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But that night she was singing her Texas heart out on folk classics. The cover and the title of this book are misleading. This book ends with a cliffhanger I think the Summer of Love expanded the realm of possibilities for sexual fulfillment, which, for some, redefined the very nature of romantic relationships. Marcos and Elliot's story take place during their last year of HS, when they're both 18 years old. Berlin: Springer-Verlag.
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Your password has been changed. Change password. B ut if Woodstock began as just another business opportunity, it turned out to be far and away the largest. The fact that it had occasioned a traffic jam that closed the New York State Thruway, and the novelty of half a million people gathered for three days amid conditions of rank squalor in a mood of trouble-free celebration, made it newsworthy.
But what determined that Woodstock should attain mythical status was, more simply, the fact that it was filmed. T he truth is that by the time of Woodstock, the age of peace and love — such as it had been — was already at an end. A week before the festival, 3, miles away in Los Angeles, members of the so-called Charles Manson "family" went on a killing spree that resulted in the deaths of seven people, including the actress Sharon Tate. Manson was the serpent in the garden, the killings the most horrific manifestation of the shadow side of hedonistic libertarianism.
I did not go to Woodstock, but I did see the movie. It was not until some 20 years later that I actually made it to Woodstock, on a pilgrimage to find the spirit of the festival. The farmland where it was held had remained just that, but the town of Woodstock itself had long since surrendered to commodity brokers and lawyers, upmarket restaurants and antique shops. The last remaining vestige of "Woodstock Nation" was a clothes shop on the outskirts of town, flying a flag emblazoned with the words "Rainbow Family".
I nside was a man named Day, wearing a greying beard and a woollen hat, studded with peace badges and topped with a knitted mushroom stalk, which lent him the appearance of a stoned garden gnome. He had arrived in Woodstock two years after the festival, he told me, commanded by a man named Bob Reynolds to found the local chapter of the Rainbow Family.
It was Reynolds, Day said, who had torn down the fence at the festival, delivering it to "the people". Woodstock, Day told me, lighting a cigarette, had been "the birth of a new spirit", which had "manifested there collectively, in that the spirit moved us together on a site called Bethel, which means the House of God in Hebrew". He exhaled a plume of smoke and fixed me with a meaningful look. T hat spirit lived on, he said, in the Rainbow Family — hippies, tepee-dwellers, keepers of the flame — which had held its first gathering a year after Woodstock and which continued to that day.
The Family, he explained, worked by a principle that had gone "way beyond democracy. Serious counsels lasting eight or nine days, hassles, working it out by factions — one man left blocking the consensus, the rest of us working on him till he comes around…". A nd what did the Family vote on? The next international gathering, whether to go forward with a regional gathering. The legacy of Woodstock seemed to be a party planning service with a bureaucracy to rival the Inland Revenue.
But they haven't been able to get rid of us. I tried to find Day again this week, but there was no sign of him in Woodstock. The Rainbow Family, however, now have a presence on the web, where it is described as "the largest non-organisation of non-members in the world". The bureaucracy is apparently intact, and it continues to organise "world gatherings", usually on US Forest Service Land.
The Forest Service has described it as a group that "purposely positions itself on the brink of anarchy", its gatherings attracting "dangerous and idle masses that overwhelm county and state services, disregard local communities, and destroy the natural resources the group claims to worship".
A gathering last year in a national park in Wyoming culminated in a riot, with participants throwing sticks and rocks at police, and police responding with pepper balls and rubber bullets.