HST: Well, I'm not sure Hogarth was entirely objective but, yes, there's an element of reality, even in Ralph's most grotesque drawings. He catches things. Using a sort of venomous, satirical approach, he exaggerates the two or three things that horrify him in a scene or situation. . . And you can say that these people didn't look exactly like that, but when you can look at them again it seems pretty damn close. All the cops in the Vegas hotel lobby are wearing the same plaid Bermuda shorts, and they're uglier than any group of mutants you'd see at a bad insane asylum -- you know, for the criminally insane. But I look back on that scene and I know they weren't much different, really. They had on different colored shirts and they weren't all crazy and dangerous-looking -- but he caught the one or two distinguishing characteristics among them: the beady eyes, burr haircuts, weasel teeth, beer bellies. If you exaggerate those four characteristics, you get a pretty grizzly drawing. . .

ED.: He is a realist, then. . .

HST: Oh yes. By way of exaggeration and selective grotesquery. His view of reality is not entirely normal. Ralph sees through the glass very darkly. He doesn't merely render a scene, he interprets it, from his own point of view. For instance, he felt the senators should be on trial at the Watergate hearings. He was convinced that they were totally corrupt. Corruption in its broadest sense seems to be the thing that shocks him and gets him cranked more than anything else. . . congenital corruption. . . on a level far beyond police payoffs or political bribery. . . deeply corrupt people, performing essentially corrupt actions, in the name of law and order.

ED.: Do you plan any further projects together?

Gonzo 1 - The Great Shark Hunt

HST: The trial of Nixon would be a nice trip for Steadman.

ED.: In the Senate?

HST: Yes. Nixon doesn't have to be in the dock -- according to law -- but it's possible that he might be. . . and I think that would be an ideal story for Ralph. Or maybe a very expensive wedding in the South -- Old, incestuous families, things like that -- or a carnival scene, like a traveling carnival, with sideshows at country fairs. . . and I think he could get off pretty harshly on an L.A. gang rape or a sex orgy on Beekman Place in New York. . . There's a kind of wild theme in his drawings: decadence, corruption, immorality. . . like these horrible people in plastic hats standing outside the Kennedy Memorial in Dallas. Obscenity in its broadest sense is another hallmark of the things that shock him. . . I think he sees all of Dallas and Texas and even all of America as obscene, or at least a mockery of what it should be -- the way it claims to be, from his point of view. He probably thinks it was doomed from the start. He has that King-George-III notion of America.