Oh yeah. Own it.

Summer Camp

This article was published on 05.25.06

Do you find yourself deliberately collecting artifacts of banality, mediocrity or extreme ostentation? Choosing cultural signifiers precisely because they are already so over? (Are you amenable, for instance, to the enduring popularity of David Hasselhoff or Eartha Kitt?) Is nothing new for you unless it is retro? If you or anyone you know tends to see the world through rhinestone-studded, heart-shaped, super-huge sunglass lenses, you may be an adherent to what has been called “the campy lifestyle.”

You should know that SN&R is here for you. And just in time for summer, too.

In Sacramento, summer is a time when people seem desperate to be cool, in more ways than one. There is temperature cool, and there is not-lame cool. Both require great effort. The city has a reputation, in some quarters, for abject squareness. Perhaps the reputation is founded. But here is what we propose: to, like, totally own that squareness. To make it fun. In this town, clearly, the way to a cool summer is right over the top. Herewith, suggestions, from various and sundry experts, several of them fictional.

Some critics may write in to criticize our flagrantly campist agenda. To them we say: Whatever. This guide was carefully designed for wide appeal. Its pages have been certified to contain much edification for, among others, today’s vehicular recreator, and wayfaring fortune-hunter, and brazen basker, and pious karaoke-ist, and home-and-garden jingoist, and aficionado of hot Starfleet captain-on-adopted-Borg-drone action. And more!

As a cat-food commercial once said, “good taste is easy to recognize.” Good bad taste is harder to recognize. It is our humble hope to help you cultivate and celebrate all the perversely sophisticated appeal your Sacramento summer has to offer. Everybody knows what it takes for a movie to become a camp classic. Well, what about a city? Keep reading.

—Jonathan Kiefer
Summer Guide Editor

Photos by Larry Dalton
Art Direction/Design by Don Button & Erin Sierchio