Author brings humanitarian message to Marin Center

Greg Mortenson is seen with Khanday schoolchildren in Pakistan. Mortenson, who talked to a sold-out audience at Marin Center on Thursday, wrote 'Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Fight Terrorism and Build Nations One School at a Time.' (Provided by the Central Asia Institute)A sold-out crowd of 2,000 people, crackling with excitement and anticipation, packed into the Marin Veterans Memorial Auditorium for an old-fashioned slide show.
In our high-tech, short-attention-span popular culture, this old-school presentation Thursday night was the hottest ticket of the Marin Center season because it was delivered in person by Greg Mortenson, a former "dirt bag" mountain climber who is the co-author and subject of "Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Fight Terrorism and Build Nations One School at a Time."

A New York Times No. 1 best-seller, the phenomenal success of the book has turned the shy, unassuming humanitarian from Bozeman, Mont., into a reluctant celebrity and genuine American hero - a nominee for the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize.

When Mortenson asked his audience how many of them had read "Three Cups of Tea," a gripping account of his death-defying efforts to build schools in war-torn Pakistan and Afghanistan that has been on the best-seller list for 105 straight weeks, nearly every hand in the hall shot up.

Tall and lumbering, the boyish 51-year-old had on khaki slacks, a brown sportcoat a little too snug for his bulky body and a bright red Jerry Garcia necktie adorned with hearts that his wife, Tara, gave him for Valentine's Day.

"She said I had to wear this in Marin," he said to a warm laugh from the audience. "It's called 'Exploding Heart.' It took a lot of courage to put it on."

It took an extraordinary amount of courage for Mortenson to do what he and his Central Asia Institute have been able to do since 1996, successfully building 78 schools in the wildest regions of Pakistan and Afghanistan and operating four dozen others, educating thousands of children, particularly girls, who are often denied an education by the Taliban and Islamic fundamentalists.

"The more I do this, the more I'm convinced that there's only one thing that can make a difference and that's education," he said. "Unless the girls are educated, the society won't change.

"From my perspective, I see girls learning how to read and write, and they teach their mothers to read and write, and educated women refuse to allow their sons to join the Taliban."

Pacing the stage as he talked, his story illustrated by slides of the schools and the faces of the grateful children they serve flashing on a large screen behind him, Mortenson told the crowd that he had bad news and good news for them.

He began with the bad news. "Since 2007," he said, "the Taliban have bombed or destroyed or shut down 500 schools in Afghanistan and another 180 schools in Pakistan."

"What is interesting, though, is that nearly all the schools are girls' schools," he explained. "Their greatest fear is that if a girl gets an education, grows up and becomes a mother, the value of education will go on in their community, causing the Taliban to lose their ideological power to control the society."

Shifting gears, he went on: "Here's the good news. How many of you know that in Afghanistan in 2000, at the height of the Taliban, there were 800,000 mostly boys in school? Today, there are 7.2 million children going to school in Afghanistan and 2 million of them are female. Has anybody here heard that?"

The audience buzzed at the question. Two hands tentatively went up.

"In the last year I've talked to over 350,000 people and in the whole time that I've asked that question, only about 50 hands have come up," he said.

Then, pausing for emphasis, he elaborated: "That is the greatest increase in school enrollment in any country in modern history, and nobody in America is aware of it. Don't you think that's good news?"

With that, Mortenson smiled as a huge ovation washed over him.

The "Three Cups of Tea" saga began in 1992, when Mortenson attempted to scale Pakistan's K2, the world's second-highest mountain, as a tribute to his younger sister, who had died at 23 of an epileptic seizure.

As fate would have it, he had to turn back before reaching the summit. Emaciated and injured, disoriented and half starved to death, he stumbled into the tiny, impoverished mountain village of Korphe (pronounced Core-fay), where he was nursed back to health.

While recovering, he noticed that the village's 84 children were sitting outdoors in the cold, scratching their school lessons in the dirt with sticks. They were so poor that they couldn't afford the $1-a-day to pay a teacher, sharing one with a neighboring community.

When he was strong enough to leave, Mortenson vowed that he would return and build a school, making good on that promise.

"I found a better mountain to climb," is the way he put it.

Since then, he has fearlessly carried out his mission, tirelessly raising money for the institute, leaving his wife and two young children for months at a time, surviving a kidnapping by militant tribesmen, two fatwas against him, a firefight by rival opium dealers and any number of physical hardships in the rugged land that is like a second home to him.

The title of his book comes from a Pakistani saying that after one cup of tea you're a stranger, after two a friend and after three you're family. In other words, it's all about winning hearts and minds by building relationships, which Mortenson has done.

When his book came out in paperback, he had the subtitle changed from "One Man's Mission to Fight Terrorism" to "One Man's Mission to Promote Peace."

"Fighting terrorism is based in fear," he explained. "Promoting peace is based in hope. The real enemy is ignorance. The real key and hope for peace is through our children."

With President Obama's election, the elephant in the room Thursday night was what Mortenson thinks of the new administration's Afghanistan/Pakistan policy.

"I'm concerned about what's happening now in Pakistan," said Cornelia Busse, who attended a pre-talk reception for Mortenson that was a benefit for the Marin County Library. "We're sending Predator drones in and that concerns me. We're killing civilians and I'm worried."

During his talk, Mortenson reminded his audience of what Obama, Gen. David Petraeus and other military leaders have told him.

"They all say the same thing: There is no military solution in Afghanistan," he said. "They say the answer lies in education."

Despite that knowledge, a U.S. troop buildup looks inevitable.

"President Obama now is rapidly deploying three brigades to Afghanistan," he said. "We are going to increase our troops there by up to 60 percent, about 25,000 troops there by the summer.

"My concern is that there is no strategy, there is no military plan. If you talk to any Afghan leader, they all say the same thing: We do not need more U.S. troops in Afghanistan. What we need is training and supplies for our army and our police. And most of all we need education."

Paul Liberatore can be reached at liberatore@marinij.com

Lib at Large: Reuniting Grateful Dead members, fans happy about tour - but not ticket prices

Bill Kreutzmann, the drummer for the Grateful Dead, is one happy man. He has a new band, a power trio called BK3 that's making its San Francisco debut tonight at the Independent, an intimate nightclub in the Western Addition.

It's one of a half dozen shows for Kreutzmann with BK3, a group he's formed with bassist Oteil Burbridge of the Allman Brothers Band and guitarist Scott Murawski of the band Max Creek.

After that short tour, Kreutzmann goes straight into rehearsals with his reunited Grateful Dead bandmates - Bob Weir, Mickey Hart and Phil Lesh - for a Dead tour that kicks off April 12 at the Greensboro Coliseum in North Carolina and ends May 10 with a homecoming show at Shoreline Amphitheater.

In addition to the new band and the new Dead tour, Kreutzmann has a new girlfriend and what sounds to me like a new lease on life.

"My personal life has changed immensely for the better," he told me from his home in Kauai, Hawaii. "I couldn't have dreamed of being this happy."

Too bad Deadheads aren't quite as joyful as he is these days. Many of them are furious over the nearly $100 ticket price the Dead is charging for the best reserved seats for its tour, the band's first in five years.

The outraged tone was set by a profane YouTube tirade by a female fan that has Deadhead chat sites and message boards buzzing over what is being seen in some quarters as price gouging by the ultimate egalitarian band.

As it turns out, $100 is sounding like a good deal.

"I've heard of tickets going for $1,200," Kreutzmann said. "They've been scalping tickets for horrendous amounts of money. And I really hate that, by the way. That's one of my pet peeves.

"There are people out there who just care about making money," he went on. "They don't care about the music or making the fans happy. Just because someone will pay $1,200 for a ticket, in this economic climate it's adding insult to injury. It's an uncool thing."

Plus it puts a lot of pressure on the Dead to live up to the elevated expectations that come with ticket prices that high.

"I don't know if I can play that good," Kreutzmann laughed. "That's like so much money. (Jerry) Garcia would be infuriated. He'd be like, 'No way, man. You can't charge that much.'"

In reality, ticket brokers are charging a lot more. After talking with Kreutzmann, I went online and found tickets for the Shoreline show going for more than $2,000 each. Tickets in the $500 to $900 range are commonplace.

"It's pretty awful," agreed Tim Jorstad, the Dead's San Rafael-based business manager. "Some artists are just fine with scalping tickets, charging a premium and keeping the money. We aren't. That money is not going to the band, and it's not good for the fans."

Jorstad explained to me the rather complicated process of pricing concert tickets while trying to maintain some control over the brokers and scalpers.

"We thought long and hard about ticket prices," he said. "The band was extremely sensitive about what they should be."

Jorstad had the band's booking agent survey ticket prices for some 50 bands touring last year, such as the Eagles, that are equal in star power to the Dead. Many ticket prices for those bands were in the $150 range.

"I went back to the band with my research and we sat back and said, 'OK, we don't want to be $150, which is what a lot of those tickets we surveyed were coming in at," he said. "We talked hours about this. We probably give this particular topic more time than anything else. In the end, our ticket pricing came in at 65 percent lower than that collective group."

What they agreed to charge, on average, was $95 for premium seats (plus $2.50 service charge), and $58 and $40 for second- and third-tier seats.

"We wanted to make sure we had something for everybody," Jorstad said, reminding Deadheads that "since our last tour in 2004, everything associated with touring has gone up in price - fuel, trucking, busing, personnel.

"This may be the Dead's last tour, and maybe not," he added. "And when you add into the mix the touring expenses and that this will be a good, four-hour show, we felt it was good value for the ticket price.

He acknowledged that it isn't what the fans are accustomed to paying. "They're used to $50 and $60 tickets," he said. "We don't like to make people unhappy, obviously, but what we're charging isn't an unreasonable price to pay. We've tried to be fair to the legacy of the Grateful Dead, but we are a business entity, and we're trying to give our band members a reasonable pay day as well."

According to Jorstad, the Dead had enough clout to get half the available tickets for the tour and sell them themselves at face value through Music Today's ticketing facility and the band's Dead.net.

In addition, the Dead set aside 1,500 of the best tickets for Grateful Dead-related charities to sell to support their work.

Despite the carping from Deadheads, Jorstad insists that the band still has its '60s bonafides.

"We didn't do what a lot of bands do. We didn't take corporate sponsorship money," he said. "And there were millions of dollars on the table for that."

The problem is that the Dead have no control over giant Ticketmaster and the ticket brokers that dominate what is called the secondary ticket market.

"Ticketmaster does what it wants. They have a secondary ticket Web site, and that's the auction. That's the secondary market, and that's where they scalp tickets for very high prices," Jorstad said.

"We shut that down as much as we could, but it was hard," Kreutzmann said. "It makes me feel the audience is getting exploited, having to come up with all this money."

It appears that the band is trying to give Deadheads their money's worth.

Augmented by lead guitarist Warren Haynes and keyboardist Jeff Chimenti, the surviving members regrouped last March for an Obama fundraiser at the Warfield and followed that with a huge benefit concert at Penn State that raised $500,000 for the Obama campaign.

As a reward, they were invited to the Inauguration, playing at the Mid-Atlantic Ball. Afterward, they were among a select group of celebrities who shook hands with the president and first lady.

With those benefit concerts behind them, they have a head of steam heading into the tour. And they aren't taking it lightly. In two weeks, they're going into Bob Weir's San Rafael studio to begin a heavy rehearsal schedule, some 20 days, an unusually intense regimen for this band.

"We're going to rehearse like crazy before we go out," Kreutzmann said. "I want us to be really, really good."

Paul Liberatore can be reached at liberatore@marinij.com.

Liberatore: Elvin Bishop's Grammy nomination is long time coming

Veteran bluesman Elvin Bishop, whose album 'The Blues Rolls On' is up for a Grammy, has gained accolades from critics and blues fans throughout his 45-year career.
For the first time in his 45-year career, Marin's Elvin Bishop is up for a Grammy Award. I'm betting that true blues aficionados agree with me: It's about time.

Bishop has at long last gotten the attention of the Grammy people, who nominated his "The Blues Rolls On," on the Southern California label Delta Groove Music, as best traditional blues album. In terms of name recognition, he's more than aware that he's up against some formidable competition from Buddy Guy, B.B. King, John Lee Hooker Jr. and 95-year-old Pinetop Perkins.

"In the recording academy, there are 12,000 people who vote and 11,000 of them neither know nor care anything about the blues," Elvin told me matter of factly. "They just check off a name they've heard. That's basically what it amounts to."

Win or lose, Elvin plans to make the most of the experience. He's going down to the Staples Center in Los Angeles for Sunday's 51st Grammy Awards show with his wife of 22 years, Cara, and their 20-year-old daughter, Emily, a junior at UC Berkeley.

"I played on the Grammy show three years ago, but this is the first time I've been up for an award," the 66-year-old singer-guitarist-songwriter-bandleader-master gardener said from his San Geronimo Valley home. "Anybody you can think of in the music industry will be there. You schmooze around and see people you ain't seen in years and go to parties and stuff. There's nothin' to it really."

While pop stars like Jay-Z and the Jonas Brothers, Kid Rock and Lil
Wayne, Miley Cyrus and Taylor Swift soak up all the TV time, the blues and the other Americana awards are treated like the red-headed stepsisters of the Grammys. They're handed out long before the cameras go on.

"Blues is not a very important category to them," Elvin conceded. "The blues awards are given out in what they call 'the pre-tel.' That stands for, 'You're not going to be on TV.'"

I first met Elvin in the mid-'70s, just as his "Fooled Around and Fell in Love," the single from his Capricorn album "Struttin' My Stuff," shot up the charts and was a top 40 smash.

But Elvin's a blues musician, not a pop star, and he understands that the blues is bigger and more important and more enduring than any awards show or hit tune.

Not many blues musicians go to the University of Chicago on a National Merit Scholarship as Bishop did before joining the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, the group that introduced young rock fans to the blues in the '60s.

And beneath his aw-shucks persona and Oklahoma-farm-boy-in-overalls image is an intellectual's appreciation of the history of the blues as an American art form that has been passed like a torch from generation to generation.

That's the concept he very effectively conveys on "The Blues Rolls On." One way he illustrates the tradition is by including among the album's dozen tracks the song "Yonder's Wall," featuring singer/guitarist Ronnie Baker Brooks, son of the bluesman Lonnie Brooks, whom Bishop has known since the early '60s.

Four decades ago, Bishop recorded "Yonder's Wall" when he was with Butterfield, who learned it from the 1950s Chicago bluesman Elmore James, who picked it up from Arthur Cruddup, who had recorded it in the '40s.

"The concept of the whole thing is how the music flows from one generation to another, and I thought that was a good example of that," Elvin said.

Furthermore, he cited a line in the song, "Your man went to war," as yet another illustration of its enduring relevance from decade to decade and from singer to singer and, unfortunately in this instance, from war to war.

"These guys are singing about four different wars - World War II, Korea, Vietnam and now Iraq - and the words still hold up," he pointed out. "The blues rolls on."

As part of the package, Bishop enlisted several generations of blues musicians as guests on the record, with B.B. King and James Cotton the elder statesman.

Before listening to this album, I'd never heard of the up-and-comers John Nemeth, whom Bishop calls "a monster talent, a guy to keep your eye on," or a family band from Tupelo, Miss., called the Homemade Jamz. It includes 14-year-old lead singer and guitarist Ryan Perry, his 11-year-old brother, Kyle, on bass, and their little sister, Taya, on drums. She's all of 9-years-old. Talk about the younger generation.

"They're the nicest family in the world," Elvin said. "And they're on their way to success."

In keeping with his theme, Bishop had them record "Come On In This House" by Junior Wells, one of the elder bluesmen who mentored him when he was just starting out.

Adding to his impressive guest list are Kim Wilson from the Fabulous Thunderbirds, George Thorogood, Warren Haynes of the Dead, zydeco stars R.C. Carrier and Andre Thierry, Marin's Angela Strehli and Tommy Castro, guitarist Mike Schermer and young Derek Trucks, considered by Bishop "the best slide guitar player who's ever been."

In addition to his Grammy nomination, Elvin's a multiple nominee at the Blues Foundation's 30th Blues Music Awards on May 7 in Memphis.

"The Blues Rolls On" is up for album of the year as well as contemporary blues album of the year. The title track is nominated for song of the year. And Elvin is in the running for contemporary blues male artist of the year.

But first there's the Grammys on Sunday night. I asked Elvin what it would mean to him if he actually won.

"I don't know," he said after a moment. "It couldn't hurt anything. It's like a guy pitching a no-hitter. For ever after, it's there."

Paul Liberatore can be reached at liberatore@marinij.com.

Lisa Kokin : Ex Libro Exhibition Catalog by Paul Liberatore

Lisa Kokin : Ex Libro, Paul Liberatore Catalog Essay

Lisa Kokin once called one of her exhibitions Relative Obscurity. While she is charmingly self-effacing, she was referring to the pieces she created for that show out of family photos she'd found in flea markets, not to herself.

At this mature point in her career, the 54-year-old Bay Area artist has achieved a level of prominence in the contemporary art world that invites comparisons in aesthetics, content and use of materials to Louise Bourgeois and Kiki Smith. For the past two decades, Kokin has been in the forefront of an emerging new art form: the artist’s book, hence the title of the exhibition at Donna Seager Gallery: Ex Libro, meaning not only "from the book," but in Lisa Kokin's mischievous world of layered puns, "formerly a book."

“Lisa Kokin alters books and text through a complex system of destruction and preservation,” Seager says. “There is as much meaning in what has been taken away as in what remains. The look and feel of books, papers, texts, and photographs blend to form a unified structure, whole unto itself even before you begin to mine it for the rich content.”

Since artists’ books have been recognized as a distinct genre only since the early 1970s, even the most ardent art lovers can be forgiven for not knowing exactly what they are. They are not books about artists or books depicting artists' work. In the absence of a better description, they have been defined by Stephen Bury, head of European and American collections at the British Library, as “books or book-like objects whose appearance is determined by the artist.” In other words, the book itself, in its altered form, is the work of art. Kokin calls hers “reassembled books.”

“My definition of an artist’s book is open-ended, a freedom that may in many ways be attributed to my lack of formal book art training,” she explains. “I am blissfully unaware of all the rules I am breaking as I go about my routine of sewing, stapling, riveting and otherwise reconstituting objects to transform them.” Kokin left out shredding and pulping and gluing and mashing. Her studio looks like a depot where books go to die, only to be magically reborn as pieces of art that are wonderfully fascinating and endlessly varied in their imagination and creativity.

On a recent visit to her studio before the exhibition, shredded pages in mounds on a table immediately brought to mind images of Monet's haystacks. She explained how she takes each and every one of these shredded pages and painstakingly pulps and molds them with white glue ­into balls of various sizes, from bonbons to boulders. “It's very difficult physically,” she says with a slight grimace. “There's a lot of repetitive motion.”

In one corner of the floor was a cluster of what appeared to be stones, the smooth, round ones found on river bottoms. She'd molded them from pulped self-help books. Their colors are watery reds, earthy greens, browns and grays, and on many of them you can glimpse the titles: Fit for Life, How to Live on Your Income, Nice Girls Don’t Get the Corner Office. Arranged together on the gallery floor, they form an installation she calls Room for Improvement.

“Through her process of art making, she explores cultural and personal issues of conformity and gender, the ambiguities of society and human behavior,” Seager says, referring to Kokin's frequent investigations of her bisexuality, her Jewish heritage, her devotion to universal struggles for social justice and against censorship. “Her aesthetic in these meanderings is consistently refined and appealing.”

And, in this show, funny. The woman has a sense of humor to go along with her social conscience. “It's very important that people laugh,” she says with a sly smile.

Like a Native American using every part of an animal, wasting nothing, Kokin has taken the variously-colored spines from the self-help rocks and fashioned them with burlap and twine into what looks like a Venetian blind. She calls the piece Treatment, a play on both psychotherapy and window coverings. In this context, the titles are as risible as they are readable: Eat More, Weigh Less, How to Clean Everything, How to Manage Your Mother, The Simple Abundance Journal of Gratitude, and the presciently ironic The 401(k) Millionaire.

“I like to work within limitations,” she says. “I ask myself, ‘How can I take a book and make it look completely different, but only use the materials from the book and very little else? Those are the parameters of my challenge. I sometimes use thread or wire, but I don't want to use extra color or doodads or tchotchkes.’” Kokin has several reassembled dictionaries in this collection. Her favorite, Abridged, has recently been featured in Banned and Recovered, an exhibit sponsored by the San Francisco Center for the Book and the African American Museum and Library at Oakland.

“Each artist was asked to pick a book that had been banned,” Kokin recalls. “I originally thought to do a gay-themed book, but when I searched the Internet for banned books and found that the American Heritage Dictionary had been banned in at least two states, I thought, 'That's my book.'” It struck her as beyond the pale that anyone would ban a dictionary because some bluenose found 39 “objectionable” words in it. But there's no underestimating the dictatorial righteousness of the Texas Society of the Daughters of the American Revolution, who were “shocked” by “debasing” words like “brain” (denotes violence), “bucket” (slang for buttocks) and “across-the-board,” (betting on horse racing in Texas is illegal).

“I pulped each page and saved only the banned words,” Kokin explains. “I then reconstituted the pages and pressed the 'bad' words into their respective pages. Then I baked the book to darken the pages and give them a burnt aroma. The pages are held together by a strap made from the spine of the dictionary, with an anagram for “American Heritage” (“Ream Again Heretic”) sewn onto the bottom. I used the entire dictionary except for the covers, with only glue, snaps and thread to hold it together.”

Like many of her baby boom generation, Kokin was taught to wash her hands when handling books, to treat them with the utmost respect. So she’s had to wrestle with conflicted feelings about her sometimes ruthless artistic process. “Every time I take my X-Acto blade to the tender page of a book, I see my long deceased grandfather's face before me,” she says. “He is not happy. I am committing the Jewish equivalent of a mortal sin, and, believe me, I feel guilty. So powerful is my drive to rearrange and juxtapose, however, that I am willing to risk the wrath of my ancestors to accomplish my mission.” It was especially painful when she was faced with a handsome atlas that had been in the Indian Consulate library in the 1950s.

“It was such a beautiful book,” she sighs. “The maps were just gorgeous. It hurt to have to pulp them, but I did.” The result is a striking piece that consists of pyramids of pulped pages stacked symmetrically in colorful balls between the book's covers. The old atlas ended up exacting its own bit of good-humored revenge. After she’d pulped all the pages, she discovered that there weren't quite enough to finish the piece, hence the title, Four Balls Short. “I had to take some pages from another book,” she admits.

Conversely, Kokin made the most of a tragedy, salvaging a priceless first edition of Uncle Tom's Cabin, subtitled, Or, Life Among the Lowly. “A friend gave it to me after her friend’s dog chewed it up,” she says. In its new form, the pulped balls grow like Topsy on twisted wire out of the remains of the book. All that was left of the title was Un Life, which is what Kokin decided to call it.

She has always been a political artist, from her beginnings making batiks to protest the Vietnam War and to support solidarity movements in Chile and Latin America. Later, she designed posters for leftwing causes in a graphics collective and built apartment houses in Cuba. While studying at California College of the Arts, she began working with found materials: photographs, buttons and other common objects from flea markets that used to belong to real people, and now only represent their discarded memories.

“My work is about memory and history, both personal and collective, and the areas where the two intersect,” she says. “I'm interested in representing the human condition by using the objects we leave behind.” Some of her most powerful work deals with the horrors of the Holocaust and the plight of marginalized people everywhere. She has never been afraid to tackle the largest socio-political issues: racism, censorship, violence, genocide.

On a recent search at a recycling center, Kokin came upon a batch of Western novels, Louis Lamour-style macho tales with titles like Blood Reckoning and Night of Vengeance. In the past, she would not have been attracted to this kind of book, but she saw them as particularly relevant now, at the end of two terms under the swaggering George W. Bush.

“For the Ex Libro exhibition, she shredded these shoot-'em-up novels to create two long, quilt-like pieces she calls Shroud. They hang in the gallery as both a death knell for the past and victory banners for the future. “It's about the end of an era,” she says. “I see it as a comment on the last eight years. Now that I'm older, I still have political consciousness, but my work is not as black and white as it was when I was in my twenties. I had very strong opinions then, and I still do, but they have grown more subtle.”

“I believe in Lisa Kokin’s work,” says Seager, “She has an individual approach to her materials and medium. With humor, content, unerring instincts and meticulous craftsmanship she is able to deliver a unique aesthetic sensibility. When I see her work, I am reminded of the first time I saw an exhibition by Eva Hesse in which my idea of art was instantly expanded and I was able to imagine new forms of self-expression.”

With this extraordinary show, we’re seeing an artist at the height of her powers, serious in purpose but light in touch. She presents her view of the world with the
consummate skill of an artist whose work will be remembered, and whose contributions are destined to take their place in the history of art in the new millennium.

See Lisa Kokin at www.donnaseagergallery.com

Terra Linda woman debuts album 20 years after being forced into hiding

Marin singer/songwriter Kathryn Keats calls her debut CD, "After the Silence," an apt title that celebrates her new life, a second chapter free of the relentless fear of being hunted down and killed, murdered by a psychopath who had once been her songwriting partner, her mentor, her lover.

For the better part of two decades, during what should have been the heart of her musical career, Keats gave up her public life, hiding from a murderous madman under a new identity provided by the Alameda County Victim Assistance Program.

She was escaping from a psycho former boyfriend and erstwhile musical director named Ken Ford, who told her the Zen gods commanded him to leave her "dismembered and hanging from the trees."

"It was terrifying to always be looking in closets and behind doors, to be afraid to walk on the street," she recalled, sipping a cup of tea at the dining room table of the comfortable Terra Linda home she shares with her husband and their two young sons.

Free at last
Keats is a zipper-thin woman in her late 40s, hip looking, with short, spiky black hair. On this gray day, she wore low-rise jeans that hugged her trim figure and padded around barefoot in her tastefully decorated house, its walls hung in fine art.

In 2005, she received the news she had been awaiting most of her adult life: that Ford had died, of lung cancer. Her first response was to express her relief, her long pent-up emotions through music.

"I wrote a song the day I found out that Ken was dead," she recalled. "I was crying, writing it at the piano. Lorenzo (her then 8-year-old son) was behind the couch. He slowly stuck his head up and sang the chorus out of nowhere. I said, 'May I use that?' He replied, 'Yes, but how much will it pay?'"

What emerged that day was a country ballad, "Why Don't You Pray," that begins, "It's my first day of freedom for many a day," and goes on to rejoice over the end of a murderous affair that forced her to abandon her musical career and kept her emotionally paralyzed with fear for decades.

"You know I spent 20 years, almost half a life," she sings. "I don't recommend it. You forget how to cry."

She's excited about this second chance she's been given, even though she says she doesn't quite know what to make of it yet.

"I've had a hard time getting comfortable in suburbia," she said. "I'm grateful and I love it. It's beautiful. But I'm really just a funky musician. To feel of value, all I need is a city, some places to work and to be composing and producing music with creative people."

Even in less than funky upper-middle-class Marin, she's set free her long suppressed creativity with her new album, a slickly produced independent CD that showcases a half-dozen finely crafted original pop songs she co-wrote with titles like "My Life," "Hold Me" and "Lovin' So Easy."

"To come out of hiding and take back music is a really different vibe," she said, lamenting the confusion it has caused her children. "It would have been easier to take back music and not come out of hiding because I'm a good musician, songwriter and singer."

In all of her time underground, she was none of those things. She didn't have the heart to write songs and wouldn't have sung them in public if she'd wanted to. She couldn't even use her real name, Ellen Munger, which was becoming known in musical theater circles before the nightmare that ended her career just as it was beginning to take off.

To elude her stalker, she legally changed her name to Kathryn Keats, the first name borrowed from her grandmother and the last from her favorite romantic poet.

In the early '80s, after a dramatic and unprecedented Alameda County court trial, Ellen Munger ceased to exist.

"The last show I did was in Theater on the Square in San Francisco and someone in the audience recognized me," she recalled. "It was my last attempt to work. I knew when that happened, I was done, that was it, it was over. It was proof that I could no longer do what I'd done my whole life. And I didn't really know how to do anything else. That's all I loved."

Sex, drugs, rock 'n' roll
Growing up in Evansville, Ind., she had been a natural-born performer, announcing to her family when she was 5 that she wanted to be a singer when she grew up.

She spent her youth pursuing that goal, singing at Nashville's Opryland when she was still in high school, appearing a number of times on TV in "The Mike Douglas Show," studying at the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music.

She wasn't yet 18 when she moved to New York in the mid-1970s, landing a part in "Let My People Come," a lurid off-Broadway show that billed itself as "a sexual musical" and included nudity, simulated intercourse, X-rated songs and a lot of offstage drug use.

That's where she met Ford, the show's long-haired and handsome musical director, 13 years older, a powerful and charismatic personality.

It didn't take long for her to fall under his spell and for her to move in with him in Philadelphia when they weren't on the road, touring with the show for the next five years.

"Ken was a great musician," she says, even now. "All we did was write music together."

And do drugs.

Keats was alarmed when Ford began showing psychotic symptoms, hearing voices, seeing spirits in the shadows on the walls, a schizophrenic splitting into multiple personalities.

Angry and paranoid, he turned on her, beating and sexually abusing her.

"None of this probably would have happened if there hadn't been so much drug use," she said, remembering those free-wheeling hippie days. "People in Marin need to know that drugs really screw you up. And they really get you in trouble when you're a teenager, which I was when I met Ken. I was 17."

A life-saving trial
The insane romance turned into abject terror in 1983, when they were living in an Oakland apartment. For 54 harrowing days, Ford held her captive, subjecting her to unspeakable torture and humiliating abuse.

Keats didn't try to escape because she believes she was suffering from Stockholm Syndrome, in which victims become emotionally attached to their abductors.

"When you're in that situation, you learn to do anything to love your perpetrator, so you stay alive," she explained. "You'll get killed if you get away. So you end up identifying with the perpetrator because if you don't, the perpetrator will kill you. So you'll do anything to stay in the good graces of that person so you won't be murdered."

Ford's descent into madness resulted in him once showing up at Keats' sister's doorstep looking like a prophet of doom, barefoot, wearing a white robe and white wig.

Just in time, the sister intervened, calling the police, who took Ford to Highland Hospital in a straitjacket. After he was released, he called Keats from a pay phone, threatening to find her and kill her.

In mortal fear for her life, she took her case to a young district attorney named Leo Dorado, now an Alameda County Superior Court judge.

"When I went to see the apartment, then there was no doubt in my mind that he was very dangerous," Dorado recalled last week. "The things he had written on the walls were not just disturbing, but totally dark and scary. It was incredibly frightening. That's when we knew we had to do something."

Hamstrung by the limitations of the law in domestic violence cases in those days, when stalking wasn't even illegal yet, Dorado cobbled together what he calls "a kind of hybrid case, between a criminal and civil proceeding, to indicate that he was dangerous, but that there was a psychiatric foundation to his dangerousness.

"We hadn't really done this before and we couldn't find any precedent for it," he continued. "But we knew he was so dangerous we had to get the psychiatric community to present a case that was coherent to a jury, to give her some time."

Keats, then still known as Ellen Munger, was a powerful witness.

"Despite the mortal fear for her life on an immediate basis, she was able to hold it together in court," Dorado said. "She's so intelligent she was able to give a good factual history to the jury and show how bad he had become. What impressed me about her was her strength through all of this. To be able to focus and be able to stand in front of a jury and recount these things. She knew better than anybody what was in his mind."

The jury believed her, and Ford was sentenced to a six-month involuntary psychiatric commitment.

"Without a doubt, she was in mortal danger if we didn't have him committed, and the jury understood that," Dorado recalled. "But there was only so much we could do to keep him committed."

"After the trial, I lost touch with her," Dorado said.

And so did just about everyone else except for a few close relatives.

Going underground
With her new identity, she went into hiding in Los Angeles, serving as an assistant to photographer Herb Ritts and working as a "schlepper," her word, in the film industry.

In 1989, while managing an acting studio in San Francisco, she met and fell in love with Richard Conti, an actor and owner of a marketing design business. They married four years later and now have two sons, 11 and 13.

She kept the door to her past closed, except for an occasional crack.

"The real details I didn't know," Conti said. "There were certain things I really didn't want to know, to be honest, because some of them were really bad. I could see it was really painful to her, so she kept that to herself."

But fear is not easily hidden or kept to oneself.

"There were episodes when we'd be out to dinner and someone would walk by who would spook her, who would remind her of Ken, and we'd have to go right home," Conti remembered. "Even at home, if someone strange was parked across the street, she'd make me go over and ask him what he was doing. She had a lot of bad dreams. There was always that fear."

Afraid no more
The fear evaporated four years ago when the call came that her tormentor, who had become a street person, was dead.

"It was like the biggest weight off her shoulders," her husband recalled. "She really changed. She totally opened up. The day she found out she was in tears because it was an incredible release. Interestingly enough, she sat down at the piano again and started singing. It was automatic."

She also called Dorado, the former prosecutor who had saved her life all those years ago.

"I didn't hear from her until one day she called me, not that long ago, and said, 'This is Ellen Munger. I don't know if you remember me but I just wanted to tell you that Ken Ford is dead and I can come out now.' It was really a stunning call after so many years had past.

"She recited to me what she'd had to do, to stifle her creativity because of the publicity, of not being able to rest until she'd heard he'd died. We have a good relationship now. We don't always have good stories and happy endings in these kinds of cases."

In March 2006, Keats told her story for the first time in an article in Reader's Digest.

"I wanted people to know who I was, to know what I'd been sitting on forever, to know why I'm so weird, why I'm so extroverted but so terribly introverted, why no one knows anything about me," she explained. "And also the fact that since I lived through it, it was really my job to come out and speak about the issue."

Keats doesn't regret the good that her story has done in helping other abused women, but she wishes she could have spared her sons from it.

"Can you imagine being a child and the one person you trust implicitly, your mother, is not who she said she was for the first 10 years of your life?" she asked. "I would never have come out of hiding if I had known the impact it would have on my children. Never, never, never."

But the past is the past, as Keats knows better than anyone. And she has her first CD, at long last, and her career in music is beginning again.

"The music part is awesome," she beamed. "Everything I'm tied to in my whole being is music. Oh, my gosh, just to be back in public with music and write music and work with people I want to work with. It's so cool."

'After the Silence'

What: Kathryn Keats sings in Marin for the first time, accompanied by bassist Michael Manring and pianist Kevin Gerzevitz

When: Friday, Jan. 23

Where: 142 Throckmorton Theatre, Mill Valley

Tickets: TBA

Contact Paul Liberatore via e-mail at liberatore@marinij.com

Bioneers: Chemicals = Cancer is a topic at Marin Conference

Scientist warns of cancer link
Paul Liberatore
Article Launched: 10/18/2008 10:46:15 PM PDT

Environmental scientist Sandra Steingraber, hailed by the Sierra Club as "the new Rachel Carson," spoke Saturday at the 19th Bioneers Conference in San Rafael on a subject of intense interest to Marin County women: the link between toxic chemicals in the environment and cancer.

Marin has one of the highest rates of breast cancer in the state, and organizations such as Zero Breast Cancer (formerly Marin Breast Cancer Watch) are calling for accelerated exploration into its possible causes, including environmental factors.

Steingraber's book, "Living Downstream: An Ecologist Looks at Cancer and the Environment," won the Jenifer Altman Foundation award for "the inspiring and poetic use of science to elucidate the causes of cancer."

A senior research associate at Commonweal, the health and environmental research institute in Bolinas, Altman established the foundation shortly before her death of cancer in 1991.

In introducing Steingraber, an internationally recognized expert on the environmental links to cancer and reproductive health, Charlotte Brody, executive director of Commonweal, praised her ability to communicate scientific research through her literary talent.

"You learn the concepts," she said, "but your heart sings at the same time."

In an impassioned half hour talk to an overflow audience in the 2,000-seat Marin Veterans Memorial Auditorium, Steingraber told of being diagnosed with bladder cancer 30 years ago when she was 20.

Now a mother of two elementary school age children, she obviously recovered from her cancer and realized that hope, but she learned some things about her illness that have nothing to do with the high cancer rates in the family that raised her.

"Here's the punchline," she told her audience, "I was adopted."

But, she went on, "It didn't take long for me to learn that bladder cancer is considered a quintessential environmental cancer. We have more evidence for a link between toxic chemicals and bladder cancer risk than almost any other cancer."

Although the medical community ignored the connection between carcinogens and cancer in those days, she suspected that her cancer had something to do with the environment in the Illinois small town where she grew up.

Years later, while researching "Living Downstream," she discovered that she was right. Her hometown and its riverside environs "have statistically elevated cancer rates, three dozen different industries line the river, farmers practice pesticide-intensive agriculture, hazardous waste is imported from as far away as New Jersey and the drinking water wells contain traces of both farm chemicals and industrial chemicals, including those with demonstrable links to bladder cancer."

While decrying the lack of regulation of government oversight and regulation of chemical products in this country, she got a huge ovation when she called for the same kind of crisis-driven rescue of the environment that Congress just gave to the economy by bailing out Wall Street.

"We need a $700 billion bailout to invest in alternative energy and reform our chemical regulatory policies," she insisted. "If we don't take action, we don't know what will happen, but it will be terrible. Our ecology will tank."

Steingraber is currently a distinguished visiting scholar at Ithaca College in Ithaca, N.Y., and a sought-after public speaker.

During her address on Saturday, she referred to the words of her mentor, Rachel Carson, in "Silent Spring," that we are all exposed to "a changing kaleidoscope of chemicals over our lifetimes."

These chemicals are particularly hazardous to pregnant women, an issue she writes about in her follow-up book about her pregnancy with her first child, her daughter, Faith, 10.

In "Having Faith: An Ecologist's Journey to Motherhood," she reveals the alarming evidence of chemicals causing what scientists call "spontaneous abortion."

Seeing this as a problem that crosses political lines, she said she's interested in engaging the pro-life and pro-choice movements in a dialogue on this common ground issue.

"Maybe we can all agree, pro-life and pro-choice, that any chemical with the power to extinguish a human pregnancy has no rightful place in our economy," she said to thunderous applause.

Paul Liberatore can be reached at liberatore@marinij.com

Paul Liberatore: Hot Buttered Rum's Redner shakes up Vivaldi's classic

Just before violinist Aaron Redner was to go on stage the other night at the Fox Theatre in Boulder, Colo., with his band, Hot Buttered Rum, he was on his cell phone, talking excitedly about playing Vivaldi's "The Four Seasons" next week in Mill Valley.

"I find myself in a band that travels nonstop and has lots of followers, and that's great," he told me. "But I've been feeling a need to tap back into my classical roots."

By classical roots he means the master's degree in classical violin performance he earned from the New England Conservatory in Boston before joining Hot Buttered Rum, spending the past six years on the jam band circuit with groups such as Phish and String Cheese Incident and the Yonder Mountain String Band.

As a side project that will take advantage of his classical training, the 37-year-old Tam High grad has come up with an idea for a crossover concert at the 142 Throckmorton Theatre during a break in Hot Buttered Rum's busy touring schedule.

Next Thursday night he'll be joined by some of the finest young classical musicians in the North Bay in an interpretation of Antonio Vivaldi's "The Four Seasons," a timeless favorite that most people are familiar with in some form or another. We've all heard strains of it in movies and commercials and have probably hummed it in the shower without knowing it.

"That's why I picked this piece, because it's almost like pop music, " Redner explained. "I'm still going to play all the notes, but there's room
Advertisement
for interpretation and improvisation more than there is in most classical music."

For this one-off gig, he's assembled a classical string quartet filled out by guitar, bass and harpsichord. He's enlisted the likes of Karen Shinozaki, who grew up in Terra Linda and performs with the San Francisco Opera Orchestra, and violinist Michelle Maruyama, who appeared at the Nano Mugen Festival in Japan recently with Third Eye Blind.

"I'm surrounding myself with huge talent and trying to stay relaxed in the middle of it," he said, noting that he's encouraging them to shed their classical music conformity, urging them "to think of themselves as a band."

During breaks between the movements in "The Four Seasons," various aggregations, including all the members of Hot Buttered Rum, are primed to jam on jazz, bluegrass and swing renditions of seasonal songs like "Autumn Leaves" and "Summertime." Making sure this doesn't resemble a traditional classical concert in any way shape or form, Redner's even got an interpretive dancer in the mix.

"People in the jam band world are saying how much they love this piece, which I didn't expect," he said, referring to the Vivaldi. "And classical music fans are going to hear some jazz standards in this show, and some swing and some bluegrass - music they might not go out of their way to hear normally."

During his college years, Redner was on track for a career with a chamber group or symphony orchestra. Then, as he put it, "I got kidnapped by this band, the Grateful Dead. And I decided I loved playing music that people could dance to in a communal atmosphere. That was lacking in my classical music experience."

Even six years later, though, his classical jones has been hard to kick. During Hot Buttered Rum shows, he's known for playing a Beethoven sonata in the middle of a bluegrass tune.

"I've been trying to do that more and more," he said. "Fans are starting to expect it."

With this concert, which Redner hopes will be the first of many, he joins a classical crossover movement pioneered by virtuosos like Edgar Meyer, Joshua Bell, Bela Fleck, Mark O'Connor, Chris Thile and Mike Marshall, who produced the last Hot Buttered Rum album.

"In order to do this kind of thing and not sound like a dilettante, you have to do your homework," he said.

As a resident of San Anselmo, he said there are a lot of beautiful places to do that.

"I go over the Bolinas-Fairfax Road, stop beside one of the lakes and practice my butt off," he said. "When I'm up on Mount Tam in the open air, I try to create music that fits that perfection. I don't want to be guilty of air pollution."

IF YOU GO

- What: Hot Buttered Rum's Aaron Redner's "The Four Seasons," acoustic

- When: 8 p.m. Oct. 23

- Where: 142 Throckmorton Theatre, 142 Throckmorton Ave., Mill Valley

- Tickets: $20, $15 students/seniors

- Information: 383-9600

Photo Info: Aaron Redner of Hot Buttered Rum leads a group of equally musical friends in an excursion into the classical world of Vivaldi, with surprisingly modern results. (Dave Fleischman)

Paul Liberatore can be reached at liberatore@marinij.com
Print Email Font ResizeReturn to Top