A counterculture scene visibly degraded within roughly one year.

Evidence

This year, after a bad summer and a long boring winter, they appeared tired and strained. They were pale. They had flaccid shoulder muscles. Last year, at the Easter Be-In, one had noticed flower-like girls and handsome, androgynous dancing boys. This year, at the Yip-Out, one saw teenyboppers in baby doll shifts and miniskirts covering ripply thighs. One noticed boys with acne scars under their day-glo face paint. … It was the outer-borough crowd. “Nobody,” Kempton thought, “seemed to be having a very good time.” Still, they were well-behaved. The New York Times item was headlined, 10,000 CENTRAL PARK YIPPIES LEAVE NO LITTER PROBLEMS. (By comparison, the Parks Department needed three days to clean up after the 135,000 people who attended the June 1967 Barbra Streisand concert.) — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 1226

Categorization

• SEED: The rapid one-year decay of a scene — the ‘bad summer and long boring winter’ — as evidence for how quickly countercultural forms commodify or exhaust themselves.
• CANDY: 10,000 Yippies left no litter problems while 135,000 Barbra Streisand fans needed three days of Parks Department cleanup.
• XREF: connects to: A place becomes haunted by being stained with a singular intense year — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on…, 483