Build Date: Tue Oct 22 17:50:05 2024 UTC
I no longer have a soul, having bartered it long ago for dashing good looks and a handful of super-powers.
-- Lenny Tuberose
Nasty Review of New Hunter S. Thompson Compilation CD
1999-06-09 02:40:00
Who gives a crap what Hunter has to say about music? That's the question Everett True of The Stranger (www.stranger.com) asks. He didn't like EMI U.K.'s Songbook Series CDs, a new series of personal musical compendiums by "left field" artists, including super author Hunter S. Thompson, and gonzo artist Ralph Steadman. He may have a point, but he goes too far, when he calls Hunter "a sad fuck."
Okay, so the Hunter CD probably is terrible, but that's the kind of cheap-buck shit that Hunter has always gone for. He's opportunistic like a shark. He recently wrote a horrendously boring Nash Bridges episode, obviously FOR NO GOOD REASON AT ALL. Utter tripe. But I'm getting a little sick and tired of every young-Turk writer claiming that Hunter is a drug addled burnout.
Even in the old days, they had to put the screws to Hunter to get him to turn anything in by presstime. That's when Hunter was running around the world trying to make a name for himself, brewing his own beer, and barely able to keep a roof over his head. Now he's old and successful, has some money, and he can write whatever he wants. So he does a lot of lame, money grubbing stuff in between his various projects. But when he wants to, he can STILL turn out a brutal blast of crazy writing. I've seen it happen. He's just as sharp as he ever was, I tell you!
Anyway, the Hunter CD doesn't sound like it would be all that bad to me. What the hell does he expect Hunter to put on this CD? Stuff like Jefferson Airplane and Bob Dylan seem perfectly reasonable to me. Most people would be disappointed if he DIDN'T put the music that people associate with him on there. (I mean, "White Rabbit," fuck, he's gotta have that on there!)
True is an ASS for saying that hunter has no passion for music, even if it's true. It's just a mean statement, designed to give his article artificial edge. So what if there's nothing from the last three decades on the compilation? With Hunter, you can't conclude anything from that. Hunter probably listens to all kinds of sick new stuff.
I remember when I went to see Hunter speak several years ago at U.C. Berkeley's Zellerbach Hall. He was characteristically several hours late, and in the meantime, the audience was sonically TORTURED, hours on end, by a cranky, neo-punk band called Alice Donut, who made it absolutely clear that Hunter had personally picked them to open the show. I guess True would have liked a bunch of weird indie flailing on the Hunter CD instead of Lou Reed.
T O P S T O R I E S
Another Nobel Prize-Winning Author Describes Drunkenness
This book won a Pulitzer Prize. Here's its famous paragraph on getting drunk... (More...)
'Why I'm pretty sure JD Vance had sex with a couch'
True or false? The answers await us in that magical land where all truths are revealed -- the internet. (More...)
In 2010 Dr. Cheng-Huai Ruan discovered a way to cause a patient with an abnormal heartbeat to get back into a normal rhythm by sticking a finger up the patient's ass. (More...)
WKRP in Cincinnati aired from 1978 through 1982. Howard Hesseman played Dr. Johnny Fever, a DJ from Los Angeles who was fired from his previous job for saying the word "booger" on the air. In the show Hesseman would do some dialogue, introduce a song, and start the song. You'd hear a few notes, but never the whole song. (More...)
SF Hippies Can't Get Their Act Together
The annual 420 Hippie Hill event in Golden Gate Park, where large crowds of hippies, wannabe hippies, and hippie poseurs drape themselves in tie dye t-shirts and gather on a hill on 4/20 to smoke weed, was cancelled this year because the organizers couldn't get their act together. (More...)
Mozart to be inducted into the Rock 'n Roll Hall of Fame
Joining such hard-rocking inductees as Abba, Chet Atkins, Nat King Cole, and Neil Diamond, the Rock 'n Roll Hall of Fame is proud to induct Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. (More...)
C L A S S I C P I G D O G
The Deep Dark Underbelly of the Star Wars Myth, or Ramayana Remembered
It's a fact: Star Wars is a blatant plagiarism of an ancient Asian legend, and the long lines of devout Star Wars freaks are really unscrupulous Asian copyright busters. From Indonesia to Thailand to Nepal, videos are available for sale or rent before they're even released in the US and UK due to this nerdy camcorder-clutching bunch. (More...)
During a magnificent sunny day in a fast receding autumn, the Spock Science Monitor reporters once again blew the playa dust off of their computers and covered the 2002 Burning Man Decompression – held every year just east of Portola Hill in beautiful San Francisco. Both an afternoon and evening issues were released to the unsuspecting crowd of freaks attempting to in some small way experience the euphoria of the playa – if but for a brief afternoon far from the desolation of Northern Nevada. (More...)
Patient Joab's scientifick editorial discusses aspect of the space-time-beer continuum never before processed by sub-bush-robot minds!!! Too fabulantastic to contempulate! (More...)
Johnnie Royale's Guide to Wakes
Wakes can present problems for Bad People of the Future. (If you don't know what a BPotF is, you need to read more of the PDJ.) Sure, your friend is gone and you miss him and that really sucks; it does, I know. But all Bad People of the Future are gonna die, and they have all accepted that fact. They do deserve, however, to have one final kickass party to celebrate all the bad things they've done in the past, present and future. And you, as a friend, have to make sure that their desire for a final send off is well executed (sorry for the pun). That's just the way of BPotFdom. (More...)
A Blast from the Past! Pao Tzu goes over and under the crucial variables in the production and consumption of Salvia Divinorum. A must read for psychonauts of all stripes. (More...)
40 Acres, a Mule, and a Crummy 90-Second Spot on Weekend Update
Consider the plight of the Black Man. The Black Man on "Saturday Night Live," I mean. Has there ever been a more pathetic thing than a token unredeemed for 28 years? Where is the NAACP when you really need them? (More...)