Sunday, June 27, 2010

Our Town

Check out the green bud featured in today's New York Times business section.

It was just a few weeks ago that, upon returning to the Rockies from a quick trip to Europe, we came across not one, not two, but three articles in the NYT business section featuring Boulder's virtual gold rush toward digital capitalism.

The techno-entrepreneurialism that the journos at the NYT highlighted a few weeks ago is now replaced with a look at "cannabis capitalism" i.e. the for-profit medical marijuana mom and pop shops opening up all over town.

What's interesting to me is how without even looking for it, these Boulder-based feature articles in our national newspaper keep presenting themselves to me as source material for my new novel-in-progress which, as luck would have it, features a remixological figure I imagine to be "Walt Whitman Benjamin" who, in addition to being a kind of professorial con man, regularly visits one of these sinsemilla shops to relieve himself of a contemporary condition yet to be properly diagnosed (he can't help but wonder if it may not be the curse of writing itself ... Cocteau: "Writing is a sickness." ... Bataille: "I write not to be mad." But then again, he thinks it could just be his Conceptual practice in general, something that creeps into his morning fog of thoughts on a daily basis which, he figures, is due to his ongoing performance art project where he portrays an enigmatic sculptor / skull-rupture who is the illegitimate brain-child of Marcel Duchamp and a late-night college radio station DJ: "I was all rupture all the time.").

There's more than a bit of satirically rendered techno-entrepreneurialism in the new novel too, as well as a heavy dose of self-effacing new age lifestyle coaching (writing it out from an undisclosed location in the Pacific Northwest is giving me the perfect distance I need to render this storyworld into vision).

Early drafts can be found in reverse order here (scroll to the bottom and read the entries as you go up).



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