I compiled this list of mini profiles of some of my closest creative collaborators ten years ago, for the launch of my e-book collection En svensk gonzo in winter 2016. The list is still relevant, so no reason to change anything. However, more collaborators may be added. Please excuse the skewed gender balance…I’m afraid there’s nothing I can do about it at this point. Below, find also my highly personal “Gonzo Manifesto,” with my own definition of the term.
Much more on En svensk gonzo (A Swedish Gonzo) here! (In Swedish)
Dan Perrin
A beloved child has many names, so it says. “Senan,” (“The Tendon”) “Dana-Tranan,” and “Dandy Dan” are just three of the nicknames my old brother and teammate Dan Sinclair Perrin has been called over the years—by me and others. In a bygone era, Danne was one of Swedish basketball’s most natural mid-range shooters—a gifted athlete when we battled together on courts across Sweden, from Jokkmokk to Ängelholm, wearing the proud purple and gold colors of our KFUM Central mother club. As early as the late 1980s, we lost Danne to Göteborg, where he first attended the Valand Academy of Fine Arts, then got stuck. Now he’s back as my neighbor in Gärdet, where it all began. Throughout his long career, Danne has created many acclaimed exhibitions and public art installations. His work is represented in prestigious public and private collections. Here, Danne enhances many of my texts with his peerless illustrations, newer and older. He also played a key role in our 2012 book PA&Co—ännu en kokbok (PA&Co—another cookbook). To contact Danne, send a DM.
Buy and download En svensk gonzo (A Swedish Gonzo) as e-bok here! (in Swedish only, unfortunately)
Pierre Björk
The then-very-young fashion and portrait photographer whom I once managed to persuade Mikael Jansson to accept in his team as an assistant. Today, Pierre shoots portraits Swedish for magazines and other clients. Personally, I’m a fan of his paparazzi-style photography, which has a strong sense of fashion, often with a raw edge. We developed this ideom together and, over the years, have created out a number of features in this genre, which has become Pierre’s well-known trademark. Pierre contributes here with, among many other things, his renowned photo series for my story Skräck och hat i mode-Stockholm 1&2, (Fear and Loathing in Fashion-Stockholm 1&2,) as well as images from a trip to New York a trip to New York, where Pierre lived at the time, where we together “covered” the opening of our mutual friend Carsten Höller’s major retrospective at the New Museum on The Bowery.
Tomas Almgren
Many readers at the time believed—and still do today!—that Tomas in my writings was a fictional character, but no, hell no, certainly not. His existence is very much “in the flesh.” Tomas was born in faraway Tehran under the name Siawash Horsiar, adopted here to our barren north—more specifically, Östermalm—where we became friends in our early twenties, having known of each other previously, back when Tomas attended Gärdet and I Engelbrekt Östermalm schools. Throughout the latter part of the nineties and the early 2000s, Tomas contributed to my writings as my “anthropological assistant,” always offering his most personal, quite unique perspectives and observations on all the situations, events, phenomena, fates, adventures and people we encountered along our winding path. In recent years, he has made repeated comebacks in this role. More may follow if time is kind.
Mikael Jansson
My old “professional big brother,” Mikael Jansson, is, as everyone knows, one of the world’s leading fashion photographers, with assignments for the planet’s top fashion magazines and brands. For over twenty years, we worked together regularly, producing a vast number of—if I may say so myself—classic works: books, websites, exhibitions, and, of course, a large number of fashion and portrait features. Here, Mikael is represented by a wealth of images from Stockholm New and many other collaborative projects, including my 1998 essay Sår är till för att göra ont! (Wounds are meant to hurt!)” as well as our books PA&Co—mer än en kokbok (PA&Co—more than a cookbook) from 2006 and PA&Co—ännu en kokbok (PA&Co—another cookbook) from 2016.
Joakim Lindengren
Joakim Lindengren studied sculpture at Konstfack art school in Stockholm but ended up becoming an adult comic artist instead. He broke through in underground circles in the mid-1980s and is the man behind timeless classics such as Tungt Kylskåp (Heavy Refrigirator), Krystmarodören (The Thrust Holigan)), Brun utan Tvål (Brown Without Soap), Kung Kisstanks Hämnd (King Piss Tank’s Revenge), John Holmes and Sherlock Watson, Kapten Stofil: Hut Går Hem (Captain Senile: Good Behavior Pays Off), and many more. Here, Joakim contributes some of his memorable, controversial illustrations to my articles on Södermalm, City, and Östermalm in Dagens Nyheter from the mid-1990s.
Nicho Södling
The largest and most cherished of the projects that Nicho and I have worked on together over the years is Vanity of Man, Nicho’s stunning series of classic “fashion portraits” of indigenous people from the Omo River delta in southwestern Ethiopia—a remote, hard-to-reach, formerly completely isolated area that I myself visited on an adventurous river expedition with my beloved father back in 1988. Nicho is primarily a fashion and lifestyle photographer. These days, he works mostly on his own large-scale photographic projects from various parts of the world, not least from Brazil, where he lives for much of the year. Here, Nicho contributes, among other features, images from a French excursions.
Mathias Johansson
A former athlete and warrior from the vast, barren expanses of Jämtland, he has long been firmly established in Gamla Stan, where he pursues his career as a photographer specializing in form, architecture, art, and portraiture. His portraits of the New York artist Louise Bourgeois are internationally renowned. Mathias is represented in the collections of Moderna Museet, Louisiana, and several other prestigious institutions. Here, he shares some fondly remembered photos from our shared adventures in Tokyo in 2003.
“Right now, on my nightstand, is `Sekelskifte i Stockholm´ by Claes Britton. A fiery journalist who dares to be emotional—Hunter S. Thompson in Dalarö. `Fear and Loathing in Stockholmot for the faint of heart.”
—Bodil Malmsten
My gonzo manifesto:
Gonzo has come to be associated—primarily among those who haven’t really read Hunter S. Thompson—first and foremost with alcohol, drugs, and sexual debauchery. I find this unfortunate. Certainly, alcohol and various types of drugs are important components of this literary tradition—and of the mental states that gave rise to it. Sex, on the other hand, plays at best a secondary role.
For me, gonzo is primarily about letting go of traditional objectivity in order to allow one’s own personality free rein—about describing reality through that personality and its inner monologue, associations, fantasies, and hallucinations.
The literary expression that Hunter S. Thompson single-handedly invented is rooted in 1950s Beat literature; not least, I would argue, in William S. Burroughs’s unrestrainedly surreal, bizarrely humorous maelstrom of inner nightmarish visions. Thompson evolved the style his very own, contemporary incarnation. In my opinion, he is a unique portrayer of American society and the terminally ill American national soul.
I myself took the plunge and cast aside journalistic so-called objectivity to write fully in the gonzo tradition—in my own highly personal, Swedish-style adaptation—for the first time in 1994. I have continued ever since. For me, this form of expression offers greater freedom and broader opportunities to portray our contemporary reality as I see and experience it—from a more honest, truer perspective than if I were to restrain myself in the conventional, often false, doctored straight-jacket of objectivity.
“His hallucinated vision strikes one as having been, after all, the sanest”
–Nelson Algren on Hunter S. Thompson
“He sees Stockholm as both his home village and a metropolis. He’s a gonzo flâneur—Hunter S. Thompson through the eyes of Hjalmar Söderberg.”
–Johan Hakelius
See images from our 2016 En svensk gonzo book release in our BrittonBritton studio here in Stockholm:
Svensk gonzo (Swedish Gonzo) book release
It was a truly memorable, intimately personal, appropriately wild and crazy evening celebrating my e-book anthology En svensk gonzo in our BrittonBritton studio on Regeringsgatan in Stockholm, in the company of a small circle of friends, collaborators, publishers, editors and old classmates.