A retirement village of the Love generation

 

Tuesday, August 18, 2009

 

We finally returned to the village of Woodstock last weekend, resuming a ritual we unintentionally gave up some years ago. I almost even remembered the route, and recalled more about the place the closer we came – so that by the time we got off the New York Thruway, I remembered landmarks – buildings faded over time, but not gone. Even when we arrived, it was as if nothing had changed except minor details – an art gallery now a music store, the statues in front of the remaining gallery different than those that remained fixed in my mind.

With the 40th anniversary hovering over us, we felt compelled to make our visit, as if we also felt the ticking clock inside ourselves and knew that if we did not honor this anniversary, the next one at the 50th year mark might be beyond us.

After watching so much else change in my life – Northern New Jersey is a slum of McMansions that has ruined the whole Route 80 corridor from Willowbrook Mall to beyond the Delaware Water Gap – it was a relief to find so little changed in what is essentially the eastern Mecca for the Woodstock Generation. I would like to give that credit to Greenwich Village but New School, NYU, Cooper Union and a host of capitalistic mayors (the worst being Michael Bloomberg) have done everything possible to destroy that place as a community. Whatever hip it had vanished the moment the Beemer crowd drove in, and the last vestiges of the hip went with the closing of “Love Saves the Day.”

Still, I could not get over the feeling that Woodstock has become the hippie version of a retirement village. While plenty of young people still roam the streets, I saw the familiar faces of the older crowd, wearing out the rest of their lives here the way they might old jeans.

This was particular evident at the ball park concert where all of the older performers – the performers who didn’t make it the way Bob Dylan and other did – marched out, played their bit and retired back to the shadows to wait for another anniversary or another potential gig.

To keep in the mood, Sharon and I watched the movie Woodstock when we got home. Sharon claimed Joan Baez was out of touch in the film, no longer cool.

This said something about me, since it was that era of Greenwich Village my best friend Hank and I sought out in the mid-1960s , only to find that we had missed it.

I still ache for that life, where poets and musicians gather at street corner cafes to talk of life and art, where Bob Dylan and others like him still struggled to find their voices, unmarred by the future fame they would suffer.

In this respect, Woodstock this weekend gave me this – as if after all these years I finally found the place to which all of the old folk performers fled after the Summer of Love.

It was a warm feeling, and one that allowed me to return here to this rat race where people lie about healthcare and credit cards companies engage in practices once thought to be in the purview of the mob.

I guess I was most offended by the fact that people attending the 40th anniversary concert at Bethel were not allowed to bring cameras into the concert. Talk about Orwellian. The music of the revolution has become the music of repression. Perhaps the media analysis made last week about the original Woodstock was right when it said it was the first step towards the total marketing of the masses, and the end result is concert police busting kids who want to take pictures of their musical heroes – who have become nothing but product whose image must be controlled.

Where is Abbie Hoffman when we need him most?

 

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I finally got a copy of “Harvey,” the play, and the changes made for the film are very curious. The screen play was well crafted, using many of the better lines from the play, but it also contributed bits that the play lacked, small items that have since become some of the more memorable elements.

The play, however, also answers some of the small questions the film and its screen play did not provide, such as why Dowd carried an extra coat.

It’s Harvey’s coat.

In the play, Dowd also carries and extra hat.

While I have not yet finished reading the play, I’ve already noticed the differences. The film opens with a shot of Dodd’s name in front of the house, then shows Dowd coming down from the porch where he is greeted by a special delivery man. Harvey is introduced here by Dowd holding open the gate for him. The film then shows Dowd’s sister and her daughter inside the house.

The play more or less opens inside the house after Dowd as gone, where we get a glimpse of Dowd’s mother’s portrait, like a great spirit hanging over this small world.

James Stewart in a 1990 interview said the sister’s role is the most important because she has to play both realities. She has to seem to be in the real world and yet also has to have a foot in Harvey’s ghostly world. After all, she has actually seen Harvey, and she secretly knows he is real.

The film’s early glimpse of Dowd and the invisible Harvey is designed to clue us into what to expect. The play’s introduction actually puts more of this weight onto the shoulders of the sister, who balances real and unreal in a magnificent way.

Early critics of Spielberg claim his version will take an “anti-science” position. The original film is less about science as it is about competence, and the concept of death. We get a lot of talk about death and dying, and the misperception of who has died, and the impact of the mother’s death on all of the children.  The play and film are also about the mistaken notion of propriety and society. As Veta seeks to develop a social network that will provide her daughter with opportunities to meet eligible men, Dowd develops his own network filled with the socially unacceptable. Ironically, Veta’s daughter meets her man through the efforts to stop Dowd.

The anti-science charge against Spielberg is a bit unfair since he is so rooted in classic sf, which in turn is rooted in Mary Shelly’s classic fiction, and most of that generation’s sf acted as warning against science presuming to take on the role of God. Science as with all progress generally goes too far and becomes something that works against the humans it is designed to help.

As with Woodstock, today’s society is killing everything human in humanity with the pretext of curing its ills – so that it is almost impossible to enjoy life.

Whereas no one will allow you to take a picture at the 2009 version of Woodstock, science won’t let you eat things that taste good or smoke things that make you feel good, or drink things that would twist your world view in the wrong direction. This all comes at a time when one study showed 85 percent of American currency shows traces of cocaine, hinting just how many people are seeking chemical relief to the rising social expectations of our times.

Dowd like The Beats knew true joy can’t be bottled by science, but is often found in the most primitive of social venues by actually talking to people you meet there.

“Nobody brings anything small into a bar,” Dowd says, of people’s troubles and aspirations.

Science and society insist we meet greater and greater expectations. We must buy iPods or Wii, but we can’t actually use them to record what we experience – such as a historic concert.

Doctors want to inject Dowd so that he will fit into society, and the film and play ask whether or not that is an acceptable society we are trying to fit into.

That’s not anti-science, it is common sense.