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Notes toward a Mongolian heavy metal show, replete with horsehead fiddles

You know the bronze sculpture in the front of the arts council? Asked Sarah holding her can of Chinggis beer. Yes I just wrote about that today! You said. Well it’s their mum who made it, said Sarah pointing to the big screen behind the stage where a video of two Marilyn Manson looking young Mongolians spoke the introduction to the show.

We were both metalheads, said Degii. I did not see his face until we moved in together. We would date after work when it was dark.

Traditional nomadic costumes, the “long song”, throat singing, and horsehead fiddles are part of the heavy metal band’s songs. And young Mongolians whose spiked shirts could impale you moshing around in the front:



On the way home you dared the wind and god. You kept music loud in your ears because if you don’t hear them you won’t react to them; you are bad at ignoring people which is what you must do. Only two shouts this time. In the last weeks there has been a bite to the air when the sun goes down.

At 10 pm at the fast food place two blocks south of your apartment there are three customers. The guy and girl working the register tease each other. The guy examines his pants. An older woman in a pink chef hat comes out and leans against he wall. A customer has the remote and is flipping through channels. Night shift. Another thing that is universal like the girl crying in the bathroom earlier. A woman with a pail of dirty water came in with a mask and you motioned her in before you so that when you got in only one poople remained floating in the pool in the porcelain hole in the ground. You squattd over it and feel a big piece of uterus lining leave our body like giving birth to strawberry jam. The metal concert continued pulsing in the next room. Next to the mirror an adolescent girl leaned with tears down her face and her friends touched her back and arms—another thing that happens in every country.