The horror film acts as a canvas for the obsessive powers of Eros and Thanatos. Mixing dreams of love with nightmares of death, the genre has never ceased to be a pumping ground for the return of the repressed. For me no horror film articulates this blend so gracefully as Karl Freund’s 1932 classic The Mummy, featuring Boris Karloff as Imhotep, a fortuitously resurrected high priest of Egypt, whose lone driving force is the potential resurrection of his late lover, the ancient Egyptian princess Anck-es-en-Amon.

Disguising himself as a modern Muslim, Imhotep manipulates several British archeologists into digging up the princess. However, when her remains are moved to the Cairo Museum, his attempt to resurrect her using a sacred scroll fails. Imhotep’s aggravation is soon relieved when he discovers the existence of Helen Grosvenor, whose eerie resemblance to the princess leads him to believe that she is Anck-es-en-Amon reincarnated. Grosvenor’s own magnetic attraction to Imhotep encourages this belief, but her frenzied fear of transformation via death—combined with a mild attraction to one of the witty bourgeois archeologists—drags her away from Imhotep and leads to his heartbreaking end. A spiritual delinquent in both his previous life and his resurrected one, Imhotep puts the supernatural powers of ancient Egypt in the service of desire, heretically placing his libinal urges above his religious piety.

These urges that have transcended time and death guide his hypnotic actions, and dominate every aspect of his existence. His strict allegiance to the supremacy of love makes him, even in his undead state, more alive than the living that surround him. Like a somnambulist consumed by a fire of mad dreams, Imhotep epitomizes the only kind of love that matters to me: love as trance.

It is not a coincidence that, three years after making The Mummy, Karl Freund directed his only other film, a sinister gem starring Peter Lorre appropriately titled Mad Love.

Urban exploration, also referred to as vadding, is the covert investigation of prohibited manmade structures not meant for public use. These structures include steam tunnels, crawl spaces, elevator shafts, and other hidden or forbidden spots.

Over the past decade urban exploration has gained a fair amount of notoriety, spawning an international network of individual and group explorers. Recently I even discovered the existence of the Portland Vadding Collective. This growth in popularity is largely due to the Toronto-based zine Infiltration, which mainly documents the explorations of the editors, but also includes entries from hardcore urban explorers throughout the globe. Occasionally these documented adventures verge on the enigmatic, like the discovery of a hidden room in a church tower with “chairs arranged in a circle, and maps tacked to the walls,” while others recount life threatening quests for the Marvelous, as with a Minneapolis group who, when searching for a fabled natural cave, took a canoe down the city’s sewer system and nearly drowned. However, some explorations are simply exercises in subversion, such as the re-infiltration of Toronto’s City Hall after the local security patriarch publicly claimed a million dollar security overhaul would keep the Toronto urban explorers out.

Like authentic poets, urban explorers leap past the banal settings of the modern world, and head straight for the undercurrent, momentarily freeing themselves from the monotony of consumer capitalism. A catalyst in this plot against boredom, Infiltration acts as a subtle gateway to the diverse tactics of spatial defiance.

It’s rumored that on Halloween of 1990 a clandestine team of vigilant skateboarders, in response to the impending laws against their lifestyle and the city’s refusal to fund a skate park, began constructing what has become one of Portland’s do-it-yourself wonders. The Burnside Skate Park, impressive in both its creation and the activities it holds within, is an assemblage of ever-changing bowls, half-pipes, and swelling structures that provide the ideal milieu for inventive and spontaneous play. Entirely run by the skateboarders with no admission fee or rules of conduct, the park functions as a metamorphic bastion for the city’s skateboarding community, uncontrolled by the ridiculous ethics of Christian capitalism. Differing from other skate parks that are built to corral skateboarders from the streets and commodify their way of life, the Burnside Skate Park is the epitome of collective empowerment in the service of pleasure. Located beneath the Burnside Bridge, just north of SE 2nd and Ankeny, the park quivers like the coral dunes of a post-apocalyptic seascape.