Salon.com > Rachel Louise Snyder

Kissing the ring

Wed, 11 Oct 2000 19:00:00 +0000

Behind me a small fountain trickles softly as I sit at a wrought-iron table on a stone patio with ocher frescoed walls. Surrounded by ficus plants, I overlook a pool with a small cabana and a garden full of roses. Beyond the pool is a valley hinged with mountains. What is the frontman of Kiss doing with a pad like this?

"A home should be your sanctuary," Paul Stanley says of this place -- which happens to be his Beverly Hills abode. "The purpose of a house is to build something where you don't want to leave. That was the idea of this place."

Stanley and his fellow masked musicians -- Gene Simmons, Ace Frehley and Peter Criss (plus some minimal personnel changes over time) -- have, after 27 years, decided to call it quits. Time to shed the platforms and revel in the afterglow of nearly three decades of defiance. Kiss, which Stanley calls a marriage of "rock band, superhero and athlete," defied the critics. For years it flouted the hacks who never stopped chiding the band for their over-the-top performances, their musical simplicity, their simple pleas to party and rock 'n' roll -- chiding them, in fact, for embodying exactly what rock 'n' roll types are supposed to embody.

He still gets around

Wed, 06 Sep 2000 19:00:00 +0000

Tall and lean, with a cockeyed smile and hair more gray than brown these days, Brian Wilson is unassuming, authentic and full of the kind of purity of spirit that you can mistake for naiveti. As enthusiastic about mousse as he is about music, Wilson's personality is often compared to a child's -- something that must be reconciled with his years of severe drug addiction and schizophrenia, both of which he has under control now.

He has had the same favorite song for 40 years -- Phil Spector's "Be My Baby." ("I learn something new every time I listen to it.") When asked to recount acts of kindness, he offers people instead. ("My wife and my [four] daughters.") When asked about songwriting, he alternates between promises of having his best work forthcoming and claiming he can't top his history. ("I'll never be better than 'Pet Sounds,'" he said dismally. Then later, "I'm writing the best rock 'n' roll song you ever heard.")

Uninformed consent

Mon, 27 Mar 2000 17:00:00 +0000

When Ali Zaidi visited the University of Rochester hospital in 1994 complaining of respiratory problems, he opened a Pandora's box of miscommunication and half-truths from a community of caregivers who seemed more intent on recruiting human guinea pigs and tallying research grants than on following their Hippocratic oaths. A UR graduate student at the time, Zaidi says he was asked to sign a consent form for a clinical trial he hadn't even been told about by an investigator who called the federal regulations "onerous" and "red tape."

The protocol involved Heliobacter pylori, a bacterium common in gastric ulcer disease, but it was the word "radioactive" that caught his eye just as he was poised to sign. When he inquired about the nature of the study, he was assured that it was perfectly safe. Zaidi refused to sign. After consulting his doctor, he declined to participate in the trial. When he complained about what he called UR's irresponsible recruitment methods, first to the principal investigator, then to the university health services, he says he was disregarded.

Viva la evoluci

Thu, 24 Feb 2000 17:00:00 +0000

Here is the truth: Before I came to Cuba I loved
Fidel Castro. And still do, a little, in the way
that you love an ex who once seemed so right for
you. It's not a romantic, yearning-in-the-loins
love, but an idealistic respect for someone with
the gall to think he could change an entire country
and the ability to succeed.

It wasn't falling in love with Castro or Cuba that
surprised me; I knew before I left Chicago that it
would be a place that would speak to me, a place
where passion wouldn't be a thing defined only in
bedrooms and whispers, but a place where I'd get my
color back, make my vision a little sharper. I need
that every now and then. Like Samson and his hair,
travel's where I get my strength. What did surprise
me was how separate Castro came to be when I spoke
of Cuba, like understanding that Vietnam is so much
more than the setting of America's biggest 20th
century blunder.

Junker

Wed, 23 Feb 2000 17:00:00 +0000

"We asked for cheap," Ann said. "Economico." The man shook his head. Even for Cuba this car was a bomb. A bomb that we'd waited four hours to get, arriving at 7 a.m. in Havana and hoping there'd be a car to rent that day. Now here we were in Santiago de Cuba on the other side of the island after six days of battle with the bomb, whom we'd affectionately named Franqui early on in the hopes of endearing it to us. We feared for our deposit. "The engine runs OK," I told the man, "we made it all the way from Havana. It's just everything around it that's crumbling."

I had come to Cuba to discover the island on the millennium. Literally, but also metaphorically. What was Cuba to become in this new century? We spent the first two weeks in Havana before our odyssey with Franqui, and by then I had established a routine much like any I have at home. I rose at around 6 a.m. and drank cafi con leche at a nearby cafeteria on the corner of Avenida 23 and Calle L in Havana -- one of the city's main intersections and home to Coppelia, the famous ice cream metropolis where Cubans line up for hours every day.

Laughing with the Dalai Lama

Tue, 05 Oct 1999 16:00:00 +0000

During rainy season, Dharamsala, India, home to the exiled Tibetan community, is transformed from a mountaintop village into the enchanted forest of Robin Hood folklore. The clouds descend over the ridge like a scrim and the feeling -- the inability to see anything -- can be claustrophobic, can make you blink and squint and hyperventilate in the thick, wet air. Anything might suddenly appear -- cars, monks, cows -- where once was only thick gray fog. Unable to see more than 10 feet down the steep, winding path, you can almost imagine a band of merry horsemen emerging from the pine trees lining the road.

Our guidebook told us the 14th Dalai Lama had a presence so large he filled up the room during his public audiences in Dharamsala. Now suddenly we -- a traveling American writer and photographer -- had been granted a private audience with him. Would his presence, I wondered, overwhelm me? Would I be rendered inarticulate? Would I feel a transcendence afforded legends standing in the presence of this reincarnated demigod? It occurred to me that the cleanest clothing I had was an orange T-shirt that said "Life is Good" -- which seemed mildly inappropriate when meeting a man in exile.

A tale of two Sues

Fri, 10 Sep 1999 16:00:00 +0000

Sue Hendrickson has a knack for finding stuff. In Cuba she found an astrolabe -- the ancient precursor to today's global positioning systems -- in six feet of water, buried under coral. She's found ants and centipedes imbedded in ancient amber in Mexico and whale fossils in Peru. And in South Dakota, eight years ago, she found the largest Tyrannosaurus Rex ever recorded in the history of field paleontology. (It's now called "Sue.")

Lucky break, she figures.

How unusual is it to find a T-Rex? In the Western United States, where dinosaurs are known to have proliferated, bone fragments from the ancient beasts crunch under your feet as you walk. But that's about as close as you'll get to the granddaddy of dinos. You might find a portion of a triceratops or part of a duckbill dinosaur, maybe even a mammoth-size tooth, but never a T-Rex. Only 25 have ever been found. Sue Hendrickson, whose giant, carnivorous namesake is currently being cleaned and assembled for a show in May 2000 at Chicago's Field Museum of Natural History, puts it this way: "Every day we'd wake up [in the field] and jokingly say, 'Today I'm gonna get me a saber-toothed cat.' But a T-Rex? You don't even joke about that. It's too far-fetched."

My lunch with Ira Glass

Fri, 16 Jul 1999 16:00:00 +0000

Americans are once again arranging their schedules to hear a radio show. And it's no mystery why: Listening to Ira Glass' public radio phenomenon "This American Life" is much like reading a good novel. There is character and scene and plot. At the end there is change, a subtle hint that the character will go on to live her life differently from that moment on. There is vision. There is inspiration or sadness or pain, but there is always something -- always, as Glass would put it, a place for your heart to go.

One such moment occurred during a recent show in which a woman who had been married for a long time ran into her ex-boyfriend at a yogurt shop. She found herself thinking about him night and day. She looked forward to his calls. She considered meeting him. And finally she told her husband how she felt. What we expect is anger, or pain, or tears, resentment or the tallying up of the years her husband stood by her unfalteringly. What we expect is
outrage. Instead, the husband wraps his arms around his wife and says, "Honey, I am so sorry I can't do that for you anymore." He holds her, then she calls the ex and tells him she can never speak to him again.

Will you still love me tomorrow?

Sat, 19 Jun 1999 16:00:00 +0000

Carole King: Frizzy roan-colored hair, freckles, guileless blue eyes -- the early '70s archetypal earth mother dressed in tattered jeans and gauzy shirt, perched atop a thoroughbred, riding through a field of wildflowers and prairie grass. Her visage was as common 25 years ago as macrami plant holders and shag carpeting.

Her 1971 album "Tapestry" (estimated to have sold as many as 20 million copies worldwide) made her an international star, but King was always more comfortable backstage, offering her songwriting genius to those more interested in the limelight and accolades. These days, the 57-year-old mother of four seems to have come full circle in her varied, 40-year career. She began as a songwriter, moved on to solo albums, took up environmentalism, starred in several New York musicals, then came back to songwriting. Recently, Celine Dion, Natalie Merchant, Rod Stewart, Trisha Yearwood and Courtney Love have all covered her songs, and she co-wrote the themes to the movies "One Fine Day" and "You've Got Mail." Though she's released albums only sporadically in the past 15 years, King never fell into obscurity like so many of her contemporaries.

Hurricanes and hope in Honduras

Tue, 26 Jan 1999 20:00:00 +0000

What you notice first is the smell. A sour, rotting stench, it seeps into your hair, your clothes, your skin. It's in my watchband now. When I first arrived in this section of Tegucigalpa, Honduras, called Comayaguela, just before the New Year, workers from UNICEF issued me and Ann, the photographer accompanying me, cotton face masks to avoid the smell. But it seeped into the cotton. We smell it at night when we go back to our hotel. In our hair and in our sheets. In our backpacks and in the thin pages of my notebook. Mostly, though, it seeps into your memory.

Nearly 25 years ago, another powerful hurricane devastated Honduras. Fifi, it was called, like an innocent pup, and 8,000 people died. Three hundred thousand were left homeless. This one, Mitch, was worse: 6,600 died, 9,000 are missing, 1.5 million are homeless. When it came, on Oct. 26 and 27, it brought 200-mph winds before diminishing to a catastrophic tropical storm that hovered for nearly a week.