TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/111891/1118500.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 6KB | 148 lines

                                                                                PEOPLE, Page 73

CALIFORNIA

Galaxy Of Rising Stars


A multicultural crop of trendmakers sets the pace in politics,
science and art


    Doing Well By Feeling Good

    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."

    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."


    Transit Gloria

    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.

    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."


    Man Of The Golden West

    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.

    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).

    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."


    The Voice Of Gay Rights

    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.


    Voyaging To The Far Side

    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."


    Young Old Master

    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.

    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."

    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.