Word: woodstocks
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What is your favorite decade of fashion? -Kim Ho, DENVERThe '60s. I don't think we've ever seen in any decade as much of a transition in how people dress. From the Kennedy years-very polished, very sophisticated-we go to Woodstock and hippiedom and Carnaby Street and Twiggy and the mini. Quite a lot of drama happened...
...there, it started raining. I wasn't surprised. The last time I was there it also rained quite a bit. That was in August 1969, when I was one of the 400,000 or so people who converged on the place to attend something called the Woodstock festival. I had headed there that time by instinct, like a salmon swimming upstream to spawn, because I was 17 years old and anything involving guitars or hippies demanded my immediate attention. The opposition of my parents, the discouraging weather forecast and traffic so heavy it closed the New York State Thruway meant...
...something none of us foresaw: not just a concert but a spontaneous utopian community. Now I was back, 39 years later--cue the wistful music--to visit the Museum at Bethel Woods, which is perched on the edge of the festival site and dedicated to telling the story of Woodstock and of the 1960s generally. A museum about Woodstock was probably inevitable. Those three days of peace, love and mud have become the baby boomers' version of the Trojan War, their collective foundation myth. It was only a matter of time before the whole thing was commemorated with interactive displays...
...billion to Time Warner. At 78, he's a venture capitalist who wears an American-flag pin on his lapel--which makes him an unlikely guy to devote himself to the legacy of a place that had a freak-out tent. But he does have a daughter who attended Woodstock (against his wishes). And another who missed out but persuaded him much later to buy the land where it all happened...
...entertaining and briskly informative, filled with flat-screen TVs showing period footage and glass cases that hold things like old Jefferson Airplane album covers. I enjoyed it well enough. But I was never able to shake the feeling that the place that really preserves the spirit of Woodstock is that big open field outside. Woodstock was the last great event of the 19th century, a delayed outburst of Romantic-era communalism and nature worship. It was built on sentiments that aren't conveyed very well by institutional means. So if you visit the museum, which I recommend, here's what...