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Google Translates a Review of the French Edition of My Book About Hunter S. Thompson

My book was called Outlaw Journalist in the English-speaking world. The title was a little more cumbersome in French. I saw that a review of the book appeared in a French publication, so I copied and pasted it into Google Translate and this is what I got. I particularly like the phrase “monkey emeritus.”

Hunter S. Thompson was the inventor of gonzo style: journalism written by a living pharmacy, a way to crack the American dream without skimping on LSD, peyote, Tequila, Chivas Regal and other amphetamines, a columnist who is featured as the character Principal’s reports.

The excellent biography by William McKeen does justice to this monkey emeritus.

The cover of the French paperback features this Al Satterwhite photograph, taken in Cozumel in 1974.

The monster was born in 1937 in Louisville, Kentucky, a city providing half the world’s bourbon. Adept of creative vandalism, the juvenile seeks to silence his demons by engaging in the Air Force. Editor of a cabbage leaf for sport pilots, it is already the bombing and the chameleon. He was fired in 1957 for “rebel and superior attitude.”

Here grouillot to Time columnist bowling Puerto Rico goalkeeper villa in Big Sur, freelance for The Observer in Latin America. Adept of hitchhiking in bermuda, the character loves shooting rats with a 357 Magnum. Reader Hemingway at the time of Bob Dylan, this atypical madmen consonant with a new generation of columnists. They call Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion, Terry Southern. Their way? Integrating the psyche of a journalist in the article itself, deal with the real weapons of fiction. In this new journalism, Thompson adds a kind of intimate caving with whims and exciting. Set in 1964 in San Francisco, he lives between the world of psychedelic hippies and the leather community while the Hells Angels, which he dedicated in 1967 an essay memorable him to be beaten by those crazy bikers. “Journalism, he said, pays for our continued education.

Now camped in his hut in Aspen, Thompson throne with his eternal cigarette holder and his Hawaiian shirt in the woods elk stolen Hemingway. Looks like a kind of Walt Whitman redesigned by Robert Crumb. The brilliant crazy wrote to President Johnson asking him to be appointed Governor of Samoa before embarking on one of his terrible raids journalism. Will pay for the presidential candidates of 1968: Richard Nixon, his staff Antichrist, “a nightmare of intrigue, bullshit and suspicion”, and his rival Humphrey, “an ignoble body electrified.

“Hunter did not commit suicide, Hunter followed the Way of the Samurai” (Iggy Pop)

Freak. Described by one witness as “a cross between half-mad hermit and a Tasmanian devil”, this psychotic Celinian is recruited by the fledgling Rolling Stone magazine, which he made the beautiful days. There he publishes Loathing in Las Vegas, the story of a drift distorted through the game city, wrote to the Dexedrine and bourbon during the summer of 1971. Journalism vision, stretched, torn by lightning psychotropic, as if the Stones put music in the Apocalypse of St. John. The legend of gonzo Thompson begins to take shape. The man, safari hat covers the presidential campaign of 1972 or the fall of Saigon, and sometimes signed “Martin Bormann” on hotel registers, becomes a character in the comic strip Doonesbury Uncle Duke, a reporter with the glasses of ‘Aviator seeing bats everywhere.

After 1976, Thompson patina. Cocaine him gnawing nostrils. His wife Sandy left him. He was fishing for tarpon in Key West, is the portrait of Muhammad Ali, hangs out with Jim Harrison or John Belushi, then resumed a weekly column in the Examiner. Working in his kitchen in the middle of televisions turned on, the super-freak of the Reagan gently invite to vote for Bill Clinton, whom he lent “the loyalty of a lizard who lost his tail.” The man who loved to “dedicate” his books with a bullet becomes the totem of young Hollywood, revered by Sean Penn or Johnny Depp, who will play in the film Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. But, less a prisoner of his mythology, the old hunter scalps in 2005 will choose the end of Hemingway’s heroes: a .45 caliber gun in his mouth. “Hunter did not commit suicide, Hunter followed the Way of the Samurai,” says Iggy Pop. Consistent with this life pyrotechnic is the gun that his ashes were eventually scattered.

Hunter S. Thompson: journalist and off-the-law, William McKeen (Tristram, translated from English by Jean-Paul Mourlon, 496 p., 24 euros).

Hunter S. Thompson

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Land of the freak and home of the brave

Hunter S. Thompson lived a huge life. It’s so monumental that it’s nearly impossible to tell the whole widescreen Technicolor story. 

Hunter S. Thompson in “Freak Power”

I know, because I tried to wrestle that life between covers when I wrote Outlaw Journalist a dozen years ago.

At least I had the luxury of a book with wide-open pages.

To tell Hunter’s story on film is tougher. Maximum ass-time in seats rarely exceeds two hours, so you have that limit.

So what’s happened with tellers of Thompson stories is that they have begun to break off chunks of this epic life, to focus on just a part of the narrative.

A couple of years ago, Timothy Denevi examined Thompson’s 1970 political campaign and his influential role as a journalist covering the 1972 presidential campaign. He called his excellent book Freak Kingdom.

Click above to order the film.

Daniel Joseph Watkins put together a lavishly illustrated coffee table book celebrating that 1970 campaign and now he’s co-directed a new documentary. Both the book and film are called Freak Power. 

Watkins and his co-director, Ajax Phillips, have done a masterful job filleting the contours of Thompson’s life and creating a riveting, inspiring and heartbreaking documentary of a critical time in the life of Hunter S. Thompson and his country.

As the Sixties limped to that decade’s sad conclusion, Thompson retreated to Aspen, Colorado. He evacuated the Bay Area after a few years in San Francisco, where he’d witnessed the birth of the counterculture. 

He found peace and beauty and the community he wanted in Aspen — like-minded friends he fondly called freaks. As was the case with most of the country in that foul era, there was a generational divide in the town. 

Aspen’s powers-that-be included old-guard Germans who’d come to the Colorado ski village after ending their Nazi careers. They had become the new establishment, and, joined by the conservative town folk, they went to war with the long-haired young folk who’d moved to town to ski, fuck and smoke dope.

One of the stores posted a sign: No Hippies Allowed.

Into this world came Thompson, who soon joined in with the other young folk — Thompson was 33 in 1970 — to look for a different kind of society.

“We were the aberrants,” Thompson’s friend Ed Bastian said. “We were freaks of nature. So we might as well call  ourselves freaks.”

With his friends, Thompson helped established the Freak Power movement. He was placed on the ballot as a candidate for sheriff, with a platform that called for renaming Aspen “Fat City.” It was a move to scare away developers and tourists. “Sod the streets at once,” he said elsewhere in his platform. He wanted a pedestrian town.

Click on the cover to order.

Though Thompson was funny, running for sheriff wasn’t really a joke. He believed that politics was the art of controlling your environment. And he and his friends thought they could really establish a new utopia in the mountains.

We so rarely take funny people seriously. Many assumed his campaign for sheriff was some sort of prank. Watching the film, you can see idealism in his eyes.

And what we also see in Freak Power is Thompson’s seriousness of purpose. He had a lot of good ideas, and planned to use the office of sheriff — if he’d won the election — as sort of an ombudsmen within the community. 

Again, Thompson was ahead of his time. The sort of law-enforcement model he suggested is similar to the proposals we hear in the wake of the defund-the-police movement.

So he was putting forward a lot of great and innovative ideas, but he couldn’t help himself. He had to be funny. 

For example: the incumbent sheriff, Carrol Whitmire, had a short, well-groomed head of hair. Since one of the gripes the Aspen old guard had with the hippies was with their tendency to be hirsute, Thompson shaved his head, so he could refer to Sheriff Whitmire as “my long-haired opponent.”

Freak Power shows the campaign in all of its glory. It makes no effort to tell the full-life story of Hunter S. Thompson. That might take three 10-episode seasons on Netflix.

Click on the cover to order

Instead, you see this brilliant guy, climbing to his peak. His first book, Hell’s Angels, was behind him. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and his campaign coverage for Rolling Stone were ahead. (His first article for Rolling Stone was about the campaign)

Watkins and Phillips use 1970-era films from a variety of sources. The images are crisp and the sound is excellent. There’s nothing about this film that looks dated.

As always. Thompson’s civic wisdom is timeless. His analysis of American political experience — spoken 50 years ago in an Aspen hotel — could have been spoken yesterday.

Things are pretty foul. A lot of friends shake their heads about the state of the modern world and say, “I wonder what Hunter would say about all of this.”

He’s already said it. 

Listen to him in Freak Power and re-read his political coverage. He warns us about the nation’s Trumps, no matter what their names. Denevi, in Freak Kingdom, pays tribute to Thompson’s enduring political wisdom.

Freak Power is a fantastically well-made film, laser focused on that long-ago campaign but with wisdom that resonates today. The story is told with the vintage film and with voiceovers by the surviving participants. They appear at the end, old soldiers speaking of their battle and their eventual survival. 

Throat, meet lump.