This Portland, Oregon bookstore is not accessible to the general public.

Go ahead and install video cameras all over downtown. Make them accessible on smartphones and computers via wifi by everyone. There could be no better tool for the average citizen to keep tabs on corruption and incompetence among city employees. Streaming video of day-to-day life would be a valuable service to shut-ins. Terrible, strange and wonderful sights would be seen. All of downtown would be a free global broadcast studio for protesters, publishers and advertisers. Just possibly small incivilities would decrease if people knew they were being watched. And the police would get what they want, too.

This wouldn’t come free, and might be abused, and would do away with privacy on a scale usually not seen outside of military prisons. For these reasons, I can’t say this is definitely a better idea. But the idea of ubiquitous cameras for all, not just police, is worth considering.

Lownsdale Park, First Presbyterian Church and the South Park Blocks all contain memorials to the Civil War (1861–1865). First of a series.

See Portland Memorials for thousands of memorials in downtown Portland, Oregon USA.

Music: Aeolian Piano Roll – “Phantom Patrol” (1903)

Hand / Eye Supply presents Trevor Blake’s presentation on his book Portland Memorials.

[video]

I was supposed to link up with an old friend of Jack’s that afternoon. He’d been down to Occupy once, and he offered to go back with me. Trevor knows every inch of Portland. Obscure monuments. Weird iconography. Real history.

This tree stump? Look closer. It’s made of stone. It’s a grave-marker for a member of a forgotten Masonic order. That building over there? It used to be a speak-easy. They had an underground phone line straight to the local police precinct.

Trevor speaks in such a slow, deliberate manner, and in such a low tone of voice, that I have to listen. His whole demeanor is disarming. He has a kind of fastidious, algorithmic intelligence that makes me feel like a small dog barking at cars.

We wound our way through the city on foot. A few blocks from the park, I stopped to tear a piece of cardboard off a discarded box. I needed to make a sign. I pulled a felt tipped marker from my pocket, one I’d swiped from Trevor’s apartment, and wrote:

Afghanistan is the world’s largest deposit of Lithium.
If you own an iPhone, you are a douchebag.

It was subtle, I thought. Considering the fact that Generation Apple had organized most of the Occupy movement via social networking websites, like an Arab Spring for spoiled suburbanites, I figured there was a good chance I would offend virtually everyone I passed.

I didn’t want to debate the gross sociopolitical factors of their white, middle class existence or how it was or wasn’t fundamentally sustained by third world labor and exploitation at almost every level. It was all neo-Marxist bullshit to me, wrapped in a disingenuous skin of Libertarianism by a bunch of people who had never actually read Anarchy, State, Utopia.

Read the rest at FKNONLINE.

See also Portland Memorials by Trevor Blake.

1040 NW Everett St. Portland, OR 97209

Bearing Service Company was founded in 1929. The Bearing Service Company building was built in 1945. Above the entryway there is a Deco style sign and round overhang. The round overhang is completed in it’s reflection in the front window. At the base of the column supporting the overhang there is a circle drawn in the sidewalk. The round overhang, column and circle form two wheels and an axle, a good match for an automotive business.

See Portland Memorials for thousands of memorials in downtown Portland, Oregon USA.

Music: Aeolian Piano Roll – “Phantom Patrol” (1903)

Kate Mather, The Oregonian:

Daniel Rafatpanah thought he was going to die. A jittery gunman was marching the 29-year-old and two of his Southeast Portland housemates upstairs to the attic, a handgun aimed at their backs. None of them knew the man, who demanded Popsicles and alcohol before taking them hostage Monday afternoon. But when he placed the gun under his foot to change into a new pair of pants, they knew it was their only chance. “Everything’s in slow-mo, and I’m like, ‘It’s go time.’ It’s time to fight this guy,” Rafatpanah said.

Jonathan Mooney, 26, bearhugged the gunman from behind. Robert Steinfeld, 21, broke a beer bottle over his head. And Rafatpanah started throwing punches, his hands bloodied by the shattered glass. Everyone reached for the gun as the man fell. The man fired a shot as the struggle continued. Rafatpanah’s right hand got sliced open by the gun’s mechanism, and blood poured everywhere.

A neck hold wasn’t working. Not knowing what else to do, Rafatpanah bit the man’s ear. “Let go of the gun, let go of the gun!” he yelled through clamped teeth. “Let go of my ear!” the gunman responded. The two tore apart, and Rafatpanah spat out a bean-sized piece of ear.

“I tasted the blood of my enemy in my mouth,” he said. “And so at that point you realize the stakes have gone so much higher because blood is being drawn – my blood, his blood.”

Rafatpanah lunged toward the gun and wrestled it away.

Article continues, with video.

Previously at OVO:

Trevor Blake: Time Machine (after The Invisibles by Grant Morrison). June 2011. Model: Danny Chaoflux.

Hand-Eye Supply
23 NW 4th Ave
Portland, OR, 97209

503.575.9769
Regular Hours: Monday-Sunday: 12pm – 6pm PST (GMT+8)

Trevor Blake: The Sound of the Hammer Greets You on Every Side: Portland Memorials

Between 2009 and 2011 Trevor walked the length and breadth of downtown Portland. When he found a memorial, he transcribed what it said and where it was. Portland Memorials includes all the memorials in downtown Portland. The book is entered this book into the public domain for the same reason Joseph Shemanski gave Portland the Shemanski Fountain: “to express in small measure gratitude for what the city has done for me.” Trevor will discuss the book and the remarkable memorials he found while writing it.

Trevor Blake was born in Knoxville, Tennessee and moved to Portland in 1992. He works as a freelance sign language interpreter. Besides Portland Memorials, he is the publisher of OVO (1987 – present); author of The Buckminster Fuller Bibliography; contributor to The Journal of Ride Theory Omnibus (Portland, JORT 2003); In Extremis (Athens, Survival Kit 1994); Pozdravi iz Babilona (Ljubljana, KRT 1987); and the literature of the Church of the SubGenius.

Hand-Eye Supply

Curiosity Club

Curiosity Club Streaming Video

Portland Memorials
144 pages, 8.5 x 11, $15.00
Thousands of memorials in Portland, Oregon.
[Information] [Print] [Kindle]

Trevor Blake: Architectural Detail of Occupy Portland. 11/11/11. Portland Oregon USA. Public Domain.

More public domain photographs of Occupy Portland by Trevor Blake here.

The USS Oregon was launched in 1893 and served until 1919. The battleship’s crew saw action in five wars. The Oregon was scrapped in 1956. The bow, mast and anchor chain of the Oregon are in Tom McCall Waterfront Park, near SW Pine and Naito. One mile north is the Albers Mill Building. The smokestacks of the Oregon were in a Liberty Ship memorial park where this parking lot is now. The Willamette River Greenway Trail runs next to the Building. Walk along it until you find a wall running into the Willamette River. On the other side of this wall are the remains of some Liberty Ships that had been made in Portland. This is what remains of the Liberty Ship memorial park.

Music: Aeolian Piano Roll – Phantom Patrol (1903)

Learn of thousands of other memorials in Portland Memorials by Trevor Blake.