WELCOME BACK, STARSHINE

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.