Book Description

A 720 page (many full-color), 2011 issued, 19 1⁄2 x 13 1⁄2" facsimile edition of the 2010 artist's book chronic freedom.The book surveys individual lives and institutions as they emerged from the back-to-the-land movement and its cannabis economy in the Southern Humboldt region of Northern California, from about 1970 to 2010. Its six parts are separately paginated and all include original writing, interviews and reporting; reproduced newspapers, transcribed television and radio reporting, books, government documents; private photographs and journals; tipped-in artifacts like soil supplements bags used in marijuana cultivation. Beginning with the essay, "Against Dialogue: and for speaking only to ourselves," the next parts are on the lives and deaths of three young men, all children of the hippie generation. One murdered in 1993, another in 2003 and a suicide in 2004. The third part focusses on locally written and produced hip hop music and its scene made by peers of the dead men.The last part, "Hippies & Weed: Southern Humboldt County 1968 - 2010," reproduces a survey of local and national media-including entire books, community newsletters, private journals and play scripts, often printed in micro-tiles that require magnification, sometimes accompanied by commentary and altered by graphic interventions. Oral history interviews, most of adult children of hippie settlers, conducted from 2004 to 2010 are reproduced verbatim.chronic freedom is the main volume in a series of five by the author. Others are: dirt, light, 3 books and Big Drug Factory - Unfound. Together they represent a single work that attempts to collect and interrogate traces of their subject's histories.