If love is the drug when I want to OD

I haven't written here in a long while, because my thoughts have been consumed with life changes, and I have never felt entirely comfortable discussing my relationships on the internet. My relationship with Paul ended a month ago, which is a good thing, considering that, after my 6 hour drive northward (from Portland) I felt nothing but relief.

Relief that I had decided, rightly, that I wasn't in love with this person anymore and that we weren't right for each other. We are both good people, but, to be succinct, he's just East Coat and I'm just West Coast. I'm super laid back and love sangria and spontaneous dance parties - and with Paul, I felt like I was dating Woody Allen. I drove him crazy with my laissez faire attitude, and his neuroses drove me absolutely batty.

I also felt relief as soon as I crossed the Canadian border and realized that I wouldn't have to keep dealing with Homeland Security and enduring the scrutiny involved in renewing my work visa. Although I love some aspects of American culture (IE dirt cheap happy hour), I do feel that the cheap alcohol and cheap shopping was akin to an opiate of the poor. Although I, ironically, left 4 days after the inauguration of Barack Obama, I am relieved to walk away from such a militaristic culture. My ex boyfriend said that the Canadians he met in Vancouver were all too "naive" for his taste. Although Canada, particularly with the current Conservative administration, is far from perfect, he took issue with the rampant idealism and optimism that could only result from a culture used to universal healthcare.

I just wanted to address this so I could move on. There are many proximate and fundamental causes to this decision but, ultimately, we just weren't compatible. This is a decision I should have come to a year ago, but didn't for fear of regret. Romantic relationships are difficult enough that it's not often worth it. For now, I am happily independent.

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.

I got a brand new house on the roadside made from rattlesnake hide I got a brand new chimney made on top made out of human skull

Excuse the watermark, I stole the image from an apartment site I was looking at.

Sometimes I wonder why I pay so much to live where I live. I have lived in 6 different apartments/houses since I moved out of my parents' house, and in each of them I lived in a trendy and accessible neighbourhood. If, say, I wanted to move to a place that was a 10 minute drive outside of town, I could have that whole house pictured above, to myself. Meanwhile, I'm in a cute & trendy 1 bedroom condo while, while cool, has no counter or storage space to speak of. I'm so urbanized, that in Austin, Texas last year, I was completely dumbfounded that there wasn't always a coffee shop within sight. Growing up in Vancouver, I became accustomed to being able to look up on any city street and see 2 or 3 coffee shops within my eyeline. In Austin, however, I had to occasionally walk 5 blocks without seeing one.

I love that I am half a block from bars, restaurants, and a grocery store. In fact, at every single place I've lived, there have been 3 grocery stores within a 5 minute walk. Although I never talk to any of these people, seeing people surround me on the pavement everytime I step outside makes me feel a kind of camaraderie with my fellow human population. I feel less alienated, I feel like I'm part of something. Even though I may never have the cash to spend at the trendy boutiques lining the sidewalks of my neighbourhood, I feel oddly comforted that they're there. Even though I never talk to these people, I like that I see them everyday. When I feel too alone in my apartment, sometimes I take walks and go to coffee shops for some inexplicable urge to be surrounded by human life.

I have a 15 minute commute by foot to my work in the morning and a 4 minute commute by transit. I love this. But, sometimes I wonder how little my life would be affected by, say, a 10 minute move Eastward. I could then afford a house and a garden and a big porch. However, that location wouldn't afford me the social cache of living in a "trendy" neighbourhood. I read an article by an economist recently that calculated that, since he paid 200 thousand more for the convenience downtown digs than he would've out in the suburbs, the privilege of walking to work rather than commuting cost him around 100 dollars a day. For me, I think a move out to the suburbs is associated with settling down and becoming, god forbid, responsible. Because, clearly, it is an irresponsible, irrational decision to waste a few hundred dollars extra a month for the privilege of being surrounded by people I never talk to, stores I never shop at, and bars I never frequent. Oh and, lest we forget, the theater which hosts plays I never attend, and the concert hall I never patronize.

In a way, I think the fact that Vancouver real estate prices are astronomical anywhere I'd want to live has contributed to my resistance to returning there. I don't know if I'll ever have the cash to buy a home (and it's looking more and more like a pipe dream, based on my current working class paycheque-paycheque existence), but I like to know that it's a future possibility, however remote.

Of course, there are significant environmental benefits to living downtown and car-free. Really, none of us deserves to be taking up the room that a house and yard consumes. Still, though, I love the idea of space. I think this is why I am reluctant to move to New York, a city that I absolutely adore. I just can't imagine being constricted by walls and boundaries that are closer in than those I have now. I know some people want a house to fill a family with, but I really just want space to cook big dinners, and a room to write in, a studio to jam in, a darkroom to develop photos in, and a dancefloor for my friends to party on.

I wonder how it will affect peoples' sense of nationalism as, due to changes in lending policies following the mortgage crisis, so few of us are able to own homes. It is a very American idea that we are each entitled to our own piece of land. And now, as relative salaries diminish, this American ideal is inaccessible to most of the population. Can we feel as tied to a country if we are unable to own our own piece of it? The importance of ownership is a central tenet of capitalism, and I wonder how capitalism will change as space diminishes and ownership becomes out-of-reach for many as the middle-class continues to erode. But, I can't help but feel that the space that surrounds me affects my sense of self immeasurably.

When I think about the meaning of space, I can't help but think of Gaston Bachelard's text "The Poetics of Space": "to sleep well we do not need to sleep in a large room and to work well we do not have to work in a den. But to dream of a poem, then write it, we need both....Thus the dream house must possess every virtue. However spacious, it must also be a cottage, a dove-cote, a nest, a chrysalis. Intimacy needs the heart of a nest."

A house is tied to our pasts, our future: "a great many of our memories are housed, and if the house is a bit elaborate, if it has a cellar and a garret, nooks and corridors, our memories have refuges that are all the more clearly delineated...if one were to give an account of all the doors one has closed and opened, of all the doors one would like to re-openm one would have to tell the story of one's entire life."

There are countless metaphors that equate the interiors of our home with the interiors of our mind. The places we inhabit can be imbued with many emotions and memories: they can remind us of lost loves, haunt us about unfinished projects, and annoy us about the emptiness in our lives.
The houses and spaces we have inhabited are intertwined with our memories and our past, and I often wonder what it does to someone's psyche to be rootless, or, even, homeless. As soon as I go to my cabin at Sakinaw or to my mom and dad's house, I feel that I have returned "Home". I have many friends whose parents have split up and moved to small apartments and they really have nowhere that represents their childhood home to them. It is funny, I have never felt that anywhere I've lived has been a real "home". To me, the idea of a "home" is associated with stability and a kind of permanence, and all of my homes have been definitively temporary. Lately, I think it would be nice to impose my vision of an ideal home onto a place I live. It would be nice to feel that kind of connection and that kind of intent to stay put. But, of course, knowing me, as soon as I renovated things to my liking, I would probably freak out at the lack of adventure in my life and leave to discover unknown places.

There is a dichotomy in my mind between my urge to carve out a beautiful life and a beautiful space in one city and house and make it my home and the desire to unburden myself of my belongings and attachments and set out on another adventure with only a backpack to my name. Humans are horders. It's why we shop, why we want our own piece of the pie, why our ancestors traveled to North America to seize land from the Native Peoples. It comforts us to have something all to ourselves. But, what does that do to our psyche when variable interests rates can take what we have away so easily? We have all read countless studies of the link between pervasive poverty and extreme political views, but what does it do to our political future when an entire generation grows up unable to get their own piece of the proverbial pie? What happens when we graduate from school with an average student loan debt of 30,000, credit card debt of 3,000, and are unlikely to ever own a home? 30 years ago, you could've obtained a decent job after University. Now, University grads (well, okay, us, that is me, who majored in Creative Writing and English Literature, with a Minor in Russian Literature in Translation) are lucky to be making 12 dollars an hour. We are not in the middle class. We are not about to achieve the American (Pipe) Dream. We are the working class. We are poor and getting poorer. In a way though, there is a kind of strange comfort in knowing how to be poor. The economy doesn't really affect me personally, at least so far. I've never had any extra money, so nothing has changed. No wonder I find socialism so attractive. I have nothing to lose and nothing to tie me down. So, where do we go from here?

Flowers are essentially tarts; prostitutes for the bees.

Although I didn't have the cash to front for Deerhunter or Gang Gang Dance , who respectively put out two of my (and everyone else's) favourite albums of the year, I managed to take in some more fiscally-accessible (hah) shows.


Fist Fite at Plan B



Last weekend, I saw The Mint Chicks, Lickity, and Fist Fite at Plan B.


The Mint Chicks are a noise pop band that moved from New Zealand to Portland. I like noise and discord in an accessible, fun context, and that's why The Mint Chicks are really fun to watch.

Lickity is a synth punk project backed by the drummer of the seminal L.A. punk band "Fear". They have these epic shows where the frontman wraps his head in tape, screams a lot, and makes all the fifty-something ex-punkers rock out. It's a definite experience.


Bald spots surrounded me as Lickity played
Fist Fite is gaining a lot of popularity. They backed the Klaxons on tour and they're super fun to watch (if anyone wants a visual, the frontwoman had a thing with Vancouver's Garrett. I didn't want to know that either). I love the bar Plan B, because they make the strongest drinks I've ever tasted. My drink was nine-tenths gin, one-tenth tonic.

When my dad came down to visit me, he told me that I should give walking tours of Portland bars since he told me that, in two months, I've been to more bars in Portland than he's been to his lifetime in Vancouver. For a relatively small town, there are some super rad bars here.



Last week, at Backspace, I saw Hecuba, Pit er Pat, and Lucky Dragons on tour together. They're from Chicago and L.A. and all play experimental electronic music which encapsulates performance art and music.

The documentary on Luke Fishbeck, aka Lucky Dragons, "make a baby" project.



This weekend, I saw the Portland band Starfucker play with my friend's band Flaspar at the Someday Lounge. Starfucker (the frontman's former band was Sexton Blake) has gotten a ton of buzz lately, which isn't surprising considering that they're cute boys in tight pants who write accessible indie pop with cheeky lyrics.

The recording isn't much to listen to, and, despite our world-weary cynical comments during the early part of the set list that "this is music I'd like to wash my dishes to and not stay up late at a bar for," their set gradually became more exciting. The songs "Florida" and "German Love" are irresistibly fun, and by the end, I found myself shaking off my music-snob preconceptions and enjoying myself. Being a child of the 1990s, I am a sucker for a little lo-fi pop now and then. They're a tight, enjoyable band that really excited the mixed crowd of hipsters and the bridge and tunnel ilk. I'd see them again live, but I wouldn't buy them on vinyl. That being said, if I was 16, they'd be plastered all over my locker.

Flaspar is an electro-dance project of Keil's, and he's also in the other dance project Guidance Counselor, which is appropriately titled considering their effect on teenage girls.



Guidance Counselor: why do all the bands wear animal masks now?

I have been having too much fun lately. Too much fun, not enough photogenic-ness.

Also, I really need a haircut, but I am paralyzed by indecision (aren't we all?). I've really let myself go to the point where I actually lost my blowdryer since I hadn't used it in 3 months. My beauty routine for the past three years takes about 3 minutes: wake up, shake my hair so it gets even bigger, put on way more eyeliner than is socially acceptable, and walk out the door. The only thing that's separating me from a suburban soccer mom is the short skirts and obsessive skincare regimen. Clearly, I'll never lasso a husband unless I put more effort into looking hot and less effort into being a nerdy hermit.

We Gotta Get Outta This Place

It will be interesting/frighten to see what happens over the next few weeks:

George W. used the last-minute timing of Clinton's "midnight hour" law changes at the end of his term as justification for contesting those laws; however, he like other presidents is doing the same thing.

The article "So Little Time, So Much Damage" appeared in The Times a few weeks ago, and a related article. "Midnight Hour" was printed in this week's New Yorker.

Speaking of The New Yorker, there is an interesting article on "new liberalism" here.

At least, it feels like I'm in the thick of something, living in these equally scary and exciting country. The stores are big here. The cars are big here. The weapons are big here. And the fuck ups are huge.

Everyday, I speak to impoverished people who are desperate for work. I speak to people with families to support who are eager to accept 10 dollars an hour. I speak to people who are 64 without any retirement savings. I see resume after resume from people liberal arts degrees but lack "real-world" experience. I don't think I've ever seen economic desperation like this.

The problem is is that so many of these laid-off and down-sized people don't have any transferable skills. Due to the continued de-industrialization of North America, they find themselves unemployed after 30 years working in a manufacturing plant. These people had the "American Dream" and lost it due to variable rate mortgages and lost investments and vanquished retirement plans. They grew up in a world where stability was the goal. However, in this volatile economy, it is important to have flexibility and possess transferable and marketable skills.

I also see impressive resumes from many downsized educated and experienced people who have found themselves competing in a tough marketplace with many other unemployed over-qualified candidates.

At least it makes me happy to be able to offer some people work and be able to hire my friends for decently paying jobs. I feel impoverished, but I know I'm lucky to have a dependable salary, benefits, and 3 weeks of vacation to start. But, I still feel like I'm always playing catch-up. I guess, right now, there is a kind of solidarity in being perpetually broke.

Lately, I've been reevaluating my values. I've never really valued financial success: I always privileged travel and life experience over savings and stock options. But, I don't want to spend my life encumbered by debt. I just want enough money to have as much fun as possible. The one silver lining to the fact that I haven't ever saved enough for a mortgage on a condo is that, if I had, I'd be paying for it right now.

I've always dated similarly laid-back people to me, too, and I am realizing that that's probably not the most solid financial plan. I can't help it though, it's like I have this innate resistance to conformity and popular culture that I am unable to overcome. The lawyers and business people who work in my building all seem perfectly nice, but I am totally unable to be attracted to them without some kind of indication that they have some sub-cultural/dance night/dive bar learnings. Of course, the only people I have eyes for are the 20-24 year old recent college grad interviewees and bike messengers that come into my office.

Then again, I have a problem with dating people who fit the physical and cultural profile, but are pretty pretentious. Sometimes I wonder if something in my brain chemistry is masochistic and subconsciously attracted to people who will sneer when I tell them I prefer to listen to Lil Wayne or Hot Chip than prog rock, anyday. Perhaps my Id is at war with my Superego. They've ended the cease-fire. I think I'm just going to contract out my life decisions from now on. I'm going to go the way of the economy and outsource my life decisions. The contract's up for bidding.