Pictures from Jenni

Tim:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/drawingwithcrayons/sets/72157604136719175/

From the memorial in Chicago:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/drawingwithcrayons/sets/72157604132249400/

Young Tim's Service Work

By Mike McPadden
SUNY Purchase
Class of 1990 (except I failed out in 1988)

When I met Tim Aher in 2004 I was, in fact, not "meeting" him at all. I'd known him – off and on, granted – for the previous 17 years.

In 1987, I was a freshman film student at SUNY Purchase. The transition, for me, from a strictly regimented Jesuit boys academy to wild-and-free art-shool bohemia was no easy thing.

In fact, I could not have been more out of my element.

One issue was that I had never spent so much time around people my own age. And I was learning, the hard way, that they were creeps – and not in a manner I could relate to.

Who I could relate to were preschoolers. I was the oldest of 15 grandchildren, at least half of whom converged upon their grandmother's house for dinner at least once a week.

So when I was attempting to fill a required science credit, I stumbled onto a child psychology course that involved working with children. I took it. It wasn't like the teenage girls were talking to me anyway.

Among the three and four-year-olds I worked with was young Timothy Aher. And I actually did remember him, for years, as a sweet little guy who, on occasion, had to be reminded to keep his hands to himself.

Now lest anyone imagine Tim was a bruiser as a toddler, let me shatter your dreams – his two best friends were a pair of twins named Phillip and Sara. Tim was very taken with Sara's shiny red hair and he liked to sort of "pet" it.

Sara, darling though she was, sometimes needed to not have fingers stroking her head, and she'd let me know. Thus was born the sternest phrase I would ever muster during my tenure at the SUNY Purchase Children's Center: "Hey, Tim, let's use our words! Let's TELL Sara how pretty her hair is!"

Sometimes Tim respected my suggestion, sometimes he just took off to keep company with someone in the classroom less dorky than the guy with fluorescent orange hair and a Monkees t-shirt. And, yes, that would have been absolutely anyone else in the classroom.

But what Tim didn't realize – and that I hadn't realized until having this horrible reason for reflection – is how deeply Tim and his pre-kindergarten classmates had helped me during what would prove to be a very troubled time in my life.

I like to make wisecracks about being a misfit and unhappy in college but my depression was, in fact, deadly serious. My time, then, at the Children's Center provided me with hope, with a purpose, with a connection to the world I'd left behind in Brooklyn, and the suggestion that an even better world might be possible.

Years later – when Tim was an adult friend of my (technically) adult friend Brian Collins – I mentioned attending SUNY Purchase and Tim mentioned the Children's Center. I knew who he was immediately. We joked, from then on, about my bad influence on him. It never occurred to me to thank Tim for the good influence he had been on me.

So I'll do that now.

Tim – thank you. You have held a special place in my memory and my heart for all these years, and I want you to know that you always will.

Chris Sienko: totally shocking, perplexing, and wonderful

I didn't know Tim as well as many of you, but I liked and respected him a great deal. He engaged in every activity with complete dedication and passion. He loved the things he loved - music, art, politics, culture, metal - wholeheartedly. He organized the Festival of Marginalized Subgenres, a precedent-shattering day-long festival, without really any fear or worry about how monumental the task would be - people still speak in awed tones about it to this day. Everything I know about him involves him jumping head-long into the things he loves the most - starting bands, making albums, organizing festivals, studying, engaging in causes near to his heart - without the usual dissipation of enthusiasm that comes to so many others after the first wave of novelty has worn off. He engaged in these pursuits not in a pedantic or militant way, but in the voice of a person perpetually discovering new beauty in the world, each event totally shocking, perplexing, and wonderful. Those are the things I think about…

I was home sick the other day, and was channel surfing in bed, when I came upon this public access show in which this enthusiastic blonde woman was interviewing a member of operating black metal group OPETH, a band that I believe was close to Tim's heart. My first thought was not "I wish Tim was here to see this," but "I can't wait to tell Tim about this." Because we didn't spend a lot of face-to-face time together, I still think of things in terms of having to store up things that happened to tell him about later. I'm still holding out hope that there will be a later.

Jeff Sousa: Words for Tim

For my first year at the University of Chicago, Tim was like family. We lived together on the top floor of Snell, and - together with Jon Cowperthwait - we tended to do everything as a unit. We migrated from dorm room to dorm room, staying up to make sense of the Marx-Engels reader or to brag about O-Week conquests. Consequently, my memories of Tim don't take the form of character-defining moments. I remember him as a fixture. At Woodward or BJ, he was a brother at the table.
That said, there are images and sound bytes of Tim that have stayed with me. Rather than editorialize and try to present a specific view of Tim, I'd like to simply let them stand as fragments of the quirk and undying warmth he has impressed upon us.

Shortly after O-Week, Tim kept talking up the band Tortoise. I was ignorant of them at the time. He bought us tickets to go see their show at the Metro. As soon as we got there we were turned away at the door - the show was twenty-one plus. So, we ended up spending the evening at a neighboring McDonald's, trying to make sense of the Midwestern-ness around us (we are both from New England). Seven years later I finally downloaded Tortoise on iTunes. They're now one of my favorite bands. Every time I listen I'm reminded not just of Tim's sophisticated and precocious musical taste, but also of our "soda" vs. "pop" anthropological bullshit session at McDonald's.

Tim and I had a "dude" heart-to-heart about my situation with a girl who…well…would not put out. Tim was shocked and immediately offered his sympathies, appropriating Plato's concepts of "the forms" and "excellence" to champion pre-marital sex. "We have the equipment. I mean, yeah. Heh. We oughtta use it." After our chat he wandered back into his dorm room and sat down to finish his paper on Plato.

Mostly I remember Tim on Easter morning of our first year. Tim didn't have a tie so I lent him one of mine. I also showed him how to tie it. We primped ourselves in the hallway of the dormitory under the fluorescent light, and then the three of us went to mass - a family.

Jonathan Edward Cowperthwaite: I really thought he needed to put on a pair of pants

In his first year at the College, Tim's rock-format radio shows on WHPK were 2–4 a.m. at one point, and 4–6 at another. The best way of making sure he'd be awake for these was just staying up — and keeping me up with him. We were the guys who annoyed everyone else at 3:30 in the morning by talking too loudly at the picnic table outside Hitchcock Hall while he rolled cigarettes.

Over the course of a few months of these late nights, at first Tim would leave a mug in my room, then maybe a sweatshirt and shoes, then all of his books (he was going to be studying in my room anyway…). By the middle of the year he'd effectively moved in. I went out of town one weekend in Winter Quarter and returned to find a note from our resident assistant: she'd used her keys to let Tim into the room because he couldn't function without everything he'd left inside it. He was annoyed and slightly surprised that I'd be so inconsiderate as to lock him out of our room.

I have a vivid memory of a photograph from that spring: it's of Tim wearing just boxer shorts, seated in my armchair, reading a Playboy. I snapped it one afternoon upon returning from class to find him there, in what was a pretty common sight. Tim would rise mid-day, wrap himself in his duvet, lumber across the hall to my room, and set up camp. He was unsheepish about answering my phone and taking messages for me, loaning my books out to others in our hall, and, well, not bothering to get dressed. He'd made himself at home.

I share this not to make fun of Tim — at least not exclusively… — but to try to assign a perspective to my sense of loss upon hearing of his death:

We hadn't stayed in close contact after we left the dorms, although I dutifully attended a few of his shows, and was, as he predicted in that Reader interview with Liz Armstrong, bewildered and displeased when he asked me to participate in a noise-music panel at his Festival of Marginalized Subgenres. We did a pretty terrible job of keeping in touch; I hadn't even seen him in two years.

But my experience of my first year in Chicago is inseparable from my experience of life with Tim.

What I lack in the way of specific stories is offset by an entire year's worth of conversation: what we were reading, what was wrong with the world and the stupid people who ran it, whom we found attractive, how I really thought he needed to put on a pair of pants. I owe him some of my skepticism about economics majors, and a begrudging appreciation for music not found at Barnes & Noble. My GPA benefited more than once from finishing homework I would've ditched for bed except that Tim was sitting on it.

It's humbling to realize that the catalyst for an entire year's worth of experience wasn't events, or things, but a person, whose omnipresence I took for granted at the time but will now sorely miss.

Christopher Matranga on Tim

Presented at Geoff Guy's, March 15

As I am sit here trying to collect my thoughts about
Tim, I find it difficult to compile all my thoughts
into simple words. I first met Tim when I was the
WHPK Rock Format Chief at the University of Chicago.
During my first semester as Format Chief, Tim wanted
to do a radio show that mixed punk, noise, and
traditional country/bluegrass. The show would be
co-hosted by Tim and Forrest Gregg. At the time I
bristled at the idea; what the hell were these kids
thinking? Luckily, Kareem Rabie, the previous Format
Chief, talked me into letting them have a show and
honestly it was probably the freshest programming WHPK
had seen in decades. The fact that Tim and Forrest
were on at 4 am did not seem to matter to them. They
put as much time and effort into their show as if they
were in a prime time spot with hundreds of thousands
of listeners. I never had the heart to tell them that
at 4 am and with only 100 Watts of power the only
listeners were the random kids on campus who were
overly caffeinated. The one thing I remember most
about this time was that whenever I stopped into the
WHPK record library Tim was there, usually wearing a
torn up hoodie, searching the record stacks and
playlists for something new and unusual to listen too.
I think I learned more about music by listening to
the radio of show of these two 18 year old freshmen
than I have in my 34 years of listening to and playing
music.

Tim was notorious for leaving his email account open
on the WHPK office computers. As you might expect,
mischief frequently set in with the office staff and
Tim’s account was the target of numerous, X-rated,
joke emails of questionable comedic content. Despite
having his email account abused about 4 times a week,
Tim never seemed to catch on to the fact that he
should log out after his email sessions. We of course
continued with the pranks. Tim never seemed to mind.
I still crack a smile about once a week thinking about
some crazy email we would send from Tim’s account to
his friends and other WHPK disc jockeys.

Even after I graduated in 2002, I still got occasional
emails from Tim. The last time I ran into him in
Chicago he was working at a law firm downtown and had
just decided he was going to attend law school. He
had a certain glow in his eyes that I had seen in
countless young students while I was working on my
Ph.D. It was a look of enthusiasm and hope; a belief
that he was embarking on something that was his
calling, something that he had to do to be complete.
I remember being thrilled for him, mostly because of
the look in his eyes. I knew he had made the right
decision for himself. With Tim’s intelligence and his
never-ending optimism, I had no real concerns that the
cold legal world would change him. I knew that the
legal profession was gaining something it sorely
needed: a hopeful, optimistic, and positive energy.

I know that we are all hurting from the loss of Tim,
but from my perspective we have gained so much from
him in the short time he was with us. These days I
like to remember all the clowning around we’d do with
Tim at the station, the crazy Rock Format parties at
Geoff Guy’s apartment, using magic markers to draw
mustaches on Tim’s face after he’d fall asleep at
parties, sneaking up the bell tower and ringing the
bells at 3 am, and countless other moments. Tim was a
great kid. I am a better person for having known him.
Christopher Matranga, 1010 Downlook, Pittsburgh, PA
15201, matranga at netl dot doe dot gov

immured in His limitless ranges

The first half of a poem I discovered from a band Tim was fascinated with, Dead Raven Choir. They set rare and profound poetry to noise so dense it drowned out the words. Said words becoming a secret message you had to hunt down yourself. Here's one I brought back (the rest to come when I finish typing it up...)

from William Everson's A Canticle to the Waterbirds

Clack your beaks you cormorants and kittiwakes,
North on those rock-croppings finger-jutted into the rough
Pacific surge;
You migratory terns and pipers who leave but the temporal clawtrack
written on sandbars there of your presence;
Grebes and pelicans; you comber-picking scoters and you
shorelong gulls;
All you keepers of the coastline north of here to the Mendocino beaches;
All you beyond upon the cliff-face thwarting the surf at Hecate Head;
Hovering the under-surge where the cold Columbia grapples at the bar;
North yet to the Sound, whose islands float like a sown flurry of chips
upon the sea:
Break wide your harsh and salt-encrusted breaks unmade for song,
And say a praise up to the Lord.

And you freshwater egrets east in the flooded marshlands skirting
the sea-level rivers, white one-legged watchers of shallows;
Broad-headed kingfishers minnow-hunting from willow stems on
meandering valley sloughs;
You too, you herons, blue and supple-throated, stately, taking the air
majestical in the sunflooded San Joaquin,
Grading down on your belted wings from the upper lights of sunset,
Mating over the willow clumps or where the flatwater
rice fields shimmer;
You killdeer, high night-criers, far in the moon-suffusion sky;
Bitterns, sand-waders, all shore-walkers, all roost-keepers.,
Populates of the 'dobe cliffs of the Sacramento:
Open your water-dartling beaks,
And make a praise up to the Lord.

For you hold the heart of His mighty fastnesses,
And shape the life of His indeterminate realms.
You are everywhere on the lonesome shores of His wide creation.
You keep seclusion where no man may go, giving Him praise;
Nor may a woman come to lift like your cleaving flight her clear
contralto song
To honor the spindrift gifts of His soft abundance.
You sanctify His hermitage rocks where no holy priest may kneel to
adore, nor holy nun assist;
And where His true communion-keepers are not enabled to enter.

And well may you say His praises, birds, for your ways
Are verved with the secret skills of His inclinations,
And your habits plaited and rare with the subdued elaboration of His
intricate craft;
Your days intent with the direct astuteness needful for His outworking,
And your nights alive with the dense repose of His infinite sleep.
You are His secretive charges and you serve His secretive ends,
In His clouded, mist-conditioned stations, in His murk,
Obscure in your matted nestings, immured in His limitless ranges.
He makes you penetrate through dark interstitial joinings of His
thicketed kingdoms,
And keep your concourse in the deeps of His shadowed world.