Alan and I would often go see one movie while Mom and Dad saw another when they lived in Madison. The last one I remember seeing with him there was The Dark Knight Rises.
Several times during the movie, the music would go into this funky 10/8, either 3-3-2-2 or 2-2-3-3. I would start conducting it in the movie theater, and saying in an excited whisper "the meter! Alan, the meter!" and he would tell me to shut up.
He never got why I was so excited about it. These things always brought me back to the early days of listening to meter with him. We would later get into conversations about whether Hans Zimmer was too gimmicky. When we went to see Twelve Years a Slave, it was a big topic of discussion. In the end, the music really helped those movies feel right. Whether or not Alan wanted to hear about it in the movie theater while I was waving my arms around like a lunatic or not, he did get it. He did care. Maybe not as much as I did, but...
I still find myself thinking I should tell Alan about something, and realizing that I can't, not really. But I tell him anyway.
Alan loved Korean cinema. Uncle Steve had given me and Mom books on Korean films years earlier, but for Alan, the interest grew in the last few years. He took a course on violence in Korean film, and was excited to be in this class because the professor had an interest in phenomenology. There was a focus on the movies of Park Chan-wook.
I had wanted to see Snowpiercer with him, but he backed out and said he would watch it with a friend instead. I don't know if he ever made it to the movie while it was playing here. I still haven't seen it, but I think it's on Netflix now.
His movies spanned genres, and while always somewhat dark, were not all ultra-violent. His biggest success was with his Vengeance trilogy, of which Oldboy was the middle. This trilogy would stretch almost anyone's tolerance for violence, both physical and emotional. I wonder if this was the scale of emotion that ran behind Alan's quiet exterior. He was so hard to read.
College afforded Alan the possibility of being the one who knew more about a topic when he talked with me. That didn't happen very often, given my breadth of trivial knowledge and our nearly 10 year age gap. When he talked about the use of color desaturation in these films, or the phenomenological themes, he was able to teach instead of be taught. This knowledge added a new and stimulating dimension to our relationship.
Hidden in all the tough conversations about his troubles, in all the silly conversations, the mundane comments made as we passed each other in the house, was this new, more adult character to our brotherhood. I mourn the loss of his future, and selfishly what I lost in our future together.
Alan barely made it to college at all. With the exception of a few windows of motivation (the time he went on a tour of Columbia, for instance), he really just kind of shut down when college was brought up. Mom really pushed him to look into Beloit. It was in many ways similar to Lawrence, my alma mater. However, Alan felt that Lawrence had become somewhat uppity since I went there. It just didn't fit his persona. I also think he wanted to break free of Appleton. We both loved many things about the town, but Alan saw it as a reminder of the tough times he had there, the limits of small cities in the Midwest. These feelings were even more accentuated by his summers and Thanksgivings in New York, which gave such a stark contrast to the Fox Valley.
Beloit was in many ways not that different, and in many ways was more limiting than Appleton, but it had the vibe he was looking for. We first saw that vibe through Martina Pfefferle, who was graduating from Beloit when Alan was applying. Alan and my parents got to see a presentation she gave about music during times of oppression.
So, when a couple years later, I brought up the Shostakovich String Quartet #8 and played it in my car for him, he had already heard a lot about the situation.
In brief, Stalin had told Shostakovich he could only write happy music extolling the virtues of Communism. When he came up with this number, it must really have been a huge two-hands-waving-middle-fingers f--- you. He must have been willing to die for this music. Shostakovich dedicated the piece to "the victims of fascism and war," despite the clear references to Jewish folk music, the dark humor and parody that link the music not to abstract concepts from Western Europe, but to the concrete reality at home. Not only did he write this piece of vitriol in that political setting, but he signed it repeatedly with his name, the "DSCH" motif (D-Eb-C-B by their German denotations) that forms a main theme throughout.
Alan appreciated that passion, that pain, and that virtue. Maybe he understood the suicidality as well.
In filmmaking, I think he probably could have found a way to express himself in a way that would work through themes out in the open. He seemed so impatient to get to that stage. He wanted to do meaningful work, not class projects with classmates he didn't respect or give a damn about. He would have done anything to jump ship and start working in the industry if he could, if it got him a step closer to being able to make films that meant something to him. I wish he could have waited.
As Alan got more and more into film, he started to go through all the classic directors and tried to watch their most iconic films. In fact, going through Alan's old things, I stumbled across a piece of paper that he and Uncle Steve had written all over on one of our family Fountain City excursions. Under the name of each of several dozen directors was each of their most important films, like a checklist or a syllabus.
When Mom and Dad still lived in Waunakee, we sat down one afternoon to watch Once Upon a Time in the West, the Sergio Leone classic.
Watching it, you could totally see both sides of the perennial argument about this film: it is one of the greatest films ever made, and it is totally cheeseball. The music is clearly a part of making it both of those things.
The haunting sound of the harmonica in the movie represents the search for vengeance for the loss of a beloved brother against the man who caused his death. It's easy to see how, in times of great loss, anger can develop naturally out of the pain. Sometimes, it helps assuage guilt, another by-product of the loss of a loved one. Sometimes, in the case of suicide, blaming something or someone else allows you to be angry, but not angry at the one you lost. And sometimes, there are places those pointing fingers land that are justified, legitimate and productive.
For Alan, I find myself not pointing fingers at people. But here are the things I would go after with my harmonica.
Mental healthcare barriers
Alan had full access to mental healthcare. He was lucky to be insured and to have a family that encouraged him strongly to seek it out. He had counselors and psychiatrists who worked with him hard to keep his anxiety and depression at bay.
So then, why is this on my list -- when he didn't seem to have barriers to care? The situation is so much more complicated than that. When Alan was younger, it was tough to recognize that he was depressed. He probably went much longer than he should have before getting treatment. He must have known that what he was going through was not right, but maybe he didn't realize it was not normal. And when he did, he had to convince everyone of it.
When Alan did start taking antidepressants, he did not react well to them. Most made him so sleepy, he could not function. Some made him feel so numb, he blamed them for making things worse because he would be getting yelled at, and not even be able to care about the argument going on. He felt that they made some of the worst arguments in his life worse. He had such a hard time figuring out how to adjust them, and his personality and the depression itself made it hard for him to communicate with a doctor what was working or not. Even with a seemingly long list of medications to choose from, there are really only a few classes of medications available. While many people respond well to one of the first couple they try, this is not the case for everyone.
It was even harder to get Alan to a good counselor. Talk therapy is tough business, and very individual. It can be very tricky to find the right person to work with, and for them to find the right strategy to work with the patient. He saw some that were fluffy and bubbly, not a fit for him. He saw some that were so easily intimidated by the situation that they didn't stick with him. They may have been great therapists for others, but not for Alan.
Getting good mental healthcare doesn't just mean having access to one person. It means getting hooked up to a system. Even for Alan, with the privileges he had, this was a struggle. What about for the many people out there who don't have those privileges? Or don't know in the new insurance landscape what is available to them? What about people that are so scared by the stigma of mental illness that they don't get help when they know they need it? Or that don't know enough about mental illness to know that they have it?
In other words, this is a societal problem. When having the access Alan had is not enough, it speaks to a much larger problem in the community.
I hope you will all consider taking some action here. Whether it means opening your mind to education about mental illness and healthcare, donating to good causes such as the National Alliance on Mental Illness or to smaller local causes such as this one.
Consider raising your voice politically to help protect mental healthcare parity, the idea that these illnesses should be treated, covered, and thought of like physical ailments, not as some special lesser class. Sign petitions. Go to events to show your support. Help fund research to find better treatments, to provide more resources.
Reach out to friends and loved ones that you see struggling with mental illness. As a society, we need to break the stigma. And while not everyone will want to talk about it, we can start slowly working on breaking down those barriers.
These websites work by posting your mug shot, and then a sister website will offer to remove it, for a fee. At least six states have taken action against these operations, but Iowa and Wisconsin are not among them. I know I haven't shied away from Alan's legal issues, and that's mostly because I personally do not find shame in them. Alan was a good person, and his digressions were relatively minor. But a mug shot does not tell that story.
I don't know what legal or political action can be taken to do something about this, but this is an industry that should not exist, and should be taken down.
Bullying
We make such a big deal out of bullying in grade schools nowadays. And we should. It's totally not appropriate, and for so many kids, they don't know how to get help when it happens to them. I remember growing up, and when I was bullied, I somehow ended up being the one who got in trouble. Reporting it was called tattling. Defending yourself physically was seen as unacceptable -- zero tolerance.
I remember seeing a video of a nerdy kid getting picked on by a classmate outside. When he feels physically threatened, the nerd lashes out, seriously injuring the bully. He was severely punished for this, and told that he had used excessive force. Pardon me, but that kid is not trained in self defense. He is not a professional law enforcement officer or soldier. In today's zero tolerance world, it's probably safer for bullied kids to go all out and do as much damage as possible since they will face the same punishment for lesser damage. The clear problem here is that the nerdy kid had no way of knowing how to get help. He had no way of knowing how to get the pain to stop.
Alan confided many years later that he had been bullied as a little kid. He never told us about it. Those little things -- having his backpack taken away, comments about looking funny because he was half Asian or because he was skinny, he stored all of them away until they resurfaced years later.
But it wasn't just in grade school. He stood up for his friends who got bullied on the street for being different. He was bullied by administrators at his school who, having legal degrees, you would think would know better than to casually throw around hurtful words that were not legally justified.
Frankly, I don't see a day any time soon when these issues are gone. But that doesn't mean we can't try to make the world a better place by fighting them. In the movie, the man with the harmonica gets his revenge, and shoves his harmonica in the mouth of the man who killed his brother as he lies there dying. I will never get that satisfaction, but I won't back down.
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.
