I just saw this thread and thought i would pop up for a moment. The Rolling Stone experience, now that it is over, was an instructive and fascinating one. Actually I was very lucky that it came out in the same time frame as Burning Man, as it was very helpful to go to the burn and release any negative feelings around the article, among a community that seems closer to "my" community than any other.

There seems to be a natural process that the mass media goes through with any figure who challenges the status quo in some way that can't be simply ignored. Part of that process is character assassination, mischaracterization, deliberate distortion, etc. It is interesting that Vanessa references my mother's experience with Kerouac at great length - except for the NY Times Review that proclaimed On the Road a masterpiece, he was generally savaged in the press, as were the beat generation in general. I wrote in "2012" how the media acts as an "immune response task force" seeking to inoculate new patterns of incoming information - the Rolling Stone piece is a perfect example of this process.

I also felt there was a certain guilt-riddled incoherence to the piece, a sense of confusion as to why they were devoting space to me only to hatchet me and misrepresent my ideas.

What is very interesting, as an individual person undergoing this process as well as witnessing reactions to it, is how quickly one gets converted from a normal person (someone who is "one of us") to a screen for the projection of the larger collective's hostilities and envies - to an "other" who somehow is no longer considered to have feelings in the same way. I will forever insist (and told Vanessa this over and over again) that I am not a "guru" in any way, just someone who is using the skill set that I have to try to understand what is going on and contribute to the process as best as I can.

Anyway I chose to live in NYC in order to fight the media demon directly, so I do feel this is ultimately a blow in my favor.