Charles Manson was the real face of 1969

[2 articles]

Forget Woodstock, Charles Manson was the real face of 1969

http://www.thestar.com/news/insight/article/678160

Nostalgia tells us 1969 was the height of hippiedom, when
individualism, non-conformity and the creative impulse reigned. The
dark underside of those ideals gave America a bloody jolt 40 years ago tomorrow

Aug 08, 2009
Murray Whyte
Toronto Star

There's no use going looking for 10050 Cielo Dr. any more. It's gone,
razed more than a decade ago. On the rough, tumbling northern slope
of the San Fernando Valley's western edge, north of Beverly Hills,
the house that stands there now shows a different address.

But that hasn't stopped legions of gawkers from rubbernecking their
way up the scrubby valley wall along Cielo Dr., spectrally still and
remote. It is a macabre pilgrimage, to the place where, 40 years ago
tomorrow, a generation's defining criminal atrocity took place.

Four decades later, the multiple murders of actress Sharon Tate,
eight months pregnant at the time; her former fiancé, hairstylist Jay
Sebring; Voytek Frykowski, a friend of Tate's husband, director Roman
Polanski; and Abigail Folger, the Folger's Coffee heiress, still
resonate with a grim, consuming clarity.

Feel-good nostalgia tells us that 1969 was the height of the hippie,
warm-fuzzy era of peace and love, and that this week's other 40th
anniversary, of the Woodstock music festival, was its pinnacle: A
moment where individualism, non-conformity and the creative impulse
reigned, where repression was challenged and, in many ways, fell.

But that's rose-coloured hindsight of a fractious time that unleashed
demons as much as it seeded naïve idealism. The Cielo Dr. killings,
and the murders of Leno and Rosemary LaBianca in Los Feliz a day
later, were as much a product of those times. No one embodies this
dark flowering more than the murderers' puppetmaster, Charles Manson.
And his stamp on the culture is arguably deeper and more lasting than
Woodstock's.

Part of it, surely, is the extremeness of the violence, executed with
a cool sense of purpose ­ 102 stab wounds inflicted on the four
victims in the house plus Steven Parent, an 18-year-old delivery boy
shot dead in the driveway on his way home as the killers made their
way to the house.

The next night, the killing continued, this time in the hills of Los
Feliz, where Leon and Rosemary LaBianca were murdered in much the
same way, stabbed with a knife and fork. Leon's stomach had carved on
it the word "WAR."

But just as horrifying as the brutal nature of the crimes were the
killers themselves: Tex Watson, Patricia Krenwinkel and Susan Atkins
­ long-haired flower children, and proverbial "good kids," for the
most part; Watson was an A student and high-school star athlete;
Krenwinkel the daughter of an insurance executive and an actual choirgirl.

But Manson, their patriarch and orchestrator of the murders, looms
huge over them all, and the entire counterculture generation.

The killings were a perplexing infusion of revulsion in what was, by
now, a waning countercultural movement: The Manson "family," as they
called themselves, were hippies, for all appearances ­ charter
members of the peace and love generation, which met violence with
sit-ins, and guns with flowers. They were political and
anti-establishment, as were so many of their generation. They were
indulgent users of drugs like marijuana and LSD. They lived on a
commune, the Spahn Ranch, and were, by many eyewitness accounts,
practitioners of "free love."

But when their time came in court, the world was shocked to see the
women, in hippie garb, holding hands and singing, ridiculing
prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi, laughing at his accounts of their crimes.

"The mantra of the era was `peace, love and sharing,'" says Bugliosi.
"Prior to (the Manson case), people just didn't identify hippies with
violence. Then the Manson family comes along, looking like hippies,
but being mass murderers. And that shocked America: How could this be?"

Trying to derive meaning from seemingly random acts orchestrated by a
pyschopath is dangerous territory. But there's little question that
the murders, both at the time and in hindsight, cast a pall over the
counterculture. Violence in America was nothing new; neither was
murder, nor were high-profile cases. But brutal, unjustifiable
violence from within, committed in its name? This was something new.

A week after the murders, Woodstock took place in upstate New York,
swelling spontaneously to a half-million kids listening to acts like
Country Joe and the Fish, Santana and Jimi Hendrix. But it was
revelry cast in dark shadow.

"The first thing to recognize is that the past and history are
different," says John Storey, a cultural historian in the U.K. and
the author of Cultural Theory and Popular Culture. "The struggle over
the meaning of the '60s, for example, changes on whether we highlight
Woodstock or Manson. This, in simplified form, could be said to be
the difference between those who view the '60s and its legacy as
positive or negative."

Meanwhile, the counterculture ­ to the conservative establishment at
the time, not much more threatening than a bunch of lazy, misguided
kids who needed to grow up ­ was morphing quickly from social
revolution into fashion trend and marketing opportunity.

Earlier festivals, like The Human Be-In in San Francisco in 1967,
were free; later that year, the Monterey Pop Festival was intended to
raise money for free clinics (though the $500,000 it raised
mysteriously disappeared).

By Woodstock, the naive sheen had dulled. "The real thing Woodstock
accomplished," Bill Graham, the former manager of Jefferson Airplane,
told Storey, "was that it told people rock was big business."

If Woodstock was the beginning of the end, then the murder
indictments on Dec. 8, 1969, of Manson, Watson, Atkins, Krenwinkel
and two other family members, Linda Kasabian and Leslie Van Houten,
were to many its grim, undeniable conclusion.

"Is Charles Manson a hippie?" asked Rolling Stone in one cover story.
"The '60s abruptly ended on August 9, 1969," the date of the murders
on Cielo Dr., wrote Joan Didion in her 1979 collection of personal
essays on life in the '60s, The White Album.

That was a philosophical take. At the time, others were more
practical, driven by fear. In the October 1969 issue of Los Angeles
magazine, spurred by the Manson family murders, Myron Roberts wrote
an alarmist indictment of a generation run wild, fuelled by drugs,
lax morals and a loss of standards.

He chided Life magazine's special edition on Woodstock for making it
"a cultural event of monumental import, just behind Genesis and
landing on the moon." Woodstock was lauded for being civil, to which
Roberts wrote that "no one stopped to ask why the absence of violence
at a large, public gathering of the young should be considered more
remarkable than the fact that the fans who go to football games ...
do not customarily tear up the stadium or attack one another."

He then compared Woodstock to "another youth festival ­ the Nuremberg
Rallies ­ where Hitler, Goebbels & Co. were the featured group and
the multitudes of fans were stoned on slogans, not grass." Not
finished yet, he concluded the article with a practical guide to
"protecting yourself from `freaky' crime" ­ meaning drug-induced, of
course, perpetuated by a darkening culture of hippiedom.

And this was before any of the Manson crew had been caught. When
Manson, looking beatific, long hair and beard flowing, was arrested,
the dark side of the era had a face. And when the grisly details of
the murders came out, the death knell for the counterculture was
sounding loud and clear.

It is, by now, a gruesome litany: Manson was obsessed with the
Beatles, who were central to the countercultural movement. The White
Album in particular. He believed they were sending him messages,
enlisting him to start a revolution. The song "Helter Skelter"
became, for him, a command to start a race war between blacks and
whites; "Piggies," ridiculing the British upper classes eating "with
forks and knives," was for Manson an invitation to wipe out the
wealthy ("what they need's a damn good whacking," the song went).

The Tate house was chosen over an old grudge that had nothing to do
with Tate or any of the other victims. Manson, an aspiring
songwriter, had auditioned there for producer Terry Melcher when he
lived there with his then-girlfriend, Candice Bergen. Melcher, after
witnessing Manson in a frenzied fight one night, broke off ties,
which infuriated Manson.

The night of the murders, when the family members arrived, Parent was
rolling down the driveway. Watson shot him dead at the wheel. He then
cut the phone line, and the three made for the house.

Slitting a screen, the threesome slipped inside. Tate, Sebring and
Folger, thinking they were being robbed, were tied by the neck with a
rope, which was flung over a support beam in the living room. They
asked what would happen to them. "You're all going to die," Watson
said calmly. Panic took hold.

Frykowski got loose and burst outside, screaming for help. Watson
stabbed him 51 times. Inside, Tate, Sebring and Folger struggled to
get free. The stabbing, 102 wounds altogether, came in a flurry.
Tate, who was eight months pregnant, begged to be allowed to have her
baby. Atkins stabbed her 16 times. In custody, she told Bugliosi that
she told Tate, before she killed her: "Bitch, you're going to die. I
don't have any mercy on you." When she was done, she wrote "PIG" in
Tate's blood, before taking a shower and leaving the scene.

The next night, the Manson family, this time joined by Kasabian, Van
Houten and Manson himself, went looking for more victims. They chose
the LaBianca house at random.

"If you were white and appeared financially well-off, you qualified
to be murdered," Bugliosi said. The killers used knives and forks ­
an apparent reference to the Beatles song ­ and left the LaBiancas
butchered in their home, but not before raiding their refrigerator
and showering.The fallout was severe. Once the Manson family was
revealed, the establishment's dim view of counterculture turned rabid
and extreme. Even Polanski himself was implicated.

"In their rush to assess what had happened, some of the mainstream
press brought the nature of Roman Polanski's movies into the nature
of the crime and held (his) movies responsible," Warren Beatty told
Los Angeles magazine recently. "Roman was a total innocent. Neither
his life nor his movies had anything to do with this. But because
he'd made Repulsion and Rosemary's Baby he was made to seem responsible."

For some, the counterculture was already teetering under the weight
of its own portent. Indulgent and hedonistic, it had become bloated
and without focus ­ a set of superficial trends, not a social
revolution. The Manson crimes represented a shocking extreme to a
culture that was becoming increasingly incoherent.

"What struck me about the Manson murders was how at the moment they
happened, it seemed as if they were inevitable," Didion said, during
an interview at the National Book Awards. "It seemed as if we had
been moving toward that moment for about a year."

Bugliosi had no such sense at the time. "I'm not a sociologist. I was
just trying one murder case after another," he says. "But looking
back, it seems to be the consensus of many that the Manson case
sounded a death knell for hippies and everything they symbolically
represented."

High above the San Fernando Valley, on Cielo Dr., the quiet absence
of No. 10050 says much the same thing.

--------

August 1969, Charles Manson, Woodstock and the end of an era

http://www.examiner.com/x-2766-Atlanta-Astrology-Examiner~y2009m8d8-August-1969-Charles-Manson-Woodstock-and-the-end-of-an-era

August 8, 2009
by Patricia Lantz

Joan Didion wrote in"The White Album", her 1979 collection of essays
on life in the 60's; "The 60's abruptly ended on August 9, 1969, the
date of the murders on Cielo Dr."

The decade of the 60's has become synonymous with all the new,
exciting, radical, and subversive events and trends of the period.
This was a time when a ridged culture became unable to hold back the
demand for greater individual freedom. A counter culture broke free
and sparked social revolutions throughout much of the world.

Yes, it was an unusual decade, and the legacy of the America's
Counter Culture movement of the 60's is huge.

It was a time of Social and political upheaval, a time of revolution,
individualism and non-conformity and it was also a time of love,
music, sex and mind expanding psychedelic substances.

By the end of the 60's much the counter culture, which had began as a
progressive social movement bent on changing the world for the
better, seemed to have lost it's focus and become self indulgent and
hedonistic. Rather than a social movement it had seemingly de-evolved
into a superficial social trend.

And the Manson Family crimes represented the dark extreme of a
counter culture that was becoming increasingly incongruous.

Just a few days after the murders on Cielo Dr. but before the Manson
Family was arrested the Woodstock Music Festival took place in
upstate New York.

For many Woodstock seemed the pinnacle of the movement. it was a
moment when personal freedom and non-conformity reigned.

As astrologer Steffan Vanel writes:

" I personally experienced Woodstock as an explosion of Aquarian
universal love and brotherhood. I witnessed it as the small groups of
hippies in every town on the East Coast coming together and amassing
to nearly a half million. I was only 17 years old at the time, but I
remember thinking "This is going to change the world. This power of
love is what is really going to change the world. Kids from now on
are going to become hippies, and drugs and music is going to do it!"

" The collective good vibes of Woodstock didn't last long. The next
big festival was the Rolling Stones at Altamont, California where
someone was murdered. The Rolling Stones had tried to show how
US/California cool they were by hiring the Hells Angels for security
for the show and paying them with cases of beer. A very bad move.
Here we saw the dark sides of Pluto (death), Neptune (drugs and
alcohol), and Uranus (sudden erratic craziness)." Read Steffan
Vanel's entire article

But for many Americans Woodstock was seen as, the epitome of a
generation gone wild on drugs, with lax morals and a loss of
standards. The already darkening perception of hippie culture turned
black when Charles Manson was arrested (October 69) and the details
of all the murders came out....this signaled the end of an era.

As prosecutor, Vincent Bugliosi, says, "The mantra of the era was
`peace, love and sharing. Prior to (the Manson case), people just
didn't identify hippies with violence. Then the Manson family comes
along, looking like hippies, but being mass murderers. And that
shocked America: How could this be?".

Looking back at the 60's the decade seems to resemble an amazing and
beautiful love affair that in the end went very very bad. However,
during that affair, society was impregnated with the Aquarian vision
of brotherhood and service to all mankind.

What was conceived in the 60's has been nurtured and growing within
our sociey and soon will take on a life of it's own. We can only hope
the birth will be painless and that what's being born will arrive healthy.

Excerpt from "The World Transformed"

"The most interesting alignment begins when Uranus enters Aries and
squares Pluto in Capricorn from June 2012 to March 2015. It could be
the coupling of the Uranian need for nonconformity, change or
rebellion with the fearless impulsiveness of Aries that will release
the world from traditional conservative constraints.

This Uranus in Aries-Pluto in Capricorn contact is quite capable of
igniting the cultural revolutionary forces that began in the
mid-1960s...when Uranus and Pluto were coupled in Virgo. In affect,
what was conceived at that 1960's coupling will be born...come to
life and become viable during this era."
Read more:
http://www.examiner.com/x-2766-Atlanta-Astrology-Examiner~y2009m2d17-A-world-transformed-Pluto-in-Capricorn-global-governancepart-2

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The Art of Rebellion

[2 items]

The Art of Rebellion

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/09/books/review/Heller-t.html

By STEVEN HELLER
Published: August 6, 2009

If not for Mad magazine, there might never have been (in no
particular order) 1960s youth culture, underground comics, Wacky
Packs, "Laugh-In," "Saturday Night Live," R. Crumb, Art Spiegelman or
an age of irony, period. Mad, which began in 1952 as a comic book
that parodied "serious" comics as well as American popular culture,
with an emphasis on television, movies and advertising, was conceived
and originally edited by Harvey Kurtzman (1924-93), a Brooklyn-born
comic-strip artist, writer and editor. Kurtzman was the spiritual
father of postwar American satire and the godfather of
late-20th-century alternative humor. If this seems like hyperbole,
all you have to do is read The Art of Harvey Kurtzman: The Mad Genius
of Comics (Abrams Comic­Arts, $40), Denis Kitchen and Paul Buhle's
insightful, entertaining and profusely illustrated (with rare images
of original work) biographical monograph, which chronicles almost
everything Kurtzman accomplished ­ and that was quite a lot.

"In Mad and all his subsequent ventures," the authors write,
"Kurtzman drew a bead on the phony aspects and idiosyncrasies of
modern commercial culture. . . . He took on Senator Joseph McCarthy
as surely and seriously in the pages of Mad as Edward R. Murrow did
on television." He also fought against a wave of comic-art censorship
that overtook the country in the '50s and fostered the restrictive
Comics Code (echoing the role of the Hays Office for motion pictures).

Soon after World War II, Corporal Kurtzman made drawings for Yank,
the Army's weekly magazine. But his talents were really unleashed in
his first comic-book job, doing so-called filler pages titled "Hey
Look!" This was an absurdist collection of sequences produced for
Stan Lee's Timely Comics (later Marvel Comics) between 1946 and 1949.
As Kitchen and Buhle point out, Kurtzman slid under the radar there
and had "virtual free rein." His distinctive, frenetic minimalism,
condensed lettering and rebuslike signature ("H. Kurtz," with a
little figure of a "man" at the end) were developed during the course
of this strip. It served as the steppingstone for some of his most
historically significant contributions to comic art.

In the late '40s Kurtzman sold a short-lived experimental strip,
"Silver Linings," to The New York Herald Tribune, but it was his work
with the legendary E.C. Comics that ignited his career. Founded by M.
C. Gaines, a comics pioneer, and inherited by his son, Bill, the
original Educational Comics company evolved from a formulaic
publisher into a groundbreaker, taking on the name Entertaining
Comics. Kurtzman was a force in this change. In 1950 he began drawing
horror and sci-fi comics, including "Tales From the Crypt" and "Weird
Science" ­ and thus a new, more vivid and gruesome style of comic was
born. According to the authors, E.C.'s sci-fi comics became known for
"antiracist intimations" and "warnings against atomic doomsday," as
well as "fantastically busty women in space outfits." And "by 1953,
E.C.'s horror titles had circulations hovering around 400,000 each."
(Today these comics are heralded as precursors to current horror films.)

Among the most popular comics on the E.C. list were Kurtzman's two
war series, "Frontline Combat" and "Two-Fisted Tales," which
displayed a realism not present in similar comic books. Although
Kurtzman honestly believed that gore was not suitable for children,
he was nonetheless driven by a storyteller's need to be truthful and
not romanticize horror. In Kurtzman's war stories, Kitchen and Buhle
write, "rascals as well as moralists would meet their demise. . . .
Redemption, if it could be found at all, demanded cleareyed
understanding of frightful realities."

While Kurtzman is celebrated for the early days of Mad, his tales
about the Korean War have been too often overlooked. They prefigure
recent novels and films that demythologize warfare. In "Corpse on the
Imjin!," a six-page story he created for "Two-Fisted Tales," war is
embodied in a solitary G.I. watching an enemy corpse float downriver
­ the drawing of the half-submerged form is heartbreaking. As the
soldier speculates on how the man died, he is set upon by a North
Korean and becomes entangled in vividly choreographed hand-to-hand
combat. After the Korean is killed, the American engages in some
soul-searching. "Kurtzman's thoughtful, more realistic and human
depictions of war," the authors write, "were in stark contrast with
competing gung-ho war comic books that glorified war, almost never
displayed moral ambiguity and frequently featured Koreans as garishly
yellow-skinned and bucktoothed 'gooks.' "

After largely concentrating on war, he decided to turn to humor, and
Mad was "Kurtzman's baby from the first moment of its
conceptualization." For the first 23 issues it was a comic book, but
Kurtzman had long wanted to edit a "slick" magazine, in an effort to
legitimize the comic medium. Bill Gaines resisted for some time, but
the July 1955 issue marked a radical format change (Kurtzman designed
the illuminated logo that identified Mad for dec­ades). It was so
successful it prompted an immediate reprint. Actually, the altered
format was propitious: since Mad was no longer a comic book, it was
not subject to the Comics Code, which had severe consequences for E.C.

Kitchen, an underground comic artist and publisher, and Buhle, a
historian of comics, superbly chronicle the rise of E.C. and its fall
at the hands of restrictive Congressional investigations ­ in 1954
Senator Estes Kefauver opened hearings in New York investigating
sadism and racism in comics, with Bill Gaines as "his chief (hostile)
witness" ­ and a cowardly, self-regulating comic-book industry. The
liberal psychologist Fredric Wertham had charged in his book
"Seduction of the Innocent" that comics harmed children. Although Mad
could have been condemned under this blanket indictment, the fact
that it was no longer a comic book saved it from certain demise.

Kurtzman eventually left Mad to work on various other, lesser-known
humor magazines: Trump (published by Hugh Hefner), Humbug, and Help!
(which prefigured National Lampoon). For a generation of boomers who
grew up hoarding Playboy, his collaboration with the artist Will
Elder on a comic strip about the buxom Little Annie Fanny ­ the
anti-Betty and anti-Veronica ­ provided a teenage rite of passage.

I have another memory of Kurtzman. A few years before he died, I was
with him at a restaurant when he was having a brief meeting with an
art director from an ad agency. Kurtzman had accepted an advertising
job to earn some much-needed cash. I watched this iconoclastic
humorist acquiesce as the art director altered everything Kurtzman
had done, removing all the humor and leaving only the style. Maybe
it's a good thing the authors were unaware of this anecdote; their
book is probably better off without it.

Underground cartoonists of the '60s and '70s knelt before two
deities: Harvey Kurtzman and Paul Krassner. Kurtzman you know about.
Krassner was the editor and publisher of The Realist, considered the
first underground-­press periodical, a product of the Beat and
anti-McCarthy movements. While The Realist was rather conventionally
designed compared with the psychedelic underground newspapers that
began springing up during the mid- to late '60s, it was more ribald
and raucous than anything in print ­ scandalous, borderline libelous
and even pornographic. It was the next evolutionary step in
counterculture satire after Mad. And it is cited by Jay Lynch, an
underground cartoonist known for the strip "Nard 'n Pat," in the
introduction to James Danky and Denis Kitchen's Underground Classics:
The Transformation of Comics Into Comix (Abrams ComicArts/Chazen
Museum of Art, $29.95). As Lynch says, The Realist bitingly attacked
"the sham and hypocrisy of society at large" and was one of a few
magazines that contributed to the rise of the underground comix sensibility.

This collection of essays, reproductions of original art, and
mechanicals of comics pages and covers is a nice complement to the
Kurtzman book. Primarily the catalog for a traveling exhibition, it
includes images that will be familiar to anyone who grew up with the
under­grounds and captivating to those who did not ­ a good
substitute if you can't see the exhibition.

I was happy to be reintroduced to Dope Comix; Spain Rodriguez's
Trashman, one of my favorite antiheroes of the day; and Gilbert
Shelton's "Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers" (the Abbott and Costello of
the dope generation) and "Billy Graham Reaches the Dope Mystics." But
the book is worth the price if only for the superb reproduction of
Rick Griffin's "Fighting Eyeballs." Griffin, who rendered the
original Rolling Stone magazine logo in the '60s, was Hieronymus
Bosch on mushrooms, as evidenced by his astonishingly precise surreal
assemblage of eyes fighting eyes in a sci-fi dystopia.

Griffin died in a motorcycle accident. Yet many of the other artists,
currently in their 60s and 70s, are still quite active. This is not
(as the title suggests) the definitive collection of all their
classics, but it is a satisfying representation of some of their
greatest hits.

The visual language of rebellion has a few commonalities that are
adapted to individual cultures and countries. The images in Zeina
Maasri's Off the Wall: Political Posters of the Lebanese Civil War
(I. B. Tauris/Palgrave Macmillan, paper, $29.95) are stylistically
similar to some of the underground comics created in the '60s. But
the messages in Lebanon from the '70s to the early '90s were
decidedly more serious than those in the United States. Underground
comics were concerned with sex and drugs, among other favored themes;
the Lebanese activists were concerned with survival and victory.
American undergrounders faced nightsticks and Mace when they
demonstrated against government policy; the Lebanese factions used
lethal weapons.

This is not a picture book per se, although it is well illustrated
with black-and-white and color plates. Maasri, an associate professor
of graphic design at the American University of Beirut, provides a
detailed analysis of the nature of graphic propaganda and of the
issues Lebanon faced during its civil war, along with explanations of
various symbols and motifs. The book also includes a provocative
chapter on martyrdom. Most of the images reproduced here did not
break any new design territory ­ which makes sense. They were meant
to function in a cluttered visual environment amid many messages.
There are the requisite portraits of martyrs and a few anti-Israel
protests (one with the swastika embedded in a Star of David). But
there is one poster in particular that caught my eye for its
conceptual curiosity. The designer is anonymous, and it is titled
"Towards Independence." It looks pixelated, like a Whitman's Sampler
box, and depicts a figure running with a torch. In the heat of a
civil war, such a well-designed composition makes it seem as if the
conflict were basically the Olympic Games.

One of the most common visual genres of the modern age is the
anthropometric photo, known as the mug shot. These pictorial records
of arrests, usually showing the full face and profile of the accused,
are employed by police agencies the world over, and have barely
changed their basic format since being introduced in the 19th
century. It is axiomatic that mug shots are not flattering. The
bright lights are meant to highlight every defining facial feature,
and there is no allowance for aesthetic nuance. Nonetheless, mug
shots can be fascinating, particularly those of the same person over
time, or of famous people when they were young. Raynal Pellicer's Mug
Shots: An Archive of the Famous, Infamous, and Most Wanted (Abrams,
$35) offers many interesting ones. As the front jacket, with its
pictures of Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison, suggests, the book
includes arrest photos of rock stars whose pedigree depended on their
brushes with the law. Some musicians, like David Bowie and Johnny
Cash, look pretty cool in their shots. Then there are infamous
political figures: Stalin, Lenin, Trotsky and Mussolini (with a full
head of hair), all of them arrested before rising to power, of
course. The anarchist Emma Goldman appears in three mug shots ­ from
1893 and 1901 and during her deportation to Russia in 1919; the years
were certainly hard on her.

In fact, anarchists have their own section. The photos of Santo
Caserio, who fatally stabbed the president of France in 1894, and
Leon Czolgosz, who shot President William McKinley in 1901, seem as
if they could have been taken yesterday. There are sections on war
criminals (including a defiant Hermann Goering) and civil rights
leaders (including Martin Luther King and Malcolm X). There is also
an eerie color frame of Lee Harvey Oswald, who is most commonly
represented in black and white. The longest section is devoted to
notorious mobsters, notably Al Capone (who doesn't look so sinister).

This well-designed book took form when Pellicer, a French documentary
film producer and director, uncovered caches of mug shots preserved
on glass plates, film negatives or paper prints at the Police
Head­quarters Museum in Paris and the National Archives in France and
the United States. Brief but informative accounts accompany the
images and "are intended to report reality and give the facts without
ever interpreting them," Pellicer writes. "This is first and foremost
a book of stories, not a history book." Indeed, these faces tell some
amazing stories.

-------

So Many Books ... And So Little Time

http://www.creators.com/lifestylefeatures/books-and-music/scanning-the-bookshelf/so-many-books-and-so-little-time-2009-07-31.html

I can't think of a better way to launch a Comic-Con-centric column
than with "Underground Classics: The Transformation of Comics Into
Comix" by James Danky and Denis Kitchen (Harry N. Abrams, 143 pages,
$29.95). This large-format treat ­ launched to accompany an
exhibition at the Chazen Museum of Art at the University of
Wisconsin, Madison, where Danky is on the faculty (Kitchen's a
longtime cartoonist-writer) ­ puts the emphasis on the artwork, with
124 full-color illustrations and 30 black-and-whites.

There are also solid essays by Paul Buhle, Trina Robbins and Patrick
Rosenkranz and an intro by Jay Lynch ­ all nicely illustrated ­ that
give major props to the artists as well as provide historical
context. But it's the full-page plates that carry the day: Wondrous
works by Bill Griffith ("Young Lust"), Leslie Cabarga ("Dope Comix"),
Gilbert Shelton ("The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers"), R. Crumb (too
many to count) and many other stars of the movement, plus my all-time
favorites, the Air Pirates (if only I had kept my copy of the first
"Mickey Mouse Meets the Air Pirates Funnies"!).

The beatniks would have secretly enjoyed being saluted in "The Beats:
A Graphic History" (Hill and Wang, 199 pages, $22) even as they would
have publicly dissed it.

This is a terrific compilation, with too many names to mention: Text
by Harvey Pekar, Trina Robbins and others; edited by Paul Buhle; art
by Mary Fleener, Gary Dumm, Ed Piskor and many other imaginative souls.

And, all sorts of beats get their time in the spotlight: Gregory
Corso as well as big-name Jack Kerouac, Tuli Kupferberg as well as
Allen Ginsberg, and on and on. The mix of artists' work serves the
mix of subjects well; "The Beats" could almost serve as an
introduction to the graphic novel format itself.

...

.

Woodstock at 40: Exploring the Bay Area connection

Woodstock at 40:
Exploring the Bay Area connection

http://www.insidebayarea.com/music/ci_13017957

By Jim Harrington
Oakland Tribune
Posted: 08/09/2009

By the time they got to Woodstock, they were half a million strong.

They had come from all over the country to Max Yasgur's dairy farm in
Bethel, N.Y., for a three-day celebration of peace, love and rock 'n'
roll that was so big it ended up stretching to a fourth day ­ and
into immortality.

Forty years later, the Aug. 15-18, 1969, festival is now recognized
as the most famous concert of all time, as well as the defining
moment in the '60s counterculture revolution. And it might never have
happened without the things that came before it on the streets of
Haight-Ashbury, in Bill Graham's Fillmore club and in the Berkeley
and Palo Alto music scenes.

In other words, the road to Woodstock began in the Bay Area.

San Francisco sound

The most obvious connection is on the lineup card. About a third of
the acts that played that weekend were from the San Francisco area.
What's more significant, however, is that so many of these bands ­
including Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead and Sly and the
Family Stone ­ were the ones that people wanted to see.

"I don't know if you have half a festival if you don't have the Bay
Area bands," says Cheryl Pawelski, vice president of A&R for Rhino
Records, who compiled the new six-CD set "Woodstock ­ 40 Years On:
Back to Yasgur's Farm."

"All of the Bay Area artists were releasing such seminal albums at
the time. That area was just too important to music to not invite
those artists to the party."

And once they arrived, many of them made the most of it. Sly Stone,
Janis Joplin, Joan Baez and the Airplane all delivered memorable
sets. Berkeley's Country Joe McDonald became a folk hero as he led
the masses in his signature cheer, "Give me an 'F'"..." and Bay Area
clown prince Wavy Gravy emceed the event and secured his spot in '60s lore.

The Grateful Dead lived up to its reputation of coming up small in
big situations ­ drummer Mickey Hart recalled that Woodstock "was the
worst we ever played." But Carlos Santana came to Woodstock a
promising talent and left a legitimate superstar.

"I was there when Santana played and it was just phenomenal,"
remembers Susan Reynolds, a former Moraga resident who edited the
book "Woodstock Revisited: 50 Stories from Those Who Where There."

"You waited a long time between bands and so when someone actually
played it was like, 'Yes.' But when Santana played, it was like, 'Oh,
my god, yes!'"

Leave it to Creedence

But it was an East Bay band, Creedence Clearwater Revival, that may
have been most pivotal to Woodstock's march to history, says author
Pete Fornatale. The John Fogerty-led band out of El Cerrito was the
first major act booked to the festival, and that gave it the momentum
it needed.

"That gave these (promoters) credibility because they had absolutely
none going into the festival," says Fornatale, who recently published
"Back to the Garden: The Story of Woodstock."

Many are surprised to learn that CCR was at Woodstock. Credit that to
Michael Wadleigh's Academy Award-winning documentary, "Woodstock,"
which, in its original form, didn't include CCR, Blood, Sweat &
Tears, the Band and some other of the festival's most notable acts.
(The recently released 40th anniversary "Ultimate Collector's
Edition" of the film does feature some of these performances.)

Wadleigh's 1970 film turned out to be the single most important
document of the festival. It was an avenue for millions to experience
"Woodstock," first in theaters and then in subsequent video/DVD
releases. And what those viewers witnessed from the Bay Area acts
were truly legendary performances.

"Sly Stone got up there and it was like a Baptist church on a Sunday
morning," says Fornatale. "(Santana) just rose to the occasion and
launched an amazing 40-year career."

The 40th anniversary of the festival has ushered in a wave of
remastered recordings, books, DVDs, and memorabilia. Meanwhile
organizers are expecting about 100,000 fans to turn out to see
Woodstock alumni and other performers at the "West Fest: Celebrating
the 40th Anniversary of Woodstock" on Oct. 25 at Golden Gate Park in
San Francisco. (Visit www.2b1records.com for more information.)

ZIP codes don't tell the entire story of the Bay Area's effect on Woodstock.

For one thing, so many of the festival's top acts from beyond the
Golden Gate, including heavyweights Jimi Hendrix and the Who, were
clearly inspired and reacting to the psychedelic brand of blues-rock
known as the "San Francisco Sound." And Woodstock went beyond music.
It also turned out to be a benchmark for such campaigns as the peace
and free speech movements. That's another link to the Bay Area, which
played no small role in bringing these movements to national
prominence a few years earlier.

"California set the tone for peace and love and it shifted eastward
across the nation," remarks Elliott Landy, the festival's official
photographer, whose work can be seen in the book "Woodstock Vision:
The Spirit of a Generation."

That tone was set, in large part, in 1967 during two local
"happenings­" the Summer of Love and the Monterey Pop Festival. Those
events gave birth to the flower children, which would blossom into a
nation by the time they got to Woodstock.

"We were living in small towns. Many of us were considered freaks in
our own towns," Reynolds recalls. "Then, we went to Woodstock and we
realized we weren't alone."
--

Reach Jim Harrington at jharrington@bayareanewsgroup.com

.

Remembering Woodstock

[5 articles]

Back to the garden

http://www.thenational.ae/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20090808/MAGAZINE/708079994/-1/OPINION

August 07. 2009

This month marks the 40th anniversary of Woodstock, the three-day
music festival that became a defining moment in the history of
popular culture. John Morris, an organiser and the event's presenter,
tells Jeffrey Sipe what went on behind the scenes.
--

For most people in August 1969, it was footage on the evening news,
an enormous sea of people undulating before an outdoor stage on a
dairy farm in Bethel, upstate New York. For many, it was the film and
the album that came out less than a year later. For a few, however,
it was standing on a stage gazing out at half a million young people
and nearly trembling with the realisation that they had succeeded in
drawing the expected 75,000 ­ and around 425,000 others.

Forty years later, no concert anywhere has attained the cultural or
historical significance of the three-day Woodstock Music & Art Fair,
now known universally as just Woodstock. But it also left a huge
personal footprint on the lives of those involved.

"It's still probably the most important event thing that I've ever
done," recalls John Morris over the phone from his part-time home in
Santa Fe, New Mexico. He divides his time between there and Los
Angeles, making a living from staging art and antiques shows. "It was
a kind of work experience and a kind of pressure situation where I'm
exceedingly proud of what we did, the fact that we did it well."

Morris was the onstage MC at the festival, seen in the documentary
Woodstock presenting the bands, calming the crowds and making the
public service announcements.

He was hired as the production coordinator three months before the
start of the festival and his responsibilities included booking the
performers ­ the likes of The Who, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, The
Grateful Dead and Jimi Hendrix ­ and making sure they could get to the stage.

"I spent a lot of time on the mic talking to half-a-million-plus
people," he says, awe still in his voice 40 years later.

The night before the festival was scheduled to begin, Morris, along
with the primary organisers Michael Lang, Joel Rosenman and John
Roberts, met at Morris's rented house in Bethel and had what they
assumed would be their last sit-down meal until the end of the
concert. After dinner, they went back to the stage. Something, they
knew, was happening.

"It took us an hour and a half to do what we were used to doing in
like six minutes," Morris says. "Then I was on the stage and the
whole field was filled with people as far as I could see. I didn't
know that the sound guys had just finished their soundcheck and I was
standing next to a live mic. I said to myself, 'Holy ****!' and that
went out all over the crowd and I heard half a million people
laughing. That's when we knew, 'OK, we have a whole different situation here.'"

Rock concerts were nothing new or daunting to Morris, who by 1969, at
the age of 30, had already staged countless gigs in the US and Europe
and managed the Fillmore East, the New York-based sister club of the
legendary San Francisco music venue.

But this was something very different.

"We knew quickly that we had a situation where we weren't just doing
a concert, which was what we were used to ­ we were maintaining a
city," he says. "We had all sorts of things that you don't think
about when you're doing something in a concert hall. We not only had
the sanitation problem, we had the instant problem of how to get
people in and out because the road was totally jammed."

Following the festival, the New York State Police showed Morris a
satellite photo of the area. There were an estimated two and a half
million people attempting to reach the concert site, causing the
biggest traffic jam the country had ever seen. At one point, the New
York governor Nelson Rockefeller was considering declaring the area
an emergency disaster and sending in the National Guard to clear it
out. It was left to Morris to man the telephone and convince the
governor's office that sending in troops to remove the crowd would
result in a true disaster.

Organisers had expected that 75,000 people at most would show up.
That in itself would have constituted the largest crowd ever for a
concert in the US, topping the 45,000 or so who had attended the
Monterey Pop Festival a year earlier and The Beatles' 35,000-strong
(or 55,000, depending on whom you believe) crowd at New York's Shea
Stadium in 1965.

"I had a bet with Mike Lang that I would pay him a hundred bucks for
every thousand people over 75,000 that showed up," Morris recalls.
"Thank goodness he didn't try to collect it."

Chris Langhart, a colleague of Morris's from the Fillmore, was the
technical director.

"Langhart came into my trailer one night and said, 'How much does
Jimi Hendrix weigh?' and I said 'Huh?' and he said, 'How much does
Jimi Hendrix weigh?' And I said, 'Well, he's an ex-paratrooper and
he's like 5ft 6in, 5ft 7in. Give him 165 pounds.'

"Chris went across to his trailer, and in half an hour he came back
and said, 'What does your average groupie weigh?' I said, 'They tend
to be sorta short and sometimes a little dumpy ­ give 'em 125
pounds.' So then he came back about 30 or 40 minutes later and threw
a great big plan down on the table. It was the bridge from the
production area to the stage. So I asked, 'What were all those
questions about?' And he said, 'Well, I took Hendrix and I figured if
he was going across the bridge and he was being chased by as many
groupies as you could have on the bridge, and they all were going
down on one foot at one time, how much was that per square foot load
and I doubled it.' It took two bulldozers to pull the damned thing
down after the festival."

This all occurred, of course, after the ordeal of securing a site for
the concert. The actual town of Woodstock issued a quick rejection of
the festival and other small town councils in the area also rejected
it. The idea of thousands of kids and numerous rock bands ­
counter-culture, anti-Vietnam War ­ invading their rural bastion of
"traditional America" was not a welcome one.

"And then Max Yasgur showed up and said, 'I have this dairy farm and
why don't you take a look and see what you think," Morris says. "It
was actually almost ideal, and we had a home. We were only on that
site 21 days before the festival, on 18 of which it rained.

"I think Max's main motivation was that he had read about what was
going on with us," he adds. "He had read about the fact that a bunch
of towns had rejected us. He had the property and he felt we deserved
a shot at it…

"He had had three heart attacks before the festival and he always
travelled in his station wagon with oxygen and nitroglycerine. I was
terrified from the time I first met him until the thing was over that
we were going to give him another heart attack. But we didn't and, of
course, his speech to the crowd was one of the most emotional parts
of the festival."

Yasgur told the crowd: "I'm a farmer. I don't know how to speak to 20
people at one time let alone a crowd like this. But I think you
people have proven something to the world. Not only to the town of
Bethel or Sullivan County or to New York State. You've proven
something to the world. This is the largest group of people ever
assembled in one place.

"We have had no idea that there would be this size group. There have
been a few inconveniences as far as water and food and so forth. Your
producers have done a mammoth job to see that you are taken care of.
They enjoy a vote of thanks. But above that the important thing that
you are proving to the world is that a half a million kids ­ and I
call ya kids because I have children who are older than you are ­ a
half a million young people can get together and have three days of
fun and music and have nothing but fun and music, and I God bless you for it."

It was not just the crowd that co-operated. The musicians, with very
few exceptions, went far beyond what would have been expected under
normal circumstances, as Morris explains.

"Joe McDonald, who was an old friend, came to see the festival. And
on the first day, we had nobody in there. We had nobody to play.
Richie Havens had somehow managed to get in, and I got Richie to play
like three or four encores. He said, 'I don't have anything left!'
and he made up Freedom. The song was made up on the spot.

"He was totally exhausted by the time he finished, and Joe McDonald
was standing there on the side of the stage and I said, 'Joe,
remember in Amsterdam when we were talking about how you might try a
solo career?' He said, 'Yeah.' And I said, 'Now.' And he said,
'What?' And I said, 'Please. Now. I need you to go on now.' We had to
get him a guitar. And I just literally put my hand in the middle of
his back and shoved him out and he was wonderful."

Two days later, McDonald appeared with his band Country Joe & The
Fish to play a full ­ and scheduled ­ set. Others who appeared at
Woodstock and went on to major careers included Santana, who had
previously never played outside San Francisco, and the British singer
Joe Cocker, who had never played a major date in the US. Both
received $2,500 (Dh9,200) for their appearances.

McDonald, however, wasn't the only musician to make an unscheduled
solo appearance.

"John Sebastian [of The Lovin' Spoonful] was walking down the street,
dressed in tie-dye, literally completely dressed in tie-dye from head
to toe," recounts Morris. "He was not booked for the festival. He was
carrying a guitar and it was like, 'Where did he come from?' And we
put him on. He played for a while, too."

By improvising their way through the first day, organisers bought
enough time to hire a fleet of helicopters to get the headliners to
the site. Joan Baez was ferried to the site in time for her scheduled
closing of the first night. Her a cappella rendition of Ave Maria
served as a lullaby to half a million people.

"All I had to do at the end of it was go out and say, 'Well,
everybody cuddle up with each other and have a peaceful night and
we'll see ya in the morning.' And it was just so settled and so calm
and so great."

After three days of peace, love and rock'n'roll, the most famous
concert ever came to an end. As a cultural event, it was an enormous
success. As a business event, it was something else.

"We were $2.7 million [Dh9.9million] in debt at the time the festival
was over," Morris recalls. "We went back to the office and there was
probably about a half-million dollars in uncashed cheques and cash
for tickets that had been sent in that nobody ever had the chance to
go to the bank and take care of. We sold Warner Brothers a bigger
hunk of the movie for a million dollars so it reduced the debt a bit,
and to me the reason I have always admired and loved [organiser] John
Roberts is that he said, 'We will pay this off if it takes us the
rest of our lives. We will not go bankrupt. We will see that
everybody is covered.' And he did. They finally broke even, I think,
10 years after the festival."

It took a while, Morris says, for everyone involved with Woodstock to
come back down to earth following the concert. Morris himself left
the US for "a couple of different countries" and eventually settled
down in London, where he opened the Rainbow Theatre, which went on to
become one of the city's most important live music venues.

But the year following Woodstock, he says, "was just kinda lost". Not
just for him but for those who had pulled off an unprecedented feat.
In the end, a lost year doesn't seem like much to pay for giving the
world a dream.

--------

Woodstock, 40 years later: Back to the garden again

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/la-ca-woodstock9-2009aug09,0,1735158.story

Three days of music, mud and social harmony: Some of the festival's
masterminds reappraise its meaning.

By Reed Johnson
August 9, 2009

The song, written by Joni Mitchell -- who wasn't there in person but
somehow managed to grasp the essence of those three muggy, ineffable
days in August 1969 while hunkered down in David Geffen's New York
apartment watching TV -- said we had to get back to the garden. But
what exactly was the garden?

In a literal sense, of course, it was Max Yasgur's bucolic dairy farm
in Bethel, in upstate New York, where the Woodstock Music & Art Fair
took place in a torrent of almost preternaturally inspired
musicianship and gusting rains.

But for a number of those who invented Woodstock, or were present at
the inception to document it, the Eden-like quality of the event had
more to do with the idea of young people taking control over their
lives, wresting their destinies away from the powers that were
(parents, politicians, the draft board). It had to do with the
still-relative newness of rock 'n' roll, the raw, naked power of an
art form still striving for recognition and respect. Music, at that
time, was youth's lingua franca in the way that the Internet,
cellphones and video games are today, and John, Paul, Mick and Bob
were as famous as, well, Biz Stone or what's-his-name who just won
"American Idol."

"It was before the music business became the music industry and there
was a lot more room for bands to find their feet," says Michael Lang,
the promoter who masterminded the festival into being.

Mostly, Lang and others assert, the freshness and vitality of
Woodstock had to do with the performers' creative energy and the
generous, cooperative spirit of social harmony that prevailed over
that long, muddy weekend, despite the 20 miles of stalled traffic and
the bum acid trips.

"For a moment, everybody was peaceful. Everybody looked out for each
other," says Baron Wolman, one of four photographers whose seminal
images of Woodstock will be on display this month and in September at
Duncan Miller Gallery in Los Angeles ( Jim Marshall, Henry Diltz and
Lisa Law are the other contributors).

Of the hundreds of images he took that weekend, Wolman says, one of
his favorites shows law enforcement officials working together with
the tie-dyed crowd to evacuate people needing medical help. "This was
a manifestation of the coda of the '60s generation and the
counterculture and people who felt it was time for a change,
politically and socially," he says. "Look, it wasn't perfect. It was
difficult. It was hot, it was humid, it was muddy. There wasn't
enough food, there weren't enough porta-potties. Nevertheless,
nevertheless. . . ."

Four decades old next weekend, Woodstock already has been analyzed
and commemorated endlessly, canonized by pop culture historians, even
sequel-ized and reenacted a couple of times, as if it were the Second
Battle of Bull Run. Its stature as an official creation myth of the
1960s counterculture is a fait accompli.

But even at this late date, and with our nation preoccupied with more
pressing matters (what did Michael Jackson's doctor know and when did
he know it?), there's still occasion to reflect on Woodstock's
complicated legacy, as the latest wave of backward-glancing books,
documentaries and exhibitions attests. Yet another take on the legend
will be represented in Ang Lee's new feature film, "Taking
Woodstock," opening this month, based on the memoirs of Elliot Tiber,
who as a young man helped steer the festival to his town of Bethel.

Heading for Woodstock

Lang was an ambitious 24-year-old promoter from Brooklyn when he and
a small group of associates conceived the idea of staging an outdoor
music festival. A haunter of New York nightclubs and former owner of
a Miami head shop, he had big ideas and chutzpah to burn, as he
writes with Holly George-Warren in his just-published memoir, "The
Road to Woodstock." Lang also elaborates on his odyssey in a new
documentary, "Woodstock: Now and Then," directed by Oscar winner
Barbara Kopple, which Lang executive produced; it's scheduled to air
this month on the VH1 and History cable channels.

For Lang, one of Woodstock's principal messages was that young people
were capable of putting on and managing a large-scale cultural event
themselves. In the weeks leading to Woodstock, Lang says, he and the
other promoters held intense discussions about how overtly political
(or not) the festival should be. Lang's contingent thought the
political themes, notably opposition to the Vietnam War, would emerge
more or less naturally, as in fact they did. "We had big debates with
the underground press and the counterculture press. We managed to
convince everybody except Abbie Hoffman," he says, adding a chuckle.

In the end, the festival spoke on behalf of young people's concerns
simply by communicating that "We're in charge, this is how it's going
to be," Lang says. "The event was the political statement."

Asked what he thinks is most often missing from the many reappraisals
of Woodstock and its era, Lang doesn't hesitate. "A lot of the
serious work that was done and effort that was put into changing the
things that we thought were unjust in the world," he says. "There
were a lot of very serious people doing serious work. They weren't
just standing around on the corner getting stoned."

The question of who gets to control and shape the history of
Woodstock and the 1960s was revisited during the 25th and 30th
anniversary restagings in 1994 and 1999. Chip Monck, the original
festival's production supervisor and stage lighting designer who also
was pressed into last-minute service as master of ceremonies, says
those latter events belonged to "a different time, a different
milieu, a different association." Any future Woodstocks, he predicts,
are "not going to be filled with acts that make you tremble."

But he does concede, half-jokingly, that "I've already designed the
wheelchair ramps for the 50th." And, having witnessed and helped
engineer a global platform for the first festival, he's intrigued by
the idea of what can be done when a new culture meets an emerging technology.

"If we had had laptops in 1969 and then every one of those 456,000
people had had 10 friends, couldn't we have made a helluva movie?" he
says, speaking from his home in Australia.

Paul Kantner, co-founder of Jefferson Airplane, says that his band
and the other musicians shared "a sort of unspoken sense that a whole
lot of stuff was going on." The music of that time was deeply
influenced by a host of what he calls "random factors": the civil
rights movement, the sexual revolution, drug experimentation, Beat
poetry. "I kind of liken it to white-water rafting," he says. "We
didn't have time to think about it." By contrast, he believes, with
today's contemporary music, "There's no big scene going on where
people gravitate to the scene rather than just being fans."

The lasting impression

Few people had a fuller perspective on Woodstock, both from ground
level and behind the scenes, than Michael Wadleigh, the documentary
filmmaker whose three-hour, Oscar-winning "Woodstock" brought the
festival's fecund atmospherics to a worldwide audience, helping to
seal its impact. (An expanded 40th-anniversary edition has been
released on DVD and Blu-Ray.)

Wadleigh thinks that impact partly endures in the unsurpassed force
of the acts: Janis Joplin's wrenchingly earnest, "utterly dangerous"
blues wailing; Jimi Hendrix's smoldering guitar riffs; Country Joe
McDonald's scorching indictment of middle-class parental complicity
in allowing their sons to be shipped home in boxes.

Even more, he believes, the Woodstock spirit is encapsulated in a
commitment to cultivating an "independent, creative approach to life"
that he fears is being lost. "Question everything, that was the
slogan then," says Wadleigh, speaking by phone from his farm in
Wales. "You read the big books and thought the big thoughts."

Above all, Wadleigh expresses concern that the necessity for taking
care of our great, planetary idyll -- what Wadleigh, citing
Buckminster Fuller, calls "spaceship Earth" -- has failed to live up
to Woodstockian idealism. In some of its final frames, Wadleigh's
documentary raised the specter of this failure with its bleak images
of the exhausted, garbage-strewn hippie campground.

"I gotta tell you, I thought the '60s were going to end badly,"
Wadleigh says. "And in terms of a popular [environmental] movement,
the carbon is still not going back down."

Today, Wadleigh and his wife, Birgit Van Munster, are devoted to the
cause of sustainable development, as activists, college presenters
and through their Homo Sapiens Project. One of its principal efforts
is an ecologically minded graphic novel, relating the muddled
evolution of mankind and its shortcomings in planetary custodianship,
related from the perspective of a visiting space alien reporting back
to its fellow creatures.

The modern environmental movement kicked off years before Woodstock,
with the publication of Rachel Carson's dystopian elegy, "Silent
Spring." Nearly half a century later, Wadleigh laments, we're even
further from solving our environmental crisis than we are from
returning a man to the moon, another of this summer's big anniversaries.

"We've got to get back to the garden," he says.
--

reed.johnson@latimes.com

--------

Woodstock concert milestone for some, controversial for others;

keepsake section in today's Journal & visit woodstock.historybeat.com

http://www.poughkeepsiejournal.com/article/20090809/NEWS01/908090367/1005

Festival left clear imprint

By John W. Barry
August 9, 2009

You might have been one of the hundreds of thousands to attend the
Woodstock Music and Art Fair in 1969, where Santana, Janis Joplin and
Jimi Hendrix performed.

Or you might have attended the All Points West Music & Arts Festival
Music last weekend in Jersey City, N.J., where Jay-Z, Coldplay and
the Yeah Yeah Yeahs performed.

Perhaps you attended neither. In any case, the impact of the
Woodstock festival - the 40th anniversary of which is next weekend -
is no less significant.

"I embraced Woodstock personally as a statement that a nonviolent,
spiritual revolution was possible," said Dennis McNally, who has a
Ph.D. in American history, and served for years as publicist for the
Grateful Dead, one of the many bands to perform at Woodstock.

McNally, who has written a history of the Grateful Dead as well as a
biography of Jack Kerouac, did not attend the festival on Yasgur's
Farm. But, "Woodstock served as a shining example."

The Woodstock festival, plans for which were laid out in the Town of
Woodstock, Ulster County, left a large imprint on American popular
culture, history, music and values.

Woodstock and the moon landing, separated in 1969 by less than a
month, inspired optimism, hope and pride among Americans watching
soldiers ship out to Vietnam, while recovering from two tragic
assassinations a year earlier - those of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy and
the Rev. Martin Luther King.

" '68 was a terrible year politically," said Kevin Seekamp of Accord,
Ulster County, who attended Woodstock. "I just remember that. There
was so much going on that the idea of three days of music and
celebration of life was so different than the murder of Martin Luther
King in 1968 and Bobby Kennedy."

Today, the spirit of Woodstock continues to resonate for many.

"Those people who were there and those people who took something from
it learned we could relate to each other in a much nicer way than we
had been in general and a better, more peaceful world is possible,"
said Woodstock resident Michael Lang, one of the four partners who
staged the celebration in 1969 and the public face of the festival
for 40 years. "I think that hope is what we took away from Woodstock.
... I think I see the legacy of Woodstock in, for example, the Obama
election, the green movement of today, the advances in human rights.
I think that's the legacy of Woodstock and I think that continues to grow."

If you were at the All Points West festival, you may or may not know
that the large-scale music festivals of today - Bonnaroo in
Tennessee, Rothbury in Michigan, Mountain Jam in the Catskills and
All Points West - are also part of the Woodstock legacy. Like
Woodstock, these festivals run over several days and include camping,
live music and attendees who drive thousands of miles across the
country to attend.

'Watershed moment'

"Obviously, Woodstock was a watershed moment in many ways," said
Jeremy Stein, founder and director of the Rothbury Festival, which
this past July hosted Bob Dylan, Willie Nelson, the Black Crowes and
many other bands. "Of course, there is a connection to that time
period, with what's going on today."

Steven Garabedian, an assistant professor of history at Marist
College in Poughkeepsie, incorporates Woodstock into his class discussions.

"I include it in my courses as a significant moment alongside the
Democratic National Convention protests in 1968, the Vietnam War,
Kent State," he said. "All of these things, I see as important to the
larger story of American history."

Garabedian, who in the fall will teach a course called "A Rock and
Roll History of America," said on the musical side of things,
Woodstock was part of a trajectory that began with Bob Dylan playing
an electric guitar at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965; and which
continued with the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967.

But, he continued, Woodstock goes far beyond any musical analysis.

Garabedian typically shows his students the scene in the Academy
Award-winning Woodstock documentary that features musician Country
Joe McDonald singing the "I Feel Like I'm Fixin' To Die-Rag." This
Dixieland romp performed on acoustic guitar is a scathing satire of
the Vietnam War.

Reaction to war

Garabedian believes Woodstock was a reaction to the Cold War.

And, he said, "the pressure for conformity, the expectations and the
pressure on young people to take up the mantle of leadership as some
of them started to investigate aspects of American society they had
always taken for granted, that everything was as it should be and the
U.S. was the beacon of freedom."

"When they started to question one thing, they started to question
another," Garabedian said. "When the civil rights movement was
starting in the '50s and started to get the attention of young white
kids who maybe had this inclination to ask questions, I think that
encouraged them. Once they started asking questions about race in the
U.S., then they started asking questions about the Cold War, Vietnam
War, gender roles, the women's movement."
--

Reach John W. Barry at jobarry@poughkeepsiejournal.com or 845-437-4822.

--------

Remembering Woodstock

Middling music, but a vivid memento

http://www.philly.com/inquirer/columnists/dan_deluca/20090809_Middling_music__but_a_vivid_memento.html

By Dan DeLuca
Inquirer Music Critic
Aug. 9, 2009

Everybody knows the Woodstock Music & Art Fair was the biggest, most
zeitgeist-defining of 1960s music festivals. But how good was the
music, really?

The 40th anniversary offers a chance to listen in more detail than
ever before. That's thanks largely to Rhino Records' six-CD boxed
set, Woodstock 40 Years On: Back to Yasgur's Farm (**1/2), which
means to capture the countercultural gestalt with highlights from
(almost) all of the performers, including Jimi Hendrix, The Who, Sly
& the Family Stone, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, Creedence
Clearwater Revival, Santana, and Ravi Shankar.

At eight hours in length, that's a lot of music, though only a fifth
of what compiler Andy Zaks hoped to include before "non-Aquarian
logistical realities" got in the way, as he writes in the liner notes.

One of the things that a close look back at Woodstock reminds you is
how many of the iconic acts of the '60s were not there. No Beatles,
Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Led Zeppelin, or Beach Boys.

Otis Redding sang for "the love crowd" at Monterey Pop in 1967, but
there was no similar outreach beyond the countercultural comfort zone
at the 1969 Upstate New York love-in. Other than San Francisco-based
Sly's psychedelic soul-rock polyglot, there wasn't a single
significant African American soul, R&B, or blues performer at
Yasgur's Farm. What's up with that, Woodstock?

What you do get on Yasgur's Farm are some worthwhiles, for sure. A
full-of-feeling performance from Tim Hardin. A giggling Arlo Guthrie.
A sweetly psychedelic Incredible String Band.

Joan Baez, thankfully, mixes overly pretty folk with surprising
country-rock. And Canned Heat nearly makes the 28-minute blues
"Woodstock Boogie" worthy of its length - as opposed to, say, the
Butterfield Blues Band's nine-minute "Love March."

Among the letdowns: Neil Young, whose only included appearance is
with CSN on "Wooden Ships" and his own "Sea of Madness." A bigger
bummer: The Band, the great Canadian American realists, did not allow
their music to be included.

Richie Havens' manically strummed incantations remain as off-putting
as when I first heard them in the Woodstock movie, in an altered
state on the Ocean City Boardwalk lo those many years ago. And then
there are acts that have come up short in the test of time. Are
Sweetwater, Bert Sommer, Melanie, and Quill worthy of revisiting?
Only to historically obsessed nostalgists.

What's good about Back to Yasgur's Farm? For starters, the closer:
Hendrix's mind-blowing "Star-Spangled Banner" flowing into the
wondrous riff of "Purple Haze." And Sly & the Family Stone's
deliriously joyful medley of "Dance to the Music/Music Lover/I Want
to Take You Higher," which gives way to a Tommy interlude by The Who,
which sounds explosive, despite Roger Daltrey's assessment of it as
"the worst performance we ever did."

The real value of the Rhino box isn't so much in the music: It's as a
document that captures Abbie Hoffman ranting about imprisoned White
Panther John Sinclair (and getting hit over the head by Pete
Townshend). And Wavy Gravy announcing that "what we have in mind is
breakfast in bed for 400,000)!" And sonorous-voiced emcee Chip Monck
notifying "those who have partaken of the green acid" to go to the
hospital tent before the Dead embark on a typically diffuse 19-minute
"Dark Star."

For non-completists, there are options. Rhino has also reissued the
Music from the Original Soundtrack and More: Woodstock double disc,
plus a two-CD companion, Woodstock Two.

Sony/Legacy has put out a series of The Woodstock Experience CDs
(***) that collect complete performances of individual artists - the
Airplane, Joplin, Santana, Johnny Winter and Sly & the Family Stone -
packaged with the studio album the act released in 1969. So the
Airplane live set comes with Volunteers, and Sly's is bundled with
the brilliant Stand! It's a good deal if you don't own the studio
albums, but you probably do. They're available together, or individually.
--

Contact music critic Dan DeLuca at 215-854-5628 or ddeluca@phillynews.com.

--------
The enduring appeal of Woodstock

http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/feat/archives/2009/08/09/2003450717

After the buzz wore off, the utopian communal aura of a Woodstock
Nation gave way, almost immediately, to the reality of a Woodstock Market

By Jon Pareles
NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE, NEW YORK
Sunday, Aug 09, 200

Baby boomers won't let go of the Woodstock Festival. Why should we?
It's one of the few defining events of the late 1960s that had a
clear happy ending.

On Aug. 15 to Aug. 17, 1969, hundreds of thousands of people, me
among them, gathered in a lovely natural amphitheater in Bethel (not
Woodstock), New York. We listened to some of the best rock musicians
of the era, enjoyed other legal and illegal pleasures, endured rain
and mud and exhaustion and hunger pangs, felt like a giant community
and dispersed, all without catastrophe.

A year after the riots at the Democratic convention in Chicago,
expectations about large gatherings of young people were so low that
this was considered a surprise. Although the festival didn't go
exactly as planned, it was, as advertised, three days of peace and
music. That made Woodstock an idyll, particularly in retrospect, even
though it was declared a state disaster area at the time.

"Not withstanding their personality, their dress and their ideas,
they were and they are the most courteous, considerate and
well-behaved group of kids I have ever been in contact with in my 24
years of police work," Lou Yank, the chief of police in nearby
Monticello, told the New York Times.

Yet for all the benign memories, Woodstock also set in motion other,
more crass impulses. While its immediate aftermath was amazement and
relief, the festival's full legacy had as much to do with excess as
with idealism. As the decades roll by, the festival seems more than
ever like a fluke: a moment of muddy, disheveled, incredulous grace.
It was as much an endpoint as a beginning, a holiday of naivete and
dumb luck before the realities of capitalism resumed.

Woodstock's young, left-of-center crowd ­ nice kids, including
students, artists, workers and politicos, as well as full-fledged
LSD-popping hippies ­ was quickly recognized as a potential army of
consumers that mainstream merchants would not underestimate again.
There was more to sell them than rolling papers and LPs.

With the 40th anniversary of Woodstock looming ­ so soon? ­ the
commemorative machinery is clanking into place, and the nostalgia is
strong. There's a Woodstock Festival museum now at the Bethel Woods
Center for the Arts and a recently built concert hall at what was the
concert site, Max Yasgur's farm (though the original Woodstock
hillside has been left undeveloped).

A new, much expanded anthology of music recorded at the 1969 festival
has been issued: the six-CD Woodstock 40 Years On: Back to Yasgur's
Farm (Rhino). Complete Woodstock performances by Sly and the Family
Stone, Santana, Janis Joplin and others have been released by Sony
Legacy. Cable and public television channels have their Woodstock
specials scheduled, and there's yet another batch of commemorative
books, including The Road to Woodstock (Ecco) by the festival's
instigator, Michael Lang, which includes tidbits like how much the
bands were paid.

Taking Woodstock, a comedy directed by Ang Lee ( ), is due for
release this month.

A summer package tour, Heroes of Woodstock, features musicians who
appeared at Woodstock ­ including Jefferson Starship (playing
Jefferson Airplane songs), Levon Helm from the Band, Tom Constanten
from the Grateful Dead, Ten Years After, Canned Heat and Country Joe
McDonald. It arrives at Bethel Woods on Saturday.

Unlike previous anniversaries in 1994 and 1999, however, there's no
big festival this year bearing the Woodstock name ­ reflecting,
perhaps, the dismal memories of Woodstock '99 in Rome, New York,
where a hot, pent-up audience, angry at high vendor prices, set fires
and looted and vandalized the site.

While the original Woodstock showed how much discomfort an audience
would put up with for the sake of sharing an event ­ something
promoters were happy to learn ­ Woodstock '99 breached the limit of
fan exploitation.

Yet the original Woodstock still has a rosy glow. It was finite and
all smiles ­ far different from the Vietnam War, the racial tensions
and the much-discussed generation gap of the same era. Woodstock
became free in both senses of the word: free as in liberated (from
drug laws and dress codes) and free as in gratis, not collecting
tickets and handing out, as Wavy Gravy said, "breakfast in bed for 400,000."

A cynic might see the festival as a prime example of how coddled the
baby boomers were in an economy of abundance. The Woodstock crowd,
which arrived with more drugs than camping supplies, got itself a
free concert, and when the people responsible could no longer handle
the logistics, the government bailed them out. Some people took it
upon themselves to help others; many just freeloaded.

Still, Woodstock gave virtually everyone involved ­ ticket holders,
gatecrashers, musicians, doctors, the police ­ a sense of shared
humanity and cooperation.

Trying to get through the weekend, people played nice with one
another, which was only sensible. Musicians performed for the biggest
audience of their lives. Townspeople and the National Guard pitched
in to keep people fed and healthy. No one, the New York Times
reported, called the cops "pigs."

One lunatic with a gun could have changed everything. The Altamont
Festival, marred all day by violence, took place only four months
later. Miraculously, at Woodstock, there was none.

Seemingly within minutes after it ended, Woodstock was the stuff of
legend: a spirit, a nation, an ideal, amorphous but vivid, with an
Oscar-winning documentary film, the 1970 Woodstock, to prove it
wasn't all a hallucination. (The film was also an early lesson in how
profitable ancillary rights could be; the festival itself lost money,
but the film recouped it many times over.)

Sheer size made Woodstock consequential. It was huge. The Beatles had
played to 55,000 people at Shea Stadium; the 1965 Newport Folk
Festival spread about 71,000 people over four days. Had Woodstock
drawn the 100,000 to 150,000 people that its promoters planned for,
it would simply have been one in a string of big rock festivals
dating back to Monterey Pop in 1967, which had an estimated total of
200,000 people over three days.

After Woodstock gave up on collecting tickets ­ abandoning flimsy
fences and declaring itself a free festival ­ it grew to what was
variously estimated as 300,000 or 400,000 people, more than double
the attendance of previous rock festivals. That number would have
been considerably higher if traffic problems hadn't turned some away;
many people walked for kilometers to the site.

When the hippie subculture surfaced en masse at Woodstock, two years
after the Summer of Love, it was still largely self-invented and
isolated. There were pockets of freaks in cities and handfuls of them
in smaller towns, nearly all feeling like outsiders. For many people
at the festival, just seeing and joining that gigantic crowd was more
of a revelation than anything that happened onstage. It proved that
they were not some negligible minority but members of a larger
culture ­ or, to use that sweetly dated term, a counterculture.

At Woodstock hippiedom simultaneously reached its public peak and
opened itself to imitation and trivialization ­ one more glimmer of
rebellion to be deflated into a style statement.

For true believers Woodstock was about cooperation and mutual aid,
and about making love, not war. (At a time when Vietnam had divided
America into hawks and doves, that was a peace dove sitting on the
guitar in the festival logo.) But Woodstock was also a whole lot of
people getting stoned at a rock concert, which was much easier than
working to change the world.

Politicos like Abbie Hoffman, who is widely credited with coining the
phrase Woodstock Nation, wanted to claim Woodstock as a symbol of
resistance to repression. But Pete Townshend batted Hoffman off the
stage with a guitar when Hoffman interrupted the Who's set to protest
the imprisonment, for drug possession, of a fellow activist, John Sinclair.

There was antiwar fervor in some songs, like Richie Havens' Handsome
Johnny and McDonald's I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-to-Die Rag. Joan Baez
spoke about her husband, in jail for draft dodging, and sang We Shall
Overcome. There was also, in much of the music, that particular
late-1960s aura of imminent doom or enlightenment, in songs like
Wooden Ships (performed by both Jefferson Airplane and Crosby,
Stills, Nash and Young) and the Who's Amazing Journey. And there was
Jimi Hendrix's Star-Spangled Banner, with its screams of feedback and
its divebombing glissandos, brash and dire, angry and insistently
American. But Woodstock was no earnest rally; it had love songs,
blues and extended guitar jams.

After the buzz wore off, the utopian communal aura of a Woodstock
Nation gave way, almost immediately, to the reality of a Woodstock
Market: a demographic target group about to have its dreams stripped
of radical purpose and turned into commodities. A wider audience
realized it was possible to enjoy the music, drugs and fun without
the ideological trappings.

Soon enough everyone was a quasi-hippie; long hair on men no longer
signaled anything about what they stood for. FM radio, which was the
pipeline for underground rock, traded quirky, exploratory disc
jockeys for consistent formats that advertisers could depend on. Now
that it was clear how large an audience was at stake ­ that it wasn't
just a few freaks ­ professionals were back in charge.

Woodstock and other late-1960s festivals changed the scale of rock
concerts. Bands eagerly moved up to arenas from theaters; a week
before Woodstock, for example, two of its acts, the Jefferson
Airplane and Joe Cocker, shared a bill at the Fillmore East, which
had all of 2,700 seats. Music soon expanded, or bloated, to fill its
newfound arenas. The early 1970s were the era of noodling jams and
10-minute drum solos that would have to be torpedoed, a few years
later, by punk rock.

Woodstock would prove something to the world. What it proved ­ that
for at least one weekend, hippies meant what they said about peace
and love ­ was fleeting and all too innocent; it couldn't stand up to
everyday human nature or to the pragmatic workings of the market. But
40 years later the sensation lingers.

.

Woodstock myths re-examined

Woodstock myths re-examined

http://www.cantondailyledger.com/news/x1331801458/Woodstock-myths-re-examined

By LARRY ESKRIDGE of the Daily Ledger
GateHouse News Service
Fri Aug 07, 2009

CANTON - Forty-one years ago, an ad appeared in The New York Times:
"Young men with unlimited capital looking for interesting and
legitimate business enterprises."
The ad was placed by John Roberts and Joel Rosenman, two young men
who were trying to get into business. The unlimited capital came from
Roberts' trust fund, which the pair used as collateral for loans for
any potential projects. While they were both in their early twenties,
the two were definitely not part of the counterculture.
The ad was answered by two other young men, Michael Lang, who had
previously been the owner of a head shop in Florida, and Artie
Kornfeld, who had worked with the pop group The Cowsills. They were
trying to get funding to build a recording studio/cultural center in
upstate New York near the home of Bob Dylan. The place was named Woodstock.
From the beginning, Woodstock was the stuff of myth and
contradictions. Seen today as the height of anti-establishment
activity, the festival was, from the beginning, seen as a
money-making project. The concert became free only after it was
determined there was no way to keep the crowds from tearing down the
fences and entering without paying.
Tickets which had been purchased at $18 a pop are now treasured
keepsakes for the Boomers who bought them.
And for an event which has been known as anti-capitalist, huge
amounts of cash were thrown around by the organizers with little or
no oversight. At least one worker told Joel Makower in the book,
"Woodstock: The Oral History," that she never spent a penny of her
own money during the time she worked for the organization, even for
highly personal items.
Area residents were divided about having the event so close to home.
Many were extremely unhappy about having so many long-haired,
dope-smoking hippies in the vicinity. On the other hand, they were
not adverse to selling the hippies food, water, and other necessities
at highly inflated prices. And many of the organizers later recalled
they rented property for a week or two at the same price for which
the land could have been sold.
At the same time, many of the locals were quite sympathetic to the
young festival-goers. Some private citizens offered food and water
free to those passing by their property, and some merchants either
lowered their prices, gave things away for free, or told the
youngsters to pay what they could.
And while most people think potential disaster at Woodstock was
averted by the attendees sharing what they had, much of the food
eaten at Woodstock was donated by local women and civic organizations
who were supposed to be opposed to the irresponsible young people.
Even the site at Bethel was provided by dairy farmer Max Yasgur, who
felt the young people had been used badly by the residents of the
first site, Wallkill, who pulled the plug on the festival weeks
before. Yasgur, by the way, rented his property to the festival for a
nice profit.
One of the most enduring memories of those setting up the festival
was the almost complete lack of organization of the organizers.
Workers preparing the site switched from one job to another with very
little direction. As time became shorter, workers would often decide
to take the afternoon off and go horseback riding simply because the
weather was nice.
At the same time, answers to many of the logistical problems of
today's outdoor and arena events were provided by Woodstock. The
sound systems used in many large gatherings had their origins at
Woodstock, while solutions to problems such as sanitation,
transportation to and in the sites, and security are traced back to the event.
Oddly enough, many of the ideas used at Woodstock were found by the
organizers in studies published by the U.S. military.
For a festival known for its well-behaved audience, security was a
major concern for the organizers. The man hired to head security was
Wes Pomeroy, who had also been the coordinator for federal troops at
both the 1968 Republican and Democratic conventions. After an
agreement with the New York Police fell apart, Pomeroy found himself
dealing mainly with a commune called the Hog Farm, who told the press
they would keep the peace with a "Please" force armed with cream pies
and seltzer bottles.
Wavy Gravy, the head of the Hog Farm, told author Makower his
reaction was, "My God, we're the cops!"
The biggest security threat came from the counterculture itself.
Headed by Abbie Hoffman, the Yippies demanded $10,000 to keep them
from disrupting the festival. The organizers paid the money.
Perhaps the most intriguing incident happened after the festival was
over. The organizers had been working with a bank which had provided
the capital for the event. On the Monday after the event, the bankers
called the organizers in to demand how they were going to meet their
obligations. According to Rosenman in Makower's book, the bankers
were angrily dressing down him and Roberts when one of them noticed
the two had not signed the personal guarantee forms forcing them to
pay. The bankers suddenly became quite solicitous, realizing the
organizers were now under no legal obligation to pay back the money.
Roberts and Rosenman signed the forms. It would be years before sales
of the albums and movie tickets allowed them to pay back their debts
and see a profit.
------
Reporter's note: With all the myths and misunderstandings about
Woodstock, and with all the time elapsed, I wondered if there would
be any point in writing about the events on Aug. 15, 16, and 17,
1969. I had planned to do three stories, one for each day of the
festival, but I still had doubts whether anyone would be interested.
While taking pictures at this year's Fulton County Fair, I took a
break near the fair office and I sat down to read a book on Woodstock
I found at Parlin-Ingersoll Library in Canton ("Woodstock: The Summer
of Our Lives" by Jack Curry). A man who looked like a typical farmer
attending the fair, dressed in overalls and a baseball cap, sat down
beside me and, looking at the book, asked, "Did you go?"
I replied, "No, I was too young, and from what I heard, it was
probably just as well."
The man smiled wistfully and said, "I wish I had been there."
At that moment I knew the three stories had to be written.

.

Paul Krassner Interviewed by Carol Queen

In Praise of Indecency:
Paul Krassner Interviewed by Carol Queen

http://www.alternet.org/sex/141841/in_praise_of_indecency:_paul_krassner_interviewed_by_carol_queen/

By Staff , Carnal Nation
August 6, 2009.

Paul Krassner talks about same-sex marriage, indecency, and our
culture's hypocrisy about sex.
--

A lot's been said and written about Paul Krassner since he founded
the legendary underground newspaper The Realist in 1958. People
Weekly crowned him "the father of the underground press." (He
demanded a blood test.) The FBI, writing anonymously to Life
Magazine, called him "a raving, unconfined nut." Groucho Marx once
predicted that in time, Krassner would be "the only live Lenny Bruce."

However you describe Krassner, the history he has made and witnessed
has been extraordinary. As publisher of The Realist, he targeted
every form of hypocrisy available with a trademark blend of satire
and journalism. He also founded the absurdist prankster group The
Yippies with Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, edited Lenny Bruce's
autobiography, dropped acid with Groucho, did a brief stint as editor
of Hustler, and ran an underground abortion referral service for a
decade before Roe v. Wade. In 2004, the ACLU gave him the Upton
Sinclair Award for his commitment to freedom of expression.

Krassner's books include his autobiography, Confessions of a Raving,
Unconfined Nut and One Hand Jerking, a collection of essays. He's
just published two more: Who's to Say What's Obscene? and In Praise
of Indecency. Carol Queen interviewed him at the Center for Sex and
Culture this month.

See URL for video.]

.

How did the radical Bill Ayers obtain tenure at the University of Illinois?

How did the radical Bill Ayers obtain tenure at the University of Illinois?

http://www.worldtribune.com/worldtribune/WTARC/2009/ss_politics0623_08_05.asp

By Cliff Kincaid, Accuracy in Media
August 5, 2009

The University of Illinois, which employs communist terrorist Bill
Ayers as a professor, has been hit by an admissions scandal which has
forced the resignation of the chairman of its board of trustees. An
investigation by the Chicago Tribune found that more than 800
undergraduate applicants received special consideration from 2005 to
2009 because "they had powerful patrons, including elected officials,
trustees and donors." It added that "Dozens more law and graduate
school applicants also got preferential treatment."

But how did Bill Ayers get his job? All signs point to his rich
father, Thomas Ayers, who was CEO of Commonwealth Edison and a major
power player in the Chicago establishment.

Will the Chicago Tribune investigate this? Thomas Ayers sat on the
board of the Tribune Company, which publishes the Tribune.

Thomas Ayers also sat on the board of Northwestern University, where
Bill Ayers' wife and fellow terrorist Bernardine Dohrn got a teaching job.

As a result of what the Tribune has revealed in the admissions
scandal, Illinois Governor Pat Quinn created an Illinois Admissions
Review Commission, which is scheduled to release a written report on
the controversy this week. However, the commission has not been
charged with investigating how professors got their jobs. This is a
major omission.

Considering his history of terrorism, including bombing police
stations, many people have been intrigued by the question of how Bill
Ayers got to be a tenured "Distinguished Professor" of Education at
the University of Illinois. That is why I submitted a state Freedom
of Information Act request to the University of Illinois. I wanted to
know how he was appointed and how he got tenure. I then asked
Professor Mary Grabar, who has completed a major report (PDF) on the
work and history of Professor Bill Ayers, to analyze the results of
my request. She reports:

"A review of Ayers' Curriculum vitae shows a rapid path through the
educational system after he came out of hiding in 1979 for his
involvement in bombings of U.S. government buildings with the
domestic terrorist group Weatherman. Charges were dropped after the
Carter Justice Department charged the two FBI agents with illegal
surveillance. Enrolling at the nation's premier training academy for
progressive teachers, Columbia University's Teachers College, Ayers
soon earned both an M.Ed. and Ed.D. in Curriculum and Teaching (1987).

"A Freedom of Information request for his tenure review process
produced only blank forms with a cover letter stating that such
information cannot be released 'unless the disclosure is consented to
in writing by the individual.' But were the standards for hiring and
promotion relaxed a bit for the son of a prominent Chicago
businessman who headed Commonwealth Edison and sat on the board of
the Chicago Tribune? Tenure requires proof of scholarship and
publication in one's field, and the only book that Ayers had to show
was a loosely constructed story of six anonymous preschool teachers,
with none of the rigorous evaluation and data normally required in the field.

"But an examination of his writings and syllabi reveal that Ayers
continued in this vein, using his platform as a professor to promote
the idea of education as the 'motor force of revolution' and himself
as the hero at the forefront. They reveal an educational philosophy
that contradicts the Illinois Professional Teaching Standards posted
on the university's website. The question remains: how many others
could have made such a seamless rise from fugitive to distinguished
professor while flaunting all standards?"

Another of our Freedom of Information Act requests resulted in the
disclosure of a syllabi for a curious course entitled, "Social
Conflicts of the 1960's." Two of the three pages are a diatribe,
mostly against the U.S. policy of resisting the communist conquest of
South Vietnam. It's not exactly clear how students were supposed to
be graded for taking this "seminar," but Ayers concludes the course
description by saying, "Show up or be doomed," and if you want to
bring your children to the class, that's "fine."

Sounds like a great learning environment.

Clearly, the scandal involving the University of Illinois goes far
beyond hundreds of students getting admitted because of high-level
financial and political connections.

Mary Grabar's report demonstrates that Ayers' techniques are recycled
Stalinist strategies of undermining American culture and education in
order to bring about revolution. She asks, "Was Ayers' appointment
part of the 'Chicago Way'?"

Before the Illinois Admissions Review Commission finishes its work,
this is a question that should be investigated and answered. Illinois
Governor Pat Quinn created the commission through an executive order
saying that "fairness and transparency in the administration of an
educational system is a fundamental aspect of the public trust." A
new executive order should be issued to permit the panel to examine
how Ayers got his teaching job.

.