Jeremy Bernstein (photo by Dion Ogust)

The Woodstock Film Festival has become an annual burst of new energy to the town, perfectly timed — after the summer bustle settles and winter threatens. For the last twelve years, sometime in October, Woodstock becomes extra rich with talent. Filmmakers, directors, actors and musicians come with creativity at the forefront of their minds. Film buffs and fans wander the village in search of new and interesting things to take in. As a local, I can say that the film festival is one of the more global events to happen here.

This year, the not-so-new kid in town, Paul Green (School Of Rock founder) is the Musical Director of the festival and he has generously flanked the weekend with a couple of local gems, making this year’s festival uniquely Woodstock-centric. The opening concert on Thursday night is our own songstress Simi Stone. And to send festival-goers home with Woodstock fresh in their minds — Jeremy Bernstein & Friends will play the Bearsville Theater at 9 p.m. Sunday, October 14. If you want a taste of who we really are in Woodstock, I highly suggest you put these shows onto your agenda.

Jeremy Bernstein is about as Catskills as you can get. His songs know just where to land in these the hills, they were born here with him, and they know all the shortcuts — connecting one valley to the next, traveling the streams down to the Hudson River.

People come here from all over the world — to ski the slopes, swim in the mountain streams, take in the fall foliage — they come for the beauty of the Catskills. But Woodstock really is an amalgamation of all that makes a renaissance — a fascinating blend of people who live and create here. Enter Jeremy Bernstein, born in 1973, the same year his parents moved to Woodstock.

He spent his formative years in a basket in his mother Alice’s classroom, who, alongside her then husband Ian Bernstein, founded the Children’s Center (one of the first alternative schools in the area), in their home. Under Alice and Ian’s Tutelage, the school later took roots on Neher Street and became a mainstay — giving many of us kids, who grew up in the 70’s and 80’s, opportunities to be ourselves and flourish in an educational environment. After Ian’s retirement, the school continued (and continues) as The Woodstock Day School.

Though he began to write songs in his early teens, Jeremy went from Onteora High School, to SUNY Purchase to study photography, and from there to University of New Mexico as a painting major; he ended up at SUNY New Paltz with metalsmithing and jewelry making. His true passion eventually revealed itself to be making music. Which he does rather well…

“Growing up around all of the music and the art in the 70’s has really shaped who I am….” The Band, Dylan, The Beatles, sound-tracked his early years — add a little Parliament Funkadelic come high school, and now you can hear a some of all of that and much more in Jeremy’s brand of Funky Mountain Music. There is richness in his melodies, some pain, plenty of optimism in his voice and a whole lot of love. His music is honest and from the heart.

“I love it here in Woodstock. I’ve traveled all over the world and there is nothing quite like it. The community, the land, the mountains, and the fresh water…we are so close to New York City and yet so far away. We have access to everything we need. The wealth of talent and incredible people here is second to none. With that said you have to get out of here. Make your art, and get it to other places.”

And he does. For the last few summers, Jeremy has snuck away and spent a little time in Europe, playing his songs in Paris, London and Lyon…

“A few years ago my first solo record, Love Eat Sleep, was picked up by Collette [a well known trendsetting shop] in Paris. We sold out several times which resulted in a few great shows.”

He’s been lucky enough to have spent his childhood listening to music and then growing up to share the stage, and recording studio with those same artists who influenced him. A few years after coming back to Woodstock in 1994, he connected with Michael Clip Payne (Of Parliament Funkadelic) who culled several local artists to form a band called Drugs. Before long, Jeremy found himself touring Europe opening for PFunk, playing in 400 year old castles in Germany and sharing the stage with legends like George Clinton and Fred Wesley.

(Photo by Alan Carey)

Film lovers and indie industry people swarmed into town for the 2012 Woodstock Film Festival, which ran from October 10 to 14. Visitors and residents attended almost 130 events, including film screenings, concerts, panels, parties, and the wind-up award ceremonies, which honored director Jonathan Demme and director/actor/writer Tim Blake Nelson, along with winners of this year’s competitions.

Recipient of the juried Maverick Award for best feature narrative was California Solo, directed by Marshall Lewy, about a failed rock musician facing his demons. The Audience Choice award for this category, chosen by exit votes, was Any Day Now, director Travis Fine’s story about a gay couple trying to adopt an abused 14-year-old with Down syndrome.

For best documentary, Maverick Award jurors, all industry professionals, chose Treva Wurmfeld’s Shepard & Dark, about playwright Sam Shepard and his long-time best friend Johnny Dark. Audiences picked Once in a Lullaby: The PS 22 Chorus Documentary by Jonathan Kalafer.

Maverick Award honorable mentions went to Exit Elena and First Winter (feature narratives) and Virgin Tales (documentary).

Other juried awards were given to Junkyard for best animation, Curfew for best short narrative, Past Due for best student short film, El Ultimo Hielero (The Last Ice Merchant) for best short documentary, Nor’Easter for best cinematography.

Although the festival centered in Woodstock, film showings and other events were held at venues in Rhinebeck, Kingston, Rosendale, and Saugerties. Each screening was preceded by a 90-second trailer, a takeoff on the theme of the Olympic torch. Winners of previous festival awards carry their trophies, on the run, through each of the participating towns, observed by audience members and a little girl, who meets actress Melissa Leo at the end. They walk into Woodstock’s Upstate Films theater, representing the aspiring filmmaker’s induction into the world of film.

The trailer was meant to showcase the different towns while exemplifying the spirit of the event, said festival executive director and co-founder Meira Blaustein. She observed, “The festival forms an intimate and nurturing environment conducive to networking, career opportunities, and especially a good time.”

Over 225 volunteers in snappy yellow festival t-shirts helped with ticket-taking and other tasks, and organizers estimated that more than 150 actors and filmmakers attended.

Woodstock restaurants were busy all weekend, and some shops got a boost in sales. “There was a lot of shopping,” said David Saxman of The White Gryphon boutique. “These sorts of events are always very positive for merchants.”

Film-goers were apparently too distracted to buy books, said Nan Tepper at The Golden Notebook, despite the antique film cameras in the window, but she called the festival “totally fun. We’re happy to have it here.”

Gabriel Butterfield

Paul Butterfield used to be a household name in Woodstock. You’d see him out at nights in the bars, at local clubs and restaurants. He played with everyone. His band, as tight as any around town, was always in demand…as was his own demon harp playing and tried and true blues chops. It’s hard to think he moved away 30-some years ago and passed away 25 years ago last spring.

This Friday night, Butterfield’s talented son Gabe will be playing the Bearsville Theater in a tribute and retrospective concert for the great bandleader and seminal rock and roll figure alongside a band put together by longstanding Conan O’Brien sidekick Jimmy Vivino, and including a host of top local players…many of whom shared the stage with Gabriel’s father, back when.

The idea is to raise funds for a full-length documentary film that Butterfield’s been putting together about his father, The Life and Times of Paul Butterfield, that he’s hoping will ensure the man who plugged electric blues into the rock and roll world, and Bob Dylan to The Band, a place in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

“This would be our second nomination,” Gabe Buterfield says.

Who was Paul Butterfield, only 44 when he passed away of peritonitis in a North Hollywood hospital in May, 1987?

Like many rock and roll legends from Woodstock’s 1960s/1970s heydays, there’s a host of stories.

Michael Lang recalls going to see him one Thanksgiving at Benedictine Hospital, where he was for some illness.

“I walked these long empty hallways until I found him all alone in this one room. It was like one of those scenes from The Godfather,” he said. “But as always, he was good to see. He had real talent.”

Lynne Nasoe, once married to Butterfield Blues Band drummer Phil Wilson, still speaks in awe about how much fun, and how bright, the boss was back when everyone kept moving from coast to coast with recording and concert gigs, kept on time by Paul.

Happy Traum spoke about a man who, while not as big in size as many of his fellow rock and rollers or blues men in town, could appear gruff and intimidating at first. But then was all charm and chumminess once you got to know him.

That side of his father, Gabe Butterfield now says, was part and parcel with his having been a bandleader having to keep a whole host of temperamental players in line for years. And having come up in the harshness of the Chicago blues scene in the 1960s.

Paul Butterfield, born in the same Hyde Park neighborhood where our President now keeps his private home, was the son of an Irish immigrant turned lawyer who attended private school and studied classical flute until he got bitten by the blues harmonica…and started hanging out at South Side clubs with his buddy, guitarist Elvin Bishop. Somehow, in their early 20s, the two hired away Muddy Waters’ rhythm section…and secured a gig as the house band at a folk club on Chicago’s North Side, where they brought in a second, younger guitarist…Mike Bloomfield. By summer 1965 they were headlining at the Newport Folk Festival as a blues act…and infamously went onstage (sans Butterfield) to back folkie Bob Dylan for his first attempt at electrified rock music.

Butterfield’s first albums, on Electra Records, were critical hits — and trendsetters — in their day. His bands spawned superstars, splintered regularly, and he kept experimenting…adding horn sections, moving back to Woodstock to become his manager Albert Grossman’s first big act on Bearsville Records. Eventually, he took to touring with The Band’s Rick Danko after his main gig itself splintered. He was known as one of the top guest artists to have on any truly cool album.

“I was born in Chicago and only four when he played at Woodstock,” Butterfield’s eldest son, Gabriel, says in preparation for this Friday’s concert. “I spent years on the road, going everywhere, with my father and brother Lee…I was 21 when he passed and we had just spent several months with him. Then we dispersed and he came home from a show, started making himself a sandwich as he liked to do late at night, when everything just started to shut down.”

Julio De Diego, Landscape, c. 1940, Oil on board

Over the course of an epic life Julio De Diego, one of the more flamboyant Woodstock characters of any era, supported himself as a costume, scenery and textile designer, a jewelry, sculpture and furniture maker, performed on stage, in film, circus and ballet, illustrated bodies, books, and magazines; was a printmaker, draftsman, romantic legend, and throughout it all, a painter of remarkable ambition and accomplishment. A rare, authoritative retrospective of his work at the Fletcher Gallery opens at 5 p.m. Friday, December 7 (in conjunction with Woodstock’s Open House) and runs through January.

Born in Madrid in 1900, Julio left home at age 15 when his father destroyed every drawing in the house. The boy found work apprenticing backstage at the Madrid Opera as a set muralist — distinctions between “art” and “craft” blurring forever. His first show at a gambling casino resulted in the sale of a painting at 17 — an early success which failed to diminish his father’s disapproval. Augmenting his income as a dancer (he shared the stage momentarily with Nijinksy in Petrouchka) Julio soon spent a few detested years in the Spanish army, including active service in North Africa. Cutting off all contact with his family, Julio fled to Paris in ‘22 where Surrealism, in particular, cast its spell. Further European wanderings included studies in Rome where Julio concluded a youth, he later recalled, wherein “mysticism and sensuality became indistinguishable.” In 1924, the New World beckoned and undaunted by the Great Depression, Julio landed in America, eventually finding his way to Chicago where, in 1935, he finally earned himself a one-man show at what then was, arguably, the most important fine art showcase in American, the Art Institute of Chicago. One of the gems of the retrospective is “the audition” piece De Diego submitted winning him this breakthrough. “The Annunciation” is an archetypally traditional painting (complete with Renaissance miniature landscape in the background) featuring Mary and the Angel, both of whose elongated hands are rendered with remarkable facility — hands, ever the foremost test of draftsmanship. It is also, almost certainly a prototype for one of several commissions he received at St. Gregory’s in Chicago.

Painting expeditions to Mexico and excitement surrounding the work of Carlos Merida, among others, garnered further breakthroughs. Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp and Max Ernst soon took an interest in Julio in New York in the 1940s. Several from the large number of futuristic paintings of that period are represented at The Fletcher Gallery, work originally shown at The Whitney and The Met and high-end Manhattan galleries. In 1947, a mature De Diego exhibited with the Surrealists in Paris and London.

Visiting Woodstock first at 50 in 1950, Julio moved here permanently in ‘61, having become an indispensable member of Woodstock’s “last wave,” prior to the town’s identity shifting from paint brush to guitar. Perhaps even more memorably than his three amigos — Fletcher Martin, Eduardo Chavez, and Herman Cherry — the Spaniard set this bucolic art colony ablaze with a sensual energy he once described as, “the enemy of idleness.”

I remember him appearing in the entrance of the Joyous Lake in a black cape, long hair and beard, wild sombrero, a gold hoop at his ear, those large, full-lidded eyes scanning the room, a giant ring or two clasped to his huge hands. No other artist of his day fit so effortlessly into an era seeking to embrace The Gypsy. Rather than “join in” to a Dionysion age, indeed, Julio seemed — as some peripherally phantom captain — to lead it. All except for one major difference…industry!

Susan Lipkins (photo by Dion Ogust)

Woodstock bow-maker Susan Lipkins has won a gold medal in the Violin Society of America’s 2012 international violin and bow competition. She received the award for one of her bass bows and is the first woman ever to win a gold medal in the prestigious contest.

Lipkins and her husband, David Wiebe, who makes stringed instruments in their workshop on Glasco Turnpike, are on the board of trustees of the Maverick Concerts, and they both play bass in the Esopus Chamber Orchestra.

“I made the bow specifically for this competition,” says Lipkins, who has entered the biennial contest five times before. “When you make a competition bow, you use the best material that you collect for this purpose — the most dense black ebony, the most beautiful pernambuco stick, mother-of-pearl that’s the most reflective and colorful. It’s more warm-looking and appealing to mount in gold instead of silver. And it has to be clean and perfect.”

This year, she had received a commission from Jeff Turner, principal bass player of the Pittsburgh Symphony. “He wanted a gold-mounted bass bow, and he wanted to see it win a gold medal,” says Lipkins. “He paid in advance. I had to make what he wanted — it had to be a player’s bow — but it worked out in the end.”

Her bows are always tailored to the specific needs of the customer. In this case, Turner wanted the frog, the ebony piece that moves to loosen or tighten the hair, “lower than usual, so the response is more immediate,” she explains. “He also wanted the bow on lighter side, weight-wise. That was tough because gold weighs more than silver.”

Before making the bow for this year’s competition, Lipkins showed her last four creations to one of her mentors, New York City bow-maker Yung Chin. “He’s judged competitions a number of times. Every time I would show him a bow, I went in proud and left feeling low. But each time, he was glad to see, ‘Okay, she cleaned that up, here’s another suggestion.’ I’m always trying to learn how to make bows better.”

Asked why there are so few women making bows, she muses, “In the history of bow-making, women weren’t working in the shop — they were doing finishing work, rehairing and putting the grip on. It does take a bit of hand strength and fortitude to rough out and bend the stick. Sometimes my hands look kind of rough — maybe it wasn’t a feminine thing to do 100 years ago. I don’t really know why, but there are only a few women making bows here, a handful in France, and a handful in Brazil.”

Since receiving the award in mid-November, Lipkins has received seven inquiries from prospective buyers, and three have made it onto her waiting list, which now numbers somewhere between 40 and 50. Given that she makes about 10 bows a year, those new customers are going to have a pretty long wait.

Sam Truitt, Tony Fletcher, James Lasdun

Hidden meanings

Sam Truitt’s DICK may be one of the most obfuscated and impenetrable works to have come along in some time. And yet it’s full of rewards…and an opening (and opener) to great worlds of understanding, both personal and political. A novel of sorts, it started “publishing” in short one and a half minute long segments of 450 words apiece on YouTube, Twitter and Facebook November 22, one year from its anticipated conclusion — and full publication — on the 50th anniversary of JFK’s assassination next autumn. But described by Truitt as being in the genre of Metanoia — a term that refers to the idea of repentance (or at least a change of mind) in theology, a “correction” in rhetoric, or a psychological process that uses psychotic breakdown to allow for internal rebuilding and healing — “Dick” somehow weaves a deep effect with seeming too affected. In fact, it somehow imparts a sense, in the final rounds, of being as perfect to our age as Truitt’s slice-of-moment poetics, for which he is best known, or the various seemingly-obscure works by Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot and James Joyce were to the beginnings of the last century.

“It’s ‘about’ the JFK assassination — or, as it is written, ‘Made of maps, mirrors and labyrinths — though grounded in proprietary knowledge — DICK is a book that explodes the Kennedy assassination and the machinations around that event. References to the JFK murder are in fact quite oblique: in fact, the whole work is, including most obdurately the integral deployment of Morse Code as text.’”

Truitt works in layers. Taken as transmitted what comes across is a robotic British female voice reading bits of text interspersed with long renderings of “dash dot dot dash dash” Morse Code, simultaneous to a fast-paced flickering of partial images and appearing/disappearing notes. One gets a sense of things happening, of a narrative being unveiled somewhat reluctantly, and huge amounts of work at play. The very cross-pollination of media is impressive…and about the only welcoming element of the whole enterprise, at least until one starts returning to it daily and getting a sense of something unfolding.

Having been cheat-slipped a copy of the text as a whole, before Truitt came up with the transmission idea for its initial “publication,” DICK — as a whole document — is similarly mysterious in its constant use of Morse Code and Shakespearean stage directions amid an apparent stream of consciousness babble of statements, descriptions, and epiphanies. Yet it also imparts a building sense of outrage and dangerousness. Something evil is being imparted, it appears, that creates a sense of outrage in the writer.

Partly that comes from the sense of background Truitt allows to precede his transmissions.

“The story behind DICK lies in my family’s association with Kennedy’s assassination,” he writes. “My mother, the visual artist Anne Truitt, was a close friend of Mary Pinchot Meyer, the ex-wife of Cord Meyer, who helped found the World Federalist Movement and was subsequently a CIA official. Mary Meyer had an on-going affair with President Kennedy up to his death, about which she wrote in a diary. On our family leaving Washington for Tokyo in 1963 (my father, a journalist, had been appointed bureau chief of Newsweek in Japan), Mary Meyer told my mother that if anything happened to her she should find and safeguard the diary. Mary Meyer was assassinated in Washington in October 1964, and on this news my mother contacted James Angleton, the CIA’s head of Counter Intelligence and a family friend, to secure the diary. He did so and having read the diary kept it in his safe at CIA. Subsequently the diary was given to my mother and to Mary Meyer’s sister, Antoinette Pinchot Bradlee, the wife of Ben Bradlee of the Washington Post. They read and then burned it.”

Unstated in the annotations Truitt provides are such elements as his father’s eventual release from Newsweek and eventual suicide, the fact that his sister’s godparents were Angleton and Meyer (and his godfather, Cord Meyer), or his toddler memories of having had his first school experience alongside the Kennedy kids in the White House nursery.

After running some of the Morse Code through translators, uncovering what appears to be a gobbledygook of capital letters, I asked Truitt if I was missing something. He said he’d added that another cryptographic layer that needed cracking by those searching out the deeper messages he was trying to impart.

“You can continue the penetration and find out what was transmitted by Mary Meyer’s diary,” he said. “Why do I bury it all? Unless there’s an outright release of all the documents involved in her assassination, the Kennedy murder, and the other records kept top secret — unless everybody were to become clear and come clean at the CIA, the FBI and so forth — the whole of this narrative will never be clear. I chose this as a way of sharing the impenetrability of what really happened.”

Truitt, who lives in Lake Hill and runs Station Hill Press near the Bard Campus across the river, went on to note how his wife had suggested he somehow write his family’s secrets and then decided to do so in “a John Cage sort of way.”

“I think this stuff is still sort of dangerous. What I’ve done here is a form of self protection, I guess,” he added. “Yet it does bring together the political and art focus. It’s just buried, dude.”

And yet, somehow, bound for some form of eternity, now, given the absolute rigor of Truitt’s work here…as well as his rising reputation as truly modern writer pushing his craft, and art, into new areas as few do so well these days.

“What’s always obsessed me,” he added, in apparent finale, “Is that you can’t get here from here.”

For the full experience of Sam Truitt’s DICK, visit www.facebook.com/pages/Dick-An-Oblique-Kennedy-Conspiracy-Countdown/494093407275592?ref=hl, search it out on Facebook, or visit https://twitter.com/sam_truitt on your computer or smartphone.

Holly George-Warren and Elizabeth Mitchell.

Not one but two local women have been nominated for the 2013 Grammy awards: music writer Holly George-Warren of Phoenicia for the liner notes of The Pearl Sessions, a reissue of Janis Joplin’s 1971 hit album, with supplementary material; and Woodstock resident Elizabeth Mitchell for her new CD Little Seed: Songs for Children by Woody Guthrie. Both recordings also have a Woodstock resonance among their studio personnel, evidence of the creative ferment nurtured by the community.

George-Warren learned about her nomination through a congratulatory email from a friend. “I had no idea!” she said. “I was shocked and surprised and delighted.”

The Pearl Sessions is a two-CD set, also released in vinyl, that includes both Joplin’s platinum album Pearl and alternate takes dug up from the Columbia Records vaults.

The alternate versions are interwoven with talkback in the studio. “You hear Janis coming up with ideas,” said George-Warren, “telling the guitar player what to play, choosing the tempo and the arrangement — although all that is usually the producer’s job.”

Paul Rothchild, who produced the first four Doors albums, was known for being dictatorial and authoritarian in the studio. “He made Morrison do 20 takes” of some songs, noted George-Warren. “But here he was, listening to what Janis said, completely collaborating with her. She hasn’t been given enough credit over the years. She’s stereotyped as a self-destructive artist, but in the studio, she was straight, together, and focused on her artistic vision.”

George-Warren’s credentials include writing for Rolling Stone, New York Times, Village Voice, and many other periodicals, as well as authoring or editing books such as Public Cowboy No. 1: The Life and Times of Gene Autry (Oxford University Press, 2007) and The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame: The First 25 Years (HarperCollins, Sept. 2009).

“I have written tons of liner notes,” she said, “and I’ve had the privilege to become knowledgeable about Janis’s music over the years. I was a fan as a kid, and I gave a lecture at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame a few years ago when she was honored in their annual program ‘American Masters.’”

For the Pearl Sessions notes, George-Warren interviewed Dan Penn and Spooner Oldham, the co-authors of “A Woman Left Left Lonely,” one of the songs on the album. Oldham is a keyboard player who backs up Bob Dylan. Penn recalled meeting Joplin in the studio and congratulating her on her success. “He’s never forgotten her reply: ‘I don’t think I’m going to be around long to enjoy it,’” reported George-Warren. “She had a premonition.”

Rothchild passed away from lung cancer in 1995, but George-Warren had interviewed his engineer friend Bruce Botnick for a project on The Doors. “He told me about Rothchild’s relationship with Janis, how they were smitten with each other in the studio.” In the service of art, the two decided to hold off on consummating their passion until the project was completed.

Instead, Joplin died of a drug overdose the day she was supposed to record the vocals for “Buried Alive in the Blues,” which remains an instrumental track on Pearl.

Some of the photos that accompany the current release were shot by the late Barry Feinstein, a long-time Woodstock resident. The Full Tilt Boogie Band, which played back-up on “Pearl,” featured Woodstock piano player Richard Bell.

There’s a beauty about art at its most challenging edges. The underlying idea behind “difficult” literature — as with any medium — is to impart a sense of curiosity as to how the visible elements of all we touch, smell, hear, taste and see coalesce into patterns, make sense of our experiences and memory, and shape our belief in a future. We turn to those brave and/or lucky enough to publish, perform, exhibit or build their thoughts and visions because they validate our own. And feed them.

Et tu?

It’s deadline time, holiday gift-wise. Fortunately there are some really great books available out there for those seeking to really have an impact this season. The following five are local, deeply original, and now vetted, as it were.

All entail memory, the process of conscious and unconscious thinking (and thoughtfulness). Each is invigorating in the ways in which their creators, invariably at the top of their powers, push their limits. Taken together, they demonstrate the breadth of modern art-making, the complexity of contemporary existence, and the universal urge we all harbor to not only make some sense of things, but find peace and solace in such attempts.

Spring Creek

Nick Lyons Spring Creek, newly republished in a 20th anniversary edition with a new preface and Mari Lyons’ gorgeous watercolor illustrations given added emphasis, is stunningly beautiful. The Woodstock-based author, a major trout fishing authority who has taught literature and served as a publisher of others’ writings along with his own, renders the joys, patience, and experience of fishing a Montana stream over a summer. It’s descriptive writing of the highest order, where each sentence, paragraph and chapter is so well-crafted and carefully executed that one can’t help but get drawn into an emotional narrative of catharsis, no matter whether you care about fishing or not.

“Tough fishing stretches you, provides you with skills and confidence for a thousand lesser moments — and it eggs you on to take great chances,” Lyons writes late in the book, after he’s allowed his readers to grow accustomed to his stream, its owner, his fishing companions, and the thought patterns which rise as one learns to dance with nature as one fishes. “It’s not just courage that’s required, of course, but some knowledge of the kinds of major tactics that can be necessary on a trout stream, and then a perfection of the skills needed to enact them.”

Anyone who found growth through Norman Maclean’s great A River Runs Through It should be given this. Along with anyone who treasures great writing.

Life Sentences

Similarly, Michael Perkins’ latest, Life Sentences: Aphorisms & Reflections, which the longstanding Woodstock fixture and Times contributor read from at The Golden Notebook last Sunday, shows our unofficial poet laureate and chronicler of the town’s underlying history (and endless walks) in a lighter, yet somehow much deeper mood than usual. Consider this Perkins Unbound, the way we often encounter him during a too-busy time, brightening our days with quiet, cantankerous-on-the-surface quips about this or that. Assembled here, those snippets add up to a trove of peculiarly landscape-bound knowledge, a philosophy that, read in order, gathers a sense of philosophic narrative, born of place, as it rolls along.

“If you think yourself as a good judge of character, put yourself on trial. The marvelous is always near, waiting, like a ghost, to be recognized,” some of the 500 aphorisms gathered here run. “Ideology is inevitably a recipe for murder. Do whatever you do, not so others will remember you, but so you won’t forget yourself. When it is too late, the time is right. An opinion is the first draft of thought. Poetry is still necessary — but only the right kind.”

Reading such items, a few here, a few there, makes one wish to sharpen memory…and may actually allow such things to actually occur. That Perkins has allowed himself, and us, to revive such a delightful form in a comfortable and comforting home town setting is a gift, indeed. And, hopefully, it’s a spur for us all to start collecting our own such thoughts and dangerous attempts at an ideology.

Performing Arts of Woodstock [PAW] will be 50 next season. At the moment that feels like 49 consecutive miracles in a row. Despite a solid string of very strong shows, lousy logistics dog the company, primarily in the form of a rogue-ish re-model of Town Hall, sure to shrink PAW’s shoe-box of a theater by a half size. On nights court isn’t in session, that is. While Town Supervisor, Jeremy Wilbur vows support (and well he should — his first run for office hinged upon a series of plays he penned and starred in, lampooning the-then highly fragrant issue of a town sewer), these days PAW’s hopes hang on a yet-to-be budgeted Les Walker design for an addition on the existing Community Center.  The proposed building includes plans for a “shared” PAW home, and but for such half-born hopes, the company survives with no “official” town sponsorship. Though PAW president Edie Le Fever, (“Mother Courage” to local theater folk) seldom complains, with several other new theater companies nipping at her heels, PAW has little choice but to soldier on.

Astoundingly, despite these and other challenges, this year’s annual Winterfest fund-raiser, looks and sounds like a million bucks, largely due to the vision of Christa Trinler,  a hugely energetic actor, producer, and board member.

Entitled: Forbidden Fruits, this year’s gala will work well to ward off the cold with heat — human heat, otherwise known as sex, albeit it of a whimsical variety. The intimate black box feel of the venue, Utopia Soundstage in Bearsville, is sure to provide the perfect provocative environment for a highly entertaining evening, including but not limited to: broadly romantic and sensual poetry, innuendo-laced song, and some delightfully bawdy, naughty, and occasionally ridiculous comedy. Additional alcoholic libations promises to lubricate the lascivious proceedings, and a fabulous lite buffet of aphrodisiac-infused foods await sampling as provided by Kathy Miller. (I predict a melange of tamarinds, mangos, persimmons and pomegranites glazed with a ginseng roux.)

We are to expect a lavish stage filled with tapestries, oriental rugs, large pillows and ottomans. And because the Utopia soundstage (thanks to originator Todd Rundgren) has a “full-on” light rack above, as well as splendiferous amplification throughout the event should prove a special occasion for friends of PAW, especially for those of legal age.

Local testaments of tremendous talent will include the beautiful Ann Osmond and almost-as-cute Dennis Yerry who will perform three songs, including the wonderful “Too Close for Comfort” as well “Don’t You Feel My Leg,” (which Maria Muldaur used to “sign” for the deaf, seated at the bar of the old Joyous Lake). Robert Burke Warren, fresh from his success in PAW’s “The Dumb Waiter,” will provide us with a Prince song (back from when the artist was actually known as “Prince”) and a spoken version of Leonard Cohen’s killer: “A Thousand Kisses Deep.” (Uncle Rock fans under 12 will be fined and accompanied home.) The lovely Christa Trinler and the highly talented Ron Morehead will investigate the dark and deep first act of Greg Owen’s “Girls Fart Too.” Ron will then attempt to more seriously redeem himself with a famously obscene ee cummings poem. Another from that poet — the charmingly risque “May I feel” will be enthused and effused by the effervescent Joyce Romano, soon joined by  hilarious Audrey Rapoport (who can be funny and provocative, both — and note: she teaches…) when the two serve up the first act of Dean Lundquist’s “Finger Food.” The evening will close with a highly under-clad ensemble piece from the last act from “O Calcutta” — sorry — make that “Cabaret.” And there’ll be a reading of the marvelous Pablo Neruda poem, “Your Hands”.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if a corporate sponsor…or even just a filthy rich widow — were to adopt PAW for a pet? Well, it hasn’t happened and though the Utopia sound-stage is a perfect stop-gap it won’t come cheap. That’s right — back to the wall — PAW digs deep asking for help…doesn’t seem fair, somehow. So come out to support “the little company that could” with a marvelous night of Forbidden Fruit. Doors open at 7 p.m. for an 8 p.m. show on Saturday, January 26 at the Utopia Soundstage behind WDST in the Bear Complex. Tickets are $35 for adults, $30 for seniors (includes buffet, dessert, beverage and show — cash bar). For reservations call 845-679-7900 or visit www.PerformingArtsofWoodstock.org.

J. R. R. Tolkien with Betty and Ian Ballantine.

Two weeks ago the first installment of Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit was sliced out of first place at theaters by The Chain Saw Massacre, and thus the forces of good once again seemed in a terrible spot. True, there was some comfort knowing Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy raked in roughly three billion worldwide, but actual solace even today can only be found in one place. It’s a tiny hamlet called Bearsville, bordering the anomaly of Woodstock. Yes, it’s Bearsville, for only there might be found the one surviving pioneer of the Tolkien phenomenon.

Betty Ballantine is 93 and was just declared legally blind. As “Ian Ballantine’s better half,” she could, if she wished, lay claim to co-creation of the American paperback. Widowed since 1995, she lives today in the same large, drafty, hillside house she shared with Ian and their son Richard, which was recently emptied of a complete collection of Ballantine Books — or at least the 1200 titles its founders published under the name.

When the father of the modern paperback, Allen Lane of Penguin, entrusted Ian Ballantine with the responsibility of bringing his brainchild to America in 1939, he also fulfilled conditions allowing the 23-year old Ian to marry Betty, just 20. Six years later, in New York, the stormy relationship with Penguin ended. Borrowing money from a consortium of hardcover publishers, the Ballantines opened a paperback reprint house they called “Bantam Books,” its emblem, a crowing cock. Ian — who reinvented whatever he touched — eventually ran afoul of his board of directors, and though retaining the fierce loyalty of an inner sanctum, found himself fired as president of Bantam in 1952. Seeking sanctuary in Bearsville, he promptly broke his leg skiing. Convalescing within reach of the phone, Ian now put together the John Paul Jones of paperback houses in three weeks, using savings, their city apartment for an office, and a staff of five, most of whom appeared promptly at 5:15 p.m., having completed with their “daytime duties” at Bantam. Once again, Ian was President, with Betty Vice President, and this time out they used the family name. Their logo: two capital B’s back to back, as a couple would stand with little choice but to take on the world. Their very first title went to number one on the best seller list, which was a good thing — the Ballantines had five dollars left in savings.

In 1961 Betty was personally responsible for five of the 25 or so titles Ballantine Books published monthly. She had, by then, single-handedly created “The Western” and — with Fred Pohl’s guidance — pioneered Science Fiction originals. One from each of these categories, plus an original novel, plus two of Ian’s ideas and/or discoveries — often with a first time author — such were her duties. “Besides that,” she states with obvious enjoyment, “I was quite busy explaining Ian Ballantine to a company which was both afraid and in awe of him, on top of which few people but myself really understood what he was saying half the time. So, yes, I was a busy woman.”

Cooking breakfast by touch and memory, in a modest kitchen overstuffed with five sets of china, Betty, once seated, seems to stare out a large kitchen window, guessing at the vague shapes of birds and squirrels.

“Tolkien!” she responds to prodding, brushing crumbs from a vivid turquoise sweater. “Wonderful man! Perfectly dressed…beautifully spoken. We met him for tea at a very distinguished establishment in London, where — he soon informed us — he’d prepared a ruse through which he might call the meeting short if we proved to be…well, you know, afterall, we were Americans! But he warmed to us and soon seemed to appreciate our…I suppose you’d call it, ‘reverence’ for his books. And well he should. For by then we’d made him a very wealthy man!”

Asked how The Hobbit came to be published by Ballantine, Betty raises her head of tight, snowy curls and inhales as if smelling something burning.

“Her name was Mary — or was it Miriam? — our receptionist at the front desk. She stopped me as I came in one morning to say: ‘Betty — I’m just reading this lovely little book.’”

Betty Ballantine recognized the title, for The Hobbit had by then become a fixture in English parlors of the discerning elderly. But for adolescent children? Never! First published by Allen & Unwin in 1939 in a run of 1500, and illustrated with a cover drawing by its author, the novel, together with its sequels, became a cottage industry for that small, careful English publisher. What greeted Betty this Manhattan morning, however, was an American hardback edition published by Houghton-Mifflin.

Steve Kerner in his living room. (photo by Violet Snow)

“When the water splits the painting open, magic happens at the subatomic level,” says Woodstock artist Stephen Kerner. “I feel like I’m shifting worlds of atoms around. It feels like flying.”

Kerner’s mystical approach to making art has grown out of inspiration from indigenous cultures, experimentation with multi-layered painting techniques, and a youthful period spent hobnobbing with creative New Yorkers of the sixties and seventies, from Allen Ginsburg to Larry Rivers to Sal Mineo. In Woodstock, Kerner also runs a business, Stone River Archival Printers, providing giclée printing services to artists, photographers, and galleries, an outgrowth of his early efforts to submit copies of 40-foot paintings when applying to museums.

Sitting in his house near the top of Meads Mountain Road, with a view that includes the Ashokan Reservoir, Kerner is reminiscing about his life on East 10th Street, where he rented an apartment at the age of 16 in 1965. His parents had moved from the Lower East Side up to the 90s and were ready to advance to Long Island. Kerner stayed behind to mingle with Beat writers: Ginsburg, Gregory Corso, William Burroughs. “They would use my apartment to take drugs and sleep and get together,” he says.

The following year, he moved to the Chelsea Hotel, where his neighbors were artists Larry Rivers and John Hultberg, composer Virgil Thompson, actress Viva from the Andy Warhol scene. He drank morning beers with Norman Mailer and visited jazz musician Ornette Coleman’s Artists House on Prince Street. “I was exposed to so much,” Kerner recalls.

He considered a career in music — he performed with a jazz quartet and still plays upright bass. “But it was hard to make real money in music,” he says. “Well-known musicians I knew personally were borrowing money from me.”

He decided to focus on art and found he could trade paintings for food and art supplies. At the Chelsea, he watched artists at work and received advice from them. “When I started submitting to museums and exhibiting, John Hultberg told me to get documentation, that it would help down the road. He also said, ‘Keep your work beautiful.’ I had a tendency to go the dark side. It was a fine line.”

At the time, it was much easier to get work accepted by galleries and museums than it is today, says Kerner, whose work has been shown at the Smithsonian, the Whitney, the Corcoran Gallery, the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, among others. “The city embraced artists. In those days, you could get advice from museum curators — you could have a dialogue with them,” he says. There was also a fraction of the present number of artists attempting to show.

Figure by Louis Bouché, 1917.

“How do you like your husband’s new paintings,” historian Alf Evers reported that artist Henry Lee McFee’s wife was asked (she also being the sister of artist and Byrdcliffe co-founder Bolton Brown).

“I mean to like ‘em,” she is said to have replied. “Even if it kills me.”

Embracing the New: Modernism’s Impact on Woodstock Artists — the show that opens alongside a swath of exhibits at the Woodstock Artists Association and Museum Saturday, February 9 — captures a time when art could shape a town’s future, and lead to fisticuffs and political battles. It harks back to a day when to discuss an art work you had to go and see it. The new wasn’t reproduced in print, let alone online. More importantly, we’re talking about an era, a century ago, when folks could spend a summer, years even, talking about what they may have seen on a European trip, or down in the new galleries just starting to open in New York City. It was a time such talk helped shape the way this community of Woodstock spoke about art and, in turn, attracted other artists who wanted to join such conversation, both in words and via their own art-making.

Featuring works by Alexander Archipenko, Konrad Cramer, Andrew Dasburg, Henry Lee McFee, Charles Rosen, the show speaks of Woodstock’s early 20th century days of ferment, when Byrdcliffe was taking hold, Hervey White was getting his Maverick experiment off the ground, the Arts Students League was setting up local roots, and a host of young artists were moving north from New York to be among their type. Embracing The New attempts to understand the ways in which the artistic influence of Europe’s avant-garde landed on our local art scene. It takes two lines…one, the effects of European art, from Cezanne and Matisse to Picasso and the Surrealists, on local stylistic experiments. And more directly, the role that the epochal 1913 Armory Show — where Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending A Staircase nearly started a riot, along with other trend-changing works — had on local artists who submitted paintings to it, and then started showing in galleries influenced by its radicalism.

According to WAAM, Embracing The New will celebrate the centennial of the Armory Show, also to be noted this year with major exhibitions at the Montclair Art Museum and the New-York Historical Society Museum and Library. WAAM will include two talks by prominent historians associated with the Historical Society exhibition and catalogue to highlight the various themes highlighted locally — an April 13 event with independent scholar and author Avis Berman whose talk, titled “We Were Only Waiting for This Moment to Arise: American Collectors and the Armory Show” will precede Kimberly Orcutts,“Myth, Controversy, and Modern Art: Reconsidering the 1913 Armory Show,” on April 20.

What’s on view from our local talent here? How do the old battlelines between the likes of Art Students League classicist Birge Harrison and newer talents such as Archipenko get brought to life, along with the explosion of talent as young artists incorporated, and grew from, what they were being exposed to then?

Robert W. Chanler’s Parody of the Fauve Painters makes fun of young artists paying homage to Matisse, portrayed as a chimp, while Louis Bouché uses the same master’s palette for his own 1917 nude (Chanler was actually included in the Armory show himself). Armory show participant Andrew Dasburg is represented by local landscapes that seek to capture “Father of Modernism” Paul Cezanne’s brushstrokes, and sensibility, while Konrad Cramer demonstrates how one can use homage as a base for deeper explorations. Archipenko’s Repose, from 1911, is a version of a work actually displayed at the Armory exhibition.

“Art is dead! Let us bury him,” was how some local artists put it in a ceremony they performed on Rock City Road in the decade following Armory and all the changes set in motion just as our local art colony was forming itself (as reported by historian Alf Evers). “Here lies art…”

And on it goes…

It will all be up through May 5, with a special WAAM Family Day on the topic of Cubism set from 1p.m. to 3 p.m. for Saturday, March 16, including a kid-friendly tour of the exhibition.

It all opens, along with a member’s New Works exhibit curated by gallerist Carrie Haddad of Hudson, a solo show by glass artist Peter Bynum, and works by Annette Jaret, and Arm of the Sea Puppet Theater, this Saturday, February 9 from 4 p.m.-6 p.m.

The Woodstock Artists Association and Museum is located at 28 Tinker Street. Call 679-2940 or visit www.woodstockart.org for further information.

Eric Parker (photo by Dion Ogust)

Many people in this world brag and shouldn’t. Others never brag though we sometimes wish they would. Case in point: The late Larry Hoppen once berated Eric Parker, who had just returned from a world tour with Steve Winwood: “You have a lot of nerve!…going out on the road with one of my all-time heroes, then coming home and walking around town without even wearing the f-ckin’ tour jacket!”

Eric grew up in a house with four other brothers, three of whom — like dad — were drummers. Eventually, the Parker place boasted as many as five “active” drum sets. Whoever finished dinner first put on a record, cranked it, and bashed along. The first tune Eric remembers nailing was Jimmy Reed’s, “Any Way You Want It.” He learned to read in the drum section of “band” at school. His first foray into an ensemble was called “Dog Breath” in the tenth grade. Invited to join the successful “Razzamatazz,” Eric was allowed to move to Ithaca at 17. Razzamatazz rehearsed in the home of pianist Bob Leinbach, soon morphing into “Hot Sweets” with Leinbach on keys and trombone, and Arti Funaro on guitar.

Meanwhile in Woodstock, circa 1972, The Fabulous Rhinestones were the hottest band in town. Killer-singer-guitarist Kal David backed by master-bassist Harvey Brooks were destined for fame. Yeah, sure…

On the strength of “Half Moon” written for Janis Joplin, songwriting team John and Johanna Hall moved to Woodstock; chop-master Hall soon fronted Orleans, and nudged the Rhinestones aside. After a stalled second record Kal and Harvey were looking for young Rhinestone blood. It came from Ithaca.

Brooks was the bass legend of Electric Flag, Super Sessions, Seals & Croft The Doors, and Miles Davis’ iconic “Bitches’ Brew.” Eric remembers being dropped off at Harvey’s place for the audition by his Mom. He says he could feel his heart-thump at the handshake but Harvey was instantly welcoming and Eric — along with Bob and Artie — got the gig with the proviso: “Just don’t tell anybody you’re 18…”

In those pre-DWI-days, Woodstock was a wall-to-wall, bar-to-bar party. The Rhinestones sputtered back up to speed, giving Orleans a run for their money, at least locally. Simply “touring the town” was a cash cow: principally — The Joyous Lake, but also, The Espresso, Rosa’s Cantina, The Watering Troff, The Sportman’s, later The Whitewater Depot, The Chance in Poughkeepise, or for a monster pay-day, The Sha-boo in Connecticut. At 20, Eric Parker was up to his eyebrows in girls and ready cash.

When The Rhinestones hit the wall in ‘77 Eric went out on the road with Rolling Stone’s “Best New Artist” Valerie Carter.” Next he recorded and toured with ex-Foghat bassist/guitarist/producer Nick Jameson, who — in the wilds of Vermont — produced a record using only himself, Eric, and Paul Butterfield on harp. Butterfield eventually tapped Eric to drum for himself, Rick Danko, and Blondie Chaplin (of the Beach Boys) — an ensemble Parker still considers one of the strongest quartets of the day.

Another throw-together band included the post-Orleans Hoppen Brothers and Bob Leinbach, whose car broke down after a gig at The Chance in Poughkeepsie. Noticing John Hall’s new band was playing the next night, Eric and Bob crashed in a freezing cold dressing room to check out the competition. “If you ever want some more fire in the back-burner,” Eric suggested backstage to John, “Or…if your drummer gets pneumonia…give me a call.” Shortly there after John called to say his drummer got pneumonia; could Eric come on board?

This was the guy I first came to admire who co-wrote the hit “Crazy” with Leinbach…the “rack-tom” drum-kit Eric Parker who John used to introduce as, “My favorite drummer in the world.”  That John Hall Band, fueled by his song “Power,” toured extensively with Little Feat and John was regularly invited by Little Feat’s legendary Lowell George to join the Feat on stage. Then came the night Lowell pointed at Eric, whose classic “who me?” finger to-his-chest, required the engineer’s push to propel Parker onto stage. Four or five such invitations on successive nights followed, then a five in the morning knock on Eric’s door on the sixth night. A rather energetic Lowell George entered, wanting to know: “Hey man, where were you tonight?” Watching a WWII war movie on late night TV, Parker prevaricated:  “I don’t know I…didn’t want to overstay my welcome.”

Lowell glanced at the TV screen, “Wrong plane, again — of course,” he mumbled to himself.

“I know, isn’t that stupid?” Eric agreed, “They’re using a Bristol Blenheim when it should be an American B-25 bomber.”

“You know World War Two Aircraft!” Lowell proclaimed, amazed.

“Of course!.. Dad’s a total buff…my brothers ‘n I assembled and collected all the kits: Messerschmidts, Spitfires, Mustangs — hey! Sound a little like guitars!”

So began a cheerful post-show conversation. Around 7:30 a.m. Lowell toddled off, bidding a fond farewell with, “So be there — okay? You need some money, man — to…be there when I want you on stage?”

“No, no, no!” Eric insisted. Nevertheless an hour later another knock came to the door and Little Feat’s tour manager handed Eric a bag containing six crisp hundred dollar bills. The amount varied from night to night. But the man always knocked. And he always had a bag. And the bag always contained large bills. Eventually Lowell’s wife, Liz George arrived, disgruntled, on tour, and Lowell asked if he could bunk with Eric for most of a week until Liz figured out where Lowell was hiding. Oh, those kids!

James Lasdun

James Lasdun’s new book, Give Me Everything You Have: On Being Stalked — from which he’ll be reading and of which he’ll signing copies of at Golden Notebook’s new upstairs space at 4 p.m. Saturday, February 16 — is scary good. And deeply complicated in the rare ways one seeks in the best of literature. It’s completely non-fiction, although it references a wealth of works that have come before it…and sets the tone for a whole new genre of necessary works.

It all starts in as safe a place as one can imagine, living here — a creative writing class that the celebrated British-born poet, short story writer and novelist teaches in a New York college. He talks about the anxieties bred by sharing one’s creations in such settings, showing empathy for his students and humble humor about his own literary standing. Then, like a classic Hitchcock narrative (or one of his own, as he eventually points out), things start to run awry. He lets one student, who he’s pegged as being more talented and likely to reach the stage of getting a novel published, get a bit closer than is usual. He introduces her to his agent, who says her work isn’t ready for representation yet, but sets “Nasreen” up with an editor. The two meet for a coffee, she hands him her book…and things start to go crazy.

Nasreen, who Lasdun describes as best he can without treading into libel territory, starts harassing her former teacher with e-mails. She flirts, taunts, grows angry…and starts appearing in his online mailbox repeatedly each day. Then grows mean to the point of harassment, calling herself a verbal terrorist. And then charges her former teacher with terrorism…and worse.

“You don’t have to be a writer to imagine how it feels to find yourself the object of a malicious attack on the Internet,” he writes after describing, and showing examples, of how his stalker starts spreading her venom around through Amazon, Goodreads, Wikipedia and other public online sites. “An ordinary negative review is depressing, but it doesn’t flood you with this sense of personal emergency, as if not only your book but also your life, or at least that large aura of meaning that accumulates around your life and gives it value, is in imminent and dire peril.”

Eventually, Nasreen starts attacking the agent Lasdun has introduced her to, as well as the editor she turned her on to. She starts e-mailing his employers, editors, and work friends charging him with sexual harassment, adultery, and literary theft. Eventually, she finds ways of taking on other persona, operating out of other e-mails…and after several years, starts writing e-mails under his name.

Lasdun goes to the New York Police, who call Nasreen…to no avail. Her crimes aren’t the sort anyone wants to spend money prosecuting. Eventually, Woodstock police help out. The story goes on and on for years…and is still happening, according to the author.

Andrew Dasburg, Charles Rosen and George Bellows. (Historical Society of Woodstock Archives)

From the start Andrew Dasburg was the ring-leader of “The Rock City Radicals,” that group, including Konrad Cramer and Henry Lee McFee, which in the early teens of the last century utilized Cubist and other European influences to twist traditional landscape and still-life painting in Woodstock inside out. Dasburg’s artistic odyssey found its feet here, as evidenced by his painting [dated around 1910] included in The Woodstock Artist’s Association and Museum’s current show “Embracing The New.”

Married many times, Dasburg demonstrated a devotion to Woodstock which — like a marriage — was passionate, dramatic, and fraught; his life here becoming a near constant struggle to reconcile domestic and financial difficulty with an over-riding need to create. Eventually, for a time, he happily balanced the vastly contrasting environs of Taos, New Mexico with Woodstock, until a final break with his “Catskill wife” presaged his permanent relocation to New Mexico. There, after decades of poverty, artistic vacillation, disastrous health, periods of desolation (including one in which he stopped painting entirely) and indeed a highly adventurous romantic life, the hard-won mantle of genius finally settled over this stooped master — albeit qualified to the region of his greatest and most dedicated accomplishment: Taos, where still at work at around his simple adobe home, Dasburg died at the age of 92 in 1979.

Some 65 years earlier he was on the front lines of the American Avant-garde in Woodstock — this being the only time such as description applied to our “backwater,” until Guston made his lonely vigil here 50 years later. This, then, is part of a longer story…

Andrew Dasburg — who would never know the name let alone the nationality of his father — was born in Paris in 1887; shortly thereafter he returned with his mother to her childhood home near their namesake, Dasburg, Germany. At the age of four his hip was profoundly injured. Two years later, after emigrating with his mother to immigrant-stuffed New York City, that hip re-injured left him handicapped for life. At a school for crippled children Andrew’s art teacher noticed his talent for drawing and enrolled him part-time in the Art Students League. In 1904, at 17, Andrew’s mother scraped together payment for night classes with firebrand Robert Henri at The Chase School of Art, and here Dasburg met future Woodstocker and wunderkindt of “The Ashcan School,” George Bellows.

Probably the recipient of a scholarship, Andrew attended The Art Students League’s new Woodstock summer school in 1907, where he met his future wife, Grace Mott Johnson (called “Johnson” by one and all, including the couples’ only child.) Instructor Birge Harrison, newly retired from stodgy Byrdcliffe, created gauzily lit canvasses of the tonalist school — a far cry from the gutsy reportage of Robert Henri. Harrison’s star pupil/assistant, John Carlson, another child emigre, was fast becoming a master of traditional plein-aire painting — “solidly grounded work” against which Dasburg’s modernist efforts would outrageously contrast. Though Andrew secretly differed with instructor Harrison, writing in 1908, “I will never be satisfied with just painting atmospheric conditions and changes of light,” he knew how to conform when necessary, winning first place (perhaps besting Carlson) in a juried show of Harrison’s students’ work from the previous year at The League’s base in New York.

In 1909, with money which could only have come from his lady “Johnson,” the young art students embarked for Europe, marrying in London and joining friends in Paris. Finding herself pregnant, losing their baby, and increasingly dissatisfied with her husband’s high-handedness, Johnson returned to Woodstock, soon sharing letters from Dasburg placing many under his spell.

In his year abroad Andrew encountered the paintings of Cezanne at the Vollard gallery, met Picasso at the apartments of Gertrude and Leo Stein, made two copies of a Cezanne still life which instantly became ‘[the] standard of what I want to attain in my painting’; visited Matisse in his studio where The Master wiped away what seemed trivial as Dasburg watched him “re-draw the line until it had a limpidity and casualness without being forced.” He experienced the paintings of Renoir, which, with other masterworks, were hung “floor to ceiling in every room.”

Steaming home in 1910, genius-stuffed, Andrew returned to Woodstock, hailed the conquering hero. Yet it would take three years before the ticking bomb of modernity exploded onto a Dasburg canvas. Never careful to date, spare from rage, fail to gift, or keep track of once sold, “known Dasburgs” leave many gaps. We do know he accompanied George Bellows (arguably the most energetic painter on these shores) to Monhegan Island whereupon Bellows unleashed the most prodigious outpouring of his life. Not surprisingly, one surviving canvas of the eleven Dasburg completed there bears witness, not to Cezanne, but to Van Gogh as transmuted through the thoroughly American George Bellows.

Both Bellows and Dasburg participated in the hugely important 1913 New York Armory Show — where Duchamp’s “Nude Descending a Staircase” was famously dubbed “Explosion in a Shingle Factory,” and battle lines between formalists and Cubist-inspired insurgents were — literally — drawn in blood. “I like him,” Dasburg wrote his wife, “who lays himself open to all…who has the strength to prevail…and does not fear to put himself where only the worthiest will survive.” Back in Woodstock, while artistic argument seldom if ever came to blows, divisions were, indeed, distinct. Dasburg had by now been joined by young German expatriot, Conrad Kramer (who’d recently married local painter Florence Balin), and Henry McFee, whose wife Aileen dubbed Woodstock’s Avant-garde “The Post-Toasties” versus John Carlson’s conservative “Nature Boys.”

(Photo by Dion Ogust)

Q. Peanut butter: creamy or chunky?
A. Chunky. Creamy does virtually nothing for me audibly.
– From an interview of Robert Euvino

In a clearing on a hill to the east side of Yankeetown Pond early last Saturday afternoon, about half past one, four parallel white lines from two planes crossing the blue sky together moved very slowly from one side of the horizon to the other. About half way across the trajectory, the sound of jet engines could be heard, proving once again that light travels faster than sound. The sound grew louder, soon reached its peak, and then began to diminish. Everyone who walks in the woods around here has had this experience at one time or another. Few natural settings are free these days from reminders of human-produced sound.

Silence in this setting did not return. This particular hillside, tucked into a secluded part of Wittenberg, was infested with a multitude of microphones spread throughout the clearing and surrounding woods. One mic, which looked like a dry mop, was being carried from spot to spot by an earnest young man, John Chiarolanzio. He moved quickly at times, but always stepped delicately and with an obvious self-awareness to avoid marring the potential gold he was panning for. Meanwhile, Matt Snedecor tended to the discretely placed stationary microphones with equal care.

Instructions for the afternoon included the following: “Cast will create sounds for large battle scenes, and participants must be prepared to shout, scream, grunt, and generally act ferocious. Other related sounds will also be recorded.”

Following instructions, the 30 or so people gathered in the small meadow on the hillside gave robust yells. “This is the Woodstock crowd that gets things done,” encouraged one sound man.

They continued their yelling in unison, each reading the same small writing on the back of a large index card. “Scum,” they shouted. “Scum. Scum.”

“Fortuna,” they yelled next. “Fortuna. Fortuna.”

Then they yelled “No.” “No. No. No.”

They were instructed not to yell in unison. The “Nos” stretched out over time. Different voices were distinguishable. Some people waited for a quiet space in time to yell their “No.” Others experimented with different vocal registers.

“No Me Lawd” was next on the list. After that were “Impossible,” “Nay!” and “Huh?” The last seemed particularly to encourage variations in tone and delivery.

The cluster of people was told to turn outward from the group and yell in different directions. Creating sounds in different directions, they were told, provided “reflections from whatever.”

There were 96 words or phrases of dialogue on the list. That’s a lot of yelling.

The purpose of the sound effects recording session was to create audio effects to be used both in an epic Hollywood motion picture currently under production and in a sequel to a successful video-game franchise. Sound designers Robert Euvino and Coll Anderson, who combined forces to create audio effects to be used for both, took turns directing the dedicated and passionate group gathered for this sole purpose.

Euvino, described as a sound guru, owns and operates a post-production recording facility (Night Owl Productions in Kingston), where he spends most of his time composing music and designing sound effects for a variety of applications. He described later how the use of a multiplicity of microphones would allow him to amplify the sound so that the small crowd could be transformed into a real horde. With the power of sound manipulation, it appears, each Woodstocker has the power of at least a dozen ordinary mortals.

There was family feeling to the event, with small clusters of people of all ages and sizes trickling in to participate. The communal primal scream seemed an appropriate activity for an early spring afternoon.

It may seem peculiar that a town like Woodstock, which has a long history of specialized arts performance, also prides itself on the deeply felt quality of its community life. The two are not diametrically opposite after all. At best, with a little amplification they can feed each other.

Louis Otey and Maria Todaro (photo by Dion Ogust)

“It’s a chance to listen to international stars in a rustic, picturesque setting — without having to pay hundreds of dollars,” said Louis Otey, co-founder and co-director of the Phoenicia International Festival of the Voice with his wife, Maria Todaro.

The Phoenicia festival’s 2013 program will observe the bicentennials of Richard Wagner and Giuseppe Verdi, while also featuring its usual wide-ranging mix of world music, theater, jazz, gospel, Gregorian chant, prose reading, and more. The fourth annual festival will take place August 1-4 on an outdoor stage on Phoenicia’s parish field and at other venues around the town.

The third member of the Phoenicia-based founding group, baritone Kerry Henderson, has withdrawn to focus on his new company, LiederWorks, reviving the art of the classical song recital.

Other changes this year include a bigger stage and bandshell, plus a 42-piece Festival of the Voice orchestra. A campaign on Kickstarter.com has been launched to come up with the funds to pay top-notch players, many of them drawn from the Westfield Symphony Orchestra of New Jersey. Todaro sang the role of Carmen last year with the Westfield Symphony under the direction of David Wroe, who is helping to assemble the festival orchestra.

Garry Kvistad, founder of Woodstock Chimes and director of the Drum Boogie Festival, will be participating on percussion, along with his brother, timpanist Richard Kvistad of the San Francisco Opera Orchestra. Garry Kvistaad has performed extensively with Steve Reich and is a member of the Nexus percussion ensemble.

The Saturday-night opera will be Verdi’s Rigoletto, starring soprano Nancy Allen Lundy, who has been performing at Teatro alla Scala in Milan. The title role will be sung by Otey, recently returned from an operatic gig in Copenhagen. Another leading role goes to Barry Banks, an English tenor who has sung with the Metropolitan Opera, the Welsh National Opera and many other companies worldwide. The festival orchestra will be conducted by Steven White of the Metropolitan Opera.

Another Verdi masterpiece, the choral Requiem, will close the festival on Sunday, with 120 singers from local choirs and professional soloists. Wroe will conduct.

To compensate for Wagner’s anti-Semitic reputation, a program entitled “The Art of the Cantor” has been scheduled for Friday afternoon, when female cantors will explore the richness of Hebrew liturgy. The evening performance will be the festival’s “Voices of Distinction,” in which up-and-coming opera stars mingle with seasoned performers, presenting vocal works by Wagner.

Actor and writer Carey Harrison, with lively musical accompaniment by pianist Justin Kolb, will read from personal journals and letters exchanged among Verdi, Wagner and Liszt.

Theatrical director Shauna Kanter presents Master Class, a play about the great soprano Maria Callas, at the STS Playhouse. Festival attendees will also have the chance to watch a master class of young professionals, led by dramaturg Cori Ellison, providing insights into the construction of an opera scene.

Among the Saturday events is a performance by The Spirit of Sepharad, an ensemble that includes a vocalist, a flamenco dancer, and musicians playing oud, saz, guitar, violin, and other instruments. They trace the migration of Sephardic music from medieval Spain across North Africa, to the Middle East, and beyond, uniting many cultures.

Other festival features include an opening-night celebration of gospel music; the Cambridge Singers, returning to the festival with their renditions of Gregorian and Medieval music; Ensemble Pi, performing the work of living and undiscovered composers, under the artistic direction of pianist Idith Meshulam; music for kids by Story Laurie; and late-night Latino jazz and bossa-nova mix by Abacaxi at the Sportsmen’s Bar.

Otey and Todaro are giving fundraising performances for the next several weekends in Albany, New York City, Garrison and Rhinebeck, mostly at the homes of affluent music lovers whose donations will go a long way to supporting the festival. “It’s a courtship,” explained Todaro, referring both to private donors and to granting agencies. A festival is not eligible for grants until it has three years under its belt, so this year the grant applications have been going out. Results are awaited.

The couple are also giving a performance for the Phoenicia Business Association — not to seek donations but to share with the business owners what they’re up to. Many local shopkeepers have to mind the store all summer and can’t make it to the festival performances, so a private concert is a good chance to hear the music. “It’s important for us to connect with the businesses,” said Todaro. “We’re building a crowd that’s sensitive to what we’re doing.”

While the big bucks are greatly to be desired, fundraising is aimed at every level of the festival audience. “Every penny helps,” Todaro said. “Even a dollar, multiplied by thousands of people, helps. The director of development of the New York City Opera told us not to neglect small donations. All those little donations make things go.”

The Phoenicia International Festival of the Voice will be held August 1-4 in the hamlet of Phoenicia.

(Photo by Dion Ogust)

Paul Green, of School of Rock fame, has a raspy voice and man-child ways that make his cinematic doppelganger Jack Black look like a naïf. He bounds about Todd Rundgren’s old Utopia Studios, reading inspiring notes from his iPhone or leaping onto the stage to thrash out some licks to the music he’s rehearsing a roomful of local kids through — Pink Floyd’s “The Wall” — with a minimum of self-consciousness. He’s as rock ‘n roll, in his jeans and black shirt, slight paunch and oft-noted ass crack bared, as anything bad ass not seen on a record cover or in some publicist’s promo package. He’s as rock ‘n roll, to put it another way, as Woodstock’s ever been.

Yet his Academy of Rock’s first sessions, bounding for a pair of May performances of both the Floyd classic and a full-throated kids tribute to the evergreen wonders of Led Zeppelin, are also as professionally run and organized, in their way, as the recording industry that once kept the town’s economy humming…or the Woodstock Day School where Green’s kids and so many of these 50-plus students learning their rockin’ craft, go.

“If you know your songs, sit in a chair…Jody, get your ass on the floor,” he’s bellowing at the start of his Academy’s weekly three hour session Saturday, April 13. “Now when I call your name I want you to say something nice about the person who’s just spoken before you, got that?”

The Paul Green Rock Academy, which he owns and operates with his wife Lisa, started up last month and is planning concerts of the Floyd on May 17 and 18, and “A Tribute to Led Zeppelin” May 31 and June 1 at the Byrdcliffe Barn, where Green put on a performance of Jesus Christ Superstar late last summer…a room who’s size, he says, “is perfect for this.” They’re currently negotiating purchase of a permanent home, along with necessary permitting, not far from where we are in Bearsville, but just over the Saugerties line.

Most importantly, they’ve recently finished organizing a curriculum for their first-ever Summer Camp Intensives, which will include such offerings as “Make a Kids’ Rock Album With Marco Benevento” from July 8 through 12, “Rock Strings Withy Tracy Bonham,” from July 15 to 19, “Experimental Analog Recording with Aaron Freeman (aka Gene Ween)” from July 15 to 19, “Songwriting Workshop with Gail Ann Dorsey,” from July 22 through 26, and “Percussion Camp with Jason Bowman” from July 29 through August 6. All limited to 16 students max, each, at $375 per student.

And there are the sessions like those in action at Utopia right now, on Fridays and Saturdays, which will repeat each season, always focusing on classic albums or band set lists for kids to learn, perfect, and perform.

“We’ll likely do something focused on Woodstock musicians — The Band, John Sebastian — in the fall,” Green says, later (after these intense classes are done with for the week). “We’re looking into a tribute to the Woodstock Festival for next summer.”

Ah, that festival…It turns out it, and producer Michael Lang, had something in getting Green and his idea of rock education to town.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

Green was a Philly-area musician teaching guitar on the side when he started taking in more students, forming a class, in the late 1990s. By 2002 he was borrowing money to start his first Paul Green School of Rock Music in a dilapidated building, and after Spin Magazine profiled him and his rock teaching methods a few months later, he became the focus of a VH1 shoot, then the Hollywood film starring Jack Black was made and released (claiming coincidence, in true rock and roll style), and eventually another documentary (Rock School) was finished, which eventually came out in 2005. By which time Green got bought out and started working new takes on his rock education ideas.

William Pachner at age 98.

In a corner of what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a five year old Jewish boy blinds himself in the left eye with a kitchen knife while sharpening a pencil. The surgeon, understanding the child yearns to be an artist, explains: “There is no hope for the eye, and no hope for a one-eyed artist. Drawing requires seeing three dimensions — for that you need two.” Sixty one years later a different surgeon botches a retina repair on the same patient’s other eye. Between these two blindings another set of extraordinary events provide the groundwork for the achievement of William Pachner.

First: in 1939, at the age of 22, Pachner is provided a three month visitor’s visa to the United States where his portfolio of European illustrations, though turned down by Esquire Magazine, provide him jobs elsewhere. Hounded by the FBI for working on a visitor’s visa, Pachner’s updated portfolio is submitted directly to the publishers of Esquire just as the artist is about to be deported. Now it all turns around: the job of his dreams is offered, a worker’s visa negotiated, a leggy beauty first seen in his own drawings is courted and married; in short — a hugely successful life at the pinnacle of the golden age of American magazine illustration, is his.

Second: In 1945, a diplomat-friend granted access to post-war Europe visits Pachner’s home sending back the following telegram: “There is no further hope Bill.” Pachner soon learns that in the course of a single afternoon two years earlier his entire family was marched to the edge of a pit, forced at gunpoint to strip, and excecuted with a bullet to the back of the each of their heads. At that time Bill was attempting to enlist in the U.S. army. He tried in three different states. Blind as he was in one eye, he was three times refused. Now, realizing he is the last of his line, Pachner resigns from his American dream, resolving to witness his truth in paint. Upon hearing that Juliana Force — founder of The Whitney — is dying of cancer and has put her house in Woodstock up for sale, Bill moves swiftly to purchase it. Now, 73 years later he’s in this same house. The irony of the Pachners settling in an art colony layered with “genteel” anti-semitism is nothing less than tragi-comedic.

Near the beginning of what will prove to be a four hour conversation on what he will eventually admit to be his 98th birthday, Bill Pachner informs me, “There were two painters here in Woodstock who I respected…Bud Plate — who died so young…just starting, really. And Phil Guston who left me his paints, brushes, canvas and paper — the very paper on which much of the work we discuss today was painted…”

“Why?” I ask.

“He never mentioned a word of this…When I visited his studio his paintings were always turned to the wall. I don’t want to discuss Phil Guston’s problems, I have enough of my own — he was a true friend, nonetheless. The facts are, after his death his wife Musa called and said that Phil had instructed her I was to have these things. You’ll have to look at my work to decide for yourself as to why…”

With the trappings of a success sufficient to maintain himself and his family put away in boxes he has neither the strength nor interest to retrieve, we can only look briefly on the main body of Pachner’s work. His first one-man show was hung in 1948 at the Weyhe Gallery in Manhattan. Inside of the next ten years small museums began to collect him, bigger galleries to represent him. Typical of this period is a painting called “The Truck,” which depicts a load of prisoners on their way to being gassed and burned. It traveled across America in a solo exhibition sponsored by the American Federation of Arts, before selling at the Ringling Museum in Florida circa ‘54. Bill remembers the painting as “honest and arduous,” one of many transitional works bearing him from the illustrative to the true. “Sentimental, but passionate. Of course — without passion there is nothing.” Through the afternoon Pachner will rail against many who came to Woodstock to create “decorative, empty-headed, hopelessly derivative paintings devoid of anything deeply felt…devoid of life itself.” Finally, with a hint of forgiveness he despairs, “But the rarest thing in the world is to find a singular painter.”

“As for me — I was criticized for not having a style — but my exact intention was to somehow avoid such a thing. With a style you go to work with a set of tricks of up your sleeve — exactly as I did as an illustrator — but once in Woodstock I was done with all that. Never again would I touch a commissioned work…When I painted the cover for Collier’s when FDR was re-elected to his fourth and final term, I was sent a thousand dollars. Such was my duty, my pleasure and my privilege. But with the news of the extermination of my family all such made-to-order stuff became meaningless…that life I’d worked so hard for…blew away like ashes.”

Three walls of Pachner’s living room teem with paintings he can no longer see — highly colorful works, abstracts and semi-abstracts all produced prior to 1981. He sold one such painting to The Whitney, won prizes including a Guggenheim, and for many winters became a much-loved teacher of art in Tampa, Florida. Pachner tells me his modernism is not Paris-based and does not spring from Cubism, that it is subtly but ineffably middle-European, which in turn is imbued with sensibilities traceable to the Northern Masters. Be that as it may, there is nothing here which — to my eye — urgently demands rediscovery.

In 1980 Bill Pachner had a studio finished in Tampa. He and his wife (their two children grown) returned to Woodstock for the summer. His first friends here — Eugene Speicher, Manuel Komroff, Walter Plate — were, by now, long dead. His friend and neighbor Yasuo Kuniyoshi had, in Pachner’s estimation, “lost his fire.” And Guston, who arrived simultaneous to Pachner in ‘45 at age 32, with little but fine reviews for his WPA murals, had already experienced tremendous fame and then scuttled this success by abandoning the Abstract Expressionism bearing it. Guston, who infamously re-embraced realism via cartoon, would himself be dead before 1980 was out. Outside of this group Bill Pachner was known locally as an abstract painter who took himself far too seriously, whose work started out morbid — and when it finally moved out of the Death Camp — could never again make up its mind.

In ‘81 the routine retina repair failed, with further operations proving futile. What the surgeon first told him at five years old, new surgeons were telling him at 66: “your life as an artist is over.” Pachner, unable to accept this simple fact, descended to the depths, his “colorful” life now a constant night. Yet a need to make paintings overrode reality and, some might say, sanity was briefly forfeit. The cruel absurdity being (as we shall see) and for whatever the reason, Bill Pachner becomes conduit of a profundity he is powerless to express. Quixotically, almost pathetically, he refuses to give in until, once again, a perverse, tenacious luck provided its rescue.

Students from Paul Green’s Rock Academy (here rehearsing for Pink Floyd’s The Wall, as performed last weekend) will be on the bill for the Concerts on the Green.

Miss the Rock Academy take on Pink Floyd’s The Wall up at the Byrdcliffe Barn last weekend? Needing to hear some hot music outdoors to completely shake the winter’s cobwebs, and the past week’s rainy hangover, once and for all?

The 8th season of the free Woodstock Concerts on the Green, curated and engineeed by the Woodstock Music Shop’s Jeff Harrigfeld, who also records everything he presents, starts up this Saturday, May 25 with a 1 p.m.-6 p.m. line-up that starts with those talented and fired-up students from the new Paul Green Rock Academy (who go on to perform the best of Zep in Bearsville next weekend), the booty shakin’ bluegrass group Two Dollar Goat, Sin City playing “cosmic American music,” world musicians Passero; the Hamilton Hill Robotic Steel Band from Schenectady, classic rock and blues from the Ronnie Bait Band and up-and-comers Two Dark Birds closing out what promises to be a truly great bill.

“The concerts have developed into a tradition by building community, promoting business and most importantly, giving local musicians a chance to share their music with locals and visitors,” noted Harrigfeld of the Village Green events he’ll be putting on for the town every other week on June 8, June 29, July 6, July 27, August 10, August 31 and September 7 featuring talented musicians from all over the Hudson Valley.

In addition to those young kids from the Paul Green Rock Academy — one of the sponsors of the concerts this year, alongside the Woodstock Chamber of Commerce & Arts, Radio Woodstock, Chronogram, Mid-Hudson Valley Federal Credit Union, Markertek, Photosensualis, Woodstock Apothecary and the Woodstock Music Shop — some of the musicians expected to play this summer include the likes of Catskill-based instrument inventor Brian Dewan, folksters Mike & Ruthy, Dharma Bums, Eric Erickson, dubster Ras T. Asheber, young Noel Fletcher, quiet legend George Quinn, the Rev. Thunderbear Traveling Road Show, Kris Garnier & friends, and dozens more.

According to Harrigfeld, a free compilation CD of the 2012 Woodstock Concerts on the Green performances that he’s made will be handed out to concert goers while supplies last.

It’s true Woodstock fun, in classic rock and roll style (with quite a few truly contemporary touches, as befits the changes the entire region’s been going through of late).

For a full schedule and further information, including bad weather updates, visit www.woodstockchamber.com or look for Woodstock Concerts on the Green on Facebook.

Then again, you can also just find Harrigfeld at the Woodstock Music Shop, alongside his wife Jenn, at 6 Rock City Rd, call 679-3224, or e-mail concertsonthegreen@gmail.com.