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the memorialization of woodstock is a curious thing, dont you think?
what's up with that?
if youre thinking about the history of outdoor pa systems, though, woodstock is a real watershed moment. it changed how outdoor sound was projected, and generated an interesting process of rethinking the technologies.
but as a festival? seriously, its more the film and the joni mitchell song...so it became this fetish object because watching the film you could "be there" again and again, and "be there" in a way that stripped out much of the overall political context and so reduces it to just another music festival even as it transforms the idea of it into some world-historical Watershed. and that is a kind of indicator of how the history of the vietnam period's been reprocessed as a consumer change: the emergence of a new and pretty self-involved demographic that imagined one could consume one's way into an alternate political world.
of course, the wider political context wasn't like that, but it seems folk forget about that mostly, like there's been some mist of amnesia spraying over us all for a very long time.
fact is that of you see the last 40 years or so as a protracted extension of the political conflicts put into play during the vietnam period, it's hard not to see that the right won. they they fucked it up. but think about how central stuff like "the vietnam syndrome" was for the development of contemporary conservatism into the soporific that accompanied neoliberalism.
in a general way, you could see the end of bushworld as the end of that period, the one dominated by the political configuration put into motion through and in reaction to the vietnam period.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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