I knew Ted Sturgeon for ten years, from 1975 until his death in 1985. I was part of his extended family. That makes me pretty lucky – not everyone gets to hang out extensively with one of the greatest writers in the world.

In 1983, while working on my newspaper, Not the Reader, I asked him if he’d write a feature article. I asked for a story about people who were being displaced by the development ofSan Diego’s planned “Gas Lamp District.” He agreed, then gave me a story about a girl who was trying to contract AIDS so she could bilk money out of the federal government. It was called “Grizzly.” A horrible premise but, in Sturgeon fashion, brilliantly written.

The week he died, I showed him a philosophical essay I’d written on the nature of ideas. I described ideas as volitional entities, as life forms, as things that invade our minds, reproduce, mutate, then travel off to inhabit other minds. He said it was the first inspiration he’d had for a long time. I had the wrong ending, though. I’d written something about ideas taking us eventually to the stars. He told me the ending should be about going to the stars, finding another planet where civilization had died, turning the systems on and seeing ancient ideas coming back to life again, art by art, philosophy by philosophy.

I’m finally getting to use Ted’s idea. It will be the ending for my twelve-eBook Mapping Freedom series.

You don’t make much money writing music for stage plays, so in search of financial fortune, I decided to do what my friend and music teacher was doing: write jingles. At the time,San Diegowas home to Tuesday Productions, a national radio and TV jingle producing company. In an effort to get noticed by them, I wrote an “Operetta” for local classical music radio station, KFSD.

San Diego’s KFSD, with its 100 kW transmitter was (and still is) the most powerful station in the area.  They played exclusively classical music until 1996 when the station sold and it changed its format. But up until then you could hear this tune occasionally blaring – usually late at night – on 94.1 FM on your dial.

Yes, it’s hokey, but hey – I was only 24 when I wrote it.

Play KFSD Operetta by Chas Holloway

The Old Globe Theatre has been a prestigiousSan Diegoinstitution since it was built for the California Pacific International Exposition in 1935. It’s actually a complex of theaters: the Old Globe, itself, the outdoor theater that does a Shakespeare festival every summer and The Cassius Carter indoor theater-in-the-round.

I wrote original music for a play called Poor Murderer written by the Czech/Austrian Pavel Kohout. It had debuted in 1976 on Broadway and a couple years later The Old Globe did my musical version. It was directed by Craig Noel.  I was a young self-taught composer and being involved in this production and using Russian scales and instruments was pretty cool.

Pavel Kohout

More on The Old Globe

More on Pavel Kohout

More on Craig Noel

–  END  –

The Creatorians launch another paradigm

They live under the sidewalks.

Beneath the skin of the city, beneath the rushing traffic and whirling banquets, there exists a different set of truths.

There, in the basements and deep down in the catacombs, dwell the crazed inventors, the mad scientists, the opium-heads, the visionaries, the manic architects. Unknown to surface-dwellers, it’s these strange beings – the Creatorians – that hold up the world.

And cursed by the ancient codes, they must stay hidden to survive.

Thus, blazing suns turn to shadows. Grand theories hide in children’s games. Great heretics live like wraiths far underground. Leaders, lightning tamers, revolutionaries, paradigm shifters, all kick back on subterranean patio furniture sipping scotches & sodas, like visionary bomb shelter dwellers of a forgotten atomic age.

Ignored.

Neglected by the Nobel Prize Committee.

Waiting…

…until…like a cloud of long-lost spirits, they shall one day emerge upon the land, and they shall set their ghostly paradigms free to leap from mind to mind, setting brains ablaze until the world has been conquered, and the planet reorganized artistically according to their plans…

–  END  –

Charles (Chas) Holloway is an American writer, lecturer and publisher most noted for promoting visionary works on the science of freedom, such as Jay Snelson’s The V-50 Lectures, Robert LeFevre’s Freedom School Lectures and Spencer MacCallum’s The Art of Community, as well as works of his own.

Holloway’s website and current lecture tour is called “The Freedom Chamber.”

Born inLa Jolla,California, he is the grandson of the World War Two aircraft tycoon, Reuben H. Fleet. In 1967, he was sent by his family to a military school but at sixteen dropped out to join the 1960s counter-cultural rebellion.  A year later, he was accepted at a radical art and science college inHollywood.  “I smoked dark brown hash, dropped acid, hung out in the music and science departments and got turned on by ideas,” Holloway said.  “It was colorful, vibrant, intense.” His teachers at the college included Tom Hayden, Theodore Sturgeon and Harlan Ellison.

At twenty, he moved toEureka,California, to work at a PBS television station which had been taken over by ingenious artists. “We had a psychedelic TV truck and drove all over Humboldt County doing remote broadcasts – we looked like a nomadic Grateful Dead tribe, showing up to tape the kinetic sculpture race, the concerts, the stock car races, the dobro players on their wooden porches and the world-class glassblowers.  We were the coolest thing inEurekauntil new management came in and fired everybody.”

Holloway returned to Southern California during the summer of 1976, America’s 200^th Anniversary, and wrote musical scores for several stage plays, including Kohout’s Poor Murderer for The Old Globe Theater inSan Diego.

Around that time, he discovered an obscure subject called “Volitional Science” in a live course taught by Jay Snelson, which was based on the innovative theory of property of Andrew Galambos.  The course changed his life. “In the 60s and early 70s we were all idealistic about finding freedom,” Holloway claimed.  “But nobody knew how to do it.  That’s why all my friends back then got absorbed into the system, one by one.  Since I’d found out there was a scientific way to understand what freedom was and attain it, I just never gave up.”

During the next two decades, while studying and developing further scientific explanations about the nature of freedom, Holloway wrote radio jingles, an operetta, produced several songwriters and played coffeehouse pianos throughoutCalifornia.  He created a newspaper, wrote and sold television scripts, news articles, documentaries, comic books, science fiction stories and studied writing with George Clayton Johnson, Danny Simon, John Truby, William F. Nolan and Theodore Sturgeon.

In the mid-1990s, he produced internationally known classical pianist, Gustavo Romero, recording and distributing (through Koch, International) many CDs, including the complete Beethoven Piano Concerti performed by Romero and the English Chamber Orchestra.

Currently, Holloway enjoys scientific epistemology, writes fiction and non-fiction and gives lectures on the science of freedom.

[parts of this bio were taken from an interview with Chas Holloway for the Arcata Eye]

–  END  –

World’s Foremost Expert on Science of Society Dies.

Jay Stuart Snelson, scientist, lecturer and writer, died peacefully in San Clemente at 12:15 AM on December 21.

Born in 1936 in Redlands, California, Snelson Graduated in 1959 with a baccalaureate degree from the University of California at Los Angeles.  From 1961 through 1963 he lectured for Coast Federal Savings and Loan Association on the productivity of free enterprise.  During those years, Snelson was also Director of the Anti-Communist Information Center where he lectured on the failure of political collectivism and the success of free market capitalism as the prime creator of human wealth.

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By Chas Holloway

Ayn Rand

Ayn Rand was inspired by heroism. She admired individualism. She wrote about men building skyscrapers, manufacturing steel, carving megacities out of raw earth. In Atlas Shrugged, her most famous novel, the images of monster trains pushing forward, unstoppable, was a metaphor for the forward motion of civilization, itself.

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