Anti-Climacus

ALL-TIME DESERT ISLAND TOP FIVE: It's been a long time since I've done one of these, so...

ATDIT5: Songs that remind me of summer:

1. "1979" -Smashing Pumpkins (Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness); pretty much the soundtrack to driving around Midland with my friends in August before my junior year of high school, where high school memories should probably peak, anyway. It's got a remarkably light touch for being a Billy Corgan song, and it's pretty much devoid of his usual angst and earnestness, which always helps;

2. "A Summer Wasting" -Belle and Sebastian (Boy With the Arab Strap); what's more appropriate than "seven weeks of river walkways?"

3. "Green Arrow" -Yo La Tengo (I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One...); I lived out my own personal version of the old Volkswagen commercial (with "Pink Moon") using this song... and actually this entire album.

4. "Roam" -The B-52's (Cosmic Thing); summer is the time to really let your guilty pleasures out, you know.

5. "One Way Street" -Euroboys (no idea what the album is); irony and meta-irony; I first heard this song (by an American band called the Euroboys) last summer on German music television (viva, which was once described to me as "music for 14-year olds," though I think the person who said it meant it pejoritively) while hiding in my hotel in Dijon from French people. In any event, one of the guys in the band wears a Buffalo Springfield shirt in the video, which I think is probably a referencing so deadly uncool it circles around and becomes hip again.