I was a first-hand participator in these zany antics at CITY with Francis, Hinckle & Schwartz at the time in 1975 and even briefly dated the late Sue Berman. See "Faster Than The Speeding Photon" by Rasa Gustaitus with photos by F. Stop Fitzgerald about me, Fred Alan Wolf, Nick Herbert and Saul-Paul Sirag. Indeed, I met Gary Zukav because Francis used to cook pizzas for us in the wood oven at Tommaso's Restaurant on Kearny off Broadway. Tommaso was living with Gary at 372 Green Street and bribed me with a case of Asti Spumanti to take over his small room at Gary's. The rest is history. I took Gary to Esalen when I directed the physics consciousness workshop there with Michael Murphy, Tim Leary and others. It was funded by Werner Erhard of est and the late George Koopman using DOD money. I essentially wrote the physics parts of Gary's "Dancing Wu Li Masters" that sold millions of copies. Gary never took any serious physics courses. He studied under Henry Kissinger at Harvard before volunteering for the Black Berets in Vietnam. The rest of the issue has an article about Arthur Koestler who I knew in London in 1974 at the tests of Uri Geller's psychic powers with David Bohm, John Hasted, Arthur C. Clarke et-al at Birkbeck College, University of London. Charlotte Allen's article on Tucker Max is too long.
Excerpts of Schwartz's writing on Francis Ford Coppola:
"In 1974, when the magazine came into view as his new toy, he was the monarch of San Francisco's de facto statelet, and Coppola's City seemed intended as something akin to a single party organ in a totalitarian society ... he imagined himself as a parallel to the communications magnate depicted in Citizen Kane, remarking to one crony, as he swept through the offices of the reorganized magazine, 'It's fun running a newspaper, Jedediah' - a reference to the sidekick portrayed by Joseph Cotten, of Orson Welles's fictional protagonist."