Word: altamonte
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...Columbine should have been the new generation's Altamont: cautionary notice that there's real death lurking in the id, real evil that can be conjured up out of the American shopping malls and God knows what cocktails of brainlessness and lovelessness and dank anger and adolescence marinated in hate. In the last couple of weeks, high school students in Colorado, California and Kansas have turned in other teenagers who may have been planning school massacres to celebrate the second anniversary of Columbine in April...
...that mythological decade of cultural madness-imploded Dec. 6, 1969 at the Altamont Speedway. There, the promise of Woodstock and the Age of Aquarius mutated into a frenzied paroxysm of violence, leaving 850 injured and four dead. From Nov. 3 through Nov. 9, the Brattle Theater will be showing a newly restored and re-edited version of Gimme Shelter-the completely enthralling and horrifying documentary that captured the day's ferocious chaos...
...things went terribly wrong. We can see hints of the impending disaster in some of the film's pre-Altamont footage: raging groupies attack Mick Jagger; backstage, suits furiously try to exploit the potential of the upcoming San Francisco concert at any expense (in one particularly chilling moment, one lawyer makes the ominous prediction, "It'll be like lemmings...
...mindless anarchy have rushed into the void cleared by the vague promise of freedom. The audiences seen here are the dark doppelgangers of Woodstock. Every face looks programmed and every movement emotionless, like a Stepford Wives vision of the hippiedom. Along with the Charles Manson bloodbath four months earlier, Altamont revealed the antipode of Woodstock's blissed-out flower children-the negative space on the other side of the spaces of freedom that the '60s opened...
Gimme Shelter has a lot to offer the viewer: in addition to the incredible footage of Altamont and the infamous-almost unbearably brutal-stabbing caught on film, there's great concert footage from the tour: the Stones are at their raw and gritty peak and Mick Jagger gives a clinic in stage dominance. There's even prophetic footage of Tina Turner singing a duet with Ike Turner, their voices spasmodically oscillating between pure sexuality and brutal violence. We see great backstage footage and intimate shots of the Stones in the studio recording Sticky Fingers. We see the machinations...