Smoke and Mirrors

Smoke and Mirrors

The Influence of Hunter S Thompson by Martin Askem

A smoking man, an image, and an image I recently drew with pastels to portray Hunter S Thompson.

Hunter S Thompson, Iconic journalist and author and creator of ‘Gonzo’ style of journalism. A style of reporting where reporters involve themselves in the action to such a degree that they become central figures of their stories. He is also known for his use of psychedelics, alcohol, firearms, and his iconoclastic contempt for authoritarianism.

I first stumbled across Thompson in early 2009 when watching the surreal film ‘Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas’, a film which was a portrayal of Thompson most famous work. This film an inspiration for a surreal poem I wrote entitled ‘Fear and Loathing’

Hunter S Thompson was a complex, confusing yet brilliant man. A man who for me was surrealism in the written form. Surrealism as a subject being the most powerful and indeed attractive of forms for my work.

A native of Louisville, Kentucky, Thompson grew up in the Cherokee Triangle neighbourhood of the Highlands He was the first son of Jack Robert, an insurance adjuster and a U.S. Army veteran who served in France during World War I, and Virginia Davidson (née Ray; 1908–1998). Introduced by a mutual friend from Jack's fraternity in 1934, they married in 1935.
His father died on July 3, 1952, when Hunter was 14 years old, leaving three sons — Hunter, Davison, and James to be brought up by their mother. Contemporaries indicated that after Jack's death, Virginia became a "heavy drinker. James was openly homosexual, and died of AIDS.
Interested in sports and athletically inclined from a young age, Thompson joined Louisville’s Castlewood Athletic Club, a sports club for teenagers that prepared them for high-school sports, where he excelled in baseball, though he never joined any sports teams in high school, where he was constantly in trouble
In 1970 Thompson wrote an article entitled The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved for the short-lived new journalism magazine Scanlan's Monthly.
Although it was not widely read at the time, the article is the first of Thompson's to use techniques of Gonzo journalism, a style he would later employ in almost every literary endeavour. The manic first-person subjectivity of the story was reportedly the result of sheer desperation; he was facing a looming deadline and started sending the magazine pages ripped out of his notebook. Ralph Steadman, who would later collaborate with Thompson on several projects, contributed expressionist pen-and-ink illustrations.
The first use of the word Gonzo to describe Thompson's work is credited to the journalist Bill Cardoso. Cardoso had first met Thompson on a bus full of journalists covering the 1968 New Hampshire primary. In 1970, Cardoso (who, by this time had become the editor of The Boston Globe Sunday Magazine) wrote to Thompson praising the "Kentucky Derby" piece in Scanlan's Monthly as a breakthrough: "This is it, this is pure Gonzo. If this is a start, keep rolling." Thompson took to the word right away, and according to illustrator Ralph Steadman said, "Okay, that's what I do. Gonzo."
Thompson's first published use of the word Gonzo appears in a passage in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: a Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream:
I could write page after page about Thompson, about Gonzo. For me the smoking man is an inspiration and tells me to look beyond the smoke.

Martin