Tag Archives: suicide

Finding an Antidote for Poisoned Music

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The shitty (tragic?) parts of my life have tended to poison things that I love, including favorite music. Low, a band I once saw in concert every year, has been off my playlist ever since Mimi Parker, a member of the duo, died suddenly of cancer. It’s been three years now. As much as I miss the music, I can’t listen. Not yet.

Alan and Mimi play Low music in Fargo (2010)

A similar grief hit when my friend Gord Downie, the lead singer of The Tragically Hip, died although I was more prepared for his death, given his prognosis. It wasn’t grief as much as mourning, as Joan Didion differentiated in The Year of Magical Thinking. I attended one of his final concerts, and then he died. As much as I miss him, his music provides comfort.

Gord singing and contorting at Fort Henry in the ’90s

The poisoning is more intense when it comes on a personal level. I very much enjoyed Modest Mouse until a student I associated the music with committed suicide. And then, as they sing on Polar Opposites, I’m trying to drink away the part of the day that I cannot sleep away.

I’ve had a couple of relationships turn terribly sour and drag the joy of the music with them. The death of an ex made The Red Hot Chili Peppers feel dark and awful, while Sufjan Stevens, once a great passion, was dragged into a quagmire of triggering memories. I’m working on getting his music back into my head.

Sufjan plays Christmas Unicorn at The Bowery Ballroom

In the end, this self-cleaning of music, loving it once and then not, allowing it to creep back in, knowing it again, almost feels like wisdom, or at least the closest I will ever get to a thing like that.

Phil plays one of his last shows at The Capital Theatre

Easy Prey

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The horror lies within your imagination. Nowhere else. Sleep and you’re easy prey.

Run, run, run, but it’s right there with you. The darkness of being mauled and eaten comes from within because we know what that is.

We do it to every living thing and pretend we don’t. Anything but that. That’s what we say.

Missed Pitch #1: Alexander Salkind

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(Paris, 1986) Curtis was a nice enough guy – even if he had been hitting on my girlfriend, calling her “his earth mother” – and was the personal assistant to the wife of film producer, Alexander Salkind. Mrs. Salkind, he said, wanted to produce an adaptation of Euripedes’ Medea, the Greek tragedy of a mother murdering her children.

I wrote a brief scene – Medea desperate on the rocks, blood on her hands – and headed over to the Salkind’s sprawling apartment for my afternoon appointment. Salkind’s wife wasn’t there, off having lunch with a Count and didn’t return until the evening, intoxicated, and acted out Medea’s anguish, crawling beneath the grand piano, for her husband.

Salkind hated the idea. “There are three things people never want to see in movies: suicide, AIDS and this.” And then he turned to me. “And what do you have to say?”

“Uh, well, I see your point, but…”

“Ah.” He waved me off and left the room.

His wife stayed under the piano, worn out from her performance, as I went into the kitchen and got drunk with Curtis. “You’re a sneaky rat bastard, that’s what you are.”

I didn’t understand why he kept saying that, but the tequila was good.

The Suicide of Robin Williams

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Robin Williams was a talented actor whose characters touched a common thread of compassion and understanding, well remembered in such films as Dead Poet’s Society, Mrs. Doubtfire and What Dreams May Come. Robin WilliamsHowever I struggle with the accolades and reverence being expressed at the moment. As much pain and torment as he might have suffered, his suicide could steer many in the wrong direction.

Some years ago, I lost a student the same pointless way, a most empathetic and delightful young man – much like Mr. Williams – and was privileged to offer these words at his funeral:

Recently I was at concert of Ladysmith Black Mambazo, a South African a capella group. Ladysmith Black MambazoTheir voices really are something, eight voices singing together in unison, long deep notes, short happy ones, all of these singers singing in unison. I thought a lot about B. while I listened to this music, because as beautiful as it was, I didn’t feel very good. I was off. Something was missing. I wasn’t just sad; I was uncomfortable. I wasn’t myself. And it came to me. One of the singers was gone from my life. Notes were missing. A voice was gone. I had lost B’s voice, that laugh, that insane guffaw, that wild energy exploding out, all of those over-reaching concepts, so many of them now not realized.It makes me quite upset thinking about it, not just sad, but angry too. I don’t know why I had to lose this voice.

As much as we want to debate our beliefs in this world, there is one thing we cannot dispute: this life is all we have. And I wish Mr. Williams thought more about that.