Today is June 20th, the summer solstice, the first day of summer here in the northern hemisphere. The first day of summer is typically significant for me, so I’d like to introduce Sound of Summer, a personal project I’ve been working on since Memorial Day Weekend, the unofficial first day of summer in the United States.

In the summertime, I tend to feel everything more deeply than any other time of the year. While I was in high school, I could attribute it to the leisure; in college, the break from routine. Since graduating from school, leaving New York and working full-time, navigating those triggers has been hazy, especially because summers in Portland arrive late or not at all. Sound of Summer presents a timeline of every summer over the past 10 years, constructed from the playlists that have evolved over those summers.

I’m prone to bouts of nostalgia, always feeling like my best days are behind me. It was a pleasure to work on this project and recapture everything I’ve felt over the past ten summers as I culled each playlist, which, when exported from iTunes, originally contained between 120 and 220 songs depending on the season. I then pared each playlist down using my intuition as a metric: if the song made my heart feel like it was being squeezed or if I associated it with a memory, it remained. While working with the data belonging to summers of intense emotional involvement, more of the songs were sentimental to me, tied to memory, and difficult to discard, establishing the relationship between precarious emotional state and amount of media consumed.

Go to Sound of Summer »

This is article 1 of 2 in the Sound of Summer series

Portland’s Oven & Shaker is the best. They have my favorite cocktail, my favorite charcuterie and my favorite pizza. They’re located a convenient six-block walk from my apartment, but I prefer to reserve eating out for special occasions. I’ve had a few of their pizzas but my favorite is their salami pizza. It has provalone picante, salami and is drizzled with honey on top. This recipe, Mama Chloe’s Authentic Pizza Suprema attempts to recreate this at home.

Ingredients

• Pizza dough - this recipe makes two servings. Also I do a 24-hour slow rise in the fridge.
• 2 cloves garlic
• 3 campari tomatoes
• 6 oz mozzarella
• 6 oz parmesan
• 16 or 24 slices salumi
• 1 tbsp tomato paste
• 1 tsp flour
• 1 tsp sugar
• pinch salt, dried oregano, rosemary, basil to taste
• honey for drizzling

I’m sure you can substitute the campari tomatoes for any similarly-sized tomato, parmesan for another hard, sharp cheese, and choose whichever cured meat works for you. I’ve used salami and I’ve used chorizo. I also like to use a multiple of 8 for the number of meat slices.

The Method

Preheat your oven as high as it will go; mine goes to 550° F.

Preparation

Roast two cloves garlic in the preheating oven while you prepare the rest of the ingredients.

Cut crosses in the bottoms of the tomatoes and steam them until they open up. While the tomatoes are steaming, grate your parmesan and mozzarella, combine them well and set aside. I know the New York Times recommends against shredding your mozzarella but the Times has also tried to fearmonger HTML. Slice up your salami nice n’ thin.

The Sauce

Your tomatoes should be done at this point. Transfer them to a strainer set over the receptacle of a food processor and express the juice while filtering the seeds and skin. Discard solids.

To the tomato juice, add your tomato paste, flour, sugar, salt and herbs. By now your garlic should be ready and fragrant, add that too. If not, toss your dough, and then retrieve the garlic. Process until smooth.

Assembly

Toss the dough. Don’t roll it out. There are a bunch of tutorials on how to shape pizza dough, there isn’t even one I can recommend over the others. I’m not an expert here but I just work it out from the center and spin it around my hand until it’s even like it’s no big deal.

Starting from the center, apply your sauce to within 1” of the edge of the crust. My wooden spoon was in the shop, so I used a pastry brush here. Italians everywhere faint.

Apply cheese liberally. Apply salami. I usually keep in mind that the pizza wheel will cross the pizza four times so I try to keep four trajectories in mind as to avoid having to bisect a piece of meat. Maybe that’s overthinking it, because as your cheese bubbles, your pizza surface will develop a varied landscape and your carefully placed morsels of meat will shift.

Bake for 15-17 minutes, but this depends on your oven. I turn the oven light on and watch it through the window. I judge it on how it looks, just like everything else in life. Remember that things continue to release heat after you stop applying heat to them, so I try to take it out a few moments early.

Drizzle liberally with honey. Go out of your comfort zone. Seriously go out of your comfort zone.

That’s Amore

Congratulations, you have made Mama Chloe’s Authentic Pizza Suprema.

Some people find an artist’s catalog to be the way they like to carve up the domain of music; most people find albums to be discrete enough. For me that unit is seasons. Seasons are inexorably tied to mood and can also be associated with life changes, especially when you’re young and all you do is school. To organize music based on artist or album or even year released is extrinsic; the music has always been about me.

Last fall, I briefly saw a psychiatrist because I no longer liked listening to music. It distressed me more than all the other aspects of my personality that I should see a psychiatrist for because listening to music and making it a part of myself makes up a large part of my identity. When cassettes were a thing people didn’t make fun of, I would record songs off the radio. When I got my first computer, a Macintosh Color Classic when I turned 9, I would record them in 8-second or 30-second clips, depending on whether I was holding down the Option key or not. As a kid, I would fall asleep with the radio on next to my pillow. I found out while I was sleeping that Jonathan Melvoin, the touring keyboardist of my favorite band at the time, had died because the radio had infiltrated my subconscious (for years I erroneously thought that I predicted it in a dream).

I was a late adopter to mp3s, as hard drive constraints and only owning devices that could play physical media made mp3s impractical. I would burn my mp3s to audio CDs and disambiguate them by marking the date on the CD. My senior year of high school was a big year for me. After retiring my beloved but limiting tangerine iBook for a TiBook (which afforded me the hard drive space) and then buying my first iPod a few months later (obsoleting my discman), mp3s finally made sense. When I transferred all my mp3 CDs back to mp3 files, I put all my songs into playlists named after the date on their respective CD. When that became too specific, I consolidated the playlists into month-year “objects.”

This is where it gets important. I kept up this habit of attributing month-years to the mp3 files in my library. Each month I maintained a playlist that contained songs I listened to that month. Eventually I noticed that iTunes had a metadata field called “Groupings,” (apparently to denote movements within classical music) so I started putting the year-month data in there because it was the only appropriate field. I was able to store comma-delimited month-year values for each song, and then create smart playlists based on the groupings field and no longer had to manually maintain my playlists. I just had to tag an mp3 with the month-year value and it appeared in the right playlist for that year and month. At some point the month-year pattern got cumbersome and I consolidated further into season-years, especially as life seemed to speed up as I got older and months became too short.

Do you remember in High Fidelity when Rob is organizing his record collection autobiographically? That’s okay, I have a clip:

That’s the closest analog to this model. Each of my season-year playlists has the emotions and experiences of that three-month moment encoded into every song it contains. I’ve inadvertently managed to create a detailed narrative of my life just from the way I ended up organizing my mp3s. If want to feel how I felt my freshman year of college, I just filter my library for 2003FALL and I get all the tracks I listened to then, all the emotions I’d experienced, and the general mood of that period in my life. Say I want to re-experience my first year in Portland, although I don’t know why I would want to live through that again. I filter my library to 2009 and get 2009SPR, 2009SUM, 2009FALL, and 2009WIN. Say I only want to experience every summer of the past ten years. I filter my library by SUM and I’m having those rich emotional experiences again.

Since my groupings are tag-delimited, I can store multiple season-year parings for songs I’ve listened to in multiple instances throughout my life. Since those songs have had more weight than a song I only listened to for one season, I created a smart playlist called Greatest Hits and it looks for any track whose grouping contains a comma, indicating more than one season. This creates an approximation of some of my favorite songs, but unfortunately doesn’t take into account the handful of songs I listened to so intensely in one season of my life that it just hurt too much to ever listen to again.

There are some caveats to this model. The metadata associated with a track file is invaluable. If I lost all my year-season pairings to all my tracks it would be like losing a diary, it would mean losing a way to get back to my history. It has me locked into iTunes, and has 40GB of my hard drive tied up with files. Unfortunately, these tags can’t easily be abstracted out of iTunes which makes any “cloud”-based or social music site not compatible with the highly personalized, completely niche, homegrown method I’ve developed. I guess this does make me a music hipster.