Comments

This was a sad one. Further blurs the lines between genius and insanity. Still have my favorite tee shirt from many moons ago...Ralph Steadman drawing with HST's words "He who lives like a beast takes away the pain of being a man." Apparently, not enough...RIP

Posted by Mike Neiss at February 22, 2005 9:24 AM

Cleese, yes. Thompson, no.

I could never find any method in the madness with Hunter.

Posted by shua at February 22, 2005 10:09 AM

"Let him that would move the world, first move himself" - socrates

Dr.TH says it best - "I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they've always worked for me" !!..yeah and guns too.. however ironic that sounds !!

..and lets remember he created 'Shotgun Golf'
http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?id=1992213

Posted by /pd at February 22, 2005 10:18 AM

Hunter's last column. Somehow appropriate, it's a strange 3:30 am chat with Bill Murray.

http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?id=1992213

Posted by Greg at February 22, 2005 10:18 AM

Peter Pan. Kinsey. Hunter. Quixote. Ray. Are you asking us to start to see the REAL person? Are you asking us to start to take a look at our REAL gifts? Are you asking us to stop holding back and to start living life now? Because I'm with you, it's not worth waiting for death for people to appreciate our genius...or is it madness? Oh, who the hell cares, right? Just go do it! What is that great saying you have about players playing? The point is that we need to see the REAL person behind each of us and pull the enthusiasm out of each other every day to achieve it. Oh my..a one line job description for a CEO.

Posted by Wendy at February 22, 2005 10:54 AM

He was important because he was an original -- devising a new form synthesized from Southern story-telling traditions (compose a set of threads that are mostly lies and from it spin out a whole cloth of essential truth) crossed with a Jack London/Joseph Conrad approach to living a life of on the edge and writing about it.

No one better understood or more honestly described the non-coastal American character.

And, I think most importantly for us, he was never afraid to fail, never set aside a possible WOW because it might not work. That meant his body of work is littered with failures and almosts along with his home runs. But he had the courage to innovate and not worry about getting consensus for every sub-tactical choice.

He was living, breathing innovation, when he succeeded, as in this near-perfect ethnography about the Kentucky Derby (http://www.derbypost.com/hunter.html), or when his effort belly-flopped. As Wendy said: enthusiasm.

Posted by jeff angus at February 22, 2005 11:47 AM

Don Quixote is one of the few books you can take one chapter alone any chapter of the book and you know it will an inimitable pleasure.

Quixote was a dreamer, had a noble purpose and never harmed others more than he harmed himself.

He had the perfect companion in Sancho, the opposite realistic mind. What a couple!

Posted by felix gerena at February 22, 2005 12:07 PM

It's unfortunate that so few of our "leaders" today could ever hope to have something so profound for their epitaph. Here's to the renegades - Hunter, Tom, Steve Jobs and others - who grab life by the horns and inspire others to do the same!

Posted by Andrew Hayden at February 22, 2005 12:34 PM

I have always been torn about HST. I find it hard to imagine what it must have been like to realize that your best is behind you. It has been thirty years since he has "moved the world" with both of the Fear and Loathing books--which are brilliant.

Now John Cleese continued to grow from Monty Python to Fawlty Towers to Fish to being John Cleese. He makes me smile just thinking about him. I hope he lasts for many more years.

Posted by Jack Covert at February 22, 2005 2:31 PM

Hunter WAS ALWAYS so chemically altered that I was never sure what he was producing - difficult to identify with his lifestyle and renderings - hope he went peacefully and happily.

Posted by John at February 22, 2005 2:45 PM

Years ago, my husband and I finished off the first half of a mountain bike trek with a stop at The Woody Creek Tavern, a down-to-earth gathering place located in the "suburb" of Aspen where Hunter Thompson lived. In the "gallery" attached to the tavern, which really wasn't much more than a funky room with wooden walls like the tavern, was an exhibit by a local artist--Hunter Thompson. A lifelong fan of Thompson's Fear & Loathing, I sprinted into the gallery to view his works, paintings that provided an amazing look into the soul of a brilliant artist.
Bright red greeted me in the images of violence and death--roadkill in all of its glory and other bloodied scenes. The psychologist in me was saddened, thinking that there was an inner tension and discontent that made it difficult for this multimedia artist to live in this world as it is. If Hunter Thompson's creativity was fueled by discontent, I am grateful that he held on as long as he did to provide us with his gifts.

Posted by Pam Brill at February 22, 2005 3:09 PM

Hunter was the past, not the future. The future isn't a juvenile/infantile "thumbing one's nose at" corporations/politicians/your parents/the system/etc. but doing exactly what you want and taking complete responsibility for the forms, structures and relationships you want to exist and how you want to live. Thompson destroyed--himself included. Like my 10 year-old nephew says "Kurt Cobain was a loser--he killed himself." You kill yourself, you lose. How are you going to inspire anyone to live your way, to love your way, if it doesn't even work for you? The whole drugs and alcohol thing is so tired, boring and trite I can't even handle it. Have a few friends die of it and then see how glamorous it is. Relationship killer and the opposite of creative.

Artists like Hunter S. Thompson and most other counter-culture folks (right up through punk) are artists that don't believe in the ability and responsibility of the artist to create--and so stoop to criticism and politics disguised as art. Doing so allows them to remain aloof and saves them from having to put any productive solutions on the line. They talk about what they don't want and so avoid making what they do.

True artists put it all on the line. They make themselves vulerable--this is the only way love works. Van Gogh, Bootsy Collins, Ray Charles, Murakami. They work to make/have/be love despite the myriad reasons not to. They often face difficulties because of that but I think a lot of people confuse those difficulties with creation--and I believe that's inaccurate. That's not love but self-indulgence as a career option. (Not that there's no room for self-indulgence in love--there most definitly is. But over doing it gets boring quick.)

Thompson wrote some good things--but so will anyone who commits as he did. Love and creation (and business) isn't only committment--but what you're committing to. It's easy to be a great (and creative) writer/manager/whatever in the service of the wrong thing. But that doesn't mean anyone gets anywhere because of it. What he did took some guts, and he obviously had some creativity in him, but "rebellion" was also the norm at the time he did it. And what he did contained no humility, no empathy, no compassion (not even for himself). He learned what it was about and refused to change course. It's no surprise to me that he ended his life with a gun in his mouth. He had been flirting with it for forty years.

Posted by Eben at February 22, 2005 6:01 PM

No sign the guy died sane.

Posted by AH at February 22, 2005 10:53 PM

EBEN:

I can't see how you can condemn Thompson's suicide at a painful, ill, age 67 or 68, but grant an Indulgence to Van Gogh who took his life at age 36 or 37 when he was physically able to go on.

Creation, I think, is not about love, though love, I'd have to agree, is about creation.

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In the face of felons who had highjacked the Executive and continued to commit felonies, Thompson roiled the environment. He didn't kill people, he didn't burn the flag. He disagreed. He took typewriter in hand and spoke his beliefs in an original voice. He created opposition to something that required opposition, just like Steve Jobs or Vicente Fox or Kenneth Iverson or Ben-Gurion or FDR or Curt Flood or Branch Rickey or King Gillette did in their respective fields.

He chose his own time. That makes him neither hero nor loser, just someone who made a choice he had the right to make.

Posted by jeff angus at February 23, 2005 12:55 AM

Jeff, I agree. God knows we need more like Hunter S. Thompson now... instead we have a host of corporate media hacks who can't get enough of war and patriotism. HST lived a full and glorious life and the decision to end it was his to make.

I also find Eben's lack of compassion for HST & Kurt Cobain strangely ironic. Who are you to judge their suffering? How is the suffering and suicide of an old European painter superior to that of HST's? Or Kurt Cobain's? Or anyone's?

I recommend you follow your own advice and show some humility.

Posted by AJ Hoge at February 23, 2005 2:40 AM

This great line about HST from the New York Times obit. "'He spent his life in search of an honest man, and he seldom found any,' said James Silberman, his longtime editor and publisher at Random House and Summit books." I also liked this, also from the NYT: "His assignments always became quests."

Posted by tom peters at February 23, 2005 9:06 AM

Thanks, Greg, HST and Bill Murray talking @ 330am--it doesn't get much better than that. viagra overnight shipping no prescription

Posted by tom peters at February 23, 2005 9:10 AM

Great post, Jeff.

Posted by tom peters at February 23, 2005 9:13 AM

Yes, Hunter was the voice of the "opposition" - with the tone of a mad blogger. There was no one who could touch him for flaming, cynical, abrasive, political wit - from his first piece in Rolling Stone 33 years ago when he was excoriating the "depraved" Richard Nixon to the last piece in Rolling Stone (11/11/04) when he was endorsing him: "Where is Richard Nixon now that we finally need him? If Nixon were running for president today he would be seen as a "liberal" candidate...I would happily vote for him... He was a crook and a creep...but on some nights when he would get hammered and wander around in the streets, he was fun to hang out with."

Posted by John O'Leary at February 23, 2005 12:12 PM

or, as bob dylan sings (from Time Out of Mind/Not Dark Yet) "behind every beautiful thing, there's been some kind of pain."

Posted by Erik at February 23, 2005 6:32 PM

Tom's post got me thinking about what HST means to us.

Yes, he lived a passionate life. Wrote some incredible things (The Great Shark Hunt, a thick collection of his journalism, was the first thing I read by HST and it blew me away). Indulged in a huge number of illegal substances and so forth.

And if there's anyone in the business/motivational world who can claim HST as an inspiration, it's Tom Peters. He's the king of exuberance and innovation and risk.

But as for the rest of us --- who are laboring through our tedious jobs --- can we really legitimately praise HST without condemning ourselves? We're drones, we live in a world circumscribed by rules and standards and measurements. There's something pathetic about us folks who dutifully trudge to work in business clothes every day, claiming HST as an inspiration. Because, deep down, we know that we have rejected the kind of freedom he embraced.

The business world doesn't tolerate much freedom and individuality. I'm afraid that any effort to inject some of HST's spirit into corporate life is doomed to be very superficial.

Posted by James at February 24, 2005 2:59 AM

H.S.T. killed himself while he was on the phone with his wife for crying out loud! His son, daughter-in-law, and SIX-YEAR-OLD GRANDSON were in the house at the time! In my opinion, this horribly selfish and demonic legacy negates anything he might ever have written. I'm sorry, but if he really wanted to go out that way (which in and of itself is a mortal sin) he should at least have had the decency and consideration of his family to go out into the woods by himself. No?

Posted by Howard Alford at February 26, 2005 4:46 PM