Summer of Love...Are you going to San Francisco?
From Economist.com
America changed for the better after it
IF TIE-DYED fabric, joss sticks and finger cymbals are not your thing then you should avoid San Francisco at the moment. A flowery-haired throng is expected to attend a free concert in Golden Gate Park on Sunday September 2nd to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the “Summer of Love”. Hippie-era luminaries (survivors, some might say) such as Canned Heat, Country Joe McDonald and Wavy Gravy have promised to appear. Internet rumours that the gathering might be cancelled were reportedly dismissed by the organisers as the work of “Nixon’s retired dirty tricksters”.
Events have been held across America to celebrate the spirit of that heady summer, including a festival at Monterey, the sight of the first big outdoor pop-concert in June 1967 and forerunner of the era’s biggest gathering of stoned youngsters at Woodstock. Sunday’s “happening” takes place in the spiritual home of hippiedom. A “human be-in” at Golden Gate Park in January 1967 acted as both prelude and catalyst for the Summer of Love.
Timothy Leary, a psychologist and exponent of the psychedelic experience, invited the world to “turn on, tune in, drop out”. Tens of thousands of young “hippies”—a term coined by Herb Caen, a now-deceased San Francisco journalist—took up Leary’s offer and descended on the Haight-Ashbury neighbourhood of the city that year (a “huge invasion“, as the San Francisco Chronicle called it at the time).
It is not hard to see why the Summer of Love has been romanticised in popular culture. It was when the young “seemed to be deserting their scripts”, according to Todd Gitlin’s sweeping history of the 1960s. That summer represented the high point of the decade. The Beatles sang a tune about love that was beamed across the world in an experiment for satellite television. A growing sense of optimism that the world could be changed with the application of a little love hit its peak before it all started to go wrong in 1968. More than two-thirds of respondents to a PBS online poll earlier this year said they would liked to have gone to San Francisco in that carefree summer of 1967.
The decade still reverberates in the American psyche. The reaction to George Bush’s recent comparison of the Iraq conflict to the Vietnam war is just the latest example. Some are quick to point to the similarities between then and now: a Texan in the White House, an unpopular war, an actor in charge of California. But the differences are just as stark.
(Continued here.)
America changed for the better after it
IF TIE-DYED fabric, joss sticks and finger cymbals are not your thing then you should avoid San Francisco at the moment. A flowery-haired throng is expected to attend a free concert in Golden Gate Park on Sunday September 2nd to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the “Summer of Love”. Hippie-era luminaries (survivors, some might say) such as Canned Heat, Country Joe McDonald and Wavy Gravy have promised to appear. Internet rumours that the gathering might be cancelled were reportedly dismissed by the organisers as the work of “Nixon’s retired dirty tricksters”.
Events have been held across America to celebrate the spirit of that heady summer, including a festival at Monterey, the sight of the first big outdoor pop-concert in June 1967 and forerunner of the era’s biggest gathering of stoned youngsters at Woodstock. Sunday’s “happening” takes place in the spiritual home of hippiedom. A “human be-in” at Golden Gate Park in January 1967 acted as both prelude and catalyst for the Summer of Love.
Timothy Leary, a psychologist and exponent of the psychedelic experience, invited the world to “turn on, tune in, drop out”. Tens of thousands of young “hippies”—a term coined by Herb Caen, a now-deceased San Francisco journalist—took up Leary’s offer and descended on the Haight-Ashbury neighbourhood of the city that year (a “huge invasion“, as the San Francisco Chronicle called it at the time).
It is not hard to see why the Summer of Love has been romanticised in popular culture. It was when the young “seemed to be deserting their scripts”, according to Todd Gitlin’s sweeping history of the 1960s. That summer represented the high point of the decade. The Beatles sang a tune about love that was beamed across the world in an experiment for satellite television. A growing sense of optimism that the world could be changed with the application of a little love hit its peak before it all started to go wrong in 1968. More than two-thirds of respondents to a PBS online poll earlier this year said they would liked to have gone to San Francisco in that carefree summer of 1967.
The decade still reverberates in the American psyche. The reaction to George Bush’s recent comparison of the Iraq conflict to the Vietnam war is just the latest example. Some are quick to point to the similarities between then and now: a Texan in the White House, an unpopular war, an actor in charge of California. But the differences are just as stark.
(Continued here.)
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