The Selby

Don't you love this website? The Selby features photographs, paintings and videos by todd selby of interesting people and their creative spaces













These photos make me realize how I wish I had some kind of successful & lucrative creative career & the money to fund this magical bohemian lifestyle they represent. Also, though, it's kind of inspiring & makes me wonder about saving the money I'm spending now on a jam space & fund it toward creating a beautiful magical place to live (although, i do really like my apartment).

This is the building I'm trying to get into in my next move. 1300 square feet of open space. It's like a blank canvas with some much inspirational/fun potential. Can you imagine the dance parties?

This could only happen to me.

I have spent the past week or two being sick on the couch watching movies. I even missed the show of friends Casey and Brian, who I met in Seattle before they abandoned the rain for San Francisco, although I have plans to go down to the bay area soon. Between that & trying to save up for moving, I haven't gone out too much.

The other night, at the East End, I went with friends to see two of my favourite Portl
and bands: Explode Into Colors and Fist Fite . Explode Into Colors is a super fun band to see with a lot of recent buzz surrounding them, and I wouldn't be surprised if they were the next band to emerge from the Portland scene into more widespread popularity.

There is a door in the East End basement, by the bathrooms, that is always closed, that has "do not enter this is a studio" graffitied onto it.

When we were hanging around outside, a man with crazy white hair poked his head out and said, "hey girls, do you want to come see my art?" Being me, I shrugged my shoulders and followed him inside. He was shaking with the faint tremors like someone who has been drinking and drugging for 40 odd years, and his basement lair housed an astonishing collection of paintings, books, photographs, old furniture, and art supplies. At first we were a little skeptical, but then I started to enjoy myself.

One conversation:

Crazy old man: I suppose you won't like my work, will you, I don't want to offend you I draw a lot of ----. I just think they're beautiful.

Me: Hey, there's nothing wrong with that. that's all Georgia O'Keefe drew.

Crazy old man: Yes! *His arms are in the air and he jumps up and down* Beautiful flower ----!

At this point he hugged me.

He put on Leonard Cohen and he showed us lots of photos and we talked about the Native American goddess figure and the mythology of the "goddess", residential schools, Sauvie Island, Vietnam draft dodgers, local artists, how he thought the "harvest" in Mendocino compared to the Pacific Northwest and Vancouver Island. All sorts of things. After I told him I was Canadian, I could basically do no wrong, and he told me about smoking pot in Stanley Park in the 1960s......"I remember a place, where there were totem poles. And lots of people. Did I dream the totem poles?"

I can't even explain in a blog how amusing and surreal this was. At first, I thought he was a crazy drug addict, not that he's not, but then, gradually, when he showed us advertisements for gallery shows of his work, and I realized he was actually legitimate. Then, before we were leaving, he asked is we wanted "a book". We said sure, and he brought out books and signed them for us (and wrote down his phone number).

Anyways, it turns out he's the author, Walt Curtis, the book was "Mala Noche", an autobiographical book released in the 1970s, which inspired Gus Van Sant's first film, which in turn set the stage for a lot of the New Queer cinema of the 1980s and 1990s. Curtis is friends with Gus Van Sant, and we talked about his new film "Milk" which he absolutely loved, and I'm desperate to see.

In 1984 film director Gus Van Sant (Drugstore Cowboy and Good Will Hunting) began his career with a small, black-and-white independent movie called Mala Noche. Van Sant's film, a gritty look at a gay man's relationship to Latino teenagers in Portland, Oregon's Little Mexico, was based on a novella by Walt Curtis, a street poet with a cult following among experimental writers and audiences. Curtis's small chapbook has never been widely available but is reprinted here with more material by him and an introduction by Van Sant. Curtis's authentic voice sounds like a cross between Allen Ginsberg and the over-narration on a travelogue about inner-city life. He is unstinting in his self-revelation, and the energy and love he has for his characters is palpable (the city of Portland is as much of a person here as his fellow humans). Mala Noche will be a revelation for anyone who loves Van Sant's film, and a fine introduction for those who have yet to watch it.

An underground literary legend associated with Ken Kesey, William Burroughs, and Allen Ginsberg, Curtis has been called Portland, Oregon's, unofficial street poet. "Mala Noche" first appeared in 1977 as a chapbook and was later made into an award-winning film by Gus Van Sant. It is a vividly homoerotic account of Curtis's passionate and mostly unrequited love for several Mexican street youths who come to Oregon seeking jobs and money. The powerful imagery is reminiscent of Jean Genet and of other Beat Generation writers. There is great sadness in the lives of these lost young men but also great beauty and dignity, which Curtis effectively captures. Illustrated with the author's photos and drawings and accompanied by several essays and poems, this book deserves a place in both Hispanic and gay literature collections, though libraries should beware of the graphic language and situations.

Anyways. This better explains my surreal, sort of amazing experience:





And the trailer for Mala Noche:

The Shock Doctrine

Love her or hate her, Naomi Klein's book "The Shock Doctrine", published a year ago, is a pretty amazing read. I adored "No Logo" when it came out, and have since read a number of blistering attacks on her hypotheses from her detractors, politicians, and economists. Regardless of whether or not you agree with her theses or believe she sensationalizes and simplifies ideas for personal profit, her work is fascinating and provocative.

It is an attack on free-market fundamentalism and the global profiteers who benefit from recent wars and catastrophes. Here are two papers that attempt to discredit her thesis from The Cato Institue and The New Republic.

You can listen to her discuss the bailout profiteers here on "Democracy Now"


Excerpt from the book:

Having been part of the movement against ballooning corporate power that made its global debut in Seattle in 1999, I was accustomed to seeing business-friendly policies imposed through arm-twisting at WTO summits, or as the conditions attached to loans from the IMF.

As I dug deeper into the history of how this market model had swept the globe, I discovered that the idea of exploiting crisis and disaster has been the modus operandi of Friedman's movement from the very beginning - this fundamentalist form of capitalism has always needed disasters to advance. What was happening in Iraq and New Orleans was not a post-September 11 invention. Rather, these bold experiments in crisis exploitation were the culmination of three decades of strict adherence to the shock doctrine.

Seen through the lens of this doctrine, the past 35 years look very different. Some of the most infamous human rights violations of this era, which have tended to be viewed as sadistic acts carried out by anti-democratic regimes, were in fact either committed with the intent of terrorising the public or actively harnessed to prepare the ground for radical free-market "reforms". In China in 1989, it was the shock of the Tiananmen Square massacre and the arrests of tens of thousands that freed the Communist party to convert much of the country into a sprawling export zone, staffed with workers too terrified to demand their rights. The Falklands war in 1982 served a similar purpose for Margaret Thatcher: the disorder resulting from the war allowed her to crush the striking miners and to launch the first privatisation frenzy in a western democracy.

The bottom line is that, for economic shock therapy to be applied without restraint, some sort of additional collective trauma has always been required. Friedman's economic model is capable of being partially imposed under democracy - the US under Reagan being the best example - but for the vision to be implemented in its complete form, authoritarian or quasi-authoritarian conditions are required.

Until recently, these conditions did not exist in the US. What happened on September 11 2001 is that an ideology hatched in American universities and fortified in Washington institutions finally had its chance to come home. The Bush administration, packed with Friedman's disciples, including his close friend Donald Rumsfeld, seized upon the fear generated to launch the "war on terror" and to ensure that it is an almost completely for-profit venture, a booming new industry that has breathed new life into the faltering US economy. Best understood as a "disaster capitalism complex", it is a global war fought on every level by private companies whose involvement is paid for with public money, with the unending mandate of protecting the US homeland in perpetuity while eliminating all "evil" abroad.

In a few short years, the complex has already expanded its market reach from fighting terrorism to international peacekeeping, to municipal policing, to responding to increasingly frequent natural disasters. The ultimate goal for the corporations at the centre of the complex is to bring the model of for-profit government, which advances so rapidly in extraordinary circumstances, into the ordinary functioning of the state - in effect, to privatise the government.

In scale, the disaster capitalism complex is on a par with the "emerging market" and IT booms of the 90s. It is dominated by US firms, but is global, with British companies bringing their experience in security cameras, Israeli firms their expertise in building hi-tech fences and walls. Combined with soaring insurance industry profits as well as super profits for the oil industry, the disaster economy may well have saved the world market from the full-blown recession it was facing on the eve of 9/11.

In the torrent of words written in eulogy to Milton Friedman, the role of shocks and crises to advance his world view received barely a mention. Instead, the economist's passing, in November 2006, provided an occasion for a retelling of the official story of how his brand of radical capitalism became government orthodoxy in almost every corner of the globe. It is a fairytale history, scrubbed clean of the violence so intimately entwined with this crusade.

It is time for this to change. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, there has been a powerful reckoning with the crimes committed in the name of communism. But what of the crusade to liberate world markets?

I am not arguing that all forms of market systems require large-scale violence. It is eminently possible to have a market-based economy that demands no such brutality or ideological purity. A free market in consumer products can coexist with free public health care, with public schools, with a large segment of the economy - such as a national oil company - held in state hands. It's equally possible to require corporations to pay decent wages, to respect the right of workers to form unions, and for governments to tax and redistribute wealth so that the sharp inequalities that mark the corporatist state are reduced. Markets need not be fundamentalist.

John Maynard Keynes proposed just that kind of mixed, regulated economy after the Great Depression. It was that system of compromises, checks and balances that Friedman's counter-revolution was launched to dismantle in country after country. Seen in that light, Chicago School capitalism has something in common with other fundamentalist ideologies: the signature desire for unattainable purity.

This desire for godlike powers of creation is precisely why free-market ideologues are so drawn to crises and disasters. Non-apocalyptic reality is simply not hospitable to their ambitions. For 35 years, what has animated Friedman's counter-revolution is an attraction to a kind of freedom available only in times of cataclysmic change - when people, with their stubborn habits and insistent demands, are blasted out of the way - moments when democracy seems a practical impossibility. Believers in the shock doctrine are convinced that only a great rupture - a flood, a war, a terrorist attack - can generate the kind of vast, clean canvases they crave. It is in these malleable moments, when we are psychologically unmoored and physically uprooted, that these artists of the real plunge in their hands and begin their work of remaking the world.