(Photo by Dion Ogust)

Manuel Bromberg needed a cliff. It would be a grand sculpture.

It was the mid-1960s and the artist, a professor of painting at SUNY New Paltz, had just been awarded a grant for Distinguished Research, he remembers to be about $14,000.

“So I applied to do this, a combination of a sculptural thing based on strata and architecture, some bullshit, y’know just words…and I get it,” says the 98-year-old artist from his Woodstock home. “They give out four of them. Wow, I’ve got this thing, and now I’ve got to do it.”

Ideas kept striking him, environmental issues, notions of art’s relationship to nature, and he kept thinking about a wall mural that he had done while teaching at North Carolina State University College of Design (where he collaborated with Buckminster Fuller…) a 10×40 foot piece constructed of colored plaster abstractions in strata layers.

“You don’t suddenly get up in the morning and go to a cliff,” he says. “It’s another way of seeing a landscape. It’s a continuity, not just a gimmick.

Manuel Bromberg, Winged Victory. Fiberglass, polyester resin, wax, marble dust, from his solo show opening at the Kleinert Saturday, May 2.

“So, I’m going to do a cliff…where am I going to do it? You have to bring in a crew. You can’t be on the thruway and get your ass knocked off it…and I’m told about riverbeds somewhere. I go to all these places, drive miles and miles and I’m looking at them all, looking at caves…trying to find a cliff that will allow me to park trucks, keep the workers safe. Finally driving down 23A toward Catskill, I see a cliff set in off the road. But there is a private road into it and there’s sort of a tank there. It’s owned by a plumber, David Smith, and its private, it’s almost like a stage set, it’s a beautiful site. It settled a huge problem…now I can come down 23A, turn into this private road that there’s my cliff, set in off the road. I ask him if I can do this cliff and he says of course.”

And thus began an enduring portion of a career for this artist who had already been acclaimed for his WPA post office murals in the 1930s; won a Legion of Merit award for creating an extraordinary graphic record of World War II, created from photos he took in the European Theater that themselves are remarkable; was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in Creative Painting, and held various posts to colleges and universities.

Some of these natural pieces are now included in a solo exhibition at the Byrdcliffe Guild’s Kleinert/James Center for the Arts, Manuel Bromberg: Cliff Sculptures, which presents, according to the Guild, “a focused scope of the artist’s fiberglass cliffs produced between 1968 and 2010, examining his innovative idea of reimagining the scale and weight of rock formations in nature.” The show, curated by Portia Munson and Jared Handelsman, will open with an Artist’s Talk with the near-centenarian at 3 p.m. Saturday, May 2, followed by an Opening Reception, 4 p.m.-6 p.m. at Kleinert/James, 34 Tinker Street in Woodstock.

The Guild tells us that Bromberg “is an original participant in what has come to be known as the Woodstock Art Colony, the term used to describe artists who, working in a combination of realist American Regionalism and/or European-based abstraction, settled in Woodstock in the wake of the establishment of the Byrdcliffe Art Colony, the Maverick Colony, and the summer school of the Art Students’ League.”

Most of the rest are long departed. The lineage stretches back to the early 20th Century and includes names like Fortess, Cramer, Chavez, Bellows; Bolton Brown, Carlson, Dasburg, de Diego, Fenton, Kuniyoshi, Malkine, Linden, Pike, Ruellan, Winslow…and on and on…

“I’m probably the last remaining person of an era…Jane (Dow Bromberg, his beloved wife, a fine artist, who passed away in 2008) was very popular and was given the town award and loved by all the women and started many of the things we take for granted. We had many, many friends, but they’re all gone now. The last one that was close to me was Sara Mulligan, the actress, Jim Mulligan’s wife. I used to take her out to lunch and we’d talk, always the actress, with her hair and makeup…”

He talks of his introduction to Woodstock around 1940.

“This one guy, Arnold Blanch, and Doris Lee, they’re living on the Maverick and I’m doing this mural competition that I won, a Post Office mural of Cowboys, six feet by 12 feet [in Colorado], and they’re knocked out by it, and I’m totally innocent that they’re knocked out by it. They make Juliana Force, the director of the Whitney Museum, who lived here, too, come and see it, and I’m getting press that I never thought of or knew about.

“Arnold asked me if I would come to live in Woodstock. After I finished that mural and another, that’s how I got here. Twelve hundred bucks I got for it, that was a lot of money. I came to New York City, stayed for a short time on Bank Street. Then I went to Woodstock and I lived in a shack on the Maverick Road…not a house, a shack in the woods. With the wind blowing through it, no insulation. I was so cold there that I got married.

“I married this beautiful girl that had come to Colorado…this is her work up here [he points to a long wall filled with beautiful paintings and drawings]. So we got married by a justice of the peace, Shultis, another Shultis. When I proposed it was on the sixth of December. On the seventh, it was Pearl Harbor. We didn’t get married until the 25th of December. On the following April 15, I’m in Saugerties getting inducted. We were living on the Riseley farm in a little house, no water, no heat, $5 a month. Lucille Blanch drove Jane to Saugerties so she could say goodbye to me. And that was it. So I’m gone from Woodstock until the war ends. Jane went back to her mother, moved to Florida.”

Jane was pregnant when Manuel went into the army. “So I’ve got a three and a half year old daughter…when I came home.”

He began his teaching career in North Carolina, won the Guggenheim award; they spent some time in Virginia and a year and a half in Europe.

The reading for the remarkable new collection of essays, Every Father’s Daughter: 24 Writers Remember Their Fathers — which takes place at least in part at 4 p.m. Saturday, May 23 at Woodstock’s Golden Notebook — will be an historic occasion according the book’s Kingston-based publisher.

“Anthologies like this are one of the most difficult kind of books to publicize,” said Bruce McPherson of McPherson & Company, which has become recognized as one of the nation’s top small publishing houses since winning the national Book Award several years back. “You can’t get all the authors together for a book launch…”

McPherson said he tried a soft launch at the recent Associated Authors Writing Conference in Minneapolis, where quite a few of his two dozen were in attendance. But then he got a cool idea.

“We asked our authors who could be available this Saturday at an independent book store of their choice. We contacted the bookstores,” McPherson said. “We’ll be holding simultaneous readings from 4 p.m.-6 p.m. in eight different locations.”

Continuing, he added that the Golden Notebook event featuring psychologist/author Nancy Jainchill will be moderated by the anthology’s editor, Margaret McMullan, via Skype out of Indianapolis, and will be held simultaneous with other readings from the likes of California, Boston, Louisville, Kentucky, and Ann Arbor, Michigan. Following an hour dedicated to the local, each event will spend its second hour in a Q & A with audiences able to engage authors across the country.

As for the local event, where McPherson himself will be, he added that one of the joys involved in publishing Every Father’s Daughter came in the chance to finally meet Jainchill, who he’d been reading for some time. “When we got her photograph in I recognized her,” he added.

Jainchill’s essay in the new book, “Sol’s Exodus,” is a soft-spoken stunner about the ways in which we don’t know those close to us, and can get lost in our own lives for decades. It’s about an only child and an immigrant father of complex birth, trying to get along. And not for years. And lessons learned.

It’s one of 24 highlights in an engaged and engaging collection that mixes original pieces with excerpts from published memoirs, and includes the writing of such contemporary greats as Jane Smiley, Alexandra Styron, Bobby Ann Mason, Joyce Maynard, Jane Anne Phillips, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Alice Munro.

“After my father died, I couldn’t read or write, perhaps because, in the end, my father was unable to read or write. I didn’t know it then, but I was looking for a collection of intensely personal essays, written by great women writers telling me about their fathers and how they came to know their fathers, a collection which might help me make some kind of sense of my own very close relationship with my father. I wanted to know from women, replacement sisters, if they had similar relationships with their fathers as I had with mine. Or, if their relationships were altogether different, I wanted to know how exactly these relationships were different,” writes McMullan in her introduction, as eloquent as this who’s who of great women’s writing — and all writing — these days. “Eventually, I contacted the authors I loved and admired — some of them friends, some of them friends of my father’s. I never wanted this to feel like an assignment, but I suppose it was. I simply asked these women to tell me about their fathers. They took it from there.”

Nancy Jainchill reads from her portion of Every Father’s Daughter: 24 Writers Remember Their Fathers 4 p.m.-6 p.m., alongside Skyped readings from seven other bookstores across the nation, at Golden Notebook, 29 Tinker Street in Woodstock Saturday, May 23. The event is free and open to the public. For further information call 679-8000 or see www.goldennotebook.com.

Chris Seubert, new WSA director. (photo by Dion Ogust)

Big changes are again underway in the Woodstock cultural scene.

First came Nancy Campbell’s announcement that she was stepping down from the directorship of the Woodstock School of Art next week after five years in the position.

Chris Seubert, a former WSA student and current school of art instructor, as well as an adjunct professor at SUNY Ulster, will be stepping in to fill the position.

Then, on Monday, May 18, Center for Photography at Woodstock executive director Ariel Shanberg announced his departure, effective at year’s end.

At the 47-year-old Woodstock School of Art, which took over the former home of the Arts Students League in the late 1970s, Campbell said  she was moving on to concentrate on her painting, which was what first brought her to WSA to take classes in the early 1980s.

“It has been a colorful journey full of learning and inspiration,” she said in a press release last week. “Thanks to some pretty incredible people, it’s been a great five and a half years for me at the WSA. I work with a Board of Directors who are united in their love of the school, who make thoughtful decisions, who have been wonderfully supportive, and whom I now count as friends…The staff members of the Woodstock School of Art are my heroes. Starting with Pam, then Mimi, Eric, Mandara and Kim our bookkeeper, each knows his or her job inside and out. They’re like the little engine that can and does keep the school functioning and in good condition! They’re motivated, independent, dependable, and never say no.”

Campbell, who will still serve on the organization’s board, noted that, “the WSA will remain in very good hands when Chris Seubert takes the helm as ED. Chris was instrumental in getting our cooperative program with SUNY Ulster off to a great start in 2012; he was named one of the Adjunct Professors of the Year for the entire SUNY system. Chris is smart, funny, easy to talk to and has some great ideas for the WSA.  You’ll like him!”

The leaving of Shanberg, who has been in his position for a dozen years since the sudden stepping down of Colleen and Kathleen Kenyon, came only weeks after most of the CPW staff left their positions for a variety of reasons, and just as new staff was being hired and starting work running the 39-year old institution’s various programs, which kick into high gear next month.

“CPW is doing well and poised for significant progress in the coming years,” Shanberg said in a press release this week. “I took CPW’s mission to heart during my 12 years as Executive Director, while also responding to tremendous changes in the field of photography. I’m proud to have led such a responsive arts organization, and I’m grateful to the thousands of artists, volunteers, and supporters that have helped enable CPW to grow. We have begun feasibility planning to enhance this building, fully aware of its place in Woodstock history. CPW also has a strategic plan, energetic new staff members, and a strong Board in place to ensure its future.”

Privately, Shanberg said that he was planning to get married in November and looking to move from Woodstock to his fiancee’s home in Sullivan County before then.

“I’m moving on to new adventures,” he said. “I see this as a healthy opportunity.”

Speaking as head of the board at CPW, Center founder Howard Greenberg, a New York gallerist now, wrote that “over the past twelve years Ariel has overseen CPW through dramatic changes in the field and has done an extraordinary job. His curating has helped set trends and championed important voices in photography, and I’m excited to see what’s next for him.”

The press release announcing Shanberg’s resignation noted that, “The new director will have at least a full year to prepare for CPW’s 40th anniversary in 2017.” It went on to note Shanberg’s accomplishments as having included the initiation of CPW’s Digital Kitchen, a digital learning, processing and printing space, the expansion of its Woodstock Artist-in-Residency program, increased visibility doing portfolio reviews around the world, and the Center winning a recent Ulster County Executive Arts Award for “best arts organization.”

As for recent staff resignations, Shanberg said that, “The truth is we’ve had a lot of people come on in crunch times, and leaving for a number of personal reasons.” He went on to note the difficulties of hiring at low wages below the area’s cost of living thresholds.

“We started discussion about [Shanberg’s] departure some time ago, but then it all came to a decision point in the last few weeks,” said CPW board treasurer Jed Root, a noted photo industry agent in the city. “I think overall we are facing challenges regarding fundraising and budgeting. We’ve seen the staff that we have get younger and younger. We need to raise more funds to avoid that.”

Shanberg called the decision “bittersweet.” He added that he’s leaving this week for a long planned motorcycle trip across the country. But then he’ll be back at work through the coming months.

Songwriter Dave Kearney and 86-year-old Carlo Travaglia working on a song. (photo by Thomas Colello)

“We all need meaning and purpose, and at the end of life, we need to feel like our life meant something, that it was worthwhile. If you can tell your story in a way that other people enjoy and will listen to, it’s an amazing boost for your sense of worth.” Geriatric physician Lewis Mehl-Madrona was describing the philosophy behind SageArts, which brings together musicians and elders to collaborate on songwriting that expresses the essence of each elder’s life experience.

SageArts was launched last spring by organizational consultant Colette Ruoff of Rosendale, who was inspired by Lifesongs, a project started by two musicians in Santa Fe. Five Hudson Valley singer-songwriters received training from the Lifesongs founders and have been working with elders in the local community. The resulting songs will be performed at a benefit concert at Marbletown Community Center in Stone Ridge on Sunday, May 31, from 4 p.m. to 7 p.m.

Because one of the goals of SageArts is to connect youth with seniors, young people from the Hudson Valley performance troupe Vanaver Caravan will be singing the songs back to the elders. Also performing will be Elizabeth Clark-Jerez, Elly Wininger, Dave Kearney, Bonnie Meadow, and Jim Metzner who have developed songs about the lives of elders Janet Fulmer, Rosalind Stark, Pauline Delson, Carlo Travaglia, and Richard Geldard. They will be joined by guest artists Peter Wetzler, Stephen Johnson, Eleni Reyes, Karen Levine and Elena Erber of Caprice Rouge, Vicki Russell, Sara Perrotta, Heather Masse, Sarah Kramer-Harrison, and the band Mamalama.

The songwriting process created a deep bond between 86-year-old Carlo Travaglia and musician Dave Kearney, who discovered common ground in their difficult relationships with their fathers. “I thought I would just collect information and write a song about him,” said Kearney, who visited Travaglia at his house weekly over the course of three months. “Instead, we shared down to the bone the emotions of our life stories. I made a friend in Carlo I’m sure I will have the rest of my life.”

Travaglia, who was 16 when his father died, told Kearney about “things he’d needed to say for years and couldn’t find the right person to say them to,” explained the musician. “And I talked about unresolved things I hadn’t said to my dad. It’s going to be an emotional moment for me to do this song onstage.”

Kearney came up with the idea of framing the song as a dream sequence. “Carlo’s father comes to him in a dream. Just like in real life, his father doesn’t say much. I asked Carlo, ‘What would you say to him if you had chance to talk to him and know he’s hearing you?’” When Kearney played the song for the first time, Carlo and his wife were in tears. “Then I knew I had done my job.”

Travaglia explained that the process “opened up perceptions of what I had been through and how I had managed to deal with this stuff. It was cathartic. It reenergized me. As a result, I’m starting to write a memoir.” He is also considering joining the advisory board of SageArts to help bring the program into nursing homes, where he feels the work could be vital. “When people go into nursing homes, they close down. There’s still a lot of life in these people, we just have to find it, to reignite their hope.”

Ruoff, SageArts’ founder and president of the board, has found a nursing home, Thompson House in Rhinebeck, where the staff is eager to embrace the process, but the structure of the system is getting in the way. The types of grants available to a nursing home require “the most bang for the buck,” said Ruoff. “Grants tend to work with large numbers of people and touch them superficially. We’re going deep and narrow with a small number of people and sharing it widely. We believe there’s an enormous ripple effect through the community.” That effect includes changing public perceptions of elders and giving staff at facilities a new respect for their clients. Mehl-Medrona has seen family members gain more appreciation for their elderly relatives after attending a concert.

For now, Ruoff is contemplating going into low-income senior housing projects. “We want to write songs with people of different ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds than the ones we’ve worked with so far, who are mostly upper-middle-class, white, and highly educated. But all voices of elders of the community matter, and people have different life experiences to bring.”

Francesca Ortolano hopes to bring the work into Kingston’s Governor Clinton Apartments and  Alexander Yosman Towers, where she manages programs for the residents, all low-income seniors. She remarked, “I’m so excited about what Colette is doing. Our elders come with rich lives and histories and have a lot to offer in terms of the stories to tell and notches in their belt. And it’s wonderful for them to know people want to hear their stories.”

Through the concert, Ruoff is hoping to raise money to pay the musicians and start a pilot program at the residences managed by Ortolano. “These songwriters have given so much to this project on a volunteer basis,” said Ruoff. “It’s time now to turn around and employ them. We received a generous donation from Markertek, but it’s been challenging. We’re a startup and you need a certain number of years of history before you can go to foundations.”

When she brought the elders together for a conversation, Ruoff learned that the project has catalyzed changes in their lives. Richard Geldard has gone back to teaching philosophy after 15 years of retirement. Pauline Delson, 99, drew on her dance background to choreograph a folk dance for the May 31 concert. Rosalind Stark, 95, has returned to playing the piano. “We’re building a community of elders who will be meeting monthly,” said Ruoff. “We’re talking about other things we can do, making films, unleashing the voices of elders. A lot is bubbling up through this process.”

Mehl-Medrona observed, “We live in a culture of quickness, and a song is a nice unit of attention that even young people can manage. This work is a marvelous exercise in distilling what was essential about yourself and communicating it to other people. Also, it’s really good for your brain. Stuff like this slows the rate of decline and can improve cognitive function. If you can delay progress to a nursing home by one month you can save millions of dollars. We need to be looking in these directions.”

SageArts will present a benefit concert on Sunday, May 31, 4-7 p.m., at Marbletown Community Center, 3564 Main Street in Stone Ridge. Tickets are $20, and $10 for elders and children. For more information on SageArts, or to consider joining the advisory board, see http://www.sagearts.org.

(Photo by Dion Ogust)

During my first season reviewing Maverick Concerts, in the mid-1970s, I was surprised and gratified by the quality of the series. However, one concert turned out to be a serious disappointment. It was performed by the venerable Curtis Quartet, which had been in existence for decades. As I recall, at the time most of the players were original members of the ensemble, which was in residence at the Curtis School of Music. They must have been tired of what they were doing, because the whole performance was flat and lifeless. At the time I wrote that if you had fed the music into an oscilloscope you would probably have seen a flat line.

At the beginning of the following season, I was introduced to Leo Bernache, the music director of the series. “I’ve been wanting to meet you,” he said enthusiastically. “I wanted to thank you for that review you wrote of the Curtis Quartet.” “Thank me?” I replied, incredulous. Bernache then explained to me that he had wanted to stop inviting the Curtis Quartet for several seasons but one board member had insisted adamantly that they be retained. With my review as backup, he was finally able to convince the board that he could stop inviting the ensemble. I’ve never told this story in public before.

The afternoon the great Borodin Trio made its Maverick debut was one of the hottest I’d ever experienced. I remember that the temperature was close to 100 degrees, the humidity very high. As the violinist Rostislav Dubinsky played the last note of the first half of the concert, his violin came apart. The tailpiece, which holds the strings taut, came loose. Apparently the glue that kept it in place had melted. After an unusually long intermission, the concert resumed, with Dubinsky using a violin lent him by a member of the audience, who just happened to have it in his car. The Borodin Trio never returned to Maverick. I always wondered whether that incident had been the cause.

On another very hot summer day, Yehudi Wyner accompanied several of his colleagues from Yale University for a chamber music program. Wyner, who is best known as a composer (and is still active, at 86) was a formidable pianist and enjoyed playing chamber music. The concert ended with Brahms’s First Piano Quartet, a typically difficult piece of Brahms with a particularly demanding finale, which should be taken as fast as possible while still maintaining clarity. Wyner’s tempo was amazingly fast, and he played with all the clarity and energy you could possibly want to hear. After the concert, I asked him how he could play like that in such heat. “I love it,” he said. “The hotter it is, the better I play.”

Shortly afterwards, I was speaking to my uncle Leonard Felberg, a violinist who had gone to Yale with Wyner and knew him. “It’s true,” said Lenny. “I remember when we were off from school we would go to the Wyners’ apartment in Manhattan to play chamber music. In the middle of summer he would keep the windows closed. The hotter it got the better he liked it.”

Maverick Concerts is proud of the distinction of having been the locale of the world premiere of John Cage’s famous/notorious 4’33” in which a pianist sits at the keyboard and plays nothing, inviting the audience to concentrate on the ambient sounds surrounding them. I consider this event a major step in the development of “conceptual” art, which I detest, but it was still an Event and I can understand why Maverick commemorates it.

Several seasons ago pianist Pedja Muzijevic “played” 4’33” as part of a concert. I noticed that he did not look at his watch, and that he did not lower and raise the keyboard cover twice to divide the “music” into “movements.” After the concert, I ran into Alex Ross, the classical music critic for The New Yorker, whom I consider one of the most erudite and discerning of all writers on music. I mentioned these apparent failures of interpretation to Alex, who was amused. Several days later he sent me an email. He had learned that the division into “movements” was an invention of the pianist David Tudor, who “played” the premiere, and it is not in Cage’s score. He also spoke with Muzijevic, who had decided that looking at his watch would distract the audience so he decided to approximate the time. And it turns out that, despite the title, Cage’s score does not specify that the silence has to last exactly four minutes and thirty-three seconds. It can last for any amount of time, and can be “played” by any instrument or combination of instruments. So much for my pedantry!

Another string quartet intimately involved in Maverick’s history was the Tokyo Quartet, which performed almost every year at Maverick during its entire career. The ensemble was wildly popular in its early days and its concerts always filled the hall, but I was not as fond of the group as most people. The quartet played splendidly, but for years I found its performances too “perfect,” extremely well executed but never very exciting.

One year the ensemble notified Maverick’s management that it was offering only an all-Bartók program for the summer. I heard reports that the board of directors was in a tizzy. They didn’t want to pass up a favorite ensemble, but the board thought Maverick’s audience was too conservative to come to an all-Bartók concert. The full house told all of us that the audience wasn’t so conservative after all.

Eventually, the first of the group’s Japanese members retired and was replaced by Peter Oundjian. He introduced a welcome element of imperfection to the ensemble, leading it in taking chances and playing with a wider range of expression. Although his tenure was ended by a hand injury in 1995 (he has since gone on to a highly successful conducting career), Oundjian brought about a permanent change in the Tokyo Quartet’s personality, much for the better in my opinion.

Maverick also enabled me to become familiar with the playing of the great Colorado Quartet, which I heard numerous times there and later at Bard College. I wound up publishing a series of recordings by this group on my own Parnassus label. Unfortunately it is now disbanded but its complete recording of the Beethoven String Quartets will keep its legacy alive. Two other ensembles I heard and loved at Maverick left almost no recordings. The Rogeri Trio (named for the maker of the violinist’s instrument) was one of the best piano trios I ever heard. It was founded in 1976 and played numerous concerts at Maverick, but its only recording I know is a Trio by Katherine Hoover which, years after it was made, also wound up on the Parnassus label. (There is now another ensemble of the same name.) The Aulos Wind Quintet brought us some of the best wind playing I ever heard, a breathtakingly accurate and impulsive ensemble. I know only one recording by this ensemble, works of Harbison and Rochberg. (Again, there is now another ensemble with the same name.)

The current schedule of two concerts during most summer weekends is a relatively recent innovation, dating from the Platt Administration. But many years ago, Leo Bernache tried a few Saturday evening concerts with young artists. Although I remember the concerts as worthwhile, they attracted only small audiences and were soon discontinued. The concert I remember best was a performance by a compelling soprano named Joy Simpson, who sang a widely varied program from Schubert to Spirituals. I also remember her accompanist, a small, wiry woman named Sylvia Olden Lee who played very well and who was the greatest virtuoso page turner I ever saw in action. You could barely see her hand flick out and the page would turn, and she didn’t miss one during the whole concert. We were especially lucky to hear Simpson, who died suddenly at the age of 40. She made one LP of Spirituals but apparently no other recordings.

One of my favorite memories from my decade at WDST is the afternoon I interviewed Leon Barzin. He was a legendary conductor and conducting teacher, then in his eighties and in town to lead a conducting workshop. Although born in Belgium, Barzin had been living in Woodstock in 1915. He told me and our listeners about the origins of the Maverick hall. He had not only played viola during the first concert season, he had helped build the hall, and he described driving nails. Remembering that interview helps connect me to the beginnings of the Maverick tradition, and thinking that someday a researcher may be reading these words for an article on the 200th anniversary.

Marlene Dietrich, New York City 1968, by Elliott Landy.

Before he captured Janis Joplin or Jimi Hendrix on stage, got to know Bob Dylan and then The Band when they played a Woody Guthrie tribute at Carnegie Hall in 1967, or even heard of Woodstock and some Aquarian Festival still more than a year off in the smoke-hazed future of the late 1960s, the photographer Elliott Landy was seeking out ways to support himself with his craft.

“In 1967 I had my first job in Denmark on a Danish feature film,” he says in anticipation of the upcoming launch event for his new book of pre-rock and roll images, “Opening Night,” at the Kleinert/James Arts Center this Saturday, July 4. “The Vietnam War was going on and I felt a pull to come back to the States and stop the war. My first thought was that I could go and shoot in Vietnam. My second thought was that I didn’t want to go and get shot at.”

Instead, Landy took to photographing the antiwar demonstrations of the time, which hadn’t yet pulled the nation’s full attention. He got a press pass from Westside News, and then became photo editor at Rat Underground News.

Soon enough Landy realized he needed a steadier stream of income and decided to use his press pass to get into celebrity press events and sell what he could. The result are what’s in Opening Night, a new limited edition book published by  Imperial Pictures LTD — 1960s images of Faye Dunaway, Dustin Hoffman, Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor at openings for their early hit films, Andy Warhol events, Marlene Dietrich after her one woman show. Big black and white images of the ermine-enshrouded, black tie and begowned stars of the day.

The book has an almost visceral sense of the works commenting on the celebrity culture Landy was out to capture.

“Now, in retrospect, I realize that who I am doesn’t let my camera lie,” he says. “I wasn’t aware of what the pictures were looking like at the time, but later the essence is what comes out from them.”

Each shot plays off an innate sense of tension between stars and their audiences, stars and their handlers. The world of the time feels surreal, as if putting on a face to look past the times they were taken in.

Landy says he felt everything was absurd in that world he briefly entered. But he was never sure whether his subjects felt the same way, although he recalls a time when Dustin Hoffman said as much. And you can see it in many of the eyes captured here.

“Many times the scene would be so crowded, all I could do was raise the camera over my head and click the shutter,” he adds. “But then you see what’s there — an eyeball at the edge of the frame; Richard Harris before a smiling crowd one second, and that same crowd’s attention moving on the next.”

Landy moved on from the celebrity shoots as soon as he found access to the rock and roll culture of the time, which felt like it was in the same world as antiwar demonstrations. It seemed to matter more. And the young photographer liked the people he came to shoot, eventually moving with Dylan and crew upstate, where he continued shooting the scene through the Woodstock Festival into 1970, 1971. After which he again stopped.

“Look how great this other way of being is…I was shooting to show what paradise looked like,” Landy recalls. “But that only lasted another 18 months before I lost interest. I found I didn’t like the business side of rock and roll, and how hard it was to get paid properly for what I was doing. I got less and less consideration from the bands and the record industry.”

The photographer notes how he started feeling raped by what he was doing, on the one hand, then estimating how much he could make on a shoot, on the other. So instead he just took pictures of his wife.

So why is all this coming together now?

“I’ve long wanted to combine these and the protest images, as I did in Woodstock Vision in 1994,” Landy says of his dream book as yet in need of a publisher. “To me, both are really important for setting the stage for what rock and roll became at that time. I’d call it Hollywood Peace.”

Landy was approached by Amy Hood and Jonathan Leder of Imperial Publishing, which had branded itself  interested in “showcasing the complex beauty of classic American iconography.”

“I did it because I love the work,” said Landy, who’s now working to complete a long-awaited 160 page book of all his photos of The Band, with memoirs. “They made it easy for me.”

The 60-page Opening Night will be available in a limited edition of 1000 copies. The release party for the book, complete with slide lecture, takes place 6 p.m.-7:30 p.m. Saturday, July 4  at the Kleinert/James Center for the Arts located at 36 Tinker Street in Woodstock.

“In retrospect, seeing how the culture has evolved over the past 50 years, the message of these photos is more relevant than ever — that we, as a society, pay more attention to physical glamour and fame than to wisdom,” Landy adds, in conclusion, reading from his own introduction to the new work. “There are relatively few hero philosophers and spiritual leaders in the popular culture. These images shed insight into the true nature of what we value and perhaps, becoming aware of this will help us change.”

Amen, Elliott.

James Cox and Mary Anna Goetz (photo by Dion Ogust)

James Cox and Mary Anna Goetz, married nearly 45 years now, are seated behind their Willow gallery talking about the 25 years they’ve been part of Woodstock and the new exhibit of works by Wilna Hervey and Nan Mason they’ll be opening this Friday, July 10. The couple’s been telling all about how they picked the place for Cox’s first gallery all his own, who helped them get settled, and the warm welcome they’ve felt from the local community from the get go.

Then the subject of memorable events within that 25 years comes up and the couple break into hooting laughter as they each try telling the tale of the she bear that lay siege to their home for an entire summer, starting while they were away on the Cape and ending, after an evening escapade wherein Jim had to beat back the bruin with a fireplace poker, with state Encon officers bringing in a trap to take the bear away.

“A few weeks later they called to say she was again headed our direction; they had a homing device on her by then,” Jim noted.

“We said it was up to them to keep her away from our kitchen,” Mary Anna added.

Goetz (originally from Oklahoma) and Cox (from Indiana) had met in college and eventually moved East to the New York metro area. The couple attended the 1969 Woodstock Festival from Newark, New Jersey, where he was working for Vista and she for the Urban League. But then Manhattan called; Cox became the legendary Grand Central Art Galleries’ second director while Goetz had two children and continued her painting career at the Arts Students League and Salmagundi Club.

“Then I wanted out of there,” Cox said. “I’d started dealing with Woodstock artists, and then my mother mentioned that she had a friend from South Bend who was Fritzi Striebel’s sister.”

Elizabeth “Fritzi” Striebel was wife to John Striebel, a well-known cartoonist who used to work his adopted home town into his Dixie Dugan comic strip as “Stockwood.” She suggested that the Coxes meet a friend of hers who knew the art scene at what was then the Woodstock Artists Association.

“I got there and was immediately told I was late by this tall white haired woman,” Cox recalled. “But then Aileen Cramer showed me all around town, introducing me to all the artists still alive then, and by the time I left I was really sold on the whole idea of moving to Woodstock.”

By May, Cox had taken what had been known for years as the red barn (and later Hawthorne Gallery) on Elwyn Lane. The couple bought a house on Mill Hill Road next to the lumber yard so he could try out his dream of walking to work.

“Two kids, two cats and a dog,” he recalled. “It was a great time for the arts in Woodstock. Tom Fletcher opened around then, and Elena Zang. Before long the Guild was building the Kleinert/James Arts Center and the artists association was working on the Towbin wing.”

Goetz recalled that the other galleries in town included Bob Angeloch’s Paradox Gallery, and Anne Leonard on Tinker Street. The Rudolph Gallery, where Bread Alone is now, had just closed. Woodstock Framing Gallery was showing more and more contemporary art, as was Mike Densen’s Vasco Pini, where Lotus now is on Rock City Road. The Landau was still the Village Pub, full of enough cigarette smoke that no one needed to actually light up inside; the Center for Photography at Woodstock was still upstairs from the Tinker Street Cafe.

“It’s cool, as we look back, to see how so much that was started then has survived and actually grown stronger,” Cox added. “Nick Buhalis had just left the school of art but suddenly there were all these new teachers there.”

The new James Cox Gallery opened in June, 1990, with an exhibit of classic Woodstock artists Cox assembled including George Bellows at the height of his new auction popularity. He called it “The New Era” and rented buses to tour his old New York clientele around town, including the Artist’s Cemetery.

Goetz remembers stuffing hand-printed invitations all night, and the huge lawn party that Ann Blanch, the painter Arnold Blanch’s final wife, threw for the couple to introduce them to everyone still alive from the town’s glory days.

“We had big shows almost every month, and plenty of auctions,” Cox recalls of that first gallery in town where he showed Leslie Bender, Richard Segelman, Ernest Frazier, Christie Scheele and other new talents he was finding and championing around the region. “Then I started getting whole estates such as Carl Eric Lindin and Tomas Pening. We held events with Family, and then with the Woodstock Arts Board.”

All along, though, Cox and Goetz — like so many Woodstockers in their first decade in town — were still looking for a “more perfect” spot where they could combine gallery and studio, plus their home. Eventually, after going on and off the market several times, they found their current compound off Route 212 in Willow. After two years converting an old barn into a gallery and studio, plus renovations to the main house and outbuildings, they moved in and opened the new James Cox Gallery in 1996.

So what were the couple’s big highlights over all these years?

Cox mentions a big party thrown at the late Lee Mills’ mansion on Ohayo Mountain in tandem with Alice Lewis and the Woodstock Arts Board, where the then-millionaire premiered the collection of classic Woodstock art he’d put together, and had guest Geoffrey Holder emcee the evening of cocktails and hors d’oeuvres. Then there were the storytelling evenings he put together around the pizza oven he had built out back of his gallery, one SRO with the great Malachy McCourt holding everyone spellbound.

“My daughter’s wedding was a delight; finding the remarkable work of Joseph Garlock in an old wood shed; this one huge Doris Lee auction we had; and all the friends who moved up here after we did,” he recalled. “Then there was my handling the world-wide publicity and marketing of the Leonardo Horse, a 24-foot high bronze horse, a gift to the Italian people from America, that now resides in Milan. It was featured twice on the front page of the Sunday New York Times, and when we hosted the three day unveiling in Beacon 80,000 people came.”

Goetz smiles and goes back to that bear, and seeing her husband battle her away from a ripped-off plywood window cover with a measly piece of shaped iron.

“I love that people are still calling us green horns,” she adds, while also noting her delight teaching courses at the Woodstock School of Art for decades now. And all the friends the couple have made over what is now decades.

“As for the things that most made us feel at home in Woodstock, I would have to point to those ‘universals’ like seeing your kids perform in local school productions, participating in Woodstock’s Halloween parade, and attending those incredible Woodstock funerals with their soaring rhetoric, group laughter, and plentiful warm hugs,” Cox added. “Being accepted into those inner circles of lifelong Woodstockers for parties, dinners and celebrations — getting to know Alf Evers, Eva van Rijn, Kit and Gordon Taylor, Alice Lewis, the Sweeneys. I guess it’s all just like any other small town, only cooler.”

To celebrate their 25th, James Cox and Mary Anna Goetz are not opening their latest exhibition this Friday, July 10 with a usual blast, but also planning a “huge” full moon garden party, like that thrown for them when they arrived in town a quarter century ago, at their home on July 31.

Look for your invites…just don’t expect them to be hand printed or stuffed into envelopes this time around.

Maria Whitcomb, Voice Fest intern. (photo by Violet Snow)

“We’re training a new generation, a new breed of artist,” said Maria Todaro, mezzo-soprano and executive director of the Phoenicia International Festival of the Voice. “They are equally balanced between the right and left side of the brain. They have the creativity and disconnect from reality that you need as an artist, and the super-Cartesianism and rationale that you need to be organized.”

As the festival brings its sixth year of world-class vocal music to Phoenicia, from July 29 to August 2, participants will include youngsters educated by the Catskills Academy for Performing Arts (CAPA), a year-round series of community programs sponsored by the festival. Eight CAPA students and several other interns will be performing and helping to run the festival, with chances to meet opera star Frederica von Stade, jazz vocalist Sheila Jordan, Emmy-nominated actor and Broadway singer Ron Raines, an American Idol finalist, a former Miss America, and a multitude of other professional musicians. This year’s offerings revolve around the theme of American music, with opera (Carlisle Floyd’s Of Mice and Men, Italian-American Gian Carlo Menotti’s The Medium), musical comedy (Stephen Sondheim’s A Little Night Music), gospel, barbershop, theater, Native American music, and other genres.

At the festival office on a Monday morning, two weeks before opening day, 20-year-old intern Maria Whitcomb recalled her first year working with the festival in 2013. “I was writing a patron newsletter and program notes, and once the festival started, we were in charge of everything on stage. We helped rig lights and sound. We put up music stands and chairs, sometimes really fast.” She also performed as a non-singing extra in Rigoletto, wearing a giant prom dress and unexpectedly facing an improvised dip and kiss from tenor Barry Banks as the rakish Duke of Mantua. “I just had to roll with it,” she said. “It taught me a lot about what it takes to be a performer.”

Whitcomb, a Kingston High School graduate, is now a vocal performance major at Syracuse University, where she also studies in the first music industry program established at a U.S. college. This year, while at school, she has continued to write newsletters for the festival, as well as doing market research. One of her final projects was a 50-page marketing plan describing how the festival could work with various media outlets. On July 31, she’ll be one of the students in a sample master class, demonstrating to a festival audience how an instructor prepares singers for a concert.

Participants in the CAPA apprenticeship program receive vocal coaching and training in business skills that prepare them to work in the real world. One CAPA student, Lily Arbisser of Woodstock, who worked on supertitles for the Voicefest, now has a job doing supertitles at the Met. She will sing in the July 31 festival production of The Medium. Another young Woodstocker, Alexandra Bailey, will play the daughter of Dylan Thomas in the August 1 world premiere workshop performance of Do Not Go Gentle by Robert Manno.

Other CAPA youth programs include a children’s choir that meets weekly in Phoenicia and a five-day intensive music camp scheduled for the week before the festival. Organizer Justin Kolb, a classical pianist and festival board member, is recruiting a total of 20 kids, aged seven to 12, to study vocal music July 20 to July 24 at the Emerson Resort in Mount Pleasant. The program costs $185, with five slots available for scholarship students. For information or to register, contact Kolb at 845-486-3588 or j.kolb@phoeniciavoicefest.com.

While educating young people, the festival also benefits from their labor, paying apprentices a small stipend to help out with a variety of administrative tasks. Interns are key to a show that runs on a bare-bones budget, luring stars to enjoy the mountain air and camaraderie, while charging only $25 a ticket for most performances. A surprise benefit of having enthusiastic young interns, said Todaro, in her French-accented English, is the effect on seasoned performers. “The kids who are working with them are like puppies on flame — they’re so excited, and it reminds the established artists why they started. They arrive thinking, ‘Here I am in the sticks, doing a favor,’ and then we see them transform.”

The Phoenicia International Festival of the Voice will take place Wednesday, July 29, through Sunday, August 2, with performances at the Parish Field and other locations around Phoenicia. For details and tickets, see http://www.phoeniciavoicefest.org.

Hervey White by Wang Jida, study for a life size bronze. (photo by Dion Ogust)

The great tragic sculptor John Flannagan, three of whose rarely seen works are serving as centerpieces of the ambitious Music in the Woods: One Hundred Years of Maverick Concerts pair of exhibitions opening with joint receptions in the Towbin Wing of the Woodstock Artists Association and Museum and Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild’s Kleinert/James Arts Center on Saturday, loved music from his orphaned childhood. As well as the wild opportunities Maverick founder and visionary Hervey White gave him.

“He belonged to no one and at the same time to whoever could catch him,” White said of the Maverick Horse, a concept he’d been playing with for well over a decade when he paid Flannagan 50 cents an hour to hew an 18 foot statue of the same name for placement in his Maverick Concert Hall.

He could have been speaking of Flannagan, who would go on from his work in West Hurley to productive stint in Ireland and suicide before he turned 50. But also the entire arts community White helped steer through theatrical pageants, wild anarchic money-and art-making schemes, and a music series that lasted on in that strangely solid concert hall to this very day.

Curated by Susana Torruella Leval, a part-time Woodstocker for 40 years, Metropolitan Museum board member and director emerita of New York’s Museum del Barrio, the combined exhibits brings together a wealth of historic and contemporary artistic works to mark the importance of music in Woodstock’s history of the past century, as well as bringing together three of the town’s top arts organizations just as they did with some regularity 100 years ago.

Back in those days before recorded music became ubiquitous, or jazz and pop music began its spread and seep beyond cities, chamber music was a key sign of cultured life. First at Onteora Park and other regional summer creative hotspots, then later at Ralph and Jane Whitehead’s home in the Byrdcliffe Colony, afternoon concerts became a must for visiting artists and their patrons. Not long after starting up his Maverick Arts Colony rival to Whitehead’s experiment, which had first brought him to town, White realized classical music could help him pay his bills. Which then led him to larger ideas for theatrical pageants, casts of hundreds and then thousands, and the entire Maverick Festival phenomenon (and later formula) for which he would eventually become legendary.

What comes through in the new exhibit are the ways in which all the arts intermingled in the early, creatively fecund years of the last century. Artists made sets, played music on the side, danced and acted. Musicians inspired writers. Clowns such as Chaplin, Keaton, Landon and Lloyd, as well as Woodstock’s own Wilna Hervey, befriended Thomas Mann and Pablo Picasso, Igor Stravinski and violinst Albert Einstein. And in Woodstock, everyone tried to capture Hervey White whatever way they could, like that Maverick Horse he long revered and captured several times in epic poems and other works.

What lasts, as well, is a sense of just what an art work White’s hand-built-by-many Concert Hall on the Maverick property is, and what a loss his quarry and later festival theater, all bark and forest-like roof over dirt floors, still is.

Through everything, the rougher Catskills quality that the Maverick brought to the Woodstock aesthetic shines through like a beacon for newer artists now drawn to the area for its potential as well as heritage.

Among the works on hand are painted and photographic portraits of Hervey White by Bolton Brown, Harry Gottlieb, Konrad Cramer, Peggy Bacon and others; portraits and vintage photos of the musicians who came to town, and often stayed, by Robert Chanler, Antonio Borone, George Bellows, and Konrad Cramer; quick sketches of musicians in performance by artists John Fenton, Andrée Ruellan, Julia Santos Solomon and others; drawings and prints, sculptures and paintings by Woodstock artists that keep capturing the changing yet unshifting essence of the town; and various images of the concert hall itself by a wide range of photographers from Cramer and Alfred Cohn to Howard Greenberg, Dion Ogust, and Noritaka Minami, recent recipient of funding from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, through the Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild, for capturing the forest temple to music now.

The materials in the exhibition are drawn from private collections in and around Woodstock, as well as from the town’s public collections and archives, Maverick Concerts, WAAM, the Alf Evers Archive of the Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild, the Woodstock Public Library, and the Historical Society of  Woodstock.

Music in the Woods: One Hundred Years of Maverick opens at both the Kleinert/James Center for the Arts and WAAM’s Towbin Wing with a grand reception 5 p.m.-7 p.m. Saturday, July 25, then stays on view through August. Curator Susana Torruella Leval will give a talk reflecting on the concept of the “Maverick spirit” at 2 p.m. Sunday, July 26 at WAAM.

Woodstock Artists Association and Museum is at 28 Tinker Street in Woodstock and the Kleinert/James Center for the Arts is at 34 Tinker Street. For further information, call 679-2940, 679-2079, or see either http://www.woodstockguild.org or http://www.woodstockart.org.

Shauna Kanter of VOICETheatre enjoys the remodeled space.

Photos by Dion Ogust

Audiences attending VOICETheatre performances of Our Country’s Good have been among the first to enjoy Woodstock’s newly air conditioned Byrdcliffe Theater, which was renovated this spring, thanks to private donations. The addition of heat, a/c, and insulation will enable companies to mount more shows at the historic venue, since it will be usable in three seasons instead of just the summer.

VOICETheatre’s founder and artistic director, Shauna Kanter, remarked, “This change is big for us.” Since it was recently pushed out of its digs in New York City, where cutting-edge theater is increasingly difficult to produce, the company is making Byrdcliffe its base.

Our Country’s Good, written by Timberlake Wertenbaker and directed by Kanter, is based on a Thomas Keneally novel about a play performed by prisoners in one of the first penal colonies in Australia. The final performances are Thursday, July 23, through Saturday, July 25, at 8 p.m. and Sunday, July 26, at 2 p.m. Tickets: $25; seniors & students $20. Reservations: 845-679-0154

Upcoming Byrdcliffe Theater shows in August include a performance ritual by Secret City on August 2 at noon, on the theme of “camp” (see http://thesecretcity.org). Choreography on the Edge will present experimental work by local choreographers and dancers, Friday, August 8, and Saturday, August 9, at 8 p.m., and Sunday, August 10, at 3 p.m., with tickets priced at $12.

The Byrdcliffe Theater is at 380 Upper Byrdcliffe Road, Woodstock, off Glasco Turnpike.

Setting the stage for the Voice Festival. (photo by Dion Ogust)

“We are called ‘the little engine that could,’” said Maria Todaro, co-founder and executive director of the Phoenicia International Festival of the Voice. “That’s how the industry talks about us. They’re still scratching their heads. We’re also called ‘the possible next big thing.’”

Now in its sixth year, the largely volunteer-powered festival has managed to attract major stars of opera and other musical genres to sing among the mountains of the small town of Phoenicia, while keeping ticket prices down to $25 or less for most events. Held this year from Wednesday, July 29, to Sunday, August 2, the event has undergone many changes in its growth from what was originally a weekend show, but some vital features persist. As always, many of the performances will take place on an outdoor stage in the Parish Field, while other events will be held at churches, the STS Playhouse, and other venues, all within walking distance of the hamlet center.

Last year’s festival was the first to establish an overall theme, which was Spanish music. This year, America is the theme, with American composers and homegrown musical styles guiding the choice of repertoire. Voices of Distinction, a recital that showcases rising stars as well as established singers, opens this year’s festival on Wednesday night with George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue,” played by pianist and festival co-founder Justin Kolb, followed by a jazz combo of piano great Jack DeJohnette and vocalist Sheila Jordan. Songs from “The Great American Songbook” set the tone for the festival, with the Phoenicia and Woodstock Community Choirs backing up European musical stars Jose Todaro and Maria Helena DeOliveira, who happen to be Maria Todaro’s parents. Also appearing are American Idol finalist Elise Testone, Emily Drennan, David Bankston, Ann Benson, and local sensation Lucia Legnini.

Maria Todaro and her husband, baritone Louis Otey, traditionally perform at the festival, but this year, Otey is starring in the English opera The Wreckers at Bard College and will not sing on the festival stage. Todaro, a mezzo-soprano, will perform “American Classics” on Friday night with celebrated soprano Frederica von Stade, New York City Opera soprano Lauren Flanigan, and bass Bradley Smoak, who distinguished himself as Basilio in The Barber of Seville at last year’s Voicefest. They will sing works by American composers Peter Schickele, Jake Heggie, Ricky Ian Gordon, Tom Pasatieri, Robert Cucinotta and Carlisle Floyd — all of whom will be present.

As always, the keynote event of the festival is the Saturday night opera. Carlisle Floyd’s setting of the Steinbeck novel Of Mice and Men will star Michael Hendrick, Malcolm MacKenzie, and Nancy Allen Lundy. The show will be directed by the composer, with the Festival of the Voice orchestra led by Elizabeth Scott, who conducted a phenomenal production of Vivaldi’s Gloria at an early Voicefest. Come early with blankets or camp chairs (and optional picnic) to find a seat, as opera night can attract over 1000 spectators. Tents provide cover in case there’s rain, but the Saturday night audience generally overflows the shelter.

Emmy-nominated actor and singer Ron Raines will star in Stephen Sondheim’s A Little Night Music on Thursday night. The multi-talented Raines has sung opera and musical comedy, while appearing on the TV show Guiding Light for 16 years. This year’s musical will be the first one to grace the outdoor stage.

The STS Playhouse will host The Medium, a one-act opera by Italian-American composer Gian Carlo Menotti, on Friday evening and Saturday afternoon. Madame Flora will be sung by Metropolitan Opera star Victoria Livengood, who performed often with Menotti. Also starring will be young locals Lily Arbisser, as Flora’s daughter, and Jack Warren, as the mute servant boy.

The World Music offering will be “Down to the Roots,” featuring Native American singers,  on Saturday morning. Charlotte and Cynthia are an Inuit throat singing duo called “Silla.” Pua Ali’i ‘Ilima o Nûioka is the New York City extension of a school of traditional Hawaiian dance founded by Vicky Holt Takamine in 1977. Local composer, performer, and educator Joan Henry is a traditional Song-Carrier & hahesh’kah (lead drummer) for elders among the Nde’, Coast Salish, Shoshone, Tsalagi, Chippewa/Cree and Dakota nations.

Since the community choir is opening the festival this year, their usual closing will be taken over by Voices of Gotham, an 85-member barbershop chorus that wowed audiences at a previous Voicefest with extraordinary harmonies, humor, and movement.

Other events include “Good News: Here Comes Gospel” with Ralphine Childs and the choir of Point Church in Kingston; “Ben Franklin and the Armonica,” or glass harmonica, presented by Cecilia Brauer of the Metropolitan Opera orchestra; Latte Lectures on the history behind festival events at Mama’s Boy Café (free); The Diva and The Fiddler by violin/voice duo Diana Jacklin and Hartmut Ometzberger; a sample operatic Master Class (free); Souvenir, a comedy about singer and cult figure Florence Foster Jenkins; Shape Note Workshops, which teach singing to the musically illiterate (free); Cambridge Chamber Singers, an a capella ensemble from Harvard University, appearing at the Voicefest for the third year in a row; “Art of the Cantor” with the Mendelson Trio, also returning; Late Lounges at Brio’s Restaurant (free); magic and music for kids with ventriloquist Steve Charney and Harry; and a world premiere workshop performance of Do Not Go Gentle — The Last Days of Dylan and Caitlin, an opera about Dylan Thomas by Robert Manno and Gwynne Edwards, conducted by David Wroe.

The Phoenicia International Festival of the Voice will be held from Wednesday, July 29, to Sunday, August 2. Performances will take place at the Parish Field on Ava Maria Road and at other venues around the hamlet of Phoenicia. For tickets and schedule, go to http://www.phoeniciavoicefest.org.

Lauren Flanigan sings at the festival on July 31. (photo by Dion Ogust)

The Phoenicia International Festival of the Voice extends to many styles of vocal music, but it’s run by opera singers and tends to revolve around operatic forms. Given that most of classical opera is European and is performed in languages other than English, I was curious to see how the festival would handle this year’s theme of American music.

The evening performances showed how versatile the operatic voice can be, drawing out subtlety and passion from American English in popular tunes, art songs, and musical comedy, as well as pure opera. The music may not have been as familiar to classical fans as the selections of previous years, but the audience response was enthusiastic, as always.

An assortment of American genres opened the festival in “Voices of Distinction,” beginning with pianist and festival co-founder Justin Kolb’s presentation of a thrilling “Rhapsody in Blue,” backed by the Festival of the Voice orchestra under the dynamic baton of conductor David Wroe. As the sky darkened and a nearly full moon rose over the bandshell, 86-year-old songstress Sheila Jordan delivered a seasoned, relaxed, and gorgeous series of standards, accompanied by Jack DeJohnette on piano. Better known as one of the best drummers in jazz, DeJohnette showed deft and sensitivity on the keys. In the middle of the set, Jordan, who had just discovered that DeJohnette, like herself, has Seneca ancestors, sang a stunning Iroquois chant.

They were followed by American Idol finalist Elise Testone, performing original soul/pop tunes in the expansive voice that drives her rising career. Emily Drennan, now touring in Mamma Mia!, joined the Phoenicia and Woodstock Community Choirs and the festival orchestra for towering renditions of “We Will Rock You” and “We are the Champions,” with vivid help from local guitarist Ralph Legnini. His daughter, Lucia, 17, reprised a duet with Drennan from a previous Voicefest — a song from Wicked — with poise and a clear, ringing voice.

Opera stars came out for the two last numbers, as festival executive director Maria Todaro’s father, Jose Todaro, belted a Mario Lanza song, “Because,” and her mother, Maria Helena De Oliveira, gave a deeply moving rendition of “When You Walk Through the Night,” the choirs soaring behind them.

On the second night, Stephen Sondheim’s A Little Night Music brought classically trained voices into the Broadway musical, producing a superb show with a surprise revelation to many of us who hadn’t seen it before — that it’s the source of Judy Collins’ 1975 hit “Send in the Clowns.” The song was performed by opera star and 1981 Miss America Susan Powell, who brought dramatic depth to her character’s tragic miscalculations about life and love. Ron Raines, known for his work on TV, Broadway, and opera, sang opposite Powell with authority, his strong voice filling the role of an adulterous lawyer, even as his nuanced performance made the character sympathetic.

It was a treat to see Christopher, Brittany, and Libby Sokolowsky, siblings who are part of a Hudson Valley opera family, together onstage in supporting roles. They share an arresting stage presence and spectacular voices that will no doubt continue to develop. Soprano Sarah Heltzel excelled as an acid-tongued countess, providing comedy and vocal brilliance. Despite the lack of a set, aside from red folding chairs, lively direction by Marc Astafan made for an engaging show.

The renowned Frederica von Stade, headliner for a recital of songs by American composers, unfortunately had to cancel. Sublime lyrics featured poetry by Walt Whitman, Stanley Kunitz, Langston Hughes, and A. E. Housman. Soprano Lauren Flanigan, a veteran of the Metropolitan and New York City Operas, was winning, with her heartfelt introductions to complex songs by Thomas Pasatieri, delivered with clarity and power.

Bass Bradley Smoak performed two obscure American ballads in his warm, round tones, then gave the most poignant rendition of “Shenandoah” I’ve ever heard. He was joined by Maria Todaro in a rollicking duet composed by Robert Cucinotta. She also applied her robust, expressive mezzo to two Peter Schickele pieces. A last-minute addition to the line-up, Keith Phares, was entertaining with works by Jake Heggie and several short gems by Charles Ives, as katydids creaked in the background, one of the joys of outdoor performance.

Of Mice and Men, with the tragic inevitability of its ending, is a perfect subject for opera, but the relentlessly atonal score by Carlisle Floyd was not to my taste. No doubt contemporary music connoisseurs were able to appreciate it, but the first act dragged, both lacking in melody and short on dramatic action. A plethora of unsympathetic characters, aside from the two leads, didn’t help. However, Michael R. Hendrick was touching as the mentally impaired Lenny, and Malcolm MacKenzie gave a superb portrayal of George, his harried caretaker and companion, while Nancy Allen Lundy sang beautifully as Curley’s slatternly wife.

I confess that I left at the intermission, partly due to festival burnout, and I was told that the audience who remained gave the heartrending finale a standing ovation. Other programs I missed, including Gian Carlo Menotti’s short opera The Medium and the Inuit throat-singing sisters, were reported to be splendid. I’m sure the festival closer, the barbershop chorus Voices of Gotham, was magnificent, as they dazzled two years back.

Overall, it was intriguing to watch the festival find its way through an all-American repertoire that mixed crowd-pleasing spectacle with challenging music. Next year’s theme will be Shakespeare, with Verdi’s Otello as the featured opera and Celtic music among the other performances — surely a festival to look forward to.

Photograph of Cyndi Lau­per by George Holz.

Dennis Hopper’s pinched, grizzled, weathered face stares out from the book jacket. Little white shapes around his head suggest flower petals, until you realize he has his arms clasped overhead.

Holz Hollywood: 30 Years of Portraits, published by DAAB Media, gives an overview of celebrity photography by George Holz, who lives with his family, two dogs, and a flock of East Friesian sheep on a farm near Phoenicia. A party celebrating the launch of the book will be held in the lounge at the Phoenicia Diner on Saturday, August 22, from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m.

Among the book’s 164 tritone black-and-white photos and 89 color plates, lushly printed in Italy, are film and TV stars (Jack Nicholson, Liza Minelli), musicians (Joan Jett, Yoko Ono), politicians (Donald Trump), athletes, and a few unknowns. Many were shot on assignment for magazines, including Vanity Fair and Harper’s Bazaar. Others were publicity shots for record albums, such as the cover for Madonna’s “Borderline” single. There are pictures that never made it into the magazines, alongside iconic photos: Anthony Quinn standing beside the oak tree he planned to be buried under; Carly Simon in a bathtub, holding a live lobster.

It wasn’t easy selecting an image for the jacket front, which is actually different from the book cover. (Beneath the jacket is a leaping portrait of Dominique Swain, who starred with Jeremy Irons in the remake of Lolita.) Beauty and character mingle in Holz’s work, but for the jacket image, he went with character. “We wanted something closeup and strong. We were looking for someone who bridged the worlds of entertainment and art,” Holz explained, pointing out that Hopper, who appeared in 75 films, was also a photographer and an art collector. “And he was a polarizing person. Some people hate him, and some are fascinated by him.”

Holz recalled the shoot at Hopper’s barbed-wire-topped compound in a rough section of Venice, California. The interior was adorned with works by Lichtenstein, Pollock, Warhol. “It was like going into the Whitney,” said Holz. “We walked around the compound, and I photographed him with his art. He was obsessed with vacuuming, and I photographed him vacuuming his bedroom. He was not a smiley kind of guy.”

Some of the photos are accompanied by text by either Holz or the subject of the portrait. Monica Lewinsky, who had lived next door to the photographer in the West Village and babysat for his son, wrote about her photo session. It took place at 2 a.m. in the meatpacking district, now trendy but then a gritty setting that yielded a shot with an aura of 1940s Paris.

Holz photographed Steven Spielberg when Schindler’s List had just come out. “Spielberg made me nervous,” said Holtz. “I was worried he’d ask me to move the lights, that he’d start directing me. But he was a total gentleman. He wanted to know about my family, since my father had escaped Nazi Germany at 13. My mother has my picture of Spielberg on her mantel.”

Holz grew up in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, where the scientists of the Manhattan Project had been at work in the middle of Appalachia, designing the atom bomb. After World War II, research at the Oak Ridge lab turned to nuclear reactors. “There were more Ph.D.s per capita than anywhere in world,” Holz remembered. “It was very suburban. Our fathers could not talk about their work.”

He began to take pictures at 16 and studied photography at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California. Later he lived in Milan and Paris, shooting for Italian Vogue and French Elle, before settling in New York City. In 1988, he bought his property in Shandaken, where he loves to fish and goes hiking with his dogs. Many photography sessions are redirected upstate, with rural beauty serving as backdrop for several photos in the book. He continues to maintain a studio in Manhattan, traveling to Europe and Los Angeles on assignments.

Holz still shoots analog film for his personal work, fine art studies of nudes in nature, which have been shown in galleries and museums around the world. For commercial work, he has gone digital. “I love that film makes you think more, slows you down,” he said. “You have to wait to see what you’ve got. But for the workflow of modern-day jobs, people want it yesterday, and you have to do digital. It’s a different way of thinking, with people looking over your shoulder at your computer, giving you feedback. I liked to shoot without even Polaroid tests because I didn’t want people looking at it while I did it. But they both work. I try to make my digital photos look like film.”

When taking pictures of famous people, he said, “Celebrity is secondary. You can’t rely on celebrity, or the picture won’t stand the test of time. You have to use your skills in lighting, timing, technique, capturing the decisive moment when everything comes together at once. To me, someone should look at the photo and wonder, ‘Who’s that?’”

A launch party for Holz Hollywood: 30 Years of Portraits will be held on Saturday, August 22, from 7 to 9 p.m., in the lounge at the Phoenicia Diner, 5681 Route 28, just east of the turnoff for Phoenicia.

The Woodstock Film Festival, which unspools in Woodstock and a variety of other Hudson Valley communities in less than a month, came out with a slew of high-profile announcements this past week. First came the news that its indie emphasis this year would highlight on two truly maverick Canadian-based film innovators as award winners, and then an official lineup was announced that includes everything from big celebrity events to a host of premieres and film genre focuses that taken together demonstrate just how major the 16 year old festival’s become.

“I’m so excited about our upcoming Sweet Sixteen. We have the highest number of women filmmakers (25 out of 53 full length films!), the highest number of foreign films that are coming to us from far flung places such as Russia and Bhutan, the Netherlands and Australia, and the highest number of films featuring great musicians and music,” WFF Executive Director and co-founder Meira Blaustein said after making the big announcements this week. “There are some amazing films, filmmakers, musicians, writers, and artists of all kind who will soon gather at the Woodstock Film Festival and I can’t wait for everyone to come here and meet them.”

The film festival, which started as a Woodstock only event in 2000, runs its 130 plus film screenings, panel discussions, concerts, special events and parties from Wednesday, September 30 through Sunday, October 4 with 16 world premieres, five North American premieres, four US premieres, 33 east coast premieres, and 27 New York premieres starting with a big kick-off screening of Ron Chapman’s new The Poet Of Havana documentary and a performance by the film’s focus, Carlos Varela and band, with special guest Jackson Browne at UPAC in Kingston.

Things then move on to include a keynote address by Gasland director Josh Fox; opening and closing night screenings of new works by Maverick Award winner Atom Egoyan (The Sweet Hereafter) and Fiercely Independent Award winner Guy Maddin (My Winnipeg), with a special centerpiece showing of Robert Zemeckis’ new The Walk, the long-awaited dramatization of local resident Philippe Petit famous high wire walk between the now-gone World Trade Center towers.

Other special screenings being highlighted at this point include Barbara Kopple’s latest documentary about America’s oldest continuously published weekly magazine, Hot Type: 150 Years of The Nation; Robert Campos and Donna LoCiero’s documentary about the state of stand up comedy, 3 Still Standing; a look into the continuing relevance of veteran singer/civil rights activist Mavis Staples in Mavis!, and a new episode of the hit FX Cold War spy-thriller The Americans to be followed by a discussion with the show’s creator Joe Weisberg.

Panel discussions will include the usual mix of industry-specific and more general crowd pleasing lineups, with Egoyan and Maddin leading the lineups alongside music panel participants Stewart Copeland, Krishna Das and Natalie Merchant; actors and directors Mary Stuart Masterson, Michael Cristofer, and others speaking up everything from animation to marketing.

Youngsters will get their own day for interaction with festival participants at Onteora High, just as such local films as I Dream Too Much and Good Ol’ Boy will get their special focus alongside shorts, women-made works, pieces with an eye towards various social chalklenges and responsibilities, music films, and a celebration of new and older LGBTQ voices.

New this year, in addition, will be a new World Cinema Competition that includes both the Canadian award-winners new works and other films new to the states. As well as a Carpe Diem Andretta Award honoring a film “that best exemplifies living life to the fullest through character and story” in both documentary and/or fictional format being presented in the name of the late longtime area resident Vincent “Jay” Andretta III, who passed away in December, 2014.

“All these filmmakers are coming here, literally from all corners of the world,” Blaustein added. “As we enter into our sixteenth year, I reflect upon the past years of gradual growth and am thrilled by how the festival has opened itself up into the world while maintaining the core authenticity and artistry that it was first founded on…I invite everyone to come and discover the many national and international selections that make up our 2015 lineup, as each is its own unique gem and in each you will find something that will inspire and move you.”

Online sales and phone sales for the 16th Annual Woodstock Film Festival go live on September 9 at http://www.woodstockfilmfestival.com, when the WFF Box Office at 13 Rock City Road in Woodstock will also be open Wednesdays through Sundays from  noon to 6 p.m. daily, with expanded hours once the big Sweet Sixteen week rolls around.

Matthew Odell, Adelaide Roberts and Marie Duane. (photos Courtesy of Adelaide Roberts)

Elephants are useful friends,
Equipped with handles at both ends.
They have a wrinkled moth-proof hide.
Their teeth are upside down, outside.
If you think the elephant preposterous,
You’ve probably never seen a rhinosterous.

Ogden Nash’s salute to the elephant is one verse of the narration he wrote to accompany Camille Saint-Saëns’ Carnival of the Animals, which will be performed, along with Francis Poulenc’s The Story of Babar the Little Elephant, on Sunday, September 27, at 3 p.m. at St. Gregory’s Episcopal Church in Woodstock. The concert kicks off a new season of the Young Artists Music Series, a program that was started in 2005 to bring talented students from the Julliard School to St. Gregory’s, giving them the chance to perform in an unfamiliar but welcoming venue.

Two Julliard professors, Adelaide Roberts and Matthew Odell, will duet on a single piano, with narration read by Woodstocker and church member Marie Duane. There is no charge for admission, but donations are invited in order to fund the forthcoming student concerts. The first of this season’s young performers will be a baritone who is recruiting an ensemble of singers to perform scenes from operas in November. “He has sung at St. Gregory’s before,” said Roberts. “He keeps asking when he can come back.”

The exact date of the November performance has not yet been pinned down because students are still working out their schedules. “It’s not easy to set up dates,” said Duane. “The students have so many other commitments — exams, performances, auditions, competitions.”

It’s important for students to practice performing in different kinds of settings. “It’s one thing to learn something and perform for your teacher or in your living room,” said Roberts. “It’s very different to perform in front of people. Each performance is different, according to the venue and the audience. You have to adjust psychologically.”

After a winter break, monthly concerts will resume in February. For one presentation, Roberts has lined up a top-notch violinist who flies down from Canada each week to attend Julliard. Another concert will feature a young cellist, possibly accompanied by his sister on violin.

Julliard, located at Lincoln Center, is one of the top music schools in the country, admitting only the cream of the crop. Students aged eight through 18 have come to St. Gregory’s to perform. The series was started eight years ago, when St. Gregory’s former priest, Charles Dupree, told Duane he wanted to establish a concert program for young people. Duane had become friends with Roberts, her daughter’s piano teacher, decades before. The pianist and her late husband, Edgar Roberts, performed together internationally, four hands on either one or two pianos. Duane sometimes joined them, delivering spoken narration, at concerts around New York City. The September 27 concert will be repeated at Fordham University, the Julliard School, and the Church of St. Paul the Apostle in Manhattan.

The Carnival of Animals was written by the French Romantic composer Camille Saint-Saëns in 1886. He composed it for fun in the midst of writing his challenging Third Symphony but never permitted the piece to be published during his lifetime, for fear it would ruin his image as a serious composer. Each of the fourteen movements represents a different animal or group of animals: swans, kangaroos, tortoises, fossils, pianists, for example. The humorous poems were written by Ogden Nash in 1949 for a recording on which Noel Coward recited the verses. The Disney studio incorporated the piece’s finale into the animated film Fantasia 2000.

Poulenc’s The Story of Babar was inspired by Jean de Brunhoff’s 1931 children’s book about Babar the elephant. The composition was designed to play alongside a reading of the book.

The subject matter will appeal to children, while the classical music, performed by seasoned professionals, will suit the tastes of adult fans.

The Carnival of Animals and The Story of Babar will be performed on Sunday, September 27, at 3 p.m. at St. Gregory’s Episcopal Church, 2578 Route 212, just east of the village of Woodstock. Donations are gratefully accepted to help support the Young Artists Music Series at St. Gregory’s.

(Photo by Dion Ogust)

There was a hush around Woodstock earlier this week. But by Wednesday that was disappearing as attendees for the “Sweet 16” outing of the Woodstock Film Festival started arriving in town by rental car and bus.

The big mash-up of over 200 screenings, panel discussions, concerts, parties and assorted other events was to kick off with a concert at UPAC the evening of September 30 and then run through to the giant awards ceremony gala at BSP, also in Kingston Sunday night, October 4.

But on Wednesday, everyone was centering around the WFF offices at the Woodstock Film Center on Rock City Road…or at local hostelries, as well as a huge number of short term rentals around the area. People were asking what was sold out at this time, and which films and events were suddenly hotter than their availability might indicate.

Of course, there were also the quieter requests about where the parties would be happening. And any after parties for those not beholden to overactive screening schedules.

We checked in over the previous days with some of the filmmakers coming the farthest for the film festival. What were they anticipating? What role did they think festivals like Woodstock’s play in their creative process? Did they know anyone at the festival who might be coming?

“I live in LA but I have been coming to the Woodstock Film Festival since its inception 16 years ago now. Of all the film festivals I go to it is my favorite,” noted Doreen Ross of music licensing giant BMI, who will be on a key panel. “The programming is extraordinary and the fall foliage is breathtaking but it’s the people there that fill my heart and inspire me. The filmmakers who attend and the artists that live there are concerned with substance as much as creativity. I do panels and such all the time exploring the creative process of putting music in film but at Woodstock we always get to push the envelope and be more imaginative. For instance, this year I’ll be moderating a chat on October 3rd with Stewart Copeland, Krishna Das, and Duncan Bridgeman about the international language of music, universal madness, and spiritual healing. Yes…it’s all related to a film premiering there called 1 Giant Leap II: What About Me? but it will be a very creative nontraditional panel.”

Ross added that at this point she knew “a lot of people who are coming from all over.  About 50 of us meet for dinner every year and it’s like a tribal gathering.”

Jacob and Josh Kornbluth, director and writer/star of the performance film hybrid Love & Taxes, will be flying across the country from the Bay area and had never been to Woodstock, or the Catskills, before.

“I don’t know what to expect, which makes it kind of exciting. I have a sense that the Woodstock Film Festival is about taking chances and real independent films (whatever that means). I feel like we made a film that was, in a way, purely about the act of creating something…so the opportunity to share it with an audience of people who don’t know me is pretty thrilling,” said Jake Kornbluth. “I can tell you it means the world to have a festival like WFF select us. I don’t know what it does to my creative process, but it feels like a reward and a celebration. We started making the film seven years ago, and would shoot a scene every few months when we could scrape the funds and the crew together to do it. That whole time, I was dreaming about some day finishing the film and sharing it with audiences. That’s what’s happening at WFF!”

Brother Josh was equally exuberant, and noted that like his brother he knew one other producer at the festival, but was looking forward to meeting many like themselves.

“I haven’t been to Woodstock before, though I feel as if I have! I was 10 years old when the big music festival happened, and much of the music that I revere (including The Band, Van Morrison, and a plethora of amazing folk and rock musicians) has been produced there. As a New York City kid, I considered everything ‘upstate’ to be mysterious and wonderful, with mythical things like ‘trees’ and ‘nature,’” he wrote in an email. “I am anticipating a film-festival scene that rejoices in movies that are truly independent and risk-taking, bursting with film artists and fans who love nothing more than to be surprised and delighted by new work. I am also super-excited but hella-nervous about the upcoming screenings of Love & Taxes — almost no one on Earth has seen our movie yet!”

Hillevi Loven, director of the transexual-in-the-Deep-South documentary Deep Run, also spoke about her anticipation of coming north to a place she’d long dreamt of visiting.

“I am a born and bred New Yorker so Woodstock has been on my radar for awhile, though I have not been to the Woodstock Film Festival. I am looking forward to a wild and potent mixture of NYC and Woodstock energy,” she replied to our questions. “Film festivals are a kind of sustenance for me as a filmmaker. Though I have not been alone in my attic whittling away at stories, my six year documentary filmmaking process has sometimes felt that way. It is utterly essential to share your work with audiences and take in their reactions, and get into conversation…Film festivals like WFF are about cinephilia, intense exchanges, and community, and all that is vital sustenance for filmmakers.”

Longstanding composer Duncan Bridgeman, who will be giving the U.S. premiere of his one-of-a-kind feature documentary about the power of music, 1 Giant Leap: What About Me?, at the Woodstock Playhouse Friday evening, mentioned having to come to the festival before, four years ago, and how “it felt really relaxed and easy to flow within it.”

“So many movies are still made now without any distribution in place. Festivals like Woodstock can sometimes be the only way of getting movies screened. They keeps the movie experience alive,” he added, noting how he is intrigued at how a music panel he’ll be on will work out. “I also know festival organizer Meira, who I met in Bhutan when I was screening my movie at the arts festival there.”

Speaking of Bhutan, cameraman Yeshey Namgyal, who will be showing his short film My Paralympic Dream Thursday afternoon, was excited about everything in the week to come.

“This will be my first visit to Woodstock. I hope to meet film makers from around the world and also I hope to talk about my film and my country to the audience,” he said in an email that arrived in the middle of the night from the Himalayas. “Woodstock Film Festival is helping me to learn new ideas for filming. We can meet many filmmakers from many countries and we get a chance to see their work…I, too, know Meira Blaustein as we have met in Bhutan during the Bhutan International Festival.”

Finally, the two big award winners for this year’s festival, Canadian-based filmmakers Guy Maddin and Atom Egoyan, also sent messages about their own anticipation.

“I’ve never been, but for anyone of my generation it’s obviously got a huge place in my cultural mythology,” the former said of Woodstock. “I’m very excited to be there.”

And added Maddin, continuing the confusion we’ve all grown to live with in Woodstock…

“I guess my heart wants some evidence — maybe very young fossils? — of the great concert, as if it were The Deluge and not a bunch of musical acts. I don’t know what these fossils would be — brown dots on sidewalks where the bad acid once blew and burnt itself into the concrete?” he wrote. “Maybe Mike Tyson is still training within earshot of the theater — heavy bag blows ringing out into the night air? But I know this can’t be, so I am a blank slate, my back all smooth awaiting the gooseflesh Woodstock will produce with its heady hybrid of nowness and mythology.”

For more on all things WFF, stop by the Woodstock Film Center on Rock City Road or, even better, check out their website at www.woodstockfilmfestival.com.

Meira Blaustein, Mary Stuart Masterson, Michael Cristofer and Martha Frankel at the Film Festival. (photo by Dion Ogust)

When a friend of mine in California wanted to know if I would cover The Woodstock Film Festival for The Huffington Post, the first thing that came to my mind was The Poet of Havana, the opening film, a documentary about Carlos Varela, who journalists call, “the Cuban Bob Dylan.” I would find out later that this was a title that he didn’t particularly like. “This is a way of speaking that the journalists use,” he would say. “I really like Dylan, but I’m not the Dylan of Cuba. We’ve taken very different paths and also some very similar as well. I’ve never liked the labels that the journalists use to place you in a style.”

Just a few weeks earlier I had seen Jackson Browne perform with Larry Campbell and Teresa Williams at Bethel Woods. An old friend, I had been speaking with Larry for weeks about Jackson Browne and his relationship with Carlos. “He really loves this guy. He talks about Carlos all the time,” Larry told me. Browne is apparently the man responsible for bringing Carlos to the United States, supporting him, and by coincidence Jackson would be at the Woodstock Film Festival’s opening night at UPAC for a live performance with Varela and his band after the premiering of the film. Browne performs one of Carlos poetic gems, “Muros y Puertas” (“Walls and Doors”) on his new CD.

It seemed like the pieces like a puzzle were all beginning to fall into place.

Carlos Varela and Charles Lyonhart.

The film festival is always in October, usually the first week of the month when autumn sneaks in while we’re not looking. I had been trying to arrange an interview with Carlos with the festival’s press office for weeks. I also wanted to speak with Ron Chapman, the director of The Poet of Havana. I was told that Carlos did not speak a word of English and that I should email the questions that I wanted to ask. Now here it was, Wednesday, the first day of the festival, and still no word from Carlos or his people. I figure I’ll go to the film, which I wanted to see since I’ve been hooked on his music for the last couple of months, and maybe catch up with them there.

Outside the entrance to UPAC on Broadway in Kingston, it was like a who’s who of some of notable Woodstock musicians — Tim Moore, Julie Last, Phil Void and Nick Martin.

I hadn’t worn a press pass for over 30 years now. I used to do this for a living when I was in New York City in the 70s and 80s. Things have changed since then. I used to carry a bag with a spare 35 mm camera, film, a notebook, pocket tape recorder, blank tape and had a Cannon 35mm camera slung around my neck. These days a device the size of a pack of cigarettes, and iPhone takes its place. It was familiar and strange at the same time.

Moving around and bending down to take photos of Carlos and his band I realized that this old body was not as eager to work as it was 30 years ago.

The film itself was quite good and it gave you a really comprehensive look at Carlos Varela’s Cuba and the music scene going on over there. The Cubans are a very cultured and passionate people, which I will come to understand better in the next few days. But even though I had a press pass I wasn’t made aware that prior to the film there was a gathering upstairs at UPAC where Carlos, Jackson and Ron Chapman all were greeting people.

I wasn’t going to let that throw me and went home the first night of the festival a bit sore yet hungry for more. Still more days to come. I’ll catch up.

Death

When you are given your press credentials you chose the top five films you’d like to see for review. One of the two films that I still wanted to see the most, after The Poet of Havana, was Left On Purpose a film about a suicide. That was all that I had to read to be drawn in. The word “suicide” is a trigger for me, having lost my pal John Herald to suicide some ten years ago; there is not a day that goes by that I don’t think about John and his suicide. When I read more about the film, I learned that it was about the life of Mayer Vishner, somebody that I actually knew back in the 60s from the St. Mark’s Bookshop in New York. Mayer was a political activist who was a “behind the scenes” kind of guy. He was friends with and worked with Abbie Hoffman, Phil Ochs, Paul Krassner, Ed Sanders and Michael Ventura. Mayer was 64 when he took his life —ironically how old I’ll be next week. Mayer’s death, that he had longed planned, called his “Existential Project,” was primarily due to pain which he claimed was caused by loneliness. There were, of course, other factors that contributed to his wanting to die, however all through the film Mayer talks about his loneliness and having outlived his usefulness. The director of the film, Justin Schein, filmed the bulk of the 85-minute documentary in Vishner’s Greenwich Village apartment where Mayer lived for over 30 years. This was a pretty powerful film — and I was struck by similarities I felt with Mayer. I am really not that unique, this could be any baby boomer past his prime living alone, feeling as if he’d outlived his usefulness and purpose in life…faced with financial problems, health problems, loneliness, disappointment in the dream…

When we had a chance to sit and talk about his film, Schein relayed some facts to me.

Since 2007 baby boomers have had the highest rate of suicides of any age group in the United States. Historically people between the ages of 40 and 64 (there’s that number again) had the lowest rate in the past. Since 2007 the rates for suicides among people in that group has risen nearly 50 percent. In addition, men were four times more likely to commit suicide than women accounting for 78 percent of the 41,149 suicides in the United States in 2013 and its numbers are growing.

James Lasdun (photo by Dion Ogust)

James Lasdun, who’ll be reading for this weekend’s Woodstock Library Forum at 5 p.m. Saturday, October 17, has a way of working his Woodstock life of recent decades deeply into his writing, be it poetry, non-fiction or fiction. Sometimes overtly, sometimes more subtly via a description, a telling observation.

Even now he will, he says, though he’s spending much of his time in Brooklyn, where his youngest child is in high school. So he’s acutely aware of how special his currently foreshortened time in the woods is, where he penned such notable poetry collections as  Landscape with Chainsaw,  Water Sessions, and the more recent Bluestone: New and Selected Poems; his novels The Horned Man and Seven Lies; two screenplays for indie films with Hudson Valley roots, several celebrated short story collections (including It’s Beginning To Hurt) and the memoir Give Me Everything You Have: On Being Stalked.

“I’m working on a novel, I’m always working on something,” Lasdun said last weekend before hurtling back down the Thruway to a life filled with teaching jobs (that include a continuing stint at the University at Albany’s Writer’s Institute). “It’s more prose than poetry right now. At the library I was assuming I’d be reading poetry but maybe, now that you mention it, I may try out a mixture of things. I’ll have to give it some thought.”

Lasdun’s subject matter involves classic modernist focuses on various aspects of the interior life, with a constant eye to the external draw of life into fated narratives, new understandings, or continuing resignations. Beauty shines through everything, though, as captured by the filmmaker Bernardo Bertolucci in his version of one of the man’s short stories, released as the film Besieged almost 20 years ago, where life storms in on a recluse with invigorating results.

We ask how his latest time at his Catskills home has gone and he speaks about “reveling in how lovely it is,” including the surrounding “peace and space.” But then he adds to the equation. “I really love Brooklyn, too,” he corrects himself. “The problem is too much traveling.”

James Lasdun’s reading for the Woodstock Library Forum starts at 5 p.m. at the Woodstock Library this Saturday, October 17. Call 679-8000 or visitwww.woodstock.org for more info.

Untitled (Figures on Boat) by John Fenton.

Lucky 13. At least that’s how any serious art collectors in the area should feel looking at what the 13th annual auction to benefit the Woodstock Artists Association and Museum is offering up. It will all happen when event co-sponsor, curator and auctioneer James Cox sounds the gavel starting the proceedings at 1 p.m. sharp Saturday, October 17 at WAAM, 28 Tinker Street.

Among the items available this year are pieces, in various media, by Auguste Renoir, Alice Neel, Antoine-Louis Bayre, Robert Motherwell, Philip Guston, Franz Kline and many more.

“Perhaps because Woodstock is a 110 year old art colony the supply and quality of art never seems to abate,” Cox noted, describing nudes by Emil Ganso, a rare line drawing by sculptor John Flannagan, a pen and blue ink piece by Milton Avery, and a portrait by Eugene Speicher as among the “best he’s seen” for sale by classic Woodstock artists in years…if not ever.

There’s jewelry up for bidding by Manette Van Hamel, a handwoven tapestry by designer and muralist Anton Refregier and various landscapes of the immediate area, as well as three 19th century Hudson River School pieces…233 lots in all.

Buyers may bid live, on line or in real time via liveauctioneers.com or invaluable.com, a new platform that has been added for this year’s sale. An online catalog can be accessed through both auction services.

And to add to the unique nature of the weekend, there’ll also be special Friday evening arts panel discussion, entitled “Connections: Enduring Themes in the Art of the Hudson Valley Region” with the Dorsky Museum at SUNY New Paltz’s curator, Daniel Belasco, River Crossings co-curator and Marymount Manhattan art history professor Jason Rosenfeld, and Woodstock-based artist and independent curator Norm Magnusson talking about recent shifts in the local scene, as if in preparation for the next afternoon’s auction.

It all takes place at WAAM, 28 Tinker Street in the center of Woodstock, with the auction starting at 1 p.m. sharp Saturday, October 17.

For more information contact WAAM at 679-2940 or http://www.woodstockart.org; or James Cox Gallery at 679-7608 or http://www.jamescoxgallery.com.

James Cox and Mary Anna Goetz (photo by Dion Ogust)

James Cox and Mary Anna Goetz, married nearly 45 years now, are seated behind their Willow gallery talking about the 25 years they’ve been part of Woodstock and the new exhibit of works by Wilna Hervey and Nan Mason they’ll be opening this Friday, July 10. The couple’s been telling all about how they picked the place for Cox’s first gallery all his own, who helped them get settled, and the warm welcome they’ve felt from the local community from the get go.

Then the subject of memorable events within that 25 years comes up and the couple break into hooting laughter as they each try telling the tale of the she bear that lay siege to their home for an entire summer, starting while they were away on the Cape and ending, after an evening escapade wherein Jim had to beat back the bruin with a fireplace poker, with state Encon officers bringing in a trap to take the bear away.

“A few weeks later they called to say she was again headed our direction; they had a homing device on her by then,” Jim noted.

“We said it was up to them to keep her away from our kitchen,” Mary Anna added.

Goetz (originally from Oklahoma) and Cox (from Indiana) had met in college and eventually moved East to the New York metro area. The couple attended the 1969 Woodstock Festival from Newark, New Jersey, where he was working for Vista and she for the Urban League. But then Manhattan called; Cox became the legendary Grand Central Art Galleries’ second director while Goetz had two children and continued her painting career at the Arts Students League and Salmagundi Club.

“Then I wanted out of there,” Cox said. “I’d started dealing with Woodstock artists, and then my mother mentioned that she had a friend from South Bend who was Fritzi Striebel’s sister.”

Elizabeth “Fritzi” Striebel was wife to John Striebel, a well-known cartoonist who used to work his adopted home town into his Dixie Dugan comic strip as “Stockwood.” She suggested that the Coxes meet a friend of hers who knew the art scene at what was then the Woodstock Artists Association.

“I got there and was immediately told I was late by this tall white haired woman,” Cox recalled. “But then Aileen Cramer showed me all around town, introducing me to all the artists still alive then, and by the time I left I was really sold on the whole idea of moving to Woodstock.”

By May, Cox had taken what had been known for years as the red barn (and later Hawthorne Gallery) on Elwyn Lane. The couple bought a house on Mill Hill Road next to the lumber yard so he could try out his dream of walking to work.

“Two kids, two cats and a dog,” he recalled. “It was a great time for the arts in Woodstock. Tom Fletcher opened around then, and Elena Zang. Before long the Guild was building the Kleinert/James Arts Center and the artists association was working on the Towbin wing.”

Goetz recalled that the other galleries in town included Bob Angeloch’s Paradox Gallery, and Anne Leonard on Tinker Street. The Rudolph Gallery, where Bread Alone is now, had just closed. Woodstock Framing Gallery was showing more and more contemporary art, as was Mike Densen’s Vasco Pini, where Lotus now is on Rock City Road. The Landau was still the Village Pub, full of enough cigarette smoke that no one needed to actually light up inside; the Center for Photography at Woodstock was still upstairs from the Tinker Street Cafe.

“It’s cool, as we look back, to see how so much that was started then has survived and actually grown stronger,” Cox added. “Nick Buhalis had just left the school of art but suddenly there were all these new teachers there.”

The new James Cox Gallery opened in June, 1990, with an exhibit of classic Woodstock artists Cox assembled including George Bellows at the height of his new auction popularity. He called it “The New Era” and rented buses to tour his old New York clientele around town, including the Artist’s Cemetery.

Goetz remembers stuffing hand-printed invitations all night, and the huge lawn party that Ann Blanch, the painter Arnold Blanch’s final wife, threw for the couple to introduce them to everyone still alive from the town’s glory days.

“We had big shows almost every month, and plenty of auctions,” Cox recalls of that first gallery in town where he showed Leslie Bender, Richard Segelman, Ernest Frazier, Christie Scheele and other new talents he was finding and championing around the region. “Then I started getting whole estates such as Carl Eric Lindin and Tomas Pening. We held events with Family, and then with the Woodstock Arts Board.”

All along, though, Cox and Goetz — like so many Woodstockers in their first decade in town — were still looking for a “more perfect” spot where they could combine gallery and studio, plus their home. Eventually, after going on and off the market several times, they found their current compound off Route 212 in Willow. After two years converting an old barn into a gallery and studio, plus renovations to the main house and outbuildings, they moved in and opened the new James Cox Gallery in 1996.

So what were the couple’s big highlights over all these years?

Cox mentions a big party thrown at the late Lee Mills’ mansion on Ohayo Mountain in tandem with Alice Lewis and the Woodstock Arts Board, where the then-millionaire premiered the collection of classic Woodstock art he’d put together, and had guest Geoffrey Holder emcee the evening of cocktails and hors d’oeuvres. Then there were the storytelling evenings he put together around the pizza oven he had built out back of his gallery, one SRO with the great Malachy McCourt holding everyone spellbound.

“My daughter’s wedding was a delight; finding the remarkable work of Joseph Garlock in an old wood shed; this one huge Doris Lee auction we had; and all the friends who moved up here after we did,” he recalled. “Then there was my handling the world-wide publicity and marketing of the Leonardo Horse, a 24-foot high bronze horse, a gift to the Italian people from America, that now resides in Milan. It was featured twice on the front page of the Sunday New York Times, and when we hosted the three day unveiling in Beacon 80,000 people came.”

Goetz smiles and goes back to that bear, and seeing her husband battle her away from a ripped-off plywood window cover with a measly piece of shaped iron.

“I love that people are still calling us green horns,” she adds, while also noting her delight teaching courses at the Woodstock School of Art for decades now. And all the friends the couple have made over what is now decades.

“As for the things that most made us feel at home in Woodstock, I would have to point to those ‘universals’ like seeing your kids perform in local school productions, participating in Woodstock’s Halloween parade, and attending those incredible Woodstock funerals with their soaring rhetoric, group laughter, and plentiful warm hugs,” Cox added. “Being accepted into those inner circles of lifelong Woodstockers for parties, dinners and celebrations — getting to know Alf Evers, Eva van Rijn, Kit and Gordon Taylor, Alice Lewis, the Sweeneys. I guess it’s all just like any other small town, only cooler.”

To celebrate their 25th, James Cox and Mary Anna Goetz are not opening their latest exhibition this Friday, July 10 with a usual blast, but also planning a “huge” full moon garden party, like that thrown for them when they arrived in town a quarter century ago, at their home on July 31.

Look for your invites…just don’t expect them to be hand printed or stuffed into envelopes this time around.