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About The daily Nebraskan. ([Lincoln, Neb.) 1901-current | View Entire Issue (Jan. 14, 1988)
Now the Grim Reaper wears flowers in San Francisco By Charles Lieurance Senior Editor "There has been a crystals renais sance in the rediscovery of these tools in what can be called ‘sacred technol ogy.’ Translated, this means that crys tals facilitate alignment with your spiritual evolution, helping you on the path to healing. Come find out how to apply the use of these crystals in at taining your 'Highest Good.’” —San Francisco “New Age” classified advertisement // w ast year we closed this street ** I off, no problem. There were hundreds of us partying in the streets. Where is everybody?” “They’re dead.” It was a flat, lifeless, resigned re sponse to a naive question, a response offered by the old gay guard on Castro Street, San Francisco, New Year’s Eve 1987. True, last year the gay population of the city’s Castro district had created a throng of color, feather boas and screeching noisemakers, but since then thousands had died of AIDS. At a quarter till midnight, in the final moments of a lethal year, about a hundred people, maybe less, tried to create enough noise to raise the dead and close the street. They skipped frantically across the streets on green lights and were easily halted by one police officer on the red ones. They tried to hold hands and make a circle to block the intersection, but the dis play of unity never happened. One gay man with long black hair turned his face to the cold northern California sky at midnight and shouted, “We made it through another year!” Two lesbians tried to TP a police car, but lost interest Caught in the skipping feet was one of the city’s numerous free newspa pers. This particular one advertised plans to turn Alcatraz into a “New Age” Eden, a holistic, karmically sound, pyramid-energized, crystal line paradise where Paul Winter’s hymns to harp seals and whales would float listlessly out to sea — where tourists stood at the rails of tour boats trying to imagine what the great, unencroachable prison once looked like. People come to the West for decadence, for the brine smell and unscrupulous undertrimmings of the Barbary Coast, for glimpses into the often sanguinary mythology of those denizens of America packed next to the jagged cliffs that become sharper and fiercer as one travels north along the coast highway from L.A. Since a tourist can’t see the prison where A1 Capone sat imprisoned but still enthroned, they head for the remarkable cavernous bars of China town, with ornate Fu Manchu door ways. They rarely get as far back into the smoky recesses as they’d like, but they sit at the bar and imagine bar gains whose negotiations began in some primordial dynasty that culmi nate with incense and ritual some where beyond the bar and well before the back alleys. Acid. It has remained. It’s the cleanest and best acid you can get in this country. It’s not as monstrous as Greek acid, but its subtlety is its glory. The lysergic imagination still creates mostof the images in Haight Ashbury, where hippie debutantes buy novelty hookahs and step into the Neighbor hood Gap outlet for a pair of stone washed jeans. On New Year’s Eve they crowd into Oakland Coliseum for the ritual called The Grateful Dead, which is an inherently lysergic ritual. And here the Dead arc at their populist best, piping epic space jams into the lobby where hundreds without tickets recre ate the concert via substance abuse, whirling in hypnotic wheelsof tiedye, which begins to mat against them like colored crepe paper from the high school proms these misfits never at tended. Inside there arc rows of tape machines and pictures are taken freely. Jerry Garcia sings in a fragile voice, “I will survive ...” Just like on Castro Street, where the police arc swatting the celebrants off the street with little effort, where they arc turning down the throb of Bronski Beat and searching for a lull aby to rock them slowly into insensate forgetfulness. The year-end news in San Fran cisco says that this year more people than live in all of Omaha crammed onto the Golden Gate Bridge to cele brate its 50th anniversary. No one at the start of 1988 could say which meant more, closing the bridge or not closing the street. WE ALWAYS g_ NEED LEADERS . The Air Force is looking lor pilots ... navigators .. missileers ... engineers .. ^ managers and ... more. Our posi tions are important. Yxi can get one ^ through Air Force ROTC As an Air Force ROTC cadet, you’ll be trained in leadership and management practices Yxi may also apply lor our scholarship program that helps pay college ecpenses, plus $100 per academic month, tax free After graduation, you’ll have all the prestige and respon sibility of an Air Force officer Yxill discover a new world where you’ll be challenged to eocel... and rewarded lor your success Let us give you the details today (.'apt Wright (1. Wheeler, Jr. 402-472-2473 _MRIORCLk^ “ ' HOIC w leadership FjreUenre Starts Herr
