ERASING DAVID: HERE'S LOOKING AT YOU

For a while, in a brief fit of paranoia, I decided to use only cash whenever I bought something. That way, any person or persons who might want to track my movements throughout the day (I don't know who—the FBI? The NSA? Walt Disney's frozen head? Like I said, I was paranoid) would know only what ATM I'd used to get cash and at what time. No one could take the information produced by regular use of a debit card and compile a map of my movements. Even if the bank assures you that all personal information is secure, it's become clear that anyone with the means and the skill can get at it if they please, and do with it as they see fit. I wanted to take measures to prevent that from happening in my case.

The problem, obviously, is that one has to remain eternally diligent in the computer age in order to accomplish such a goal, and I'm a little bit lazy. It took me less than two weeks to drop the idea. I went right back to using my card, scattering all kinds of data into the unforgiving world, the same as any other debit or credit card holder. Those of us with bank accounts sow the seeds of our own potential downfall.

Or consider that Google keeps a detailed database of its users containing a record of every site they've visited using the search engine and--who knows?--maybe every action they performed while on those sites. Google claims it only does so to tailor searches to individuals, but they can do what they like with the information they amass, and the legislation that might stop them from doing so has a nagging tendency to lag far behind advancements in technology.

The documentary Erasing David centers on the issue of privacy in the information age, and does so by making use of a poorly planned stunt. Journalist David Bond (he could not have a more perfect last name) decides to try to go underground, making himself as invisible as possible to the scrutiny of two private investigators charged with finding him, all to see if it is even possible for a person to go completely off the grid when so much about us has been recorded electronically.

The target

As far as the stunt goes, he makes a huge mistake by attempting all this while his wife is nearing the end of her pregnancy. They have a low-key argument about it early on when he tells her that he intends to be gone for a month, meaning he'll be off playing espionage games while she's making repeat trips to the doctor to deal with the complications of an impending birth. Why is it that so many men in relationships are prone to pulling this kind of shit?

Apart from Bond's apparent cluelessness, he does a great job analyzing the nature of privacy in a time when, in the name of convenience and security, privacy is constantly eroded. The setting of the experiment is the U.K., so Bond takes a look at the ridiculously huge security culture of England, which has one of the most heavily spied-upon populations in the world. Evidently, it's close to impossible to go anywhere in London without being caught on camera. Londoners are always being watched, ostensibly as a crime-prevention measure. According to Bond, the ubiquitous cameras actually do little to cut down on crime. The implications of how else the cameras might be used is left meaningfully hanging.

He also touches on a trend in some British schools to use electronic fingerprinting as a way of keeping track of student activities. Students come in for class? They lay a finger on a classroom scanner. Check out a book from the library? Scanner. Ideally, children would be scanned everywhere they go at school, and fingerprint scans connect to a database of information about the students. While some may feel that such a technology will help with problems such as class attendance and keeping track of school materials, the same technology could be applied to life in the general community, meaning that that average citizen might one day find themselves required to be scanned in order to take part in government or private services.

The scanner in action

As far as Bond's time on the run is concerned, he plays it smart at the beginning, and then just falls apart from there. He starts by heading over to France, and in so doing confounds his two pursuers by going well outside the net they cast for him. But not long after, he decides he needs to visit his parents' home in the country, working from the assumption that because it's in the middle of nowhere, he'll be able to see if anyone is trying to sneak up on him. It doesn't seem to occur to him that a relative's home is one of the first places investigators would look. From there, he heads off into a rural area in Wales, holing up for a night in an abandoned hut. It's here that we see the first signs of the intense paranoia that will plague him throughout the remainder of the experiment: Bond agonizes over every unidentified sound over the course of a drizzly night, seemingly in the grip of an almost painful anxiety. Later, in a hotel room, he becomes convinced that his portable camera equipment has been bugged or tagged with a tracking device. His behavior starts to mirror that of a paranoid schizophrenic, with Bond continually looking over his shoulder, certain that imaginary agents hired by the investigators are around every corner.

The funny thing is, apart from going online to gather some basic information, the two private eyes don't use any technologically special techniques to track their target. Most of the skills they apply appear to be old-fashioned investigative tools. They even go through Bond's garbage to gather intelligence on where he might turn up. Not surprisingly, they also go out to the countryside where Bond's parents live and spy on the house. They call the hospital where his wife is being treated, pretending to be him in order to find out when her appointments are scheduled. I don't want to give too much away, but when they do finally catch up to Bond, it's while he's doing something that could have, under different circumstances, been easily avoided. I can only assume that by this time in the experiment, stress and sleep deprivation had taken their toll on his cognitive functions.

I came away from this film with a disturbing impression. In most fiction dealing with distopian, totalitarian societies, the assumption is that government agencies vested with the power to spy on citizens will be the ones to finally exterminate civil liberties. So many conspiracy theories ground themselves in an overwhelming mistrust of government. And while we should always be aware of the degree to which government affects our quality of life, I find that relatively little attention is turned toward the motives of the private sector. It's as if people forget that the larger a corporation becomes, the more it is like a federal agency. And rather than privacy being taken away by a nosy government, people appear content to sign away a lot of their privacy, entirely of their own accord, to privately owned social networks such as Facebook. Why have security cameras mounted on every streetlight and telephone pole when so many willingly post photos and footage of themselves doing things they'll wish they hadn't in a few years? When we use the internet, we put a lot of ourselves out there for someone else to snatch up, and we do it freely.

Who would have thought we'd be inclined to give away so much of what we claim to be inviolable? 

HEAVY METAL'S NOT ANGRY, IT'S JUST EXCITED

     More than once over the years, after mentioning to someone that I enjoy heavy metal, I've gotten the reply, “Really? You don't seem like an angry person to me.”

      Since when do you have to be seething with rage to like heavy metal? It's the kind of opinion I expect from people unfamiliar with the genre: all metal is grinding, bashing hatemusic, produced by serial killers, for serial killers. Everybody knows that.

      I'm not going to say there isn't a lot of stuff in the genre marketed to frustrated teens and surly twenty-somethings. There sure as shit is, possibly the majority of it judging from the average album cover. But for every ten or so screamer metalcore bands, there's at least one doing interesting things with melody and time signatures, writing genuinely complex, engaging music that demonstrates not only instrumental virtuosity but a uniqueness of vision and imagination.

      Some years ago I started listening to Death again, a death metal band that goes back to around the mid-80's. Their early stuff is pretty standard, fast and growling without an awful lot to set them apart from their peers. The further along in their career you go, however, you begin to hear song arrangements that are intricate to the point of mirroring classical compositions, and technical skill that rivals anything else in the world of rock n' roll. On albums such as Individual Thought Patterns and Symbolic, Death represent themselves less as a band driven by aggression than as one   inspired by a love of the possibilities inherent in metal.

      My taste in metal has, over the course of twenty years, drifted away from the howling angst typically associated with this kind of music, and gone more in the direction of work that attempts something new without necessarily relying on negativity or rage. The angrier-sounding something is, the less likely I am to want to hear it.

      This is probably the key reason I don't listen to Slayer anymore. There was a time when I tapped into the full-on belligerence they're famous for, mainly in my teens and partway into my early twenties. They have a sound that appeals particularly to the frustrated and hormonal. What I find remarkable is that in close to thirty years, almost nothing has changed about their style--except maybe that it has grown more sonically brutal—and never seems to have moved beyond the war/religion/psycho killer subject matter that has suffused every album since the beginning.

This is what Slayer sounds like

      I have a difficult time believing Slayer's professional image is sincere, or a reflection of genuine artistic ambition. What's more likely is that they've found a niche in the music industry and exploit it effectively enough to rake in the cash, the same as a lot of recording artists. Maybe when they were younger and first starting out there was a real spark of inspiration, but after so many years of playing virtually the same thing, song after song, album after album, there must be some part of them, even if it's not a part they pay particularly close attention to, that's gotten a little bored with the whole thing.

      I sure have. And I feel the same way about many bands that subscribe to the hyper-aggro aesthetic Slayer, in large part, set in motion decades ago. I have no problem with an element of aggression in music—as with profanity, it can express a great deal when used carefully. But I find that, as I grow older, the internal discontent that frequently comes attached to an enjoyment of intense metal music has disappeared, and in its place there's a desire to hear something that's still loud, still heavy, still informed by a certain combative attitude, but nevertheless doesn't bury itself alive under six feet of wailing despondency.

The kind that makes you do stuff like this

      What better explains my growing fondness for stoner metal? I know it's a broad generalization that includes many bands that don't focus primarily on songs for the perpetually baked, but it's become a designation for a sub-category of bands that play heavy, down-tempo, often very bluesy metal. Bands like Electric Wizard, Behold! The Monolith, Cathedral, and Graveyard seem to be looking to a past slightly behind the initial rise of metal-as-metal in the 80's, and are drawing as much influence from the fuzzy psychedelic rock of the 60's and early 70's. I really like their interpretation of an older style, and how they've managed to bring new ideas to a sound that could have easily become obscured by the ongoing crush of newer music.

      It's the bands that are wiling to change and experiment that I appreciate the most. My favorite Slayer album? South Of Heaven, the one where they slowed down a few of the songs and allowed for a more brooding and dynamic style. I remember when that album came out. Most of my peers hated it, exactly because it wasn't fast from beginning to end. My memory of how the album was received tends to reinforce my opinion that the most overtly belligerent music appeals mainly to the young and discontented, and in the course of growing up it's vital that we begin to develop a taste for work that is denser and more involved. Slayer, at least on that one record, showed that they have it in them to do unexpected things. A band that fails to do so becomes stagnant. Those who do reflect the same kind of deepening maturity we hope for in ourselves.

      Just look at the Melvins. They've been around since the mid-80's, playing what I would describe as hardcore punk during their earliest period, gliding over into slower, more structurally complex music in the late 80's and early 90's, as well as producing the droning, tonally-oriented work they're best known for on Lysol, Bullhead and Eggnog. Then, during their time on Atlantic Records, they changed again, retaining elements of their earlier period while writing songs that were simultaneously more accessible and very weird, if that's possible. Tracks on Houdini and Stoner Witch display a latent pop sensibility that would come to greater fruition in their post-Atlantic years, particularly on more recent albums; there's stuff on Nude With Boots that I swear would sound perfectly normal if performed by Led Zeppelin in their heyday.

      Mastodon are another great example, and one that is more temporally compressed. In just a little over ten years, they've gone from borderline hardcore to becoming a stellar representative of the progressive metal vanguard. Listen to “The Last Baron” from Crack The Skye—it's absolutely epic, making multiple twists and turns in its approximately thirteen-minute running time, at times laid back and at others roaring with a spirit that is not so much antagonistic as exultant. Like all great metal-as-metal, it exhilarates and thrills the listener, lifting you out of the everyday and into a place that can be as mystical and fathomless as all outer space.

This is what Mastodon sounds like

      For me, and for probably many fans, that's really what metal does: it excites, it deepens and enhances the quality of life, it encourages a positive and energetic response to the world. Far from being something to commit suicide to, metal at its best is life-positive, not life-negative, the same as any other great music.

Listen to Master Of Puppets and tell me I'm wrong.