Interview with Steve Silberman

Steve Silberman- Containing Multitudes (originally published just after Jerry's passing in my rag HUMP)

Wherever destiny takes us, we go, willingly or dragged with our heels kicking sparks. And every evening, after we find ourselves having digested an hour of a news program, our global awareness indicator points decidedly north, in an inflated sense of truth, justice and the American way. But is the media our destiny or just various individuals who spin thoughts into our info receptors. After an hour of CNN we think that we are hurky-jerky informed on world events.

Isn’t it true that we never really know what’s going on in the world, but only certain distorted facts that get filtered through various media? Who are these men who call the shots on what is ultimately shown to us? Do they really want us to get all the facts of the story, or just certain facts?

Traditionally, journalists were hard-boiled, martini swilling guys with degrees in Journalism, men with ink in their fingers, who often immersed themselves in stories to find out a good lead, or to get a scoop on a story. But bottom-line, men who were no nonsense and often very conservative in nature. A conservatism that was so ingrained in their character, that their stories often had conservative slants, whether conscious or not.

Imagine what would happen if the swirling gospel of the media, that we call the news, was dictated by a hipster?

What if Dan Rather was a proponent of Earth First or Gay Rights? Chances are that he would find it impossible to write stories that contradicted his deepest belief system.

Just the other night, I saw Ted Koppel defending the interment of Japanese orphans during World War Two. He based the acceptance of American atrocities on knowing the details of history and therefore being aware of the specifics that lead up to our inhumane acts. He said that because the Japanese killed more Chinese than all the Japanese killed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that those American’s who threw Japanese children in Hellholes, were justified. This type of logic is the sort of hypocrisy that contributes to the ills that plague our modern soul. Would a hipster ever let this type of spin on revisionist history occur?

Since my first story about the Internet ran four years ago in Synthesis Magazine, I have tried to show you how the Net will transform our lives, and the world we live in. Many of you turned the other cheek in a basterdization of Christian ethics, but like destiny, you can’t escape history. Time and tide wait for no man.

How could a new source for news ever compete with the monolithic dinosaurs of the current day? Well, Wired News is the David ready to slay the Goliath. And at the helm, loading stones into the slingshot is Steve Silberman. Part scholar, part Deadhead and part visionary, please welcome Steve with a high, hearty, HUMP………..


Tell me what it is you do.

I work for Wired News, I write about a story a day, three or four stories a week and a column. Wired News is www.wired.com I seldom write for the magazine because Wired News is so all consuming. Wired News is a very exciting thing that hasn’t really been talked about much in everyone’s eagerness to bash Wired for hubris or to talk about how Wired Digital is “burning money.” Basically, what we were able to pull off, was to launch a news service last year. We’ve not only managed to stay away from the Silicon Valley press release mentality of a lot of the other on-line news services, but we’ve also stayed away from the sort of gee-whiz/hype/capitalist/lust over objects that afflicts Wired Magazine. We’ve also been able to get into the news flow and kind of inject into the media an awareness of stories that might have otherwise gone unnoticed. I wrote a story about the number of blacks getting onto the net being disproportionately higher than what one might imagine and at the same time there is a loss of minority-ownership radio stations. That story was picked up by CNN and turned into a special report. I wrote a story about this atomic veteran who survived being basically marched through ground zero in the early fifties, everyone he knew who was there with him was dead. He put up a web-site and he ended up getting a book contract to tell the story of the Atomic Veterans. So we’ve been able to be an interesting conduit for stories that otherwise would have been not noticed. I think Wired News is cool, it reminds me of a zine in a way or an underground newspaper from the sixties, but because it looks like a straight news service, we end up getting looked at by a lot of straight and mainstream media people. I have a feeling that most of the people who read us are reporters from other media. The New York Times outright stole one of the first stories I wrote for Wired News. They called me up, asked me for the contact numbers of the story I was writing about, and then ran it as if they were breaking the story. I’ve gotten totally used to that now.

Scooped.

Yeah.

In the last issue of HUMP, I asked Steven Johnson who has FEED.COM if he felt that the dinosaurs like Time Magazine or the New York Times felt the new news media biting at their heels yet. He said no. Do you think that they feel competitiveness as to where people feel the source for news might be?

Absolutely, I think people can read a lot of news and it’s not just insidery geeky business news. Allen Ginsburghs terminal illness broke on Wired News half a day before any of the wire services had it, we break a lot of interesting cultural information before the other news services. I don’t think that the owners of the Hearst newspapers are waking up with sweaty palms, worrying that people are going to go to our news service, instead of reading the newspaper in the morning with their sip of coffee. Also, I don’t think that Time Magazine is worried that we are going to go out of business. On the other hand, what I think that is even more interesting than direct competition for eyeballs, is that the on-line world as a whole is becoming an interesting challenger for some of the bullshit in mainstream media. The first time I really saw that was when Time Magazine ran a cover story on Cyberporn, siteing this study by this guy Marty Rin, who is really a student at some East Coast university. The cover was very spectacular, it was a child’s face that had been altered by photoshop so that his eyes were totally wide, he looked like he was looking at split beaver right on his screen. What happened was a group of journalists and smart folks got together on the WELL, and found out through digging a little that Marty Rins study was completely bogus. The figures that he came up with were from surf sessions on porn sites rather than general usenet statistics. The study was completely debunked. Time ran a retraction in microscopic type. Time was made to look very foolish. Even though the publisher of Time Magazine didn’t commit hari cari, it’s important to realize that the study was debunked by on-line conversation on the Well.

So here’s the sense that there are watchdogs for the mainstream media now.

Things like Wired News and intelligent on-line communities like the Well act as an ombudsman for the big media view of things, conventional wisdom. An ombudsman in the old newspaper world was somebody whose job it was to be a little bit cynical. They would take the coverage in a newspaper and say” is this really true?” They were the check and balance for the stories and the spin. Places like Wired News and the on-line community in general are acting like a giant ombudsman for mainstream culture and mainstream media and I think that is a profoundly important development in American History.

The Persian Gulf had media blackout, could that happen again, or is on-line reporting going to change that.

Yeah, I do think it will change the way public response is organized completely. It will massively decrease response time so information will be wildly disseminated on a scale that the sixties mimeographing radicals could have only dreamed. It’s as if you could go back in time and say to SDS “how would you like to have a meeting that’s a) Worldwide, b) very low cost, c) as pervasive as the television networks, and D. you can do images and text?” They would go out of their minds!

What if the Black Panthers were able to arm the citizens of Oakland with laptops and Video Cameras, instead of guns?

Exactly. I also think the ubiquity of video cameras is interesting, but of course it’s a mixed blessing. The story I’m working on now is how whenever a big crime happens, like the Oklahoma City Bombing, somebody comes up with pictures or video of the bombers eating sandwiches, or Princess Di walking through the hotel lobby before the car crash. One wonders if one is ever completely not under watch. But yet on the other hand, if there’s massive police brutality or something, there’s a guy with a video camera. And hopefully that information can get on the net or a television station.

In the case of the Humboldt Cops torturing people with pepper spray, they handed in the goods on themselves.

Around the Tiennaman Square thing, the first thing that the Chinese Government tried to do was to shut down the Fax machines. I think as the Net becomes more pervasive in Third World countries, it will either become harder for the enemies of human liberties to accomplish their deeds or it will just cause dictators and despots to completely crack down on the Net. So I think it will be both, it will be turf wars, where people will be trying to wire their local communities and organizations into the Net and Governments will be coming down on them. And coming down on them in more insidious ways as filtering software becomes more pervasive. So if you’re in country XYZ and the government doesn’t want you to see political sites, when you log on, you’ll just never see them, they’ll be invisible. Imagine if Gary Bower of the American Family Council could put his own filtering software in everybody’s machine, gay kids would never see gay teen sites and there is a lot of information that will be lost as filtering software becomes accepted as a humane replacement for censorship.

Couldn’t all the hype about child molesters on the Web just be a rallying point for filtering software and censorship? Don’t you think that just parallels the censorship of newspapers. Aren’t certain stories kept to regions?

Yes they are, but I see it as my personal job and mission in life to undo that and I have a very clear case in point. A couple of University of Pittsburgh students were recently barred from having any internet access and from even physically appearing in any computer labs, and they were computer science majors, so it was tantamount to expelling them. Their crime was that they had created one of the most useful net security resources for people who wanted to guard their sites against hackers that there is. It’s a site called anti on-line.com and the University simply did not understand what these kids were doing and reacted against it in a very heavy-handed way. For instance one of the first sites to talk about a hack called a windowhack, that allows people to take down windows machines remotely. It’s a very useful site that was referred to by many other sites. But these kids were screwed by not only being barred form the Net and use of any computer equipment on campus but by being barred from communicating directly with the person that was making it all happen. I got a tip from one of the students who said that the only coverage that the story had gotten was in the school newspaper. I wrote an article about it in Wired News and within two weeks, the story had gotten into USA Today, The Village Voice, The New York Times and the associated Press. The school officials, even though the case is still pending, got a heavy message that they were fucking up. I think it’s very possible for Wired News and people on-line who have compelling enough Web Sites to make regional outrages a global concern.

Did you feel that the media adequately covered Allen Ginsbergs passing?

Allen was a friend of mine for twenty years, all of my adult life. The depth and sensitivity of the coverage of like The New York Times impressed me, they put his obituary on the cover. There were some decent stories in the AP about him. Ultimately, the coverage he got, was because he founded a movement that has almost become a cultural trademark, the Beat Generation. Everyone from Starbucks to Levi’s has appropriated it. Granted, a lot of the content that Ginsberg and Kerouac and Burroughs had put across is not appreciated in an ad of slackers nodding, out as jazz plays in the background. But Ginsberg was perennially popular with young people, I know because I went on several different tours with him. And wherever Ginsberg went the halls were packed to capacity and often he would give a second reading to the thousands of people that were outside that couldn’t get in. So he remained, in terms of popularity for a poet, incredibly popular. I can’t say that he was necessarily influential on the current poetry scene in any kind of obvious way. There’s a tremendous bunch of corny, tacky, beatnik poetry out there in zines that I can’t say is really a good thing. But I do think that he was subtly pervasive influence in terms of encouraging public sincerity and honesty in such things as homosexuality and even drug use. I think that even though he was a very famous man, that some of his most enduring influences are part of the woodwork, part of the air that Americans breath that allows them to be a little bit freer then they would had he never lived. Certainly for a subject like homosexuality, he really was one of the first people to open the door at all on any kind of honest dialogue. Although I think what he was really saying about homosexuality is still not appreciated even by his gay fans. I asked him once in 1987 if he felt that it was ironic that he was hailed as the father of gay poetry and that he had hardly any gay friends? He said “well Burroughs and I never really considered ourselves gay, gay was like Castro street, we called ourselves queer.” What’s funny is that this was before the word queer was resurrected by the younger queer people. I said what’s queer? He said “well gay people are like adults trying to have sex with each other and queers like me and Burroughs, we’re trying to have sex with straight teenagers.” I happen to know how often he was very successful in that ambition. I think that Ginsberg and Kerouac also pointed to a truth that even this week America is wrestling with. There’s this little blonde guy who claims that this co-workers on an oil rig were harassing him sexually. One of the lower courts said “well this couldn’t be true because all these guys are heterosexual, so it must be about something else besides sex. The same lower court said it’s only harassment if the people involved in gay, because only then would sexual attraction be going on. That’s ridiculous. One of the things that both Ginsberg and Kerouac pointed to is that the human heart is very complicated. Walt Whitman said “I contradict myself, very well than I contradict myself. I am vast, I contain multitudes.” And I think that Ginsberg and Kerouac were pointing to the fact that we contain multitudes, some of our multitudes are heterosexual and some of our multitudes are homosexual and they’re all kinds of different feelings and tenderness. Going with that tenderness is more subversive than going with the idea that gay people are genetically determined and you can’t get mad at them because its genetic. It’s actually more subversive to say that we all have these different ways of relating and loving those around us, and what are we going to do with that?

Science is still looking for a gay gene.

Right and what are they going to do when they find it? What about all those kids that Allen slept with, did they have just a little bit of the gene? It’s easy to say that they slept with him because he’s famous, which is probably true, but they also slept with him because they loved him. The truth is ultimately more subversive than any easy take on it, even a progressive take on it, even a gay positive one.

What about NAMBLA?

Allen was hit with some of the hysteria over pedophilia. I talked to Allen about NAMBLA, and he didn’t know that much about it, but he defended their right to speak. To be frank, I think he had a soft part in his heart for NAMBLA, because he himself was very attracted to teenagers, so he was well aware of the pleasures and the risk of inter-generational sex. As far as I know he did not have sex with minors. I remember talking to someone about Allen not soon after he was dead. This person said “well I never liked Allen Ginsberg and I’m not sad that he’s dead.” I said, “Why’s that?” And he said, “Well he was a pedophile. One of my professors said that he supported NAMBLA.” I asked if he ever read his poetry and he said “No and I don’t want to read it.” Well that’s great, that’s like not listening to John Coltrane’s music because he was a heroin addict at one point. People are so moralistic it’s unbelievable. Or people that said that Jerry Garcia took heroin and wrestled with addiction himself. We’re all wrestling with something.

Exactly. You can always find a reason not to listen to somebody.

It’s more of what you can accomplish anyway despite how confusing and messed up your life is. Who doesn’t have a messed up and confusing life?

I don’t know, I haven’t met them yet.

And those people who pose as those kind of altruistic people are the ones who turn out to be the worst kind of motel room whore mongering drag…..

..J. Edgar Hoover……

I read Rock Scully’s book “life with the Dead,” and hearing about how Garcias would set hotel rooms on fire when he would nod out, didn’t make me lose love for the man. It allowed me an insight to his psychological make-up. If we all didn’t have these quirks and eccentricities, we would lose our individuality.

I find it almost redemptive to read those stories. I’m reading through a much more in-depth biography of Jerry Garcia that’s going to be published in a year and a half by Blair Jackson, long time Dead scholar. Garcia’s relationships make even mine look relatively stable. He often had two girlfriends at once and sometimes three. He was always paying off various ex-wives and was riding a little scooter from one wife to the next. It was obvious that he was unable to make up his mind who he wanted to be with intimately and he probably had big fears of intimacy and yet was drawn into it. And as I read through it and go through my own relationship apocalypses it made me feel better. When I put on a tape now I think, “geez, this guy who’s singing and making this beautiful music, once he got off stage, had to deal with all these ex-wives and problems and all this tzuris, as they say, a great yiddish word that means hassles. And yet he was still able to create this art that had like a primordial majesty to it.” I met Garcia and he certainly was my favorite of the Dead in terms of personality. I mean the Dead are fairly egotistical and isolated guys by now. Bill Kreutzman is an unpretentious and nice guy in terms of my limited contact with him, but I never felt like they were living saints or anything like that. But for so long they were able to speak this musical language and be so articulate in it. They gave so much pleasure and so much ur-education to so many people. Its amazing that they were able to do that and still struggle through their lives as we are all doing. So one of the things about Allen was that he never tried to present himself as perfect. He always presented himself as this lusty, confused, hilariously egotistical goofball. Even though I think he had a tremendous ego, there was something redemptive, and as he might have said, Bodhisvata, about his willingness to be wounded and confused and fucked up in public. He realized that we’re not alone and the thoughts in our head don’t make us the one cursed.

Much of the music we look back on and label as ‘revolutionary,’ is only so in hindsight. Just as so many people say, “rock is dead” today, it will take visionary thought or just the simple [passage of time to see how today’s music related to and contributed to society at large. With that in mind, do you feel the impact of the music of the Dead has yet been revealed?

What’s hilarious and cosmic about this is that this is the second interview in twelve hours where this question has come up. I was reminded last night when the author of this Phish book asked me this question is that in the late sixties, like 69 or 70, I was reading the newspaper at my parents home. My parents were communist and the paper was published by the political organization that my father was in called Progressive Labor. It was accusing the Grateful Dead of being sellouts because they were not singing songs about the war and they were not addressing the political issues of the day. And they certainly were not (sell outs), they were singing these weird transformations of traditional American folk songs and (lyricist) Hunters psychedelic word salad. In a sense they were occupying their own little space and yet if you think back on the more topical music of the day, it’s totally tacky and did not last and was a flavor of the month. Certainly some of the more tacky stuff like “eve of destruction,” is completely forgettable. Some of the more earnest stuff like Phil Oches and whatnot is great, but it’s very much of it’s period. But if you put on the Dead playing Dark Star in 1969, damn it’s still relevant to this era. Their subversiveness was at the level of music and being open to spontaneously emerging forms in the improvistory moment. In a funny way that ends up being more subversive than coming up with some big policy statement about why the government are all pigs. You end up being a little garden where the essential free nature that is the heart of every living being gets to flourish. This is more subversive in the same way that Picasso is more subversive than some of the social realist artists of the Soviet Union. You look at Social realism and you think “oh god, this is just tacky propaganda.” You look at Picasso and there’s vitality and a untameability to his images that could practically over throw a police state. At least in your mind, for a moment when you look at Picasso you’re not living in a police state. That’s the best kind of art.

I guess that’s the difference between being the road, a car or a bumper sticker.

So what this guy was asking me last night, was were the Dead the voice of their generation and the answer is no. They were the voice of something deeper than that. They were the voice of a transcendent, very wild and hairy principle, like the voice of the Tao, which is the voice of every generation.

It’s interesting how the Dead made a point of not making overt political statements on stage while at the same time there were protests and rioting going on right behind the show.

I know that Garcia was personally asked hundreds of times by police and anti-drug organizations to make an announcement at the shows to tell the fans not to come to the shows and take drugs, and he never did. I think it’s too his credit that he wasn’t willing to take on the role of an authority in other peoples lives. And yet, it’s true that a lot of people suffered by going to jail and what not because the government was able to move in and really cut through the dead scene likes wolves through a flock of sheep. Who wants to be caseing out crack dealers, when you can go to Oakland Colesium and bust a bunch of Oberlin Students.

The lot of the Dead couldn’t handle the weight of suddenly being the cool place to be.

The lot was like a wildlife preserve and all of a sudden a lot animals, even those not native to that jungle, came in simply because it was one of the few places where animals could be animals. Also there was a lot of greed by people realizing that they could make some quick bucks selling nitrous or bad drugs. It’ easy to understand how it could develop that way considering the amount of hypocrisy and oppression at large in the American Culture. There was definite feeling in the early eighties that the Dead scene was a little island of sanity in the middle of the Reagan/Bush Bullshit Festival. What’s unfortunate is that after MTV featured the Day of the Dead, it became known as the biggest party going. Al these people who really didn’t care about the music showed up. I mean there was always people who didn’t care about the music. They were filtering themselves in, and then out. Once the music became irrelevant in the lot, it just became a place to: live in a barter economy, a place to not get a job, a place to have a lot of sex, and make some money, and stay high constantly. It became too much of a refuge, I think. A little bit of all that is great, but it really became a bunch of people who weren’t dealing with the outside world much. The thing about the Dead scene that I really miss, is that it was a litmus test and a easy way to see where people were coming from. There were many times I would be in some small town, or on the road, and I would look, and it wasn’t even so blatant as Dead patches on a knapsack or stinking orf Patchouli oil, even if they were dressed in straight clothes, there would be just a look in their eyes and I would say “do you go to shows?” And if they said “what kind of shows?,” you knew you made a mistake. So often you hit though, and it was an instant, if not shallow, brotherhood and sisterhood with other people you might have seen at a show at that moment you were having a revelation. I not only miss it, I think that my life is suffering form the lack of that, and from the lack of having a place to remagnetize the compass needle of my spirit. I’m doing fine with my adult life, like keeping a job and all that. But in terms of the heartfullness and confidence that I need, it’s not as easy to feel at home in the world without occasional visits to Deadland.

I just figure I’ll never dance again.

I know, I’ve put on weight since Jerry died because I don’t dance as much. I feel like I’ve aged twenty years since 1995. I think that the problem with the size and scale of the Dead scene in later years was too centralized and the litter had become too big and there are only so many teats. I do think there has been an upsurge in more local and smaller jamming bands, who take some of the lessons of the Grateful Dead. Although it’s a little too easy too play that way. But local hippie scenes are getting more attention from people, because they have too. They just can’t hitch a ride to Deer Creek and immerse themselves in their own scene, because that place no longer exists. Every Deadheads hometown disappeared like Pompeii under the volcano. Everyone has to find the scene that’s local to them. That having been said, I’m on Phish tour.

Jumping Ship?

No, I love Phish and have since 1992. I don’t feel like it’s jumping ship, I feel like it’s a different ship and it’s floating very well thank you. Phish are doing great things in their own groove. Seeing Phish now is like seeing the Dead in 1973 because their music is so focused and so tight that they can go anywhere with it. It’s a very exciting time to be into Phish and I’m not there because it’s a substitute, I’m there because it’s good music.

I tend to be a snob sometimes.

I remember I ran into someone who saw the Deads last 650 shows, at a Phish show, 6 months after Jerry died and he said “Owww, it’s like the Stepford show! It’s the same people, the same clothes, different band!!” I mean, sure a lot of the cultural forms have been appropriated, but that’s not the point. The point is the music and point is getting off, and the point is psychedelic experience whether you’re tripping or not, and the point is being free for a moment and listening to the spontaneous risky inventions of a bunch of geniuses that are very hooked into one another. So wherever you can find that you should do it, whether it’s at Phish or your own local bar or your own room.

Interview with Bill Kreutzmann

Interview with Bill Kreutzman—BK3 (Egyptian Windmill Operators)

I’ve been pretty lucky in my journalistic career to interview many of my heroes: Timothy Leary, Mickey Hart, Ken Kesey, Robert Anton Wilson, Bob Weir, Paul Kanter, Jorma and the list goes on. But it was a real joy to spend a while chatting with Bill Kreutzmann of the Grateful Dead. The focus was on his new band, BK3 (aka Egyptian Windmill Operators) but the ease of the conversation steered us off-course to tales of Hawaii, Obama, and Bette Midler. Like the coolest guy you would ever want to share a brew with, Bill filled the conversation with laughter, positivity and hopeful looks at the future. Eventually I will write a more complete introduction, but in the kindtime, enjoy this transcription of what was one of my favorite talks in a long time----ladies and gentlemen—drumroll please—Bill Kreutzmann!



Bill Kreutzmann---Y’ello.

DNA: Hi, This is DNA calling from Santa Cruz.

BK: DNA. How do you pronounce that?

DNA: You just did my friend. You also spelled it, so you’re ahead of the game.

BK: Right on. How is Santa Cruz treating you?

DNA: Great. I’m looking at the ocean right now, people are playing volleyball, the sea lions are out, the sun is breaking on through.

BK: Right on, right on. You’ve given me the warmest phone call yet. I did two interviews prior to yours and they’re both freezing out there in Boulder. I’m sitting here in 80 degrees Hawaii weather.

DNA: I lived in Maui for several months. What a magical experience.

BK: That’s why I’m here.

DNA: You got yourself an ocean view?

BK: I don’t have an ocean view, but I have a hidden garden which is wear I keep my beautiful flowering plants. That’s my hobby here--growing tropical flowers. Pikaki is used for leis and is the smelliest (that may not be the proper word) in Hawaii.

DNA: Do you still run your organic farm, Grateful Greens?

BK: No, I stopped that. It operated for a while, but then I had to move back to the mainland for several years to do Grateful Dead projects and the farm was loaned out to somebody. But I’m back! I couldn’t stay away. I couldn’t find the happiness in Marin that I find here in Hawaii.

DNA: Next time you have to move to the mainland, try Santa Cruz--it’s not too shabby.

BK: I agree with you. Right now my step-daughter is attending Cabrillo College and then will be transferring the University down there.

DNA: Cabrillo is a great college. There are excellent people that attend there. Ya know, all your archives are stored here in Santa Cruz, at UCSC.

BK: I knew that! I was instrumental in having that happen. UCSC offered us such a deal. They even offered us a room dedicated to the archives. Pretty cool.

DNA: Although I don’t have much knowledge about archival goings-on, I volunteered to help. On my resume I said that I could pick out Jerry Garcia’s underwear out of a pile of laundry. They didn’t respond.

BK: That was a good line though.

DNA: I do stand-up comedy. Sometimes it works--sometimes it fails miserably.

BK: Ah well, that’s life. The thing, DNA, that I really want to talk about is the trio that I have coming your way soon.

DNA: Really exciting man. I’ve seen Oteil Burbridge play with the Aquarium Rescue Unit and besides the Allman Brothers, he’s sat in with God Street Wine. I used to go see Scott Murawski play with Max Creek all the time.

BK: Put me in the mix and you know what the bands like. It’s the best band I’ve played in since the Grateful Dead days.

DNA: I listened to a couple of tracks on your Myspace page. It’s great. Do you see this trio staying together for a while beyond this tour?

BK: I would sure like that. I would like to just keep doing it. As a matter of fact, the three of us just talked yesterday—but we live so far apart. Oteil lives in Alabama and Scott lives up near Providence, Rhode Island and I live in Kauai. So we have a lot of conference calls—it’s the best way to do it. They are all into it--I can tell they are really excited. I think for Oteil, and I don’t think he will mind me saying this—he’s played with the Allman Brothers so much that he has it down in his back pocket—that its fun for him to be in a band where he can be totally open and free. I encourage that with my players. I don’t have rules. I believe in what John Coltrane once said, “Damn the rules.”

DNA: “Damn the rules. It’s the feeling that counts.”

BK: And that’s the same for my trio, or any band I play with. That’s where I coming from. I’m not sitting there thinking the music should do this or do that. I let the music talk to me, rather than imposing my own stuff.

DNA: What a difference to play small clubs where you can see the whole room, as opposed to Madison Square Garden.

BK: I like both you know? But the small club thing actually taught me to hear better. I learned to play softer. I have a jam garage here and it’s the hottest jam garage in the world. Not temperature-wise, it just sounds good. I provide a bass amp and a guitar amp and I have a Noble and Cooley drum set in the back. We’ll play for hours and sometimes the cops will come about 11:30. “That’s enough boys.” They know me by now. They don’t get too pissed off because the music is real good.

DNA: Are you still having trouble naming the band?

BK: It’s the BK3.

DNA: Oh! BK3!!

BK: I didn’t like the word trio, and I have no problem with jazz, but it reminded me of a jazz band. I’d rather be BK3--my initials and 3. That’s the official name. The other name we tried to use but my manager talked me out of it—The Egyptian Windmill Operaters. That’s our name—Egyptian Windmill Operators. It doesn’t have to make sense. Like Aquarium Rescue Unit. She said, “You oughta use your initials.” If you could call us BK3(Egyptian Windmill Operators), I would dig that. See, I’m a little comedian too.

DNA: I always thought you were the funniest guy in the band.

BK: I don’t know how to take that. ( silence followed by laughter)

DNA: You pulled out of being somewhat reclusive from the Dead scene to do this Obama gig. Was it Obama that pulled all of you together?

BK: Well yeah. It was really him. I missed the first show those guys did for him.

DNA: At the Warfield.

BK: Bob wanted me to make it. But I had just flown in from Costa Rico for hours, and the gig was the next day, and it was more than I could do. It went real well for them. Bobby said we could get something together at Penn State and he was like, “Let’s do it.”
I met with Bobby and said, “Well if we’re going to all this trouble to get together for Penn State, let’s get together and do a tour.” And everybody said yes to it. It was kinda my idea, I guess. If you’re going to all this trouble for one gig, why not tour?

DNA: So it’s a show-by-show thing, no future plans, take this tour and see what happens?

BK: Yup. We’re going to practice for 20 days before we hit the road. 20 rehearsal day. Some of those are set-up days. It’s going to different. We don’t want to structure it the way we used to—ya know, four or five years ago—we want to change it up and make it better. I want to talk about that, but I really want to talk about the trio. People who like the Dead will really like BK3.

DNA: You guys play a bunch of Dead tunes.

BK: Not a bunch. We do some really nice covers like “Rhymes” by Al Green, as well as, original songs by both Oteil and Scott. I totally encourage that. Everyone is doing tons of Dead stuff, and it’s a great book to play from, no doubt about it, so that’s being covered. In our band we will certainly do our fair share, but Hunter wrote us 12 original songs. And we’ve played 8 or 10 of them so far. They’re way cool songs.

DNA: How’s Hunter doing?

BK: His writing is incredible. I have a phone call when we are done one to Mickey, and one to Bob. I need to send him a DVD of BK3 from the Culture Room (Ft. Lauderdale, FL.). It will blow his mind. He should be quite happy. If I was him I would be quite happy.

DNA: I look forward to hearing those new tunes played out. Mike Gordon (bass player for Phish) helped curate this band?

BK: We call him the curator. We started over a year ago when Mike invited us down to do a benefit gig down in Costa Rico in a town called Jaco. It’s a surf town about halfway down the coast. The benefit was for the school system and we stayed at Mike’s dad’s house. To cut to the chase, Scott was the guitar player, and about two songs in I knew I had a player on my hands that could go anywhere--we played maybe 5 hours that night, we got really into it. People loved it and we got to give money to the school system, which was the most important thing. The next day I said, “Mike I had a really good time last night, let’s do this more.” He said, “Bill, I’ll do it whenever I can but I’ve got my own band.” I thought to myself what am I going to do, sit at home and audition bass players? I said, “Mike I want somebody who is the best at their instrument and who knows me.” And Mike said, “Lets call Oteil.” Oteil said OK and that’s why we call Mike the curator. We all are having the best time, I just love it!

DNA: Oteil is just a monster bass player, t takes it so many places.

BK: Well they got a drummer who likes to take it many places too. He’s having a lot of fun and Scotts the same way. Scott feels the same way as far as freedom and imagination, he doesn’t play the same thing twice in a row. He takes solos and you think he’s done and he’s only halfway through. He’s building and building and building and doing all these tonal changes and it’s really good music. They trade off all these licks and lines and sides of solos, which is really fun, or they’ll play in unison or harmony parts on the same line and I’m back there laughing. I can’t believe what I’m hearing. I know the Deadheads in Santa Cruz, or anyone that loves good electric music will enjoy it. I don’t like to use the word jazz, I like to say free music. It’s not traditional music, if anything it’s close to fusion. Ya know DNA, I love your name, I heard this one track, and I said, “What band is that?” And my girlfriend Amy said, “You nut, that’s you!” She had put on some of the CDs I had lying around the house and I thought I was listening to some fusion band. I was like, “Fuck, that’s us?” That’s’ how happy I am with this band. Onstage they crowd around my bass drum and you have three guys laughing their brains out while their playing. It’s sort of Bluegrassish in this way. We play real close and play tight music.

DNA: You’re kicking off the tour in Santa Cruz, cannot wait! You said that you will rehearse with the Dead for 20 days, will you have anytime to practice with BK3?
BK: We won’t have time. Maybe we’ll get in there that afternoon and play a few songs, but that’s how it goes with the trio, we don’t really need to rehearse. I’m not reallt sure how that sounds to you. . .

DNA: You guys are all consummate professionals. . .

BK: We’ve all played for years. You’re the first interviewer whose known both Scott and Oteil, most people don’t know either, and if anyone gets known it’s Oteil and me. But I’m glad you know Scott, he’s an amazing guitar player. And their voices are great as well and they complement each other. Scott has kinda of a raspy voice and Oteil has kind of a pretty gospel voice, nice contrast of tones.

DNA: I grew up on the East Coast we would go see Max Creek, waiting for the Dead to return. It was cold and we had to stay warm.

BK: I don’t feel like I’m the leader of the band. I like for everyone to be the leader. It’s sorta Obamaish. He said, “I’m your leader, but you all got take a hand in this thing.” That’s how we do it. I don’t tell them what to do, I say, “Here are some ideas, what do you think?”

DNA: Do you have a set list before you start?

BK: We call up a few songs. We have a master list sitting out there and think which key might fit with the next song, tempo or feeling. We don’t have to have a set list at all. One night I got up there at Toads in Connecticut and played a 1/2 hour drum solo before those guys came out and joined me. I brought down a good hard beat and started jamming on the beat and made up another song and played it for an hour and a 1/2 and then started a song off the list. We went into Eyes of the World—it was the biggest meltdown! It’s great to see the audience having that much fun—very reminiscent. Now that Obama is president, I feel better.

DNA: The world is just as crazy, but it’s nice to have a guy at the helm that you don’t hate.

BK: I was in Washington for the inaugeration to play with the band. I was watching television in my hotel room—there was two million people a 1/2 a mile away, I decided, well, my hotel room is safe—so I was watching the swearing in on TV. There’s the old tradition of the president getting in the helicopter and flying away—and I heard a helicopter outside my window, I grabbed Amy and we went to the window and it was Bush flying away—so we gave him a big wave. Good riddance, man.

DNA: 8 years of lunacy.

BK: It felt much longer than 8 years.

DNA: Well there was his Dad as well. I just heard they’re talking about Jeb in 2012. It’s way to early to hear stuff like that. Too soon, too soon.

BK: How about Palin?

DNA: Drill Baby Drill.

BK: Let’s shoot wolves from helicopters.

DNA: She gave a lot of fodder to comedians.

BK: Didn’t do her any good. When McCain chose her I thought he did it because he didn’t really want to be president. I doubt that was his thought but it appeared that way.

DNA: He couldn’t have made a goofier choice.

BK: I know. Thank god.

DNA: Had a question about Hawaii. You guys passed the Lowest Law Enforcement Priority of Cannabis Ordinance, but your police chief recently said that, “anyone who is pro-marijuana is automatically pro-terrorist.”

BK: Blame it on being slow-minded and uninformed. Hawaii is very backward when it comes to things that are fun like marijuana and dancing. The caberet laws are in effect. There are no places on this island where you can go and dance. You can go out and sit-down, but you can’t dance. There has been a ton of corruption politically and it’s the good-old-boy syndrome—which is another word for gangster. The way I deal with it is by living my life in the best way, trying to be an example to other people. There was a guy here, Andrew Kluger, who built a dam that broke 2.5 years ago and killed several people. . .

http://archives.starbulletin.com/2006/03/15/news/story01.html

. . .and the corruption goes all the way up to the Governor. They never inspected the dams, they knew one was leaking and it finally broke. It was 400 million gallons of water, it carved a miniature Grand Canyon—took out the property across from me, which is Better Midlers property. I got the least damage from it, but I lost all my Ag water, so I couldn’t water all my beautiful flowers, and they died. The city water has too much chlorine in it and it’s also very expensive. What I’m saying is that for such a beautiful place it’s amazingly backward.

DNA: To go indirectly back to the Dead for a second. I lived in Maui but realized that to fight the good fight and make a difference I needed to move back to Turtle Island. And I gotta say that it was through touring with you guys for 500 shows that I realized it was through being an activist and community action that you could really help those around you.
BK: You’ve got a good heart. I’ll tell ya, the cops here are just really mean, unduly mean. They take pride in being bullies.

DNA: Well play it safe with that garage of yours.

BK: I don’t do anything that they could get too down on me for. Last Friday night it was a lady cop that came to shut us down. She was very polite and she said, “Wow, that sounds really good, but it’s 11:30 and we’ve been getting complaints.”

DNA: Was it Bette Midler that called the cops?

BK: No..no..Just saying that Hawaii is Obama land, but their policies are not like Obama.

DNA: Corruption runs deep. Look at Blagojevich.

BK: I cannot believe that he is still in the news.

DNA: Hey you screw up at work really bad and it takes balls to keep showing up.

BK: Yup. After the inauguration we played that night. The next night, thanks to Mickey Hart, I got invited to a Power Party. Nancy Pelosi was there, Barbara Boxer was there, Harry Reid was there, Diane Feinstein was there—all the heavys. That asked us a lot of questions and I always promote Green. I pleaded to build solar panel factories, obvious stuff. Let’s take all those Mercedes store in Long Beach that cannot be sold and put electric motors in those son-of-bitches. I was running all this stuff down and the vibe was really optimistic. Those folks didn’t like working for Bush and there was joy I the air and that made me feel better about our country. I wasn’t too happy with Bush and I know you haven’t.

DNA: It’s hip to talk Green, but when is somebody going to thank the hippies for thinking of it all.

BK: we never get thanked, but as long as they take action that will be enough.

DNA: Thanks a lot for the talk Bill. If you ever need a stand-up comedian to open for you guys. . .

BK: You can call me every morning to make me laugh.

DNA: It’s on. Expect a call tomorrow at 6am.

BK: Come find me in Santa Cruz I have a story about John Belushi I want to tell you.

DNA: OK.

BK: How did you get the name DNA?
DNA: In 1990 I was backstage for a Showtime comedy contest. I was backstage, high on acid, freaking out that I didn’t have anything funny to say. And then I remembered that my initials were DNA—which is funny.

BK: Perfect.

DNA: One last thing. The only interaction we ever had in the past. . .

BK: Uh oh.

DNA: In 1986 I was at a Bill Graham private party at the Fillmore. John Lee Hooker was there, Huey Lewis, The Charlatans were playing onstage, it was insane. Everyone knew each other, except for me. I was like an orphan at a family reunion.

BK: Orphan!

DNA: I was standing next to the dance floor, where a bunch of high-class ladies were shaking it. And you pushed me into the dance floor and said, “Get in there and dance young man!”

BK: Great story, I’m not usually that pushy!

DNA: Alright, see you in Santa Cruz. Aloha.

BK: Aloha!

Interview with Zecheria Sitchen

The Return of the Cosmic Farmers
By DNA


My Dad never really let loose with his thoughts. Every now and then he would launch a bauble of a parable that would either anger or confuse, but very rarely enlighten. It was him I credit with such beaut’s as: “In every women there can be one good thing, your penis,” and “Life is a burning candle, when you die, the flame goes out,” and “always work for yourself, you set your own hours and you’re never late” and “Never trust anyone, including me!” One time though he gave me a gem, a gem that I still contemplate today: “There are only three things that are worth thinking about, where do we come from, where are we now, and where are we going?”

Those three questions have become my measuring stick for seeing the relevancy of what I do. In fact, these lines of reasoning have guided me throughout my adult life. With that in mind, witness the amazing tale of the Sumerian’s as told by Zecheria Sitchen.

To date, Sitchin has deciphered more then 2,000 clay cylinders from that ancient land on the Persian Gulf that existed some 6,000 years ago. Some of these fragments, which date to 4,000 B.C., are in museums around the world.

One fragment in particular, presently in Germany, indicates that Earth is the seventh planet, counting in from Pluto. The time frame here is four millennia before modern astronomy confirmed the existence of Pluto as an actual planet in our solar system.

So how did an ancient race of people know this fact? Sitchin says it is because these ancient people did not come from Earth, but from Nibiru, the Twelfth planet. Zecharia Sitchin - whose work challenges everything we thought we knew about human civilization, is considered by many to be the greatest historian of all time. Sitchin is one of a small number of orientalists who can read the Sumerian clay tablets, which trace Earth’s, and human events to the earliest times. He has a profound knowledge of modern and ancient Hebrew and of other Semitic and European languages, the Old Testament and the history and archaeology of the Near East. His Earth Chronicles series of books (in 13 languages) combine advances in modern science with textual and pictorial evidence from the past to form a cohesive and fact-based story of what had really happened on our planet in the past 450,000 years. His mind-stretching cosmology is a preparation for the return of the Nibiruans, our creators, who, he says, will be returning soon. Although incredible, this body-of-work appears unchallenged academically.

It pays to read his books if you have a interest in the parallels that occur between all the world religions. The name of the Gods in antiquity holds clues and solutions to today’s problems. So let’s get out the lawn chairs and look up at the skies as DNA takes us one step beyond and a little past that…………


DNA
The Sumerians seem to be the base for the ideas of Evolution and Creationism. What is their tale?

Sitchen
You must distinguish between the Sumerians, who were peole like us except what they knew, what they witnessed and what they wrote down on clay tablets, took place 5 or 6000 years ago Besides the gap in years, they were people like us, humans. Distinguish between them and the so-called gods who were their teachers and gave them the knowledge.

So when the Sumerians said there are so many planets in our solar system, and the sun was at the center, and that Uranus looked green, etc., it was not their own acquired knowledge, it was what they were told.

They were told by the Anunnaki, which means ‘those which from heaven to Earth came down.’ So according to the Sumerian records, about 450,000 years ago, the Anunnaki came to Earth and started travelling between our planet and their planet. They named their home planet Nibiru, which comes to our vicinity every 3600 years.

So one of the questions I asked myself before I even started the books, was where is the planet, what are they talking about? I found out that at the turn of this century, scholars who were both astronomers and who had read those tablets, were arguing among themselves. Some said Nibiru was another name for the planet that we call Jupiter, because there was a text that said there was a conjunction, there was this, there was that. Another group said it couldn’t be Jupiter because there was another text that disagreed and said that it had to be Mars. The assumption of these scholars was that when they read names of planets in the Sumerian tablets, that they are always talking about the seven known celestial bodies which were the Sun and the moon and the five planets, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. The human eye cannot discern planets beyond that. Uranus, Neptune and Pluto were only discovered with the aid of telescopes and the aid of other advanced instruments.

So whenever there was names of more than those seven, including Nibiru, the scholars assumed that were duplicate names for those seven known celestial bodies. Nobody ever mentioned that the ancient people might know more than them. One day I found an actual depiction on one of the cylinders, of the solar system with the sun, not the earth, at the center, surrounded by eleven celestial bodies. I learned to read the texts for myself and they kept saying that the number of the family of planets, including the Sun and the moon, was twelve. Now, with the aid of telescopes we know the number of planets is nine, with the farthest out being Pluto. So with the Sun and moon, the number is eleven, there is one missing, the twelfth member. The depictions show a twelfth planet. The title of my first book was shortened from The Planet which is the Twelfth Member, to The Twelfth Planet. That was twenty years ago. The planet is also known as Planet X and its symbol is the cross.

Planet X was this other planet which invaded our solar system billions of years ago. It was captured in the gravitational pull of our Sun, and now it orbits between Mars and Jupiter. That planet is Nibiru. All this information about Nibriu’s travel into our Solar System, it’s capture, it’s collision and other things that explain many things, such as the asteroid belt, it’s 3600 year rotation, was not knowledge acquired by the Sumerians on their own. They had no telescopes. It was knowledge given to them by people who shared some of their knowledge every 3600 years.

They were capable of space travel half a million years ago and they had as much knowledge as we do today. When they came here 450,000 years ago, we did not exist yet, there were only hominids. The Sumerian text and the Book of Genesis, which is based on the Sumerian text, acknowledge and recognize evolution. Homo Sapiens did not exist, Modern man was not here, there were only ape-men and women, if you like. The Sumerian text says that when the Annunaki came here that they needed workers,man power, and through genetic engineering combined their genes with the hominids. That was 300,000 years ago, which scientific studies suggest is when our species, Homo Sapiens, first appeared. They jumped the gun on evolution and brought us half a million, a million, I don’t know, years ahead. Evolution would have brought us around anyway, but not as fast as they could have through genetic engineering.

DNA
Is the Annunaki DNA based also?

Sitchen
DNA plays a major role in this whole thing. There are literally tens of thousands of Sumerian tablets, which is the written records of the Sumerian, and it is immense. The Egyptian text’s that were left behind are meager compared to the Sumerian. What I tell people is that if they follow the daily news, through the papers, or the internet or whatever, then follow all the recent discoveries in space and in Astronomy, such as the discovery of other solar systems with planets around it, the possibility of long term orbits which confirm the possibility of a 3600 year orbit, they will find that all the Sumerian cosmology is being corroborated on a weekly basis. At the same time, all that we are finding out about DNA, about genetics, about chromosomes, all that we are finding corroborates the detailed Sumerian text that speaks of how the genetic engineering took place. The texts are very specific. But I am not an Astronomer or a Microbiologist, if we were to get those people to study the texts they would really be ahead of the game.

Everything I say is directly from the texts that are in museums all over the world. I do not make any of it up. So when I say what I say, is it so? Well yes, there is a text that exists, and it does say what I say it says.

Many scholars like to say that it’s all a myth, it never happened. Like I said, the Sumerians make it clear that in the tablets it is not them speaking, it is what the Gods told them and they dictated it down. If this were to be treated not as myth, but as actual knowledge that was handed down to us over hundreds of thousands of years, imagine how much sickness we could get rid of and how much healing we could obtain. This is the point I wish to make. People say to me, “OK so the Sumerians knew that Uranus was blue-green and that Mars had water on it, what does it mean to me.?” What it means is that if the texts were treated as actual knowledge and not as mythology we could have the clues to a better life, a better health and a better understanding of where we are from, and therefore a better understanding of where we are going.

DNA
I studied the Epic of Gilgamesh in college and the parallels between it and the stories in the Bible struck me. It was amazing to see that the same stories were being told thousand of years before Genesis was written.

Sitchen
Well many Priests and Rabbi’s speak favorably about my books. The Vatican is very well aware of the truth. A year ago the Pope said he “doesn’t say there are no UFO’s.” He put it in a double negative.

DNA
How does the recent excitement over Aliens and UFO’s play into the return of this Twelfth planet?

Sitchen
I don’t see any other explanation of all these reported phenomena except to say that the cycle is returning.

DNA
So you could say that our creators are returning.

Sitchen
Yes you could say that. It’s a nice way of saying it. It’s irresponsible though to give dates. I would rather talk in generalities.

DNA
What about the idea of Panspermia; the theory that our planet was seeded with DNA?

Sitchen
That’s a Sumerian tale. Nibiru brought life into our solar system. But in Panspermia, life was brought to our planet by comet and the Sumerians said not by comet, but by another planet.

DNA
It’s interesting that we are almost at the point where we have the technology to go to other planets and seed them with DNA, it’s gone full circle.

Sitchen
We’re not there yet, but we’re getting there. I have no doubt that we are destined to repeat what was done to us on our planet, to others, on other planets. I think that we are part of the celestial cycle. We are not just here alone on this speck of dust we call Earth, we are part of an on going cosmic drama, and we will play our role in it.


DNA
Well kids, I’m just blowing off steam here, but could it be that another planet will be entering our skies in our lifetimes? Will this planet really harbor our creators? Could it be that Sitchens translations are accurate? What if they are? What would this mean to you? I leave with you with this tale that Sitchen likes to tell…..

“Two travelers were going from one town to another and they reached a crossroads, they saw that the poles indicating the directions of the way to the town had fallen to the ground. One of them said, “Uh oh, we’re in trouble, now we won’t know which way to the town.” The other traveler said, “No, don’t worry about it.” He took the sign and stood it straight so that the one sign that had the name of the town that they came from was pointing in the right direction. And in this way they were able to know which way they were going. So you see, in order to know where you are going, you have to know where you came from.”

Interview with Bruce David

(Originally published in my rag HUMP somewhere in the 90s)

Guys, how many times have you been looking at magazines at Tower when you hear the uneven breath of a pasty faced pudge ball next to you? You look up and see that a fifty year old yupster is gawking at the newest issue of Big Booty as he unhurriedly looks for his car keys in his pocket. “You freaking pervert,” you think to yourself. You remind yourself “I am above that cretin. I do not feel the need for pornography. I do not need to look at naked pictures of women showing me their vulvas.” Suurrrrreee!!!

This month I achieved one of my life goals. I got my picture in a porno mag. Yup, in the November issue of Rage, a Larry Flynt publication, you can find my ugly mug on the contributors page. Perhaps it’s the DNA kiss of death, or perhaps it’s other factors, but the day the new Rage cam out, I got word from editor Bruce David that Rage had ceased publictation.

David sees it this way; “Larry Flynt had us do up promotional material which suggested the magazine was going to be soft. When the first issue hit the stands with a girl jamming a gun in her twat, retailers and distributors freaked. Many sent the book back unopened. 75% of all future issues were polly bagged, which meant you couldn't see our covers or coverlines. Nor could you peek inside. But then we could no longer get on most newsstands anyway and the ones we did get on placed us with titles like Cheap Sluts and Hot Hotties, so we missed our demographic.

Regarding ads: we had no ad force. The only reason we got any "straight" advertising is because a girl in the production department took it on her own to call the skateboard companies and such. It was hard selling them, though, when no one could find the mag on the newsstands. Compounding that, most legitimate advertisers won't advertise in a mag with dicks in it. That's what happened as I see it. Others might see it differently.”

In any case, being printed in Rage was definitely a highlight for me. The magazine was the toast of the underground as it combined interviews with White Zombie, Social Distortion, Korn, Tool and Motley Crue with interviews with Cyber genuises. Rage also included strong anti-corporate pieces and a strong tendency for humor. But what would you expect from a guy who ran Andy Warhols Interview magazine, Larry Flynts Hustler and wrote ALF’s famous lines.

Spread ‘em and HUMP as we look inside Bruce David’s mind……………………



David- You sent me some girl copy and it was about monkeys and I got confused. What was that about?

HUMP- It was from a book that was published in 1951 called Monkeys as Pets.

David- Was it a book that seriously dealt with the issues of monkeys as pets?

HUMP- Yeah it was a complete monkey manuel, their habits, training and care. I just thought it was funny.

David- Did you change the text at all?

HUMP- I changed the sex of the monkey from him to her.

David- I’m concerned about copyright, but people who wrote a book about monkeys forty years ago could all be presumably dead. So what’s with this new publication of yours.

HUMP- Well the conservative periodocals are on the rise in Chico and I’m getting pretty sick hearing about the great legacy of Ronald Reagan.

David- Oh it’s terrible, it’s all a nightmare. I keep asking myself how we got here. The situation is so absolutely perverse that I walk around saying “this is all wrong.” I’m a little older so I’ve witnessed the progression of at least my time-span. You know we al grew up just accepting this stuff and the younger generation gets stuck believing even more of it. Things seem like they always been the way they are, so it’s hard to even question it.

HUMP- I figure the least I can do is give a differing voice.

David- Well I don’t know if you get The Nation, but it’s a great source of information. But the latest is that the Chrysler Corporation has sent out notices to all the magazines and newspapers that they advertise with. They request they get to see any advance articles that mention the Chrysler company, either negatively or positively. If the magazines don’t give them an advance look, so they can obviously censor it, they will pull their advertising. And, they may no apologies about it. Although the news didn’t cover it, when questioned about it Chrysler said “hey we’re just doing out front what everyone else is doing under the table.”

HUMP- Even smaller publications have to bow to their advertisers. My goal with HUMP is to have an agreement with my advertisers that we reserve the right to say whatever we please. So.. did you have a hand in the Larry Flynt movie? Were you a consultant?

David- Actually my participation was to have my lawyers send Oliver Stone a cease and desist letter, threatening litigation if I was portrayed in any manner whatsoever. So the character would have been me was Arlo. You’ll notice there was no mention as to what his Job category was, or his history. In the original draft he was clearly named the editor and was given some bogus history that had nothing to do with my life. That just bothered me right from the start. That was even before they added the twitchy eye.

HUMP- Did you go to see the final product?

David- Of course. I was at the West Coast premier. It was totally accurate. Everything that happened in the movie according to my own personal knowledge actually happened. My quibbles with the movie were more deeply personal, like the fact that I didn’t have a twitchy eye. I saw myself in a much more glorius role in the day to day success of Hustler Magazine. I brought a lot of talented writers into the pages of Hustler. But quibbles is all they are. The movie was about Larry’s life not mine. If I ever get the opportunity to make a movie, then I’ll be the hero.

HUMP- When they showed the Larry Flynt building, is that the real building.

David- Yeah, it’s where I’m sitting right now. It’s like a massive boat on Wilshire Boulevard. It’s literally shaped like a boat. Of course it’s not the building that Larry and I first worked in when we moved Hustler to Los Angeles. At that time we were in the twin towers. To toot my own horn a little bit, I was working in New York as a journalist and the founding art director of Interview magazine, Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine. I was writing for publications like Screw and Penthouse and I was producing a TV show that still runs on cable called Midnight Blue. Larry appeared on the TV show, but before that I had written a review of Hustler in the pages of Screw in which I said that “Hustler has just edged out Refrigerator Monthly as the most boring magazine in America.” Larry read the review and agreed with me and offered me the managing editor position. The masthead was Larry, Althea and then me.

HUMP- Have you ever had any qualms about getting into the industry that you’re in?

David- Well you know that I always saw myself working at the New York Times, but the New York Times didn’t share my vision. I came up through the underground press, which means I had one foot in pornography to start with. First of all it was never an issue with me, secondly I was excited by the idea. When my sister and I had just graduated from college, she asked me what I would like to do with my life, and basically because I’m a shallow person, I said “ultimately I’d like to be the editor at Playboy magazine. But when Hustler came along, I saw that it had a lot of potential and when he offered me the job, I jumped at it. I could see that Larry was pushing the envelope but that he needed someone like me who knew how to write and knew how to get writers. It still annoys me to this day that people still make such an issue out of sex.

HUMP Did you ever wish that you went mainstream when Larry would end up in jail and before the Supreme Court?

David- Well it was very exciting. When I got out of college, I was young and naïve and I’m sure I entertained some vain glorious ideas about the Times. It didn’t take long to realize what a conservative environment that would be and that I wouldn’t fit into an environment like that. It would give me no comfort level because that’s not the kind of person that I am.

HUMP- With Rage, are you shooting for a new demographic?

David- Well even more than that we are trying to redefine what men’s publishing is all about. We tried to get rid of all the predictability of Playboy and Penthouse. Those magazines are so staid in their layout and their text. Mike Salisbury who is the designer of Rage, is the guy who created Joe Camel and the logo for Jurassic Park and about a 100 american icons that you would recognize immediately. When we sat down to talk about Rage, we wanted to change everything from the way it’s photographed, to the way it’s designed, to the way it’s written, to the type of things that are addressed in the pages of the magazine.

HUMP- What made you revert to the Adult advertising in the back?

David- Well, we’ve been under pressure from the beginning to take the ads for the 900 numbers. Larry Flynt was great about not forcing the issue. But there comes a time when you’re still in the red where you have to make the decision about breaking even on all the money that was put into the magazine.

HUMP- Rage features the leading technicians and cyber-gurus who will be affecting the future of our county and culture, do you have a Rage Web site?

David- That’s really embarrassing, next question please.

HUMP- Rage is very anti-capitalism.

David- Yes. We are very anti-corporate. Capitalism didn’t just kill Communism it has killed Democracy in the process. Just the fact that Westinghouse and General Electric own NBC and CBS is frightening. I mean along with all the other nefarious things that they are up too, their shooting plutonium into space. If there’s a mishap on the launch pad, we can all wave goodbye to Florida. Of course, if it blows up in the atmosphere, that’s the end of 5 billion people. It’s obvious NBC and CBS are not going to deal with this issue on their newscasts, they have no motivation to get people inflamed with the sheer madness of it. In essence the American people are being lied to.

HUMP- You got involved with Hustler in 1975. Did it seem that the lines were more easily defined between the counter-culture and society at large then they are today?

David- I don’t think that the lines are mixed today at all, it’s all so clear. To simplify things, to distill it down to its most basic form: corporations are evil. Multi-national corporations have seized control of our government. They have bought and paid for all our politicians and they have destroyed the two-party system. No matter if it’s a Republican or a Democrat that gets into office their the same beast with two heads. No matter whose in the White House, the same people pay him for. Even if he did try to get the truth out, what news station would allow it? They might let him make his statements, but he would be so ridiculed by the press, which is owned solely by the multi-nationals, that the American public would lose all respect for him. The pro-corporate press very easily manipulates Americans. I can’t believe when Rush Limbaugh says the press is left-leaning when it’s so obviously right-leaning.

HUMP- Isn’t the Larry Flynt empire a corporation?

David- Under the FCC laws conglomerates or multi-nationals can own as many radio and television networks that they want. The problem is that the same people who own the sources for news and information are the same people who own nuclear power plants. So when there has been up to a 50% sperm reduction count over the last thirty years, you might hear a 10 second byte on it. And as my father says “it’s quieted to death.” I think that the purpose of the entertainment industry today is o keep the American public calm and distracted from what is really happening. Listen to what it says her in The Nation:

“ Even before PatCo stilled the hand of union busters, Business Week whined it’s newest mission, quote “ It will be a hard pill for many Americans to swallow, the idea of doing with less, so that big business can have more. Nothing that this nation or any nation in recent history compares in difficulty with the selling job that must be accomplished to get the American people to accept the new reality.””

That was written twenty years ago. The thrust was already in motion.

HUMP- When Larry Flynt takes over like Blunt or Big Brother, skateboard magazines, how does the editorial content change?

David- Well I’m not involved with those publications, so I’m not there when Larry talks to the publishers. My guess would be that there is no agenda, I’m sure Larry leaves them to do whatever they want
No other publisher in this country would have let me do what I have done with Rage magazine. I have taken a political position that is anti-press and anti-corporation and have not had to worry about advertisers and kissing their butt. Granted, because we are a men’s publication, many advertisers do want to advertise with us anyway. But it all comes together to allow me the ultimate goal in publishing. I am not answerable to anyone except Larry Flynt and Larry doesn’t care what I put in the pages of the magazine. The girl part of it is his focus and he’s very concerned about the photo features.

HUMP- Is there censorship in what can happen in the girl copy?

David- Well of course I can’t say that they are a minor becaue they must be over 18 years of age and I can’t say that they have been screwing their pet dog because bestiality is illegal, but you would think I would have the right to report on that. So even though, by the letter of the law it is legal for me to write something like that, you end up with distributors and retailers freaking out and perhaps even getting busted by conservative prosecutors in back water counties in Georgia.

HUMP- So when Larry was involved in all the court hearings were you running Hustler?

David- Yes that’s true. And during part of that time I was running Hustler from the courthouse. At the Cincinnati trial for instance, I think Althea was one of the people originally charged and although she was second in command, I was running the magazine for them. It was always from the first day I got there Larry, Althea and me. Althea was always actively involved with the magazine. I could always count on her to represent the best interest of the magazine.

HUMP- Were you in Georgia when Larry got shot?

David- Actually I was going to go to Georgia where he was shot, but Larry said “don’t worry about it, nothings going to happen there.”

HUMP- In the movie it appeared that after Althea contracted AIDS, that respect for her dropped from the other staff members.

David- I left Hustler right before any of that happened. I began to write for television shows like Family Ties and ALF.

HUMP- How was it going from issue driven content to fluff?

David- I hated it. I don’t think that I fit anywhere but in the world of porn. It’s the only place where I find people that are not uptight, not inhibited and who are free and easy with their speech and don’t mind a good debate. I still to this date have dinners with Al Goldstein. This guy is a great iconoclast. You can sit at the table and discuss anything and take any position pro or con and it won’t poison you’re relationship with him. He’s guided by free thought. In the entertainment business there is huge amounts of money and everybody is afraid that the next guy coming up will get his job.

HUMP- At what point did you realize that ALF wasn’t cutting it.

David- I think I was becoming more and more concerned with what was going on in the world. I would watch TV news and I wouldn’t see my reality on it. I was becoming very aware that something was wrong and increasingly frustrated that I didn’t have a platform to express my views. I noticed that all the jokes that I would put in the show that were based on social commentary would inevitably get cut out. So I went to Larry, knowing his dedication to the first amendment and free speech with a proposal and Rage is what came out of it.

HUMP-- Wasn’t Rage out years ago as a test issue.

David- Althea Flynt at one time started a rock magazine called Rage. I’m not sure if it really ever came out, but it was Altheas intention. But LFP still had the name. We tried many names, but Rage kept coming up. We almost went with Bravo though, but there was a copyright problem with it.

HUMP- Bravo seems more like a theater review magazine. Do you feel like there is a certain age where kids shouldn’t be exposed to nudie magazines. When I was 12,I couldn’t wait to get my hands on Playboy.

David- Well I don’t think there is anything wrong with sex, nor showing pictures of naked women and naked men having sex. On the other hand I have twin boys who are six years old. And while I am very relaxed on the subject, I don’t leave the magazine laying around where they can find it. I think if they did find an issue they would be mildly curious and then they would quickly forget about it. Sex is a non-issue for them. But I’m not a psychiatrist, so I don’t know what the long range effects of that might be. Besides it’s a social taboo. I don’t want my ids running around on the streets saying that they saw daddy’s naked pictures. It’s a practical decision. But by the time your twelve or thirteen, if you’re healthy, you’ll want to get your hands on a men’s magazine. It’s normal and I can’t believe that society would frown and make such a big deal about it.

HUMP- Do you still get harassed by the Christian coalition?

David- Well Jerry Falwell still does his same old number. But even more so, the feminists always through Hustlers name into the mix. For the A&E biography on Larry Flynt, Larry asked me to participate for a couple of minutes and I reluctantly agreed. Of course the set-up to my talk was Gloria Steinem saying how disgusting and revolting the piece of meat cover was and then they cut to me saying “oh yeah, that was my idea.” I think that pornography or x-rated material is a non-issue, that war, that battle was decided by Larry Flynt back in the seventies and eighties. The religious right and the feminists can piss and moan all they want, but their not going to change anything. By and large the American people don’t care. The news is happy to print controversy about Larry Flynt, it keeps the public distracted from the real problem that the corporations control the American government.

HUMP- I would imagine that working for Hustler you probably saw just about everything under the sun. How was it when Larry hooked up with Ruth Carter?

David- That was disturbing. But by that time I had learned that not only is Larry unpredictable, he was also capable of making connections and links to people in areas that you would never expect, and that is part of his genius. To him the normal demarcations don’t apply. He was constantly establishing connections and seeing similarities in things that you would think had nothing in common. But still, his thing with Ruth Stapleton Carter was just too much. It was a problem for me terms of how I saw reality, but it wasn’t a problem for me in terms of how I saw Larry. I always knew it was his magazine and that he could do anything he wanted with it. I never questioned that or resented his choice of directions. Although the Christian slant in Hustler I did think was ludicrous and embarrassing, I had my name removed form the books shortly after that. And then I left the magazine entirely somewhere around 1981-82.

HUMP- One last question Bruce. If not Crispen Glover, who would have picked to portray you in the movie.

David- Brad Pitt.

Interview with Weird NJ

Goin’ Jeresy
Weird New Jersey

Often treated like the red headed stepchild, New Jersey has been the target of ridicule of other states and contemporary conversation. And yet New Jersey has defined our current culture. From the light bulb, to the phonograph, to Motion Pictures, New Jersey has been a mutant gene in the double strand of America.
If anything, Chico, California deeply resembles the feel of Jersey. There is a certain brashness and authenticity of the people that seems to define the character of it’s citizens. And while Chico doesn’t get the severe winters of NJ, there’s something in the air that reeks of Jersey. Maybe it’s all the transplants. While we all struggle through the transition of summer into winter, I can only hope that people keep their wits about them.
I recall one time in good old NJ when I visited my friend Chuck. I was getting ready to move to California and had one more night in town. Most of my friends were in college and so it was off to Chucks for the last hooray. I was about halfway there when I realized that my bike had a flat front tire. Luckily it was all downhill from the point of the realized flat. I suppose I could have walked my bike the last mile but I threw reason to the wind as I shredded my rim on the descent.
At Chucks, I was back in the prototype Wayne’s World basement. As one friend slept groggily on the couch, we poured Tabasco and chili peppers down his throat.
Since he was awake, we all moved outdoors for some air. With a little help from my hand, my beer emptied its contents down my throat, and it was back into the kitchen for a refresher. It was right around that time, alone in a big old NJ house when I heard a strange noise from the attic. It sounded like someone rummaging through a silverware drawer.
I looked out the window and counted my friends, yup, they were all out there. I strained my ears and sure enough there was more metallic clanging from upstairs. As the hair on my neck stood up and started doing a little dance, I raced outside, and told the boys what I heard. Chuck said that both his grandparents died upstairs and that the attic was haunted.
I still like to think that someone was getting one back on me for a prank I might have pulled.
Mark Sceurman and Mark Moran of Bloomfield NJ have taken the folklore of NJ and put it together in a monthly magazine called Weird NJ. Within the pages of Weird NJ you get to hear more than ghost tales. This months issue features the fate of abandoned mental hospitals, a rail car graveyard, a host of strange cemeteries, the elephant house, an interview with a guy who saw something very strange in the skies of Paterson, weird NJ animals and more.
Always ready for a new adventure, the two Marks are more than modern day Ghostbusters, they are your travel guides to the local legends, modern folklore and sites throughout the state of NJ that are previously unrecorded. If you are subject to the bizarre side of life, take a trip with HUMP through Weird NJ.


HUMP- I got a copy of Weird NJ while I was visiting the East Coast this summer.

Sceurman- Well it certainly is causing quite a stir around here. I’ve been doing this for eight years now. I started off by doing it just for my friends. At first the weird things were just a sidebar, but as time progressed, the weird places you can visit became the highlight.

HUMP- I remember at sleep away camp there was always stories of creatures that lived in the Pine Barrens.

Sceurman- We’ve encountered about twelve different devils in New Jersey, from the Bigfoot sightings up in the Northwest, to the Jersey Devil in the Pine Barrens, in Somerset there’s the Big Hairy Man that is seen wandering around in the great swamp area.

HUMP- Why are these creatures referred to as “devils?”

Sceurman- I think it came out of Puritan instincts. The first sightings were in the 1700’s and they thought everybody was the devil back then.

HUMP- when does the MTV feature come out?

Sceurman- it’s on November 30th. MTV gave us the cameras and said shoot whatever you want. We shot about five hours worth of film and it will probably be edited down to about seven minutes. But it will be action packed.

HUMP- Have you become a magnet for weird stuff?

Sceurman- People always stop me on the street and say “your that weird guy.” Somebody always has a haunted house they want us to go look at it and investigate it. That is not really what weird NJ is all about. We are set up more like a travel guide to odd places, just telling ghost stories doesn’t cut it.

HUMP- My dad used to take me to gravity hill.

Sceurman- Yeah, one is in Franklin Lakes and one is in Howell and one is in Hopewell. The one in Hopewell has a big X on the road where you’re supposed to stop, put your car in neutral and be amazed as it rolls up hill backwards. It’s really just an optical illusion. The thing is, that this magazine will always be around, because somebody always has a weird tale about their neighborhood, or something they remember being odd in their town. Really what we are after is stories that are not told outside the perimeters of a town and there is an abundance of tales in NJ.

HUMP- Why is NJ so weird?

Sceurman- I can’t really say, but we’ve found the more sparsely populated the area is, the stranger the stories get. People will tell us stories with very sparse directions and we head off to find them and photograph them. Usually people will say “go like twenty miles, past five telephone poles and hang a left.” Half of the fun is finding the places. With urban legends, you can say whatever you want, but in Weird NJ, there are tangible places that you can go visit.

HUMP- Did you go to school for journalism?

Sceurman- I always was into publishing. I started a zine called the Bonzo Dog Band Fan Club. It was based on the most obscure band we could find. We actually got to meet them and stay at their house in England. And that fizzled out and I went to this.

HUMP- Oh. How is the music scene in NJ?

Sceurman- Well there’s about 3 million bands with everyone trying to find their niche.

HUMP- has anyone ever come up to your office and blown your mind?

Sceurman- We interviewed this guy who has a time displacement machine and lives in a town that used to be called Sodom. He claims that he can displace time for up to two years. He also says that he has a car whose radio reports the news two days before it happens. The car I built out of wood and he claims that it can travel up to 350 miles an hour. We also received a letter form the celeberty stalker, the one who stalks Kathy Lee Gifford.

HUMP- Is he a stalker or a hero?

Sceurman- Well he’s in Virginia now and he wants me to pick up this time elliptic resonator he has to get him out of jail.

HUMP- What’s the latest great story you did.

Sceurman- We found the wallet man of Morristown that we’ve been looking for five years. When I say we, I mean my business partner, Marc Moran. There was a famous murder in 1833. Anton Le Blanc was a hired worker for a farm and he thought the owners had money so he killed them all and took off. The law found him in Jersey City the next day, brought him back to Morristown and hung him. While he was hung, they did experiments on him. They hooked up an electrical current to him to try and reanimate him. After that failed, they skinned him and made wallets and ladies handbags out of his skin. The legend was that that the handbags got into the possession of the very wealthy in Morristown. After five years of looking we finally found someone who had a wallet made out of Le Blanc. They also had his death mask. He found it at an estate sale. It just came rolling out of a box.

HUMP- That’s right kids, only in New Jersey!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Write to Weird NJ at POB 1346 Bloomfield, NJ 07003
Or e-mail them at HYPERLINK mailto:markatWNJ@aol.com markatWNJ@aol.com
And tell them HUMP sent ya!

Interview with Apollo 12 astronaut Edgar Mitchell

Do The Right Psychic Stuff




Interview with Apollo 12 astronaut Edgar Mitchell


Let me lead you down the path of the unusual and the strange. A short stop in the field of screams reveals a glimpse of unnerving dreams. Look under that rock, isn’t that a three headed salamander? Well, it’s more than a genetic mishap, it’s an omen. See the shadow of the raven on your heels? I know it means something, but what? Feeling the hairs on the back of your neck standing on end yet? Feeling psychic yet? Break out the Ouija board and get in touch with your psychic powers. Remember the time you weren’t sure who was moving the plastic thing across the board. Well what the hey was that about? What about the time you were going to call your friend and when you picked up the phone they were already on the other line? Yikes!

Many of us have experienced weird odd freaky things that we couldn’t readily explain. We knew someone was staring at us and they were. OooooooHH. We knew a letter would come in the mail and it did. AAAhhhhhhh. Sure the skeptics say “look, you think about the phone ringing all the time, it’s only a matter of time before it rings at the same time you’re thinking about it.” But you and I know it’s our psychic powers. We’re starring in our own personal Twilight Zone episode.

As much as we love the creepiness of knowing something is going to happen, very rarely do we blurt out that we can read others peoples thought. If you’ve paid attention to our rabid society you know that if you are truly psychic, desperate fates await you. Psychics always end up locked up in a padded cell as a nutball, or, stowed away in a government lab like a psychic La Femme Nakita (the movie, not the series), or, return to kill everyone in your High School Class ala Carrie, or begin to think that their Jesus. Believe it or not, but psychic powers are still considered to be a precious commodity by society and governments. But is it really worth getting locked up for?

Me, I’m not afraid of some shrinks Diagnostic Manuel. I’ll say it loud and proud I’m telepathetic and I vote. I’m telepathetic, I can see the future, and it’s all bad. Don’t believe me? Well I’ll prove myself. Pick a number between one and ten. Multiply it by 9. Add the two digits in the number together till you get a single number, like if it’s 24 then 2+4=6. Subtract five. Take that number and find it’s letter equivalent like a=1 b=2 c=3 etc.. Take that letter and think of a country that starts with that letter. Take the last letter of the country and think of an animal that starts with that letter. Take the last letter of the animal and think of a fruit. Good going……………… you passed.

At this point you probably feel ridiculous that you just obeyed some random commands in a paragraph. For those of you who know me, you can begin to feel scared that perhaps I am indeed willing my telepathetic powers over you. For those of you who know me not, feel lucky.

Imagine a world where we could see each other’s thoughts. Frankly it worries me endlessly. I barely like to hear what people are up to, let alone see their every thought. Unfortunately for me, a total breakthrough between humans psyches will occur and soon, according to sixth man ever to walk on the moon, Dr. Edgar Mitchell. Dr. Mitchell’s Institute of Noetic Sciences explores the scientific principals behind ESP, telepathy, psychokinesis and other ‘powers’ he considers part of the natural evolution of humans and the universe. His new book “The Way of the Explorer: An Apollo Astronauts Journey through the Material and the Metaphysical Worlds,” is a brilliant look at Mitchell’s life.

If you really dive into this interview certain ideas should present themselves to you. You might think something like this:
You-“ Wow, this astronaut dude is really into ESP. He used to do experiments with Uri Geller, that Israeli Psychic who used to go on talk shows in the seventies and bend spoons with his mind. Weird. Huh? Edgar Mitchell thinks that because of an experience he had in space he was going to devote his life to trying to prove ESP is real. And he’s done it. Cool.”
Others of you probably won’t understand a word of this interview and probably didn’t get Kangaroos eating Oranges in Denmark either.

If you ended up with Cats eating Strawberries in the Dominican Republic, or Dogs eating Strawberries in Deutsche Land, you’re far too analytical for your own good.

Rev up the engines, hit the boosters, start the countdown, feel your throttle, tilt your head back, engage warp drive and put your, hand-built to scale, pyramid on your head (to recharge your brain cells) and let Spaceship HUMP take you to the moon and back with Edgar Mitchell.


Ever since I was ten I’ve been fascinated by books such as “Psychic Discoveries Beyond the Iron Curtain,” “Surgeon of the Rusty Knife,” and of course the Uri Geller books. As an Astronaut and a mainstay of our society, how did you get involved in such fringe culture?

Well, let me simply tell you the experience then let you know of the “wow” that occurred to me. I had a PHD in aeronautics and astronautics before I went The experience was a sudden realization that the molecules in my body and the molecules in that spacecraft and the molecules in the bodies of my friends were manufactured by an ancient generation of stars out there. Suddenly instead of an intellectual exercise in how stars form it became a very personal experience and that became kind of a “wow.” I realized from that experience that our scientific cosmology on how we came to be and how the universe formed was incomplete and flawed. The religious cosmologies and esoteric cosmologies were archaic and flawed and we needed a new story about ourselves. At some point in human life people always ask the questions “who are we,” “how did we get here,” and “where are we going?” It seemed to me as a newly minted space herded civilization that we needed to re-ask those questions. I experienced the Universe as interconnected and an intelligent process yet neither were described nor understood in any of our official ways of knowing. It is mystical experiences that are the basis for all religion. I began to ask myself “what is this brain. Why am I beginning to feel this exhilaration?” It was enigmatic and I’ve spent the last 25 years trying to resolve those issues.

Did you at one point on the re-entry of Apollo 12 turn to Alan Shepard and say “dude, I’m having a religious experience.”

No, it was too powerful for that, too personal, too much wonderment. I did look at my colleagues and wonder if the y were experiencing any of this but they seemed to be busy doing other things. Many Lunar Module pilots like myself after the lunar surface activity was complete had a light workload on the way home. We were systems engineers flying the command module home on a well functioning spacecraft, we didn’t have to pay that much attention to what was going on. There was time to be contemplative and meditative and gawk at the universe. Most of the LMP had a heightened experience, but for most of them it took many years to acknowledge it and talk about it, which was also true for me. When my duties with NASA were done I formed the Institute of Noetic Sciences and set out to understand what my experience and what all this means.

Did your contemporaries see you as a heretic?

I’m sure some of them felt that. Interestingly enough, I did an ESP experiment on the mission from the moon and you would be surprised how many state conservative engineers furtively slipped into my office, closed the door, and asked me to tell them about it. Once it became public that is. So yes, I was seen as different, but I had too good a reputation as an intellect to be dismissed out of hand. There was a certain measure of respect that went with all of it.

If it’s true that Russia had been working on paranormal experiments since the fifties did you ever learn of what our government was up too? Was NASA involved in the pursuit of telepathes?

Well NASA had no such agenda, but our intelligence community, the CIA had a lot of work going on in the late sixties and seventies just like the soviets did and I happened to know about that, although I wasn’t on the inner circle of that. Nearly all of that work has been declassified in the recent years. Some of my colleagues, who I worked with at SRI with Uri Geller back in the early seventies have written papers on it. The work focused primarily on remote viewing.

If you could get a kid who could see across country into someone’s file cabinets, that would be a pretty powerful weapon.

That was the idea they were working on.

Uri Geller seemed promising, was it just that he didn’t have the control?

Well, he didn’t have the control he would have liked to have. The problem was that if a person is put in an environment that isn’t conducive to relaxing, they have great difficulties in utilizing their capabilities. The mental environment and the environment of acceptance either help you along or hinder you. After 25 years of research I understand pretty darn well how this works. My new book that I’ve been working on for the last three years explains the theoretical properties behind the experience.

In a world where any half bit actor or actress establishes their own Psychic network, it does seem that, based on supply and demand, people really do want to believe.

I always try to set out and show what is real and what is not real. I have good physical science and brain neurology to show what happens and how it happens.

Are some people more prone to ESP than others?

Yes, but it all has to do with early training. If you grew up in a home where it was allowed and encouraged, it becomes developed like a muscle. If you exercise it becomes developed if you don’t it atrophies. By the time were nine or ten, if we don’t exercise that muscle the brain starts pulling out those neurological circuits. There is a neurological component to it. What we are dealing with here is a very basic way that the universe has organized itself. There is nothing supernatural about it. The institute trails behind my own work, independent schooling and research.
People have been having these types of experiences forever. They call them Mountaintop Experiences or Eureka Experiences or Epiphanies. I just happened to choose going into space to have a really powerful one. I assimilated information in a new way. For me it was looking at my Universe from a new perspective that gave me the experience. The intriguing question is why does the brain do that? Why does the brain reorganize ideas? It’s an evolutionary cosmological fact that nature does that. We’ve been overlooking something that is very natural and evolutionary. I try to explore why and to have it make sense.
It turns out that all the psychic effects are tied to what is called in physics as quantum non-locality. This was discovered years ago, but only proven in 1982. It ties right in to many of the parapsychological studies. I don’t use the word “para” anymore. It’s all psychological to me, science. It’s the way nature works it has a non-local component that quantum physics has talked about for 75 years and that’s what we are seeing, that information is ubiquitous in the universe.

In Village of the Dammed, a generation of kids become psychic and the adults destroy them. Aren’t there many people who profit from secrets and wouldn’t it seem that destroying telepathy would be a main goal of theirs?

Well, now you’re getting to the evolutionary component of all this, we live in a trial and error universe and it’s one that is constantly developing. We have 400 years lived under the classic Newtonian and Cartesian worldview, or system of thought where everything is separate and discreet. We have built a whole civilization in the west under those ideas. It turns out those ideas are wrong and flawed, that is not the way that the Universe is structured and we are just now realizing it. People have a lot vested in the old order of things. Cartesian duality and separation of religion and science have been the dictum, the sacred cow for four hundred years, they don’t want to see that order changing, but in an evolutionary universe it’s going to change anyway. So the answer is yes and that is exactly what has to change. The religious community has always said these things are true they just happen to be supernatural and the scientific community has always said that they are not true because they don’t have a model that explains them or theory that explains how they work. I have to say sorry your both wrong, it does work and it is very natural if you understand how mind and matter are related. I have done physical experiments that prove my theories but it’s a slow process getting them accepted by the scientific community.

Even psychology wasn’t accepted for quite a while.

The BF Skinner school of behaviorist thought and the Pavlovian notion of how learning takes place dominated it. In the seventies transpersonal thought and several other things transcended those ideas. So now we are finding ways to how it works. We explain through Quantum Holograms, which is a non-local portion of matter, it carries the information about the event history of every object in the Universe. Since a Quantum Hologram is non-local it is available to any human or object that can tune into it.

Aboriginal tribes supplement their rituals with hallucinogenic materials in order to transcend locality. Does your institute ever work with those types of factors?

Well, those earlier cultures all seemed to use hallucinogens of one kind or another. By and large what this does is gets the left brain out of the way so that you are perceiving through the primitive more emotional right part of the brain, and that’s all well and good, but it’s unnecessary. The evolutionary leap, in my opinion is a better integration of the left and right hemispheres of the brain into a more holistic way of learning. We know how to train peoples how to do that. Ancient meditative techniques help people to do that.

What is the breakthrough that you see coming in the next couple of years?

What I’m talking about is he a better understanding of the Quantum Hologram. We now know that it is a basic part of all nature and it is responsible for what we perceive as mystic, spiritual, esoteric insights. It is firmly rooted in the way matter is structured. The mystics have always said that Universe is interconnected and this is exactly what the Quantum Hologram proves.

The story goes when my mom was pregnant with me when she would walk in front of the TV the station would change. Where doe this fall into the realm of things you’ve seen.

Well I’ve never heard of that one before, but it doesn’t surprise me, we have seen with people like Uri Geller and hundreds like him that these are ubiquitous human capabilities centered around what we call intention. The way we think and the way we choose does have an effect on the physical world and if you have any doubt about that look at this century and the way human intention have changed the face of the planet. It also works on a much deeper level than that as well. Our intention does affect physical reality and that is demonstrable.

What about the story where Uri Geller manifested your tie clips that had been missing for two years?

Was it good science, no? Was it a good a awakening experience that anchored for me that we are dealing with a powerful real phenomena here and the question is how do we explain it and that of course is what I have been able to do. The Institute is a very powerful organization and we have 50,000 sustaining members and we are a potent force for how we bring the spiritual and the scientific together into a common understanding. We are currently trying to refocus on how we should go in the next twenty-five years.

When you build a bridge between eastern and western thought you realize that the Easterners understood all along what he nature of the universe was while the westerners have had to have the truth almost kill them before they caught a glimpse.

It was the Cartesian duality in the West that allowed science to arise. The intellectual power at the time and the investment in the inquisition and the Roman Catholic Church allowed intellectuals of that time to look at science because it didn’t threaten the church’s position. So physical science was capable of rising and doing all the wonderful things its done n the last three hundred years. Now we realize that it was an artificial division. Hegel said that thesis; antithesis and synthesis make progress. We’re at a point of new synthesis where we are capable of putting it all back together again where science and the mystical experience must be understood within the same framework.

So whereas Maslow said only some people could achieve peak experiences, you are saying that it is available to all?

Maslow was right as far as tradition and our evolutionary path, but what we are talking about is an evolutionary future in which these capabilities are available to anyone. It is a matter of choosing, it is a matter of training, it is a matter of cultural bias and if we train people and it becomes an acceptable worldview in our culture then these capabilities are available to everyone. If people open themselves to the knowledge I think they will choose it. Especially if we find ourselves in world crisis like we do at this moment where civilization is in peril there is no insurance that we are going to survive and we won’t unless we change our minds a little bit.

In your own family have you fostered the psychic muscle in your kids?

I have tried yes. My older children are adults; my eldest daughter just turned 44. All of my children are open to these ideas and are experimenters themselves. There are groups raising their kids this way.

Doesn’t the church see your ideas as the work of Satan?

I call it the death road of the dinosaur. The dinosaurs were a successful species for a couple of hundred million years but then they failed to be able to accommodate to changing times. Maybe they were helped along by an asteroid impact by its no matter, we are in evolutionary universe and we will either evolve or we will perish. There is always resistance to change but nature has a way of kicking us in the but when we get too complacent. Things move along in spite of our desires not to evolve. If we don’t evolve willingly we will evolve out of sheer necessity.