Tom Wolfe-Fashionista Of His Own Kind-And A Hell Of A Writer When The Deal Went Down Has Cashed His Check -The 50th Anniversary Of The Summer Of Love (1967)-In The 1960s Time Of Fear And Loathing- The Movie-Hunter S. Thompson’s “Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas”

Tom Wolfe-Fashionista Of His Own Kind-And A Hell Of A Writer When The Deal Went Down Has Cashed His Check

By Bart Webber

I had been, strangely enough, in La Jolla out in California attending yet another writers’ conference which seems to be the makings of my days these days, attending writers’ conferences that is instead of taking pen to paper or rather fingers to word processor keyboard, when I heard Tom Wolfe had cashed his check. “Cashed his check” a term (along with synonymous “cashed his ticket”) grabbed from memory bank as a term used when I was “on the bum” hanging out in hobo jungle camps and the whole trail of flop houses and Salvation Army digs to signify that a kindred had passed to the great beyond. Was now resting in some better place that a stinking stew-bitten, flea –bitten, foul-aired and foul-person place. No more worries about the next flop, the next jug of cheapjack wine, the next run-in with vicious coppers and railroad bulls, and the next guy who was ready to rip whatever you had off to feed his own sullen addiction.

By the way this is not Thomas Wolfe of You Can’t Go Home Again, Look Homeward, Angels, etc. but the writer, maybe journalist is a better way to put the matter of tons of interesting stuff from acid trips in the 1960s hanging with Ken Kesey and his various tribes of merry pranksters, the Hell’s Angels, drifters, grifters and midnight sifters, to marveled space flights in the 1970s to Wall Street in the reckless 1980 and back who had cashed his check. The strange part of the “strangely enough” mentioned above was that on Monday May 14^th 2018, the day he died, I was walking along La Jolla Cove and commenting to my companion without knowing his fate that Tom Wolfe had made the La Jolla surfing scene in the early 1960s come alive with his tale of the Pump House Gang and related stories about the restless California tribes, you know those Hell’s Angels, Valley hot-rod freaks and the like who parents had migrated west from dustbowl Okies and Arkies to start a new life out in Eden. These next generation though lost in a thousand angsts and alienation not having to fight for every breath of fresh air (with the exception of the Angels who might as well have stayed in the Okies and McAllister Prison which would have been their fate.   

I don’t know how Tom Wolfe did at the end as a writer, or toward the end, when things seemed to glaze over and became very homogenized, lacked the verve of hard ass 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s times. Although I do note that he did a very although I note he did an interesting take on the cultural life at the Army base at Fort Bragg down in North Carolina in a book of essays around the theme of hooking up. That hooking up angle a sign that social cohesiveness in the age of the Internet was creating some strange rituals. Know this those pound for pound in his prime he along with Hunter Thompson could write the sociology of the land with simple flair and kept this guy, me, flipping the pages in the wee hours of the morning. RIP, Tom Wolfe, RIP.  

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The 50th Anniversary Of The Summer Of Love (1967)-In The 1960s Time Of Fear And Loathing- The Movie-Hunter S. Thompson’s “Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas” 

Zack James’ comment:

You know it is in a way too bad that “Doctor Gonzo”-Hunter S Thompson, the late legendary journalist is not with us in these times both this 50^th anniversary commemoration of the Summer of Love, 1967 which he worked the edges of while he was doing research (live and in your face research by the way) on the notorious Hell’s Angels. His “hook” through Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters down in Kesey’s place in La Honda where many an “acid test” took place and where for a time the Angels, Hunter in tow, were welcomed. He had been there and later as well when he saw the ebb tide of the 1960s coming a year or so later. He would have “dug” the exhibition at the de Young Museum at the Golden Gate Park highlighting the events of the period.    

Better yet he would have had this Trump thug wrapped up and bleeding from all pores just like he regaled us with the tales from the White House bunker back in the days when Trump’s kindred one Richard Milhous Nixon, President of the United States and common criminal was running the same low rent trip before he was run out of town by his own like some rabid rat. Hunter Thompson wherever you are –help. Selah. Enough said-for now   

Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas, starring Johnny Depp, based on the gonzo journalism of Doctor Hunter S. Thompson.

Make no mistake I have read everything of Hunter Thompson’s that I could get my hands on. I love Johnny Depp as an actor. However, this film does a true disservice to both of their talents. Johnny makes no sense as Hunter, although he was legitimate wild man Hunter’s friend. More importantly, Fear and Loathing, driven by stuff internally spinning in Thompson’s head, does not translate on the screen as anything but a diffused and nonsensical homage to late counter-cultural self-indulgence, drug division. Of the worse sort.

Thompson always claimed that his literary attempt to use the tenets of ‘gonzo’ journalism in the book was a failure. I disagree with that evaluation for the book but certainly not for the film. Let us face it this is classic case of the film being very, very inferior to the book, although the episodes and language hew fairly close to it. Please, please read the book. And please, please read many times that little gem snippet of his about his take on the high (and low) side of the 1960s experience, what it meant to those who got caught up in the excitement and danger, and when he could see the whole thing literally ebbing. Classic. You will also laugh and be entertained by his drug-induced attempt to find the meaning of the American experience in the post-World War II world. As for the film it will give you nothing but fear and loathing.