Follow me

This post is going to be, admittedly, a little disjointed. When I try to reminisce about Alan, things kind of run together all stream-of-conscious-y. I've thought a lot about these various musical memories, and have come upon them from multiple different directions. So, I guess I'll start with Christmas.

We've had many Christmas traditions over the years. We had Christmas bears and Christmas stockings, and of course all the things I covered in the blog entry about Great-grandma. One short-lived but dear one was Uncle Steve getting Alan the DVD sets for each of the Lord of the Rings movies, and then taking us to the theater to see them with him.

It had a bit of everything -- adventure, nerdiness, music in cool meters for me. It provided a framework for movies that came after it. When we watched Thor, his friends -- technically called the Warriors Three, were "Gimli, Asian Legolas of the Woodland Japanese, and the guy from Robin Hood: Men in Tights."

So, now I ask you to follow my tangent here. The Lord of the Rings movies were made in New Zealand, which is kind of like Australia, but they talk even funnier there. "seven eight nine" -->"seevin, ite, noin" It's like Down Under's Canada.

This is how my brain connects this memory to Kimbra and Lorde -- two New Zealand singers that had huge hits recently, and are famous for weird songs, great voices, and making absolutely ridiculous faces when they sing.

Kimbra made it big when she was featured in Gotye's Somebody That I Used to Know.

She has a solo career over in Australia and New Zealand.

I warned you about the faces.

Lorde, of course, I already covered in this entry.

I guess this post goes to show how hard it is to capture even one group of thoughts about Alan and my relationship with him as a cohesive whole. This blog is but a dull reflection of its subject. I hope you are able to follow me.

After nightfall

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.

Spellbound

There were so many times when I was so proud of Alan. One of those was when he was asked to play the piano in an arrangement of the Spellbound Concerto. I couldn't find a recording of the arrangement they played, but to give an idea:



His orchestra conductor put an enormous amount of trust in him to do this, and he would have been so exposed. I wish I could have gone to the concert, but I kept on top of how things were going up to and after his "big break."

He had so much potential. It's so hard to see the void left by his passing, not just in the present, but in the future.

Time in a Bottle

I mentioned before that Alan was my movie buddy. The last two movies we saw were X-Men: Days of Future Past and Guardians of the Galaxy. I guess this makes sense; we both loved Marvel Comics growing up. In fact, I recently found a drawing he made me when I moved away for medical school that included the things we shared, which apparently were: Marvel Comics, music, Great America. I guess this is what was important to 10 year old Alan.

For Alan, it was usually Spider-Man. I guess that makes sense. He was a loner who was misunderstood and under-appreciated, driven by a deep need to be good. He was haunted by the consequences of failing to do so. He was pensive, and had a constant inner dialog.

For me, it was the X-Men. Also misunderstood and under-appreciated, they banded together to make the world a better place.



Neither of us had read the relatively obscure comics that led to the Guardians of the Galaxy movie, but we both looked forward to it. Here's the trailer -- the most iconic part at 1:51, if you want to skip ahead.



As you can see, the soundtrack was big on oldies.

Anyway, I guess we both outgrew comic books, but this was still something we shared. It's funny, the more I think about it, Alan was always the person I wanted to spend the most time with. He wasn't sociable or pleasant all the time, and he clearly didn't always want to be around me. We each had our own lives with our own friends as well. As much as I know he cared about me, it's clear I always cared more about him. Ours was a difficult relationship to describe. We were clearly brothers, but we were truly friends as well. He saw me as another parental figure, but not exactly as a parent. He was able to tell me things he wouldn't tell Mom or Dad. He would come to me for help when he didn't want to go to someone else.

Part of this was because he seemed to want to compartmentalize his problems -- to split them up into ones he could tell me, tell them, tell his friends. Each of us got a different little part of the picture. Maybe he did it to prevent any of us from seeing to whole thing, his pain in its entirety. Maybe he was afraid of what we would do to try to help him. Regardless the reason, it's made for a complicated task now that he is gone to figure out exactly who he was. I was poised in a position to see more of the picture than most, but of course, my view, and this blog as its outgrowth, is so limited -- such a small fragment of Alan.

Crouching Tiger Exit Wounds

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:

----------------------------
CROUCHING TIGER
EXIT WOUNDS
----------------------------
BLOW
THE MEXICAN
----------------------------
BLOW
POKEMON 3
----------------------------

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?