BRIAN LIBBY

2011 in review

Every year I receive stuffed into holiday cards printouts of what people have spent their year doing. I used to mildly scoff at the format, but for some reason this year it occurred to me that over time the memories of past years blend together, and it actually might be worthwhile to sum things up. Hopefully this doesn't come off as too self-centered. Although it's framed as my year, the experience is mostly about who I was with and where I happened to be.

The football rapture

The year began for me not on January 1 but the 10th of that month, when my beloved Oregon Ducks played for a national championship. It was the moment I had waited my entire life for—well, sort of. I’m not sure prior to this winning a national title even seemed possible. Maybe that’s why I started referring to this game in the days leading up to it as “The Football Rapture”. I told people that if Oregon were to win the game, you wouldn’t see me anymore because I’d be in Zimbabwe or East Timor helping the poor.

The game was a classic, decided on the last play of the game. Oregon came away with a heroically valiant effort, but the final score was Tigers 22, Ducks 19. It was a devastating disappointment, and I'm still not over it. But it was the greatest season in Oregon football history. I sometimes think of a fellow Ducks fanatic who wrote succinctly on Facebook after the game, “SO PROUD!”

Although I was ready for a break from the Ducks after the emotional tsunami of the championship game, there was an end-of-February deadline for a new update to my 2007 book, Tales From the Oregon Ducks Sideline. I was busy throughout January and February interviewing former players and coaches, which was of course a tremendous labor of love. Most of the key interviews had taken place four years earlier, yet this time around I was very excited to speak with the person I’d most regretted missing when the book was written the first time around: coach Mike Bellotti, the man who guided the Ducks for 15 years, including a Fiesta Bowl win in 2001.

The publisher also wanted a new foreword for the book, and I was lucky enough to have former Ducks great Ahmad Rashad agree to write one. Whereas the writer of the previous book’s foreword, Joey Harrington, simply churned out a completed draft on his own and sent it over, Rashad preferred to talk out a draft over the phone. Which was more than fine, because it meant I got to have numerous phone calls with him over a period of a couple weeks.

Will write for food

In terms of my bread-and-butter work, architecture journalism, the year began with a series of home magazine assignments, including pieces for Luxe about luxury homes in Colorado and Arizona, as well as the Park Box (a longtime favorite architect’s work here in Portland) for Oregon Home. For Architect magazine I wrote one story on high-tech architecture school classrooms and another on architects’ favorite design software. I also wrote two articles in the early part of the year for Design Bureau, one on a Seattle house and another on GE’s new line of high tech medical gadgets.

Although most of the magazine stories I write now are about design and architecture, one of my favorite pieces of the year (or any year) was more about history. Claire Phillips, whom I profiled for Portland Monthly, was a Portland-raised nightclub owner in Manila during World War II who wined and dined Japanese officers in order to pass on countless secrets to the Americans. After the war, she was the subject of a Hollywood movie called I Was An American Spy as well as an episode of TV’s “This Is Your Life”. But Claire, widowed when her soldier husband was killed in a Japanese prison camp in The Philippines, never completely adjusted to life back in Portland after the war. She was dead from alcoholism by the 1960s. But while her game has faded, there is a growing effort to honor Claire Phillips here in Portland with a statue and documentary film.

Talking art & architecture

In the spring, I started to get busy with a couple speaking engagements and some other non-writing efforts. May brought a lecture at the Portland Art Museum as part of the Artist Talk series (in which local artists pick a favorite artwork at the museum for discussion). I selected a French landscape painting by Virgil Narcisse Diaz de la Pena called “The Forest at Fontainebleau”, which is part of a period and group of artists called the Barbizon School, a precursor of Impressionism. I felt a little bit in over my head - I'm no great art expert - but luckily I was able to more or less communicate why the piece is meaningful on a personal level.

 

In June, I delivered a lecture to the City Club of Portland called “Why Memorial Coliseum Matters” as part of a continuing three-year effort to save this landmark building. I grew up attending countless events at the Coliseum during my childhood and teen years, but that’s not why we (in the organization Friends of Memorial Coliseum) have sought to save it. Although this astonishing feature has long been curtained off from public view, the Coliseum is actually the only arena in the world with a 360-degree view to the outside, offering a gigantic postcard view of the city skyline.

Mid-Atlantic adventures

Also in the spring, Valarie and I traveled east to stay with her parents in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Valarie goes home every spring and Christmas, while I tend to tag along every other spring. Staying with Pat & Hank, her parents, is always enjoyable because they are such hospitable, salt-of-the-earth people. Pat cooks some delicious dinners every time, from meat pies to roast chicken and of course the local specialty, pierogies. Valarie's sister, Chris, and her two kids are fun to be around as well.

Because my sister Sara now lives in Washington, DC, I wound up taking a trip within a trip, riding Amtrak down to our nation’s capitol from Philadelphia (after numerous delays). Sara is now an editor at the nation’s biggest online political magazine, Politico, so I was able to visit her office just across the river in Virginia and meet a few of her coworkers. It still amazes me how smart and talented Sara is; during her year-and-a-half stint at Politico, she has already been promoted a couple times and is now the publication’s Deputy National Politics Editor as we approach a presidential election year.

Also while in DC, I was able to hook up with my one of my lifelong best friends, Chad. The primary reason to see him, beyond simply catching up after a few years without seeing each other, was to meet his son  for the first time since his birth last year. He was an absolutely adorable child, and it was very moving for me to see the child of such a close friend. Chad also had a tantalizing offer: an invitation to come back to Washington that summer to participate in a project with his band, Beauty Pill. They would be recording its new album in full public view, in an Arlington nonprofit art center’s black-box theater. Would I like to be one of a handful of photographers to document the album being recorded?

By July, I was back in DC amidst record-breaking heat but exhilarated to be part of “Immersive Ideal”. For three days from about noon until 10PM, I would hang out in a windowless but high-ceilinged space watching Beauty Pill’s members recording tracks on guitar, drums, electric piano, vibraphone and bass. Normally working 10-hour days makes me grumpy or fatigued, yet by midnight each night when recording ended I was still full of energy and excitement. I took over 1,000 photographs during the Immersive Ideal sessions, as part of an exhibit showing at Artisphere in January 2012 that will have the final album recording playing with a continuously changing montage of still photos of its being made.

Writing and running 

Meanwhile, my schedule that summer was getting busy. Just as I was off taking photos or visiting family, a year or two of relatively slow journalism work transformed into a flurry of assignments. For Metropolis magazine I wrote about a new theater chair designed by Portland firm Ziba that combines the lightness and portability of folding seats with the plush comfort of theater seats. For Stadia, a London-based publication devoted to stadiums and arenas, I wrote about efforts to erect a new NFL team stadium in downtown Los Angeles. For Oregon Home, I wrote about a restoration at Portland’s midcentury-modern downtown skyscraper, the Portland Plaza. For Luxury Home Quarterly, I wrote about a host of projects in Canada, Miami, Switzerland and Texas. For Auditoria, an industry publication devoted to concert hall and auditorium design, I covered the new Frank Gehry-designed Miami New World Symphony Hall and was excited to conduct an email interview with the legendary architect himself.

During the summer I also began a new effort to get into better shape. It started with exercise: bicycling, mostly, then later running. At one point in the fall I was running as much as 15 miles a week, which is about the most I’d ever done regularly. As the rainy season arrived in earnest later in the autumn, I finally got a gym membership and began exercising there regularly. And in addition to the exercise, I’ve also been seeing a naturopath monthly and trying to change my diet at her urging (fewer carbs). I feel much better mentally/emotionally and I’ve lost about seven pounds so far.

TV tour

In the summer Valarie and I took another trip: to the eastern Washington towns of Snoqualmie and Roslyn, each the site of filming for favorite TV shows of ours, Twin Peaks and Northern Exposure. In Snoqualmie, about a half-hour east of Seattle, we stayed at the same hotel that had appeared numerous times on David Lynch’s Twin Peaks; it also overlooked a huge waterfall, Snoqualmie Falls, which had been featured in the show’s opening credits. I shot lots of video of the falls and wound up turning it into a short film.

Heading east a few days later towards Roslyn, we crossed the Cascades to find the landscape changing to one of golden, rolling hills. Valarie found a good deal on lodging at a cushy resort called Suncadia, so when we weren’t checking out Northern Exposure sites we were receiving relaxing spa massages and hiking along the Cle Elum River outside. Once we actually got lost on a hiking trail, and not only was the lodge happy to send someone to pick us up, but that someone turned out to have acted numerous times in a supporting role on Northern Exposure as the town barber. He had great things to say about all the cast and crew except for the show’s star, Rob Morrow, who we were told “kind of thought his poop didn’t stink.” By coincidence, we’d watched an episode with the barber character in our room the night before he picked us up. Driving back home to Portland, we thoroughly enjoyed making our way through eastern Washington and the Columbia Gorge, although in the back of my mind this also reminded me of driving through this area on September 12, 2001 in a frantic effort to get home from a work-trip following the terrorist attacks. Luckily the beautiful Gorge and the river never cease to lift one’s spirits.

Goodbye Sage

The summer also brought a milestone in my family. After 35 years in business, my dad retired and sold his restaurant, The Sage. I was very happy for him because I know it’s been a whole lot of work, with plenty of attendant worries. 35 years of taking the garbage out, of having to hire and fire employees often without proper work ethic or education. 35 years of showing up early in the morning to hand-knead 15 loaves of bread and make gargantuan pots of soup.

But I also knew that my dad was retiring somewhat reluctantly, concerned about what he’d do with all the idle time, and missing before it even left him all the sincere customer appreciation and accolades – the community always kept The Sage’s tables filled. And after waltzing into the Sage back kitchen to make myself Dagwood-sized sandwiches for the better part of four decades, my sister and I were saddened to see the family business leave the family. It’s where Sara and I worked all through junior high and high school, and we’d known many of the employees there for decades. Again, though, at the end of the day I was happy for my dad to relax a little more, even somewhat against his will.

What’s more, I took time upon his retirement to think of my dad’s entire career, including his pre-Sage days on active duty in the Air Force. During Vietnam, my dad had analyzed spy-plane and satellite reconnaissance photos – a curious coincidence given how I later became a photographer and an art critic specializing in photography. We may not agree on politics, but I’ve always felt tremendous pride that my dad was involved in the military intelligence field, especially his association with what I think of as the greatest, fastest, most beautiful plane every built: the SR-71 Blackbird.

As if Dad's transition weren't enough, we also moved my grandparents this year into an assisted living facility. I'v been so luckyat 39 years of age to have three of four grandparents still alive. But moving my mom's parents this year emphasized their age and frailty. It was a sad affair, although enlivened by the opportunity to go through their treasure-trove of photos and keepsakes. My aunt Barb and I have been busy scanning their old pictures.

Still more writing

Come fall, it was time for the release of my newly updated Tales From the Oregon Ducks Sideline. The promotional blitz wasn’t as substantial as it had been four years earlier for the original release. That said, I did a few radio interviews, including the syndicated “Big E Sports Show” in Dallas.

Locally, it was a hoot to be a guest on the longtime local TV show “AM Northwest,” which I remember watching on sick days from school way back in the 1980s. Oregon Symphony director Carlos Kalmar and famed Pink Martini bandleader Thomas Lauderdale were fellow-guests on the show that day, so it was a thrill to talk with them in the green room before we went on the air. Just before Kalmar’s segment, the Uruguay-born composer—not someone you imagine as a football fan—wished me a good Oregon Ducks season.

I also was excited to be able to have a reading at Powell’s Books. Although attendance at the reading was low, Powells' author representative turned out to be acclaimed author Kevin Sampsell, with whom I chatted long enough before the event that we wound up having lunch a few weeks later.

Writing assignments also continued to come at a faster rate during the summer and early fall months. For Dwell magazine, I wrote about the historic Watzek House in Portland. In Architect I talked to designers about environmental issues affecting their work. For Atlantic Cities, I covered the burgeoning design and political struggle to build the Oregon Sustainability Center in downtown Portland. For the Oregon Encyclopedia, I wrote entries on Portland architects Brad Cloepfil and Robert Thompson. And for Design Bureau, I profiled landscape architects in Texas and California.

In the fall I was humbled to receive my first board-of-directors appointment, which in fact became a board chair. It’s for a new nonprofit wire service called Oregon Arts Watch. It takes its cue from a number of similar nonprofit journalistic organizations sprouting around the country such as the Chicago News Collaborative and the Bay Area Citizen. The idea is that newspaper coverage has declined so much in recent years that important issues affecting the public good are no longer being properly covered. By going nonprofit and supplying stories to major dailies, we can help bring a more substantial array of information than one finds in dwindling dailies like The Oregonian. Also as part of my Oregon Arts Watch role, I will also be contributing articles from time to time, and in early autumn I delivered my first one: a report from a screening of My Own Private River, an alternate edit of the classic Gus Van Sant film My Own Private Idaho. Van Sant and actor James Franco were both at the screening (Franco actually did the edit, which focuses more on the film’s late star, River Phoenix), so I was able to quote them for the article. It was the fourth time I’ve written a story about Portland-based Van Sant after previously interviewing him about films like Elephant and Gerry.

Ducks returneth

I wasn’t emotionally ready for it when the Ducks took the field at Cowboys Stadium in Dallas for their first game of the year. I still hadn’t recovered from losing the national championship game in the final seconds. It haunted me. But by this season opener, another horrific threat had emerged: that Oregon was being investigated by the NCAA for possible recruiting violations. Given how USC had earlier that year seen their national championship from 2004 and Reggie Bush’s Heisman Trophy taken away, it shook me to the bone with worry that Oregon’s back-to-back Pacific 10 Conference championships of the past two seasons could be taken away. And I was exceptionally bitter that Auburn, Oregon’s opponent in the national championship game, was exonerated by the NCAA after the lack of smoking-gun evidence prevented the exacting of punishment, even though coaches from Mississippi State University and even former Auburn players had gone on record saying the pay-for-play schemes were true.

But come September 3, Oregon not only had a game to play, but one against the team that would be top ranked all season long: the LSU Tigers. Despite Oregon leading LSU in total yards and first downs, turnovers cost the Ducks the game. After going 12-0 in the regular season during 2010, we’d suddenly lost two games in a row. Luckily, the Ducks rebounded nicely, going 10-2 over the course of the 2011 regular season, enough to earn a third straight conference championship and a trip to the Rose Bowl. As I write this, it is 12 days before the game, and the feeling is different than it was leading up to Rose Bowls in 1994 and 2009. This time, we’re not like the first-time Oscar-nominee just happy to be in the running. Given how the Ducks last tasted Rose Bowl victory in 1917, the pressure is on to win the game.

Busy winter

Luckily, life goes on, and the rest of the fall and winter winding down 2011 has remained busy. In October, the American Institute of Architects hosted a screening of my short films as part of their annual Architecture + Design festival. Writing assignments have continued to come from publications like Luxury Home Quarterly (about houses in Los Angeles and Florida), Architect (designers discussing digital fabrication techniques), and Portland Monthly (a remembrance of Humphrey Bogart’s late pre-Bacall, Portland-born wife, Mayo Methot). I’ve also continued to operate my local blog, Portland Architecture, with an expanded offering of other writers’ work besides my own.

In November, I received a very pleasant surprise: Portland State University invited me to teach a class in its Honors College called “Urban Discourses”, which uses Portland and its arts/humanities as a template for learning about cities. I’d thought that having only a bachelor’s degree would preclude me from consideration as a professor, but the head of the department said that my experience, particularly with writing, was enough of a surrogate for a Ph.D. that she was willing to give me a try. So I’ve spent much of December formulating lesson plans, wondering how I’ll be able to fill two hours of class time twice a week, and imagining discussions of Portland-bred artists like Mark Rothko, Gus Van Sant, and Simpsons creator Matt Groening.

In 2012 I’ll turn 40, which I anticipate not with dread but enthusiasm. Almost every new decade has been better than its predecessor: My 30s were more enjoyable than my 20s and my 20s were vastly better than my teens (although my teens weren’t better than the first 10 years of life). I’ve speculated about celebrating my 40th with an international trip, because after regularly visiting locales in Europe and Asia from 2001-2007 there has been a long dry spell. Germany and Switzerland? Spain and Portugal? We’ll see. Or even if I don’t travel anywhere, I have so much to be thankful for. Valarie’s health has improved substantially in the past year, for example, after a mysterious illness (involving dizziness and vertigo) has made things difficult for her for over two years. Although not lucrative, I’m both excited and humbled by how things have gone with my writing career, especially given that the travel-memoir I’ve been working on for two years is nearly complete. And maybe this will finally be the year, after a 95-year drought, when the Ducks finally taste January bowl-game victory. Even if they don’t, though, and even if I seem often caught up in various stresses and windmill chasing, there is no doubt I am one of the lucky ones.

Beryl Markham's "West With the Night"

I first noticed this book because of an Ernest Hemmingway quote on the back: "I knew her fairly well in Africa and never would have suspected that she could and would put pen to paper except to write in her flyer's log book. As it is, she has written so well, and marvelously well, that I was completely ashamed of myself as a writer. I felt that I was simply a carpenter with words, picking up whatever was furnished on the job and nailing them together and sometimes making an okay pig pen. But she can write rings around all of us who consider ourselves writers."

The book has, to my surprise, actually more or less lived up to that high praise.

Markham was a pilot in 1930s Africa, and her book, more or less an autobiography, is full of stories both of the wonders of the wildlife-filled landscape and the spiritual wonder of flight. Piloting her plane at night, for example, she writes, "To fly in unbroken darkness without even the cold companionship of a pair of ear-phones or the knowledge that somewhere ahead are lights and life and a well-marked airport is something more than just lonely. The hills, the forests, the rocks, and the plains are one with the darkness, and the darkness is infinite. The earth is no more your planet than a distant star...the plane is your planet and you are its sole inhabitant."

Edward Dmytryk's "Crossfire"

Last night I finished watching this very thought-provoking noir with an interesting combination of social message and traditional pot-boiler: 1947's Crossfire.

The story, set in Washington, DC just after the end of World War II concerns the murder of a Jewish man by a hate-filled American soldier and the ensuing investigation. But the film is really about transitioning from the violence of wartime to the justice and peaceful society of back home. The subtext actually makes an otherwise rote drama into something exceptionally resonant and powerful, aided especially by the acting. The great Robert Ryan earned his only Oscar nomination here as the bigoted killer, and it was his first movie role. Robert Mitchum and a young Gloria Graehme are also standouts in their supporting roles.

I believe it was Jean-Luc Godard who called Crossfire the best American film noir. I think that's a huge overstatement. The same director, European expatriate Edward Dmytryk, made a far greater film - a masterpiece even - with the noir Murder, My Sweet. And the Mitchum-starring Out of the Past also easily trumps this picture.

Yet Crossfire snuck up on me as something very compelling in an unexpected way: like a mediocre work of architecture and construction that wound up looking gorgeous.

Lonnie Johnson's "Four Hands Are Better Than Two"

 

Listening to the radio a few weeks ago, I heard for the first time the pioneering 1920s African-American jazz/blues guitarist Lonnie Johnson. I was stunned by the virtuosity and style. It seemed to me like an odd but incredible fusion of Robert Johnson (raw and bluesish) guitar playing with Django Reinhart (jazzy and swinging). And as it happens, Lonnie Johnson was a big influence on Reinhart, and also played with jazz titans like Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong. Now I feel silly to have not known him.

In listening to his music in the days since that initial radio introduction, I've become particularly transfixed by the song "Four Hands Are Better Than Two" because of its combination of Johnson's guitar with an accompanying piano that has, because of the way that it was recorded, a strange, almost ethereal presence - almost like the piano player is playing loud and hard, but doing so in the next room from where Johnson's guitar solo is front and center. That said, it's only fitting that this virtuoso of a guitarist is the focus of the song, which zooms along with a rapid but nimble tempo that for me is at once frenetic and, more indefinably, even gentle like a lullaby.

Top 25 college football programs of the decade

After spending this decade, like the previous ones, obsessed with college football and then writing two books about my beloved Oregon Ducks in the last three years, here are my picks for the decade's best NCAA gridiron programs.

1. USC

2. Florida

3. LSU

4. Texas

5. Oklahoma

6. Ohio State

7. Utah

8. Georgia

9. Virginia Tech

10. Boise State

11. West Virginia

12. Oregon

13. Miami

14. Michigan

15. Florida State

16. Penn State

17. Wisconsin

18. Boston College

19. Alabama

20. Texas Tech

21. Georgia Tech

22. Oregon State

23. Maryland

24. California

25. BYU

Favorite films of the decade

 

Earlier today I happened to see a post on MSN Movies in which three of my former movie-reviewer colleagues from Willamette Week - Dave McCoy, Kim Morgan and David Walker - picked their top ten movies of the decade. Dave McCoy picked No Country For Old Men as tops, not a surprise given he picked another Coen Brothers movie, Miller's Crossing, as his top pick for the 1990s. Kim Morgan picked Battle Royale, and David Walker picked Oldboy.

It has been about three and a half years since I gave up movie reviewing. Sometimes I miss it, particularly when certain really inspiring films come along. Other times I don't miss it at all, like when I see another stupid teen movie coming out that I very well might have been stuck writing about, or when I drive past another antiseptic Regal Cinemas multiplex. I also haven't been prolific about seeing movies since giving up reviewing them. There are tons of promising movies from this decade that I haven't seen.

 

That said, I give you my tentative list of the top ten movies from the 2000s decade:

1. The Royal Tenenbaums

2. Mulholland Drive

3. Lost In Translation

4. No Country for Old Men

5. Memento

6. What Time Is It There?

7. In the Mood for Love

8. The Dark Knight

9. The Filth and the Fury

10. Old Boy

*Note: I did not include the film Beau Travail, because IMDB lists it as having been made in 1999. But it opened in Portland in 2000, and I would list it as my #3 film if it were eligible, right Between Mulholland Drive and Lost in Translation.

 

HONORABLE MENTION (in alphabetical order): American Psycho, The Barbarian Invasions, Before Sunset, Casino Royale, City of God, Collateral, The Deep End, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Donnie Darko, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Good Night and Good Luck, Goodbye Dragon Inn, Gosford Park, Grizzly Man, Hot Fuzz, I'm Going Home, Kill Bill Vol. 1, Last Days, The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou, The Man Without A Past, Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, My Architect, Punch Drunk Love, Shaun of the Dead, The Squid and the Whale, Star Wars - Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, Team America: World Police, Tropical Malady, 28 Days Later, Under the Sand, Waking Life, War Photographer, When the Rain Lifts, Winged Migration, With a Friend Like Harry, Zodiac

We are (currently) the champions: Oregon's place in Pac-10 history

On December 3, 2009, 18 days ago as I write this, the Oregon Ducks capped one of the greatest regular seasons in team history by coming from behind in dramatic fashion against archrival Oregon State in the annual "Civil War" to earn the Pac-10 Conference championship.

I could go on and on about the joy I've experienced since the moment the clock hit zero at Autzen Stadium: how I screamed "WE DID IT!" so loudly Valarie was plugging her ears, how I ran into the street yelling "ROSE BOWL! ROSE BOWL!", or broke down in tears watching the celebration. Or how ecstatic I am to actually be going to the Rose Bowl itself on New Year's Day.

But the reason I decided to write this post was that tonight, Ducks fanatic and statistics lover that I am, decided to look and see how Oregon's run of three Pac-10 Conference championships shakes down in terms of rankings for conference titles won in the last decade and the few decades before that.

 

I already knew that Oregon is second for the 2000s decade behind USC in terms of overall wins (Oregon State is third). But if you go by Pac-10 conference championships for this decade, it brakes down thusly, with schools ranked by overall titles and then the number of outright titles in parenthesis:

1.  USC: 7 (4 outright)
2.  Oregon: 3 (2)
3.  Washington: 1 (0)
3.  California: 1 (0)
3.  Arizona State: 1 (0)
3.  Oregon State: 1 (0)
3.  Washington State: 1 (0)
8.  UCLA: 0
8.  Stanford: 0
8.  Arizona: 0

If we pull back further to look at Pac-10 titles won since 1990 and continue looking further back by the decade (I went back to 1960, but the Pac-10 dates back in various forms to 1915), Oregon has less of an edge each time.

Pac-10 titles won since 1990:

1. USC: 9 (4 outright)
2. Washington: 5 (2)
3. Oregon: 4 (3)
4. UCLA: 3 (1)
5. Arizona State: 2 (1)
6. Oregon State: 2 (0)
6. Washington State: 2 (0)
8. Stanford: 2 (1)
9. California: 1 (0)
9. Arizona: 1 (0)

 

Titles won since 1980:

1. USC 13 (7 outright)
2. Washington 7 (4)
2. UCLA 7 (4)
4. Oregon: 4 (3)
5. Arizona State: 3 (2)
6. Stanford: 2 (1)
7. Oregon State: 2 (0)
8. Washington State: 2 (0)
9. California: 1 (0)
10. Arizona: 1 (0)

Since 1960:

1. USC: 25 (18 outright)
2. Washington: 10 (7)
3. UCLA: 10 (6)
4. Oregon: 4 (3)
4. Stanford: 4 (3)
6. Arizona State: 3 (2)
7. Oregon State: 2 (0)
7. California: 2 (0)
7. Washington State: 2 (0)
10. Arizona: 1 (0)

Obviously the constant is that USC has been dominant both recently and throughout history (although particularly in the 1960s, 70s and 2000s). But as the decades have gone by, the race for second best has seen different leaders at different times. If you look at the conference between 1960 and 1990, Washington and UCLA are clearly the two winningest programs besides the Trojans. But in the last twenty years, that has changed as Oregon has ascended to be the number one contender against mighty Troy.

 

What does the next decade hold for the Ducks football program? It's of course impossible to tell. The last 20 years indicate an almost continuous forward trajectory for Oregon, but the Ducks are still looking to win their first Rose Bowl since 1916. (The 2001 Ducks did defeat Colorado in the 2002 Fiesta Bowl; that year the Rose Bowl acted as the national championship game instead of the traditional Pac-10/Big-10 clash.) What's more, conference competitors like the Huskies and Bruins also provide lessons in how even the mighty can fall. And then there are threats like the Beavers, who will finish the decade with their three-way-shared Pac-10 title in 2000 as their only one for a 50-year period, but who have been within one win of clinching the Rose Bowl and the conference title for two straight years. As long as Mike Riley stays in Corvallis, the Beavers figure to keep knocking on the door.

Even so, during this golden period between clinching this year's conference title and playing the Rose Bowl itself, it's worth a moment to savor what a Pac-10 championship means all by itself. WIth the exception of perhaps the Southeastern Conference (SEC), there is no greater conference in college football than the Pac-10, and if Oregon can win against these nine foes, the Ducks can compete with anyone.

Watching Shmoo and Captain Caveman

 I have had a nearly lifelong fondness for Hanna Barbera-produced cartoons of the 1970s and 80s after spending thousands of hours watching them as a child. Although back then my favorites were some of HB's more popular cartoons like The Flinstones, Superfriends and Yogi Bear, I've developed a retroactive fondness in my adult years for some of the lesser Hanna Barbera works of that period.

Sometimes it's the earlier 60s HB work I enjoy, like Magilla Gorilla, Auggie Doggie & Doggie Daddy, and Johnny Quest. There are times I go for late 70s Hanna Barbera, like Godzilla.

But today it was two 80s HB cartoons that I watched online: The Shmoo and Captain Caveman. Although I was always rather ambivalent about that titan of Hanna Barbera fandom, Scooby Doo (meaning I watched it nearly every day as a kid but only because it was so ubiquitous, and less excitedly so), it struck me while watching the two Shmoo episodes and single Captain Caveman episode that they were very much made from the Scooby Doo template.

Part of the template is casting. There is always some sort of either talking animal or other quasi supernatural character who acts as both hero and comic relief. In Shmoo's case, he is a kind of shapeshifter who spends most of his (or her) time as a blobby bowling-pin shape, but can take on the form of literally anything. In this episode, Shmoo acted as a tire when the gang's car went flat, and then shapeshifted into a tire jack when a replacement tire was found, as well as a blanket, a pillow, a pogo stick, and a parachute, all of which were part of several life-saving actions. Shmoo also seems to delight in kissing both protagonists and antagonists alike.

What I found particularly astonishing about the Shmoo and Captain Caveman shows, though, was that nobody seems phased by the fact that there is this unearthly being of completely unknown form or origin - he's just a funny pet with almost limitless powers. I shouldn't say completely unknown, though. I've since learned, as I wrote this post and plumbed Wikipedia, that Shmoo began in the venerable Lil' Abner cartoon and has a surprisingly rich history, as the entry delineates:

"A shmoo is shaped like a plump bowling pin with legs. It has smooth skin, eyebrows and sparse whiskers - but no arms, nose or ears. Its feet are short and round but dexterous, as the shmoo's comic book adventures make clear. It has a rich gamut of facial expressions, and expresses love (often) by exuding hearts over its head.

They reproduce asexually and are very prolific. They require no sustenance other than air.

They have no bones, so there's absolutely no waste. Their eyes make the best suspender buttons, and their whiskers make perfect toothpicks. In short, they are simply the perfect ideal of a subsistence agricultural herd animal."

Personally, though, I prefer to restrict my consideration of Shmoo to the 1980s Hanna Barbera cartoon, even if it's just a cheesy formulaic rendition of an actually richer satirical newspaper-cartoon character. It's ultimately this HB formula and the look and style of Hanna Barbera cartoons that I love, not some biographic history of this bowling bowl-shaped blob.

Captain Caveman is less abstract of an entity; he takes on a caricature of a prehistoric man instead of an indescribable morphing blob. But his trusted club has unexplainable powers as well: a series of Flinstones-like small animals come out of the club to provide whatever assistance the Captain needs. In the episode I watched, a small bird pops out of his club in order to bite a padlock off a mummy's coffin, which itself is acting as a secret portal from which a mummy comes and goes.

Besides the lead characters like Shmoo or Captain Caveman, they are routinely part of a small nomadic group of quasi-hip youngsters in their late teens or early 20s. It's always a mix of genders, and usually a racial mix as well. It's a kind of idyllic 70s version of Young America. One member of the group, usually the most cowardly and child-like male figure (Shaggy on Scooby Doo and Billie Joe on Schmoo), has a particularly tight bond with the pet-hero-supernatural figure. Whether it's Scooby or Schmoo or "Cavey" (as Captain Caveman's gang calls him), the title character appreciates the coward's desire to be left alone in bliss without seeking fame and fortune. It allows said title character to not only enjoy that master-dog relationship, but also act in that truly heroic way later in the episode: the role of the reluctant hero who is only utilizing his/her powers in order to save innocent lives. Shmoo doesn't just shapeshift to randomly steal or kick ass, and Cavey has sophisticated judgment despite his prehistoric brain.

There's a line on The Simpsons that also partially explains the template. Lisa says, "If there's anything I've learned from years of watching Scooby Doo, it's to beware of real estate developers." Almost invariably there is an antagonist, revealed at show's end, who is trying to scare people away from some valuable piece of land or discovery. In one of the Shmoo episodes I watched, "The Valley Where Time Stood Still", Shmoo and the kids encounter what seems to be a Texas valley where prehistoric pterodactyls and T-rexes still roam, only do discover it's merely a rancher from the bordering property who has discovered an oil deposit and is seeking to reap its fortunes without the landowner's knowledge by fabricating the appearance of angry dinosaurs (a pterodactyl turns out to be a remote-control glider) and cavemen (guys with long beards and department store leopard skins for loincloths).

By setting a multicultural group of youth against greedy devious adults, these cartoons helped act, for all their cheap animation corner-cutting and saccharine, formulaic storytelling, as a kind of ongoing series of morality plays during my youth. More than just heroes and villains, though, the collected Hanna Barbera works of this particular formula, the Scooby Doo template of a small group of youth and their supernaturally talented pet-slash-pal ham fistedly avoiding certain peril and bringing down powerful forces of corruption -- instilled in me the idealistic sense that you can and should take on the powerful with hope of success. It's a nice theme to revisit when you're older and more cynical.  Even the 37 year old version of me enjoys taking 10 or 20 minutes now or then to return to the land where backgrounds repeat every few seconds if you're running somewhere, and there's nothing surprising about the having a sexless childlike shifting blob for your companion-slash-bodyguard.

Somebody else's tweets

Somebody I don't know from Orlando just started following me on Twitter today. I don't know why, but I found it funny reading her sole seven tweets out of context (the various punctuation and capitalization errors are hers, not mine):

• on Days of Our Lives yesterday? 

• Where were you on September 11, 2001?

• Im on a roller coaster right now. 

• He's got a little bit of separation anxiety. 

• Uh remember? 

• You shut up! 

• Easy now Hey look Isn't that Mrs Thomas?

Oregon Ducks on the cover of Sports Illustrated!!!

This is the fourth time a current Ducks player has been on the SI cover, and all have been quarterbacks. The last time was quarterback Jason Fife in 2003 following Oregon's victory over #4 Michigan. 

Before that, in 2001 Joey Harrington was on the cover of SI's college football preview issue (along with some idiot from Oregon State named Ken Simonton).  

And quarterback Akili Smith was on the cover just prior to the NFL draft. I'd have expected Oregon's Dan Fouts, a member of the Pro Football Hall of Fame, might also have been on the cover, but alas no.

There was also this cover story featuring distance runner Steve Prefontaine:

 

I may not like Oregon's current football uniforms (or any of them since the Harrington era), but I love seeing them on the cover of Sports Illustrated. Go Ducks!!!

Flickr top 10

A few weeks ago I started posting photos on Flickr in earnest, and by now there are 931 pictures and counting on my account.

One of the fun things about having your photos on this site compared to other photo hosting & printing websites I've used like Shutterfly is being able to see statistics on which of one's shots other people click on. There's much more of a public viewing aspect to Flickr, it seems. I don't necessarily put a lot of stock in the relative quality of the shots chosen versus others on view, because a lot of this is based on people clicking thumbnail images; what's compelling in a thumbnail might not always be the most compelling photograph overall.

That said, it's still fun to sift through the photos according to clicks. Although the numbers are changing all the time, following are the top 10 shots from my Flickr account.

#1: "Coliseum & parade 001A"

This was a shot I took in June of this year inside Memorial Coliseum at the Rose Parade. I wasn't interested in the parade so much as the opportunity to see the Coliseum with its curtain open, exposing the view through glass-enclosed building to the skyline of Portland outside.

#2: "Memorial Coliseum (1)"

This is another shot of Memorial Coliseum, taken in April of this year just after an open house with mayor Sam Adams in which Coliseum supporters loudly roared their support for the building, a turning point against the plan to demolish the building.

#3: "China Part 1 (83)"

One of numerous shots I took inside the Forbidden City in Beijing while visiting the city in November 2007 on a press tour for a new art museum opening, the Ullens Center.

#4: "SoWa 1"

I wouldn't have necessarily thought of this as a standout photo, or enough of one to be the 4th rated among over 900. Perhaps the people who find and recognize my name on Flickr, or who otherwise come to my page there through various Twitter/Facebook postings I've sometimes made about new photos being added, are skewed more towards Portlanders. Besides, South Waterfront is also rather interesting, I think, as a new urban neighborhood that began from scratch on a brownfield site just a few years ago, at the height of the real estate boom, and now are struggling to stitch together a sense of community and fill out the empty units there.

#5 "Manhattan From Brooklyn Heights (1A)"

This is one of several photo prints I scanned recently from the thousands of pre-digital camera photos I have in albums. I have lots of negatives, but only a fraction of the overall collection. This picture was taken on a very special day in October of 1996. It's taken from a promenade in Brooklyn Heights, where I was on a stroll with Valarie and her parents, who were visiting from Bethlehem, Pennsylvania that day. (Valarie and I lived in New York at the time.) Not only can you see the World Trade Center prominently in the background, but later that night after this shot was taken, I was at Yankee Stadium to see Derek Jeter, Bernie Williams, Wade Boggs, Paul O'Neill and company win the World Series.

#6 "China Part 1 (175)"

This was taken in Beijing on the same 2007 trip as the above shot of the Forbidden City. The picture was shot from the entrance to the China Today art museum.

#7 "Tokyo 112 Akakusa tour guides"

While on my first trip to Japan in 2004, I encountered this pair of good-natured tour guides at a Shinto shrine in the Tokyo district of Asakusa.

#8 "Japan 273 Tokyo"

This is a shot of the Prada store in Tokyo's exclusive Omotesando shopping area. It was designed by one of my favorite architecture firms in the world, Herzog & de Meuron of Switzerland. They also designed the Bird's Nest olympic stadium in Beijing and Tate Modern museum in London.

#9: "Thompson & WTC (1A)"

Another one of my pre-digital camera photos, this is a scan of a print taken in about 1995, when I was finishing up my studies at New York University. As you can see, the World Trade Center is again visible in the background. And as it happens, Valarie used to live on this block, which is particularly a coincidence because when I took the picture we hadn't yet met.

#10 "Coliseum & Parade 43A"

This is another shot taken inside Memorial Coliseum during June's Rose Parade. One of the compelling features of the building is how the seating bowl sits completely free standing from the rest of the building, although some extra structural bracing was added in an ill-advised restoration.

Again, I don't necessarily think these are my 10 best photos. Not at all. The exterior shot of the Coliseum is a little bit blurry, and I think the Prada store shot is only interesting because the building is interesting, not because of any expert photography. Even so, it's fun to see what people have been clicking on.

NBA championships: a basketball oligarchy (or: why I hate the Lakers)

The first National Basketball Association title was won in 1947 by the Philadelphia Warriors over the Chicago Stags. In the following season, Philadelphia's repeat bid was ended in the Finals by the Baltimore Bullets.

Over the following 21 seasons from 1949-69, however, either the Lakers or Celtics franchises would go on to win 16 of the NBA titles at stake. That's more than 75 percent.

Today, with the Finals set to begin and the Lakers going for their 15th title (the ninth in Los Angeles), I looked up online a list of the NBA champions from each season. I knew the Celtics have won the most championships with 17, of course, with the Lakers in second. Combined the two franchises have now won 32 of 62 titles, just over half.

Let me reiterate: the Celtics and Lakers have won over half of the NBA titles. If there is any justice in sports (there isn't), neither of these teams would win another title ever again.

After Boston and LA, from watching through my lifetime I know the Bulls have 6, the Spurs have 4, the Pistons 3, as well as the Knicks and Rockets both with 2. But what about the rest?

One thing I particularly wondered was how many teams like my beloved Trail Blazers have won just a single title. As it happens, it's a pretty rare occurrence. Only three NBA teams that are still in their original cities - Portland, the Milwaukee Bucks and Miami Heat - have a single title. The Atlanta Hawks also won a title while located in St. Louis (1958), as did the now-defunct Rochester Royals (they became the Kansas City and then Sacramento Kings) in 1951 and the Seattle SuperSonics in 1979 (they're now the Oklahoma City Thunder).

And if you add the Bulls and Spurs to the Celtics and Lakers, those four teams have won 42 of 62 titles. That means four teams have won over two thirds of the rings.

Every sport has bullies with more money and bigger-city fan bases that horde titles. The New York Yankees are the biggest with 23 or 24 titles. In hockey there is the Montreal Canadiens, or there are Manchester United and Liverpool in English Premiere League soccer. College football has Notre Dame and USC.

But in none of those sports (except maybe the Premiereship) is there such a clog of a small oligarchy of teams winning the vast majority of the titles.

It makes me all the more happy that Portland managed to beat the odds and win the 1977 championship. And that a very promising championship window may be opening for the Blazers soon.

Oh, and in the spirit of tonight's game: go Magic!

From the archives: a conversation with David Lynch, just after 9/11

Today I was looking in my work archives for an interview I did with an engineer several years ago. I still haven't found that interview, but I happened to come across a transcript of the interview I did with director David Lynch in fall 2001, just a few weeks after the 9/11 attacks.

The interview became part of a profile I wrote of Lynch for Salon, in which I remember using this quote from novelist David Foster Wallace:

"Some guy killing his wife in and of itself doesn't have much of a Lynchian tang to it, though if it turns out the guy killed his wife over something like ... an obdurate refusal to buy the particular brand of peanut butter the guy was devoted to, the homicide could be described as having Lynchian elements."

At the time, I was terrified of even flying from Portland to LAX for fear of some kind of terrorist attack. I even thought to myself, "If I have to die, at least it will be while going to interview one of my all-time favorite filmmakers." As it happens, the flight went just fine. But it's an indication of how shaken I and many were in those first days after 9/11. And, of course, there was something slightly Lynchian about the American national mood during this time period. On the way to the interview, I saw a marquee meant to say "God Bless America," but the 'B' had fallen off. I ended up using it as an opening anectdote for the story.

Once I got to the interview, which took place over a couple hours at Lynch's production company, it was fun and surreal. Lynch owns two homes next door to each other in the Hollywood hills, one for his home and the other for offices. We did the interview in his backyard painting studio, which included a time-out at one point so Lynch could pee into the utility sink. "I drink a lot of coffee," he explained. I also loved his genuine boy-scout vocabulary. He alternately called me "Buster" and "Buddy" through the course of the talk.

This interview also was memorable for me in how it, at least indirectly, affected my own hobby making short videos - mostly travelogues and such. In this interview, Lynch talks a lot about being open to happy accidents and impromptu discoveries as an artist.

Even though my little camcorder travelogue videos are nothing compared to Lynch's movies, I really took to heart what he said during our talk about how "...you always have to stay on guard for something new that comes in to join with the ideas that have already gone down on paper. It’s always an experiment until you get to the point where it feels correct. It’s funny, you can prepare for happy accidents, but you can’t set them up. That’s the nature of them: they surprise you. The strangest, smallest things can lead to big, beautiful things."

As you'll see in the interview, we talked just a few days before his film Mulholland Drive opened...

BRIAN: Mulholland Drive is opening nationwide tomorrow. Are you nervous?

LYNCH: For a couple of reasons you have detachment. One is for safety reasons. And one is because you finished the film quite a long time before it’s released. At the same time, I’ve done everything I can. I’ve traveled and talked and done whatever they asked me to do.

Do you believe the PR machine does a movie like Mulholland Drive much good? 

All that can help, but really it’s still about word of mouth. It comes down to a ‘buzz’ that a certain film either has or doesn’t have. So far, knocking on wood, it’s going really well.

Do you feel an extra sense of closure because of this film’s unusually long journey from TV pilot to feature?

It’s like having a child who had to have a serious operation that made it OK, and maybe even a little bit better because of the operation. It looked like this project was dead for awhile. Then I got really lucky as these ideas came to me. The process really was interesting, and now it feels like this was the way it was always meant to be.

With Mulholland Drive combining the pilot with new footage shot later, do you have a personal attachment to one part over another?

No, because when it switched into a feature and I got the ideas of how to make that happen, it changed the viewpoint. Suddenly it was seen from different angle, and it was new again. It was like if you had a rug and you wanted to make it bigger: a lot of the thread went into the original rug, and the ideas for the new part of the rug were indicated by the original. But it’s one rug.

So maybe this unusual path for the movie helped push you, at least for this project, into a different kind of creative process.

You said it, Brian. If Mulholland Drive started out as a feature, it would be a completely different film. It’s like the surrealists, who would throw up these scraps of paper and see how they come down. These things trick the mind, and so new things come out of it. All you have to do is look back and see the changes in cinema to see that it’s always got room to grow and change in surprising ways. And how do you arrive at those new ways? Sometimes it’s because you’re forced into a corner. That’s a beautiful thing.

Have there been many aspects of your films that resulted from these sort of happy accidents?

There are some parts in all my films that have been the result of this. I have heard filmmakers say that they know exactly what they’re going to do every day of the shoot, but I don’t know if I believe that. You may think a script is finished, but when you go out and start filming you always have to stay on guard for something new that comes in to join with the ideas that have already gone down on paper.

Feeling out what’s right and what’s not seems to be a very important part of how you work.

Exactly. It’s always an experiment until you get to the point where it feels correct. It’s funny, you can prepare for happy accidents, but you can’t set them up. That’s the nature of them: they surprise you. The strangest, smallest things can lead to big, beautiful things.

Thinking of this notion of discovery in light of your first feature, Eraserhead, taking five years to make, did the extra time help foster this process?

Discoveries don’t necessarily need a lot of time to occur. But when you have time, you sink deeper into the world. It’s about staying true to the original ideas, whichever way they came to you. If you do that, then you have a chance to translate them properly.

Due to the dark nature of your films, people often assume you had a disturbed childhood. But you’ve countered that it was actually quite idyllic. Where did you get your first glimse of the darker world that has inspired you?

I grew up in the Northwest, but my mother was from Brooklyn. So I would go to New York every now and again, and I would have that shock at a young age and then go away. In the beginning I think it was very pleasant, but then New York, like most cities, suffered a real decline. Contrasts are what make people feel things, and I felt a huge contrast.

And then later you lived in Philadelphia, which, as you’ve often said, played a big role in the development of your artistic sensibility.

My greatest influence was Philadelphia. When I went there, I found myself living under this blanket of fear. It took a year after I got to California for the fear to lift off. It’s called ‘The City of Brotherly Love’, and I always say if a city is going to call itself that, then they kind of owe it to the people there to make sure that that’s true. It was so far from true that it wasn’t even funny. It was such a corrupt, sick place that it was a pitiful joke of a town.

And yet as work of yours like Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks shows, evil and darkness can just as easily exist in small-town America.

For sure. When you live in a remote place in the country, you could say that’s very peaceful and beautiful—until man appears in the distance, walking slowly toward your home. If anybody approaches your house in the country, from the distance you can’t tell if they’re friendly or not. So there’s a different kind of fear.

You also claim to be not much of a film buff. It is it safe to assume your own past is your greatest influence?

Even though I have films that I truly love, they are more of an inspiration than an influence. It’s an enthusiasm that you get from seeing something that you truly love. The influence is always the ideas. And the way you translate the ideas is key: staying true to them.

And if you get an idea from a movie it’s not your idea.

Right. It’d be like eating somebody else’s food.

It also seems noteworthy that you grew up in the 1950s, and that era—one of darkness percolating beneath a romanticized family façade—seems to have rubbed off on you. It was an innocent time, a naïve time, and in a way false time. But that’s how you see it looking back. When I was in it, it was fantastic. It didn’t seem false. I saw plenty of strange things, but there was an enthusiasm, a very positive feeling that you could do anything. And that’s a good feeling.

As we see in Film Noir, an inspiration for much of your work, the ’50s represent a desire for normalcy after a horribly difficult war. But you can’t just flip a switch and make the memories go away.

War kind of balances things out for awhile. It’s like fresh air after a storm. It lasts for a certain number of years and then it begins to putrefy again. But during those few years, there’s this great feeling. It was a very positive, creative time. Everything sort of reflected that. At the same time, there were probably things brewing under the surface that couldn’t hold indefinitely.

And ‘things brewing under the surface’ are a huge component of your work.

That’s always the way it is. There’s a good side to hiding things, but there’s a sick side to it as well. And now in the last ten years, or maybe even awhile back before that, everything has been more exposed. The sickness is getting light put on it. I think maybe that’s kind of a good thing. You’re shocked at first, but people understand human nature. It can lead to something really good.

Your films contain a great deal more abstraction and enigma than most everything else coming out of Hollywood. Should more filmmakers and audiences be willing to embrace this style?

It’s about likes and dislikes, and that’s a subjective thing. Some people love getting lost and feeling their way out. Other people have more literal minds, and get angry when things are not very specific. A Hollywood studio is a big business, and therefore has to think about attracting a majority, because it’s about getting people into the theaters. But if you’re making films for a different reason, then you don’t have to worry about that, or at least not as much.

But of course the risk is always there that, if a picture bombs, you won’t get to make another.

I’ve been very lucky, because I’ve made enough to break even. No persons who have financed my films have been hurt, although some distributors have. New Line, for example, lost money on Fire Walk With Me, although it wasn’t the only film they’ve ever lost money on.

So how do you acknowledge that pressure while staying true to your vision? You just hope that people get the same thrill that you got getting those original ideas. And that’s what it’s all about. When you’re painting, you’re not thinking about an audience. You’re in a thrilling world, and then you have a show and hope that thrilling world will thrill other human beings. It’s a real eye opener. Sometimes it’s shocking how few people are thrilled.

How do you handle it when this happens?

The only safety is in being true to the ideas, so that at the end you can say, ‘It feels correct.’ If you’ve done that, then it doesn’t really hurt as bad if people don’t go for it.

Do you ever second-guess decisions you’ve made in past movies?

There are probably things I’d like to change in every film, but they’re minor. In my short film The Grandmother, in the last shot I like the whole frame except for this pod in the center that I drew wrong. Now it’d be so easy to get that correct, but that’s the way it was, and that’s the way it should stay. When the films are done they’re done.

Considering the proliferation of more affordable video and post-production equipment, do you think if you had grown up now you’d have had a camera in your hands at an earlier age?

I could get my hands on a camera anytime. For a long time I just never thought about it. As soon as I thought about it I had a camera within a week. You can always do what you want to do. It’s true that it’s getting easier and easier, but also a camera is still just a tool. It’s the ideas and how you express those ideas. If people have that drive and catch the ideas, there is better and better opportunity to express themselves.

You talk a lot about spending time just sitting and thinking in search of creative ideas. Do people spend enough time doing this?

We don’t. Life is going real fast. And you can catch some ideas going fast, for sure. But I always say ideas are like fish, and there are all different kinds of fish: some fast, some slow.

So how do you catch these ideas?

It’s a mystery, and you can’t force an idea to come to you. But you can make preparations. It’s like you can’t force yourself to go to sleep, but you can lay comfortably in the bed and close your eyes, get nice and cozy, and eventually you’ll go to sleep. If you sit in a chair, and if you have a desire for ideas, you begin to daydream, and you’ll see that daydreams will take you to different places. There’s a lot of mundane places it takes you. But if you have a desire for ideas, as you’re daydreaming you’re sinking deeper in. And all of a sudden you can catch one.

How do you know which idea is right among the infinite possibilities?

When you catch ideas there’s not an infinite amount of possibilities. As soon as you catch your first idea a road is indicated. As these ideas come along, some will go along that road and some will take you on a different road.

With respect to some of your more abstract films—Lost Highway, Eraserhead, Mulholland Drive—do you write and direct these intending at certain points for there to be multiple meanings, or do you know exactly what everything means?

I know exactly what everything means. I really believe consciousness is like a ladder, and there are different rungs of consciousness. If you’re on one rung, you have a certain understanding of things. Then you go up a couple a couple of rungs and it’s like a new world. Whatever level you’re at, that’s your level. You shouldn’t judge another person, because you don’t know where they are at or what their right or wrong is. You should just be taking care of yourself and following what’s inside you. It doesn’t matter what level you’re on. If you stay true to the ideas, in the translation they could have a different meaning for someone on a different level of consciousness.

What if someone were to come to you with a theory about one of your movies that was entirely different from what you had in mind when you made it?

I would say, ‘Very good.’ In a way ideas are like music on the page. Depending the ability of the musicians to play and the conductor interpreting the notes, you can get huge variations. But it’s the same notes on the page.

And if you tell someone what one of your films or TV episodes means, they don’t get to interpret it in their own way.

It robs people of their right to figure things out for themselves. It’s like somebody saying, ‘This is what life is all about.’ People have said it in different ways, but it falls on deaf ears because you have to experience life yourself and find your own way out. That’s part of the beautiful trick.

In Fire Walk With Me, the Log Lady says to Laura, “When this kind of fire starts, it is very hard to put out. The tender bows of innocence burn first. And the wind rises, and then all goodness is in jeopardy.” In the wake of September 11, what can we learn from your films’ constant exploration of innocence vs. naïveté?

What strikes me is that it seemed like it happened on September 11, but in a sense it didn’t. It’s like a doctor telling you that you have cancer, but the cancer has been growing in your body, sometimes even for years before. I think the key to a lot of it is for us to look back and see how come it happened, and face that, and rectify that and move forward.

It’s like a moment from your films: While we went innocently about our business, something evil was lurking under the surface.

I think it’s safe to say the world’s getting crazier all the time. Facing the music and learning from it is all you can do. Like with cancer, you’ve got to remove it without killing the whole body. People are analyzing what might have gone wrong, and that’s a good sign. That can be a beautiful thing. Granted it’s a little bit late, but better late than never.

And this comes back to giving yourself the opportunity to generate ideas. It’s not just true for creating art, but for living your life in general.

Exactly.

Numero Group is numero uno

It’s hard to think of a single instance—other than my current fascination with Numero Group—when I’ve become a big fan of a record label but not by way of any particular artist.

I may be a huge Beatles devotee, for example, or even a Duran Duran fan, but that doesn’t necessarily make me a Capitol Records enthusiast (the label both bands recorded for) or even aware of the label in any identifiable stylistic or historic way.

In the early 1990s, when I was taking a year off from school and living with friends in a band (who recorded for renowned punk label Dischord, home to and owned by the seminal band Fugazi), their influence made me a fan of not only Dischord but certain indie-rock or punk labels like Matador (home to Liz Phair) and Rykodisk (Morphine, Sugar). Had I gone to college here in the Northwest instead of being on the east coast (school in New York, my year off in DC), I might also have become a fan of labels like Seattle and Olympia-based Sub Pop and K Records.

Numero Group is something different. It specializes in reissues and collections of lesser-known soul and R&B artists of the past. In that way, though, it’s not unlike a label I loved as a kid: K-Tel Records, which produced several collections of pop hits in the 1970s and 80s. K-Tel’s name came from advertising on TV frequently, tangentially related to the “only $19.95!” genre.

I still have two K-Tel albums, by the way. One, Neon Nights, features dance and new-wave hits from the early 80s, from familiar songs like Rick James’ “Super Freak” and The Human League’s “Don’t You Want Me” to now forgotten fare by artists and groups like Skyye, Atlantic Starr and Junior. My other K-Tel album is 25 Rock Revival Greats, featuring early rock songs from the 1950s and early ’60s like “Johnny B. Goode,” “Chantilly Lace,” and “Wipe Out”. It was one of the first albums I listened to regularly on my own as a child that wasn’t children’s fare like my Sesame Street and Mr. Rogers records, or Marlo Thomas & Friends' Free To Be You and Be, and one of the first two or three albums I acquired independently of my parents. It had been given to me by a neighbor friend, Joe, out of a pile his older brother had left behind after moving out of the house.

1950s rock of this vintage, picked up from listening to 25 Rock Revival Greats, also represents some of the first music that my dad and I connected on. He loved hearing oldies like “Black Slacks” and “Rockin’ Robin”. In fact, my dad wound up taking me to what would be my first concert: Chuck Berry at Civic Auditorium in Portland. Until then, my tastes had been shaped more by my mom’s love of The Beatles, Stevie Wonder and Elton John.

Numero Group is less crassly commercial than K-Tel, oriented to the past rather than mostly the present. It’s also a much deeper ongoing delve into a treasure-trove of lesser known music, particularly R&B and soul from the 1960s and 70s, be it from a host of different American cities and regions as well as imported sounds from the Caribbean and even Israel (a funk gospel album).

The funny thing is, while I certainly always have enjoyed the occasional Motown song, I was never a huge fan of the label or its trademark sound. A lot of the Motown glory years—the mid-1960s, were a little before the time period of a few years later that I like best, musically speaking, when R&B was ready to give way to funk.

That difference could be distinguished by the work Motown artists like Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder did in each period. I adore Marvin Gaye’s What’s Goin’ On from the early 1970s, but don’t feel strongly about earlier hits like “I Heard It Through the Grapevine.” More importantly, I’m resistant to hit golden-oldie songs that have permeated popular culture enough to be played constantly over the years in movies, TV shows and commercials. Part of what I love about songs from Twinight’s Lunar Rotation and some of the other Numero Uno soul collections is that it’s music I haven’t already heard played to death.

The first Numero album I bought on the label was the soundtrack (never before released) of a 1974 blaxploitation movie called Brotherman that was never actually made. The producer commissioned the soundtrack from an unfortunately titled but talented Chicago act called The Final Solution. Their style is similar to Curtis Mayfield, whose Superfly soundtrack is arguably the gold standard of blaxploitation movie-inspired albums. Its songs are about drug dealers and pimps, but the sound is bright and uplifting, the guitar-bass-drums combination firmly at root yet enlivened with a wide array of horns and strings. (I previously blogged about Brotherman separately a few months ago.)

Yet Numero Group is really about its collections of old soul music by a varity of artists. As they write on the label's website, "The mission was simple: to dig deep into the recesses of our record collections with the goal of finding the dustiest gems begging to be released from their exile on geek street. No longer would $500 singles sit in a temperature-controlled room dying for a chance to be played. No more would the artists, writers, and entrepreneurs who made these records happen go unknown and unappreciated."

My favorite collection so far is called Eccentric Soul: Twinight’s Lunar Rotation. All the music was culled from a Chicago label, first called Twilight and then later Twinight. The label was a kind of side project for a couple of music-industry insiders who specialized in signing artists to bigger major national labels but reserved their own brand for an assortment of singers and groups in the Chicago area, some of whom were on the cusp of breaking through with radio hits and some who were little more than dreamers saving up their money to satisfy the dream of recording a song or two in a professional studio.

One group in particular, The Notations, seem wondrous. Imagine the warm, heartfelt tones of Marvin Gaye and the early '70s sub-era of the Motown sound, with just a touch of the harmonizing earlier Motown groups predating like The Temptations that can be heard in songs like "A New Day" and "I'm Still Here". 

In all the Twinight’s Lunar Rotation songs I enjoy the warm, bright tones: brass sections of saxes and trumpets with jangly guitar and the occasional organ. The lyrics are often quite melancholy, yet underscored with an unrepentant sense of optimism. This is non-cynical music mostly coming out of an African-American culture of the 1960s and 70s with plenty of reason to be. And decades after the civil rights and antiwar movements from whence these songs came, the subjects (mostly love and relationships) and sounds are transcendent.

There are too many different artists and songs to talk about individually, but I have to at least mention the great band and artist names on Twinight’s Lunar Rotation, such as Renaldo Domino, Harrison & The Majestic Kind, Velma Perkins, and Nate Evans.

Another Numer Group collection I’ve played countless times over the past few months is called Cult Cargo: Grand Bahama Goombay (pictured at right). Besides the music being produced in large American cities like Chicago, Philadelphia or Miami, Numero Group has shown there to be a rich patchwork quilt of international locales that produced very listenable soul music scenes of their own. I would have expected Bahamas music to have been much more exclusively reggae-like, but Grand Bahama Goombay is closer to straight-up rock or R&B with small flourishes of calypso and other Latin American sounds.

My favorite artist on this collection is definitely Cyril Ferguson, who also goes by the stage name Dry Bread. In fact, of his two songs on the album, each is under one of the monikers. This actually seems oddly fitting given how different they are lyrically, or at least thematically. “Gonna Build a Nation,” which leads off Grand Bahama Goombay, is inspiring ‘60s rhetoric about brothers and sisters joining hand in hand to create a new, less violent, more egalitarian society. “Words to My Song,” is a witty track composed on the spot during a recording session when some impromptu jamming on guitar and drums with fellow musicians called for some lyrics on the spot. It presents the author as fed up because someone has stolen the words to his recording. He writes, “The next time I write a song/there ain’t gonna be no words/let the music go on.”

One other song from Grand Bahama Goombay is really worth mentioning: a cover of Dave Brubeck’s classic “Take Five,” by Ozzie Hall. It’s one of my favorite jazz covers, because Hall manages to maintain the sense of precision that exists in the original work but to give it a warmer, more…soulful feel than even Brubeck’s version ever had.

Two other collections I've either bought or received recently (my birthday a couple weeks ago) are Eccentric Soul: The Bick Mack Label (Big Mack was a Detroit-based Motown competitor); Cult Cargo: Belize City Boil Up, featuring music from Belize; and Eccentric Soul: The Deep City Label (pictured in the marching band shot above), music from south Florida. Of these, I know Deep City the best. As often happens with these albums, the first song seems to be one of the best: "Am I A Good Man" by Them Two, a soul-searching soul song if there ever was one.

Another favorite track on Eccentric Soul: The Deep City Label, "I Am Controlled By Your Love" by Helene Smith, typifies a type of song I've heard numerous times on these collections. In it, Smith sings of how no matter what hardships may threaten her relationship, and regardless of what mistakes or transgressions her lover commits, she is happily and unrepentantly at the mercy of her affection. Her love is undying no matter what. It gets to a level of absurdity, but the purity of the lyrics' passion is palpable and very memorable. The same could be said for "Yes, My Goodness Yes" by Velma Perkins (pictured at left) on Eccentric Soul: Twinight's Lunar Rotation.In that song, Perkins reaches a kind of estatic level of romance that is totally unpractical but again, impressive in its intensity. These women really, really love their fellas.

Not every song or artist on these Numero Uno albums is great, of course. And even after hundreds of listening hours, I’ve only scratched the surface of the label’s catalog. Yet in that time, Numero Group has done nothing less than to reshape my sense and impression of American music during the years leading up to and immediately after the time I was born, which also happened to be some of the most socially tumultuous and artistically fruitful.

Battle for Memorial Coliseum

On August 22, 1965, Allen Ginsberg saw The Beatles play a concert at Memorial Coliseum in Portland. Ginsberg was inspired enough by the experience to write a poem, “Portland Coliseum”:

A brown piano in diamond
white spotlight
Leviathan auditorium
iron run wired
hanging organs, vox
black battery
A single whistling sound of ten thousand children's
larynxes asinging
pierce the ears
and following up the belly
bliss the moment arrived
 
The million children
the thousand words
bounce in their seats, bash
each other's sides, press
legs together nervous
Scream again & claphand
become one Animal
in the New World Auditorium
 
while a line of police with
folded arms stands
Sentry to contain the red
sweatered ecstasy
that rises upward to the
wired roof.

As it happens, my mom was at that concert, too. She wrote away for tickets through the mail, as was then the custom. Her family dropped her off at the five-year-old Coliseum for a few hours during the afternoon—the Beatles played Portland on a Saturday afternoon—and picked her up afterward. “I don’t know how we ever found her again,” my grandma always says when the story is re-told. They’d thought it a little silly how worked up my mom was over the band, but after the family saw them on The Ed Sullivan Show together, at least they had some idea of the phenomenon.

Twelve years after that concert at Memorial Coliseum, on June 5, 1977, came the biggest moment of my lifetime as a sports fan, albeit one that as a five-year-old I was too young to appreciate: the Portland Trailblazers’ winning of the NBA championship. I can hear radio announcer Bill Schonely’s call in my mind, how just after the game ended 109-107, he called the time of day as he announced, “The Portland Trail Blazers are world champions. They’re number one,” but it’s because I’ve seen the video clip replayed, or heard the call on my “Blazermania” record album (produced by now-defunct local radio station KYTE).

Later in life as a teen, though, I got to see several Blazer games at Memorial Coliseum during the heyday of the Clyde Drexler-led teams that won two Western Conference Championships in 1990 and 1992 as well as the league’s best regular-season record in 1991. I remember vividly how lightning-quick the Blazer fast break was in those days, with Drexler, Jerome Kersey and Terry Porter racing down court. And needless to say, the atmosphere was special given how the Coliseum sold out literally hundreds of Blazer games in a row.

Besides The Beatles, virtually every big entertainer of the 60s, 70s and 80s played there, from Elvis to Led Zeppelin to Luciano Pavarotti. The Dalai Lama spoke at Memorial Coliseum, as did Barack Obama during his campaign last year.

Regardless of what event one would attend at Memorial Coliseum over the years (it opened in 1960), part of those memories was the building itself, particularly the dramatic sense of place that existed outside the seating bowl in the perimeter lobby.

There are times in the distant past I remember going to the Coliseum but the event or act itself is gone from my memory. Only the view through the glass remains intact.

In a design or sculptural sense, the Coliseum’s concrete seating bowl is unique and elegant in how it stands completely detached from the surrounding glass walls. Architects describe the effect of the seating bowl in relationship to the transparent perimeter of the building it as a teacup inside a glass box. It’s the kind of detail that elevates Memorial Coliseum, or any building that achieves such elegant simplicity, into being a work of pure and transcendent architecture.

The nostalgia I or others here may have for the building would not be enough of an argument in and of itself to preserve it for the future. But as the Coliseum has come under the threat of demolition this spring, and practically taken over my life in the process as the preservation effort has risen to the building’s defense, it’s become more and more clear that the building deserves whatever effort my architect friends and I can muster.

Luckily, one Portland radio station’s poll found those in favor of the Coliseum’s preservation outnumbering those supporting its demolition by more than an eight to one margin. And aside from the editorial board of The Oregonian and billionaire Merritt Paulson, whose plan to build a minor league baseball stadium in the Rose Quarter (the development that includes the Rose Garden arena and Memorial Coliseum) is what’s threatening the Coliseum with demolition, I’ve hardly found anyone in the whole city who likes this idea.

Most all American cities, when they build a bigger, newer arena for their NBA basketball team, eventually demolish the older arena. Chicago Stadium in Chicago is gone, as is The Spectrum in Philadelphia, and the Boston Garden in Boston. But Portland and Oregon have always either had or sought an identity for different values. In the last decade sustainable architecture has revolutionized design of buildings here, and Portland has become a national leader in this field. But a fundamental principle of green building is the re-use of existing buildings. The US Green Building Council, which administers the LEED (Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design) rating system for sustainable buildings, is one of the numerous organizations that have written Portland mayor Sam Adams and City Council to call for Memorial Coliseum’s preservation. (The National Trust for Historic Preservation and the American Institute of Architects are two others.)

More than the value of recycling Memorial Coliseum into a viable new purpose to meet green/sustainable values, the building is worth preserving because of its enduring value as a great work of architecture.

Even people who have spent their whole lives living in Oregon don’t completely realize what an architectural treasure Memorial Coliseum actually is. Besides the sculptural quality of the teacup-in-a-glass-box concept, and the cinematic, panoramic quality of the skyline view visible through the transparent exterior, the Coliseum is one of the only indoor arenas in the world that has the capacity to be lit almost completely with natural daylight.

There is a curtain extended around the 12,000-seat seating bowl that hasn’t been opened for years. But it’s supposed to be able to be opened. When you see photographs of the Coliseum from inside with the curtain open during daytime, it’s breathtaking. A few weeks ago I interviewed by phone a retired architect, Bill Rouzie, who had been part of the design team that created the Memorial Coliseum plan. (You can read the whole interview here.) Also part of that team early on was Gordon Bunshaft, who is easily one of the five or seven most accomplished American architects of the 20^th century, responsible for masterpieces of design like Lever House in New York City.

The whole concept behind Memorial Coliseum's design, Rouzie told me, was to give the arena a sense of transparency and connection to the outside - something anathema to most large performance spaces.

"We were thinking, we’ve got this oval bowl that is going to sit in a glass box," he recalled in our phone talk. "When you’re in the bowl looking at something happening, you can either have light or not with the control of the curtain. To get out of there, or at halftime, you walk out into a space and instead of being in some blind corridor, you come out and you’ve got glass and you can see the city. You know where you are, and whether it’s day or night." 

"That was the whole point of the design. You never feel lost there. I can even get lost in some of the buildings I've designed, especially the hospitals. But not the Coliseum."

If Portlanders could stand inside the Coliseum in the daytime with the curtain open, this 49-year-old, supposedly obsolete old basketball arena without a basketball team would stand out for what it is: a mid-20^th century version of the Acropolis, Chartres Cathedral, Wrigley Field or the Rose Bowl: a public gathering place with the simple beauty and unique sense of place to endure for generations.

Part of the problem is what developers call “deliberate benign neglect”. Billionaire Blazers owner Paul Allen’s Oregon Arena Corporation has a contract with the city of Portland, which owns Memorial Coliseum, to manage the building. As shown in research by Portland State University professor William Macht, associate director of the school’s Center For Real Estate, Oregon Arena Corporation has a financial incentive to take the Coliseum to break-even point, but a financial disincentive in terms of turning a profit. After break-even point on the Coliseum, OAC receives a bigger percentage of those profits (and the City of Portland less) on events at the Rose Garden next door. And it’s at the profit-making point that much needed repairs and upkeep on the Coliseum would be triggered.

Another problem is the generational lag time that has long plagued the public when it comes to appreciating historic architecture. As my architect friend Rick Potestio said to a group of city planners during one meeting our Coliseum preservation group attended recently, if Portland had saved more of its cast-iron buildings from the late 19^th and early 20^th century, we’d have the equivalent of Bourbon Street in New Orleans. If we’d preserved more of the Victorian houses that used to exist in this city, we’d have a priceless, identity-defining collection today like San Francisco does. But societies have a long pattern of working to protect hundred-year-old buildings while dismissing forty or fifty-year-old architecture as ugly, obsolete, and worthy of demolition.

Take the statement made by Portland city council member Randy Leonard last week to The Oregonian. He called Memorial Coliseum “ugly” and said it’s a building “only a mother could love.” As it happens, Leonard graduated from Grant High School at a ceremony in the Coliseum in 1970.

But Leonard is wrong. I say that not simply he disagrees with me, although that’s a story in itself. The commissioner and I had a public war of words one week ago over email that was published online by the Portland Mercury and Willamette Week.

There has been broad consensus from the art and architecture community, as well as the broader public at large, from the time it was built. Even in early construction photos the Coliseum is impressive. Although its structure spans the equivalent of four city blocks, the building sits on just four pillars.

Fourteen years before the Coliseum was completed, in 1946 the Equitable Building in downtown Portland, designed by the great architect Pietro Belluschi, became the first structure in the world with a glass curtain wall. In this system, the building is held up not by its exterior walls but interior columns, allowing the outside “skin”, as architects call it, to be made of materials like aluminum and glass. It sounds like a no-brainer today, but this modest office building in downtown Portland was the first anywhere to be built like this. The Portland office of New York and Chicago-based architecture firm Skidmore, Owings and Merrill emerged from Pietro Belluschi’s office after he became dean of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s school of architecture in the late 1950s. And being so much larger in scale, Memorial Coliseum is a kind of sister building to the Equitable building just across the Willamette River: a glass palace born from the same office that invented the now ubiquitous glass tower.

Much of a wonder as Oregon is in terms of its natural surroundings—Cascade peaks like Mt. Hood, Mt. Bachelor and Mt. Jefferson,  rugged Pacific coastline, high desert in the east and fertile valley the west—we lack a long architectural history compared to the American east coast or Europe or much of the rest of the world. But Memorial Coliseum is just the kind of building that needs to be preserved for Portland, something to become in the future that very history that we lack today. Obviously not every old or moderately old building should be preserved, but the Coliseum is a giant in this city, vastly too important to tear down.

As I told Mayor Sam Adams during an open house about the Rose Quarter development—an incredibly surreal moment in which he interviewed me with a microphone before an audience of hundreds, TV cameras inches away—in an ideal world there will be a day in the future when the Rose Garden is torn down and Memorial Coliseum is still standing. Even after a decade and a half the Rose Garden has acquired plenty of memories of its own inside the building. But it looks like it was designed by Fred Flintstone, and the building (like most all arenas) feels closed off from the outside. There’s scarcely a window anywhere.

The moment with Mayor Adams before the TV cameras was just one of the numerous moments during the Coliseum preservation battle in which I’ve acted far beyond my normal role as an architecture and visual arts critic, becoming something much more like an activist. It’s not something I sought, and in fact I now find myself yearning for a time when the Coliseum fight is over and I’m keeping a lower, slower profile. In the past few weeks I’ve been interviewed by three or four different TV stations, been a guest on a local conservative radio talk show, and interviewed countless times by newspapers like the Portland Mercury. I've also addressed city council, joining former Oregon Governor Victor Atiyeh at the table to speak to council. It’s a temporary case of flipping sides: the interviewer becoming, however modestly and locally-focused, the interviewed. I’ve also had the experience of meeting with numerous city council members and staffers one on one. Sometimes I feel like I’m in the D.A. Pennebaker documentary about James Carville and George Stephanopolous in the 1992 Clinton presidential campaign, “The War Room.” That movie has also provided some good lessons about strategy, and the importance of directly engaging those opposing you with speed and relentlessness.

So, we know the Coliseum is a tarnished architectural gem of the past that should not be demolished. We know the building hasn’t been given a fair chance to succeed economically—that in fact the opposite is true: that it can turn a profit, but merely hasn’t been allowed to do so. Will it be allowed to continue for future generations? It’s still hard to say. Right now our side has apparently won the first of a two-stage battle. As of now the arena, says the mayor, will not be torn down for a baseball stadium. The stadium is now being planned for Southeast Portland’s Lents neighborhood. But nothing is completely guaranteed at this point. Lents is starting to look less ideal a fit than it did a week ago, and the ebbs and flows of the Coliseum’s fate have already cycled up and down countless times. Even if it’s not outright demolished, the building could still be ruined by its own renovation, be it a crass corporate entertainment mall like the Blazers have planned, or the amateur recreation complex another developer has proposed.

I keep hoping that people would look to change the architecture not in the Coliseum’s main arena but at the surrounding underground exhibition hall. It is over 50,000 square feet of space, big enough to host the Portland Auto Show for years before the Oregon Convention Center was built. The exhibition hall also wraps around the veterans’ war memorial there, with a small garden-like space cut into the ground. Think of how much this huge neglected space could be enlivened if you did something like what architect I.M. Pei created for the Louvre museum in Paris in the 1980s: a glass entry area that dramatically guides visitors into the underground space and introducing a bounty of natural light—all while preserving the original building above ground.

 

A few days ago I won a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts to study visual art as part of a small group of arts journalists, curators and artists for an intensive two-week period in June including trips to several major museums up and down the east coast and private lectures from gallerists, critics and other experts. But I reluctantly turned down the fellowship this week because it would have conflicted with the ongoing Coliseum battle. That should give some indication of how important this battle is to me.

Crossing over from writing and criticism to outright activism has given me pause many times during this struggle. As I said, the relative peace of being just a journalist again certainly conjures an attractive feel in my imagination. Like my literary hero, Ferdinand the bull of the popular children’s book Ferdinand, I yearn to leave the bullfighting arena and relax under the olive tree again.

Even so, I was encouraged last Sunday about reading a New York Times Book Review piece by Ruth Conniff about a children’s book biography of Jane Jacobs, “Genius of Common Sense.” Conniff writes: 

“Jacobs…became a well-known magazine journalist and architecture critic, and author of the groundbreaking book The Death and Life of Great American Cities. But she also put her words into action.

With carefully researched articles and community protests alike, she made a name for herself defending so-called slums, like Manhattan’s West Village, against the proponents of urban renewal, who wanted to replace historic areas with high-rise apartment buildings and freeway interchanges.

When it came to the Village, Jacobs had personal reasons for taking up the cause. She was born in Scranton, PA, but moved to New York at 18 and fell in love with the city…renovating an old house on Hudson Street…So when Robert Moses, the ‘master builder’ of New York City, decided Washington Square Park needed a four-lane highway running through it, Jacobs energetically joined a movement to stop it.

At a public meeting about the highway project, Moses stood up and bellowed, ‘There is nobody against this – nobody, nobody, nobody, but a bunch of, a bunch of mothers! Then he stomped out.’

His plan failed.”

Certainly I’m no Jane Jacobs, but there is clearly precedent for writers taking a stand against dreadful urban renewal ideas. Considering I attended New York University, its campus centered on Washington Square Park, I have Jacobs to thank for not letting a freeway go there. And through this process, I’ve often yearned for a similar kind of future, when I can go to, through, or past Memorial Coliseum and see it standing there gleaming. Even better, though, is some as-yet unborn architecture writer of the future having that same chance.