I’m not going to pretend, friends, that America in the year 2018 and The Spirit of Christmas are subjects easily corralled into the same article, except for the intervention of a truly weird coincidence. For in describing to you the enigma of the recently deceased Bud Sife we’ll be catapulted into a zone where a civilization in near collapse and A Merry Christmas can and do absolutely exist, side by side.
Kiriki Metzo, daughter Woodstock legend Julio de Diego and imbued with a colorful history all her own died at home in her Westbeth apartment in lower Manhattan on November 3. She was 90 years old.
Anyone who could object to Luzzi’s tidal wave of eloquence while hypnotized by sorcerers of erudition spanning the last 3000 years is nothing less than a modern-day Scrooge.
A renowned beauty and intellect of legendary sensuality and style, she was praised, envied, scandalized, even worshipped (for one, by Byrdcliffe’s founder Ralph Whitehead, who named the domicile he built for her “The Angel.”) But though she was the first great woman artist of Woodstock, her face remains all but unknown to us.
The idea that a feminine impulse could save testosterone-driven capitalism from itself is not new. In fact the notion was subtly rooted in Woodstock’s first back-to-nature, Arts and Crafts community, Byrdcliffe. Here a bisexual and lesbian sub-culture prevailed unacknowledged, even by itself. Historians of an earlier era remained at best vague in describing it, and at worst silent. That silence ends now.
Rumors proliferate in Woodstock like botulism in an ancient can of tuna fish. So until it failed to go away, I paid little mind to the one in the headline. A single visit to the town offices, however, and the gossip was at least partially substantiated. Someone named Erin Moran had indeed purchased 24 acres of land under and around one of Woodstock’s less advertised treasures (which occupies approximately 125 acres) for a dollar. Part 2 of 2.
Even before the lights come up it’s obvious this is a magnificently audacious production.
Rumors proliferate in Woodstock like botulism in an ancient can of tuna fish. So until it failed to go away, I paid little mind to the one in the headline. A single visit to the town offices, however, and the gossip was at least partially substantiated. Someone named Erin Moran had indeed purchased 24 acres of land under and around one of Woodstock’s less advertised treasures (which occupies approximately 125 acres) for a dollar.
On May 11, Peter M. Mayer, international publishing legend, founder of The Overlook Press, and Woodstocker of more than 50 years, succumbed to amyloidosis at the age of 82.
Pia Öste-Alexander, artist, activist, matriarch, and proud Woodstocker, died in her Wittenberg home after a brief illness on New Year’s Day at the age of 86.
The business of media is changing, but local, on-the-ground, fact-checked journalism is needed now more than ever.
