Ken

Salon has a link to a bunch of quote about Thompson, this one seeming
relevant to your query:

Robert Sam Anson, journalist "His special curse"

  ...past midnight, in a townhouse on New York’s fashionable East Side,
a rock magazine publisher [Rolling Stone’s Jann Wenner] is hosting a
party for his staff...

  ...The hour is late...he is doing his best to get drunk. Standing off
in a corner, trademark shades in place, stoned as usual, he looks oddly
depressed. This is not his kind of crowd. Everyone appears to be over
thirty. They are wearing suits and ties. None of them is stoned. And
they are all so calm. That is the real problem: none of them is crazy.
They wouldn’t understand the demons that live in his head. He drains
his glass in a gulp and orders another drink. And then another. Buy the
end of the evening, he will have had many drinks, and will still be
sober. It is special curse: to be able to fill his body with alcohol
and drugs, and always have it function; never to be able to blot out
what he has seen, what he knows. And looking around, he knows that it
is over: the revolution, the fighting, the chance to be different. The
counterculture has become The Culture, and out there in the streets is
the proof.... (1976)

  From "Gone Crazy and Back Again: The Rise and Fall of the Rolling
Stone Generation," by Robert Sam Anson (Doubleday, 1981)

Or: the rage is gone. Or: when so many practice what looks like gonzo
journalism but on such/much safer topics....

Doug
On 21-Feb-05, at 11:32 AM, Ken Wolman wrote:

> Douglas Barbour wrote:
>
>> Yeah, I heard it on our newscasts this morning, & remembering the
>> thrill of reading Fear & Trembling on the Campaign Trail in Rolling
>> Stone, thought again about how much we need someone like him now. But
>> I
>> guess lately he hasn't written that way, or only for a much more
>> limited venue.
>>
>> Such voices are necessary, & to lose another, as you said, sad.
>
> Okay, true to the maxim that the only dumb question is the one you
> don't
> ask, I will throw out the question of what has changed in the years
> since Thompson first "came up." Is this style of personal journalism
> lost or transformed, and if the latter, then into what? I remember as
> much corporate lock-step in the middle 1970s as I've run into since.
> Perhaps the change has been too subtle (or insidious) to be marked
> unless your looking for signs of the times.
>
> ken
>
> --
> Kenneth Wolman
> Proposal Development Department
> Room SW334
> Sarnoff Corporation
> 609-734-2538
>
>


Douglas Barbour
Department of English
University of Alberta
Edmonton Alberta T6G 2E5 Canada
(780) 436 3320
http://www.ualberta.ca/~dbarbour/dbhome.htm

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