I'm not very sure what i was talking about earlier. A lot of it is about the last years of 1960s in the US and the some books from that era. To most people they're about drugs. To me, those guys gives us, civil rights, affirmative action, free press, good sex and rock n roll.
They must've done something right.
They also give us feminsm (the jury's out on that one).
Hunter S. Thompson (1937 - 2005) wrote Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas as an epilogue to the social revolution of the 1960s. Drawing the parallel to where Indonesia is today - looking back at the aspiration of the nation of "Reformasi 1998" - i can't help but thinking that he had just put it better than i could.
“(During the late 1960s) there was madness in any direction, at any hour. You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. . . .
And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. . . .
But now, less than five years later (this was written in 1971), 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.”
Many of the better sounding phrases I borrow from better writers and others are words of prophets. I don’t pretend to even understand most of the times and direct quotes for those I can remember are clearly marked.
Hunter S. Thompson works greatly helped describe and illustrate the burden of knowing and saying things others could not say. The Terry Gilliam film is an exceptionally true-to-the-book film in a sense most of the lines are taken directly from the book. The DVD bonus has commentary with HST, Johnny Depp, Terry Gilliam, Benicio del Toro, Ralph Steadman and more. James Nachwey amazing photographs distill raw moments so we don’t forget what we see. I posted his Jakarta series on my other blog.
Ralph Steadman, Andy Warhol and MS Escher illustrates their astute powers of observation. I sometimes see only absurd pictures in my head.
Heather sent Great Shark Hunt and an illustrated Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas for my birthday a few years ago. Samantha gave me a copy of V for Vendetta and currently lives in San Francisco. She is a geneticist and she does not believe religion is genetics but she couldn’t tell me why. Her mother said she was conceived during the Bob Dylan concert in the Isle of Men.
Goenawan Mohammad was the first person I heard using the word “Krisis” and his one page column should explain what he means better to Indonesians.
Verbal Education is the series of post I wrote to educate my dog. The title for this post is Lawrence Ferlinghetti, quoted in full. He is an American poet and painter, currently 90 years old and living in New York. I hope he doesn’t mind.
Tony Parsons wrote a nice book on Stories We Could Tell. The story took place around an attempt to interview John Lennon, in one London night, August 16, 1977. The night Elvis died. In the interview, Like a great confessor, talking about the whole mad trip as if for the first time, as if for the last time. On the tape, John told stories about everything, everyone, death of Brian and the various trips they been and everything.
John Lennon said the quirk of life for self made man is that they usually have someone with education to front for them, to deal with the other people with education.
For all practical purposes, my blog is science fiction. Though if you really want to see more of science fiction, you should really go and see District 9 where they put poor aliens in the ghetto.
