a savage journey to the heart of the american dream
"Let me explain it to you, let me run it down just breifly if i can. We're looking for the American Dream, and we were told it was somewhere in this area..."
Just finished reading Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, its so much greater than its movie version regardless of Johnny Depp and all stream-of-consciousness like--garbled emotion, bits of memory, reminescense and passive observation twirled into the writing and twisted around so the first time you read it you only get a simple fleeting image of his reality, which gives you the kind of drug-addled perspective that our protagonist has, except that you actually have the luxury of going back and reading it again to sort everything out. Las Vegas is the perfect place for this shit to go down, the city of culmination, of sin, where everything is built to look like something else, giant buildings shaped like pyramids and palaces, where the ceilings are painted like the sky and the sky is smog-filled and drowned with radioactive light. What a shithole! This is the real America... finially we realize that true freedom is the freedom to destroy yourself at will. Mostly what i noticed about the book though was the way the 60's are kind of portrayed as one huge euphoric trip, the whole nation was on acid, an era of uppers and of intense happiness, and the 70's conversely became the burnt out coming down period. There was this one scene where Raoul Duke turns on the TV all fucked up on mescaline, and an image of Nixon's hateful face appears, smiling, i think that Nixon represents a lot of the 70's--after the Watergate scandal I imagine everyone, who had spent an era dreaming and hoping and protesting, must have lost their faith entirely in their country... maybe that was the final death of the american dream?
oh wtf do i know, anyway, it was a good book.
Just finished reading Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, its so much greater than its movie version regardless of Johnny Depp and all stream-of-consciousness like--garbled emotion, bits of memory, reminescense and passive observation twirled into the writing and twisted around so the first time you read it you only get a simple fleeting image of his reality, which gives you the kind of drug-addled perspective that our protagonist has, except that you actually have the luxury of going back and reading it again to sort everything out. Las Vegas is the perfect place for this shit to go down, the city of culmination, of sin, where everything is built to look like something else, giant buildings shaped like pyramids and palaces, where the ceilings are painted like the sky and the sky is smog-filled and drowned with radioactive light. What a shithole! This is the real America... finially we realize that true freedom is the freedom to destroy yourself at will. Mostly what i noticed about the book though was the way the 60's are kind of portrayed as one huge euphoric trip, the whole nation was on acid, an era of uppers and of intense happiness, and the 70's conversely became the burnt out coming down period. There was this one scene where Raoul Duke turns on the TV all fucked up on mescaline, and an image of Nixon's hateful face appears, smiling, i think that Nixon represents a lot of the 70's--after the Watergate scandal I imagine everyone, who had spent an era dreaming and hoping and protesting, must have lost their faith entirely in their country... maybe that was the final death of the american dream?
oh wtf do i know, anyway, it was a good book.