Wednesday, July 27, 2022 — 3
Arts
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
The sun has come to serve many
purposes in our lives. It is a source of
light and power, a symbol of joy and
clarity. It heals us of our ailments, both
physical and mental. After a year of
isolation and another year of finding
our way out of it, we need — and even
deserve — that joy more than ever,
and there’s no better time to get it
than in the summer. My memories
of past summer vacations are filled
with drive-in movies, family reunions,
stiff muscles from water skiing and
listening to “yacht rock radio” on
every car ride. The writers of this
B-Side have shared their own summer
experiences, the good and the not-so-
good, and how the art they associate
with these memories has stayed with
them. These pieces are both fun and
formative — everything a summer
vacation should be. In the same way
that the sun gives us life and energy,
the art and media we consume help
us discover who we are and make us
shine.
Daily
Arts
Writer
Hannah
Carapellotti
can
be
reached
at
hmcarp@umich.edu.
The concert, the sun and the holy
spirit of Lorde’s ‘Solar Power’ by
Daily Arts Writer Serena Irani
I still have faint memories of my
first concert. They’re fragmented
flashes of feelings more than anything:
singing along to Bon Jovi while stuck
in traffic on the way there, excitement
and adrenaline running through my
5-year-old veins in anticipation of Aly
& AJ as the opening act, purchasing
the overpriced concert book I’d end up
spending hours poring over religiously
and wearing my bright pink Hannah
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When I was 8, my parents sent me
to Girl Scout camp for the first time.
The camp was in middle-of-
nowhere western New York. The
drive felt endless to an 8-year-old,
trapped in a cramped car while your
mom played Phil Collins and Elton
John CDs. But when the scene in the
front window changed from never-
ending trees to a wooden camp sign
and hordes of girls heading in, my
focus shifted. Maybe this drive was
MALLORY EDGELL
Daily Arts Writer
leading me to somewhere new and
important. I don’t know what my
parents expected me to find in my
camp experience, but I’m sure none
of us were planning on me finding a
place I never wanted to leave.
Away from the social norms of third
grade where pre-determined friend
dynamics rule everything, camp was a
free for all, a fresh start. From my two-
week session that first year, I made
friends that I stayed in contact with
over multiple summers. I’d call their
parents each summer, back when
each family just had a landline, so
we could skim the camp catalogs and
find sessions to do together. For a few
years those sessions were horseback
riding, then they transitioned to
more adventurous things. I spent two
weeks learning how to tackle a high
ropes course, and another two weeks
backpacking with six other girls in the
Allegheny Plateau.
Looking back, I always remember
those camp years as simply an
amazingly fun time in my life. I got to
go kayaking whenever I wanted, eat
too many s’mores when my counselors
“raided the kitchen” for us and soak in
the sun doing arts and crafts outside
the dining hall. Yes, there were rainy
days, occasional homesickness and
lots of complaints about bugs, but
camp was my happy place.
It wasn’t until recently that I
realized camp wasn’t just a positive
place for me, it was formative. In
perhaps the silliest ways, I think it
taught me who I needed to be and
how to get to that ideal. For me, this
becomes apparent when I think back
on one of my favorite parts of the
camp experience: the songs.
I don’t know why I loved camp
songs so much, but they were
constantly stuck in my head. It must
have been something to do with the
community you felt a part of when
50 girls are screaming “Alive Awake
Alert” (a song similar to “Head,
Shoulders, Knees and Toes”) at 7
a.m., trying to be let into the dining
hall. These counselors were smart,
Montana T-shirt that would get
shrunk in the dryer a week later. Miley
Cyrus’s actual set was pretty much a
blur, a null and void blind spot in my
memory, but the feelings surrounding
it have never quite faded.
Four summer circumstances and
the media I used to survive them by
Daily Arts Writer Erin Evans
Summer
comes
with
some
inevitabilities. Change, for one. Going
home to your parents, in my case.
Either embracing the days when the
outdoors turns into a pressure cooker
or developing a hatred of the sun that
may have made me think you were
cool in high school. I have come to
love this season, but it still brought
Design by Abby Schreck
The Sunshine B-Side
This is a repeat after me song
Design by Jennie Vang
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HANNAH CARAPELLOTI
Daily Arts Writer
knowing that a little bit of healthy
competition to start the day was the
perfect way to build energy in us
sleepy-eyed campers.
The songs gave me confidence I
didn’t normally have. At school I was
always shy. I still had a lot of energy,
but didn’t exactly know what to do
in most situations. Camp songs gave
me an outlet for my energy that was
never frowned upon. Instead, it was
actually considered a good thing. If
my unit of campers sang songs like
“Little Birdies” loud enough, we got to
enter the dining hall first, and I would
do anything to get those cinnamon
french toast sticks. I went from quiet
and on the outskirts to singing “The
Princess Pat” wherever we went,
always wanting to learn more songs or
teach them to other people.
With a lot of Girl Scout songs come
patience and perseverance. You see,
songs like “Alive Awake Alert” are
sung in repetition.
certain unfortunate situations, and
getting through them (and summer
generally) with joy and grace depended
partly on the media I chose to set my
mood and the tone of my summer to.
These are four recommendations —
vices, if you will — and what they have
meant to me in the past few months.
Perhaps they can be useful to you too.
If not, reading about someone else’s
slight misfortune is usually enjoyable.
Seven songs that hit different
in the summer by Daily Arts Writer
Joshua Medintz
Summer rocks. It’s the season of
street fairs, park hangs, beach days,
sausage from a street cart, dope tokes
and sunburns. And it’s the season
of music that hits different. This is a
playlist for those days when you’re
chilling in that park, toking that dope,
slurping that sausage. This is a playlist
that will hit different this summer.
Baked Buzzed Bored: ‘Super
Mario Sunshine’ by Daily Arts
Writers
The writers of The Michigan
Daily do it all. On top of being college
students with full course loads, they
roll up their sleeves to consume media
and write. For the entertainment of
our loyal readership, The Daily has
revitalized and revamped “Baked
Buzzed Bored.”