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WOODSTOCK, AND ALL THAT

Perhaps you haven't heard, but a big outdoor music concert took place in upstate New York 40 years ago. Ah, Woodstock: what was meant to signal the coming of a revolution was in fact the main event. How sad and tidy and sweet. Somehow I managed to spend the anniversary driving up the Hudson listening to the Woodstock Channel on Sirius XM radio in an air-conditioned car. It all seemed rather appropriate. (The revolution is available by satellite, even if the music may not have been so good.)

I'm inclined towards ambivalence whenever the airwaves and papers get crusty with nostalgia. There is something so tiresome about baby boomers waxing on about their own unwashed importance, squeezing out every last penny from marketing their memories. Yet it's hard not to feel moved by all of the manipulatively wistful slideshows and soundtracks. "A phenomenon of innocence" the New York Times described it at the time. It certainly was different: "That the festival survived was a miracle. That there was not a single fight struck the outnumbered police as more remarkable," observed a stupefied Economist in 1969.

Perhaps it is always easiest to feel nostalgic for what we have never experienced--this lends the era or collective memory a nebulous potency, so that it may fill nearly any void of yearning. Given the punishing element of nostalgia, the way it is like a sore we poke at or a scab we pick--the better to feel invigorated by our pain--it can be easier to lament the times we weren't around to enjoy, rather than confront the kind of lives we may have otherwise lived. (Somehow the odds are against my having been among the acid-dropping, fluffernutter noshing, mud-sliding hordes, but it's charming to imagine otherwise.) 

Amid all this hoopla, there was something authentically sad buried in Gail Collins's reverie about her experience at Woodstock in the New York Times over the weekend:

Current younger generation, I know you would be equally good-natured if you found yourself stranded in the middle of nowhere, cut off from the world with 400,000 other people and a bunch of bands. But it will never happen because although you will have many, many fine adventures of your own, you will never be cut off.

My sister-in-law Laura just got back from the Lollapalooza concert in Chicago, which was the exact opposite of Woodstock in the sense that it was an extremely pleasant way for a middle-aged person to spend a weekend.

The thing that struck her most — besides the misting tents, the lobster corndogs and the truffled popcorn — was that “at any point you could look around and 50 percent of the people were texting or reading a text. Which is fine for keeping in touch, but I wonder how truly involved you can get with the music.”

Naturally it is a device of nostalgia to trick us into believing that things like lobster corndogs and truffled popcorn are anything other than progress. And there is a case to be made that chronicling an experience--even in only 140 Twitter-friendly characters--tends to sharpen our tools of observation. Yet our relentless toggle between what we are living and what we are communicating is now seemingly inescapable, making the self-contained universe of the Woodstock festival a current impossibility, for better or worse. This is something else to rue, perhaps, while eating fancy popcorn and listing to the crisp sound of satellite radio.

~ EMILY BOBROW

Picture credit: Todd Huffman (via Flickr)