Vegas, list trouble etc.

[Michael Bailey]

Joseph Tracy wrote:
>
>
> What happens in Vegas in IV?
> Puck Beaverton is in Vegas. Why?  To gamble where he is not welcome with the
> magic fingered Einer, OK. zatit? Hide from police/Doc ? Is he on an errand
> for A Prussia? Is that why Riggs has a gun?

Riggs is expecting to be laid waste by USAF jets, isn't he?
I didn't suspect any threat to him from Prussia.

If in any respect Riggs is to be read as Pynchon (I just can't let go of
that quadrille paper, I even went out and bought some) - then perhaps
the zome-town is the "road America didn't take" and Riggs is in the
state of frightened seclusion surrounded by his own creation
that some anecdotes ascribe to Mr Pynchon during that time frame.

>
> What is Vegas about?
> The novel Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas accounts for two trips to Las
> Vegas, Nevada, that Hunter S. Thompson and attorney Oscar Zeta Acosta took
> in March and April 1971. The first trip spawned from an exposé Thompson was
> writing for Rolling Stone magazine about the Mexican-American television
> journalist Ruben Salazar, whom officers of the Los Angeles County Sheriff's
> Department had shot and killed with a tear gas grenade fired at close range
> during the National Chicano Moratorium March against the Vietnam War in
> 1970. Thompson was using Acosta — a prominent Mexican-American political
> activist and attorney — as a central source for the story, and the two found
> it difficult for a brown-skinned Mexican to talk openly with a white
> reporter in the racially tense atmosphere of Los Angeles, California. The
> two needed a more comfortable place to discuss the story and decided to take
> advantage of a Sports Illustrated magazine offer to write photograph
> captions for the annual Mint 400 desert race being held in Las Vegas. ( the
> novel has little to do with these reasons for going to Las Vegas, but is
> more about the descent of the 60's revolution into drugs, self absorbtion
>  and irrelevance)
>

interesting background, and much of it news to me!

Bill Murray made a movie called "Where the Buffalo Roam" (1980)
which shows a different side of Thompson as he's faced with some
of the factors that drive the disillusionment that F&L showcases

------------- digression -----------------
(another interesting Bill Murray role
was in his remake of "The Razor's Edge" (1984)
http://www.allmovie.com/work/the-razors-edge-40413
- "Apparently Murray said he'd film Ghostbusters only if
Columbia would let him do Razor's Edge")



-- 
- "The whole point of life is to have a story" - Jeremy Cioara