BRIAN LIBBY

Catchup

The last few weeks have been a blur. Here's my attempt at recapping a few highlights:

Last week we caught tap virtuoso Savion Glover at Portland’s Schnitzer Hall for a performance called ‘Classical Savion’. The show’s first half, as the title indicates, had Glover tap dancing to various famous classical themes. More so than previous times we’ve seen him in years past, this time Glover’s dancing really seemed to act as a rhythm section to the music. Sometimes his feet would follow the natural rhythm of the Bach or Dvorjak piece being played by the accompanying string section, but other times he would tap or shuffle his feet into a beat that completely changed the nature of the music, such as a hip-hop-like dance rhythm. Just through a guy’s two feet, these musical works would often change feel and emotion mid-song. Glover really picked up the most, though, when he was joined onstage by a drummer and pianist for a self-composed jazz-classical hybrid rendition of the Sousa march ‘Stars and Stripes Forever’. Best working of a patriotic song I’ve ever heard, although it was about a half-hour long, so I don’t see it being performed at any sporting events.

Last night brought the opening of The Affair @ The Jupiter, Portland’s annual art fair. Now in its third year, the fair has a nice mix of serious artwork and slapdash young efforts, rich collectors with their cleavage and perfume, but also hipsters with beards and tattoos. In recent weeks I’ve seen articles in both USA Today and Business Week about how Portland is becoming a magnet for young creative people from all over the nation, and you feel at an event like The Affair a sense of the special moment happening here. I’ve got to write a wrapup for The Oregonian by tomorrow morning, so hopefully I’ll be able to cast it in the proper light.

For the last several weeks I’ve been putting in lots of late-night and weeekend time working on my first book, Tales From the Oregon Ducks Sideline, a history of my beloved college football team. I went to my first Ducks game in 1980, age eight, and as most all friends and family know have been hopelessly obsessed with the Ducks my entire life. So while art, film and architecture are more my usual beat as a journalist, this book is such a labor of love. (Which is good, because the pay is shit.) So far I’ve been able to interview some of my biggest heroes: Joey Harrington, Rich Brooks, Danny O’Neil, even Kenny Wheaton, the hero of Oregon’s most famous play: the 97-yard interception and touchdown in 1994 that saved the game against Washington and propelled the Ducks to their first Rose Bowl in 37 years.

Speaking of the Ducks, two weeks ago today Oregon enjoyed one of its greatest victories in the 112 year history of the team: a 34-33 victory over perennial college football powerhouse Oklahoma. The game has been mired in controversy because the Ducks’ comeback from 13 points down in the 4th quarter was aided by an onsides kick recovery that many now believe should have gone to Oklahoma. After the game, the Sooner fans and even OU president David Boren (a former Republican senator I thought we were finally rid of) have been extraordinarily self righteous, but anyone and everyone knows questionable calls are part of any game. Like, for example, the fumble by Oregon’s Jonathan Stewart that was awarded to Oklahoma even though he seemed to be down. Hopefully Oklahoma will get some class and self respect Sooner or later. But I don’t have to wait for that as the author of Oregon’s official history. In my chapter on the game in Tales From the Oregon Ducks Sidelines, the onsides kick controversy will definitely be minimized and the Ducks’ heroic comeback given the greatest attention.

I’m also in the process of arranging a trip to Japan for late October. There’s a design conference in Kyoto I’ll be going to, and hopefully a tour of some historic architecture there. Kyoto is the ancient capital, and the only major Japanese city whose ancient architectural treasures weren’t destroyed during World War II. I’ve always found it fascinating how the Americans reduced the whole country to ashes - not just in Hiroshima and Nagasaki but Tokyo, Osaka, Kobe, Nagoya. Yet they deliberately left Kyoto largely alone out of respect for history. I’ll also be traveling to Tokyo on this trip, of course, and seem to have some meetings planned with Portland advertising/design companies situated there like Wieden + Kennedy and Ziba Design.

Meanwhile, though, the latest Ducks game is about to start, so I’d better go find a video tape.

Joe and the Lego Ship

A few weeks ago I got an email from an old friend I’d wondered about for decades. Joe Czekalski used to live in a duplex two doors down from my family on Fleishauer Lane in McMinnville during our first few years of elementary school in the late 1970s. Our house was a kind of a second home for Joe, and vice-versa.

Joe was a very sweet, spirited kid, exceptionally good-natured. We’d spend hours watching Bugs Bunny cartoons, reading his older siblings’ Tiger Beat magazines, and singing along to Cheap Trick’s “I Want You to Want Me”. Both Joe’s parents were deaf, and he seemed to crave contact with the outside world with an enthusiasm my family found very endearing.

Joe got teased a lot for his funny clothes and gangly look (as upposed to my funny clothes and shortness), and was occasionally given to outbursts when pushed too far. I remember in Mrs. McCallister’s first grade class, he chased Steven Vossler all the way to the bathroom door and then, when Steven locked the door before Joe could reach it, Joe kicked open the small metal mesh window. But Steven, while a good guy, was a teaser, and he may have had it coming.

Being six or seven years old, we played with toys a lot, and I particularly remember us working on a Lego set for a space ship and space station. The ship looked just like the Galactica on Battlestar Galactica, which was the idea. (We were such big fans of that show that Joe actually insisted on being called “Starbuck”, after Dirk Benedict’s ace Viper pilot. My dad took on the new nickname enthusiastically. He still calls him Starbuck when Joe’s name comes up.)

I wasn’t so much into the building of the "LL928" Lego ship as I wanted to play with it, to use my imagination. I knew I wanted it to look exactly like on the box, though. Joe was much better than I was at actually building with Legos, so I got him to build the space ship for me.

As you can see, I've kept the ship all of these years. It's lost its pointed front end, the little man who pilots it is also long gone, and it's covered in dust. But how many Lego ships stay put together this long?

Joe already was sure as first grader what he wanted to do when he grew up: join the army and become a pilot. And when I heard from Joe recently via email after all these years, it turned out that he’d come very close to doing precisely that. He’s indeed in the army, and is currently in Iraq serving his second tour of duty and third overall in the wartime Middle East (the first one coming during the 1990 Gulf War). He didn’t end up becoming a pilot, but he’s as close as anyone to the aircraft. Joe is a mechanic on some of the Army’s premiere attack helicopters.

I don’t want to delve into war politics, but it definitely gave me pause thinking about Joe over there in harm’s way. Hopefully Starbuck will return to the Galactica without any Cylons getting in the way. In the meantime, I will keep his Lego creation safely harbored on the top of my bookshelf, where it’s un-ironically displayed as a work of art.

Strangeways and Nevermind

I usually don’t like to listen to the same album in one day. It’s a funny little rule I follow. Even if I’m particularly into a record and listen to it every day, I still like to let the listening experience sink in for a night. Otherwise it’s like over-eating at a great meal. (Which, ironically, I do at almost every dinnertime.)

But this Labor Day Weekend I wound up listening to the same album twice in one day on two different occasions. I realize this isn’t earth-shattering, stop-the-presses kind of news for anyone else, but for me it’s a noteworthy aberration.

The two albums are The Smiths’ Strangeways, Here we Come and Nirvana’s Nevermind.

First we played the Nirvana record on my i-Pod during about a 30-mile stretch of Highway 12 in Washington, heading west from Centralia where we’d exited off Interstate 5. This was on Friday, late in the 90-plus-degree afternoon.

If you haven’t guessed already, the occasion for playing Nevermind was that we were headed toward Aberdeen, Kurt Cobain’s hometown, on the way to Lake Quinault near Olympic National Park for our friends Becca and Eric's wedding. Neither Valarie nor I had been to Aberdeen before, and even though it sounds corny and obvious to play Nirvana at such a time, we had a sincere desire to think about the place where Cobain grew up with his music as the soundtrack.

The only problem was, we got a little too hasty about putting the record on. We were on the last song, “Something In The Way” (not including the unlisted song that plays after 13-ish minutes of silence), as we entered town. I could tell, though, that Valarie wanted to start the album again, as she knew I hate listening to the same record or song twice in a row. But luckily I was willing to temporarily suspend the rule, because it made for a moving, contemplated experience. She made a squeal when I gave the go-ahead for a replay

Aberdeen is a fishing and logging town, and traditionally has been pretty blue-collar and somewhat depressed. The first thing we found, however, was a thriving mini-mall of chain stores and a Taco Bell across the street. Like so many cities and towns, Aberdeen seems to have recovered with an influx of new development and retail options, but to an extent seems to have sold a bit of its soul in the process. Gritty old Aberdeen must have depressed Kurt Cobain, or at least added to the challenge of inheriting the DNA of a suicide and depression-prone family. But I think he’d have found just as much to be depressed about in the ubiquity and unsightliness inherent to sea-of-asphalt strip malls and Everywhere, USA chain stores that have invaded Aberdeen.

Nevermind sounded as fucking insanely brilliant as ever on both listens. Valarie cites “Territorial Pissing” as her favorite song, while I’m most partial to “On a Plain” and “Drain You”. But I think there’s not anything close to a bad song on that album. At the time Nirvana was popular, a few of my friends argued for the superiority of Nirvana’s debut album on the indie label Sub-Pop, Bleach. But I never took to it. Bleach seemed to draw more from metal, whereas Nevermind seemed, while wholly original, also more punk influenced, like a polished version of Sonic Youth. No, Nevermind is definitely the masterpiece here, I think, even if that’s a more obvious choice. I could say so much more about Cobain’s suicide and my feelings about it, but I hesitate to open that Pandora’s Box. (Short answer: compassion, not condemnation).

Incidentally, upon entering Aberdeen we knew to look for the town's entry sign that reads "Come As You Are". I'd thought this was a tribute to Cobain, but it turns out the sign predates the Nirvana song of the same name. Apparently the song's title was a nod to the town's sign. "Come As You Are" was also the first Nirvana song I really became a big fan of. I hadn't fallen for "Smells Like Teen Spirit" when it was released as a single, although I've since come to appreciate its cataclysmic power. But I wound up liking all the other songs that were released at the time anyway.

On to the other record: As a high school student in a small town during the mid-to-late 1980s, I didn’t even know who The Smiths were. Unless you count the time when a couple girls in my French class wrote the band’s name on the chalkboard. But that doesn't really constitute knowing a band.

By happenstance, I heard the band’s last album, Strangeways, Here We Come, a few years later in 1990 while in college at NYU. It was playing on the PA system in a darkened screening room at the Angelica Film Center on Houston Street in New York. I was waiting for a midnight screening of David Lynch’s Wild At Heart. This was freshman year, and I remember my narcoleptic roommate James was with me. James had been a Smiths fan and encouraged me to get the album when I expressed interest. My more prevalant memory of James, however, is of him sitting in the closet in the middle of the night, night after night, crying into the telephone to his girlfriend while I tried to sleep. He was homesick and only lasted one semester. But I have him to thank for my buying Strangeways.

Obviously I was struck by Morrissey’s unique crooner-esque voice, dressed in the guitar-pop instrumentation of Johnny Mar and company. Although I didn’t realize it at the time, this was the last Smiths album, recorded three years earlier in 1987. It has a less traditional array of instruments (xylophone, synthesizer) than the band’s more jangly, guitar-oriented previous albums, such as The Queen Is Dead, Louder Than Bombs and Meat Is Murder. Strangeways is a bit glossier and majestic, which I think suits Morrissey’s morose lyrics.

It’s funny how sometimes one owns an album for years, liking it alright but listening to it rather seldomly, and then one day one suddenly wants to hear it all the time. According to my i-Tunes stats, I’ve listened to Strangeways something like eight times in the last two weeks. I've probably only listened to it about ten times in the sixteen years I've owned the record. (It's actually a CD, of course, but I've never taken to using that term.)

We first listened to the album in the car, driving home from our weekend in Lake Quinault. Aberdeen was the setting for this one too, at least at the beginning. I remember re-starting the first song, “A Rush and a Push and the Land Is Ours” after pulling out of a Chevron station near the Wishkah River, which was in progress when I decided to pull over. Valarie and I briefly imagined similarities and the degrees of separation between Morrissey and Cobain. (They both were pretty depressed and they both became pals with Michael Stipe.)

I listened to the album again later that afternoon, while surfing the Internet at home. At first I was just going to listen to “Death of a Disco Dancer”, which is my favorite song on the album along with the aforementioned “Rush and a Push”. But then I kept listening to the end and backed around at the beginning to hear the ones at the beginning before “Disco Dancer”.

The cover photo of Strangeways is of James Dean in the movie East of Eden. (Dean was a hero of Morrissey’s.) The album isn’t generally considered The Smiths’ best—that honor generally seems to go to The Queen Is Dead or their eponymous first album. But I read on one online music site that both Morrissey and Marr consider Strangeways their favorite. At least they can agree on something.

Meanwhile, for the last few weeks Marr has reportedly been here in Portland producing a Modest Mouse album. It’s almost 20 years since the band broke up, and aside from a few appearances with The The and Electronic, Marr hasn’t recorded much since. Still, I can’t help but imagine him strumming his guitar and looking out at the same horizon.

Awe and Fingers Crossed: The Jonathan Stewart Era Begins at Oregon

Yesterday the Oregon Ducks opened their season with a 48-10 victory over Stanford. What was even more exciting, though, was the promise shown by our sophomore running back Jonathan Stewart. Stewart was the #1 rated high school running back in the country two years ago. Last year, he backed up Ducks senior Terrence Whitehead and showed flashes of brilliance. Against Stanford, Stewart had 100 yards before the 2nd quarter was halfway over. Read what Oregonian columnist John Canzano had to say:

"...from today forward let's call the 19-year old running back 'The Franchise.' Because even more significant than Oregon's victory over Stanford was the news that coach Mike Bellotti has a back who could go down as the best in school history.

Apologies to Maurice Morris and Onterrio Smith. And to Derrick Loville. And to Saladin McCullough. And, maybe, too, to Bobby Moore. Barring injury or a fluke, Stewart is going to make people forget them. We're witnessing something special here.

Smith set a school record by rushing for 100 yards or more in seven consecutive games in 2002. McCullough holds the single-season rushing record (1,343 yards in 1997) and the career record for 100-yard rushing games (11). But if I really saw what I think I saw on Saturday from Stewart, he is going to mop those records up by the time he's finished at Oregon."

On the re-broadcast of the game I watched on the Oregon sports network (ABC carried it live) on Sunday night, Ducks commentator Anthony Newman put it even more succinctly: "A superstar is born."

The only problem, though, was that Stewart sprained his ankle early in the third quarter. And while both player and team are saying it doesn't seem very serious - he is expected to play next week against Fresno State - Stewart's injury is a reminder just how easily the fortunes of a team change, how easily Oregon's carriage could turn back into a pumpkin. Tonight I'm praying Jonathan Stewart has a strong constitution, because as Canzano writes, "A player like Stewart comes along as often as they re-pave the stadium parking lot. And maybe that's why the season feels a little exciting, and a little fragile today."