Leni Riefenstahl’s Nazi propaganda film Triumph of the Will soon collapses inwards under its own largeness and lack of substance. Scene after scene of columns of soldiers marching, or standing in massed formation on parade grounds. The viewer gets bored, and starts trying to see signs of humanity intruding on the edge of the celluloid.

Wow, that sure is a lot of soldiers. Are some of them uncomfortable? Do they have itches they aren’t allowed to scratch? Where are they billeted and fed? Were there latrine pits dug somewhere? Where did Hitler go to the toilet? I would have liked a film made about these topics, and in a way, Riefenstahl made a film about the most boring aspect of Hitler’s rise to power.

I feel this way about many films: where the camera all but twists and cavorts to avoid capturing things that might be exciting. For example, although I don’t like the James Bond films, many things in their background are absolutely fascinating.

For example, the man called Ross Heilman.

He was a Jew from Florida who moved to Jamaica, renamed himself “Ross Kananga”, claimed Seminole heritage, and opened a crocodile farm. Some people have biographies that seem to be written by a random word generator, and he was one of them. At the height of his success Ross had more than a thousand crocodiles, and he would harvest their skins. In those days, crocodile skin sold for $2 a pound, and $450 for a reasonably good entire skin.

One day, location scouts for the film Live and Let Die discovered the farm, and wanted to use it as the fictional nation of San Monique. Ross obviously made quite an impression on the cast and crew, because they named the villain of the film “Kananga”. Ross doubled for Roger Moore in the infamous scene where he jumps across a river on the backs of living crocodiles, something that was hazardous to his health.

Something like that is almost impossible to do. So, I had to do it six times before I got it right. I fell five times. The film company kept sending to London for more clothes. The crocs were chewing off everything when I hit the water, including shoes. I received 193 stitches on my leg and face.”

Ross never became a film star, and he did not have long to live. In 1978, he died of cardiac arrest while spearfishing in the Everglades. Or so some stories say. There is a conspiracy.

This is from the autobiography of inventor, businessman, and filmmaker Arthur Jones.

“Later, he had so many people after him that he decided the only way out was to fake his own death, so that people would stop looking for him; so he took his grandmother out in a small boat in the Everglades in order to have a witness to his death. The plan being to turn over the boat in a spot where she could easily escape, but where he could get away; leaving the impression that he had drowned, even though his body was never supposed to be found.

“I was after him for having done one of the cruelest things I ever witnessed; he tied a bunch of crocodiles very tightly, packed them in a big trailer and then left them there for weeks. When their legs were untied their feet were already rotting off, even though they were still alive. I figured tit for tat, nit for shit, and had similar plans for him; but he was dead before I could find him. Several other people had plans for him as a result of some of his other stunts.”

It sounds implausible and hard to believe (and might have pleased Ross Heilman in this regard), but I wonder if it’s common for a man to suffer cardiac arrest at the age of 32.

“One” by Metallica has a famous section at 4:32 where Lars Ulrich plays a syncopated sextuplets on the kick drums (6 beats on, 2 beats off)…and then James Hetfield doubles it on guitar. The effect is dramatic: the guitar sounds like a machine gun.

The effect wouldn’t have worked if he’d played the cello. There’s something natural about the pairing of electric guitars and automatic guns. Although not a full rhyme, they’re at least a slant rhyme for each other. The force. The percussion. The volume. The way they harness bolts, pins, voltage, and steel to amplify something in the human condition.

But there are many guns, and if you’re drawing a comparison with high-gain metal, there’s only one gun that fits the bill. The most famous gun.

In 22 June 1941, the Wehrmacht tide overflowed Russia’s borders. Millions of Russians were killed, and millions more were wounded. In the latter category was a mechanically-inclined man called Mikhail Kalashnikov, who spent his convalescence studying mechanics and firearm design. After a few false starts and setbacks, he created his masterpiece: a gas-powered imitation of German assault rifles called the Avtomat Kalashnikova 1947 – more famously known as the AK-47.

In doing so, he joined the ranks of men like Samuel Colt, Hiriam Maxim, John Browning, and Richard Gatling – men with names that have become death. The classical Greeks believed that a society grows great when old men plant trees. Kalashnikov and his ilk are the second sort: the ones who provide fertilizer for the trees. I wonder if Mr Kalashnikov ever stayed awake at night, thinking of the bodies. All the millions and millions of them.

The AK-47 is a pragmatic weapon, easy to use, even easier to die from. Despite being ergonomically uncomfortable (and not particularly accurate), they’re cheap, can be mass produced, and function even when clogged with dust, mud, blood, sweat, and unburnt propellant. At one point, they killed 250,000 people per year. They adorn the Mozambique flag. They are simple enough for a child to use. Children often have.

Functionally, they are similar to the WW2-era German MP42 Sturmgewehr (lit: “Storm-Rifle”). I haven’t found any sources to indicate that Kalashnikov was wounded by an MP42, but it would be funny if he had. In any case, the Germans lost. The world was changing, and superior rifles no longer won wars. Truthfully, by the time Kalashnikov arrived on the scene, they didn’t even win battles.

But the world no longer has battles. Now, almost all fighting is irregular, conducted by some flavour of guerilla forces. Afghanistan. Vietnam. Sudan. The Clauswitzian ideals of battle are over, and now being a soldier means you’re crouched in a jungle, motionless, made of matter almost indifferentiate from the the mud and leaves on the ground, so fascinated by what’s beyond your gunsight that you don’t even move when a mosquito lands on your lip. In this new era of undeclared wars and uniformless fighters, the AK-47 thrives. It’s the embodiment of a Communist weapon, a different, louder voice for the proletariat.

But what about guitars? What’s the connection?

Once, music was entertainment for the rich – formal, stultified, encased in tradition. A symphony orchestra contains four rigid groups of musicians – woodwinds, brass, percussion, and strings – with other subdivisions within. Everyone has a role to play, and roles that they cannot. What was that Heinlein quote about specialisation being for insects? Symphonies have always sounded cold to me, and maybe that’s why. They remind me of a hive.

Guitars are very much a common person’s instrument. They’re easy to make, easy to learn, and versatile. You can play them standing up or sitting down (evocative of the marksman’s choice of firing from the hip or the shoulder), you can play them while singing, and you can play them any way you want. There are no rules with guitar. You can change from strumming chords to playing lead melodies on the higher frets. If the guitar has a hollow body, you can slap it with your palm for percussion.

You can play a guitar sloppily and still sound good. For some styles of music (eg, grunge and shoegaze), it’s almost mandatory that you play sloppily. If a guitar goes out of tune, you can retune them in the middle of a performance. And they can take massive amounts of abuse. Ask any rock musician just how hard it is to smash a guitar on stage.

But guitars are quiet, and need amplification. The Beatles famously quit touring because they couldn’t hear their instruments over the sounds of screaming fans. Through the sixties and seventies, the wattage of stage equipment kept rising, and soon artists could impose their visions at literally deafening volumes.

In short, the guitar is to instruments what the AK-47 is to guns: a multi-purpose tool. They’re a transition from a world where maps dictate territories (the limitations of classical instruments and classical weaponry were both defining factors in the character of early war and music), to a place where the tool is servant and slave to the master’s voice.

Is there some link between the mutating forms of music and guns? Does it reflect some deeper change in the currents of the world? Biologically, evolution can follow two routes: divergence (where a species splits into two dissimilar lifeforms), and convergence (where two dissimilar species evolve to look like each other). A good example of convergence is the thylacine, which looked and acted rather like a fox despite belonging to the marsupial class. The stripes give the game away, but the skeletons are so close that it takes an expert eye to separate them.

Small arms and musical instruments almost seem to be following convergent evolution: fast, efficient, interchangeable, and they even look similar. Roy Orbison starred in a terrible movie called Fastest Guitar Alive, about a man who has a gun inside a guitar case. Maybe that’s generic, and every guitar is halfway to a gun (or vice versa). Guitars are sometimes called “axes”. We should update our terminology.

(For an earlier example of machine gun drumming, listen to “Darkness Descends” by Dark Angel at 0:53.)

One of the cool things about hell* is that you’re allowed to break stuff without guilt. Smash the furniture. Write on the walls in your own excrement. Hell is the worst place possible, so anything at all you do there would change it for the better (Like a maximally random jigsaw puzzle could be partially solved by lying on top of it and having a seizure). It’s fun to break stuff, and it’d be a shame to wait until the afterlife to start. Thankfully, I have an incantation that flings the gates of hell wide open:

“Here’s my views on sex and gender.”

Any discussion about sex and gender immediately becomes the worst conversation in the whole world. They all share this status, somehow. Everyone has an opinion, everyone brings emotional baggage to the subject, and nobody ever changes their mind. It is the most shrill, unpleasant, fact-averse topic of discussion on the internet.

That said, if we’re not afraid of breaking thngs…

For complicated reasons, humans have evolved into dimorphic sexes: male and female. Although this is biologically instantiated in our chromosomes, our sex has various outwards signs (bone structure, facial hair, sex organs, etc), which we call a gender.

Why do we need such thing as a gender? Because primitive humans had no way of telling whether someone has XX or XY chromosomes (nor can the average person today) so we needed fairly obvious outwards signs. And it works. Usually you can tell what someone’s sex is without even being aware of what chromosomes are. Diamonds are strictly defined as octahedronal lattices of carbon atoms, but a jeweller doesn’t need to fire up an electron microscope to tell whether something’s a diamond. A diamond leaves outward signs of its own nature.

Sex is the reality, gender is the signal.

But in the case of humans, sometimes the signs don’t match the reality. Sometimes accidents of nature (androgen insensitivity, sexual aphallia) or social choices (Ru Paul’s Drag Race) will leave a male displaying signs of femininity, or vice versa. What do we do in these cases, where the signs don’t match the reality?

Let’s break away from diamonds, and consider ships.

Some ships belong to England, some belong to Spain. To help differentiate them, they fly a flag of the nation that owns them. If you see a ship flying the Union Jack, you assume it belongs to England.

But suppose an English ship takes down the Union Jack, and runs a Spanish flag up the mizzenmast (ie, dressing in drag). What’s changed, exactly? Has it now become a Spanish ship? No. It might confuse other ships into thinking so, but absolutely nothing at the level of reality has changed. It’s still an English ship.

Suppose Queen Elizabeth sells the ship to King Philip (ie, transgenderism). Has it become a Spanish ship?

You can make an argument for or against. It is now subject to Spanish maritime law and can journey into Spain-controlled waters. But there’s a sense in which it’s still not a Spanish ship, and will never be a Spanish ship.

Up until now, I’ve assumed that English ships and Spanish ships are exactly equal, beyond the property of who owns them. That’s not the case for the human sexes. Men tend to be larger and stronger. Women carry more body fat. What if English ships have shallower drafts and narrower hulls, making them better for navigating rivers? And what if Spanish ships have wider beams and more ballast, making them better for navigating oceans? Has Queen Elizabeth selling a ship to King Philip changed anything about the nature of the ship? No, it hasn’t.

Presumeably, if Christopher Columbus asks for a Spanish ship, he doesn’t give a shit what flag is flying on its mast, or what piece of paper belongs to what person. All he wants is a ship that can cross an ocean! If King Philip gives him a purchased English ship, he’s not going to be happy, regardless of who insists it’s now a Spanish ship.

Sadly, I think this is the case for a lot of transgendered folk. Their bodies bear obvious signs of who they were. Women are not normally six feet tall, with hands big enough to palm a basketball. Men are not normally. They can think they’ve changed their gender, and society might decree that they’ve changed their gender, but ultimately, the signs are still in conflict with reality.

The only option is to haul the, hack away and refurbish the hull, so that it kind of looks like a Spanish ship (transsexualism). We cannot do this very convincingly for humans.

*Though it depends on which hell you are formulating. The Bible conceives hell as. Some of these places are dark and cold, others are burning hot. The Islamic hell is more explicitly the latter. “The person who will receive the least punishment among the people of Hell on the Day Resurrection will be a man, a smoldering ember will be placed under the arch of his foot. His brains will boil because of it.” Pure Land Buddhism has many hells you can end up in, the most fearsome of which is Avici. It lasts for trillions of years, and has iron snakes, iron dogs, and iron walls. You can die there but will always be reborn inside. And presumeably you must take a pill, to prove to it that you are cool.