I'm Always Sad (a party)

Five minutes of death & love on a Latvian train

A filmmaker’s take on how to dance to grief.

Three years ago, my brother Ethan sat with his guitar in my living room and tested out a new song called “I’m Always Sad.” I argued that he could record it as a dance number - I always loved sixties ska which sounded “up,” with lyrics about being down.

Ethan had a different vision for this song he’d written on a train - so he recorded it epic and cinematic, which led me, as his sometime video director, to a snowy train track in Latvia.

One of the things I love most about filming in distant places is the generosity I find when I’m far from home. I can’t imagine commandeering an Amtrak train without a budget or a permit, but in Riga, thanks to a community of good friends, we were able to make it happen.

Apocalypse When

We intended to edit the video quickly, but life intervened with a violence I wasn’t prepared for. First, the creative impulse took us to San Francisco to film our improvised musical Brother Verses Brother.

Then, I found myself with a nonrefundable ticket to a double-feature of grief: navigating the maze of my father’s hovel, physically hoisting him to the toilet while he prepared to die - all while an earbud stuffed in my ear was squawking a terrible secret.

As I and my sisters tended our dad, I was also arguing with one specialist after another in a hospital in another city, where Ethan had suddenly taken mysteriously ill.

I didn’t know how to tell my dad that his other son might be dying, nor how to tell my lucid but stricken brother his father was dying too.

We kept a photo of Ethan here

Thirty minutes after my dad died, my friend and co-star Lara offered to drive me through the night, away from my father’s body, 350 miles to my brother’s hospital bedside, so I could be the one to break the news to Ethan.

With Friends Like These

It’s funny who shows up when the world ends. In those months, the smell of my brother’s hospital became normal to me. There were good friends I expected to visit who complained about “afternoon traffic,” while unexpected medium-friends actually showed up with salad and coffee. You learn quickly who can handle the smell of death.

When Ethan could function, I watched Wild Strawberries with him, and furiously redesigned my father-son poetry book Father Verses Son to include a bundle of his poems, changing its title to Father Verses Sons (plural) in case Ethan didn’t make it - or in case he did.

He did. Ethan began to move. The unexplained autoimmune condition retreated in fits and starts, as mysteriously as it had arrived.

As Ethan regained his strength, we began the long, cathartic process of building the musical soul of our film, Brother Verses Brother, while he put final touches on his album, Earth City 2: Nightfolk.

Creativity and the Magic of Isolation

Last night in Riga, we returned at last to throw an “I’m Always Sad” release party for a great Latvian crowd. It was more than a video premiere, it was a celebration of persistence.

There is a strange irony in “I’m Always Sad.” It’s a song about the glories of isolation, written before we were forced into a very real, very terrifying isolation by illness and loss. But finishing this project (and I am a firm believer in finishing everything) reminded us that while the song honors being alone, the making of it required the opposite: the power of family, and of friends who don’t care about traffic.

No matter the tempo, a song about sadness can always be a dance.

Please watch on YouTube and pass it on - it genuinely helps. Have a sad party.