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His nickname was Superman his favorite action hero and his friends thought he was invincible. ERIK DAVIS talks to Earth and Fire, the couple who built the site and compile data for everyone from high school kids to medical authorities. News 14 Diebolds Secret Fears: Some of the most serious problems facing the voting-machine company are revealed in confidential memos from Diebolds own attorneys. The documents, leaked to the Oakland Tribune, kicked off a court battle raising some of the same principles as the Pentagon Papers case. But why isnt the rest of the media reporting on this scoop? BY ROBERT GREENE 16 A Cold Equation: MARK CROMER looks at HIV and porns deadly bottom line. ERIN AUBRY KAPLAN shares some of the conversation from a salon of notable African-Americans. BY JUDITH LEWIS Among the ploverphiles: Fergus Henderson explains nose-to-tail eating. BY JONATHAN GOLD Anti-turntablism: Dorkcore rules at the Laptop Battle. BY NIKKI FINKE 25 DISSONANCE With no due respect, MARC COOPER takes on the Cahuilla Indians as the real oppressors for hiring union-busting firms at their two casinos in the Coachella Valley. The good soldier: Pat Tillman, Condi Rice and Colin Powell. And shes not above enjoying a good bar fight (Moore versus Brosnan in 34 Laws of Attraction). JADE CHANG on how British comedian Danny Wallace started a social movement by accident. BY GREG GOLDIN 39 ART 40 Stranded: The many connected lives of Steve Roden. BY STEVEN LEIGH MORRIS 43 MUSIC 44 Here comes our band: The return of the Pixies. BY PIOTR ORLOV 45 From a hidden place: Argentine singer-songwriter Juana Molina. BY ALEC HANLEY BEMIS 46 P-Funk power: Lyrics Borns Later That Day. STEINYs pseudo-psycho-romantic-urban-contemporary soap opera concludes. COMICS " 50 BEK," BY BRUCE ERIC KAPLAN 51 RESTAURANTS 52 Counter Intelligence: Lost in Tampopo: Daikokuya, for hardcore ra-men and women. BY JONATHAN GOLD 54 WHERE TO EAT NOW 55 A list of favorite restaurants compiled by JONATHAN GOLD and MICHELLE HUNEVEN. The former Ramparts magazine editor who now spends much of his time touring college campuses warning against the "treasonous" proclivities of a new generation of radicals and railing against proposals to pay slave reparations to American blacks. It's Horowitz's 63rd birthday party, and the guest list is intimate. His wife, April, has put out a modest spread on the dining-room table. I stand with a claque of Horowitz's friends and associates as we sip wine, dip chips and gossip as the sun sinks into the ocean before us. Although the gathering is small, a hefty slice of Southern California's conservative power elite is here. In one corner stands Shawn Steel, the combative chair of the California Republican Party. In another, loquacious libertarian talk-show host Larry Elder -- the self-styled "Sage of South-Central," once the target of an African-American boycott campaign -- loudly trades one-liners with a couple of admirers. Then there is Joe Hicks, whose attendance at this party would strike some of his old friends as not only odd but blasphemous. Still, the veteran black political activist looks perfectly comfortable yakking away with Manny Klausner, one of the most energetic advocates and a co-author of the anti-affirmative-action Proposition 209 approved by California voters in 1996. You'd never know that Hicks had once tirelessly battled both Klausner and his ballot initiative. So what's a guy like Hicks doing at a party for a guy like Horowitz? Joe Hicks, one of the city's most respected leftists, has defected. SHORTLY AFTER GIVING UP HIS CITY HALL post this summer as a new mayor took office, the 61-year-old Hicks accepted Horowitz's offer to take over as executive director of his Center for the Study of Popular Culture. The reaction among Hicks' former friends and allies, meanwhile, has ranged from bewilderment among a few, to shock and angry denunciations from the many. Hicks spent his adult life inside of "the movement," deeply enmeshed with a host of civil rights groups. And it's only natural that his dramatic break with those organizations has elicted a wave of negative responses. Start compiling opinion around the ACLU, the Southern Christian Leadership Coalition or any other activist group that Hicks was a part of, and you could fill pages with disparaging comments. Dressed, as usual, in a dark and dapper sport coat, crossed American and Israeli flags on his lapel, Hicks gives Horowitz a warm birthday hug. Later that night Hicks says to me he has never felt better. Instead, he sees his political transformation as merely part of a long, fluid arc: "Looking back over my history, you see some moments where I was very consolidated in certain positions, but I was always thinking and always re-evaluating. But every now and then something would come along and jar my fundamental beliefs. Indeed, those who might write off Hicks' defection from the left as a simple caseof selling out or facile opportunism do so strictly at their own peril. If money or position were all that Hicks desired, he could have used his ample multiculti credentials -- not to mention his recent role as city human-relations commissioner -- to retire to a cushy position as diversity czar for some corporation or government agency. But, in fact, Hicks is in it for the same reasons he manned the barricades of the left: for the pure passion of politics. Perhaps Hicks just hankers to be in the middle of the political buzz -- and the middle, nowadays, is way over on the right. Maybe Hicks got so fed up with the knee-jerk aspects of the left that he finds it satisfying to kick back from across the divide. Or maybe Joe Hicks has simply been won over to the conservative cause by force of argument. I don't pretend to know his deepest motivation, and in the end what difference does it make? The left hardly needs to agree with what Hicks is now doing -- and of course, it won't. Falling back on the left's default reflexes of branding its rivals as racists, Klansmen or "fascists" won't wash in the case of Joe Hicks, who -- until a few months ago -- was considered by many to be among the most thoughtful, reflective and complex activists that the local left has produced. The sorts of issues that still obsess Hicks -- race, class, social and economic justice -- are all those dear to the soul of the left. But too often that same left confronts these complex issues in a frankly reactionary manner, unwilling to as much as re-examine assumptions ossified decades ago in a very different America. But from even the most rigid of leftist positions, you make a mistake if when you lose an asset like Joe Hicks, you simply slam the book closed on him, and don't take the time to at least hear his story. Watts '65: Journey Into Blackness HICKS' SOCIAL CONSCIOUSNESS AND activism are firmly rooted in the political geography of a segregated Los Angeles. Educated at Jefferson High in the 1950s, Hicks was rather late in coming to any sort of political belief. His father, still alive today at age 92, was what Hicks called a "borderline Garveyite" -- referring to the back-to-Africa movement of Marcus Garvey. After a year of study, Hicks had a conversation that changed the course of his career. Stationed in Japan in the early '60s, Hicks says he first was called a "nigger" not by a fellow sailor, but by a Japanese bar girl. By the time Hicks left the Navy in 1964, the civil rights movement was in full bloom. He followed it in the news and, as a liberal Democrat, was inspired by what he saw unfolding in the freedom marches. But at the time, he says, he was just one more middle-class guy, working at the Gas Company, married and trying to raise a family. As the Watts riots burned through the heart of the city, and with a curfew clamped down on the riot zone, Hicks could go no further than his own front porch to escape the stifling summer heat. A National Guard jeep buzzed his house, and the soldiers ordered him to go inside. By 1968, US locked horns with the rival Black Panthers, and the feud bloodily culminated on the UCLA campus that year with the shooting of Panther leaders Alprentice "Bunchy" Carter and John Huggins. He dabbled...
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