BRIAN LIBBY

The "Don't get cocky" Pause

There's a short scene in the original Star Wars that's always been one of my favorites. Ben (a.k.a. Obi-Wan) Kenobi has just died by Darth Vader's light saber, essentially sacrificing himself so Luke would escape. Now Luke, Leia, Han and Chewie are escaping in the Millennium Falcon. Luke is crushed by Ben's death, but with a squadron of tie fighters approaching Han needs his help.

After Han and Luke have mounted the Falcon's two gun turrets and are shooting away, Luke exclaims excitedly, "I got one!" And Han, ever my hero, says, "Great, kid. Don't get cocky." (Which is particularly appropriate considering how phallic the whole scene is.) Much as I love the action in the scene, it's that little moment in between gunfire blasts that I respond to even more. I also like the exchange a few moments prior, when Han tells a mourning Luke, "Come on, kid, I'm gonna need your help. We're not out of this yet."

This is a long-established storytelling formula that I actually learning well by watching Bugs Bunny cartoons. Bugs was always minding his own business when Elmer Fudd or another nemesis started trying to kill him. But as soon as they did, Bugs would say something like, "Of course you realize this means war."

I guess what I'm saying is I love that moment when the hero-to-be is dealt a blow, dust themselves off, and come up battling.

Incidentally, for all its well-deserved criticisms, there's a similar moment in The Phantom Menace that I've always thought was one of the best in any Star Wars movie. It comes when Darth Maul has just killed Qui-Gon Jinn while Obi-Wan Kenobi (aka Ben) is stuck between two forcefields. There's a moment of near silence as Darth Maul paces and Kenobi steels himself for the duel that remains. Without saying a word, Ewan McGregor's face transforms from shock and sadness to anger and determination. He's ready to get it on.

What I love even more than the battles in these scenes are their occasional little pauses, the small moments where people catch their breath before taking on more. There's an unexpected sense of calm amid the chaos that reinforces the frenetic battles all the more.

I once saw at the PDX Fest an experimental short film by Melody Own called "Waiting With Guns", in which she spliced together a series of seconds-long moments from old cowboy movies in which groups of men are about to fire -- not the moment when they lock their triggers, but just before, as they crouch around a corner, or peer over a cliff, guns in hand. Owen always moved on to the next scene before anyone fired, so it was like she was sampling and repeating that tiny idiosyncratic visual fragment like a DJ would do musically with samples. Maybe that's when I first began to think of the "Don't get cocky" pause as not just a narrative conjunction, but a moment of its own.

Borrowed Music

Recently I had some time to kill downtown and decided to check out a few CDs from the library: Shubert piano sonatas, Dvorak string quartets, Shostakovich's 15th symphony, and a collection of Thailand ceremonial and court music. (I can also vouch for there still being plenty of Linda Rondstadt albums available on the library shelves, but not one single CD of traditional Japanese music.) After all these years, I still find it amazing that I can just walk out with this stuff, free of charge, and all they ask is that I bring it back in a few weeks. Like Jerry Seinfeld once said, it's a government version of the pathetic friend. I love it.

Anyway, though, my point was supposed to be that both the Shubert and Dvorjak albums are terrific. I'm not very good at articulating what I like about classical music. I don't know anything about arpeggios or major-seventh chords or an allegro versus a scherzo.

But I can tell you the Shubert feels alternately delicate, deep, mournful and optimistic. According to a book I have called Classical Music: A Rough Guide, Shubert was kind of old-school when he was composing back in the early 19th century, preferring tuneful melodies to the more ambiguous music popular in that time. Andras Schiff is the pianist on this recording, and I don't know anything about him, but being a solo piano recording, it's basically all him. I don't know very much about pianists, other than a big name like Andre Watts or people I've seen like Vladimir Feltsman, Anne Marie McDermott, and Yakov Kasman (the guy who suddenly was tapped to fly across country to step in at the last minute and save a Rachmaninov performance here).

I was listening to the Dvorak last night on my i-Pod while editing video shot from the plane during my flight to Los Angeles a couple weeks ago, and the Poco andante and Finale from the String Quintet in G Major (op. 77) really made the footage - a succession of time lapse footage of the plane wing with clouds going by - come alive. Does anyone out there know someone who could play some of it for me? I'd love to use part of the piece as soundtrack to the film. The music was stirring, with the violins and cellos often playing at a frenetic pace. But it also has moments of quiet tenderness. Dvorak, again according to the Rough Guide, successfully married folk music traditions with symphonic music. So there's a whimsy here that balances the more anthem-like classical aspects.

These albums also represent to me a new era for my music collection in which I don't keep a physical copy, like one has in the past with a either a CD or vinyl record album. As much as I love my i-Pod, it's going to take a long time for me to get used to the idea that much of my music collection exists only as digital files. Maybe that's fine, in a way, because the music itself should matter more than its packaging. But that also eliminates the heretofore established art form of album covers. And more importantly to me, as someone who avidly collects and hordes physical things that I love, I won't have the comforting effect of knowing that a piece of music that I love is literally within grasp. As I write this, though, I also get a sense of how soon this conceptual difficulty with change is what dates me. I'll have to stop making fun of my mom for not knowing how to use an ATM.

Pomp, Circumstance and Sara

This Friday my sister Sara will be graduating from college at USC. As I’ve told friends over the past few weeks, particularly the ones I’ve known for a long time, they’ve been stunned. Sara was the child they remember clinging to my ankle when I’d be trying to leave the house with them. How could she be graduating from college? Recently on the phone Sara reminded me that I’d once said, “Wow, when you graduate from college I’ll be thirty-four!” As in old. And now that moment has arrived. I no longer feel reticent about being the age I am, but it’s still slightly surreal for all of us to see Sara well into adulthood.

That said, Sara’s been ahead of the curve for a long time. She was put in a talented-and-gifted program early in elementary school, a harbinger of things to come. I remember when she still was missing some permanent teeth Sara memorized all of the US presidents, so you could just throw out any number between one and forty and she’d name the chief executive. In 12 years of public school and four years at USC, anything other than an ‘A’ grade has been a major anomaly. In high school, she was editor of the school paper when it won first place in the nation. At USC, she also became the editor of the Daily Trojan, while also running with the cross-country team, working at a work-study job, and keeping a permanent spot on the dean’s list.

Sara is also a ferociously hard worker. For the last couple years, it seems like her day has begun with an 8AM class, continued into the evening at the paper, and then extended into the wee small hours with homework. Last summer, she worked as an intern at People magazine, where she acquired a bounty of stories to tell friends about Botoxed celebrities and the yip-yip dogs they tote to Starbucks and nightclubs. Most recently she interviewed Dolly Parton at press event celebrating the DVD release of 9 To 5. What a way to make a living.

Speaking of which, Sara’s been sort of half-jokingly saying, “Oh my god, I’m done with college. What am I going to do with my life?” Which is funny, because she seems so solidly on track for an impressive journalism career – hell, she already has one. But I know the feeling is sincere. It’s daunting to not be in school for the first time since kindergarten. And the job market isn’t always kind to kids fresh out of school – unless one is willing to set aside most of what he or she has learned in school in order to make copies or serve food.

The thing I’ve tried to impart to Sara and other people that age coming out of college is that it isn’t necessary to land the ideal job right out of school and start in full-throttle on a career. I think at 22, coming off so many consecutive years of school, the best thing to do is just try and have some fun. The career and achievements will come, along with responsibilities like a mortgage or marriage. I hope Sara goes to Italy with a backpack, or discovers some author or filmmaker she never had time for in school, or even just takes the time to enjoy some bad daytime television. At this age you won't have much money or assets, but you have one thing many of us older people envy: freedom to do whatever the fuck you want.

Meanwhile, major congrats to my prodigal little pal.

My Inner Casey Kasem

When I was a kid I listened virtually every week to the American Top 40 radio countdown of Billboard magazine-ranked singles. It was broadcast here in Oregon on the long-gone Salem station KSKD, “Cascade 105”.

Without any sense of irony (this was elementary-school age we’re talking about), I loved host Casey Casem and his smooth, yet almost Muppet-like voice. Years later I can do a pretty decent imitation of him saying something like, “This song jumps up five notches to number seven,” with “five notches” in a higher-pitched voice and “number seven” more of a bass-like low pitch. 

I remember the sense of drama I felt as Casey neared the top of the list, listening on a clock radio in my bedroom, or a Walkman as I walked the dog. I instantly date myself by the bands and songs that come to mind. Is “Man Eater” by Hall & Oates #1 again? Certainly they’re here to stay. Whereas Madonna, author of “Borderline” and “Lucky Star”, is clearly a flash in the pan. And when, after a succession of top 10 hits, will Duran Duran finally score a #1 single? I can’t remember if it was “The Reflex” or “A View to a Kill” that finally did it. And I want to know who’s falling for a cheesy anthem like Foreigner’s “I Want To Know What Love Is” enough to take it to the top of the chart.

For the next couple decades or more, until I got my i-Pod, I didn’t really think of music in terms of individual songs. I clung to the notion of an album as the artform. But an i-Pod and, more specifically, i-Tunes software, make me think of songs again. I gravitate to the list of my Top 25 songs played. Sometimes I even find it affecting my listening habits. I can create my own singles chart. I am my own Casey Kasem. (Thankfully Jean Kasem and her pony-tail sprouting from the top of her scalp are nowhere to be found.)

As it happens, though, my top 25 is a little bit out of whack. The statistics for some songs are artificially high because the software incorporates times that Valarie has listened to them on her i-Pod. For example, the #1 song on my list has been one of the tracks from Mali Music, the album Damon Albarn (of Blur and Gorillaz fame) made with several Mali musicians (hence the title). Called “Spoons”, it’s a great song, and a great album, but I’ve listened to it about three times on my i-Pod, and Valarie the other 20.

Several movements from Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos are more literally at the top of my i-Tunes chart. I listen to them regularly as motivation, particularly on weekday mornings when I’m trying to shake off fatigue. I think of the Concertos as going hand-in-hand with the espresso I drink. What’s also curious about this is that Valarie and I have long had a friendly disagreement about how it’s best to listen to music. She likes to program certain music for certain activities, like up-tempo rock and pop for washing the dishes or soft classical for reading. I often prefer to make the music itself the activity, just lying on the couch and listening. But with Bach, I must say that the pace and complexity switch my mind into a higher gear, and that’s helpful for activity.

A handful of Beatles songs unsurprisingly occupy the upper portion of my list as well. In the past I’d always eschewed the collection of #1 Beatles hits called simply 1, because I don’t like greatest hits albums – there’s no flow, no sense of the album as its own entity. But I downloaded a few songs from Valarie’s copy, and I must say I’ve been hitting “Lady Madonna”, “Paperback Writer”, “Day Tripper” and “The Ballad of John & Yoko” pretty hard.

I’ve also listened several times to certain Beatles album tracks that never became big singles. From Let It Be I love the George Harrison song “I Me Mine” and Lennon/McCartney's "Across the Universe". From the “White Album” (I use quotes instead of italics because it’s not the literal album name), I love “Cry Baby Cry”, “Savoy Truffle” and “Sexy Sadie”.

For many years, Rubber Soul ranked among my favorite and most-listened-to Beatles records, but about five years ago my CD got a scratch on the second song, “Norwegian Wood”. I found I just couldn’t listen to the album at all with that song missing, and I never got around to buying a new copy. (I was paralyzed—how can I buy a whole new album but the case and all but one song work great?) But now I’ve finally downloaded “Norwegian Wood” and uploaded the rest of Rubber Soul, making the album come alive again on my i-Pod. People shower lots of praise on Revolver because it marked a transition between The Beatles’ early career of relatively simple pop songs and their later, more psychedelic period. But I think you could say the same about Rubber Soul. (Incidentally, I remember when I was growing up, it was always Sgt. Pepper that was considered the band’s greatest masterpiece, but it’s for some reason been overtaken since then by Revolver.)

Two David Bowie songs are also ranked high: “Oh! You Pretty Things” and “Life on Mars”, both from the classic album Hunky Dory. Interestingly, my favorite Bowie recordings have usually been his later albums from the 1970s, particularly the “Berlin Trilogy” of Low, Heroes, and Lodger that he made with Brian Eno, as well as Station to Station. But hearing “Life on Mars” in Wes Anderson’s The Life Aquatic accounted for the film’s most transcendent moment, and now it’s become a favorite.

A guilty-pleasure pop/R&B song from the early 80s is also in frequent rotation: “Let It Whip” by The Dazz Band. I fell in love with that song as a child when I bought the Neon Nights compilation album from K-Tel Records.

The first track from Bjork’s Vespertine, “Hidden Place” also gets played a lot. Valarie bought us that album in New York just a couple weeks before September 11, and the spiritual quality of the songs hit us right away. But Vespertine ultimately didn’t get listened to very much over the ensuing years, because it lacked the peppy, danceable quality of her previous records. But a couple months ago while in Brooklyn I had the good fortune to meet harpist Zena Parkins, who plays on Vespertine, and that inspired me to listen to the album again. And it’s actually quite exquisite—but nothing beats that first song for me.

Although it’s cooled off lately, for quite some time I was listening to the second half of The Clash’s Combat Rock almost incessantly. In particular, I love “Ghetto Defendant”, which includes spoken word by Allen Ginsberg alternating with Joe Strummer’s singing. Sometimes Ginsberg and his recitations seems out of place in the song or even outright silly, but I fall for them anyway: “Starved in metropolis/hooked on cosmopolis”.

When I was a kid, my dad got me into 1950s music like Chuck Berry (my first concert) and Jerry Lee Lewis. I was also greatly influenced by a compilation album my childhood friend Joe Czekalski gave me called 25 Rock Revival Greats. So I’ve downloaded some digital versions of the singles I loved from that old vinyl copy: “Black Slacks” by The Sparkletones, and “Just Because” by Lloyd Price.

Finally, I’ll wrap up with some other random songs I’ve listened to a lot, with the albums in parenthesis:

Joy Division, “Atrocity Exhibition” (Closer)
Paul McCartney, “Fine Line” (Chaos & Creation in the Backyard)
Duran Duran, “My Own Way” (Rio)
The Evens, “Mount Pleasant Isn’t” (The Evens)
The Beta Band, “Squares” (Hot Shots II)
Colleen, “Ritournelle” (Everyone Alive Wants Answers)
The Decemberists, “The Engine Driver” (Picaresque)
The Police, “Tea In the Sahara” (Synchronicity)
Tom Waits, “Alice” (Alice)
Ben Webster, “Tenderly” (King of the Tenors)
The Chills, “Tied Up In Chain” (Submarine Bells)
Count Basie, “April In Paris” (April in Paris)
Galaxie 500, “Listen, The Snow Is Falling” (This Is Our Music)
Gene Ammons, “Pagan Love Song” (Bad! Bossa Nova)
Jimi Hendrix, “Rainy Day, Dream Away” (Electric Ladyland)
John Lennon, “I Found Out” (Plastic Ono Band)
Prince, “Dirty Mind” (Dirty Mind)
Tricky, “Black Steel” (Maxinquaye)
Morphine, “I’m Free Now” (Cure For Pain)

Movie Quiz

I couldn't resist answering this quiz from the strangely-named blog Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule:

What film made you angry, either while watching it or in thinking about it afterward?

Crash – not because of its indictment of racism, but because of the manipulative filmmaking style

Favorite sidekick?

Chewbacca. Easy answer but the truth.

One of your favorite movie lines

Owen Wilson as Eli Cash in Wes Anderson's The Royal Tenenbaums, reading from his book Old Custer: “The crickets and the rust beetles scuttled among the nettles of the sage thicket. Vamanos amigos, he whispered, and threw the busted leather flint craw, over the loose weave of the saddle cock, and they rode on in the friscilating dusklight.”

William Holden or Burt Lancaster?

William Holden. They're both great, but somehow Lancaster is a little too pretty, whereas Holden has demons and humanity.

Favorite John Ford movie:

It'd have to be The Searchers. I saw it in a college film class, and it brought me to tears when John Wayne picks up little Debbie to take her home--after always saying heretofore that he was going to kill his kidnapped niece when he found her because she'd been 'tainted' by her Indian captors. I also really love Ford's My Darling Clementine. My dad's favorite Ford film is The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, which is also great.

What film artist (director, actor, screenwriter, whatever) has the least–deserved good reputation, artistically speaking. And who would you replace him/her with on that pedestal?

Least deserved? Frank Darabont, Robert Zemeckis, Ron Howard. Most of the people I'd replace them with have good reputations already, even if the idiotic Academy chooses not to reward them with Oscars.

Barbara Stanwyck or Ida Lupino?

It’d be cooler to say Ida Lupino, since she was a pioneer of both indie filmmaking and female directors. But I love Barbara Stanwyck, with her mix of sultry femme fatale and loving beauty.

Showgirls—yes or no?

No. I remember when I lived in New York it was starting to gain traction as a midnight movie, like The Rocky Horror Picture Show or Eraserhead, and I'd just roll my eyes. Irony or no irony, it's just a sensationalistic skin-flic.

Most exotic or otherwise unusual place in which you ever saw a movie:

Either in a parking lot in Portland’s Central Eastside industrial district, with old mental hygiene films projected against an outer warehouse wall, or on a Disney cruise as part of the “Ebert & Roeper Film Festival at Sea”, which I covered on assignment for a travel magazine.

Favorite Robert Altman movie:

Short Cuts—when I did my ‘Best Films of the 1990s’ list for Willamette Week in 2000, it was ranked #2. I called the movie "an endlessly fascinating probe of everyday moral dilemmas and what makes everyone from a birthday clown to a phone sex operator tick."

Best argument for allowing rock stars to participate in the making of movies:

The first example that comes to mind is George Harrison producing “Monty Python’s The Life of Brian”, but I’m guessing the question refers more to rock stars acting or directing. One of my favorite movies is Two Lane Blacktop with James Taylor and Beach Boy drummer Dennis Wilson. But neither of them are really rock stars. Somehow Mick Jagger in Freejack doesn't seem like a good enough argument, though.

Describe a transcendent moment in a film (a moment when you realized a film that just seemed routine or merely interesting before had become become something much more)

I’d have to go with the Claire Denis film Beau Travail, about a French Foreign Legion outpost in Africa. Denis devotes much of the film to the Legion’s endless training regiments, and somehow the ritual is elevated to something abstract and operatic.

Gina Gershon or Jennifer Tilly?

Neither. Gina Gershon has a toughness I like, but I’m turned off by how she kind of snarls with her lips. Jennifer Tilly seems like a tramp who’s been sucking on helium.

Favorite Frank Capra movie:

I must confess the only one I’ve seen is It’s a Wonderful Life, which I appreciate but don’t love. I really should see Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, but the clips always kind of make me cringe.

The scene you most wish you could have witnessed being filmed:

The helicopters attacking to “Ride of the Valkyries” in Apocalypse Now. I've always found it of astonishing visceral power, whether one's a hawk or a pacifist. But then again, perhaps because I love that scene so much I wouldn't have wanted to be there for its filming. That would have taken the sense of magic away from what's being seen onscreen. Maybe instead I'd choose the opening scene in Saving Private Ryan of the D-Day invasion. For damn sure I wouldn't have wanted to be there in real life, and the filming of that scene is one of the most impressive things I've ever seen in all of cinema.

Robert Ryan or Richard Widmark?

Robert Ryan, but I love both of them, and each has starred in numerous minor classics from my favorite period, American Film Noir. Widmark’s great in a couple movies by the great Sam Fuller—Pickup on South Street being one of them. I’ve often thought of him saying snidely, “Don’t wave your flag at me” when someone gets patriotic with him. It was comforting amidst all the “United We Stand” rhetoric of a couple years ago. And Ryan is in too many to mention, although The Set Up and Men In War come immediately to mind.

Name a movie that inspired you to walk out before it was finished:

Freddy Got Fingered – I had to review it, so it was probably unethical of me to walk out. But I just couldn’t take the bestiality anymore.

Favorite political movie:

Robert Redford’s The Candidate, with the D.A. Pennebaker documentary The War Room (about Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign) a close second.

Your favorite movie poster/one-sheet, or the one you’d most like to own:

I’m partial to several that  Valarie and I already own: Le Samourai, Vertigo, The 400 Blows, Wings of Desire, 8 1/2. I bought my Le Samourai poster several years ago at Cinema 21's annual sale, and I went through this wrenching drama to get it. There was only one copy of the poster, and the guy in line directly ahead of me was planning to buy it for a friend. I begged and begged him to let me buy it. I explained how it was perhaps my favorite movie of all-time, and I'd come to the sale only to buy that poster. He finally relented, only after refusing several times, asking it to be rolled up for him, and then sliding it over to me, pointing his finger in my face, and lecturing me about my skewed priorities.

Jeff Bridges or Jeff Goldblum?

Jeff Bridges—he’s an underrated actor, and one of the best of his generation, I think. I’m particularly fond of his performance in the under-seen Fearless, about plane-crash survivors, not to mention The Big Lebowski, my favorite Coen Brothers film.

Accepting the conventional wisdom that 1970-1975 marked a golden age of American filmmaking in which artistic ambition and popular acceptance were not mutually exclusive, what for you was this golden age’s high point? (Could be a movie, a trend, the emergence of a star, whatever)

I love the movie Francis Ford Coppola made in between the two Godfather movies: The Conversation, with Gene Hackman as a wire-tapper experiencing a crisis of conscience. I also love Chinatown, of course, as well as Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange.

Grace Kelly or Ava Gardner?

I know the underlying question is between the wholesome, pure Kelly and the sexy Gardner who broke Frank Sinatra’s heart. I don’t have a strong personal feeling for either, but I’d lean toward Grace Kelly because I love Hitchcock’s Rear Window, which she’s fabulous in.

With total disregard for whether it would ever actually be considered, even in this age of movie recycling, what film exists that you feel might actually warrant a sequel, or would produce a sequel you’d actually be interested in seeing?

Danny Boyle told me in an interview once that he’d like to make a sequel to Trainspotting, which I think would be cool. And while I’m OK with George Lucas not making episodes 7-9 of Star Wars (he won’t be able to screw it up that way), part of me would have loved to see what transpired after Return of the Jedi.

An Offense Worse Than Tardiness

This morning, with a warm day forecasted, I decided to go for a walk in the neighborhood early before starting in on my work. I have a usual route that takes me nearby an elementary school. About two blocks after I'd passed the school, I came to an intersection where a man and his son, maybe five or six years old, were stopped with their bikes.

The father, decked out in bicyclist's spandex, was scolding his son. Apparently the son was late for school, and this was a recurring problem that the father was fed up with. Fair enough. But the dad was taking a hostile attitude that immediately got my attention. I only heard bits and pieces of actual conversation, but the tone was unmistakable as the dad shook his finger at the son.

Obviously I know virtually nothing about the context the incident came from, but I found myself getting really upset at that father. I wished I could summon the gall to butt in and tell man to stop intimidating his poor little boy. I also confess to fantasizing about punching him in the nose. For all I know, the dad had plenty of right to be frustrated with the kid's behavior. But clearly the kid was upset and traumatized, not just by failing to get to school on time but especially having an adult verbally abusing him. I always come back to the old cliche that you can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar. That kid was completely frozen. Was scolding going to warm up his traumatized little psyche?

Certainly I'm no expert on parenting. I have no children. But if I did, I hate the idea of ever getting to a point where I have to yell at and act hostile with someone who barely comes up to my waist.

In a way, though, the father will get his comeuppance in one way or another. Someday when he wishes his son didn't live thousands of miles away, or that he'd get a father's day card in the mail for a change, he'll be inextricably linked to incidents like today's on the sidewalk, when petty frustrations took precendence over nurturing.