This is the end of the Introduction to
Gonzo Marketing: Winning Through Worst Practices ["87 used & new from $0.47"], the bit in which Hunter S. Thompson (may he rest in peace, high as the highest order of angels)
kills me for daring to apply his patented term "gonzo" to the mundane problems of the world's worst greedheads
-- another term of art the man had pending before the Metaphorical Patent Office of Common Usage. It seems only fitting to begin with the cover of his illustrator's solo book (Ralph Steadman has
an excellent website too). This is the way I imagine some children see the world of adults. It's the way I saw it, anyway. And some days still do.
Once more: the red bit at the beginning is the end of the previous installment.
Play is serious stuff, profound even. While it's hard to describe, we all know it when we see it, flourishing as it tends to do, in accord with innate qualities. Even when those qualities are coming at you right straight off the wall...
Introduction [continued]
Difficulty At The Beginning [17]
"...you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West,
and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see
the high-water mark -- that place where the wave
finally broke and rolled back."
-Hunter S. Thompson
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas [18]
How many days have I been racked out on this couch? Three? Four? I got back from London last week and immediately came down with the flu. Influenza the ancients called it. An evil influence from the stars. Between hits of Alka Seltzer Plus and fitful bouts of restless, fevered sleep, I've been reading Elmore Leonard's novel, The Hunted. Maybe that's what did it.
Somebody's banging on my door and bellowing. "Locke! Come out here you bottom-feeding scum sucker! I know you're in there. Come out or I'm coming in!" Something much harder than a fist hits the door with a sickening thud. A window shatters. I'm waking up now. More like coming to. What was I just dreaming? Something about the book. Something terrible. You know those dreams that keep repeating, won't let you go? One of those. I won't be able to finish it on time. I don't know what I'm doing, what to write. What if my publisher wants the money back? But this is worse. I stumble to the door, undo the bolt.
And find myself eye-to-eye with the uncompromising orifice of a shotgun barrel. Look how round it is. Nasty. I am definitely not ready for this. "Look," I croak, my voice breaking, "I've got a mother of a cold going on here. Could you maybe come back later?"
A rough hand reaches through the door and grabs me by the shirt, yanking me out into the cold, then hurling me back against the long bank of entryway windows. It's not the Fed-Ex guy. Not UPS or the mailman. Nobody else ever comes here. "Who are you?" I manage, "and why are you doing this?" The man looks crazed. He looks as if he's been drinking. Maybe even on drugs.
Then I notice the cigarette holder. Oh dear God. My worst nightmare come true. It's Hunter S. Thompson. In that case, definitely on drugs. "I wish I had something to offer you," I say, thinking as fast as I can, which isn't very, "but I quit drinking 16 years ago." He jacks a shell into the pump. Uh-oh, wrong approach. However, he sees that I've recognized him. Sees the confusion lifting, the fear dawning in my face.
"I understand you're writing a book," he drawls. And just lets it hang there, the whole scene suddenly framed in tableaux. I should have seen this coming. I should have called it Seven something. Or something about Simplicity or Cheese. "Look," I say... but that's as far as I get because the shotgun is now jammed between my teeth. "Mrphh rmble xltrig forqwad!" I protest.
"A book about gonzo," he says with towering contempt. "A book about gonzo marketing," he says, and spits -- an ugly gesture at the best of times, and I'm thinking this isn't one of them. But at least he's pulled the gun back some, so I can talk.
"Hunter, man! It's not what you think! You're gonna love it, actually. See, the reason it's gonzo is what you said about the writer needing to be engaged in what he's writing." I compulsively add "...well, he or she." Big mistake. He rams the barrel into my sternum, pinning me against the window. "Yeah sure, so it's a business book, OK. But not that kind of business book. You know?" It doesn't look like he knows. "Listen..." I try again.
But he says "No, you listen to this!" And suddenly there's a blinding light and a very loud noise that I'm hearing with every auditory synapse as I watch myself, fascinated, tumbling backwards in slow motion through the glass, which has shattered into a rainbow catching the morning light, fractal, delicate, heartbreakingly beautiful. I slam into the Sony XBR TV...
...my head crashing through the largest tube job on today's consumer electronics market. Circuits spark and leap. The current streams into my brain. I realize as consciousness fades that the damn thing is trying to mate with me. Artificial intelligence attempting to spawn itself on the far and fading shores of broadcast. Predictably, the attempt fails.
The phone rings.
"Hello?" Tentative. Thinking maybe this is what comes after. You get some kind of call. But it's David Weinberger. You remember him from Cluetrain, right? "So how's the book coming?" he wants to know, all rested and cheery. At this moment I hate him. "I've decided not to write it," I hear myself saying. "I'm afraid people won't... you know, they just won't get it." Even though it's dawning on me it was all a dream. Still...
In an interview with FAST COMPANY, Weinberger offers a short course on the World Wide Web and its true power...
[DW:] "The belief in centralized management isn't just a business decision. It's part of a larger, neurotic understanding about our place in the world. For the past century, Americans have been obsessed with controlling everything. It's neurotic because the human condition is about living in a world that we didn't make and that we can't control. In that sense, the Web's lack of control -- its very architecture -- is a celebration of being human in a universe that joyously overwhelms us."
from:
Internet 101 by Keith H. Hammonds
source: Fast Company, 1 March 2002
"What do you mean you're not writing it!" Weinberger thunders. I can tell he's secretly pleased, though. He just signed a contract for his own book and, really, the guy is more competitive than Larry Ellison. Also, he senses something deeply neurotic with strong psychoanalytic potential. But I head him off before he can get into it. "I just realized it was too complex," I say. "These business types haven't evolved enough yet. Maybe if I live another thousand years..."
I don't want to tell him the truth. That Woody Creek, Colorado is only a few hundred miles into the mountains west of here and it's all too clear that that fearful loathsome Dr. Thompson is still up there somewhere. Alive and kicking.
end of Introduction
(but to be continued)
NOTES
[17] The I Ching or Book of Changes, translated by C.F. Baynes and R. Wilhelm, Princeton University Press, 1967.
[18] Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream.
from: Hunter S. Thompson (Obituary) by Warren Hinckle
source: The Nation, 21 March 2005
Sudden death shakes this earthquake-prone town, where life is taken so easily for granted. Thompson's favorite San Francisco hangouts were decked in gloom. The night of his death, in the back room of the Tosca, writer Tim Ferris and others of Hunter's close Frisco friends sat shiva with owner Jeanette Etheredge. Gavin Newsom, the mayor, sat in to hear the tales. Recalled was the night when Thompson took every glass in the bar and stacked them in an increasingly unstable pyramid on four cocktail tables. The understandably nervous owner told the writer that if he put one more glass on top of the heap the "damn thing will fall down." Just one more glass, Jeanette, Hunter said. It fell down.
"utopia" that reads more like a nightmare of social planning run amok. Among Bellamy's "improvements" was a strongly implied program of eugenics to weed out the "unfit" and increase the number of superior -- read upper-class white -- worthies.
