cannabisnews.com: Welcome Back, Starshine 










  Welcome Back, Starshine 

Posted by CN Staff on May 20, 2007 at 15:12:10 PT
By John Leland 
Source: New York Times  

San Francisco -- The Summer of Love, by most accounts, began on Jan. 14, 1967, with a gathering known as the Human Be-In in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, and ended on Oct. 6, with the Death of Hippie march, a mock funeral staged in Haight-Ashbury to tell aspiring flower children to stay home. Forty years later the children are at it again, only older and more institutional this time. The Whitney Museum of American Art is noting the anniversary with “Summer of Love: Art of the Psychedelic Era,” opening Thursday.
The Public Theater, which formed that summer with “Hair,” is staging a hippie-friendly season of Shakespeare in the Park, with “Romeo and Juliet” and “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” as well as a concert performance of “Hair” in September. Jefferson Starship, Quicksilver Messenger Service and other bands will renew the faith in July at the Monterey County Fairgrounds, where their younger selves performed at the 1967 Monterey International Pop Festival. But the wild cards are in places like Zieglersville, Pa., where a three-day Session Summer of Love beer celebration will feature a mini-firkin fest; or at the Palms Casino and Hotel in Las Vegas, where the Rain nightclub will hold a three-night rave event called Summer of Love, the Love-In, billed as an “all-out sensory assault.” If just thinking about these events leaves you tired, you can head to Starbucks for a 40th anniversary Monterey Pop CD set. (And if, like the squares of old, you need help with the lingo, a firkin is one sixth of a hogshead.)The flowers may have faded, and rents in the Haight may have gone through the roof, but the Summer of Love brand continues to extend. Instead of aging gracefully into kitsch, it has solidified into canon. “Why are we fascinated now?” asked Jann Wenner, 61, the editor and publisher of Rolling Stone, which will publish a Summer of Love double issue in June. “It’s our youth for a great number of people, especially those of us who now control things.”In recent political campaigns, claim on the era’s legacy has swung largely to conservative debunkers, who hold up the Summer of Love as an exercise in liberal self-absorption and a touchstone of moral decline. Now, with the nation again in an unpopular war, utopian voices are coming out again, softer in their politics but no less determined in their exceptionalism. “Much about that summer, looking back, seems incredibly foolish and narcissistic and grandiose,” said Oskar Eustis, 48, the artistic director of the Public Theater who was 9 in 1967 and whose parents took him to a demonstration at which protesters tried to levitate the Pentagon. “But it’s not crazy to remember that we stopped the war, and we did.” In contrast to the first time around, this summer’s activities will be spectator events, not participatory ones, replaying the Summer of Love as something you watch, not something you do. There will be comfortable seating and refreshments. And though there will likely be references to the current war, the art will still be fighting the last one, reflecting the songs and sensibilities not of the Iraq grunts’ generation but of their parents’.Which raises some questions: Is it possible to extract the Summer of Love from the distorting filter of narcissism? Or is that narcissism the essence of the brand, as revisionists and advertisers would have it? Economists use the term “survivorship bias” to describe the recollection of past moments by what has survived into the present, filtering out whatever elements did not bear fruit. For the Summer of Love what has survived is the music and industry it created, the fascination with youth culture, the now generic images of gentle hippies and a swirl of pretty colors that has found its home in the language of advertising. Some of the less institutional elements, like the Haight’s Free Store, voluntary sweep-ins, free food-ins, the free health clinic and the Death of Hippie, have receded from the narrative. Without these the Summer of Love has survived as a simple story: For a magical few months tens of thousands of young people left home for San Francisco, where they gave the nation new sounds, new pleasures and new styles. In went adolescent idealism and creative energy; out came a lifetime of ads for cars, Pepsi and retirement plans. This story has endured so tenaciously because it played out in the media in real time, with a level of stage management that was as forward-looking as the music. To “drop out” in 1967, as Timothy Leary urged the crowd at the Human Be-In, meant to emerge from obscurity and drop in — into a media spectacle that fascinated the country and a media economy that would replace manufacturing as the heartbeat of America. From the start the season had an official governing body, the Council for the Summer of Love; a hit theme song, Scott McKenzie’s “San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair)”, written and produced by the organizers of the Monterey festival; and a television deal, when a young ABC executive named Barry Diller bought the rights to Monterey for a never-realized Movie of the Week. The council came up with the name Summer of Love to put a positive spin on events that were often portrayed negatively in the press. Almost as soon as the hippies hit Golden Gate Park, sightseeing companies offered guided bus tours of the Haight, providing tourists a look at the hairy new wrinkle in humanity. As a 1967 manifesto from the Death of Hippie proclaimed, “Media created the hippie with your hungry consent.” In this year’s Summer of Love it will be clear who are the performers and who the spectators, where art ends and life begins. Even if you sing along to “Good Morning Starshine” or crash on the sidewalk outside the Whitney, you’re still there to honor someone else’s show. It ends when you walk out the door. If the first Summer of Love was about the shared exploration of possibility, conducted in the public eye, the anniversary demonstrates the accrued authority of the institutions that make this watching possible. These institutions have not always served the art, said Christoph Grunenberg, curator of the Whitney’s “Summer of Love” exhibition for the Tate Liverpool gallery, where it began in 2005. Instead, he said, they’ve enabled “a rather superficial consumption of a retro aesthetic, which doesn’t take into consideration the motives behind it, the desire for liberation.“The utopian impulse of the period is missing,” he said.The exhibition includes underground magazines, psychedelic light shows, album covers and posters and films of concerts, as well as paintings and sculptures from the ’60s and early ’70s. It’s “the first serious art-historical evaluation, as opposed to something that has been looked at as quote unquote just popular culture,” said Henriette Huldisch, the assistant curator in charge of installing the exhibition.Mr. Grunenberg, 44, said the art has been “a victim of its own success at the time and tainted by its association to drug culture, music culture, fashion and design. “It was unusual in that it aspired to the level of mass culture,” he added, “and that’s the cause of the suspicion that comes to psychedelic art. Can the light shows at a Jimi Hendrix show be art?” Yet there were other narratives within the Summer of Love. Once the masses started to arrive in the Haight, some pioneers left the city for greener pastures. By late summer LSD gave way to speed and utopian seekers to ill-prepared teenage runaways, children who could not take care of themselves. “Most people see the Summer of Love in very happy terms,” said Brad Abramson, vice president of production and programming for VH1 and an executive producer of the channel’s “Monterey 40,” a documentary about the 1967 pop festival that will be broadcast beginning June 16. “One thing that struck me was finding out what a mess it turns out to be. By the end of the summer speed freaks were catching and eating cats.” Mr. Wenner, who started Rolling Stone in San Francisco that fall, sees this narrative as a sideshow to the essence of the Summer of Love. For him the survivorship bias has allowed the substantive elements of the day to emerge from the confusion and hype. “I was skeptical of this invasion of the Haight-Ashbury, wear-flowers-in-your-hair stuff,” he said. “The grungy, sleeping-on-the-floor-in-a-sleeping-bag lifestyle was not for me. The drugs were, and the music was, and the peace and love was. But the grungy lifestyle, which was very limited to kids coming in from out of town, was not for me.”The sunnier side will be on display at this year’s Monterey Summer of Love Festival, where tribute bands, dressed up like Jimi Hendrix or the Byrds, will share the stage with some performers from the original festival, a three-day charity concert that included Hendrix, Janis Joplin, the Grateful Dead and others. Concertgoers this year will get Big Brother and the Holding Company without Joplin, and Carlton Poward performing as Hendrix: proof that nostalgia can conquer even death. But the commercial and canonical imperatives will be familiar. A goal for the first Monterey festival was to prove that rock music was “an art form in the same way jazz was,” said the record producer Lou Adler, 73, one of the organizers. “It was still looked on as a trend, two and a half minutes and you’re out. So the idea was to do a festival in the same place that there was a jazz festival and a folk festival; that seemed to validate it.”But from the start there was distrust between the organizers, who came from the Los Angeles music business, and the more underground groups, said Michelle Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas, who helped organize the event. “There definitely was that feeling from the San Francisco musicians that the Los Angeles groups were the commercial groups, and they were the real heart and soul,” she said. “I think they were just jealous because we were making the money. The whole point, I thought, was to make hit records.”In the end of course both sides won: the industry because it sold the ethos of the underground and the hip bands through the growth of the business. The ’60s culture blossomed not at the expense of its commercial tendencies but through them. The branding of the Summer of Love is not a corruption of the original moment but an impulse that was there all along.Like any brand, Summer of Love nostalgia champions its own brandedness, or exceptionalism, separating itself to an exaggerated extent from what came before or after. In this separation the past is seen as a purer image of the present, shorn of vulgarity and invested with possibility. The past points to a more utopian future than the one it actually became. Mr. Eustis of the Public Theater said he hoped to invoke the utopianism of 1967 without simply playing to nostalgia that runs on the desire to forget, not to remember. “Nostalgia is a corrupting emotion,” he said. “You’re imagining a lack of contradiction in the past. You’re imagining something that wasn’t true. It’s a longing to be a child again, to have magical thinking about the world.”But he added that nostalgia could also have a “progressive aspect” that pushes people to think forward rather than back, to “remember that you can imagine a world that is different, where money didn’t determine value, where competition wasn’t the nature of human relations.“That imagination can be powerful,” he continued. “The dream is real. The negative aspect of nostalgia is when we want that feeling that everything is possible, but we don’t want to do anything about it. That’s just narcissistic. That’s longing to feel important again. Baby boomers are very good at that.” For Michael Hirschorn, 43, executive vice president for original programming and production at VH1, which has built a business on the synthesis of youth culture and branding, the first order of business is to recover the music from the trappings. The channel’s Monterey documentary, he promised, will be about that music, not peace and love. “The ’60s always felt hokey and lame to me, so smug and self-important,” he said. “Seeing this footage now, maybe the ’60s and the Summer of Love can be reclaimed from its own advocates.” In the meantime issues of the underground magazine Oracle will be in the Whitney, and Quicksilver Messenger Service will be back at Monterey. And of course mini-firkins will be in Zieglersville. But this year’s pilgrims will find less reassessment, in the sense of discovering something new, than the impossible promise of recapturing the old. And with luck they will find some good music and art, along with more kitsch than anyone seems to want to acknowledge. To celebrate that, there’s Stanley Donen’s 1967 classic “Bedazzled,” with Dudley Moore and Peter Cook. It’s newly out on DVD, and it’s a trip. URL: http://tinyurl.com/2b4c4rSource: New York Times (NY)Author: John LelandPublished: May 20, 2007Copyright: 2007 The New York Times CompanyContact: letters nytimes.comWebsite: http://www.nytimes.com/Related Articles:Summer of Love: 40 Years Laterhttp://cannabisnews.com/news/thread22989.shtmlHippies Were Right All Along - We Knew Thathttp://cannabisnews.com/news/thread22941.shtml

Home    Comment    Email    Register    Recent Comments    Help





Comment #20 posted by FoM on May 21, 2007 at 16:53:54 PT
Hope
I find this all very interesting too. What happened 40 years ago changed so much of how we can look at the world. Maybe it was because I was still a Catholic and had so many questions and what the Hippies believed made more sense to me then all the theology I learned in school. The common answer when anyone asked a question, and they didn't know how to answer, they answered with it's a mystery. I didn't want to go thru life with answers like that. That isn't an answer and what I heard from young people and their ideals from that time wasn't a mystery. It was a logical alternative.
[ Post Comment ]

 


Comment #19 posted by Hope on May 21, 2007 at 16:05:33 PT

Oh boy.
So much said and happening on this thread!
[ Post Comment ]


 


Comment #18 posted by FoM on May 21, 2007 at 13:54:23 PT

Something Else
I don't like shopping but we are finishing up our foyer and stairs so we had to order our carpet and linoleum. Then we went to Walmart (boo hiss I know LOL!) We went to look at the Plasma and LCD TVs and I was totally absorbed in looking at the screens when my husband pushed me forward and said move. I did and then we heard an alarm go off seconds later. He saw a person behind us hiding some kind of tool and he cut something to steal something. The staff came and asked my husband for a description of the person. He said he had sandals on for one thing. The employee pointed to one man with sandals and he said was it him? My husband said oh no he is just an old hippie. I smiled. I don't understand stealing. I love flat screen tvs but we can't get one until the price drops. We should not covet what is not ours. So many people live life just trying to get more stuff and they don't care if they have to steal it. That is something I believe that people with a hippie heart won't do. That's all for now.
[ Post Comment ]


 


Comment #17 posted by FoM on May 21, 2007 at 13:41:08 PT

Dankhank 
I like what you are saying. I like what museman is saying. What became important to me as the 60s faded away was a thought. I didn't have to be like other people just because they said I should conform. If I had been a determined person that wanted to make money above all things I could have done that. I have not been paid for the majority of things I have done in my life. I wanted to give what I had away because I thought that was the right thing to do. If I hadn't been that way I would have a lot more money then I have. I have no regrets either.
[ Post Comment ]


 


Comment #16 posted by Dankhank on May 21, 2007 at 13:23:22 PT

history ...
someone has to be the devil's advocate ... might as well be you ... museman.I have been one for many years, as anyone will testify, that knows my history.I periodically ask my Mom the question:In the sixties we wanted Cannabis legalized and you said change the law, we haven't succeeded yet, but we got Medical Cannabis in some states and the DEA attacks the sick and steals their medicine. We changed the law and it doesn't matter to the politicians...What do we do now?no answer ...I submit to you that many in service industries are there due to a desire to "love all." "Hippies" and others who care about fellow humans continue the tradition of loving all by their actions.C Manson was never a hippie, he was a predator, but because he preyed among the hippies he adopted the mein and we got stuck with him. Madison Avenue preyed, made money, but DID keep the idea of the sixties around for next generations to question.Politicians preyed on "hippie" ideas, too stupid to know that some of those ideas were based on old knowledge, and some on new knowledge. It all seems to be coalescing these days and may lead us to some new ways of being.The Hippies did the lab work to show that Cannabis heals, and doesn't kill. Many today recreate with Cannabis and while they may be less committed most seem to know that it is a medicine, it must be, it doesn't harm.I hope this doesn't seem like I'm disputing, 'cause I'm not.I know full well how this country and it's people co-opted the flashy from us, ignored the important, turned may of us into cranky people, but now the important is becoming important to them as well.I value all critical thought on the topics in here, talk that helps me focus my own jumbled potpourri of hope, fear, angst, compassion, dislike, and love.Thanks for prodding me ...peace to all who would learn and grow ... 
[ Post Comment ]


 


Comment #15 posted by FoM on May 21, 2007 at 13:13:00 PT

museman
I think of that time in history as a time when many people decided that the way our country was wasn't what they wanted. I never wanted to live in a commune because I wanted to share my life with my husband and child. We wanted for life to be simplier and we worked for that day. We wanted to own our own home and a little land where we could live our life together. I really believe that the Summer of Love or Woodstock or any of the events that took place back then was a door for people. It was a door to another way of life if we wanted a different way. The hippie movement wasn't established on th east coast where I was from so it makes the meaning different for me. 
[ Post Comment ]


 


Comment #14 posted by museman on May 21, 2007 at 11:41:04 PT

yesterdays dreams
Have become todays nightmares, not because those dreams were realized,and failed somehow, but because the powers and principalities chose to undermine, infiltrate, instigate, persecute, prosecute, and in general make reality and life hell for those without resource that held to such beleifs, and the dreams faded into commercialism.How does anyone feel when they dedicate their life to a dream, suffer, and sacrifice, because they believe in it's possibilities and potential, only to have the various aspects that you painstakingly revealed to the world amidst much ridicule and discredit, become patented objects for corporate profit, and the underlying premises of peace and sharing rended to pieces by the fangs of a predatory society?We set out to share life, with all the color that we found languishing beneath the black and white and brown tones of a puritanical society gone insane. We set out with smiles, and laughter, and an innate sense of a 'oneness of being' that every other aspect of the world, and it's preceding generations fought hard to destroy.But we were all children. A multitude of children rising up into the light.They beat us down, those of us that had no material shields to hide behind. The hippie hype went on with those who could afford to 'be cool,' and the rest of us struggled to hold on to the dream of peace and prosperity. But, just like every other good thing discovered by creative (and usually poor) people, Madison Avenue ripped it off, and put a price tag on it.Sure it's 'safe' to look at it all now, because that youthful power of the '60's was successfully cowed, and brought into the status quo. The soul of the hippie was collectively bought and sold, otherwise we wouldn't see it being advertised as 'for sale.'We can laugh at the antics of the multi-colored long-haired youth, dancing with abandon while attemmpting to expand their consciousness with the demonized psychedelic, because the powers of rule and dynastic control, have declared that time and era offically over and ended. They can easily get any number of 'successful' middle-class boomers to reminisce on their own 'youthful foibles', but they don't dare talk to any of us that didn't trade our souls for the subhurbs and the materialistic 'american dream' that is a corrupt parody of the very dream some of us still hold sacred.If these words interfere with one's joy of remembrance, it just can't be helped. One thing about 'joy' that I have found; If one's 'joy' is obtained and held for the benefit of the few, or the ones who can 'afford to pay' at the expense of everyone else, then that joy is false and needs to be put in it's place. (not a reflection of anyone here)There were enough 'pretenders' and 'posers' back then, and it seems to me that those are the ones that are being celebrated here, with the iconic particpation of some of the original 'acts' that provided the sound track for our collective movie. They can all afford it. The bankers were 'good to them' though they often substitute the word 'life' with 'banker.'It just sickens and disgusts me. I didn't want to be the 'devils advocate' on this subject. I hoped someone else would see what I see, but apparently not. peace
[ Post Comment ]


 


Comment #13 posted by Hope on May 21, 2007 at 08:50:15 PT

Hitchhiking was a phenomenon of the time.
I tried once...but my mother had me thoroughly trained about not getting in the car with the strangers. It was funny. I tried to do it. I just couldn't get my authentic Earth shoes to get me into a stranger's car, although I remember having to ride with a strange truckdriver out in the middle of no where, after car trouble once. I was so pregnant and near ready to give birth that he had to get behind me and boost me up into his truck. That turned out ok. 
[ Post Comment ]


 


Comment #12 posted by Hope on May 21, 2007 at 08:42:22 PT

"...beginning of the concern for our earth"
Silent Spring. A book that pretty much shook the world.
[ Post Comment ]


 


Comment #11 posted by FoM on May 20, 2007 at 19:35:07 PT

Dankhank
I agree with what you are saying. 
[ Post Comment ]


 


Comment #10 posted by dankhank on May 20, 2007 at 18:47:00 PT

i believe ...
Everything good from then stayed good, only to be polluted by the "predators" that always accompany groups of people and feed on and sicken them.It's human nature ...San Francisco was not a good place to break-thru ... hard to sustain yourselves. It had to be there, though, because there it could give voice.
[ Post Comment ]


 


Comment #9 posted by FoM on May 20, 2007 at 18:13:52 PT

Hope
Something happened during that time that was more then just a Summer of Love. It was an awakening of something deep inside many people. People that didn't even know each other could relate and that was so unique. People that never even made it to San Francisco knew it was special. I believe in many respects that was the beginning of the concern for our earth. People wanted to find a simplicity in life and many people did just that. People scattered but the dream and vision never died it only faded into the background but it's alive and well.
[ Post Comment ]


 


Comment #8 posted by Hope on May 20, 2007 at 17:59:35 PT

Oh....and of course...
scary and ...many beautiful things and events as well.
[ Post Comment ]


 


Comment #7 posted by Hope on May 20, 2007 at 17:57:00 PT

She would have seen the good and the bad.
Don't forget the weird, strange, odd, serendipitous, spooky, and funny, even hilareous...after the fact, mostly, of course.Like spending the night in an old mission yard...and it supposedly being haunted and horrible howls at night and people...including her, busting out of sleeping bags...forget the zippers. Getting carried over to Mexico in a produce truck and...well there was a book's worth of tales, adventures, and misadventures.
[ Post Comment ]


 


Comment #6 posted by FoM on May 20, 2007 at 16:56:49 PT

Hope
I had a baby too and could only be their when I saw news clips on the tv and it was really fascinating to me. Your sister must have an amazing memory from that time. She would have seen the good and the bad.White Rabbit is one of my all time favorite songs.White Rabbit Video: http://www.youtube.com/v/6xhYk9PEmXA
[ Post Comment ]


 


Comment #5 posted by Hope on May 20, 2007 at 16:24:03 PT

My younger sister did that scene.
She hitch hiked out there with friends and had a long road trip adventure. It was something. I'm so glad she survived.I was taking care of a baby. But I loved the music and clothes...and freedom and hope.Grace Slick. I loved her voice.And Janis. All my children and grandchildren were introduced to her voice as soon after they were born as possible.
[ Post Comment ]


 


Comment #4 posted by FoM on May 20, 2007 at 16:16:44 PT

RevRayGreen
Yes he was. We have Monterey Pop on DVD. It was an amazing event.
[ Post Comment ]


 


Comment #3 posted by RevRayGreen on May 20, 2007 at 16:00:38 PT

SanFrancisco
'Down at Monterey'.......classic video FoM, cool seeing Jimi soaking up the atmosphere.
[ Post Comment ]


 


Comment #2 posted by FoM on May 20, 2007 at 15:16:25 PT

Scott McKenzie San Francisco Monterey 1967
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFp48BLpH-A
[ Post Comment ]


 


Comment #1 posted by FoM on May 20, 2007 at 15:12:57 PT

Poster from Above Article
http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2007/05/17/arts/20lela_ready.html
[ Post Comment ]





  Post Comment