Chasing Freedom Remembering the Sixties

Book excerpt: CHASING FREEDOM, REMEMBERING THE SIXTIES, by Marquis Who's Who in the World writer Paul Heidelberg, is a novel about life, art and music in San Francisco during 'The Roaring Sixties." The novel revolves around life at the San Francisco Art Institute, which the author attended for four years before earning a degree in painting and creative writing (Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead studied at the art institute, and Janis Joplin 'flipped burgers" for money in the school cafeteria before attaining rock star status). The book, set in 'The Sixties," which the author considers to have been from about 1965-75, has a painter as female protagonist and a painter and poet as male protagonist. It includes poetry readings at the Coffee Gallery on Grant Avenue, where Janis Joplin had her first paying job as a singer, and incorporates poetry into prose. The book includes the author ́s 'Theory Of Relativity Of Ping-Pong Balls" of people constantly meeting and parting he had formulated while living in Europe. Other characters who figure into the book's progress and conclusion include a sculptor who graduated from art institute in the late 1960s who has an upbeat personality and often ends a sentence with laughter: 'ha, ha, ha, ha, ha." CHASING FREEDOM, REMEMBERING THE SIXTIES includes scenes from wild art exhibition openings, to free performances by such musicians as blues great Charlie Musselwhite (in a San Francisco bar) and Dr. John, who led a New Orleans-style musical parade up Columbus Avenue in North Beach. The book includes scenes in Morocco in 1971, and 'Essouira Peter," a Yale University graduate who had 'tuned in, turned on and dropped out," to Barbayanni in 1960s Greece. Barbayanni, 'Uncle John," lived in the village of Mallia, Crete and wore the black baggy pants, high black goatskin boots and other accoutrements of a proud Cretan - the clothing that had been worn by the grandfather of the writer Nikos Kazantzakis. The great Cretan writer is also an important figure in the book. Another key figure is the Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca. As author Heidelberg writes in the beginning pages of CHASING FREEDOM, REMEMBERING THE SIXTIES, the book is not merely a remembrance of 'The Sixties," but it is also a remembrance of all times when artists and others have been Chasing Freedom, as Federico Garcia Lorca did in the 1920s and 1930s. The novel concludes at a great rock concert in San Francisco. (The price of the book includes a suitable-for-framing Fine Art Print, the cover illustration, created by using modern computer software to alter a photographic transparency taken at the San Francisco Art Institute during ]The Sixties.])