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    In the Hudson Valley and Catskills, Veteran Rockers Start Over

    How the Hudson Valley and the Catskills became the home to grunge icons, ex-punks and one-hit wonders.Melissa Auf der Maur spent 15 years as a rocker on the road, playing bass in alternative bands like Hole and the Smashing Pumpkins, dating Dave Grohl, and at times taking up residence in Janis Joplin’s old room at the Chelsea Hotel in New York. But in 2006, when she met and fell in love with the filmmaker Tony Stone, she knew it was time to settle down away from the city, become a mother and raise a child in a “cozy little town with a cool kindergarten and plenty of nature.”She was 34 and in the middle of making her second solo album, she said, when Mr. Stone took her to Hudson, N.Y., to visit friends and family who had moved to the area.“I had a tingling feeling,” she said. “I said to Tony: ‘If we’re going to live anywhere in the U.S., it’s going to be here.’”The couple moved to Hudson in 2008 and started a family soon thereafter. But Ms. Auf der Maur still felt driven by the urge to create. She also wanted to do something community-focused, like starting an arts center similar to the ones she had relied on when she was a struggling young musician growing up in Montreal.Together with Mr. Stone, she started Basilica Hudson in 2010. The arts and performance space, housed in a former railroad wheel foundry, hosts both international music festivals and local events. A reclaimed elementary school, built around 1901 and close to Basilica’s net-zero campus, now serves as a showpiece, design innovation hub and media center for the couple’s interest in green design. Basilica has also become one of the Hudson Valley’s most popular wedding venues, which, as Ms. Auf der Maur puts it, “wasn’t in our original plan, but totally pays for our wild, purist dreams of arts and culture.”A former grunge icon for Courtney Love’s band in the dangerous days of the ’90s, Ms. Auf der Maur is just one of the many musicians who have moved to the Hudson Valley and the Catskills to start over, in one way or another. Some have put their musical careers on hold. Others have continued recording and touring, while devoting themselves to completely new pursuits. But the artists in the area make up a dream festival bill for the Lollapalooza generation, one that remembers vinyl, cassettes, CDs and when MTV still played music videos for most of the day.Melissa Auf der Maur, left, and Courtney Love of Hole, onstage in Los Angeles in 1999.Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic Inc., via Getty ImagesThere’s longtime area resident Natalie Merchant, the former lead singer for 10,000 Maniacs, who has volunteered for educational nonprofits including Head Start in Troy; the bassist Tony Levin, who played with King Crimson and Peter Gabriel, and who now lives in Kingston and pursues photography; the songwriter Amy Rigby, now an author and podcaster in Catskill; Daryl Hall, of Hall & Oates fame, who became a nightclub proprietor with the opening of Daryl’s House in Pawling; and Kate Pierson, the inimitable singer of the B-52’s, who pioneered the funky retro chic motel concept in the Catskills with the opening of Kate’s Lazy Meadow in Mt. Tremper in 2004.And where else but in Woodstock could the dentist who is filling your cavity have had a former life as a “one-hit wonder” in that golden year of pop, 1967?As a couple, Ms. Auf der Maur and Mr. Stone seemed like the perfect combination for making a thriving arts center in Hudson a reality; she had the vision, and he had the know-how. “I wanted to see if I could bring the world to us, to bring all the things I had experienced around the world to this tiny town,” she said.Mr. Stone is the son of two artists who were active in the SoHo and TriBeCa loft scene of the 1970s. “Tony’s dad, Bill, was a contractor in Lower Manhattan, who at one time almost went in on a plumbing pipe threader with Philip Glass,” Ms. Auf der Maur said. “A lot of artists worked renovating many lofts in SoHo, a skill my husband inherited,” she continued. “We’re not afraid of taking on big buildings without plumbing or electricity. Our destiny seems to be taking these buildings and creating a second life for them and ourselves.”Mr. Stone described himself as “an urban-rural hybrid,” who grew up in a loft on Duane Street in Downtown Manhattan but spent every summer “off the grid in a hippie cabin” in Vermont. “By age 12, I was wiring solar panels and digging wells,” he said. “It set the stage for what Melissa and I do today at Basilica.”He came to know the Hudson Valley as a student at Bard College and again when his aunt bought a house in Hudson, followed by his parents, who moved to the area in 1998. Soon after he started dating Ms. Auf der Maur, Mr. Stone introduced her to family haunts in Vermont and upstate New York, where Ms. Auf der Maur “began to understand the power of nature in the raw and the need to preserve it,” she said. “It makes you look at everything differently. And that, too, changed the whole direction of my life.”Ms. Auf der Maur and Mr. Stone seemed like the perfect combination for making a thriving arts center in Hudson a reality; she had the vision, and he had the know-how; Lauren Lancaster for The New York TimesNow, the couple are players in the local arts and climate scene. Ms. Auf der Maur is a member of the Regional Economic Development Council for the Capital region, where she reviews grant applications. (Basilica Hudson and The River House Project, their green design initiative, have received grants from the council.) She and Mr. Stone were part of the team that helped secure a $10 million grant from the council to revitalize the Hudson waterfront.Ms. Auf der Maur also joined the writer, musician and producer Jesse Paris Smith (who is the daughter of Patti Smith) and the musician and activist Rebecca Foon to help Hudson become a part of the 1,000 Cities Initiative for Carbon Freedom, a project to get cities of all sizes involved in the renewable energy and zero emissions goals set forth by the Paris Agreement.“Melissa and Tony’s efforts have been a blessing for our community, one that really demonstrates the connection between climate action and social justice,” said Kamal Johnson, the mayor of Hudson. “Basilica has been a great asset,” he continued. “It has brought world-class artists and audiences to our door and served as the stage for many events that bind together our community.”The singer Amanda Palmer, who is half of the punk-cabaret duo the Dresden Dolls and has a place in Woodstock, concurs with the mayor’s take on Ms. Auf der Maur, now 50, who has also found the time to work on a memoir that will include some of the 30,000 photos she snapped during her time as a musician. “She’s an important nexus, a vital connective tissue in the arts, the environment and in swaying a certain kind of creative, like myself, to take up residence in the Hudson Valley,” Ms. Palmer said.About five miles south of Hudson is the town of Catskill. In 2011, the singer-songwriter Amy Rigby (best known for her 1996 album, “Diary of a Mod Housewife”) moved there from France with her rocker husband, Eric Goulden, also known as Wreckless Eric (best remembered for his 1977 record “Whole Wide World”). Her friend Deb Parker, a former owner of the Beauty Bar in the East Village and who had become a real estate broker in the area in the late 2000s, showed the couple around.The singer-songwriter Amy Rigby moved to Catskill with her husband in 2011. These days she’s writing and producing a podcast.Lauren Lancaster for The New York TimesOnce they were settled, Ms. Rigby started working part time at the Spotty Dog Books & Ale in Hudson and pursuing writing. In 2019, her memoir, “Girl to City,” about being a musician in the East Village from the 1970s through the mid-90s, was published.During the Covid-19 shutdown, Ms. Rigby created a podcast based on “Girl to City” and began work on a follow-up memoir, “Girl to Country.” The Hudson Valley is all about second acts, she said. “Everybody reinvents themselves up here.”Ms. Rigby onstage with her husband, Eric Goulden, at City Winery in New York City.Al Pereira/Getty ImagesTake Tracy Bonham, who had a No. 1 alternative single in 1996 with “Mother, Mother,” but who has since used much of her time to teach music to children. In 2020, during the height of the pandemic, she and another musician founded Melodeon Music House, an educational program in Woodstock that was inspired by the popular 1970s Saturday morning TV series “Schoolhouse Rock!”But unlike her peers, Ms. Bonham ultimately decided full-time country life was not for her. This fall, she returned to Brooklyn, where she currently teaches the Melodeon curriculum to preschoolers.“It was really for the energy and vitality of the city, and the diversity of the people,” Ms. Bonham said of her return to the city. “Now that I look back on it, it could be a bit isolating,” she said, referring to Woodstock. “The sun goes down early and the winters are long and hard, so you can feel a bit trapped. Now that I am back in Brooklyn, I feel re-energized and inspired. There’s both more opportunity for work and to socialize.”Ms. Rigby, too, feels the pull of the city. “When I was driving down to Manhattan to play a gig at the City Winery recently, I kept telling myself, ‘I don’t care about the city anymore,’” she said. “But it’s a defense mechanism. I still care about the city that made me, and nothing feels as good as playing to a New York crowd.”Ms. Rigby, at home in Catskill, N.Y.Lauren Lancaster for The New York TimesHowever, when she hits the New York State Thruway and sees the mountains, Ms. Rigby said, she can breathe again. So for now, she’s staying put. “I probably became a more well-rounded person living up here. New York will always be the paragon of where one goes to pursue a creative life, but that kind of low-rent existence for aspiring artists isn’t possible there anymore.”Tony Levin, who has lived in Kingston since the mid-70s, is also not going anywhere. Best known for his inventive bass playing with King Crimson, Peter Gabriel and Paul Simon, Mr. Levin still tours and records. But he is also a writer and a photographer, and he recently took advantage of his downtime during the pandemic to organize many of his photographs into a new coffee table book, “Images From a Life on the Road.”Across the river in Beacon, Richard Butler, the charismatic frontman of the Psychedelic Furs, who studied at the Epsom School of Art and Design in London before pursuing music, lived and painted there for decades before relocating to Connecticut last year.Another rocker with long ties to the area is Bruce Jay Milner, whose band, Every Mother’s Son, had a hit with “Come on Down to My Boat” in 1967. The tune also earned him and his bandmates a place in the “One-Hit Wonders” exhibit at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland.Bruce Jay Milner at his dental office, Transcend Dental, in West Hurley, N.Y.Lauren Lancaster for The New York Times“I had just started dental school at N.Y.U., but this was way, way more exciting,” Dr. Milner said of the instant success as a young musician. “I really thought I would pursue this, stay in the music game forever, if we kept getting hits.”Unfortunately, that was not to be. Dr. Milner ended up finishing dental school and now lives and practices dentistry in West Hurley, about three miles south of Woodstock. Naturally, he claims to have attended the famous festival of peace and music in nearby Bethel, in 1969. The name of his practice? Transcend Dental.“I still play a lot locally, have a digital keyboard in my office and have had my hands in the mouths of some of the biggest names in music,” said Dr. Milner, ticking off famous patients like Brian Eno and Sonny Rollins.The musician Amy Helm, whose father was Levon Helm, the drummer for The Band, is a patient. She said Dr. Milner was “the kind of guy who will play a song and sing harmony with you before he gives you a root canal.”Dr. Milner said: “Being a dentist up in Woodstock, with all these great musicians, is a pretty great second act. And what other dentist can say he is in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame?”“He’s the kind of guy who will play a song and sing harmony with you before he gives you a root canal,” a longtime patient said of Dr. Milner.Lauren Lancaster for The New York TimesSal Cataldi is a writer, musician and former publicist living in Saugerties, N.Y. More

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    Music Festivals Try to Go Green and Carbon Neutral

    A handful of festivals are striving to become carbon neutral by reducing waste, using high-tech dance floors and offsetting emissions.In Nashville this past August, about 5,000 revelers in neon chaps, gothic chains and kaleidoscopic crop tops descended on Bicentennial Park for an electronic music festival. They gyrated to pulsating sets by the British D.J. Chris Lake and the electronic duo Snakehips. They watched choreographed light shows and got massages in a healers’ village.And when they raised their arms in the air, many of them flashed a green wristband, signifying a commitment to partying in a way that was carbon neutral.Billed as the “greenest festival” in the country, Deep Tropics had no trash cans (though there were plenty of recycling and compost bins), and single-use plastics were banned. Festival organizers said that all the carbon consumed for the two-day event (including the fuel used by all the festivalgoers) will be offset by the planting of some 23,000 trees.“We’re the next generation of festivals,” said Blake Atchinson, 39, who founded Deep Tropics in 2017 with his twin brother, Joel Atchinson. “We are trying to be on the cutting edge of technology and culture and sustainability and art.”The festival was founded by Blake and Joel Atchison. “We are trying to be on the cutting edge of technology and culture and sustainability and art,” Blake said. Taylor Baucom for The New York TimesTraditional music festivals consume a lot of resources. The sound systems and lights alone guzzle tons of power. Bigger festivals like Lollapalooza and Tomorrowland draw hundreds of thousands of revelers, who use energy to get there and leave behind mountains of waste. What isn’t carried in by hand needs to be trucked in.And that’s not counting the D.J.s. A 2021 report by Clean Scene, a climate collective in Berlin, found that 1,000 of the top D.J.s together took more than 51,000 flights in a single year, emitting 35 million tons of carbon dioxide — equivalent to the amount of power consumed by 20,000 households.But there is a novel push by eco-minded organizers to make festivals greener, sometimes through smaller, feel-good initiatives like compost toilets and vegan food trucks. Others are striving for bigger impact by offsetting their carbon emissions, or tapping dancers’ body heat to power their heating and cooling systems.“There’s pressure on festivals, especially because they’re such large events,” said Fallon MacWilliams, 37, a D.J. and promoter in Berlin who is one of the three founders of Clean Scene. “This year while touring I saw a lot of festivals changing the way they’re doing things when it comes to plastic and encouraging artists to take trains to the festival.”Vision: 2025, a nonprofit in Bristol, England, has gotten more than 40 festivals in Britain to pledge to cut their emissions in half and double their recycling rates by 2025. Daybreaker, which organizes sober dance parties worldwide, hosts a series of morning raves where single-use plastics are prohibited and public transportation is encouraged.Some festival organizers say the changes need to be more systemic. Music festivals are “completely dependent on cheap flights and therefore the consumption of fossil fuels,” said Eilidh McLaughlin, 35, a founder of Clean Scene. “Any effort to advance sustainability is essentially greenwashing unless you are working to actively break the cycle and reduce your carbon footprint by touring more sustainably.”The festival took place in Nashville in August.Taylor Baucom for The New York TimesThe lights and sounds will be offset by the planting of trees.Taylor Baucom for The New York TimesIn 2020, DGTL, an organization in Amsterdam that produces electronic music festivals, pledged to be climate neutral. “We are trying to create a new festival landscape where sustainability will be the norm,” said Mitchell van Dooijeweerd, 31, the sustainability manager for DGTL. “It’s become a business model, because we are experts in this and everybody wants to change.”For this year’s Deep Tropics, the organizers teamed with Green Disco, a company in New York that helps events become environmentally friendlier. During the festival, its founders Jonah Geschwind, 22, and Jacob Chandler, 21, stood at the entrance and sold $20 “eco-bands”: green wristbands that funded the planting of trees and other environmental causes.“If you make sustainability easy and as cool as possible, people are going to naturally adopt it,” said Mr. Chandler, who said they sold about 500 bracelets, which he estimates will offset 400 metric tons of carbon dioxide.A group called Green Disco sold “eco-bands” that will offset carbon emissions. Taylor Baucom for The New York TimesBigger festivals are also making efforts: Coachella has increased vegan food options, urged its attendees to car pool and pledged to slash emissions; Burning Man announced a 10-year sustainability road map in 2019.And some music acts are trying, too. Coldplay has pledged that its current tour will create half as much greenhouse gas emissions as its previous one. The band is also touring with a kinetic dance floor that uses human movement to create electricity. The floor was a previous attraction at Club Watt, a dance club in Rotterdam that’s now closed.Still, real-world practicalities sometimes get in the way. At this year’s Burning Man there were 12-hour traffic jams, leaving ravers stuck in hot, idling cars while Nevada temperatures crept above 100 degrees. And at Deep Tropics, some vendors used plastic packaging despite signing pledges.There were no trash cans at the festival (though plenty of recycling and compost bins).Taylor Baucom for The New York TimesThat doesn’t mean progress isn’t being made, said Heather White, 49, an environmental scientist in Bozeman, Mont., and founder of the nonprofit One Green Thing.“From a 30,000-foot level, does all this matter?” she said. “It absolutely matters. These electronic music festivals are drivers of culture change. We have to have these living laboratories, where people can see zero waste at a concert, because without culture change, big policy solutions are not going to work.” More

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    This Play Is Touring Europe. But No One’s Going Anywhere.

    By 2024, the British director Katie Mitchell’s latest project “A Play for the Living in a Time of Extinction,” will have been shown in 10 countries. Yet neither Mitchell, nor any cast or crew, will cross a single border.The experiment is part of “Sustainable Theater?”, an initiative of the Vidy-Lausanne Theater in Lausanne, Switzerland, in conjunction with a network of 10 European producers. Mitchell has created a “touring score” — an online handbook with detailed instructions on every aspect of the production — that is handed to local artists in theaters at each stop. But those artists have creative control, too: “A Play for the Living in a Time of Extinction,” a monologue by the American playwright Miranda Rose Hall about a young theater worker reckoning with man-made damage to the environment, will have a different director and look everywhere it goes.This commitment to zero travel is part of the theater’s efforts to adapt for climate change. In recent years, a growing number of artists and venues have started to rethink their reliance on easy, yet environmentally costly, international travel.At the Piccolo Teatro in Milan, where the show opens Thursday, Mitchell’s vision has been reinterpreted by the Rome-based collective lacasadargilla. “You have the artistic freedom to make your own show,” Mitchell’s instructions read, “while working within the parameters outlined below.” Those include casting, music and technical requirements — down to a video tutorial explaining how to build a power meter.Lisa Ferlazzo Natoli, a member of lacasadargilla who directed the Milan version, called Mitchell’s production, which she saw over Zoom when it was presented in Lausanne, “Model Zero.” Now, it felt as if she and Mitchell were co-directing from a distance, she said.The Rome-based theater collective lacasadargilla rehearsing  “A Play for the Living in a Time of Extinction” at the Teatro Piccolo in Milan. All the show’s electricity is generated from stationary onstage bicycles.Alessandro Grassani for The New York TimesIt is an unusual production model in European theater, where directors tend to have the final word on every iteration of their work. The goal, Mitchell explained in a video interview, was to figure out new avenues for theater-making in the face of an environmental threat. “In the light of climate change, you can’t have the normal hierarchies, systems, structures, or control, because the subject is so much bigger and so much more important,” she said. “You have to relinquish artistic control.”Mitchell, who is 57 and renowned across Europe as a theater and opera director, said that she could afford to experiment with what she called “eco-dramaturgy.” “I’m at the end of my career, not at the beginning, so I don’t have anything to lose if I mess up artistically. I’d like to keep the young generation free of that, and they just get the outcome.”The “Sustainable Theater?” program started with virtual conversations. To come up with a feasible production model, Mitchell and another environmentally conscious artist, the French director and choreographer Jérôme Bel, held online meetings twice a month for nearly a year with Vincent Baudriller, the artistic director of Vidy-Lausanne Theater, and Caroline Barneaud, its director of international projects.The team also linked up with researchers from the University of Lausanne to evaluate the theater’s carbon footprint. Completing a similar self-evaluation process is a requirement for the Vidy-Lausanne’s European partners, which include theaters in Ghent, Belgium; Maribor, Slovenia; Vilnius, Lithuania; Zagreb, Croatia; Lisbon; and Stockholm. (Taiwan’s National Theater and Concert Hall has also signed up.)Production-wise, the partners signed on sight unseen: At the time, Mitchell and Bel thought they might create a single production (and script) together. Instead, each theater will get two: In addition to “A Play for the Living in a Time of Extinction,” a work by Bel, called “Jérôme Bel,” will also be restaged by participating theaters.The play is about a young theater worker reckoning with man-made damage to the environment. A tree onstage represents the only tree left on the planet.Alessandro Grassani for The New York TimesMitchell’s work has been responding to the climate crisis for a decade, onstage and off. She stopped flying entirely in 2012, she said, after meeting the British scientist Stephen Emmott and hearing him talk about the need for radical behavior change. The zero-travel rule for “Sustainable Theater?” was her idea — and “irritated people, definitely, to begin with,” she said. Since she is based in Britain, she directed “A Play for the Living in a Time of Extinction” entirely over Zoom ahead of its Lausanne premiere last September (which she attended virtually).Cameras were positioned inside the theater to relay rehearsals to Mitchell, and operated by a dedicated technician. “It’s not entirely easy to read a room, and you can’t pick up the little micro-conversations that are going on. We had to have a different protocol of communication,” she said. “You could view everything as a problem. Me and my team, we chose not to.”Barneaud, from the Vidy-Lausanne, said that the experience was a positive one for the theater’s in-house team. “It gave everyone a greater sense of responsibility. The sound engineer, for instance, had to act as ‘ears’ for the composer, Paul Clark, since he wasn’t in the room.”Out of the instructions in the script that Milan’s Piccolo Teatro and other theaters received after the premiere, only a few are set in stone. One is to take performances entirely off the electrical grid. Instead, to generate electricity, Mitchell positioned stationary bikes onstage that performers ride throughout the show. Mitchell said this was about “showing the effort of electricity.” (There are tutorials in the touring score on how to build the bikes, too.)The Milan version, made for a larger stage than in Switzerland, and with more elaborate sets, employs four bikes instead of two. While climate change has been a recurring theme in lacasadargilla’s work since its inception in 2005, the show’s requirements still forced its members to rethink some habits, Ferlazzo Natoli said: “Normally, we work much more with video, but video consumes a lot, and it requires a stable quantity of energy.”Working with constraints had proved stimulating, she added. “It’s so exciting, because we discovered that we can work with devices, lights and instruments that we didn’t know before.”Lisa Ferlazzo Natoli, left, a lacasadargilla member, directing the show in Milan. ”We discovered that we can work with devices, lights and instruments that we didn’t know before,” she said.Alessandro Grassani for The New York TimesThe artists and producers involved all stressed that the model they had developed was just one option to limit theater’s impact on global warming, rather than a one-and-done answer. “I think we’re really at the beginning of this journey,” Claudio Longhi, the director of the Teatro Piccolo, said. “This project is a way to ask questions, a provocation.”When the Italian version of “A Play for the Living in a Time of Extinction” premieres on Thursday, Mitchell will be watching — over Zoom, of course. But there will be no notes from her afterward, she said. “It belongs to the local artists in Milan. They’re free to do whatever they want.” More