Woodstock

Hippies used to say, if you remember Woodstock, you weren't really there. Republicans say presidential contender Hillary Rodham Clinton can forget about getting $1 million in taxpayer funds for a Woodstock museum. Sens. Clinton and Charles E. Schumer, Democrats from New York, want to earmark the federal money for a museum that would commemorate the 1969 music festival in their state.

Wanted: tie-dyed shirts, signs, guitars, snapshots, bits of trampled fence and other groovy artifacts from the 1969 Woodstock concert. The Bethel Woods Center for the Arts wants the artifacts for a museum honoring Woodstock and the '60s, which could open next year. A 4,800-seat concert pavilion at the former farm 80 miles northwest of New York City opened this summer.

Laurel Canyon residents never expected to have to make a federal case out of a collapsed street in order to get it fixed. But that's what happened when a landslide destroyed pavement along Woodstock Road during the heavy rains of 2005 and sent governmental agencies tumbling into a debate over responsibility for the $1-million repair job. The winding, narrow street meanders along ridge tops in the Hollywood Hills.

No naked mud dancing. And ditch the patchouli. The Woodstock concert site is going upscale this summer. The $70-million Bethel Woods Center for the Arts opens Saturday with a classical concert just over the hill from where Jimi Hendrix and the Who took the stage 37 years ago. The reincarnated performance venue will welcome back some '60s stalwarts -- though the summer schedule also features the New York Philharmonic and Ashlee Simpson.

A performing arts and music center on the original Woodstock concert site will open July 1 with a performance by the New York Philharmonic. The Bethel Woods Center for the Arts also announced it will host a two-day Woodstock anniversary concert the weekend of Aug. 12-13. No artists have been lined up for that show. The 4,800-seat summer pavilion is up the hill from the stage that drew about 400,000 fans in August 1969 to listen to the likes of the Who and Janis Joplin.

David Myers, a cinematographer whose feature-film credits included George Lucas' debut film, "THX 1138," and Alan Rudolph's "Welcome to L.A.," but who was best-known for his camera work on landmark concert documentaries such as "Woodstock," "Elvis on Tour," "The Last Waltz" and "The Grateful Dead Movie," has died. He was 90. Myers, a longtime resident of Mill Valley in the Bay Area, died of natural causes Aug.

Ground was broken this week for a performing arts and music center on the site of the Woodstock Festival, the legendary summer of 1969 celebration of "peace, love and music" that attracted hundreds of thousands to rural upstate New York. When completed in 2006, the $63-million center, christened the Bethel Woods Center for the Arts, will be the first permanent structure to be erected on the site.

Re "Partisan '9/11' Signals New Era for Documentaries," by David Macaray, July 12): Documentary 101 in college will start with the "rude awakening" that, by merely turning the camera to focus on a subject, the documentarian is already making a "statement" film -- namely, that the film's subject warrants attention. Leni Riefenstahl knew and documentarians today know that the "raw" footage can be collated, edited and combined to propound many points of view. "Woodstock" raw footage could have easily been used to demonstrate the decay of modern civilization in a bacchanal of drugs and self-indulgence instead of a celebration of youth, music, tolerance and love.

Steve Shashok was a lanky, longhaired 21-year-old when he went to Woodstock. Through three days of music and mud, he wore the same bell-bottoms covered with a crazy quilt of colored and corduroy patches. The pants are now history -- officially.

Three decades after its debut, the groundbreaking concert film "Wattstax" will be re-released Friday, with its original "lost" ending restored -- a culminating performance by Isaac Hayes, filmed under stadium lights before a packed, nearly all-black L.A. Coliseum audience.