1960s Decade

It's an irony that's long puzzled Alice Echols: For all of the '60s' noble "question authority" rhetoric, the decade of the long, strange trip often gets the rose-colored glasses treatment. As memory fades, many of us, she contends, have been swept up by a touched-up '60s that's part Oliver Stone-esque impressionistic history, part remastered "Greatest Groovy Hits."

Their hair is thinner and their girth broader. Their lifestyles tend more to the minivan and gardening than to any utopian fantasies favoring the overthrow of what they used to call Amerika. Oh, and there's one more thing the graying lions of the radical left share in the aftermath of Sept.

Oh say, can you see those headbands and fringed vests, smell that cannabis and patchouli, hear that jangle of beads and ankle cymbals? "Hair" is back, and Claude, Sheila and Berger and their dippy band of hippies are in full flower at UCLA's Wadsworth Theater today through June 24. Starring Sam Harris, Jennifer Leigh Warren and Steven Weber, the Reprise!

"Sooner or later most filmmakers want to make a film about their childhood," muses Hong Kong filmmaker Wong Kar-wai, sitting on a balcony of a Los Angeles hotel and languidly puffing a cigarette. "The 1960s was the era in which I grew up." And how fondly he remembers it. Born in Shanghai, Wong landed in Hong Kong in 1962, at the age of 5.

From weird little Web sites do odd books grow. Swinginchicks.com was the Internet's answer to "Where are they now?" questions about women who'd been pop culture darlings of the 1960s. What ever happened to Brigitte Bardot? Where is Judy Carne hiding? You don't care? Well, Chris Strodder did. The sometime Web designer and writer was an impressionable second-grader in 1965 when he first saw Angela Cartwright, the foil-wrapped ingenue of TV's "Lost in Space" series.

In the 1960s, kids traded baseball cards all summer and took transistor radios to school to listen to the World Series in the fall, while Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris were trying to beat Babe Ruth's home run record. HBO's "When It Was a Game III," which airs tonight, captures many of those moments as it examines the last decade of innocence of America's favorite pastime.

Fox Knock-Off Network will build its fall season around a "highly original" reality-based television show called "The 1960s House," network executives announced this week. The show confines a contemporary family to a house in Berkeley, as it would have been in 1968. The family must survive not only the '60s . . . but each other. Each week, in so-called "hot tub councils," the family votes out a relative.

Thirty years before Austin Powers uttered his first "Yeah, baby, yeah!" or danced the frug with a group of "birds" down Carnaby Street, people were grooving to a diverse, often outrageous crop of movies that came out of the swinging England and hip, hot Hollywood of the '60s. These flicks ran the gamut from freewheeling musical comedies to head trips into the world of psychedelia to plotless excursions into surrealism. They proved to be an inspiration--and not just to Austin.

The scene was not unlike that of dozens of other massive Christian gatherings that have sprung up across the country in recent years. In fact, many of the cars driven to the Arrowhead Pond on Saturday bore bumper stickers emblazoned with their names: Promise Keepers, Harvest Crusade, Urbana. But this was somehow different. As the faithful came in waves, a pair of grizzled men in jeans sat next to their camper in the parking lot, one playing a banjo.