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- PEOPLE, Page 73CALIFORNIAGalaxy Of Rising Stars
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- A multicultural crop of trendmakers sets the pace in politics,
- science and art
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- Doing Well By Feeling Good
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- Anthony Robbins, 31, is the latest California guru to get
- rich by helping people feel good. Raised in a struggling family
- from Glendora, Calif., the 6-ft. 7-in. Robbins went to work for
- a human-development lecturer after high school. By 1983 he was
- running his own Date with Destiny seminars, but was also
- overweight and "totally depressed." He decided his life needed
- an overhaul and soon was urging others to change theirs. To
- glean his secrets, customers pay $170 for a one-day seminar and
- $5,000 for a two-week Hawaiian program. Sample message: "The
- meeting of preparation with opportunity generates the offspring
- we call luck."
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- Last year Robbins grossed $50 million, enough for a Del
- Mar castle and a helicopter. "I'm proud of my abundant
- life-style," he boasts. "I work 22 hours a day, but to me it
- isn't work."
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- Transit Gloria
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- They can call her an anarchist (as a fellow politician did),
- but they can't tell her where to get off: liberal Democrat Gloria
- Molina, 43, is on, and plans to stay there. The Los Angeles-
- born daughter of an immigrant Mexican farm worker, Molina quit
- teaching in 1968 and maneuvered her way into the starchy
- political club that had run the city for generations. Waging a
- populist campaign among minorities, she registered a series of
- historic firsts in California politics: first Hispanic
- representative to the state assembly, first Hispanic member of
- the Los Angeles city council, and first Hispanic candidate since
- 1875 (and first woman ever) to win a seat on the powerful,
- five-member Los Angeles county board of supervisors.
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- From that position, the confrontational Molina keeps
- pressing for improved programs for minorities. Hispanics, she
- says, now "have a leadership that is willing to stand up and be
- counted."
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- Man Of The Golden West
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- He is a mere 23 years old, but already movie director John
- Singleton can rightly be dubbed the Tocqueville of the
- gang-ridden war zone known as South Central Los Angeles.
- Singleton's first film, Boyz 'N the Hood, about young black
- males coming of age in the inner city, has grossed $56 million
- in four months.
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- Singleton grew up in South Central, where "from the time
- I was born, I looked out the window and there was this 70-ft.
- screen [a drive-in theater] with movies on it." He read widely
- and enrolled at the University of Southern California film
- school, where he won three prizes for as many screenplays (of
- which Boyz was one).
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- Singleton still prefers to live in the "real world" of
- South Central, from which, he says, "I bring a street
- sensibility to the business of Hollywood. It helps me survive.
- Here, instead of a trusty gun, you need a good lawyer and an
- agent."
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- The Voice Of Gay Rights
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- For more than two decades, the Advocate, published in Los
- Angeles, has been the magazine of choice for gays, but it seemed
- more a dull club newspaper than the militant defender of
- homosexual rights its name implied. But since Richard Rouilard
- became editor in June 1990, the Advocate has been anything but
- boring. Rouilard, 40, injected an aggressive, news-oriented
- flavor, with stories on subjects such as suicide among
- homosexual teenagers. Even the pejorative "queer" has come out
- of the closet. Gay people, says Rouilard, now proudly call
- themselves queers as a way of proclaiming their basic rights.
- "The future of our movement," he says, "lies in queer activism,
- not gay and lesbian activism." The Advocate has gained a
- legitimacy among gays that had eluded it until now. Circulation
- has jumped from 60,000 to as high as 150,000.
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- Voyaging To The Far Side
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- If there is romance in theoretical physics, Taiwan-born
- Nai-Chang Yeh, 29, will find it and sing its charms. The only
- female physics professor at the California Institute of
- Technology in Los Angeles, Nai-Chang studies high-temperature
- superconductivity, searching for new applications in fusion
- technology. This voyage to the far side of physics research is
- all the more satisfying because Nai-Chang has triumphed in what
- is usually regarded as a man's world. "Women aren't encouraged
- to go into science," she says, "because it is perceived as cold
- and masculine. Women are heavily represented in biology because
- it has to do with `life' and is considered to be warmer. But I
- find physics to be very beautiful." Nai-Chang devotes as much as
- 100 hours a week to research and teaching. In what little time
- remains, she studies Chinese literature and visits with her beau.
- "We don't have time to marry," she says, "because we're both
- working so hard."
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- Young Old Master
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- Is it possible that a painter who is only 26 and largely
- self-taught warrants superlatives like "phenomenal" and
- "extraordinary"? Those are the judgments of gallery owners and
- buyers who are rushing to collect the canvases of Manuel Ocampo,
- a Filipino who has been working in Los Angeles since 1986.
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- Ocampo began painting in Quezon City when he was 15, had
- a brief brush with instruction, then set out on his own. Santa
- Monica gallery owner Fred Hoffman gave him a show last January,
- and in only an hour sold the entire collection of 20 oils for
- about $5,000 each. "He is one of the hottest young artists
- today," says Hoffman. "He paints as if he's been at it for 50
- years. His technique is as good as an old master's -- but with
- wild subject matter."
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- And wild it is. In bold colors and classical forms,
- Ocampo, a renegade Roman Catholic, depicts anti-Catholic and
- political themes with such titles as Truth Is Dead and All Will
- Fall. Hoffman calls the paintings "mesmerizing." Ocampo says
- they are "hellish, apocalyptical." Most Catholics label them
- offensive, but Ocampo makes no apologies. Catholicism, he says,
- is "one of the major oppressors of Third World cultures."
- Whatever the themes, the paintings now sell for as much as
- $10,000 apiece.
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