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).
Metadata:
Boulder,
novel,
marijuana,
Conceptual practice,
writing,
digital capitalism
