Press "Enter" to skip to content

Posts published in November 2010

There Can Be Only One!

A moment ago I was sitting here in my apartment, quietly reading the internets, when my door buzzer rang and scared the living shit out of me. I was not expecting anyone and nearly didn’t go to the door, but I poked my head down the stairs and saw the UPS guy. Barefoot, I went and saw that there was a package for me.

Did I order something that I forgot about? I thought. It is absolutely possible that late one night I came home and did some Amazon business. It’s happened before. It will happen again.

Curious to see what I had ordered for myself but had not remembered ordering, I opened the box. Inside were copies of Highlander and Highlander II on Blu-ray.

What? So random.

Then I looked and saw my mom’s name and address on the packing slip. I laughed aloud. So, in honor of this random gift, expect a couple of Highlander retrospectives this week on The Black Laser. And, right now, enjoy some of the magnificent soundtrack to the first film by none other than the mighty Queen.

But, most importantly, thanks mom!

God damn, did you see the power of Queen destroy Silvercup Studios?! That was SO AWESOME.

What did NASA find?!?!

As Space Pope, I am privy to all that takes place in the universe. It’s my job to be aware of goings on and such like, but I have made an arrangement with your humble earth scientists at NASA (so primitive!) not to reveal what they’ve discovered until they have a chance to wow the human race on Friday afternoon (afternoon! How parochial! There’s no afternoon in space!).

They’ve sent out this press release.

Dwayne Brown
Headquarters, Washington
202-358-1726
dwayne.c.brown@nasa.gov

Cathy Weselby
Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif.
650-604-2791
cathy.weselby@nasa.gov
Nov. 29, 2010

MEDIA ADVISORY : M10-167

NASA Sets News Conference on Astrobiology Discovery; Science Journal Has Embargoed Details Until 2 p.m. EST On Dec. 2

WASHINGTON — NASA will hold a news conference at 2 p.m. EST on Thursday, Dec. 2, to discuss an astrobiology finding that will impact the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life. Astrobiology is the study of the origin, evolution, distribution and future of life in the universe.

The news conference will be held at the NASA Headquarters auditorium at 300 E St. SW, in Washington. It will be broadcast live on NASA Television and streamed on the agency’s website at http://www.nasa.gov.

Participants are:
– Mary Voytek, director, Astrobiology Program, NASA Headquarters, Washington
– Felisa Wolfe-Simon, NASA astrobiology research fellow, U.S. Geological Survey, Menlo Park, Calif.
– Pamela Conrad, astrobiologist, NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
– Steven Benner, distinguished fellow, Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution, Gainesville, Fla.
– James Elser, professor, Arizona State University, Tempe

Media representatives may attend the conference or ask questions by phone or from participating NASA locations. To obtain dial-in information, journalists must send their name, affiliation and telephone number to Steve Cole at stephen.e.cole@nasa.gov or call 202-358-0918 by noon Dec. 2.

For NASA TV streaming video and downlink information, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/ntv

For more information about NASA astrobiology activities, visit:

http://astrobiology.nasa.gov

– end –

What can it mean, humans!? What did they find out there in the dark nether regions of the void, which is, of course, not a void, but filled with dark matter and the Great Destroyer’s consciousness?

Tune in Friday at 2 (-5 GMT!) to find out! And remember, this is the year we make contact.

My super awesome trip to the Metropolitan Opera House.

Last Friday my friend Shelby, who works for the Metropolitan Opera doing events, invited me (on my insistence) to take a tour of the opera house. It was so ridiculously awesome that I recommend every New Yorker have a friend like Shelby and make her take you on a tour during the middle of a work day. Here is a list, in no particular order, of the things I enjoyed while there.

  • Entering through the employees’ entrance
  • Seeing the auditorium empty except for the stagehands setting up for that night’s performance of Carmen
  • Going on stage (I didn’t sing)
  • Seeing the costume shop, set shop, and properties area
  • Discovering that every dressing room for a principal actor has its own piano for warm ups
  • The faces of every person who saw us and was all, “Who the fuck are these kids?”
  • Shelby saying “fudge” instead of “fuck”
  • The smell of the place, like old people
  • Going into the chorus rehearsal room
  • And, really, so much more

But of all the things I saw, one really stood out for me. It was this.

A 30 FOOT TALL BLOODY JESUS HEAD.

Are you kidding me?! How amazing is this thing? It’s huge! So huge, in fact, that I made Shelby get into the photo so we had a sense of its scale. I want this in my house so bad it hurts.

My only regret of the day is that I didn’t bring my camera with me. I thought it presumptuous so I left it at home and I told her as much. She said that it would have been all right though, and I immediately felt a pang of regret. Oh well. I’ll just have to find a reason to go back camera in hand.

Happy (Belated) 2nd Birthday, The Black Laser!

Yesterday marked the two-year anniversary of The Black Laser. Isn’t that exciting?! Let’s all have some cake!

What does the bright and shining future hold for The Black Laser?! WHO FUCKING KNOWS?!? What, I can see into the future? Jesus Christ, guys. I may be the Space Pope, but I’m not psychic. Well, I AM psychic, but I’m not a friggin’ fortuneteller. You want one of those, you go to a fucking carnival.

In all seriousness, the site’s long overdue for a redesign. What I’ve got now is SOOOO 2008 that it just screams for the tender loving help it needs. I’ve got some ideas for it. We shall see.

Otherwise, there will be no great changes to the format or content of The Black Laser. Why would it change? So, keep reading, and I’ll keep posting all sorts of crazy crap.

I also want to say happy birthday to my darling niece Sienna as she shares a birthday with The Black Laser. I don’t get a lot of two year olds on this site, so one of you with a direct line will have to convey my birthday wishes.

A Letter To iPad Users

Dear iPad users,

First watch this.

Now, let me admit that I am officially jealous. Why? Because you guys get to play with a bitchin’ version of Rebirth for only 15 bucks.

Oh, you say, what’s so great about Rebirth? Let’s rewind to 1997. I’m a sophomore in high school living in my parents house running a Macintosh Performa of some sort listening to Pantera all the time. The computer ran Day of the Tentacle, Sam and Max, and Leisure Suit Larry. It could dial into the internet. I had a version of Photoshop (3.0, the first one with layers) that my brother had pirated for me. It had an enormous 750mb hard drive that was filled with pictures and Word Perfect documents and games. No one knew what a hipster, an IED, P2P, the blogosphere, Google, or an iPhone were. Broadband was years off. The only instant messaging was IRC. I got all my demos from the demo CDs (yes, CDs) stuck to the cover of computing magazines. It had a 3.5″ disk drive. It was so awesome.

It was on one of those CDs attached to the cover of an issue of MacAddict or MacWorld or whatever that I got my first taste of computer music in the form of a demo of Rebirth from Propellerhead Software. Of course, computer music had been around for some time already in the form of the demo scene on the Amiga and old Commodore computers, but this was new to me. I had no idea what a TB-303, a TR-808, or a TR-909 were or that they were what Rebirth was emulating. I had no concept of how important the 808 was to hip-hop music. I had no idea that the 303 had effectively created Acid. There was no Wikipedia. How would you find shit like that out? I was just a teenager in my parent’s house in California avoiding my schoolwork and making luscious crunchy electro sounds on this marvelous and, at the time, prohibitively expensive (199.00) piece of software. I just used the demo over and over and over, unable to save, until it would time me out and I would have to start over. I spent a LOT of time trying to recreate the 303 line from New Order’s “Confusion (Pump Panel Reconstruction)”. You’ve heard it, but in case you haven’t listen below.

[audio:https://www.theblacklaser.net/blog/wp-content/audio/confusion-pump-panel.mp3|titles=Confusion Pump Panel Reconstruction|artists=New Order]

People often talk about books or albums of events that had huge impacts on their lives. I think that Rebirth is one of those for me. Couple that with the arrival of Johnny Violent’s “North Korea Goes Bang” on an Earache sampler CD again from the cover of a magazine, and my metal-centric world was split right open. Humorously, the Johnny Violent track was such a secret shameful pleasure of mine that I never really spoke about it to anyone but would still blast it in my bedroom. Listening to it now reveals it to be a little silly, but it was a gateway drug for me.

The combo of Rebirth, the awareness that the creation of such weirdness was accessible, and the Johnny Violent track, the awareness that electronic music wasn’t just bullshit glossy crap, opened up my musical world like nothing else had since my very first metal record years earlier. As the years went on and the stigma I felt for liking electronic music faded, I explored electronic music in depth. The late 90s were a wasteland for interesting heavy metal with nü-metal and rap-metal dominating the scene. Absolutely miserable. Instead, I turned to the sounds of Underworld, Front Line Assembly, Front 242, Future Sound of London, Fluke, Daft Punk, Orbital, Meat Beat Manifesto, and whoever else was exciting and fresh and new.

After the summer of 2002, I had a little bit of money in my pocket and I purchased the then-new Reason 2.5 and a USB MIDI controller. Reason was the successor to Rebirth by Propellerhead Software and it was (and still is) an amazing piece of software. But, with its added complexity and power, the simplicity of making silly little 303 and 808 lines in Rebirth was lost. Sure, you could sample and tweak synths until your eyes exploded and you weren’t limited to strictly linear composition of sequences, but a little something was lost. I’m not saying I would go back, but it was much like learning to edit on a linear taped-based system and the Steenbeck and then moving onto a fully fledged NLE like the Avid or Final Cut. The simplicity engendered by the more limiting systems prevented me from doing a lot of dicking around. Decisions were made and you lived with them. I’ve talked about this before.

Even then Rebirth was lost to me since the Props didn’t invest the time or energy to port Rebirth to OS X. They chose, smartly, to focus their energy on making Reason awesome. Still, the legacy of Rebirth lives on in Reason as a device that will pull info directly from Rebirth into Reason. You can still download it for free from the Rebirth Museum, but it won’t work for me. Alas. Ideally, we’d see them shove Rebirth back into Reason for version 6. No need to make it fancy. Just have it support mods, be sequenceable, be routable and boom. Instant love. And my money.

To bring it all back, iPad users I am jealous that you now have access to one of my favorite, most important pieces of software for a paltry 15 bucks. Unfortunately, it just doesn’t make sense to buy an iPad at 500 bucks (at the cheapest) when I could instead get the much more useful Native Instruments Komplete 7 for the same price. If I bought the iPad with 3G, I could also afford the upgrade to Reason 5+Record 1.5. Pair Komplete and Reason with Logic Pro and I have a formidable synthesizer army capable of unleashing the wrath of the Space Pope on the universe. Nevermind that I’m not that good at making electronic music, it’s still damned fun and it’s money better spent than on trinkets or booze or nonsense.

Does anyone out there want to let me give them 15 bucks so I can put Rebirth on their iPad? Yes?

Sincerely,

The Black Laser.