Ghost juleps on non-race day: "Sadly, the Kentucky Derby no longer is decadent and depraved. It’s just another vacuous capitalist bait ‘n’ switch."

This one's from May 3, 2019, but it goes back considerably further. For those just beaming to Earth from the Starship Whatever, the pandemic has pushed Kentucky Derby 146 to Labor Day weekend in September. This hasn't prevented phantom celebrations of the race that isn't, at least just yet. All of it is suitably surreal, but as Hunter S. Thompson observed a half-century ago, the Kentucky Derby hasn't ever been exactly as it appears -- even when it disappears.

---

ON THE AVENUES HORSE RACE REHASH: Sadly, the Kentucky Derby no longer is decadent and depraved. It’s just another vacuous capitalist bait ‘n’ switch.

Everybody's working for the weekend.
-- Loverboy

(Ralph) Steadman wanted to see some Kentucky Colonels, but he wasn’t sure what they looked like. I told him to go back to the clubhouse men’s rooms and look for men in white linen suits vomiting in the urinals. “They’ll usually have large brown whiskey stains on the fronts of their suits,” I said. “But watch the shoes, that’s the tip-off. Most of them manage to avoid vomiting on their own clothes, but they never miss their shoes.”
-- Hunter S. Thompson

It’s getting better all the time, except when it isn’t. That’s why the Great Pumpkin invented gin.

The insipid cacophony of Blunder Over Louisville has receded from view, and the most recent iteration of Kentucky Derby Festival hyperbole approaches its yearly sell-by date.

Soon our peculiar institution, otherwise known as the Run for the Roses -- or, the greatest two-minute anticlimax in all of sports -- mercifully concludes, freeing the dazed masses to return to exurban multiplexes for repeat viewings of whatever comic-book-derived motion picture drivel currently diverts their attention from facing up to the daily challenges of this decidedly uncivil society.

By then the two-week expanse of festive revelry will have rendered half a month null and void as they pertain to any semblance of useful activity.

Insightfully, though not judgmentally, visitors entering the gates of European cities in medieval times wrote of rampant public drunkenness, especially during celebrations, with people sprawled insensate in the streets amid mounds of garbage and excrement.

Mud, blood and beer; all merely natural states of urban occupancy. Consequently 700 years later, on Sunday, numerous residents of Louisville metro likewise will find themselves lying prone on the toasty tarmac; chewed up, spat out, and duly prepped to begin queueing at local rehab clinics. Let’s hope they bathe first, but maybe cynics like me will get lucky and it will rain all day Saturday.

Meanwhile the world’s foremost horse pimps, with their entourages of low-paid attendants and exploitative regalia, already will have traveled to fresh drugging grounds elsewhere in pursuit of the Triple Crown, which now trails full-contact tiddlywinks in the spectrum of TV sports ratings, but almost made sense back when previous masters like Heywood Hale “Woody” Broun appeared on black and white television doing commentary at Churchill Downs, Pimlico and Belmont Park.

If you’re getting an impression of personal distaste about the Kentucky Derby, that’s only because it’s entirely true. 

As I’ve often observed, ruinous mint juleps and atrociously unflattering hats don’t function as aphrodisiacs in my rarefied world, and yet someone always asks if I’m excited by this most over-rated time of year in Louisville metro.

Nah, but hey -- I’ve mellowed and shit.

It’s fine by me if the Kentucky Derby is your kind of gig, so please go forth and have right at it. Just count me out, and kindly refrain from stepping on my lawn this Saturday unless you’re bringing delicious bottles of Schlenkerla Rauchbier to accompany our projected roast beast.

Then everyone can be happy, as opposed to the flag-waving idiocy of Blunder, when the noise is impossible to muffle no matter how much I drink.

And I drink a lot whenever warplanes strafe my house.

---

For some, especially non-gamblers, the Kentucky Derby is a time to admire the innate beauty of horses. Indeed, they’re splendid animals, albeit regrettably subjected to criminal interference by humans when it comes to thoroughbreds being genetically engineered for the sole purpose of maintaining the custom of wagering and the devastating addiction it often spawns.

Kentucky Derby fest season also is a time for lowlifes like me to straighten up, fly right, and obey the one-percent’s finger-wagging instructions by displaying a proper veneration for upstart new money, inbred old money, ephemeral showbiz glamor, ostentatious (read: tacky) parties, and conspicuous consumption by our presumed “betters” of such a vapid intensity that by all rights the spectacle should impel us to commence the instantaneous honing of curative pitchforks.

Happily, the Kentucky Derby is a time for filling the Crescent Hill Reservoir to the rim with bourbon, and here, at last, we find a genuinely positive attribute of the season, so please do me a favor and save that detestable mint for chewing gum or some of the wonderful chilled yogurt soup the Greeks do so well in summer.

As a lifelong contrarian, I’ll take my bourbon ration served neat, then immediately trade it for requisitely peaty drams of Scotch. On the big day, I plan on stocking plenty of hooch and keeping the doors to the 1117 East Spring Neighborhood Association firmly bolted, because in addition to the horse races, May 4 in the year of 2019 doubles as the last Saturday of invasive voter canvassing prior to the Indiana primary election on the 7th.

I just might be compelled to booby trap my porch with tarantulas and other deadly cargo.

But recall that the calendar was even less favorable to civilized existence in 2018, when Derby Day coincided with Cinco de Mayo, which is fast approaching St. Patrick’s Day as an expression of sheer amateurism among my fellow Caucasians. This year Cinco de Mayo arrives on our post-Derby Sunday, encouraging the oblivious party to keep right on going, and lending a whole new meaning to Day of the Dead.

---

Last year at Insider Louisville, Susan Reigler -- musician, educator, former local restaurant critic and bourbon expert -- sat down with Sara “Bar Belle” Havens for a few questions.

(Reigler’s) affinity — or awareness, we should say — for bourbon came much earlier in her life, when she would spend Saturdays at Churchill Downs with her family.

“The track in those days always smelled of old wood, cigars, popcorn and bourbon — quite a special combination,” says Reigler.

In spite of all my cranky bluster, I can relate to these sentiments. There’s a part of me that genuinely appreciates the old-school, tactile joys of the pre-intravenous ponies, the shabby and dung-laden track, and the laid-back Southern culture that used to characterize this scene.

The native Louisvillian writer Thompson grasped it better than most, and his 1970 account remains essential reading precisely because it deconstructed the mythology and described what the Kentucky Derby symbolized -- what it "was" -- with what it very shortly would become:

(The Texan) had, after all, come here once again to make a 19th century ass of himself in the midst of some jaded, atavistic freakout with nothing to recommend it except a very saleable "tradition."

Around the same time, I can remember Broun doing his televised racing commentaries -- and the man could write, too.

To be great, a horse must have metaphorical wings. In mythology we punished wax-winged Icarus for flying too close to the sun, but in recognition of the nobility of their singlemindedness, mythology has let the chariot horses of Apollo traverse the sky. Race horses do not chaffer over money, get into bar fights or endorse horse blankets and aluminum shoes. They combine strength, grace, beauty and speed as perhaps no other link in the Darwinian chain can manage (cheetahs have funny-looking shoulders).

There was a certain poetic flair, albeit oblivious, to the way the Courier-Journal of old used to cover the varied expressions of Churchill Downs pageantry, a quality of an indefinable “something” both venerable and genteel involving rites of spring, colorful flowers, exclusive balls and parties, and as a last resort, the horses themselves. Customs were handed down from one generation to the next, and honored.

Compared to what the Downs and the Derby have become in this time of celebrity-besotted, Disney-cum-Vegas plasticized swipe-card, UPC-tattooed entertainment experiences, 1970 might as well have been 1905.

Listen, I’m not delusional. Breeding horses for racing, wagering on them, smoking, drinking, eating and all the social constructs draped around the experience always had to do with shaking down suckers, first and foremost.

That's understood, although I submit that during the course of my own life -- perhaps as a result of globalization, or Reagan’s trickle-down, or the entire business of America’s business becoming a 24-hour-per-day psychological waterboarding designed to sell, sell, sell -- most of the tradition and authenticity have been drained away, or perhaps stripped and flipped like the Yankee Stadium demolition and rebuild, yielding an improved model in which every last corpuscle of sculpted cement, fake wood and pastel color is calculated for one reason and one reason alone -- to ensure that fools and their cash are expeditiously parted now, as a racetrack, and then even more so later, somewhere down the way, as a casino.

---

But enough of the Kentucky Derby’s deleterious implications for human civilization.

Let’s talk about beer.

From 2012 through 2017 the “official” beer of the signature institution known as Churchill Downs was Stella Artois, chosen import of AB-InBev’s payola empire. In 2018 the title passed to Corona, perhaps the most vile mainstream corn-choked Mexican lager atrocity known to man.

In 2019, pay-to-place reaches glorious new heights of Goebbelsian categorization, although I'm crushed to learn that there isn't (yet) an Official Hard Seltzer Water of the Kentucky Derby.

• Corona – Official Import Beer of the Kentucky Derby
• Budweiser – Official Domestic Beer of the Kentucky Derby
• Blue Moon – Official Craft Beer of Churchill Downs, the Kentucky Oaks and the Kentucky Derby

The Brewers Association reminds us that Blue Moon cannot be "craft," but no matter. While the Kentucky Derby has spawned or embraced many intrinsic traditions since its inaugural run in 1875, locally brewed beer hasn’t ever been prominent among these predispositions.

After all, bourbon gets you there way faster.

Still, we can surmise that in the oldest of far-off times there’d have been plenty of local beer to celebrate the annual race, at least prior to the idiotic onset of Prohibition, which rendered the United States a planetary laughingstock.

After restorative Repeal, local beer returned, but when the original Falls City swapped its fermenters for a fleet of semi-trailers in 1979, there was nary a single drop of hometown beer left to drown a wretched punter’s sorrows until 1993, when Sea Hero’s triumph may have been marked by a few hardy and pioneering microbrew fans drinking David Piece's Silo Red Rock Ale from a growler on their porch with a radio nearby, because then, as now, the very last situation you'd expect to experience in this life is local beer at Churchill Downs -- where first Stella, then Corona and now Blue Moon is the this-that-or-another "official" mass-market creation of choice, and there’s barely any incongruity worth noting because the multinational track itself has little to do with the schizophrenic city and increasingly impoverished state in which it resides.

Here, there and everywhere: when the real money is at stake, you can be sure that soulless neoliberal capitalism will be oozing through the keyhole, breathlessly drooling in anticipation of sponsorship opportunities, with conceptual coherence always taking a back seat to the sheer weight of numerically amassed ending zeroes.

Maybe next time it will be Michelob Ultra. Anyway, there’s plenty of time for an experiment, so go out and assemble a committee of horse pimps. We’ll see if any of them can spot the difference between the watery, beer-scented banality of Corona and those equally reeking buckets of equine drug-testing residue over there where the inspectors are being paid off.

It’s not a trick question, you know.

Only a month to go for Freak Power at the Frazier ("Hunter S. Thompson’s Campaign for Sheriff").

This is a wonderful exhibit. We also enjoyed the Frazier's bourbon tasting. The tastings continue but the exhibit is in its last month.

Freak Power: Hunter S. Thompson’s Campaign for Sheriff
Curated by Daniel Joseph Watkins
April 30 – September 2, 2019.

Hunter S. Thompson came home from the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago disgusted yet motivated by what he’d seen: protests violently suppressed, riots, corrupt politicians, and abusive cops. Back in Aspen, he found more of the same. The local police and sheriff’s departments were targeting hippies, charging them with absurd crimes, harassing them on the streets, and trying to push them out of town. He knew something had to be done and he realized it had to be done by people like himself. The hippies, intellectuals, and freaks had remained silent long enough. The time had come to organize and seize political power.

Freak Power tells the story of Hunter’s plan to become Sheriff, take control of Aspen, and transform it from a conservative mining town into a mecca for artists, rebels, and activists. Through original print material from the campaign, photographs, and political art, Freak Power chronicles a little-known period in Hunter S. Thompson’s life, a period when he wrote prolifically about politics, the environment, drugs, and American values. As the conservatives and freaks battled it out, the campaign became fraught with violence, accusations, and moments of absurdity that bordered on fiction. As weird a tale as Thompson ever wrote, his own forays into politics may have been his wittiest and most thought-provoking escapade of all.” — Excerpted from the jacket of Freak Power: Hunter S. Thompson’s Campaign for Sheriff (2015) by Daniel Joseph Watkins, curator of the Freak Power exhibition. Book available for purchase in the Frazier’s Museum Store.

A Hunter S. Thompson documentary: Buy the Ticket, Take the Ride.

A 2006 New York Times review is here, and it's accurate. The documentary is entertaining but superficial. The decidedly unromantic "flip" side to Hunter S. Thompson's declining years is discussed in greater detail by Joe Rogan and his guest, author Timothy Denevi.

Hunter S. Thompson eulogizes Richard M. Nixon (1994): "He Was a Crook."

(Wikipedia)

Arguably, the finest political obituary in American history. A Facebook friend linked to it yesterday, remarking that he rereads the piece every few months. It's a sign that I should, too -- and now it's your turn.

It is impossible to read Dr. Thompson's masterwork without laughing aloud. It is equally impossible to pull one representative passage. One simply must read the whole piece.

On occasion it will occur to me that I've borrowed a phrase from Thompson while writing. This is the reason why I limit my reading of his essays, because doing so influences my own style. Unconsciously, I try to emulate it. The same applies to H.L. Mencken.

My heroes are the polemicists. Ah, yes; always and forever.

He Was a Crook

By Hunter S. Thompson (The Atlantic; originally published in Rolling Stone on June 16, 1994)

DATE: MAY 1, 1994
FROM: DR. HUNTER S. THOMPSON
SUBJECT: THE DEATH OF RICHARD NIXON: NOTES ON THE PASSING OF AN AMERICAN MONSTER.... HE WAS A LIAR AND A QUITTER, AND HE SHOULD HAVE BEEN BURIED AT SEA.... BUT HE WAS, AFTER ALL, THE PRESIDENT.

... It was Richard Nixon who got me into politics, and now that he's gone, I feel lonely. He was a giant in his way. As long as Nixon was politically alive -- and he was, all the way to the end -- we could always be sure of finding the enemy on the Low Road. There was no need to look anywhere else for the evil bastard. He had the fighting instincts of a badger trapped by hounds. The badger will roll over on its back and emit a smell of death, which confuses the dogs and lures them in for the traditional ripping and tearing action. But it is usually the badger who does the ripping and tearing. It is a beast that fights best on its back: rolling under the throat of the enemy and seizing it by the head with all four claws.

That was Nixon's style -- and if you forgot, he would kill you as a lesson to the others. Badgers don't fight fair, bubba. That's why God made dachshunds ...

... It is fitting that Richard Nixon's final gesture to the American people was a clearly illegal series of 21 105-mm howitzer blasts that shattered the peace of a residential neighborhood and permanently disturbed many children. Neighbors also complained about another unsanctioned burial in the yard at the old Nixon place, which was brazenly illegal. "It makes the whole neighborhood like a graveyard," said one. "And it fucks up my children's sense of values" ...

ON THE AVENUES HORSE RACE REHASH: Sadly, the Kentucky Derby no longer is decadent and depraved. It’s just another vacuous capitalist bait ‘n’ switch.

Welcome to the second annual reprint of this column, with minor updates. In truth, I've barely noticed the revelry of the 2019 Derby Festival season. That's delightful, but of course the bile always remains sequestered off to the side somewhere, eager to ooze out and ruin the carpet.

---

ON THE AVENUES: Sadly, the Kentucky Derby no longer is decadent and depraved. It’s just another vacuous capitalist bait ‘n’ switch.

A weekly column by Roger A. Baylor.

Everybody's working for the weekend.
-- Loverboy

(Ralph) Steadman wanted to see some Kentucky Colonels, but he wasn’t sure what they looked like. I told him to go back to the clubhouse men’s rooms and look for men in white linen suits vomiting in the urinals. “They’ll usually have large brown whiskey stains on the fronts of their suits,” I said. “But watch the shoes, that’s the tip-off. Most of them manage to avoid vomiting on their own clothes, but they never miss their shoes.”
-- Hunter S. Thompson

It’s getting better all the time, except when it isn’t. That’s why the Great Pumpkin invented gin.

The insipid cacophony of Blunder Over Louisville has receded from view, and the most recent iteration of Kentucky Derby Festival hyperbole approaches its yearly sell-by date.

Soon our peculiar institution, otherwise known as the Run for the Roses -- or, the greatest two-minute anticlimax in all of sports -- mercifully concludes, freeing the dazed masses to return to exurban multiplexes for repeat viewings of whatever comic-book-derived motion picture drivel currently diverts their attention from facing up to the daily challenges of this decidedly uncivil society.

By then the two-week expanse of festive revelry will have rendered half a month null and void as they pertain to any semblance of useful activity.

Insightfully, though not judgmentally, visitors entering the gates of European cities in medieval times wrote of rampant public drunkenness, especially during celebrations, with people sprawled insensate in the streets amid mounds of garbage and excrement.

Mud, blood and beer; all merely natural states of urban occupancy. Consequently 700 years later, on Sunday, numerous residents of Louisville metro likewise will find themselves lying prone on the toasty tarmac; chewed up, spat out, and duly prepped to begin queueing at local rehab clinics. Let’s hope they bathe first, but maybe cynics like me will get lucky and it will rain all day Saturday.

Meanwhile the world’s foremost horse pimps, with their entourages of low-paid attendants and exploitative regalia, already will have traveled to fresh drugging grounds elsewhere in pursuit of the Triple Crown, which now trails full-contact tiddlywinks in the spectrum of TV sports ratings, but almost made sense back when previous masters like Heywood Hale “Woody” Broun appeared on black and white television doing commentary at Churchill Downs, Pimlico and Belmont Park.

If you’re getting an impression of personal distaste about the Kentucky Derby, that’s only because it’s entirely true. 

As I’ve often observed, ruinous mint juleps and atrociously unflattering hats don’t function as aphrodisiacs in my rarefied world, and yet someone always asks if I’m excited by this most over-rated time of year in Louisville metro.

Nah, but hey -- I’ve mellowed and shit.

It’s fine by me if the Kentucky Derby is your kind of gig, so please go forth and have right at it. Just count me out, and kindly refrain from stepping on my lawn this Saturday unless you’re bringing delicious bottles of Schlenkerla Rauchbier to accompany our projected roast beast.

Then everyone can be happy, as opposed to the flag-waving idiocy of Blunder, when the noise is impossible to muffle no matter how much I drink.

And I drink a lot whenever warplanes strafe my house.

---

For some, especially non-gamblers, the Kentucky Derby is a time to admire the innate beauty of horses. Indeed, they’re splendid animals, albeit regrettably subjected to criminal interference by humans when it comes to thoroughbreds being genetically engineered for the sole purpose of maintaining the custom of wagering and the devastating addiction it often spawns.

Kentucky Derby fest season also is a time for lowlifes like me to straighten up, fly right, and obey the one-percent’s finger-wagging instructions by displaying a proper veneration for upstart new money, inbred old money, ephemeral showbiz glamor, ostentatious (read: tacky) parties, and conspicuous consumption by our presumed “betters” of such a vapid intensity that by all rights the spectacle should impel us to commence the instantaneous honing of curative pitchforks.

Happily, the Kentucky Derby is a time for filling the Crescent Hill Reservoir to the rim with bourbon, and here, at last, we find a genuinely positive attribute of the season, so please do me a favor and save that detestable mint for chewing gum or some of the wonderful chilled yogurt soup the Greeks do so well in summer.

As a lifelong contrarian, I’ll take my bourbon ration served neat, then immediately trade it for requisitely peaty drams of Scotch. On the big day, I plan on stocking plenty of hooch and keeping the doors to the 1117 East Spring Neighborhood Association firmly bolted, because in addition to the horse races, May 4 in the year of 2019 doubles as the last Saturday of invasive voter canvassing prior to the Indiana primary election on the 7th.

I just might be compelled to booby trap my porch with tarantulas and other deadly cargo.

But recall that the calendar was even less favorable to civilized existence in 2018, when Derby Day coincided with Cinco de Mayo, which is fast approaching St. Patrick’s Day as an expression of sheer amateurism among my fellow Caucasians. This year Cinco de Mayo arrives on our post-Derby Sunday, encouraging the oblivious party to keep right on going, and lending a whole new meaning to Day of the Dead.

---

Last year at Insider Louisville, Susan Reigler -- musician, educator, former local restaurant critic and bourbon expert -- sat down with Sara “Bar Belle” Havens for a few questions.

(Reigler’s) affinity — or awareness, we should say — for bourbon came much earlier in her life, when she would spend Saturdays at Churchill Downs with her family.

“The track in those days always smelled of old wood, cigars, popcorn and bourbon — quite a special combination,” says Reigler.

In spite of all my cranky bluster, I can relate to these sentiments. There’s a part of me that genuinely appreciates the old-school, tactile joys of the pre-intravenous ponies, the shabby and dung-laden track, and the laid-back Southern culture that used to characterize this scene.

The native Louisvillian writer Thompson grasped it better than most, and his 1970 account remains essential reading precisely because it deconstructed the mythology and described what the Kentucky Derby symbolized -- what it "was" -- with what it very shortly would become:

(The Texan) had, after all, come here once again to make a 19th century ass of himself in the midst of some jaded, atavistic freakout with nothing to recommend it except a very saleable "tradition."

Around the same time, I can remember Broun doing his televised racing commentaries -- and the man could write, too.

To be great, a horse must have metaphorical wings. In mythology we punished wax-winged Icarus for flying too close to the sun, but in recognition of the nobility of their singlemindedness, mythology has let the chariot horses of Apollo traverse the sky. Race horses do not chaffer over money, get into bar fights or endorse horse blankets and aluminum shoes. They combine strength, grace, beauty and speed as perhaps no other link in the Darwinian chain can manage (cheetahs have funny-looking shoulders).

There was a certain poetic flair, albeit oblivious, to the way the Courier-Journal of old used to cover the varied expressions of Churchill Downs pageantry, a quality of an indefinable “something” both venerable and genteel involving rites of spring, colorful flowers, exclusive balls and parties, and as a last resort, the horses themselves. Customs were handed down from one generation to the next, and honored.

Compared to what the Downs and the Derby have become in this time of celebrity-besotted, Disney-cum-Vegas plasticized swipe-card, UPC-tattooed entertainment experiences, 1970 might as well have been 1905.

Listen, I’m not delusional. Breeding horses for racing, wagering on them, smoking, drinking, eating and all the social constructs draped around the experience always had to do with shaking down suckers, first and foremost.

That's understood, although I submit that during the course of my own life -- perhaps as a result of globalization, or Reagan’s trickle-down, or the entire business of America’s business becoming a 24-hour-per-day psychological waterboarding designed to sell, sell, sell -- most of the tradition and authenticity have been drained away, or perhaps stripped and flipped like the Yankee Stadium demolition and rebuild, yielding an improved model in which every last corpuscle of sculpted cement, fake wood and pastel color is calculated for one reason and one reason alone -- to ensure that fools and their cash are expeditiously parted now, as a racetrack, and then even more so later, somewhere down the way, as a casino.

---

But enough of the Kentucky Derby’s deleterious implications for human civilization.

Let’s talk about beer.

From 2012 through 2017 the “official” beer of the signature institution known as Churchill Downs was Stella Artois, chosen import of AB-InBev’s payola empire. In 2018 the title passed to Corona, perhaps the most vile mainstream corn-choked Mexican lager atrocity known to man.

In 2019, pay-to-place reaches glorious new heights of Goebbelsian categorization, although I'm crushed to learn that there isn't (yet) an Official Hard Seltzer Water of the Kentucky Derby.

• Corona – Official Import Beer of the Kentucky Derby
• Budweiser – Official Domestic Beer of the Kentucky Derby
• Blue Moon – Official Craft Beer of Churchill Downs, the Kentucky Oaks and the Kentucky Derby

The Brewers Association reminds us that Blue Moon cannot be "craft," but no matter. While the Kentucky Derby has spawned or embraced many intrinsic traditions since its inaugural run in 1875, locally brewed beer hasn’t ever been prominent among these predispositions.

After all, bourbon gets you there way faster.

Still, we can surmise that in the oldest of far-off times there’d have been plenty of local beer to celebrate the annual race, at least prior to the idiotic onset of Prohibition, which rendered the United States a planetary laughingstock.

After restorative Repeal, local beer returned, but when the original Falls City swapped its fermenters for a fleet of semi-trailers in 1979, there was nary a single drop of hometown beer left to drown a wretched punter’s sorrows until 1993, when Sea Hero’s triumph may have been marked by a few hardy and pioneering microbrew fans drinking David Piece's Silo Red Rock Ale from a growler on their porch with a radio nearby, because then, as now, the very last situation you'd expect to experience in this life is local beer at Churchill Downs -- where first Stella, then Corona and now Blue Moon is the this-that-or-another "official" mass-market creation of choice, and there’s barely any incongruity worth noting because the multinational track itself has little to do with the schizophrenic city and increasingly impoverished state in which it resides.

Here, there and everywhere: when the real money is at stake, you can be sure that soulless neoliberal capitalism will be oozing through the keyhole, breathlessly drooling in anticipation of sponsorship opportunities, with conceptual coherence always taking a back seat to the sheer weight of numerically amassed ending zeroes.

Maybe next time it will be Michelob Ultra. Anyway, there’s plenty of time for an experiment, so go out and assemble a committee of horse pimps. We’ll see if any of them can spot the difference between the watery, beer-scented banality of Corona and those equally reeking buckets of equine drug-testing residue over there where the inspectors are being paid off.

It’s not a trick question, you know.

---

Recent columns:

April 30: ON THE AVENUES: Greg Pennell tells his story.

April 23: ON THE AVENUES: Gehenna, Franklin Graham, Jean-Paul Sartre and Fred Astaire lead us straight to Hell.

April 16: ON THE AVENUES: Amid Deaf Gahan's "victory" over grassroots activists at Colonial Manor, the toxic paranoia is no less rancid.

April 9: ON THE AVENUES: It's time for a change, and David White understands that change begins with a whole lotta scrubbing.

April 2: ON THE AVENUES: Donnie Blevins tells his story.

ON THE AVENUES: Sadly, the Kentucky Derby no longer is decadent and depraved. It’s just another vacuous capitalist bait ‘n’ switch.

ON THE AVENUES: Sadly, the Kentucky Derby no longer is decadent and depraved. It’s just another vacuous capitalist bait ‘n’ switch.

A weekly column by Roger A. Baylor.

Everybody's working for the weekend.
-- Loverboy

(Ralph) Steadman wanted to see some Kentucky Colonels, but he wasn’t sure what they looked like. I told him to go back to the clubhouse men’s rooms and look for men in white linen suits vomiting in the urinals. “They’ll usually have large brown whiskey stains on the fronts of their suits,” I said. “But watch the shoes, that’s the tip-off. Most of them manage to avoid vomiting on their own clothes, but they never miss their shoes.”
-- Hunter S. Thompson


It’s getting better all the time, except when it isn’t. That’s why the Great Pumpkin invented gin.

The insipid cacophony of Blunder Over Louisville has receded from view, and the most recent iteration of Kentucky Derby Festival hyperbole approaches its yearly sell-by date.

Soon our peculiar institution, otherwise known as the Run for the Roses – or, the greatest two-minute anticlimax in all of sports – mercifully concludes, freeing the dazed masses to return to exurban multiplexes for repeat viewings of whatever comic-book-derived motion picture drivel currently diverts their attention from facing up to the daily challenges of this decidedly uncivil society.

By then the two-week expanse of festive revelry will have rendered half a month null and void as they pertain to any semblance of useful activity. Insightfully, though not judgmentally, visitors entering the gates of European cities in medieval times wrote of rampant public drunkenness, especially during celebrations, with people sprawled insensate in the streets amid mounds of garbage and excrement.

Mud, blood and beer; all merely natural states of urban occupancy. 700 years later, on Sunday, numerous residents of Louisville metro likewise will find themselves lying prone on the toasty tarmac; chewed up, spat out, and duly prepped to begin queueing at local rehab clinics. Let’s hope they bathe first, but maybe cynics like me will get lucky and it will rain all day Saturday.

Meanwhile the world’s foremost horse pimps, with their entourages of low-paid attendants and exploitative regalia, already will have traveled to fresh drugging grounds elsewhere in pursuit of the Triple Crown, which now trails full-contact tiddlywinks in the spectrum of TV sports ratings, but almost made sense back when previous masters like Heywood Hale “Woody” Broun appeared on black and white television doing commentary at Churchill Downs, Pimlico and Belmont Park.

If you’re getting an impression of personal distaste about the Kentucky Derby, that’s only because it’s entirely true. As I’ve often observed, ruinous mint juleps and atrociously unflattering hats don’t function as aphrodisiacs in my rarefied world, and yet someone always asks if I’m excited by this most over-rated time of year in Louisville metro.

Nah, but hey – I’ve mellowed and shit.

It’s fine by me if the Kentucky Derby is your kind of gig, so please go forth and have right at it. Just count me out, and kindly refrain from stepping on my lawn this Saturday unless you’re bringing delicious bottles of Schlenkerla Rauchbier to accompany our projected roast beast.

Then everyone can be happy, as opposed to the flag-waving idiocy of Blunder, when the noise is impossible to muffle no matter how much I drink.

And I drink a lot whenever warplanes strafe my house.

---

For some, especially non-gamblers, the Kentucky Derby is a time to admire the innate beauty of horses. Indeed, they’re splendid animals, albeit regrettably subjected to criminal interference by humans when it comes to thoroughbreds being genetically engineered for the sole purpose of maintaining the custom of wagering and the devastating addiction it often spawns.

Kentucky Derby fest season also is a time for lowlifes like me to obey the one-percent’s finger-wagging instructions by displaying a proper veneration for upstart new money, inbred old money, ephemeral showbiz glamor, ostentatious (read: tacky) parties, and conspicuous consumption by our presumed “betters” of such a vapid intensity that by all rights the spectacle should impel us to commence the instantaneous honing of curative pitchforks.

Happily, the Kentucky Derby is a time for filling the Crescent Hill Reservoir to the rim with bourbon – here, at last, we find a genuinely positive attribute of the season, so please do me a favor and save that detestable mint for chewing gum or some of the wonderful chilled yogurt soup the Greeks do so well in summer.

As a lifelong contrarian, I’ll take my bourbon ration served neat, then immediately trade it for requisitely peaty drams of Scotch. On the big day, I plan on stocking plenty of hooch and keeping the doors to the 1117 East Spring Neighborhood Association firmly bolted, because in addition to the horse races, the date of May 5 in the year 2018 doubles as Cinco de Mayo, which is fast approaching St. Patrick’s Day as an expression of sheer amateurism among my fellow Caucasians, AND the last Saturday of invasive voter canvassing prior to the Indiana primary next Tuesday.

I just might be compelled to booby trap my porch with tarantulas and other deadly cargo.

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Recently at Insider Louisville, Susan Reigler – musician, educator, former local restaurant critic and bourbon expert – sat down with Sara “Bar Belle” Havens for a few questions.

(Reigler’s) affinity — or awareness, we should say — for bourbon came much earlier in her life, when she would spend Saturdays at Churchill Downs with her family.

“The track in those days always smelled of old wood, cigars, popcorn and bourbon — quite a special combination,” says Reigler.

In spite of all my cranky bluster, I can relate to these sentiments. There’s a part of me that genuinely appreciates the old-school, tactile joys of the pre-intravenous ponies, the shabby and dung-laden track, and the laid-back Southern culture that used to characterize this scene.

The native Louisvillian writer Thompson grasped it better than most, and his 1970 account remains essential reading precisely because it deconstructed the mythology and described what the Kentucky Derby symbolized -- what it "was" -- with what it very shortly would become:

(The Texan) had, after all, come here once again to make a 19th century ass of himself in the midst of some jaded, atavistic freakout with nothing to recommend it except a very saleable "tradition."

Around the same time, I can remember Broun doing his televised racing commentaries -- and the man could write, too.

To be great, a horse must have metaphorical wings. In mythology we punished wax-winged Icarus for flying too close to the sun, but in recognition of the nobility of their singlemindedness, mythology has let the chariot horses of Apollo traverse the sky. Race horses do not chaffer over money, get into bar fights or endorse horse blankets and aluminum shoes. They combine strength, grace, beauty and speed as perhaps no other link in the Darwinian chain can manage (cheetahs have funny-looking shoulders).

There was a certain poetic flair, albeit oblivious, to the way the Courier-Journal of old used to cover the varied expressions of Churchill Downs pageantry, a quality of an indefinable “something” both venerable and genteel involving rites of spring, colorful flowers, exclusive balls and parties, and as a last resort, the horses themselves. Customs were handed down from one generation to the next, and honored.

Compared to what the Downs and the Derby have become in this time of celebrity-besotted, Disney-cum-Vegas plasticized swipe-card, UPC-tattooed entertainment experiences, 1970 might as well have been 1905.

Listen, I’m not delusional. Breeding horses for racing, wagering on them, smoking, drinking, eating and all the social constructs draped around the experience always had to do with shaking down suckers, first and foremost.

It’s understood, although I submit that during the course of my own life – perhaps as a result of globalization, or Reagan’s trickle-down, or the entire business of America’s business becoming a 24-hour-per-day psychological waterboarding designed to sell, sell, sell – most of the tradition and authenticity have been drained away, or perhaps stripped and flipped like the Yankee Stadium demolition and rebuild, yielding an improved model in which every last corpuscle of sculpted cement, fake wood and pastel color is calculated for one reason and one reason alone – to ensure that fools and their cash are expeditiously parted now, as a racetrack, and then even more so later, somewhere down the way, as a casino.

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But enough of the Kentucky Derby’s deleterious implications for human civilization.

Let’s talk about beer. In 2018, for the first time in six years, the “official” beer of this signature institution known as Churchill Downs no longer is Stella Artois, the chosen import of AB-InBev’s payola empire.

Now it’s Corona, perhaps the most vile mainstream corn-choked Mexican lager atrocity known to man, reminding us that while the Kentucky Derby has developed intrinsic traditions since its inaugural run in 1875, locally brewed beer hasn’t always been prominent among these predispositions. After all, bourbon gets you there way faster.

We can surmise that in the oldest of far-off times, there’d have been plenty of local beer to celebrate the annual race, at least prior to the idiotic onset of Prohibition, which rendered the United States a planetary laughingstock.

After glorious Repeal, local beer returned, but when the original Falls City swapped its fermenters for a fleet of semi-trailers in 1979, there was nary a single drop of hometown beer left to drown a wretched punter’s sorrows until 1993, when Sea Hero’s triumph may have been marked by a few hardy and pioneering microbrew fans drinking David Piece's Silo Red Rock Ale from a growler on their porch with a radio nearby, because then, as now, the very last situation you'd expect to experience in this life is local beer at Churchill Downs -- where first Stella, and lately Corona, is the official multinational-beer-of-choice, and there’s barely any incongruity worth noting because the multinational track itself has little to do with the schizophrenic city and impoverished state in which it resides.

Here, there and everywhere: when the real money is at stake, you can be sure that soulless neoliberal capitalism will be oozing through the keyhole, breathlessly drooling in anticipation of sponsorship opportunities, with conceptual coherence always taking a back seat to the sheer weight of numerically amassed ending zeroes.

First Stella, now Corona. Maybe next time it will be Molson. There’s plenty of time for an experiment, so go out and assemble a committee of horse pimps. We’ll see if any of them can spot the difference between the watery, beer-scented banality of Corona and those equally reeking buckets of equine drug-testing residue over there where the inspectors are being paid off.

It’s not a trick question, you know.

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Recent columns:

April 26: ON THE AVENUES: The wonder years.

April 19: ON THE AVENUES REWOUND: Our great and noble leader is here to stay, so let's break out the țuică and make a joyful noise.

April 12: ON THE AVENUES REWOUND: In Havel, I trust.

April 5: ON THE AVENUES: New Albany's downtown food and dining scene is solid ... for now.

"That Hell’s Angels foresaw all this 50 years ago underscores the depth and seriousness of Thompson as a political thinker and of ours as a singularly dangerous time."

It's a recurring cultural theme: If one feels he has little to lose because the rules of the game are arrayed against him, obeying the rules -- the niceties, those norms -- becomes far less important. Shouldn't understanding this be the most "common" piece of "common" sense?

This Political Theorist Predicted the Rise of Trumpism. His Name Was Hunter S. Thompson, by Susan McWilliams (The Nation)

In Hell’s Angels, the gonzo journalist wrote about left-behind people motivated only by “an ethic of total retaliation.” Sound familiar?

... It has been 50 years since Hunter S. Thompson published the definitive book on motorcycle guys: Hell’s Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs. It grew out of a piece first published in The Nation one year earlier. My grandfather, Carey McWilliams, editor of the magazine from 1955 to 1975, commissioned the piece from Thompson—it was the gonzo journalist’s first big break, and the beginning of a friendship between the two men that would last until my grandfather died in 1980. Because of that family connection, I had long known that Hell’s Angels was a political book. Even so, I was surprised, when I finally picked it up a few years ago, by how prophetic Thompson is and how eerily he anticipates 21st-century American politics. This year, when people asked me what I thought of the election, I kept telling them to read Hell’s Angels.

Hunter S. Thompson and the anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

I've spent a few minutes trying to verify this Hunter S. Thompson quote, which I've seen tweeted several times today -- the 15th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

The towers are gone now, reduced to bloody rubble, along with all hopes for Peace in Our Time, in the United States or any other country. Make no mistake about it: We are At War now -- with somebody -- and we will stay At War with that mysterious Enemy for the rest of our lives.

It will be a Religious War, a sort of Christian Jihad, fueled by religious hatred and led by merciless fanatics on both sides. It will be guerrilla warfare on a global scale, with no front lines and no identifiable enemy.

These words can be found as part of a column published shortly after the attacks, as archived at ESPN.com, and a version of it apparently is included in the book Kingdom of Fear.

However, to google Hunter S. Thompson and 9-11 together yields a treasure trove of crackpot conspiracy theories about the writer's interviews in the aftermath of 9-11, and his subsequent death, which (naturally) wasn't suicide but murder.

This is why I don't go to Reddit.

Ever.

Still, if the above quote actually is Dr. Thompson writing just after the towers fell, it is remarkably prescient. We've been at war for 15 years, and there's no end in sight. A few days ago we visited the Antietam battlefield, and it prompted reflection -- about sacrifice, but also what comes after a bloody day. In the case of 9/11, we're still living it.

"Jesus! Where will it end? How low do you have to stoop in this country to be President?"

The late Hunter S. Thompson ... writing in 1972.

"This may be the year when we finally come face to face with ourselves; finally just lay back and say it—that we are really just a nation of 220 million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns, and no qualms at all about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable. The tragedy of all this is that George McGovern, for all his mistakes... understands what a fantastic monument to all the best instincts of the human race this country might have been, if we could have kept it out of the hands of greedy little hustlers like Richard Nixon. McGovern made some stupid mistakes, but in context they seem almost frivolous compared to the things Richard Nixon does every day of his life, on purpose as a matter of policy and a perfect expression of everything he stands for. Jesus! Where will it end? How low do you have to stoop in this country to be President?"

From: The Moment You Realize Trump Finally Crossed the Line, by Charles P. Pierce (Esquire)

Equal time: "This was a night dominated by the hollow men of the Democratic Party."

I watched Bill Clinton speak to the Democratic National Convention on Tuesday, then Joe Biden, Tim Kaine and Barack Obama on Wednesday.

Oddly, given social media's resident mania about SCOTUS, I can't recall one of the four so much as mentioning the court appointments to come.

At any rate, I kept waiting for the flame to be reignited in my barren soul. It remained extinguished. St. Clair's notes brilliantly cover the Wednesday program, beginning with a reminder of how much each and every one of us should be missing Hunter S. Thompson just about now.

Night of the Hollow Men: Notes From the Democratic Convention, by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch)

+ Since my co-editor Joshua Frank prefers to go surfing rather than do his reportorial duty and watch the DNC Convention from gavel-to-gavel, he’s telling me that I have to write another account of tonight’s proceedings. I’m not sure I’m up to it ‘frankly.’ What would Hunter Thompson do? Oh, yes, he would get his body and mind in fighting form by having breakfast. I guess I’ll follow the good Doctor’s example: “Four Bloody Marys, two grapefruits, a pot of coffee, Rangoon crêpes, a half-pound of either sausage, bacon, or corned-beef hash with diced chilies, a Spanish omelette or eggs Benedict, a quart of milk, a chopped lemon for random seasoning, and something like a slice of key lime pie, two margaritas and six lines of the best cocaine for dessert.” All to be consumed while naked. Snarf! Sniff! Belch! ALRIGHT! I’m primed. Bring on Biden!

+ Margie Kidder was one of Hunter Thompson’s best friends. I asked her if this menu remotely resembled his real appetites. Margie told me that she and Hunter were together during the 1984 Democratic Convention in San Francisco, where his main obsession was in scoring some cocaine to get him juiced for covering the tedium of the convention.

“Here’s what Hunter would do,” Margie told me. “He believed firmly in getting your cocaine first, which at that convention involved spending a lot of time with a gay friend of mine he referred to in his writing as “the bowl of fruit”. Then you got your drinks lined up and we would sit and watch the TV in the press room. I kept insisting in going out onto the floor to interview what often turned out to be ex-lovers of mine, who I couldn’t really quote for obvious reasons. He was disgusted with me. At one point, back at the St Francis hotel, Hunter screamed down the hall at me “You are a political neophyte! You are a dangerous woman!” Then he went off to a party at Ann Getty’s house or apartment and called her a fascist dyke and punched a hole in her living room wall and Pat Caddell (the Democratic pollster) and I had to race over with my trans driver Greta and our 1960s Cadillac convertible loaned to me by the gay community and rescue Hunter from the well-dressed and horrified Democrats. Sen Patrick Leahy thought he was funny. Few other Democrats did. But then Leahy often rode around with us in that Cadillac.”

Hunter S. Thompson on sportswriting: "It keeps a man busy and requires no thought at all."

I'm not sure how it came up, but yesterday I became engaged in a discussion about sportswriting. It brought to mind a piece by Hunter S. Thompson, but I couldn't place it, and then miraculously, a Twitter discussion about Thompson's best sportswriting led right to it.

It's just funny.

Epitaph ... "Nixon Uber Alles" ... Four More Years ... Fear and Loathing at the Super Bowl

 ... Sportswriters are a kind of rude and brainless subculture of fascist drunks whose only real function is to publicize & sell whatever the sports editor sends them out to cover....

Which is a nice way to make a living, because it keeps a man busy and requires no thought at all. The two keys to success as a sportswriter are: 1) A blind willingness to believe anything you're told by the coaches, flacks, hustlers and other "official spokesmen" for the team-owners who provide the free booze ... and: 2) A Roget's Thesaurus, in order to avoid using the same verbs and adjectives twice in the same paragraph.

Even a sports editor, for instance, might notice something wrong with a lead that said: "The precision-jack-hammer attack of the Miami Dolphins stomped the balls off the Washington Redskins today by stomping and hammering with one precise jack-thrust after another up the middle, mixed with pinpoint-precision passes into the flat and numerous hammer-jack stomps around both ends...."

Right. And there was the genius of Grantland Rice. He carried a pocket thesaurus, so that "The thundering hoofbeats of the Four Horsemen" never echoed more than once in the same paragraph, and the "Granite-grey sky" in his lead was a "cold dark dusk" in the last lonely line of his heart-rending, nerve-ripping stories...

Hunter S. Thompson eulogizes Richard M. Nixon: "He Was a Crook."

(Wikipedia)

Arguably, the finest political obituary in American history.

It is impossible to read it without laughing aloud. It is equally impossible to pull one representative passage. One simply must read the whole piece.

You may have noticed that just two days ago, I borrowed a phrase from Dr. Thompson. This is the reason why I limit my reading of his essays, because doing so influences my own writing. Unconsciously, I try to emulate it. The same applies to H.L. Mencken.

My heroes, the polemicists. Ah, yes.

He Was a Crook

By Hunter S. Thompson (The Atlantic; originally published in Rolling Stone on June 16, 1994)

DATE: MAY 1, 1994
FROM: DR. HUNTER S. THOMPSON
SUBJECT: THE DEATH OF RICHARD NIXON: NOTES ON THE PASSING OF AN AMERICAN MONSTER.... HE WAS A LIAR AND A QUITTER, AND HE SHOULD HAVE BEEN BURIED AT SEA.... BUT HE WAS, AFTER ALL, THE PRESIDENT.

... It is fitting that Richard Nixon's final gesture to the American people was a clearly illegal series of 21 105-mm howitzer blasts that shattered the peace of a residential neighborhood and permanently disturbed many children. Neighbors also complained about another unsanctioned burial in the yard at the old Nixon place, which was brazenly illegal. "It makes the whole neighborhood like a graveyard," said one. "And it fucks up my children's sense of values."

Pierce, Thompson and the Manics on the life of Richard Nixon.

That's right: One hundred years ago on Wednesday, Richard Nixon was born. The tributes are effusive and deadly accurate, as with Charlie Pierce's take.

Happy Birthday And I'm Glad You're Still Dead, by Charles P. Pierce (Esquire)

If he were still alive, and the existence of god thereby utterly disproved in a huge and public way, this would have been Richard Nixon's 100th birthday ...

... There will be a lot of chin-rubbing and beard-pulling, and discreet apologias on the theme of what a "quintessentially American" life was led by Richard Nixon. This a whole load of bollocks. I know hundreds of Americans who live their quintessentially American lives without doing a fraction of the damage that Richard Nixon did to his country and to the world simply by getting out of bed in the morning. His crimes are not excused by his neuroses. The subsequent dementia of the Republican party does not absolve him of the damage he did to our politics. Nixon was not "us." Most of us don't kill Asians to prove to someone else how tough we are. Most of us don't cover our workplaces with shame and disgrace and then claim that somebody else, and there was always somebody else with him, was really to blame.

But there's more!

Let's not forget Hunter S. Thompson's world-classic Nixon obituary from 1994, as originally published in Rolling Stone: He Was a Crook.

If the right people had been in charge of Nixon's funeral, his casket would have been launched into one of those open-sewage canals that empty into the ocean just south of Los Angeles. He was a swine of a man and a jabbering dupe of a president. Nixon was so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning. Even his funeral was illegal. He was queer in the deepest way. His body should have been burned in a trash bin.

The last word goes to the Manic Street Preachers (from the album Lifeblood, 2004).