The old VHS tape clicks into motion—rotational to lineal to magnetic to image.
The air is filled with echoes of deep past—I feel reverberations, but this might as well be my primary source. The camera settles on a fidgety boy of about five years, happiness and innocence bubbling from his grinning face. He begins his joke [...]
The life of the goat is driven by a raw spontaneity that has little human equivalent outside of childhood, senility or mental illness — and perhaps those hippie free-spirits who dance around in fields all day or drop lots of acid.
…First, deomestication: 10,000 years ago. Then, the pagan traditions which are eventually immortalized in the Bible (Sheep go to heaven, Goats go bring the plague to thy neighbor so you can return to village bizniss).
Wherefore art thou, goate?
The diuell..dooth most properlie and commonlie transforme himselfe into a gote. –R. Scott. ‘Discov. Witchr.’ v.i.89. (1584) If you’re short of trouble, take a goat. –Finnish saying
The goat and the sheep, two animals locked in perpetual binary harmony. Like some star system, they graze together, [...]
I see it all unfold from about, without. A meta-travel. We goto this land for many reasons that are all the same. We run from broken homes, repentant lovers, dead pets.
Flip through the study-abroad brochures advertising semesters in Prague, Vienna, Amsterdam. Flip to the next page.
Now you are in the Exotic section. Beijing, Hangzhou, Dakar, [...]
Stand by and look uninvolved as she grilles the drivers for rates and times; you don’t want them to raise her rate because of you.
…She said she drinks, but just “doesn’t feel like it.” On your birthday?
The first time I heard heavy metal— the kind I listen to, from Scandinavia — in Mongolia was also the first time I heard this music broadcast on mainstream TV, while staying with a herding family in East-Central Mongolia.
…Usually, I get up every ten minutes or so to clear my side of the ger, if only to lessen the number in my immediate vicinity, for a few moments of relative peace.
By 8th grade, I found myself with one real friend, and more than one enemy whose favorite pastime was to remind me of just how many friends I didn’t have.
…I saw in it the intense introspection and honesty that I’d been forced to learn through years of social self-discipline, trying to learn the unwritten rules of society for which my brian found itself less than ideally suited.
On Death Metal: >But unlike the garbled sound emanating from the lovable and occasionally frenetic Cookie Monster, death-metal vocals seem to come from a dark spot in a troubled soul, as if they were the narrator’s voice on a tour of Dante’s seventh circle of hell… Early death-metal bands such as Death and Morbid Angel that emerged from Florida in the mid-’80s helped create the musical template that characterized the blasting sound as well as that of its Satan- and occult-obsessed sibling, black metal: fast, relentless drumming often featuring two bass drums; grinding, rapid-fire chording on guitars; squealing guitar solos; muted electric bass; unexpected sudden tempo changes; and a sense of theatricality that’s inevitably threatening—“a horror film put to music” is how Monte Conner, a vice president at Roadrunner Records, sees it… To be a true Cookie Monster vocal, said Mr. Conner, who signed some of the subgenre’s biggest bands, including Sepultura and Fear Factory, “it’s got to be really, really guttural.
…>While it is not clear to me if the motivating power of death metal is generating a vanguard of energetic youth or drawing artistic and creative young people into a trap of naive individualism, I believe that the political significance of musical sound is rooted in the meanings that the participants constitute and the consequences of those meanings for the participants’ lives and the larger society.[^motpower] [^motpower]:Harris M Berger, “Death Metal Tonality and the Act of Listening,” Popular Music 18, no.
General Advice on Mongolia Travel
If they fail to recognize you for your achievements (i.e. survival), realize they don’t get it (yet) and have faith that their time will come .
…well the G is swallowed, and calls up from the bottom of your throat, leading to a slippery o that somehow terminates in a soft V. Realize you won’t be learning this language from a book.