This is my brother's response to my blog entry about the history of ISIS.


Thanks for sharing your ISIS post, and kudos for reaching blog number 70. The backgrounder on Wahabiism is very helpful, as is the chronology of Saudi Arabia's evolution (devolution?) from warring nomadic tribes to an oil-rich kingdom that "exports" (and supports clandestinely) the most violent forms of jihad beyond its borders. Think of all the Wahabi jihadi schools Saudi has funded worldwide.

I appreciated your Stanford alumni respondent's reference to America's twisted relationship with the Saudi monarchy and our complicity in so much of what has gone down (mostly badly) in the Middle East. I was also reminded of Michael Moore's excellent 9/11 documentary, which seems increasingly prescient with the passage of time. The only commercial flight allowed to depart U.S. airspace on 9/11 was a plane packed with relatives of Osama bin Laden and other Saudis with monarchial ties. The film also shows the Bush family's (and hence America's) three-generation partnership with Saudi royals. Good stuff.

I hadn't realized there were historic Wahabi precedents for the recent demolitions of the Bamayan Buddhas, the saints' crypts and ancient libraries in Timbuktu, the Shiite mosques in Iraq, and other revered monuments and grave sites in areas conquered by ISIS. Now I realize this has been going on for centuries as a "purification" and self-corrective whenever Islam strays too far from what the purists perceive as the True Way. Christianity has had a similar trajectory, if you consider all the times it has "self-corrected" with wars, snake handler splinter sects, inquisitions, triplicate popes, wanton slaughters of "disbelievers" and the like. In Israel now, the radical purists who control the government seek compression and conquest of the Palestinians so Jewish settlements can continue expanding. It works.

I see now that McCain, Lindsay Graham and the usual neo-con hawks are beating the war drums for an escalation of U.S. military action against ISIS. The rationale is that jihadis with western passports will soon return to their home countries and create the next 9/11. While that's certainly possible, I think a better rationale for U.S. military involvement is to forestall the rape, enslavement and slaughter of innocents and "apostates" now under way in ISIS-conquered territories. As your blog suggests, unless vast new oceans of oil are discovered beneath their boots, the Wahabbis are not prone to negotiate or conciliate with anyone. It's "fire and sword" all the way. A template exists for U.S. intervention under the U.N. genocide aegis, as happened when the Serbs were "cleansing" Croatia in the 1990s. (Although we have conveniently ignored much vaster genocides -- see Ruwanda and Sudan -- when our "national interests" were not involved). 

Ironies abound, many of them of our own making. If we continue to battle ISIS, our "allies" are Syria, Iran and Russia. ISIS' battlefield success owes much to its acquisition of U.S. weaponry and munitions that our very expensively "trained" Iraqi army abandoned in the field. So now we're trying to blow up our own stuff. We're helping stabilize a Syrian dictatorship that has gassed its own citizens (as we backed Saddam Hussein when he did the same thing). And anything we can do to forestall the creation of the new ISIS caliphate helps Iran and Russia expand their spheres of influence in the Middle East. And so on, ad infinitum.

As for ISIS, it has used 21st century technology to advance a very old conquest strategy. As Genghis Khan discovered, a populace that is thoroughly terrified in advance is easiest to subjugate. Before his army moved in on a city, he made sure its inhabitants had seen and heard about the hideous atrocities that would be visited on them if they resisted. His emissaries would then offer peace if the city would capitulate bloodlessly. It usually worked. ISIS uses social media postings of massacres and beheadings to achieve a similar terror quotient, but it goes beyond Genghis by demanding conversion as well. 

I find it incredibly bizarre that the same caliphate websites that depict the brutal rape, slaughter and "heads on pikes" beheadings of conquered non-believers can with another click guide users to jolly immigration entreaties. "The new caliphate needs doctors, dentists, pilots, school teachers, bakers, bankers, public health workers! Come on down! The future is here!"

And supposedly people are flocking there, but then, that may just be their propaganda. Hard to know what's real.

A Brief History of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria

I recently read a piece by an English gentleman named Alistair Crooke.  Crooke is a former high ranking member of Britain’s MI6.  He is a diplomat and an advisor to the European Union on Islam and the Middle East.  He has written extensively on this subject.  I have excerpted a recent piece of his that purports to explain the origins of ISIS, The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria.  There is also reference to an Egyptian scholar, Amira Nowaira,  who writes of many overlapping topics.  There is a link, further along in this entry to a book of hers, “Islam, Gender and Modernity” which answers many FAQ’s about Islam.  One might call it “Islam for Dummies” as it is written in a very accessible style.  I have also delved into that invaluable resource, WikiPedia for further elucidation.

        Amira Nowaira; Egyptian scholar and Islamic expert

      Alastair Crooke, whose writings form the basis for this blog          entry.                                                                    

This recent blooming of zealous Islamic fundamentalism in large portions of Syria and Iraq (which may soon encompass parts of Jordan) should be of interest to all educated individuals as our leaders in Washington have already taken actions against ISIS.  The following is one interpretation of the origins of ISIS.  I would be interested to know your thoughts.  Feel free to comment in my blog or e-mail me directly.  

The Origins of ISIS

One dominant strand to the Saudi identity pertains directly to Muhammad ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhab (the founder of Wahhabism), and the use to which his radical, exclusionist puritanism was put by Ibn Saud, a minor leader of Bedouin tribes noted mostly for their constant inter-tribal warring.

                                                               Abd al-Wahhab

The second strand relates to King Abd-al Aziz's shift towards statehood in the 1920s: his curbing of Wahhabi violence (in order to have diplomatic standing as a nation-state with Britain and America); his institutionalization of the original Wahhabist impulse -- and the subsequent seizing of the opportunely surging petrodollar spigot in the 1970s, to channel this volatile Wahhabist impulse current away from home towards export -- by diffusing a cultural revolution, rather than violent revolution throughout the Muslim world.

                                         King Abd-al Aziz

But this "cultural revolution" was no docile reformism. It was a revolution based on Abd al-Wahhab's hatred for the putrescence and deviationism that he perceived all about him -- hence his call to purge Islam of all its heresies and idolatries.

As a censorious disciple of the 14th century scholar Ibn Taymiyyah, Abd al-Wahhab despised "the decorous, arty, tobacco smoking, hashish imbibing, drum pounding Egyptian and Ottoman nobility who travelled across Arabia to pray at Mecca."

In Abd al-Wahhab's view, these were not Muslims; they were imposters masquerading as Muslims. Nor, indeed, did he find the behavior of local Bedouin Arabs much better. They aggravated Abd al-Wahhab by their honoring of saints, by their erecting of tombstones, and their "superstition" (e.g. revering graves or places that were deemed particularly imbued with the divine).

All this behavior, Abd al-Wahhab denounced as bida -- forbidden by God.  Like Taymiyyah before him, Abd al-Wahhab believed that the period of the Prophet Muhammad's stay in Medina was the ideal of Muslim society (the "best of times"), to which all Muslims should aspire to emulate. 

Taymiyyah had declared war on Shi'ism, Sufism and Greek philosophy. He spoke out, too against visiting the grave of the prophet and the celebration of his birthday, declaring that all such behavior represented mere imitation of the Christian worship of Jesus as God (i.e. idolatry). Abd al-Wahhab assimilated all this earlier teaching, stating that "any doubt or hesitation" on the part of a believer should "deprive a man of immunity of his property and his life."  (The prior link will lead to a book written by an Egyptian scholar who has expertise in the various tenants of Islam.  Her name is Amira Nowaira and the excerpts in the link are derived from one of the books she has written which goes into more depth about ISIS and Wahhibism, etc.  The book is called “Islam, Gender and Modernity.)  One of the main tenets of Abd al-Wahhab's doctrine has become the key idea of takfir. Under the takfiri doctrine, Abd al-Wahhab and his followers could deem fellow Muslims infidels should they engage in activities that in any way could be said to encroach on the sovereignty of the absolute Authority (that is, the King). Abd al-Wahhab denounced all Muslims who honored the dead, saints, or angels. He held that such sentiments detracted from the complete subservience one must feel towards God, and only God. Wahhabi Islam thus bans any prayer to saints and dead loved ones, pilgrimages to tombs and special mosques, religious festivals celebrating saints, the honoring of the Muslim Prophet Muhammad's birthday, and even prohibits the use of gravestones when burying the dead.

Abd al-Wahhab demanded conformity -- a conformity that was to be demonstrated in physical and tangible ways. He argued that all Muslims must individually pledge their allegiance to a single Muslim leader, a Caliph.  Those who would not conform to this view should be killed, their wives and daughters violated, and their possessions confiscated, he wrote. The list of apostates meriting death included the Shiite, Sufis and other Muslim denominations, whom Abd al-Wahhab did not consider to be Muslim at all. 

There is nothing here that separates Wahhabism from ISIS. The rift would emerge only later: from the subsequent institutionalization of Muhammad ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhab's doctrine of "One Ruler, One Authority, One Mosque" -- these three pillars being taken respectively to refer to the Saudi king, the absolute authority of official Wahhabism, and its control of "the word" (i.e. the mosque). 

It is this rift -- the ISIS denial of these three pillars on which the whole of Sunni authority presently rests -- makes ISIS, which in all other respects conforms to Wahhabism, a deep threat to Saudi Arabia. 

Abd al-Wahhab's advocacy of these ultra radical views inevitably led to his expulsion from his own town -- and in 1741, after some wanderings, he found refuge under the protection of Ibn Saud and his tribe. What Ibn Saud perceived in Abd al-Wahhab's novel teaching was the means to overturn Arab tradition and convention. It was a path to seizing power. 

Ibn Saud's clan, seizing on Abd al-Wahhab's doctrine, now could do what they always did, which was raiding neighboring villages and robbing them of their possessions. Only now they were doing it not within the ambit of Arab tradition, but rather under the banner of jihad. Ibn Saud and Abd al-Wahhab also reintroduced the idea of martyrdom in the name of jihad, as it granted those martyred immediate entry into paradise. 

The conquered inhabitants were given a limited choice: conversion to Wahhabism or death.  This is the same choice today’s ISIS is using in the towns they capture.  By 1790, this alliance controlled most of the Arabian Peninsula and repeatedly raided Medina, Syria and Iraq. 

Their strategy -- like that of ISIS today -- was to bring the peoples whom they conquered into submission. They aimed to instill fear. In 1801, the alliance attacked the Holy City of Karbala in Iraq. They massacred thousands of Shiites, including women and children. Many Shiite shrines were destroyed, including the shrine of Imam Hussein, the murdered grandson of Prophet Muhammad. 

In 1803, Abdul Aziz then entered the Holy City of Mecca, which surrendered under the impact of terror and panic (the same fate was to befall Medina, too). Abd al-Wahhab's followers demolished historical monuments and all the tombs and shrines in their midst. By the end, they had destroyed centuries of Islamic architecture near the Grand Mosque.  This was the same belief that led the Taliban to destroy the Buddhist monuments in Bamiyan.

A Shiite assassin killed King Abdul Aziz (taking revenge for the massacre at Karbala). His son, Saud bin Abd al Aziz, succeeded him and continued the conquest of Arabia. Ottoman rulers, however, could no longer just sit back and watch as their empire was devoured piece by piece. In 1812, the Ottoman army, composed of Egyptians, pushed the Alliance out from Medina, Jeddah and Mecca. In 1814, Saud bin Abd al Aziz died of fever. His unfortunate son Abdullah bin Saud, however, was taken by the Ottomans to Istanbul, where he was gruesomely executed (a visitor to Istanbul reported seeing him having been humiliated in the streets of Istanbul for three days, then hanged and beheaded, his severed head fired from a canon, and his heart cut out and impaled on his body). 

Abdullah bin Saud, the unfortunate monarch whose severed head was shot out of a canon in Istanbul.  (If they ever make the movie, I say Johnny Depp is a shoe-in for the part...)

In 1815, Wahhabi forces were crushed by the Egyptians (acting on the Ottoman's behalf) in a decisive battle. In 1818, the Ottomans captured and destroyed the Wahhabi capital of Dariyah. The first Saudi state was no more. The few remaining Wahhabis withdrew into the desert to regroup, and there they remained, quiescent for most of the 19th century.

               Istanbul at the height of the Ottoman Empire.

Wahhabism did not just wither in Nejd, but it roared back into life when the Ottoman Empire collapsed amongst the chaos of World War I.   Abd-al Aziz, who, on uniting the fractious Bedouin tribes, launched the Saudi "Ikhwan" in the spirit of Abd-al Wahhab's and Ibn Saud's earlier fighting proselytisers. 

The Ikhwan was a reincarnation of the early, fierce, semi-independent vanguard movement of committed armed Wahhabist "moralists" who almost had succeeded in seizing Arabia by the early 1800s. In the same manner as earlier, the Ikhwan again succeeded in capturing Mecca, Medina and Jeddah between 1914 and 1926. Abd-al Aziz, however, began to feel his wider interests to be threatened by the revolutionary  Ikhwan. The Ikhwan revolted -- leading to a civil war that lasted until the 1930s, when the King had them put down: he machine-gunned them. 

For this king, (Abd-al Aziz), the simple verities of previous decades were eroding. Oil was being discovered in the Saudi peninsula.  Britain and America were courting Abd-al Aziz, but still were inclined to support Sharif Husain as the only legitimate ruler of Arabia. The Saudis needed to develop a more sophisticated diplomatic posture. 

So Wahhabism was forcefully changed from a movement of revolutionary jihad and theological purification, to a movement of conservative social, political, theological, and religious doctrines and to justifying the institution that upholds loyalty to the royal Saudi family and the King's absolute power.

With the advent of the oil bonanza -- as the French scholar, Giles Kepel writes, Saudi goals were to "reach out and spread Wahhabism across the Muslim world ... to "Wahhabise" Islam, thereby reducing the "multitude of voices within the religion" to a "single creed" -- a movement which would transcend national divisions. Billions of dollars were -- and continue to be -- invested in this manifestation of soft power. 

It was this heady mix of billion dollar soft power projection -- and the Saudi willingness to manage Sunni Islam both to further America's interests, as it concomitantly embedded Wahhabism educationally, socially and culturally throughout the lands of Islam -- that brought into being a western policy dependency on Saudi Arabia, a dependency that has endured since Abd-al Aziz's meeting with Roosevelt on a U.S. warship (returning the president from the Yalta Conference) until today. 

Westerners looked at the Kingdom and their gaze was taken by the wealth; by the apparent modernization; by the professed leadership of the Islamic world. They chose to presume that the Kingdom was bending to the imperatives of modern life -- and that the management of Sunni Islam would bend the Kingdom, too, to modern life.

This new form of “civilized Wahhabism” made it tenable for Western powers to do business with Saudi Arabia and allow it to extract its enormous oil wealth.  To the Wahhabi purists this new Wahhabism was  seen as a corrupt sell-out to the West.  ISIS is meant as a corrective movement to contemporary Wahhabism. 

ISIS looks to the actions of the first two Caliphs, rather than the Prophet Muhammad himself, as a source of emulation, and it forcefully denies the Saudis' claim of authority to rule.

As the Saudi monarchy blossomed in the oil age into an ever more inflated institution, the appeal of the Ikhwan message gained ground (despite King Faisal's modernization campaign). The "Ikhwan approach" enjoyed -- and still enjoys -- the support of many prominent men and women and sheikhs. In a sense, Osama bin Laden was precisely the representative of a late flowering of this Ikhwani approach.

Today, ISIS' undermining of the King's legitimacy is not seen to be problematic, but rather a return to the true origins of the Saudi-Wahhab project.

The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria is a Sunni jihadist group in the Middle East. In its self-proclaimed status as a caliphate it claims religious authority over all Muslims across the world and aspires to bring much of the Muslim-inhabited regions of the world under its political control, beginning with Iraq, Syria and other territories which include Jordan, Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, Cyprus and an area in southern Turkey

          ISIS militants with captured Iraqi security forces.

ISIS is the successor to Tanzim Qaidat al-Jihad fi Bilad al-Rafidayn—more commonly known as Al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI)—formed by Abu Musab Al Zarqawi in 2004, which took part in the Iraqi insurgency against American-led forces and their Iraqi allies following the 2003 invasion of Iraq.  It’s current leader is Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, a scholar of Islam with a PhD in Islamic studies and a former cleric in Iraq at the time of the US invasion.  al-Baghdadi considers himself the caliph or supreme religious leader of all true  Muslims (Sunnis).  al-Baghdadi and ISIS have received private financing from citizens in Saudi Arabia and Qatar and enlisted fighters through recruitment drives in Saudi Arabia in particular. 

                       A 'before' picture of al-Baghdadi

Despite ISIS's ferocious rejection of all things decadent and western, here's a picture of al-Baghdadi in his "Caliph" mode sporting a Mickey Mouse watch.

The ease with which ISIS overran the territory they now control shows that the Iraqi security forces, as trained by the US military, are no match for the zealotry of these “true believers”.  

These people saw the Afghan mujahadeen rout the Russian army.  Many believe it led to the implosion of the Soviet empire.  They saw how nineteen true believers armed with only box cutters could commandeer American airplanes and terrorize the American populace with the destruction of The World Trade Center.  It appears that they want nothing less than to recapitulate the victories of Ibn Saud and Abdul Waziz back in the early 1800’s when they captured the holy cities and unified the Saudi peninsula under the doctrine of Wahhabism.

They believe that the period of the Prophet Muhammad's stay in Medina was the ideal of Muslim society (the "best of times"), to which all Muslims should aspire to emulate.  This event took place in the year 622, the beginning of the Muslim calendar.  Thus is reborn the Wahhabi philosophy and  its violent rejection of all things western and  pertaining to the “infidel”.  Their current goal is to create a true caliphate comprised of a large swath of Syria and Iraq where mainly Sunnis now dwell.  Their next goal is to incorporate all lands where Sunnis live and to liberate them from the Shiia and other impure influences.

I doubt if the Bush II administration was anticipating such unintended consequences when we invaded Iraq.  That's one thing about the iron fisted reign of a ruthless dictator.  He can keep such uprisings in check, for better or worse.  

It will be interesting to see how things progress in this nascent "Caliphate of ISIS" and what roll other nations will play in determining its future.  

Mickey da Mayor of Happy Acres 

Farewell to Old Momma

     I was going through some old media, winnowing out the stuff that was obsolete; cassette tapes, video tapes and CD roms with names like "Windows '98 Operating System".  As I was putting this stuff in a box to be disposed of, I came upon a cassette labeled "Gone with the Wind".  It was a recording my dad had made sixty years ago.  My mom played Scarlett O'Hara and my dad played Rhett Butler.  Our Hawaiian maid played Mammie and my dad's secretary and best friend, Polly, played Melanie, Scarlett's best friend and her rival for her true love, Ashley.  Our older sister played one of Scarlett's sisters.  I and my brother (ages 5 and 7) had bit parts where, on cue from our dad, we would yell out in our pipsqueak voices, "Miss Scarlett!  Miss Scarlett!  I think that's Colonel Butler riding up!"  My favorite part of that little family recording was when my father drummed his fingers on the glass table that held the microphone.  He meant to simulate galloping horse hooves.  At the time he did it I remember thinking it was going to sound silly and unrealistic but I was wrong.  When we heard the tape played back, it sounded thrilling and life-like; not that I had heard had a lot of galloping horse hooves in my young life living on the beach in Hawaii.

Mary Nai'ole Alapahi our maid and family companion; proud of her pure Hawaiian ancestry.

     The recording was made in 1953 on a wire recorder as tape recorders were still a thing of the future for the average consumer.  A couple of years after that recording was made and our dear mother, old momma, as she came to be known to my brother and me, had passed on, I was sitting with my dad one day in the living room when he pulled out that old wire recorder and hit the play button.  Out came the tinny but very recognizable voice of our mother saying her lines as Scarlett.  Years later someone had that old wire recording transfered to cassette and I had one of the copies here with me.  When our dad heard old momma's voice on that recording, he leaned back in his chair and started sobbing.  I watched in awe and heartbreak as my father's chest started heaving.  I had never seen my father in such a state.  I started crying too.  I cried for my father's loss and for my own.  I cried as if my little heart was breaking.

While momma's home sick in bed, dad takes us boys and sister Mary Lynn to our favorite restaurant; Fisherman's Wharf.  I'll have the Mahi Mahi with extra lemons and tartar sauce, please; as usual.

Momma rallies from bed to join us in the living room for an impromptu jam session on New Year's Eve, 1953.  While brother Tom, in the foreground concentrates on his fingering of the ukulele, I'm staring dreamily off into space, wool gathering in my own little world.

     This little recording project had been made in our parent's master bedroom as my mother, by that time, was too sick to get out of bed.   A year or two earlier our mother had a large black mole removed from the nape of her neck.  It was a melanoma.  By the time we had moved to Hawaii, our mom had breast cancer.  She had already had one breast removed but the cancer had metastasized.  My father, who was a doctor, probably knew that the condition was terminal for our mother.  But all my brother and I were told was that momma was sick and had to stay in bed.  

     In retrospect, I should have known things were more serious than what we had been told because our sister was with us.  Our sister, who was actually our half sister, had taken the vows of a Dominican nun and was living in a convent in Spokane at the time.  As a novitiate, she was only allowed to leave the convent for dire family emergencies.  Mary Lynn, known to the convent by her new name, Sister Miriam, had been raised apart from our family in Hawaii.  Our mom had been formerly married to a fellow she grew up with on the northern plains of Montana, Joe Richie.  They had a daughter, Mary Lynn.  World War II offered a chance for them to get away from the desolate life that they had known in Shelby Montana.  

     Shelby was a little farm town about fifty miles south of the Canadian border.  The land was flat as far as the eye could see.  Because of its location the area was best known for growing winter wheat and the prevalence of a large clan of Hutterites, a hearty breed of farmers who were first cousins to the Amish and the Mennonites.  Words can't begin to describe the winters in Shelby.  Most days the temperature was well below zero.  Snow storms and howling winds would come barreling down from the arctic for months.  Our maternal grandmother was a fervent, God-fearing Catholic.  She had been a teacher in Shelby for many years and had struck the fear of God in many a young sinner.  Years later, my brother Tom and I visited our ancestral home of Shelby.  When the local townspeople heard that Mrs. Pettigrew's grandsons were visiting from San Franciso, we couldn't buy a drink in that town.  Wherever we went; and there really weren't that many places, grizzled old ranchers and farmers would buy us drinks and regale us of how they had had the holy hell scared out of them by their school marm, our grandma.  Woe to the young miscreant who was late or absent from school.  Mrs. Pettigrew would hunt them down and march them back to school by the ear informing them of the eternal damnation in hell that awaited them if they didn't straighten up; going to mass and confessing their sins would help a lot too.


Grandmother Pettigrew; the terror of Shelby, Montana

Four generations in Montana.  Our mother Eileen is the young mother on the left.  Our sister Mary Lynn is the young blond in the foreground.  Grandmother at the top.  Great grandmother on the right.

    Our mother, Eileen, was a bohemian, although she didn't know it yet.  All she knew was that the life of Catholic fear and sorrow that her mother had mapped out for her was not what she wanted.  Bright lights, big cities and cocktail bars was where Eileen wanted to be.  When the war came along, she saw her chance to get away.  Eileen and her husband and their young daughter got in the car and headed off to find their fortunes in the war effort.  They had heard that they were hiring in defense plants in some faraway city called Long Beach, California.  California, here we come!  They made it to Long Beach not much the worse for wear, however, our mom's husband had been hiding a secret from her and Mary Lynn.  He had a bad heart.  One day, they were driving around the gritty industrial heart of war-time Long Beach, checking out prospective employers.  Eileen, our future mother, was driving, her husband, Joe, was in the passenger seat and little Mary Lynn was seated between them.  All of a sudden her dad pitched over in her lap, dead of a massive heart attack.

Our mom with her first husband Joe Richie as newlyweds before the war.  Happier healthier times.

     They took the body back to Shelby for burial.  Eileen had already made up her mind to continue to seek her fortune elsewhere, but now she was a single mother.  A tough life decision had to be made.  Eileen's chances of escaping Shelby and making it on her own were going to be a lot easier without a young daughter in tow.  Grandma Pettigrew insisted that Mary Lynn stay with her in Shelby.  Grandma knew she had struck out with Eileen in terms of molding her into a God fearing Catholic but it wasn't too late to do so with her granddaughter.  After many heated discussions around the kitchen table our grandmother prevailed and Eileen reluctantly accepted the fact.  She left Shelby and her daughter and joined the war effort as a member of WAC, the Women's Air Corp. where she met and married our father who, at the time, was a newly minted MD and a dashing Captain and pilot in the US Army Air Corp.  After their wedding they drove up to Shelby to collect Mary Lynn.  The plan was for the three of them to drive across country, stay in motels and get to know each other as a newly minted family.  

     Grandma Pettigrew was devastated at the thought of losing her grandchild.  She didn't trust our "hard partying" mom and this new husband of hers to bring up her grandchild in a proper Christian tradition.  Granny followed the newly minted Mr. and Mrs. Stevens and their young daughter to the motel that night and pounded on the door demanding her grandchild be relinquished to her.  This went on for several nights as Stevens family continued to drive south, away from the northern plains of Montana and its stern God-fearing matriarch.  By about the third night my dad had had enough.  He and our mom decided to leave it up to Mary Lynn; stay with her mom and her new husband or go back to Shelby with Grandma Pettigrew.

     As my mother had been away for several years, Mary Lynn had felt abandoned.  In letters, Eileen promised that she would be home soon.  But as the war dragged on my mother stayed away and that mother daughter reunion was put on hold.  When her mother finally showed up with her new husband in tow, Mary Lynn had to admit to herself; she didn't really like this new guy, Bill Stevens and felt uncomfortable with his over eager attempts to get close to her. After some agonizing, she decided to return to Shelby with her grandmother.  Eileen and Bill ended up in Honolulu Hawaii with their new family, my brother and I.  Our sister stayed in Montana living in the house with velvet Jesus pictures on all the walls and eventually, to our grandmother's great joy, donned a wedding dress and a gold wedding band and at a Catholic seminary in California, she knelt at the altar and married Jesus Christ.

     And now, less than a year later here she was reunited with her "other" family.  As a big sister, twelve years older than me, she assumed a sort of foster mother/baby sitter roll with my brother and me.  It was wonderful to have her with us and it helped to salve the wounds of dealing with our mother's sickness.  Then one day momma took a turn for the worse.  I heard an ambulance with siren blaring park in our driveway.  The next thing I knew two men dressed all in white were hurrying through our living room into the bedroom where our mother lay.  They were carrying a stretcher.  In a moment, as I watched from the living room couch, terrified and devastated, they carried our mother out in the stretcher and slid her into the back of the ambulance and took her to the hospital.  She would not return.  Now that our mother was gone, our sister's bereavement leave was up and she had to return to her seminary.  

     The day of her departure, I was lying on my side on the living room sofa, pretending to take a nap.  I couldn't handle losing my mother and my sister both at the same time.  As I lay there with my eyes closed I felt someone lean over me.  It was Mary Lynn saying goodbye.  I felt something warm and wet drop into my ear.  It was years later that I figured out that it was a tear. 

 Mary Lynn and her brothers.  Her last visit to see her dying mother before heading back to the convent.  We wouldn't see our sister again for many years

     Our mother was now in the cancer ward at Queen's Hospital in Honolulu.  When my father would go to the hospital to see her, Tom and I were dropped off on the big lawn in front of the building.  We would play among the huge banyan trees on the lawn waiting for our dad.  Soon we would hear his shrill whistle coming from the open third floor window of momma's room.  It was his signal to us to stand under the window.  As we stood there looking up, our mother's face would appear at the window.  She looked down at us, smiled sadly and gave us a weak wave.  I could barely hear her voice as she said, "I love you boys".

     Several evenings later Tom and I were on our parents bed while our dad read "Charlotte's Web" to us.  He had just got to the part where Charlotte was dying.  I remember crying about that when the phone rang.  Our father picked it up and had a short and quiet conversation with someone and hung up.  "Boys, I'm afraid momma's not going to make it through the night.  I'm sorry."  I lay there on that bed where my mother had lain just days before, and cried my eyes out.  First for the death of Charlotte and then for the loss of my mother.  By morning, she was gone.  Farewell, momma.

      Mickey da Mayor of Happy Acres

     

     

Matt the Cat's Improbable Musical Oddysey

     One of my housemates has one of the small bedrooms downstairs in the main house.  He works as a waiter at a very popular fish restaurant in Sausalito called, amazingly, "Fish".  He is also an ardent, and very skillful surfer.  When he's not "fishing" or surfing or wandering the aisles of our local Whole Foods Market looking for the best deals and muttering about how much the prices have gone up---behavior I have personally observed---he is in his little cloister at Happy Acres either watching the internet surf cameras or PBS TV or he is writing on his computer.  He lives a quiet, some might even say ascetic life.  He doesn't have a girlfriend, doesn't date and doesn't socialize with anyone but an old school friend who he sees maybe twice a year.

Here's Matt when he used to help with the vegetable garden and the chickens.  That's the old homestead's original dairy milking barn in the background.

     He would be considered a catch if he put himself out there as he is ruggedly handsome, has a great physique and is imbued with all the boy scout virtues.  He has also shown talent in the past in various arts.  Matt's life was not always so circumscribed, for he once was a truly swinging guy.


Here's two copies of watercolors Matt painted back in the early nineties.  They adorn the wall of one of our kitchen counters.

These are gifts to the mayor when Matt was in his paper mache period.

     When I first met Matt thirty-four years ago, he was living in the house next door with a couple of other bachelors.  Upon our first meeting, he was loading up a pick-up truck with music equipment. He explained to me that he headed up a trio of piano, stand-up bass and drums called the Matt Cassell Trio.  He played mostly swing tunes on the piano and sang.  He came off, on that first meeting, as kind of cock-sure, boasting of how he could walk into pretty much any night club in San Francisco; sit down at the piano; belt out a few tunes, and instantly get a gig for him and his music mates.

     I could tell just from listening to him talk that he had an impressive set of pipes and I could well imagine that he probably sounded very good singing and playing.  His father had been in radio here in the Bay Area back in the day and Matt had inherited his voice.  "When I was just a kid in junior high", Matt once told me, "an older girl in our school came up to me and said, "you know Matt, you're gonna break a lot of hearts with that voice of yours"".  He invited me and my lady friend to come hear him play at the Pied Piper Room at The Palace Hotel.  

     The Pied Piper Room was one of the older swanky watering holes in The City, made famous by a large Maxfield Perrish painting of The Pied Piper over the bar.  So one night my lady friend and I took him up on his offer.  We were treated to Matt's wonderful renditions of "Mack the Knife", "Heaven, I'm in Heaven", "Come Dance with Me", "Minnie the Moocher" and other popular swing tunes of a bygone era.  Matt's trio was tight and they were swinging and Matt's singing did not disappoint.

     By the late nineties, the constant hauling of gear and schlepping to various venues around the Bay Area was getting to the fellas.  The bass player had a pretty good day gig and his wife was agitating for  him to give up the band.  Soon thereafter, the band packed up their instruments and called it quits.  Matt embarked on a career as a resource teacher at the local middle school here in Mill Valley.  His job was to look after the mentally and physically challenged "special ed" kids.  The school was thrilled to have Matt's masculine presence at the school and he was instantly drafted into outdoor lunch and recess monitor duties, aided ably by his stentorian voice.  A couple of bellows from Matt, out on the playground, usually brought the miscreants quickly into line.

     Back in the late seventies Matt, sporting a lion's main of rock-star hair, had aspirations of musical stardom.  He had written a bunch of songs and recorded several albums in a local studio in the Palo Alto area where he grew up.  With a bit of self promotion and his dad's radio connections, he managed to get a decent amount of local air play.  Since his records were self produced, he only pressed about a thousand copies and they eventually all sold out in local record stores.  Then, like so many others before him, interest in his music slowly died out and Matt hired out as a singer/piano player, eventually forming his own trio.


The cover of a three song CD that Matt recorded live at a venue in Palo Alto.  He's doing his best impersonation of Frank Sinatra...

This is the back cover from Matt's second album.  Nowadays, the pipes are still there but the hair is gone.

     Around the early 2000's, Matt was renting a room in a lady's house here in Mill Valley.  Every afternoon after school he would come up to Happy Acres to hang out with me and have a smoke (strictly forbidden in his rented room) and a drink.  I had a pretty sophisticated music recording system set up on my computer and Matt recorded several of his newer tunes in my living room.

     One day, Matt came bounding up the back stairs to the living room at Happy Acres, where I held court, and breathlessly exclaimed, "Dude!  You're never gonna believe what happened to me today!"  Because Matt had enjoyed some air time back in the day with his self-produced albums, he had an account with ASCAP, one of the groups who monitor the airwaves for their client's music.  They bill the radio stations and send a check to the artist.  Matt, who hadn't heard from ASCAP in some time, was holding a letter that had been forwarded to him by ASCAP.  It read, and I liberally paraphrase here:  "Dear Mr. Cassell, I am a young hip-hop producer down in Hollywood.  Me and my music buddies down here and back in New York think that you are the bomb!  A buddy of mine out in Phoenix was going through his old records out in the garage and he found your first album "Heaven". He sent me some MP-3s of your tunes and I was knocked out with your great tracks and your bitchen voice.  I sent it around to some other producers and DJs and they agreed.  I don't know if you are still playing.  Heck, I don't even know if you're still alive but if by chance you get this letter, I would be thrilled to hear from you."  

     So Matt called the phone number in the letter and talked to the letter writer.  "Hello, this is Matt Cassell.  Is Dwayne there?" (arbitrary name).  "Matt Cassell?  Matthew Larkin Cassell?" said the breathless voice on the other end of line.  "You got my letter!  I'm so stoked!  What are you doing these days?  Are you still into music?  I would love to use some of your tracks as samples under some hip-hop tunes I'm producing."   Matt was genuinely touched by this young man's enthusiasm and said he'd be interested to hear how his old tunes were going to be utilized in this new musical genre that was so different from the tunes' original jazz-rock format.

     Within weeks, Matt started hearing from old music buddies that they had heard tunes on the radio with his old song "Heaven" sampled underneath some rap songs.  Eventually Matt hired a local entertainment lawyer to pursue royalties and penalties for using his music, (which had been copyrighted), without his permission.  One rap duo in Southern California called "The People Under the Stairs" had had some success with a tune using Matt's material.  He got the name of the record company that had put out the group's single and was finally able to locate and talk to one of the duo's rap artists.

     They sounded very apologetic on the phone and professed to ignorance about the provenance of the sampled tracks.  When Matt asked them where they had found his old record they told an amazing story.  The two guys had been traveling down in Mexico with a camera planning on shooting stuff they might be able to use in a music video.  One day, they found themselves at a small flea market outside of Mexico City.  The flea market was being held in front of a women's prison where the purveyor's were trying to raise funds for the incarcerated.  In most Mexican jails, you have to pay the jailer's to provide food for the inmates.  While going through the merchandise for sale, they spotted an old album with a black and white picture of a cat called "Matt the Cat".  They were intrigued enough to buy the record, thinking it was some local Mexican wanna-be rocker.  

     When they got home and played the record what they heard instead were the dulcet tones of our very own Matt Cassell.  They loved what they heard and  promptly "borrowed" one of Matt's old tracks to sample under their rapping.  Matt also contacted some other rap producers that had sampled his tracks without his permission and had his lawyer write them to try and collect for "damages".  The official fine for using someone's copyrighted music  without permission is $ 150K.  None of these struggling little labels had that kind of scratch so Matt had to, mostly, settle for the comfort of knowing that several current rap artists thought enough of his music to sample it.  Though not credited or compensated, Matt was getting air play again after all these years.

     One of the record producers was a fairly stand-up guy and, though he couldn't pay Matt for his transgressions, he offered to re-release all Matt's old music along with some of his modern tunes.  Eventually a double CD of Matt's music was released and was subsequently picked up for air-play in various far flung places all over the world, including a college radio station in Sydney, Australia.  He was the featured track on an album called "The Kings of Digging" which was comprised of obscure but quality tracks from the past.  A trio of Japanese girls calling themselves the Nubian Slaves featured his music on a radio show they had.  Eventually a Japanese label called Pea Vine put out a CD of Matt's music.  Today, if you Google "Matthew Larkin Cassell" you will get over 150,000 hits.  A rap and hip-hop producer of some note back in New York wanted to re-record some of Matt's old music and even had evoked some interest from Jay-Z, avowedly the biggest fish in the hip-hop world.

     Although nothing ever came of those connections, a different phenomena regarding Matt's music came about.  There is a group of music aficionados who look for buried treasure in the bins of old albums in used record stores.  Through word of mouth, Matt's old records quickly became valuable collector's items.  One day Matt came bounding up the back stairs, kind of like the last time, with more breathless news.  One of his original records had just sold on e-bay for $ 1,325!  Soon, several copies of his first two albums started showing up on e-bay and none of them sold for less than $ 700.  Matt still had some of his old records and he was able to cash in on the collector's craze.

     By this time word of this implausible musical odyssey of Matt's had gotten to the editor of the entertainment section of Marin County's local paper, The Independent Journal.  Paul Liboratore, the long-time music critic for the paper, came out to Happy Acres to interview him.  He also took some pictures of Matt with his piano keyboard and one of him crossing the street carrying his surfboard.  Soon after the article came out (he was headlined on the front page of the entertainment section with several color pictures), one day while he was walking into our local Whole Foods, a late model black BMW pulled up alongside Matt.  The driver rolled down his window and exclaimed, "Hey, aren't you that guy who was in the IJ the other day?"  Matt had been briefly plucked from obscurity for another fifteen minutes of fame.  Although his old songs had become popular all over the world, the songs were being passed from fan to fan via MP-3 format with nothing in it for Matt.  Like so many others, Matt found fame but not fortune on the internet.  Although he does get the odd and very modest royalty check from his re-releases.

Here's one of the pictures featured in our local newspaper.

Matt, at one of our parties a few years ago, in the process of saying goodbye to his hair...

Matt, with his shaved head proudly shining in the sun, playing his guitar on the back stairs outside his bedroom at Happy Acres.

     Matt's story eventually caught the attention of the long-time music critic for the SF Chronicle, Joel Selvin.  For decades, Joel had been chronicling the music of people like Santana, Journey, the Grateful Dead, Boz Scaggs and the like.  Joel called Matt, who by now was living here at Happy Acres.  "Hey Matt, this is Joel Selvin from the Chronicle.  Is this really true what I've been hearing about your music?"  Matt responded that, yes, it was all true.  "Fuck" said Mr. Selvin, "Looks like I'm gonna have to come out to Mill Valley and interview you."  Joel made it clear that the only reason he was interested in such a small musical fish like Matt was because of the back story.  So one day Joel Selvin and a Chronicle photographer came out to Happy Acres, interviewed Matt and took some pictures.  A few weeks later Matt got the same treatment in the SF Chronicle that he had in the Marin County IJ.

     Since then, Matt has recorded some of his new tunes at a music buddies local studio.  He put together a little ad hoc band and performed a couple of times at one of our local watering holes here in Sausalito called "The No Name Bar".  However, it was a one time deal and Matt had no aspirations of trying to resurrect his music career.  Every now and then someone will stop him and say, "Hey!  Haven't I seen you somewhere before?"

     Here are some lush vocal stylings from Matt, the cat, Cassell.  Enjoy!  I sure do.  

     Mickey da Mayor of Happy Acres

Here's a link to Matt's Wikipedia page.  He is written about in the Huffington post.  If you go to the article there is a link to a YouTube recording of one of Matt's early recordings.  Just copy and paste the web sites below and paste in to your favorite search engine and you'll find more material on Matt and links to a bunch of MP3's of some of his tunes.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_Larkin_Cassell

Here's a link to a comprehensive discography of his double CD:

http://www.stonesthrow.com/store/album/matthewlarkincassell/the-complete-works

     

      

Brother Timmy VS The Water Spa

     Otter Views - Water Spa Too Soothing

Tom Stevens for CST

A friend’s aching back sent us on Sunday to verdant Carmel Valley, where one tennis ranch operates as a public amenity an aquatic spa called “The Refuge.” 

For $39 plus tax, any law-abiding person owning a swim suit and flip-flops can take the waters, perspire in steam rooms, and recline by fireside in comfy lounge chairs. For an additional $12, you can rent a deluxe Hugh Hefner-style white terry cloth robe.

My Hefner phase lost to recall, I eschewed the robe in favor of a loose cotton shirt and a high tuck of the complementary pool towel. Luckily, few mirrors or reflective surfaces accost spa patrons. The Refuge is all about feeling good in the body you brought, even if it differs from the one you thought you remembered.

To that end, the spa employs a near-Babylonian arsenal of body pleasing stress-reduction systems. Stream-fed hot and cold soaking pools abound, as do fire pits ringed by comfortable patio chairs. Separate benched chambers offer salutary blasts of Saharan dry heat or Amazonian steam. Yet other rooms soothe spa patrons with ergonomic sling chairs and discreetly piped-in New Age flutes.

The discreet flutes are part of a thoughtfully calibrated sonic environment designed to still the inner rabble rouser and let relaxation commence. The soft whuffling of the patio gas fires mingles with bird song. Breezes rustle in the trees overhead. From all sides comes the hypnotic thrumming of mini waterfalls splashing into hot and cold pools. 

Should this artful susurration somehow fail to induce tranquility, a picket line of posted signs reminds patrons to “Respect the Silence.” I liked that sentiment and felt moved to comment on it.

“Totally the reverse of what’s going on in Congress right now!” I began. “Outrageous! Did you read about that latest . . .”

“Shhhhh,” my friend whispered. “You’ll bring on stress.”

Actually, I should have come to The Refuge packing more stress. As the day went on, our successive immersions in hot pools, cold pools, saunas and steam rooms left me in a torpid bliss state I can only call “stress debt.” Thankfully (and probably only temporarily), my present life includes so little stress the first hot pool exhausted it all. Everything after that was stress gravy.

Lying in an ergonomic chair at one point, I gazed idly up at blue sky, puffy white clouds and sun-dappled treetops. I tried to reflect upon the many stress-wracked periods of my earlier life when I could have made better use of The Refuge, but I lacked the energy. 

“Stress is wasted on the young,” I observed. “My life has such a low aggravation metric these days, I feel like a charlatan basking in all this comfort. I should probably just stay home and take a nap.”

“Shhhh,” my friend whispered, pointing to the nearest Respect the Silence sign. “Don’t worry about it. I have enough stress for two.”

Yet as our visit lengthened, even that proved insufficient to counter the spa’s many blandishments. Among these is a regime of heat-cold-rest-and-repeat treatments which, if followed scrupulously, leaves the patron’s body tingling all over with soft electric fire.

In Finland and Siberia, sauna bathers whip themselves with birch branches and roll in the snow to achieve the same effect. In Carmel Valley, the “double cold” pool does the trick. Perhaps to avoid the stress of lawsuits related to cardio-pulmonary failure, The Refuge thoughtfully posts little pictographs at each water feature.

The icon with two yellow suns indicates a pool with hotter water than a pool with just one sun. Blue spheres – possibly ice planets? – indicate the cold pools. The pools with one ice planet are about the same temperature as the ocean hereabouts, that is, barely tolerable. The two ice planet pools are considerably more Arctic. 

The tingliest “double cold” pool greets patrons exiting at a loopy stagger from the sustained furnace blast of the spa’s sauna or steam room. Spotting the pool’s limpid waters, inviting blue tiles and helpful stair rail, the superheated spa-goer happily descends three steps before the frigid shock locks in. By then, it’s too late. You’re chest-deep in a clear, fiery, icy liquid that resembles water in fluidity only.

According to the spa’s tri-fold brochure, double cold pool immersion should last “five to 10 seconds” on average but “no more than 60 seconds.” I was about to remark on this, but I’d already been in for 10 seconds and could no longer breathe. A full minute in there would probably relieve all stress, permanently.

Near the end of our visit, The Refuge filled up with patrons who didn’t need midriff-hiding towel tucks. These were lean and sinewy marathoners who had just finished Sunday’s Big Sur race. The pools and saunas beckoned, but the runners all took seats on the patio, pointed their feet toward the fire rings, and fell gratefully asleep.

Their silence was respected.