Moving house

The Holy Bee of Ephesus can now be found at:

http://holybeeofephesus.wordpress.com/

Update your bookmarks accordingly.

Face-Off, #1: "Tombstone" vs. "Wyatt Earp"

This has nothing to do with the highly believable John Travolta/Nicholas Cage action-fest of '97. What we are trying to do here is take two productions that are telling the same basic story and see which one provides the best viewing experience. Remakes don't count, re-boots are acceptable, and the closer together they came out, the better.

As is often the case with the Holy Bee, to understand the entertainment, we must start with the history...

People of Tombstone, Arizona remembered October 26, 1881 as particularly cold. A bone-chilling wind whipped off the nearby Dragoon Mountains, and many residents assumed a flurry of light, dry snow was on its way to the little silver-mining town. A storm of a different kind came instead. Two groups of men faced off against each other in a nondescript vacant lot. (The OK Corral, which would soon lend this confrontation its name, was actually on another street on the other side of the block. Its rearmost portion could be accessed by a tiny alleyway, the entrance to which was still several yards from the vacant lot. But, as author Jeff Guinn points out, "Shootout at the Vacant Lot on Fremont Street" doesn't have much of a ring to it.)

Animosity between the larger interests each group represented had been growing for the past eighteen months. A tangled mess of politics, personality clashes, and a long series incidents such as stolen U.S. Army mules, the semi-accidental shooting of the Tombstone city marshal, and a botched stagecoach robbery just outside of town limits all contributed to the tension that had been humming through the town since early the year before.

On one side were five men -- Joseph Isaac "Ike" Clanton and his younger brother Billy, brothers Tom and Frank McLaury, and Billy Claiborne -- who represented the "cowboys." Small-time ranchers who openly rustled cattle from over the Mexican border less than forty miles south, they were viewed with suspicion by the town leaders and businessmen. Most were legitimate ranch hands with a rowdy streak, coming into town to drink and raise a little hell. Dealing in stolen cattle was something everyone did to keep their ranches afloat, and most people looked the other way (especially if the cattle came from Mexico.) Other cowboys were more sinister -- genuine "bad men" from Texas, who fled that area when the legendary Texas Rangers started cracking down on outlawry. Politically Democratic and sympathizers to the old Confederacy, they also had many allies in the town who appreciated their free-spending business and admired their free-spirited resistance to authority.

On the other side were four men -- city marshal Virgil Earp, his two brothers Wyatt (a deputy federal marshal) and Morgan (deputy city marshal), and the notorious John "Doc" Holliday (a well-educated dentist-turned-professional gambler) -- who represented the order- and community-minded townspeople. The clannish, uptight Earps were never incredibly popular with the people they were charged to protect. Wyatt in particular was viewed as a dour, self-aggrandizing social climber, with a checkered past on both sides of the law, who spent most of his time running card games in a variety of saloons and investing in mines that didn't pay off. He viewed his off-and-on career as a lawman as a means to an end (that end being authority and respectability that would lead to wealth). He had formed a close, unlikely friendship with Holliday, who was slowly dying of tuberculosis. Holliday was known to have a vicious temper when drinking (which was most of the time by 1881), and his reputation for unstable behavior and violence preceded his arrival in Tombstone. Wyatt Earp's own reputation suffered in many people's eyes due to his association with what many considered a degenerate. But one of Wyatt's good qualities was loyalty to his friends. The Earps were politically Republican and staunch Unionists, perpetually on the make to enhance their status and make money. The cowboys were a threat to that goal.

The Earps and Holliday confronted those five cowboys that day to disarm them -- they were carrying firearms within city limits, against the local ordinance. It was a shaky accusation to make, as the cowboys were ostensibly on their way out of town, and therefore justified in taking the weapons (which they had lawfully turned over on their arrival the day before) with them. They were just taking an awfully long time to make an exit. Lingering. Almost trying to spark a confrontation. Harsh, drunken words and threats had been spouted in the saloons the night before (mostly by the loud-mouthed Ike Clanton), and the Earps had had enough. As they approached the vacant lot, they were stopped by county sheriff John Behan -- a friend and ally to the cowboys. He assured the Earps -- falsely and dangerously -- that the cowboys had already been disarmed. He was ignored, and wisely took cover.

Billy Claiborne fled at the sight of the approaching lawmen. After the tiniest moment's stand-off, either Wyatt or Billy Clanton fired their weapon. The unarmed Ike Clanton fled as soon as the shooting started. Thirty seconds later, it was all over, and the remaining three cowboys were dead or dying in the lot and the adjacent street. Tom McLaury was also revealed to be unarmed, but was shot several times as he desperately grabbed at the rifle in his saddle holster. Only Frank McLaury and Billy Clanton had weapons on them in the vacant lot that day. The worst of the cowboys -- true outlaws and killers like Curly Bill Brocius and John Ringo -- were nowhere near Fremont Street that day.

But it did not end there. Controversy and retributions continued for several months. The Earp party were tried and acquitted of murder. Virgil and Morgan were victims of fearsome ambushes orchestrated by Ike Clanton and the more violent-minded cowboys. Wyatt and Holliday led a posse of dubious legal authority to cleanse the countryside of cowboy influence. The so-called "Vendetta Ride" became almost as legendary as the shootout itself...

The story of the Shootout at the OK Corral was big news in its day. Contrary to Western myth and the fantasies of the dime novelists, shootouts in the streets of town in broad daylight were exceedingly rare. The incident faded from the headlines, but bubbled just under the surface of popular consciousness. There sprang up an entire subculture of "Western buffs" dedicated to debating who was in the right, who shot first, etc. The mythologizers portray the Earps as a force of justice and order, and the revisionists claim that the cowboys, although no angels, weren't that bad, and that the Earps were just as morally compromised, and on top of that, genuinely unpleasant people. (The argument rages on to this day, only instead of in historical journals and Western magazines, it's on internet sites.)

The shootout burst onto the scene again half-a-century later -- this time Hollywood-style. Fictionalized and simplified. There was no doubt in the mind of Hollywood (or what passes for its mind) who was in the right. The Earps were law & order, the Good Guys. The cowboys lawless, sadistic criminals, the Bad Guys. Westerns were kings of the box-office in the mid-20th century, and the Earp-Clanton shootout was terrific story fodder. The first major film to attempt the story was 1939's Frontier Marshal starring Randolph Scott. Then came John Ford's masterpiece My Darling Clementine (1946) with Henry Fonda as a serious, pensive, Henry Fonda-type Wyatt. John Sturges' Gunfight At The OK Corral (1957) gave the confrontation its inaccurate name once and for all, and Burt Lancaster played Wyatt in the typical, square-jawed moralistic hero mold. Hugh O'Brien also followed this pattern for The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp, which ran on ABC from 1955 to 1961. Enjoyable as all of these were, none of them attempted to tell the story in any realistic way. And by the time Josey Wales ambled out of movie theaters in early 1976, the Western was pretty much dead. (For more on Westerns in general, why not check out the Holy Bee essay "In Defense of the Western"?)

Then came the multiple Oscar-winning Unforgiven in 1992, and Westerns were once again in vogue. Unfortunately, that vogue was short-lived because most of the films that came in the wake of Unforgiven were pretty terrible. Everything had to be a high-concept "Western with a twist." Posse (black cowboys -- an historical reality to be sure, but it was a wretched movie) and Bad Girls (gunfighting cowgirls -- the few that existed did not look like Drew Barrymore) were a couple of the more high profile ones, but a huge slew of them never made it to theaters. As a video store clerk in the early 90's, I handled every bit of atrocious, Western-themed trash that came down the straight-to-video pike at that time, and as a fan of the genre, I even watched a few, to my regret. (If you've got a hankering to see Rob Lowe as Jesse James, 1994's Frank and Jesse is streaming on Netflix. I won't spoil any surprises as to its quality.) Which is why I was excited to learn in the fall of 1993 that there were not one but two movies taking a serious, "historically-accurate" look at the frontier lawman Wyatt Earp and his role in the "OK Corral Shootout." The "competing Wyatt Earp projects" were big news for awhile in the movie mags. How do they measure up against each other?

Tombstone, released in December 1993, was what is commonly referred to as a "troubled production." In an interview with True West magazine, lead actor Kurt Russell estimated around 100 crew members quit or were fired during the course of production. It all started so promisingly: Oscar-winning screenwriter Kevin Jarre (Glory) crafted an enormous, multi-character, multi-subplot story giving equal time to the Earps and the cowboys. The finished film as written would have stretched well past the three-hour mark, and it was an actor's dream, with page after page of chewy dialogue. Jarre would also be making his directorial debut.

So with financial backing secured from Hollywood Pictures, eighty-five actors and hundreds of extras hired, costumes from 100% authentic materials stitched up, and extensive sets built on location in Arizona, production got underway. But then ugly truth occurred to the cast and crew -- brilliant writer Kevin Jarre couldn't direct his way out of a paper bag. After four weeks of shooting, he managed to complete only a single scene (the one at Henry Hooker's ranch) with hours of unusable footage and botched shots. The producers stepped in and relieved him of his directing duties. They were considering pulling the plug on the whole affair, but core members of the cast and crew pulled together amidst the chaos, and continued production. Russell, who had fallen in love with the project, began directing until a replacement for Jarre could be found. The eventual choice -- George P. Cosmatos, director of a couple of Stallone action flicks -- was no one's idea of an innovative filmmaker, but he could handle basic action scenes and could stick to a schedule.

What wasn't revealed until after Cosmatos' death a few years back was that Russell continued directing the film until the very end. He would secretly slip Cosmatos a shot list each night, and during shooting he would indicate what he wanted through the use of hand signals. (It has been reported that Stallone directed Cobra and Rambo in a similar fashion, using the amenable Cosmatos as a front.) Russell also began paring down the script to focus more on the Earps and get the shooting back on schedule. The other actors may have grumbled at the (sometimes drastic) reduction of their parts, but they went along with it, sometimes slipping cut dialogue back into their scenes as the cameras rolled. (Russell claimed he cut many of his own scenes, too.)

Tombstone is an action movie, no doubt about that, fudging facts or making stuff up out of whole cloth (the red sash worn by all the cowboys was a fictitious but handy bit of visual shorthand -- the equivalent of the "black hat" in the old B-Westerns). There is lots of "real" history in there, but its shuffled and compressed in order to amp up the story. (A prominent location in the film, The Birdcage Theater, was not built until after the shootout. Veteran Western actor Harry Carey, Jr., age 72, plays Marshal Fred White, who was 31 at the time. Just nitpicky stuff that non-history nerds would never notice.)

Wyatt Earp, which started production at the same time but was not released until April 1994, was supposed to be everything Tombstone could no longer be -- a true epic, with a measured pace and a majestic sweep that Tombstone was originally supposed to have, if its first draft is any indication. Jarre originally developed the Tombstone script with Costner, and when Costner decided to tell his own, more Wyatt-centric version with writer-director Lawrence Kasdan instead, he attempted to block the production of Jarre's film. Even as Tombstone finally got underway, the Costner-Kasdan movie was considered the "prestige" project, and everyone anticipated it would outperform the comparatively low-rent Tombstone artistically and commercially. Unfortunately, the whole reason Costner chose another Earp project is what works against the film the most: It focuses to the point of claustrophobia on a single person, rather than taking advantage of a cast of dozens -- and that single person is an unlikeable character played by a dull actor.

(POINTLESS SWIPE AT LAWRENCE KASDAN WHICH MAKES THIS BLOG POST EVEN LONGER: Kasdan is a truly gifted writer who can and should be revered and respected as the primary screenwriter of Raiders of the Lost Ark, and the writer whose final draft of Empire Strikes Back made it the best of the Star Wars movies. His work then began taking a turn toward the pretentious, culminating in 1991's Grand Canyon, one of the most self-serious, smug, faux-sophisticated, Baby Boomer-worshipping piles of "message movie" diarrhea ever squirted onto celluloid.)

Although the scope of the film is hamstrung by limiting itself to a lone central character, Costner's typical blankness actually works in making Wyatt Earp the character a more historically accurate portrayal. I believe Russell's enthusiasm and skill as secret director and uncredited script doctor are big parts of what made Tombstone a success. But his breezy performance did not really capture the true essence of the cold, taciturn man the historical Earp was. Russell can be a fine actor (check him out in Dark Blue), but he tries far too hard to make Earp a sympathetic, traditional Western hero. For someone described by another character as a "frowner" (Jarre was clearly familiar with the real Earp), Russell spends an awful lot of time grinning. I suppose it worked for the lightweight popcorn-y crowd-pleaser that Tombstone ultimately became. But I would love to have seen a darker Tombstone made a decade or so later, with a more grizzled Russell bringing the sense of menace he brought to his character of Stuntman Mike in Quentin Tarantino's Death Proof. The wooden, charisma-free Costner, one of my least favorite "major" actors of the 80s-90s era (his mega-stardom was a perpetual mystery to me), actually does a much better job of capturing Wyatt as he was -- kind of an asshole.

The buzz-generating performance of both films came from the actors playing the eccentric wild-card Doc Holliday. Tombstone's Val Kilmer is a little too chubby-cheeked to look like someone dying of consumption, and visibly weighs in at a hefty two bills, but a pallid complexion and permanently sweaty shirt-front are enough to convey his condition. Dennis Quaid, on the other had, looks suitably haggard thanks to a sixty-pound weight loss and a painfully hoarse croak of a voice. Both are superb. Kilmer's Holliday has the edge thanks to the actor's twisted charm and the many witty quips provided by Jarre's screenplay. Quaid's Holliday retains the insouciance of the southern gentleman gambler, but remains firmly grounded in reality. (Quaid received a well-deserved Supporting Actor nomination.) Kilmer's Holliday transcends reality. Indeed, he is likely a creature of pure cinema fantasy -- but he's riveting to watch. (Kilmer shockingly did not receive a Supporting Actor nomination, but had to settle for an MTV Movie Awards "Most Desirable Male" nomination. That a character who spouts geysers of sweat and coughs up blood through the final third of the film could be considered in any way "desirable" shows just what MTV thought of its audience, even back then.)

Veteran character actor Sam Elliott brings some old-school Western authenticity to Tombstone's Virgil Earp, but Michael Madsen is severely miscast and wasted as Wyatt Earp's Virgil. Sporting ridiculous gingerish hair and retaining his Chicago tough-guy cadence in the few lines the script sees fit to give him, Madsen is also clearly younger than the actor meant to be his younger brother. Tombstone's Bill Paxton brings his usual performance style (mildly annoying lunkhead) to the role of the youngest brother involved in the shootout, Morgan. The poor soul who plays Morgan in Wyatt Earp came off as a total non-entity with even less screen time than Madsen's Virgil. Dana Delaney is quite fetching and spunky as love interest Josie Marcus, and -- as is repeatedly the case -- the soap opera actress who plays Josie in Wyatt Earp is totally non-memorable. (And for those who love a Bill Paxton/Bill Pullman mix-up, Pullman appears briefly in Wyatt Earp.)

Wyatt

So in terms of filling out supporting parts with actors who are at least on some level colorful and interesting, give the edge to Tombstone's rep company. It's a crazy-quilt mishmash that runs the gamut from the ridiculous to the ludicrous but is eminently watchable and includes the likes of Charlton Heston, Michael Rooker, Frank Stallone, Billy Zane, Billy Bob Thornton, and Jason Priestly. The real standouts are the chief trio of villains -- Broadway veteran Stephen Lang as the boozy braggart Ike Clanton, the great Powers Boothe as head cowboy Curly Bill, and Michael Biehn as the psychotic, brooding John Ringo (sharp-eyed viewers will recognize him from similarly intense turns in The Terminator and The Abyss.) Robert Mitchum was slated to play Old Man Clanton, but was injured in a fall and had to withdraw. He provides the film's opening and closing narration.

Virgil

Wyatt Earp's supporting cast does have some good actors: James Caviezel, JoBeth Williams, Adam Baldwin, Tom Sizemore, and...uh, Jeff Fahey? Really? (Fahey starred in so many straight-to-video abominations he was a punchline around the video store.) But the film is intent on focusing entirely on its titular character, and the supporting cast has next to nothing to do, with a few exceptions. I did like David Andrews' performance as laid-back eldest brother James Earp, a full-time bartender who did not take part in any gunfights, but observes his younger brothers' tough-guy antics with a wry twinkle. (His character was left out of Tombstone.) Comedic actress Catherine O'Hara shows off her dramatic chops as Virgil's firey wife Allie (who despises Wyatt.) And the one spot where Wyatt Earp's casting totally outshines its predecessor was Mark Harmon (of all people), who deftly captures the smooth-talking, gregarious essence of Earp foe Sheriff Johnny Behan, without turning him into the hissable, unctious bowler-hatted dandy fop that Tomsbtone chooses to go with.

Morgan

Wyatt Earp pulled a dirty trick beloved by movie marketing teams where they take an actor in the film who's on a recent hot streak and boosting his billing way beyond the scope of his performance. Gene Hackman -- hot off his Oscar-winning performance in Unforgiven -- has about ten minutes of screen time as Wyatt's strong-willed father, but gets third billing on the poster and in the credits. Yes, Virgil and Morgan ended up as blank ciphers, but at least they were a ways down the cast list. Tombstone did something similar, but only in the TV commercials. The announcer would intone "Kurt Russell...Val Kilmer...and Jason Priestly in...TOMBSTONE." Priestly is officially listed eighth in the cast, but he must have had a great agent, because even that is far, far too generous for his blink-and-you'll-miss-it part as Deputy Sheriff Billy Breakenridge. If you recall, he was riding high as a cast member on the hottest show on TV at the time, Beverly Hills 90210, and playing up his appearance in commercials that ran heavily on Fox in prime time probably sold a lot of tickets. Hills fans who were duped into going to the movie thinking they'd see their idol in a large role were surely surprised by his almost cameo-sized appearance, and the fact that the filmmakers decided to portray Breckinridge as quite obviously gay. (Not that there's anything wrong with that, as Seinfeld would say, it's just that there was no historical or narrative reason for doing so.)

There are script-related weaknesses in both films -- usually where some purple-prose dialogue clunks on the ear. For every great line (such as Russell's "You gonna do something, or just stand there and bleed?", or Quaid's taunt to a group of snooty townspeople "Y'all can jes' kiss my rebel dick"), there's a cheesy howler. But it was the 19th century after all, before the birth of irony, and a lot of people really spoke in those super-earnest pronouncements that sound hokey to the modern ear. Costner's introduction of himself as "I'm WAH-ATT EARP!" as he cocks a shotgun is apt to inspire giggles, and Tombstone goes for the painfully cliched slow-motion "Noooooo!" not once, but twice. Some of Tombstone's weaknesses relate to the chopped-up nature of the shooting script, and a lot of Wyatt Earp's have to do with the air of self-importance slathered onto it by Kasdan.

Doc

THE WINNER? Tombstone. Its lesser regard for history is offset by its faster pace, more memorable supporting performances, and overall fun factor. The shootout is the centerpiece of film, coming about halfway through, with the Vendetta Ride being the true climax. Wyatt Earp is more realistic, with some great sequences from periods in Earp's life that Tombstone didn't cover. His ill-fated early marriage is used to explain his grim personality, his time on the buffalo-hunting circuit is well-staged, and his early days as a lawman in Dodge City are a major part of his legend, but the film has a somewhat ponderous air and lags severely in its final act. The shootout is placed awkwardly about 3/4 of the way through, and the Vendetta Ride seems like a limp afterthought. The film has a sense of over-inflated pompousness common to epics (especially epics associated with Kevin Costner.) And Wyatt Earp's resounding box office implosion almost single-handedly killed the "Western revival" less than two years after it began.

So, after spewing 3700 words on this topic, I can conclude no better than quoting Tombstone's Curly Bill Brocius:

"Well...bye."

Coming soon... The Hulk (2003) vs. The Incredible Hulk (2008).

Family Jewels

Greetings.

I hope my summer hiatus from writing hasn't killed off what little readership I have. I know I said that in a previous post that my work ethic was virtually non-existent during the summer months, but that's not 100% factual. I have been working, sometimes feverishly. Just not on this blog. On what, you are justified in asking.

On my family history. The Big Summer Project has been scanning, digitizing, and organizing the thousands of family pictures that have come into my possession over the years. Doing this has also revived my periodic interest in genealogy.

Say what you will about obsessing over the Magic: The Gathering or the minutiae of Harry Potter, but exploring genealogy truly outranks them in sheer nerdiness. It's the hobby of Mormons and retired people (nothing against those folks, it's just that they're not your go-to for cutting-edge activities). But I suppose I'm one of them. The only lower rung on the hobby ladder is metal-detecting. Maybe next summer.

As someone with the last name of Isenhower, I have been subjected repeatedly to the well-meaning but irritating question "Any relation to the President?" These instances are diminishing greatly since those with any knowledge that there had once been a President Eisenhower are rapidly dying off. "No, it's spelled differently," I would always say.

Out in the retail world, I had a little routine. If there was an older person manning the counter, I would observe them always checking the "E's" first when I would go to pick up a prescription or my developed film. (The fact that I once picked up developed film is itself evidence that I, too, am heading into the "older person" zone.) I would let them look, and allow them to give me a puzzled, apologetic shrug, before I told them, with exaggerated patience as if it were the most obvious thing in the world, "Check the I's."

Yes, I was kind of an ass.

My parents would always say up front, "Isenhower-with-an-'I'," as if that were the full name. They had to deal with it much more than I ever have. Almost no one goes to the E's first anymore. It's kind of a relief, as I no longer have the energy to direct random maliciousness toward retail clerks. (Almost. Randy at Wingstop, there's almost no chance you're reading this, but you're an idiot and you annoy me to no end.)

Despite the different spellings, I discovered several years ago that yes, in fact, I am related to former U.S. President and Supreme Allied Commander of the European Theater of World War II Dwight D. Eisenhower (at right). I'll explain how in a moment.

The following section of text was found recently in a forgotten My Documents file-in-a-file-in-a-file in a dusty corner of my hard drive -- a Word document pieced together in stages from 2003 to 2008 or so during times when I caught the genealogy bug. I can't claim total authorship. Some of the writing sounds like me, some assuredly does not, and I've forgotten what I typed out and what was cut-and-pasted from several different sources. So with that disclaimer, here's the History of Isenhower-with-an-I:

According to tradition, early generations of the Eisenhauer family were horse-mounted warriors in the service of Charlemagne (768-814, at left), living in a hilly farming region of southern Germany known as the Odenwald, on the banks of the Rhine River.

During the years 773-795, reports were given of a massive ore mine situated right in the midst of the Odenwald, and even in modern times iron ore has been mined there. A picture dating from the early 18th century shows the primitive way iron and ore were exploited. The man below in the pit of the mine who breaks off the iron ore is the eisenhauer (iron-cutter). Derived from this professional term, the family name developed. Being a small municipality, the Odenwald was frequently overrun by rulers of more powerful countries, resulting in its people being oppressed and deprived of religious, personal and political liberty. Equally disruptive was the fact that in this locale beginning in the early 1600s, the population was about evenly divided between Catholics and the new Protestant Lutherans, with intense religious strife from time to time, including home and church burnings, business disruption, and mob violence.

Over centuries, the Eisenhauers evolved from warriors into pacifists. Many German Lutherans at the time were followers of the Mennonite movement (founded in 1528), which advocated pacifism and the rejection of materialism. The Eisenhauers were Mennonites, and were probably victimized during Germany's religion-based Thirty Years' War (1618-48) for their beliefs. At the end of the Thirty Years' War, Switzerland and Holland became independent and began to practice religious tolerance as did Russia under Catherine the Great a few decades later. Members of various Eisenhauer families fled to these areas to escape the carnage.

A Scene From the Thirty Years' War by Ernest Crofts

The line of American Eisnhauers is from Eiterbach, a small village northeast of Heidelberg. In the 1600's, William Penn made several trips to Germany to convince German farmers to emigrate to his new North American colony, Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania was filled with merchants and craftsmen, but very short on farmers. Penn founded his colony on the principles of the Society of Friends religion -- the Quakers. The Quakers and Mennonites had many similarities. (The Amish, still common in rural Pennsylvania, are an offshoot of the Mennonites.)

Hans Nicholas Eisenhauer (c.1691-c.1760), a native of Eiterbach like his father before him, had moved his family from place to place, avoiding religious persecution and ongoing border skirmishes with the French. It seems he made his home for a time in both Switzerland and the Netherlands. Unable to establish a permanent farming homestead, he supported his family as a weaver and lumberman -- and occasionally a reluctant soldier.

Heidelberg, Germany

William Penn's message of peace, religious freedom, and fertile farmland to be found in Pennsylvania outlived the man himself, and continued to find a receptive audience in war-weary Mennonites. Mennonites who emigrated from Germany in the 18th century, typically went down the Rhine River by raft or flat boat to Rotterdam in the Netherlands, where they embarked on English ships that then stopped briefly in England before proceeding to Philadelphia.

This relatively inexpensive and easily-managed route of emigration was the result of an agreement between the British monarchs King William & Queen Mary of Orange and William Penn. This was, in modern terms, a rescue effort for minorities who were being "ethnically cleansed." William, who was originally Dutch, sympathized with the Protestant exiles, but not enough to want to keep them in England. The emigrants had to agree to take an Oath of Allegiance to the English Crown before proceeding on their journey.

In the fall of 1741, Hans Nicholas and family followed this route aboard the ship Europa. According to "The Eisenhower Family" by Betty White (!?), the passenger manifest of the Europa listed 44 adult male passengers -- including “Hans Nicol Josshower (Iron cutter)" and sons -- embarking from Rotterdam, Holland with Captain Ludsaine as the ship's master. (Women and children were regarded more as cargo.) They had a rough arrival in America on November 17, 1741. The Europa ran aground in the port at Lewes, Delaware and sank. Captain Lusdaine and a cabin boy drowned but "the 120 souls on board" were saved and transported to Philadelphia by boat, where they took the Oath of Allegiance three days later. Hans Nicholas settled and lived the rest of his life in and around Bethel Township, Pennsylvania, about twenty-five miles to the east of what would be the state's modern-day capital, Harrisburg.

OK, back to words I know are my own...Much of the information I'm relating to you comes from a 1717 edition of the "Martin Luther Family Bible," carefully brought over on the Europa by Hans Nichoals, with a handwritten family history on the cover, inscribed by an unknown hand sometime later in the 1700's. It is currently in the Eisenhower Library in Abilene, KS.

Hans' son, Johann Peter Eisenhauer (1716-1802), was a blacksmith, gunsmith, and prominent merchant and landowner of Bethel Township, Pennsylvania, where he also served as constable. He married three times and fathered seventeen children through the course of his long and remarkable life. He is the common ancestor of both Your Humble Narrator and the revered General and President.

He became a naturalized British subject in 1752, but when the American colonies declared independence in 1776, he was firmly on the side of the revolutionaries. He was one of the few local merchants who provided supplies for General Washington's troops during their legendarily harsh winter camp at nearby Valley Forge. ("Two bushels of wheat and some forage" according to a surviving invoice.) His eldest son Peter (may have) fought the British (or, more likely, their Indian allies) as a part of the guerrilla group Paxton Rangers, and another son, Frederick, was killed at the Battle of Germantown.

Spelling, especially the spelling of names, was pretty fluid before the 19th century, which can be confusing for amateur genealogists. Around the time of the Revolution, Johann Peter began frequently spelling his name "Eisenhower" as opposed to the earlier "Eisenhauer."

Dwight D. Eisenhower was descended from Johann Peter's seventeenth and final child (another Frederick) sired by ol' J.P. when he was a few ticks past eighty. The Holy Bee was descended from Johann Peter's eldest son, the aforementioned...

Peter Eisenhauer (1745-1778), like his brother Frederick, did not survive the Revolutionary War. The date and place of his death correspond to an incident called the Wyoming Valley Massacre, where British-allied Native Americans and local Loyalists (colonists who remained loyal to Britain) attacked a group made up largely of the unruly frontier troublemakers called the Paxton Rangers (or variants thereof.) At times, the Rangers could generously be called a rough-hewn militia supporting the independence movement, but usually they were hard-living, destructive, Indian-killing thugs. Records confirm Peter's death took place at this time and place, but Revolutionary War records do not list his name among the official dead. It is not known if Peter was actually fighting "off the books" as a Paxton Ranger or with another militia group, or was just passing through and got caught up in the action, but he died along with 340 others in that obscure little river valley in northeastern Pennsylvania.

The Battle of Wyoming by Alonzo Chappel

(A poem, Gertrude of Wyoming, was written thirty years later to commemorate the event, and sixty years after that, a sentimental Congressman from Ohio was so moved by the poem he proposed naming the newly organized Rocky Mountain state "Wyoming" after it. To the puzzlement of all, his suggestion was accepted.)

Peter lived long enough to father at least one son, another Johann Eisenhower (c.1770-c.1830), about whom almost nothing is known, except his middle name may have been "Benjamin." Or Benjamin may have been another son of Peter. Or not. Genealogy can be a frustrating pastime. Anyway, Johann/Benjamin had a son, yet another...

Peter Isenhower (1812-1881), who, like so many men of his generation, decided the eastern states of the young nation were already getting a little too crowded, and packed up his family and headed West. The census shows him in Carroll County, Missouri in 1851, and Steuben County, Indiana by 1858. It's this clown we all have to thank for the endless name-spelling trauma we would be forced to endure as a result of his seemingly arbitrary decision to drop the first "E" from the family name sometime during his journey west. (If things really run in families, he was probably dodging a creditor or irate mistress.)

Peter finally gave us a Benjamin Isenhower (1835-1909) to whom we can pin some facts. Benjamin lingered back east until about the time of the Civil War, then he and his young family joined his parents in Indiana, where he was a hardware store owner (and occasional postmaster) in the town of Ray. Benjamin fathered James Culder Isenhower (1859-1928), who has the distinction of being the first Isenhower to settle in Iowa -- specifically, Tama County, Iowa, which remains the "Isenhower-with-an-I" capital of the world to this day. Swing a dead cat in the county seat of Toledo, and you'll probably hit an Isenhower. (This is not recommended.)

James Culder Isenhower and wife Elsie

James Culder's son James Earl Isenhower (1891-1954) was the first Isenhower in my family line not to be born in our old stomping ground of Pennsylvania. A dyed-in-the-wool screen-door front-porch-swing Midwesterner. His son, Kenneth Earl Isenhower (1918-1986) was my grandfather. I never met him more than a few times, as he was a restless sort (like his ancestors), and he died when I was still pretty young. Having no fondness for endless vistas of corn, it was he who first rolled the Isenhowers into California. His eldest son, my father Spencer Earl Isenhower (b. 1939), was born in Iowa, but has been a Californian for almost sixty years now. The Holy Bee is a Golden State native, born in the state capital of Sacramento in 1974.

And wonders never cease, I've produced two more "Isenhowers-with-an-I"'s, one in 1998 and another in 2000. Odds are, that name will continue for at least a couple more generations, but those who look for it under "E" will be gone altogether, and we "I" types will be persecuted no more.

So there it is. The Charlemagne stuff seems a little far-fetched, but I'll leave it in. (You can excuse any old bullshit with the phrase "according to tradition.")

If you want to explore genealogy, it's easy and no one has to know. It'll be our little secret. Just download yourself some free family tree-making software. I recommend Legacy. If you want to pony up some cash, you can get the full version with some extra features, but the free version is just fine for most users (including myself.) Start plugging in what you know. Once you get beyond the facts you know about your parents and grandparents, it's time for research.

1) Ask questions of your elderly relatives. I know this makes your hobby no longer secret, but your elderly relatives will not judge you the same way your jackass friends will. Your elderly relatives will probably be delighted (unless there's some shameful family secret, which is always worth finding out.) Be prepared to pay a personal visit or talk on the phone, as your elderly relative may not be "on the e-mail." And be prepared to cross-reference and ask others, as an elderly relative's memory for places and dates may not have its former bite. They may not remember their parents' anniversary or where their late brother was born, but they'll remember that Great-Uncle Alec smoked Hav-A-Tampas, and the cold snap that killed their begonias, and what they wore to third cousin Ida's wedding (everyone knew it wouldn't last, as Ida had a wandering eye and the fellow she married was a plow-blade salesman who was on the road a good part of the year, and a good Baptist, but not a Reformed Baptist, etc. etc. until you start sneaking peeks at your watch). Precious memories, but not much good for filling in your family tree software.

2) Use the internet. If you go to the various family tree websites (Ancestry.com, Familysearch.org, and several others) armed with some names and dates of great-great-grandparents, you are bound to find some information on your ancestors, even if your family is totally non-noteworthy and unremarkable. I lucked out in sharing ancestry with a president, but I've found material on all branches of my family.

A word of warning: Much of the information may be wrong. If one person entered a wrong date or bad guess years ago, it can and will be re-copied and re-sourced ad infintum by lazy researchers until it sounds like gospel truth. Using the material on the websites as a starting point, do as much of your own research as you can, delving deeper into online archives. If you're patient and make some lucky mouse clicks, you can uncover new material and correct some mistakes without leaving your computer chair. (There's always the option of actually traveling to various county offices and nosing around in the records -- true original research -- but most armchair genealogists can get by without that level of commitment.) But never trust the first thing you find. It's a jumping-off point only. Mistakes and sloppiness abound. Double-check everything you get from the 'net whenever possible.

As always, you can learn more at your local library...

More to come...

The Holy Bee hasn't forgotten you. It's just that his work ethic is at a very low simmer between June and August.

Keep the faith & stay tuned...Lots of new things cooking...

Holy Bee Recommends, #7: "On Writing"

Stephen King...the name still conjures images of his 80's heyday, when his novels about vampires, re-animated corpses, haunted hotels, and psycho killers defined horror fiction. His work took a broader turn beginning about twenty years ago, giving a subtler, more psychological twist to his grim terror tales, and also expanding far beyond the confines of the horror genre.

I am an unabashed fan of King's work, but not for the reasons one would expect. Nothing that the printed word conveys can truly terrify me (this is the failing of my own imagination, not of King's skill), so I read King for the clever twists and turns of his stories, and for his authorial voice -- informal, highly descriptive, pop culture-savvy, and often laugh-out-loud funny.

2000's non-fiction On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft may be my favorite King book of all time, if we're judging by how many times something is re-read. It's under 300 pages, and divided into three parts. First is a (very) brief autobiography, focusing on the experiences that shaped him as a writer. Second is his thoughts on the craft of writing, suggestions and tips for novice writers, and the techniques that work for him. (Some of Part Two is an endorsement/re-statement of the seminal work by Strunk & White called The Elements of Style, which also graces the Holy Bee's bookshelf.) Third is a graphic, squirm-inducing account of the near-fatal 1999 road accident that crippled him, his painful rehabilitation, and the role writing played in his recovery. Life is not a support system for your art, King says. It's the other way around.

No matter if your audience is six (hi, guys!) or six million, writing is an enormously gratifying act of creation. Where before there was nothing, now there is something. Even if it is just ramblings about your iPod playlists. An oil painter or woodworker, I'm sure, feels a similar satisfaction, but they're working with tangible raw materials. A writer's raw materials are his or her thoughts, conjured up out of the ether, marshaled and organized, then expressed as eloquently and precisely as possible to provoke some kind of emotional or intellectual reaction from an unknown person, who could be thousands of miles away and/or centuries in the future. King compares it to telepathy, and believes it is the one true act of magic that exists in the real world.

Not that I'm saying writing is a "better" skill than painting or woodworking....OK, I kind of am. Deal with it.

"I am approaching the heart of this book with two theses, both simple. The first is that good writing consists of mastering the fundamentals (vocabulary, grammar, the elements of style)...The second is that while it is impossible to make a competent writer out of a bad writer, and while it is equally impossible to make a great writer out of a good one, it is possible, with lots of hard work, dedication, and timely help, to make a good writer out of a merely competent one." -- SK

I have re-read this book many, many times in the decade since its publication. What bits of advice does the Holy Bee try to bring to bear on his humble web log?

1. Reading is the creative center of a writer's life. If you don't have time to read, then you don't have the time -- or the tools -- to write.

• Through reading, you begin to recognize the difference between good writing and bad writing. As King puts it: "We read to experience the mediocre and the outright rotten; such experience helps us to recognize those things when they creep into our own work, and to steer clear of them. We also read in order to measure ourselves against the good and the great, to get a sense of all that can be done." I still remember when I discovered that a published piece of work I was reading was not any good. I was in my mid-twenties, and it was a sci-fi novel from the Star Wars expanded universe entitled Rebel Dawn by Ann C. Crispin. I was about halfway through it when it hit me like a laser bolt. "This... is...horrible." Before, I had naively assumed publication automatically implied at least a base-level quality. Sorry, Ann, but Rebel Dawn blows.
  
• All the things that stressed you out about writing in school -- things like proper grammar, good sentence and paragraph structure, and where to stick a semicolon -- are the things King calls your "toolbox," and your toolbox will gradually become fuller the more you read. These things cannot really be taught (as someone who struggled to teach grammar for four years, I can attest to that), apart from the labeling of the parts (gerunds, participles, etc.) but you can absorb it through your reading, and it will begin to be reflected in your writing almost automatically.

2. Avoid the passive voice. Doesn't "The hangman pulled the lever" sound so much better than "The lever was pulled by the hangman"? This kind of writing crops up all over the place. It will not be used by the Holy Bee. Oops, I mean, the Holy Bee will not use it.

3. Avoid using too many adverbs. If you're writing is clear and specific enough, you won't need that many of them. This is advice I'm always mindful of, but regularly (see?) fail to follow. Adverbs are just so user-friendly! My prose will continue to be littered with words ending in "-ly" until the end of time, but I do try to watch it. For every adverb you read, I've rejected two. In fact, I almost wrote "probably continue to be littered" two sentences ago.

4. Be honest. This can be applied broadly. Don't pander to or second-guess your audience. "If you expect to succeed as a writer," King says, "rudeness should be the second-to-least of your concerns. The least of all is polite society and what it expects. If you intend to write as truthfully as a you can, your days as a member of polite society are numbered, anyway." Don't second-guess yourself, either. If you're struggling to choose the proper word, the first one that comes to mind is usually going to be the best one. Trust your gut, and if on reflection it really doesn't work, that's what second drafts are for. "Honesty" does not always mean "factual accuracy," as any good fantasy writer will tell you. In writing, it means emotional truth. In my autobiographical essays, I sometimes expand/compress/fudge chronology or facts to improve readability (and no autobiographical writer can avoid this, like it or not), but my aim is always to stay true to my emotions and reactions to what I was going through at the time.

Those lessons I can easily apply to the swill you read here. King's other advice -- on character, dialogue, and his preference for "story" (flowing & natural) over "plot" (stiff & artificial) -- apply more to fiction writing. My last attempt at fiction writing was about seven or eight years ago, when I got the idea for a ghost story set in the trenches of World War I. I still think it's a good idea, but two or three pages into it, I realized I didn't have the literary flair (or discipline) to pull it off.

Another enjoyable part of the book is King's description of his own writing method. He prefers writing in the morning, alone in his writing room at a desk facing the wall, with loud music blaring. Although constant pop-culture jokes are made about King's frenzied, prolific output, he says his writing goal is ten pages (about 2000 words) per day, every day. Disciplined, yes. Superhuman, no. Because he enjoys the process so much, it rarely feels like "work." King says a book should take about the length of a season -- three months or so -- to complete, otherwise it will grow stale in the writer's mind.

The Holy Bee is not blessed with a "writing room," nor the time to crank out 2000 words a day in one if he had one. I try to get about 2000-2500 words per essay at a rate of two essays per month. Here's how a Holy Bee piece comes together:

My writing process often begins when an opinion or idea starts rattling around in my head like a BB in a tuna fish can (to borrow a simile from Dave Barry), and refuses to go away. This usually occurs when I'm in my back patio chair trying to read. Or in the shower (the Holy Bee is very clean.) After awhile, I will grab my yellow legal pad (contained in its battered blue imitation-leather cover) and a green Paper Mate felt tip pen, and get to work.

When it comes this way, white-hot and burning a hole in my cerebral cortex, often 80% of the complete blog essay ends up right there on the paper -- but totally out-of-sequence, as new points to make occur to me. I have to work fast, because I often envision a specific way of wording something, and I need to to get it down before I forget. I've forgotten before, and it puts me in a bad mood for several days. Tons of asterisks, arrows, and margin notes help me piece it together when it comes to second-draft typing time.


Sometimes it doesn't come that easy. If I'm writing something "to order" or on a deadline, I'll have to force-start it. Just grab that tablet and pen and start. Even if it's complete gibberish. The important thing is to start the physical act of writing. It will be the most boring, inane drivel for a paragraph or two. But I've learned if I make a start, the pump gets primed, the good stuff starts flowing, and I'll go ahead and make the switch to MS Word or the Blogspot site itself. I can always re-write or eliminate those opening segments at this point. Once it's up on the site, I re-read it about a dozen times, fixing errors (a few seem to always slip through), tweaking the wording, adding or subtracting a sentence or two. Then I announce the latest entry to the world via Facebook, and await the plaudits from my grateful readers.

Most of the "Playground" entries have started with a simple list of six to ten songs from the era I'm conjuring up, a couple of bullet-pointed notes, and one or two paragraphs of stilted, uninteresting longhand. Out of the corner of my eye right now I can see the skeletal, embryonic outline of "This Used To Be My Playground #20," still laying on the slab, inert, waiting for my muse to sprinkle her fairy dust on it and bring it to life.

According to my notes, the space and title for this "On Writing" essay were reserved on my Blogspot dashboard on April 17. The actual act of writing began on May 22. I'm typing these final words on June 12. In between those dates, work and family boorishly intruded like a gang of Capital One vikings. Almost two months between spark and fire. So it goes. I will be backdating this entry to May 30, to preserve the lie that I update my blog two times every month. Who says the Holy Bee doesn't do fiction?

(Should I remove the adverb "boorishly" from that last paragraph? Just can't seem to. And you can get my annoying parenthetical asides when you pry them from my cold, dead hands.)

Apocalypse Wow: The Gospel According To The Holy Bee

"Well, I guess hard times flush the chumps. Everybody's lookin' for answers..."
-- Ulysses Everett McGill
O Brother, Where Art Thou

As our friend Col. Hans Landa would say, "That's a bingo!" I got my card early, found about fifteen of this guy's followers to monitor on Facebook over the weekend, observed their varying reactions, and marked off the excuses as they came up. (Actually, the most common one used by a factor of about 1000 was the "convoluted explanation" one, second down from top left, but it wasn't in a neat row like the rest.)

Religion as a topic of study will never cease to fascinate me, as the very title of my entire blog suggests. Within arm's reach of my computer at all times, along with my complete works of Shakespeare, is my King James Revised Bible (and my New Oxford Annotated Bible, and my biblical atlas and concordance.) Since the Holy Bee was in short pants, he's always said if you want to truly understand the history, breadth, and beautiful capabilities of the English language, you should have a familiarity with the speeches of Churchill, the plays of Shakespeare, and the KJV Bible. (Students of the English language's close American cousin would do well to know his or her Lincoln and Twain.)

Fascinated as I am by its history and sociological impact, for as long as I can remember, actually adhering to a religion has been anathema to me. I have always found it oppressive, creepy, cloying, and ultimately empty. I have no questions about my purpose or existence. I don't need any outside set of doctrines to give me a code of ethics or morality. (And as far as my moral lapses -- of which there are many -- as long as they are confined to victimless pettiness like snickering at the fundamentalist rubes on Facebook without their knowledge, who the hell cares?)

And yet, so many are driven to seek answers and purpose, and I confess to a total failure of understanding this. It's so simple for me:

• I'm perfectly content to accept my own and all others' existence as random and haphazard.


• There are no "answers" to the meaning of existence, apart from our biological need to perpetuate our species


• Morality exists independently of religion. It's an instinctive way for homo sapiens to make their surroundings more pleasant and comfortable. Being robbed, assaulted, or killed can ruin anyone's day, so we avoid doing it unless driven to it by economic desperation or psychological deviation.


• We have been blessed and cursed with super-charged cerebral cortexes, which have boosted us to the top of food chain, while at the same time gotten us into all kinds of trouble as we tied ourselves in knots concocting elaborate mythologies and constructs to answer all of the questions that started occurring to us before we had the means to answer them technologically/scientifically. We are also the only species that has a conscious awareness of our own mortality, and that scares the hell out of us.


• Even the early forms of sexual morality made a certain primitive sense. "Don't screw a bunch of random people/animals/objects or you may end up with a disease that could endanger the tribe." (The development of the condom very early on in our history made this as obsolete as the sundial, but religious leaders love to cling to the sex stuff to this very day.)


• By combining fear of death with our innate desire for safety and order (i.e., "morality"), we get religion. "Follow these rules, Jebediah, and you won't really die."

And then it all gets culturally conditioned into (most of) us for the next 5000 years, until even a person who seems rational in all other areas will express a belief in an invisible sky-king.

And even if I allowed for the possibility of a "god", the Canaanite deity Yhwh ("Jehovah" if you prefer the anglicized Hebrew), the God of Abraham, is not the one I'd back. His cruel, capricious, petulant, and downright psychopathic behavior all through the Old Testament should be enough for anyone to run to the more reasonable embrace of Zeus or Odin. But the people of the Ancient Near East have repeatedly proven themselves gluttons for punishment.

Fast forward a few thousand years...For the most part, your average modern Christian goes about their daily lives finding comfort, meaning, and a sense of community through their religion. They accept much of the Bible, especially the more unpleasant and/or outrageously fantastical parts in the Old Testament, as "allegorical." Which is kind of cheating, isn't it? You get to pick and choose, like a cafeteria. "I'd like a double serving of the love and charity, please, but you can keep the smiting and stoning." If you want to put only the bestest and nicest parts of the Bible on your tray, I'm here to remind you that there's still a shitload of headcheese and squid innards on the Big Menu that the Original Chef once insisted you eat if you wanted to be in the club, but you now feel free to ignore the unpalatable bits due to your own interpretation. (And it is your interpretation once you start to get picky -- you don't get to quote one verse to back up your point while ignoring the bloodthirsty lunacy of the verses preceding and following it.) But I understand the vast majority of religious folks in America are trying to lead a good life and abide by the Golden Rule, which is really what the whole she-bang boils down to. As long as they keep the more extreme stuff away from my genitals and science textbooks, I've got no beef with their beliefs. You see things your way, I see them mine, now let's have a beer and watch 30 Rock together.

Then there's the fringe types, who give all religions a truly bad name by doing things like flying planes into buildings (same God, different book), or holding "God Hates Fags" signs at soldiers' funerals. Which is wrong, according to all observable evidence. God seems to regard "fags" as, at worst, a minor annoyance. (He certainly allowed all those kid-touching priests to get away with it for decades, didn't He? All part of "His Plan," I guess.)

No, God reserves the full fury of His bottomless hatred for...poor people.

He's given the poor and impoverished such a royal (divine?) fucking-over for five millennia, it staggers the imagination. The pat response is that they get to go to Heaven after their suffering and receive their "eternal reward." The same Heaven that the wealthy Christians go to. The ones who lived their lives with Cadillac Escalades and granite counter tops and vacations in Cancun. If these rich folks were truly devout and believed with all their hearts, according to the tenets of the faith, they would go, wouldn't they? To the exact same place as some poor Haitian bastard who's lived in a mud hole and ate rat shit his entire life. There's no special Super-Deluxe-Heaven for poor people. It's the same place. Raw deal.

Out on the furthest whisker of the fringe are those that believed that an 89-year-old retired civil engineer, using some convoluted numerology, calculated Judgment Day from the date of Noah's Flood. (In other words, dating an event that never will happen from an event that never did happen. Can I please have a list of bridges that this civil engineer worked on so I can avoid them?) They said the date was May 21, 2011. There have been end-of-the-world doomsayers throughout history, but none got the attention these people did these last few weeks. They spent millions on advertising billboards, and a fleet of tastefully-decorated RVs (religious nuts love stickers!) to criss-cross the country (many of them quitting their jobs) to "sound the trumpet" for what they passionately believed to be the End of the World, which would begin with a massive world-wide earthquake, followed by their physical bodies being "raptured" skyward, while the unworthy stayed behind for five months of Hell on Earth before the planet was literally destroyed on October 21.

With very little effort, in the spirit of an anthropological study, I found some these people who had public Facebook walls, kept all their tabs open all weekend, and periodically checked in on them as they gradually realized they had been duped and the worldview they had clung to for who knows how long was totally invalidated. As the weekend wore on, and the Rapture failed to materialize, they kept coming up with more and more desperate scenarios for how it could still happen. Here's how it went down:

1. The Original Scenario: "The Rolling Apocalypse." When the earliest time zone -- represented by the island of Kiritimati in the South Pacific -- hit 6:00pm in the early evening hours of the 21st, the earthquakes and rapturing would begin, rolling westward so all the world could witness the destruction as it moved toward them, zone by zone, and the mockers and scoffers would "wail and tremble and gnash their teeth." (The fundies seemed to get a great kick out of this, if their wall posts were any indicator. They must have relished feeling like winners for once.) They began posting links to geological websites, noting with delight all of the seismic activity occurring. (Never mind that there's always seismic activity occurring, and that this is just the first time they've bothered to check.) As the hour approached -- about 9:00pm Pacific Time on Friday the 20th -- there were lots of goodbyes, and then it got real quiet. The appointed time came and went, with no apocalypse.


2. The Revised Scenario: "The Stroke of Midnight in Jerusalem." The lack of a "rolling" apocalypse only fazed them for a moment. They dismissed it as just a theory. In reality, a careful study of Scripture that they did in the last few hours revealed that the world will end all at once at the very last moment of Judgment Day in Jerusalem. Which would be 3:00pm Saturday where I was. The anticipation was intense. (I thought they would shit a collective brick when that volcano in Iceland popped off.) The zero hour approached, again there were tearful goodbyes, the throwing around of Bible quotes, and lots of "brother" and "sister"-ing each other. The clock chimed midnight in Jerusalem, and guess what? If you said "no apocalypse," come and collect your prize. The Facebook walls stayed quiet for a little longer this time.


3. The Revised, Revised Scenario: "As Long As It's May 21st Somewhere In The World." The flop sweat became visible, but the hardcore True Believers regrouped and said it wasn't over. The last spot on Earth where it would be May 21 was Pago Pago, once again in the South Pacific. That would occur at 4:00am Sunday morning my time. I wasn't going to stay up, and looked forward to what I'd see in the morning, when all the Whos down in Whoville cried "boo hoo."
   


4. The Aftermath: When I checked in at 9:00am Sunday morning, it was clearly all over for most of them. Some simply hadn't updated for ten or twelve hours. A couple of them gracefully admitted being snookered, apologized for bugging their friends and relatives for so long, and continued to profess their overall faith. Several more of them turned their walls private, or de-activated their accounts altogether. Larry "JesuswillreturnMay21" So-and-so changed his name overnight. Some spun May 21st as the "last available day of salvation" and the real shit would go down on May 22nd. Or 23rd. Or maybe the 24th, depending on how you interpreted a particular month in a particular version of the Hebrew calendar. Some are now preparing for October 21, when the Rapture will occur and the earth will be destroyed in a kind of 2-for-1 deal. Pretty much every statement on the bingo card above was trotted out at one point or another on the 22nd.

And through it all, making repeated smug and sometimes hateful posts on their walls, were the mainstream Christians, who either helpfully suggested they were going to hell for being blasphemers in league with Satan, or oozed their condescending okely-dokely sympathy all over them for following a "false prophet," and said there was always a place for them (and their wallets) in their church. They also never, ever got tired of throwing Matthew 25:13 or 24:36 at them. Over and over and over. I wish just one of them would have exploded, "Yes! Yes! I saw it the first nine hundred fucking times you posted it on my wall!!!" Alas, they're too nice. Deeply messed up, but nice.

Okay, we're nearing the end of Our Text for today. I ultimately found myself kind-of, sort-of sympathizing with these people. I want to know what they're missing, that they can't find in conventional religion. What happened to them along their life's journey? Did they come out the womb with one or two synapses that just didn't fire? If only for a few minutes, I'd like to feel like they do, just to see what it's like. Even though we occupy polar opposites of the religious spectrum, both atheists and weirdo doomsayers exist outside of the mainstream. I have no questions, require no guidance, and I love existing in this world, with all its flaws. They seem desperate for answers, will take guidance even from an elderly crackpot with an adding machine, and want nothing more to see this world destroyed in flaming violence because of all its wickedness and evil.

...And by "wickedness and evil," those types almost always mean "homosexuality." Sometimes "wickedness and evil" means gangsta thug rappers in saggy pants. But, really, 99.9% of the time it's homosexuality. It's their #1 go-to issue, leading the pack of other sins by a country mile. But guess what? Men have always been fascinated by their own penises and the places they could put them. It's nothing new. Gay sex is in the Bible of course, and was condemned, but it pops up (pardon the expression) so much in the Bible, it's a wonder any of those guys slept with a woman at all. The guy who painted The Last Supper was down with a little guy-on-guy action, as was King James himself. It's just that now, the fundies are bothered that it's all over their TV without being judged as sinful behavior. The easiest solution would be for them to get rid of their TVs and pretend it's not happening, the way people did for thousands of years. But then they'd miss The Young and the Restless. (No kidding. Looking at those people's profiles, you wouldn't believe the number of "daytime drama" fans.)

I'm afraid there aren't any "good ol' days" to which to return. Every era and epoch had its problems. There were none of these in the good ol' days:

But there were also none of these:

I'll take my chances against the gangsta thug for the luxury of crapping indoors any day.

So, the world will keep on turning, horrible and wonderful things will continue to happen with no particular rhyme or reason, people will continue to do horrible and wonderful things to themselves and each other, until our volatile species eventually fades into evolutionary obsolesence and extinction, which will happen long, long before our sun goes into red giant phase and burns our little blue-green ball into a lifeless charcoal briquette in about 5 billion years.

Amen.

This Used To Be My Playground, Part 19: Nine Inch Fails -- You Want To What Me Like A What??

#133. “Closer” – Nine Inch Nails

#134. “No Excuses” – Alice In Chains

#135. “The Day I Tried To Live” – Soundgarden
For some reason, the summer of 1994 was a heyday for particularly grim music. Saturating the air were the negative vibes of “industrial” bands like Nine Inch Nails and Ministry (their 1994 offering was entitled Filth Pig. Indeed.) All the grunge knock-offs and second-generation shoegaze aided and abetted the general ambiance of doom. Which was fine by me. It matched my state of mind. I was in the grips of post-breakup grief, and things like the NIN magnum opus The Downward Spiral (“Help me – I’ve broke apart my insides/Help me – I’ve got no soul to sell/Help me – the only thing that works for me/Help me get away from myself...My whole existence is flawed...”) gave it a voice. The gritty Alice In Chains EP Jar Of Flies was also a favorite at this time, thanks to the song that may have summed up my feelings better than anything else. I almost wore out the CD on this one, so it’s worth quoting at length:

It's alright…There comes a time
Got no patience to search for peace of mind

Laying' low…Want to take it slow
No more hiding or disguising truths I've sold

Everyday something hits me all so cold
Find me sittin' by myself -- no excuses that I know

It's okay…Had a bad day
Hands are bruised from breaking rocks all day

Drained and blue …I bleed for you
You think it's funny, well you're drowning in it too

Everyday something hits me all so cold
Find me sittin' by myself -- no excuses that I know

Yeah, it's fine…We'll walk down the line
Leave our rain, a cold trade for warm sunshine

You my friend …I will defend
And if we change, well I love you anyway

Get the picture, skipper?

The “hitting me all so cold” bit was cruelly ironic. I remember it as especially hot around that time, but maybe that was because my bedroom was in the loft-like upper floor of my house, and the AC struggled mightily to keep up with the blast-furnace heat of a northern California summer. The heat rose in tangible waves to my poorly insulated sanctum, with its sloping ceiling tucked under the eaves. In the room’s defense, it was big (bigger than the bedroom I’m currently sleeping in as an adult with a career), with hardwood floors, which gave it amazing acoustics. I had recently acquired a set of 70’s-era Panasonic speakers. They were chipped, flecked with paint and other mysterious substances, and missing their mesh covers, so the pulsating cones were exposed in all their throbbing glory – and they put out an awesome sound, which was needed to be crystal-clear audible over the whir of the elaborate network of electric fans used to keep the room habitable. A beanbag chair placed right in the sweet spot between those beauties provided my primary listening/sulking area.

Future Oscar-winner Trent Reznor and future desiccated corpse Layne Staley were all very well, but it was Soundgarden’s Superunknown that was truly the soundtrack to my summer of '94. ("Cry if you want to cry/If it helps you see/If it clears your eyes"). I had bought it at the Wherehouse on the day of its release (March 8), but it didn’t have a real resonance with me until I’d had my heart ripped out and backed over by a Honda Civic del Sol (figuratively.) Almost any track from this album would work for the Playlist, but I went with the three of the five hit singles this monster spun off – “The Day I Tried To Live,” (noted here), “Spoonman” (see below), and “Black Hole Sun” (watch this space.)

When I wrote in my previous entry that I had never felt as alone as I had at that point, I wasn’t kidding. I had lost my high school friends through increasingly divergent interests, and the fact that too many of their invitations to hang out had been rebuffed because I was part of a couple and too busy doing couple-type shit. Although I had good times with Skot and Peyman working at First Run Video, Skot was now gone and Peyman was preparing to be gone, gearing up for his transfer to Cal Poly in the fall. The phone wasn’t ringing, and I was isolated, Howard Hughes-like, in my oppressively hot second floor bedroom – door closed, music blasting.

#136. “Rocks” – Primal Scream
Scotland’s Primal Scream were the chameleons of the British music scene. On their little-regarded first two albums, they veered crazily between two types of retro -- the flower-power Byrds and the gutter-punk Stooges. They finally hit pay dirt by latching on to the burgeoning “house music” fad with the acid/electronica/dance album Screamadelica. On their fourth album, Give Out But Don’t Give Up, they changed sounds yet again, now attempting to re-create the boozy riff-rock of early 1970’s Rolling Stones and Faces. There was only room for one Black Crowes, so this move left the critics and Ecstasy-gobbling Screamadelica-loving club-rats cold, but proved irresistible to the Holy Bee. Urged on by their repeated chants of “get yer rocks off!” I decided to rejoin the land of the living.

When I finally emerged, blinking and mole-like in the mid-July sunshine, I was at loose ends. I was starting a new social life from scratch. Luckily, I soon discovered good ol’ Skot working at a hole-in-the-wall Mom & Pop video store in a strip mall. It was as if I hadn’t seen him in years, when in reality, it was more like five months.

He had an apartment, and it was now that I felt the first stirrings of desire to have a place of my own as well. His roommate’s name escapes me – he was a butcher’s assistant in the meat department of Food 4 Less – but he vacuumed (with carpet powder) twice a day, carefully wrapped the stove burners in foil, and dried his whites on a clothesline on the back patio. Skot said it was like living with his grandmother. One of the other things I remember from hanging out at his apartment was a single CD that kind of blew my mind.

It was a compilation of Chess blues artists on a budget-line MCA album originally issued on vinyl in 1963 called simply, The Blues, Vol. 1 – a mere 12 songs by Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Little Walter, Sonny Boy Williamson, John Lee Hooker and others of their ilk. It was absolutely revelatory. The sound had all the primitiveness of DIY punk, and all the rawness of an exposed nerve (Little Walter’s overdriven harp and Hubert Sumlin’s guitar were always deep in the red and threatening feedback). And it was blues, so I certainly relished the lyrical sentiments at that point in my life. Skot kept saying he was someday going to spring for the lavish 4-disc box set Chess Blues on display at Camelot Records at the mall. I ended up getting it before he did (if he ever did.) I was now a blues aficionado. Not that fancy, jazzed-up Chicago shit with the horns. I loved primitive blues. Delta blues. Moaning in the moonlight. Lifelong Obsession #1 for this entry.

Skot also took it upon himself to repair my love life. Over the last two years, I had encountered many young women in high school and junior college with whom I felt a slight spark, but could not pursue them because I was already in a relationship. One evening, Skot announced we were going to track some of them down and put me “back in the saddle.” He squeezed some last names out of me, and began cheerfully flipping through the phone book, calling everyone by that name, as I curled up on his floor, crippled by equal parts embarrassed agony and glee.

“Hello, does by any chance ****** live there? Oh. Ok, sorry to bother you.”

Next person by that name in the book.

“Hello, does by any chance ****** live there? Oh. Ok, sorry to bother you.”

I could never in a million years have been that bold, and I don’t know what we would have done had we actually contacted one of our targets. Set up some kind of sad date, I guess. But we struck out. He also wamted me to take a shopping trip to Sacramento to pick him up some cologne that was only available at a certain store. The shopping companion he arranged for me? A drop-dead gorgeous 21-year-old employee of the Underground record store that he was friends with. Fire-red hair, alabaster skin, and a bell-like voice that liked to sing Sam Cooke songs. Dreamy. We streaked southward at ninety miles an hour in her Volkswagen Beetle as she blithely told me she lacked both a license and insurance. I don’t know what Skot expected would come of this, and I appreciated his insanely optimistic efforts, but the ingenue in question had eyes only for Skot, and the Holy Bee’s little 19-year-old nerdy self never felt more like a monkey in a sidecar in his life.

#137. “Spoonman” – Soundgarden
Let’s see… “Spoonman”… another track from the great Superunknown. How do I connect it to my next little vignette? Spoons stir coffee!

This Used To Be Mahler's

Lest we forget, the mid-nineties was the height of the Great Coffee Shop Boom. The Friends gang and its devotion to “Central Perk” would make hanging-out-at-an overpriced-café-with-bad-art-and-big-cushions a legitimate societal phenomenon when their show debuted that coming fall, but they were reflecting the trend, rather than leading the way. Every street corner, even in Yuba City, boasted a coffee shop by the middle of '94. I began hanging out at a place called Mahler’s on D Street in Marysville. Laboring behind the counter at Mahler’s was a friend-of-a-friend. Caspar* was a close companion of my high school associate McKinney, the fireplug-sized loudmouthed eccentric (he resembled Elroy Jetson with Tourette's) I have written about a few times already.

Caspar had grown up on various Air Force bases throughout Europe. When he would pal around with McKinney junior and senior year, he kept his blond hair piled high in an annoying Morrissey pompadour, wore bizarre golf knickers that exposed a generous length of argyle sock, and tooled around in a second-hand 1970’s model Porsche 915. Before I knew his actual name, I used to refer to him as “Hitler Youth Boy.”

In the year since graduation, he had toned down his Euro-trash style, and was now usually clad in a Primal Scream (Screamadelica) t-shirt (at right) and simple cargo shorts. The blond pompadour rode a little lower (and, I noted with a chuckle, had already begun to thin noticeably at the temples), and he seemed a great deal less pompous as he schlepped mochas behind the counter at Mahler’s. Though he never lost his touch as a world-class know-it-all and self-proclaimed master of many dark arts (when I first watched the American Office a decade later, I was convinced the writers had spent some time with Caspar, and created Dwight Schrute as an affectionate tribute), as I wore a Norm Peterson-style groove in the corner barstool that summer, I found him a congenial conversation partner and a sympathetic ear. His girlfriend, Audrey*, whom I had known in high school much better than Caspar (she was the object of my friend Anthony’s affections way back in Part 3) often joined us, slurping down free coffee and commiserating.

Ever since Audrey was unceremoniously tossed from her parents’ home around her nineteenth birthday (they didn’t believe in “keeping adult birds in the nest”), the couple had been shacked up with Caspar’s dad (affectionately known as “Dud”), but in the market for their own place.

#138. “Longview” – Green Day
Like McKinney, Caspar was once a member of the YCHS Choir. Nowadays, this type of person is popularized by shows like Glee, which celebrates choristers’ “uniqueness” and “quirky individualism,” but I’m here to tell you that in real life, they’re just damned weird, and not in always in a pleasantly goofy TV-show way. Clannish, cliquish, and addicted to drama, they only seemed to date and socialize with each other, which resulted in an incestuous little closed-off society, similar to those found in the more remote Appalachian "hollers." Some of the ambitious ones went off to universities, leaving the more socially crippled and lame that remained behind at Yuba College to close ranks still further. Their creepy little touchy-feely coven also spilled over into and tainted the college drama department, which played a big part in my not pursuing the interest in acting I'd had back in high school. Both Caspar and McKinney had left the choir fold after high school -- and thus had a shot at a normal life -- but one night I was invited along to a Yuba College Choir party by Caspar. At a nondescript apartment of an unknown chorister, I came face-to-face with Lifelong Obsession #2.

It wasn’t love at first sight. Hell, I didn’t even finish it (gasp!). But I did have my very first beer on July twentysomething, 1994. It was a Miller Genuine Draft, which Caspar assured me was the closest American mega-breweries could come to European-style lager. (I have since had reason to doubt this assertion.)

The Green Day album Dookie was the soundtrack to this particular party, and it played over and over. I bought it the next day. Its tuneful, pop-punk songs about moving out of your parents’ house (“Welcome To Paradise”), neurotic self-pity (“Basket Case”), and total slackerdom with a healthy dose of self-pleasure (“Longview”) definitely hit a nerve.

Another party attended around that time was at the home of Stacy, the first person hired after me at the video store, relieving me of my status as “new guy” and inheritor of the “Trainee” name tag. Stacy could have been twenty-three, or she could have been forty. No one could quite tell. She lived out in the middle of nowhere with with a fellow cat-obsessed spinster -- her mother. She invited all of us co-workers to a shindig she was throwing in her barn/garage somewhere between Marysville and Gridley. None of us wanted to go, but neither could we stand the thought of her sitting alone in her barn surrounded by snacks no one would eat. We formed up a guilty, reluctant carpool and headed her way. “Longview” came on the radio on the way out, and I remember being impressed that they played the uncensored version (I guess it was late enough at night.)

#139. “Big Empty” – Stone Temple Pilots
Upon arrival, it was about as bad as we expected. Triscuits and ping-pong in a poorly-lit equipment shed. I had my second beer of the summer (a Michelob), and finished it this time. We caught occasional glimpses of Stacy's Mom (ha!) as a Mother Bates-style silhouette in a bedroom window. Stacy owned nothing resembling decent music (Michael Bolton and Jon Secada were her faves), and only a cassette player from which to play anything. We all checked our pockets for random cassettes, and someone came up with a cut-out promo copy of The Crow soundtrack. The Crow was one of the first “serious” comic book adaptations, and was a dark, nihilistic, incomprehensible, headache-inducing buzzsaw of a movie notable for killing off its star Brandon Lee in an on-set accident (meaning he didn’t have to sit through the final product like the rest of us poor bastards.) Its equally stupid soundtrack was immensely popular throughout the seedier side of Yuba City/Marysville. I’m sure many a batch of meth was cooked up to the sounds of Machines Of Loving Grace and Helmet barking away in the background. When STP’s “Big Empty” is the most listenable item on the menu, you know you’re in trouble.

I was now on the prowl for that elusive third beer. As always, to be continued...

* Not their real names. If they should read this, they'll certainly recognize themselves, and anyone who knows me well knows who they are, but why run the risk of embarrassing them as I dig up all this old stuff?