hippies - film - 2009 - Taking Woodstock

Taking Woodstock
Ang Lee
Focus Features
2009
120 minutes

Ang Lee, director of Brokeback Mountain, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and his career centrepiece The Incredible Hulk (haha, just kidding), also directed Taking Woodstock, another film about chance encounters and personal transformations.  In Taking Woodstock, the time and place is upstate New York, 1969 - the crisis: the investor group planning the Woodstock Art Festival has already been barred from holding their from Wallkill NY and the need to find another venue quickly.  The solution: Elliot Tiber, the youngest chamber of commerce president in the history of the tiny-town of Bethel, NY, opens up his family’s “resort” to the Woodstock people as a headquarters, and helps them find a new concert venue on a neighboring dairy farm owned by Max Yasgur.  

The film is about the Woodstock arts festival, but its also about a small number of the small-town characters unbinding their uptight tendencies through their encounters with the Woodstock people and the hippie travellers, Elliot tries drugs and explores his homosexuality - his overbearing parents try drugs and dance in the rain, etc.  Max Yeager agrees to host the concert on his property as a rebellion against the town’s conservative population (who occasionally express their simmering anti-semitism and, at times, appear like they’re ready to launch a pogram against Yasgur and the Tiber’s).







The film presents a perspective on the famous Woodstock concert that pushes the music to the periphery, where it drifts into the centre an echo that’s heard across the rural countryside.  Elliot attends the concert in the sense that he’s on the Yasgur farm while music is played, but he’s so distant from the stage that it’s relevance is primarily to affirm the historical setting of the film.  Instead, the short-lived community that emerged, and the carnivalesque atmosphere that the concert created, is the centre of Lee’s focus with regards to the concert itself.  Elliott slides down a muddy hill and takes LSD in a van with a pair of hippies he met by chance.  

The reproduction of the hallucinogenic experience on film is a standard feature of virtually every hippie and drug movie ever made, from Reefer Madness to Easy Rider to Friday to Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.  The scene provides directors with an opportunity to indulge their facility with visual effects for their own sake, without concern for the constraints of fantastical plot advancements.  In Taking Woodstock Ang Lee places Tiber in a setting that was already decorated in abstract psychedelic patterns that begin glowing and moving after he takes the sacrament of the Aquarian age.  Lee’s filmic visualization of the psychedelic is, in fact, fairly conventional, but it is also true to much of the psychedelic imagery of the era he represents.  In a that vein it should be noted that one of the promotional posters for the film emulates the uniquely colourful ‘rainbow-inking’ printing technique pioneered at the San Francisco Oracle.  One of the hippies metaphorically refers to the vast audience as an ‘ocean’, and Lee uses visual effects to represent it as such in his own psychedelic flourish.

A scene from Taking Woodstock's Hallucination sequence

A final point of interest is the character of Michael Lang, the young hippie who organized the concert and, in the film, is represented as an old friend of Elliot’s.  The film is an adaptation of a heavily contested book written by Tiber, and one of its main disputants is Lang himself.  Tiber is the centre of this film, and he positioned himself as indispensible to the organizing of the concert.  Lang acknowledges Tiber’s role but regards it as minimal, asserting that some aspects of Tiber’s telling are altogether false, including the part where Elliot introduces Lang to Yasgur.  In Tiber’s version, Lang is always kind to Tiber and appreciative of his ideas and always acting as an intercessor between Tiber’s family, the hippies, and his own cost-obsessed investors.  Lang’s last words are in reference to his work in helping the Rolling Stones organize what ended up being the Altamont Free Concert, the anti-Woodstock where the Oakland Hells Angels worked as stage security and killed an aggressive fan (in self defense).  

avant-garde - book - 1985 - The Dada & Surrealist Word Image

The Dada & Surrealist Word Image
Judi Freedman & John C. Welchman
The MIT Press
1989
141 pages

The Dada & Surrealist Word Image is a hardcover catalogue for a travelling exhibition of Dada and Surrealist works of art.  The exhibition’s first location was the Los Angeles County Museum of Art where it was shown from June 15-August 27, 1989 before being transported to other locations around the United States and Europe.  

I think that the title of the catalogue makes its content, and the theme of the exhibition, quite clear.  Play with language featured prominently in the programs of the Dada and Surrealist movements who sought to unlock the liberatory potential of nonsense and incongruity in written and visual creative work.  The Dadaists focus on language is driven by a desire for nonsense and a will to break down the structures of control that edify culture.  The ‘word salad’, jumbles of words juxtaposed with jumbles of images, often in the photomontage, became the primary Dadaist mode of representing language in visual art.  Raoul Hausmann was a particularly strong proponent of this kind of work.

Raoul Hausmann - Elasticum (1920) 

More specific to this catalogue however, are detailed analyses of two of the most famous word/image works of these two movements.  Marcel Duchamp's L.H.O.O.Q., from 1919:

Marcel Duchamp - L.H.O.O.Q. (1919)

a postcard reproduction of Leonardo’s Mona Lisa featuring a hand-drawn moustache and goatee over the famous portrait, and the letters LHOOQ written at the bottom, which, when pronounced out loud in French, are meant to sound as: "Elle a chaud au cul" which translates to English as, "She has a hot ass."  Duchamp was intentionally bringing bathroom stall humour to the eminent High Renaissance portrait.  

The other work of great importance to this exhibition was The Treachery of Images, the famous “this is not a pipe” painting of 1928 by the Belgian Surrealist Rene Magritte (side note: Magritte is heavily represented in this text!).  This is the work that inspired Michel Foucault to investigate relationships between written language and its visual referrents, and is perennially used as a background or an introductory image to semiotic lectures and academic discussions on representation and reality.

Rene Magritte - The Treachery of Images (1928)

While the written component of this catalogue focuses on these particular works of art, or on the overarching concepts and strategies that these movements were working with, the actual catalogue component shows a variety of images from a wide swath of the Dada/Surrealism ranks.  Max Ernst, Man Ray, Kurt Schwitters, Raoul Hausmann, Jean Crotti, Francis Picabia, and many more are represented.  There are also a number of works by figures such as Jean Cocteau, who were only tangentially connected to Surrealism, but whose visual works bear the influence of that movement’s ideas.  All of the images are in black and white, which isn’t so bad, since many of the works are drawings.  Also, the catalogue includes an interesting essay about Joan Miro and Magritte and critical theory (mostly Julia Kristeva’s) by University of California, San Diego professor John C. Welchman.

lgbt liberation - book - 1971 - The Gay Militants

The Gay Militants
Donn Teal
Stein and Day
1971
355 pages

I purchased The Gay Militants for two dollars from the man who sells books on the street at the corner of Bloor St. West and Brunswick Ave. in the Annex neighborhood of Toronto.  The small number of street-bound booksellers who set up within a one kilometer radius of the University of Toronto St. George campus have some good books.  In addition to The Gay Militants, I have also found books by Herbert Marcuse and Henri Lefebvre from either the man in the Annex or the man who sells books just outside of St. George subway station.  Don’t ignore these guys!

The Gay Militants is a comprehensive (300+ pages) history of a then new radical homosexual activism, starting in June 1969 with the Stonewall Riots, and ending with discussions of the event of Christopher Street Liberation Day (essentially the first NYC pride parade), on July 27, 1970.  Barely over a year of action is chronicled, in great depth, by Teal - and this book can be read almost as a survey of the underground (and overground) press coverage of the burgeoning gay liberation movement, as each chapter contains dozens of article excerpts.

Teal, who died in 2009, was an insider to the gay liberation movement, and he wrote his text in the voice of someone who was present at many of the events he described.  He was a founding member of the Gay Activist Alliance, an organization that is also one of the primary subjects of his text, and therefore was at the heart of these matters as an active participant, and not just their historian.  The book is an incredibly dense look at all of the events from that first year, from battles with police, to the management of dances, to the establishment of an underground press (as well as commentary on items in both the activist and popular press that showed difficulty in accepting that there was any such need for gay liberation).  The Gay Militants also, towards its end, quotes statements of support for  from members of The Black Panther Party as well as critique of other (macho-man) radicals who ignored their cause or didn’t see it as valid.  

black metal - film - 2008 - Until The Light Takes Us

Until the Light Takes Us
Aaron Aites and Audrey Ewell
2008
93 minutes

The 2010 documentary film Lemmy, focusing on the life and times of Motorhead frontman Lemmy Kilmeister, was an extended study in perpetual adolescence and obsessive fandom that characterizes all levels of the culture of rock music.  Reknown rockers like Dave Grohl (Foo Fighters and Nirvana) and.... uhm... some Metallica guys... hang on Lemmy’s every word, just happy to bask in his aura, while their hero regales them with his own boring fan-stories of having met Little Richard and whoever else.  Lemmy was largely composed of talking head interviews with rock stars who profess their undying love, interspersed with scenes of the object of everyone’s affection showing off his toy collection and his hi-scores at some bar-top video-game.  Right after watching Lemmy, I watched Until the Light Takes Us, a documentary film about the Norwegian black metal scene that formed in Oslo during the late-1980s and early 1990s that turned out to be quite a palette-cleanser to the two-hour rock-star geek convention I had just finished watching.

Since the punk documentary American Hardcore came out, based on a Feral House book title of the same name, I have heard that a documentary version of the Feral House book Lords of Chaos was also in production. Until the Light Takes Us is unaffiliated with Lords of Chaos, it is a documentary directed by Aaron Aites, former songwriter and member of the indie rock band, Iran, and Audrey Ewell, a filmmaker who is currently working on a documentary about the %99/Occupy movement (according to her twitter page).  The documentary looks into the events that made the Norweigian black metal scene so notable (the burning of medieval churches, the intense personalities, the gloomy record store, the suicides and murders) but also into the legacy of these matters.  

Aites and Ewell’s documentary profiles the history of the black metal scene as something that formed from an intense opposition to everything in waking life.  The musicians hated mainstream society, Christianity, and in the case of Dead (the original lead singer of the original black metal band, Mayhem), life itself.  Tabloid newspapers and books like Lords of Chaos have covered the events that made this scene world famous, Dead’s suicide captured on camera, to be used as an album cover, the group’s relentless destruction of medieval Christian churces as a symbolic gesture towards reclaiming a pagan spiritual heritage, and Varg Vikernes murder of Mayhem lead guitarist Euronymous, are all discussed at length in this documentary.  Fenriz of Darkthrone and Vikirnes (formerly of Emperor, presently of Burzurm) are the two main interview subjects although a number of other individuals are interviewed as well in order to investigate the attitudes and actions of the “Inner Circle” (the name these individuals gave to their little social scene).  Vikirnes discussion of the murder is especially interesting, as he switches between two voices, one of an individual killing another in self-defense, and the second voice is of a killer for whom scenes of extreme violence are no big deal.

Dead: Mayhem's suicidal frontman.

Varg Vikernes smiling in court. 

This documentary has been criticized for being a work of uncritical fandom.  After watching Lemmy, a more highly regarded documentary, I know that it can get a lot worse than Until the Light Takes Us if you can’t stand relentless adulation on film.  Personally, I don’t see how this documentary can be read as such.  This film about a small music oriented subculture features a musical score that is largely of experimental and melodic electronic music by artists such as Boards of Canada rather than the sounds by the bands that make up this movie's focus.  The black metal content of the score is mostly of Burzum’s atmospheric keyboard pieces or of pieces by contemporary doom metal operators like Sunn O))).  Black metal music is played in short referential bursts that play a semiotic role in the film’s structure.  Otherwise this scene appears on film as, in present, through isolated interview subjects, most notably Fenriz of the band Darkthrone, who appears as a loner, and through Varg Vikirnes, a prison inmate.  These subjects look back upon a small music scene that never appeared vital, but instead was always isolated.

The legacy of this scene is also covered, as, for example, the Norweigan artist Bjarne Melgaard is made an interview subject, and his visual work, assemblage paintings with black metal themes, and some kind of black metal performance piece, is featured prominently, (Fenriz seems to hate it).

 Additionally, the store run by Euronymous, Helvete, where metal records and evil music was sold, and a centre for the black metal scene, is shown where it currently stands as a bright boutique of some sort.  These aspects of the film suggest that while the legacy of this tiny scene has greatly expanded beyond its origins in an Oslo shop basement, its original scene and the authentically dark pathos that made it so noteworthy is long gone.  



PS, the film is viewable in its entirety on Vimeo here.

vagabondia, toronto tent city - book - 2004 - Down to This: Squalor and Splendour in a Big-City Shantytown

Down to This: Squalor and Splendour in a Big City Shantytown
Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall
Random House
2004
475 pages

Hiya!  My copy of Down to This was acquired at the U of T Victoria College book sale held every fall.

From some indeterminate moment of genesis in the late 1990s, until September 2002, a homeless community thrived on the south-east corner of Toronto’s downtown.  At the mouth of the Don river there’s a post-industrial wasteland that joins the waterfront with the decaying portlands that a group of self-reliant vagabonds built shelters on.  These grounds were apparently contaminated with beryllium and other toxins, and many of the people who lived there were struggling with mental health, substance abuse issues, and other personal issues.  Still, they built a community that, to some extent, worked.  The people who lived at this site were evicted in fall 2002, and now, almost a full 10 years later, the site remains a fenced off waste.

 

Tent City Toronto: 2001

 

2005 view of Tent City grounds, taken from Citynoise.org

Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall is a writer who, in the spirit of gonzo journalism, lived at Toronto’s tent city from November 2001 until the date of eviction.  Bishop-Stall, however, went beyond any of Hunter S. Thompson’s endeavors, by becoming fully integrated into the community.  He drank with the Tent City dwellers, occasionally smoked crack with them, fought with them, and talked and joked with them over that ten month period.  When Bishop-Stall was beaten up by some of the rougher inhabitants of the place, he didn’t pack up and leave immediately, in fact he stayed for many more months.  Down to This is a day-to-day account of Bishop-Stall’s experiences as a part of this community, with text under date headings to show the movement through time.  The precession of events at Tent City during this period went from a cold winter of communal bonding, to a hot summer of crack that brought the city to an end.

Bishop-Stall’s work is not just an account of life in the temporary makeshift village, it’s also a story of his own problems, as he weaves in memories and accounts of dreams of a failed relationship into his on-going narrative.  Furthermore, the activity of writing, of protecting his notes, and the signing of his publishing deal for Down to This are all incorporated into his story of living at the Tent City.  After the author secured publication for this book he began interviewing many of his neighbors about their lives, what brought them to this point, what kept then on the street, etc.  Bishop-Stall appeared to become good friends with many of the tent city inhabitants, and he manages to humanize them in his writing without idealizing them or treating them as either charity cases or lost causes (even if they did have long-term issues with addiction, committing crimes, mental health, etc).  

The most interesting aspect of Down to This are the detailed descriptions of the lifestyles of tent city’s inhabitants.  The dwellings made from plywood and found (or often donated) materials, the often unseemly methods of bringing in an income (Bishop-Stall hustles pool at a dive bar and he discusses one scenario where he sees an acquaintance crash his bike into cars and then demand money from the drivers), the constant drinking (tall cans of Crest Strong) and shouting and screaming and fighting.  One persistent feature of life in tent city was illness, the author was perpetually suffering from a variety of ailments throughout the book, recalling similar accounts of rough living as told by authors such as Ted Conover in his personal hobo adventure tale Rolling Nowhere, and others who have thrown themselves into this kind of lifestyle for the sake of writing.  

Tent City was a major embarrassment to the Toronto municipal government, and garnered international media attention for a brief period of time in the early 2000s.  The city had to shut it down to hide its shame... not only that but during the city’s final summer crack dealers were setting up shop, and the tent city was becoming an example of a Sadistic counterpart to Hakim Bey’s concept of the ecstatic and carnivalesque temporary autonomous zone.  It was not only residents of tent city who were consuming the crack, but Bishop-Stall described scenes of middle-class teenagers coming down to buy the stuff.  At that point tent city was becoming a high-profile law-free zone open-air drug market that no government could knowingly tolerate.  For Bishop-Stall, the eviction of the tent city population was bitter sweet, as the community was broken up but everyone was given housing.  

A filmmaker named Eric Weissman made a documentary film about the tent city and its inhabitants, and followed the lives of some of them well after the date of eviction. Weissman's film appears on youtube in segments, here's part 2 (for some reason blogspot's internal youtube video search couldn't locate part 1: