HERE WE GO ROUND THE MULBERRY BUSH

A revitalized version of the L.A. Free Press? Uh, Art Kunkin says so. You remember him, founding publisher-editor of the old Free Press back in the day? Kunkin, right, wants to re-connect with all these folks (scroll down) -- they're mostly famous and mostly from the '60s -- for celebrity testimonials. Sounds to us like the old counterculture redux, not revitalized, while there's a new counterculture shaping up in Crawford, Texas.

Meantime, Gig LeCarp won't be attending tomorrow's $2-million fireworks memorial for Hunter S. Thompson, where the late writer's bagged-up ashes will be shot 300 feet into the air from a red Fiberglass "fist" canon. "Not that I begrudge the good Doctor his booming sayonara," LeCarp writes in a faux memo to Jann Wenner, adding:

Whatever private anguish or defective pharmaceutical prompted him to cash in his chips, at 67 and in failing health -- well, no player can tell another when it's time to quit the table. And if his loved ones want to tamp his ashes into a howitzer and blast them across the bar at the Jerome, that's their business.

But to join the pack of media hyenas slavering at the gates...all those gizmo-saddled, gonzo-worshiping curs...swilling Wild Turkey, snorting ether, waving cigarette holders and craning their wattled necks for a glimpse of Johnny Depp [who's paying for the farewell party] ...sorry, but I'll pass. The plan to erect a giant fist clutching a peyote button is a nice touch, but it's a bit anachronistic; these days what matters is who's doing the fisting.

Feature this, Mr. Wenner: This depraved cult of press jackanapery is what took the punch out of gonzo a long time ago. Hunter was our tragic clown, but he used to be much more than that, before the bitch
Celebrity got him. We should be celebrating the seat-of-the-pants outlaw who savaged despots and wrote like Fitzgerald on liquid nitrogen, not guzzling Cristal with the rest of the press corps in Aspen -- a nest of rabid greedheads that would have been renamed Fat City if the Doctor had won the sheriff's race back in 1970.

That stuff was too good not to quote, and it's just the tip of the memo. Go read the whole thing, Art.

-- Tireless Staff of Thousands