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: