Author: brendanmstewart

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Barefoot In Babylon: The Creation of the Woodstock Music Festival, by Bob Spitz

Bob Spitz’s 1979 book, Barefoot In Babylon: The Creation of the Woodstock Music Festival, updated in 1989, is currently out of print. However, if you’re looking for a rollicking good read and a fascinating glimpse into the behind-the-scenes machinations that resulted in Three Days of Peace, Love and Music in 1969, contact your local library for a copy.

Generally speaking, although I have a great love for much of the music that came out in the 1960s, I feel the same way towards hippies that Cartman from South Park does and, if nothing else, Barefoot In Babylon proves that Sea People are as non-existent as clean hippies.

While the author’s tone is frequently admiring, it is far from hagiographic. The promoters of the Woodstock festival come across as naive, bored rich kids (at best) or drug-addled fools of epic proportions. Michael Lang, the curly haired poster boy for Woodstock was a generous and giving man, as long as it was with somebody else’s money. But when the festival started and the world started collapsing around the promoters, Lang was in outer space on acid and good vibes. It’s clear that he wanted Woodstock to happen because he wanted to attend the rock concert of his dreams.

The popular myth of Woodstock is that for three days the hippies lived in peace and harmony, grooving to Santana, Sly and the Family Stone, Ten Years After, and Jimi Hendrix. To an extent, that’s true. Violence was minimal, but that probably has as much to do with the altered consciousness of the attendees as it does to the better angels of human nature.

The dark side of Woodstock is almost never discussed. Yes, everyone knows it was a financial disaster. But there were thousands of drug overdoses, one fatal, many more nearly so. One young man was run over by a tractor. Concession stands were turned over and burnt down. It all sounds a lot like the mess that was Woodstock ’99. But no, this was the original.

The artists who played don’t get off scot free either. Joan Baez did a very nice thing by going to the side stage and performing for people who couldn’t get to the main stage. On the other hand, the Grateful Dead were asked to expand their set in order to keep the kids calm, and instead refused to play unless they were paid upfront in cash–no small demand in a tiny town in the middle of the night on a weekend when no banks were open. The Who, also, did this. Sly Stone wouldn’t go on until “the vibes were right” (the vibes became right when one of the promoters verbally berated the star). Jimi Hendrix was threatening to cancel until the last minute because he was freaked out by the size of the crowd. Even Sha Na Na’s manager insisted his act go on at night (he was put in his place by the promoters, who didn’t care whether Sha Na Na went on at all).

But the creation of the Festival was some kind of triumph. Until one month before Richie Havens took the stage, the festival was supposed to be held in Walkill, New York. With a month to go, the town of Walkill pulled the rug out from under the promoters and left them with no site. It was pure luck they found Yasgur’s farm in Bethel, and a miracle that they were able to turn the farm into a usable concert setting in that time. Electrical lines needed to be laid, wells needed to be dug, ground had to be cleared, and the stage had to be built. It was an enormous amount of work, and many corners were cut.

There were not enough portable toilets, and hundreds of them were inaccessible to the trucks that were supposed to clean them out. Within hours of the first day, most of the portable toilets were overflowing. Ditches needed to be speedily dug and the waste siphoned into them. The water pipes were laid on top of the ground. Stepped on by hundreds of thousands of hippies, the water lines broke and needed to be repaired almost constantly. Similarly, the electrical wires ended up above ground after the rains came, and then exposed by trampling feet. This opened up the very real possibility that thousands of people could have been electrocuted, since everyone was wet and packed together like sardines.

I always knew that Woodstock didn’t quite go as planned. But the scope of the disaster was a revelation. The book starts with Michael Lang and Artie Kornfeld pitching their idea for a recording studion to John Roberts and John Rosenman, two venture capitalists in search of an idea. The studio, to be located in Woodstock, would be heralded by a giant concert.

From there, the author takes you on a tour of town zoning meetings (not as boring as it might sound), and into the back rooms where the promoters were forced to hand over money to groups like Wavy Gravy’s Hog Farm, or the anarchist Up-Against-The-Wall-Motherfuckers, in exchange for not causing trouble. The Hog Farm comes in for a particular beating in the book. Far from being the Hippie Clown he portrays himself as, Hugh (“Wavy Gravy”) Romney was just another hustler on the take, looking for bribe money with the threat that he could cause a lot of problems. Abbie Hoffman, also, threatened Woodstock with anarchic disturbances unless he got paid off. In the Sixties, they were hippie characters. In any sensible decade they’d be called extortionist radicals.

The book is endlessly fascinating, though I would have liked more about the music. In the end, though, the book was about the promoters and the behind-the-scenes wheeling, dealing, and outright scheming that led up to that music (much of which was great). The Woodstock Festival has long ago passed into mythology, and will never be removed from the haze of nostalgia. But it was an arrogant undertaking, poorly planned, hastily put together, and atrocious in its execution. Enjoy the music; the music abides. But be glad you weren’t one of those people in the Bad Trip tent, or wallowing in the overflowing sewage. It’s a better movie than an experience.

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The Dark Knight, Part 2: Holy Christ, Batman!

This will likely be a short entry because my thoughts on the subject are “shower thoughts.” That is, they popped into my head whilst taking a shower this morning and then got set aside by the rest of my day.

Spoilers galore.

It occurred to me that the three main characters of The Dark Knight can represent three archetypes. You’ve got the Caped Crusader as the Christ figure, Harvey Dent as Everyman, and The Joker as Satan.

The Joker is the key to this. Sure he creates plenty of mayhem, kills lots of innocent and not-so-innocent people, but these are red herrings. What the Joker really wishes to do is corrupt. He is the devil on your shoulder telling you that everything is nothing and nothing is everything, that the only truth that matters is what you want. He seeks to bring you down to his level, to prove that you (Man) are worthless, no better than He (Satan) is. He tempts and triumphs when people succumb to his temptation.

He tempts the Batman to kill him, and fails. He tempts a guard to beat him to a pulp and, when the guard succumbs to the temptation, The Joker escapes. He tempts the passengers of two ferrys to kill, and is horrified when the passengers listen to their better angels and do not kill their counterparts. In Jokerworld, the hostages are dressed as criminals, the criminals as doctors and nurses. Innocence is corrupted, evil hidden. Alfred’s line about the Joker wanting to see the world burn is telling. What the Joker wants to see is our world become his world…hellfire, it is.

Enter Harvey Dent as the Good Man. Here is the guy next door. He’s handsome, has a beautiful girlfriend, a great job, and he’s a moral crusader. He is the daytime’s version of Batman. In many ways, he’s a comic book character. Good, pure Harvey Dent.

But Harvey is Everyman, and Everyman has both goodness and evil inside of him. Harvey’s evil is deeply suppressed, but not so hidden that the nickname “Two-Face” doesn’t precede his transformation. Then through a terrible tragedy to his heart and soul (the death of his girlfriend) and an equally terrible tragedy to his physical presence (the searing of his face), he is pushed to the edge of the abyss. Now when he looks in the mirror he sees the two faces of Everyman. He sees his unscarred goodness, and a twisted, rotten visage that is way beyond the reach of plastic surgery. As Everyman would do, he agonizes.

Despite the rage coming from Harvey after his disfigurement, one can’t help but think that some intensive therapy and some reconstructive surgery would give him at least part of his life back. An angel on his shoulder, in the form of Lieutenant Gordon comes to see him and console him, to tell him that his life is not yet over, but Dent’s rage prevents him from hearing the message. Anger is one of the Seven Deadly Sins, and can prevent you from seeing goodness or God. Anger, lust, pride, gluttony, etc…they are spiritual blinders, and when we are spiritually blinded we are confused and weak.

Satan preys on confusion and weakness. Enter The Joker. When the Devil appears to Harvey Dent he does so as an Angel…a nurse. And in direct contrast to the rest of the movie, the Joker’s seduction of Harvey Dent is just that: a seduction, with just a hint of the madness lurking underneath. He doesn’t scream Harvey Dent into submission. He convinces Harvey Dent to embrace evil, to make the spiritual blindness permanent by becoming one with the anger. The Fall of Harvey Dent from a man of grace to Two-Face requires a savior.

Harvey Dent (Man) commits great evil. It is Batman who tells soon-to-be Commissioner Gordon that he (Batman) will accept the blame. Batman takes Two-Face’s sins onto himself and sacrifices his public image in order to give hope to Gotham (mankind).

Regardless (and this may just be an old English major’s rantings), The Dark Knight aspires to be so much more than a comic book movie. It largely succeeds.

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The Dark Knight

I’ll get the obvious out of the way first. Heath Ledger was absolutely amazing as the Joker. Compared to Ledger’s performance, Jack Nicholson’s take on the premier Batman villain was a ludicrous showcase of ham fisted showboating, and with all due respect to Cesar Romero, the role of the Joker belongs to Ledger now and, likely, forever.

Also, there will be spoilers in this “review.”

Okay, that’s out of the way, although I’ll revisit it somewhat later.

Director Christopher Nolan successfully restarted the Batman franchise with the excellent Batman Begins a few years ago. He did it the way it should have been done: he pretended George Clooney was still on The Facts Of Life and that Jim Carrey had never been let anywhere near a green suit festooned with question marks. It was a Jedi mind trick of epic proportions: “There were never nipples on the bat suit.” And jeez, it worked. Christian Bale took over the role of Batman as if Michael Keaton was hamming it up in Beetlejuice: The Revenge.

The casting was perfect. For starters, Christian Bale is an actor. Michael Keaton is a character. Liam Neeson played the terrorist Ra’s Al Ghul with all of the understatement that Danny DeVito left in his trailer. The dude who played the Scarecrow was creepy and believable. He was NOT Howard Stern, who was rumored to be the man in the scarecrow mask for the aborted fifth movie in the original run. Not being Howard Stern is usually enough, but in this case the actor was excellent. His name escapes me, which probably means I won’t be on his Christmas card list, but I’m too lazy to go to IMDB right now. I write on the fly, you know.

But the tone of the first movie was darker and more serious. This was a movie based on a comic book, but the cast and crew treated it with respect. There’s the difference. The first series of Bat flicks had melted into an annoying goo of hammy acting and knowing winks at an audience the cast and crew assumed were all like Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons.

Now comes The Dark Knight, easily the greatest comic book movie ever made. The majority of the cast is lifted from the first movie, with the exception of Maggie Gyllenhaal replacing a way-too-young Katie Holmes. I’ll spare you the intricacies of the plot. The mob doesn’t like Batman and hire The Joker to do away with him. That will suffice. At it’s core, it is still a comic book, not Tolstoy.

Enter the Joker, the character that elevates the movie into something more. Unlike Nicholson’s take of the villain as a petty thief who takes a colorful chemical bath and then rises to become a crime boss, Ledger’s version is The Joker as Anarchist. In the original Tim Burton-helmed Batman, Joker wanted revenge against Batman. In Nolan’s hands The Joker wants “to see the world burn” as Alfred (Michael Caine) so eloquently puts it. He is not driven by profit. When he does get his hands on the Mob’s money he burns it.

What drives The Joker is the desire to see the rest of humanity brought down to his level. Ledger’s joker is possibly the most nihilistic villain ever to grace the silver screen. He doesn’t want to kill Batman. He wants to be killed by Batman. He seeks to force Batman to break his pledge against killing. In Joker’s world, humanity is fierce and animalistic, hiding under a thin veneer of civilization. Blow up a few buildings and watch the people turn on each other.

In the case of Gotham City’s crusading District Attorney and all-around good guy Harvey Dent (the excellent Aaron Eckhart), Joker succeeds. Kill his girlfriend, and horribly disfigure a guy while attempting to blow him up…well, you can certainly damage sanity. And by the time Dent ends up in the hospital he is clearly a man in whose sanity has been stretched. But it is when the Joker shows up at the hospital and reasons with Dent that the sanity snaps and Dent becomes the villain Two-Face (you won’t even remember Tommy Lee Jones’s version after this, I promise). In effect, the Joker finds the good guy when he’s seriously down, and convinces him to stay there. Then he blows up the hospital because that’s the kind of guy the Joker is. The fact that he does it while wearing a nurse’s uniform is more chilling. The fact that his remote control has a glitch and the Joker is clearly annoyed (not mad or hyperventilating, just annoyed) as he continuously hits the red detonation button is downright frightening. It is too bad that Two-Face will not be around for the next movie. Eckhart played him with the cool insanity that fits the role, not the leering, laughing hamminess of Jones.

The movie has much to say about humanity. The Joker is thwarted in his schemes but, more importantly, he fails to turn citizen against citizen. He even fails to turn hardened convicts against ordinary citizens. Joker is the Id writ large. He is the badass that many convicts pretend to be. But when face to face with anarchy, when confronted with a man for whom the truth is whatever he wishes it to be, when dealing with true madness, even the worst convicts suddenly realize the benefits of a system of law and order. This may seem like a no-brainer, but it’s a concept that seems beyond the limited intellect of those who sport the Anarchy “A” on their clothes, or those people who think that there are no objective standards of truth. These are people who have never looked The Joker in the eye.

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In Cold Blood, by Truman Capote

I’m not sure whether Truman Capote intended this or not, but it seems to me that In Cold Blood is nothing less than a meditation on the absolute banality of evil.

The triumph of the book—and it is a triumph—belongs to Capote, who crafted a new style of journalism with this book. By writing a non-fiction book using the conventions of a novel, Capote was able to bring an immediacy to the story that is lacking from most non-fiction and especially from most “true crime” books, a genre that has attracted more than its fair share of hacks looking to sensationalize the gruesome details of someone else’s last day on earth. Capote doesn’t sensationalize anything here. In many ways, and this isn’t a criticism, the story is as flat as the Kansas landscape in which it takes place.

For me, the most effective part of the book was the first. Capote alternates sections of Book 1 between the story of a typical November day for the Clutter family (going to the insurance agent, helping a friend bake pies, etc) with the day of Dick Hickcock and Perry Smith (eating lunch, going to the general store to buy stockings and rope). The reader is lulled into a sense of complete normalcy, though there is definitely something amiss. Book 1 ends with the meeting of the Clutter family and Hickcock/Smith, and the slaughter that electrified and terrorized the tiny town of Holcomb.

The subsequent sections deal with the aftermath and investigation of the crime, intercut with the killers wandering aimlessly in the West and Mexico looking for work (but not too hard), planning more petty crimes. It is the testimony of a prisoner who had told Hickcock about the Clutter family and their mythical safe with thousands of dollars in it, that leads to the arrest, conviction, and, eventually, the execution. Four shotgun blasts lead to six deaths, all of which are “in cold blood.”

Throughout, the novelistic prose takes the story way past the ordinary true crime story. Because Capote had incredible access to almost all the parties involved (including both killers), it allows him to take the form of the omniscient narrator. This is the essential ingredient that most true crime books are missing: in depth interviews with the criminals. Yes, Perry and Hickcock are portrayed with a degree of sympathy, but the murders themselves are never excused as the byproducts of not enough quality time with Daddy.

Unlike a book like Helter Skelter, the prosecutor’s version of the Manson murders, Capote doesn’t make the villains of his piece larger than life. Nor does he canonize the victims, or inflate his own role in the story. Bonnie Clutter’s fight with mental illness is discussed, as is the rough childhood of Perry Smith. When Capote does appear, he is in the nameless character of “a reporter.” In Helter Skelter, Vincent Bugliosi made Manson and his followers larger than life and twice as mean. Capote portrays the killers here as exactly what they were: a couple of bored losers and petty criminals who, through a combination of arrogance, stupidity, and viciousness, entered the Big Time by killing four people.

It’s telling that when Hickcock and Smith were caught, the townspeople at first were incredulous. They had fully expected that this was some sort of professional hit organized by someone in town. They found it easier to believe that one of their neighbors and friends had planned and organized this than to believe that a couple of strangers had done it. Robbery was the goal (and perhaps the rape of young Nancy Clutter by Dick Hickcock—thwarted by Perry Smith who had no tolerance for sex crimes), but it was acknowledged that the murder might be necessary. “No witnesses,” the soon-to-be killers agreed over lunch. The killers knew nothing about Herb, Bonnie, Nancy, and Kenyon Clutter. They didn’t have to. The identities of the victims, and the lives they led, were never considered. As simple as that.

This is the dirty secret of this kind of evil. It’s all very ordinary. John Wayne Gacy killed over 30 people, and was a pillar of the community and a clown at kids’ parties. Jeffrey Dahmer was the normal guy who lived next door who kept body parts in his refrigerator in case he got hungry. Ted Bundy was an extremely intelligent man active in local politics when he wasn’t luring girls into his traps. Dick Hickcock and Perry Smith were just punks looking for a quick cash fix (the better to blow it in Vegas, most likely). That’s all they were. Yes, they had rough childhoods…especially Perry. But as one character in the book says, “So what? So did I. I may drink a little more, but I don’t kill people.”

We are conditioned to believe that evil froths at the mouth. It is recognizable in the over-the-top gesticulations and overheated rhetoric of Adolf Hitler, or in the wild eyes of Charles Manson, and it exists on 24-hour news channels. That’s all very comforting because we believe we can avoid evil as long as we can avoid those scary people. In Cold Blood reminds us that it also exists in settings as bucolic as the flat plains of Kansas, and it looks a lot like the guy standing next to you in the store, buying rope and joking with his friend.

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The Terror, by Dan Simmons

A horror novel disguised as historical fiction, or vice versa. In The Terror, Dan Simmons, a brilliant writer of many different genres, tells the true story of the HMS Erebus, commanded by Sir John Franklin, and the HMS Terror, commanded by Francis Crozier. The facts are all there: both ships were ordered to find the Northwest Passage through the Arctic. Both ships became icebound. The canned food supplies on both ships were tainted with food poisoning. Both ships were abandoned and all hands perished on a long, brutal walk through an Arctic nightmare. There is some evidence of cannibalism.

But the story of what actually happened to the expedition can never be fully known. The ships were found, as were some remains. But what went on will remain forever a mystery. What Simmons has done here is fill in the mystery with fantastical fiction.

Simmons sticks to the facts in the broadest terms, but drops in heavy dollops of Inuit mythology and some of the trappings of horror fiction including a huge white creature that hunts and kills the men of the ships like a cat playing with a box full of mice. At first it is thought to be a polar bear, but it soon becomes clear that this is a monster on a whole other level.

The only problem is that this is a bridge too far. The fictionalized story of the expedition was harrowing. The monster on the ice seemed like it came from a different book (a potentially good book, but a different book nonetheless). The book is extremely long (almost 800 pages of a large bound paperback) and crammed with details about life on the ships, the horrific effects of scurvy, a full chapter on delerium tremens, etc. It’s not unlike Moby Dick in its attention to detail, but that’s not necessarily a good thing. The last 100 pages or so of the book ties up the one remaining loose end from the previous 700 pages…the fate of Captain Crozier. It’s 100 pages of hallucinatory prose, mixed with poetry, blended with Inuit creationist mythology (at least the monster is explained…I was beginning to think it wouldn’t be), and standard expository prose. Nearly all of it could have been cut or condensed.

Simmons is a great writer and always worth reading. However, this book is nearly 300 pages too long. Edited down to a more than reasonable 450 pages, this book may have been classic Dan Simmons. As is, it’s a lot of work to put in for a relatively small payoff.