From Summer of Love to Mars (and back?)

Another 2017 anniversary has been noted by several writers and columnists this month: the so-called Summer of Love's 50th. Here's one writer's take on it - Todd Gitlin: Summer of Love and Rage.

Hippie-dom, and Summer of Love were something I only read about, back in England, and, otherwise engaged in my own throes of marriage, separation and frustratingly attempting divorce in an era when it was nowhere near as easy as it is today. I did fleetingly enjoy a few of the LSD-induced songs drifting through my transistor radio, but back then the other side of the Atlantic seemed as far away as Mars - and as alien.

Commenter "Rodmacd", in a thread below the linked piece had this to say:

The hippie era was pretty brief. The Summer of Love, followed 2 years later by Woodstock; thought, with breathless anticipation, to be an "OMG, What's Next?!" event -- and, as we all now know, "next" turned out to be a few years of a whole lot of not much until the hippies traded in their tie-dyes for tie clips and pasted over their "War is not healthy for Children and other living things" bumper stickers with ones that read "He who dies with the most toys wins". Mighty Mammon took a shot or two back then, but it rallied strong and remains the heavyweight champion of the American Dream.

Oh - and speaking of Mars... dragging myself back to 2017 again, here's an interesting piece by Tyler Losier:


The race to the red planet: How NASA, SpaceX are working to get to Mars.

Well then...speaking of space travel, and potential future ways to do it, or aid it: here's another interesting piece, this by Tom Spender:

Teleportation: Photon particles today, humans tomorrow?

As the always quotable and much lamented Sir Terry Pratchett once wrote:

“This is space. It's sometimes called the final frontier. (Except that of course you can't have a final frontier, because there'd be nothing for it to be a frontier to, but as frontiers go, it's pretty penultimate . . .)”
― Terry Pratchett, Moving Pictures

Music Monday ~ Back to Be-in, Love-in and the '60s

Music Monday this week peeks into tomorrow, 14 January, then back to 1967. On 14 January in 1967 the "Human Be-in" took place in San Francisco, prelude to the Summer of Love to follow a few months later.

JANUARY 14, 1967 Human Be-In (1:30)

Tens of thousands meet in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park for a "Gathering of the Tribes" that puts the city's hippies in the national spotlight. Organizers Michael Bowen and Allen Cohen (also the co-founders of the Oracle newspaper) call the event a Be-In -- a clever reference to the successful sit in protests of the civil rights movement.

"A union of love and activism previously separated by categorical dogma and label mongering will finally occur ecstatically when Berkeley political activists and hip community and San Francisco's spiritual generation and contingents from the emerging revolutionary generation all over California meet for a Gathering of the Tribes for a Human Be-In. ...

Music will be played by all the Bay Area rock bands, including the Grateful Dead, Big Brother and the Holding Co., Quicksilver Messenger Service, and many others. Everyone is invited to bring costumes, blankets, bells, flags, symbols, cymbals, drums, beads, feathers, flowers...

The Human Be-In is the joyful, face-to-face beginning of the new epoch.
-- The San Francisco Oracle, Vol. 1, Issue 5, p. 2

(see HERE)


It's all part of history now. See here for more detail.

In January 1967, in England, still in my twenties, I was ignorant of what was going on five and a half thousand miles away. The new music eventually seeped through on the radio, first in a trickle then in a tsunami, and hung around for years.

Two songs that immediately spring to my own mind from that long-gone era:

From USA artist -

From UK artists - I've always loved this one -

I've been finding myself in an unplanned '60s time-slip - kind of - these last few days. First, in preparing this post, then reading a book which covers 1958 to 1963 and the present (Stephen King's "11/22/63"), then watching a DVD yesterday evening I picked up in the rental store due to the starry cast list, without having an idea of its theme - The Company You Keep (Redford, Sarandon, Nolte, Sam Elliot, Julie Christie, Chris Cooper)- it turned out to be based on events a year or so after the Summer of Love, and surmising, fictionally, on present-day fates of a set of well-matured members of The Weather Underground.

In the book "11/22/63" mentioned above the author says on numerous occasions, "the past harmonizes". I'm finding, also on numerous occasions, that so does the present!