His provocations became harmless, had to become harmless. For it is by no means easy to live out the part of the jester these days. The potential to expose by construing politics as a drama seems exhausted too. In a time when the mediafication and aesthetization of what journalists must cover is in your face and obvious, there is little exposé potential in construing something as stage managed and media adapted. [transl. from the essay "Den journalistiske hoffnarr"/The Journalistic Jester]So how to be genuinely provocative in your gonzo writings these days?
Well, it seems that a journalist may earn the gonzo label through provocation - and that provocation tends to become the one single criterion for possessing that gonzo quality.
And provocation becomes a sad end in itself.
But who's being sad about it? Well, the other night I watched Mads Brügger on web tv discussing Hunter S. Thompson as a journalistic icon with host Sune Aagaard (which I paid for a one-year membership of Club dk4 to be able to). Aagaard was asking Brügger about the conditions for writing gonzo journalism in Denmark nowadays, and at one point Brügger was pinning down "the essence of gonzo" by introducing the story of journalist and former chief editor Claes Kastholm Hansen who is said to have defecated on the desk of a colleague at Ekstra-Bladet, used the curtains to wipe his bum and left the building. And thereby lost/quit his job. As far as I know, Kastholm didn't even write about the event, and I can't believe that Mads Brügger (who has written some of my favourite examples of contemporary Danish gonzo journalism) presents gonzo as just a matter of causing outrage and not giving a damn. 'The Gonzo journalist is out to defecate on your desk, and noone ought to feel safe' - ?
2 comments:
However, Claes Kastholm did in fact comment on the (..pretty unfortunate..) incident several times. See:
http://www.journalisten.dk/sw2410.asp. I agree with you, though. One might behave outrageously, but that certainly doesn't make one gonzo. Only stupid. The term should be handled with care so that people won't tire of it, though I tend to forget because it's such a smack in the face of a word.
Thanks for a great blog - and a great read. You should definitely turn that splendid Ph.D into a book asap.
All the best,
Leonora Christina Skov
Thanks for your encouragement! and for challenging the premises of my work on different occasions too. I appreciate it.
About Kastholm, you're right and I'd like to read that text of his which seems to have been more of an explanation/apology than a piece of gonzo journalism though. Mads Brügger was talking about the incident itself, not about a text, and he seemed to be forgetting that gonzo is, well, committed to text. Basically a given act or attitude or experience or life style must have been worked up into a piece of more or less literary journalistic writing to become gonzo journalism.
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