443 - The Legendary Venice Salon

Program Notes

Guest speaker: Kathleen Wirt

Today we feature a talk given by Kathleen Wirt, the hostess of the legendary salon that took place in Venice, California. While the stories Kathleen tells are of interest from an historical point of view, they are also very informative for anyone who is also interested in starting a salon in their area. Kathleen’s talk was given at the inaugural session of the Aware Project Salon, which has picked up the torch and is carrying this work to a new generation. You may know about Leary and McKenna, but if you don’t know about Kathleen’s Venice Salon you only have part of the historical story.

Psychedelic Awareness Salon with Kathleen (Video Jan 2015)
Ashley Booth’s Web Site

Aware Project: Rethinking Psychedelics

Aware Project on Facebook

Aware Project on Twitter

Transcript

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Greetings from cyberdelic space.

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This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.

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And if I had the time and energy right now, I would play one of those old-time radio clips

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that goes something like, we interrupt this program to bring you an urgent message.

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But if I did, you would probably get the wrong impression.

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In truth, that scene only works in my mind.

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But if you’ve been with us these past few weeks, then you know that this month we’ve

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been running a pledge drive.

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And I’m happy to report that we’re almost funded through the end of this calendar year.

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So a big thank you to all of our donors who hopefully have already received a personal email from me,

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along with a PDF copy of my novel, The Genesis Generation.

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As you know, for this month-long fun drive, I’ve been playing a seldom-heard Terrence McKenna workshop from June of 1994.

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And, by the way, I am aware that the static in that conversation is a bother,

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but I wasn’t able to remove it with the tools that I have available.

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Apparently, his microphone had a short in it, so I’m sorry for the distraction,

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but since I hadn’t been able to find this particular series on the net anywhere else,

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I thought that, well, we could put up with a bit of static and not lose whatever newly shaped ideas the Bard McKenna came up with.

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Anyway, that is the program that I’m going to interrupt right now.

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There’s still at least one more, and maybe two more, McKenna Talks in that series that I have left to play for you,

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but today there’s something that I have left to play for you, but

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today there’s something that I find more pressing, and at least for me, it’s just as interesting as

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Terrence can be. Now, I can hear you saying, as interesting as Terrence? You’ve got to be kidding.

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Well, just stick with me here for a minute. One of the things that’s easy to do is to mainly focus

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on the best-known historical figures in any era

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and overlook the behind the scenes people who actually did as much and sometimes more than

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these celebrities did to foster the growth of psychedelic ideas. While most of us know the

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names of Leary and McKenna and a lot of us also know about Al Hubbard, Myron Stolaroff, Gary Fisher

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and the other lesser known movers and shakers of the recent past.

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There’s one person that I’ve mentioned here in the salon before who is every bit as important as any celebrity has been in opening up the public discussion about psychedelics.

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And to my great pleasure, we are going to hear from her in just a few moments.

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we are going to hear from her in just a few moments.

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Now, if you’ve listened to or read the Genesis Generation,

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you’ll remember a chapter that is titled Caitlin’s Salon.

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Caitlin, of course, is an Irish pronunciation of Kathleen, so I’m told.

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And the model that I use for Caitlin is my dear friend Kathleen Wirt.

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And after we listen to Kathleen’s talk,

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I’ll return to my telling of her salon story in my novel.

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But first let me set the scene for the talk that I’m about to play for you.

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This talk was actually given in January of this year, 2015 for any time travelers who may be with us now.

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And it was the first talk given at the Aware Project Salon in Los Angeles.

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I find this talk to be significant from two perspectives at least.

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First of all, Kathleen, in telling the story of the legendary Venice Salon that she hosted for eight years, gives us a look back into some important history of the then newly energized

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psychedelic movement. You see, it wasn’t all that long ago that it was actually dangerous to admit

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that you had an interest in psychedelics.

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For example, those of us who attended her salons were aware that our license plates were probably being recorded while we were attending her salon, and that we had thus placed ourselves in a more

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public position concerning these substances. Looking back on it now, I realize that it actually

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wasn’t much of a risk for those of us who attended these salons.

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The risk was primarily all Kathleen’s, but we were all on edge a little bit, at least most of the time.

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However, getting back to my point about our unsung heroes,

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I simply can’t find the words to explain the importance of Kathleen’s salon.

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Up in Northern California, there was Esalen, Terrence McKenna, and the Shulgens as focal points.

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But in Southern California, we had Kathleen’s Salon.

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Now, many of the people who spoke at Kathleen’s also were featured at Esalen from time to time.

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But Esalen’s expensive, and Kathleen’s was, well, it was a free potluck event.

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And it was within driving distance to over 15 million people.

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And here’s the thing.

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Kathleen hosted this event every third Friday of the month for eight years.

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And if my memory is correct, during that time, she only missed one or maybe two nights.

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But even then, she still opened up her home on those occasions, even though she wasn’t there herself.

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Now, this was no small matter, because the house wasn’t all that huge,

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and yet I can’t remember there being less than 40 or 50 people there at any time.

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It was always an amazing evening.

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And since street parking on Penmar was tight, many of us would get there several hours early, particularly those of us who had to drive a bit to get there.

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And it wasn’t unusual to walk in early and find Myron Stolaroff already in the kitchen warming up the lasagna that he usually brought to share. And sometimes Rick, the sitar player,

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would be there melting chocolate for his candy treats. But by the time the evening speaker was

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about to begin, the conversation from the kitchen, dining, and living rooms was so intense that we

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were almost shouting at one another to be heard. And then Kathleen would

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take charge. She’d get us all quiet and introduce the speaker. So why am I spending so much time on

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this, you ask? Well, Kathleen’s salon has now been the inspiration for the Aware Project Salon,

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which is at least the second salon she’s inspired. And I say second because Kathleen’s salon was also

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the inspiration for this, the

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psychedelic salon. Unlike Kathleen, I don’t have what it takes to open up my house to a raft of

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strangers, many of whom stayed around until well into the morning after one of these sessions.

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I know that my wife and I would say goodnight to Myron and Jean Stoleroff as we headed in

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separate directions for our hour and a half drives home, and as we’d

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be parting, we’d still be amazed at the fact that even though it was now after midnight, we seemed

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to be the first ones to leave. And so now Kathleen continues her work by sharing her experiences with

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the Aware Project Salon, with the expectation that the lessons won’t have to be relearned by the

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organizers and members of this newly formed salon,

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which is hopefully only one of many that are now taking place around the world.

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So this is more than a talk simply about the history of one of the most important gatherings

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of working class intellectuals to take place recently.

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It is also about keeping the flame alive and moving forward.

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And there’s one final thing that I’d like to mention

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before we join Ashley Booth as she introduces Kathleen.

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Even if you are relatively new to the Psychedelic Salon,

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by now you know about Terrence McKenna,

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who played a significant role in helping us all find others

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with whom we can share our ideas about psychedelics.

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In my opinion, Kathleen Wirt,

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who kept herself behind the scenes as our community grew,

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has contributed every bit as much to our culture

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as has Terrence or Timothy or any of the other elders.

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She is truly one of a kind.

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The AWARE Project’s aim is to balance the public conversation about psychedelics,

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spread accurate information, and give a new face to psychedelia.

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We feel that this change will occur through connection and relationship, one individual at a time. Thank you. The People Who Use Psychedelics Mindfully Cross All Social, Racial, Economic, and Political Boundaries.

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All right, so I’m really excited to introduce Kathleen Wirt.

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I’m going to read you a little bio.

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Don’t, because it’s part of my talk.

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Okay. Okay.

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Yeah, but I’m just thrilled to have you.

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I’m so happy you like it.

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You’re a perfect, perfect first speaker for our series.

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With that, thank you.

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I see at least half a dozen people here who used to come to my house,

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and it makes me feel like I want to cry.

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I miss it so much.

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I’m going to sit down so they don’t move around.

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We, and everything that Ashley’s saying

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about what she’s hoping to achieve with this meeting,

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I’m just sitting here thinking,

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we said exactly the same thing 17 years ago,

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except it was very scary and very illegal,

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and we didn’t have any lists.

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The way the whole thing

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began I had a I was looking for a place to live I just left my husband and I

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found a house in Venice with a friend of mine who was the secretary for dr. Oscar

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Janaker and the people in the Albert Hoffman Foundation were concerned they

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were all pretty much in their 80s and they were very concerned that their research would be marginalized and that their lives

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would be

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not understood

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and that they had just suffered

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enormous beat downs through the war against drugs

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and zero tolerance

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and really people had

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ripped them off, they trusted people who stole

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things from them and they were just

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pretty much at a low point

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and looking for somewhere to put their archive of study together,

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to put it all together somewhere safe where we could start to digitize it and archive it.

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And we moved in, Lisa and I moved into this house at 2463 Penmar,

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and the Albert Hoffman Foundation paid a third of our rent

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and pretty much had the dining room, which was a library.

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And what really kicked this off, we had finally, everyone was so excited,

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the Sandoz Corporation had agreed to let go of their documents about the research with LSD.

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And this was something that, at the time, we had like a list of the board of directors,

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and nobody really wanted to be associated with it.

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People were very much on the down low.

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People’s research had been discredited.

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Their lives had been, like I said, discredited.

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People had their practices taken away from them.

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They were on FBI watch lists.

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And so this was very, very, very underground in the beginning.

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And they started having the board meetings at the house.

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So they brought in all these books, all these volumes,

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and some paintings, which I will tell you about in a minute.

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But these gentlemen sat around,

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and I remember the first board of directors meeting they had at the house.

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I listened in for a little bit and the thing

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went on for maybe seven hours

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and I’m thinking well they’re all retired and they don’t have

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anywhere else to go

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and they were

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discussing whether they needed

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to get some funds happening and they were

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discussing would we if we had

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people contribute say $20 a month

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or $25 a year for a membership

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would it be a membership?

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Would they be a member of the foundation

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or a friend of the foundation?

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And this created a three-hour

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discussion over using

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which word. And I just remember

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sitting there thinking, oh my god,

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these guys have done so much.

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I was thinking

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we need to get some new people on board here.

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You know, because this is just, I don’t have time for this.

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Because the discussion was that if we call the members of the foundation,

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then somehow there was an expectation that they would get something back.

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Anyway, is that the door open?

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No, it’s on my motorcycle outside.

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Oh, okay.

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Anyway, I started out going to raves with John Beresford,

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who was a 75-year-old psychiatrist from Canada

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who headed up the Committee Against Unjust Sentencing.

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And we would go to these parties,

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and we had a big poster of the LSD molecule behind us,

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and we would sign up kids to digitize

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the documents in the archive and um what was happening is they were saying oh my god you know

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Dr. Janiker you know I would just love to meet him and I was thinking ah this would love to meet you

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too like these people would love to know that they’re still known and remembered by people and

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that people still care about what they did.

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So I started hosting these events as a cross-generational forum to bring people together to just share the wisdom from the elders before they were gone

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and to bring together the communities and the tribes.

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One of my original hopes and something that sort of happened but never really did

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was I knew there was a great divide between these gentlemen and Timothy Leary

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because Timothy Leary had popularized LSD use,

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and they felt like he had been irresponsible about it,

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and they had a little bit of anger there in just what had happened to them afterwards.

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And being here in Los Angeles, you know, we had the whole star power was behind Leary.

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You know, Perry Farrell was going over to his house all the time.

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I went there one night for an event for the Biosphere, and it was just, you know, it’s very star-studded.

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Winona Ryder.

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And we didn’t have any of those people at all.

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We were like the scientists and people who had, like, done serious work on the thing.

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So I say that because we didn’t

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have an email list at first,

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but we really very much

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tried to avoid attracting the kind

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of people who were just going to come in

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and talk about their trips and like,

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I’m so fucked up,

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and try to score drugs or whatever. This isn’t

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what it was about at all. It was about

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discussing serious research.

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In fact, I made a list. Basically, it

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broke down into categories. We talked about

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entheogens and science. We talked about politics and law.

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And we also had events about culture, or meetings

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about culture and art. And everything pretty much fell into these categories.

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When they brought

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the paintings in, and

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has anybody seen the 30,

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actually there were more of them than that, but the

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paintings that were in Life Magazine in 1959,

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there was a cover story,

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and they had noticed that,

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and we have all this research,

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you know, all the documents of all the

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research ever done on LSD.

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So you can just go through my dining room and pick out a book and look at it.

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They had noticed at one point, and this is maybe in the 1950s somewhere, well, 59,

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that the people who had taken LSD were speaking of it in very visual terms.

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And so they’d been in clinical settings up until this point.

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And they said they had a picture, or they had a Kachina doll.

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And they had people, famous painters, people who were actually artists,

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paint this doll first when they were not under the influence,

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and then after they had ingested LSD.

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And I had 35 of these paintings in my house. And the first ones, the Kachina doll was just blue and green.

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And he had a red and orange belt.

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He just had a little splash of red and orange on him right here.

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And most of the paintings were very realistic, the first ones.

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Then the ones afterwards were just such amazing art.

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You had like a Mayan kachina doll.

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You had alien kachina dolls.

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There was a particular group of them, maybe five of them, that were orange.

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And at the time I didn’t care much for orange.

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And one of them was…

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I had them all on this side wall over here where I didn’t have to look at them.

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All together.

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And one of them in particular just looked like someone had thrown up all over the canvas.

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And it was about this big.

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And I was just like… So at some point I had moved them to another wall.

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And I remember coming out of my bedroom one morning, like all the way to the other end of the house

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and you had a clear shot to the other end of the living room

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probably as far as from here to the back wall

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over there in that area

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and it was a Kachina doll on fire

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and it became my favorite painting

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I was just like, oh, you had to be that far away from it to see it

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it was amazing art, you guys. Anyway, I was going to address how illegal this was in the day,

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and I look out here and I see some people that are kind of in my age range, or maybe

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a little younger, but I was expecting to maybe have to explain about zero tolerance and how dangerous this was.

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The first gathering that we had, Alexander Shulgin and his wife

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came down and kicked it off for us.

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And we had, they, actually, I remember her coming up to me,

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and she pulled me aside, and she said,

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you know we’re on an FBI watch list, and you’re going to be on it too.

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And I was like, yeah, right.

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She was so paranoid.

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But

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the next two months, every

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single time I saw a police car, I was

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pulled over and searched.

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Every single time, six times.

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If they were in front of me,

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behind me, other cars, middle of the

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afternoon, no matter what I was doing, I got

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pulled over and searched. And so I kind of became a believer in that. And of course, I had nothing on me.

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There was also, at the time, I was in Venice. I had read in LA Weekly that they had traps

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on the telephone so that if you were discussing things or that certain words would come up

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in conversation. And we weren’t using any kind because we weren’t selling anything or, you know, we had no LSD lab in our house.

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Then we weren’t really that careful at first about what we were saying.

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And so I imagine that we might have been targeted, you know,

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for people checking this whole thing out.

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We had, well, actually that first meeting with the Shulgens,

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I remember Jack Herrera was there, and this is one of several times where I, just stumbling into it as a young person, had no idea these men and women had known each other forever, and they actually didn’t all like each other.

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fighting them all over. And then they’d get there and go, oh, so-and-so’s here. So Shulgin and Herrera disagreed on what substance would change the world, which you might imagine.

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And I remember that the Shulgins would not let anyone smoke pot in the house. They were

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like, that’s, you know, you cannot consume anything at all. So Jack just stood out on

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my sidewalk and puffed joint after joint after joint right in front of the house, which I didn’t find out

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about it until later, but that was extremely illegal and scary at the time.

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But Venice being Venice at the time, we had prostitutes on the corner

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and it was like nobody really gave a shit. There were meetings where we had

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fire dancers out in the street and just blocked the street off.

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Nobody ever said anything about it.

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As the meetings went on, we determined not to have any sort of list.

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And I’m really sorry about that nowadays.

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I’ve got very few pictures.

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I’ve got, at one point a few years ago,

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we had some people together

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and we all sat down and we tried to write down

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every meeting that we could remember and every speaker

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that we could remember because we didn’t take pictures.

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And there were a few times when

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we filmed or recorded

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the meetings and you might see some

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of those on

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Lorenzo Haggerty’s site, Matrix Masters.

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He did record a few,

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but it was never the crowd or anything.

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It was just of the speaker

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and we were very careful not to get anybody on camera.

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There was definitely a fear of that.

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So the political meetings that we had

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were some of my favorite

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because I’m a rabble rouser

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and very radical

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and I wound up having an organization

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called Rave the Vote out of this

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where we would go to festivals

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and sign up people on ecstasy to vote.

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Hundreds of them them you guys

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and I just remember

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at one point the Rockefeller laws

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they had the big demonstrations in New York

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black DJs were just like fuck the police

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but the white DJs wouldn’t take a stand on anything

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and nobody seemed to care

00:21:00 ►

and again when I talk to kids about this

00:21:03 ►

in the pre-Obama world,

00:21:05 ►

it’s hard to imagine people being so apolitical.

00:21:09 ►

But I would say,

00:21:11 ►

I would blow up newspaper headlines

00:21:14 ►

and put them on a table

00:21:16 ►

along with my voter registration forms

00:21:19 ►

and our big, you know,

00:21:20 ►

rave the vote thing.

00:21:21 ►

And I would say,

00:21:22 ►

look at this,

00:21:23 ►

Justice Kennedy says

00:21:24 ►

that we should all be seized and searched all the time. That that would be more constitutional than just selecting

00:21:28 ►

people. That everyone should be subjected to that constantly. Would you like that? Would

00:21:32 ►

that affect your life at all? And they’d go, oh, yeah. And we’d, you know, well, here,

00:21:36 ►

vote. So I think they were probably all Democrats. Yeah, this was a year, talking about bicycle

00:21:43 ►

rides, where the bicycle riders thought that they

00:21:47 ►

were getting a police escort and the police were they were moving them through intersections and

00:21:54 ►

they’re like oh this is really nice and at the end of the thing they circled them uh took all

00:21:58 ►

of their bicycles sent them to jail and like strip searched the women five times in two days. And, like, seriously horrible, horrible stuff.

00:22:08 ►

And, of course, they were sued, and they paid, but, you know, they, you know, who paid?

00:22:13 ►

We did, the people who pay our taxes here.

00:22:15 ►

We pay for that whenever people sue the police.

00:22:19 ►

The police don’t pay.

00:22:20 ►

You and I do pay.

00:22:21 ►

You and I do.

00:22:29 ►

We had only, I can think of only twice in the eight years we had the events,

00:22:33 ►

we had people that we thought had come in under false pretenses.

00:22:36 ►

And one of them was pretty early on.

00:22:40 ►

And I remember, Will, you were talking about, you were talking to him about the court system.

00:22:44 ►

He was saying he was an attorney, but he didn’t know anything about the court system or about, where was it,

00:22:45 ►

San Diego, you remember?

00:22:49 ►

Okay.

00:22:51 ►

I was a follower of Jack Kerr.

00:22:54 ►

Right, right.

00:22:55 ►

As the meetings wore on and the years

00:22:58 ►

wore on, we got a little less,

00:22:59 ►

my bedroom was like the stoner room,

00:23:01 ►

and then it started to move out into the living room

00:23:04 ►

and then nobody cared or anything. But the one thing that nobody ever did was try to

00:23:08 ►

buy, sell, or ingest any kind of hallucinogen at my meetings. Everyone pretty much had their

00:23:13 ►

own sources and that was the purpose of the thing. So I would think that if anybody did

00:23:17 ►

come in thinking that they were going to discover something or bust know bust somebody there was absolutely no way to do that this this particular guy asked a lot of questions wanted to know who’s

00:23:30 ►

who and what we were up to and I think he must have been very disappointed and

00:23:37 ►

then the other time was really funny I used to when I told people about this I

00:23:42 ►

would just say well it’s the Albert Hoffman Foundation,

00:23:49 ►

which sounds very scientific and scholarly if you don’t know who Albert Hoffman is.

00:23:53 ►

And I found that that was a very good screening mechanism.

00:23:59 ►

I’d just say this flatly, and if anybody knew who Albert Hoffman was, then they were totally cool with what he was.

00:24:08 ►

We had a guy that showed up one night in one of our raucous free-for-all discussions or whatever,

00:24:10 ►

and I remember him going,

00:24:11 ►

wait a minute, wait a minute.

00:24:15 ►

He goes, everybody knows that ecstasy is bad for you.

00:24:17 ►

He goes, are you talking about it’s okay to take it? And everyone in the room just sort of turned around.

00:24:22 ►

And it was just silence.

00:24:24 ►

And somebody goes, how did you get here

00:24:27 ►

who invited you you know because every once in a while someone would come that thought oh this is

00:24:34 ►

a really neat gathering because we did have um meetings that sometimes would be about art or

00:24:39 ►

culture we um we had uh one of our uh one of our members worked at the Tar Pits, the La Brea Tar Pits, and took pictures of really beautiful psychedelic pictures of sun play on oil and water and backlit those. evening of his artwork. And you might not have realized that everyone in the room was experienced

00:25:06 ►

travelers,

00:25:08 ►

let me say, for meetings like

00:25:10 ►

that. So you could see that if

00:25:12 ►

someone had come maybe on the wrong night.

00:25:13 ►

But we did not publicize this to anyone.

00:25:16 ►

People

00:25:16 ►

found out about it, and sometimes it took a while

00:25:20 ►

for people to find out about it. I remember

00:25:22 ►

when Gary Fisher, who is now

00:25:23 ►

out of the research closet

00:25:26 ►

and is being recognized for what he did,

00:25:29 ►

he gave MDMA, no, I’m sorry, LSD

00:25:33 ►

to autistic children in the 60s

00:25:36 ►

and had a phenomenal success rate.

00:25:41 ►

I remember him saying there was one little girl

00:25:42 ►

who did nothing but scream

00:25:44 ►

and that she

00:25:45 ►

had at one point, they called it the

00:25:48 ►

God room where they would go in and do this

00:25:49 ►

but she took him one day and she goes, we have to

00:25:51 ►

understand Dr. Fisher, I still have a very long

00:25:53 ►

ways to go. It’s like

00:25:55 ►

I just actually said this.

00:25:57 ►

But after

00:25:58 ►

the hysteria over LSD

00:26:02 ►

sort of launched

00:26:03 ►

they, from what he had said at the meeting,

00:26:07 ►

they destroyed his research.

00:26:09 ►

I mean, people’s lives were ruined over this.

00:26:14 ►

Much the same sort of thing was happening with MDMA,

00:26:17 ►

and this was the reason for why the whole meeting was so timely,

00:26:22 ►

is because, as I used to tell people when I was explaining this,

00:26:26 ►

that in every culture, not every culture,

00:26:29 ►

many tribal cultures throughout history,

00:26:32 ►

when you’re like 15, you go out and you ingest something

00:26:35 ►

and you find your animal spirit or whatever.

00:26:37 ►

And that’s illegal in this country to do that.

00:26:41 ►

But it doesn’t stop the human need for the children

00:26:44 ►

to separate themselves from their parents or find their own you know entities um and discover themselves

00:26:49 ►

so uh that was definitely one of the major um pushes of many of our of our topics um we had

00:26:59 ►

Rafael Eisner came in and uh I had so many young gravers tell me that they wished their friends had been there,

00:27:07 ►

their boyfriends or whatever, where he explained how MDMA works,

00:27:11 ►

and that you couldn’t take more and get off more.

00:27:14 ►

And I’m assuming that probably most people in this room are aware now that, you know,

00:27:17 ►

if you take 5-HTP, like, he basically said you could do it 12 to 20 times a year with absolutely no ill effects at all,

00:27:24 ►

as long as you gave your serotonin time to build back up.

00:27:27 ►

And that, I see now that there’s, you know, they call it molly nowadays,

00:27:33 ►

but there’s definitely an interest and a return to that.

00:27:37 ►

Because toward the end of this era, everything was so adulterated that, you know,

00:27:43 ►

I have to say that one of the reasons,

00:27:46 ►

there were several reasons why we stopped doing this.

00:27:48 ►

One of them was that everybody died,

00:27:49 ►

like all of our scientists and the elders were gone.

00:27:53 ►

But that the scene had been,

00:27:58 ►

well, the researcher, is it Rico, how do you pronounce his name?

00:28:01 ►

The one who falsified his research.

00:28:03 ►

I don’t remember his name.

00:28:04 ►

Rico. Rico. I don’t remember what his name was. Rico.

00:28:05 ►

Rico.

00:28:06 ►

I don’t know if he pronounced the T or not.

00:28:07 ►

He got this level of hysteria up with the Bush administration

00:28:14 ►

where he said that there was like a, what was it,

00:28:16 ►

a 40% mortality rate, something crazy like that.

00:28:19 ►

I think it was like Parkinson’s from…

00:28:21 ►

But they were talking about a mortality rate,

00:28:23 ►

and it took several years for someone to go,

00:28:25 ►

wait a minute, if all these kids are doing this every weekend,

00:28:28 ►

we don’t have all these people dropping dead,

00:28:30 ►

and this isn’t happening.

00:28:32 ►

But it served to do a couple of things.

00:28:36 ►

Number one, you could not play electronic music in public

00:28:38 ►

without getting arrested.

00:28:41 ►

You couldn’t gather.

00:28:43 ►

They passed laws in Europe against gathering or playing

00:28:45 ►

electronic music. I talked to some people at your house

00:28:47 ►

last night and they said, yeah, that

00:28:49 ►

you could…

00:28:52 ►

I know that we would go out

00:28:53 ►

to desert parties and we’d keep an eye

00:28:55 ►

out and we’d put on country music

00:28:57 ►

if we saw the Rangers coming.

00:29:01 ►

Did that

00:29:02 ►

make them think we were all doing speed?

00:29:03 ►

I don’t know.

00:29:05 ►

It would make me very angry to be

00:29:07 ►

pigeonholed into this.

00:29:09 ►

And then of course you go, well they are right.

00:29:11 ►

We are doing this.

00:29:13 ►

But definitely it should not have been

00:29:15 ►

demonized the way it was.

00:29:17 ►

And the word rave became a bad word

00:29:19 ►

and you just couldn’t use it anymore.

00:29:20 ►

In fact, when rave

00:29:23 ►

the boat was folded in to rock the boat, it was at this point where you couldn’t use the word rave anymore. In fact, when rave the boat was folded in to rock the boat, it was at

00:29:27 ►

this point where you couldn’t use the word rave anymore. And I was really pushing for

00:29:31 ►

them to call it roll the boat. I thought that would be pretty cool. I’m going to see about

00:29:40 ►

some of the discussions we had. Oh anybody know Francis Delavecchia?

00:29:47 ►

Francis.

00:29:47 ►

When Francis was running for mayor,

00:29:49 ►

he came in and read

00:29:50 ►

the first chapter of his book.

00:29:55 ►

This is a whole category, ego.

00:29:58 ►

I sometimes

00:30:00 ►

did not realize what I was stumbling

00:30:01 ►

into when I would invite people

00:30:03 ►

who maybe didn’t get along with each other.

00:30:06 ►

And I

00:30:07 ►

would just kind of laugh about it because I’d think

00:30:10 ►

well what we’re told is the whole lesson

00:30:12 ►

here about this process

00:30:14 ►

is that it’s about a loss of ego

00:30:16 ►

and we’re supposed to lose our ego in the process

00:30:18 ►

so what does it mean when our elders have

00:30:20 ►

like this ego showdown in front of us?

00:30:23 ►

It was kind of

00:30:24 ►

amusing actually.

00:30:25 ►

There were only a few times where I’d have to just stand up and stop it.

00:30:30 ►

When I was like 30 years old, 35, well, maybe 37.

00:30:36 ►

But to actually get up and tell someone with a PhD in his 80s to stop talking

00:30:44 ►

was a difficult thing to do,

00:30:45 ►

but every once in a while I’d have to do it. And I just remember one of my favorite ones,

00:30:50 ►

we had Art Kunkinan from the L.A. Free Press, and Art had quite famously published the addresses

00:30:58 ►

of all the drug officers in the LAPD, or in California. They didn’t have a DEA back then. It was back in the 60s though.

00:31:06 ►

Yeah, back in the 60s. But this is one of his

00:31:08 ►

big claims to fame. He’d been

00:31:10 ►

hung out with Timothy Leary.

00:31:13 ►

Art had a great

00:31:14 ►

pedigree. And it was definitely

00:31:16 ►

somebody we wanted to talk to.

00:31:18 ►

Well, Myron Stolaroff was also a dear

00:31:20 ►

friend who was on the board of directors

00:31:22 ►

of the Albert Hoffman Foundation.

00:31:24 ►

And apparently they had a rivalry that I was unaware of. And when Art found out that Myron

00:31:30 ►

had spoken at my gathering, Art had to talk too. So he came down, he scheduled him for

00:31:35 ►

a talk, and I just remember there being a rather increasingly pointed discussion about whether or not Americans could truly practice Buddhism.

00:31:47 ►

It just got really ugly, and I finally just had to go, stop, stop, we’re not going to talk about this anymore.

00:31:54 ►

Iris Lord was one of these people, and Iris is still around, but she’s had a stroke and she’s in New York.

00:32:00 ►

And Iris was in her 70s, and I remember her telling me, she had a stage

00:32:05 ►

show that she did. There weren’t very many

00:32:07 ►

women at these things, by the way.

00:32:09 ►

Largely male. And especially the older

00:32:11 ►

women who were there, the women who were in their 60s and 70s

00:32:14 ►

were just fabulous people.

00:32:16 ►

Myron Stolaroff’s

00:32:17 ►

wife, Jean, told

00:32:19 ►

me one time that when she was 15,

00:32:22 ►

she and her girlfriends in New York

00:32:23 ►

used to steal a car and drive

00:32:26 ►

in to New York City to see Frank Sinatra

00:32:28 ►

play.

00:32:29 ►

I was just like, that is so punk rock.

00:32:34 ►

Wonderful women. Anyway, Iris

00:32:36 ►

did a stage show called

00:32:38 ►

Twelve

00:32:38 ►

Famous Men, and she had

00:32:42 ►

relationships with people like Marlon Brando,

00:32:44 ►

Lenny Bruce

00:32:45 ►

like really

00:32:48 ►

an amazing life

00:32:49 ►

some of these relationships when she was 14

00:32:52 ►

years old which like I don’t know

00:32:54 ►

I work in the music business and I hear

00:32:56 ►

these things and I don’t know just suddenly

00:32:58 ►

I guess it used to

00:33:00 ►

be legal to have sex with 14 year olds

00:33:02 ►

nobody used to care

00:33:03 ►

you know it’s a little disturbing.

00:33:08 ►

She and her sister, her twin sister, very beautiful.

00:33:12 ►

She looked, at 74, she was a very beautiful woman.

00:33:16 ►

Anyway, God bless Iris.

00:33:18 ►

She’s in New York, and she and her husband call me every now and then,

00:33:22 ►

but she’s unable to talk on the phone.

00:33:24 ►

We had all of, like, but she’s unable to talk on the phone.

00:33:29 ►

We had all of, like, a who’s who.

00:33:32 ►

Like, talking about the scientific programs that we had and the ones that were about drugs,

00:33:35 ►

we basically, I’d go,

00:33:36 ►

we need someone to talk about ketamine,

00:33:38 ►

and we’d find a guy, and he’d come in and speak.

00:33:40 ►

We needed someone to talk about salvia divinorum,

00:33:42 ►

whether it’s a guy who grows it up in Malibu,

00:33:44 ►

we’ll have him in.

00:33:47 ►

We had… we needed someone to talk about salvia divinorum whether it’s a guy who grows it up in Malibu we’ll have him in we had so many talks about ayahuasca and ibogaine

00:33:52 ►

really, I’ve never done either one of those substances

00:33:56 ►

but I was in the minority

00:33:59 ►

I would say maybe a third of our attendees had

00:34:02 ►

in fact, one of the things that they said about these gatherings

00:34:05 ►

was that if you wanted to be a speaker,

00:34:08 ►

you better know your topic pretty well

00:34:09 ►

because there were probably many people in the audience

00:34:12 ►

who knew as much or more about your topic than you did.

00:34:15 ►

I’m recalling Christmas.

00:34:17 ►

We had a Christmas program about the shamanic origins of Christmas.

00:34:22 ►

And my roommate at the time was a…

00:34:26 ►

He was taking so long to talk about…

00:34:31 ►

Like, everyone in the audience was just kind of…

00:34:34 ►

Like, I know…

00:34:35 ►

They drank the reindeer piss because they ate the mushrooms.

00:34:39 ►

And, you know, the Amanita mascara mushroom is on all these woodcuts.

00:34:42 ►

And they just basically kind of rested the discussion away from him

00:34:45 ►

and everyone else gave the talk.

00:34:47 ►

Apparently we all knew everything

00:34:49 ►

and we didn’t even need anyone to talk about it.

00:34:53 ►

We had a girl in who did

00:34:55 ►

a documentary about Chernobyl

00:34:57 ►

and I remember that she was very surprised

00:34:59 ►

at the level of

00:35:01 ►

knowledge that we had in this group.

00:35:04 ►

In fact, Ed Jaffe said to me one night, I remember this,

00:35:08 ►

he just goes, well, once again, Kathleen,

00:35:09 ►

all the smartest people in L.A. are at your house on Friday night.

00:35:13 ►

Because L.A. kind of has a reputation for not being that deep.

00:35:18 ►

And we really, I found that later on when we started using an e-mail list, but we never did like a group, we never published it

00:35:28 ►

in any way, that I would just kind of lose

00:35:32 ►

some people’s email addresses if they caused us too much trouble.

00:35:36 ►

People came in just wanting to talk about themselves or hijack the discussion

00:35:40 ►

or wanted to give shit to the speaker because that wasn’t what it was about. It was about a good

00:35:44 ►

feeling thing and about making our speakers feel welcome.

00:35:48 ►

And definitely, you know,

00:35:50 ►

whenever we opened the thing up for discussion,

00:35:52 ►

I just would always look at the look of delight

00:35:55 ►

on our speaker’s face when he would hear

00:35:56 ►

like how intelligent and pointed the questions were.

00:35:59 ►

You know, it was like, this was really a great place

00:36:01 ►

to talk about your area of interest.

00:36:05 ►

Anyway, we had obviously the people from Arrowhead.

00:36:08 ►

Rick Doblin was in a couple of times, well, more than a couple of times.

00:36:11 ►

I remember he came back from Palenque, and we used to hang a sheet on the back wall for a screen.

00:36:20 ►

And he was showing slides from Palenque, and he got up and he just sort of shook.

00:36:24 ►

There was a picture of one of the ruins

00:36:26 ►

and he shook the sheet so that it shimmered

00:36:28 ►

and he goes, this is what it looked like

00:36:30 ►

to me.

00:36:35 ►

And he said, Andy Papp

00:36:36 ►

oh my god, Andy

00:36:37 ►

we didn’t have too many people

00:36:40 ►

we had a few people who came in who had not

00:36:42 ►

tasted the sacrament. I had a roommate

00:36:46 ►

who was one of them. She was a fundamental Christian

00:36:48 ►

and I always felt like it was really

00:36:50 ►

big of her

00:36:52 ►

to be so open-minded

00:36:54 ►

that she would help me get

00:36:56 ►

ready for the meetings, she would help me clean up afterwards

00:36:58 ►

and she would be at all of them

00:37:00 ►

and listen to everything everybody had to say with a very

00:37:02 ►

open mind, yet she was

00:37:04 ►

definitely as fundamental as it gets about heaven and hell and all of that.

00:37:17 ►

Andy Papp was another one.

00:37:19 ►

Andy is now a definite part of the community.

00:37:21 ►

He goes to Burning Man every year, but he’s a scientist who invented the clone gun,

00:37:24 ►

and he was a very kind of crotchety guy. And I remember we never

00:37:28 ►

had any pot in food that was just not

00:37:31 ►

even discussed. It was just understood that that was one of the rules. We were not

00:37:35 ►

dosing anyone. We weren’t getting high at the meeting. This was not for that.

00:37:40 ►

And somebody, and I used to give a prize for the best

00:37:43 ►

homemade dish, and it was usually just a prize for the best homemade dish,

00:37:46 ►

and it was usually just some weird thing I found in my house

00:37:47 ►

because I had so much crap in the house.

00:37:49 ►

I’d just go, oh, here, we’ll get this away.

00:37:51 ►

But Andy, they said these were extra-leaded brownies,

00:37:56 ►

and he asked me several times,

00:37:58 ►

does that mean they have pothead?

00:37:59 ►

I’m like, no, Andy,

00:38:00 ►

no, it just means it’s extra chocolate,

00:38:02 ►

and I was so sure that it was.

00:38:04 ►

Well, it turned out, no, I was wrong.

00:38:07 ►

And he ate like four of them.

00:38:10 ►

And it’s probably the only time that I really ever started sweating at that event.

00:38:16 ►

Because Andy, I thought at the time he was the kind of person who would sue me.

00:38:18 ►

And I remember I sat next to him the rest of the night and held his hand.

00:38:23 ►

And he was being kind of crotchety and mean,

00:38:25 ►

but I just sat there and held his hand because I didn’t want him to sue me.

00:38:32 ►

Anyway, and actually I had to call Andy down a couple of times

00:38:36 ►

and just say, hey, you were mean to the speaker, or you’ve got to stop that.

00:38:39 ►

You’ve got to stop questioning too hard.

00:38:42 ►

Definitely a high point.

00:38:43 ►

Allen Ginsberg read his poetry in my living room.

00:38:46 ►

And that,

00:38:47 ►

many times when these speakers would come,

00:38:50 ►

I’d have their book that they wrote, and I

00:38:52 ►

would have them sign it. And

00:38:53 ►

that was one of only two times

00:38:56 ►

someone stole something

00:38:58 ►

from my house. Someone stole

00:39:00 ►

the book of poetry that Allen Ginsberg

00:39:02 ►

signed for me, so I’m really sad about that.

00:39:04 ►

Some dickhead has a book that says,

00:39:07 ►

Thank you, Kathleen.

00:39:10 ►

We’ll remind him constantly that he stole it.

00:39:17 ►

Anyway, we had a guy whose dad was a blacklisted writer,

00:39:21 ►

wrote a screenplay about when he was under surveillance by the FBI.

00:39:24 ►

Amy Pothall Ralston, who served at some of the most poignant meetings that we had,

00:39:29 ►

were people who had been victims in the war on drugs.

00:39:32 ►

And we had a couple of really notable meetings where people had been incarcerated

00:39:36 ►

and had a lot to say about the prison industrial complex.

00:39:41 ►

And Amy was one of those people.

00:39:42 ►

In fact, she’s made a movie about marijuana, which some of you guys may have seen Amy Ralston it’s it follows

00:39:50 ►

the legal history of marijuana and anyway you know you definitely need to

00:39:56 ►

have her speak at one of these she was fabulous she served she was her ex

00:40:02 ►

husband her estranged husband was manufacturing MDMA in Germany.

00:40:08 ►

And when they made it illegal in America, the FDA, or the DEA, arrested him when he came back from the country.

00:40:16 ►

And they started pressuring her.

00:40:19 ►

And they wanted her to wear a wire and go to all of his contacts.

00:40:22 ►

And she was like, I’m not with this man.

00:40:24 ►

I haven’t been with him for years.

00:40:25 ►

I don’t know any of these people, and I’m not going to do it.

00:40:28 ►

And they harassed her for two years.

00:40:30 ►

She said at one point they, like, kicked in all her walls.

00:40:34 ►

They tore the door off the refrigerator.

00:40:36 ►

They threw things around.

00:40:37 ►

They told her that they were going to make her sorry that she hadn’t cooperated.

00:40:42 ►

And the worse things got, the more determined she became to not help them at all.

00:40:47 ►

And every time she got a job,

00:40:49 ►

they’d call up her employer and tell her that,

00:40:51 ►

tell them that she was under federal drug investigation.

00:40:53 ►

Anyway, she’s 100% innocent.

00:40:56 ►

She got a 19-year sentence

00:40:57 ►

and served nine years of it

00:41:00 ►

before President Clinton pardoned her.

00:41:02 ►

And this was so chilling, you guys.

00:41:05 ►

I have

00:41:06 ►

the legal,

00:41:09 ►

the things that we did to try to help people

00:41:11 ►

were, I get

00:41:13 ►

goosebumps thinking about

00:41:15 ►

these poor women in jail

00:41:17 ►

that basically if you don’t have anyone

00:41:19 ►

to turn in,

00:41:21 ►

the man that these

00:41:23 ►

one woman, her roommate,

00:41:25 ►

I think was in jail for 25 years

00:41:26 ►

for translating a telephone call.

00:41:28 ►

If you wanted to get a conspiracy

00:41:30 ►

verdict against people,

00:41:34 ►

you had to have three people

00:41:35 ►

and the undercover agent

00:41:37 ►

could not be one of them.

00:41:39 ►

So they would have, you know,

00:41:41 ►

just trump up all these charges

00:41:42 ►

against the girlfriend

00:41:43 ►

and she would have nobody to turn in.

00:41:44 ►

So she’d wind up going to jail for 25 years,

00:41:46 ►

and a man would be out,

00:41:47 ►

because he’d turn in somebody,

00:41:49 ►

and he would go free.

00:41:51 ►

And it’s just really, really awful.

00:41:53 ►

That’s one of the things that John Beresford

00:41:55 ►

was involved in with the Committee Against Unjust Sentencing,

00:41:59 ►

the November Coalition,

00:42:02 ►

and the Tallahassee Project,

00:42:04 ►

which profiled 100 women in Tallahassee prison

00:42:07 ►

and what had happened to their families.

00:42:09 ►

All of this, I mean, the good news is all of this is, you know,

00:42:14 ►

news in the newspaper right now.

00:42:15 ►

You know, it started out that really only the libertarians

00:42:19 ►

and, like, some hardcore Republicans would even agree with you on this,

00:42:22 ►

that it didn’t make sense to

00:42:25 ►

be punishing these people. But through some of these talks, we definitely saw how the

00:42:31 ►

prison industrial complex profited from these things. And it was so clear that at the end

00:42:37 ►

of the Cold War, that there was a need to have a war against somebody, and so America

00:42:41 ►

turned to war against its own people.

00:42:49 ►

And we were the guerrillas in the trenches, you know?

00:42:51 ►

Do you remember what your movie was called?

00:42:57 ►

It was something like Pot.

00:42:59 ►

I remember thinking like this,

00:43:00 ►

like everybody’s made a movie like this,

00:43:03 ►

but I went to the premiere and it was really well done. And you know what?

00:43:04 ►

I’ll let you know, and I’m in touch with her and you guys should definitely

00:43:07 ►

have her for a speaker here she’s amazing amazing speaker we people who

00:43:15 ►

were invited had to be vetted like you couldn’t just tell anybody especially in

00:43:18 ►

the early days that we you know we had a we actually mailed out the invitations

00:43:24 ►

in the early days.

00:43:25 ►

We were careful not to say anything on the phone.

00:43:28 ►

Laura Huxley was my host.

00:43:31 ►

I’m just looking through the list here.

00:43:33 ►

Dr. Janiker Oz, he talked about the LSD studies he did with Cary Grant.

00:43:38 ►

We had Cary Grant’s handwritten notes about his LSD experiences in my house.

00:43:43 ►

And, in fact, I’ve got a really great story about that.

00:43:46 ►

Eva Marie Saint

00:43:47 ►

has said that when she was doing North by Northwest

00:43:50 ►

with him, that

00:43:51 ►

she felt

00:43:53 ►

very uncomfortable and it wasn’t very nice

00:43:56 ►

to her and she was really freaked out

00:43:57 ►

and she didn’t feel like she was doing a good job.

00:44:00 ►

And then one Monday he came in

00:44:01 ►

completely different. And she said

00:44:03 ►

it was the weekend after he had done LSD.

00:44:06 ►

Anyway, he did it over 200 times with us, and we had all of his notes.

00:44:10 ►

On his men, we had Laura Huxley, you know, all this Huxley’s widow came.

00:44:18 ►

Myron, who, you know, wrote The Secret Chief.

00:44:24 ►

who wrote The Secret Chief.

00:44:30 ►

John Lilly was there.

00:44:35 ►

John had, this was in his phase where he’d been sitting on Venice Beach

00:44:38 ►

in his Speedo in his wheelchair.

00:44:39 ►

I mean, it pretty much kind of,

00:44:43 ►

I was upset with him over the dolphin thing and um

00:44:48 ►

I you know was obviously very nice but he was just barely there but I do have a photo of him

00:44:53 ►

at my house and you know so it was just pretty much all the notables before before they were

00:44:58 ►

gone we never had Terrence McKenna um but if you look down the list of the board of directors

00:45:05 ►

we stopped

00:45:08 ►

dropping them off the list when they died

00:45:11 ►

because we realized we just needed to put a little star next to their name

00:45:14 ►

and say deceased because they remained who they were

00:45:16 ►

and their name on the project remained important

00:45:19 ►

and I’m very

00:45:22 ►

happy that this is

00:45:25 ►

going to happen again it looks like

00:45:27 ►

and more openly

00:45:29 ►

and with more support

00:45:31 ►

from the rest of the country

00:45:33 ►

where you don’t have to

00:45:35 ►

discuss, I remember

00:45:36 ►

Lorenzo Haggerty

00:45:42 ►

had a meeting where he

00:45:44 ►

I think he was still working for AT&T or something when he did this but it was like how do you talk Lorenzo Haggerty had a meeting where he,

00:45:47 ►

I think he was still working for AT&T or something when he did this,

00:45:48 ►

but it was like,

00:45:48 ►

how do you talk to people about this

00:45:50 ►

without getting fired?

00:45:51 ►

How do you know who is safe to talk to?

00:45:54 ►

And we actually had a meeting about

00:45:56 ►

techniques and, you know,

00:45:59 ►

different strategies for bringing this up

00:46:02 ►

to people that you worked with,

00:46:03 ►

or, you know,

00:46:03 ►

hey, I just,

00:46:04 ►

I saw this thing on TV the other night.

00:46:06 ►

Act like you didn’t know anything

00:46:08 ►

or act like you didn’t have an opinion

00:46:09 ►

to draw people out to try to educate them.

00:46:14 ►

It’s a very exciting

00:46:16 ►

time.

00:46:17 ►

Every once in a while we wouldn’t

00:46:20 ►

have a speaker or someone would cancel.

00:46:23 ►

I’d just

00:46:24 ►

invite in maybe a musical group that

00:46:26 ►

I worked with. Or one of my favorite meetings was Walter King, who just passed away a couple

00:46:34 ►

months ago. Walter was a civil rights attorney. And he had been turning up for several years,

00:46:41 ►

and I didn’t even know who he was. But we had about six people there that night, it was a very small group

00:46:45 ►

because we just had it the third Friday night

00:46:48 ►

of every month no matter what, at some point we stopped

00:46:50 ►

we didn’t even need to send out an announcement

00:46:52 ►

people would just come

00:46:53 ►

I think we only took off maybe

00:46:56 ►

five times in eight years

00:46:58 ►

seriously, it was always happening

00:47:00 ►

and Walter

00:47:02 ►

I said, well who are we?

00:47:04 ►

who’s here? let’s just everybody go around

00:47:06 ►

and tell their story. And Walter got up and he told of how he had been, yeah, his family

00:47:13 ►

had escaped Nazi Germany when he was eight years old. And they had gone to Italy. And

00:47:21 ►

he had joined Mussolini’s fascist youth brigade, and how he had, Mussolini

00:47:28 ►

and Hitler had pinned a pin on him on stage, and he said, he goes, I could have killed

00:47:33 ►

them both, but I was only eight years old. And then he sang two fascist youth songs in

00:47:40 ►

Italian in the living room, and us how after the war his dad married

00:47:46 ►

an Egyptian slave and he

00:47:47 ►

joined the merchant marines and then he’s

00:47:50 ►

cruising across some

00:47:52 ►

body of water in South America

00:47:53 ►

and they’re going, come join the revolution

00:47:56 ►

and he’s like, I’m going to go to the United States and get

00:47:58 ►

rich, which

00:48:00 ►

he never did.

00:48:01 ►

It was Che Guevara.

00:48:03 ►

The scope of the people, if someone did LSD in 1959

00:48:08 ►

you guys they pretty much many of them had also like climbed Mount Everest like I I can’t tell

00:48:15 ►

you what great adventurers these these people were and what what special souls um the the first

00:48:20 ►

meeting that we had um I had three members of the Adventurers Club,

00:48:26 ►

which, you know, you have to climb Mount Everest to be in that,

00:48:29 ►

and you got to be nominated by someone else.

00:48:32 ►

And at one point, I had, like, all these people in the kitchen,

00:48:35 ►

and I’m like, everyone who floated naked down the Amazon is talking in the kitchen.

00:48:41 ►

And these people would meet each other, and they’d go,

00:48:43 ►

Oh, yes, you married me in Fiji in 1949.

00:48:48 ►

Just fabulous, fabulous.

00:48:50 ►

And I hope that we create some new memories here.

00:48:55 ►

I start out now maybe as one of the elders,

00:48:58 ►

which is kind of fucked up and sad.

00:49:01 ►

But awesome too.

00:49:02 ►

Yeah, anyway, somebody’s got to, you know,

00:49:04 ►

people got to step in and

00:49:05 ►

take it from there.

00:49:08 ►

Anyway, anybody have any questions?

00:49:10 ►

Well, thank you.

00:49:11 ►

Woo!

00:49:19 ►

Yes?

00:49:21 ►

What was Oscar

00:49:22 ►

Janneger’s take on

00:49:23 ►

LSD just briefly?

00:49:25 ►

Oz did it, like, into his 80s

00:49:28 ►

when he got together with Albert Hoffman.

00:49:33 ►

As elderly men, I remember seeing a picture of the two of them,

00:49:37 ►

and I think they were, like, in their underwears and bushes,

00:49:39 ►

just sort of like, hey.

00:49:42 ►

You know, they, Oz,

00:49:41 ►

sort of like, hey.

00:49:43 ►

You know, they,

00:49:44 ►

Oz,

00:49:48 ►

I’m very concerned about what happened to the archive.

00:49:50 ►

I know that

00:49:51 ►

things started

00:49:54 ►

to disappear out of it, and there was

00:49:56 ►

an unfortunate situation with my roommate

00:49:58 ►

that I won’t really go into, who

00:50:00 ►

was the

00:50:02 ►

Oz’s secretary, and they

00:50:04 ►

had a big falling out and I wasn’t

00:50:06 ►

really implicated in it but they did

00:50:08 ►

find a more permanent home for the

00:50:10 ►

collection and it went to Pasadena

00:50:12 ►

I think Arrow would take it over

00:50:15 ►

did they?

00:50:15 ►

do they have the paintings?

00:50:18 ►

I don’t know about the paintings

00:50:19 ►

I emailed

00:50:21 ►

the Albert Hoffman Foundation

00:50:23 ►

let’s see if anyone responds

00:50:25 ►

and Earth responded back to me.

00:50:28 ►

Oh good, good to know.

00:50:29 ►

They took over the whole thing.

00:50:30 ►

I’m so glad to hear that.

00:50:32 ►

Because obviously the LSD books,

00:50:35 ►

I had the 75 volumes from the Sandals Corporation,

00:50:38 ►

those right there,

00:50:38 ►

and the paintings were part of mine.

00:50:41 ►

And I had Ron Bretton, do you know Ron?

00:50:44 ►

Ron was the president of the Albert Hoffman Foundation.

00:50:46 ►

And the final things I found when I moved out of Penmark,

00:50:49 ►

I had things in my garage that I gave to him.

00:50:52 ►

In fact, you guys, I’m writing about this

00:50:54 ►

because we were evicted from this house

00:50:58 ►

about two and a half years ago.

00:51:00 ►

And I just started thinking about what had gone on there

00:51:04 ►

and what an amazing salon this was

00:51:07 ►

and that it was

00:51:08 ►

in my mind

00:51:09 ►

I don’t want to say it’s as important as Millwood

00:51:13 ►

but it certainly maybe

00:51:14 ►

was on a list of

00:51:16 ►

great salons in the history

00:51:19 ►

of our culture

00:51:20 ►

and I didn’t want it to be

00:51:23 ►

forgotten and I’m also very pissed

00:51:26 ►

at the evil people who kicked us out of our house.

00:51:29 ►

So I have this sort of flower revenge planned

00:51:32 ►

where I want to tell people

00:51:33 ►

that if they are in Venice,

00:51:35 ►

that they should put some flowers on the fence

00:51:36 ►

at 2463 Penmore.

00:51:38 ►

So if you guys are ever around there,

00:51:40 ►

write down the address

00:51:41 ►

and just stick some flowers in the fence

00:51:43 ►

so that whoever’s living there will just go,

00:51:44 ►

what are these fucking hippies doing?

00:51:46 ►

We’re going to make a little pilgrimage

00:51:50 ►

to where this all happened.

00:51:53 ►

Kathleen,

00:51:54 ►

someone’s research

00:51:55 ►

was, I found

00:51:58 ►

actually on the fly at Burning Man,

00:52:00 ►

photocopies.

00:52:02 ►

Oz had trusted someone

00:52:04 ►

to be his assistant

00:52:05 ►

and this was before we got involved

00:52:08 ►

and they had stolen

00:52:10 ►

a lot of this stuff and they were selling it on the internet

00:52:12 ►

so I don’t know if that’s the case

00:52:14 ►

but I do know that it’s one of the reasons

00:52:17 ►

that they felt kind of

00:52:18 ►

beaten down and didn’t feel

00:52:20 ►

you know felt like they’ve been

00:52:22 ►

used by people

00:52:23 ►

yeah

00:52:24 ►

as we start start this salon series what do you

00:52:28 ►

think are some of the most important things to learn about and encourage people it’s engaging

00:52:36 ►

people you guys it’s an actually didn’t mention this Fraser Clark came to one of our meetings

00:52:41 ►

and he said that he had heard about what we did

00:52:45 ►

which was very flattering

00:52:47 ►

because obviously, like I said, we weren’t public.

00:52:52 ►

And he

00:52:52 ►

said that he came to speak to us

00:52:54 ►

because he thought that

00:52:55 ►

Southern California youth were going

00:52:58 ►

to change the world. And he said it’s

00:53:00 ►

because we are exporting

00:53:01 ►

the entertainment industry and

00:53:03 ►

people care about what we wear, what we say, what we do,

00:53:06 ►

what we think, and what we believe,

00:53:07 ►

and that we can influence people.

00:53:11 ►

And definitely, that was always part of my manifesto,

00:53:17 ►

was to try to change the world and to affect other people.

00:53:22 ►

We discussed a lot about having a media desk because all these people had PhDs and when

00:53:29 ►

the newspaper had some inaccuracy in it, they could say, well, actually, you can’t die from

00:53:34 ►

eating psilocybin or things like this.

00:53:36 ►

There was a need for expert voices.

00:53:40 ►

So I think definitely to keep in mind about how we engage the rest of the world

00:53:46 ►

and how we can affect public policy and laws.

00:53:50 ►

It seems to me like that’s the way it’s going

00:53:53 ►

because it’s just not financially feasible for them to put everyone in jail in America

00:53:58 ►

unless the rest of us work at the jail.

00:54:03 ►

You know?

00:54:03 ►

Yeah.

00:54:05 ►

Yeah. But definitely,

00:54:08 ►

I think just by

00:54:09 ►

being knowledgeable and being able to

00:54:12 ►

counteract the hysteria or any misinformation

00:54:13 ►

you might run into, that that’s

00:54:16 ►

there’s a great deal of power

00:54:18 ►

and knowledge.

00:54:20 ►

Definitely that

00:54:21 ►

whatever you learn at these things

00:54:24 ►

you take with you and spread out to more people.

00:54:31 ►

How do you think the psychedelic culture has changed since the time you were hosting these style events?

00:54:37 ►

Well, you can use the word rave again.

00:54:41 ►

It seems very similar.

00:54:45 ►

You know, it’s interesting because I’m pulling things I used to wear out of my closets or my, you know, trunks.

00:54:53 ►

And I’m going, oh, wow, I can wear this again if I lost some weight.

00:54:57 ►

That it seems to me that, you know, how culture and fashion and everything seems to come back around like once every 20 years.

00:55:05 ►

A lot of things seem very 1990s to me right now.

00:55:07 ►

The only thing that’s different is the openness in which we can talk

00:55:10 ►

and the ease with which we can gather.

00:55:12 ►

You know, that we can, you don’t have to print up flyers and put them around anymore

00:55:16 ►

or call people on the phone or put a stamp on something.

00:55:20 ►

You know, all you have to do is just type it up and hit a button.

00:55:22 ►

And I think the opportunities to engage people are enormous.

00:55:27 ►

That would be the difference is the Internet.

00:55:30 ►

Do you think you saw me if you had a watch list?

00:55:33 ►

You know, you guys are too now.

00:55:37 ►

We’re all on Facebook.

00:55:38 ►

Yeah, exactly.

00:55:40 ►

Yeah, I think they gave up on me.

00:55:42 ►

But, yeah, it was pretty scary here for a little while.

00:55:45 ►

I remember one guy, one of the policemen,

00:55:46 ►

he was like, I was, he actually put me in the back of his car.

00:55:51 ►

And I was thinking, I’m going to,

00:55:55 ►

I suddenly remembered I had a butterweed in a glove box.

00:55:58 ►

I’m like, oh, shit.

00:55:59 ►

And he came in and I thought he was going to go, what’s this?

00:56:03 ►

But instead he turned around to me and he goes,

00:56:06 ►

are you living out of your car, Kathleen?

00:56:07 ►

I was like, what?

00:56:09 ►

I was an actress, I had shoes and stuff in there.

00:56:12 ►

I’m like, no. And then he goes, you’re on

00:56:14 ►

methamphetamine, aren’t you? And I’m like, no!

00:56:17 ►

I don’t do that.

00:56:18 ►

And then he goes, well, you’re a

00:56:20 ►

wreck. And I just burst into

00:56:22 ►

tears.

00:56:23 ►

And I go,

00:56:24 ►

I’m not a wreck. I’m wearing a dress and I have a wreck. And I just burst into tears. And I go, I’m not a wreck.

00:56:26 ►

I’m wearing a dress and I have a makeup

00:56:28 ►

and I take my vitamins

00:56:30 ►

and I work out.

00:56:32 ►

I go, if you think I’m a wreck

00:56:34 ►

it’s because I’m 35

00:56:36 ►

and I’m old.

00:56:40 ►

And then he, like, starts

00:56:42 ►

touching me. Oh no, you’re a very

00:56:43 ►

attractive woman, Kathleen.

00:56:45 ►

Yeah, it’s just, yeah.

00:56:47 ►

You know what?

00:56:49 ►

There’s a difference.

00:56:50 ►

You have a camera on that right now,

00:56:51 ►

and you wouldn’t be calling me.

00:56:53 ►

Yeah.

00:56:54 ►

Exactly.

00:56:56 ►

Yeah?

00:56:56 ►

Has the Patriot Act challenged some of the ways

00:57:00 ►

you feel congregations used to have?

00:57:02 ►

I remember that Russian e-book

00:57:05 ►

cracker came in as

00:57:07 ►

a traveler, and yet they held

00:57:10 ►

him without trial.

00:57:11 ►

We had so many horror stories about

00:57:13 ►

stuff like that. I mean, seriously.

00:57:16 ►

I don’t think people really

00:57:17 ►

know.

00:57:20 ►

Kids, yeah, kids today.

00:57:22 ►

You don’t know. We had to walk to school

00:57:23 ►

barefoot. Seriously, it was really scary.

00:57:26 ►

I remember the TIPS program, you know,

00:57:28 ►

that there was a definite fear

00:57:32 ►

that somebody could turn you in for being un-American.

00:57:34 ►

And, you know, when Bush won, it really got worse.

00:57:37 ►

You know, it was the level of paranoia and fear.

00:57:40 ►

And at some point, you know, every once in a while,

00:57:42 ►

people would be like, well, we’re going to move.

00:57:44 ►

Like, we had a biofuel bus come through and everybody was going to Costa Rica.

00:57:47 ►

Come join us.

00:57:50 ►

People wanted to move to New Zealand.

00:57:52 ►

It was like, do we stay and fight?

00:57:56 ►

Because I had a definite belief that you can’t be like some kind of martyr if nobody knows about you. Like there’s

00:58:07 ►

no sense of throwing away your life for a cause if you’re not going to change anything.

00:58:11 ►

And one of my ideas that I really liked a lot and that I think someone still should

00:58:16 ►

do is that with the red states and all the ignorance back there, you know, when I go

00:58:22 ►

back to Springfield, Missouri, I always put it, make one of my things that I do to,

00:58:28 ►

I upset people, I provoke people, but not in a bad way.

00:58:31 ►

I talk to them and I give them facts.

00:58:32 ►

I speak authoritatively about things

00:58:34 ►

and they can’t, like, you know, tell me that I’m wrong.

00:58:40 ►

And that we should send people in,

00:58:48 ►

like spies or something,

00:58:52 ►

go in and open up little coffee shops in small towns across America to engage people in conversation and change their minds.

00:58:55 ►

Instead of just sitting in a tree, like Butterfly or whatever,

00:59:02 ►

or blocking traffic or doing things that obstruct

00:59:05 ►

things why not find ways to to really change things you know very i think that would be very

00:59:10 ►

sneaky like wonderful you know gorilla thing to do is to send people in like you know missionaries

00:59:15 ►

for higher consciousness to uh to you know you probably have to be blonde to go do it or

00:59:23 ►

something you’d have to look like the people who live there.

00:59:26 ►

And just kind of subversively start to work on them and change their lives.

00:59:31 ►

Thank you.

00:59:31 ►

Yeah.

00:59:33 ►

I was wondering if anybody in your group had done any research about other revolutionary things that had happened in history

00:59:40 ►

and used those parallels and kind of things that worked in terms of…

00:59:44 ►

That sounds like it would be a good talk for you to give.

00:59:47 ►

I don’t know about it.

00:59:48 ►

I almost minored in history.

00:59:51 ►

I’m a revolutionary for sure.

00:59:53 ►

And I have to say that

00:59:54 ►

the end of every century,

00:59:58 ►

you find certain things,

00:59:59 ►

like the ideas of free love

01:00:01 ►

and flight and open-mindedness.

01:00:05 ►

There’s certain things that come back around like the end of free love and flight and open-mindedness, there’s certain things that come back around

01:00:06 ►

like the end of the 1700s, end of the 1800s,

01:00:09 ►

end of the 1900s.

01:00:11 ►

And you definitely, you know, like whether it’s a balloon

01:00:14 ►

or the Wright Brothers or the space shuttle,

01:00:17 ►

and free love seems to be the same every time.

01:00:20 ►

But there’s definitely, well, the French have a word for it

01:00:25 ►

fin de siècle

01:00:25 ►

it’s an openness that we have

01:00:28 ►

when the century is changing over

01:00:29 ►

and here we are

01:00:31 ►

I know that I didn’t pay off

01:00:34 ►

any of my charge cards

01:00:36 ►

until after 2012

01:00:37 ►

just in case

01:00:38 ►

I’m just like what the hell

01:00:40 ►

I’m like I’m not going to worry about this

01:00:46 ►

if the world’s going to end, and then damn it, it didn’t.

01:00:50 ►

No, I think that’s very interesting,

01:00:52 ►

and I would say that I know that I had a definite interest in that.

01:00:55 ►

I know a lot about the French Revolution and the American Revolution,

01:00:58 ►

and definitely I saw what we were doing

01:01:02 ►

as a bit revolutionary.

01:01:05 ►

Have you employed any of those

01:01:06 ►

techniques and used them in your

01:01:08 ►

working? Is there anything that’s happened

01:01:10 ►

that causes us being

01:01:12 ►

able to have this meeting in a more open way

01:01:14 ►

than had been done through revolutionary

01:01:16 ►

activity, or it’s just happening

01:01:18 ►

because everybody’s doing it?

01:01:20 ►

I’m just wondering what you’re

01:01:21 ►

saying. What we’re doing is actually

01:01:24 ►

for that.

01:01:25 ►

I’d say that the cost,

01:01:27 ►

the thing that I think has changed

01:01:29 ►

the public opinion the most

01:01:30 ►

is just the cost of the drug war.

01:01:33 ►

Who was it that said

01:01:34 ►

that when the punishment is worse

01:01:36 ►

than the offense,

01:01:39 ►

then you’ve got to take a look at it.

01:01:41 ►

And just the fact that we have

01:01:43 ►

more people incarcerated per capita

01:01:45 ►

than any country in the world,

01:01:47 ►

I’m just nauseated to know that it was a guy from,

01:01:53 ►

what, it’s a New Jersey prison at Abu Ghraib

01:01:56 ►

who taught everybody what to do there,

01:01:58 ►

that people are so routinely abused,

01:02:01 ►

the poor man in Florida that they boiled to death in his shower this year,

01:02:05 ►

a 180-degree steam shower. Do poor man in Florida that they boiled to death in his shower this year. 180 degree steam shower.

01:02:08 ►

Do you guys know about that?

01:02:10 ►

Yeah. I mean, I

01:02:11 ►

we’ve got a long ways to go on crime

01:02:13 ►

and punishment here.

01:02:15 ►

And that again, you look here, we are

01:02:18 ►

on the west side of Los Angeles.

01:02:21 ►

We, no matter

01:02:21 ►

what our financial state

01:02:24 ►

may be, we are privileged people and we’re in a position to try to change things,

01:02:28 ►

you know, without the dangers, the routine dangers that many people face, you know.

01:02:34 ►

You know, I mean, the whole police brutality cases,

01:02:37 ►

and then what, you know, the Black Lives Matter thing,

01:02:40 ►

I think that that ties in very much to this,

01:02:42 ►

because especially the way that the laws have been disproportionately leveled against minorities.

01:02:49 ►

It’s just really, we think this country’s free, but I think we all know that it’s not.

01:02:58 ►

I’m so glad you guys invited me to come here.

01:03:00 ►

Woo! I have a few pictures

01:03:11 ►

we’re probably going to upload them to some kind of site

01:03:14 ►

we didn’t have a slide show or anything

01:03:17 ►

if you don’t know the people are coming along anyway

01:03:20 ►

just to close off

01:03:24 ►

I think that having this kind of historical context

01:03:27 ►

to this new salon series I think is really important

01:03:30 ►

to be able to take a moment of gratitude

01:03:32 ►

that things are a lot better now

01:03:35 ►

in terms of being able to be more open about these things

01:03:37 ►

and I think that this is a really good time to be able to think about

01:03:41 ►

we do have the freedom of speech here

01:03:43 ►

and I mean you can talk about your experiences

01:03:46 ►

to the people that you love

01:03:48 ►

and, like, start sharing your stories.

01:03:50 ►

I mean, I wouldn’t talk about, like,

01:03:51 ►

buying, selling, or making anything,

01:03:53 ►

but you can share your stories.

01:03:55 ►

So, you know, consider the people in your lives

01:03:57 ►

that are very close to you

01:04:00 ►

that don’t know this aspect of you

01:04:01 ►

so that we can start changing the public perception.

01:04:06 ►

I think one of the biggest, the people that tend to get kind of pushed over to the other side of voting for medical marijuana

01:04:15 ►

are people who do know someone that uses medical marijuana.

01:04:18 ►

So I think in the same way, if you become an ambassador and show that you’re an intelligent person

01:04:25 ►

that’s got their stuff together,

01:04:27 ►

and you say that you have tried some of these things

01:04:30 ►

and it’s made a positive impact on your life,

01:04:33 ►

it makes people curious.

01:04:36 ►

And with the Aware Project,

01:04:38 ►

we’re not advocating for full legalization

01:04:41 ►

or that everybody should do psychedelics,

01:04:46 ►

but we’re just trying to make people curious about these things

01:04:49 ►

and encourage people to maybe rethink what they think that they think about psychedelics

01:04:56 ►

and to hopefully, you know, start to be able to get more research funded

01:05:01 ►

because if anything, at least it’s just going to make it more safe for the people

01:05:06 ►

that may do these things no matter if they’re legal

01:05:08 ►

or not. And at best

01:05:10 ►

it could be a whole new area

01:05:12 ►

of therapy for people that have

01:05:13 ►

really tough

01:05:15 ►

psychological or whatever

01:05:20 ►

kind of situations.

01:05:23 ►

I’m really excited

01:05:24 ►

to be starting this series out,

01:05:25 ►

and please stay tuned.

01:05:27 ►

We’re going to have our next speaker next month.

01:05:29 ►

It’s going to be Vicki Kraft,

01:05:30 ►

who is the leader of the first legal Santo Daime church in California,

01:05:38 ►

and it just became legalized in past June.

01:05:42 ►

So the Santo Daime is an ayahuasca church from Peru.

01:05:45 ►

So it’s pretty exciting

01:05:47 ►

that this is the first legal one

01:05:48 ►

in California.

01:05:49 ►

So she’s going to talk about

01:05:50 ►

the legal process

01:05:51 ►

that she went through

01:05:52 ►

to get her church legalized.

01:05:55 ►

So please come back,

01:05:57 ►

share the event,

01:05:59 ►

bring friends,

01:06:00 ►

and just spread the good word.

01:06:03 ►

Yes, and please get on the email list and check out BicycleDay and

01:06:07 ►

awareproject.org.

01:06:09 ►

Thank you.

01:06:15 ►

You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon, where people are changing their

01:06:18 ►

lives one thought at a time.

01:06:22 ►

In just a moment, I’m going to close with a short reading from my novel,

01:06:26 ►

in which I talk about Kathleen Salon. But first, I want to mention a date that will,

01:06:31 ►

well, it’ll soon be here. However, since many of our fellow salonners don’t listen to these

01:06:35 ►

podcasts when they come out, well, this event may have already passed. What I’m talking about

01:06:41 ►

is the Bicycle Day event that Ashley Booth and her fellow members of the AWARE Project have organized.

01:06:46 ►

To begin with, you can find more information about the AWARE Project at awareproject.org.

01:06:53 ►

And information about the Bicycle Day event, which is going to take place on April 18, 2015, can be found at www.bicycleday.la.

01:07:04 ►

www.bicycleday.la As you know, Bicycle Day is a celebratory day that commemorates the date Dr. Albert Hoffman first tripped on LSD

01:07:12 ►

and then bicycled home from his lab in Basel, Switzerland on April 19, 1943.

01:07:20 ►

During the bicycle ride home, he experienced the psychedelic effects of LSD,

01:07:24 ►

Now, during the bicycle ride home, he experienced the psychedelic effects of LSD,

01:07:30 ►

making this the date of the first ever acid trip propelling the West into the psychedelic age.

01:07:35 ►

Now, if you’re in L.A. or in the L.A. area and are looking for a place to find the others,

01:07:39 ►

then the Aware Project and Bicycle Day event are the place to go.

01:07:48 ►

As a side note, while a few of the elders who participated in Kathleen’s salon are no longer with us, many of the others are still alive and kicking.

01:07:59 ►

For example, Kathleen mentioned Art Culkin, the legendary founder of the LA Free Press, and an important member of our community for longer than most of us have been alive.

01:08:05 ►

Well, Art just celebrated his 87th birthday with a party at Joshua Tree, so happy birthday, Art!

01:08:12 ►

Also, I was talking to Jean Stoller off the day before yesterday, and I told her about the story Kathleen told about her.

01:08:19 ►

And I should mention that Jean and I are really close friends, and so when she started to backtrack a little on the story,

01:08:22 ►

I reminded her that, well, she’d told me that story as well.

01:08:25 ►

There were a few little differences, and of course now we’ve agreed that while she may not have actually stolen a car, she and her friend actually

01:08:30 ►

did skip school on more than one occasion to attend big band concerts. However, they took public

01:08:35 ►

transportation. She wanted to be clear on that. And by the way, Jean would love to hear from you

01:08:42 ►

if you can remember how to use snail mail.

01:08:50 ►

She’s not on the net and doesn’t have email, but her mailing address is post office box 742 Lone Pine, California, 93545. And you have no idea how pleased she would be to hear

01:08:58 ►

from you. In fact, several years ago, while Myron was still alive, I also asked our fellow

01:09:04 ►

slaughters to send them a note in the mail.

01:09:06 ►

Only two people did so, but Jean still mentions them when we talk.

01:09:10 ►

So, if you can, it would be really nice of you to drop her a note.

01:09:14 ►

Just a card would be great, actually.

01:09:16 ►

And did I mention that Jean is now 88 years old and still living on her own up in the high desert?

01:09:22 ►

Where yesterday she drove out towards Death Valley

01:09:25 ►

to look at this year’s beautiful crop of wildflowers. She’s simply unstoppable. Now,

01:09:32 ►

getting back to Kathleen and her salon, I’m going to close by reading a few paragraphs from chapter

01:09:37 ►

9 of the Genesis Generation, which is titled, Caitlin’s Salon. According to Fig, Caitlin’s was one of the places in Southern California

01:09:48 ►

where the worlds of music, art, and intellectual conversation converged.

01:09:53 ►

On the occasions when I attended one of these gatherings,

01:09:56 ►

I met movers and shakers from the Hollywood scene,

01:09:59 ►

prominent university professors, musicians from all over the world,

01:10:03 ►

more writers than you can count, DJs, drifters, old hippies, and young couples,

01:10:09 ►

some even with infants in tow.

01:10:11 ►

I found that if you used your imagination when you were attending one of these salons,

01:10:15 ►

it was easy to think that maybe you were attending a Communist Party cell meeting in Chicago during the 1930s.

01:10:21 ►

Without a doubt, this was the most eclectic and fascinating crowd that I have

01:10:25 ►

ever encountered. Only at Burning Man have I seen its equivalent. What is most exceptional about

01:10:32 ►

Caitlin’s house, at least to me, is not its decor or even its funky goth meets art deco design.

01:10:39 ►

What I find so unique about her place is the force with which its ambiance hits you when you first walk in the door.

01:10:46 ►

Maybe you wouldn’t feel it if you came in without first knowing some of the history that has

01:10:50 ►

transpired there, but that wasn’t the case with me. After Fig picked me up at the airport for my

01:10:56 ►

first visit to LA, we spent the afternoon strolling along the waterfront in Venice Beach, while she

01:11:02 ►

told me about many of the great evenings she had experienced at Caitlin’s.

01:11:06 ►

So as soon as I stepped down into that sunken living room, I recognized the huge curved

01:11:11 ►

sofa where at various times psychedelic elders like Anne and Sasha Shulgin, Oscar Janager,

01:11:17 ►

Arthur Conkin, and John Lilly had vigorously exchanged ideas and joined in the group conversations.

01:11:23 ►

So vivid has been Fig’s description of some of the more memorable nights at Caitlin’s

01:11:27 ►

that I swear I could see the ghosts of Gary Fisher and Myron Stolaroff sitting on that

01:11:32 ►

little couch that squared the L-shaped sofa, talking about the legendary Al Hubbard, the

01:11:37 ►

Johnny Appleseed of LSD.

01:11:40 ►

What a history that magical room has.

01:11:43 ►

Now, skipping ahead a little bit in the story, the chapter includes this.

01:11:49 ►

Okay, everyone, a voice from the dining room called out, let’s get started.

01:11:54 ►

We’ve got a larger crowd than usual tonight, so everyone scrunch in a little closer.

01:11:58 ►

And you guys in the kitchen, come on in here if you can fit.

01:12:01 ►

I turned around to locate the source of this lilting female voice,

01:12:05 ►

just as Fig was saying,

01:12:07 ►

that’s Caitlin.

01:12:08 ►

I’ll try to remember to introduce you to her before we leave.

01:12:12 ►

Within a few minutes, Caitlin had somehow taken control

01:12:15 ►

and quieted the dozens of private conversations

01:12:17 ►

that spilled out of the living room and into the dining room and kitchen.

01:12:22 ►

I don’t know what I expected to see and hear at one of Caitlin’s salons,

01:12:25 ►

but I apparently assumed that it would be more of a high-class affair with a lot of people talking

01:12:30 ►

about the arts and psychedelic drugs and other things I didn’t keep up with. But as I soon learned,

01:12:36 ►

these evenings were more of a raucous intellectual free-for-all where you had better know what you

01:12:41 ►

were talking about because for sure there would be at least one person there who knew as much about your topic as you did.

01:12:48 ►

As I look back to the times I made it to one of Caitlin’s get-togethers,

01:12:52 ►

I can see a thread running from her salon back to the eclectic College of Complexes in Chicago

01:12:57 ►

during the time Slim Brundridge was its proprietor.

01:13:01 ►

And from there, this slender little thread of never-ending conversation

01:13:05 ►

proprietor. And from there, this slender little thread of never-ending conversation continues back to the salons of Paris, and on in time back to the public spaces in ancient Athens. How else could we

01:13:12 ►

have evolved as far as we have if there hadn’t been countless thousands of these little gatherings

01:13:17 ►

where ideas could collide, regroup, and then collide again, until the final seed of some new idea grew into a meme, which in turn might eventually grow into yet another new idea.

01:13:29 ►

Last month, Caitlin continued, after once again regaining control of the room,

01:13:34 ►

our discussion leader was our British friend Al, or the Alchemist as he is more affectionately known.

01:13:40 ►

And with that, the tall, stately, and over-the-top gorgeous Caitlin smiled

01:13:45 ►

blew a kiss and winked at Al who blew a kiss back her way

01:13:49 ►

and Kathleen all of us here in the psychedelic salon are blowing you kisses right now as well

01:13:57 ►

thank you so very much for everything that you have done and continue to do for our community

01:14:02 ►

and for now this is Lorenzo.

01:14:05 ►

Signing off from Cyberdelic Space.

01:14:08 ►

Be careful out there my friends. Thank you.

⚗️ alembic

Explorer

443 - The Legendary Venice Salon

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