In the Pale Moonlight

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.

Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell

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.

Theory

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.

Theme song

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.

Throwback Thursday?

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.

Unfinished projects

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.

Parks and Recreation

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.

Premium Blend Get More: Watch More Stand-Up.

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.