Word: thompsons
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...this despite my admiration for Alex Gibney's very thorough documentary account of the writer's disheveled life and career, Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson. Aside from a first wife who became totally fed up with Thompson, it collects a lot of tolerant - if often head-shaking - comments on the good doctor's rattling passage through the history of recent American life...
...Politically, these people range from George McGovern to Pat Buchanan; culturally, from Tom Wolfe to Jimmy Buffett. They all acknowledge Thompson's role as a founding figure among the ranks of the new journalists, who, beginning in the 1960s, usefully challenged objectivity as journalism's reigning standard by intruding themselves - their opinions, their emotions, their rages and outrages - into their accounts of the way we lived, publicly and privately, in a very troubled time. The downside of their efforts - especially in Thompson's case - was a highly unreliable subjectivity. It was covered over by Thompson's stylishness and eventually subsumed...
...Vegas and the political campaign of 1972. These books had their moments, of course, but there was something hysterical about the expression of his loves and hates in them as well - and there is something winking and indulgent in the comments Gibney has collected from those who eye-witnessed Thompson at work during those years. He remained likable - and readable - but he was not really taken seriously by the people he was covering. He was well on his way to being a "character...
...Moreover, one suspects that the gonzo qualities of his work - not that anyone has ever defined what that term actually means - seem to be an expression of a nature grown increasingly addled by dope and drink. Like a lot of addicted people, Thompson often appeared to be rather sweet-souled, almost passive, when he was clear-minded. His rage came out when he was alone at the typewriter, pounding out copy against deadlines that he almost always missed. As is always the case in journalism, when he was against the gun, editors had two choices: run what Thompson wrote, however...
...Thompson had, in the pre-revolutionary culture of that period, plenty of company, ranging from the psychiatrist R.D. Laing to the media guru Marshall McLuhan. The more gnomic their pronouncements, the more they seemed to the impressionable to be deeply wise and romantic. It is during this time that fame became a major factor in Thompson's demise. The groupies gathered, the legend grew and, soon enough, the work suffered even more deeply. A nadir was reached in 1974 when he was assigned to cover "The Rumble in the Jungle" between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman. He chose to float...