Dave's Blog

Disneyland's Pirates are Back - What Can I Make of It?

2006-06-27T23:33:00.000-07:00

The Louvre

Early this year, the Louvre Museum in Paris issued a press release indicating that the museum would close its doors on March 6^th for four months as it underwent a special refurbishment. The great old museum – the world’s largest - home to such great works of art as the Venus de Milo, The Virgin and Child with St. Anne, and the immortal Mona Lisa, needed a boost, curators said, to “keep up with the times.”

A March 7^th press conference assembled in front of La Pyramide Inversée revealed that in light of the Ron Howard’s soon-to-be released Hollywood blockbuster film featuring Tom Hanks and based on Dan Brown’s bestselling novel The Da Vinci Code, the museum closed so that it could be lovingly enhanced to reflect some of the more memorable scenes from the movie.

The most notable upgrade would be the placement of a naked Frenchman on the floor of the museum’s Denon Wing, a magnificent hall completed in the 17^th Century by Louis XIII. The man’s nude body would be a likeness of the story’s fictional character Jacques Saunière – sprawled out face up with a pentagram drawn on his stomach in blood, and posed to resemble Da Vinci’s famous Vitruvian Man. Likewise, the beloved Mona Lisa would be enhanced by the placement of the words “so dark the con of man” scrawled in special ink across its bullet-proof sealed encasement in the Salle des Etats. After the museum reopens, guests will be issued a special wand, officials said, with a small ultra-violet light that will allow them to view the words over the 16^th Century painting just as they were seen in the film.

Responding to criticism of commercializing one of the world’s greatest museums of art, Louvre Chief Curator Jean Paul Le Croque balked. “Our aim is not to change the spirit of the Louvre, but to make it more relevant today. We will make sure the additions look as if they were always a part of the museum and that they will blend in and strengthen the art that people have been coming to the Louvre to see for generations.”

Le Croque laughed off the suggestion from one reporter who said that many people will undoubtedly say that the museum was selling-out one of the greatest artistic institutions in the name of a cheap cross-marketing gimmick.

“Nonsense,” Le Croque shot back through a translator, “you should know that we were approached with the idea of using touch-up artists from Montparnasse to repaint the top of the beloved Mono Lisa’s blouse to reveal just a little bit more – as is customary and more acceptable for a portrait in the modern world -- but we said no to this idea without hesitation!”

“Besides,” La Croque clucked, “due to the abundance of low-cut clothing in Paris during the hot summer months, we believed that matching the museum’s overall theme with the new film would simply be more lucrative.”

It’s a Work of Art

Okay, I have a few of the details mixed up here. I’m not aware of any cross-promotional plans with The Da Vinci Code and The Louvre. The real story is, of course, the Walt Disney Company’s decision to close what may be the most sublime immersive artistic experience ever created, The Pirates of the Caribbean at Disneyland (and Walt Disney World), on March 6^th of this year, so that it could be “refurbished” and tied in with the second Disney film of the same name premiering next week - a film Disney hopes will be a Da Vinci Code-type blockbuster.

But you see, the Pirates of the Caribbean at Disneyland, which turns 40 years old next year, is in the opinion of many, not just an expensive carnival-style, tunnel-of-love theme ride with a bunch of dressed-up pirate manikins with moving arms and nodding heads. And it’s not just about the “Yo-Ho” song you all know – though one must admit there’s a special beauty there. Many in fact believe that The Pirates of the Caribbean is a true masterpiece very much like, say Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon or Da Vinci’s Mono Lisa. Sound silly? Think again.

If you do think about it, Pirates is really something vastly original and elegant - a completely immersive artistic experience in which the viewer is invited to become one with the art itself. It’s as if you could literally jump inside Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights and have a look around for awhile, or maybe spend a few precious moments with Bogey in the Sierra Madre. In Pirates, the illusion works because everything you can see has been given the level of detail of reality itself. You’d be hard-pressed to find a more carefully crafted and original creation of this kind anywhere. The experience is presented which such care that, as you travel through the fantasy, you live it.

What makes Disneyland something different and apart from its spawned-off copycat theme parks, is its unique care for creating a gracefully executed ambiance and extreme careful attention to detail. This marriage of Hollywood studio machinery, the remarkable Disney invention of audio animatronics, and an artistic vision from a cadre of Disney artists – all spawned from the core creative genius of Walt Disney himself -- makes The Pirates of the Caribbean attraction one of the world’s most cherished masterworks. It also would seem within the realm of reason that the Walt Disney Company is in a position to be the steward of a historical work of art.

The Pirates movies – well let’s just say they’re nice little pictures that happen to lack anything close to the experience that “inspired” them, if I can even use that adjective to describe something so distinctly uninspiring. If I’m feeling gracious, I’d call the Pirates of the Caribbean movies harmless fluff, but still pure commercialism, and come on, have no artistic merit like the original.

The Pirates of the Caribbean was created by a relatively small circle of people. Disney himself was the most important element. After him it was probably Xavier Atencio or “X” Atencio as he was known. Atencio collaborated with Disney way back in the early days. He started as an animator for Fantasia and worked on many Disney projects over the years. Notably, he scripted The Pirates of the Caribbean and the The Haunted Mansion. He also wrote the words to the song “Yo Ho, Yo Ho, A Pirate’s Life for Me.” (The music was by long-time Disney composer George Bruns.)

Atencio’s voice can be heard echoing through the caves in the ride pre and post the 2006 refurb – he’s the scowling, ghostly man behind, “Dead Men Tell No Tales …. Dead Men Tell No Tales …” If it doesn’t sound familiar, listen for it next time you are on the ride, just after the waterfalls. Atencio’s voice can also apparently still be heard in the Haunted Mansion. If your “Doom Buggy” stops because the ride is having a problem, Atencio tells you to stay in your seat. Note the famous “Ghost Host” voice in the Haunted Mansion is that of the late Paul Frees, who also was the voice in the Voyage Through Inner Space and many of the pirates. Anyway, Atencio is perhaps the ride’s most famous creator aside from Disney himself. He is still around today and attended the opening on Saturday.

Memories for Me

The Pirates of the Caribbean makes up some of my own earliest memories. I remember seeing the darkened misty bayou at Laffite’s Landing (where the ride begins) as a totally convincing representation of nighttime even after we came inside from the bright daylight of a summer day. Maybe I was four or five. I remember eating a very large plate of pasta as a youngster in the Blue Bayou. As each boat passed by us, I thought, “heh, wonder if they know about the waterfall around the corner?!” Inside that bayou it really WAS nighttime. There were fireflies in the bushes and a full moon surrounded by clouds. We’d go on the ride and after getting on our boat, I remember passing the little house and hearing a banjo playing O’ Susana – it also plays the Yo-Ho Song. The darkness around the corner was creepy. I remember the waterfalls as terrifying and looking around the caves with other cascading falls and gliding through caves with skeleton pirates playing chess and drinking. I remember the echo of “Dead Men Tell No Tales …” Then the ship battle and the gigantic pirate scenes of pillaging bandits and a burning city. It was larger than life and awe-inspiring. As an adult, the careful attention to detail and the immensity of this creation allows for a completely believable immersion. For a child, there is no immersion. It simply is real.

(I have to insert a trivia note about the skeleton’s chess game. Symbolism abounds in Pirates. The game is apparently arranged in a “stalemate” which is a situation where the player whose turn it is to move has no legal moves but is not in check. The term is also a metaphor for a situation in which neither side of a conflict can achieve victory.)

The fact that The Pirates of the Caribbean was not directly inspired from a particular movie or book and contained no otherwise familiar characters always made it an even more unique and self-defining experience for me. It simply was THE Pirates of the Caribbean– it wasn’t a fake rehash some other thing.

When I heard a few years ago that Disney was making a movie about the ride, I wondered if the movie would come to define the idea, while Disney’s great creative attraction would end up as the afterthought. If Hollywood makes a blockbuster movie about the life and times of Mona Lisa and the story behind that smile, then the next generation thinks of the Mona Lisa as the movie – and oh, did you know that it was a painting first? Not to my surprise, I found the Pirates movie quite distastefully lacking in artistic merit and some sequences in the film made little or no sense. What a waste. And, of course, the move became a popular hit.

The Pirates rides around the world are not the same, but largely similar. (Note the Walt Disney World ride is also being changed to match the movie). Although it makes interesting fodder, I don’t refer to the other manifestations elsewhere in this writing.

Pirates opened at Disneyland’s New Orleans Square on March 18, 1967 about five months before I was born and only three months after the death of Walt Disney, who was heavily involved in the creation of the attraction until the end. So, Pirates makes for a nostalgic last masterwork from one of the greatest creative legends of the 20^th Century. In fact, many of the park’s attractions remain as they were when Disney himself experienced them, and this, I believe, makes the park itself among many things, a museum. The Tiki Room is another fine example.

The Enchanted Tiki Room opened on June 23, 1963, and was the first audio animatronic experience ever created. Today it operates very close to exactly as it did then – and actually is only mildly dated – at least to me. But even if it is outlandishly dated, it still operates today much like a shrine to something so uniquely original and charming, it really does deserve preservation in much the same way any great artistic achievement should. The point of experiencing the Tiki Room, the visitor should know, isn’t really just about a bunch of singing birds and orchids, though its okay if that alone strikes you as nice. It’s really about putting yourself in the place of a visitor to that very same room more than 40 years ago. In its proper historical context, The Enchanted Tiki Room is a masterpiece of innovation. There was nothing even remotely like it before its existence, and it all spawned from Walt’s own desire to reach for an experience that could take us further than the movies could. I can’t imagine what the first visitors to The Enchanted Tiki Room must have thought. And it paved the way…

New Opening Day

Saturday June 24^th 2006 was the red carpet opening for the reopening for Pirates, and I wasn’t invited. In my place there were such celebs as Kevin Pollack, James Cameron, Lynda Carter (oooow), Vincent D’Onofrio, Kiera Knightley (hey why not put her in the ride instead of Depp?), Orlando Bloom, the Deppster, and Governor AWNOLD Schwarzenegger. I think I saw James Cameron standing in line in front of me on the Indiana Jones Adventure, but it might have been sunstroke.

I arrived at the park early Monday, June 26 (Pirates opening day for the masses). There were huge crowds that rushed to Pirates as the gates flung open at 8am on this muggy and warm day. The line extended from New Orleans Square, through Frontierland, down Main Street and ended near the entrance to the park – that’s about a three-and-a-half hour wait. I went up to a guy standing in line:

Me: “Dude, This line isn’t for Pirates is it?”

“Yep, this is for Pirates.”

“Wholly crap, you got to be kidding me, right?”

“No, that’s what you’re here for dude, go on, get in line.” He motioned back toward the park entrance way down there.

I’m not sure how this guy knew that I was there only for Pirates, but I suppose it’s that Sixth Sense between us dudes.

I decided to defer my riding a bit later – and indeed the lines went down about an hour later. I got on pirates for the first time at around 11am.

Keeping it “Relevant”

In Michael Geoghegan’s Disneyland Podcast for February, Kathy Rogers, a Senior Show Producer for Imagineering, said “Our intent is not touch the spirit of the attraction but to strengthen it and make it more relevant today because in our movie franchise, Captain Jack Sparrow and Barbosa have always lived in this world of the Pirates of the Caribbean, and so its our goal just to bring them into this attraction as if they’ve always lived in this attraction.”

So, to keep alive the spirit of Imagineering, I’ll imagine I interviewed Kathy myself. Here it goes:

Kathy: Our intent is not touch the spirit of the attraction but to strengthen it and make it more relevant today …

Dave: More “relevant today.” Huh? Kathy what are you smoking? Who said Pirates wasn’t relevant – and what does that mean exactly? After 40 years, it’s still the most popular attraction in the park, right? So where’s the lack of relevance? And how do you strengthen a time-proven classic by adding elements from a mediocre pop movie? Are we to believe that the corporate suits meticulously went through a hoard of mail from caring Disney fans about the ride’s lack of relevance and said – “oh, gee that pirate ride needs to be more relevant – what can we do to help? Here, here’s some money Kathy, please help the fans!”

Kathy: … because in our movie franchise, Captain Jack Sparrow and Barbosa have always lived in this world of the Pirates of the Caribbean …

Dave: Huh? Neither Captain Jack Sparrow nor Barbosa ever lived in this world, babe. In fact they didn’t exist at all before 2003 – then, they only really lived in the mind of a bad screenwriter hack. Get a clue.

Kathy: … it’s our goal just to bring them into this attraction as if they’ve always lived in this attraction.

Dave: But they haven’t ever been in this attraction and nobody missed them. And, it makes perfect sense that no one missed them because the whole idea is just plain STUPID! Hey, thanks for allowing me to interview you. Take care and have a nice day.

By the way, Kathy was quoted in several articles this week saying the following:

"I cannot imagine how anybody can see this attraction and walk off and say, 'Boy, they did something they shouldn't have.”

Well toots, try to exercise that Imagineering muscle a little harder next time ‘cause here it goes: “Boy, they did something they shouldn’t have.”

So I’ve made my point – here’s the scoop – and let me be clear: I rode the ride twice – and my overall verdict: Disaster averted. The ride is not ruined, life will not come to an end, and the changes are for the most part subtle. In fact, a big part of the Pirates renovation was to upgrade some 250 speakers throughout the ride and to digitize some of the sound effects (a good idea – though I’d expect it without a big shutdown.) Upgrading the sound and lighting as long as its not really changed is more like daily maintenance – such as dusting off the Mona Lisa display case. The ride “enhancements” are not different enough to be called anything more than a minor change – and thank goodness for that, because the changes that were made to fit the movies are by and large stupid and unnecessary – and, duh, just a marketing gimmick that happened to be inserted into a cherished piece of art.

Although the ride still stands up strong after the reopening, there is absolutely nothing (aside from some sound and lighting enhancements) about the “upgrade” that makes the ride better in any way. Take this obvious cliché to heart, folks: if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. There ain’t no need, okay? Drop the “relevance” talking points. Try your goofball movie promotions on something a bit less sacred than Walt Disney’s last earthly creation. It’s like The Vatican had some artists come in and paint a tiny little Snickers bar in Adam’s hand as he reaches out to God on the Sistine Chapel. Say they do a nice paint job, and it’s an excellent rendering of the Snickers wrapper. It’s small, and if you aren’t familiar with the work you would probably miss the Snickers entirely. Still, you’d have to ask – other than promoting Snickers, why do it? (Well to keep Adam relevant, of course.)

Some Details

The Pirates addition includes a few new special effects – and some music from the movie (ick). One new effect makes it look like your boat will go through a cascading waterfall in the caves – which also turns into an illusion of “Davy Jones” from the new movie. It’s really a projection on a sheet of fog. A nice-looking illusion, okay, but unnecessary and out of place. Another is the changed dialog from the pirates, such as those on the ship, the Wicked Wench – decidedly a BAD idea. The only thing I could pick out from the new dialog was the constant reference to CAPTAIN JACK SPARROW. Barbosa’s bantering goes something like this:

“Aarghh, It’s CAPTAIN JACK SPARROW!!”

“Aye, ye maties, it’s who?”

“Aye, it’s CAPTAIN JACK SPARROW...!”

“Aye, who again?”

“Aye, can everybody hear me out there! It’s CAPTAIN JACK SPARE – ROW!”

That’s SPARROW, you get it? Okay, I get it. You want me to know that CAPTAIN JACK SPARROW is now part of the ride. Honestly, I’d much rather hear the old talk about the “lily-livered varmint.” Can I say it? I’ll just say it just once – and forgive me: Who gives a shit about CAPTAIN JACK SPARROW anyway?

But, back to the ride. One scene shows an animatronic Sparrow hiding just out of view of some pirates. Another scene shows Sparrow popping his head out of a barrel. Does it look like Johnny Depp? Yep, it sure does, very good likeness. But hey! What the hell is Johnny Depp doing in the classic Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disneyland? He’s an eccentric Hollywood actor. Get him the heck out of there! He just doesn’t belong. Interestingly, the original pirates faces were the faces of the ride’s creators – so Depp is truly a stranger among them. To take a not so subtle step just one step further, perhaps Disney Imagineers might want to place a Pirates movie DVD in Depp’s waving hand so that he might suggest that “Ye go buy one, in me gift shop up top!”

The last scene of Depp – which is the last scene visitors see as they start up the exit ramp back up to the bayou –- is a really stupid and unnecessary scene of Depp sitting on a bunch of treasure and feeling happy about having it. He mumbles the Yo-Ho song and says some other crap, and is animated to mimic Depp’s annoying overacting. In fact the scene is set up in a square shaped alcove that looks like it was quickly and awkwardly knocked out of the wall for the only purpose of placing Johnny Depp.

So, Disneyland usually get’s things right, and on occasion, if the wind is blowing the wrong way, they screw up. In the grand scheme of things, Pirates is okay. This “upgrade” was roughly as degrading as the policitically correctifying stuff they pulled in 1997. You probably know the ride was changed to take out what was deemed to be “too offensive” a sin for Disneyland though somehow Disney himself didn’t mind. Pirates running around after women while reeking havoc and setting fire to a town, was too racy for the teenagers – presumably not the ones necking in the boats as they go by. Instead of chasing the women, the pirates now chase women carrying plates of food. Thus, the sin of lust was removed and gluttony was substituted. (The ride portrays six of the Seven Deadly Sins.) Politically correctifying Pirates was about as stupid an idea as hiring touch-up painters to raise Mona Lisa’s blouse higher to cover her bosoms. Shame on Disney management, but like this time around, thank God they didn’t do worse.

It has been suggested by some that the original Pirates story is actually a backward dream sequence. The beginning of the ride on the nighttime bayou is something akin to “modern day” and the waterfalls take us back in time – and we begin by seeing the skeletons of the pirates we’ll see in life later. The portrait of the red-headed woman in the drunken skeleton room may actually be a portrait of the red head being sold at the auction later, the suggestion being that she eventually becomes a pirate like her “owner.” It makes for an interesting way of looking at it, though, of course, the “new” story inserted in the ride which is roughly about Sparrow and the Pirates pursuing treasure - and Sparrow gets it in the end, kind of screws up this elegant and imaginative interpretation.

The Bigger Dream

Disneyland was one of those “boys and their trains” kind of things. Disney’s success in the movie business allowed for an extravagant boyhood in his adulthood. Disney started out building his own real train in his backyard in the Holmby Hills. The idea of Disneyland developed out of a simple Mickey Mouse park originally planned for Burbank. Later Anaheim was scoped out. Disneyland would have a lot of neat stuff, he said, and it would be “surrounded by a train.”

The train did yield some limitations on the park’s expansion – and some might not realize that the reason that the Pirates ride has waterfalls comes from the necessity of taking the boats outside of the park, beneath the railroad tracks to the bulk of the ride in a giant makeshift movie studio. The Haunted Mansion needs the same trick – thus the stretching room that everyone knows is really an elevator down, and get’s you to the bulk of the ride outside the railroad border.

Disney rides generally take place inside make-shift movie studios. In other words, a very large wherehouse-like room that can facilitate a controlled visual and auditory environment. Thus, the theme rides were something of a natural adaptation for a movie studio company.

In the Hands of a Corporate Giant

So, having a collection of great art in the hands of a corporate behemoth can be a dangerous thing. Sometimes that overpowering tendency toward making money can overtake the implied responsibility of caring for the collection. Corporate executives and marketing managers see opportunities in tying together the popular attraction into a popular movie. Then they see opportunities in tying the popular movie franchise back to the attraction.

It may all make sound business advice for the short term, but likely it doesn’t make good artistic sense. The idea of shutting down the Louvre to accommodate its ties to a popular movie might indeed be attractive if the Louvre were owned by stockholders expecting a good annual report this year, but it just seems like a stupid idea when you understand anything at all about art.

So are corporate behemoths always bad for the creation of art? Not always. When you have real artists on the payroll and a nice budget, great things can happen. Fantasmic, the giant nighttime water and pyrotechnic display débuted in 1993, is considered by many to be the most innovative outdoor type show of its kind ever created. I too was impressed by Fantasmic. The show’s theme at first seemed to be simply a display of the imaginative scenes – partly inspired, it seemed, by the famous Sorcerer’s Apprentice sequence in Fantasia and little swaths of many other Disney films. The simple imagination theme gives a nice vehicle for a lot of expensive special effects dazzlers and placement of Disney motifs and characters. But also, behind the effects, the show’s finale seems to suggest the metaphoric creation of the Disney universe and perhaps even Disneyland itself through the spirited imagination of Walt’s well-known alter-ego, Mickey Mouse.

In fact – this Disneyland creation theme has been well built into the Disneyland persona. Another recent example is the “Remember Dreams Come True Fireworks” display, meticulously and artfully executed this past year, which draws much from the Disneyland anthem “When You Wish Upon a Star, Your Dreams Come True” theme. The idea works so well, I think, because visitors watch the metaphor, and somehow, perhaps subconsciously understand that they are standing inside the physical reality of Walt’s own fantastic and gigantic dream and its continued manifestation through time, four decades after his death.

Afterthought

Me, I have my own dreams – like that stupid waterfall I’ve been building in the backyard. After three months of work, it’s way over budget and the stupid filter still leaks. What a pain that has been. As Disneyland and Pirates as a guide, I might realize my dream too. I just hope it’s soon.

My Turtle, and Me

Iris Chang Post Script

2006-06-03T17:23:00.000-07:00

Some seven months after writing about Iris Chang, her name continues to surface. Many people have told me her story has had a lasting impact. Despite this, I’ve come to believe that her absence remains and probably will remain a significant void in intelligent public discourse about a teetering foothold on civil liberties, and the “thin veneer,” as Iris called it, holding civilization back from the capacity to commit the unspeakable. Iris’ special mixture of passion and brave tenacity is too rare, I think, and the issues around Nanking’s past and other political struggles around world are too vast and messy to make a similarly charismatic and tireless advocate likely to emerge for a while. After all, being a lone warrior for such a sobering cause has its downside. Maybe this is the most resonant part Iris’ legacy. In the meantime, of course, events scattered around the world today continue to make Iris’ message timely and relevant.

New resources of looking back on Iris’ life occasionally pop up. A more accessible version of a 56 minute speech at the University of California Santa Barbara now appears on Google video along with an even more youthful, 30-year old Iris on the Charlie Rose program back in 1998. They reveal more images of a young writer on a mission, and also some glimpses of an ordinary person thrust into a stressful whirlwind of controversial issues, almost always dealing with them gracefully, and occasionally showing human vulnerability.

Shortly after posting my story, “Iris Chang One Year Later …” I was surprised and gratified to be contacted by Ying-Ying Chang, Iris’ mother who, to my delight, was pleased with the article even while pointing out a few (thankfully minor) errors, which I immediately corrected. I could never have expected her gracious expression of thanks, especially over an article about what must be such a painful source of grief for her and her family. It goes to show that the web can make the world a smaller place.

The Chang Family has been involved with the Iris Chang Memorial Fund that supports an essay contest supported by tax deductible donations.

An abbreviated version of my article also appeared in the newsletter of the San Diego Chinese Historical Museum in January.

Iris Chang One Year Later...

2005-11-09T07:15:00.000-08:00

As a little girl, Iris Chang went to her school library looking for a book about the Chinese city of Nanking. Her parents had often told her stories about something that had happened in Nanking a long time ago, something very terrible that a youngster could barely grasp. Many people died, she knew, and the famous Yangtze River “ran red with blood.” In fact her grandparents had fled Nanking in that year of 1937 narrowly escaping unimaginable terror and death.

Iris’ parents who had relayed the story could be described as intellectuals that immigrated to the United States from Taiwan. Iris was born in Princeton, but her family settled in the quiet college town of Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, where both parents became professors, one of physics, the other microbiology, at the University of Illinois. Growing up within her parent’s academic world around the university, it seems that Iris was a curious and precocious child who enjoyed books and writing. At home she kept a book of poetry and was fluent in English and Mandarin.

But on that day at the library somewhere around 30 years ago, Iris found no book about Nanking. In fact, if Iris had looked for such a book in almost any other library outside of Asia, she wouldn’t have found one there either.

One year ago on November 9, 2004, Iris Chang, the beautiful, gracefully articulate, now 36-year old historian and best-selling author drove her 1999 Oldsmobile Alero alone in the dead of night just east of San Jose, California headed west on Highway 17. She had slipped out of bed some time in the early morning, leaving her husband of thirteen years Brett Douglass, an engineer at Cisco Systems, asleep in their Sunnyvale home. Their two year old son Christopher was staying with Brett’s parents in Illinois.

It’s hard to imagine what was going through the mind of Iris Chang that early morning as she followed the dark turns through the back hills of Los Altos. It’s a rural wooded area with miles of trees and rolling hills. We can surmise there were few other cars out at that hour, and she had little to do but think. It was a clear night. We know little else about that drive.

It appears that she simply drove for a while – probably less than 30 minutes -- until it seemed that she was “far enough” away. She pulled off the highway onto what was described as a steep utility road and parked. At that time it may have still been dark. The details of exactly how things happened after that are excruciating to imagine.

She had brought with her a large-sized handgun in a cardboard box on the passenger’s seat. She had secretly purchased the Civil War era “relic” the day before at an antique shop. Antique guns have no waiting period for purchase in California.

At sometime that morning probably just around sunrise, she loaded a bullet into each chamber of the gun and placed the barrel upward inside her mouth. In an instant Iris Chang died alone inside her car on a dusty turnoff near the Lexington Reservoir, her head fell to rest against the driver’s side window. A passerby would find her about two hours later. In the back seat behind her there was child’s car seat with a teddy bear toy.

Later that day, probably about five hours after that gun fired, I would be sitting in my office at Intuit Inc in San Diego browsing headlines on yahoo.com. I remember I saw “Author of The Rape of Nanking dead.” I didn’t recognize title, so I passed this item over. Later, I browsed the same page again, and saw the same headline. On a whim I clicked on it.

The first accounts of a young author my age committing suicide – who had written an important historical account (of which I knew nothing), was a suddenly a bit arresting. I decided to do a quick Internet search on this new name “Iris Chang.”

On Google, lots of things popped up – her three books, interviews, even a few audio interviews on public radio. I remember this story suddenly felt eerie, and I quickly realized that an immense tragedy had just occurred.

Iris had contributed immensely to the cause of history – in particular, her second book, published in 1997 before she was thirty, was perhaps one of the most controversial and important of the entire decade.

“The Rape of Nanking” shed light on a forgotten tragedy. The scope of this tragedy, Iris had discovered long after that day in the library as a little girl, was huge – so huge, it put an entirely new perspective on the Second World War. In fact, it turns out that there wasn’t just one holocaust, there was another – and stunningly, this one seemed every bit as horrifying as the Jewish Holocaust.

Her book became the first comprehensive documentation of the Nanking holocaust published in English. It became a bestseller, and made Iris Chang a celebrity and advocate for the cause of bringing this tragedy into public awareness. At the same time, the magnitude and shear horror of working on this cause would also bring her life tremendous sadness and pain.

This was a woman of conviction, courage, intellect, talent and tremendous empathy for the suffering of others who was suddenly lost while a new mother and in the prime of her life. She had everything to live for. It felt like this was life at its cruelest.

The story of what happened in Nanking – a story that was very close to being completely forgotten before Iris’ book -- is nothing short of jaw-dropping.

When the Japanese Imperial Army invaded the then capital city of Nanking China in late 1937 on an expansionist rampage, they had been keenly inculcated into a belief system that taught them they were wholly superior to their enemy in every way. Soldiers where eager to literally stomp out the Chinese people without remorse as if they were mere insects.

Hundreds of thousands of innocent Chinese civilians would be tortured and killed in a matter of weeks. The numbers were very big, but the scope of it all wasn’t just about the numbers. In this single paragraph from the Introduction of The Rape of Nanking, the immensity of the horror becomes more clear as Iris begins her disparaging portrait of insane human barbarism:

The Rape of Nanking should be remembered not only for the number of people slaughtered but for the cruel manner in which many met their deaths. Chinese men were used for bayonet practice and in decapitation contests. An estimated 20,000-80,000 Chinese women were raped. Many soldiers went beyond rape to disembowel women, slice off their breasts, nail them alive to walls. Fathers were forced to rape their daughters, and sons their mothers, as other family members watched. Not only did live burials, castration, the carving of organs, and the roasting of people become routine, but more diabolical tortures were practiced, such as hanging people by their tongues on iron hooks or burying people to their waists and watching them get torn apart by German shepherds. So sickening was the spectacle that even the Nazis in the city were horrified, one proclaiming the massacre to be the work of “bestial machinery.”

In total, somewhere between 19 million to 36 million Chinese civilians were ultimately killed as a result of the invasion of China by Japan in WWII, a rather stunning statistic when you figure that six million is the commonly accepted number of Jews murdered by the Nazi’s during the same general period. The world’s collective amnesia about an event of this magnitude is simply inexplicable.

An important part of Iris Chang’s contribution was as a skilled researcher. Before The Rape of Nanking, some of the horrifying details were not well documented (barely documented at all in English), a factor contributing to the event’s obscurity. She had a tireless persistence to comb through archives (one story relays that she stayed in the library so late and concentrated so intently, she once found herself still inside a library after it had closed and the staff left). Another important ability was her fluency in Mandarin which allowed her to conduct interviews with survivors in China. Among many there she would ultimately become a hero.

One discovery in particular made for a surprising twist to the story. Iris was able to contact the son of John Rabe, who was a Nazi living in Nanking at the time of the massacre. Rabe helped run a safety zone in the city (along with others, many of them Americans) that was a haven for many Chinese. Rabe, who even had contacts with Hitler, did much to help and was outraged by what he saw in Nanking. Iris likened him to a kind of “Oskar Schindler” of Nanking.

Iris located Rabe's granddaughter, Ursula Reihardt, who told Iris there was a diary. Later the diary was translated by publishers in English and Chinese. The diary turned out to have a plethora of corroborating evidence of atrocities and is considered a significant historical find. Iris relayed later that when she showed this diary to her father, he broke down in tears.

Iris also wrote in her book about Minnie Vautrin, an American running the Education Department and Dean of Studies at a college in Nanking. Vautrin protected thousands of Chinese women from Japanese soldiers and also kept a diary. Chang said that the entries of this diary could perhaps make it as important as the diary of Anne Frank. In it Vautrin described how refugees poured in and her struggle to protect them.

In a strangely familiar story, after Vautrin returned to the United States, she too took her own life.

Iris described in her book something she called the “Second Rape” or the “Rape of History.” Some Japanese groups, namely Japanese “Nationalist” groups had denied that the Rape of Nanking ever happened. Today, historians consider the events undisputed, and although her book caused something of an uproar among these groups, it seems that the facts have been accepted by scholars outside Japan (and many inside), and Iris’ book received rave reviews across the world.

Iris was thrown into a firestorm of controversy amongst deniers, and she became a headstrong advocate in the Chinese demand for an apology from the Japanese government. She pointed out that Germany has paid billions of dollars in reparations for its war crimes while Japan has paid close to nothing. While Germany has put up monuments commemorating the victims of the Jewish holocaust, Japan still to this day (although a bit lower profile lately) regularly worships Class A war criminals in the Yasukuni Shrine as deities.

According to Iris, it is against the law not to teach the history of the holocaust in German public schools, yet in Japan most of the details of WWII is are conveniently left out of the curriculum. She said:

“There is so little information taught about the Sino-Japanese war or even all of World War II in Japanese public schools that some people who have spent time teaching in Japan have reported that students are often baffled when the find out that the U.S. and Japan were ever at war, and sometimes their first question is: Which side won?”

Iris’ story of Nanking ripped open fresh wounds. Anti-Iris Chang literature sprang up on Japanese college campuses, conferences there condemned her, and a Japanese publisher attempting to publish her book received death threats.

Through it all she was unyielding in her view that Japan after 60 years of denial must make a clear and unequivocal apology. Once on the MacNeil-Lehrer News Hour when the Japanese ambassador spoke about Nanking, she dryly turned to the moderator and said, “I didn’t hear an apology.”

Helen Zia, author of “Asian-American Dreams: Emergence of an American People” said, "To see her on TV, defending the 'Rape of Nanking' so fiercely and so fearlessly -- I just sat down, stopped, in awe."

Iris spent her childhood in Champaign-Urbana eventually attending the University of Illinois earning a B.A. in journalism. She also received a master’s degree in writing at Johns Hopkins University. She launched a successful career as a journalist early in her twenties, working for the Associated Press and the Chicago Tribune. She wrote articles about diverse subjects such as AIDs victims, the history of the transistor, toxic mold, and working mothers … but all the while she aspired to write books.

In the course of the next decade, she set out writing and discovering three very different stories – each related in some way to her Chinese heritage, but universally pertinent. In a broad sense they each tell true stories about people that were victims of governmental power … and she spent her life advocating justice and civil liberties for those that suffered cruelty at the hands of others. Iris had a profound gift for writing, but also a profound gift for finding true stories of particular relevance – untold stories that desperately needed a storyteller.

The Thread of the Silkworm, her first book, was published when she was only 25. This is remarkable when you consider the technical subject matter (literally rocket science) that made up the background of the story, and the difficult and careful research she used to depict times, events and places accurately. Silkworm was a rather griping depiction of the life of Tsien hu-shen, the brilliant Cal Tec scientist who came to America from China in the 1940s to study rockets– and eventually hoped to become an American. After a series of distinguished accomplishments in academia and becoming a founder of the famed Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Dr. Tsien was falsly accused of being a Communist and a spy and was imprisoned and then confined to house arrest in a long, drawn out bureaucratic nightmare. Tsien, a patriotic admirer of America, was eventually deported back to China where years later he became a Chinese hero and the Father of the Silkworm Missile Program. The Silkworm missile would eventually be used against America in the first Gulf War. This stinging tale rather brilliantly shows us through a little known piece of history, the irony arising from Cold War McCarthyism and a grim reminder of how politics didn’t simply victimize and innocent man, but came back to bite in a big way. At 25, Iris became the youngest author to publish for Basic Books.

The Rape of Nanking is the book for which Iris Chang will always be remembered. This was a breakthrough book, not only for Iris, but for history. Its scope and importance is hard to overstate. This depiction of an unbelievable WWII atrocity committed by the Japanese Imperial Army on the defenseless then-capital city of China is perhaps a candidate for THE most egregious act of barbarism in all human history. At the same time it was close to completely unknown in the west before publication of this book in 1997. It is nothing short of stunning that the events that took place in Nanking China are still barely known in the western world.

The Chinese in America: A Narrative History, is a supremely interesting epic book published in 2003 depicting the history of America as Iris said “through the eyes of one immigrant group and their experiences.” She wanted to write a current book about the history of the Chinese here, and again she would expand on the themes of human rights and civil liberties. She documented different waves of immigrants that arrived – the most commonly known being the gold rush era immigrants, but also those that came later. She noted that in different times in history Chinese people were hailed and admired while at other times they faced discrimination or even genocide.

These works in the span of ten years made up an important and significant body of work for someone so young. Stephen Ambrose, author of Band of Brothers, Citizen Soldiers and D-Day, was arguably the preeminent historian of World War II. In a warm compliment to Chang he called her "maybe the best historian we've got. She understands that to communicate history, you've got to tell the story in an interesting way. She uses those vital storytelling rhythms."

Along with the fame, the cause of bringing to light injustice, the controversy, Iris suffered the severe dark side of its painful past. At times researching Nanking had been torturous. The stories of victims – often relayed to her in excruciating detail first hand – seemed to became a rapturous burden. While writing The Rape, stress caused her to lose a lot of her hair. One friend said that she cried on the phone with him for an hour one night after writing, unable to comprehend the cruelty. Another friend said her working space at home was shrouded with pictures like a shrine to the victims. Later, last year, her husband still expressed frustration at her relentless work on horror stories, this time for her fourth book – which she never completed, about the Bataan Death March.

Some of the struggle seems to have stemmed from the stress of countless public appearances and talks around the country. She pushed herself literally to the point of exhaustion. Some of her worst experiences of last year seemed to stem from overwork and sleep deprivation as she pushed herself to the ultimate limits. In the spring of 2004, her public appearances were at the rate of about a city a day – sometimes she had several engagements each day from morning till night.

From this backdrop, something snapped in the summer of 2004 when Iris went to Louisville Kentucky to research Bataan. She suffered a breakdown shortly after arriving and was hospitalized. Although she recovered, things never came quite back to normal. She began seeing a psychiatrist but wasn’t happy with her treatment and the family conveys that she was not entirely cooperative. Her illness was enough of a problem that Brett and Iris sent their son to be with Brett’s parents in Illinois. Things started to get better last fall, and Iris was not thought to be a suicide risk.

Excerpts from her suicide note, of which she wrote three drafts, show that Iris had reached a breaking point of desperation, fear and guilt. She believed that someone was actively trying to discredit her and she was afraid for her safety. “I sensed suddenly threats to my own life,” she wrote, “an eerie feeling that I was being followed in the streets, the white van parked outside my house, damaged mail arriving at my P.O. Box.”

In a transgression of overwhelm and pain her note says, “Each breath is becoming difficult for me to take -- the anxiety can be compared to drowning in an open sea. I know that my actions will transfer some of this pain to others, indeed those who love me the most. Please forgive me. Forgive me because I cannot forgive myself.”

It’s probably too simplistic to say that her depression and death was caused solely by her work, but clearly they played a major role. She had tendency to profoundly empathize with victims, and her work seemed to define and engulf her.

Aside from attention her death drew back to her work, her illness also shed light on the profoundly serious disease of depression. It brought into view the stigma of shame associated with mental illness, and the reluctance of victims to get the help they need. This problem, it has been suggested, may be particularly prevalent in the Asian culture.

At Chang’s memorial in Los Gatos, James Bradley author of the now famous book “Flags of Our Fathers: Heroes of Iwo Jima” recited an open letter to Iris’ small son. He explained how his first book had been rejected by 28 publishers, yet Iris had encouraged him to not give up. Years later he looks back at two best-sellering books about WWII. The movie rights to Flags of Our Fathers was eventually purchased by Steven Spielberg. Clint Eastwood directed the film which wrapped shooting last week in Chicago. http://www.flagsofourfathers.net/ Although Iris had dreamed of The Rape of Nanking becoming a film and had apparently been in talks with some about this at one time, this dream remains unrealized.

In the spring of this year I was fortunate enough to meet Dr. Nancy Lo, President of the Association for Preserving Historical Accuracy of Foreign Invasions in China (APHAFIC). Nancy hosted a meeting at a San Diego library with Iris Chang last year, and has met with her other times over the years. Nancy is a charming person, a distinguished scientist, and an engaging friend.

Nancy introduced me to Colonel Frank Mason, a WWII veteran and eyewitness to the Rape of Nanking. Mason is an affable and friendly man who was interviewed by Iris many times on the phone and in person about his wartime experiences. It turns out he lives only a few miles from my home. We spoke one day a few months ago and he reminisced about his meetings with Iris. “I would tell her how beautiful she was,” he said. “She would just laugh.”

When he talks about Nanking he gets sullen. He described being powerless to help in a scene of overwhelming mayhem taking place in the city. “After the women were raped,” he said tersely, “[the Japanese] would slice them open.”

When he read about Iris’ death in the newspaper he was incredulous. His voice lowers when he recalls that day. “I just couldn’t believe it.” In pondering his voice cracks and its hard for him to say, “Her heart just gave out…”

Today, millions of people have heard of The Rape of Nanking, millions more than would have known without Iris Chang’s work. Still, only a small minority of Americans have any notion of what happened on that side of the world during the war. Pearl Harbor we remember, but collectively as a nation we don’t know much else, just a few battles that followed in the Pacific: Midway, Iwo Jima, Saipan perhaps.

Iris’ publisher and agent, Susan Rabiner said at Iris’ memorial: “Now, some child will go to the library and -- though there wasn't such a book for Iris when she was growing up -- there will be a book in a language they will understand. And they will see the photographs and see a beautiful young woman, completely devoted to her cause.“

In the end I run out of words to put down about Iris Chang, author, scholar, “change agent”, advocate, historian, teacher, mother. I often think that each time someone dies, the world becomes a different place. I’ve never felt that more than with Iris Chang. It feels unfair that I only learned about her and her cause a few hours after she was gone.

But Iris Chang leaves a big legacy, an indelible message … and she left a warning. In a 2004 Interview she said:

“Personally I believe we are living in more dangerous times then ever. Don’t forget we now have the technological capacity to exterminate the human race with nuclear weapons, so the stakes are much larger. I don’t think that human behavior has evolved much really beyond what it had been since caveman times. We have civilization but the veneer of that civilization is exceedingly thin. If anything I think that while there’s much more attempts to try to bring about peace, that the reality is that the numbers of people who’ve died during wars or being murdered by their own governments has increased because the technological means to perpetrate mass murder has increased, but basic human nature has stayed the same.”

“Every 80 years or so the world is going to be populated with entirely different people. During that 80 years there is going to be a ruthless struggle as the world’s power and capital is transferred from one set of hands to another. Every generation is going to have to confront these basic challenges to their civil liberties and civil rights, not just in the United States but around the globe. As an author, I hope that in my brief lifetime, because we are all just here for a flicker of time, that I will help serve as a bridge between the past and the present. That I will help preserve some of the stories of our age and the struggles so that future generations can benefit from them.”

Iris had something important to say, and it is immensely sad that she herself suffered so much while she tried to bring awareness and justice to the suffering of others. People like this are rare, and oh what misfortune that we are all powerless to change her demise.

Now that a year is passed, I can see that over time her memory will eventually fade much like the victims she herself hoped would never be forgotten. Others will pick up her causes, but there likely won’t be another like her. Please don’t forget this woman, the last victim of The Rape of Nanking.

One year later ... Iris, farewell.

Resources:

There are many resources about Iris on the net. Here are a few. Above all else, I recommend Glenn Zucman’s audio interview:

Best Audio Interview: Glenn Zucman's Interview With Chang - April 2004 This is an mp3 recording (Ipod compatible) of an Interview with Chang at the LA Times Festival of Books at UCLA for Glenn Zucman’s radio show called “Strange Angels.” This half hour Interview is perhaps one of the best concise audio interviews of Chang available. Iris discusses a wide range of topics including all three of her books. Zucman is also an artist – see Zucman’s portrait of Chang.

Other Audio Interviews:

Audio Interview: Neal Conan Interviews Iris Chang on NPR about The Chinese in America May 7, 2003

Audio Interview: NPR Interview of Chang on “All Things Considered” December 3, 1997

Audio Interview: Penny Nelson Interview Iris Chang on “Forum” June 23, 2003

Audio Interview: Interview of Chang on the Paula Gordon Show April 22, 2004

Recommended Video: This video of a lecture Iris gave at USCB as part of their “Voices” series on October 16, 2003. Sharon Yoshida, introduces Chang. The presentation is almost one hour long: UCSB Webcast.

Other Video: A good video of Chang at The Committee of 100 - 2003 and The Video.

The definitive article: about Chang and her death – published April 17, 2005 in the San Francisco Chronicle by Heidi Benson (many pictures included): Historian Iris Chang won many battles: The war she lost raged within

Other Aritcles:

Another article by Benson written November 11, 2004: Author described as 'exhausted' before she was found dead

Excellent article written by friend Paula Kamen on Salon.com: You’ll need to register on Salon.com to read the whole article: http://www.salon.com/mwt/feature/2004/11/30/iris_chang/index_np.html

Wikipedia entry for Iris Chang

Iris’ website (hasn’t changed since her death – still shows her rigorous speaking schedule): http://www.irischang.net/

Mourning Iris Chang by Dr. William Y. Jiang (pdf file)

Nancy Beardsley column

Alex Danin Adler’s Farewell

Memorial site – lots of pictures

San Francisco Chronicle article by Laurie Barkin: Unbearable sadness of others' pain

1998 Article about response to The Rape of Nanking: When Iris Chang wrote ``The Rape of Nanking,'' to memorialize one of the bloodiest massacres of civilians in modern times, she wasn't prepared for the firestorm she started

Metro Active Article by Ami Chen Mills: Breaking the Silence December 12, 1996

Article on Asianweek.com

Article: Forgotton Holocaust.

Nightmare in Nanking by Sue De Pasquale

Gravesite

The Iris Chang Scholarship Fund
University of Illinois Foundation
Attn: Jeff Roley
1305 West Green Street
Urbana, IL 61801-2962

Unforgettable Genius

2005-08-27T12:35:00.000-07:00

Gracie and Al Cauble were great family friends. They were the kind of people that everyone that knew them was glad they did. I only knew them in their twilight years, shall we say. Gracie lived well into her nineties. After Gracie left, Al hung on for a few more years, but his life was never the same without Gracie.

They lived most of their years in Pacific Palisades in the last house on Sunset Boulevard. It once had a great view of the ocean, but I didn't know them then. The view was blocked ages ago by a condo building across the street. Gracie told me about how they saw deer walking through their yard in the 1940s, but things haven't been like that around there since.

Living in this part of LA, Gracie and Al knew many celebrities. Gracie worked in a gynocologist's office and became friendly with stars like Donna Reed. Al did electrical work in a lot of celebrity homes. He did lighting work in the famous Getty Musuem at Malibu. Sometimes Al would take us for a drive through the windy hills along the coast - later we drove Al because his sight just wasn't good enough, and he would point out various celebrity homes here and there. Most of what Grace and Al shared about celebrities were funny little stories or anecdotes, though I remember Gracie talking about Esther Williams once - she said something like - "She was a damn bitch, she was."

They loved living there amongst the rich and famous it always appeared. Gracie loved music, particularly jazz. She dabbled at the piano sometimes, usually a Gershwin tune or something in that vein. Back in the old days she wrote a musical that included the song "We Belong Together" a nice little love ballad. I still have the original handwritten copy and a record of "Juanita, Lady of the Organ" playing the song on an LP from the 1950s that Gracie gave to me along with countless other records and sheet music. The song was part of a full musical that Gracie had written, which she told me was reviewed by MGM for consideration.

When I met with Gracie years ago and she learned I liked the piano, she and Al sent me a tape of jazz solos played by Art Tatum. She marveled at Tatum's technical ability in famous recordings of "Tiger Rag" or "Tea for Two." Indeed Art's playing demonstrates a technical mastery that is extraordinary and is perhaps one of the most influential jazz artists of all time. Over the years, Grace and Al made me several tapes. I really can't listen to Art Tatum without thinking of them both - and all the times we took drives in the car around the Palisades with the old, scratchy homemade recordings of Tatum.

In the last decade of her life, Gracie lost most of her sight and the ability to play the piano. She had been a writer all her life and wrote many little stories about life experiences - most of them humorous. So, when she couldn't see anymore Al took her to brail classes at UCLA and Gracie eventually wrote a few stories for children that were published in brail.

Grace and Al are both gone now, Al passed away last year. Sadly, he was depressed and alone in a convelescent hospital. He only wanted to go home to die with his pictures of Gracie that he had neatly arranged on a dresser. Wendy and I happened to stop in and see him only one week before the end. He only spoke a few words.

I found this story by Grace in my file drawer that she gave to me many years ago for my birthday. It tells a little story about the old days, a story that she had told many times during those drives in the car with a Tatum recording playing...

---

UNFORGETTABLE GENIUS

A MEMOIR

Gracie Cauble

It was early spring of 1932.

The mantle clock chimed a quarter after the hour. I slipped on my jacket and made sure my purse and house keys where handy, then stood by the living room window looking into the black, deserted street.

Tony should be here any minute now, I thought. What a crazy time to have a date… at two fifteen in the morning! But he haqd said THIS was very special and worth giving up a nights’ sleep for.

Tony was keyboard man with a band playing on the east side of Cleveland and did not finish his gig until 2 a.m. I worked all day, so occasionally I sacrificed a nights’ sleep, for friendship’s sake, and we got together.

Soon his headlights approached and his car stopped in front of my house. I grabbed my purse, slipped noiselessly out of the door, locked it and hurried off the porch and into the car.

“This surprise had better be good,” I admonished. “I worked hard today and I’m tired.”

“You’ll forget all about being tired… you’ll forget everything,” Tony laughed.

As we drove down the eerie, deserted streets toward downtown Cleveland, Ohio, I tried to get him to tell me where we were headed, what we were going to see or who we were going to see, but he was adamant. We turned down Cedar Avenue into the deep ‘colored’ district and parked at a curb with several other cars. There were a lot more street lights here and people going into a building.

We entered a door above which was a sign in bright lights saying ‘Jimmy Owen’s Place.’ We climbed a steep staircase, the wooden steps concave by wear from innumerable feet through many years. The only light was a naked bulb hanging precariously from the sloping ceiling. At the top was a landing and a door through which we heard voices and laughter.

Entering a moderately-sized room, we saw a myriad of little tables covered with red and white checkered cloths. Two white people were seated at each table… all men except for three or four white women. Jimmy Owen was at the bar and two black men acted as waiters. An upright piano stood in the middle of the room. Tony and I squeezed ourselves between the tables to n empty one near the wall, ordered a beer, and I looked around the room with interest. Through the haze of cigarette smoke I recognized two side-men from a band currently playing at a select supper club in the downtown area, another piano man now engaged at a large hotel lounge, and one of the men talking to Jimmy Owen, whom I was certain was the leader of a fourteen-piece outfit working at Euclid Beach dance hall.

“What is this,” I asked Tony, “ a musicians’ convention?”

“Not exactly,” he answered, “but many musicians come here after their gig is finished.” He glanced at his wrist watch. “Three-thirty, you’ll know in a few minutes.”

Ten minutes later a man entered the room from the rear, guided to the piano by one of the waiters. Everyone stood up and shouts filled the room.

“Hi Art! How are you So glad you made it tonight.”

Astonished, I turned to Tony. “Art?” I said. “Not Art Tatum!”

Tony grinned, “The one and only. I knew you’d be surprised and thrilled.”

He was a large built man in a loose fitting brown suit which was the same color as his smiling face. Waving his arm, he acknowledged the greetings, twirled the piano stool a couple of times and sat down. Immediately a mug of beer was thrust toward him, for which he groped until he touched the handle. He drank the entire contents then placed the empty mug on top of the piano and began to play.

With the first notes, the hub-bub of the room ceased entirely. Not a sound interrupted the marvel of Art’s music. It seemed that no one even breathed. I was stunned. I could not believe what I was hearing. From where we sat we could get a glimpse of his hands on the keys now and then. After fifteen minutes he stopped playing and someone gave him another mug of beer. Some of the men spoke to him, but most of the audience was silent under the spell of his magical technique.

His artistry was mind boggling. It did not seem possible that any human could execute arpeggios so rapidly yet so clearly. His ten-note span of the left hand strode up and adown in perfect harmony with the scintillating right hand improvising aqs no Jazz player had ever done before. Art’s innovation was unbelievable, yet through the cloudburst of notes, one could always hear the melody. He played several sets, always tunes from the Broadway shows or the scores of movies, interspersed with mugs of beer, until almost six in the morning. No one left the place until Art got up from the stool, waved, smiled and allowed the waiter to guide him to the rear from where he had first appeared.

The new day had arrived and the sun was shining as we drove home. In a short time I would have to face a day of work with no sleep, but I was too overwhelmed with the fantastic music I had experienced, that nothing else mattered.

On the drive home Tony told me what he knew of Art’s history. Art was born in Toledo completely blind in his left eye and had only twenty-five percent vision in his right eye. They say he can see nothing but large shapes. He plays poker by looking at the cards while holding them three inches from his right eye. When he was seven, his father got him a violin, but somehow he and the violin did not click. When he was thirteen, he switched to the piano and they were wed forever. Strange as it may seem, he had only one teacher – and that teacher was also blind.

Art made his debut at age seventeen. Soon he was playing background music for a fashion show at Station WSPD in Toledo. He went to the Columbus State College for the Blind for two years where he studied classical piano. In 1930 he went to New York as accompanist for the ‘colored’ singer, Adelaide Hall. After that, he organized a trio with Tiny Grimes on guitar and Slam Stewart on bass. But he preferred to play solo. In 1938 he went to England and took London by storm; in Glasgow, Amsterdam and Brussels he drew huge crowds. But he was happiest entertaining in the Colony Club of New York, and the nightclubs of Harlem. His many records and accolades made him very popular.

Art was a fervent admirer of Rachmaninoff, Rubenstein and Horowitz. Even the “Great Toscanini” came to the 331 Club in Los Angeles to hear Art’s fantastic technique and they had talked for an hour. Thesed famous classical pianists often went to where Art was playing. Horowitz and Art became friends and Art knew Horowitz by his voice. When asked who were the three greatest pianists in the world, Art would answer, “Horowitz, Horowitz and Horowitz.”

Norman Granz recorded twelve or thirteen albums of 33-1/3 records of over two hundred numbers.

To musicians, especially pianists, Art’s innovations and improvisations were unbelievable – almost incomprehensible – his hands and mind bordered on the super human. His brain was like a computer.

Authorities claimed he never signed an autograph or check, but had a stamp made for that purpose.

Every chance I got, I went to hear my idol, even in New York. After the war, we moved to California and searched for notices about where Art was playing. At long last, he had engagements in Hollywood and we haunted those places.

Art was a very private man. It was not commonly known that he had a son. He married late in life. The King of Jazz loved steaks, beer and the bottle, and did not take care of his health.

The first time I saw Art Tatum was in 1932 when the big band swing era was beginning to bloom and come into its own. The last time I saw Art was in 1956 at a club in Hollywood. I was shocked at his appearance. He was very thin. He knew our voices as we were a couple who had followed him for many years and many places.

“Have you been ill?” I asked.

“No,” he said with a friendly grin. “I just figured I was too fat and had to slim down a little.”

Art’s congenial smile was always the same. He was a gentle man whether he was talking to a celebrity or a tourist.

On November 5, 1957, the music world was stunned by the news that he had passed away of uremia after only two days in the hospital. The beer, steaks and the bottle had caught up with him. When the news filtered into clubs, cafes, studios, etc., the music stopped and piano players sat with folded hands and tears falling on their cheeks.

Art was only forty-six when his magic fingers were stilled forever. Fats Waller, a famous pianist of the swing era, once said, “I play piano and I’m here, but God just walked in.” He had seen Art enter the club. Frank Sinatra once said, “If the entire music world had a throne, Art would be sitting in it.”

Many celebrities attended his funeral. Sarah Vaughn and Ella Fitzgerald sang. He was buried in a Los Angeles cemetery.

Never before, and never again will such a God-given talent enter this world. A gift like that only comes once in a lifetime, probably several lifetimes, if ever.

Many professional keyboard men have tried to duplicate Art’s technique, but that is impossible in its entirety. Now and then we hear an arpeggio or weird combination of chord that have probably been copied from Art’s work. He was an inspiration to the pianists who were visually impaired – Ray Charles, George Shearing, Stevie Wonder. They are all very good but there will never be another Art Tatum and I am indeed, grateful that I saw, heard and talked to the great King of Jazz, the UNFORGETTABLE GENIOUS.

Las Vegas Strip Glitter Still Here But its Boring Now

2005-08-23T14:40:00.000-07:00

This quote was on my coffee cup at Starbucks in the Aladdin Casino:

"Risk-taking, trust, and serendipity are key ingredients of joy. Without risk, nothing new ever happens. Without trust, fear creeps in. Without serendipity, there are no surprises."

-- Rita Golden Gelman, Author of Tales of a Female Nomad. She has had no permanent address since 1986.

The winds blow hot and dry here in Las Vegas sweeping across crowded streets day and night. The sidewalks along Las Vegas Boulevard seem to swell with traffic at night when its hard to walk comfortably. During this visit, the Bellagio fountains seem to go off more often and they seem to shoot water higher into the sky. The crowds watching seem bigger.

During the day, the sun weighs heavy on the skin. The skies here are hazy and dotted with clouds. Down below traffic is heavy especially around the resorts. Road construction slows down the already slow traffic to a crawl on the side streets. Some streets span very wide, but not wide enough. Legions of young Latinos still pass out solicitations for dial-up striptease - holding their explicit pamphlets out to just about anyone - couples, perhaps old ladies too.

People still crowd the casinos, the restaurants, the stores. People still smoke a lot in the casinos - often they smoke cigars. This is immediately noticeable by someone from California where it is illegal to smoke in just about any public place indoors. As the casino overwhelms the senses with lights and sounds that suggest players are making money, its easy to see that for all practical purposes, all patrons are in fact losing. The toursists walk this way and that. They wear a lot of Hawaiian shirts and wield lots of cameras. They often have children walking with them. Entertainment or an inticement to entertainment is around every corner. There are a lot of Starbucks. Things tend to be expensive. Upscale restaurants are easy to stubble upon these days. Advertising for cheap deals tend to be misleading.

The Wynn is the latest big hotel here. It's clean and crowded but feels serene by design - and elegant. Brown and golden on the outside, white and dotted with bright colors on the inside. The outside has piped in music from invisible speakers that are hidden somewhere behind perfect landscaping, mostly pine. The floors inside the extended lobby have elaborate and brightly colored tile work. The walls brandish clean and and colorful furniture and artwork. The theme is decidedly upscale. Outside there are tall waterfalls and a wall of cascading water over the "Lake of Dreams" - a place to provide nighttime lightshows. Within your first moments there, it becomes clear that there is not enough room for the crowds to stand to watch the shows. People tend to pool around a second-story railing for a look. The lake below and outside features bubbly water and four nude statues of male and female female figures modestly facing the giant wall.

We agree to buy a pair of drinks for the priviledge of sitting outside in front of the Lake of Dreams in the warm evening air and watch two versions of the show. It consisted of about five minutes of state of the art light visuals reflecting on the water and the flat waterfall "screen." A giant human head slid up out of the water which uses some kind of projection technology to show a woman's face whose lips and expressions are perfectly timed to the music.

As in all Vegas resorts, here people are constantly snapping pictures. The hotel is beautiful to be sure, but after a long string of new and remarkable resort hotels here, I just don't have a strong reaction to The Wynn resort. We walk through and it feels like just another giant (though this is less giant) Las Vegas mega-resort.

People seem to enjoy themselves here in Vegas, yet I tend to feel there's always a creeping feeling of frustration beneath the surface. People argue with curt faces at the registration desk, taxicabs honk in traffic a lot. Lines for buffets move slow. Children our restless. And, again, casino patrons sit at tables for long periods of time with hollow, intoxicated eyes, patiently losing money at the gambling tables. The casino is all too happy to oblige.

There’s a deafening silence inside Haleakala

2005-07-17T17:50:00.000-07:00

I’m not in any way learned in geology, so the following is a layman’s explanation of how Maui came to be - based on leafing through a few guide books and brochures.

All of the Hawaiian Islands (about 19 in total) came about as the crust of the earth far beneath the Pacific moved slowly through the eons (plate tectonics) over a “hot spot.” A hot spot is a place where super-hot lava is rising out of the earth – in the case of Hawaii it just happens to be belching its way up underneath the ocean. (Another hotspot is Yellowstone National Park.) As the gigantic Pacific Plate moved northwest across the hot spot during the course of millions of years, the chain of islands was created one by one. The hotspot, I suppose has stayed in relatively the same place all this time, but as the plate moved, it carried the islands with it. So, all of the Hawaiian islands came from the same source – the oldest islands stretching out west, the and newest island being the Big Island which is still growing as Kilauea continues to erupt.

Maui started with a huge mound of lava that made a giant dome. Today that dome is the West Maui Mountains. After the eons of time went by, erosion made huge and beautiful valleys – like the Iao Valley. Later, in fact, a lot later, as the plate moved further, another giant dome was made, Haleakala. The lava flows of these two mountains met in the middle and made the isthmus that is today the middle of Maui.

Haleakala is big. It makes up roughly 75% of the entire island. Like its bigger siblings on Hawaii, Mauno Kea and Kilauea, Haleakala is among the most massive structures on earth – roughly the size of Everest when measured from the bottom of the ocean.

Haleakala is also considered an active volcano, though currently dormant. I was a bit surprised to learn that the last eruption was only about 200 years ago about a dozen years or so after Captain Cook arrived here. We visited the site of this eruption which is well down the mountain on the southwest shore of east Maui – a short drive past Wailea. It’s an amazing giant field on the easy slopes of the mountain filled with these giant reddish brown and black volcanic rocks. Where the fields meet the water the pieces of rock go from pumpkin size to golf ball size – sometimes making a salt and peppery mixture of lava rock and what looks to me like white coral.

When seen from below, the summit of Haleakala was completely covered in clouds during our entire week stay in June 2005. This is apparently a typical phenomenon that gives rise to the remarkable and diverse eco-zones that make up different parts of the island. The trade winds blow from the west toward the east. When they hit Haleakala, the air rises and cools creating clouds. These clouds shroud the mountain up to around 8,000 feet typically allowing the summit to poke through on the top. So, most of the time when one gets to the summit, one would look down upon a huge expanse of clouds. This also gives an eerie and beautiful glow to the famous sunrise on the summit – something we didn’t do. Maybe next time we’ll be more in the mood for the 2:30am wake up call to begin the drive up.

The cloud formation on the east side creates the dense, lush and beautiful rainforest that makes the road to Hana the spectacular drive that it is with and cascading waterfalls coming down most all the time. This side of the mountain can get a whopping 400 inches a year of rain. The west side of Maui lies in the rain shadow of the mountain and remains mostly dry and arid. On that west side is Kihei (where our condo was) and Wailea, the ritzier community down the block with resort hotels and golf courses frequented by the rich and famous. Just one week before our visit, the Maui Film Festival was hosting stars mostly in the swanky Wailea hotels.

The Haleakala summit at 10,000 feet above sea level general drops in temperature about 30 degrees and opens up a huge “crater” that is a both an awesome vista and a lifeless void that looks nothing like the rest of this planet. For me it looked most like the images of Mars from the Mars rover – and sometimes something like the moon. It’s a stunning site.

The crater isn’t a real crater because it was created by erosion, not a volcanic blast. It’s a landscape of black, grey and reddish rocky sand and contains a number of smaller reddish cinder cones within the main crater area which dips down about three thousand feet from the summit. To hike down the sliding sands trail into the crater is to take a serene and mystical trip to another world. During our hike, the crater was shrouded in fog that would blow by us. Occasionally – within a matter of minutes – the fog would clear revealing the colorful and bizarre enormity of the crater. Two minutes later visibility would again vanish.

We were passed by a band of horses taking some tourists up the trail to the top. I remember thinking as I watched them that the inside of the crater was a deafening, still silence. So much so that the voices of the tourists on the horses could be clearly heard while they were still just barely visible coming up the winding trail. We couldn’t help but be somewhat envious of the these horseback tourists (though not the horses) as the climb up is a lot tougher than the climb down. Although the trail is gradual, the altitude makes a big difference.

Within the upper sands of Haleakala are two famous and rare natural anomalies. The beautiful Silversword plant and the Nene goose. The Silversword – which grows only here and on Mauno Kea on Hawaii – is an interesting oddity. It grows with succulent skinny white leaves with a greenish hue that grow out from a common middle and sometimes extend upward on a stalk. They are famous for blooming only once and then dying – something that happens anywhere after four to fifty years.

The Nene are brown geese that probably originated from Canadian geese that arrived on Hawaii after getting way off course in flight south. After a separate evolution on Hawaii they lost most of the webbing in their feet and have become accustomed to the rather harsh climate at the higher levels of Haleakala.

We saw the Silversword but mostly near the observatory center at the top which looked to have been cultivated by the ranger service. Nonetheless, they do occur up there naturally. We saw no Nene – except captive ones in the Kula Botanical Gardens down the mountain.

Click here for my pictures of Haleakala. Also see special instructions.

Why nobody talks about Kaho’olawe

2005-07-09T17:14:00.000-07:00

Looking out over the ocean anywhere on the south shore of Maui from Ma’alaea all the way up to Lahaina, the Hawaiian island of Kaho’olawe is clearly visible. About eight miles from the shores of Maui, it looks a lot like the more familiar island of Lanai does from West Maui from Lahaina to Ka’anapali.

Kaho’olawe is relatively small, but not the smallest of the eight major Hawaiian islands. Ni’ihau, an island populated exclusively by native Hawaiians, is smaller. In fact Kaho’olawe is 11 miles long and six miles wide which gives it almost 30 miles of coastline. Still, it seems the island is so seldom talked about, I don’t think I had heard one word about it, and was barely aware of its existence, before our June 2005 trip to Hawaii.

So what gives?

The answer is simple. Kaho’olawe was seized for target practice during WWII, and we bombed it to kingdom come. It remains today virtually uninhabitable.

Back around about 1917 the island was leased out from the existing territorial government to a cattle rancher by the name of MacPhee for $200 per year – that’s about 55 cents a day. Not a bad price for a Hawaiian island of 45 square miles. The lease went all the way to 1954 with an option to renew. A Harry Baldwin bought into the island as well around 1922 and they jointly ran a successful ranch. In 1939, being in a patriotic mood, they agreed to offer up a small tip of southern shore for U.S. Army target practice. It was a nice offer, but may have been a mistake on their part … besides, let’s get real, no deal that good lasts forever. The day after Pearl Harbor the U.S. Navy evicted MacPhee and Baldwin and seized the whole island as there very own gigantic artillery range in the name of national defense.

The “good” news was that MacPhee and Baldwin were to get their lease and the island back (blown to bits) after the war. The bad news was that after the war MacPhee and Baldwin were told to take a hike and were never compensated. When their lease ran out in 1954 the island was appropriated solely for military use by presidential decree. Kaho’olawe became the most pulverized place on earth.

Luckly, Kaho’olawe isn’t rich and lush like the other well-known islands. It’s mostly dry as it sits within Haleakala’s large rain shadow and is generally too low to spawn cloud formation and rain as happens on the other big Hawaiian islands. The coastline is also made up largely of cliffs and there are only a few good beaches.

The bombing continued until 1990 when a native Hawaiian group finally managed to convince the government to stop, and the state took possession of the territory from the Navy in 1994. The U.S. Congress allocated about $400 million to clean up this mangled isle filled with debris and unexploded ordinance, yet the sum didn’t even come close to doing the job. Today it still sits out there as a big, barren wasteland. At present, there doesn’t seem to be anything that will prevent Kaho’olawe from remaining a giant dusty bump well into the future.

Adventures in Hawaii

2005-07-06T22:58:00.000-07:00

If you’re ever in Oahu, and you’re the type of person that would patronize the commercial tourism industry, you’d probably attend a luau or perhaps make a day of the Polynesian Cultural Center. There isn’t anything wrong with these things, though despite what the glossy pamphlets tend to imply, I’d say it’s doubtful that you are getting an “authentic” cultural experience. What you are getting is a kind of modernized, moralized and Disneyfied depiction of an ancient culture. It’s all meant in good spirit, but I imagine the tourist machines must make the real purveyors of Pacific Islander cultures sneer. It seems, however, that many, perhaps even most island guests – with their Hawaiian shirts, leis (and Mai Tais in hand for the luaus) -- seem to take the experience as the essence of the Hawaiian or general Polynesian cultural experience.

One might compare this to the American perception of Chinese food. What most Americans think of as Chinese food, is actually a distinctly American food that is dished up with some Asian cooking techniques. Real Chinese people don’t eat sweet and sour pork, kung pao chicken, or crispy beef – yet they cook it up for Americans all over this land all the time. (Note, however, my favorite local Chinese establishment Pick Up Stix has a row of Mexican chefs lined up behind the woks.) Some Chinese dishes have some similarities to these dishes, but most food that Chinese people eat is simply too exotic for the American palette – and probably doesn’t have enough MSG and sugar added. I don’t think Chinese people tend to package their food in those little square containers either. But I digress…

At the Polynesian Cultural Center in Oahu, you’ll see a depiction of various Polynesian cultures in a beautiful, immaculate theme park environment – and brought to you directly from the Church of Latter-Day Saints. In fact all the cultural representatives from the different Polynesian islands are actually students (converts plucked from their representative homeland) attending the adjoining Brigham Young University adjunct -- and undoubtedly you’re getting a look at these cultures through the church’s ever-present, though again generally well-meaning, filter.

One authenticity you won’t see at the PCC – or in any other show I know of in Hawaii (except the joint across the street from our hotel on Kuhio Street) is the nudity that was once a normal part of ancient Hawaiian culture. Going back a hundred and a half or more years ago, around the time that Joseph Smith was seeing his visions back on the mainland, protestant missionaries were working hard to mold the natives into a more “civilized” culture. Apparently, a significant part of the mission became the task of simply convincing native Hawaiian peoples to please wear clothes.

Just around the time of the end of the Civil War, Mark Twain journeyed to Hawaii on a steamship called the Ajax. It’s not clear to me how well known it is to the general public that Twain went to Hawaii (then referred to as the Sandwich Islands) or that he wrote some good material that offers among other things, an interesting historical perspective about life there in the 1860s. His exploits make a nice little book which I picked up at the Bishop Museum called “Mark Twain in Hawaii: Roughing it in the Sandwich Islands.” He took residence there for about four months writing articles and letters while doing extensive sight-seeing. The book has some characteristic humor that make it well worth the read. Take for example this section of text where Twain explains some of the problems with Hawaiian’s adjustment to this new custom of wearing clothing…

“In the rural districts of any of the Islands, the traveler hourly comes upon parties of dusky maidens bathing in the streams or in the sea without any clothing on and exhibiting no very intemperate zeal in the matter of hiding their nakedness. When the missionaries first took up their residence in Honolulu, the native women would pay their families frequent friendly visits, day by day, not even clothed with a blush. It was found a hard matter to convince them that this was rather indelicate. Finally the missionaries provided them with long, loose calico robes, and that ended the difficulty -- for the women would troop through the town, stark naked, with their robes folded under their arms, march to the missionary houses and then proceed to dress! The natives soon manifested a strong proclivity for clothing, but it was shortly apparent that they only wanted it for grandeur. The missionaries imported a quantity of hats, bonnets, and the male and female wearing apparel, instituted a general distribution, and begged the people not to come to church naked, next Sunday, as usual."

In another section Twin writes:

“At noon I observed a bevy of nude native young ladies bathing in the sea, and went and sat down on their clothes to keep them from being stolen. I begged them to come out, for the sea was rising and I was satisfied that they were running some risk.”

Twian’s writings cover a broad range. He tells stories about riding a lame horse on Oahu, looking at the live volcanos on the Big Island, seeing the Iao Valley on Maui, and even commentary about some Hawaii lawmakers. For example, Twain recounts a little story about a Hawaiian legislator who offered a bill for "the construction of a suspension bridge from Oahu to Hawaii, a matter of hundred and fifty miles! He said that natives would prefer it to the interisland schooners, and they wouldn't suffer seasickness on it.... Do not do an unjust thing now, and imagine Kanaka [native Hawaiian] legislatures do stupider things than other similar bodies. Rather blush to remember that once, when a Wisconsin legislature had the affixing of a penalty for the crime of arson under consideration, a member got up and seriously suggested that when a man committed the damning crime of arson they ought either to hang him or make him marry the girl."

I mentioned Captain Cook’s rather unpleasant end at the hands of Hawaiian natives (including what happened to his heart) in the last blog. Twain offered these details:

“His flesh was stripped from the bones and burned (except nine pounds of it which were sent on board the ships). The heart was hung up in a native hut, where it was found and eaten by three children, who mistook it for the heart of a dog. One of these children grew to be a very old man, and died in Honolulu a few years ago. Some of Cook's bones were recovered and consigned to the deep by the officers of the ships.”

When Twain returned to San Francisco, he felt his Sandwich Island adventures had ample opportunity for the podium and he tried his hand on the lecture circuit. They proved to be very successful for him. The poster for the event advertised: "Doors open at 7 o'clock. The trouble to begin at 8 o'clock."

Maui’s Squishy Demise

2005-06-30T20:54:00.000-07:00

Haleakala is the volcanic mountain that makes up the entire eastern part of the island of Maui, and it is absolutely huge. So huge, a guide book told me, that 100 Mount Fuji’s could fit inside Haleakala. That includes the 93 percent of Haleaka unseen beneath the ocean – in all it is nearly the size of Everest. In fact, Maui’s Haleakala has so much mass, geologists say it is literally squishing the earth’s crust. That’s interesting, but it’s not what I’m writing about, so let’s move on. Today’s blog is really about how an ancient demigod of lore (his name was Maui) had something of a run in with the ancient goddess, Hina, his mom.

You’ve heard of a Kahuna – you know, like how we like to affectionately refer to someone in charge as The Big Kahuna? It’s also been a part of the surfer language for a long time (such as in the 1965 Avalon/Funichello cheese “Beach Blanket Bingo”). But before even Gidget, quite a long time ago, a Kahuna was a sacred ancient Hawaiian shaman of sorts.

In the old days there were many Kahuni and they all learned to recite these really long poems about folklore completely from memory (you’ll soon see why they might have got a kick out of repetition of their craft). One of these poems recited at rituals and other important events was known as the Kumulipo, a fantastic epic adventure of more than 2,000 lines. These guys really had some colorful material – if it was available on the islands a few hundred years ago, these guys were only allowed to play on cable.

The Kumulipo has a lots of creation myths and culminates in a long geneology story all the way up to the time of Captain Cook (1789) for whom the Kumulipo was apparently once recited. Sometime not too long after cracking a smile while enjoying the Kumulipo, things turned sour for Cook and you may recall that the Hawaiians ripped his body to shreds after a petty skirmish over a stolen rowboat. As an aside, in the mayhem, the Hawaiians apparently hung Cook’s heart up on a line where three children came across it thinking it belonged to a dog and consumed it for lunch.

Anyhoo, the Kumulipo tells a rather strange life and death tale about Maui who throughout Polynesia was something of a half-man, half-mythological-sorcerer-being. One of the guide books calls him a cross between Paul Bunyan and Hercules.

The Kumulipo chant recounts some nice things that Maui did for humankind – like he fished up the islands of Hawaii out of the ocean, took fire from a mud hen, and lifted up the sky allowing us to walk upright. But Maui also had a mischievous and rather nutty side. I’m thinking the Kumulipo chant must contain a Hawaiian term or two that would roughly translate to “kinky” perhaps?

One problem in Maui’s time was that the daylight just wasn’t long enough to dry all the washed tapa (a course cloth made from pounded bark). That was because the sun god La (called Mahu-iki in another account) was lazy and wanted to move across the sky quickly to get back to bed. Maui’s mother, goddess Hina, was a maker of tapa so something had to be done. Maui decided to take this matter in his own hands while standing atop of the aforementioned Haleakala. What imagination. He braided together his sister’s pubic hair to make a really, really long rope (sis must have been somethin’) and used it to lasso La and slow him/her/it down to a stop. When La pleaded for freedom, a bargain was made. La agreed to walk slowly across the sky, but would be allowed to go a bit faster in winter. An extra bonus for humans was that Maui’s achievement also allowed more daylight time for fishing most of the year.

There’s lots more to tell, but let’s plow head first into Maui’s final prank. He decided to approach mom while she was sleeping, and, eh-hem, crawl into her vagina leaving only his feet dangling out (whata jokester). Just the same as it would you, this event caused nearby warrior birds to laugh like crazy. (One can easily see the natural comedic gifts of those wacky ancient Kahuna bros.) Anyway, all that bird racket awakened Hina (the fable doesn’t say that Maui caused her to awaken), and Hina was so pissed off she simply squished Maui to death. Thus, Maui became the first grown man-god to be crushed to death while being simultaneously stuck head first inside his mother’s vagina. Well, I mean he was the first man-type being to experience death, without regard to the method of death, I think is closer to the actual idea meant to be expressed in this story.

As far as I can tell, we still have no motion picture or stage version of this tale.

Now, we should consider that this little fable has some kind of “reverse-birth” symbolism about death and I suppose the Kahuna didn’t have quite as many puritan hang-ups as Americans tend to have about men being stuck head first into his mother as such, so I surmise that in ancient days chants were sometimes allowed play off cable. This was all before the missionaries came to the islands and broke up the party (sometime in the 1800s). I’d also add that there are a few other cleaned-up versions which have Maui entering Hina’s stomach through her mouth, and Maui using coconut fibers to make rope rather than his sister’s pubic hair, but I for one really hope the Kamehameha Schools teach the real version of this rich island heritage. No revisionist ever concocted a raunched-up version of an old fable, right? We’re no pinheads. We know which version the genuine ancient Kahuna had memorized.

The Story of Clarabelle Lansing

2005-06-28T21:34:00.000-07:00

So I made it back from Hawaii with a lot of pictures. One week on Oahu and one week on Maui. I didn’t have a lot of time to “blog” and besides, I had a hard time finding an Internet connection. None was offered in our hotel on Oahu and the cable modem at our condo on Maui just wouldn’t work with my laptop.

Had a great time and great trip, but I’d like to start with a story about Hawaiian air travel.

I do have a lot of irrational fears, but I don’t have a big fear of flying, though I have a little fear. It all just seems so unnatural – a giant machine like that being controllable in flight. I get the science of it, it just seems unnatural. Of course if something goes wrong with part of the plane – such as an engine – you always know that planes have backup systems, and you can always make an emergency landing at the nearest airport. Of course, when you are flying to Hawaii, there aren’t a lot of alternate airports along the way.

There haven’t been a lot of planes that have gone down in the great Pacific on the way to Hawaii – and planes are landing in Honolulu every three minutes. So, planes are damn safe – although Stevin Levitt, the interesting young economist, points out in his new book Freakonomics that if you account for all factors, flying is probably not the safest way to travel as is widely touted, but is probably about as safe as driving in a car – which actually is still pretty darn safe. Surely there’s nothing to fear soaring 500 miles per hour at 30,000 feet on top of a giant fuel tank. It’s really a matter of the odds of having a mishap are low, but the stakes are pretty high when the time comes.

So, when I flew to and from Hawaii on Aloha airlines, I wasn’t particularly anxious about the flight at all - in fact I enjoyed my Salisbury Steak, roll, side salad, Coke and brownie, but I couldn’t help but think about this interesting story you may have heard about which I account in my own words below after reading a few articles about it out on the web. So I start my notes about Hawaii (I'll have more later and I'm working on the pictures), with this little story about Aloha Airlines. See if you can put yourself there…

The Story of Clarabelle Lansing

Clarabelle Lansing was a senior flight attendant for Aloha Airlines back in 1988. She was one of those courteous and helpful people that happily assist a plane full of obnoxious Hawaiian tourists on their way to the next island – you know they type: the sunburned families with maps, the fat men that scratch a lot, the screaming children. A forced smile never seems quite as forced with these ladies (sometimes guys) - they are real professionals, and they don’t get enough credit. The “buh-bye” thing at the end is protocol so it isn’t fair to roll your eyes at that. In all probability they are nice people and they actually mean you no sarcastic pittance.

Aloha Airlines had dozens of daily inter-island flights then and still does today – generally they last 20 minutes to an hour depending on which islands are involved, whether conditions, etc. Its easy flying, but you know, kinda repetitive. Good take off and landing practice for the pilots, kind of dull routine for veteran flight attendants like Clarabelle. Anyway, its fluff a pillow here, tell someone to put their tray in the upright position there, pretty routine stuff.

On April 28^th at about 1pm Clarabelle prepared things for passengers as usual. This flight was from Hilo (on the Big Island) to Honolulu. That’s about a forty minute deal. Take off, pass out the nuts, pass out the drinks, collect the cups, down, you’re done, next flight.

This time Clarabelle was assisted by two others: Michelle Honda and Jane Santo-Tomita. Picture them all. That simple, business-like uniform usually neatly ironed, the little airline name badges (probably also say “Aloha”), big smiles, professionalism, patience. They plucked out the cookie wrappers and used Kleenex from the magazine holders, refolded the blankets, wiped the crumbs off the seats that double as floatation devices, and made sure the daily peanut treats and soft drink carts were ready to go, things like that.

First Officer Madeline "Mimi" Tompkins and Captain Robert Schornsteimer settled into their cockpit seats and did their little checklist routine. There was an FAA traffic controller seated in the “observer” seat. This was the not the first flight of the day for this plane – it had been active that day.

Passengers began to board. You might imagine the Hawaiian music playing in the cabin as everyone was boarding, and you know the drill – passengers with special situations come on first, then first class, then rows 18 to 25, etc. Everything was perfectly fine … oh, except that one passenger noticed something on the way in the plane door, or was she just imagining something resembling a 40 inch crack in the fuselage? Hmm. It was going to be a normal day – almost.

Aloha Airlines flight 243 left the ground of Hilo at 1:25pm. It was on schedule. Weather was good.

So imagine take off. You get that powerful engine sound and you feel the pressure in the back of your seat, yowweee it’s getting pretty fast here, you think, and you reach that sweet-spot speed where your seat dips down and then you feel the plane pull up into the air. It all feels just a bit unnatural and dicey, but its okay – as long as the engines keep going, the plane keeps going up. And ascent goes pretty quick from there. I can tell you the scenery flying out of Hawaii is lovely - beautiful green hills and valleys meet shoreline on one side and the blue ocean on the other. Man it really does look like paradise.

Well, that take off stuff went just like that for the folks on this flight, nothing special. People were flipping through their airline magazines and peering out the windows just like you always do when you fly. The little bing-bong bell went off to indicate the flight was at altitude. Clarabelle, Michelle and Jane started down the aisle dishing out the nuts and the drinks. Oh, take your Coke and shut up, Clarabelle must have thought when she dealt with at least one slimy nit-wit, but we’ll never know.

First Officer Mimi had been at the “wheel” for the lift off and leveled the plane at 24,000 feet while the captain did other routine, non-flying stuff – from this I assume he filled out some mindless red tape forms or something.

So when did it happen? Something like 1:45pm just after leveling off, and I can tell you, it wasn’t Clarabelle’s best day. At the moment of reckoning she was at row five picking up a passenger’s plastic cup. Michele was in row 15 or 16. Jane was in row 2. They were three good people each doing their job, getting through another day. Bless them all.

Mimi Tompkins heard a loud “clapping” sound and felt her head jerk back. In that instant there was grey insulation material whirling about the cockpit. The controls were described as “spongy” and “loose.” Captain Schornsteimer looked back to see the cockpit door gone and blue sky above the passenger cabin. Yikes, this is bad, he must have mused.

In the very front of the plane, attendant Jane Santo-Tomita was hit violently in the head by debris and was slammed down to the floor. She was seriously injured but lucky to be down. A passenger held her there.

Michelle Honda was also thrown to the floor as the plane started to decompress. She held on to the legs of the seats for her life.

Eyewitnesses say that Clarabelle did not immediately get sucked out of the plane, but things must have happened pretty fast. As the plane began to rip open, she was hurled against a hole on the left side of the plane creating something very bizarre to imagine. As she temporarily blocked the air from sucking out the hole, Clarabelle’s body covered the crevice in such a way that she created a surge of extreme air pressure back into the plane – this surge probably caused further damage to the roof and may have created a very loud noise. This strange and possibly painful phenomenon is commonly known as fluid hammering – and is sometimes referred to as “cannonball pulse.” This probably lasted but an instant.

You’ll have to use your imagination to get an idea of how much mental and/or physical anguish Clarabelle must have felt or what her state of consciousness may have been at the moment she was sucked from the left side of the airplane over the open ocean somewhere south/southeast of Maui. There’s no evidence that she struck the plane knocking her unconscious after ejection, so I tend to imagine her bruised and in such terrified shock she could barely breathe, perhaps a bit of blood coming down on her forehead with her arms outstretched – in a desperate tumble along with smacking debris and oversized carryon luggage while she watched wide-eyed at the spinning image of her plane, her passengers and her crew soaring away above her. At some point I imagine her looking down at the blue ocean. It must have gotten quiet – only the sound of wind just before the end. I’m sure you can guess why they never found her body. Sorry for the drama. That’s what I imagine.

Back on the plane things remained panicky. Think about what the passengers just witnessed and think about what you’d be thinking. Am I next? How do I tighten this damn belt? Are we going down? Yes, we must be going down – this doesn’t happen to planes that land!

There were 89 passengers strapped in a plane, but first class had definitely bought the best ride for the money. The first 18 feet of the plane behind the cockpit were completely wide open – the floor was pretty much all that was left. Noise in the plane made communication between crew members impossible. They used hand signals. The captain’s quick musing that this situation was pretty bad led him to make a snap decision to put the plane in a steep decent – he apparently grabbed the controls from Mimi. One hopes this wasn’t an act of sexism. Considering the enormity of this event, let’s give him some leeway. In any event, the rapid decent may not have made the passengers feel much better about the fate of the plane, but breathing was probably getting difficult as the masks they always tell you will fall down in the case of cabin depressurization, didn’t come down. Of course, logic would tell you this particular malfunction goes without saying for the first class section.

Nonetheless, these tourists had no time to admire the view. In the front they were holding on to poor Jane Santo-Tomita. They held on to her all the way down saving her from certain death. The other attendant, Michelle Honda, although injured, was able to crawl up and down the aisle assisting and calming the passengers by holding onto the seat legs of the coach area, a hero.

But before we get to the end, it gets just a little bit worse. Imagine this scenario: The walls of the plane hadn’t torn away in a clean break. There were jagged bits of metal pieces being battered by the slipstream, then breaking loose and spearing back among the passengers. One can rightly assume that this made an uncomfortable situation for the travelers even more uncomfortable. Most of the passengers were injured, seven seriously.

At 1:58pm the plane was able to make an emergency landing at Runway 2 at Kahului Airport, Maui. The whole ordeal was but 15 minutes long – but how long do you suppose it felt like to the passengers and crew? No word on whether or not passengers received a refund on their tickets.

It’s all about metal fatigue friends, though there are some conflicting theories on this incident – including one that claims that this whole story can and probably will happen again. The Aloha planes that take off and land so much may have been more susceptible to this type of fatigue.

Clarabelle was the only one to die. There’s a memorial for her now at the airport in Honolulu. As for the plane. According to the accident report:

“A major portion of the upper crown skin and structure of section 43 separated in flight causing an explosive decompression of the cabin. The damaged area extended from slightly aft of the main cabin entrance door, rear ward about 18 feet to the area just forward of the wings and from the left side of the cabin at the floor level to the right side window level.

The value of the airplane was estimated at about $5 million. As a result of the accident, the airplane was determined to be damaged beyond repair. It was dismantled on the site and sold for parts and scrap.”

First Entry

2005-06-09T22:12:00.000-07:00

I'm starting a blog today - a good time to start just before my trip to Hawaii on Saturday. More to come...