A Protest Against Forgetting #3: Fall Back, Look Forward.
It's Kevin. Thank you for visiting.
How long into adulthood did it take for you to NOT view autumn as the beginning of the school year (silly question if you are a student or a teacher), as the end of summer's freedoms and the firm reminder of obligations locking into place until June?
I haven't been in school in a very long time. So I've no idea then why I forget the present to remember a past that has no bearing on now. Especially as I could just as easily remember fall as summer in San Francisco (which actually begins right around Labor Day and ends around Halloween), visiting my parents for the Jewish holidays or the anniversary of my wedding (Oct 30th).
That day certainly felt like summer here. Or as beautiful as many summers as I remember.
This year, for the first time, I feel like I'm closer to not making this old mistake. Summer wasn't the glorious release of not wearing masks and being able to go anywhere free of worry we'd all hoped it'd be. So its ending didn't feel like loss but rather the wind up to...something? I don't really know yet. Maybe for now just leaving behind the mistaken idea that it's all over too soon.
If time is hard to pin down these days, maybe that's an opportunity to reevaluate what any one season of it means exactly, if old memories are simply expired because they are old or are now both old and in the way.
"Wintering" is an idea that when daylight is short, we do not just shut down like a battery but shift, like a hibernating animal, to rest and the recharge we need to do everything else the rest of the year. Maybe there's an idea in that of "autumning" waiting to happen, that fall is not the "grow the hell up" after the innocence of summer but what summer becomes, not something over too fast but what it imagines actually becoming real.
Maybe if summer is innocence, fall could be wisdom.
How to: Remember the name of a song and who sang it.
Of course you can just use Shazam or Sound Hound or any of its competitors but absent decent wifi and a charged cell phone (anybody who forgot to plug in this morning has been there), follow these simple rules.
Most song titles are four words or less. Song titles need to be printed on something or crammed onto playlists. So short is always chosen over long which is why "Jingle Bells" is not called "In a one-horse open sleigh." and "Respect" is not called "Find out what it means to me."
If you find yourself trying to remember the name of a song and you have a line of lyrics that's more than 4 words, the answer might be in there. But you've probably got some loose words in there too. Zero in on the fact that...
Titles are usually repeated, emphasized words, usually at the beginning and end of a song's chorus. Combine the former and the latter and the shortest version of a repeated, complete sentiment is usually the title.
"American Pie" is a complete sentiment. "Bye Bye Ms. American Pie" is too but "American Pie" is unique all on its own and shorter. As for the "repeated" and "emphasized" I get that "halfway there" is shorter than "Living on a Prayer" as a title but which phrase does Jon Bon Jovi let loose on?
The exceptions can be difficult. Often blues songs will be titled "Something something blues" and never say "something something" in the lyrics. I've no idea how, before the movie happened, we remembered the name "Bohemian Rhapsody" as nobody speaks those words anywhere in the song. Same is true for The Beatles "A Day in the Life" or David Bowie's "Space Oddity" or a rare b-side from 1991 called "Smells Like Teen Spirit."
With those you gotta link the repeated words to the actual title in your mind ("Ground control to Major Tom" = "Space Oddity") which takes some practice. So does..
Pairing song names to the artist. Get in the habit of saying songs by both their title and who performed them, at least to yourself. "Respect" by Aretha Franklin. "Girls" by Beyonce. These are two disparate pieces of information and difficult enough to remember by themselves, mostly because describing what a song sounds like is very hard and artists often do not sound like themselves. in which case
Sounds first, feelings second, genres third. If you have enlisted the help of another person in trying to figure the name of a song and its artist, saying it sounds like "indy rock" won't get you very far. The Arctic Monkeys, Iron and Wine and the Alabama Shakes all sound like "indy rock" and sound nothing like each other. Instead, simply use adjectives to describe what you hear-- fast/slow, loud/soft. Think in words that describe what is happening in the song and avoid labels or editorializing. A song that sounds "angry" to you might sound joyous to the person trying to help you.
Why bother doing this when an app will solve the mystery in a flash? If we love music, we ned to be able to recall it, hear it whenever we want and know it by its name. All those are expressions of that love. They're also way less frustrating than being at a bar, hearing a great song and saying to your friend "ya know, that one?" and waving your hands until your friend thinks "who let them in here?"
Bookmarks:
A half-dozen essays, books and podcasts you need in your life right now.
"The Misunderstood Talent of Gladys Knight" by Emily Lordi (The New Yorker, Aug. 2021)
Nothing I like better than a revaluation and a reckoning for someone everyone knows but few truly know deeply or understand fully. Gladys Knight and her brothers are in the Rock n' Roll Hall of Fame. Now name another song of their besides "Midnight Train to Georgia" :)
"The Battery's Dead: Burnout Looks Different in Autistic Adults" by Beth Winegarner (New York Times, Sept. 2021)
Speaking of revaluation, large, generalized social phenomena rarely present as generalized here on the ground. Every so often, we will have to revise what we think we know based on what we learn about new group of us effected by it.
"The Secret, Essential Geography of the Office" by Paul Ford (Wired, Feb. 2021)
Not the TV show but that place we used to go for employment. We may never sit in one again but our geographical placement in relation to those we work with will only become more important as working and workspaces do.
"Credit Scores Could Become even Creepier and More Biased" by Rose Eveleth (Vice, June 2019)
I can't get over how many little of life's requirements we don't give a second's thought as to where they come from (credit scores, job references, waiting in line for brunch) or whose interests they protect (hint: not ours).
Taking a break after 200 episodes of inviting interesting people to give praise to an album they can't live without, Heat Rocks remains the 45 minutes of densest most actionable music education in podcastdom. Your hand will get tired from taking notes and downloading bangers.
Yeah, I know this novel is 24 years old so I ain't exactly breaking news here. You might have heard of it from the cancelled-too-soon TV adaptation starring Kathryn Hahn and Kevin Bacon. If not, its a novel in letters about a women who falls for a man she meets once, tells her husband and the two of them conspire to write and inform him of this falling. Controversial from the jump, part memoir, love story and art criticism, its so blown through the sky brilliant I cannot say enough good things about it. Read 10 pages. If its pushing your buttons big-time, keep reading. You are in the presence of sheer genius.
Card Catalog:
Topical factoids. Knowledge not news.
-- In America, the most popular halloween candy is Reeses Peanut Butter Cups, followed by Skittles, then M&Ms.
-- Leaves change colors in the fall because daylight hours are shorter and they need less chlorophyll (which is green). The chemical processes of breaking down chlorophyll result in the leaves displaying red and yellow pigments and also lead to a weakening of the connection between the leaf's steam and the tree which will lead to the wind blowing off the leaf and the tree shedding its foliage.
-- Until the 16th century, the season of autumn was referred to as "harvest."
-- September is the most profitable issue for fashion magazines because of the twin retail forces of back-to-school clothes buying and the official of the 4th quarter of business, containing the Christmas holidays.
-- The baseball World Series got its name in 1904 as a marketing gimmick to make the reach of the sport seem bigger than just the United States.
--The Pumpkin Spice Latte was invented in 2003 by a man named Peter Dukes, at the time a product manager for Starbucks, who had an idea for "pumpkin pie-flavored coffee."
-- The Cable Knit Sweater traces its roots to the Aran Islands, off the west coast of Ireland. The knit was invented to bulk up finer mainland Irish wool in order to keep the island's fisherman warm while at sea.
Tool Library:
Notion.so is, on the face of it, like any other "stay organized" piece of software. And I usually cannot make head or tail of such things. But it this case, I get it and I like it. It's not immediately intuitive but...
It lives both online, on your desktop and on your phone and syncs faultlessly (can you say this about Spotify?).
You can organize images and video just as easily as notes you take with text (try pictures with Evernote or text with Pinterest and see how far you get)
It's easier than Google Docs to collaborate with others.
People who love Notion more than I are constantly inventing new uses for it which makes it more like playdoh than hardened clay.
Right now, I use it instead of Pinterest to store images and to maintain articles in progress, my idea file and yearly goals. And that works just fine. But I find that if I need my weak grasp on technology to do more for me, Notion usually can.
It's a swiss army knife. And in a world where there's an app for everything but usually one thing only, that is rare.
Listening Room:
Every issue of this newsletter will contain a 10 song Spotify Playlist. This issue's playlist contains songs by Earth Wind and Fire, Devo, Chris Stapleton, Chaka Kahn and John Coltrane.
The theme will always be the same:
“Against Forgetting”
You will have probably heard of the artists on each playlist but the songs of theirs I chose will always be b-sides/deep cuts and overlooked gems.
APAF Issue #3 - playlist by Kevin Smokler | Spotify
Playlist · Kevin Smokler · 10 items · 1 saves
Exit:
'To Autumn'
Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies
-- John Keats
Witten while recalibrating. Logo by Dave Linabury