Even though I was nervous as hell about flying, my trip to Albuquerque to see the Japanese Metal Ballerinas called Babymetal went well in late November 2024. See, I had had bad experiences at security several years ago on Alaska Airlines during a trip to Portland to watch Japanese woman wrestler Maki Itoh: Starting with when I began following the band Happy Mondays and the Baggy scene out of the house rock music hybrid coming from Manchester UK [aka “Madchester”] in the early 1990s, it’s got to be loose-fit shirts and pants for me. So when they made me take off my belt and my shoes, it caused much embarrassment and snickers out of security. But this time, no such problem with United Airlines, who whisked me through without incident. Still, things were crowded, even for a Thanksgiving Day.
I also hate turbulence and on this trip, I ended up in an uncomfortable middle seat on the three-hour flight. No problem with turbulence here though, and the landing went smoothly. Albuquerque has a nice, convenient airport too: unfortunately, my hotel did not deliver on the promised shuttle, what with them giving their driver the day off for Thanksgiving, forcing me to cab it.
The hotel itself was part of a vast office complex and convention center area, mostly empty during my stay because of Thanksgiving. Made me feel like I was in that old Sixties garage rock psychedelic song Caverns of My Mind: all those wide boulevards and towering brick edifices with shining company names at the top and the massive convention center next to the hotel that looked like a concrete statue of the Japanese turtle monster Gamera.
For Thanksgiving dinner, I had a burger at the bar that was not a turkey, turned out pretty tasty, as I talked Thanksgiving football with the friendly wait staff. That would change in the next several days, when other wait staff were grumpy about being made to work on a holiday, not to mention that breakfast for a couple days was an inadequate, microwaved breakfast burrito.
Night of the concert took me by Uber to one of those areas that look like company office warehouses, to a place called Revel Entertainment Center, a large, windowless blockhouse. It turned out to be one of the better venues where I’ve seen the Japanese Metal Ballerinas over the last 10 years, with an expansive restaurant and bar area featuring several outlets for various foods [I had a rather satisfying Mediterranean salad] and a friendly fellow bought me a Coke at the bar, though he acted rather strange after I told him I didn’t drink alcohol, congratulating me while obviously loaded and fidgeting around, typical of the reactions I get at bars whenever I mention my sobriety.
There was also this old-fashioned self-portrait photo machine booth against one of the walls. The Japanese Metal Ballerinas had earlier noticed it, were fascinated, and took their pictures taken inside it. Do they have those booths in Japan, I wonder?
Well, anyway, wanting to see the Japanese Metal Ballerinas up close, I had opted to buy a VIP package so I could enter early and position myself at the lip of the stage, where the young women would recognize my Hiroshima Toyo Carp Japanese red baseball hat: the group is from that city and have in the past shown their devotion to the game and their team similar to what we baseball bums take to heart and soul.
But I simply cannot stand around during rock concerts for hours as I wait for an opening group who is usually meh [this concert, it was some metal group with a woman singer who kept running her mouth about sex acts, which you would never hear out of the Japanese Metal Ballerinas]. I mean, listen sports fans, a baseball outfielder doesn’t have to stand around like that for hours: they get to go to the dugout for a break here and there, am I right? So I had to sit down at the bar in the back of the hall from time to time, thus losing my place in front of the stage.
During the concert itself, I ended up standing mostly at stage right. I tried waving around the Hiroshima Toyo Carp hat so one of the young women would recognize it. I think Momometal [the word “metal” makes up part of the ballerina nicknames, thus, lead singer Sumetal, dancer Moametal, dancer Momometal] may have noticed it, but in the middle of all those lights and commotion, you never can tell.
Well, whatever, the concert was the pinpoint perfection of modern ballet moves to full-blast pop metal music, which differs from the usual brand of aggressive onslaught, what with its anthemic themes and more melodic and lyrical underpinnings. The young women were resplendent in their full-length dresses with multi-colored shards of triangular foil that caught the reflections of the light show into twirling and spinning along on the stage. You don’t usually hear it coming out of the darkest strains of metal music but the Japanese Metal Ballerinas called Babymetal really do excite an electric feeling of, get this, “joy”: their fans who are parents even bring their kids to Babymetal shows to join in the “fun”, another word you usually don’t hear around the metal hordes.
I enjoy these shows so much that, when they end, it usually takes me a day or two [maybe even longer] to get over them, like I’m leaving behind old pals of mine. I’ve been following the Japanese Metal Ballerinas since they first started as teenagers back in 2014 and I felt this strange sense of an almost brotherly pride to have seen them come this far in their success. So, sad if wistful nostalgia marked my train ride down to see my family in Trinidad Colorado. It was eased though by the beauty of the New Mexico to Colorado route on the Southwest Chief: wide vistas of valleys and walls of mountains and mighty rock formations and flowing rivers. The rustic Old West flavor of the train station in Lamy, New Mexico, with an ancient passenger car set behind a makeshift holiday village, made me think of how DH Lawrence and his wife Frieda and their group used to get off at Lamy for the car trip up to Taos, where he started his short-lived literary commune.
My month-long stay in Trinidad included a reading from my novel Zelda Rising at Mutiny Trinidad Coffeehouse, of course. It was the section where the narrator mentions how he doesn’t like Cat Stevens:
And it seems that every cat person out there has to love Cat Stevens and Crystine was no exception: in one of the videos, it’s him meowing his morning-has-broken song while she’s doing this stumble of a slow waltz with her dancing cat.
After one of the folk musician performers said he liked Cat Stevens, I had to remind everyone that this was the narrator speaking and not me. Well … it was a half-truth, I never much cared for his music myself, him or Seals & Croft, come to think of it: the seventies weren’t a great time for pop music, though compared to today’s crass trash, it can come off as sounding innocent and naively charming.
Anyway, I didn’t get a chance to do any other open mics in Trinidad, so I simply hung out at home. Early December had very temperate weather, encouraging me to sit outside on the lawn, stare at Fisher’s Peak mountain in the distance, and catch up on my reading: a book by William Gibson, creator of cyberpunk, called Zero History that was well-written but went nowhere; a biography of DH Lawrence, and the journals of my new sparring partner on Xwitter, Joyce Carol Oates.
Another very eventful holiday on the boob tube, what with this Luigi guy shooting the Health Care Executive in the back, like Uncle Fester used to threaten on The Addams Family; another Luigi who’s a pro wrestler with the gimmick of making pizzas; the California wildfire inferno; the anniversary of the Jon Benet Ramsey murder [new DNA tests will solve it any day now, as usual]; and old reruns of The Love Connection with the late, lamented host, Chuck Woolery, who went on to become a conservative radio talk show host.
We also watched the Twilight Zone. One of my favorite episodes concerns the overworked office guy who is hassled by a boss who keeps haranguing him with demands to Push, Push, Push, and a shrewish trophy wife. On the train ride home, he dreams that he can get off to an 1880s wonderland of the simpler, more relaxed life in a town called Willoughby. Exasperated and careworn, he throws himself off the train one night thinking he can reach this bucolic nirvana and ends up in a hearse run by the Willoughby Funeral Home.
In my imagination, Trinidad Colorado sometimes feels like my Willoughby, even if it does have a Walmart and no Japanese Metal Ballerinas.
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