It’s that time of year. The sun is out and the streets are crowded. The music from passing cars is speaker-rattlingly loud and children are on scooters, screaming, everywhere. Regular anxieties about your career or your grades or your social situation are replaced with concerns about light lunches and good drinks, tanlines and personal projects. It is, in short, almost summer. Now, then, is the time to assess our circumstances and see what vibe is in store for us across the next few months.
In previous years, the summer vibe has been declared by fiat. Hot girl and feral girl summers were impositions. White boy summer was an awful trial and test of patience. These were questionable vibes. They were the meme stocks of summer vibes. Irresponsibly speculative and largely untethered from reality. We’ve learned that vibes cannot just be spoken or willed into existence. Vibes are not like light born from some omnipotent voice. The vibes instead are incipient, emergent.
This year’s summer vibe has to be discerned and read out of the world like so many tea leaves at the bottom of a curiously-attractive soothsayer’s cup. Selflessly, we’ve decided to assess the mood, do the work, and describe the nascent summer vibe as it develops.
Researchers are, as you know, uncertain of the full scope of the summer vibe. Does each metropolis have its own? Is it nation-based? Continental? Experts are fairly sure that there’s a causal relationship between hemispheres (we all know, for instance, that “hot girl summer” in the northern hemisphere linked up with “weird boy winter” in the southern hemisphere), but work remains to be done. Grants for vibes-based analysis are few and far between. In our inexpert opinion, vibes are like a language. They’re not a geography thing. They’re diffuse, unsettled. Just as a language has dialects, so too does a summer vibe have regional variations. Our research into vibes will necessarily be a little specific to Montreal, but all the same we’re pretty sure that macro-level learnings can be extrapolated.
To tap into Montreal’s summer core, we have to go to Parc La Fontaine on a sunny afternoon. It isn’t the nicest or the largest park in the city, but it is the most quintessentially summer one and the one populated by the most diverse cast of characters. La Fontaine calls out to any and all people as soon as the sun comes out and the weather inches above freezing. La Fontaine’s summer siren song is so effective that, in fact, it frequently tricks people in late April into trying to pretend it’s warm enough to hang out on the ground only to have them develop a kind of emotional and actual hypothermia. But when it’s nice, actually nice, La Fontaine beckons and delivers anything anyone might need from a park in the summer.
There’s water and ducks in the water. There’s all the ball sport areas. Dogs have their own zone. There’s a restaurant named after Robin Hood for no clear reason. There are refurbished, well-lit bathrooms that do not seem like a place you might die (cf. the public bathrooms at Parc Jeanne-Mance). People lounge in hammocks they brought from home or try to tightrope walk across ziplines between trees. Children can be seen climbing baroque rope contraptions. Remote workers take up entire picnic benches by themselves with their macbook and bags. Musicians are all over the place such that it’s often unclear if they’re performing for others or just playing for themselves. Fitness and dance classes take place any old place. Cops worthlessly patrol the surrounding streets (hopefully) miserable and envious and increasingly despondent in their ugly cars. La Fontaine, in sum, is a microcosm of the city and something like a metonym for the very idea of Summer in Montreal.
Now, depending on your French skills, you may be wondering why we didn’t mention the fontaine (French for fountain) part of Parc La Fontaine. Well, so, Parc La Fontaine gets its name from a dude rather than a thing. Louis-Hippolyte La Fontaine apparently did some stuff when there were two Canadas (yes, there were two) and, as a result, they named a park after him. There’s even a statue of him there (that we’re pretty sure no one ever notices). Anyways, either by coincidence or design, Parc La Fontaine also also used to have a fontaine. It was huge and a very questionable use of water, but also very nice and really tied the park together. For several years now, though, there’s been no running fountain. They decided to build or rebuild a theater in that area, drained the water, turned off the fountain, and that’s apparently how it’s going to be for who knows how long. The city’s decision to transform Parc La Fontaine into Parc La Fontaine sans fontaine (The Fountain Without Fountain Park) makes the place uglier, but it also works to reinforces the idea that La Fontaine is a microcosm of the city. There is nothing more emblematic of Montreal than enormous construction sites that exist without obvious rationale and are never occupied by any actual construction workers. As the saying goes, Montreal is going to be a beautiful city as soon as they’re finished building it.
When we arrived at La Fontaine in the early afternoon, the vibes were palpable. Normally we’d have to calibrate our instruments, double- and triple-check our figures, but not this time. The vibe was apparent, almost tangible. It was, though, hard to describe. We struggled to come up with a name for the aura surrounding things. After wandering around at length and mulling it over and feeling it out we’ve settled on something that maybe sort of works. This year we’re haing a low-key ambivalent adult human summer.
Let’s fucking go.
Low-key ambivalent adult human summer is, as we’re sure you know, an exciting vibe development. Typically vibes are one note, fallacious. They’re anchored to some restrictive identitarian features. Not this year. This summer is existentially-lost-but-laughing-coded. It’s some under-thinking and over-feeling type shit. It is indiscriminate, amorphous. The vibe is inclusive and compellingly open to all comers.
Low-key ambivalent adult human summer is a season directed by Wong Kar-wai and Julia Ducournau, written by Charlie Kaufman and Sarah DeLappe based on a story by Han Kang and Paul Beatty. It’s all about feeling some type of way, but not concretely or definitely and never for long. It’s about doing things for too many and not enough reasons. These are the months where your accomplishments look like failures and failures accomplishments. We’ll get compliments we don’t much care for and shade we appreciate greatly.
This is months of that feeling where you walk into a room, but can’t remember why you walked into that room but it’s OK because that room is kind of nice and better or maybe actually worse but not unpleasantly worse than that other room? This is summer is a 10 minute music video for a 2 minute song. This is the summer of reading Ecce Homo on the beach, keeping your headphones on at a party even when you’re not listening to anything, and starting a new Tumblr but telling no one.
We are all about complicated feelings that do not resolve themselves this summer. By August, we’re going to wonder whether we need to see a professional about alexithymia but we’ll put it off because there’s always something better to do and who can even get a health care professional for real anyways and we don’t even really want to go and really find out if there’s some neurological basis for all these semi-feelings we’re having.
It is a tale of two cities summer, best of times and worst of times. But like not all Victorian, y’know? No uncomfortable, scratchy clothes. Or smog. Just light fabrics and almost empty bags and maybe a few too many cigarettes here and there.
This is not the time for emotional awakenings or growth. This is about the opposite of reckoning. It’s about unraveling, slowly and accidentally, until you are a beautiful, new tangle of qualities that you’re not sure you love or hate.
It’s a time of conflict and conflict-avoidance and conflict over conflict-avoidance and also a kind of chill harmony and oneness with everything.
This summer we’ll make new, fervent enemies and encounter charming, nameless strangers. Buy zines and never read them. Break a heart and try a new tea blend or two. Start unprecedented hobbies out of nowhere and they’ll be arcane and slightly alienating and also maybe rewarding (whatever that might mean).
Events will happen and you will be asked how they were and you will say nothing because there is nothing to say. Unexpected things will be fun and expected things less so. And vice versa?
You’ll never be lonely, but you also won’t not be lonely. (This might be an aspect of the summer vibe that has been imported over from the general 21st century vibe. Hard to say.)
You will stretch out rhizomatically across yourself and be unsure whether you have discovered or covered over some essential part of yourself. You will be more you than ever have been and that might make you retch and celebrate on the same five minute span.
There’s no telling why these are the vibes. Maybe it’s because 2023 has felt like a rerun of some mid old episode from a season in the past. Maybe it’s because only and exclusively all the callous, cynical, and mindless insanity of the off- and online world keeps upping its tenor. Maybe because a set of indescribable and unshiftable socioeconomic attitudes undergird the operation of the world at large such that we are all being slowly, incrementally wrung out totally without purpose. Maybe it was just time for something low-key after so much high-key fuckery for so long. It doesn’t matter why low-key ambivalent adult human summer is coming because it is coming regardless.
Now, of course, you can resist low-key ambivalent adult human summer. You can fight the vibe or come near to rejecting it outright. You can go full melancholy or try unfettered happy for a bit. See how it works. You can lean into adolescent hi-jinx or ageless calm. The vibes aren’t a mandate. You can always opt to merely observe the vibes, keep your relative distance from them just like you can go to the pool but not go swimming. Your participation in low-key ambivalent adult human summer, like ours, is optional and voluntary. If it suits your day or hour, give it a go. Sync up for a minute. You might find that you have only low-key ambivalent adult human summer Sunday afternoons. The vibe is flexible, mutable. It’s everywhere and anywhere or maybe nowhere at all. It’s a frame, a mode of understanding and appreciating a certain cast of attitudinal light.
Low-key ambivalent adult human summer is, from where we’re standing, a nice opportunity to look around without the pressure to find. It’s about contemplating nothing really at all save maybe the pretty colors of the ugly trees or the overbearing demands of objectively nice weather. We think it’s going to be good. Also a little bad. Nice, but not too nice. We’re going to appreciate it, but not enough or fully until it’s over. It’s going to be a lot of things all at once. But definitely low-key and adult and so very human.
I’m low-key desperate to go to Montreal. 😮💨
New fav. post !
"La Fontaine’s summer siren song is so effective that, in fact, it frequently tricks people in late April into trying to pretend it’s warm enough to hang out on the ground only to have them develop a kind of emotional and actual hypothermia" (this is actually about me and my improv group)
Low-key ambivalent adult human summer -
"This is about the opposite of reckoning. It’s about unraveling, slowly and accidentally, until you are a beautiful, new tangle of qualities that you’re not sure you love or hate. "
this is great