Month: April 2015

Furtive Doctrinaire Urges while Listening to the Metal of my Youth

Years ago, I made a critical comment about Metallica to a friend of mine.  It was something along the lines of: I didn’t understand their musical direction anymore. My friend suggested that I was being too doctrinaire. I’ve been thinking about that for a long time. For me, it’s always been Kill Em All, Ride the Lightning, Master of Puppets, and And Justice for All. I liked Metallica (the black album) well enough; though, I thought the vision for that album was mostly about making the music simpler in order to facilitate commercial success and mega-stardom for the band.  After that, I didn’t pay attention to them. Load was a load. St. Anger had potential but seemed very uneven and kind of thrown together. The rest since then I’ve done without.

Are you kidding me?

This last week, I looked up some of the bands I haven’t listened to in years, including Metallica, and now I remember why. Country?* Opera? Okay. On one hand, I like that. It’s weird to have a bunch of guys who used to write songs about Cthulhu, retribution, witches, and serial killers do something entitled “Mama Said” with twangy steel guitars and Stetsons. I like that in a perverse kind of way (though I wished there could have been at least a small human sacrifice going on in the background of the video).

On the other hand, I really, really tried to like Death Magnetic. But after exploring it and thinking carefully about the songs, I had to conclude there was something missing. It has never felt anything but soulless to me—and not in a good Lovecraftian sort of way. It’s like they were trying hard to recapture some of their early sound. Without a doubt, they’re highly capable musicians. But it felt cold, technical, overproduced, and uninspired the way “Fuel” always feels—like I’m hearing Metallica Revisited, like they’re now a tribute band to their earlier selves.

So today, sitting at my computer, thinking, well if I’m going to be doctrinaire, then let me be doctrinaire, I clicked on a YouTube copy of Machine Head’s The Blackening and nearly leapt out of my chair. THIS. THIS was what I felt when I first heard “The Four Horsemen.” Machine Head isn’t trying to sound like early Metallica, but sometimes they do.  And they have that same edge—a certain emotional authenticity along with the technical precision. It was something Metallica once brought to rock.  I think it’s gone to others now.

* Apparently this is on Load and I simply disbelieved / edited it out of my conscious awareness back when I first listened to the album.  I’m sure there’s a repressed memory of hearing it somewhere back there.

Bangkok Prolegomenon: the First Six Months

Bangkok
Bangkok as seen from the Siam BTS platform.

Moving to Bangkok has been very formative thus far. Among other things, this city has challenged me to enter states of discomfort linguistically, energetically, intestinally, sometimes interpersonally. But this has not been a bad thing. I think it has been the kind of discomfort necessary for growth. As I approach six months in Thailand, I can say without a doubt that I have evolved. My sense of who I am as a social being has changed; the way I envision my future has changed; and the way I contextualize experience has changed radically.

In fact, I’ve been spending so much time absorbing this culture, trying to grasp its surfaces and my relation to them as an outsider, I haven’t had much time or space to work on anything beyond the most essential concerns: my teaching, my fiction writing, my day-to-day wellness. Everything may be constantly changing, constantly in flux no matter where we are, but the speed of change in Bangkok, the sheer pace of life, could be legitimately described as overwhelming.

I’ve had to allow for a certain adjustment period. And I’m lucky in that I work with a fascinating group of English teachers who seem to include a high degree of cultural adaptability as part of their professional skill set. So I’m in good company. I live in a very friendly hybridized intellectual space, which has helped.

But still, the sense of space in Bangkok, its division and reunification, the way it gets compartmentalized (and sometimes abruptly disrecognized) remains mysterious. Human space, psychological space, seems pressurized here in ways I never experienced in the West. The psychogeography of the city—the points where concepts and bodies overtly intersect—is always a matter of relativity, of negotiation, sometimes of extreme tension.

So I don’t have the civic narrative down yet. I’m still learning how this place is unfolding. Every city is a story being told from multiple points of view at once. And this one—the concrete, frenetic, crowded, brilliant, astonishing Bangkok in which I live—remains enigmatic, at least for me.