"Like being everything you are all at once."

The weather turns earlier in Michigan than it does in New England. I had forgotten.

The last few mornings, I have donned a fleece before sleepily stumbling to the barn to feed breakfast. That first shock of warm softness against sun-weathered skin still manages to surprise.

Two days ago, my mother and I dismembered a young tree growing behind the barn. Late August's suddenly forceful winds had begun assaulting its branches and bending its narrow trunk over the fence separating it from the riding arena, and its clatter and snap and spastic gestures had scared my horse. We amputated limb after limb until only a triangular tuft of green remained at the top; the trunk remained standing, having greatly overmatched our flimsy saw. In the aftermath, the breeze swiftly bypassed the newly gaunt figure whose ashen skin warned of the gray-brown days to come. It was only after the taking-down that I realized just how much the tree had grown.

Down came the branches, down go the temperatures, down goes the sun in the deepening sky. Evenings arrive earlier now; darkness surprises rather than procrastinates. And while I miss the post-1opm sunsets -- one of the few benefits of living on the Western edge of Eastern time -- I much prefer sixty degrees to ninety and gusty briskness to stagnant humidity. The anticipation of autumn is a prickly and welcome sensation.

Fall has always held some promise of (ironically) renewal and structure. Renewal because fall births school years and theatre seasons, structure because such institutions drop me into a template of regimentation. I like a measured existence, and love autumn for offering one up every year.

(Even the clouds roll in with new-found organization, uniformly sized and shaped and spaced, proud battallions methodically advancing across a wild blue battlefield.)

When I wake up to September tomorrow, I will still be in Michigan. New England will wait for me; it will still be autumn when next I visit. This fall lacks the gleam of its predecessors, but it will suffice. I begin a new job in two weeks, and though it requires a mere teaspoonful of intellect compared to my last position, it still brings a framework and financial gain in with the season. The farm will still consume my mornings, and until Octuber 10, all spare time will belong to GRE subject test preparation. My location will not change, but my life's boundaries will harden in the cool crispness. I will look East for nostalgia, I will look West for inspiration, but mostly I will look forward. It's time to bury the wayward summer.

A Bigger Kind of Kill

For years, I have soundtracked my life according to the season. Bands and albums become inextricably linked to particular phases and places; their sounds rocket me back to their corresponding moments whenever they enter my ears. Bon Iver's Blood Bank EP immediately conjures the vicious gray-and-black cycle of a colorless Providence winter, while The Decemberists' The Crane Wife recalls the autumn of my junior year of college, all yellowing skies, brisk throat-tingling breezes, and crisp autumn leaves descending in kamikaze spirals to find themselves beneath the shoes of frazzled students. So too this summer has found itself underscored by a recently-released album: Sunset Rubdown's magnificent Dragonslayer.

The brainchild of Wolf Parade's keyboardist and co-principal songwriter Spencer Krug, Sunset Rubdown began as a bedrom recording project and has matured into a full band with considerable live performance prowess. Characterized by what Filter magazine so accurately deemed "epic eccentricity," the band layers precise melodies and stately vocals over chugging rhythms and lush guitar- and piano-based orchestration. Their sound conveys a unique urgency especially appropriate for this summer, the first in my life clouded by a terrifying futurelessness, racing toward the first fall in five years to refuse promise of a return East. Listening to the layers of sound swirling beneath Krug's literate, grandiose lyrics produces the feeling I imagine I would experience upon standing at the edge of the Grand Canyon, and, in doing so, engenders a painful awareness of the need for proactivity in charting a path through a vast and overwhelming future.

Those lyrics, in fact, make this specific music-to-moment match particularly unique. Past seasonal soundtracks often achived their status through either sound or lyrical content, but never before Dragonslayer have those two characteristics converged so as to relate simultaneously and perfectly to a certain span of time. Krug is an unabashed symbolist, perhaps the purest in indie rock, and his narrators catalogue scads of fires, animals, mythic figures, virgins, and bodies of water in their complex-yet-direct, sometimes sprawling but always deft lines. Yet the apparent opacity of the lyrics does not totally obfuscate their accessibility, as Pitchfork's Jessica Suarez astutely observes in her review: "What seems like a pile of metaphors is just Krug simplifying the world. Actions are products of instinct or fate, always out of our control, easier to describe than understand. It's Krug's way of-- perhaps insufficiently-- interpreting the world without fully taming it." Indeed, Dragonslayer's comprehensibility eclipses that of the band's previous two LPs. Images and ideas recur from song to song, and while Dragonslayer is not a concept album (at least not to my knowledge), its progression of tracks forms a distinct thematic arc that charts a course from recklessness toward increased maturity.

But Dragonslayer is by no means a typical coming-of-age journey. Its lyrics distinguish it from the average maturation narrative in that the recognition of the need to grow up has already occurred before the album begins, infusing its early songs with the unique bittersweetness wrung from the tension between adulthood's required sophistication and youth's unbridled revelry. Opener "Silver Moons" begins with past tense -- "There were parties here in my honor;" "It was out of line but it was fun" -- as its narrator sets "off to the ballet, and to practice all these ancient ways," passing the torch to a new generation of night owls. His graduation to increased civility is not without sadness, however: "Hey, maybe these days are over, over now...And I loved it better than anyone else, you know." Second track "Idiot Heart" finds its narrator admonishing that "You can't settle down until the Icarus in your blood drowns;" when his audience fails to take his advice, he spits an ominous portent of forthcoming consequences: "I hope that you died in a decent pair of shoes: You've got a lot of long walking to do, where you're going to." Successive songs present images of fallen deities ("Apollo and the Buffalo and Anna Anna Anna Oh!"), ghosts and black swans and kingdoms ("Black Swan"), and transience versus permanence ("Paper Lace"), mapping a landscape of uncertainty and destruction that both frightens and beckons as Krug acknowledges the perverse allure of recklessness and devastation. Bursting with cataclysmic emotion, the heaving tide of these songs makes the listening process an overwhelming one, simultaneously fulfilling and draining (in an entirely positive sense). And the album has only reached its midpoint.

If Dragonslayer's first five songs represent recognition and reluctance to change, its final three usher in increased receptivity to the idea, and eventually reveal an eagerness to embrace it. Pivotal track "You Go On Ahead (Trumpet Trumpet II)" anchors the thematic transformation, as Krug shifts from participation to observation: "I would like to just follow you awhile. I'd like to watch the white flash of your heels as they take turns breaking the desert heat to beckon me in languages I've never learned." He also expresses the desire to abandon his performative role: "I'd like to throw this trumpet down and go on empty handed." His longing for removal from the fray becomes a wish for purification; he hopes to "appear before you virgin white if virgins are still chaste" and implies that the passage of time has distanced him from the mess he once craved. The song's final line -- "And if reflections on the water sometimes look like burning tears, we can watch them changing shape without pushing off the pier" -- confirms his urge to maintain that distance. All the while, the song's simple, soaring melodies reinforce its singer's attempt at increased wholesomeness.

Penultimate track "Nightengale/December Song" ratchets the purification factor up a level, describing rituals of spiritual cleansing that comprise bathing in mud and "swimming in a lake of holy water," while filtering these images through a lens of complementary personalities described in pyrotechnic terms: "You are a fast explosion and I am the embers." Danger still lingers beneath the narrator's increasingly mature surface, but it is conquerable and even beneficial when properly harnessed and cultivated. The album's sweeping conclusion, the epic "Dragon's Lair," continues this exploration, its lyrics signaling a heightened responsibility heretofore unseen. Direct connections to "Silver Moons" abound -- the same parties, confetti, and dead leaves feature prominently -- but the focus has shifted to the future. Having undergone a period of reflection, Krug is now prepared for bigger battles: "So you can take me to the dragon's lair, or you can take me to Rapunzel's windowsill. Either way, it is time for a bigger kind of kill." Youthful brazenness becomes heroic bravery, the destructive fire now channeled into a ferocious competitive spirit hell-bent on slaying monsters and seducing damsels. Yet the potential for decimation still remains, a fact highlighted by Krug's beguiling delivery. Aurally, "dragon's lair" and "dragonslayer" bear a strong resemblance, and Krug's hissing prolongation of the letter S makes the former sound curiously like the latter. It forms the album's most arresting moment, both lyrically and performatively -- with a slight vocal idiosyncrasy, Krug foregrounds the fine line between heroism (killing the dragon, saving the kingdom) and villainy (killing the dragonslayer, unleashing chaos), and closes the album with bone-chilling subversion.

All this overblown analysis, of course, is one person's completely speculative interpretation. Spencer Krug is an immensely talented songwriter whose notoriously mystifying lyrics lend themselves to a variety of explications, while only the writer himself knows the full extent of their meaning. Suffice it to say that in the face of excess time, this overactive imagination felt like putting an English major's twist on one of the summer's best albums. Who knows whether my ideas are remotely valid, but if any of the words or links above persuade you to explore Dragonslayer -- or, for that matter, its equally excellent predecessors, the blissfully quirky Random Spirit Lover and the gloriously sweeping Shut Up I Am Dreaming -- then this quagmire of an intellectual experiment will not have been in vain.

When Life Gives You Limens

"You can't look back. You must look back."

The professor's sonorous proclamation of that vital paradox emanated from the podium and washed upward, outward over the steeply-inclined rows of square red seats in the bright, cubic hall. The British Arts Center auditorium, unflinchingly modern with its cement walls and lacquered blonde hardwood floor, seemed an unconventional lecture location in its flagrant rejection of Yale's opulent Gothic embrace, but the lecture proved anything but orthodox. The incomparable Joe Roach was explaining the essential predicament of the Orpheus myth during the first meeting of his World Performance class, where I, intoxicated by this first brush with performance studies at the outset of my final year of college, would hear for the first time the term that has come to describe every phase of my life between that moment and this one: Liminal.

Quite simply, "limen" means "threshold" in Latin, and liminality - the straddling of an existential threshold - informs conventional and experimental performance in that performative acts negotiate the space between artifice and reality, between past and present, between the familiar and the foreign. As it describes a state of flux, liminality inherently implies change: as Jon McKenzie states, its "spacial, temporal, and symbolic 'in between-ness' allows for social norms to be suspended, challenged, played with, and perhaps even transformed." Furthermore, as performance studies extends beyond the expected areas of theatre and performance art into the anthropological, sociological realm, liminality manifests in rites of passage such as the isolation and reintegration of a tribe's adolescent males, or even those four freewheeling, exhausting, stressful, euphoric, intense and all-too-fleeting years of college we so fondly remember. In all cases, participants and observers find themselves changed by their relationship to each other and to the event at hand. And since all performances involve liminality, and all life involves performance, liminality becomes ubiquitous, unrelenting, inescapable.

The oxymoronic idea of constant liminality prompted McKenzie to coin the term "the liminal-norm," a concept which "operates in any situation where the valorization of a liminal transgression or resistance itself becomes normative -- at which point theorization of such a norm may become subversive." Full disclosure: I freely admit that I lack the philosophical knowledge to completely understand some of performance theory's loftier concepts, and McKenzie's idea initially struck me as somewhat tautological and head-scratching. After re-reading it, however, it seems he implies that given humans' incessant desire to assign value to liminal states, attempting to brand liminality as the new status quo threatens to obliterate our awareness of change and its impact upon us.

Hence my decision to name this blog after McKenzie's term. Liminality dictates the lives of most twentysomethings as we bob and weave our way through the blinding glare of the post-college world and the wobbly-kneed adventures of early-career uncertainty. Those of us prone to obsessive introspection constantly identify it for ourselves and for each other, mercilessly analyzing its implications and cowering beneath the monumental significance we assign it. We cannot -- and should not -- escape it, but we must not become too accustomed to it or else we risk forgetting it and, in turn, forgetting parts of ourselves.