Anybody who wanders around the world saying, “Hell yes, I’m from Texas,” deserves whatever happens to him.
- The Kentucky Derby Is Decandent and Depraved
He had done a few good sketches, but so far we hadn’t seen that special kind of face that I felt we would need for the lead drawing. It was a face I’d seen a thousand times at every Derby I’d ever been to. I saw it, in my head, as the mask of the whiskey gentry - a pretentious mix of booze, failed dreams and a terminal identity crisis; the inevitable result of too much inbreeding in a closed and ignorant culture. One of the key genetic rules in breeding dogs, horses or any other kind of thoroughbred is that close inbreeding tends to magnify the weak points in a bloodline as well as the strong points. In horse breeding, for instance, there is a definite risk in breeding two fast horses who are both a little crazy. The offspring will likely be very fast and also very crazy. So the trick in breeding thoroughbreds is to retain the good traits and filter out the bad. But the breeding of humans is not so wisely supervised, particularly in a narrow Southern society where the closest kind of inbreeding is not only stylish and acceptable, but far more convenient - to the parents - than setting their offspring free to find their own mates, for their own reasons in their own ways. (“Goddam, did you hear about Smitty’s daughter? She wen crazy in Boston last week and married a nigger!”).
- The Kentucky Derby Is Decandent and Depraved
By this time Ralph wouldn’t even order coffee; he kept asking for more water. “It’s the only thing they have that’s fit for human consumption,” he explained. Then, with an hour or so to kill before he had to catch the plane, we spread his drawings out on the table and pondered them for a while, wondering if he’d caught the proper spirit of the thing… but we couldn’t make up our minds. His hands were shaking so badly that he had trouble holding the paper, and my vision was so blurred that I could barely see what he’d drawn. “Shit,” I said. “We both look worse than anything you’ve drawn here.”
He smiled. “You know - I’ve been thinking about that,” he said, “We came down here to see this teddible scene: people all pissed out of their minds and vomiting on themselves and all that… and now, you know what? It’s us…“
- The Kentucky Derby Is Decandent and Depraved
The outlook for Louisville’s Negroes may have improved from “separate but equal” to “equal but separate.”
- A Southern City With Northern Problems
Meanwhile, the homeowner who will sell to Negroes is a rare bird - except in the West End. And arguments are presented with great feeling that those who will show their homes only to whites are not prejudiced, merely considerate of their neighbors. “Personally, I have nothing against colored people,” a seller will explain. “But I don’t want to hurt the neighbors. If I sold my house to a Negro it would knock several thousand dollars off the value of every house on the block.”
- A Southern City With Northern Problems
It is the same assumption that motivates a homeowner to sell to whites only - not because of race prejudice but out of concern for property values. In other words, almost nobody has anything against Negroes, but everybody’s neighbor does.
- A Southern City With Northern Problems
Ah, Jesus… another bad tangent. Somewhere in the back of my mind I recall signing a contract that said I would never do this kind of thing again; one of the conditions of my turning pro was a clause about swearing off gibberish…
But, like Gregg Allman says: “I’ve wasted so much time… feelin guilty….”
- Fear and Loathing at the Super Bowl
“I got nothing personal against Thompson,” he told another NFL player who happened to be skiing in Aspen at the time: “But let’s face it, we’ve got nothing to gain by talking to him. I’ve read all his stuff and I know how he is; he’s a goddamn lunatic - and you’ve got to be careful with a bastard like that, because no matter how hard he tries, he just can’t help but tell the truth.”
When I heard that I just sort of slumped down on my bar-stool and stared at myself in the mirror… wishing, on one level, that Keating’s harsh judgment was right… but knowing, on another, that the treacherous realities of the worlds I especially work in forced me to abandon that purist stance a long time ago. If I’d written all the truth I knew for the past ten years, about 600 people - including me - would be rotting in prison cells from Rio to Seattle today. Absolute truth is a very rare and dangerous commodity in the context of professional journalism.
- Fear and Loathing at the Super Bowl
Jean-Claude, like Jay Gatsby, has “one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced - or seemed to face - the whole external world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just as far as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey.” That description of Gatsby by Nick Carraway - of Scott, by Fitzgerald - might just as well be of J.-C. Killy, who also fits the rest of it: “Precisely at that point [Gatsby’s smile] vanished - and I was looking at an elegant young roughneck, whose elaborate formality of speech just missed being absurd…”
- The Temptations of Jean-Claude Killy
More or less… and this qualifier is the essence of what, for no particular reason, I’ve decided to call Gonzo Journalism. It is a style of “reporting” based on William Faulkner’s idea that the best fiction is far more true than any kind of journalism - and the best journalists have always known this.
Which is not to say that Fiction is necessarily “more true” than Journalism - or vice versa - but that both “fiction” and “journalism” are artificial categories; and that both forms, at their best, are only two different means to the same end. This is getting pretty heavy… so I should cut back and explain, at this point, that Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas is a failed experiment in Gonzo Journalism. My idea was to buy a fat notebook and record the whole thing, as it happened, then send in the notebook for publication - without editing. That way, I felt, the eye & mind of the journalist would be functioning as a camera. The writing would be selective & necessarily interpretive - but once the image was written, the words would be final; in the same way that a Cartier-Bresson photograph is always (he says) the full-frame negative. No alterations in the darkroom, no cutting or cropping, no spotting… no editing.
But this is a hard thing to do, and in the end I found myself imposing an essentially fictional framework on what began as a piece of straight/crazy journalism. True Gonzo reporting needs the talents of master journalist, the eye of an artist/photograper and the heavy balls of an actor. Because the writer must be a participant in the scene, while he’s writing it - or at least taping it, or even sketching it. Or all three. Probably the closest analogy to the ideal would be a film director/producer who writes his own scripts, does his own camera work and somehow manages to film himself in action, as the protagonist or at least a main character.
- Jacket Copy for Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream
Nothing is fun when you have to do it - over & over, again & again - or else you’ll be evicted, and that gets old. So it’s a rare goddamn trip for a locked-in, rent-paying writer to get into a gig that, even in retrospect, was a kinghell, highlife fuckaround from start to finish… and then to actually get paid for writing this kind of manic gibberish seems genuinely weird; like getting paid for kicking Agnew in the balls.
- Jacket Copy for Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream
The major polls and surveys in the country suggest that Nixon may be right, despite the outraged howls of all those voters who insist that a choice between Nixon and Johnson is no choice at all. Sen. Eugene McCarthy has called it “a choice between obscenity and vulgarity.” Yet McCarthy is the political heir of Adlai Stevenson, who said that “People get the kind of government they deserve.” If this is true, then 1968 is probably the year in which the great American chicken will come home to roost… either for good or for ill.
- Presenting: The Richard Nixon Doll (Overhauled 1968 Model)
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