Andy's Treasure Trove

Mentioned In This Episode:

Come along with Andy and his friend Brooks Collins of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) as they search the hills near San Francisco International Airport for the wreckage of Flying Tiger Airlines flight 282, which crashed there in 1964, right near the spot where Gaspar de Portola's 1769 expedition became the first Europeans to behold San Francisco Bay. Brooks is a great conversationalist and he’s knowledgeable in an astonishing number of topics, so our conversation ranges from air wreck adventuring and archeology to particle physics, mirages, Nike missile bases, Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy, tunnel boring, raptors, and many other topics. Andy, as usual, asks a lot of questions and makes quirky attempts to be amusing.

Check-six.com page for this crash: http://www.check-six.com/Crash_Sites/Flying_Tiger_282.htm

Lockheed Constellation:

Wreckage from flight 282:

Brooks Collins:

What to do during the COVID era when it's problematic interviewing someone in person? Get a bunch of your poet friends to read their poems to your listeners! I realized that I have at least ten friends who are poets, some of them highly celebrated poets, and I had already recorded some of them reading their poetry. Several other poet friends wrote new poetry for this show and sent their recordings to me. Most of the poets you’ll be hearing are from California, and I live in Arizona now where I know only two poets (so far) so I’ve also included several poets from this year’s Tucson Poetry Festival, which occurred a few weeks ago on-line because of the COVID crisis.

List of poets/poems:

Neil Harvey – Zoom Word

Jon Hammerbeck – Accidental Droppings

David Hammerbeck – 4-3-20

Susan Thackrey – Selections from Andalusia: The Farewell / How do you…; Mourning in Al Andaluse / Alba; Walnut / Eyelid; The Moon / Look How…

Ralph Jack (Ralph Gutlohn) –   Acceptable Limits; Be Like Concrete; At The Bottom Of A Glance

Ken Paul Rosenthal – Where Icarus Flew

Kara Daddario Bown – Graceland; Safety in Numbers

Waz Thomas – Falling Water; I Walk, I Stumble, I Fall; Susanville; No!

William Pitt Root – Ways Water Has; Ode To A Frog

Pam Uschuk – Green Flame; Cracking 100

Bojan Louis - Huzzle 8

Diana Marie Delgado: The Kind Of Light I Give Off Isn’t Going To Last; Some Guy I Liked Who Dated Strippers; & Who Makes Love to Us After We Die?

Sylvia Chan - Personal Concept

Sean Avery – Genius; How To Make Mumble Rap

Special thanks to Melanie Madden, Executive Director of the Tucson Poetry Festival.

Neil Harvey is an award-winning artist, photographer and media producer. His artwork and writing attend to the space between thoughts. His work has been shown in galleries in California, New York and New Hampshire. With five short films to his credit, he has been a featured artist at Chicago’s Mess Hall Experimental Music Festival. He has been a radio producer, writer, editor and host for The Bioneers: Revolution From the Heart of Nature, New Dimensions Radio, The California Indian Radio Project, The Love of Wisdom With Alan Watts and Music From the Hearts of Space. He has produced over 300 internationally distributed radio programs for which he has won numerous awards. He earned a B.A. in Visual Arts/Communications at the University of California, San Diego. About his 40 year Correspondence Piece and the 2019 Brooklyn installation Sound In Stalls One, Two, Three collaborations with sound artist Jon Hammerbeck, he has written "It is like dropping a rusty cadillac into your birdbath."

Jon Hammerbeck is a big tall lawyer, of Viking descent, who lives on the edges of Los Angeles. For many years he DJ’d under the name Lew Cadia, on KSDT-FM radio in the southern empire. His sound work has been featured at The Mess Hall Experimental Music Festival in Chicago, in films, and in various vehicular forms during rush hour traffic for over 40 years. His in-depth study of the works of Martin Heidegger, Alfred North Whitehead, Fritjof Capra and Edgah have informed his interests in Dada, musique concrète, and multilayered muscilageounous musical forms. His multimedia titles include Mental Shelf Life, Chronospondence I 1982/2013, Suburbaphobia Melted Combo 8/82 and Correspliceness I: Is Growth Lions(1982). About his part in the 2019 sound installation Sound In Stalls One, Two, Three he wrote: “The honor to present carefully crafted and randomly mussed-up sound in the intimate acoustics of three Brooklyn brew pub toilets has opened new possibilities for creative release.”

David Hammerbeck has been a teacher, a writer, an actor and director, a trekking company owner, and has even toiled in the restaurant business, most notably at the venerable Keens Chophouse near Herald Square in Manhattan. He has taught at UC Santa Cruz, Loyola Marymount, DePaul University, and other institutions, as well as teaching abroad in Kazakhstan and Nepal. He has trod the boards in London, New York, LA, San Francisco, and other choice locations, and has appeared in films, including a Batman film as Michelle Pfeiffer’s father. David also has a bunch of degrees, including a PhD from the School of Theatre, Film and Television at UCLA, though he is a true and loyal Banana Slug at heart. He is married with Davika Acharya, the ex-crown princess of Nepal, and has two sons, Dev, and Darwin. He recently published a novel, After the Last Rites, with Agora Press, and has written other works, including a stage adaptation of Albert Camus’ The Stranger. He also appeared on Jeopardy! He did not come in first, but he did win a new fridge, and a month’s supply of Heath Bars and Vicks Inhalers, fortunately in separate wrappers.

Susan Thackrey began composing poetry when she was three. She took a long leave of absence from her graduate program to become an inaugurating student in the Poetics Program at New College. It was an extraordinary experience to study with Robert Duncan and Diane di Prima formally and informally over a number of years. Susan has given invitational lectures on Robert Duncan, Charles Olson, and George Oppen, including as a keynote speaker at the George Oppen Conference in Buffalo, and most recently on Duncan's H.D. Book for the San Francisco Poetry Center. Books currently in print are Andalusia (CHAX Press), Empty Gate (Listening Chamber), and George Oppen: A Radical Practice (O Books and San Francisco Poetry Center). Thackrey's day jobs have included co-founding and managing Thackrey & Robertson Gallery. Her current work is as a Jungian Analyst in the C.G. Institute San Francisco.

Ralph Gutlohn (AKA Ralph Jack) is currently a tax preparer in San Francisco. He attended Franconia College and has a graduate degree in creative writing from San Francisco State University. He is the author of The Hat, The Watch and The Pen and Travelling Close To Home, has worked on a fishing boat in the Faroe Islands, and owned an ice cream store in San Francisco. Throughout his long career in self-employment and a lifetime of attendant experiences he continues being called to jot things down, not daily, but a time or two a week.

Ken Paul Rosenthal is an independent filmmaker and educator. His recent documentary work explores the geography of madness through natural and urban landscapes. “I make film to nurture a more intimate relationship with the animate world, help alleviate human suffering by cultivating beauty, and build community through direct engagement and conscious dialogue.” Ken has exhibited his work nationally and internationally, including: New York City MoMA; The Guggenheim; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts; Anthology Film Archives; San Francisco Cinematheque; The Art Museum of the University of Houston; Museu do Chiado Museum of Contemporary Art; Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art; Chinese Taipei Film Archive; Berlin International Directors Lounge; and dozens of film festivals. He is the recipient of numerous festival awards, an Award of Merit from the University Film & Video Association, a Kodak Cinematography Award, and is widely recognized for his media work in mental health advocacy. Rosenthal's Mad Dance: A Mental Health Film Trilogy presently circulates in over 300 academic and public libraries, has collectively won 19 awards, screened at 73 film festivals, and been presented in person at hundreds of universities, mental health symposia, peer support networks, and community events worldwide. He holds an MA in Creative & Interdisciplinary Arts, an MFA in Cinema Production, and has taught film as a means of cultivating personal vision and community in workshops and universities in North America and abroad.

Kara Daddario Bown is a Philadelphia-based freelance writer and editor. Her writing often examines the diverse ways in which illness and loss affect the human experience. Sometimes she writes humor pieces. She has performed at The Moth GrandSLAM and is a StorySLAM winner. Her work has been published in The Belladonna, The Pennsylvania Gazette, Philadelphia Stories (Print Edition and 15th Anniversary Anthology), The Chestnut Hill Local and The Penn Review. She is currently at work on her first novel. She holds a Bachelors in English and Creative Writing from the University of Pennsylvania and an MBA from Villanova University.

Waz Thomas is a yoga teacher, a disciple, a guru, an old friend of Andy’s and perhaps one of the most mysterious people Andy has ever known. Also a visual artist, mainly in collage, and a poet, Waz lives near Bolinas, CA and gifted Andy with a collection of recordings of him reading his poetry.

Poet and editor William Pitt Root grew up on his father’s farm in Florida. He earned a BA at the University of Washington, where he studied with David Wagoner, and an MFA at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Influenced by Langston Hughes and Wendell Berry, Root composes expansive, musical free-verse poems that are nonetheless politically engaged. In a piece Root wrote during his tenure as the first poet laureate of Tucson, he stated, “Whereas Poetry may strengthen the weak and the injured, give recognition to the neglected and dignity to the afflicted, Poetry may also give the gift of affliction to those grown arrogantly careless in their strength.” Root’s numerous poetry collections include White Boots: New and Selected Poems of the West (2006), PEN West Poetry Award finalist Trace Elements from a Recurring Kingdom: The First Five Books (1994), and The Storm and Other Poems (1969). Root’s poetry has been featured in several anthologies, including And What Rough Beast: Poems at the End of the Century (1999) and The Last Best Place: A Montana Anthology (1988). His honors include the Southern Review’s Guy Owen Prize and three Pushcart Prizes as well as a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University and other fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. The poetry editor for the literary journal Cutthroat, Root has taught at Hunter College, Michigan State, and the University of Montana. He lives with his wife, poet Pamela Uschuk, near Durango, Colorado.

Political activist and wilderness advocate, Pam Uschuk has howled out six books of poems, including CRAZY LOVE, winner of a 2010 American Book Award, FINDING PEACHES IN THE DESERT (Tucson/Pima Literaature Award), and her most recent, BLOOD FLOWER, one of Book List’s Notable Books in 2015. Her collection, Refugee, is forthcoming from Red Hen Press. Translated into more than a dozen languages, her work appears in over three hundred journals and anthologies worldwide, including Poetry, Ploughshares, Agni Review, Parnassus Review, etc. Among her awards are the War Poetry Prize from winningwrites.com, New Millenium Poetry Prize, Best of the Web, the Struga International Poetry Prize (for a theme poem), the Dorothy Daniels Writing Award from the National League of American PEN Women, the King’s English Poetry Prize and prizes from Ascent, Iris, and AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL. Editor-In-Chief of CUTTHROAT, A JOURNAL OF THE ARTS, Uschuk lives in Tucson, Arizona. She edited the anthology, Truth To Power: Writers Respond To The Rhetoric Of Hate And Fear, 2017. Uschuk has also just edited Puro Chicanx Writers of the 21st Century, March 2020. Often a featured writer, Uschuk teaches at the U of A Poetry Center and at Ghost Ranch. She was the John C. Hodges Visiting Writer at University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Recently she was awarded a writing resididency retreat at Storyknife Women Writers Colony in Homer Alaska for the month of September 2020. In April 2020, her work will be feature in the Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day series. Her multi-genre book called OF THUNDERLIGHT AND MOON: AN ODYSSEY THROUGH OVARIAN CANCER is in the hands of an agent.

Bojan Louis (Diné) is the author of the poetry collection Currents (BkMk Press 2017), which received a 2018 American Book Award, and the nonfiction chapbook Troubleshooting Silence in Arizona (The Guillotine Series 2012). He is an assistant professor in the Creative Writing and American Indian Studies programs at the University of Arizona.

Diana Marie Delgado is the author of Tracing the Horse, a New York Times “New & Noteworthy,” selection. She is the recipient of numerous grants, including a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. A graduate of UC Riverside and Columbia University, she currently resides in Tucson, where she is the Literary Director of the Poetry Center at the University of Arizona.

Sylvia Chan hails from the San Francisco Bay Area, where she performed as a jazz pianist. She lives in Tucson, where she teaches in the Writing Program at the University of Arizona and serves as court advocate for foster kids in Pima County and nonfiction editor at Entropy. Her debut poetry collection is We Remain Traditional (Center for Literary Publishing 2018), and her essays appear in Prairie Schooner, The Rumpus, and The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2019.

Sean Avery (pronouns he/they) is a rapper, poet and teaching artist from Avondale, Arizona. Their work integrates Hip-Hop music, poetry, and theater to explore how Black masculinity is projected onto their body. They strive for an authentic performance of self, hoping to inspire others to examine their own identities. Avery’s work has been featured on Afropunk, Blavity, the 2015-2016 Wisconsin Film Festival, and the 2018-2019 Chicago Hip-Hop Theater Festival. They’ve shared the stage with performers such as Saul Williams, Lemon Anderson, and J. Ivy. They’re also an alum of the University of Wisconsin-Madison with a B.A. in English Creative Writing, where they received the nation’s only full-tuition Hip-Hop & Spoken Word scholarship, First Wave. Currently, Avery teaches throughout the Phoenix valley at schools and nonprofits while performing their Hip-Hop play and album “skinnyblk” both regionally and nationwide. “skinnyblk” the album is available now on all streaming platforms.

POETRY CENTERED is a new podcast from the University of Arizona Poetry Center, featuring guest-curated highlights from their archive of poets reading their work in Tucson. Check it out.

In the last episode, number 23, we heard from visionary ethnobotanist, mystic and writer Terence McKenna, and from Rick Doblin, president of the Multidisciplinary Association For Psychedelic Science.

This episode, number 24, is a continuation on the same topic, the increasing use of consciousness-expanding substances, also called psychedelics or hallucinogens, for health and personal growth. People around the world are using LSD, psilocybin mushrooms, and a whole range of other psychedelic substances to treat conditions ranging from allergies and anxiety to substance abuse and alcoholism, post-traumatic stress disorder, and many other problems. Some people use these substances in tiny doses to enhance their everyday life, work, and play. Some use them in higher doses for more profound experiences. This topic has been getting more attention these days due in part to Michael Pollan’s recent book entitled How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence.

Today we’ll hear from Ralph Metzner, Timothy Leary, Andrew Weil and an anonymous friend "Don" under the influence of a “micro-dose” of LSD.

Ralph Metzner, the German-born American psychologist and pioneering LSD researcher at Harvard University, and the author of The Well of Remembrance, The Unfolding Self, and Green Psychology, was speaking at the New Living Expo in San Francisco in 2012, and my friend Margie Lewis gave me a ticket to see him there in a panel discussing “the re-birth of psychedelic culture.” Right before the panel started, I asked Ralph for a brief chat as he was waiting to go onstage, to talk about psychedelic drugs as medicine to strengthen the body-mind connection.

Then we’ll hear a few minutes from Timothy Leary’s talk at the University of California, San Diego, in 1976, recorded using the little cassette recorder that I recorded lectures with at the time.

Then, Dr. Andrew Weil speaks at a MAPS conference in 2012 in San Jose, CA, about how he used LSD to help cure himself of allergies vis-a-vis the mind-body connection. After that comes my interview with Andy in 2012.

[caption id="attachment_2886" align="aligncenter" width="1024"] Andy Moore and Andy Weil in San Francisco, 198? (Photo by Jack Walsh)[/caption]

Next, hear my interview with a friend who asked to remain anonymous when discussing taking LSD to enhance his life and work. An hour or so before this interview occurred, he had taken what is called a “micro-dose” of LSD.

[caption id="attachment_2902" align="alignnone" width="1024"] Let's call him "Don."[/caption]

Part 1 of a two-part program about the increasing use of consciousness-expanding substances, many of them illegal, for health and personal spiritual growth. People around the world are using these consciousness-expanding substances, also called psychedelics or hallucinogens, to treat conditions ranging from allergies and anxiety to alcoholism and addiction, post-traumatic stress disorder, and many other problems. Some people use these materials regularly in low doses to enhance their everyday life, or they may use them more occasionally in larger doses for a more profound experience. This is a topic that has gotten more attention these days, due in part to Michael Pollan’s recent book entitled How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence, which includes accounts of his own personal experiments with LSD, psilocybin and DMT.

I thought that now would be a good time to dig into my trove of recordings and play you some that I’ve made on the topic of psychedelic drugs over the years between 1976 when Timothy Leary came to speak at my college, and just a couple of weeks ago when I recorded an interview with a friend who was under the influence of LSD at the time.

In this episode I’m going to start out by playing you part of a recording that I made in 1991 of a talk given by Terence McKenna at the California Institute for Integral Studies in San Francisco. Terence was a visionary explorer and writer, and a singularly engaging speaker. He wrote books like The Archaic Revival, Food of the Gods, and True Hallucinations, all of which I own and recommend. He also happened to have gone to high school with one of my best friends in San Francisco, so I’m lucky to have gotten to know Terry personally a little bit too, and I treasure a letter that he sent me a short while before he died.

After Terence McKenna, we’re going to hear from Rick Doblin, the President of an organization called MAPS (which stands for the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies). Rick will talk about that organization’s work to bring currently illegal psychedelic materials into the light of science so that they can be studied properly and used to help people. You’ll hear Rick speaking to doctors, therapists, researchers and other members of MAPS at a MAPS conference in San Jose, CA in 2010, and then you’ll hear Rick in conversation with me, at MAPS’ former headquarters in Ben Lomond, CA, where I met him for the first time.

In the next episode, episode 24, which is also available now, we’ll continue this psychedelic journey and you’ll hear my brief chat with psychologist Ralph Metzner, one of the early LSD research pioneers at Harvard University along with Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert (aka Ram Das), Huston Smith, and Andrew Weil. Ralph talked with me just before going onstage at the New Living Expo in San Francisco in 2012. After that I’m going to play you a short bit of a recording of Timothy Leary lecturing at my college, UC San Diego, in 1976 or 1977, talking about psychedelic drugs, pleasure, and human destiny. After that we’ll hear Dr. Andrew Weil at that same MAPS conference in 2010, talking about how he cured some of his own allergies using LSD, and then we’ll listen to a personal conversation I had with Dr. Weil around 2012, about the mind-body connection and how consciousness-expanding substances can play a role in optimizing that connection. Finally, I’ll have a chat with a friend here in Tucson Arizona, who, as we talked, was under the influence of LSD. He tells about the subtle ways that it is influencing his perceptions and his engagement with his art-making.

Please post your comments and reviews in iTunes, or on andystreasuretrove.com.

An interview with Hugh King (also known as "Chopper King.") What I’ve selected from our conversation for this podcast has to do with three distinct parts of Hugh’s life that I find especially interesting: 1) His childhood pyromania; 2) The part Hugh played in the anti-war “GI Coffeehouse Movement” during the Vietnam War in the late 1960’s and 70’s near Fort Dix, New Jersey; and 3) The emergence of Hugh's "Chopper King" character from the TV shows Biker Build-off and Motorcycle Mania. This episode is 35 minutes long.

Here's Hugh in 2019 at the controls of a deactivated Titan II missile in its silo outside Tucson Arizona.

Please leave a review of my show on iTunes!

This episode of Andy’s Treasure Trove features two great fans of my podcast, Peter and Kath Hart of London. When my family and I were in London a few years ago, we spent a very pleasant day with them, I presented them with some Andy’s Treasure Trove t-shirts, and recorded a short interview with Peter about things that he had mentioned during the day, including stories about his grandfather’s experiences in the British film industry, and the small village of South Ascot where he grew up. He also tells us about some British condiments that you might want to seek out and try. Kath chimes in at the end, and we parted company with warmth in our hearts and some insights into England that only real Brits could provide.

Photo by Jack Walsh

Keywords and links for Episode 20:

It Ain't Half Hot Mum, The Ladykillers, Whiskey Galore, Lavender Hill Mob, London Belongs To Me, In Which We Serve, Austin 12 motorcar, Alan Ladd, South Ascot, Sgt. Adams, Scrumping, Gavin Fairfax Ltd., Walton-on-Thames, Hampton Court Palace, North Wiltshire, Mel McCuddin, Flickr, Marmite, Bovril, Brown Sauce, HP Brown Sauce, Daddies.

Recent drawings by Peter Hart, all local to Melksham, Wiltshire:

This is my homage to my favorite band, Sparks, and the core of Sparks, brothers Ron & Russell Mael. I speak to Tosh Berman of Tam Tam Books, who wrote a book about a history-making Sparks 21-album concert series in London and who published a book of Sparks song lyrics. I also chat with Eric Theise, an artist, musician and avid and articulate Sparks fan. Laurie Cohen, Director of the Mill Valley Philharmonic, shares her first impressions of Sparks music, and I mention something about each of Sparks' 25 albums from 1972 to the present, and play excerpts from some of my favorite tracks. The episode closes with "Part One" of my conversation with Ron and Russell Mael!

There's a great podcast totally dedicated to the music of Sparks called "All You Ever Think About Is Sparks" that can be found at https://sparkspodcast.podbean.com if you'd like an even deeper dive into the music of Sparks. Check it out!

Interviews from the April 30, 2016 "Join the Green Rush" cannabis job fair in San Francisco, plus an interview with Mario Furloni about his and Kate McLean's documentary Pot Country and the feature film, Freeland, that it inspired.