BRIAN LIBBY

My School Box

Recently I’ve been thinking about the craft of writing biographies and how, despite being a journalist, I’m just not cut out to tell someone’s life story in the standard narrative manner—you know, with the “Then young Johnny Carson attended the third grade at Plains Elementary School in Omaha” kind of biography. I’m too lazy to do all that research.

At the same time, I’ve become interested in the notion of biographies being told through examining the artifacts people hold on to—their keepsakes and such. I don’t mean it’d always be compelling to look at some old lady’s spoon collection or a lock of hair from junior. I mean those “Rosebud” kinds of items, to borrow from Citizen Kane, the items that represent a kind of personal archaeology. 

As a kind of test case, I’d like to talk a little about one of my own—and before anyone tosses it into the proverbial fire like poor Charles Foster Kane's sled.

It’s called My School Box. It’s small, yellow and made of cardboard. I used it to store my various pencils, erasers, and other detritus of the second and third grade. I know this because on one side of the box, where solicited by a few blank lines for my eight or nine-year-old scrawl, I list my teacher as “Watson”, and on another as “Martin”—my second and third grade teachers, respectively. Afterward it spent the next twenty-five years or so in the top drawer of my desk at home.

The box has a series of hand-drawn illustrations of a banal midcentury modern-looking school on the front (not that I don't like midcentury modern), a yellow school bus on one side, and a couple of kids running for school with books in their hands. But over the years I placed various stickers on the box. On the top I have a butterfly covering the head of the boy running to class, as well as stickers of a gremlin from the movie “Gremlins”, Christopher Reeve running in a field toward the camera as Superman, a drawing of John Lennon’s face with the block letters “JOHN LENNON”, and finally a sticker with the slogan, “I’VE GOT THE EATIES FOR WHEATIES”. Funny that I don’t remember ever eating Wheaties as a kid. I was more of a Cocoa Puffs fan.

I’m embarrassed to say the inside top of the box has a campaign sticker for Bob Packwood. (Embarrassed less, by the way, by his later disgrace upon sexual harassment charges, and more by the simple fact of his being a Republican. But I deserve some slack—my parents voted GOP, so I didn’t know any better at the time, and I later saw the err of my ways.) That same portion of the box also includes a Portland Trail Blazers sticker featuring Terry Porter taking it strongly to the hoop. I’ve also drawn a rocket ship (I was way into astronauts in those days) and have hand-written the slogan “FIRE UP!”, which was the marketing slogan for the Oregon Ducks football team in 1980.

I also chuckle seeing the price tag is still on this thing after 25 years. It reads “NON-FOODS” and, below that “49¢”.

Inside the box I’ve kept a number of small items over the years.

There is a note card from Valarie written on May 25, 1995, just a few weeks after we started dating. It’s got a beautiful quote from Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse.

There is also a New York University window sticker that never made it to my car; I don’t like overloading my vehicles with stickers, and if I’m going to put just one on the window, it’ll be for the Oregon Ducks.

The box also contains a cute school picture of my sister Sara from 2nd grade in 1991. She’s now 21 and about to graduate from college at USC.

I’ve kept lots of tickets over the years. Closest to the top is one from a Yankees game against Oakland at Yankee Stadium on April 22, 1994. I seem to be recall being in the front row of the upper level and being excited to see Jose Canseco.

Next up is a basketball card of the Blazers’ Cliff Robinson (this was before he asked to be called Clifford) from 1992 that I got free with a loaf of Franz Bread. In the photo, Robinson is slam-dunking against a Lakers team (gotta love that) that includes AC Green, Byron Scott and Sam Perkins. What’s really amazing is that Robinson, who’ll turn 40 this December, is still playing in the NBA.

There is also a handful of various student ID cards: NYU from my senior year, 1995; McMinnville High School, sophomore year in 1987-88; a ‘Free ID Card’ I got at Payless Drug Store in 1985; NYU, freshman year; 7th grade; and finally, MHS student body cards from junior year senior year.

More tickets now. One is from the Basketball Tournament of the Americas on June 28, 1002, in which the newly formed “Dream Team” of NBA players, formed for the 1992 Olympics, played Cuba at Memorial Coliseum in Portland. My dad and I saw the US win that game by 81 points. The starting five was Magic Johnson, Michael Jordan, Patrick Ewing, Larry Bird and Karl Malone. Portland’s own Clyde Drexler came off the bench to a standing ovation. I also remember before the game the Cuban players asked to have their pictures taken with the US team.

I also have tickets from an NFL exhibition game between the 49ers and Broncos that my dad went to at Eugene’s Autzen Stadium on August 29, 1970 (price $6); a Simon & Garfunkel show at the Paramount Theater in New York on October 30, 1998; two Oregon Ducks football games against USC and Oregon State with no year listed (it was probably the late 80s); and two unused tickets to the 1991 Freedom Bowl in Anaheim, in which Oregon lost 32-31 on a controversial no-good call on what would have been Oregon’s winning two-point conversion.

Next I find a circular Cub Scout patch commemorating a day camp I went to in 1980. This is followed by a metal Pittsburgh Steelers sign, and a cutout from the newspaper of an ad for Ocean Way Motors in McMinnville, where I worked during the summer of 1989. My co-worker Matt Mattecheck gave it to me, and wrote all our funny nicknames for the sales staff pictured in the add (“San Antonio” for Frank Celentano, “Pink Floyd” for Lloyd Mobley, “Richter Dichter” for Bob Richter, and so on). Matt drew two arrows to various salesmen with the inscription, “What a dick!”

After a baseball card featuring Cincinatti’s Eric Davis from 1989, I find a school photo of my cousin Susie at age 14, then some more snapshots of various relatives as well as a shot from my 14th birthday, attended by my friends Reese and Todd as well as Amy, a girl I had a crush on at the time but who had been hospitalized with a heart defect. Reese is so big that in the photo he’s on his knees on the floor while the rest of us are sitting in chairs, but Reese is still taller. (I'm happy to report, incidentally, that he's grown up to be a bad-ass prosecutor knicknamed "The Velvet Hammer".)

There is a postcard of Judson Memorial Church at NYU that I gave to my comparative politics professor, Ernest Oliveri, at my final exam, with the idea that he could mail me back my final grade. Which ended up being a B+. Despite being a good grade, it’s frustrating, because ultimately I finished my undergrad studies one point short of graduating Cum Laude. Had the B+ been an A, I would have made it. Another postcard reads SHALOM FROM ISRAEL and was written to me by my college friend Glenn during a summer he spent in Tel Aviv.

Next there are several photos of my dog Nancy, a gorgeous German Shepherd/coyote mix who passed away when I was in college. And still another photo, this one an official shot taken for my parks & rec swim team, shows me posed in my little blue and yellow Speedo suit, with the none-too-subtle photographer's imprint Stewarts of Dayton right on the front.

More baseball cards now: Ruben Sierra, Alex Sanchez, Dave Parker, Greg Maddux, and a Bo Jackson rookie card. And more Blazer cards from Franz Bread loaves featuring Buck Williams and Terry Porter.

More snapshots: me at Madison Square Garden for a Knicks game against the Lakers in about 1994; my friends Joel and Nathan playing backgammon in 1991 when Joel and I drove down to visit Nathan at the University of Oregon; a faded old picture of me hunting for Easter eggs with my mom and my grandpa; and two shots of a C-130 military transport plane (my dad was in the Air Force).

At the bottom of the box is a program from an April 1991 show by jazz saxophonist Branford Marsalis at New York’s Village Vanguard club. This was before Branford had, to my great dismay, become the Tonight Show bandleader for Jay Leno. I got him to sign my program after the show. Also written in the inside is a message from my friend, with whom I went to the performance: “He just played a lick from ‘Mad About You’”, referring to the song on Sting’s Soul Cages LP from that year.

It seems very likely that others will find these contents a bore, but for me they are essential artifacts I’m determined to hold on to come spring-cleaning or a trip to the dump. I’m not sure if it collectively tells my story better than I could do with a standard narrative, but somehow it feels comforting to know this junk remains with me.

The Unscored Touchdown

I think Coach Puckett saw it as a lark. It was the last game of the season for our 5th grade intramural football team, the Steelers. Being short and scrawny, I had spent most of our games on the sideline except for various kickoffs and short stretches as a defensive back or flanker. But Coach Puckett, a burly bearded man who resembled the sea captain on The Simpsons who always goes, “Arrrrr”, probably knew how desperately I dreamed of and yearned for gridiron glory.

“Alright guys,” the coach said as he entered our huddle (coaches were allowed to join us on the field in pee-wee football to call plays). “We’re gonna do an end-around to Libby.” I clearly remember Puckett with a tongue-in-cheek smirk, but for me it was as if Carmina Burana was suddenly blaring between my ears. After months of sweaty, bruising practice and years of daydreaming, the moment—my moment—had arrived.

It was late in the game and our team had a safe lead of a couple touchdowns. We had the ball deep in on our opponent’s territory, maybe the 10 yard line or so. I lined up in the flanker position (a quasi wide receiver) on the left side of the line of scrimmage. When the quarterback hiked the ball I proceeded to run to the right, and as I came around he handed me the ball.

In countless football games over the years during recess at school, I’d come to think of myself as an above-average talent at football. Although undersized, I had very good balance and could zigzag my way around defenders. I scored a lot of touchdowns on the unmarked Newby Elementary playing field just beyond the playground. I also could throw tight spirals after hundreds of hours playing catch with my dad and various neighborhood friends like Joe Czekalski and Jeff Briscoe.

Football also dominated my interest in books and, of course, on television. I idolized Terry Bradshaw, “Mean Joe” Greene and the rest of the Pittsburgh Steelers, who at that time in the late 1970s were in the process of winning a then-unprecedented four Super Bowls. I memorized the score, most valuable player and stadium for every Super Bowl. I’d challenge people to pick a number between one and fifteen and I’d then register all the data like a robot.

“Super Bowl XIII? Why of course that’s Steelers 35, Cowboys 31. Bradshaw got knocked unconscious by DD Lewis and Hollywood Henderson, but he held his ground and threw the winning touchdown pass. Super Bowl VII? Gotta be the Dolphins over the Redskins 14-7, the one where the kicker tried to pass and threw an interception.”

I remember taking the dog for a walk with my dad and making my case as to why playing quarterback in the NFL was a viable goal. People often tell kids they can accomplish anything they set their minds to, and as a naive white middle class child from a stable small town family, I never had or saw any reason why I couldn’t be the next Terry Bradshaw. “I know I can do this,” I pleaded to my dad as the dog sniffed the sidewalk-abutting shrubs of Fleishauer Lane.

When the chance came at age 10 to play organized football with pads and helmets, I’d already been waiting for several years. But it was a rude awakening.

I didn’t recognize the uneasy feeling that came when we were outfitted with equipment. I was so excited to have, for the first time in my life, the helmet and shoulder pads that came with membership on a real team. These were the accoutrements of my heroes, and to strap on this battle gear could only be a right of passage into the field of dreams for which I was destined.

But the helmet felt heavy on my head. How could I fire off a pass with this giant bubble weighing me down? Ditto for the shoulder pads. How was I supposed to lift my arms with this weird fusion of plastic and foam on? And even back as a 5th grader I always had an acute eye for aesthetics. Why did players on different teams all have white helmets on? Where are our logos? Hey, the Steelers don’t wear red jerseys, they wear black! Hell, there’s not even a stripe on the pants!

Then there was practice. For years I’d spent not only just about every recess, but every afternoon following school playing tackle football. But that had consisted of, say, three against three with two receivers and a quarterback facing three defensive backs. Here they wanted everybody to line up right in front of each other and knock one another down, using our helmeted heads as projectiles.

Coach Puckett’s favorite practice drill was called “Root Hog”. The team gathered around as two players of the coach’s choosing got in four-point stances with the tops of their helmets just barely touching, faces looking at the ground. When Puckett yelled “Hut”, the objective was to drive your opponent backwards, with your back legs as the engine and your head the bumper. I had my ups and downs at Root Hog. Occasionally I’d overtake a player who dwarfed me in size, to Puckett’s enthusiastic if patronizing approval. Other times I was driven backwards in a kind of horizontal free-fall, my hands clutching at the grass as if it were a tree branch I could cling to before I crashed to the ground.

For much of the season, standing on the sidelines next to Coach Puckett, I’d alternated between frustration and denial. There was no getting around the fact that while my uniform stayed clean, Neil Dilper was happily getting his muddy scoring touchdown after touchdown. Deep down I knew he had something I didn’t: a physical fearlessness. It wasn’t just that he was bigger than me, but that he was as happy to knock you down if you were in his way as he was to dance around you. I just wanted to dance. Somehow I’d come to adore the game of football without ever completely acknowledging that the game consists of people trying to brutalize each other. I wanted to make the great plays but wasn’t willing to succumb to the sweaty, bruising side of the game.

Maybe it’s only hindsight, but when Puckett called the end-around play for me during garbage time of the season’s last game, I think on some subconscious level I knew scoring would be at best a consolation prize I could take away from an otherwise failed experiment. But football so utterly ruled my imagination at that age that it would take years before I was ready—or able—to willingly let the game slip from my grasp. I’d go on to play on various teams for another three or four seasons, routinely stuck at positions I didn’t want to play or on the sideline as bigger, better teammates snared the glory.

Perhaps it’s needless to say at this point, but my end-around didn’t make it to the end zone. Sometimes when recalling the moment, I tell people I was stopped just short of the goal line. But when I really try to see through the fog of memory, it’s possible that the defense swarmed me around me and I was tackled after no gain. Puckett sent in another player to replace me after the whistle blew, and on the very next play the team scored on a quarterback sneak. “Don’t worry,” the coach said. “We’ll get you another chance.” But even then I could do the math: the clock was ticking in the 4th quarter of the last game, and next year I’d have another coach. The season ended with a consolation of sorts: a pizza party at Shakey’s. But I never got any closer to scoring that elusive touchdown.

Although having scored on Puckett’s end-around call would have even today stood as one of the most satisfying achievements of my life, I now see it as the beginning of a long transformation in which I learned that neither football nor any other sport—and I played almost all of them at that age—would be my life’s pursuit. I'd routinely scored in the top two to five percent on achievement tests in school, but for many years it barely, if ever, occurred to me that using your brain was better than using your body.

I’m certainly not complaining about how things turned out for me. As I sit here writing about pee-wee football, it’s the middle of a weekday and most people I know are at work, while as a writer I can recline here at home in my slippers and sweat pants. I know I’m extraordinarily fortunate to have a career that’s more than a career, an endeavor that gratifies me far beyond the simple necessity of paying the bills. I more or less make a living by talking to people who fascinate me and then telling other people about it—hard to beat that.

After all, I think Neil Dilper, our team's star, has spent some time in prison.

Nevertheless, I place a lot of personal emphasis on that unscored touchdown, because it represents the first time in my sheltered boyhood when I had to really change course and learn to see opportunity in failure. If somebody had said to me then, “Look kid, you’re too short and not talented enough to play football, even at the very lowest levels of small town pee wee league fare,” I wouldn’t have been able to accept it. But it was true, and ultimately it was just the first of many hard truths I had to not only accept, but use as trial-by-error motivation.

And yet for all the deconstruction I’ve done of why that moment was a beginning as much as an end, I must confess it still eats away at me some twenty-three years later. I think one reason I’ve always loved football is that, with its well-marked yard lines and boundaries, it’s a simple, literal register of whether you’re successfully moving forward to your goal or being pushed back by the opposition. Sometimes I dream of that unscored touchdown as if it represents a life of failing to cross that golden line, beyond which all kinds of elusive successes lie. But perhaps not scoring is just the fodder I needed to start lining up in different formations on other, more far away fields.

About the Films

Over the last few weeks I've been putting together a DVD compilation of the six completed short films I've made over the last two years. One thing I decided to include was liner notes about each of the works. I thought I'd include them here:

Kerra Skola consists of a single continuous shot: a trip through an automatic car wash. I simply mounted a video camera onto the dashboard of my car, paid $5 for the Triple Polish, and hit the ‘Record’ button. During editing, Rob Tyler and I employed techniques such as the motion-blur to render the machine’s brush twists and water sprays in a more abstract manner. I’ve always found carwashes to be a kaleidoscopic diversion from everyday life: a performance you watch through the windshield. And that was what I hoped to portray. (The title, incidentally, is Icelandic for “car wash”, or at least “car” and “wash”. I happened to be flipping through Rob’s Icelandic dictionary as we were editing.) Most of the audio is existing sounds from the carwash picked up with the microphone on the camera, which Rob then manipulated similarly to the visuals. We did add one external bit of external audio: radio transmissions from Soviet cosmonauts, which again was meant to emphasize the otherworldly atmosphere.

Tsukiji 5AM was shot entirely at the Tsukiji fish market in Tokyo on my first morning in the city. I’d woken up very early at my hotel with jet lag and remembered the market’s main period of operation was around 4-5AM. It was very important personally that I only minimally edit what I shot (everything you see comes in chronological order) to preserve the integrity of the original experience. With Andy Blubaugh’s help, I simply paired about fifteen minutes of footage into about seven, removing the redundant or otherwise unwanted shots. All the sound comes from what the camera’s microphone picked up. I also omitted narration or other ways of imposed storytelling. I wanted Tsukiji 5AM to retain the same wonder and bewilderment that I, as a foreign visitor, experienced being at the market. It’s an extraordinarily impressive operation, with so much coordinated chaos. But at the same time, seeing so much butchering makes the film, however unintended, an essay on human consumption.

Western Travelogue #2 consists of a series of images, most of them unrelated, that I shot with a Super-8 camera. I got in the habit for several months of taking the camera on various outings: a boat ride in Yaquina Bay on the Oregon Coast, or a walk through Portland Central Eastside industrial area. Each shot is followed by a couple seconds of black screen, because I think of this film as a kind of a moving slideshow, where each image is loosely related to the whole, but considered on its own as well. Although it’s completely non-narrative, there is still a kind of sequential change from urban landscapes at the beginning to natural ones later. The end montage of pigeons in flight is a good example of a recurring personal style: attempting to mine beauty from seemingly tattered, tarnished subjects, often with localized scrutiny that takes the subject out of its context to be viewed as more abstract physical forms and patterns. Mercifully, none of those pigeons managed to make a direct hit on me or my clothes. The music is a collaboration with Eric Schopmeyer, who skillfully articulated and transformed my vague ideas about melody, instrumentation and mood.

Super Terrific Shinjuku is a companion piece to Tsukiji 5AM. Shot on the same trip to Tokyo in June of 2004, it chronicles an evening I spent in the Shinjuku neighborhood, with its flashing neon and spectacle of shops, clubs and many, many people. I loved seeing so many neon signs in a language that I not only couldn’t understand, but didn’t even know any of the characters from. It made the patterns of light and color stand out to me all the more. I feel a little guilty about including the performing monkey footage, because I feel sorry for the poor animal. But in the end I just couldn’t resist.

Western Travelogue #1 is the first film I ever made. Shot on super-8, it chronicles three distinct landscapes: city, mountains, and beaches. It also includes narration in Japanese without subtitles; I’ve always been fascinated by the musicality of languages I don’t understand. I imagined this resembling a documentary about Oregon that I might have stumbled upon in a junk shop or thrift store on a decaying old film reel. I enjoyed the idea of viewers filling in the blanks, seeing images of towering fir trees or horses trotting along a ridge and imagining what these voices are saying about them. Thanks to Ned Howard for his work with not only the narration, but also the recurring waltz music in the background. The middle portion of mountains and forest land was photographed going to and from my aunt Laura’s funeral, and is intended as a tribute to her.

Nocturne began the same way as Kerra Skola, with my video camera affixed to the dashboard of my car. This time, however, the occasion was an 8-minute drive from my home in Southeast Portland at 3AM to a bakery in the Pearl District, crossing the Willamette River via the Hawthorne Bridge and passing through Downtown. What I hoped to convey was the juxtaposition of solitude and eeriness that came from traversing a dense urban environment that is all but devoid of people. Unlike with Kerra Skola, I didn’t use any editing techniques to enhance the action onscreen. With this film I wanted to maintain a greater sense of the reality from which this moment was born. That said, Ned Howard’s ambient musical score is essential to the film’s haunting tone.