Preface
Welcome to the Home Page of Bernard X. Bovasso
bernx@aolcom
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A massive promotion campaign and relentless media attention spotlighted a small village by the Hudson River during the Summer of 1994. It was an event that was a significant climax to the approaching end of the second millennium. The event, as shall be reviewed in the following, had a mythological proportion consistent with the motif of The End, in this case, the end of the Woodstock ethos.
From my own standpoint--as a local resident--the Village and Town of Saugerties was being sold to the Devil. I did not mean this in a purely euphemistic sense but quite literally. On the other hand, given an understanding of mythology and psychology, it is not possible to leave the Devil to theological questions or the usual moral or political issues that deal in good and evil, better or worse, or however else bonded opposites are yin-yanged, stood on their heads, one the mirror image of the other. The devilish ambivalence effected all concerned and the quiet, sleepy village was in for the fit of its life. Passions flared around the question of whether to be or not to be the summer art center of the universe; whether to embrace the devilish hybris or resist it. Certainly a great temptation voiced itself. But it had more to do with the elevation of Saugerties to instant world fame than the politically offered notion justifying the festival as panacea for the local recession. As the Festival mania set in there lurked in the shadows the inevitable depression, the downer whose mythological signature was anticipated by the sudden importance of mud. What mud has to do with fame may be apparent in the following essay.
Bernard X. Bovasso September 4, 1994
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bernx@aol.comPart II
COVET NOT THY NEIGHBOR'S FAME
THE SEDUCTION OF SAUGERTIES
THE SINEWS OF THE DRAGON REVEALED (From Saugerties to the Ukraine)
FRIENDLY SAUGERTIES (And the World) CONFRONTED BY A NEW ETHOS
WOODSTOCK IN SAUGERTIES: A FARCE OF LAW, ORDER & PROFITS
THE KIDDIE FARM
THE MEDIA INVASION OF SAUGERTIES
URINE, FECES, MUD AND MR. DEATH
THE PIED PIPER IN SAUGERTIES
LUGH AND LANG ALIKE
MUD AND THE GREAT UNBORNING
THE NIGHT AFTER THE LIVING DEAD
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The celebrated goals, however, were designed in phantom issues. The dump proposition, for example, was irrelevant. It is not legal by federal statute to create a landfill in a wetland or where an aquifer is located. Yet, between the County dump promoter, The festival promoter, the Winston Farm (anti- dump) Alliance and the Saugerties town board, the proposed Festival conveniently served as the preventive for the dump, whereas the promise of the dump served to insure the possibility of a Festival! In this catch 22 maleficence everyone remained happy right on past the great mud event. The only goal achieved was that the Festival promoters were granted a variance by the Town Board to go ahead with their grandiose plan.
The goal of "substantial financial gain" was equally counterfeit because based on attendance and the box office yield. Only half of the celebrants paid their way. The rest crashed the gate. "Substantial" simply meant that far less was made than expected. A genuine financial gain would have been realized if the Town Board had the wit to negotiate for a fraction of the residuals that the backers would earn in the future spinoffs generated by the festival. The third announced goal was more a confession of the inferiority and denial suffered by Saugerties for the last 25 years-- existing as it did in the shadow of its neighbor, the town of Woodstock, and its globally famous name.
The festival, now to be located in Saugerties, was an opportunity to ameliorate such fame-envy, if only it were vicariously borrowed. The seduction played on this entrenched inferiority of country mouse Saugerties. Neither the flattery by the big city rat was resistible or the spell cast promising world and global fame. The fact is, begged, borrowed or purloined, on or off the map, Saugerties does not have the special resource of Woodstock. The particular fame of the name (The town and the original 1969 festival in Bethel) rests in the fact that Woodstock had been an artist colony for the last 100 years and traditionally enjoyed a strong attraction for artists and an art interested public. Venerated accordingly as the Catskill Mountain mecca for the culture elite, it was also a magnet for Hippies, Rock musicians and the promoters of the original 1969 Woodstock Festival. Its new culture veneer, however, merely provided a concealing glaze for its art tradition of the 'thirties and 'forties: Woodstock as the pride of social realism and the American Marxist approach to art.
It is ironic that Saugerties should envy the evolution of the Woodstock Nation and its army of dropouts. Back in the early 'seventies Saugerties enjoyed such formidable insulation that anyone arriving in the village (such as myself) sporting a beard was considered a "hippie." More the local amazement that I chose to buy an old and dilapidated factory building in the village and proceeded to live in it. It was unthinkable that anyone (except a "hippie") would care to live in a factory. My own parents felt the same way. In those days an artist was consideredÄfrom a secure and cozy middle class standpointÄa misfit and freak except, perhaps, in Greenwich Village, Woodstock, N.Y. or Provincetown, Ma. I had to explain to local people that I was too old to be a Hippie, the Beatnik generation had passed me by and if a label were required I would more properly be known as a "Bohemian." Neither did I live up to local expectations as a shiftless New York City artist, a "communist" or liberal better expatriated to Woodstock. My factory employed local people and my artistic proclivities seemed to have all the earmarks of a production business.
Soon after, more artists with beards and bra-less ladies with loose fitting dresses infiltrated the Village. It was cheaper to live in Saugerties than the more favored Woodstock which, by then, had become a star rising over the Catskills. In other words, there is absolutely no reason why Saugerties should be placed on the map as a place renown for Art except it borrow the fame of Woodstock. The promise of a Saugerties Art Center to justify allowing the great mud and violence event merely chooses "Art" as a catchword for economic salvation. It suddenly dawned on SaugertesiansÄat least since the demise of the local IBM hegemonyÄthat where Art and artists go, the buck is sure to follow, something that I have been reminding for 20 years. The formula is simple: encourage artists to locate in the community by making available reasonably priced living and work (studio) space. The many old loft buildings in the Village of Saugerties would fit the bill. Without work space an artist is dead. It is also helpful if artists are looked upon as something other than "low life." Some culture-consciousness is required and which is contagiously spreading through many rural communities. The hope is for the attraction of money spending tourists to offset the demise of farming and light industry. The City of Kingston learned the trick and its Roundout section was transformed into a mini-SoHo. But if Saugertesians want such a tourist attraction it would be better to address the subject in terms of real-estate and communicating with artists rather than depending upon a self-obsessed promoter to deliver an "art center" all packaged and ready to go. An Art Center is not something attractive for investment by big-buck media giants.
Saugerties, in contrast to Woodstock, was traditionally a vigourous if not important industrial town. But it no longer has any industry to speak of. A few years ago an Italian brick-making firm with a revolutionary "clean" method of mining and manufacturing brick thought Saugerties a desirable place to locate a factory. The high-tech brick makers were attracted to the local clay-rich terrain. Soon enough, however, the brick-makers became mired in local bureaucratic red tape, not to mention the new breed of ecology minded Yuppies recently arrived in town. Its patience spent the firm moved elsewhere. No doubt it would have been too close to the naturally pristine Winston Farm. In other words, where manufacturing is "dirty," a 25th anniversary Woodstock Festival would be "clean" for local aging and reformed Hippies, ecological puritans and politicians who coveted the fame of their Woodstock neighbor.
In my own case, as an art fabricator and designer, my factory studio had been zoned out of business (in the village of Saugerties) because of my lacquer spraying, polyester casting and fiberglass constructions. The building had been a factory for over 100 years. Such art pollutions certainly had to go for the safety of myself and others. More alarming were the new Village residential zoning laws that would make it illegal to paint pictures in your living room. As a result of such thriving concern for the environment, and indifference to revenue producing industry, it was astounding that local government was hardly perturbed by the colossal ecological trashing of the pastoral Winston Farm property for the purpose of rubbing off some of the name and fame of "Woodstock." Equally amazing is the expectation that by the promise of the Festival promoters, the wave of a magic wand and a phantom multimillion dollar investment, an Art Center would materialize on the Winston Farm site to amplify Saugerties' position "on the map" as the art center of the universe. Aside from such media fame, "Art" would rescue Saugerties not only from its post-IBM, and now, post-festival, economic blues, but its county ordained fate as keeper of the mega-dump.
Such day-dreaming would account for the great delusional spell cast by the officials that whatever happened on Winston Farm and the surrounding community was fine and flawless, all goals victoriously achieved. The momentous ecological, cultural, ethical, moral, social and aesthetical defilements that occurred in Saugerties have been-in true Marxist fashionÄwritten out of history. The kids enjoyed themselves and everything was fine, as if how they took their pleasure was irrelevant. How people recreate, is not a simple matter. It is not possible to determine a morally and aesthetically correct universal mode of recreation. The archaic musical violence displayed was not exactly comparable to the macho aerobics of a football game. A football game is certainly a piece of demonstrated violence but, as with theater, confined to the players. The mud-ritual in Saugerties, on the other hand, was a not a spectator sport. The greater part of violence and obscenity instigated by the performers took place off-stage. Is this the way children, en mass, were supposed to take their pleasure?--breaking bones in the moshing pits? The cosmetic trend of puncturing the body wherever a needle will go may be called a "pleasurable pastime" if it is admitted that self-inflicted pain and suicidal affectations are forms of gratification. The Winston FArm event was all fine and dandy because only two lives were lost (officially). The 23 bodies allegedly found in the mud is firmly denied and left as the grass roots rumor that it is (no doubt spread by malicious clean-up workers and morbid medical personnel).
Was this pronounced tra-la-la official attitude a case of collective denial on the part of local politicians? Were the Woodstock Venture promoters the enablers, demonstrating a classic example of dysfunctional symbiosis: the abused unconsciously indulging ("getting off on") the abuse administered by the abuser? All the Town Board had to say was: "If we cannot have residuals in our contract, then get the hell out of town." And if such residuals were forthcoming they would be obliged to honestly admit that what amounted to hosting a dip in the honey bucket of collectively expressed human depravity was a worthwhile tradeoff. Not without coincidence in this Emperor's New Clothes syndrome, the celebratory tone of the Town Board meeting was set following a gratuitous letter made public by theWoodstock Ventures Promoters.
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Apparently, the local heroes were not applauded for their tireless dedication to allowing the billion dollar international cartel do a multimillion dollar business in the town. Through its persona front organization the dragon prevailed efficiently if not greedilyÄas Dragons are wont to doÄand to the virtual exclusion of local businesses. Neither were the local tireless heroes thanked for the "modest" profit that would flow into the Dragonþs belly or celebrated because nothing more than the cost of bare expenses would be paid to the town. In other words the Dragon took all and gave nothing back in terms of profits. There is not, of course, anything wrong with being in business to make a billion dollars, except for the greedy extremes indulged: not a nickel of residual earnings would trickle down to the town treasury of the local heroes. In co-opting body and soulÄno less in the name of the "Spirit"Äit would suffice to flatter the local "hicks" and "appleknockers". This world class city slicker device worked fine, especially on the local political and business leaders who were hardly trained in the judicious art of peeking behind the mask. Neither are they, as it would now appear, astute in the art of poker- playing at the negotiation table.
Obviously, little Saugerties held the trump card. It had the final say about whether the megalithic designed-for-profits organization would spread its dragon coils in the townþs lovely and well conserved natural environment. But they never played their card for a piece of the residuals that would be reaped by the Dragon in its post-festival spinoffs. Apparently the dragon was irresistible to virgin Saugerties and with hardly a St. George, or a local card shark, in sight for the rescue. The leaders of the kind, friendly little town obliged, dutifully bent over and compromised the land as well as its people. Two hundred years ago the British and the Tories were run out of the Valley for doing less than that. Accordingly, the thank-you note continued, as if with a vengeance to in fact penalize while they insidiously praised the local tireless heroes. One and all were concisely listed so that after the aftershock of the Dragon presence passed on, they would circumstantially appear as the culpable members of local government. But the cooperation of the board, questionable as it looked, was more a case of naivete rather than complicity. As M. Lang notes in a Middletown Sunday Record interview (August 21), "...it wasnþt easy to sell Woodstock to the politicians and bureaucrats who approved it, admits Lang...He said he didn't have to lie. `But you don't have to tell them everything?"
Ergo: "Thank you Supervisor Jim Griffis and Council members Mike Sommers, Marie Post, Roger Lindhurst and Tom Turco. You served your community and your neighbors with wisdom, compassion and endless energy. You served Woodstock Ventures by making us be good as we could be." Who served whom for what? The Promoters did their deceptive best to serve their profit-demanding corporate backers. The Saugerties politicians in turn,served Woodstock Ventures by serving the community with wisdom, compassion and endless energy! That's all? Serving a piece of the residual action would have been more practical. "Serving" is obviously more like dealing, no less from a loaded deck for those who were co-opted, not in the name of the Spirit, but profit for the Big Bucks corporation:
"Thank you Bob Yerick and Bob Moser of the Festival Development Corp... Thank you Saugerties Village Mayor Tina Chorvas and the Village Board...Thanks to building inspector Bob Trancillito; the Village Water Board and all the area fire companies, especially Centerville and Cedar Grove, tireless professionals all...Thank you to the Saugerties Business Association...Thank you to the Winston Farm Alliance ...Thanks to the Town Police who were simply awesome, especially the amazing Deputy Chief Kevin Drescher who served as Woodstock liaison...To Family of Woodstock there are almost no words adequate to describe the debt of gratitude we owe. Heroic, tireless and compassionate they represent the very best that we humans can be. We and the thousands of people they helped last week-end will always be in our debt..." And for all that DEBT, DEBT, DEBT BUT NO MENTION OF BUCKS!!
Unfortunately, the "always be in our debt" and the "debt we owe" are euphemisms concealing how Ventures þ94 charmed, bullied, and coercedÄno less with the added muscle of Albany and the GovernorÄthe town Supervisor and Board to overlook and waive any residual share of the multimillion spinoffs. Whatever would be earned from certain long lasting properties such as movies, videos, CDs, etc., would be coveted to the last drop by Polygram & co. "...Will always be in our debt" was the parting insult added to the inestimable injury done. No doubt there were many listed in the public thank-you note who were not too happy about joining the lineup. The letter sounded like a social or culture-crime list requiring a "Nurenberg trial" to adjudicate it, or more appropriately, a Grand Jury. The epistolary bombshell was indeed a final example of Orwellian double-speak intended to do delayed action injury to the dupes who lent themselves as Quislings and betrayed their greater constituency. The sweet lollipop had a core of poison. On the other hand, was it an example of cynical contempt for innocence that the Promoters were punishing those who slavishly and unconsciously attended to the cause of earning big bucks for the insatiable polyglot dragon? Or were they simply preparing the compromised officials for their future role as ineffective mincemeat when the time came for State and perhaps Federal investigations.
The town politicians acted with even less wit than Faust when he chose to trade his soul to the Devil for a piece of the big action, in this case long on fame and short on fortune. Faust at least enjoyed his delusion until he realized his loss. The co-opted politicians and bureaucrats could only superficially ease their pain by insisting and continuing to insist how marvelous everything turned out. Compared to them Faust and Lang were pragmatic realists. The la bella figura persona works up until the point of critical mass: "you can fool some of the people some of the time...", providing you don't tell them everything!
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"Pepsico...is also a majority partner in a European holding company called Grand Metropolitan...which owns Haagen Daazs, also owns such U.S. companies as Pillsbury, King, Pearlvision, IDV International and Vitners. It is run by a large board of directors that includes most of Pepsicoþs Board members. Plus the heads of Viacom and Phillips."
"Fine Hosts Inc. who handled all food services and vending supervision at Woodstock þ94, is based in Hartford, Connecticut. According to its top brass, the company is still privately owned by þten of the nationþs largest insurance companies, plus its second largest bank.þ They fail to elaborate except to say that þweþre big. But not as big as the other guys."
"Nobody Beats the Wiz, Inc. is a large stereo components chain who are notoriously shy about their current ownership. All theyþll admit to is a 'special arrangement' with Viacom, Phillips, and Pepsico."
"Polygram Inc. is Netherlands-based with a board of directors that reads like a whoþs who of leading European industrial concerns. It came into being in its present form on September 30, 1987...owns Island Records, A & M, Polydor, Verve, Mercury, Deutsche Gramaphone, and Lawrence Welk's considerable publishing empire. They also got a motion picture company run in tandem with Universal Studios, called Gramercy Pictures."
"Polygram, it turns out, is 80 percent owned by electronics giant Phillips N.V. Phillips makes computer components, stereos gadgetry, and other high tech components...The company is currently Saugerties' and Ulster Countyþs largest employer, ever since IBMþs downsizing of recent years." (Paul Smart in the <I> Mountain Eagle, August 18, '94)
Part III
Considering the above corporate circularity, the Promoters' letter made unequivocal sense: Thank you....You served Woodstock Ventures by making us be good as we could be. Their con-game and bunko techniques could not have been made any better. Better the negotiating Town Board had succeeded in "making us as BAD as we could be" and perhaps earn a contract with residuals? When you are dealing with the Devil you have to put aside all platitudinal idealism and be devilish. Admittedly, that is very difficult for Saugertesians to do, steeped as they are in the American tradition of friendliness and giving the other guy the benefit of the doubt. Apparently the lesson in critical evaluation was not learned if the politicians saw fit to soft-soap their public about how flawlessly the Festival went off, except their newly learned lesson in political cynicism: don't tell them everything.
The entire Woodstock-in-Saugerties event cannot, in view of the great seduction, be dismissed and conveniently forgotten as a passing annoyance, a mere case of commonplace bureaucratic ineptitude. In the coming months "Woodstock" will reveal itself on many levels! Äas something just short of a catastrophe, not so much for Saugerties but the Promoters and their conspiring multinational cartel. Their cat has been let out of the bag and turned loose, no less in a major media showcase for all theworld to see. All those kids of the next generation who absorbed the mud of Saugerties may be bearers of a revelation.
In every dark pit there is, for the looking, a residual glowing ember of light to be found. In this case the spark of light embodies a concentration in astounding anomaly of little much abused char-girl Cinderella Saugerties communicating with the Nation if not the World at large. Somehow the rape of the virgin on the river by the Hadean forces of New (under-) World Order of totalistic mono-capitalism has resulted in an exposure‚ far more important than a rock concert noisily celebrating the Woodstock religion. On the other hand, the mythology of this religion (that is not a religion!) is inseparable from what amounts to the over-exposure of a global giant in its cocksure approach to running callously rough shod over people in its mania for wealth, global power and a compulsion for inscrutable control.
World Communism may be dead and replaced by its natural enemy imitating its ruthless methods and perverted ethic. Who learned what from whom is hard to say. The fact remains, the entire world, from the U.S.A., the Orient and Africa to the former Soviet Union have a prospectus in rack and ruin for the global deficit in simple human compassion. Such compassion is inextricably bonded in uncomplicated common sense. We cannot see it in our own back yard because of the media forest of trees.
It would directly and pragmatically indicate that governments are inept when it comes to running an efficient and solvent business; that governments should not go into business or fund business. Religion, Free Enterprise, Media and the Arts must be decisively and categorically separate from the State. The only business of government is to keep business, and other activities of the private sector, honest; that is, for the protection of the people from scurrilous exploitation. This is indeed a vital part of internal national defense--keeping private business honest through fair regulation! A bank, for example, should be a bank and not also a credit card company, or a brokerage house; a credit card company should not be a bank but a credit card company. Neither should a media corporation be in the business of manufacturing and retailing the electronic devices by which such media is presented, etc. Any overlapping of function, as described in the above corporate conglomerations, and disarmingly referred to as "diversification," easily leads to a vertical situation and to totalistic and monopolistic control. Pure and simple that is what 20th Century "socialism" and totalitarianism were all about--the creation of vertically structured mono-capitalist hegemonies. The twentieth Century was the age of such totalistic demonstrations, some benevolent and some malevolent and very often switchable; namely; Hitler's National Socialism, Mussolini's Fascism, Stalin's Communism and, most benign of all, Mr. Roosevelt's New Deal. Coincidently enough, "rose-e-velt" literally means "red land", notwithstanding that our beloved Chief of the Depression and War years came from a well endowed and aristocratic ("blue-blood") American family. The Century is now coming to a close along with totalistic socialism and lawless wing-dinging capitalism. Little Saugerties got a taste of the latter under the nome de plume of "Woodstock". But after the heavens opened up the magic word was wasted and trashed as "Mudstock". The Dragon's ubiquitous bowel movement was left behind as the baptismal fluid of our half-cooked generation when it absconded with the treasure. In this case the uninvitedÄbut predictableÄmud blew their cover. It was as if Saugerties was chosen to be the town of the Century for hosting the event of exposing the unscrupulous side of privatized socialist totalism, if not the beginning of the end for soul-less business practices. Aside from the calculated and clever deceptions utilized to win over the favor of the Saugerties Town Board, Woodstock Ventures was behind the vicious and uncompromising manner so-called "Federal Marshals" and Venture's goons went after tee shirt vendors who allegedly infringed on their copyrights. In one case of demonstrated State and Corporate terrorism, a goon squad entered a house contiguous to the Festival site whose owner was selling tee shirts, intent upon confiscating them. The owner appeared with his shot gun and said "get out of my house or I will blow your ass off." The Venture goons docilely obliged. But not all such vendors were aware of their civil rights and suffered a loss. Only after the Festival did the confiscators return the tee shirts to avoid any charges of theft. Veritable dragons and Hadean Lords, apparently, die hard and it is expectable that when the final breath is at hand the multinational corporate monster must play a desperate hand at power. As the heavens would have it, the corporate monster made its move in a problematical area. Since domestic industrial production no longer is the prime resource for lucrative investment, it has been replaced by non-productive service industries and those of leisure time and entertainment. In this case an art form came under the aegis of generating megabucks. Although it easily enough seems so, Art is hardly a cut and dry buy and sell commodity. Aside from its aesthetic affects, it has more to do with human expression, intuitions, feelings and the ceaseless redefinition of life and the culture forms surrounding it. In other words, Art is endured in ambivalence, a virtual La Donna automobile when it comes to the unpredictable public mood and its drift. Not without expectation, a boomerang effect played itself out at Winston Farm in Saugerties. The polyglot monster in its moment of apparent success and glory was apparently forced by powers beyond its control to give up the ghost, that is to say, its usurpation of the Spirit. The lines were then drawn between youthful idealism, and the greed of those corporate giants amalgamated in Dragon power and the Cronus-like mania to swallow up everything, including the almost religious sentiments of the Woodstock enthusiasts. It is here that the media fascists blew their cover in full view of the next generation. Saugerties would be fixed on the map as the place where the Woodstock religion was betrayed. Equally exposed in full view was a mania for greed demonstrated not only by the ponderous corporate dragon but all those free-lance vendors deployed in and around the farm for the purpose of selling something to the celebrants. In this sense greed and the greedy were elevated to a symbolical meaning and embodied as an image that has been traditionally characterized as the Satan. Why the arrival of the Devil at this time and this place (and where I happen to live). Well, maybe because I am here and we are all here. The whole world was here a few days ago spinning in the Hadean mud. That is the very point of the epochal event in Saugerties: The whole world was here and all at once fused in a single passion. What indeed is the meaning of this colossal synchronicity but that a world myth was playing itself out in anticipation of the millennium in a kind of mini-Doomsday ritual!
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According to the Saugerties politicians, everyone had a great and wonderful time, everyone, that is, except a certain "negativistic segment of the population," as the precociously optimistic Saugerties town board called the town silent majority. The Board referred to them as "mysteriously negativistic". The fact is, everyone was frightened for what was about to descend so close to the Village, no matter the polyanna pap offered by the inspired, heroic bureaucrats. Along similar negativistic lines, only after the fact (of the disaster) were some vendors sufficiently tasteless to vocalize that there vending was a bust. It seems the Festival security force was so moved by the mob that they fled the site on Friday. Consequently, it was impossible for the vendors to leisurely conduct their anticipated windfall business. Conveniently the company funny money scrip system broke down. This was capitalized when it was realized, to the chagrin of the State and County sales tax spies in the field, there was less law and more disorder the better to do business in over the counter and into the pocket U.S. greenbacks. How to calculate County and State sales tax with such mercantile anarchy? As a result, it will be difficult for vendors to admit they made any money, or face auditing by the County, State and Federal tax people.
The honest vendors dealing in scrip were soon displaced by a jolly army of hyperactive freelance pirates who arrived hawking everything from cases of beer to balloons filled with nitrous oxide (laughing gas). The merchants of Saugerties village werenþt, in any case, laughing, rendered cranky for how they were deprived of three days of tourism at the peak of the summer season. The village was successfully sealed off to traffic by the State Police.
Malcontention spared no one. The overworked and horrified medical units hardly appreciated that they were allowed on the site by the great altruism of the promoters to practice their humanitarian specialties. One doctor had the medically incorrect gaucheness to say he would have rather spent a day in the field during the Korean or Vietnam wars than in the combat zone of Winston Farm. A group of equally ungrateful not-for-profit charity volunteers had the audacity to plan for a lawsuit because they somehow believed their lives were in danger. As much was the case for the life threatening constipation suffered by a multitude of recalcitrant celebrants who refused to eat or drink for fear that sooner or later they would have to go to the potty. Since the potties remained unemptied this was hardly a choice for the more squeamish children not used to charnel house vapors. Nice kid toilet training was further acerbated when some fescinine types joyfully upended the potties with the hope that their contents would further enrich the ankle deep mud for those who chose to roll and slide in it. Reflecting on such pudent behavior, one proud and enthusiastic Saugertesian mother, typically obsessed with the inscrutable privileges of children, offered her empirical opinion; "the children really enjoyed themselves."
Out of the half million delighted children and their mothers there were a few childish spoilers. One morally disillusioned bambino uttered (and on TV, no less!) that he would never buy another ticket to a concert again, considering that half of the half a million got in free by breaching the gate as the cops dutifully followed orders and looked the other way. Another honest diaper Johnny complained that he was fooled into not bringing drugs, booze and a weapon. No one had told him that self indulgent crime and felonious ecstacy would be the rule of the festival: multimedia designer anarchy, planned chaos, prefabricated adversity and participational ritual violence.
The Feds, not to be outdone in this calculated defilement of Saugerties, ordered the U.S. Coast Guard, based at the mouth of the Esopus Creek in Saugerties, to mobilize, and with tight security, receive the many bands that arrived by boat from the illegal helicopter pad across the river on the Moonie estate in Tivoli. The unofficial press leak to this highly visible government operation was that Al Dore was coming to enjoy the music first hand, as a V.P. should. How's that for State/Church/"Free" Enterprise collaboration! And speaking of "armed forces" (although I am fain to speak of the Coast Guard and their life-saving duties in such a way), a force of National Guardsmen with armored vehicles and tanks were bivouacked at Saugerties High School, all ready to move with their 5000 body bags, reserve forces in the outreach, choppers and a giant troop carrying cargo plane at their disposal. Most alarming of all, the Promoters had replaced their chief of security a week or so before the festival with the commanding general of the N.Y. State Guard. The general was known, as local guardsmen told it, a hothead with a quick trigger finger. All along my worst fear was that the half million kids packed on the farm would panic like a buffalo herd to the effect of the General doing what generals know how to do best. I began to dread the possibility of a mega-Kent State massacre, and that the Guard would have occasion to use some of their 5000 bodybags. But, by the Grace of God, it rained instead! No one, not even hotheads, like to wage war in a downpour.
When the private internal security force deserted and mixed with the crowd to enjoy themselves, it was said that the General had a "nervous breakdown." More likely Generals blow out their own brains when their troops head for the rear and the battle is lost. Was this alleged case of nerves, no less for a Brigadier General who saw combat in Vietnam, a mere euphemism to notice his disappointment that he had no occasion to deploy his troops and armor? Apparently the Promoters had him, as well as the Saugerties Town Board, fooled all along. Nothing that was promised seemed to pan out. The opportunity for filming perhaps the greatest (moneymaking) documentary of the century was also thwarted when the rains came and dampened the spirit of any possible mass hostility and violence.
As a result of the rain, I didn't walk over to the farm to see Aerosmith perform. It was too wet and they didn't go off until two in the morning. Instead, as if to challenge the heaven sent rain, the sound was perversely put up to deafening proportion so that from a mile and half away I could listen to Aerosmith from my window. The wet, early morning hours were also interrupted every 15 minutes as helicopters roared over my roof going to and from their pads at the festival. I worried that the choppers, both coming and going, took the same flight path (right over my roof). The rain stopped, along with Aerosmith, by Four in the morning and the fireworks began. At daybreak, Sunday, I went to bed wondering how a quarter of a million rain-soaked children would do in the morning chill. As I tried to fall asleep I also wondered whether some master plan for a lucrative planned catastrophe had been foiled by a Higher Power. Either my prayers had been answered or the alban Emperor Cumus finally woke up and, with his typical sibylline talent, ordered the rain. Then I fell asleep.
In view of the obvious, why even rhetorically question whether such organized establishment mayhem was an idiom of vice or virtue. Like Lotto, was it promoted ostensively to improve the economy--pro bono publico--by government and elected politicians? Rather than seek to attract solid industrial corporations the predilection seemed to be for bunko business and enterprises in human vice, and possibly a new mode of revenue in Orwellian planned and recorded public catastrophe. Indeed, why not, especially in N.Y. State, where solid industrial manufacturing has made its exodus and will not be wooed back. No question about it, the Empire State and its Emperor of twelve years were in the vanguard of the New World Order. What better place for Media Fascism to express itself and have its first (and hopefully last) big showcase tryout. Would Little Saugerties and its Winston Farm survive their new Bread and Circus position of fame and continue to dutifully serve as the Coliseum of the Western World?
On the other hand the relatively good behavior of the frolicking pubescent mob was counted as a plus except that it was hardly due to proper middle class upbringing. Although the law enforcement was "massive," as the Town Board promised, its only weight was felt in the traffic control persecution of Village residents attempting to assert their automobile rights. The draconian police blockade of the village was effected in the cause of 1) a single business, Woodstock Ventures, given priority over all others and thus (illegally) allowed to function, 2) indulging the children of America enjoy themselves far beyond the limits of the law.
There were no reasons (except those stated in the Constitution) why ordinary mature citizens should not patiently put up with such enforced anarchy. Either comply and inconvenience themselves or risk arrest. Indeed, even the National Guard with tanks and choppers would be no match for the tantrum rage of a half million drugged and boozed swooning motherþs darlings if any attempt was made to restrain them from doing their infantile Sodom and Gomorrah best. The police and troops were thus co-opted, indeed blackmailed by the kiddies who used a ploy that worked well on parents: gimme or else! Or else what? Real rather than ritual riotÄtear the place apart? Short of that, for the better part of prudence, "...theyþre just having fun" said the commander of the State Police, and by which he meant his forces would overlook the moshing violence and broken bones, the bootleggers selling everything desirable at a college break spree, the underage boozers, the mud nudists, public defecaters and fornicators, or whatever else suits a puerile army when given its way without supervision.
The blessing was that it was all confined to the kiddie farm and did not leach out into nearby Saugerties Village. Apparently the crowd didn't have the slightest inclination to visit the village, if at all they knew it existed, because on site the bootleggers and smugglers provided all the beer and drugs that were needed. The permissive approach of the law enforcers and their de facto complicity in breaking the law prevented any worse case scenario from taking place. As a result, the national Guard with their armored tanks and five thousand body bags remained hidden and inactive at the High School. But from a broadcast media standpoint the laid back logistic approach sent a message to the nation: if kids wanted to get crosstown they best do it by breaking the law, or at least, work to develop some skill in the practice of maleficent being. This message will certainly go down in history to define the new and corrupted meaning of Woodstock and the hard worked for fame of Saugerties politicians.
There are two possibilities that may result in this nefarious meaning: either the next (Woodstock II) generation will grow up a cynical bunch of felons, or they will mature with the greatest contempt for official lawlessness and their morally deficient governing elders. I would bet on the latter case, and which is to say this army of muddy bunnies may be the avant garde of a drastic reform movement.
Is there anything worse than an angry bunny? I do not know, although a few weeks before the festival went off I designed and printed a bunny tee shirt and put it on sale at the Booktrader on Main Street.
It competed very well with the official Woodstock II tee shirts and the company goon squad terrorists kept away (because of a recent Supreme Court ruling about parodying a copyrighted property).
** ** ** **
As a result, when the hordes of reporters with notepads in hand and the TV crews arrived on Main Street interviewing everyone in sight, sooner or later they became suspicious and found it necessary to ask who, if anyone, was against the festival? If I was in sight the people would point to me and I was immediately surrounded by a TV crew or pinned down by a reporter. Or I would be tracked down at my hangout in the Main Street Restaurant, a fully intact 1930's style place where Mike and his Aunt Katy made the best bacon and eggs and blueberry pancakes in the world. A German TV crew caught me over coffee one morning. The interviewer in impeccable English asked me to define the nature of the coming Woodstock event. "Well," I began, trying to be as international as I could, "it will be, you know, a Dionysian ritual." He looked at me a bit puzzled. "You know," I tried to clarify, "Like what Nietzsche wrote about in his Birth of Tragedy..." He grew even more puzzled. No doubt he never heard of Nietzsche, Wagner, or for that matter, Mr. Hitler and his "Teutonic" gang. At that point the cameraman, who the German company had hired in N.Y. City, started to laugh and said, "Why you son of bitch, you're from the City!" What blew my cover, he explained, was the way I sat at the counter reading my N.Y. Times folded longwise in half, the way you read a non-tabloid paper when packed in subway car. The German, impeccable English and all, didn't know what the hell we were talking about.
Another time a Fox TV News crew cornered me against the window of the Booktrader, the one and only bookstore in Saugerties. It happened to be the Mainstreet headquarters for the "contra-Woodstock" partisans. My tee shirts to that effect were displayed in the window. "Are you opposed to the Festival because afraid there will be a riot?" I decided to have some fun. "Of course not," I explained with a great show of confidence. "We will be well protected. The National Guard will be here with tanks." At the time I was only guessing about that, but he seemed-- hyperbole or not-- impressed. Emboldened, I continued, "Not only that, but the 82nd Airborne is on alert for a drop if the Guard fails." The interviewer was writing furiously in his notepad, taking it all down, listening but not hearing. "Furthermore," I added, "Mr. Clinton has postponed the invasion of Haiti. The task force will re-routed up the Hudson and the Marines will land on the shores of Saugerties if the 82nd Airborne caves in." The videoman at that point let out a loud guffaw and put up his camera. Soon after a team from the Boston Globe got their hands on me and I wound up in full color on the front page of the Sunday edition. From Vermont to Maine New Englanders responded to how Lew, the proprietor of the Booktrader, held the fort for the contra-Woodstock partisans. "Keep up the good work," "give 'em hell" were how most of the responses went, and always with an order placed for a Contra-Woodstock II tee shirt. I suppose a real Yankee Doodle knows what a Tory is, and will, thank God, never forget (our Revolution.) My media diarrhea soon drew the attention of my 94 year old Roman mother in Staten Island: "Stay out of trouble...you hear me!" she shouted (no doubt because she is a little deaf), "keep your mouth shut!"
After spending 20 years in Saugerties, a painter refugee from the SoHo, I found myself the spokesman for the unspeakable and not to be broadcast consensus opinion of the town and Village of Saugerties. Putting my desk top publishing talents to work I soon had a Contra-Woodstock II newsletter in the Booktrader, free for the asking. "You're really having a good time with all of this, aren't you?" one of the Villagers asked. But of course, I was doing what comes naturally for me, polemical compulsive that I am. In fact, for or against the invasion, everyone seemed to be having a great old time with Saugerties' new found taste of fame. This mania no doubt included the festival promoters and all those employed in bringing the festival about. That is why the half million people would come here; to rub some of the (muddy) fame off on themselves, participating as first hand witnesses, permanentized in a moment of history. Fame and historical immortality are, of course, kissing cousins comprising a state of psychological inflation ("Inflation: Expansion of the personality beyond its proper limits by identification with the persona...It produces an exaggerated sense of one's self-importance and is usually compensated by feelings of inferiority," says C.G. Jung)
As might be expected in such a case, a manic high is soon enough followed by the inevitable downer. In the festival case the plunge down the bottomless moshing pit began when the one thing beyond the control of the promoters, the Saugerties Town Board and the State, took place. As if by the hand of a higher contending power the heavens opened up and the rains came. They came and they came and as a great second coming, the paraclete arrived as a soggy spirit and wet holy ghost. If not for the great wetness the promoters and their cohorts, the Winston Farm Alliance and the Saugerties Town Board, would have prevailed in the great delusion of the Emperorþs clothes: the false notion that the dump fate of Winston Farm was contingent upon the success of the festival and the economic salvation of Saugerties was at hand. The great wetness arrived to demonstrate how a wetland responds to intrusion, whether by a dump or a festival. The emotional "wetland" of "feelings of inferiority" and depression reveal as much.
But even more was demonstrated when the heavens opened up. The resulting oceans of mud mixed with urine and feces provided a baptismal opportunity for the lily white children of the affluent middle class to indulge themselves in the downside of spiritual experience. The fires of hell were dampened on earth, dissipating the rapture of libidinous violence. How much did this baptismal immersion express a great collective need to publicly exorcise a darker, shadow side? Why else were so many spiritually galvanized adolescents content to display themselves rolling in the murky ooze of Hades, except similia similibus curantur (like cures like)? The group self-punishment offered a way to collective redemption through ritual expiation of guilt, apparently for the difficulty to grow up with hardly any help from hyperthyroid Mamma (or Dad sleeping in the closet), preferring to languish forever in the middle class utopos (no-place) of eternal childhood. The children had inherited the sins of their parents (so what else is new!) And so the rains came to Provide the fluid of redemption, the Holy Water of moving on and out of the nursery noise of rock and roll in a final, clumsy and crude effort at rebirthÄliberation from regressive stasis in dark security beneath Mammaþs apron. St Augustine made the point when he said we are all born between piss and shit. It is only inferred, however, that we must move on from there. How literal could the death and birth metaphor be at Old Nickþs farm where Woodstock and Rock and Roll died and dissolved in the mud of Lethe.
In this metaphorical and mythological sense, on a dismal August weekend in a dampened Saugerties wetland all the children died a symbolical death, lead to a watery doom by the Pied Piper musical promotor, Old Nick himself. The nominal mother magic of Woodstock also died along with the tail-eating rocking and rolling serpent of pubescent electronified libido. Indeed, the mighty mother-wood was old nicked in the garden of wood-chopper town (Saugerties means sawyer in Dutch). At last Adam and Eve were extruded from the garden and banished into life and the real world, no longer obliged to shun Daddyþs apple or observe the great American matriarchal-garden-of-paradise mandate: where Prozac and two showers a day are required for the rest of your life. All this spiritual awakening to responsible maturity but for a weekend in Saugerties! Would the Fathers of AmericaÄif you can find them, and who art only in Heaven, deadbeat and banished as they areÄthank Saugerties for hosting the rites of passage for their (overgrown) matricentric kinder. What special destiny was this that the sleepy and friendly village of Sawyers by the Esopus Creek accomplished the epochal task of putting the nominal magic of Woodstock and the heebie jeebies of Rock and Roll to final rest in its wetland.
Why dead? Why not when the magic place was drained and profaned, reduced to a common commodity, rendered as sweet and sickening as Pepsi. And good old Rock þn Roll, spawned in counter culture gyrations from Elvis to the Grateful DeadÄa great anti-establishment noise banging away at the powers that be and which shall not be movedÄnow gives way as the very tool of the establishment. It may be said that in death it moved up to the heavenly heights of megalithic and polyglot corporate obesity that now, with suffocating effect, spreads its monopolistic fat over the nation and the world: Rock þn Roll in the service of rampant and unrestrainable exploitation.
** ** ** **
SAUGERTIES
Yes, Woodstock is dead, metaphorically or otherwise, and we killed it. This was not beyond Lang himself who, when asked by the Sunday Record, "What did you discover during Woodstock," answered; "I understood intellectually that a lot of people resented what we were doing. A lot of people my age. They didnþt want to give it up." The (mythological) inevitability was; Woodstock had to die. Lang himself was playing the role of Mr. Death. Early on I became aware of this and it disturbed me, indeed, frightened me because I didnþt understand it. Back in April I monitored all press notices about the Woodstock II progress. I entered the following in my notes: "Pied Piper Lang, a.k.a. Old Nick and his mercenary soldiers of fortune, have arrived in Saugerties. They are bivouacked along the Old Saugerties Woodstock Road in what was once a Roman Catholic church. His politically convenient spokeswoman, Ilene Marder, appropriately marked the occasion in an interview with reporter Tinker Twine, correspondent for the Kingston Daily Freeman (April 23). The journalist poignantly notes: þSunlight filtered through stained-glass windows on the upper level of the former church... (Spokeswoman) Marder pointed to an ornate wooden cubby near the front of the former church. þThatþs the confessional; we may be using it,þ she joked. þI hope we donþt put fax machines in there.þ" How more appropriately perverse that the Pied Piperþs headquarters would be located in a former Catholic Church, not to mention a fax machine in a confessional booth. Indeed, the confession at hand might be tele-communicated throughout the world in search of absolution.
These coincidences would have served as ammunition for my opposition to the Woodstock venture. But it was all getting too spooky for me to pursue on this synchronistic and archetypal level. When a cluster of events begin to follow a recognizable myth pattern it is not difficult to predict the outcome. Besides, Ilene was an old friend of mine from years past and her husband, the Hon. Maurice Hinchey, now our congressman, was once my neighbor down the block. I buried the note and forgot about it until recently when I was able to give the entire matter more analytical consideration.
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Lang was playing out, at least according to my intuitive perception, an archetypal role. In the history of myth "Mr. Death" has many forms. He is personified as the Greek Hades and later the Christian Devil. Essentially he is an outgrowth of Hermes, or in the Teutonic case, Loki. In ancient Ireland the god Lugh served as the Hermetic figure. He was known as the young luminous god of the harvest but also the "one with the long arm" (of death, which spares no one). But he was a two in one god. Accounting for his lethal function was his opposite known as Crom Dubh (the namesake of Dublin), the "dark bent one." Light and dark, birth and death are combined in such Hermetic figures, just as Satan and Lucifer (the light bringer) are combined in Christian culture, although with hardly noting their difference. In their rude forms such Hermetic natures represent trickster figures, the psychic backup for a shaman as archetypal con man.
Psychologically they represent the function of intuition, of smelling out (new) possibilities that are largely unseen and unimaginable. Jung calls intuition "irrational" and by which is meant that it is "illegal" for rational understanding. Hermes, accordingly, was originally known as Hermes the Thief, revealing felonious talents even as an infant. But he was also, as the daemon of intuition, the patron of magic and healing. This function is represented by the magic healing wand, first depicted as a phallus and later, more discretely, as a serpent. Hades, as Prince of the underworld, the womb/tomb of death, is also phallically predisposed as is evidenced by his rape of the virgin Persephone. She is then brought below as his consort and reigns for the winter season as the Queen of Death.
Another Hermetic or Mercurial figure of Death is the Pied Piper who was known to lead the children of Hamlin to their deaths. Intuition runs the course from Alpha to Omega, birth to death, and from womb to tomb. I could not help see Lang as a kind of stupendously intuitive Pied Piper figure. Perhaps that is because the image has some personal significance for me. At the end of WWII my ship wound its way up the Weser River in Northern Germany headed for Bremen with a cargo of relief flour for starving Germans. All along the river there was terrible destruction from the bombings. This threw me into shock and despair. The German river pilot guiding our ship said the Weser was called the river of death. It seemed obvious to me and I concurred. But that is not what he meant. He explained it was the river of death because on it was located the village of Hamlin of the Pied Piper story. Aside from the quaint legend it was the task of the Pied Piper figure to lead dead souls to the river where they would embark for the place of death. Apparently the death boat took the dead to the island of Helgoland, just north of the mouth of the Weser river of Death. Hel is the Old German Hades and the Weser was apparently the River Stix. With the arrival of Lang and his Pied Piper plans for Winston Farm I began to look suspiciously at him as the Devil himself and worried the Esopus Creek which wound its way through Saugerties was also a River of Death. As it turned out, it was in fact the Beaverkill, which flows North through the Winston Farm site, into the Catskill Creek, through the City of Catskill and then to the Hudson with its extraordinary festival accumulated load of vile and dangerous pollution.
It all began to remind me of my seafaring days and how I had little stomach for the horrors of war, in my case, the aftermath of war attended by starvation, disease and a variety of forms of human depravity. The vast traffic of the black Market under the noses of the Allied occupation forces reminded me of the vast traffic of bootleggers and other illegal vendors that appeared for the great defilement in Saugerties on its Woodstock weekend.
** ** **
Syd M. in the August 18 Woodstock Times picks up on this death motif and amplifies it further: "When they start cleaning up the site (provided they donþt just keep the trash and turn it into that dump weþve all been clamoring for), Iþm betting theyþll find bodies in the muck, mudpeople who have devolved into neo-amphibians, their arms shrunk into tiny, pruny fins, their legs fused as tails, their gaping maws permanently formed into silly grins." The story of such squamous children was related by Kingsley in his turn of the century book, The Water Babies. It was one of my favorite stories and I read it every night chapter by chapter to my baby sons at bedtime. They never forgot about Tom, the chimney sweep boy, covered permanently all over with soot. Early in the story he flees his fate and dies after falling in a stream. There he is turned into an aquatic being and makes his way to the sea. After many adventure the great sea mother fairy turns him back into human form when it is determined that he is ready for manhood. Soot covered or mud covered amount to the same thing, a return to death or, as in this case, devolvement to a fish. Herman Melville tells in his Moby Dick that as a small boy he was confined to his room in punishment for attempting to climb up the chimney, apparently in reverse trip back to the womb. During this sojourn he has his mystical "counterpane" experience and which, as he notes, marked him for life. In either case the "devolvement" amounts to a death but in anticipation of rebirth. This sense of liberation and renewal was expressed by many of the kids at the site who never heard of Melville, Kingsley or Jung. If a conclusion is to be drawn from all of this, the Death of Woodstock will not have been for nought.
On the other hand, so massive a ritual of death and renewal indicates that what is demonstrated collectively is, as a rule, barred to the individual. The individual remains a mere instrument to the archetypal destiny of the greater whole and the vehicle to the expression of a psychistic religion of magic. Such was the case for our neolithic ancestors, and for Europeans, the cultures of the early Bronze Age; or the pre-Columbian cultures of Meso and South America. In such cases the death motif is strongly pronounced. Through the jaws of death, which double as a uterine portal, a rebirth, or new life, is anticipated, in both the metaphysical and psychological sense. The ritual includes a return to radix, the root to life, the slime and plasma of primordial generation, Mother Earth in its fecund, oozing ubiquity.
Such religious expression is optimally demonstrated in present-day Haiti where mud plays an important part at a festival celebrating the power of Ogoun, the bloody voodoo war god, and Baron Samedi, the god of death and the burial ground. An Associated Press report notes: "'The mud is like a drug,' said Joseph Agent, 64, of Grantier Village near Port-au-Prince, the capital. 'It gives you strength. It gives you luck. It gives you health. It's a power.'" The report further elaborates: "Believers bathe in the mud, drink it, dip their babies in it, throw in offerings: money, rice, even the bloody head of a bull...Some stand in the mud holding burning candles, quietly praying. Others dive in face-first and thrash in the ooze, believing themselves possessed by Ogoun's power." This power of the war god, of course, is related to Baron Samedi, the God of Death. What else has war always been about but the mass demonstration of human sacrifice, the return to the Mud of the Mother through the portals of Hades (Pylos, for ancient Greeks) and across the river of Lethe in anticipation of rebirth, resurrection and return to the Father in Heaven. I suppose it is merely a word coincidence that Hades and Haiti are phonetically similar.
For ancient Teutonic or modern Arab warriors death in combat is the instant guarantee for return to the Almighty Progenitor. For those less fortunate than the slain-in-combat warrior there remains the elemental religious ritual of death and renovatio: "Others (such as the celebrants at Woodstock II) dive in face-first and thrash in the ooze believing themselves possessed by Ogoun's power" in a simulated or virtual reality of the death by combat meaning.
It may be obvious to some that the surviving veterans of wars often feel secretly cheated out of this grand release from life and return to Our Father Who Art In Heaven. In post-trauma combat stress, for example, the focus is often on a "Buddy who bought it," and leaving his comrade behind to suffer "survivor's guilt."
Need it be added, the grand ritual performed at Winston Farm in Saugerties religiously sublimated the psychic necessity for great World Wars fought in the conventional manner. In this way the "death instinct" was apparently overcome, and transposed as a ritual re-enactment, the (mytho-symbolic) drama of experiencing death. The problem here is that the ritual is performed as a mass action, just as war requires huge amounts of troops to realize the greater sacrifice of lives.
"The only way for kids to make the older generation understand is through mass gatherings like Bethel," observed Jimi Hendrix about the first Woodstock event: "And the kids are not going to be in the mud all the time. From here they will start to build and change things. The whole world needs a big wash and scrubdown." Unfortunately, mass gathering was also a vitally required ingredient of the Nazi movement, equally intent on a mass cleansing. Need it be said; the greater the crowd the greater the risk of calamity. It may be apparent that reformational mass movements have a tendency to constellate mass slaughter. What such movements have in common is a permanently installed great dictator, usually a military man (such as Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin Castro, etc.) who requires a constantly mobilized war machine to achieve his ends. Notably, Signor Castro still wears his soldier suit as if he were born in it. This precisely materializes the archetype of "Mr. Death," the Haitian Ogoun/Samedi divine duality, or in the European case, the Devil himself as the great and peerless leader.
In the first Woodstock case spoken of by Hendriks there was no such clearly articulated figure present. Mr. Death was a collectively subjective presence only subliminally at work to promote the estate of Hadean mud. Hendriks, accordingly, was proved wrong (that the kids were not going to be in the mud all the time). In his Greening of America Charles Reich extols the so- called new higher cultural consciousness that lead to the Woodstock ethos, although not before forcing ca-ca brown to a more acceptable chromatic tint. Indeed, the psychic state of ca-ca brown mudness remained for 25 years and until such time when Michael Lang assumed leadership. Prior to that only the spirit (as in ghost) of the Devil was in place. When, for example, the Rolling Stones-- performing before a mass gathering (300,000) at Altamount Speedway near San Francisco-- began their Sympathy for the Devil, one of the kids attempted to mount the stage and was stabbed to death, appropriately, by a member of the Hell's Angels. During the commotion Mick Jagger's comment went out over the amplifiers; "Something very funny always happens when we start that number." And why not when only the Devil's party is present to appreciate such "sympathy" for the unseen Lord of Death! Hades, in Greek mythology is known as the unseen, or invisible one, from the more ancient nominal root Aides.
For the Ionian Feminine Mystery religions Hades and Dionysos are identical, as Herakleitus notes. In either case dismemberment, death and dissolution were the prelude to rebirth. The orgiastic nature of such fertility cults and their rituals along with the Hadean Dionysos were extolled by Nietzsche, prognosticating as such the fragmentations of abstract and surreal art. Would Nietzsche have recognized Rock 'n Roll as the epitome expression of liberation, dissolution and chaotic abandon that he called for? More pointedly, what was his later appeal to the National Socialists of Germany? More pointedly, such archaic liberation was no less the archetypal dynamis behind the mass political movements of merciless and bloody revolution, as we have come to know them in their 19th and 20th century expressions. Such movements are, because unconditionally collective, purely archetypal and, as it were, "untouched by human hands," the Johannine Great Beast at large.
The person, as individual is, accordingly, "devolved," pluralistically fractured and reduced to a faceless particle of the mob. In this sense the mass driven mud ritual is ambivalently paradoxical. On the one hand, it strives for rebirth as a simulated fertility means of overcoming death, and on the other, because purely a collective response, uses the extinction of the individual to achieve its end, the whole, pars pro toto, in service only to the whole, the individual parts sold to the Devil. This is indeed the crown of the Devil's work, the dissolution of the individual and the permanentizing of the mud-state, quite to the contrary of Hendrik's dream for the future. It is the driving force behind totalitarianism and now the new media fascism that employs Rock 'n Roll at its convenience and for its profit by way of reducing the individual to a collective paste.
The Dionysian frenzies, as prelude to death and dissolution, characterize the peculiar psychological and social state represented by mud. Mud, mudder, mut and muter are close cousins to matter and mater (mother), the autonomous and runaway materialism that St. John in his Revelations referred to as the Great Beast and which was a coded response to Rome, its materialism, brute power and hegemony. His Bottomless Pit (of Satan) is brought up to date by the mud pits: mud as organic plasma, the fusion of all differentiated and defined parts, the epitome of antecosmos as chaos; the entropic Black Hole condition of organism, life and bios limited to primordial slime.
That Woodstock died twentyfive years ago is hardly something to be taught as a lesson. The lesson is, in fact, joined as a mythological paradigm. Something dead that goes on living is commonÄand lately celebrated by the publicÄas a vampire, or Dracula. The only way these Dracula folk of the living dead prevail is by sucking the blood of the living. Since Blood and Soul are mythologically related, it may be said that vampires are soul-suckers. They are all Spirit but have no Soul. Why? Because they are dead! In other words, if you lose your soul, dead or alive, you must suck off the soul of others. Soul is anima, as in animation, to be moved in life; or animal, that part of the human nature that prevails only in life. Only the dead are made up as the Spirit which concentrates the past and the dead of the past in its definition.
The Spirit is a major element in religion. Religos means to reconnect (with the past). It is also important in the religions of ancestor worship and the ancient (prehistoric) cults of the dead (such as the ancient Greek and Ionian Feminine Mysteries, the Great Mother and Artemis cults). But in all cases the worship of the Spirit always evolves as a patricentristic society because the hidden (or unconscious) male element of the feminine psychology is a spirit, or animus. Spirit, maleness and animus characterize exoteric extentionality (as phallic function), whereas Soul, feminine, and anima characterize esoteric intentionality (as uterine function). As a hetero-unity they are represented by the dynamics of inny and outy, Yin and Yang; always together and interactive but always defined and maintained in their difference, or hetero-nature.
With that said, it may be apparent that the ghost or Spirit of Woodstock is couched in something that has gone unconscious in the 20th CenturyÄthat God Is Dead, and We killed Him (announced Nietzsche). But that has always been the case. Christ the Son must die to resurrect and join Our Father Who Art In Heaven, and the Spiritus Sanctum. Significantly, the local Festival movement whose slogan was Join the Spirit (of Woodstock) were selling dogtags they manufactured with the Festival logo. Early on I asked some of these Saugerties Spirit and dogtag people if they knew what the major purpose of dogtags were for members of the armed forces. They were aghast when I reminded that they were essentially articles by which the dead and wounded may be identified. Callously I asked, "are you also going to make designer body bags to go with the tags?" After that the "dog" was dropped from "tag." The "Spirit" slogans were then also downplayed. At the time I didn't lecture that the Father, Son and Spirit (the Holy Trinity) go together whereas Soul-Lady remains their counter. In other words, join the spirit and betray the woman (the feminine nature). Aware of this, the Roman Catholic Church some fifty years ago announced (by Papal Bull) the Ascension of the Virgin Mother to position alongside Our Father Who Art In Heaven. Yet it is significant that the local group did not choose to speak of the Soul of Woodstock. From a secular promotional standpoint it would have been just as catchy. The simple fact is (whether these Festival enthusiasts knew it or not) Woodstock was very much dead, had lost its soul 25 years ago and prevailed the only proper way the dead prevail, as ghosts and spirits.
If, as seems to be the case, the Festival promoters and commercial enthusiasts were identified strictly with the ghost of Woodstock (that is, its Spirit), then they are apparently and unconsciously a party to vampire necessities: the need to suck soul from a half million children paraded to muddy finality by the Pied Piper Promoter. The half million children had their souls ecstatically sucked out of them during the mud ritual. In effect, they experienced a spiritual death: whomsoever gives up their life will find it. But what about the ghost (spirit) promoters & co? They cannot suffer death and earn rebirth because they are already dead, and as dead as a bloodsucker will ever be. Money and power hardly sooth the Faustian wound of loss of soul. In the ghost state of delusion, however, such material rewards are more than comforting. But here no judgments are justified except to distinguish between Soul People and Spirit People, The People who celebrate Life and the Ancestor Worshippers who celebrate the Spirit for the treasure it may bring. In other words, soul in its melanistic (night) condition strives for light and the fire, as does psyche (The Greek word for soul but which also means moth or butterfly); whereas Spirit as fire yearns for a plunge in the darkness of mud, the underworld of Death.
In Greek the word ploutos (which means great wealth or treasure), refers to Hades and the underworld of the dead, the eternal night of the tomb which serves as the psychic storehouse of the human race funded in its collective, ancestral experience. Unfortunately, ploutos since has then been bastardized and limited to meaning as a literal reference to material wealth when in fact it intends the wealth of the dead and the treasury of ancestral ghosts (the metaphor may be extended today as the pool of human genetic resource and where spirits perform as DNA). Notably, when the plurality of such spirits (literally, as points of light) were monotheized they were abstracted and congealed as The Spirit in the singular sense.
"Join the Spirit," as it was mindlessly preached by the Woodstock II dogtag vendors of Saugerties, recaptures the ghost (spiritus, geist) motif but without qualifying the fuller meaning of "Spirit" (as Spiritus Sanctum), in this case degenerated as a commercial device. For these secularizing Spirit idolaters, are the Dead really Grateful? And where were the Soul People (African America) in this epochal unholy ritual in the secularized mud of Winston Farm? The pretense to celebrating the Spirit, or what amounts to the Spirit of American Music, would have had to also include the best of Blues and Jazz. Denying its ancestor, the soul-less ghost of Woodstock II merely sucked off the blood of Soul Music, pumping passion and rhythm through amplifiers fit only for hearts that are hard of hearing and those digitalized brains that see only through the tube. Soul (anima) is not for virtual reality buffs and those who confuse Media for Art, simulation for the real thing and feeling as a packaged commodity.
The final note with regard to the collectivized blood and soul sucking death motif has to do with the frenzy of freelance vendors drawn from the local population who made good and profitable scores from the army of scared, lonely, dirty and hungry children attending the festival. The next bad scene included scavengers and buzzard people who scrounge in the remains of landfills and garbage dumps; in this case, the treasure of tents, sleeping bags and what have you left behind in the hasty retreat of the wet and exhausted celebrants. This was especially unpleasant for myself as a local person because I grew up in Coney Island, Brooklyn, where such "spiritual" exploitation of large masses of people was the rule. Its tough living in a Carny town (meat and flesh town) so that as soon as I was able I ran off to sea. Now the vulture ambiance has followed me to Saugerties. Worst of all I am reminded of those folk who infiltrate battlefields to loot and pick off the dead, or those "fireship" people who in olden times would scavenge off the dead and drowning of shipwrecks.
Significantly, back in January I designed a Tee shirt where I replaced the Woodstock dove (of peace and love) with a vulture. It was a disgusting vulture with a greenback in its beak. I replaced the word "Festival" with "Festering" to indicate what I expected from the event. Unfortunately I was not wrong and because of that I had to suffer this thing from six months before. Now it is over, all the muddy water babies have gone home, hopefully transformed, and only the tally sheet lies just ahead. How will it all wash? In an interview by John Milgrim of the Middletown Record, Frank Schaller, the owner of Winston Farm, observes: "If you stand out in the field you see it. The garbage dump is there." Somewhat disconcerted for the irreparable damage to his property, an old farm of peerless natural beauty, retained of paleo Native American artifacts and an ancient burial ground, he commented on his experience with the Pied Piper: "He's a very good talker...He's your best friend when your standing next to him. I want to see promises kept now. I want to see action." But that is just the way ghosts areÄnow you see them and now you don't. In this vein, as Schaller notes, "There's no way you'll ever know what happened backstage...There's a big story behind the Woodstock story."
Finally, my little tale must end with a big "so what!"Äexcept for the people of Saugerties who will be at task to regain their friendly, fair-minded American ambiance, or those values that prevailed before the great invasion by the Keres, the ghost bacilli of spiritual infection.
Otherwise call it a great "eye-opener", the necessary ingredient for a critical life changing transformation, the rebirth impossible without the sufferance of the ultimate sacrifice. I suppose you can't have it both ways. If wake up you must, sleepy, friendly Saugerties, you must pay dearly the tinker who painfully sharpens your brain. Hopefully, as Saugerties goes, so goes the World, even as Mr. Pied Piper, a.k.a., Lord of the shades, Hades, Old Nick of the Bottomless (muddy) Pit, the archetypal flim-flam fame-bearing (Luci-pheros), walks away with a pocket full of the peoples' money. If nothing more, the Devil will have been given his due.
Bernard X.Bovasso/ Saugerties, N.Y./ August 21,1994
10715 words, posted/January 27, 1997 bernx@aol.com