BRIAN LIBBY

The Virtue of Standing Pat

At noon today the NBA’s trading deadline passed. With a record of 21-31, a handful of players due to become unrestricted free agents at the end of the year, and others with bad character reputations, the Trail Blazers were expected to be one of the teams most likely to cut a deal. But when the clock struck noon this afternoon, no deal was done. And I couldn’t be happier.

It’s not to say Portland doesn’t need change. Deservedly or not, coach Maurice Cheeks probably will be gone after the season ends. The team has two legitimate starting power forwards, Zach Randolph and Shareef Abdur-Rahim, the latter of whom is sure to sign with another team as a free agent this summer and could have brought an outside shooter—something the Blazers desperately need. Starting shooting guard Derrick Anderson has been streaky and mostly ineffective. Although he’s been the most consistent player on the team this year, point guard Damon Stoudamire is clearly expendable, not to mention being another free agent at season’s end. And despite signing a contract extension last summer, an outburst against Coach Cheeks has confirmed may people’s fears that even with enormous talent, small forward Darius Miles doesn’t have the character to be a valuable player in this league.

Still, I’m glad Portland didn’t make a deal, because what was available to them right now was just a mirage of help. The main deal Portland reportedly considered would have sent Abdur-Rahim, Travis Outlaw and another player (possibly Ruben Patterson) to the Milwaukee Bucks for Michael Redd and Keith Van Horne. Redd is a free agent at the end of the season as well, and Van Horne has a big, long contract that doesn’t match his value as a player. And I'd hate to see us give up Outlaw, whose career is in its infancy (we did that with Jermaine O'Neal and it bit us in the ass) or Patterson, the scrappy defensive specialist whose insertion into the game always provides a much-needed burst of energy.

General manager John Nash probably felt a lot of pressure to pull the trigger on a deal. Many fans surely felt we didn’t have anything to lose considering that this season is a sinking ship. But I’d like to think the Blazers’ having stood pat as the trading deadline passed is an indication that Nash is willing to take the long view and eschew stopgap trades that happen for little more reason than the sake of doing something. It’s better to steadily, consistently build the right team the right way, even if it takes years.

I also think there’s a larger lesson here. When things aren’t going the way one wants, it’s natural to flail about in search of a fix. To a large degree that’s a good inclination, but there’s also genuine prudence in just waiting and watching until the right opportunities come along. Being in business for myself, I’ve faced that with the inevitability of ebbs and flows in the amount of work I’m getting: Sometimes it’s too much and sometimes it’s not enough. And while I do believe that the modicum of success I’ve had has been due to a certain amount of tenaciousness, I also see that there is virtue in patience. In basketball the cliché is “letting the game come to you”, but clichés become oft-repeated clichés because there’s some elemental truth in them.

Performance Piece

This week Valarie and I are going to our third classical music concert in less than a month. Chamber Music Northwest is in the midst of a Brahms festival that we're keen on. And last month we caught Oregon Symphony performances of Dvorak and, my personal favorite, Shostakovich. I've fallen in love with the natural sound of the instruments you can only get in person. It just seems to envelop you from all sides, and yet it doesn't overpower the ear either.

Unfortunately, even though I've bought a fair amount of classical albums over the past couple years, all of them have been disappointing sonically. The CD and stereo system just can't seem to replicate the real performance. And listing to classical music on record I also seem to spend the whole time turning the volume up and down depending on what's happening in the piece, because some parts I can barely hear and others are too loud. It's frustrating to only get that sublime experience of a classical performance a few times a year.

Ironically, I've always felt the exact opposite with rock music. Although there's something to be said for the theatrics of seeing a band play, I've never liked live rock as well as albums. Give me a pair of headphones anyday, where I can hear the guitar, bass and drums in equal harmony, focusing on the tiny details of a good production. But I also just don't like the logistics of rock performances--even if that makes me sound like an old fogey. Shows never start any earlier than 9:00, you usually have to sit through at least one opening band, and you're actually not sitting at all but standing for hours. It's not to say there haven't been some rock shows that blew me away. I remember seeing Fugazi in about 1993 with my friend Paul and the electricity would have made the folks at Bonneville Dam blush.

Still, it makes me wonder if much will have changed about music performance over the next generation or two. Pianist Glenn Gould famously (and wrongly) predicted that the ubiquity of stereo recordings would soon render classical performance obsolete. I'd never make the same prediction about rock, because it's so ingrained as a sub-culture--and that's great. But next time you're at CBGB or the Whiskey-A-Go-Go, don't expect to see me there.

Remembering Michael Rolfson

A year or two ago I read an article in The New Yorker magazine about newspaper obituary enthusiasts. Apparently there are lots of people who love them as little miniature biographies of ordinary people, and for others I suppose it’s just a morbid curiosity. But ever since reading the article, I’ve tried to pay a little more opinion to that page in the newspaper, at least the feature-length story they seem to run most days under the banner “Life Stories”.

Today’s main Oregonian obit, about former psychologist Michael Rolfson, has particularly stuck with me. Apparently Rolfson grew up in the Portland area and worked here treating mental illness until he had to give up his career after developing afflictions of his own: agoraphobia and what sounds to have been schizophrenia. A burly former weightlifter with a thick beard, he had to sell his house and move into a low-income assisted living apartment with medical bills of $50,000 per year.

The story also goes on to describe Rolfson as a younger man, before his demons got the better of him, earning “multiple degrees in psychology, literature, literature and speech,” and having “once taught at several Portland colleges”. Generous to a fault, he would refuse to lock his door and maintained his faith even in those who robbed him. And despite what’s described as an ogre-like appearance, he was purportedly quite a lady’s man as well, having been involved in a “group marriage”—when else, but in the 70s.

I love the innocuous little details obituaries often provide, such as with Michael the fact that he loved the oyster beef at Hung Far Low, a Portland Chinese restaurant. Or that he “liked a cigarette and craved a snifter of the Christian Brothers he could not drink because of his medications”.

Not every obituary profiles such an interesting and ultimately tragic life (Rolfson died of heart failure at 60). But when done right this type of writing blends the important and mundane. I enjoy that because little details about people helps complete our picture of them. Yet unfortunately most non-obituary profiles are either too official or too trite, and rarely a nice balance of both . We are the sum of our greatest and worst deeds, but also so much in between.

That said, my motivation for writing about Michael Rolfson’s obituary is not to focus on his love of oyster beef, but rather to join the Oregonian’s obit page in briefly paying tribute to a guy my heart goes out to and, perhaps even more importantly, I would like to have known.

Another Kind of Red Dawn

I have to relay an incredible story my dad emailed me yesterday:

"On Monday we got a letter with a foreign postmark. I couldn't tell where it was from. Inside was a letter from a Russian family thanking us for a charitable gift they had received 12 years earlier.  As I remember the charity drive was sponsored by Mom’s work and had to do with a famine or crisis in the Russian far east. [It was the early 90s right after the Soviet Union broke apart—hard times for a lot of people.] I think we were asked at the time to include a family picture and address with the contributions we sent to them.  Apparently this Russian family has kept our family picture in a revered spot and finally wondered if it was possible to actually talk to a family in the USA. They gave a complete rundown on how their family is doing since our gift arrived. It blows my mind that me, a retired Air Force officer would be corresponding with a retired officer from the Red Army.  Go figure."

Just when I’m ready to give up hope in humanity something like this comes along. You send twenty bucks to Africa after one of those TV pleas from Sally Struthers or Indonesia after the tsunami, maybe some kind of modest care package to go with it, and you forget about the whole thing before long. But perhaps you actually do more good than you’ve imagined. Apparently my parents’ gift to this family in Russia really meant something, and it’s very touching to think of some hungry, downtrodden family amidst the unforgiving tundra near Siberia being helped significantly by a gift that probably wasn’t all that huge by American standards. And by the way, these were not exactly peasants: the father of that family was an economist, and the mother was a speech therapist. If they were starving you know it was pretty bad there.

Then there is the backstory behind the gift and the relationship it created. As my dad mentioned, the patriarch of that Russian family had served in the Soviet military at the same time my dad was in the Air Force. People forget so quickly what the Cold War felt like, but the threat of nuclear war was at least as scary as the current age of terror. And living in the US or the USSR of course gave you a heightened sense of vulnerability. I remember seeing the movie Red Dawn as a kid and saying, "Gee Dad, a war like that would never really happen, would it?" And he said something to the effect of, "Well, actually it could." Even 14 years after the Soviet Union ceased to exist, I feel comforted that these old enemies can symbolically break bread through the mail. It gives me hope for today's Bin Laden and Bush-bred morass.

Coincidentally, a few days ago Valarie also resumed correspondence with a pen pal in Sheffield, England who she has never met but first began writing back and forth with many years ago after bonding in an Oasis fans’ chatroom. (I’ve since bonded with him over NFL football.) I think it’s great when people in different countries find a way to meet each other can correspond. It could be through the privileged helping the needy, like with my parents and that Russian family and dramatized so hilariously in the movie About Schmidt (“Life is short, Ndugu…”). Or it could be like Valarie and her Gallagher-groupie friend: socioeconomic equals who happen to live a few thousand miles apart.

These days there is increasingly a global cultural divide best summed up by the title of that book “Jihad Versus McWorld”. I doubt many people in Afghanistan or Iraq have computers and DSL, but there ought to be a way for individuals like us to put a more human face to each other’s respective cultures…just like it has for my dad and those commie-Ruskies.