To the extent that this newsletter has a theme at all, it’s about the intersection of art and life: how they influence and shape each other, how they give each other meaning. When I think about my past, my memories are defined by the art I was enjoying at the time — the music, the books, the movies — as much as the people and events. I think the best times of my life were when all of those elements interacted with and enriched each other (and I’m very fortunate to have had many of those times, and to continue having them!).
That’s especially true when I think about past summers, the times when I could really sink into books and movies and music. So every now and then in this newsletter, I want to briefly reflect on a formative summer and the art that impacted me during it, which will (ideally) say something about the human relationship with art and growing up. Or maybe you’ll just find out I had really bad taste. Either is possible.
I’m starting this week with Summer 1999.
When I think of summer, I think of Len’s “Steal My Sunshine.”
Every June, as the days get hot and trips to the ocean get more frequent, that little sample from “More, More, More” starts playing in my head. When I first heard it (over and over and over) in the summer of 1999, I didn’t realize that it’s mostly about being hungover; I just knew that it sounded the way that summer felt. 25 years later, it still does.
To be fair, a lot of songs from Summer 1999 feel that way: Tal Bachman’s yearning “She’s So High,” Sugar Ray’s lazy “Someday,” and of course the dubious bars of LFO’s “Summer Girls” (“Billy Shakespeare wrote a whole bunch of sonnets”). That summer has become totemic in my memory, even though the day-to-day details are fuzzy now. It was the summer I was 13, the first summer of adolescence and the last summer of childhood.
13 is a weird age. You’re a teenager, but you feel like a teenager-by-technicality. You’re still largely dependent on your parents, and everyone still treats you like a child. You feel pulled in both directions: afraid to leave the ease and security of childhood while growing increasingly curious about adolescence and its promise of risk, romance, and purpose. 13 is a perpetual sense of being in-between, on the verge of leaving what you know for something new and undiscovered.
The art I loved in childhood still largely defined my tastes at 13. The top of the list would have been K.A. Applegate’s Animorphs series and Star Wars, in that order. As a child, I’d seen both stories as inviting me into a bigger, more complicated world: the Star Wars stuff I read was aimed at older fans (because Star Wars fans were, by and large, older), and Animorphs (while aimed at kids my age or younger) had moral complexity and a very adult strain of sadness. I assumed they’d always be the most important stories in my life (just like I’d assumed I’d always be obsessed with dinosaurs when I was six). But without my noticing, my relationship with these stories was changing.
Star Wars: The Phantom Menace came out in May 1999 (one of the very few movies I saw in theaters during the “Best! Movie Year! Ever!”). I was thrilled with it, and especially all of the new aliens, ships, worlds, etc., to sift through in various “Essential Guides” and “Visual Dictionaries.” I spent an unhealthy amount of time pondering the backstories and interpersonal dramas of podracers who appear in the movie for like five seconds. But I was also experiencing Star Wars content aimed at my age group for the first time… and it all felt a little less complicated and interesting than I would have wanted. I didn’t realize it at the time, but my Star Wars fandom had peaked the summer before and now I was on a downslope. It was a very gradual downslope (I still love Star Wars), but in the coming years Star Wars became less and less part of my identity.
Animorphs presented a new sort of challenge: I’d started to realize that being seen in public reading a book with a girl turning into a starfish might look childish.
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ff76ed377-509e-40b3-91dc-ff303c75f098_318x466.jpeg)
That summer I did a pre-8th grade program at what would eventually be my high school (and current employer), and after a couple of long bus rides with a co-ed group who all seemed much more athletic and confident than me, I knew that there was no way in hell I could be spotted on there reading an Animorphs book. That’s the first rule of teenage social survival: don’t do anything that someone can make fun of you for. I never considered not reading Animorphs, but now I read them in my room. I felt a little guilty about it: the books I read were an essential part of my identity, a part of me. But at the same time, I saw it as a necessary sacrifice to enter the world of adolescence. We all do that, especially at 13: suppress parts of ourselves in the hopes of making ourselves more acceptable, less rejectable. It’s not until later that we realize how few of those sacrifices were worth it.
I should probably tell you what becoming a teen meant to me. At baseline, adolescence seemed terrifying. We spent most of the summer at the Jersey Shore, and I remember the teens I’d see hanging around downtown or on the beach: loud, gangly, aggressively confident (or at least aggressively committed to drawing attention). I found them a little threatening. Primarily, I feared that I wouldn’t be able to thrive in their world. In middle school, I was the sort of kid who could have a perfectly pleasant conversation with adults but froze up around my peers; I didn’t imagine high school was going to be any better.
Puberty had started to kick in, which didn’t help: suddenly everything seemed like a much bigger deal, every social interaction imbued with dizzyingly high stakes. At the same time, there was an undeniable allure. It was a strange and unfamiliar world, sure, but it also seemed full of adventure and romance. I’d begun to feel a constant sense of yearning; I guess I can blame puberty for that, in part, too. I got “The Talk” that summer, which gave me a partial language to explain it, but it was about more than that. I wasn’t just interested in sex, I was interested in being cool, worldly, adult.
Of course, at 13 you’re very much on the outside looking in. The only way I could glimpse that mysterious world was through music. People forget that some of the defining musical acts of “the 90’s” only debuted in the decade’s final year: NSYNC, Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, Ricky Martin (in English). So much of the age-appropriate art I engaged with was squeaky clean (the Animorphs were child soldiers making life or death decisions, but they never cursed or went to parties; the worst that kids in Disney Channel Original Movies did was get snarky at their parents). But here was music aimed at my demographic that also had an unmissable sexual edge, a heat and tension that I couldn’t articulate (but definitely responded to). Of course, I wasn’t supposed to like the boy bands or anything but the looks of the pop divas, because masculinity is a prison. So I rolled my eyes and groaned whenever my sister put on the CDs or they came on the radio or MTV… but quietly, secretly paid attention. I remember hearing “Genie In a Bottle” for the first time and not really knowing what to do with the feelings that burbled up. All I could likely tell you: Star Wars didn’t make me feel like that.
On one hand, my response was a sign that I was successfully being sold on images of sexuality and cool. But listening to those songs were also an attempt to try to define the feelings that those images inspired in me, to figure out where they were pointing, what they meant. It was my first hint of the raw, tumultuous, hormonal energy that would define the next half decade of my life. Music was the way I made my first, tentative contact with it, before I could even give it a name.
From the outside, my life in Summer 1999 would have been largely indistinguishable from Summer 1998. But from the inside, I could feel something new starting, with all of the fear and promise that brings. Summer was a time to explore that, but also a pause, a deep inhalation of breath before plunging into my final year of grade school and the real, quantifiable end of childhood. That’s why Summer 1999 still resonates as The Summer in my memory today. Those songs I mentioned at the beginning of this newsletter spoke to that feeling: an adult sense of yearning, but over light enough music that it still felt innocent. It’s telling that I never picked up on the actual subject matter of “Steal My Sunshine,” despite how many times I heard it. At 13 you’re not paying attention to the lyrics yet, you’re just starting to nod to the beat.
As a final artistic note, Summer 1999 was also when I first attempted to write a novel. It was an extremely derivative sci-fi war story, combining the first person POV of Animorphs with the top-gun-bravado of the X-Wing: Rogue Squadron comic book series (it never got a formal title beyond “ALIENS1.doc” but if it had, it probably would have been something like Bandit Squadron #1: Betrayal!). All of the characters were based on my friends and classmates, kicking off a decades-long habit of writing fan fiction about my own life. I wrote a few chapters, then gave up. But the idea of creating my own longform story, full of drama and rich characters and complicated lore, took root. Having abandoned dreams of being a paleontologist and a director, for the first time I started to think: Maybe I want to be a writer.
That’s all for this week! This was an experiment, but I’m hoping to write some more of these (2002, 2005, and 2007 are already taking shape in my head). We’ll see!
On the self-promo end of things: Catholic Movie Club’s on a break this week, but we’ll pick back up with The Godfather: Part II next Friday. A perfect movie for the Fourth of July weekend!
Until next time…