The doctor is in: Hunter S. Thompson emerges from the mist and unleashes a nice rant against the Dubya you can read over here at Rolling Stone. HST is a favorite of mine, although he's been professionally kind of a shadow of his vigorous kill-em-all-and-eat-their-brains gonzo self since about 1980 or so. But for every lazy hackwork essay he does, he still occasionally turns out a gem like this:
Did you see Bush on TV, trying to debate? Jesus, he talked like a donkey with no brains at all. The tide turned early, in Coral Gables, when Bush went belly up less than halfway through his first bout with Kerry, who hammered poor George into jelly. It was pitiful. . . . I almost felt sorry for him, until I heard someone call him "Mister President," and then I felt ashamed.
I only hope he's right about the end.
Picked up the new Tom Waits and the lamentable final Elliott Smith CDs this week. Through a quirk of the cash register, I actually got one of them for free! The pimple-faced dude behind the counter apparently only rang one of them up, and I didn't realize it until I was in the parking lot, it was raining, I'm unscrupulous and so forth... I stuck it to the man. Anyway, they're good stuff, totally opposite of course. I'm working on an actual review of Smith's "from a basement on a hill" for the paper and will post eventually.
Waits' "Real Gone" is a gutbucket blast, though, all tearing engine-driven punk blues, louder and more hardcore than anything Waits has done in a long time. It lacks the saloon lullaby feel some of his work has but makes up for that in sheer noise. Good stuff to listen to in the car as you screech through traffic and knock down old ladies.
No comments:
Post a Comment