Spins

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Spins

Boss Tones


Standout: Richie Havens delivers a winning “Streets of Philadelphia.”

Photo by Roger Gordy



Springsteen and 11,000 virgins

Various artists
One Step Up/Two Steps Back: The Songs of Bruce Springsteen
(Right Stuff/Capital)

TRIBUTE ALBUMS usually preach to the converted; rare are sets of favorites for mass consumption (Common Thread, the country tribute to the Eagles, being a notable exception) or sets that unearth missing roots (the recent Bob Dylan­produced Jimmie Rodgers tribute). That’s OK–what counts is that a tribute album bring new perspectives to the faithful. One Step Up is clearly meant for hardcore Boss fans (among 28 songs, there are only two hits and two others known to the general rock audience), who hardly need to be convinced of his mammoth songwriting powers. But proving that power isn’t the point of this two-disc set. Instead, it’s about Springsteen as a titan of “meaningful” rock in an era that values soundscapes over stories.

To that end, disc 1 features new recordings that reveal Springsteen as a logical source for the current urban/folk/alterna-country scene. The disc focuses on his desolate-loner themes; highlights include John Wesley Harding finding tender hope in the ragged rocker “Jackson Cage,” and ex-Blaster Dave Alvin twisting the stadium boogie of “Seeds” into a Delta shuffle. Disc 2 features previously released covers of songs that Springsteen himself never released (with the exception of “Streets of Philadelphia”). This disc presents his early work as a sponge for ’60s rock and soul, from the British Invasion­style power-rock of the Knack’s “Don’t Look Back,” to the perfect Memphis gospel-soul of Clarence Clemons’ “Savin’ Up,” to rockabilly legend Sonny Burgess sweetly singing “Tiger Rose.”

But overall, the hits (Richie Havens’ sublime “Streets of Philadelphia,” for instance), the misses (Kurt Neumann losing the desperate terror of “Atlantic City” in slick hipness), and the fan-only trivia (Elliot Murphy using the more detailed, bootlegged version of “Stolen Car”) don’t really add up to a “tribute,” or even a portrait of this prolific singer/songwriter. The net effect instead reveals Springsteen as an unseen fulcrum in rock: For the past, he’s the Last Great Oldies Hero, the last important rocker to create in the language of rock’s golden age; for the future, he offers new writers ongoing proof that simple virtues like characters and drama can matter.
Karl Byrn

Anonymous 4
Hildegard von Bingen: 11,000 Virgins, Chants for the Feast of St. Ursula
(Harmonia Mundi)

SOMETIME AROUND the fifth century–no one knows for sure–a Christian British princess who was promised to a pagan king decided to skip town for a pilgrimage to Rome, rallied 11,000 virgins for traveling companions, slighted a Hun chieftain, and was slain–along with her traveling virgins–near Cologne. Then she got sainted. In the 12th century, German abbess Hildegard von Bingen–an eccentric mystic and composer who is now the sweetheart of the early-classical music scene–penned a stunning series of ecstatic chants commemorating St. Ursula and the fallen virgins. The Anonymous 4, a New York­based vocal quartet who are the superstars of the aforementioned early-music scene, deliver the chants with emotional verve and bell-like clarity. If you got suckered into purchasing the recently released synthesizer-enhanced collection of von Bingen compositions from the producer of 1993’s fabulously successful, Grammy-nominated Chant (Angel/EMI), by the Benedictine Monks of Santo Domingo de Silos, then you owe it to yourself to savor this haunting, transformative work.
Greg Cahill

Jacky Terrasson and Cassandra Wilson
Rendezvous
(Blue Note)

PIANIST JACKY TERRASSON tones down his excesses long enough to create a subdued palette for jazz vocalist Cassandra Wilson’s exalted talents. Sparsely accompanied by Terrasson, bassists Lonnie Plaxico and Kenny Davis, and Afro-Cuban percussionist Mino Cinelu, Wilson steals the show, rendering the likes of the country standard “Tennessee Waltz” and the Lerner-Loewe chestnut “If Ever I Would Leave You” in deep, hypnotic shades of blue. Further proof that Wilson–cut from the same soulful cloth as Nina Simone–is a major force with which to be reckoned.
G.C.

From the Oct. 2-8, 1997 issue of the Sonoma County Independent.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

Malt Liquor Marketing to Latinos

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Malt Liquor Marketing to Latinos

Malt Assault


Christopher Gardner

Liquid crack: Malt liquor is the cheapest high you can get. It sells for as little as $1.39 for a 40-ounce bottle, which is equal to five shots of whiskey.

The malt-liquor industry, drunk on high-octane sales to the black hip-hop nation, has set its sights on the Latino youth market

By J. Douglas Allen-Taylor

A LITTLE MORE than a year ago, a small article that appeared in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch should have sent shock waves through the local Latino population. But few folks in these parts read the St. Louis papers, and even if they did, fewer still would have recognized the article’s significance. But its full effects, when finally felt, will almost certainly have a devastating impact in the backyards and bars of the barrios of Sonoma County and other California communities.

St. Louis­based Anheuser-Busch brewers announced that with the introduction of a new brand called Hurricane, it was entering the malt-liquor sales wars in earnest.

Although Anheuser-Busch–now under investigation by Federal Trade Commission for marketing to underage drinkers–has long dominated the American beer industry with its flagship Budweiser and Bud Light brands, it has never quite been able to master the selling of malt liquor. Its King Cobra label languishes fourth among malts both in the nation and in California, partly because of its laid-back advertising campaigns.

Bringing in Hurricane under the slogan “Brace Yourself,” Anheuser-Busch planned to change all that. “Hurricane has a more street-relevant imagery [than King Cobra],” an Anheuser-Busch spokesperson was quoted as saying. “We want it to be part of an attitude.”

Often referred to on the street as “liquid crack,” malt liquor is the dregs of American brews. Although it is packaged like beer and looks like beer when poured in a glass, malt liquor’s alcohol content is twice as high, and its concentration of corn syrup and other sweeteners serves to jack up the intoxication process. Even beer industry papers refer to malt liquor as “high octane.”

A 40-ounce bottle of malt liquor, which in many circles is the standard serving for one drinker, has the same amount of alcohol as five shots of whiskey. Its effect on the human system can be violent, murderous. “Throwing back a 40”–drinking it down in great gulps, as is the fashion–feels like the equivalent of someone standing behind you with a baseball bat, teeing off on the back of your head every time you take a swallow. You leave your brains on the pavement when you walk away. If you can walk away.

Malt liquor is also the cheapest legal high you can get. Selling in groceries and liquor stores for as little as $1.39 for a 40-ounce bottle, King Cobra, for example, goes for about the same price as soda water.

In the United States, malt-liquor drinking has been most often associated with the African-American community. Black consumption of all malt-liquor brands in this country is estimated at 28 percent, but it is considerably higher for such high-profile malts as Olde English 800 and St. Ides. A marketing brochure for Olde English once noted that the product is “brewed for relatively high-alcohol content (important to the ethnic market!).” And spokespersons for St. Ides ads are almost exclusively African-American rap artists.

Some malt-liquor marketers have purposely avoided the Latino market. A sales executive for Stroh’s (Schlitz Malt Liquor, Champale, Colt 45, Mickey’s) said last year in Beer Marketer’s Insights, an industry newsletter, that marketing malt to Latinos doesn’t work because while malt liquor is often positioned as the brew of outsiders, “Hispanic consumers seem to be more interested in becoming part of the American mainstream and not as much being different or setting themselves apart.”

If this is the case, why should the introduction of Anheuser-Busch’s Hurricane brand have any relevance to the Latino population?

Well, the Stroh’s executive was wrong when he described the Latino population as exclusively mainstream-oriented. American Latinos are a young population, a median age nine years younger than non-Hispanic whites, with almost 30 percent under age 15. A restless rebelliousness brews within that segment of the Latino youth population whose music influence is more apt to be rap than mariachi. They define themselves in different ways, setting themselves apart, and they are ripe for the youth-targeted malt-liquor campaigns.

More important, Latinos are estimated to become the largest ethnic minority in the country by the year 2010, with a probable purchasing power of $188 billion a year. The chance that the malt-liquor brewers would overlook such a market is practically nil.

Anheuser-Busch has proven itself to be a master at selling beer to the Latino market, where Budweiser is “el rey de cervezas” (the king of beers). If the giant brewer can market malt liquor to Latinos in the same way it was marketed to African-Americans–and with the same success–then the other malt-liquor dealers will surely follow.

By the Numbers

WHAT ONE SEES evidence of in convenience-store parking lots from Cloverdale to Petaluma–where young Latinos congregate to throw back 40s–has been quantified by sociologists and social workers. The statistical evidence is irrefutable: There is a high rate of alcoholism and alcohol-related problems within America’s Latino population.

Latino youth are particularly vulnerable. A study last year showed a strong relationship between the number of alcohol outlets, the prevalence of alcohol billboards, and the incidence of violence and crime among the Latino youth population. One Bay Area report found earlier this year that although Latino high school youth are less likely to drink than white youth, “those who do drink tend to drink heavier than their white counterparts.” That doesn’t take into account the large number of Latino high school dropouts (at a rate of 50 percent in California as opposed to a 15 percent rate for African-Americans), a group that tends to have a higher drinking rate than students.

A distinct pattern of public drinking among Mexican-American men leads to a higher rate of alcohol-related violent deaths. While 2 percent of white and African-American deaths occur in bars, the figure is 12 percent for Mexican-Americans. One study of homicide victims determined that alcohol was found in the bloodstream of fully 70 percent of Mexican-American male victims between the ages of 25 and 35. A University of California Medical Center study indicates that alcohol is involved in twice as many deaths of Mexican-American males as those of whites.

“Drinking is accepted within the Latino culture,” says drug and alcohol counselor José Flores. “It’s culturally based. It’s been around forever. Latinos drink within the family structure, within a religious context. It’s used in festivities, even in funerals. Many Latinos start drinking at home; I remember having a couple of sips of beer when my dad would come home. It’s not like drug abuse. Especially among new immigrants and first-generation Latinos, drug abuse is a huge stigma. But alcohol . . . that’s acceptable. And that’s what makes it such a problem when it’s abused.”

Drug and alcohol program director Rogelio Balderas agrees. “Hispanics tend to drink to excess,” Balderas says. “We don’t drink to have a good time; we drink to get drunk.”

In Mexico, he says, that is less of a problem than in the United States. “In Mexico, people drink por quenseña, every 15 days, that is, every paycheck. You drink your little bit of money off, you get drunk, you sleep it off, you go back to work. But here in the United States, people get paid more often. They get paid more money. The alcohol’s more accessible.

“So when Mexican immigrants bring with them the same type of drinking habits they had in Mexico, it gets accelerated.”


Photo by Christopher Gardner


Drinko for Cinco

SOME CRITICS BELIEVE that part of the problem of alcoholism in the Latino community is that alcohol companies are expropriating elements of the culture, turning it to their own benefit.

“The alcohol companies are trying to take over Latino culture by sponsoring festivals and institutions,” says Felix Alvarez, a professor at the National Hispanic University. “They give scholarships to Latino educational institutions, they give grants to civic groups like the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, they give ‘Hispanic Achievement Awards’ and then do full ads on the awards in the Hispanic press to make sure we all know about it.

“The alcohol companies don’t do this because they love us,” he adds. “They do this for two reasons: one, so that Latino culture will be closely associated with drinking; and two, so that Latino organizations will be less likely to speak out against drinking.”

Alvarez says one example is the sponsorship of the Cinco de Mayo festivals by Budweiser Beer. This formerly staid military-oriented celebration has, with the active prodding of beer company sponsorships, recently passed St. Patrick’s Day as the No. 1 alcohol consumption holiday in the United States. Not coincidentally, rock- and bottle-throwing melees leading to numerous arrests have broken up Cinco festivals in both San Jose and Los Angeles in recent years.

San Jose State professor Maria Alaniz says such ads are nearly impossible to escape in the barrio. Hard-liquor commercials continued on Spanish-language television even while the liquor industry was voluntarily keeping them out of the rest of the media. And one recent study organized by Alaniz showed that the typical Latino student in some Bay Area cities passes between 10 and 61 billboard liquor ads each day on the way to school.

Some alcohol companies expropriate Latino national or cultural symbols, surrounding themselves with Latin American flags, architecture, party symbols such as piñatas, or food items like tortillas or jalapeño peppers. A Budweiser ad repeats the popular Mexican nationalist saying “Como Mexico no hay dos” (There’s only one Mexico), and then adds, “Como Budweiser tampoco” (Budweiser, too). Miller stirs the pot of Mayan nationalism, reprinting a Mexican map with pre-Columbian borders. Corona puts Mexican clothes on a parrot, sticks a bottle of beer in each claw, and has it alternately shouting “Viva Mexico!” or proclaiming its beer as “the Drinko for Cinco [de Mayo].”

Other ads, almost breathtaking in their brazenness, try to enlist God’s aid. An ad for Felipe II whiskey shows a priest, full glass in hand, blissfully eyeing heaven, from which a soft light has descended to bathe his enraptured face. “Tomarle no es pecado” reads the copy. To drink is not a sin. Cuervo Gold aligns itself with one of the sacred religious symbol of Old Mexico, placing a margarita blender on top of a Mayan pyramid.

But most of the ads use sex as a selling point, some double-dipping with patriotic themes. Coors dresses a smiling, curvy woman in a swimsuit upon which is printed a map of Mexico. Budweiser shows a group of guerrilleras modeled after the heroines of the 1905 Revolution, but now with their shirts thrown away and only crisscrossing cartridge belts to partially cover bare breasts. More often the Latino-oriented liquor ads rely strictly on straight sex with no chaser–long-legged, long-haired women with half-exposed bosoms and hiked skirts, often alone in bars, obviously waiting for a man.

Alaniz explains the special significance of such ads to Latino men. “In Latino culture, if a woman is alone in a bar, it means she’s not worthy of respect,” she says. She pauses, considering her words carefully. “It means she’s a whore. They’re filling our communities with images of whores.

“The advertising campaigns of the alcohol industry aimed at the Latino population are insulting our culture and history,” she says. She blinks and her voice drops to an almost plaintive whisper as she says the word insulting. Dispassionate and rigorously academic in her writing, articulate and quietly forceful in her public presentations, she allows this one unintended insight into the depth of her emotion on this subject.

If she seems to take this personally, there is a reason. Alaniz grew up in a Mexican-American community in Stockton, where her family home stood behind the neighborhood bar. “I saw it firsthand,” she says. “I heard all the noise. I saw the men walk home and beat their wives in their front yards. I saw men fighting and shooting each other. This bar was a magnet for the men. They were mostly farm workers, and I saw them work hard all week and then go out on the weekend and spend their whole paychecks on alcohol. I saw all the harm alcoholism causes in a community and in a family. I saw all of that stuff as a kid, and it’s deeply imprinted in me. That’s why I’m committed to this work.”

Alaniz sees the alcohol advertising campaigns both as an attack upon Latina womanhood and as an attempt to “commodify” Latino culture. “Malt-liquor ads are raunchier than the rest,” she says. “If a beer ad puts a woman in spandex, the malt-liquor ad puts her in leather, often astride a can or a bottle. They are the worst.”

She points to a photograph of an Olde English ad taken inside a liquor store earlier this year, a picture of a black-dressed Latina against a tiger-striped background. The tiger is one of the advertising symbols for Olde English. “El Tigre te desea,” the ad copy reads. The Tiger desires you. The tiger-striped background seems to undulate and pulsate, like living flesh.

Fair Game

A SPOKESPERSON for Bromley & Associates, the San Antonio Latino advertising agency that handles several Anheuser-Busch ads, says that the agency is prohibited from commenting on anything connected with the brewer’s advertising campaigns. And representatives for Stroh’s and Anheuser-Busch failed to respond to repeated telephone messages requesting that they comment on their malt-liquor marketing policies.

But Octavio Emilio Nuiry, an independent Latino marketing executive, says he has no particular problem with the way alcohol companies are marketing their products to Latin Americans.

In the past, Nuiry was highly critical of the way U.S. advertisers have approached the Latino market. He is a Cuban-American journalist who worked in the public-relations field for years and presently owns his own marketing firm in Long Beach. Last year, Nuiry wrote an article for Hispanic magazine titled “Ban the Bandito!,” which took advertisers to task for using stereotyped Latino images.

But Nuiry says that Latino-targeted alcohol ads are “quite good; they’re put together by very clever people. . . . A line can be crossed, of course, if the ads are done crudely or with a lack of respect for the culture,” he explains. “But using Latin American flags and national symbols is fine. Look, I’m Cuban. If Budweiser did a very good ad of Cuba, I’d be proud of it. Advertising is driven by emotion, and nationalism is a strong emotion. It’s fair game.”

Nuiry laughs at the Felipe II priest ad, denying that it steps over into blasphemy. “No, this ad is very funny,” he says. “Sometimes there is a humor to things that other people might not understand, but Spanish-speaking people, they won’t miss the punch line. There’s a tradition in the Catholic Church of priests drinking, even being alcoholics. Americans are appalled by this, but you can’t look at it from an American point of view. America is a conservative society.”

Nuiry says that the Latino-owned advertising agencies that produced some of these ads had “a certain amount of moral responsibility owed” to the Latino community not to create advertisement that was detrimental to the community. “Every ad agency should have some moral fiber and some limit to what they will do. But they also owe it to their clients to produce good work.”

Hip-hopped Up

ALTHOUGH ONLY A HANDFUL of Latino rappers have done malt-liquor commercials, the rap/hip-hop connection is the key to understanding how malt-liquor advertising has already penetrated the Latino youth market.

“They don’t really need a lot of Latino rappers to push malt liquor,” says Oakland researcher Makani Themba. “They can get to young Latino consumers in other ways.” She has studied the issue of malt-liquor advertising for the past six years, first as a media policy specialist with the Marin Institute for San Rafael’s Prevention of Alcohol and Other Drug Problems, and now as co-director of the Oakland-based Praxis Project, a media and policy advocacy group in such areas as environmental justice and violence and substance abuse prevention.

“Hip-hop is not stratified along racial lines in the same way as the rest of the country,” Themba says. “Advertisers have turned hip-hop into a single, multicultural market, with black kids as the ‘opinion leaders.’ It’s called the ‘hip-hop nation.’ When they get black rappers to do ads for malt liquor, they’re reaching black kids, Latinos, and everybody else who identifies with the music.”

She points to a November 1996 American Demographics article, “Marketing Street Culture: Bringing Hip-Hop Style to the Mainstream,” which lists such trendy, high-style mass merchandisers as Tommy Hilfiger and Estee Lauder as riding the hip-hop wagon to sell their wares, and citing figures that more than 50 percent of American consumers aged 12 to 20 either “like or strongly like” rap music.

Themba says it was Olde English that first made the jump into hip-hop, but it was St. Ides that set the identity of malt liquor as what she calls the “gangsta drink of choice, the brew of alienation.”

In the early ’90s, the rap pendulum was taking a dangerous swing from the “wave your hands in the air, and party till you just don’t care” East Coast to the more raw and violent “fuck tha police” West Coast. With a huge leap of corporate faith, St. Ides signed up a core of these young, chip-on-their-shoulder, immature, and sometimes even mentally unstable rappers to be the spokespersons for their brand.

Rather than trying to dilute gangsta rap’s hard edge by giving them studio-written lines, St. Ides turned the rappers loose, allowing them to create their own copy. In the first half of the ’90s, St. Ides rap ads reflected gangsta rap’s gross immorality, linking malt liquor with drug use, underage drinking, misogyny, violence, gang activity, and irresponsible sex. Eric B. and Rakim labeled the drink “bold like a Smith and Wesson,” and Erick and Parrish called on their homies to “hit the bozak [gun] while I take a sip.”

In a TV ad, Snoop Doggy Dog rapped, “I just come through the door with a box of 4-0’s [40 ounces]. 40’s just a bounce and a house full of whores.” The word (pronounced “hoes”), an obviously derogatory gangsta rap term for women, was bleeped out in the ad. But the rhyming reference was too obvious to miss and, in case it might have been, the camera lingered on the figure of a young black woman while the bleep was heard.

Yo-yo, a female performer reportedly under the drinking age when she made the ad, rapped, “St. Ides in the house. Ladies, try this. Puts you in the mood. Makes you wanna oooh!” But the prize for both underage and sexual explicitness went to O’shea Jackson, the Los Angeles gang member, now movie star, rapping under the name Ice Cube. “Please pass the bottle, ’cause I’ve been drinking ever since I could swallow,” he said in one commercial.

And in another, this one aired on African-American­oriented television, Ice Cube just cut to the chase: “Get your girl in the mood quicker, get your jimmy thicker, with St. Ides malt liquor.”

The ads provoked outraged protests. In some African-American communities, malt-liquor billboards and posters were defaced. St. Ides commercials were publicly criticized by the U.S. Surgeon General and the New York State Consumer Protection Commission and drew fines from the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, and the New York State Attorney General’s Office. One of the largest complaints was that by using a music form, rap, which was heavily popular among teenagers, St. Ides was directly targeting underage drinkers. The reaction to the ads was so bad that G. Heileman Co., the national brewer that had created the St. Ides label, disavowed any connection with St. Ides.

But the trend had been set.

“Before the St. Ides ads began in the early ’90s,” Themba says, “binge drinking was not a facet of young African-American life. In only a few years, they turned that completely around. Now when you think of rap or inner-city black kids, you think of a malt liquor 40.”

Not coincidentally, malt-liquor sales increased dramatically in the same period. While malt liquor comprises less than 5 percent of the beer market, it is the fastest-growing segment. In the early ’90s, malt-liquor sales increased almost 25 percent, while beer sales overall had a 5 percent growth rate.

Several of the other malt liquors followed St. Ides’ lead, making their ads and commercials, as Maria Alaniz puts it, “raunchier.” Colt 45 began an advertising campaign called “It Works Every Time.” One of the print ads in the series showed an African-American woman down on all fours, with a can of Colt 45 hovering directly behind her. It did not take much imagination to get the inference.

Earlier this year, posters for Anheuser-Busch’s Hurricane Malt Liquor began appearing in liquor stores and groceries in the Bay Area. They show a luscious Afro-Latina, dark and inviting, long hair blowing in a tropical wind, jeans shorts ripped to the top of her long, black thighs, standing next to a bottle of malt brew.

“Bebe este y yo soy lo tuyo,” she seems to be saying. Drink this and I’m yours.

Alcohol stirred by sex, a witch’s brew. The malt-liquor assault upon the Latino community has begun in earnest.

As the Hurricane ads say, brace yourself.

From the Oct. 2-8, 1997 issue of the Sonoma County Independent.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

Talking Pictures

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Talking Pictures

Tough Enough


Tony Friedkin

Earful: Michael Douglas whispers sour nothings to Deborah Unger in ‘The Game.’

Playing ‘The Game’ with a stress expert

By David Templeton

Writer David Templeton takes interesting people to interesting movies in his ongoing quest for the ultimate post-film conversation. This time out, he calls up Dr. Jim Loehr of LGE Sports Science to discuss the nifty new adrenaline-opera The Game.

I AM ON HOLD, sitting in the pre-dawn darkness of my office, listening to the plaintive howlings of Elton John over the phone as Dr. James E. Loehr untangles himself from another call.

Yawning, I reach for my coffee cup, nearly spilling it onto my lap, where Dr. Loehr’s confidently rebellious new book, Stress for Success (Times Business; $25), is open to page 39, the Toughness Training Profile. The Profile is a test–based on one given to entry-level clients at LGE Sports Science, in Orlando, Fla., a world-class mind-and-body training facility for athletes, businesspeople, and others in high-stress, maximum-performance situations–that helps the recipient determine his or her weaknesses by rating such things as self-discipline, positive attitude, and fearfulness on a scale of 1 to 10.

Having taken the test a few days back, I use this time to check my results for loopholes.

“Good morning,” Dr. Loehr’s cheerful voice cuts in, just as I am attempting to decide if my body language is more positive or negative. I sit up straight, throw my shoulders back, and greet the doctor in kind. “Interesting movie, wasn’t it?” heexclaims.

Thus begins our discussion of the audacious new thriller The Game. One of those don’t-spoil-the-ending movies (be careful, this column carries hints), it’s about an emotionally shut-down billionaire (Michael Douglas) whose senses threaten to come alive when his seedy brother (Sean Penn) gives him a birthday present he’ll never forget: a membership in The Game, purported to be a live-action role-playing adventure for rich folks, that turns out to be . . . something quite different.

As president and CEO of LGE Sports Science, and as one of the planet’s top sports psychologists–his clients include tennis great Monica Seles, hockey star Eric Lindros, and Olympic speed skater Dan Jansen–Dr. Loehr has a unique understanding of how the human mind and body react under the weight of enormous emotional pressure, such as that experienced by athletes, FBI agents, military personnel . . . and Douglas’ cranky tycoon.

“Here’s a guy who’s been very successful,” Loehr explains, “but his life is passing him by. I see it all the time. One of the things that happens to people under constant high stress is they can start losing touch with their emotions. They go kind of dead inside, they become numb. Like Douglas’ character. He felt no joy. He had virtually no compassion. He was pretty dead.

“Then this company comes along with The Game,” Loehr says. “What they are offering is a way to jolt people back to their senses again, to wake them up, to get them in touch with their lives again.”

All this talk of waking up is reminding me how early it is. After taking another swig of coffee (a stimulant Loehr recommends against), I suggest, “It sounds like you are in the same business as the people offering The Game.”

“We are,” he laughs. “We’re doing the same thing. We look at the effects of all the stress in your life, and we try to determine your weakest links. Then we set up a game plan that will jolt you back.

“What’s interesting in the movie,” Loehr continues, “and this is exactly what we’ve found, is that we can’t jolt you back by reducing your stress or by just creating a lot of comfort in your life. We have to create more stress for you.

“Stress is necessary,” he says. “It’s how we respond to stress that can be harmful. What we do is we get you on the edge, we push you to your limits. We stress you in ways that will bring you back alive. We need to open up new frontiers in your thinking, in your ability to dive deep emotionally. Because that’s where the real pearls are. That’s what they did to Michael in the movie. They pushed him to his edge.”

“It seems a little cruel,” I offer.

“Really? Think about it a minute,” Loehr counters. “When people go mountain climbing or skydiving, they’re deliberately taking themselves to the edge. That, they say, is where their lives open up for them. It’s kind of unfortunate that we have to push ourselves to the edge of annihilation in order to feel alive, but it works.

“The other thing that’s interesting is that if we don’t do it ourselves, life often does it for us. Life brings these thunderbolts from hell, as it were, to wake us up. It might be an accident or a heart attack or a plane crash. Something that jolts us to say, ‘I almost lost it, but now I have another chance.’

“Unfortunately, sometimes that never happens,” he adds. “You just shut down more and more, and then drift away.”

“Were someone to offer you a chance to play The Game,” I wonder, “are you so balanced that you wouldn’t need to accept?”

Dr. Loehr pauses.

“I don’t know,” he finally says. “I’ve learned over the years that anytime I can do anything that opens me up, that allows the fog to clear and to show what’s really important, it deepens my capacity for living my life. I think I’d be more than game for it.”

From the Sept. 25- Oct. 2, 1997 issue of the Sonoma County Independent.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

Al Gore

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Friends of Al

By Doug Ireland

Now that Al Gore is mulling over the choice of a criminal lawyer, the race to succeed Bill Clinton in 2000 has suddenly undergone a sea change. Only a month ago polls showed Gore’s reputation for integrity higher than Bubba’s; now Gore is sinking like a stone. A Los Angeles Times survey released last Friday says that the veep’s approval rating has plummeted a vertiginous 30 percent, to only 34 percent.

The appointment of an independent counsel to investigate Gore’s role in the Donorgate scandal is now inevitable, but the revelations that Gore illegally used his White House office to raise hard money for the ’96 campaign are only the beginning. Any probe will ineluctably lead to a dissection of the entire Gore fundraising operation, and the sleazy characters who people it.

There’s Floridian Howard Glicken, who was a key fundraiser for Gore’s ’88 presidential campaign and who collected $2 million for Clinton/Gore last year. A longtime friend of the veep and his wife who has hosted book parties for both in his Coral Gables home, Glicken headed a gold-trading company that was indicted by the feds two years ago in a major case involving drug-money laundering. Glicken escaped prosecution only by cutting an immunity deal with prosecutors; the company was penalized $375,000, and Glicken’s partner went to prison for 27 years. Glicken was in and out of the White House at least 50 times, and used the access he bought with campaign cash to grease the way for his clients south of the border–to whom, according to the Wall Street Journal, he sold himself as a key Gore Latin America adviser.

There’s Noach Dear, a race-baiting right-wing Democratic City Councilman from Brooklyn. Dear ran Gore’s ’88 presidential campaign in New York and raised another $2 million for the ’96 campaign from his power base in the Orthodox Jewish community. He was also a business partner of convicted Medicaid swindler Eugene Hollander, a nursing home magnate. In 1993 Dear was caught siphoning monies for his personal and political use from a charity he headed, Save Soviet Jewry.

There’s Nate Landow, a Maryland developer who was a key founder of the neo-conservative Democratic Leadership Council and the financial godfather of Gore’s ’88 campaign. Landow had raised bales of cash for Jimmy Carter and was slated to become ambassador to the Netherlands–until reports that he’d been involved in casino and hotel construction deals with members of the Gambino and Meyer-Lansky cartels forced him to withdraw from consideration. In ’96, after an impoverished Oklahoma Indian tribe shelled out $100,000 for Clinton/Gore in return for promised help in reclaiming mineral-rich tribal lands, the DNC put the Cheyenne/Arapaho leaders in touch with Landow’who, they say, tried to shake them down for 10 percent of any revenues from the land if it were recovered.

Of most immediate legal concern to Gore, however, are the campaign cash collections of Peter Knight, who headed Gore’s House and Senate staffs until he became a pricey K Street lobbyist in 1989. Gore engineered Knight’s appointment as chair of the ’96 Clinton/Gore campaign, for which he personally raised $19 million, much of it from clients doing business with the federal government. And Time reports this week that the Justice Department is already investigating Knight’s dealings with Assistant Energy Secretary Tom Grumbly, a former Gore staffer under Knight who turned the department’s multibillion-dollar toxic waste cleanup fund into a political pork barrel.

Grumbly awarded Knight’s lobbying client Bill Haney a $33 million contract to test a toxic waste cleanup process. He kept renewing it despite repeated warnings from government scientists that Haney’s process might not work, was not cost-effective, and presented serious environmental and safety risks. Haney and his business partners gave a total of $182,000 to the Democrats in the last election cycle, with many of the contributions being made on the very days Grumbly renewed Haney’s contracts. Gore himself delivered an Earth Day speech at Haney’s home plant in Massachusetts, praising the businessman as “a shining example of American ingenuity.” Indeed.

Gore’s man at Energy also gave another Knight client, Fluor (Daniel?) Corporation, a $5 billion contract to clean up toxic waste at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington. Fluor and its PAC coughed up $203,000 for the Clinton/Gore fundraising machine in ’95-’96, including $100,000 only two months before the Hanford contract was signed.

This by no means exhaustive list of Gore’s corrupt cronies and their shady doings tells us why an independent counsel investigation will stretch out well into the 2000 campaign and sink Gore’s candidacy. And all of this underscores why radical campaign reform is the only way to take politics away from the special interests and give it back to the people.

Web exclusive to the Sept. 25-Oct. 1, 1997 issue of Sonoma County Independent.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

Last of the Red Hot Lovers

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Last of the Red Hot Lovers

Mistress Maker


Betsey Bruner

Go Figure: Ed Brown as Kashman in River Rep’s ‘Last of the Red Hot Lovers.’

‘Lovers’ sexual revolution is still red hot

By Daedalus Howell

ONCE ITS GLOW-PLUGS are warmed, River Repertory Theater’s production of Neil Simon’s uproarious comedy Last of the Red Hot Lovers has all the torque and combustion of a diesel engine.

Directed by Tiana Lee, the play is a snapshot of the sexual revolution’s diaper days as observed by one Barney Kashman, a middle-aged seafood restaurateur living in New York City in the late ’60s. Barney (excellently deployed by Ed Brown) is financially successful and, by all accounts, happily married–yet he pines for the intrigue of an extramarital encounter.

Set entirely in his mother’s East 30s apartment, replete with Naugahyde sofa bed and rotary phone, each act introduces a new woman with whom Barney attempts to commit infidelity. The results are varied and epiphanies abound.

Thirtysomething Brown is both convincing and hilarious as the 47-year-old, buttoned-down Barney. Bespectacled, with spray-gray hair and deftly painted crow’s feet, Brown gives a delightfully jubilant performance that complements Simon’s punchy yet germane text.

Brown draws Barney as a goosy, handwringing, overgrown teddy bear, managing to engender empathy rather than contempt for the would-be adulterer. Barney is not ignoble; his lifelong monogamy and faithfulness have simply left him understandably curious.

In Act 1, Barney conspires to meet the trashy, hard-boiled Elaine Navazio (capably played by the gum-smacking Debbie San Angelo), who has made a delusive pastime of her own infidelity. San Angelo manages to depict the character’s romantic resignation with a world-weary coolness despite the little chemistry between her and Brown.

By the second act, however, the show truly ignites when gorgeous, frenetic London Sawyer makes her stage debut as dingbat, schizoid Bobbi Michele, a wannabe actress and cabaret singer who lets on to being the hapless dupe of many a libidinous machination.

Sawyer portrays Bobbi with dizzying energy–preening, pouting, and sashaying about the stage, a sort of Marilyn Monroe­meets-Peter Pan­on­the ­back-lot of Laugh In. Sawyer is a real discovery for SoCo theater.

Jeanette Fisher is admirable in the role of Zelda Michaels, a depressed married woman who claims to have enjoyed only 8.2 percent of her life. Zelda, a friend of Barney’s wife (whom we never meet), thwarts Barney’s advances by constantly clutching her handbag and braying morosely about the shambles that her marriage has become. Fisher, returning to the stage after an absence of several years, makes a considerable comeback here, playing Zelda as a wide-eyed, stricken, and defeated woman whose revelations play genuinely with only granular evidence of schmaltz.

Director Lee and Ricardo Zelaya share credit for the subtle lighting design, and the set, a joint effort devised by Lee and Terrence Sherman, effectively replicates a cozy studio apartment rigged with nooks and passages that optimize the stage’s tight quarters.

Last of the Red Hot Lovers is a fine play that flourishes in the apt hands of River Repertory Theater–well worth the scenic drive to Jenner.

Last of the Red Hot Lovers plays Friday-Sunday, Sept. 26-Oct. 11. Jenner Playhouse, 10432 Hwy. 1. Friday-Saturday at 8 p.m.; Sunday at 2 p.m. Tickets are $8-$10. 865-2905.

From the Sept. 25-Oct. 1, 1997 issue of the Sonoma County Independent.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

Oliver North

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Oliver North Throws a Party

By Ruth Conniff

Yes, the Cold War is over. I know because I attended Oliver North’s victory celebration at the Capitol Hill Hyatt in Washington, D.C. The July 8, $150-a-plate dinner marked the American triumph over the Evil Empire in the worldwide battle for democracy and freedom.

“We won,” North declared. “Reagan saved the world from communism.” The party was held on the 10th anniversary of North’s testimony before Congress in the Iran-contra hearings. And North estimated that fully 10 percent of Congress was there to revel in the moment with him. “I don’t think I’ve seen so many members of Congress since I was subpoenaed,” he said, peering out at the audience.

Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, made the opening remarks, claiming credit on behalf of Republicans for the fall of the Berlin Wall and the contra victory in the Nicaraguan elections. “How many more generations were you willing to consign to totalitarianism?” he demanded of the “liberals in Washington.” He denounced the Clinton administration, which “never had the guts to put on a uniform, never had the guts to go fight for this country, and doesn’t have the guts to do what’s right today.” Sen. Jesse Helms, R-N.C., led us in the Pledge of Allegiance, after first praising Ollie North as “a genuine American hero.” Little Orphan Annie sang the national anthem. Stanton Evans, the master of ceremonies, introduced Annie (aka Randall Brooks, of Broadway musical fame) by explaining that Ted Turner and Jane Fonda have announced a campaign to get rid of “our American heritage” by doing away with the national anthem and replacing it with “America the Beautiful.”

“Well, this is our answer to Ted Turner and Jane Fonda,” Evans announced. As Little Orphan Annie warbled “O say, can you see,” an enormous American flag rose slowly behind the head table.

The audience of about 500 people rose for the invocation by the Rev. Linda Poindexter (wife of Iran-contra conspirator Admiral John Poindexter).

“The Lord be with you,” she said. “And also with you,” the audience responded. Then she thanked God for guiding our American leaders, “especially President Reagan.”

Apparently we’d all been caught in a time warp. President Reagan? “After all, he’s the one we’re really honoring this evening,” North said (graciously ignoring Reagan’s refusal to endorse him in his failed Senate run, not to mention Nancy Reagan’s explicit denunciation of him in the crucial final days of his campaign).

Reagan’s ghost cast a long, broad-shouldered shadow over the North event–just as it did during the 1996 Republican convention, which at times seemed more like a requiem for Ronnie than a promotion of current Republican politics.

Besides being so obviously backward-looking, this Reagan nostalgia seems odd because of the total whiteout of George Bush, who was as invisible at the North event as he was at the San Diego convention. The Republicans seem to prefer to act as though there never were a 42nd president. (Bush, ironically, played the role of eraser in the Iran-contra affair, pardoning Caspar Weingberger before trial, along with five other alleged Iran-contra conspirators, and thus, according to independent counsel Lawrence Walsh, completing the Iran-contra coverup.)

And just why are conservatives eulogizing Ronald Reagan and the end of the Cold War anyway, eight years after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, and somewhat ahead of Reagan’s actual demise?

“There’s a sense among conservatives that we really haven’t celebrated this one cause that brought so many factions together, which was the Cold War and ultimate victory in it,” says Keith Appell of Creative Response Concepts, the public-relations firm in Alexandria, Va., that helped put on the Oliver North event. “We think Ronald Reagan was the guy who set the tone for the end of the Cold War. Victory in Nicaragua was really the end of communism, and celebrating that needed to be done.” Not to mention the fundraising potential. “It never hurts to raise a few bucks,” Appell acknowledges.

Since his sudden rise to fame during the Iran-contra hearings, Oliver North has become a right-wing cash machine. Financial statements he filed when he ran for the Senate in 1992 showed that he had raised more than $20 million since the Iran-contra hearings, mainly through a massive direct-mail operation. His non-profit organization, the Freedom Alliance, which he built up from his legal-defense-fund mailing lists, collected $150,000 from the “Celebration of Freedom Tenth Anniversary Gala” alone. A recent issue of The Free American, the Freedom Alliance newsletter, has an article on the group’s new headquarters two miles from the Dulles airport in Virginia. The building “also houses Oliver North’s bulletproof-vest company,” the article points out. During North’s Senate race, the non-profit group got in trouble for leasing office space to North’s private businesses, without collecting some $88,000 in rent.

The Freedom Alliance appears to exist mainly for the purpose of promoting North. The group distributes op-eds in which North rails against feminists, gays, and President Clinton’s “flower-child foreign policy.” It hosts conferences for young conservatives, and it supports special causes like the Michael New legal-defense fund. (New was the U.S. soldier discharged from the Army in 1996 for refusing to wear a U.N. insignia and serve under U.N. command in Macedonia.) Besides generating lots of money, the idea of promoting Ollie North and reliving the conservatives’ glory days fits into a broader public-relations strategy. Keith Appell calls it “doing Reagan.”

Appell’s PR firm has been growing rapidly in the last few years. Business is booming for such clients as the Christian Coalition, Newt Gingrich, and Regnery Publishing. In addition to promoting the conservative triumph over communism, the firm has drawn directly on the Cold War mentality in other ways.

After The New Yorker published an article by Jane Mayer criticizing Regnery and author Gary Aldrich for failing to distinguish between fact and libelous gossip about Clinton’s sex life, Creative Response Concepts put out a barrage of press releases that smacked of red-baiting, tarring Mayer as a left-winger and a radical feminist.

“Doing Reagan” isn’t just a matter of tapping into any old, anti-communist vein, however. It’s a whole marketing concept.

“You’ve seen a number of events on Capitol Hill in the last couple of weeks, where we’re bringing in working families and showing how tax cuts benefit them, setting up the bully pulpit, doing a lot of talk radio, doing events with family farmers, handing out mock $500 checks,” says Appell enthusiastically. He pulls out clips from the Cleveland Plain Dealer and the Los Angeles Times to bolster his point.

“Congressman Don Manzullo [R-Ill.] met with some family farmers and here’s a picture of him standing with them on a flatbed truck!” Appell cracks himself up, giggling with delight at this PR coup. “It’s great! It’s working!”

“This is the Reagan approach–a classic example is Reagan going to the Berlin Wall toward the end of the Cold War. … He could have given a speech anywhere, but he gave it in front of the wall. That picture captured the very essence of the Evil Empire.”

So “doing Reagan” means … ?

“What we have done is to get more pictures,” says Appell.

That, in a nutshell, is the Reagan strategy. And Oliver North is nothing if not picturesque.

Of course, there are still those teensy problems with violating international law and subverting the U.S. Constitution.

North was convicted in 1989 of three federal crimes: aiding in the obstruction of Congress, accepting illegal gratuities, and destroying documents related to arms sales to Iran to finance the illegal contra war. He was fined $150,000 and sentenced to 1,200 hours of community service.

But a year later, the U.S. Court of Appeals ruled that, because North testified under immunity before Congress in 1987, the conviction would have to be reviewed to make sure none of the witnesses were influenced by North’s immunized testimony. After key witnesses said that they had, in fact, been influenced by testimony North gave before Congress, independent counsel Lawrence Walsh dropped all charges.

At the celebration dinner, Jesse Helms assured us that everything North did in the Iran-contra affair was “absolutely legal and authorized by law and by the president of the United States.”

Rep. Dan Burton, R-Ind., who is heading the House of Representatives’ investigation of the Clinton administration’s campaign-finance scandals, was nonchalant about the Iran-contra affair. He hinted that the Boland Amendment, which cut off aid to the contras in 1984, was made to be broken: “The Boland Amendment, which was passed by the liberals in Congress, was just another obstacle and obstruction to the fight against the communists,” Burton explained. “Ollie North found innovative ways to help, and I congratulate him for that.” Burton and other speakers at the gala made it clear that subverting Congress and running a covert war were minor issues, compared with the larger battle against international socialism.

“Ronald Reagan gave hope to America,” Burton said, to a round of applause. “I remember when Ronald Reagan stood in front of the Berlin Wall and said, ‘Mr. Gorbachev, tear down that wall.’ “

Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, R-Calif., spoke with admiration of working with North in the Reagan administration. “He was just a guy who worked upstairs from me at the White House. We always knew he was running all over the world doing all kinds of crazy things,” Rohrabacher chuckled. “We didn’t know what he was doing! I remember at one point going to talk to Ollie [during the contra war] and saying, ‘What can I do to help?’ He told me some things I could do–none of them were anywhere near the line of legality–but he said, ‘You don’t have to do that, we have some people who will take care of these things.'”

Rohrabacher, now known as the “surfing congressman,” has a Web page featuring pictures of him surfing, as well as his thoughts on surf culture and the relative merits of different types of boards. During college, master of ceremonies Stanton Evans told us, Rohrabacher helped found an organization called the Committee for the Prevention of Nuclear Peace. Its motto was, “We already have enough bombs to blow up the world 10 times over, so a few more can’t hurt.”

One of the men seated near me, whose wife works for Oliver North, pounded on the table in a fit of hilarity over this quip, and passed the wine bottle. Rohrabacher closed by saying, “Ollie is a great example to youth.”

Rep. Helen Chenoweth, R-Idaho, a favorite of militia groups in her home state, spoke after Rohrabacher. Evans introduced her as “a modern Joan of Arc on behalf of U.S. property rights.” Chenoweth is fighting “the collectivization of land by the government” out in Idaho, just as many heroic women fought against Bolshevism in the former Soviet Union, Evans said.

Dressed in a pink suit and sparkling earrings, Chenoweth spoke breathlessly about the first time she saw Oliver North on TV during the Iran-contra hearings: “I saw this young colonel who promised to tell the truth. And I thought, ‘My goodness, this is going to be unusual.’ And for the next days and weeks I was riveted to the television set … What was it that riveted all of America? … True leadership and true love of country and a dedication to duty we’ve seldom seen. … The more I’ve gotten to know Ollie North, the more I saw what it was that gave him that riveting quality of leadership– and that’s his close and abiding relationship with God, the creator of the heavens and Earth.”

The woman at my table who works for North nodded solemnly.

Rep. Bob Barr, R-Ga., testified that Oliver North would be an asset in the war on drugs. He noted the Peruvian government’s policy of shooting down airplanes carrying drugs, and said, “This is the sort of approach Ollie North would take. It’s gotten the drug traffickers’ attention.”

Actually, North took a much more complicated approach to drug traffickers in Latin America. “You will recall that over the years Manuel Noriega and I have developed a fairly good relationship,” North wrote in an e-mail message to his boss, Adm. John Poindexter, at the National Security Commission on Aug. 23, 1986. In the wake of news stories about Panamanian Gen. Manuel Noriega’s involvement in the drug trade, Noriega had appealed to North: “In exchange for a promise from us to ‘help clean up his [Noriega’s] image’ … he would undertake to ‘take care of’ the Sandinista leadership for us,” North wrote to Poindexter.

In a 1985 notebook entry, North recorded a weapons purchase by the contras, with U.S. assistance, from a supplier in Honduras: “14 M to finance [the arms] came from drugs.”

Another set of memoranda and purchase orders tracks more than $300,000 paid by the Nicaraguan Humanitarian Aid Office, overseen by North, to a major U.S. marijuana trafficker to ferry supplies to the contras in his airplane. The plane had also been used to run drugs.

Other documents show North intervening on behalf of known drug smugglers, including José Bueso Rosa, a Honduran general and CIA liaison who was arrested for conspiring to import $40 million worth of cocaine into the United States to finance the assassination of the president of Honduras. Bueso assumed his American friends would keep him out of prison. “Our major concern–Gorman, North, Clarridge–is that when Bueso finds out about what is really happening to him, he will break his long-standing silence about the Nic Resistance and other sensitive operations,” North wrote in an e-mail message to Poindexter. North recommended that he and his colleagues “cabal quietly in the morning to look at options: pardon, clemency, deportation, reduced sentence.”

All of these declassified documents come from the National Security Archive, a public-interest research library in Washington, D.C., which obtained them using the Freedom of Information Act after a long legal battle with the Reagan and Bush administrations.

The drug evidence, while damning, is not much worse than North’s direct testimony before the Iran-contra committee, in which he admitted that he lied to Congress, created false documents to throw investigators off his trail, and conducted secret deals with terrorists and arms merchants.

But since he got off on the technicality related to his immunity, North now presents himself as entirely innocent of the very crimes he confessed to committing.

His supporters are sanctimonious about North’s guiltlessness and the relative depravity of the Clinton administration.

“Can you imagine an administration of which Ollie North was a part bringing illegal aliens into the country to vote? Committing mail and wire fraud? Racketeering? Obstruction of justice?” Georgia Rep. Bob Barr asked, without any apparent irony. “Ollie, we need you now.”

Is Oliver North running for office? Before North’s speech, the lights dimmed, and what looked suspiciously like a campaign film began to roll: “Ollie North: Always the Courage to Stand Up for Freedom.”

Pat Buchanan was a supporting actor in the film, recounting North’s performance in the Iran-contra hearings. “You could feel the air go out of the liberals in this town when they realized they weren’t going to break anybody,” Buchanan said.

The film featured clips from the Iran-contra hearings. The audience booed as the congressional questioners, who looked like plodding bureaucrats, bullied our hero, the brave, straight-shooting Marine. Then came a montage of politicians praising North for his courage at the hearings’ close. In the end, North was vindicated.

But then, alas, “his quest for the Senate was not to be,” the voice-over said. Still, “his quest continues.” There were shots of North doing his nationally syndicated radio show. “No one, not even Oliver North, knows what the future holds. But one thing is certain. In the quest for freedom, Oliver North will be there.”

“You have to figure out relatively soon in life what’s worth dying for,” North said, looking pensive at the end of the film. “You also have to figure out what’s worth living for. I’ve figured out this country is worth living and dying for.”

Cut to footage of the collapse of the Berlin Wall.

The film was made specifically for the banquet, not for any political campaign, according to North’s staff at the Freedom Alliance. North does not have any immediate plans to seek office. Although “a lot of people are curious, especially with the news articles regarding Governor [George] Allen stepping down,” says the Alliance’s Dee Dee Lancaster.

But with the Virginia governor’s race now in full swing, and the Senate race still three years away, it doesn’t look as if North will be running again any time soon. Meanwhile, he serves his purpose as an icon.

North got a standing ovation when he stepped up to the microphone at the banquet. The ordeal he went through during the Iran-contra hearings, he said, “was about this very document I carry with me until it’s tattered and torn–the Constitution.” He pulled it out of his pocket and waved it at us.

Then he told a long story about the hearings. It was a great telling, full of humor and pathos. He described how nervous he was. He talked about how he prayed, as he waited, surrounded by security guards in a little locked room outside the Senate: “God, if an earthquake ever hits Washington, let it be now.”

A little old lady slipped up to him as he was entering the hearing room on the first day–somehow getting past security–and handed him a card, which his attorney, Brendan Sullivan, grabbed from him. Sullivan kept the card throughout the hearings, setting it on the microphone stand during North’s testimony and putting it back in his pocket at the end of the day. A curious reporter finally demanded to know what was on the card. Sullivan slowly took it out of his pocket, looked at it, then put it away again, before replying: “The answers.”

What’s really on the card, North told us, is Isaiah 40:31. He carries that with him until it’s tattered and torn, too. The verse reads: “But those who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall not be weary, they shall walk and not faint.”

Two honored guests at the banquet were Adolfo Calero, president of the Conservative Party of Nicaragua, and David Jacobsen, a former hostage held in Lebanon by the radical Shiite Islamic group Hezbollah. North accompanied Jacobsen home, after taking credit for his release.

Calero and Jacobsen both thanked North. Jacobsen told the moving story of his release and trip home in November 1986 with the mysterious William P. Good (North’s code name), who gave him a verse of the 23rd Psalm inscribed on a baseball cap.

The white-haired Calero also gushed. “I’m so proud to have been part of that task force that saved civilization,” the former contra leader said. He got a standing ovation. “But there are still great problems in Nicaragua,” he pointed out, including more than 50 percent unemployment. He made a special plea for Nicaraguan immigrants in the United States–“40,000 who have been living here and who have no future in Nicaragua and are facing deportation with this new immigration law.” The irony of Calero asking the assembled conservatives to loosen the immigration law was lost in the hoopla.

After sponsoring a covert war that ultimately killed 30,000 people in Nicaragua, and waging a long destabilization campaign against the Sandinista government, Oliver North and his colleagues from the Reagan administration are taking credit for Nicaraguan democracy.

But the elections in Nicaragua–held in 1992 by the Sandinista government, and in which the Sandinistas peacefully stepped down–did not represent the victory the contra supporters in the United States were looking for. They were aiming for the military overthrow of the government.

And, of course, they were subverting democracy at home to try to achieve it. Now the Republicans are casting themselves as the triumphant good guys in the global battle between good and evil. And they are trying to revive the whole musty, Cold War narrative to energize their movement. Who knows? Maybe it’s good for one more round.

“Oliver North as the standard-bearer of the right gives you a sense of the shallowness and ethical dearth of the conservative movement in this country,” says Peter Kornbluh, who, as a senior analyst at the National Security Archive, is an Iran-contra expert. Kornbluh has watched with a jaundiced eye as Oliver North takes his place next to G. Gordon Liddy and Bob Dornan in the rogues’ gallery of conservative talk-radio. “All that’s left for them is to rabble-rouse on the radio, and, in North’s case, to raise lots of money through direct mail from ignorant souls wholly unschooled in the great treachery to the Constitution that North committed,” he says. “If that’s their symbol, so be it.”

Web exclusive to the Sept. 25-Oct. 1, 1997 issue of Sonoma County Independent.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

Jive 3

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Jive 3

Jive 3


Magali Pirard

Further proof that while chickens may lay,
people lie

Edited by Gretchen Giles

LIARS, BRAGGARTS, AND DREAMERS–man, are we lousy with them around here. The more than 100 submissions received for our Jive 3 personal essay-writing contest packed a dose of fibbery that would make Pinocchio’s nose splinter, would make George Washington blush over his hatcheted cherry tree, would put even Walter Mitty at a loss.

The long and winding Jive history began three years ago in a coffee shop, as, while trying not to spit as we blew-cooled coffee, we noticed that all around us were scribbling, furrow-browed scribes, notating the margins of books, looping across the pages of diaries, and inking up torn scraps of scratch. “What the heck,” we muttered, foam arched in an attractive manner across our lips, “are they writing about?”

In the past two years of hosting our Java Jive contest, we seem to have answered that question: They, you, the public at large, are writing about sex.

Sex is great stuff; we love it. But year after year of writing and reading about that mysterious woman in the corner with the black beret whose emerald green eyes have a hint of a smile about them grows a bit stale.

So this year we mixed it up, exhorting you to lie, and lie you did. Gone is the java; the jive remains. In addition to sex (and there was still plenty of it; after all, this is the No. 1 topic about which to lie), we got anger, joy, reflections on aging, and plenty of tomfoolery. Of the five top winners, someone even told the truth.

We offer big wet smacking thank-yous to judges J. J. Wilson of Sonoma State University, writing instructor Scott Reid, Maureen Hurley of the Russian River Writers’ Guild, Readers’ Books’ co-proprietor Lilla Weinberger, and SRJC writing instructor Guy Beiderman–last year’s Jive winner. Hugs also to Carolina Clare of North Light Books and to Tom Montan and Jane Love of Copperfield’s Books.

Lovely heaping thanks to all who submitted–even the writer who expanded on the word coprophilia–and we are grateful to have had to happily haggle over the work of Rebecca Alber, Susan Bono, Ric Escalante, Stephen Gross, Nancy L. T. Hamilton, Liz Hanna, Kate Kinsey, Suzanna McGee, Dean Musgrove, Liz Sinclair, Tim Stires, and Elva Zimmerman.

And that is no jive.

1. [Untitled]

Who am I (&I)? Rastapunk, funkologist, cantakerous deductologist. Metaphysician, yawnmower, Socratic numbers cruncher. I am an enigma wrapped in a puzzle, shrouded in a large Eskimo woman named Irene. I am the “King of All Mediocrity,” and the court jester of Clintonlot. I’ve got a rip in the fabric of my space-time continuum and I just lost another buttonhole. I am the watcher and the peacetalker,I am the self-infected wound on the scab of indifference. I am deep ecology and televised cacophony. I am an ironic godhead to all dispossessed, anemic tax consultants. I am second homeless. I have puce-colored hair. I am a debit card in the side of consumeristic madness. I am Crush Limbaugh, and a nude Gingrich. I stand naked between these lines, yet adorn the golden robe of curiosity as to a brighter meaning and a wider waistband. I don’t work for peace, but rather leisure for it. I am Marilyn Hansen and Madonna McJackson. I am the thought police raiding your vice-filled subconscious and I will water your suburban lawns. I don’t eat cheese. I don’t brush after everymeal. I am the barcode tattooed on your wrist and the iridescent gadfly in your soup. I am the jukebox anti-hero and the Huck Finn floating down the stream of your consciousness. I am the FedEx of change and the splinter in your mind’s eye. I am unorganized religion and the phlebotomist in the vein of society. I rue the passing of Crystal Pepsi and feel dance fever was the pinnacle of civilization. I believe power-sweating should be an Olympic sport. I secretly know cumin is the devil’s spice. I’m starting a No Doubt cover band called No Doi. I practice tarot reading with Star Wars trading cards. In conclusion, I feel everyone should praise the obvious, go for the gusto, and inflict deadly accurate mime control.
– Ocean Moon

2. I Am Probably Not the Buddha

Remember you must be your own light. The Truth is your light and your refuge in this world. Life is suffering.–The Buddha

Those who seek the Truth need look no further than the bottom of their child’s diaper pail.–Catherine Lloyd (Probably Not the Buddha)

I am clearly not the Buddha. In fact, the chances are pretty slim that the Buddha’s even in my neighborhood. For one thing, I doubt he plays tennis and everybody in my neighborhood, it seems, plays tennis. Unless they’re on life support, in which case I suppose they might be the Buddha. I mean, they’re sitting in one place, leading the contemplative life, if you will (unless they’re brain dead, in which case maybe 95 percent of their soul has attained nirvana and the other 5 percent is stuck in the body like a foot in a railroad track).

I really can’t say, probably not being the Buddha myself.

There are a number of other very good reasons why I am probably not the Buddha. For one, I ovulate. Ovulation has traditionally been a handy means of eliminating prospective religious leaders (Aimee Semple McPherson and the Virgin Mary being notable exceptions). Besides, it’s hard to live on the day’s wages from begging when you also have to buy panti-liners with the spare change.

Two, the Buddha ascended into nirvana several thousand years ago. Since we only get one Buddha every 100,000 years or so, I estimate (using my limited command of mathematics) that another one shouldn’t be showing up until around A.D. 90000, at which point we’ll either be shooting through the galaxy in giant BBs like Jodie Foster in Contact or we’ll have all taken our place in the afterlife and left the planet to the cockroaches and the sharks.

Three, the Buddha sat down under a bodhi tree at the age of 35 and didn’t get up until he was the Buddha. I’m only 34, so there’s still time, but there aren’t any bodhi trees in Santa Rosa (I don’t believe). I don’t think the Santa Rosa plum tree in my backyard would suit since the smell of rotting plums on the ground and the fresh ones dropping from the branches would certainly not be very conducive to a meditative state.

That said, there are also a number of very good reasons why I might be the Buddha: for one, like the Buddha, I have small breasts, favor jeweled hair ornaments, and wear dresses because I look hippy in slacks.

Two: The Buddha spent six years with the hermits of Uruvilva, denying his body food and comfort. I spent six years changing diapers and eating the crusts of peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches while working part-time as an accountant. The parallels are evident.

Three: The Buddha had one child. A boy he named Rahula. Rahula (very) loosely translated means “gets in the way of my career.” The child eventually forgave his father for dumping him with his grandpa when he saw him floating in the sky on a lotus throne.

To get the same effect with my own kids, I’d have to be floating on a hamburger bun bathed in a halo of light from the Golden Arches. It could happen. . . .

Or maybe not. I don’t know. There are strong arguments on both sides for me being the Buddha. I suspect that the chances that I am not the Buddha might be fractionally more likely. That’s why I’m saying that I’m probably not the Buddha. Either way, there is one thing I do know for sure and that is that you are probably not the Buddha either.
– Catherine Lloyd

3. How I Invented the Smoothie

I am Sonoma County adventurer Jacob Openspace. The world is my hackey-sack. This is the story of how I invented the Smoothie.

The year was 1972. My plane crashed in the Sierra, killing everyone else on board and leaving me without food. I was surrounded by desolate, icy peaks. I would have eaten my fellow passengers to survive, but that is against my principles. You see, I am a vegetarian.

Suddenly I spied wild strawberries under the ice. One propeller of the downed plane spun at a perfect purée pace. Crawling on my belly through the flaming hull of the plane, I found a baby’s bottle. Remembering that the child’s mother wore only natural fabrics, I hoped against hope as I tore off the rubber nipple. Oh, thank God! Soy milk!

I added the ginseng I always keep tucked in a body cavity for just such emergencies. Suddenly, a voice behind me!

“I’ve noticed you gathering ingredients. I’d like to make an offering,” gasped a beautiful young nun. “That ginseng thing was unnatural,” she said. “But, like the Wise Men, I’d like to give frankincense and myrrh.” I tenderly declined and left her to die.

I poured my precious yield into my Greenpeace hardhat and strapped it to the propeller. Just then a fireball shot from the engine, narrowly missing me but perfectly toasting wheatgrass and barley growing wild on the peak. I scooped them up and slid on my belly toward the kitchenette of the plane, in search of a cup.

Only Styrofoam! Damn these planet-poisoning airlines! Then I remembered a handsome listener-supported-radio commuter mug I’d spotted in the cabin. It was in the hand of a passenger who had just made the ultimate pledge.

As I savored the first sips of my nectar (the mug happened to contain just the right amount of honey left over from tea), a rescue chopper appeared over the peaks. I looked back on the wreckage of airplane and human lives with misgivings: another 30 seconds and I might’ve found some bee pollen. But as I leaped from the rocks for the rope ladder, I knew I had discovered something.

Next episode: I invent the phrase “What goes around comes around” in a small but deadly Russian River whirlpool.

– Jefferson Elder


4. Word Meadow

I am a born writer. I emerged from the womb screaming not at the shock of the world but at my lack of words to describe it. A few days later, the first poem drooled from my lips.

Perhaps I sound like I am bragging. I am not. To be born with a gift means to claim no credit for it. Any talent I possess I owe to my ancestors, a long line of saga spinners, skalds of the courts, readers of runes, farmer-poets and warrior-poets who could choose from over 100 expressions for sword: skull-crusher, pale-maker, corpse-pain, screamer, blood-waker. The sun was called day-star, sprinkler, grace-shine. The tongue? A word-meadow. All of this in the oral tradition, preserved in the communal memory. When the art of writing finally reached Iceland in A.D. 1000, it was an instant success. During the long dark winter nights, the old sagas and ancient verses were copied onto sheepskin, then passed along through the centuries from one sod hovel to the next, surviving Black Death, avalanches, earthquakes, floods, famine, and the tyranny of the Danes. At times the island’s population nearly died out entirely.

On the second day of Easter, 1875, my five-year-old grandfather woke to a day black as night; by noon he could no longer see his own hand in front of his face. Mount Askja had erupted, spewing ash so thick that it not only blocked the sun for three days, but destroyed a third of the island’s farmland, an event eerily resembling the apocalypse prophesied in the pagan verse Song of the Sybil (as set down by my ancestor Snorri Sturluson in the 13th century):

The sun turns black

Cast down from heaven are the hot stars

Fumes reek, into flames burst

The sky itself is torched with fire . . .

Well, would you know more?

On a sunny evening the following July, my grandfather’s family joined the thousands fleeing Iceland for a marshy, flood-prone reserve on the shores of Lake Winnipeg. The gush of words continued even here. In the midst of their first disastrous winter, those settlers that hadn’t died of starvation or smallpox started, of all things, a newspaper which printed the first immigrant poet of New Iceland, my distant relation Guttormur Guttormsson:

O kin of volcano and floe-sea

Cousin of geyser and steep.

Even the sparse journal entries of my Great-Uncle Sveinn evoke a certain poetic resonance:

January 16: Cold, snowing.

January 17: Cold, snowing.

January 20: Cloud, heavy frost.

To this day, Iceland publishes more books per capita than any other nation on the planet. I could go on, as my people are wont to do. The words run quite literally in our blood. Yet I’ve inherited other legacies, too, from these Icelanders who spend half of every year drenched in light, the other half sunk in darkness. Polar moods. Days so black they pass for night. The word-meadow is my haven. Well, would you know more?
– Christina Sunley

5. [Untitled]

I am a waitress. I’d much rather tell you I am a writer, a student, a wife; still, I am a waitress. A food-server, a “Miss,” and sometimes a “Ma’am.” Depending on what you think of my performance you leave me some cash, laid gratuitously on the table for services rendered. A Freudian tip. The busboys neatly stack the green bills. They get 15 percent of everything I make. The food chain continues.

I am merely the messenger, a conduit, the harbinger. Between kitchen and customer I walk to and fro, relaying a code. Like the government, I modify the message to keep you both placated and at peace. I dodge bullets from the cooks as I put in your special order and then take it off the check because you dislike your own creation. I answer questions like the best of game-show contestants: “No, the Caesar is not fishy,” and “Yes, it will be enough food for you.”

I have poured your beer into a wineglass because you like drinking it that way. I have asked the chef to wash his hands before making your meal because you don’t like germs. I have sung “Happy Birthday” to a dead and buried nine-year-old on her birthday because her mother wanted me to. “This was her favorite restaurant!” she explains tearfully, as I clear her third margarita glass, drained.

I am wait-staff; I am serving-wench; I am a Lady in Waiting; joined at the tip to you, the Guest in this crazy dance of social service. We play our chosen part of serf or king, sitting or standing, mother or child. It’s nothing to be ashamed of. It’s merely the system. And besides, my astrological chart says I’m aspected to serve humankind. I just thought it would be more like Mother Teresa or the Peace Corps, but service is no longer romantic when done for reward.

I have called you a cab after too much wine, and called you worse for the same reason. I have held your head in my lap after you had a heart attack in my section and talked about your children while waiting for the ambulance to arrive. I am Hang Man champ, hanging out at the counter with kids grown bored of parents who prompt, “What do you say?” and then forget to say “please” themselves.

I am the voice that read you the entire menu because you forgot your glasses. I am the ear into which you whispered “I don’t have any money,” after you ate your dessert. I am the one you stiffed because your meal was too expensive and you needed money to buy cigarettes. I am playful yet efficient, pleasant, and fast–which is most important since you have a movie to catch in a half-hour. I am at your disposal; I am at your beck and call. But that’s OK. I’ve heard good things come to those who wait.
– Jill Haugh

Honorable Mention[Untitled]

Susan Fleming is a prince. She is adept at many things required of the descendants of czars and kings. She is jovial yet speaks with a commanding bellow changing the mind of the Oracle of Diana.

Susan Fleming is copper- and golden-precious. She is worth sifting sand in excavation of her for centuries. She is a discovery like Lucy and humans walking upright.

Susan Fleming is alive so that we can live. She casts no fool out.

Susan Fleming sews hope into the breast-pocket of God.

Susan Fleming is walking across the kitchen; the rhythm of her steps reverberates through us all.
– Susan Fleming

Runners-up

People Can’t Place My Accent

By necessity, tribal custom was hard in the Ural Mountains. Sensing early and correctly that my myopia was the sort of handicap that could very well lead to my being left outside the village walls after dark for the wolves to dispose of, my parents worked tirelessly to teach me a skill that would benefit the community. I developed a knack for whittling accordion reeds, which positioned me as a valuable trade commodity. And so it was to save the life of their son that my parents traded me to a roving band of polka gypsies for two goats, a Maharaja slalom ski, and a large wagon that my folks later used to make the long trek to Kashmir, where they now make a comfortable living screen-printing Mao Zedong, Buckminster Fuller, and Martha Stewart T-shirts.

I labored on accordion reeds the entire Atlantic passage. But not all of the days were spent below-deck with a small knife in my hand surrounded by a pile of cane. Many a happy afternoon was passed with what I came to think of as my new family on the deck of the wave-tossed ship. The gypsies would fling me overboard so as to help me perfect my newly acquired swimming abilities, and in thanks I taught them the classics: the theme to “Gilligan’s Island,” “My Sharona,” and a tune that they earned a certain following with in resorts throughout the Poconos, a polka version of “I’m a Lineman for the County.” My given name had long since been forgotten, as the gypsy clan had embraced me as one of their own and had taken to calling me Mookie ‘Boom-Boom’ Ignatious, a name I still treasure today.

We landed in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, and my first taste of America was a corn dog and a strawberry slushy. The gypsies ended my indentured servitude when they did a quick cost analysis and discovered that buying accordion reeds at music stores cost much less than clothing and feeding me. Heavy of heart, I set off down the road on my own. In the damp, still night, the sad gypsy voices carried far after me, ” . . . a three-hour tour, a three-hour tour.” Aside from the clothes on my back, all that I could call mine was piled on the inverted hood of a ’64 VW bug that I dragged down the road behind me by a rope tied about my waist. I didn’t know where I was going or how I would get there. Something pulled me west, either a subliminal desire to see the World’s Largest Ball of Twine in Kansas, a longing to visit the birthplace of Phyllis Diller, Lima, Ohio, or maybe just blind ambition and momentum. I cried myself to sleep that night in a dumpster behind a 76 truck stop and dreamt of polkas, the open road, and stale Stuckey’s pecan logs.
– Bradford Rex

[Untitled]

As I scrubbed one of my two cookie sheets down to the finish this morning, I realized that I expected it to be my last cookie sheet. I found, in that light, that I wanted to make it look like new, like I just bought it yesterday. That I cared about it slightly more than might be considered normal; that it was something more than a temporary transport for chocolate chip cookies: it was the Last Cookie Sheet I Would Ever Own.

This is a sobering way to start the day, but I was not as alarmed as I once would have been. It was strangely peaceful to view the metal rectangle in this light, and I scoured the corners with a small pleasure, dried it carefully, and put it away gently, sliding it in next to its twin.

I seem to have reached an age where taking care of what I already own has great merit. Me! The mother of mañanaism. How did this happen?

It’s enough to make you want to bake cookies.

“Things” rarely arouse my lust these days. I have a recurring fantasy of taking armloads of Things I already own, running out of the house into the street, and dumping them–running back into the house, doing it again. In this dream, all I feel is a growing, yelling freedom, some Boston Tea Party yippeekaiyah. (Oh, how I want to go back and rearrange the letters in that last word; I can see so many possible pairings. I know Bruce Willis would know how to spell it right. But even Bruce Willis doesn’t inspire all that much lust. I’m just going to let it go. Let go.)

So, how’d this happen to me? Childless, I’m becoming a “granny,” an LOL. Maybe a BOL. I grow old, I grow old, I will wear my leggings-with-a-big-top rolled.

I move into these ideas and see they are true, and so much nonsense falls away, snakeskin of my earlier lives. In my time I’ve considered more carefully the selection of peaches than the selection of men to be my partners; gone through 4,000 hair rollers now rusting in East and West Coast landfills; seen all the episodes of Star Trek and assumed that whatever didn’t work could be readily replaced, repaired, reinvented.

I’m tired of transitory relationships with the insignificant.

My brothers would laugh and say, “Not if it was a 20-year-old-with-a-tight-butt insignificant”; but they haven’t gotten here yet. Maybe they never will; maybe they can hang forever in the place where nothing meets. I just can’t. I am hoping–in fact, I’m betting the farm on my hope–that there is time enough left for one last reinvention of me: into a person who knows what to value and protect and what to let go of, into a creature with metal.

This is gonna take some real elbow grease.
– Popy Metropolis

Celebrate Jive 3 with our winners, judges, and the Independent staff when we host a reading of these gems of genius on Wednesday, Oct. 1, at 7 p.m. Featured readers include our judges and honorable-mention winners. Copperfield’s Santa Rosa Annex bookstore, 650 Fourth St. The reading is free–as is the grub–and open to all. For details, call 527-1200.

From the Sept. 25-Oct. 1, 1997 issue of the Sonoma County Independent.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

Pesticide Use in Sonoma County

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Pesticide Use in Sonoma County

Toxic Tide


Michael Amsler

Sign of the Times: Notice warns of methyl bromide use in a local vineyard.

Pesticide use on the rise

By J. Beck

A PUBLIC-INTEREST group announced Sept. 18 that statewide pesticide use is on the rise, but farmers and state regulators claim consumers have nothing to worry about. In the report “Rising Toxic Tide, Pesticide Use in California, 1991-95,” Pesticide Action Network scientist James Liebman found that in that five-year period pesticide use increased 31 percent, from 161 million to 212 million pounds of pesticide-active ingredient.

In Sonoma County, where an average of 49 pounds of toxic active ingredients were applied per harvested acre, the intensity of pesticide use ranked sixth among all counties in California at nearly twice the state average.

But California Farm Bureau spokesman Clark Biggs says PAN “conveniently” chose 1991 as a starting point because it was near the end of an eight-year drought and farm acreage was relatively lower than subsequent years. The state Department of Pesticide Regulation released a 1995 pesticide-residue report the same day, finding no trace of pesticide residue in 64.6 percent of 5,502 marketplace samples. The state report found pesticides below the legal limit in more than 33 percent of the samples and notes that about 1.6 percent of the samples contained illegal levels of pesticide. Department director James Wells says, “This [state] report indicates a high level of grower compliance with pesticide laws and regulations.”

But PAN says that’s not good enough. According to its report, the use of cancer-causing pesticides increased 129 percent between 1991 and 1995. Gregg Small, director of Pesticide Watch Education Fund, says, “California should be at the cutting edge of sustainable agriculture and promoting non-toxic approaches to pest control. Instead, we find our state agencies doing very little to reduce the use of pesticides.”

As a result, the widespread use of toxic agricultural chemicals damages both human health and the environment, PAN claims.

“This is not surprising because pesticides are created to be poisons,” the report notes. “Epidemiological studies have shown an association between pesticide use and increased numbers of birth defects among both farmer and non-farmer residents of agricultural regions.”

The report adds that 1,000 cases of acute occupational illnesses linked to agricultural pesticides are reported each year in California. And recent studies have focused on the role of many pesticides in disrupting hormonal balances in wildlife and humans.

PAN found that of all the crops in the state, grapes–including those cultivated for wine and raisins–receive the most pesticides: 59 million pounds in 1995, of which 49 million pounds were sulfur. The PAN report notes that while sulfur is not a systemic poison, it is acutely irritating to the skin and eyes, and is the pesticide causing the most reported worker injuries in California.

Despite a plan to phase out the use of methyl bromide–a powerful fumigant widely used in the local grape-growing industry–the amount of the controversial chemical used in cultivation actually increased, from 14.7 million pounds in 1993 to 17.5 million pounds in 1995.

A 1995 Lake Research public-opinion poll showed that that trend runs counter to popular views about pesticide use: 79 percent of Californians believed it is important to reduce pesticide use, and 87 percent favored labeling foods to describe pesticide residues.

But toxicologist Carl Winter, at the University of California at Davis, says the most important point to consider is not the frequency and overall amount of pesticide usage but the amount of consumer exposure. “Almost any chemical is toxic at a certain dosage. The dose makes the poison,” Winter says.

His department has found no major health risks posed by eating state produce, he says, adding that he hopes consumers do not shun fresh fruits and vegetables because of the report’s findings. The largest potential health risk confronts the workers who handle the highly concentrated pesticides in the field, he concludes.

Still, PAN is calling for fewer pesticides and more public access to information about the extent of their use. Currently, the state Department of Pesticide Regulation is supposed to keep accurate and accessible reports on the use of agricultural chemicals. According to the report, Gov. Pete Wilson and pesticide manufacturers have been trying to cut in half the state mill tax that funds a large portion of the DPR’s $25 million annual budget. “Such a serious cut in the DPR’s budget will seriously compromise the agency’s ability to track, let alone reduce, pesticide use in California,” the report concludes.

PAN wants the DPR to produce annual reports detailing and summarizing pesticide use in the state by crop, by county, and by toxicity. It wants the state agency to create an easily accessible Internet database on the use of particular pesticides on particular pieces of land, so you’d know exactly what is being applied in your neighborhood.

“Practical, viable alternatives to toxic pesticides do exist,” the report concludes. “For example, organic production is the fastest growing sector of U.S. agriculture. The organic food sector has grown 20 percent a year over the past seven years and now accounts for $3.5 billion in annual sales.

“Although we do not expect all of California agriculture to convert to organic production overnight, the success of organic producers demonstrates that it is possible to create a thriving agricultural economy without using toxic chemicals.”

Editor Greg Cahill contributed to this article.

From the Sept. 25-Oct. 1, 1997 issue of the Sonoma County Independent.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

Bruce Cohn

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Bruce Cohn

Striking Oil


Michael Amsler

Hit man: Doobie Brothers’ manager Bruce Cohn has been takin’ it to the streets for 28 years.

Rock veteran, winemaker, olive oil purveyor–Bruce Cohn has it all

By Gretchen Giles

THE AFTERNOON is one of those tourist-swoon Indian summer ones made all the better by the fact that it’s a businesslike Tuesday in Glen Ellen, with almost no swooning tourists, save the two slightly tipsy couples in the B.R. Cohn winery’s tasting room.

Gold and platinum records honoring mega-sales for the rock band the Doobie Brothers add a decorative glint to the yellowy light that oozes through glass-fronted French doors into this room where I am stupidly standing, hoping that winery owner and Doobie Brothers’ manager Bruce Cohn himself will just, kind of, like, appear.

“Bruce is in his office,” directs the tasting-room attendant when I finally muster out a request as she bustles past me into an anteroom to procure more bottles.

Stepping out into the buttery heat of the day, I start tentatively up the hill toward a large white house. Hundred-year-old olive trees stand cool and tall, without regard to the asphalt drive that now paves its way around them. Farm and outbuildings are trim and cleanly painted, built low like the chicken and dairy barns they were intended to be when this 46-acre former Mexican land grant was first farmed.

Vines bursting with the hot fruit of Cohn’s acclaimed cabernet and chardonnay stocks weave down the hill to the left; terraced down the right are olive trees, and more pleasingly straight plaits of grapes.

Cohn decided against uprooting the olive trees when he bought the property in ’74 as a muffle against the noise of Hwy. 12 below. As the olive oil produced by this rare breed of French tree–known as picholine–grows in popularity, so does Cohn’s appreciation for their muffle and their muscle; estate-derived B.R. Cohn extra-virgin oil retails for $50 a bottle. And while the oil is certainly excellent, believe that this is a really nice bottle.

Cohn’s office is off to the side of the big house, his former home, now destined to be the winery’s new tasting room. He and his family moved recently to an adjacent property, establishing a more private residence and acquiring enough extra land to have a total of 100 planted acres of trees and vines. With his adulthood spent in the down-and-dirty of rock ‘n’ roll, and a Sonoma County childhood spent in the sometimes dirty work of agricultural production, Cohn perfectly fits the model of the gentleman farmer.

In a separate building behind the big house, Cohn’s staff is eating midday chocolate cake while he is ensconced in his private back office, overlooking the pool. The air conditioner blares, and his large desk has an organized scatter of wine bottles, paperwork, and three dirty-yellow rubber duckies. The walls are laden with the gold and platinum platters of success, and Cohn has lively brown eyes, a quick smile, and a deadly astute boss’ voice each time the phone interrupts the interview.

We are talking about his family–the other one–the Doobie Brothers, who, after 14 personnel changes and some 28 years as an outfit, are finally playing a gig at Cohn’s estate. Scheduled for Oct. 12 and co-billing musician Joe Walsh, this benefit concert for local children sold out in just three days.

Cohn met two of the original Doobies, Tom Johnston and Pat Simmons, while hanging around his brother’s San Francisco recording studio in 1969. Already a great favorite with the Hell’s Angels, the Doobies were looking to record a demo. They took to Cohn (“I owned a Harley,” he chuckles. “I was OK”) and he to them, recognizing their potential to be as big as Creedence Clearwater Revival, huge stars then poised on the brink of breaking up.

Cohn and his brother Marty recorded the demo for the Doobies and sent it to Warner Brothers. Warner sent a scout out to hear the San Jose­based band live. “But we didn’t know where to take him,” Cohn remembers, “because the Doobies were playing high school dances and pizza parlors and Hell’s Angels parties. And we didn’t want to take him to a Hell’s Angels party, so we took him to Ricardo’s Pizza Parlor,” Cohn laughs, “and there were, like, 20 people in the audience.”

Fortunately for fans of such ’70s rock hits as “Listen to the Music,” “China Grove,” “Black Water,” and countless others, the Warner’s rep was an oversized man with an appetite for pizza and country-influenced rock. He gave the thumbs-up, Warner organized a tour, Cohn quit his job as a television engineer and director at TV-20, and they set off on the road. He was 23.

“It was a disaster,” Cohn groans. “The whole tour. It was a total failure. We couldn’t sell any tickets. We went out with Tracy Nelson of Mother Earth and we called it the Mothers Brothers Tour, and, ah–it stiffed. The record stiffed–it sold about 10,000 copies–and there we were back in clubs and ducking beer kegs at Hell’s Angels parties again, taking guns and knives at the door and collecting two bucks.

“‘Oh, yeah,'” he smiles, lightly imitating a hippie voice, “we thought, ‘We’re going to get off of food stamps and brown rice,’ and it didn’t happen. But these guys were tenacious, and they wanted to stick it out, and record companies were different in those days; they would stick with an act and work it over two or three albums.”

The second album, Toulouse Street, was the one that worked the magic. Featuring Johnston’s original hits “Listen to the Music” and “Jesus Is Just Alright with Me,” the album sold 2.7 million copies and made the Doobie Brothers household and carload names as radio stations played–as they continue to play–those songs.

Eschewing the usual manager’s take in favor of receiving payments and royalties along with the group–“I’m a member of the band,” he says. “I just don’t play an instrument”–Cohn set about creating pension funds, retirement plans, tax-lessening fiscal policies, and other highly unusual artifacts, in the rock world, of financial longevity.

Among his projects, Cohn bought the Olive Hill ranch where we are seated, two strong wills, not eating chocolate cake. He did it for his sanity, to get back to his roots, having grown up on a dairy farm in Forestville. He sold his cabernet grapes to Ravenswood, Gundlach-Bundschu, Sebastiani, Kenwood, and other wineries, and he made friends with such winemakers as Charlie Wagner at Napa’s Caymus Winery, one of the premier vintners of cab.

In the late ’70s, Wagner–the man whom Cohn credits as being his oenological mentor–persuaded Cohn to try making some of his own wine, offering to tend it in his Napa vats. The problem was getting it there. “I was afraid to bring him the grapes because August [Sebastiani] would drive up and down the highways, and if he saw me taking grapes to Napa, he would cut me off,” chuckles Cohn. “So I brought them over at night.”

In six months’ time, Wagner invited Cohn over to taste the results. Cohn, more used to after-concert tequila, admits that he had little palate back then. But he tasted his own pinot and pronounced it good. “[Wagner] said, ‘That’s not good, that’s great!’,” remembers Cohn. “Then he poured the cab and asked me about that, and I said it was great, and he said, ‘That’s not great, that’s the best damn cab I’ve ever had from Sonoma. Put your name on that label.'”

What Cohn did was to put his Olive Hill designation on the wines bottled from his grapes by Ravenswood and other regular purchasers. A case of Olive Hill Gundlach-Bundschu cabernet traveled with President Reagan to China. When Cohn phoned the White House to inquire why that vintage was chosen, he was informed that, according to White House investigations, it was the best California cabernet available. It would not be understatement to say that Cohn was pleased.

During a lull in the Doobies’ career (there actually were no Doobies for seven years in the ’80s), Cohn had a hit managing the band Nightranger, and used the money to begin his own winery. With his olive oil gaining acclaim, he and Olive Hill oil partner Greg Reisinger are branching into the specialty market of dipping sauces for bread, aged vinegars, and other small complements to the good life of the stomach.

Music, wine, family, and fine foods: Which satisfies Cohn the most?

“There’s not one,” he answers. “It’s like, which kid do you love the most? Each business has its own personality, but they’re all a challenge. I’ve spent a lot of time in music–over half my life–and so a big part of me is still in that. I’ve spent a lot of my life as well in agriculture, so I feel a really strong kin to that. The food business is probably the most intriguing to me because it’s so new.”

From the Sept. 25-Oct. 1, 1997 issue of the Sonoma County Independent.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

Los Lobos

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Los Lobos

Wolf Tales


Robert Sebree

Not Just Another Band From East L.A: Los Lobos plays LBC on Oct. 4.

Los Lobos prowls for new ground

By Greg Cahill

WE HAVE A VERY LOW boredom threshold,” says Los Lobos tenor saxophonist and sometime producer Steve Berlin. “If something isn’t exciting to us, it’s dead beyond belief. We just stomp it out and go on to the next thing.”

The next thing for this acclaimed roots-rock band is as yet undetermined. It’s been 18 months since the release of their eclectic Colossal Head (Slash/Warner), and after 14 years the preeminent purveyors of blistering rock, R&B, sultry cumbias, and polka-beat norteños find themselves strangely without a record deal (the band is renegotiating its longtime Warner Records contract).

That leaves the long and winding road, which brings them Oct. 4 to the Luther Burbank Center for the Arts in Santa Rosa.

Yet that’s a bit unsettling for a prolific band that has to its credit more than a dozen albums, soundtracks (including the Top 10 1987 hit La Bamba, Desperado, and last year’s Feeling Minnesota), tributes, and children’s records. “It’s kind of weird right now because we’re in between album cycles,” concedes Berlin, during an early morning phone call from a San Jose hotel room. “This is a sort of middle ground, so we need to think of new ways to excite ourselves.”

No problem. In fall of 1993, guitarist and accordionist David Hidalgo and drummer Louis Perez–the primary songwriters and creative force behind the band–anxiously approached three top executives in a corporate office at their record label to play a tape of their experimental Latin Playboys project.

The execs stared solemnly at the walls as the room filled, first with the sound of a scratchy archival recording and then a dark stew of weird found sounds, assorted mechanical noises, and distorted echoes of global folk music. It was a far cry from the bright Latin pop that made Los Lobos a household name a decade ago with a cover of Richie Valens’ “La Bamba.”

“Nobody said anything until the third song,” recalls Hidalgo. “It was a tough sell, but they had no idea what we were going to do. I guess it was pretty far off from what they had envisioned.”

The Latin Playboys (Slash/Warner), which derived its name from an East L.A. bar, was hailed as a post-apocalyptic soundtrack for the global village. It was the follow-up to 1992’s brilliant Kiko, a fiercely eclectic album that stretched the boundaries of the roots-rock genre with exotic songs imbued with Afro-Cuban rhythms and magic realism. “Everything fell into place for that album,” Hidalgo muses. “It came together quickly, and it was kind of like we were just going along for the ride, too.”

The breadth of their work should come as no surprise, though few imagined the heights Los Lobos would climb. Most of the band members grew up in the gritty blue-collar barrio of East L.A. surrounded by a bustling potpourri of Mexican, Chicano, and working-class American cultures. Music always was a big part of that upbringing. There were romantic boleros, the buoyant mariachi flourishes, the grittier norteños, and the narrative corridos–all from Mexico. Those were complemented by the Latin rock of Valens, the Midnighters, and other East L.A. musicians, coupled with the blues, R&B, and jazz that filled the airwaves.

This group of boyhood chums formed a folk band and spent their garage days ricocheting between mainstream rock and Mexican border music. They cut their teeth on an endless string of backyard barbecues, raucous wedding parties, and late-night dances before hooking up with the L.A. rockabilly band The Blasters, where they met Steve Berlin. Success came quickly on the heels of the 1983 debut . . . And a Time to Dance, which garnered a Grammy Award for the folksong “Anselma.” Their 1984 breakthrough, How Will the Wolf Survive?, was a Tex-Mex tour de force that showed up on everyone’s Top 10 list. It earned them Band of the Year honors in Rolling Stone‘s 1984 critics’ poll, tying Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band.

The band recorded on Paul Simon’s landmark 1985 Graceland album, soared to the top of the pop charts with its turbocharged version of “La Bamba,” and seesawed between several albums of acoustic folksongs and often blistering electric roots rock. But their creative peak was Kiko, which revolutionized roots rock in the same way the Beatles’ best work forever altered pop. Kiko–recorded without rehearsals to infuse spontaneity–is a multicultural Sgt. Pepper’s, a mesmerizing melting pot of innovative production, disparate musical influences, and dreamlike images that has elevated the rough-and-tumble barroom sound to high art.

“It’s just a sign of growth,” says Hidalgo, who downplays the notion that the album marked a creative leap. “Music is best when it has a charm, when it’s more childlike.

“When you capture first impressions, things just magically seem to appear.”

Still, Berlin is caught off guard when asked to describe that creative sojourn. “We’ve created a niche for ourselves that nobody else inhabits; I really don’t think anyone else can do what we do,” he says. “In terms of how the band has changed, it’s really hard to articulate from the inside. Because we do so little planning, we just let whatever happens happen. I mean, you look at a band like U2. It seems like they have a staff meeting every 20 minutes to determine what they’re going to do and how they’re going to dress. I’m not saying that in a pejorative way, but they obviously make profound statements about their image.

“By comparison, we never talk about it and just show up for the first day of recording to see what happens, relying on our instincts and our wisdom to get us through a record. It’s the same knuckleheads doing it, but we just keep refining what we do, not so much to get better as to get deeper.

“To us that’s the most exciting part, that we play something that really strikes a nerve in an interesting way.”

Los Lobos performs Saturday, Oct. 4, at 8 p.m. at the Luther Burbank Center for the Arts, 50 Mark West Springs Road, Santa Rosa. Tickets are $22.50. Call 546-3600.

From the Sept. 17-24, 1997 issue of the Sonoma County Independent.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

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