Murilo Jambeiro de Oliveira
Brazil, November 24, 2024.
In early 1997, I arrived from the house of a friend whose parents had been hippies, where I discovered the 25-year-old recording of Woodstock 1969. There, in principle: Santana and Jefferson Airplaine, were gems that I came into contact with for the first time, and soon after that I accessed the internet for the first time. I was already a regular BBS user, and the internet provider had arrived in the city, where the public who worked with this, as well as the students of the technical school, met in the Internet Relay Chat, no more than 20 people under 20 years old.
That day I chose the nickname Woodstock, and I ended up helping to register the city’s Internet Relay Chat channel and becoming its manager. This is the story that led to the city using and being known by the name Woodstock between the beginning of 1997 and the year 2000. A period in which the city’s chat channel jumped from 20 simultaneous users to more than 3 thousand simultaneous users, ranking in the top 5 in Brazil. I have always liked almost everything, or everything, that I heard about Woodstock 1969.
But one story perhaps deserves more attention than another, when, for example, in 2009, Ang Lee produced “Taking Woodstock”, a legend was told again, as I had heard on some occasion when I was a teenager, that Woodstock 1969 would be the greatest pacifist act in history, that is, the terror of war was gigantic at that time, and many spoke of the Apocalypse. Meeting Eliot Tiber would be a necessary act of pacifism, of reconnecting the Village with the interior of the United States, close to New York. This kind of dichotomy was frightening the country, and made it seem like a meeting between the Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
Throughout my life I realized how the number 69 or 96 is a constant in my life, and I studied my date of birth and found references in German, about Ethiopians, sayings about Uriel the Archangel, which would take me to Oxford, where Uriel the Archangel is the patron saint, as the Ethiopians describe July 15, my birthday, founded in 1096, where the philosophy faculty is on Woodstock Road. This has been happening with adulthood, but it is filling an album, since Uriel the Archangel is not as common in the Catholic Church as it is in the Episcopal Church, or in the Church of England.
There are more curious references, because as I said, the 196th day of the year, with 169 days left in the year, is represented by this, the Angel who holds the fire, and this, for example, will be expressed in some moments of the Dynasties of Julius-Claudius, and in its representations such as Caesars Palace in Las Vegas. Its main conference room, or rather, having a large wedding at Caesars, for example, means having 196 guests. And with some effort, the Dynasties of Julius-Claudius go up to 69.
No such central issue to be addressed here, simply an accumulation of curiosities that I really like. And how often one can, near or far, throughout life, remind one another. How I wanted to introduce this unpretentious video, of the use of horses in the recordings of Ang Lee. It was never more foolish, that the central symbolism among 500 thousand people who gathered there, was largely in Eliot Tiber. Tiber’s discomfort with that life, the tedium with which he calls the event, and what it would mean for the pacifist movement transcends his own figure, but it is these types of personalities that build the imaginary of even a Horseman of the Apocalypse, the Patron Saint of Oxford, or at the limit, the Julius-Claudius Dynasty, as I like to think of it.
Bonus featurette from the ‘Taking Woodstock’ Blu-ray
@CoexistenceLaw
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