and will the last wookie please totl

May The Force Please Go Away

Thirteen reasons to be hugely grateful that "Star Wars," the king of adolescent space epics, is finally feckin' over

By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist

Wednesday, May 25, 2005

Can we just say it? Can we admit it now? Is it finally time?

Here goes: Thank the great Sith Lord above that the massive computer-driven marketing hellbeast that is the overblown "Star Wars" epic is finally over.

There I said it. Can we agree? Because the truth is, this most bloated of megamovie franchises hasn't been a certifiable cultural phenom, something to get truly excited about, for over 25 years. Admit it now, get it over with, move on to pretty happy things like puppies and porn and sunshine.

Look, I'm sorry, but I don't care how many gazillions the last three flicks have made at the box office from ubergeeks too old to get "Harry Potter" and too emotionally immature to graduate to real movies. Episodes I-III are mostly one thing and one thing only: huge exercises in CGI acrobatics, manic video games writ large, numbly awful movies full of fine actors reduced to stiff mannequins in bad monk robes and uncomfortable headpieces delivering stone-cold line readings seemingly written by that slightly twitchy tin-eared dweeb who sat next you in fifth-grade algebra, sweatingly.

It's all just a little -- how to put this carefully -- it's all just a little embarrassing.

Here, then, are 13 reasons to celebrate the end of the cute, overblown SW monster. Reasons for normal people to get back to caring about decent movies with subtle dialogue and true character development and nuanced plot lines not revolving around a monochromatic good/evil dialectic executed by barely emotive cartoon characters who have somehow been brainwashed into thinking they're making art. Admit these now, get it over with, move on to happy things like wine and sex and pleasures that have absolutely zero to do with whooshing lightsabers. OK?

1) Begone, Star Wars ubergeeks. Begone, terrifically strange and tragically lonely fan boys who camp out, weeks and months in advance, for SW tickets, even at the wrong theater. Drink the Kool-Aid if you must, boys. Your 15 minutes are way, way up. Never has a culture wished so deeply for a group of people to get deep into online porn and pop more Ritalin and stay the hell home.

2) Unfortunately, now the media coverage of such geeks will simply switch over to sad psychochristian fanatics who are already lining up for Mel Gibson's "Passion of the Christ" sequel, "Dead Things I Pulverize with a Cuisinart and Then Smear All Over My Hairy Catholic Chest."

3) Poor Ewan McGregor. Poor Natalie Portman. Poor Liam Neeson. Fabulous actors so completely drained of nuance and character you are left wishing Obi Wan would shoot heroin and dive into a toilet and have a deformed religious experience, and that Neeson might veer off and start asking Princess Amidala what her favorite sexual position is and how many orgasms she has in a month and what she really thinks about when she sees Vader's throbbing red lightsaber.

4) Farewell, the odd and recurring hype that claims, every few years, that George Lucas might, in fact, be one of the truly great, visionary directors of all time. He isn't. Not by a long shot.

5) Darth Vader choking a giant red M&M candy. Darth Vader staring down that creepy Burger King mascot thing. Darth Vader hawking cell phones and Energizer batteries and floor cleaner and breakfast cereal and who the hell knows what else. Good riddance, odious sea of SW product tie-ins. Like the goddamn franchise needs more cash? Like seeing Darth Vader hawking tampons and aspirin and Darth Vader-branded bunion pads is in any way necessary? Please.

6) Let's just say it outright: Harrison Ford carried the first three movies, period. Carrie Fisher was amusing enough, the droids were cute and infinitely annoying, James Earl Jones' Vader voice work was nearly a character unto itself. But no one topped Ford at delivering a cynical line or expressing incredulity or offering up that famous "Who, me?" look that would later come to such wondrous fruition with Indiana Jones. "Star Wars" without Ford's dry humor and bewildered mug is like a cheesy pinball machine without the ball: all bells and whistles, few genuine pleasures.

7) Two words: Jim Henson. Next to Ford, Henson's astonishing Creature Shop gave the first movies brilliantly wacky life, silly and tangible and honest. The last three flicks are just painful reminders of how much he, and his entire Muppet universe, are missed in this world, and how much computers have drained many movies of their soul.

8) Did I mention Chewbacca? Did I mention that maddening commercial where Chewbacca is in the booth recording sounds for the new series of "Star Wars" cell phone ring tones and oh my freaking God let's just imagine that for a moment, the pale little sexually denuded dude sitting next to you in the café who gets a call on his Nokia and when it rings it sounds like that weird famous Chewbacca howl, and you turn and look at him and wonder what he might look like if he exploded into a million bloody little geek-boy pieces like, right now.

9) Enough with the dissecting of SW plot lines. Enough with the seeking of deep mythological parallels. Despite all those blogs and articles insisting SW is some sort of modern iteration of "Crime and Punishment" crossed with "Dr. Spock's Guide to Parenting," there is little of true intellectual substance to speak of in any of the SW flicks, and say what you will about old-time '60s radical Lucas' commendable desire to criticize current rabid right-wing ideology via his simple good/evil allegories, the overarching plot of SW is so basic and the execution so orthodox, you might as well be watching "The Bad News Bears," stoned. It's true.

10) The late, great master of myth Joseph Campbell loved the first three "Star Wars" movies. He saw in them a wonderful modern-day example of his favorite allegory and recurring cultural theme, the hero's journey. Joseph Campbell is dead now. Even he was ready to move the hell on.

11) This is from the recent Rolling Stone interview with Lucas, with Lucas examining a plot thread: "Is Anakin a product of a super-Sith who influenced the midichlorians to create him, or is he simply created by the midichlorians to bring forth prophecy, or was he created by the Force through the midichlorians? It's left up to the audience to decide." Note to George: You are 61 years old. Stop speaking like this before you hemorrhage something. And see item No. 10, above.

12) Raise your hand if you love the concept of prequels. Ten years of crappy CGI and 10 years of lumpy stiff acting and 28 years of waiting and you watch "Sith" where only the last 30 minutes really finds any sort of cinematic footing, and after all that screaming and all the cheeseball animation and all the slaughtered Jedis and the stilted, lifeless dialogue and heavy Vader wheezing and Yoda's irritating speech impediment, where do we finally end up at the end of Episode III? That's right: 1977. And who the hell wants to be back there?

13) I'll happily admit that the first three films were breathtakingly rich allegories for their time, landmark filmmaking, funny and quirky and cutting edge and cute fun for the kids, full of wry characters and state-of-the-art special effects saddled to a rather generic, by-the-numbers hero's journey sprinkled with the occasional subreference to Buddhism or the fine art of egolessness.

But.

But it must be stated and cannot be repeated enough and we have to admit it once and for all: The "Star Wars" films, each and every one of them and it feels like there are about 127 of them now, they remain, always and forever, movies for anxious, easily stupefied 10-ear-old boys.

There I said it. Can we all just go outside now?

___________________________________________________

Mark Morford's Notes & Errata column appears every Wednesday and Friday on SF Gate, unless it appears on Tuesdays and Thursdays, which it never does. Subscribe to this column at sfgate.com/newsletters

once upon a buffalo in mexico

Viva Mexico! Viva la Independencia!

One minute we are speeding past men riding donkeys, then we're into a city, pastel-colored buildings suspended overhead

The Daily News (Halifax)
Sunday, March 17, 1991
By Tim Carlson

THE SCORPION WAS dead. The lizard escaped. I took one good swing at the rat with a stick meant to hold the cabana window shut, but it was far too quick for me.

An all but sleepless night.

I awoke a few hours later, the sound of the waves crashing on the shore of Zipolite calming any distemper that might have lingered from my battle with the cabana critters.

At 9 a.m., the sands of Zipolite are hot enough to encourage the least athletic to jog from under thatched roofs, where some travelers sleep the night in hammocks, down to the water's edge.

In Zipolite, a sparsely populated stretch of Mexico's Pacific coastline about 100 km south of surfer haven Puerto Escondido, it's difficult to remember what day it is, not that it matters. The word "resort" doesn't come readily to mind. It's the perfect last port after a low-budget trip through the interior.

It seems Mexican-years from Mazatlan, where the cheapest possible flight from Canada set me down a month before.

MAZATLAN

Mazatlan's Golden Zone hotel strip is brochure Mexico -- more American than Mexican, beach fashion on parade -- although Old Mazatlan, with a beautiful cathedral, small parks and lively market is a realistic primer to life in cities that aren't so dependent on tourism.

Mazatlan was the only place in the country where I saw white trash tourists screaming their lungs out at cab drivers in an attempt to get the fare quoted in English.

The package holiday set usually sticks close to the beach, getting second-degree burns and trying to ignore droves of Mexicans hawking bracelets, blankets, hats and hammocks. Out on the street, hucksters offer free breakfast scams where condo or hotel promoters try to determine the limit on your Visa card.

Nightlife in Mazatlan is a tropical version of the American disco -- dancing to the same Fine Young Cannibal/Madonna/Janet Jackson rotation offered at home.

Except different.

A bar in one of the better hotels, right on the beach: The bar is packed with people dancing -- on the bar, that is. More people dance half-heartedly on the bleachers encircling the bar, gawking around, waiting for something to happen.

A couple up on the circular bar does a bump 'n' grind to a Madonna song. The guy grabs a funnel hanging from a rope attached to the roof, he yells something into the woman's ear, she puts the tube to her lips and he up-ends a Corona in the funnel.

Once the beer is splashed all over her clothes and the people below, she grabs the rope and the guy pushes her off the bar. The idea is to play Jane of the Jungle and land safely on the other side. But her foot connects with the head of the Mexican bartender, who goes down like a George Foreman victim.

Down on the beach, the moon's reflection riding the Pacific waves, a man stands with his horse, looking up at the bar wondering if there will be any takers for the romantic moonlight ride he offers.

ZACATECAS

Fate encouraged me not to leave Mazatlan, but I resisted.

Although first class bus schedules, prices and choice of companies in Mexico were very impressive, the first ticket I bought was for a bus that simply did not exist. After a long hassle (in which I learned the Spanish for refund) I ended up going second class.

On first-class buses, there is usually a small portrait of the Virgin above the windshield; on second-class buses it's somewhat more elaborate. Sometimes it's an entire shrine. The driver gets on, crosses himself, and we're off.

Durango is only 200 km east of Mazatlan, but the steep, beautiful mountains rising to 2,000 metres in between make this an eight-hour journey of competing portable radios, kilometres of litter-filled ditches, sputtering up one side of the mountain and careering crazily down around corners (often on the wrong side of the road).

Don't let the stereotype get to you, I console myself. These guys drive this route all the time. They probably have master's degrees in career- ing crazily.

But in the foothills not far from Durango, the bus slows. Up ahead is a dented semi-trailer. Wooden pallets are strewn all over the highway. We finally ease ahead, past another bus, the front bashed in all the way up to the first passenger's seat.

In the Durango bus depot, there are more than a few long, bandaged faces.

I count my blessings, but I'm quickly distracted by some delicious roast chicken, which also makes me forget about the time change. I miss the connection to Zacatecas and must wait for the next bus.

A city of 200,000, Zacatecas is in a valley wedged between two small mountains. Walking the streets is more like climbing stairs. The spire of an incredible cathedral of pink sandstone (built between 1612 and 1752) rises in the centre of the city.

The Spaniards started mining silver here in 1548, but the Zacateco Indians were at it long before that. Men ended up dying in the shafts while "employed" trying to keep up with their conquerors' fervor for the precious metal.

Coal cars take you down inside El Eden Mine, where you then walk through tunnels and over wooden bridges, the guide pointing to the flooded shafts below and relating how small children working there met a premature end. Heart rending stuff.

Then the guide flips a switch to turn on an electric waterfall, which scares the hell out of everyone, and he sits back and laughs. That's the only one of his jokes that translated well.The mouth of the mine is above the city on one of the mountains. If there is no wind, a cable car runs from the mine, over the city, to the opposite mountain, Cerro de la Bufa. Here there is a church, museum and monuments dedicated to revolutionary Pancho Villa and friends who won a major battle here in 1914.

At night, the view from the Bufa, high above the colonial city, is spectacular. I was with two women from Texas and the Mexican guys they'd met the evening before, drinking rum on a terrace by the museum. My guidebook said a portrait of the Madonna in the nearby chapel, La Capilla de la Virgen del Pattrocinio, could heal the sick. One of the Mexican guys, David, said some believe the entire building was capable of similar miracles.

We ended up at El Elephante Blanco Disco only because the bar down inside El Eden mine was (supposedly) the scene of a shoot-up the night before. I met a dozen relatives of David's there, all who were interested in getting work in Montreal.

With a few empty rum bottles on the table at the end of the night, one of the Texan women (who taught English in Guadalajara for a few years) was comparing Mexican and Texan culture.

"I'd never marry a Texan man," she said as David stroked her hair. "They're too closed-minded. Mexican men are so much more sensitive."

GUANAJUATO

One minute, we're speeding past men riding donkeys, cactus as high as the bus poking out of the dust. Then we're down into a city with old subterranean tunnels and a maze of twisting streets with the backs of pastel-colored buildings suspended overhead.

Guanajuato feels like a chunk of not colonial, but medieval, Spain inhabited by Mexicans. And although the tourists (they're the ones standing on street corners trying to find 'up' on the map) are slightly more plentiful than Zacatecas, this odd place is great fun to get lost in.

Guanajuato is also a colonial silver mining town, protected from development by a federal order designating it a national monument.

The revolutionary hero here is Father Miguel Hidalgo who in 1810 led his rebels with some success over Spanish troops in and around Guanajuato and Zacatecas and sparking the independence movement. Their first major victory was burning down a large grain storage house called the Alhondiga de Granaditas that the enemy was using as headquarters.

Hidalgo was caught and executed a year later and his head was put in a cage which hung from a corner of the building for over a decade.

The Alhondiga is now a museum. Bright murals dealing with the Hidalgo legend cover the walls of the landing between floors, statues of the revolution's protagonists are given heroic space. And the cage in which Hidalgo's head decomposed hangs in a room for all to see.

The Alhondiga is the most historically significant museum in Guanajuato, but probably not the busiest. The home of Diego Rivera, famous muralist (whose Mexico City home is where Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky was murdered) is preserved for art pilgrims.

The Don Quixote museum celebrates the Man of La Mancha year-round with depictions of the man in every conceivable form -- sculpture, paintings, sketches, snuff boxes, all the way to plastic toys.

It's fascinating -- Quixote is depicted as Christ figure in one painting, or in a Second World War or post-nuclear context in others. Like depictions of Christ in art, every artist has his or her idea of what the man's facial hair was like -- a well-clipped Van Dyke, gigantic handlebar moustache, or a wild, flowing beard. A teenager in military uniform with an automatic rifle follows patrons through the various galleries.

The Alhondiga and Quixote museums, however, hardly compare in either civic pride or tourist chatter to the Museo Mo- mias, which my guide book called "the quintessential example of Mexico's obsession with death."

The Museo's history began in the 1890's when the powers that were told the poor to exhume their ancestors because they couldn't afford the grave tax. When the coffins came out, they found not skeletons, but well-preserved mummies -- human husks with hair, genitalia and fingernails often intact.

Once the shock subsided, the commerce began, with people charging curious visitors to see the remains of great-granddad. The authorities found this embarrassing until the entrepreneurial spirit caught up with them too -- and now there's a nice climate-controlled building with a fine selection of dehydrated zombies under glass.

I had a hint of what was to come from the Momias postcards on sale at every store. As horrific as their expressions are, there's something most amusing about these flaking cadavers. One expects to be revolted in the presence of such an anthology of death, but after the first few cases those sickly tourist faces give way to smiles.

A smiling male momia, clad only in a pair of leather boots, seems frozen mid-jig, doing a death-defying dance in his own grave. There's a special case reserved for severed heads and infants, and a fading photo gallery of pics showing people posing with the recently exhumed.

Souvenirs (and there's a Disney-scale selection, everything from Momias key chains to piggybanks) are available in the dozens of booths outside.

In the Mercado Hidalgo, two men, sides of pork slung over their shoulders, go between the cramped stalls, throwing them down with a dead-meat slap on the butcher's counter. All kinds of vegetables, candy, clothing, sombreros and tourist junk are for sale in the two-floor complex. Dogs run around licking the floor beside the fruit juice stand or the counter where a woman carves up cow hearts and livers.

It was time for Montezuma's Revenge to hit, and it did, with no subtlety whatsoever.

Five days, in retrospect, isn't a long enough stay in Guanajuato but, like most travelers on a budget, the promise of another new, exotic stimuli is only a dilapidated school bus away.

OAXACA

Mexico is getting more expensive, especially in the resorts and the rapidly industrializing northern states. But that doesn't mean there aren't still good deals to be had for the budget traveler.

In Oaxaca I stayed at Casa Arnel where a room, opening on a courtyard full of tropical plants, flowers and parrots, cost less than $6. My dive in Mazatlan, complete with mosquitoes coming through the torn screen, was double the price.

It's still possible to live in Mexico on $10-15 a day, staying in budget hotels and buying food at the market. Another $5 a day will provide luxuries like a hot shower in your room and a meal or a few drinks at a zocalo cafe in the evening.

Oaxaca is an eight-hour bus ride south of Mexico City -- a long time to spend on any bus -- but first class on any major route in Mexico is as bearable as it gets. The buses are as modern and generally cleaner than any in Canada. Mexico to Oaxaca was 25,000 pesos ($12 Cdn). A flight would be about $50 one-way or $25 (luxury class) on the train.

Going on the ground gives you a chance to see the Mexico that rarely shows up in travel articles and tourist literature. Stopping in small villages with sprawling shanty towns, women and children yell up at the bus windows, offering tamales, sandwiches, corn chips, Coke or coffee so sweet it shouldn't be sold to anyone without a dental plan.

The Oaxaca markets are at least a one-day diversion even for those who hate shopping. There are two large indoor markets near the zocalo. One is a crowded maze of food, textiles and leatherwork. The other is for prepared meals -- like a precursor to the modern shopping mall food court with ma & pa lunch counters rather than burger chains.

Each different food stall or fonda is painted a different primary color, with stools, a counter and stove behind. There are a few specialties, but every operation is required to have Oaxaca's traditional hot chocolate. Hershey's it ain't. Unsweetened, but spiced with cinnamon -- it's served in large bowls with sweet white buns for dipping.

Chocolate also makes into other dishes, especially sauces like mole Oaxaqueno (chilis, bananas, chocolate, cinnamon, and pepper) served over chicken. Spend a few dollars at this place, and you don't have to worry about food for the rest of the day.

The best pottery, folk art, serapes, hammocks and textiles, brought in mainly by women from the surrounding villages, are for sale on the street. These people like to barter, unlike the indoor markets where the price tags rule. Another large indoor market is located near the second-class bus depot, a half-hour walk from the zocalo. The piles of fruit and vegetables are maintained with obvious pride and considerable architectural skill.

MITLA, TEOTITLAN de VALLE

An air-conditioned tour bus goes straight to the Mitla ruins, bypassing the weaving and mezcal shops in the town itself. The weaving shops are a fascinating cottage factory usually consisting of only one or two workers. Young men dressed only in Adidas shorts, drenched in perspiration, stand weaving serapes by stepping on the pedals that form the pattern, their hands reaching overhead to cords that throw the shuttle back and forth across the warp. Imagine pre-industrial revolution Nautilus equipment.

The Mitla ruins make up in detail what the lack compared to Monte Alban's vast grandeur. Intricate patterns line the walls built as late as the 13th Century A.D. The patterns aren't carved, but composed of separate stones fitted together like large stone Leggo. It's estimated that more than 100,000 pieces were used on the main building alone.

When the Spaniards arrived they plunked down a church, San Pablo, in the middle of Mitla's main square. It's a small church, weather-beaten, not that distinctive, but nothing could be a better symbol of the conquest.

On the way back to Oaxaca, I jumped off the bus and started walking up a side road to Teotitlan de Valle. Fortunately, some construction workers gave me a ride before the road got too steep.

Teotitlan is Mexico's prime stop for serapes, the entire town seemingly employed in the one craft. Whereas the people in the weaving shops at Mitla looked like factory workers, these craftsmen took their work at a slower pace.

ZIPOLITE

It's a good thing the scenery is nice between Oaxaca and the Pacific Coast, because second-class bus service is the only way to get there unless you fly.

Like the Mazatlan-Durango trip it takes eight hours to go 150 km, but through a quickly changing geography: from the hilly country near Oaxaca through dusty little towns, rising into red earth foothills, up to heavily-wooded foothills at an altitude of 3000 metres where palm-like trees meet the clouds. Then it descends to the dry coast. Iguana country.

As the bus boarded in Oaxaca, I discovered I'd lost my ticket, and had to buy another from the ticket-taker once we were on the road.

Half the people on the bus were searching for the idiot gringo's ticket. It was found during one of many food stops. I was refused a refund, which sparked an angry chorus of protest from the people I was sitting with. Unfazed, the ticket man told the peasants off in Spanish and left the bus.

The ticket was only worth about $5, but that's almost enough to live comfortably for a day in Zipolite, a four-km walk from Puerto Angel where the bus stops.

And a 4km-walk back, as I discovered when I tried to break my last 50,000 peso (about $45) note and nobody on the entire beach could give me change.

Zipolite was the perfect place to end the trip. There are no real "attractions" other than the waves and no history or architecture to marvel at. There's little to do but body surf, eat, drink, or lay in a hammock reading as a sow and column of piglets files by, followed by a few nude people, a bunch of chickens, some narcotics officers and a 50-year-old hippy with a spear gun and some fish on a chain.

-30-

after 300 dey drunk and lay down

“Boire sans soif et faire l’amour en tout temps, Madame, il n’y a que ça qui nous distingue des autres bêtes.”

The Alcoholic Monkeys of St. Kitts

by Alex Shoumatoff
Maisonneuve Magazine
Issue 5, September 2003

Neuropsychiatrist Dr. Maurice Dongier of McGill University studies the causes of alcoholism. He and I are related by marriage, through an extended family of Rwandese émigrés in Montreal and, at a recent family gathering, Maurice started telling me about the alcoholic monkeys on the Caribbean island of St. Kitts. They were African green monkeys, whose ancestors were brought over by French settlers from Senegal and the Gambia in the eighteenth century.

Ladies of the garrison, parasols atwirl, would stroll with them on leashes, like poodles, along the ramparts of the fort. During a battle with the British for control of the island, some of the monkeys managed to escape into the island’s thickly forested interior. Now there were forty thousand monkeys on the island, about the same number as the human inhabitants—and they were such a serious agricultural pest that the government paid hunters to shoot them.

The monkeys particularly liked to raid sugar-cane fields. After a rainstorm, it was Maurice’s understanding that some of the cane would ferment, and the monkeys would come out of the forest and get drunk from chewing it. Some of the males would beat their wives and children and would exhibit what he called, in his Marseilles-inflected English, “skeedrow behaviour.”

A McGill colleague of Maurice’s had been studying the monkeys, and had found that 17 percent of them displayed classic symptoms of alcoholism—the same proportion reported in an alcoholism study of Swedes—and that the monkeys’ susceptibility to alcohol showed clear family linkage. I sipped in appreciative silence the magnificent Sauterne that Maurice had brought up from his wine cellar.

I told Maurice about my fascination with primates—how I had observed lemurs in Madagascar, mountain gorillas in Rwanda, mixed troops of squirrel and capuchin monkeys in the Amazon and many other species in the wild. I was very familiar with African green (also known as vervet) monkeys—no one who has spent any amount of time in Africa can fail to run into them. “I’d love to see these monkeys,” I mused to Maurice, and he said, “So would I,” and he added that it would be even more interesting if we flew to St. Kitts from Montreal in a small plane. He had a pilot’s license and was part-owner of a Beechcraft that he took up most weekends.

Every time Maurice and I saw each other after that, I would ask him, “When are we going to St. Kitts?” and he would tell me that he was working on it. After the third blizzard of the winter, the idea of actually doing this had become very attractive, and on February 26 the two of us took off in sub-zero weather from Montreal’s Beloeil Airport in a two-engine Aztec Piper and headed south. It was twelve hundred miles to Florida, and another twelve hundred over open water to St. Kitts. We could get there in two days, Maurice said, but he warned, “We are at the mercy of Aeolus.”

At seven thousand feet and 175 knots, a trip like this becomes an epic voyage. Plowing through Himalayan cloudpeaks, catching glimpses of the earth below, is an almost hallucinatory experience. “We are literally ‘getting high,’” I yelled to Maurice over the engine’s drone, and he yelled back, “Of course.” We marvelled at silver rivers slithering to the sea, at the baroque swirls of estuaries, half-frozen, like milky cataracts, as far down as Virginia, where winter began to lose its grip; at the transition from snow to frozen brown ground to green; at how every twenty minutes a strategically sited skyscraper thicket would appear, as if each were a kingdom: the kingdom of Philadelphia, the kingdom of Wilmington, the kingdom of Baltimore.

The first night we made Florence, a friendly little burg deep in the piney woods of South Carolina whose claim to fame is that it was, half a century ago, the first stop for Nazi POWs. The next night we made an unscheduled stopover in the Bahamas, after our radio conked out, then another in San Juan, the swinging, seething capital of Puerto Rico, due to a cracked seal on the right wing’s oil tank. It wasn’t until the morning of the fourth day that we spotted a string of lushly forested volcanic cones poking up from the cobalt sea—tiny, ex-Dutch Saba and St. Eustatius, then the slightly larger, ex-British St. Kitts and Nevis.

Maurice’s colleague, Frank Ervin, was waiting for us at the little airport in St. Kitts. Sixty-eight, with long flowing white hair and beard, he looked like Walt Whitman or an éminence grise of the sixties. Ervin had grown up in east Texas and he had an expansive, easy drawl that made him instantly likeable. “My mother was a widow, and during the Depression she worked for the Farm Security Administration, giving out loans to poor rural blacks, so I feel completely at home among the Kittisians,” he told us as we drove to Estridge Estate, a working sugar plantation on the northern part of the island where he and his wife, Roberta Palmour, a human geneticist also at McGill, were conducting the alcoholism study.

“You will find the Kittisians extremely polite,” he went on. “A few of the younger generation affect a faddish, emulative Rastafarianism, but this is basically an old-time scene, right out of Mr. Pickwick.” The island, only twenty-three miles from tip to tip, one of the northern Leeward Islands in the Lesser Antilles, was discovered by Columbus on his second voyage and named for the patron saint of travellers (St. Kitts is streamlined patois for St. Christopher). From 1643 on, it was the first stop for slave ships and the auction centre for the entire Caribbean.

It had then, and has to this day, a single economy: sugar cane. There was a tourist compound with a casino and a golf course on the other side of the island, Ervin told us, that attracted charter flights from places like Dallas, Toronto and Cali, Colombia (the island was a transshipment station for cocaine until a few years ago, when the Drug Enforcement Agency caught on to the fact that the cargo on these flights wasn’t only human). However, the shortage of white-sand beaches had kept it from becoming a big tourist destination.

“Unlike on other islands, ganja is frowned upon, but there’s a lot of heavy drinking,” he continued. “Neither Isben Williams [a Barbadian analyst with many alcoholic patients in the capital] or I have a handle on how much is genetic and how much is sociocultural. Until television arrived five years ago, there was nothing for the men to do when they came in from the cane fields but go to the rum shop and play dominoes. Places like our local pub, the Cosmopolitan Bar, are still the big gossip and buddy centres, so if you have any vulnerability at all for one drink to lead to the next, you’re going to drink a lot of booze.”

A dusty road led between tall dense walls of cane to the ramshackle plantation house. Inside were computers and a high-tech lab. In a compound in back were eleven hundred caged monkeys, some in small solitary cages, some in larger cages in groups of up to a dozen. I went out to see them just as it was getting dark. A frisson of panic spread through the compound at the sight of a new bearded honky. In cage after cage, the scampering, screeching monkeys would flow into the farthest upper corner and plaster themselves into a tight, trembling pod, their eyes bulging. Never had my arrival on a scene inspired such terror.

This was not about monkeys in the wild, I realized. It was a laboratory for breeding monkeys for medical purposes. The main income of the operation was derived from providing European and American laboratories with monkeys for medical research or drug production and from preclinical drug trials on the monkeys who remained on the farm. The alcoholism study was only one of about forty that Ervin was running.

It was not alcoholism but an interest in the biology of violence that brought Ervin to monkeys. Fascinated from an early age by how the brain works, Ervin was a brilliant student. Starting in public school in rural East Texas, he rose meteorically through the academic strata until, by the sixties, he had become a psychopharmacologist in the Harvard Department of Psychiatry. He was not impressed by the way Timothy Leary, over in the department of psychology, was handing out LSD to all comers, and voted “no” when Leary wanted to transfer to his department.

Frustrated by the inability of clinical psychiatry to cure the most severe mental disorders, he gravitated increasingly to neurobiology. He studied schizophrenia, then the mechanisms of pain—phantom limb pain and other syndromes; then he focused on temporal lobe epilepsy, which introduced him to psychotic behaviour, on which he eventually became a recognized authority, in demand as an expert witness at psychotic-murder trials.

“Some epileptics experience between seizures increasing dysphoria [the opposite of euphoria], irritability and loss of impulse control, which in the right setting can lead to extreme violence,” Ervin explained. “Epileptics who murder are acquitted under the Napoleonic code, which recognizes that they are incapable of controlling themselves.”

“I’m fascinated with people who feel like killing somebody with no external input,” he went on. “They give clues to the brain’s machinery.”

Ervin then began to wonder whether non-epileptics with similar histories of impulsive violence could be victims of other unknown innate brain disorders, so he started looking for people with an established vulnerability to loss of control who had been identified by the criminal justice system rather than the mental health system. By l968 he had 180 self-referred violent patients.

“Thirty-five were murderers,” Ervin recalled. “We’re not talking about small-time, getting a little irritable. One federal prisoner who volunteered for the study was too embarrassed to tell me what he had done. He was a little guy—looked like Peter Lorre. I read his file: he had eviscerated two girls, six and seven, masturbated on their entrails and tried to burn down a cathedral to conceal the evidence. He was genuinely relieved to be locked up so he couldn’t hurt anybody else. ‘Tell me what happens,’ I said. The man explained, ‘I go along fine, then I get these feelings like I want to do something, like burn down a house or mutilate a child. I start getting these nightmare images. What I used to do, when I was on the outside, was go to a bar to try to obliterate them.’” Ervin explained that the man “was turning to alcohol in an ignorant, miscarried attempt at self-medication. This is very common. It brought on the very violent behaviour he was trying to fend off.

“If you take any maximum-security prison, the diagnosis is uniformly alcoholism,” he continued. “The majority of murders, rapes and property crimes are committed under the influence of alcohol. The question is, is drinking simply a common practice of the criminal subculture, does it contribute to the crime or is it just contributory to their getting caught?” Ervin believes it plays an active role. “Alcohol in low doses excites the limbic system, particularly the amygdala, which organizes attack behaviour, the fight or flight responses—and at the same time it dampens the inhibiting mechanisms in the frontal lobe, the neocortex, which control primal aggression,” he explained. “Or as a psychoanalyst would put it, the superego is soluble in alcohol.”

By the late sixties Ervin had reached a point in his research where he “needed a social group with a complex behavioural repertoire to study.” Greens were just what he was looking for. “The weed monkey of Africa,” Ervin called them. “They range all over the continent and exploit practically every habitat. They are highly adaptable and aren’t endangered, and their DNA overlaps 95.5 percent with man.”

Ervin hooked up with some scientists doing experiments at Victoria Falls, in what was then Southern Rhodesia and is now Zimbabwe. Just as he was getting on the plane, however, Southern Rhodesia hit the fan. Victoria Falls fell to the guerrillas of still-in-the-bush, soon to become the despotic, erratic head of state Robert Mugabe, so Ervin needed to find another population. By chance, a colleague at the Smithsonian Institution discovered an old green-monkey skin labelled “St. Kitts.” Ervin flew down to the island as soon as he could. He drove out to the arid southern tip, where there is a great salt pond. A man named Mr. Wigley lived on the pond. Ervin asked him if there were any monkeys on the island, and Mr. Wigley replied, “Yeah boss.”

Ervin dreamed of stocking the southern tip with monkeys and conducting a massive Calhoun experiment: fencing them off in a confined area and providing them with unlimited food until, as with Calhoun’s rats, every space was filled and they began to rape and murder each other, the mothers committing infanticide and eating their babies. Ervin could play Animal Farm games—control them with electronics and gadgets, make the weakest one the only one who could open the food and watch how he became the leader, make the alpha male a criminal outlaw omega.

All this was a little hard-core and Island of Dr. Moreau for my blood. I really had problems with what was going on here, however important to science and beneficial it was to the human race. I wondered what Brigitte Bardot would think of this place. “Is that where they blind them?” the primatologist Jane Goodall asked when I told her about my visit to St. Kitts. “This is one of these offshore medical labs where ghastly experiments that would never be permissible on the mainland are performed. Once you accept that humans are not the only beings with feelings or personalities and reason, a whole new concept enters in, and places like this raise a lot of questions. We have too long thought we can do anything we like as long as it is vaguely postulated to be good for us.”

Ervin was eloquent in his defence against the animal-rights issues the operation raised. “I’m an unrepentant speciesist,” he said. “If a baby monkey has to be sacrificed so its kidney can provide twenty-seven thousand polio vaccines, to me this is a reasonable trade-off.” Defending his research on alcoholism, he noted, “Even if my motives were purely selfish—intellectual curiosity, ambition, to be the one who discovers the genetic basis of alcoholism—this research would still benefit the human race. Alcoholism is the third leading cause of preventable death in the US. One in eight children has an alcoholic parent. The annual cost of the disease is $130 billion—twice the cost of the Gulf War—mainly due to absenteeism, but also because it causes chronic heart and liver disease and several kinds of brain rot and takes up half the nation’s hospital beds; the health costs are staggering. Half of fatal car accidents are alcohol-related, and this is quite apart from the tremendous social toll: fatherless children, abused wives and other personal tragedies. So,” he continued, “you can see why this is worth trying to understand. And to understand it you have to have animals whose neurobiology and endocrinology you can manipulate. No progress has been possible in any clinical problem you want to name—cancer, influenza—without an animal model.”

---

For the next four years, after discovering that there were monkeys on St. Kitts, Ervin would come down whenever he could and study the monkeys in the wild. He found that true to their species, they had adapted to practically every one of the island’s mini-ecosystems. The St. Kitts greens had been without predators for centuries and their social organization was much looser and more relaxed than the traditional, sharply hierarchical African troop; “like a Quaker meeting,” as Ervin put it.

In an eighteenth-century natural history of the island by Jesuit naturalist Father LeBlanc, Ervin read of how the slaves would set out halved coconuts filled with molasses and rum to lure the monkeys in from the forest; barbecued monkey is still a popular dish on the island. This got him thinking about how the monkeys might be useful for alcohol research.

While driving down to Basseterre, a serious confusion about the monkeys getting bombed on the fermented sugar cane emerged. Maurice and I had been led to believe we were going to see feral intoxication. This was what we had flown all the way down here to see. Ervin had assured me over the phone that seeing this was only a matter of patience and the amount of time we had. But now he confessed that he had never personally witnessed a single act of spontaneous wild drunkenness, nor were there any reports of such a thing happening.

Moreover, the cane didn’t ferment after rain—he didn’t know where we had got that idea. (From him, actually, his Texan penchant for hyperbole apparently having got the better of him.) But there was a tree on the island known as the jumbie cutlass whose fruit was hallucinogenic, and the monkeys had frequently been observed tripping out after eating it. So wild drinking “would be expected,” he now said. “Look at all the alcoholic dogs.”

I later sent out a query about “feral intoxication” to a Web site where 550 primatologists schmooze with each other, and got a number of interesting responses. That wild ring-tail lemurs get drunk on fermented lily pods in Madagascar is well documented. In Kenya, there are folktales about wild drunken galagos, and in a video called “Animals are Beautiful,” not only baboons, but elephants, warthogs and kudus feast on the fermented berries of a marula tree and get into “what to human observers may be an all too familiar state,” as the video’s narrator comments. Cedar waxwings get loaded on fermented juniper berries. Cats are driven crazy by catnip. I’ve heard even certain species of ants trip out on hallucinogenic fungi. There does seem to be a basic desire on the part of many sentient beings to get high. Some can handle the consciousness-altering substances, others become addicted.

One can become addicted to almost anything, though—chess, golf, jogging, Ella Fitzgerald singing Cole Porter. The question then becomes, to what extent is the addiction biological? Ervin pointed out that “alcohol is not a bad food source, as Joe Six-Pack’s belly attests. One can imagine the selective advantage of being able to eat fermented fruit. One can even imagine genes for extracting the calories in alcohol, and 17 percent who didn’t get efficient at doing this and leave acetaldehyde (which is what you make when you drink alcohol) in the brain long enough for addictive compounds to form.”

This was one approach that Ervin was looking at: alcoholics may be pushed heavily by their genes or their environment, but alcohol itself may be also intrinsically addictive. “If you do your homework on the blackboard, you could show that acetaldehyde going to the brain can in theory interact with dopamine, serotonin and probably other neurotransmitters to form an adduct which would be an opiate-like compound that could be the basis of a true addiction like morphine, opium, etc. But nobody has been able to demonstrate that this happens in man. So far such opiate compounds have only been found in the spinal columns of Parkinson’s disease patients, but not alcoholics. It takes a certain kind of enzyme to tie together acetaldehyde and dopamine.”

It was to explore such avenues that Ervin and Palmour started their alcoholism research program in 1980. Rats had been used in alcohol research since the twenties, but theirs was the first monkey model. Since then rhesus monkeys have been tested in Rotterdam and at Harvard, cynomolgus monkeys in Denver, and Ervin had just sold some of his drinkers to the University of North Carolina.

“When I started the study, the literature said animals will not voluntarily consume alcohol in excess,” he continued. “The existing studies were set-ups for the animals to self-inject intravenously, which is a more useful model for heroin, or forced-drinking set-ups, where the animal is shocked every ten seconds until he takes a drink. But I screened two hundred monkeys for voluntary consumption and found thirty-five drinkers.”

I accompanied Amanda, a local girl who is responsible for putting out the rum and recording how much each monkey drinks, on her rounds. The rum that is used is 150-proof local moonshine brewed in the hills and known as hammond, for Lord Roy Hammond, whose agents cracked down on the practice after the Second World War. The hammond is diluted with water to thirty proof and is placed from 9 am to 1 pm alongside an identical bottle of pure water. The monkey has the choice of which liquid he wants to drink.

“After two weeks you can tell who is a drinker and who isn’t,” Amanda explained. “This tall one’s a crazy alcohol drinker,” stopping at cage 0609-3. “He has already drunk 275 cc’s in an hour and a half. He usually drinks over 400 cc’s. After 300 they get drunk and lay down.” 01907, however, hadn’t touched his hammond bottle.

The monkeys in the study were in small solitary cages, to keep environmental influences to a minimum. But I wondered whether boredom and isolation factored in a monkey’s choice of fluid; if I were locked in solitary like this day after day, I’d probably go for the rum myself.

Ervin had prepared a group of ten males so Maurice and I could observe the effects of hammond on social behaviour. We would be “sort of like a bartender observing his customers,” he explained. A bald patch had been shaved on a different part of each monkey’s body to tell it apart. Ervin gave us a crash course in first-level screening for sixteen basic categories of behaviour—the same techniques employed by biosocial anthropologists in the field, which he said had proved surprisingly useful in mental wards and prisons in predicting recovery and recidivism rates.

“Psychiatrists are too hung up on speech,” he said. “A person can sound completely rational, but you can tell from his body language that he’s dying to kill you.” (Here Ervin became a psycho, maniacally wringing his hands in his crotch and jerking his head uncontrollably to the right.)

“The first split is between social and individual behaviour,” he explained. “Individual is eat, drink, defecate, urinate, masturbate, orient (focus on something). Signs of anxiety include scratching, ear flapping, yawning; abrupt anxiety may be expressed by an involuntary liquid defecation. Social behaviour breaks down into affiliative and agonistic.

Grooming is the female affiliative behaviour par excellence, as you can test by driving around the island and seeing all the girls plaiting and braiding each other’s hair, while the boys are chasing each other and rough-and-tumbling. The same is true of monkeys. For agonistic behaviour you describe what the focal animal is doing. You separate the social hierarchy by the rate of threats received or emitted. The lowest level of threat is displacement. A big male displaces a smaller one from the shade.

At the first level of aggression there is eye-to-eye contact, frequently accompanied by a smile or half-yawn, a slight demonstration of the teeth. At the second level, the mouth opens fully, the canines are displayed, and the monkey barks. The recipient escalates or backs off. In a full dominance confrontation the loser submits, and you get a pelvic present. In the case of stumptail macaques, the loser is buggered.”

“If the conflict is not resolved by symbolic semiotics,” Ervin went on, “the antagonists chase each other and cut each other up. Their canines are as sharp as straight razors. Eighty percent of the bites are at the axillary, femoral or carotid arteries, where they are most likely to kill.”

As soon as Ervin left, the ten monkeys all approached, making contact calls. It didn’t take long to pick out the dominant ones; they hadn’t been together long enough for there to be a single obviously paramount alpha. Left Shoulder, as we named him, was the boldest, but not the biggest. Big doesn’t mean boss, Ervin later explained. Dominance is often hereditary.

LS approached with penis erect, yawning. The others, ranged along the perimeter of the cage, gazed wistfully out, occasionally directing a half-yawn at nobody in particular—a “displaced threat.” Two monkeys sat on a pole, swishing their crossed tails; this meant “buddies.” A little adolescent came up to us, masturbated briskly and licked the come off its fingers. “Hate to waste protein,” Ervin explained. Masturbation, he said, was basically something to do to while away the day.

Another monkey caught a fly in the air with a lightning swipe of the hand and ate it. Left Thigh sodomized Right Thigh three times in the course of the morning, stepping up on the crooked back of his calves to get a better angle of thrust. I recalled the gradient of expressions for “hanging out” in Mexico and the Southwest: around Mexico City people say they are tragando cañote, “sucking cane”; in Chihuahua it becomes comiendo moscas, “eating flies”; while in northern New Mexico it is chingando el borrego, “fucking the sheep.”

On St. Kitts the expression is “liming.” (Liming was the main behaviour Maurice and I saw over nineteen hours of observation between us.)

After an hour of baseline study, Amanda brought four bottles of hammond. Four of the monkeys showed immediate interest in them, particularly Small Central Thorax (SCT), the wimpiest, scrawniest and mangiest of the group, who, clinging to the wire by all fours, with his eyes blissfully closed, sucked the spout for five minutes straight and returned for several more equally long drafts.

The hooch took effect in less than half an hour: SCT was staggering and weaving like a classic drunk. After several attempts to reach the pole laid across the centre of the cage, above his head just out of arm’s reach, he finally made it, but soon afterward, unable to keep his balance, he fell back down to the floor. The other three drinkers, who were also omegas, lay down and slept for a few minutes; when they came to, they seemed normal. The effect was not unlike that of rum on the planters of St. Kitts, described by an early chronicler named Richard Ligon: “It lays them asleep on the ground.”

SCT was the only real “skid row” monkey of the lot. There seemed to be a correlation between drinking and low status. None of the alphas were drinkers. One alpha, in fact—the local member of the Temperance League, apparently—shoved the spout of one of the bottles so that no one could reach it.

A few mornings later, when SCT was reeling drunk again, Maurice observed several of the sober monkeys catch him and prop him up as he was about to fall. Apart from a few tiffs, we saw no violence. In fact, the alcohol seemed to produce more altruism than aggression. Maurice agreed; what we had seen supported the contention of the writer Marguerite Duras, a severe alcoholic, who claimed that liquor makes you more intelligent, social and socialistic.

Ervin explained that you wouldn’t expect to see changes in social organization and level of aggression for another two weeks, when the drinkers would be putting away four hundred cc’s a morning. “With alcohol the ritual system [of aggression] breaks down. A drinker will initiate an act like appeasement or sex play, then break it off. Failing to send the right signal, he is attacked, and because he has lost judgement, he attacks back, then all hell breaks loose.”

“The same sort of breakdown of the agonistic minuet happens in bars,” he continued. “Take, for instance, this exchange, which actually happened in a bar on the North End of Boston:

Guy 1 to Guy 2: Got a smoke?
Guy 2: Sure. Hands Guy 1 unopened pack. Guy 1 peels cellophane and throws on floor.
Guy 2: Pick up your trash.
Guy 1: Fuck you.
Guy 2 pulls gun and blows Guy 1 away.”

---

What exactly is alcoholism? I wondered. Like most Frenchmen, Maurice had been drinking at least three glasses of wine a day for decades. “In America, I would be considered a heavy drinker, but I am not an alcoholic,” he explained. As far as most Frenchmen are concerned, there are no alcoholics in France, although France has one of the world’s highest per capita consumption rates—fourteen gallons of pure alcohol a year, compared with eight in the United States—and one of the world’s highest cirrhosis rates. Wine is simply part of the meal.

To date, no genes associated with alcoholism have been found in any species. A big mistake of popularizers, Ervin said, is that there is a “gene for alcoholism,” like a “gene for criminality,” just waiting to be found. “Alcoholism is a complex, multifactorial disorder, heavily influenced by sociocultural factors,” he explained.

“It could be not one but hundreds of syndromes, some of which may have a genetic aspect. But all such genes might do anyway is to give you a susceptibility, a predisposition. Your alcoholism might never be expressed—for instance, if you were a Muslim.”

There is anecdotal evidence, but no hard statistical data, Maurice remarked, of a lot of serious drinking in Russia. But how much of this drinking is biological, how much is frustration with the demoralized and oppressive poshlost of the society and how much is due to the cold? Extreme cold and hot climates (Brazil, for instance) produce heavy drinking, but then the Irish are no slouches either. Maurice, Ervin and Palmour were part of a multidisciplinary team studying alcoholism in northern Ontario, whose males are dramatically more prone to the disease than southern Ontarians. This may, however, have less to do with geography than with personality.

There is a strong correlation between alcoholism and high scores on a sixty-point questionnaire devised fifteen years ago by the neuropsychiatrist Marvin Zuckerman to identify “sensation-seeking” behaviour. Zuckerman-positives, who seek out adventure, danger and constant stimulation and tend to drink a lot, abound in northern Ontario.

There is also a correlation between alcoholism and depression, which is caused, according to the latest thinking, by a malfunction of the dopamine, serotonin and norepinephrine receptors. Depressives are drawn to alcohol for the initial short-term spike in these chemical neurotransmitters, but alcohol, like marijuana, is a depressive, and its chronic effect is to desensitize the receptors and to make you more depressed. (Although I don’t find this to be the case with cannabis.) Addiction may be an attempt to get back to the original excited state.

There is also anecdotal evidence, but no good studies, of heavy drinking among Native Americans. One drunk Navajo is said to die of exposure every day on the Navajo reservation. Asians—Japanese, Tibetans and some Native Americans—do have a proven congenital reaction to alcohol: they flush. The flushes are very uncomfortable, like menopausal hot flushes, and are often accompanied by nausea and dizziness.

One would expect that Native American alcoholics are pushed by their genes, but how much of their drinking is attributable to cultural degradation (defeat is particularly hard on the males of a defeated culture; worldwide, there are three times as many male alcoholics in subjugated or formerly subjugated societies), how much to the cultural value many tribes attach to alternate states of consciousness? Native Americans themselves complain that they were deliberately addicted to “firewater” by early traders, the way the Chinese were addicted to opium by the British East India Company.

Native Americans drink to get drunk. So do Russians. So do I, every once in a while. When I drink—and I’m not much of a juicer, my liver being shot, having had malaria twice and hepatitis once—I keep drinking. Why else drink unless you’re going to get drunk?

This makes me an alcoholic, according to the current, rather lame definition of the disease. In the absence of actual genes, alcoholism is defined functionally, as drinking to the point where you are no longer in control, where you’re unable to stop although you have become physically, economically or socially impaired because of alcohol: you have cirrhosis, you’ve lost your job, your family is disintegrating.

This definition includes the need to get smashed periodically, even the binge drinker who ties one on every nine months and is a sober, responsible citizen the rest of the time; people like Winston Churchill, who started his day with a shot of brandy and by evening was famously, vituperatively drunk; and four American Nobel Prize winners.

Alcoholism seems to be the occupational hazard of writers particularly, who need substances that will turn off the machine or grease their mental wheels. The most reliable substance, the old standby, is booze. In one of his recent Vanity Fair columns, Christopher Hitchens, himself an unapologetic hip-flask journalist, extolls the salubrious effects of liquor on creativity.

At this point there is no definition of alcoholism in monkeys, but Maurice said that if Small Central Thorax kept drinking the way he had been for twenty days, and you took away his hammond and he started having violent withdrawal symptoms, you could safely conclude that he was an alcoholic.

The important thing, Ervin emphasized, was to realize that the difference between organic and functional psychosis is artificial. There are two languages, one neurobiological and the other psychosocial, for describing the same phenomenon.

“You can say clinical depression or low serotonin level. The problem with the overspecialized scientists of today is that too few of them are bilingual.” But ultimately, he added, everything is organic, “since there is an underlying brain.”

This was the point Ervin was trying to make in a book on the biology of violence that he published in l970, which was attacked by leftist intellectuals who “thought that I was trying to do away with the Che Guevaras of this world, that I was saying that there was no legitimate cause for anger, such as social injustice, because it was purely biological,” he explained.

“But what I was saying was that each of us has a well-oiled attack mechanism that is under varying degrees of control, and our anger, whatever triggers it, is accompanied by specific, measurable changes in brain chemistry. And in fact, just as everybody was saying that violence couldn’t possibly be genetic—this is hot off the press—a Dutch librarian assembled a three-hundred-year pedigree dripping with murderers, rapists and arsonists who have been found to share a defective NMAO gene. For the first time a gene associated with impulsive criminal violence has been isolated and sequenced.”

Ervin went to his blackboard and at the top he wrote “Behaviour,” then just below it he drew four boxes representing motivational states, which he labelled “Taste,” “Anti-anxiety,” “Anti-depressant” and “Craving (Addiction).” Then at the bottom of the board he wrote “Gene.”

“The puzzle of the system is how do you get from the gene, which makes a protein molecule, typically an enzyme, to the states? There may be several paths. There could be a single defective gene, or several disorders. We’d be willing to argue that every alcoholic family has a different genetic lesion. You can have your error on any one of twenty points down the line. Even a single mutation of the right kind can disrupt a complex function like intelligence. What happens at one enzyme, if you knock it out or slightly increase or decrease its activity, can reverberate throughout the system. It’s like what happens in the rain forest if you pull out the monkeys.”

Turning to his caged monkeys, he continued, “Let’s say you have identified a hundred excess drinkers, who meet all the criteria. The first thing you do is check their pedigrees to see if they are family-history positive or sporadic. A sporadic alcoholic could have suffered an accidental lesion prenatally—at fertilization, formation of the egg or meiosis—or because of disease at any time. There is no strong unifying hypothesis, you can’t find a unifying pathophysiology, so the sporadics are irrelevant to research, and you concentrate on the familial alcoholics.

Are the family histories identical? No. Some pedigrees have only male alcoholics, others both sexes. If you limit yourself to one pedigree, you can be reasonably sure that if there is a biological disorder, it’s the same one. If the pedigree is male-limited, it seems unlikely that it’s multiple-gene disorder. More likely it’s a single-gene error.”

Palmour explained that there are “a handful of candidate loci” for the genetic basis of alcoholism. A study of rhesus monkeys at Harvard supports the hypothesis that there may be a genetic malfunction for handling stress that prompts some monkeys to drink alcohol more readily than others. Palmour, who is studying her third generation of greens, has found genetic abnormalities in some of the drinkers’ adenylate cyclase that are identical to abnormalities in alcoholic humans. Adenylate cyclase, she explained, is a “dopamine transducer. A transducer is one of four or five ways cells can talk to each other.

Alcohol-preferring monkeys who have not been drinking have a dramatically higher level of adenylate cyclase than non-preferring monkeys, but if you let them drink for two weeks, the level normalizes. So we are considering evidence that many of the things we regard as psychopathological are not the consequence of a small primary lesion, but of the attempt of the organism to re-establish homeostasis—of overcompensation.

This hypothesis, that adenylate cyclase may play a role in alcohol addiction, is attractive because it is involved in dopamine production, and if it holds up between humans and monkeys, it has to be on the common pathway between gene and behaviour.”

But it could also be a dead end, Ervin admitted. A scientist considers himself lucky when one out of thirty hypotheses holds up for five years. Such is the progress of research. Meanwhile, the monkeys were also being used for more pragmatic types of research, like drug testing.

---

I was eager to see some wild greens. But apart from a couple of dozen on the arid south tip who are habituated to tourists, the other forty thousand or so keep an extremely low profile. It’s hard to see them doing anything, let alone getting spontaneously drunk. But that some of them had a hankering for alcohol was suggested by Father LeBlanc’s report as well as by the behaviour of Ervin’s captives.

In fact there was one monkey that had escaped but remained on the compound, taunting the others, and Ervin was dying to catch him. We could put out some rum and molasses in a halved coconut. But we never got around to doing it. According to Jane Goodall, the same sort of thing is rumoured to be done with palm wine to bait chimpanzees in Guinea.

Ervin said there were some monkeys on the slopes of Mount Liamuiga—the volcano in the centre of the island, also known as Mount Misery—and arranged for me to climb it with a huge dude named Cleaver, who hunted monkeys for a living. The government paid him by the day, and he sold whatever game he shot locally. As we climbed through the rain forest, Cleaver told me his recipe for marinating and barbecuing monkey ribs. The monkeys in the forest were “very bashful and sensitive. They see and hear more than we do.”

There were all sorts of folk tales about the monkeys—Anancy stories, he called them (Anancy is a cunning, spiderlike Caribbean culture hero of West African origin)—like about how they stole the straw hats and sunglasses of the tourists. Ecologically, he said, the monkeys had been a disaster. Along with introduced mongooses, they had wiped out the ground birds, the large, edible toads known as mountain chickens, the parrots, the St. Kitts bullfinches, the agoutis, the iguanas and the grass snakes. “They hassle farmers’ crops, the sugar cane, the birds’ nests,” he complained.

The monkeys who live on the slopes of the volcano and in its crater have plenty of wild food, so they have little truck with humans. Cleaver and I climbed through a mango forest into a palm brake; the palms are mountain cabbage palms, whose tender lead shoots are the source of the salad delicacy, palm hearts.

After three hours we entered an elfin cloud forest of small, twisted trees dripping with Spanish moss, with small epiphytic orchids in their crotches, and at last we reached the crater’s rim. We could hear, but couldn’t see, a raucous troop of monkeys calling to each other in the frothing jungle at the bottom of the crater, and fifty yards from us, a monkey walked briefly out on a branch to check us out and disappeared back into the forest.

They were there all right, and who was to say they don’t get smashed on fermented fruit from time to time, or even make their own secret brew of hammond, Maurice quipped afterward, like the monks from whom monkeys get their name, with their Chartreuse and their Benedictine? The question is completely unstudied.

Maybe we should come back next winter and mount a feral intoxication study, I suggested. Maurice agreed that we must continue our research, but he had another subject in mind—the pulque-guzzling burros of Teotihuacán.

The last time I talked to Maurice he had an epigram for me—from Beaumarchais’ The Marriage of Figaro: “Boire sans soif et faire l’amour en tout temps, Madame, il n’y a que ça qui nous distingue des autres bêtes.” (To drink without thirst and to make love whenever you feel the urge, Madame, there is nothing but this that distinguishes us from the other animals.)

“We now can say that this is not true,” he told me.

talkin' bout my germination

Smoke Pot, Not E-mail

In which it is proven that excessive info lust makes you dumber than a happy pothead. Isn't that great?

By Mark Morford
SF Gate Columnist
Friday, May 13, 2005

Didn't you already just know? Didn't you already sort of see it coming?

That is to say, didn't millions of us already sense, deeper down, despite all this mad orgasm of technology and despite all this incredible ability to stay in constant touch and despite how you can now travel almost nowhere in the world save for remote parts of the Amazon jungle where you cannot be tracked or e-mailed or faxed or called on the cell or FedExed a package from Amazon.com, don't you just know that we are, in fact, lowering our IQs and slaughtering brain cells like Karl Rove murders joy?

It's true. It has now been proven. A new study sponsored by Hewlett-Packard shows we are now being openly pummeled like Antarctic baby seals by our own glorious and demonic tech creations, that when we indulge in huge relentless gobs of e-mail use and cell phone use and instant messaging and Blackberries, et al., that we are, in fact, enduring the ongoing death of brain cells, the happy suicide of mental capacity, a very noticeable drop-off of IQ points.

And, according to the study, this drop-off is even more pronounced than the happily incapacitated state we enjoy after smoking a large, happy joint. A spliff. Gangster. Kif. Ganja. Only without the dry mouth and the giddiness and the swoony sparkle and the smooth mellow bliss and the desperate right-now urge to lick a very large salty pizza and then have sex and take a nap.

Infomania makes us dumber. Slower. Dimmer. Make a note of it. Write it on a Post-it and stick it on your monitor right now and stare at it like a mantra and then vow to yank the cables out of your brain and get outside and play with the dog and read more big thick books full of polysyllabic words and complex sentence structures and then, oh yes, be sure to smoke more pot because hey, it sure as hell ain't as bad for you as e-mailing like a maniac all day.

Because this is the funny thing, the ironic thing, the thing that confounds us and makes us go no way that can't be true because just look! I am doing nine things at once! I can drive my bloated SUV and chat online and answer e-mails and type in my bitchin' Blackberry and send instant messages and bang out text messages on my cell with my nose and still have room to think fond thoughts about my penis, all at the same time! I am superhuman! I am the wave of the future!

Wrong.

But this is what we think. We think technology is making us sharper, more efficient, more light and nimble and connected and enlightened and more primed to hotwire our bodies straight into the grand cosmic mainframe so we can finally be forever placed atop God's own personal IM Buddy List.

And much of the sci-fi bookshelf is taken up with visions of people as human/machine hybrids, these glorious yet weirdly damaged beings who have happily sacrificed hunks of their analog, low-tech humanity at the altar of high-tech hardwired info glory and we're like oh my God that is so cool! I can't wait until I can play a video game in my sunglasses and merely think about any person on the planet and have my intracranial implant chip automatically dial their intracranial implant and them I can speak to them through a microphone implanted in my tooth!

But, alas, we are not smarter. We are not deeper. We are not even all that much more profoundly connected to anything larger or more significant. We need to know this.

All we are now is more adept at allusion, at skimming like lightning over the surface of things, at referencing the world more deftly, while comprehending it less. We can quick-link and cross-text and multi-chat while at the same time remaining blissfully ignorant of how these very info tools are quietly destroying that all-important human skill, that slower, longer, often far more subtle and difficult art called deeper understanding, and if you've lately been anywhere near a roomful of teenagers, you understand this phenom perfectly.

On first blush, the next generation, they appear to get it. They are wired like a telephone pole. They speak the lingo and are fluent in ring-tone programming and iPod bells and HTML whistles and nothing but nothing in the tech sphere gets by them and you'd think, wow, these kids, they must be info supergenuises by now, so aswim are they in giant pools of gizmos and information and communication ease.

But then you hear them speak. They you hear them try to form a complete sentence about an actual subject of interest and struggle to form a single nuanced and careful thought that has nothing to do with what was on the WB or what video they just watched on their PSP or what their friend just text-messaged them on their Nokia, and you hear them fumble and slur and fall into huge pits of painful, tortured Bush-like grammar and you go, oh my freaking god we are in deep, deep trouble.

And of course, it's not just teens. It is the way of America. We have embraced infomania like a Republican embraces dead trees. We think, because we see it on the Net or because Bush mumbles it into the TelePrompTer or because someone sent it to us via e-mail that it must be true, while at the same time the sheer speed and ferocity of the delivery technology denies us the right to sit back and think more deeply about it all. Faster info, slower absorption. America, thou art one giant episode of "Short Attention Span Theater."

But oh, we don't seem to care. Maybe the trade-off is worth it? Maybe it really doesn't matter if we're just a little dumber and a little less coherent and a little less able to process complex thoughts, so long as we can e-mail 27 people while simultaneously talking into the speaker phone while downloading "Weapons of Ass Destruction III" as the iPod resyncs with the new NIN album. Or maybe that's just me.

Or how about this: Maybe we need to start looking at our info lust as merely yet another addiction, a narcotic, a happy necessary globally hailed universally embraced drug. E-mail as mental tranquilizer, intellectual emetic, Zoloft for the wired masses.

Maybe, after all, it's time we bring e-mail and IM and the like more in line with our other delicious vices and necessary enhancements, and just say, screw that deep brain stuff, it's time to kick back, light a spliff, pour some scotch, fire up the e-mail. Hell, it sure beats thinkin'.

****

Mark Morford's Notes & Errata column appears every Wednesday and Friday on SF Gate, unless it appears on Tuesdays and Thursdays, which it never does. Subscribe to this column at: sfgate.com/newsletters

love lifts us up, where we belong

Party Like A Rock Star,
Play Like An Allstar,
Fuck Like A Porn Star!

Back Where We Belong

CyberPorn Industry Convention Stirs Up Montreal

YNOT Blog by SexyScribe
Monday, May 09, 2005

MONTREAL, CANADA - With bars that close at 3am and after-hours clubs that run til 10am, Montreal is one of the more adult industry-friendly cities on the continent. Bilingual, multi-cultural, and fairly liberal when it comes to all things sexual, Montreal is a natural home for a porn convention, and yet, for the last two years, it was relatively abandoned as a site for industry events.

YNOT NewsMontreal hadn’t seen an official industry event since Cybernet Expo in 2003. The Webmaster Access East convention remedied that sorry state of affairs, and helped prove once again that Montreal is an important hub for business in the adult industry. With a few simple words in white blazed on a black background, the slogan on the official show t-shirts echoed the sentiment felt by many North-eastern adult industry professionals: “Back where we belong.”

Despite the chilly spring weather, show-goers were not deterred from taking advantage of all the city and the show had to offer. With seminars during the day and scheduled dinners and parties at night, WAE offered everyone plenty of opportunity to sample the city’s highlights and rediscover Montreal’s easy-going attitude. Seminars during the afternoons were largely well-attended and covered topics including traffic, content, legal issues as well as the requisite newbie seminar.

Food and dancing were two of the more popular evening activities, including Thursday night's show opener: "The Ultimate Poutine and Beer Happy Hour at the Peel Pub" which led to dancing at Reality Cash and JoinRightNow.com’s WarmUp Party at Club Living.

Gamma's Friday night dinner at Buena Notte nearly filled the restaurant to capacity and sated most everyone's appetites, while poker players at the My Virtual Card poker tournament counted chips and held bluffs until the wee hours of the morning, and others found their way to Club Exit for some ear-pounding tunes. On Saturday night, 2much opened their office and studio in old Montreal for the show's final bash, and revelers eventually made their way to one or another of the city's after-hours clubs.

There were no protests from picketers, no controversy over the convention, no scandal at the hotel, and despite the diversity of the hotel’s guests, no arrests were made and the hotel security guards were never even bothered. Even if opinions varied on the show, which they invariably do, one thing everyone agreed on is that the return of an industry show to Montreal was long overdue.

SexyScribe is Assistant Editor at YNOT. She can be reached at cyn@ynot.com

Monday, May 09th 2005 05:32:45 PM

SexyScribe reporting from YNOT North

Overheard in a downtown Montreal bar during WAE:

Visitor: “The really cool thing about this city, besides all the bars and nightlife and the hot women, I mean, is that if you look out the window at the people walking by on the street, they all have a smile on their face.”

The out-of-towner was referring to the locally cherished phenomenon known as Montreal Spring Fever. Despite the persistent chill in the night air, webmasters and adult industry professionals were treated to the warmth of Montreal’s hospitality during the Webmaster Access East convention last week.

Having lived in Montreal nearly my whole life, I feel a certain pride for the city I call home. Urban, chic, multi-cultural, and sexy, the city seems to charm people in a way no other North American city does. Maybe it’s the French, or the neo-Euro flair to its architecture, or the countless strip clubs that shamelessly dot the city like a Lichtenstein, but it’s hard not to fall under its spell. Last week during Webmaster Access East, I had the chance to see the city again through visitors’ eyes, and every once in a while, I couldn’t help throwing a thumb up and a spontaneous "I love Montreal!"

More...

Good work if you can get it, Lulu. ; - )

W2

a manna of hummable frogs

What's On Jesus' iPod? Pt. II

Readers respond! Ministry, Moby, Metallica and Morphine, and of course, we are all going to hell for this

By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist

Wednesday, May 4, 2005

The suggestions, they came in like a happy plague of shimmering locusts, like a manna of hummable frogs falling from the heavens. So many there were, I could not possibly use them all and for that I, and if he were here right now, Jesus, apologize.

The question, first posed in my What's On Jesus' iPod? column from last week, has now been thoroughly and wondrously answered by you, glorious and sanctified readers, because, well, you Get It.

You Understand. You know that life is, after all, one giant divine iTunes Party Mix, and that Jesus is nothing if not one of the great -- if deeply misunderstood and misrepresented -- mystical DJs of the known universe. On this we can all agree. Except, of course, for those who were horrified and offended by this idea and believe we are all going to hell because of it. But hey, even the Devil likes a good Sinatra MP3.

So then, what's on Jesus' iPod, according to you? Well ...

Jesus would listen to "God," by Tori Amos: "God sometimes you just don't come through / Do you need a woman to look after you?" Sense of humor, sense of irony and a wicked loop!
-- Heather L

"Miss Freelove '69," Hoodoo Gurus. Jesus remembers those whores, artists, freaks and treats that filled his days and nights of wandering. He smiles, thinking about those crazy afternoons that you can't really speak of to anyone who wasn't there.
-- nick

Jesus wanted me to mention his ipod has over 12 hours of lenny bruce concerts, not the early bits but all the complete wild shows at the horn, in SF and at carnegie hall
-- Aric A

I think that a 'supernatural being' would have something more serious in his personal rotation. Consider: Adagio for Strings, Samuel Barber; Requiem Mass (K. 626), Mozart; Piano Concerto No. 3 (Horowitz), Rachmaninoff; Goldberg Variations (Gould), Bach
-- Tyler M

When he's snagged the keys to Daddy's late-'60s convertible El Dorado to go out cruising, in that magic California warm early evening softness, he belts it out and sings along with Dusty Springfield, "Son Of A Preacher Man."
-- Anne J

Are you kidding? His playlist OPENS with Steely Dan's "Deacon Blues." If I have to explain it, then you don't understand Jesus at all.
-- Marie C

"Super Sex," by Morphine -- Jesus loves Mark Sandman, and even Jesus digs that baritone sax ripping through the darkness. Jesus is a baritone sax. America is in darkness. Rip on, Jesus.
-- John K

HOW DARE YOU!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Send such an e-mail out talking about Jesus and God the way that you have done ... After all the wonderful and great things he has done for you. I can't believe that someone would send such garbage out ... this post makes no sense whatsoever, and what in the world is an IPOD!!!!!!??????? I have a song for you ... how about "Amazing Graze" [sic] or "The Old Rugged Cross" there are so many songs that you should list in your "Post" that tell who he is and what he is all about ... instead of this garbage that you have posted that makes no sense whatsoever...
-- "The Smiths Home" [yes, a real e-mail]

Jesus would have the entire "Three Weeds from the Same Root" cd by Polish black metal band Thor's Hammer. After all that was done to Him when He was here, He'd have to have a black sense of humour.
-- Jennifer H

Moby, "My Weakness", because it sounds like someone left the door open in a corner of heaven where the children's choir practices and some of the mischievous kids are peeking through instead of participating.
-- Jon B

I think his iPod would include some fun Cole Porter songs, especially the version of "You're the Top" with Porter's sort-of secret naughty lyrics, because, if nothing else, Jesus has to have a sense of humor. I also think Jesus had a fling with Peter.
-- Sam H

"Minarets," by Dave Matthews Band: Scathing indictment of the Moslem intolerant Re-fried again Christians ... written between Gulf Wars I and II .... (Minarets are those cool phallic towers on Moslem mosques)
-- Stephen R

He just loves Nawang Khechog and relaxes with "Leading the Path of Non-Violence" and "The Heart Is for Kindness".
-- Oliver D

I personally feel Jesus would have Johnny Paycheck's "Take This Job and Shove It" in response to the people who have made him their boss but refuse to listen to what he's saying.
-- James M

Mike Scott, "Open." Because Jesus is all about being open to love, life and the mystery; Bright Eyes, "When the President Talks to God." The Morford J.C. column set to music and poetry; Nashville Pussy, "C'mon, C'mon." Jesus loves screaming, "f-- yeah!" on the chorus
-- Jim W

Lectures. Especially Naomi Klein, Malcolm X, Arundhati Roy, Howard Zinn and Cornel West. And he has the complete archive of Democracy Now! programs.
-- Se…n Kinane

An audiobook of Christopher Moore's "Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal" can't be any less inspired than some bits of Paul's letters
--Colin M

"Somebody Loan Me a Dime," by Boz Scaggs -- Jesus is just amazed that God put such a soulful tune in a white guy.
-- Bob W

Put it this way -- if JC doesn't have this song on his divine pod, he ain't really Jesus. It's "Somewhere Over the Rainbow," by Hawaii's big Buddha of love, Israel Kamakawiwo'ole. If you've heard it, you know why.
-- Jesse K

I'd say "running with the devil", by van halen, it would take him back to the day, when he and lucifer were just hangin out
-- R Sherman

Jesus likes to rave on E and listen to vintage Kraftwerk just to feel young again.
-- Jeremy

I'm certain that Sigur Ros' entire CD "Agaetis Byrjun" is on Jesus' iPod. In fact, I think I saw him at one of their concerts.
-- Carol Q

I think Jesus would like Lyle Lovett's "Church"
-- Anne W

Louis Armstrong's "What a Wonderful World." Kind of self-explanatory, but if I had to leave my 23-year-old son with one philosophy to live by, this would be it.
-- Valerie H

Yo, we KNOW Jesus was a black man, right? Right? So where in the name of Afrika Bambataa is all the old-school hip-hop Jesus would NO DOUBT have had on his iPod? Grandmaster Flash & the Furious 5's "The Message"... THE MESSAGE?! HELLO?!
-- Will S

Jesus would love almost anything by Bill Evans, who grabbed handfuls of piano notes like grapes which he squeezed into celestial wine. Especially "B Minor Waltz."
-- Bruce H

"Disposable Heroes," by Metallica, because he hates war; "War Pigs," by Black Sabbath, again because he hates war; "Sabbath Bloody Sabbath," also by Sabbath, because it could easily apply to what people have done with his Word; "The Sign of the Cross," by Iron Maiden, because, well, God protects us all, except maybe rabid right-wing born-again anti-marijuana fundamentalists
-- Chris M

I'd have a very hard time believing that Jesus is not a big ol' musical theater queen. Jesus loves Sondheim, so he'd have "Sorry/Grateful," from "Company," and "A Little Priest," from "Sweeney Todd," and "Hello Little Girl," from "Into The Woods." He'd recognize that nobody's ever written a better song of thanks for his dad's creation than "Oh, What a Beautiful Morning."
-- Janet H

Jesus would never own an iPod. Someone might give him one, but the guy traveled light and unencumbered. He'd turn right around and give it away, mint and in the box.
-- Echo U

stupid article, i hope that you repent of your sins and trust Jesus Christ's death, burial and resurrection for the salvation of your soul.
-- Tony W (preachertony.com)

Kinky Friedman -- "They Ain't Makin' Jews Like Jesus Anymore" (it's funny, and the guy in the song stands up to the redneck)
-- Glenn W

"Get Right with God," Lucinda Williams: If she lived 2,000 years ago, Lucinda would have been Jesus' Calamity Jane, the 13th disciple, and today happily wedded gay couples and female priests would be welcoming Pope Lucinda XVI.
-- Josh L

I definitely know that Jesus has the entire John Prine collection on the Holy iPod, especially, "Jesus, the Missing Years," "Your Flag Decal Won't Get You into Heaven Anymore," "Fish and Whistle," "Angel from Montgomery" and "Space Monkey."
-- Lise R

Jesus' top three Elvis tracks? "All Shook Up" when feeling inspired; "Jailhouse Rock" to keep his spirits up after being arrested; "Suspicious Minds" because it teaches us about trust.
-- George H

Now more than ever before in the benighted history of competing dogma, Jesus' iPod, I am sure, would contain more than a few samples of Middle Eastern music. Particularly, it would feature Cheb Mami, Faudel, Woroud Milad, Nawal al-Zoghbi, the enchanting chanteuse Amina Annabi and the divinely/diabolically inspired Natacha Atlas.
-- Brian S

I know what Jesus has on his iPod because he lives down the street from me and drives that old low-rider Chevy. He plays a lot of War, for example -- if I've heard "The Cisco Kid" once I've heard him play it 1,000 times. Trouble is Mark is that Jesus is bisexual -- I know because he keeps telling me and the ol' lady that he loves us. Whenever he rolls up a fat one he always grins and plays "What If God Smoked Cannabis!"
-- Ernest S

World music: Cesaria Evora deserves her name mentioned -- Sodade and Angola. Her voice is smooth, cormforting and haunting. Her soul is so pure -- Jesus would want this one.
-- Cynthia N

I challenge you to write a similar article about the Prophet Muhammed and his iPod.
-- Mezula M

The one I really and instantly thought of is Lamya -- album "Learning from Galling." Song: "Mountains." If you can't close your eyes and picture a young bare-breasted Lady Liberty on horseback riding through a field of wheat, over mountains, along coastlines, hair all a-flowing in the wind to THIS tune, you ain't human.
-- Janet C

The last movement of Mahler's 4th Symphony -- a child's, or peasant's, view of heaven; the opening of Mahler's 8th Symphony, "Veni, Veni, Creator Spiritus" -- another taste of heaven; Fauré's Requiem -- either the Sanctus or the In Paradisum -- could be entrance music for heaven.
-- David P

He's got "Dear God," by XTC, for when he's feeling melancholy.
-- Leslie H

Jesus has Jeff Buckley's version of "Hallelujah" on his iPod because he understands about love and loss and redemption, and every time he hears it it stops him in his tracks and breaks his heart open again.
-- Amber C

If Jesus has empathy for the young and hopeful who feel crushed by the fear, anger and confusion of growing up in the early 21st century, he listens to a lot of Bright Eyes
-- Alex

I'm thinking that he has "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life" in the shuffle, the Eric Idle original from the "Life of Brian" soundtrack
-- Tor O

I can't believe that the Gate has the free cash flow available to waste money and pay a socialist journalist like yourself to write worthless s-- like this ....
-- Patrick B

Belly-dancing music! Stuff like "Chicky," by Oojami, "Ah Ya Leil," by Shereen, "Habibi Alli," by Miami, "Moon Over Ala Nar," by Naked Rhythm, "Enta Omri," by Amr Ismael, and everything Hakim and Turbo Tabla have ever done, for starters. After all, he's from the Middle East, and I am sure he loves a good beledi-rave!
-- Janice K

"Circulos," Gato Barbieri. Its a musical expression of perfect lovemaking in its cadence, percussion and horn
-- Ann S

Patricia Barber's version of the Doors' "Light My Fire" -- respecting both a major Divine Yay Yay Grrl and the Dionysus of our time that was Jim Morrison.
-- Dimitra T

You can't forget Ministry. And not that bubblegum synth pop hoo-hah from the '80s. Jesus loves the industrial, darker-than-dark speed metal of the '90s version of Ministry. Especially "Jesus Built my Hotrod" and of course, "Stigmata." Ah, Stigmata. That would get him whirling like a dervish.
-- Lance L

The Big Man would definitely include Ray Charles' "You Don't Know Me." For all the self-righteous hypocrites screaming their fear-mongering dogma in his name.
-- Cara W

I found your recent article to be completely disgusting and disturbing. This truly shows the lack of intelligence that you have. It also shows that you have nothing else to do but waste your time at the current job that you hold. What a disappointment you are, to write such an article that offends most of the people of America ... Jesus has a place for you once you pass on. I hope you enjoy it.
-- A.J. Webb

Do not forget Liz Phair. Jesus loves guitar-straddled pixies who sing about sexuality and gulping down the life force
-- Mac

"Fields of Gold," Sting. For those gray cloudy moments of longing pastoral reflection on the good and the bad that his brothers and sisters have done to each other, while he is sitting in his midtown condo looking downtown to that gaping hole in the landscape caused by thousands of years of exploitation, hate and maddeningly shortsighted overdevelopment.
-- Paul F

Deathcab For Cutie, because even the son of God needs a little bit of emo
-- Hayley M

I am sure that Jesus has Dar Williams' "The Christians and the Pagans" to give him a smile. And I have always imagined him singing "Brown-Eyed Girl" to Mary Magdelene.
-- Terry D

I'm uncertain whether your article "What's On Jesus' iPod?" moves us forward in any measurable way toward solving the divisions we see today in the government vs. religion debate. It seems that it only replaces the right's claim that "Jesus was one of us" with your claim that Jesus was like you.
-- Jim B

For those moments he's feel extraordinarily silly, the complete works of Monty Python -- especially Every Sperm Is Sacred and "All Things Dull and Ugly."
-- Amy M

You forgot one: JC totally rocks out to Brahms' 3rd. Ravel's "Bolero" is also a guilty pleasure of his, cheesiness and all ... the Holy Ghost always tells him to turn that s-- down!
-- Dave H

"Spirit in the Sky," because it's by Norman Greenbaum (and because it's in "Wayne's World").
-- Peter M

If I'm going to hell, do I get to bring MY iPod?
-- Loren C

###

Mark Morford's Notes & Errata column appears every Wednesday and Friday on SF Gate, unless it appears on Tuesdays and Thursdays, which it never does.

Subscribe to this column: sfgate.com/newsletters