Hair of the dog...

I'm wheezing like a geriatric, walking up what feels like Everest. I just stare down at the cobble stones and try to forget the hangover that threatens to send me tumbling back the way I came. The aptly-named Steep Hill is the last thing I wanted to tackle today, especially alone with a DVX camcorder and tripod getting me down.
Well, I say alone - I've been left to it with my heavy equipment by my pal, Nick, who's too 'busy' in his perusal of the antiqual boutiques and restaurants. His flamboyance makes him forget his manners sometimes, but that's what makes him fun to have around.
As usual, I say 'fucking this' and 'fucking that' too much and tweed smiles of Lincoln's better half drop as they silently judge the invading hoodie. I'm hardly wearing trackie-bottoms tucked in socks, but I wouldn't expect them to know that: they can barely see beyond the high street.
I haven't even got a story in mind, yet. Coming up to the Cathedral Quarter seemed a little more original than joining the swarm of my peers on the Brayford fighting for scraps: "Look, there's a swan with a limp! Do you think we could go with that from an emotive angle?"
So, I thought I'd try my luck up top. But, the sweat's getting in my eyes now. Nonconformism is the bane of my life.
We get into the main square and I hang my head for a moment.
"Eh! Hari's over there! Come on, you pussy."
I look up and the girls are sitting outside the pub, sangria in hands. Why that seems appropriate on a windy day in March, I don't know. Then again, it's not exactly conventional someone to be in this much turmoil as I am, on a Monday afternoon.
"Sam's inside," Hari taunts, "We were just about to ring you, but you really look like you don't need to be here."
Sam clearly has other ideas as I see him come out the doors with two pints and a jack and sambuca.
"'Saw you through the window, you looked like you could use these," he laughs in the same pitying way as Hari, "Hair of the dog and all that."
I've only known him six months, but already Sam's like my brother. He knows I'd never turn down a drink with him, regardless of how many we put away together only the night before. Naturally, the shot goes down the hatch first. I wince and gulp, but apparently it's going to stay down. Listening to my friends chatter and sipping on the pint of Stella, I look out into the square absent-mindedly. Never so much in my whole life have I wanted a story to come to me.
Moments later I spot potential aggravation. A van has got jammed in a turn down one of the quarters narrow roads, much to the following driver's annoyance. After slamming his horn a dozen times, he struts over to give his worth to the van-man. Both out of their vehicles now, the angst is almost at breaking point, after some harsh words lead to the them standing toe-to-toe, fingers jabbing each others chests.
Two things spring to my mind at that point: how quickly can I get this camera set up and will it appear ethical filming someone getting their head busted? Probably not for the latter, but it's here on a plate and crime sells news copies. Damn. As I'm trying to make my mind up, one of them storms back to their car looking like a man whose balls have shrunk at some point in the exchange of threats. Every now and then you come across someone you realise you shouldn't have fucked with. He throws back a rushed "prick" in consolation.
I sigh. I find it funny how nowadays I look for these kinds of moments to erupt. Always on the lookout for a bit of action to report and shaking people down for valuable information, in journalist mode. I like it in a way. It makes my life feel like a sort of film noir.
As I drain the last of my drink, it's a welcome surprise to me that I feel slightly healthier. I'm not sure whether the irony of that is more amusing or worrying. I see Sam finishing his fourth in the time it has taken my current fragility to let me take down one. He's obviously starting to get a buzz on and I know it won't be long before he gives me that look that says, "Things are going to get heavy tonight. And you know you're coming with."
I'm starting to contemplate taking the easy way out. I could just go and get a few shots the cathedral and put a creative spin on whatever the latest news post on their website is. Still, I hate being predictable. I may be last-minute, but I'm an egotist and like my work being recognised for some unique talent or other. Battling with my conscience rarely goes well.
"Fancy another shot, mate?"
"Huh, what?" I look up at Sam, "Errr...Yeah. Yeah, go on then..."

Pure Gonzo...

You know, I think I may have had it right the first time around. I altered this page so as to appear more professional. Whereas, for a long time, it was dedicated to relaying the acts of carnage of myself and acquaintances of mine, I recently punted an attempt at a more sophisticated approach. Articulate I believe I can do; sophistication? Never.

Therefore, changing my blog to a literature review was a bad idea. I do love to read classics and I do believe all in which I've said in previous posts, but right now I'm boring myself to tears. I can't do serious. And if trying to accommodate lecturers, employers, whoever, in the bid to sound more professional means writing in a tone that is wholly unnatural to me, I can tell you right now...Fuck that!

The idea of these pages is so we can develop a style of our own that will make us unique and entertaining. Well, trawling through previous posts, would be enough to stick the noose around zebedee's neck.

My last blog may not have been totally 'professional' (god, I'm sick of hearing that word), but it was a sickening read that was way more enjoyable than the current unenthusiastic drivel.

I'm not a critic, I'm a journalist. And a pretty twisted one at that. And I'm going back to what I love to write - aggressive social commentary. With that, I can infuse a literary vibe so my dream of one day being a Journo-come-novelist can start here. So disregard anything else on here that might sound well thought out, planned and wrapped up in a pretty pretentious bow and stand by, Lincoln, for some obscene spitting, shitting and kicking because this is it...This is pure gonzo.

Review: 'The Rum Diary' by Hunter S. Thompson

The Rum Diary

By Hunter S. Thompson

Bloomsbury Publishing, RRP £7.99, pp 224

Hunter S. Thompson’s long-lost first novel, written in the early 1960s, by no means portrays naivety, but gives us a rare insight into far more youthful and - let's not say innocent - aspirational style of writing for him.

Although The Rum Diary still boasts Thompson’s obscene nature, it is not nearly as ostentatiously outrageous as his widely celebrated Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, in which is so hardcore  the pages themselves tend go out of their way to jump out and ‘slap you about a bit.’

You’d be foolish to think, however, that the story's lack of psychedelia abandons it as a softcore romp in comparison to Thompson’s usual literary pornography. It is still written in the same fast-paced, shit-kicking style that we have so admirably come to associate with him.

The title itself suggests Thompson’s love for inebriating substances - in him we trust to name his earliest published work, after a journal dedicated to the consumption of hard liquor.

It is often overlooked that this novel was in a way, a Gonzo novel in its early development as style. Therefore, what is so fascinating about this novel is its element of semi- reality centered around his reporting work in Puerto Rico.

Based on the island of San Juan, Puerto Rico, during its economic Yankee ‘Boom’ of the post-war 1950s, Thompson’s protagonist and itinerant Journalist Paul Kemp leaves New York, after accepting a job at The Daily News, a small English newspaper. In good-old Hunter S. Thompson fashion, however, this book quickly turns into a tale of perverted individuals, immoderate violence and alcohol-fuelled lust. What’s more, it is a story of pessimistic cynicism and fear of going “over the hump”: a sign of Thompson’s constant torment at his youth slipping away.

The book unravels as we follow Kemp through the half-native/half-American inhabited San Juan, as he desperately tries to figure out which steps to take next in his life. You're led to believe that he was once a grab-life-by-the-balls kind of character in his early days. Kemp still sometimes seems to possess a classic devil-may-care attitude, but now life has petered out at the ripe old age of thirty-one, after too many years of worthless jobs and meaningless frolicking on the road. 

The island becomes his purgatory and only intensifies his anxiety over his dead-end lifestyle. The place’s raucous inhabitants and maddening “goddamn  heat” forces a realisation from a withering arrogance, that you can only live your life on the basis of single serving jobs and one-way tickets for so long:

“I was a seeker, a mover, a malcontent and at times a stupid hell-raiser. I was never idle long enough to do much thinking. At the same time I shared a dark suspicion that the life we were leading was a lost cause. It was the tension between these two poles- a restless idealism on one hand and a sense of impending doom on the other- that kept me going.”

The plot lies in Kemp’s darkening mood as his excitement at landing in a tropical paradise surrounded by new opportunities, eventually turns into an inescapable hell where he is surrounded by “phonies and pricks:”

“When the sun got hot enough it burned away all the illusions and I saw the place as it was- cheap, sullen, and garish- nothing good was going to happen here.”

Kemp’s only break from reality is the infallible supply of rum on the island and the messy characters that he shares a few shots with.

The book contains a good range of characters, but all them become a pain in Kemp’s arse in some form or another and add to his ever sobering thoughts as they inspire and depress him at the same time.

There’s Lotterman, the hot-headed and completely corrupt ex-communist owner of nespaper, who’s constantly talking about phonies or nuts in a town where, apparently, you can only survive if you’re a con man or crazy; the psychotic and totally bizarre Moberg, who enjoys urinating on photocopying machines in drunken frenzies; Yeamon, a stubborn and violent thug who tugs Kemp head-first into a world of terrifying nights that include conflict, murder and vicious police brutality; and Sala, who takes the role of Kemp’s best-friend and would shoot everyone “if only he had a god-damn Luger.”

All of them, uncoincidently, are money-hungry alcoholics who find themselves drawn to the flexible hours and pay of freelance journalism and in some part are the swine of the earth, under Kemp’s silent scrutiny:

“Some of them were more journalists than vagrants, and others were more vagrants than journalists – but with few exceptions they were part-time, freelance, would-be foreign correspondents who, for one reason or another, lived at several removes from the journalistic establishment….. Puerto Rico was a backwater and the Daily News was staffed mainly by ill-tempered wandering rabble. They moved erratically, on the winds of rumor and opportunity, all over Europe, Latin America and the Far East.”

Collectively, they all contribute to Kemp’s increasingly obvious paranoia that the unknown key to contentment that he has been chasing all these years is swiftly becoming out of reach, and his unsettlement that the island will be his downfall is racing to catch-up with him.  

His unease reaches breaking-point when he finds himself ensnared in a perilous love-triangle with the sweet but seductive Chenault and her boyfriend, the repressive Yeamon. Unsurprisingly, after years of living the greedy freelance journo lifestyle, Kemp finds himself lacking in willpower:

“And then in the back of my brain a little melodramatic voice was saying, ‘And this concludes The Adventures of Paul Kemp, the Drunken Journalist. He read the signs and saw it coming, but he was too much of a lecher to step out of the way.’ Then I was stepping out of my shorts and into the shower with Chenault, keeping my eyes tightly shut while my soul fought a hopeless battle with my groin."

For every action there is a reaction and naturally Kemp’s immoral acts leave him fighting for his freedom and sanity, as the risk of DTs is ever present with the right number of shots and he suffers “an idle tension that builds up in places where men sweat twenty-four hours a day.”

If there is one aspect that will find criticism within this book, it’s that although it ends with an exciting and unforseen climax, it does so rather abruptly and leaves the reader hanging in a fashion that is not altogether pleasant - likely that Thompson's distractable self found a later and greater project and did not quite put his heart into the ending this one deserved. By "project", I mean probably mescaline.

Despite this, Thompson’s Hemmingwayesque style and vividly dark and cynical sense of humour make’s this novel one sure to never collect dust on your shelf, if only for the stoical Paul Kemp who could possibly be the most charismatic fictional character since James Bond. A man that's found the perfect balance between hardly working, incessant drinking of cheap rum and the ability to charm rich women into one-night stands.

If you’re looking for a hilarious read, packed with shameful laughs and impure sex, as well as a thrilling climax, then The Rum Diary is perfect for you to forget about the tediousness of your everyday life and indulge yourself in warmer and seedier horizons that we all secretly wish we could set sail for. It’s enough to want to make you pack your bags and catch the next flight heading to the Caribbean. Better stop at the off-license for some rum first, though.