Jonah Raskin

-
0
Jonah Raskin

Free Radical


Arrested Development: Yippie founder Abbie Hoffman usually got what he wanted from the police–which was attention from the media.

Photo by UPI/Bettman



Jonah Raskin recalls activist Abbie Hoffman and the theater of the soul

By Sara Peyton

IN THE MONTHS before Yippie founder Abbie Hoffman surfaced in September 1980, after six and a half years of running from the law on a drug charge, he sometimes hung out at the rustic Union Hotel in remote Occidental. Hoffman–a counterculture Pied Piper whose no-holds-barred theatrics helped to entice stoned-out Vietnam-era flower children into antiwar activism–passed the hours drinking red wine in the hotel’s saloon with his longtime comrade and future biographer, Jonah Raskin.

During the visits, Raskin–who chronicles those times in his acclaimed biography For the Hell of It: The Life and Times of Abbie Hoffman (University of California Press, 1996)–put his life on hold. Hoffman–who suffered from clinical manic depression–talked non-stop, racked up huge phone bills while staying at Raskin’s home, paced, drank up his host’s booze, and put the finishing touches on his 1980 autobiography, Soon to Be a Major Motion Picture. “Abbie was busy organizing his surrender,” Raskin recalls. Those plans culminated successfully in a brilliant pre-surrender public relations coup–a friendly interview with ABC-TV correspondent Barbara Walters.

To mask Hoffman’s identity, Raskin introduced his fast-talking friend as Barry Freed, Hoffman’s underground alias. As Freed, the then-fugitive worked to protect New York’s St. Lawrence River from dredging and even met with Sen. Daniel Moynihan. “When he was here, Abbie talked to several people about how to keep the Russian River clean,” says Raskin. No one recognized the heavily bearded man.

The two men had become pals at the height of Hoffman’s fame in 1970 after the Yippie leader’s conspiracy trial for inciting riots at the 1968 Democratic National Convention and before he was nabbed five years later for selling cocaine. During that period, Raskin, an academic-socialist­turned­counterculture activist, unwittingly delivered an envelope to Hoffman from someone named “Molly,” who turned out to be radical Weather Underground leader Bernadine Dohrn, wanted on rioting charges.

On such radical wings, the friendship flew.

Before long, Raskin was the minister of education for the Yippies, an anarchistic band of publicity-seeking political activists who used the media to stage their rebel acts. Whether he turned up on the Merv Griffin TV show toting a marijuana joint or delivered a speech dressed like a Keystone Cop and shooting his cap gun into a crowd, Hoffman’s in-your-face theatrics got him the media attention he thrived on.

Cultural revolution is what Abbie did best, says Raskin. “But it wasn’t all show. The show was for a serious purpose and something that was really heartfelt,” he says. “The Yippies were genuine radicals.”

They were also more fun. “I can remember spending a day with Abbie and encountering a folksinger. We started singing and dancing in the street. We’d go to the Law Commune and meet with radical lawyers. We’d meet with Black Panthers, hang out on the street corner, or play basketball. We’d go back to Abbie’s place on East 13th Street and go up on the roof and climb into his hammock.

“It was just great to be on the roof of his apartment building and look out on the New York skyline.”

AS WE TALK at his Occidental home, the 55-year-old Raskin–a Sonoma State University communications instructor since 1981–pours tea. For him, it has been a difficult year of extreme highs and lows. Last summer, he faced brain surgery for a benign tumor. Though the surgery was successful, it left one eye weeping (recently corrected by plastic surgery). Two weeks later his mother, Mildred Raskin, died.

Last fall, For the Hell of It was published. It was praised as both a vivid chronicle of the liberation movements of the ’60s and a biography of their self-appointed publicist. Feminist Vivian Gornick opined in The Nation: “In the ’60s, the revolution pressed on Abbie’s heart as it did on the hearts of a few million others, and he put his manic-depression where it belonged: on the line for the glory of a liberated life.”

Others have condemned the era as silly and misguided. Calling Hoffman–who committed suicide in 1989 at the age of 52–“a “Groucho Marxist,” Jonathan Rieder wrote in the New York Times Book Review: “The violent anxieties [Hoffman] and the others were churning up in Middle America–to what end?–helped fuel the backlash and Agnew and Nixon.”

For Raskin, the book project reaffirmed his commitment to his old friend. When first starting the research, “I was angry at Abbie because he committed suicide,” observes Raskin. “But I’d forgotten the more positive things about him and his role as a protester-comic-genius,” he adds. “One of the things I’ve seen in the reviews is how much ’60s bashing is going on. But people came forward then. There was a generation of people who wanted to end segregation in this country. They were in rebellion politically, culturally, and spiritually. Relationships between men and women changed. We have much more freedom in the ’90s then we did in the ’60s.

“I don’t want to idealize Abbie. He was an egomaniac, he wanted to be famous, and he was excessive. He had plenty of flaws. But he joined with people who were trying to change the world and remake themselves. So they stumbled and fell and took wrong turns–so what?”

During the book project, Raskin drew on his own recollections, interviews with some 250 people–including LSD guru Timothy Leary, activist-turned legislator Tom Hayden, and black radical Angela Davis–FBI files, court records, TV and radio broadcasts, press clippings, and Hoffman’s own books and articles. It wasn’t easy to find the truth about the Yippie leader, Raskin says, since Hoffman deliberately changed his personal history and left a trail of false stories and documents, creating a nightmare for biographers.

“Looking back at Abbie Hoffman from the vantage point of the ’90s, it seems to me that he was the first American cultural revolutionary in the age of television,” says Raskin. Objective reality didn’t exist for Hoffman, who advised followers “to turn your life into an art form, a theater of the soul.”

Yet, for Hoffman–who affected what Raskin calls a “Jewish drugstore cowboy persona” as a teen, gambling, drinking, and hot-wiring cars before being drawn to radical causes in college–close, lasting relationships remained out of reach. “It was hard for Hoffman to look inside,” Raskin continues. Hoffman married three times and had numerous lovers; he neglected his children, sometimes bullied his friends. The Yippie male elite was sexist, and fellow female founders, including writer Robin Morgan, eventually denounced the male members and moved on to the women’s movement.

“The part of Abbie’s life I like the best was between 1967 to 1973,” says Raskin, about the years of massive antiwar protests, student strikes, free love, and LSD. “You can almost see Oliver Stone doing a movie on this time period.”

Indeed, Hoffman had a knack for the outrageous. On Aug. 24, 1967, Hoffman and fellow protesters dropped dollar bills at the New York Stock Exchange as “startled capitalists,” according to the Daily News, scrambled for the cash. A few months later, he announced plans to make the Pentagon “rise in the air.” He received a permit to raise the seat of military power, but no more than 10 feet. In a letter written to the East Village Other, Hoffman declared: “We will dye the Potomac red . . . and try to kidnap LBJ while wrestling him to the ground and pulling his pants off.” At the protest, the irreverent Hoffman and his second wife, Anita (who today lives in Petaluma), dropped LSD.

As the tumultuous years of antiwar protest stilled, the once-youthful hustler, who loved to get high, turned to dealing drugs. Arrested in 1973 for selling three pounds of cocaine to undercover narcotics agents in Manhattan and facing 15 years to life on felony charges, Hoffman turned to Raskin for help.

“One day at the Bronx Zoo he asked me to contact a lawyer in midtown Manhattan and pick up an envelope containing $10,000 cash,” Raskin writes. “I remember when I handed it over, I said goodbye, thinking I’d never see him again.” For most, that’s how the story of Abbie Hoffman ends, with the one-time radical leader slipping underground and out of the spotlight. Though he surfaced in 1980, Hoffman never successfully inserted himself again into public life. Unable to cope with the demons of his mental illness, he sabotaged efforts at recovery.

But his biographer remembers those underground years fondly. “When Abbie was underground, lots of people helped him, even though it could have gotten them in trouble for harboring a fugitive. There was the romance of helping the outlaw,” says Raskin.

“I had some of that romance too.”

From the February 13-19, 1997 issue of the Sonoma County Independent

This page was designed and created by the Boulevards team.
© 1997 Metrosa, Inc.

Talking Pictures

-
0
Talking Pictures

Words Words Words


Red Diaper Bard: The infinite complexity of Shakespeare’s “Hamlet,” as revealed by Kenneth Branagh, pleases language-loving Josh Kornbluth.



Renowned monologuist Josh Kornbluth revels in Branagh’s wordy new take on Hamlet

By David TempletonWriter David Templeton takes interesting people to interesting movies in his ongoing quest for the ultimate post-film conversation. This time out, he meets renowned San Francisco monologuist Josh Kornbluth to size up Kenneth Branagh’s enthusiastically wordy adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

A severely blond Kenneth Branagh, in the role of , has just uttered his fiery proclamation that all his thoughts will henceforth be bloody ones. The camera pans back, the music swells, and the word Intermission float up onto the screen. Moments later, the lobby is raucously packed with people, many forming into loose-knit clusters to murmur and debate with unreserved intensity.

Josh Kornbluth, calmly munching on a bagel, is moving beelike from group to group, sampling the various verbal nectars before moving on to the next cluster. A common topic is the epic four-hour length of the film, a measure that is due to director Branagh’s decision to edit not a single line from Shakespeare’s original text.

When word is given that the film is about to resume, Kornbluth returns to his seat, commenting, “I don’t know. I’ve sat through plenty of 90-minute films that seemed a whole lot longer.”

Verily.

Hamlet, lush and entertaining, energetically performed by such watchable performers as Derek Jacobi, Charlton Heston, Julie Christie, Robin Williams, and Kate Winslett, is remarkable in spite of its prodigious length. In fact, the inclusion of lines and scenes that have been excised from previous film versions only illuminate the Bard’s mastery at plot and characterization, while never diminishing his knack for thick, showy monologues.

Kornbluth, though he might blush to be compared with Shakespeare, is himself a master of the insightful single-person oratory. His sly, smart, gleefully autobiographical one-man shows have thrust this mild-mannered son of New York communists into a luminous class of performers that includes Spalding Gray, Lily Tomlin, and Eric Bogosian. His remarkable work has now been published in book form. Red Diaper Baby: 3 Comic Monologues by Josh Kornbluth (Mercury House, 1996) is wise and funny, full of language-loving riffs on human nature that demand–much like Shakespeare, only far, far different–to be read joyously aloud.

“It’s really sort of cool to hear all of the lines spoken,” Kornbluth gushes, sipping a cup of coffee after the show. “That it wasn’t reduced to those few things that have become our little cliché friends–the ‘To be or not to be’ scene, and all the different speeches we know so well–is very exciting.

“Shakespeare, when he’s clicking on all cylinders, jumps in and just talks about people’s shit,” he continues. “And he talks about it really, really directly. Claudius says, ‘Sure, your dad died, but he had a dad who died, and his dad died, and his dad died–so what’s the big deal?’ That’s some very profound shit!”

He stares down at his coffee for a moment.

“I think the lives we live today, as we live them, are not generally represented in the commercial visual media with anywhere near the complexity or the richness that our experiences deserve,” he finally remarks. “But Shakespeare does that. He has an amazing grasp of the complexity of human nature. Hamlet is good, but he’s also bad. Everyone is complex.

“But in mainstream stuff,” Kornbluth goes on, shaking his head, “Obi Wan Kenobi is good and Darth Vader is evil, and that’s as complex as it gets. It’s like a binary system. It’s zero and one.

“But in Shakespeare, there are all the possible numbers. We are 0.000111, or we’re 0.001222. You know? We’re the square root of minus one! Within the human character, all numerical values are possible.

“What most movies and plays do, though, is to say the opposite. Zero and one. They say, ‘The things that you feel about yourself, the contradictions that come to you as you are falling asleep, the contradictions you see in other peoples lives, the paradoxes that cannot be reconciled–forget about those! Those are fruity phantasms. You should simply understand that you are either zero or one. You’re a superstar or you’re nobody. You are a success or a failure. You’re evil or good. You’re either a fine upstanding parent or a bad parent.’

“But why not both in conflict with each other?” Kornbluth demands. “Hamlet is all about how we are both. At least, I think that’s what it’s about. What do I know?” He laughs again, throws back the last swallow of coffee, and concludes thusly.

“Here’s what I do know,” he smiles. “I know that watching Shakespeare, it seems to opens you up, and I realize afterwards that I am not even scratching the surface of what it means to be alive. I am not scratching the surface, intellectually, of what I want from my own experience.”

Very cool shit indeed.

A web exclusive to the February 13-19, 1997 issue of the Sonoma County Independent

This page was designed and created by the Boulevards team.
© 1997 Metrosa, Inc.

Mexico

-
0

Mexico Barbaro

By John Ross

The noisy appearance of hundreds of soldiers at 8 a.m. on the quiet streets of Santa Fe, in the west of the capital, startled the neighbors–but the troops had come in peace. The soldiers formed long lines outside voter registration modules and waited patiently; Jan. 15 was the last day to receive a photo-credential that would allow citizens to cast a ballot in critical July mid-term elections, which will select a new Congress and, for the first time ever, a mayor of Mexico City chosen by the people.

Approached by reporters who could not recall such a military display at the modules before, the soldiers refused to identify themselves and turned away from the cameras, tersely explaining that they were merely “following orders from our superiors” to pick up their voting credential. By regulation, military personnel are forbidden to talk to the press without the permission of the Secretary of Defense.

The soldiers’ silence was a typically close-mouthed performance by a military that is considered one of the most insular and Sphinx-like in Latin America. Nonetheless, the appearance of the troops outside the walls of Military Camp No. 1, the sprawling base on the city’s western borders, was a rare peek at how electoral politics function inside the Mexican Army, reflecting the surprising political visibility the Mexican military establishment has drawn to itself lately.

Just two days before, 11 high-ranking retired military officers (including three brigadier generals, an admiral, and three vice-admirals) had announced their affiliation with the left-center opposition Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD)– a deviation of allegiances that caused the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which has ruled for 68 years, to fulminate ominously. The Mexican military has generally “shown unconditional support for the State and the authoritarian structure of which the PRI is at the center,” writes historian Lorenzo Meyer.

Sympathy for the PRD within the military has been incubating since the 1988 presidential election, when party founder Cuauhtemoc Cardenas won precincts around Military Camp No. 1 and the Naval Secretariat from the PRI’s candidate, Carlos Salinas de Gortari. Unlike most modern Mexican politicians, Cardenas, who is a possible PRD nominee for Mexico City mayor, has strong family ties to the military–his father, Lazaro, president of Mexico in the 1930s, was the youngest of the generals who won the revolution from which the Army was born.

The defection of the retired high brass drew a feisty response from General Ramon Mota Sanchez, a former PRI federal deputy (there are three generals serving as PRI deputies) and director of the party’s old guard “Revolutionary Unity” section, who questioned the officers’ motives and accused them of being “delinquents” and “dentists” [sic].

“I am not a traitor to the military,” responded retired Brigadier General Gustavo Antonio Landeros, “I’m a traitor to intimidation and abuse. The military is tired of being used to cover up the inadequacies of the government” to resolve social problems. Brigadier General Samuel Lara decried the “entreguismo” of the government–the privatization and sale of once-nationalized enterprises to transnational corporations–and the constant loss of sovereignty inflicted upon the nation in the name of neoliberal economic policies.

As a “popular” Army and a “revolutionary” institution, the Armed Forces are sworn to uphold a constitution the last three neoliberal presidents have altered constantly to suit their ideological commitments. Clearly, some officers continue to support the PRI-run state no matter how contrary its policies are to the spirit of the Mexican Revolution. Others have been forced by personal conviction to draw a line and openly declare their opposition to the technocrats in power.

What is most surprising about this debate is that it has unfolded in public.

After dominating Mexican politics for more than a decade following the Revolution, the military was prodded back to its barracks by Lazaro Cardenas and eased out of the corporate directorship of the state party by his successor, Manuel Avila Camacho, the last general to rule Mexico. Avila’s successor, Miguel Aleman, sealed the deal, offering the military complete autonomy over its own affairs in return for unswerving loyalty. After a failed attempted to win the presidency back in 1952 and “restore the Revolution,” the generals retreated behind the walls of Military Camp No. 1 and similar installations.

Now in 1997, the Army is once again asserting its presence in public life in a manner that observers like Reforma editor Raymundo Riva Palacios think reflects “the failure of civilian authority” to resolve the nation’s most pressing social and economic quandaries.

Under President Ernesto Zedillo, military leaders have taken command of Mexico’s drug war and civilian law enforcement. General Jesus Gutierrez Robello sits opposite his US counterpart, General Barry McCaffrey, as director of antidrug forces–rampant police corruption forced Mexico to go to its military to tackle the narcotraffickers. The military’s antidrug mission has beefed up its equipment inventories by about a half billion dollars of US drug-war-generated weaponry.

In the past year, generals have come to occupy command positions in 19 state civilian police agencies and the federal district. In Mexico City, General Tomas Salgado, a hard-nosed military man whose last command was in guerrilla-ridden Guerrero state, has replaced 35 civilian police commanders with Army officers. Supersecret police units, under military direction, are reportedly being assembled and the newly militarized police now squares off against dissidents: A general commanded the riot squad that recently evicted two garbage workers from a traffic island, on the 97th day of a prolonged hunger strike, stimulating protest by many independent human rights groups.

David Fernandez, who directs the Jesuit-run Padre Miguel A. Pro Juarez Human Rights Center, is fearful of the militarization of public security: “The military is an authoritarian institution used to responding with violence. It has shown little regard for individual guarantees.” Fernandez also bemoans the civilian space lost to the takeover of the Mexico City police by the military. “It makes the transition to a democratic system that much harder,” he says. But Lorenzo Meyer finds a silver lining in this grim prospect–involvement in public security exposes the military to public pressures as their positions become more conspicuous and controversial.

The military’s surge into public life here was charged by the reappearance of the Mexican guerrilla after 20 years in hibernation. The 1994 uprising of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) and the 1996 emergence of the Popular Revolutionary Army (EPR) has mobilized half the Mexican Army and militarized a broad swath of the central and southern areas of the nation. Exerting considerable influence on Zedillo, a president with no deep political support within his own party, the military’s flattery and continual professions of loyalty have borne fruit in a budget that was upped by 44 percent in 1997. Off-budget bonuses controlled by the President may add as much as a billion US dollars to the military’s coffers.

Fueled by drug war hardware (20 U.S. Huey helicopters have just arrived), the military is expanding its ranks from 170,000 to 210,000 early in the next century–3,000 troops were added in 1996. But the military’s new visibility has its downside for the generals–allegations of human rights abuses have escalated, particularly since troops launched a no-holds-barred counteroffensive in Guerrero and Oaxaca states following the synchronized attacks by the EPR last Aug. 28.

Typical of the charges is a report filed by the Mexican League for the Defense of Human Rights, from the Mixtec Indian municipality of Alcozauca, on the Guerrero border with Oaxaca. On Jan. 13, Army troops reportedly rounded up all the men in an outlying village, forced them to lie down on the hamlet’s basketball court, and took 20 men captive–they have yet to be located.

The allegations are reminiscent of abuses charged to the Mexican Army during the first weeks of the 1994 campaign against the Zapatistas, when the military used the same technique on the Morelia ejido. Three men were singled out and executed several miles away, in a case that has been long ventilated by human rights groups with little success–the military has refused to recognize its responsibility in the killings and take action against the soldiers involved.

Similarly, the military has failed to prosecute troops involved in mass executions of civilians in the southeastern Chiapas county seat of Ocosingo. In one case, the Army announced that a lieutenant deemed responsible for killing five young men in the town marketplace in January 1994 had himself committed suicide. Case closed.

A web exclusive to the February 13-19, 1997 issue of the Sonoma County Independent

This page was designed and created by the Boulevards team.
© 1997 Metrosa, Inc.

Sonoma County Books

-
0
Sonoma County Books

Printed Matters


UPI/Bettman

Land of Dreamy Dreams: Sebastopol author Megan McDonald’s ‘My House Has Stars,’ illustrated by Peter Catalanotto, is among the favorite children’s books collected above.

Girls, God, galaxies, garbage–they’re all grist for our local authors

By Gretchen Giles

WHEN THE SUN peeks a few timid rays down our backs and into our gardens at this time of year, there’s no question: we’re out on our backs and in our gardens. But there has not been a reasonable share of that lately, and the second-best choice is obviously to be on our backs with a view of the garden–surrounded by a few good books. Adhering to our tradition of synopsizing books produced by area writers and illustrators, we find ourselves this winter comfortably awash in a bounty of new children’s books, as well as tomes on wide-ranging topics. Below, we offer just a sampling of the local crop.

Stephen S. and Jeanette K. Berger
A Tooth Fairy Tale
Illustrated by Camille Czech
Dragonbreath Productions, 1996

SANTA ROSA DENTIST Stephen Berger and his wife, Jeanette, have written a sweet ‘n’ silly tale that sugarcoats its message of dental health in the story of Vesta, a wise tooth fairy sent down to Earth to save the world’s children from tooth decay. Yeah, go ahead and laugh, but kids lick this stuff up, and the conceit that children’s teeth are as precious as stars is a good one. Complete with back-of-the-book charts, stickers, a poster, and other incentives, as well as a step-by-step description of the proper way to brush one’s teeth, this is an excellent tool to coax sulky brushers into better habits, produced by a couple so dedicated to the state of children’s mouths that they buy back tons of Halloween candy from kids each year.

Kay Drikey
Positive Aging A to Z
Vision Books, 1996

WHEN PETALUMAN Kay Drikey was a young 68 years old, she went back to college. With a full career as a mother and a business person, as well as a stint in the Peace Corps behind her, Drikey’s studies in gerontology led her to write this collection of 26 profiles of outstandingly vital seniors, ending with her musings and tips on the glories of the aging process, underlying her assertion that getting old has nothing to do with feeling old.

Robert Funk
Honest to Jesus
HarperSanFrancisco, 1996

SANTA ROSA’S Dr. Robert Funk is founder of the Westar Institute and the Jesus Seminar think-tank of religious scholars and lay people who meet regularly to hash out the historical and philosophical relevancies of the gospels and of Jesus’ life. A former ordained minister, Funk does not always find himself welcome in religious circles, as he is a Christian who doesn’t believe in God. At least, not the traditional notion of an omniscient, sentient being who presides over the heavens and can be called upon to grant a child’s prayer or stay a murderer’s hand. What he does believe is that Jesus was a living, breathing, fallible man who had the gift of occasionally being able to see through God’s eyes. That is, his spiritual powers were acute enough to be able to peer through small breaks in the firmament of reality to the glorious wonder of the cosmos that enrapture us all. With a constant feel for his readers, Funk cogently leads us through the plausibilities and implausibilities of traditional Christian teachings, taking the fundaments of faith back to the rigors of their historical roots.

Matthew Gollub
Uncle Snake
Illustrated by Leovigildo Martinez
Tambourine Books, 1996

A YOUNG OAXACAN BOY becomes insatiably curious about a forbidding black cave near his home. “Don’t go in there or you may never come out,” warn his parents. What happens next? Well, a baby could tell you. But the transformation that the boy undergoes from his time in the cave and the sentence he must bear thereafter draw on the power of myth and redemption, themes far elevated above the playpen. Sebastopol author Matthew Gollub has successfully teamed again with gifted illustrator Leovigildo Martinez (The Moon Was at a Fiesta, The Twenty-Five Mixtec Cats) to create a compelling piece of folklore. Based on traditional Mexican myths, Uncle Snake posits a distinctly unscientific notion of where lightning comes from, and does so in a poetic and challenging text, with drawings so beautiful that they were recently honored by the Society of Illustrators in New York. Highly recommended.

Andrea Johnston
Girls Speak Out: Finding Your True Self
Introduction by Gloria Steinem
Scholastic Press, 1997

GIRLS TALK. Girls listen. Girls think for themselves. The positive exploration of girlhood through former Independent writer Andrea Johnston’s eyes is designed to both resonate with and empower young girls, ages 9 to 15, who often internalize feelings of being “undervalued” by society. Based on the nationwide Girls Speak Out program (conscious-raising meetings for diverse groups of girls held by program co-founders Johnston and Gloria Steinem), the book uses the stories, poetry, and experiences of the young participants, as well as noted writers’ works to explore sexism, racism, patriarchy, and sexual abuse. Illustrations of female artifacts from “pre-history,” and their interpretations by girls and by the author, show how these ancient goddess symbols, unearthed in various continents, can be today’s role models. The book can be a practical guide on how to organize a “Girls Speak Out” program, or it can simply be a supportive connection with the powerful expressions of young girls who’ve learned that each voice matters–Paula Harris

Cynthia Lamb
Brigid’s Charge
Bay Island Books, 1997

RELYING ON FACT and legend, Cynthia Lamb of Cotati traces back her ancestor, healer Deborah Leeds, and examines the legend that Leeds birthed a devil that haunts us still today. Traveling from England to New Jersey in 1704 to marry a man she had never met, Leeds integrated herself into the burgeoning Quaker community, established herself as a healer of extraordinary powers, and comfortably bore and raised 12 children. But it was babe number 13, an unexpected change-of-life pregnancy, that garners the attention, as shocked midwives reported the transformation of the infant to a winged devil. Meticulously researched, Brigid’s Charge follows the wiccan path along its rocky road.

Verna Larson
The Bearables of Bernie Bear
Illustrated by René Torres
Vision Books, 1996

BERNIE BEAR lives in the woods with his ma and pa. Drawn away from home one day following the flight of a honeybee, Bernie becomes lost and stung, is found and comforted. That is all that happens in Santa Rosan Verna Larson’s story, and there are read-aloud times, when a child is drowsy and pajama’d, leaning with a head damp from a hot bath next to one, that not much more needs to happen.

Jonathan London
Jackrabbit
Illustrated by Deborah Kogan Ray
Crown Publishers, 1996

PROLIFIC Graton author Jonathan London turned out some nine volumes of children’s literature last year, earning himself both awards for outstanding work and a facetious honorable mention as the most overpublished juvenile author (R. L. Stine of the Goosebumps horror factory tiptoed away with first prize in that line). Deceptively simple yet pleasingly lyrical, London’s stories are usually grounded in a deep love and respect for the natural world. Jackrabbit is no exception. Based on a neighbor’s true rescue of a baby jackrabbit from a plowed-down orchard, Jackrabbit traces the brief stay the bunny has in a human home before she is returned to the wild to mate and have babies of her own. Plumped with smells and tastes, Jackrabbit leaves the animal content in the wild, dreaming sweetly of the exotic scent of bananas.

Megan McDonald
My House Has Stars
Illustrated by Peter Catalanotto
Orchard Books, 1996

MEGAN MCDONALD, the Sebastopol author who introduced thousands of children to the joys of a smaller order with her Insects Are My Life, is surely one of the only children’s authors to begin a read-aloud book with a quote from Dante: “And so we came forth and once again beheld the stars.” But it is exactly this deep-reaching sensibility that makes My House Has Stars so complete. Using the childlike wonder inherent in the notion that the stars we gaze upon at night are in the same sky that shelters people in Nepal, Japan, Brazil, and Alaska (to name a few of the places McDonald puts her characters), this poetic read-aloud book is chock-a-block with everyday facts about things like yurt-building and Japanese mythology, all the while stressing the commonality of the human experience.

Douglas Pittman
Principles for Living on the Edge
Quantum House Publishing, 1997

DOUGLAS PITTMAN of Sebastopol exhorts us to lead a “bold and daring life–expansive and creative,” in this extended essay on the positive. Taking the stand that we are our own worst enemies, Pittman offers affirmations and cues to loosening the restrictions of individual paradigms and of finding a way to stand whole and golden in this world, achieving personal and professional goals heretofore thought impossible by minds that have restrictions created only by themselves.

Vicki Sebastiani
Cucina Viansa
Viansa Winery, 1996

SONOMAN Vicki Sebastiani’s evocation of the good life tempts one to throw over all duties for a glass of rough red (served in a tumbler, peasant-style), a crust of good bread, and anything with olive oil, tomatoes, basil, and olives in it. Based on an ethos of living exemplified by the Viansa Winery Sebastiani owns with her husband, winemaker Sam Sebastiani, this book is elegantly laid out, full of tips and wine pairings, and gorgeously illustrated with photos and doodles. There’s nothing fussy or even expensive about the food here. Rather, this working cook’s manual is based on the garden, the seasons, and the simple restrictions of time.

Ann H. Sutherland
My Grandpa Has No Garbage
Illustrated by Kathryn Graham-Wilson
Vision Books, 1996

CHILDREN ARE NOT particularly the ones who need a good sit-down with My Grandpa Has No Garbage. They’re natural environmentalists. It’s the older crowd, the purchasers, who already have set patterns of discarding that need to be discarded. In a straightforward singsong, Ann H. Sutherland of Petaluma tells the American tale of an older man who grew up giving discards to the rag picker of his city streets, moved to the country, composted, recycled, or burned his trash–and confounded the garbage company.

From the February 13-19, 1997 issue of the Sonoma County Independent

This page was designed and created by the Boulevards team.
© 1997 Metrosa, Inc.

Jean Hegland

-
0
Jean Hegland

Tree for Two


Into the Woods: Jean Hegland sees the forest for the trees in her new novel.

Photo by UPI/Bettman



Author Jean Hegland goes wild

By Zack Stentz

ONE OF THE YEAR’S most fascinating science fiction novels has nary a starship or extraterrestrial in any of its 193 pages. Instead, novelist Jean Hegland’s Into the Forest (Calyx, 1996) takes as its subjects Nell and Eva, two intelligent teenage girls trying to survive in an isolated house in the heart of a redwood forest, while outside society gradually falls apart and reverts to chaos. Nell and Eva’s priorities aren’t to seek out new life forms and new civilizations; they’re to figure out how to grow their own food, keep healthy, and defend themselves in a world suddenly gone low-tech and savage.

Interestingly, the actual details of society’s collapse are left vague, and form an indistinct backdrop to the realities of the girls’ day-to-day existence. “I think that I was much more interested in how a disaster would/will affect individuals than how it will come about,” says Hegland, sitting at a table on the 55 acres of second-growth forest property she shares with her husband and three children near Healdsburg. “Individuals won’t know what’s happening in the wider world. You don’t know what’s going on and you’re left to your own devices.”

DRIVING OUT to meet Hegland at her remote home, it isn’t difficult to guess what inspired her to tell the tale of two teenage girls living far from the nearest town. To reach her house, one must navigate several miles of axle-shattering dirt road and cross a one-lane bridge rickety enough to make Indiana Jones wish he’d majored in mathematics instead of archaeology. “We’re not quite as isolated as Nell and Eva,” she says.

Still, Hegland is familiar enough with the often unglamorous realities of rural life to have not succumbed to Rousseau-like fantasies and romanticized the glories of living close to nature. “I don’t have any illusions about what Nell and Eva are up against,” she says. “They’re going to have hard lives, to lose teeth and break bones, and their baby could choke on something or die of any number of things.

“And yet, we place this enormous value on living a long time and avoiding discomfort, and I wonder sometimes if that value is misplaced.”

Hegland’s two minds on the subject of civilization and its discontents are manifested in the novel’s big-wow finish. Without giving away too much, suffice it to say the two girls make an irrevocable break with society. “Some people find the ending really heartbreaking, while others say ‘Yeah!’ and are really excited by the girls’ decision.”

Mixed reaction to the finale aside, Into the Forest has garnered plenty of praise since its debut in July, with Hegland garnering positive reviews and touring independent bookstores up and down the West Coast in support of the novel. “Since it was published by a feminist company, a lot of the interest has been coming from those quarters,” she says, of the book which has just been picked up by Bantam. “But I’ve also had people tell me things like ‘My 19-year-old son saw my copy and then read the book and loved it.'”

Stranger still to Hegland has been the desire of some readers to draw one-to-one correspondences between events in the book and the author’s own life and personality. “I’ve been surprised at how much people who know me want to read my life into the book,” she says. “I suppose that has to do with people’s interest in that mysterious thing that happens when stories get written. But none of my characters corresponds exactly to me or anyone else. There’s some of me in all of them, but their lives are not my own.

“And,” she adds, laughing, “they had a much nicer house than we do.”

HAVING LIVED and studied for a time in eastern Washington state, Hegland got to see a societal breakdown up close when Mount St. Helens blew its top in 1980. “That was the funny thing about the disaster,” she recalls. “The people closest to it knew the least about what was going on.”

But even a cursory read of Into the Forest reveals that Hegland’s primary source of inspiration was not her life but her imagination. And like many fiction writers, she felt the disorienting twinge of having her own characters become more real to her than the actual people in her life. “It was very strange,” she says. “I’d be writing, and then I’d get up and actually be surprised to see my own face looking back at me in the mirror, and not Nell’s. I even had Nell’s dreams sometimes.”

Though already at work on her next novel, Hegland makes it clear that she hasn’t entirely left Nell and Eva behind. “I’m definitely finished with this book,” she says, “and I’ll never write a sequel, but I do find myself thinking about the characters, and what became of them, and how they’re doing now.”

From the February 13-19, 1997 issue of the Sonoma County Independent

This page was designed and created by the Boulevards team.
© 1997 Metrosa, Inc.

Barf-O-Rama

-
0
Barf-O-Rama

Snips & Snails


From roach burritos to diaper gravy, Barf-O-Rama delivers

By Warren St. John



FIRST THERE WAS Mad magazine and later came Pee Wee’s Playhouse and The Simpsons. Now, naughtiest of all, there is Barf-O-Rama–a series of books that will surely delight kids and make their parents shudder. With its emphasis on scatology for scatology’s sake, this series won’t be winning any Caldecott awards.

So far, 10 Barf-O-Rama books have appeared in print, with titles like The Great Puke-Off, Pig Breath, Dog Doo Afternoon, and The Legend of Bigfart. Seven more are due out in coming months. The books deal with “a helmet full of hurl,” “fettuccine al farto,” and “buttwurst.” If these books have any redeeming value, it is that they will keep little Timmy turning the pages of an actual book, rather than zoning out in front of the VCR.

The series is the brainchild of Ann Brashares, a very mild 29-year-old editor at the Daniel Weiss Associates literary agency. When Brashares talks about Barf-O-Rama, what she is really talking about is boogers, “scab pie,” and even “balloons filled with diaper gravy.” This may not be the high-minded stuff that nudged this soft-spoken Barnard College graduate toward a career in publishing. But still, for Brashares, Barf-O-Rama represents the fulfillment of a dream.

“For a long time,” she says, “I’d been thinking about doing something gross.”

There are no whoopie cushions or plastic puddles of fake vomit lying around Brashares’ office; on the walls are photographs of her husband and baby. So how did someone so professional conceive of something as unapologetically disgusting as Barf-O-Rama? “I grew up with three brothers,” she explains. “They find gross things funnier than anything else.”

But as a businesswoman, Brashares has gotten into the gross-out game with a real purpose. Barf-O-Rama, she says, is all about marketing–trying to target that elusive group of boys on the verge of adolescence. The books, with their lurid covers–of a baby whose diaper is about to explode, a kid gagging on a roach-filled burrito–look like things that no parent would approve of, and therein lies the allure.

“It’s a famous problem that you can’t sell books to boys,” Brashares observes.

The Scholastic company’s insanely popular Goosebumps series of light horror has certainly won over this readership in recent years; Brashares thought she’d go Goosebumps one better. “I thought, ‘What if I do something about food? Or gross food?'” She developed a proposal for a book about a group of kids who get into a “gross-out war,” which she called The Great Puke-Off. She ran her idea by executives at Bantam Doubleday Dell. (Her company, Daniel Weiss, comes up with book ideas, packages them with writers, and then sells them to publishers, much as Hollywood producers sell to studios.)

Bantam Doubleday Dell was “reluctantly interested,” she says. Then Brashares called on an old friend, Katherine Applegate. Applegate is the Thomas Pynchon of juvenile fiction; her publisher claims to have never laid eyes on her, and she shuns interviews. She writes out of Minnesota under the pseudonym of Pat Pollari, a gender and ethnic neutral name conceived, ironically enough, so as not to offend. She gets paid a few thousand dollars per manuscript. Applegate, who is “somewhere in her 30s,” according to Brashares, agreed to give The Great Puke-Off a try. Bantam was skeptical, but Applegate turned in something so disgusting that the publishers had to take note.

Here’s an excerpt: “‘Aaargh! There are roaches in the food!’ Zoner shouted. “Allie was the first to blow. Her eyes changed from blue to green behind her glasses. Her throat started doing the gack dance. Then she emitted. She extruded.”

And in case you don’t know what a “gack dance” is, Barf-O-Rama books come with glossaries: “The spasms observable in the throat of a person preparing to gack, blow, heave, hurl, or emit.”

Bantam Doubleday Dell was disgusted enough to order 16 more books just like it, and the Barf-o-Rama series was born.

Getting in on the disgusting trend is Addison Wesley, with its Grossology series. And then there are the gross toys: The Archie McPhee Co. in Seattle is selling lots of brain-shaped gelatin molds these days, and a company called Brainstorms is moving tons of “Gurglin’ Guts Eye Balls,” which produce “oozing and sloshing noises” when shaken. These are all noble efforts, but in both scope and degree of grossness, Barf-O-Rama takes the cake, and gacks it up right back in your lap.

“It delivers,” Brashares says.

But won’t this stuff damage a child’s mind? Dr. Norma Doft, a child psychologist at New York University Medical Center, says, “Everything has to be taken within the framework of who the kid is. For some kids, it’s too stimulating; for others, it meets their needs.”

Even Brashares herself says, “Parents aren’t going to want their kids to have 48 Barf-O-Rama books on their shelves.” Dan Trace, manager of Copperfield’s Books’ Sebastopol store, doesn’t see this as a problem. “It’s a moderate seller,” he says. “We’ve only moved three to five of each number so far, and it came out in July of ’96. And,” he adds with a laugh, “my son will be 13 in April, and he picked one up and just said, ‘Yuck.'”

Dear old mom is probably the biggest hurdle standing between Barf-O-Rama and Goosebumps-style success. A survey last year in Publisher’s Weekly determined that mothers buy nearly half of all children’s books, with teachers buying the next 20 percent; kids themselves buy between 5 and 15 percent of the books they read, and fathers, even fewer than that.

Brashares argues that the books are an alternative to violent or scary stories. “Nobody gets hurt or killed,” she says. “It’s just that they’re pretty gross.” And how. To quote from that potential classic of underground prepubescent literature, The Great Puke-Off: “The two vomit streams hit Mr. Chapman like a fire hose.

“I stood on the seat as the tidal wave of heave rolled by.”

From the February 13-19, 1997 issue of the Sonoma County Independent

This page was designed and created by the Boulevards team.
© 1997 Metrosa, Inc.

Bernie Krause

-
0
Bernie Krause

Warning Signs


Nature’s Way: Naturalist Bernie Krause has released a collection of journal notes and field recordings.

Photo by Eric Luse/San Francisco Chronicle



New book captures Bernie Krause’s life in the wild

By Greg Cahill

THE BITTER TASTE of mortality hung in his throat. Bernie Krause huddled in the cabin of a New Zealand coast guard cutter, sailing to Antarctica through stormy South Pacific seas. The small cabin, perched at the stern near the engine room, lurched violently as huge waves buffeted the ship. He couldn’t eat. He couldn’t sleep. And using the toilet was like peeing into a coffee can while riding a roller coaster. The acrid smell of vomit and diesel exhaust wafted through the cabin, contributing to the roiling in the pit of his stomach.

Nature wasn’t giving up its secrets easily as Krause ventured back to the southern continent to record the sounds of whales, seals, and penguins.

In search of relief, Krause staggered from the cabin, only to be greeted by daunting 40-foot walls of dark gray water that came one after another, crashing on deck and threatening to break apart the ship. “It was the most terrifying experience of my life,” recalls Krause, who now lives in the green hills above Sonoma. “It took me two weeks to stop shaking.”

But Krause’s tribulations had just started. Shortly after recovering from the sea voyage, he learned firsthand about Antarctica’s legendary cold during a brief jaunt outside the research station where he was staying. Five seconds after he stepped out of the station’s airlock, against the advice of the resident scientists, the subfreezing air–174 degrees below zero–crystallized the viscous fluid of his eyes, lacerating the corneas and sending Krause to sick bay for several more weeks.

“You learn real quick,” says the soft-spoken naturalist and sound recordist of life in the wild. “Real quick.”

SOME OF THOSE LESSONS are included in Notes from the Wild: The Nature Recording Expeditions of Bernie Krause (Ellipsis Arts, 1996), a fascinating collection of words and sounds. The new 95-page book offers lively, insightful accounts of his exploits through entries from field journals and–thanks to a companion compact disc–excerpts from field recordings he has made of wild animals and their habitats.

“I wanted to give the reader a sense of what it’s like to record and to experience the world from an aural texture rather than from a visual texture,” he says of the decision to release a book/CD project. “We are very much a graphic culture, but in ancient cultures, the aural cues are much more balanced with the graphic. Because my eyesight isn’t particularly great, I hear the world, I don’t really see the world as other people do.

“That’s created an experience in my life that is absolutely powerful to the extent that I almost don’t want to do anything else except listen to that voice of natural environments, it gives me so much pleasure.”

Krause, 57, is probably best known as the studio wizard who in 1985 lured Humphrey the wayward humpback whale out of the brackish Delta water and back to the open sea. He did it by serenading the languid leviathan with a tape recording of humpback whale sounds. The episode brought him worldwide recognition.

But Krause–a slightly built, reserved man who harbors a real passion for the natural sciences–spends most of his time far from the limelight, recording the grunts, growls, hoots, and howls of wildlife in their natural surroundings. He captures the ambiance of rain forest and desert, meadow and marshland, by taping animal sounds uncorrupted by human ones–or trying to. In the past decade, he has released a series of nature recordings for the Nature Company and on his own Wild Sanctuary label. His fanciful 1989 recording Gorillas in the Mix (Rykodisc) used digitally sampled animal noises to create a jungle of jazzy beats. Krause is now creating complex soundscapes for a new Disney theme park in Florida and a Native American museum in Massachusetts.

But capturing the sound of the wild is a challenge these days: the pounding beat of oil drills travels 70 miles in Alaska’s thin Arctic air; the shrill buzz of chain saws ravaging the Brazilian jungles drifts 20 miles; and the auditory wake of airplanes and helicopters is everywhere. In 1987, Krause spent two months in Africa recording the sounds of Dian Fossey’s endangered mountain gorillas. “I got 15 minutes of usable tape out of 500 hours in the field,” he says, explaining that within earshot of gorillas feeding in the small Rwandan nature preserve are ghetto blasters pumping out rap, the shouts of nearby villagers, and the sounds of domestic animals.

Krause has been likened to a botanist collecting the auditory seeds of species destined for extinction. That’s an accurate description; he notes that of the 3,300 hours of natural sound he has recorded since 1968, 20 percent of his tape library comes from now-extinct habitats. In his new book, Krause poignantly illustrates that point by pairing two journal entries: the first, from June 1989, describes the serene beauty of Lincoln Meadow in the Yuba Pass in the High Sierras; the second, from April 1996, chronicles his return to find the nearby woods clear cut, the stream muddied, and the songs of the birds and frogs all but silenced.

“It’s like missing an old friend,” Krause says of the personal toll exacted by such grim discoveries. “You find something that gives you some sense of a spiritual place–some sense of solace in the world–but then you almost feel violated when you return to find that as human beings–as a tribe, as a race–we’ve become so desensitized to the extraordinary beauty in these places, which really speaks to us in a spiritual and a psychic way. As a result, we find ourselves with a void in our lives because we’ve allowed this to be taken away from us.

“We’re all part of that process.”

For Krause, that loss is powerful motivation to get the word out. “I’m hopeful that we may stop being so destructive in our living and our lifestyles–I mean, America is 5 percent of the world’s population and uses 60 percent of the resources–but until we’re prepared to stop that, I don’t think much is going to change,” he says. “I think that it’s going to get a lot sadder and a lot more stressful to live because there won’t be any place left to go for a respite.

“So while I am hopeful, I am not optimistic.”

Bernie Krause will give a reading and play excerpts from his field recordings at 7:30 p.m. on Tuesday, Feb. 25, at Copperfield’s Books, 650 Fourth St., Santa Rosa. Admission is free. To learn more about his work, visit his website.

From the February 13-19, 1997 issue of the Sonoma County Independent

This page was designed and created by the Boulevards team.
© 1997 Metrosa, Inc.

Sex Online

-
0
Sex Online

Wet and Wired


Christopher Gardner

On the Receiving End: Cybersluts come in all ages, shapes, sizes, and genders. The bi-curious coed could just as easily be a 78-year-old grandfather.

Sex within the online void
is completely surreal

By Richard Camp

WELCOME . . . ” Canned voice. Like the computer in Star Trek. “You’ve got mail.” Your electronic mailbox is overflowing with mostly dirty pictures. You’ll download them later. Click quickly past the headlines, newsstand, software forum, bulletin boards. Float to the chat areas. Cruising. People Connection. Lobby. Flirt Nook. Small talk, small talk, small talk. Cruising. Back in your secret life. Here you’re more comfortable–it fits you better than your real life. You feel connected instantly, intimate in the dark. Lobbing gibberish in the chat rooms, but whispering to others, reaching out, eavesdropping.

Check the names: HotJill4U, SxyGal123, BiDeb4fem. The profiles. Hobbies include “cheerleading, going to the mall, talking on the phone, sex with girls, sex with guys.” Looking for clues. Does she or doesn’t she? Doesn’t she “put out”?

Who’s really a girl, who’s really a guy? Sometimes you find yourself wondering if it really matters. It’s all part of the turn-on.

In your wired world, your so-called life, you’re a cyberswinger, a cyberstud, and all the girls are 16, 18, 21, and bi-curious (which sounds cuter somehow than bisexual). They are coeds who work as models on the side or as strippers in the dark blue night, or they are lonely housewives, teen virgins, or sly Lolitas, or leatherdom’s leather-bound, pierced and wrathful. All the men are six feet tall, square-jawed, and hung like John Holmes.

And the funny thing is that it all may be true. Or not. Doesn’t matter. In the void, you can be whoever you want to be. It’s as real as your mind can make it. Suspend your disbelief.

Have Any Pets?

I know I am nearing the end of my cyberlife, my dubious semi-journalistic adventures online, when somebody, some stranger in the void, sends me, unexpected and unencouraged, a Tijuana sideshow online picture of a woman fellating the member of a horse. Not a horse, really. More like a pony. Neither the woman nor the pony appears to be having a particularly enjoyable time. I don’t know whether to be disgusted or to laugh out loud.

The sender includes only a brief note, which reads, “Do you have any pets?” Welcome to the virtual community.

I’m new to America Online. I’ve stumbled into the cyberhood singles bar. And tonight is disco night. . . .

What are you wearing? What do you look like? What are you wearing? 38-24-34. What do you look like? What are you wearing? Pulling you close. What are you wearing? Leather and lace. Silk. Nothing at all. Kissing you. Touching you. Silk, leather, and lace. Feeling you. Touching you. Feel me. Touch me. What do you look like? Wearing? Pulling you closer, closer. Want you. Need you. Need you. Need you . . .

Yes, online we are a nation sitting up late in the dark alone in our rooms, shades drawn, lights dimmed, pants around our ankles, naked in front of the computer, our pale flesh cast blue and dead in the flickering glow of the computer screen. Stripped of flesh, of touch, of taste, a sense of heat and cold, hot skin, and goose-bump flesh, seduction is a game of mental Twister, a crossword puzzle. Grease up your vocabulary and get ready. Find the right combination of words, get them just right and maybe you’ll turn the conversation dirty.

The pull is seductive. You are whoever you want to be. Your best version of yourself. Sex–or what passes for sex–is free and easy and safe, without consequences. Everybody is beautiful. Healthy. No flabby stomachs, no VD, no crooked dicks. No date rape, no pregnancy, no morning-after question marks. No specter of AIDS. We can play out our brightest desires and darkest fantasies. Best of all, we never have to worry about tomorrow.

Wade in, feel the undertow.

One night, wandering through the chat rooms, spying on everyone, I discover a woman, a real entrepreneur, who will, for a mere $10, send me–safe and secure and fresh in a Ziploc bag– a pair of her panties in which she has recently masturbated.

Brian, a young college kid from the Midwest, finally admits to me during an impromptu discussion of embarrassing cybermoments that he engaged in frantic, fast, and sweaty one-handed typing, sans pants, with a woman he understood was a young, hot bi-curious coed. As they neared the end–the part with all the ‘ohhhhhhhhhhs’ and ‘ahhhhhhs,’ CAPITAL LETTERS and !!!!!!!!!!!–she suddenly dropped an information bomb on him: She was, in fact, not a young and nubile nymphet with a gymnast’s flexibility, as she had previously said. Rather, she was a 79-year-old grandmother who’d snuck into the rec room of the nursing home for a little AOL cyberfling.

“You loved it, admit,” she typed. “I got you off, young man.”

Then the screen erupted in a flurry of giggles.

As Brian recalls, “She just kept typing ‘heeeheee heeeheee heeeheee.'”

A young girl, brazen on screen, is nervous when I call her for our interview. Her sweet, lilting Southern accent makes her sound younger than she actually is, at least that’s what I tell myself. The echo and clink of dishes being put away follow our conversation around the room. I ask her questions, but mostly there is only the sound of her putting the dishes away.

“Look,” she says finally. “I know that I said I’d answer some of your questions . . . “

She pauses. “But you sound old.”

“I am old,” I say. And I feel it as I hear her young, wavering voice.

It dawns on me that she doesn’t believe I am a legitimate writer.

“Look, I’m sorry,” she says, presumably putting the last dish away, “but my boyfriend just showed up, so I gotta go.”

I arrange to talk over the phone to another woman I’d met online. I ask if she is alone. “No,” she says. “My daddy’s down in front of the TV. The game is on.” I ask her to explain her $1,000 AOL bill. She won’t.

One night, a woman whispers to me that she saw from my profile that I am a writer. She says she would like to call me up and read me some of her erotic stories, which she writes under the name “O.” I think she is the only one in the void to believe that I am truly a writer.

(Cyber) Affair to Remember

I meet “John” in the void, lurking in a chat room called “M4hotf4phx.” He’s a 35-year-old Bay Area marketing professional who married his college sweetheart 10 years ago.

“At first you feel awkward,” John says, “embarrassed, like, ‘This can’t be real. Can it be this easy?’ Then it’s, like, cool–there are so many uninhibited, sexually adventurous people. You quickly begin to feel like Don Juan or somebody. My wife had no idea. It was like I had this secret life. It was a real blast of confidence. I felt great, sexy even. Sex with my wife improved.

“Online, there is this feeling of distance, of safety. At the same time, there is an instant intimacy. As the words appear on your screen, they are like whispers. You are like co-conspirators. I always talk a little first. Tell them I was unhappily married. It was easy,” John explains. “I was just playing around. Meeting people and doing it online. Late-night seductions and lunchtime quickie nooners.

“Then I met Jane, a 25-year-old medical student in New York who lives with her boyfriend,” John continues. “She was sweet. I met her one night just cruising around as usual. We talked about all sorts of things. Mindless chatter, our lives, our spouses. We seduced each other and later began having phone sex. We’d meet and chat online, arrange a time to call. She’d send me these hot little notes. It was great. I felt wanted. The situation felt dangerous.

“Don’t get me wrong,” John quickly adds. “I met some really sweet girls online. Began to feel very emotional about a few of them, especially Jane. But sooner or later, you lose perspective. I mean, when I wouldn’t hear from Jane for a day or two, I’d actually get worried. When she told me she was doing this with other guys online, I got jealous.”

John laughs here; then the tape is quiet for several heavy moments.

“One night she sends me this message . . . her brother had been in a car accident and was in the hospital. She said she wanted me to call her. That she couldn’t stop crying and didn’t know what to do. She said she needed someone to hold her. And my first thought was like, ‘What do I do? What can I do?’ I felt helpless, totally unable to help this poor woman. But, though I hate to admit it, my second reaction was stronger–it surprised me how strong it was. It was like, ‘Why the fuck are you calling me?’ I mean, come on, I’m really a goddamn stranger, aren’t I?

“That’s when I decided to pull the plug on the thing,” John says. “It was getting boring anyway. You start to get paranoid. At first it’s fun trying to figure out who’s telling the truth and who’s pulling your chain. But, after a while, it becomes a drag. It starts to feel stupid. It’s like suddenly you realize that this fantasy world doesn’t really exist, that you are alone in front of the computer or on the phone jacking off.

“I was having other doubts, too. Was I really having an affair? My wife never had any idea. I started thinking, ‘Why am I doing this? This isn’t my life.’

“When I wrote Jane to tell her that I was breaking it off, canceling my America Online account, she started sending me these psycho messages. ‘Don’t ignore me! I won’t let you ignore me. I love you!’ It got scary, stupid, ridiculous.”

He pulled the plug on the relationship, but not on AOL.

Then there’s Jane’s side of the story. “I was a newbie [newcomer online],” Jane recalls. “I’d met a couple of guys and had cybersex before I met John. One of them even talked me into phone sex. It wasn’t great, but I liked the sense of anticipation. The attention. John was sweet, articulate, older. We talked about things other than just sex. He was having problems with his marriage. We talked a lot. The phone sex was great–great voice, John, if you’re out there. I guess I kinda fell in love with him.

“I met other guys online after I met him. But he was, like, my first. You know, special,” Jane says. “I’m afraid now I’m becoming a cyberslut. I sleep with guys online who I’d never even approach in real life. It’s like I’m addicted. Besides, it’s fun and safe. How many other things can you say that about these days? I even arranged to meet a couple of guys in real life. One of them was this total nerdy freak–nothing like he was online. But the other one was really cool. I was really nervous. Like a blind date, only with all these expectations. He turned out to be really cute and really sweet. I felt like I already knew him. We had this great, really hot sex. But we haven’t been able to get together since.

“After that, I told John that I wanted to meet him for real,” Jane says. “I think this must have really freaked him out. He agreed, but said he couldn’t do it until the springtime. At the time, I didn’t think that anything was wrong. I pictured, like, this wonderful, sexy, romantic weekend. But then he got weird, withdrawn. I guess he couldn’t handle it. I guess you could say he dumped me.”

Operation Sex Change

Sex is undergoing a change in America. We’ve passed through the free-love ’60s, through the sex-fest ’70s, and the sex-is-death ’80s. Now we’re hip to be turned on again. But this time, we want to make it safe. In the void, we’re protected. Anonymity and distance are the safest sex.

We can’t get hurt in cyberspace, because cyberspace is really nowhere.

Many I talked to online think I’m a killjoy. They think this is all just a kick, fun. Killing time. Beats sitting around the TV. They tell me I’ve overreacted, misunderstood. Say I’ve overlooked the turn-on, the spirit of play. I have to ask myself, Can so many be so wrong?

We want to feel naughty, we want to feel hip. Have a secret underground life. It’s the flip side to our Puritan impulse. And it seems safe. The world today is a dangerous place, especially for giddy young lovers. Sex can mean death. Sex kills. Close the distance between us and you take a big risk. People kill each other all the time. We know it. We see it every night on TV. Our world is a dangerous place and distance protects us. But remember, it separates us, too.

“We are a generation whose rallying cry was ‘Make love, not war! Life not death!'” writes David Black, author of “The Plague Years,” one of the first in-depth magazine pieces on AIDS. “Because of AIDS–or rather because of our attitude toward AIDS–we have deprived ourselves of that alternative. Now there is only death. . . . Before AIDS, the sexual instinct was a force for life. It was a specific against all the horrors–political and personal–we endured. It allowed a last refuge of hope. After AIDS, we have allowed ourselves to surrender that last refuge. We no longer have the power to deny death by an act of love. Even making love is tinged with doom.”

Is sex in the void really an act of defiance, our last remaining refuge against death? Maybe. The problem is that it isn’t real. In the face of AIDS and death, technology, and alienation, we’ve traded making love–if not making love, then actual human contact, skin on skin, body heat–and cashed it in for relentless masturbation. Instead of having sex, making love, we talk about it to each other, chatting across this distance we have created between us to protect ourselves.

Talk, Talk, Talk

We are already a nation that talks too much. Talk radio, daytime TV, the evening news. Our culture is voyeuristic, our experiences vicariously lived, our lives filled and filled and filled with onanistic chatter. We are audience participants. We’ve got Ricki Lake and Jenny Jones and Hard Copy and Cops and Dan Rather, Tom Brokaw, and all those talking heads on Entertainment Tonight and A Current Affair.

Maybe we should just shut up. Sign off. Go outside and feel the wind on our faces. Smell the autumn leaves drifting and tumbling along the gutter. Remember how it feels when someone smiles at us with their eyes. Feel the thrill of sitting next to someone, barely touching. Go wave to our neighbors across the back fence. Go sit on the toilet with the sports page. Because sex flying across the screen becomes nothing but a desperate try for connection, arousal across the cold wasteland we have created for ourselves.

Sex in the void becomes a sad, nostalgic tale, a bittersweet script for what might have been. Want to meet a potential lover?

Go to the supermarket.

From the February 6-12, 1997 issue of the Sonoma County Independent

This page was designed and created by the Boulevards team.
© 1997 Metrosa, Inc.

The Scoop

-
0

Tobacco Goad

By Bob Harris

AT THE PHILIP MORRIS factory tour in Richmond, Va., the PR begins before you even enter the door. From the outside, the place looks less like a manufacturing facility than a tobacco theme park. A stylized metal sculpture incorporates the logos of all PM’s major brands, including Marlboro, the best-selling coffin nail in the world. The smokestacks are decorated to look like cigarettes, turning belching pollution into a sight gag.

Even the footlights leading to the building are cylindrical with little filter tops.

Once inside, you fill out a guest register. After name and address on the form, there’s a space for “brand,” as if smoking was as automatic as a zip code. They don’t miss a trick.

The lobby is a giant exhibit on smoking’s place as an essential part of America. The company propaganda proudly trumps that almost a hundred million Americans light up every day. They don’t mention the 500,000 customers who die every year, including my dad. There are also displays about Philip Morris’ part in our culture, from TV sponsorship of I Love Lucy to the company’s recent acquisition of Kraft, Miller Beer, Oscar Mayer, and Tombstone Pizza (an apt name if there ever was one).

The company paints itself as politically progressive, pointing toward its Virginia Slims brand’s “positive” messages toward women. The doubling of female lung cancer since 1970 is again somehow neglected.

It’s all bright and polished as heck. The hookahs and snuff boxes in the display cases are as antiseptic and as well presented as the Smithsonian’s exhibits. The schoolkids going along on the tour are getting the idea that smoking is patriotic and clean.

Even the air smells nice.

The humming noise continues. What the hell . . . ? The tour begins with a short film in a viewing room that has large ashtrays screwed prominently on an arm of every seat.

The movie is an extended sales pitch, trumpeting PM’s concern “for consumers of today and a world of tomorrow.” It opens with the familiar old Marlboro Man ads, with the guy on the horse and the western music. The camera zooms in, the gnarly studboy opens his mouth, and out comes . . . Japanese. The schoolkids all laugh. The ads still run in Japan, where the cancer rate has skyrocketed in the last 10 years. Fully half of PM’s sales come from operations in 170 countries. The U.S. Commerce Department and trade representatives have spent the last decade subsidizing tobacco ads overseas and blackmailing smaller countries into lowering trade barriers against cigarettes.

The film boasts of the company’s concern for its people, its work at “creating and improving communities,” and its history of “meeting consumer preferences since 1854.” There’s nothing about the morality of pushing an addictive substance into undeveloped countries for profit. Am I expecting too much?

On we go to the tour bus. Both Vicki, our guide, and the bus are decorated in the red and white Marlboro color scheme. There’s a lot to see–the work area is three football fields of cadaverous contraptions sucking tobacco through underground pipes at 75 mph, requiring the services of 100,000 employees working three shifts to whap out a billion cigarettes a day. In small quantities, tobacco smells OK. But a billion butts’ worth? The place kinda reeks.

No one smokes on the factory floor. Pressed for an explanation–after all, smoking is a healthy patriotic American tradition, right?–Vicki puts it down to “insurance reasons,” newspeak for admitting that smoking is a messy, dirty habit that would eventually make the PM wage slaves cough up blood.

The tour ends at the company store, where visitors can pay for all sorts of PM advertising geegaws and snag as many cigs as their wallets can support. There’s a suggestion box–shaped like a pack of Marlboros, natch–for anyone who has a bright idea on how to increase the efficiency of this gruesome machine.

And of course, the adults get complimentary packs of any brand they want. Drug dealers always give you the first one for free.

The kids are clearly impressed with the whole thing.

Can’t allow that on my watch.

I open a pack of “lights,” light one up, and suck hard. I don’t smoke. The sounds of my lungs’ mortifying fight for air give the kids an idea what being clean and patriotic would be like.

Vicki doesn’t know whether to help me or scold me. Instead, she just smiles wanly and keeps handing out the cigarettes.

The Scoop is archived at www.goodthink.com.

From the February 6-12, 1997 issue of the Sonoma County Independent

This page was designed and created by the Boulevards team.
© 1997 Metrosa, Inc.

Sex Anthology

-
0
Sex Anthology

Take It Lying Down

Loving It: From the modern to the arcane to the just plain weird, the collected writings of ‘The Sex Box’ satisfy.

Collected erotica of ‘The Sex Box’ a great bedside read

By Gretchen Giles

GUT LIVE hummingbirds. Dry the hearts and powder them. Sprinkle the powder on the person whom you desire. So advises “Gumbo Ya-Ya,” an anonymously written almost-poem on the black arts of winning those whom you love to your side.

Consume the delicate testicles of spring lambs; daub a Eucharist wafer with semen; crunch down the water of a celery stalk: any of these edibles will help induce lascivious feelings in one–so says essayist W. L. Howard, writing on aphrodisiacs in 1896.

Because the bed is where the heart is, at least according to the authors collected in The Sex Box (Chronicle Books, 1996).

Coyly declaring editorship by “Anonymous,” this anthology–edited in fact by one John Miller–is a provocative compendium of the arcane and the erotic. Split into three volumes–“Man,” “Woman,” and “Sex”–which slide comfortably into one firm box, these readings range widely from the teachings of the Kama Sutra to Anaïs Nin’s Delta of Venus, to a lengthy essay by Havelock Ellis on the joys of foot fetishism (in which he not once mentions smell).

Sensuously titled in small, flamed-colored letters, the books in this series can’t be told by their covers. Spending one I-love-my-job afternoon curled up in my office with jazz vocalist Betty Carter coolly swinging on the CD player, I began naturally enough with “Woman,” which itself practically begins, naturally enough, with a recipe.

Curiously (and freed erotic impulses are nothing if not curious) citing sauerkraut as a childhood love begotten from a sick day spent doing nothing but watching cows cud grass, writer Sabrina Sedgewick craves the stewed stuff after lovemaking. She recommends simmering it with plenty of phallic images (read: sausages) and with shreds of the very fruit of temptation itself, the apple, putting the casserole on the heat before making languorous two-hour love, then decamping nude to the table to savor the meal.

An excerpt from Pauline Réage’s famous 1954 The Story of O concerns itself as much with the vagaries of female dress as it does with submission and seduction, while Nin’s Delta of Venus selection centers on the erotic components of a heavy silver belt and long blonde hair.

Food, clothes, hair, and sex: all this girl stuff is presented in such an adult manner that you almost forgive Miller’s collective metaphor. That’s particularly true when reading Christina Rossetti’s long 1859 “Goblin Market” poem, which fairly bursts its juicy seams with images of ripened breast-heavy fruit waiting to be taken into the mouth like a strawberry in Tess.

The selections in “Man” begin jovially, with ancient Roman author Ovid (he of the Metamorphoses) describing a midday nap delightfully eclipsed by the appearance of a disrobing woman who joins him on his couch. He ends rapturously, “Jove send me more afternoons as this.”

Sixteenth-century Arabic author Muhammed Al-Nefzawi’s writings on gymnastic sexual positions include convoluted descriptions of such lovemaking techniques as “the fitter-in,” “sheep fashion,” the beauteous “rainbow arch,” and “frog fashion”–the last as complicated as an engineer’s wet dream.

And guys, listen up, because Vatsyayana’s famed Kama Sutra has suggestions for enlarging your “lingam”: hit it with stiff brushes and allow stinging insects to take their pleasure there. It’s sure to swell.

Pleasures of a mutual order play out in “Sex,” boasting what must surely have been the first printing of the phrase “flying fuck”–Thomas Rowlandson’s 19th-century poem “Pretty Little Games,” which describes a lass riding her “steed” to ecstasy. Running the gamut from a sweetly told night of fellatio in 19th-century China, to Ellis’ toe tales, to the matter-of-facts of anthropologist Margaret Mead, the slim “Sex” volume gives us more from the sage Vatsyayana, who advises differing methods of slapping one’s partner to euphoria, but who saps any appeal from the idea of orgy, terming it “congress of a herd of cows.”

Most compelling of all is Molly Bloom’s sweet surrender to joy taken from James Joyce’s Ulysses, found in the “Man” volume. Joyce’s familiar breathless run, occupied by such homebody concerns as mustache cups and the always-present lack of money and the need for clean linens, builds as surely as an orgasm to its final, glorious assertion of the act of love. Yes.

From the February 6-12, 1997 issue of the Sonoma County Independent

This page was designed and created by the Boulevards team. © 1997 Metrosa, Inc.

Jonah Raskin

Free Radical Arrested Development: Yippie founder Abbie Hoffman usually got what he wanted from the police--which was attention from the media.Photo by UPI/BettmanJonah Raskin recalls activist Abbie Hoffman and the theater of the soulBy Sara PeytonIN THE MONTHS before Yippie founder Abbie Hoffman surfaced in September 1980, after six and a half years of running from the law...
Read more

Talking Pictures

Words Words WordsRed Diaper Bard: The infinite complexity of Shakespeare's "Hamlet," as revealed by Kenneth Branagh, pleases language-loving Josh Kornbluth.Renowned monologuist Josh Kornbluth revels in Branagh's wordy new take on Hamlet By David TempletonWriter David Templeton takes interesting people to interesting movies in his ongoing quest for the ultimate post-film conversation. This time out, he meets renowned San Francisco...
Read more

Mexico

Mexico Barbaro By John RossThe noisy appearance of hundreds of soldiers at 8 a.m. on the quiet streets of Santa Fe, in the west of the capital, startled the neighbors--but the troops had come in peace. The soldiers formed long lines outside voter registration modules and waited patiently; Jan. 15 was the last day to receive a photo-credential that...
Read more

Sonoma County Books

Printed MattersUPI/BettmanLand of Dreamy Dreams: Sebastopol author Megan McDonald's 'My House Has Stars,' illustrated by Peter Catalanotto, is among the favorite children's books collected above.Girls, God, galaxies, garbage--they're all grist for our local authorsBy Gretchen GilesWHEN THE SUN peeks a few timid rays down our backs and into our gardens at this time of year, there's no question:...
Read more

Jean Hegland

Tree for TwoInto the Woods: Jean Hegland sees the forest for the trees in her new novel. Photo by UPI/BettmanAuthor Jean Hegland goes wild By Zack StentzONE OF THE YEAR'S most fascinating science fiction novels has nary a starship or extraterrestrial in any of its 193 pages. Instead, novelist Jean Hegland's Into the Forest (Calyx, 1996) takes as...
Read more

Barf-O-Rama

Snips & SnailsFrom roach burritos to diaper gravy, Barf-O-Rama deliversBy Warren St. JohnFIRST THERE WAS Mad magazine and later came Pee Wee's Playhouse and The Simpsons. Now, naughtiest of all, there is Barf-O-Rama--a series of books that will surely delight kids and make their parents shudder. With its emphasis on scatology for scatology's sake, this series won't be winning...
Read more

Bernie Krause

Warning SignsNature's Way: Naturalist Bernie Krause has released a collection of journal notes and field recordings.Photo by Eric Luse/San Francisco ChronicleNew book captures Bernie Krause's life in the wildBy Greg CahillTHE BITTER TASTE of mortality hung in his throat. Bernie Krause huddled in the cabin of a New Zealand coast guard cutter, sailing to Antarctica through stormy South...
Read more

Sex Online

Wet and WiredChristopher GardnerOn the Receiving End: Cybersluts come in all ages, shapes, sizes, and genders. The bi-curious coed could just as easily be a 78-year-old grandfather.Sex within the online voidis completely surreal By Richard CampWELCOME . . . " Canned voice. Like the computer in Star Trek. "You've got mail." Your electronic mailbox is overflowing with mostly dirty...
Read more

The Scoop

Tobacco GoadBy Bob HarrisAT THE PHILIP MORRIS factory tour in Richmond, Va., the PR begins before you even enter the door. From the outside, the place looks less like a manufacturing facility than a tobacco theme park. A stylized metal sculpture incorporates the logos of all PM's major brands, including Marlboro, the best-selling coffin nail in the world. The...
Read more

Sex Anthology

Take It Lying Down Loving It: From the modern to the arcane to the just plain weird, the collected writings of 'The Sex Box' satisfy. Collected erotica of 'The Sex Box' a great bedside read By Gretchen Giles GUT LIVE hummingbirds. Dry the hearts and powder them. Sprinkle the powder on the...
Read more
1...9989991,000Page 2,165 of 1,000
11,084FansLike
4,606FollowersFollow
6,928FollowersFollow
north bay bohemian newspaper sonoma napa county logo
CURRENT ISSUE & ARCHIVES
East Bay Express cover
East Bay Express cover
CURRENT ISSUE & ARCHIVES
Newsletters Subscribe Advertise About Us Contact Us Letter to the Editor Press Release Obituaries Writing an Obituary Archives Find a Paper Distribute Bohemian Vote for Best Of Plaques & Banners
win free stuff
Features Local News News
Arts Books & Literature Crush Culture Movies Music Spotlight Theater
Astrology Look Media Opinion Letters To The Editor Open Mic Press Pass Rolling Papers
Dining Restaurants Small Bites
Readers' Picks 2025 Arts & Culture Beer, Wine & Spirits Beauty, Health & Wellness Cannabis Everyday Services Family & Pets Home Improvement Recreation Restaurants Romance Shopping
All Upcoming Events Today's Events Submit an Event Promote Your Event
weeklys california local media group logo

FOLLOW US

Copyright © Weeklys All rights reserved.

Our Publications

ADVERTISING Advertise Legal Submit an Obituary Legal NoticesFictitious Business Name (FBN) StatementsDoing Business As (DBA) NoticesTrustee Sale Notices

COMPANY INFO Job Opportunities Journalism Awards Privacy Policy Terms of Service

Support Local Journalism