May 24, 2003 By CHRIS WATSON SANTA CRUZ SENTINEL STAFF WRITER

Too many people in Isabel Allende’s family have called her a liar for her to dismiss the charges completely. x They say she spins family stories until they’re unrecognizable.

That she imagines and fabricates characters that never existed.

But the author of these tales — and of novels like "The House of the Spirits," "Eva Luna," "Paula," "Daughter of Fortune" and "Portrait in Sepia" — shrugs off the accusations.

"To be called a liar is awful," she said recently, "but I don’t care.

"And as Mario Vargas Llosa said in his essay ‘The Truth About Lies,’ a fiction writer must use lies to get at the truth sometimes."

It comes with the territory of fiction.

One story no one has a quarrel with, however, is Allende’s story of where she was on Tuesday, 9/11.

But if you ask her about it, be sure to specify which 9/11, which Tuesday — 2001 or 1973 — you want to know about.

On Tuesday, at the Capitola Book Cafe, Allende will talk about her new book, "My Invented Country: A Nostalgic Journey Through Chile," which orbits those two significant years in the two countries she calls home — Chile and the USA

"On Sept. 11, 2001, I was at home in California, having a shower, when the phone rang," she said recently from her home in Northern California. "It was my mother from Chile, and she was crying.

"I thought she must be crying about what happened in Chile on Sept. 11, 1973; but she said, ‘no, no, turn on the TV.’ ’’

On the very day the World Trade Center was destroyed in New York, Chileans were remembering the bombs that had leveled the presidential palace in Santiago, Chile, on Tuesday, Sept. 11, 1973 — the bombs that signaled the military overthrow of president Salvador Allende, Isabel’s uncle.

"In 1973 in Santiago," Allende remembered, "I got up early to go to work. The streets were empty, no buses, no traffic, only military convoys going by.

"I drove downtown and stopped at a friend’s house who had a telephone and tried to call my in-laws. Then I heard on the radio that there was a military coup.

"My friend’s husband, a teacher, was trapped downtown, so I went to pick him up. The school was empty, and he was listening to the radio and crying. The radio announced that they were asking the president to surrender, and he wouldn’t and that they would give him half an hour and then they would bomb the palace.

"My friend and I went up to the roof of the school and watched the bombing of the palace, watched the panic, the fires."

For Allende, the terrorist act in New York and the CIA-orchestrated terror in Chile still resonate harmonically.

She writes in "My Invented Country":

"That distant Tuesday in 1973 my life was split in two; nothing was ever the same, I lost a country. That fateful Tuesday in 2001 was also a decisive moment; nothing will ever again be the same, and I gained a country."

With "one foot in California and one foot in Chile," Allende writes that were it not for the events of 1973, she would never have become a writer, never have married an American, lived in California or "lived with nostalgia for so long, or be writing these particular pages."

"My Invented Country" is Allende’s salute to the places, people and events that turned her into the writer she is today. It is a book filled with the geography, politics and history of Chile and with stories about the author’s "weird" family and the places that served, for a time, as her homes-away-from-home — Bolivia, Venezuela, Brussels, Beirut.

A memoir that contains more delight than angst, "My Invented Country" serves also, at times, as a travelogue of Chile, the most civilized of Latin American countries, in some opinions.

Allende’s memoir also works as a vindication of her trademark blend of magical realism — a heady mixture of what is mythic, what is real and what is remembered by the heart.

She writes:

"(My grandmother) introduced me to magical realism long before the so-called boom in Latin American literature made it fashionable."

"Besides," she said, "with my family, you don’t have to invent much."

In the memoir, Allende rationalizes her blurring of fiction and facts. At other times, she carefully profiles the real people who were the models for characters in "The House of the Spirits," "Eva Luna" and other stories.

Still, anyone who’s read her novels will be hard-pressed to distinguish absolutely between what is real and is imagined.

And in truth, that blurring of exterior and interior worlds has affected Allende’s personal life.

In "The House of the Spirits," for example, she discovered that a character she thought was a total invention — the French count — turned out to bear frightening similarities to the father who abandoned her when she was little.

It was only when literary critics began to point it out that she began to recognize the impact of his abandonment on her life.

"I thought I never missed him," she said, "but there are no loving fathers in my fiction, and all the women in my books are strong."

One of the spookiest blendings of fact and fiction occurred around the writing of Allende’s second novel, "Of Love and Shadows," based on a true political crime that occurred during the dictatorship of Pinochet.

"The novel was based on a real case, about people who disappeared during a dictatorship and whose bodies were found five years later in an abandoned mine."

What facts she didn’t know — who found the bodies and how— she invented.

Only later, when a Jesuit priest visited her and asked how she knew he’d heard about the murder in confession, how she knew what he was wearing and that he drove a motorcycle to the mine, did Allende feel a shiver go up her spine.

"When I found out that, to the smallest detail, it was true, I felt panic. I felt that all stories do exist, that I just tap into them.

"And I felt," she added, "that the written word has tremendous power and that a writer has a terrible responsibility."

Allende’s talent, though, is wider than the grave politics that so deeply etch her work.

Her sense of humor, for example, has survived, and is well-displayed in this memoir.

She writes:

• "In my family . . . the national sport is to talk about the person who just left the room.
• "We Chileans are enchanted by states of emergency.
• "We Chileans enjoy funerals, because the dead person is no longer a rival, and now he can’t backstab us.
• "In my family nearly all the men studied law, although I don’t remember a single one who passed the bar. Chileans love laws, the more complicated the better. Nothing fascinates us as much as red tape and multiple forms." Allende hopes, if nothing else, that her memoir incites travelers to visit one of the most enchanting places on earth.

"You should go during our winter, when it’s summer there," she said.

"Take a tour to the south, cross the seven lakes to Argentina. There’s wonderful food everywhere, and the transportation is safe and modern. Chile is not like other Latin American countries where things don’t work. The coffee is good, the beds are good and the bathrooms are clean."

Could she be telling the truth?

Should we believe her?

While we decide, let’s relax and drink a toast to weird families everywhere.

What follows is Allende’s mother’s recipe for Pisco Sours, a preferred drink at summer gatherings in Chile.

Pisco Sours

Mix in a blender:

1 portion lemon juice 4 portions of Peruvian Pisco (a clear liquor similar to tequila) a little whiskey sugar to taste crushed ice Add one egg white (not whipped) and blend again.

Contact Chris Watson at cwatson@santa-cruz.com. If You Go WHO: Isabel Allende, ‘My Invented Country.’ WHERE: Capitola Book Cafe, 1475 41st. Ave., Capitola. TIME: 7:30 p.m. Tuesday. DETAILS: 462-6035.

suntimes.com May 21, 2003 BY LAURA EMERICK Staff Reporter

Pay close attention to that man behind the curtain. Andres Levin is Latin music's Professor Marvel, the studio wizard behind such diverse groups as Aterciopelados, El Gran Silencio, Arto Lindsay, Jorge Moreno and Ely Guerra. But his latest and perhaps greatest creation is the Latin music supergroup Yerba Buena.

Mixing African-based Latin styles such as rumba, son, soca and cumbia along with American hip-hop and funk, Yerba Buena represents a distinctly urban sound--one that Newsday, among others, has hailed as "an entirely new form of Latin music."

Though Levin is best known as an arranger, composer and producer, Yerba Buena gives him an opportunity to step out from behind the control board. "I had been thinking about creating a group for many years," said Levin, 33, a native of Venezuela who came to the United States in the mid-1980s. "I had produced lots of soul, hip-hop, Latin and Anglo artists. But I wanted to try a marriage of styles that hadn't been done before."

The core of the group's sound, however, hails from Mother Africa. "I focused on the triangle from Havana, Nigeria and New York," Levin said of Yerba Buena (whose name means "good herb," "mint" or Spanish slang for marijuana). "Historically it's the most logical base. We're tracing back history and exploring where these [Latin] rhythms came from."

Drawing on his extensive music industry contacts, he recruited lead vocalist Xiomara Laugart; percussionist Pedro Martinez; vocalists Eduardo "El Chino" Rodriguez and Cucu Diamantes (the stage name of Ileana Padron, Levin's wife); saxophonist Ron Blake, and trumpeter Rashwan Ross.

Levin, the group's music director, guitarist and programmer, envisioned Yerba Buena as a free-form collective, with guest artists dropping in on studio sessions and live sets. So for "President Alien," the band's debut album released last month on Razor & Tie, Yerba Buena is joined by jazz trumpeter Roy Hargove, vocalist-bassist Meshell Ndegeocello, guitarist Marc Ribot, flutist Dave Valentin, keyboardist Money Mark, rapper Stic, Brazilian percussionist-vocalist Carlinhos Brown and bassist Sebastian Steinberg (formerly of Soul Coughing).

It's a veritable United Nations of all-star musicians. "That's the way I work, layering and putting rhythm sections of people who wouldn't usually work together," Levin said. "One of the drummers we originally met in Nigeria, and then he showed up on my doorstep in New York. So we put him to work."

Over the last 18 months, the group honed its sound through club and concert dates while opening for such diverse artists as the Dave Matthews Band, Celia Cruz and Ray Charles. "The band developed a lot during the making of the record," Levin said. "Some joined halfway through the process. 'President Alien' represents a year and a half of people who flowed through my studio."

About that title: it plays on the term "resident alien"--an IRS designation for individuals who are not U.S. citizens but have a green card (work permit). "We came up with a long list of a hundred-plus names for our first disc," Levin said. "I loved the triple play on words. It has many meanings at the same time; it's not directly political, but it can be perceived as such." Besides, he added with a laugh, "Most of the people in our group have their green cards."

Many have compared the Yerba Buena sound with the heyday of the Fania All-Stars in the '70s, when Cuban, Puerto Rican and Nuyorican musicians developed a new fusion that would become known as salsa. "There are a lot of parallels," he said. "Yerba Buena is a very musician-driven project. Like in jazz, there are a lot of solos. That's something that doesn't happen much anymore."

Despite Levin's varied production skills, he views Yerba Buena as a live animal, not a studio creation. "Live, it takes on a whole new shape," he said. "The whole band takes off, and it feels more like a rock band. It's controlled chaos, Latin style."

Whatever you call Yerba Buena's sound, it does not adhere to the usual Latin music formulas. "Latin music is so stagnant these days," he said. "It's not the fault of the artists. Most of it is so radio-driven."

Levin knows all about the influence of radio programmers. It's an artistic land mine that he's tried to sidestep in his production work over the last dozen years (his credits also include David Byrne, the B-52's, Chaka Khan, Tina Turner and Ndegeocello).

If Yerba Buena, a creation of his New York-based production house Fun Machine, "works out in a commercial way, it could open doors" and help break down barriers in the hidebound Latin music world. "I hope artists will gravitate toward it."

Though he's happy to share the spotlight for a while, Levin intends to keep up his studio work. "I'm not going to stop producing, ever." He's working on Latin superstar Paulina Rubio's next album and producing a live version of his all-star tribute disc to Afrobeat legend Fela Kuti, "Red Hot + Riot," at the Hollywood Bowl on July 20.

But for now, Yerba Buena remains his priority. "A lot of the alternative Latin movement has been geared to rock and electronica," he said. "I think everyone's gotta come together. That's where Yerba Buena comes in."

Miami Herald Posted on Wed, May. 21, 2003 BY FABIOLA SANTIAGO fsantiago@herald.com

DESIGN DISTRICT EXHIBIT: Artist Sandra Ramos poses with installation 'Why do rain drops look so much like tears?' PEDRO PORTAL/EL NUEVO HERALD STAFF

Water bottles shaped like tears -- or are they rain drops, really? -- come down from the ceiling to the floor, their shadows on a white wall casting another layer of poetic deluge.

''Why do rain drops look so much like tears?'' murmurs artist Sandra Ramos, echoing the title of her installation piece, ¿Por qué se parecen tanto la lluvia y el llanto?

Like the Cuban Alice in Wonderland character Ramos created in another work, a series of engravings, the 33-year-old Havana artist stands before her poignant exhibit at the Miami Design District's Casas Riegner Gallery and marvels at the raves generated by her first solo show in the United States.

It's titled Heritage of the Fish after a soulful poem by the late exiled Cuban writer Gastón Baquero, Testamento del pez (The Fish's Last Will and Testament), in which a fish professes his devotion to the city he abandoned. In five installations using sculpture, photographic self-portraits, video and water -- lots of water -- Ramos comments on the losses fueled by exodus after exodus from the island.

''Water is a symbol of the situation in Cuba, of the sadness of separation, of the impotence we feel before things that happen and we cannot change,'' Ramos says. ``I've always used water in my work in some form, but lately, it has evolved from a secondary role to being a fundamental and symbolic element.''

Ramos' art, which has attracted attention from Mexico to Tokyo and has been acquired by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, is remarkable enough on its artistic merit alone. But it is even more so because she's a vanguard artist inside Cuba, part of a generation that in the past decade broke through some of the constraints of censorship and made art, music, movies and authored works reflective of the starkness of Cuban reality.

These artists, writers, musicians and cinematographers fueled a boom of Cuban culture now in jeopardy as the regime renews its repressive apparatus following the sentencing of 75 dissidents to long jail terms and the executions of three men who tried to commandeer a ferry to the United States.

''Who knows what's going to happen?'' says Ramos, who has now returned to that politically charged Havana.

Ramos' artwork -- paintings, etchings, installations -- mourn the choice of exile, the trauma of abandoning the island, the break-up of family ties, the loss of childhood, of love, of self.

In a chalcography, she creates an Alice in Wonderland-like girl from a picture of herself. The child waves to a plane taking off amid palm trees. It is titled: ''Y cuando todos se han ido, llega la soledad.'' And when all have left, comes loneliness.

In another engraving, the elegiac body of a woman is slumped grieving in the shape of the island of Cuba. A pitched-black one shows only the soft silhouette of a man and a woman on a raft.

The losses she reflects in her art are all too familiar.

In 1992, her then-husband, a set designer in Havana, decided to leave Cuba. He traveled to Italy, Venezuela and is now living in Miami.

''It was a very hard time for me,'' Ramos says. ``I had to decide whether I was going to follow him or not.''

She chose to stay in Cuba, living through the ''special period,'' the harshest economic times in recent Cuban history, infamous for food shortages that prompted people to invent unimaginable dishes.

''Can you believe grapefruit rinds marinaded and fried like steak?'' Ramos laughs.

The hardships fueled her art, she says. Without electricity in her apartment nor transportation to go back and forth, she remained in her studio from dawn to dusk pouring her grief, her sense of isolation into her work.

She broke into the international art scene in the mid-1990s after she participated in and curated several Havana biennials. International curators and art gallery owners who traveled to Cuba for the events saw her work and began showing it in their galleries and promoting her abroad.

Her pieces also have been exhibited at Art Basel, Art Miami and Art Chicago.

''She's an artist who surrenders her biography, her most intimate feelings and her own body to discuss social, political and cultural problems,'' Cuban art critic and curator Gerardo Mosquera has said of her work. ``She uses her portrait to personify the Cuban flag, the island, establishing a parallel between her personal situation and the suffering of her own country.''

Born in 1969 in Havana, Ramos lives in the once-grand neighborhood of Vedado in an old house that she and her husband restored from shambles and have furnished with antiques other Cubans have sold to them. She has a 1 ½-year-old daughter, Alexa.

The main piece in her living room used to be one of her favorite paintings, an old-fashioned crib suspended in a charcoal-gray nothingness by tiny pink wings. But a foreign visitor fell in love with the work and she sold it.

''It's very hard to sell something that has been a part of you for so long,'' she says.

Inspired by her best friend's grandmother, Gloria González, who was a painter, Ramos began her art studies at age 12 in Havana's Escuela Elemental de Artes Plásticas.

''I loved to go to her house and watch her paint,'' Ramos remembers.

She studied at the prestigious San Alejandro Academy and at Instituto Superior de Arte under the tutelage of the talented ''1980 generation,'' artists like José Bedia, Leandro Soto and Carlos Cárdenas -- all now exiled in the United States.

''There's an entire part of my life in Cuba up to 1994 that has all left, that is here now,'' Ramos says.

But leaving the island is not for her.

''Do you think that if you leave Cuba your art would suffer?'' someone in the art gallery audience asks her one evening during a lecture.

''Yes,'' Ramos readily answers. ``My work is too related to my life there and my life would change a lot if I left. Maybe someday I need to change, but not now.''

The Sun News, Posted on Sat, May. 17, 2003 By Jamie Kritzer (Greensboro, N.C.) News & Record

GREENSBORO, N.C. - Five months ago, Venezuela native Luisa Vann paid WXLV for a 30-minute time slot so she could launch "Luisa su voz Latina."

Recently, the ABC affiliate agreed to sell Vann a new time slot with twice as many viewers. Her program now airs at 12:30 p.m. every other Sunday, moving from its former slot at 6 a.m. Saturdays.

"Luisa" is just one of a growing number of media outlets that now compete for the attention of the Triad's Hispanic population.

During the past decade, the Triad has seen the startup of more than a dozen publications, TV programs and radio stations marketed toward Latinos.

The owners of those media outlets say they are trying to fill a need and tap into a market that represents a more significant part of the economy than a decade ago.

In the 2000 census, the Triad boasted the third-fastest growth rate for Hispanics of any metro area in the country during the 1990s. Its 62,210 Hispanics represented a ninefold increase from the 1990 census.

"Simply put, what's driving the growth of the Hispanic media is the growth of the Hispanic population," says Sheri Bridges, associate professor of marketing at Wake Forest University.

"Hispanic media are homing in on a specific need. ... We always want things that remind us of home, and the Hispanic media are providing that for the Hispanic population."

Moreover, the Hispanic-geared media are tapping into a market that spends an estimated $54 million each month in the Piedmont Triad, says Don Hild, who owns Hispanic Marketing Resources, a High Point company that does research for businesses trying to reach the Hispanic market.

In January 2002, Hild launched a semimonthly publication, TeleGuia, a TV guide for Latinos. His formula: market the TV guide in the Triad, Triangle and Charlotte and distribute the publication in Mexican restaurants, grocery stores and other places where the Latino community meets.

The results have been phenomenal, Hild says. In 15 months, the guide's circulation has grown 15 times, to about 30,000.

"The key to advertising is repetition, and we're in people's homes for two full weeks," Hild says. "If you can get exposed three or four times a day for two weeks it is supremely better than newspaper advertising that might not even be seen once."

On the back of most issues of TeleGuia is an advertisement for Fast Envios, a Wake Forest-based business that sells satellite dishes mostly to the Hispanic community. Since Fast Envios ads started appearing in TeleGuia in January 2002, business has doubled, from sales of about 25 dishes per week to 50, owner Rafael Obando says.

"It's been outstanding," he says. "We ask our customers where they heard of us, and half of them say TeleGuia."

Most of the Hispanic-geared media provide new immigrants, most of whom don't speak English, with their only outlet for local news and information, plus information on where to find local Latino entertainment.

Vann's TV program, too, aims to help Latinos.

She can't offer the splashy production or entertainment Hispanics in the Triad can now see on the 14 Spanish-language channels that have been added to Time Warner Cable's lineup in the past year.

But she can offer something those programs cannot: useful local information for Latinos who are far from home.

Fri, May 16, 2003 06:29 PM PDT by Kate O'Hare Zap2it, TV News

LOS ANGELES (Zap2it.com) - A clip from the Wednesday, May 21, second-season finale of UPN's "Enterprise" was shown to advertisers on Thursday, May 15, during the network's upfront presentation in New York. Also on hand was David Greenwalt, showrunner of "Jake 2.0," the new show set to follow the "Star Trek" spin-off this fall.

"They had an ad for 'Enterprise' that made me never want to miss it," he says. "Somebody just kills a million people on Earth. It looks good. Actually, 'Enterprise' looks really good, and I'm happy to be after it."

The finale, "The Expanse," finds a new alien race, the Xindi (pronounced ZIN-dee) attacking Earth and cutting a swath of destruction from Florida to Venezuela. When "Enterprise" returns next fall, the 22nd-century ship, its captain, Jonathan Archer (Scott Bakula), and crew find themselves in a frightening new world.

"We thought, 'We've done two years on the show, let's really shake things up, really take some risks,'" says executive producer Brannon Braga. "It turned out to be very inspirational for Rick [Berman, also an executive producer] and I. We ended up coming up with a really cool finale. It's not going to be resolved in one episode, it's going to be resolved in multiple episodes, if not the entire season. It's a big arc."

"We've never tried it, and we thought, 'What the heck?' It did something that everybody wanted to do, which was amp up the danger on the show and redirect it, or, as Rick says, give it a course correction. It will repurpose the crew, redefine them, and give them a seasonal adventure that will test their mettle once and for all and take them into a strange, dangerous place with all of humanity at stake, force them to rise to the occasion."

"In the decade or more I've been here, we've never gone into a season of 'Star Trek' with this kind of feeling, with this, 'Holy cow, we have a direction!' We're not just sitting down and saying, 'What are we going to do this year?' We have a purpose, and it's very exciting. We're just getting back, and we're digging it."

The Xindi, as Braga describes them, are a culture made up of several different intelligent species that all evolved on the same planet. "Some Xindi are giant, insect-like creatures," he says. "Some Xindi are humanoid; some Xindi are reptilian. It's an interesting idea, to me, anyway."

"Sure, we could have made it the Romulans that attacked Earth. But haven't we seen the Romulans for the past 15 years? Do we really just want to keep seeing the Romulans? No. We've got to do new stuff. We've got to keep pushing the boundaries."

"That won't meant hat we won't continue to see familiar species involved in this epic mission, but the main foe, we wanted to be new."

Although he works in one of TV's most venerable franchises, Braga is inspired by what he sees around him. "We're not modeling our show after anyone, but we look at shows like '24,' 'Boomtown,' and you see them breaking convention and getting experimental. That's always something we've enjoyed doing. We've told stories backwards, in circles. We've done a lot of wacky stuff on 'Star Trek.'"

"Whereas 'Enterprise' was a little more grounded in reality the first two years by the nature of its premise, we are now going into a region of space where we're going to start experimenting more."