Friend, musician, athlete remembered for humor and passion

By Caitlin Carmody

This article was first published today in the print edition of the S&B.

Last spring, for his tutorial’s “music happening,” Paul Shuman-Moore ’09 performed in the style of Jandek, an idiosyncratic blues-folk musician who was one of Paul’s favorite performers. Paul played a guitar and sang covers of Jandek tunes and nursery rhymes, never once breaking character.

Eric McIntyre, Music, Paul’s advisor and professor of last year’s “Weird Music” tutorial, said that even being confronted with the weirdest of weird performances couldn’t shake Paul. “I had a chicken in one hand and was yelling Dr. Phil excerpts at people…I went up to Paul and was reading these Dr. Phil excerpts, trying to maintain character furiously. I’ve got the camera on him, and I just started laughing, because he would not be shaken, he didn’t shake at all, and it was just this true performance,” McIntyre said. “There was Paul over there just completely in character, in the style of Jandek singing ‘Itsy Bitsy Spider’.”

Music played a significant role in Paul’s life. “For him, music was just pure passion,” McIntyre said. “It’s hard to describe, it’s just pretty unique to be so completely wrapped in it.” McIntyre said Paul was a talented and creative student. “He had a real aptitude for the subject matter,” he said. “In our class he always had creative insights. He wasn’t afraid of things that were off-the-beaten-path views.”

Paul played the trombone in the orchestra, but much of his musical experiences were much less mainstream and more experimental. Daniel Furuta ’08, a friend and fellow tutorial member, said he and Paul, and occasionally other students, would play a show at least once a month. “What we played varied … electronics, toy instruments, non-music objects,” he said. “It sounds kind of ridiculous, toy instruments, but it was a serious pursuit [for him].”

Emily Iwuc ’08 was on the Concerts Committee with Paul, and often played with him and Furuta. She said that Paul taught her different aspects of experimental music, like how to circuit bend and solder. She said he thought about applying to be Concerts Chair and they joked about competing for the spot. “When he was playing music, he seemed to have a good time,” she said.

Paul was also very involved in Ultimate Frisbee. He starting playing on the Grinnell team at the beginning of his first year and excelled at the sport. “He was a really good thrower and really fast,” team member Brian Cavanagh-Strong ’09 said. “There was also kind of a running joke that he had the prettiest legs on the team. He wore really short shorts and these [leg] muscles would pop out.”

Cavanagh-Strong recalled Paul’s participation in the Frisbee team’s annual Good v. Evil tournament. “Paul was always on the Good team and he would come in long white underwear, white t-shirt and wear white briefs. He would make crosses out of sticks and parade around, and he also wore underwear on his head once,” he said. “He was always coming up with funny chants and cheers.”

Yet Paul’s sense of humor didn’t overshadow his kindness. “I don’t think he ever said a disparaging word about anyone, ever,” co-captain Noah Bindman ’07 said. “Even in a context where something like that might be acceptable, he never said anything bad about anybody,” Bindman said.

Paul’s intensity and humor also carried over to his passion for movies. He was a core member of the group “Movie Maddness” and according to his friend Soleil Ho ’09, Paul liked “terrible movies.” “I don’t think he ever missed a meeting of Movie Maddness,” she said. “Sometimes it would just be him and Andrew Cole [‘06] watching a movie together. He was really into movies, it was his favorite thing to do on the weekdays.”

One of Ho’s favorite memories of Paul was when they watched Dr. Seuss’ cult classic The 5000 Fingers of Dr T. “The voice sounded familiar,” she said. “And we were like, “Who the fuck is this guy?” and we were brainstorming while watching in agony, and then Paul whispers, ‘It’s Captain Hook,’ and we just had a collective orgasm, it was so good.”

McIntyre said that Paul exhibited a “humor matched with boldness.” He said one of his fondest memories of Paul was of an orchestra performance of Mahler’s Symphony No. 1, during which Paul used a few bars of rest memorably. “At the climax of this work, after all this tumultuousness, comes this sort of triumphant theme. And Paul’s in the very back, and in the performance I look back there and he’s raised his fist in triumph and is waving it around,” he said. “It’s just something that I can’t get past,” McIntyre said. “Nobody would do that, but he did, and it made me smile.”

McIntyre said that this was a good example of Paul’s character. “I felt all along, even before he disappeared, that he was someone that I would be talking about to classes for generations,” he said. “The reasons I’m going to talk about him in the future are things that he did while he was here, because he did some things that were very memorable. George Carlin said, ‘Make someone’s life.’ It’s one thing to make someone’s day, but to do something that people for years from now on Thanksgiving, people will be saying, ‘Did I tell you about this guy who did this?’”

Many who were close to Paul recalled his sense of humor as a defining feature of his personality. “I remember his infectious laugh and smile,” Cavanagh-Strong said.
“If you looked at Paul and he was smiling, you were on your way to laughing with him,” he said.
Bindman agreed that Paul was “absolutely hilarious.” “It took me awhile to realize that what was hilarious about him was this gentle sarcasm that was really funny,” Bindman said. “His eyes were always laughing, no matter what was going on.”

McIntyre echoed these thoughts. “It seemed like to me there was a lot of joy,” he said.
“If there’s one sort of image that carries through all the images I have, it’s of him with this small, perhaps mischievous smile that says he doesn’t really want to let on that something’s funny, but he’s thinking something’s funny.