Sydney Poitier & Michael Lang RIP

Two titans of the 1960s have died, and their lives and careers are a reminder of an era that was both troubled and exciting, where the world was being reshaped, and the repercussions of which we are still living with today. 

Sydney Poitier was a not just a brilliant actor but also a great movie star. He was the first black man to win the Best Actor Oscar, and movies like Guess Who's Coming to Dinner? and In the Heat of the Night forced white America to see the power of the black voice and experience. Poitier was a boy when he escaped to NYC to start his life that would lead him to cinematic and cultural greatness. In fact, so potent was his reputation that a play called Six Degrees of Separation was written based on the bizarre cob job of a man named David Hampton who claimed to be his son (I blogged about it a while ago; Poitier doesn't appear in the play as a character because he doesn't need to -- his image was so powerful and famous that anyone who saw the play knew who he was and why someone would want to be his son). Poitier has died at the age of 94 and his legacy will on.  

Michael Lang was one of the co-creators of the 1969 Woodstock Festival that made history as one of the greatest and most important cultural events in American history. A kid from Brooklyn, in his early 20s Lang and his colleagues threw together the three (actually four) days of "peace, love, and music" that captured that imagination of the world and is still talked about endlessly to this day. Lang was involved in other musical festivals and music management, and oversaw the 1994 and ill-fated 1999 revivals of Woodstock. He had a reputation, and an affect, of someone for whom the 1960s never ended, who kept the "groovy man" spirit of that decade alive -- right up until the end. Lang has died at the age of 77. For all of Mr NYC's Woodstock coverage over the year's, go here.