Taking Woodstock
Sep. 13th, 2009 11:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pasitheaI kept Stacey up too late Friday night to get her out of bed in the morning to go oyster hunting Saturday morning. So instead, we went to see a matinee showing of Taking Woodstock It was playing in Palo Alto and we timed it such that after the show was over, it'd be just a short jaunt up to the woods to do the hiking we'd planned to do that morning.
The film has gotten mixed reviews, but most of the negative reviews have come from either A) People who were throwing a tantrum about the main character being gay or B) People who were throwing a fit because it was a movie about Woodstock that had none of the nostalgic music from Woodstock that they desired.
On the topic of the first part. DEAL WITH IT! Look. I know a bunch of our current right-whingers are people who like to blither on about how the Boomers were the GREATEST GENERATION EVAH and they want to take pride in an event that they were no part of and claim the awesomeness of it as their own as a way they can look down on the rest of us... But here's the thing... The movie was based on the AUTOBIOGRAPHY of Elliot Tiber. He is gay. He wrote it himself. The guy that gave Woodstock a venue after right-whinge asshats ran them out of two other venues was a GAY JEW. Suck it up!
As for the music... I think I understand the artistic choice to use stuff that wasn't at Woodstock. The event was about the music, yeah, but it was about the music of the moment, not nostalgia. It was also about love and peace and all that, not about RIAA profit margins. We all know what Janis Joplin, Jimmy Hendrix, and the Who sound like. Does everything need to be nostalgia and remix?
Besides, the movie was presented as being about the town and the kid who was managing the venue. He wasn't quite part of 'it' and the townspeople certainly weren't. Finally... How could a 2hr film possibly even hope to pay its due to three days of nonstop music? It's not feasible. You could never present the true sound of Woodstock in that amount of time.
Personally, I'm lucky enough to have a pile of reel-to-reel tapes my dad had and one of them happens to be a few hours of stuff that was recorded live at Woodstock (patched off the sound system, not open mic) and even the ~6hrs of sound I've got really doesn't even start to cover what things must have been like.
So... Now that I've addressed the critics, let me address the film: I really thoroughly enjoyed it. I thought it was really neat to see a film about Woodstock that wasn't focused on nostalgia and pop culture but instead was showing you the behind-the-scenes. All the people who worked to make it happen and the amount of effort and organization required to pull it off. The sheer scale of the thing is boggling. Burning Man caps at 50,000... That's about 1/10th the estimated 500,000 that were at Woodstock. It must have been totally overwhelming. The logistics of trying to pull off an event of that magnitude are staggering.
Speaking of Burning Man, I think that was part of what interested me most about Taking Woodstock. A lot of the people at Woodstock were proto-Burners. There was much commonality but there were also differences. It was really interesting to see what 40 years of event planning has done. Woodstock was not a Zero-Impact event. The people going to the thing made quite a mess by most counts and left the event sponsors doing a lot of the cleanup. Plus, it was different from Burn in that it was a show. At Burning Man, there are no spectators. You are part of it. I think this happened at Woodstock too, but not as consciously or intentionally as Burning Man. It's a subtle change in philosophy but it's important. Perhaps it was just my timing on seeing the film and my interests and some of my current project goals but I found the film really enjoyable and inspiring.
On only the thinnest tangent of connection, I started teaching myself to play the Beatles song "All you need is love" I'm learning the second-guitar chord parts first because chords are a lot more challenging for me than the first guitar melody. It's the first time I've tried playing guitar since I gashed my thumb with a meat cleaver a month ago and I played my acoustic guitar which as a wider neck than the electric. Happily, I was able to play for about half an hour before it started getting a little achey and I decided I'd best give it a rest. It's going to take a while before my thumb is really back up to full strength (I'm going to be taking it easy for the next two months just to be sure I don't re-injure it) but the outlook so far is promising.
Heh. Stacey isn't a big fan of the Beatles but likes a few of their songs. She skeptically asked if my book had "Paperback Writer" in it and was surprised that it did.... Actually, this book contains EVERY Beatles song (though some of them are in easier keys than they'd normally have been played) Somehow, this ended up in us looking the book up online and... Holy crap, I got a steal! I bought the book on our store credit at the used bookstore for what would have been $12 (but was effectively free due to trade-ins) The book is Beatles Complete Easy Guitar by Hal Leonard publishing. On Amazon stores, the book sells for between $65 and $210 O_O Wow. Glad I got it when I did. Needless to say, the book is out of print and is unlikely to ever be printed again. F***ing greedy music labels grubbing for every penny. *sigh* The current implementation of copyright law makes me so very sad. At the end of Taking Woodstock, Mike mentions that what happens next is probably that everyone sues everyone else as they chase the money. I don't know if this was an anachronism put in by Elliot or prophetic, but it is sad. Greed is so ruinous.
The film has gotten mixed reviews, but most of the negative reviews have come from either A) People who were throwing a tantrum about the main character being gay or B) People who were throwing a fit because it was a movie about Woodstock that had none of the nostalgic music from Woodstock that they desired.
On the topic of the first part. DEAL WITH IT! Look. I know a bunch of our current right-whingers are people who like to blither on about how the Boomers were the GREATEST GENERATION EVAH and they want to take pride in an event that they were no part of and claim the awesomeness of it as their own as a way they can look down on the rest of us... But here's the thing... The movie was based on the AUTOBIOGRAPHY of Elliot Tiber. He is gay. He wrote it himself. The guy that gave Woodstock a venue after right-whinge asshats ran them out of two other venues was a GAY JEW. Suck it up!
As for the music... I think I understand the artistic choice to use stuff that wasn't at Woodstock. The event was about the music, yeah, but it was about the music of the moment, not nostalgia. It was also about love and peace and all that, not about RIAA profit margins. We all know what Janis Joplin, Jimmy Hendrix, and the Who sound like. Does everything need to be nostalgia and remix?
Besides, the movie was presented as being about the town and the kid who was managing the venue. He wasn't quite part of 'it' and the townspeople certainly weren't. Finally... How could a 2hr film possibly even hope to pay its due to three days of nonstop music? It's not feasible. You could never present the true sound of Woodstock in that amount of time.
Personally, I'm lucky enough to have a pile of reel-to-reel tapes my dad had and one of them happens to be a few hours of stuff that was recorded live at Woodstock (patched off the sound system, not open mic) and even the ~6hrs of sound I've got really doesn't even start to cover what things must have been like.
So... Now that I've addressed the critics, let me address the film: I really thoroughly enjoyed it. I thought it was really neat to see a film about Woodstock that wasn't focused on nostalgia and pop culture but instead was showing you the behind-the-scenes. All the people who worked to make it happen and the amount of effort and organization required to pull it off. The sheer scale of the thing is boggling. Burning Man caps at 50,000... That's about 1/10th the estimated 500,000 that were at Woodstock. It must have been totally overwhelming. The logistics of trying to pull off an event of that magnitude are staggering.
Speaking of Burning Man, I think that was part of what interested me most about Taking Woodstock. A lot of the people at Woodstock were proto-Burners. There was much commonality but there were also differences. It was really interesting to see what 40 years of event planning has done. Woodstock was not a Zero-Impact event. The people going to the thing made quite a mess by most counts and left the event sponsors doing a lot of the cleanup. Plus, it was different from Burn in that it was a show. At Burning Man, there are no spectators. You are part of it. I think this happened at Woodstock too, but not as consciously or intentionally as Burning Man. It's a subtle change in philosophy but it's important. Perhaps it was just my timing on seeing the film and my interests and some of my current project goals but I found the film really enjoyable and inspiring.
On only the thinnest tangent of connection, I started teaching myself to play the Beatles song "All you need is love" I'm learning the second-guitar chord parts first because chords are a lot more challenging for me than the first guitar melody. It's the first time I've tried playing guitar since I gashed my thumb with a meat cleaver a month ago and I played my acoustic guitar which as a wider neck than the electric. Happily, I was able to play for about half an hour before it started getting a little achey and I decided I'd best give it a rest. It's going to take a while before my thumb is really back up to full strength (I'm going to be taking it easy for the next two months just to be sure I don't re-injure it) but the outlook so far is promising.
Heh. Stacey isn't a big fan of the Beatles but likes a few of their songs. She skeptically asked if my book had "Paperback Writer" in it and was surprised that it did.... Actually, this book contains EVERY Beatles song (though some of them are in easier keys than they'd normally have been played) Somehow, this ended up in us looking the book up online and... Holy crap, I got a steal! I bought the book on our store credit at the used bookstore for what would have been $12 (but was effectively free due to trade-ins) The book is Beatles Complete Easy Guitar by Hal Leonard publishing. On Amazon stores, the book sells for between $65 and $210 O_O Wow. Glad I got it when I did. Needless to say, the book is out of print and is unlikely to ever be printed again. F***ing greedy music labels grubbing for every penny. *sigh* The current implementation of copyright law makes me so very sad. At the end of Taking Woodstock, Mike mentions that what happens next is probably that everyone sues everyone else as they chase the money. I don't know if this was an anachronism put in by Elliot or prophetic, but it is sad. Greed is so ruinous.
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(no subject)
Date: 2009-09-14 07:23 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-09-14 07:30 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-09-14 07:37 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-09-14 05:01 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-09-14 05:36 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-09-14 05:42 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-09-14 07:46 am (UTC)Elliot heads towards Woodstock, and when he reaches the field, he meets two hippies in a VW van who give him a tab of LSD. After watching the colorful patterns inside the van get all psychedelic for x hours, he steps out after dark and sees the crowds of people on the hill, and in the distance, the stage, which he sees as a concentration of millions of points of light.
It looked like a galaxy to me. And it occurred to me, if Woodstock was a galaxy, Elliott only made it about as far in as the solar system. Unlike Michael Wadleigh's documentary, this movie is earthbound, in a sense.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-09-14 03:31 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-09-14 07:51 am (UTC)Though lately the big uber beatles being poured in our ears by the music industry has made me a little jaded. All the radio stations are trying to push the new remastering, it just seems they're animating their dessicated corpses up for another quick buck.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-09-14 09:56 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-09-14 10:00 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-09-14 10:03 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-09-14 11:06 pm (UTC)The thing KT mentioned about him not actually making it to Woodstock sounds interesting. I mean, that sounds more believable - rather than someone making it to the big gigantic critical event, someone who kinda sorta is around for it without being in the middle of it. That sounds pretty cool.
I really like the Beatles. I rate them as more influential and talented than Pink Floyd, Nirvana, or the Ramones, if that gives you an idea of where I stand on 'em. You know the story behind Paperback Writer, right? It was this dare from George, to Paul, to write a song about something other than girls.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-09-14 11:27 pm (UTC)And yeah. I know you like the Beatles quite a bit. When I saw the book one of my first thoughts was, "Hey! I could teach myself to play Beatles songs and then when Jon was over, play em for him because I bet he'd really love that!"
I like many but not all of their songs. In particular, I like the peacenik ones more than the ones about girls. This book contains probably around 200 songs. it's pretty impressive... And, like I said, the kind of book you just can't buy today because there's too much greed. :/
(no subject)
Date: 2009-09-15 05:31 pm (UTC)My favorite album pretty much is "Let it Be" or "Revolver." Some Paul songs are stronger than others, but most of his ZOMG G1RLZ songs just don't do it for me - and I'm much more of a George fan anyway.