Follow it! 

Gonzo Flyers created by that inimicable artist

GRANT GOODWINE.

If you feel inclined to buy a T-shirt to help us bring the best contributers in the world to New Orleans, go here.

To browse the official website, go here. World-famous composer/musician David Amram is playing with four New Orleans musicians. Panels you won’t want to miss are booked. Old friends will be hanging out.  No Tickets needed, though if you like, there will be a donations option at the door. More here.

THANK YOU. See you there.

Also, in the news . . .

The Hell’s Angels Letters – Hunter S. thompson

This book in hands – IT IS MIND BLOWING JAW DROPPING!!!

I just can’t leave it alone!

I approach it, open it, flip through it, can hardly decide what to read first, enjoy some pages, close it, do something else, and walk back to it, open it…… – for hours now!

Feel like taking two weeks off to just stay IN IT!

All these letters from Hunter asking you to save the situation, etc. ADORABLE!!!!

Wow! Thank you. Remember, it’s 1/4 written by Hunter (his new writing presented in color scans, full size).

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From Paul Krassner – Realist

Diving into my garage boxes, I found a follow-up note from Paul Krassner that confirms what I remembered: he explains that in my absence (I was in Las Angeles with Hunter during a quick weekend visit) he sent me a letter but addressed it to the wrong person at Random House. So here is how I found out about that and – yes – I hurried down to the Obscene Letters area to rescue it and read it. True, such a section existed at Random House down in the basement. It made for amusing reading, and I kept both letters as souvenirs.

Read excerpts from the original, funny – mash – letter here.

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The post Hunter Thompson and Paul Krassner appeared first on Margaret A. Harrell.

Hunter S. Thompson as Remembered by Paul Krassner.

click image to go to full article at Abakus Magazine.

(offsite)

Click here to go to 1960’s interview with the young satirist, Krassner.

The post Meeting Paul Krassner appeared first on Margaret A. Harrell.

Culture Counter Magazine has a new article called

Charlie Hebdo and the Limits of Satire:
Realist editor Paul Krassner Rethinks the Art of Irreverence

Here are the opening paragraphs. Paul Krassner sent me the link and a Happy New Year, 2015, which I pass on:

Was there ever an American version of Charlie Hebdo? Americans are asking themselves these days. Yes, there was. It published on and off from 1958 to 2001. It was called The Realist, though it often ignored the real and ventured into the twilight zone. Its editor was Paul Krassner, who learned a lot from Groucho Marx and Lenny Bruce and who created his own dark sense of humor.

Perhaps America’s oldest living satirist, Krassner never read or even heard of the feisty French publication, Charlie Hebdo, until terrorists attacked its Paris office and killed eleven staff members at the start of January 2015 in retaliation, they claimed, for a cartoon of the prophet Mohammed. If he could have, Krassner would have joined the staff and egged it on in a nanosecond.

As the founder of The Realist, which lampooned presidents, popes, and pop culture icons for decades, Krassner acted as an irritant and a provocateur. Later this year he turns 83, but he hasn’t lost his sense of subversive humor and a certain innocence that enables him see the absurdity of the human condition.

“At its best, satire has a truth embedded in the laughter and it can serve to wake people up from their cultural brainwashing,” he told me. “I think satire comes from the heart — it reacts to hypocrisy, contradictions, cruelty, injustice — and then it goes to the head.”

Born in New York in 1932 and a resident now of Desert Hot Springs in Southern California, Krassner has long enjoyed a countercultural connection to the San Francisco Bay Area and to Napa County, where his daughter, son-in-law and granddaughter lived and where he has performed his own provocative brand of stand-up comedy. His Bay Area connections come across loudly and clearly in his most recent book, Patty Hearst & The Twinkle Murders: A Tale of Two Trials (2014) in which he revisits the courtroom dramas that featured Hearst and Dan White and that invited the nation to wonder who and what was real and who and what was unreal and even surreal. For Krassner the dividing line wasn’t obvious.

Continue reading. Click to go to the actual article – with cartoon.

Dec. 26, 2015. Two updates from Krassner:

1. At this point “Patty Hearst & the Twinkie Murders”is now not available from me, but rather from PM Press.

2. The piece excerpted from Abakus was actually excerpted from the 2012 edition of Confessions of a Raving, Unconfined Nut, included in a new chapter “Bloopers and Outtakes: The Parts Left Out of This Book,” available at paulkrassner.com.

He is working on a novel and it’s moving along. Should be funny.

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There’s something oddly funny about Paul Krassner. And it’s been going on for more than 50 years. He palled around with Lenny Bruce, the pioneering 1950s “sick” comic, and even edited Bruce’s autobiography, How to Talk Dirty and Influence People. He was instrumental in founding the Yippies!, those radical “Groucho Marxists” who fought the establishment in the late 1960s with theatrical, absurdist guerrilla monkeyshines. And as the editor of The Realist he paved the way for The Simpsons, The Daily Show, and Bill Maher. Kurt Vonnegut and Lewis Black are just two of the legions of fans who cite him as a major influence and inspiration. The Realist was a proto-underground magazine of “Free-thought Criticism and Satire” begun in 1958. In its heyday, everyone from Norman Mailer and Joseph Heller to Woody Allen and Dick Gregory to Ken Kesey and Tim Leary to Art Spiegelman and S. Clay Wilson appeared on its cheap newsprint pages. Krassner’s most notorious publishing prank was his “Parts That Were Left Out of the Kennedy Book” hoax in 1967, presented as actual excerpts that Jacqueline Kennedy had removed from William Manchester’s The Death of a President prior to publication. Defying conventional norms of taste and decency, its climactic scene involved Jackie discovering LBJ engaged in necrophilia with JFK’s corpse on Air Force One. Many believed it was true, including Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg. You can read the full story in Krassner’s newly updated Confessions of a Raving, Unconfined Nut: Misadventures in the Counterculture.

There was an illustration here. Go to the original post to see illustrations. Uncle Paul wants YOU . . . to be offended. One of the updates in the new edition of this memoir concerns the funny encounter he, Hunter Thompson, and I had in New York in the 1967. The same story I told in Keep This Quiet! His version. In his words. Paul just e-mailed this story to pass around. Read more: “Paul Krassner on the Art of Offensive Cartoons.” Buy book on Amazon

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Paul Krassner is putting what he calls, in quotes, “our story” into his reissue of his autobiography, Confessions of a Raving, Unconfined Nut: Misadventures in Counterculture – New Expanded Edition. This is quite funny. I love the effect of being a “character” in a book stepping off the pages, or maybe just pretending to step onto them in the first place. It makes me wonder how Hunter would have responded to my memoir, suppose I had published it while he was alive – which never crossed my mind. Anyway, just suppose. See more about Krassner’s memoir here on Amazon.com:

Krassner lives in a world where Truth and Satire are swingers, changing partners so often you never know who belongs with whom – Playboy

Wickedly funny . . . Chillingly funny . . . A convincing look at a man who knows how to wield absurdity – San Francisco Chronicle

Paul’s own writing, in particular, seemed daring and adventurous to me; it took big chances and made important arguments in relentlessly funny ways. I felt, down deep, that maybe I had some of that in me too; that maybe I could be using my skills to better express my beliefs. The Realist was the inspiration that kep pushing me to the next level; there was no way I could continue reading itand remain the same – George Carlin

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