If you write about Las Vegas, Hunter S. Thompson is someone you get asked about a lot. Of course, Thompson never lived here, but his tourist experience in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas formed at least one generation's view of this town. Even today, Fear and Loathing likely remains the most influential book ever written about Vegas. I read Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas countless times as a kid, saw Thompson speak twice when I was a student, and count myself as an admirer (most recently of his two volume collected letters).  Yet, since moving here, as a book about Las Vegas, I have always found Thompson's masterpiece lacking insight to the point of being useless. I once put this odd circumstance this way: "For a writer with a sociological bent, Las Vegas remains the ultimate Rorschach test. Hunter Thompson, as it were, brought the fear and loathing with him to the desert."

This week a Vegas perspective on Thompson is offered in Las Vegas Weekly, where I am on staff. The Weekly  package on Thompson and his book about Vegas includes an interview with his editor at Rolling Stone as well as a remembrance and examination by art critic Dave Hickey.  By the way, Hickey along with Hal Rothman are the two writers I would pick over Thomspon as the most insightful on the subject of Las Vegas (FYI: I do not know Hickey or Rothman). Anyway, in his essay Hickey wonderfully fleshes out and articulates the problems he finds in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas:

"First, nothing that happens in the book requires Las Vegas as a setting. It all could have happened in any American city during the seventies.... Second, Hunter's hysterical loathing for working stiffs and service personnel remains inexplicable to me. The waiter at the Polo Lounge is a dwarf; the store clerk is a mongoloid; the room service waiter is a reptile; the lady at check-in is a gorgon, and I hate this about the book. Savaging the weak is not funny, even if you're purportedly 'tripping.'"

Interestingly, Thompson after writing the book that would so inextricably link his name to Las Vegas, apparently, only returned once during the remaining decades of his life. Thompson's return trip to Vegas came in 2003 at the invitation of the CineVegas film festival that was screening a documentary on him. The trip was a typical Thompson fiasco with a certain sad poignancy added now looking back this month on two years since Thompson killed himself.

photo by KATHY WILLENS/AP