Remember all that "Baby Mozart" craze where people would play classical music to their infants, and event to their pregnant bellies?
We did a version of that for Alan. This was the soundtrack to his time in utero:
When we first moved to Wisconsin, Mom was working long hours in Oshkosh. Dad and I spent a lot of time together at home. We would play the whole Super Mario Bros series, Dr Mario, and the TMNT games together. For years, Mom refused to play, thinking that all these games were silly or violent. But one day, when she was pregnant with Alan, this music lured her in. The intense competition with Dad to get the best score kept her there. And I was relegated to watching.
You could say that Alan had games in the blood. When he was in late middle school and high school, his insomniac nights were filled with computer games. This seemed to mark a shift in him -- he was no longer the happy-go-lucky kid of his early childhood. He became sullen at times and struggled to get up each morning. He started to rewrite his life -- remembering the days of letting everything roll off his shoulders, making friends with everyone, as troubled times.
Later, when he had started college, sometimes the only thing I could do to interact with him at all was to sit behind him while he played computer games. We would talk about the games themselves. Usually, he would turn off the game music and listen to classical music, which made everything a bit more dramatic, especially Skyrim and the Fallout games.
Some of my last moments with him were playing MarioKart Wii, which I had taken to calling Mario Speedwagon. It was one of the few games where I could actually beat him. We stayed up late (for me, anyway) Thursday night playing before I called it quits and went to bed. I thought about the two of us maybe going as Wario and Waluigi for Halloween.
Alan had a brief obsession with the song, Goodbye Horses. He would play it for me. He would describe its disgusting use in Silence of the Lambs and Clerks II. "Did you know the singer is a woman?" he would ask.
I never paid him much mind about this. The song is creepy and dated. Now, I wish I had. In the song, one man describes his hopes crushed, and states, "All things pass into the night." The singer disagrees. The symbolism of the horses reportedly comes from the Bhagavad Gita, which Alan would have been quite familiar with, having read it for class, a copy still on his bookshelf.
In its allegory, the person as a whole is represented by a group of people on a chariot pulled by a team of horses. Two armies represent good and evil on either side of the path as the charioteer guides the reins of the mind through life. Alan's chariot, he felt, had veered off course. His digressions had set him up for mugshot extortion websites, and there, displayed for everyone, was the death of his dignity.
He probably felt that it was long past due to leave the chariot of his body and the horses of his senses behind. I hope now that he now knows some peace away from those things -- that his dashed hopes and dreams no longer haunt him, that he is flying over us, released.
Most serious pianists have had, at least some time in their lives, a huge crush on Rachmaninoff, I think. Alan was trying to figure out what to play for "the big concerto" his senior year of high school, and while he initially settled on the Grieg, he briefly considered a Shostakovich concerto that I suggested, as well as several Rachmaninoffs.
By the accounts we have, Rachmaninoff was a melancholy artist type, which Alan would have gotten. He required significant treatment for depression during his life. Some of that is echoed in his use of the Dies Irae in so many of his works. There must have been some thought of death in his head at all times. Having said that, his works were full of so much life.
I had been listening to a lot of Rachmaninoff this summer. I had stumbled across his Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini in my iTunes folder after having heard it on the radio, and decided to look into it more. The theme he speaks of is from Paganini's Caprice No. 24, one of the greats of the virtuosic violin repertoire. Listen to how he works the Dies Irae into it. Certainly the piece is not all dark. There is even a sweet romantic theme where he turns the melody upside-down at 15:27.
This late spring, I finally moved into the house I had bought almost a year earlier. Alan had been living there through thick and thin (mostly thin given all the construction). When Alan's legal problems started, he briefly tried living on his own, but ended up back in the house. After Mom and Dad left just before my birthday in late July, I moved back into the house. Oftentimes, in the evenings, I would close the door to my master suite, and do some combination of finishing clinical notes, watching TV shows on Netflix, taking long baths in my swimming pool sized bathtub, reading Zelazny stories, and listening to classical music, in a variety of combinations.
One particularly tough day, I came home to relax. Isabelle was gone to Canada, Alan was downtown, and I was feeling a bit lonely. I laid down and started some Rachmaninoff playing. The second piece -- his second piano concerto. Fate must have been mocking me because I had forgotten what lies in the second movement:
Yeah, that would be the source for the bridge from Eric Carmen's All by Myself(1:40). Not exactly what I wanted to hear at the time. Maybe Rachmaninoff had a sense of humor.
Speaking of which, probably the fondest Rachmaninoff-related memory I have regarding Alan is the comedy act that we saw with Mom and Dad in Chicago. Alan had watched this musical comedy duo, Igudesman and Joo, on Youtube years earlier (Ed did you show him this?), and I saw that they were coming to do a CSO performance with Emanuel Ax. Um, yes please. I bought four tickets, and we went to the late night show.
In addition to this and other classic bits from their act, they had a great voice-over by Ax himself while he played a piece. In the voice-over, he checks out a woman in the front row, contemplates introducing himself to her ("I'm Manny!"), regrets not having better hemorrhoid treatment, puffs himself up ("I play with Yo-Yo Ma!), and fears screwing up the hard part, which he does.
Now, surrounded by supporting friends and family, I still find myself feeling alone sometimes, longing for another conversation with Alan. I wonder if that is a fraction of how Alan felt, deeply loved, but still somehow all by himself.
In the blog, and through his life, we made a lot of animal analogies about Alan. Alan the cat.Alan the fish. The first of all of these was Alan the sheep. He was born in the year of the ram, just like Dad. Mom and I were born in the year of the dog, so we saw each other as sheepdogs, each with our sheep to keep in line.
Personality-wise, Alan did have a kind of sheepish center, but kept it well-hidden most of the time. When he was in a bad mood, and you tried to force something on him, he would lash out and push back. He didn't bleat -- he snarled and howled.
Maybe that's why he played this track for me one day on the way to IHOP. Or maybe not.
Alan liked The Heavy. He liked a lot of music that brought jazz and soul influences into rock. He seemed a bit disappointed that the band had gotten so much play on commercials and TV shows. I guess that was the hipster in him.
Moving forward without Alan, our whole family is figuring out our new roles. I feel like a sheepdog without a sheep. I know I have other purpose in my life other than him, but it's hard to feel it now. Time, I'm sure, will sort that out, but right now, it's one of the most acute reminders of our loss. It makes me want to howl out.
Alan had a thing for tigers. His room had at least four representations of tigers, his favorite being this one:
This scroll represents a saying in Korean "horangi dambaepideon shijeore," or "when the tiger smoked" -- that is to say, a long, long time ago. Alan saw the tiger and its folk art representations as a connection to his Korean heritage. Maybe he wanted to be seen as clever, fierce and proud. We always said Alan was like a cat, not a big striped one, but the quiet self-centered slinky kind. He loved cats, and cats loved him.
You may have noticed there are a lot of tigers in this blog, too -- crouching tigers, tigers we don't have. Maybe it's just a coincidence, or maybe not.
The music for today's entry was the number one song on the charts when I was born, but more to Alan's taste.
Now, for the nerdy neurologists out there (I know at least some of you are reading this blog.), this phrase, "the eye of the tiger," brings up images of T2 hyperintensity with surrounding hypointensity in the globus pallidus, most often seen in a disease now most commonly called pantothenate kinase-associated neurodegeneration (PKAN).
He used to hate it when I would sing along to the chorus, but change the words:
It's the eye of the tiger on the MRI scan,
T2 pallidal signal that's bilateral
And it used to be known as Hallervorden-Spatz Disease
But it's now got some different names... 'cuz they were Nazis
Come to think of it, everyone seemed to hate it when I did that.
When Alan switched from music store lessons to full on Suzuki lessons with Mrs. Chang, he really excelled. As many of you know, part of the Suzuki method is active participation of the parent in the lesson and at least early on, in the practicing.
When I started violin lessons, Mom and I would read the introductory material together, learning about chin rests, shoulder rests, f holes, the names of strings, practiced where to put each foot, each elbow, each finger. When I started playing actual music, the responsibility shifted to Dad, who was still Ricky at the time. His long-distant trombone experience in high school was enough to get him through those early days.
For Alan, Mom and Dad covered the majority of those responsibilities again, but as he became more advanced, my visits home from school included helping more and more with the technique of practicing -- when to take things slow, how to feel the music, how to adjust tempo and emphasis musically, not herky-jerky.
As Alan prepared for recitals and competitions, he had to play pieces from different periods, so there were a long string of modern pieces. One of the early ones was Bartók's Evening in the Country. Alan's first take was cutesy and light. I worked with him extensively to get the feeling that the country in question was rural Transylvania, where people were of Hungarian, Romanian and German heritage, not known for their lightness. I remember prancing around the living room like an idiot to get Alan to understand the paradox of spryness with heft.
It was an important moment in his musical development. His rendition of this piece was the first time I could really truly feel something in his music. He got it.
Maybe this was the precursor to the role of music later in his life. Maybe this is why he always had music playing -- the pensive dark music to match his mood, the light happy music to try to lift it, the songs he sang over and over again, the ones he wrote (always with lyrics full of despair). Maybe these moments paved the way for the soundtrack, the music that haunts me now that he is gone.
Alan liked to listen to the song, Every Breath You Take, but he liked to change the words up. The wackier, the better. It became a bit of a game.
Every drain you snake,
Every leaf you rake,
Every vamp you stake,
Every bread you bake,
I'll be watching you.
Every wind you break,
Every death you fake,
Every earth you quake,
Every frost you flake,
I'll be watching you.
I guess this fit with his 80s obsession. It used to crack him up how many people would play this song at their wedding, given the clearly pathologic stalker vibe it gave off.
I wonder now if he is watching us. Part of me hopes he is. Part of me finds that creepy.
The first movie with subtitles Alan watched was Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. I think I asked for the soundtrack for Christmas that year, and so Alan would have heard the CD in the Saturn on one of his trips to and from Milwaukee or Great America when I was in med school.
When the movie came out, Hollywood Cinema's sign had a curious setup. There was a movie title per line, but there were only outlines separating every other title, so it read something like this:
I think Marianna Allen has a photo of this somewhere. Let's not even talk about the "up your butt" game with this group of movies.
Alan would only have been 8 at the time, so the parents and I weren't sure if he was following the plot. He insisted he did, and proved it by describing a scene:
Deep man voice: And you will die!
Evil lady voice: So will you!
Deep man voice: [pulling imaginary dart from neck] Oh, how'd that get there? I guess I will.
Alan was my movie buddy. We saw so many films together. Action film? Call Alan. Weird foreign film? Call Alan. Of course, sometimes I would tell him I wanted to see a movie with him, and at the last minute, he would inform me that he might go see it with a friend instead. Nice.
As time goes by, I realize I lost so many different things when he died, not just a brother, but my Star Trek buddy, my movie buddy, my music buddy, my video game buddy, my internet meme buddy, my keep me up to date on "young people stuff" buddy, my piggyback riding buddy, my complaining about parents buddy, my complaining about society buddy, my best friend, the kid I raised with Mom and Dad. I know I can never replace him as a whole, but I find myself searching for fill-ins for some of the smaller roles. Anyone want to see a movie?
Okay, this post is a bit different. There's no music. This post is about the other thing we listened to on long road trips: Alan himself. He really liked science fiction, as do I. He would find full text stories and read them to us. Each title below is a link to the text online. I don't know if anyone will actually do this except for me, but try reading these stories out loud and imagine his voice.
In this short story, people ask a computer of their making a question that cannot be answered, or can it? The answer is not 42. Alan read this to me and Isabelle on one of our trips to Wisconsin to see Mom and Dad. This was one of the first.
This story, published 24 years after the previous story, is about an entirely different question, almost the opposite in fact. Alan read these to us back to back. Despite my extensive Asimov collection, somehow I had missed these gems of his work. Knowing now the questions that were going through Alan's head, I wonder how this darkly humorous take on existence resonated with him.
Read to me and his friend Laura on our way back from New Orleans on our last family road trip. In it, he ponders a quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson:
If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore, and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God!
Let's just say that's not how things unfold. This was the last story he read out loud to me.The last line haunts me as I hear it in his voice: "The long night had come again."
Roger Zelazny is my favorite sci-fi author. This is not his best story. For that, you might want to check out A Rose for Ecclesiastes. These two stories were the pre-Space Age sci-fi era's last hurrah, writings about Venus and Mars at the moment just before we knew what was on them (or what wasn't). This particular short story, The Doors of His Face, The Lamps of His Mouth, stretches the definition of short a bit, but bear with it. To get the full experience, try reading it in a variety of mediocre southern accents, with one of the characters sounding remarkably like Cleveland from Family Guy.
For Isabelle and me, this story, in those voices, is a strong memory of who Alan was -- realizing that the character with the thickest southern accent was from the Midwest halfway through the reading, complaining about the spotty 3G/4G internet access on the road, lines alternating between masterfully delivered and awkward due to trouble reading on a phone screen in a moving car.
Beyond?
Frankly, I don't know what comes next. Reading stories has been hard for me since he left us -- too hard to concentrate. I do see irony in Alan's reading speculative fiction about the distant (on not-so-distant) future when he couldn't even picture his own tomorrow. I think Alan would want us all to look forward, though, in that way that he couldn't.
There was a great This American Life on misconceptions. In it, they interview otherwise normal adults who thought unicorns were real, that "XING" on streets signs was a word pronounced "zing", or that "misled" was the past tense of a verb, "to misle", meaning to mislead. Some time, ask Dad to pronounce the word "debris".
Alan had quite a few of these little misconceptions. One day he made fun of me because I suggested he use his laptop on his lap, as the name suggests. He said, "You think it's LAP TOP? Don't you know it's LAB top?"
But my favorite? When the song I'm a Believer was used in Shrek, Alan started to listen to it, but for years he was convinced the words were, "And I saw her face. Now I'm a bit evil." He was actually disappointed that those weren't the words.
Sorry, Monkees and Neil Diamond fans. Alan's version was sung by Smash Mouth.
This kind of thing exemplified Alan's dopey charm. He was so much smarter than his delayed slow responses would make you believe, but then sometimes, he really just didn't know.
Marianna Allen once taught me the movie version of the fortune cookie "in bed" game, you know, where you add "in bed" to the end of your fortune? "Big things are coming your way" or "Expect lots of business ahead" take on new meanings, adults giggle like adolescents, et cetera.
The movie version is to add "up your butt". Try it -- most of the Harry Potter series is hilarious. Classics like Twelve Angry Men, not-so-classics like Dude, Where's My Car, well, you get the point.
We both watched one of the goodies for this game, There Will Be Blood, but I think separately. It isn't the movie so much that reminds me of him. It's the music.
The soundtrack features the cello version of Arvo Pärt's Fratres, a piece that he wrote and rewrote over and over again for different instruments and ensembles. Each version starts with a very mathematically arranged set of chords diverging from a center point, and then explores that series. The solo cello version sounds almost baroque, with each chord broken up into rolling arpeggios. The solo violin version is similar as well.
Some of the other versions sound quite different. The chords sing out in a ghostly manner, changing yet unchanging.
I played this version, and a few other pieces, for Alan on a longer than expected drive from my place in Chicago to Madison. I think it appealed to the part of his musical sensibility that listened to electronic dance music, capturing some of the "trance" element.
Two versions of one piece, exactly the same underneath, yet totally different. Like two brothers.
I've written before about the trip Alan and I took to Korea in 2011, but I didn't elaborate much on what we did there. One very meaningful component of the trip involved visiting several Buddhist temples. Even though we were not raised religious, Alan felt a certain affinity to these places. On earlier trips with Mom and Dad, he had met prominent monks, and was given prayer beads that he wore most of the time.
We went to Donghaksa near Daejeon with our eldest aunt one evening. The beginning of the walk from the parking lot was a paved road with vendors on either side, but as we got closer in, these gave way to a path running along side a calm brook nestled in the trees. There was a sense of calm that clearly spoke to Alan, even though he found the juxtaposition of serene/spiritual/ancient and aggressive/commercial/new amusing.
One symbol that we noticed specifically at this temple, though it was present at many, was the fish. There were many fish windchimes along the bottom of many of the structures. In the instrument tower, there, alongside the drum, the cloud gong, and the bell, there is a giant wooden fish. I wish I had better pictures, but here's one I do have.
The symbolism of the fish is strong in Buddhism. I think there are many ways you can look at it. A fish lives in an environment that would drown most things, but it thrives. Its entire body is powerful muscle. It is covered in scales that glint in the sun like coins. It can swim with the current or against it.
I wonder if Alan was like a fish out of water, powerful and beautiful, but out of his element, and every breath a struggle. If so, I wonder if his soul was looking to return to the calm brook from which it came. Alan did have a way of looking into the water, his mind clearly so far away...
Seoraksan
As we walked around the temple grounds, the monks started to play the drum.
Looking back at the last couple years for Alan, I see a whole bunch of accomplishments and disappointments. From my vantage, I saw good grades, good friends, keeping appointments, and a strong effort to do the good thing. I also saw difficulty keeping on top of responsibilities, trouble sticking with a job, and too many times saying "f--- it," which inevitably led to trouble -- my bike getting stolen, an OWI mostly from being a smartass to a park ranger, blacking out in a stairwell. His life was a lot of ups and downs, but there were so many ups, and I was so proud of him.
He didn't see things like that. Those accomplishments didn't matter. His experience was that of a burden
constantly being on him. The oppressive feeling of responsibility when
you don't think you are going to live up to expectation and the fog of
melancholy were always there. When he did well, or when he was having a
good time, he truly did seem to feel good. It just didn't last; it always faded
back into the fog.
He must have felt like he was constantly hitting rock bottom, and when he hit its surface, it would shatter, revealing an even deeper chasm in which to fall. This summer, I thought he had reached the bottom. After his OWI, Mom and Dad briefly moved him into an apartment closer to downtown so he didn't have to find a way to get downtown without a car. I checked on him regularly, but his sleeping schedule was way off, and it was hard. He had quit his job and was looking for work. He was focusing on substance counseling, and we were working on getting him to get mood treatment as well.
One evening, I took him out to dinner, and we listened to his music in the car. I had introduced him to Schubert's Death and the Maiden quartet, and he had put it on his phone. He thanked me for showing him the piece.
He had also discovered Mingus and Moanin'.
I think he said that Jordan had played it for him in New York. I can't imagine he had never heard it before given how many times Uncle Steve and I played and talked jazz with him, but this was an epiphany for him. It spoke to him.
I remember thinking that these two pieces were the sounds of his rock bottom. I thought he had nowhere to go but up, and he seemed to be looking that way. I had no idea how much further he would fall.
More times than not, if Alan was playing music (very loudly) in the basement, it was electronic dance music. He had gotten into well-mixed DJ music such as that of DJ AM, but when he got to Iowa, he expanded his tastes and met a lot of people in the dance music scene.
One subgenre he listened to a lot was called vaporwave. It's a movement that grew out of/next to chillwave, using parodied overcommercialized imagery and sounds, 80's and 90's music, pop culture, Japanese and Korean lettering, et cetera, and blending it into a choppy/jazzy mix.
Maybe I didn't describe it very well, so I'll show you Alan's description. He made this film for a production class. He didn't share it, I think mostly because he didn't yet have access to good sound equipment, and was a bit worried about the sound quality. It won't play embedded, so you'll have to click the link.
This Saint Pepsi album was on his youtube account.
It includes the sound that Toad makes on MarioKart. Yeah, I can't pretend I understood all of this, but I did hear it a lot. Or at least the bass thumping through the ceiling/floor.
There are very few times I am ahead of the curve when it comes to music. Alan definitely had the hipster "before it was cool" thing going on. When I did catch something early on, it was from nerdy sources like NPR or Youtube videos of British TV.
There was the whole Gnarls Barkley thing, which hit the UK first:
And there was Adele, whom nobody had heard of in the US yet when I started listening. By the summer, she was THE artist. One of her early UK hits was a Dylan cover, Make You Feel My Love.
There are several other versions of this song, but Alan found one of Dylan singing it himself.
We listened to this in the car on the way to (or was it from?) a special dinner at the Edgewater in Madison. The highlights of the evening included the waitstaff making a flaming Irish coffee for dessert at table side. Personally, I don't like the Dylan version. His voice is gravelly and low with age, but still has his signature whine.
Listening back on these now, I realize I can't listen to breakup songs the same any more. Sure, my heart has been broken before, but never like this. The desperation to have things back the way they were, the longing to be with someone who chose not to stay with you, it all has a totally different gravity now. Did Alan know how many hearts he would break by leaving us?
The first show he watched regularly was Blue's Clues. Nick Jr. had recently started to replay the same episode over again for kids, Ã la Teletubbies.
Alan never seemed to want to pretend to participate in the mysteries. He just liked watching the show.
As he got a bit older, there were other Nickelodeon shows, like all the classic NickToons. These, I could legitimately sit down with him and watch for my own enjoyment, too.
Mom mentioned Starship Troopers. This straightforward alien invasion Heinlein sci-fi book turned sappy anti-war movie was made into a computer animated cartoon, Roughnecks. It was on in the morning before school, and Alan tried not to miss it. This was one of the few television shows that Mom and Alan watched together regularly.
Alan gave me an excuse to act young, whether that meant 22 or 5. The kid in me still wants to play with him and wants him back. The adult in me is heartbroken by the pain he must have been in, and wants to still take care of him. Both miss him.
In the spring of 2011, Alan and I took a trip to Korea together. Our cousin Sunghoon and his wife were our gracious hosts. On the flight there, we were across the aisle from each other. Alan was next to a couple who had never had Korean food before, and he helped them figure out how to eat everything. I got stuck next to an elderly Chinese man who elbowed me for most of the flight, spoke no English or Korean, and yelled incessantly at the flight attendants whenever he wanted something.
We arrived at their tiny apartment late in the evening, and went out for samgyupsal, grilled pork belly, which was one of Alan's favorite foods. The next couple weeks were a whirlwind of activity, with us touring the east coast, the south coast, and the southeast, as well as Seoul and visiting our aunt in Daejeon. Despite this jam packed schedule, there was plenty of time, especially in the evening and morning when the two of us would talk in our room.
Alan told me about the delay -- his friends would count to ten before expecting a response and getting mad at him or repeating themselves. He had to stop smoking weed while we were there, but he was dismayed to note that he was "only 10% less spacy" clean.
He told me about how hard it was for him to start the day without a cigarette. Despite my wanting him to quit, I would pack the pack a few times, pull out a cigarette, set out an ashtray and lighter by the open window, and then wake him up. This was the only way we could get started each morning.
While we were there, Sunghoon, asked us why you couldn't say, "Oh my f---" in English, which he felt should be the obvious phrase to say for something more intense than "Oh my God." He charged us with trying to get it to take off in the US.
We compared music notes, and found a weird little overlap in Electro swing -- club and dance worthy electronic music with heavy Big Band and swing influence. When Sunghoon played it, we had never heard of it before, but it first grabbed Alan's attention, then mine.
I still can't figure out the words to this track -- Don't have a tiger, we're knee-deep in science?
When I returned (earlier than Alan, who stayed behind), there was a strange emptiness in my life. I remember thinking the world felt hollow back in Chicago. The same sights that brought me joy just didn't do it for me. For ten days, I just lacked my normal contentedness with life. Maybe it was Alan withdrawal. Maybe it was just jet lag. Maybe it was the let-down of ending that trip, full of amazing "Oh my f---" moments shared with my brother, and returning to the real world.
I've already talked about Alan's love for The Lion King. In addition to The Circle of Life, there is one other song that stands out -- The Lion Sleeps Tonight.
Timon and Pumbaa's version notwithstanding, it is actually the Tokens' version that we listened to the most. One day when Mom and Dad lived in DeForest, we were driving somewhere, and Alan played this song over the car stereo on his phone.
We started to sing along, and this became a little tradition of ours. On several road trips afterward, we would come back to this song. It's not the easiest song to sing -- remember Alan's lack of a good falsetto. However, I can sing that high, and even got to the point where I could sing the soprano licks -- mind you, not well, but I can sing them.
When our cousin Edward visited us in the house this summer, he brought his own versions of the song. He apparently listened to them in the lab. On the way to the state fair in Des Moines, he played the Tokens version, the French language version, and even a version of Mbube, the song that it was based on. This sing-along was followed by a day of eating food on a stick (butter on a stick and bacon-wrapped pork ribs on a stick being highlights) and going on carnival rides. I had no idea it would be the last one.
What do you do with "our things" when there is no "us" any more? Alan and I had so many little traditions, inside jokes, topics of interest that the two of us would talk to only each other about. Isabelle told me that when her father died, she felt like there was a part of her that disappeared, the part that only existed with him. It took her a long time to realize that part of her was still there. I hope I find that part of me some day.
One of the things we talked about often over the years was Star Trek. I had started to watch The Next Generation when it was still on air, and watched straight through to the end. In residency, I watched the entirety of The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager and Enterprise on Netflix again. One of the hot Trekkie debates is about Enterprise, not just whether it was good or not, not whether it should ever have existed, but why they chose such a horrible theme song.
Here are the theme songs:
Listen to the themes in The Original Series. At 0:48, you have TNG, and you will hear (reduplicated) the same thematic material in the beginning leading up to a retooled main theme. At 4:08, the DS9 theme song clearly echoes the opening with a changed up rhythm. At 7:45, VOY, the opening twists the melody a bit, and then brings it back to the original series theme with the upward phrase at 8:44.
They are all thematically linked. They are all classically instrumented.
Then, in Enterprise, they went with non-classical and vocal. Even worse, there's a double negative at 9:50, much worse than the split infinitive in the first two (to boldly go). At 10:10, there's "strenth." Strenth. What the heck is strenth?
My favorite episode changes from time to time, but currently is from sixth season of DS9, entitled,"Far Beyond the Stars." In it, the actors play science fiction writers in the 1950s, in a time before the civil rights movement. There's a Taoist "who is the dreamer" theme suggestive of the butterfly story in Zhuangzi/Chuang-tzu (which both Alan and I read for school). Here's a clip from the beginning.
Alan's favorite episode of all the shows was from the sixth season of DS9 as well, entitled, "In the Pale Moonlight." In it, Sisko, the main protagonist of the series, compromises his morals for the greater good.
I strongly (or stronly) suggest you go and watch this entire episode on Netflix, but if you are 100% sure you won't, or if you've already seen it, here's the extremely powerful end monologue.
This episode briefly came up in our last conversation on Saturday night. He couldn't think of the name of the episode, but we had discussed it before, and I knew.
Maybe the first event that truly shook Alan's sense of whether he was a good person or not happened in Madison when he was working and taking community college courses. He was at a party, and a kid came out the shadows next to the house he was standing in front of. The kid started to yell, "You looking at me?" and tried to pick a fight with Alan. Alan couldn't remember what happened next, and could only patch together the details in bits and pieces. He described it as being "redded out" in anger. Alan ended up leaving the house with blood on him, and the kid had hit his head hard, ending up in the ICU. The police determined that the kid instigated it (captured on security camera), and that there was no evidence that Alan did anything wrong. They may have fallen down the stairs together while Alan was trying to get away. No charges were filed, but Alan wondered what exactly happened. He wondered what evil might be within him. What exactly did he do?
Until that point, I think his thoughts about good and evil were abstract and disconnected from reality. After that event, good and evil were real, and he didn't know which he was. That uncertainty, that ambiguity, fascinated him, drew him to things like that episode of Star Trek, but it also tortured him.
How do you convince a 21 or 22 year old deep thinker that everyone has good and bad in them, that there were more pragmatic things that he needed to focus on to get through daily life? How do you convince someone who had already started to question whether life was worth living that he shone a light into the lives of so many others -- his family, his friends, the homeless guy he befriended, the people who had nobody else?
The night he told me about his demons, we talked in an alley between two parts of Isabelle's condo building next to the air conditioners. He sat on a window ledge and smoked a cigarette. I find myself going there now, sitting in the moonlight, staring up at a flickering streetlamp, wondering how it could have gone differently. And how I will ever move on without him. I come up empty-handed.
When Alan started college at Beloit, he was assigned room 321 B. Some time during the early part of the year, someone added to it, and his room was labeled, "321 Blast off". Rarely did we see his room without other people in there. It was a combination self-serve restaurant, lounge, hotbox. Those kids would eat anything, so when we would stock Alan up on dried cuttlefish and gochujang, Korean instant ramen, or seaweed, it would disappear within days. Our parents and/or I would visit at least a couple weekends a month, usually taking a rag-tag group of friends along for dinner at Applebee's or the Chinese buffet. We got to meet Courtney, Leslie, Jack (Zack? Mom's accent made it hard to tell), Jared, Sam (briefly), Rui (how Mom spelled Louie), Rosie, and the rest of the gang.
Alan was in "piano class," where he would play duets with other students, and taking private lessons, but he never seemed to listen to classical music. He was into offbeat East Coast (or sometimes Midwest) hip-hop, by people like former Wu-Tang Clan members Rza and Gza and Das Racist.
To each his own, I guess.
While at Beloit, he kept up good grades and did well for himself despite all this. When some temporary social falling out led to missed classes, he found he had the rebound capacity of a wad of wet Kleenex (*splat*) and dropped out. But before that, he discovered a love for philosophy. Perhaps the most influential course for him there was on phenomenology, a course he described as "phenomenal." Somehow, when we talked about it, we would always end up singing:
Phenomena, doo doooooo doo doo-doo...
Since he wasn't able to bounce back, he had to rebuild. He moved in with Mom and Dad, started taking courses at MATC, and got himself back on track. Academically, despite the existential struggles that clearly tormented him, he was somehow able to keep on top of things. He had rediscovered his love of film, and decided to go to film school at Iowa. While this complicated my life quite a bit, I was happy for him to move into my house, and this ushered in our closest times since I graduated from high school.
When Alan was an adolescent, he started to struggle to connect with Mom and Dad. Who doesn't? When things got really tense when I was visiting from college or from med school, I would drive him out to Barnes and Noble to let him calm down. I told him that I, too, had struggled at that age with them. It's hard to be mature enough to form all these thoughts, but not be mature enough to know when they don't matter. For me, it was Lynne Slattery Schroeder who first set me straight on that. For Alan, I felt it was my job. I told him that parents were like that -- that you couldn't change them, and that it was easier to change 5 hard things about yourself than one easy thing about someone else.
On the drive, we would listen to my Dave Brubeck CDs, and I started ear training with him. We talked about basic music theory. We used pieces with weird meters to practice hearing the beat.
Blue Rondo a la Turk,9/8 broken up as 2-2-2-3/3-3-3:
Take Five, 5/4:
I think he played a version of this at his senior recital with Ed Hou and Ryley Crowe. I am waiting to get footage of this from our parents. I also played it with our jazz band, Gyrase, in med school. Too bad we never played it together.
Unsquare Dance, 7/8:
Later, Uncle Steve and his friend Jordan would introduce him to more jazz, but this was his start. Our sharing of music went both ways. He was always introducing me to new things, but this was something I introduced to him.
In retrospect, this was the beginning of our tradition of car conversations. It often felt like we were each other's co-pilots, driving through life together. I'm sure now, I'm not the only one feeling a bit lost without Alan in the passenger seat.
Alan recently told me that he had a theme song. It had been proposed to him by a friend. I present that last today, but I think his theme song probably changed over the years, so here are some candidates that came to mind.
Let It Be
This is the first song he started to sing repeatedly, playing the chords on his guitar.
It wouldn't have been so bad if he could hit the top note. Imagine, "let it be, let it [insert noise vaguely resembling the sound of a dial-up modem connecting]..."
Paul described this song being inspired by a dream of his mother, who had died when he was young, telling him that things would be okay.
After Alan died, Mary Bennett, a good family friend, and Alan's surrogate Iowa mom, hugged me, with sad eyes but a comforting smile, and told me, "there will be answers, not now, but some day." Don't call her mother Mary, though. She doesn't go for that.
I Shall Be Released
As we enter into Alan's Bob Dylan phase, this was the song that he seemed to prefer the most. At the piano or with his guitar, we got to hear this one quite a bit, too. The way Alan sang it, the phrasing was more reminiscent of the the Joe Cocker version than The Band or Dylan himself, though I think it was actually a Dylan version he heard first.
I remember telling Alan that he had the whole teen angst thing going pretty well. He denied it, but then admitted that if you are 1) a teenager and 2) angsty, you might have teen angst. This is also around the time he started smoking. In the beginning, he knew I wouldn't approve, my being a doctor and all. He tried to hide it, but he was so bad at it. I caught him the very first time he tried to smoke a cigarette when I was visiting Mom's Madison condo.
I had gone into the bathroom, and when I came out, he was rushing back in from her porch stinking of smoke. "Dang, I thought you wouldn't notice," he said.
A couple weeks before he died, we were at Walgreen's, and Alan was working on an assignment for a rhetoric class. He had to tell a short personal story. He decided on the story of why he decided to smoke. He had been watching an old war movie with Dad and noticed that the soldiers were always smoking. He asked Dad why, and he said something about having so few of the comforts of home, and that being one thing they could have. Alan thought, "Wow, you can inhale comfort. I want that." Already, in the early years of high school, he had lost that sense of well-being at baseline that he strove to attain for his whole life.
All Along the Watchtower
Near the end of high school, Alan was playing in a band on his electric organ. One of their signature songs was All Along the Watchtower, and just like the other songs, we as a family got very intimate with the same damn chords over and over again. The song had made a resurgence, maybe because of its use in Battlestar Galactica.
Of course, he also like the Hendrix version:
Uncle Steve gave Alan a CD, A Nod to Bob, which had covers of many of Dylan's iconic songs. One that caught both our ears was a version of this song by The Paperboys that has Musical Priest, an Irish reel, in the background. It sounded like we were playing together, but couldn't decide on what to play. Had trouble finding one with good sound quality, sorry.
Take On Me
At some point, Alan's musical taste started veering from the 60s and 70s to the 80s and 90s. There was something about the aesthetic that spoke to him. It was weird to hear the music I grew up around, but never really listened to, become Alan's music of choice.
Of course, there's also this Family Guy bit:
And this:
Can't Take My Eyes Off You
This was officially Alan's theme song. Does it fit? Depending on how you see it, it's either just hauntingly beautiful and sweet, or a little creepy and desperate.
I'm not sure who made the call, one of his Iowa City friends I think. What song meant Alan to you? Is it on this list? It's hard to pin someone down with just one song.
I hope that some day soon, TBT is no longer a thing. For now, I'll use it as an excuse to think about the early years.
Like many little kids, Alan had videos he would watch over and over and over again. As I mentioned earlier, he had vague memories of these as an adult, but it left the rest of us with a more lasting impression.
The earliest of these were the Wee Sing videos. The first, Wee Sing Together, featured a birthday girl name Sally, two living stuffed animals, and her little brother and friends. This is how Alan learned his address, and it helped him learn his alphabet. My friend Phil would come over and yell, "Hummmmbearrrrr!", one of the characters' names. The video promised, "the more we sing together, the happier we'll be."
The next video, Wee Sing Train, followed a magic train where the engine, Chug-Along and the caboose, Cubbie, took kids all over a magical land meeting such characters as Sheriff Knickerbocker, who "[felt] so gooood with [his] Bobbity-bop" and a singing vegetable garden.
After the Wee Sing videos, we moved onto Disney movies. The Lion King was a major one, as I mentioned earlier. The only one he liked more was Aladdin. He identified with the character, a scrappy kid in over his head that people called Al.
I identified with the Genie, a comedian (voiced by Robin Williams, whose birthday was July 21, my birthday, and whose suicide would impact Alan years later) with a big personality and a mouth to match. I had always wanted to be a comedian growing up. The Genie would do anything Al asked, just like I would for my Al.
I'll tackle the TV shows later. For now, it's back to the present.
There are some things you never finish because you run out of time. There are so many things I wish I could have done with Alan -- trips I wanted to take with him, things I wanted to share with him. But it doesn't always take something as dramatic as death to cut plans short. For both Alan and me, there were pieces of music we started playing in high school, and ran out of time to perform in a big way.
For me, it was Zigeunerweisen by Sarasate. This was Grandpa Lee's favorite violin piece, and I learned it, but never polished it for performance.
For Alan, it was the Grieg piano concerto. By this time, he was spending more time playing the chords to I Shall Be Released or All Along the Watchtower (more on that soon) instead of working on the Grieg. He still practiced, and made a lot of progress with his classical playing, but it was no longer his top priority. Here is Evgeny Kissin's interpretation:
When I moved to Chicago, Evgeny Kissin came to play the Grieg with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and the whole family came down to see it. It was a mild March evening, and we walked from my apartment to the Symphony Hall. At some point, he broke a string, and had to take time during a long rest to pull it free from the others. Very rock star. His control over his hands made it seem like he could alter the gravity over the keys. There was a series of encores, and later in the program, the original version of Petrushka. This ballet is proof that there is humor in classical music. The contrabassoon is the most flatulent sounding thing ever, and there were some muffled laughs (see 5:17)
Both of us continued to play in the beginning of college, but then let it go a bit. When Alan moved in with me a year ago, we tried to get him a keyboard, but he never really wanted to go do that. His organ stayed in its case, too. Somehow, he did keep up his skills though. For me, music has been an important outlet, both before Alan's death, and especially in this time after.
The mother of one of Alan's good friends posted on his obit that the music in Heaven just got better. If he's up there jamming in Heaven, I'm sure he's disappointed that he beat Bob Dylan there.
This is the story of the last night I spent with Alan. Actually, let's start with a few days earlier. He wasn't spending much time at the house. He was busy with school and friends, and not having a car made being at the house hard for him. Thursday was a particularly rough day, and there was a flurry of texts and calls with Mom and Dad that I inevitably got sucked into. I asked him to touch base with me, so we went out to eat at China Star together. On the drive, he told me how he felt that he had lost two things in the last year: his independence and his dignity. I encouraged him to stick with it, and acknowledged that things must really have been sucking for him.
On Friday, Isabelle and I were downtown for the Soul Festival, Iowa City's marginally African American cultural event. Al Jarreau was singing, and we were looking at vaguely African crafts in a tent. On the way there, Isabelle had seen a poster for Retta performing the next night in the Union.
Now, let me explain the significance of this. I first saw Retta perform on a promo reel back in 2000 at Lawrence University as part of the Student Organization for University Programming. She was the funniest comedienne of the group, and I made sure we booked her. A decade later, she was a cast member of the TV show, Parks and Recreation. If you have not seen this show, let me try to describe it to you. The first season is horrible. It's a cheap knock-off of The Office with a female Michael Scott with even more obnoxious comedians as the actors. Somehow, magically, this show, still all those things through its run, became one of the funniest half hours on television. If you haven't seen it, I'm going to ruin it for you with this clip, the funniest joke of the whole series, delivered by now superstar Chris Pratt as a throwaway ad lib right at the end.
Alan loved that show. He tried unsuccessfully to get me to start watching it, but I wouldn't. One day a couple months ago, I decided to give it a try while I was writing notes for work at home. I powered through the first season, and started to appreciate how he could love this show so much. We bonded over the stupid jokes, and he was constantly asking if I had seen the one where so-and-so does or says this or that. Retta was extremely underutilized on this show as the office manager, Donna. For several seasons, she just sat there and said a joke or so an episode. Then, finally, seasons later, she became Aziz Ansari's sidekick, and manages at times to totally outshine him. I texted Alan and asked if he would go to the show with me. Things like this were hit or miss with Alan, so I had no idea whether he would go or not. Isabelle even agreed to be his backup if he didn't want to go. He did agree, and I picked him up Saturday night to go see the show. Retta was on fire. She started her act with telling us that she had this song stuck in her head, but did not know the words. The song, below, turned out to be one of Alan's favorites for reminiscing about childhood, and also, I do happen to know the words. As a linguist, I couldn't pass up learning the little bit of Zulu at the beginning.
For your reference, it starts, "Nants ingonyama bagithi baba," which you might translate roughly to "Sir, there is a lion coming." Retta said the words could have been, "Iiii'm an asshole, I'mma punch ya-in the throat," and she wouldn't know any better. This movie held a special place in our lives. We got a VHS copy when Alan was maybe three. That meant that for the next three years, we got to watch it several times a day. Now, for a three year old, that doesn't mean that much, but for a thirteen year old, let's just say I might know the whole movie by heart still.
Her act was filled with jokes, culled from her experiences of late, and from her old standup act from years ago. It was honestly one of the best comedy acts I have ever seen. She ended the act with another musical joke, one that I remembered from my college years.
Aaand of course being a nerd, I also knew the words to this song, the "Laudamus te" from Vivaldi's Gloria.
After the show, Alan needed his film equipment from the house, so I drove him there to get it and dropped him back off downtown. I would only ever see him again briefly the next day as I was on my way out to the Walk to End Alzheimer's, and he was on his way in to start editing film from an apparently crappy morning of shooting. I am so thankful to have had this evening with him.
