28 Meaningless Conclusions I Came To Regarding Meaningless Events Ocurring In 2008, an Otherwise Unusually Meaningful Year

1. I saw exactly 16 American films that were released in 2008. The best was Burn After Reading. The worst was Harold and Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay. (Oy.) Here's all of them, best to worst, and their star ratings (on a four-star scale):

Burn After Reading (four stars)
Be Kind Rewind (four stars)
Step Brothers (three and a half stars)
The Bank Job (three and a half stars)
The Dark Knight (three and a half stars)
Iron Man (three stars)
WALL·E (three stars)
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (two and a half stars)
Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired (two and a half stars)
Semi-Pro (two and a half stars)
Leatherheads (two stars)
Baby Mama (two stars)
Tropic Thunder (two stars)
Rambo (two stars)
Jumper (one star)
Harold and Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay (zero stars)

2. There were 32 more (strangely, exactly twice the amount I saw) released that I really want to see. They are (in alphabetical order):

88 Minutes*
American Teen
Baghead**
The Band’s Visit
Blindness
Body of Lies
Changeling
Cadillac Records
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Death Race
Doomsday
Frozen River
The Grand
Gran Torino
JCVD
Man on Wire***
Meat Loaf: in Search of Paradise****
Midnight Meat Train*****
Milk
Miracle at St. Anna
Mister Lonely******
My Name is Bruce
Paranoid Park
The Pineapple Express
The Promotion
Revolutionary Road
Strange Wilderness*******
Synecdoche, New York
Valkyrie
The Visitor
W.
The Wrestler

*I know, I know; I can't help it.
** Possibly more than any other movie.
*** Though, I have to admit, I'm baffled at how this could possibly be as good as everybody says.
**** Fuck off. I can sense you judging me.
***** Clive Barker purportedly wrote this when he was stoned. How on Earth does something like this even get made? I must see Midnight Meat Train.
****** Currently in my living room.
******* My friend Chris swears by this. I am currently devising a plan where, on the same night, I will watch Strange Wilderness and he will watch Without a Paddle (a pleasant surprise if there ever was one), after which we will discuss the merits of both via telephone.

3. The Beatles, discounting Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, are actually pretty good. And, further:

a. Revolver is, perhaps, their best record; and
b. And Your Bird Can Sing is, perhaps, their best non-single.

4. Metal Church's third album, 1989's Blessing in Disguise, is surprisingly rad.

5. Neon Knights (from 1980's Heaven and Hell) is the best—and, maybe, only good—post-Ozzy Black Sabbath song. (May require further inspection.)

6. After listening to much of, if not the entirety of, its catalog (including 2008's Good to Be Bad, which was, inexplicably, my first-ever digital download purchase), I can confidently report that Whitesnake has produced exactly one great song (Still of the Night, from 1987's Whitesnake), one pretty good song (Slow An' Easy, from 1984's Slide it In) and one okay song (Hit An' Run, from 1981's Come An' Get It).

7. Though it may be the wimpiest (and/or worst) song ever, Kid Rock's All Summer Long was a huge smash hit, further lamenting Rock's image as an old-school white trash badass, rather than exposing him as a thin-armed, deflated, silly-hat-wearing douche bag.

8.Clipse's Hell Hath No Fury, though pretty fucking awesome, is exclusively enjoyed by well-educated white people (especially music critics).

9. Black Flag's My War (album) is nearly as heavy and awesome as The Stooges' Funhouse.

10. So What by Pink was second only to Katy Perry's I Kissed a Girl as the most surprisingly good single of 2008 (though So What is the better song).

11. The Ramones is the greatest rock band of all time.

12. The Gaslight Anthem is pretty good. (Though the song The '59 Sound is simply great.)

13. Dinosaur jr is still capable of putting out good records and playing transcendent live shows.

14. The Stooges are capable of neither.

15. There is an Art of War 2 starring Wesley Snipes.

16. I will see TR2N on opening day, even though TR1N was pretty boring.

17. Never buy anything from buy.com. Ever.

18. Home Run Inn makes what is easily the best frozen pizza since the creation of frozen pizza. (Sausage and Pepperoni.)

19. The best new flavor of chips I tried last year was Limited Edition McGraw's Spicy Jalapeño Fritos brand corn chips. The second best is Vitner's Buffalo & Blue Cheese potato chips (though I can't find any record that they ever existed).

20. The best new trend in frozen foods is, easily, Birdseye Steamfresh vegetables. (Fuck the Green Giant ones; they're taller than the inside of my microwave and come out all crazy.)

21. The best movies I saw last year (for the first time) not released in 2008 were (in no particular order):

Escape From Alcatraz
Killer of Sheep
This is England

Aguirre, the Wrath of God

22. Like Iron Maiden or tequila, summer sausage is best enjoyed in small quantities.


23. There's an outside chance that when my favorite TV show (Mad Men) returns, it may, inexplicably, be under the guidance of someone other than its creator.

24. There is no chance that my second favorite TV show (Lipstick Jungle) will continue in any way, shape or form, though me and my wife and have created a future where it is resurrected by Lifetime and, though there is absolutely no evidence or documentation anywhere to suggest this, we both foresee this as a likely possibility, as it is just easier that way, rather than letting go of one of the few things we enjoy equally.

25. After being persuaded otherwise by the near masterpiece Rocky Balboa, Sylvester Stallone reminded us all that he's a very special type of nutso with Rambo.

26. The best Rolling Stones song that isn't Gimme Shelter, Beast of Burden, Street Fighting Man or Honky Tonk Women is Jiving Sister Fanny.

27. Utopia may just best antisocial as the most misused term in the English language.

28. The Jerk, Too is only available for purchase in the U.K. Trust me; I checked.

You've Come a Long Way, Baby, and All You Got Was This Stupid T-Shirt

Note: Don't read this if you don't want to know (albeit in a vague manner) what happens in Seasons One and Two of Mad Men.
1.

About ten years ago, upon serving on a jury, I became aware that Americans hate women—perhaps nobody more so than women, themselves.

Though this may be a bit of an overstatement (and without getting into the particulars of the lawsuit), I left feeling as if the plaintiff—a woman—was the recipient of some weird pent-up ire that was in total disproportion to the particulars of the case. People turned her into the accused, in what was like a more opaque (and less traumatizing) instance of blaming the rape victim for the rape.

And no one was harder on her than the women.

It was awful, and I left feeling as though my half-jokingly entertained suspicions had been confirmed with quick and humorless authority: my opinions on things were the exact opposite of those of the average person.

It’s a strange realization to come to—that not everyone has read Laura Mulvey and Margaret Atwood.

When I was a sophomore, my mulleted female college counselor with unshaven legs and a penchant for swearing at her eight-year old daughter over the phone suggested I take a feminist film theory course. Sure, I figured; I didn't know from feminism. I mean, as a sixth-grader, I was surprised to learn (though I had suspicions) that girls pooped. That's where I came from.

But I enrolled in the class, and it floored me. I felt like everything I had been taught or instinctively thought about women was a lie. It kept me awake, panicked, at night. And there is was—right there this whole time, staring me in the face, so obvious. It was as blatant as seeing Southern Blacks endure the weight and thrust of fire hoses wielded by the purveyors of injustice: here was indisputable evidence of social discrimination so ugly, you'd be a fool to not recognize its wrongness.

Finally, I owned it. I made earnest but laughably cryptic attempts (i.e., out-of the-blue phone calls from an ex-boyfriend somberly professing I'm so sorry if I treated you with anything other than the respect you and other members of your gender deserve—is that weird?) to apologize to those who may have been affected by the older, less-enlightened me. And I recast women in my worldview as strong-willed, capable and independent.

So you can imagine my confusion when my future wife, while we were visiting a friend's house, asked me to go downstairs and fetch her a Popsicle.

2.

One of the things a liberal education affords you is an inflated sense of the fairness and goodness of other people out there in the real world. Most of whom, as it turns out, either: (a) haven't been exposed to the material that you have; or (b) if they have, don't scarcely give a fuck. Ultimately, for the rest of your life, you find yourself nervously avoiding eye contact in the actual real world, where you realize that maybe we actually haven't gotten past this.

I carry suspicion in my pocket (next to my keys, the longest of which is usually sandwiched between my index and middle fingers in case I need to jam it into an assailant’s eye on criminally short notice) and I pulled it out to process the severious demonization of presidential-candidate Hillary Clinton, which somehow managed to best the previous demonization of senatorial-candidate Hillary Clinton, which bested the previous demonization of first lady Hillary Clinton, and so forth. People, for some reason, just hate her—is it because she's assured and educated?

I felt similarly suspicious of the public’s reception to Sarah Palin.

Look—I am not, in any way, insinuating that Palin is Clinton’s intellectual equal. That would approach the absurd. But what I am suggesting is that that they do have something in common: the generally encouraged vehemence of their detractors.

Interestingly, Chicago Sun-Times columnist Michael Sneed addressed the public’s disdain for Ms. Palin (and Ms. Clinton) in her September 17, 2008 entry in her column, under the incendiary banner Revoke My Feminist Card:

Hmmm. Maybe . . . I am not a feminist after all.

Maybe . . . working in a man's world for 42 years and busting my butt to beat them up the ladder deletes me from the feminist category.

Perhaps . . . struggling to be a good single mom in a very married world—yet meeting my five-day-a-week column deadline—doesn't earn me a feminist handle either. . . . [I]f appreciating a woman who chose a husband who supports her ladder-climbing skills puts me in the non-feminist category, well maybe that's where I belong. . . . She is real. She is rural. She may not be a brilliant tactician, but she's got street sense. Palin is so unlike the very controlled Hillary Clinton, who would never be caught dead in red heels.

Thus, it now appears Palin has emerged as ‘everywoman’ to a huge portion of our female population; a woman never really identified with what we thought was our quintessential role model—a highly educated woman who wears tailored suits, whose voice is never shrill and who has a husband who makes more than she does.

It's a gutsy thing to write—even if it's borderline insane—and, though I usually find something cringeworthy in her column, that Sneed (itself a cringe-worthy moniker) would stand front and center in direct opposition to the rest of Obamaworld (p/k/a the Land of Lincoln) to support another woman, was pretty, oh, I don’t know—radically feminist. Like how when Blake Schwarzenbach sang: You're not punk and I'm telling everyone/Save your breath I never was one was, like, totally punk.

There is a danger in suggesting that feminism as an ideology is whatever you make of it, and open to limitless interpretation: it makes it easy for educated dudes to pretend that visiting a strip club is encountering female empowerment in action, rather than encountering titties in action.

However, measured dissent against the majority and its dominant tenets is all too rare these days on the liberal side of things. It's the kind of thing that keeps people on their toes and, at the very least, affirms their own identity within a cause, group or ideology.

Hell, in the same column, Sneed asks: “what fault is there in admiring a woman who is against abortion—even though I believe in freedom of choice?” That's batty!

In the next day’s column, she wrote:

. . .Hillary Clinton ran for president and was hit with more sexist barbs than St. Sebastian had arrows.

And when John McCain chose (gulp!) a good-looking woman from Alaska named Sarah Palin as his running mate, the liberal pundits threw every red shoe at her they could find. . . .Being first and fair was my journalistic baptism in the tumultuous 1960s.

Unfortunately, fairness keeps getting redefined.

So here's a hard-nosed, well-respected, old-school Chicago female reporter who felt the need to write a defensively apologist article for supporting the woman attempting to lay claim to the second-highest seat in the land—I mean, isn't that just fascinating?

Don’t get me wrong; I’m not a big fan of Palin's. I do, however, find her a pinch more appealing than her male equivalent, Ted Nugent, primarily because she doesn’t write terrible songs in addition to discharging ridiculous-looking weapons.

Her troubling policies, values and ignorance are only slightly less troubling than the scary, down-home, outdated survivalist mentality of those whose cauldrons she stirs the bubbling violence in. (See picture: Really? You want to kill people because of their politics? Joke or no joke—that's fucking scary.)

But I don’t buy that she was chosen merely to appeal to those obviously closeted-racist Hillary Clinton supporters who, upon Obama’s securing the nomination, found themselves on the fence (?!!!) in deciding between McCain and Obama. Though that's certainly part of it.

I’m guessing she wasn’t picked because she had never been out of the country before. Or because she has a pregnant, unmarried teen-aged daughter. Or for her inability to summon up a single Supreme Court case besides Roe v. Wade.

No matter what anyone says, Palin is a woman of accomplishment—she's Governor of Alaska, after all. And that is, no doubt, admirable. But tell me—what did you find more impressive when you watched the Vice-Presidential debate: her political prowess and grasp of the issues? Or how good she looked, having giving birth just a few months prior?

Imagine if we put her running mate up to such scrutiny.

I think that McCain and his sleazeball campaign put her up for the slaughter. Not only did she take the fall for the Republicans, she did it with the majority of the male population ogling her. And I think that John McCain and his advisors are total bullshit for that.

In the October 18, 2008 edition of The New York Times, Mark Leibovich, in his article Among Rock-Ribbed Fans of Palin, Dudes Rule, writes:

It is not unusual for fans of Sarah Palin to shout out to the Alaska governor in the midst of her stump speeches. It is noteworthy, however, that the crowds are heavily male. ‘You rock me out, Sarah,’ yelled one man, wearing a red-checked hunting jacket as Ms. Palin, the Republican vice presidential candidate, strode into an airplane hangar here on Thursday. He held a homemade 'Dudes for Sarah' sign and wore a National Rifle Association hat. Kenny Loggins’s 'Danger Zone' blared over the loudspeakers. . . . While there are plenty of women, including wives and daughters of male fans, at Ms. Palin’s appearances, they acknowledge they are outnumbered. 'This is not a ladies campaign,’ declared Linda Teegan at a rally in Weirs Beach, N.H., . . .'There seem to be lots and lots of guys here,' she said. 'I’d guess 70-30, maybe 65-35, men to women. It’s quite noticeable to me.'

The dudes tend to make themselves noticed. 'You tell ’em baby,' a man yelled out at a rally Wednesday night on a high school football field in Salem, N.H.

In other words, Palin was chosen, in a last-ditch effort, as the pharmaceutical Sildenafil citrate needed to pump some much-needed blood into the flaccid penis of the Republican Party.

3.

I remember, as a college student, watching the episode of My So-Called Life where Rayanne sleeps with Jordan Catalano behind best friend (who has a devastating crush on JC) Angela’s back. I remember thinking—Christ, why would she do that to her best friend? It seemed so unlikely; I thought it was merely a side of drama hastily whipped up by the writers to go along with the story-arc cut of meat, until I recalled instances where girls I knew in high school did the same exact shit.

In these situations, guys of this age will, basically, sleep with a girl because he’s able to and his hormones are on high alert. But girls will sleep with a guy to hurt another girl.

I had always chalked this type of undertaking up to manufactured, overwrought teenaged dramatics. But, now, it is particularly disheartening to consider the dynamics of young women hurting another over some guy, not least of all because few of us are as brooding and attractive as Mr. Catalano—the Jackson Brown of dyslexia.

Being a man (or, more accurately, the opposite of Muddy Waters' Mannish Boy, a Boyish Man), I can only imagine what it must be like to be a woman at any age. Each age seems to be fraught with new societal pitfalls: in grade school, the boys are mean to you; in high school, the girls are mean to you; and in college, the boys are, again, mean to you.

Then the pressure cooker really starts to rattle: get married, have children; ignore any maternal instinct to stay at home with your young child(ren) in order to pursue a career, even if you decide that you no longer want to; and try to stay thin, youthful and attractive.

If you stay single and independent, you are envious of your married friends with kids. And if you are married, you are envious of your single friends. The song Single Girl by Ruby Vass—a standard that knows a few variations and has also been recorded by The Carter Family (as Single Girl Married Girl), among others—seems to pointedly take the side of the single girl:

Single girl, single girl
Goes to the store and buys
Oh she goes to the store and buys
Married girl, married girl
She rocks the cradle and cries
Oh, she rocks the cradle and cries

Single girl, single girl
She's dressed in silk so fine
Oh dressed in silk so fine
Married girl, married girl
Wars just any kind
Oh, she wears any kind

Single girl, single girl
Goes where she please
Oh, she goes where she please
Married girl married girl
Baby on her knee
Oh, got a baby on her knee

And TV’s Mad Men explores this dichotomy in splendidly over-melodramatic fashion; particularly in the character of Peggy Olson, portrayed heroically, as having an unlikely combination of perseverance, earthy elegance, irresponsibility and callousness, by Elisabeth Moss.

Pulling off the character of Peggy Olson, both in the writing and acting, is quite a nifty trick, indeed. Peggy is meant to represent the unlikeliest of archetypes—one that has never really existed, nonetheless—without playing like one.

At first, as a viewer, if you think you know what Peggy wants, it’s that she just wants to be left alone. You feel sorry for her. She seems utterly powerless and victimized. But as her character develops, so does her power. And then sometimes you feel sorry for the people she comes in contact with. Not because she’s vicious, but because she leaves unprecedented amounts of wreckage in her wake.

She is initially bombarded with inappropriate come-ons from the men and criminally bad suggestions from the women (namely office manager/goddess Joan) involving contraception and the importance of showing a little leg in order to snare a husband—with undisguised sexism the ruling party in both camps.

Peggy gets pregnant after a frivolous roll in the hay with he of the snap-together aristocracy: the smirking-when-he-isn’t-pouting, pear-headed Pete Campbell. When she is pregnant, she is ridiculed because everyone thinks she is fat. She has the baby, gives it away, suffers the possible damnation of the Catholic church to which she belongs, and certainly of her much older, afghan-weaved sister, who is charged with taking care of the child.

Peggy longs to be part of the boys’ club, yet she is clearly riddled with guilt about it. And as she makes headway at Sterling Cooper it is, to some degree, at the cost of her womanhood.

Femme fatale Joan is seemingly happy being the plaything of the conservatively perverse Roger Sterling—the Sterling in the fictional ad agency and centerpiece of the show, Sterling Cooper—until she meets and gets engaged to a coveted doctorial candidate. Scenes of the two fiancés together at home suggest a new side to Joan previously unseen. She is tolerant and nurturing, wounded but trusting, eager to please and intelligent. And at work, she shines while assisting Harry Crane, “head of the television department.” And just when you’re feeling really happy for her, Crane replaces her, and it’s just devastating.

And then her fiancé rapes her.

And what to make of the mess that is Betty Draper as played by January Jones? It is thoroughly unpleasant to watch the former model—who has given her all to be Mrs. Donald Draper only to be repeatedly cheated on and lied to—begin to unravel. But the following reading of her character by Erin J. Shea in an October 22,2008 article from metromix.com (and appearing in the Chicago Tribune offshoot Redeye) would never have occurred to me:

The long-suffering and disturbingly evil Betty Draper typifies every wretched stereotype of the early ’60s housewife, including how she treats her children.

I was very confused by this, as I have consistently found Betty to be a sympathetic—albeit thoroughly damaged—character. And I would be remiss if I failed to point out that this assessment of her character was written by a female, though I’m not entirely certain that it's the sole determining factor. But it was so decisively different from my own interpretation of the character that I had to wonder: is this a specifically feminine reading?

What's with the acidity?

The women on Mad Men are made to suffer, not entirely unlike women in a Lars Von Trier film. Sure, the men are made to suffer, too. But it’s a different type of suffering: their suffering is directly related to the guilt of how they treat the women in their lives, and they are allowed to cope with it by drinking obscene amounts of old-fashioned cocktails and smoking ludicrous amounts of unfiltered cigarettes. And sleeping with other women. And being gone for days at a time.

Conversely, the women are raped. Or have to give up their babies for adoption. Or be a mother and sole caregiver while the men are gone.

And when Betty wants to get back at Don for cheating on her, she has anonymous sex in the back office of a bar. Not out of desire or lust, but because of the pain it would cause her husband; it seems to have more to do with him than it does her.

Mad Men is immeasurably less about advertising than it is about gender roles. It is not accidental that it takes place on the cusp of The ‘60s as cultural event, counting on the audience’s by-now ingrained understanding of the term and the social and societal changes implicated therein.

A man’s responsibility, as Don Draper understands it, is to be an earner, to provide a comfortable lifestyle for his family. His obligations, largely, end there.

Betty is expected to be forthcoming in the bedroom, to cook and clean and take care of the household and kids while remaining elegant and attractive—but not too revealing so as to not satiate the desires of the wrong element. And, when Mad Men begins, in the middle of things, that’s exactly what she’s doing. And then things start to crack, slow and hushed, all around them.

Don Draper represents the last gasp of a very particular lifestyle. There are peripherals of change to come all around him—the beatnik crowd surrounding fever dream Midge Daniels; buffoonish ascot-wearing Orwell understudy Paul Kinsey’s black girlfriend and their march in Mississippi; the drafting of openly gay “European” Dylan fan Kurt as a fresh, youthful perspective within the firm—and Draper advances as if he is impervious to them.

Draper serves as the link between masculinity before World War II (the Great War) and after Vietnam (the lousy one). He will be the last of a generation whose men fought wars, shaved daily and struck their women when they were “hysterical.” Men like Roger Sterling wouldn’t change—their ideologies die with them; but a man like Draper is present for the unspooling and all of the confusion it awakens.

As is Betty, and as things start to fall apart, they still clutch on to the way it was supposed to be. That’s all they know how to do.

Single Girl Married Girl? Here there’s no discrimination; they’re both severely punished.

4.

So the second wave of feminism (the first wave being, primarily, the women’s suffrage movement at the turn of the century) hit in the 1960s and lasted into the 1980s. Forty years isn’t enough time to render the playing field equal. Kate Lorenz of CareerBuilder.com writes:

According to the AFL-CIO, the average 25-year-old woman who works full-time, year-round until she retires at age 65 (if that's when she's able to retire) will earn $523,000 less than the average working man?

At the current rate of change, working women will not achieve equal pay until after the year 2050. That's almost 100 years after President Kennedy signed the Equal Pay Act into law, prohibiting discrimination based on sex resulting in unequal pay for equal work.

Maybe by 2050 things will start to make a little more sense. As it is now, every time I see a man hold a door for a career woman, I take it as a personal affront to the women’s movement: you'll never bridge that salary gap if you keep playing the subservient role.

Equality is the only ideology under which true harmony and freedom can be achieved. But nobody's really certain how to divvy up the duties any more. Now everybody works and nobody wants to do anything when they get home. Everybody does everything.

Men are no longer providers, and women are not housewives: my wife makes more money than I do; I sure as hell never fought in a war; and I cook more than my wife does, and not because I'm some sort of gourmet chef or something.

And who would want to go back to the way things were? Oh yeah, that's right: like half the fucking population.

I think that the only way to achieve true equality in the workplace and at home is to be a fabulously wealthy couple, where both work and just pay other people to do everything for them. Which means, ostensibly that equality is a concept that can only be enjoyed via the oppression of others. Who's driving the car? Why, the driver, of course. Who's taking care of the children? Why, the children's caretaker, of course. Who's washing the dishes? You get the point.

More and more, I feel like maybe, in order to wear the hats we’ve been fitted for, we’ll evolve into one species, not unlike Marilyn Manson on the cover of Mechanical Animals. Only browner and, hopefully, with a couple extra arms and more manageable hairdos.

Amazing Things Part Two

From: Toys "R" Us Weekly Ad, Sunday, October 12, 2008.

This Halloween, why not spend $16.99 on an officially licensed INDIANA JONES Electronic Sounds Whip, and dress your child like a Steinbeckian dust-bowl era hobo? With a whip. (Outfit sold separately.)

I Had a Dream, I Had an Awesome Dream

Transcription of miniature tape recording. The morning of Monday, October 6, 2008.

I just woke up, feeling an urgent need to urinate and, more importantly, to document the specifics of the dream I just had, in the hopes it will prove beneficial to all of humankind.

In this dream, I am living in the 1950s and working in advertising. It should be noted that this has nothing to do with the fact that I watched two episodes of Mad Men last night and, frankly, the suggestion of which diminishes the seriousness and weight of this revolutionary concept and its ideas, so let’s not for a second even consider it.

I have traveled back in time, from 2008 to the past by a means that is so simple and feasible, I can scarcely believe that it has yet to be implemented. More on that later.

I’m sitting around in an office with five or so rather well dressed gentlemen. One has a beard, is smoking a pipe and bears a striking resemblance to Orson Wells. Another rather timid fellow is wearing a bow tie and glasses and goddammit, come to think of it, maybe these are the guys from Mad Men, because there’s another rather smarmy little prick over there by the window named Pete Campbell. And the others I’m pretty sure are from Mad Men, too, like the guy, who’s name escapes me, that the closeted Italian guy has a crush on (the one who had been published), he’s there, too, and why shouldn’t they all be from Mad Men? That’s fine—it need not diminish the potential contributions of my dream to science or, more specifically, the science of time travel or society at large just because there are some characters from a TV show in it. Big deal. Mad Men is utterly serious: its moments of levity are few and far between and, themselves, still quite upsetting. It’s a very highly regarded show. And unlike the New York depicted in Mad Men, we’re in the Chicago of the 1950s.

So I’m sitting around in an office with some guys that are probably the characters from Mad Men, and we’re trying to brainstorm for a customer account or something. I make the suggestion that we all try to come up with things that are currently of interest to us personally. One of these is Kleenex, another, black baseballs and, another, spiral ham.

I look out the window and see an immediate signifier that I am indeed in the 1950s—the window frames a view from atop a super-tall building where, since it is the 1950s, half of the land below is concrete and generally very hustly and bustly, and the other half is submerged in water, just as Chicago was in the 1950s.

Not sure I can verify the truth of that last statement, but I’m also not yet sure how significant it is that half of Chicago was submerged in water during the 1950s; this will be determined later, with further investigation of this aspect and its relevance to the importance of the concept as a whole. (If it turns out to be a minor topographical detail and its importance to the concept is determined to be that of merely a cosmetic nature, then—perfect! If it proves to be integral to the concept, then we may have to verify this by: (1) interviewing people who lived in Chicago in the 1950s; (2) photographs, etc.)

At any rate, there are some really large and tall boats out there (on the water portion), as they were the primary means of transportation in Downtown Chicago at that time. (Again, may need to verify this.) The portion of land that is not submerged in water is swarming with businessmen all dressed up like they often were in the ’50s, wearing hats and stuff and carrying around accordion-style briefcases, a pictorial representation of which makes up Fig. 1. (IMPORTANT!)


I am looking out the window with the other gentlemen, one of them noting that it is quite a view, and this makes me smile. Oh, ye simpletons of the past, I think. Impressed by the simple construct of a half-water, half-land metropolis. How amazed would you all be by the all-concrete futurism of the true present day (in the future)? I fear that your poor heads might explode.

Though the specifics of our conversation/brainstorming session escape me, I remember constantly berating myself for using the word dude (as I often do when talking to our nanny and my boss) because, I’m fairly certain, people didn’t talk like that in the 1950s.

It is important to note here, before we get too far into this thing that, for those existing in the 1950s via time travel, it was (is?) imperative that their secret remain as such, as there are some that view their very existence as a threat to civilization. But we shall delve into that in more detail later, as its role in the situation expands, at which point it will be impossible to ignore.

I look up, seeing a moose head (Fig. 2) mounted above a desk littered with papers, fountain pens and coffee mugs. From the 1950s. Behind the desk, on a small rolling cart is a 1950s-era computer, and—wait a second; a computer in the 1950s? Looking at the design of the IBM logo on its screen (Fig.2(a)), I am quickly reassured as, ah yes, every office did indeed come equipped with an IBM computer in the 1950s, an this IBM is most certainly of that era, given the vintage of the IBM logo.

I am finding it difficult to refrain from asking if anybody has heard that new Pink song, the one she performed on the 2008 VMAs. And I want to know, mostly because I am wondering if anybody thinks she is as attractive as I do. I am looking for validation, because I am not sure why I find her so irresistible, but no, I must remember that I’m in the 1950s, and Pink and the 2008 VMAs won’t exist for years. We are listening to Rosemary Clooney on an ancient turntable—though it’s most certainly new to these human fossils—until one of the gentleman, I’m thinking the bow tie guy with the glasses, slips a CD into the archaic (it was the ’50s after all) CD drive of the aforementioned computer. I ask him what he is playing, as it sounds to me like Daft Punk. He says he doesn’t know, that he got it from Gabe, who works at the Sears Tower.

Well, hell’s bells, I think. He must be talking about my pal Dorosz. It’s just the sort of brash move Gabe is known for making: time-traveling back to the 1950s and introducing the people of the past to Daft Punk.

So I ask him: “Is that Gabe Dorosz?” not really considering the possibility that Gabe might use an alias.

“I don’t know,” he says. “I only know him as Gabe from the Sears Tower.”

“Well, does he laugh like this?” I extend and shake the fingers of my right arm, which is bent at the elbow and locked at my side, releasing the heft of my best laughing Gabe impression.

“I don’t know,” he says, somewhat confused. “I’ve never heard him laugh like that . . . or at all.”

“Well,” I sigh, “is he Greek?”

“Yes,” he says and, for me, this is affirmation.

I now know I am not alone. There are other time travelers here. Friends. Like Gabe Dorosz (who is actually Polish).

We break for lunch, and after I walk through the building’s lobby and out its revolving doors, I run into my friend Chris.

“Dude, what are you doing here?” he asks in a whisper. He looks and talks just like he did when he was fifteen, with braces and a tendency to mumble. Oh, and he is wearing army fatigues. “Whatever happened to buckling down and giving it one last chance?”

I now remember, that back in the present (2008), we co-own a struggling pizza parlor called Pizzeye (Fig. 3), which is also the name of our band that plays exclusively at our pizza parlor. We had sworn to each other, in the 2008, you see, from beneath our chef’s hats and from behind our flour-powdered aprons, that we were going to give it one last shot before packing it in and going to chef school.

“How long have you been here?” I ask him.

“I don’t know. Four months,” he mutters. “Come with me.”

I follow him through what looks like downtown Columbus, OH, where, if you’ve been there, you know that everything, in an attempt to impress, is a bit unimpressive.

Given his comment about whatever happened to buckling down and giving it one last chance I am somewhat unclear as to how this whole time travel thing works: is the time spent here, in the past, equal to the time spent there, in the present? Like if you’re here for four months, when you go back to the present, does that mean you will have disappeared for those four months?

Without me asking him—and I think that this sort of mind-reading phenomenon may have something to do with time travel, or at least time travel as it pertains to this situation here—he looks at me and says: “No. That’s the best thing about it.”

I wonder if we’re here in the past and there in the present at the same time, then how is my being here a detriment to giving it one last shot in the present?

I refuse, I think, to feel guilty about this. Besides, I am in advertising now, which is certain to have more of a future and be more lucrative than the whole pizza parlor/band thing.

I follow him into his neighborhood, which appears to be more residential. We break into other people’s residences along the way by indiscriminately smashing windows with bricks and cinder blocks, mostly sifting through the belongings in their basements and littering them all over the floor. Occasionally, Chris will steal something, as he does with a bottle of laundry detergent and a gallon of milk. “Milk and detergent,” he reveals, “are expensive here.”

I wonder what his motivation for time traveling back to live in the 1950s is.

“Do you work?” I ask.

“No, I don’t have to.” He says. “You can live really cheaply here. My rent is like seventy-two dollars a month.”

And here’s where the whole method and funding of this time travel deal blows wide open and starts to make logistical sense. I guess I had been somewhat hazy on this until this conversation with Chris, but of course, I now remember how this works. And this is really the part that’s going to be ultra-revolutionary and change the way we live, and how we all view time travel.

Time travel accounts are available only through a disguised, secret posting—though I can’t remember exactly the nature of that listing, I’m sure I could pick it out from the others—on craigslist.org (though, if you type in craigslist.com, it’ll still work), and payments for impending time travel excursions may only be made with a valid Pay Pal account.

Of course. That’s why that shit is such a big deal.

For example: if you deposit $5,000 into your Pay Pal time travel account here in 2008, when you arrive in the 1950s, you’ll still have $5,000 at your disposal. And everybody knows that $5,000 in the ’50s has, like, exponentially more value than it does in 2008.

Pay Pal, in conjunction with craigslist, has developed and provides this time-travel service at no cost to you.

And now I remember that Chris had been eyeing a dummy check made out to my wife—hmm, wonder what happened to her—back in 2008, denoting a $5,000 deposit to her Pay Pal account.

Was he eyeing it so he could steal the money and use it to travel back in time? And if you spend that money in the past, but return to a point in the future before you paid the money to Pay Pal, then do you even have to bother to pay the money to Pay Pal?

“No,” Chris says, once again using his mind reading powers, which, it is becoming incresingly clearer, are indeed inherent in time travel. “You don’t pay again. You pay once, go back in time, and just make sure you return to a point in the future before you’re supposed to pay. So it’s essentially free.”

I guess you can’t really be mad at somebody for stealing your money, as long as, after returning from the past, he makes sure to return to a spot in the future before the point where he is to steal your money, making sure that it never really happened/happens.

This is unbelievable, I think.

“It’s addictive and it’s dangerous,” Chris warns. “If you’re exposed as a time traveler, they’ll kill you.”

It’s getting dark, and Chris and I stop at a row of newspaper dispensers to grab a newspaper of some sort. “French fries,” a robed, hunched-over woman, purportedly homeless but sounding and looking more like a witch than a homeless person, bellows. “French fries! One dollar!” Chris and I are engaged in heady conversation—I can’t remember the particulars, but it has something to do with avoiding being killed by them—and are scarcely paying attention when we each hand the woman a dollar in exchange for the fries she is selling.

“From the future!” she screams, removing her hood and revealing herself to be neither a witch nor homeless; she is a normal looking person wearing some sort of disguise. Selling french fries to expose the time travelers.

“They’re from the future! They paid one dollar for fries—a full month’s rent—when they should only cost five cents! They’re from the future!”

People are starting to stare. “We had better go,” Chris says, and takes off running. I take note that that is a big disparity between paying one or seventy-two dollars for a month of rent; someone here has their figures wrong. Still, we fell for it. How could we be so careless?

As we scurry, I notice that Chris is eating his fries. “Aren’t you afraid that they’ve been poisoned?” I asked him. “No,” he responds, continually jamming them in his mouth.

We finally arrive at Chris’s apartment building, and I am struck by how indicative of the 1950s it is that the entrance to his apartment is via an elaborate series of narrow tunnels sliding down into the underground. I am somewhat concerned and claustrophobic about being too broad to fit in, and make it through, the tunnels, but before I know it, I’m on his “patio," a sprawling, white circular wafer; immaculate, smooth and reflective. In its middle sits an aluminum, circular patio table with four interrogation-room-style chairs (Fig. 4).

“The apartment’s not that great,” he says, “but you can see the entire universe from here.” And you can. Except that the universe is an indescribable expanse of water, space, steel and dirt; you can scarcely tell where one construct ends and the other begins.

It is beautiful and it is heartbreaking, and now I know that the majesty of time travel is worth risking death.

Before I can dwell on such notion, Chris and I are in some sort of junk shop, gathering unknown supplies for reasons not entirely clear.

I notice a crudely designed rolling-mechanism hot dog warmer, like the ones advertised in Sky Mall that have since shown up in the sale fliers of Kohl’s and Target. Recognizing the worth and usefulness of such a machine, I ask the shopkeeper how much it costs. “Fifteen dollars,” he snaps. “Without the filter.”

Fifteen bucks in the 1950s; that’s like 600 bucks! Or something.

Though I’m not at all certain what the filter is supposed to do, given that we’re in the 1950s and there is a filter for this queer apparatus available, I am assuming it is, if not essential, at the very least more hygienic.

“How much for the filter?” I ask, pitching the tone of my words to include the utter disbelief that such a thing would cost so much.

“An extra fifteen percent.”

“Fifteen percent? Are you joking?”

“Look—you’re not fooling anybody, “ he accuses. “We carry these things for you people but we’re not fooled by you. We know where you come from. Fifteen dollars.”

It becomes clear that, not only is there a black market of products designed for time travelers from the future living in the 1950s, but that I have given myself away by showing a familiarity and an interest in a rolling mechanism hot dog warmer—a thoroughly 21st-century concept.

“I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I blubber, blushing and sweating.

“Get the fuck out of my store, time traveler!” he shouts.

The doors to the shop burst open, revealing gas-masked, black-clad officers armed with comically gigantic flashlights and seriously frightening dogs, obviously looking for time travelers from the future to mangle.

I snatch the rolling mechanism hot dog warmer from the counter and hurl it at them, and they all turn into balloons emblazoned with the image of Captain Caveman.

And then I woke up.

I am somewhat reluctantly coming to realize, after recounting this tale in urgent and regaining my composure, that there is scarcely anything to be learned from this dream.

No wait, strike that.

There are two things I have learned: (1) I am perhaps the only male in America whose dreams featuring characters from Mad Men contain only the male ones; and (2) that the mixture of a pint of Walgreen’s brand ice cream and 10 mg of Paxil is a super shitty before-bed elixir.

Enduring Metallica Part VI VI VI: Death Magnetic

VI. VI. VI.

Death Magnetic kicks off with That Was Just Your Life, its reverb-drenched, cascading guitar picking sounding more than a little bit like those which define the calm-before-the-storm in many a metal-era Suicidal Tendencies exercise. You half-expect one of Rocky George’s sweetly dissonant guitar leads to come-a-weeping, or hear Mike Muir chime in with: what the hell’s going on around here?

The galloping guitar propelling That Was Just Your Life is quite comforting and sad, really—like running into an old friend at a funeral. It kind of sounds like old Metallica. Ulrich’s double kick, though played with perfect precision, is such an oddity that it sounds like he’s merely proving he can still do it. Though Rick Rubin's production is similar in some ways to ...And Justice for All, it sounds decidedly more overdriven. And the cymbals on the bridge sound as if they were mic’d up and compressed by Dave Fridmann in an attempt to best the oversaturation of Sleater-Kinney’s excellent swansong The Woods.

Death Magnetic sounds like no other Metallica record, and sounds like them all.

When Hetfield extends the word die to diyyeeeeeaah! to conclude the verse, he sounds a little more than a lot like his former self. But the song works better when Hetfield keeps his mouth shut—his affectations often sound forced, a product of the same determination and discipline that negotiated his sobriety. And his lyrics are a constant reminder of the new Metallica trying to inhabit old Metallica space. Now, when Hetfield scowls, it’s clear that his loyalties have changed:

Like a general without a mission
Until the war will start again

Used to be Metallica identified more with the infantry soldiers than the higher-ups. It was all about rising up and lashing out, not strategizing the next phase of the battle. It is a pronounced difference, diminishing the scope and effect of the music.

The End of the Line starts out promising enough, with some tricky time signatures rolling out of the way just in time to avoid being crushed by some steam-rolled palm muting. Then it quickly devolves into some sort of blunter, less-nuanced version of the verses of Pearl Jam’s Even Flow, which is, itself, neither particularly subtle nor nuanced. The song manages to get back on track for the verse before insisting on repeating that goddamned bridge again.

There’s uncompromising delight in hearing James Hetfield spit out sinister word associations like Choke! Asphyxia!, that is, until it becomes apparent that he’s talking about the rigors of being a spotlight-hungry celebrity. It's as if he's the Ghost of Christmas Future coming to say, meet your maker, Paris Hilton.

Still, repeated listenings to that palm-muted verse could cause quite the strain on the muscles in the hinge of your neck, especially if yours are as out-of-practice and creaky as mine.

After the chorus, Kirk Hammett and James Hetfield masterfully harmonize their chunked-out guitar runs as if they were playing aural BATTLESHIP with Iron Maiden. And, wait a second—is that bass I hear? Wow. Here, Rubin negotiates something, literally, unheard of in most Metallica records—and it’s not just the bass. Rather, it’s the union of the three stringed instruments nakedly chugging in unison atop the drums, without the addition of a rhythm guitar track to “fill out the sound”; good recordings of smartly written parts don’t need them.

Unfortunately, the part is over as quickly as it began. Fortunately, it is followed by the sort of wah-wah freakout guitar solos that Kirk Hammett was created to perform. And it is worth noting that this one is so pervasive and unwavering in its staccato that it could just as easily be utterly stupid if it wasn’t so fucking awesome and hilarious.

After a good, let’s say two-minute run, Hetfield decides to ruin the song again, this time swooning all snake charmer-like through a vocoder. (You know, those things that made Cher’s voice in Believe and Sean Kingston’s in Beautiful Girls sound all like they came from outer space.) Though its presence is fairly subtle or, rather, about as subtle as a vocoder is capable of being, Hetfield’s lyrics and vocal melody are not.

At this point in the song, I would not think it unreasonable to hide your face in your hands out of embarrassment, or uncommon to suffer from a stomachache.

This agenda of this silliness is forwarded, purportedly, so the music can swell and plod along clumsily when Hetfield bellows: "The slave becomes the master!" The line defies logic in the context of the song; it’s like an assignment that would earn a C- in Aggression Writing 101.

Broken, Beat & Scarred is probably the best, and most original, song here. Rolling Stone has already pegged it as a “likely fan favorite,” robbing me of my sense of discovery, but that doesn't diminish its impact. Lyrically and melodically, Hetfield employs a structure perhaps best described as round-like, suggesting a sort-of Row Your Boat about sadism. Something about the repetition of the words, and the brute-force employment of the phrase “what don’t kill you make you more strong” works magically; as does the psychotic Greek chorus, headed up by Hetfield, muttering “show your scars,” its collective teeth gritted. The song only goes to good places, nicely thrashing about, when it stomps up the stairs .

Given its subject matter; it might just be about Rocky Balboa!

The Day That Never Comes starts with the kind of atmospheric, dreamily processed guitar you would normally find populating the records of The Brother Kite or Explosions in the Sky these days before segueing into a very familiar Metallica construct, leaving any alternative interpretations to burn faintly in the distance. Kirk Hammett lunges little guitar squiggles over the precision and simplicity of Ulrich’s drum accents, this time relegated to single snare hits and bass, and this time played by Robert Trujillo. It’s an incredibly comfortable and familiar precision—though it’s really only been executed One time previously—and it is a convention that serves its inventors quite well. The guitar line to the verse sounds an awful lot like a few-notes-short version of the guitar line to the verse of Fade To Black. The chorus soars with dread, with Hetfield’s put-on affectations just barely saved by Hammet’s symphonic guitar harmonies and Ulrich’s aptly ludicrous tom rolls.

But when all the instrumentation gallops to a pause, there’s nothing and no one to bail out Hetfield when he claims "No the son shine never comes" with a subtlety approximate to that of Randy “Muscle Man” Savage imploring you to snap into a Slim Jim, and elicits the same instinctual head-shaking and involuntary forced-air-through-nose laughter.

Such sentiments return when, after about a 30-second instrumental break (nothing really special), Hetfield returns to the mic to profess:

Love is a four-letter word
And never spoken here
Love is a four-letter word
Here in this prison

Wow. Not sure if Hetfield was really trying to invoke prison love and all that entails when he wrote this, but it is commonly thought that in prison, love is a four-letter word, indeed.

The final three minutes of The Day That Never Comes are nearly all that one could hope for musically in this type of Metallica song. It speeds up, has nice little tricky, yet melodic guitar noodles and concusive drumming, and after about a minute of these final three minutes, Metallica’s guitars start to hammer-out a hammered-on progression that ranks, musically, alongside the best of Metallica. It sounds familiar and new at the same time—the first and, alas, last such moment on Death Magnetic. But it’s thrilling while it lasts.

All Nightmare Long starts off sounding as if could be an outtake from The Black Album before opting for a more obtuse, raging old-school thrash metal onslaught, letting up for a second to let Hetfield gurgle one, two in very classic Metallica fashion. The structure of All Nightmare Long is pretty bizarre—even as it jumps all over the place, Hetfield keeps things together with his vocals, and employs them to convincing effect in the fist-pumping anthem of a chorus. It’s big and dumb but, at least this time, who’s complaining?

Cyanide, like most of the songs on Death Magnetic is a mixed bag, but this one is particularly heavy on the tricks and light on the treats. It starts out with a mildly interesting interplay between: the shotgun kickback of snare and guitar chords; and the pellet spray of cymbals and, again, Hammet’s explosive wah-wah. Then, everything halts, and Metallica, for the first time, sounds like a second-rate (is there any other kind?) bar band, as the drums and bass bounce around unremarkably, until the guitars come in to save them, but instead wind up sounding like—bad, early Stone Temple Pilots?

The chorus is engaging enough, and has a kind of interesting rhythm relative to its melody; I’m found myself humming it when I’m too tired to know better. The mid-section of Cyanide offers the most embarrassing moment of any Metallica record or song to date, where Hetfield wonders: “Say is that rain or are they tears?”

This line has also relentlessly haunted me: it’s so grammatically, I don’t know, fucked up, but I can’t figure out how to fix it, given the amount of syllables allotted by its context in the song. Say is that rain or is it tears? Nope.

The Unforgiven III might have been funny, if it weren’t so depressing.

I’m not too familiar with the Unforgivens I or II, but my fellow ’80s-Metallica brother-in-arms Jeff (though he’s no fan) has assured me that there’s some sort of narrative to The Unforgiven, where Hetfield sings of the third-person him, which turns out to be him or the first-person Hetfield. Surprise!

That certainly seems to be the case here. I think that Hetfield envisioned The Unforgiven III as some sort of romanticism-in-suffering version of sea chantey or something, rather than the lamely conceived, loosely connected series of clichés it ultimately is. Though, musically, it has a few minimally interesting parts (and plenty of unbearable ones) and, certainly, the chorus is super-catchy, Hetfield’s maritime metaphor gives birth to the self-parody of a self-pitying sea captain, and it’s embarrassing to the core:

He’s run aground
Like his life
In water much too shallow
Slipping fast
Down with his ship

Uh-huh. And so Hetfield sinks with this one, bringing everybody aboard (including you) with him. Surely, one amongst them knows that The Unforgiven III is pretentious, childish drivel. Is there no one in the band willing to stand up to the mighty (on the outside, inside he's crying) sea captain? Or are they each so full of contempt for him that they relish the thought of his embarrassing himself?

The Unforgiven III does offer one essential moment: when Hetfield talks of the search for seas of gold, it’s good fun to imagine him saying, search for Caesar’s ghost.

The Judas Kiss bashes around pretty amiably for about eight minutes, and commits no real offense except for its really boring chorus—but is rarely exciting either.

The instrumental Suicide and Redemption should, by all means, be fantastic. No ridiculous lyrics to contend with, and, like the fantastic slow creeper To Live is to Die from ...And Justice for All, it’s paced slow and pitched low, and runs for about ten minutes. But the bend-it then chunk-it riff at the core of Suicide and Redemption is the least interesting part of it, which is unfortunate because, as these sorts of things go, they have to keep coming back to it. Still it has some quite nice stretches—some of the best of them having as much to do with Black Sabbath as Metallica.

My Apocalypse is the album's closer, and any fan of Puppets or Justice knows what that means: it’s Damage, Inc. and Dyer’s Eve time, where Metallica places that one song so fast and so aggressive, they wouldn’t deign to attempt to play it live. In the context of Death Magnetic, My Apocalypse serves this purpose better than anyone has the right to expect. It’s pretty fucking fast, and Hetfield is up to his old tricks again, yelling threats like “Fear my name extermination” and “Demon awaken my apocalypse,” and it’s pretty nice.

But My Apocalypse feels more like a jumping off, rather than a winding up, point. Maybe Metallica feels the same way: though it is the last song on Death Magnetic, its lyrics are inexplicably printed first in the liner notes.

My Apocalypse and the whole of Death Magnetic comes off as neither scary nor dangerous ( maybe a little bit kickass) but, rather, as thoroughly deliberate and reeks of desperation. It's as if Hetfield & Co. painted themselves into a corner of shittery, and they're trying to claw their way out, but are unable (or unwilling?) to stymie the tendencies that derailed them in the first place.

That it is unquestionably the best thing Metallica has managed to produce in the last 20 years has at least as much to do with the poor quality of its output during that time being complete nonsense as it does with the quality of Death Magnetic.

And what’s with that title—Death Magnetic? It reads the same as if you went into a diner and saw cheese grilled on the menu.

It’s as if they think, utterly wrong-headedly, that with the proper application per square inch of intent and brute force, they can just turn things around, and no one will be the wiser.

Enduring Metallica Parts I–V: Mytallica

I.

It’s not easy being a Metallica fan—whatever that means.

My unqualified love affair with and gratitude for the existence of Metallica is relegated to music made during a very short period of time relative to the amount of juice I’ve wrung from it: 1986–1988, when their third and fourth albums, Master of Puppets and ...And Justice for All, were released.

Lots of people, especially when they’ve been drinking heavily, will tell you that Puppets and Justice are bullshit; that the real Metallica albums are the first two, Kill ’Em All and Ride the Lightning.

That’s fine with me—they can have ’em.

While I do admire those first couple of albums, they’re a little too uncured for my tastes. The guitars all sound like stupid-colored Jacksons plugged into plastic-Crate half stacks, and when James Hetfield doesn’t sound like he’s singing in the bottom of a well, he sounds like he’s singing through a shitty digital effects processor.

Though Lightning is certainly better than its overcast production (after all, it does contain For Whom the Bell Tolls), the vocal-less chunky soup of The Call of Ktulu is easily rendered negligible by the excellent instrumental tracks on Puppets and Justice (Orion and To Live is to Die, respectively).

And Kill ’Em All’s minor masterpieces (Seek and Destroy, Jump in the Fire) take a back seat to the best thing about Metallica’s first record—how totally stupid they all look in the photo on the back cover.

Any fan of early Metallica, if he (or, randomly, she) doesn’t loathe The Black Album, will at least acknowledge that it pales in comparison to Metallica’s earlier albums. What you’ll never find is the person who likes the first four records (or some variation thereof) and claims that Metallica just keeps getting better and better. Saying you think that Master of Puppets is pretty good, but you really like Load is like saying that you think that Jack Nicholson is pretty good in Chinatown, but that you prefer him in Anger Management.

Honestly, and I think this really goes to the heart of the problem I have with post-Justice Metallica, I see no real difference between the The Black Album and populist modern country music by Brooks and Dunn, or Kenny Chesney or something—you know, it’s all built Ford tough.

Metallica’s appeal reached its apex with the release of The Black Album, which sold 15 million copies. Only people who didn’t like it: fans of the first four Metallica records. So they bolted.

But according to RIAA statistics through 2005: 1996’s Load has sold 5 million copies; 1997’s Reload, 3 million; 1998’s Garage, Inc., 5 million; 1999’s S&M, 5 million; and 2003’s St. Anger, 2 million. Do you know anyone buying these records? I don’t. (Besides my friend Chris, who purchased St. Anger and threw it out of his car window after listening to it on the way home from the record store.)

II.

Used to be the Metallica-coined language of speed metal was, though certainly not universal, at least spoken by kids with different accents; you were just as likely to see a skater wearing the same Metallica shirt as your average mullethead.

The only other band I can think of from that time with similar broad cross genre-ational appeal was Suicidal Tendencies, though their social melding may have been of a more divisive nature. When kids wore Metallica shirts, they were at least advertising the same records, if not lifestyles.

But the first Suicidal Tendencies record was hardcore punk, and the mid-career one-two punch of Controlled by Hatred/Feel Like Shit...Déjà Vu (itself a compilation of two EPs that, as far as I can tell, were never released separately) and Lights, Camera, Revolution! were pretty much straight-up speed metal, purportedly due to guitarist Rocky George’s metallic background. When Hatred and Revolution dropped, I could have scarcely given a fuck about early Suicidal—but I sure did love those metal records. The skaters probably felt the opposite, preferring the misunderstood youth of Institutionalized from Suicidal’s self-titled debut to the groovy Satanism of Hatred’s Waking the Dead.

So I suppose, then, that former Suicidal bass player Rob Trujillo was a good choice to fill the oafish shoes vacated by Jason Newsted (himself the replacement for original bassist Cliff Burton) when, in 2001, he left to concentrate on his side project with the impossibly stupid name Echobrain.

Unhappy with letting Echobrain define embarrassment in his post-Metallica career, Newsted undertook the depressing business of putting the meta into metal, banding together with the mötley düde attached to Tommy Lee’s famously generously proportioned wiener and G’nR’s shitty Use Your Illusions-era jack of all trades Gilby Clarke for the reality TV show/band Rock Star Supernova. Even though it proved to be the band Lukas Rossi was involved in with the comparatively subtle name—he had previously been in a band called Cleavage—Rock Star Supernova’s sole album somehow managed to go platinum in Canada.

Newsted, famously the perpetual victim of the band’s relentless frat-boyish hazing, had been unhappy in Metallica for some time. Things, it seems, never really got any better for him from the time he joined the band. According to legend, Hetfield and Ulrich had insisted that producer Flemming Rasmussen bury Newsted’s bass to such a degree that it was inaudible on ...And Justice for All. Consequently, the first time he heard the album’s final mix, Newsted wept.

The Hetfield-Ulrich Dictatorship that rules Metallica appears to be actively vying for the title of disproportionate assholeishness relative to talent, which is currently held by the mean-spirited, leather-faced brothers Van Halen, Eddie and Alex. (VH with David Lee Roth: awesome. Van Halen with anybody else: not so awesome.)

James Hetfield, the taller half of this damaged incorporation, recently told MTV of new bassist Trujillo (he joined in 2003, but Death Magnetic is the first record he’s played on): "In the studio—and no offense towards Jason—but Rob has already contributed more to this record than Jason did in 14 years.” Hey—none taken buddy.

And Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich, the shorter half, has said it’s “difficult to praise Rob without insinuating that there was something not great about his predecessor.” Jeez. No wonder dude quit.

Word is Death Magnetic is a return to Metallica’s speed-enhanced days of yesteryear. But that was the bald-faced lie buzzing around the last one, too, 2003’s St. Anger, perhaps the worst of Metallica’s career—though it may be worth noting that I have never been able (nor do I ever plan) to listen to it enough to confidently grant it that distinction.

The return-to-form agenda as advanced by Metallica, its publicists and record label appears to be gaining traction fairly effortlessly. As far as I’ve seen, of all of the reviews in major media outlets, only Pitchfork (predictably) has given it an unfavorable review.

Brian Hiatt, in his four-star (out of five) review in Rolling Stone gushes:

Just as U2 re-embraced their essential U2-ness post-Pop, this album is Metallica becoming Metallica again—specifically, the epic, speed-obsessed version from the band's template-setting trilogy of mid-Eighties albums: Master of Puppets, Ride the Lightning and, especially, the progged-out ...And Justice for All.

And Entertainment Weekly’s Chris Willman, in his B+ review writes:

Producer Rick Rubin suggested they quit all that messy evolvin' and get back to the grinding sound of 1986's Master of Puppets. The result might just be patronizing the faithful, but if so, it's some of the thrashiest, most thrilling appeasement you'll hear.

Gee, thanks, Metallica!

III.

This whole metal thing is exceptionally tricky. First of all, there are so many different definitions of what heavy metal even is. If you were to tell my friend John, a pretty old-school metal dude (Judas Priest and Black Sabbath is his aural meat and potatoes) that Poison was a heavy metal band—he just might punch you in the face. More likely though, he’d shake his head, and just walk away.

The closest I can come to defining heavy metal is: any music that I like that my wife thinks is stupid. And I don’t blame her—any genre of music whose protagonists are oftentimes wearing codpieces is inherently ridiculous. (Ridiculously awesome!)

To paraphrase Blake Schwarzenbach of Jawbreaker, one, two, three, four, who’s metal? What’s the score? Alice Cooper? Blue Cheer, White Lion, Whitesnake, Bon Jovi, ELO, Blue Oyster Cult, Black Sabbath, Aerosmith, Guns ’n Roses, Warrant? (No, maybe, yes, yes, no, no, yes, yes, not really, no, yes.) But that’s scarcely the point. This guy may not agree with that guy that Aerosmith is a metal band, but both will easily agree that Manowar is.

And, certainly, Metallica is—settling, definitively, what’s in a name.

But somewhere along the way, everyone forgot that rock was created as a tool for freaking out parents. Always has been. Or was supposed to be, anyway. From the negro music reviled by fine, church-going southern whites to the no-good white hooligans with mop tops and toothpicks threatening to undo the social and moral fabric of America. From hippies on acid growing their hair long and pointing the finger at them for their failings to the mad-grinning, googly-eyed Satanism of heavy metal losers. From the indiscriminate fucking and vacant coke-sniffing of glittery disco dancers to the broken glass and sheer volume of nihilistic punk violence, and the greed and gaucheness of nihilistic gangsta violence.

And that’s it. Now its shuffle or, if you prefer, repeat.

And when top-selling artists advocating actual murder in the real world is greeted with a more-of-the-same style shrug, then maybe things have been taken about as far as they can go.

With gangsta rap moving many units and the grisly and disturbing CSI and Law and Order: Special Victims Unit being two of most popular shows on television, shock—outside of real-life horror—is hard to inflict these days. But Iron Maiden and Black Sabbath used to manage quite handily.

IV.

In 1982, the satanic imagery of Iron Maiden’s seminal album The Number of the Beast may have been frightening, but it has since become comically impotent. It could be that the passage of time has produced a pronounced lack of a Maiden-led satanic uprising. Or it could be the market saturation of all of Maiden’s obscenely priced reissues, as there is nothing faintly Satanic about a Deluxe Reissue Remastered with Over 5 Hours of Bonus Material! Or it could be that frontman Bruce Dickinson has emerged as the William Shatner of heavy metal, writing genre books and just kind of running around all goofy-like.

For the impotence of Sabbath, Just Say Ozzy; he was invited by George Bush to the White House, for fuck’s sake. These days, all these former purveyors of evil seem to renounce or deny their former wicked ways. Black Sabbath bassist Geezer Butler has stated:

[A]ny lyrics that I or Ozzy wrote were actually warnings against Satanism . . . I had a very strict Catholic upbringing, so I read a lot about Satan. But we never, ever promoted Satanism or black magic, we only used it as a reference, and it wasn't our only topic. We wrote a lot of science fiction lyrics, anti-Vietnam war songs, the occult was only dealt with in three or four songs. But people completely misinterpreted them, the way they always do.

I can’t for the life of me figure out how people got the wrong idea.




Everybody was scared to death of heavy metal in the ’80s, mostly because everybody in heavy metal wanted to scare people to death. Twisted Sister, who in retrospect seem positively vaudevillian, actually scared people. Even though their music sounded about as sinister as the theme song from Cheers, they brought the scary by dressing up like murderous trannies and pretended to indiscriminately eat big meat legs of indeterminate origin.

Most people figured that heavy metal was at least as likely to cause American youths to commit suicide as Advanced Dungeons and Dragons. Whether in horror movies or music, the occult freaked people out, and it was exploited by many a metal band for that particular reason. (But not Black Sabbath or Ozzy.)

And it was never more popular.

Although they came later, Metallica still had that black aura of danger and wickedness swirling around them. They weren’t Satanists. They didn’t play dress-up. And they weren’t funny like Savatage or King Diamond or Helloween. They were decidedly serious, angry. Fast and, most importantly, heavy as Captain Lou Albano's lunch pail.

For better or worse, the influx of hair metal bands and their incessant power-balladeering waltzed in and replaced a decidedly ugly brand of danger with that of insincere blush-cheeked emoting and sleazy bathroom sex. Soon, even the veteran metal stalwarts were releasing and making videos for their versions of the power ballad, playing ball with the record companies, MTV and most importantly, record buyers. (Scorpions, Dokken, Mötley Crüe, Kiss, Whitesnake, Aerosmith, Def Leppard, etc.)

So I guess we should have seen it coming. 1988’s …And Justice For All finally spawned a Metallica video, after they had sworn up and down and every which way that they would never make one. The video was for the song One, which is, I suppose, kind of ballad-like. But rather than being about love, it’s about being a blind, deaf, mute living war casualty with no arms, legs or means of communication, the latter of which he is desperate to regain so that he can let somebody, anybody to please kill him.

And it was rad at the time, even if now it seems like a premonition of weak things to come. They were pretty beastly looking, as if they could scarcely give a fuck what you think

The best thing about the video for One has to be watching Newsted’s fingers expertly traveling the fretboard of his bass, purportedly playing notes.

Even if the songs on The Black Album were a bit prettier, Metallica was still pretty ugly. After The Black Album—though hugely disappointing, it still had songs about, like, snakes and shit on it—Metallica plunged ass-first into an abyss of boneheaded self-actualization. In Hero of the Day from 1996's Load, Hetfield warbles the line: “Excuse me while I tend to how I feel.” That’s a far cry from the cryptic imagery of Damage, Inc.'s “slamming through, don't fuck with razorback.” (I’m not quite certain what or whom razorback is but, rest assured, I won’t be fucking with it.)

All of a sudden (I had not really paid too much attention for some time) Metallica looked like rock stars instead of underpaid bouncers and town-lockup drunks.

Gone were the signature scumstaches of yore. All of Metallica’s hair was shortened, and teeming with product. Perhaps most shockingly, Kirk Hammet underwent a transformation of Chris Cornell (Cornish?) proportions, suddenly becoming Metallica’s most handsome member. Shortly thereafter, rumors abounded that he was, in fact, gay.

Metallica had become the very thing it actively promoted it would never become: the establishment. The Thing That Should Not Be. (Sorry.)

At any rate, Metallica lost their sense of danger and, if you ask me, their sense of purpose. And it angered a lot of people. (Especially a lot of drunk ones.) The only other group able to inspire such earnest admiration for its early work and clenched-fist-shaking wrath for the perceived Et tu, Bruté style betrayal of its fans, is Guns ’n Roses. (Though they, inarguably, had only one good record.)

V.

Part of the thrill of listening to music of a different era is putting it into its proper context. Early rock and roll is rambunctious only in conjunction with the tumultuous time it appeared—without which it would be defined by PBS Doo-Wop fund-drive specials and Rock ’n Roll Elmo.

David Bowie may be a cuddly bisexual now that we’ve experienced Culture Club and Wham!, but can you imagine that shit back when it happened? Even Jane’s Addiction was a bit shocking when, in their prescience, they released Nothing’s Shocking.

So its easy to imagine PTA moms with large, feathered hair flipping out over Accept’s Balls to the Wall or Animal (Fuck Like a Beast) by saw-blade-as-penis lunatics W.A.S.P., but when was the last time a metal band inspired fear in the hearts of Americans?

It wasn’t that long ago, actually. In the mid-to-late-’90s, Marilyn Manson caused a veritable shitstorm when he released the albums Antichrist Superstar and Mechanical Animals, the latter of which featured a truly creepy rendering of Manson naked, with nippleless breasts, but without genitalia on the cover. He was also gallivanting around with he of the Church of Satan and writer of The Satanic Bible, Anton LeVey; staging concerts patterned after Nazi Germany rallies; openly advocating the use of hallucinatory drugs; and, most importantly, facilitated outrage and protest from Christian groups all across the country, on every stop of his 1997 tour.

Kudos to him. Amazingly, even with the subtlety of the hydrogen bomb (his name is Marilyn Manson, for chrssakes), people fell for it. Gloomy and defiant wore it on their faces, because their parents were frightened and outraged by it. (And I suppose that’s part of the appeal of gangsta rap. But there’s something less tangible about drinking someone’s blood out of allegiance to the unholy one than there is to shooting someone in the face because of paper, or some damned thing. Whole different ball of wax.)

Manson reinvented heavy metal imagery, making it shocking and dangerous again, but has since all but lost his edge. Was that the genre’s last gasp?

There are those crazy Norwegian black metal bands that actually, like, kill each other, but nobody really listens to them. So the only real reason to be scared of a Norwegian black metal band is if you’re in another Norwegian black metal band.

So what is a new, back-to-its-roots Metallica record supposed to convey, anyway? Even if they thrash it out like they did in the old days, what does that mean? Anything? If it isn’t scary or dangerous—and surely anybody who’s seen the film Some Kind of Monster can attest to the fact that there’s nothing remotely scary or dangerous about eschewing guitar solos from your songs in favor of group therapy and sobriety—then how can it be adequately kickass?