BRIAN LIBBY

Yin & Yang: Concert Hall and Living Room

On Saturday night I experienced two seemingly opposite ends of the music spectrum, although each was enjoyable in its own way. First, Valarie and I went to see the Oregon Symphony perform Shostakovich’s 5th Symphony. Shostakovich is my favorite classical composer, and the 5th is so robust and powerful that instead of politely clapping and perhaps exclaiming, “Bravo”, I felt more like pumping my fists and shouting, “Yeeeaaahhhhh!!!,” as if I were at a football game.

Then, after we enjoyed a quick bite at Clarklewis and I dropped Valarie off at home, I went over to friends Ady and Eric’s for a karaoke party. As I walked in, Ady and her sister were already belting out some 1980s chart topper. Before long, I talked myself into performing Wham’s “Everything She Wants”. Whenever I sing karaoke, I seem to harbor these delusions of grandeur that are quickly shot down to earth when the words finally come out of my mouth. And sure enough, I now cringe thinking of how I’d change octaves mid-song, searching in vain to find a good voice. But I know with karaoke it’s all part of the fun, and as another friend reminded me that night, the people who sing the worst are oddly the most successful.

One other interesting tidbit about the evening was that I wasn’t the only person going from the high culture of the symphony to the joyous ineptitude of karaoke. One of the players from the symphony was actually an attendee at the party. It reminds me of this documentary I watched last week for a review I was writing of the Northwest Film Center’s Reel Music series. It was a documentary called Music From the Inside Out, and it featured members of the Philadelphia Orchestra talking about what music meant to them intellectually, emotionally, socially, etc. The camera would often follow individual members as they engaged in different types of playing outside their work: jamming with traditional Latin music groups, listening to hip hop on headphones, watching a street musician play the accordion while on tour in some foreign city.

I guess what I’m saying is that, as with so many other types of art and culture, I enjoy the mix. Just as I sometimes go from a multi-course dinner of foie gras, twenty-three-green salad and braised duck one night to a double-quarter-pounder and fries another, it’s fun to go from Shostakovich rendered by gifted musicians to “99 Luftballoons” interpreted by a non-musician. I’d be lying if I said the symphony wasn’t infinitely better in a pure musical sense, but the karaoke was a lot of fun too. If only I could just get a little practice in with George Michael’s opus before my next moment on the living room stage.

Derrida

Last night we watched a 2002 documentary called Derrida, about the French philosopher Jacques Derrida, who also happens to have died a few weeks ago. The film was superbly done, which was in itself surprising since I had heard virtually nothing about it when it was released—and it’s my job to know such things. The filmmakers (Amy Ziering Kofman and Kirby Dick) not only deftly intertwined narrated Derrida writings, a fly-on-the-wall look at his everyday life, interviews with the philosopher, and hauntingly beautiful ambient electronic music by Ryuichi Sakamoto. Their style of filmmaking was also tied to Derrida’s philosophy of deconstruction in a way that has me rethinking the very act of filmmaking itself.

Throughout the film, we are reminded—either by Derrida himself, or by the filmmakers’ inclusion of cameras, boom microphones and themselves in the frame—that what we’re seeing on screen is not a true reality. “I don’t usually dress like this,” Derrida says one morning as he’s being filmed in his home. “I usually don’t get dressed unless I’m going out.” Apparently he’d usually be roaming the house in his robe or even just skivvies, but he put on a nice button-down shirt because he was being filmed. This is but one commonplace but important example of the larger idea constantly put forth in the movie. Whether it’s reality-based TV shows like Survivor or more serious documentary films, we are virtually always presented a reality on the screen that is not a reality at all.

When we watch Survivor, for example, we’re not seeing all the cameras and extra takes and logistical stuff going on in the background, and we’re also not getting a sense of the competitors as they really are. It’s an invented world with its own weird rules and situations, and they act accordingly. Yet the show’s producers are counting on the fact that none of this will cross our minds very much. After all, this genre is described as being reality. If we don’t buy into it, the bubble is burst.

And the same is true with more serious documentary filmmaking, like the Derrida. There’s one terrific shot late in the film where the camera views Derrida walking down the street from the vantage point a few stories above in a nearby building. Being able to look down at the philosopher, we see he is surrounded on all sides by two camera operators and a man with a huge boom microphone. In most films, all we would see was Derrida. I love the fact that, because of his own philosophies about reality and the representation of truth, the filmmakers responded accordingly and essentially said what never gets said about the illusion of reality.

As we talked about all this stuff following the film, Valarie said she thinks what viewers are after is not reality per se, but voyeurism. I think there’s some truth to that. If we’re shown what’s happening behind the curtain, the illusion is lost, and the power of that voyeurism is destroyed. In the future as I write film reviews or other kinds of articles, I can’t help but think that this film will have a profound, lasting effect on how I view any number of visual images on the small and big screen alike.

Bread For Thought

Yesterday I worked a nine-hour shift at the Pearl Bakery in Portland as part of a food magazine article I’m writing. I got there at 3AM and helped make dough and form hundreds of loaves. In particular, forming the already-made dough into Ciabatta, baguette, Kaiser rolls, and pastries was a lot harder than I expected. Each one required a very precise hand motion, which had to be repeated hundreds of times as a group of us churned out enough bread to be sold at several markets and restaurants throughout the city. You had to make sure after folding over the flattened piece of dough that the seam was on the bottom. You had to shape certain loaves in a meticulous oval that was at once properly kneaded but still of sufficient shape to rise properly. And it all had to be done according to a rigid schedule that anticipated scores of other steps to follow.

The article is about a company called Vocation Vacations, which allows participants to choose one of several different careers and basically participate in a job shadow. For some it’s a trial run for a career change. For others it’s just to see what another life is like for a spell before going back to your own. You can be a TV producer, a winemaker, even a cowboy (misguided voting tendencies are hopefully not required for that job).

On a personal level, the practical applications of Vocation Vacations don’t interest me very much because I’m not seeking a career change. But the idea of walking in somebody else’s shoes for a day or two is something I find fascinating. With the Pearl Bakery stint, not only was it fascinating to spend a day behind the scenes as all this terrific bread was being made, but it was also a treat—despite the brutal 2:30AM wakeup time—to observe a city asleep. I drove from our apartment in Southeast through downtown to Northwest Portland to get to the Pearl Bakery, and I saw maybe five cars the entire time.

Considering an imaginary list of things that will never happen, I think it would be great for the country if everybody had to do another person’s job now and then, just to get a sense of how it feels: both the work itself and what it requires to go there and do it everyday. Not to get all “Kum-ba-ya”, but we’d probably all get along a lot better.

And in my case, it didn’t hurt getting a free Parisienne loaf to take home.

This Isn't A Guide Dog

The computer desk I sit at all day looks right onto a sidewalk, so in the corner of my eye I see a scattered stream of people who either live in the neighborhood or have come here to visit one of the two other tenants in this building: a dance studio and a popular brunch spot.

The most regular player on this Mulberry Street stage is the dance studio owner, who has a giant perm and about a pack-a-day cigarette habit that takes him out by the dumpster and, next to that, my window. (Yes, it's certainly a picture-perfect view!) There are also lots of hungry hipsters strolling by, and a background that includes lots of Vanagons and Outback. Two houses down it's "clothing optional", I remember one of them telling me at a neighborhood block party.

Outside my window I've recently come to notice a man who frequently walks by with his dog. The first thing I noticed about him was that he was blind. And thus, without thinking about it much at all, I automatically assumed his canine companion was a seeing eye dog. But then, looking a bit more closely I realized that the man was leading the dog, not the other way around. Until then I also had never stopped to consider that he always had one of those sticks to poke in front of where he was waslking. Therefore having a real guide dog would have rendered the stick (I'm obviously ignorant of its formal term) unnecessary.

After this discovery I got to thinking: Have I ever before seen a blind person walking with a dog that was not his or her seeing-eye dog? Either this gentleman who regularly passed my window was really unique, or I had continually made that same incorrect assumption, the victim of a lazy, "If x=y", knee-jerk manner of thinking.

After all, when you really think about it, there's no reason a blind person can't just want a dog because he or she loves dogs. And there's no reason a blind person's pet dog absolutely must have a full-time job as one's guide. I mean, sure it'd be helpful, but an alternative arrangement is certainly not impossible.

So if I have indeed missed seeing or saw and misperceived these blind persons with non-guide dogs, then, how much other plainly obvious stuff is there out there in everyday life that I've got wrong? Whatever amount it is, I have to assume its effect is relatively benign. But it's unnerving to consider how inaccurately one may be seeing the world. It's biological fact that literally no one can see things though an other person's eyes, so it's natural to assume you see things just fine because, after all, what are you going to compare it to?

I'm not talking about this on an optometric level so much as a cognitive one. If one's vision were a TV or movie screen, let's say, the problem wouldn't be that you didn't see all that was in the frame. Instead, the image in frame simply would be either constantly moving or changing to a degree that you didn't have time to ever properly comprehend what you were seeing.

As I write this, it's about an hour before I go over to my friend Andy's house to work on editing a short film with him. It makes me think that it's no wonder I've increasingly come to favor slower-paced editing. If a music video is on one end of the spectrum in terms of rapidity of cutting images, and Jim Jarmusch is on the other end of the spectrum, I'd definitely be closer to Jim than I would to MTV. I think part of the reason is I like to be have enough time to contemplate what I'm seeing in the frame before moving on to the next image or the continuously unveiling moving camera frame.

Incidentally, this brings up a question of whether it's better to review movies on  video or in a theater. On video you can rewind and thus reconsider aspects of a movie more easily. But a theater is the intended visual experience, and a superior one because of the size of the image and the quality of its projection.

Anyway, now if only I could remember the importance of seeing everything when when I'm looking at the window--or peering occasionally from around my computer screen. Come to think of it, while I've been typing this, I've probably missed a lot.

Remembrance of Pork Medallions Past

A couple days after Christmas my friend Mac, visiting from Brooklyn for a few days, left a brief message on my answering machine. There was nothing extraordinary about it--he simply forgot his leftover food after we ate dinner at Montage Catfish Parlor. But somehow I can't bring myself to delete the message:

Hey Brian, it's Mac...I uh...I think I...Hello?...Let me start over. I think left the leftover pork medallions in your car. So look for a giant pterodactyl shaped out of aluminum foil...and I'll talk to you soon.

There's nothing that special about the message itself, but I've long had an obsession with (or at least a keen interest in) preserving memories of good times and friends/family. I take photographs, I shoot video, I've kept a diary on and off, and then there's this web log. But through all of that, very little of that recorded memory has consisted of the human voice. (Video does, of course, but the visual image is dominant.) Ideally I'd love to have some kind of audio tape comprised of good conversations but also meaningless nonsequitors and impromptu remarks.

The few recordings I do have, tucked away in some old dusty box, mean a lot. For a high school history project, for example, I recorded an interview with my Grandpa Lehman about his memories of landing on the beaches of Normandy in World War II.

Where does the desire to catalog, preserve or even horde memories come from? Is it healthy, or does it mean I'm not living enough in the moment? Increasingly I've come to understand that change is constant and that you have consider life a trip down a river more than the stops you make along the way.

But it's been fun to play back a few times on the answering machine Mac's pork medallions message, especially since he is like a lot of old friends in that live far away and probably always will. That's a blessing and a curse for my generation--we've moved further out into the world than most of our parents have, and we've got friends and family scattered all over. Mac is in New York, and another close friend is back in DC, while others are in Los Angeles, San Francisco, London and so on. And Valarie's whole family is out in Pennsylvania.

I don't mean to elevate an answering machine message to more than what it is, but even as I accept the passage of time, I don't apologize for sentimentalizing treasured little documents now and then.

I've Just Gotta Say This: Fresh Beer Does Not (Necessarily)Taste Better

With college football’s bowl season and the NFL playoffs as well as college and pro basketball on TV, I’ve been watching a lot of sports lately. It’s been entertaining to see the Orange Bowl, the NFL wild-card playoffs, and some key early-season basketball games. But along with watching sports comes all the TV commercials one has to endure over and over. I'm definitely feeling a hangover.

Usually I am able to avoid doing the time. While flipping channels, which incidentally is a personal pastime in and of itself, I can avoid watching any commercial in its entirety by merely hitting the channel-change button . But when I’m committed to watching a good game, suddenly I can no longer run. I've got to sit through them.

What used to torment me the most among the commercials in heavy rotation during sporting events was the endless refrain of Bob Seger’s “Like A Rock”. The song accompanied a campaign for Chevy trucks running so long you’d think they comprised some kind of religious mantra—a Hare Krishna for the Red States.

But now it's Budweiser and Coors haunting me. Each has made a pathetic attempt to distract viewers from the prevailing issue of taste—because neither beer possesses much of it, one assumes. Instead, Bud and Coors emphasize the comparatively benign issues of how recently the beer was bottled and whether it's consistently been kept cold through every stage of its trip from brewery to your fridge. Sure, these things matter, but not as much as taste. It's not even close at all.

Budweiser reminds us “fresh beer tastes better”. Maybe so, but I’d rather have a bottle of foreign or microbrew beer that had been sitting in a warehouse on the equator for an extra week or two than a just-brewed Budweiser with ice crystals forming on the outside of the bottle. And Coors says that their goal “is the coldest tasting beer in the world”. What the hell does that even mean? You can take any American "macro-brews" down to absolute zero if you want, and they still wouldn’t taste any better. (The fact that I occasionally drink Pabst Blue Ribbon is of course irrelevant.)

I know this does not comprise the most important message I’ll ever bring forth, but the desire to bellow my opinion from the rooftops about these bogus beer commercials reflects how frustrating it feels being berated by them over and over through the course of the game. Yes, I could simply avoid these ads by not watching sports, but it’s not that easy. I love watching some of the games I’m watching.

Perhaps you could consider this entire passage an indirect way of  my advertising the need for Tivo.

On Guard! Hidden Talents Abound

A few days ago my friend Ned gave me for Christmas a DVD called On Guard! Educational Films of the Cold War Era. The DVD contains four documentaries from the 1950s about nuclear attack and how to possibly survive them. (Key word here being possibly, as in “If you’re the lucky one in seven hundred thousand, you could possibly survive a detonated A-bomb.”) The films are fun, collectively forming an antiquated Midcentury time piece that’s at once hilarious (because documentary filmmaking has come a long way since this), creepy (one remembers the ever-present threat felt in those days from the specter of nuclear war) and oddly heartening (every era had its fears, so today’s terrorist scare is put in an historical context that feels more par-for-the-course than a sign of impending apocolypse). And as an added bonus for us webfoots, one of the films is set here in Portland.

What’s really the coolest thing about the On Guard! DVD, though, is that Ned collected these films himself, designed all the packaging, and personally oversaw the pressing of several copies—all just to give away to friends.

Previously, Ned has also come out with three CDs, each one a compilation of music from a particular era and genre of yesteryear. First came tiki and Hawaiian music mix, next a Bossa Nova retrospective, and finally earlier this year a tribute to cowboy and western film songs. As with the recent DVD, Ned did the graphics and wrote liner notes for each one, and in the case of the CDs the liner notes contained an extensive essay about the history behind the music.

Ned’s DIY productions of kitchy-but-genuinely-good music and film stems in part from his graduate degree in museum curating – or something like that. But I assume his education further speaks to a more enduring love for putting these little packages together.

All this makes me think of the various art projects and other hobbies that many of my friends have going. My friend Rob is a painter in addition to being a filmmaker and a television news graphic designer. My friend Ady works for Chamber Music Northwest by day and finds time out of work to make documentaries, build furniture, silk screen, play clarinette (she’s classically trained) and partner with her music-teacher boyfriend to instruct a middle school marimba playing ensemble. My friends Rosie and Paul both have interest in and talent for writing fiction when they’re not designing software or teaching high school, respectively. My uncle Allan is an excellent guitarist. And here at 1743 Mulberry, I willingly volunteer that Valarie is quite probably a more talented pure writer than I am.

I’m happy for all my friends who have all this interesting work going on, and yet I feel bad for them because in nearly every case, there often just aren’t enough hours in the day to devote to it. How lucky I am that one of the primary things I’m passionate about doing – writing – is something I also happen to do for a living. It’s not to say all those people hate their day jobs, but I’m not sure how many would do it for free, or if it is something they're just as passionate about as their personal projects. Sure, I love to take still photos and make short films, but if I were doing either of those things for a living, I’d miss writing, which I’m overall blessedly fulfilled by.

But all is not lost. All but one of the people discussed here including myself are in our early thirties. (Sorry Allan--you're the one exception.) Hopefully one day Ned’s new release will come not from the computer in his bedroom, but from his independent music and video label.

Pulling the Curtain on Voice-Overs

Everybody has a peculiar talent or two, and one of mine has always been identifying famous people doing voice-overs on television. Valarie and I will be crashed in front of the tube watching a commercial, and I’ll say, for example, “The guy narrating that Navy ad narrated Ken Burns’ Jazz documentary.” As a result, I’ve become interested in how a lot of famous actors who presumably wouldn’t be caught dead lending their image to a TV commercial (except Catherine Zita-Jones in those T-Mobile ads) often are willing to lend their voices.

To name a few: Julia Roberts is the voice of America Online’s most recent campaign. Gary Sinise narrates Cadillac spots. John Lurie (Fishing With John, Down By Law) lends his gravelly voice to Toyota commercials. Stockard Channing can be heard urging us to drink milk. For years Donald Sutherland has hawked Volvos. Jim Belushi is the spokesperson for Johnsonville Brats. And Gene Hackman does voice-overs for Lowes, after many years with United Airlines and several others.

I’m always suspicious that these actors are hoping we won’t recognize them. That way, they can earn a hefty paycheck without the integrity of their acting careers being threatened. Sure, you could argue that by now Gene Hackman knows that we recognize him, and that it doesn’t take away from his multi-Oscar-winning career. But why is it we’ve never seen him actually appear in any of the countless commercials he has voiced? I think most actors know they’ll be perceived by many as sellouts if they appear on commercials. So is doing a voice-over for a commercial in which you don’t appear merely approaching the sellout line without crossing it, or is it just crossing it clandestinely?

I think it comes down somewhat to the product being sold. I doubt Gene Hackman has ever spent much time in the suburbs shopping for do-it-yourself home improvement products. I can, however, picture Donald Sutherland driving a Volvo. Does that make Hackman more of a sellout than Sutherland? Not necessarily, but Sutherland maintains just a hair more dignity in my book.

That said, I can’t help but want to pull the curtain from behind all of these Wizards of Oz.

Shorthand, Souza and U-3

Last night Valarie returned from a ten-day trip to her familial home in Pennsylvania. While there are more reasons I’m happy to have her back than I can detail here, I was reminded this afternoon that one of my favorites is the chance to renew the conversational shorthand we share.

Pardon the crassness of this example, but after going out for breakfast and browsing for books at Powell’s today, I found myself desperately having to go to the bathroom. On the drive home I found myself humming a few bars of some old John Philip Sousa march. Valarie instantly knew the reference: There is a scene in The Right Stuff in which John Glenn’s re-entry into to Earth's atmosphere is dangerously jeopardized by a lost heat shield on his Gemini space capsule. As the capsule shakes violently and the heat rises almost unbearably, Glenn begins obsessively humming a Sousa march. As I piloted our sedan through the Hawthorne district, contorting myself behind the wheel to withstand the frantic call of nature, I began humming Sousa in just the same way, and Valarie instantly giggled. Granted she has a very low giggling threshold, but the point is that a few bars of "When Johnny Comes Marching Home" better expressed the need to run for the bathroom than words ever could.

There are all kinds of other shorthand references Valarie and I share, and countless ones I enjoy with other friends too. My old friend Reese and I still quote lines from National Lampoon’s Vacation nearly twenty years after the days we’d watch the movie over and over again as eighth graders. (“Don’t know why they call this stuff hamburger helper; does just fine by itself!”) My friend Paul and I still enjoy imitating our high school home-economics teacher, Mrs. Simonsen, who slurred and finished every sentence by saying, “Kay?”

With my sister there is a limitless array of Simpsons lines and imitations of our mom. For example, years ago we passed mom on the way to the store, and she waved for us to pull over so she could ask us to pick up vacuum cleaner bags. There was something about the rigorousness with which she enunciated the bag size, U-3 (“Yyyouuuuu threeee!!!”), that has made us cackle ever since. We also like to mock our dad saying, "That's the best steak I've ever eaten!" when he gets his hands on any cut of red meat this side of Black Angus.

Regardless of its origin, there’s something pleasingly familiar about exchanging an oft-repeated line with someone you’re close to. I hesitate to get too philosophical about a topic I began with an anecdote about dashing for the toilet, but I think the repeating of one phrase over and over again is at least indirectly a kind of affirmation, a ritual. It’s just for laughs, but it reinforces a bond you share. It's the verbal equivalent of some secret handshake, not because it's at the exclusion of others but nonetheless fun to be of exclusive party to.

Oh, and just in case you’re wondering, I was able to make it home to the bathroom before combusting.