I haven't really had much of a summer. Things have been real hectic for the last five months or so. I went straight from putting together the 2008 International Pancake Film Festival Texas Edition (go Spurs!), to the insanity of the Jeff Koons show at work. Then there was a little wedding I helped plan. Then packing up all my precious belongings and moving half way across country. It didn't help that our landlords decided to tear down our porch in Chicago right as the weather was getting nice and then hire the slowest moving deck builders available.It's only now that the dust has finally started to settle in my life. I read an entire book (Child 44, highly recommended) went to an antique show (seeing as how I own about 4,000 pounds of crap I only bought a few view master reels.) Oh, I went swimming a few times this season. Barbequed a little. It still feels like summer skipped over me this year. More time was spent indoors packing, later unpacking, than outdoors skipping stones and flying kites and whatnot. One of the nice things about our new place, in addition to all the legal spray paint money can buy (in your face, Mayor Daley!) is the free cable that we have now. I have watched a Shirley Temple marathon, some Adult Swim. There is some fascinating public access shows available (provided by Somerville Community Access Television or SCAT for short, teehee.) I decided I want a Sweet 16 party for my birthday this year after watching a very insightful documentary on the subject on MTV. It was yesterday though that summer finally entered my life. I was flipping through the channels when I came across a Kid Rock video on VH1. I am fairly ill-informed on Mr. Rock's career. I know he's from Michigan, performed with a small man named Joe C. who later died, and married Pam Anderson. That's a bout it. I don't know if it was the fact that I hadn't seen a music video in a coon's age or if this was actually good, but I fell head over heels for this video for his white hot song All Summer Long. Allow me to set the scene for you- the music starts, it's a mash up of Warren Zevon's Werewolves of London mixed with Sweet Home Alabama. Kid Rock narrates this tale of lost summer love while tooling around a lake in his boat "Cowboy." His full band later joins him on a huge elevated stage with flashing lights. He tells a tale set back in Northern Michigan during the summer of1989, of his days spent getting high and drunk on whiskey and fornicating to "Sweet Home Alabama." Meanwhile girls in bikinis dance around and an actor playing a young Kid Rock fraternizes with a young Pam Anderson look-alike. I have no idea why a lady in a confederate flag bikini is so intriguing to me, but it is. I asked the Mrs. if she'd wear a Confederate Flag bikini the next time we hit the beach and she flat out refused. I then asked if she'd wear a Budweiser bikini. Again- no. I guess the bikini is a much more palatable format to me. Racism and Bud are two things I don't tolerate in real life, but in bikini form….that's a whole other story. So I played the video for the Mrs., hoping she'd see how cool Confederate Flag bikinis are. I couldn't make the sell. She was also not fond of the fact that the song rhymes "things' with "things." They do rhyme though, you got to admit that. Admittedly it's not my favorite part of the song-that comes toward the end. Let me quote it in its entirety:
'Now nothing seems as strange as when the leaves began to change
Or how we thought those days would never end
Sometimes I'll hear that song and I'll start to sing along
And think man I'd love to see that girl again'
I would put that up against any prose you'd take from Ray Bradbury's love letter to summer, Dandelion Wine. And it's nice to know that I have an official summer jam for the 3 remaining weeks of summer. I am also fully aware that if through some miracle Kid Rock and I were to meet on a Michigan beach back in the summer of '89, he would have made fun of me and or beaten the crap out of me. But that's not the point; it's the music, man. The music. And to a lesser extent the Confederate Flag bikinis.
