Brian Brooks Redefines the Meaning of Woodstock Generation

By Scott Macaulay On August 27, 2009

After viewing Taking Woodstock at Cannes, Indiewire's Brian Brooks realized that he belongs to "the Woodstock Generation." Never mind that he was born less than a year before the event and that during his childhood he styled himself like Alex Keaton, the improbably conservative youth played by Michael J. Fox on the sitcom Family Ties. And forget the fact that he still bristles when he remembers his mom's love of dressing him in "flower-patterned shirts, plaid bell bottoms and moccasins and a bead necklace" when sending him off to pre-school. (And totally forget his teenage fan letter to Ronald Reagan!) For Brooks, whose taste (and politics) soon shifted away from the traditional to embrace everthing from goth to Godard, Taking Woodstock brought him back to his childhood. "Except this time," he writes, "I could actually appreciate it rather than run away."

His indieWIRE piece, "Rebel, Rebel: Why Taking Woodstock Gave Me Goosebumps," is an eloquent personal testimonial as well as a timely meditation on why the spirit of the '60s still matters. The piece is a great read, a conflation of the personal and the political, that concludes with these words:

Somehow, the film awakened my inner rebel if only for a moment and it taps the inner youth that never completely dies...

Maybe I can’t completely articulate why the era as seen in the story of this film has a special place in my soul. OK, maybe rebellion is just fun, damnit. Maybe it’s worth it to have a focus on fighting against something, if only for the joi d’vivre. I went against the ‘60s when I was really young and became a fan as an adult (maybe I owe a thank you note to George H.W. Bush). The same rebel that made me an Alex Keaton knock-off at 13 is the same spirit that makes me a raging liberal at 40. But then again, as Jefferson Airplane’s Grace Slick once said back in the ‘60s, “Never trust anyone over 30.”