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The Original One-percenters, and Other News

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On the Shelf

huntersthompsonblank

A screenshot from PBS’s Blank on Blank, animated by Patrick Smith.

  • “You get a tremendous boot out of what the Angels call ‘screwing it on,’ taking a big bike and just running it flat out as fast as it will go. I used to take it out at night on the Coast Highway, just drunk out of my mind, ride it for twenty and thirty miles in just short pants and a T-shirt. It’s a beautiful feeling. I recognize it as an illusion and a fantasy, but for someone who has nothing else to go back to, this is maybe one of the happiest moments of his life.” In 1967, Hunter S. Thompson spoke to Studs Turkel about the Hells Angels, and fortunately it’s on tape. In fact, now it’s not just on tape—it’s an animated featurette.
  • David Gates talks about taking his time: “I’m just naturally slow. It usually takes me about three or four months to write a story. Then it takes me a while after I finish a story to forget that story and convince myself that my next story is a hot new idea that’s never been done before. Nobody but the writer cares how long it takes to write something.”
  • Bridges: great for driving over. Also great for playing like a harp. “In the middle of the bridge, the woman opened the bag to reveal a cache of objects, including a wireless speaker and a stethoscope, which she draped around her neck. She then approached each of the bridge’s wrought-iron suspension rods. Clanging them with a metal tine, she leaned in to listen, holding up the stethoscope as though each resonating note were a heartbeat: C, F, A, G. When the woman found a rod with a particularly pleasing sound, she set about attaching other equipment to the bridge, lifted from the kit bag: a ‘bridge-bow,’ resembling the spokes of a wheel, which would spin around and strike the suspension rod with rubber balls, and a ‘digi-bow,’ which would capture the resonance digitally and then enable her to manipulate it using a string.”
  • Summer is slow, and in its longueurs you may find that you need a new hobby. Choose mesmerism and impress your friends with centuries of medical-spiritual flimflammery! An 1884 guide called Mental magic: a rationale of thought reading, and its attendant phenomena and their application to the discovery of new medicines, obscure diseases, correct delineations of character, lost persons and property, mines and prings of water, and all hidden and secret things will take you step-by-step through the joys of mesmerizing for fun and profit. If you get bored, just add drugs: “I have found,” the author Thomas Weldon writes, “that those who … have taken Opium, Datura, Indian Hemp, or other powerful Narcotics, are most susceptible to Magnetic Treatment and rapidly cured of disease.”
  • The artist Mary Mattingly added her annotations to a bunch of old Whole Earth Catalogs, revising them to explore “scenarios of ecological collapse.” Living in a geodesic dome has never felt so apocalyptic: “Drop City is a fucked-up mess. Drop City is completely open, completely free; I own it, you own it, because we all know that energy comes from the same place. Ten domes under the skydome, overshadowed by the Rockies; silverdomes, domes that are paintings, multicolored cartopdomes, and one black dome … ”