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Opera Goes Activist: Carla Lucero's 'Wuornos' takes pity on a battered woman

Mark — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 19:13:48 GMT

Photo: convicted serial killer Eileen Wuornos Bay Area Reporter, June 21, 2001 by Mark Mardon Suddenly opera is enjoying a Renaissance among young composers and audiences. Once the art form seemed nearly moribund, an anachronistic form of musical theater in which bloated singers sang bloated roles in overworked, worn-out old warhorses. Now, in a daring departure from the stodgy past, composer and librettist Carla Lucero - one of the very few women composers in the history of opera - has created the politically and socially charged opera Wuornos - a full-scale opera to be premiered Friday at Yerba Buena Center as part of the National Queer Arts Festival. The ambitious production tackles head-on the issue of men committing violence against women in America. It zeros in on one particular woman - convicted serial murderer Eileen Wuornos, a prostitute who worked along Florida highways and who now awaits her fate on death row - who her defenders say was provoked to the point of striking back hard, not just once, but seven times. This is not the usual stuff of opera. Think of Verdi's Aïda, with its splendid setting in ancient Egypt and plot involving an Ethiopian slave and the commander of the Egyptian army; or Bizet's Carmen, which occurs in Spain of yore, entangling a gypsy cigarette girl with a corporal and a handsome matador; or Puccini's Tosca, in which a devout Italian girl crosses paths with an escaped political prisoner and a savage police chief, and ends up dispatching the cop with a knife. Again and again around the world, these magnificent museum pieces have played to audiences that, far from welcoming innovation, insist upon upholding tradition. This is the modern age, however, and the operatic nerve seems to have been struck in a number of young composers who insist on taking liberties that shock the blue bloods but warm the cockles of New Music enthusiasts. The results, so far, are encouraging: witness the recent smash success of Erling Wold's Queer, a chamber opera based on the William Burroughs novel. Now comes Carla Lucero, a lesbian forging new ground in an artistic territory heretofore dominated by men. Before she relocated to the Bay Area, where she had the good fortune to become AIRspace artist-in-residence at the Jon Sims Center for the Arts (then under the direction of Lauren Hewitt, now the producer of Wuornos), Lucero lived and composed in L.A., working with Collage Dance Theater, scoring for films and videos, and studying Music Composition at the California Institute of the Arts. She's young, and hugely ambitious, and hugely talented, and a host of equally talented, ambitious people have lined up to support her in her endeavor, including acclaimed soprano Kristin Norderval in the lead role as Wuornos, musical director Mary Chun, who conducts the Opera Ensemble of SF, and director Joseph Graves, a veteran of more than 36 shows in this country and in Great Britain. Hooking up with the Jon Sims Center changed Lucero's life, and will likely have ripple effects in the opera world for some time to come. Her opera could even make waves, but whether that happens depends on how many people are willing to give her a chance to present her case, and what kind of mood they're in. One thing is certain: the opera must fly on its artistic merits. If it relies too heavily on its social message to make an impact, it may be doomed to early retirement. The balance to be struck is one of high-minded social activism versus art for its own sake. In today's capitalist world, art with a conscience doesn't sell particularly well. The right balance can be achieved, but it will take uncommon effort - the kind that comes from the will of a woman determined to use opera to tell a tragic story. In the Wuornos prologue, Aileen Wuornos (Norderval) retrieves a gun from its hiding place and says: "If I am damned, who is forgiven?" The question is one Lucero has pondered and seems to want to answer, and the result, judging from the opera's synopsis (www.wuornos.org/synopsis1.html), is something of a morality play, with Wuornos as the tragic innocent. As the curtain opens on Act I, Wuornos stands upon a balcony, watching a media circus take place as reporters talk excitedly among themselves about murdered men found in the woods off a Florida highway. She taunts them, though they can't hear her, then recalls her horrible childhood: "A flashback reveals Aileen's teenage mother and abusive father in their home. Her mother is desperate. She makes the decision to escape, fleeing to the home of her parents (Aileen's grandparents). Aileen's grandmother is an alcoholic and her grandfather is disturbingly distant. Aileen's mother convinces her reluctant parents to take the baby Aileen." Already, the sociological line Lucero is taking in the Wuornos case is clear. Serial murderess Aileen Wuornos is a product of her rotten environment. We dare not judge her without judging the society that put her in the position of having to kill - repeatedly - in self defense. So her defenders, including Lucero, insist. Who, in fact, is Aileen Wuornos? Some of the answer can be found in the many newspaper accounts of Wuornos' crime spree and subsequent trial and imprisonment. The most visual/visceral way to get into the heart of the story is to view Nick Broomfield's fascinating, well-made but hopelessly biased 1992 documentary, Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer. Looking at the wild array of loony characters in Wuornos' life - including the lesbian lover who betrayed her, the hippie lawyer who prodded her to plead guilty, and the "nice" Christian lady who adopted the imprisoned Wuornos - you can't help but feel sympathy for the Aileen, and see your way to forgiving her for doing in seven tricks who done her wrong. Clearly she was hanging with a wacky and dangerous crowd, in the context of which her own murderous instincts seem forgivable. After all, she didn't choose her rotten life, it was chosen for her. In the build-up for Wuornos, including well-received sneak-peaks during the past year, many lesbians in San Francisco have begun discussing Wuornos, both the woman and the political and social issues underlying the opera. In one meeting at the Women's Building, two or three dozen women viewed the Broomfield documentary, then formed a circle with their chairs to speak their minds. Soon they were discussing the merits of using "psychodrama" as a way for women inmates to tell their stories as a way of saving their own lives. Medea Project director and talented performer Rhodessa Jones was there. So was Norma Hotaling, founder and director of SAGE (Standing Against Global Exploitation), a nonprofit organization in San Francisco which helps ex-prostitutes heal traumas and live healthy lives. The moderator put out questions about Wuornos, and the women responded with enormous passion and compassion for the woman's suffering, and anger at those who forced her hand. At the same time, they raised questions about the opera - not about its quality, which received wildly enthusiastic raves from those who had seen it in previews, but about its authenticity. Whose story is it? Is it the true story of Aileen Wuornos, or Lucero's conception of Wuornos. Of course it's the latter, and Lucero has put together a compelling libretto that promises a great operatic opening night. But does the real Aileen Wuornos, in her cell on death row, even know the opera is taking place? Lucero replies she wrote twice asking Wuornos' blessing, but received no response. Instead, she relied for her impressions in large part on personal letters from Wuornos that came into her possession from an intermediary. "What struck me was the child-like innocence," Lucero told the women in the circle, adding that the eventual hardness in Wuornos took over as a protective measure. "I've been more than responsible with the story," said Lucero, then reiterated, just for good measure: "Having the letters confirmed my perception of her character, her child-like innocence." And that, dear opera lovers, is how larger-than-life characters are born.

Dedicated-to his-Tormentors

Mark — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 05:37:54 GMT

being a lengthy, completely superfluous, shocking profile of the fabulously demented queer artist Tino Rodriguez by Mark Mardon Just now, Tino Rodriguez is hot. Some would say he's always been hot, but consider his art, rather than the 32-year-old San Francisco painter's vibrant queer sexuality. Even those who don't regularly patronize art galleries could well run across Rodriguez's work. Walk into a bookstore carrying gay literature, and there among the new arrivals you'll see a paperback volume with a striking cover illustration by Rodriguez. The anthology, Virgins, Guerrillas, & Locas: Gay Latinos Writing on Love, edited by Jaime Cortez (Cleis Press; 1999) is adorned with a painting of a young Latino man with dark-shadowed, unblemished features. The youth's huge, piercing eyes seem to gaze inward as his scarlet lower lip puffs out, as though he were about to cry; thick black eyebrows are accentuated by an ebony choker around the lad's smooth neck. Most notable is the translucent-white wedding veil adorning the young man's head, framing his androgynous face. The image smacks of transgression, a Mexican artist's slap in the face of machismo, through the somewhat heretical feminization of what ought to be, by traditional Mexican cultural standards, a thoroughly masculine visage. Is this merely a metaphorical portrayal of a virginal boy, no more offensive than a church icon? Or does this figure represent something much more revolutionary: an already thoroughly deflowered Latino youth, veiled to lure the attentions of other, predatory males - a youth who wants to be mauled for the umpteenth time, his lips pried apart and forced to wrap around someone's monster cock? His apparent sadness, in this view, would be that of a youth torn by his queer desires and the recognition of his outcast status in Mexican society. To puzzle out the answer to the image, one must know Tino Rodriguez and his body of work. Fortunately, opportunities to do so are near at hand, with showings of Rodriguez's work happening first at Bucheon Gallery, located in art-trendy Hayes Valley, and shortly thereafter at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, at the prestigious biannual group exhibition, "Bay Area Now 2." The Bucheon exhibition, a one-man showing by Rodriguez entitled "Apocalyptic Innocence," features a host of miniature paintings, all realized in the artist's signature style, a formalist approach to bizarre and often deeply disturbing scenes. The works resemble Renaissance paintings in technique and presentation, yet a close glance reveals twisted themes of decapitation, bloodletting, cock sucking, ass play, boys and adults flaunting their penises, rabbits and fairies at play, and demonic creatures with human torsos, erect, lustful, and sadistic - all rendered as in fairy tales. "It's a formal style, yes," responds Rodriguez when asked about his approach, which he developed mostly on his own, albeit with some training at the San Francisco Art Institute and elsewhere. "I'm painting in a very traditional way a very non-traditional subject matter. Like, one has someone sucking cock, and in another one someone's sticking his finger up someone's ass - in a beautiful Renaissance style. This kind of painting wasn't even done in the Renaissance, and if it was, we'll never see any of it, because they were burned by that guy Savonarola." In one of Rodriguez's miniatures, "Forever and Ever," a fanged monkey leers at a genteel, almond-eyed woman adorned in Elizabethan finery. The grotesque creature seems drawn not only to the woman's body, but to her bodace. Behind the two stretches a hazy, verdant landscape, a sort of dreamscape. "We have a saying in Mexico," says Rodriguez, who was born in Guadalajara and moved to the United States at age 12: "When you're a monkey, even if you wear the fanciest clothing, you won't stop being a monkey. Meaning people are what they are, regardless of what they wear or how much money they have. I think this ["Forever and Ever"] is a take on that." His parents were not artistic, and had little education. The first art that captured his imagination, says Rodriguez, were the religious images adorning old churches in his native country: "paintings, murals, retablos, all the statues with glass eyes. I think all these images are somehow a part of my childhood - a lot of blood, a lot of suffering. But there's a lot of magic too, all those cherubs and little kids." Cherubs, kids, blood, erections, and magic gardens are all reoccurring themes in Rodriguez's work. One of his signature pieces in the "Apocalyptic Innocence" exhibit, "The Golden Age," a 10" x 14" oil on wood painting, depicts all of these elements. It could be a fairy tale rendered in Renaissance style, but Rodriguez says it was based on no story, but simply emerged from his imagination without connection to any particular story (Rodriguez devours darkly poetic writings by Rimbaud, Genet, Bataille, Blake, and the like). A trio of rabbits dances in the scene's foreground, their shadows visible against the mysterious metallic ball behind them on the parquet floor, a manicured garden observable through the open-curtained window in the background. Why the inclusion of rabbits in this and so many other of his paintings, Rodriguez is asked. He replies in typical blunt, forthright style: "I like them because they're horny." Rodriguez places a huge emphasis on sexuality both in his imagery and in his personal life. When he isn't painting - and it's rare that he isn't, because he makes his living solely through his art, which requires enormous discipline and working late into the evenings as exhibitions loom - he fully enjoys the boisterous company of fellow young artists and gay revelers. He's a dancing fiend, particularly enamored of techno-trance music, and on his nights out at house parties, art openings, bars and clubs, he exudes boundless energy, enthusiasm, and lust. His laughter, rich and full, fills any room he occupies; in conversation, he displays a gentlelness that seems at times at odds with his chosen themes, so often dark and disturbing. Yet that gentleness can be seen in the faces he paints - so often modeled on his own handsome features. His subjects rarely smile, however; most often they betray an odd passivity, whether they're experiencing orgasm or being beheaded, or they grimace in the throes of unspeakable terrors. Why, he's asked, is blood evident in so many of his paintings? "Well, I'm Mexican, hello? I still have the pagan in me. It hasn't been that far away, the sacrifices in the 16th century." But one can't help think Rodriguez is working through some very personal issues in his chosen subject matter, a fact he confirms in explaining the subject of a self portrait entitled "Broken," part of the Bucheon Gallery exhibit: "That's me after being slapped." And who slapped him? "Oh, fuck, life. Actually, I was hoping to dedicate 'Apocalyptic Innocence' to everyone who had hurt me, which is really kind of cool, because everybody else dedicates shows to people they love, their mom, dad, boyfriends, girlfriends, families, things like that. And I'm like, why can't I just fuckin' dedicate this to everybody who's hurt me?" The opening reception for "Apocalyptic Innocence" took place at Bucheon Gallery (540 Hayes St.) on Friday, October 29, 1999. The opening reception for "Bay Area Now 2" took place in the Grand Lobby of Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (701 Mission St.) on Friday, November 19, 1999. This article originally appeared in the October 28, 1999 Bay Area Reporter.

Quentin Crisp Quips

Mark — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 22:36:06 GMT

The old queen speaks out on her nearly 90 years of camp by Mark Mardon A long time ago, according to 88-year-old raconteur Quentin Crisp--one of the English-speaking world's most visible homosexuals and a man renowned for rarely turning down party invitations--people had a lot more time for fun. "In Edwardian times, things were fun," he declares. "Then, there was more idleness, more time to flirt with everybody, to hold conversations, have great dinners and all that." Now, he laments, "Everybody's in a great hurry." "Fun" is the topic of the moment as Crisp fields questions, and he comments on it with special authority, given that fame is Crisp's pastime and having fun his life's work. He hobnobs with stars, appears in films and television commercials, commands stages in speaking engagements throughout the United States, cheerfully gives countless magazine and television interviews, poses endlessly for photographs and makes himself readily available for almost any social occasion in which his ready wit and striking appearance will lend extra cachet. As he listens politely to an interviewer's questions and responds with alacrity--all part of his job as someone "in the smiling and nodding business"--he sits in his cramped quarters on Manhattan's Lower East Side, nursing a bad cough. He's lived happily in the same cheap rooming house, on the same block inhabited by a band of Hell's Angels and their Harleys, since moving to New York City from London 15 years ago. That's when he undertook, improbably but successfully, to remake his life in the United States at the age of 74. "I was English before," says Crisp in a raspy voice, articulating his words as precisely and majestically as a prime minister addressing Parliament, or perhaps a Shakespearean actor delivering a soliloquy, "and there's no fun in England. "I should explain," he adds after a heartbeat, "that England is a vast, rain-swept Alcatraz. But America is fun because everybody is your friend." Well, almost everybody. Certainly he's looking forward to his trip to San Francisco this month, during which he'll promote his latest book, "Resident Alien: the New York Diaries," yet Crisp is unsure how he'll be received there, or how much fun the trip will be. San Francisco, he observes dryly, is the only city where critics ever gave his public talks bad reviews. The gay population of San Francisco, writes Crisp in "Resident Alien," "cannot understand my refusal to be an apologist, much less an evangelist, for homosexuality." "Gays have less hold on reality [than straights]," he says. "Homosexuals are people standing on the bank, watching other people swim." One can only imagine the reception he'll receive this time, in light of a recent interview with The Times of London, in which he was quoted as saying he'd support an expectant mother's decision to abort a fetus if she knew it was genetically predisposed to homosexuality. "Homosexual life is horrible !" he says when asked about the statement, which he stands by. "All homosexual men spend all their days in public lavatories, and all their nights in dimly lit back rooms behind questionable bars. Do you think you want that to happen?" Is this a form of Crispian humor? Or does Crisp truly feel this applies to all homosexuals? "Well, not to lesbians," he answers, "because they manage to conduct their lives in a more graceful way." Such statements may come as a shock to gays and lesbians who became acquainted with Crisp from his landmark 1968 autobiography, "The Naked Civil Servant"--or who saw the television film adapted from the book--and who prefer to see him as a model crusader, holding steadfast as an effeminate homosexual facing relentless persecution and fierce condemnation from society at large. As British pop-music celebrity Boy George recently wrote in his review of "Resident Alien" for the London Daily Express, the Crisp of yore was "a queer Jesus for the 20th century, his cross was pink and massive, and he suffered persecution on a daily basis." It was in 1908, near the end of Edward VII's peaceable, decade-long British reign, that Crisp was born and named Denis (a moniker that proved far too colorless for his liking). So, of course, while everyone in England was having such a jolly good time, he was a mere infant, not yet making the dinner rounds. But never mind that: Soon enough, as he grew up to be the dandy he was and still is, he began applying makeup and lipstick, coloring his hair, painting his fingernails, outfitting himself in the dandiest garb he could scrounge up, and bopping about the streets of London for all the world to see. Unfortunately, during the increasingly stuffy and tense Georgian times of his youth, England's general populace found Crisp's manner and deportment not only un-amusing, but reprehensible. He got a strong sense that life wasn't very fun at all--though it had its moments. He resolved never to hide his identity even from harshly disapproving critics, who were legion in Britain at the time. Crisp came of age in a time and place where to be homosexual was to experience extreme isolation. "Long before homosexuality was ever heard of," he says, "I was swarming around the house saying, 'Today I am a beautiful princess.'" He felt himself to be "the one among the many," and developed the notion that all heterosexuals were his "betters." Taunts, jeers and threats of bodily harm followed him wherever he went, but he deflected these by erecting a sturdy defense of gentle wit, gracious manners and elaborate deference to almost everybody. He became, as he often said, "one of the great stately homos of England." Over time, Crisp became accepted, even coddled, by the mainstream. His style became fashionable. He now feels most at home among heterosexuals and conservative or apolitical homosexuals (he rarely uses the term gay, and then only with some discomfort). His acceptance by society at large has led Crisp to distance himself from his youthful, angry, rebellious persona. He now seeks only to amuse himself and others, not change the world. As he writes in "Resident Alien": "I am concerned with the high gloss on society, not with its inner machinery. I am a freeloader, a dilettante, a butterfly on the wheel." Politics, Crisp says, is boring, the antithesis of fun. He's never been political, merely demonstrative. He deplores the way everything nowadays has become politicized, especially the gay movement with its insistence on gaining rights. As he wrote in "How to Become a Virgin," the sequel to "Civil Servant," "Anyone who demands acceptance places himself in the same position as a girl who asks, 'Do you really love me?' Every mature woman knows where that gets her." Even now, despite all his protestations to the contrary, Crisp is a de-facto political figure, representing gays and lesbians who seek assimilation into the heterosexual mainstream. He's an anti-role-model for activists and separatists, a pacifist and the darling of apolitical dilettantes. He merely wants to enjoy life and be friends with everybody. In this regard, usually even die-hard politicos are willing to cut the funny old gent some slack. After all, this ostentatiously nellie fellow has stood up for himself--and, by default if not by intention, for all queer people--through a global depression, numerous queer bashings, two world wars and the continuing AIDS crisis. Who can blame him, then, if his wit has lost its former bite and relevance: He's a long-term survivor, entitled to indulge in life's frivolities. Crisp very deliberately presents himself as shallow, as a product packaged to please others. He obediently goes where his handlers tell him to go, does what they want him to do. He has shaped his image to be passive and flaunts that passivity daily. When he leaves the house, he says, he empties his mind of any serious thoughts, making himself into a great wide-open vessel into which people feel they can pour anything. "You know," he says, "when someone asked Garbo what she was doing before her close-up, she said, 'I'm emptying my mind.' That's what you have to do." As far as personal relationships go, he's thoroughly democratic, opening himself to everyone and giving to everyone in exactly equal measure. Has he had a significant romance? "Oh, no," he replies. "No, I couldn't cope with that!" But doesn't he see relationships as a source of happiness? "Oh, no," he exclaims again. "I don't think a relationship has anything to do with happiness. They nag you all the time! They say, 'You're not going to sit around looking like that all day, are you?' And so you find yourself combing your hair for somebody you already know! It's absurd!" Then who are the people closest to him? "I don't think anyone is close to me. I spread my love over the whole human race. It's threadbare, because I spread it horizontally, not in depth. I don't love some one person more than all others." Does he feel that emotion called love? "I don't know what it means." Eschewing politics, avoiding emotional attachments, emptying the mind, being eager to please, dabbling in pop culture, letting one's self be steered by others: All these traits characterize art in the postmodern age. Did Crisp deliberately set out to create such an artful effect? He doesn't say directly, but probably he did, after a fashion. Like Warhol--in fact, long before the artist came along and created his Factory--Crisp set about methodically creating his own persona. He constructed himself from head to toe, and presented to the world an original, initially disorienting, but undeniably interesting and fun figure. As Crisp wrote on the final page of "Civil Servant," as a result of the "wall-to-wall puritanism" of his early years, he felt victimized and "constantly at the mercy of others." This left him "crushed and seething with a lust for tyranny." His real power, he discovered, the weapon with which he fought back against his persecutors, was precisely his flamboyant sense of style, his willingness (to use a contemporary expression) to get in people's faces. With his appearance and mannerisms hypervisible and hyper-real, and his social patter spectacularly witty yet artificial, Crisp has turned himself into a walking challenge to notions of masculinity. He has come to embody the height of camp, with its stylized mannerisms and anti-butch, pro-feminine stance. By caricaturing himself, Crisp makes both an artistic and social statement. As Richard Dyer observed in "Only Entertainment": "You've only got to think of the impact of Quentin Crisp's high campÉon the straight world he came up against, to see that camp has a radical/progressive potential: scaring muggers who know that all this butch male bit is not really them, but who feel they have to act as if it is." And what does he think of models of masculinity in today's gay community? "There was a gay restaurant in New York," Crisp replies archly, by way of anecdote, "and if you went into it, the only reason you knew you hadn't strayed by accident into a construction canteen was because all the men looked so clean. But they'd all got pre-ruined jeans on, tractor boots, kitchen-tablecloth shirts, and some of them even had tin hats--though they've never done any construction the whole of their lives!" Quentin Crisp died in Manchester, England on November 21, 1999, at age 90

All he needed was love

Mark — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 22:24:50 GMT

How Brian Epstein's passion for the Beatles shaped history. . . . by Mark Mardon No figure in rock 'n' roll history did more to trailblaze the road for future band managers - defining the path to success for all great bands - than Brian Epstein, who managed the Beatles, boldly shaping their ascent from Liverpool obscurity to global superstardom. Elvis may have had Colonel Parker, but compared to Epstein, Parker was a mere carnival barker. In marketing the Fab Four to the world and setting countless precedents in doing so, Epstein set in motion cultural forces that irrevocably changed not just the music industry, but global society. What motivated him therefore becomes a question of significance not just to Beatles fans, but to those who want to understand Western Civilization in the late 20th century. Epstein had the bad luck to be gay in Britain at a time when that country's criminal penalties for homosexuality were particularly harsh. The fact of Epstein's gayness, however closeted he may have been out of necessity (his homosexuality was well known to and accepted by those close to him, just not talked about publicly), figures hugely not just in his own life, but in the Beatles' vast legacy. Though Epstein hardly conjures up the image of a conquering warrior, his gayness turns out to be as significant in the course of human events as that of Alexander the Great. The decisions Epstein made in orchestrating the Beatles' meteoric rise were both revolutionary and hugely informed by his being gay. Whether these statements accurately reflect the historical record, or exaggerate for the sake of erecting yet another icon in the pantheon of manmade deities, they are impressions inescapably drawn from viewing Arena: The Brian Epstein Story, a documentary film by British television and film producer and director Anthony Wall, to be screened at this year's San Francisco Lesbian and Gay Film Festival. "He was one of the great original tragic stories of the new rock era," Wall told the Bay Area Reporter during a recent visit to San Francisco, "a kind of person that changed the world. He died in 1967, four years after he was running a record shop in Liverpool, absolutely unknown to the world. Then he managed to become one of the most famous people on earth." Brian and 'the boys' Wall's documentary, produced in cooperation with Paul McCartney and many others close to Epstein, benefits enormously from having first-hand access to archival footage of Epstein and his "boys," as he was forever calling the Beatles. We get to see intimate views of John, Paul, George and Ringo, often together with Epstein, learn about their party habits, meet their friends and colleagues of yore, hear them as they rehearse and perform, and relate to them on a profoundly human level, rather than at the level of untouchable superstars. The striking thing in the film is the contrast starkly revealed between the rough-and-ready boys, with their working-class accents and manners, and the refined, impeccably tailored, elegant Epstein, whose personal style masked his attraction to "rough trade," as made clear from interviews with those close to him. Though Wall steers away from delving into the details of Epstein's love life, he in no way shies from conveying the nature of Epstein's desires. The film revels in telling the story of Epstein's gayness, in many ways emphasizing that being gay determined the course of his life. In particular, especially in a contemporary interview with an affable and articulate Paul McCartney, it seems clear that the question of whether Epstein's well-known love for John Lennon remained unrequited or not becomes central to almost everything else in assessing the man's life and tragic death. Did he or did he not have a one-time fling with Lennon in the south of Spain, just a week after Julian Lennon was born? Did he or did he not commit suicide over the hopelessness of his love, or was his death accidental, as officially ruled? "The trouble is, the only two people who really know are dead," says Wall, who nimbly raises the issues in the film, delicately balancing points of view and, perhaps, softening the edges of the controversy. Moreover, he adds, "Lennon would certainly not have been above saying one thing to this person and another thing to that person." The film's US producer, Debbie Geller, joins with Wall in explaining that "one of the evergreen and reductionist views of the Beatles and Brian Epstein was that Epstein was in love with John Lennon, and that was really his only interest in the group, and that had he not had that hangdog, unrequited love - which only came true in that one little instance in Barcelona - then the Beatles never would have happened." This view, she insists, does "a real disservice to Brian Epstein." Lennon the tease Geller does feel that Lennon most likely teased Epstein about being gay, maybe even manipulated his attraction "as a way of maintaining power over him." From the outset, Epstein's gayness was known to the Beatles and completely accepted. But a bit of perversity in the relationship seemed inevitable. "Brian liked a bit of punishment," says Wall. "So Lennon - that was his stock in trade, dishing out, taking people to the end of their tether, seeing how far he could push them. And they were all very amusing, witty, but Lennon had that sort of ambitiousness about it, seeing what he could do next." In the film, McCartney addresses the question of whether Epstein and Lennon ever had sex, and considers the possibility unlikely but not impossible. Even if something did happen between them, though, he believes the matter relatively insignificant. McCartney's obvious eagerness to address the question on screen is remarkable. Geller explains that during the interview, McCartney said: "Are you going to ask about his being gay? No one ever asks me about that." Considering the extent to which the Beatles' lives and careers have been put under a microscope, this omission in the record seems astounding, but it helps explain McCartney's readiness to take part in the film project. Says Wall: "He didn't need any persuasion, because he himself had come to this point where he thought it was time to tell the story. He was quite clear that he wanted to do it because it was time the record was set straight, and that Epstein had been largely forgotten and hadn't been given his due." The portrait of Epstein that emerges is one of a fantastically ambitious, driven, fastidious and brilliantly passionate man, handsome yet woefully unlucky in love, who repeatedly put himself in harm's way because of his secret desires. Apart from his obvious (and necessarily platonic) love for his "boys," Epstein was never able to establish a lasting love relationship. One California lad, Diz Gillespie, whom some characterize as a hustler, for a time seemed to be working out for Epstein. But the relationship turned sour. "Everybody's down on Diz," says Wall. "But Epstein seemed to find some kind of consolation in Diz, although Diz fucked him around knowingly." And thus was gay life in Britain, even for the man who helped move his once bombed-out, burned-out country back into modernity and renewed prestige on the world stage. t The Brian Epstein Story screened at the Castro Theatre on Monday, June 19, 2000 at 12:30 p.m.

Mark's writing online

Mark — Sun, 06 Apr 2008 23:26:07 GMT

-- “A verse to gay life” (Bay Area Reporter): Profile of poet Aaron Shurin http://ebar.com/arts/art_article.php?sec=books&article=99 -- "The reluctant activist" (Sierra Magazine): Profile of writer Wallace Stegner http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1525/is_n4_v78/ai_13180167 -- "In Search of Elusive Metaphors: The Art of Travel Writing" (South American Explorers) http://www.saexplorers.org/publications/magazine/guidelines -- “Cultural Revival” (Sierra): Journey to Ladakh ("Little Tibet"), India http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1525/is_n2_v77/ai_11908102 -- "On the trail again" (Sierra): Excursion through Navajo country http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1525/is_n1_v77/ai_11725843 -- “The Big Push” (Sierra): Peru's cocaine-rainforest connection http://www.geocities.com/Tokyo/5342/The_Big_Push.html -- "Yoga matters" (BAR): Ashtanga yoga comes to SF http://www.ebar.com/artscolumns/artcolumn.php?sec=calendare&id=32 -- "Holcombe reborn" (BAR): Portrait of musician Holcombe Waller http://www.ebar.com/artscolumns/artcolumn.php?sec=calendare&id=25 -- "The Lover" (SF Sentinel): Review of Marguerite Duras' novel http://members.tripod.com/istudio/summary.htm -- Thånk Yøü! (BAR): Stockholm marries SF @ Davies Symphony Hall! http://www.ebar.com/artscolumns/artcolumn.php?sec=calendare&id=48 -- "Hail, Norton!" (BAR): The Emperor Norton rules again http://www.ebar.com/artscolumns/artcolumn.php?sec=calendare&id=34 -- "They made it!" (BAR): Heklina's Trannyshack turns 10 http://www.ebar.com/artscolumns/artcolumn.php?sec=calendare&id=37 -- "Peaches does Madona" (BAR): Peaches Christ hosts "Midnight Mass" http://www.ebar.com/artscolumns/artcolumn.php?sec=calendare&id=23 -- "I heart Jokie" (BAR): Musings on war vs. art http://www.ebar.com/artscolumns/artcolumn.php?sec=calendare&id=36 -- "Buddy film" (BAR): A view of Brokeback Mountain http://www.ebar.com/artscolumns/artcolumn.php?sec=calendare&id=31 -- "A Day out of time" (BAR): Spencer Day in concert at NCTC http://www.spencerday.com/SD/SPENCERD/PDFS/IMG010.PDF -- "A new Day" (BAR): Spencer Day's "Movie of Your Life" http://www.ebar.com/artscolumns/artcolumn.php?sec=calendare&id=22 -- "Rising star" (BAR): From "Crimson Club" to big time http://www.ebar.com/artscolumns/artcolumn.php?sec=calendare&id=44 -- "Gay Pakistani in SF seeks asylum" (BAR): Fallout from 9/11 http://www.sflnc.com/index/readthis/news/kj/86.html -- "The Dots have it" (BAR): Rock music review http://www.ebar.com/arts/art_article.php?sec=music&article=185 -- "Crash test" (BAR): "Crash" vs. "Brokeback Mountain" http://www.ebar.com/artscolumns/artcolumn.php?sec=calendare&id=40 -- "Read it and weep" (Sierra): A book exposes forest clearcutting http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1525/is_n4_v79/ai_15518180 -- "Critical Mass: Jail Time for Biking" (Earth Island Journal): The consequences of civil disobedience http://www.earthisland.org/EIJOURNAL/fall97/ov_fall97bikejail.html --"A Club Without Closets" (Sierra): gays and lesbians in the Sierra Club http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1525/is_n3_v79/ai_15156677 -- "So Beautiful!" (BAR): A glorious Gay Pride Celebration http://www.ebar.com/artscolumns/artcolumn.php?sec=calendare&id=63 -- "Black and White Men Together" (BAR): Pygmies and gay history http://www.colinturnbull.com/markmardon_review.htm -- "Bringing Back Sam" (BAR): Profile of writers Kevin Killian & Sam D'Allesandro http://www.ebar.com/arts/art_article.php?sec=books&article=50 -- "Gen's tale" (BAR): portrait of a fallen hero in Hawaii http://www.ebar.com/artscolumns/artcolumn.php?sec=calendare&id=58 -- “Out & About” (BAR): Weekly Events Listing (Oct. 21-27, 2005) http://www.ebar.com/arts/art_article.php?sec=outabout&article=26 -- “Out & About” (BAR): Weekly Events Listing (Dec. 2-8, 2005) http://www.ebar.com/arts/art_article.php?sec=outabout&article=33 -- "Meet the Buffoons" (BAR): The SF Buffoons are boffo http://www.ebar.com/artscolumns/artcolumn.php?sec=calendare&id=14 -- “Outsider Moves” (BAR): Trans dance http://www.ebar.com/artscolumns/artcolumn.php?sec=calendare&id=24 -- “Kickin’ Kiki” (BAR): Kiki and Herb ring in the new year http://www.ebar.com/artscolumns/artcolumn.php?sec=calendare&id=30 -- "Calamity strikes" (BAR): Calamity Jane shines in HBO's "Deadwood" http://www.ebar.com/artscolumns/artcolumn.php?sec=calendare&id=43 -- “The Ecology of Commerce” (Sierra): Book Review http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1525/is_n3_v79/ai_15156671 -- “Living Within Limits” (Sierra): Book Review http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1525/is_n5_v78/ai_13259763 -- “Nature, Technology and Society” (Sierra): Book Review http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1525/is_n5_v78/ai_13259765 -- “Wilderness Ethics” (Sierra): Book Review http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1525/is_n6_v78/ai_14263189 -- "The Geography of Nowhere (Sierra): Book review http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1525/is_n5_v78/ai_13259757 -- "Kenaf: a non-wood paper alternative" (Earth Island Institute/ReThink Paper): eco-fiber review http://www.ecomall.com/greenshopping/eikena2.htm -- "Garbage In, Garbage Out" (Earth Island Institute/ReThink Paper): How the NY Times gets its facts wrong on recycling http://greenyes.grrn.org/1996/0257.html -- "Dark Victory" (Sierra): Book review http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1525/is_n3_v79/ai_15156665 -- "Modesto Pride a big hit" (BAR): Modesto holds its 1st Pride Celebration http://www.ebar.com/news/article.php?sec=news&article=1981 -- "Paying homage to Quito" (Mountain Travel/Sobek's TerraQuest Expedition): 1st dispatch from the Galápagos Islands http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~kpt/terraquest/galapagos/dispatches/fintro.html -- "Practicing CPR in the Galápagos" (TerraQuest): 2nd dispatch from the Galápagos Islands http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~kpt/terraquest/galapagos/dispatches/fintro.html -- "Hot flashes on the white sand" (TerraQuest): 3rd dispatch from the Galápagos Islands http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~kpt/terraquest/galapagos/dispatches/fintro.html -- "Tripping on the black volcano" (TerraQuest): 4th dispatch from the Galápagos Islands http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~kpt/terraquest/galapagos/dispatches/fintro.html -- "Flight of the iguana" (TerraQuest): 5th dispatch from the Galápagos Islands http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~kpt/terraquest/galapagos/dispatches/fintro.html -- "Our role in the animal kingdom" (TerraQuest): 6th dispatch from the Galápagos Islands http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~kpt/terraquest/galapagos/dispatches/fintro.html -- "The buzz aboard the Alta" (TerraQuest): 7th dispatch from the Galápagos Islands http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~kpt/terraquest/galapagos/dispatches/fintro.html ---------------------- Editing samples: -- “Now, if I ruled the world . . .” (Sierra Magazine, 1992): Visions of the next 100 years (Essays by Wallace Stegner, Wendell Berry, Brent Blackwelder, Richard Bangs, Frederik Pohl, Anne and Paul Ehrlich, T.H. Watkins, Susan Merrow, Murray Bookchin, Roderick Frazier Nash, Cleveland Amory, David Orr, James Gustave Speth, and Ernest Callenbach. http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1525/is_n3_v77/ai_12095996 -- “A return to the peaks” (Sierra Magazine, 1992): Essay by Mountaineer and Environmental Movement Leader David R. Brower. http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1525/is_n3_v77/ai_12095990 -- “Love, war and remembrance: comrades in arms,” (The Nation, July 1993): Essays on Gay Life in the Military. http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_hb1367/is_199307/ai_n6388651

How to age and die with grace

Mark — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 19:50:56 GMT

BOOK REVIEW Still Here: Embracing Aging, Changing, and Dying, by Ram Dass; Riverhead Books. "What happens after death is a central theme of all the world's religions," writes the guru of psychedelic experience and Soul awareness, Ram Dass, in Still Here, his elegant swan song, written from the perspective of an old man confined to a wheel chair, having endured a stroke, now looking back upon his life and evaluating the prospects for death - and the Soul's existence after death. He quotes Goethe, who once avowed that "I am just as certain as you see me here that I have existed a thousand times before, and I hope to return a thousand times more." He observes: "Every attempt to describe what happens after we die - the bardos in the Tibetan texts, the mansions in the Kabbala, the heaven and hell of Christianity, the ground of being in Buddhism - point to the same source: that is, a realm that the Soul enters after death in some form of continuing evolution." He quotes a Japanese Zen Master who, on approaching death, picked up his pen and scribbled, "'Birth is thus. Death is thus. Verse or no verse, what's the fuss?'" The fuss is all in our minds, Dass assures us in this profoundly wise and elegant book. It's the Ego at work, that force within us that shouts out so loudly we forget to listen to the Soul, making us forget that all the things the Ego works toward are transitory and ultimately burdensome, while all the Soul wants is to be liberated, to become fully Aware, to exist peacefully for all eternity. Ego time is immediate, short-term; Soul time beats with the pulse of infinity. The Soul, unlike the Ego, carries no baggage, and acts quietly. It is thus easily overlooked in the din of our chaotic lives, with our minds so overwhelmed with distractions. Those who approach the end of their mortal lives without having calmed their Egos and gained Awareness, warns Dass, will meet death badly. But death need not be so feared. Dass offers a prescription for aging and dying with grace: "We each bring to the moment of our passing the summation of all that we've lived and done, which is why we must begin as soon as possible to prepare ourselves for this occasion by waking up, completing our business, and becoming the sort of wise elders who can close their eyes for the last time without regrets." Everything else in Still Here leads up to this conclusion. Dass laments that the real value of elders of our society - who more and more are treated (and come to view themselves) as "obsolete, like yesterday's computers" - is sadly being overlooked. "Wisdom is one of the few things in human life that does not diminish with age," writes Dass, whose body has failed him but whose mind is not only lucid, but aware of larger truths: "While everything else falls away, wisdom alone increases until death if we live examined lives." In Dass's worldview, ultimate wisdom equates with "Awareness," otherwise known as "God, Brahma, Paramatman, the Nameless, the Formless, The Unmanifest, the Nondual, the Absolute. Ego and Soul are inextricable parts of Awareness, just as Awareness is the very essence of who we are." The reason wisdom has ceased to retain its once-exalted stature in human society, according to Dass, is because "at root we are a secular society whose deepest leanings are toward the school of thought known as philosophical materialism . . . the idea that reality is limited to what we perceive through our senses." Our Egos prevent us from seeing beyond ourselves. "The Ego is what ages and dies," Dass asserts. "It doesn't continue. It is nearly impossible for the Ego to imagine this. When the Ego thinks it's dying, it mistakes itself for the whole - body, Soul and Awareness - and often people who are beginning to go through the long process of ripening into God run around to different doctors (and maybe even shrinks) because they develop an even more intense dread of death." Throughout the book, Dass serves up examples from his own life. Yet, thankfully, his anecdotes are kept to a minimum, his own Ego kept in check. Primarily he takes stock of his own situation to launch into reflections on universal issues: learning to face and conquer our fears as we age, expanding our consciousness, coping with depression, accepting the changes in our bodies, working with pain, adjusting to dependency, enjoying our eccentricities. Dass's core advice, though, centers on letting go of the past, lest memories intrude and discolor the present, and ceasing to worry overmuch about what the future holds. "Prolong not the past./Invite not the future," quotes Dass from a Tibetan Buddhist verse. But how is one to achieve these goals? Dass's advice contains the beauty of wisdom: "Getting the Ego to release its grip can be as simple as being able to experience what's present at any given time. It sounds simple, but volumes have been written about just how to do this, some of them thousands of years old. It's called meditation." This review first appeared in the Bay Area Reporter. © 2008 by Mark Mardon

Redefining Progress: A Time to Repair the Earth

Mark — Tue, 21 Aug 2007 16:43:04 GMT

Photo of David R. Brower. Essay by Mark C. Mardon ------------------------ This essay appeared in the Winter 1990 issue of National Forum, the Phi Kappa Phi Journal, devoted to "preserving the global commons." ------------------------ David Brower, the grand old man of conservation -- the man author John McPhee once dubbed The Archdruid -- sips a martini at Sinbad's, his favorite lunch spot, overlooking San Francisco Bay. He looks out through the plate-glass window, scanning the air just above the water, hoping -- expecting -- to spot brown pelicans in flight as they pass under the Oakland Bay Bridge. "There, three of them!" he points excitedly to some specks near the water's surface, just forward of the bow of an immense, slow-moving container ship. "Do you know," he boasts a moment later, "just a few days ago I counted 25 while I was sitting here having lunch?" Brower's enthusiasm for counting brown pelicans is understandable. Twenty years ago, their numbers had dwindled so drastically along the West Coast that they appeared to be on the verge of extinction. The culprit was DDT, an insecticide that became popular following World War II and that earned its developer, Swiss scientist Paul Mller, the 1948 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine. What the Nobel committee did not foresee when it bestowed the prize was that huge quantities of DDT would soon be leaching off farms into rivers, lakes, and oceans. The chemical would break down into DDE, which would steadily accumulate in the flesh of fish. Those fish would be consumed by raptors and sea birds. And those unfortunate creatures would lay eggs with shells so thin they couldn't hold up during incubation. So insidious would DDE's effects become, in fact, that by the spring of 1969, bird watchers on Anacapa Island near Santa Barbara, California, would count 320 new pelican nests--only 19 of which would contain eggs. In the 1960s, when environmental activists like David Brower (who then ran the Sierra Club) called for a sweeping ban on the use of DDT, the pesticide industry accused them of being "antitechnology." What that vague but deliberately unflattering epithet implied was that anyone opposed to DDT was anti-progress. And to be against progress, as any high school history student learns, is to be not merely anti-American, but anti-Western Civilization. ____________ Our Western culture -- if not every civilization -- has long nurtured a sense of time-continuum, a moving forward, a reaching out to explore new ideas and frontiers. In this respect, human beings have been optimists, never recognizing limits to the space available to them. Wherever and whenever we have perceived a void, we have rushed in to fill it in what historian Daniel J. Boorstin calls "the spirit of exploration." Behind this spirit, always, lies the sense that something waits to be discovered. The Magellans, Amerigo Vespuccis, and Captain Cooks of our Western history revealed our ignorance of the physical world; the Darwins, Adam Smiths, and Sigmund Freuds of our heritage revealed the dark continents of genetics, economics, and the subconscious. Each plunge into these alien territories brought us greater understanding of ourselves and our universe, while strengthening our resolve to explore further. And so, continually, we raise ourselves to new plateaus, only to discover vast, unexplored areas ahead of us. "We cannot assure the future," reads a poster tacked to a mud wall in a Colombian farming village, "we can only risk the present." Risk it for what? The farmer might ask. And comes the unfailing answer: Progress, to move forward. To push on. We dare not retreat. Retreat is inimical to our collective sense of destiny. But as Thomas S. Kuhn pointed out in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, our movement forward will always be nonlinear. We try numerous paths, only to discover that many lead us astray. Clues that we are on the wrong track begin to mount up. Finally, assuming we do not wish to perish in the wilderness, we heed them, retracing our steps in order to scout a better route. ____________ The environmental ills we confront today indicate that our "advanced" technological path is leading us not out of, but ever farther into the jungle (and certainly our course is no better charted than Columbus' prior to his first expedition to the Indies). Yet despite all the gadgetry we carry on our backs, we're hopelessly ill-equipped to avoid the jungle's pitfalls. Technology, for all its promise, is landing us in quicksand. So familiar are the troubles besetting our environment that the list of them reads like a litany, recalling the Biblical plagues: -- human reproduction has spun out of control, with more than six and a half billion of us now overloading the planet, creating unmanageable wastes, widespread poverty, and overwhelming demands on scarce, nonrenewable resources; -- quietude is being eroded and scenery obstructed, especially by automobiles and airplanes, frustrating our chances for reflection and rejuvenation; -- vast swaths of tropical rainforest the world over are being clearcut and burned, largely to make way for temporary farms and cattle grazing; temperate old-growth forests are being ravaged for fuel and lumber, often as export commodities; -- aquatic ecosystems, including commercially-vital fisheries, are succumbing to the ravages of oil spills and pesticide runoffs; -- fertile soils are turning to dust, victimized by overgrazing and excessive tillage, contributing to the inexorable spread of desert-like conditions around the world; -- the air surrounding us becomes fouler each day, with pollutants drifting on currents, causing acid rain, ozone-layer destruction, global warming, and a host of health problems; -- wildlife habitats are being demolished by bulldozers and their kin, with the consequent extinction of plant and animal species at a rate unprecedented in Earth's history; -- toxic chemical and nuclear-energy-production wastes have been silently, steadily seeping into aquifers, threatening all animals' lives; -- nuclear weapons proliferate around the globe, manipulated by capricious politicians and warriors, threatening to decimate all animal and plant ecosystems, leading many, perhaps most of us, to a profound pessimism and uncaring about the well-being of the Earth. No question about it: These are mighty unpleasant happenings, which is why a great many people would like to ignore them -- for peace of mind's sake. But not looking at one's compass is a sure way to wind up in a morass. Practical people lost in the woods like to read maps -- as opposed to tea leaves -- in order to find trails to follow. Environmentalists have many times been accused (usually by those who think technology offers solutions to all ills) of being pessimists. But all they are doing, really, is plotting landmarks on maps, hoping to discover where they are heading. That is what biologists Paul Ehrlich, Anne Ehrlich, and John Holdren do in their textbook, Ecoscience. Having plotted various environmental stress signs on their map of civilization, they conclude that a realistic path for the future includes continuing worldwide inflation, a widening of the gap between rich and poor, increased incidence of famine, heightened social unrest characterized by strikes, riots, and terrorism, more frequent international confrontations over resources, and a probability of nuclear war that increases "in some (perhaps nonlinear) relation with the growing number of possessors of nuclear weapons." This is where we appear to be heading with our so-called progress. ____________ "The Big Party," says David Brower, "otherwise known as the Industrial Revolution, is reaching its end." And what will take its place? Chaos? A colonization of outer space? Princeton physicist Gerard K. O'Neill and science writer Isaac Asimov believe the latter is necessary to avoid the former. They propose that humans leave their crowded countries and stretch out in the wide-open expanses beyond Earth's atmosphere. "Once we break out from the confines of this planet," wrote O'Neill in 1976, in The High Frontier, "we can begin building new lands from the limitless resources of our solar system." But, he added,the most important benefits of space colonization are neither physical nor economic, but "the opening of new human options, the possibility of a new degree of freedom." These are the very notions that set sailors voyaging across the oceans in the 15th century, that have motivated explorers throughout the ages. They epitomize our society's long-held concept of progress. But people adhering to such ideas today ignore every blinking red warning indicator on the map of civilization. They take comfort in the notion that, if we soil our planet -- even make it unlivable -- we needn't worry because we have rockets to facilitate our escape. Consider this: By the time we mass our resources to put even a few handfuls of people into space stations, the Earth's capacity to sustain human life will have eroded beyond repair; we will have permanently lost the strength to make our odyssey among the asteroids. Perhaps a small population of moon humans will serve as the seed for a new civilization hundreds of years hence, but that, as Asimov knows, is speculative fodder for science fiction. What we really need to be strong, David Brower says, is to take a very different course. We must put all of our energies into undoing the damage we have done to our planet. "We need to take whichever word we like best," he says, " -- renew, rehabilitate, regenerate, repair, replace, restore -- and go to work with it, rebuilding our own life-support system." "In the Franklin Roosevelt administration," Brower says, "we had the RFC and NRA -- the Reconstruction Finance Corporation and the National Recovery Administration -- to get us out of a deep economic depression. We are entering a much deeper ecological depression." Brower believes the time has come for a new Restoration Era. In the way that the Industrial Revolution began putting people to work in the late 1700s, the Restoration Era would see us working to undo the damage done by our hardworking forebears.He endorses the call by California environmentalist John J. Berger for the creation of a "Restoration Corps," loosely modeled after the New Deal's Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC). In Restoring the Earth, Berger asks that the world's peoples commit themselves to replanting forests, restoring streams and prairies, renovating and expanding public transit systems, and reintroducing native species to carefully reconstructed habitats. Restoration work has long been done -- is still being done -- on a piecemeal basis. Much of the know-how exists. One much-acclaimed project is Daniel Janzen's effort to re-create a dry tropical forest in Costa Rica, a habitat that had been reduced to "scattered biotic debris." Janzen pays local people to assist him in reassembling the forest from its remnants. "He depends on help from the people who were making a living by taking the ecosystem apart," Brower says. Today the Society for Ecological Restoration International (http://www.ser.org) supports restorations efforts worldwide. As David Brower contemplates a piece of chocolate cake for dessert, musing that he's no longer the lithe young man who once climbed peak after rugged peak in the Sierra Nevada, he repeatedly turns to look out the window, in the direction of Oakland. "San Francisco Bay could be restored, too," he muses, sharing the hope of all the area's environmentalists. For decades the Bay has been subjected to dredging, landfilling, and industrial pollution. And the fresh water that feeds the Bay, nourishing its extraordinary ecosystem, now trickles in at less half its former volume; most of it is now diverted to housing and industrial farms to the south. Environmentalists would like to see most of that water brought back home to rejuvenate an estuary that development-crazed people have allowed to decay. Progress, for David Brower and for all those who advocate a Restoration Era, means abandoning the industrial path that leads to ruin, repairing the earth we tore up in our forward rush, scouting a new path, and starting all over again.   © 2007 by Mark Mardon