2010 (prod. 2010 – 2011) edition of 10
18 x 13″. 13-page fold out book, inkjet-printed, color, with a preserved original May 24, 1973 ed. of Rolling Stone. Presented in two archival-grade 4-flap enclosures with string-and-button fastenings sewn into folded book cloth, cotton twill canvas, tent canvas and leather binding. Offered only in series.
Big Drug Factory — Unfound is a documentary assemblage on the murder of Dirk Dickenson—a man in his twenties who had recently moved to Southern Humboldt—by federal police on Pratt Mountain during a drug raid in April 1972. A range of texts and public records is contained in the book’s two archival-grade four-flap enclosures.
Central among them is a preserved original May 24, 1973 ed. of Rolling Stone, whose cover story by Joe Eszterhas, “Death in the Wilderness: The Justice Department’s Killer Nark Strike Force,” investigates Dickenson’s death. Among the other historical documents presented are reproductions of contemporaneous local newspaper reports and facsimile copies of the coroner’s report and autopsy. The transcribed 2009 interview with Jon Akselsen, a Southern Humboldt homesteader who was stopped on the road during the police raid helps situate events within contemporary community life.
In demonstration of how the circumstances of Dickenson’s death remain directly relevant to the communities of Humboldt County today, the book reproduces a Humboldt-based internet blog’s 2006 reassessment and subsequent online discussion of the Rolling Stone coverage of the killing. These radically different documents emphasize the way distinctively contrasting registers and treatments of the same event, when brought together, generate the possibility of new readings.