Fall

Yet another Transmission event tonight, and you can bet your ass I will be there. Summer is ending really goddamn fast and soon I will feel the claustrophobia of winter set in. Here's the funny thing: I like it cold, it's the snow I hate. For most people it is the exact other way around- the snow makes everything "pretty" and "seasonal". The hell with that. I hate looking at snow and I hate shoveling it, but give me a nice cold crisp day and all is well. Part of this is my arrogance in believing that I look damn good in coats, part is that all the panhandlers disappear to warmer climates, but most of all it is that some music -in fact much of what I like- sounds a whole goddamn lot better when it is less than 50 degrees outside.

Fall is the shit. We have so precious little of it here, and let me clarify the earlier statement: I don't look forward to the -20 chill of late January, but from now until early December (barring that nasty white stuff) is paradise. One of my traditions is to take a solo trip to the north shore of Lake Superior with a few jugs of mead. While there, I sit on the beach or at a suitably rocky outcropping and blast my winter playlist and stare out into the water. I know it sounds a little melodramatic and sappy in a Nick Drake, neo-romantic way, but fuck you, I love it. Before I leave, I always stash a bottle of mead under a rock for my next maudlin/pensive visit. It's a good time, especially in November when Lake Superior is at it's grayest and most violent. It's simultaneously austere and manic, alien and intimate. It reminds me of the poem "New Hampshire Again" by Carl Sandburg:

I remember black winter waters
I remember thin white birches
I remember sleepy twilight hills

While the bulk of this poem is clearly (just read the title, for chrissakes) a meditation on New England, specifically Robert Frost's nostalgic version of it, those opening lines will always place me just off the road north of Castle Danger, MN. And whereas Sandburg is where my mind immediately goes to when I'm there gazing across Superior's waves, my driving companion on the way north is a mix tape that invariably starts off with U2's "A Sort of Homecoming" and ends with the entirety of Springsteen's "Nebraska" album.

But tonight I will not travel to the north shore. Tonight I am going downtown to hit up the single dance/dj night that I give a shit about. Dangling prepositions and all.

On my way there I will most likely pump up the volume on Joy Division's "Disorder", my favorite song from that band, and one of the best lead-off tracks of any record of all-time. When you factor in that the band members were all 23 or under at the time of it's release and that it sounded like nothing before it AND served as the perfect sonic reflection of the geographic region (Manchester) at that time, the result is nothing short of staggering. If you were to look up "auspicious debut" in the dictionary, there would be a picture of Ian Curtis next to it.

Turn off the lights and turn this shit up.