TS Eliot once wrote, "April is the cruelest month," and while I totally agree with him (espcially right around tax deadlines) sometimes I think he picked the wrong month. While the hope associated with Spring can drive you up the wall, sometimes the long slow sticky melting of tar on the black top gives August the trump card.
Our most classic poets, The Rolling Stones, once wrote "See the fire is sweepin our very streets today," and while in 1969 the context was much more politically-charged than it is today when I walk outside in the 90 degree heat of Greenpoint, I feel the Stones wrote this song as a soundtrack for August itself.
War, children, it's just a shot away.
Love, sister, it's just a kiss away.
Fuck or fight. August makes you want to destroy something because it's too hot, there's too much rage at the fact that coldness yawns before us, there are 1/2 naked people all around us, and we just want to "go side, go bashing" or find someone to take us to an air-conditioned 5 x 5 foot space where everything is quiet. In the awesome book Stranded: Rock and Roll for a Desert Island, editor Greil Marcus describes "Gimme Shelter" as "the greatest rock and roll recording ever made" because it "both denied shelter and delivered it."
And it's true. In the dead heat of the longest, most ludicrous month of summer, all I wanna do is commit crimes with Mick Jagger and wrap up in his blood-red scarf (from the Maysles Brothers documentary of the same name) and keep him off the stage at Altamont so he doesn't have to see his song become a live-action narrative. The lust that could redeem the heat is overshadowed by grim violence, and shelter becomes not a soft bed but a life-saving necessity. On a infinitely smaller scale "Gimme Shelter" makes me feel like the sweat that drips down my shirt is worth something, if nothing more than the forces that cause poets to write lines and songs that stick in the public consciousness forever.
