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It is not surprising, then, to find Cook a little numb by the time he gets to Woodstock, which he sees as the natural outgrowth of one Beat movement. Having gone there to observe the rock festival (though his base of operations was a motel room), he reports that most of the people he saw were sullen, mud-caked and silently straining to hear the music. He dismisses the claim that Woodstock was the soul-expanding event portrayed in Michael Wadleigh's film documentary. Well and good. But amid the chaos of Max Yasgur's farm, Cook seems a little like Stendhal's young soldier, who doesn't realize that he's in the battle of Waterloo because he perceives it as only a scattering of minor incidents. Likewise, Cook inadvertently stumbles upon a critical subject: the contrast and relationship of reality to myth. If Woodstock ever becomes a milestone in a social or spiritual revolution, it will not be because of its soggy realities, but because it has been successfully mythologized. The colorful, short-winded realities of the Beats, however, are the stuff that footnotes are made of.
R.Z.S.