chokes on weeties

This idiotic ad campaign for Kellogg’s Sustain™ has been around for a while now.

It’s been very effective because I’m completely persuaded not to buy the shit, if only to discourage media ‘professionals’ from producing any more of such drivel.

Little wonder the GFC, when there’s an army of people doing this kind of nonsense who could otherwise be employed in productive work.

Er... speaking of which, I’ve got some things to do...

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Spirit of place

Tell us about it...

In the heart of the next morning, under its early carnation sky, Lunt and his dog went round to the horse-yard. The mills were creaking, straining their guts to drag trickles of love from the red powdered earth. The land lay flat all round with its dusty scrubby shade trees making black dawn patches.

Lunt bent down and took a pinch of dust between his thumb and finger, sucked it and swallowed.

“Ah, you bitch country,” he said. “I love you.”

• Thea Astley, A Kindness Cup

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case study

Syd Barrett (an artist)  —  image source

Illustrating the principle that most days it’s not worth not getting out of bed of a morning, artist Duggie Fields recounts the disintegration of his former flatmate Syd Barrett, who was a co-founding member of ‘legendary’ rock band Pink Floyd:

I think he spent quite a while lying in bed. I used to be in the next room and I’d be painting... And I knew he was lying in bed sort of thinking — my [speculative] interpretation was that he was thinking — that, while he lay there, he had the possibility of doing anything in the world that he chose. But the minute he made a choice, he was limiting his possibilities. So he lay there as long as he could — so he had this unlimited future! But, of course, that’s a very limited present, when you do that, and a very depressing one ultimately.

• interviewed for the film The Pink Floyd and Syd Barrett Story (Otmoor Productions Limited, 2003)

Still, surely that kind of thing can’t hurt in moderation. So maybe next time you have a lie-in and arrive late for work, tell your employer it was imperative for you to maximise your possibilities. If you have a heartless philistine of a boss who just doesn’t get it, maybe it’s time to move on...?

Duggie Fields (an artist)  —  screencap by jarcob

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Reflected glory

The Vatican’s newspaper has finally forgiven John Lennon for declaring that the Beatles were more famous than Jesus Christ, calling the remark a “boast” by a young man grappling with sudden fame. The comment by Lennon to a London newspaper in 1966 infuriated Christians, particularly in the United States, some of whom burned Beatles’ albums in huge pyres.

But of course the Church of Rome still seeks to boost its relevance by stirring up a ‘controversy’ about an off-the-cuff remark made over 40 years ago by a guy who’s been dead almost 30 years.

And a remark no one thinks at all remarkable, outside Vatican City and beyond a vocal minority of fanatics in the Bible Belt.

Forget Lennon, O Ye Defenders of the Faith, what about poor old Giordano Bruno?

I’m sick and tired of hearing things
From uptight, short-sighted, narrow-minded hypocrites
All I want is the truth now
Just gimme some truth now

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Brilliant dude, pity about the illustration

“Verisimilitude in a narrative is always more important than veracity.”

The late Michael Crichton again, in a talk he gave to the AAAS at Anaheim in 1999.

The man whom Tim Blair summed up as a “novelist and warmy-mocker” — the latter being, for the Muftim, the really important, if typically shallow, distinction — was in fact a trained scientist and physician before becoming a novelist, screen writer and climate-change sceptic. Blair’s studiedly trite remark, of course, illustrates the very point Crichton was making above.

Although the point generalises, Crichton was specifically referring to movies, and to illustrate he drew on the following example:

If I understand the new film Elizabeth correctly it shows Mary, Queen of Scots secretly poisoned at home; although in fact she was publicly beheaded 15 years later. That’s like making a movie where JFK dies by being hit by a bus sometime during the Reagan administration.

That’s a neat and colourful illustration, but in fact Crichton hasn’t ‘understood’ the film Elizabeth at all correctly.

Mary, Queen of Scots barely features in the 1998 production Elizabeth, from memory, if at all, and is certainly not poisoned. Two Marys, however, do meet their untimely deaths in the film. Queen Mary Tudor dies of some mysterious illness, possibly poisoned. And Mary of Guise is assassinated in Scotland, as suggested in the film, by the silkily sinister Sir Francis Walsingham, turned Lothario.

No, Mary, Queen of Scots is in fact dispatched more in keeping with historical rigour in the sequel, Elizabeth: The Golden Age, released eight years later.

But still, we all know Crichton’s statement about verisimilitude, veracity and narrative is absolutely spot on.

Why? Because it has verisimilitude!

(N.B. Note that the ABC transcript of Crichton’s talk misquotes the word ‘verisimilitude’ as ‘milieu’. See the transcript at Crichton’s website, from which, however, the Elizabeth illustration seems to have been expunged.)

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Judicial activism rescues child

Child abuse takes many forms...

Italy’s top court has overruled a couple’s decision in naming their newborn son, labelling their choice “ridiculous”. The couple named their son Venerdi, which in Italian means Friday.

Italy’s Cassation Court has banned the couple from using the name saying it was a ridiculous name that would expose the boy to mockery. The Judges ruled that the name Friday — taken from Daniel Defoe’s famous novel Robinson Crusoe — was associated with “subservience and inferiority”.

Clearly, the poor child would have been at severe risk of taunts from literary critics. The judges did good.

The judges also ordered that the boy be renamed Gregorio, after the saint’s day on which he was born.

The problem now becomes that every child named Gregorio who was born on a Friday will be subject to taunts from literary people of “nerdy Venerdi...”

The couple, known only as Mara O and Roberto G, told the court that they are considering calling their next child Mercoledi, which means Wednesday.

Obviously they haven’t considered the risk to their unborn child of mockery from enthusiasts for ’Sixties sitcoms.

Memo to Cassation Court Judges: These people want flogging...

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The ‘Times’ beats up the Corey legend

That’s the South Gippsland Sentinel Times, a regional weekly serving a stretch of Victoria from the Latrobe Valley to the Bass Coast.

And Corey, of course, refers to Corey Delaney — a.k.a. ‘Party Boy’ Corey — who became a legend in some minds when in January he hosted a wild, outrageous party at his home that became virtually a riot, while his parents were absent on holidays in Queensland.

The Times ran a story on page 4 of last week’s edition with the hysterical headline:

‘Corey’ party at Cape Woolamai

Cowes and San Remo police are concerned with the amount of under-age parties held in the area including Cape Woolamai, where a party of under-aged drinkers got out of hand last weekend.

Senior Constable Julian Wildenberg from San Remo police said that there has been a spate of under-age parties recently which is concerning authorities.

“There were at least four complaints about a party in Cape Woolamai (on the weekend),” he said.

He also said that they are becoming “common”.

Corey-esque he was asked.

“Yes, I would say so,” he said.

Well now, hang on just a minute — Corey-esque?

Let’s just briefly review the Corey incident back in January:

More than 500 teenagers spilled on to the streets, damaging property and throwing projectiles at police cars...

Up to 30 police were called to the party, along with dog squads, transit police, divisional vans and a critical incident response team.

Not to mention the police helicopter, and threats by the authorities to bill Corey and his parents for the outrageous cost of the police response.

By way of contrast, to describe the Cape Woolamai incident as Corey-esque is most likely an exercise in slick — or slack — journalistic hyperbole.

No charges were laid. ... S/C Wildenberg said that no parents were seen during the noisy affair where “at least 30 youths were present”. [My emphasis]

Sounds not unlike several parties I myself attended — well over 30 years ago!

That the “affair” in Cape Woolamai might be somehow attributable to latter-day Corey-esque excess would seem to be contradicted by S/C Wildenberg’s own words:

“I haven’t encountered [a party] as bad as this for quite a while,” he said.

I’m sure that’s true, but such parties have always, and will always, happen from time to time.

The article goes on to observe that S/C Wildenberg “was serious about the matter, concerned for the safety of the adolescents involved in the party.”

Well, so are we all, but most of us also know that unruly and risk-taking behaviour by adolescents and young adults is a perennial hazard that wasn’t invented by ‘Party Boy’ Corey.

The Times journalist should get a grip.

Source: “‘Corey’ party at Cape Woolamai” by Samantha Freestone, South Gippsland Sentinel Times, Tuesday, April 29 2008, page 4. (No link available/print only)

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Makes you wonder

The following thought-provoking collective letter was published this week in The Guardian (UK):

In May, Jewish organisations will be celebrating the 60th anniversary of the founding of the state of Israel. This is understandable in the context of centuries of persecution culminating in the Holocaust.

Nevertheless, we are Jews who will not be celebrating. Surely it is now time to acknowledge the narrative of the other, the price paid by another people for European anti-semitism and Hitler’s genocidal policies. As Edward Said emphasised, what the Holocaust is to the Jews, the Naqba is to the Palestinians.

In April 1948, the same month as the infamous massacre at Deir Yassin and the mortar attack on Palestinian civilians in Haifa’s market square, Plan Dalet was put into operation. This authorised the destruction of Palestinian villages and the expulsion of the indigenous population outside the borders of the state. We will not be celebrating.

In July 1948, 70,000 Palestinians were driven from their homes in Lydda and Ramleh in the heat of the summer with no food or water. Hundreds died. It was known as the Death March. We will not be celebrating.

In all, 750,000 Palestinians became refugees. Some 400 villages were wiped off the map. That did not end the ethnic cleansing. Thousands of Palestinians (Israeli citizens) were expelled from the Galilee in 1956. Many thousands more when Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza. Under international law and sanctioned by UN resolution 194, refugees from war have a right to return or compensation. Israel has never accepted that right. We will not be celebrating.

We cannot celebrate the birthday of a state founded on terrorism, massacres and the dispossession of another people from their land. We cannot celebrate the birthday of a state that even now engages in ethnic cleansing, that violates international law, that is inflicting a monstrous collective punishment on the civilian population of Gaza and that continues to deny to Palestinians their human rights and national aspirations.

We will celebrate when Arab and Jew live as equals in a peaceful Middle East.

Seymour Alexander, Ruth Appleton, Steve Arloff, Rica Bird, Jo Bird, Cllr Jonathan Bloch, Ilse Boas, Prof. Haim Bresheeth, Tanya Bronstein, Sheila Colman, Ruth Clark, Sylvia Cohen, Judith Cravitz, Mike Cushman, Angela Dale, Ivor Dembina, Dr. Linda Edmondson, Nancy Elan, Liz Elkind, Pia Feig, Colin Fine, Deborah Fink, Sylvia Finzi, Brian Fisher MBE, Frank Fisher, Bella Freud, Catherine Fried, Uri Fruchtmann, Stephen Fry, David Garfinkel, Carolyn Gelenter, Claire Glasman, Tony Greenstein, Heinz Grunewald, Michael Halpern, Abe Hayeem, Rosamine Hayeem, Anna Hellman, Amy Hordes, Joan Horrocks, Deborah Hyams, Selma James, Riva Joffe, Yael Oren Kahn, Michael Kalmanovitz, Paul Kaufman, Prof. Adah Kay, Yehudit Keshet, Prof. Eleonore Kofman, Rene Krayer, Stevie Krayer, Berry Kreel, Leah Levane, Les Levidow, Peter Levin, Louis Levy, Ros Levy, Prof. Yosefa Loshitzky, Catherine Lyons, Deborah Maccoby, Daniel Machover, Prof. Emeritus Moshe Machover, Miriam Margolyes OBE, Mike Marqusee, Laura Miller, Simon Natas, Hilda Meers, Martine Miel, Laura Miller, Arthur Neslen, Diana Neslen, Orna Neumann, Harold Pinter, Roland Rance, Frances Rivkin, Sheila Robin, Dr. Brian Robinson, Neil Rogall, Prof. Steven Rose, Mike Rosen, Prof. Jonathan Rosenhead, Leon Rosselson, Michael Sackin, Sabby Sagall, Ian Saville, Alexei Sayle, Anna Schuman, Sidney Schuman, Monika Schwartz, Amanda Sebestyen, Sam Semoff, Linda Shampan, Sybil Shine, Prof. Frances Stewart, Inbar Tamari, Ruth Tenne, Martin Toch, Tirza Waisel, Stanley Walinets, Martin White, Ruth Williams, Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi, Devra Wiseman, Gerry Wolff, Sherry Yanowitz

By contrast, Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has already celebrated on the collective behalf of all Australians.

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Aussie torch relay in some other foreign capital imagined

As many as 10,000 “China supporters descended” on Canberra yesterday for the Beijing Olympics torch relay through the Australian capital.

There were several incidents in which large, vocal groups of China supporters surrounded and taunted smaller groups of Tibetan activists.

Mr Stanhope says he is aware of contact between the embassy and Chinese organisations but does not know the degree of resourcing or support provided by the embassy.

Stanhope, however, seems fairly unperturbed by the unknown-ness of “the degree of resourcing or support provided” by agents of the Chinese government in Australia.

He says any Australian ambassador would probably do the same if the shoe was on the other foot.

“Just imagine if this had been the Australian torch relay in some other foreign capital,” he said.

“I’m sure the Australian residents in that particular country at the time would have flocked and would have perhaps expected or anticipated some support from their embassy, so I think it’s a quite reasonable thing to do.”

Well yeah, sure...

It’s quite conceivable that droves of Aussie expats, resident students and tourists would have “descended” on the streets of Beijing in order to “surround and taunt,” say, Australian Aboriginal activists protesting at an Australian Olympics torch relay in that city.

Agencies of the Australian government in China would almost certainly have provided some significant “degree of resourcing or support” for such activities.

Yep, it could easily happen...!

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Names and shades

Whilst sorting through a pile of old VHS tapes, I came across a rockumentary called The Story of Rock and Roll, produced by the Nine Network and screened in November 1995.

The opening credits announced the appearance of a Pete Towshend...

Among the luminaries interviewed for the production was a certain Al Kopper...

Mr Kopper bore a striking resemblance to a later interviewee, Al Kooper...

Kooper was one of several rock-legends who evidently require dark glasses when being interviewed indoors, including Eric Burdon...

... and Eddie Van Halen...

... and Barnsey...

Bono, in contrast to his more recent custom, was interviewed sans shades — perhaps because he was outdoors in broad daylight...

A more recent indoors pic shows how Bono has matured as a human being ...

On Andrew Denton’s Enough Rope in 2006, Bono explained his dark-glasses fetish thus:

BONO: I mean, I’ve got a — there’s many reasons for the glasses — posing, I’m sure, right up there, privacy, and I do like having one step of a remove, actually. I don’t think I have — I don’t think when I’m singing I hold anything back and I don’t think when I’m writing I hold anything back. But I think I’m allowed to hold something back in this kind of a set-up, and, as honest a man that you are and as honest as I’m trying to be, there is a natural insincerity in the kind of — in the set-up, and I’m trying to be much better at it, but I just need one step removed.

ANDREW DENTON: That’s a good answer...

Good as any.

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Legal and epistemological minefield predicted

After a long hard week, here’s the kind of story that makes life sweet:

The United Kingdom’s fortune-tellers, mediums and spiritual healers will march on Downing Street to protest against new laws they fear will lead to them being “persecuted and prosecuted”.

Organisers say that replacing the Fraudulent Mediums Act of 1951 with new consumer protection rules will remove key legal protection for “genuine” mediums.

They think sceptics might bring malicious prosecutions to force spiritualists to prove in court that they can heal people, see into the future or talk to the dead.

Psychics also fear they will have to give disclaimers describing their services as entertainment or as scientific experiments with unpredictable results.

In my humble opinion those “genuine” guys should be seizing this opportunity to prove, once and for all, that their’s is a legitimate field of scientific endeavour. As a bonus, they could tip the bucket on those malicious sceptics.

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‘Unlistenable nightmares’ procured

Here’s some ‘amazing’ news which seems to have passed under the radar of major MSM outlets:

A British widow has given 4,000 vinyl records spanning every classical genre to her local Oxfam shop, the largest music donation in the charity’s history.

Apparently it’s all there, from A to Z — well er, at least, from B to S...

The collection, worth an estimated 25,000 pounds, ranges from Bach and Haydn to Stravinsky and Stockhausen and will keep the shop stocked for three years.

“It is amazing. I can’t think of a classical genre that is missing,” said Oxfam volunteer Terry Hyde. “It is all there, all your big figures from the 18th and 19th century, your 20th century unlistenable nightmares by Stockhausen, avant garde, opera, unaccompanied violin. Virtually every genre is covered.”

Shop manager Jacky Theobald said the collection was too big to go on sale at the same time. “We will do a Chopin week, a Mozart week, that sort of thing.”

Music connoisseurs will not want to miss Unlistenable Nightmares Week.

Amazing.

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Advertising demystified

“Advertising is, at its core, just the simple delivery of information.”

So says Chris Berg, research fellow with the Institute of Public Affairs and editor of the IPA Review.

One can only agree that the most lavish promotion for any given product is ultimately reducible to a statement of the application of the product, technical specifications, and so forth.

In short, well-paid advertising hot-shots are not creative geniuses, but rather simple information workers.

With Mr Berg’s searing demystification of their craft, they may now expect a concomitant reduction in their remuneration. If I were in the advertising industry, I’d be joining the union with all haste.

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The Gospel of Pilate

Well, hey, why not a Gospel of Pilate? If Judas can have one, then surely that other assassin of Christ is entitled to equal time.

Without these two men, who both played pivotal roles in the Crucifixion of Our Lord and Saviour, no believer today could enjoy the Salvation that Christ’s sacrifice has vouchsafed for them.

What set me to (again) thinking about this stuff was that we dropped in on friends last weekend and found them watching a dvd of Norman Jewison’s 1973 big-screen production of the rock-opera Jesus Christ Superstar. The Pilate presented in that Lloyd-Webber & Rice opus is — second only to the title character Himself, of course — easily the most intriguing portrayal in the show, albeit that he only gets barely about 15 minutes of screen time. (Priorities.)

As portrayed by Barry Dennen in the film, Pilate has a pronounced lisp — in conformity with an apparent tendency in cinema to camp-up the character, taken to sublime absurdity with Michael Palin’s rhotacistic Pilate in Monty Python’s The Life of Bwian Brian.

But little is actually known about Pilate — beyond his prominent role in the Scriptures as Procurator of Judea — that is not, at best, of dubious reliability. In the Sunday Age some time ago, Terry Lane described Pilate’s lot and function as “the daily grind of crushing little people”. While to a great extent that’s probably a fair characterisation — imperial Rome, after all, was necessarily and quintessentially a police/terror state — the fact is that various accounts of Christ’s trial before Pilate give the impression of the latter as an intelligent and complex character.

Indeed, a number of sources, including the Gospels, convey an impression of Pilate as being deeply conflicted regarding his role in Jesus’s fate. Further, among the Apocryphal texts, the Acts of Pilate presents a detailed narrative of Pilate’s active resistance to the Sanhedrin’s condemnation of Jesus.

An interesting modern treatment of Pilate’s role in the Crucifixion I’ve found is contained in the Soviet-era author Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel, The Master and Margarita. Bulgakov’s depiction of Pilate discretely occupies several chapters of the novel, and was dramatised by Channel 4 Productions in a short feature (about 1 hour) called Incident in Judea.

For anyone interested in reading further, the relevant sections in the text of the novel are Book One, Chapters 2 (“Pontius Pilate”) and 16 (“The Execution”); and Book Two, Chapter 25 (“How the Procurator Tried to Save Judas of Karioth”).

There’s also a dream-sequence in the “Epilogue” in which Bulgakov floats a redemptive resolution of Pilate’s perdition:

To the moon stretches a broad path of moonlight and up it is climbing a man in a white cloak with a blood-red lining. Beside him walks a young man in a torn chiton and with a disfigured face. The two are talking heatedly, arguing, trying to agree about something.

‘Ye gods!’ says the man in the cloak, turning his proud face to his companion. ‘What a disgusting method of execution! But please, tell me,’ — here the pride in his face turns to supplication — ‘it did not take place, did it? I beg you — tell me that it never took place?’

‘No, of course it never took place,’ answers his companion in a husky voice. ‘It was merely your imagination.’

‘Can you swear to that?’ begged the man in the cloak.

‘I swear it!’ answers his companion, his eyes smiling.

‘That is all I need to know!’ gasps the man in the cloak as he strides on towards the moon, beckoning his companion on.

A reappraisal of Pilate is perhaps in order, in consideration of his reluctance — albeit, ultimately futile — to deliver Jesus to the executioner’s gibbet. Was he the monster that is portrayed in tradition? Or just a flawed man, hence a pliant and unwitting instrument of God, the Father and Son?

Had Pilate not yielded to the clamour for blood of the priests and the mob, Christianity may have been stillborn. And ourselves, doomed, for want of heavenly Salvation.

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Interstellar war imminent

It’s astonishing, but there’s not been a murmur of protest over this:

The Beatles song Across The Universe will be the first song to be beamed directly into space, NASA has announced.

And yet, surely Led Zeppelin fans would far rather that Stairway to Heaven was beamed into the interstellar reaches to represent our species. And don’t James Blunt fans have anything to say?

But not surprisingly...

The Beatle Sir Paul McCartney said it was an “amazing” achievement and John Lennon’s widow, Yoko Ono, has called it the “beginning of a new age”.

Well, yes... It could ignite an interstellar war if the lyrics of the song are mistranslated. We could look up one day to find a million sleek and horribly beweaponed star cruisers poised to unleash electric death at a single word of command from the leader of the Vl’Hurgs, as he challenges we Earthlings to take back what we said about his mother.

NASA will this week beam the song via its Deep Space Network (that’s the one the Republicans keep threatening to make pay its own way with commercial advertisements). What’s more...

At exactly the same time, fans across the world are being asked to play Across The Universe in a bid to “create a harmonic convergence” around planet earth and throughout the universe.

They stop short of claiming such a “harmonic convergence” will solve greenhouse and ring in universal peace and understanding.

But, hey, this could just work! Please start churning out the Beatles’ Across the Universe on your CD players and iPods immediately, because it’s a happening thing.

Get with the vibe and do it now!!!

Elsewhere, Caz over at avatar briefs gives us an idea of the odds of Across the Universe reaching the ears (or whatever auditory sense organs may obtain) of advanced aliens.

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Guitar unsmashed

For Christmas my nephew gave me a copy of The Rolling Stone Interviews. Bless him, he probably thought it an astute choice as I, being nominally a Baby Boomer, must of course be vitally interested in the self-obsessed maunderings of such iconic personages as Jim Morrison, Phil Spector, Joni Mitchell and others.

Never mind that I came in on the tail end of the Baby Boom, such that by the time I hit my youthful peak all the purported good times were over. Worse still, all we had to look forward to were the Seventies. Beyond that we might have looked forward to the End of History, if it weren’t for the fact that this happened to coincide with the End of Certainty.

But I digress. I’ve determined that I should immerse myself in my glorious Boomer heritage, and that my nephew’s gift of this absorbing tome must not go unread.

First up is an interview in 1968 with Pete Townshend, the motive force behind archetypal rock band The Who, and (as I read elsewhere long ago) “the thinking man’s rock guitarist”.

Townshend’s interlocutor, Jann S. Wenner, begins by asking:

“The end of your act goes to ‘My Generation,’ like you usually do and that’s when you usually smash your guitar. You didn’t tonight — why not?”

To which Townshend quite reasonably replies:

“Well, there is a reason, not really anything that’s really worth talking about...”

Well, of course — except that the interview then goes on for four pages about why he didn’t smash his guitar, why he’s done so up to that performance, how it affects his guitar playing, etc. This interview is dated September 28, 1968, so by this time Townshend has been smashing guitars as part of his live act for perhaps a couple of years or more.

In other words, Townshend has persisted with the practice for as much as two years after guitar-smashing had been roundly debunked by Michelangelo Antonioni in his 1966 parable of ‘Swinging London’ Blowup.

In the film, we find swinging Londoner David Hemmings at a Yardbirds gig in some swinging London venue. Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck are both doing their swinging London guitar-hero thing, climaxing with Beck doing his swinging London guitar-smashing thing, after which he hurls the remains of his instrument into the reverentially watching crowd of swinging Londoners.

A struggle ensues among the spectators for possession of the holy relic. Hemmings somehow wrests the coveted thing from the pack and legs it out the door, hotly pursued by several of the faithful.

Cut to the next scene out in the street, where Hemmings, having evaded his pursuers, examines the smashed guitar a few moments before disdainfully tossing it into the gutter. As Hemmings strides off down the street, a couple of long-haired swinging London bystanders pick up and examine the wreckage before similarly discarding it for the worthless piece of junk it has become.

Antonioni’s searing demystification of ritualised guitar-smashing seems, therefore, to have been completely lost on such leading exponents of the practice as Townshend. Thinking man’s rock guitarist, indeed!

Phew! Only four pages into the first offering of the 450+ pages of The Rolling Stone Interviews, and already my progress seems to be stalling. Watch this space for further reports as they arise of snippets that may or may not be of interest.

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Back to the Garden

I have a long-standing attitude of ambivalence, at best, with regard to the pursuit of, and prospects for, human colonisation of outer space. This has occasionally put me at odds with those of my g-g-generation who, like me, grew up in the ‘wonder years’ of the Apollo moon program.

I take a similarly jaundiced view about another great sacred cow of my generation, namely the Woodstock ‘Love Nation’ Festival of 1969. Happily I can claim some distance from the event, having only just turned twelve at the time; however, we baby-boomers are supposed to regard this event with great reverence, and even to think of it as having some real, seminal cultural significance.

Perhaps it does, although in an unintended way. Probably the best take I have read on the Woodstock phenomenon was by Julie Burchill in her essay “The Method Rhythm”, an extract of which follows. One may agree and disagree with many things Burchill writes, but here she has nailed the Hippies and the Woodstock ‘vibe’ perfectly.

The delusions of self-sufficiency harboured by the Hippies persisted beyond the point in their history when it became clear that the very existence of the Hippies was totally dependent on hand-outs from the straight world — Woodstock.

Although popular myth has long perceived Woodstock as the ultimate fulfilment of Hippie ideals and Altamont as the death of the dream, in reality it was Woodstock that most perfectly spotlighted the hypocrisies, helplessness and hapless lethargy of the Hippies.

Car-owning Hippies clogged up the highway to Woodstock in an eight-mile traffic jam, while a thunderstorm falling out of the August sky turned the site into a muddy bog. The police declared Woodstock “a disaster area”, and they were not wrong. ... In their rush to the promised swampland it had never occurred to the Hippies that their stomachs would not be kept as full as the family freezer. There was nothing to drink and no food in the land of plenty. Counterculture capitalists twenty-four-year-old investment broker John Roberts and twenty-five-year-old entrepreneur Mike Lang, the big daddies behind Woodstock, had been too busy rushing in the cameras and recording equipment to set up a single hot dog stand.

Soon the half a million jolly campers of Woodstock were starving — but help was at hand for the ravenous ravers. The local Women’s Group of the Jewish Community Centre spoonfed the frontiersmen of Utopia 30,000 sandwiches. Woodstock’s owner, middle-aged dairy farmer Mr Max Yasgur, donated huge quantities of milk and cheese to prevent the gurgling inmates of his farm from wasting away. Even the originally outraged residents of Woodstock warmed to the plight of the helpless Hippie nation when the prospect of turning a fast buck out of the dawning of the Age of Aquarius beckoned.

But most of all the Hippies had President Nixon’s Armed Forces to thank for helping them to stave off the pangs of hunger. Instead of saying “Let them eat love beads,” as might have been expected after all those charred draft cards, the Air Force was sent in with a small mountain of edible treats. Despite all the protests about the bombs, napalm and Agent Orange that the same Air Force was dropping on the Vietnamese, the peanut butter sure tasted swell. Manna from heaven, courtesy of President Richard M. Nixon.

When the playpen was dismantled at the end of the three-day fling — on the other side of the country, Sharon Tate had been dead for seven days, murdered by some longhairs from way back — the head of Monticello’s constabulary was full of praise: “Notwithstanding their personality, their dress and their ideas, they are the most courteous, considerate and well-behaved group of kids I have ever been in contact with in my twenty-four years of police work.”

The praise of the police for the Hippies was echoed by the Hippies’ praise of the Hippies — Woodstock was perceived by them as the stuff that the Birth Of A Nation is made of.

Any movement that celebrated an event like Woodstock as some kind of moral triumph made an event like Altamont inevitable.

• Julie Burchill, Damaged Gods.
  Arrow Books, London, 1987. Pp. 42-7.

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