In one of the highlights of the new Netflix documentary series “Total Catastrophe”, the members of the band Red Hot Chili Peppers are evacuated from the stage of the 1999 Woodstock festival, after some excited spectators start lighting fires near the stage. The organizers ask the singer Anthony Kiedis to try to calm the crowd. And in response The band returns to the encore, and chooses – of all the songs in the world – to perform Jimi Hendrix’s “Fire”, a choice that causes the vandals to light more and more fires, on the way to what develops into a whole night of disaster.
Can the paparazzi be accused of irresponsibility? Is a rock band, by its very nature, supposed to be a restraining factor or an educator? Not easy to decide. And that’s what’s beautiful about this series, which is not the first to deal with that infamous festival, but manages to provide a complex and neutral picture – as much as possible, given the harsh scenes projected in it.
Woodstock 1999 is seen as traumatic mainly because of the gap between its pretension – to try to recreate the values of peace and brotherhood of the original Woodstock festival held 30 years earlier – and the result. Three days of physical violence, sexual abuse of women, vandalism of property, disgraceful sanitary conditions (people are recorded swimming in a pool of shit. Literally), financial exploitation of the spectators who were required to spend a huge fortune on food and water and much more. And above all – an almost complete disconnection, bordering on contempt and life-threatening, between the production and what is happening on the ground. All of these are presented in detail in the series. And yet, as mentioned, its added value is found in the balanced approach, which tries to tell a complex story and not just look for culprits.
It seems that the figure that represents this approach the most is that of Michael Lang, one of the organizers of the legendary festival of 1969, who was also one of the producers in the late nineties version. Lang, who died a few months after posing for the series, is a deceptive type. A hippie in the res., with long curls and an embarrassed smile, who continues to talk about peace and love, and wants to harness the festival to the war against the sick evil of America at the time – the rising violence, and especially the massacres that were committed in several high schools a short time before. Lang was the one who decided to hand out candles to the crowd on the closing night of the festival, to create a moment of camaraderie and identification with the fight against violence. But these candles quickly became the fuel that lit the fires.
- “We decided it was time for everyone to walk their own path” Statik and Ben Al Hasof
And yet, throughout the series it is not entirely clear whether he is an innocent person being taken advantage of by his co-producer, the promoter John Sher – a cynical type who does not hide his main motivation, namely money – or whether Lang is less detached than he seems. In one scene from the third episode, where the violence reaches its climax and the mobs loot the various stalls, including the cash in the cash registers, one of the sellers is told about Lang’s visit immediately after the looting. According to him, the aging flower boy walks among the ruins without even bothering to ask one of the sellers how he is doing and how he is holding up.
Even that John Sher, who is undoubtedly the closest thing to portraying the evil of the series – gets a complex treatment. First of all, he is extensively interviewed and appears throughout the episodes, and thus he gets to voice his version, parts of which certainly make sense, and especially the legitimate desire to make money from this huge production, unlike Woodstock 1969, which, although it became a legend, caused great losses to the organizers. All this cannot atone for what appears to be excessive greed on the part of Sher, and still.
The series also does not try to draw a direct and exclusive line between the brutality of the organizers and the violence of many of the 200,000 viewers, and presents additional explanations for this outbreak, for example that the rioters themselves are to blame, and were only looking for a suitable trigger to unleash the violence and rage with which they came from home.
One of the main interviewees in the series is a girl named Hether, who came to the festival as a teenager and describes the many hardships and injustices she experienced. And after all, when she is required to summarize what she went through, she says: “Even though I went through scary experiences, it was tremendous. It was a once-in-a-lifetime experience.”
on the knife
So many people and so many studies are trying to analyze what caused the downfall of the Israeli left. Isn’t it worth the effort? The answer is so simple that it can be summed up in two words: Abu Mazen. Or, if you like, no partner. If the leader of the Palestinian Authority, who is seen as a moderate on the ground, continues to compare Israel to the Nazi regime – the Israeli left must change its attitude drastically.
The capture of model agent Shay Avital in Amsterdam was covered last Friday in the media as if it was at least the capture of Adolf Eichmann. The news opened every edition, and the reporters reported on the arrest of the man, who had been walking for three months in the heart of Europe, not in the jungles of South America, with the drama that befits an operation by a General Staff patrol in the enemy’s rear. You exaggerated.
If a writer like Salman Rushdie is unable to live safely in the heart of the United States just because he wrote a book over 30 years ago that dares to be critical of Islam, apparently no one can be sure, and that the extremist elements of this religion endanger the peace of the entire world, and therefore They can be treated with tolerance and a inclusive approach.