How International Times sparked a publishing revolution

How International Times sparked a publishing revolution

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/organgrinder/2009/jul/17/international-times-underground-newspaper

As an archive of International Times launches online, Dugald Baird
looks at the lasting influence of the underground paper

by Dugald Baird
17 July 2009

I wasn't born yet when International Times was launched in 1966, but
­ like many others ­ I felt its impact.

The counter-culture paper, which was published throughout the 1970s
and into the 1980s, helped launch the careers of Germaine Greer, Jeff
Nuttall, Heathcote Williams and John Peel, among others. There were
original stories from writers such as Norman Mailer, William
Burroughs, Alexander Trocchi and Allen Ginsberg. It mixed radical
politics with news and features on literature, drugs and sex. And it
covered the spread of alternative culture across the globe, from the
May 1968 protests in Paris to the Black Panthers to the anti-Vietnam
war movement.

It also had a great sense of provocative, playful humour, visible in
cover lines such as 1967's "Impeach the home secretary", May 1971's
"Super free cut out Jesus mask" and the numerous headlines spoofing
the News of the World, such as 1969's "London bobby turns into a
girl". "Holy cow! It's another dirty commie smut rag!" Captain
America tells readers on the cover of a March 1971 issue.

More importantly, it provided a model for the alternative press. It
was almost certainly an influence on Tony Elliott's decision to
launch Time Out magazine, whose first issue looks almost identical to
IT's "What's Happening" listings section. IT's design (a mixture of
hand-drawn illustrations, typeset text and cutout photographs),
arresting covers and striking logo helped set the graphic tone of its
era. It championed cartoonist Robert Crumb and underground comic
strips such as the Furry Freak Brothers. And it's hard to imagine the
fanzine revolution of the late 1970s, led by Mark Perry's Sniffin'
Glue, without the "do it yourself" aesthetic of IT.

The fortnightly paper also helped spark the development of the music
press in the UK; its launch was partly born out of frustration with
mainstream titles' lack of coverage of underground music. Indeed, it
launched in October 1966 at London's Roundhouse with a gig headlined
by Pink Ployd. In his blog The Wired Jester, journalist Alex Watson
quotes IT co-counder Barry Miles on the motives that spurred the
launch of the paper:

"The idea of anyone from our community writing for the Guardian or
the Times was inconceivable. None of the papers had any popular music
coverage in those days. Our group of people needed somewhere to
express themselves, so in early 1966, Hoppy [John Hopkins] and I
started to put it together. We got the guy who'd been editor of Peace
Times for CND [Tom McGrath], to help, too. He'd gotten freaked out
and left London and gone to live in the countryside, but we got him
to come back."

Miles went on to discuss the paper's writing and distribution:

"IT wasn't properly edited. It depended a lot on people bringing
stuff in. It was the same with distribution ­ anyone could come in a
grab 50 copies, and we just trusted them to bring the money back, and
then they could get some more copies. By 1969, IT's height, we were
printing about 44,000 copies, and it was going out every two weeks or
so, unless we'd been busted or something."

Commercial pressures were clearly always a factor, and the paper had
to hold regular benefit nights in order to stay in print. One of
these, 1967's "14-Hour Technicolour Dream" at London's Alexandra
Palace, featured a stellar lineup including Pink Floyd, Yoko Ono,
Arthur Brown, Soft Machine and others. Having heavyweight supporters
clearly didn't hurt either ­ Watson quotes Miles:

"The first few issues had a lot of serious articles by William
Burroughs about the overthrow of the state. He used it as his
platform to work out his ideas. And there was Ginsberg too. All the
usual suspects. When we were running out of money, I was talking to
Paul McCartney about it, and he said, 'Well, you should interview me,
then you'll get ads from the record companies.' And I thought, 'Hey,
he might be on to something.' So I interviewed him, and then George
Harrison, and then the next week Mick Jagger called up, demanding to
be interviewed too. And Paul was right, we got ads from the record companies."

The interview Miles is describing ran in January 1967, and from later
that year EMI ran ads for bands such as the Beatles and Pink Floyd.
In late 1969, the paper introduced its own regular music supplement, MusicIT.

However, the commercial pressures continued: in February 1972, it
announced that it had decided to move away from the tabloid format
and start life again as a 52-page Rolling Stone-style magazine with a
glossy cover. It explained that while it had started as "the one lone
voice in the wilderness of off-Fleet Street journalism", "there are
now four radical tabloid newspapers fighting for your custom". It
would therefore be focusing mainly on the "general culture" rather
than politics. However, this change lasted only for some half dozen
issues, and the paper soon went back to its radical tabloid format.

Like fellow underground title Oz, whose editors (including Richard
Neville, Jim Anderson and future magazine mogul Felix Dennis) faced
notorious obscenity trials, IT experienced continual harassment from
the authorities. The paper's offices were raided for the first time
in March 1967, when 8,000 copies were seized on grounds of obscenity.
The charges were later dropped. In 1970 it charged with conspiracy to
corrupt public morals by printing gay contact ads in its back pages.
It was convicted in 1972 and temporarily closed down.

Meanwhile, Hopkins, described by a judge as "a pest to society", was
jailed for allowing cannabis to be smoked in his Bayswater flat.
Miles helped organise a full-page advert in the Times in July 1967,
funded by McCartney, that stated the law on marijuana was "immoral in
principle and unworkable in practice". It was signed by the Beatles,
David Dimbleby, RD Laing, Graham Greene, Jonathan Aitken, doctors and MPs.

The paper stuttered to a halt in August 1974; in June 1975, it was
revived when underground paper Maya adopted the IT masthead and the
two titles merged. It continued into its 10th birthday and the punk
explosion, and was published regularly up to about 1978.

IT was relaunched for a few issues in the early 1980s. I first bought
it in 1986, when it had been revived by comedian and writer Tony
Allen and Chris Brook, in Camden alternative bookshop Compendium. IT
struggled on with various one-offs into the 1990s.

Until now, it has been hard to get a look at copies of the paper.
Original 1960s issues, often produced in small print runs, have
become collector's items. But now, backed by Miles and Hopkins, all
the issues are available to view in an online archive.
http://www.internationaltimes.it/

It seems fitting, given the ethos of the paper, that it lives on as
an internet resource: in a sense, the "community" that it once served
has now moved online.

But do you remember International Times in its heyday? Do the covers
in our picture gallery bring any back any memories? Let us know below.
--

In pictures: International Times covers
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/gallery/2009/jul/15/international-times-magazine

.

Somewhere Under the Rainbow [Gathering]

Somewhere Under the Rainbow

http://alibi.com/index.php?scn=feature&di=&story=28435

An admittedly myopic view of the bigger picture

By Maren Tarro
July 16 - 22, 2009

It was sometime after midnight, and a steady, cold rain was falling.
Thunder broke above the mountain ridge, seemingly only feet above my
tent. Neither the stormy symphony nor the pillow wrapped around my
head came close to muffling the combined thumps of more than 100
drums that climbed to a rhythmic cacophony and filled every space in
the dark pine forest. Pounding endlessly day and night, hundreds of
calloused hands struck the stretched skins, hammering out a sort of
heartbeat. It rose and fell, slowed and quickened collectively. At
times it was almost gentle and timid; then, without warning, it built
to a frantic pace. Regardless of the tempo, the primitive palpitation
always sounded as though it was seeking something out. It never ceased.

It was my fourth night in the Santa Fe National Forest, and I'd yet
to grow accustomed to the constant drumming accompanying the more
than 10,000 attendees at this year's national Rainbow Gathering­a
temporary intentional community comprised of hippies, nomads and
Earth children seeking to live in harmony with nature. Actually, I
hadn't managed to acclimate to anything at the gathering. Not the
sounds, not the smells, not the complete disregard for nearly every
societal norm. They call themselves a family, made up of tribes and
clans that travel and live together, some year-round, and some only
part-time. They shun the world as we know it and seek to create their
own using public lands and the First Amendment. They hold smaller
gatherings throughout the year then come together at a different
national forest each year for a huge family reunion.

I had tried being open-minded, empathetic, treating the whole thing
as an anthropological study, but I just couldn't do it. In a
desperate attempt to see eye-to-eye with this Rainbow family, I had
even broken an eight-year hallucinogen-free run and eaten a mixture
of honey and psychedelic mushrooms. But there I was, in the midst of
a mellow trip, further from understanding them than I had been when I
arrived. Their customs, traditions and endless maze of contradictory
beliefs had brought my frustration to a tipping point matched in
intensity by their most frenzied drumming. Though I had planned to
stay for seven days, I was done. I wanted to go home.

Welcome Home

Twenty-six miles from Cuba, N.M., deep in the forest, I parked my
Jeep precariously close to a steep ravine's edge. Having somehow
managed to follow the vague directions nonchalantly offered by a
dreadlocked man wearing a dusty blazer, who steered gatherers into
parking configurations cooked up in his blissed-out head, I pulled
into a spot some 10 miles from his original suggestion. It was a
tight squeeze between a Toyota and a log marking the spot behind me
as decidedly "taken."

From there it took three trips, loaded down with newly purchased
camping gear and hailed by calls of "Welcome home!" to find and set
up camp. My friend Naomi and I were joined by 22-year-old Bonnie and
58-year-old Dave, who we'd arranged to pick up in Albuquerque through
a rideshare board. Bonnie was a Rainbow Gathering veteran who'd
offered to show us the ropes, and Dave was her roommate along for the
experience.

Our campsite was a mile up and down hills from the trailhead. The
distance mattered little when compared to the view. Perched on a
grassy, flower-covered ledge that dropped gently into a tree-filled
valley, the hike seemed worth it. A nearby kitchen called Deep Faith
only verified our decision. Cavernous pots filled with simmering
beans and rice sat atop a fire-baked mud oven and sent steamy aromas
through our campsite. I dropped in on the open-air kitchen and asked
to snap a few pictures. My request appeared to irritate the kitchen
workers; their irritation deepened when I admitted I was from a
newspaper. They turned their backs to me, covering their heads with
their sweatshirt hoods, as I tried to capture the rustic feel of the
handcrafted oven.

Exhausted from miles of trekking through the woods and racing to set
up camp before ominous clouds released their rain, we stuck close to
camp and rested for the night. I became aware of the drums minutes
after snuggling into my sleeping bag. With my eyes closed, I imagined
I was sleeping in a South American jungle on the verge of discovering
a fabled tribe.

Peace, Love and Awkwardness

The morning brought sunshine and a visit from a neighboring camper,
Brent. His ready smile and hint of lingering baby fat epitomized the
rainbow spirit I had read about while researching this nomadic tribe
known as the Rainbow family.

He joined us for tea and admired the valley view for a moment, then
pointed out the slit trench at the bottom of the hill. Affectionately
called "shitters" by the family, the four-foot-long, narrow holes
were as modern as toilets got at the Gathering. It was only minutes
before someone came along and unknowingly gave us a graphic
demonstration of shitter protocol. What a view, indeed.

Brent sent prayers and blessings our way, suggesting I join him the
next day for a nature walk hosted by an herbalist, and headed off to
meet friends. We set out ourselves to see what we could see.

We wandered down the main trail through the trade route, a stretch of
well-worn forest path flanked on either side by family hocking their
wares: hemp necklaces, cigarettes, ramen, crystals, herbs, candy­you
name it. No money is exchanged at the Gathering, only bartering is
allowed. Most vendors had wish lists consisting of items they'd be
willing to trade for. A typical wish list might read, "Bud,
mescaline, shrooms, acid, ride to NYC."

The trail was clogged with people making deals and people just trying
to bum anything for free. Fighting my way through the throngs of
people­some of whom had been in the woods for weeks readying the
campsite­I was occasionally assaulted by body odor so sharp my eyes
watered. Surprisingly, the smell didn't originate from those who
would be described as hippies but rather from gutter punks. Dickens
would have called them street urchins. They were a rough bunch,
sneering and grabbing, their darting eyes observing it all with suspicion.

As we reached the end of the crowd, we came upon a man trading
intangibles. He was offering unconditional love in exchange for funny
dances, cartwheels or silly walks. I managed a vaudevillian trot as I
passed by, starting to feel myself getting into the spirit of things.
I smiled often, and each time someone addressed me as "sister" or
"mama," I responded in kind. I hugged strangers, ignoring the
invasion of my personal space even when those embraces lasted for
minutes at a time, incorporating an awkward intimacy into what should
have been a casual greeting. Babylon­the "real world" in Rainbow
vernacular­began to melt away. I was in the woods with family, and I
was going with it. I mean, if the only requirement for membership was
having a bellybutton, then I qualified. Right?

The Sound of Creation

Mealtimes could be quite a production. Signaled by the blowing of a
conch, Gatherers materialized in the main meadow, streaming out from
the surrounding forest and arranging themselves in concentric
circles. Once assembled, all would join hands and a collective "ohm"
would reverberate through the lush green clearing. Brent explained
the ohm as being the sound of creation. Whatever it was, the
collective hum was not only audible but palpable, as well. Its low
vibration radiated out from ribcages, traveling down outstretched
arms and from hand to hand.

Meals were prepared and served by a number of kitchens with colorful
names like Musical Veggies, Granola Funk and Turtle Soup. They'd make
the rounds, handing out rice balls and ladling vegetable stews
followed close behind by an obviously seasoned Gatherer shouting,
"Yeast! I got your brewer's yeast!"

Bonnie explained the yeast was used to supplement the vegetarian
fare, helping to fill in any nutritional voids. I only partook once.
Receiving a generous "sprinkling," the yeast outweighed my stew,
transforming the already bland portion into a thick, chalky, inedible paste.

Fortunately, after nightfall, several kitchens upped the culinary
ante. Teasing impossibly tasty dishes from roaring fires and letting
out their own sounds of creation, cries announcing their efforts rang
out from the hills.

"Oz has pizza in the woods!"

"Sushi at Deep Faith!"

"Get your asses over to Shut Up and Eat It for deep-fried zuzus!"

Oz' thin-crust pizza was satisfying on many levels. It was perfectly
executed in both crust and sauce, and unlike most of the Gathering's
meals, it proudly displayed meat atop the cheesy slices. More
surprising than the pepperoni was the cooking method. The deep-woods
chefs had managed to heft an actual oven up a steep hill to their
site. Hooked up to propane tanks, the appliance seemed as at home as
it would in, well, a home.

Deep Faith's vegetable sushi was packed with fresh and pickled
veggies, a welcome break from camping's nonperishable fare. But Shut
Up and Eat It stole the show. Gatherers refer to sweet treats as
"zuzus." Shut Up raised the stakes to state-fair standards by
deep-frying battered chunks of caramel apples. The chefs made
candy-studded trail mix look like packing peanuts.

Late-night hunting and gathering excursions became a saving grace for
me. Not only was my palate comforted, but the stunning ingenuity
employed for no other reason than to make others happy most clearly
embodied, at least to me, the rumored spirit of the Rainbow family.

The Calm Before the Storm

I busied myself with camp chores and daily hikes to my car to charge
my phone. In between I joined Brent on the nature walk led by 7Song,
an herbalist from Ithica. He possessed a refreshing amount of
cynicism, telling us, "Even though my name is 7Song, get rid of your
Native American fantasies. I'm a Jew from New York."

As he pointed out native plants and described their uses, he was
careful to warn against using them irresponsibly. Cradling an osha
plant's lacy blossom, he quizzed the 50 or so students on its Latin
name, praised it for its ability to relieve altitude sickness and
cautioned would-be herbalists to not be overeager in prescribing.
Pointing out that any herb could interact differently with
pre-existing conditions or the use of other medications, he wasn't
shy about expressing his belief that Rainbow Gatherers were likely to
disregard his advice and gobble up anything growing like it was Tylenol.

I sat in on massage circles, tranced out to drum circles, carried
wood to community fires, donated money for community food and
supplies, endlessly bummed out cigarettes and otherwise did my best
to be an active participant.

I even became a one-woman candy patrol, handing out nearly 300 Dum
Dums that I'd brought in from Babylon to the muddy, the young, the
naked and the stoned. It was as I strolled about, distributing
lollipops just for the hell of it, that my frustration began to peak.

It was July 4, Interdependence Day, a day set aside for morning
silence and praying for peace followed by nonstop partying. The
morning silence was observed by some. Others just took to whispering.
Rain drenched the Gatherers and turned the camp to a mud slick. Many
took refuge beneath trees, umbrellas and plastic ponchos, while
others didn't even don basic clothing.

Despite the downpour, Gatherers were determined to celebrate. The
morning silence was broken by yet another ohm chorus, a children's
parade through the meadow, and drumming, dancing and all other forms
of revelry.

Handing out candy, I got a chance to encounter nearly every type of
Gatherer. Some were excited by the free offering, some were
uninterested. Some were disgusted at the sight of refined sugar on a
stick, some only accepted after verifying they were
vegan-appropriate. More than a few accepted my offer with a healthy
amount of suspicion, and several of the gutter punk variety snatched
the candies quickly as though I might change my mind and rescind the offer.

My bag emptied, I once again headed to my car to plug in my phone and
enjoy a little air-conditioning. I struggled up the muddy hills,
slipping and sliding all along the way. Approaching my car, I noticed
something wasn't quite right.

Lost in Translation

It seemed I had unknowingly broken a rule, a rule of the unorganized
organization's gathering, which professed to have no rules.

My first indication was a hazy coating of some substance on my
windshield. I assumed it was tree sap, but I quickly realized no
trees hung over my car. Puzzled, I slid into the passenger seat and
set to charging my phone. As I settled into the seat, I turned my
head to gaze out the driver's side window, and there it was. Scrawled
across two windows was the description of my sin, "To the shit who
parked in a supply vehicals [sic] parking spot / your [sic] lucky I
didn't slash your tires."

The message was written in a gooey, translucent substance. As I
wondered what had been used to so succinctly spell out my
transgression, my eyes fell on a tube of Carmex shoved into the frame
of my side-view mirror.

OK.

I was officially pissed. My car had been parked in the same spot for
four days. I had been told by someone with some air of authority to
park in that spot. I had been careful to not park in the log-marked
spot. What the fuck had I done to deserve greasy, petroleum-based vandalism?

I sat in my car for an hour going over the week's events. I felt
certain I had done my best to understand the Gathering and contribute
to it. Sure, at the end of each day I had been exhausted and
increasingly fed up with the Gatherers' idiosyncrasies. I struggled
to find it charming when I realized clocks were unwelcome, that
scheduled events happened when they happened. I tried not to judge
when I came across small children covered in dirt and snot, wearing
filthy clothes and no shoes. Each time I was scolded for small
infractions like using a flashlight, carrying a camera or not
sounding a warning when police were spotted, I smiled and adjusted.
When people let their dogs shit all over the place, causing the
meadow to turn into a fecal minefield, I simply held my nose and
watched my step.

I had struggled to understand why marijuana, LSD, peyote and
mushrooms were welcome but hard drugs and alcohol were frowned upon.
Why, if all were welcome and there were no rules, were drinkers kept
by the parking lot separate from the larger Gathering?

I tried to empathize with Gatherers' animosity toward Forest Service
and law enforcement officers. Hundreds of Gatherers were pulled over,
searched and issued citations for offenses ranging from dirty license
plates to possession. Bonnie had been busted for less than two grams
of weed and insisted the officers had no probable cause to search the
vehicle she was riding in. My own encounters had been peaceful until
a Forest Service agent tried to put the fear of God in me by giving
my car, parked on that ravine's edge, a forceful shove while I sat in
it. I hugged the dashboard as he walked off laughing. But I grew
tired of the Gatherers taunting the officers and shouting obscenities
when their target was a group of officials who had formed a search
party interested only in locating a Gatherer's missing 4-year-old daughter.

Perspective

To be fair, not everything contributing to my frustration was the
Rainbow's doing. Wet clothes and bedding were dragging me down, and
an angry sunburn wasn't helping. Naomi had taken a tumble on her way
to the shitter, injuring her leg and slowing us all down. Ants,
termites, biting flies and mosquitoes assaulted us day and night, and
thick mud clung to our shoes. A lack of privacy and bathing lent to
our discomfort.

It wasn't all bad. Each night I returned to camp and unloaded my
misery on the always gentle Brent. He would consider my complaints
then encourage me to give the Rainbow another chance. From his point
of view, the Gathering was a successful experiment in communal
living, while I didn't see much difference between the Gathering and Babylon.

In both places, some people worked tirelessly to build and maintain
the community while some seemed only to greedily reap what had been
so diligently sowed. Both places were home to loving individuals and
a disproportionate amount of assholes. Both places walked a thin line
between embracing nature and holding it at bay.

My final evening saw Brent and me once again hashing out our opposing
perspectives. He was sticking to his ideals; I was sticking to my
pragmatism. As the electric charge of psilocybin crept through the
center of my bones, I agreed to search out the Rainbow's meaning one
last time. A vivid rainbow appeared above us, causing Brent to leap
up, certain it was an omen. I laughed along with him and we made our
way to a bonfire seeking warmth and common ground.

The End of the Rainbow

I'd love to end my tale by telling you I connected with the universe
and discovered a pot of warm fuzzies at the end of the rainbow, that
I communed with the Great Spirit and received deliverance from my
many conflicts, but I can't. Instead, I found myself once again
surrounded by street kids. I stared into the fire as steam rose from
my soggy shoes, floating through my final hours in the forest while
my scraggly brothers and sisters debated the finer points of scamming
the welfare system and offered advice as to the most effective ways
to blow up squirrels and pigeons.

I retreated to my damp sleeping bag, wrapped myself in a blanket of
drumbeats and sought refuge in the knowledge that I would be heading
home in the morning. I felt no shame in cutting out two days early,
only relief. I would pack my impressions of Bonnie and Brent into my
bag, taking them home as souvenirs. They had been patient
ambassadors, Rainbow representatives charged with translating a
strange culture into an experience that could be grasped by a cynical
Babylonian. They did their damnedest. But no amount of sage smudging
or meditating in nature could convince me to apply for citizenship.
My allegiance lies with Babylon and all its horrific, materialistic
glory. Things might be screwed up here, even tragic, but we're aware
of our faults and trying to overcome them; we're not hiding from them
in the woods hoping they'll just go away.

.

Woodstock at 40

[2 articles]

Woodstock at 40:
Celebrate fest's B-day with books, concerts & new film

http://www.philly.com/dailynews/features/20090714_Woodstock_at_40__Celebrate_fest_s_B-day_with_books__concerts___new_film.html

By JONATHAN TAKIFF
Philadelphia Daily News
takiffj@phillynews.com 215-854-5960
Jul. 14, 2009

SEVERAL OUTDOOR, multi-day music festivals were held in the summer of
'69, including, in our own back yard, the Atlantic City Pop Festival
at the shore town's racetrack.

All were celebrating a seismic explosion in conscious rock - music
spirited by the Beatles, Bob Dylan and "the movements" (anti-war,
civil rights, feminist, ecological, psychedelic) and proffered by the
likes of Jefferson Airplane, Santana, Janis Joplin, the Who,
Creedence Clearwater Revival, Canned Heat, Joe Cocker and the Band.
Simultaneously, this surge of oversized shows served as a coming of
age and coming together for the just-emerging baby boomer generation
that would embrace its new stars as countercultural heroes.

The biggest, baddest and most legendary music fest of all was
Woodstock, a venture "created for wallets . . . designed to make
bucks. And then the universe took over and did a little dance."

So quipped Wavy Gravy, performance artist and front man for the famed
Hog Farm commune, which gently policed and fed the festival.
Woodstock pilgrims - anywhere from 300,000 to "half a million
strong," depending on who's counting - clogged the New York State
Thruway and turned the cow pastures of Sullivan County, N.Y., into an
instant city on Aug. 15-18, 1969. They suffered rain and famine of
almost biblical proportions - enough for then-New York Gov. Nelson
Rockefeller to declare the site a disaster area. Yet, through it all,
festivalgoers never lost their sense of cool or their kindliness
toward one another.

The Woodstock festival wasn't just the lead story for a day or two.
Captured first note to last by sound engineer Eddie Kramer, and
visually (pristine fields to muddy mess) by a camera crew led by
Michael Wadleigh, the epic event would soar to legendary stature,
dwarfing that other historic '69 summer happening, man's first walk
on the moon.

Even those in attendance came to rely on Wadleigh's pointedly
political, three-hour film document - first released in theaters in
March 1970 - to define what the newly anointed "Woodstock Nation" was
all about. "Most of what I know of the festival, I saw in the movie,"
said Joel Rosenman, one of the event's four producers, who was stuck
in an office all weekend, dealing with "life and death" issues.

And millions more who would dose just on the movie (considered the
best documentary ever) and soundtrack albums would likewise become
imbued with Woodstock's spirit - those calls to rock free, get back
to nature, make love, not war, expand your mind . . . so much so
that, when asked, they too would swear, "Yeah, I was at Woodstock."

This summer, you can be there too, even better than before. To mark
the festival's 40th anniversary, Woodstock is being revisited and
celebrated anew with treasure troves of freshly unearthed
performances, insightful books, commemorative concerts and a
promising new feature film.

"Woodstock was a ray of hope in a dark time, and today, it can be
that again," believes the festival's most visible creator, Michael
Lang. "It's telling that Barack Obama's inaugural celebration was
characterized as 'Washington's Woodstock.' "

Video verite

The place to start our magical mystery tour is still Wadleigh's
documentary, "Woodstock - 3 Days of Peace & Music," just re-issued by
Warner Home Video in a new, high-resolution, Blu-ray disc form (as
well as conventional DVD) in that extended, four-hour director's cut
edition first let loose at the 25th anniversary mark.

A limited-edition "ultimate collector's" treatment packs cute touches
like a wrapper of fringed buckskin - a major Woodstock fashion
statement. But the really big deal here is a new bonus disc with an
extra 2 1/2 hours of concert footage, including a big helping of
Creedence Clearwater Revival and a 38-minute grind through the
Grateful Dead's "Turn on Your Lovelight," two bands missing from the
movie due to artistic and business "differences."

Newly mixed by Kramer in 5.1-channel sound - a neat feat since he
only had seven tracks of band music to juggle - and freshly edited
and sharpened for high-def viewing (more obviously so than the
movie), this extra content brings us closer in spirit and endurance
to the six-hour marathon that Wadleigh first intended to foist on the
world "in two, three-hour or three, two-hour chunks," he told me at a
recent launch party for the video disc set.

Even 40 years later, this long-haired director still relishes
recalling how he stuck it to the man, breaking into a Warner facility
and spiriting away the "Woodstock" negative, then threatening to burn
it after hearing that a studio exec wanted to cut the movie down to a
typical, 90-minute running time.

More musical discoveries

Also enhancing our virtual festivalgoing experience are a series of
five new "Woodstock Experience" CDs from Sony Legacy that deliver the
complete Woodstock performances - previously heard only in truncated
form - of five label notables. Each is paired with the musical act's
big studio album of the same year.

Janis Joplin's performance with her then new, soul revue-style band
sounds snappier than on-site reviewers suggested. Another Texas
bluester, Johnny Winter, was in sturdy form. Best of show Sly and the
Family Stone were at absolute peak powers, blazing a funk-rock trail
still being tread by the minions.

And the Jefferson Airplane's trippy, 90-minute, dawn-on-Sunday set
was way better than the musicians believed at the time, or their
overly fatigued audience could appreciate. Conversely, not all of
Santana's Latin fusion coming-out party at Woodstock proves as
legend-making as the fiery "Soul Sacrifice" finale spotlighted in the film.

By the way, Sony Music Entertainment also is the driving force (with
Woodstock Ventures) behind a new Web site, Woodstock.com, a place to
get back in touch with the music, those still-relevant issues and
maybe that hippie chick you lost in the garden.

Want more?

Along with reissues of the multi-disc "Woodstock" and "Woodstock 2"
soundtrack albums that sold millions back in the day, Rhino is about
to unload (on the anniversary of the festival's last day, Aug. 18)
"Woodstock: 40 Years On: Back to Yasgur's Farm."

This four-years-in-the-making, six-disc, 77-song (plus numerous sound
bites) box set is the first to deliver festival performances in
precise running order (Wadleigh's film took liberties to build
themes) and includes 38 numbers never heard before.

"40 Years On" co-producer Andy Zax said that on first surveying the
tape treasure trove, he contemplated putting out a 30-disc set
covering the whole shebang - good, bad, whatever. While sanity
finally prevailed, Zax still went for a "warts and all" approach,
including unvarnished festival performances of Canned Heat, Arlo
Guthrie and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young tunes that Wadleigh felt
compelled to replace with other recordings for the movie.

Noteworthy here are the Dead's cosmic "Dark Star" and a raga in the
rain by Ravi Shankar that didn't make the flick because the sitarist
ordered cameramen off the stage.

Woodstock by the book

While listening to all that good stuff, dig into one of the new books
focused on the festival.

Breeziest read is the handsome coffee table tome "Woodstock: Three
Days That Rocked the World" ($35, Sterling) that also tracks the
weekend in chronological fashion, with striking photographs and
large-type quotes that are easy on the eyes for the target boomer set
and for read-alongs ("Gimme an 'F' . . . ") with the grandkids.

This is an official publication of the Museum at Bethel Woods Center
for the Arts, a $100 million facility located on the festival site in
New York. Still, the book isn't a total suck-up, allowing feisty
fumers like Pete Townshend and Neil Young to repeat their objections
to the star-making machinery. (Townshend's "Won't Get Fooled Again"
was a festival retort.)

For those who want to relive the "Hey, let's put on a show!" thrills
and tribulations - and there were many of both - concert brainstormer
Michael Lang has at last spilled his guts, "because they asked me,"
in "The Road to Woodstock" ($29.99, Ecco). This writer relished the
tales of Lang's run-ins with the fiercely competitive concert
promoter Bill Graham, and the down-to-the-wire negotiations with
Warner Bros. to fund the film, spirited by festival co-producer Artie
Kornfeld and his buddy Fred Weintraub, the newly named movie studio
exec who'd formerly run the Bitter End music club.

A fractional share the film and album profits eventually helped the
concert producers wipe out a $1.6 million debt from their reluctantly
turned "free" festival a mere 10 years later, Rosenman shared.

"The only one who really got rich off Woodstock was [documentarian
Michael] Wadleigh," claimed Kornfeld.

While not on site, New York FM rock DJ Pete Fornatale was clearly on
the Woodstock wavelength: He juggles scores of snappy anecdotes from
pundits, performers, production principals and showgoers as "Back to
the Garden: The Story of Woodstock" ($24.99, Touchstone). Oddly, he
allows the late Graham to anoint himself a festival savior. But there
are other enjoyable stories about talents who fell into Woodstock
almost by accident - like John Sebastian, Melanie and doo-wop
revivalists Sha Na Na - and came out as stars.

"We were paid $300 for our Woodstock performance and a token fee of
$1 to be in the movie, which worked out to 8 cents a guy," Sha Na
Na's Jocko Marcellino told me. "And while the movie [largely edited
by a just-out-of-NYU Martin Scorsese] makes it appear we were on
early in the festival, they kept putting us off. We finally got on
second to last Monday morning, just before [Jimi] Hendrix. The place
was decimated, looked like a refugee camp. But getting into the movie
was the best career move ever."

Concerts, film tributes

Still haven't had enough? Two touring concert packages aim to
recapture the Woodstock spirit.

On Aug. 4, Glenside's Keswick Theatre hosts "Hippiefest: A Concert
for Peace & Love" with other stars of the era (like the Turtles and
Felix Cavaliere) who, um, weren't actually at Woodstock.

On Aug. 18, appropriately, the Mann Center hosts "The Heroes of
Woodstock" with remnants of Canned Heat, Ten Years After, Jefferson
Starship, Country Joe McDonald and ex-Grateful Dead keyboardist Tom
Constantine, among others.

Also in the tribute vein, Bucks County's Bristol Riverside Theatre is
putting together a revue called "Woodstock at 40," running July 16-26
and built on festival faves like Joplin's "Piece of My Heart" and
Cocker's take on "With a Little Help from My Friends," which summed
up the weekend for many.

On Aug. 28, Ang Lee's film "Taking Woodstock" offers a little-known
but true tale of a guy named Elliot Tiber (played by Demetri Martin)
who saved the festival by coming up with a permit and new location
after the event had been kicked out of two other towns.

That last-minute move explains why small items like ticket booths and
a stage roof never got built, and the whole show had to be
illuminated by just a dozen or so spotlights.

Future fest?

Both Joel Rosenman and Michael Lang hint that an officially
sanctioned commemorative concert will "eventually" be held to mark
the big 4-0. Maybe their Woodstock Ventures' "summer of love" product
tie-ins with Target could lead to more?

But the steadfastly cause-centric and image-protecting Wadleigh made
a big stink about a soft drink company's sponsorship of the last,
30th-anniversary-celebrating Woodstock festival, also sadly recalled
for its ugly setting (a decommissioned military base in Rome, N.Y.),
preponderance of thuddish metal bands and fire-fueled riots.

"There isn't a single corporate logo visible anywhere in my movie,"
Wadleigh snorted.

"Woodstock was the antithesis of what the music industry turned into.
And if anyone tries to tie another Woodstock festival to an obnoxious
sponsor, I'll be out protesting again." *

--------

DVD: 'Woodstock' delivers a lot to love

http://www.newsok.com/woodstock-delivers-a-lot-to-love/article/3385741

40th anniversary 'Director's Cut' brings definitive documentary about
landmark 3-day concert to home screens

By Gene Triplett
Published: July 17, 2009

Tickets for the Woodstock Music and Arts Fair were $7, $14 and $18 in
advance for one, two or three days.

For those prices, you could witness performances by Jimi Hendrix;
Janis Joplin; The Who; Santana; Crosby, Stills & Nash (with a guest
appearance by Neil Young, who refused to be filmed); Joan Baez;
Jefferson Airplane; Sly & the Family Stone; Arlo Guthrie; Country Joe
& the Fish; Ten Years After; Richie Havens and John Sebastian just to
name quite a few, and all on one stage, in the middle of a cow
pasture owned by a Bethel, N.Y., farmer named Max Yasgur.

That seemed moderately pricy in August 1969, especially for many
longhaired free spirits who seldom were flush with so much spare
change. But eventually the fences were cut, and the freeloaders
flooded in to turn the festival into a small city of nearly "half a
million strong" as the Joni Mitchell-penned CSNY hit goes.

It was the crowning moment in the late-'60s counterculture movement
against the war in Vietnam and the period's racial strife. It was a
movement ­ from then on dubbed the "Woodstock Nation" ­ that pleaded
for universal love and understanding and enhanced its hopefulness by
getting high and grooving to some of the greatest music ever to come
out of rock, and rock fused with folk, jazz and blues.

And this was its peak celebration, miraculously peaceful considering
the unexpectedly massive number of people who found themselves
struggling against poor sanitation, inadequate first aid provisions,
bad weather and food shortages.

Some came in the true spirit of peace and love; others just showed up
for the sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll. Almost everyone got muddy.

Director Michael Wadleigh captured it all on film for the 1970
Oscar-winning documentary "Woodstock," and the 40th anniversary
edition DVD, "Woodstock ­ 3 Days of Peace and Music: The Director's
Cut," brings bonus flower-power euphoria to the home screen ­
preferably a very large, high-def screen hooked up to a 5.1 surround
sound system.

It's the closest one can come to experiencing the visual and aural
splendor of the sweeping, frequently split-screen version originally
shown in theaters and never intended for tragically limited standard
television screens.

And the bonuses range from generous to extravagant, depending on
which version one can afford or is willing to pay for. The limited,
numbered Blu-ray and DVD "Ultimate Collector's Edition" versions
contain two extra hours of performance footage, some of it newly
discovered, much of it never before seen, including performances from
Baez, Santana, The Who, Jefferson Airplane, Country Joe McDonald,
Canned Heat, Joe Cocker and five (Creedence Clearwater Revival, Paul
Butterfield, Grateful Dead, Johnny Winter and Mountain), who played
the festival but never appeared in any film version.

The "Ultimate" package also includes a third hour of bonus material
featuring interviews with Martin Scorsese (one of the original
editors of the film), Wadleigh, Hugh Hefner, Eddie Kramer (chief
on-site engineer and Hendrix producer-engineer) and others involved
in the film and concert production. Other segments include "3 Days in
a Truck, No Rain! No Rain! No Rain!" and "Living Up to Idealism."

Other extras in the limited box include a 60-plus-page reprint of a
Life magazine commemorative issue, a Lucite lenticular display of
vintage festival photos, festival memorabilia and an iron-on patch
with the dove and guitar Woodstock emblem.

The Blu-ray "UCE" sells for $69.99, and the loaded DVD sells for
$59.99. Then there's the no-frills two-disc "Special Edition" going
for $24.98, about the same price of a three-day pass bought at the
Woodstock gate Aug. 18, 1968, the first day of the festival. It
offers the same remastered picture and sound, without the extra
performances or mementos.

Still, it's almost worth the extra bread to check out John Fogerty
and Creedence ripping through "Born on the Bayou," "I Put a Spell on
You" and "Keep on Chooglin'," a hulking Leslie West and Mountain
tearing off "Beside the Sea" and "Southbound Train," Winter
speed-riffing through "Mean Town Blues" and the Airplane flying "3/5
of a Mile in 10 Seconds."

At any price, you can revel in some of the most glorious moments of
an idealistic age when anything and everything positive seemed
possible, and/or grieve over the fact that it all seems "a long time
gone." Then take solace in the knowledge that this music is still
alive and well, and timeless.

.

The Weather Underground

The Weather Underground

http://www.examiner.com/x-13438-Boston-Indie-Movie-Examiner~y2009m7d17-The-Weather-Underground--The-Maine-Independent-Film-Festival-in-Portsmouth-NH

July 17, 2009
by Joel Bocko

[On Saturday, July 18 at the Music Hall in Portsmouth, NH, The
Weather Underground will be screened and followed by an appearance by
Mark Rudd, a member of the group and participant in the film who will
take questions regarding himself and the documentary. This will be
part of the Maine Independent Film Festival at the same location,
which will be written about on this site tonight. The event itself
will also be analyzed in a follow-up piece on The Weather
Underground, to appear on Sunday. In the mean time, here is a piece
written for my blog as part of a political movie series. The content
has been moderately revised.]

"You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows."
-Bob Dylan, "Subterranean Homesick Blues"

"We're against everything that's 'good and decent' in honky America.
We will burn and loot and destroy. We are the incubation of your
mother's nightmare."
-"J.J.", member of the Weather Underground, as relayed in The
Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage

"Dig it! First they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the
same room with them, then they even shoved a fork into the victim's
stomach. Wild!"
-Bernardine Dohrn, member of Weather Underground, wife of Bill Ayers,
on the Charles Manson murders

"They knew they were crazy...Terry [Robbins] and Billy [Ayers] had
this Butch Cassidy and Sundance attitude-they were blessed, they were
hexed, they would die young, they would live forever, and at their
most triumphant moment they would look over their shoulders, as Butch
and Sundance looked back at their implacable pursuers, and say more
in admiration than in dread, 'Who are those guys?' I believe they
thought they looked cute, and that everybody would know it was
basically a joke. The next minute, they were lost in it and couldn't get out."
-Carl Oglesby

"You don't need a proctologist to know who the assholes are."
-Popular saying amongst Students for a Democratic Society

The Weather Underground, the only domestic terrorist group to take
its name from a Top 5 hit on the Billboard charts, became - briefly -
a household name again during the 2008 election (thanks to Bill
Ayers, once a member of the defunct left-wing cadre, now a Chicago
education reformer who has crossed paths with Barack Obama). The
Weather Underground, an excellent 2002 documentary, is a decent
starting point for anyone curious about the group; though somewhat
sympathetic to the radicals (you won't find that Manson quote
anywhere in the film) the upshot is that it solicits interviews from
many of the Weather big shots. This offers a look into the group and
its history which veers from funny to scary to pathetic, but is never
less than fascinating.

Indeed, the possibilities for compelling stories in this material are
endless. The film begins by thrusting us into the midst of
late-sixties tumult. The Vietnam War has been raging for years, the
nonviolent civil rights movement has given way to black militancy,
and the student Left - at the height of its power - splits into
different factions. One of the most notorious is the Weathermen, and
at first they seem to be something of a joke, striking the
Marxist-Leninist pose half-ironically as if they can't quite convince
themselves that privileged white students are somehow equivalent to
Vietnamese guerrillas. They declare a desire to "bring the war home"
but while Asian hamlets are being napalmed, they hold orgies in order
to "smash monogamy" and destroy any last semblance of bourgeois conservatism.

At what point does the self-indulgent revolutionary play-acting
become real? The exact turning point is hard to determine, but by
early 1970 at least one faction of the Weathermen was building bombs
with the intention of killing people. A crossed wire prevented what
would have been the worst terrorist attack on U.S. soil (the bomb,
studded with nails, was intended for a dance at Fort Dix) and the
Greenwich Village townhouse went up in smoke, along with three
Weatherpeople. As former SDS president Todd Gitlin (who also appears
in the film, comparing the WU to Hitler, Stalin, and Mao) mercilessly
puts it in his book: "The best to be said for the Weathermen is that
for all their rants and bombs, in eleven years underground they
killed nobody but themselves."

It was actually after the townhouse explosion that the group
officially went underground, declaring that they would go out of
their way to destroy only property, not people, from now on.
Throughout the early seventies they planted bombs, including in the
Capitol and the Pentagon, sent out manifestos, and even sprang
Timothy Leary from prison. In 1976 they showed up in an Emile de
Antonio-Haskell Wexler film, Underground, which is depressing to
watch now. With the camera shooting the back of their head, they
drone monotonously about how the revolution is closer than ever,
sounding bored with their own ideas. One by one, they re-emerged into
a changed world, and the footage of Bernardine Dohrn emerging in
1980, shot on video with everyone dressed in early 80s fashion, has
the shocking quality of Rip Van Winkle.

This vibe was cultivated in the excellent 1988 Sidney Lumet film
Running on Empty, about a family that is still in hiding 20 years
after a botched bombing left a man blind. Though the movie ups the
ante on the violence its protagonists had committed, it also portrays
them as liberal humanists and loving parents. What's missing is the
obvious fanaticism of the Weather Underground, their love of abstract
theories and militant slogans and revolutionary stardom. Also missing
is the cold, almost zombielike trance they eventually slumped into,
evidenced in Underground...it's hard to shake the impression that if
most of these radicals had ever attained power they wouldn't have
been planting flowers and humanizing communities but rather sending
their enemies into gulags or re-education camps (or worse). But that
may give them too much credit; as they swing from one emotional
extreme to another, they hardly seem to know where the hell they're
headed. One Black Panther, regarding their buffoonish random violence
with disbelief, berates their organization as "Custeristic."

All this makes for a great story, with swings from romantic
revolutionary fervor to choking paranoia to that cold, empty morning
when unemployed college graduates realize that a decade has passed
them by and they are sitting on a park bench, pretending to be
revolutionaries and getting absolutely nothing done. There's
something humorous in this realization and at times The Weather
Underground suggests a sublime black, and bleak, comedy. Sometimes
the humor is broad parody - when one Weatherwoman whines about
cutting her hair after her comrades had just blown themselves up in a
botched bombing, you can't believe your ears. At other times we
approaches sharp satire - some of the slogans have to be heard to be
believed and the image of wimpy white college students psyching
themselves up to be street fighters is priceless. And occasionally
the humor has a poignant edge (Mark Rudd emerges from hiding and his
father says, "he's 30 now, too old to be a revolutionary.")

There was always an incredible tension in the countercultural left,
exacerbated in the Weather Underground, between the sense of personal
liberation and political duty. To what extent was the revolution a
pose, a game that a bunch of privileged romantics were playing until
the rules evaporated and as Oglesby says, "they couldn't get out"?
The film does a good job showing the serious context of the times,
including the shocking brutality of Vietnam, and the crippling sense
of shame that one's own country was responsible for this brutality;
also the violence unleashed on black Americans, and the guilt of
white middle-class kids who realized that they could never, ever
experience the same share of desperation. But, scored as it is with
Aphex Twin electronica, The Weather Underground doesn't quite capture
the joyousness of that time, of what it must have been like to be
young and feel that the world was transforming around you,
crystallized in rock 'n' roll and a youth culture which made the
transition from teenage rebellion to political revolution seem like a
natural progression. Many of the Weathermen saw themselves as rock
stars, and the film touches on this when Todd Gitlin notes the Bonnie
and Clyde vibe that some of the revolutionaries cultivated.

As a result, intoxicating experiments with drugs and sex were all
wound up with street violence and the romance of the doomed outlaw.
There's a mystical aspect to all of this - as ludicrous as it sounds,
the recollection of a car barreling down a highway while tripping
radicals conducted an orgy within is oddly captivating. One can see
how impossible it may have been to separate the fun from the serious,
the excitement from the responsibility - there's the sense that the
radicals themselves were never really sure where one stopped and the
other began. An antecedent to their confusion is Godard's great La
Chinoise, a vibrant piece of Pop Art in which the Mao-spouting
student revolutionaries play-act at revolution and then seem to
regard their own violent actions with disbelief. Revolution as
performance art, or vice-versa, I suppose, but the charm ends where
the damage begins.

Had another bomb detonated at the wrong time, had someone not
received the message to evacuate a building, there could easily have
been more victims of Weather violence. And meanwhile, what did their
bombing achieve? If anything it furthered the dissolution of a viable
antiwar movement, encouraged the government to crack down on the
Left, and soured public opinion against "those radicals." Some of the
Weather veterans realize this, and their recollections drip with
regret. Mark Rudd, now a math teacher at a community college, admits
that he feels more confused than anything else when looking back on
those years. He's ashamed that he succumbed to violence, but
remembers the rage that drove him and the knowledge that something
terrible was going on in the world, and acknowledges that he still
doesn't know what to do with that.

Ayers, Dohrn, and most of the others come off as unregretful. Some of
them have gone on to professional success in academic circles, and
still spout leftist rhetoric while leading comfortable bourgeois
lives. Others speak nostalgically of the past and seem to regard it
as a big fun adventure. Probably the most likable interviewee is
Brian Flanagan, a New York City bar owner who seems remarkably unlike
the typical Ayers-type aging leftie, and more like the working-class
guys that the Weather Underground initially sought support from.
Flanagan acknowledges that "the war made us crazy" and regretfully
speaks of how one can do terrible things when one thinks one is in
the right. When asked why he left the organization, he shrugs and
says "it wasn't fun anymore" and that he missed his girlfriend. After
all the grandiose glorification, the honesty is refreshing.

Brian Flanagan is also present in one of the many surreal passages in
the film: a clip from his appearance on "Jeopardy." To these bizarre
mixtures of pop culture, outsider politics, and political reality,
one can now add the cast of "Saturday Night Live" dancing with
Eskimos and a man in a giant moose costume while the vice
presidential nominee raises the roof to shouts of, "You say Obama, I
say Ayers! Obama! Ayers! Obama! Ayers!"

It's a crazy world we live in...
--

IN ADDITION: I'd just like to point you to this fascinating article
from Chicago Magazine.
http://www.chicagomag.com/Chicago-Magazine/December-2006/Sudden-Impact/index.php?cp=1&si=0#artanc
It's about a physical altercation between Flanagan and a Chicago
lawyer during the Days of Rage which left the lawyer crippled for
life and Flanagan charged with attempted murder (he was acquitted).

.

Paul Krassner: Button-pusher redefines obscene

Paul Krassner: Button-pusher redefines obscene

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/07/15/NS9B18L40Q.DTL

Thursday, July 16, 2009
by Justin Berton

To Paul Krassner, obscenity is finally returning to its roots.

A prominent cultural provocateur since the '60s, the 77-year-old
comedian, political humorist, journalist, writer (etc.), says true
obscenity is now evolving into its proper definition: Something that
causes real harm.

Pornography: not obscene.

Running Sarah Palin for vice president? Totally obscene.

"They knew who she was but thought they could cram her down our
throats," Krassner said, noting Palin's stance against using
government funds to pay for rape kits. "And if her daughter got
pregnant (from rape), her daughter would have to ask for a raise in
her allowance just to pay for her kit. That's obscene."

Krassner's latest book of essays, "Who's to Say What's Obscene?
Politics, Culture, and Comedy in America Today," should reach
bookshelves any day now; his previous book, "In Praise of Indecency,"
another collection of musings and rants, has become a fixture in mall
bookstores looking to fling the bird at the Man (it's the book cover
with a large middle finger sprouting from a skyscraper, usually
prominently displayed at the greeting table).

Krassner has been pushing America's buttons all his adult life. As an
omnipresent figure in the '60s, he edited Lenny Bruce's
autobiography, "How to Talk Dirty and Influence People," took LSD
with Timothy Leary (and introduced it to Groucho Marx), rode with Ken
Kesey's Merry Pranksters, co-founded a political party with Abbie
Hoffman and started a magazine with John Lennon and Yoko Ono. He
currently writes columns for High Times magazine and the online
magazine Adult Video News.

"They say I'm 77, but I've got a mind like a 23-year-old," Krassner said.

Since Krassner first started using humor to shine a light on
America's great hypocrisies, the national discourse has shifted
dramatically, he said. Nowadays, mainstream culture has become so
allegedly subversive, it supports two satirical newscasters - Jon
Stewart and Stephen Colbert - and just about everyone owns a
sarcastic take on the state of the world.

"I used to say, 'Irreverence is our only sacred cow,' " Krassner
said, "but now irreverence is a big industry."

Commentary, book signing. 8 p.m. Fri. $19.50. Freight & Salvage
Coffeehouse, 1111 Addison St., Berkeley. (510) 548-1761.
www.freightandsalvage.com.
--

jberton@sfchronicle.com

Walking Mount Tam with Gary Snyder

An Interview With Gary Snyder

Walking Mount Tam

http://www.counterpunch.org/heilig07142009.html

By STEVE HEILIG
July 14, 2009

Mount Tamalpais is Marin's Mount Everest. Although only 2,574 feet
high at the summit, it dominates the county; to get to or from West
Marin from almost anywhere else, you have to go over or around it.

Much has been written about "Tam" and countless photographs taken and
published featuring its image. However, what may prove to be the
ultimate book about Tam does not feature a single photograph.
Tamalpais Walking: Poetry, History, and Prints, published by
visionary Berkeley publisher Heyday Books, is a labor of love by West
Marin artist Tom Killion and the poet Gary Snyder.

Gary Snyder is one of the great literary figures of our time.
Prominent in the San Francisco poetry scene of the 1950s and early
60s; he first gained wider renown as the thinly-fictionalized
primary figure "Japhy Ryder" in one of Jack Kerouac's The Dharma
Bums, published in 1958. But he has long transcended any "beat poet"
label with his prescient ecological and Buddhist thought, and voice
of true "green" values who walks his talk by homesteading in the
Sierra foothills for four decades. Before settling in there, though,
Snyder lived in Mill Valley in the 1950s and 1960s and has been
walking all over Tam for over 60 years.

Tom Killion grew up in Mill Valley and recalls a feeling of awe about
Tam since early childhood. After much education and world travel, he
settled in Inverness, where his woodblock printmaking studio is a
productive source of the many colorful prints that have graced
numerous books and countless walls and exhibits. He first
collaborated with Snyder on their book The High Sierra of California
in 2002.

Killion has been "carving Tamalpais" in both color and
black-and-white prints since the early 1970s, and his first book
featured those early works. Tamalpais Walking is primarily Killion's
project, featuring 60 of his prints, done over decades and done from
vantage points all over the mountain and from all over Marin and the
Bay Area. Killion also contributed essays on his own experiences with
Tam and the mountain's history as well as descriptions of how he
produces his prints.

But at Killion's request, Snyder wrote of his own almost lifelong
experiences all over its slopes, nooks, and crannies. Poetry
pertaining to Tam by Snyder and others is featured throughout. Snyder
is now at work on a book "which will be pretty much a personal memoir
of 20th century trans-Pacific Buddhism." But he still loves to talk
about "Tam."

What is your earliest memory of Mount Tamalpais?

Gary Snyder: I grew up the Pacific Northwest, but actually was born
in San Francisco. My aunt lived in Richmond, and in 1939, the
Treasure Island World's Fair was on. My aunt invited my parents to
send me down to stay down with them in the Bay Area for a month and
get a chance to experience the World's Fair. I was nine years old and
they put me on the train, and for that month I really experienced a
lot of good things, San Francisco, the zoo, the beach and ocean --
and Muir Woods and Mt. Tam. We went over the Golden Gate Bridge,
which was still quite new then, and up to the top of Mt. Tam, and
then spent a day in Muir Woods. And I was suitably impressed.

Impressed enough to come back before you were too much older, right?

Yes, but actually my first experience with Tam after my childhood was
in 1948 when I was passing through the Bay Area on my way back from
working as a seaman in South America. My college sweetheart lived in
San Francisco and I connected with her and we went on a hike all over
the mountain, as described in the book. Anyway, after I finished my
undergraduate work in Portland, I went to Indiana University for a
semester of linguistic anthropology, decided that wasn't what I
exactly wanted to do, and came out to the West coast in the Spring of
1952. I lived for a while in Berkeley, and then enrolled at UC
Berkeley and stayed there until I first went to Japan in May of 1956.
But before I left, I lived for 4 or 5 months in Mill Valley and did a
lot of walking on the mountain then.

It was still legal to camp anywhere up there, right?

Well, I think so, but I'd never asked! I still really don't know if
it was; I read somewhere that it was sometime in the early 70s where
they decided to ban most camping there. But it was not very intensely
managed, other than the state park at Pan Toll. Actually I didn't
sleep up there too many times. It was best for long day hikes anyway.
At that time I was living in Homestead Valley, off Throckmorton, and
I could walk out the door of my little cabin and get onto trail walks
that didn't involve very much walking on pavement at all.

On those hikes did you encounter very many other people hiking?

Only on weekends.

Then it hasn't changed that much in that regard. So you soon got this
concept of walking all the way around in a day ...

Yes, I had all these old maps and had studied them closely. When I
went to Japan there were two big hills nearby called Atago and Hiei.
And the first thing I did was discover how to catch a bus to the base
of the base of Mt. Atago and climb it. There was a Shinto Buddhist
shrine up there; and Mt. Hiei had been for many centuries the
headquarters of the Tendai sect. There were still a lot of temples up
there, and I learned from some of the priests there of one of their
many practices, although one not much done much anymore, which was
circumambulation. This involved going around the mountain by a
certain route for a thousand days. People have been doing that for
centuries; it's an old practice not only in East Asia but also in
North India, Nepal and Tibet. It's a Buddhist practice that is
probably older than Buddhism.

So when I was in India in 1962 with Joanne Kyger (a Marin poet and
Snyder's wife at that time) and Allen Ginsberg, we heard more about
circumambulation. I made a little note to myself to see if we
couldn't find a way to do that elsewhere.

So, back on the West coast in the mid-60s, I connected a route on Mt.
Tam and walked it once or twice by myself, and then took Philip
Whalen [a poet and Zen priest who once lived in Marin] and Allen
Ginsberg together to do it with me. We initiated stops at certain
locations, to chant and blow the conch and such. It was a lot of fun.
This is all described in a book titled Opening the Mountain [by
Matthew Davis and Michael Farrell Scott, with a foreword by Snyder.]
It's become a practice for a fair number of other people since.

So how did you hook up with Tom Killion to start collaborating on
these books of images and words?

I had first met him in the 1960s I think, and he had given me a gift
of his early book Views of Mt Tamalpais. He'd become a passionate
print artist fairly early on. After some years he got hold of me to
do a book on the high Sierra, which was a wonderful project. And
after several more years he said he'd like to do another on Mount
Tam, and I was interested from the start, although we agreed it would
in some ways be a very different book.

What's the main difference?

Tam is used by very many people, and is not a wilderness area like
the Sierra. Tom was already well read about the history of the
mountain, so I started reading up about the history of hiking,
especially in the late 19th century when many people got excited
about it. It was not just done for wilderness travel. William
Wordsworth and his sister walked 30 miles through a rainstorm all
night! People could be really hardy; John Muir was not so special in
that regard. Many people got out to be gold rush miners by walking
the whole way. That's the way most of the world was.

I've trekked around the Himalayas, and there and in other areas
walking still is the primary transport. Yes, it's not weird to walk
long distances -- to not do it is what's weird.

So how many times do you reckon you have circumambulated the mountain?

Oh gosh, I don't know. Others have done it much more. But easily a
dozen, I'd say. There were a lot of other great walks on it though --
when the narrow gauge railroad was working, you could take it over to
Fairfax, get off there, walk across the mountain on the north side on
a trail that would take you over to Stinson, back up over Bolinas
Ridge to Mill Valley, and catch the train back home. Part of that
trail is now obscured by the reservoirs up there, but it was
originally a major Indian trail between Richardson Bay and Bolinas Lagoon.

There was a lot of struggle through the years to preserve Tam from
development and logging; did you study that?

Yes. It's fascinating, really; the mountain has never been that
intensively managed and there is no one single landholding
jurisdiction over it -- it was cobbled together by the good will and
strong spirits of all kinds of people. It's also mostly not the
federal government, other than when William Kent decided to give them
Muir Woods -- and not let them name it after himself, by the way --
and then some parts of it are now in the Golden Gate National
Recreational Area. The efforts of private citizens from different
parts of areas around the mountain combined in various ways to save
it, even though they were often not quite sure exactly what they were
trying to do a lot of the time. The people who had the railroad to
the top also wanted to extend it over to Stinson and Bolinas, but
that got stopped. A developer was going to log and build housing in
Muir Woods until Kent bought it. Then the Marin Water district came
into existence and that saved a good chunk of the north side of the
mountain. Audubon Canyon extends all the way to the top of the
Bolinas Ridge. And so all of this combined to give us a place
where you go walking on trails that were mostly built by volunteers,
and you rarely go through a boundary that says "You have now left
this and entered that." So that's part of the fascination I have with
the social and political history of the mountain.

In the book, there is an ironic observation that a century ago, there
was a 'class' distinction about hiking; if you were rich, you rode
your horses in Golden Gate Park, but if you were of more limited
means, you hiked Mt. Tam.

Right. Once stages and cars came into being, walking started to
become something you only did if you had no other option. But later
it again became something anyone did. But a lot of the early hikers
on the hikers weren't poor; some were influenced by English and
French romanticism. Rousseau was a great walker, and Dickens went for
a ten or 15-mile walk, every night sometimes, throughout London.
Which could have made him crazy.

As for other writers, you first took Jack Kerouac hiking on Tam, right?

Yes I did, several times in the 1950s when I was living in my little
cabin in Homestead Valley. I had already introduced him to hiking in
the Sierra when we went up on the Matterhorn in October of 1955,
which is described in The Dharma Bums -- one of the few things in the
book which is actually close to truth (laughing). And I took Allen on
the mountain, and Philip, anyone I could get my hands on. Jack was a
hardy hiker and old football player, who had no problem laying on the
ground and going to sleep, and after Tam I talked him into applying
for his famous fire lookout job. Allen was thought of as one of these
wimpy Easterners, but he and I did a ropes, ice axes, and crampons
climb of Glacier Peak in the North Cascades in Washington state one time.

Do you have any favorite spots on the mountain?

Well, it's very diverse there, because it has the ocean on one side,
the interior on the East, and microclimates all over. You can go into
a damp drippy redwood grove in one part of the day, and be in cypress
and serpentinian vegetation later. One special place is up in that
basin where Rock Springs used to be, and the serpentine outcropping
just a short walk away. Potrero Meadows is always surprising in its
openness and scope, especially this time of year when it is fresh and
green and wet. The slopes coming up from Muir Woods are very nice,
and to go down the Steep Ravine trail is remarkable. I used to always
come down the absolutely barren rocky trail that would take you down
to Mountain Home, but wisely enough they've closed that as a route
and point you to a more sensible and safer one. And I really love the
old Mountain Theater, which is nearly always empty of people. What
energy they had in those days they had to think they could have a
theatre there and hold full-scale plays. I've sat there and
meditated, just pick any spot on the stone seating, looking out over
the city and bay and sometimes all the way to Mount Diablo.

Do you have any most striking memories of incidents or sightings up there?

You know, my memories are not like I have a single great story; it
might be just a particular hawk or vulture going over, an old tree...
I suppose I could tell a few things I did with girls but that
wouldn't go into a newspaper. It's just a great place to take people,
who may have looked at it from the city or the Bay Bridge, but it's
full of details and endlessly interesting.

As a poet, do you have any favorite poems about Mount Tam, by
yourself or others?

Lew Welch's poems about the mountain, especially some of his final
ones, are really touching [Welch was also associated with the Beats
and lived in Marin in the 1960s before disappearing in 1971; some of
his poems are included in the new book.] He was another person who
really got to know the mountain.

In the new book Killion writes that you avoid using words like
'sacred' about the mountain. Why is that?

I do think the word "sacred" is overused -- in fact, it's thrown
around without treating it sacredly. My ancient mother, who died
recently, always said she was an atheist. I asked her about it one
time and she said "Well, there might be a god, but if there is a god,
it's so powerful, amazing, and beautiful that it would be kind of
disrespectful to say you believed in it!" I really liked that. So,
you also shouldn't have to call wilderness, or a mountain, 'sacred'
in order to have to protect it. Mount Tam is not the High Sierra of
California. It has been a very powerful and perhaps half-unrecognized
influence on the whole Bay Area. Tam is a model for appreciating
nature close at hand and not needing a total icon of pristine
wilderness to get your attention. We can make the most out of all
kinds of areas closer to us. And I hope this book might being some
new people into consciousness about Tamalpais, and they might want to
get out on the mountain and take a real look around.

Coda: Tom Killion of Inverness Dismantles a Myth

Growing up in Mill Valley, Tom Killion's first memory of Tam is "when
I was about seven, and went way up on the fire roads with my
next-door neighbor family, and discovered I could just go right out
the back door and up some flights of steps and be on the trails -- it
was a real adventure." And thus his sense of awe about Tam's slopes.
But as an historian, he did not harbor much awe for the widely told
story of local Native Americans seeing Tam's outline as one of a
'sleeping lady." "It's an invention, one of the 19th-century
creations of the new settlers,' he says. "As the Europeans took over
new parts of America, they seemed to want to create some sort of
'back' story for themselves. And what they did was foist it upon the
people they'd displaced. Here at least it is relatively benign. The
"Sleeping Beauty" story was really popular in the mid-1800s, as the
Brothers Grimm had just published their collection of stories, and
then out came some operas, such as Wagner's Ring Cycle. Germans were
the biggest population group of immigrants in the Bay Area in the
late 19th century, and they loved to go hiking and pioneered the
hiking culture on the mountain."

Killion points out that the first mention in writing of the Sleeping
Maiden or Lady dates to the 1870s, but that the image's creation of
the "Indian" aspect of the story came later. "To make it seem more
authentic, the first generation of kids born and raised in Marin and
San Francisco in the late 1880s and early 1900s started to put it
into poetry and such. There were all sort of invented Indian legends
then; they couldn't quite decide how to view the Native Americans
here, for as long as they were still contesting them for the land
they hated them and it was massacres and genocide, but once they were
subdued and disappeared into the background, they became 'noble
savages'." Killion says it is not surprising that no mention of any
'sleeping maiden" has been found in Native American lore, as "you
just don't find that kind of anthropomorphizing of places around
here." Finally, "People I've talked to here who are descendants of
Miwoks say it was all invented."

"The fascinating thing is how young people in the early 20th century,
already a generation removed from the days when there was much
interaction between Miwok people and the early settlers, wanted this
mountain they loved to somehow have a romantic past. So they came up
with these wonderful adolescent stories -- and the adults grabbed
ahold of it and used it to create a recreational background for their
culture of hiking. One of the Marin kids was actor in the Mountain
Play and the myth found its way into the play in 1921 Still, he
admits, "once somebody says it, you can really see it. It's more
obvious from the East Bay, and in those days many more people were
out on the bay as that's how one traveled then."

Killion "never took any art classes" and is largely self-taught. His
earliest woodcut of Tam dates from 1969 or 1970, done when he was a
teenager as a holiday card for his family. Now, with many layers of
color in his more elaborate pieces, he says a single work can take
him over 300 hours of work. "I tend to expect that I will spend two
months on something, but it often runs to almost four months for
these big color ones," he says. "It's almost like painting with wood
blocks at this point; I get the basics down and keep carving away a
little more, building up the colors, and sometimes have gone up to 15
or more layers."

As for his own favorite spots on the mountain, he lists "out at the
serpentine power point above Rock Sprints, and down along the front
of Bolinas Ridge, most any old place, and an area over on the north
side trail where you have this wonderful flora, madrones with that
beautiful pink bark growing over that grey wacky rock that is all
over Mt. Tam."

Killion has many more spots he loves on Tam, including "Lone Tree
Spring, on the dispea trail -- I'm sure that's what Lew Welch was
thinking of when he wrote that hymn to a spring."
--

This interview first appeared in the Anderson Valley Advertiser.

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1959: The Year Everything Changed

[2 items]

'1959: The Year Everything Changed' by Fred Kaplan

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/arts/la-ca-fred-kaplan19-2009jul19,0,1773067.story

The end of the 1950s was a pivotal time, a cabinet of wonders, the
author contends, that overshadows every other year, including those
of the '60s.

By Zachary Lazar
July 19, 2009

1959
The Year Everything Changed
Fred Kaplan
Wiley: 336 pp., $27.95

When a writer needs a break these days, he picks a year -- 1968 was
popular last year -- and spends a few hundred pages arguing how it's
central to our lives now. This year, we have Rob Kirkpatrick's "1969:
The Year Everything Changed" and now Fred Kaplan's "1959," whose
subtitle makes the same claim. Can it be true of both years? The
answer is yes, of course. That's the thing -- every year is the year.
In just this past June, we saw violent protests in Iran, a coup in
Honduras, the sentencing of Bernie Madoff, the death of Michael
Jackson, and the implosion, via sex scandal, of two Republican
presidential hopefuls. There's always a hailstorm of interest out
there. And the challenge is in making these disparate, interesting
things cohere and produce some sort of larger meaning. The challenge
for a book like "1959" is not simply gathering together all the
interesting data about Kaplan's favorite year -- and it is a
fascinating one -- but in presenting it with a style that's
meaningful and inventive.

Kaplan's premise is certainly a good one. He's arguing that the real
fulcrum of the 20th century and beyond is not -- as many argue -- the
1960s, but the unsung '50s. Forget Woodstock, forget LSD, forget the
peace marches and "I Have a Dream." Forget also Altamont, Vietnam,
race riots and the assassinations of the Kennedys, Malcolm X and
Martin Luther King Jr. "The truly pivotal moments of history are
those whose legacies endure," Kaplan writes. "And, as the mid-forties
recede into abstract nostalgia, and the late sixties evoke puzzled
shudders, it is the events of 1959 that continue to resonate in our own time."

This is an incredibly audacious claim, but it highlights a problem
with this type of book -- casual history, we might call it -- which
never seems to decide if it wants to be really serious or just kind
of fun. A Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, an expert on any number
of subjects both political and cultural, Kaplan is capable of being
as serious as anybody, and yet it's when his book is at its most
serious that it feels least persuasive. What Kaplan really wants to
do, I think, is illuminate some personal icons: Miles Davis and
Ornette Coleman; Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs;
Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns; Norman Mailer, John Cassavetes,
Berry Gordy. Indeed, all of these artists were engaged in radically
important work in 1959, tantamount even to a kind of renaissance. But
then, how do you connect painting or jazz to the invention of the
microchip (March 24, 1959)? Or the Cuban revolution (Jan. 1)? And
what about the civil rights movement (King was in India, Malcolm X in
the Middle East)? Or women?

Kaplan feels obligated to stop at all of these way stations, and this
inevitably forces him to make generalizations ("for all the added
risk and strain and restlessness, the breakaways and breakthroughs of
1959 eased, enriched, and emboldened the conditions and prospects of
American life"). Writing like this often makes us forget that we're
being presented with a cabinet of wonders.

There is John Howard Griffin, author of "Black Like Me," who -- after
helping Jews escape the Nazis, losing his eyesight in a bomb attack,
retreating to a French monastery to study Gregorian chant, regaining
his eyesight -- has his skin artificially darkened so that he can
tour the southern United States as a "black" man and report on how
he's treated.

There is a 31-year-old Fidel Castro eating an ice cream cone at the
Bronx Zoo -- not yet a feared enemy or despot but a kind of folk hero
in a United States that, after Venezuela, is the second country to
recognize his new regime. There is Ornette Coleman with a white
plastic saxophone, playing music so weird that one audience "beat him
up and broke his horn outside the club afterward."

There is Richard Nixon showing Nikita Khrushchev around an exhibition
of American kitchen innovations. "Khrushchev refused to be
impressed," Kaplan writes, "dismissing the Western wonders as either
commonplace ('We have such things. . . . We are up with you on this,
too') or contemptible ('Don't you have a machine that puts food into
the mouth and pushes it down? Many things you have shown us are
interesting, but they are not needed in life. . . . They are merely
gadgets.')." In just a few paragraphs, Kaplan give us the Cold War in
all its Strangeloveian absurdity, Nixon "like a nervous real-estate
agent, trying to close a big sale" and Khrushchev "boisterous,
bellicose, brimming with energy."

At its best, "1959" captures these flavors -- the coining of the word
"aerospace," the finned Edsel, the thin lapels, the dread of the
Bomb. Those who love the AMC series "Mad Men," set just after the
epochal year, will find much to love in Kaplan's book. Where it
stumbles, though, is in its larger argument, its dutiful potted
histories of the civil rights movement, the laws of censorship, the
progress of feminism and other weighty matters. We feel the writer
filling in an outline of what must be included if his book is going
to have a sufficient page length. Neither he nor we are having much
fun, and I wished that Kaplan had found a more radical way to
construct his book, one matching the verve of 1959 itself.

Was I persuaded that 1959 was the year that changed everything? I'll
give Kaplan the microchip, and the Beats, represented here by the
publication of "Naked Lunch" -- nothing in literature after the Beats
has managed to be as radical and popular at the same time. But I'd
bet on Warhol eclipsing any 1950s artist and a certain band from
Liverpool eclipsing him and everybody else (my apologies to the King
of Pop). Which is to say only that the year 1959 was absolutely
great, but maybe not the absolutely greatest.
--

Lazar is the author of "Aaron, Approximately," "Sway" and the
forthcoming "Evening's Empire."

--------

What were you doing in 1959?

http://www.cmonitor.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20090717/OPINION/907170308/1028/OPINION02

That year started a U.S. culture shift

By George Will
July 17, 2009

Fifty years ago, on July 21, 1959, Grove Press won permission to
publish D.H. Lawrence's novel Lady Chatterley's Lover. Two days
later, G.D. Searle, the pharmaceutical company, sought government
approval for Enovid, the birth control pill. These two events, both
welcome, were, however, pebbles that presaged the avalanche that
swept away America's culture of restraint and reticence.

That change is recounted by Fred Kaplan, an MIT Ph.D. and cultural
historian, in 1959: The Year Everything Changed, an intelligent book
with a silly subtitle. There never has been a year - or a decade,
century or even millennium, for that matter - in which everything
changed. There are numerous constants in the human condition,
including (and because of) human nature. Furthermore, pick a year,
any year, in the last, say, 250 and you will find it pregnant with
consequential births and battles, inventions and publications that
made modernity.

Besides, one reason America got into so many messes after 9/11 was
the disorienting mantra that on that day "everything changed." Still,
consider how much 1959 did incubate.

Until into the 1940s, it had been a crime in Massachusetts to sell
Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy, in which Roberta loses her
innocence to a factory foreman. In 1948, the Supreme Court affirmed a
New York court's judgment against Doubleday for publishing Edmund
Wilson's novel Memoirs of Hecate County, which depicted an
extramarital affair. In 1957, the Supreme Court upheld the conviction
of a bookseller for mailing obscene materials, saying that
constitutional protection of free speech did not extend to obscenity,
as determined by the Department of the Post Office, which had its own
judiciary.

The court said, however, that the test of obscenity was "whether to
the average person, applying contemporary community standards, the
dominant theme of the material taken as a whole appeals to prurient
interest." And to be obscene, material must be "utterly without
redeeming social importance."

So, would Lawrence's novel be judged both prurient and worthless?
Barney Rosset of Grove decided to find out by alerting the post
office of his intention to import some copies from Europe. The post
office impounded them. Then a court abolished restraints on sending
them through the mail. Within weeks the novel was a best-seller, as
was Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita. Four months after the United States
slipped the leash of Earth's gravity by putting a satellite into
orbit around the sun, social restraints, too, were being shed.

In July 1959, Searle sought FDA approval to market Enovid for birth
control - not, as in 1957, to treat "menstrual disorders." When
finally the pill reached the market, U.S. News & World Report
wondered whether it would be considered "a license for promiscuity"
and "lead to sexual anarchy." The very idea of "community standards,"
the crux of the Chatterley decision, was becoming problematic.

Kaplan lavishes excessive attention on Norman Mailer, who today seems
marginal. It is a significant datum - signifying today's diminished
importance of words - that the poet Allen Ginsberg's 1959 recitation
at Columbia University caused the sort of commotion that only a rock
group could cause today. But Kaplan's judgment that Ginsberg "saw the
connection between freedom from structures in poetry and freedom from
structures in all of life" merely validates the axiom that everything
changes except the avant garde.

More serious change was coming, born of a mundane material, silicon.
On March 24, 1959, at an engineers' trade show, Texas Instruments
introduced perhaps the 20th century's most transformative device, the
solid integrated circuit, aka the microchip. It would help satisfy
what Kaplan calls Americans' "yearning for instantaneity," a cousin
of the spontaneity ("first thought, best thought" proclaimed
Ginsberg) so celebrated in the next decade.

Kaplan is especially convincing concerning jazz as a leading
indicator of more serious, because more disciplined, cultural
enrichment. On March 2, 1959, Miles Davis began recording Kind of
Blue, perhaps the greatest jazz album. On May 4, John Coltrane
recorded Giant Steps, on May 22, Ornette Coleman recorded The Shape
of Jazz to Come and on June 25, David Brubeck began recording Time
Out. The emancipation of jazz from what Kaplan calls "the structures
of chords and pre-set rhythms" proved that meticulously practiced
improvisation is not an oxymoron.

On July 8, 1959 - two months after President Eisenhower authorized
U.S. military advisers to accompany South Vietnamese units on
operations - in a hut 20 miles from Saigon, eight advisers were
watching a movie.

Viet Cong sprayed the room with bullets, wounding six. Two died, the
first of 58,220.

.

Counterculture Celebrated Throughout Summer in Taos

Summer of Love: Counterculture Celebrated Throughout Summer in Taos

http://www.californiachronicle.com/articles/yb/132912940

July 13, 2009
By S. Derrickson Moore, Las Cruces Sun-News, N.M.

Taos, once one of the planet's grooviest hippie hot spots, is
celebrating the golden alternative counterculture days of yesteryear
with the Taos Summer of Love.

Oscar-nominated actor Dennis Hopper, quintessential "Easy Rider" icon
of the era, was in residence during the 1960s, stirring up excitement
and trouble in Taos. This summer, you'll have a chance to see some of
his original artwork and the man himself, along with creations of
Larry Bell, Ron Cooper, Ronald Davis, Ken Price and Robert Dean
Stockwell at an exhibit at the Harwood Museum of Art, where art and
culture critic Dave Hickey will moderate a panel with Hopper and
other featured artists at 6 p.m. Aug. 1.

More than 300 summer events have been scheduled, including live
concerts, parades, motorcycle rallies, shopping specials, a Hippie
Homecoming, readings and lectures, art shows, festivals and more.

Michael McCormick, owner of Taos' Mike McCormick Gallery, said the
theme has stuck a chord with visitors.

"It is a brilliant theme. The show at the Harwood is stupendous!
Dennis was in town off and on for a long time and still continues to
appear. He eats regularly at the restaurant, Graham's Grill, right
next to the gallery," said McCormick, who added his gallery is among
those having special events this summer. "Our show for Angus
MacDonald was a huge success. We had a six-course dinner for 200 people."

Another insiders' tip: For a good time, visit or arrange to take a
workshop or stay at the

Mabel Dodge Luhan House, erstwhile home of the legendary bohemian
arts maven, as well as Hopper, and visitors who included Georgia
O'Keeffe, D.H. Lawrence, Ansel Adams, Martha Graham and Carl Jung.
Don't miss Lawrence's artworks on the windows of the historic adobe's
upper floor bathroom.

And the Dodge Lujan House gourmet breakfasts are delicious. Info and
reservations: (800) 846-2235 or www.mabeldodgeluhan.com

Taos, one of the country's earliest and most enduring meccas for
1960s counterculture aficionados, seemed a logical site for
celebrating the 42nd anniversary of the original Summer of Love,
which in 1967 attracted tens of thousands to the then epicenter of
flower power, San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury District.

The Taos County Chamber of Commerce will sponsor free live music on
Taos Plaza from 6 to 8 p.m. every Thursday through Sept. 7.

Taos Public Library is celebrating with a Summer of Love Library
Series through Sept. 30. Learn about living and creating in Taos
during the 1960s from John Nichols, Bill Davis, Lisa Law, Rick Klein,
Roberta Courtney Meyers, Pat McCabe and others or pick up a souvenir
Summer of Love bookbag by Taos artists Amy Cordova.

On weekends, watch Harriet Greene sculpt "Peace in Marble" at The
Farnsworth Gallery in Taos. She'll carve large peace letters in
marble with quotes from global peace activists.

Debuting from 10:30 a.m. to 9:30 p.m. Aug. 15 will be the Taos
Mountain Music Festival in the Taos Ski Valley. Joan Osborne, The
Wailers and Ozomatli will headline the first of what organizers hope
will be an annual event, featuring rock, blues, hip- hop, country and
Latin music. Tickets are $35 in advance and $38 on showday. It's free
for kids 10 and under with an accompanying adult. Info:
www.taosmountainmusicfestival.com

Fiestas de Taos, a community celebration honoring the two patron
saints of Taos, Santa Ana and Santiago, runs from July 24 to 26 on
the Taos Plaza. Don't miss the historic parade, mariachis and
traditional dances.

Somos Summer of Love Writer's Series at 7:30 Aug. 14 at Taos Art
Plaza will feature readings by Mark Rudd, former Students for a
Democratic Society leader in the 60s and author of "Underground: My
Life in SDS and the Weathermen," along with Iris Keltz, author of
"Scrapbook of a Taos Hippie." She'll read from "And the Walls Came
Tumbling Down," her new memoir about her Jewish-Palestinian marriage
during and after the 1967 Six-Day War.

In honor of the 2009 Taos Summer of Love, Revolution Records is
releasing a collection of tracks from 16 original independent artists
from New Mexico, California, and Colorado. Proceeds benefit nonprofit
groups. Info: www.imaginerevolution.com

Also on tap: summer chairlift rides, races and music at the Frazer
Mountain Madness Days July 25 and 26, "Peace. Love and Solar Spike
Volleyball," Aug. 1 to 3, wine dinners, a 60s Fashion Show on Aug.
23, Saturday art and movement classes for kids, an Aug. 8 Poetry Dojo
and more.

If you're planning a vacation in Santa Fe, you can book a round trip
shuttle between Taos and the City Different for just $10.

For a complete listing of events, visit
www.taossummeroflove.com/calendar.You can also sign up to win a
$4,000 vacation in Taos at www.taossummeroflove.com/sweeps
--

S. Derrickson Moore can be reached at dmoore@lcsun-news.com

.