Word: altamont
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...Angels have clearly lived up to their lawless image - arrests and convictions for drug trafficking (especially meth), assault, weapons possession and even murder have trailed the group for decades. Most notoriously, Hells Angels allegedly plotted to kill rock legend Mick Jagger following the infamous 1969 riot at California's Altamont Speedway, where the gang was providing security. The Rolling Stones front man had criticized the Angels after a biker stabbed to death a spectator who had pulled a gun during the melee; the killing was ruled self-defense and charges were dropped. (Much of the episode was captured...
There probably weren't really that many murderous hippies running around in the 1960s, but you wouldn't know it from the novels of the past decade. Ever since Merry Levov blew up a post office in Philip Roth's American Pastoral, it has been like one long, literary Altamont: Russell Banks, T.C. Boyle, Susan Choi, Christopher Sorrentino and Dana Spiotta have all written books about nut-job flower children. And here come two more: Peter Carey's His Illegal Self (Knopf; 272 pages) and Hari Kunzru's My Revolutions (Dutton; 288 pages). Didn't anybody just leave...
...copies at a few hundred indie video stores around the world, but there is only one way to see it legally. In 1972, Swiss-born photographer and filmmaker Robert Frank made a documentary about the first Rolling Stones tour of North America after the tragedy of four deaths at Altamont Free Concert two years earlier. The film was called Cocksucker Blues, after a song Mick Jagger wrote to anger record company executives with its stark, homoerotic lyrics and the aggressive manner in which he sings them. Although the movie was originally commissioned by the Stones themselves, they blocked its release...
...then, Albert and David had pretty much patented the branch of documentary known as showbiz v?rit?. Showman, a profile of movie distributor Joe Levine (1963), What's Happening: The Beatles in the U.S.A. (1964), A Visit With Truman Capote (1966), Meet Marlon Brando (1966) and the Rolling Stones' Altamont debacle Gimme Shelter (1970) all demonstrated v?rit?'s affinity for performers. A form of documentary that plants a two-person film crew (camera and sound) in a room with the subject, then waits for something to happen, v?rit? is dependent on exhibitionists, self-dramatizers, natural actors, people eager to tell their...
...good news is that as the price of crude has headed steadily upward, technological innovation has driven down the cost of alternative energy sources. Wind farms cover hillsides near Palm Springs and Altamont Pass in California and are springing up in the breezy Midwest and on the Atlantic Coast too. Solar cells can churn out electricity at around 25¢ to 35¢ per kilowatt-hour, falling but still a multiple of the cost of energy from coal-fired power plants. Canada is extracting oil from the tar sands of Alberta for an amazingly efficient price...