late Period have mainly been in middle-of-the-road, not unpleasant, family-friendly fare like the Father of the Bride movies and The Out-of-Towners. There have also been a few outright disasters like Leap of Faith. In Bowfinger, both Steve and Eddie Murphy showed flashes of their old form, but the movie ended up being not especially memorable. I couldn’t bring myself to see Bringing Down the House, and I feel the same way about the upcoming Pink Panther remake. Watching the preview for it, I was treated to the sight of one of my favorite movies and one of my favorite comedians combined to produce a series of painfully unfunny gags.
But all that doesn’t mean the Late Period has been a waste of time; it just means that, instead of being in a few easily identifiable places, the great stuff has been dispersed into smaller bits in a wider variety of media.
TV
IMDB lists 27 TV appearances since 1991, and while I haven’t seen all of them, those that I have seen are universally excellent (he was the best Oscar host since Johnny Carson). And that doesn’t include all the times he’s been on The Late Show with David Letterman, which are never ordinary talk show appearances but genuine events that Steve puts a great deal of effort into. I particularly remember one that included a short film called “Dave and Steve’s Gay Vacation,” where the two comedy legends frolicked on the beach hand-in-hand.
PLAYS
Cecil and I were fortunate enough to catch a performance of Picasso at the Lapin Agile in San Francisco a few years back, and found it to be smart, funny, thought-provoking, and altogether worthwhile. I am less familiar with Steve’s other plays, which include WASP and The Underpants; I pledge to devote some future period of time to educating myself about them.
BOOKS/RECORDINGS
Steve has published three books in the Late Period, each of which is also available in an audio version in Steve’s own voice.
I’ll admit to being not completely sold on 2003’s The Pleasure of My Company and 2000’s Shopgirl. They are both carefully crafted, compassionate books about modern people with modern problems, written in an old-fashioned prose style laced with dry wit and elegant turns of phrase. But there is a persistent lightness about them, and not the good kind; the comedy seems too gentle, the drama lacking in tension. Listening to them read by Steve makes for a more pleasant experience, although his voice is sometimes so soothing as to border on the narcotic. I’m not sure how I’d feel about these books if they’d been written by somebody else; I might expect less and so enjoy them more, or I might not bother with them at all.
Much more fun is 1999’s Pure Drivel, a collection of short pieces, most of which originally appeared in The New Yorker. Some of them are hysterically funny, such as “A Public Apology”; some are funny in a gentler, more whimsical way, such as “Mars Probe Finds Kittens”; and one, “Michael Jacksons’s Old Face,” is weirdly, genuinely, powerfully poignant.
In fact, as Steve has grown older, the undercurrent of melancholy in his work has come more and more to the fore. I attribute this partly to developments in his personal life; partly to the natural effects of aging; and partly to the depressive streak that runs through all great comedians. The latter has always been there, and you could argue that its increasing presence is his work makes it that much more an expression of his true self - which is, after all, what we’re all trying for, isn’t it?
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August 8, 2005
Ode to Steve, Part 1
Steve Martin—actor, screenwriter, novelist, playwright, poet, philosopher, comedian, and number-one role model for the prematurely gray—will turn 60 on Sunday, August 14.
Steve ranks very high on the list of my personal deities. He was the funniest man on Earth for roughly a decade (by my estimation from approximately 1975 to 1987). But Steve is so much more than a comedian; he is a true polymath for whom comedy is the gateway into an exploration of all existence.
I use the word “is” advisedly here. It is a sad but true fact that, at least in terms of his movie career, Steve has been in a slow but steady decline for about fifteen years. This year he will be appearing in the Pink Panther remake—a colossal train wreck in the making—and in…I can barely bring myself to type these words…Cheaper by the Dozen 2.
But I am willing to forgive Steve these indiscretions, because he appears to have given up on the idea of making good movies, choosing instead to appear in whatever crap Hollywood is making this year, collect the large paycheck, and add to his art collection. I find this kind of sad, because I still believe that he could be making good movies if he really wanted to, but he appears to have made a strategic decision to put as little effort as possible into films so he can concentrate on writing instead.
There’s something very noble about that in an age where the trend is so completely away from everything literary. Every writer wants to be a movie star, whether secretly or openly; here’s a movie star who wants to be a writer. Is a writer. In addition to the seminal Cruel Shoes, Steve is the author of Pure Drivel, a second book of short comedy pieces; a novel called The Pleasure of My Company; two plays, Picasso at the Lapin Agile and WASP; and the novella Shopgirl.
The movie version of Shopgirl, starring the man himself, is coming out soon, and it is on this that I pin whatever slim hopes I have of Steve once again making a good film. Since it is based on his own book, and he took the time to write the screenplay himself, it seems possible that Steve will actually try in Shopgirl, and that it will not suck.
But no matter; Steve can keep churning out lame movies for the next three hundred years, and that won’t make him any less of a god. My plan is to devote this week’s entries to an appreciation of all the good things Steve has done over the years, and in order to save the beloved early stuff for last, I’m going to start with the most recent and move backwards.
Here’s a piece that Steve wrote earlier this year for the Washington Post. It shows that he can still be effortlessly, fantastically funny when he wants to be:
A Few Words on the Passing of Dave Barry’s Column
By Steve Martin
January 2, 2005
Dave Barry is going on an “indefinite hiatus” only to attract attention to himself. Not famous enough, Dave? Why don’t you go on hiatus! Oh, and make it indefinite. That’ll grab some headlines.
Dave says he wants to spend more time with his family. But I hesitate to tell you that Dave’s family is a hash pipe and some old Playboy magazines. Yes, Dave has written many funny essays that have appeared in our nation’s newspapers. However, most of his material is plagiarized from his own mind. Often, a funny idea will come to Dave, and then he will use that idea in one of his columns. Also, he will sometimes have a perfectly legitimate sentence, and then twist that sentence all out of shape so it will read funny. Another device that he uses is the old trick of putting the punch line at the end of the sentence or paragraph. These tactics are abhorrent.
And, by the way, you know how he often says, “And I’m not making this up?” Well, he made that up.
Dave Barry, and I am not making this up, loves Satan.
Yes, he’s really going on hiatus to give himself more time to worship Satan. When you think of all the Daves in the Bible, most of them are Satan worshipers. The snake, if you recall, was named Dave. And who is it who often takes a hiatus? Satan. Remember the movie, “Satan Takes a Hiatus”?
Also, Dave Barry plays in a band with Stephen King. Stephen King does not play music with people unless they’re able to shine beams of light from their eyes that can set fire to wastebaskets. And I’ve seen Dave at dinner parties light people’s cigarettes just by glaring at them, or sometimes he’ll just reheat fondue.
But I will miss Dave. I’m going to miss every Sunday morning when I would run outside and get the paper and read his column and laugh out loud and feel sick with envy because he’s so funny. Now I’m just going to have to settle for knowing that he’s still there, in Florida, being funnier than all of us put together, but that the rat is keeping it to himself.
Ane here’s Steve’s heartfelt tribute to Johnny Carson, which I stole from the New York Times:
The Man in Front of the Curtain
By Steve Martin
January 25, 2005
DEAR JOHNNY,
This letter comes a little late.
I remember seeing the tape of my first appearance on your show, on a home recording, a reel-to-reel Sony prototype video recorder, probably around 1972. What my friends and I ended up watching was not me, but you. It’s almost impossible to look away from oneself onscreen, but you made it possible, because there were lessons in what you did. You and Jack Benny taught me about generosity toward other comedians, about the appreciation of the plight of the pro, as valuable as any lessons I ever learned.
Your gift—though I’m sure you wouldn’t have called it a gift—was, as I see it, a blend of modesty and confidence. You wanted to do the job and do it well. You allowed the spirit of your idols, Stan Laurel and Jonathan Winters among them, to creep into you, and you found a way to twist their inspiration and make it new. In you I saw simplicity, joy, politeness, sympathy. Your death reminds me of the loss of America’s innocence, the distance we have come from your sly, boyish leers to our flagrant, overstated embarrassments for parents and children.
If I could wake you up for a minute, I would ask you to tell me how good you thought you were. “Between you and me,” I think you would whisper, “I know I was great in a subtle, secret way.” I think you would also say: “I enjoyed and understood the delights of split-second timing, of watching a comedian squirm and then rescue himself, of the surprises that arise from the fractional seconds of desperation when the comedian senses that the end of his sentence might fall to silence.”
Your Nebraskan pragmatism—and knowledge of the magician’s tricks—tilted you toward the sciences, especially astronomy. (Maybe this is why the occultists, future predictors, spoon-benders or mind readers on your show never left without having been challenged.) You knew how to treat everyone, from the pompous actor to the nervous actress, and which to give the appropriate kindness. You enjoyed the unflappable grannies who knitted log-cabin quilts, as well as the Vegas pros who machine-gunned the audience into hysterical fits. You were host to writers, children, intellectuals and nitwits and served them all well, and served the audience by your curiosity and tolerance. You gave each guest the benefit of the doubt, and in this way you exemplified an American ideal: you’re nuts but you’re welcome here.
We loved watching baby tigers paw you and koalas relieve themselves on you and seeing you in your swami hat or Tarzan loincloth, and we loved hearing Ed’s ripostes and watching you glare at him as though you were going to fire him, but we knew you weren’t.
We, the millions whom you affected, will weep inside when we see the reruns, the clips of you walking out from behind the curtain, the moment in the monologue when a joke bombed; we’ll recall your deep appreciation of both genuine and struggling talent.
Because you retreated into retirement so completely, let me thank you, in death, for the things I couldn’t quite say to you in life. Thank you for the opportunity you gave me and others, and thank you—despite divisive wars and undulating political strife—for the one hour a night across 30 years of American life when we were entertained purely, delightfully and wisely.
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August 6, 2005
The Rev. Hell Gets Confused
Amazingly enough, it took me this long to get one of those dealies that lets you record analog media on your computer. The turntable isn't working, so I am starting with the cassettes.
The first thing I digitized is a spoken-word bit by Richard Hell called "The Rev. Hell Gets Confused." This was on one of those Giorno Poetry Systems records and I used to play it on my radio show at KZSC in Santa Cruz, way back in...well, er, you know...back then.
The record belonged to the radio station and I've never seen another copy anywhere, nor has it ever appeared in digital form before so far as I'm aware. More to the point, it is freaking hilarious, so go ahead and click on the word "Play" below to hear it.
PARENTAL ADVISORY: Contains many naughty words.
PLAY.
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August 5, 2005
What it says on the north wall of Dave's Coffee Shop
"Hatred ever kills, love never dies. Such is the difference between the two. What is obtained by love is retained for all time. What is obtained by hatred proves a burden in reality, for it increases hatred. The duty of a human being is to diminish hatred and to promote love."
-Mohandas K. Gandhi
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August 1, 2005
Homemade cookies
"Don't be involved in making too many homemade cookies, your ideas of big or small, good or bad. Make only as many as you need. Without food you cannot survive, so it is good to make cookies, but don't make too many. It is good to have problems, and without problems we cannot survive, but not too many. You don't need to create problems for yourself; you have enough problems."
-Shunryu Suzuki
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