Arizona Summers, Part 2

One of the phenomenons of living in an internet age is that the threshold for viewing home movies decreases rapidly. Perhaps this is more an effect of America's Funniest Home Videos, but it seems that if something crazy/funny/painful to somebody's crotch doesn't happen in the first thirty seconds, we are ready to move on. The other phenomenon is that watching home movies does not become a special occasion anymore. I preemptively lament the loss of the "let's break out the home movies" that will occur when the internet generation grows up. When today's 15 year-olds are old enough to say that as they return to their childhood homes with their own young children, all their old home movies will have been on Youtube for twenty years. Who knows, maybe they will be able to say things like "let's break out the old home holograms!" which, if it is the case, would be awesome. Still, the watching of home movies in the presence of parents in childhood homes is now a thing of the past, for better or worse. Well, for worse, actually: the breakdown of privacy has given us a freedom of expression that is crass at best and boring at worst. We have seen it all, in youtube home movies or otherwise, which is the first step to ADD, if that makes sense. When everything from everyone is available, we don't want to see anything that isn't new, shocking, or fast, which makes the activity of sifting through home movies terrible. What this means for us is that watching a long youtube clip can be excruciating, especially when it is of somebody's cute kids doing something relatively mundane, which has been excruciating for a third party since the beginning of time. Add the cute kid thing to a video that doesn't shock and awe, and you have the recipe for the perception of wasted time. This is all to introduce the clip I have attached here, which is of my cute kids doing something relatively mundane. So don't watch.

Yet, if you are still inclined, let me clue you in to why I feel like this video is worth posting: There is an unparalleled joy in what is happening here, a joy that has been the staple of summers for at least thirty years. When Mark and Paul and I (where was John? At a baseball card shop? At EFY?) were preteens on vacation at my grandparents house, we would go down to their basement, find the tennis rackets, and pretend to film fake videos of invented songs like our perpetual favorite, "Go Into Your Brains and Eat Your Heart Out," which had several different versions. The key words of the last sentence were "pretend," "fake," and "invented." That is all you need to know to figure out the importance of those childhood experiences, both for our development and for our lack of development. And by the way, Mom, next time you worry that your kids were never talented like the Inouyes, just remember that we pretended to film fake videos of invented songs in Grandpa's basement while they were actually performing real songs on real instruments for a real audience. Which of those hypothetical videos would you rather watch on the internet?

We have several videos much like this one, but I posted this because it is the most recent and the most similar to what my brothers and I were doing in Grandpa's basement over summer vacations. As for the Arizona summers part, if somebody somewhere has the old music videos of us lipsyncing Yes and Seal songs, please send them to me. They are evidence of three points of Arizona summers: 1) we had to work late at night because the daytime lethargy from oppressive heat was too great for our creativity; 2) We had to film inside so that our props would be cool enough to hold and we wouldn't be sweaty; 3) Those kind of limitations (being inside and late at night) meant that our creativity shone brightest in small bursts, but those bursts were dizzyingly brilliant.